ã€ŠRe-Birth Of A Genius. Creator/Destroyerã€‹


 Chapter 1: Sam

    *dab* *dab* *dab*

    Foot steps of dozens of men running can be heard in the corridor. A young and handsome army officer is running in front followed by dozens of soldiers in uniforms, fully equipped with guns.

    "Quick, we have to catch him before its toote." The young officermanded his subordinates in an anxious tone. After taking a turn they saw a corridor which had arge room on the other side. Everyone increased their pace and the young officer quickly opened therge door and entered the room.

    What they saw almost made them puke their guts out. A bloody stench invaded their nostrils and the room is littered with corpses of dozens of armed men. One look and they recognised them as a private force.

    The soldiers who entered the room are special forces of USA and they saw many bloody scenes. Even they created many bloody scenes. But what is in their sight gave even these soldiers chills.

    Every corpse has a face full of fear and agony and not a single person is without a protruded bone. Yes, protruded bones. Each and every person has at least one bone protruded from their bodies and some of them even had a bone shard pierced deeply into their eyes, throat, hearts and other vitals. These bone shards are taken from their limbs and ribs of theirrades which can be clearly understood after observing the limp arms and legs of some corpses.

    In midst of the corpses lying on the floor, there is a young man who seemed to be in histe twenties or early thirties standing with his upper body exposed. He has blood all over his body and face. There are some bullet wounds and de scars on his well-defined muscles. His jet-ck hair is soaked in blood. His palms are equipped with a pair of weird ws. These ws only have sharp nails which resembled a wild beast¡¯s, made of metal and each nail is individually connected to a small disc like thing on the back of his palm with small metal joints between which a type of string is passing through. If anyone doesn¡¯t know better, they would think that it is a normal metal string but it is a graphene string, the sharpest and the strongest thing in the world.

    Looking at the scene the young army officer stopped in his tracks and just stood there looking at the bloody figure.

    "You finally came here captain Richard. I was getting tired of waiting." The bloody figure said as he is still looking towards the window from where one can look at the vast ocean.

    "You were waiting for me?" the young and handsome army office replied in a somewhat surprised tone.

    "Yeah, I was waiting for you. I want you to be the witness of my final master piece, so that you won¡¯t have to suffer from it." The bloody figure replied.

    "Just surrender Sam. You can¡¯t run away anymore. Why are you making it so hard for yourself? Just follow me to pentagon and you can live your rest of the life peacefully. I know you are angry, but your vengeance will shake the bnce of the entire world power. I will help you negotiate with them to handover whoever is responsible for the incident." Richard said without caring about the so called master piece.

    "Bahahaha, do you really think its that easy captain? Do you know who the culprits are? The heir of Rothschild n, the heir of the McGregor n, the prince of moro, the heir of Samarita family, the heir of Hestia house. Are you confident in getting me their heads?" Sam answered whileughing.

    Listening to his words Richard was dumbstruck with shock. He knew the incident has something to do with these families, but he was unaware that it was rted to the direct heirs of these families. He was at a loss of words. Before he could reply Sam continued.

    "Richard, do you know how much I love her? The only girl who cared for me. The only person who didn¡¯t look down on my status as an orphan. But now shemitted suicide due to jealousy and l.u.s.t of these rich bastards.

    Do you know how I feel when I recall, that while I was working my ass off to save this f.u.c.k.i.n.g world from the global warming which they created without a care, the only person I love was brutally r.a.p.ed for twenty days straight and tortured until shemitted suicide. Just because some rich bastards are jealous because their fatherspared me with them since we are of Same age. Do you know how I feel? I hate myself. I hate all the titles I earned as a scientist, engineer, musician, painter, doctor, super soldier, hacker, inventor, weapon creator.

    I became so many things at this age of 25 but do you know what I really wanted to be? The greatest friend, the best brother a man could ever be. But all I became is a person with a broken heart and filled with a storm of hatred. Don¡¯t you dare try to convince me, if you don¡¯t know how I feel." Sam said coldly. His voice was filled with mncholy and resentment.

    Richard looked at Sam not knowing what to say at all. He clearly knows what this man before him represents. The bloody figure before him represents the pinnacle of genius, the greatest genius ever born in the history of mankind. An orphan in the streets of India became an existence who can look down on the world with disdain and contempt. He is an inventor, doctor, designer, painter, musician etc., He mastered each and every knowledge that he could ess. He is not a Jack of all trades but a master of all trades. And if it isn¡¯t enough, he is also a super soldier who could take on a whole battalion of armed soldiers alone. Nobody knew how he managed to do all these things but he did it. Looking at him Richard finally opened his mouth.

    "I can¡¯t say I can understand your pain. But what I understand is that your life has been too short for all your capabilities to be shown to the world. The world hasn¡¯t seen enough of you. You are the greatest creator of the world Sam. But I don¡¯t think you already reached your limit. I will take you from here with force if I have to, to stop you from heading towards a dead end. You and I both know that if you get your revenge you will be hunted to the ends of the earth. Please,e with me Sam."

    "Thank you, Richard but I can¡¯t go back now. I can¡¯t let go of those bastards after they forced my Ste to kill herself." After speaking he suddenly moved and pressed a button in front of aputer in the room. Everyone quickly surrounded him.

    The monitors in the room showed various locations of mansions factories, office buildings etc, looking at them Richards eyes widened with disbelief. Suddenly every building in theputer screen was hit by a seemingly humongous cane as they werepletely destroyed. Every one in the room were dumbfounded.

    The biggest consortium of the world and the secret rulers of the whole earth are destroyed just like that.

    "Hahahahah." Sam startedughing maniacally. "Finally, Ste you are avenged. There are thousands of people apanying up th...." *Bam* *Bam* Suddenly two gunshots were fired and interrupted his speech. Two bullet holes were formed in his already wounded body.

    Richard came out of his stupor and supported the body of falling Sam. Meanwhile Everyone aimed their guns at the one who shot. He is ackey of the consortium but he was toote to stop the destruction. Richard look that Sam with endless regret in his eyes.

    "Don¡¯t worry my friend I already lived my life to the fullest I hope with my life as an example these rich bastards will hold back and watch out". Sam said.

    "I am sure they will." Richard sad with assurance.

    "Richard, as my only friend I will leave thisb as a parting gift to you. This is God¡¯s cane which I used just now. Please keep this alive and make sure every government will behave properly from now on. I want you to be the guardian of world Ste dreamt for before. Sam said.

    "I will. don¡¯t worry Sam." Richard replied.

    "Before death I think I should change my title from the greatest creator to the greatest destroyer after all I just destroyed half the world¡¯s power with a single button." Sam said with smirk.

    "No, Sam. you don¡¯t have to change because you will be the greatest creator and you will be the greatest Destroyer of this world. Nobody world can challenge or dare to challenge that statement." Richard said with a smile.

    "haha that¡¯s true. goodbye my friend." Sam said as he closed his eyes.

    "Goodbye Sam." Richard said with Tears in his eyes.

    "At this moment all the soldier in the room aimed at the ceiling and shot 3 rounds as respect. They know what this man contributed for world. He created wonders to help mankind survive more time by removing the threat of global warming. He gave hope per so many people who can¡¯t even more due to their ailments.

    He is an existence which is living example of miracle but now that existence is dead the greatest creator, greatest destroyer, the greatest genius ever is dead.

 Chapter 2: New World

    Sam slowly open his eyes only to see endless darkness around him. ahead of him a few feet away there stood a young man who seem to be in his early thirties as his gaze was directed towards him. The man has an extraordinary bearing to him that makes one feel as though they are watching a superior being. the handsome face, sword like eyebrows, sharp gaze everything only made the bearing more Majestic.

    ¡¯Am I dead? Or am I still alive? Or is this a hallucination?¡¯ Sam thought to himself. At this moment the Majestic young man suddenly spoke.

    "You are really dead. You are currently in your soul form which I captured. I am Ling tian."

    "So, you are saying that you captured my soul after I was shot dead?" Sam asked with an astounded gaze.

    "Yes". Ling Tian replied

    "Why?" Sam asked bewildered. He didn¡¯t get why he was still here and can¡¯t believe this situation. It all felt like a dream to him. He didn¡¯t believe a soul exists until now.

    "Because I saw potential in you which was far from realized. Your previous world so small for your Intelligence.

    So, I will give you a chance. A chance to realize your full potential, A chance to live again in a world where only your imagination can limit you. Ling Tian replied.

    "There are other worlds with life?" Sam was surprised again. Even when he is alive, he never felt this shocked in a single day.

    "There are more things to be surprised about kid. This universe has more things to offer than you can imagine. You will learn it slowly." Ling Tian replied.

    Hearing that Sam waspletely bewildered. everything still felt like a dream to him. He went in to deep thought. ¡¯Well, I have nothing to lose anything anyway.¡¯

    "Sure, but what should I do there? Sam asked

    "Live your life to the fullest. Ascend the highest peak where you can look down on anyone under heavens. Then we meet again." Ling Tian replied.

    Sam seemed confused by the answer.

    "Before I send you, I will give you some knowledge. They arenguage and some cultivation techniques you will require. You cannot pass down any of these techniques to anyone because they are specifically created for your body constitution and your spiritual Core." Ling Tian continued.

    "What are cultivation techniques? What is spiritual Core you mentioned." Sam asked with confusion

    "Hahaha don¡¯t worry you will know when you arrive into your new body.

    By the way there is a final test waiting for you down there that is to find the best contract around you as your first contract if you pass the test you have a present there ,if you fail then think as I granted this life to you can live as you like and forget whatever I said earlier."

    After Ling Tian finished everything turnedpletely dark and Sam lost his consciousness.

    When Sam opened his eyes again, he felt great head ache as he saw clear blue sky and floating clouds. He felt a searing pain on his stomach as slowly moved to stand up and he observed his surroundings.

    He realized he is in the middle of some woods. The ground around waspletely razed as if it was plowed. He checked his body when a searing pain increased at his abdomen.

    When he saw it clearly, he was shocked. there are two holes in his stomach as if he was stabbed by something. Each hole is around 2 inches wide.

    But for some reason blood stopped flowing from the holes. he stood there dazed for some time thinking if it was dream or not then suddenly a piercing headache started as a set of unknown memories entered mind.

    His soul entered the body of a 15 year old boy whose name is also Sam. He doesn¡¯t have anyst name because, he is an orphan. He is a tailor who lived in a nearby vige named Lava rock vige.

    He made a living off of his tailoring skills by selling clothes he made from the silk he obtained from the silk moths in the woods. As per his routine when he came to woods to collect silk, few kids of his age started running towards him.

    Only then realized that they were being chased by a bull like beast. Then they purposefully directed the beast towards him and the beast pierced him with its horns and that¡¯s how the original owner died. Sam sighed as he thought. ¡¯Guess I can¡¯t escape the fate of being an orphan in this life time too.¡¯ As he thought up to this, he slowly made his way towards his vige while enduring the pain. When he entered the vige, he was shocked for some time when he saw the scene in front of him.

    The scene before reminded him of the medieval period. the streets are not clean at all. All the houses are made of mud walls and only some select few are made of stones in a certain area.

    Then something came to his mind. The good-looking multiple story houses belong to the vige officials, while the mansion belongs to vige head. the average looking house belongs to vige guards and hunters or some rtively well-off families with rather highly regarded professions.

    Normal mud houses belong to Farmers andbor and others. To his surprise even though the original Sam is an orphan he also has a stone house which is both his shop and his house.

    While Sam was walking towards his house all the people are watching him with surprised expressions and whispering to each other.

    Just when he reached his house and about to open his door, he heard someone calling him.

    "Hey Sam, you are here. What happened to you exactly that Oliver said that a ¡¯zing earth bull killed you in the woods."

    A middle man from next door said as he was walking towards Sam. His name is Michael. He is a cksmith who lives next door to Sam. When Sam saw him, he didn¡¯t know how to react as he knew from this body¡¯s memories that he had a very good rtionship with him.

    Sam forced a smile as he answered. "I am alright Uncle Michael. Don¡¯t worry about me Argh..." by the time he finished his words he felt his wounds hurting again. His face became pale as he sweated profusely.

    "Easy kid." Michael reached him and held Sam with his hands as he was about to copse.

    "Damn it, kid I thought that Oliver is talking nonsense but who would have thought it¡¯s real. The wound is too deep Sam I think only the healer mage can heal you. But that costs a lot. I don¡¯t even know how you are still alive."

    " Uncle Michael please enter my room and take out the leather pouch under my bed. I will go to the healer." Sam said enduring his pain.

    Michael slowly made Samy on the floor and made his way into the house. After some time, he came back with a leather pouch in his hands.

    "Sam, I don¡¯t think you can go alone just wait a bit I will get my push cart. I will take you to the healer." After saying that, Michael went to his house and came back with a push cart which he used to transfer his cksmith products and materials.

    He carefully carried Sam andy him on the cart and kept his leather pouch beside him and started pushing the cart. At this time, Sam slowly started losing his consciousness.

    Sam slowly open his eyes only to see a ceiling made of stones. "Oh, you are awake." somebody said suddenly.

    Sam startled due to the sudden voice after he turned towards direction which from which voice came there, he saw a middle-aged man carrying a leather pouch with him then he recognized immediately that leather pouch belongs to himself. The man came towards the bed and gave back his leather pouch then said. "This is your leather pouch, I took my treatment fee, the rest is within the pouch."

    Sam opened the pouch there he saw 2 stones size of a quail egg.

    "You can leave when you feel that you are ok." The middle-aged man said. Suddenly the door opened and Michael came in.

    "Oh, you are finally awake. How are you feeling now?" Michael asked Sam.

    "I am ok uncle; I think I just need some rest." Sam said.

    "Actually, I heard about you from Oliver. He said you are already dead in the Woods. That¡¯s why I came to check your house whether he is lying or not. But when I came you are already back and you are injured. But thank God you are okay. What happened exactly kid?" Michael asked.

    "I was really hit by the bull uncle but now I am okay. I don¡¯t why, but by the time I got there to collect the cocoons a bull madly rushed towards me and hit me. Even I don¡¯t know how I survived." Sam replied. he didn¡¯t see any reason for revealing it was done intentionally so he kept quiet.

    "Uncle Michael I would like to rest if you don¡¯t mind." Sam Said

    "Ok kid, don¡¯t worry about anything else, just take some rest. goodbye I will visit you again"

    .

    After Michael left Sam kept staring at the ceiling and tried to understand the situation he is in. ording to the memories of original owner of the body, right now he is in a ce called destend which is a part of Western continent.

    In this world the Technology is not that developedpared to the Modern Earth. The people took apletely different path of development because of special circ.u.mstances, that is the presence of spiritual energy.

    In this world there is a special kind of energy present everywhere in the atmosphere. And everything is made of spiritual energy the humans here possess unimaginable strength and power by utilizing this spiritual energy. They are called cultivators.

    There are two types of cultivator they are Qi cultivators and mages. The Qi cultivators use spiritual energy to develop their body and utilize their body to fight they are also called warriors whereas, the mages use spiritual energy by converting it into form of various elements.

    Right now, the middle- aged man who came earlier is also a mage and a mage of light element. The light element mages are not much known to theirbat prowess but they are most suitable for healing and are highly regarded. That¡¯s why these healers usually charge a lot.

    In this world the being a mage or a warrior cannot be directly decided by people themselves. It depends on the body constitution and the spiritual core of the person. If a person has a pure Qi core which is a solid white in color then they are most suitable for Warriors. The person who is suitable to be a Mage will have a pure elemental core. Various types of elements indicate various type of affinity to that particr element.

    For example, if a person has a pure red color core it will be fire element, a light blue indicates water core, pale green indicates wind, dark green indicates nts or wood, gold color indicates metal, milky white indicate light element and so on.

    Other than the pure mages or pure warriors there are other type of cultivators who has mixed core who can practice both Qi and Elements. They are basically called ¡¯Warrior-Mages¡¯. When a person 14 years old their core will activate. Sam also activated his corest year but the problem is nobody could identify his core.

    His core is fully transparent when he tried to absorb spiritual energy, he can absorb it easily and he can also control it well but he was unable to use it for both spells or martial arts.

    So, he was not suitable for both types of cultivation so he stopped after he reached third level Initiation stage and solely focused on his tailoring skills and achieved some significant improvements in embroidery.

    That¡¯s how he was able to earn the spiritual stones in his leather pouch.

    Even though they are low grade spiritual stones they are totally high-level currency for normal people. For working hard for an entire year, he was only able to earn only five stones and three of them are already taken away by the healer as a fee for treatment.

    Thinking up to this point Sam heaved a huge sigh and closed his.

    "Let¡¯s have a proper sleep first think about what to do tomorrow." Sam muttered under his breadth and slowly fell asleep.

 Chapter 3: Business Deal

    *chirp* *chirp* *chirp*

    Sounds of birds chirping can be heard as dawn slowly arrived. Sun can be seen slowly rising in the east where a volcano is emitting a faint trail of smoke. Word of the vige is that this vige actually doesn¡¯t exist in the first ce but for some reason 500 years ago a dormant volcano under sea became active and thatva created this vige. That¡¯s the reason this is called va rock vige¡¯.

    Sam is slowly walking through the streets with his shirt on but two gaping holes can be clearly seen on his shirt and it ispletely filled with blood stains. Only few vigers can be seen on the streets as it is still early. Sam slowly made his way to his house.

    "Hey Sam, you are back. I was just about toe to that clinic to see you." Michael¡¯s voice can be heard from behind.

    "Hi Uncle Michael. I was already feeling good by the time I woke up so I came back myself." Sam replied.

    "Okay you go wash up ande to my house we will go to breakfast for Robert¡¯s Inn." Michael said.

    "Okay uncle."

    Sam walked into his house after Michael left. The room he entered has several dresses hanged and neatly presented for disy. There are several other products like gloves, socks, scarves etc.

    ¡¯Seems like this original body is quite skilled in sewing, weaving, knitting, and embroidery. Even in the modern earth his clothes can be considered pretty decent. Let alone in this medieval world.¡¯ Sam thought as he made his way towards his bedroom. After he entered his bedroom he walked towards a mirror and took a look at himself.

    ¡¯Hmm, Not bad.¡¯ Sam thought as looked at his reflection. He is a man with Jet ck hair and Same ck eyes. He can be considered quite handsome. He has sharp eye brows and perfect nose bridge, sharp jawline there would be very fewdies who wouldn¡¯t like him. When he smiled it gave him a devilish charm.

    Sam went to take a bath in his bathroom. ¡¯there really is no shower. Why am I not surprised?¡¯ After that he took a bath from the stored water in arge container and left to get dressed. sometimeter Sam went to Michael¡¯s house. Then both of them went to an inn. There a middle-aged man greeted them.

    "Hey Sam, Michael you are here. Come,e, sit." Robert greeted them with a smile. Robert is a fat middle aged man with bald head.

    "Hi Uncle Robert." Sam replied.

    "Hey Fatty, hurry and serve the breakfast." Michael replied to Roberts with a smile.

    "Coming. Sam, I heard you were wasted by a ¡¯zing earth bull¡¯. It is a level 2 Initial stage magical beast. You are so lucky. You should take of yourself. Luck can¡¯t save you always kid." Robert said as he made his way over to the table where Michael and Sam sat. This is world consists of magical beasts. Even though humans ruled over thends. But about three-fourth of the world is upied by the endless forest. And forests are ruled by magical beasts.

    "Thanks for your concern uncle." Sam replied. Robert brought the breakfast and three of them casually chatted as they ate breakfast. ording to Sam¡¯s old memories both Robert and Michael are friends but for some reason both of them didn¡¯t get married. The previous Sam has pretty good rtionship with both of them. After some time, inn is getting full with customers. Both Sam and Michael made their way home after finishing their breakfast.

    While walking on the streets everyone is looking at Sam and whispered to each other with surprised expressions. ¡¯Guess this Oliver put some effort in spread the news I was dead.¡¯ Sam thought as went to his home.

    Both Sam and Michael bid farewell and Sam went inside and observed his house. It has 4 rooms one room in the front which is his shop, a bedroom, a kitchen and a room in the back is his workshop. He slowly made his way to the counter and took the leather pouch he left earlier. In this small vige there were very few who could get their hands on the spirit stones. Not only they are used for cultivation but also a form of currency. Basically except for some high-level officials and some rich people no body can get their hands on these stones. The vige head issues a spirit stones for the youth who can cultivate until they reach the age of 16. And they can get only 1 stone for every 3 months. Sam can¡¯t cultivate. So, he has no ess to these stone. A young girl from a noble family in the nearby city came to this vige with her guardians to hunt some beasts. Since the vige has an active volcano nearby, surrounding woods have more beasts of fire type. So, she came for some beast cores by hunting those beasts. The beast cores contain high fire type spiritual energy so it is beneficial for fire mages. When she came to the vige, she identally stumbled upon a person who is wearing a scarf made by Sam. And she found her way to his shop. After seeing his skills, she got so impressed she gave an order of a lot of dresses which were currently on disy in his shop. For past few months Sam continuously worked on his order that he emptied all the silk in his inventory by the time hepleted making his order. The total order is worth a sum of 10 spiritual stones for which he got a 5 spiritual stones in advance. Today is the day that girl wille for the dresses. ¡¯Thank god. If it wasn¡¯t for the girl, I would have died again just after I was reborn.¡¯ Sam sighed.

    *Bam*

    Suddenly someone knocked open the door and 3 young men entered the room.

    "Take all the dresses and search for the spiritual ston...." The young man in the lead abruptly stopped as he saw Sam in the room.

    "How are you still alive?" Oliver eximed. The young man in the lead is precisely the one who caused the original Sam¡¯s death.

    "Good to see you to Oliver. Even though you are the son of the vige head you can¡¯t take away my products after barging into my shop. Don¡¯t you think so?" Sam said with a smile that is not a smile. There is a sharp glint in his eyes. He was always a vengeful person in his previous life. Even though he doesn¡¯t have anything to do with the previous owner of the body he at least felt like he should take revenge for previous Sam.

    "How can you be alive? I saw with my own eyes that you got pierced by the Bull." Oliver questioned after getting over the previous shock.

    "Well, I am lucky, I guess. Don¡¯t worry, now that I am alive, I will definitely pay you back whatever I owe you." Sam said with the Same devilish smile.

    "Hmph what if you are alive? You can¡¯t do anything to me. If you know better you will definitely give me that spiritual stones, otherwise you won¡¯t be so lucky every time." Oliver said as turned around and left. Even though he is vige head¡¯s only son he can¡¯t go over board otherwise his father¡¯spetitors will use it as an excuse in politics.

    Apparently, Oliver just got greedy after he learnt about the business deal between Sam and the Girl from the city. ording to him Sam is just a trash who can¡¯t even cultivate. So how did he deserve these spiritual stones?

    "We will see." Sam muttered as he gazed at the departing backs.

    After that Sam started organizing all the goods in the room. Some time passed and a few people entered his house. A red-haired girl who seem to be around 16 to 17 years old is in the lead followed by two middle- aged men who seemed to be in their 30¡¯s wearing leather armors. Without any doubts they are her guards. The red-haired girl wore a red colored battle attire and she wore a red colored armor with a me symbol on it. She exuded a noble aura as her every movement is made with grace. Even Sam who saw so may modern beauties felt she was too beautiful.

    "Sam, are my dresses ready?" The red-haired girl asked Sam.

    "Yes, Miss Freya. You can take a look yourself." Sam gestured as replied aftering out of his initial daze.

    Freya started examining all the dresses nodded several times with satisfaction. After she examined every dress and cloth she turned towards Sam and spoke.

    "Well done Sam, you really are good at what you do. Even though you can¡¯t cultivate you can still earn well if youe to city. What do you think? Do you want toe to ¡¯Star wood city¡¯? I will help you arrange a shop there. You can earn a lot more than here. Even though the city merchantse here to buy goods, you will lose so much by doing business with them.

    Listening to what Freya said Sam started contemting. ¡¯I really want to leave this city but that Ling Tian guy said that there is still a test and I haven¡¯t even seen the so-called techniques he stored in my memory. I will leave after the test that guy said is finished.¡¯

    "Thank you, Miss Freya. I really want to move to city. But I still have somethings to do here." Sam replied.

    "That¡¯s okay. I will be leaving the vige tomorrow. Take this token and visit ¡¯Crimson me¡¯ family in the star wood city when you arrive there." Freya offered a token made of wood which has a Same red me carved on its surface along with a leather pouch which consists of the rest of the spirit stones.

    "Thank you, Miss Freya." Sam received the token and pouch and said politely.

    "Good bye then." Freya¡¯s bodyguards took the packed clothes and left along with her.

    "Finally, alone." Sam said as he made his way to his bedroom and sat on his bed crossing his legs. Then Sam closed his eyes.

    "Let¡¯s see what these cultivation arts you gave me Ling Tian. They better be good." Sam muttered as he went through his memory to see that techniques.

 Chapter 4: Spiritual Core,Constitution & Cultivation technique

    Sam slowly started going through his memories to see what those cultivation techniques are. As soon as he started concentrating on the memory his conscious suddenly drifted into an unknown world where a book is floating in front of his eyes. When he slowly touched the book, it transformed into a beam of light and entered the space between his brows. Then he acquired some previously unknown knowledge.

    The information is mainly regarding his spiritual core and body constitution. From this information he came to know that his spiritual core is not useless like the inspectors said. It is just somewhat unique. Basically, after cultivation stage is Initiation stage which consists of further 3 sub-stages. These sub levels are respectively known as initial, middle,te stages. Each of these three sub-stages are divided into further three levels, which are indicated by numbers. Therefore, the initiation stage has a total of nine levels. The initiation stage ismon for both Warrior and Mage. In the first three levels of the initiation stage the cultivators don¡¯t have to follow any cultivation technique. All they have to do is to collect as much spiritual energy as possible. But after the third stage initiation ispleted the every one has to practice a form of cultivation technique in order to open the acupoints until they reach the ninth level and breakthrough to the next stage which is called novice stage. The youth who can cultivate up to ninth level before 16 years of age will be sent to an academy in the city to further cultivate. Sam initially easily cultivated until third stage but his pure transparent core is not reacting with any type of cultivation techniques. At first everyone thought that it is just a defective even until now even Sam had thought so too. But, now Sam understood that the previous thinking is wrong. The core ispletely unique. ording to the newly acquired information from the weird book every core has different properties and abilities. For example, not every fire core will have same abilities. Some fire cores will provide highly concentrated but smooth mes but some others may produce raging and explosive mes. It can simply be called nature of the core. Simrly, Sam¡¯s core also has a type of unique nature. The abilities are Observe, Absorb, Manipte and Convert. These are the unique abilities of the core. And this core has two properties one is itsrge capacity to store spiritual energy and another one is it can amodate any number of elemental properties. That means if other core can be considered as an already drawn painting then this transparent core is a nk canvas. What painting he want to portray, is all dependent on the Sam¡¯s choice. Anding to the constitution of his body its even more simple. He has none. No special properties. His body is almost identical to a normal modern earthly being. Without any properties of the people born in this world. The body a person born this world carry a trace of stagnant spiritual energy. The arrangement of this spiritual energy is mostly known as constitution which is highly suitable for warriors. But Sam¡¯s body has none. So, both his body and core arepletely like a nk canvas and how to paint is up to Sam¡¯s decision. But how to paint is the main question. When Sam thought up to this point his conscious jolted and he found himself floating in that space again.

    In front of him there were four books floating in the air. There are different titles written on the covers of the books. On the first book there is a title named ¡¯Beastuary¡¯. Second book is ¡¯Bloodline Refinement and Evolution Technique¡¯, Third one is ¡¯Myriad Beast Bloodline cultivation¡¯ and thest one is ¡¯Divine soul spiritual sense Technique¡¯. Sam slowly moved towards the ¡¯Beastuary¡¯ and touched. It disappeared in the form of a beam of light just like the first book. Simrly, the same thing happened to other books. After that Sam opened his eyes in the real world and heid down on the bed while thinking to himself.

    ¡¯So, this is my situation. With the remaining spirit stones, I have I can cultivate up to the peak of initiation. But I have topletely keep it a secret. Comparing these cultivation techniques to the techniques given by authorities, the authorities¡¯ techniques are utter trash.¡¯

    Going through the information obtained from the four books Sam realized something. The ¡¯Beastuary¡¯ is nothing but a book of the knowledge regarding various beast. But information it contained is enormous, it contained the origins of the beasts, their habits, likes, dislikes, behavior, abilities and many other details. One could tame any beast if they can properly utilize this information. The second book ¡¯Bloodline Refinement and Evolution¡¯ used to purify and upgrade the bloodline of the beasts. Every beast in the lower realms is a descendant of a beast of its superior being so there might be traces of bloodline in that superior being. The beast with these blood lines can be improved and evolved into those of the superior beings. The Divine soul spiritual sense technique is highly suitable for Sam. Because it enhances the observation ability of his spiritual core. Basically, with his spiritual core, Sam can observe the spiritual energy in his surroundings. With the help of this technique he can further differentiate every thing and range is also high. For, example Sam can even differentiate various gases in the air since every thing is made of spiritual energy. And if he has enough control, he can directly separate oxygen from the air. But first he has to have to obtain wing property to his core. With advancement of this technique the effective range will increase.

    Last but not least, the ¡¯Myriad beast bloodline cultivation technique¡¯. This technique is the direct cultivation technique only suitable for his core. It is the technique with helps in amodate the different elemental properties in his core. The ¡¯Myriad beast bloodline cultivation technique¡¯ is uses the bloodline of the beasts. After cultivating up to the peak of initiation the cultivator has to select a beast and form a Bloodline contract with it. And both man and the beast will be linked and cultivate together and both of them will advance and breakthrough together by sharing spiritual energy of each other. ¡¯Now I understand what the contract that Ling Tian mentioned. But I have to wait until I reach the peak of initiation. So, I have to check the initiation cultivation first.¡¯ Sam thought and again sat cross legged and dove into his memories. But what he seen there made him slightly puzzled. The ¡¯Myriad beast bloodline cultivation technique¡¯ is Warrior-Mage technique. Basically, from the previous owner¡¯s memories Sam have an idea about the cultivation techniques. Most of the cultivation techniques doesn¡¯t need cultivator do anything other than meditating and cirction of the spiritual energy but this ¡¯Myriad beast bloodline cultivation technique¡¯pletely destroyed his understanding. In this technique he not only has to meditate but he has to work out while circting spiritual energy. From what Sam understood, from the technique he has to do exercise while opening the acupoints by circting the spiritual energy. This will be difficult but the advantage theck of constitution to be a warrior and make the body tough enough to endure the effect of Bloodline contract. Sam took the spirit stone from the pouch and started to fill his spiritual core. After sometime the spirit stones radiance by reduced by arge margin and Sam opened his eyes. When he saw the spirit stone is sufficient to cultivate from third level to fifth level but now the spirit stone is almost depleted. Sam could only smile wryly. Now Sam has to exercise physically while circting the spiritual energy. Generally, a cultivator opens acupoints step by step in various body parts one by one for example from 3rd to 4th stage acupoints in hands, from 5th to 6th stage acupoints in legs, 7th stage for torso, 8th stage for chest and finally the acupoints in head. But the ¡¯Myriad beast bloodline cultivation technique¡¯ ispletely different. All the points will be opened at same time that is the main reason Sam was left puzzled. But he just left it for another time. Now Sam has to think about the exercise he has to do.

    ¡¯Maybe I can try ¡¯that¡¯ training routine.¡¯ Sam thought as he felt a little nostalgic. One has to know in his previous life Sam is a super soldier. His training is the most brutal in the world since he has to get results in a short span of time due to his other professions. That is one of the reasons Sam was popr in the Military since, no one other than himself was able to survive the training for a single day. ¡¯Okay then, let¡¯s proceed with that.¡¯ Sam thought and went outside and started running in the streets. Every person on the street is looking at him as if they were looking at a cray person. But he didn¡¯t care and just went along with his run. After running for about an hour Sam went into his house and directly entered his backyard. There he started his exercises until it is noon. After that Sam entered his room and started preparing his lunch on a coal stove. ¡¯I should find some body- weights; normal workout is not efficient.¡¯ Sam thought.

    Later that evening Sam went to Michael¡¯s house. *knock* *knock* Sam knocked the door.

    After a few moments Michael opened the door and greeted Sam.

    "Hey Sam,e in."

    "Hi uncle, I need your help with something." Sam said as he entered the door.

    "What do you need? If it is something, I can do I will definitely help you." Michael said as he gestured Sam to sit in a chair.

    "I have some drawings here and I need these things made with heaviest metal avable to you." Sam passed down some papers after he sat in the chair.

    Michael took the papers and started going through the sketches. "It can be done in two days kid but why do you need these for?"

    "I have some use for them uncle. How much does it cost?" Sam asked.

    "Don¡¯t bring up the money kid. Its not much. I have a lot of scraps to cover them since they are not thatplex."

    "How can that be okay uncle?"

    "Its settled Sam. Don¡¯t talk about money." Michael insisted.

    After some casual chat Sam left to his home but was stopped by someone.

 Chapter 5: Breakthrogh

    Just as Sam was entering the gate of his house somebody blocked him. When Sam saw who it was, he immediately recognised them. They are the twockeys of Vige head¡¯s son, Oliver. Just as he was about to ask what do they want he was punched by the guy in left and two of them started beating him up. Sam just fell on the floor while gritting his teeth and not even letting a groan of pain, while still looking at them straight in the eyes with a cold. After beating him up ck and blue both of them stopped. One of them spoke.

    "This is the initial warning. We can¡¯t do anything to you in the house due tows. But we will beat you up every time we see you until you hand-over the spirit stones. You better know what is good for you.". After that both of them just left with look of disdain in their eyes.

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything and just silently walked inside his house and slowly went inside his bedroom. After closing the door, the expression slowly changed and the pain on his face is reced by an intense cold. "Damn it, just how many days I have to keep this act?" Yes, Sam is acting. Right now, he is trying very hard to act as Dead Sam so that others won¡¯t recognise anything. What type of person was he back on the earth? Was he a person that will make a small talk with his neighbours with a smile? Was he a person who keeps a low profile to avoid trouble for offending a powerful person? Was he a person that will just grit his teeth and swallow the humiliation of getting beat up right at his door step? Absolutely not.

    Right now, Sam is looking at the Vige head¡¯s mansion. His gaze is filled with hatred and cold raw arrogance. "Oliver, at first I just wanted to teach you a small lesson. Then when you warned I just wanted to kill you directly. But now I will make you regret living. You think that just because your father is vige head that you can do anything with his help. I will let you know how useless your father¡¯s position is when the timees. Just you wait." Sam said to himself. Sam slowly went to his bed and slowly fell asleep.

    After two days Michael deliver the products that Sam wished to make. Sam thanked him and opened the package. After that Sam took some cloths, he sewn for the past two days. They are pockets of different sizes and shapes that match the current products he got from Michael. After Sam arranged the products in the cloths and wore them, he looked like fully equipped American foot ball yer except he got no helmet. These are the body weights he asked Michael to prepare for the training. After fully wearing every thing Sam was barely able to stand with difficulty. From then onwards his training began. Sam closed his shoppletely for the following month. His daily routine became extremely simple. Wakeup-absorb energy from Spirit stone- Exercise and deplete all his energy- Eat- Absorb- exercise- eat ¨C sleep. He just kept on repeating this process for twenty days. All this time whatever he is doing he never took off the weights from his body even while sleeping he just slept like that.

    Finally, on the twenty first day, Sam is doing push ups on his fingertips while the spiritual energy is flowing all over the body while he was sweating profusely. After some time, spiritual energy ispletely depleted and sat cross legged on the floor reaching out to the final spirit stone in the pouch. ¡¯This better be the sufficient otherwise if I have to absorb spiritual energy from the surroundings, I don¡¯t even know how many months it takes to open all the acupoints.¡¯ Sam thought as he closed his eyes and started absorbing the spirit energy. Actually, for a normal guy it would be easy to breakthrough up to 7th level of initiation stage with the same amount of spirit stones Sam has used if he has a high enough talent. But Sam is still at 3rd level of initiation stage. Because for him there are no levels in the Initiation stage. He has to directly open all the acupoints at the same time. This requires a lot of concentration to achieve as it is not an easy task to distribute the spiritual energy to all acupoints at the same time. That is the reason why Sam is also mentally exhausted other than fatigue due to training. After some time, Sam opened his eyes and stood up. He immediately started exercising. Until sky turned dark, he performed various type of exercises. Suddenly, Sam stopped exercising and stood up without any movements while closing his eyes. An abrupt explosion of energy urred inside his body as spiritually energy can be seen intensely drawn into his body from all the meridians. With *puff* all the blockages on his acupoints cleared at the same time as an extreme pain attacked him from inside as if all the muscle fibres in his body were being torn apart bit by bit. Sam closed his as faced the sky and gritted his teeth. Then suddenly Sam suddenly opened his eyes and easily took off all the body weights on his body with a single hand. The previous too heavy set of pieces were as light as feather in his hand. Even Sam himself felt astonished by this development. When his looked at his bare upper body. He saw a greyish ck matter is covered all over his body. They are emitting a filthy smell. But Sam felt quite pleased because ording to the cultivation manual the huge amount of impurities is an indication of sess of the break through to the 9th kevel of the initiation stage. Sam felt the cirction of spiritual energy is also so smooth and pure. He stretched his body and went to take a bath.

    After some time, Sam slowly came out of his bathroom andy on his bed. His body undergone a major transformation in a single day. His body almost contained no fat. His muscle density increased exponentially. Even in his past life he never felt this strong before. He felt like he could control every part of his body and its so free to control it. ¡¯Now its time to take revenge.¡¯ He thought and went to sleep with a faint smile on his face.

    Next day morning.

    Sam just got ready to leave home in a sleeve less vest and normal pants. His well-defined arms can be seenpletely and with his chiselled chest almost tore the vest away. Sam just locked the gate and went outside. Just when he went outside, he saw two people waling towards him. They areckeys of Oliver. They came straight towards him and the one in the front said. "I thought you would turtle yourself in your house. If you haven¡¯te back today, I would have just bared in and kicked your ass. Now just cough up the Spirit stones so that you can live your life freely. What can you piece of trash who will forever stuck up at the third stage of initiation can do with that spirit stones?"

    Sam just stood there looking at him like he saw a pig. He inwardly thought ¡¯what did these guys see in themselves that they think too highly of themselves. Where would he keep his face if he knew I was at the 9th stage of initiation.¡¯ As Sam thought up to this point, he inwardly snickered and with a hint of disdain he threw a leather pouch towardsckey. Then without even regarding them he turned around and left in his own way. Theckey thought Sam was really afraid and just felt the pouch from outside. Seeing that it was full with stones he left without looking back with a proud smile. Perhaps he should have just looked back because, just now Sam took the which leads to the woods.

    After Sam walked for around a half an hour. He reached the woods and went to the previous ce where ¡¯he¡¯ was killed by the zing Earth Bull. The ce is still in a mess after what happenedst time. So, Sam started searching where the zing earth bull was now. After intense searching he found something. But its not the zing earth bull, the silk moths¡¯ nest which Sam usually collects silk from. When he saw the next, he was dumbfounded. Even though Sam knew that the silk worm are the ones ¡¯Sam¡¯ used to collect silk but he didn¡¯t pay much attention to it. But now when he saw them directly, he understood what they are. These silk worms are called ¡¯Heaven spirit silk worms¡¯. They are not much useful inbat but when they reach Level-3 beast the silk they produce is of very high level one which can be used for many purposes. Even then this is not their main advantage. The main advantage is which ever type of Elemental energy they absorb their silk and their nature will turn into that nature. For example, if these silk worms are reared in a fire essence filled ce then their silk will bepatible to the robes of fire mage or arrows made for users of fire element. ¡¯Before I leave, I will definitely collect all these worms and rear them.¡¯ Of course, Sam doesn¡¯t know all these things inherently he learned all these things from ¡¯Beastuary¡¯. Just when Sam is thinking how much money is, he going to make from these worms a sound suddenly startled him.

    "Moooo...."

    The zing earth bull which ¡¯killed¡¯ him previously is looking at him angrily as if his existence itself is an insult to it. Sam also looked at it coldly. "I was just looking for you and you came to me yourself."

    As if it understood what he said the angry bull came at him with heavy force and him directly. Sam instinctively used his arms and blocked in front of him. He skids his feet about a meter along with the bull. The bull looked at Sam disbelievingly. Sam looked at with disdain as he slowly said." They said you are a Level-2 Beast at initial stage. But look at you, you can¡¯t even kill a guy an Initiation stage cultivator. You are a shame to your race." Then an intense amount of spiritual energy gushed out from his body as he looked at with a provocative smirk on his face as he gestured with his hand toe. Bull really got angry and with a furious roar it directly dashed towards him. But Sam stood there unfazed by itpletely and blocked it a single hand.

    *BOOM* the sound was like a thunder as dust trailed from the ground. At this time there were a group of people passing by, who were alerted by the loud sound immediately rushed over and when they saw the dust cloud they stopped and try to peer through it. After a moment when the dust finally settled, they the scene and dumbfounded. A man is standing there with a torn sleeve less vest with a cold smile while, his hand blocked a gigantic bull. In front of the bull that man looked like a 8 year child standing before an a.d.u.l.t. The scene left all of them stunned. Before they came back to their senses, the bull immediately stepped back and looked at Sam a bit afraid. Sam then released his aura and looked back at the bull with a huge evil grin. That devilishly handsome face and that evil grin made him look so attractive that the newly attractive spectators almost forgot their initial shock. Just when they lost themselves in the scene, Sam suddenly moved. He took a step forward and leapt toward the bull and just when he reached the bull, he made a fist and punched with all his strength. The bull was in so much daze that it can¡¯t even move and took the full force of the punch.

    *Bam* *Crack*

    With a loud sound the bull wobbled on its legs before falling on the ground with a loud thud.

    *thud* Sam moved towards the bull and confirmed its death. Meanwhile the people who came are talking.

    "Senior brother, did I see this right or am I hallucinating?" A fat guy in the group said to a handsome young man in the front who is their team leader.

    "You haven¡¯t seen it wrong." Leader replied.

    "Damn it. Where did this guy evene from? A young man whose looks are simr to the leader said.

    "Taking out a Level-2 Beast when he is at 9th level initiation that to with brute force that¡¯s really something. The leader said with an interesting look in his eyes. "Haley what do you think?" the leader asked the final and the only female member of the group. The girl who seemed to be around 17 years old has an indifferent and cold aura around her. Her beautiful face aand jade like smooth skin and deep blue eyes made her look like a cold princess. Still looking at Sam she indifferently nodded showing her approval to his words. The team leader really didn¡¯t mind. At this time Sam is already getting ready to take away the corpse of the bull. Just when he was about to lift up the corpse, someone called him.

 Chapter 6: Grudge

    "Little brother right there." The leader from the group of four walked along with his team and called.

    Seeing them Sam immediately became a bit vignt. Because they are not from the vige and looking from their luxurious cloths and fancy hunting equipment, they must be some bigshot from the city.

    "Hello little bro, Is this bull for sale?" the young leader asked as Sam didn¡¯t reply with a smile on his face.

    "No." Sam indifferently replied and turned around to do his work but he was suddenly grabbed from behind.

    "Hello, little brat. Its not polite talk like that and do you really think you can really reject the option?" the young man who looked simr to team leader spoke as grabbed Sam¡¯s shoulder from behind.

    "Take your hand off me." Sam said in a cold voice. He is actually irritated to put up the act this long and he is already a bit impatient to continue his revenge, now a random person who thinks so highly of himself grabbed him from behind. When was he stooped this low?

    "What you think you are something just because you took down the bull?" the young man said with disdain still keeping his hand and released his aura. ¡¯Acolyte Mage¡¯ A thought came to his mind as felt the aura. ¡¯Judging by the aura he should at initial stage¡¯ Sam thought with a smile on his face. Suddenly he moved and grabbed that person¡¯s hand and twisted and moved towards the back of the young man. Then in a blink on of an eye he coiled along the young man¡¯s back and locked his neck with his remaining hand and used his legs to hold his legs and made the young man kneel. He applied more pressure on the Youngman¡¯s hand which he caught and said in a cold voice.

    "It is not for sale. Do you have an opinion?" Sam said in a cold voice. His voice was so cold that even the beautiful cold young woman looked a bit terrified. At this moment the team leader hurriedly stepped forward and said in a mediating tone.

    "Little bro, just leave him please. My younger brother is ignorant. Why stoop to his level?"

    "Humph" Sam coldly snorted and released him. "Next time you put hand on me without permission think twice, because much less your elder brother even if your father came and pleaded you won¡¯t be off the hook so easily." Then he turned around when to the bull.

    "I am Philip. May I know your name?" The team leader asked. Sam didn¡¯t reply. Seeing that Philip didn¡¯t reply instead his smile got bigger. Just when he was about to say something. His younger brother beat him to it. "You piece of shit. Bastard just you wait. Do you know who I am? I will kill you. If you have the balls. Tell me your name before you leave."

    "Damn it Paul, Will you shut the f.u.c.k up? Don¡¯t you have any shame...."

    "CAREFUL" Before he could finish speaking, the other young man who was silent till now shouted. When Philip turned around, he saw Sam rushing towards his Paul with a horn in his hand. The horn is the bull¡¯s horn. Sam broke the 1.5 feet long Bull¡¯s horn and rushing towards Paul. The look on the Sam¡¯s face is so cold and terrifying that even Philip felt chills along his spine. He came out of his daze and suddenly intercepted Sam by releasing his aura. He is a midstage Acolyte mage but even he felt a little startled by Sam¡¯s strength. Even though he is not a Warrior his body strength is still refined by the spiritual energy. It is not a peak of initiation could take. But the person in his hands right now is going against the norm.

    "Little Bro, stop it. He just spoke in an impulse. Even though Sam got intercepted he forcefully dragged Philip and took his face close to Paul and coldly spoke. "Who did you call a Bastard? Say that again if you dare." Sam¡¯s voice is filled with iparable fury. He is filled with just cold rage. Listening to his words Philip understood what happened. The foolish little brother of his really hit this guy¡¯s sore spot.

    *Smack*

    Just then a smacking sound heard and Sam suddenly fell unconscious. The one who hit him is the ice-cold woman. She just stood there indifferently after that and then coldly nced at Paul.

    "Just keep your loose tongue to yourself if you had no capabilities to back it up. If that guy is even a 1st level acolyte you would have already been dead even with your brother¡¯s help." She then turned to look at Sam for a few seconds and turned around to examine the Bull corpse.

    *Pah* *Pah*

    Suddenly Philip pped Paul. Just because you are from city do you think every one is your sub-ordinate. Do you really think pissing others off and losing in a fight is enough shameful? Now you even started pressuring others with your status. I should have never let you y with those noble pricks. Worst of all you even dare to insult the person who beat you and shown mercy. Damn it that guy is an Acolyte, both of us would have been dead."

    Suddenly Sam woke up. He looked at his surroundings and searched for something his eyes still filled with cold fury. Finally, he found something and just when he was about to reach his horn. Philip beat him to it and said.

    "Little Bro, I know you are angry, but please give me some face and leave this matter alone. This time it really is my brother¡¯s fault. Just give him a chance. We can discuss things. How about it?" he said with a polite tone.

    Sam coldly looked at them and as though he was thinking something, he stayed silent for sometime and slowly walked towards Philip. He slowly grabbed the horn and turned around and walked towards the corpse. Haley stepped back from the corpse and looked at him.

    "Little Bro. Do you need some help with that corpse?" Philip offered. Since Sam walked away, he is more than happy to help and he sighed in relief.

    "Where are you guys from?" Sam asked without turning around.

    "We are from Starwood¡¯s academy from Star wood city. I am the son of Ever green Pavilion head. As an apology today. You cane to my ce and fine I will treat you to a good meal."

    "The day Ie to the city; the day is your little brother going to have a broken arm. If your brother is half as humble as you and apologized, I would have called it off. But trust me next time if all four of youe at me together. I will still take that arm. There is no person who is still alive after calling me a bastard. I am letting him off easy because of you. You better take care of you brother." As soon as he finished a shocking scene happened. The bull which is around a 700 kg is lifted up by Sam with a single arm and he kept it on his shoulder. Just like that he started walking off without turning back towards his vige

 Chapter 7: Confrontation

    "Marvin, what do you think about him?" As soon as Sam left Philip asked the third guy in the team. He has brawler gloves equipped to his hands.

    "I think he is pretty amazing. He is suitable to be a warrior who focuses on grappling techniques." The man named Marvin said. "Killing a zing earth bull while being at the initiation stage is pretty good, even it is by guerri tactics its nit bad at all." He continued after a slight pause.

    "No, He killed it with a single strike." Haley said from the side.

    "What? Impossible. The strength difference is so huge." Marvin said with shock.

    "There is no damage to any other body part on the corpse except for its head. Not only that look around. There are no signs of the bull using fire type attacks. That means only one thing. He killed it even before it could use its fire attacks." Haley exined. Hearing that all of them observed their surroundings and they realized what she said is right.

    "We should follow him. If he is from the vige, we should try to recruit him earlier. So that our faction can have another expert in the school." Philip said and all of them started move towards vige. Even Paul followed unwillingly.

    .........

    While the situation is like this in the woods. The situation in the Vige Head mansion can¡¯t be said to be the same. Oliver is fuming while looking inside the leather pouch in his hand. The pouch is filled with transparent ss like stones. They are none other than the spirit stones whose spiritual energy is exhaustedpletely. The leather pouch is precisely what Sam gave to Oliver¡¯sckey. Oliver just threw the bag in anger and started walking outside the mansion. The twockeys also followed him. They were truly afraid this spoilt son of the vige head has never been this angry. After he looked at the pouch, he didn¡¯t even speak anything but directly started making his way towards Sam¡¯s house.

    When he reached Sam¡¯s house, he saw the house was locked and immediately they broke in to the house and started thrashing the ce and all the cloths that were ready for sale are destroyed. Afterpletely thrashing everything they made their way outside they saw a lot of people surrounding the house as they were whispering.

    "See that. Sam must have offended this spoilt son of vige head. This Oliver went berserk again."

    "Shhh, are you insane. He will give you trouble if he hears it."

    "What if he heard it? I am just stating the facts."

    "Where is Sam?" Oliver roared at the people. Everyone became silent for a second. At this moment Michael made his way over by pushing the crowd aside. As he looked at the mess, he became angry.

    "Oliver, what do you mean by this? Even though you are vige head¡¯s son you are not above thew." Michael said loudly.

    "I will do whatever I want. What if I wreck amoner¡¯s ce? Even if I kill him, he should ept it with a smile." Oliver roared. The crowd went into uproar. More than half the vige residents are here. By this vige guards also arrived. When they heard Oliver¡¯s words, they were all dumbfounded. Just as the guards want to make a move to take Oliver away, the crowd all started to make way. When the path was cleared, they all saw Sam making his walking towards his house with a gigantic bull on his shoulder. When Sam saw Oliver and hisckeys and then the state of his house, he is immediately angry. At this time Oliver also saw Sam, but his expression is different. Seeing the gigantic bull, he understood one thing. ¡¯Sam started cultivating. And he is high level too.¡¯ He understood this because he clearly recognised the bull corpse. That is precisely the bull he used to kill Sam. He couldn¡¯t help but gulp after seeing how Sam looked. Before he coulde out of his daze. Sam already made his move. Sam dropped the corpse and released his aura. He swiftly moved one of the twockeys behind Oliver. He caught the back of the neck of the guy and mmed his face directly to the ground.

    "Ahhhhhhhhhh" that person gave a miserable shriek. But Sam didn¡¯t stop at all. He stood up and stomped the guy on his back and grabbed his arm up. Sam made his other arm like a de and shopped at that guys arm.

    *crack* a cracking sound came and the bone pierced outwards of the skin. But it¡¯s still not over. Sam again chopped and another cracking sound came "Ahhhhh Ahhhhhhhh, please I apologize, leave me alone, leave me alone. Please let me go." The guy whose arm was broken started begging.

    "Toote." Sam coldly replied and a scene which shocked the whole crowd happened. Sam grabbed the bone which pierced out side of the skin and directly pulled. A bone appeared on his hand. The guy under his foot fainted from pain. Before anyone can digest what happened. Sam leapt towards anotherckey and pinned that guy down.

    Thatckey came out of his daze and he immediately started begging. "Please Sam. Please let me go. I will never trouble you again. We were forced to do this by Oliver. Please. By this time guards also came out of their shock. But they don¡¯t dare to move. They all are initiation stage warriors. But they were afraid of Sam. Seeing his speed and strength, they felt like they will send themselves to death if they were to fight. So, they started persuading.

    "Sam, leave him alone. This is a crime." One guard said.

    "Shut the f.u.c.k up. Where the f.u.c.k are you when they thrashed my house. If you talk one more word. You will be next." Sam said in cold voice and immediately after he finished, he stabbed the bone in his hand diagonally from below the rib of theckey under him.

    "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh......" theckey screamed in agony. He tried struggle out of the grip up but Sam stayed on him like a mountain. Then Sam directly kicked on the part of the bone which is outside with his knee. The total bone disappeared. Even blood stopped flowing out as the bone blocked it. Theckey fainted. This scene caused chills down the spines of all the spectators. Everyone felt their hair standing up on their necks. This time there is only one thought on their minds. ¡¯Too cruel.¡¯ All of them thought this Sam is a vey nice person since he is very humble. But now they felt like they saw him for the first time. The devilishly handsome face felt so unfamiliar to them. Sam then got up and slowly started walking towards Oliver, with a cold look on his face. His aura is too intense that Oliver¡¯s legs started shaking as he stepped backwards.

    "W- what do you want to do?" Oliver looked at Sam and asked with trembling voice. He is afraid now. He never would have thought that a ¡¯trash¡¯ would make him this afraid. He regretted this his actions now.

    "I already told you Mr. Oliver. I am going to pay you back for everything." Sam said in a low voice as suddenly threw a punch at Oliver. Oliver flew like a kite whose string got cut. But he didn¡¯t hit hit the ground. A middle-aged man who wore luxurious robes caught him. No body knew when this guy came. But when everyone saw the him they hurriedly bowed and said. "We pay our respects to vige head." He is the vige head of theva rock vige and father of Oliver. He indifferently gestured them to rise and he regarded his surroundings and finally looked at the young man in front of him who is the only person didn¡¯t bow.

    "Young man, don¡¯t you know how to pay respects to your superiors." Another middle-aged man said to Sam from the side. He is an official in the vige who is responsible to collect the tax from vigers. He is peak Acolyte mage. Sam didn¡¯t pay any attention to him. He only looked straight towards the Vige head coldly without saying a word. The official got angry. Just when he was about to say something. Vige head stopped him and asked the nearby guards. "What happened?"

    A guard came forward and respectfully said everything about the situation without hiding any truth. Since, so many people saw what happened it is impossible to lie. The vige head¡¯s expression grew unsightly the more heard the situation. Then he looked at his son with disappointment on his face. Then looked at Sam and the Bull corpse and said. "You broke through."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply instead he released aura.

    "Ninth stage initiation." The vige head muttered in a low voice and then continued. "As far I remember you can¡¯t cultivate. How did you do it?"

    Sam still didn¡¯t reply. Vige head asked again. He pointed at the twockeys unconscious on the ground asked. "Even though youngsters have disputes, should you be this cruel."

    "Where were you when they wrecked my shop? Where were you when they beat me up in the vige. Where were you when they tried to plot and kill me? don¡¯t talk if you don¡¯t know." Sam said.

    "How dare you talk to me, the vige head like that?" the vige head roared in anger. He released his aura and started applying pressure on Sam. Sam started sweating profusely and his legs started shaking. But he still looked at vige head directly and replied.

    "What you still remember, you are the vige head? Then I paid 10 percent of my tax every month and I have beaten up by these two guys and threatened by your son. Now they thrashed my house and he said he is going to kill me?" Vige head immediately lost his temper and was about to make his move. Just then a voice came from the distance.

    "Woah 10 percent tax? Vige head I thought ording to kingdom¡¯s rule there is only 5 percent tax system. And you a Novice mage is still going to attack a junior at initiation stage because he asked for the tax he paid." Everyone turned towards the voice and saw four people in the expensive battle attire. When vige head saw them, he immediately paled. And stood there stupefied. Unlike him all the vigers are in uproar. They all didn¡¯t know they were being cheated of their hard-earned money. So, when they learnt of it, they were really angry.

    "Young master Evergreen. What are you doing here?" Vige head asked.

    "What I still need your permission toe here?" Philip replied. His friendly manner and polite tone all gone.

    "No, no that¡¯s not what I meant. Even I had known I would have prepared a banquet for you." Vige head replied. Not minding Philip¡¯s tone at all.

    "I don¡¯t care about your hospitality. Just leave right now." Philip impatiently waved his hand.

    "I will leave." Vige head immediately replied and went away. But he is followed by a huge crowd along with him.

    Philip made his way toward Sam and stood before him. His teammates followed him and stood behind him.

    "So, your name is Sam." Philip said with a smile.

    Sam indifferently nodded and turned towards Paul. "We are even." Then he turned around carrying the bull corpse and walked into hispound.

    Philip didn¡¯t mind and started followed him while Paul heaved a huge sigh of relief. He was really afraid earlier. After Sam¡¯s ruthlessness he felt lucky and abandoned all thoughts of revenge. Quickly he also followed along with others. Sam went to his backyard where the well was and dropped the corpse. Suddenly Michael¡¯s voice came.

    "Sam, since when can you cultivate?" Michael asked as ran towards him. Philip and his teammates all looked at Michael.

    "Hello uncle Michael, it¡¯s just that my progress was so slow that they thought I can¡¯t cultivate. But now my effort paid in and I broke through."

    "Great, is this your hunt? Boy you got guts. Your first hunt is the bull tried to kill you." Michael asked as he looked at the corpse. Philip and his teammates look puzzled. But when they saw the marks of wounds on Sam¡¯s torso they immediately understood.

    "Yes uncle." Sam chuckled. "Uncle you see my friends are here can we talkter." Sam said with an awkward expression.

    "Okay we will talk tomorrow." Michael said and left.

    "Why are you guys here?" Sam¡¯s expression immediately changed to indifferent manner. His smile waspletely gone. Everyone was dumbfounded when they saw this change.

 Chapter 8: Uninvited Guests

    "Why are you guys here?" Sam coldly looked towards these four people and asked with no emotions.

    The expressions of the four people cannot be anymore astonished. They thought this Sam ispletely different person.

    "Sam isn¡¯t it a bit rude. You just said that we are your friends right." Philip said with his signature friendly smile.

    "Get to the point." Sam asked impatiently.

    "Hahaha okay, May I know how old you are?" Philip asked.

    "Why do you need to know?" Sam asked with a trace of confusion.

    "Just answer some question and we can have a proper discussion. Please." Philip requested with a pleading tone.

    "Two months to 15 years." Sam replied as he sat cross legged in front of the bull corpse. While Sam was still indifferent every one else was stunned beyond belief. Because even in the city even in the imperial capital of the western continent, reaching the peak of initiation before 15 is rare.

    "Are you telling the truth?" Paul asked to make sure. But all he got is a cold re from Sam in reply.

    "*phew* Sam are you interested ining to Starwood city to join Starwood academy." Philip asked after taking a deep breath. Sam looked at him in confusion. Seeing his expression Philip started exining.

    "Actually, your vige is theplete end of our western continent in Southern direction. It has only connection with three cities. Starwood city, Misty River city. And finally, Mountainke city. This Lava rock vige is under jurisdiction of Starwood city. Every year there will be a batch of people from your vige sent to the Starwood city. That is why I am asking if you have an interest to join. Listening to the exnation Sam finally realized. Right now, Sam really wanted to go to Starwood city. But It was not to join academy but to open a business. Sam knew one thing that is if he wanted to develop his cultivation, he needs a lot of resources. That is why Sam decided to open his shop in the city. Even though he never learnt any tailoring skills in previous life the owner of the body has ingrained the skills to his bones. So, it is not difficult earn some money. After some initial savings he can just bring out his skills and inventions from his previous life and he can develop further. But when he thought of his limited knowledge of his world going to the academy doesn¡¯t seem to be a bad idea. But he still has to wait toplete the test of that Ling Tian guy.

    "I wille but I have some things to take care of here. So, I won¡¯t being until a few dayster." Sam replied. And then again continued to concentrate on the corpse. Sam closed his eyes and started releasing his spiritual energy into the corpse and started observing. He is testing the ¡¯Observe¡¯ ability of his spiritual core. When the Spiritual energypletely filled the corpse. Sam got a view in his mind. He can clearly see the muscles, blood, bones, nerves, and even cell structure of the Bull. There is a faint trace of particles emitting from the pores of the skin from the Bull. That is the spiritual energy particles. ¡¯So, the spiritual energy is just like concept of light in my previous world. Light is made of photons where as this spiritual energy is made of these particles. One thing inmon is that both doesn¡¯t seem to be have any particle mass.¡¯ Sam thought as he slowly opened his eyes and withdrew his spiritual energy. As soon as San got up, he has a faint headache. ¡¯this is why he gave me the Divine soul spiritual sense technique. Sam thought as he turned around. When he saw that there is nobody there in his backyard, he was relieved. He didn¡¯t want any guests. He slowly walked towards the door to enter his house.

    Meanwhile, the vige head was fuming in his mansion. "what connection does that brat have with the young master of Evergreen family? Tell someone to keep watch on his house. As soon as those nobles from the city left inform me. I have to kill that bastard for all the mess he created." Vige head said to his subordinate, His subordinate bowed and left. He turned look at his son who is still lost in daze and heaved a sigh. ¡¯If Sam doesn¡¯t die, Oliver can¡¯t recover and advance in his cultivation.¡¯ He inwardly thought and he turned his gaze towards the window. There outside the mansion, more than half of the vige residents are sat down in protest for their taxes. Seeing this he only burnt more in fury.

    Faraway from the mansion, Sam just entered his house and stood there dumbfounded by the scene in front of him. There are four people in front of him. They are none other than Philip and his team. They all washed up and changed their clothes and sitting in his living room c.u.m Shop and chattering away as if it was their own home. Haley has some papers in her hands as she is examining them with full concentration with a strange expression. Seeing that Sam has entered Philip said.

    "Come on Sam. We are waiting for you." He said as he gestured to Sam to sit in an empty chair.

    "I already said I can¡¯t go right now. Why are guys still here?" Sam asked in annoyance as he sat in the chair.

    "Of course, we will be staying here until you settle your matters." This time the one who answered is Marvin. Hearing his response, Sam became speechless. ¡¯Aren¡¯t you guys nobles from city. How can you be so shameless?¡¯ Sam thought inwardly.

    "Don¡¯t worry. We won¡¯t disturb your life." Philip said shamelessly.

    "Are you the who made the dresses do Freya?" Out of blue, Haley asked causing everyone to be silent. After all this is not how the ice princess behaved. But Sam was clearly annoyed by her tone. Was she ordering him? Like hell he would answer her back. So, he just turned his head away. Seeing his response, Haley really got angry. Twenty or something days ago Freya got a new dress collection from god knows where and those dresses are really pretty. Either quality or embroidery everything is excellent. Freya said she specifically custom made her dress by a tailor. But she won¡¯t reveal who it was no matter what. That is the reason when she saw the designs of the dresses, she really felt excited. She didn¡¯t control her tone because she got used to it.

    "I am asking you. Answer me." Haley repeated in same tone. Sam got more and more irritated. ¡¯If I wasn¡¯t afraid that you would all gang upon me, I would have kicked you out already and now this girl is even speaking to me in bossy tone.¡¯

    "What does that got anything to do with you?" Sam replied in the same kind of tone as her. Hearing this all the people in the room became stunned again. Nobody dared to talk to Ice princess like this before. ¡¯Bro you got guts alright.¡¯ This is the thought in all three boys¡¯ minds. This time even Haley got stunned. This is the first time anyone has spoken in that tone with her. Everyone will always be respectful to her or tter her. She even has people sucking up to her. But this is first time hearing such reply. Looking at their faces, Sam understood what they are thinking so he continued.

    "Listen to me Miss. You might have been people ttering and sucking up to you left and right. Hell, you might even have several flower guardians pursuing you. But I have no reason to be subservient in front of you and I don¡¯t even have to tolerate your tone and behaviour. If you have a problem with a that get the hell out of my house. If you really need to know something, you have to be polite and I will also politely answer." Speaking up to this point Sam stood up and walked towards his room and continued talking. "If you guys want to stay here, I can allow you as repayment for guiding the city. For the food you can eat the bull outside for the following days. But the you have to separate the leather blood and horns for me in repayment. I am not looking for friends. if you really want friendship lets wait until we are trustworthy enough for each other. Until then we can only make deals. If you agree, you can stay. Or else leave by tomorrow." Finishing what he wanted to say, he left to his room and slept on his bed.

    After hearing what Sam said everyone was dumbfounded. Haley then had asplicated expression on her face. Philip has a smile on his face s he muttered. "Interesting."

    Next day before the dawn arrived. Sam jumped the wall and entered Michael¡¯s house and then he covered himself with a cloak and left the vige in the direction of woods. He thought that he should be cautious since he offended the vige head. Indeed, he is right. They are some guards secretly watching Sam¡¯s house. But they didn¡¯t realise they missed him.

    Sam slowly made his way to his usual ce in the woods and wondered. ¡¯Where should I search for the best beast? As far as I know the strongest beast in the woods in this area is level 2 peak stage ¡¯Scarlet me panther¡¯ and its partner. So, if strongest is considered best then it should be one of the two. But I think that is not true.¡¯ Sam pondered. Just then a sound came to Sam¡¯s ears.

    "CAW" "CAW" Sam lifted his head up and saw a bunch of crows flying over from the volcano. Then suddenly something shed in his mind. ¡¯No matter how much of a greater world it is. How can there be ordinary crows in a volcanic region? There is definitely something fishy here. As thought about it Sam directly walked towards the volcano. Sam looked at the volcano from the distance as he slowly made his move over there. The top of the volcano is not visible. As the smoke covered all of it. Sam went to the foot of the volcano and the temperature is very high. He can clearly see the crows making their way in and out from the smog cloud at the top. "Let¡¯s see what you have in store." Sam muttered as he slowly started climbing

 Chapter 9: First Contract

    Sam slowly started trekking the volcano slowly. The surface is so hot that the sweat itself is vaporizing into thin air as soon as it came out of the pores. But Sam kept on going. Because the higher he got the more crows he saw near the volcano, this only made him believe that there is something really wrong. Because no normal crow can survive near a volcano much less flying towards the mouth of the volcano. Then if these crows are not ordinary, then should be magical beasts. And if a whole flock of these crows are there together and nobody in the vige has never paid any attention to it. That is something unnatural. That is the reason Sam is trying to find out.

    Sam finally entered the smog that covered the mouth of the volcano. When he entered the smog his didn¡¯t blur on the contrary what he saw made him almost lose his grip. The volcano mouth is not as near as he expected. It is still far away and what made him even more shocked is the mountain from now on doesn¡¯t have any slope. It is almost like a straight wall. Sam took a deep breath and continued his hike. But after sometime he can¡¯t bear the temperature. His body is tempered by cultivating the ¡¯Myriad beast bloodline¡¯ technique in order to bear the pressure from the bloodline from the beasts but he still can¡¯t continue. So, he finally gritted his teeth and sub-consciously started the cultivation technique. Suddenly he felt that the temperature around him has elevated a lot. Realizing this Sam saw hope and again continued his journey. But after another hundred meters of climbing he started feeling immense pressure bearing down up on him and again his journey slowed down. But Sam didn¡¯t stop he cultivated furiously and carried on. Finally, almost when it is noon Sam reached top. On the top there were hundreds of crows. All the crows are as Sam expected Level-1 beasts. Their eyes are fiery red and their feathers are just like normal crow feathers but their colour is a bit different as they had a reddish hue for them on their ck colour. Sam finally realized what these are. They are fire crows. But ording to the knowledge he learnt from the ¡¯Beastuary¡¯ they shouldn¡¯t be here. That is the reason Sam didn¡¯t even think in that direction. But reality proved him wrong. These beasts which are higher grade species that are not supposed to exist in this mortal realm are here. Sam finally understood one thing; he took the right path. He felt a bit excited and a rare smile appeared on his face as he slowly moved towards the edge of the mouth. But scene in front of him is not as he expected. There is an orb which is glowing with vigour like a brilliant sun is present in centre of theva pool. But another thing that surprised him is that the depth of the volcano. The depth inside the volcano is very smallpare to outside. Sam almost climbed 4000 metres but inside the volcano the depth is only 500 metres. This contrast made him stupefied. ¡¯If it isn¡¯t for the heat waves from theva pool, I would have suspected it is an illusion. Sam thought as he leapt inside the mouth of the volcano andnded on the bank which is very small that it could barely sufficient for a single person to stand. He took a deep breath that almost made his lungs get fried. He then observed the orb which is in the size of an elephant. With that brilliance there seemed to be something that is sleeping.

    While Sam is observing the orb, on his house the uninvited guests are discussing about him.

    "Brother, do we really need to stay here and take him with us. He doesn¡¯t seem to like us that much." Paul asked Philip. He is a bit afraid to be with Sam.

    "What do you think Haley?" Philip asked Haley with a smile as if he didn¡¯t hear Paul at all.

    Right now, Haley is looking through all the papers in work room where Sam usually makes the clothes. She stopped up on interruption and looked towards Philip. "I need to make a deal with him. Even if you guys leave, I am staying here." She replied with her indifferent tone. Both Marvin and Paul were puzzled. "What deal do you want to make?" Paul asked curiously. But all he got was a re in reply.

    "Okay Haley cool down alright. I know you want to ask him to make dresses for you. You don¡¯t have to make Paul nervous if you don¡¯t want to say it." Philip interrupted as heughed.

    "Humph." All he got in reply is a snort as turned her gaze away towards the papers.

    "I don¡¯t think Sam is that much of an irritating person. I think he is just irritated about something that is why he is behaving like that." Marvin said from the side.

    "I think so too. Let¡¯s wait we don¡¯t have anything to do anyway." Philip said as he sat down and started cultivating.

    Meanwhile Sam is still observing the orb. After observing for so long he realized that there is a bird which seemed to be in a state of sleep. Sam just understood that his thinking is absolutely correct. So, he went through the ¡¯Myriad Beast Bloodline¡¯ technique and revised how to make a contract. Then he started making various hand symbols while circting his spiritual energy ording to technique then aplex looking rune emerged from his be. Suddenly the bird in the orb started giving off a reaction. Then the orb brightened and the very next second it dimmed then a majestic looking bird appeared. And sameplex rune appeared from the bird. And suddenly the blood came from bird and Sam at same time which spread along the Rune. Then the runes exchanged and merged into each other¡¯s body and disappeared. And a loud sound came from the bird. "CAWWW". All the fire crows prostrated as a sign of respect. Then the bird looked at Sam and it cawed again.

    "Caw Caw Caw " but Sam heard another thing.

    "Greetings young master." This sound came in his mind. Which made Sam dumbstruck.

 Chapter 10: The Gift & A New Partner

    "Greetings young master." As soon as this voice was heard in his head. Sam became dumbstruck with shock. He looked at the massive bird in front of him. It is almost 4 times his current size. But Sam felt like this bird is still quite young. But that is not the main reason Sam felt such shock. The main reason is that the bird in front of him is the Legendary ¡¯Three-legged Golden Sun Crow¡¯ which he only read in the myths of his previous world. He saw this bird in the ¡¯Beastuary¡¯ but it said that the bird only exists in upper Heavenly realms. But he is seeing one right in front of his eyes. Just as he was about to open his mouth, a bright light appeared from the ¡¯Golden Sun Crow¡¯ and then formed into projection of a man who is very familiar to Sam. He is none other than Ling Tian. Then Ling Tian spoke with a smile

    "Congrattions Sam, you didn¡¯t disappoint me. In fact, you came earlier than expected."

    "So, this ¡¯Golden Sun Crow¡¯ is sent here by you?" Sam asked as realization dawned onto him.

    "Yes, he is one of the younger generations from the ¡¯Golden Sun Crow¡¯. It is the same age as you." Ling Tian replied.

    "But if my first contract is one of the strongest bloodlines, where can I get the blood lines of the same level as I advance in the cultivation levels in this ¡¯Mortal realm¡¯." Sam asked with a frown.

    "Hahaha, you don¡¯t have to worry about that Sam. Mortal world you are living in is not as simple as you think. The world you are living in is a fallen world. Even though you can¡¯t get the pure-blooded beasts of the Heavenly like the ¡¯Golden Sun Crow¡¯, you can still find the beasts with at least a of those bloodlines. That is what the reason that I gave you the ¡¯Bloodline Evolution and Refinement technique¡¯. If you can find a beast with at least a trace of bloodline you can activate the blood line directly by making some effort." Ling Tian said. Sam nodded in understanding.

    "Can I ask you something?" Sam said.

    "Sure"

    "If you created this cultivation technique that is this unique what kind of technique did you cultivate and how did you create this type of technique?" Sam asked slowly.

    "Bahahaha." Hearing this question Ling Tian burst in to a fit ofughter and continued. "I didn¡¯t expect you to ask that question. If you really want to know thene and find me and win a duel with me. Then I will tell you what you want to know. Ling Tian said. Hearing this Sam frowned. ¡¯From this guy¡¯s words, he must be really strong. This guy is definitely from the Heavenly realms. But how much higher he has to be in so that he could even send a ¡¯Golden Sun Crow¡¯ to this world. I wonder how many years it would take me to get there. Sam wondered. Just then Ling Tian¡¯s voice came.

    "I don¡¯t have much time to chat with you. I already told you that I will give you a present if you pass the test now that you passed the test ept the gift." Just as finished his words a transparent blue gem which is spherical in shape flew out from theva pool and floated in front of Sam. Sam slowly extended his hand and itnded on it. Looking at it, Sam felt quite puzzled, then Ling Tian¡¯s voice came. "Spread your spiritual sense in to it." Sam did as he was told. Then Sam suddenly entered into a different world. He looked around in astonishment. The world around ispletely against all the science he learnt in his previous world. The world is divided in to four quadrants. One has is like a volcand mass, one is like a pr region, one is like a Spring field and thest one is like a desert. Other than that, the spring field has various mountains on which clouds are roaring and there is argeke in the point where all the four quadrants are intersected. In between theke there is and mass and upon thatnd there is arge circr tower. Sam felt like he is dreaming when he saw this.

    "Like it?" Ling Tian¡¯s projection suddenly appeared beside. Sam almost jumped out of his skin but he nodded his said after the moment of shock. They slowly floated towards the tower in the centre of theke. As theynded in front of the tower entrance Ling Tian gestured Sam to open the door. As the door opened a majestic scene entered their eyes. Then Ling Tian the spoke.

    "This miniature world is a Divine Dimension which I refined myself. This tower is also my creation which I am presenting to you. The first floor of the tower which we are in right now is a library." Ling Tian paused and Sam looked around. There are several wooden shelves in the room just like a library. But the racks are not filled with books instead they were filled with a lot of wisps of light.

    "Those wisps are also called Divine wills. These are all the data I collected from various people and some are my own self creation. Some of them are cultivation techniques, some of them are insights on battle and arts, some of them are martial techniques, some of them are auxiliary professions like Inscription arts, Formations, Weapon making and so on. the speciality of this floor is you can read here as much as you want as the time flow is 10 times slower than the outside floor. But you can¡¯t cultivate here. You can only read and gain insights. Then let us go to the second floor. Ling Tian said rapidly without giving Sam any time to continue. They suddenly appeared in the second floor. Even before Sam digested the information from the first floor, he became stunned again. The second floor is arge white space. Ling Tian spoke from beside him.

    "This floor is an illusory space. This floor is also having time flow same as the first floor. But the difference is you can simte any kind of situation here. Just imagine and you will understand." Then Sam imagined theb from his previous world and suddenly theb appeared in front of him then he imagined the battle he had before his death. Then the battle yed like a video in front of him. Just as Sam was marvelling from the scene Ling Tian suddenly spoke. "You really have good battle sense." Sam came out of his reverie. Then the scene disappeared. He felt a little mncholic.

    "Okay then, the remaining five floors are blocked for now. You can open them if you meet some certain conditions. Let us go out." Ling Tian and they instantly appeared outside the door of tower. Thend around you is storage for your beasts. Since you are cultivating the ¡¯Myriad Beast bloodline technique¡¯ and already reached the Acolyte stage you can already tame the beasts. But remember you must always make contract as an equal for the beasts you choose for your cultivation. Finally, thend around you is an herb garden. Because of these various conditions, you can almost cultivate any kind of herbs and they also have same 10 times. But this time it is faster. Not only you can cultivate the herbs but also you can raise the beasts here in this space. But the beasts don¡¯t have any effect of the time flow. If you enter this dimension the crystal will fall down and it would make you vulnerable. So, beware of that." As Ling Tian finished up to this point his projection blurred and almost became invisible. "Seems like I don¡¯t really have any time left. Be careful Sam I will be waiting for you."

    "Wait, I still have many questions, I want to ask." Sam shouted.

    "Don¡¯t worry Sam. There will be a next time. But I have a final advice for you. Don¡¯t be alone. I know you don¡¯t believe in people. But find some true friends and develop along with them. If there is know one around to share the joy and Sorrow, the journey will be boring and iplete." As he finished. Ling Tian¡¯s projection faded. Sam stayed in silence and after sometime he willed to go out of the Dimension. Then he appeared before the Golden Sun Crow. Both of them just stayed in silence. Sam quietly examined the bird. It is majestic looking bird. Its feathers are like golden mes which looked quite majestic and bright with l.u.s.tre. Its three talons are sharp and big which can rip apart anything.

    "Hello." Sam finally said to break the atmosphere.

    "Hello, young master. I am the Prince of the Golden Sun crow tribe." The bird replied.

    "Prince of the tribe?" Sam asked in bewilderment.

    "Yes. I came to this world on the arrangement of Master Ling Tian." The crow replied.

    "What is your name?" Sam asked.

    "Yanwu"

    "Just call me Sam. Since, our contract is based as equals there should be no need for such honorifics and we are going to live a long time together." Sam replied.

    "Thank you, Sam. By the way congrattions on bing an ¡¯Acolyte¡¯. Master Ling Tian has a present for you." Yanwu said and he pped his wings and absorbed all theva inside the pool. There are a lot of spiritual stones in the bottom of the wide pool. As Sam watched the stones his eyes sparkled. Because the stones are not white in colour like normal spirit stones rather, they are red in colour. They are Fire elemental spirit stones. These spirit stones are extremely valuable because they can increase the cultivation speed by many times. The market value for these stones is very high. One elemental stone is same as five normal stones. It may even increase depending on the location. And the pool Sam can see at least thousands of them. Sam shifted his gaze towards Yanwu and asked slowly. "How many are they?"

    "They are not that much. They are only around 10,000 stones." Yanwu replied. Sam can¡¯t see from his face or from the cawing of Yanwu. But he can sense that Yanwu is smiling. As Sam was still in his shock. Yanwu spoke again.

    "Sam this is the gift from my Golden Sun crow tribe." And Yanwu pped its wings. After a small gust of extremely hot air there flew hundreds of ck feathers andnded in front of Sam. Sam caught one of them and examined them with a confused expression. Seeing that Yanwu let out a cheerful cawing. His eyes bright with smile and said.

    "Inject your spiritual energy into them." Sam did as he was told and the feather became bright and golden colour then Yanwu continued. "These are the feathers of the elders and current king of my tribe. These feathers have high endurance and can be used for attack and defence if used properly. Since you have Golden Sun Crow bloodline from our contract, you can also use them and you are also verypatible with them." Sam was shocked again. After sometime he looked straight at Yanwu and said. "Thank you." Sam felt really grateful as these are really valuable treasures for anyone and even more valuable for the Golden crows themselves. Even though he knew most of it was due to Ling Tian. He still felt grateful.

    "Okay Yanwu. I think you have already enough of this ce. So, let us go outside. From now on we are partners. Let us reach the top of the world." Sam said with a rare smile on his face. Just when he was about to say something, he saw the feathers and the spirit stones and felt troubled. ¡¯How should I take them out of this ce?¡¯ Sam thought. Feeling Sam¡¯s trouble Yanwu spoke. "The Dimension can be used for storage. There is bas.e.m.e.nt under the tower which can store anything."

    "That Ling Tian guy really is forgetful." Sam muttered as he waved the hand in which he was holding the crystal and said. As he waved the crystal all the spirit stones and the feathers vanished.

    "Come on I will give you a ride." Yanwu said as he bowed. So that Sam could hop on. Sam climbed on stood there. Then Yanwu Cawed loudly as he flew out of the volcano and straight up into the air. It is already time for the sun to set. Then suddenly Yanwu transformed into arge Raven from its Sun crow form and flew down towards the entrance of the forest. Generally, by this time no one would dare stay in the woods. So, nobody saw their arrival. As Yanwunded, Sam jumped to the ground and Yanwu turned into the size of a normal raven andnded on Sam¡¯s shoulder. Then Sam walked towards his home along with Yanwu with a smile on his face. He is very excited and anticipated for the future. This is the first time he felt happy since he came to this world.

 Chapter 11: Sam the tailor

    Sam is waking through the streets as he is returning to his house. He is quite curious because all the streets are pretty much empty and very few people can be seen on the street. But threw his thought back of his mind. The raven on his shoulder is looking around excitedly with out blinking his eyes.

    "Sam, do you really live in this vige?" Yanwu asked curiously.

    "Yes, why?" Sam replied.

    "The houses here are all so small." Yanwu said slowly.

    "Don¡¯t worry we won¡¯t be staying here for long." Sam said as he patted Yanwu¡¯s head. He is quite happy today for the first time he came to this world. He can finally say goodbye to the helpless feeling of a weakling and choose the path to develop and finally leave this backward vige. All Sam wanted right now was to go to his house and examine himself to understand his own strength perfectly. As Sam thought up to this point, he reached his home and opened the door. Inside he saw the ¡¯guests¡¯ who are sitting in the living room and all of them looking at various papers. One nce and Sam knew it that they were the designs of various attires ¡¯he¡¯ made previously. By the scene in front of him Sam involuntarily frowned. And in middle of them were huge chunks of meat which are obviously barbecued. This meat is none other than the meat from the bull he killed. ¡¯Are they really nobles from the city? It is one thing for them to stay here shamelessly. But to think that they won¡¯t have any shame to open his work room andfortably look through all his designs. How thick is their skin exactly?¡¯ Sam thought inside his head.

    Suddenly all four people inside the room noticed the new presence and looked towards the door. When they saw Sam and noticed his expression, they immediately knew what he was thinking. So, they immediately avoided his gaze. Particrly Paul immediately soaked in his own sweat as he was afraid Sam¡¯s temper will raise again and beat him up. After all he is not Sam¡¯s match despite him having the superior cultivation level. But his worries were unfounded. Then everyone noticed the ck raven on Sam¡¯s shoulder and Philip asked to break the silence.

    "Sam, why did you bring a Raven with you?"

    "It is my new friend, Yanwu." Sam said with a normal tone. The usual coldness was nowhere to be seen. Everyone felt a bit bewildered. Sam didn¡¯t even see them as friends even when Philip helped him to get out of the pinch from the vige head. But now he went outside this morning and brought back a big ck raven and saying it is new friend. So, they were little lost. ¡¯Bro, on what standards do you usually make friends?¡¯ this is the thought on their minds. Well except for one person.

    "I want to make a deal with you." Haley spoke slowly in a low voice from the side. Everyone came out of their wandering thoughts and looked at her including Sam. Her three teammates were a bit surprised. Because, this is not how she usually talks. The Ice goddess Haley and her cold and haughty manner are famous all around the Starwood city. Now hearing her polite tone, everyone felt like they were dreaming. But Philip was smiling from other side with an amused expression as he looked at both Sam and Haley.

    "What do you want?" Sam asked in an equally polite tone. This time even Philip felt a little surprised. All the three boys only have one thought. ¡¯What happened to all the cold persons today. Why did they be so polite all of a sudden?¡¯ But Sam didn¡¯t care what they thought. His personality is akin to a mirror. What ever the other people offer hr reflects it back in full scale. Listening to his tone Haley rxed as she was afraid, he would react just like he did yesterday. Then she took a deep breath and continued.

    "I want you to make me some dresses." Haley said slowly. Listening to this all her teammates felt that they heard it wrong. Because, based on her wealth and status, she could get as many dresses and as many types as she wants. But they were bewildered to take her such a polite approach and request a person like that. But they didn¡¯t know what thoughts that Haley has. Haley has seen Freya¡¯s dresses she got from Sam from before. Every dress is like an art work and since they were specifically made for Freya, they clearly matched her very well. She ang Freya are from the same academy and are of same age and they have an obvious rivalry that is known to all the Starwood city. Now after seeing the elegant and beautiful dresses Freya wearing, she felt that she lost inparison. She tried to find out where Freya got these dresses, but all the efforts are in vain. But her teammates would never guess that. Because in their hearts Haley is an Ice-Goddess, who is aloof to all the mortal thoughts. Who would guess that the goddess in their thoughts is like every other young maiden? That is why she felt a little anxious since no one can give the dresses she wants other than Sam. But the reply she got disappointed her a bit.

    "I can¡¯t do that now." Sam replied. The other guys all felt shocked again. ¡¯Damn this guy really knows how to y hard to get. The goddess is clearly requesting politely and he didn¡¯t even hesitate to reject.

    "Why?" Haley asked with frustration. ¡¯Why is this guy so hard to please? I am already asking politely. Damn it many Scions in the city are trying so hard to please and he is not even hesitating to reject me.¡¯ She inwardly thought as she felt her pride for her beauty shattering.

    "Right now, my shop is not in a condition for creating clothes as I lost all the instruments when Oliver thrashed the store. Moreover, I don¡¯t have enough raw materials. So, I can¡¯t do it." Sam replied with the same polite tone. Hearing this Haley felt a little better yet disappointed. She clearly felt better since he doesn¡¯t reject her for any reason but circ.u.mstances and disappointed because she can¡¯t get the dresses. Looking at her disappointed expression, Sam continued.

    "I will be opening my shop in the Starwood city. Since you asked me now, I will only create clothes for you first. But the number of dresses will be same as Miss Freya that is a total of 10 dresses and will be done in same quality." Listening to this Haley¡¯s eyes sparkled. Then Sam continued. "But you have to keep the prices a secret because, I will be charging new prices as I am changing my products a bit." Sam said. Haley immediately agreed.

    "I will be in my work room as I have something to do. So, please don¡¯t disturb me till morning." Sam said as took two huge pieces of barbecued meat chunks in middle of the team and went towards his work room. he didn¡¯t really feel any shame to grab the meat as it came from the Bull he killed. ¡¯This meat really tastes.¡¯ Sam thought as he took a bite and entered his work room. After Sam left all three guys in the room were about to ask something. But Haley beat them to it. "Don¡¯t you dare talk about what happened now get out of your mouth." She said coldly as she sat down and continues eating. Everyone just shook their heads and they also continued eating.

    Inside the work room Sam sat down as he started eating. And Yanwu also started eating other piece of meat. Suddenly, Yanwu asked.

    "Sam who are they?"

    "They are a few people from the city who I made a deal with." Sam replied slowly.

    "Oh" Yanwu replied as he continued munching on the meat. After they had their fill Sam stood up and started searching for something and after an intense search in all the mess, he finally found a big piece of ck cloth. And he slowly walked towards a wooden mannequin which the previous Sam had it made. He picked the mannequin and ced it properly before searching for other tools. All this time Yanwu is looking at his actions curiously. Sam finally got all the tools he wanted. He ced the ck cloth on the only intact table and took a few pieces of the ribbon strips which are the measurements of himself and started marking the ck cloth. Looking at him work rapidly Yanwu asked a little curiously. "Sam what are you doing?"

    "I am making an over coat for myself." Sam said without stopping.

    "What is a coat?" Yanwu continued.

    "Hmm, how should I exin? It is an outer garment which is worn on top of the clothes. You will see it in a bit." Sam said with a smile. He clearly understood how curious Yanwu is. Even though he doesn¡¯t know how old Yanwu is, he clearly understood his brain is of a little kid. Every in this world is new to Yanwu. Sam finished his markings as he took a scissors and started cutting. All this while Yanwu asked various questions and Sam answered them patiently with a smile on his face. But the people outside clearly didn¡¯t what is going on inside. All they could hear is a Raven Cawing nonstop while a person is speaking. After some time, theypletely disregarded it as they don¡¯t have guts to go and see. But Haley can¡¯t control her curiosity and walked towards the work room and slowly opened the door. The scene in front of her made her shocked. Because the cold and aloof person who is always on his temper is now smiling while working on the cloth. The smile on the handsome young man¡¯s face made her heart skip a beat. His smile is so warm and looked like a radiant sun in the dawn as he is exining each and everything he is doing to the Raven as if he is exining it to a child and Raven is nodding and cawing at him like it understood. The scene looked so mesmerising as she stared at the handsome young man working precisely and elegantly without batting an eyelid.

    "Haley" Suddenly a slow whisper was heard in her ears and she saw Philip standing near her with a smile.

    "Is he looking good?" Philip asked with a meaningful smile. He clearly saw her mesmerized gaze and now teasing. Hearing him say that Haley really felt extremely embarrassed and looked down while her face be red.

    Looking at her Philip¡¯s smile became a grin. As she saw the grin Haley felt even more embarrassed and stomped the ground. As the sound came, Sam looked towards the door and his gentle smile immediately gone and a deep displeased frown upied his face. Both Philip and Haley felt a bit awkward and looked at each other.

    "I remember saying not to disturb me." Sam said. His tone is full of displeasure.

    "Hahaha Sam we just wanted to take a look at what you are working." Philip directly ignored what Sam said and made his way into room with a shameless smile and Haley slowly followed inside with an embarrassed look. Clearly, she also felt curious and wanted.

    *Phew* Knowing that it is impossible to get them out because of Philip¡¯s shameless nature hepletely ignored them and then again started working by himself. This time Yanwu didn¡¯t make a single sound as it just looked at the two intruders with displeasure. He is obviously pissed as he was having a pleasant conversation with Sam and it is clearly interrupted. Both Philip and Haley involuntarily shuddered as they felt the gaze of Yanwu. They don¡¯t know why they felt a sense of crisis from the Raven. Sam finally cut the pieces and grabbed a needle and a ck thread roll as he started stitching. Haley looked at him in daze again. This time even Philip felt a bit stumped. Yanwu is as usual curious. Sam right now is not a cold arrogant man, not a strong fighter with a greatbat prowess. Right now, he is an expert tailor. His hands are moving with such dexterity that they felt like flowing water. His actions are graceful yet precise and most importantly fast. With in an hour they saw a piece of garment in Sam¡¯s hands but all three other characters other Sam in the room clearly can¡¯t understand what it is. It looked like a cloak and a long robe at same time. But they clearly know it is not. Sam took the over coat he made to the mannequin and put the coat on it. It is a ck over coat with a hood. Sam left the room and came back with arge bunch of feathers in his hands. Looking at him go to his bedroom anding back with ck feathers the other two guys also felt puzzled and followed him in to the work room. Sam put down the feathers and picked one up and put it on the coat. He slowly started sewing the feather on to the coat surface. After sewing one feather he picked another feather and did the same. Since he had a lot of feathers, he sewed them densely and sewed in an orderly pattern. Time slowly passed by as he sewed one after the other. All the people looked at Sam working with shock. They could clearly see his strong concentration and care as he was afraid, he would damage a feather even a little. Night slowly passed as dawn approached. Finally, by the time sun rose Sam sewed the final feather and the coat ispleted. By the time is coat is finished, it did not feel like the feathers are sewed on it, rather it looked like a feather like pattern naturally formed on the cloth itself.

    Sam took the finished coat and wore it. He felt quite satisfied as he looked at the coat. He felt rather worried as he wasn¡¯t certain that the previous Sam¡¯s skills are still with the body. But his worries are rather unfounded. All the other people in the room looked at the coat with astonishment. Never saw this type of cloth. Its length is up to knees and it looked quite stylish. While Yanwu is cheerfully pping his wings as it felt even closer to Sam with the familiar aura from the feathers. Only then did the others came out of daze. Then finally Haley couldn¡¯t help but say. "Incredible." She felt like Sam¡¯s way of making the coat so great. If she hadn¡¯t seen it herself, she wouldn¡¯t believe that the coat is made of feathers. She took a deep breath and said.

    "Mr Sam I would like to change my request." Haley said. Then only Sam realized these ¡¯shameless¡¯ people are with him. He felt like he would be in trouble from Haley¡¯s expression. He asked cautiously.

    "What does Ms. Haley want?"

    "Can you make me a formal gown with feathers like this?" She asked him with an anticipating gaze. Looking at her expression all her teammates smiled wryly. ¡¯Where is the aloof goddess? She is obviously a fan girl." After some thinking Sam agreed with some reluctance.

    "Sure, But I will only do one and only this will have a discount. Next one will be of high price."

    "Alright. It is a deal" She nodded and left the room with her teammates in excitement.

    Sam came out of the room and said. "I will go hunting after some time. We can leave the city tomorrow."

    "Can we join for the hunt?" Philip asked immediately.

    "Sure." Sam agreed as he didn¡¯t want to hear another shameless excuse to tag along and continued saying. "Let me prepare for some time." Sam left to his bedroom to examine himself after the breakthrough.

 Chapter 12: New Abilities

    Sam entered his bed room and sat down cross-legged on the floor after he removed his coat and put it on a hanger. Yanwu flew towards the coat and started looking at it curiously. Meanwhile, Sam closed his eyes and examined his transparent spiritual core. Inside the transparent core there are two new things appeared. Those are a golden light and a golden me. They both just stayed still in centre in the spiritual core. When tried to activate the spiritual energy in the core and tried it to spread to his whole body to cultivate and didn¡¯t have any change. He felt quite puzzled and stopped. Sam thought for sometime and tried in a different matter. He spread the spiritual energy and after spreading the spiritual energy he tried to convert the golden me. Then suddenly his spiritual energy converted into Fire type elemental spiritual energy. He felt like he is one with fire. Sam then withdrew the golden me and tried to use the golden light. This is the light element. These elements came from the Golden Sun Crow. So, they felt different than the normal elements. Sam thought something and immediately opened his eyes and looked at Yanwu. Yanwu is rubbing his head on the coat. Sam looked at him and smiled as he shook his head.

    "Yanwu, I have something to ask you." Sam said. Yanwu immediatelynded in front of Sam.

    "What do you want to know?" Yanwu asked.

    "I now have both of your elements. The fire and the light element. But I have a doubt, how I should learn the spells. Should I learn like any orthodox mage or do I have any other methods since I obtained the elements in a unique way?" Sam asked.

    "Oh, you probably don¡¯t know this. Have you ever thought how the beasts use their elemental skills without doing any hand signs or incantations?" Yanwu asked.

    "No" Sam replied directly.

    "Because the beast doesn¡¯t need do them as they have elemental skills imprinted in themselves. For example, for a normal fire ball spell or a pyro st spell should require many incantations and hand signs. But I don¡¯t have to do it like that. I can just control the me flow directly and fire ball will appear. Let us go to the Tower¡¯s second floor. I will demonstrate it to you." Yanwu said. Sam took out the crystal and then both of them disappeared into the tower as the crystal fell down on the bed.

    "See carefully." Yanwu said to Sam as he changed into his original form and opened his mouth wide open and fire ball which is in golden colour flew into the distance. After that Yanwunded and turned towards Sam. "Using the spells like that is called innate elemental maniption. It is not only for beasts but also for humans as well. If they practice it over and over again until their bodies are long used to it and imprinted into his muscle memory, he can definitely do it, at least for the spells heh practiced, he can perform innate elemental maniption. But you don¡¯t have to do this, because you got it from my blood line. So, you will also have the innate elemental maniption like I have and you can also perform other fire type spells with the innate elemental maniption as long as you know the principle behind the spell." Yanwu exined. Hearing that Sam nodded in understanding. Sam slowly closed his eyes and started to conjure the fire ball in his palm. Slowly, a golden fire ball appeared in his palm and Sam threw it as it disappeared into horizon. Sam now understood how it works. Just when he was about to try again, Yanwu spoke.

    "Sam there are other abilities along with the innate elemental maniption. First one is ¡¯Elemental Fusion¡¯ and other is ¡¯Bloodline technique¡¯. Elemental Fusion is like this when one is fully able toprehend the nature of an element you can obtain elemental fusion. There are three levels of elemental fusion. In level one you can make all your skin one with the element." As Yanwu said all his feathers and skin slowly turned into Golden me. Then Yanwu continued. "In this stage you can have swift movements with in a ce filled with fire element and spell casting may be easy. In second stage you can make one part of you body into an element at a time." Yanwu paused again and turned his wings into golden mes. When Sam covered his hands with spiritual energy and slowly put his hands into the mes. He felt a searing pain on his skin but he was sure that Yanwu is controlling the temperature, but his mind is not on it. He is currently looked at the hand which is passed directly through the me wings. Sam retracted his hands and Yanwu immediately retracted his Elemental Fusion form. "Final fusion form is making your whole body one with your element. I am unable to do it. Sam you can¡¯t achieve fusion directly, but you have a huge advantagepared to others since, the main condition to achieve fusion is to obtain high level innate elemental maniption." Yanwu paused and took a deep breath and continued.

    "Sam the Bloodline technique is a forbidden art. You will also have it since we share the same bloodline. But you have to remember to use it as ast resort."

    "How do I use it?" Sam asked.

    "Examine your blood." Yanwu said. Sam closed his eyes and started examining his blood with his spiritual sense. In his blood he found traces of golden blood flowing along with it. When he observed carefully, he found out that the golden blood is mixed perfectly with his own blood. "The golden blood is the Golden Sun Crow Blood. You have to concentrate your spiritual sense on this blood and spread your me type energy along with the flow of you blood rapidly. The bloodline forbidden art will activate. If you activate it you can fight an opponent many times stronger than you. But you have to pay a heavy price for it." Yanwu exined. Sam opened his eyes and looked at Yanwu before speaking.

    "What about your light attribute? Do you know any healing spells?"

    "No, we don¡¯t have any healing spells. We use the light attribute for movement techniques. See this?" Yanwu replied as his wings turned bright with golden light and he immediately disappeared and reappeared quite a distance away and in the same way he came back.

    "Humans can also use it but pure light elemental mages don¡¯t have any attack spells, So, they don¡¯t have much use for it. That is why they only focus on healing." Sam nodded in understanding.

    Sam slowly closed his eyes and tried copy Yanwu¡¯s movement technique and made his spiritual energy into light elemental spiritual energy and concentrated on his legs. Then suddenly moved. Just like that he also disappeared but instead of stopping normally he fell down face first in a distance.

    "Bahahaha" Yanwuughed as he followed Sam. Sam stood up with a gloomy expression and started practicing the movement technique again and again. Sam fell down many times over and over again and he practiced the movement technique over the hours. Bu tin the outside world only an hour passed. Sam finally has some improvement in his movement technique. Then he and Yanwu got out of the Dimension. Sam sat cross legged as he took out a Fire elemental Spirit stone and started absorbing fire elemental spiritual energy. The fire spiritual energy entered his spiritual core and converged towards the golden me in it. Then the it turned into golden colour from red colour and finally started converting itself into normal spiritual energy slowly filling his spiritual core. Slowly his fatigue got away. Even though he hasn¡¯t sleptst night. He as a cultivator can go on for at least 2 to 3 days straight without sleep.

    After recovering Sam slowly stood up and took the coat from the hanger and wore it. Then he slowly walked out of his room and Yanwu who already transformed into his raven form is already following behind him as hended on Sam¡¯s shoulder. Both of them entered living room where Philip and his team mates are already waiting.

 Chapter 13 Day in the woods

    Day in the woods

    ¡°Shall we go?¡± As soon as Sam entered Philip said with a smile. Sam nodded and all five of them left the house and started walking towards the woods. After sometime Sam spoke.

    ¡°I forgot something, you guys carry on and I will join you in a bit.¡±

    ¡°Oh, do you want me to apany you?¡± Philip asked.

    ¡°No, it won¡¯t take long.¡± Sam said.

    ¡°Then we will wait for you here.¡± Philip said. Sam just nodded in acknowledgement and walked towards the vige centre and came back after a while. This time the only difference is, he has a ring with a small blue crystal on his right hand. Everyone didn¡¯t notice anything odd and all of them again walked towards the woods. After walking for a while, they entered the woods. They stopped in a field which has more open space and sat down to discuss the ns.

    ¡°How about going individually, we can hunt in the outskirts for a while and let¡¯s meet here at noon. Then we can go for something inside the woods.¡± Sam said.

    ¡°No, how can that be done. After all Sam you have the lowest cultivation here. So, how can we rest easy if something untoward happen to you.¡± Philip rejected immediately.

    ¡°I can handle it myself in the outskirts.¡± Sam said with a frown. He wants to be alone after all he need to collect the Silk moth nest and store them in his Dimension. He doesn¡¯t want these people to know about it. That is why, he is trying to go single.

    .....

    ¡°We will go by pairs. Haley and Paul, Sam and Marvin and I will go alone since my cultivation level is highest.¡± Philip said again. This time Haley frowned. She really doesn¡¯t like this Paul very much, but now Philip is suggesting them to team up. Seeing Haley¡¯s expression, Philip looked at her and signal something with his eyes and she remained silent. Seeing that nobody has any objections, Sam has no choice but to agree and without saying another word he started walking in the direction where Silk moth nest is present. Seeing this Marvin also nodded to his teammates and quickly followed Sam. Looking at the man who dressed in ck with a ck raven on his shoulder walking without any intention of cooperating as a team Marvin smiled wryly.

    ¡°You better exin yourself.¡± Haley said to Philip.

    ¡°Nothing, I didn¡¯t really mean to make you and Paul a team. I just wanted Sam and Marvin to tag together and if I don¡¯t make the teams like that, he won¡¯t believe me. So, don¡¯t take it to heart. Let¡¯s just wait here until noon. Nothing would be challenging to us anyway.¡± Philip said as he sat down on the ground. Haley didn¡¯t reply and just turned her gaze towards the horizons. Paul had a disappointed expression. After all who wouldn¡¯t want to have some lone time with a beauty.

    Meanwhile Marvin is having a hard time. He clearly knew why Philip arranged them to be together. He is also an ordinarymoner, but his talent can be considered quite good. So, only few people dared look down up on him. Philip thought that Sam didn¡¯t like them because Paul has acted like a spoilt young master. That is the reason he sent Marvin and Sam together so that they can work out some friendship as both of them have simr statuses. But their n can be considered quite a failure. Because from the start Sam didn¡¯t talk to Marvin and Marvin didn¡¯t dare to start the conversation looking at Sam¡¯s expression. Suddenly Sam turned towards Marvin and said while showing his pinkie finger.

    ¡°I need to take a leak.¡± Then he turned and disappeared into bushes without even waiting for the response. Marvin didn¡¯t get to speak and stood there nkly. He hesitated whether to follow or not and finally decided against it and waited there patiently.

    Sam went into the bushes and rapidly ran towards the Silk moth nest as Yanwu followed him at same pace. After a few moments he finally encountered the Silk moth nest and walked towards it.

    ¡°Oh Sam, these are Heaven spirit silk moths.¡± Yanwu eximed in surprise as he saw the silk moths.

    ¡°I know. That is the reason we are here.¡± Sam said. As he looked towards the queen moth, which is in the size of a normal eagle.

    ¡°Oh, you n to breed them? That is not a bad idea. Since you have the Divine Dimension they could be bred nicely. So, why the dy? Capture them.¡± Yanwu said with some excitement.

    ¡°Well, I don¡¯t know how.¡± Sam said with an awkward expression.

    ¡°You don¡¯t know how?¡± Yanwu looked at him like an idiot. Then he continued. ¡°Sam remember one thing. In the world of the magical beasts. In the same cultivation stages the one with the higher-grade blood line is superior and if both of them are of same cultivation stages their strength makes them superior. Even though these Heaven spirit silk moths are of a decent blood line they are a lot inferiorpared to my blood line. So, that naturally makes you superior to them as well. All you have to do is to activate your bloodline aura and justmand them to enter the Dimension. That is enough.¡± Yanwu said matter of factly.

    But Sam still felt a little worried. Even though both his and the Queen moth¡¯s cultivation stages can be said to be same. There is a lot of disparity as he just entered the Acolyte stage and the Queen moth is at peak of the level to which means it can be considered as peak of acolyte stage. Even though he felt that it wouldn¡¯t work. He did as Yanwu said. as soon as he released the bloodline aura all the silk moths that are flying or lying on the branches fell down as they couldn¡¯t bear the pressure. Only Queen moth turned towards Sam but it also felt like all the blood in it is trembling. It started Buzzing.

    ¡°Please lord. Have mercy.¡± A female voice suddenly entered Sam¡¯s mind. He almost jumped up as looked around and involuntarily his concentration disturbed as a huge pressure bore down from the bloodline and all the silk moths started spasming.

    ¡°SAM STOP¡± Yanwu yelled. Then Sam suddenly stopped and looked at Yanwu and the Queen moth and finally understood to whom the voice belonged to. Then the female voice came back again.

    ¡°Lord what do you want from this humble one?¡± The Queen moth asked.

    ¡°I want to make a deal with you.¡± Sam said as looked at the queen. Queen didn¡¯t say anything as she looked him like that. It seemed to be confused. Sam continued. ¡°I want you to guys follow me. I know you don¡¯t have muchbat prowess until you broke through the next stage. So, I will provide all the resources and ensure to make your family develop to new heights. In exchange I will take your silk from you and your family members. What do you think?¡±

    Queen moth didn¡¯t know what to say immediately. She doesn¡¯t know what bloodline the human has but that bloodline is definitely far superior to hers. So, she doesn¡¯t have any reason to refuse. But what she doesn¡¯t understand is the human who is superior to her is making a deal rather than ordering her. That is the reason she felt something is not right. But suddenly a voice an aura simr to before interrupted her thought process. ¡°Answer now¡± Yanwu from the side coldly said inmanding tone as he released his bloodline aura.

    ¡°This humble one agrees.¡± The Queen said as it nodded her head vigorously, afraid that Yanwu will get angry. Sam nodded in acknowledgement and waved his hand which has the crystal ring put on and all the moths including the queen disappear. The Sam and Yanwu went back to Marvin.

    As soon as Marvin saw Sam he sighed in relief. He thought something happened to him. But then another thought came to his mind. ¡®What is he doing all this while?¡¯ Marvin walked towards Sam and asked slowly. ¡°What happened to you Sam? Is something wrong? If you hadn¡¯te back in 2 more minutes, I would have called the team to search for you.¡± Marvin asked.

    ¡°It is a big leak.¡± Sam said indifferently. Marvin immediately choked as he heard Sam¡¯s reply. He just wanted to bang his head to the tree. ¡®Like hell it is a big leak. If you just want to do something alone, just say so. Why such pathetic excuse?¡¯ he inwardly thought. Now he clearly understood how Sam felt when they gave shameless excuse to stay in his house. They again started walking. But out of blue Sam asked a question. ¡°How did you guyse to the vige?¡±

    This question confused Marvin a bit but he still replied. ¡°Of course, we came on horses. You don¡¯t expect to walk from the city right.¡±

    ¡°Where are the horses?¡± Sam asked.

    ¡°They are at the inn.¡± Marvin replied. Sam immediately stopped walking and looked at Marvin with a frown. ¡®How are you guys nobles? You are all shameless people. You clearly have ce to stay at inn but stayed at my home to disturb me.¡¯ Sam inwardly thought. If Marvin heard this, he will immediately curse him as Sam didn¡¯t even stay at home since yesterday and when he stayed, he minded his own business. Sam shook his head and started walking again. Suddenly he thought of something and said to Yanwu.

    ¡°Yanwu, find the zing earth bulls in the forest and bring me two of them. I need steeds.¡± Yanwu nodded its head and with a huge screeching it flew into the sky and disappeared into horizons. When Marvin heard the screech, he turned around abruptly only to see that Yanwu is flying away with great speed. He was clearly astonished. He didn¡¯t seem to hear what Sam said to Yanwu. Otherwise, who knew what type of expression he would have. Then they both started hunting slowly.

    At noon both of Sam and Marvin appeared at the meeting spot of the team. Sam can be seen carrying various carcasses but Marvin is walking with nothing in his hand. Because, he had a spatial treasure which is a few cubic meters wide. He offered Sam to help with his corpses. But met with only rejection. As they arrived at the camp, they can see the other three are waiting for them. When Sam saw all of them are empty handed, he guessed they also have spatial treasures.

    ¡°Sam, you seem to have some big catch.¡± Philip asked with a smile.

    ¡°So-So¡± Sam replied indifferently. Philip then looked at Marvin with some hope but he only saw the helpless look on Marvin¡¯s face. This time Philip also sighed.

    ¡°Okay then, after lunch we are going to hunt the lord of the forest. It is the very peak of the Level to beasts. But I think we can handle it together.¡± Philip said and all of them sat together to eat lunch.

    After eating and resting for a while all the five people went in search of their prey for today. Which is the lord of the forest ¡®Scarlet me Panther¡¯.

    After searching woods for more than two hours they finally narrowed down the ce where the Scarlet me Panther stayed. But when they found the ce where the ce where the panther stayed, they felt absolutely shocked at the scene.

    In front of them there is ckish coloured panther lying in its own pool of blood and two panther cubs which are in ckish red colour lying in its two front paws. In distance from them there is a Red coloured panther which is clearly injured severely, fighting on itsst legs with a golden tiger. All the people clearly understood the scenario. The ck panther is a Wind fang panther which is clearly the mate of the Scarlet me panther. The tiger which is a Gold blood tiger sneaked attack on the Panther couple when the ck panther is about to deliver its cubs. Now the panther couple is clearly at a disadvantage. Even though all the three beats are at same cultivation level that is the Late stage of the Level 2, the panther couple is definitely going to die because of the sneak attack. When Philip and his team mates saw this scene, their eyes gleamed with delight. Even if tiger won the fight, it will definitely be exhausted then they could make a move and they will get three corpses of Late stage Level 2 beasts and also two panther cubs. They can make a fortune. All of them except one person are happy by that oue. That one person is obviously Sam. When all of them are seeing the profit. He is seeing the eyes of the ck panther which is groaning in pain helplessly as the panther looked at her mate and her kids. All Sam could see is love of the mother who is helpless. The ck panther is licking the young cubs who didn¡¯t even open their eyes fully but involuntarily shuddering due to the fluctuations from the fight of two beasts. The mother panther is slowly licking and groaning tofort the cubs. Nobody present can understand her groans except the two beasts and Sam.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry kids, Mother is here.¡±

    ¡°Mother won¡¯t let anything happen to you.¡±

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry.¡± The panther is stillforting as slowlyforted its kids. Sam¡¯s eyes turned red as he involuntarily shuddered. He is an orphan in both his lives. Even though he is cold and arrogant deep inside he always wanted for that motherly love. He always wanted to have someone who he can call mother and lean on her shoulders to tell her all his burdens. But he never got that. Seeing the helpless Mother panther. Sam couldn¡¯t control himself and stepped forward. As Sam took a step forward, Philip blocked him and said hurriedly.

    ¡°Sam, time is not right yet. Just wait a few more minutes and we can attack.¡± Sam immediately became furious as he saw Philip blocked him. He looked at Philip with his eyes red and involuntarily released his aura and spiritual energy. His Golden Sun crow bloodline aura is also activated and mixed with killing intent as he stared at Philip with his red eyes. Philip involuntarily stepped back. Only one thought remained in his mind. ¡®He broke through¡¯. He clearly remembered that Sam is only at Peak of initiation two days ago and his physical strength is extraordinary that he could kill Paul who is at the Second stage acolyte mage anytime he wanted without even giving any chance to use his elemental spells. Now that he is at Acolyte stage, Philip couldn¡¯t even imagine how powerful he became. Even he himself at fourth stage Acolyte mage felt extremely fearful by the dangerous aura emanating from Sam.

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother with him and leapt towards the Gold tiger directly and Punched it with all his might at its abdomen and sent it flying. Scarlet me panther felt surprised and looked at Sam and seeing that Sam has no malice he just nodded and turned towards the Golden blood tiger. The Gold Blood tiger is already exhausted a bit as he fought with the Scarlet me panther. And when the tiger saw Sam, its instincts told to not to fight him at all. This is the reaction from the aura directed towards it from the Golden Sun Crow bloodline. Since Sam has no malice towards him, the Scarlet me panther didn¡¯t feel much pressure. But it fell to the ground and fell unconscious. it is in itsst breath. It looked at Sam with a pleading gaze and roared. Nobody understood what it said only Sam understood.

    ¡°SAVE THEM¡± That is what the Scarlet me panther said before it died. Looking at its corpse the ck panther roared in sorrow making Sam even more enraged. He directly leapt towards the Golden tiger again and kicked it with all his might.

    *Crack* the tiger flew again with cracking sound as Sam¡¯s kick broke few bones of the tiger. Then the tiger roared furiously with a burst of killing intent andunched an attack towards Sam and wanted to bite his neck. Sam side stepped and threw a punch towards its neck. But this time a *Ding * came as he felt like he hit metal. Sam involuntarily gave a low groan n pain as he saw the tiger. Then he remembered something he learnt from the beastuary, the gold blood tiger is a metal elemental beast. He was able to break the few bones because he caught the tiger off guard. But now it is fully prepared. Then he looked the tiger coldly and both the man and the tiger started exchanging blows. Meanwhile, Philip and his teammates finally came to their senses.

    ¡°Shall we help him?¡± Marvin asked as he saw Sam nervously. He is shocked at Sam¡¯s strength. Even though the Gold Blood tiger is injured and exhausted itsbat prowess should still be at 5th stage of Acolyte and Sam is directly trading blows with his brute strength at his First stage Acolyte level. He is now afraid of Sam even more.

    ¡°No don¡¯t even think about it.¡± Philip immediately his eyes still staring at the scene.

    ¡°Why Big bro? if we don¡¯t, he will take all the loot if he wins.¡± Paul said clearly displeased. Philip immediately pped him.

    ¡°You clearly deserve that p.¡± Haley said as she looked at Paul with unhidden disdain and again turned back towards the fight. She felt heart beating rapidly. She is the topmost genius of the city with her cultivation base at third stage Acolyte. But her pride took a bug hit when she saw Sam fighting. She even doubted her Genius title. Beside her Paul¡¯s voice can be heard. ¡°Why big bro?¡± He clearly didn¡¯t understand why Philip hit him when he stated obvious.

    ¡°Because, we will die in hands of him if we interfere.¡± Haley answered as she pointed at Sam. Paul was shocked by the answer and turned towards Philip for confirmation. Philip nodded his head as sweat dripped from his forehead. He clearly felt when Sam looked at him earlier. If any of them interfered in the fight, they will definitely die in Sam¡¯s hands. As he thought up to this something happened in the battle field. One of the tiger ws managed to hit Sam on his chest where his ck coat didn¡¯t cover creating a w scar as blood dripped. The wound was not deep but Sam who clearly felt a bit tired already felt his strength his strength drop and he immediately looked at the tiger coldly. He leapt back and looked towards the tiger as he slowly extended his hand and pointed towards it his palm wide open. Then he suddenly gathered all the spiritual energy inside his body into his palm which formed into a sphere. But a thing which even surprised him happened. The spiritual energy around him also started gathering into his palm. But he didn¡¯t think much about it in between the fight. Philip and the teammates were quite puzzled by his action. They didn¡¯t understand why Sam is gathering all the spiritual energy into his palm. Even the Golden blood tiger felt a little puzzled and looked at Sam with confusion. Then suddenly the sphere of spiritual energy which is in the size of four times the basket ball turned into a concentrated ball of golden fire. Everyone was dumbstruck as they didn¡¯t even know what happened. ¡®He is a warrior mage¡¯ this thought stuck Philip and his teammates¡¯ minds. Then before theye out of their daze Sam shot the fireball right at the Gold Blooded tiger. The tiger felt the danger from the fire ball and tried to turn tail and run. But it was toote as the fire ball struck it in full force. Then the tiger roared in misery as it felt all its flesh burning and blood evaporating. After sometime all the flesh burned to ashes. The only thing left from the tiger is its skeletal remains. Watching this scene all four members felt their hair standing on their necks. They involuntarily looked at Sam and felt themselves shivering in fear. All their backs are soaked in sweat. Then suddenly Sam walked towards the mother panther and slowly patted her head and said. ¡°I will take care of them.¡±

    The ck panther roared and licked Sam¡¯s face with tears in its eyes. ¡°Thank you¡± Sam heard this voice in his head. All the four teammates also felt the gratitude of the mother panther and guilt rose in their hearts. If they directly fought the panther and obtained the cubs then they don¡¯t need to feel like it. Because that is thew of jungle. But taking the cubs from the mother panther in her helpless situation is really a bit overboard. As they were thinking Sam immediately copsed to the ground in exhaustion. Sam just sat on the ground and looked towards Philip and his teammates coldly.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry. We don¡¯t have any ideas.¡± Philip said seeing Sam¡¯s expression. Then only Sam rxed. Then all of them suddenly heard a loud screech and when the saw towards the direction. They saw a ck light shing and Yanwu appeared in front of Sam and flew in front of him cautiously looking at Philip and his teammates. He felt Sam¡¯s aura when he unleashed the final attack and thought he was in danger. Then he immediately flew over here.

    ¡°Rx Yanwu, they are not enemies.¡± Sam said and Yanwu looked at the surroundings and understood the gist of the situation. But both Sam and Yanwu didn¡¯t notice the shock in faces of Philip and his team mates. They felt the amount of pressure from Yanwu is same as Sam and they shivered. ¡®Thank god we don¡¯t have any ideas on making a move.¡¯ As they thought up to this point, they involuntarily shivered again. ¡®This raven is not ordinary at all.¡¯ Then all of a sudden, the ground trembled. They saw two middle stage level 2 zing earth bulls running towards them. Just when Philip and others are getting ready for a battle, they heard Sam saying. ¡°They are not enemies.¡± They looked at him puzzlement. Then they saw the two bulls stop in front of Yanwu and bowed their heads, they felt shocked. Then even more shocking scene urred. As Yanwu said something to the bulls, they bowed towards Sam in a show of respect. Then Sam slowly stood up and said to the bulls.

    ¡°Dig a hole which will fit those two.¡± Sam said as he pointed towards the two panthers. Then looked at the mother panther and took the cubs in his both hands and said in low voice. ¡°I will take care of them.¡± Then the mother panther nodded in gratitude and let out itsst breath and closed her eyes.

    After sometime the bulls dug holerge enough to put the both panthers and slowly dragged the two panthers and ced them in the hole and started burying them. Philip and his teammates looked at this from the side and said nothing. Only Paul has an expression of unwillingness. After the bulls were done, Sam walked towards the tiger¡¯s skeletal remains and touched it. They were metallic bones. They werepletely made of pure metal. He kept the remains on the back of one of the bulls and slowly walked towards Philip and said. ¡°I willpensate for your loss.¡± He said and without waiting for their reply he walked towards the vige with one raven and two bulls following him. Philip and his team mates stared at his back in daze for sometime and finally hurried to follow him. As they walked sum is already setting slowly and sky turned dim.

 Chapter 14: To the Starwood City

    14 To the Starwood City

    It is already dark when the five of them came back to vige. The roads are deserted as ever. So, nobody bothered with the zing earth Bulls apanying the five people and a raven. They went to Sam''s house and they left the Bulls in the backyard and all five of them entered the house. All of them didn''t even say a single word all this time. After all of them washed up Philip and his team mates sat in the living room. They didn''t even eat anything as they don''t have any appetite. But at their cultivation level, they can make do with not eating for 2-3 days straight. Suddenly Sam, appeared into the living room from his bedroom, in his casual wear. When they saw Sam''s sleeveless vest, they were all a bit surprised as they weren''t able to find any type of injury on his arms at all. It seems like the injury on the chest is the only injury now, which is just tied up with a gauge. Sam has a big leather pouch in his hands. He walked into the room and just looked at them in silence for a while, Even Philip and his teammates also didn''t know what to say. After what seemed like an eternal silence Sam finally spoke.

    "Thank you for not hitting me when I am down." Sam said as he bowed his head a bit. All of them seemed a bit surprised from his humble attitude. Until now all they understood is that Sam is cold individual who has no emotions. But now they felt like they didn''t know him at all. Then Sam continued. "I don''t like to be with strangers often and can''t make friends easily. That is the reason why I kept my distance from you. But from now on we can be friends." Sam said slowly. He meant everything he said. Even though he clearly knew that he would be save with help of Yanwu, Philip and his definitely not know of this. So, them being honest and leave the benefits of obtaining the three corpses of the magical beasts is not something anyone can do. Hearing what Sam has to say, Philip and his teammates heaved a long sigh. Then Philip smiled and extended his hand for a hand shake. Sam shook his hand and smiled as well. Then Sam said again. "I don''t know how much a corpse of beasts at that level, so please ept these as mypensation." Sam said as he put the big leather pouch on the table.

    "You don''t need to, you said yourself we are friends right. We don''t need those kinds of formalities at all." Philip immediately rejected with a smile. From the side Marvin also spoke.

    "Yes, you don''t need to do that."

    "Please, I insist." Sam said and then turned around and went to his bed room."

    As soon as Sam left Philip heard Paul sneering. "How big of apensation can he give? This bag at most contains a thousand spirit stones, but those bodies at least get us more than 3000 spirit stones." Even though he said that, he was also a bit moved by what Sam did. They certainly can''t force him forpensation. But he himself gave it to them voluntarily. As he spoke, he opened the bag and almost dropped it to the floor. Looking at Paul''s expression, Philip walked over and saw inside the bag and he was also shocked.

    "F-Fire Elemental spirit stones." Paul said in amazement. Hearing that both Marvin and Haley also felt rather shocked and immediately ran over as they wanted to confirm. After some time, all of them came out of their daze and looked at each other. Then Philip spoke slowly. "Right now, the exchange rate in the Starwood city is 6:1 for the fire elemental stones. So, this bag is worth 6000 spiritual stones. Damn he almost gave us double the price." If Sam heard this, he would have felt a pinch in his heart. As he didn''t want to lose that much money just after he became rich. But Sam didn''t know about this and just slept peacefully after two days.

    Next day after sun rose Sam woke up and washed up before he went into his backyard to look at the zing earth bulls. But Philip and others already beat him to it. Sam saw Yanwu which is on his shoulders to look at all the other four people vigntly. Understanding his thoughts, Sam said with a smile. "Don''t worry they are our friends now." Sam then walked towards the other four and greeted them.

    "Good morning, you guys are early." He said with a smile. Looking at his smile all of them felt stunned because the contrast in his character is too much for them to bear. They came out of their stupor and Marvin asked slowly. "Sam, why did you get these bulls here?"

    "Well, you guys already have your own steeds. So, I thought I should get one so that I won''t drag you guys down in our journey today." Sam said with a straight face. Hearing this all of them wanted to curse him badly. Using Level 2 beasts is not that umon, but only their elders in the family has that privilege, but now a guy whose cultivation level is lower than them has two of them and he is even saying them that he got them in order to catch up to their horses. ''Damn it. Now our horses will be the one that left behind. These beasts are at least 6 times faster than the normal horse. Even if they have a lot of weight on them, they can still manage to run 5 times faster. Normally Starwood city will take at least four days to reach on horses. But from the look of it, they can reach at their destination in one day on these Bulls. But the point is all of them don''t have one. Suddenly Philip said from behind. "Sam, I have borrowed a carriage for our journey from my family, since you have the bulls, how about we connect these bulls to those carriage and leave." He asked with some anticipation. Entering the Starwood city with two middle level magical beasts as their carriage steeds. Even his father doesn''t have that privilege because generally cultivators tame beasts to assist them in battle. So, nobody would try to use them for carriages. He also felt like Sam might not agree for the same reason. But unexpectedly Sam agreed.

    "Sure, you make the preparations and we will set out early." Sam said as left to prepare. All three boys almost jumped in joy. Then they also left to prepare.

    After an hour or so, Sam and others were gathered outside as Sam carried big bag on his shoulders while Yanwu is resting on that bag, looking around curiously from a new view point. There is a carriage waiting them which is full green in colour and has a symbol of a tree in middle of the carriage. That is the crest of the Evergreen family. There are two zing earth bulls attached to the carriage. Looking at the big bag Sam carrying, Philip said.

    "Sam let store these in my spatial ring, it will save some space inside the carriage." Sam nodded and Philip made the bag disappear. All of them boarded the carriage while Marvin took the reigns to drive the carriage. Sam previously let Yanwumand the Bulls to hear everymand of Marvin and others. So, they stared their journey. Sam wanted to meet with Michael before leaving, but he was not home. So, he just left a note and left the city. After sometime the carriage left the vige through the only gate that connected the vige to the cities. As they left the vige, a guard immediately hurried over to the vige head mansion and informed their departure to the Vige head. Vige head smirked.

    "Now that bastard Sam and those from the City will all die due to an attack from the bandits. So, I don''t have to care as that has nothing to do with our vige." He said to himself after the servant who reported to him left. "Due to those twerps, I don''t even have a single second of rest from the past few days." As he spoke, he nced at the vigers who are still protesting for their taxes. Hepletely left the me for these troubles on Sam and Philip for revealing his scheme. That is the reason he wanted to kill them so badly.

    Meanwhile, after Sam and others left the vige they are travelling at a significant speed. Inside the carriage Philip, Sam, Haley and Paul sat while Marvin is controlling the carriage. While inside Philip is chatting with Paul and Haley stayed silent. But Sam is looking at a metallic piece of bone in his hands. This is the bone from the skeletal remains of the Golden Blood tiger, he killed yesterday. He examined this bone closely. It has a metallic lustre as it is just processed in shape of the bone. As Sam is examining the bone, Philip said from the side.

    "Sam, these bones of the Golden Blood tiger are very useful for weapon forging. Even rank-2 Artisan will have a hard time topletely melt the bone. So, they usually use the bones to directly forge the weapons instead of using it for casting. Even though the rank-3 Artisans can melt these bones, these bones are not suitable for rank-3 treasures. So, they won''t do with these types of bones."

    Sam nodded his head and closed his eyes. Thinking about what Philip said, he started thinking. Artisans are one of the most important professions in this world. Basically, there are two types of Artisans, one type is Weapon Artisans, who are responsible for forging or casting weapons, A rank one Weapon Artisan should have two important qualities first one is they should have to be fire attribute Mage and second one is they should be at least have a cultivation base of Acolyte. The Artisans are respected highly in this world. Even city lord of the Starwood city should treat the rank 2 artisans as his equals. There is another type called Schr artisans. These

    Artisans mainly design new things to improve the lifestyle as well as solve various problems. They don''t have any restrictions on their certifications, but any design or weapon that they design should meet the standard set by the predecessors. The Artisan guild is in charge of certifying these Artisans. The Artisan Guild is an independent organisation and doesn''te under the jurisdiction of the royal authority. But they won''t just recklessly cause trouble. After thinking about this for a while. Sam started concentrating again on the Bone. This bone is the one he broke when he caught the tiger off guard. He slowly started spreading his spiritual energy int

    o the bone and started concentrating on it just like he concentrated on the Bull corpse. He could clearly see the granr structure of the Metallic bone and started observing it closely. After concentrating a little more. He could clearly see the bond between the grains. After observing for a while Sam took out a Fire elemental spirit stone and started observing it the same way. After observing both bone and the spiritual stone, Sam came into a conclusion. The spiritual particles which form the spiritual energy can be ssified into four different states. Active, Passive, Stable, Unstable. The spiritual energy in the spiritual stones is in passive state but

    it is extremely stable. The spiritual energy in the objects like metals and rocks will be passive after achieving an elemental nature and is also extremely stable. If the stability of the Spiritual energy which maintains the bonds bes unstable, the structure will copse. After thinking up to this point Sam started to concentrate even more on the bondage between the granr structure and tried to manipte the spiritual energy just like how he manipted the surrounding energy yesterday when attacking the tiger. As he increased his concentration, his veins bulged on his forehead as sweat started dripping from it. Other people also looked towards Sam as they observed his condition. Suddenly, the bone in the Sam''s right hand turned into powder and fell on the ground. All the other three gasped in shock as they saw the bone turn on to powder. Just then Sam suddenly opened his eyes and also saw the powdered Bone while panting. His mental energy ispletely exhausted. He smirked up on realising his conjecture is correct. He involuntarily looked at the spiritual stone in his other hand and a thought came into his mind but he immediately rejected, since, he is afraid of the consequences. He looked at all the other three and didn''t say anything and collected the bone powder to a small pouch and started meditating to recover. Philip stopped chatting and just looked at the pouch. After some hours passed, Sam opened his eyes.

    "How did you do that?" Philip immediately asked.

    "Do what?" Sam asked feigning ignorance. Philip increased his voice and pointed at the pouch and asked again. "That." Sam just shook his head and stayed silent. Looking at this Philip stopped asking. But he still felt restless inside. He knew how difficult it is to cut or melt the Golden blood tiger bone, not to mention powder. Because, he is also aspiring to be an artisan. He is currently trying to be an apprentice of the Head of the Artisan guild in the Starwood city who is a rank two Artisan. Other side Haley also visibly stunned by the feat Sam has done. But she is more stable than Philip. Just as they are in own thoughts the carriage stopped. Marvin''s shout came from outside.

    "AMBUSH" They immediately jumped outwards of the carriage and looked at two people fully covered in ck clothing and wearing masks standing and talking to each other.

    "They came early and they have the Level-2 Beasts with them." One guy in ck said to other. Sam also came of the carriage and looking at the two assants he again went inside the carriage, remover the ck coat andid it on the two panther cubs who are sleeping. They didn''t open their eyes yet, since their birth. Sam came outside again and looked at the two men in ck coldly. These 16:22

    two are at seventh stage of Acolyte and looked at Sam and others and threatened.

    "Leave everything on you and we will let you live." One guy in ck said. Sam didn''t even speak to them and coldly said. "Attack"

    "Suddenly both the zing earth bulls shot a huge ball of fire from their mouths directly towards the two men. When they saw these they immediately panicked and turned back to flee. They clearly didn''t think that the Bulls are of level two middle stage. They thought that they are only at initial stage that is why they tried this ambush. Right now all they wanted to do was curse the vige head to death. When the guys are about to follow the two men Sam stopped and said. "You can''t capture them, their cultivation levels are higher and we better don''t push our luck." All the others nodded. If we push a cultivator to a life and death situation, they might do something crazy which will inevitably cause damage on both sides. So, they continued on their journey. When they boarded back Sam wore the coat again and ced the two little pups in his embrace. They snuggled against him and found afortable spot to sleep. Even though the magical beasts will grow up faster, it will still take sometime for them to grow up from the infant stage. During the infant stage the mother will feed the cubs with her spiritual energy until they can grow enough to eat on their own. Right now Sam is doing the same thing and looked at the two cubs with warm smile. Watching this scene Haley''s heart skipped a beat. The smile on the Sam''s handsome face will make any girl''s heart beat faster. Same thing happened to her as she saw smiling like that. His devilishly handsome face with his perfect skin tone and the contrasting ck outfit gave him an impable look that makes every boy envy him and every girl adore him. At this movement Philip chuckled and looked at Haley with a meaningful smile. Haley immediately got out of her daze and immediately hid her face which is blushing in embarrassment. Sam didn''t even notice this as he just looked at the cubs.

    Next day in the morning by the time sun rose a green carriage belonging to the Evergreen family could be seen at the borders of the Starwood city. Sam and the others travelled the entire night as Paul took the reign of the carriage in middle of night. Now they can see the city gates from a far.

    Soon Sam and the others arrived near the city gate. The guards watching the gates could clearly see the carriage with two level 2 beasts rushing towards them at full speed. They panicked for a moment and looked for their supervisor. By the time their supervisor arrived the carriage reached the city gates and stopped there. The supervisor watched the Evergreen crest and heaved a sigh of reli

 Chapter 15: Buying a new house

    Philip arranged a guest room for Sam and left. Sam took a nap for two hours and woke up. He washed up and came outside and started looking for Philip. After searching for a few minutes, he finally found Philip in the hall way of the Evergreen family. He is talking to a middle-aged man and when Sam came inside. They both of them saw him. Philip smiled at Sam and gestured him toe. Sam went towards and stood beside Philip.

    "You must be Sam." The middle-aged man who seemed to be in his early forties said with a smile as he examined Sam from head to toe, with a sharp gaze. Sam felt like the middle-aged man in front of him can see through him entirely.

    "Sam, this is my father, the head of the Evergreen pavilion. Marcus Evergreen." Philip introduced.

    "Hello" Sam just nodded his head. Seeing this Marcus lifted his eyebrows a bit with surprise. No because he felt offended, but because it has been many years since someone has not bowed in front of him to suck up on every chance they get when they knew he was the head of the Evergreen pavilion. The young man before him has shown utter disregard for his position. "Interesting." He mumbled under his breath and spoke to Sam. "Philip said you have an amazing talent in cultivating and came to Starwood city to join in the Starwood academy. There are still two months for admissions. So, you can stay in the Evergreen house if you want until then."

    "No need Mr. Marcus. I will stay outside. I am nning on buying a house. I like to stay alone most of the time. So, I won¡¯t implore on you. Anyway, thanks for the offer." Sam rejected immediately. Hearing this Marcus didn¡¯t say anything and looked at Sam again and said to Philip.

    "Take Sam to have breakfast and show him around the city." Then he nodded towards Sam and then walked away.

    "Let¡¯s go. Haley and Marvin wille any time. We should get ready to leave." Philip said as he dragged Sam towards the dining hall,

    Marcus arrived at a meeting room to attend the morning meeting. The Evergreen pavilion is an auction house which houses auctions for various magical weapons, articrafts, Pills etc. These auctions will be held randomly for various asions depending in the items they had in store. And very month there would be a grand auction, which will have more valuable and collectible treasures, and there will be even more grand auction in for every year. Today is a day which they chose to hold the monthly auction. The monthly auction will not be necessarily held on same day of every month. It may be held on any day of thetter half of the month depending on the avability of the items. That is the reason, they are having a meeting now to discuss, the ns for today. When Marcus arrived, every one in the room stood up and dipped into a bow.

    "All of you take a seat." Marcus said as he took the head seat. Soon they started discussing the things about the auction. When meeting was about to end, one of the elders rose up and spoke.

    "Pavilion head, I heard Philip brought along with him two mid-level level 2 beasts with him. The zing earth bulls of this level are hard to find. So, how about we auction them today."

    "They don¡¯t belong to my son. Those belong to a friend of his." Marcus said as looked at the elder with a sharp gaze.

    "I also heard that. His friend is only from a vige, no? I also heard he has two cubs of panther type magical beasts, if we ask him to sell them to our auction house. I don¡¯t think he will refuse. After all he doesn¡¯t have the capability to refuse anyway. Even if we force him to do th.." Before he finished speaking, the elder felt an immense pressure bore down on him. Marcus is a peak stage Novice mage and the elder is only at 3rd novice mage. So, his face paled in horror.

    "Don¡¯t talk about this anymore. Otherwise, I will kick you out of the family." Marcus said coldly. Elder nodded his head in agreement. Actually, the elder doesn¡¯t have any guts to ask these questions. But some senior elders who are at thete stage Novice mage has their eyes on the beast pets of Sam. So, they just wanted to test waters with this elder as scapegoat. Now that they learnt the attitude of Marcus. They immediately lost all the ideas on the pets. The Evergreen family is most united and clean family in the city and they all respected the Pavilion head a lot. So, they immediately left all the thoughts on the Beasts. Then the meeting ended and everyone left to do their works.

    Meanwhile, Sam along with other four is already on the streets of the Starwood city. Sam left the cubs at Evergreen family and left Yanwu there to take care of them. Philip is taking Sam on a tour all over the city to show him various ces. Sam suddenly asked.

    "Where is Crimson me family?" Philip was stunned for a second and asked.

    "Why?"

    "Ms. Freya gave me this token when we did business before. So, I just wanted to go and pay a visit to her since I am already in the city." Sam said as showed the token. Philip looked the token and said.

    "Oh, Freya even gave you a guest token. Sam, do you perhaps like her or something?" Even Haley started listening attentively as she waited for answer. Even she herself doesn¡¯t know why she was concerned about. But all they saw is the cold face of Sam with a frown. Then Philip immediately waved his hand and started acting as if he never asked the question in the first ce. They took another way and started walking towards Crimson me family. Just as they were about to enter the Crimson me family a youngdy came out of the gate in an elegant dress. Thedy has a red hair and oval face and Jade like skin is inplete contrast with her hair and dress which gave her charm an extra touch. Her long legs and voluptuous figure were greatly highlighted by the dress she wore. The overall look gave her a noble air which makes all the girls grit their teeth in envy and all the young men drool over her. She is none other than Freya and the dress she wore is precisely one of the dresses Sam had made. As she came outside everyone¡¯s attention on the streets was diverted towards her but her attention was diverted towards a group of five people. She hurriedly walked towards them as she greeted.

    "Hey Philip, you guys came back already." Freya shouted in excitement as she neared them. Even before Philip answered, Freya walked towards Haley and spoke.

    "Yo, Haley how is my new dress. This is also made by the same tailor. I already told you, if you request me cutely, I will definitely take you to the tailor." Freya bragged as she ced her hand around Haley¡¯s shoulder. Haley immediately pushed her hand and said coldly. "You don¡¯t have to worry about it anymore." Haley said as she pointed at Sam. At first Freya didn¡¯t notice Sam since he changed the way he dressed and his aura is alsopletely changed. But when Haley pointed at him, she immediately realized who the person as her expression became awkward for a second. Sam also didn¡¯t know what to say and only said after a while.

    "Hello, Ms Freya. Nice to see you again."

    "Haa, Sam it is really you." Freya immediately came out of her stupor and immediately looked from up and down and said slowly. "You can cultivate?"

    Everyone was dumbstruck by the question. ¡¯What do you mean you can cultivate? He is a monster.¡¯ This is the thought in everyone¡¯s mind. Then Freya immediately screamed in low voice as she asked anotherpletely different thing.

    "Sam, what are you wearing? It looks great. Did you make it yourself?" Freya asked as she examined the coat Sam wearing closely. Everyone was stunned as they looked at her sudden changes except for Haley, who shook her head for the antics of her friend and pulled her backwards. Freya shook of her hand and said frantically.

    "Sam, you should make me a few dresses like that. I love that pattern more than the previous dresses you made. Don¡¯t worry, I won¡¯t ask for more. Just a dozen dresses will do."

    "No way. Mr Sam already promised that he would take my request for dresses a priority. And what do you mean by dozen dresses? Do you know how much effort Mr Sam has to make, to create one dress like that? We all saw with our own eyes, he stayed up a whole night, to make that single cloth he is wearing right now." Haley said as she pointed at Sam¡¯s coat.

    "What? You saw him make the dress? Sam this is clearly discriminating. I don¡¯t care. Since, you discriminated, you should take my request as priority." Freya said without any shame.

    "Freya, how can you be so shameless?" Haley scolded from the side.

    Watching this all the boys have wry smiles on their faces. They looked at the two goddesses of the city fighting over a tailor to make a dress. They even doubted their meaning of lives. ¡¯Maybe the tailor is the greatest profession.¡¯ they thought as they looked at Sam. Sam then coughed dryly to grab the attention of the two maidens in an argument. When they turned towards him, he spoke.

    "Ms Freya, I already made a few dresses for you. So, what Ms Haley said is right. And it is not really possible to make a dozen dresses like that. Even the feathers required will be hard to find. And I still have to find a ce to live, before we talk about anything." Sam spoke with a straight face. Then only both thedies stopped arguing but still sparks flew whenever their gazes met. They started their tour again, but this time they have Freya also tagging them. Philip took Sam several houses for sale, but Sam didn¡¯t like them at all. After looking till the noon, they stopped at an inn to have lunch.

    "Sam, why don¡¯t youe to my Crimson me family and stay there. I will arrange a shop for you and you can do the business whenever you are free even after you joined the academy." Freya said while eating. Sam didn¡¯t answer and just shook his head. Then Philip spoke.

    "In what price range are you looking for?" Philip asked.

    "As long as the ce is nice, price is not an issue." Sam spoke tly. Freya was a bit surprised as she knew that Sam, she knew doesn¡¯t have much money, but when she saw other four people doesn¡¯t seem surprised, she just stayed silent.

    "Then, I have a ce in mind. But the ce is not a normal house, but a small mansion. At least it is same size of your vige head¡¯s mansion. Do you want to take a look?" Philip asked.

    "Brother, do you mean ¡¯that¡¯ ce?" Paul asked from the side slowly. Philip just nodded and waited for Sam¡¯s reply.

    "Sure." Sam replied and all of them finished their lunch quickly and left the inn. After walking for an hour, they arrived at the mansion that Philip mentioned. "This mansion belongs to our Evergreen family. We recently built it and are auctioning it today evening." Philip said as he showed the mansion. The mansion is at the bank of a river which is flowing through the city. The mansion has a bigpound around it. It has arge space big enough to host any even in its backyard. The spiritual energy in this ce is very high. It is very beneficial for mages and warriors who are yet to enter the novice stage. When the Evergreen Pavilion discovered this ce, they immediately applied for the rights to develop this ce and now they are selling this in auction. Fifty percent of the profit will go to city and fifty percent belongs to Evergreen Pavilion. There are many people who were looking at the mansion. Most of them are the young nobles in the city. When Sam and the others are looking at the Mansion, a young man came towards them and spoke to Freya.

    "Hello, Freya. You look as beautiful as always." He said ignoring all the other people in the group.

    "I know." Freya said indifferently. The young man who spoke earlier didn¡¯t know how to reply as he stared awkwardly. Then he looked at Philip and greeted him.

    "Hello Philip, I heard you came with a big haul from this hunt. I heard you got back with two level 2 Magical beasts as your ride." The Young man said to Philip, a bit envious.

    "They are not mine Raymond. They belong to my friend who is right here." Philip said as he pointed towards Sam. The man named Raymond, looked at Sam and looked at him from head to toe. Sam didn¡¯t even bother to take a look back and just kept on looking towards the mansion.

    "Who might you be?" Raymond asked haughtily. His tone filled with arrogance. But Sam didn¡¯t reply.

    "I already told you. He is my friend Sam. He is fromva rock vige." Philip said as he looked at Sam.

    "Oh, just a country bumpkin." Raymond said condescendingly. "Then, it would be easy. Name a price for both your beasts. And don¡¯t you dare be unreasonable."

    Sam then looked at Raymond with a cold look and didn¡¯t reply. He really didn¡¯t like this guy. Sam then turned towards Philip and spoke. "Let¡¯s go." And then turned around to leave. Raymond immediately lost his cool. He is a young noble of Starwood city. He is also a genius of Starwood academy who is at second level mage acolyte at sixteen years of age and now a country bumpkin is daring enough to ignore him. "You little piece of shit. Come and stand here right now and apologize. Otherwise don¡¯t even dream of having a good time in the city." Raymond shouted on top of his lungs, then all the people around looked towards him. A young man whose features are simr to Raymond came forward and walked towards Raymond. Philip and his group also stopped. Sam looked at Philip and others and said. "We don¡¯t have to care about every dog that barks on the street." As he said that, he turned around and started walking. Philip didn¡¯t seem that surprised. When he turned around and was about walk, he heard another voice.

    "Philip, your friend doesn¡¯t seem to know manners. Just, a country bumpkin at first stage acolyte and is still so arrogant. Haley you should keep your distance away from them and hang around with people of a higher standard." His voice was not loud. But everyone can hear it clearly. Haley didn¡¯t bother to reply and stared at him coldly. Sam turned around to take a look and saw a young man who resembled Raymond slightly and standing near Raymond.

    "He is Leonard from Greyhound family. He is elder brother of Raymond and is a fifth stage acolyte mage." Marvin said to Sam afraid he would do something rash.

    "You, country bumpkin. Come and apologize right now. And we will let it go." Leonard continued.

    Sam looked at Philip and said. "I already told you. There is no need to mind every dog that barks." Then he turned around again. Philip let out a chuckle and also turned around. Freya looked at Leonard gloatingly as she started walking back. Leonard just stood there stupefied. He looked at all the people who are whispering and looking at him. He gritted his teeth as he felt like he lost a great deal of face. All he wanted was to just bash the head of that guy, but he refrained himself from doing, as it will only embarrass himself more. Both the brothers left the ce with shame.

    Meanwhile

    "Sam, you changed a lot. I didn¡¯t know you are this cool. That look on Leonard¡¯s face is priceless. Hahaha." Freyaughed as she spoke. Rest of the group didn¡¯t seem surprised at all. As they already saw how Sam will behave first hand. All of them went to the Evergreen family house and stayed there. Sam immediately went to his room to check on the two cubs. Yanwu immediately flew onto his shoulder. Philip and others came inside the room. The two cubs who were asleep until a minute ago opened their eyes as they looked at Sam and others. This is the first time they opened their eyes and Sam felt happy as he looked at the two cute cubs with sparkling eyes. The two cubs slowly stood up and walked towards him. Sam looked at them and picked them up. They snuggled into his warm embrace and looking at them Sam gave a warm smile. All the other people looked at the scene which looked like it came from a painting. Both the girls in the room felt their heart beat quickening. Sam looked so handsome now with a smile, they doubted if they were really the same person. they came out of their daze and looked at each other and blushed as they became embarrassed. Freya then looked at the ck panther cubs which looked like cute cats and went over.

    "OH, Sam they look so cute. How about you give them to me? I will take good care of them?" Freya said as she reached out her arm and tried to pat the heads of the cubs. But both of them ducked their heads to avoid her hand. Looking at the scene everyone burst intoughter. Even Haley let out a low chuckle. She also liked the cubs. But they are fire type and her attribute will be repelled by them. So, she didn¡¯t try. Freya pouted her lips unhappily and looked at Sam. "Sam your cubs embarrassed me. So, you better make up to it by making my dress earlier." She said shamelessly. Sam just shook his head and just started sharing his fire type spiritual energy to the cubs. Yanwu just rested on Sam¡¯s shoulder. All of them chatted as they waited for the evening.

    Sam along with Philip and others came to the Evergreen Pavilion in the city centre. The Evergreen Pavilion is bustling with people as there are so many who came to the monthly auction. Sam and Philip went inside and sat in a private room. There are a total of 10 private rooms which are all filled. Soon the auction started.

    "Everyone, I am your host today. I first want to thank you all for your patronage and showing your support for our Evergreen Pavilion." The host is beautiful woman in her early twenties.

    "She is my big sister Eva." Philip said to Sam from the side. Sam indifferently nodded. He really didn¡¯t care who the host was.

    "The first item for today¡¯s auction is a sword. This is sword is obtained from the Pavilion head with much difficulty. This is made by the famous rank 2 Artisan Sylvester. This is a grade 2 sword which has a sharpness inscription of rank 2 and is made of Fire steel. This is really suitable for Acolyte and Novice warrior mages." The host introduced the sword and the crowd started discussing immediately. "the starting bid is 100 spirit stones and with at least 10 stones in increment." Host finished the increment and soon the bidding started

    "100"

    "110"

    "130"

    "140"

    "200" Suddenly everyone became silent. Everyone turned towards a private room. The room belonged to the Crimson me family. As soon as the bid was heard everyone became silent.

    "200 spirit stones once, twice and sold." The host confirmed the bid and proceeded next item.

    "Freya, seems like you have a new sword." Marvin said to Freya from the side. Freya merely smiled. Even though there are other people from the same generation as her in the family. She is the most talented of all. So, the sword will naturally belong to her. She is third stage Acolyte Warrior mage with fire attribute. So, the sword is naturally suitable to her. Meanwhile, the auction started again. Sam didn¡¯t seem to be interested in anything.

    After two hours the finale of the auction came. "Now, the most awaited finale of the auction came. It is the River side Mansion. It has a cultivation environment most suitable for Acolytes and the scenery of the house is also great. The house is specially designed by our architect and carefully supervised by our Evergreen pavilion." The host introduced as a painting with the house is brought on to the stage. There is a scroll which is the deed ofnd which was also brought on to the stage. The host continued. "The starting bid of the mansion is 3000 spirit stones and each bid should be of 100 increment in minimum." As soon as she finished the bidding started.

    "3000"

    "3200"

    "3500"

    "3800"

    "4000"

    The bidding is going on like that. Meanwhile Sam is silent the whole time. Philip others worried a little as Sam stayed silent. They thought that Sam stayed silent because he doesn¡¯t have enough.

    "Sam, you can take the spirit stones you gave us before and buy the house. You can returnter." Philip said. Sam didn¡¯t reply and just smiled.

    "8000" suddenly a voice came and everyone became silent. The voice came from the Greyhound private room. Even the voice is familiar to Sam. It is none other than Raymond who bid.

    "Real bidding starts now." Sam muttered in low voice. Philip and other felt a little surprised. Then another voice came.

    "9000" This time it is Crimson me family. Now only Philip and others realized what Sam meant. These noble families are waiting to bid and didn¡¯t even bother to fight with the small fries. Even though the noble families have a good enough cultivation environment in their houses. They can¡¯t provide it to all younger generation. So, if they have another ce like this mansion, it will increase their strength. That is the reason they are all bidding. Philip and others only realized it now.

    "10000" Another bid came. This is Heart field family. Which is another noble family in the city.

    "11000"

    "12000"

    "15000"

    Each noble family is trying to outbid each other.

    "18000" This time even noble families surrendered. This is from the Greyhound family. They seem to be determined to obtained the mansion. Just as everyone thought the bid is done another voice came.

    "20000" Sam bid in a leisurely voice. Everyone in the auction room was dumbstruck. Even Philip and others in the room are also stunned. They didn¡¯t expect Sam to bid such high amount. Everyone turned to the private room which has nobel. This is actually a spare room, but it seemed to be opened today. Everyone thought. Meanwhile in greyhound family room Leonard¡¯s expression turned unsightly. He clearly remembered the voice. Then he came to his senses and raised the bid.

    "21000"

    "25000" Sam raised the bid again and with arge margin. This time Leonard gritted his teeth and said loudly. "Don¡¯t push your luck."

    "Bid or Shut the f.u.c.k up." Sam said in a cold voice. Everyone was dumbstruck and inwardly thought. ¡¯You got balls. Alright.¡¯ Very few people in the city would dare to say shut the f.u.c.k up to Leonard. And it seemed that one who bid is just that person.

    "26000" Leonard raised the bid again.

    "30000" Sam didn¡¯t back down at all. This time even Leonard stayed silent.

    "Once, twice, Sold." Host finally confirmed the bid and auction was over. Those people who bid for the items went to collect the items and left while some stayed behind. They are curious to see who the person who cursed at Leonard. And they seem interested. Sam finally came when most of the people left. He slowly walked to the table and took arge bag full of spirit stones out of thin air. This time he didn¡¯t have to care about showing a spatial treasure because Philip gave him a spatial ring this morning, saying that this is for the excess spirit stones he gave aspensation. So, he epted. He ced the leather bag on the table and asked the manager. "What is the exchange rate for fire spirit stones? Everyone was dumfounded after hearing that. Even Freya as surprised. Fire spirit stones are hot in demand in this area. That is the reason the Starwood city went to great lengths to obtain the Lava rock vige. But they weren¡¯t able to find a single fire spirit stone. The manager came out of his stupor and said "1:6" The manager said as he stared at the bag while gulping hard.

    Sam opened the bag and quickly started separating, he then poured more than half of the bag on the table and kept the rest of them. There are 5000 stones in total on table and Sam felt quite reluctant. But he still needed to get the house. Under surprised expressions of all the people Sam took the deed of the house and left with Philip and others.

 Chapter 16 After the Auction

    After the Auction

    Sam along with Philip and others went to his newly bought mansion. The mansion inside is really good and concentration of spiritual energy is higher than outside by many times. The scenery from the front balcony is really good as the river right beside the mansion and the distant mountains are really great to look at. All of them came to this mansion to celebrate. After they ate dinner, they sat together in the living room and chatted leisurely.

    ¡°I will be going somewhere tomorrow. I will be back in a month. So, all of you guys can stay in the mansion if you want.¡± Sam said. Everyone became silent. After all they didn¡¯t expect Sam to go outside the city, the very day next day he bought a house. This is somewhat unexpected.

    ¡°Why don¡¯t we go together?¡± Philip asked.

    ¡°No need. It is personal.¡± Sam didn¡¯t exin further. Then Sam turned towards the two girls and spoke. ¡°Ms Haley, Ms Freya after Ie back, I will make the dresses I promised you.¡± Sam said with a smile. Both the girls didn¡¯t reply and just nodded their heads. After chatting for some time, everyone left the ce other than Sam, Yanwu and the cubs. He left the Bulls at the Evergreen family. Sam then entered the bedroom. The mansion is already fully furnished and he climbed up therge bed and closed his eyes peacefully.

    While Sam is sleeping peacefully, the noble families in the city are not sleeping at all. The Fire elemental spiritual stones gave everyone a great shock. Every noble family in the city knew the value of the fire elemental stones in this ce. Especially, the crimson me family. They have arge number of fire attribute cultivators in crimson me family. The crimson family is one of the main recipients of the fire spiritual stones. So, as soon as Freya went to home, she was immediately summoned to the main hall where family meetings were heard. As she entered the room, she saw the family patriarch and other elders sitting there silently with solemn expression.

    ¡°Freya, who is that person that used the fire spirit stones? How do you know him?¡± An elder asked impatiently as soon as Freya entered the hall. Freya frowned as she heard the elder¡¯s tone and immediately felt displeased. She immediately turned to her father who is the patriarch of the family. But he didn¡¯t seem to see his daughter¡¯s displeasure and gave a look which is expecting her to answer. This made Freya even more angry, but she gritted her teeth and said. ¡°He is a friend from the Lava rock vige. We had a business deal before. Now he came to city to enter Starwood academy. Hearing this many elder¡¯s frown eased. One of the elders said with amanding tone.

    ¡°Invite him to Crimson me family tomorrow. We have something to talk to him.¡±

    ¡°Why?¡± She asked with a frown.

    .....

    ¡°We have a deal for him. We need the fire spirit stones from him.¡± The elder replied.

    ¡°Why do our family need to buy from him? We are not short on wealth, right?¡± She inquired further. But there is no reply. What she said is indeed right. The crimson me family really doesn¡¯t have any shortage of wealth. But the fire spirit stones are different altogether. As they are fire cultivators, the fire spirit stones will have a higher rate of absorption and the energy inside their body will have less impurities. They are extremely beneficial to fire cultivators particrly the younger generation at acolyte stage and it will give them a solid foundation. So, they could advance further. The fire spirit stones are really scarce in this region and even with their connections there are only a hundred stones which can be imported to the city every three months. So, a cultivator with no background and a lot of fire spirit stones is too big of a juicy meat they can¡¯t miss. That is the reason, they can¡¯t leave this offer. But Freya¡¯s answer immediately made them stand up from the chairs.

    ¡°He is going to leave the city tomorrow. He said that he has something to take care. So, he will be leaving early in the morning.¡± As soon as she finished all opened their eyes in disbelief and immediately sent orders to visit Sam¡¯s mansion now. Looking at their reactions Freya finally understood what is going on and she immediately regretted saying what she already said. She looked at her father, who is silent from the start and spoke slowly. ¡°I am really disappointed in our family father.¡± She said as she left the hall and went to rest. Simr scenes happened in the Evergreen and Heartfield families. The Heartfield family has same reaction as the Crimson me family. Even though they are notpletely fire attributed n like the crimson me, they still have a lot of Fire attribute mages. So, they also set their eyes on him. The city lord mansion even went a bit further and even sent people tova rock vige to inspect how Sam got the Fire spirit stones. The Greyhound family also sent people to mansion. Because the young masters of the family can¡¯t swallow the embarrassment, they brought upon themselves. So, they sent people to take care of Sam. Finally, the Evergreen household has different reactions. This is because their head ordered them not to get near Sam again after they held a meeting just like the Crimson me family. The second reason is they already got a total of 2500 fire spirit stones already. If they get too greedy, they might get in to trouble. That is why the elders also stayed silent when Patriarch ordered them to stay put.

    River Side Mansion

    Several ck shadows can be seen moving swiftly in the dark of the night. They slowly entered the mansion and started searching. When they reached all the members looked at each other and reached a tacit understanding. They will finish the job first and then think who gets what. They immediately pushed open the bedroom door and were only greeted with an empty bed. They realized this person is swift then their households. Then they returned to their households. As soon as they left the house a ck raven slowly flew in the mansion and directly dashed towards the bed and disappeared in front of a transparent blue crystal on which is now fixed in between various gems of the head board of the bed.

    Inside the Divine Dimension, Sam is standing at the window of the first floor of the tower and looking outside. Yanwu entered the Divine dimension and flew through the window andnded in front of Sam. It reverted back to his original majestic Golden Sun crow form and now Sam has to keep is head up to look at the eyes of the huge beast.

    ¡°Every family except the evergreen and the city lord mansion came.¡± Yanwu said to Sam. Sam didn¡¯t say anything at all and just nodded. Then he said after some silence. I will be inside the tower for a few days and I won¡¯t being outside unless there is an emergency. So, I want you cultivate as well. Now that our cultivation levels are linked, you just focus on the cultivation and I will be practicing some techniques. I need to increase my cultivation level as soon as possible. And take care of other beasts as well. Bring some food for the bulls and the little ones (Panther cubs). Try to nt some herbs that are useful for cultivation. Sam said. After a brief pause, he said. ¡°Collect your faeces in the volcanic zone.¡± Sam said as looked at Yanwu was a bit confused but still nodded. Then he left to aplish what Sam asked him to.

    Sam already guessed the moves of the noble households, that is the reason he immediately moved to Divine Dimension. He turned around and looked at the Divine wills in the Shelves and walked over to the martial arts shelves. Sam didn¡¯t really like the martial arts with the fixed moves. He believed that as long as a person his weapon which might be a Sword, a Sabre, a knife and even his own fists, every move he made with them will be a martial-arts move. Even though he felt the same way in his previous life, he still learnt some fixed martial arts to understand his own body properly, to use it with efficiency. He finally created a fighting style of his own, which solely depends on his understanding of his own body and anatomy of the human being. That is the de-boning technique which highlyplements his own w type weapons. His fighting style is never registered and it never got to outside world in his previous life as he never taught it to anyone. Sam, then looked at the shelf and muttered. ¡°I need to use another type of fighting style and use my own fighting style as a trump card. The less people to know my style, the better.¡± He then selected two wisps which werebelled like this. ¡®Monkey¡¯s staff insights¡¯ and ¡®Hou archery insights¡¯. Seeing the titles Sam felt a little confused and looked at the other wisps and they are mentioned as insights. Finally, Sam found a wisp with nobel. He took the wisp in his hands and sent his spiritual sense. The wisp dissolved in to him and a string of entered in to his mind. ¡°I don¡¯t want to spoil you by spoon feeding the martial arts to you. Try creating a few of your own ¨C Ling Tian.¡± Looking at the words Sam didn¡¯t know whether tough or cry. But quickly threw the thoughts to the back of his head and just took the wisps and absorbed them. They also disappeared. Sam then sat cross legged and started going through the newly acquired memories. A majestic human silhouette appeared in his mind as he started moving his staff. The staff felt like it was the body part of the person. Not like an external weapon. The silhouette moved the staff in whatever way he liked, there is noplex stance, no elegant moves, no fancy technique. Every move is unique and simple in its own way. After the performance is done Sam heard a few words. ¡°A staff is a profound yet simple weapon. There are no rules on how to use your staff. Just like how no body can say how you want to use your own hands. As long as you want to use it use it in anyway you want. There is no right no wrong in the way of staff. You can use it in barbaric way like a club or you can use it to perform fancy moves.¡± After he heard the words Sam slowly opened his eyes and recalled the words of the person and started contemting. Then Sam stood up and went to the shelf named Inscriptions and Formations. He was confused why both of them arebined. There are total of 10 wisps and he took the first one and absorbed it then he then entered the second floor for simting room without looking through the memories. After Sam entered the Simting room, he sat cross legged to digest the new information.

    Outside world. The day after the auction. The whole city is waiting for the news about what happened to Sam. They learnt that Sam came from a vige. So, they were particrly sure that the noble families will definitely get their hands on him. Philip along with Paul, Freya, Haley, Marvin went to Sam¡¯s mansion and found no one. Then they all sighed. They didn¡¯t understand why Sam wanted to leave the city temporarily just after he bought the house until they returned to their own homes yesterday. They thought Sam is in big trouble. But they soon got the news that Sam is no where to be seen. Last night most of them saw the ugliness of the world as well as their family. While they were thinking like that in mansion. The person they are concerned about is practicing his new techniques in the Divine Dimension.

 Chapter 17: One month

    One month passed on outside. But Sam spent about 10 months in the second floor of the tower. All he did was practise his techniques. Since, he can imagine anything inside the second floor of the tower. Sam used it to his maximum ability. He practised his hand to handbat using his attribute powers. He just practised the same basics over and over again until he was mentally exhausted and sick of doing it again. He practised the same basic movements tens of thousands of times if not hundred thousand times. He followed the principle of one of the very few people in his previous life. It was none other than Bruce lee. As Bruce lee once said ¡¯I am not afraid of a fighter who practises a thousand kicks. But I am afraid of a man who practices a kick for a thousand times.¡¯ From this quote Sam experienced the result for himself in hisst life time. Even a basic punch is a deadly attack from a fighter who really knows how to use it. That is the reason Sam just keep on practising his basics. Other than the hand to handbat, Sam also practiced the staff techniques and archery to increase his arsenal of attacks. He picked archery to practise long range attacks. Even though he was pretty skilled in all different types of guns in his previous life and is even skilled in making it, he really doesn¡¯t want to bring the guns out as of this moment. Sam always felt like the guns are most dangerous in human¡¯s hands. Even though they can¡¯t provide the damage as big as bombs and stuff, guns make people realize their toxic ideas easier. A man with gun in a hand feels superior to others and wants to be treated as a superior. That is how it happened in his previous world and Sam felt like it won¡¯t be much different in this world. So, if he made some guns, he would only use them himself.

    Apart from improving hisbat skills, Sam also started studying formations and inscriptions. He first felt puzzled as he saw both the formations and inscriptions put together. Butter when he studied, he realized that they both arepletely analogous. They have a vast number of simrities. An inscription is the way of condensing the spiritual energy in a certain form in a certain ce ording to requirement of the Inscription Master. Where as the formation is guiding the energy in a certain way and do a certain work by converting into a certain work. The mostmon thing in both is that they both require the energy nodes. The runes are used as the nodes in case of inscriptions and the formation gs or other objects as energy nodes. From another perspective both formations and inscriptions can bebined as well as interchanged. That means the runes of the inscriptions or the inscriptions itself can be used as the energy nodes for formations or the formation principles can be used to guide the energy flow to create an inscription.

    Sam came to this conclusion after a long time of hypotheses and contemtion and result baffled him so much that he felt so shocked of his own thought process. The finalpletion of the Inscription and Formation merging is creating the Array Disc. This is a process of condensing the formation itself into the Disc using inscriptions. That is the reason why both of them are grouped together. From the look of it, Sam thought that it is not impossible to create his own self-created inscriptions and formations if he tried and experimented, by observing and manipting the energy flow. After all Observation and Maniption are both his innate core abilities.

    After having these thoughts Sam suddenly felt like these people are really stupid. All these Inscription Masters and Formations only work on how to memorize the nodes and the process to achieve an already set inscription or formation. They don¡¯t really care about how and why these things are working like that. ¡¯They have this much of valuable resource, but these things are such a waste in a people like this. They can¡¯t really use them for their full potential.¡¯ Sam inwardlymented when he was studying the inscriptions and formations. He had almostpleted all the wisps rted to the subject. After all, Sam himself is a genius and he can clearly understand all the theoretical knowledge easily. The problem is he can¡¯t really make them practically. He could be considered as one of the most knowledgeable people, theoretically this field. But his practical skills arepletely restricted by his own cultivation base. Sam sighed thinking of his cultivation base. After one month in the outside world passed, Sam came out of his tower. But he still stayed in the divine dimension.

    At this moment the garden of different climatic zones is not as empty. Yanwu went back to theva rock vige and brought back a type of grass that is suitable for the Bulls. The Heaven spirit silk moths can eat any type of leaves. The environment in the Garden in filled with the various elemental spiritual energy. So, the silk moths are divided into various groups and are kept in different regions. There are total of three moths that broke through to the Level-3 beasts and they are from three different attributes. Fire, Metal and Ice. This made Sam extremely delighted as he would get a new type of resource. Other silk moths are kept in the normal zone when they are cocooned as Sam needed this type of silk as well. The Bull beasts are still in the Evergreen family.

    The most major things happened to the Panther cubs as they finally grew up a little. They are now at size of an a.d.u.l.t panther of the modern earth. But in this world, these are still considered as slightly grown cubs. These panthers are happily ying around in the Volcanic zone. As soon as they saw Sam arrived, they immediately pounced on him as they happily licked his face. Sam smiled as he struggled to get up. These are now at Level 1 beasts at Middle stage.

    "You seem to be enjoying yourself." Suddenly a voice came from behind. Sam turned around and saw a majestic looking three-legged golden crow. Sam saw it and smiled. Yanwu has a Deer like corpse under its talons. Sam smiled at Yanwu.

    "Here, I have been waiting for you to take your share. Yanwu said as he transmitted arge amount of spiritual energy to Sam. Sam put the cubs aside and epted the energy as he stood straight.

    This is a daily routine for them. As Sam cultivated in the Myriad Beast Blood line technique, he doesn¡¯t need to cultivate himself. His contract beasts will share the spiritual energy equally with him and vice versa. Since, Sam was busy the whole time, Yanwu was the only one cultivating for both of them. But it is not slow at all. Yanwu can cultivate using the spiritual energy inside the garden since he is a beast. And on top of that beasts can increase their cultivation as long as they consume the flesh of others. So, Yanwu has no problem because, it has vast woods to hunt. So, in the past few months, Yanwu reached limit of initial stage level 2 and Sam is at 3rd stage Acolyte stage. This rate of improvement is quite high even it is considered in 10 months¡¯ time frame. But the outside flow time only one month. Sam slowly digested the Spiritual energy as he sat Cross legged.

    After sometime Sam opened his eyes and looked at Yanwu and said. "Let¡¯s go and see outside." As he spoke, Sam waved his hands and both of themnded on his bed. Yanwu already changed into his Raven form. Sam took the crystal from the bed and ced it back on the ring and walked downstairs while Yanwu was still on his shoulder. As soon as they came downstairs into the living room, the mansion door opened and five people entered the room. They are none other than Philip and others. Looking at Sam all of them were surprised, but the two girls were more than just surprised as they saw Sam and blushed as they averted their gaze. Because Sam right now didn¡¯t wear anything on his upper half of the body. He is only wearing pants and his well-defined chest and torso are fully exposed. Sam didn¡¯t feel anything strange as he just he invited them.

    "Come on guys, Sit here." Sam said with a faint smile. Then only Philip and others came out of daze.

    "Sam, when did you arrive?" Philip said as he made his way to the chair and sat down. The other two boys also exchanged greetings, but the two girls didn¡¯t say a single word. Sam didn¡¯t think much at first and sometimeter he noticed that they arepletely silent.

    "Sam, you don¡¯t know how popr you are. Almost all the big families¡¯ representatives came here very often in the past month to meet you. But all they got to see is your empty house or us sitting here like this," Marvin spoke without thinking much. But this statement made the already gloomy mood of the girls further down. Then the atmosphere suddenly turned awkward. Sam, finally understood why the two girls are like that.

    "Seems like I am quite popr, huh. Ms Freya, Ms Haley. I did friendship with you and I don¡¯t have any rtionship from your family. So, please don¡¯t feel guilty about it." Sam said to ease the atmosphere. Sam didn¡¯t me these girls. He might be the cold and ruthless type, but he really is not so petty to me the younger generation for the decisions of their elders.

    Both the girls looked at him with gratitude and were about to say something. But when they looked at Sam¡¯s n.a.k.e.d upper half, they blushed again and looked down again.

    "What happened again?" Sam asked in confusion.

    "Sam, you probably should wear something." Paul said in low voice. Then only Sam realized what is happening and immediately took a sleeveless vest from the spatial ring and wore it.

    "Ms Haley. I can understand why Ms Freya is like that, but why are you behaving like that." Sam asked Haley, who was also clearly feeling guilty. Haley just stayed silent. Instead Marvin answered.

    "Well, Haley is city lord¡¯s daughter."

    "Oh" Sam acknowledged and stayed silent for a while. Then he continued. Ms Haley, Ms Freya your dresses will be ready by the next month. But I am not doing itpletely with the feathers. I have some new ideas. But you should still pay after the work is done. I will give you the discount though. Sam saidpletely changing the topic. Both girls looked a little startled and finally smiled. Seeing this, others also smiled and they soon went back to their cheerful selves. After sometime Sam took out a list and handed it over to Marvin and said.

    "Marvin can you buy these for me?" As he said that Sam gave him the list and was about to pass him some spirit stones in the leather pouch. But was immediately stopped by Philip.

    "Sam, it is better if you don¡¯t takeout the fire spirit stones now. The topic of these fire spirit stones is still sensitive. So, its better to pay using normal spirit stones." Philip said.

    "But I don¡¯t have any normal spirit stones." Sam said awkwardly. Hearing this everyone was dumbfounded. Then Philip came out of his daze and said.

    "Then Paul will apany Marvin. He will exchange your fire spirit stones, with the normal spirit stones with my father and then they will buy you the items that you want." Philip said after some thinking.

    "Sure" Sam said and handed over the pouch to Paul. Now their previous awkwardness ispletely wiped out. Paul took the pouch while Marvin looked through the list. The more he read, the more he opened his mouth wide. He came out of his daze and looked at Sam in bewilderment and asked.

    "Sam, why do you need so many items, what are you going to do?"

    "Let me see." Philip asked as he grabbed the list and he also got shocked. He then said to Sam, his wide open. "Sam, when did you start dabbling in the Formations and inscriptions?" This time Haley and Freya also lost their cool. ¡¯He knew inscriptions and formations. Since when did he know. Where did he learn those?¡¯ this was thought in everyone¡¯s mind. Sam didn¡¯t bother to reply. He instead turned towards Marvin and spoke. "Please get them as quick as possible. If you are left with change bring formation gs." The list contained all the items that are required to create any type of formation or inscription. The items include every type of material required to create even the mostplex of the first rank inscription or the formation." Marvin nodded and went outside along with Paul.

    The rest just chatted leisurely. It already became evening by the time Marvin and Paul came back. When they came back, they saw that Sam and others are still in the living room and two panthers are also ying around. Both Marvin and Paul were exhausted as they dropped onto the chairs.

    "Sam, next time you better give mepensation for that tiresome job. We had to buy all the items in different shops to not to get suspected and it has been evening buy the time it waspleted." Marvin said in an exhausted tone. Everyone looked at Paul. He didn¡¯t say anything. But from his expression, they all understood that his is in same state as Marvin.

    "Sure, sure." Sam said as he spread his hand towards hand. Marvin took a spatial ring and passed over to Sam and Sam passed over his own empty spatial ring. Sam checked all the items in satisfaction. Then he looked at them and said.

    "Guys, I need to tell you something." Everyone looked at him and waited for him to continue.

    "I will be going outside the city again and will be back one monthter." Sam said with a straight face. Everyone stayed silent with a dumbfounded gaze and then looked at each other.

    "Then why did youe at all?" Freya asked.

    "It is a bit troublesome to buy all these things." Sam said again with a straight face. Hearing his reply Marvin and Paul looked at each other pitifully. They wanted to cry, but no tears came. Philip and others also looked at them and sighed. You came all the way back just make us run your errands. This is the thought in everyone¡¯s heads.

 Chapter 18: Experiments

    Sam is in second floor of the tower in the Divine Dimension. But right now, the room is not in its usual illusory state rather it is just like any other room. Just that it is several hundred timesrger. Right now, Sam can be seen squatting at one ce and drawing something with his brush. There are tworge concentric circles that are formed with some small runic figures could be seen. This is the main skeletal frame of an inscription. This is mainly used for condensing andpressing the inscription to the object of the inscription. The big circle is in about three feet in radius while the small circle is about two feet in radius. These circles will differ for each rank and it will be more difficult to draw the higher it goes. The gap between the two concentric circles is used to ce the runes of the inscription, which are responsible for the energy flow and energy conversion as well as to achieve the purpose of inscription. When Sam finally finished all the Runes, he drew some lines joining to wards a much smaller circle in the centre, which is the ce where the object on which the inscriptionid has to be kept.

    After finishing the drawing. Sam stood at a point in between the concentric circles, where there is no rune. This is the ce where the person who performs the inscription has to stand. Sam stood there and observed the inscription patterns he drew himself to make sure there is no mistake. Sam still felt cautious since he already experienced what will happen in the simtion. Sam had tried the same process many times and failed may times in the simting environment. There will be a high bacsh when the inscription failed. Sam took out an ordinary sword and checked it. The sword is one of the items Sam asked Marvin to buy in the list he gave. Sam came out of the inscription circle and went towards the side of the room where there are two logs of same kind and same thickness. Sam the sword at the log with only using his spiritual energy partially. The sword lodged into the wood until it is half way through. This is the Starwood, which is one of the most important resource avable in the woods near the Starwood city. This is a strong material which is used for making weapons and handles for swords and sabres.

    Even the low quality of the Starwood is still highly valuable. The logs in front of him are low level as well. Sam then took the sword back and walked back to the inscription circle and kept the sword in the centre and came back to his spot. Then suddenly he started circting his spiritual energy and the inscription circle is activated and the runes started moving as the concentric circle converged, the runes are directing the spiritual energy in different ways and started condensing towards the sword. Sam didn¡¯t even bat an eyelid as he closely observed the nature of energy flow and how each rune is directing the energy. Sam tried this in simtion before. But the simtion is only showing the sess and failure of the resulting inscription but the actual process is still can¡¯t be observed and the energy flow is not visible. That is the reason why Sam went outside and asked Marvin and others to buy the items.

    Sampletely observed the whole process but still felt a bit disappointed, because it is very difficult to observe how the energy is being modified and directed by each rune individually. Sam went to pick the sword. There is an obvious inscription on the de. He then walked towards the intact log of Starwood and swung the sword, this time the de of the sword directly passed through the log as if it was a hot knife cutting through the butter. He slowly examined the cut and looked at the sword. Then he nodded in satisfaction. This is the power of an inscribed weapon.

    Then he looked at the ce where he drew the inscriptions and couldn¡¯t help feel a little disappointed. Even though he clearly seeded in inscription, he really failed in achieving his objective. Sam sat down and took out a note book. He took a brush and started writing.

    ¡¯Experiment-1 Sharpness inscription.

    Objective- Observe the energy flow and direction caused by a single rune individually.

    Inscription- sessful

    Energy flow- Visible but not possible to analyse

    Final result- Failed.¡¯

    He flipped the next page started drawing in the next page. It is the drawing of the inscription circle, he did earlier. He looked at the inscription circle and started observing the circle from various angles and started brain storming seriously.

    After sometime Sam abruptly stood up as an idea came. ¡¯What if I divide them individually?¡¯ Sam thought as looked at the inscription circle in his note book. The runes with in the gap between the inscription circle are all connected in some way. ¡¯If I look at the runes as a gear train and look at the whole resulting energy flow as the final gear ratio, then each rune will be an individual pair of gears in mesh. That means just as input gear and output gears rotate in different speeds, then input of energy flow for the rune is the speed of the input gear and the output of the energy flow is the speed of the output gear. Then the difference in the energy flow between the input and output of the energy flow can be termed as the individual gear ratio. Then just like how in a gear ratio, it is possible to obtain the final gear ratio from the product of all the gear ratios of the pairs in the mesh, the total energy flow and change in that energy nature to perform a sessful inscription will be the product of the changes in the energy flow in the runes.¡¯

    As he thought up to this point Sam felt like he was enlightened and heading in the right direction. ¡¯Now that I already know the input and output of the energy flow. If I can calcte the individual change in links one by one, then it will be possible to understand the energy flow. Since, I am also part of the gear train and I know my specifications, it will be much easier. Since, Sam is the one inputting the energy standing in the circle, he is also a link of the energy chain created and an important link at that. So, Sam turned the page over and wrote the ideas he got and stood up.

    He went to the ce he made the inscription circle and took out a different brush and a bottle of ink. This is the inscription ink which he made himself from the materials Marvin has brought. Different inscriptions have different requirements. But the neutral type inscriptions like the sharpness inscription Sam made just now can be made with the same ink. So, right now Sam is practicing with neutral inscriptions. Sam stood and observed the inscription circle in the note book. He is thinking how he should dissect them individually without making anything go wrong. Sam started drawing the first and foremost rune which would be on his left from his standing ce on the inscriptions. He slowly and urately drew the circle where he should stand and then the first rune. The first rank inscription circle has a total of 12 energy nodes,prising of the inscription master and the other 11 runes. So, Sam should try to analyse all the 11 runes.

    As hepleted the first rune and the extension lines which would connect with the next rune, Sam stood up and put away the ink and the brush and stood at the node and started activating the rune with his spiritual energy. Then Sam saw how the rune is processing the energy. He was clearly able to tell the difference in the energy when it was sent inside and came outside. Just as he felt a little excited. There is a change in the energy flow.

    *BOOM*

    The abrupt change in its nature made the spiritual energy unstable and a miniature explosion urred. Then Sam flew over andnded on his back as spewed a mouth full of blood. He panted heavily and tried to stabilize his breathing. After some heavy relentless panting, Sam finally sat up looked at the rune which was obviously disfigured. Then Sam took out the note book and wrote.

    ¡¯Experiment-2 Sharpness inscription.

    Objective- Analyse first rune separately to understand the Energy flow

    Energy flow ¨C Can be identified but not stable enough to analyse

    Repercussions ¨C a spiritual energy explosion

    Reason- In stability due to dissecting

    Result ¨C failed.¡¯

    Sam then closed his eyes and went deep into thought. He thought of the various scenarios on how to stabilize the energy without using the Binding circle. If the Binding concentric circle was used, then it will be hard to analyse the energy flow. Then he started thinking hard and finally had an idea. The thought that came to his mind is that he has to somehow utilise the energy aftering out. The energy must go somewhere. Even the unstable should have to be used. Then Sam started going through his options and finally an idea came. ¡¯Formation.¡¯ There is a Rank 1 spirit gathering formation which is useful for gathering spiritual energy in the immediate surroundings. This formation not only make the use of the spiritual energy efficient; it will also make the cultivator use the unstable energy by stabilising it. Then Sam immediately took out the formation gs andid down the formation. Again, he started the experiment but the result was still the same.

    *BOOM* Sam then understood why this happened. The energy flow of the rune and the formation ovepped and created an explosion. Sam again took out the note book.

    ¡¯Experiment-3.....

    Sam continued on doing experiments as he finally seeded. This time Sam removed a formation g as the node and then utilised the rune in ce of it. Formations can use any thing as a node as long as the formation master can make it transmit the spiritual energy. As the second floor of the tower has no noticeable spiritual energy to be used by the spirit gathering formation. Sam used the Spirit stones. Finally, when Sam used the rune as the input node to the formation and connected the output of the rune to the next node which is the next formation g, Sam finally seeded.

    ¡¯Experiment 10

    Objective - Analyse first rune separately to understand the Energy flow

    Result ¨C seeded¡¯

    Sam smiled as he saw the result and let out a satisfied sigh.

    Days passed slowly on outside. Sam stayed inside the tower and just continued analysing various runes and inscriptions along with formations. He didn¡¯t cultivate or practice anything else as he just kept on experimenting. During this time, he had bacshed many times and sometimes he struck with his thinking process. He conducted hundreds of experiments as days passed. Only other thing he did other than the daily routine is that he carved sometimes with the wood. Whenever, he got mentally exhausted, he will take the time to carve differentplex shapes.

    A month passed on outside and Sam is still inside the tower¡¯s second floor. He sat exhausted on the floor, but he has a smirk on his face as he looked at the ordinary sword in his hands. It is simr to the sword as that of the first sword on his first experiment. But this sword has so many runic marks on its handle. The handle is literally covered by arge number messily without any space left. But Sam was not a least bit bothered by it. He seemed quite satisfied. He slowly stood up and pierced the sword heavily into the ground and then concentrated the spiritual energy into the runic symbols on the handle. Then suddenly a dazzling sight appeared as formation appeared in front of him. This is binding formation. This will help to stop the movements of the enemy for a certain amount of time depending on the opponent¡¯s strength.

    Sam inscribed aplete formation on the sword handle. This is just like creating an Array disc. But Sam just reced the disc with the handle. But it is easier said than done. Even inscribing an Array disc, itself is not easy at all. The person should be both great at both inscriptions and formations and even then, a person won¡¯t inscribe an Array disc unless he is rank 2 in both trades. Then only he would be confident to inscribe an array disc. But Sam who clearly was only a first rank at both trades has inscribed a formation and that too on a handle of sword. Sam looked at the sword and then slowly stood up as he went outside of the tower. There are two panthers slowly dozing off. Yanwu, is also in his original form as slept on a tree. Sam smiled as he went outside the Divine Dimension andnded on the bed. He slept normally after what seemed like an eternity.

    Next day Sam wore his ck feather coat on the sleeveless vest as he walked downstairs. Yanwu is following from behind. Sam went outside the mansion along with Yanwu towards Philip. Along the way Sam noticed that the streets of bustling with people and everyone seems to be discussing something. The whole city is lovely. Sam made his way towards the Evergreen family to meet with Philip and others.

    "Oh, you are finally here." Philip seemed as if he was finally relieved to see Sam here.

    "You seem happy." Sam said.

    "Well, the admissions to the Starwood academy will happen in three days. I thought you wouldn¡¯t make it since there is no news from you. Now that you are here, I am really happy." Philip said with a smile. "Let us go to your Mansion. It is time. Others will also be there." Philip said as both of them along with Paul went Sam¡¯s mansion.

    After sometime.

    "My mansion seems to be your meeting ce." Sam said jokingly.

    "You are not using it anyway. So, what if we use it for a bit." Freya said from side.

    "Now that you are here. We are all relieved. All of us thought that you can¡¯t make it to the admissions day." Marvin said from the side. Sam just smiled.

    "Sam, I think it is better for you stay in my family for the rest of the days before exam. The attention of City lord and other families may have been directed towards the admissions, but they still kept an eye on you. They might have already known that you already came back and they might plot something." Philip said from the side. Hearing what he said. Both the girls felt a little awkward. After all it is their families that are plotting against their friend.

    "My father said that these nobles would do anything to get their hands on what they want if it is in hands of someone with no status." Philip continued. Hearing that everyone stayed silent and looked at Sam waiting for his response. They got the response. But it is not what they expected. Sam just smiled and said casually.

    "There is a much better and easier solution than hiding. Don¡¯t you guys know?"

    "What is it?" Philip asked. He thought that since his family is the only one not against Sam, it is best to stay there. But what Sam said next made all jaws drop to the floor.

    "It is simple. Let us just go get some status." Sam said as he stood and started walking towards the door.

 Chapter 19: Bet

    "Let¡¯s get some status." After Sam said those words, everyone was dumbfounded. They don¡¯t know how they came but they followed Sam, to a ce. The ce is the Artisan Tower. When Philip and others saw that they felt dumbfounded. They don¡¯t know why they came here. Artisan Tower is the branch of Artisan guild. In every significant city Artisan Guild opened an Artisan tower.

    The Artisan tower is one of the four ces that is not under the jurisdiction of the city lord. The other three ces are the Pharmaceutical Guild, The Inscription Guild and The Formation Guild. These four ces have a lot of influence since they bring most of the trade to a city. The four ces have four towers in the city. The four towers are powerful not only because there is an expert whose strength is simr to that of the city lord, but also, they have high statuses. The heads all the four towers are Rank 2 in their professions. So, even city lord has to show some respect to them.

    So, when Sam came to the Artisan guild, they thought that Sam might know someone here that could help him out of the situation. Then Marvin asked. "Sam, do you know someone here?" Marvin.

    "No." Sam¡¯s reply surprised them.

    "If you don¡¯t know why are we here?" Freya asked this time.

    "Well, didn¡¯t I say earlier, to get some status of course." Sam said matter of factly.

    "Sam, did you study Weapon smithy or forging before?" Philip asked after some thought. He guessed why Sam came here, but he didn¡¯t dare think of the possibility. Sam didn¡¯t answer to his question and just walked to the counter. Sam asked the receptionist.

    "I want to take the exam."

    "Here, fill the form and go to the first floor." The receptionist who is a youngdy said with slight annoyance as she looked at him and passed a form. Sam looked at the form and took a look at it. It is an apprentice examination form. The apprentice examination form is used for people who want to be an apprentice of some already ranked Artisan. The test will help analyse the aptitude and knowledge of the candidate and the result will be posted in all the Artisan guilds, if any of the Artisans like the candidate they will offer him a chance to be an apprentice. That is how the system works in all the other guilds as well. When Philip and others looked at the form, they thought they finally understood what Sam nned. Philip can¡¯t help but say. "Sam even if you can get high score and able to be an apprentice for a high ranked artisan, it would be toote. We don¡¯t have much time." Philip said a little concerned. Sam smiled and about to answer then he heard someone from behind.

    "You finally came from the hole you are hiding." Hearing that Sam and hispanions all frowned. They turned towards the person who spoke and saw Leonard standing there with an ugly expression. Then Leonard saw the form in Sam¡¯s hand and said with a mocking sneer.

    "You really are country bumpkin. Do you really think just because you can take an examination you will definitely be an apprentice of an artisan? Listen carefully, I am already an artisan of an Elder of the tower, he is about to be a rank 2 artisan. Do you still think that anyone will take you as an apprentice in the entire Artisan tower? Dream on. I will deal with you as soon as the admission tournament is over, I will make you regret ever born."

    Sam didn¡¯t mind him at all and just walked to the counter and said to the receptionistdy. "Miss, I want to take an Artisan exam, not an apprentice exam." Hearing what Sam said everyone looked dumbfounded. The sneer on the Leonard¡¯s face froze. Then he burst in to aughter. Receptionist also looked Sam up and down with a frown on her face. She seemed to be annoyed for some reason. Sam thought inwardly.

    Receptionist just looked at Sam¡¯s handsome face and said with the same frown. "Get lost" Then she continued her working.

    This time it was Sam¡¯s turn to frown. He really felt displeased. Meanwhile the receptionist also felt displeased. She is actually someone of lofty status. Her father has punished her by making her work as a receptionist for today, which made her temper ring up quite since morning. Now a guy who is younger than her is asking to take an Artisan exam. Isn¡¯t it a joke? It is good thing that he is handsome, otherwise I would have kicked him out myself. She inwardly thought. Then she heard a voice which made her annoyance even more.

    "Hello young miss, I want to take the Artisan exam." Sam repeated himself again. He got a good look at the woman. The first impression that the woman gave would be a ¡¯vixen¡¯. She is beautiful, s.e.xy, seductive. That doesn¡¯t mean that her character would be bad. It¡¯s just that her beautiful face, voluptuous figure. Her proud chest gave everyone that impression. They just cannot help to look at her more and get attracted to her. But none of them could be seen in Sam¡¯s eyes. He currently very displeased by her behaviour. At this time the young woman spoke in an extremely cold tone.

    "I don¡¯t know where you came from. But you better get lost before I kick you out." She said with an extremely cold tone. Philip and rest were about to convince Sam but stopped as he gestured them.

    "I will say again. I have an Acolyte mage cultivation and the fire attribute. Now, I want to take an examination to be an Artisan. On what grounds are you going to throw me out of here." Sam said in an equally cold tone. Hearing this she finally lost her cool.

    "Fine you want to take the Examination. I will let you take that. You will have to pay 10000 spirit stones to participate. Then we will talk." She said in anger.

    "Why should I pay 10000? Isn¡¯t it 1000 stones?" Sam asked in same cold voice. He is being increasingly frustrated.

    "Because I said so." She said as if she is only natural but with the same high pitch voice. Sam turned and looked the surroundings. Right now, there are a lot of people surrounding them. Even there are some people with the artisan tower uniform. They seemed to be elders of the tower. But they are not interfering with themotion. Seeing this Sam got even more frustrated. But he really didn¡¯t lose his cool but gave a devilish smile. Seeing this smile Philip and gang felt a bit cold. They looked at the receptionist with pity.

    "Okay I will pay. Better I will pay a total of 18000 thousand stones. But in return I don¡¯t want my amount in return. Instead, I need a total of 5 times the original amount. Deal?" Actually, there is a rule that every candidate should pay and will only get the money back if he passed. It is to stop them from wasting the guild¡¯s time.

    Hearing this all the spectators were dumbstruck. They let out a cold breath. They really want to see how big these balls are.

    "Young man, don¡¯t be excessive." Now an elder intervened. Knowing that the matter is getting out of hand, he cannot be just standing there. Sam didn¡¯t even bother to look at the elder. He just looked at the woman coldly with that devilishly handsome wicked smile.

    Seeing his confident yet wicked smile, the woman felt a sense of danger. But when she saw the surrounding people looking at her for reply, she felt that she would lose a lot of face. So, she agreed.

    "Deal." She then spread her hand towards Sam, asking him to pay up first. But Sam didn¡¯t say anything and looked through the crowd as if he were searching for someone. Then the receptionist asked with a sneer. "What chickening out now?" She said with a provocative sneer.

    "I don¡¯t trust you." Sam said with same calm and cold face. Everyone looked at the handsome man with a shocked gaze. ¡¯This guy really knew how anger people to death.¡¯ Philip and gang thought as they looked at the receptionist. Just as the receptionist is about to lose her cool again. A tranquil voice came from back of the crowd. A middle-aged man came forward as crowd made way to him. Every employ bowed with respect. "I can be the middle man." The middle-aged man said. He is in robes belonged to the Artisan tower. From the respect of others, he seemed to be in quite a high position.

    "Who are you?" Sam asked with same cold voice. Every elder looked at Sam with fierce expression.

    "Young man, don¡¯t you know how to respect the elders?" The elder who interrupted Sam earlier spoke. Again, Sam didn¡¯t even bother and looked straight at the middle-aged man. Respect, he lost all the respect to these people when they just stood and watched the show. He came here with proper etiquette and procedure to take the examination, but he couldn¡¯t help being disappointed.

    "I am the head of the tower." The middle-aged man said with the same tranquil voice. He didn¡¯t seem to be bothered by what Sam did. Everyone on the spot felt their legs going weak. ¡¯This young man is done for.¡¯ Everyone thought. Even Philip and gang felt quite anxious. But Sam didn¡¯t even say anything and threw a leather bag to the middle-aged man and the person checked the bag and nodded. Then he turned to Sam and said to him. "This way please." As he spoke, he walked upstairs. Sam and the receptionist followed. Then the rest of the crowd followed as well. Leonard is also among them, he seemed to be enjoying it quite well. He also has same thought. "This country bumpkin is done for." He muttered as he followed.

    Upstairs Sam, the tower head and the receptionist along with the crowd all stood before the room. The room is filled with all types of things like a bellow, pits, anvil, hammers, quenching tanks, etc. Everything a weapon maker need is there. The tower head started exining. This is the examination room. "You need to bring your own materials, if you want you can buy from the tower. After finishing the product, you should take it to that tform. If it is passed, the standards, the tower spirit will give the rank of the weapon which is also your Artisan rank. If your weapon is innovative and new design you have to ce your hand on the tform and use your spirit sense to show how you will use it. Then you may also get a Schr artisan rank." The tower head exined.

    Then he pointed at the wall and said. "That screen shows what you are doing to the higher ups from the guild. If they find any mistakes or malpractices are there, they can reject you." Sam nodded.

    "Why waste your breath on him? He isn¡¯t going to pass anyway?" the receptionist sneered from the side. Sam didn¡¯t even take a look at her and walked inside the room. The room has ss walls for others to see from outside.

    "Time limit is half a day." The tower head said from behind. Sam nodded and entered the room. He touched and examined every tool.

    "Did Sam really know Weapon smithy?" Freya asked Philip.

    "I don¡¯t know." He replied.

    Did Sam really study to be an artisan? That is an obvious no. Sam didn¡¯t know about anything rted to weapon smithy in this world. But that didn¡¯t mean that he ispletely oblivious to manufacturing. He dabbled almost in all kinds of engineering in his previous life.

    After examining all the tools, Sam started looking through the moulds in the room. There are various moulds of basic structures of weapons. Generally, an Artisan will use the mould to get the basic structure and then proceed with the forging. They all are waiting to see what type of weapon Sam will forge.

    But out of their expectations Sam didn¡¯t even take a second look at the moulds and took somethings out of his spatial ring which made them dumbfounded. Sam went to the work table and took out a long paper scroll from the spatial ring and spread it over the table. There are various fine geometrical figures on the scroll. Sam looked at them once and walked towards the quenching tank. There Sam sat cross legged as he took arge heap of sand. The sand may look like some mud. But it is actually fine. It just looked like some ordinary soil, Sam took water from the tank and started pouring it over the sand and started mixing it. Sam brought the soil from the river bank.

    Seeing his weird actions everyone broke out in discussions.

    "What is he doing?"

    "Did he lose his mind?"

    "What is that soil for?"

    "Is he going to make things out of mud.

    "Acting Mysterious" The young receptionist scoffed but the tower head stayed silent all the time.

    Sam didn¡¯t hear any of thesements. He just quietly mixed the soil. After he felt satisfied with the soil. He took out four wooden nks and some nails and started making a rectangr frame. When the frame ispleted, Sam ced it on the soft floor and took out a fine sand out and started spreading it evenly on the floor. He then took out another set of weird things from the spatial ring. There are some wooden carvings.

    Then Sam ced the wooden carvings on the work table and picked up a wooden mallet from the tools. Then he went back to the wooden frame with a wooden carving and ced it inside the frame, then he poured the wet soil and started ramming it with the mallet. He filled and rammed until the wooden frame is fully packed firmly. Then he inverted frame along with the packed sand. The sand didn¡¯t fall at all. Then he carefully took out the wooden carving and left packed sand with the cavity.

    Sam is performing the good old casting operation using the green sand moulding technique. Just now he used wet soil and the wooden carving which is technically called as a pattern to create a sand mould to pour the molten metal. Generally, there will be another extra mould above the one he just created with an opening to pour the metal, to prevent the impurities from mixing along with the molten metal and to ensure that the metal is poured properly.

    But Sam didn¡¯t feel like there is a need to it. Because the room is surrounded by a formation to avoid impurities and as for control Sam has trust in his dexterity to control it. Then Sam started to make moulds in same way with all the other patterns. The room is soon filled with seven moulds. Out of them six have moulds of singleponent. The seventh one has many smallerponents. Then Sam came to the table and checked the scroll. After he checked the sketch properly Sam took a few steps back.

    Looking at Sam¡¯s weird actions, the crowd already started getting used to it. Now only the receptionist is makingments.

    "Acting all high and mighty and only ying with mud. Those spirit stones are good as mine."

    Just as she was about to continue. The tower head shot a re. The tower head is not like rest of people. He is one of the most knowledgeable people here. So, he understood that the young man is definitely not ying with mud.

    Mean while Sam took out something which everyone thought would be another weird thing but went against their expectations. There is a gold metallic skeleton that looked like a skeleton of a tiger. Everyone was shocked and looked at in awe.

    "Golden Blood tiger." This time the silent tower head also seemed a bit shocked. He is also thinking what sort of material that young man will be using, but never would he have expected that he would use a material that would even stump the rank 2 artisans like him.

    Everyone broke into discussions as soon as they heard the name.

    "Damn, where did he find a whole skeleton of the Golden blood tiger?"

    "He seems to have some background. Otherwise it is impossible to get the skeleton with his own strength."

    Then under the astounding gazes of everyone, Sam went to therge tiger skeleton and removed the ws and kept them in the storage. Then he removed the front leg bone of the skeleton and held it with both his hands over therge cauldron and kept it.

    Sam closed his eyes and observed the metallic bone structure and slowly started analysing the grain distribution of the bone. Then everyone saw Sam sweating profusely as he kept on concentrating.

    "Still acting. Humph. Does he really think that Golden Blood tiger bones are that easy to handle? This is ridiculous even to watch. He doesn¡¯t even know the basics and still want to be an Artisan." The reception is still scoffing. Everyone also nodded in agreement except few people. There are none other than Philip and gang and the tower head.

    Philip and others because they saw how Sam made the bone into powder before and Tower head because of his intuition.

    Yes, Intuition because he felt Sam¡¯s seriousness and confidence.

 Chapter 20: Product finished

    While everyone wasmenting on what Sam is going to do. The man himself sat there with a metallic bone in hand with his eyes closed. There is cauldron under the bone. The cauldron in sculpted from the rock which is found besideva inside volcanoes. The rock can resist high temperature. Even the readymade moulds which Sam has seen earlier are made by this rock.

    Right now, Sam is still concentrating on spreading his spiritual energy through the bone as evenly as possible. If it was a month before, Sam would have already lost his concentration due to exhaustion of his soul power. But now Sam prepared himself by cultivating the Divine soul spirtual sense in the past time he spent in the tower. So, Sam has more than enough mental strength. When all are anticipating when Sam¡¯s cover will be blown, they saw the bone in Sam¡¯s hand started reducing into powders right in front of their eyes. The golden coloured metallic bone is slowly but surely turning into powders. The powders are so fine they looked like some golden coloured sand. All the people took a deep breath to calm their hearts. The sneer on the receptionist¡¯s face froze as she saw the scene unfold in front of her. Leonard also saw the scene with his mouth agape. Tower head is the only calm one at least on the surface. Even Philip and others who saw this scene and already knew the oue, had showed their change in expressions. The tower head is only calm on surface.

    He clearly felt shocked, but the excitement has far surpassed the shock. He saw an Acolyte whose limit should be the rank 1 materials acting against the norms and working with a most tough and difficult rank 2 material which even the rank 2 artisans would avoid. He is clearly feeling his excitement raising along with the expectation on what toe.

    The bone in Sam¡¯s handpletely disappeared as it turned into fine powder and filled therge cauldron in front him up to third of its total limit. The full leg of the Golden Blood tiger is clearlyrge as it is already as tall as Sam. But the cauldron is evenrger as thatrge of a leg only filled up to a third of it. Sam then backed off a bit took of his coat and vest revealing his handsome and chiselled upper half of the body. He then again started walking towards the cauldron. All the spectators looked towards the scars on his and abs. There is an obvious w marks on his chest and scars two stabbed wounds on his abs. Looking at that all the people just stared in silence for a while.

    "Don¡¯t tell me he got the tiger himself. He seemed to be only 3rd stage Acolyte, then how on earth did he kill the tiger? Judging from its size, it clearly iste stage of level 2." Someone said from the, everyone nodded as they were thinking the same thing. Then they heard a sneer.

    "He must have been carried by a hunting party. What is so great about that?" The young receptionist spoke. Everyone felt as though realization dawned on to them. Seeing this Philip and others just shook their heads. Even if they told the truth, no one would believe them that Sam killed the tiger alone.

    Meanwhile Sam is concentrating as he stood in front of the cauldron. He then slowly started circting his spiritual energy inside the cauldron and spread it all over the metallic bone powder after every grain of powder is enveloped with the spiritual energy, all the spiritual energy is converted into golden mes. The mes burned fiercely but arepletely condensed and concentrated over the powders.

    "What intense mes? I have never seen the mes in golden colour." Someone said in the crowd.

    "Yes, the intensity of the me is quite high."

    "Why is he using the mes directly through the mouth of the cauldron? Does he not know it he hard to control the mes this way and heat loss is high?" Somebody asked. Generally, an artisan will keep the mes around the cauldron to spread the heat evenly and to efficient use of heat. But Sam didn¡¯t seem to follow the norm.

    "He doesn¡¯t need it." Tower head said from the side silencing everyone. They didn¡¯t understand the meaning of the words. Only a few elders in the crowd understood what he meant. Sam, doesn¡¯t need the cauldrons help to spread the heat evenly, he can do the whole process by himself. But the whole process is not as easy as said, he needs an impable control of mes and Sam is currently disying it with his eyes closed.

    "Hmph, whatever. Does he really think just because he turned the bone into powder, he can melt it? The Golden Blood tiger bone is even more difficult to melt." The receptionist said with same scorn on her face. She didn¡¯t really like the fact that Sam is still hanging on there doing things she can¡¯t understand.

    Just as she finished speaking something happened that made everyone to look at her with an amusing look. Sam stopped the mes and as soon as he did, an extremely hot and sizzling liquid with in golden and red colour can be seen in the cauldron.

    ¡¯He made the Golden blooded tiger¡¯s bone to melt with his Acolyte mage cultivation.¡¯ This is the only thought in everyone¡¯s head as they stared at the scene and looked at the receptionist and Sam with an amused expression. They initially thought that Sam¡¯s spirit stones are as good as gone as they saw all the weird actions he performed. Now, they are having second thoughts.

    Meanwhile Sam didn¡¯t seem to be bothered at all. He is just carrying on with his work. He then spread the spiritual energy into his palms as they started covering with the Golden mes. This is First stage of the innate elemental fusion. Sam achieved this when he is practicing his fighting techniques as his control over power is increased. Then Sam carried the cauldron and walked towards the moulds. Everyone was dumbfounded when Sam is using a cauldron half as tall as him, but wider than him by a few times to pour the molten metal inside the Sand moulds he made. After pouring all the molten metal into six moulds Sam came back and put the cauldron back in its ce, then Sam went back to the skeleton and removed a rib bone and went to a smaller cauldron. Then he repeated the same actions. Making it in to powder and then melting it. In the same way he went back to thest seventh mould and started pouring the metal. This time, the seventh mould has a lot of cavities which are small andplicated, some are hollow cavities, some looked like fine straight line. After pouring the metal, Sam came back to the table and examined the sketches on the scroll carefully once again, after looking at it, Sam gave a satisfied nod and came towards the door.

    "Can you bring me some wasted ss pieces, the transparent the better and few more nks of wood." Sam said to Marvin. Marvin nodded and left in hurry. Sam, then looked at the receptionist and gave a cold evil smile. The receptionist didn¡¯t dare to say anything. Previously, whatever she said that Sam couldn¡¯t do, he had done it and seemingly in a fast pace. It had been around four hours and a normal rank 2 Artisan will take this time to only heat the Golden Blood tiger¡¯s bone. But Sam had made it melt along with the many other things. Now she only wished that Sam¡¯s sand moulds are not good enough and his work can¡¯t be finished

    Marvin came back with a big leather bag full of ss pieces and a person can be seen carrying arge number of nks from behind. Sam took the bag and was about to walk back and start working again Sam heard the tower head speaking to him.

    "Where did you learn such a profound technique to melt the Golden Blood tiger bone? Even I can¡¯t see through it." Sam just shook his head with a smile and went back into the room without speaking as if he was amused by the question. Actually, Sam¡¯s technique cannot be considered as a profound thing at all based on earth standards. Yes, he has an amazing fire control, but that is not the main reason that melting of the bone is possible. The main tricky in making it in to powder.

    Sam used the very basic of the heat conduction principle. Any metal will be difficult to melt if it is bigger. Why? Because when any substance changing its phase that is when it is changing from solid form to a liquid form then, it needs to absorb arge amount of heat energy after reaching a critical temperature point which is known as melting point. This is calledtent heat of the substance. If the material is in arge quantity, it will take more time to raise its temperature to melting point and it will be harder to reach the Latent heat limit. Because ording tow of heat conduction, a metal with high conductivity andrge surface area will tend to conduct the heat to surroundings, instead of absorbing it. That is why in modern earth people won¡¯t use these kinds of materials for casting and go to powder metallurgy instead.

    Sam simply used this principle and turned therge bone into millions of entities which are so small. These entities are the grains in the powder. Then he used his spiritual energy to separate each grain and used the fire to melt it separately. This cannot be called profound instead it would be called a waste in modern earth. Because in powder metallurgy the powders are not molten instead, they will be heated to a certain temperature after the powder is poured into a mould until a new bond is formed. Melting the powder is waste of energy in modern earth. But Sam didn¡¯t have that problem in this world.

    Sam came back into the room and kept on working. He has total of twelve hours to work and he only used a little over 8 hours. So, he is continuing the work as he waited for the moulds to solidify. Sam just took out another scroll and started preparing more moulds with a new set of patterns. This time the number of moulds filled the whole room, in tens. Sam then walked towards the cauldron. This time he didn¡¯t use the bones instead he took out the wholerge leather bag of ss pieces. Then he started melting it. This time it didn¡¯t take much time and then started pouring it in more than 90 percent of moulds in the room. The ss is clearly a lot different as it can be directly used for ordinary casting. But the ss back on earth can¡¯t be used like it as it solidifies as soon as it leaves the heat for a second.

    As Sam was doing this the first batch of the seven moulds all cooled down, Sam slowly went there are and then, he slowly started destroying the moulds as Soil copsed. Crowd looked at the scene curiously, they want to see how these knew moulds will work. Then they saw Sam taking out some metallic objects in various shapes and sizes from the heaps of the soil. Particrly from the seventh andrgest mould he took out a bunch of objects. Sam slowly went to the grinding stone and started grinding the objects after an hour of grinding, Sam had a bunch of shiny metallic objects with him. Then he took some long and thin vertical metal strips with circr cross section. They can be considered as wires. Actually, it is impossible to produce a casted wire in modern earth, but here with Sam¡¯s control over spiritual energy and his dexterity, Sam has done the impossible. Sam took the wires to the anvil and stood before the circr protrusion which is used for making curved shapes. Sam put a wire across the circr protrusion and started coiling it. All the crowd looked at Sam with a surprised expression as he made a weird coil out of the wire. It is one of the oldest things created in the modern earth which is used in a myriad of things andpletely new to this world. A helical spring. The crowd didn¡¯t know what purpose it serves, but they are waiting as they saw Sam making a number of springs. Then Sam finally made his way to table.

    There are all theponents in front of him shining. Sam took deep breath as he started assembling. The crowd looked as Sam took a slightly curved metallic block in his hands. It has a converging cross section. That is one end is bigger than other. The block has two circr grooves on bigger side and a single hole on smaller side. Then the Sam took a weird looking de. What seemed like the handle of the de is also curved, then Sam inserted the ¡¯handle¡¯ of the de inside the single hole on the smaller side. Then he took out some metallic bone powder with one hand and made a fist with another hand. Then he pointed his index finger from the fist towards the joint of de and the block, then the fingertip of the index finger released a golden me which is burning fiercely, Sam slowly moved the finger around the joint while slowly pouring the powder. Sam is welding the joint, but the crowd didn¡¯t understand, but the tower head understood. He saw a simr technique from the higher rank artisan, but the technique is made in much different form. Sam then did the same thing to another pair of identical block and de. After that he kept them aside and took another which is also curved but has arge hollow, inside the hollow there are two holes smaller than the holes in previous block, Sam took a weird looking object which the crowd didn¡¯t understand. The object looked like a long cylindrical rod mounted by a thick metallic disc on top. It is a piston. Sam inserted the piston rod inside the block and then took another piston and did the same to another hole. Then Sam carefully took the previous block welded with de and inserted inside the hollow. The two piston heads inserted perfectly inside the grooves on the metallic block.

    Sam repeated the same actions with another set of the blocks. Then Sam turned over the set, there two, much smaller holes can be seen, and there is long rectangr hole. Sam inserted two coin like objects inside the small holes. Then Sam took two springs and inserted inside the holes and again inserted a pair of coins again. Then Sam took out a bottle of liquid from the storage and started pouring. It is the blood of the zing earth bull which he killed earlier. This is preserved in a bottle of special material. Crowd grew even more confused by his actions. But they won¡¯t be getting any of the answers now.

    Sam slowly poured the blood and then repeated the same actions with another set. Sam kept the sets aside carefully not to spill the blood outside and took the rectangr block in his hands. Its width is a lot lesser whenpared to other blocks. It has two long protrusions in rectangr shape on both sides and a circr hole in centre of the long t side. Sam took two, wedge like objects and welded on either side of the circr hole.

    The wedge is hollow all the way with both sides open. Sam took another hollow wedge which has one side closed and other side open, then Sam inserted the wedge (second one) such that closed surface will face the circr hole. He took two springs and kept them in hollow he took two small pistons and inserted the piston rods inside the springs. Then Sam took the set (Curved block and de) he previously kept aside and inserted the rectangr the rectangr protrusion of the block into the hole of the set. Then the pistons on the wedges inserted themselves inside the holes where Sam poured the blood. Sam welded all the joints and then did the same on the other side of the rectangr block,

    Now there is a weird looking object with half a crescent of irregr cross section on both sides of a rectangr block. Looking at the object the crowd didn¡¯t know what to make of it. Even tower head looked a little lost. Sam then took out a small thin rope like thing from the storage. It is the spinal tendon of the zing earth bull. Due to staying outside without any bodily fluids of bull, the tendon shrunk, but its sticity can¡¯t be doubted. Sam inserted the ends of the tendon inside a small hole near the joint of the des on both sides. The crowd didn¡¯t notice this at all. Sam poured some metal powder on both sided and melted it to solidify.

    Sam came to the final step. There are only three objects left on the table. A weird looking spline like object and a small metallic frame and a coin like object. Sam welded the metallic frame on the bottom side of the central rectangr block. The crowd understood something for first time. It is the handle. They understood because Sam held it with his hand. Then Sam took the weird looking spline. They can¡¯t recognise the shape. But anyone from the modern earth who know the English alphabet will recognise, it is shape formed by intervening of the two ¡¯S¡¯ letters in different fonts (Cover page). There is a circr protrusion on the bottom side of the shape, Sam inserted the protrusion inside the hole, then took the coin like object and welded it with the protrusion which came barely came out from other side. Then Sam took thepleted object in his hands and held it with his hands. The ¡¯S¡¯ shape is not parallel to the object but it is some what tilted outside. But Sam didn¡¯t care as it is intentional. Sam cleaned his creation for onest time and then slowly walked towards the tform.

    "He seems to be finished." One of the people from the outside crowd said.

    "But what is it exactly? I can¡¯t understand"

    "Me too."

    "Tower head do you know what it is?" One of the braver ones asked. But tower head shook his head. Sam took the weapon to the tform and ced his hand on the palm shaped groove on the tform.

    The tform has two grooves. One is in shape of the circr coin. This is where badges of artisans kept when they bring the product for evaluation. They will ce the badge in the groove and their hands on the badge to proceed for examination. The tower spirit will evaluate the product ranking. This is used for product appraisal as well as promotion examination. The fresh examiners have to keep the hand on the palm groove.

 Chapter 21: I think this status is enough. No?

    Sam closed his eyes as he started spreading his spiritual sense. He felt like his consciousness slipping into the tform and an illusory space came into his eyes. There was a human silhouette is in front of Sam¡¯s vision. ¡¯The tower spirit¡¯ the thought came to his mind

    "What is your name?" the tower spirit asked in a neutral voice.

    "Sam."

    "Imagine a suitable scenario to use your product and use it. Show its capability to its fullest. If you can¡¯t use your product yourself, you can imagine a cultivator with the requirements and use it. Test starts now." The tower spirit said and disappeared.

    Sam looked at his hands. There is golden metallic object in his hands, it is clearly what he made moments ago. Sam closed his eyes and imagined a scenario.................

    It has been an hour since Sam has started his evaluation. But he didn¡¯t open his eyes. The crowd started growing impatient.

    "How long is he going to take?" Someone said in the crowd.

    "Yeah, it has been such a long time."

    "Maybe he failed and just pretending." This time it is Leonard. But he himself didn¡¯t believe his words. He is dumbfounded from Sam¡¯s performance. He just hoped he would fail atst step. There is someone who also hoped he would fail. That is the receptionist. She forgot about the bet a long time ago. She is an Artisan of first rank and her cultivation is at peak of Acolyte. She became Artisan recently at 18 years of age. This is a great aplishment. Generally, Artisans use take the test atte stages. But now she saw someone, who is at initial stage Acolyte and working with higher rank materials. The pride she had shattered into pieces. That is the reason, she wanted Sam to fail, so that her view of world would be proved correct. But there is a sense of foreboding that is saying her to give up the hope and it is correct.

    The tform brightened suddenly as Sam took his hand. The screen on the wall near the tform, showed the result of the evaluation.

    ¡¯Product name- Unknown

    Product type- Weapon

    Creator- Sam

    Rank of the weapon- Rank 2¡¯ Below the writing there are nine golden stars.

    Crowd went into uproar. The expressions of those who wished Sam to fail are burning with embarrassment. Sam¡¯s friends are jumping with joy. Sam passed and he is just not 15 yet. This is a major aplishment to be a ranked Artisan at his age. All the knowledgeable persons are looking at the stars below the rank.

    Sam understood what the stars meant. The weapons in the same rank are also divided in the quality and they are shown with the stars. The more the stars the more incredible the weapon is. The one star being the lowest and 10 stars being the highest. If a weapon has 10 stars it means its might can bepared to the next rank weapon. The badge of an artisan also contains the stars. For example, the tower head of this tower is a Rank 2 artisan with 6 stars. Just when Sam was deep in his thoughts, another string of letters came.

    ¡¯Examination Evaluation

    Candidate- Sam

    Result- Passed

    Rank - Pseudo Rank 2 weapon Artisan Rank 3 Schr artisan.¡¯

    Looking at the result Sam let out an arrogant smirk. He wished for this result. The Pseudo rank 2 means, if an artisan of lower cultivation rank can create higher rank then he will get Pseudo rank title. That means, as long as he reached the required cultivation rank, then he can be a rank 2. Then with a blinding light a circr tform appeared on the rectangr tform on which Sam¡¯s weapon along with two circr badges which are 3 timesrger than a normal coin, one is a golden badge with a symbol which indicates the number 3 in this world¡¯snguage on it and under the 3 there is a scroll symbol. This is symbol of his Schr Artisan. This is his Schr Artisan badge. The other badge is ck in colour. Normally, the weapon artisan badge is in silver in colour. The ck indicates the pseudo rank. The badge has number 2 on it. There is a symbol of a hammer and a symbol of fire under the number. Back of the both badges, there is Sam¡¯s name.

    Sam took the weapon and stored it inside the ring. Then he slowly took the badges and looked at them carefully. There are nine stars on the Weapon artisan badge. Indicating his position as a higher level among the other rank 2 artisans. Sam felt proud of himself. Sam slowly took the badges and walked back to the table.

    Sam put on his vest and coat and started walking towards the moulds and started breaking them. There are several, ss tube like products and the small metallic products which he collected inside his storage. Sam tidied up the ce slowly. Keeping the soil and scraps, he even cleaned the grinding stone. He cleaned until the room is back to its original way before he came.

    Sam slowly walked outside the room and smiled towards Philip and his friends and walked near them. Sam took out the badges and asked Philip with a smile.

    "I think this much of status enough. No?"

    Philip didn¡¯t answer and just looked at Sam with grin as he gave him a thumbs up. All Sam¡¯s friends are shocked at excited. The thought having a pseudo rank 2 artisan made them excited even more.

    "You hid himself too deeply." Philip finally said.

    "Yeah. That is true." Paul said slowly.

    "You better give me discount when Ie to you." Marvin spoke.

    "Damn it, Sam. How can you hide the fact that you are an Artisan from me? Don¡¯t worry, I will be magnanimous and forgive you if you.... hmph" Freya was about say something shameless again, but Haley shut her mouth with her hand.

    Haley slowly looked towards and said in an extremely low voice. "Congrattions." That¡¯s it. No lengthy talks and only short and straight forward.

    All the other spectators in the crowd just stared at them as they chatted. Nobody wants to interrupt; nobody wants to leave either. After all, it is not every day one woulde across a prodigy and nobody wants to miss a chance to talk to him and try to make a connection. They are all Apprentice Artisans and rank 1 artisans. So, having a connection with a higher ranked artisan is always beneficial. But nobody has guts to interrupt. After all they all just stood and watched the show, when Sam was getting ill-treated at the reception. Not only they didn¡¯t interrupt, but also let the receptionist do and say whatever she wanted. Now they don¡¯t have any face to start a conversation.

    "Excuse me, Sir." Somebody finally approached. The person is none other than the tower head. Sam turned and looked at him. He didn¡¯t reply at all. Seeing Sam¡¯s expression tower head didn¡¯t know what to say.

    Of course, Sam wouldn¡¯t be courteous. He really didn¡¯t like the Artisan tower. Although, the mistake of one person being rude and unreasonable cannot represent the character of every person belonging to the tower, what bothered him most is the fact is nobody tried to stop the receptionist when she is being unreasonable. Even this tower head also camest and acted as a middle man rather than stop thedy being rude.

    Sam directly ignored the Tower head and walked directly towards the receptionist and looked at her face. The change of the receptionist face can be really considered amusing. There is no trace of arrogance she showed a few hours earlier. Her head held down in embarrassment and she is gritting her teeth as she stared at the floor.

    Sam stood in front of her. Sensing that someone is near her she looked up saw Sam slowly staring at her. There is an arrogant smirk on his face. His eyes stared at her directly without any trace of hiding the cold raw arrogance. He looked at her chest and saw a badge gold in colour and there is a number 1 engraved on it with a symbol of hammer and fire underneath. He looked at her eyes again and this time there is also disdain along with the arrogance in her eyes.

    She saw the eyes filled with raw arrogance and disdain and felt her pride shattering. Nobody looked at her like that in all her eyes. It is her first time someone looking at her like that. From childhood all the people around her looked at her with adoring and admiring gazes. She was praised for her beauty and talents endlessly. Wherever she was, there are countless people looking at her with envy. But now there is a person right in front of him looking at her disdain. Endless disdain.

    "I ...." Just as she was about to say something Sam interrupted her.

    "Pay up." Sam said as spread his hand. Everyone around was dumbfounded. They imagined countless scenarios, but never this one. The youngdy also became fl.u.s.tered as she remembered the bet.

    "Young sir, why don¡¯t we let bygones be bygones? So, please give some leeway." An elder from the Artisan tower said. Seeing that Sam is still young he wanted to mediate by smooth talking.

    Sam looked at the elder and said with an amused expression. "Why should I?" Elder was stumped by the reply. ¡¯Is he asking for a reason?¡¯ Elder thought and looked at the tower head with a look of hesitation. Then tower head himself spoke up.

    "Sir, Sam. Kelly is my daughter and I failed to teach her properly. So, please give me some face." He said with a gentle tone. "Kelly, apologize." Then he shouted towards the receptionist.

    Kelly felt her body shudder from his father¡¯s abrupt shout. Tears threatened toe out of her eyes. Looking at her expression, nobody could rte to her arrogant-self few hours ago. Every person felt their hearts tighten as they watched her beauty. Well, everyone except one.

    Sam looked at her with the same cold look. When she looked at his handsome face and that cold expression, her mood became even more gloomy. Kelly wasn¡¯t able to speak. She wanted to say something, but she can¡¯t get the words out of her mouth. She, doesn¡¯t know if it was due to anger embarrassment.

    "Hahaha. Did you see that? she doesn¡¯t even have anything to say. I am sick of waiting here." Sam said as heughed coldly. He looked at Kelly and repeated. "Pay up." She still didn¡¯t reply.

    "What? Do you really think I have all day? Pay up." Sam asked as his tone be harsh. Kelly almost broke into tears. He saw her face that was about to cry. Then he turned towards the tower head and spoke. "Aren¡¯t you the middle-man? Why are you staying silent for?" Listening to him everyone felt like he is not kidding. They first thought that he is just going to find some trouble to cleanse the humiliation and make a fuss here with his status a higher ranked Artisan. But it seems that he really is asking for money? But it is still trouble to them. Because even with the Artisan tower¡¯s ie, it is not easy to pay 90000 spirit stones. They would need to exin it to their higher ups. So, the only oue is to let her pay herself. And it is obviously impossible for a girl who recently became an Artisan. So, there is only one option left.

    "Sir, Sam How about I pay it for her?" The tower head asked. Even though he said without hesitation, he felt his heart bleeding inside. He first thought that, since he had a conflict with his daughter and made her work at the reception, he would entertain her a little bit by just mediating the bet. He didn¡¯t really have any thought of making the bet. His initial assumption is that the young man is trying to bite off more than he can chew. So, after he failed, he would just take the entrance fee and give the rest back by convincing his daughter as well as teaching the guy a lesson on behalf of her. Even if the young man became a rank 1 artisan, he can directly use his seniority as a rank 2 artisan to mediate the conflict and put it off a joke. That is his initial n. But the young man didn¡¯t follow the script. He just took the exam and out ranked him. These 90000 spirit stones are savings from past two years he has been making. Now all of them will be gone.

    "Oh, did she use your mouth to act arrogant in front of me?" Sam asked a question which made him stumped. ¡¯Now you are beingpletely unreasonable¡¯ The tower heard inwardly thought. But he forced a smile. Then Sam said again.

    "Forget it. Just return my spirit stones back and send me a whole set of equipment that is in that room." Sam said as he pointed at the room in which he has just taken the test. Hearing this the tower head sighed in relief. The equipment is not an issue at all. Particrly for an Artisan who is in second rank there is a significant discount on the basic smithy equipment. Even though it will cost him some spirit stones, he wouldn¡¯t have to go broke. Sam took a piece of paper and wrote something and passed it to the tower head.

    "This is the ce where I live. Send it after the Starwood academy admissions are over. But you better keep the ce a secret." Sam then turned around and started walking. Then he stopped and looked at Kelly and then continued to walk away. There is a look of disregard in his eyes. The intense disdain before was also gone. It was as if his eyes were saying to him. ¡¯You don¡¯t even deserve my disdain.¡¯ This left her a bitter taste and finally broke into tears. Her father came forward and took her into his embrace. She just lost her head in an impulse. She never wanted to take it out on a random person who has nothing to do with her bad mood. But it happened on an impulsive decision of hers and now that random person trampled on her pride and even disregarded her existence. She was in awe with his performance and unique skills he disyed, but she never got a chance to express her admiration. All she got was an intense disregard in his eyes, first time in her life she wanted a person¡¯s acknowledgement. She wanted to own up to her actions, but she chickened out atst minute. She hated herself. Both father and daughter just stood there in each other¡¯s embrace as everyone left them alone.

 Chapter 22: Before the Admission Exam

    A person had a lifeless expression as he walked out of the Artisan tower. This person is none other than Leonard. His body covered in cold sweat as he thought about what he should do. The country bumpkin whom he thought he could trample upon anytime is now an existence, he shouldn¡¯t provoke. But he and his family already provoked him. "I will just stay silent about it. There are a lot of people in the city who wants his wealth. So, if news won¡¯t spread there would be a possibility of him dying. So, I will just stay out of this." He muttered as he ran to his house.

    Meanwhile in a nearby costly inn. Sam and his friends are having a meal as they chatted cheerfully.

    "Okay attention every one. Here let me give a toast for our very own artisan Sam." Marvin stood up and made a toast with his wine ss. In this world, the people who are 16 years old are considered a.d.u.l.t and can drink as they want. At the table only Sam is still underage. Even Paul is 16 years old. So, everyone except Sam is having wine while he was stuck with a fruit juice.

    "Sam, how old are you exactly?" Suddenly Philip asked from the side. Everyone looked at Sam curiously. They really want to know how old Sam exactly is. Even though he said that he will reach 15 in about two months, it had been a vague answer.

    "I think I will turn 15 in few days. Sam said without any interest. But the other¡¯s expressions turned gloomy. Sam observed that and asked nonchntly. "What?"

    "You do know what that means right?" Freya asked.

    "What do you mean?" Sam asked with confusion.

    "Howe you are so dense even with your mind like that. Even though you are just about to be 15 you already have be an Artisan, that too a higher rank. Do you know how people feel when theypare themselves to you?" Philip exined.

    "Well, its their bad, if they think like that. If it wasn¡¯t for the fact these nobles are eyeing me, I cannot be bothered to take the examination." Sam replied as if taking this exam itself is a tiring job. All the others sitting at the table felt that they didn¡¯t have anything to talk about anymore as they heard his reply. They just stayed silent and finished their meals. After that the two girls went to their home and the rest of the boys shamelessly followed Sam to his mansion. As soon as he entered the mansion, Sam was greeted by Yanwu. Before Sam left to the Artisan tower, Yanwu said he wants to go out to do something and then left. Seeing that Yanwu has returned Sam felt relieved. Sam felt that Yanwu has something on his mind but he didn¡¯t ask anything.

    Sam and other boys sat in the living room and chatted. Philip asked in between.

    "Sam do you know how the admissions take ce?"

    "No."

    "Well, then I will let you know. Actually, we cannot call it as simple admissions. Because it involves people students who are already admitted in to the academyst year." Philip said.

    "Why?" Sam asked with a confused tone.

    "The thing is the process is not only for the admissions but also for the assessment of the previous years students. They will put the previous year students against the candidates for the examination in the final round of thepetition. So, that is why we are also involved." This time, Marvin answered.

    "Actually, what are the qualifications to attend the exam?" Sam asked.

    "The first and foremost age and cultivation. The first round of assessment is this. The candidates must not be older than 16 and must not be younger than 15. The age will be assessed with high precision, measuring up to days. Me and Paul, wanted to take the exam at same time. So, I took the examst year. Now I am about to reach seventeen and he is about 16 years old.

    When ites to cultivation assessment. The minimum requirement is the 9th stage initiation and there is no problem, the one doesn¡¯t reach thete stage of Acolyte." Philip finished.

    "The second round will be eliminating the major number of candidates by a free for allpetition. It changes every time. But it will always have some danger with in. There will always be some deaths. The ones who are still left after thepetition will be having an admission to the academy." Marvin continued after a slight pause. "The third and finalpetition is the group fight between the Seniors and the candidates left after the examination. In thispetition they will rank the freshmen and seniors ording to their results and there will be a significant reward based on the score." Marvin finished exining. Sam started thinking and asked a question. "Will there be a restriction on weapons?"

    "Any weapons above rank 1 will be rejected. Candidates cannot use the array discs and inscriptions as such as well. Pills and other medicine are also not allowed. Philip said.

    "Okay then you prepare well for the exam then we will not be visiting you tomorrow. See you at the academy." Philip and others left, leaving Sam alone. As soon as they left, Yanwu came andnded in front of Sam.

    "Sam, I need to go out for a few days." Yanwu said as soon as hended.

    "What happened?" Sam asked Yanwu as he sensed his seriousness.

    "I need to investigate something. I will be back within ten days." Yanwu said reassuring Sam. The tokens Sam got from the city gate for the beasts leaves a special aura on them which makes the security of the city guards to recognize them. So, Yanwu cane and go as he please. Even if he doesn¡¯t have that, he can still turn in to an ordinary crow and travel as he please.

    Seeing that Yanwu is not willing to talk more, Sam didn¡¯t ask further. "Okay stay safe. If you have any problem, just let me know." Yanwu nodded and flew away. Sam just sighed and slowly walked to his bedroom to sleep.

    Samid on his bed and just stared at the ceiling. After sometime his eyes closed as he slowly drifted into sleep.

    Next day morning, Leonard really underestimated the scope of news that a 15-year-old pseudo rank 2, artisan will bring. The whole city by this time knew that there is a young and highly ranked artisan is in the city. This news even got more attention than a young man buying a mansion at a high price in an auction using fire spirit stones against the noble families. But nobody seemed to made a connection between these two young men.

    Sam walked on the streets as he heard people talk about him. He made his way to the Artisan tower. As soon as he entered the tower, the workers in the artisan tower went stiff. Generally, the first floor is a weapon shop and a receptionist will be there to attend to the people who came to the tower for purposes other than buying weapons from the shop. There will always be several staff attending to the customers. If a high ranked artisan like Sam entered the tower, then they will jump in joy to serve him. But now nobody dared to approach him as they had ruined such chance from giving a bad impression yesterday.

    Sam walked towards the reception. When he saw the person sitting at the reception, Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel surprised. Because the person in the reception is same as yesterday. The Kelly who is daughter of tower head. He didn¡¯t expect her to work at the reception the very next day after suchmotion. When Sam looked at her, she also looked him and their gazes met. When she saw him, she couldn¡¯t help but feel fl.u.s.tered. She lost all the pride arrogance from yesterday, there is no sign of the wilfulness she disyed yesterday. But Sam didn¡¯t feel like interacting with her.

    He just stopped in his tracks and looked around. He then looked at a young man who is not attending any customers, he called over him. "Excuse me." The young man immediately stiffened but he still walked over and stood in front of Sam.

    "Can I trouble you to look for an elder here? I need to ask them something." Sam asked the young man with a polite but neutral tone. As soon as he finished, the young attendant nodded his head and left in a hurry. They are not that far away from the reception. So, Kelly clearly heard their discussion. She felt somewhat lost. Actually, it is the receptionist¡¯s job to inform the elders if somebody came to meet them, but Sam didn¡¯t even bother to talk to her. She felt the same disregard that he showed her yesterday.

    After Sam left yesterday, she stayed alone and reflected on her behaviour. She then understood that, she has been too used to going everything her way within the Artisan tower. That is the reasons, she acted arrogantly after she became an Artisan at 18. She has be drunk of being called a genius and started acting wilfully. Now when Sam trampled on her like nothing, she understood how delusional she really is.

    Sam then called for another attendant and asked for some materials. Then the attendant brought those material and Sampleted the transaction. After that Sam waited for a few more minutes.

    The young man who left earlier came rushing from upstairs, behind him was the middle-aged tower head.

    "Sir Sam, what can I do for you?" the tower head asked Sam with a humble tone.

    "I need to borrow a forging room for a while. You see there is the admission to Starwood academy day after tomorrow. I need to make a weapon for myself." Sam said with a polite tone.

    "Sure, sure. You can definitely borrow one. I will lead the way right now." The tower head agreed quickly and started leading the way. Sam followed him. Behind them, Kelly looked at Sam as if she was about to say something but she didn¡¯t say anything.

    Tower head led Sam to a private forging room. This room didn¡¯t have any transparent walls, instead it has fully opaque walls respecting the privacy of the Artisan. The tform is also only having a single groove which can only be operated with a badge. Sam examined the room and nodded in satisfaction. Then he turned towards the tower head and nodded. The tower head got the hint and turned to leave, albeit with reluctance.

    Sam stayed in the forging room making something all the while until it is evening. Nobody knew what he is doing. When sun is about to set, Sam finally came outside. His face looked exhausted but there was a satisfying smirk on it. His handsome has a unique charm attached to it because of that smirk. When he looked straight there was a beautiful and s.e.xy woman standing with her head down. It is Kelly. Sensing his gaze, Kelly looked towards him and as soon as she saw him, she made her way towards him and stood right in front of him. Sam was about to move away and leave.

    "Sorry." She said in a sweet, alluring yet timid voice. Sam halted his footsteps and looked at her with a questioning look.

    "I just want to apologize for my arrogant behaviour yesterday. I know it won¡¯t change the fact I was arrogant and unreasonable; I just hope you can just forgive me." She said in same timid voice.

    Looking at her appearance, Sam understood what was happening. She never felt the disregard he shown yesterday before. She felt that her existence has always being valuable. But know a person is not even acknowledging her existence. Seeing her Sam sighed.

    "Why do you seek forgiveness?" Sam asked. She was stumped and stared at him in silence. She wanted to say something but she doesn¡¯t know how to voice it out. Sam then continued.

    "I don¡¯t care if you are arrogant. In fact, I myself am arrogant. Even though you being arrogant caused me displeasure. That¡¯s about it. Nothing more. That is not enough for me topletely disregard. At most I would beughing at your naivety for acting arrogant in front of a superior person. you not being able to back your arrogance and losing will bring you disdain. But if you can¡¯t even keep your words, that is when you will be an existence that I will not acknowledge." Sam finished and left there without turning back. Kelly stood at the spot with a pondering expression and after sometime she smiled and looked at the direction in which Sam has left.

    Actually, Sam doesn¡¯t like to talk that much. But when he saw Kelly, he saw himself in her. In his previous life, there was a point of time when Sam wanted nothing but the acknowledgement of others. When Sam started having results of all his hard work and talent, he wanted nothing but acknowledgement of everyone superior to him. He wanted them to feel that his existence matters. Kelly is in simr situation. Sam doesn¡¯t know why she is like that. But he felt that is the case.

    Sam came to the first floor, where another young man is taking the shift as a receptionist. He walked to the counter and asked. "I want to buy some arrows." When the receptionist saw who it was and stood up. He immediately acknowledged his request and immediately asked. "Sir, how many do you want?"

    "I need 10 rank 1 arrows and 200 normal arrows." Sam said. The receptionist nodded and Sam left the tower after hepleted the transaction. Sam slowly made his way to the mansion. There is nobody from the noble families targeting him now as the admissions are right around the corner. On the way to his mansion, Sam bought several items needed for inscriptions and left to his ce. That night he justy on the bed as he stared at the ceiling. He didn¡¯t know what he should do. Things are moving too fast since, he came to this world. He suddenly thought of a little girl. ¡¯Ste. I hope you are in peace now.¡¯ Sam thought as he slowly muttered something.

    "Happy Birthday Sam." Today is the birthday of Sam of this world. Now it would be his birthday from now on. He slept as a small teardrop came through his left eye signifying his loneliness, in this unfamiliar world.

 Chapter 23: Assessment Begins

    On the day of the admission of the Starwood academy. As soon as sun rose everyone in the city is making their way to the academy. The academy upies arge amount ofnd. All the streets were bustling with people. Everyone is talking excitedly. There are many people who came from various viges under the jurisdiction of the Starwood city. Every vige will send their suitable candidates, to take part in the examination. There is arge crowd gathering at the academy. There will be hundreds of people gathering at the academy to participate in the admission. There will be better guidance and resources if they were able to enrol into the academy. There are five viges under the control of the Starwood city. Anyone from these viges are suitable for joining the examination. Everyone is here for opportunities

    Sam slowly walked towards the Starwood academy. As he slowly walked towards the academy, the crowd became denser. There are lot of people gathered in groups and talking. There are a lot of counters with queues. These counters are here for registration. Sam walked towards one counter and joined the queue. When his turn came, he took out his city resident token and registered his name. Then he slowly made his way, where all the candidates are gathered. After the registration process ispleted, a group of people in same type of clothes came. They have a symbol of Starwood tree on their clothes. They seem to be staff of the academy. They guided all the candidates through the huge gate into the academy. After passing through the gate Sam started observing his surroundings. The ce is a huge empty ground. In the centre of the ground there is a huge stage and there are several tents in the ground.

    There are several viewing tforms on the other side of the huge stage where several groups of people can be seen seated. Each tform belongs to each major power. The central two tforms belong to the city lord and the Starwood academy. On the tform belonging to the city lord, there is a middle-aged man with a majestic appearance in Ice blue colour robes sitting in the chair. That is none other than the City lord. He is a Baron ranked noble who is in charge of the territory under the Starwood city. He is the strongest of all people here. Only the principal of the Starwood academy is his match. There is a familiar face beside the City lord. She is Haley. She seemed to searching for someone in the crowd of candidates.

    Sam then turned towards the Starwood¡¯s academy¡¯s tform. There are several elderly figures in the same uniform sitting there. There is a middle-aged man who seemed to be a little older than the city lord sitting in the main seat with his eyes closed. He has a schrly air around him. His eyebrows are clear indicating his peaceful state. His figure is not muscr and more on the lean side. He has bronze skin giving a faint l.u.s.tre of unique charm. He is the principal of the Starwood academy who is also the only match for the city lord.

    Sam then looked towards other tforms and found some familiar faces. Marcus Evergreen can be seen as he is chatting with Philip and Paul is also trying hard to get into the conversation. They seem to be in good mood. Then Sam saw another familiar face on another tform. It is Freya. There is a robust middle-aged man who has a fiery air around him sitting next to her. He has a scowl on his face as he seemed somewhat unhappy and Freya also has a pout on her face. She wore her battle robes today which she wore when she came to Sam¡¯s shop in Lava rock vige. Sam then turned towards the Grey hound family and searched for some one. When he found Leonard and Raymond. Sam gave a wicked smile. He really wants to see how Leonard will react when he saw him.

    He then saw other four tforms. They belong to the four towers. When he saw the Artisan tower tform, he saw that Kelly is also present along with the Tower head and other friends, Sam didn¡¯t care much about them and just started looking around with the calm face.

    But the rest of the candidates are not as calm he heard two boys chatting.

    "Oh, look there three goddesses are all here. I feel like I am already in heave. A handsome young man said to an average looking man who has a sword on his hip. The average looking man has an irritable expression as he spoke. "Shawn, keep it low."

    "How can I keep it low? I can see all the three goddesses at same time. Jack you should let me loose sometimes and stop your nagging. When will you understand my youthful and handsome self? Learn to appreciate beauty." The handsome young man whose name is Shawn said with the exaggerated sigh. The man named Jack didn¡¯t know what to reply and just sighed. Shawn then continued.

    "Look at the three goddesses. Fiery goddess Freya, Ice goddess Haley and the Artisan goddess Kelly all are here at the same time. Do you think that anyone of them will take interest in me? Oh, by the way do you know that Kelly is daughter of the tower head. They hid this too deeply. I heard that an arrogant young and talented not so handsome artisan has humiliated Kelly. If I know who is I will kick his butt..." Shawn kept on bbering.

    Hearing his words, Sam furrowed his brows. ¡¯He wants to kick my butt. We will see then.¡¯ Sam thought and then started thinking about the other point. ¡¯The fact that Kelly is tower head¡¯s daughter is hidden is new. That is why Philip didn¡¯t strongly oppose, when I had a conflict with Kelly yesterday. If he knew he would probably have stopped me.¡¯ Sam thought to himself.

    "Attention Everyone." The principal of the academy came to the stage and started speaking. "Today is the day our Starwood academy wees new blood. You will all be the future of the academy and also the kingdom. So, I wholeheartedly thank all the candidates for appearing here to join in the exam." The principal paused and looked at the candidates. The first round will be age and cultivation assessment. If you don¡¯t meet the requirements you will be disqualified to participate in further. Now, there are around 400 students and we will only select the top 100 students today. So, I request candidates to go to any of the tents toplete your assessment." The Principal finished and went back to his ce.

    There are around 20 tents in the ground. Sam walked towards a tent and stood in the queue. Coincidentally, Shawn and Jack are in the same queue. When Shawnpleted his assessment he had a proud look as he came out of the tent and a grin showing all his teeth can be seen. After a few minutes Jack also came out of the tent. Both of them have a bronze colour token in their hands. This is token saying that, they are selected for the next round of assessment. Within no time Sam¡¯s time came. When Sam entered the tent, he saw a young man in his twenties sitting behind a desk. The desk has two crystal balls of volley ball size resting on it. After entering the young man looked at him and asked.

    "Name?"

    "Sam."

    "Pleasee forward and ce your hand on this left crystal." The young man said in a low voice. Sam ced his hand on the left side crystal ball and the crystal ball glowed. Sam, then felt a prickling sensation on his palm. Then a string of letters projected on the crystal ball. ¡¯15 years and 1 day.¡¯ Sam felt dumbfounded. Even though Philip said that the age will be measured up to the days, he didn¡¯t think that it would look this cool. He was awed by this age measuring device. Then he saw the young man behind the desk. He also had a shocking expression on his face. But his shock is for a different reason. He is shocked because of the close shave Sam had. Then he came out of his daze and said to Sam.

    "Now, please keep your hand on this crystal." He said as he noted down Sam¡¯s age in the book. Sam nodded and kept the hand on the right crystal ball. This time also another string of words projected.

    ¡¯Acolyte level 3¡¯. This time the young man felt his world turn upside down. A fifteen-year-old at Acolyte that too at level 3. This time young man almost had a heart attack. He stood up from his chair in shock. Sam felt quite puzzled from his actions.

    "Excuse me, what should I do now.?" Sam asked.

    "No- Nothing." The young came out of his daze and handed a bronze token to Sam. The bronze token has a symbol of Starwood tree engraved on it. Sam took the token and left leaving the young man.

    The first-round assessment went very quickly. Sam underestimated the number of eliminated contestants. Sam thought that since rules are not hidden, he felt that not many non-eligible contestants will attend. But they are many who still came to just try their luck. This is because there are special concessions made for special constitutions. But there are very rare. Now, there are only two hundred something people left.

    Sam came and joined in the group with the bronze tokens, there he saw someone familiar. It is none other Oliver. The c.o.c.ky son of the vige head.

    When Sam saw him, he also saw Sam by coincidence. Sam gave him a smile. Looking at Sam, Oliver immediately broke out in cold sweat. He still remembered the way Sam, ruthlessly dealt with hisckeys, if it wasn¡¯t for his father, he would have suffered miserably, just like hisckeys. Both of them are crippled. Sam just made their worthless. One of them can¡¯t bear the torment andmitted suicide. Oliver didn¡¯t want to provoke Sam again. Oliver then turned towards the viewing tform of the city lord. Sam also looked towards same direction and saw someone he failed to notice earlier. The vige head of theva rock vige. He is standing behind the City lord, along with four others. These are all the vige heads of the other four viges under the city lord. Sam turned towards Oliver again and gave an evil smirk. He really wants to see, how the vige head is going to react after he was finished with his son. Then a voice interrupted Sam¡¯s thought.

    "The first-round assessment ispleted. All the candidates with a bronze token are eligible for the second round." The Principal said as he stood up and walked up the huge stage.

    "The second round of the assessment will begin in a few minutes. The second round will take ce in the testing grounds of the Starwood academy. The condition for passing the second round is quite simple. You have to survive. In the testing grounds, all of you will be assessed at the same time. Thest hundred who will stand are eligible for the next round. There will be ranking in this round. The one who has more points will have highest ranking. In this round the candidates have a free for all royal rumblepetition in the grounds.

    Along with the candidates, there will be some Level 1 and level 2 beasts in the grounds. Each level 1 beast carries one point. Each level 2 initial stage beast carries 2 points. Level 2 final stage beast carries 3 points.

    Other than the beasts in thepetition, every other participant is also an enemy. Thest hundred to survive will have extra points ording to the ranking. The person who ranked in the hundredth ce is awarded with 101 points. The candidate in 99th ce will have 102 points, then so on so forth. Even if you have killed many beasts and have gained so many points, if you failed to survive till top hundred, the rest of the points will be deleted. So, be careful.

    Your lives are your own responsibility. If you are in a life-threatening danger and wish to give up. Crush the bronze token and the hunting grounds formation will protect you. But if you don¡¯t do that and continue, your life is your own responsibility. You can use any means except for the external assistance to survive in thepetition. If you use external means like inscribed weapons, inscriptions and array discs, that would be tantamount to the provocation of Starwood academy and you will be bearing the consequences."

    Then the Principal turned towards the noble families and said. "The eligible families from the noble household pleasee forward and join the group." Then a group five to eight people came forward from each house-holds viewing tforms. After all the people joined. The Principal again addressed the crowd and said.

    "You will be following this Elder to the testing grounds. You guys will be ced in different locations in all of the testing grounds. If another candidate is nearby you will get the signal from your bronze token. The time limit is until dawn tomorrow. May the most qualified win." The principal said and went back to the viewing tform.

    The Elder who is pointed by the Principal gestured all the candidates and took them towards the gate behind the ground. The gate led to the entrance of a majestic looking ce, which looked like a city square. There are various buildings. The world behind the gate itself looked like a city. Then the Elder guided them to an entrance which can allow only one person at a time. On both sides of entrance are majestic looking tall walls banning the view inside. The Elder gestured the first person to go through the entrance and the person vanished.

    ¡¯Teleportation Formation¡¯ the thought came to his mind. Then Sam felt confused. Even the lowest quality teleportation formation needs a rank 4 formation master. But the Starwood city only has a rank 2 formation master. How did they get it done? Sam thought inwardly and finally his turn came.

    Sam felt a little dizzy when he opened his eyes. Hended on his back as soon as he teleported inside. When Sam looked around all that came into his view are trees. He is in a ce like woods. After he stabilized a bit. A voice came in his mind.

    "The Second round assessment begins"

 Chapter 24: The Second Round Assessment

    At the stage where first round assessment took ce all the people on the viewing tform are looking the stage. Now the stage is not empty. There is projection of a forest like ce on the stage. This is the projection of the testing grounds. All the people here are spectating the assessment. A backward ce like Starwood city cannot get this type of high-level equipment. Sam¡¯s guess is right. Nobody is responsible for this in Starwood city. All the formations and the Equipment all over the academy are arranged by the royal family itself. The education in the whole western continent takes priority among other aspects. That is the reason the royal family arranged this kind of facilities for the academy even in the backward country.

    Inside the testing ground. Sam finally stabilized from the after effects of the teleportation. Then he stood up and climbed a tall tree near him to get a clear view around him. Sam didn¡¯t see any beasts or other candidates near him. Judging from the view, he seemed to be appeared in a particrly isted location. Sam climbed down, picked a direction and started walking. He is pretty care free.

    After walking for a half an hour, Sam finally had a reaction from the bronze token in his pocket. He immediately became vignt and jumped of to a nearby tree and hid behind the leaves. After a few minutes, he saw a pair walking towards his direction as they talked.

    "Didn¡¯t I tell you? We are going in the right direction. Didn¡¯t we feel the reaction from our badge. There is definitely someone here." A male voice can be heard.

    "I still doubt this is the right direction. I think we should have gone to the opposite direction instead." Another male said. After a few seconds, two people came into Sam¡¯s view. They are wearing identical clothing. They belong to the Heart field family. Sam immediately felt amused as soon as he identified their identities. Sam immediately jumped down the tree. When two people saw, Sam suddenly appearing in front of them, they immediately drew their swords and took a fighting stance.

    "Who are you?" One of the two pointed his sword towards Sam and asked vigntly. Sam gave an evil smirk and didn¡¯t reply. He suddenly made his move. Sam immediately disappeared form his position only leaving after images and immediately went behind the person in the left. Then he immediately punched the person below his ribs. The person gasped for air as he dropped his sword and immediately copsed on the ground trying to reduce his pain. He is a second level Acolyte warrior and his strength is not weak by any means. But he felt himself quite weak before Sam¡¯s monstrous punch.

    The one on the right immediately reacted and swung his sword at Sam, but all he hit was an after image created by Sam. Suddenly, he felt some one poked at his back. He immediately swung his sword but he hit nothing but air.

    *Pah*

    He then stinging pain on his face. He was pped. But when he turned towards where the p came from, he saw nothing. Then he suddenly felt someone poking at his throat. When he looked down, he felt a finger pointed at his throat from behind. When he immediately reacted to catch the person, he caught nothing but air.

    Suddenly, he felt chills along his spine and he broke out in cold sweat. Only one thought came into his mind. ¡¯If other party wanted him dead. He would be a corpse.¡¯ The other party had touched him so many times. But he couldn¡¯t even see him. Then he immediately dropped his sword and raised his hands. He gave up fighting this guy. This guy is an absolute nightmare. But he felt unwilling. He can¡¯t give up just after little more than half an hour of the assessment. So, he spoke.

    "I surrender. We are not a match for you. Can you let us go? We are from Heart field family. If you let us go now. We will remember this favour." He said as looked around but he found no one. Meanwhile, the one who was knocked down earlier also stood up and picked his sword. He is looking around vigntly. They both are waiting for reply anxiously.

    Meanwhile at the viewing tforms. All the spectators are watching various candidates battling. Suddenly, someone from the Heart field family noticed their two candidates meeting up and walking together. He smiled. The rest of the people also looked at it and cursed under their breath for the luck of the heart field family. Then they saw someone appearing suddenly in front of the two candidates and initiated an attack.

    "Wow, what speed?"

    "Yeah, he is so fast."

    "They can¡¯t even see him. He is practically toying with them."

    "Look that guy gave up. Tch. So much for a noble descendant."

    "I think they he is negotiating."

    All kinds ofments came from the spectators. The head of the heart field family has a weird expression on his face as he looked at his family candidates being toyed with by someone. Leonard from the Greyhound family saw this scene and started sweating. Even he can¡¯t follow Sam¡¯s movements. All the families are watching this battle with interest.

    "Please leave us now. We will definitely repay the favour." The candidate from the heart field family pleaded again. Suddenly, he felt a p across his face. This time the p is much stronger and he was immediately sent flying. Afternding on the ground he spat out some blood and a tooth fell down from his mouth. He immediately took out his bronze token from his pocket and broke it. He immediately appeared at the viewing tform and sighed in relief.

    The other guy who looked at hispanion¡¯s state he immediately gave up fighting and was also about to break his token. But then suddenly a hand caught his arm with great strength. Then he looked at the person who stopped him. He saw handsome young man wearing ck. His handsome face has an arrogant smirk and his eyes are filled with a mischievous light. He then took out a folded paper and shoved it into that person¡¯s hands and said. "Bring this to your family head." Then he let go of his arm.

    The candidate from the heart field family took the letter and immediately broke his token. He was also transported to the viewing tforms. He stabilized himself and looked around. There is only one more person and that is hispanion. The first two candidates to be eliminated are actually from the Heart field family. This is a great shame. Then he looked towards the heart field family¡¯s viewing tform and seeing the gloomy expressions from his family members he looked down in shame. Then he remembered the letter and then walked towards the viewing tform timidly. When he passed the letter to the Family head, he almost pissed his pants from the family head¡¯s look.

    The family head took the letter. He knew who passed the letter as he was watching the whole time. He read the letter and immediately frowned after seeing the content.

    "Hello Family head of the Heart field family. This is from the humble one who was once blessed with the presence of the representatives of the heart field family at my river side mansion. On the ount of sending someone to congratte me on the very same night I bought the mansion through the auction. I humbly beseech you to ept my repayment this way. Don¡¯t worry, this is not the end. If I meet the other people from your family, I will treat them with utmost care. ¨C Sam."

    As soon as he read the letter, his grip tightened on the hand rest. *Snap* the hand rest broke and everyone looked at him. But his ispletely focused on the letter and particrly the words ¡¯River side mansion¡¯. He clearly understood why the young man toyed with the candidates of his family. But that didn¡¯t make him any less angry. He is even more furious. A junior at the Acolyte stage is pping face. He is angry. All the other noble families are watching him with curious looks. They want to see what is in the letter. But the family head of the heart family clearly didn¡¯t have any intention of showing them and diverted his attention to the projection.

    "Seems like the younger generation of the heart field family is getting weaker and weaker. It is only half an hour and two of five are eliminated." Someone from the crimson me family said with a mocking tone. The heart field family head didn¡¯t reply and just looked at the project.

    Everyone also turned towards the projection. Now battles started in many regions as the candidates got closer. A young man particrly caught the attention of the spectators.

    "The handsome is a genius. If you guys go away now. I will not pursue it any further." The young man said. This is none other than Shawn. He is surrounded by three people. These candidates came from different ces and formed a temporary alliance. So, they can a little longer. When they heard his words, one of the three immediately attacked. Suddenly, Shawn made some hand seals and chanted something. Then the soil beneath the three candidates became soft as the three of them got struck in it.

    "Didn¡¯t I tell you I am a genius? You guys didn¡¯t listen. Now, you better quit yourselves or I will make you suffer." As soon as he finished the three of them felt their bodies sinking in to the ground slowly. They immediately took their tokens and they were all vanished.

    "I am so awesome." Shawn spoke with a grin as he started walking again.

    All the spectators in the viewing tforms looked at him in awe.

    "Not bad" One of them said.

    "It seems that we have a few good seeds to nurture." Someone from the Starwood academy said. the others also nodded. Then a screen appeared suddenly beside the projection of the testing grounds.

    "They finally encountered some beasts." Someone said. The screen is the quiterge and a list of names can be seen on it with some numbers beside them. This is the ranking list. It shows the points of the candidates who are hunting the beasts.

    "Look there, near theke." One of the spectators eximed. Near theke a young man with a sword is fighting with a bunch of snake type beasts. This is none other than jack. There are around 10 beasts of first level around him. His name is on the top of the list right now.

    By the time he was finished, he has 12 points beside his name. "He is not bad."

    "Yes, his sword y is good." Spectators allmented. Soon, names started to appear on the list. All of them are mostly candidates from the noble families.

    Sam is right now in middle of climbing a tall tree. He just encountered the tree, which seemed to be tallest among the nearby tree. When he finally climbed the tree, he got a clear view of surroundings. He saw several candidates battling with beasts. It seems to be that no one is interested in eliminating others. Rather they all are interested in .u.mting more points. Sam looked around and saw a pack of hyenas near a small hill. There seemed to be a lot of them. The hyenas are red in colour. These are Blood hyenas. Sam immediately recognised them and all of them are one of the cruellest animals in the wild. They grow their strength from consuming the blood of others. The pack is filled with level 1 and level 2 beasts of initial stage there is one level 2 middle stage also. Sam felt that he hit a jackpot looking at them. He immediately climbed down and used his light energy to move faster. Sam named this technique as ¡¯Phantom steps.¡¯ Sam used his phantom steps to get near the hill.

    Just as Sam was a few meters away from the hill, he sensed his bronze token has reaction. Someone was nearby. Sam immediately moved towards the direction that signal ising and hid behind a tree. He saw a group of people in a crimson red battle attire. They were five people in total. They are all the candidates in the Crimson me family. Sam immediately recognised them because of the red me crest on their armour. He gave an evil smirk.

    The five candidates are in a defensive battle formation as they observed their surroundings vigntly. In the centre is a young man with the battle attire, who seemed to be the young master of the Crimson me family. With an evil smile came out of his hiding and stood in front of them. All of them looked at him vigntly as the young man questioned.

    "You? Aren¡¯t you the friend of Freya?" The young master asked. Sam was a bit surprised as he looked at him but it only stayed for a second. He just stood there and smiled silently. Seeing that Sam is in silence. The young master continued.

    "I am Carter of the Crimson me family. Freya is my cousin. Since, you are friend of her, I will let you leave if, you handover all the fire spirit stones you have with you." Sam still didn¡¯t reply.

    At the viewing tforms

    "This young man is in trouble."

    "Yeah, its his bad luck to encounter the Crimson me family group. Even though he is strong how can he win 1 vs 5."

    "What are you even talking about? Carter alone is enough for beating him. Why do we need to gang up? Carter is already at 4th stage acolyte mage. The young man will be defeated in a single blow." Someone from the Crimson me family said. He is sitting on the other side of the Family head.

    "Carl, since you are so confident, why don¡¯t we make a bet?" Philip said to the young man who just spoke.

    "What do you want to bet on?" Carl asked.

    "All five of your people will be eliminated by that guy alone." Philip said.

    "Really? You are so confident in him? I will ept your bet then. What is the wager?" Carl replied in a confident tone.

    "How about 5000 spirit stones?" Philip asked. Hearing that amount everyone looked at him with interest. Even the Family head of the Crimson me family looked at Philip. Carl hesitated on hearing the Big amount.

    "Don¡¯t chicken out now." Philip said again.

    "Who is chickening out? I am in." Carl said and immediately looked at the battle. Philip also looked at the battle. So, does all the spectators.

    Meanwhile near the hill.

    Carter is growing impatient as Sam didn¡¯t reply. He then immediately said. "Don¡¯t me me now."

    As he said that all five of them surrounded Sam, and three of them including the Carter started making hand seals. While the other two wielded their sabres as they lunged towards Sam.

    Sam kept his smile as three fire balls and two Sabres came to him from all side. Sam didn¡¯t move at all and just circted his spiritual energy as Golden mes covered him and devoured the three fire ballspletely. He spread his hands at the same time and caught the two sabre wielding hands at the same time.

    As the smoke cleared out, all the five people saw is Sam¡¯s handsome face with an evil smile without even moving a bit.

    All the spectators at the viewing tforms are also stunned.

    Sam slowly started twisting the hands he caught. The two warriors loosened their sabres. Both of them are at Level 2 Acolytes, but now they are like children facing an a.d.u.l.t.

    *Crack*

    Cracking sounds appeared as slowly twisted their hands. He soon broke their hands and threw them away. They started holding their hands and wallowing in pain. Sam then slowly looked towards the two other Acolyte mages as he raised his hands.

    Spiritual energy started gathering in his hands in form of sphere. Both of them wanted to get away as they sensed the danger, but their legs felt so heavy all of a sudden. Sam then slowly looked at Carter and said slowly.

    "I was just going in search for a prey. But who would have thought the Prey itself wille looking for me?" Sam said coldly.

    "Prey?" Carter was furious.

    "Yes, you are my juicy and delicious prey." Sam said coldly and as soon as he finished. The spiritual energy in his hands suddenly turned into giant golden fire balls as heunched them on to the two mages. Both of them were sent flying as their armours and clothing turned into ashes.

 Chapter 25: Making Points at a single shot

    Carter saw Sam walking towards him. He broke out in cold sweat. He felt his legs shaking and his palms are almost dripping sweat. If possible, he just wanted to turn tail and make a run for his life. But he felt that if he made a move, he might even die. His instinct told him that the best decision is to stay still. So, he did.

    Sam slowly walked and stood in front of Carter. Then he just stared at his eyes without even blinking. Sam slowly raised his killing intent slowly and released his aura of blood line. He just stared at Carter like he was staring at an insect.

    Carter observed the eyes, the killing aura and felt like he was about to die just like that. He felt like the decision of whether he should live or die is not his but in the hands of the person standing in front of him. He felt like the air around him became still as if paying respects to the existence before him.

    Sam then leaned forward and whispered in Carter¡¯s ear. "Do you know why you are still alive? Because I disdain to kill punks like you." Sam then stepped back. He took out a letter and gave it to Carter. "Give it to your family head." Sam said and turned around and walked away.

    As soon as Sam left, Carter immediately fell to his knees and he looked at the letter in his hands. His body is soaked in sweat. He doesn¡¯t have any strength in his legs. Just when he was about to break his token, he heard Sam¡¯s voice. "Take away yourckeys with you. If I see them again, I will definitely kill them." Carter immediately stood up and walked to other four people and started breaking their tokens. After that Carter broke his token and left the ce. When he appeared at the viewing tforms, he saw a furious Carl who stood up from his chair and looking at him coldly. Then he saw the family head who is also extremely disappointed. Then he slowly walked towards them and didn¡¯t say anything. He just passed the letter.

    *Pah*

    Carl pped Carter and said. "Trash"

    Carter didn¡¯t try to exin himself and just stood there his head held down. He waited for the family head to reprimand him, but no voice came. So, Carter turned towards the man standing behind the family head. It is his father. When he looked at his father, he just patted his shoulder and said nothing. Maybe Carl didn¡¯t understand but both the family head and Carter¡¯s father clearly understood the situation as veterans. They clearly knew what kind of situation Carter is in, that is why they didn¡¯t me him.

    The family head opened the letter and read. When he read the content, he almost puked blood in anger. Then he looked at his daughter who is gloating as if saying ¡¯you asked for it.¡¯ Now he finally understood why the family head Heart field behaved like this. He already in a bad mood today because of his daughter. Because, when heard that a young and genius artisan has emerged in the city and the rumour said that they saw, Freya came along with him, he asked to invite him over, so that they can strike up a rtionship. But his daughter refused to give any details regarding that person¡¯s identity and he didn¡¯t connect that Sam and that artisan being the same person. As he thought that a genius artisan like him don¡¯t need to attend this normal academy. But he doesn¡¯t know he can¡¯t be anymore wrong.

    Carl looked at Philip who is grinning from ear to ear. He reluctantly took out the spirit stones and passed it to Philip, who took them as his grin grew wider. Carl then looked at the projection gloomily and he swore that he would teach Sam a lesson.

    Meanwhile in the testing grounds, Sam is making his way towards the hyenas as stealthily as possible. He just didn¡¯t want to alert them. He took a high vantage point on a tree and looked towards the Blood hyenas pack. There are around 100 plus hyenas in total. There are around twenty level 2 initial stage, a level 2 middle stage and rest of them are all level 1 beasts. He looked at them and pondered on how to take them down. He really didn¡¯t have any points right now as he didn¡¯t encounter any beasts on his way here. Now, he finally understood why. This is the territory of the blood hyenas. He started observing the surroundings of their and finally came to a conclusion.

    Sam took out a bunch of formation gs as he disappeared from the tree. All the spectators at the viewing tforms are puzzled from his actions. They are now paying special attention as he took out the whole group from a noble family.

    Sam is moving around stealthily with a high speed as he ced the formation gs in various positions.

    "What type of formation is heying?" A young man from the formation tower¡¯s viewing tform. The rest of the people also looked at the formation tower¡¯s head curiously.

    "It¡¯s a type of illusory formation." The tower head slowly. He recognised the formation. It is one of the most difficult rank 1 formations. This formation has only one effect. The appearance of the people in the formation will change in the perspective of one another. But the formation tower head didn¡¯t understand, what is the use of the formation in this situation. In fact, nobody at the viewing tforms understood, except for one person. The Principal of the Starwood academy is also looking at Samying down the formation with a faint smile.

    Meanwhile Sam quietly finishedying down all the formation gs except for the one which acts as the formation energy core. As soon as the energy core isid down. The blood hyenas will definitely sense that something is wrong with the energy flow nearby and this will cause him some trouble. He took a deep breath and threw thest formation g to its location from a distance and as soon as he did, before even the hyenas could react, he took out few bottles of read liquid and threw them in between the pack and ran towards a tall tree and climbed it up. When hyenas finally sensed the weird energy fluctuation, they smelled blood of various beasts. This blood is precisely the liquid Sam has thrown inside the pack. Sam bought these bloods for making inscription ink. But now he is using them to confuse these hyenas.

    Actually, blood hyenas are very cunning and intelligent hunters. So, even if Sam distorted their view and make them see theirpanions as other animals, they won¡¯t be easily fooled as they still have the sense of smell. That is the reason Sam used the blood of various beasts because, the blood hyenas immediately lose their rationality as soon as they smell blood.

    Sam saw as the blood hyenas tear each other apart. He just stood on the tree from afar and saw the hyenas trying to kill each other as if they are mortal enemies. All the spectators are dumfounded at the viewing tforms as they saw the scene. The points beside Sam¡¯s name are soaring high as he slowly overtook the position one by one. Finally, he settled in the top position, but his points are still raising.

    Sam observed the hyenas as they are rapidly decreasing in number. Then he saw that the leader of the pack stopped its killing spree. Sam understood that the Leader of the pack observed something and he just waited there.

    The Pack leader of the blood hyenas sensed the energy fluctuations due to the formation a bitter after they started killing each other. It looked around as to sense the cause and finally saw a anomaly and ran towards the core of the formation. As soon as it sensed the formation core it immediately crashed into it to stop the illusion, but the bacsh from the formation sent it into a half dead state as he flew over and hit arge rock. There are several broken bones protruding out of its body. As soon as it took a look after it the illusion is gone, it saw a miserable scene. There are only about 12 hyenas that are still alive and all of them are really in a miserable state. They can even be killed by a single critical blow. Sam took out a ck colour bow, from his storage and a took some a rank 1 arrow. This bow is forged by Sam himself in the private forging room. Since, he learnt that rank 2 weapons are a not allowed in the assessment

    He nocked the arrow on the bowstring and stretched it for its limit as he aimed at the pack leader, who is now surrounded by the rest of the hyenas which are alive. He then started circting his spiritual energy as a ball ofpressed golden me is started forming at the tip of the arrow. When the ball of mes grew into the size of a ser ball, he finally released the arrow.

    The arrow hit the Leader and an explosion of golden mes took ce spreading it to the rest of the hyenas which are alive. After a few minutes the hyenas werepletely burnt to ashes leaving only a pile of bones. Sam slowly made his way and collected the corpses of hyenas which are not stuck in the explosion.

    All the spectators at the viewing tforms are stunned by how the scene yed as they watched how Sam dealt with a pack full of hyenas. Then they noticed that Sam has already obtained 124 points in total and then they looked at the second ranker. The second ranker is someone from the city lord mansion. His points are a little over thirty. The third and fourth ces are rapidly getting caught up with his pace.

    The difference between the first and second ces is so huge. All the noble families sighed at this and felt ashamed after seeing the performance of Sam andpared it to their younger generation. Sam collected the corpses and his formation gs as he started his journey again. Soon he found a river. He sat down at the river bank and took out the corpse of a hyena. He cut the hyena into small pieces as he threw them into the river which is flowing slowly. As the smell blood started spreading slowly inside the river, slowly fishes came, but Sam didn¡¯t make a move as he stood still with his arrow nocked.

    After waiting for sometime a huge crocodile like beast came and jumped to the surface. Sam immediately released the arrow as it pierced right through the eye of the crocodile. The crocodile halted its movements briefly. Sam this time took a ranked arrow and shot it imbued with the spiritual energy. This time the arrow pierced in its other eye and the crocodile dropped dead.

    Sam then slowly approached the corpse. After making sure that it is really dead. He started dissecting it with a dagger, he had forged in the private room. He slowly and neatly separated the hide on its back and put in his storage and started grilling the meat on a fire.

    Sam sat beside the fire as he just stared at the horizons. Then Sam saw two people walking towards him. They are both familiar faces to him. They are precisely Jack and Shawn. Sam had a mischievous smile on his face as soon as he remembered Shawn¡¯s words.

    At the viewing tforms.

    All the spectators are watching Shawn and Jack move towards Sam with some expectations. Both Shawn and Jack took third and fourth ces in the point ranking right now. So, they wanted to see them fight and know who is stronger as they didn¡¯t see the full extension of Sam¡¯s battle prowess.

    Shawn and Jack stopped in front of Sam and stopped. Shawn spoke.

    "Hey buddy, where are you from?" Shawn asked and Sam didn¡¯t reply and just smiled.

    "Oh, you don¡¯t want to say. Okay. The meat you are eating is smelling so good. Could you sell us some?" Shawn asked.

    "Not possible." Sam said. Shawn had a disappointed expression on his face. Then Sam continued.

    "If you want it. You can take it after you beat me." Sam said and took a big bite of meat. Both Jack and Shawn furrowed their brows. Then Sam stood up and made his move.

    Sam disappeared in front them and appeared at the back of Shawn and he unceremoniously kicked his butt. Shawn immediately screamed in pain. He is a level 4 acolyte, but he still felt a groaning pain as fell forward.

    Immediately Jack made his move as he attacked Sam. But all he hit was thin air. Then Jack saw as Sam appeared behind Shawn who just got up and kicked his butt again. Shawn again cried out loud.

    "My handsome bum. How can you do that?" Sam felt speechless at this narcissist. Meanwhile Jack drew his sword and lunged towards Sam. But Sam easily dodged as he disappeared and by the time, he reappeared he saw a hand wielding a swording towards him at high speed.

    Sam felt that he couldn¡¯t dodge. So, he grabbed Jack¡¯s hand and stopped it from moving. Sam smiled faintly as he felt the momentum and smile.

    "Impressive." Sam said genuinely impressed. But before Jack could react, he felt that he was held by a python as Sam immediately moved and locked him in a hold as he pointed a finger at Jack¡¯s neck. He then whispered. "But not good enough." Jack felt helpless as he tried to free himself but failed to do so.

    "I lost." Jack surrendered. Then Sam released his grip and walked towards Shawn who is still holding his butt as he stared in shock. Sam then kicked his butt again and said.

    "Well, you guys can have rest of the meat and you don¡¯t have to quit thepetition. Thank you for the spar. I enjoyed quite a bit. Sam then smoothly disappeared as they stared at him with their mouths open.

    They two who are at level 4 acolyte were toyed with a level 3 acolyte. Shawn felt even worse as he didn¡¯t even have a chance to fight back. Both of them sighed as they looked at each other.

 Chapter 26: The Hunt

    At the viewing tforms

    The spectators are not any less disappointed by the fight between Sam and the duo. They still didn¡¯t see how strong Sam really is. They could only wait in silence.

    Time passed slowly. More and more people were being eliminated. And slowly approached dusk. Sam is currently slowly advancing forward as he slowly took care of beasts. His pace is slow and steady. But the difference between him and the second ce is still a lot. Right now, the candidate from the city lord mansion dropped to fourth ce as Shawn and Jack took second and third ce respectively. They are with 64 and 63 points respectively and they are hunting together.

    Sam stopped his advance and looked at the sky. Seeing as the dusk has arrived, Sam started looking for the tracks of people instead of tracks of the beasts. Sam just started following the candidate¡¯s tracks. He followed them with a rapid pace. When he finally encountered the first group of people, that is the group of three people. They were fighting a ¡¯Earthen Bear¡¯. This type of bear like beast is a lot difficult to defeat as it has an amazing defence. Sam didn¡¯t stay there for a while as he made his move without disturbing them.

    When the spectators at the viewing tform saw this, they were quite confused as why Sam didn¡¯t eliminate them directly. They felt the same confusion when he left Shawn and Jack. Because he didn¡¯t even hesitate to take down the noble groups for even a second.

    After leaving the first group of three, Sam encountered another two groups of people and they are all candidates from different viges andmoners. He just left them be. Sam continued on his journey in search of candidates but he left all themoners alone. Finally, he encountered a group of three people. There is a familiar face in the group. This guy is none other than Raymond. Two other people from the Greyhound family are with him.

    Raymond and others sensed a presence near them with the bronze tokens and are in their guard against them. Seeing them, Sam didn¡¯t even bother to hide as he saw the group and made his appearance. As he stood in front of three with a smile, Raymond became surprised for a moment then he gave a wickedugh.

    "Bahahaha, I wished that I could find you, but who knew that you woulde to me on your own vition. Seems like even heavens are not on your side as they sent you directly to me. This is your karma for humiliating me like that. Now if you don¡¯t want to be eliminated right now, you better kneel down and apologize, otherwise, even if you beg me after I made my move, you won¡¯t get away." Raymond said to Sam coldly.

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to reply as Raymond bbered. Seeing that Sam is just standing there smiling and didn¡¯t even bother to reply, Raymond got angry and just ordered his subordinates.

    "Beat him up, until he begs for forgiveness." As soon as he finished, the subordinates immediately made his move. Both of them are at Level 2 Acolyte warriors and immediately formed a pincer attack as they wielded their swords from both sides. Sam didn¡¯t even bother with their as he immediately disappeared from the spot and immediately punched Raymond in his guts. Raymond was immediately sent flying. As soon asnded he spat out a mouthful of blood.

    The spectators at the viewing tforms are all looking at him surprised. They didn¡¯t understand why Sampletely left all the people he encountered alone and attacked the candidates from Greyhound family. Particrly, the people from the greyhound family are all anxious for Raymond. As Raymond is a direct line descendant of the family, him being in the academy is important for his growth. But when they saw Sam fighting Raymond, they clearly understood that chances if Raymond being making the cut is almost Nil.

    Sam slowly walked towards Raymond. The twockeys immediately attacked him from behind. But they missed again and by the time they came out of the shock of missing onnding an attack from behind they saw Sam kicking Raymond who is already on the ground in the stomach and sent flying again. Then both of them stopped moving. They understood one thing, if they made a move, then Raymond has to bear the price. Sam then slowly walked towards Raymond who just sat up painfully. He squatted down and locked his eyes with Raymond and said.

    "You and your guys better quit right now. Otherwise, I won¡¯t even hesitate to kill you." He enunciated every word as he released enormous amount of killing intent. Raymond almost peed in his pants. He picked hisst bits of courage and spoke from his gritting teeth.

    "Do you know what you are doing? The Greyhound family will not leave you and definitely get revenge." As soon as did, he regretted the very next moment.

    As soon as Raymond finished speaking Sam immediately moved. He held Raymond by neck as he lifted him up from the ground. Raymond has difficulty breathing as Sam increased the pressure on his neck. Sam then turned towards theckeys and said. "You better not do anything funny. Both of you be obedient and get lost from here. Otherwise, don¡¯t me from taking your dear young master¡¯s life."

    The twockeys immediately reacted and broke their bronze tokens. Then Sam turned towards Raymond and just smiled without saying anything.

    At the spectator¡¯s area the head of the grey hound family rose to his feet and his aura increased as he saw Sam holding Raymond¡¯s neck. All other people just looked at him without saying anything. The Grey hound family head also quite helpless as he couldn¡¯t do anything to help his son and this made him only more furious. Leonard just stayed silent as he already predicted this oue. From Sam¡¯s status, his father can¡¯t do anything to take revenge. And only him and the people from the Artisan tower and Sam¡¯s friends know of this.

    Sam didn¡¯t know how furious he made the Greyhound family head and even if he knew, he wouldn¡¯t care. Now Raymond is panicking in his hands. Sam didn¡¯t say anything as he just increased the pressure on Raymond¡¯s neck. Raymond finally gave in and immediately took out his token and just when he was about to break the token, Sam took out a token and shoved into Raymond¡¯s clothes and said. "Bring it to your father." Then he let go of Raymond and just looked at him as Raymond broke his token and vanished.

    When Raymond came out of the formation. He took deep breaths as he looked around. When he saw the ranking screen, he felt quite disappointed. There is still a bit more people to enter the top 100. They are currently over 120 people inside the testing grounds. He slowly made his way to his furious father and handed the letter Sam gave him. When the family head read his letter, he involuntarily released his aura. Leonard became more anxious as he saw his father¡¯s reactions and became more worried of the consequences. There is another person, who is more anxious than Leonard. It is none other than the vige head of the Lava rock vige.

    He clearly knew that the enmity between Sam and Oliver is not a small one. He is afraid that Oliver would be dead if he got into Sam¡¯s hands. All he could do was pray that Oliver won¡¯t encounter, Sam.

    As time passed, the sky is getting darker and it became increasingly difficult as they are reduced. But the members in the testing ground just kept on decreasing slowly and steadily. Because Sam is on hunt as he eliminated the noble candidates one by one. After Raymond there are 10 candidates who got eliminated. And out of 10, six are from the noble families who got eliminated by Sam. They are from the heart field family and Grey hound family. Now all the noble families are eliminated except for the candidates from the Evergreen family. All the noble families became extremely furious as they stared daggers at the evergreen family head.

    "Marcus. Did you n all this?" The crimson me family head asked as he looked at Marcus.

    "Don¡¯t me me for this. You are the people who made a move against him the very night of the auction. Do you really expect him to take that lying down? You guys are reaping what you sowed. I just left him alone that night and he just left my candidates alone. It is that simple." Marcus Evergreen said with a smile. All the family heads snorted. The city lord listened to this and finally understood who this guy is and why is he targeting the noble families? He heaved a sigh as he felt lucky that all the candidates from the city lord mansion didn¡¯t encounter Sam. But his sigh froze in the middle as he looked at the projection.

    Sam changed his direction as he felt arge presence from his bronze token. This seemed to be a big group. When he arrived at the group, he hid himself and looked. The group is the biggest he encountered. When he saw who the people are, he immediately smiled. This is the group he was searching for. This the biggest prey as they are the people from the city lord mansion and there are other people in themon clothes also. The people are none other than candidates from the other representing the vige heads under the city lord mansion. He felt so because Oliver is also present in the group. He smiled coldly as climbed a tree nearby and took out his bow and aimed.

    The people in the group are looking around vigntly as they are afraid of the sneak attacks.

    "Who is it that is hiding? Come out now." The person who seemed to be the in charge spoke. Sam didn¡¯t reply and just released the arrow. The arrow tore through the air as it pierced into Oliver¡¯s hand.

    "Ahhh" Oliver gave an ear-piercing scream as he looked at his hand. The crowd looked around and they made their move towards the central figure who spoke earlier. Just before the guy in the centre gave another warning another arrow pierced Oliver¡¯s another hand, making him unable to move them at all. Then Sam came down from the tree as he made his way forward and stood a few meters away from the crowd and stood there with a smile.

    "Who are you? I am Harry from the city lord mansion. You better leave before I make a move on you. Or you won¡¯t be able to escape even if you wantter." The man in charge said to Sam.

    The city lord became quite anxious at the viewing tforms. Even though he thought that probability of Sam winning against 10 people is low. He still felt quite anxious. He looked at the screen and noticed that there are only 6 extra people left in the testing ground. If by any chance Harry gets eliminated before. He would lose a lot of face.

    Sam didn¡¯t reply to Harry¡¯s question. Instead he took out a ck coloured metallic rod which is a bit over six feet long. This rod is one inch in diameter. This is also one of the things he forged in the private forging room.

    Harry and the others all became vignt. Just as they were about to make the first move, Sam beat them to it and moved towards them head on. He spun his staff as he moved towards the crowd.

    When Sam swung his staff towards the first person in the group. the ck staff has a golden glow as a golden sphere of mes formed at the tip of the staff. When Sam hit the person, an explosion urred as the staff made contact with his body. The man was sent flying as he became unconscious and his skin scorched ck. Before the crowd could react, Sam made his move and sent another person flying with another swing.

    Harry immediately turned his tail and began to flee. He felt afraid of getting hit by Sam¡¯s attack. He only has one thing in his mind. To flee. Sam didn¡¯t bother with him. As soon as he dealt with the rest of the people from the city lord mansion, the people from the various vige heads already broke their tokens and fled.

    When the city lord saw the number on the screen, he sighed in relief. Even though he felt a bit ashamed from the fact that his descendant is fleeing, he didn¡¯t really care as long as he survived. Sam slowly walked towards Oliver.

    Just as he stood in front of Oliver, a loud voice reverberated from all directions.

    "Only hundred people left. All the people left in the testing grounds are now eligible for joining the Starwood academy." Sam heard the notice and didn¡¯t react. He just looked at Oliver coldly.

    Oliver also didn¡¯t feel happy as he heard the notice. He just felt his legs shaking as he stared at Sam. He wanted to break his token and flee desperately, but his hands are in no moving condition. Sam punched Oliver in his Guts and made him sit down.

    Oliver who fell on his butt looked at Sam who squatted with fear apparent in his eyes. He felt that he is jus staring at a devil rather than a human. Sam just had an evil smile as he stared coldly at Oliver.

    Sam kept his staff away as he slowly took Oliver¡¯s hand into his hands and started stroking his fingers.

    "Sam, please I beg you. Just leave me now. I won¡¯t ever interfere in your life ever again." Oliver pleaded in a shaking voice.

    *Crack* "Ahhhhhhhhh.." Sam didn¡¯t even bother to reply as he broke one of Oliver¡¯s fingers.

    "Oliver, have you ever thought this day woulde?" Sam said as he further twisted the broken finger as some shards of bones protruded outside. Sam slowly moved for another finger and again broke it. In the woods with the absolute silence, only sounds of cracking and screaming could be heard.

    At the viewing tforms. The Vige head of the Lava rock vige stood up as he looked at his son pitifully screaming as he got tortured by Sam. All the people from the noble families felt lucky as they felt lucky for not going overboard on scheming against Sam. They looked at Oliver with pity as they wondered what kind of enmity they had. After sometime Oliver disappeared as Sam broke his token after taking away is spatial ring.

    The Vige head didn¡¯t say a word and just looked at the scene. Oliver¡¯s name has been ced in 100th position. But he didn¡¯t feel the slightest bit happy.

 Chapter 27: All at Once

    Sam walked towards the other three people from the city lord mansion and broke their tokens after he dealt with Oliver. After staying there and recovering his spiritual energy for some time, Sam stood up and looked at the darkened sky. He took out a bunch of spatial rings from his pocket. These are obtained from the noble descendants he knocked unconscious. After forcefully erasing the spiritual senses of the original owners, Sam took out arge number of weapons in from them. There are normal swords, spears, Axes, Sabres and there are even some ranked weapons. There are around fifty weapons in total. Sam looked at them and looked at the surroundings. As he looked at the in ground, he smiled as a light shed across his eyes. He immediately moved as he took out some formation gs.

    Sam ced one formation g after another in a rapid pace. All the spectators looked at him dumbfounded as they looked at the sheer number of the gs, as far as they knew, there is no rank-1 formation which uses that many formation gs. The spectators at the viewing tforms all turned towards the formation tower head as they waited for his exnation.

    "He isying a number of rank 1 formations at the same time. As for how many and what are they even I can¡¯t guess it from here." Hearing his answer all the spectators were surprised as they kept all the concentration on the projection.

    Right now, the battles in the testing ground are not taking ce as everyone is waiting for a right chance. Nobody wants to be the first one to break the bnce.

    Sam finishedying the formation gs. He took the weapons as he kept them in various ces and ced spirit stones along with them. Sam then walked towards the centre of the arrangements as he took out his bow and an arrow. He nocked the arrow and he aimed at the Sky. He spread his spiritual energy and the arrow started glowing with a golden light as a light sphere started forming at its tip. Sam released his arrow and the arrow flew towards the sky and exploded giving a brilliant sh which could be seen all across the testing grounds. Sam kept the Bow and took out a formation g and kept it in the centre and he leapt towards a tree and stood on its branch.

    Everyone in the testing grounds saw a bright sh. As they saw it, they couldn¡¯t help but feel startled. They didn¡¯t think that someone would break the delicate bnce using such a shy method. Whoever it is responsible for that sh is definitely confident in himself or he must be a crazy person. Whoever it may be, this is a deration of fight with them. He is asking them toe and find him if they dare.

    All the candidates left are not pushovers. They also had some pride as they reached the top 100. So, everyone moved towards the direction. And when everyone moved towards the same point, different people will cross paths and battles are inevitable. The delicate bnce was broken again. The eliminations increased as they battled against each other. The nobles and other spectators couldn¡¯t help but shake their heads as they saw various people falling in to Sam¡¯s obvious trap.

    But there are still some people with enough brains to think what is happening. They avoided the fights and moved carefully towards Sam¡¯s direction. They are carefully looking around for any traps that were setup. Sam fired another shot towards the sky as if he was asking them to hurry up. This made the candidates who are moving slowly to turn red in anger as they felt like they are provoked.

    There are only fifty candidates left in the testing grounds. All of them are making their way towards Sam. All the spectators looked curiously. They wanted to see what kind of trap that Sam has prepared. When finally the first person appeared, all he saw was the empty open field which is surrounded by the trees, Soon everyone made their way and all the forty nine people stayed as they stayed silent. Finally, someone broke the silence. "Who is the one that gave the signal?" This none other than Shawn. Nobody answered. Then somebody from the crowd shouted.

    "Whoever it is that gave the signal,e out and speak. Don¡¯t tell me you have guts to create themotion but not admit to it." Someone spoke in a mocking tone. As soon as he finished, there is a whistling sound of wind as an arrow tore through the air from a dark corner. The arrow hit the formation g which was hidden in the centre of the grass field. As soon as the arrow hit the formation g a dazzling light appeared as it blinded everyone.

    *Whoosh* *Whoosh*

    Then suddenly all kind of whistling sounds appeared as a lot of weapons flew and hit everyone.

    "Ahh.....

    "Shit"

    "My hand..."

    "Ahhhh"

    "Ahhh, it¡¯s a trap.."

    "I can¡¯t see,,,,,,,,,"

    Screams of all kinds appeared as the light slowly dimmed down. By the time everyone adjusted again, there are only ten people who are left standing. The rest are groaning in pain, as they rolled on the ground with their hands clutching various wounds.

    At the viewing tform all the spectators stared at the scene with their jaw dropped. This is the scene, they didn¡¯t expect. They thought at most a few people will fall into Sam¡¯s trap. But only ten people left.

    The ten people who left are all not in best conditions. They used all their might to keep themselves from getting injured. They looked at each other vigntly. As they were all thinking who is the mastermind behind the trap, a ck figure suddenly appeared and stood in the middle. It is none other than Sam.

    All the ten other people understood that this guy is the mastermind behind everything. They stared daggers at him as their eyes were filled with hatred.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother with them and looked at the people on the ground and said. "You guys better quit right no. Otherwise, you wouldn¡¯t have a chanceter even if you want to."

    The candidates on the ground all wanted nothing but tear Sam apart. But they didn¡¯t have any energy left as they were in state ofplete exhaustion. They reluctantly took their tokens one after another as they disappeared. On the screen at the viewing tforms the rankings are being fixed as people broke their tokens.

    After all the injured candidates left Sam finally turned his attention to the remaining people. There are a few familiar faces to Sam. They are Shawn, Jack, Harry and another person from evergreen family. He is a cousin of Philip; his name is Mathew. He is the only one left from the Evergreen family group.

    The remaining six people are all wearing regr clothes, they don¡¯t belong to any of the noble families. Sam stood there and observed each of them. There is a total of five men and a single woman in the remaining six. He looked at them and observed them carefully.

    "What formation did you use?" The young woman spoke directly breaking the silence, without any courtesy. She directly spoke about the point she needs and ignored all the formalities about introductions. Sam didn¡¯t reply and just stood there.

    "As far as I know, there are no formation masters at your age that are registered in the formation tower. It is impossible to use the formation discs, so you definitelyid the formation yourself. Who might you be? May I know who is your teacher?" The young woman continued. Sam didn¡¯t reply to her questions and said.

    "I don¡¯t have any obligation to tell you. But if you still want to know, you can beat the answers out of me." His voice was as nonchnt as it can be. She furrowed her brows as she made her move. She immediately formed a few hand seals at a rapid pace as she formed a water sphere directly andunched it towards Sam. But the water hit nothing but a tree as Sam dodged it. She looked around to find where Sam is, but before she could react there is an arrow that came towards her throat, she immediately lunged side-wards to evade the attack, just as she was about to make hand seals for another spell. She felt a searing heating from her back. As soon as she turned around, she saw a fireball making her way and behind it she saw Sam looking at her with a cold smile. She gritted her teeth in hatred as she took out her bronze token and broke it. She immediately disappeared as the fire ball immediately hit a tree which burned into ashes.

    The remaining candidates looked a little baffled as they saw the fight concluded before they could even react. They didn¡¯t even manage to catch Sam¡¯s movements much less predict his attack. They really felt surprised. They wondered if they could manage to defend the attacks of Sam. But they felt that it was nigh impossible. All of them looked at each other, then a burly guy said. "Let us just attack him together." He said and waited for others to reply. The ganging up idea is alright, but the first person who did so will definitely face higher risk, that is the reason, nobody answered.

    Just as the burly guy was about to say something, someone spoke.

    "I quit." The person was none other than Mathew Evergreen. His cousin Philip said before that if he faced against Sam, even if in a group, he should immediatelypromise as he said that Sam won¡¯t pulling his punches at all. So, he quickly took out his token and broke it. Following him Shawn and Jack also looked at Sam and nodded and then they broke their tokens at the same time. They too don¡¯t want to fight with Sam as they were already shown mercy once. They are not na?ve enough to think that Sam will show them mercy again. Looking at the three people who quit, Harry also took out his token and left. Now there are only five people left. They looked at each other and simultaneouslyunched their attacks towards Sam.

    Sam saw as various spells and weapons wereunched towards him. In front of everyone¡¯s eyes, Sam disappeared leaving only an after image. The five candidates all looked around vigntly. But suddenly an explosion came and one of the candidates flew into the air, with his skin scorched. The remaining four started feeling anxious and another arrow hit the burly guy who spoke first and he also flew with an explosion. The remaining three didn¡¯t dare to hesitate any longer and immediately broke their tokens. Finally, Sam is the only one left in the testing grounds. Then a voice came and resounded.

    "The second-round assessment is over, the candidate who left please, break your bronze token." The voice came and Sam took out his token and broke it.

    Sam reappeared at a ce and looked around. He felt quite puzzled as he was in an unexpected ce. He thought that he would be out of the testing grounds, but he was in a ce which looked like a cave and all the other people with in the top 100 are in it. Then the same voice which gave the announcement earlier came again and resounded.

    "Now all the top hundred candidates are selected and you will be participating in the next round assessment tomorrow. You will participate as a team and have a group battle against the senior team. The senior team only has people who joinedst year. Some elders will be monitoring your battle and interfere, if there are any critical situations. You will be given new tokens and use it to escape as soon as you can if you can¡¯t handle the situation. Even though the elders can save you, it might already bete. Your life is still in your hands. Since, some of your seniors are already inte stages of Acolyte, you can use weapons up to rank 2. But the inscribed weapons and inscription scrolls and pills are still prohibited. Those who want to get healed, there will be an elder visiting you to heal you. Finally, fighting is prohibited amongst yourself." The voice finished the announcement in rapid pace and disappeared.

    Sam then looked around the people in the cave and he felt so many sharp res at him. He then shook his head and smiled as he walked to the corner and sat down as he stretched his body and closed his eyes. But he can still feel the hatred filled res. The res only stopped when the elder came to heal the injured. Sam sighed and leaned against the wall to take a nap.

 Chapter 28: The Third Round Starts

    Sam took a nap for an hour and woke up. He saw that all the people assemble together while some people stood facing them. Sam saw them and recognised them as some of the elders of the Starwood academy. Sam slowly moved towards the group as they are still settling. After some moments, the elder in the lead spoke.

    "As you all heard from the announcement earlier, this time the assessment is topete with your seniors in the school. The seniors will be at the maximum cultivation level of thete stage Acolyte. The aim of the battle is to take away the golden sphere of the other team in their base on the other side and merge it with your silver sphere. Or you can eliminate all the other people from their team to win directly. This time you can use rank 2 weapons, but the inscribed weapons are still prohibited to bring from outside. Every thing in the testing ground is yours to use. The test will continue until the day changes and by the time the time limit is over and neither teamspleted the objective, the team with the most people wins. As I already told, use your time wisely. If you are in danger you can escape by breaking the token. As the announcement said earlier, you will receive our help in critical times, but we might bete.

    I have never seen or heard about the victory of the freshmen. The best oue is that the freshmen proved themselves by eliminating as many seniors as possible. All the best."

    The Elder finished and the elders beside him started distributing the tokens. This time the tokens are in silver colour. "Every candidate of the opposite team is worth one point. And the one with the most points will be ranked higher. Which will be individual ranking of the round. There will be the overall ranking which will be assessedter. There will be rewards for every rank." The Elder continued after the distribution of the tokens. Then a screen and a tform appeared. There is silver sphere on the tform and all the names of the candidates can be seen on the screen. When everyone looked at the name of the first ranker, they looked towards Sam, as they wanted to etch his name and face inside their minds.

    "The third-round assessment begins." The elder said and left with the other elders.

    After the elders left, all the people looked at each other as they were confused on how to proceed further. Sam just shook his head and went to the back side of the crowd and sat down as he leaned against the wall.

    "We need to select a leader." Someone said from the group.

    "I agree. But the question is who should be the leader?" As soon as he finished everyone looked at Sam involuntarily and then immediately rejected the idea. Then they looked at the ranking list and were thinking, who should be the leader. Then suddenly Harry walked to the front and faced the crowd as he said. "I am Harry from the city lord mansion, the city lord of the Starwood city is my father. So, I would like to take the position of the leader."

    When everyone heard this, they exchanged looks for a brief moment and agreed. Even the nobles didn¡¯t have any objections, there are not many nobles left to begin with. Only the people from Evergreen family and the people from the city lord mansion were left and they both don¡¯t have any objections.

    When everyone showed their approval, Harry felt satisfied with himself and gave Sam a proud look as if he defeated him. But Sam paid little attention to the whole thing, much less Harry.

    Harry started giving instructions, to the people.

    "Everyone, start separating yourselves into groups by the type of elements you have. Warrior mages will form two groups of main force. One to defend the silver sphere and one to obtain the other¡¯s sphere. The wood element and wind element mages along with a warrior team will act as scouts. Earth mages will divide into two groups to provide two lines of defence. Water mages are responsible for support on all the groups, with both attack and defence. Fire elements also join the main attack force and leave three people here at the cave. Archers and the rest of wind elements along with metal elemental mages willy in ambush at this spot........"

    Harry indeed took a goodmand position as he instructed everyone as he showed them the directions through the map that was given by the elders. The map is theyout of the current battlefield. After Harry is done with the basic instructions, everyone started preparing for the departure. When the ce near the map is somewhat cleared, Sam made his way to the map and started looking at it.

    "Wait, what about him?" Someone asked as she pointed at Sam. This person is none other than the girl who challenged Sam. The one who asked about the formations. Sam looked at her with the surprised expression. He didn¡¯t expect she of all people would mention him at this point.

    But Sam didn¡¯t say anything, he just stared at the map, as if he didn¡¯t care at all.

    "What about him?" Harry asked from the side. Many people also started getting curious. They forgot about Sam when they are busy listening to Harry¡¯s instructions.

    "You do know that he defeated all the people here single-handed right?" The girl said to Harry as if waiting for him to exin.

    "He is not suitable for the team. We can do better if he doesn¡¯t get involved." Harry said as he averted his gaze. He really didn¡¯t wanted Sam to get involved in this operation as he didn¡¯t want him get any credit. So, he is using the power he had as the leader to oppress him. He waited for Sam to object him, but the one who is objected him is another person. It is none other than Shawn.

    "Are you kidding me Harry? You are going to keep him out of the team, just because you got your ass beat?" Shawn didn¡¯t hold back at all, as he revealed Harry¡¯s true intentions. Shawn looked at Harry with disdain.

    "He took down almost all fifty of us in a single strike and you are saying that he is not suitable for this battle." Shawn said again before Harry could reply. Harry only snorted in reply.

    Then Sam suddenly turned around and walked towards the cave entrance as though the topic is not rted to him. Just as he was about to leave the cave. Somebody shouted.

    "Wait." Sam halted his foot steps as he turned around and saw the girl from earlier is walking towards him. She stopped in front of him and spoke.

    "I am Melissa. Shall we team up for this round?" She asked Sam with a polite tone. Sam looked at her as he examined from top to bottom. Even though she is not as beautiful as the three goddesses she is still a rare beauty, she tied her long hair into a pony tail as she wore a battle attire. Sam examined her as he asked. "Why?"

    "I think your skills are more helpful in this battle." She said without hesitation. But Sam¡¯s reply stunned her. "No, no. What I am asking is, why should I team up with you?" Sam¡¯s question stumped not only her but also all the other candidates.

    As he saw she wasn¡¯t replying, Sam was about to leave. Then she stopped him and said. "I am the daughter of the formation tower head. Even though I am not a ranked formation master, I can assist you inying the formations."

    Sam looked at her and said. "You cane with me. But you have to follow my instructions." Sam said as if he wasn¡¯t going to ept no as an answer.

    Melisa nodded an both of them started walking. But they were halted again by another person. This is none other than Shawn. Jack is standing beside him. Sam looked at Shawn with a questioning gaze filled with displeasure. His face said that, if Shawn didn¡¯t give proper exnation, he is going to beat him up.

    "Well, you see. We don¡¯t like this Harry guy, so can we follow you. You don¡¯t have to worry. I am genius, and my friend here is also not bad. We won¡¯t drag you down. We will follow all yourmands." Shawn said with a wide smile. Sam shook his head and said. "Suit yourself." Then the four of them left. Mathew hesitated, whether you should follow them are not, but he decided against it.

    Harry gritted his teeth in anger as he saw four of them leaving. He felt that he lost a lot of face, as they rejected follow hismand. "There are only four people, we don¡¯t have to care about them." Harry said to the rest of the freshmen and again started assigning the tasks to them.

    At the viewing tforms, the city lord shook his head in disappointment. Right now, there are no younger generation people here as they all joined in the third round in the seniors¡¯ team. All the spectators are watching the scene.

    Meanwhile in the cave simr to the one fresh were in, the seniors are discussing the n. The one in the centre is Philip as he instructed everyone. Even though Philip is one of the lower cultivation level persons at level 5 Acolyte. He is known for his strategies and all the seniors gave him themand. He concluded arranging the tasks and then said.

    "if you find anyone wearing ck and doesn¡¯t have any armour and wields a bow or a staff. Don¡¯t engage unless there are three people in the group and all of you have to be at least middle-stage Acolytes. Otherwise, just turn your tail and run to meet other team mates, leave whatever task you are doing and inform others." Philip said in a solemn tone.

    All the seniors felt a little puzzled and someone asked. "Philip, who is this guy, that you gave him such high evaluation? What is his cultivation level?"

    "Well, we can be considered friends. As for his cultivation level, he must be at Level3 Acolyte stage." Philip said with a smile.

    "Hmph, just a trash at Level 3 Acolyte. He is mine. Everyone, if you encounter him, capture him and I will trade for him with you for 1000 spirit stones." Carl said from the side as he left along with his squad. Philip only shook his head and said.

    "Guys, I am not trying to exaggerate here. He killed a ¡¯zing earth bull¡¯ which is at Level 2 initial stage in a single punch when he is at only 9th level of initiation stage. You can understand how great hisbat prowess is. As far as I know, he is a warrior mage now and of fire attribute. I don¡¯t know his full prowess, but he has many tricks up his sleeves. If he just wants to escape and survive until the end, with his speed, nobody will be able to stop him." Philip said in a grave tone. Then he let everyone disperse and only Philip, Marvin, Paul, Freya and Haley are inside the cave looking at the map.

    "Haley, who do you think themander of the freshmen team will be?" Philip asked.

    "I think Harry will take the charge." Haley said with certainty.

    "Then what do you think Sam¡¯s position will be in the team." He asked again,

    "ording to my understanding of his character, he won¡¯t give Sam any position which will help him take more credit." Haley said.

    "If he hinders Sam for at least half of the time, that would work for our advantage. If he can¡¯t even use an excellent trump card like Sam properly then he is really foolish." Philip said as he shook his head.

    "If Sam¡¯s movements are restricted and dragged down by the team, we will win without much trouble." Marvin said. Rest of them also nodded.

    But they didn¡¯t know that Sam ispletely let loose and he didn¡¯t have to follow any orders at all. He is right now at the river which divided the territories of both the freshmen and the seniors.

    Sam looked at the stone path which is the only safe way to cross the river. He observed it as he looked at from the river bank. Melisa, Shawn and Jack stood behind him as they just looked at him doing weird observations.

    "Do you know what ce this is?" Sam asked them as faced them.

    "This is the dividing line of the territory. Harry said that there is only this one bridge to cross the river safely and the river is filled with dangerous water bound beasts." Melisa said. Sam then nodded and continued.

    "Right now, both teams¡¯ scouts are making their way here slowly so that they won¡¯t leave any tracks behind, but we don¡¯t have to do that because, we are not using this to cross the river, rather, we are using this to trap them." Sam said and turned towards the bridge.

    "Shawn can you destroy the path?" Sam asked nonchntly.

    The three of them furrowed their brows as they heard Sam¡¯s words. Seeing his expression, he didn¡¯t seem to be joking.

    "Sam. Isn¡¯t it a bit risky." Melisa slowly asked.

    "You, don¡¯t have to worry about it. I have another way to cross the bridge. Judging by the speed. The main squads won¡¯te near the bridge until thete morning and even the scouts take few hours. Now, both the teams will use the darkness as the cover to ce the traps. So, don¡¯t worry. I have my ns. Shawn make it as smooth as possible without much noise." Sam instructed.

    Shawn couldn¡¯t do anything and used his earth elemental control topletely drown the stone path.

    Sam then took out a few corpses of the blood hyena and dropped them in the river where the path is used to be.

    Soon arge number of alligator type beast gathered near the meat. These are the ¡¯River gators¡¯ and a water type beast. Right now, all the beasts are at level 2 middle stage, when they saw 10 something River gatorsing, they slowly stepped back. Only Sam remained there as he looked at the River gators which are slowly making their way on to thend. Suddenly Sam released a peculiar aura which all the other people couldn¡¯tprehend, but they saw all the River gators stopped in their tracks and prostrated in front of Sam as if paying respects.

    Sam released his Golden Crow blood line power. Before the three could understand what is happening, Sam gave somemands which made them stupefied.

    "Ry mymands to all your kin. No one should carry the river easily. Any one who dares to cross the river from this area should be stopped by you guys. You can only let them cross it, if your life is in danger. Otherwise, don¡¯t let them cross at all. One mile on both sides is your job to guard, do you understand?" Sammanded the river gators as he ismanding his own subordinates. But even more shocking thing is that all the River gators nodded their heads excitedly. Sam then took out all the corpses of the blood hyenas and gave them to the river gators.

    "This is yourpensation for guarding the river. If you guys have a life-threatening danger, you can stop the duty. You don¡¯t have to keep your life on line. Now let us cross the river." Sam said and as soon as he did, the biggest of all the river gators walked forward and entered the river. Sam and others stepped on its back. Then the river gator swam across the river and left them at the other bank of the river.

    Even after the beast left, Melisa and others are still in daze as they couldn¡¯t understand the situation.

 Chapter 29: Planning

    After crossing the river, Sam and the other three separated to scout for a while to find a temporary safe point. After finding a safe point, where they can avoid the both teams, Sam and others sat in a circle as they discussed the n.

    "There is an open field which has to be crossed to arrive at the cave of the opposing teams. I think in a while after the first batch of the scouting teams of the seniors¡¯ team returned to the base after they searched their territory, the main attack force and support force will move to take advantage in the dark. There is a narrow pathway which is the only route for entering and exiting the path as the trees are denser and the other two sides are territories of two beast packs. One side is their of the Dark wind wolves and the other side is the territory of the Myriad illusion snake." Sam said as he started drawing the outline of the map of the on the soil. The other three had serious expressions as they are trying toprehend how to utilise the information. Well, at least two are trying, while the other one is already speaking as soon as Sam finished.

    "Oh Sam, your drawing skills are good. Even though they are not as good as mine, they are okay" Shawn said with a narcissist smile. All three of them looked at him with speechless expressions.

    Sam looked at the calm and collected Jack and then looked at Shawn, then said to Jack in a pitying tone. "It must have been hard on you to handle this guy." Jack first time had a change of expression as he looked at Shawn and then at Sam. His face was filled with helplessness as nodded his head.

    Sam then abruptly stood up and kicked Shawn who sat on his left side on his butt. Shawn fell face first in to the soil as a lot of sand went straight to his mouth through his c.o.c.ky grin.

    "Sam, that¡¯s a bitch move. What has my handsome bum has ever done to you for punishing it? You must have been jealous of my butt. Seeing that yours is bony." Shawn stood up and roared at Sam furiously. Sam didn¡¯t say anything and instantly disappeared and kicked Shawn on his butt again as soon as he appeared behind him. This time Shawn is a little prepared and avoided the face first fall as he supported himself with his hands.

    Just as he was about sigh in relief another kicknded on his bum and Shawn rolled on the ground.

    "Pfft." Melisa couldn¡¯t hold on anymore andughed as Sam kicked Shawn repeatedly on his butt. Meanwhile, Jack is looking at Shawn who actually felt quite vexed and helpless. ¡¯Seems like I need to employ the same method in the future.¡¯ He thought.

    "Truce, Truce. I will hear you and won¡¯t speak for the rest of the n." Shawn immediately told as soon as he understood why Sam literally kicked his ass. Sam nodded and then moved towards the drawing he drew and continued.

    "Actually, Academy arranged theyout of the cave vicinities almost same. For our freshmen team cave, we have to pass through a narrow path inside a bamboo forest. The both sides of forest are also upied by two beast packs. One is ck mane goris and the second one is the Wind tailed panther." Sam said.

    Listening to this information the three felt surprised. Previously, when Harry exined the n, he also pointed out theirs of the various beasts. But they didn¡¯t notice this peculiar simrity between theyouts. Ignoring their thoughts, Sam continued.

    "The thing is, the academy wants to see how the participants are going to face the situation when we have to face the enemies head on from a single direction. When the team members move from the cave and cross the narrow path, they will enter the open field I mentioned. Between the two open fields, there is aplex forest which is equally divided in to two halves."

    All of them nodded as they understood the basicyout now.

    "How are we going to proceed in thepetition? Are we going for the sphere or for the kills?" Jack asked the question. Melisa also nodded as if she also wanted the answer and looked at the Sam¡¯s Handsome face. Sam had a mischievous smile on his already devilishly handsome face, which gave him a unique evil charm.

    "Of course, we are going for the kills. Even if we manage to get the sphere from the senior teams, we cannot reach our team¡¯s sphere and merge them ourselves. The entire team is against us." Sam said as if it was obvious.

    The three have very different expressions. Jack nodded as if he expected the answer and Shawn had an expression as if he trying to listen everything with an incredible concentration. Melisa was surprised by the decision. Sam then looked at her and exined.

    "Even though you might think that stealing is a better method as our numbers are low. You are forgetting something. What matters to us right now is points. The more points we get the higher the ranking will be. the elders won¡¯t expect us to win the battle anyway." Sam said with a faint smile.

    "At least in this way, we will have our individual rankings a bit higher." Sam finished.

    "Okay what is the n?" Melisa asked.

    "The thing is, the senior team has an advantage in the cultivation level and they clearly know about the beast territories and won¡¯t take any measures to defend there. Same goes for the freshmen team. But the Senior team don¡¯t know that we arepletely by ourselves and they won¡¯t expect to act against the norms.

    What we will be doing is that we would set a very basic trap at the exit of the narrow patch way from this side and conceal it with the concealment formation. As far as I know, some noble family candidates who saw performance may be cautious against me using the attack formations. But we are not going to do this." Sam paused and then turned towards Jack and spoke.

    "You have to guide Shawn to do something ording the instructions I will give, as I will leave along with Ms. Melisa to get something. You guys have to be careful." Jack agreed and Shawn only nodded his head.

    "We will move as soon as the Main force and their support leaves the ground. We willy the trap and flush the defence team as well as the defence support outside towards the trap."

    "How are we going to do that?" Melisa asked Sam.

    "You will see. But first go and get your hands on as many bird type beasts as you can. You have to kill it in a cleaner way as I need their blood. I will collect some necessary herbs." Sam said and moved; the rest of the teammates also moved.

    After an hour Sam and others met at the same point.

    "Shawn make a pit of two feet deep and one metre wide." Sam said and immediately took out some odd-looking grass like herbs which are in red colour. Shawn made a pit and Sam started crushing the herbs and the rest followed suit and a red coloured fluid came and poured them in the pit. After crushing all the juice from the grass, Sam said again.

    "Extract blood from all the birds and fill the pit."

    Everyone got to work and started filling the pit with blood. When the work is done, Sam gestured them to get back from the pit and started heating the blood and nt juice mixture with the golden me. After some time, a pleasant fragrance came from the pit making all feel strange.

    "Don¡¯t breathe, hold your breath" Sam¡¯s shout made their minds clear as they immediately held their breath and tried to calm their minds. Soon Sam finished and collected the liquid of this in a big leather bag used to carry water. He stored all of it inside various bags and kept them way in rapid pace. Then only all of them released their breaths in relief.

    "We will be going, by now the main attack team will be gone. We need to move as soon as possible, before they take any preventive measures." Sam said and moved. The rest hurriedly followed even though they have many questions they wanted to ask.

    At the viewing tforms,

    "What are the four kids doing? They are hunting bird type beasts and that guy is collecting that weird grass."

    "Oh, they finally met."

    "What are they doing? Are they making any concoction or something?"

    "What is the mixture? Judging from their looks, that seems to have some weird effects on them."

    Everyone is discussing the weird actions of Sam and his group. Only a few people who are knowledgeable are having some thoughts about Sam¡¯s ns. But even they felt a bit confused.

    Actually, Sam got this knowledge on how to use this grass from the beastuary as it is something only avable near the Myriad illusion snake territory. Not many people know how to use it more effectively. Sam and others moved fast but stealthily as they finally reached the area near the exit of the narrow path. They could faintly see the tracks left by the attack team and the support team. Sam guessed that there are at least forty people moving.

    Sam and others halted and checked whether there any traps or ambushes left by the team. When they found that there are no traps, Sam felt that something is not right. Then suddenly Melissa spoke. "Actually, it is notmon to use basic traps in battle, as the cultivators can sniff them out easily. That is the reason, I am also waiting for the kind of trap you are going to set up." Sam nodded and started hismand.

    "Shawn, you have to dig pits at least 12 feet deep in all the points, I am going to mark. The pits should in circr shape, with at least one-meter diameter. We have to finish it as soon as possible. If I am not wrong, the next batch of scouts will being in search for the tracks of the main attack force of the freshmen team. I willy down the concealment formation. Then you guys can proceed."

    Sam finishedying the formation in a few minutes, this speed dumbfounded the other three, especially Melisa. She saw this speed only when her fatherid down a very basic first rank formation. But her father is a rank 2 formation master. When Sam is done, he ignored their surprise and said with a faint smile.

    "You guys should proceed. Jack cover for them. Melisa, as soon as Shawn finished a pit, you use your water element and make a swamp inside. The swamp should make them struck at least knee deep when they fall from this height. Melisa, after you are making a swamp, you should drop all the liquid inside the pit. Shawn after you are done with this you are going to close the mouth of the hole with a very thinyer of soil. It shouldn¡¯t even have any traces of being dug out." Sam finished saying and Melisa immediately asked.

    "Sam, do you really think thesemon traps will work?" Sam smiled and didn¡¯t answer her immediately, then he looked at the dark sky and said. "Ms. Melisa, when a person thinks he got stronger, he starts ignoring the most basic threats. Now, the seniors will be thinking they are stronger than us and in fact it is true. So, it is natural to be a littlecent. We are going to use it against them. They wouldn¡¯t expect us to use these basic traps. They might even think that we may use an attack formation as they knew about me. But they wouldn¡¯t expect me doing this. And the concealment formation is of visual type. So, they can¡¯t see any difference and all they can see is the area before we set the traps. You will understand when theye." He paused and then addressed all three. Out of 10 pits we dug, total four are mine and the rest are yours." They nodded their head. Actually, they are not really counting on these traps.

    "Okay, Shawn and Melisa, please finish this as soon as possible. Jack do you have any long-range attacks at your disposal?" Sam asked. Jack nodded his head and didn¡¯t say anything else. Sam also didn¡¯t pursue and started making preparations and took out another type of nt and started making juice out of it. They didn¡¯t ask him anything and just let him be.

    Shawn and Melisa are efficient andpleted this in half an hour. Sam also finished his preparation and said. "You guys hide in the trees and stay away from the pits for some time. I will lure the people out as soon as possible." Sam said and was about to leave.

    "Will you be able to do this alone? If you want, we can help you." Melisa asked and Jack also looked at him. Sam just shook his head and left with a smile. Melisa fell in to a daze as she looked at Sam¡¯s handsome smile. Sam didn¡¯t notice and started moving towards his next destination.

    Meanwhile at the viewing tforms. All the spectators also quite puzzled as they saw the actions of Sam and his group. One of the noble elders sneered. "These guys are still too na?ve to think that thesemon traps would work. They really think that they can win themselves. They are too c.o.c.ky to leave young master Harry¡¯s leadership. This guy is one of the elders from the city lord mansion. City lord also nodded and said.

    "They really are na?ve. Particrly the young man in ck named Sam. He is strong, but if he can think that he is strong enough to take on all the people at the senior team with his little group, he is really foolish. I don¡¯t really think he is fit enough to join the Starwood academy with that thinking of not joining a team." City lord spoke as he looked towards the Starwood Academy¡¯s viewing tform.

    All the nobles immediately caught on what he is implying. The city lord wants to deal with Sam and wants him to not enrol in the Academy. If he gets into academy, he will be under the Academy¡¯s protection and making a move against him is provoking the entire academy. All the nobles immediately started singing the same tune as City lord and said.

    "City lord is right indeed. This guy is ruthless and ambitious at the same time. He left the team to gain all the credit himself. He really is unfit to join the academy. The Crimson me family head said.

    "I think the City lord is right."

    "Me too." All the noble family heads agreed. Only the four tower heads and the Evergreen family are just watching in silent.

    "I wonder what the Principal thinks." City lord asked all of a sudden and everyone became silent. All the nobles who spoke earlier are waiting eagerly. The Principal didn¡¯t speak and just watched the projection. Seeing this City lord said with a much colder tone.

    "I hope the Principal will make a wise decision." This is a hidden threat. All the people understood that city lord is quite serious.

    "It is not your ce to decide who should or shouldn¡¯t join the Academy. Isn¡¯t is right City lord?" The Principal directly spoke after City lord threatened him. Everyone who spoke up earlier immediately shut their mouths. City lord just snorted and didn¡¯t speak either.

    "Look, he is entering the wolves¡¯ territory." Someone spoke from the crowd and everyone immediately turned their attention back to the projection and were quite surprised.

    Sam is indeed entering the Dark wind wolves¡¯ territory near the senior team cave area. The Dark wind wolves are of Dual elemental attribute. Darkness and Wind. Sam is going to use these wolves against the senior team.

    Sam waited for some time and moved as soon as sky brightened a little. Dawn came. He moved deep inside the territory and soon found out the mainir of the wolves. Sam hid his aurapletely and observed the wolves from a hidden corner. He is saw the alpha of the pack which is at the Late stage of level 2. All the wolves are close to it.

    All the wolves are just waking up one by one slowly as dawn broke. Sam looked at them and immediately took out several small ss bottles which are filled with a green fluid. This is the nt juice Sam made while setting the traps. Sam gave an evil smile and started his preparations.

    Meanwhile at the freshmen cave. Harry and only another person were left in the cave as he sent everyone else outside. He walked towards the tform and took the Silver sphere and kept it inside a leather pouch and hung it to his belt. He then turned towards the other guy and said.

    "Build a thick earthen wall." The other guy was quite nervous and just nodded his head. After that he used a spell and an earthen wall was formed in front of the tform hiding the tform. After it was done, Harry nodded and said. "You better keep your mouth shut." Then he walked outside along with the other guy.

    When they came out all the other freshmen candidates are waiting outside for them for a sometime. Mathew looked at Harry and asked. "What is the dy for?"

    "Nothing, we were building an earthen wall as an extra defence." Harry said casually. No one doubted him and Harry along with another thirty members including Mathew started moving together. They were the attack team of the team and the scouts¡¯ team and ambush teams already left. There are only twenty people left at the Cave. Even though many objected that twenty is very few and are not enough, Harry didn¡¯t listen and just kept them here and another twenty people are left at the edge of the open field and remaining people are scouts and ambush squad.

    Harry didn¡¯t mention the sphere at all to the others. Because he has another motive. The points for merging the sphere are fifty, which exceeds another people byrge number if he did it. He didn¡¯t really trust his team members that they would let him do it that is why he took the sphere along with him. If his team members know, they wouldn¡¯t agree as it is dangerous to take it outside and it would help the senior team if they knew. But the senior team knowing is quite impossible. Or so he thought.

 Chapter 30: Plan Executed

    As soon as everyone left the cave and started walking a team of three emerged from within the soil behind the earthen wall.

    "We should thank these freshmen really. Particrly that guy Harry. He made it a lot easier for us." One of the three said.

    "This Harry really won¡¯t change. He only cares about himself. If he had used that guy in ck, we would have a difficult time." Another guy said as he shook his head. He is from the Evergreen family and he also saw the second round along with other noble children.

    "Who is that guy actually? Even Philip said to stay vignt." The remaining person spoke with curiosity.

    "Well, he is a friend of Philip and came from the Lava rock vige. He is not only monster in battle taking on multiple opponents at same time. He is really proficient in archery and also formations. You guys didn¡¯t see, what he did in the second round. He actually defeated the top hundred all by himself using formations. And from the rest of the top ten, four guys including harry all gave up even before they fought." The guy from the Evergreen family said.

    "He really is good then. Judging on this Harry¡¯s character, he must have held grudge against him and didn¡¯t give him proper opportunity and kept him in scouts team or something." The other guy replied.

    "Okay it is time, we need to send the information to Philip and the attack squad to intercept Harry and his team. We are going to win this easier than we thought." As soon as he finished, all three of them entered the tunnel. Then they emerged behind the cave. There are about seven people waiting for them.

    This is the scout squad who are responsible for scouting the main base of the Freshmen team. The three people who entered the tunnel are Late stage Earth elemental mage Acolytes. The decision to infiltrate the territory when it is still dark is very beneficial to them.

    As soon as they ryed the information to the rest of the seven members, a guy took out a paper and wrote everything. Then he took out a bow and arrow. He tied up the paper to the arrow and shot it towards the bamboo forest. He is a wind element mage warrior. The arrow tore through the wind as it smoothly reached a tree and struck to it.

    A guy emerged from the dark and took the paper from the arrow and shot it again in certain direction where another guy picked it up. These guys are from the second scout team. Actually, Sam made a mistake of guessing that the scout teams still haven¡¯t crossed the river. They crossed the river even he before he broke the stone path. So, twenty people slipped through and sent the information to the base and then to the attack squad.

    The attack team of seniors has twenty people only. But more than half of them are atte stage and other at least at peak of middle stage Acolytes. Most of them are warrior mages.

    By the time the information came to the attack team, they are almost nearing the river crossing. The leader of the team smiled as he spoke.

    "The Team leader of the freshmen team is just as we predicted, Harry, the son of the city lord. The information says that the silver sphere is with him and even his team members doesn¡¯t know it. We can finish it quickly if we cross the river and set an ambush at the other side.

    The others also became excited as they moved faster, but when they saw the river crossing, they immediately dropped their excitement. There is no usual stone pathway over the river is not there. The team leader gritted his teeth and said.

    "We have to cross this as soon as possible. Let us go. Water elemental mages and Warrior mages, you guys move first."

    Five people of the twenty moved. Four of them are Water element Mages and the fifth one is mage warrior. All of them are at peak of middle stage except one person who is at thete stages of the Acolyte. All four of them entered the water as they moved and reduced the water resistance by controlling the water flow. The rest of the team are also following them from behind. When they are in the middle of the river flow suddenly a river they stopped moving.

    All the members gulped down loudly as they looked around nervously. They are surrounded by the river gators. Suddenly, all the river gators attacked and started biting them. "Move" the team leader shouted as they tried to retreat. But they are quite slow and are a far away from the both sides. Then they decisively moved forward while fending off the attacks from the River gators. After a desperate struggle they got an opening. But a guy screamed.

    "Shit. Vile beasts" He screamed as he broke his token and disappeared then followed by him other three people including two women also broke their tokens. All four of them are fire element users. One of them is even Warrior mage. All of them arete stage. The rest of the team members cursed under their breath as they started moving hysterically towards the other side.

    By the time they reached the other side, they lost another team mate and only 15 people were left in the team.

    "Shit. These wild beasts. I want to kill them all." A guy shouted as he stood up.

    "Stop, we need to move towards a safe ce. We have to engage the attack team as quickly as possible." The team leader stopped the guy and lead the rest of them to the forest.

    At this moment at the Viewing tform all the spectators are whispering while ncing at the city lord. They are really disgusted by Harry¡¯s actions. By the time they are getting heated by the discussion they saw the scene of attack team getting attacked by the river gators and five of them getting eliminated. Their jaws dropped. They saw the scene when Sammanded the River gators but they never expected this to actually work. Then they saw the change in the score board. There are five points next to Sam¡¯s name. The first one to gain points is Sam a freshman instead of any senior.

    "How can the attacks by the River gators count as his points?" An elder from the city lord mansion shouted.

    "Hemanded the beasts to attack and they obeyed. Thus, they are his subordinates, we can even call them as his weapons. So, naturally the points are his. Even the formation spirit of the testing grounds epted it. Why, do you have a problem?" An elder from the Academy¡¯s tform said. Everyone became silent and didn¡¯t speak.

    Then suddenly score board changed again as points appeared beside ten members of the senior team. Then everyone noticed that the scouts¡¯ team of the seniors¡¯ team at the cave attacked the defence and took them out only one guy from the freshman is left. He is none other than Oliver. He is left out as his fingers are notpletely healed. The Elder said that he needs to rest the fingers for at least a month, before he can fight or do anything else. That is why he was left here and used as watchman for the cave. One of the seniors questioned him.

    "Do you know Sam?"

    "Yes" He replied in a shaky voice. As soon as he heard the name, he involuntarily broke into cold sweat. He himself didn¡¯t notice, but the seniors did. They patted his shoulder and said.

    "Where is he now? Which area is he assigned to?" The senior asked again.

    Oliver forced himself to calm down and said in a low voice. "He is not participating with the team."

    The seniors frowned and asked. "What do you mean?"

    Then Oliver recounted what happened and the seniors¡¯ mood became gloomy.

    "We need to inform this to Philip." One of them said and took out a paper. But they don¡¯t know it would be toote.

    Meanwhile at the Wolves¡¯ir. Sam finally finished his preparations and started moving, He has a very small ss container in each hand as ran towards the wolf pack. Sam then threw the containers and took out another one from the storage. Just like that before the wolves could react, he threw a lot of containers with the green liquid, the ck wolves with blue eyes all inhaled the green vapours emitted by the green liquid and started shaking with irritation. They looked at Sam, who is running and all the wolves including the alpha started chasing him.

    Sam ran at a fixed pace. He is visible to the wolves, but kept a constant distance between them. He ran straight towards the cave of Seniors¡¯ team. After running for a while suddenly the cave entrance came into his view and he increased his pace.

    "Philip the wolves are chasing someone, he is leading them this way." Someone who is on the watch duty outside the cave ran inside and said. Philip and others ran outside and saw. They didn¡¯t recognise Sam. Because Sam changed his clothes and covered his face. He ran in the front and the wolves followed.

    There is a total of thirty people inside the cave and all of them came outside and looked at the iing wolves with fear. When they looked at the guy in front, they all want to greet all his ancestors for luring the wolves here.

    Philip looked at the team members and said. "This guy is definitely a freshman. He must have provoked the wolves identally and brought them here. We need to take the sphere and move out of this ce. Let¡¯s go."

    All of them went inside and then stared the screen in dumbfounded manner. They looked at five names which are dimmed. They are all from the attack squad. "Damn, it there are already people from the attack squad who got eliminated." Someone said through his teeth. Philp also felt quite surprised. But he didn¡¯t dally and said. "Paul, take the sphere. We have to move quick."

    All the defence team at the cave moved towards the narrow path and then met with the other defence team which has twenty members, now all fifty members started moving towards the narrow path. Even though they have fifty members, the thought of fighting the wolves didn¡¯t even cross their minds. They just kept on fleeing. But how can they be faster than Sam and Wolves?

    Soon Sam along with the wolves met the group. The group which is orderly suddenly became chaotic mob and all of them started fending the wolves as they ran towards the path. Sam removed the clothes covering his original attire and threw it away. Then he took out a big ss container which contained the same red liquid he made and threw it in the middle of the battle as he held his breath.

    The wolves and the candidates all started feeling dizzy as they took in the vapours emitted by the red liquid. Philip looked at Sam and the liquid he threw and immediately cursed.

    "F.u.c.k, hold your breaths and move out of this area." He said as he moved towards the narrow path and entered it with great difficulty. Sam moved to the back of the battle field and didn¡¯t follow them towards the path. He looked at the people who fell unconscious on ground along with the wolves. The Wolves¡¯ cultivation is not enough to make them as intelligent as humans. Yanwu is intelligent because of his high-grade blood line.

    As soon as the red fumes dissipated, Sam moved towards the unconscious seniors. Out of fifty, half of them fell unconscious. The beasts all fell unconscious because they aren¡¯t intelligent enough to hold their breath. Sam slowly broke the tokens of Seniors. They disappeared and Sam looked at the wolves and pondered. Then he shook his head and dismissed the idea as he walked inside the narrow path.

    Sam came out of the other end of the path and looked at Melisa, Jack and Shawn. Melisa has a cheerful expression and Shawn has a grin. Only Jack is calm as ever. Sam looked at the pits and slowly took a detour around them. He then looked at Melisa and asked with a smile.

    "How is it?"

    Then only the three noticed Sam and almost jumped out of their skin.

    "Sam, you are not handsome as me. So, if you surprise people like that you will scare them to death." Shawn said in a vexed tone. Both Melisa and Jack looked at him speechlessly. Sam didn¡¯t speak and kicked him on his butt directly.

    "Sorry, sorry." Just as Sam was about to continue, Shawn pleaded. Then Sam slowly walked towards the pits and looked at the people inside. The seniors inside are all cursing.

    "Damn it we fell into their traps. We are done for."

    "Who came with this despicable idea?"

    "I want to kill them."

    Actually, all the seniors aren¡¯t unconscious this time. As even though Sam and others dropped the liquid, it has been long time and their effects will be reduced even though the hole is closed. That is why seniors are just feeling weak instead of unconscious. Sam slowly moved towards other pits and finally found someone.

    He looked into the pit, coincidentally all of Sam¡¯s friends are inside that pit. Philip, Marvin, Freya, Haley and Paul. All are looking at Sam with angry looks. Even cold as ice Haley is looking angry.

    "Sam, can you be any more despicable?" Marvin shouted from pit.

    "Good to see you too. Marvin" Sam spoke in sarcasm. Then he looked at Philip and said.

    "Philip, didn¡¯t expect you to be themander."

    "Me too. I didn¡¯t expect you to be here. I thought based on Harry¡¯s character, he would try to suppress your involvement." Philip said as he smiled. Even though he is angry he is in a better mood than other four.

    "Well, you are not wrongpletely. You guys just gave an unnecessarily high evaluation to his intellect. He just said that, I don¡¯t need to be the part of the team and do however I want." Then he gestured Melisa and others toe and spoke as he pointed at them. "These guys followed me and here we are, setting up half of the Senior team." Sam finished.

    Hearing to what he said. Philip and others immediately want to be buried in the same pit. They felt that this year is the most embarrassing of all years for senior team¡¯s performance.

    "I guessed one thing right. You are indeed troublesome." Philip said and gestured to Paul, who took out the golden sphere out of his pocket and threw it towards Sam. Sam caught it and said. "Thanks, I will treat you guys to dinner. So, don¡¯t hold against he alright."

    "Next time. At least let us fight you man. You are too ruthless. You are not even giving us chance to fight and directly making us lose." Marvinined from the side. Sam nodded and waved his hands. All of them took out their tokens and broke them. Sam¡¯s points increased by another five. He then walked towards the other three. He then said. "You guys can take the other pits. I had enough harvest." And then he moved towards a tree and leaned against it to rest. The three nodded and walked towards another pit. Shawn and Melisa took seven points each and Jack got six points. Then three of them walked towards Sam and also sat down as he waited for him to recover.

    As soon as Sam opened his eyes. Melisa asked. "Sam how did you do it?"

    Sam smiled and replied. "Actually, it is quite simple. The red grass is from the territory of the Myriad illusion snake and it only grows there. It is known as ¡¯Mind numbing grass¡¯. If it is mixed with the blood of the bird type beasts which is usually warmer natured than the normal beasts and heat it up. It will make people unconscious. But it only works on Acolyte level and it the person is more vignt, it might not even work. Then the green liquid is taken from another grass which also grows in the same territory. It is called ¡¯turmoil grass¡¯. It will make the temper of the ones who inhaled it to immediately lose and attack their enemies in frenzy. I used it on wolves and lured them towards the senior team main camp. Then the rest you know." As soon as Sam finished all three of them dropped their jaws. Not only them even the spectators at the Viewing tforms are all in uproar. Sam stood up and said.

    "Don¡¯t you guys remember the words of the elder? Everything in the forest is our resource."

 Chapter 31: Against the other half

    Sam started walking as the rest of the three stared at his back in daze. They really heard and remembered the elder¡¯s words, but only understood now, how much those words can mean.

    "Come on, only half of the seniors are out, there is still other half of them roaming around. I think it won¡¯t take long before they figure out something happened to their main base. Let¡¯s just go to their main base and rest for mow and we can n further." Sam said in an unusually loud tone. The three of them were quite puzzled but didn¡¯t mention anything and followed Sam.

    As soon as four of them left, a ck shadow moved and started travelling in the opposite direction. He is none other than a member of the second scout team.

    Sam halted in his steps in the narrow pathway and turned aroundpletely. He smirked as he looked at the back of the figure who is moving at a rapid pace. Sam then spoke.

    "Change of ns. We need to set a huge trap inside the main cave and let then find another hiding point." The three of them were obviously confused by Sam¡¯s decision and exchanged nces. Sam shook his head and said.

    "Trust me. The information of us going to rest is already on its way to the rest of the team which is still in out there, I really underestimated Philip. He really did a great job forming an informationwork. Okay let¡¯s go before the wolves wake up. We need to make our preparations as early as possible." Sam said and started running towards the Main cave of the Senior team.

    Meanwhile at the viewing tforms. Everyone stared at Sam as if they were afraid to miss any of his actions. They really broadened their horizons. They saw Sam making use of the mostmon traps and then taking out half of the Senior team all by himself. Even though there are other three, they really didn¡¯t help much. When they looked at the screen showing the score, they saw that out of 55 members that are eliminated in senior team. 35 are under Sam and the rest of the twenty members are under the remaining three who followed Sam. The remaining freshmen team really did nothing.

    "This guy is too smart." One of the elders said and rest couldn¡¯t help but nod in eptance. Sam really used every resource in the forest as if they were his own personal tools. They really felt that Harry made a mistake without using him properly. Now, not only is he humiliating all the seniors by making fools out of them by using these tricks, he is even decreasing the chances of the remaining freshman team. The nobles felt like they should really take care of him as soon as possible. Because, with Sam¡¯s intelligence and talent and the way he remembered and took revenge for all the grudges, they might really be in trouble.

    In the testing grounds.

    While Sam and the other three are nning on how to deal with the remaining senior team members, something major happened in the forest near the Freshmen Base camp vicinity. This situation even diverted the attention of all the spectators at the viewing tforms from the Sam and his group.

    At a ce not far from the river crossing. The Senior attack team and the junior attack team are both in a confrontation. Both the attack teams are in a stand still not daring to make the first move at all. Even though the junior attack team has out numbered the Senior attack team by more than twice as they were around thirty members and the senior team has only fifteen members left, the junior team is at a major disadvantage as there are morete stage Acolytes in the Senior attack team.

    Harry looked at the team members of the senior attack team with nervousness apparent in his eyes. He really didn¡¯t think that he willnd in this kind of situation. He thought that he can go around the attack team and then directly confront the defence team of the Seniors at their main base and try his luck at merging the sphere in between the battle. Never in his dreams did he think that the senior attack team will directly sh with them. He almost wants to curse them all.

    "We are in luck to meet Harry the son our City lord this early in thepetition. What do you think everyone?" The leader of the attack team addressed his teammates in a sarcastic way.

    "Mason, don¡¯t get too c.o.c.ky quickly. We haven¡¯t even battled yet to know who is the winner." Harry said in anger as he heard the team leader¡¯s sarcastic manner.

    "Well, you guys think too highly of yourselves to think that you can beat us, just because you outnumber us." Mason, who is the team leader of the senior attack team said. He is the son of the captain of the city guards. So, he is clearly acquainted with Harry and both of them didn¡¯t get along well at all.

    "You are overconfident." Harry retorted with a sneer.

    "You could say so, because you don¡¯t outnumber us by as much as you think. ATTACK!!!!!" Mason roared, but neither him nor the team mates behind him made a move. Just as Harry was getting puzzled, three men suddenly came out of the ground beneath the freshmen team and attacked by catching them off guard. They each took care of people at same time and eliminated six of the freshmen team.

    The freshmen team was immediately in chaos. Just as Harry was about tomand something and control the situation. Mason and his team moved and started attacking. Fire balls, water spheres, wind des were flying through as they started hitting each other. This is not like a battle at all. It is more like a mob fight.

    Out of nowhere, more members from the senior team came joined the battle. Harry sweated profusely as he tried to think of a solution. Just then a whistling sound came as an arrow tore through the wind and pierced through his back.

    "Ahhhhhh." Harry screamed in misery. The City lord immediately stood up in his seat as he saw his son got injured. But he couldn¡¯t do anything.

    Harry looked at the direction from which the arrow came and saw a young man in the senior uniform aiming and shooting at the freshmen. Harry realised that winning is impossible. ¡¯Flee¡¯. This is the only thought that is left in his mind. Even if the team here is eliminated. He has still twenty people at the defence and another forty-five people in the form of various scout and battle teams. If he can escape now and gather them at a same ce and fight back, he might actually stay for more time in the test. This is what Harry thought as he tried to flee. Then another arrow pierced his leg. He fell down and started screaming in pain. Mason slowly moved towards him and stood in front of him. Then he made various hand seals and a lot of vines grew from the ground and tied Harry in his ce. Then he said with a smirk.

    "Harry, you better give up now and handover the sphere. You already lost."

    Harry gritted his teeth and his eyes are filled with unwillingness and resentment. He wanted to shine in thispetition and wanted to be titled as the best freshman, but first Sam came and foiled his ns and now he was caught by the senior attack team and that too in the hands of the son of the subordinate of his father. He felt like he is humiliated. He looked at Mason¡¯s face and wriggle his hand out and reached into his pocket. Mason thought that he is going to break his token, so he didn¡¯t stop him. But Harry took out the silver sphere and started frenziedly injecting all his spiritual energy. Mason widened his eyes and just as he was about to make a move, he realized it was already toote. The silver sphere burst into several particles and turned into a powder. Everyone saw what happened and were dumbfounded by Harry¡¯s actions.

    "Hahahahaha, If I can¡¯t have the bonus of merging the sphere, nobody can have it." Harry said hysterically as he broke his token. All the seniors started cursing under their breaths as they watched Harry vanishing from the spot. The freshmen had even more unsightly expressions as they saw the sphere destroyed. They were more concerned about the sphere being here than the fact that Harry has destroyed it. After all they didn¡¯t have much expectation on winning against the senior team. But they didn¡¯t expect their team leader to be this self-centred and didn¡¯t trust the team members at all. He just wanted the points of merging which will inevitably make him the best freshman with the highest number of points.

    "Shit, this ass hole" Mathew cursed and then spoke to the one beside him. "Give the signal and tell all the team members to assemble at the cave. All the members retreat." Mathew said as he started running. The rest of the team also followed and the seniors still kept on pushing with long range attacks. By the time the remaining attack team of the Junior team were in safe ce. They were only ten members left. Mason, didn¡¯t give themand to follow as he saw a scouting towards him in a hurry. He thought that something happened and just ordered everyone to stay.

    After a few moments the scout finally reached them and said in a shaky voice. "Mathew, the main base ispromised. All fifty members in the defence are down."

    As soon as the rest of the members heard this news, they were all stupefied. After a few seconds silence, Mason spoke after he took a deep breath. "How?"

    "ording to the scouts from team 2, four people from the junior team, lured the Dark wind wolf pack towards our main base and made them move towards the trap they previously set. Fifty members are already out." The scout said.

    "How did you guys know this?" Mason asked again after digesting the information.

    "The team 1 sent us an urgent report which has to be delivered to the main base. The scout who is responsible went there and saw the scene where the scenario happened and the four freshmen discussing the ns for further action. Apparently, they were going to our main base and hiding there until we return." The scout finished saying in a single breath.

    "I knew this would happen." The earth element warrior- mage from the Evergreen family, who is also part of the trio from the first team said as he sighed. Everyone turned and looked at him in a puzzled expression.

    "Dorman, what do you mean?" Mason asked.

    "Previously, when we took out the defence team of the Freshmen team, we got a piece of information. The person named Sam, about whom Philip had warned us against has been set free and another three people followed him." Dorman said.

    "What do you mean set free?" Mason inquired. But some people who saw the second round had already understood.

    "Actually, this guy Sam is the first ranked candidate and he defeated the rest of top 100 by luring them into a trap by setting up a formation. He is not only good in hand in handbat, he is also good at formations and archery. He even defeated Harry when he was surrounded by all of Harry¡¯sckeys. So, Harry took the leadership role and thenpletely didn¡¯t include Sam in the team and kicked him out. What Philip said is that with Harry¡¯s petty character, he would drag Sam down by giving him as worse task as possible, but he really overestimated Harry¡¯s intelligence. Now, Sam not only is free but also has some helpers. He will be really dangerous as he is very proficient in setting formations and plotting strategies. If we can¡¯t catch him as early as possible, he will be a head ache." Dorman said as he sighed dejectedly.

    Mason also remembered what Philip said and so did the rest of the team. Honestly, they first thought that Philip is just exaggerating as some of them are confident that they won¡¯t fall for his tricks and some of the people who saw the second round thought that since, they saw it, they can avoid it. But when they heard about the news of fifty seniors getting eliminated, they were at a loss of words on what to say. They really didn¡¯t think that Sam would be this troublesome, just as they were feeling happy about their overwhelming victory on the freshmen, they got a news that their team has got reduced by half.

    "That despicable sc.u.m. He is nothing but a trash who has to resort to these kinds of petty traps and tricks. He is nothing but a coward." Just as the whole team were silently thinking on what to do, someone cursed. When they turned towards the direction, they saw Carl gritting his teeth and his face was red with anger. Not only him the rest of the noble household students are all in the same state except the people from the Evergreen family. Carl noticed all the gazes and said.

    "I will lead a team and eliminate him." Even though he didn¡¯t mention who he was speaking to, everyone can make a guess and turned towards Mason.

    Mason thought for a moment and said. "No need for you to go. We will all first attack the main base of the freshmen and move back to deal with Sam and his followers. You already heard how he lured the wolf pack, if we separate now, the rate of the sess is very low. We already lost more than half of our team, which is the first time in history. The highest the previous freshmen got against their seniors is at most less than half of our losses. We can¡¯t afford to lose anymore and humiliate ourselves. Scout team 2 will keep watch in them"

    Everyone in the team agreed and nodded. Seeing that he can¡¯t convince them, Carl gritted his teeth and just followed the team. So, the team all started walking towards the freshmen main camp.

    At the freshmen main camp, right at this moment, all the freshmen are gathering. All the scout teams and ambush teams all came and formed a group. Mathew took the responsibility of the leader and spoke.

    "The defence team at the main base is eliminated and we are the only ones left in the team. The senior team ising to attack our main base. We are going to take a stand here and are going to defend and survive as long as we can. We have to drag as many people as we can with us."

    "Yes" All the freshmen shouted and started moving to take their positions. After a few minutes the senior team came. There are about 35 people in the team. Right now, the senior team has assembled all the team members on this side of the river crossing. Only ten people are left on other side and all are part of the team 2 scouts. The team 1 is of 10 people and team 2 is of twenty people. The people of team 2 are responsible for information transfer. Now, all are assembled.

    The battle at main base of the freshmen started and ispletely one sided. Even though there are more people on the freshmen team, they arepletely overpowered due to their inferiority of their cultivation base and soon all of them are eliminated and the senior team had to pay a price of five people.

    Senior team took some rest and all of them stayed silent. Nobody, is happy as they lost a total of sixty people and this is a clear humiliation and all of this is due to four freshmen. In fact, it could be said that it is all due to one person. He only with the help of three others took out more than half of the team. This only made their mood gloomier.

    After a few hours. The sun is already high up in the sky and there is still more than 12 hours to the finish of thepetition. Due to the fact that Harry destroyed the sphere, there are only two ways to win thepetition. First one is to eliminate all the candidates from the opposite team and second one is to eliminate a greater number of people than the other team before the time limit is up. That is the reason, Mason declined the idea of Carl leading a team to eliminate Sam and hispanions. He doesn¡¯t want any mishaps to happen. If Carl and the team he led got eliminated, he would surely regret it.

    Mason and the rest of the team are currently at the river crossing, they probed and further confirming that the river gators are gone, they crossed the river and then started walking towards their main base, On the way the rest of the team also joined and the remaining forty people of the senior team slowly and cautiously travelled until they came to the narrow path leading to the open grounds before their main base cave.

    A team of ten people cautiously travelled through the narrow route and came out from the other side. When they saw that there are no traps like the pits they saw earlier, they started checking the flow of energy for any presence of the formations. After confirming that everything was clear, they immediately signalled the rest of the group toe.

    Soon the group slowly made their way to the cave and cautiously entered it. On their way, they clearly saw the tracks of the wolves. But to their luck the wolves already returned to theirir after they became conscious. When they finally entered the cave and confirmed there are no traps, they heaved a sigh of relief and rxed a bit. But Mason has a gloomy expression and was in deep thought.

    At the viewing tforms, the spectators all observing the scene without batting an eyelid. Because, Sam and hispanions right now are on a small hill top near the cave and are looking towards the cave.

    Sam was watching the scene of the Seniors¡¯ team entering the cave cautiously as if they were walking on the egg shells. He has a cold smirk on his face as he looked at their looks of concentration and vignt expressions. The remaining three are all looked at Sam waiting for his next move.

    Sam looked at the cave which is not far but not near either. He then took out a weapon out a ck metal bow and nocked a ranked arrow. He then pulled the string to its limit and injected his golden me energy ready to fire at any moment. He then said to the other three.

    "Get ready we are going to have a meleebat with them after the initial attack. So, as soon as they get out of the cave hit them with your best long- range attacks. Move now and inform me when you are ready." As soon as he finished the remaining three immediately moved. After a few moments the signal came and Sam immediately released the arrow.

    The arrow tore through the air and entered a hole which is previously created by Sam and entered the cave and hit the ground in the middle with a loud explosion and a crashing sound of ss could be heard as a red vapour immediately filled the cave.

    Mason immediately felt that something is not right and shouted. "IT¡¯S A TRAP GET OUT OF HERE!!!!!!!!!!". But it was already toote. Some of the people in the cave already fell unconscious and the rest of them ran outside. Just as they were trying to catch their breath, suddenly they felt a sense of danger. Mason immediately looked around and out of blue he felt an acute pain in his leg. He looked down and saw an arrow pierced through it and then he looked towards the direction where it came from. He saw a figure d in ck as his outer cloth swaying slightly wind. That man has a bow in his hand as he shot arrow after arrow at the senior team, with a speed so high that he can¡¯t even see his movements.

    He came out of his daze and turned towards his teammates to give orders to hide, but he saw they were all being attacked by various long- range attacks. Some people are struck in soil and some people are being attacked by some flying daggers, some water spheres could also be seen. He shouted. "Be careful. Defend yourself." He shouted again as he took shelter behind a think rock.

    Soon the seniors came to their senses and started defending themselves, By the time they took shelter and themotion died, they saw only fifteen members of the team are still conscious. There are around ten people who fell unconscious on the ground and the morale of the senior team died down.

    "Don¡¯t worry, they are not yet eliminated. As long as we can take them down and not let them break the tokens of our team members, we can save them." Mason shouted to his team members as he tried to boost their morale. All the seniors looked at their friends and then exchanged nces. Soon, someone spoke.

    "Yo, kids. Is that all you got? Are these little tricks the only thing you know? If you have gutse and fight me?"

    "Yes, what is the name of your leader again? Sam, right? I heard you are so great in closebat and are not afraid of anyone. Why don¡¯t youe out and let us see for ourselves?"

    "Howe you guys are noting out?"

    "Come on, let us fight hand to hand instead of these cheap tricks."

    Everyone started to provoke Sam and others as they continued to spout endless nonsense.

    Not far away Sam and the other three are also hiding behind a rock. Now that the seniors are on guard against them, it is almost impossible to attack long range. Sam is hearing the provocations with an amused smile. Suddenly, he heard Shawn shouting from beside.

    "All of you call yourselves seniors. We are four and you are more than ten and some of you guys even have cultivation above us. And you have gall to ask us to fight head on." he scoffed loudly. Immediately all the provocations died down. Suddenly, another voice came from the seniors¡¯ side.

    "Sam, you despicable piece of shit. Come out if you are really a man. If I don¡¯t make you regret living today, I won¡¯t call myself Carl again." Hearing this all the seniors looked puzzled and dumbfounded. Then another shout came.

    "You country bumpkin,e out and ept your fate."

    "You piece of trashe on if you have balls."

    All the noble family students in the senior team are insulting Sam. The other seniors felt quite confused.

    "Sam has a feud with all the noble families except for the Evergreen family. Due to that feud he deliberately targeted all the other candidates from the noble families and eliminated them very early in the second round. Now only Harry and the candidates from the Evergreen family are the only students belonging to the noble families in the freshmen." Dorman exined to the remaining seniors and realisation dawned on to them. They felt this Sam is crazy to have a feud with the noble families and eliminate the juniors of the family making them fail in the admission. ¡¯No wonder, this Carl and others are all angry.¡¯ Everyone thought. Then Dorman continued.

    "Carl has an extra reason. He lost a bet with Philip and five thousand Spirit stones are gone because Sam beat his cousin in second round." Everybody looked at Carl with a weird look. ¡¯Why bother betting and why bother taking it on someone who didn¡¯t even know you lost because of him? Damn, so much for being a noble. You might as well me the tree, since the bird pooped on you has a nest on it.¡¯ All the seniors who are a little broad-minded have thoughts like these.

    Carl red at Dorman and then he felt the gazes of all the other seniors he felt incredibly ashamed and shouted. "SAM, I WILL F.U.C.K.I.N.G KILL YOU TODAY."

    Meanwhile Melisa and others all looked at Sam, whose expression got colder and colder as they heard all the insults hurled at him. Sam suddenly stood up and took out a staff. This is not the ck staff he used yesterday. Instead, it is golden in colour and is shining brightly under the sun. The staff has smooth surface and there is a symbol of ¡¯Double S¡¯ (Cover) near one end of the staff and there are some engravings near it. Sam looked at the three and said.

    "Cover me from afar. You don¡¯t have to directly attack anyone. All you have to do is distract them if anyone tries to sneak up on me from behind." Sam said and started walking.

    "Sam. Its dangerous." Melisa said from behind. But all he got in reply is a cold stare which seemed to say. ¡¯Do what I say¡¯. He then left without turning back.

    As soon as seniors saw someone walking towards them, they looked at him and saw Sam walking towards them with a golden staff in his hand. His face was as cold as ice and the aura around him ispletely chilly and evil. Sam¡¯s expression is nowpletely sinister as he stopped a few meters away from them. He then held the staff on one end and kept the other end on his shoulder and said in an emotionless voice.

    "Those who called me cane and say all the shit to my face. Of course, the context his that you have balls to say that." His voice is soft but cold. He didn¡¯t even ce at them when talking and looking to the side as if it was beneath him to look at them and treated them as thin air. The seniors looked at his arrogant demeanour and felt like they were humiliated. But none of them made a move and looked at the seniors who called out Sam and waited. Soon, around seven members came out of their hiding spots as they looked at Sam with angry eyes. They were instructed by the family. ¡¯Kill him, if chance arrives.¡¯ Even though they know that Sam can escape as soon as he broke the token, they still had to try their luck.

    The seven surrounded Sam. There are three who are atte stage Acolytes and all of them are seventh stage. Carl is one of them and is the only mage warrior. The remaining four are all middle stage Acolytes. Out of which three are at fifth stage and thest one is at sixth stage. Sam looked at them nonchntly as if he doesn¡¯t have any pressure. This made them even more infuriated and one of the guys in middle stage made a move. He is a warrior and swung his sabre at Sam with a ferocious aura. But just as he was about to hit, his target vanished and appeared behind another one of the middle stage Acolyte, who didn¡¯t make any move.

    Before anyone could understand how Sam escaped, they saw Sam swinging his staff in an extreme speed. All they saw is a golden blur and sh of a golden me sphere at the point of contact between the staff and the person. That¡¯s it. Before they realised, a golden me explosion urred and by the time, the mes are gone, they saw the senior who got hit lying there unconscious with his body scorched ck.

    They all looked at the ce where Sam stood and before they could make sense of the situation, they saw another blur and another guy also got scorched ck as if he was grilled on fire. This time Sam didn¡¯t move and stood there. He ced a foot on face of the guy and ced the staff on his shoulder and looked at all the seniors who came out of their hiding and scanned them with his cold gaze.

    Then all the people there heard Sam saying. "Tch, TCh. What a shame they fainted." Then he looked at Carl and said. "You are right to call me trash. They are still breathing after all."

 Chapter 32: Third round over

    All the people who heard Sam¡¯s words were utterly dumbfounded as they looked at his cold and emotionless face and then looked at the person who is scorched ck under his foot. Even though he is alive now, he wouldn¡¯t be able to take it for long. He will definitely die if he isn¡¯t treated in time. Now, they understood why Philip said so many times to be wary of him.

    Mason looked at Sam with his mouth wide open. ¡¯It is really our luck that he doesn¡¯t have patience to deal us one at a time. That is why he is using the traps. If he took it up on himself and started hunting the seniors one by one patiently, we would have been in even more trouble other than worrying about winning thepetition.¡¯ He thought as gulped hard.

    The most shocked is still the noble kids. They really didn¡¯t expect Sam¡¯s strength to be that great. They were now regretting stepping out. The other two middle stage acolytes are already trying to take their tokens and escape. Suddenly, Sam moved and the first person to take the token felt some explosion on back of his head. Under the surprising gazes of everyone present. The senior student fell motionless on the ground and he doesn¡¯t even have the faint breath that the first two victims have. ¡¯He is dead.¡¯ This is the thought on everyone¡¯s mind. Mason soon came out of his daze and came forward and started making hand seals and soon, some vines started sprouting from the ground and coiled along Sam as they tried to tie him up.

    Just as Mason was about to givemands to his teammates who were still in daze. He saw a big ball of golden fire burning in the ce where Sam stood. After a few seconds all the vines started turning into ashes. Sam came out of the fire and walked towards Melisa and others who are standing out of the hiding ce and are watching the fight with awe. He stood in front of them and said.

    "Our cooperation ends here. Take the ones who are inside the cave and get out of here. I am not responsible if you got involved in between." He finished and didn¡¯t wait for any reply and turned around and started walking.

    "Do you need our help?" Shawn asked from behind. Sam halted in his footsteps but didn¡¯t look at them and said. "No need." The he walked away again. They watched Sam¡¯s back as he walked majestically with a staff in his hand. Soon they came out of daze and started running towards the cave. The seniors just saw the scene and didn¡¯t do anything. They are just watching who is still walking towards them.

    Sam walked towards a central point in between the group and said nonchntly as looked around the seniors. "I don¡¯t care if you are seniors, I don¡¯t care if you are from the noble families ormon families. But today I am going to take their heads no matter what." He said as he pointed at the remaining four noble family senior students. The four of them started sweating profusely. They didn¡¯t expect the insults they used to provoke Sam would have this much reaction from him. They also felt bit puzzled. They clearly saw Sam only has a cultivation of third stage acolyte. But he has that much power, that he could go toe to toe with a seventh stage acolyte and he might even win with a proper nning and weapons.

    "If any of you got any objections you can also join the fight. But remember one thing. If you join the fight make sure I am dead today. Otherwise, even if you leave, I will make sure to pay you backter." Sam continued with same nonchnt expression. Just as all the seniors were hesitating Sam moved suddenly and appeared beside another guy who is in the middle stage acolyte and broke his arm.

    *Crack* "AHHHHHHHHHHH" a blood curling scream came from the guy. He is one of the first seven who provoked Sam, when they saw him, they noticed that there is the token in his hand. Sam has broken his hand because he wanted to escape. Sam threw the guy away and stood there and looked at the seniors who aren¡¯t part of the conflict. All of them took a step back under his cold gaze. Even Mason felt hesitant about helping the others. His instinct told that even if they could kill Sam now by ganging up on him, they had to pay a terrible price, which might even cripple or even kill many of them.

    Carl looked the scene as the other seniors are all backing down with fear apparent on his face. Just then he thought of an idea. "If you guys don¡¯t help me now, all of you will be enemies of all the noble family descendants. If we make it out of here alive, I will take revenge on all your families." Just as he finished his words all the seniors who were about leave stopped in their tracks. Meanwhile the people who fell unconscious due to Sam¡¯s trap also woke up.

    Sam turned towards the cave and saw that no one is there. So, he heaved a sigh and looked at all the seniors who are around him. Including the people who just woke up there are around twenty-three people around him and eight of them are atte stage acolytes out of which six of them are at seventh stage and two of them are at the eighth stage. The two are precisely Mason and Dorman. Sam noticed Dorman¡¯s clothes and looked at him with a questioning look.

    Dorman understood and said. "I am from the Evergreen family. We don¡¯t want to have a conflict with you. So, I will just stay at side." As he spoke, he and three middle stage acolytes moved to the side. The rest of the crowd except Mason all surrounded Sam with dejected expressions. Sam then looked at Mason.

    Mason shook his head and spoke as he matched Sam¡¯s gaze. "Can we drop this? It is not good for any of us if the conflict blows out proportions." He tried to mediate. He knew that he can¡¯t convince these noble kids. So, he tried his luck with Sam. But he was disappointed looking at Sam¡¯s expression. Then he just looked at the seniors who came from themon families and said. "You guys can step back. You have nothing to with this." As soon as he said this the rest of the seniors who were threatened by Carl earlier, took a step back and heaved a sigh in relief. Even Carl was gritting his teeth and didn¡¯t have anything to say. Technically, Mason is not a noble. But his father is responsible for the security of the city and he reports directly to the superior of the City lord. So, he didn¡¯t dare directly antagonize him.

    As soon as Mason took his stand, Sam moved. He was like a phantom as he moved around the seniors and touched them. The four seniors were caught off guard. There are 4 of them, but none of them was able to catch Sam or block him, he was like a ghost and his presence seemed to disappear. They noticed that his speed also improved so much then previous time.

    Right now, Sam is gritting his teeth andpletely focused on his and left all the defence off guard. If they couldnd a hit on him now, they might even win in a single strike. With in few seconds Sam came back to his original ce and stood there while sweating profusely. Now, all the seniors already are in attack position. The mages all started making hand seals while the warriors drew their weapons but when they saw what is in Sam¡¯s other hand, they felt like their heart dropping. There are a lot of leather pouches in his hand. These are the pouches in which the seniors kept their tokens. Now, they finally understood what Sam was trying to do. He didn¡¯t have any intention to attack at all. He is stealing their tokens.

    Sam didn¡¯t care at all and took out a big leather bag and kept all the pouches in it. Then he took his token from his coat pocket and put them in the leather bag and closed it. Then he threw the bag towards the ce he and his teammates hid.

    He turned towards the seniors and said. "If anyone want to go out, the other party has to die." Just as he finished, he held his staff and started his attack.

    This time the whole staff is glowing in a golden l.u.s.tre and is covered with golden mes. He swung the staff as he hit a senior at Middle stage Acolyte stage. As soon as hended the hit. The mes covered the certain area as if an explosion urred. The senior who took the hit only fainted, but his injuries aren¡¯t light either. Sam is using the atmospheric spiritual energy for these attacks instead of how he used his own energy to attack earlier when he killed the previous guy. This is to make sure his spiritual energysts long. But this method will make him mentally exhausted. When Mason saw Sam¡¯s attacks, which became less ruthless he rxed a little but he still felt a little tension.

    He really didn¡¯t want Sam or his team mates die in this battle. Because they all are going to be in same academy. That is why, he is standing out of this. If Sam got defeated, he would step and save his life making him owe him. Then he can use his authority over seniors and mediate the dispute. As for Sam winning, he felt that it would be possible and if that happens, he has to stop this by making the seniors step back before things got serious.

    But looking at the fight he felt that it was in a deadlock. The seniors weren¡¯t able tond a clean hit on Sam, since the beginning due to his extreme speed. But Sam also was having a bit hard time, because of facing three superior cultivators at thete stage acolyte. Even then he is not at disadvantage. The scene looked majestic as Golden me was flying in all directions with Sam as centre.

    *BOOM* Suddenly a fire st came and hit Sam and he took a few steps back as he tried to defend the attack. He is currently facing two warriors and a mage all at the seventh level Acolyte. Carl is the mage with fire attribute. Out of seven who came at him, he already killed and one and the rest of three fainted, Now, all he has to do is to deal with the three people in front of him and everything will be settled. Sam took a deep breath and looked at the three seniors. He is having a little hard time. Just as he was thinking how to deal with it, Carl spoke.

    "You little Bastard. Where is all the arrogance from earlier?" Carl spoke as he sted another fire ball at Sam. When the mes cleared, they saw Sam standing there with his head down. When he lifted his head up and looked at Carl, his gaze became sinister. He is like a mad man as stored his staff. He then took a weird golden coloured object from the storage and held it in his hand. This is none other than the weapon he made at the Artisan exam. The crescent des shined with golden l.u.s.tre as it reflected under the sunlight. All the people are looking at it with awe. Even at the viewing tforms all the people are looking at the weapon with puzzlement. Only the people from the Artisan tower are watching it with anticipation. Under the surprised and confused gazes of all, Sam suddenly made his move.

    He disappeared from ce and he started moving towards Carl with a dangerous aura surrounding him. He is emitting an ice cold killing intent which isplete contrast with the Golden mes he is emitting from the weapon in his hands. Just as he was about to reach Carl, he was attacked from behind. The warrior hit him on his back with his axe. But just as he was about tond the hit. Sam turned around and blocked the attack with the blunt part of his weapon, then he waved his hand and one of the crescent des was pierced directly in to the warrior¡¯s body as he directly pierced it from a spot near the cor bone. When Seniors saw this they all took a step back. The warrior who was pierced can¡¯t even let out a scream. When all of them looked at the de, they noticed that the not a single part of the crescent de is out. It directly entered the other¡¯s body shing all the internal organs on its way. Blood sshed on Sam¡¯s face as he pushed the de deeper and deeper. When he can¡¯t push it anymore. He directlynded a knee kick on the ribs of the warrior.

    *Crack* *Crack* *Crack*

    Cracking sounds could be heard as Sam kicked continuously with his knees on the ribs of the senior. By now, all the ribs on the one side are broken, when there is no more cracking sound, Sam looked at the senior¡¯s face which is filled with pain and hanging on hisst breath. He held the weapon tightly and pulled it downpletely.

    *SLASH* The upper body of the person was shed in to two as blood and the internal organs which are now in pieces came out along with the broken bone shards. Some of the seniors even puked out at the scene. But Sam didn¡¯t even bat an eyelid and then moved towards Carl again. This time, he is not even running, he is just walking step by step. But the other warrior didn¡¯t even make a move. Sam stood in front of Carl and immediately shed at him. Carl finally came out of his daze and tried to dodge his attack. But he failed to and had a deep sh on his chest as blood gushed out.

    "Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" Carl released a blood curdling scream as he fell to the ground. He looked at Sam with resentment and fear at the same time. He hurriedly aimed at the sky and shot a fire ball. Sam didn¡¯t bother by his actions. He just shed again and this time he aimed at Carl¡¯s arm. Just as the de made contact with the arm. Sam sensed the danger from behind. He abruptly stopped his actions and swung the crescent de as he hit something. When the object which came towards him made contact with his de it made a nking sound and the surrounding wind turned chaotic for a second. Sam looked at the object and saw it was an arrow. He then coldly looked at the direction which it came and saw a guy in white, standing there with a bow in his hand and an arrow nocked on it. He is the wind element mage warrior who was a part of the scout team of the seniors.

    He released another arrow at Sam. But this time something unexpected happened. Sam swung his weapon as the arrow appeared and the de this time shed the arrow into two. Carl is slowly crawling backwards. He felt lucky that he made a deal with the archer earlier. He then looked for the bag in which Sam kept his token. When he saw where it was, he kept his looks on Sam who is fending off the arrows. He was very careful to not gather his attention. Then suddenly Sam turned towards him and gave him a smirk. He felt a bad premonition.

    Sam jumped behind rock to take cover. He then held the weapon as he made the double S symbol face him and looked at it. Right now, the symbol is not straight as it is tilted a little. Wedges on both sides are against the symbol as if they are blocking it from getting straight.

    Sam held the weapon by its handle horizontally and made the symbol face upwards. Then he held the symbol with his other hand and straightened it forcefully as it pushed the wedges into the blocks. The crowd around him including Mason is looking at his weird actions in daze. Even the spectators at the viewing tforms are all looking at him.

    When he straightened the symbol, the weapon suddenly elongated as two blocks protruded out. The tendon stretched to its limits. Sam then turned the weapon vertically and pulled the tendon which a little. The weapon now like a bow. The spectators all dumbfounded. They didn¡¯t expect the melee weapon which suited Sam¡¯s ruthless fighting style when he killed the warrior earlier, but when they saw the weapon turning into a bow, they were clearly surprised. Sam took out a ranked arrow and nocked on the bow, then he came out from the hiding and aimed at the archer far away. The spiritual energy turned into a huge sphere at the tip of the arrow, then it suddenly started condensing as if it was beingpressed forcefully. Then the small sphere suddenly turned golden colour and brightened. Sam gave a cold smile and released the arrow. The archer on the other side immediately smelled the threat and was about to leave. But the arrow is too fast and when itnded on him leaving a trail of fire on its way. There was a huge explosion and the surroundings all burned to ashes, even some rocks started melting. By the time the explosion was cleared, all they can see is a huge crater in midst of which a burning corpsey down.

    Sam didn¡¯t even look twice at the explosion and walked towards Carl who was staring the scene with a dumfounded expression.

    He slowly reached to the double S symbol and turned it so, it can change back into its original form. When he finally came in front of Carl and looked deep into his fearful eyes and emitted immense killing intent. He then spoke in a low voice.

    "What did you call me earlier? Can you repeat that? I didn¡¯t hear it clearly." Everyone finally came out of their stupor and realized what had Sam done. Particrly, Mason is wiping his sweat. He fell in to daze from the point when Sam changed his weapon. The rest of the events happened in a blink of an eye. He looked at Sam, who is emitting an immense killing intent. It is so intense that he could almost smell blood in the air.

    Carl peed his pants as he felt the full brunt of Sam¡¯s killing intent. He then stuttered. "Cri- Crimson me F-family would ne¡ªever forgive you, I-if you k¡ªkill me." This almost took out all the energy Carl has left. Sam didn¡¯t reply and just jabbed the de directly into the shoulder of Carl which cut half of the joint. Then he grabbed the hand at the wrist and tore the whole arm off from the shoulder.

    "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH" Carl screamed in agony. The rest of the seniors took a step back and just wanted to stay away. They almost couldn¡¯t bear to see the scene. At the spectators viewing tform, the head of the Crimson me family stood up from his chair as he released a terrifying aura. But Sam didn¡¯t know any of it. His full focus was on Carl who is shivering like a leaf as his handsome face was filled with tears and snot. The arrogance from earlier waspletely gone.

    Sam then jabbed the de into other shoulder and said. "Come again. I didn¡¯t hear you clearly." His cold voice and the sinister smile on his handsome face made him look like a devil in a human form. Carl didn¡¯t know what to say. In fact, he didn¡¯t dare to say anything.

    Sam looked at the pitiful Carl and said coldly. "Do you know what I hate the most?" Carl shook his head. "Someone calling me a bastard." He then tore the other arm off and jabbed the de in one of the legs at the thigh and pinned it into the ground and proceeded to tear off.

    "Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh"

    "No oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, noooooooooooo"

    "JUST KILL MEEEE. PLEAAAAAAAAAASE"

    "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"

    Carls screams finally stopped. Not because the pain has stopped, but because he didn¡¯t have any energy left to scream. Sam stopped after he tore off all the four limbs. He then stored the weapon and held Carl¡¯s leg in his hand. He tore off the flesh and took the bone in his hands, then he broke the bone into half and looked at Carl, who is now lying in a pool of his own blood. Everyone¡¯s blood turned cold as they looked at Sam¡¯s ruthless actions. They thought that Sam was like a demon from hell. They even forgot that he was a human for once. Then under everyone¡¯s gaze, Sam directly pierced the bone¡¯s sharp edge into Carl¡¯s throat. Carl could only groan in pain as he waited for death toe. He just wanted to die in peace. But his wish didn¡¯te true. He heard Sam¡¯s cold voice.

    "I hope you will be born dumb in your next life. Otherwise, you will die a dog¡¯s death just like now." As finished speaking he slowly spread a golden fire on Carl¡¯s body, burning him alive. For thest moment until he lost his life. Carl didn¡¯t have a moment of relief as he felt an extreme pain until the final moment. He died with pain and regret filled his eyes as he looked at Sam¡¯s eyes which arepletely cold and emotionless. Under everyone¡¯s gaze Carl turned into ashes.

    Sam then turned towards the remaining Warrior from the seven before. He immediately took a knife and slit his throat himself. He felt that suicide is better than suffering Sam¡¯s torture. Then Sam¡¯s gaze turned towards the four people who fainted previously. They are now dead because ofck of treatment. Then only he rxed a bit and sat down in meditation. The rest of senior team exchanged nces and then turned towards Mason.

    Mason took out his token and broke it without saying a word. The rest of the seniors all followed suit. All the seniors disappeared. Then only Sam left in the ground and an announcement came.

    "Third round assessment ispleted. Winners are the Freshmen team."

    At the same time at viewing tform another loud scream can be heard.

    "CAARRRRRRRRRLLLLLLLLLLL"

 Chapter 33: Please be lenient

    At the viewing tforms, on the centre stage, there are two groups of people standing separately. One is the freshmen group and the other is the senior group, both of which just participated in thepetition. Suddenly, a light appeared in the centre of the stage and a figure sitting cross-legged emerged slowly as light dissipated. As soon as the light appeared, all the spectators took a step back and cleared a significant distance. All the people are looking at him with various expressions. Some of them are looking at him in fear, some in admiration, some in resentment.

    Who could it be other than Sam?

    Sam just sat there and meditated with a peaceful expression on his face. Family heads of the noble families and city lord are looking at him as if they wanted to tear in to shreds and pieces. But Sam was not concerned about it and sat there as if he was in his own home. This made the other freshmen look at him with new respect. They clearly saw how ruthlessly he can kill someone. His methods are worst than death. But now looking at his handsome face with peaceful expression, they weren¡¯t able to rte at all.

    Principal stood up rom his seat and broke the silence.

    "The assessment for this year admissions are over and both freshmen and seniors performed well in the third round." He spoke as he looked at all the freshmen and seniors. Even though, he spoke as if he was praising them, anyone could say, he didn¡¯t mean it at all.

    All the students who met his gaze hung their head low. He then continued. "The third round is won by the freshmen. Now all the seniors can leave, except the top three rankers." As soon as he spoke, all the seniors left the stage and walked deep in to the academy. There are only three seniors left on the vast stage. They are Mason, Dorman and another senior who is a fire elemental mage atte stage. Principal nodded at them and then looked at the freshmen. He then spoke again.

    "From today onwards you are all the students of the Starwood academy. You will be given the living quarters inside the academy and you can sign up for the sses you think are suitable. If you can¡¯t decide, you can ask your seniors for help. Now except the names on the list all of you can step down from the stage." As soon as he finished arge screen appeared and there are only four names on the list and those names are of Sam, Melisa, Jack and Shawn.

    After only the four of them are left on the stage, Principal looked at the seven members on the stage and then spoke. "Now the prizes will be given for all of you.

    Third ce of the senior team Howard. Five hundred Academic credits.

    Second ce of the senior team Dorman thousand Academic credits.

    First ce of the Senior team Thousand five hundred Academic credits.

    Now moving onto the freshmen team. You guys have three types of rankings. The second-round ranking. The third-round ranking. The overall ranking. I will announce all of them at the same time, since there isn¡¯t much difference.

    Melisa ¨C Second round ranking fourth, third round ranking third, Overall ranking third. A total of 1000 Academic credits.

    Jack ¨C Second round ranking third, third round ranking second, Overall ranking second. A total of 2500 Academic credits.

    Shawn- Second round ranking second, third round ranking third, Overall ranking second, A total of 2500 Academic points." After announcing their names Principal looked at Sam, who is still meditating, with out giving a damn about what is happening. Just as he was about to open his mouth. Someone spoke.

    "Principal, I don¡¯t think he is suitable to enrol in the academy." The one who spoke his Crimson me family head. Principal frowned as he looked at him. At this moment other family heads spoke.

    "I think Crimson me Patriarch spoke truth. I also feel like he is indeed not suitable." Heart field family head said.

    "I agree." The head of the Grey hound family.

    "I think that I already made myself clear about the admissions. You don¡¯t have any say in this matter." The Principal¡¯s voice grew colder. Then the City lord¡¯s voice came.

    "Principal, did you not see, how ruthless he is to his own school mates. He is at such a young age, but he is so vicious. He killed so many members for such trivial thing as insulting. If we were to rear someone like him. It would be akin growing a snake inside our own house. He is not suitable for the academy at all." Principal was about to say something, but suddenly an elder from the academy spoke.

    "Principal, I think what city lord said makes sense. His character doesn¡¯t suit our academy at all."

    Another elder chimed in. "He doesn¡¯t even bat an eyelid when torturing them, He is indeed ruthless."

    "Yes, Principal. You have to think clearly. He is already too ruthless."

    When principal saw these three elders and the looks on the family heads¡¯ faces, he clearly understood the situation. These Elders are allckeys of the noble families.

    "ENOUGH. Do I need to remind you guys who is in charge." The Principal raised his voice as made every elder shut up."

    "Do I have an opinion here?" Suddenly a voice came from the stage. All the spectators looked towards the stage and saw, Sam who was meditating all this time spoke as he opened his eyes and slowly stood up. He stretched his body a little as he looked at all the Family heads and elders. All of them are looking at him as to listen to what he has to say.

    Sam turned towards the Elders and said. "I want to ask a question. Did I break any rules?" As soon as they heard his question all the spectators were dumbfounded. That¡¯s right he indeed didn¡¯t break any rules at all. So, they have no reason to reject his admission. But these Elders doesn¡¯t want to give up yet. One of them spoke.

    "Its not about the rules. You definitelyck character. With your ruthlessness, you will be a tumour to the society, much less an Academy."

    Listening his answer, nobody believed it. But nobody called him out as well. Sam only nodded as he had a pondering expression on his face. Then he looked at the Family heads and asked.

    "what is the problem with you guys?" The family heads were about blow their tops when they heard the nonchnce in his voice. But they kept their cool and the Crimson me family head spoke.

    "You killed our off spring. So, don¡¯t even think about using the academy to escape the consequences."

    "Oh, why can¡¯t I kill them?" Sam asked with same nonchnce. The Crimson me family head felt humiliated. He gritted his teeth and spoke.

    "Carl is of noble birth.

    He has a great future.

    He has yet to see the world, how can he die in the hands of a peasant like you? Even if he tries to kill you, it should be your honour" He spoke as if he is stating a universal truth. Sam suddenly felt speechless as if he looked at the Family heads who are nodding their heads with approval.

    He shook his head and spoke. "Do you know why they died?"

    All the family heads frowned as they looked at him and he continued. "Because you guys rubbed your hypocrisy over them. You should have told them one thing. They can use their status to live in a society, but they can¡¯t live with it in a battle." He paused and continued.

    "Let me give you a damn good reason why I can kill them. Because he provoked with insufficient strength.

    So, what if he is of noble birth. He is weak.

    So, what if he had a great future. He is weak.

    So, what if I am a peasant. He is weak.

    So, what if he had status. He is ultimately still weak. So shut your f.u.c.k.i.n.g mouths and stop showing off your hypocrisy." He then turned towards the Principal and said. "What do you guys decide about the admission?"

    Before the principal could speak, an elder who spoke before beat him to it. "A disrespectful brat like you can only dream about getting an admission. Principal, I think we should teach him a lesson instead. You also heard how he spoke." Sam raised his eyebrows and took a good look at the opposing elders and then the family heads. Then he looked at the Principal and said.

    "I actually don¡¯t like to talk much, but as it is about the academy where the future generations are nurtured, I will make an exception." He paused and let out a sigh. Then he pointed at the elders who spoke out earlier and continued. "An academy which has these people, people who could get their teaching values swayed by the things like power, authority and wealth as teachers. I don¡¯t have much expectations on it that it could nurture any good students. As far as I know, the student¡¯s quality will on depend on the teacher who nurtured them. So, I refuse the admission of this school."

    As soon as he finished, he saw the surprise in everyone¡¯s eyes. Including the principal. Then he saw the looks of the noble family heads, who were a bit surprised but also happy. But before they could get fully excited, Sam did something that truly felt like cold water sshed on their faces.

    Sam took out two badges and started rubbing them with his sleeves, then he pinned both of them on his chest over the coat, then he looked at all the dumbfounded gazes of the spectators before finally stopping at the family heads. He then spoke. "Goodluck killing me. But I have an advice for you. If you guys aren¡¯tpletely confident enough to kill me or if you think there is even a slight possibility that I can escape. You better stay put and do nothing because if you miss, I will make sure that I won¡¯t miss at all." He got off the stage and walked towards the exit. The family heads¡¯ faces are looks to behold. They clearly saw what badges that Sam was wearing. They are the badges of the pseudo rank 2 artisan and the schr artisan. They are now sweating at the fact on how they offended Sam. They even made advances to kill him. They regret it now dearly.

    Looking at Sam¡¯s back, Philip and his friends followed him. City lord and the Crimson me family head looked at Haley and Freya hesitating before leaving with same dumb expressions. But they didn¡¯t dare to stop them. They already are regretting about their actions; they don¡¯t want to offend Sam even more.

    Philip and Others met with Sam. They didn¡¯t know what to speak at all looking at Sam¡¯s expression and just kept on walking together. But after sometime Philip broke the silence.

    "Sam are you sure, you don¡¯t want to join the academy?" He asked in a concerned tone.

    Sam just stayed silent. Actually, he was pretty pissed about the attitude from the teachers from the academy. Looking at his silent face, Philip continued.

    "Actually, this time the academy¡¯s selection has much more than normal assessment. ording to my father there is something big going on at the Count [Noble title] city. That is the reason, Freya, Haley and Paul all got admittedst year even though they are all at the initiation only. My father said the count needs the young talents for something. So, you might miss this opportunity, if you reject the admission."

    At Philip¡¯s words, Sam has a change in expression, but he didn¡¯t say anything. He then looked at them and finally stopped at Haley and Freya. "Just forget about it. Let¡¯s go. I have something to do." He spoke and the rest of them followed silently.

    After sometime, the group of six people came to a ce which made Philip and others look in astonishment. They are in front of an inscription tower. When they saw Sam about to make his way in to the tower. They have a premonition that something about to happen.

    Finally, after two hours they came out side, with Sam in lead. Sam has a red colour badge which has a ¡¯1¡¯ and 9 golden stars below it. Then there is a symbol of brush and scroll and a rune below it. All the people in the tower and the staff are in uproar. Philip and the others are also looking at him in awe, they are still in daze as they followed Sam without even thinking what is going on. Before they knew it, they are at another ce. Then they were dumbstruck again. They were in front of the Formation tower. This time they felt their heartse out of its ce. They looked at Sam as if they were looking at a monster. When theypared themselves to him? Never mind...

    After sometime, Sam has a blue colour badge with same ¡¯1¡¯ and nine stars, but at the bottom it has a formation g. Looking at the badges on his chest Sam felt quite satisfied. But he then took them off and pinned them inside of his coat and then turned towards Philip and others. "Let¡¯s go my treat today." Then he walked towards River side mansion.

    It already became dusk. At the river side mansion Sam and Philip are sitting around the fire. There are several birds over the me. Sam took these bird type beasts from the assessment grounds. As the birds were grilling everyone was silent as they don¡¯t know what to say. They had too many surprises today. First is Sam is way more powerful and second one is Sam is bing a rank 1 inscription master and Formation master.

    Sam looked at their faces and spoke after he sighed. "Ms Freya, Ms. Haley. I am really sorry. I know its notfortable for you guys, but I must say. I can¡¯t just leave your kin, just based on our rtionship. Because I don¡¯t think our rtionship is close enough. So, if you want to stay away from me. I won¡¯t stop you. We could act as strangers." As soon as Sam spoke both Haley and Freya froze for a moment then Freya spoke.

    "You don¡¯t have to apologise. Actually, me and Carl aren¡¯t close anyway. He is an illegitimate child of my father and we are not any good terms. In fact, I hate him to the guts. It¡¯s just that I was afraid, you will hate me for what my family did." As soon as Freya finished, Haley also said.

    "I also don¡¯t have anything to do with what happened. Even Harry is also son of a concubine. You don¡¯t have to apologise." She paused and then took a deep breath and then looked at Freya. Freya also met her gaze and they both nodded and turned towards Sam again as Haley continued.

    "Actually, we are the one who should apologise for what our families did. We also have a favour to ask. We hope you can be lenient if our families don¡¯t provoke you further." They both looked at him with a pleading gaze. They were both afraid. Because, with Sam¡¯s status as an Artisan, Inscription master and a Formation master, all he need is to say a word and make some promises, then there would be a lot of individual cultivators, that are willing to take revenge for him. That is why they are pleading him. Sam then nodded and didn¡¯t say anything. They then had small talk as they ate the grilled meat peacefully.

    Meanwhile many people in the city are in uproar as the news about Sam rejecting the admission and his status as an Artisan spread among the city. Then they heard another shocking news, after leaving the exam site, Sam went to Inscription tower and the formation tower and passed the rank 1 exam. The Family heads in particr are restless. They wanted to make a visit andpromise. But they don¡¯t know how they should proceed. There is another person who is also restless now. That is the Principal of the Academy.

    He is already a little regretful, about Sam not taking the admission. Now that he heard that Sam is also an inscription master and Formation master, he immediately lost his cool. "I have to action immediately. Otherwise, the losses... I can¡¯t let him go." He muttered as he walked outside.

 Chapter 34: 100,000

    Sam was eating along with others at the riverside, when he saw a middle-aged man approaching them. When he looked at him, he felt quite surprised, not only him even Philip and others also felt surprised. Because, the person who came is none other than the principal of the Starwood academy.

    Principal has an awkward expression when he saw Philip and others eating together with Sam as he realized he came at a wrong time. After all, who would like to be disturbed while eating. Looking at his awkward expression, Philip and others exchanged nces as and stood simultaneously.

    "We will look for you tomorrow Sam. Good Bye." They bid farewell and left Sam and the Principal alone. After they left, Sam stood up and invited the principal inside the mansion and took a seat. Then he finally spoke.

    "For what do I owe the visit of the respectable Principal?" He asked with a calm voice. Principal hesitated a little and then finally spoke.

    "I want you join the Academy." As soon as he heard the words, even though he expected it Sam still felt quite surprised and confused. Because, no matter how muchbat prowess or talent he had, he is still an Acolyte. But the Principal is at same level of the City lord himself. So, it is surprising that he would humble himself bying here to invite him personally. He then asked with same nonchnt expression. "Why?"

    Principal again hesitated a little. After a brief silence he seemed to made up his mind, he said. "Actually, if it was normal time, I wouldn¡¯t bother to ask you to join the academy, but this time this is quite serious. You might and might not know, this year in a few days we have to send a batch of young talents to the Count city as the count is looking for young talents." Hearing this Sam nodded. He indeed knew this as he heard it from Philip. The Principal continued.

    "But there is more to it than what meets the eye. The one who is looking for the new talents is not Count but the Emperor himself." At this revtion Sam took a deep breath. The Emperor is looking for talents even this remote ce. He has only one question in mind. ¡¯Why?¡¯ As if sensing the question, the Principal said,

    "I also don¡¯t know why he is looking for young talents. But the search is happening around the whole Empire. That means the whole Western continent. The main criterion for the selection is not the power but the potential and talent. The news is not privy to the noble families of the city. Even the Count himself didn¡¯t know it. All he knew is that the Duke has asked him to look for talents. I only have this info because, my rtive is quite powerful and have notable influence." The Principal paused again and looked at Sam. He wants to see if Sam gets tempted by the news, but he was disappointed by that same calm expression. Then he heaved a long sigh and continued.

    "All the cream of the crop talents will be gathered due to this selection process at the Royal capital in three years. Precisely, for the Princess¡¯ eighteenth birthday. There will be a tournament on that day and those who performed well will be rewarded. That is why I want you to enrol the academy and I will send you to Count city. This will be a great opportunity." He said and looked at Sam¡¯s eyes only to see a tranquil expression. There is no change at all. Under that gaze Principal finally gave in and said.

    "Actually, if the candidates do better, the one who selected will benefit as well. The Starwood academy will be given more resources and opportunities." Finally, Sam nodded. He didn¡¯t believe one bit that the Principal only came here so that he wants to help Sam get the opportunity. How could there be something so good in this world. He thought for sometime and asked.

    "You want me to go on behalf of the Starwood Academy so that you could benefit from it?"

    The Principal nodded.

    "So, you want to offend the Noble families here and even the city lord?" Sam asked again.

    "What is there to offend them? More like they don¡¯t want to offend you. Maybe they might be some bigshots in the city. But they are all subordinates of the Count. If the Count knew that they offended someone with your talent in cultivation as well as the professions, he mighte over himself and deal with them. They might even visit you by tomorrow morning to make amends to your rtionship." Principal sneered as soon as he thought of the noble families.

    "Okay then. 100,000 spirit stones." Sam spoke and Principal froze in shock. ¡¯Did he hear it clearly? 100,000 spirit stones. Why don¡¯t you go and rob someone?¡¯ Just as he was about to reject the idea, Sam spoke again.

    "What don¡¯t want to pay? Okay then. I will make a visit to the Mountainke city and the Misty River city tomorrow and see if they want to pay." As soon as he heard this, the Principal wanted to greet Sam¡¯s eighteen generations in a single breath. ¡¯Damn it, I was being too na?ve. I really thought of him as a fifteen-year-old and told him everything and now he is fleecing him clean. He gritted his teeth and reluctantly nodded.

    "Okay the, you may leave. I will report to school tomorrow." Sam bid farewell. The Principal cursed in his heart as he left the mansion.

    After sometime Sam took out the weapon he used to kill Carl and others and had a satisfied smile on his face. The weapon worked exactly as he thought it would work. His design didn¡¯t let him down at all. His weapon has made so many people think on how it works as it can transform in to two modes. The answer is actually pretty simple. Sam used the most basic of the fluid mechanicws and that is Pascal¡¯sw. He just used the principle of the Pascal¡¯sw, which is that the pressure is equal in all directions. This is generally used in brakes of vehicles in modern earth as there are material and fluid constraints to use them on higher levels. But here Sam used the Blood of the beasts as fluid andpressed it with the pistons made by the Golden blood tiger bones. This is one of the toughest rank 2 materials. What he did is to simply ce the pistons andpress the fluid and ce the bocks in the position. The wedges are the locks which are making them to stay still. As soon as he applied more force on the wedges by moving the Double S symbol, the weapon would expand.

    Sam ced the weapon on the table in front of him and then took out a sharp golden object. It is one of the ws of the golden blood tiger. He held one of the nails and started carving on the weapon. After he is done, he lifted it up and looked at the names that he wrote. There is one word on the each of the blocks. On one side, the word ¡¯Golden¡¯ is written and on the other side ¡¯Crescent¡¯ is written. Sam nodded in satisfaction as he ced the weapon in the storage. This is the first weapon he created in this world. Just when he entered the Bedroom, he saw a crow enter from the window. At first, he thought it was Yanwu, but soon he realized it was not. Just as he was about to throw it away, he felt a familiar presence and observed the crow closely. There was something tied to the leg of the crow. It was a small piece of ck cloth. Sam took the crow in his hands and unwrapped the ck cloth. Then he saw a golden feather as well as note.

    He immediately recognised the golden feather. It belongs to Yanwu. Then with a puzzled gaze, he opened the note and then read it.

    ¡¯Sam, this is Yanwu. Right now, I am in middle of something crucial and cannote to you for the time being. I am sending this note to inform you that, I won¡¯t be able to make it in the ten days¡¯ time. I will be back as soon as possible, but if possible, make a trip to the "Falcon cliff city". I just wanted to say that you shouldn¡¯t have to worry about me. I am safe here. Good bye.¡¯ Sam frowned as soon as he finished reading the note. He was worried a bit. Because, someone who could write a note, definitely has to be a human and as far as Sam know, no human can really control the greed of having a saint beast like the Golden sun crow as a pet. Sam didn¡¯t believe humans that much. So, he had to make a trip. But before that he has to find out how to go there. As he thought, he just wanted to go out to fish out info from Philip. But from the dark sky, he abandoned the idea and went to bed. He had to take some rest after all that he had done in the assessment.

    Next day morning. Philip made his way to Sam¡¯s mansion early in the morning. The rest didn¡¯te because, they had to prepare for the first day of school after the vacation. But, does that mean he doesn¡¯t have anything to prepare? Absolutely not. But there are some advantages he possesses as an Elder brother. He took his time slowly walking towards Sam¡¯s mansion, mainly because of the gossip among the crowd. Everyone is talking about the Principal¡¯s visit to Sam¡¯s mansion. He was trying to get some details and when he finally got the news, he just stood on the spot for a few seconds.

    The news is that Sam epted the invitation of principal to join the academy. Then he hurriedly ran over to the mansion and saw Sam slowly walking outside. He directly blocked his way and questioned.

    "You joined the academy?"

    "How do you know?" Sam frowned. He and Principal should be the only ones who knew it right? Why did Philip have this knowledge?

    "What do you mean, how do I know? Everyone in the city is talking about it. Come on, tell me. Why did you change your mind?"

    "Doesn¡¯t matter. Let us go." Sam directly ignored the question and started walking as Philip followed him, seemingly not willing to give up at all.

    After walking for a while, they finally arrived at the academy. Sam suddenly remembered something and asked.

    "Do you know where Falcon Cliff city is?" Philip stopped and asked.

    "Why?"

    "Nothing. Just tell me."

    "It is the Count city which our city is under control of. What business do you have there?"

    "Nothing much. I just want to visit it once." The conversation ended. Then both of them walked inside the academy.

    Philip left Sam and walked towards his own amodation. Sam went to the ce all the freshmen gathered. When the rest of the freshmen saw him all of them maintained a certain distance. But they cast him weird nces as they whispered. But he didn¡¯t think much of it. Soon some people made their way towards him. They are Jack and Shawn. Melisa is looking at him from a far seemingly hesitating toe or not.

    "Hello, Sam." Jack greeted him. Sam nodded and looked at Shawn who had an awkward expression on his face.

    Shawn now understood why Sam kicked his butt so many times. Because he said that he would kick Sam¡¯s butt before with Jack. But at that time, he really didn¡¯t know who Sam is and in a moment of impulse he made some boasts and as a result, he is still feeling sore in the butt. After all, Sam heard that words loud and clear.

    Jack didn¡¯t care about his friend¡¯s awkward situation and spoke to Sam.

    "I want you to make me a weapon." He asked Sam directly. Sam lifted his brow feeling a little amused.

    "What kind?"

    "A sword. I will provide the material."

    "It would be expensive."

    "How much?"

    "It would depend on your requirements. But rest assured that it would be a bomb. Are you sure you want me to make it?" Sam asked again with a smile.

    "I am sure. About the price. We can discusster." The conversation ended. Shawn looked at the two who are treating him like thin air and gritted his teeth. Just as he was about to say something, Principal came. He could only take it lying down.

    "Wee to all the freshmen. I won¡¯t waste the time with pleasantries. I will make quick. First of all. I apologize to Mr. Sam who was treated unfairly yesterday. I have already dismissed the elders from their position. So, you don¡¯t have to worry about them causing trouble." As soon as he finished the freshmen including Sam were all surprised. Now, all of them understood why Sam came to Academy.

    Principal didn¡¯t seem to care about anything and continued. There are mainly four areas in the school. The testing grounds, which you are not allowed to ess. The training grounds which you are have full ess to. The teaching area and finally the student amodations. Other than these four areas there are some important buildings which are the library, the mission hall, the credit market. In this academy, everything would depend on the academic credits. You can buy resources through credit shop and you can enrol into the courses you like using the credits. The Credits are not only valuable in this academy but also in any other academy in the whole of the western continent. So, please use your credits wisely. In some time, you will be given the identity tokens which will also be the storage of your credit cards. Initially, you will all be given 10 credits each and you can use them to enrol in basic courses and any more than that you have to earn them yourselves. You can graduate from the academy as long as you break through to the novice stage or you can stay here until you earn 50,000 credits. If you earn 50000 credits you can directly enter the Academy in the Count city to further cultivate. I hope you will make use of time spent in the academy worth it as you will be removed from the academy in four years even you are nor graduated. I wish you best of luck. The senior student will take it from here." He finished and left without turning back.

    He didn¡¯t spare Sam an extra nce. After all, he still owes him a 100,000 spirit stones. Soon, a senior in the academy uniform came. He seems to be of third year as there are three-star marks embroidered on chest of the uniform. He first distributed some cards which are silver in colour.

    "These are the identity cards for you. Inject your spiritual sense and mark it, just like how you would do with a spatial storage. After marking it when ever you send a wisp of spiritual energy it will disy your name and the amount of credits you have." The senior exined.

    Many freshmen including Sam did what senior said and looked at the features. Sam has a total of 4500 credits in his card. He was quite satisfied with it. After exining how to transfer the credits which is to tap with another card and direct the number of credits with your will, the senior guided them to the student amodation. Sam, followed and finally found his amodation. It is a simple stone house simr to the one he had in the Lava rock vige. Sam didn¡¯t care much about it and went inside. There were already uniforms prepared inside. He tried it and felt that it felt that it fit perfectly. He was quite puzzled as how they knew his measurements. He didn¡¯t dwell on his thoughts and came out of the house and walked towards the teaching building along with other freshmen.

    By the time he came to the teaching building there are already a lot of freshmen browsing through a big notice-board. That is the list of the teachers and the type of courses they teach along with the cost of course. Sam just took a look and didn¡¯t take another nce. He then went to the library.

    The students were discussing on which course they should take and they didn¡¯t take notice of him. But there is a person in elder robes watching Sam¡¯s every movement. Sam slowly made his way to library. When he looked at therge section of racks and books, he felt quite surprised as he didn¡¯t expect the academy in a rural city like this would have this amount of knowledge reserve. Then Sam slowly walked towards all the sections and stopped at a rack named ¡¯Artisan Section¡¯. Sam came to this section, not because he wants to learn Artisan techniques, but rather he wants to know about the Artisans of this world. Because, the word Artisan has a different meaning in this world from his original world as there are only two types, weapon Artisan and Schr Artisan. So, that is why Sam is curious about this. Sam took a book titled ¡¯Who is an Artisan?¡¯ and sat at an empty table. When he looked around, he saw that the number of people is onplete contrast with the number of books. He opened the book and started reading. After a few hours Sam finally had his answers.

    The word Artisan in this world is more or less same as that of his original world. It is just that many people didn¡¯t know about this. ording to the book, there are many types of Artisans. Weapon Artisan and schr Artisan are only two of them. They are tailor artisan, Painter artisan, Golem artisan, Wood Artisan, Puppet Artisan, Jeweller Artisan, Architecture Artisan etc. Then why didn¡¯t the Artisan tower have these categories?

    Actually, they do. It is just that in such a long time there are no other artisans in this area that people forgot about them and the staff at the Artisan tower also got used to it. That¡¯s it. In fact, even in the count city Artisan tower he can find many other types of Artisan.

    Sam looked at the book and had a mischievous smile on his face.

 Chapter 35: Black Meteorite Sand

    After Sam was done with the book in the library, he walked back to the amodation, but he was blocked by someone at the entrance. He looked at the person who blocked him and he didn¡¯t recognise him at all. So, he just ignored him and went around him.

    "Stop right there." The person who blocked him shouted, but Sam didn¡¯t even care at all.

    "If you don¡¯t stop right now, you are going to regret it." He shouted again and again didn¡¯t get anything in response other than the door mming sound. He just gritted his teeth and turned around cursing under his breath.

    Sam entered the Divine dimension and was now in library. He walked through the racks and then finally halted in front of the rack. The rack consisted of several divine wills. This the ore encyclopaedia. The rack consisted of the divine wills which have information about the ores avable in the world. This info includes the material properties, rank of the material and as well as the avability of the material etc. Sam absorbed the divine will and then sat cross legged to digest the information.

    Meanwhile at the amodations of the third-year students, the guy who blocked Sam earlier is standing in front of another third-year student obediently and said.

    "He is too over-bearing boss. He didn¡¯t even bother to listen what I have to say and just treated me as if I was thin air. He is way too arrogant."

    "So, what if he was adept in various professions, does he not know who my father is? My father is the rank 2 Pill master. Does he really think that the Artisan and Pill master are same? Pill master has contacts with all types of power houses, healers and anything that had to do with the medicine. I think he doesn¡¯t know what is good for him. Watch over him and tell me when he gets out of the house. I will teach him some manners myself." The guy snorted as he spoke in an irritating manner. Theckey who reported the news just stayed silent as he slowly made his way out. Then he spoke in under his breath. "This freshman is going to have a hard time. Last time this jerk Albert used his father¡¯s status and almost ruined a girl¡¯s life and now he is trying to push around a genius freshman."

    At this moment the guy named Albert who bragged about his father being a Pill master is thinking about how to make use of Sam. He doesn¡¯t know what his father might actually think if he knew this.

    Just like in Artisan tower, the Pharmaceutical tower also has multiple professions and they are Pill master, Healer and the Potion master. Since, these guys usually deal with the medicine and health of the cultivators they really have a certain high standing in the society than the other professions. But this time Albert might have foolishly estimated this value to be too high. As for why.....

    Next day morning. Sam finally came out from the Dimension. He spent almost eight hours¡¯ worth of time of outside world in the tower and that means he spent more than three days inside the tower only digesting the information. He has a slight head ache as he walked out to the living room. Just then someone came to his house and that is none other than the Principal of the Academy. Sam looked at him a little surprised as he didn¡¯t expect him toe this early.

    "Honourable Principal, do you not know what privacy is?"

    "The door is not locked." The Principal replied expressionlessly and made himselffortable as he sat on a chair. Sam walked over and sat on a chair opposite to him and said.

    "Anyway, what do you want that you came early this morning?" Sam asked directly.

    "Do you have any manners? Can¡¯t you be more respectful towards the academy principal?" The principal was displeased by Sam¡¯s behaviour. Sam raised an eyebrow and said in nonchnt tone.

    "I am not here to study. I am here only as part of the business deal. You didn¡¯t even uphold your side of the deal even after a day is passed since Ist visited the academy and you have gall to ask manners from me using your status. Where are my spirit stones? We can talk about manners after you made the payment." Sam didn¡¯t leave any face and directly asked for payment.

    Principal felt his eyebrows twitching. "You know, any student will be honoured that I came to their ce and you are talking like this. Are we going to have a proper conversation?"

    "We can talk after you pay up." Sam didn¡¯t budge. He really didn¡¯t want to have a conversation with this man. Because, he knew that the Principal himself is the one who leaked the info of him joining the academy. Why was he so sure? Because, the Principal is the strongest of all people in the city and who dares to spy on him to eaves drop the conversation much less leak it to public.

    Then Why did he do it? Simple. He just wanted to make whole city known as soon as Sam agreed to make sure that he didn¡¯t go back on his words. A second rank Artisan is going back on his words. How shameful would that be?

    "I will pay you up afterwards. First, I want to talk to you about something. In two weeks, we are going to the Count city which is the ¡¯Falcon Cliff City¡¯. I want you to prepare everything and get ready to go. You may note back for a while if you get selected."

    "Okay. What else?"

    "Well, I want to have a business deal with you"

    "Oh, what do you want?" Sam became alert as soon as he heard the words business. Principal really wanted to bash up his head as soon as he saw Sam¡¯s change in attitude.

    "I want a rank 2 weapon made by you." Sam raised his eyebrow as he looked at him.

    "Are you sure?"

    "what do you mean ¡¯are you sure¡¯? the principal is starting to get irritated.

    "I am expensive."

    "How much? I need a spear made of Fire steel. I will provide the material and you only have to make it."

    "Spear with fire steel?" Sam started to think and he finally gave a reply. "10,000 spirit stones." Principal immediately became angry.

    "Do you really think I am stupid. How can a spear cost that much which is at rank 2? And I am giving you the materials."

    "That¡¯s my price. If you don¡¯t it you don¡¯t have to agree."

    "Hmph. Ii would be a fool to agree." He then stood up and turned towards the door and started walking. Just before he was about to open the door, he turned back and said.

    "In two weeks¡¯, time, the team will be moving to ¡¯Falcon Cliff city¡¯. There will be ten members in the team and you are already one of them. The rest of the team will be decided in a few days. Get ready before the time is up." He finished and opened the door, just before he was about to step outside.

    "Wait." Sam called him from behind. Principal has a smug smile as he turned around. He really wanted to give Sam a hard time now that he has something to ask. But as soon as he heard the next words, he immediately wanted to hit himself.

    "You haven¡¯t paid me yet." Sam said as he stretched his hand and demanded. Principal gritted his teeth and took out a spatial ring and tossed it towards Sam. Then he turned around and left. He really just wants to get out of this ce right now.

    Sam counted the spirit stones with a satisfied expression. Then he turned towards another room and shouted. You cane out now. Then Philip along with Marvin came out.

    They both had embarrassed expressions. They both came early in the morning and saw that Sam is not in his bed room. So, they went into another room to look for him and then they heard someoneing in. When they saw it was principal, they thought something serious happened and were afraid, then they saw Sam suddenlye out of the room and felt shocked. They don¡¯t know how Sam came from the room. After some thinking they left the thought on the back of their minds and was waiting for principal to leave in order to y a prank on Sam. They really wanted to see this serious guy getting fl.u.s.tered once. But they didn¡¯t expect Sam to sense them. So, they just came outside and gave an awkward smile.

    Then as though he remembered something Philip spoke. "Sam, so you came to school because, the Principal hired you to participate in the Count city." He was quite surprised when he heard this. After all, most people would die for the opportunity and here Sam is extorting money to take the opportunity. He really wants know how courageous Sam could be.

    "Leave the matter alone. How long is there for the next monthly auction of your family?" Sam ignored Philip¡¯s question and directly asked him.

    "Well, in one week. Why are you asking?" Philip replied.

    "I have something to sell this time." Sam replied as he started thinking. Just then another person came inside the house. This time it is Jack and Shawn is not with him this time. Sam gestured him to sit down and turned towards Philip and Marvin.

    "You better be careful. I heard that Albert has eyes on you. His father is a pill master and he is used to bully the juniors. He might try to get some benefits from you since you are an Artisan. So, you might want to stay away from him. He is after all the son of the Pharmaceutical tower head. Even though his father has to give face to you since you are of simr ranks, this Albert is stupid and is still in a delusion that his father has higher status than you. He is at novice stage. That is why I am warning you. We will take our leave then." Philip said as he stood up and started walking along with Marvin.

    When Sam heard of the Albert guy, he really wasn¡¯t afraid. After all, even though the rank 2 Artisans have to give face to rank 2 Pill masters and Healers, Sam didn¡¯t have to do that. Because his age is of key factor. How old is Sam? 15. How old are the rank 2 Artisans? So, the respect is not for Sam¡¯s rank rather it was to his potential. Not only that. What is Sam¡¯s cultivation level? Level 3 Acolyte. At this stage normal cultivators will only have an apprentice level in any profession because, they don¡¯t dare to attempt the exam until they are atte stage. That is because at thete stage, the chances are high to pass as the energy level is high. Sam quickly came out of his thoughts and then looked at Jack who sat there and looking at him.

    "So, what kind of sword do you want?"

    "First take a look at the material." Jack said and then took out arge leather bag and ced in front of Sam. Then he opened the pouch and showed the material.

    Sam was quite surprised to see the material as he saw the huge amount of ck metallic sand and touched it to inspect it. "ck meteorite sand" Sam said unconsciously. Jack nodded as he smiled.

    "It is indeed the ck meteorite sand." Sam was surprised after hearing the confirmation. The ck meteorite sand is one of the best materials that are avable to make a weapon and that is not the best part. The best part is that the sand doesn¡¯t have a specific rank. Not only this any meteorite sand doesn¡¯t have a specific rank. Because the rank of the material increases as the time passed. The meteorite sand starts at rank 1 and increases its rank as it absorbs the spiritual energy.

    Even after it was forged into a weapon or articraft, it would improve along with the cultivator who formed a bond with it. If there is no cultivator particrly supplying the spiritual energy the process would be slow but that would not stop it from improving and even this is not the main part, the main advantage is that anything that is made of the meteorite sand will nurture a spirit after it was nurtured to a certain level. The weapons or articrafts with spirit are very powerful than any weapon of the same rank. That is the reason the meteorite sands are highly sought after particrly when they are in lowest stage. Because if they are at the lowest stage cultivators can refine them with their own spiritual energy until they attain spirit which will make the bond between weapon easier.

    If anyone from knew that Jack is showing the ck meteorite sand to Sam, then there would be chaos in the whole Starwood city. His status as the pseudo rank 2 Artisan genius, as youngest inscription master will not be of any help at all. The warriors and Artisans would go to any means to get their hands on this material.

    Now, this material is in hands of an Acolyte. He felt chills just thinking of the consequences. He looked at Jack and didn¡¯t speak anything. After a few moments of silence, Jack spoke up.

    "I know it would be dangerous task but I think you are the only one suitable to do this. I can¡¯t trust anyone to keep the secret of the valuable material."

    "You trust me?" Sam asked with a surprised expression. After all, they only knew each other for two days and only spent less than 12 hours together. It is hard to trust a human in this short time. At least, Sam believed he can¡¯t trust someone in that short time frame.

    Jack shook his head and said. "I don¡¯t trust you, but I trust my intuition. My intuition is telling me that you are a guy who can be trusted to make a deal." Sam just nodded his head and didn¡¯t speak at all. Then after some silence he spoke. "what is the deal?"

    "You make the best sword you can make with your current abilities and I will pay you."

    "what is the payment then?"

    "The rest of the ck meteorite sand is yours." As soon as he finished speak, the air around seemed to turn still. The words repeated themselves in Sam¡¯s head. The payment is not what he expected.

    "Are you sure?" Sam asked to confirm he didn¡¯t hear it wrong. Jack nodded and said.

    "I don¡¯t have any use for the sand right now. This will only be a burden for me. The price is not only for the processing but also for the secret you have to maintain in order to not implicate us."

    Sam pondered for a while after Jack finished his words. He is not pondering whether to ept the deal or not. He is pondering on what to do with the remaining sand. He smiled and stood up. He looked at Jack and said.

    "I will do it. But this is not the right ce. We have to do it in the most secret ce. Let¡¯s go." Sam said as he became energetic. He really can do a lot of things with the meteorite sand. So, he is quite enthusiastic to work on it as soon as possible.

    Soon both of them came to the Artisan tower. Sam met with the tower head.

    "Are my equipment ready?" Sam asked as soon as they met. Tower head¡¯s smile froze momentarily. He just wanted to make some small talk with Sam but the other party is not even giving a chance. He felt helpless and answered.

    "They are ready a long time ago. Actually, I wanted to send them tomorrow itself, but when I heard that Principal came to your mansion, I thought it would be inappropriate."

    "Okay then, send everything now. Install it by afternoon. I have something urgent." Sam said and without waiting for any reply left with Jack after he bought a log of high-quality Starwood.

    Both Sam and Jack arrived at the mansion and after sometimeter, the staff from the Artisan tower came and Sam showed an empty room in the ground floor to them and instructed how to install them in the room and went back to sit with Jack.

    He took out the Starwood and took out a dagger. He started carving as Jack observed him with interest.

 Chapter 36: Sam the Swordsmith

    Sam carved the wood until the instation is done. Jack just watched with interest. Both of them didn¡¯t utter a single word at all. Finally, after all the staff was gone Sam went to the forging room as Jack followed him.

    "Would you mind, if I leave my signature?" Sam asked Jack as both of them walked.

    "Okay." Jack replied seemingly not minding at all. Soon they entered the room.

    The room was full of equipment needed for forging and there is a lot of space left even after the equipment was fully installed. Sam went through all the equipment as he examined them closely. Then he took out some formation gs and proceeded toy a formation and took out some fire element spirit stones andid them at the formation nodes. Soon the room was filled with fire elemental spiritual energy. Jack just watched the whole process without interrupting. He really wanted to see what gave Sam, the edge above others to be a rank 2 weapon artisan with such cultivation level.

    After the formation is done, Sam took out the soil which he used at the Artisan examination and started preparing a soil mould for a pattern he made. It looked rectangr and it got a small vertical slit in it. After he finished making the mould, he walked back to the cauldron and then took the ck Meteorite sand. He poured a little amount in it and started melting it with the golden mes. Jack frowned as he looked at the small amount of the ore but didn¡¯tment on it. He just continued to observe as Sam just continued on working with it.

    After more than an hour the ck meteorite sand started melting and soon turned in to a liquid. Sam poured the liquid in the mould and put the cauldron back into its ce. He then took a deep breath and took out some threads out of his storage. These are threads made by the silk of the Heaven Spirit silk moth. This is of neutral spiritual energy property. He took out them and started picking out some of the same length which is around two metres. He ced all the threads he picked to the side and stored the remaining away.

    He moved to the cauldron again and poured another small amount of ck meteorite sand. This time the amount is even lesser than the previous time. He started melting it and after the ore turned intoplete liquid, he picked up one thread from the side and dipped itpletely inside the pool of molten metal. After the threadpletely soaked inside the molten metal pool. He reached out his fingers which are currently under Elemental fusion and picked up the thread by holding the tip carefully and with other hand he squeezed the thread and went through the whole length squeezing the dripping liquid metal.

    *Gasp* Jack took a deep breath as he steadies himself looking at the scene. After all, it is not easy even for the fire elemental mages to touch the molten metal, but Sam did it without even a change of his expression. He waspletely surprised. Of course, he would be because he didn¡¯t know that Sam is using elemental fusion.

    Sam didn¡¯t seem to care about what thoughts are going through Jack¡¯s mind, he ispletely concentrated on the process as dipped each thread and squeezed them out. He left all the threads to the side and let them cool down.

    Sam then pored the soil which he used to make a mould all over the empty ground and ttened it Now the floor is like it was made of the soil itself. He built the boundaries all around the soil.

    He took out the bag of ck Meteorite sand again and this time he poured one-third of the bag. Even that amount is a lot as the bag seemed to carry at least thirty kilograms of Sand. He poured sand and started melting it. This time he is not directly using the spirtual energy in his body, rather he is manipting the fire spiritual energy around which is due to the formation heid earlier.

    He did so because he didn¡¯t have sufficient energy to melt all the metal as the ck meteorite is harder to process the Golden Blood tiger bones. Time passed as Sam kept on increasing the temperature of the big lump of metal sand and the sun set by the time it started showing signs of melting. Soon, it turned dark and the metal started melting and by the time it is on vergepletely turning into fine liquid Sam started increasing the heat. By this time, Sam already turned pale as his vest was soaked in sweat. He cursed himself for not taking it off earlier. After the metal finally turned into a pool of liquid, he finally stopped the me. By this time the spiritual energy obtained from the formationpletely depleted and Sam is also on hisst legs. He quickly moved and poured the molten metal on the soil floor evenly all over like a thin film.

    After pouring it he put the cauldron back in its ce took out some fire spirit stones and started absorbing spiritual energy. After an hour or so, Sam opened his eyes and walked towards the thin liquid film which by now almost solidified but is still very hot.

    His hands glowed in golden light as elemental fusion took ce, he then folded the metal sheet by exactly half and took a hammer as he started hammering it as he put the sheet on the huge anvil.

    Sam right now is using an old technique used by Japanese swordsmith on the modern earth. He doesn¡¯t know if there are people who knew this technique in this world as there are some mythologies that are popr in the world are real here. But he learnt this technique with great difficulty as he was curious about this process. He went to great lengths in his previous life to get a hold on thest remaining old swordsmith who know the process. Generally, this method is used to make Japanese des like katana and wakizashi, tsurugi etc. But after learning this technique he tried and implemented with normal swords and it worked with some skill. So, he is using the same technique which he improved on.

    In this process the de is made by folding the metalyer byyer and hammering it as it get heated again and again.

    Sam right now, is applying heat with one hand and hammered it with the other hand and he folded it in the middle. Theyers are no where to be seen as he hammered it with brute force and technique. In the wide room of the mansion at the quite riverside only the sounds of metal hitting metal can be heard as the floor tremored.

    Jack just saw as Sam using all his strength to beat the metal into shape, with a new found respect in his eyes. He understood why Sam is proud of himself. He also understood why Sam got an edge over others, his techniques are unconventional, his way of doing things are different. Generally, many Artisans will handover the overly physicalbour to other apprentices or assistance when they make weapons for others. Even if they did do it, they will think of the easiest and efficient way to do it. After all, with their status who will question that their method is wrong other than the higher rank artisan who can but chose to stay silent as they felt that it is beneath them to interact with the lower rank ones.

    But Sam is not behaving like that. His seriousness made him think of the request he made. ¡¯I want you make the best sword you can.¡¯ And judging from the scenario, Sam is indeed doing it. Jack looked at Sam thinking that his intuition was right.

    Jack was right. Sam is trying to make the best sword he can as he made the final two folds and the de finally took the shape. Sam hammered the unevenness as he made the de endure the beating of its life. After an hour of hammering the de in various frequencies. Sam lifted the de. He took out a big ss bottle which is full of beast blood he collected in the testing grounds and then poured all over the de evenly. The Blood evaporated with a bloody smell and red vapours as soon as it hit the de. Sam is using the blood in order to maintain reduce the heat slowly instead of doing it directly with water because he was afraid it might crack and that is why he used the blood which also contains a certain amount of spiritual energy. After the vapour is gone, Jack finally got to take a clear look at the de. The sword has a straight edge one side and the other edge is also parallel to it except that when it reached the end, it converged into a curve as it created a point of the sword.

    The ck colour was giving of slight glint under the illuminating device in the room. Sam looked at the blood with a satisfied smile. He then ced the de carefully on the anvil and went back to the mould he made earlier at the start of the process. He copsed the mould and took out a ck metallic object. This is the handle. He cleared the dirt off of the handle and went to the grind stone as he started. The handle is circr cross section which gradually decreased from the bottom. At the junction there is aplex shape Sam came up in random to make it look better on one side and on the other side there is the double S symbol.

    Sam finished grinding the handle and then heated the slit. He took the de into his hands and then heated the pointed protrusion on the bottom of the de which should go into the handle. He heated the protrusion into the red-hot condition where the fusion of the metals is possible.

    After joining the handle, he started grinding the de slowly and smoothly, with a faint smile on his face. Jack observed the scene and he felt dazed. Sam didn¡¯t look like he is grinding a sword instead he was like a parent grooming a child. He sharpened the de with utmost precision and care as the de slowly became sharper while leaving behind the metal powder.

    Slowly, the night became deeper and deeper and Sam didn¡¯t seem to notice at all. If any other Artisan of same rank was in his ce, he would have already fainted. But Sam didn¡¯t seem to know the fatigue at all as he worked on the sword. When he was finally done, the dawn is only an hour away.

    Jack looked at the de which is giving of a sharp aura, just as he was about to reach out Sam gestured him to stop. Under his puzzled gaze, Sam took the sword and picked up the threads he left to cool down. Then only Jack remembered the threads which are dipped inside the molten metal. The threads are now inplete ck colour and just as Jack thought that they became solid wires, he saw them falling like an actual thread when Sam picked them up. Jack was puzzled but Sam was not.

    Because, he used a technique that was widely used in the Indian traditional textiles. In India, particrly in Kancheepuram of Tamilnadu of south India is quite famous for the traditional Indian saree. They use a technique in which gold is used along with the traditional silk to make gold threads from which they make sarees which are valuable and they generally make them for custom orders or for the offering for the goddess.

    Sam used the same technique to make these threads and of course he is not going to exin it to Jack. He took the threads and then sat down as he ced the sword in hisp. Then he took one thread and then started rolling it over the handle and by the time the whole handle was done, there is only small amount of thread. Sam stood up as he felt the sword all over with a satisfied smile. He then infused his spiritual energy and then swung the sword over the anvil. The sword keened as it tore through the air and directly passed through the anvil. After a few seconds of silence, the upper part of the anvil slid over and fell down. The sword gleamed as the sun rose and a ray of light hit the de. The de shone as if showing its magnificence as he lifted the sword high in the air.

    Sam smiled and slowly fainted on the spot. Jack quickly reacted as he caught him and took the sword from his hand. He felt a weird sensation as he held the sword. The sword looked like it was a ruler that was above all the other weapons. When he tried to move it, he felt a faint resistance from it.

    He looked at Sam with a deep admiration and only saw a satisfied smile on his face as he fell asleep.

 Chapter 37: Sam the Tailor II

    Jack carried Sam to his room andid him on his bed and came downstairs. He looked at the ck sword that was ced on the table. He took the sword and caressed each and every part of it carefully feeling the expert craftsman ship and the superior auraing from the sword. The sword in total is a little less than three-foot-long and the de itself is a little bit more than two foot. It is a single edges de which is fine and sharp. He can even feel the aura emanated by the beast blood used to quench it.

    ck sword is exquisite that a single look and he wants to wield it and don¡¯t want to put it down. He tried to swing the sword and then he felt the slight resistance. The sword is not heavy. It is around 12 kgs. But for the cultivators it was light like a feather. But the ck meteorite weapon has a special property that the density of the metal increases as it increases in rank further. Now that it is only at rank 2 it is not that heavy.

    Time slowly passed and Jack just held the sword and tried to wield it to getfortable with it and slowly the resistance started fading. After a long time, a few hours away from the noon, Jack heard the foot steps from the stairs and he saw Sam walking down the stairs with his usual calm expression. He came down and took a seat and gestured Jack to take a seat.

    Both of them sat there for a few moments maintaining the silence. Sam finally spoke.

    "Is it good enough?" Sam asked as he looked at the Sword. Jack also took a loot at it and felt its sharp edge, then he looked at Sam and said.

    "It is more than what I could ask for."

    "Are you sure, you want to give the rest of the ck Meteorite Sand to me?" Sam asked as he felt that no matter how he looked at it the deal waspletely beneficial to him only. After all, making a sword is only around a day of time for him, nothing else. For a day worth of time, he didn¡¯t think that someone is generous enough to present around more than twenty kilograms of level 2 Meteorite sand.

    Looking at Sam¡¯s expression, Jack just shook his head with a faint smile and then replied. "I don¡¯t have any use with it. But an Artisan like you can make it real treasure. After all, with me, it would only be a more valuable sand. Anyway, if you think the price is too high, then I can ask something from you. You just have to agree for one request of mine in the future, but don¡¯t worry, the request wouldn¡¯t be disadvantageous to you."

    Sam pondered a bit and nodded his head and then he stood up and shook Jack¡¯s hand who also stood up. Then after thinking for a second, he said. "I have something to do, you can stay here for a while if you want." Jack hesitated for a minute and asked.

    "Are you going to make something with the ck Meteorite sand?"

    Sam just nodded and didn¡¯t say anything else. Jack took a deep breath and said.

    "If you don¡¯t mind, can I watch it?" Jack asked with hesitation. He knew his request was rude. After all, an Artisan¡¯s technique is a valuable knowledge and not everyone can just spectate it. Last night, it was still not over the line as sword was made for Jack himself. But today, Sam is working for something of his personal use. So, it is indeed not appropriate for Jack to watch it.

    But he can¡¯t just convince himself to let go of an opportunity to see how Sam is going to work with the ck meteorite Sand. He felt that Sam¡¯s techniques were unique and something of his own, he really want to see, how Sam is going to use the precious raw material. Sam thought for a moment and said. "Sure." His reply was so nonchnt. Jack was a bit dazed and wasn¡¯t able to react as Sam moved towards the Forging room. He came out of his daze and ran towards the room, afraid that he would miss something.

    Sam slowly walked towards the cauldron in the forging room and picked up the bag of ck Meteorite sand. The bag was still two-thirds full and he poured a quarter of it in the cauldron and he slowly started heating it up.

    After a few hours powder started to melt down and soon a pool of molten liquid metal could be seen. Just as jack was expecting Sam to do something, he saw Sam taking out the same silk thread he took earlier. This is the same Heaven spirit silk moth¡¯s neutral thread. But this time the thread is not a small amount like before instead it is a big bundle. Sam dipped the thread bundle and started pulling out while squeezing as he repeated the earlier actions again and started making the threads. The process went on for hours. Seeing this, Jack couldn¡¯t help but feel a little disappointed. He didn¡¯t expect that Sam would do something like this again. Suddenly, he came to realization. Sam agreed readily because, he already saw the technique. Jack only sighed.

    If Sam knew Jack¡¯s thoughts, he would definitely praise him for deducing urately. Even though Sam was confident that not everyone can use his skills just by watching them and not everyone can copy his ideas, he just wanted to be careful. After all, no one could be cautious enough in this dog eat dog world. It was almost evening by the time Sam finished making the threads and half the bundle almost dried by the time he finished taking out thest bit of thread from the cauldron. There is only a small amount of metal left in the cauldron.

    Sam took out a very wooden carving and prepared a mould. He again started heating up the remaining metal, so that it could be finer liquid again and after that he poured the metal in the mould and left it to solidify.

    Sam left the thread bundle and sat down as he started recovering his energy. Then only Jack noticed therge thread and shocked. He was so focused on Sam¡¯s techniques and busy on being disappointed, he almost forgot the size of the thread bundle. The size is almost of two basket ballsbined and he has only one thought. ¡¯what is he going to do with that?¡¯. He just looked at Sam with anticipation as he waited.

    Sam opened his eyes only after it became dark outside. He took the dried bundle in his hands and started walking to the next room and Jack followed. When Jack followed inside the room he waspletely stunned. There are wooden mannequins and big table. There are all the tools required for a tailor. He looked at all the equipment and Sam. Never in his life did he think that this cold guy would be a tailor.

    This also first time Sam came into the room and inspected all the tools. This room is prepared by Philip when he was training for two months inside the Divine Dimension. After inspecting everything, he took out his ck feather coat, which he kept in his storage when he was forging and ced it on the table.

    He took out two big needles from the table drawer and inserted the thread inside the needle hole. These needles are called tapestry needles which are a verymon instruments for weaving a fabric. He started weaving skilfully with high dexterity and speed as he used the light spiritual energy.

    Jack stared at the after images of the hands and was feeling dizzy. He looked at Sam¡¯s concentrated face and thenpared it with the him, who tore away Carl¡¯s limbs without even giving a second thought or batting an eyelid even when all the blood sshed on his face.

    There is noparison at all. Nobody, would imagine that the Sam who could kill someone making everyone who even looked at him with fear is now weaving a cloth. He even ignored the fact that Sam is using an extremely precious material like the ck Meteorite Sand as a thread for a cloth.

    Time slowly flew as Sam just weaved and big peace of cloth came to take a shape as itid on the table. The time flew and it became mid-night. After the thread is over, Sam took put a piece of chalk and started marking as he took out a set of measuring ribbons. After that he took out a pair of scissors and tried to cut.

    *ng* With an annoying sound, the scissors broke. Then only Sam came out of his zone and then looked at the broken scissors and then at the cloth. Then only he realized that he can¡¯t cut this cloth with a normal scissors. He looked around and he finallynded his gaze on Jack who is staring at him with a dumbfounded expression. He suddenly got an idea and then he walked towards Jack.

    "Can I borrow your sword?" Sam asked.

    Jack came out of his daze and then took out the ck sword from his storage. Sam held the sword and then passed the cloth to Jack.

    "Hold this cloth at these two ces." He guided Jack to hold the cloth as he spread his hands. Then a clearly drawn chalk line could be seen. Sam took a step back and held the sword tightly then with a swing a sword keen could be heard in the room and the cloth became two.

    Jack almost jumped out of his skin as he saw Sam making his move. After he came to his senses, he couldn¡¯t help look at Sam in admiration at his control over sword. He can cut a solid anvil and can also cut a bolt of cloth without escaping the range.

    Soon, sword keening could be continuously heard as Sam and Jack repeated the same actions and a number of various sized cloth pieces could be seen. Sam walked towards the mannequin and then only he remembered something and immediately ran over to the forging room.

    After a few minutes and he came back. He has a ck needle in his hand. Then he ced the clothes over mannequin and started sewing with the same left-over thread. After the work is done there was a coat on the mannequin. Jack looked at the coat and then looked at the ck coat with the feather patterns on the table. But just as he was about topare the two, he saw Sam burning the feather coat and, in a few minutes, there are only a pile of ck feathers left inside the disappearing golden mes.

    Jack was surprised by two things this time. First one, the feathers are real. The second one, Sam couldn¡¯t burn the feathers. He was wondering how Sam could do that. Never in his mind did he think that feathers are of precious material. He just gave all the credit to Sam¡¯s fire control. Of course, he couldn¡¯t be more wrong.

    Sam took the feathers and started his embroidery just like he did before. Jack had same feeling as Philip and others as he looked at Sam working with a smile on his handsome face. The smile and devilishly handsome one at that, didn¡¯t even match the cold-blooded demon who could kill that ruthlessly. He just stood there as he looked at him working. By the time Sam was done there was birds chirping that could be heard from outside.

    Then only Jack came out of his daze and realized that it was already morning. Sam took the new coat off of the mannequin and wore it.

    Jack just looked at him standing majestically as he wore the coat and gave a supreme aura. Sam felt a sense of dejavu as he wore the coat. It was just like how he did itst time at the Lava rock vige. He couldn¡¯t help but chuckle as he looked at the coat.

    *Grumble* Suddenly a stomach grumbling disrupted the silence and Sam looked at his stomach as he felt an immense hunger, then he looked at Jack who just came out of the daze and said.

    "Want to eat something?"

 Chapter 38: Cooperation

    Sam and Jack are sitting at the river side where Sam usually eat along with Philip and others. This time there is a huge bird that was roasting on the fire. Sam looked at intently as he was waiting for it cook waster. Even though he, could make it faster with the Golden mes, the feel of waiting while roasting the meat on an open fire is really good.

    "Sam, I want to make a deal with you?" Jack broke the silence.

    "What would that be?" Sam asked as he flipped the bird.

    "Do you need more meteorite sand?" This line caught Sam¡¯s attentionpletely, he turned towards Jack and looked at him with a serious expression.

    "You have more?" He asked.

    "No, But I know a ce where you can find it." Jack replied with same calm tone.

    "Why should I believe you?" Sam asked a little cautiously.

    "The ck meteorite sand is a proof itself."

    "That is what it is making it more suspicious. Even though you and I might not have any grudges, you might have some other intentions to bait me with it. After all, if you really know the location where the Meteorite sand is, you can make a deal with a High-level noble family or better yet the royal family. You can live your life in luxury. Why would youe all the way here to a backward city like this and make a deal with me using that precious resource." Sam said bluntly.

    Jack shook his head at Sam¡¯s spections and didn¡¯t know what to say for a moment.

    "What should I do to have you believe me?"

    "Nothing much. Just tell me the truth of the whole matter. Why do you want to make a deal with me? Where did you get this ck meteorite sand and how are you so sure that there is Meteorite sand at some ce and how did you know it?"

    Hearing Sam¡¯s questions, Jack hesitated a little and finally came to a decision. "I don¡¯t know if you will believe me if I tell you the truth, but since, you asked, I will tell you.

    My father is originally from the royal capital. He once apanied a group to an expedition. At that time the group went to the small ind and then discovered arge amount of all kinds of Meteorite sands. My father and the other members in the group are very happy to find it and everyone took a small amount of a type of Meteorite sand and then made an agreement that everyone should keep the ind a secret and all of them could onlye back once a year to take a small amount at the same time in order to not to draw any suspicion. They took a soul oath and all left their own ways after making an agreement on the next time they should meet.

    But they didn¡¯t know they were already betrayed. One of the guys already sent the news back to his organisation even before they made an oath. They already put some tracker spell on the rest of the group and hunted down in the very next days.

    But my father already had made some preparations as he prepared to along with my mother and me. But they still managed to find us out and he took the enemies on and let my mother and me escape. My mother then fled with me to the vige. The ck meteorite sand I took out yesterday is the one that my father passed." Jack said as he felt a bit sad.

    "How long has it been?" Sam asked calmly.

    "15 years" Jack replied in an equally calm but sad tone.

    "Then you are just an infant at that time. How do you know all these?" Sam asked with some suspicion. Jack just let out a sigh and shook his head. Then he took out a scroll and passed it to Sam.

    "I only found it recently. My mom died a year ago and then she passed me this scroll. She said that this given to her by my father to be passed on to me after I turn 16. But she passed awayst year as due to her past ailments."

    Sam took the scroll and read everything. The scroll contained more or less what Jack said. But there is an extra info. That is the name of the Organisation. It is called ck water Organisation. Sam looked at Jack and asked.

    "What is the deal then?"

    "I want your help in the destroying the ck water organisation." Jack said in a cold tone.

    "I am not a person who kills for money. Even though I believe you. The ck Water and I don¡¯t have any grudges. So, I have no reason to destroy them." Sam said.

    "Take a look at this." Jack tossed another scroll to Sam.

    Sam opened it with a puzzled look and frowned up on looking at its contents, it is a lot of information about the organisation. There are all types of shady businesses they are a part of. Sam remembered the Mafia back on modern earth. This ck water is this world¡¯s version of the Mafia. Just as he was about to say that it is none of his business if the ck water is involved in these kinds of business, he saw thest of the list and frowned.

    He fell into a deep thought. He really didn¡¯t care much about the starting of the list as there is not such as an absolutely good society. The underworld ismon. But thest of list made him really despise this organisation.

    "Where did you get this info?" Sam asked as he looked at Jack. Jack sensed that something was wrong. "My father used to work from royal family. My mother said that after he came back from the expedition, he started investigating everyone that went along with him using all his resources, they he came to knew that one of them was from the ck water. So, he collected all the info he can and passed it to my mom along with the other scroll."

    After Jack finished Sam stayed silent for sometime and then looked at thest line with some hesitation. Then he took a deep breath and said.

    "I will help you, but not in a direct way. I won¡¯t just directly attack the organisation with force and I am not going toe into lime light directly. But whenever you are going to make a move, you have to tell me and I will n it in such a way that you can give them the maximum damage. I will onlye to lime light when they put their sights on me. I will only take the payment after you feel satisfied and I will only take it for the work I provided. So, if you want to take the deal, I am okay with it."

    Hearing Sam¡¯s words, Jack was a bit puzzled. He was mainly asking Sam for this deal because of the immense potential of him. Hisbat prowess is off the charts and he seem to have a lot of talents in auxiliary professions. But when he heard confidence in Sam¡¯s words, he couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit tempted but he can¡¯t bring himself topletely ept it.

    Sensing his hesitation, Sam spoke again. "ording to the info in the scroll, the ck water is an immense organisation with many branches. Let us give our deal a test run. If we go to the count city there might be a branch there. We will make some arrangements and eliminate the branch over there. So, you can think about the cooperation after that."

    Jack though for a moment and nodded his head. "I am okay with this, but when do we go to count city?" He asked as he looked at Sam with some expectation. He really is too eager to get revenge.

    "We don¡¯t have to go alone. You go back to school today and then you wait there. There will be a team of people going to be selected to be sent to the Count city in 12 days. So, there might be a news of selection and you can try your hand in it. If you can make it, we will be having a free ride." Jack was a bit surprised and calmed down. He nodded at Sam and extended his hand.

    "it is deal."

    "Deal"

    Then soon became silent as they munched on the meat.

    Meanwhile in the Crimson me family the atmosphere is a bit gloomy. The meeting room was filled with this sadness as the family head sat on the main chair and all the elders took a seat. There is woman who is sobbing sat next to the family head. Freya stood in the centre and looked at the family head.

    "Freya, can you do this for the family?" The family head asked Freya with a pleading tone.

    "No, father. I already asked you before to not to make a move on him. You refused and sent people to assassinate him. He got the news. Then when he is taking the academy assessment, you also asked Carl and others to make a move just because he took revenge for what you did? Now, you want to meet him just like that because he has status that you cannot offend. Sorry, father. I already did what I can and already requested him to be lenient towards us. If you don¡¯t provoke him any further, he will be lenient. I can¡¯t bring myself to make a request for him to meet you. After all, even though he is magnanimous and can do that for me because of our friendship. I won¡¯t have any face to show him after that. I still have some shame left." Freya said with a tone filled with disappointment.

    "Freya, how can you say that? You have to do something to our family." An elder from the side suggested.

    "And why should I do that? I am not the one who created the mess. You the esteemed elders did and you have face to ask me to clean up. Dream on." She said and left without any hesitation.

    All the elders looked ashamed being berated by a young girl.

    "What a pity? We have lost a genius like Carl and we also lost a chance to maintain a good rtionship with such a monstrous talent. And worse, we have offended him."

    Someone from the side sighed as he thought of the situation.

    "Maybe those from the academy already knew that. That is why they didn¡¯t send the elders to save Carl. They truly are meticulous when currying favour."

    "No. they didn¡¯t intentionally stop the elders from saving him. It is more like they are not able to at all." Suddenly the family head said making all the room silent.

    "What do you mean? Family head"

    "The judge of the assessment is the not the academy elders but something else. There is another rule that the Principal didn¡¯t mention as it has be the norm since so many years that the rule was implemented and there was not a need aroused. But due to Carl and others the rule was used after a long time." The family head sighed as he remembered about his son.

    "What kind of rule it is?" One of them asked.

    "When somebody issues a death challenges and keep their escape tokens as wager the other elders can¡¯t interfere in the fight while they are in the testing grounds. Actually, the judge won¡¯t allow it." The Patriarch said in a low voice.

    "But isn¡¯t the judge also the part of academy and isn¡¯t he also human. He can bend the rules, right?"

    "No, the formation itself is the judge. No human is fit enough to judge the assessment as they can influence the judgement."

    All the elders felt confused. "What do you mean the formation is judge?" Someone asked. But this time there is no reply.

    Meanwhile. Sam finished his meal and went to the city along with Jack. They went to the market and Sam bought a lot of materials for tailoring, raw materials for forging and a lot of materials for inscription ink. Jack looked at the Sheer amount of the materials and took a deep breath.

    "Sam, why are you buying so much?" He asked failing to hide his curiosity.

    "I need to make some money." Sam said and continued his shopping spree. It was already afternoon by the time Sam came back to his mansion. Jack has gone back to the academy.

    After entering his mansion. Sam took a seat on a chair and after a moment of silence he spoke.

    "I don¡¯t like guestsing uninvited. So, you bettere out while I am being nice."

 Chapter 39: Protection fee

    As soon as Sam¡¯s words were finished a person came out from a room slowly. He is a tall young man who seemed to be eighteen to neen years of age. His looks are quite average and he would just blend in with crowd. The only notable thing about this guy¡¯s is the nose that ispletely in the air. If it is possible, he might want to touch the sky with it. He is arrogant to the bones.

    He came in front of Sam and sat down in a chair opposite to him unceremoniously and made himselffortable. The young man sized him up and said with arrogance.

    "You must be Sam. You are just like how the rumours mentioned. You are really a brat who doesn¡¯t know manners. Do you not know how to pay respect to the seniors in the academy?" He said as he puffed his chest to make sure that Sam can get a clear look at the three stars on the uniform. But what he got was the calm look of Sam without any emotions.

    "Anyway, I heard that you are a proficient Artisan, Inscription master and Formation master. I want you to make me some Inscriptions. I want them to be attack type, defence type. Don¡¯t give me some trashy things. Since, you are an Acolyte warrior mage with fire attribute, you have to make the inscriptions of fire type and I want at least a fifty of each of them. I also want a rank 2 spear. I am a warrior, so I will be using it. So, make sure that I you do your job properly. Make some inscriptions on it as well."

    Albert didn¡¯t even bother to look at Sam and said whatever he wants. Sam didn¡¯t stop him either. He just went along. Albert continued.

    "I will give you a week time." He said and then turned around to leave.

    "Wait." Sam said as Albert stopped in tracks.

    "What, you have any objections? This is the protection fee I am collecting to take care of you in the Academy. After all, you don¡¯t want a Novice mage sneak up on you when you are in your amodation or a Novice warrior trying to kill you at your mansion, right? You better think carefully." Albert threatened with a smile.

    "Who are you exactly?" Sam asked with a cold glint in his eyes.

    "What? Do you really want to pressure with your status? I am Albert. I am son of the head of the Pharmaceutical tower. You can unt your status at anyone. But you have to keep your tail between your legs in front of the Pharmaceutical tower. After all, it would not be good, if no healeres to your aid with in the city when you are hurt?" He said with a mocking smile as he left the mansion. He didn¡¯t even have a thought that Sam would reject him.

    Sam is looking at his departing back with an intense disregard. He is looking at Albert as if he was a brainless fool. He understood one thing. Albert is a frog in a well. In his eyes the Starwood city is the only world he knew. After all, if he could think with somemon sense, he can understand that threatening Sam with his father¡¯s status as head of the Pharmaceutical tower was quite foolish. Sam suddenly heard someoneing and saw two panthers pouncing at him.

    There are the two cubs he picked up. He rubbed their heads as they snuggled in to him as if Sam¡¯s embrace is the only safe spot in the world. Right now, they are already at the peak of the Level 1. Sam didn¡¯t know why, but these panthers are growing exceptionally well under his care.

    "Say little ones, do I really look like that much of a Vegetarian?" Sam asked as he stroked their mane with each hand. The too panthers looked at him with puzzled expressions.

    "Never mind. I should really think of a way to make sure this guy knew I am a non- vegetarian. After all, I still at an eagle for a breakfast. He said as he walked to the bedroom along with the panthers. Then he disappeared and reappeared inside the tower.

    Sam slowly walked through the racks as he observed. Then he stopped at a rank named, ¡¯Usage of Light element¡¯. He looked through various shelves in the racks. There were all types of auxiliary uses of light element listed there. Like ¡¯long time illumination¡¯ ¡¯short term illumination¡¯ ¡¯Night vison¡¯ etc. He finally stopped at a wisp named. ¡¯How light element works in healing?¡¯ He stopped and took the wisp in arms as he started absorbing the knowledge slowly.

    Actually, Sam didn¡¯t really want to be a healer immediately. He wanted to study this field after he left the Starwood city. But now he changed his mind.

    Sam went through the healing procedures and spells carefully. Actually, healing spells are quite simple and they are very few of them. They are diagnosis, basic healing for wounds, Purification for Blood and toxins, Advanced healing which is used for high level injuries when libs are torn off and then finally regrowth which is growing a missing organ. But the regrowth is almost lost in the world and only a few very high-level healers which can be counted on one hand can perform it.

    The healer spells are not considered like the attack spells which are ssified using the power level. But the healer spells are ssified by the level of control. The only requirement to heal the spell is that the mage has to have a light attribute and then he has to have an exceptional control and another condition is that adequate spiritual energy. The more spiritual energy a healer has the higher level of injury and the higher level of the cultivator he can cure. From the information Sam came to know that the healers are ranked rather differentlypared to other profession. The healers will be ranked on how high the level of the cultivator they can cure. That means, if a healer who is at an Acolyte stage can cure a cultivator at Novice stage for an Advanced injury, he will be ranked as a rank2 healer.

    Sam went through the information and started observing how the spell works. He observed and analysed each and every spell one by one. After a while, Sam noticed something inmon in all the spells. The spells all depend on the control of the spiritual energy and are inducing the mitotic division by exciting the vitality of the already present cells in the body. Basically, a human body is made of so many cells which are formed by mitotic division which is started from a single cell and this will stop after reaching a certain stage and will only happen in small amounts such as when healing some minor wounds on the skin. But this mitotic division will stop making a new organ or limb because they be stable. The light elemental energy full of vitality will make the cells escape from the passive stage and increase the rate of healing.

    Sam opened his eyes and went to the second floor and started practising in simtion environment. He kept on practising his control over his elemental energy as he stood in a single ce motionlessly.

    Time flew by slowly and he kept on practising and soon fifteen days passed inside the tower and only one and half day passed outside the tower. Sam finally came out of the tower with a satisfied expression and slept on his bed peacefully.

    Next day morning, Sam couldn¡¯t help but grumble. Three days have passed and only two days are left for the auction and he couldn¡¯t help feel a little down. He wanted to use this chance to make a fortune in the city before leaving it. But now he can only earn a little less.

    When Sam came down and thinking of what to do to earn more money this time as he ate along with the panthers, he saw another group of uninvited guests. But this time he couldn¡¯t help but feel a little serious. He saw two middle-aged men walk towards his mansion through the window. They are the Artisan tower head and the Crimson me family head. When they entered the mansion, Sam didn¡¯t say anything and looked at the two men with a cold look.

    "Sir Sam, I have something to discuss with you. But the Family head of the Crimson me family also has something important. If you can spare your time a little." The Artisan tower head spoke in a mellow tone. But Sam didn¡¯t say anything and just gestured them to sit.

    As soon as he took a seat, the Crimson me family head spoke. Sir Sam, I know that you and our family has differences. It was my mistake to send people after you due to my greed and it was Carl¡¯s mistake to go after your life in the test. I know it is not easy to forgive us, but I still hope that you can be magnanimous this time. If you want to punish anyone, you can punish me. Please, leave my family some way out." He didn¡¯t beat around the bush and apologized directly. His voice was so dull and lost of all energy. He is really being sincere. Sam just gave a cold smile and said.

    "Sir, are you making a mistake? How can a low-level puny cultivator can possibly take your apology?" Even though his words are humble, they were filled with mockery. The Family head didn¡¯t know what to say?

    "If you really want to show your sincerity, I have a request. I am going to auction some items in next monthly auction at Evergreen family. I hope family head can patronize me." Sam said after some thought. He is trying to use this chance to make some money. Even though he can extort from him, he didn¡¯t really want to do that and stoop so low. In this way, he can at least give Freya some face. He can¡¯t leave the Crimson me family alone after what they did. But he can¡¯t directly annihte the family on ount of Freya. Even though their rtionship isn¡¯t deep, he really didn¡¯t want to leave the first friends he made in this life on such a sour note.

    Crimson me family head was ecstatic after he heard the news. He really didn¡¯t think that matter could be solved with money. After all, he was prepared to worst case scenario where Sam wouldn¡¯t forgive him at all. He stood up and thanked Sam before leaving as he sighed in relief.

    Sam then looked at the Artisan tower head.

    "Sir Sam, it is just that there is an important issue. That is why I came to disturb you. Otherwise, I wouldn¡¯t dare to disturb you." The tower head hurriedly exined. Sam just looked at him calmly and said.

    "Just get it over with."

    "Yes. There is a notice from the Count city¡¯s Artisan tower. Usually, when there is a genius Artisan, the immediate superior Artisan tower will make a visit to him to give their appreciation and offer to move to a better environment. County city¡¯s Artisan tower also wants to send someone over. So, I am here to confirm your schedule." The tower head exined his purpose.

    Sam pondered for a moment and said. "I will be going to the Count city in few days. I will visit the tower myself. They don¡¯t have to make a visit here."

    Tower head didn¡¯t speak anything and just nodded. He clearly knew about the tournament and already thought that Sam might have already made it to the team.

    "Then I will take my leave." He bid farewell and just as he was about to make his move, Sam stopped him.

    "Wait."

    "Sir Sam, you have any thing I can help you with?" He asked with a bit of expectation. He really wants to mend their rtionship.

    "Do you know the tower head of the Pharmaceutical tower and his son Albert?" Sam asked with a casual tone.

    Up on mention of Albert, Tower head immediately understood. "Sir Sam, does that brat Albert find any trouble with you?"

    "I need you to arrange a meeting with him for me. Better, if it is a surprise visit in the tower itself." Sam said avoiding the question.

    Tower head thought for sometime and nodded. "I will see what I can do. I will send you the details tomorrow." He said and bid his farewell.

    Sam then sent him off and took out the bunch of materials, he bought two days before and said to himself. "Now, it is time to make preparations for auction."

 Chapter 40: Meeting

    Sam is now inside the tower¡¯s second floor. Since, it can be used for anything other than the cultivation purposes, he is now using this to make his goods. Right now, he is drawing an inscription circle and the circle is not your normal first rank inscription, rather it is for first rank inscription formation circle.

    In the centre of the circle, Sam put a robe which is red in colour with a ming design. This is the robe for male which he created. He used the Heaven Spirit silk moth which evolved with the fire elemental energy and used that silk to make this robe. The robe is mostly red in colour and the embroidery indicated as if it was burning with mes. Hepleted the circle and went to the node point. There is also a formation that isid down in order to support the spiritual energy level to him.

    Sam manipted the spiritual energy and started infusing it to theplex inscription circle. The whole circle lit up and started converging towards the centre. The energy level inside the formation also started depleting as the inscription got closer. Soon, the inscription haspletely formed as it appeared on the inside of the robe. By this time, Sam already fell on the floor and panted heavily while sweating profusely. After catching his breath, he stood up and walked towards the robe and then wore it. He then injected his spiritual energy and a transparent hemisphere appeared with him as centre and soon the spiritual energy started to gather towards him.

    This is a spirit gathering formation. Sam inscribed this formation onto the robe directly. Actually, some people who are rich enough would buy an array disc and use it in expeditions or battles to increase the rate of energy gathered. But Sam used his research and experiments to inscribe it directly on the robe.

    Since, the robe is also made of the Heaven spirit silk of fire elemental energy, it will also provide resistance against fire attacks for some extent along with a defence for the attack up to the level of peak level Acolyte. If he used some defence inscriptions, he can make it defend a Novice level 1 attack. Sam looked at the robe with satisfaction and stored it away.

    He came out of the dimension and took a seat in his living room as he sighed and took a big gulp of water. He is really exhausted. This is the day of auction. For the past few days, Sam continuously kept on making clothes and inscriptions. This is auction material he is going to put on sale. The three days he spent on the clothes which is thirty days inside the tower, he made a single dress everyday out of which twenty-eight of them are to auctioned off. The remaining two, well he is a man of his words.

    Sam came out of the mansion and looked at the river. He suddenly had an urge to swim. So, he took off his vest and directly jumped into the river and started swimming. After one hour of swimming, he finally felt satisfied and came out. It is already noon. He looked at the bright sun and smiled. The scene looked like it came out of a painting. His handsome face, his tall figure, his chiselled and bare upper body and ck hair drenched in river water, the bright sunlight and his equally bright smile. The scene was mesmerizing. He enjoyed the feel for a few moments and walked back towards the Mansion entrance. He changed his clothes and wore the newly made feathered ck coat and came outside.

    "it is about time." He murmured as he walked towards the city.

    Meanwhile in the Artisan tower, the tower head is pacing at the reception as if he was waiting for someone. Kelly stood aside as she looked at her father. Soon, two middle-aged men came with exquisite robes and dignified auras. Both of them have badges with number 2 on it. They both are tower heads of the inscription tower and Formation tower. When they looked at the Artisan tower head pacing nervously, they couldn¡¯t help tease.

    "Hey, Harold. What happened to you? You are pacing like a dog." The Inscription tower head said as he chuckled.

    "Falter, Felix you guys came. Now, that if that little ancestor arrives, we can go." Harold, who is the Artisan tower head replied.

    Falter is the formation tower head and Felix, is the Inscription tower head. Since, these guys have more or less same position they are naturally friends and had some dealings.

    "Why did you ask us toe all of a sudden?" Felix asked.

    "Alfred¡¯s son, Albert seemed to be offended Sam. So, he asked me to arrange a surprise meet with Alfred to talk. It is not like you don¡¯t know Sam¡¯s temper. Just because he was called bastard, he made an artwork out of the kid from the Crimson me family. This Alfred is arrogant enough in front of us, now his own arrogant son has to provoke this demon.

    I am already had some differences with Sam. That is why, I want to mend the rtionship. I want you guys to help me. After hees, apany me to the Pharmaceutical tower. This is the time when he teaches his apprentice. So, we have to make sure that we catch him at the spot."

    "This is okay with me. Let us see, how that arrogant bastard will unt his arrogance at a Genius like Sam." Felix said.

    "Let us see, how it goes." Falter spoke.

    Soon Sam came to the Artisan tower head and looked at the three middle-aged men and looked a little puzzled. He walked towards Harold and spoke.

    "Hello. Are the arrangements done?" He directly greeted and asked about the situation. Hepletely ignored the other two middle-aged men. Harold felt like gloating as he looked at his friends¡¯ expressions.

    "Sir, Sam. These are Formation tower head Falter and Inscription tower head Felix." He introduced.

    Sam looked at them and said. "Hello. I am Sam." His reply was short and onto the point. His voice was calm and collected. He really didn¡¯t treat them like seniors at all. Both the elders felt a little awkward as they werepletely used to the flowery words from every junior they met. Now, only they felt how it is to meet a really capable one. The people with capability will not act subservient to others.

    "Sir Sam, both of them will be apanying us to the Pharmaceutical tower. At this moment Alfred will be teaching his apprentice or would be supervising the ground floor. So, if you want to surprise him, this will be best time." Harold said. ¡¯Because, that jerk will be tooting his own horn at the newly joined apprentice¡¯ He inwardly thought.

    "No problem." Sam replied and made his way along with other three tower heads and Kelly also meekly followed after them. She was really curious as how Sam would deal with this. She is also third year in the academy and clearly knew about Albert. When she heard that Albert had offended Sam, she immediately thought that Albert was dead. After a few moments only she realised that with Sam¡¯s current prowess it is almost impossible to kill him. When she heard from her father about how Sam wanted to meet Albert¡¯s father instead, she was quite surprised and confused. That is why, she is following them to see what he will do.

    After a few minutes the group of five came to the Pharmaceutical tower. Now, Sam is wearing all his badges in open. When people saw the three bigshots along with Sam and all the badges, they immediately guessed his identity. This caused amotion in the tower. When Alfred who is relishing in the admiration of all the apprentices in the ground floor heard themotion, he was about toe out, but the group already reached the door of the room.

    When he saw the other three tower heads with Sam, he frowned.

    "Harold, what is with themotion? Why make a big fuss when youe?" Alfred asked with a clearly displeased tone. He didn¡¯t address Sam at all. In his view, no matter how much of a genius Sam is, him greeting him first is loss of status, since he is now in higher status. In his mind a Pill master is higher than Artisan. That is why he didn¡¯t even budge when saw the rank 3 Schr Artisan Badge.

    Sam just sized up the arrogant and haughty Alfred. He is just like his son. His face will blend in the crowd naturally. Nobody would bother to pick him out of a group. He made his way to the room and looked around. The room has three big green lizards. Sam recognised them in a nce. They are green scale lizards. Each lizard is kept on a table andpletely bound by various inscriptions and Articrafts. All three of them are at Level 2 Peak and all of them have their leg severed. Blood dripped from the wound.

    Sam looked at the scene and immediately understood what is happening. There are three people standing near each table. They are healers, who are practising healing lessons. Actually, they use these Green scale lizards to practise because, the severed limb will grow as long as they were fed with enough water spiritual energy. All the healers are rank-1 healers. They will make a wound and heal it. They might make some mistakes as the beast level is at the highest of the rank-1 healer could handle and the wound will heal irregrly. They will repeat the process and after the practise ispleted, they will sever the spoiled leg and ce the lizards inside the water spiritual energy environment and let it heal itself. Even though, they might take a considerable time, the healers didn¡¯t care.

    When Sam walked towards the bound lizards, he observed as he looked at them. Even though, he is ruthless, he felt that torturing the beasts without any particr enmity is still beneath him. All the healers standing there immediately walked away and stood behind Alfred. They felt their hair stand as they saw Sam¡¯s cold gaze.

    "Mr. Alfred. I am Sam. I am here today to speak about your son Albert." Sam said without looking at him at all. He is still looking at the binding articraft chains on the lizards.

    As soon as Alfred heard his son, his expression changed and he whispered something in a healer¡¯s ear and walked towards Sam.

    "What do you have to say?" He asked with a frown.

    "Well, your son Albert came to my mansion uninvited a few days ago and then ranted on that he wants me to do this and that for him as protection fee in the school. So, I am here to discuss that." Sam replied and took a seat in one of the three chairs in the room. "Please take a seat." He gestured Alfred to sit which thetter followed.

    "Mr. Sam. You seem to be mistaken. I know my son. With your status isn¡¯t it beneath you to nder others. Young men nowadays are being spoiled." Alfred didn¡¯t admit. But he couldn¡¯t help feel disappointed in heart. He really said the truth and that is he really knew his son and his son would definitely do what Sam had said. But knowing is one thing and admitting is another.

    "Dad, are you looking for me?" Suddenly Albert came in and when he looked at Sam, his face brightened and said.

    "Are you done with my order?" He didn¡¯t even see his father¡¯s expression when he said that. He was really enthusiastic when he saw Sam. But he is bound to be disappointed.

    Sam looked at Alfred with a hint of mockery and disdain.

    "What are you waiting for? Take out the goods." Albert didn¡¯t see the situation and just demanded again. Alfred suddenly wanted to bash his son so hard, that he wouldy on the bed for a month. He is now in a spot because of him. His didn¡¯t see the bigshots and people and directly trying to extort from a genius.

    Suddenly, Sam missed his gun, He really wanted to bury a whole magazine of shots in this Albert¡¯s chest at point nk range. He stood up and walked towards one of the Lizards which are tied up and then ced his hand on a binding chain. He looked towards Alfred and spoke.

    "Mr. Alfred. I am here because I have something to say. Because, you might find this useful in future." As he said that the chain he touched suddenly turned into powder and he moved to another chain on the lizard. The spectators are looking at it incredulously. He didn¡¯t seem to care and continued.

    "You might not know. But I am a person, who advocates Pride and arrogance, because I am quite proud and arrogant myself.

    Your son Albert wanted to use his status as a Novice to extort something from me." As he said this all the bindings on the lizard are in powder state.

    "Your son also threatened me using your position as a Pill master. Indeed, the people from the Pharmaceutical tower have higher status in the society. But I know that there are differences in the statuses between the people from the Pharmaceutical tower as well. For example, a healer is high ranked than a Pill master. Isn¡¯t right?" Sam said as he ced his hand on the wound of severed leg of lizard. He looked at Alfred and said.

    "An advice Mr. Alfred. Your son¡¯s arrogance for your status will be just liking healing spell. He can save himself from some people. Just like how they he can heal some wounds just like this."

    As he spoke the golden light started emitting from the hand and in a rapid pace the new leg started growing and with in a few dumbfounding seconds, there is new leg. Sam then patted the lizard¡¯s head and then took the severed leg in to his hand.

    "But if he is drunk from arrogance from your status excessively. This might happen."

    As he said that, suddenly the leg in his hands turned into a meat paste in his hands. Even the bones were not spared. All the spectators took a step back and felt fearful.

    "I came here to tell this today not because, I am afraid of your status or something. I could have dealt with your son with many means. But the you will interfere with your revenge pursuit with unlimited hypocrisy, which I hate to my guts. That is why I am informing you directly. If your sones to me again. Remember that my cultivation will not stay same all the time." He said and walked towards the entrance along with the three bigshots and Kelly.

    The three bigshots didn¡¯t say a thing today, because they just wanted to watch the show and try to help Harold a little to improve his rtion with Sam as his main trade is Artisan. But when they looked at Alfred¡¯s current expression.....

 Chapter 41: Products

    After Sam left with the group, the rest of the members of the Pharmaceutical tower also left as they looked at Alfred and Albert. Now, father and son were the only people left in the room. It took a long time for them toe back to their senses.

    "Dad, what does he mean by this?" Albert was still confused as he looked at the healed Green scaled lizard and the meat paste of the leg on the ground.

    *Pah*

    Alfred suddenly pped Albert out of nowhere.

    "Why do you have to provoke someone you can¡¯t afford to offend?" He yelled at his son as slumped back into the chair with a dejected expression. He just looked at the healed leg of the lizard. He clearly understood one thing from what Sam told him. He can be as arrogant as he wants, but he can¡¯t provoke him.

    From what he saw, Sam has a light attribute and he is proficient in healing spells, and he has so much control on his spiritual energy that he can even perform regrowth. Even though, it is easy to perform the regrowth on the Green scaled lizard, it is still more than what his skill level can catch up to.

    If he tried to provoke Sam with the higher social status as a pill master, he will juste and be a certified healer and then with his young age and potential, he will be in higher status in no time and even without it he can just get a few people to do his bidding. But there is one thing that confused him, that is why didn¡¯t Sam just take a healer exam and attain higher status, with having proficiency in all main professions, he can enjoy so many privileges, after all that type of genius is absolutely unheard of.

    The three bigshots also had same doubts and Felix asked him directly.

    "I have my reasons." This is the answer that he gave without any more reasons.

    "Sam, do you want to apany us to a meal?" Harold asked.

    "No, Thank you. I have something going on. I have to go to the Evergreen family as I have some items to auction off. Maybe next time." Sam bid his farewell and looked towards Kelly. He also nodded at her in a polite manner made his way to the Evergreen family.

    Kelly looked at his back as if she wanted to say something but held herself back.

    After half an hour Sam went to the Evergreen family house. He is sitting in a room which seems to be where the head of the Evergreen family entertains the guests. There are two people along with him. it is head of the Evergreen family Marcus and his son Philip.

    "So, Sam what is it that you want to auction off today. You even said that it is a big haul." Marcus asked as he looked at Sam who has a calm expression.

    "Mr. Marcus, do you by any chance have a squad of 14 people in Evergreen family who has a better coordination and it would be better if they have some fire or ice attribute in the squad." Sam asked with confusion.

    "Well, before that let me show you something." Sam said and took out the robe that he made today morning and wore it. "Mr. Marcus how does it look?" Sam asked with a smile as he looked at Marcus who is looking at the exquisite design of the robe.

    "The robe is quite good and the quality of the material is great as well."

    "Mr. Marcus, do you have a sparring room?" Sam asked with a smile.

    "Sure, let us go." Even though Marcus felt quite puzzled on why Sam asked for a sparring room. he didn¡¯t question him and just led the way.

    When they went to a training room, Sam entered the sparring ring and seeing this Philip entered the ring. He looked at Sam and said. "Sam, I finally have a chance to spar with you? Even though I know that I am not your match at all, it would till be a tough fight."

    Ad soon as he finished, he made some hand seals and a fire ball appeared in his hands. He immediately threw that towards Sam. But his opponent only stood there with a faint smile as fire ball hit him in the chest. Marcus and Philip were surprised yet scared. They didn¡¯t expect that Sam will take full brunt of attack. But when the smoke cleared, they were even more shocked because, there is not even a single thread damaged on the cloth. Sam just stood there with same smile.

    Philip was still unwilling and this time a raging fire appeared in his hands. This time he didn¡¯t pull his punches at all. The fire flew as it was a river of mes and came towards Sam. This is a spell called incineration. But the oue didn¡¯t change. The damage is non-existent. When Sam was about to say something, he saw something else. Philip concentrated his spiritual energy as some metallic sheen could be seen on his arms. He immediately took out a sword and made a move towards Sam. A loud sword keen emerged along with a fiery de as it hit the target.

    But the oue was still not what Philip wished for. He saw Sam blocking the sword with his hand as the sleeve glowed a bit due to injecting spiritual energy. This made the expression of the Father and son change.

    But the most surprised one was Sam. Because, ording to information and what everyone knew is the Philip is a Fire attribute Acolyte mage at level 5. But what Sam saw now was that Philip is a Metal and Fire, Dual Attribute Acolyte Warrior-Mage at Level 7. He was quite perplexed at what he saw and was dumbfounded. Philip is hiding his prowess all the time. But he didn¡¯t question it and just stayed silent. Philip also retracted his sword and looked at Sam and both of them nodded in tacit understanding. Then Sam turned towards Marcus and said.

    "Mr. Marcus will you pleasee and assist me?"

    Marcus was dumbfounded by this and stared in daze for a second before he asked.

    "Are you sure?"

    "I am not going to have a spar with you. I just want you to make a move so that I could demonstrate my product." After hearing what Sam said. Marcus slowly made his way to the ring and stood there.

    "You can attack me with a power level of around fourth stage Novice." Sam said as he took a defensive position.

    Marcus hesitated a little and then took an attacking stance. A huge zing me sted towards Sam and hit him. This is a Novice range spell called Inferno. When all the smoke cleared up. Philip and Marcus almost fainted from shock. Because, Sam is still standing there without a single scratch. But the whole robe is glowing as a big energy barrier formed around Sam. When they saw this scene, they finally understood what Sam¡¯s product is. This is an extraordinary product. Just this robe alone will be centre of attention of the monthly auction.

    Marcus took a deep breath and spoke first. "Sam, how many of these do you have?" He really wants to buy this robe. If possible, he just wants to buy every robe off. But knew this is not possible.

    "Mr. Marcus. Aren¡¯t you being a little hasty? Demonstration is not finished yet." After he spoke, he took out a thin book and passed it to Marcus and then said. "Please read this." Both Philip and Marcus took the book and flipped through the pages. There are some well-images and also numerous details regarding the robe and how can it be most effective. When they finished skimming through the book, Philip and Marcus stared at Sam as if they were looking at a monster.

    "Sam, this is a set for seven?"

    "Yes."

    "Then why did you ask for a fourteen-man squad."

    "Well, I have more than one set."

    Even though, he had the spection, after he heard the confirmation, he was quite shocked. He immediately ordered for a 14-man team toe to the training room. Mostly they are at Acolyte stage and there are some fire and Ice attribute mages in them.

    Sam took 14 robes, half of which are red and another half are blue. He then exined about the robes to the 14 people and then turned towards Marcus.

    Half an hourter. Marcus was full of smiles and had a fascinating expression on his face.

    "How about it Mr. Marcus? will this do? Are they worthy enough to be auctioned?" Sam asked with a faint smile.

    "Sam, how many sets do you have?" Marcus asked directly.

    "Four." This reply made Marcus to take in a deep breath.

    "Sam, I want to make a deal with you. I will buy two sets directly. Name the price." Marcus asked.

    Sam pondered a bit. He really didn¡¯t have any objection on selling these things to Marcus as he didn¡¯t have a bad opinion of Evergreen family. But these things are his money-making opportunities. After some brief thought, Sam finally replied.

    "Mr. Marcus, I have no objection in selling you. But about the price. I will let you auction two sets of the robes and I will take sixty percent of the price of the least expensive set from you. But you have to waive the auctionmission for me."

    "Okay." As soon as Sam said, Marcus agreed.

    After making some small talk, Philip and Sam went out and Marcus went to make some preparations.

    "Philip, can you invite Freya and Haley for a meal? I have to talk something." Sam asked Philip

    "Sure." Philip asked two servants to inform them while he and Sam walked towards the inn. The two servants went towards the Academy and informed Haley and Freya about the matter.

    After Sam and Philip waited for a while in the inn, both the youngdies came. They greeted and sat down quietly. They ordered the dishes and finished the meal quickly. All this time, they only made some small talk and the girls didn¡¯t talk much at all. They are still feeling awkward around Sam.

    "Can we go to my mansion?" Sam suggested as soon as they came out. Then all four of them walked towards the mansion.

    After they arrived at the mansion, Sam directly took them to the tailoring room. When they entered all three of them were dumbfounded as they saw what was inside the room.

    There are two wooden mannequins which are disying a dress each. Both the dresses are simr in design, except that one dress is red in colour with golden colour embroidery and the other is ice blue in colour with white colour embroidery.

    The dresses have twoponents. The top and a pant. The top has short sleeves and there is a phoenix head embroidered on the left side chest for the red dress and the body was embroidered along with it and extended towards the bottom of the waist where the tail begins and from which the golden coloured feathers are embroidered along the back side of the top. The top is short in front as it covered a little more than the lower abdomen from the chest as the back of the top is quite long as it extended a little below the calf. The pant is also red in colour. Which is simple without any exquisite designs.

    The Blue top also has simr design, but the feathers are white in colour and the phoenix embroidery started from the right chest to left. The pant is also in icy blue colour.

    When the two girls saw these dresses, they froze on their spots. Even a man like Philip is amazed by the dress. Most importantly, the dresses can not only be worn formally, but also in a battle. But the design on the dress will make the girls quite reluctant to battle with them on.

    Haley and Freya exchanged nces as they slowly walked towards the dresses and started examining them. They felt the fabric the design and everything were quite great and the craftsman ship is quite excellent.

    "Hello,dies. You should pay before you take the cloths." Sam interrupted their actions from behind.

    When Freya and Haley came back to their senses, they again became awkward.

    "Ten spirit stones each. Pay up and take your dress." Sam said as he reached out his hand with a smile.

    Haley and Freya couldn¡¯t help but smile at Sam¡¯s behaviour. How much is Sam¡¯s worth? How rich is he? Ten spirit stones are not a matter at all. They exchanged nces and took out the spirit stones and passed over.

    "Sam, this is not fair, I asked for a dozen dresses. You only made one." Freya was back to herself again. Since, Sam can still remember their request for dresses, that means he is still treating their friendship normally, irrespective of their families¡¯ actions.

    "Can you not be that shameless?" Haley also smiled as she scolded Freya.

    "There is a surprise, in the dress. If you are in a dangerous situation, direct all the spiritual energy into the dress right before the impact." Sam said from behind. Freya and Haley felt quite confused and Philip was the most bitter one.

    He already knew what Sam can do with a normal robe. If the people who buy Sam¡¯s clothes in auction knew that two such clothes are sold at 10 spirit stones, he wondered how they felt.

 Chapter 42: Auction

    After the girls took their dresses and left the mansion, Philip and Sam sat in the living room.

    "Sam, can I ask you something?" Philip asked he hesitated for a while.

    Sam just looked at him and nodded without replying. Philip took a deep breath and said.

    "I want to you to teach something for me."

    "What would that be?" Sam was surprised for a second and asked with an amusing smile.

    "I want to be an Artisan. I once wanted to try my luck with the Artisan tower head, but you came. What attracted me, is the different techniques you are using. Different things you are making. And you can make things that are beyond what your cultivation rank allows. I want you to teach me how to be an Artisan." Philip said as he let go of his hesitation.

    "Why do you want to be an Artisan?" Sam asked as he looked at Philip with a faint smile. He really does know that there would be someone who wants his techniques. But he really didn¡¯t think that the first one toe after his techniques is the first friend he made after rebirth. Even though, they aren¡¯t that close, he really didn¡¯t have any bad impression of Philip. But there is one thing that bothers him is that Philip is not as simple as he portrayed himself to be, there is definitely a veil of mystery.

    Philip thought deep and hard about the question Sam asked him. He understood that Sam felt something was off about him, but he didn¡¯t really bother as he himself made it known to Sam by unsealing his cultivation.

    "Because, I like to create something." Philip finally came up with an answer.

    "Make yourself clear. You want to make something or create something?" Sam asked again.

    "What is the difference?" Philip was left confused. ¡¯Isn¡¯t it same in both cases?¡¯ He inwardly thought as he asked.

    "Even though the meaning of both words is same, in real life they are different. That difference is also so thin like a cicada wing but making arge variation between a maker and a creator. If you want to make something, all you need is to know is the answer for a question ¡¯how?¡¯ for whatever you want to make.

    Creation is different. You need to know answers of more questions other than ¡¯how?¡¯, you have to know the answer for ¡¯why?¡¯ and ¡¯what?¡¯ also." Speaking up to this point, Sam looked at Philip who was confused and pondering. "If you have to rity on what I asked, meet me again and ask? As I am your friend, I will teach you. But there will be certain price to pay." Then he walked towards his room leaving Philip alone to think things over.

    At night. Evergreen Pavilion. The ce is filled with people as guests are streaming in. The monthly auction is going to take ce after all. Sam and his friends are already inside the private room, they sat before as they are looking at the guests filling the auction house. The attendants of the Evergreen family are greeting everyone as they guided them to the seats. Soon, the auction house is filled up and only private rooms are yet to be filled.

    All the spectators are waiting for the auction to start. Soon, the crowd fell into an uproar as they saw who ising to the auction house. The head of the Crimson me family head could be seen. They were shocked beyond belief. Even though the monthly auction is a grand event and the other noble families also had to show some face to the Evergreen family, but the head of the families would nevere to the monthly auction, only they woulde to the yearly auction. But now, the Crimson me family head hase to the auction this time and everyone felt that there is something special in the auction this time.

    The Crimson me family head was greeted by the Evergreen family head and then made his way to the private room reserved for his family. He looked at the Private room, Sam previously sat in and felt reassured that the room is upied.

    Soon, when audience were about toe out of their shocked states, the people from the other families arrived. And the situation is same as the Crimson me family and their heads also arrived. Even city lord and the tower heads also arrived at the auction. The spectators were totally convinced that there is definitely some special item in today¡¯s auction.

    Even though, their thoughts are correct, they don¡¯t know that all the bigshots have varying reasons for that. Crimson me family head came to make it up, for the past. The rest of the family heads and city lord on the other hand thought that the Crimson me family head has sniffed something valuable in the auction that he needs toe to the auction personally. So, they didn¡¯t want to miss out on the treasure and made their way here. As for the tower heads, they only came because they want to see what Sam had put in the auction.

    Soon, auction began. The beautiful elder sister of Philip is still the auctioneer. She enthusiastically started auctioning the items one by one. The finale came.

    "Now, the auction hase to the finale. This time I won¡¯t exin or describe the product. You can see the demonstration yourselves." Eva said with an alluring smile and left the stage.

    Crimson me family head also knew the time hase. Even though, he didn¡¯t know initially what item Sam is going to sell, he pulled some strings and finally got the answer. The item is the finale. He immediately became attentive. Although, he prepared to bid whatever the item is, he still wants to see, what kind of item did Sam has to sell in the auction and that too worthy of finale.

    Everyone, immediately became serious and watched the stage, then an acolyte mage came to the stage wearing the red robe. This is precisely the robe that Sam wore this afternoon. While demonstrating the product. Then another acolyte and a Novice entered the stage and demonstration has proceeded in the same way as Sam did in the afternoon.

    The guests are already in awe of the robe. Even though, the armours will do, if opponent is really too powerful, he will definitely deal a major damage. So, they will have to maintain high quality armours which are costly but clearly not good looking either and might even look bulky. But when they saw the exquisite robe, they werepletely thrilled of its capabilities.

    Just as they thought that the demonstration is over another six people with almost same attire entered the stage and this time a middle stage novice also entered as their opponent. This time the crowd became even more shocked to see. There are only seven Acolyte and the opponent is a Novice. They can¡¯t possibly deal with him. Or so they thought.

    When the Novice made a move, the seven people also made their move at the same time. One of them went directly to the opponent head on, while the remaining six people surrounded in and took a certain position. Suddenly, the robes of them started glowing and a binding formation appeared, stopping the movements of the Novice for a split second in which he was dealt with a blow from the remaining seventh person. They then immediately took a step back and immediately took another battle formation as Novice attacked them. Their robes glowed dimly again and then a barrier appeared fending the attack off. This is a pure defensive formation. Finally, they took another position and this time their robes glowed brighter and as the energy of the six people gathered towards the centre person as a huge fire ball appeared. The fire ball immediately shot towards the Novice almost getting him off the stage.

    The demonstration was finished. But the audience werepletely dumbstruck and were still in daze. They understood the first two formations but they didn¡¯t understand the third attack at all. Even the big shots like family heads and tower heads, didn¡¯t understand.

    Of course, how could they understand. It is the result of Sam¡¯s continuous research and experiments. The robe set is filled with various inscriptions he created. He used the inscriptions he modified by the experiment and then used them as the energy nodes by the position of the members of the squad creating the instantaneous formations. As for the third attack, it isbination of the formation and the attack inscription. Basically, there are both consumable and permanent inscriptions that are inscribed. But the attack inscriptions are almost all consumable. So, Sam used his understanding of the behaviour of the runes andbined the formation knowledge he had and created thest attack, which can deal a blow even to a middle-stage Novice. The energy of the all the six will be condensed towards the seventh one where it converts into the fire type energy and form a fire ball,

    All the noble family heads and even city lord feelpletely determined. They should obtain these robes. If they could train a batch of these Acolytes specially, they can be of great advantage. Even though there seemed to be quite a few numbers of Novices in the city. Everyone knew, that the fighting force of the city or even nobles are mainly dependent on Acolytes. This is backward ce after all. So, they were quite determined to get this.

    Eva came back to the stage and a set of the seven robes was neatly disyed on the mannequins. Sam made two sets of fire and ice type. So, the Evergreen family reached an agreement to get one set on each type. So, the other two sets will be disyed.

    As soon as they saw the robes, they just wanted to snatch them away. They saw a notebook was also disyed along with the robes and felt confused. Then Eva came to the stage.

    "Dear guests, this is the set created by the special guest and is provided with the notebook filled with instructions on how to use it properly. The starting bid of the set is 50,000 spirit stones. The minimum increment will be of 5000 spirit stones."

    As soon as she finished the audience became agitated and then started bidding.

    "50000"

    "55000"

    "65000"

    "70000"

    "85000"

    Some rich merchants started bidding. Even though they are not that rich, if they could fork out some money, they can sell it to a higher city and can make some profit out of it and thus they are trying their luck.

    "120000" suddenly a voice silenced everyone. The city lord bid his price and the merchants came to their senses. The noble families still have to bid. Soon, they started bidding.

    "125000"

    "135000"

    "140000" All the noble families startedpeting, but there is still someone who is silent, it is the Crimson me family head. That didn¡¯t mean he is giving up. But he is even more determined since he knew who the seller is and he hase especially for that. He is merely waiting for time.

    "200000" finally the bid came to this and it is still the city lord. Everybody became silent. They didn¡¯t want to pay more than that. Eva looked around and just as she was about to announce. Another bid came.

    "250000" this is crimson me family head. He raised the bid by 50000 making even city lord grit his teeth and stayed silent. He didn¡¯t expect that there is stillpetition.

    "250000. Once, twice and sold." Eva confirmed the purchase and a lot of people were extremely disappointed. There are only two people who were grinning. They were Sam and the Crimson me family head. One for the money and the other for resolving the grudges.

    Just as the auction house was silent and gloomy. Another set of blue colour robes came making all the other noble families to see hope. They immediately became alert and started bidding. This time Crimson me family headpletely stayed out of situation and then the price of the robes reached the same 250000 and this time the city lord really bid it as their family has many ice type Acolytes. The remaining noble families felt indignant and they pulled strings to get their hands on the maker of the robe set. But the Evergreen pavilion gave them the answer, they immediately dismissed the ideas.

    They clearly understood, why Crimson me family head came and bid so much even going against the City lord. He is not only after the product; he is also resolving the grudges. They understood it because, they clearly knew about his visit to Sam. They immediately connected the dots and regretted not paying the visit themselves toe to an agreement. But it was toote.

    Sam was grinning ear to ear in his private room. Philip said from the side. "Sam, you are filthy rich. The Noble families you have sold had been sucked dry and your money now can be equal to half of the savings of a noble family. We should squeeze out some benefits from you."

    "Yes, I heard that you gave gifts to the girls. How is that fair? You can¡¯t be that biased. Why don¡¯t you give some gifts too?" Marvin said from the side.

    "Don¡¯t involve our dresses in this. Marvin, do you have any shame? You can even be petty at that? If you try using my dress as leverage, I will beat you up. Moreover, we paid for it." Freya immediately lost her cool. This time even Haley didn¡¯t stop her.

    "Hmph. Freya, how can be so shameless? You can even call that payment. Did you see the demo earlier? Ordinary robes can be so formidable, if made by Sam and I heard from Philip that the dresses are 10 times more exquisite than the robes and from Sam¡¯s character he would have made even more formidable tricks to them. Yet, you can shamelessly say that you paid for that by just giving 10 spirit stones. You might as well not pay it. Are you really from a noble family?" Marvin immediately shot back.

    "Alright, you guys better stay silent. I will also give you guys sell you somethingter. Don¡¯t be irritating." Sam said as he saw situation going out of hand as they are starting to argue. He is almost regretting not selling something to Marvin and others. He almost judged their EQ by his standards and forgot that unlike him, they are actual teenagers.

 Chapter 43: A life time too early

    Sam went back to his mansion with his huge sum of money. Out of 500000 spirit stones from the auctioning the two sets, he got 475000 spirit stones and the rest was the auctionmission. Other than that, he got 350000 stones from selling the other two sets to the Evergreen family. When he received therge amount of spirit stones, he felt so happy that he can¡¯t get rid of the grin on his face.

    He walked to his mansion gleefully and slept peacefully on his bed. But right now, the people who bought the sets arepletely sleepless. After all, they just saw a new creation which would help their elite Acolyte subordinates and increase the efficiency of the team. So, they really are sleepless and so are their sub-ordinates.

    At Crimson me family.

    The family head and another elder are sitting in a private room. There is no other person in the room and they are looking at the robes sets as they were thinking about something.

    "Are you sure, you don¡¯t want me to take a look?" The other elder asked with a solemn expression. He is an inscription master of the Crimson me family. Even though he is at Novice stage, he is only at the rank 1 inscription master stage. Because, it is not that easy to be an inscription master much less promote the rank further. Because, the energy levels and control required for bing an inscription master or any other professional is not that low. That is the reason, many people will get their rank1 examination only at thete stages of the Acolyte.

    The inscription master is looking at the robes with obvious excitement and greed. He really wants to see, how a young brat has used the inscriptions to make a robe this powerful. That is the reason, he came to meet the family head as soon as they came back to the house. If he could study and observe and even better duplicate the robe, he might improve his skills as well as make a lot of money.

    The family head however, ispletely oblivious to the thoughts of the inscription master before him. He held a note passed over by his daughter, Freya in his hand. There is a confused expression as well as hesitation written all over his face.

    Meanwhile, somewhere else there is another person who is not as hesitant as him.

    The City lord as soon is currently in a private room in a city lord mansion along with another two people, who will be recognised by Sam easily as they just got acquainted today. They are Falter and Felix. They both sat down across the table and on the other side, the city lord is looking at them seriously and asked again.

    "Are two of you confident that you can replicate it, if you examine them?" He asked with a solemn expression. But the greed in his eyes cannot be hidden at all. The two tower heads looked at each other and Felix said with a confident expression.

    "Even though, he might be a genius, he is after all inexperienced. I think we both can understand the concept behind the manufacturing process, once we examine it."

    "Okay, then. You can take a look." The city lord agreed and then he took out the seven robes, which are icy blue in colour on the table. Felix and Falter both took each and started examining them. They touched the cloth and didn¡¯t even know what material it was, but they left the thought and searched for the inscriptions all over the robe without leaving a single corner. But they didn¡¯t find it, which made them frown in displeasure. After examining for some time, they finally found something odd. There is an inner lining to the robe. When they saw this, they immediately rejoiced and tried to probe with their spiritual sense only to be blocked.

    "I will try another way." Felix said and tried to infuse the spiritual energy directly into the robe to observe carefully. But before he could observe anything the inscriptions directly activated and he felt helpless for a second.

    "How about we directly cut open the lining?" Falter suggested and both of them looked at City lord asking for his approval. City lord felt quite conflicted by their suggestion. After all, it is not cheap. He pondered for a bit and then finally he decided.

    "You can do whatever you want. But make sure that you can reproduce them."

    Felix nodded and then with a wave of his hand a wind de appeared and cut open the lining inside the robe. Just as the three were about to rejoice, apletely unexpected thing happened. zing mes started to emerge from the tear as they started burning the robe instantly. Before they could react all the robe left was a piece of rag and remaining turned into ashes. They didn¡¯t even have time to respond as they looked.

    The three of them stared dumbstruck, not knowing what happened. Felix was the first one toe to the senses and picked up the rag as he said. "This brat sure is sly. He set up a trap. If anyone tries to pry into the process, they wouldpletely lose the product." His face was a little gloomy as he spoke. Then he looked at the rag cloth and was stunned.

    By this time, the city lord slumped back into the chair as he looked at rag in Felix¡¯s hands and when he directed his gaze to Felix to howl out the curses, he was confused by thetter¡¯s expression. Soon, the expression on Felix¡¯s face turned into that of shame and anger and finally rage. He just wanted to blow his top, but couldn¡¯t find an outlet.

    Falter saw his face and also felt quite puzzled. He took the rag and saw it, he also felt like vomiting his blood in anger. Looking at the tow big shots getting angry even after destroying his expensive robe, City lord just snatched the rag from, Falter¡¯s hand saw a string of letter on it.

    ¡¯You want to copy my creations with your measly abilities. Not any dog shit expert can do that. You are a life time too early to do it.¡¯ When he saw the words, he also became embarrassed and angry. He is after all a City lord and even though the other party didn¡¯t know he was scolding him, reading the words, he still felt like he was humiliated.

    He just wanted to go to Sam¡¯s mansion and give him a beating. But up on remembering the other party¡¯s status, he immediately lost all the thoughts and stayed put as he slumped in the chair. He regretted doing this now as he looked at the remaining six robes, which had their value depreciated greatly due to loss of one robe of the set.

    In Crimson me family mansion.

    The inscription master left the private room angrily and stomped away in fury. Inside the room, the family head is still sitting in the same ce as he looked at the note, which has words. ¡¯If you don¡¯t want to suffer any losses, you better not mess with robes or you will regret it- Sam¡¯ this is the note passed to him by Freya. He looked at the seven robes on the table and sighed as he muttered. "I hope, I made the right decision."

    Sam woke up early the next day. He made a visit to the academy and met with the Principal.

    "I heard that you made a big haul in yesterday¡¯s auction." Principal asked as soon as he saw Sam.

    "So-So" Sam replied nonchntly as he took a seat.

    Hearing his reply, the Principal gritted his teeth in anger. If not for the fact that he was considering his image as an elder, he really wanted to drown Sam in curses.

    "Why did youe?" Principal forced himself to calm down and asked.

    "When are we leaving exactly and how many days it will take us to reach the Falcon cliff city?" Sam asked without bothering about other party¡¯s expressions.

    "We will leave in six days¡¯ time. I am going to conduct an assessment for all the students to choose. There are 10 spots in total. Even though it would be difficult to select them, I came up with a n to pick them carefully. One spot is already fixed for you and there are only nine spots left.

    I will inform you after the team is selected. It will take a week to travel in a horse carriage. If we travel on the beasts, we can make it shorter though. What do you think?"

    "What do you mean by that?" Sam asked as he raised an eyebrow.

    "I heard that you have two beast pets at level 2 middle stage." Principal said with a smile.

    "So?" Sam asked acting dumb. Seeing this Principal got irritated and spoke.

    "If you can help with the transport, we can reach there earlier."

    "Why should I help?" this is the only reply he got for his blunt request.

    "You areing with us too. What is wrong with transporting us?" Principal said a bit enraged. ¡¯This brat. Why is so difficult to get a small favour from him.¡¯ He thought inwardly.

    "Of course, there is nothing wrong. But they are mine. Why should I give you guys a free ride?" Sam asked as he ignored the anger of Principal.

    "I am already giving you a free pass. Can¡¯t you just give us a ride? Why is it that you can¡¯t bear to do that? If you don¡¯t give us a ride, I am not letting you off easily. You are so rich and still want to fleece me for a ride." Principal stood up and pointed a finger at Sam as he spoke.

    "Fine. I will let you take advantage of me for this one time." Sam conceded. He stood up and just as he was making his way to the door, he heard Principal speaking.

    "If you want, you can bring one or two followers with you. It is for giving us a ride and I am providing a special privilege to you." Sam just acknowledged silently and walked back to his mansion.

    At the river side sat along with the panthers which are munching on some deer like beast and was deep in thought about his past life. Apart from Ste, he missed three things mainly. His wrist watch, His motor bike and his flute. Then he thought about the ws he used to fight with. At first, he thought of using the Golden Blood tiger ws to make a set for himself. But he got the news of the avability of the Meteorite sand and that too of various types, that is why he stopped himself. After all, the better the material and the better the possibilities. He sighed as he looked at the bare left hand without any wrist watch.

    "Right now, I don¡¯t want to make these things with a low rank material. I might as well wait to get my hands on the meteorite sand. Meanwhile, I better figure out a way to solve the problem of the engine and its fuel." He muttered as he looked at the river.

    Even though he can make a steam engine easily, he really has no interest in making one. After all, even though the steam engine is one of the turning points of the technology back on earth, for Sam right now, they are nothing but money makers which he didn¡¯tck much. He just wants to make something that he has other uses. He fell deep into thought and finally came to a conclusion.

    "Let us first think of a way to make some fuel. Then, I can create an engine ording to that. Anyway, I need to get a bike as soon as I can. I really miss the feeling of riding." He spoke as he stood up and stretched his bodyzily.

 Chapter 44: Assessment over

    Next day The Principal of the Starwood academy is in an extremely good mood as he felt that he got one over the money- grubbing brat, Sam. That is why, he is full of smiles since morning as he followed, he attended his duties.

    But this smile didn¡¯tst when he met two people waiting at his office for him. He furrowed his brows as he recognised them as an Artisan and his assistant who runs a business in the city. He is good at making carriages and all the carriages in the noble families and merchants are made by him. When Principal saw him, he was quite puzzled. He invited them into the office and asked them.

    "Why do you want to see me?"

    "Sir, I am here to collect payment for an order." The man who seemed to be the boss said in a low voice.

    "Payment? I don¡¯t remember having made any deal with you and even the academy doesn¡¯t have business. Are you here by mistake?" Principal grew more and more and confused.

    "No, Sir. If you look at this, you will understand." He said as he passed over a letter to the principal which he took and read. As soon as the Principal read the content, he immediately became enraged and wanted to punch someone in the face. But he forced himself to calm down and looked at the boss in front of him and asked.

    "Did this happen yesterday?"

    "Yes, sir." The boss said. Even though, he is an artisan, he is merely a rank 1 and doesn¡¯t have much status as he skills were low. That is why, he started using his knowledge to make the carriages instead of weapons. He was nervous, when ¡¯that¡¯ person came to his shop yesterday and ced an order on behalf of the Principal¡¯s name. But he quickly dismissed the thoughts as he knew that a person of ¡¯that¡¯ status doesn¡¯t need to bother to make him go against the Principal to deal with him. That is why, he became more confident and came to look for the Principal to foot the bill. But looking at the Principal¡¯s expressions, he is starting to doubt his decision.

    Principal suddenly heaved a sigh and looked away from the letter and asked. "How much is the bill?"

    "5000 spirit stones." The person said slowly looking at the Principal¡¯s expression and as expected, he saw the Principal¡¯s expression turn dark and ugly and he immediately exined himself.

    "Sir, He gave us a special order and the design himself, including the materials to be used. If you want, you can take a look at it." Boss passed over a huge scroll. Principal looked at the exquisite sketches and the designs of variousponents and became impressed, but when he looked at the list of the materials needed, he almost puked blood in rage. He held back his anger and returned the scroll for the boss and finished the Payment along with. Boss left the academy happily.

    After making sure that nobody is around, Principal immediately roared in rage as tore down the letter.

    "SAAAAMMMMM"

    He became so enraged at the content of the letter. The words are written like this. ¡¯Honourable Principal, yesterday when we discussed the travel arrangements, you only mentioned about the beasts of mine and forgot to mention about the carriage. So, as a humble student, I took it up on myself and ordered a specially made carriage for our team and I am writing this to remind youplete the payment. You don¡¯t need to thank me as it is my responsibility to help you do these minor tasks. ¨C Sam.¡¯

    Principal immediately understood Sam¡¯s intention of getting himself a new carriage under the expense of him. But he can¡¯t lose face and get embarrassed by exposing the truth. Because, if he exposed the truth, he has to action against Sam for tantly using the Principal¡¯s name which he obviously unable to do. That is why, he can only curse in his heart. Just when he thought he took advantage of that brat, he made him lose another 5000 spirit stones.

    Meanwhile at the river-side mansion, Sam just came out of the river after taking a swim and started walking towards the mansion. Two panthers, also followed him along yfully jumping around. Even though they are big now, they are ying like kids.

    Sam dried himself normally without use of any spiritual energy. He tried his best to live like a normal human whenever he can and taking bath and having sleep and even taking the meals regrly is for the same reason. After he changed into a new dress, he went to a room where arge table is there and a scroll is fixed over on it. Sam looked at the half- finished design and was in deep contemtion. He moved towards another small table at the side, which is filled with all sorts of calctions and writings.

    He is trying to design the things he missed. The calctions are for making a wrist watch and he is designing them on the scroll. After that he has to think of ways to make use of the resources to run a motored vehicle. In fact, he wanted to make an engine full of inscriptions to convert the spiritual energy in the spiritual stones to the shaft power required. But he immediately rejected the idea because, this will make use of theplex inscriptions and high-level skills and experimentations on them, which are restricted by his cultivation level. That is the reason he rejected the thought and another reason is that, this world doesn¡¯t have something like patent and if a high ranked inscription master gets hold of this, it will make his effort go to waste as they can easily imitate it. But if he were to use a new type of fuel and an engine with a simr andplicated mechanism to the modern world engine and make some tweaks with very delicateponents, he can make sure they can¡¯t produce a working model even if they get hold of the mechanism and that is the reason, he doesn¡¯t want to make use of simple spirit stone powered engine.

    But he is still in contemtion over what type of fuel, he should make and if he can proceed with his initial thoughts.

    He then looked at the design again and started drawing the remainingponents of the watch. He is slow and steady as he took his own sweet time, because even if he can design this faster, he cannot make the watch, because of theck of materials as he included various meteorite sands in his design.

    He just kept on drawing as he is trying to make himself busy. Because,tely Sam is feeling a little bloated and unable to be at ease. The cause of this is the overflowing spiritual energy within him. He is at the limit of his Level Acolyte, but he can¡¯t break through easily because, he needs to exchange energy with his contract beasts. Even though atter stages, he can break through directly, at his current level of cultivation level, he can¡¯t do this because at the foundation levels of cultivation, he has to increase along with beasts, so that he can have maximum efficiency. That is why hepletely let go of anything that is rted to spiritual energy and just concentrated on his designing of his newponents.

    This went on and on as he maintained his daily routine like a normal engineer from earth and worked on his designs slowly.

    But the rest of his city is not at all boring as Sam¡¯s life. The Principal announced the city about the selection tournament and the noble families, became excited as their spections became correct. They all are filled with hopes that their geniuses would be selected, as the criterion for the selection is the potential rather than the cultivation level and are making their ns to make their children perform better.

    All the noble families attended the assessment test which will be going on for three days straight. All the students were excited to try their best to get into the team. When they heard that they have only nine spots they felt a little disappointed and more than half of the students just dropped out of thepetition but some of them felt weird as they thought that selection of nine members is a bit odd.

    All the assessments were taken ce inside the test grounds and the assessment this time is not fight against students but rather there are number of trails to assess their potential in various aspects.

    But Sam was oblivious to this as he was in between in a pile of paper scrolls and continued to do his work.

    Soon, the assessments are over and there are only two days left before they can start their journey to the Falcon cliff city and Sam finally got a message from the Principal to meet the rest of the team mates to get along before going to thepetition. Sam also needs to visit the Evergreen family to take back the zing earth bulls, so he made a trip to the academy first.

    When he reached the academy, a senior student received him and then led him to a room which already has ten people waiting for him.

    When he entered the room, he saw Principal addressing the nine people sitting in front of him and felt a little surprised as he saw a few familiar faces there. Philip, Freya, Haley, Kelly, Jack are sitting along with another four people. He didn¡¯t recognise the other people.

    But the one with the big surprise is not him but the others in the room. They all felt weird at first when they noticed that the overpowered freshman, Sam didn¡¯t participate in the assessment and now that they saw him here, they were shocked. ¡¯So, He is already in the team.¡¯ All of them thought and understood the odd selection 9 members, because the 10th member is already decided.

    Between those surprised gazes there is one with some disdain. Sam came out of his stupor and walked towards the Principal.

    "Hello, Sir." He greeted him with a nonchnt face. The rest of the people also came out of their stupor and looked at Sam.

    "Hello, Sam take your seat." He said as he pointed at the seat.

    Sam nodded and took a seat without greeting anyone else. He just gave his friends a look before turning to look at the Principal.

    "Now, that all the participants are here, I will say a few words. We will be going to the Falcon cliff city day after tomorrow. The ten of you are going to represent the Starwood city in the tournament that is going to be conducted by the Count himself. There will be teams from the other cities under the jurisdiction of the Count and people from the Falcon Cliff city will also participate in it. I can¡¯t tell you what the rewards are but the tests would be on various aspects and the winners will get the recognition and rewards beyond imagination. I hope you guys will prepare well and work hard in representing our city and the academy." Principal spoke as he looked at the ten participants.

    "Sir, how many days is the tournament going to be conducted?" Philip asked as he raised his hand.

    "I am not quite sure. But you will know after we reach there. I and City lord are going to apany you all. Eisen, you are going to be the in charge of the team." Principal said as he looked at a person and that guy stood up. He is the one who looked at Sam in disdain. Sam saw the three stars on his chest. He seems to be at the initial stage Novice.

    "Sir, do you mean that I am the leader of the team?" Eisen asked as he looked straight at the Principal. Thetter nodded.

    "I have an objection regarding the team." He said with an arrogant tone. Principal raised his eyebrow as he looked at Eisen.

    "What would that be?" Principal asked in a low voice.

    "I don¡¯t want someone who used their status to get into the team through the backdoor. This will not do justice for the team members at all." Eisen said as he looked at Principal straight in the eyes without noticing the change of expressions on other members. But everyone could understand that he is talking about Sam and then all of them looked towards him. They wanted to see how Sam would react to that, but all they could see was a cold, emotionless and nonchnt face without any reaction. Then they heard the reaction from another person.

    "So, Eisen. You mean the Principal of this academy, me is a person who is influenced by the people¡¯s status and open the backdoor without considering their capability." Principal asked as he voice sounded a little colder.

    Eisen was dumbfounded for a moment when he heard this. He really dared not agree to what Principal said. How could he agree that Principal is a person with out morals? That would be courting death. Even if he really felt that, he wouldn¡¯t dare to say that.

    "No sir. I-I mean that someone might have u-used their status to threaten......" He started in a fl.u.s.tered tone and was interrupted by the Principal.

    "Enough. I am not going to ask your opinions nor do I care. You are only a leader of team because of the cultivation level. Don¡¯t think that you have some say in the team members selection simply because I gave you the position. You better keep your mouth shut. Everyone you guys can leave. Meet me at the Academy gate at morning in the day after tomorrow. You are dismissed."

 Chapter 45: Day of the journey

    After the meeting is ended, Sam walked out of the academy and started walking towards his mansion. But he some people stopped him on his way and the person in the lead happened to be Eisen.

    Sam didn¡¯t speak and just looked at Eisen with a cold gaze as he raised an eyebrow as if questioning him of the purpose. For some reason Eisen got irritated looking at Sam¡¯s nonchnce and said in an arrogant tone.

    "You better withdraw from the team." He just made a statement as if he was ordering his subordinate as he looked down with his height two inches taller than Sam. There are two people behind Eisen and one of them is part of the team and another one who seemed to resemble Eisen a bit, looked at Sam with a gloating smile.

    Sam didn¡¯t reply anything and just walked around the group stayingpletely silent.

    "Wait."

    "Sam."

    Two shouts came at same time and one of them is Eisen and another one is surprisingly Jack who is running towards them. When Sam looked at Jack and didn¡¯t even bother with Eisen, he became angry. Because, he felt that his pride got hurt. He is the champion for the assessment and senior in the Academy and most of all his cultivation level is higher. So, a junior and one without any test is really a thorn in his eyes.

    "Let¡¯s speak in the mansion." Sam said to Jack as thetter nodded and both of them started walking.

    Seeing the tant disregard from both of them made Eisen grit his teeth in rage. "Sam, do you think you are a bigshot. I am also an inscription master and a Formation master and my father is the head of the Formation tower. Even if you have more titles than me, then what of it? I heard that you don¡¯t even have a teacher and you are self-taught. How far do you think you can go? You better stop being arrogant and ne humble. In front of me you are nothing." He said as he released his aura of a Novice stage.

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother with his words and just kept on walking, but Jack stopped in his tracks and looked at Eisen with a cold re full of hostility. So, he also had to stop and turned around and patted Jack on shoulder.

    "I don¡¯t have time to sniff every piece of shit that is on my way. We can just walk around and ignore it." He said and pulled Jack along as he started walking.

    Eisen and the two people behind him immediately had ugly expressions and Eisen had it worst as he saw people looking at him in weird way. He was about blow up, but then he remembered that, he is near the Academy and the heart of the city. So, he forced himself to calm down and gave Sam¡¯s retreating back a hateful re before leaving the ce.

    After some time. At Sam¡¯s Mansion.

    Both Sam and Jack were sitting across each other in the living room. Sam has same nonchnt expression on his face, but the coldness toned down a little. Jack seemed to be hesitating about something.

    "Are you going to speak or not?" Sam asked as he looked at Jack.

    "I need a favour." Jack said slowly. An expression of unwillingness on his face.

    Sam didn¡¯t speak and just gave a questioning look and maintained his silence. Looking at him, Jack just took a deep breath and continued.

    "I know you don¡¯t like doing favours, but I don¡¯t have any other choice. Do you have any way to take Shawn along with us to Falcon cliff city?"

    "He didn¡¯t pass the test. Why did you want him toe?" Sam asked.

    "it has something to do with Eisen. Before the final round of the examination, he and his two underlings jumped on me and Shawn to get the spots. But their n partially failed and I was able to make it safe, but Shawn wasn¡¯t that lucky as he got took the first attack in full force. He wasn¡¯t even able to participate in the final round." Jack exined.

    "So, Eisen is telling me to back off because he wants another spot and he thinks I am an easy target, since I don¡¯t have any background?" Sam muttered to himself. Then he spoke to Jack.

    "Even if I can get Sam to join us in journey, how is it going to help? He can¡¯t join the team, right?" Sam asked in reply.

    "idents happen." Jack replied with a cold tone.

    "Sure, just bring him along with you." Sam smiled and agreed. Jack immediately became relieved and left after he thanked him.

    Sam just walked to the rooms and started making the preparations to leave the city. He collected all his design scrolls, his tailoring tools and some small forging equipment. He asked Philip that to search for a buyer for the Mansion and to his surprise, the Evergreen family itself bought the mansion for half the price he bought it in the auction.

    Right now, he has a total of 825000 spirit stones he earned from the auction and he has a 2000 fire element spirit stones still left after his, Yanwu¡¯s and Panthers¡¯ consumption. Along with the 15000 spirit stones he got from selling the mansion and the 100000 spirit stones he got from the deal with the Principal, his total worth is 850000 spirit stones approximately which made him feel a little satisfied. This habit of being satisfied of the money he earned himself is from his past life. Even though, Sam is famous for his intelligence and abilities the most, the other trait that most people knew about him is his extravagance. He liked spending money and making money, he has a lot of materialistic needs and reckless spending made all the second-generation heirs burn with jealousy. He doesn¡¯t know exactly why he got this habit, but he knew that that had something to do with his childhood poverty. Even after rebirth, Sam still has same materialistic love and he didn¡¯t have any thoughts of getting rid of it.

    The day of the departure finally came and Sam left the mansion early in the morning and started walking to the Academy gate. When he reached, there are already some people waiting there. There is big carriage made of the top-grade quality Starwood and some other rank 1 metals. The Carriage ispletely ck in colour and it looked mostly like a modern-day caravan of celebrities and in fact Sam actually designed it to be such. It has every thing that a caravan should have except the engine and the driverpartment which gave him an extended space. At the front of the Caravan are two zing earth bulls attached just like how the horses would be.

    Sam ignored the people that are waiting walked towards the two bulls and patted their heads, for which they rubbed their heads in a docile manner against his palm. The other people who are appreciating therge carriage with interest are stunned when they saw the scene. Sam owning these two beasts is not a matter which is known by many people, so when the other students saw this, they were stunned. After all beast taming is not amon or easy thing to do.

    Sam didn¡¯t care anything and just examined the bulls. They grew, not only in size but also in their level. Before he came to this city, they were at Middle-stage of level 2 and now they arete stage of level 2. He wondered how the Evergreen family took care of them.

    Sam then looked at the other students, who are chatting. There are three people here and two of them are the people who are part of the team and other person seemed to be their person. The extra person is a boy who wore a Starwood academy uniform. The two team members are a boy and a girl, who is the fourth andst girl other than Kelly, Freya and Haley. They are giving Sam some side nces as they whispered among themselves. Soon, people started arriving. Philip, Freya, Haley came together and greeted Sam and Kelly arrived a bitter and she greeted him in low voice and started chatting with them. Of course, except with Sam. She is still a bit afraid.

    After a few moments Jack came along with Shawn.

    "Sam, thank you so much." Shawn spoke as soon as he appeared. His face is still a bit pale an obvious sign of him recovering from his injuries. Sam just smiled at without giving any response.

    "What is this about?" Freya being Freya asked directly while the rest of their group are bing a little curious. After all, one of the top rankers in the entrance examination, Shawn is somewhat familiar to them and they knew that he had some partnership with Sam at the entrance examination. They were first surprised that Shawn was unable to make the team and now him thanking Sam directly out of blue is making them curious.

    "Nothing much, Sam said that I cane with you guys to the Falcon cliff city. Even though, I don¡¯t might not have a chance to participate in the tournament. I can cheer you guys and broaden my horizons." Shawn said with his signature grin.

    "Who said you can tag along? Did you ask for my permission at all?" Suddenly a voice interrupted him from behind attracting the group¡¯s attention and they saw Eisen along with the two people that stopped Sam yesterday.

    "I am the team leader. Did you ask my permission to bring someone?" Eisen asked directly walking towards Sam with an arrogant gaze. He is eighteen years old and he is naturally a bit taller than Sam, so he wanted to intimidate him with his stature and his cultivation. But all he got in response was a nonchnt expression.

    Nobody reacted to his statement and everyone seemed to deliberately ignoring him in Sam¡¯s group and they are just carrying with their chat as if he was not there at all. Situation suddenly became awkward for him and his face turned red with embarrassment and anger and just as he was about to blow his top...

    "Seems that everyone is here." Principal¡¯s voice came and along with Principal another person also followed him which surprised everyone and that person is none other than the City lord of the Starwood city. Everyone started to bow and greet him.

    "Greetings. City lord."

    "Greetings. City lord."

    "Greetings. City lord."

    "Greetings. City lord."

    But there is always an exception and that is Sam didn¡¯t even take a second look at him.

    He didn¡¯t bother with them at all and just walked towards the carriage door which is in the middle and opened the door. Seeing this everyone thought, he is going to open it for city lord. But they couldn¡¯t be more wrong as Sam directly walked in after he opened the door, leaving them stupefied. Before, they coulde out of their stupor, they saw Sam protruding his head out side and saying.

    "Philip, Jack, Shawn,diese on board, what are you even waiting for?" He asked as if there are no other people here.

    Principal looked at Sam and cursed inside his heart. Sam looked at him and gave a provocative smirk. ¡¯You wanted to get a free ride and do you think I will just be okay with fleecing you with some money. I will make you grind your teeth to dust in embarrassment.¡¯ Sam thought as he made his way inside.

    City lord also stood there awkwardly in silence. He understood Sam¡¯s cold treatment. Who can he me for that? Rest of the team mates are all surprised not knowing how to react, then suddenly a voice interrupted their thoughts.

    "SAM, YOU IMBECILE. HOW DARE YOU DISRESPECT THE CITY LORD AND PRINCIPAL? GET DOWN THIS INSTANT AND APOLOGIZE." Eisen roared in rage as he stormed towards the carriage door.

 Chapter 46: Unexpected Gain

    Eisen got nothing in response, but he felt a hand on his shoulder, and he turned to look and was about tosh out, only to see the Principal who just gave him a re and then looked at the remaining students and said.

    "Okay, don¡¯t waste your time. We are ready to leave. All of you get on board." He said and walked towards the carriage and the students followed inside. When they went in, they were amazed to see inside the carriage. The carriage is like a long rectangr room. On the one end there is the door. There are windows on both sides of the carriage which are made of ss and are now closed. But what amazed them the most is that there are no seats inside the carriage, instead there are protrusions on both walls which are in the height of their thighs. There seemed to be a small partition at the back of the carriage, creating a small room which is closed now. There is big seat just before the room¡¯s partition and is made of quite exquisite leather and on both sides of the seat there seemed to be carpets of white fur shining. After everyone boarded the carriage, they all looked confused on where to sit.

    Sam walked towards the central seat and whistled loudly after he took a seat. Suddenly, too ck shadows entered the carriage with in a few moments andnded on the carpets on either side of Sam, they are the two panthers.

    Now Sam sat on a luxurious ck leather seat with two ck panthers on both sides resting on white fair. Compiled with his handsome features and sharp aura everyone just stared at the scene.

    "Take a seat." Sam said to Philip as he gestured towards a protrusion nearest to him. Philip walked towards the protrusion and pulled it and an exquisite leather seat appeared. The seats are like foldable chairs but the upper half is directly linked to the walls and the lower half is the only thing that can pulled to open the seat.

    Philip smiled and took a seat and gestured to his friends who along with other students were in daze to take a seat. Which they followed. Soon, the students took seats one after another including the City lord and the Principal. The only thing is that the seats on the right- side carriage wall are facing the seats on the left side carriage wall. One looked and we can easily say that the carriage is aplete personal carriage and Sam took the host seat and the rest are his guests. All the people felt this including the Principal and the City lord. But even they shut their mouths silently and shook their heads with a wry smile. There are only three people still standing there and they are Eisen and his two underlings. He gritted his teeth as he looked at Sam with a hateful re. Howa can he not understand now that he saw this? The carriage is definitely Sam¡¯s and the beasts too. He is burning with envy as he looked at the ck panthers on both sides of Sam acting docile and meek.

    "Principal, I heard that the trip is only for people in the team. Why do I see extra candidates here?" Sam asked without even turning his attention to others. Suddenly, four people tensed. They are Eisen and his two underlings along with the extra friend of the other two participants. His friends also got nervous and were about to say something but they were interrupted by Sam¡¯s voice again.

    "You can get down." Sam said as he pointed at the guy who looked simr to Eisen. This made Eisen angry.

    "You also brought an extra person and they also have an extra person, what about them?" Eisen retorted as he turned red with anger. But Sam didn¡¯t even pay attention to him and picked on his nails and said. "Shawn is my friend and carriage is mine. That guy is the one who came to assist in driving the carriage. Do you have a problem with that?" He looked at the Extra person and his two friends who smiled and nodded at him gratefully.

    Eisen was about to blow up when another voice came from outside.

    "Principal Sir. Can we leave now?" This is the voice of the carriage driver who was arranged by the Principal, who gave a look at Sam and the extra guy behind Eisen.

    "Eisen, tell him to get down." He said in a deep voice.

    Eisen looked at the City lord unwillingly only to see thetter avoid his gaze.

    "How much do you want?" Eisen asked as he looked at Sam in a low voice.

    "Don¡¯t talk money with me. You are not there yet." Sam said with nonchnt tone. Eisen was fuming in anger and released his spiritual energy and ready to make a move any time only to be interrupted by someone.

    "Sir Sam. His father is a friend of mine. Can you please do me a favour and let him on board. I will definitely repay you." City lord said in amicable smile. Sam didn¡¯t reply and just looked at him coldly without giving any reply. Then he turned his gaze towards Haley who seemed to be struggling at her father¡¯s situation and finally nodded.

    "1500 spirit stones." He said in a low voice. Eisen gave a snort and tossed a leather bag while city lord sighed in relief. Sam took the bag and passed it to Shawn and said.

    "Medical expenses."

    As soon as he said those words, Eisen lost colour in his face. He didn¡¯t know until now that Jack has guessed it was them who jumped on them. Now that he knew that Sam also knew the info, he became afraid of the consequences. He sweated profusely as he looked at Shawn and Jack as they looked at him with an extremely hostile gaze as if they want to tear him apart. Slowly, the carriage moved and took the road towards the Falcon cliff city.

    Sam looked outwards through the window as he stared at the scenery passing in a rapid speed while wind is blowing against his face. All the people are engaged in a casual chat.

    "At this pace, we will reach the city in two days at thetest. It would have been taken at least five days if we go by the best horses." Principal said out loud as he looked through the window on the opposite side. After all, the window near the seat is behind his head.

    "We will stop for the night." Sam said as he looked at the window.

    Nobody responded. But Eisen said. "It would dy the journey. Why would you want to stop?"

    Sam didn¡¯t respond to the question but said something else. "If I hear your voice in the carriage one more time, you can find your own transport."

    Eisen immediately burned in resentment, but didn¡¯t dare to say anything, he only looked at the Principal and City lord, but they also behaved as if they didn¡¯t hear anything at all, making him even more furious.

    Journey continued smoothly as sun set and evening came. They halted near a river bank to make a camp. Sam slowly walked towards the river and washed his face and the he took out some left-over meat and tied it with a rope before he threw it in the river. The river flow is slow and with the rope the meat stayed in ce. Soon a school of fish surrounded the meat and Sam immediately made his move as he rapidly threw one fish after another with his bare hands. A dozen or so fish are on the bank now. The fish are normal ones with less spiritual energy, so they were easy to catch. Sam made a fire and the skewered the fish over the me and sat along with his friends around the fire. The rest didn¡¯t try to strike up the conversation with him

    The night was serene. Samid down on the grass as he looked at the sky as if trying to peer through the mystery of universe. When the cooked smell of fish came, he looked up and to his surprise there are only 10 fish left and rest were gone. He looked at the rest of the batch and they were just chatting and seemed that they didn¡¯t eat at all. He walked towards the me and took the fish from the skewer and then ced them on the make shift tes made of the leaves.

    He arranged one fish in each te and kept the remaining two back on the me, but this time the distance is bitrge. He gave them to his friends but this time his concentration ispletely on the remaining three fish. The rest of them didn¡¯t see anything different as they enjoyed their time. He sat down near the me and just looked at the fish even while eating.

    A ck shadow passed by and at the same time Sam moved along with the fish that disappeared. He followed the ck shadow, towards the woods. His abrupt actions made everyone alert and just when Jack was about to make his move and follow him, Principal stopped him and said.

    "He is not irrational. If he doesn¡¯te early, I will go and find him." He said while he looked at the direction Sam left.

    Eisen is also looking at the same way, but his thoughts are entirely different. He is expecting Sam to have some ident. After all, the forest is in most dangerous when it is night.

    Sam meanwhile, didn¡¯t care about what others are thinking. He is running with all his might, chasing the small ck shadow. Which is moving in an extremely fast pace as if it is part of the darkness itself. Sam leapt towards it and finally caught it as he rolled over the ground and crashed into a tree upside down. He immediately got up and saw around and heaved a sigh after finding out that there is no one else around here and didn¡¯t see his embarrassing situation.

    *squeak* *squeak* a sound came as in his hands and when he saw, a purplish ck looking mouse which is three timerger than the normal mouse.

    "Shadow mouse" Sam muttered as soon as he saw it as his eyes widened in shock. He was almost felt like he was hit by lightning, because the species of the mouse should be extinct or that was what written in the beastuary. He is looking at the mouse as his grip unconsciously tightened on it.

    *squeak* *squeak* {leave me alone, I will die.} a voice echoed in his mind. Sam came to his senses and looked at the mouse and released his aura of the golden sun crow. The mouse immediately shivered as it stopped the sounds. Sam then started observing the mousepletely by infusing the spiritual energy and then he became surprised again.

    ¡¯This is not a shadow mouse with purest blood line. The blood line has various impurities.¡¯ He thought inwardly. The way of inspecting the bloodline is from the Blood line evolution and refinement he Ling Tian gave him.

    *squeak* *squeak* {who are you?} The little mouse¡¯s voice came to his mind again and Sam looked at it and spoke. "Where is your tribe?" He asked as he looked at the mouse. This is mouse at Level 2 initial stage, but it is still as fast as him. Of course, this is mostly dependent on the fact that this is night time.

    *squeak* *squeak* {there are only ten people left. All are dead. We used to live in another part of the forest and a snake like beast attacked us. Only ten of us were able to escape.} The voice was low and funny to hear. But Sam didn¡¯t care about it and looked at the mouse as if he wanted to peer through its secrets.

    For some reason, the mouse became scared at Sam¡¯s look. Didn¡¯t know why it said so much, but it knew that all the info just came out as if it was only right thing to do based on the instinct.

    Sam looked at the mouse before thinking and said. "Lead me to your ce." He said and a man and mouse walked to a ce where a huge tree and a burrow at its roots. Soon there are precisely ten mice in total as they looked at Sam with fearful expressions. The Shadow mice is a species with almost nobat strength. But they have a special bloodline ability which can make them move very stealthily in dark and they can move by merging with shadows. If not for the fact that the mouse chose to steal the fish openly, even with his acute senses, Sam wouldn¡¯t be able to catch its presence.

    "Your tribe is almost extinct and you are thest ten which were left alive. Your bloodline is full of impurities. I will give you an offer. I will evolve and purify your bloodline and you don¡¯t have to live in fear at all. I will provide you with the food you need. All you have to do is follow my instructions." Sam said as he increased the primordial aura of the Golden sun crows, which is obviously higher-grade than Shadow mice.

    Actually, the shadow mice are a very intelligent species. That is why, they were able to survive all this while, without anybat abilities. He really, has many uses for these mice. Mice looked at each other and squeaking sounds could be heard in the night. Sam waited patiently.

    *squeak* *squeak* {How can we believe you?} one mouse said abruptly stopping the discussion.

    Sam only sneered. "what do you even have for me to betray you? You guys will die sooner orter in this forest. You have nobat ability that I can make use of, but there is some use of your abilities for me, which in fact I can manage on my own with some more effort. Even I want your life, I can just kill you guys now and you can¡¯t do anything about it. I am just doing this because, I don¡¯t want a species like you is too precious to be extinct. Take it or leave it."

    *squeak* *squeak* {we are in} The mouse which was initially caught by Sam said as soon as he finished. Sam immediately finished the beast taming contract with them which is entirely different from the one he did with Yanwu. He kept all the mice in the divine dimension and gave them food, after which he walked towards the camp, where by this time, the Principal is getting ready to enter the forest.

    Seeing himing back safe and sound everyone heaved a sigh of relief. Well everyone except one.

 Chapter 47: Vickers

    Sam entered the carriage and dropped the partition, which happened to be a bed that has a hinge below and stood up and vertically. Behind the partition is another big bed that is sufficient for at least four people. Sam offered the bed to thedies and he slept on the partition bed. Philip, Jack, Shawn slept on the extra mattresses and slept on the floor. The other girl who is not familiar with them also took an extra mattress and slept a distance away and rest of the people were left alone outside. Sam didn¡¯t even bother to ask them what their ns on sleeping and he justid down on his bed and drifted into sleep as he looked at the view through the window.

    Next day morning, everyone woke up early and started their journey. If they travel faster, they can reach the city by the evening. The journey is smooth as there are no mishaps. Sam just stayed silent as he thought about what to do in the Falcon cliff city and about Yanwu¡¯s message. He wants to see how Yanwu is doing.

    With their own thoughts, the group arrived at the City before it got dark. They stopped at the city gate and the Starwood City lord went to the guards and took a letter out to show them. After the guards examined the letter, they looked at the extravagant carriage and felt quite surprised. Clearly, these guys are not the only city that came here, but they didn¡¯t see anyone making such an extravagant entrance with level 2 beasts as the carriage steeds. They let out a sigh and allowed them to enter.

    Sam looked at the city through the window and felt quite surprised. The living conditions of this Falcon cliff city are way better than the Starwood city. He estimated that the city is around four times bigger the Starwood city. Principal led the way towards a street which is full of inns and some of them are booked for the contestants for the tournament. When they entered the inn designated inn and showed the required doc.u.ments, the attendant guided them to their respective rooms. But when they saw the rooms, they couldn¡¯t help but shake their heads. The rooms are narrow and they are not even one-third as big as Sam¡¯s carriage and except for the Principal and the City lord, everyone has to share a room with another person.

    Sam looked at the Principal with a questioning gaze. Principal excused himself and went to find the manager and came back after sometime with a gloomy face and a box along with him.

    "The manager said that the inn is totally allocated and we are only left with these rooms and the authorities responsible for this also approved of it. Here, these are the tokens that you need to have through out the stay here." He said and opened the box and passed the tokens. There are 10 tokens with numbers from 1 to 10 and two tokens that have word ¡¯supervisor¡¯ and five tokens with ¡¯extra¡¯ on it. There is Starwood city written on all the tokens. Principal distributed the tokens to all the students and distributed the ¡¯extra¡¯ token to the students who are not a part of the team. While, he and the City lord took the supervisor tokens. Every student took their respective tokens that can kept on their waist bands. Eisen, looked so proud as he looked at his token with ¡¯1¡¯ on it. He gave Sam, who is examining the token number 10 token a proud and disdainful look which thetter disregarded without even acknowledging.

    Sam looked at the token and tried to store it in a normal storage ring but was unable to. Then he hung the badge inside the coat and then started walking outside.

    "Where are you going?" Principal asked as soon as he noticed.

    "Just to take a look around." He said and without even turning back walked towards the entrance. On the way, he noticed the other people who seemed to be from other cities and when he looked at the room through the open doors, he felt quite surprised by the difference. The students have separate rooms for each and the rooms are neat and spacious. He went to the receptionist and asked.

    "Can I know, how many inns are booked for the contestants?" The receptionist looked at him with a strange gaze and said.

    "Three inns are booked. The one on the right and the one on the left." Sam thanked and left to look at the street. The street has inns on both sides and each inn might be having around twenty to twenty-five rooms. He walked towards the inn which was not taken by the students and asked the receptionist.

    "Are there any rooms left?"

    The receptionist sized him up a bit and asked. "Are you a student from other cities here for the tournament?" Sam nodded his head.

    "Then, we can¡¯t give you a room. There is an order from Sir Arlo that the rooms can¡¯t be given to the candidates or the supervisors from other cities. If we get caught by doing so, we will get our inn sealed." Sam raised an eyebrow at the reply.

    "Why?" He asked a little bit curious. But the receptionist also doesn¡¯t know.

    Sam came out and walked towards the allocated inn. This time all the people from the Starwood city areing to the dining area for the meal. Sam encountered them and joined the meal. But when they entered the dining area, they were held up outside and weren¡¯t allowed enter for sometime as they said that the dining room is filled. They waited for sometime until the others came outside the dining room and when they entered and took the seat, they were only served with some porridge. All of them frowned and asked the waiter who replied.

    "The dishes are over and there are no ingredients left. I hope for your understanding." Even though with their cultivation level, they can stay without eating anything for a while, they still felt indignant for the treatment. Sam looked at the Principal and Starwood City lord and asked.

    "Do you guys know who Arlo is?" Principal felt confused and shook his head, while City lord¡¯s expression changed and sorrowed his brows. Sam understood and didn¡¯t say anything and just walked outside. When Philip and others were about to follow him, he stopped them and said that he woulde in a while. He went to the carriage and stored the whole along with the bulls and the Panthers into the divine dimension when there is no one near and walked back to the dining room and looked at Philip and his friends.

    "I don¡¯t want to stay here. How about you guys?" He asked them without looking at the two middle-aged men. Philip, Jack, Shawn, Freya, Haley, Kelly shook their heads. He looked at City lord and said.

    "How many days is thepetition due?"

    "A week from now at the Falcon Cliff academy." He replied in low voice.

    "We are leaving. We will meet you at the day of thepetition. Everyday one of us wille here and you can ry any message if you have." Sam said and turned around to leave.

    "Where do you think you are going?" Eisen asked even before the two supervisors. Sam didn¡¯t bother and this time Principal asked.

    "Sam, where will you stay? How about we go to another inn?"

    Sam shook his head and said what happened when he went to find a room. He looked at the City lord and said. "You can clean up your own mess. I don¡¯t want to bear the consequences for whatever you have done." He then turned around again and when he was about to leave, Eisen yelled.

    "You aren¡¯t allowed to leave. I don¡¯t agree." Sam halted and looked at him with a cold and sharp gaze. Looking at that Eisen continued. "Where do you think you can stay now? You said that they are not giving any rooms for us." Sam smirked at his words and said.

    "Who said I am going to inn? I am going to my own house."

    "How can you have a house here?" an underling of Eisen asked him.

    "There is none for now, but there will be in a while." This time he didn¡¯t stop and left with his group without even looking back. Principal shook his head and led the rest to their rooms. Now that the seven people left, there is more space and some of them got single rooms to sleep.

    Sam and his group are walking on the streets as they watched the bustling city which is many times livelier than Starwood city. They wandered the streets and at a random restaurant before finding their way to a shop. This ce is a Pawn shop. Sam asked around the streets to find out where he can buy a house and most of the people said only one thing. "No matter you want to buy, you can find it in the Vickers¡¯s Shop". He finally arrived after finding out the directions. The shop is so big. It is almost in the size of his river side mansion.

    Sam along with the group walked inside the shop and were surprised as soon as they entered. There are myriad of things. Weapons, Articrafts, animal remains, carcasses, special treasures. There are almost all kinds of things in the shop.

    There is a counter where a middle-aged man satzily. The middle-aged man is wearing a bright red outfit and he has his eyes closed as if he was dozing off. He has a short beard and moustache. He has a bronze skin and his face has a mischievous charm.

    They slowly walked towards the counter and just as they were about to wake him up. He immediately woke up and looked around. His eyes brightened up as soon as he saw Sam and his group.

    "Wee to Vickers¡¯s shop. How may I help you? Whatever you want, if it is avable near the premises of the Falcon cliff city, you can buy it. We will not only ept money, but also trade with treasures." He then looked at Sam and sized him up. His eyes narrowed and a mischievous smile appeared on his face.

    "I need a house." Sam said as in an emotionless voice and cold voice.

    "Oh, you came to the right person. What kind of ce do you want?"

    "Quiet, Peaceful and Spacious. It is fine even if it is in a deserted location."

    "Aha, I have a perfect ce for you. Please follow me." He said and came out of the counter. He led the group to the outskirts of the city. The ce has a no houses nearby and there is arge yard with ake. The mansion isrge and there are several rooms. But the colour seemed a little faded, indicating that it has been a while someone stayed here.

    "Do you have any other ces?" Sam asked Vickers.

    "Hahaha, actually this is the only ce avable right now." Sam raised an eyebrow at the answer and said.

    "Okay then. I will take it. How much?"

    "How much are you willing to pay?"

    "35,000 spirit stones."

    "Deal." As soon as Sam made the offer, he agreed. Sam was surprised a bit for this action but he didn¡¯t say anything. He took out the spirit stones and made payment.

    "You have toe to the shop, for the deed." Vickers said with a smile.

    "Okay. I will go with you." Sam replied and said to his friends. "You guys go inside and chose your rooms. Just leave me a room with study." He then walked along with Vickers.

    When they arrived at the shop, Vickers went inside a room while Sam sat near the counter. After a while, Vickers came out with a scroll and the transaction ispleted. Sam looked at the deed and nodded but didn¡¯t leave. He seemed to be pondering and finally asked.

    "You said that I can buy anything as long as it can be obtained near the Falcon cliff city, right?"

    "Of course. Anything." Vickers replied in mischievous tone. Sam just looked at his eyes without answering. Something about this guy is making him feel ufortable. But he didn¡¯t sense any danger. The unease is because, he wasn¡¯t able to see through him at all. His strength, his level, his age everything seemed to be a mystery.

    "I want information." Sam said after a short silence.

    "Sure. What information do you want?"

    "About the underground organisations in the city. I need the name, strength and types of business they deal with?"

    "Deal can be done Sam. But the info is one of the most expensive things you can buy." Vickers said.

    "How much?"

    "5000 spirit stones."

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything and just ced the stones on the table. Seeing this Vickers just smiled and said. "The info will be delivered to your door-step tomorrow. Do you need anything else?"

    "Dark element spirit stones." Sam said in a low voice.

    "Oh, that is unexpected. I thought you might ask fire and light attributes." Vickers said with same smile but Sam¡¯s expression changed as he looked at the man vigntly.

    "Don¡¯t worry Sam. We will never harm our customers. This is the motto of our business." Vickers said. Sam didn¡¯t say anything and just ce a big bag of stones on the table. There are around 100000 spirit stones in it.

    "What is the exchange rate?"

    "Hehe, in falcon cliff city, dark element stones are very rare and exchange rate is around 1:7, but since you are making such big exchange, I will give you discount and ept 1:5." Sam didn¡¯t refuse and received the twenty thousand dark element stones and left.

    Sam reached the mansion and looked went into the room. Surprisingly, the main room was left for him and it is fully cleaned without a speck of dust. He opened the window andid down on the bed. He looked at the night sky as he thought about Vickers. After all, this is the first person who was able to point out his elements right after a single nce.

 Chapter 48: Falcon Cliff city

    Sam woke up early and went downstairs. He saw all six people at the dining table eating some normal breakfast. He joined them at the table and chatted with them randomly. He asked suddenly in the conversation.

    "Who cleaned my room yesterday?" Everyone fell silent and looked at each other in confusion. Sam observed their faces and saw the genuine confusion. When he saw Kelly, he instantly understood. She is looking down, not daring to make eye contact with him and blushing red. He just shook his head and didn¡¯t call her out. He just diverted the topic and after sometime a knock was heard at the door. Kelly volunteered to escape the situation and when she opened the door, she just stood there in confusion.

    Sam noticed this and walked there. He saw a bunch of scrolls in front of the door and picked them up. He saw a note among them and smirked.

    "Indeed. Literally, information at the door-step." Sam muttered and turned towards Kelly and said.

    "These are for me. I will take it." Kelly nodded and turned around to leave. Then she abruptly stopped when Sam said.

    "Thanks for the room." She blushed hard and ran away without saying anything. Sam walked towards the stairs and called Jack along with him to his study.

    When there are only two of them in the study, he ced the scrolls on the table and said.

    "These are the info on the underworld organisations in the city. Take a look and tell me if anything is simr to ck water." Jack nodded and both of them took out a scroll each.

    There are around six scrolls in total. And each scroll contained details about each gang. After looking through the scrolls Sam understood roughly about the structure of the underworld in the Falcon cliff city.

    There is a total of six organisations and four are minor organisations and two are major organisations. The four organisations are namely Northern, Western, Eastern, Southern gangs which are only collect some protection fee and some other minor things. Every business has to give them protection fee to have their business run peacefully and they will do random odd jobs of intimidating, sending warnings and beating people up. These organisations are just like any normal triads in modern earth.

    The remaining two organisations are the real deal. They are another level. They just don¡¯t do odd jobs, rather they are some organisations that even the city guards don¡¯t want to mess with.

    The first organisation is named Piranha. This organisation is simply a Mercenary guild. We can put a hit on any person in the city and the cities under jurisdiction of the Falcon Cliff city. Not only will they take assassinations, they will also do jobs on kidnapping, arsons etc. They will take any mercenary assignments that cannot be done openly.

    The other organisation is called Candiru. This organisation is even more dark than the Piranha. They are the ones responsible for all the prostitution in the City. Every brothel in the City is run by them. Not only that, they are responsible for the illegal ve trade. Every rich person and noble families have dealings with this organisation. Sam couldn¡¯t help but frown at these organisation¡¯s deeds.

    The strength of the organisations is also very high. The minor organisations have few novices as core members and the leaders are at middle-stage novice. The major organisations have many novices and their leaders are at Peak stage Novice. The same level as the Principal and the City lord. Sam felt a little puzzled at this info. Because the peak of Novice stage is just in charge of a small city, but they can even be some bigshots in the Falcon cliff city. He really didn¡¯t understand this situation.

    He threw the though on back of his mind and looked at Jack and said.

    "There really are no direct clues connecting them to the ck water. But we can¡¯t be so sure. I think we should gather more intel."

    Jack nodded and asked. "Where did you get this intel?"

    "I bought it."

    "You bought it? Where? How?" Jack was a bit surprised. He never thought that this type of intel can be bought so easily.

    "Vickers." Sam¡¯s answer surprised him even more. Never would he have expected that the Vickers store will sell intel.

    "Can we buy more from him?" Jack asked. After the initial surprise, there is some excitement that they have an opportunity of getting intel easily.

    "We can do that. But I don¡¯t want to." Sam answered slowly.

    "Why?"

    "He would not have a problem with getting the intel. But he is giving me a weird feeling that is making me repulsive to work with him. I don¡¯t know what it is, but the feeling is not really good." Sam said as he looked at the scrolls.

    Jack stayed silent for a while and then asked.

    "What is our n then?"

    "I have something to do this one week. You guys keep in contact with the Principal and City lord. I will go out for a while, send someone to the inn and give the address of the Mansion to the Principal. He will have a way to contact us, if there is something urgent." Sam said and walked out of the room as Jack followed.

    Sam wants to go out and take a look at the City. Just as he was about to take a step outside the door a sweet voice came from behind.

    "Sam." Kelly stood there as he looked down and said in a low voice. Sam turned around and looked at the beautiful girl in a ck dress which is in a beautiful contrast with the jade white smooth skin. Her red lips, the voluptuous figure and the beautiful face can make a disaster befall a man. But Sam was only dazed for a second and asked.

    "Yes, Miss Kelly."

    "Are you going into the city?" Kelly asked in same sweet and slow voice. Sam only nodded.

    "Do you want to visit the Artisan tower today? My father asked me to take you there." She asked while trying to avoid looking at Sam¡¯s handsome face and sharp eyes. Sam thought for a moment and nodded. Both of them walked side by side as they went in to the city. The mansion they are living in is at eastern side of the city and the inn the Principal is staying is also in the same area. The artisan tower is at the western part of the city.

    They walked slowly, while looking around the bustling city. The Falcon cliff city is near the foot of a cliff which is the territory of the Whirl wind Falcons which is in northern direction of the city. There is patch of woods separating the Cliff and the city.

    Sam and Kelly walked on the roads and they attracted some attention on their way to the artisan tower. After all, a beauty and a handsome walking in ck outfits together is not an everyday thing, but they didn¡¯t cause muchmotion.

    Sam is paying attention to the streets and as to see, if he can get any info about the gangs. In the info given by Vickers, he mentioned that the four minor gangs have their respective headquarters in their territories itself. But the headquarters of the two major organisations are in northern region where big shots of the city usually live in.

    The northern region is the ce where, the Count mansion, Falcon cliff academy, the residences of the City officials, the noble families live. The businesses are very high-end and best in the city. The northern gang only takes the protection fee from the smaller scale business in the region but they are still far better than the other regions.

    The falcon cliff city has four exits. Southern gate, Eastern gate, western gate, North-western gate. The remaining directions are either covered by woods or dead ends. Sam walked slowly as he observed theyout of the city. They walked for an hour, when they finally arrived at the Artisan tower.

    The Artisan tower is far bigger than that of the one at the Starwood city. When he looked at the tower and the people flocking in and out, he couldn¡¯t help but be surprised. He walked in along with Kelly and they went to the reception.

    "Sam, you wait here. I will ask about the appointment." Sam nodded and took a seat at the waiting area while Kelly walked to the receptionist for the enquiry.

    After a few moments she came to where Sam sat and just as she was about to speak, someone called her.

    "Kelly?" Sam and Kelly looked at the direction where the voice ising from and saw a person standing there. He is a young man wearing an Artisan tower uniform and he has a badge of rank 2 weapon artisan on his chest. He seemed to be in histe twenties and his cultivation is atte stage novice. The young man walked towards them and directly ignored Sam and stood in front of Kelly.

    "Hello, Blyke." Kelly greeted him in a cold voice, the earlier sweet and gentle tone she has when she spoke to Sam is not there at all.

    The guy named Blyke didn¡¯t seem to be offended and spoke. "I heard from your uncle that you broke through the Novice stage and also became a rank 1 artisan. Congrattions."

    "Thanks." Kelly replied curtly and broke off the conversation. Then she turned towards Sam and said.

    "Sam, the receptionist informed the tower head about our visit. We can go there now." Her tone became gentle again. Blyke caught the difference immediately and became displeased, but didn¡¯t show it on his face.

    "Kelly, who is he?" He asked as he pointed at Sam.

    Sam didn¡¯t mind and just walked around as he made his way to the stairs and stood there as he looked at Kelly.

    "Kelly, if the Acolyte needs weapon, I can take the job. Why bother master with such trivial things." Blyke spoke and then turned towards Sam and said.

    "Hey mister. I can take up your job. Even if you can meet up with my master because of Kelly, you cannot possibly afford his services, so don¡¯t waste his time." He said as he made his way towards Sam.

    Sam didn¡¯t reply andpletely ignored him and looked at Kelly. "Shall we go? I still have a lot of things to attend to."

    Kelly nodded and walked up the stairs leading the way. When Blyke saw both of them ignoring him he felt humiliated as he looked at the surrounding people looking at him in a weird way. He immediately followed the duo.

    After a few moments they reached the top floor of the tower and made their way into a room. There Sam saw a middle-aged man whose, features are simr to that of Kelly¡¯s father reading through a scroll. He diverted his attention to the three people who just entered. Blyke walked to towards the middle-aged man and bowed to him as he greeted.

    "Greetings master." He said and stood behind the middle-aged man with a proud look on his face.

    "Greetings uncle." Kelly also greeted him as he smiled at her and gestured her to sit across him.

    She sat there and introduced. "Uncle, this is Sam." The middle-aged man nodded at Sam for which thetter replied in the same way and took a seat beside Kelly.

    Blyke became unhappy and furrowed his brows as he saw Sam not bowing to his master.

    "Nice to meet you Sam. I am Howard, the tower head of the Falcon cliff Artisan tower." He said with a smile. Sam looked at the Artisan badge on his chest. There is a golden colour badge with symbols of hammer and mes with five golden stars beneath the number.

    "Nice to meet you too." Sam replied in a cold tone. Blyke got irritated due to the tant disrespect.

    "Master, if you don¡¯t mind, I will take the job of this guy. After all, an Acolyte¡¯s weapon doesn¡¯t need a respectful rank 3 Artisan like you have to make." Blyke said with an arrogant tone.

    "May I know, why you called me here?" Sam asked ignoring Blykepletely, which madetter furious.

    "I am just curious as to how a genius like you looks like." Howard asked before giving any chance for Blyke to re up.

    "Then, the task ispleted I guess." Sam said and stood up, indicating that he wants to leave. He really didn¡¯t like the ce or the people. Kelly also became fl.u.s.tered as she looked at Sam who was unhappy. After all, taking his time off just to show his face is not a valid reason at all.

    "Don¡¯t be in a hurry, Sam. I have something to ask you." Howard said with a smile but only got a cold look as a reply. He then continued. "Do you want to join the Artisan tower as staff?" He asked directly, without beating around the bush.

    "Not interested." Sam replied directly, which made Howard a bit disappointed.

    "Master, why are you talking with him so politely." Blyke butted in the conversation and then he looked at Kelly. "Kelly, is this the manners of your friend? Why is he being disrespectful to the master? Does he even know what type of status master has? Him being requested is his honour."

    Sam is running out of patience as he looked at Blyke. Howard also looked at his student and said.

    "Enough, Blyke. Stay put for a second." He said and turned towards Sam again. He observed that thetter is looking at Blyke with an unhappy gaze.

    "I have something to do. Please don¡¯t ask me to visit you, just to get an earful from your student. It is annoying." Sam said bluntly making Howard awkward and Blyke furious.

    Blyke was about tosh out but was stopped by his Master.

    Sam looked at the Master and the disciple and walked out of the door. Kelly immediately bid farewell to her uncle and followed him. After they left, Howard looked at his disciple and asked.

    "Why are you targeting him? Do you even know who that guy is?" Blyke didn¡¯t answer and just looked down. Howard continued.

    "That guy is by rank equal to me. Do you even know that?" This time Blyke became surprised.

    "How is that even possible? He is even around ten years younger than me." Blyke asked with a shocked tone.

    "He is indeed more than ten years younger than you. He is a pseudo rank 2 Artisan and a rank 3 schr Artisan. He has lot more reasons to be proud of than you and I didn¡¯t see him tooting his horn. Here you are asking directly that you would make a weapon for him. Are you even worthy to do that? Learn to be humbler." He said and left his disciple alone.

 Chapter 49: New Profession

    Sam and Kelly are walking downstairs. Kelly is a bit fl.u.s.tered as she saw Sam¡¯s cold look. Even though, that is how he normally looks, she couldn¡¯t help but think that he became colder because of the meeting.

    "I am sorry." She apologized in a gentle tone. Sam looked at her abruptly and saw her fl.u.s.tered look and smiled a little.

    "It has nothing to do with you. You don¡¯t have to apologize." Kelly heaved a sigh of relief and looked at him. Sam thought of something and asked.

    "How many Artisanship does this tower has?"

    "The Falcon cliff tower has four Artisanship. Weapon Artisan, Painter Artisan, Schr Artisan and Tailor Artisan." She answered immediately. Sam nodded and went into a deep thought. When she saw Sam was thinking she waited a while and asked.

    "Sam, I have a request." Sam looked at her with a questioning gaze.

    "Can you make a dress for me?" She asked in a very low voice that at the end it, Sam almost didn¡¯t hear at all.

    Sam chuckled and said. "Sure. Let¡¯s go." He said as he walked towards the reception.

    Kelly was shocked and stood there rooted for a second. She really didn¡¯t expect that Sam would easily ept. She was contemting whether she heard it right or not and by the time she came out of daze, she saw Sam already talking to the receptionist. After sometime, he and Kelly both came out of the tower.

    "What did you ask at the reception?" Kelly asked out of curiosity.

    "Nothing. I want to take the tailor artisan exam. So, I asked her about the details. We willeback here after lunch. I will make you dress as I take the examination." He said with a smile.

    "Thank you so much Sam." Kelly became excited. She really had enough of Freya¡¯s bragging.

    Sam just smiled and both of them walked towards a nearby restaurant. The restaurant is so high-end and luxurious. It has five floors and even the waitresses and receptionist also dressed exquisitely. An attendant weed them and asked.

    "Sir, which floor do you want to eat?"

    Sam was a bit confused, then Kelly exined from the side.

    "Each floor has difference in service and food. The first floor only serves normal food. Second floor serves the level 1 beasts but the service is normal and the beasts are reared. The third floor is level 1 beasts and they are wild game. The fourth floor is for level 2 beasts of lower level and fifth floor is for level 2 beasts at middle-stage andte-stage. The higher the floor, the higher the service."

    "Oh, we will go to the fifth floor then." Sam said as he looked at the attendant. Attendant gave a smile and said.

    "Sir, to dine in the fifth floor, you should have a golden grade VIP card. To obtain the card, you have to pay 10000 spirit stones and you also need to have a certain status." The smile on her face is still there and voice was absolutely polite.

    "This status would be enough. I guess?" Sam showed his schr Artisan badge and the attendant clearly became surprised. She came out of her daze and said hurriedly.

    "Let me call our manager." She said and left quickly. After a few minutes, she came with a middle-aged man, whose Cultivation seemed to be at Peak of novice. He wore a ck robe and his face is cleanly shaven and a bit pale. He has a shoulder length long hair. He can be considered handsome. He walked towards Sam and greeted them politely.

    "I heard that young sir here is of esteemed status. Sorry, for not receiving you myself." His voice was humble and polite. Sam looked at the man and his deep brown eyes and replied.

    "You are too polite."

    "Can I take a look at your badge?" The manager asked.

    Sam nodded and passed over his Artisan badge. Verifying that it was authentic, he smiled brighter and then said. "I will finish the formalities right away. You can receive your VIP card after you have your meal. You can pay along with your food bill." Manager said as he gestured the attendant to lead them to the fifth floor.

    Sam and Kelly sat in private room of the fifth floor. He looked at the view through the window. Sam then looked at the artificial pond in the middle of the fifth-floor hall through the one-sided ss door. The floor tiles are all ck in colour and even the floor underneath the pond are ck in colour. Even the furniture is made with a ck colour wood.

    Soon, the waitress arrived with the dishes that they ordered. Sam cut his steak of fiery bear, which is a fire type beast. Kelly also started eating. After a while she asked Sam.

    "Why did you take the VIP card? I don¡¯t think you would stay here often, do you?" She asked with in curiosity. She knew better than to think that he took the card to impress her. That is why she asked him, why he spent so much, just to have a single meal. After all, level 2 beasts aren¡¯t something off the reach for Sam to eat.

    Sam didn¡¯t answer and just smiled. Kelly also didn¡¯t probe further and continued eating. After they finished eating, Sam paid the bill along with the 10,000 spirit stones and took the Golden card which showed the VIP customer status.

    Sam and Kelly walked out of the restaurant. Sam kept on fiddling with the card as he looked at the name of his and the restaurant.

    "ck pond." This is the name of the restaurant that he just visited. He went there just because, he wanted to see, what kind of ce this is. The name made him curious and arouse his suspicions a bit. But when he saw the whole restaurant, he didn¡¯t find anything fishy.

    He and Kelly went back to the Artisan tower and he took the tailor artisan exam. Sam took his time when he went into the testing room. The room is just like the previous time, it has ss walls and doors, except that the tools and equipment are of the tailors. There are all kinds of tools rted to textiles like looms, mannequins, marking table, all types of special scissors, all sizes of stitching needles etc. Sam took out a ck textile. This is the textile he made with the silk of Heaven spirit silk moth of fire type. Generally, the silk is in red colour, but he used a special technique and made the colour ck. This type of silk can be considered as rank 3 tailoring materials.

    The regr tailoring artisans are doesn¡¯t use this silk because, most of them in this realm might not even know this silk moth. Sam took a dress from Kelly which he is using to take her measurements. She is now looking from along with the spectators from the outside.

    The spectators are of just like before, there are a lot of people waiting for him curiously. Because, there are only two tailor artisans in the entire city. They were here because, they want to see that if there would be a third one. Sam took some measuring ribbons he used to take the measurements and started measuring Kelly¡¯s dress.

    Kelly blushed and her face became as red as cherry, when she saw it. Sam didn¡¯t notice that and he is in his own world. When he saw the measurements, he started pondering on what dress he has to make. Because, Kelly¡¯s body is more matured than Freya¡¯s or Haley¡¯s and he need to think of a different style, if he wants to enhance her beauty.

    Sam took his time and others started to doubt what he was thinking.

    "What happened to him?"

    "Yeah, why isn¡¯t he doing anything?"

    "I think he is bluffing earlier."

    "I think so too. He is young after all."

    "What is happening here?" An authoritative voice stopped all the discussions. Howard came forward and stood beside Kelly and asked.

    "Is he taking the exam?" Kelly just nodded and stood there looking at Sam.

    "Interesting." The tower head muttered and he also stood there. Sam finally got an idea and took out a paper and a brush. He kept it on a table and just before, he was about to draw, he mumbled to himself. "I better make a pen for myself." He then started drawing a dress as he imagined Kelly¡¯s figure. After some trail and error drawings, he finally decided on what to create and then he took out the ck cloth he prepared before. He marked the cloth and cut it with a specially made scissors ording to measurements.

    With is no time, he has bits he needed. He didn¡¯t take them directly to the mannequin. Instead, he took out two circr wooden frames from his storage. The circr frames are of a specific size that, one frame¡¯s outer diameter is same as the other frame¡¯s inner diameter.

    He took the garment and fixed a part of it between the two frames. He supported the wooden frames on a stool like metal frame in such a way that the garment surface is parallel to the floor and the ce below the cloth is hollow.

    Sam sat down on the floor and took out a long needle, which has a hook on one side. He took out a thread bundle which is also ck in colour. He ced the ck thread under the cloth and then stabbed the needle from the side of the hook. The hook held the thread and when he pulled it through the hole he jabbed first and a small loop of thread came out of the cloth surface. He then jabbed the cloth between the loop and pulled another small loop of the thread and made a very small knot and the process continued and after a few moments, he made a maple leaf pattern on the cloth, he made numerous leaf patterns and after the part of the cloth that is in the frame is done, he changed it and fixed another part of the cloth. Soon, all the garment pieces he prepared are embroidered with the ck leafy patterns. Even though the cloth and the embroidery are of same colour, they can be seen clearly because of the contrast provided due to the difference in thickness of the thread.

    Sam smirked with satisfaction as he saw the sessful embroidery. When spectators looked at him, they were beyond confused. What kind of technique is that? This is the question that is bugging everyone¡¯s mind. Of course, they won¡¯t know that. Because, this is a traditional Indian embroidery technique called Aari also known as maggam. How would these guys know that?

    Sam walked towards the female mannequin. And started sewing the dress. Soon, the dress took shape. What Sam is doing right now, waspletely unfamiliar to the spectators. This looked like a gown, but it is too slim to call that.

    They can¡¯t decide it, because Sam is making a traditional Chinese dress. It is a Cheongsam. The ck cheongsam with a cor. It has buttons to the right side of the chest. The dress reached all the way below the calves almost reaching the ankles. There is slit on the right side up to the knee. Which won¡¯t be visible unless they made a vigorous movement.

    Sam particrly made this cheongsam because, for him apart from an Indian saree, a cheongsam is the only thing that enhances the beauty of a woman like Kelly. When a charm of the bodily features and skin reach a certain level, their beauty can only be enhanced by simple clothing. That is the reason why, he didn¡¯t do an extravagant embroidery like he did with dresses of Haley and Freya. After the cheongsam ispleted, Sam took the dress to the testing tform.

    Basically, the tailor artisans are tested mostly for the skills and the effective usage of the material. Even though the cloths are used mostly for defence, the effectiveness of the defence that can be obtained through the usage of the cloth is the most important in the testing. Not only that, the test will also take the beauty and aesthetics into the considerations.

    After waiting for a few minutes, the tform brightened. A badge appeared. This time also, the badge is ck in colour. Everyone gasped in surprise but when they saw the number on the badge, the surprise turned into surprise.

    Sam held the badge in his hands as the result appeared on the screen.

    "Product name- Unknown

    Product type- Dress

    Creator- Sam

    Rank of the Product- Rank 3. There are six golden stars below it.

    In the same way, there is a cloth and a needle symbol. A number 3. Total of six stars.

    Sam became a pseudo rank 3 Artisan just like that.

    Sam walked towards the exit along with the dress and the badge. Kelly finally took a good look at the dress. Her eyes were almost filled with stars as she saw the dress carefully. The skilled craftsmanship. The design. The exquisite look took her breath away. When Sam saw her lovestruck fool like appearance, he stored the dress away and said.

    "It is not ready yet. I will give it to you tomorrow morning." Sam said pouring cold water on her expectations.

    Both of them walked back to the mansion as sun started to set.

    At the same time another person is walking towards the Northern region from the Eastern region. This guy is extremely familiar to Sam. It is none other than Eisen. Today, after Sam went out with Kelly, Jack went to meet the Principal to show him the mansion. Eisen tagged along and when he saw the mansion, he burned with jealousy.

    Then another news made him even more angry. It is the news about Kelly and Sam going out together. This made him even more jealous, that he almost wanted to destroy the whole mansion.

    He is walking towards the piranha organisation to ce an assignment.

    [Please read Author¡¯s thought]

 Chapter 50: Finding Yanwu

    Eisen went to a deserted restaurant and walked to a private room directly. There is a man in ck, who also covered his face sitting at the table without doing anything.

    Eisen took a seat at the table and ced a note on the table. When the other part saw the note, he immediately made eye contact and asked.

    "What is the task?" The man asked in a hoarse voice.

    "I need some beasts crippled. They are pets of a guy." Eisen replied.

    "What level are the pets? What level is the guy? How many beasts?"

    "they are at Peak of Level 1. Two panther type beasts. The guy is peak of the Level 3 Acolyte."

    "Do you know, where he lives?"

    Eisen took out a note of the address and passed it over. Then he said. "There is one thing. That guy is not ordinary. He is an inscription master, a formation master, an Artisan. His status is high. You better be cautious." Eisen warned.

    The guy in ck stayed silent for a minute and said. "The Price will be high."

    "Sure."

    While Eisen is plotting something to teach a lesson to Sam. The said person is back at his Mansion and went into the tower inside the divine dimension. Sam is right now inscribing on the ck cheongsam, he made for Kelly. After a few hours spent in the tower, he came outside and saw the night sky. He went to Kelly¡¯s room and passed over the dress and went back to sleep.

    Kelly immediately ran downstairs to the Freya¡¯s room. That night the twodies kept on bickering about whose dress is better.

    Next day morning.

    Sam is still sleeping soundly as sun rose up. Suddenly, a loud knocking sound woke him up. He opened the door with a displeased expression only to see, Freya standing there with an angry expression. He felt confused on how he pissed of this shameless chick.

    "Sam, you are biased." Freya shouted halting his thoughts.

    "What do you mean, I am biased?" He asked with even more confusion.

    "You clearly made a better dress to Kelly. I want one too." She said as she crossed her hands across the chest.

    Sam immediately understood what is happening and immediately shut the door without even replying.

    When Freya was about to knock again, Sam¡¯s voice could be heard from other side of the door.

    "If you knock one more time, I will take back the previous dress I gave you. Don¡¯t think I am bluffing. Try me if you dare."

    As expected, she immediately stopped her actions. She gritted her teeth and stomped her feet in anger, before turning around and left.

    Sam slowly washed up and walked downstairs only to see Freya continuouslyining to others about how unfair he was, when he shunned her at his room. Her tantrum stopped when she saw himing down. When he sat there, she immediately averted her gaze refusing to talk.

    "You do know that I have no obligation to make you dresses, right?" I already made you one on basis of my promise. Now, you are behaving as if you are entitled to get that dress. Do you really think you can afford the dress I gave you? I could auction it off to tens of thousands of spirit stones. Don¡¯t push your luck Freya. This is not your home, neither am I your family member who treats you like a princess and gives everything you need." Sam said in a cold voice from the side, silencing everyone¡¯s chatter. He stood up and turned towards Philip and said.

    "I have something to do. I will be going out and I might note back today. Take care of the Panthers." He said and left the mansion. Sam left the panthers and bulls in the yard in order to not arouse the suspicions of others. He said that he brought them the night he went to get the house deed. He then left them in the yard for themselves to y. Anyway, not many people wille to this secluded mansion. Or so he thought.

    Sam left some shadow mice at the mansion and left with the rest of them to the Falcon Cliff. He wants to search for Yanwu as soon as possible. His mind is not at ease on finding that there is human near Yanwu, because he can¡¯t trust a human being that would be able to control his greed.

    Sam slowly made his way to the northern region and entered the woods which separate the Falcon Cliff and the City. The woods didn¡¯t have any high-level beasts as this territory between the humans and the Whirlwind Falcons. Any high-level beast that vying for the territory has to bear the brunt of the both parties. By the time Sam crossed the woods, it is already noon. Just as he neared the foot of the cliff, he heard a voice in his head.

    [Sam] This voice belonged to Yanwu. Sam could sense that Yanwu is not far away as their contract connection is effective within a certain range only. For now, based on their current cultivation level, the limit is within 500 metres. Sam looked around to see, if Yanwu is within the woods, but wasn¡¯t able to find out.

    He closed his eyes and started concentrating on his connection with Yanwu, the connection is so faint, which means, Yanwu is at the very end of the range, after a few seconds Sam opened his eyes and looked at the cliff. He sensed that Yanwu is within the Cliff, but he doesn¡¯t know where exactly.

    He started climbing the cliff. His speed was so slow, because his concentration is on sensing the location. After he climbed to a certain height he moved towards right side and between the high protrusions of the cliff, he saw a small opening, which can bare fit a single person, Sam immediately entered it and found himself in front of a rocky path. He started walking slowly and then found a junction where several paths are leading to different locations, he took a path and walked forward until he saw a familiar silhouette in a cave. Yanwu is in his original golden crow form and he is floating in the air as he faced a huge bird. Sam was a bit bewildered as he looked at the bird, he got an answer in his mind but he didn¡¯t dare to believe it.

    {Sam} Yanwu greeted him as soon he saw.

    "Yanwu." Sam also smiled as he embraced the golden crow. Sam then looked at the creature, in front of him and was a bit confused. Yanwu exined from the side.

    {This is Sky. A roc with sky sovereign roc bloodline} Hearing this, Sam immediately thought.

    ¡¯I am right. It really is a roc.¡¯ This is the only thought he has in mind.

    "What happened to him?" He asked as he saw the roc sleeping and its expression of extreme pain. Sam observed closely and found out that the cultivation level of the roc is far higher than his.

    {I will exin itter. First let us cultivate. I have a lot of energy stored.} Yanwu said and immediately started transmitting the fire elemental energy to him. Sam sat cross legged and then started digesting the energy along with Yanwu. He immediately broke through to the Level four Acolyte as he was at the edge for quite a long time. Meanwhile, Yanwu also broke through to the middle stage of Level 2. But they didn¡¯t open their eyes as there is a lot of unrefined energy left. Both of them sat still and started refining the energy. The spiritual core of Sam, was filled to brim and was forced to expand again, leading to another break through. Level 5 Acolyte. The energy still ran rampant and it finally stopped only when he was at the brink of breaking through the Level 6 Acolyte.

    By the time they opened their eyes, it is already evening and Sun was already set. When Sam looked around the cave, he found two unfamiliar presence and immediately got alerted as he released his aura and about to attack.

    {Sam wait} Yanwu shouted from side and he stopped himself from attacking. When Sam saw clearly who the other two were, he saw a young man who seemed to be in his early teens and another bird which seemed to be a whirlwind falcon which is at Level 1 on his side. The falcon is about same size of the young man. Sam stood normally as he sized them up when Yanwu introduced.

    {That young man is Watt and that falcon is his friend, which he calls by the name Falck. He is the one who helped me write a letter for you.} Sam looked at the guy named Watt from top to bottom. He has a pale skin and lean figure. He looked a little timid as he didn¡¯t even dare to see Sam straight in the face. The Falck is indeed and a whirlwind Falcon and it seemed to have a certain connection with the boy. The boy is at the level 3 initiation. He seemed to be recently awakened.

    "I am Sam" Sam introduced himself as he extended his hand for a hand shake. Watt slowly extended his hand forward and timidly shook his hand. Sam sat on the floor and asked Yanwu.

    "So, what is the story here?"

    {A few days back when I leaved the Starwood city to investigate something, this is the ce I mentioned. I got a familiar energy impulse from this cave and when I came here, I saw the impulse came from Sky. By the time, these two guys are already here.} Yanwu pointed at Watt and Falck and continued.

    {Sky sealed himself here and these two guys identally broke the seal which released the energy impulse. The impulse is very familiar to me as I have sensed the same type of energy when I was in higher realms.}

    "You mean, that Sky is also from higher realms?" Sam asked a bit shocked. He is already a bit shocked that there is a higher realm being like Yanwu in this lower realm, now if he met another one, Sam would seriously doubt that whether there is an abnormality. But Sam¡¯s worries were unfounded.

    {No, he is clearly from this realm. The Sky sovereign roc is indeed a higher being. But Sky is a normal Great roc with bloodline of Sky sovereign roc.}

    "Is the impulse you sensed belong to that bloodline?"

    {No, actually the energy I sensed is the reason why Sky is like that. He is affected by a fire poison, which is a special technique of Bifang bloodline. Seems that the ce where Sky is from, there is a species with Bifang bloodline. If not for the fact that the other party is not a pure Bifang, Sky might have been dead by now.}

    "So, why are you here now? How do you know these things?"

    {Actually, Sky can wake up from time to time. But he won¡¯t be able to stay awake for a long time. I wanted to extract the fire poison from his body. Not only will it help him to save his life, it will also give a raise in cultivation level. We can absorb the fire poison directly.}

    "How long do we have?" Sam asked as he looked at Sky.

    {He doesn¡¯t have much time left. I was unable to take out a lot of energy as I have low capacity. If we work together, we might be able to do that. But if we dy, he might not make in past three days.}

    Sam stood up and slowly touched Sky as he started using his observation. He was able to see each and every cell of the giant creature. But each and every cell is being affected by a severe fire element energy as they became weaker. Half of the organs are already half burnt and ready to copse. The beast core is also being affected as it is reducing his cultivation level. If not for sky¡¯s high cultivation level, he would have been dead.

 Chapter 51: Watt

    Sam observed the state of Sky for sometime before sitting down in contemtion. He observed that the bloodline of the Sky sovereign rock, even though small in quantity it is high in quality. He really didn¡¯t want to let the beast die in front of him. The bloodline is the most important thing that is fighting against the fire poison.

    After some contemtion, Sam looked towards the boy and bird duo. "What about these guys?"

    {Well, Watt is a kid from the slums. His parents are dead when he was an infant and he grew up with a neighbour who took him in. A few years ago, he stumbled up on Falck who is badly injured. He saved him and both of them became friends. I don¡¯t know how he does it, but he and Falckmunicate quite well. He can understand whatever Falck is saying. He wrote the letter with the help of Falck only.}

    Sam walked to him closely and said. "Thanks." Watt just nodded and he is still looking towards the floor. He seemed to be quite timid and shy and Sam¡¯s aura is not helping the situation at all.

    "How old are you?" Sam asked with a smile.

    "Fi-fifteen." Sam immediately got surprised when he heard the answer. This guy didn¡¯t get to theter stages of initiation even after one year of awakening. He took Watt¡¯s hand into his hand and infused his spiritual energy. He got a clear view of the situation in his body. He seemed to be weak and malnourished. If not for his awakening and this one year of development, he might have been even more lean and weak. His spiritual core doesn¡¯t have any problems as he previously thought.

    After some thinking on why he wasn¡¯t able to cultivate, Sam asked. "Don¡¯t you know a cultivation technique?" Even he felt a little ridicule towards his question. After all, even in the rural ce like Lava rock vige has one or two cultivation techniques formon public, let alone a Count city like Falcon Cliff city. But the answer gave him a surprise.

    "N-no. Slum p-people are not a-allowed."

    When Sam heard it, he has a new understanding towards this world, that is, it is simr to the modern earth in more ways than he thought. In both worlds, slums are always abandoned unless they have any material value.

    "You are a wind elemental mage. Do you know that?" Sam asked as he sized the other party up. He really felt pity for this boy who is almost same age as him. But it was only pity, nothing much. The boy shook his head.

    Then a painful growl was heard from behind and Sam turned around only to see Sky waking up and opening his eyes, his expression full of pain. When he finally opened his eyes, Yanwu introduced.

    "Sky, this is Sam. The one who made a contract with me." Sky nodded his giant bird head. His brownish ck feathers lost all the vigour are almost like the dead ones. Falck and Watt looked at Sky in a fearful manner.

    Sam walked towards the Roc and said. "Your body¡¯s condition is not good at all. Your cultivation level will be kept on reducing and you will eventually die. Even though, I can divert your energy outside, I can¡¯t absorb all of it, even if I tried. Because, me and Yanwu are linked, the burden will be less, but we will take sometime to digest the energy and this will increase the risk of you dying due to the constant fluctuations of fire poison."

    Sky looked down in a dejected way. Sam is thest hope for him, because others can¡¯t even take on the fire poison even if they recognise it or their cultivation is far higher, because of the weird blood line nature of the Bifang, an equally powerful and quality bloodline is required to refine it. He already lost his hope when he fled to this ce, but his hopes reignited when he saw Yanwu and heard about Sam, now the hopes seemed to be in vain.

    Just as the dejection was about to turn into depression and despair, he heard Sam speaking again.

    "I have another idea, which might work. But I want your consent, it might be a little painful for you."

    Sky looked at Sam again, this time he is hearing with full concentration and was hoping he would hear good news.

    "If I take your energy bit by bit, you will have some problem with the fluctuations, So I will try and take as much energy as I can and stay here is seclusion, until I reach the peak of the Acolyte, that is my limit, as I cannot breakthrough directly. After that, your cultivation level would be dropped by a lot and the fire poison which is already depleted by time will also reduce its effect. Then I will use my spiritual core as conversion point to change the nature of the fire spiritual energy into light spiritual energy to heal you. In this process where your organs healing and attacked by the fire energy at same time is extremely painful. That is the reason I am asking for your consent. Trust me, the pain will be much worse than a swift death, I hope you think it through." Sam stood up and said to Yanwu.

    "You stay here and take care of him. Don¡¯t absorb anymore energy. The fluctuations are making it worse for him. I will be back tomorrow after settling somethings over." Yanwu nodded his head.

    Sam then turned over to Watt and asked. How did youe here?" Thetter timidly showed a direction. Sam gestured him to lead the way and both of them started walking with Falck following them in the air.

    "Do you have any rtives?" Sam asked while walking. Watt just shook his head.

    "The neighbour who took you in?"

    "She died recently."

    "Oh." Sam didn¡¯t talk anything else and they finally came out of the woods and entered the slums of the city. The funny thing is that the slums are at the North-eastern corner of the city. Connecting the two most prosperous areas. Sam chuckled at the thought. Suddenly a shrill cry came as Falck fell down. When both of them saw it, there was an arrow pierced into its stomach. Sam wasn¡¯t able to sense it because, he didn¡¯t feel any ill intent towards him. Watt immediately ran towards it and knelt before the bird. He just shivered all over and didn¡¯t know what to do to help his friend. Sam heard some footsteps, then a group of kids of same age as him can be seen running towards them. The boy in the lead has a bow in his hand. He walked towards Falck and kicked Watt away and said.

    "This is my hunt. Get your filthy hands away." The boy iste stages of initiation. Even though from his appearance, he seemed to be from slums, he at least fit with body. Watt stood up hurriedly and blocked the way for the group. The group has four people and the three are theckeys of the guy with bow.

    "No, please. He is my friend. Please, leave him alone." Watt spoke a full sentence loudly for the first time. Then he looked at Sam, as if he was pleading for his help. Sam just stood there and didn¡¯t say anything nor showed any movement. The boy with the bow noticed Sam and seeing that the other party is neatly dressed and might be stronger than them, he immediately said.

    "You don¡¯t do anything funny. My brother is a member in Eastern gang. If you do anything to me, he will kill you." He looked at Sam cautiously. Seeing that Sam didn¡¯t have any reaction, he turned towards Watt, who is blocking their way. The four of them started kicking and hitting him. But Watt tried his best to stay still without letting them near Falck. But after some good beating, his legs gave in and he copsed to the ground. Theckeys were about drag him out of the way, when he suddenly caught one of them with remaining strength and bit the other party¡¯s neck. The teeth dug deep and when he pulled out a chunk of meat was pulled out of the other party¡¯s body. Both of them copsed. One with his expression tired and ferocious and blood sprayed all over his face and other face full of pain and lifeless expression. He killed the other party.

    The remaining group became terrified at the scene and they took a step back. After a moment, they came out of daze and looked at Watt, who ispletely tired and exhausted. The leader of the group immediately aimed an arrow at Watt and just before he released it, a fire ball exploded at his feet, when he saw in the direction it came, he saw Sam aiming at his hand with a smile.

    "You guys better go, before I aim right at your heads." Sam said in a cold voice. The three of them immediately got scared and left the scene, even leaving their dead friend there. Sam walked towards Falck and removed the arrow and healed the wound. Then he walked towards Watt, who is almost unconscious and made him sit forcefully. Then he started to heal thetter and asked.

    "you feel unfair, don¡¯t you?" Thetter nodded.

    "you feel helpless, don¡¯t you?" nodded again.

    "you feel angry, don¡¯t you?" again nodded.

    "you want to punch my face for not helping you, don¡¯t you?" Watt nodded.

    "That is how life is. You better understand that. Nobody, will f.u.c.k.i.n.g care, if you feel unfair, helpless or angry, because it is none of their f.u.c.k.i.n.g business how you feel. If it wasn¡¯t for the fact, you tried to fight back in thest second, I wouldn¡¯t even care about healing your sorry ass.

    Everyone in the world is like that. If you need help, you have to ask and pay a price for that. Nobody, wille and help you after they saw your pitiful and pleading looks. You are the only one who can help you without paying any price. So, stop looking for pity and grow some balls and learn how to save your ass yourself, understand?" Sam looked straight in his eyes and said word by word. Then he stood up and said. "You better think it over. This is the first andst time I am doing you this free service. Next time, you have to pay a price and that too you have to ask before." He said and left to his house without turning back.

    Watt, just sat there as he mulled over what Sam said. The words are still repeating themselves in his head. He thought of all the fifteen years he lived in this world. What Sam said is true. He was the only one remained for himself to take care of. At most Falck will help him, that¡¯s it. He has no one and no one will take care of him. He has to ask for help, if he need it and he has to pay a price for the help he received.

    He doesn¡¯t care have to care about what others view him as. He doesn¡¯t have to wait for the help that wille to him on its own. He can¡¯t ask for pity, because he is weak. He looked at the dead body and touched his lips full of blood. His heart became cold and resolute.

    ¡¯I have to help myself to live and if I can¡¯t, I have to pay a price and ask for help.¡¯ He thought and looked at the direction where Sam left. He resolutely stood up and along with Falck walked back into the woods.

    Sam thought about Watt while he walked back to his mansion. He enjoyed the night view as he walked towards the eastern region of the city. He said those words to Watt, because he was like that before. In his previous life, when he was still a little kid far younger than Watt, he learnt this lesson in much harsher way than him. That is the day, that changed his life. That is the day he gave himself the same advice he gave to Watt today.

    Soon, he came to the Mansion and what awaited him made his mood gloomier.

 Chapter 52: Gloomy mood

    When Sam was back at the Mansion, there was no one inside, he searched for them and he found out that all the people are in the yard. When he went there, all of them are looking at something silently.

    "What are you guys doing here?" Sam asked as he walked towards them. Everyone looked at him and all of them felt cold sweat on their backs. Nobody, dared to open their mouth and tell them what happened. When he saw what they are looking, his world seemed toe to a standstill.

    There is a pool of blood in the yard, making the green grass turn red and in the centre of the pool, the two panthersy fainted with their four legs chopped off and the legs are just thrown along with them. Their expressions are filled with pain and despair.

    Sam felt his blood run cold. He looked at the two panthers and clenched his fists. Rest of the group all sensed the killing intent emitting from Sam. They felt the airing to stand still. They can almost smell the blood l.u.s.t from Sam. It is as if he was craving for blood now.

    If Sam knew of their thoughts, he would definitely agree, he is really craving to kill and craving for blood now. He never had this much desire to kill, since he came to this world.

    The rest of the group, felt suffocating from Sam¡¯s aura. It is as if he will cause blood shed at any second. Their legs felt weak as they took a step back slowly.

    They expected Sam to get mad, get angry, go berserk and curse at them. But never did they expect that he would be this calm. But this calmness is even more threatening to them, than all the other scenarios. Sam slowly walked to the Panthers bodies and checked their condition.

    After confirming that both of them are still alive, Sam ced the legs in the position and started healing one by one. The attacker seemed to have done this recently, their legs are still warm and are in condition to join. The group looked at him nervously. They didn¡¯t even dare to ask, since when he can heal. After an hour, Sampleted the healing and carried the panthers one by one carefully to his room and then, heid a formation and ced all the fire elemental spirit stones left on him to give the panthers time to recover.

    He walked out of the room and asked the group. "Who did this?" This is the first sentence he spoke since he saw the scene.

    Philip picked up the courage and said in a low voice. "We don¡¯t know. Some seemed to be sneaked in to the yard and then did that. We only knew it when we heard the growls." By the end of sentence, Philip¡¯s voice almost sounded like a mosquito buzz.

    "You guys can go now." Sam said and walked into the room. There he sat down in the connected study and called for the shadow mice. Only four mice came.

    "What happened?" Sam asked in gloomy voice.

    *squeak* *squeak* [Boss a guy dressed in ck came. His cultivation level is higher than yours. He came like a shadow and left like a shadow. Number 3 followed him to find out intel on him.]. One of the mice spoke. Sam named the mice with numbers from 1 to 10. He dismissed them and waited there patiently. After sometime someone knocked on the door.

    *Knock* *knock*

    Sam opened the door and saw Kelly standing there. "Eisen came. He said that he has a message from Principal." She said in a low voice.

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and just walked out of the room and went downstairs, she hurriedly followed him. Sam saw Eisen sitting in a chairfortably. He saw Sam¡¯s gloomy expression and became smug. His n seeded. That is what he thought. When Sam finally came and sat down, he said.

    "Principal told me to warn you. With your arrogant attitude, don¡¯t piss of every person you meet. There are some people in this world you shouldn¡¯t provoke. There would be people who will teach you a lesson. They don¡¯t care what status you have." When everyone heard these words, they felt confused, but didn¡¯t say anything. But Sam narrowed his eyes and looked at Eisen with a cold gaze. He knew better than anyone else, that Principal wouldn¡¯t say anything like that. Because, they are like equals in business and they don¡¯t have student and teacher rtionship.

    There is only possibility and that is Eisen¡¯s words are implying something. Eisen didn¡¯t know Sam¡¯s thoughts. He just wanted to see Sam¡¯s gloomy expression and wanted to say those words. But he felt that it would be better to use Principal¡¯s name, because he thought that Sam would never confront Principal. But he didn¡¯t know at the moment that he was dead wrong. He stood up and gave Sam a smug look and left.

    Sam also stood and without talking to the group, he walked towards his room. By this time, the shadow mice appeared again and there are five mice. Number 3 came forward and said as soon as Sam appeared.

    *squeak* *squeak* [Boss, the attacker is from Piranha organisation. Someone hired him to teach you a lesson, and that is by crippling your panthers. I followed him and went found out the assignment hall, where they ept customers. I came after that to report to you]. Number three just said everything without Sam asking in a single breath.

    Sam nodded and sent the remaining mice out of the dimension and said. "From today onwards, you guys have only one duty. Find out where the hide outs and head quarters of Piranha are. I want you guys to take note of every possible ce they upied. Their businesses, their meeting points, everything. You guys will report me everything about them at the cave I went in the morning. Number six to ten knows the address. You have time till the tournament is over. The day the tournament is over, you should be having all the info. First, I will give you guys an upgrade."

    Sam said and took them all into the tower inside the divine dimension. He took out arge brush used to make the inscriptions and then started drawing a huge circle and various runic figures. Then after half-an -hour of drawing when the circle ispleted, he took out some formation gs and started cing them in various ces within the diagram, after a long while, he took out more than a thousand dark element spirit stones and ced them in various ces inside the diagram. He stood at a ce which is simr to the node he used to stand in an inscription and injected the spiritual energy in neutral form.

    "Number 1" Stand in the circle. He ordered and the mouse came and stood in the centre of the diagram. The diagram activated and the dark elemental energy started seeping out of the elemental spirit stones and entered the mouse. The mouse trembled at the tremendous amount of spirit energy entering it body and then the blood flow. It started purifying the blood as numerous amounts of ck particles seeped out of its pores.

    Sam just continued injecting the spiritual energy and this process continued on for hours until all the spirit stones turned into dust.

    Sam fainted and the mouse came out of the dark light. Its fur became darker and more luscious. The aura emitted from it is more superior then the rest of its peers. The rest of mice became excited and then they looked at unconscious Sam and became worried. They waited for him to get up.

    Sam woke up after sometime, he took out some spirit stones and started absorbing its energy frantically. The technique he used, is a part of Bloodline refinement and Evolution manual. It is used for purifying the blood line. After recharging himself with energy, he ced another batch of Dark elemental spirit stone and proceeded with another mouse. The process repeated for hours in the tower and the outside dawn appeared.

    After he was done with the refinement of all the mice, he came out of the dimension and sent them off to the duty. He washed up and went outside to see Philip and others.

    "I am going into seclusion; I wille to the academy directly on the day ofpetition." He didn¡¯t wait for his reply and walked out of the mansion. There are five days for thepetition. He wants topletely cure Sky as well as form a contract with him as soon as possible. But before that.

    "Call Eisen over here." Sam went to meet with the Principal.

    Principal felt a little weird by Sam¡¯s cold mood, but he didn¡¯t ask anything and sent someone over to call Eisen over.

    When Eisen came inside the room and saw Sam sitting like he owns the ce in front of Principal, he felt a bad premonition.

    "Sir, you called me over."

    Principal didn¡¯t see anything and looked at Sam. Sam looked at Eisen but talked to principal.

    "Sir, did you send Eisen to pass me a message yesterday?" Eisen immediately became tensed.

    "What message are you speaking about?" Principal frowned and asked.

    "Nothing much." Sam replied and recounted what Eisen said yesterday. Without waiting for Principal¡¯s reaction, he stood up and walked towards Eisen and slowly whispered.

    "You better not be rted to what happened yesterday. Or you better pray that you will stay alive if you are rted." When Sam said these words, Principal also heard faintly and immediately asked.

    "Sam, what happened? We can talk it over."

    "Well sir. Yesterday before Eisen came to my mansion, someone sneaked and chopped of the limbs of my panthers." Sam said and left without waiting for his reply.

    Principal understood something and immediately looked at Eisen and asked. "Are you rted to this?" His voice became cold with anger.

    "N-no sir. He is just maligning me." Eisen immediately refused to admit.

    "Why would he do that?" Principal asked in an even colder tone.

    "He- He might have been jealous of me because you made me the leader of team." Eisen blurted out after thinking a bit.

    "Bahahaha" Principalughed sarcastically. "You better tell me truth or you won¡¯t be able to handle the consequences. You might not have seen his admission test, but he killed seven seniors from noble families, just because they called him ¡¯bastard¡¯. Now that his pets are crippled, you can count your lucky stars if he doesn¡¯t torture to death."

    Hearing this Eisen¡¯s face lost colour. He didn¡¯t think that Sam was this ruthless, even though he heard some rumours in the academy, he simply thought they are exaggerating and brushed them off. He started to feel scared. Even though he is stronger than Sam now, he is five years older thantter and his improvement is far slowerpared totter. He might not be in danger, but what about in the future?

    Looking at his pale face, principal immediately understood and walked out of the room. He saw Sam on the road walking slowly and hurriedly caught up with him.

    "Sam, the thing with Eisen. Can we talk about this?" Principal asked, but he only got Sam¡¯s arrogant smirk as response and then walked away. He immediately held his head. He really can¡¯t use force against Sam because oftter¡¯s status and Eisen is also not someone with lower status. He got struck in between rock and hard ce.

    Sam walked towards Vickers¡¯s store. He entered the shop and was greeted by the mischievous smile of the middle-aged man.

    "What do you need Sam? It is rare for someone to meet me this frequently." Vickers¡¯s said with smile.

    "I need that thing." Sam pointed towards a long pipe like thing which is red in colour with an irregr surface, disyed on the shelf.

    "Oh, trunk of the Giant Blood mosquito. A weird choice. May I know what are you nning to make?"

    Sam only gave him a cold look.

    "Okay, okay. 1000 spirit stones."

    Sam ced the stones on the table and took the trunk and left the shop. He walked towards the slums, to go to the cave.

 Chapter 53: Insane Breakthrough

    When Sam came to the cave, he saw Watt and Falck sitting there. While Yanwu is waiting for him. As soon as Sam walked in, Watt stood up and walked towards him and said.

    "I need help." Sam raised an eyebrow as he sized up the boy. He is not that much timid anymore, well at least he is not averting his gaze even when his hands and legs are trembling in fear. Sam chuckled and said.

    "You know, you have to pay a price, right?"

    Watt nodded at the question.

    "Okay tell me, what do you want me to help you with?" Sam asked with an amused expression. Never would he thought that there would be change in this guy in one night.

    "Make me strong." Watt answered in a low voice. Sam raised an eyebrow and asked.

    "How strong?"

    "Strong enough to not to ask for help from others and strong enough to always help myself." It took all the courage he had to say this. Sam stayed silent for a bit as he looked at Watt¡¯s expression and said.

    "You do know what you ask, right? You want to strong enough to always help yourself. Do you know how strong you have to be? You have to be at the pinnacle of the world to im that. Otherwise, there would always be someone stronger than you and there would be a time, where you have to face them and there would be a time where you feel helpless again. Think carefully."

    Sam walked towards Yanwu and sky and just as he was about to speak, Watt shouted from below.

    "Then make that strong. Take me to pinnacle." Sam turned around and asked.

    "What is the price you are willing to pay?"

    "Anything you want."

    "Are you sure? Anything?" He asked with a cold smile. Watt nodded.

    "Okay, then. From now on you will be myckey. I will give you resources, opportunities and strength. In return, you will be myckey and you will only be myckey. You don¡¯t have to follow anybody¡¯s orders except mine. Even if the other party is the emperor or the ruler of heaven himself, their words would be nothing. If I tell you to kill, you will do so. If I tell you to fight, you will do so. Are you willing to pay this price?" Sam said with a cold aura surrounding him. His back straight and hands behind his back, with his handsome face, he looked majestic as if he is superior to anything this world has to offer.

    "I am willing." Watt said.

    "I can¡¯t hear you are you willing?" Sam asked as he raised his voice.

    "I am willing." Watt also increased his voice.

    "ARE YOU WILLING?"

    "I AM WILLING!!!!!" Watt shouted at top of his lungs as tears formed in his eyes. This is the only time he felt free and brave for the first time in his life. This is the only time he felt that a huge burden has been taken off of his shoulders. This is the only time, he felt that his life has a meaning. This is the only time he felt that; he did something worthy.

    All these days, he bawled his eyes for not having his parents, for not having proper education, for not having enough food, for not having resources and wallowed in his own self-pity. But now, when he was shouting on top of his lungs that he would be willing to a pay the price to obtain the strength he wanted, he felt more alive thanbined fifteen years of his life.

    Sam walked towards him and patted his shoulders and said. "From today onwards, you are no longer an orphan in slums, but you are my subordinate. You work for me and live for yourself." Then he closed his eyes and looked for through the library of the tower in divine dimension. When he found a suitable cultivation technique, he opened his eyes and said.

    "Sit down and wait for a while." Sam then absorbed the knowledge of the cultivation technique and started copying it in a book. After half-an-hour of rapid writing, he finally finished and passed the book over.

    "This technique is called a beast warrior cultivation technique, suitable for a wind elemental mage having a beastpanion of wind element with him. Remember the manual by heart and destroy it immediately. Under any circ.u.mstance, you shouldn¡¯t share the info of the manual with anyone." Sam paused for a moment and passed him am spatial ring. "There are some normal spirit stones in this ring. Go to Vickers¡¯s shop and exchange it with the wind element spirit stones. Tell him that Sam sent you. Before that change wash up and change your dress." Sam passed a set of normal vest and pants he usually wears. Watt took the ring and dress and walked out in a rapid pace.

    Sam looked at the lean figure and smirked. The beast warrior cultivation, he gave to him is a unique cultivation technique created by Ling tian himself. In fact, the Myriad beast bloodline technique, he is using now is also a special type of beast warrior technique. This type of cultivation technique, when cultivated by a mage, will make a contract with a beast and cultivates along with it as well as his body will be as strong as beast at same level, giving him qualities of warrior as well. Just like Sam, this will increase not only the speed of the cultivation, but also the chances of having better spiritual energy and elemental fusion. If there are any bloodline secret arts, they can be used as well.

    He turned over and said to Yanwu. "Let us get to work."

    Sam took out some formation gs andid down a formation in order to conceal the energy fluctuations and then heid another formation. This formation is not a regr formation that can be seen in the books. This the formation, Sam created by himself. He started drawing various runes in between the formation. This is a special type of sealing inscription which Sam created by repeated experimentation.

    This inscription is done on a scroll and it works with the formation. In this process, within the formation, Sam will control an elemental attack or he himselfunch an elemental attack, while providing the spiritual energy to the inscription circle through the formation. He will direct the attack towards the scroll at the centre and seal the attack in the scroll.

    Generally, the attack inscriptions are done by normal inscriptions by using variousbinations of the rune diagrams which are made based on the hand seals of the attack. But Sam created this technique only because, his attacks are not conventional and instead based on the science he knew. That is why, he created an inscription sealing method to seal his special attacks, so that they can be used in an emergency situation.

    Then why is he using this now even when there is no n of using it before. Well, he thought of new use to the fire poison, other than increment in his cultivation. So, what he wants to do now is to seal a small amount of fire poison for future use.

    By the time Samid made all the preparations, Watt returned.

    "You can take the wind elemental stones and cultivate. I will be helping sky in following days. If I am not done by the third day from now, go to this address and pass this note to a person named Jack." Sam said and passed over a note to him.

    Then he walked towards the inscription circle and stood at the empty node, which he made near Sky¡¯s body. He kept one hand on Sky and started extracting the fire poison. At the same time Yanwu ced the spirit stones, responsible for providing the energy to the inscription circle.

    After much effort, the fire poison started showing reaction. Sam concentrated on extracting the fire poison near the heart. Sky growled in pain as fire poison separated. When the portion of the poison is separated, Sam didn¡¯t absorb it and directed it towards the scroll ced at the centre. The moment the fire poison hit the scroll the inscription circle which was illuminatedpletely by now converged and sealed itpletely. Sky fainted again into sleep and Sam panted for his breath.

    After this was done. He removed the formation andid another spirit condensing formation at the side.

    By this time, the sky became dark again. Watt watched Sam sealing the fire poison and opened his mouth in awe. Then he walked to a corner and started cultivating along with Falck.

    Sam ced the Fire poison scroll in the middle of spirit gathering formation. This is to use the scattered fire elemental energy that would spread in the cave to enhance the fire poison. After the preparations arepleted, Sam sat in front of sky, while Yanwu sat behind him.

    He looked at the huge roc and said. "I will begin the process. this might be painful, but I will try my best to make sure that you will stay alive and get rid of this cure."

    He then closed his eyes and ced both his palms on the body of Sky and slowly started absorbing the fire poison. He made it so slow that there is no reaction in the poison until half-an hour. He started absorbing the poison and started refining it in his body meanwhile, Yanwu shared the energy along with him, to make sure that he wouldn¡¯t reach his limit easily.

    In this way a human and a Golden sun crow are working together to save a great roc from the Bifang fire poison.

    The night passed quickly; Sam¡¯s skin turned red due to the potency of the fire poison. His skin started to be dry. When the morning son came.

    *Phew* Sam broke through to the level 6 Acolyte. There are only four days to thepetition. But Sam is not even thinking about that. He is fully concentrating on the fire poison and slowly started extracting it. His newly expanded spiritual core, started filling up again, Yanwu is also kept on absorbing the energy from behind. This seemed to be a never-ending process. By evening, both Sam and Yanwu had another break through together. Both of them enteredte stages together. While Sam into thete stage of Acolyte while Yanwu into Late stage of Level 2 beast.

    Sam who just broke through kept on absorbing the fire poison.

    The process continued and the day passed. There is still three days until thepetition. If Sam is not done today, Watt is ready to deliver the note to the address and Sam was not done so he went to visit the mansion.

    When he entered the Mansion, he was inplete awe. He never entered the mansion as luxurious as that. He is really surprised. He met Jack and passed over the note. Jack right now is preparing to create an ¡¯ident¡¯ to Eisen along with Shawn. But when he received the note, Jack smiled and modified the ns. He changed his target to the twockeys of Eisen.

    He met with the other extra person who came along with them to the City to make a deal.

    "Do you want to participate in the tournament?" Jack asked without beating around the bush.

    The other guy immediately nodded his head.

    "5000 spirit stones. There will be a spot ready. You can make your preparations. You can pay on the day of tournament." Jack said in a single breath. The other guy almost couldn¡¯t believe his words. He was still in daze when he saw Jack leaving and the he immediately went to make some preparations for thepetition. Even though, getting him a spot might be hard, who knows what would happen.

    Jack felt that he did a good job in selling the extra spot for 5000, he was thinking how Sam would react.

    Time passed quickly. The cultivation level of Sky is getting reduced minute by minute. From the cultivation level, Sam wasn¡¯t able to sense at all. He fell into Level 3 middle-stage. Days changed and finally the day after tomorrow will be the tournament. Sam is almost about to break through the Level 9. He is verge on breaking through since morning and he is waiting patiently.

    Finally, by night Sam and Yanwu both broke through to the final stages of their respective cultivation. After consolidating for a while, Sam opened his eyes and finally took a good look at Sky.

    The great roc, is now in a much better condition, but it is still in pain. Sam slowly stood up and whispered to him. "The next thing I will do to you will pain you so much that, you will prefer death over it. But I want you to endure and hang in there." He didn¡¯t even know if sky could hear his words, but he still said it. Sam ced his hands on him again and got ready to proceed with next step.

 Chapter 54: Tonic food

    Sam closed his in concentration as he ced both of his palms on Sky. He started observing the fire poison in his body. ording to Sam¡¯s ssification of this fire poison is Passive and Unstable type which leads to attack the recipient.

    He concentrated all his energy on the fire poison and observed its up to the level of the spirit particles. Then he took a deep breath and just like how he did with metals to form them into powder, he manipted the passive spiritual energy forced the molecr structure to copse and converted to fire spiritual energy.

    "CWWWAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRR" Sky opened his eyes and screamed on top of his lungs as he took the full brunt of the fire spiritual energy on his beast core and internal organs. Yanwu, Watt and Falck were all startled and trembled when they heard Sky¡¯s painful cry.

    But Sam didn¡¯t dare to let his concentration slip away. He needs delicate control over the spiritual energy in order to not make it effect Sky. He controlled the spiritual energy and let it enter from one hand and directed towards his spiritual core.

    Meanwhile, in his spiritual core. In the transparent globe, the wisp of golden me and golden light are floating in between the spiritual energy. Sam concentrated and divided the space into two with an invisible barrier such that golden me would be one side and the light would be another side. The energy he took from Sky right now through one hand is entering the core from the side of golden fire and merged along with the fire spiritual energy, then it flowed along and met with the barrier where it converted to the light spiritual energy with the help of Sam¡¯s spiritual core ability. Now, instead of refining this excess spiritual energy, he directed it out in its light elemental energy form and let it out from another hand as he started healing Sky from other side.

    In this way, he is healing Sky, with the help of the very fire poison that is meant to harm him. Sky stopped his painful screams after sometime as the fire elemental energy that ran rampant stabilised a bit and flowed towards Sam¡¯s hand and the effect of the healing from the light elemental energy, he soon felt some relief. Night passed. Sam is still standing rooted in his spot. He is sweating profusely as he furrowed his brows in full concentration.

    The lesser the amount of fire elemental energy became, the higher concentration he required. The nerves on his forehead popped over and blood started to flow out of his nose. His face turned pale and he is soaked in sweat. But he didn¡¯t dare to divert his attention. He stood there are continued on healing.

    Soon, there is no pain on Sky¡¯s face.it is reced with relief. The obvious burns on his body started healing. The feathers got their l.u.s.tre back. Slowly, it regained its vitality.

    Sun is high up in the sky, when Sam looked finally finished the process. He fell down immediately as he fainted. Yanwu quickly caught him and slowlyid him on the floor. It looked at Sky and Sam and then flew out of the cave. After a while, he came back with some dead animals, which he hunted just now. He saw Watt taking care of Sam, by cleaning his blood over andid a nket to make him sleepfortably. Sam woke up a few minutes past noon, to see the Yanwu and Watt are grilling the meat, his stomach rumbled with hunger. He walked to them and picked up a piece of meat and took a huge bite.

    They are having a peaceful meal, when a big rumbling sound came from behind. Everyone turned around to see Sky opening his eyes with a rejuvenating glow.

    {Can I have some too?} Sky asked as he slowly made his way to with his body which isrger than Yanwu a bit and sat beside them. He took a piece of meat and started gobbling on it.

    After the meal, Sam stood up and said. "Tomorrow is the tournament. I have some scores to settle today, you guys stay here till then. If any shadow micee here, don¡¯t eat them up and hear what they say." He said to Yanwu and turned towards Sky. "You just recovered. Rest properly and we can talk after I am done with dealing some things." He looked at Watt and said. "Cultivate properly." Then he left the cave and went back to his mansion. Today he has to collect some debt.

    Sam went to the Artisan tower on the way and bought a w type and weapons for both hands, the he took a private forge and made some modifications. He pulled out the original ws and reced them with the ws of the Golden Blood tiger.

    "I will make do with it until I make myself some quality ones. He made sure that they arefortable and ced them in the storage. Tomorrow is the day of tournament, so he was pretty sure that Principal is going to make send someone to remind him.

    His guess was right. When he arrived at the mansion, the extra guy came to send the message and was leaving. He looked at Sam with a doubtful look before leaving. Sam entered the mansion and was greeted by the people who are about to prepare for the tournament.

    He met with Jack and Shawn and they moved to their room to have a private talk.

    "We took care of the twockeys." Jack said as soon as they sat down.

    "I will take care of the rest. Did you make a deal with that extra guy?" Sam asked.

    "Yeah, I made a deal for 5000 spirit stones." Jack said with a smile. He is satisfied with the deal. But both Shawn and Sam were looking at him as if he was an idiot. Shawn didn¡¯t know that Jack made the deal only for 5000, that is why he was shocked by revtion.

    Sam looked at Shawn and said. "Why didn¡¯t you go there?"

    "He said he would take care of it and I thought he would really do." Shawn said with a dejected expression.

    "What is wrong?" Jack asked a bit confused.

    "How did you evene up with the price?" Sam asked with a wry expression.

    "What do you mean?"

    "Jack, he took 1500 just for the trip to Falcon cliff city. Why do you think he took that much money? Because, they will have a chance to get a spot, which is almost impossible unless someone yed their hand properly. Then a guaranteed spot. How much do you think we can sell it for?" Shawn asked with exasperation.

    His friend is a genius at fighting. Then why is he not even a little bit intelligent at these ways of world.

    "Forget it." Sam sighed. "I will take care of everything. I need a favour. Make a big pit around six feet long, 2 feet wide and foot deep in the yard and tell everyone in the mansion, not toe out to the yard at night." Sam said and left. He walked towards the inn and he entered the inn opposite to the one Principal, Eisen and the rest are staying. When the sky turned dark, they came to eat their dinner and Principal is giving a speech and telling them not to make them nervous. Eisen is fidgeting his finger and waspletely out of sorts. When he was finally done, he immediately went to his room and locked the door. He is feeling tense. From the past two days, hisckey and his brother got attacked mysteriously. He had a feeling that he is going to be in danger. Just when he was about to take a step forward towards his bed.

    *Crack* a ss breaking sound could be heard. A red vapour filled the room and before he could know what happened, he felt a little dizzy and his reaction speed slowed down.

    Just as he tried to calm down and get control of the situation, a ck figure stood in front of him and that figure opened a scroll suddenly as a big orange coloured magma like thing hit him and entered his body, the sudden change hit made him faint as he felt a burning sensation inside his body.

    After sometime. Eisen opened his eyes, he felt a searing pain inside his body and when he tried to move, he felt like his body was tied up to something. He wasid down on something and tried to look around to see where he is and who took him here.

    Suddenly a me lit up and a figure came into his sight. When Eisen saw who it is, he immediately fell into despair. The thing he most feared happened. He tried to struggle and use his spiritual energy, but he felt his blood burning and he stopped.

    Sam looked at him with cold eyes. He has his two panthers on his side as he ran his arms across their fur and snuggled into him with warm expressions. But when Eisen saw this scene, he immediately felt shocked and confused. Sam slowly stood up and walked towards Eisen, leaving the panthers with some food.

    "How are you feeling Eisen?" Are you warm enough?" Sam asked as an evil glint shed across his eyes.

    "Sam, please leave me alone. I apologise. I willpensate you with a huge sum of money. My father is rich. I will ask him to pay you a huge ransom. Please, Sam just let me walk away." He said in a trembling voice as he felt his body burning in heat. His spiritual core ispletely infected with the poison. He felt pain and distress at the same time.

    Sam just chuckled. It is toote Eisen. Don¡¯t you think? You dare attack my friends and you expect me to release you for just some ransom." Sam said in a sarcastic tone.

    Eisen felt his throat run dry. He regretted pissing this guy off. He tried to struggle again.

    "Don¡¯t bother struggling. It will only increase the pain you feel." Eisen stopped as soon as he heard it. This fire poison is what Sam collected from Sky. Even though the amount is small, he used the vestiges of the fire spiritual energy spread inside the cave to enhance the poison for the past days while he treated Sky.

    "I really admire your stupidity Eisen. Of all things you could do, you have to piss me off time and again. You dare hurt my panthers? Then I will use you to assist them in breakthrough." Sam said and threw a small fire ball towards him.

    Eisen closed his eyes in fear, but the expected impact never came. He slowly opened his eyes as he felt a burning sensation in his back. He opened his eyes and looked at Sam¡¯s evil smile. He felt despair looming over him.

    He wasid over a pit filled with fire. He is being cooked alive. The thought itself made him fall into abyss. Sam took out a bottle of red liquid from his storage and started pouring all over Eisen and said.

    "I don¡¯t want my panthers to get used to human meat. That is why I made this special c.o.c.ktail of beast blood to mask over your scent. You, Eisen will be tonic food for my panthers and assist them in breakthrough. Thank you for your service". Then he flipped Eisen over to make his front side to touch the fire.

    Eisen screamed on top of his lungs while he was being flipped like a chicken wing.

    "NOOOOOOOOOO."

    "Pleaaaaaaaaaaaaseeeeeeee."

    "Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmmmm"

    But the rest of the mansion wasn¡¯t able to hear his screams because Samid a formation to conceal everything that is happening here. Sam only stopped his flipping when Eisen has a final breath left.

    "Medium rare. You guys can dig in." Sam said as he tossed Eisen over to the two panthers.

    The two panthers immediately started eating as they smelled the scent of the various beast blood, while Eisen himself lost all the energy to even scream in pain, when he felt the teeth and ws tearing his seared flesh apart being eaten alive. Then before hisst breath, he heard Sam¡¯s voice.

    "Don¡¯t worry, you won¡¯t be alone. The Piranha will also join you soon enough." He died after he heard these words with a lot of regrets.

 Chapter 55: Opening Ceremony

    Sam slept peacefully that night. After what happened to the panthers, this is the only time he felt a little peaceful. His mind calmed down a little as he drifted to sleep in hisfortable bed. Next day early in the morning even before the sun rose, a series of knocking sounds woke him up.

    When he went outside, he saw Philip standing there.

    "Sam principal came. He said that he has something important to talk to you." Philip sounded fl.u.s.tered. Sam just nodded and walked downstairs and saw the Principal, who is sitting in a chair with a gloomy expression. When Sam took a seat in front of him, he took a deep breath and asked.

    "Sam, did you do it?"

    "Do what exactly sir?" Sam replied with a smile. When he saw Sam¡¯s smile, without a hint of malice and coldness, he wasn¡¯t even able to rte to the person he saw a few days back when he came to confront him about Eisen¡¯s ¡¯message¡¯. He immediately understood what made this young man feel so happy.

    "Why did you have to go too far? We could have talked it over. Will you take every small matter to this extent?" Principal asked with a dejected expression. Eisen is a good candidate for thispetition. He is not only a person with good cultivation for his age, he is also a person with expertise in auxiliary professions as well. He is a very valuable person on the roaster now. But he slipped away just like that because his own self- centred egoist actions.

    He is also dissatisfied with Sam. Even though, he can understand him being angry, he never would have expected that he would just kill the person because his pets got attacked. If they were killed, he might understand. They were injured badly. If there is any person other than Sam, they would take a huge ransom, and let this matter go. After all, there are lot more powerful beast pets that could be bought with money. Any normal cultivator will do so. At least, he himself would so. But Sam¡¯s answer stunned him.

    "To be honest sir. I do. I will take every small matter to this extent." Principal was dazed for a bit and said.

    "He is a main part of the roaster. He can be used to gain some actual results for the city. Did you at least think about what you have done? How much loss, is it for the academy and the City?"

    "And why should I care about that?" This time not only principal, the rest of the team also left stunned. At first, they were confused, but they understood something that this discussion is rted to Sam and someone else who was supposed to be the part of the team, but was unable to do so because of Sam. But what Sam said shocked them rather than confused. ¡¯what does he mean, why should I care?¡¯ He is part of this freaking team for crying out loud. This is thought that ran through everyone¡¯s mind. Without giving a chance for Principal to speak, Sam continued.

    "Probably you forgot, let me remind you. This is a part of business deal between both of us. You paid me and I will participate in thepetition on behalf of your academy. The deal doesn¡¯t include me tolerating what ever your students throw at me andy on the floor to let them walk over on me. You are here asking me exnation on why I did that? Where were you when your beloved student got so carried away and hired the most notorious organisation in the city to make a hit on my pets. I didn¡¯t see you demanding an exnation from him."

    Sam asked in a solemn tone. The gentle smile is gone.

    "But I would have given you apensation. You could have healed them or you could have taught him a lesson. Why go to that extent?" Principal asked with an exasperated tone.

    Sam just chuckled. Then he took a sword and threw it at the feet of the Principal, then he took a bag full of spirit stones which seemed to be a lot from his storage and ced it on the table. He looked at Principal straight in the eyes and said.

    "200,000 spirit stones. Would you be leaving your arm here, please? You can heal your arm at the healer and I will pay you that also. Are you willing?"

    The whole seemed to freeze on the spot. All the students felt their blood run cold. Principal also stared at Sam as his aura grew wilder. Sam didn¡¯t avert his gaze even under the pressure of the superior cultivator and just looked at Principal straight in the eyes.

    Why is he so daring? Because he knew that Principal won¡¯t attack him. There is no other option. Sam is the only hope, if he needs to get some benefits through this tournament.

    Principal tried his best to calm himself and left after saying. "Whatever happened, happened. I hope you will fulfil your end of the deal Sam. I will see you all at the academy in a while." He then left without even taking a look at the group.

    Sam also didn¡¯t say anything and left to his room to freshen up. He changed into his usual ck vest and coat and walked downstairs. By now, all the members in the group are ready to go.

    The group started their walk as they went to Falcon Cliff academy.

    The Falcon cliff academy is also part of the northern region of the falcon cliff city. Sam and his group came here and sat with the people from the Starwood city.

    There are separate seating arrangements for them as well as other cities under the jurisdiction of the Falcon cliff city. Other than those five groups, there are another group from the Falcon Cliff academy themselves. All the groups whichprised of total of 60 candidates along with their supervisors sat there.

    Sam observed other city lords and he was surprised a bit. The other city lords are at most at middle stage of Novice stage and so were principals of the academies. Some principals are at most at the level of elders of the academy. This left him surprised and confused at the same time. He observed something else that is the other people are looking at their group strangely, the principals and city lord of other groups are looking at them and whispering with in themselves. Even though, he felt it was weird, he didn¡¯t think much of it and waited as his gaze was fixed on the seats at the top most tform.

    The seats were for the Count and the Principal of the Falcon Cliff city. The two strongest of the people in the territory.

    After a while a huge bird screech could be heard and everyone looked at towards the sky. There is a huge Whirlwind falcon, which is obviously at the Level 3. On top of the falcon, a middle-aged man with a dignified countenance stood proudly with his back straight. He is none other than the Great Mage Falcon also called Count Falcon. He is the superior of the territory of not only the Falcon Cliff city but also the other five subordinate cities.

    He is followed by a group of Novice warriors and Mages riding on level 2 Whirlwind Falcons. They are called the Falcon guards, the elite guards of the Falcon Cliff city.

    Sam looked at the various people standing up in respect for the Count and he also stood up. He is in distaste for bowing and kneeling, but standing up as respect is still not overboard and neither did, he feels undeserving.

    Great mage or Great Warrior is cultivation stage above Novice stage and Falcon Cliff city has at most a handful of them. They might even exceed ten people and strongest of the Great Mages/Warriors is undoubtedly the Count followed by the Principal of the Falcon Cliff academy.

    While everyone is deep in their own thoughts, an entourage arrived from the depths of the Falcon Cliff academy lead by a Middle-aged man with extreme schrly aura. He has a long beard and long hair which reached his shoulders. The second most powerful person in the Falcon Cliff city is here.

    Both the big shots gave each other a warm hug as they exchanged greetings, they seem to be rather close. After sometime both of them took their seats and gestured to the audience to take a seat. They didn¡¯t expect everyone to bow. Sam heard from whispers of the spectators that the City lord doesn¡¯t like people bowing to him at all and mentioned in many asions to not to bow.

    After everyone settled down, Count Falcon came forward and addressed the people.

    "Dear citizens of my territory. On this auspicious moment, I am very happy to see that the City lords and the Principals of the academies from the subordinate cities brought the candidates for this grand asion. I appreciate the candidates who came to this event and I wish them all the best for their future.

    Today the young talents from all over my territory are here in order to participate in a tournament that is going to be held by the joint administration of Principal Castor and me. This tournament is to assess the younger generations with potential and give them new opportunities, such that they will excel in the future. I hope all the candidates give their best in the tournament and strive to be the best. The tournament rules will be exined by Principal Castor.

    After finishing his speech followed by an apuse from audience, he took a seat and Principal Castor took his ce and waited for a moment for audience to settle down. After the audience came to silence, he started speaking.

    "As our Count Falcon said. The young people will be participating in a tournament. The qualifications to enter the tournament are that the candidate must be younger than or at twenty years of age and he must be one of the chosen ten of the respective cities.

    We also conducted a tournament a few days ago to select the top 10 people in our city who willpete along with the other five groups of the sub ordinate cities. There would be an age assessmentter on to proceed with and the people who didn¡¯t pass the requirement will be eliminated immediately and the respective cities must find a substitute themselves. If they don¡¯t have a substitute, a candidate from Falcon Cliff city will take his ce.

    The tournament is for a very important cause, so you the evaluation will not only be diverse, but also considers all traits of a person not just focussing on the battle prowess.

    There are two types of final rankings. One is the team ranking which will be ranked by the c.u.mtive performance of the team of city. The second ranking is the individual ranking. The rewards for both the rankings will be given adequately.

    The candidates will be assessed in three rounds.

    The first round will be an endurance challenge. The challenge is to travel in a tower as high as possible. The tower is filled with various formations, obstacles and other restrictions. The tower is a part of our testing ground, which has thirty levels. The higher level a person climbs, the higher the points they will obtain.

    I wish you all the best." Principal concluded his speech.

 Chapter 56: Tower of Will

    After Principal ended his speech, he gestured to an elder to lead the group to the testing grounds of the academy. All the spectators followed them to the spectator¡¯s area provided at the testing grounds. After all of them left the bigshots in the ce were guided by the attendants of the academy to the private cubicles to get a better view of the test.

    The Elder led the candidates and their supervisors of the six groups and made them take their positions in front of a huge tower. There was a huge que written with characters ¡¯TOWER OF WILL¡¯. Sam looked at the ancient looking tower and was in awe about its exquisite structure.

    The tower is tall and may be the tallest of all the buildings in city, but nobody was unable to see it when they normally roam in the city for which the credit went to the arrangements of testing grounds.

    The Elder turned towards the six groups of people and said. "This ¡¯Tower of Will¡¯ is testing ce to know how strong is your will and how strong is your belief in yourself. There are thirty levels in this tower and the higher you go the higher the points you will gain. These points will be added to the c.u.mtive score of yours for the final evaluation of the tournament.

    If you are unable to step forward after you reach a certain level, don¡¯t be stubborn and learn to back down, when you can. Otherwise the repercussions will be dire and hinder your future development.

    The best record for the tower is of 27 levels and that is done by our current emperor, when he came here to test his will especially in this tower.

    I wish you all the best." He finished his speech and gave the position to another attendant who is in charge of sending candidates in to the tower.

    The attendant came forward and said.

    "The first participants will be Falcon Cliff city." As soon as he said that all the participants from the Falcon Cliff city came forward. Attendant pointed at one guy among them and gestured him to enter the tower. The first floor of the tower illuminated a little confirming the tower begin testing the candidate.

    Soon, the dimly lit first floor began illuminating brightly in white light. The first floor was passed. Now the candidate will be moved to the second floor and the that also illuminated with a dim light. This time ten minutes passed and the second floor also passed. The candidate was moved to the third floor. Seeing that the testing takes sometime the candidates and the spectators started chatting. Sam observed all the candidates from various cities and some interesting info was heard from two people from Mountainke City which is one of the close neighbours to the Starwood city. He heard two guys talking secretively.

    "Hey, do you know why the cultivation levels of the City lord and Principal of the Falcon cliff city are higher?"

    "No, I am also curious. Do you know anything about it?"

    "Yes, I overheard when our City lord exined to his son just now."

    "Really? What is the reason then?"

    "Apparently, Starwood city is like an exiling zone to the dukedom we are part of. The officials of various departments and organisations, who offended their superiors at their early stages of career will be transferred to this city. This city has literally no resources except for that Starwood forest and some othermon herbs. So, every big shot in the city from another ce, who has beef with the higher ups and were transferred there to stomp on their progress. The opportunities are less and resources are scarce. They said that even the Noble families in that city are exiled branch of a big noble family because of their internal strife. That is why other cities are controlled by a single noble family and there might be at most an extra noble family which are deployed by a big- name noble family to get the resources, but the noble families in Starwood city are different.

    Principal added that, if not for the fact they don¡¯t have any strong evidence against them to be dealt directly and the organisation can¡¯t do it due to their reputation, they might have been already dealt with by their superiors.

    So, long ago the upper echelons of various organisation, reached a consensus together discreetly, to send all these people who offended them to this City."

    When the other guy heard this, he was shocked and Sam who heard it discreetly was given more huge shock from the info. Never would he have expected that there would be a city like this where the people who offended their bosses were transferred. He didn¡¯t expect that this would be the reason for the higher cultivation base of City lord and the Principal. He thought that the Starwood city might be somewhat impressive or something. But the reason made him almost burst inughter. So, most of these guys are people who were kicked by their bosses to the curb.

    Sam looked at the Principal and City lord who is looking at the tower with a serious expression.

    "Hello, Kelly." His thought process was interrupted by a person¡¯s deep and cheerful voice. He turned his head only to see that a young man who is from the Falcon Cliff team greeting Kelly. Sam didn¡¯t bother with it and diverted his attention to the tower as the candidate came outside just now.

    "Candidate Logan from Falcon Cliff city. Twelve levels passed and failed in thirteenth level.12 Points." Attendant announced as the candidate came back with a dejected expression.

    "Sam." A sweet voice came from beside him and he saw Kelly calling him. He turned towards her and saw the young man who spoke to her earlier standing beside her with a smile.

    "This is Hawk. Son of the Count Falcon. He is my childhood friend." Kelly introduced him and Sam was a bit surprised. This time he observed the young man closely and indeed found some simrities in facial features between him and the Count.

    Hawk extended his hand and said. "Nice to meet you Sam." His tone was polite, not like some random young masters he used encounter.

    "Nice to meet you too." Sam also said in a same polite tone. Even though there are no signs of friendly smile on his face like Hawk, his face didn¡¯t show his usual coldness and temper or any signs of displeasure as well.

    "I heard a lot about you from Howard recently and Kelly also said that you are quite unique. That is why I became curious and came here to meet you." Hawk said with same smile. Sam didn¡¯t feel repulsed by his smile.

    "By Howard you mean, Kelly¡¯s uncle?" Sam asked. He didn¡¯t remember any other guy named Howard which he met with recently. But there was still a doubt as he didn¡¯t see any reason for the Artisan tower head to say something about him to Count¡¯s son.

    "Yes. Howard and my father are friends. Kelly used to live here when she was still a little kid. That is how we became friends. Recently, when Howard came to meet my father, you are one of the main topics they used to discuss." Hawk exined.

    "Oh, really? I never expected that. I don¡¯t think there is not much to talk about me." Sam replied. And they made small talk. Hawk was polite all the time. He observed that Sam is a guy with cold personality and is not one to make friends easily, so he also kept his distance and just talked with him normally. They talked about various things and when Sam learned that Hawk is a formation master, they had some more interesting things to talk about.

    "Candidate Yash. Twenty floors. Failed in twenty first floor. Twenty points."

    The announcement put a brake to their conversation and they looked at the candidate curiously. He is a young man with a peculiar around him, wearing ck. He is a seen with another two people having same aura as him in the Falcon Cliff city team.

    "Your team seems to having some good contenders." Sam noted as he observed the trio with peculiar air. He felt that something very familiar from them, but wasn¡¯t able to put his finger on it and went into deep contemtion. When he finally made a guess, he was shocked. The peculiar feeling is blood l.u.s.t. He looked at the boys in theirte teens, they are at peak of Acolyte or initial stage of Novice, but the blood l.u.s.t from them is not something that normal amateurs will have. They are used to killing and the body count must be high for their age.

    Sam thought and looked at the trio for a while before directing his gaze towards another participant who just finished his test.

    Time slowly passed by and only three people left from the Falcon Cliff team. Hawk and the other two from the peculiar trio.

    "Candidate Yaar. Twenty-one floors. Failed in twenty second floor. Twenty- one points." After another forty-minute time one of the guys from triopleted his test. Time passed.

    "Candidate Yuv. Twenty floors. Failed at twenty- first floor. Twenty points." Finally, Hawk¡¯s turn came.

    "I will see youter." Hawk said to Sam and Kelly and went inside the tower.

    The first floor of the tower dimly lit and with in a few seconds it illuminated brightly. Hawkpleted the first trail faster than anyone else. He proceeded to the second floor and in the same way, hepleted that in a very small time. Sam looked at the tower with an amusing smile. Hawk climbed the tower until he reached the tenth floor in no time. At tenth floor, he took some time to pass.

    Even though the time taken toplete the floors increased significantly. Hispletion time is way faster than other people who participated before. With in twenty minutes he reached twenty-first floor. This surprised everyone at the venue. Even though they felt surprised at the performances of the trio who made to the twenty floors, the time they took was rather highpared to Hawk.

    Just as they were discussing in whispers another floor illuminated brightly and Hawk entered the twenty-second floor. Another ten minutes passed; another floor lit up. Everyone burst into uproar and the crowd looked so excited. They wanted to see someone set a record from their city.

    Count Falcon is grinning ear to ear at his seat.

    "your son is truly good." Castor said from side.

    "He still has ways to go, to be as great as me." Count Falcon said in a serious tone, but his grin clearly told that he is proud of his son."

    Then crowd shrieked again as they another floor illuminate. Hawk passed twenty-second floor and climbed his way to the twenty third floor. Until now, this is the best performance. They were eagerly waiting but they were disappointed when tower returned to normal and Hawk came out with a bitter smile.

    "Candidate Hawk. Twenty-two floors. Failed in twenty third floor. Twenty- two points." Crowd apuded for the young man.

    Even though they were a bit disappointed as they had high expectations on Hawk, thepetition has to go on. And the candidates from the next group went forward.

    Starwood City wasst on the list and they have to wait until every other candidate is done with and within that group Sam is thest candidate. So, he stood there and waited patiently.

    Even though there are some significant results in the next candidates, there are nothing remarkable. Only one person achieved a result of twenty points from other cities, before the turn of Starwood city came at time of sun set.

    Kelly entered first to the tower as the rest of them waited for their turn. Kelly got 18 points which is not bad. The remaining teammates like Freya, Haley scored around 12 to 15 points. Just as crowd gave up. Jack entered the tower and gave a huge shock to everyone.

    His speed hisparable to Hawk and he didn¡¯t seem to stop at all. He cleared the floors after 10th level even faster than Hawk. Hawk was staring at the tower with a surprised expression, but with in the surprise there is apetitive spirit burning making him excited. When Jack arrived at the twenty third floor where Hawk failed everyone became silent.

    Five minutes passed

    Ten minutes passed

    Twenty minutes passed. To everyone¡¯s shock the floor illuminated brightly. Just as they thought that Jack would go to twenty fourth level. He withdrew.

    "Candidate Jack. Twenty-three floors. Withdrew from twenty fourth floor. Twenty- three points.

    Jack¡¯s face doesn¡¯t look good, even after he came back. His face was pale and his eyes are nk. The test almost broke him apart.

    There are only two candidates left. Philip and Sam. Sam helped Jack to take a seat and passed him some water as Philip entered the tower.

 Chapter 57: Sams turn

    Sky turned dark and night arrived. But at the testing grounds of the Falcon cliff city, neither spectators nor candidates are ready to leave. Right now, all the spectators are staring at certain disbelief. They were shocked out of their senses for the feat the person aplished.

    The said person though, is smiling and didn¡¯t speak anything else. Sam looked at Philip who stood beside him as nothing happened.

    Philip just came out of the tower, but he shocked everyone with his performance. The person responsible for announcing the result is also staring at him disbelief. Because, when he entered the tower, his performance is simr to that of Jack. Rapidly climbing the levels easily. That didn¡¯t give them much shock, but the fact that he took less than half the time toplete the same twenty-third level in which Jack almost copsed made them surprised.

    When everyone thought he was going to attempt the next floor, he withdrew and came back smiling as if nothing happened. If not for the fact, that Sam noticed some signs of exhaustion on his face, nobody would believe that he achieved such high score on the tower of will.

    After sometime Sam took a step forward and coughed to get the attention of the attendant responsible for the score. The attendant came out of the daze and shouted the results.

    "Candidate Philip. Twenty third floor. Withdrew from twenty fourth floor. Twenty-third points."

    After noting down the scores, he gestured Sam to enter the tower.

    Sam walked inside the tower and was baffled to see the walls inside the room. The walls of the room are filled with runic diagrams. Sam instantly recognised what the technique used for the creating these structures. These structures are done by a technique named inscription etching. To be able to use this technique one must be proficient in inscriptions as well as painting Artisan. But judging from theplication of the runic arrangement it must be some kind of formation which means he must be a formation master as well. Sam looked at the room and only saw a circr tform in the middle of the room which seemed to be seating arrangement. He walked to the tform and sat down.

    As soon as he sat down, he felt a jolt in his mind as his consciousness slipped away. When he opened his eyes, Sam saw himself in a familiar ce. This is the street he used to live in when he stayed at the Lava rock vige. When Sam started to look around, he saw a familiar person standing at a distance away from him.

    The person in front of him was none other than the Vige head of the Lava Rock vige. He walked towards Sam with an evil look on his eyes. "How dare you hurt my son? I will kill you today." Vige head said in a cold tone. Sam looked at the vige head coldly. He tried to move but he felt his strengthpletely suppressed by the Vige heads aura. Sam felt cold sweat, but he didn¡¯t falter. His strength seemed to weak in front of the vige head and he felt like he would be dead at any time. Danger loomed over his heart as he saw vige head walking towards him.

    Sam closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. ¡¯Even I have to die. I will at least die trying.¡¯ He thought in his head as he made his move and leapt towards the vige head. He balled his fist and punched the other party in daze, but the other party didn¡¯t dodge at all. As his fist made impact to other party¡¯s face.

    *BOOM* Sam woke up with a jolt. His mind felt a buzzing sensation. He is extremely familiar with this feeling. This is the time eleration he felt in the tower when he simted.

    Sam slowly stood up and looked at the runes on the wall as he tried toprehend the test. When he entered that illusion, his memory seemed to be erased. He only saw the more powerful Vige head and himself are in confrontation and he is in helpless situation.

    He felt weak. He didn¡¯t even have a thought that this is a test and not reality. Not even an inkling came to his mind.

    Sam thought in contemtion. ¡¯Here losing the battle is not the real loss. Losing the battle without even having will to fight is the real loss¡¯. He seemed to understand what the test of will is.

    He slowly walked towards the entrance which opened for him to enter the next floor. When he entered the next floor, he saw that the room is simr to the one in first floor. But the only difference is that the second-floor walls have moreplex runic structures.

    "This tower is definitely not created by the people of this city. This is way too high level for them to make. I will not believe even if they beat me to death." He thought out loud and sat down on the tform again.

    Sam again felt his memorypsed. His conscious drifted as he came into another familiar scene. Testing grounds of the Starwood academy, Carl and his friends surrounded him as he felt his whole-body spasm in pain and bled with several wounds. All of them are looking at him with an evil look...

    Third floor, Sam entered another familiar ce, the healers experimentalb in the tower, he felt his body tied up to the chains which used to restrain the green scale lizards. Albert and Alfred are walking towards him...

    Fourth floor,

    Fifth floor,

    .

    .

    .

    Tenth floor, Sam looked at all the people surrounding him. All the people he had conflicts with are right in front of him. Even though he has his full power and he was full of energy, there are so many people for him to handle. Vige head, Oliver and hisckeys, Carl and his friends, Carter, the seniors who lost to him in the assessment, the noble family heads, Leonard, Raymond, Eisen and his father. He is surrounded by everyone as felt suppressed and tiny in front of all the auras of all his enemies. He has Golden Crescent in his hand and tightened his grip.

    He wants to live; he doesn¡¯t want to die and he really doesn¡¯t want to die in hands of these people. But he saw the looks in the eyes of these people that had no emotion but extreme rage in their eyes. There is only one way for him. Get to live or die trying. He swung his golden crescent as the de keened in the air and shed the person in front of him......

    Sam opened his eyes as he looked at the walls and shook his head. He felt dizzy all over as he remembered the sensation. In all the ten situations, Sam always met with the enemies that are powerful than him and all these times he doesn¡¯t have any memories or recollections that this is the illusion for the test.

    All that registered in his mind is are his power level at the situation, his enemies power level and the difference in between both of them. His helplessness, his hopelessness. That is the only thing he had in mind and the test how he will face it.

    Each and every time, the only test he has to do is how can he ovee the situation. Every time he has no choice but to die due to his powerlessness. But his evaluationid on the way he died. Did he die while trying or did he give up? That is the basis of evaluation.

    Sam slowly stood up and walked towards the eleventh- floor stairs and went inside another room. This room is almost simr to the rooms before, but the walls are etched with a different form of runespared to the other times.

    Meanwhile, outside. The people are numb for the surprises now. They saw how fast Sam moved in the ten floors and eleventh one, they had a sense of dejavu and they eyed the candidates who cleared the floors just as fast.

    Sam looked at the tform and the different type of runic patterns than before.

    He doesn¡¯t know what type of change it will make to the illusion types, but the change will definitely be there.

    Sam went to tform and sat down. He closed his eyes slowly and again there was a jolt in his mind.

    Sam opened his eyes only to see and endless desert in front of his eyes, he saw the miles and miles of sand carpeting the earth as far as his eyes could see. He doesn¡¯t have anything on him except for the cloths he wore. The scorching sun and the hot sand beneath him gave a burning feel over to his body. He tried to use his spiritual energy but nothing happened. He tried a few more times and then only he realized, he is an ordinary man. Now, he is nothing but an ordinary man who is struck in between an endless dessert. He looked around a bit and then picked a direction where he could see a faint image of mountain ranges and started walking.

    He walked neither fast nor slow, he just maintained his pace and walked without caring about sun and heat. Soon, he found a dead tree on his way but didn¡¯t mind it and walked forward, his throat started to feel dry, his cloths are soaked in sweat, he is dehydrating in a fast pace. But he didn¡¯t stop.

    After walking for a long distance, Sam froze on the spot. The dead tree appeared again, He looked at for a while and just thought that it might be another tree and he might have been feeling dejavu. He walked past it, this time his body became dry, his cloths that are soaked in sweat also started to be dry. He felt an unimaginable thirst, he walked for another long distance.

    He looked at the dead tree that came again. His heart screamed of despair, he felt that something is wrong. He slowly walked towards the tree and with the little bit of meagre strength he left, he broke a small tip of a branch and took it along with him. This time his skin started cracking and his lips broke.

    After another long distance, he spotted the dead tree again, he walked towards it and looked at the branch tip, he pursed his lips and ced the broken tip on the branch, which obviously matched, his heart went cold. He is looming with despair. He looked at the dead tree and at the mountain ranges that can be seen far away. He thought. ¡¯Am I going to die like this?¡¯ Then he shook his head and thought again. ¡¯I will try until thest breath.¡¯

    He took another step forward with determination and walked towards the mountain range. He walked miles. His feet started to bleed, he encountered the dead tree again but this time he didn¡¯t stop, he increased his pace and walked again, after sometime his legs gave in, he crawled with his hands, his hands gave in he still crawled with his remaining strength. His clothes were tattered. His body was full of abrasions from the sand and bleeding. He can¡¯t see what was in front of him, but he didn¡¯t stop. Soon, he felt weak and tired. He closed his eyes and breathed hisst breath and final thing he saw is the dead tree which he saw for the tenth time.

    Sam opened his and looked at the tform. He shook his head toe out of that feeling. His body broke out in cold sweat. He stood up from the tform and walked towards the door for next floor. He was thinking what would be the next test. He walked towards the room in the next floor and sat on the tform and closed his eyes again.

    Sam opened his eyes and he felt wet all over and looked around in daze. He was floating in and endless ocean, he instinctively started kicking his feet to stay afloat. His memory is nk. He doesn¡¯t remember anything. All he had in his mind was that he fell into the sea and he has to move in order to be safe.

    Sam started to swim and he did so in a direction where he could see an ind. He swam in a moderate pace to keep his stamina in check. He swam for miles and just when he thought he would have reduced some distance and looked towards the ind; he only saw the same ck dot he saw when he just arrived. Sam looked around and again started to swim........

    Sam opened his eyes on the tform and walked towards the next one.

    Meanwhile, outside.

    Spectators looked at tower. They saw Sam clearing levels, just like the other high-scorers. They are not waiting whether he would make a good score or not. There are more inclined on thinking, whether he would beat the score that Jack has set. They are waiting in anticipation and they are not the only ones.

    "How far do you think, he would go?" Hawk asked Kelly who stood beside him. Jack also stood with them. He had enough rest to stand and Philip is looking at Hawk and Kelly to hear what she would think.

    "I don¡¯t know. But I hope, he would make it far." Kelly answered in a sweet tone. Freya and Haley are sitting a little away from them. They are feeling dejected at their low results. They both scored only 14 and 15 points respectively. They didn¡¯t even see what the third set of tests, which are twenty-first on wards are. Now only they understood that they are full of themselves. Even Philip who always goofs around and has a very ¡¯average talent¡¯pared to them beat them big time. They sighed and looked at the tower as another floor illuminated brightly.

 Chapter 58: The third set of trails

    "He is already at twentieth floor. Do you think he will beat the others and win first ce?"

    "I don¡¯t know. But he is not faster than others. Maybe he might be same as the other two guys who are in the lead."

    "I think so too."

    "I don¡¯t think so. He might even withdraw from the next floor."

    Some candidates and spectators are discussing about Sam as they spectated the tower.

    Meanwhile Sam is being under the test that will lead him to thest set of the tests in the tower. The test to enter twenty-first floor.

    Sam is sweating all over as he looked at the time as he sat on the tform. His conscious is wide awake. In his mind.

    Sam is hanging on to a tall vertical rocky surface. He looked down and beneath him is a pool of hotva, from which the hot vapours came out searing his skin. He looked upwards towards the mouth of the volcano. He can clearly see a blue sky filled with white clouds.

    Sam started climbing. His spiritual energy is sealed and his memory is nk. The only thing he knew is that he cannot hold on to the rocky wall at the same spot if he wants to survive. His body has several cuts and bruises and some of the wounds are bleeding. He slowly started getting near the mouth of the volcano. When he finally ced his hand over the mouth and pulled himself up, a light shed and he found himself at the point he started.

    "F.u.c.k" He cursed out loud as he looked at the pool ofve very near to his legs. This is the fourth time this happened. Every time he climbed up with all his might, he wille back down as if he was struck in a loop and worse every time this happened, his injuries will worsen due to the close exposure of the heat from theva. He is growing tired and he wants to rest, but something in his mind is telling him that climbing is the only escape route. If he wants to live, he needs to climb.

    He started climbing and again reached the top and again came back to the bottom in a sh.

    Fifth time.

    Sixth time.

    .

    .

    Tenth time. Sam is fully wounded. His skin cracked. He has third degree burns; he is holding the rocky protrusion with all his might. But he refused to give up. His palms are covered with blood and burns. He is hurting all over and he still tried to pull himself up, but this time his hand lost the grip and he fell into theva pool.

    *ssh*

    Sam opened his eyes on the tform. He is drenched in sweat. His skin became cold.

    *pah* *pah* He pped himself twice to make himself more awake. He looked at the door which just opened and he felt anxious as to what to see in the next round.

    His first ten rounds, he was put against powerful enemies, which he cannot win against. But he was given a fighting chance and the next ten rounds, he was put against the nature and was thrown into a helpless situation which he can¡¯t even put up a fight with. He really wants to see what would he up against next.

    He slowly made his way to the next floor and the style of the runic patterns really changed. He sat on the central tform and closed his eyes. Suddenly a voice came in his mind.

    [Oh, another young man. Seems like the younger generation is getting stronger and stronger. In one day, there are already seventh one. Let me see what you have in your head.]

    The voice sounded like as if it was belonged to an old man. It sounded coarse. Just as the voice finished, Sam felt someone enter his consciousness and read him like a book. He found an old man¡¯s silhouette in his consciousness and all his memories shed past him one by one and the memories were not just after his rebirth, but also the memories of the previous life. The Old man looked at the memories with a surprised expression. Then he turned towards Sam¡¯s conscious and said.

    [your soul belongs to another world. I wasn¡¯t able to see how you got here; he seems to be of someone who is far more powerful. Anything rted to him in your memory is unable to read. Coming back to your situation. You really seem to have gone through a lot in your past life. This might be a bit unfair to you, but I can¡¯t do anything about it. I hope your will is strong enough to make it to the top.] The Old silhouette disappeared as soon as he spoke without giving Sam any chance to speak.

    Sam again felt a jolt in mind and his consciousness drifted again. He opened his eyes and saw a familiar ce, very familiar that it etched into memory and into his very soul.

    Sam looked at the shed he was in and looked at the kids of various ages from three years to ten years in ragged cloths. He is right now back to his past, this ce is familiar to him, because this is where his four-year-old previous self, lived.

    Sam looked at the door and had a bad premonition, he tried to remember why he was back here, but nothing came to his mind, The memory of his was only remained until the situation, the rest of the memory is nk, even though he knew that he got past this, but he doesn¡¯t remember how he got past this.

    Suddenly, door opened. A young man in his twenties came in with a loud bang and looked around as if searching for someone, when his eyesnded on Sam, he immediately walked towards him and without any word he kicked him in his guts. Sam flew over andnded on the floor all the kids frightened and stood up from the grounds and huddled to other side of the shed.

    "You little piece of shit. Why didn¡¯t you go to your shift today? Who will pay for the food you are going to eat?" He walked towards Sam and held him by his throat and felt Sam¡¯s skin was warmer and his voice grew harsher.

    "So, you have a f.u.c.k.i.n.g fever and slept in. Do you know what kind of opportunity you missed? If you have a fever, you should go and beg even more and you will make even more money. You made me lose so much today." He threw Sam on the floor and kicked him again and again. Then he turned towards the rest of the group and then said.

    "You better not give this guy any food. If he wants to eat, he should go out and beg for money and submit the collection. Then only he will have anything to eat understand?" His voice grew louder and louder and the rest of the kids nodded their heads weakly.

    After that guy left, Sam sat up slowly and leaned against the wall. He is looking at the bowl he was given for the begging and looked at the door.

    He clearly knew the young man. When Sam was in the street, this young man reached out to him and said that he can go to the orphanage where he can eat, sleep and go to school like any other school. But he was smuggled to this ce, where he has to beg all day to eat food. But he clearly didn¡¯t understand what to do. But he knew that once a kid tried to escape, he was beaten so bad that the kid died.

    Sam looked at the door weakly. He picked the bowl and walked towards the door. He made his way to the streets and started begging. When he walked towards a deserted alley to sit, he saw something.

    A van is there with a door opened and two men are talking. He overheard their conversation.

    "When are we going to leave?" One person asked another.

    "I don¡¯t know either. But before we leave, we need to find out thatst group. Even though we caught almost all the leaders of these, we need to find that bastard who stole our goods silently. I heard that he is in this city and he is using our goods to make money." The man spoke as he waved a photo. Sam sneaked a peak at the photo and was surprised to see that.

    Even though he wasn¡¯t able to understand what the two men are speaking, he knew that they are angry at the young man in the photo and the young man happened to be the person who beat up Sam.

    Sam looked at the two men and hesitated a bit. He immediately left the alley and continued begging before he went back to the shed silently. He went to the young man and silently gave him the money he got through begging.

    Young man took the money and still seemed to be a bit disappointed, he took the money and pped Sam.

    "Why is your collection still low? You are a waste for me." He scolded and threw a piece of bun at Sam and left the room.

    Sam slowly made his way to the room and ate the bun which is definitely not enough for him. He tried to sleep and was thinking about the two men and whether to lead them here or not.

    Last time, a boy tried to lead police here and what happened is that the police was bribed by the young man and the boy became victim and got his leg broken.

    Sam was afraid that if he does this and get caught, he will also suffer. This is too much for a four-year-old boy. He can¡¯t seem toe to a decision and he only slept when he was unable to stay up due to his fever.

    Next day he woke up again with a round of kicking. "How dare you to sleep again today? Didn¡¯t I make myself clearst night?" The young man kicked him again and again. Sam wept as he hugged his head.

    Why? He asked himself. He was tired of this. He was clearly tired of this. After the beating was over, he took his bowl and went to the streets but this time he didn¡¯t beg anyone. He walked to the alley where the two men talked yesterday and waited there. He sat there for a whole day and when it was evening the two young man came again.

    "There are no leads."

    "For me neither." Two of them spoke with frustration. Sam walked towards the two men from his spot and then pointed at the photo in their hands.

    When they looked at the kid pointing at the photo they were confused and shooed him away.

    "Kid, get away from here. It is not a ce for you to stay."

    Sam didn¡¯t move and tugged one man¡¯s pants and pointed towards the photo and then towards the street.

    "You know where this guy is?" One of them asked as he looked at Sam.

    "Yes." Sam said and nodded his head. His throat hurt when he tried to speak. That is why he is refraining himself from speaking.

    The two men exchanged nces and gestured Sam to show the way. When they reached the hide out and found the young man, they immediately started beating him up and only stopped until the young man is dead. The young man looked at Sam with resentment as he breathed hisst.

    "Don¡¯t worry, we will take care of you." One of the two men said with a smile. At the time Sam nodded. But he didn¡¯t know that this is situation that led him to a scenario of leaving the pan only tond in stove.

    As soon as the young Sam closed his eyes, Sam who is sitting in the tower opened his eyes as he shivered heavily. That is one of the most painful memories in the past. The decision to rat out the young man, took everything a four-year-old has to offer.

    He understood now. This is the third set of the trails. He has to live through the same scenarios of the past and take the same decisions he took. But it is not easy. Because, he would rather not live the scenarios again. When the door to the next floor opened, he started hesitating for the first time.

 Chapter 59: Last test

    When the candidates who also passed the test of the twenty-first floor, Jack, Philip and the other guy from the trio, saw that Sam took more time than them toplete the same floor, they felt that he would withdraw from the twenty-second floor.

    But before they could finish their thought process, they saw the twenty second floor lit up dimly. They didn¡¯t think that he would go further. Philip and Jack are confused. Then they heard Hawk saying.

    "You guys know what the twenty-first round is. The test is ording to one¡¯s own memory and the memory may not be of same time. So, we can¡¯t judge the ability by the amount of time we took."

    After hearing that, they realized the situation. They also felt that they couldn¡¯t judge it like that.

    Time passed and Sam slowly climbed from one floor to another and passed each trail. But the time required for each test kept on increasing. Sam came to the twenty fourth floor which the other guys failed or withdrew from. Sam is already in the floor for almost an hour. They felt like he might be pushing it too far. Just as they thought he would fail, the twenty fourth floor illuminated brightly.

    The twenty fifth floor also dimly lit up. Sam didn¡¯t stop. He neither failed nor withdrew like all the other people thought. Instead, he advanced forward.

    One hour passed, twenty fifth floor illuminated.

    One and half hour passed. Twenty sixth floor illuminated. Slowly, Sam is getting higher and everyone in the crowd, including the bigshots are getting excited. They are anticipating what would happen.

    Sam is right now, in a floor where the current Emperor set a record. This floor is the limit of the emperor and is the highest anyone has ever climbed. Now, another person is on the floor and he is a young man who is not even in histe-teens.

    "Do you think this kid will make it?" Count Falcon asked Castor who is looking at the tower intently. He didn¡¯t answer to the question of his friend. He also wants to know. Will there be a genius who could beat the record set by the emperor himself? He is also curious.

    Then another uproar broke in the audience attracting the attention of the Count. The twenty seventh floor illuminated after a long, long time. Someone reached the same level as emperor did. But they didn¡¯t see Saming out of the tower. Then they saw the twenty eighth floor dimly lit up.

    "Damn, it."

    "It can¡¯t be."

    "Is he insane."

    "Oh my god."

    Everyone gasped as they saw the tower. Never did they expect that Sam would advance further.

    Three hours passed. They just looked at the tower with mouths wide open. Even though it was almost midnight, no one is in a hurry to leave. They are all looking at the tower in anticipation. Then suddenly, the twenty eighth floor illuminated. Sam broke the record. He broke the record that was set by the emperor.

    "He did it. He really did it." Count Falcon stood up from his feet as he spoke. Castor also looked at the tower with a surprised expression.

    He saw the moment the Emperor¡¯s record is broken.

    Twenty ninth floor. Sam is sitting there for a long time with his eyes closed. After he entered the twenty first floor, he has relived the worst scenarios of his past life. He has seen the past which he desperately wanted to suppress within his mind, but now they resurfaced again and he has to experience them all over again. Many times, he wanted to give up after a test is passed, but he gritted his teeth and just went along because, there is a voice in his mind telling him. ¡¯Just one more step.¡¯ Every time he wanted to step back, his heart and mind are not allowing him to do that. They are urging him to take another step forward and he is finally at the twenty ninth floor. If he can get past this, there is only one more test, toplete this tower.

    Sam opened his eyes with a jolt. The twenty ninth floor is over. Heid on the floor for a while to catch his breath. He is exhausted mentally. He looked at the door which opened and looked at it intently. He stood up and walked to the door slowly. He really wants to see, what he would be the final test. Because, he knew one thing about his memories. All the tests he passed now, there aren¡¯t even half of them, hell they might not even be a quarter of them of the whole incidents in his whole life.

    When he entered the thirtieth floor, he is nervous and anxious to take a seat on the tform. But the spectators are just as anxious. They want to see, if the person wouldplete the Tower of Will. Would he be able toplete the quest even the emperor failed to? These are the things that everyone has in mind.

    Sam slowly walked towards the tform and sat down. He closed his eyes and prepared himself to face whatever he has to face now. With a jolt, his conscious drifted to the distant past.

    Sam opened his eyes only to see a familiar luxurious ceiling. He is in his eight-year-old self. He tried to move his arms but was unable to do so. When he looked at them, he saw that he was tied up to a bed. He immediately felt anxious, because he knew what would happen to him next. He sweated profusely and looked at the door of the room. He wished that the door would never open if possible.

    But his wishes weren¡¯t fulfilled. The door opened and a mature woman walked inside the room in a revealing dress. She seemed to be in herte thirties, but actually she is in her early forties. She walked inside as she swayed her h.i.p.s and looked at Sam as if she was seeing a piece of meat served in a te.

    Sam clearly knew the situation. He was ¡¯adopted by a big shot couple who are very popr and rich in India. As technology developed and country progressed, the people who practised their traditional arts became lesser and lesser and particrly in a country like India, where people are used to behave like a mob. If they see a person seed in information tech, they will push their children to IT. If they see their neighbour¡¯s son earn high by working overseas, they will push their son to do the same. This is the mostmon thing that happens in India and it stayed even when they improved in tech and development of Economy and soon came a day where the people who are extremely proficient in traditional skills are treated like national treasures and the couple who ¡¯adopted¡¯ him are actually to people who inherited the skills like ¡¯Kancheepuram¡¯s textile making¡¯, Aari or maggam work etc.

    But why was he tied up? Because the truth behind his adoption is that he was sold by someone to this couple who has weird s.e.x.u.a.l preferences and he is their new ¡¯toy¡¯ who they bought to ¡¯y¡¯.

    Thedy slowly walked towards Sam and said. "You said, you wanted to study right? I will help you. But you have to be obedient and do whatever I ask you to. Understand?" She spoke and didn¡¯t wait for Sam¡¯s response as she climbed the bed with some ¡¯tools¡¯.

    The next day morning. Sam walked out of the mansion, with a driver who is taking him to his private tutor¡¯s ce. Thedy agreed to let Sam study, but she will never agree to let him go to school, as it would be risk of getting their secret out. At the same time Sam looked at the young girl about the same age as him,ing out of the room of the husband of thedy. He only looked for a second and boarded the car.

    Sam life continued like that for days. He will be going to the various tutors¡¯ house to learn different subjects. Even though, it was more tiring than going to school, it has some perks too. Sam¡¯s learning is extremely high that the teachers were stunnedpletely. They never seen any kid like that. But there is only thing that is different about this guy. He will never ever talk. He ispletely aloof.

    Sam days passed and the nights...

    A year passed and Sam had change in the tutors for a third time. Due to his quick learning ability, he is far ahead of his peers and learning quickly. The couple who ¡¯adopted¡¯ him though, didn¡¯t really care about that. They have money to hire tutors and they will have a ¡¯toy¡¯ who is obedient.

    But this time someone came into Sam¡¯s life. A youngdy teacher, who is in her twenties became his art teacher. She tried to be closer to Sam and did so with her utmost effort. But Sam waspletely repelled by her behaviour.

    One day when Sam came to the art ss, he wasn¡¯t able to sit his chair. Last night the ¡¯y¡¯ affected him too much. As he was being obedient for sake of sses, thedy took it too far.

    When the young teacher looked at Sam¡¯s situation, who is feeling vexed and didn¡¯t have any outlet to vent his frustration, she approached him and started talking. She told him her story and Sam waspletely dumbfounded when he heard that.

    She is also once ¡¯adopted¡¯ by the same couple and that was when she was ten years old. She has been their ¡¯toy¡¯ for more than three years until she crossed the age of their preference. She was again ¡¯adopted¡¯ by someone else.

    Sam looked at her and hugged her as he cried. He is after all an eight years old kid. How can he take all this abuse? Then from that day on Sam and thedy came to be closer and one day thedy said something to Sam.

    "I have a way for you to escape this. If you do what I say, I will take you out of that house and you can study and y as you like." Hearing the youngdy¡¯s words, Sam became tempted. Seeing his expression, the youngdy passed him a vile and said.

    "Mix this in their food and they will sleep for a long time. Then I wille and take you out of the mansion. Do it when they are alone." Sam took the vile and went back to the mansion. He hid the small vile carefully and went to his room.

    Every night the couple will send all the workers of the mansion back and the couple and their two ¡¯toys¡¯ are the only people left in the mansion before dinner. Sam walked to the kitchen slowly and emptied the vile in the juice the couple will have after dinner.

    After dinner, as usual the couple started drinking the juice as Sam watched them from behind a wall sneakily. As the couple was talking and drinking, slowly they started losing consciousness. When they finally copsed, Sam walked towards them and looked at their faces.

    But when he looked at them his face paled in horror. The couple is bleeding from their mouths and nose. He just stood there rooted after realising what he did.

    The young tutor sneaked into the mansion silently and looked at Sam and said. "Come here Sam. Let us go. They are just sleeping. We have to leave before they wake up." She said in a gentle voice.

    But would Sam believe her? He has seen too many people die right in front of him and even though he was young, he can differentiate between people from being dead and alive.

    He killed someone. This is the thought that came into his mind. He didn¡¯t know what is happening as the youngdy dragged him out.

    His world turned upside down. He became a murderer. Without even knowing why, an eight-year-old Sam became a murderer.

    The Sam in the tower opened his eyes all of a sudden and saw the same old man¡¯s silhouette he saw when he entered the twenty first floor. The old man¡¯s face is not clear at all, but he can faintly sense that the old man is smiling at him.

 Chapter 60: The Old mans will

    The old man and Sam looked at each other for sometime with out speaking anything. Finally, the old man himself broke the silence.

    "Okay, you are a lot more patient that I thought. Don¡¯t you have any questions at all?"

    "I do." Sam replied.

    "Then why are you not asking?"

    "Okay then. Why am I still here?" Hearing Sam¡¯s question, the old man got stunned and didn¡¯t know what to say. He thought inwardly. ¡¯you have an unknown old man who read your mind like a book and the old man came directly to face you after the test is over and you have only one question and that is why are you still here. Why are you not following the norm? You should really ask who am I right? And why am I so awesome that I can read your memories right? But why are you in a hurry to go?¡¯ He heaved a sigh and finally said.

    "Okay then I will say it myself. My name is Murali and I was an old expert once in this western continent. Right now, the one speaking to you is one of the wills I left behind."

    "I understand. So, can I go out now?" Sam asked. This time Murali lost it again. After all, here he is saying that he was an expert in past and this kid is concentrating on when the conversation will end. Shouldn¡¯t he be awe and admire him? Shouldn¡¯t he be asking me for guidance and request me to take him as a disciple? The old man thought inwardly. He is supposed to be genius, then why is he acting dumb.

    But did Sam really didn¡¯t know about the opportunity? Of course, he understood and that is the main reason he is trying to end the conversation. If he listens to more information, the deeper he would be in this shit. If Murali knew what Sam was thinking he might puke blood in exasperation.

    "Okay kid, I will get straight to the point. I died a long time ago and before I died, I left my inheritance some where in this western continent and this tower one of the keys of that inheritance. There is a total of four towers like this each having different type of tests. To open the inheritance, the four keys has to be put together. By now the other three towers already has a sessor and this fourth one the tower of will, being the most difficult one of all, iste in finding one. The sessors should be less than twenty years of age and has to be below Great Mage/Warrior cultivation. And the inheritance will open only when all the four sessors are selected with the required criterion and now that happened.

    I will transfer the ownership of the tower to you and the four of you canmunicate together and open the inheritance at the same time. If you don¡¯t like it, you can bring apanion along with you and you can give them the inheritance. After all, it shouldn¡¯t be forced.

    I saw that you have gone through a lot kid and I hope you will think it thoroughly before making a decision." The old said and waved his hand as he disappeared with a wave of light entering Sam¡¯s mind with some information regarding the tower and the inheritance. A small tform appeared in front of him and there is a palm shaped groove on it. Sam ced his palm on it and the tower ownership has been transferred.

    Sam went through the info given by the old man and looked at the method to move the tower. He can decrease the size of the tower and store it away if he wants to do so, but Sam didn¡¯t do it and came out of the tower first.

    When he saw the gawking crowd as if they are seeing an animal, Sam felt weird and walked towards the attendant responsible for the scores. Seeing himing close, the attendant came to his senses and spoke loudly.

    "Candidate Sam. Thirty floors. Cleared the tower of will. Thirty points." As soon as he finished every person stood up and started pping loudly. Sam slowly walked towards the group/

    "Congrattions Sam. You really are as good as Kelly made you out to be." The first one to congratte him is Hawk. Sam nodded at him with a smile andtter walked away to give the group sometime for themselves.

    Philip and Jack looked at each other and at Sam. This is the difference between them. That is what they thought inwardly. One by one candidates of the Starwood academy came and congratted him. Even the Principal and City lord came. After some time, a voice silenced themotion.

    "The first round of thepetition ended now. And the rankings are going to be disyed. As soon as he said that a screen appeared at the stage and there are two rankings that are being disyed.

    The first one is the individual ranking and the second one is the group ranking. Both of which the first ces were upied by the Starwood city. The first three ces are upied by Sam, Philip and Jack respectively in the individual ranking followed by Hawk and in the same way, the first ce in the group ranking, the Starwood city upied the first ce followed by the Falcon Cliff city.

    "The second round of thepetition will start at the noon and the candidates are requested to rest till then in the amodations provided by the academy. You will be led there by an attendant. Come to the academy entrance at the time ofpetition."

    As soon as Count Falcon finished speaking everyone started moving and left in their own ways. An attendant led the six groups along with their supervisors to the amodation provided. Soon, they were taken to six stone houses inside the academy and each group was allocated one.

    Sam looked at the shoddy house they were allocatedpared to the rest of the houses and felt that something is wrong and looked at the attendant with a questioning gaze. When met with the sharp gaze, attendant who is far weaker than him immediately cowered and said. "Elder Arlo was the one who arranged the amodations. I don¡¯t know anything." He said and left the ce immediately.

    Sam looked at the City lord and shook his head as he entered the stone house and picked a room to rx. After sometime, someone entered the house and there was somemotion outside which disturbed him from the rest.

    He walked outside and looked at the person who came and is in confrontation with the City lord.

    "Hello, my old friend. I hope the service is satisfactory." The middle-aged man with brown hair said sarcastically.

    "Arlo, is it really necessary for you take it out on the candidates due to our personal grudge. I was the one who made a mistake and offended you and I am already facing the consequences, but why are you making it hard for the candidates, they are kids after all and have nothing to do with our grudge." City lord said dejectedly. But he only heard Arlough sarcastically.

    "Nothing to do with us? I don¡¯t care. They came here depending on you and everyone depending on you will be having a hard time in my turf." He said and then looked at Sam and others.

    "Even though, your candidates did well in the first round, they still have to go through the second and third round and anything might happen. And if anything happens to them, you are the one who caused it." After that he gave a mocking look to the City lord and left the ce.

    City lord looked at the students with a dejected expression. Just as he was about say something, Sam walked back to his room. He already guessed this scenario and was not surprised that someone wille and give a warning.

    Sam sat there and meditated to recover himself.

    Meanwhile, at another stone house, the peculiar trio are in same room and are discussing something.

    "Do you think he got the ownership?" Yuv asked the other two.

    "He should get it. But the tower didn¡¯t show any signs. It didn¡¯t shrink and disappear from the spot like other towers. Do you think, he rejected it?" Yaar said.

    "We don¡¯t know that for now. We can see that after thepetition is over. We will try the method we used for another tower and see if it works after thepetition. If it is sessful, the ownership hasn¡¯t been taken and if we fail, we have to capture that kid named Sam." Yash said and the other two agreed.

    Sam didn¡¯t know, that the trio which he noticed are plotting against him. He is deep in thought as he was thinking about something. He is going through the info provided by the old man about the inheritance. Even though, Sam knew that this might bring some problems, he still took the ownership, because the old man said that he can pass the inheritance to other person if he doesn¡¯t want it. Sam took ownership, so that if the inheritance is not useful for him, he can use it to obtain some resources from the site of inheritance and also, he can make use of the inheritance to get some benefits to himself.

    Time passed and noon came. All the candidates and spectators gathered at the academy entrance. Soon, Count and Principal along with the elders came to the spot.

    "Dear Participants, I congratte you all for passing the tower of will and even if some of you guys aren¡¯t satisfied with your results, you shouldn¡¯t let it to hold you back. Will is important to the cultivators but it is not the only thing that is important and it is only one of the qualities which can be improved with time. So, don¡¯t be dejected and move forward.

    The second round ofpetition will take ce in the woods that are near the academy. We cleared a patch of woods and made some arrangements for thepetition specifically. The rules will be announced by the Principal Castor when we arrive at the spot. I wish you all the best." Count falcon finished his speech and all the participants and the spectators apuded.

    After sometime everyone arrived at the entrance of the woods.

    Principal stood in front of the participant groups and said. "This round is a teampetition. But you will not be participating along with your teammates directly. The teams will be jumbled." As soon as principal said that everyone broke into discussions. But Castor paid no heed and continued.

    "In a few moments all the participants will be picking a token and will be divided into teams randomly. After that all of your cultivations will be sealed and you will be an ordinary human before we escort you to a ce in the woods. Candidates will be blind folded and will be led into the middle of woods. Each team will be left in a different ce and each team will have to work together to find the clues we have hidden and you can only use the resources we hid in the forest or the resources you obtain in the forest. You guys have to figure out the clues and find the scrolls which will unlock your cultivation in stages.

    The teams can confront each other for the scrolls, food, resources and even for no reason. Each person¡¯s score will be calcted individually. And there are various ways to obtain points in the forests, which you will know a bitter.

    But before that let me tell you guys something. Strength is not the only thing that will save you. You have to develop sufficient awareness and adaptability to be safe as well as to grow. I hope the candidates will keep that in mind and will do their best. I wish you all best of luck.

    Now, please pick the tokens in the box." Castor finished his speech and the candidates proceeded towards the box which has tokens in it to pick their teams.

 Chapter 61: We need to Adapt

    All the candidates walked towards the box and picked the tokens one by one and came back to their groups. Each token has a number between one and six. An attendant came forward towards the group and said.

    "Form a group ording to the number on the token." After he spoke everyone started moving and soon six groups formed, but this time the members are all jumbled. Sam looked at the token in his hands which showed number six on it and then looked at the new teammates he has to work with for the following days.

    He didn¡¯t know how to react, when he saw that there is only one person that he is familiar with in the team and that is Jack. The rest of the team arepletely strangers to both of them.

    Sam and Jack stood together and took a look at the rest of the team members. There are two girls in the rest of the team and one of them is the part of the Falcon Cliff team. She wore an exquisite dress and has a proud look on her face. She must have been from an affluent family. He remembered that the girl has obtained 19 points in the tower of will.

    Another girl is a bit normally dressedpared to the first girl and she is from another subordinate city. She has a normal face which will easily blend in a crowd.

    The remaining six members are mostly from the other subordinate cities except for the two people who are from the Falcon Cliff city, two of them stood on either side of the proud girl and tried to talk to her as if they are sucking up to her and are only replied with her arrogant face and light words. But they didn¡¯t seem to be bothered with it.

    From the remaining four two people are from the Mountainke city, one is from the Misty river city and the remaining one is from another subordinate city named Blueke city.

    Sam didn¡¯t try to make a conversation with them as he saw the hostile looks from the rest of the team. They seem to hold a deep opposing opinion against him and didn¡¯t look like they want to talk to him.

    Sam and Jack didn¡¯t bother with them and just stood side by side silently waiting for the Elder to continue. After a few moments, when everyone is settled, the Elder continued.

    "We will be cing a seal, on you which will bind your cultivation as well as your eyesight. After we leave you in your respective spots of in the forest, you will regain your sight after some time.

    The round will go for seven days at maximum. The one with the highest points wins. The points which you gain individually, will be yours and the points you gain together as a team, will be divided among the participants ording to their wishes.

    Some elders will be monitoring you in the woods and are also responsible for the point records. If you are in a disagreement with the teammates about the points allocations, you have to solve it within fifteen minutes or else the elders wouldn¡¯t note your points down.

    The Elders won¡¯t be helping you directly and they would not interfere even if you are in a life and death situation unless you break your token. If you break your token, not only will they help you but also you will lose your right topete further and will be escorted out of the woods.

    On the matter of how you can earn your points, there are three most basic ways.

    One is eliminating the opponent teammates. For every opponent you defeat, you will be awarded with a point and if you are fighting against multiple opponents at a same time, you will be having a progression on the points you have obtained. That is if you are fighting against three opponents, you will get one point for the first one, two points for the second one, three points for the third one.

    The second way to obtain the points is to collect the point scrolls in the forest. There are point scrolls kept in various ces in the forest. Every scroll you obtain is a bunch of points. You have to find the scroll, obtain it and then you have to open the scroll and ce your token on it to im points.

    Not only point scrolls, you can also find attack scrolls, scrolls which can unseal your cultivation, weapons, food resources, medicine kits in various ces.

    Whatever you obtain depends on your awareness, adaptability and your intelligence. I only have on advice for you guys. Every danger leads to an opportunity and every opportunity leads danger to you.

    The final way to obtain points is simple, you just have to survive. Every single day you survive is a point to you. That means, even if you don¡¯t do anything and just manage to survive for seven days, you will still get seven points.

    So, I hope you can survive and all the best.

    Elders, seal the cultivation."

    As soon as the elder finished his speech, other elders came forward and walked towards the participants and started using some scrolls and seal their cultivations.

    Sam looked at the elder, who took out a scroll and used it on him. His vision turned ck and he felt his spiritual corepletely sealed. Then he felt someone holding his hand and started guiding him somewhere.

    After some time, Sam opened his eyes and looked around. His eyes blurred by the sudden light. By the time his eyes adjusted to the surroundings, his teammates also came to their senses and looked around the surroundings.

    They are in middle of woods, where is a patch of innd surrounded by a bunch of densely packed trees.

    "I am Dustin from the Falcon Cliff city. Let us introduce ourselves." One of them spoke. Then one by one all of the teammates introduced themselves.

    "Val from Falcon Cliff city."

    "Jessie from Falcon Cliff city."

    "Jack from Starwood city."

    "Sam from Starwood city."

    "Eve from Sand stone city."

    "Vales from Mountainke city."

    "Shor from Mountainke city."

    "Tom from Misty river city."

    "Kiba from the Blueke city."

    "Okay, now that we knew each other, we need to have a team leader. I would nominate myself to the position." Dustin said as he looked at others proudly. Everyone looked at each other and then looked at Jack and Sam. After all, those two guys hold top positions in the first round. They thought that they might have some objections, but they only saw Jack observing Sam while thetter is touching and sniffing the surroundings.

    Dustin and the other two from the Falcon Cliff city are also watching the duo, to see if they have any objections.

    "Now that none of you have any objections, I will be the team leader now. You guys have to listen to what I have to say andplete the assigned jobs. First of all, we.."

    "We have to get out of here as soon as possible." Suddenly Dustin¡¯s speech was interrupted by Sam. He looked at Sam and said.

    "What do you mean, we have to get out as soon as possible? Don¡¯t interrupt when I am speaking." He said in a harsh voice.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother with him and said. "We are in territory of a beast. We aren¡¯t ready to fight with it yet. If we don¡¯t get out of here soon, we might have to encounter it, which is clearly not a good idea." As soon as Sam said that, someone sneered.

    "Why should we believe you? Just because you said we are in a territory of a beast, we are there? Howe we didn¡¯t see any signs of beasts here?" The one who spoke this time is Val. He looked at Sam and said these words with an arrogant voice.

    "I don¡¯t have time to exin to you guys." He paused as he looked at the sky and then continued. "If you guys don¡¯t want to get into trouble follow me, otherwise don¡¯t me meter." As soon as he finished, Sam turned to a direction and started running while Jack followed after giving a look to the crowd.

    Crowd were dumbstruck by his decisiveness. They didn¡¯t expect that Sam would leave just like that. While they are still in daze,

    *roar* a roar pierced the silence and got them back from their daze.

    "It seems like a bear¡¯s roar." Eve said in a low voice. She immediately turned to look at the direction in which Sam has left and then looked at the rest of group.

    Soon, the roaring sounds neared them and footsteps could be heard.

    The group immediately got tensed.

    "Let us move." Dustin said and picked a direction as he moved when the rest of them are about to follow the low voice stopped them in their tracks.

    "They went in that direction." Eve said from behind.

    "We don¡¯t need to go there. The sound of stream could be heard from this direction. If we go there, we can have a water resource near us." Dustin said and started moving again, the rest of them followed and Eve also paused for a second but still followed the group.

    Meanwhile, Jack and Sam ran for a distance and sat near arge tree. When they heard the loud roar, Sam smirked and Jack heaved a sigh of relief. Then thetter looked at Sam and asked.

    "How do you know that we are in danger?" He was really curious on how Sam was able to do that easily. They clearly didn¡¯t have any spiritual sense as their cultivations are sealed.

    Sam just smiled and said. "The ce we are in stinks of urine of the bear and the trunks have some w marks of the bear. The marks seemed to be freshly made which indicates it got the territory recently, so the bear will concentrate highly on this ce to deal with the invaders. So, we have to leave the ce as soon as possible."

    "then why didn¡¯t we go to the stream nearby. We could have a water source nearby; wouldn¡¯t it be helpful?" Jack asked again.

    "who said that near the stream is a safe ce? We shouldn¡¯t be too near to the stream we want to stay safe. Now that we are normal people, we have to take care and it is not safe near the stream. After all, we are not the only people who needs water. If we stay too near the stream, we have to face all the beasts which wille to have water and we are too far away, we might have trouble getting water. That is why we ran this way. We cannot take any risk until we have a clear view on the situation. We just came here and we need to understand and adapt before we think about starting a fight."

    Sam finished and Jack nodded in understanding.

    "Ahhhhhh." Suddenly a shriek could be heard and both of them turned towards the direction, where the sound came and saw some peopleing towards them. They are the members of the team. They are running with their lives as a bear was chasing them. Out of eight there are only seven people left.

    "Climb a tree and stay still without making a noise." Sam instructed Jack and he stood up and took of his pants as he started peeing at the roots of the tree. The girls who are in the middle of the group didn¡¯t see anything but the boys who are in front felt like they were hit by a lightning when they saw the unexpected view.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother with them and put on his pants and immediately climbed a tree. Then he turned towards the group who are still running and said. "you guys pick a tree and climb it. Then stay still without making any noise."

    After that he stayed silent.

    The group immediately made their way to the tree that are near to them and started climbing. Even though, they are normal people without their cultivation, since their bodies are refined by the spiritual energy their strength is absolutely superior to a normal average human. That is the reason, they were able to run away from the bear. Otherwise, they could just forget about running away.

    All the members climbed the tree, but the bear still caught a man who is at the back of the group.

    "Ahhhh, No, No." He is none other than Tom. He immediately took the token from his pocket and broke it. Then a shadow came to their view and then took away Tom from the bear¡¯s ws. The bear didn¡¯t understand what was going on for a second. It started sniffing around to find the scent of the group and started wing the tree trunks. Even then the group stayed still from Sam¡¯s warning.

    Suddenly, bear stopped its movements and walked towards the tree Sam climbed and started sniffing around. Then it looked around.

    "ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAARRRRRRRRR" with a loud roar, it turned around and walked away.

 Chapter 62: First hunt

    The team members of the team 6 are all gathered after the bear left the area. Well, at least all the remaining members. The six members who came and joined Sam and Jack are looking at the duo awkwardly not knowing what to say.

    They ostracized him at first, because they got jealous of his achievement in the tower of will. But now they almost got killed because of their behaviour. Now, they understood what the Elder was warning them about adapting and surviving. This test is harder than they thought it would be.

    "Thank you." Eve broke the silence with her slow and timid voice. She looked at her feet and didn¡¯t look him in the eye. After a few moments the rest of the members also thanked him except for Dustin. He is still suffering from the embarrassing situation.

    Sam scanned the crowd and just nodded at their words. Everyone turned silent again. Looking at the awkward situation, Jack said. "What¡¯s next?" He looked at Dustin while saying these words. Thetter felt even more embarrassed.

    "Sam, will you be the leader of the group?" Shor asked. The rest of the group also looked at him with some expectation. All except for one.

    Sam looked at their expressions and said after a few moments of silence.

    "If you guys want me to lead the team, I have some conditions."

    "What are they?" Val asked.

    "First of all, you guys better listen to everymand without any questions and if you don¡¯t want to listen you can just leave the group.

    The second thing is that point scrolls you find are yours individually and even if we work as a team to obtain it, I will decide on who will get what share of the points.

    The third and final condition. If you fight with someone, you can take the points by yourselves and I won¡¯t interfere in the battle unless you ask me to and then I will take my share of points. Same goes for you guys too. If I am having a battle to get points, you are not allowed to get in my way and interfere. If we battle as a team, I will decide the share of points ording to the contribution of everyone

    If you are okay with all the conditions, you guys can follow me. If you don¡¯t, you can be on your own way now."

    The rest of the teammates were dumbstruck on the conditions. If they were to agree, they will lose control of their actionspletely to Sam. So, they are hesitating.

    "Why do you get to decide the point share?" Dustin asked.

    "I will be providing ways to find food and I will be the one to provide you the ways to live safely and I will be the one to lead you guys in a battle. Then who do you think should share the points if not me?" Sam spoke and took a seat near a tree as he leaned against the trunk and Jack followed his actions.

    Sam looked at their pondering expressions and said. "I don¡¯t have all day for you guys. The first day is the most important day and I can¡¯t waste my time on you. Please, decide quickly." His voice carried a hint of impatience.

    All of them exchanged nces and started whispering to each other. The trio from the falcon cliff city seemed to came to a decision and Dustin spoke.

    "We can¡¯t agree to your suggestion on the point share. I will be the leader of the team and decide the point share and you will be responsible for the food and shelter for which I will give you a ten percent points from each person in the group on top of your share." Dustin said and the remaining two nodded their heads.

    Sam looked at them with an amusing expression and stood up as he stretchedzily. "What about you guys?" He asked the remaining three people.

    "I will join you." Eve said and took a step forward. Both Vales and Shor looked at each other and said. "We also agree with Dustin and others. You deciding the point share is a bit unreasonable."

    Sam raised his eyebrow and asked. "Why do you think so?"

    "What if you distribute the points unfairly to yourselves?" Vales asked in return.

    "So, you think there won¡¯t be this problem with Dustin?" This time it was Jack who asked this.

    "What? Do you think we are like you, county bumpkins? Do you think we have to rely on these petty tricks to gain the points unfairly?" Val sneered at Jack. Sam just stayed still in silence but Jack asked the two guys from the subordinate cities.

    "Is that your concern as well?" When he asked the question, he looked at them with some displeasure. Vales and Shor didn¡¯t answer but from their embarrassed expression, the answer is obvious. They really did think that Sam might use this to get more points and Dustin wouldn¡¯t do so, because in their eyes only them from a subordinate city who have less resources has to rely on those means. In their eyes, the people from the Count city are all noble and superior.

    Sam could guess their thoughts without them speaking. He shook his head with a wry smile. The more people he met, the more simrities he found about these people to the people from his previous world. They really do hold high opinion on the people from a superior ce. For example, most people from India have a great prejudice that the all other Indians are like them and their behaviour is simr and the Americans, who are from a richer country will have a superior way of thinking and treat them as something special. [A/N when I say ¡¯most¡¯, I am considering therge popce and I am not targeting anyone personally and by the way I am also an Indian and there was a time I had that opinion.]

    Sam looked at the remaining team members and said. "The conditions I said aren¡¯t up for negotiation. If you guys have listened to me regarding the bear incidence, I would have stayed in the team without being a leader, but after that happened, no chance. You guys can be on your own." Sam said and turned around to walk away. Jack and Eve followed.

    "Wait, I will join you." Shor said and immediately walked towards them hurriedly. Actually, he really didn¡¯t have anything against Sam being the leader. He agreed with Dustin because of his friend¡¯s suggestion to suck up to the candidates from the eminent background in the Count city. They also thought that Sam would immediately agree and won¡¯t leave the group. But when it came to the point, he chose to trust Sam more as he proved his worth just now.

    The remaining four people remained there with an unpleasant expression on their faces. The trio especially are gritting their teeth in anger. They didn¡¯t expect that Sam would leave decisively. They just wanted to give it a try to take over the point share and if it didn¡¯t work, they will try to get some benefits. But Sam didn¡¯t follow their script and just left as soon as they tried their trick and now, they are hesitating whether to follow him as they felt that it would be their loss of face to follow him.

    Before they could make the decision, Sam and the other three left the ce.

    "What is so great about him? we can definitely make it in this forest. Thest time is just because we are caught off guard." Dustin snorted as if trying to convince them and himself. The other nodded.

    "Yes, once we get our hands on a cultivation scroll, we can get through this easily." Vales also said from the side. Jessie the only female is looking at the direction Sam left. The other are thinking that they can easily get through this if they unseal the cultivation. But is getting the scroll so easy.

    Sam and the three teammates started walking towards a certain direction in a moderate pace as he examined the surroundings. Soon, they stopped at an empty ce surrounded by trees. They could hear a faint sound of stream.

    Sam left the group there and walked towards the sound and soon found a small stream going through a rocky bed. The stream is very small and its depth is also very low. The water is pure and transparent as the pebbles and the gravel can be seen clearly under the water.

    Sam took a handful of water and took a sip. The water tasted normal and a bit refreshing after the walk. He went back to the team and said.

    "The water is stream is that way and the stream is too small to attract bigger animals. This ce is good for now. We can stay here for tonight.

    First of all, we need a few things to stay safe. First thing is we need fire. Second, we need to find some food and some containers to store water.

    Shor, go and collect some fire wood. The sticks need not be big, but they should be dry and bring as many as you can.

    Eve, you fetch some dried leaves, dried grass, birds¡¯ nest, dried tree bark along with some green leaves, which are big. Both of you don¡¯t go too far. You should be within the visible range from this ce.

    Jack you will follow me."

    Sam gave instructions and walked to a certain direction along with Jack after he saw the other two left.

    Sam and jack walked towards a direction where there is a small path in between the grass. They are moving stealthily and slowly without making any sound.

    They finally stopped near a cave and hid on a tree.

    "We have our target inside the cave." Sam said to Jack in a low voice.

    "What is it?" Jack asked curiously.

    "I don¡¯t know exactly. But it is a beast but the danger is lesspared to the bear we encountered earlier."

    Jack didn¡¯t say anything and he waited as Sam broke a bamboo tree which is a distance away from them. After that he searched a while and finally found a stone which has somewhat sharp edge.

    He came back to Jack and asked. "How sure are you at your throwing skills?"

    "I can do just fine." Jack said in a confused tone. He didn¡¯t know why Sam was asking this but still answered.

    "Okay, then. In some time, the animal will being out of the cave and I will try to stop it to stay in a single ce. You have to hit its head from a distance and the hit should be as strong as possible."

    "The cave is so wide. Is it possible to stop it in a ce?" Jack asked. Sam didn¡¯t say anything and both of them went back to the camp ce. The other two already came back with the stuff they collected.

    Sam ced the bamboo pole and the stone on the ground and picked up some dried wood. The next actions made the group confused to no end.

    He picked up a t piece of wood and round stick and ced them together. Then he peeled of the outeryer of the bamboo pole, twisted and weaved a thin but stiff rope. He took a raw stick and made a small bow on which thread he made a small loop around the round stick he picked up earlier. He made a bow drill to start a fire.

    He ced the stick attached to the bow on the t wood and started operating the bow drill after around ten minutes of continuous action, Sam is already sweating and the hole formed on the wood started emitting some smoke and he took out the drill quickly and took some bird¡¯s nest and ced the small spark in wood on the nest and after some continuous blowing the nest caught fire.

    Soon, there is a fire in the middle of the camp and the teammates are all surrounding it. Even though it is just a little before evening and it is not that cold, they were still happy to rest before a fire.

    They didn¡¯t understand how Sam made a fire out of some dry wood, but they were surprised and in awe at the trick he performed.

    Sam didn¡¯t sit for a long time. He walked towards the bamboo pole and broke it in half. Each half measuring up to three feet long.

    He took one half and split one end into several thin vertical pieces until it reached a half foot long and started sharpening the edges of each tip. After sometime, he took some sticks and broke them into small pieces. He then ced them at the bottom of the split end to make the pieces he spilt to spread as wide as possible.

    Now, the pole has one end normally and the other end like an inverse umbre frame without the canopy. He took other half of the pole and stuffed the opening with some tree bark and dried leaves and covered it with some green grass leaving only a small opening to reach the dry stuff.

    He gave the stone to Jack and picked up the two poles, then started walking towards the cave as Jack followed him with a wooden stick which is still burning.

    After they walked neared the premise of the cave, both of them looked at the cave as they hid behind a tree. Soon, they saw a fox entering the cave with a rabbit in its mouth.

    After it went deep inside the cave, Sam gestured Jack to move and they picked up all the dried wood around the area and arranged it on the ground at the entrance of the cave leaving only a small area as if leaving a path.

    After arrangements are done, Sam lit the dried wood as well as the bamboo pole he stuffed the dried and green leaves with and threw the pole inside the cave. Then he held the pole with the inverse umbre frame facing the path.

    Soon the dried wood was burning vigorously and the inside of the cave is also filled with smoke and amid the smoke a creature ran outside and looked at the fire surrounding the cave and ran towards the only way that is towards the pole Sam held.

    He immediately pressed the frame on the fox head with all his might and pinned on the ground for a second. "Jack now." Sam shouted and soon the stone with a sharp edge flew threw the air and it pierced through the ear of the fox immediately seizing its movements.

    Sam slowly moved towards the fox and to be on safe side quickly broke its neck. After that both of them put out the fire with the soil around them.

    Jack looked at Sam and smiled for whichtter replied with same one. Both of them walked inside the cave and saw the half-eaten.

    They held a torch and walked towards the cave a bit deeper and within the light of the me, they saw a small dagger.

    Both of them smiled and Sam picked up the dagger as he checked it. Now, he clearly understood the statement of the elder. ¡¯Every danger leads to an opportunity.¡¯ The danger of facing the fox may lead to this dagger.

    He passed the dagger to Jack and kept on searching and found nothing else. He tried to search for a point scroll but there is nothing.

    Both of them came out and started dressing the fox right there instead of making it at the camp. Then they cut the pieces of the fox meat and left the carcass there before walking towards the camp.

 Chapter 63: Bear Hunt

    Sam and Jack came back to the camp with fox meat and a shining dagger in their hands. By the time they came the sun is already set and it is bing dark.

    A whileter the four members sat around the fire as the fox meat was left to roast over it. Sam took a bite off the roasted meat in his hands and said.

    "Tonight, we will be staying here and from tomorrow onwards, we will be moving and everyday we will set a new camp by evening. We must explore as much area as possible in this forest in the remaining six days.

    The main priority for us is to search for the animals and mostly the cruel ones.

    Today we found a dagger when we took down a fox. As the Elder said, we have to search for the dangers for the opportunities.

    But animals are not the only dangers that we are going to encounter. There are other ces in the forest where we might get some benefits.

    Get as much sleep as you can for tonight. We are going to take down that bear which chased us tomorrow.

    Two people will sleep while the other two will keep watch, we will change in the middle."

    After they finished the dinner, Jack and Eve slept on the makeshift beds made of somerge leaves and grass while Sam and Shor took the watch.

    Shor didn¡¯t say anything as he kept watch on his surroundings while Sam worked with the dagger in his hands. He is using the dagger on the slightly thinner bamboo poles as he sharpened the edge of the pole as if he was making a spear.

    All the while, he is keeping as watch and sharpening the poles one after another. The poles are not long as they are only three-feet each. He skilfully sharpened ten poles by the time Jack woke up along with Eve and took the watch duty.

    Sam gave the dagger to Jack and instructions to sharpen the poles just like he did and went to sleep.

    While the four are in a goo shape with the food and fire along with somefortable sleep. The rest of the teams are not faring well. These guys don¡¯t know the bow drill or any other techniques that will make fire. Because, as far their knowledge goes, a fire can be made by a fire mage and if he is not avable, a scroll or an articraft will do the trick. That was it. they clearly didn¡¯t understand the ways to make a fire.

    All they could do was search for fruits and some wild vegetable to make do with for the food. Some teams are lucky to find them and some people are taking rest on their empty stomachs. Even more pitiful thing is that, now that they are ordinary people, they have to endure the cold weather of night and the mosquitoes of the wild as they huddle under a tree.

    One of those groups is the one that left Sam. The group of four right now are leaning against a tree as they huddled themselves to endure the chill of the air. Never would have they expected that they would have to live life like this. The forest is truly a test to ones will.

    After they left the other four, they started walking, but the forest path is much harder to travel than they thought. They are at least lucky enough to not encounter another animal like the bear, but they failed to find any fruits. The only silver lining is that they were able to get some water from the stream they encountered in the morning.

    "It is all because of you. Jerk." Jessie gritted her teeth as she scolded Dustin as he pped a mosquito on her hand to death. Her face lost all the elegance and pride she has in the morning. Now she looked haggard and pale. Her clothes were dirty and she looked weak.

    Dustin didn¡¯t know what to say to this pampered princess. He agreed that he was the one who proposed the idea to oppress Sam a bit to just satisfy their ego a bit in order to gain one over him due to their jealousy on the first- round scores.

    But the remaining two absolutely agreed to it and they were even a bit happy at that time, but now this Jessie is ming himpletely. He just shook his head and diverted his thoughts to Sam. He was thinking how the remaining team was doing in the forest. He hoped that they would suffer a bit, so that he could feel better about himself.

    Sun rose and the forest was full of chirping birds. Sam and Shor woke up. The fire has been exhausted by now and only some live charcoal was left.

    Sam made himself lose the sleepiness and walked towards the fire and ced a fresh dry stick, but didn¡¯t let it burn, instead made it have a spark like a live coal. He then walked towards a bamboo pole and cut a section of bamboo and ced the stick in it as he covered the both open ends with some green grass and finally poked some holes on the outer surface of the bamboo pole.

    He then walked towards some really tall bamboo trees and started checking them by tapping them on various sections, when he finally found the one, he wanted, he used the dagger a big stick to chop off the tree near its roots.

    After that he cut some sections which he tapped earlier and in front of the surprised gazes of everyone, he poked a hole on the bamboo section and a transparent liquid immediately came out. He quickly put his mouth over the hole and drank the liquid with a pleasing expression on his face.

    After emptying the section, he looked at the rest and said. "This is one of the purest forms of the water sources in a forest, have some it will be refreshing." Then he passed the remaining sections with water to them.

    After everyone had the water, they looked at Sam to hear his instructions. He then looked at the group and asked.

    "I am a warrior mage of fire element. What about you guys?" His question was intended to the two strangers but Jack also answered.

    "I am a warrior. Swordsman."

    "I am a mage of earth element." Shor said.

    "I am a mage of wood element." Eve replied.

    Sam was dumbfounded by the situation. He didn¡¯t know whether it was luck or bad luck to have these two guys in the team. Because, both of their abilities are most beneficial in the forest at the same time he can¡¯t use it. After all, even if he gave them the scrolls that can be used for unsealing their cultivation, there is chance that they would betray him. Now he is feeling conflicted and he could only find one solution.

    He has to find enough scrolls to everyone, if he wanted go use their abilities to ensure they won¡¯t have any thoughts of back-stabbing him. And giving them the scrolls first is absolutely impossible.

    He quickly shook off the thoughts and said. "Today our target is the bear. We have to make sure we can kill it properly and we cannot risk any mistakes in the n as it may cost us our lives. But I can assure you that the reward would be high.

    First of all, we have to reach the vicinity of its hideout without it noticing us.

    For that we need to take some precautions and the first one is we need to conceal our scent. Bears are one of the beasts that have a keen sense of smell and if we give away the slightest scent, we would be done for. In fact, the scent is the main reason that we were discovered by it so soon yesterday.

    Second thing is, we need to make sure that we make as little sound as possible. As it is a forest the bear wouldn¡¯t bother with every sound, but the big movements will alert it to make a move.

    The third thing is that we need to prepare something to make a trap for the bear." Sam finished his words and led the team to the stream. After that he started picking the mud near the stream and started applying all over his body. He took off his shirt and applied the mud all over the upper body and then he took off his pants without a care about thedy behind.

    Eve, immediately closed her eyes and turned around to avoid looking at the man, while the man himself doesn¡¯t seem to care at all.

    Jack and Shor were dumbfounded as they saw Sam¡¯s actions without a hit of shyness. When Sampleted the task, wore his cloths after soaking them in mud, he turned around and looked at the three people, then only realized what happened and he couldn¡¯t help but shake his head with a wry smile. He felt that he was back in those days when he was a soldier taking a mission in forest. Hepletely didn¡¯t feel awkward being n.a.k.e.d in front of the team as that was how he was in his past life.

    Sam just disregarded the whole matter off and instructed the whole team, to apply the mud as walked back to the camp. After sometime, the three people came back with their whole bodies covered in mud.

    He then stood up and said. "we need to prepare something to trap the bear. Even though we can take it head on if we go all out, we will be exhausted by the end and if other teams spot us, we will be donepletely.

    Before that, let us go and find out where the bear¡¯s home is. After that we can think of the rest of the n."

    Sam, Jack and Shor are walking while carrying the sharpened bamboo poles and Eve is carrying the bamboo section in which he ced the dried stick with the fire spark.

    Soon, they arrived at the spot they opened their eyes yesterday. Sam then started searching for trails of the bear and finally found them and from then on, they slowly and carefully followed the trail.

    After walking for more than an hour, they finally found a cave in their line of sight. Sam stopped them and changed the path as they walked in a different direction, after they reached a good distance and found a safe ce, he kept the poles down.

    "We are going to make these preparations here. Jack, you stay near the cave and inform us as soon as the bear left the cave and also see in which direction it left." After giving the instructions to Jack he took out the rope he made of the bamboo outeryer and started tying the poles. He made three frames of the eighteen poles that he and Jack made.

    "Both of you go search the nearby ces and find a bee-hive. Also check it out if you can find some vines nearby. Don¡¯t go too far though." He instructed Eve and Shor and then walked towards a nearby tree with the dagger.

    The trunk of the tree is not too thick. It is only about average. He ced the dagger¡¯s edge on the truck and used a stick as a hammer and started chopping the tree bit by bit.

    After sometime, Shor and Eve returned. But Sam is still only one-third of the tree trunk. He still didn¡¯t stop after their arrival and after a horrendous effort, the tree was finally down.

    But Sam was still not done as he started chopping the wood on the upper side of the trunk. After all, he is making a log off it. When he was almost done with it, Jack came and informed about the bear¡¯s departure.

    Sam immediately got alerted and became faster in his actions. He turned towards Shor and Eve.

    "We found both of them, but we don¡¯t know how to retrieve it." Shor said in an awkward tone. Then only Sam realized that he forgot the fact he is dealing with amateurs.

    "Shor, you go and take watch near the bear cave. Eve lead me and Jack to the vines and bee-hive."

    Shor nodded and left to take watch. Eve led Sam, who is holding the pole and the live dried wood (dried wood with fire spark) along with him and Jack to the bee-hive.

    "Both of you go and get some vines." Sam gave the dagger to Jack and sent them off.

    He started a small fire nearby and started burning some green grass and he ced the burning green grass with near the bee-hive with the help of the pole. Soon, due to the smoke, the bees started falling off the hive and Sam got the honey he needed.

    Soon, Jack came with the vines along with Eve and all of them walked towards the ce they camped temporarily.

    Sam started setting a log trap with the vines and the log. He set the trap in such a way that if the bear stepped on the rope, the log wille and hit the person who stepped on the rope. Of course, the rest of them didn¡¯t understand.

    Meanwhile, with his instructions the Eve and Jack worked on a tree which is aligned with the path of the log swing and tied the three frames made with the bamboo spikes he created

    He made the things with the help of Jack as soon as possible, afraid that the bear will return. When he was finally done with the traps.

    He halved the honey filled hive and ced on half near the rope and covered the rope with some dead leaves. Then he took the other half and squeezed it slightly. Honey started dripping from it. He then turned towards Eve.

    "You, take the hive and make a trail of honey until you can see the cave and drop the hive there and then you and Shor climb tree as fast as you can and stay still without making a noise.

    Eve nodded and started performing the task.

    Then he turned towards Jack and said. "After we lure the bear here, we have to make sure that we kill it, otherwise a beast in itsst struggle is an absolute nightmare." Sam said and passed a bamboo pike to Jack as both of them climbed two tree which are the positions, they need to take respectively to make the final move.

    After waiting for an hour or so, they finally heard the foot steps and growls of the bear which made both of them alert. Soon, they saw a bear which is sniffing and licking the trail of honey and soon ran excitedly after it saw the hive.

    Before the bear could reach the hive, the trap activated and a log swung in full force towards the bear. The bear sensed the danger and tried to avoid it by backing down, but the log still hit it at the upper ribs and threw it towards the tree with bamboo spikes.

    The bear hit the tree and the spikes pierced into it albeit only few of them. But Sam was not happy as he saw the bear still moving.

    "NOW" He shouted and he and Jack moved at the same time as a pike and a dagger both pierced into the eyes of the bear at the same time, seizing its movements.

    Even though the n was sess, Sam was not happy. He felt that it was barely passable as he looked at the wounds of the bear.

    The spikes ced on the tree almost did no damage. If he and Jack didn¡¯t take the opportunity of the dazed state of the bear, they might have been in a pickle as they can¡¯t confront the bear, even in its injury due to log trap as it will make it hard to fight a bear in its raged state.

    He underestimated the animals in this world. Just like them as they are stronger than the humans from earth even in their normal human state after their cultivations are sealed, the animals also are a bit stronger. Sam marked these thoughts in his mind as he told Jack to call Eve and Shor toe back, while he picked up the bear¡¯s dead body.

 Chapter 64: First Encounter with Participants

    Sam started picking the spikes out of the bear¡¯s body. By the time he was done the remaining three came and four of them worked together and dragged the corpse to the middle and started dressing it.

    When Sam started dissecting the bear and tore open its torso, he found a small scroll inside, which surprised all four of them.

    He took the scroll and opened it to see that it was a point scroll. There is a number 10 written on it and there is runic figure with a space in the shape of their token in the centre of it. The expressions of everyone immediately brightened up on seeing it. It is only second day and they already got their hands on a point scroll.

    Eve and Shor felt more delighted and satisfied on their decision to follow Sam. When they are in their own fantasies, Sam¡¯s voice interrupted their thoughts.

    "Three each for Jack and me. Two each for two of you. Have any objections?" Eve and Shor came back to their senses and nodded immediately. After all, they didn¡¯t do any major work other than following Sam¡¯s instructions.

    Sam took his token out of his pocket up on gaining their approval. The token has a number 6 on it and there is his name engraved under it. He ced the token on the scroll and the runes brightened up.

    Soon, the number on the scroll changed to 9 and then 8 and when it finally reached 7, he took the token and looked at it. There is a number 3 on the back of the token indicating his points.

    The points from the point scrolls can be see on the badge, the points for the survival and obtained from the battle are calcted and noted down by the elders.

    After four of them are done with the point acquisition, Sam continued his cutting and soon the bear was cut into several parts. He took the major parts with mean and passed them to Jack and buried the innards of the bear. Even though they can be used as food, carrying them with them in the forest is akin to putting a target on themselves.

    After that all of them picked the bear meat, and spikes to the cave, but before doing so, Sam set the log trap again.

    "Why areying the trap again?" Shor asked out of curiosity. Sam smiled and said.

    "If someonees here and identally gets hit, we can gain a point for taking out an opponent."

    "But will the elders consider it?" Eve asked this time. This time Sam replied rather loudly.

    "Why won¡¯t they? After all, setting the traps also is my prowess and everyone who fell under my trap are obviously took down by me. If they don¡¯t think so, I can¡¯t do anything about it anyway."

    Sam and the team left with their things and entered the bear cave. The cave is a little deeper than the previous fox cave and it is also more spacious. But this also made it a little darker on inside.

    They started a fire in the middle. Shor and Eve are responsible for roasting the meat, while Jack and Sam are responsible for exploring the cave.

    After enduring the horrible stench of blood and gore in the cave along with the dirt, they finally found two things inside the cave.

    One is a weapon, which is an axe and the another one is a defence scroll. They took the axe and the scroll back to the camp.

    Sam and Jack walked outside the cave after giving the defence scroll of Eve and Shor as they took the bear hide which he was able to remove cleanly from the bear and walked towards the stream nearby.

    They moved stealthily and after making sure that the coast is clear and there is no other creature at the stream, Sam washed the bear hide and made use of the make shift bamboo containers he made to collect the water back to the camp.

    Aftering back to the cave, the four people had a sumptuous meal with bear meat. Even though the taste is full of game vour, they didn¡¯t feel repulsive at all.

    After the meal, everyone started to take rest. Sam took the bear hide and started working with the dagger and the thin rope made of the bamboo skin. An hourter, he had a bag in his hand.

    Sam tried to pull and stretch the bag to test it and then he let out a satisfied smile. The bag is nothing special. It doesn¡¯t even have any aesthetic look. All it has was space to ce things, a cover over to not expose the things and the rope attached to hang it over a person¡¯s shoulder.

    Jack came over and looked at the bag and nodded in admiration. He really wants to know how Sam got so many ideas and how he was so familiar to the forest and have survival skills of normal human. Of course, he will never know.

    Sam washed the remaining meat clean and kept to dry for air. After that, he wrapped the meat in green leaves and stored it in the bag along with the defence scroll. He left some meat to eat at night. It is already past noon. Just as he was thinking that they should go out and explore the area

    "Ahhhhhhhhhhh...."

    A scream disturbed their peace. Sam and Jack looked at each other and smiled. The scream came from the direction precisely where they set the trap.

    They looked at Shor and Eve as Jack asked. "Do you guys want to follow or you want to stay here?"

    Both of them looked at each other and decided to follow them. Jack hung the bag containing the meat and scroll. He took a bamboo pike and passed the dagger to Eve while he passed another pike to Shor.

    Sam held the axe as four of them slowly walked towards the spot where they took down the bear.

    When they reached the spot, they saw a group of people surrounded at the tree where the bear fell. There are people from another team. And that too it is a full team with ten members. But only people standing and thest one isying on the ground unconscious.

    The group looked pretty haggard. He even saw some people from the Misty river city and there is also guy who scored twenty points in tower of will. The team members are pretty fl.u.s.tered as they saw the personying without any motion.

    "Sam, I think we should leave. They outnumber us easily." Shor said from behind.

    Sam smiled and replied. "Their number is the main advantage for us. Look at them, from their faces and situation, they didn¡¯t even seem to had proper food and water since yesterday. They might have been having a hard time, adapting to being a normal human with hunger and exhaustion. This is a best opportunity to farm points."

    Then Sam looked towards a nearby tree. There is a middle-aged man in ck looking at them. The remaining three also followed and felt a little surprised as they thought that the elders will not shoe themselves at all.

    "Elder, I will be getting a point for the guy who fell due to the log trap right?" Sam asked with a smile. The Elder didn¡¯t answer but only nodded them.

    The team who are at the tree finally sensed Sam and his team¡¯s arrival. The guy with the twenty points who seemed to be the leader of the group took a step forward and asked.

    "Are you responsible for this?" He asked as he pointed at the log swing. But he didn¡¯t get an answer, instead he got a smile from Sam in return which he took as eptance.

    "Despicable."

    "Yes, how can you use such underhanded schemes?"

    The teammates behind him started toin.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother with them and turned towards his three teammates. "We are taking them down. You guys had a meal and proper rest. So, all you have to do is take down at least one weapon and we can do the rest."

    After he finished saying, Jack ced the bag near a tree and picked the bamboo pike, which is as almost as long as his sword. Shor and Eve also held their weapons tightly as they looked at the group.

    When their opponents looked at Sam and others having weapons like dagger and axe, they were filled with envy. Even the bamboo pikes made them frustrated. They also took some time to examine other people¡¯s appearances. Even though they are still covered by mud. Their faces seemed to be fresh and energetic. Unlike them, who arepletely avoiding the danger.

    "Derek, what should we do?" One of them asked the leader, who is the guys with twenty points at the tower.

    Derek was also a bit dazed and was burning with envy. He was avoiding the danger as much as he thought that he can start fighting after he found some weapons and scrolls in the forest. He thought that they might be merely hidden in some ces and he just have to find them.

    But when he looked at the four members in front of him, he thought that he has to face dangers directly to get the benefits. He also thought that the remaining six people are out in process of getting the dagger and axe.

    The question from the teammate woke him up from the daze. He thought for a moment and his eyes were sharp as greed clouded his mind.

    "There are only four of them. If we take them down, we can get those weapons. Let us surround them." He said in a slow voice. Then he walked towards the guys who fainted due to log trap and broke his token. An elder came and vanished along with the guy.

    The nine members them exchanged nces and surrounded the four people.

    Sam just smiled and looked at Shor and Eve. "You only have to hold on until we can help you. If you can take at least one of them down. That is even better."

    After saying that Sam and Jack nodded at each other and made their move. As both of them are warriors their prowess came into handy here. Three people came at Sam and the remaining six went two vs 1 against the remaining members.

    Sam swung his axe directly at the chest of the guy in the middle. His move was ruthless and cruel. He doesn¡¯t care if he injured the other guy.

    The guys who was targeted wanted to dodge, but both sides were covered by his teammates and he can only move backwards, but the axe still pierced through his chest and blood came out of it.

    The remaining two are dumbstruck at the scene and before they could even make it out what happened, an axe swung over to one of them and pierced itself into the abdomen of another guy.

    The remaining person wanted to run. The three people weren¡¯t able to put up a fight at all. They are weak as they didn¡¯t have any food or proper rest. Sam just threw the axe that pierced through the back of the remaining guy.

    He walked towards them and broke their tokens one by one and picked up his axe as he looked at his teammates.

    Shor and Eve had their backs against a tree as they are surrounded by the four people. Jack is fighting with Derek.

    Derek seemed to be a warrior and he is pretty skilled with his foot work and fist techniques. He is dodging the bamboo pike Jack is swing at him and trying his best. But Jack seemed to pretty rxed. His other opponent is already groaning in pain as he rolled on the ground.

    Sam threw the axe at one of the four members who surrounded Eve and Shor. Both of them are holding there but the four guys aren¡¯t daring enough to make a move.

    When the axe pierced one of the guys in the back and made him faint, the others are fl.u.s.tered. Shor and Eve took this chance and took down two opponents. Only one person left and Sam immediately knocked him down.

    When he was finished dealing with them, Jack is still toying around with Derek with a smile on his face. When he observed Sam and others are done, he immediately made a move and ced the sharp edge of the pike on Derek¡¯s throat halting his movements.

    Derek¡¯s face was unwilling and reluctant. But he still took his token and broke it and soon the only four members were left on the spot.

    "Sam, one point for the guy fell for log trap. The remaining nine members were taken down by you as a team. The total points are 45. How are you going to divide them?" The Elder standing on the branch asked them.

    Sam thought for a moment and said. "13 for me, 12 for Jack, 10 each for Shor and Eve. Is that okay for you?" He asked the question to his teammates. They nodded without hesitation. After all, it is still a big amount no matter what.

    Sam said the allotment to the Elder, who nodded and disappeared. The four of them took the bag and left back to the cave. After reaching the cave, Sam said.

    "We will be staying here for the night. We will see what to do tomorrow morning. We have good harvest today."

    They stayed in the cave as they ate bear meat on the camp fire. They had same arrangement as yesterday and took turns to take watch and sleep.

    {Scores

    Sam-17

    Jack-15

    Eve and Shor-12}

 Chapter 65: Struggle beside the stream

    At night while Sam and his team are sleepingfortably. The remaining teams are having a hard time. Many of them doesn¡¯t even have any food in the two days and they don¡¯t have any proper shelter to find rest in the cold night.

    But not all the teams are having this much of a hard time, a team is much better off than others and that is team 3.

    Hawk and Kelly are in this team. Due to Hawk¡¯s status and prestige he was made as the leader immediately. He did justice for the position given to him by other members.

    Even though, they don¡¯t have fire and warmth, nor shelter and meat. They still are ten members left and they were able to find enough fruits and wild vegetables due to Hawk¡¯s observation and familiarity in the forest.

    He is not as skilled as Sam, but at least his teammates have enough food and water and they have some little gain in points.

    "How are you feeling?" Hawk asked Kelly as he passed a fruit to her to eat.

    "I am okay." Kelly has a beautiful smile on her face as she replied. Even though she looked haggard and a bit pale, she is as beautiful as ever. All the members are men in her team except for her. If not for the fact that Hawk is her friend and has her back, she knew how her situation would be, just based on the looks the people are giving her.

    "How do you think, he is doing?" Hawk asked.

    "I don¡¯t know exactly, but I think he is definitely in a better situation than us." Even though both of them didn¡¯t mention the name of that person, they knew who they were talking about.

    Kelly is looking at the sky as she thought of a handsome face which is usually cold as ice with a smile, when he was satisfied with the dress, he made for her. She smiled at the thought of the arrogant smirk he had when he received the pseudo rank 3 tailor artisan badge.

    Looking at the beautifuldy smiling like a silly little girl, Hawk shook his head and said. "I hope we could meet him. Let us see if what you said is right. I really want to see, how many points he got."

    Then a guy came and asked. "Hawk, what are the ns for tomorrow? Are we going to search for another team or are we going to search for scrolls?"

    "I don¡¯t know. I think we need to take a risk for tomorrow. All this time we are avoiding all the dangers from the beast. I think if we don¡¯t go and look for them, we won¡¯t have a chance for getting anything substantial. Tomorrow our target is to get some scrolls, either they are point scrolls. Cultivation scrolls, attack scrolls. We have to find something and we will be picking the way tomorrow. Tell them to rest properly tonight."

    After receiving Hawk¡¯s instructions, the guy went to the other teammates and gave the message.

    "You also need to rest properly." Hawk said to Kelly and stood up.

    Kelly nodded at him and smiled without any reply.

    Next day morning.

    Sam and his friends were already awake and are getting ready to move. Right now they are eating some bear meat.

    "The meat will not taste good and there is a chance that it might be spoiled soon. We need to get some new food today. So, you can eat as much as you want and don¡¯t hold back with the intention of preserving this.

    This is only third day and we have a long way ahead of us. Now that we know that we need to target the animals with higher level of danger to get rewards, we will get fresh food." Sam said as he took a big bite off of the roasted meat in his hand.

    The remaining three nodded and continued eating the meat.

    After their meal, they made preparations. They put the left-over meat and the bamboo containers along with the defence scroll in the bag. Jack is holding a make-shift bamboo sword he made himself yesterday and Eve is holding the dagger.

    Sam held the axe and Shor was left with the bamboo pike. Sam carried the bag and four of them started their move. They put out the fire and Eve is holding the container with the live dried wood, which has a small spark on it.

    "Today, let us go near the stream and explore. From every water source, there is a chance that we can find some trails leading to other animal¡¯s nest. If we are lucky, we can have another prey today.

    They moved towards the stream and when they reached there, the bank is empty and there are no other creatures. Sam and Jack started searching for trails while, the remaining two are on look out. When they found no trails of some big animals, they started moving along the bank in the same direction as the stream flow.

    On the way, Sam saw many trails, but none of them are any of the big animals and the animals they encountered are also not that big. There are rabbits, wild cats, racoons and some other animals like that. Since, they already have food for now, they are not interested in hunting them

    After sometime, Sam and the group arrived at a ce, which is a bit weird and different. There are no trails of any animals at all. The grass on the bank is too lush and tallpared to the other areas near the stream.

    "Let us stop here for a while. Rest a bit far away from the bank." When the group sat a bit away from the bank, Sam started looking around. He saw that there are no patches in between the grass near the bank and the vegetation is too thick as if there are no animals in the vicinity.

    When he came back to the group, Jack saw Sam¡¯s frown and asked. "Is something wrong?"

    "Don¡¯t you think the grass is a bit too dense and tall whenpared to other areas we have been to previously?" When Sam asked this question, Jack was a bit confused due to the weird question, but he still answered.

    "Now that you mention it. It does have difference. But does it make any difference?"

    "This situation happens when there are no animals in the vicinity and that happens mostly in two cases. First one, if the vegetation has a problem here which by my observation is not the case and the second one, they are afraid of something here." Sam exined.

    "But there are any traces of any creature here. There is no ce to stay and this territory seemed to unupied. What do you think they are afraid of?" Jack questioned.

    "How can you say that there is no ce to stay here?" Sam said and looked at the water stream.

    Jack understood something and asked. "What do you have in mind?"

    "If my guess is right, we can get something here. We need to prepare." Eve and Shor are just listening from the side without saying anything. They actually didn¡¯t see anything different here and they didn¡¯t notice anything wrong.

    "Collect as much dry leaves and grass as you can. Even small twigs will do. The prerequisite is that they have to burn quickly, as soon as they were lit with fire, they have to burn. Don¡¯t bring big ones."

    Sam instructed and he also moved. He started clearing a patch of green grass and picked up all the dry leaves and created a small ce with nothing but soil. There is no grass or any other thing in that patch. Even stones are cleared.

    After that for an entire hour, they only collected all types of dry leaves, grass, twigs etc.

    "Jack go catch some small animals. Two to three will do. Don¡¯t bring them near though. Stand there until I tell you toe near. Shor you assist him."

    Sam said as he pointed to a tree, where Jack has to stay after bringing the animals. Then he turned towards Eve and said.

    "Help me arrange these twigs and grass around the patch I created." Both of them started arranging the dried grass and twigs around the patch. They arranged it evenly such that it was half a foot high when it was all done.

    Jack and Shor already came with some wild rabbits. Sam opened the bag and took out all the bear meat left in it.

    He gathered with his teammates and said. "If my guess is right, we are against a highly dangerous animal and that is even more dangerous than the bear we took out. We should be careful.

    Sam made a small fire and lit a torch. He gave it to Eve and said. "When I say, you have to light the bed of the dead leaves we made just now. Shor, you are responsible for lighting it from other side.

    Jack, you and I are responsible for the attack. If we can¡¯t get it done as soon as we can, we might be in danger.

    Eve and Shor, both of you should light the bed and move back as fast as you can."

    After Sam instructed them on what to do, Eve and Shor got to the positions while, he took the freshly caught dead animals, with him. He applied the blood to the chunk of the bear meat. He and Jack slowly moved forward with the meat and the dead bodies in hands.

    He ced the dead bodies in the centre of the bed they created and then took a step back before throwing the bear meat into the stream.

    As soon as he threw the chunk, a huge disturbance could be heard from under the slowly flowing stream. Sam and Jack stood on both sides with a distance.

    Slowly, a scaly figure came out of the stream as it looked at the dead rabbits with still warm blood there. It moved quickly and started swallowing it without bothering to look at Sam and others.

    "NOW!!" Sam roared as Eve and Shor lit the bed and ran away. A fire surrounded the alligator which made it go frantic. It grew confused as smoke and started clouding its senses. Just as they fire was about to go off, Sam roared again.

    "JACK!!!!! Go for the rear."

    As soon as he said that he moved and hacked with his axe just below the head while Jack pierced with the bamboo pike at the rear. The alligator struggled, but Sam didn¡¯t give it any chance. Neglecting the heat waves from the mes, he pressed the upper jaw of the alligator with the leg and hacked it again at the same spot, finally making it stop struggling.

    Sam panted as he moved aside. Jack also moved to other side. Both of them are affected by the smoke and heat of the fire. Sam¡¯s pants have slight burns at the edges. He looked at the alligator and thought. If not for the fact he needs to gain points, he would have never gone to so much trouble to take on an alligator. The risk is after all higher whenpared to the normalnd animals. One bite and we will lose a huge chunk along with the bone.

    Just as he was about to rx.

    "SAAMM!!!!" Eve shouted.

    Sam turned towards Eve and followed her gaze, then only he saw another alligator with its mouth wide open behind him. He immediately moved but the axe was left behind in process of leaving some distance between him and the beast.

    Sam squatted on the ground as he looked at the alligator which is clearlyrger than the previous one by 1.5 times. This seemed to be an a.d.u.l.t one. It looked at Sam menacingly. He is the closest of all people here to the beast.

    When Jack saw the situation, he was about to make a move, but Sam gestured him to stop. Alligators are very fierce whenpared to other beasts. Many people have misconceptions that the alligators are slower on thend which couldn¡¯t be anymore far from the truth. Any slight disturbance when they are alert, they might go berserk.

    Sam and the beast were in a stare down. Suddenly the beast moved swiftly towards him and he also lunged forward. Before the beast could open itsrge mouth, Sam climbed on its back and pressed his whole weight on it.

    He used all his might to make the mouth closed, then both man and beast wrestled as they rolled on the river bed.

    Jack was helpless as he watched the situation. He can¡¯t just butt in and attack as it may injure Sam. So, he held the make-shift bamboo sword tightly as he looked at the struggle.

    "DAGGER" Sam shouted waking the people from their daze. Eve felt her hands shaking as she threw the dagger towards Sam which fell near him.

    Sam and the alligator continued on the wrestle. His clothes started to tear apart. [A/N: He didn¡¯t wear his coat as it will pass as an articraft]. His muscles are bulging as he sweated profusely. After an intense effort, he finally got hold of the dagger.

    Then he rolled over and then with the dagger he started stabbing on the abdomen of the beast. For an alligator, the skin is hard all over, and the only rtively soft ce is the abdomen area. He stabbed continuously without stopping for a second. He stabbed until his arm felt sore and a pool of blood was formed under him. Even after the beast stopped struggling, he still didn¡¯t stop.

    He stopped only after almost all the abdominal area was riddle with holes. He almost stabbed more than thirty times.

    Sam kicked the body aside and sat up with struggle, Jack came to him and gave him some water. Eve and Shor stopped the fire. They didn¡¯t know what to say after seeing the struggle Sam had gone through.

    After Sam regained some strength, He and Jack started dissecting the beasts. But there are no scrolls inside.

    All four of them gritted their teeth in frustration.

    "What do we do?" Jack asked as he looked at Sam.

    Sam calmed down and started thinking, just as he was about to say something.

    *p* *p* *p* pping sound interrupted him.

 Chapter 66: 4 vs 14

    Sam and the group turned to look at the direction from which the ps areing and they froze in their movements at the scene. There is a group of people walking towards them with two people in the lead.

    Two of them had weapons in their hands. The group looked haggard and spent. But there is a glow in their eyes as if they are energised just now.

    When they are a few feet away, the group stopped. There are 14 people in the group. It seems that two teams arebined.

    "See that Drew. Here we are having hard time from two days without any warmth and suffering in the cold, eating wild vegetables and fruits, while these guys are even using the fire to take down prey."

    "Yes, Ray. They even have two weapons. We had to sacrifice six members and work together with both our teams to get our hands on these two weapons. Here they are only four members and they are able to do this. I wonder if they are cheating."

    "I don¡¯t know about that. But these guys seemed to be the remaining members of the team six, we just took care earlier. The four members left must be these four guys."

    The two guys in the lead named, Ray and Drew are speaking as if Sam and others are not present all.

    Sam looked around and found three middle-aged men in ck. Two of them standing side by side while the remaining one who is also the person, Sam is familiar with is standing opposite them.

    Sam still felt his arm hurting a bit and is still exhausted from the struggle with the alligator. Jack is the only one who has fighting experience in closebat while both Eve and Shor aren¡¯t of much help in this kind of situation. This situation is clearly at their disadvantage.

    Sam passed the dagger to Eve, then asked Shor. "Do you want the axe or are you fine with the pike?"

    Shor was in a daze for a moment and looked at the axe in Sam¡¯s hand. He thought for a moment before rejecting the axe. He knew clearly that the axe or pike wouldn¡¯t really make any difference.

    Sam nodded and stood beside Jack and looked at the group and mostly at the two people in the lead. He recognised the two men. They are the team members of the Falcon Cliff team and right now they are part of team1 and team 2 respectively.

    Even though he is at the disadvantage, he didn¡¯t show any weakness, for he knew that it will make the opponents confidence higher.

    "Who is responsible for creating the fire?" Ray with the sabre in his hands asked them.

    The four of them didn¡¯t reply and just stayed silent.

    "We will leave the person who can make the fire and only deal with the rest. You can also have points priority." Drew said as he yed with the sword in his hands. He is very confident that the other party will agree immediately. But what awaited him was only silence.

    "Surround them" Drew ordered as all of the immediately surrounded the group of four. Now, Sam¡¯s group has stream behind them while they were surrounded on all the other sides.

    Meanwhile, the elders are talking. The two elders who are together are smiling at the situation while the elder responsible for Sam¡¯s team was just looking at the team peacefully. [A/N: for convenience sake, I will be referring to the Elder responsible for points noting as Elder-1 Elder-2 Elder-3.. and so on. So, Elder responsible for Sam¡¯s team is Elder6 and the Elders from the opposite group are Elder 1 and Elder 2]

    "How is it going Elder 6? You must have been frustrated to keep tabs on these people. How did they even get their hands on the two weapons?" Elder-2 asked.

    "Yes, they are dumb enough to separate from the group. Compared to them, the groups 1 and 2 are better. They know that the more people will have more chance to survive." Elder 1 said from the side.

    Elder-6 didn¡¯t say anything. He knew that the two Elders are just trying to get under his skin. Even when they saw how Sam dealt with an alligator alone, they are still making thesements just because they are sure that team-6 will be eliminated.

    Meanwhile, Ray and Drew are still threatening Sam and others to know how they got the fire. They are pretty sick of eating the fruits and they aren¡¯t daring enough to eat raw meat.

    After a few moments, Sam got sick of this and whispered to Jack.

    "How many people can you handle?"

    "I don¡¯t know. I can take down four people by catching the off-guard. The rest will depend on the situation." Jack also answered in a whisper.

    "Can you hold them back for five minutes?" Sam asked again.

    "I will try." Jack answered after a slight pause. Sam hesitated for a minute and said to the three in a whisper.

    "I will make the first move. You guys have to hold on for five minutes. If you think that you can¡¯t maintain the deadlock or take them down, try to push them into water."

    Ray and Drew didn¡¯t think much of the situation and didn¡¯t stop them from whispering. They just thought that they were discussing regarding the person who made the fire.

    Sam and others stopped the whispering and turned towards Ray and Drew in front of them. They exchanged a nce and nodded. Ray and Drew were smiling as they thought that the things are going as they expected. But suddenly, Sam and Jack moved at the same time.

    Sam moved to the right while Jack moved to left. Sam¡¯s left hand is still sore and he swung his axe with the right hand as he struck on one of the ribs of one person standing close to him. His blow is really hard as blood spurted from the torso of the person.

    Before others could react, he struck another guy and then another guy. By the time the team coulde out of daze, three members are already down. Sam was almost spent up. There are only two people left on his side. Before they could react, he immediately jumped inside the water.

    On the other side, Jack did a number on them as well. Out of five that stood there he knocked out threepletely and fourth one barely stood up, while the fifth one escaped.

    His make-shift bamboo sword has a streak of red on one edge. He then huddled together with Eve and Shor as he pointed the sword at Ray and Drew.

    Ray and Drew finally came to senses and took out their weapons, as they pointed at Jack. They are fuming with anger. They lost seven members just like that. They only lost six members when they faced to beasts and got their hands on the sword and sabre. But now to take down the four members they lost seven members while the other side lost no one.

    "Eve, Shor. Just stay calm and try to dodge as much as possible. Whenever theye near you for two feet, swing the weapon. Don¡¯t let theme closer than two feet." Jack whispered. The two of the nodded and took a posture with the dagger and the pike to defend.

    "Drew you take down the guy in front. The rest of you will go at the two guys in back. I will be backup." Ray said in a serious tone. He ispletely furious and he didn¡¯t dare to underestimate the other team.

    When the people started to close in to them, Jack along with the other two started walking towards the bank of the stream. Just as they were one step away from the stream, Jack moved and pushed two members in to the stream by catching them off-guard.

    This made Drew to grit his teeth in anger. He is furious not because the two members were pushed into the stream, but Jack neglected him.

    Jack heaved a sigh as he again face Drew. Now, Eve and Shor only has to deal with three members and he believed they can hold on for a bit.

    "Now, we can begin." Jack said as he made his view. He and Drew are now in a dodging game as they swung their weapons at each other.

    Ray at this time, is looking at the stream, he is already surprised that Sam didn¡¯te out. But he thought that the other party might have escaped. But now that the two people didn¡¯te out, he felt that something was amiss. Just as he was thinking what might have happened, he saw air bubbles on the surface increase and soon, the two teammates floated unconscious.

    Then he saw a glow under the water surface and the two people disappeared along with a moving shadow.

    He clearly understood what happened now. Sam is hiding underwater. This scene not only surprised him, but also his remaining teammates. They are now afraid to go near the stream bank.

    Meanwhile, under water. Sam is swimming with a small bamboo straw in his hands. This is the reason he dived into the water without thinking. Whenever he is out of breath, he kept the bamboo straw in his mouth and took a breath as he swam and searched at a same time. He is searching for the scrolls or weapons here. But he is mostly hoping that he would have a scroll rted to cultivation or attack scroll, since the danger is high with the alligators.

    While he is searching on the bed of the stream, his remaining teammates are doing a good job fending for themselves.

    Shor and Eve are in a deadlock with the three while Jack is dealing with Drew. He is having a bit disadvantage due to his vulnerable weapon, but it is mainly for the fact that he didn¡¯t want to kill his opponent. He is trying to gain some experience by fighting a swordsman. But only elders can understand this.

    He is just trying to y with Drew while he still kept an eye on Ray. If thetter made any move or he himself gets exhausted, he will knock Drew out as soon as possible.

    But things didn¡¯t go as he nned. Ray did make a move, but he attacked, Eve and Shor. When he realised this, he immediately tried to block him by leaving Drew but thetter followed him.

    Now, he was struck in a dead lock with two people, both having better weapons than him and both are in a better condition than him. He immediately felt the pressure.

    He closed his eyes for a second and took a deep breath. His aura changed and became sharp immediately. He swung the bamboo sword at Drew, who is rtively tired whenpared to Ray.

    Thetter dodged immediately but his robe still tore apart as a shing sound came. Ray attacked from the side, but Jack was already not in the same spot anymore. Before he could realise that, the bamboo sword came from his behind which he tried to dodge, but was left with a sh on his left hand.

    Jack stood there as he looked at his two opponents calmly. He is beyond tired now. The continuous walking, hunting for the rabbits, trapping the alligator and dealing with the guys, took a toll on him. Thest two swings almost took all his energy. He is on hisst legs.

    He is regretting not dealing with Drew when he still had a chance. He thought that Ray will attack him directly, so he would be able to do this. But Ray pulled one over him and yed the trick. His only relief is that the five minutes is almost up. He is hoping he would do something.

    Ray and Drew also understood from Jack¡¯s panting that the other party is almost done. They just had to drag it out. Both of them had a smile on their faces, as they yed with Jack who tried his best to evade.

    After a few moments, Jack almost fell down, He supported himself with the bamboo sword in his hands as he looked at the two people.

    Ray and Drew had smug expressions on their faces, as they looked at Jack. Just when they thought that Jack would beg them to leave, thetter startedughing mockingly which surprised them a lot.

    They exchanged a nce as they came to a decision to take down Jack. But just as they took a step forward.

    *BOOM* an explosion hit them from behind. They fell forward with their cloths burnt and their backs charred. They painfully looked behind and Sam stood there in his wet clothes, with two scrolls in his one hand and the other hand has a scroll which was open and lost all runes and split into two.

    They gritted their teeth in anger and frustration. They were so content in taking care of Jack, they forgot Sam, who is in water. No. More like that they felt that thetter has no threat to them as he was in water. They didn¡¯t think that the other party will take another route and sneak an attack on them. They gritted their teeth and broke their tokens as they felt the pain increase.

    The three people who are in dead lock with Eve and Shor were distracted by a sudden explosion and gave a chance to Eve and Shor who didn¡¯t miss. Just like that, the fourteen people who came to them were taken down and the four of them were still in the game.

    Sam also copsed on the ground as heid on his back to rest. Eve and Shor also took a seat on the ground to take a break.

    On the side. Elder-1 and Elder-2 are dumbstruck with what happened. They didn¡¯t expect that the four members who are already exhausted and were also overly outnumbered wille out as winners.

    "This is how they got the two weapons and survived until now." Elder-6 said from the side as he walked towards Sam. Elder1 and Elder2 felt their faces burning. They immediately left the spot.

    "105 points in total for your team. How do you want me to distribute?" Elder-6 asked Sam who was stillying on the ground.

    "Eve 25, Shor 25, Jack 28, Me 27." Sam said in a weak voice.

    "Wait." Eve and Shor both shouted in unison. Elder-6 looked at them in askance.

    "We didn¡¯t really help much. We don¡¯t need such high share." Eve said as she timidly looked at her feet.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother with her and just confirmed his earlier suggestion. Elder-6 nodded and left.

    After a half an hour. The four of them are sitting around a camp fire as the alligator meat roasted on the fire.

    Sam ced the two scrolls, which are yet to be opened.

    "These are the point scrolls I got under water. There are three scrolls in total. One attack scroll and these two point scrolls. Each scroll has 20 points each. How do you guys want to divide them?" Sam asked as he looked at the other three.

    "Take a scroll for yourself. We will share the other scroll. Jack will get ten, me and Eve will get five each." Shor was the first one to suggest.

    Sam looked at Eve and Jack. Both of them nodded in approval. After all, they knew the efforts they put in capturing the alligators. Sam himself fought with one of them.

    They collected the points with their badges. And started eating. The sun is setting as dusk approached while they appreciated the warmth from the me as they ate the meat after the long struggle.

    Right now, there are only two teams left in the forest and the other team is already in dire state. There are only two three people left.

    Hawk and Kelly are taking care of the wounds on their body along with another teammate. Yesterday, they fought with other team and eliminated without losing any of their teammates. But today, they lost seven members as they encountered a wolf pack and only three of them were able to escape. But they came out with something.

    "Are you sure, you want me to take this?" Hawk asked Kelly and the other guy. He is holding a scroll, which could partially unseal his cultivation. They had paid a price with seven teammates to get their hands on this. The other two nodded as a sign of approval.

    Sam and others meanwhile are getting ready to rest. They don¡¯t know that there are only two teams left in the forest and they are one of them. They are waiting for tomorrow.

    [A/N: Sam and his team took down a team first, the one with Derek. Then they took down two teams today. Making a total of three. Hawk¡¯s team took down another team. Now only two teams left.]

    {Points Sam: 64

    Jack: 53

    Eve and Shor: 42}

 Chapter 67: Blood Striped snakes

    Sam and his group stayed at the bank of the stream for the night and started their journey next day. Meanwhile the only other remaining team, consisting of only three members are staying at a same ce, without moving at all.

    Hawk took the scroll and partially unsealed his cultivation. He is at the 6th stage initiation now. Even though it is very low, he can roam around the forest however he wants, but the main thing is that the two people who are left along with him are badly injured and cannot move freely like him. That is why they nned to stay in a same ce for the day.

    Sam and his team though, they are fatigued it was gone with the good sleep and food they had. They started exploring the forest. They encountered some small animals and the beasts with some considerable strength are very rarely seen.

    They encountered some animals which gave him some points and the fourth day is over just like that with their final points being.

    Sam ¨C 74

    Jack -62

    Eve and Shor- 50

    The fifth day, they again started exploring. By this time Eve and Shor are extremely delighted with their decision of following Sam at that time. But they also felt a little guilty when they thought of their points.

    After all, they didn¡¯t do much but they got a good share.

    "Sam, thank you so much." Shor thanked him when they are walking.

    Sam looked at him with askance about the gratitude out of blue. Then Eve exined from side.

    "We actually didn¡¯t help you much, but you still gave us more than enough points. Thank you very much."

    "You shouldn¡¯t thank me. You should thank the people who didn¡¯t agree to join us instead." Sam replied and didn¡¯t exin further.

    Both Shor and Eve are puzzled and looking at them, Jack exined with a smile. "Actually, it won¡¯t be a difference whether there are two extra people or six extra people with us. Because, he can¡¯t trust you guyspletely. Hell, he doesn¡¯t even trust mepletely and every trap or n he makes is very detrimental and dangerous if any slip ups urs. So, he always did major share of the work and gave me some tasks with importance because he trusts me more than you guys.

    So, if there are another four-extra people, he won¡¯t take away points from his or my ount. Rather, they will be sharing the misceneous tasks you performed as well as the points you got. So, you have to thank the remaining members, who didn¡¯te here."

    When Jack exined, Eve and Shor were dumbstruck for a second. They didn¡¯t expect that the reason would be this. But still they felt that the points are rather high even with that reason. After all, Sam can just take more than half himself, just for the n he made.

    After that they didn¡¯t talk much, and moved normally. But suddenly Eve copsed.

    The three of them immediately checked on her and saw a snake bite mark on her ankle. Sam immediately pulled a rope out of bag and tied it tightly around the wound to not let the venom spread.

    Then he broke her token immediately.

    Sam and Jack looked around vigntly to find the snake. Shor meanwhile was really afraid. When Sam finally found the snake, which is already a distance away, he immediately struck in his movements.

    Jack saw the solemn expression on his face and immediately got alerted.

    Sam turned towards Shor and said. "The situation is a bit dangerous; I think it is better if you go."

    Shor nodded and immediately broke his token without anyints. After all, he has more than enough points to rank higher and he is sure that he would be ranked extremely higher.

    Then Sam gestured towards and Jack and both of them started running in a direction, where there is an open ground.

    When they reached the ce, Sam looked around and felt that the ce, is a bit better and there are less possibilities for snakes sneaking up on them.

    "What is the situation?" Jack asked as soon as Sam calmed down a bit.

    "Actually, this is a situation with the biggest danger as well as the biggest opportunity we encountered." Sam said as he looked at the horizon.

    "What do you mean?"

    "The snake that bit Eve earlier is actually an evolved beast. But itsbat potential is at the lowest of the snake species. But they have a special ability. They can only sneak on its opponents but when they bite the people, it is actually lethal. It particrly works against, the cultivators and the magical beasts." Sam paused a bit before continuing.

    "The snake before is a Blood stripe snake. It actually not only bites the people, but it will also suck as much blood as possible. It is actually in green in colour. But after it has its fill, the blood coloured stripes will appear on its back.

    But this is not the main reason they are dangerous. The venom they inject inside will grow rapidly inside one¡¯s body by absorbing the spiritual energy. If you got bit once, if you are not stronger by much, it will kill you with your own spiritual energy.

    Even more dangerous thing is that these snakes unlike other snakes live in a group and there is a king of snakes, which will absorb the blood from all the snakes and evolve itself. If all those snakes and the king worked together, a person with a whole cultivation level higher will have the same situation as a person with same cultivation as them."

    "Then isn¡¯t it quite dangerous. We are normal humans. What kind of opportunity are you talking about?" Jack asked with confusion.

    "Well, as I said. All of them working together is indeed dangerous, but they can only sneak attack. It is will be lethal if a person doesn¡¯t know their existence near them, but now that we have already known that we might get an opportunity.

    Right now, our cultivation being sealed, is quite an opportunity. The only dangerous thing about these snakes to us is the blood loss. Even Eve fainted due to loss of blood. It will take a lot of time for the venom to reach the spiritual core.

    If we are cautious enough, we can make it big. After all, the danger is directly proportional to the rewards we got. Do you want to try?" When Sam finished exining, Jack fell into deep contemtion.

    Just as he was about to say something a loud scream was head from a distance.

    "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH"

    Sam and Jack immediately exchanged a nce and started running towards the direction of the scream. Because, the voice is familiar to both of them. When they reached the spot, they saw Kelly trying to drag Hawk, the other guy who was helping just now saw the snakes and immediately abandoned Hawk and broke his token to escape.

    Sam and Jack exchanged a look and immediately helped Kelly. Kelly finally saw hope when she saw Sam and Jack. She almost fell into despair.

    Sam and Jack carried Kelly and Hawk and ran. When they saw that there are no snakes following them anymore, they finally stopped.

    Sam immediately searched Hawk¡¯s pockets in search of token, then he asked Kelly. "Where is his token?"

    "I don¡¯t know. When he went inside the cave alone, we didn¡¯t see anything, but he immediately felt weak and fell unconscious there. Me and the other teammate, went inside and dragged him out. After we came to a certain distance, the snakes are still following us." She didn¡¯t say the rest but Sam and Jack could understand, what happened.

    Sam thought about where the token would be and couldn¡¯t help but frown. He examined Hawk¡¯s condition and frown got deeper.

    "Did he unseal his cultivation?" Sam asked in a deep voice. Kelly nodded and he immediately got even more serious.

    "This is serious. If we don¡¯t make it fast, he will die. The Elders won¡¯t interfere without breaking the token. We have to find the token as soon as possible." When Sam finished speaking, Kelly started crying. She looked at Sam with some hope and pleading. Hawk is the close friend of hers from childhood.

    Actually, Sam could really leave them and go on his way and if Hawk was really aplete stranger, he might even leave him without batting an eyelid.

    But he had a pretty good impression of Hawk. He has a pretty good heart and is not like other young masters who are arrogant beyond their abilities. He didn¡¯t really want a positive person like this to die at such a young age.

    "Jack, you guys stay here. I wille back in a few minutes." Sam said and without waiting for reply, he left. He started running in the direction where they saved Kelly and Hawk.

    After sometime, he climbed a tree and like an agile monkey, he started jumping from tree to tree. All this while he is looking at the ground for the token. He didn¡¯t find any.

    When he came close to a cave attached to a hill. He was bewildered to see that the cave is the nest of the Blood striped snakes.

    The cave is actually pretty open and it is also not deep. There would be a distance of at most 30 feet from the entrance to the wall where two scrolls are attached. One of them is a scroll he never saw before and the other is the point scroll. There is a big snake with some faint red stripes over its green skin near the wall. This is the king snake.

    When Sam didn¡¯t find the token outside, he clearly knew where it is and that is making him feel cautious.

    He immediately went back and met up with Jack and Others.

    "I didn¡¯t find the token on the way. It must be inside the cave. Right now, Hawk has less than two hours to make it. We have to find the token as soon as possible."

    Kelly and Jack went silent at the thought of this. They didn¡¯t know what to do at all. They only looked at Sam with hope that he would have a way out of this situation.

    Sam pursed his lips and said. "Kelly, you stay near the ce and look over Hawk." He said and passed the Sabre he obtained from Ray to her. "While doing so, collect every dead leaf, dried grass, birds¡¯ nest, tree bark everything that could catch a fire easily. But don¡¯t leave him alone.

    Sam said and picked up the axe from the bag. He called Jack over and said. "You also collect the same things. You can take the bag and fill it to brim. Come back in half an hour. I need as much as you can collect. And bring some fire wood too."

    After that both of them separated and Sam went to collect some bamboo poles. He chopped the poles which are raw as well as which are dry without any difference. He made it back and forth and brought back bamboo poles, fire wood etc.

    After half an hour. Jack came back with a bag full of dried waste.

    "Separate the bamboo sections and crack them up. By the time you are finished with it, they must be intact but they must be in fragile state that they would break with small impact."

    Sam instructed Kelly and Jack. Three of them started preparing the section just like Sam said.

    Sam then stuffed them with the dried waste. Dry grass, dead leaves, dry twigs, nests. He stuffed thempletely and ced them inside the bag. Then he ced the fire wood inside the bag.

    Now the bag is filled to the brim so much that the cover cannot fill it at all.

    "Jack carry the bag carefully." Sam said and he proceeded to carry Hawk. There is only an hour left for Hawk.

    They walked carefully without making much noise. After nearing the cave, Sam with the help of Jack and Kelly ced Hawk on the tree and then three of them also climbed it.

    The tree is directly facing the cave opening. Sam took out the fire wood and passed them to Kelly and Jack to hold. Then he took out a piece and lit it with the live dried wood and some birds¡¯ nest to make a torch.

    Then Sam lit each torch for both of them. He took out the fragile bamboo sections stuffed with the dry waste and passed each over to them.

    "Light them and throw them into the cave. I will show you how." Sam said and with the torch. He lit the dry waste inside the bamboo section. After a few seconds when it was burning considerably, he threw inside the cave directly.

    "Threw one inside and throw one at the entrance." Sam said and started throwing the sections continuously.

    Each bamboo section, when hit the cave, broke open and the burning waste inside immediately spread along the cave increasing the fire and the snakes which came into the contact with went into a frenzy.

    When they came towards the entrance, the situation is not good as the bamboo sections came there also and started burning.

    Sam and others then took the dry wood, lit them and threw them inside the cave. After the fire intensified a bit, Sam said.

    "I will be going in. You guys keep throwing them. You will only stop, either when Ie back or when the bag is empty." Sam said and without waiting for their reply, he climbed down the tree and wielding the sabre and axe, he ran inside the cave.

    Even though the mes are burning, it is short lived as the dried waste won¡¯t burn for long. That is why, they have to keep throwing. But snakes still got affected by heat and are in a confused state.

    Sam moved rapidly as chopped the snakes that are in his way. When he faced the king snake, which was in a confused and enraged state, he halted his steps as he moved slowly around it.

    The senses of the snakes are blocked and this is the only time. Sam saw the token near it. He quickly broke the token with axe and a shadow took away Hawk from the tree. But both Jack and Kelly were still not relievedpletely as the dried wood and the bamboo sections are over.

    Sam also noticed that the fire is dying and the iing is stopped. He also guessed the reason and just as he was thinking about escaping. He was surrounded by the snakes which are moving slowly towards him.

    After a few moments he realized that they are moving towards the King and not him, but that doesn¡¯t make him happy as he is between the king and the remaining snakes.

    Sam was in a pinch. He doesn¡¯t know what to do. The snakes are all slow, because they lost all the energy to resist against the heat and even the king is in daze.

    But that didn¡¯t give Sam any advantage as he was also affected by the fire and smoke.

    Now, Sam has only way. That is that he has to catch the scroll which he didn¡¯t see before. But to do this, he need to get over this king snake, which is about 20 feet long. The only reason it fit the cave properly for all these snakes is that it was coiled.

    As soon as Sam came to decision, he immediately made his move.

    First, he swung his axe and hit the tail of the king. Thetter hissed and raised his head. Sam immediately Sam jumped up and with the head of the snake as support, he immediately caught the two scrolls and jumped down. But the king snake also came out of the daze and came at him.

    Sam immediately opened the scroll. Before the snake could bite him, a strange glow came out of his body as his cultivation was removed. He is now at the 9th stage initiation.

    But Sam noticed a difference. When he is in ninth stage initiation, he doesn¡¯t have the elements, but now, his state does have both the light and Fire elements.

    Sam heaved a sigh and immediately made his move. The sabre in his hands was immediately covered with golden mes as he swung it, the golden fire shot towards the king and started burning it.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop and he swung the sabre continuously burning everything in the cave and with in a few minutes, he came out with all his clothes almost burnt.

    Jack and Kelly heaved a sigh and finally took a breath. Sam gave them the point scroll and immediately sat down on the ground. He passed the token to them and said.

    "Let us get out of here." Sam said these words and immediatelyid on the ground as he closed his eyes. He is exhausted. Even though he recovered his cultivation partially, he used up all his spiritual energy in his attacks to not to take any chances.

    Jack opened the scroll. There are 40 points written on it. He then looked at Sam and smile.

    After a few moments, Sam woke up. He is already out of the forest and is in a big hall where all sixty participants gathered. He saw that all the candidates are looking at him weirdly. He then took a look at himself and saw that he was barely covered with anything. He checked that his cultivation was unsealedpletely and that he can ess the spatial ring.

    "Sam you woke up." Eve spoke from the side. Then only Sam realized that he was with the team 6 members. Jack also saw him and helped him stand up. Sam rejected his help and immediately took a fresh set of clothes and wore them along with his feather coat.

    Just as he was about to ask what is going on a voice came.

    "Now, the second round is over. Take the rest of the day off and rest here, Tomorrow morning, your scores will be announced and the third round and the final round of thepetition will begin." An Elder announced and left.

 Chapter 68: Final round starts

    Sam was sitting with the rest of team 6. Soon, some food and water were sent to all of them. When Sam was eating, he could feel the looks of resentment from the others in the team. Precisely, they are the four people, who were separated without agreeing with Sam¡¯s leadership.

    He didn¡¯t bother with them and ate the food in a leisurely pace. After that he started observing the other teams. Everyone is in a bad shape. Even though their cultivations are restored they are exhausted mentally. They didn¡¯t think that they would be this pathetic without their cultivation. Now, they almost had some new-found respect for the normal people who doesn¡¯t cultivate.

    After some time, Hawk and Kelly walked towards him while Philip, Freya, Haley also came to greet him.

    "Thank you so much Sam." Hawk immediately bowed as he thanked him as soon as he came. He didn¡¯t even say anything at all, other than the deep bow, he didn¡¯t say boastful words on how he will repay him or how he would go through hell h h h.

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything and just nodded when thetter finally stood up properly. Meanwhile, the remaining candidates are all in shock. Particrly, those from the Falcon Cliff city. They knew exactly how popr and respectable Hawk had in the city. Yet, someone as him is bowing in front of a character from the normal subordinate city. They wanted to know what happened. But unfortunately for them, the characters involved are not going to tell them what exactly happened and neither can they ask them.

    Soon, the day passed slowly. Next day morning. Everyone is led by an attendant through a way which seemed like a tunnel to a stadium. It is like a colosseum, but the size is a bit small whenpared to the colosseum in Rome.

    The seats are filled with spectators and there is a rectangr stage in the middle. The stage itself upied seventy percent of the area. It is really big. The remaining area is also filled with some seats. The attendant went away after leading them here.

    Sam looked around and his gaze finallynded on the main spectator area, where the Count, the Principal and several other big shots from the noble families and the other towers sat. He observed them for a bit and then continued observing the other spectators, the stage etc.

    Then Principal stood up from the chair and took a step forward as he addressed in a voice loud enough to not only reach all the audience but also shut them up to silence.

    "The second round of the tournament is over and the candidates are here to take part in the final round of the tournament. But before that the scores of the candidates in the second round as well as the c.u.mtive scores will be announced." After principal spoke, he gestured to an Elder sitting behind him to speak and the Elder came forward and started announcing the scores from backward.

    Rank 60 Candidate Kiba- 0 points in second round and fifteen c.u.mtive points.

    Rank 59 Candidate Tom- 0 points in second round and sixteen c.u.mtive points.

    Rank 58.....

    Rank 57....

    The Elder announced the points and came to top 10 ces and the second round points barely reached two digits at the top 5 and that person is none other than Hawk.

    Rank 5 Candidate Hawk second round twelve points and thirty-five c.u.mtive points.

    The spectators are all surprised. They thought that Hawk is likely to get highest points. But the top four candidates not only surprised the spectators but also all the officials as well. Because, the points difference is quite high.

    Rank four Candidate Shor 47 points {points include the collected ones along with the points of their survival days} and 63 c.u.mtive points.

    Rank three Candidate Eve 47 points and 64 c.u.mtive points.

    Rank two Candidate Jack 58 points and 81 c.u.mtive points.

    When they heard the difference, they almost bit their tongues. The difference is not just a ten or twenty after all. But the first ce made them almost have a heart attack because.

    Rank one Candidate Sam second round 150 points and 180 c.u.mtive points.

    When Sam heard the score even, he had a heart attack. After all, he didn¡¯t know where all these points came from. Then Jack said from behind.

    "After you lost conscious, Kelly and I explored the cave and found many scrolls. So, the total points became this much."

    "Why didn¡¯t you guys take a share?" Sam asked with surprise.

    "Well, you are the one who took the whole cave down. Even though we made some contribution, they are after all superficial. If not for saving Hawk, you might have able to clean it up yourself with proper time and nning. I think we don¡¯t deserve that much credit."

    After Jack¡¯s exnation, he didn¡¯t say anything and stayed silent.

    The remaining candidates though are looking at him as if he was a monster. They are already vexed by the high-scores of the four positions and now they are almost having doubts on meaning of their lives.

    But Sam felt some searing gazes other than that of Envy, Jealousy and Admiration. They are hostile gazes. Sam turned around and saw the weird trio. He didn¡¯t know why he has obtained the hostility of them. There are other people with even more of ridiculous expressions and they are the four people from the team six, who left Sam.

    They are looking at Eve and Shor with shocked and Jealous expression. Then the three other people targeted their gazes to Dustin, who is the one responsible for separation from Sam and the group.

    Dustin hid his face in embarrassment upon their gazes. But he also felt unfair. After all, these people could always choose to join up with Sam. They are ming him unfairly. The Principal¡¯s voice woke them up.

    "Now that the rankings are announced. The final round will begin soon.

    This round is about directbat.

    In this round you can challenge anyone to duel. But the person should be within ten ranks above you and you will lose the chance to challenge again, if you lose three times in the duels you challenged.

    But no matter how many times you lose in the duels in which you were challenged, that won¡¯t influence your challenging rights.

    Every battle you lose will give you a negative point and every battle you win you will gain a positive point. The duels will end at dusk. As soon as the sun sets, the scores will be frozen.

    So, the scores at the end of the day will be added to the c.u.mtive score and the rankings will be decided." Principal finished his speech and went to take his seat. Then an Elder came to the stage and stood on the centre. The candidates surrounded the stage and were eagerly waiting. After all, they are very disappointed on their own performances in the second round. They are eyeing Sam intensely.

    But when they recalled the monstrous score, they felt that taking down the guy in c.u.mtive ranking will be impossible. After all, they don¡¯t have many chances to challenge to .u.mte that number of points.

    The Elder at the centre of the stage, made some hand seals and ced it on the ground. Then the stage divided into six rings separately. Even though the rings are divided, each ring is still as big as basketball court. Then another five elders came and boarded the other five stages.

    The Elder who came first said. "There will be six duels going on simultaneously. A person can have a 10 minutes break maximum between each duel if he is challenged after justpleting a duel.

    You can use any weapon within rank two and below. The rank 3 weapons, single use inscriptions, formation discs, pills and other medicines are all forbidden to use on the ring.

    The fight will be over, if one candidate is unconscious or killed or surrenders. If other party surrenders and still the candidate attacks, the candidate will be eliminated from not only the third round but also the entirepetition."

    After Elder said these words, he gestured them to start. Immediately a six people climbed the rings and issued their challenges.

    Sam was also challenged by some in the very first round. The one who challenged is one of the weird trio who is also in the top 10. He is in top ten because of his c.u.mtive score from the first round.

    In fact, Sam saw a lot of people he is familiar with in top ten. For example, his three teammates in second round, Hawk, Kelly, Philip and the weird trio.

    When he was challenged by Yash, he was not least bit surprised and went on to the stage. Yash is at Level 1 Novice stage. Sam didn¡¯t know, whether the other party is a warrior or Mage, but he didn¡¯t really care that much.

    Sam stood at the one end of the ring while the opponent is at the other end of the ring.

    "Begin." The Elder confirmed and soon as his voice faded, Yash moved. He is fast and his movements are swift and smooth. He moved towards Sam straight forwardly. But thetter didn¡¯t move at all, standing at the same ce.

    Yash suddenly changed his movement and flicked his sleeve. *Swish* *Swish* He saw some shes in the air as two small knives made his way towards him. Both of them aiming at his vitals. One at his heart and one at his eye. Nobody, expected this. They thought that Yash is a warrior who is good at the closebat, that is why, they were surprised a bit.

    Just as Yash thought that Sam was caught off guard about the knives thetter moved his hands and by the time he stopped, all people gasped in surprise. Sam caught the two knifes with his fingers.

    Yash was the one most surprised. He felt that he did a good job distracting the other party with his movements, but all of it was nothing.

    Sam didn¡¯t make a move as Yash moved back. He just took a look at the knives as if he was examining the craftsmanship.

    Sam slowly started moving towards the centre of the stage. Yash was a bit cautious and decided to make his move.

    He moved like he was wind around the stage as he threw knives at Sam. The knives are shing while cutting through the air.

    Within no time, Sam was being surrounded with the fast-moving knives. He has to say he was impressed.

    Spectators were looking at the stage with interest.

    "nice knife throwing technique. That kid has potential." Count Falcon said with appreciation.

    "Indeed. But the other kid seems to be prettyposed." Castor said from the side.

    They were also looking at this fight intently. They were even more impressed at Sam¡¯s calm state.

    Sam looked at the knives shing with spiritual energy, from all the directions. Yash is moving around and throwing them.

    Sam dodged a few at first but the next ones seemed to be getting more and more in quantity.

    He gave a smirk and Sam also made his move, which took the spectators breath away. Sam didn¡¯t move from the ce instead his movements arebined to the same ce he stood as he moved rapidly.

    All they can see the after images of his hands, legs and his head. He dodged some knives, he repelled some knives and he caught some. By the time Yash got to rest, he was dumbfounded.

    Sam was standing at the same spot. But this time, he has a lot of knives in his hands. Sam caught a knife in between his fingers and he even caught some with his toes and hell, he even had a knife in his mouth.

    Yash was gaping his mouth as he looked at Sam in disbelief. By the time, he came out of his stupor, Sam made his move again. This time, the move enraged Yash, because Sam is copying his own move.

    Sam moved around the ring just like Yash did and started throwing the knives from all directions, but the thing is that the knives are enveloped with golden fire and the speed of it was even faster than Yash¡¯s.

    Yash immediately got alerted and tried his best to defend. By the time, Sam was done with half of the knives in his hands, Yash was already panting. It took all his energy, but his ck dress still had some holes in it.

    Sam smirked and said. "Not bad. Now let us see, how you are going to deal with it." This time Sam started using his Phantom steps and moved.

    The knives flew again and this time, Sam even picked the knives that strayed on the stage. He is pretty leisure. But Yash is inplete opposite state.

    Because, the knives this time are pretty different and the reason is that Sam is throwing the knives with the light elemental energy along with the fire elemental energy. The speed of them increased quite a bit and it has same effect as phantom step. Yash was unable to see them properly.

    "Ahhhh..." Yash screamed as a knife pierced him in his calf.

    *swoosh* *swoosh*

    "AHhhhhhhhhhhhhh"

    Just then another two knives flew over and pierced through abdomen.

    "I-I- SURRENDER. Yash didn¡¯t even hesitate as he surrendered. Sam stopped his assault and stood still.

    "Sam one point. Yash minus 1 point." Elder announced the result.

    Sam went off the stage and gave a provocative smile to the weird trio. He knew that they were targeting him for some reason. He didn¡¯t know why, nor does he really care. He only have one thought in mind.

    ¡¯you guys better be prepared if you want to provoke me.¡¯

 Chapter 69: No Chapters

    The fights on the other tforms are still going on but most of the spectators are all observing the tform where Sam had his fight. Even after Sam was done with the fight, they are still looking at him as if they were looking at a monster.

    After all, who would take down an opponent who is at higher level than you using their own technique. It is more of a humiliation than defeat. Sam is literally rubbing in that guy¡¯s face that he is trash.

    Nobody, wants to experience such a defeat. They are even thinking why this guy did something like that, taking things that far for a tournament. He could just defeat him normally, right?

    But only Sam and the trio knew that it is not that simple. The trio are targeting Sam intentionally and Sam is just ying along with them.

    Nevertheless, the fights continued. But Sam wasn¡¯t challenged, instead the rest of the top 10 are receiving challenges one by one. Soon, Jack was challenged.

    Both, Sam and Jack knew who that guy is. He is Drew. The swordsman who is also one of the leaders of the 14-man team who wanted to fight against Sam¡¯s team.

    Jack slowly alighted the stage, with a normal sword. Right now, he is not using the ck meteorite sword, because there might be someone knowledgeable recognising the sword material and him getting into trouble. He needs to get a sheath to cover it up to carry it around after the tournament.

    "I am going to make you guys regret what you did to us? Both you and that Sam are just some country bumpkins, how dare you sneak attack us from behind?" Drew said as soon as Jack came on to the tform. He is really angry and Jealous that he lost to Sam and Jack even with the overwhelming advantage in number and that too, when they caught the others in their weakened state. He is just making excuses for himself out of shame to get back at him.

    Jack didn¡¯t say anything at all. He just looked at Drew coldly. He is also a little bit pissed at thest battle. He is overwhelmed with numbers and these guys also tried to gang up on him. If he was in his best form, he might be able to sweep the floor with these guys. He is already angry at them and wanted to find a way to settle scores and here they are giving him a chance directly.

    Drew held his long sword as he pointed at Jack. He swiftly made his move as the sword made an elegant arc in the air as it went towards his arm. Drew is aiming at Jack¡¯s arm.

    Jack didn¡¯t move at all. His sword is still in sheath. Just before the sword made contact, a keening could be heard and Drew felt his sword meet another solid de before deviating from the original direction.

    When he came to his senses, Drew¡¯s arms were vibrating as he held the sword in the air. He looked around found that Jack is still in same posture. There is no change at all. Even his sword has no signs that it was taken out.

    Drew felt a little dazed. He didn¡¯t know how he was deviated from his original path. But he clearly missed his target, but the other party didn¡¯t seem to move at all.

    He shook his head and swung his sword again. This time he aimed at other party¡¯s chest. But just like previous time, just before he made contact, he missed. The other party is still standing there without any signs of movement.

    ¡¯What happened?¡¯ This question is not only ringing in Drew¡¯s head but also a lot of spectators. After all, there are a lot of people who are paying attention to the members in top 10 participants.

    Drew gritted his teeth and tried to calm down. He again attacked but missed. He again attacked aiming at different parts of body.

    Arm. Missed

    Leg. Missed

    Heart. Missed

    Eyes. Missed

    Torso. Missed.

    Head. Missed.

    He continuously attacked and attacked only to be missed. He felt as if he was aiming at the wrong directionpletely. All he knew is that every time he attacked and the sword was about to make contact, he could hear a keening sound and that¡¯s it. By the time, he came to his senses, he is standing there like an idiot.

    After some relentless failure, Drew stepped back and kept some distance between both of them.

    "Let us see, how you are going to dodge this?" He gritted his teeth and started concentrating. His long sword started glowing with spiritual energy. He held the sword with both his hands and swung it.

    "The Andrew sword style. Sword shower." Drew said and started making sword moves. There are sword lights in form of stabs, sh, pierce. Thebination of the sword moves was done with very basic of sword movements. The sword lights didn¡¯t immediately didn¡¯t move. They froze in the air as if they were waiting and with a final sh, all the sword lights started moving towards Jack.

    The air around him turned sharp. The dangerous sword aura emitting from the move clearly showed the threat it would pose.

    "Andrew sword style. It has been a long time since Ist saw this." Castor said as he touched his chin.

    "Yeah, this drew kid seemed to have good talent in sword. The sword shower isn¡¯t a simple move. But he still was able to learn it when he is still at thete stage Acolyte. But I think the move will only show its full power, when it is made in Novice level." Count Falcon alsomented from side.

    Even the crowd was watching to see how Jack will deal with this.

    "That is the young master Drew for you. He is after all the prodigy and the sword style of his family is quite unique."

    "Yes, I think that other guys might not dodge it."

    "Yeah, even if he is good at dodging the attack this time covers too much of the area. I think it is quite difficult."

    Meanwhile, Jack who is at the receiving end of the attack is quite rxed. He stared at Drew¡¯s movements with concentration as he examined the other party putting all his remaining power into a single attack.

    His hand slowly moved towards the sword hanging in the sheath at his hip. He held the sword handle with his right hand as his spiritual energy started circting.

    "You aren¡¯t as bad as I thought." Jack said to Drew and just when the numerous sword lights are about to converge towards his vitals. He has a smirk on his face. "But you are still not good enough to take me down." After these words, Jack drew the sword out of his sheath. A majestic sword light came out of the along with the sword and immediately disintegrated the sword shower.

    "Sword Draw." Jack muttered under his breath. Drew just looked with his weak body as his attack disappearing into nothing and still the sword light started making its way towards him. He felt like all his nerves and even his will could feel the sharpness of the sword light.

    Before he canprehend the feeling of this sharpness.

    *sh* He felt his flesh cut open as a deep gash was formed on his chest. Before he knew it, he fainted due to the blood loss.

    "Winner Jack. Plus, one point."

    "Candidate Drew. Minus, one point."

    Elder dered as Jack made his way downwards. He stood beside Sam and exchanged a nod.

    "That move is great." Castor said to Count.

    "Why are there, so many good candidates from the Star wood city? First that guy named Sam, who is good at everything we tested today and now this guy. His sword style is very unique. His movements are elegant, swift and there are no extra movements at all. It is as if he is toozy to make any extra moves, but every move he made is extremely urate and precise." Count also gave his evaluation.

    Audience also felt surprised by the development.

    They thought that Jack would try to dodge or defend. They thought that Jack is strong from the earlier performance, but he never thought that he would be strong enough to not only counter the strongest move from his opponent, but they never expected that he would be able to do so in one move.

    Meanwhile there are changes in the top 10. Eve and Shor dropped out after their first challenges. Sam actually thought that he would be highly challenged, but actually the most challenges were directed towards Hawk.

    Right now, Hawk is fighting with another person Sam is familiar with, actually more like a person who Sam fought with.

    Ray and Hawk are standing on the stage.

    "Hawk, today I am going to take you down. You have been on the top for too long."

    "You can try then." Hawk replied and started forming hand signs.

    Ray swung his sabre towards him, but thetter didn¡¯t move at all. Just before the sabre reached him, he floated through the air as he moved backwards. Then before Ray tried to make a next move, wind des started forming around him, the wind condensed in the form of des started attacking ray from all the directions.

    Hawk continuously made hand seals as he sent the wind des one after another. Ray got himself busy. He is cursing inside his heart so much. This is the reason he made the first move against Hawk, to not to fall into the trap of these wind des. But he failed again.

    Just when he was about to make rx a bit. He heard Hawk¡¯s voice.

    "Let us finish this."

    Just then he realized that he focused too much on the wind des. When he looked at Hawk, he is already done casting.

    "Dual wing sh." Hawk muttered as a wind elemental energy condensed into a Hawk and two heavily condensed wind des in form of Wings started moving towards him.

    Before he knew it, he has two deep gashes on his chest as he flew off the stage.

    Sam was impressed at Hawk¡¯s usage of wind energy. Surprisingly, Hawk turned towards him and gave a smile.

    Time passed; Sam was getting bored. He was expecting some challenges but no one is challenging him. After Yash¡¯s defeat the weird trio also didn¡¯t challenge him at all. The top 10 ces didn¡¯t change much. Except for Eve and Shor, reced by Ray and Drew. There are no changes. Surprisingly, the eleven and twelve ces are familiar to him.

    Jessie and Dustin are in eleventh and twelfth ces.

    Just when he was feeling that there would be no challenges, Hawk went on to the stage and called his name.

    Sam immediately got energised.

    "Finally." He said as he walked towards the stage in high spirits. After all, he has seen Hawk fighting and he was pretty much thinking of getting a first hand experience himself.

 Chapter 70: Hawk Vs Sam.

    Sam went up to the stage and said to Hawk. "I thought nobody is going to challenge me anymore. Atst."

    Hawk just smiled and didn¡¯t say anything.

    "Begin." Elder announced. But both Sam and Hawk didn¡¯t move immediately. They just looked at each other and tried to see what is other party¡¯s intention. The stare down went on for a few seconds, they didn¡¯t move neither they looked at different directions. They just stared at each other and tension rose.

    Finally, Hawk spoke. "You are more patient than what rumours mentioned." As soon as he said that he started making hand seals. Sam just stood there and didn¡¯t do anything, he just stood there and looked at Hawk as if he was watching a performance.

    And soon, Sam is surrounded by wind des, from all sides, he is observing the wind des that areing towards him, he can feel the sharpness of the des and the threat they could pose.

    When they were two feet away, Sam made his move, with his superior speed, the wind des didn¡¯t pose much threat to him. He moved fluidly without making any contact with the wind des, but before he could rx another wave of wind des areing towards him, but this time the density of attack increased.

    The number of des became twice the previous time. This time, Sam didn¡¯t just evade them, but he started moving forward. The spectators are watching the fight in awe. They knew about Hawk¡¯s wind des attack. He is very proficient in its control and if his opponent gets struck in the first wave, he was almost done with it.

    Even when the opponent is able to make it through the first wave, he might not make it to the second wave, if he makes it through the second wave, the third wave might take him down.

    And every time the density of attacks increases such that evading is not an option anymore. But Sam is dodging and he is making his way forward.

    Just when Sam was a three- feet away from Hawk, thetter floated with the cover of wind des and went to opposite side.

    "Elemental fusion." Sam muttered as he looked at Hawk, who stopped attacking. When Hawk heard Sam¡¯s word¡¯s he was surprised.

    "Not bad, you can recognize the Elemental Fusion." Hawk said. Sam didn¡¯t reply. Of course, he can recognise it. He himself can do it after all. But Sam was pretty impressed with Hawk. Thetter is using the Elemental fusion on his legs and is floating. Even though he can¡¯t use it directly to fly, but hovering a bit is not really a problem.

    "Why are you not using your Elemental powers?" Hawk asked.

    "Well, nobody is bothering to challenge me anyway. Might as well make most our battle and see what I can do?" Sam said but he still didn¡¯t attack. He is waiting for Hawk to attack and he will test himself. After all, it is not everyday that he gets to fight with a Novice level 1 fighter with this much control over his element.

    Hawk formed hand seals and this time they are much faster. This time air on the stage all started circling around Sam. The image resembled a small tornado circling around him. Just as he was examining it, he felt that it is a little difficult to breath. The tornado is trying to create a vacuum.

    Just when he thought that these are the only tornado¡¯s effects, he felt his feet floating and then suddenly a wind de formed with in the tornado and attacked him from behind.

    Even though the feather coat stopped the attack, he wasn¡¯t feeling happy at all. He felt that he is being a bit too passive. Sam then spread his hand towards the wind currents and his hands started conjuring fire.

    He controlled the golden mes with the enormous heat and made it circle the tornado in its opposite direction, but when he tried it in the beginning the fire is being affected by the wind speed, when spectators started feeling that Sam¡¯s attempts are futile, he increased the intensity of mes. They started circting with very high speed and the intensity also high and before he knew what¡¯s happening, Hawk felt that something is amiss, his control over wind tornado became difficult and unstable and while he tried to control it Sam already came out of the tornado.

    Sam and Hawk stared at each other when Sam said. "Maybe you want to use your Dual wing sh."

    "Are you sure?"

    "Yeah, you can use it. Let¡¯s see if I can deal with it." When Sam said these words, Hawk was already almost done with his hand seals. A Hawk materialised in front of him and the two wing shaped wind des moved towards Sam.

    This time, Sam didn¡¯t just stand there, he took out his golden staff and started spinning it. The two ends of staff are directing and condensing a huge amount of fire as he spun the staff above his head.

    Before the wind des neared him, Sam threw the condensed fire towards them. Both the attacks collided and negated each other.

    Sam and Hawk came into a dead lock.

    "You are really good. I thought that Kelly is exaggerating." Hawk praised.

    "You aren¡¯t bad yourself." Sam returned the praise.

    "Maybe we should stop testing each other? Why don¡¯t you be serious?" Hawk asked as he started making hand seals.

    This time neither replied nor just stood in ce, instead he made his move with his staff. When he swung his staff and was about to make contact with Hawk, a wind shield formed and stopped it.

    Sam took a step back and again did the same, this time the wind shield again made the contact. But Sam didn¡¯t withdraw and an explosion happened at the point of contact, pushing Hawk a step back.

    Sam didn¡¯t miss the opportunity and followed with attack after. His moves are fast and precise. Hawk wasn¡¯t able to see him at all other than he could see is the after- image Sam left behind after an attack.

    Soon, he wasn¡¯t able to cope with the speed and took the full force of an attack. He fell down on his back as he spewed some blood from his mouth.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop. He made his move again and just as he was about to make another sessful attack something unexpected happened.

    Hawk is covered by a water shield and a water sphere wasunched towards him at same time. Sam took the full force of attack andnded a few feet away. He coughed out some blood and stood up.

    When he came to his senses, he saw Hawk covered with a water sphere on all sides.

    "Oh, you are a dual elemental Mage. Didn¡¯t see thating." Sam said with a smirk. He didn¡¯t seem discouraged at all. But he failed to see the spectators¡¯ expressions which are filled with shock.

    "What Hawk is a dual elemental mage?"

    "I never knew this."

    "Yeah, he really hid deeply. I thought he only has one wind element. Who would have thought that he also had water element?" Even Castor and Count Falcon felt surprised, for different reason though.

    "I never thought he would use water element here. He said that he might not need to use this in this tournament." Count Falcon said to Castor.

    "I thought that it was his trump card." Castor spoke

    "No. He said that there are no worthy opponents who forced him to use it. Now he seemed to have found someone. Maybe it is better this way." Count said as he eyed Sam with interest.

    Sam again picked his staff and made his move. This time his speed his actually faster and there is a golden sh along with his after image. He swung his staff and attack hit the water shield with the same explosion. The water on the surface of the shield evaporated, but the impact of the explosion and the hit of the staff are reduced in the form of ripples on the water.

    He didn¡¯t stay there and immediately moved. Then a water sphere wasunched to the ce where he stood a moment ago.

    Sam continued to make his move with the staff and Hawk countered with same defence and attack. Even after tens of exchanges the dead lock remained. Both of them weren¡¯t able to make some damage. But the situation changed.

    When Samnded a hit on the shield, the water dispersed a bit and held the staff in ce, dying Sam¡¯s movement for a second making have a close shave with a water sphere.

    But Sam didn¡¯t change the strategy. Hi speed increased. He is trying to see how much speed he needs to take down the water shield without using too much of spiritual energy.

    When he found out that this method is futile, Samnded a hit and instead of escaping, he stood there and ced his hand on the shield. Hawk was a bit startled by this sudden change of pattern and was caught off-guard. Before je realized what is happening, he saw Sam¡¯s smirk and thetter injecting a huge ball of golden me into the water shield.

    "What, he is using the fire against water?"

    "Yeah. It is futile. I think he is using this as ast resort."

    "Why are you calling ast resort?"

    "You know that fire is weaker against the water. So, what is the point of using it that close and that too on the water shield directly. The chances are almost nil."

    "Yeah, maybe you are right."

    Spectators are judging Sam¡¯s actions, but Hawk who is very close to the fire realized something is not right.

    The golden me is small in size and it should have been extinguished but it is still burning like nothing happened as it continuously turned the water around him into steam. Sam smirked as he made eye contact with Hawk and immediately increased the amount of Energy, he released making the intensity and size of the golden mes higher and higherpletely evaporating that side of water shield. Before Hawk could prepare himself, Sam¡¯s attacknded on his chest squarely, sending him flying.

    Sam didn¡¯t follow with attack. Because, he is also panting. He scolded himself for trying so many times with staff. Even though he wanted to grind his skills, now he has to conserve his energy.

    Hawk stood up with much difficulty. He is trying to guess what happened exactly. He looked at Sam with new found admiration as well aspetitive spirit.

    Sam is also very impressed with Hawk. He has full understanding on his capabilities and knew that he could take down a Level 2 Novice. But he wasn¡¯t able to take down Hawk who is at Level 1 Novice. That means the other¡¯s battle prowess is not be trifled with.

    "I never thought that, I need to use this move in this tournament. I prepared it for a bigger stage, but Sam you have my respect for making me use this move."

    Hawk spoke and released a huge amount of spiritual energy. The stage is surrounded with water bubbles. Sam observed them and saw that the bubbles which are in size of foot ball are rotating on their own axes.

    Sam looked at the Bubbles and then stared at Hawk who closed his eyes and spread his hand wide open. He took the staff in his hands and swung it in the air which shot a fire ball towards Hawk.

    But before the fire ball could reach the target, a water bubble collided with the fire ball and both of them disappeared. But Sam suddenly felt something was wrong and before he realized what is happening, three wind des flew towards him from the point of collision and left a deep gash on his chest where the coat didn¡¯t cover.

    Sam took a step back and he identally collided with another bubble. Three wind des attacked again from behind. This time though, he only felt the impact.

    Sam steadied himself and stood up properly. He looked at the bubbles and then at Hawk.

    Hawk is using this time to recover the energy. Sam felt that he should deal with the situation as soon as possible. He stored the staff away and took the Golden Crescent out. When spectators saw the weird weapon with two des, they were confused.

    Sam moved the symbol and shifted it to bow mode. He took a deep breath and concentrated the spiritual energy to his legs and jumped high up in the air.

    While he started falling, he moved his hands with incredible speed as he sent arrows after arrows at Hawk.

    Hawk sensed the arrow with fire spiritual energying towards him and he started guarding with the bubbles. But the arrows became faster and faster and even more trouble is that they are negating the wind des inside the bubbles with explosion up on the contact.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop as he showered the stage with arrows all converging to a single point. Finally, Hawk wasn¡¯t able to deal with it and was hit by an explosion of a volley of arrows, but before he could fall, he sent the remaining bubbles towards Sam, who is almost down on the stage.

    Both candidates were exposed to their opponent¡¯s attacks. They fell down on the stage without a least bit of energy left. Hawk has his cloths tattered and filled with injuries. But Sam¡¯s cloths are still good. His vest though got torn and there are gashes on his upper chest and torso.

    "The fight is a Draw." The Elder said. Jack and Kelly came to the stage and escorted both Hawk and Sam down the stage.

 Chapter 71: Kidnap

    Sam woke up only after the sun set and the tournament was over. It was about time the results being announced.

    "First ce of the tournament--- Sam" This is the first thing he heard when he opened his eyes. He looked around and noticed that the stage is again back to normal and Principal along with the Count are standing at the centre, while there are nine students standing behind them.

    Sam dazedly towards the stage and walked towards the Count who is handing him a que along with a spatial ring.

    "Congrattions, Sam." Count said with a smile. Sam thanked him and went to stand along with the nine people in the back.

    The top 10 ces are filed with familiar faces. But that is not what surprised him, instead he was surprised by the fact that Eve and Shor didn¡¯t manage to make it to top 10 even with their overwhelming .u.mtion of points in the second round.

    They only managed to get into top 20 with great difficulty.

    "Now the prize for the top 10 people is that they are selected to enter the academy in the Marquis city. They can report to that ce in three months. This tournament is specially arranged to select these 10 candidates to enter the special ss that is being opened in the Marquis academy and this is done on the direct orders of the Marquis himself.

    All the spectators were surprised, the candidates who are at the bottom rankings felt envy. The candidates who missed the ranking by close shave felt jealous and the noble children were feeling undeserved. In this myriad of feelings and reactions caused by the announcement, Sam is the only person feeling calm andposed. He didn¡¯t show any expression at all. Because, he knew the info from the Principal. Then Castor still continued.

    "The remaining fifty people will be taken in as students of the Falcon Cliff academy as a special Elite ss, which we are going to open up from this year and every year, the Principals and the City lords of the subordinate cities will be picking the top 10 special students to join in this elite ss."

    When the remaining candidates heard this, they were immediately delighted. They thought that theming here is all in vain. Then another announcement came.

    "Now, the best team is Starwood city as we have seen the number of outstanding candidates, they provided followed by Falcon Cliff city. From this year onwards the resources of the Starwood academy will be doubled and the tax will be reduced from five percent to three percent."

    When Principal Starwood and Starwood city lord heard this announcement, they were quite excited. Principal is even thanking Sam in his heart about this achievement.

    Soon, the ceremony ended. Just as Sam was about to get off the stage along with others, he was stopped by Castor and Count.

    "Sam, can we borrow some of your time?" Count falcon was polite when asking. Sam gave his consent and followed them, letting his friends go to the mansion first.

    They went to a private room inside the academy and sat down as they were served with some refreshments.

    "Sam, I will be straight forward with you. Did you receive thest key of Murali¡¯s inheritance?" Castor asked as soon as the attendants left.

    Sam was a bit surprised. He didn¡¯t know that Castor would know about inheritance. After all, it is not his fault to think so as the tower of will has never been cleared before. But Sam didn¡¯t say anything and just kept his silent with a confused expression.

    Count Falcon and Castor exchanged a nce andtter said. "Actually, it is not much of a secret. You might already know that there are three other keys of inheritance and right now the other three are already owned by someone else.

    And one of those three in with the imperial family of our empire. The remaining two are under two different organizations. The thing about this inheritance is an open secret in the upper echelons of the empire and I won¡¯t be surprised if some of the noble family heads knew about this."

    When Sam heard Castor¡¯s exnation, he pondered for a moment and asked.

    ??What do you want from me, exactly?" He thought that there is no need for him to pretend, since he can¡¯t deny it. The other party is not using force which means that there is some catch here.

    "Actually, many people tried to clear the tower of will, but this became almost impossible as the difficulty of this is more than that of other three. The three parties who have the ownership of the other three keys came to an agreement that the person who can clear the tower of will cannot be forced to handover the key to anyone.

    They felt that since the tower of will is the hardest of all, the person who cleared must be important and might be irreceable in the journey. So, they announced to the upper society who has news about this to make sure not to make a move against the candidate who cleared the tower of will or they will be thebined enemy of all three of them. So, you don¡¯t have to worry that we will harm you." Count Falcon first exined to make Sam calm down, then he continued.

    "Actually, what we want is a favour from you. ording to the prince of the imperial family who is one of the inheritors, an inheritor can bring four people along with him. So, we are wondering, if we could use two spots." Count Falcon¡¯s voice seemed rather hesitant at the end. After all, asking for two spots is not a small matter.

    "What is your offer?" Sam asked without change in expression. But inside his brain was spinning. He didn¡¯t know that the thing about an inheritance is such big of an open secret. He didn¡¯t even see the point of being careful anymore. If something happens to him, the three organizations will make hell to the one who made a move on him. So, Sam directly went to the business. He wants to know exactly how valuable this spot for inheritance can be.

    Count Falcon and Castor are silent for a bit and gave him a number. "1 million spirit stones." But Sam was not moved by it at all. After all, he earnings were almost this much when he did some business in a subordinate city like Starwood city. Sam stood up and said.

    "Sir count and Principal. I actually have quite a good impression on both of you. But I can¡¯t agree if you want to treat me as a gullible person. Even though, I don¡¯t know exactly how valuable a spot is and the importance of this inheritance, I do no whether the 1 million spirit stones is worth is or not.

    Before you offer me, please check on my background. Earning a million is not a big deal for me at all. So, please be more sincere next time and I will only give you one spot. So, you guys decide what you want to offer and who wants to take the offer. For now, I will be taking my leave." Sam said and paid his farewells.

    Sam went to the mansion after that. He took a nice warm sleep that night. Next day early in the morning, the first thing he did was to check on the panthers. When he observed their bodily changes, not only they broke through and became level 2 beasts, there is some changes in its beast core and blood line.

    When he closely observed the situation, he realized that the fire poison is trying to merge with the beast core and the blood line.

    Sam was both excited and worried at the same time. Because, this is a great chance for the panthers to have a qualitative change in the beast core and the blood line, but he was worried if the constitution of this beasts will be able to withstand the evolution in this blood line.

    He thought about it for quite sometime and went through the information in Blood refinement and Evolution technique. "So, there is only one way." Sam got an idea. He came out of the mansion and went to the cave where Yanwu and Sky are staying.

    When he went there, he was surprised to see a number of scrolls at a corner. Watt immediately stood up and greeted him, when he entered. Both Yanwu and Sky aren¡¯t in the cave.

    Before Sam could say anything, Watt said. "The shadow mice brought these scrolls from somewhere. Yanwu said they might be useful for you." Sam nodded at his words and just as he was about to reply. Yanwu and Sky entered the cave.

    Sky is in a good state now. His feathers are shiny and he is full of vigour. When he saw Sam, the great roc was quite delighted. Sam first embraced Yanwu and then greeted Sky.

    "Sky, you might know about my contract with Yanwu." Sky nodded at the statement.

    "Actually, I can evolve your bloodline. If you are willing, I want make the same contract with you too."

    Sky nodded in consent without hesitation. Sam was also delighted and said. "I willy a formation here, which will allow your blood line to evolve to that of Sky sovereign roc. Your blood line will be of same level as Yanwu¡¯s.

    But from the amount of the blood line you possess, you might take sometime to achieve that. It may take three to five days.

    Sam said as he started writing the runes needed. The entire cave is almost filled with the runic drawings and he took the formation gs to ce them at some important nodes.

    After that he took a huge amount of wind element spirit stones from Watt and ced them at various nodes in the whole setup. After more than three hours of hard work, he was finally done.

    "Sky, since your case different from the shadow mice who only needed to clear the impurities in bloodline, you only have to absorb the wind elemental energy and let it go through the flow the formation will direct.

    The formation will deal with the rest. It will use the wind element energy by condensing it and will excite thetent potential of your bloodline. Actually, since you have the genes of the sky sovereign rock, you can directly evolve into one as long as I excite the genes with the wind element energy which is your blood line element.

    I don¡¯t need to participate in it directly. So, I hope you will endure and don¡¯t put any resistance."

    When Sam finished his words, Sky didn¡¯t reply anything and walked towards the node where he has to stay.

    Sam activated the formation and turned to Watt.

    "Do you have any problems with your cultivation?" He asked. Since, Watt is his follower now, he has to take care of him.

    "No problems at all." Watt immediately straightened his back.

    "You are at ninth stage of initiation. So, your contract time has arrived. Even though, I can afford the pills and medicines, you don¡¯t have to rely on them to cultivate in the initial stages. They might be useful intter stages, but if you use them now, you will have to face some bacsh. So, you don¡¯t have to worry about it." Sam paused and passed the spatial ring he got as prize yesterday. "They have some pills and herbs along with another 100,000 spirit stones. Go to Vickers¡¯ and exchange everything to wind element stones." He gave his instructions and turned towards the scrolls in the corner. There are almost around twenty scrolls. When Sam picked and about open a scroll.

    *squeak* *squeak* [Boss, something happened] A shadow mouse came as it shouted.

    "What happened?" Sam frowned.

    *squeak* *squeak* [Boss, Kelly is kidnapped.] Sam immediately got serious.

    "Details."

    *squeak* *squeak* [today me 1, 3,5,7 are in watch duty at the mansion and the cave. The remaining are on scout duty. 1,3 and me are in the mansion while 5,7 are here. We saw a ck figure inside mansion and we followed him. He took Kelly and ran. 1 and 3 are following them and I came here to report. They said that they wille and look for you at mansion.]

    After hearing to the details, Sam took scrolls into storage and said to Yanwu to look out for sky, before running out. Even though he wants to fly, he will only attract trouble, if he was spotted by city guards. He doesn¡¯t have permission after all.

    After some time, Sam was panting in his mansion. He is inside Kelly¡¯s room and all the people in the mansion are already gathered here. There is circr amulet like object and a note on the bed.

    There is another person inside the room. It is Hawk.

    "Sam, somebody kidnapped Kelly. They left a note that you have to contact them through the amulet." Philip said what is going on.

    Sam looked at the amulet with confusion. Then Hawk exined. "This is amunication amulet. It is a very rare articraft. Not may people in the Falcon Cliff city can own them." Sam took in Hawk¡¯s words. He took the note saying what Philip just said and then picked the amulet.

    He examined it as he sat on the bed. His face was cold and stoic. Freya and Haley are trembling in fear with the thoughts of Kelly being kidnapped and are expecting some reaction from Sam. But there is none. But nobody dared to do say anything.

    "What are you doing here?" Sam asked Hawk.

    "I am here to meet you. But when I arrived and asked for Kelly and you, we found out that she is kidnapped. I already sent news to the city guards. They might have already heard of it by now."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and yed with the amulet in his hands. Then suddenly a shadow flew andnded near Sam¡¯s feet. The members in the room are startled as they saw two mice.

    "Speak" Sam said

    *squeak* *squeak* [Boss, there are from a noble family. We don¡¯t know which family they are from. But Kelly is trapped in an underground room. She is safe. There is a total of five people other than Kelly. I don¡¯t know their cultivation levels. But there is a middle-aged man who seemed to be in charge. A girl. Three guards from the family.]

    When Sam heard this, he closed his eyes and seemed to be in deep thought. But the rest of the people in the room were shocked at his conversation with mice. But they didn¡¯t make a sound. After sometime Sam opened his eyes and asked Hawk.

    "How do I use this?" When Hawk said how to use it, Sam activated without any gap and they heard a voice from it.

    #### Haha, Artisan Sam, took you long enough to reach us. As you know your female friend is with us. So, if you want her back, you need to give something in return. ####

    "What do you want?" Sam¡¯s voice was eerily cold. The members in the room felt like they are standing n.a.k.e.d in cold breeze.

    #### Well, I heard that you have some spots for inheritance. So, out of four I need three of them. I will send someone for you to sign a blood and soul oath and then I will send your friend back. ####

    When Sam heard this, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Hawk was also surprised that someone will use this tactic to gain the spots.

    "Let me talk to her first." Sam replied and a trembling voice came through the amulet.

    "Sam." Kelly¡¯s voice was as sweet as always, but it was full of fear and anxiousness. Sam took another breath and said.

    "Kelly. I will tell you something now. Please don¡¯t interrupt me. Right now, you are in danger and that too, you are far away from me. I can¡¯t guarantee that I will save you.

    I will tell you some bitter truths. They might hit you. Torture you. Kill you. Anything can happen.

    But I want to say something which may hurt you. I am not going to give into their demands. It is not because that I think your life isn¡¯t worth the exchange, but because I think that if I indulge them now, this will only repeat again.

    I am telling you now. If I can save you from this, I will make it up to you ording to your wishes.

    If I can¡¯t save you. I will bear the guilt and atone the sin with rest of my life."

    When Sam finished his words, everyone felt their heart shudder. They felt that Sam is aplete stranger to them. They didn¡¯t expect him to take this kind of approach. Only three people other than him arepletely calm.

    Philip, Hawk and Jack. Only they understood that what Sam said is right. If it happens once, then it would happen again. This cycle will never stop.

    #### Sam, you better think it through. #### the male voice again came from the amulet. Then they heard Sam speaking.

    "I don¡¯t know exactly who you are. But before you spew a bunch of threats listen to what I have to say."

    ####Speak####

    "The thing is there are three things I hate most in my life and one of them is threatening me and you did that, Let us put it aside first.

    You guys are right now in an underground room. There are a total of five people other than Kelly. Among those five there is ady.

    You guys dared to kidnap without regarding the cityws, which means you have someone backing you up. You dared to offend not one but two artisans at third rank. Kelly¡¯s uncle and me. That means your backing is quite strong. And there is only one person who isn¡¯t afraid of the status of a Count and two rank three artisans.

    Miss Maya violet dew. The pseudo rank 4 tailor artisan in the city. The grand elder of the violet dew family, That means you are from violet dew family."

    ####You#### The voice from the amulet was about to interrupt him. But Sam cut in

    "I said listen to me didn¡¯t I." Sam took a breath and paused. He looked at the surprised and shocked faces of those in the room and turned his attention back to the amulet.

    "There are some possible scenarios which might happen.

    First one is that you will send Kelly to my mansion in one hour after ourmunication is cut and along with that you will send her you will send the heads of the people who abducted her and all the revenue for past six months in your textile business

    Second scenario is, you will just send her and don¡¯t send the remaining things I said, I will go directly to piranha and ce bounty on all the younger generation of your family and the every future generation of your family aspensation for the abduction.

    Third scenario is an interesting one. You can kill Kelly." Sam paused to see the reaction. As expected.

    #### What did you say?#### the other party sounded quite surprised. Even the people in the room felt their hearts trembling. Then Sam continued.

    "What you heard is right? You can kill her. But within an hour, if she doesn¡¯te to mansion, I will escape from the city. You might not know, but I am only 15 this year and I believe my talent is great. I will visit the city in a year or two.

    That will be the day, you will see who Sam really is.

    I will cover whole Violet dew estate like a dark cloud. You will see the blood bath you never saw in your life.

    I will make soil in the estate, the grass sprouted from the soil, nts grown over the grass, the tress towered over their nts and breeze flew through that tree and the people feeling the breeze. Everything. I will make everything reek of death.

    That day you will know that

    My sight itself will be your destruction

    My breath itself is cmity

    My call itself shows you the cruelty

    My every cell will be a grim reaper out for lives.

    But there is something special for you guys in the room. I might not know exactly who you are, but I will definitely find out and trust me, when I am done with you, you will be embracing the death like a boon and you will take a chance to visit hell as if you would get a chance to be immortal. You better make your choice."

    Sam finished his speech and turned off the amulet without waiting for a reply.

    The members in the room are looking at him as if they were looking at a stranger.

    The Sam they knew is Cold, yes but they never felt this much fear and threat from him before. Even Jack, Hawk and Philip who were calm before are now trembling. All the people are now drenched in sweat. Girls already fell on the floor as they fainted due to stress.

    On the other side of themunication amulet. Kelly suddenly became unbelievingly calm. She doesn¡¯t know why, but after listening to Sam, she felt that these people might not even dare to touch her.

    She looked at the faces of other five. They are looking pale as they were drenching in sweat. Particrly, Jessie. She felt her mouth go dry. Even the elder in charge is panicking. He really felt that Sam will do what he said. He stood up immediately but fell on the chair again as if his legs were jelly.

 Chapter 72: Info on Piranha

    Sam came out of Kelly¡¯s room and sat in the hall looking at the door.

    At the Violet dew family main mansion. The elder who threatened Sam earlier was waiting outside for an audience with the family head and the pseudo rank 4 tailor artisan Maya violet dew. Both of them are discussing something. When they came to the main hall up on the servants informing them about the elder, they saw an elder with a pale face and shivering legs, he seemed to afraid of something so much. Behind him, a youngdy who Sam met previously is standing with same scared expression on her face. She is none other than Jessie Violet dew.

    "Elder, what happened to you? Why are you in such a hurry to speak to us?" The family head asked.

    Elder looked at the family head and Maya once and took a deep breath before recounting everything that happened, word by word. He even said Sam¡¯s threat as it is without daring to downy anything at all.

    Family head and Maya has dark expressions as they heard the whole story. Maya is seemingly more pissed than the family head and when thetter saw that expression, he got increasingly tensed and threw a p to the elder¡¯s face.

    Then Maya spoke. "Family head, seems like what I said in the previous meeting doesn¡¯t reach the brains of the family members. My artisan status is something that I purely got by my hard work and the Violet dew family has nothing to do with it. I only came to the family back because, I don¡¯t want to unfilial and forget my roots. That is why I came to select a disciple from the family.

    But seems like the family will never change, your subordinates are even daring enough to threaten a young pseudo rank 3 Artisan and kidnapped the niece of a rank 3 Artisan. I don¡¯t know that they are this daring. If I don¡¯t receive a proper exnation, my disciple will also cut all the ties with the family after she enters my tutge." After she finished her piece, she left immediately.

    Family head threw another p across the elder¡¯s face and kicked the other party continuously.

    "Do you even know what you are doing? Do you think just because Maya has ast name as Violet Dew, you can use her name as you seem fit? She doesn¡¯t owe the family anything on the contrary the family owes her everything. We are lucky enough that she is not using her status against our family. What do you think you are doing by threatening a genius like that and even worse, the other party even knew who is threatening him? Making an enemy out of a genius like that." Then he turned towards Jessie and said coldly.

    "Jessie, as you are part of younger generation, I will not punish you. But let me give you an advice. As long as you keep following your father¡¯s methods and keep throwing your weight around, you will hit a hard steel eventually and this time is only one example." After that he turned back to the Elder and said.

    "Fulfil all his requests and don¡¯t try to y any tricks. You will personally go and handover all the things he asked and beg for his forgiveness. You are going to invite him to a meal after the banquet at the Count mansion is over. If you aren¡¯t able to make it, you are going to be revoked from your status and you are going to serve as a shop keeper. Now get lost." Family held his head as he walked away. He is going to find Maya. He has to coax her to make sure that she doesn¡¯t take any hasty decisions in a whim.

    Sam waited for more than half an hour. He just kept on looking at the door. Nobody in the house dared to sit along with him. They just stood afar from him also watching the door.

    Suddenly, there was a knocking sound from the door. Sam opened the door and saw Kelly standing there along with a middle-aged man and Jessie standing behind him. There is a wooden box which has a faint blood scent to it.

    Kelly immediately leapt into his embrace as soon she saw him. She sobbed continuously. Sam felt his westpletely soaked and showed no signs of stopping anytime soon.

    Sam put his hands around her lightly and let her cry in his embrace. He felt guilty up on seeing her face turning red from crying. The Elder and Jessie didn¡¯t dare to interrupt them.

    After she calmed down a little, she let go of Sam and stood by the side. Sam finally took a look at the Elder and sized him up. The Elder is atte stage Novice. When he looked at Jessie, his impression of her worsened a lot.

    The Elder first opened the box and found three heads in it and he passed a spatial ring to Sam.

    "Sir, Sam. I am the one responsible for everything happened today and I realize my mistake. I hope you will be magnanimous and don¡¯t stoop to my level and ept my apology." The Elder said as he passed the ring.

    Sam took the ring and ced it in his pocket. He didn¡¯t reply the whole time and just looked at the Elder coldly. The atmosphere became awkward and the Elder said again.

    "Sir, Sam. Will you please ept our apology ande to our family to ept our reception?"

    Sam didn¡¯t reply to the question and said. "I don¡¯t want to see you two near my mansion. If I see you two again, I will go straight to Piranha to ce a bounty on your heads. Try me if you want. As for your reception, I am already surprised by how a family with esteemed rank 4 artisan behaves. I never thought that an artisan with such esteemed status will let an idiot like you to use the status like that. I don¡¯t want to see any other reception from your family. Get lost."

    He closed the door right on their faces and walked towards the hall where everyone is waiting. The girls pulled Kelly to their side and started consoling her. After everyone calmed down a bit, they finally looked at Sam. They don¡¯t know, how to talk to him now. Never did they expect that they will see, Sam a kid who is same age as us, even younger by a few months can make a threat like that. They felt chills run down their spine and hearts trembling.

    They were afraid of what happened.

    Sam looked at them and took a deep breath before he spoke.

    "I don¡¯t know how you feel about me. But one thing I can tell you is, that this is the real me. All of you didn¡¯t know this part of me because, there was a never a situation like this before.

    Kelly." He called Kelly and looked straight in to her eyes. Kelly looked at the handsome face and deep ck eyes which are very familiar yet at this instance felt very strange. She only came out of the daze when Sam continued.

    "I am really sorry for what happened to you today. I don¡¯t know if you will forgive me and neither will I request you to forgive me. You have every right to be angry and hate me. But if there is any way I can make it up to what happened today, please tell me. As long as I am alive and the whatever you want is within my capabilities, I will do it. You can request it from me anytime you want. For now, please take this as a small token of sincerity."

    Sam passed the spatial ring sent over by the Violet dew family to Kelly. She took it dazedly and looked as Sam went back to his room.

    Sam sat in his study as he took a deep breath to calm his thoughts. He really doesn¡¯t want to face Kelly right now. Even though he is cold and ruthless, he really can¡¯t ept an unrted innocent life in risk to get something out of him. If he gave in to them earlier, he was pretty sure that the demands will keep on increasing. That is why he has to be that ruthless.

    Sam calmed himself down and took out all the scrolls shadow mice collected and ced them on the table. He took a scroll and opened it to read its content. When he was done reading it, he took a deep breath at the revtion. He understood clearly what these scrolls are. These are the scrolls containing orders. These orders are given to the boss of piranha, from their immediate superior and Sam was struck dumb because of who the superior is.

    "JACK!!!" Sam shouted on top of his lungs. Jack came to his room hurriedly only to see Sam pointing him to read the scrolls. When he was reading the scrolls, his eyes widened again and again due to the details.

    Meanwhile, Kelly and Hawk are sitting in the hall. Hawk didn¡¯t know what to say as he looked at the fragile beautiful girl with such tired and haggard expression. After sometime, he took a deep breath before he asked.

    "Are you okay, Kelly?" Kelly looked at him with a sweet smile on her sad face. After all, she is just a young girl and going through a kidnapping experience is not something to be happy about. But she is still trying to smile as much as she can. Looking at her effort to look strong, Hawk continued.

    "I am really sorry. I didn¡¯t know that the city guards are thatx. As the son of the count I really feel ashamed. I will consult my father and give you and Sam an exnation."

    "Thank you." Kelly replied weekly.

    "I have another thing to say." Hawk spoke and took out a bunch of invitations from his storage ring. Among the bunch there are four invitations which are different and seemed more elegant. He ced them on table and said.

    "My father is hosting a banquet at the Count mansion in a week. These are the invitations for you all. All the participants are invited along with the supervisors. The invitations for them were already sent to the inn they were staying in. There I learnt you address from your Principal. There will be a ball, so it is better toe with a partner. I don¡¯t know if Sam will meet me after all that happened. So, I will leave. Please, pass on the invitations to others and I really hope you wille. Bye."

    Kelly took the invitations and started distributing them. She saw that the four special invites are for people who are in top 10. And there are four people in top 10 from their Starwood city.

    Sam, Jack, Philip and herself all four of them are in top 10.

    In Sam¡¯s study. Both Sam and Jack are almost done with scrolls. Their expression turned heavy. Not only the scrolls contained information of Piranha and its orders from superior. There are also list of members in the organisation and the sister organisations other than piranha they have dealings with. The sheer number of the members, establishments and everything involved made their heart beat faster. And the main thing that surprised Sam most was, his suspicion was real.

    ck pond is the branch of ck water in Falcon Cliff city. And what surprised him even more is that the two organisations that are ruling the underworld of the Falcon cliff city, the piranha and Candiru are both the underlings of the ck pond.

    Thework and the members established by these organisations ran too deep in the city. Now, he understood why the Count left the organisations alone.

    The informationwork that they are maintaining is enough to make one fear them.

    Jack and Sam stayed silent for a long while.

 Chapter 73: Second Contract

    Jack finally heaved a sigh and asked Sam. "What should we do now?"

    "Don¡¯t ask me. The revenge is yours. I am only here to assist you and for a share in the riches. If you want continue on the revenge, I will help you. If you want to back down, that¡¯s it." Sam replied in a calm tone.

    Jack pondered for a few minutes and said. "Do you have a n?" Sam smiled at the question and replied.

    "After two days, we will meet here and I will tell you the n. Meanwhile, you go and buy some ck clothes, mask and other stuff to disguise ourselves." Both of them stood up and walked out. When they opened the bedroom door, they saw Kelly standing there holding two cards in her hands. When she saw Jack is also there, her expression became awkward.

    Jack was also puzzled over her reaction and looked at her in a confused gaze, not understanding the situation at all. Then Philip who was hiding in a corner came out and said with a scowl on his face.

    "Jack, I have something to talk about." Jack excused himself and walked towards Philip.

    "What do you want to talk about?" Jack asked. Philip rolled his eyes and said.

    "I never thought you are so dense." Then he dragged him away. Kelly heaved a sigh of relief and took a look at Sam before handing over one of the invitation cards. Sam took it and opened it while hearing Kelly speak.

    "Hawk gave this invitation. There is a banquet in a week at the Count mansion." Her voice was sweet as always.

    "Thank you." Sam thanked her and looked at her faint smile. He still felt guilty about what happened, so he wasn¡¯t able to meet her eye directly. Then Kelly herself spoke first.

    "Sam, you said you will do anything to make it up to me right?" Sam was surprised for a second before nodding his head. Then she continued.

    "I have something to ask you." Kelly said as she lowered her head. Then she continued. "Will you take me as your partner to the banquet?" When Sam heard this, he was stupefied for a second.

    Never did he expect that the request Kelly would make will be one like this. She could have asked for anything. After all, Kelly is not dumb enough to not understand Sam¡¯s future prospects. She could use this promise to get a lot in the future, but she is asking for him to bring her as a date. He doesn¡¯t even know what to say.

    "Are you sure Kelly?" Sam asked again.

    "Yes." Kelly replied resolutely.

    Sam sighed and said. "You don¡¯t have to use my promise like this. I will still take you as my date for that night. You should use this promise for something better. Who knows, may be in the future, I can even gift the whole empire to you if you ask." Sam said a little jokingly. Both of them walked downstairs. While Kelly went back to her room and Sam walked out of the mansion.

    After a while, he entered Vickers¡¯ shop. He saw the middle-aged man with his mischievous expression sitting on a chair at the counter as if he was awaiting his visit.

    "Oh, if it isn¡¯t my favourite customer." Vickers said as soon as he saw Sam.

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and just walked towards the counter. Before Vickers could speak, he said.

    "I want the Crystal Bamboo nts." Sam directly made his request, without making any other statements. He still felt wary of this weird man and he didn¡¯t really want to spend time with this guy.

    "May, I know why you want them?" Vickers¡¯ asked with a grin. He was curious as to what Sam is going to do with them. He is keeping a close eye on Sam since he came to his shop for the first time and he has a vague idea on what Sam¡¯s goal is. But he didn¡¯t know what Sam is going to do with the Crystal bamboos. But Sam didn¡¯t give him the answer and only stayed silent.

    "Okay, then. How many do you want?" Vickers resigned to himself that there will be no answer.

    "As many as you can get. There is no upper limit. When are they going to be ready?"

    "Come back in tomorrow." Sam immediately left after he got his answer.

    He went to the cave and saw that Sky is still undergoing the evolution. Yanwu is watching over Sky, while Watt and Falck are cultivating.

    When Sam saw Watt, he was a bit surprised. "You broke through?" Sam asked but he knew for sure that is the fact.

    Watt opened his eyes and looked at Sam with excitement. He immediately stood up and said. "Yes, boss. I broke-through. I am a Level 1 Acolyte now." Sam could hear the sense of achievement from Watt¡¯s voice. He nodded in satisfaction and said.

    "Take a break for today. After Sky¡¯s evolution is done, you will stay with me. We are going to leave this cave. As for the martial techniques, you don¡¯t have to worry about that. I have some minor tasks to do. After that, I will train you personally. Now, go and buy yourselves some exquisite cloths and have some fun." Sam said as he passed over a load of spirit stones. Watt took them and left along with Falck.

    Sam then brought out the Panther from the Dimension. The panthers arerge, that they are at least four times of normal panthers on earth. When they saw Yanwu, they immediately forgot their size and immediately leapt towards him. After ying around for a bit, all of them calmed down.

    Sam then started taking measurements of the panthers. Along their legs, necks etc. After he was done with the measurements, he took out a piece of paper and started drawing something.

    Time passed, and at night, Watt returned with some food. He was surprised to see two big panthers in the cave, but the surprise vanished after he saw them acting like cute kittens with Sam. Purring and scratching to get Sam¡¯s attention.

    Two towering beast which are far taller than Sam, acting like that made a really funny scene. That night, Sam spent in the cave. He missed Yanwu a lot as he was busy with all the tournament.

    Next day morning, Sam went to the city on a shopping spree. He went to all the shops that do business with metals and ores and bought three types of metals, not leaving a single piece in the shops. Even the Artisan tower was emptied of these materials. The first one fire bronze, a grade 3 material. The second one is Purple gold and the final item is Ink steel both of them grade 2 materials.

    Sam bought these for two purposes. First one is that he needs to make some armour for the panthers. Second one is that he has a n to make a new toy and this is especially important against dealing with this ck pond.

    After, he was done with the metals, he went on another shopping spree. This time though, he bought herbs which are used for making pills and potions. But Sam didn¡¯t just buy the herbs of fire or wind element. Instead, he bought herbs of almost all elements avable. By the end of the day, he bought herbs rted to fire, wind, water, wood, dark attribute. He even bought all the herbs which have neutral attribute. But one thing that ismon in all these herbs is that they all affects such as recovering the spiritual energy, increasing the cultivation speed, purifying the spiritual energy.

    All the pharmacies in the whole city were filled with joy while the people who were need of these herbs are frustrated. But Sam didn¡¯t care any of them and just bought all the things he needed, before he went to Vickers¡¯ shop.

    "Are my crystal bamboo nts ready?" Sam asked as soon as he entered the shop.

    "Here. Take a look. There are around 120 bamboo nts." Vickers¡¯ passed a pouch towards Sam. This is one of the inventions of the schr artisan. This is called a "Flora space." It is used to store the live nts.

    Sam took the pouch and checked the space with the spiritual sense and after confirming that there are 120, he asked the price.

    "12000 spirit stones." Sam passed the amount and went back to the cave. He then checked his finances and smiled bitterly. He was only left with 200000 spirit stones. He really spent a lot in these few days. He then made up his mind that he needs to find a way to earn some spirit stones as soon as possible.

    He looked at Sky who is still in the middle of the formation. He sensed that the aura of the roc changedpletely. It turned to more primordial, more tyrannical, more supreme than before. He also saw the changes in the feathers which had a new found l.u.s.tre to them.

    "Seems, like the process is faster than I thought. Sky might be ready by morning." Sam mumbled and leaned over a wall to sleep.

    *Caw* *Caw* [Sam wake up, Wake up.]

    Sam woke up by Yanwu¡¯s call. It is still dawn.

    *Caw* *Caw* [Sam, Sky is finished evolving]

    Sam immediately came out of his daze. He immediately looked at the formation. There was a huge roc standing with its head held high as it spread its wings. The brown feathers have a faint golden l.u.s.tre to them. The Sky sovereign roc is standing there majestically.

    When Sam woke up. He rubbed his head to Sam¡¯s body meekly to show his gratitude. *screech* [Thank you Sam].

    Sam heard Sky thanking him. He patted his head with a smile.

    After that, Sam took a step back and started making some hand seals as he chanted something. After a while, a rune appeared out of Sam¡¯s body and flew towards Sky.

    Sky stood there with his eyes closed. When the rune neared it, something seemed to be activated inside his body, soon a rune which simr to the one came out of Sam¡¯s body came out of Sky¡¯s body and shot towards Sam.

    Both of them just stood there as the runes entered each other¡¯s body. Both of them felt their energies merging together and increasing at the same time.

    After a while, Yanwu joined from the side and three of them formed a triangle. Sam stood like a node.

    Inside Sam¡¯s body the transparent spiritual core in which there are two wisps of one golden me and a golden light, there was a condensation of spiritual energy as a small tornado formed, indicating the wind element. At the same time, there was exchange between three of them. The wind element energy from Sky entered Sam¡¯s body and converted into fire and light elements before going to Yanwu.

    The fire and light elemental energies entered from Yanwu converted into wind elemental energy and entered into Sky¡¯s body.

    Watt and Falck both looked at the trio as they opened their wide open. Both of them are absolutely stunned, they didn¡¯t know what is going on between the trio, but they knew that something amazing is going on. Watt could faintly tell that three are bing a single entity right now. They seemed to be connected.

    After some time, all three of them broke through. Sam became a Novice while the two beasts became Level 3 beasts.

    There was a surge of energy wave that spread over all the Falcon Cliff making all the beasts bow down as they turned towards the direction of Cave.

    They noticed the superior aura of Yanwu and Sky and are paying their respects to them obediently. They are acknowledging their superior by prostrating themselves.

    The three of them opened their eyes at same time, feeling a surge of new found energy.

    "AHHHHH..."

    *CAAWWW*

    *SCRREEEEECHHHHH*

    One man and two beasts looked upwards as they roared in unison.

 Chapter 74: First step in plan

    Sam and the rest calmed down after a while, and he sat cross-legged in order to examine his new abilities. He spread out a hand to control the air around. He concentrated on the surrounding wind and condensed it until it was visible to the n.a.k.e.d eye. He started controlling it along with his finger¡¯s movements. But it was pretty difficult and is taking him a lot of concentration.

    Then he dispersed the wind, he closed his eyes and activated his observing ability. From his senses he could see the air around him inpletely different way. He could see the air in the form of the mixture of the various gases. Even though he couldn¡¯t actually see it, he could sense the different gas particles and differentiate if he concentrated.

    Sam closely observed the air he was breathing in and out. What he was trying to do is that if he can identify the different gases in the air and the first gas, he could think of was oxygen. When he looked at the air he breathed in andpared it with the air he breathed out, he could sense that certain gas is missing and he wanted to identify it. After some trails, he was unable to differentiate the gas and finally gave up.

    ¡¯Maybe I should increase my mental power and try it again after increasing my concentration level.¡¯ Sam thought inwardly and stood up. He then looked at Watt and said. "Change your dress, we are going home."

    After a while, Sam is back at the mansion. This is the day when he has to discuss ns with Jack. He brought along Watt and Falck. While Yanwu and Sky both are in the Divine Dimension along with two panthers.

    "Pick any room which is empty." Sam said to Watt and after thetter decided on a room, he took him to his study.

    After a while, Jack came and sat across the table.

    "Who is this?" Jack asked as he pointed at Watt. But Watt didn¡¯t bother to reply. He stood behind Sam with his back straight.

    "He is my subordinate." Jack didn¡¯t think much after Sam¡¯s reply and asked.

    "What is the n?"

    "The strength of the ck Pond is beyond our limits. We can forget about fighting head on. What we can do is use some under the table means to deal with them. Theirbined strength is that they have 500 Acolytes, 100 Novices and in which 68 of them are in early stages, 20 middle stage, 8te stage and the remaining four at the peak stage.

    Thest and the main strength of the ck pond is that they have a Great Mage at early stage. The in charge of the ck Pond restaurant." Sam recited all this info in a single breath. This is the info in the scrolls that were stolen by the shadow mice. He doesn¡¯t know why this kind of info was written in the scrolls but be was d that there was written. He took a breath and then continued.

    "Among these members the Acolytes arepletely used for information. They arepletely oblivious who they are really working for. They are working for either the Piranha of Candiru. They don¡¯t know the existence of their superior named ck Pond or ck water.

    The Acolytes are spread all over the city. They are some inn workers, restaurant owners, hooligans, students in the academy, workers in some families etc. They have most normal jobs possible.

    The early stage novices are a bit spread over in the upper circle, while they still take tasks from the Piranha and Candiru. They knew that both are abined organisation but still oblivious of the ck Pond. The middle stage andte stage novices are the ones who are mostly management staff of the organisation. They are responsible for taking tasks, managing the brothels, trade of the ves etc.

    The Peak stage novices are direct subordinates of the Leader who is the Great mage and are four over lookers of the organisation." When Sam finished saying this, Jack was a bit confused on why he is saying all this and Watt was surprised. He never thought that there is such a huge organisation running under noses of the Count. Sam then looked at Watt as if to observetter¡¯s reaction.

    Jack then only understood that Sam is saying the information for Watt. After a few seconds of silence, Sam continued.

    "First, we will target the Acolytes who are working in restaurants and inns or other settlements. We will leave those people who are in the families and academy. We will only target only those in the city and particrly, those who infiltrated the gangs. We are going to take them out.

    We will take care of them region after region. We will only act at night. After we are done with this, we will take next step."

    Sam finished saying as he looked at Jack. Jack thought for a moment and asked.

    "What region are we taking on tonight?"

    "Eastern region. But before that we have something else to do." Sam said and stood up. He took out a bundle of scrolls and gave them to Watt and instructed.

    "Take them to the Artisan tower and assign tasks to make them. No matter how many artisans it takes, I need them to be ready by tomorrow. Do you have enough spirit stones to pay up?"

    Watt nodded and immediately went out. He left Falck in his room and immediately went to the Artisan tower.

    "We have to make a visit to piranha." Sam said as went out along with Jack. After a while, both of them are at the door step of the restaurant in which Eisen ced a bounty on Sam¡¯s panthers.

    Both of them walked towards a remote private room and knocked three times on the door. After the same knocking was heard from inside, both of them went in. Sam and Jack took seat in front of a person who ispletely covered in ck clothes and a face mask.

    "What is the task?" The ck figure asked.

    "I need some beasts." Sam passed him a note and said.

    When thetter looked at the beasts inside the note, he took a look at Sam again as he sized him up.

    "Alive or dead?"

    "Alive."

    "50,000 spirit stones." The ck figure said after some thinking. Sam immediately took out a leather bag and paid up.

    "There will be ready by tomorrow." The ck figure immediately replied after epting the payment.

    Both Jack and Sam stood up and walked towards the door. Before he left Sam said. "Deliver them to my mansion. I believe you guys know the address."

    After they went out, Jack asked. "What is in the list?" He couldn¡¯t hold back his curiosity. After all, their aim is to destroy Piranha and here Sam is giving them a task to earn his money.

    "Green mist toad, brown fang snake, ck strip spider, three tail scorpion..." Sam listed out some names. Jack was shocked as he heard the names. Even though, he doesn¡¯t know about all the beasts in the list, he knew some of them. All of them have one thing inmon. They are all extremely venomous and poisonous. The venoms and poisons are so potent that even Novices can¡¯t escapepletely unscathed.

    "what do you need all of these for?" Jack asked as he looked at Sam with widened eyes. But he only got a smile in reply. On their way back to mansion both of them didn¡¯t speak at all.

    That night, both Sam and Jack came out of the mansion silently. They came to the back yard only to see two huge birds. One is Sky and another one is a whirl wind falcon simr to Falck. Sam has sent Sky out to get this bird.

    He pointed the whirl wind falcon and said to Jack. "That would be your ride for the night. Take this note. These are your targets for today. Make it as soon as possible." He said as he boarded Sky and went away flying.

    Jack didn¡¯t feel much surprised about Sam having more beasts. He boarded the Falcon and he also went away.

    That night, the eastern region of the city, fell into chaos. Particrly, many gang members of the Eastern gang are found dead in many areas. Other than that, some inns and restaurants are left on fire or copsedpletely.

    The Eastern gang and the city guards on duty were all given a huge shock. The killings are very fast and swift. Nobody, knew who the killer is. But all they could see is that the killer came on a bird type beast and killed the target without any words and left silently.

    The City guards immediately went to confront the eastern gang in the middle of night. They thought that the Eastern gang is responsible for this. Because, this didn¡¯t seem like revenge at all. It is more like, wrecking the business and when the guards enquired further, they thought that these shops might be some who rejected to pay the protection fee. The corpses of some of the eastern gang members near the settlements only gave them more assurance on their thoughts as they thought these members might be casualties in the confrontation to between the shop owners and the gang.

    Sam and Jack finished the job as quickly as possible and came back to the mansion. The two birds immediately disappeared as soon as theynded giving Jack a huge scare. But he didn¡¯t question Sam and kept his curiosity to himself.

    Next day, the news of deaths waspletely spread among the masses. All of them also believed the conjecture of the city guards. They felt that this issue is caused by the gang themselves. But only three people knew the conjecture was entirely wrong. They are Jack, Sam and the Novice in charge of supervising the intel given by the acolytes. He waspletely shocked when he saw that more than seventy five percent of the Acolytes in the Eastern region dead.

    He clearly knew about the acolytes who died are all in the same team. That is why he is fl.u.s.tered. After all, killing these acolytes means that the other party knew about the organisation. If he didn¡¯t find who targeted them, the higher ups will definitely deal with him.

    So, he didn¡¯t report the news to the higher ups immediately and wanted to investigate. But all leads disappeared with only one result. The killer is on a bird type beast.

    Meanwhile, the perpetrators are resting in a mansion.

    Sam was quite busy today. He has a day full of ns he needs to do.

    Watt went to Artisan tower to receive the items he ordered yesterday. While, his yard was now filled with all kinds of venomous beasts. All of them are delivered by the people from Piranha. They were locked with restriction ced on them and were sealed.

    Sam went in to the yard and took them all inside the divine dimension and went back to his room. After instructing that no one shoulde and disturb him, he went to the second floor of the tower.

    Sam is looking at the various beasts which are varying quantities. He took out some wats and started collecting all the venom of the beasts. For example, he extracted the venom from the fangs of snakes, he fleeced the skin of the Green mist toad which is extremely poisonous, the poison sack of the three tailed scorpions. He collected the venoms separately in various wats.

    After the process ispleted, he took out a cauldron and mixed the venoms in it with a slight me below. He closed the lid and left it on the me without doing anything. He stayed like that until everything in the cauldron came to liquid state.

    He just ced the lid like that and just stopped applying the heat through fire.

    When he came out Watt already came back from the Artisan tower. Sam took the parts and went to the bas.e.m.e.nt of the mansion, to where both Jack and Watt followed.

    He started assembling the machine under the surprised and confused gazes of the both of them. By the time he was done, it was already afternoon.

 Chapter 75: Preparations

    Sam was done assembling the machine and is examining if is working properly. The machine is a manual pressing machine.

    A pressing machine is used for creating things from sheet metals. The machines which are operated by hydraulic power are used for making the frames for cars and other automobiles. Therge-scale ones are even used in making some parts of aircrafts.

    Manual pressing machine is a small- scale version which operates with human effort. These manual pressing machines are used for making things which are small and doesn¡¯t need much precision in dimensions.

    What Sam has in front of him is a manual pressing machine, but it is a bitrger in size. Basically, the manual pressing machines will be small enough to be used by humans directly, because the effort that can be applied from the human hands is limited and cannot be used to make any big objects.

    But Sam¡¯s manual pressing machine is ofrge size. It is as big as a hydraulic press in model world. Why did he make it in this size though? Because, the humans here can make the effort required to operate this machine.

    The machine has two columns on both sides which are mounted on a solid metal bed. The bed doesn¡¯t only support the columns, it also has a work holding device which is also a die. A die in this machine is like a mould. It has a shape which the final product is required to be made.

    Then there would be upper die which is the opposite shape of the lower die. It is movable and the columns act as guideways for its vertical movement.

    There is a wheel on top of whole frame. It is parallel to the ground. When the wheel is rotated, the upper die is moving down and when it is rotated in opposite direction, the upper die will move upwards.

    The upper and lower dies will be in such a shape that if one has a cylindrical hollow, then the other will have a cylindrical protrusion with almost same dimensions. The dies if put together will be a fit.

    So, when a sheet metal piece is ced in between both of them and force is applied to the dies, the sheet metal will be turned into the shape in which the dies are designed.

    For example, if the dies are with cylindrical protrusion and hollow. The final product will be in shape simr to that of cylindrical cup. This operation is also called drawing operation.

    After making sure that the machine is alright, Sam took out a sheet of fire bronze from his storage. Why is the fire bronze being in sheet form? That is because, the fire bronze is a metal which is soft and is mainly used for making the metallic covers. It has a good affinity with fire elemental energy. Since, the metal doesn¡¯t have any major properties in suitable for making direct weapons and armours and only for making some auxiliary products, the artisans aren¡¯t willing to make much effort to make refine the ore directly.

    That is why, the artisan tower will let the young artisan apprentices practice their fire control by refining this type of ores and they will sell them in these processed forms.

    Sam took a circr piece which he had already cut previously and ced it on the work piece holder. Then he held the wheel and started rotating it. The upper die started moving and soon the deformation of the small sheet metal started.

    Sam withdrew the upper die and removed the metal piece on the work holder. Now the work piece is in a shape of small cylindrical metal cup.

    The metal cup has four inches diameter and the depth is one inch.

    He turned towards Watt and Jack before taking out a big sheet of fire bronze. There are several circr markings on the sheet.

    "Both of you have only one thing to do till the evening. Cut out the pieces off of the sheet and use the machine to make these hollow cups.

    After one sheet is done. Rece the dies with another set. There is another sheet with different dimensions and you have to make them also in the same way. If you find any problem with the machine, you can find me."

    After saying his piece, Sam went away without even looking back. Jack and Watt exchanged a look and started working. At first, they really felt interesting. Making a shape out of the sheet with a single press. Even though the machine is very different and they haven¡¯t seen that before, they felt that it is quite efficient. But after sometime, they felt bored to do the same thing again and again.

    Meanwhile, Sam went to the room and entered the divine dimension. He took out the crystal bamboo nts and started nting them in various elemental zones. These crystal bamboo nts are quite unique in nature. They actually, don¡¯t have any special characteristics. They are of neutral by nature, but if they were grown in a ce abundant of fire elemental energy, they will change colour and gain characteristics of fire elemental energy. Then that bamboo can be used for short term preservation of fire elemental consumables.

    These crystal bamboos are mainly used to serve wine with spiritual energy. That means, the fire elemental spiritual wine, can be served in a fire elemental crystal bamboo and the effects of the wine will be preserved and wouldn¡¯t be dissipated for a certain amount of time. The bamboos will lose these effects after they are removed from the tree.

    Right now, Sam is in a corner of the neutral zone in the divine dimension where he nted ten bamboo nts. He dug a hole near the nts and buried all the carcasses of the poisonous beasts. Heid a formation to supply abundant spiritual energy to them. Generally, these crystal bamboos will grow very fast. They will reach their full limit in just twenty days and for Sam it will be done is ten days.

    Sam came out of the dimension and started preparing for tonight.

    When the night came, two birds soared in sky and created a sleepless night to all the guards in the Western region. The Novice supervisor of the ck pond, felt like his world copsing. In a single night all the informationwork of the ck pond in the western region is gone. Now, he also joined the search along with the supervisor of Eastern region.

    But this time the matter isn¡¯t simple, the superiors of the supervisors also got alerted and came to a conclusion that someone is targeting them. When the matter is taken to the manager of the ck pond, he immediately became alert and fl.u.s.tered.

    "How can they get the details of members? Even if they have a spy, no one in the organisation know all the details of the members. How can they know these details?" A middle-aged man is shouting in the highest floor of the ck pond restaurant. This man is precisely the one who offered the VIP card to Sam when he visited.

    Before him, there are four Novice peak stage cultivators are standing with their heads held down. There are three men and a woman. All of them are wearing ck clothes. After the manager went silent, the woman spoke.

    "Boss, even we don¡¯t know theplete details of members. We only deal with our respective regions. You are the only one who knew all the details and if you don¡¯t tell them yourself, there is only one way for them to get these details." When she was finished, the manager opened his eyes wide.

    "No, they can¡¯t." He immediately stood up and went to the room next door. He went inside and opened another secret door in which there are a few racks with scrolls. He went through a shelf and screamed in rage.

    "NOOOOOOOOO..."

    He immediately came back to the room and looked at the four people with rage filled eyes.

    "They stole our monthly report. Apart from us five there is no other person who knows where the monthly report is. Who is the spy?"

    When the four people heard the manager¡¯s words they immediately panicked. They didn¡¯t dare to react to deny first. Instead, they just stood there in silence. After a brief silence, the manger spoke again.

    "I am giving you a week time. You better investigate who the spy is. Otherwise, I will kill all four of you." His voice was cold and ruthless.

    "Yes, Boss." Four of them immediately said in unison and left.

    At the same moment, both Sam and Jack are sitting in the study and are talking to each other.

    "We aren¡¯t going to do anything in the next few days. Right now, the whole organisation will be in a mess. They might have found out about the missing scrolls and they will be investigating. They will be busy in investigating and restructuring the organisation. They will be even be in high alert for our next attack. So, we will not do anything for now. We will proceed after the banquet is over." Sam said while Jack nodded in understanding.

    "Shadow mice." Sam called over.

    Three small shadows floated over and came onto the table.

    "Next two days, you guys will be in charge of finding the meeting spots of these Novices. I need the details regarding on what times they will be holding these meetings."

    After he was done, he sent Jack and went to his room to enter the divine dimension. In the second floor there a more than hundred cylindrical cups which, both Jack and Watt made. He looked at them helplessly.

    Then he started drawing runes on the floor. He needs to inscribe all of them. When he was done with the first inscription, he said to himself.

    "I should master etching as soon as possible." Then he continued drawing another inscription circle.

    Sam spent all the time in the tower for ten days. That means one day has passed outside and night came again.

    Sam came out of the tower and went to the crystal bamboos where he buried the carcasses near. The crystal bamboos are already grown to a considerable size.

    Sam took out the cauldron with the poisonous mixture he made and retrieved a huge wat of liquor.

    Then he made a small hole in a bamboo section, he ced a small normal bamboo tube and started pouring the poisonous liquid in it. After the section was half full, he observed some resistance and he used the wind energy to remove the remaining air from the section and forced the liquor into it.

    After that, he stuffed the hole with some green leaves.

    What Sam is doing is using a Chinese technique, to age a liquor in the bamboo to get a unique taste. But he is using this technique to create a liquor of poison.

    After one section is done, he started filling other sections in same manner.

    When he was finally over with this task. He went back to the inscription work. He went on and on with the same inscriptions again and again. He only finished when there is only one day left for the banquet.

    Sam went to look at the bamboo sections and started collecting the liquor. All the time, he tried his best to control the wind around him to not get infected from the fumes.

    After collecting all the liquor into a wat, he went upstairs into the second floor of the tower and looked at the two piles of cylindrical cups. He felt exhausted at the thought of what he has to do now. He only has ten days after all.

 Chapter 76: Going to Banquet

    The ten days are of course, in the dimension.

    Sam took out a sheet of fire bronze, he took out the make shift ws he made for temporary use and wore the one for right hand.

    He spread the sheet of fire bronze open and ced the tip of the w near one edge. He forcefully cut a small line of fire bronze with the w.

    He used a small bamboo pipe as a support and bent the wire on it in such a way that after some time, a small spring was in his hands.

    He repeated the same method and made several springs. After that job was done, he took a cylindrical cup from each pile.

    In one nce both the cups seemed to be of same size, but if carefully observed, one would realize that one cup is a little bit smaller than the other.

    The dimensions are in such a way that, the inner diameter of the big cup is equal to the outer diameter of the small cup.

    There are various types of runic symbols on both the cups and the symbols are so dense andplex too.

    He picked up the bigger cup. There is a thin L shaped slit on the curved surface. The smaller cup has a small protrusion on one end.

    Sam ced the spring and welded one end on the inner side of the big cup. He took the smaller cup and ced it inside the bigger cup, the cavities of both cups will face each other and the protrusion will enter the L shaped slit. He applied force so that the spring wouldpress then he ced his finger on the outer side of the smaller cup. The spot is exactly where the spring end would be inside.

    He started heating the spot, the metal went soft and started melting. Just before the metal will drip and form a hole, he stopped, but the spring end already formed a bond.

    After the joint cooled off, he made a hole on the curved surface area and started pouring the poisonous liquor inside it, until it was full.

    After Sam ced his palm over therger cup and rotated it. The protrusion on the smaller cup which just entered the slit vertically, moved horizontally. He took out a piece of metal wire of ced the wire, in the small hole, which he made on the small protrusion.

    Sam stood up andid a restricting formation a distance away, then he took out the small wire piece which is acting as pin, for holding the cup from rotating backwards in its ce and immediately threw it inside the formation, while he ran away from it.

    In a few seconds, a small explosion sound came and a smoke full of poison filled the restriction formation, Sam controlled the tower¡¯s second floor and eliminated the smoke before working.

    He is repeating the same thing he did and created several of these. But he didn¡¯t use them like before and just kept them aside.

    These are the things he wanted to use against the ck pond. Actually, what he is using is a simple make shift hand grenade which depends on the spring.

    When he rotated the cups, the spring will also rotate and will have try to push them back to their original ce. But the small pin made of wire, is holding it there. When the pin is removed the cups will move back to the original position, where there will be a hole appearing on the curved surface, through which, he filled it with liquor.

    After a few seconds the liquor will catch a fire and the poisonous fumes will being out of the hole, with an explosion.

    How is the liquor catching the fire? That is the reason the runes are for.

    Sam ced an inscribed formation which is responsible for collecting the spiritual energy in surroundings, he made the inscription bybining the two cups. The first half of the inscription is on the bigger cup and other half is on the smaller cup. When both halves aligned, the formation will activate.

    The formation will gain its aligned form, after the pin is removed. As for why, the formation didn¡¯t activate when pouring the liquor, it is due to the fact that Sam¡¯s actions are fast and didn¡¯t give enough time for the formation to fully activate.

    Then for the next step. After the formation is activated, it will direct the spiritual energy to the consumable inscription which wasid inside of cavity of the cup. It is a ming inscription.

    The spiritual energy gathered through the formation will activate the ming inscription which burns the liquor.

    Sam actually, didn¡¯t want to make this poison liquor. But the liquor is the only way to burn it faster and spread the poison easily.

    If not for the fact that there is no time, he wouldn¡¯t use these methods to deal with them. And time is not there because, Sam needs to take care of the panthers¡¯ body. The panthers need some nourishment to adapt to the changes in their bodies and there are only a very few methods to provide the nourishment. Otherwise, he would have took his sweet time to plot after understanding his new wind element powers.

    He kept on making the sets with incredible speed. After he was finally done, he only has an afternoon left for going to the banquet. Thedies in the mansion are already making their preparations.

    Sam came out of the tower, to take a shower before going for a nap.

    When he woke up, all the people in the mansion are ready. He washed up quickly and wore his usual clothes. His ck vest, ck pants and his feather coat.

    When he came downstairs, he saw everyone already sitting and waiting, even the Principal and the City lord along with few candidates who lived in the inn came here. All of them are waiting for Sam toe. When they saw that he is sleeping, nobody dared to disturb him. Apparently, the incident with Kelly¡¯s kidnap made them have a sense of fear towards him.

    Philip and Jack didn¡¯t wake him up, because it is after all, rare for one to sleep. Most people will be cultivating. Since, Sam is sleeping, they though that he might have been too tired and just let him be.

    Kelly immediately stood up as she saw himing down. She is wearing the cheongsam Sam made for her. Her hair was tied up into a bun. She looked stunning. But he doesn¡¯t have much reaction. The little bit of awe he felt was that the dress really suited her just as he imagined.

    Both Freya and Kelly are wearing the dresses he made for them. The dresses are of same design yet different colours. They are absolutely satisfied with themselves. And one could guess it just from their delighted expressions.

    Sam walked out after greeting the Principal. The carriage is already prepared. The two zing earth bulls are strapped to the carriage.

    Sam looked backwards and called Kelly over. Thetter was a bit nervous as she walked towards him. Under the astounding gazes of all people, Sam opened the carriage door and let her board it first.

    Everyone was looking at the handsome young man with incredulous expressions. Just a few days back they were almost sure that this guy was a king of hell in disguise. The impact from the kidnapping incident couldn¡¯t be forgotten for the life.

    But now, this cold and arrogant guy, this ruthless and merciless guy is opening the door for ady with a smile as warm as early morning sun.

    Sam didn¡¯t care about what others were thinking. He is only doing this because, he is a man of his words. He promised Kelly that she would be her date for tonight and she will be treated as one. That¡¯s it.

    After Kelly boarded the carriage, he followed along with the others. Soon, the carriage started moving and they arrived at the Count mansion within a few minutes. After all, the level 2 beasts aren¡¯t for nothing and the traffic was fully cleared as the people on the streets saw two beasts running.

    When they came down the carriage, all of them were in awe to see the majesty of the Count¡¯s mansion. By far this is the biggest mansion they have seen and this ce didn¡¯t ce to impress them. Even Sam felt that the craftsmanship in the architecture is great.

    The group entered the banquet hall. Sam is walking at the back of the group with Kelly linking her arm with him. When they arrived at the door of the banquet hall, they gathered all the attention from people.

    The main reason is that they were thest to arrive. Even though, the banquet hasn¡¯t started, all of them came so early to curry favour with the Count if possible and to gain some connections. But Sam¡¯s group just arriving on time, made them surprised. After all, who would just miss a chance to leave an impression on Count.

    The people from the noble families and other cities already arrived. After entering the banquet, Sam took Kelly to a ce with less people, he has no interest in socializing right now, but his efforts are in vain.

    Soon, many people starteding and greeting him. Some even came only for Kelly. He just replied to their greetings out of courtesy.

    Actually, there are tables already arranged for them. But nobody is in mood for just sitting and waiting. Everyone is talking to each other with all kinds of intentions marked by their smiles.

    Sam first went to an isted corner to avoid this. But since he can¡¯t avoid this, he might as well go to the table and so he did.

    When he went to the table, he saw that the chairs are already reserved specifically. Jack and Philip are already here. Even the weird trio are already sitting albeit silently. When Sam and Kelly arrived Jack and Philip cleared the two seats for them directly to let them sit side by side. He didn¡¯t reject and sat there.

    Now, there are only three empty chairs at the table, which are seats for Hawk, Ray and Drew.

    There are still a few minutes for banquet to begin. But these few minutes are torture for Sam. All kinds of people areing to greet him, with ttering smiles. They are so obvious at their boot licking attempt that it felt like they aren¡¯t even hiding their intentions.

    But they are all some small fries. Only they areing up to suck up to him. When he saw that the rest of the members are sitting leisurely without any disturbance. Jack and Philip are looking at him with gloating smiles. Sam gritted his teeth as he thought.

    ¡¯I will get my chance. You can gloat all you want.¡¯

    The rest of the people are really free. Nobody, is greeting them and even someone did, that out of courtesy. All the people areing towards him, not because of his status of first ce ranker, rather his status of the Artisan. He is a rank 3 Artisan after all.

    Sam is getting frustrated over this.

    After a few moments, all the people in the hall turned towards the entrance again, there are three people who are entering and three of them are Hawk, Ray and Drew.

    Everyone greeted them as soon they saw. This time, even the noble family people also went to greet them.

    Sam overheard something which piqued his interest.

    "See, three people of the Big four are here. I wonder thest one wille today."

    "Yeah. It has been a long time since the Big four has gathered."

    Sam looked at Hawk and the others walking towards the table. When they arrived, Hawk greeted him first.

    "Hi Sam. Thanks foring." He said with a bright smile.

    "Don¡¯t mention it. Thanks for inviting me." Sam also said with smile. Then he looked at Ray and Drew.

    "Hello. Nice to meet you."

    "Nice to meet you too."

    They also exchanged greetings and made some small talk. Even Kelly, Jack and Philip are pulled in. Only the weird trio aren¡¯t talking.

    Sam suddenly thought of the Big four thing and asked.

    "What is the Big four they are talking about?" Sam asked with a curious expression. But it was Kelly that gave him reply.

    "Haha, that is actually something made we made up when we were kids. At that time, we agreed that the top four people in the capabilities of our generation will be named as Big four and the rest of the younger generation should respect the four and treat them as leaders.

    Even though, we started this as a joke, the thing actually spread among the city and the Big four were named since we awakened. Hawk is always the first in the rank and he still kept it that way."

    Everyone couldn¡¯t help butugh at that. Some kids fooling around actually became this popr in the City and they even followed the suggestion.

    "Then who is the fourth one?" Sam asked

    "well, you might see her today. So, don¡¯t be in a hurry." Hawk replied.

 Chapter 77: Invitation from Maya

    After a few moments, the banquet hall fell silent, the reason is that some people entered the hall. The group has Count and Principal Castor in lead while a few people are following them closely.

    They moved towards the main table which is very near the table, Sam and the rest of the rankers sat. Sam noticed a young woman, tagging along with a middle-aged woman in the group.

    After the group reached the table, the middle-ageddy whispered something to the youngdy and thetter left the table. Sam¡¯s gaze followed her. She sat at the Violet dew family table. She sat beside a familiar girl whom Sam met before. She is Jessie who was also part of team 6. When he noticed the remaining people, he recognised another person.

    The middle-aged who sat on the other side of Jessie. He is the man who sent Kelly back home along with the heads.

    Sam turned to Hawk and asked. "Who is that man?"

    Hawk followed Sam¡¯s gaze and immediately recognised the person. "He is father of Jessie Violet dew."

    "Oh, who is that other girl then?"

    "She is Jasmine Violet dew. A cousin of Jessie." Sam nodded and didn¡¯t ask further.

    After everyone settled down, Count Falcon stood up and made his speech.

    "First of all, thanks for all the guests here for attending this banquet. Today, we are here to celebrate the sessfulpletion of the tournament as well as to encourage the rankers who are able to enter the Marquis academy.

    I don¡¯t want to bore you with some superficial words. Everyone let us enjoy all together. Let the banquet begin."

    After that the dishes are served. All the tables are being served with meat of Level 2 beasts, spiritual wine and herbal dishes made of rank 1 herbs. Sam enjoyed the food without much of care about all the socialising that was going on other tables. He didn¡¯t eat properly in past few days. He waspletely struck in the tower working his ass off.

    The dinner went on and soon, everyone moved to the Ball room which is adjacent to the banquet hall.

    There are some seating arrangements at corners of the room where some wine and some refreshments are arranged. There is a big dance floor. A stage is provided at one end of the room, and musicians are busy ying some melodious music.

    This ball ispletely a socializing event. While some couples are dancing in the dance floor, the rest of the people are either spectating or talking to others with superficial smiles.

    Sam went over towards the Count and Principal Castor to make a toast with a ss of fruit juice. Kelly is tagging along with him.

    "Thanks for inviting me, Count Falcon." Sam said with a smile.

    "it is our honour for Sir Sam, toe here." Count replied with a smile. After some small talk, the count said.

    "Sir, Sam. May I trouble you to stay here after the ball is over? I have something to discuss with you." Sam immediately guessed the intentions, but still agreed.

    After that, Sam went to stand at a corner and spectated, young couples and old couples dancing for the music. He felt that he was back at his previous life for a moment. Then he shook his head to not let his thoughts wander.

    After sometime, Hawk, Philip, Jack, Ray, Drew and rest all joined him at the corner again attracting attention. Freya is dancing with a young master. Her red hair, white skin and golden-red dress with phoenix design, she attracted a lot of attention. Of course, Haley didn¡¯t lose out at all, but since she was conservative, she doesn¡¯t let anyone approach her.

    Soon, a young master came to their group. This noble second -generation kid is someone Hawk and others are familiar with.

    "Kelly, it has been a while since west met. How about a dance?" The young master directly ignored all the crowd and asked Kelly for the dance. His gaze waspletely locked on her as his l.u.s.tful eyes roamed over her figure.

    Actually, Kelly is the most beautiful girl in the whole banquet. Only one girl in the younger generation can bepared with her. But no one hase to ask her for a dance and why is that? Because her hands are linked with Sam¡¯s.

    But the young masterpletely ignored this.

    "Sorry, not interested." Kelly outright rejected. The young man gritted his teeth and looked at Sam.

    "Will you let her go for some time?" He is angry. But he can¡¯t direct his anger at Kelly, so he is trying to take it out on Sam. So, his voice is actually a bit loud.

    Before Sam could even react, Hawk said. "What do you mean Eddy? Do you mean that Sam is not letting her go and stopping her from dancing with you?"

    Eddy didn¡¯t reply, but his expression said that he really is implying that. He was Kelly¡¯s number 1 admirer since they were kids. But he didn¡¯t have any progress all these years. Before, he was able to make a retort, someone came.

    There are two people who arrived to their corner. They are the middle-aged woman and young woman who came inside with Count.

    "Greetings, Artisan Sam. It is an honour to meet you." Maya violet dew greeted with a smile.

    "How can that be? Your Violet dew family it very capable and powerful. I am the one who should be honoured." Sam replied with somewhat cold and sarcastic tone.

    The youngdy beside Maya has a change in her expression. He turned towards her and said.

    "This must be thest member of Big four. Jasmine Violet dew."

    Hawk and others were stunned. They didn¡¯t mention about the identity of Jasmine as part of Big four, because they wanted to see if Sam would guess it correctly. And here he did it.

    "Nice to meet you too, Artisan Sam." Jasmine said in neutral tone.

    Sam sized her up after looking at her demeanour. She is as beautiful as Kelly. She has a brown shoulder length hair and her eyes are also brown in colour. Her figure is not as voluptuous as Kelly. She has long legs which gave her different type of beauty.

    "What do you mean acting like that in front of Lady Maya. Don¡¯t you know that she is a rank 4 Artisan? Even if you are rank 3 Artisan you still have to respect her as a senior. Seems like the ranking has gone to your head too much." Suddenly, Eddy who was forgotten by the group chided in.

    Sam frowned as he looked at him. Eddy felt even more frustrated after seeingtter¡¯s face and said again.

    "You might be a young genius Artisan. But you still have to respect the status of the rank 4 Artisan. Do you think so highly of yourself to the point that you can disregard Lay Maya¡¯s status?" Sam felt so frustrated by this clown that he wanted to p him on the face. But he controlled himself. He looked at Maya and said.

    "I clearly knew how much Artisan Maya¡¯s status is capable of. Her status enough to do anything they like in the Falcon Cliff city. Isn¡¯t it right Lady Maya? Even Mr. Eddy also knew how much weight your status can pull." Sam again replied with sarcastic smile.

    Maya also felt frustrated. She immediately threw an unhappy re Eddy. She specifically came here to clear the misunderstanding and prejudice Sam might have towards her, but this idiot has toe here and paint her image as even more tyrannical.

    "Who are you?" She asked Eddy with a cold tone. But thetter was clearly unaware of it. He was delighted that he caught Maya¡¯s attention and said happily.

    "Lady Maya, I am Eddy Rafsa. My father is the head of Rafsa family."

    "Oh, the Rafsa family, is it?" Maya muttered and turned towards Jasmine. "Jasmine, remember the name of this family. We will be halting any dealings with Rafsa family indefinitely and tell this to all the families and businesses we have rtion with about this."

    Hearing this Eddy waspletely shocked and felt cold all over.

    "L-Lady Maya..." Just as he was about to say something, Hawk interrupted.

    "Eddy, one has to know their own limitations. You should know better than to wag your mouth in a conversation which you don¡¯t have any qualifications to participate. It will only get worse if you stay here. I think it is best if you go and find your father."

    Maya nodded at what Hawk said and turned to Sam.

    "Artisan Sam. I know you have some prejudice towards me due to previous incident and I can clearly understand you, but I believe there is some misunderstanding between us. In actual fact, I don¡¯t have any rtion regarding that incident, I don¡¯t even know about what happened until it was reported to me after your way of handling things. The incident ispletely done by Jessie and her father and even family head doesn¡¯t have anything to do with it.

    I hope we can clear this misunderstanding and I am here to invite you to dinner in Violet dew mansion." Sam raised his eyebrow and looked at her with some surprise.

    He didn¡¯t expect that the matter will be like this, he was really impressed with Jessie¡¯s and her father¡¯s guts to use a rank 4 Artisan name without even consulting her.

    "When?" Sam asked after some thought.

    "When are you free artisan Sam?"

    "Then, I will contact you with themunication token then. I have somethings keeping me busy for following days." Sam said as he withdrew themunication token the Jessie¡¯s father sent him. After both exchanged their spiritual signatures on the tokens, Maya and Jasmine left.

    "Master, why are you polite to him?" Jasmine asked with the same neutral tone.

    "You will understand in future." Maya said as she patted her on her shoulder.

    The corner again reached its initial situation.

    Sam was bored and just looked around the dance floor. He then involuntarily noticed that Kelly is looking at the dance floor with some desire and some hesitant expression. He understood and extended his hand as he asked.

    "Will you apany me to a dance?" Sam asked in a gentle tone. Kelly was stunned for a moment and ced her hand in his, then both of them went into the middle of the dance floor and slowly danced for the slow melody.

    They immediately gathered the attention of the crowd. After all, a handsome young man and a beautiful youngdy, dressed in ck which ispletely on contrast to their fair skin, dancing to a beautiful melody, this scene was only a petal shower away from bing a scene from a fairy tale.

    While people in the banquet hall are enjoying the dance and conversations, the southern region is in chaos.

    Numerous areas in the southern region are smashed and set on fire. Many acolytes are dead and many establishments are destroyed. The damage is very high. The city guards and a certain Novice are having a head ache.

    When they noticed that there are no attacks after the Western region, the ck pond thought that their restructuring was effective, but within three days their acolytes are again targeted and got attacked.

    They are suffering a set back after set back. The manager of the ck pond is going on a spree of destroying the items in his residence. He doesn¡¯t know how the other party is able to gain intelligence on what is going on other side. He didn¡¯t even have a single clue.

    In the southern region on the top of a small inn, two birds are standing and looking at the burning shop. One of them is an ordinary raven and the other one is an ordinary falcon. But nobody is noticing them. Even if they see them, they might not do anything. After all, who would care about two normal birds which are not even level 1 beasts when there is a shop burning in front of them.

    "Sky, are we done for the night?"

    "Yes, this is thest ce Sam that Shadow mice mentioned. Most of thework in southern region is destroyed.

 Chapter 78: {Name the chapter}

    The banquet was over. Sam and the rest of the group came back to the mansion. The next day, Kelly behaved as if the kidnapping incident didn¡¯t happen at all.

    Sam and Jack are nning for what they have to do next in their n.

    The ck pond manager is pulling his hair in frustration about what to do against the enemy¡¯s intelligencework. He tried formations but the formations aren¡¯t able to stop the shadows and where ever the shadows are the intelligencework can reach there.

    He tried to switch the locations of his subordinates, but bad for him, the shadows are there too.

    He tried toy decoys and traps, but shadows were there when he nned that.

    All the failures and destruction of his intelligencework and more than three-fourth of the subordinate acolytes are done for just because he didn¡¯t pick a ce with no shadows.

    And the ones who breached his anti-spying activities and is causing him to grit his teeth with frustration and vexation are still on their job now.

    *squeak* *squeak* [Hey eight, after the mission is over, can we have dinner together. Last time me and 7 ate something in ck pond¡¯s kitchen and their ingredients are amazing] Number three, the male shadow mouse is asking the female shadow mouse who is with him today with on the watch duty.

    *squeak* *squeak* [Really, what did you guys eat?] three asked.

    In shadow mice a there are a total of three female mice and remaining seven are male mice.

    *squeak* *squeak* [we don¡¯t know. Actually, one and two said that. They went on for dinner that night after returning from their watch duty.] three said.

    Eight: *squeak* *squeak* [What?! Two went to dinner with one. She didn¡¯t even tell me. Damn it, ever since one and two started getting closer me and two have very less time to hang out with each other. Now that six is also hitting on ten. We need to have a girl talk once.]

    Three: *squeak* *squeak* [Well, we are the one who started this anyway. The most pitiful are four, five, seven and nine. Those kids are all being left alone, those guys are even getting into fights with each other. I think we need to take care of them. After all, we are their seniors.]

    Eight: *squeak* *squeak* [Yeah, you are right. After all, they are a lot youngerpared to us. Maybe, we really need to spend some time with them.]

    Three: *squeak* *squeak* [Talking about younger ones, Boss needs to really take care of these ck pond soon. Those little panthers really went through a lot. These jerks really went overboard.]

    Eight: *squeak* *squeak* [Well, from we know of Boss, these guys won¡¯t have any good ending. They just had to make a move on little panthers. Boss truly takes care of them after all.]

    Three: *squeak* *squeak* [Yeah. By the way do you know how he got little panthers?]

    Eight: *squeak* *squeak* [No, why? Maybe, he just stumbled up on them just like of we met him?]

    Three: *squeak* *squeak*[ No. I asked Yanwu about it and he said something interesting. The thing is the panthers have been with Boss since they were born.]

    Eight: *squeak* *squeak* [ Boss picked them when they were just born?]

    Three: *squeak* *squeak* [Let me finish talking alright. Yanwu said that, at that time Boss is still a newly advanced Acolyte and he went to hunt along with guy Philip and his friends. There they encountered the scene where the mother panther just delivered the little panthers and the father panther was sneaked up on by a golden blood tiger. Just when the tiger killed both father and mother panthers, Boss intervened and fought the tiger to death.

    But the panthers weren¡¯t able to make it. Then Boss promised the mother panther that he would take care of the babies. Yanwu said that Boss, didn¡¯t even take a single thing of Panthers¡¯ corpses. He buried them directly.]

    Eight: *squeak* *squeak* [Really?!! No wonder Boss was furious about when he saw little panthers in such a state. These ck pond guys are done for.]

    Three: [That¡¯s for sure. Oh damn. This woman is here again. Maybe we should report this to boss, this almost became their daily routine. They are getting on it at the same time for the past two days]

    The door opened and a woman came in as she walked towards the manager who is sitting on the bed with a vexed expression. This woman is none other than thedy who is part of four Novice peak mages.

    A few momentster, the room is filled with pleasurable m.o.a.ns.

    Three: *squeak* *squeak* [This horny dog of a man, how can be in mood for this after all the mess that is waiting for him to clear up.]

    Eight: *squeak* *squeak* [Well, maybe the mess is the reason he is doing this. He might not have found anywhere else to vent his frustrations.]

    Three: *squeak* *squeak*[Yeah, you are right]

    At the same time in another location.

    One: *squeak* *squeak* [Hey Two. Shall we go to dinner again tonight?]

    Two: *squeak* *squeak* [Can you stop doing this? If boss knows that we are fooling around while on the mission, we are dead meat.]

    One: *squeak* *squeak* [Yeah, okay. Whatever you say.]

    Two: *squeak* *squeak* [Okay the two guys are going to split, now. Which of them do you want to follow?]

    One: *squeak* *squeak* [Why are we following these two guys specifically?] said a bit unhappily.

    Two: *squeak* *squeak* [Dah, of course, because we know that these guys are the main culprits when attacking the little panther. One of them is the one who epted the task from that Eisen guy and the other is the one who executed the task. Boss, specifically said that, we need to look after these guys for these few days. He is nning something special for these guys.]

    One: *squeak* *squeak* [Yeah, Yeah. You don¡¯t have to tell me.] suddenly Two directly pushed One aside and said a bit angrily.

    Two: *squeak* *squeak* [If you already know, why are you asking me again? You better stopzing around and work properly. If not, I willin to boss and let him toss you to Falck as food. Hmph.]

    One: [Okay, Okay. I am going.]

    At the same time another ce.

    Four: *squeak* *squeak* [Haha, losers. Today I spotted ten hiding spots where these Novices are hiding]

    Five: *squeak* *squeak* [Do you think that you are all that just for spotting ten spots? I have seen eleven spots today and guess what one of them is even their meeting room.]

    Seven: *squeak* *squeak* [What is so great about finding a meeting room? we can get there just by following them directly. You might as well not find the meeting room.]

    Nine: *squeak* *squeak* [Yeah, what is so great about finding a meeting room.]

    Five: *squeak* *squeak* [if you are all that, why don¡¯t say what you have done today]

    Nine: *squeak* *squeak* [I have 15 hiding spots, along with this we even a routine of an over looker.]

    Seven: *squeak* *squeak* [I also got a routine of an over looker and fourteen hiding spots.]

    Four: *squeak* *squeak* [ damn it. I lost again. Tomorrow I will beat you guys.]

    Five: *squeak* *squeak* [Do you think that is going to happen? Hehe I will beat you tomorrow too.]

    Seven : *squeak* *squeak* [Woah, five, why are you yapping your mouth for? Even you are talking now. How are you any better than Four?]

    Four: *squeak* *squeak* [Yeah, at least I didn¡¯t waste time on finding a meeting spot.]

    Five: *squeak* *squeak* [Hey, you guys looking for a beating.]

    Four: *squeak* *squeak* [Come on then, I am not afraid of you.]

    Seven: *squeak* *squeak* [ Let me join in the fun too. I will beat of you guys.]

    Nine: *squeak* *squeak* [ Don¡¯t leave me out]

    Soon, the four might mice came to blows and came to a standstill.

    Six: *squeak* *squeak* [Hey, kids not again. Why are you fighting again?] Two mice which are a slightly bigger than the first four came.

    Ten: *squeak* *squeak* [Yeah guys, you shouldn¡¯t fight among yourselves]

    Four: *squeak* *squeak* [ Sister Ten. Five started this.]

    Five: *squeak* *squeak* [No, No. Four how dare you pin this on me? Sister Ten, don¡¯t listen to him. Four is the one who started this.]

    Ten: *squeak* *squeak* [Hmph. If you guys get into fight again, I will report to Boss.]

    Four: *squeak* *squeak* [Hehe, Sister Ten. I will also tell on you guys to Boss. All of you are going on dates without working properly. I wonder how Boss will deal with you guys.]

    Six: *squeak* *squeak* [ YOU BRATS. After this mission is over, I will definitely teach you guys a lesson.]

    Ten: *squeak* *squeak* [Okay Six. Not you too. Kids, let¡¯s go. It is time to report. Boss must have woken up already. The n to attack them on Banquet night is pretty sessful. Boss might have new instructions to us.]

    Four: *squeak* *squeak* [Last one to reach the mansion is a loser. Hehe.] He immediately ran away.

    Seven: *squeak* *squeak* [Hey, it is not fair. You are being too shameless.]

    Five: *squeak* *squeak* [Damn it.]

    Nine: *squeak* *squeak* [No way I am going to lose to you guys.]

    Ten: *squeak* *squeak* [These kids. Come one Six let us go.]

    [A/N: Hey guys, I tried to do something new and wrote this, I dont even have a proper name in mind. If you like it and want these types of chapters asionally, say it in thements and of course, name the chapter.]

 Chapter 79: Targeting the Novices

    The next day of the Ball. Early in the morning, it is the time for Shadow mice to report.

    Sam is in his study listening to the report of the Shadow mice. After the report was done, he went into a deep thought.

    "You guys, first target ten low-level novices. Each of you mark one. And it is better if they are a bit far away from each other. Tonight, I will be proceeding in next step.

    But before that, I need you guys to practice your shadow transverse. You enter the second floor in the tower and practice for ten hours, that means an hourter you will be going back to your duty. Tomorrow, I will give you guys a new gadget to practice, I need you guys to do something for me."

    *squeak* *squeak* [Yes, Boss]

    After saying his piece, Sam waved his hand and all of them disappeared into the tower.

    Sam called Jack over to the study and said. "Tonight, we are going to make a move, but we aren¡¯t going after the acolytes in the Northern region, it is too dangerous and there are a lot of high-level cultivators. We are going to move against the low- level Novices."

    "Okay. Are we moving on birds again?"

    "No. we are going to move normally. We will begin this after sun sets."

    "Sure."

    "I think it is better for you to speed up your cultivation." Sam said in a low voice. Even though he didn¡¯t want to say something like that, but he can¡¯t help it. They are going against an underworld organisation who has several Novices onter stages and even a Great Mage. But it is still okay, for now because Sam made some not-so- direct means to face them, but they can¡¯t just continue this.

    "Not everyone is a monstrous as you okay. I am already atte stage novice and it is already considered quite high, you are the monster for being a Novice at 15." Jack didn¡¯t take offence at all. He clearly knew that he is depending on Sam too much for this. He doesn¡¯t have Sam¡¯s resources and skills and even his battle prowess isn¡¯t muchpared to other party.

    "Okay, then. Try to advance to Novice as soon as possible. We would be dealing with Novices from now on.

    By the way, I have to make something for today¡¯s mission. I am going to the Artisan tower. You also prepare yourselves."

    After that both of them went on to do their own things, Sam arrived at the Artisan tower after a while and took a private weapon forge.

    He took out a scroll and opened it on the table. This is a new design he made to collect an important resource to help little panthers upgrade their bodies potential. He was quite aversive against this resource as it went against his conscience, but after thinking about what ck pond has done to people and particrly to both the panthers, he made up his mind.

    He took out the purple gold and thest bit of remaining Golden blood tiger bones. He wants to make an alloy for the thing he is going to make. The golden blood tiger bones are very hard and their ductility is very less.

    Purple gold is too soft and isn¡¯t suitable to take much force, so he decided to make an alloy out of it.

    But to have a better alloy, one needs to make a lot of experiments, but he only made a rough estimate and directly doing it because this tool, he is only going to use it for one time. Since, he knew that he can find some Meteorite sands through the ck water organisation, he decided that all his tools and machines should be made by the meteorite sands or other simr level materials only.

    They can nurture a spirit along with the passage of time and he will have some great tools which can even work without his direct involvement. Until then, he just needs to find some alternatives to make do with it.

    Even though this may feel ambitious, but he wasn¡¯t least bit depressed about it. He is ambitious and that is the only thing that made stand on the peak of the previous world and this time, he will ascend the peak with the same attitude.

    Just because, he is in a different world, just because he is in a world filled with people with far more power, just because he is surrounded by so many powerful cultivators than him, he doesn¡¯t want to change his character or his attitude. If he changes his character just because he is in a different world and different situations, he won¡¯t be Sam anymore.

    He went to the Cauldron and started his alloy making by pouring all the golden blood bone powder and the purple gold in powder form. He released his golden fire and started melting it....

    After the alloy was formed, Sam started his process of casting and forging. After a few hours of work, he was finally done with the tool and he walked back to the mansion.

    He went to take some rest and woke up before the sunset.

    Jack and Sam changed into some ck clothes and moved out of the mansion. After making sure that nobody is following them with the help of a shadow mouse, both of them went to the area of their first target.

    It is a small house with nothing special. A young man in his twenties is meditating inside the house while he sat cross-legged. He has some spirit stone in his hands.

    Sam whispered to Jack. "We aren¡¯t going to kill him; I need him alive." After that both of them entered the house.

    The man in the house was immediately alerted when he sensed someone else¡¯s presence inside his house.

    "Who is that?" He shouted in a not so loud voice. But he didn¡¯t really get any reply.

    Jack took out his ck meteorite sword, while Sam took out his make shift ws.

    After both of them were marked, they exchanged a look and got ready to make their move. Sam sneaked to a corner as he restrained his aura to as low as possible. When the man came out of the room he was cultivating in and spotted Jack, he immediately took out a sabre and asked.

    "Who are you? What are you doing in my house?" His voice was cautious as he eyed his opponent, but got no reply. Jack immediately swung his sword in a swift move, but the other party is a first level Novice. He easily blocked the sabre and smiled wickedly.

    "A brat at Acolyte stage is trying to take me on, you must be dreaming." But just as he finished saying this, he felt a huge force struct on his back. Some sharp objects pierced just below his shoulder des and gripped a huge piece of his flesh.

    Before he could react, he felt a w against his neck just a bit away from piercing into him. He didn¡¯t even dare to move. Taking the advantage, Jack immediately knocked down the man and both of them heaved a sigh.

    Jack then looked at Sam. He is thinking how they should move this man away. Sam also looked at him and said.

    "You better keep whatever you are going to see a secret." Jack nodded his head and Sam waved his hand. The man on the floor immediately disappeared and reappeared in the second floor of the tower. This is the best ce to keep the person as the world in the second floor is solely controlled by Sam.

    Jack was struck with shock. He didn¡¯t know that Sam has a storage item to keep living beings, if this thing was to go out, maybe even the Count who is friendly and amiable to themon folk would make a move on Sam to take away the item.

    He came out of stupor only after Sam gestured him to move. Both of them went on to capture their next target. The scene repeated again and again until they sessfully captured the ten targets they set today.

    After their mission ispleted, they went to the mansion.

    Sam immediately went to the second floor and saw the ten people, who regained their conscious, when they saw Sam, they immediately shouted at him.

    "Who the f.u.c.k are you? Do you even know who we are?"

    "You better leave us now. Or you won¡¯t be able to bear the consequences."

    "Since, you captured all of us, you must know we work together. The retaliation of our organisation is not something, you cannot deal with it."

    They went on and on until Sam almost regretted capturing them. Sam immediately made a gesture and they immediately felt a force shutting their mouths.

    "You guys might not know who I am, but those two definitely know about it. Isn¡¯t it so?" He said as he pointed at two people who just stood there without talking at all.

    The rest of the group turned towards them and could see their faces with anxiousness.

    "Artisan Sam, Are you the one responsible for previous incidents?" One of the two asked after mustering enough courage.

    "Oh, your guess is correct." Sam replied.

    "Just for injuring two panthers, do you need to go this far?"

    "Actually, if you have directly killed them, I would have just found you both and killed you off, but the thing is you cut off their limbs when they arepletely conscious. How much pain do you think, that they went through? they aren¡¯t even a year old." Sam¡¯s voice grew colder and colder.

    "So, I decided to use you guys as tonic food for them, but then I found out that an assignment I took coincides with wiping you guys off, so I am now going to use you guys to make my panthers stronger. So, you can only me yourselves for attacking my panthers. If it was just an assignment, I could have just supplied the other party some support. You guys just brought this up on yourselves."

    After saying that, Sam took out a weird looking thing.

    This is the tool that Sam made today. The took has a needle which as long as an elbow of average man. The needle is hollow, like a needle of a syringe.

    The lower end of the needle is connected to a funnel shaped hollow shell. The bigger end of the funnel is connected to red colour cylindrical object, which has an uneven surface area.

    This is the trunk of the Giant Blood mosquito he bought over from the Vickers¡¯ store. This acts like a natural suction pipe which the beast uses to suck all the blood from a living being. Then at the other end of the trunk there is another funnel shaped shell which isrger than the first one.

    The trunk is connected to smaller end and therger end is connected with a huge ss bottle. The shell of the big funnel has a handle for him to hold.

    Sam looked at the confused expressions of the ten people and without caring much, he walked towards the first person. The other person was anxious and was fearful when he saw Sam¡¯s cold and emotionless expression.

    Sam immediately pierced the person near his heart. When the other person tried to dodge, he wasn¡¯t able to do this and only stood there and helplessly took the attack.

    Sam closed his eyes and started injecting his spiritual energy into the trunk through the tool, the trunk immediately started expanding and contracting extracting the blood into the ss bottle. The bottle is huge and it can hold up to two litres. Soon after it was filled, Sam immediately took another bottle and reced the already filled one.

    The process stopped only after he filled two bottlespletely and half- filled the third one. The person who got his blood extracted was now a blood less corpse. His body copsed as Sam pulled out the needle. Then he turned towards the rest of the people to pick his next target.

    They immediately broke out in cold sweat, they wanted to talk but they don¡¯t even have an ability to move their lips, all they could do was plead with their eyes, they are tearing up, some of them urinated, but Sam didn¡¯t bat an eyelid as he proceeded.

    Thest person is the one who attacked the panthers, he looked at Sam with immense regrets. He regretted that he epted the job against this guy. He is too ruthless and merciless. He isn¡¯t even human now.

    Sam looked at more than twenty bottles of blood and sighed. He actually, didn¡¯t like what he did. Even though he didn¡¯t like these guys and they are absolute sc.u.m of society, he didn¡¯t want to do something as cruel as extracting blood from a fellow human.

    The only reason he did this is that, the fire poison in panthers¡¯ body is being more active than he thought. He overestimated their bodies and fed them that as a supplement, now he needs to upgrade and enhance their blood quality to save them.

    So, he decided to make this move. No matter how much capable he is, he is still a human and just like every other human, who will do anything when they have to save their loved ones, Sam also did this.

    Just that, these guys are part of destroying many more previously and are absolute sc.u.m in the society is only thing that gave him some relief against his guilt.

    "I hope that the blood will be enough." Sam said as he burned the corpses to ashes, even the bones disappeared.

 Chapter 80: Counts suspicions

    Sam isying on his bed and is looking at the night sky through the window. He is in a deep thought about how to proceed about dealing with ck pond. Because, he was thinking about what Count said after the ball.

    { Night of the Banquet. After the ball, inside a meeting room in Count mansion}

    Sam and Count Falcon are the only people inside the room. This is a small meeting room which has a round table with six chairs around it.

    Sam and Count are sitting across each other. Both of them aren¡¯t speaking at all. There is a jug with fruit juice and two sses on the table.

    After a long silence, Count Falcon finally spoke.

    "Sam, do you know what I want to talk to you about?"

    "Maybe about the spot for the inheritance of Murali?" Sam replied with a bit of uncertainty. He is really confused, why Count is being all mysterious.

    "Actually, No. I am about to talk about something else."

    "Oh, please tell me what to do you want to talk about? I don¡¯t think we have much to discuss this privately other than the spot in inheritance."

    "It is about the incidents regarding the past few days." Sam became tensed after hearing this. Incidents regarding the past few days are mainly the murders he and Jack carried out in eastern and western regions. But he didn¡¯t show it on his face and just looked at the Count with same calm expression. Seeing that Sam has no reaction, Count continued.

    "Past few days, there are a lot of murders of Acolytes in Eastern and Western regions, do you have anything to say about that?" Count finally came to the point.

    "Oh, what do you want to say Count Falcon? If you are only asking my opinion on this, I would say that it is a pity that there are so many lives lost, but I think you should look into the matter to find out the motives of other party." Sam replied as he took a sip of fruit juice.

    "That is why, I am asking you. What are the motives?" Sam immediately stopped his hand in the mid-air, which is holding the ss of fruit juice. He looked at the Count with a cold expression, there is no other change indicating his guilt. He slowly said.

    "You must speak carefully, Count Falcon. As a leader of a city, you should choose your words wisely. using me like that, would only bring further troubles." When Count heard Sam¡¯s reply he took a sip from his ss of fruit juice, then Sam continued.

    "May I ask, why Count Falcon is thinking that it was me?" Sam was curious. He didn¡¯t think that he left any clues behind. He doesn¡¯t have any bird type beasts around him normally, and they don¡¯t know that he has a storage that could keep the beasts, his Vi is also not close to the woods to hide the beasts, and most importantly, his moves are of surprise and sneaky. He is actually impressed that Count somehow rted this to him.

    But he has to make sure that the other party couldn¡¯t confirm whether it was him or not. At least until he was done with the things about ck pond here, Count shouldn¡¯t focus on him too much.

    "Well, you are the only anomaly in the City right now Sam."

    "Why do you think so?" Sam raised an eyebrow as he asked.

    "You are the only who came into contact with a figure who we are puzzled about."

    Sam went into a deep thought after hearing what other party said, then after a while he asked in a low voice.

    "Vickers?"

    Count smiled up on receiving the question and nodded while answering.

    "Vickers is the only one who we are quite puzzled about. We don¡¯t know where he came from, he just came here a few days before you did. He camepletely out of nowhere. He came to the city and opened a Shop, but we never saw anyone going to the shop and buy something.

    But everyone knew about his shop. Whenever someone asks people in the city, about information regarding to buy something, everyone will rmend the Vickers¡¯ shop if they don¡¯t know about it surely.

    For example, if you ask someone who doesn¡¯t know where wine is avable, abut where to buy a wine, he will subconsciously reply that ¡¯Everything can be bought in Vickers??? store.¡¯

    You are his first customer. Don¡¯t you think it is too much of a coincidence Sam. First, he came to the City, then a few dayster you came here. The first thing you did aftering here is to go to his shop. Most important is the peculiar reaction of the people.

    And a few days after you met him, a mass murder happens in the city. Even though I can¡¯t find any link between you two, I couldn¡¯t help but suspect you at all."

    When Count finished saying this, Sam heaved a sigh of relief. He thought that the other party found some clues through investigation, but now he understood, that the other party is suspecting him because, he only came into contact with a person, who ispletely mysterious in Count¡¯s eyes.

    "Maybe, you might think that way, but I went to Vickers¡¯ shop only for business. As for why I went there, you can ask a person named Elder Arlo, for a personal grudge against our City lord, he made things difficult for us by not arranging a proper amodation.

    Count Falcon, do you think that I will bear with it. I earn money to livefortably. That is why I went to find a house and your citizens are the ones who led me to Vickers¡¯ shop. If you have some doubts regarding this, you can investigate yourselves."

    Sam is not that nervous now. Even though he has to be cautious from now on to avoid suspicion from the count, he has to get rid of any thoughts that he is rted to Vickers.

    The Count was also a bit surprised by what he heard. He immediately called an attendant inside and whispered something in his ear. After sometime, the attendant came back running and whispered it into Count¡¯s ear. The expression on his face then became dark and gloomy, which showed that what Sam said is true.

    He is angry now. His subordinate is responsible for not only the abusing his authority to resolve his personal grudge, but he also took it out on the candidates which arepletely unrted to the grudge.

    What would be the opinion of candidates on him now? And even more than that, the situation led to another thing and that is he misunderstood a person of high status and directly suspected him, even interrogating him privately. Hepletely lost his face.

    "Sam, I am sorry about what happened and the words I have said before." He immediately apologized.

    But he was still a bit suspicious, he has a feeling that the mass murder is still rted to Sam, but suddenly an Elder of the Count mansion came running inside the room.

    "Sir Falcon. Something happened again." He immediately shouted as soon as he entered the room.

    Falcon frowned in displeasure at his subordinate¡¯s actions, but he restrained his anger and asked.

    "What is the matter?"

    "The southern region. The-there is a mass murder again. There a lot of people on the streetsying dead. Many shops and houses were burnt."

    When he finished the sentence Count immediately stood up from the chair. He looked at Sam who is sipping the fruit juice leisurely and at the Elder who reported the news.

    Even though his intuition is telling him that something is up with Sam, he couldn¡¯t find a reason to suspect him as there is an incident now and he could clearly see that Sam was with him all the time.

    "Count Falcon, I will take my leave. I think you need to take care of some matters." Sam stood up from the chair and he said with a smile.

    Count also nodded his head and said. "I apologise for the inconvenience Sam. I hope you won¡¯t take it to heart."

    "Don¡¯t worry about it." Sam waved his hand and walked away. He is so happy that he made a decision to send Sky and Yanwu to deal with the Acolytes in the southern region. That night he went back to the mansion and waited for the report of the Shadow mice till morning.

    The next day, he proceeded with the n to deal with the Novices and now, he is thinking on how to deal with the remaining without making the Count feeling suspicious about him again.

    {present}

    Sam is feeling a little but frustrated about how to go on about. At first, he wanted to wear their strength down, slowly and make them gather at one spot, but now, he needs a way to end it quickly. But he also has to stay clear to not fall under the Count¡¯s radar, after all it is not easy to get rid of suspicions once they started.

    After thinking for a long while, he only found one way. He needs to use shadow mice directly. His actual n is that he would take down, these Novices slowly and when the upper echelons find this out, they will gather their remaining forces together.

    Then he would use shadow mice to detonate the poison grenades he made to deal with them. But now that he wasn¡¯t able to make a move directly against the Novices, he has to deal with them using shadow mice only. Jack isn¡¯t a Novice yet after all.

    If not for the fact he needs the blood for panthers, he might not even deal with the first ten novices himself risking to be caught by the Count.

    But suddenly he thought of an idea. If he can do this, he might be able to get rid of the big fish first and then he didn¡¯t even have to care about these small fry subordinates. Basically, all he needs to do is to take care of all the subordinates who knew about ck water and ck pond. They were all the upper echelons who holds the whole organisations together.

    If he took them down, the rest of the organisation will dissolvepletely and they might form some small gangs dividing the territory and illegal business. The mission he took from Jack is to help him get rid of the ck water, not to clean the world of its darkness.

    He immediately woke up from his bed and went to his study. He is thinking of how to move on this n and what time is best to strike.

    Night passed and the shadow mice came back to him to report.

    After that was done, he passed on his instructions.

    "Monitor the four peak stage novices and the Manager of the ck pond closely. Follow in pairs. For the next few days, you have to remember their daily routine and find out which are the times all of them are most idle.

    You have one week to find this out. I need a time where all five of them can be attacked at a same time. "

    *squeak* *squeak* [Yes, Boss]

    "After that, you guys also practise the things the shadow transfer as well as elemental fusion. Use up all the dark element spirit stones if you have to. I need all of you to learn it as soon as possible. Practice it well in the tower. You are all the most important for the next step."

    He paused and passed them some spatial rings which can fit perfectly to the shoulders of the limbs.

    "Try and see, if you guys can use these. Tell me if there are any problems while using." The shadow mice took the spatial rings and tried to pry. At first, they are feeling some restrictions and soon each of them retracted some spirit stones out of it. But they see to be exhausted. Looking at the scene, Sam nodded.

    He thought that since the spiritual sense is the main thing to get something out of the spatial ring, the beasts might be able to do it. What is restricting them is their intelligence level and since, Shadow mice are one of the most intelligent creatures, it worked.

    "Try and practice with them more. These will be yours from now on." After that he waved his hand and sent them inside the tower.

    "These few days, I will work on to improve the Panthers."

 Chapter 81: Final showdown against Black Pond

    After passing his orders, Sam went into second floor of divine dimension and took out a cauldron. A distance away from him, the shadow mice are practicing.

    Inside the cauldron, he poured the blood he collected from the ten Novices. After that heid a formation around him and ced some fire element spirit stones in the formation. This is the spirit condensing formation.

    As the cauldron is in the centre of the formation, the fire elemental spiritual energy will be used to nourish the blood. Sam needs the blood to be having high fire elemental essence to improve the blood line quality of the panthers, but there is a small drawback for them, that is the wind element in their bodies will have a smaller effect on them as the fire element will be stronger. But that problem was forter day.

    Sam just started a small fire and let the blood boil in the cauldron like that. He didn¡¯t even increase the fire at all, he just let the small me boil the blood.

    The cauldron started to emit red colour vapours; the fire elemental energy is being seeped into the blood inside.

    Soon, the blood started thickening and level of the blood inside the cauldron decreased slightly. Time passed on slowly.

    Hours had passed and the initial level of blood in the cauldron reduced to half. The blood thickened and ce around him became, full ofplete iron smell.

    He spent a full twenty hours in the second floor of the tower until the blood almost solidified. After the process ispleted, he called for the panthers who are ying in outside the tower.

    When they smelled the rich fire elemental blood essence, they became restless. If not for the fact that Sam is standing near the cauldron and looking at them, they would have already jumped into the cauldron to eat it.

    Sam is looking at the huge panthers who aren¡¯t even one year old and thought to himself, whether he should feed them this human blood essence or not. He doesn¡¯t want to get them addicted to human blood, otherwise if wasn¡¯t not beside them all the time, they might even turnpletely hungry for human meat and blood.

    But once he thought about the fire poison slowly spreading across its body and beast core, he wasn¡¯t able to stop himself. He hardened his heart and let them eat. The two huge panthers who are in size of a normal bull, putting their mouths inside the cauldron as they ate the semi-solid, blood essence. When they were done, they immediatelyid contently on the floor and closed their eyes.

    Sam ced his hands on their heads and checked their situation. He could see the blood essence and fire essence spreading and strengthening the body and beast core. The slow but raging fire poison is getting more stable. It is slowly integrating itself as a part of the beast core.

    He heaved a sigh and exited the dimension and went back to his room. He justid on the bed with tired expression.

    He simply tossed all the thoughts to the back of his mind and closed his eyes to take a nap.

    The shadow mice went back to the watch duty. For a week, he keptpletely low and didn¡¯t even make any move against the ck pond.

    But the ck pond people are inpletely different situation and mindset.

    They didn¡¯t dare to believe that the moves made by Sam arepleted. Every person, who is part of ck pond arepletely on their toes. They didn¡¯t dare to rx at all. No matter how they tried to investigate, they aren¡¯t getting any clues.

    The other party seemed to know everything about the whole ck pond, but they don¡¯t even know how the party is getting their information.

    If they knew that ten mice which are less than five percent of their size are making them pull their hire like this, one should have to wonder how their expressions would be like.

    Right now, the manager of the ck pond is in another steamy session with the peak stage Novice woman.

    After a few pleasurable minutes, both of themid n.a.k.e.d on the bed as their faces were filled with relief. After some rest thedy spoke.

    "Are there any clues about the opponent?"

    "No, and it seems that their methods are changed. Today morning I got a report that ten Novices are missing. If we just let this go in this way, the organisation will be slowly eroded. So, before they do this, I need to make some preparations. We already stopped taking tasks from clients.

    The iepletely stagnated due to the destruction of all the stores. Only the businesses in the Northern region are working. The ve trade, prostitution, everything stopped in a same ce. At this pace, even if they can¡¯t attack, we won¡¯t be any better than disbanding the organisation."

    "Then what do you n to do?" Thedy asked.

    "First, tomorrow noon, I am going to host a meeting inside the ck pond with all the upper echelons present. I need to make sure that the remaining candidates stay safe. If we have to, we will send all of them into Falcon Cliff to take refugee. We will decide that after the meeting."

    "Okay, then we will do as you say." Meanwhile, at a corner two shadow mice are looking at the scene with disgust in their eyes. They have obvious disdain in their eyes.

    But they can only see and bear with it. After all, Boss¡¯ mission took priority.

    "Seems like Boss¡¯ mission will bepleted soon." Both of the shadow mice immediately left the ce.

    After the two mice left, both of the man and woman are started exchanging a book. They are using the book as amunication to write messages to each other.

    The conversation is as follows.

    Woman: [Do you think that they would fall for this?]

    Manager: [ After hearing this type of big news, nobody would stay here to monitor further. They would definitely go back to give the news.]

    Woman: [But are you going to host the meeting tomorrow?]

    Manager: [Of course, I would, but the mission would not be in the ck Pond. We will change it to the rundown restaurant. That too, we are going to host it early in the morning.]

    Woman: [But how is that useful for us?]

    Manager: [If my guess is right and the informers are really in the room just now, they would probably start preparations to attack all the upper echelons tomorrow. Because, from what I can deduce, they probably are eroding the small fries to gather us together and attack in full force. So, what we will do is, hire all the man power we can andy a huge trap for them at noon, in the ck pond.

    We will get the support from the other Great mage from the neighbouring city who is going toe tomorrow. He will reach this city, a few hours before noon.

    So, by misleading them into preparing for arge- scale attack, they won¡¯t take their time to spy us in the morning and we will make use of this to conduct a meeting and alsoy a trap with two great mages. We have a high chance of sess.]

    That is the end of the conversation.

    When Sam reached the news of the meeting he went into deep contemtion. After pondering over this for a while, he came to a decision and said.

    "Don¡¯t care about the meeting. You guys just follow them, but tonight one of youe to my room and take this ring with you. You better not lose this. The one who can carry this properly without any problem should being. I don¡¯t want anything to happen. So, who ising?

    *squeak* *squeak* [One wille]

    The mice said in unison. Sam nodded and said. "Tell the remaining mice to gather all of them at the manager¡¯s house at mid-night. All of you will be following him tomorrow. If they really host a meeting, this going to be our final strike."

    Then the two mice went away to carry out their mission.

    Sam looked at the clear sky through the window and pondered on how to deal with it. Then he called Jack over and said.

    "Tomorrow might be a big day. You stay here. We might be dealing with the ck pondpletely."

    When Sam said that, both of them looked at each other and just stayed without saying anything.

    Hours passed; sky darkened. When Sam sensed that a shadow mouse ising, he looked at Jack and said.

    "Don¡¯t resist and allow my spiritual sense to scan you." Jack nodded and closed his eyes. Sam waved his hand and Jack disappeared. When he reopened his eyes, all he can see is a big tower, surrounded by a world of different elements, he waspletely dumbfounded.

    Before he coulde out of his surprise, Sam appeared out of thin air.

    "Just stay here, for a while." Sam only said and closed his eyes; he is looking at his room in which the ring is ced on the bed. He was able to cover all the directions within the room if he concentrated enough.

    Inside the room, the ring with blue coloured stone which is embedded on a ring was ced on the bed.

    Soon, a shadow mouse came and picked the ring and shoved its fore limb until the ring perfectly fixed itself on the shoulder, even though it was a bit difficult to move, the movement wasn¡¯t hindered significantly.

    The shadow mouse then moved like a real shadow as it moved in the dark city. After a few minutes they reached the ck pond and they directly went to the manager¡¯s room. They didn¡¯t do anything as the shadow mouse just stayed there without moving.

    Hours passed. They just stayed as they saw the manager sat in meditation.

    When sun rose, the manager also opened his eyes and started walking out of the room. On the way outside all the shadow mice gathered as they moved in shadows while following the manager who is walking in streets.

    Soon, they arrived at the restaurant where Sam ced the mission to capture the poisonous beasts.

    When the manager arrived at the room, there are already people waiting. There are five people waiting.

    One of them moved towards a painting and moved it. A secret door opened on the floor leading them to the under-ground room.

    When Sam saw the room, he waspletely astonished. The room was like a small-scale auditorium. A lot of people are sitting in ten rows. In a stage upfront, there is a small round table with five chairs. Everyone stood up as soon as the manager came.

    Sam looked at the stone like walls all around. All the materials surrounding the room including the door are highly durable. They are made of a peak level 3 materials. Even a rank 3 Artisan will be in a deep trouble to melt a small amount of this material. Even the Great mage needs some effort to break through them.

    He immediately got an idea and ordered shadow mouse 1 to go outside the room. When they made sure that there are no people in the room, Sam told to Jack.

    "You stay here and make sure that there is no one who escapes the room. When theye out, they will be almost out of energy, so strike them with all you got." After that he even left Yanwu and Sky outside, both the birds are in their small forms.

    Shadow mouse immediately went inside the underground room. Even though there is no gap, the small shadow connecting the outside and inside is enough for them to move.

    When the meeting was starting, Sam observed the surroundings and gave the shadow mice instructions.

    "Spread out through the room, you guys cover all the corners and possible exits, the rest of you will enter the crowd. Release the grenades, just like you practised. You have to throw all of them as fast as you can and immediately escape. You can eithere into the shadow dimension or escape outside and go back to the mansion.

    Remember to release as many grenades as possible on the stage. The most powerful cultivators are there, we need to take them down at any cost. But remember one thing, if you sense that you can¡¯t do it at any moment immediately escape without a second thought." After Sam¡¯s message was passed among the mice, they started moving and spread among all over floor.

    After a few minutes, when the discussion was going on and all the people arepletely focussed, there was an explosion at the back of the room and green vapours started spreading among the room.

    Before the people in the room can react, a series of explosions urred all over the room and the most happened at the stage itself.

    The manager only saw a small shadow disappearing in middle of the green vapour, before he felt suffocated and took deep breaths, but immediately he realised what kind of mistake he did.

    The poison soon mixed with his blood stream and spiritual core. He immediately closed his eyes and used all his spiritual energy to suppress the poison.

    The weakest Novices are already on the floor, with their skin turned green. Some stronger people are suffering on verge of copsing. The peak stage novices who are on the stage along with the Manager are already kneeling as they fought with all their might to suppress the poison. But the more they tried the more they are suffering.

    They are unable to use any spells or attacks as they were caught off-guard by the poison. Before they came to their senses they werepletely vulnerable now.

    All their prowess and cultivation were useless because they were caught off-guard and they were even being dealt with poison.

    Just as the green vapour was being dissipated a bit, a ck figure emerged in the room out of nowhere.

    Sam walked towards them. The green vapour around him was being rotated around him not allowing the poisonous gas to be inhaled by him.

    He is using his wind element to keep himself safe, but that is also not a long term solution.

    The manager looked at the ck figure, with surprise shock all over the face. Never did he expect that he was being dealt with by a Novice, who is still a kid in his teens.

    His expression waspletely full of unwillingness.

    Sam took out another batch of grenades and threw them directly at the group of people who are still on the stage. Even though they wanted to go out through the door, they weren¡¯t able to do so, because of the poison.

    After all, the poison is concocted by using ten types of most poisonous level 2 beasts. And the quantity isn¡¯t any small amount. He used ten beasts of each type and collected the venom without wasting the single drop. He even used the spirit wine to make it more vtile and merge with the spiritual energy properly to increase its effects.

    Even the Great mage is being restrainedpletely, without much prowess left. Due to it being merged with the spiritual energy, the poison is easily mixing with the spiritual energy and the blood stream, causing the immediate effect.

    Sam still stood at the edge of the room and took out some normal swords which have some formations inscribed on their handles.

    He took them and pierced them around him one by one and soon five formations are activated around him.

    He ced more than thousand spirit stones in the formations and took out the golden crescent.

    After his actions werepleted, first thing he did was to throw away all the remaining grenades towards the stage. With a series of small explosions, the top five experts inside the room are being in aplete disadvantageous position.

    The poison started affecting the skin and it is slowly turning green.

    Sam took out three arrows, which are in golden colour. He made these arrows with the remaining fire bronze and the Golden alloy he made. There are more than ten inscriptions on each arrow.

    He nocked them all on the bow string of the golden crescent as he started gathering all the spiritual energy that has been directed towards him from the five formations.

    He spread all his spiritual energy leaving only miniscule amount and manipted all the energy around him to the arrows.

    Soon, the arrows were surrounded by a huge golden me.

    The manager looked at the Golden mes and knew he would be no match for the attack in his current state. But he wanted to at least take the opponent down with him.

    He looked around and saw that all hispanions are on the ground frothing from their mouths. He gritted his teeth and concentrated his spiritual energy. He used up all his remaining energy and started concentrating on his attack.

    Sam watched the scene and immediately released his arrow. The arrows contacted the manager and he was burning in the golden mes. But before he could die, he released his attack. A huge boulder immediately came out of the ground and flew towards Sam.

    Sam clearly have no energy to dodge. He immediately turned around and spread his remaining energy to the feather coat, which immediately turned golden colour.

    Sam immediately flew over the with the impact as the boulder smashed into pieces when it hit the wall along with him.

    Sam spurted a mouthful of blood as heid dropped on the floor. Before he lost the consciousness, he felt Yanwu screaming his name and door opening. He felt that Sky dragged him and taking him out of the room before closing it again.

 Chapter 82: Gains

    Sam opened his eyes with difficulty. He felt his whole body aching and heavy to even move. He saw the very familiar ceiling of his room. With much difficulty he moved his sore body and sat up as he leaned his body on the head rest.

    Suddenly, he remembered something and immediately checked his hands, he saw his ring which has divine dimension attached to it was still there and heaved a sigh of relief. When he peered into the dimension, he saw that ten shadow mice are resting in dark element one with their eyes closed.

    They are only safe because, they used their elemental fusion and turned into shadows, which are intangible to have any affects of the poison, but they were full exhausted.

    When he checked the surroundings of his room, he saw a few spatial rings that were left on the bed-side table. Before he tried to take a look at them, two birds flew into the room from the window. They are Yanwu and Sky, both of them are in their normal bird forms which are a raven and a falcon.

    When they saw that Sam is awake, they immediatelynded on the bed and nudged their heads gently in his embrace. Their movements are careful and gentle to not to hurt his wounds.

    Sam saw that his feather coat was hung on the hanger. There wasn¡¯t much damage done to it. It is almost same as how it was before. Just a few stitches that could be fixed in a few minutes.

    If Sam was a bit more powerful, he wouldn¡¯t have had this type of injury. Even though the great mage waspletely weakened by the potent poison, thest-ditch effort was equal to an attack of ate stage Novice, which is still far away from Sam¡¯s level.

    If not for his paranoia about the ns the general manager would make, he wouldn¡¯t have made an attempt to follow the manager himself along with the shadow mice and his n wouldn¡¯t have been seeded. His n was a sess mainly because of luck and coincidences.

    Sam really took a risk by attempting to strike at the meeting.

    When he was in deep thought with the two birds still in his embrace, Jack came into the room.

    "You are awake. I am d you are alright." He said as soon as he saw Sam.

    "Thank you. So, how was it? Are you up for the deal I proposed before? This is what I can do and am capable of. The main thing is that from the next time onwards I will be more on passive side and you will be doing the most of the action." Sam said with a smile. He was pretty confident that Jack would agree. After all, he used his tricks and gadgets to take down an organisation with a Great mage as a leader and having hundreds of members under it. The best part is that they weren¡¯t caught and the casualties are none.

    "It is a deal." Jack said and extended his hand. Sam shook his hand and said.

    "Remember, the payment will be the resources that I get from them, all types of meteorite sands are mine."

    "Don¡¯t worry. You can take all the meteorite sands and even the ny percent of the remaining resources. The remaining will be mine. How does that sound?" Jack offered.

    "Are you sure that you want to get the short end of the stick?" Sam asked with some confusion. Why give him such a big part of the share?

    "Well, you are the one doing most of the work anyway. I don¡¯t need much resources too, since I am a solo person, but you have to take care of your beasts, right? Take it as me giving you payment for yesterday¡¯s matter. After all, you are the one took down the whole organisation. My help isn¡¯t much." Jack shrugged and said with a smile.

    Sam didn¡¯t think of it much and just agreed. "Whatever you say. I will be a fool to not to agree to such a profitable deal. The fortune of a biggest underworld organisation, who am I to refuse?"

    "By the way those spatial rings are the ones from yesterdays matter. We took some of them from the organisation¡¯s locker room. When I went in and saw, there are mostly only bunch of scrolls, there was a small hidden locker after I examined for quite a while and I found three spatial rings inside. The remaining are from the corpses in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Your micepanions are very capable." Jack said as he pointed at the spatial rings.

    There are more than thirty spatial rings on the table. Maybe, the shadow mice took only some of them off the corpses, the rest might have been destroyed or they might have been unable to find out. Sam thought as he picked up the spatial rings one by one.

    There are varying amounts of resources in each ring. The spiritual stones varied from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands, for the five rings that belonged to the peak novices and the great mage, they altogether have about two million spirit stones. The rest of them had around three hundred thousand spirit stones.

    But the biggest shock came when he checked thest three spatial rings. When Sam saw the contents in the first one, he didn¡¯t even react for a while.

    The spatial ring was filled to brim with the eye-blinding spirit stones, there was hardly any space left in the storage and at the corner of the space, he found some scrolls.

    Sam took them out and looked through the information. The scrolls are the ie reports of the ck pond organisation. The information included, how many assignments they took and how much they earned and what is the profit after paying all the wages of the members in the organisation.

    The reports are on the monthly basis and he could see that they were being prepared to submit to the superiors.

    There a total of six scrolls, that means the spiritual stones inside are the ie of past six months. The total added up to a little over 18 million spirit stones. Sam took a deep breath to calm down.

    This ck pond earned almost 3 million every month with both legal and illegal activitiesbined. Sam felt that even the Count might not earn this much in taxes.

    After he came out of his stupor, Sam looked in to another spatial ring. This ring is filled with metals, ores, herbs. This could be said as a huge raw material inventory. These are all the materials that are used to make products such as medicines and weapons.

    But one thing inmon is that they are all on rare side of the avability in level 2 material category. They are exporting them to their superiors, maybe they have other businesses at other ces. This is basically a treasure trove to a Novices and Acolytes.

    Sam finally went to the third spatial ring and saw what he wanted to see the most. There are some ss cubes which have a side of at least five inches. The ss cubes are filled with a silver coloured sand like substance. When Sam saw the cubes, he waspletely over joyed. Later he noticed that there is a scroll beside the cubes.

    He took out a cube and the scroll instantly. First, he opened the scroll and went through the info in it. The info is about how these cubes should be used.

    These cubes are from the higher authorities of the ck water. And why are they sent here? They should act as rewards for the members of the organisation who performed meritorious deeds.

    Basically, what he understood from the scroll is that the ck water main base will send some meteorite sand to every other branch annually based on their scale of operations. But they cannot be used as they please. They can only use them when they performed a huge meritorious deed which benefits the interests of organisation.

    There are around twelve cubes, full of silver colour sand. From the records he knew that the ck pond was established twelve years ago and the boss changed countless times, but not a single one seemed to have contributed something good enough to take some meteorite sand.

    But Sam was a bit confused on why the main base is sending the sand annually, they could just send the reward after they confirmed that someone made a contribution, this way, they can even manage the resources better. After all, some ces might have people who are contributing more and some ces won¡¯t have much improvements just like the ck pond in this ce.

    Sam didn¡¯t think much of it and threw the thought to the back of his mind. The most important thing was to think on how to use this meteorite sand to its maximum.

    He didn¡¯t immediately open the cube, but stored it way along with the other cubes in his storage and then he took out all the spatial rings that are from the members of organisations and passed it to Jack. After that he took the ring which was now emptied of the meteorite sand and transferred more than one million of spirit stones from the spirit stones ring and passed it too.

    "This is your share from the ck pond. You can take the first pick on the resources from this ring and pass the rest to me." After that he passed the ring with the materials.

    Jack didn¡¯t stand on the ceremony and took the rings. Then he left Sam alone to let him take rest.

    Samid back on his bed and started thinking what to do next. He finished the ck pond matter and he didn¡¯t have much to do for the remaining two and a half months.

    He thought for a while and set himself some goals.

    First one is that he needs to find the most optimum usage of his wind element and let itbine with the fire element.

    Second one is that he needs to find a way to use his light element for some attacks, even if they are small scale. Even though they are other ways to attack, he has an uneasy feeling that he didn¡¯t find any proper use for this light element to unleash its full potential.

    Third one, he needs to train Watt. The kid already broke through to the Acolyte and he has to teach this kid properly and make him use the wind element in a unique way, only he can use. If he doesn¡¯t have any ideas, then I will pave a unique way for him.

    Fourth one, he has to find an interesting research topic now. He needs to use the resources of this world to make the technology that will cater his needs andforts.

    Final one, he needs to construct a level 3 forge in the second floor of the tower. This will be his portable forge and he could also make his experimental gadgets without worrying of someone seeing him.

    But before all of that, he has to make sure that he gets back in shape as soon as possible and attend the dinner in Violet dew family. After all, he agreed to contact Lady Maya after he was done with the business.

    But the immediate action is.

    Sam took out an empty spatial ring and ced all the scrolls of the info about ck pond organisation, the shadow mice initially gathered in it.

    He called one shadow mouse over and said.

    "Leave this ring in Count¡¯s mansion, somewhere that Count would find out easily." The shadow mouse acknowledged and then left with the ring.

    "This will erase all the suspicions on me." Sam muttered and closed his eyes.

    In the evening, Count Falcon is looking at the scrolls in his study. The more info he read, the more surprised he became.

    The most shocking thing is that there was a letter inside the spatial ring, which said.

    {These are the details of the sc.u.m of the society which I eliminated. They are parasites which are leeching off of themoners. I hope you will take care of the rest.} Under the letter it was signed as Robin hood.

    When Count put the letter down, he was a bit confused but he erased all kinds of suspicions on the people he previously had and that included Sam. Because, he can¡¯t imagine them being this selfless.

    And this is exactly what Sam wanted. He wasn¡¯t a person who will be a saviour of the society. And the scale of the organisation is not an ordinary Novice can deal with. So, Sam used the name of Robin hood and an incredibly chivalrous reason to divert his attention of the others.

 Chapter 83: Deal with Maya

    Sam woke up in the evening and had a hearty dinner and went back to rest. But that night, was sleepless to many people. Because, in the houses of manymoners, a leather pouch appeared out of nowhere with thousands to tens of thousands of spirit stones. The amount varied on how much their lives were affected by the ck pond¡¯s illegal activities.

    All themoners who received the leather pouches also received another thing with it and that is a note with words ¡¯Robin Hood¡¯.

    Next day, the news went to the high-level officers and even the Count himself. When he learnt of the name on the note Robin Hood, hepletely believed the scrolls and the letter that came yesterday. Now, he desperately wanted to meet this guy and recruit him. After all, even though the other party is dealing with the absolute sc.u.m of the society, the higher ups and the people in the ruling, wouldn¡¯t just leave it at that.

    The main reason is the millions of spirit stones that are in the hands of the underworld organisation. If they let a guy like Robin hood do these things his own way, the money would be his own to deal with. That is millions and millions of spirit stones slipping through their hands. How can they let that be?

    And apart from the Count and the officials, there is another person that is thinking of Sam right now. More specifically, that person is thinking about the one who destroyed the ck pond. He is none other than the great mage from the neighbouring city.

    He came here from the nearby count city where he is the in charge of the ck pond branch. He came here on request to help in catching the people who are acting against the ck pond. But before he arrived yesterday, the whole ck pond¡¯s main members disappeared. The rest of the minor members took as many resources as they can and went into hiding.

    He waspletely stunned as well as vexed at same time. After all, the ck pond is not a small organisation. It has a foundation of total twelve years and within a few days everything is gone just like that. He immediately abolished all the ideas of finding the culprit and started his journey back.

    He must report the issue to the superiors and that too, has to be done as soon as possible. But that much ofrge-scalemunication device is only in his headquarters. So, he immediately left.

    The Next day morning, Sam woke up with a fresh mind. His wounds are healed, but his body is still a bit sore and aching. But he felt that he could move normally and proceed with his normal activities.

    First thing he did aftering out of the mansion is to go to the Artisan tower to get the forging equipment. He asked them to ship all the equipment to his mansion.

    When he came back to the mansion, he found that Watt is justing back from the hunt along with Falck. They have a huge stag like beast with them. Both of them went to their yards and started a fire on which the flesh of the stag meat was being roasted.

    "From tomorrow onwards, your training will begin. Don¡¯t think about learning normal spells or attacks. You are a Beast warrior now and you will have an edge over normal warrior mages.

    Your every move, which might be physical attacks, spells, defence, anything you will be using in a battle will be obtained on how a beast will obtain.

    You don¡¯t need to waste your time on hand-seals and stuff. Just like how beast can immediately attack, you can also do that and you will be training until you achieve that.

    As for the weapon, you have to think of a weapon for yourselves and decide. Tell, me when you have it decide, then I will make it. But remember, the weapon might bemon, but your usage must be unique in your own way."

    Watt continuously nodded to show his agreement.

    After they had their meal, Sam took out the Communication token and contacted Lady Maya.

    # Artisan Sam, have you decided on the dinner? # Maya¡¯s voice came as soon as the line connected.

    "How about tonight?" Sam asked.

    # Fine with me. Then I will be waiting for your arrival. # Maya immediately agreed.

    After fixing the time, both of them hung up and Sam went back to his room. Heid on his bed as he started thinking, he is thinking about the research project that he wants to take on.

    Time passed slowly, and by evening, Sam is still confused on what type of topic he should research on. The Forging equipment has been delivered to his bas.e.m.e.nt. This time the whole equipment and set up cost him more than 600,000 spirit stones. Even though the amount is vastly high whenpared to the previous equipment he got from the bet in Starwood City¡¯s Artisan tower, that is due to the fact that this equipment must be able to endure the fire of a Great mage.

    Sam went to the bas.e.m.e.nt where the equipment was kept and after making sure that nobody is there, he immediately took them all into the second floor of the tower and went back to his room. He should assemble the equipment and make sure that there are no problems with the equipment.

    He was only done fixing everything and finished setting his workshop, just before the sky turned dark. Aftering out of the tower, he took a shower and changed into a fresh set of clothes, before he went out of the mansion.

    Everyone in the mansion is enjoying their time in the Count city. Sam found out that all of them are also going out tonight to shopping or some other recreational activities.

    Sam didn¡¯t mind and started making his way to Violet dew Family estate. When he reached the main gate, he was received by an Elder of the Violet dew family. After all, Maya can be polite to Sam, but with her status, she couldn¡¯t possiblye to the gate to receive him. it would be short-changing herself.

    When Sam was led to the dining hall, there are three people already waiting for him. They are Maya, Jasmine and the Family head of the Violet Dew family.

    "Wee. Artisan Sam." Maya greeted him with a smile as she extended her hand for a handshake.

    Sam shook her hand and said with same polite smile. "Thanks for having me Lady Maya. But please call me Sam." Maya nodded and they went to take a seat at the table.

    Soon, the dishes are served. They had small talk while eating and by the time the dinner is finished and the fruit juice was served, Maya spoke.

    "Sam, today I have called you, not only to make the misunderstandings clear but also to make a deal." When Sam heard this, he couldn¡¯t say he didn¡¯t expect this. After all, just to clear off some misunderstandings they don¡¯t have to go through all the trouble and invite him to dinner with all the hospitality.

    "Oh, please do tell Lady Maya. What kind of deal are we talking about?" Sam asked with curiosity.

    "I wonder, how much you know about the admission you got from the Marquis academy?" Maya asked without talking about her deal.

    "Not much actually."

    "Well, I will tell you something then. The Marquis academy is going to start a special branch within it. In this branch they will select all the Elite candidates from the Marquis city and the Elites from various Counties. In which the Falcon Cliff City is also included and now the top ten, of the tournament are also going to be ced inside this branch." Maya started exining.

    "Oh, I really didn¡¯t know about it. Thanks for the information. But how is it rted to the deal you mentioned?" Sam asked

    "Actually, Jasmine also got an admission into this branch from the special quota of the Marquis city¡¯s Artisan tower. But there is something that is quite troubling for me about the rules of the branch." Speaking up to this point, she paused and looked at Sam¡¯s face which was filled with calmness and no trace of emotions. Then she continued.

    "One of the rules of this special branch is that the students will not be in contact with outside world in certain circ.u.mstances and there is also a rule that states that the candidates can onlye outside of the academy only when permitted and until then, they have to stay in the academy itself.

    So, I have some trouble to send Jasmine to the special branch." When Sam heard this, he was quite surprised. He looked at Jasmine with a scanning gaze. He wasn¡¯t able to find anything unusual about her. She seems to bepletely normal person. Then Maya continued.

    "Jasmine is a special child. Since, her childhood shecked emotions. She will only interact with me and whoever I tell her to interact with. But the problem is that I won¡¯t be able tomunicate with her when she is in academy.

    You know how the world is. All the noble children are having some designs about her. If I leaver her with them in the academy alone, they might take advantage of her which will cause trouble.

    Even though, my status is considered not bad in the Marquis city, the noble families aren¡¯t pushovers either. We are at most at the equal standing and within the academy they might even have the higher say.

    So, I have trouble leaving her there." Maya finished exining and Sam finally had an inkling on what the deal is going to be about. Before he could speak Maya continued on saying.

    "I want you to take care of Jasmine." When Sam heard this, he shook his head with a smile, this is exactly what he predicted.

    "Lady Maya, let me be blunt with you. From what you said, Jasmine is just like a little child with no emotional quotient. If she tags along with me, you don¡¯t know how bad my influence can be. I am telling you directly. I am not exactly a kind of person who is suitable to stay with a pure hearted person.

    Even if you can still allow that, from what you said, there are many noble children in the special branch who set their eyes on Jasmine and that might not be just because of her looks right, it might have been something to do with her talents and been approved by their Noble families.

    If I interfere between this mess, not only would I have to face the noble children, I also have to be an enemy of all those families. Do you think I can cope with it at my current level?"

    Sam said as soon as Maya finished speaking.

    When Maya heard this, she became instantly silent. Jasmine is just sipping her juice as if the whole topic isn¡¯t about her at all. After a long silence and pondering, Maya finally replied.

    "Sam, then I will proceed the deal in this way. You don¡¯t have to take care of her continuously. Every time, if someone approaches her or tries to be close to her, she wille to you and ask for advice, all you have to do is, to give her suggestions, whether she should talk to them or not. She will listen to whatever you have to say. You only have to involve yourself, if they get heavy handed and try any forceful methods. Are you okay with it?"

    This time, it is Sam¡¯s turn to be silent. After a brief gap, he asked. "Why are you asking me this?"

    "Actually, I didn¡¯t have any thoughts of asking you first, but you are the only candidate that is suitable for it. After all, you yourself are a talented person in not only artisanship but also in other professions. You don¡¯t have much use for Jasmine¡¯s talents. Other than that, you seemed to be a person who isn¡¯t attracted to fleshly beauty that easily. Then only I came to this decision."

    "Okay, then what is your offer?"

    Maya took out a red colour gem and ced it on the table. The red colour gem is small and is only the size of thumb nail of an a.d.u.l.t. Sam took the gem in his hands and took examined it carefully. The gem is filled with fire elemental energy. But the energy is not in a form where one could directly absorb like a spirit stone.

    Sam looked at Maya questioningly. Thetter replied.

    "This is a fiery ruby. This is mainly used by Jeweller artisans and tailor artisans to implement on their products. This not only serves the purpose of aesthetics, but also can be used as an emergency spiritual energy from the user.

    As you can see, the energy in the ruby can¡¯t be used for cultivation, but the energy can be used to enhance the attack or defence. The wearer can use the energy directly without absorbing it. I will give you 50,000 of these"

    When Sam heard the exnation, he was surprised, but when he heard the number, he was immediately stunned. The number is too high. But the thing is Sam doesn¡¯t need these rubies in the battle, because, he can use the spiritual energy around him to enhance his attack, but he has some ideas on how to use them for business purposes, if he can use them properly, maybe he can make a small fortune.

    "Deal." He immediately agreed.

    Maya beamed with a smile with satisfaction. Jasmine didn¡¯t show any expression.

    "In this ring there are ten thousand rubies, I will pay the remaining in instalments." Sam didn¡¯t have many objections and agreed. After confirming the transaction, Sam left the Violet dew estate and walked back to the mansion. But when he entered the isted area around the mansion, Sam felt something amiss.

 Chapter 84: The Ambush

    Sam looked around. He noticed some presence but he wasn¡¯t able to pin point what it is. He tried to ignore it and move on and just when he took a step forward.

    *Swoosh* an arrow flew over and almost hit him on his face. Sam dodged it narrowly and immediately took out the Golden Crescent and turned on the bow mode. He aimed the bow as he nocked the arrow, in the direction the arrow came.

    Just as he was about to release the arrow, he sensed some danger. He immediately shot the arrow and ducked.

    *Swoosh*

    A spear flew over the ce where his head was before when he was in standing position. The spear pierced through the tree in a distance away from him.

    Before he could make sense of the situation, a fire ball came from behind. Sam did his best to dodge and then he was in a situation where he has to dodge continuously.

    All type of spells, and cold weapons flew over to him. Sam shot some arrows in retaliation and one of them actually stuck a person.

    "AHHHHHHHHHH.." He heard a scream from a spot and he locked the position. He took out arrows one after another and shot at the same spot.

    "AHHHHH..." He heard another scream, and by the end of the scream it became less and quite as if the person has fainted. And this made all the attacks stopped.

    Sam stood there with the golden crescent in his hands and looked around. His face is calm and collected. Until now, from the attacks he dodged, he knew that there are a lot of people who are attacking. If not for his survival instinct and his cultivation of spirit and soul, he wouldn¡¯t have been able to dodge them at all.

    The things he deduced from the ambush are that, they are more than 10 people, more than half of them have higher cultivation than him, they aren¡¯t experienced in this. But there is one thing he wants to know. Who?

    Who is the one making a move on him and what motive they had? He went through the people who might have motives. Some names popped up.

    Might be someone from ck water.

    Eisen¡¯s family.

    Jessie¡¯s father.

    Even though he has some other enemies, he has some closure with those disputes.

    Then he thought of the possibilities of being one of the three making this attack.

    ck water, theck of experience and expertise in the ambush isn¡¯t something people from ck water will have. The ck water is the biggest underground organisation and they will at least have some expertise in doing ambush. So, they can be eliminated.

    Jessie¡¯s father, that man might not want to offend Maya again with this action and if this failed it would be counted as more than an offence. There is a very small chance and it is almost negligible.

    Eisen¡¯s family, they don¡¯t have enough power to mobilize this many people in Falcon Cliff city.

    This made him even more confused as he can¡¯t think of any enemies, he made who will attack in this situation.

    All these thoughts went through his mind in a few seconds. Then he heard a voice from a distance.

    "No wonder, you got the first rank. You have some skills." The voice was filled with confidence and superiority.

    Sam didn¡¯t reply. He is looking for the voice. He could sense that he is around, but the other party was almost out of his range. He could only faintly sense the other party¡¯s location.

    He turned towards that direction and nocked an arrow. But this arrow is a ranked arrow. Even though it is only rank one arrow, it will still hurt. Sam started concentrating and the arrow immediately glowed with golden light. At the tip of the arrow there is a golden fire ball forming.

    Before the other party could, react, Sam shot the arrow. A golden ray shed through the air. The arrow missed the target but the other party got caught in the st.

    "You have balls. But do you think that you can get past us now. You are surrounded by twenty people and all of us have higher cultivation than you. Let us see who will win." The same voice came but this time it is a little bit trembling and shaky.

    As soon as the other party finished saying, Sam felt many people running towards him. Before he knew it, there are almost ten people with all sorts of cold weapons and at the same time the ranged spells areing.

    Sam immediately became tensed. There are all attacksing from all sides. Sam stored away the golden crescent and took out his ws. Even though these ws are temporary, the material of the ws are of the Golden Blood tiger.

    He immediately ran towards the city. There is almost no possibility of winning, so he thought of an idea. Sam immediately ran towards the City.

    And the warriors who areing towards him happened to be on the same direction. Sam took his attack poster, he showed the ws towards them like a tiger, he pounced towards the group.

    When hended, he immediately caught one person¡¯s leg and tore away a piece of flesh.

    "AHHHHH..." The guy immediately screamed. Sam didn¡¯t stop and got on his all fours. He looked at the team like a beast. He is after all, fully pissed off. But Sam, didn¡¯t have any hopes of winning and he knew it. He just healed himself but he is not his top condition and even if he was in his top shape, he would have very minute chance of escaping without much damage.

    And now, he has to deal with this bunch.

    Even the group was stunned. They didn¡¯t expect that this person would take this kind of posture and they immediately got confused.

    Sam looked at a guy who is a little bit separated from the group and pounced on him like any beast would do. The other guy isn¡¯t prepared and swung his sabre at him.

    Sam dodged it and twisted his body in the air. He used his dexterity and agility to its maximum and when hended on the guy, he locked the other guy¡¯s hip and swung his arms. He tore through the arm and his ws dug in that person¡¯s chest.

    But the other person who is obviously stronger than Sam, kicked him away and tried to stand up. The deep w on the chest started bleeding profusely.

    Samnded on his fours again and looked at the group. The other guys came out of stupor and looked at him in a weird way. They are confused and surprised at the same time. They never saw anyone move in this way.

    Just when they were about to attack, Sam swung his ws in the air and wind des flew towards them.

    With that attack, Sam decisively turned around and started running, but the run is a little bit weird because, he is running on his all fours. He is running like a cheetah.

    Even though he can attack them with other elements and attacks, his main aim isn¡¯t fighting them but to escape into the city. He needs to attract the attention of the city guards. From the past incident the city guards are really on high alert.

    Sam ran very fast when he is on all fours. This is a type of movement technique he made himself in his past life. Even though it will help him move faster it will consume his stamina heavily.

    When Sam was a distance away from entering the core of the region, a fire ball came and hit him squarely on his back. Even though the attack was mostly reduced by his coat, it disrupted his rhythm and slipped. He rolled over the ground andid down. Then before he knew it, a sword came and made a sh on his chest.

    Sam gritted his teeth in pain and contracted his chest muscles to sustain the blood loss. But he didn¡¯t scream. He just looked at the guys who are nearing him with hatred and coldness.

    When he tried to pick himself up, a water sphere hit him on the chest where the sword sh was. The bleeding increased.

    Next the barrage of attacks came as tried to move. But none of the attacks are fatal. The cold weapons, weren¡¯t able to make a damage through the feather coat and they concentrated their attacks on his chest and legs.

    Sam gritted his teeth and used all his energy tounch a fire ball into the air. All the city guards were alerted and immediately came running over. The group didn¡¯t realise what Sam did and just thought that Sam missed the shot.

    By the time they realized it, they were all surrounded by more than forty city guards in which more than half of them are inte stage Novice.

    The group stopped attacking and Sam justid on the floor silently. He bled from the wounds and scars but he never let out even a whimper of pain out of his mouth.

    "Do you guys think you can arrest me? Do you even know who I am?" The person who talked to Sam previously spoke again. The City guards didn¡¯t even speak when a majestic voice came from a far.

    "Zeke maverick. The Eldest son of the Marquis Blue me. May I know why you are here?" When the City guards heard this voice, they felt surprised and nervous at the same time. They knew that son of the Marquis is not a person who some small fries like them could deal with.

    But they also felt relieved, because they didn¡¯t do anything rashly.

    "Count Falcon. You are here. I am just testing out the candidates who are selected to the special branch of the academy."

    When Sam heard this, he finally felt at ease. He is thinking if the target was truly from his previous enemies. But after a moment of ease, anger and hatred came over. These bunch of assholes who are at least at Level 3 Novice ganged up on him and now they are telling him that they are testing. He felt like tearing them into pieces.

    Sam slowly made himself stand up and looked at the group with cold eyes. Even though he was burning inside, he didn¡¯t show it outside. His face becamepletely cold. He stored his ws away and is now just looking at the group of people to etch their faces in his mind.

    "Testing? Seems like your testing standards too high to think that you will use twenty Novices with higher cultivations to attack him in an ambush." Count Falcon spoke with sarcasm. He is definitely not happy that someone is causing this much ruckus in his territory.

    "Well, it is just so-so." Zeke said nonchntly as if it is only normal.

    "I think we should discuss the rest of the details in my mansion." Count said as he gestured to the group. Then he turned towards Sam and said.

    "I think it is better if you alsoe." Sam nodded and followed him. On the way he started healing himself slowly with his remaining miniscule amount of energy. When he reached the Count mansion, he was led to a meeting room which is a bitrger than the previous one he met with Count.

    Inside, the room there are already people waiting and all of them are familiar to him. They are the weird trio, hawk, Kelly, Drew, Philip, Ray and Drew. All the people from the top 10 rankings of the tournament. He also noticed something else. Except Hawk and Kelly, the rest of them are all injured.

    Their faces are paled and weak. When they saw Sam, they didn¡¯t seem surprised at all.

    Count took the head seat of the long table while the rankers sat on one side. The group of attackers sat on the other side and the people who don¡¯t have a seat are standing.

    Zeke sat in the nearest seat to the Count and his face was full of superiority.

    Sam just tended to his wounds without caring about the meeting.

    "Zeke, maybe you could say why you attacked all my top ten rankers of my City?" Count asked with a cold look.

    Zeke smiled mockingly as he eyed the ten people and said. "I am just testing the country bumpkins whether they are eligible for the special privileged branch that was going to start. But from the looks of it, they don¡¯t seem that much. They might as well withdraw, lest they embarrass themselves."

    Count frowned in displeasure and the candidates didn¡¯t seem to be in best of their moods after they heard that.

    "Last time I checked that seemed to be my job. Marquis himself has assigned me this job. Now, why would you interfere in this?" Count asked with an even colder tone.

    Just before Zeke was about to reply, a voice came from the door.

    "Because, he didn¡¯t get a ce in the special branch from the Marquis city quota and he is here to snatch a ce from our city. Isn¡¯t it right? Zeke."

    Sam looked at the familiardy who walked into the room. It is none other than Maya.

    Zeke¡¯s face immediately turned ugly and rest of the group also has same expressions.

    "Zeke, I wonder how your father will feel after what you are doing? First, you aren¡¯tpetent enough to make it into the quota and now you are ganging up with numbers against the people who has lower cultivations than you. He will be severely disappointed, won¡¯t he?" Maya took a seat at the end of the table and spoke.

    "Artisan Maya, what are you doing here?" Zeke asked in a cold tone. His sense of superiority waspletely gone. Sam looked at him and gave a mocking smile.

    But his eyes are cold and shone with a ruthless light. Count and Maya also noticed this and for some unknown reason they felt that Zeke would remember this day and regret it for the rest of his life.

    "Well, this is my birth ce. It is not weird for me to be here. But, the esteemed eldest son of the Marquis is here with hisckeys, that is a bit weird isn¡¯t it?" She answered in a sarcastic and mocking tone.

    The rest of the people following Zeke all had ugly expression when Maya scanned her gaze over them. Zeke didn¡¯t know what to say and finally gave up on exining and stood up. He wants to leave the ce immediately.

    "Count Falcon. Thanks for your hospitality, but I have to leave now." He didn¡¯t even have time to think toe up with an excuse as he stood up and walked towards the door. But before he opened the door, someone called from behind.

    "Wait." Zeke turned around and looked at Drew who stood up and started walking towards the group. He went face to face with Zeke and asked.

    "Leave your names before you go. That would make it easier for me when I visit the Marquis city."

    Drew¡¯s gaze was sharp and collected when he said this. He is fully pissed off. These days he is already vexed about the fact that Jack is a better swordsman than him and now a bunch of people turns up randomly and beats the shit out of him by ganging up on him. He is really pissed and if he didn¡¯t take his revenge he might as well stop cultivating.

    "Hahahaha.." The room is filled withughter. Zeke and hisckeys areughing uncontrobly. The Zeke said.

    "You cane and find me. The rest of them will be with me. If you can take me on, they won¡¯t be a problem anyway." Then he left without even turning back. Drew is even more frustrated. When they were gone, Maya stood up and said.

    "You guys don¡¯t mind this. One day you will be surpassing him and you can take him down at that time. The Marquis is a reasonable man and he won¡¯t make a fuss if you beat him fair and square.

    Even though she is trying to make them feel better, that didn¡¯t help much. Maya sighed and looked at Sam and she felt a bit startled.

    Sam¡¯s expression is a bit menacing right now and the rest of the candidates are too busy with themselves to notice but the Count noticed this.

    Sam¡¯s eyes are glowing with a cruel light. He is like a predator who is out for blood. His expression even gave them chills.

    Jack and Philip turned towards Sam to see what are his thoughts about this, when they looked at his expression they unconsciously gulped.

    "What is wrong with him?" By this time Kelly also noticed this and asked Philip who is near him. Now, all the people are looking at Sam. Even the weird trio are concentrating on him.

    Jack shook his head and said. "You should either kill the wounded beast or ignore it. But it you y or make fun of it when it is down, other wise its recovery will be your biggest regret."

    All of them are confused but Hawk, Philip and the weird trio understood vaguely and they have only one thought in their minds. ¡¯Beast has locked its prey.¡¯

    But the person who is in the centre of attention didn¡¯t notice them or rather didn¡¯t bother to notice them and walked back to his mansion.

 Chapter 85: New Research direction

    Sam came back to his mansion and changed from the dress which is full of blood stains and tears.

    But he didn¡¯t throw them away, instead he folded them neatly and stored them inside a spatial ring. Heid down on the bed and went into deep sleep.

    At the same time far away from the mansion, somewhere in the northern region. The weird trio sat together in a meeting.

    "Did you feel that? Or is it just me?" Yaar asked the remaining two.

    "I felt that too."

    "Me too."

    The remaining two answered.

    "Why is that guy¡¯s blood l.u.s.t so high? I only felt that from our uncle."

    "Yeah, it gave me chills. I thought we are already wild and fierce enough with the amount of our killings. Just how many lives did he take to reach that level." Yash said in a low tone.

    "Maybe we should talk to Uncle about our ns on him. "

    "I agree."

    "Let us do that."

    Next day. Sam woke up even before the sun rose.

    He ate some breakfast and went over to Watt¡¯s room.

    "From today onwards, we are going to train together. You might not know, but now I can also use the wind element, but I don¡¯t have much practice with it. From today onwards, everyday we will be practicing together and master the wind element to use it in the most optimum way."

    Watt nodded without saying anything.

    "Then, prepare. We will be leaving to the nearby woods in a while."

    An hourter, Sam and Watt came to the nearby woods and they settled at a ce where there is enough empty ce without any trees.

    Falck, Sky and Yanwu are also there and the three of them went into the deeper part of the woods, to hunt.

    Sam and Watt stood in front of each other.

    "Since you made a contract with Falck, you are a Beast warrior which in some sense are a warrior mage. But you have some inherent difference with a normal warrior mage that is your body¡¯s strength doesn¡¯t depend on the cultivation process, rather it will depend on the beast you contracted with. So, your body is as strong as Falck¡¯s body.

    You and Falck are now one. Both of you will grow together and be stronger together.

    Now, we are going to train to achieve how to use the spiritual energy just like how a beast does. We will not waste our time on hand seals and chants. In a battle one second is all it takes for your life to leave.

    So, we have to master the direct casting of a spell and in this way to you can control the scale, size and the range of the attack all by yourself.

    For that we need an absolute control over our body as well as the spiritual energy. Now, look carefully." Sam exined and stretched out his hand. At the end of his hand a small golden me emerged and Sam started controlling it.

    The golden me turned into the shape of a rabbit, then a pigeon, then a bear, a deer and finally it even changed into a human silhouette.

    After that the me disappeared.

    "Your control over your spiritual energy must reach a level, where you could do all the things I did. You have to gain the skills to gain absolute control over your ability."

    And if you still can¡¯t believe it and wants to know why you should do it. I can show you an example. DO you want to try?" Sam asked.

    Watt contemted for a second before saying. "It is not that I don¡¯t believe in you. But I still want to know at what scale the advantage of this free control of the spiritual energy will bring me."

    Sam smiled at the answer and said. "Okay, then I will show you. Turn backwards." When Watt turned, Sam walked over and stood beside him before saying.

    "I will limit myself to the Level 1 Acolyte. Do you see the two trees over there? You will attack one tree and I will attack another one. We both will see, who did it faster and in a most efficient way. You will cast the wind de spell or any other spell which you have most confidence in."

    Sam said as he pointed at a pair of trees in a distance away from them. Both of them went into positions.

    "Start."

    As soon as Sam said these words, Jack immediately started making hand seals. His speed is so fast that only after images of his fingers could be seen. When he was about to make the final hand seal, he heard a loud sound of crashing and when he saw in the direction, he saw Sam¡¯s tree already crashed down on the ground. Even before he could cast the spell, the other party was already done with the task.

    "That is the amount difference you will have." Sam said and stood facing Watt.

    "Now, your training will start. You will stand here and use your wind elemental spiritual energy. You will use the smallest amount possible and try to control it. You wouldn¡¯t use any hand seals. You will have to control the spread of the energy as well as how it travels in your body to get the desired effects.

    The first part of the training is that you have to condense the energy in your palm. You not only have to condense the energy you also have to be able to decide the amount of concentration of energy. When you are finally able to control the concentration of the condensed wind, your first phase of training will be over."

    Sam exined everything and left the ce. He stood a bit far away from Watt and he too is practicing the condensation of the wind elemental energy. Even though he had experience with using fire elemental energy, it is still a bit difficult. But his spiritual core trait made it easy for him.

    By afternoon, Sam already made a lot of progress in controlling the condensation of energy. But Watt isn¡¯t in the same situation.

    He isn¡¯t able to do it at all. All these hours he almost had no progress. All he was able to do was to condense energy in his palm. Any more that is still nigh impossible.

    Yanwu along with Sky and Falck are responsible for the lunch. After the meal both Sam and Watt, again went back to practice.

    They practiced until evening. Then they went back to the Mansion.

    As soon as they arrived, Sam entered his study and then the divine dimension. Now it is time for his research.

    He entered the second floor of the tower and took out a normal spirit stone and another spirit stone which is devoid of energy. This is the spirit stone which is used up of all its energy.

    Sam started his observation on the normal spirit stone. All he could feel was, the vast amount spiritual energy particles. The spirit stone is the example for Active and stable state of spiritual energy.

    Sam increased his concentration and kept on observing the spirit stone in greater detail. Then only he found out something interesting.

    The spiritual stone has a small spherical core which is very minute in size at its centre. This small core has somework lines extended from it all over the spirit stone. These lines were just like veins in the body. But instead of the blood, the energy is being transmitted all over the spirit stone.

    Thework lines are numerous, there are hundreds of these small lines if not thousands. Over the surface of the stone, he noticed that some energy lines came to the end and the spiritual energy is leaking slowly. But the amount is so minute that it will take decades to empty this single stone and that too if the stone didn¡¯t absorb the energy from the atmosphere to fill it back.

    Then Sam started observing the used spirit stone. In this he discovered something. The core of the stone is still intact, but the energywork lines seemed to be destroyed. The used spirit stone has thework lines which seemed to be torn away forcefully. The stone seemed to be full of holes and he could clearly see the energy that is being collected towards the core immediately drain away.

    Sam increased his concentration on the used-up spirit stone and just like he did to metals, he immediately copsed the structure. A small amount of powder was left in his palm. In the middle of the powder, Sam found out the core which is in the size of small mustard seed.

    He again diverted his attention to the normal spirit stone and suddenly an idea came to his mind. He increased his concentration and when he locked his energy on the bondage of the grains in the spirit stone structure, he slowly disrupted it.

    Then something unexpected happened. The spiritual energy which is flowing through the energy channels and the core of the stone, immediately lost the channel to transmit but still felt attracted to the core and approached it in a rapid pace.

    Sam felt the spiritual energy in the stone be extremely unstable. He immediately threw the stone far away and.

    *BOOM*

    An explosion happened in the air while the stone is still travelling. When Sam went towards the explosion zone, he felt the spiritual energy in the area waspletely unstable and is in excited state. The spiritual energy is in a state of turmoil andpletely unsuitable for absorption.

    He felt that he was extremely lucky to have escaped the situation. If the stone exploded with in his own hands, he might even have received a severe damage, because his body is also a vessel of spiritual energy and his whole body will also be in turmoil which may even lead to his death.

    Sam didn¡¯t dare to do the same experiment soon and went back to the powder he obtained from the used-up spirit stone.

    When he observed the powder, he didn¡¯t feel any properties from it. He felt that it is neither fine nor coarse, it is neither hard nor soft. He didn¡¯t even know if it has any weight.

    He ced the powder in the smallest cauldron he has and started heating it up. But no matter how much he increased the heat, the powder didn¡¯t melt, but it turned into a bit red in colour. Sam felt that the colour was a bit familiar and he thought about it.

    After a long while of thinking, he remembered what it is and finally, took out a used-up fire elemental spirit stone.

    The stone is also transparent with slight red shade and when he turned it into the powdered state, he understood what happened. The powder in the cauldron is also same as the one in his hand. After sometime, the powder in the cauldron turned back into its previous form without any colour.

    All he knew from this is that he can not treat this powder just like he treated metals. And all he got is the fire- resistant property of this powder.

    Sam then took out mustard seed sized core. He sat down cross-legged and started injecting the spiritual energy in its neutral form. After a while, the core started glowing. But as soon as he stopped the injection, all the energy immediately came out and the core returned to normal.

    Sam heaved a sigh at this.

    This is something within his expectations.

    He again started injecting but this time, when stopping it, he carefully observed the process and he clearly saw the body of the core releasing the energy as if it was a holed strainer. The energy flowed like water out of it.

    Then he understood how the spirit stone sustains.

    Basically, after the condensed energy formed in the shape of the core, the energy veins in the stone will form the structure.

    The core will be acting as the reservoir as well as junction of all the veins in the stone and it acts just like a human heart.

    Just like how a human heart which sustains while pumping the blood to various organs, the core of the stone also circtes the energy in loops with it as a junction and some loops have some alternate branches which will deviate the energy to the external atmosphere.

    When someone absorbs the energy from the core from these deviated veins, the heavy flow will tear off the veins and the spirit stone will eventually be used-up and destroyed.

    Sam looked at the core and the powder with a look of interest in his eyes.

 Chapter 86: Silver meteorite sand

    Sam only had one thing on his mind now. He needs to find a way to use this powder to construct something back. He has a new idea and he could think of many possibilities from it.

    But no matter how he tried, he wasn¡¯t able to think of a way to make it.

    After countless failures, Sam went to the huge cauldron and took out some metals from storage. Since, he wasn¡¯t able to do something with the powder, he doesn¡¯t want to waste his time and diverted his attention to do something else.

    He took out thest remaining bit of the fire bronze. This included the scraps he got from the sheet metal after the circles are cut out of it. He took out the purple gold.

    He turned everything into powders and threw them into the cauldron.

    He is finally doing something to his two panthers. Actually, he had this intention since they were attacked but he became busyter and wasn¡¯t able to find time to make them. Now that he has time to do, he is doing it.

    He also has to test out his new equipment.

    Sam started his forging and that went on for more than twenty hours inside the tower. He did it with all his heart. Even though he wasn¡¯t able to find a rare material, he made use of the best level 2 materials, to make a temporary armour for the two panthers.

    When he looked at the final product, he couldn¡¯t help but feel satisfied.

    Sam didn¡¯t make a metallic armour, instead just like how he made a coat with ck Meteorite sand by using the thread of the Heaven spirit silk moth, he made a fabric again, but the materials are different and a bit lighter.

    Panthers are a type of beasts which are mostly dependent on their speed and agility to fight and if he made a bulky armour, it might impede their movements at joints.

    So, what Sam made is a cloth which covered the limbs as well as the upper side of the body. He made a helmet made of metal, which covers the upper part of the head above the nose.

    The ears and eyes aren¡¯t covered by the helmet. It is mostly a cover for the upper part of the head and the nape.

    The fiery rubies are ced along the fabric of the cloth armour. They are ced in random positions and doesn¡¯t have any specific shape. Even though, it didn¡¯t look bad, the positioning of the rubies didn¡¯t make any sense.

    But not everyone can discover they are fiery rubies. From how exquisite and extravagant the fabric was, they might even think that the rubies are just there for decoration.

    The fabric is of golden-red in colour. It just looked like a golden cloth but there is a reddish hue to them.

    On the top of the armour along the spine, the names are embroidered. Even though, Sam can recognise the two panthers individually, it is not same for others. So, now that he has given them names, they shouldn¡¯t be wrongly identified.

    Since both of them are male, Sam named them Nero and Zenith.

    The embroidery was done with red coloured thread made of the fire bronze. Even though, the name was embroidered on the spine, they weren¡¯t made in big letters. Rather, they were in a medium -sized letters and were given some space to upy a long area.

    The cloth armour on top of the body doesn¡¯t cover the body entirely. It covered the heart and is a bitrge on the head side and it became narrow on the hind side.

    After Sam was done, he called the panthers and carefully made them wear the armour. Even though, it is made by a special cloth it is basically metallic threads, so he made sure that he added enough cloth lining inside to not to hurt the panthers.

    "From today onwards, you are Nero and you are Zenith."

    Sam said as he patted their heads. They nodded their heads in joy and rubbed their heads on Sam¡¯s chest.

    After that was done, Sam went back to do some more experiments on the spirit stone powder after a series of unsessful attempts, he gave up for now and went back to his room to rest.

    The next day, Sam and Watt went to train in the woods again. Even though, he could take Watt to the tower and train along with him, he still can¡¯t trust Watt enough to let him know one of his biggest secrets.

    Sam felt his progress is much faster than expected. By noon, he was able to manipte the condensed wind as he liked.

    Watt also had some progress but it is still far from the progress Sam had made.

    After lunch, Sam stood near a tree and closed his eyes. He concentrated to the limit as he observed the air surrounding the tree.

    Sam is trying to find a way to separate the gases. The most difficult part of it all is to identify the gases. If he achieved that with his maniption ability it is very easy for him to separate them, but he wasn¡¯t able to identify the gases in his previous attempts.

    Now, he is near the tree because, he wants to identify the oxygen. As tree releases the oxygen gas after the photosynthesis.

    Sam is carefully observing the air around him. He could obviously feel the difference between the air in the open space and right under the tree.

    But he wasn¡¯t able topletely distinguish it. After more than two hours of trails, both of them returned to the mansion where Sam went on to do his experiments inside the tower.

    The next few days, this became his daily routine. He trained and went on with his experiments.

    After more than ten days, Watt had his first phase of trainingplete. He was able to freely control the condensed wind as he pleased.

    "Now, you can manipte the wind also control the amount of energy you want use, the next phase is that you have to efficiently use the amount of energy you can control.

    Did you see that tree? You have to attack the leaves, but the thing is you have to cut only one leaf out of it. If you cut more than one leaf or any damage to the tree you are failed.

    You have to cut only one leaf with your attack."

    Watt was initially full of confidence as soon as he heard Sam¡¯s requirement, but when he tried, he was utterly disappointed. No matter how small the amount of energy he used, he wasn¡¯t able to cut only one leaf.

    Every time the attacknded, after the leaf was cut, the wind de still went on and cut other leaves ornd on the trunk or branches.

    After some time, he becamepletely frustrated and in a fit, he failed to control his energy and the tree copsed.

    Sam walked over to stand beside him. Watt asked.

    "Is it really possible to control to such extent? Even if it is what is the use of it? After all, the powerful the attack is the more damage I can do to the opponent, it will be easier to defeat him, right?"

    Sam chuckled. Instead of replying he asked his own question. "Do you really think, that the power is everything in an attack?"

    "Isn¡¯t it?"

    "No. Actually, it couldn¡¯t be more wrong."

    "How can that be? If the power is high enough wouldn¡¯t all other tricks be meaningless."

    "Haha. You yourself said it. that is true but there is a big IF in it. If you are really powerful enough, you can really ignore all the other tricks and before you be powerful enough you have to make use of the tricks you need to take down your opponent."

    Speaking up to this point, Sam waved his hand and a small breeze flew past them and a single leaf fell from the tree andnded in Watt¡¯s hand.

    "Imagine the stem of the leave as a vein at the throat of your opponent. Before he knew it, he would already be dead.

    Remember this Watt, you can use whatever trick you want to use. That doesn¡¯t have to be showy, ssy with some cool sounding names. After all, you are not training to be a showman and entertain the audience.

    You are training to fight and you are training to kill.

    The best move isn¡¯t the one whose power is highest but the one which kills the fastest."

    "But what do you do if your opponent is too strong to fall for these small attacks?" Watt asked.

    Then Sam turned around and walked away. He looked at the other tree, in front of him and controlled the wind. A breeze flew again but this time, the tree was cut in the middle.

    "If that is what you are really worried about, think about it this way. Every time in a battle, the preference has to given to whatever that is you need to do. And you only need a small knife to kill a chicken and a machete to kill a goat and a sword to ughter a lion.

    So, if you didn¡¯t think that way and use a sword strike to ughter a chicken, you would be giving preference to what you want than what you need, which can be very fatal. You think over it."

    Sam left Watt alone and went back to the mansion.

    Today he is going to take a look at the silver coloured meteorite sand he got from the ck pond.

    He entered the tower and took out a cube of sand. He opened the cubic box and took a handful of sand.

    He looked at the grains of the sand andpared it with a handful of ck meteorite sand, that was left over from making the coat.

    Compared to the ck meteorite sand, the silver coloured Sand is lighter. After checking it thoroughly and making some moreparisons, he finally came to a conclusion. This sand is really called the Silver meteorite sand.

    But wasn¡¯t it obvious by its colour? Yes, but the thing is there are two other meteorite sands which are in simr colour as this sand in his hands. That is why, Sam was able to identify the ck meteorite sand with a single nce and he wasn¡¯t able to conclude about the meteorite sand without someparisons.

    When he looked at the sand again, he didn¡¯t know what to think. Because, the silver meteorite sand is one of the lightest in all of the meteorite sands. The products made of this are also lightest to the extent that the user will feel ufortable to carry it. They might not even notice whether it stayed in the hand or not.

    This metal is just like an aluminium alloy used in manufacture of aircrafts.

    But it is stronger and also a bit more flexible than that.

    When he saw the amount of metal he had in his hands, he suddenly felt depressed. He suddenly wants more this metal. He has many ideas to use a light weight and strong products on, but this limited amount of metal is making him feel a little down.

    He came out of his depressing state very quickly and started brain storming on how to use this metal. After a fruitless hour, he finally let it go and went back to the powder of the spirit stone.

    He took the powder in his hands and thought for something, before he used most direct of the approaches, and that is to inject arge amount of spiritual energy directly which surprisingly gave him a result.

 Chapter 87: Research success

    Sam observed the spirit stone powder in his hands while injecting the high amounts of spiritual energy.

    After a few seconds, he felt the powder grains started forming bonds again and an irregr solid structure formed in his hand.

    Sam waspletely astonished as he stopped his spiritual energy and looked at the solid structure.

    The structure ispletely irregr and it isn¡¯t even like a crystal when it was in its initial used up spirit stone form.

    While he was observing the structure, suddenly it copsed again and turned back to its powder form. He didn¡¯t understand the reason at all and continuously conducted the experiments.

    He tried to use the core of the stone along with it and he tried to make the structure better by controlling the powder neatly and he discovered something new.

    His control over moulding the spirit stone powder is just like his control over moulding the spiritual energy. He was able to make all kinds of shapes with enough concentration.

    With this, he used the core and started building the structure just like a normal spirit stone but he didn¡¯t create any energy veins and injected his spiritual energy into the core.

    But the result was same as before, it only sustained for a few seconds and copsed.

    Sam finally felt that he has an inkling to get this working, that is not because he got new ideas but rather, he found that there is something that he missed and that is making the energy channels.

    He sat down andpletely focused his attention and started making the structure again, but this time he didn¡¯t make exactly like a spirit stone and he did the whole process he continuously injected the spiritual energy to keep on solidifying it as fast as possible.

    Because, the energy veins might copse if he dys it. Sam started the process and kept going on. After the construction isplete, he injected the spiritual energy.

    This time the structure did sustain for some more time, but it still copsed in the end.

    Sam stayed in the tower for more than twenty days inside the tower and outside two days has passed.

    He conducted the experiments on and off to know how to make something out of it and he wasn¡¯t able to make much progress.

    Outside, Watt is still in the process of improving himself to pass the second phase of training. These two days, he stayed in the woods continuously training and his cultivation is also improving due to this. He is on verge of making a breakthrough to the level 2 Acolyte.

    But the ability to control his attack properly is still far away. He wanted to ask Sam for some tips but thetter didn¡¯t evene out of his room for the past two days. So, he is thinking of ways to himself while waiting for him.

    Watt isn¡¯t the only person who is thinking about Sam. There are some more people who are curious about him and they are none other than Jack, Philip and Kelly. Even Hawk was a bit curious. Out of four people Jack and Philip were even more anxious.

    Because, they both know how vengeful Sam can get and they didn¡¯t think that was the most of it. When they thought of the menacing expression he gave on that day and the ways he used to take revenge on his enemies, they were thinking what the other party is going to do to the people from the Marquis city.

    Jack is in his room; he is meditating with the ck meteorite sword in his hands. These days he is spending most of his time with his sword. He wants to build a rtion with his sword and make it nurture its spirit.

    A weapon with a spirit is a lot more powerful than normal weapons of the same rank.

    Philip knocked the door and entered before asking.

    "Should we go in and take a look?"

    "I think it is better if we don¡¯t. If we disturb what he is doing, we might have to bear the brunt of his rage. You do know how horrible it can get right?" Jack immediately declined.

    "I guess you are right. But what do you think he is doing?" Philip also thought that and said.

    This time Jack didn¡¯t reply and just shrugged. But he was also curious to know what Sam is working on. Because, he clearly knew what Sam is capable of creating. His poison liquor grenades are so useful in sneak attacks that he was able to take down a Great mage and four Peak level Novices along with a bunch of other Novices all by himself.

    Even though, he used the shadow mice, they are his pets and technically it is also his battle prowess.

    Kelly is also waiting for Sam toe out. She is lucky that night because she is spending her time at her uncle¡¯s ce and Hawk is with his father. Otherwise, who knows what Zeke might have done.

    While all the people are waiting for Sam toe out, the said person is busy inside the tower.

    Days passed outside and more than ten days went on. Watt is still trying.

    Sam is sitting cross-legged inside the tower and he is looking at the formation he made in front of him. There is a book in his hands and there are more than three books simr to this beside him.

    Sam took out the brush and wrote in the open book in his hands.

    [ Experiment number 256 ¨C Energy Cell

    Structural arrangement of the spirit stone powder and energy cores model number 120

    Creating the crystal structure ¨C sess

    cement of the stone cores ¨C sess

    Creation of the Energy veins for internal cirction ¨C sess

    Creation of the Energy veins to the atmosphere ¨C sess

    Injection of energy ¨C sess

    Formation set up ¨C sess

    Self-sustained time ¨C forty-eight days and still counting.]

    Sam was finally able to get something out of this.

    His first sess was when he was able to make the created structure self-sustaining just like a spirit stone at his 100th experiment. Until then what ever he did was a failure.

    The method is actually simple, but it is more time consuming.

    After Sam made the structure, all he has to do was to inject the spirit stonepletely and make a formation of spiritual energy. This formation continuously directs the spiritual energy to the structure and make it crystallize.

    This process is almost automatic, the stone will only crystallize only after the long- term exposure of spiritual energy.

    After the initial sess, Sam got greedy. Even though the spiritual energy to create a structure is more time consuming and the energy required is slightly a little higher, there is a very big advantage in this.

    He can make the energy veins which deviate the energy outside to the atmosphere. And he can control the output of the energy as he wished. This might not be useful if it is made of normal neutral spirit stones, but if he made use of the elemental stones and particrly with the elements he can control and have ess to, he can have many uses.

    And one of the uses, he got is from his 120th experiment.

    In that experiment he made a crystal structure with the wind element stones. He used a single core and made a normal structure which is almost in same size of the spirit stone.

    When he directed the energy out of the veins and converted it to the wind, and when he tried to manipte the wind flow, pressure, and speed, he was surprised so much that he immediately got an idea and the Silver meteorite sand in his hands is suitable for it.

    That is the reason he kept on conducting the experiments and the crystal structure he is testing now has more than ten cores. It is in the shape of an ice hockey puck. But the size is slightly different.

    It is also a bit concave in nature. It is more like a section of a hemisphere. And it is also made of the wind element one. If this one seeds, his idea will sess mostly.

    Sam named this energy crystal structures as energy cells and he is going to use them just like battery cells. They can be used and reused. And that is one of the most important features needed for his next project.

    After another two days, the test on the cell ispleted and he took it out to inspect it. After confirming that everything is alright with it, Sam wrote a big sess on the notebook and closed it.

    He immediately got to work to create another in shell in same size. This is thest cell required for the next project. After this one the other requirement for the project is to just make the forging of the metal. If he seeds in this project, Sam not only would have a transport gadget in the streets and he didn¡¯t have to walk.

    Yes, the main concern is always to satisfy his vanity. He is tired of walking inside the city and streets. This made him sick and frustrated.

    The second thing is he can also use it as a weapon in a group battle and hunts.

    So, he is pretty much excited to finish this. And after this is finished, he has to start his journey ahead of the team. He has to go to the Marquis city as soon as possible. After all, if the debt isn¡¯t collected in time the interest he wants to collect will be more and if his new found friends see him like that, they will not dare to stay near him.

    They would even feel his legs shaking when they stood near him. Even though, he was pretty much a loner in his previous life, he wants to fulfil wish of Ste in this life. She always nagged him about getting some friends which he wasn¡¯t fond of. But he wanted to give that life a try and he didn¡¯t want to lose it now.

    After setting up for the next energy cell, Sam came out of the tower for the first time after ten days, but he didn¡¯t talk to anyone and immediately went to the woods. For, next process, he needs some wooden logs.

    After a day of search, he finally found some quality wood from the trees named, ck Wood tree. This is very high-level from the Starwood tree and that is not even the main reason. The main reason is that it is highly heat resistant.

    The resistance to the heat is very high that not even the heat required to make the highest- grade rank 3 metal will not even burn it. At most, it can just scorch the outer-mostyer a little bit.

    Sam started cutting thergest of the trees with wind des and after getting two long cylindrical logs with more than a foot diameter and took them back to the mansion. As soon as he entered the room, he went into the tower.

    The first thing he did was to make the surface of tree smooth.

    After that he took out the silver meteorite sand and went to the cauldron. The Silver meteorite sand was at rank 3 now.

    But it is not in the level where he cannot melt it.

    Sam quickly made a mould and started melting the silver meteorite sand, He used up five cubes of the silver meteorite sand. A lot of preid formations activated as started his fire, Sam didn¡¯t want to exhaust his energy reserves that easily, so he made a formation which will constantly supply the spiritual energy to him and he made use of this energy to make the fire.

    After more than five hours the sand finally became molten and he poured the metal inside the mould.

    The mould is actually most simple one. All he is making is a billet rectangr in shape.

    After it was done, he took out some normal ores he got from the ck pond which are used for making sturdy things more like modern day cast iron which is called ck iron. It is a rank 2 ore and Sam started melting it. This didn¡¯t take much time and immediately became liquid.

    He also made some moulds before and poured the metal.

    These are also in rectangr cross-section. These pieces became solid faster than the meteorite sand.

    He took out the blocks from the moulds and started welding. He made two frames. Each frame has two spike and each spike is slightly more than a foot apart.

    After cing the frames in the ce, he took the logs in his hands and they were inserted to both the frames with the help of spikes.

    What Sam is making is a make shift rolling machine.

    He needs to make a sheet metal and he doesn¡¯t want to take risk of polluting the silver meteorite sand by making arge and thin mould.

    He can do this by ck meteorite sand when making a sword for Jack because, he used the technique which is used to make Japanese des.

    That is still okay because, he is making a sword but now he isn¡¯t making a de and this method may not be good to use.

    Sam took out the solidified billet from the mould and ced heated it to certain extent. His hands are in elemental fusion mode as held the billet and ced it between the rollers.

    Yanwu is on the other side of the rollers, he started rotating the roller while Sam pushed the billet. When the billet waspletely outside, he noticed that the billet is a little thinner.

    The process continued, he made some adjustments to the distance between the logs and made the billet thin and thinner.

    Slowly the billet was formed into a sheet. The thickness became a lot less and became so less that it is in millimetres.

    Then only he stopped repeating the process.

    Now onto the next step. Sam has to make one of the mainponents of the product, The frame.

    There are three mainponents of the product and one is the frame, the body and the final one the cells.

    Now two parts arepleted and the only part he has to make is frame. If that is done after the assembly and some additions, he will be able toplete his product.

 Chapter 88: Time to go to Marquis City

    After arranging the sheet metal made of the Silver meteorite san aside, Sam came out of the tower and immediately went to the Artisan tower to order something. He needs some items to use his gadget more efficiently and even though he can do this himself, he doesn¡¯t want to waste his time on these little things.

    He is rich and if he can make others do his bidding on some minor things, why tire himself out.

    So, Sam went to the Artisan tower and quickly ced the order on the things he needed and came back. But just when he was about to go upstairs, he saw, Watt walking towards him in a hurry.

    "Boss, I did it." Watt said as soon as he came near him.

    "What?" Sam didn¡¯t get what he meant immediately; he is still in zone. All he had in mind is his new gadget.

    "I cut the leaf." Watt replied with excitement.

    "Oh. Okay then let us go to yard." After saying that Sam led him into the Yard.

    "Show me." He said as soon as he entered the yard as he pointed the only tree standing there. Watt took a dep breath and took out a small piece of tree bark from his pocket. The tree bark has a smooth surface and it might have been peeled of from arge tree. The shape and size of the tree bark are almost same as a ying card.

    Watt immediately flicked the tree bark and it spun in the air as it flew towards the tree. A single leaf fell as the tree bark returned to Watt¡¯s hands. He controlled the wind to let the light weighted piece toe to him.

    He looked at Sam, in anticipation. Even though he didn¡¯t use the same technique as Sam, he felt that his approach isn¡¯t wrong. After all, Sam himself said that all types of tricks can be used and achieving the goal is more important.

    And as expected, Sam really nodded his head in satisfaction. "Good, your approach isn¡¯t wrong. But since you took an approach you shouldn¡¯t leave it halfway, try to master it as much as possible. There are almost two months to the admission in marquis academy, but I will be going there earlier and will be going in next fifteen days.

    You have these fifteen days, to make improvements in your technique and use it in the most efficient way, if you can satisfy me, I will give you a gift, otherwise, you have toe to Marquis city along with the rest." Sam left these words and went back to his room.

    He must finish his new project in this moment of inspiration only, this will be the best time to achieve maximum efficiency.

    Sam went back to the second floor of the tower and took a piece of ck wood in his hands. He started carving and made a small cylindrical wooden stick, then with another piece, he made another wooden stick, but the piece hasrger diameter.

    He cut the stick ofrge diameter along the length and made it into two equal halves. When making the mould this time he ced the lower half in separate box and the upper half in a separate moulding box which is ced on the first box. These two pieces are called Cope box and Drag box in the casting process.

    There are two holes on the Cope box which is also the upper box.

    Sam lifted the cope box carefully without disturbing the mould and ced the stick with a smaller diameter inside it.

    After everything is done, he went back to the Cauldron and started melting the ck meteorite sand, After the metal is molten, he poured it into the newly made mould.

    After a few hours, the casting is cooled down and when he opened the mould, a circr pipe is there. Even though this is not the most efficient way to make a pipe, Sam didn¡¯t have much of a choice.

    Sam repeated the process for a the next few days, more than twenty days have passed as Sam manufactured each part slowly and steadily to make sure that the product is precise as he has a very high expectation over it.

    Finally, Sam was done with the parts of frame and got ready to assemble it.

    The frame initially is rectangr. Two long pipes of length 3 feet approximately and two pipes of one foot each. After welding the rectangr frame, he took out another pipe which fit perfectly between the two long pipes and welded it at the mid-point.

    Next step, there are two rectangr rods which perfectly fit between the mid-point pipe and the end pipe. But this rectangr bar has a sphere in the mid-span which is connected with a joint which allows the sphere to rotate gyroscopically.

    He welded the two bars on both sides of the mid-point pipe. Now the most major part of the frame isplete and the he has to ce the Energy Cell holders and the extrusions for holding the sheet metal body over it.

    Sam went back to work after making sure that major frame is perfect, he went back to work again.

    The work this time is to bend and cut the sheet metal carefully and use the brazing technique to join them.

    He took more than 70 days inside the tower to make it. He came out only one time to take the items from the Artisan tower.

    Now, he is inside the tower, sitting with his product in his hands. The final step is the only thing that is left to finish it and that is to install the final set of energy cells.

    He took the two energy cells which looked like the Hemispherical sections or simply bowls. Now, there are some metal protrusions added inside the cavity of the cell.

    His gadget was now mostly done, and the sheet metal operation is alsopleted, the two spheres are exposed outside of the sheet metal, and they exposed at the bottom side. He rotated the spheres until he found a small slit. This slit is in same shape as the protrusion of the Energy cell. He inserted the metal protrusion inside the slit and rotated it anti-clockwise and the Energy cell was fixed there with a click.

    He repeated the action with another cell at another sphere. Now, the process isplete. The project is finally done, and Sam kept it on the floor and the two energy cells touched the floor without letting the whole surface touch the floor.

    Sam looked at the Hover board he made and felt satisfied.

    Yes, he made a hover board. Even though, he prefer a motor bike for his transportation, that requires a lot of different materials and even more effort. The gear box manufacturing itself will take him a considerable time and he still has to take care of the tyre material, engine material, Gaskets, Piston rings etc.

    If he want to make an advanced bike without any IC engine, he needs more technology and a lot of Electric and Maic materials which aren¡¯t avable to him.

    Even if there are avable, he can¡¯t waste so much time and effort to make on which will not be useful in future.

    But, this hover board, will just grow its grade with him and stay with him forever.

    The Hover board, isn¡¯t like the pseudo-hoverboard with wheels which is popr in 2019& 2020 in his previous life, but it is more simr to the advanced invention he made himself in thete years of the 21st century.

    The main reason the hover board isn¡¯t a feasible idea in early 21st century is because of theck of suitable material for motor to generate enough thrust with minimum space and theck of power source which provide enough torque required to provide the thrust.

    But Sam himself made these break throughs in his previous life and now he did it again in this life.

    The hover board is approximately three feet long and one foot wide.

    It is basically rectangr in shape, but there are some differences in the edges and the corners.

    The surface is of silver meteorite sheet metal and the on both short edges of the rectangr board are attached with a solid metal blocks, which is made of the ck meteorite sand.

    The front side of the Board, the ck metallic block is has chamfered edges and there is a small rectangr groove in the middle. This small rectangr groove is extended deep until it reached the frame pipe.

    On the rear side of the board, the metallic block is divided into two parts, one to the left and one to the right and both are hollow in nature. Both are connected to the Wind energy cells which are hidden behind the sheet metal surface.

    The Whole body is in silvery white colour, but Sam painted the upper surface with ck.

    On the upper surface, there are two Circr tes visible. But they are made in such way that they are in coincidental with the actual surface.

    Sam walked forward and stood on the board. He ced both feet on each circle.

    There are some small protrusions on the surface. One is near the rear circle and there are two at the centre of the board. There are two near the front circle.

    If one looks at it normally, they can¡¯t even see the circles and protrusions due to thick ck coating.

    Sam painted his signature Double S symbol on the ck surface with white and green colours.

    After positioning himself on the board, Sam took a deep breath and started the board. The two Wind energy cells in bowl shape are under the Circles on the surface.

    The wind energy started getting out and converted into the wind. Since, Sam can control of the pressure, velocity and density of the wind flow, he made sure that the wind hits the ground with enough force to make the board hover in the air.

    Now, the board is one foot high in the air. The two energy cells are emitting the wind as Sam controlled it. Now, he moved his rear foot slightly and touched the protrusion near the rear circle.

    Immediately jets of wind came out of the rear hollow rectangr blocks. This jet is responsible for forward motion of the board. After testing everything and making sure that it is working properly, Sam exited the tower.

    He is finally done with the Hover board and he wanted to leave this ce as soon as possible. If he doesn¡¯t take revenge as soon as he can, he will have be more and more frustrated and by the time he finally took the revenge, the results would be too inhumane.

    He has another goal for going this early. He needs some foundation in the Marquis city to make money. Even though, Sam has enough money, with a money- making business, he can also make some connections.

    And from what he could guess, there is a great chance that he will be staying a long time in the Marquis city.

    When Sam came out, Watt was waiting for him in the hall. He seemed to be here to make some achievements and here to show him.

    Both of them went to the yard and Jack took out the tree bark piece again. This time when he flicked the piece, it drew an arc in the air and hit the highest leaf on top of the tree and it didn¡¯t stop.

    Watt controlled the wind flow as he made the piece of tree bark, hit the falling leaf many times and by the time it fell on the floor, the leaf became powder.

    Sam looked at him and said. "It is not bad, but can you hit this?" Sam took a stone from the ground and showed it to him.

    Watt nodded and Sam threw the stone into the air. The tree bark made flew and just as it was about to hit the stone, an air thrust moved the stone away.

    Watt looked at Sam and understood that things would be that easy. He started controlling the tree bark, and followed the stone.

    The cat and mouse game went on and on. After a few minutes, Watt used his second hand and the tree bark tore into two pieces and one of them flew towards Sam.

    Sam caught it with his fingers and at this moment the other piece went on and hit the stone.

    "Good. Pack your things and get Falck ready. We are leaving tomorrow." Sam said as he went back to the mansion.

    He went back to the mansion to speak to the rest of people. When they heard the news that Sam is leaving, they were shocked but they quickly understood. Since, when did Sam leave the people who came after him. He will kill a person for just calling him Bastard. He made a human being a tonic for his pets for harming them.

    Now, a noble kid led twenty people to ambush him when he didn¡¯t even mess with the other party. Only, god knows what state the other party will be in.

    Sam refused when Jack and Philip suggested that they would follow him and went to meet the Count.

    After saying the he has some business to take care of and assuring that he would meet the other party in Marquis city again and again, he finally got to leave the city.

    The Next day, there will be a Trading Carriage travelling to the Marquis city. So, Sam went back to the mansion to take rest and prepare for the next day¡¯s journey.

 Chapter 89: Blue flame city

    The next day before Dawn, Watt and Sam got ready and met up outside the mansion. Falck is with them and when Sam made it disappear with a wave of hand, Watt was stunned but he didn¡¯t ask any questions, when he looked at Sam¡¯s expression. Thetter seemed to be in a hurry.

    They went to the Northern City gate where the Trading Carriage is waiting. This is the carriage of Golden- Horse tradingpany. They trade resources from this type of backward area and sell them to the merchants and other noble families who require them.

    Along with this trading, they also provide the transportation for a small number of people.

    The carriage will take 17 days to travel to the Marquis city.

    The Marquis city is called Blue me city. The city is under the Maverick family which holds the Marquis title.

    The Maverick family is one of the noble families which was there since the establishment of the empire. The General Blue me from the Maverick family made great contributions with a neighbouring empire which shares half of the western continent with them.

    After the empire has been established the first emperor, gave this Marquis title to the general while promoting the Maverick family name which is thest name of the general to the Aristocracy.

    These family members have a special blood line which effects the spiritual core and everyone of them have fire type spiritual core, but in every generation, there will be a person who will awaken the power blue me and that person will be the next marquis.

    Sam got all this info from the person in-charge of the trading carriage. After all, this is themon knowledge in the Blue me city.

    When Sam asked about Zeke, the person said something interesting. The Marquis has three wives and even more amusing thing is that three of them are sisters. Marquis married them because, he has promised something to the three women¡¯s father, and he has no way to avoid it.

    Marquis has a child with each wife and all of them are sons and this Zeke is the son of the first wife.

    After awakening their spiritual cores, the third son is the one who activated the Blue me blood line and was crowned as the Young Marquis. The second son Luther has no problem with that as he isn¡¯t interested in that, but the eldest son Zeke is ambitious.

    Since, he was destined not to inherit the title, he wanted to grow through business. So, he recruited some Artisans and Inscription masters to start his own business of weapons and Articrafts.

    When Sam heard this, he smiled lightly.

    The carriage went on with a moderate pace, without any hurry. The horses used are Level 2 beasts, so their endurance is also quite high. They only stopped once a day. Even though, they can go on for days without any food and sleep, they still stopped to not to tire themselves out as they might encounter beasts or bandits on the way.

    Sam maintained aplete low profile as they travelled. He didn¡¯t want to interact with the rest of the passengers or the people from the tradingpany. Right now, he is really on the edge as he could feel himself turning back to his previous self. Particrly, in thisst days, Sam developed a strong repulsion against the young masters.

    Since, the one who initiated the attack on him is also a young master, his murderous intent is kicking in and he is trying to restrict it as much as possible.

    After a week of travel, the carriage entered the Insect Canyon. Anyone who is travelling to the Blue me city, must travel through this Canyon. The carriage increased its speed as they tried to cross the Canyon as soon as possible. Sam looked through the window and found that there is ack of greenery. The canyon is area is almost like a desert.

    Both sides of the canyon are filled with woods and grass, but the canyon ispletely bare. There is not even a single de of grass in the canyon.

    After more than half-an-hour, they crossed the canyon and went into the woods and halted for rest.

    Sam came out of the carriage and inquired why they halted and came to know that the area around is ce where a type of grass which is used in some potions is usually grown and all the passengers and even the tradingpany members will try to find it here. So, they will stop here and wait for half a day before starting their journey again.

    Sam wasn¡¯t interested in the grass and walked around and when he came to vicinity of the Insect canyon, he found something and immediately understood why the canyon is like a desert.

    There is a peculiar looking grass in front of him and it is a different shade of green almost like emerald. The grass is like a border between the canyon and the surrounding woods.

    The grass has no special effects of medicinal effects, but it has one function and it is to deter a certain insect species and that is called Zoi termite.

    This insect is a peculiar one, because they live and roam inrge groups. Just like ants and they all work on the orders of the queen Zoi termite. The queen will have a special metal connection with them and themunication range is very huge.

    These Zoi termites feed on spiritual energy of any organic or living substance, but there is one huge problem. When they bite into something and suck the spiritual energy they will leave their saliva in that body and this saliva is actually quite dangerous. Because, it will start draining the life force of the body.

    Their target can be anything, human, beasts, nts. They can get their food from any living thing or from fresh flesh.

    The only good side is that they are quite controlled and not greedy. They are easily satisfied. Even though, they can increase faster if they eat more, they won¡¯t over do it to avoid being target of a powerful beast or cultivator.

    A beast in size of zing earth bull will give them enough food for more than a month.

    So, they won¡¯t seek out to hunt after they had their prey, but why are all the people avoiding the insect canyon? That is because, the Zoi termites are a quite superior insect species and they won¡¯t prey on other insects making all types of insect species to take shelter in their territory.

    Even though these insects are not strong individually, they have a huge advantage in numbers and particrly in their own territory, they can make the whole trading carriage vanish.

    Many people willpare weak ones with insects, but Sam thought otherwise. Even in previous life Sam felt that the insects are one of the most superior species. Why did he think that way?

    Well, if we think about it, an ant is strong enough to lift many times its weight and imagine if an ant is in size of an average human.

    A grasshopper is so fast that we can hardly touch it with most effort. Imagine if it is just half a size of an average human. It will toy around with a special forces soldier like it was ying with a kid. They have one of most superior gics.

    Even in this life, Sam has same opinion about insects. Insects should never be underestimated.

    Sam started plucking some of this emerald coloured grass and squeezed the juices before applying it all over his body. This grass is the only thing that deters the spread of the Zoi termites. It is their natural repellent grown by the earth itself by adapting to the changes caused by the termites.

    Sam entered the valley slowly on his hover board. He didn¡¯t dare to walk normally in the valley. If any of the insect horde caught his feet by surprise, he will be done for. No matter how good his spiritual sense and awareness he has, he didn¡¯t dare to take this risk.

    While he is hovering slowly inside, he noticed that there is some movement underneath the ground surface.

    He closed his eyes and is looking for the Zoi termites. If he can get these insects, things will be very easy for him in the future. He wants to see if he can get the queen ant herself and if he could get her, he can control the whole swarm.

    But just as his spiritual sense entered underground, he felt an immense sense of pressure. He saw a huge white termite in the size of volleyball and could feel that the insect looking at him.

    The insect is in far higher level than him.

    Sam is sure that even the amount emerald grass in the boundary can¡¯t deter the queen if she wanted to move herself. He immediately turned around and the hover-board moved in its top speed. Luckily, the queen didn¡¯t put him in its eyes, otherwise he would have been done for.

    Sam came out of the valley in less than two minutes. The ant queen gave him goose bumps all over. He immediately went to the nearest water source to wash over his skin to clear of the emerald grass juice. But he didn¡¯t stop sweating.

    He went back to the carriage and sat beside Watt who is meditating. Sam really felt like running away from this ce. The image of the termite queen is making him nervous.

    The enormous sense of danger made him feel uneasy all over. He really wished that the carriage will move soon.

    Sam heaved a sigh only when the carriage is started moving. But he still couldn¡¯t get the termite queen out of his mind.

    The remaining days, he didn¡¯t try to get out of the carriage and stayed inside meditating continuously. He only came out to have an asional meal.

    After another ten days, the carriage finally arrived at to the Blue me city. After registering at the city gate and entering it, Sam straight up went to the Golden-horse tradingpany¡¯s branch office to buy a ce for himself.

    The Blue me city is also divided into five zones. The first zone is the Academy zone. It took up one fourth of the city and this is as big as Falcon-cliff city.

    The academy has all kinds of necessities inside. It ispletely isted by the outside world and could be said to be a city by itself.

    The next zone is known is upper ss zone. The upper-ss nobility and the Marquis live here. It is aplete noble residence and there are no shops, businesses and other kinds of establishments except the profession towers and the residences of the Artisans, healers, inscription masters etc.

    But those professionals also must be of upper ranks and must be at least rank 3.

    The third zone ismoner zone and the biggest area of all. All themoners live here and there are some minor establishments like shops of daily necessities and some cheap weapon shops etc.

    The fourth zone is a rich zone and the residences are high-ss. Here, if one has money one can have a house irrespective of status.

    The final zone is market area and the biggest business area. Every merchant, noble family, a richmoner has stores here. It has all kinds of business establishments. Food, weapons, Articrafts, etc. Even the Golden-horse tradingpany has their branch here.

    Sam went to the Golden-horse tradingpany to buy a mansion. Even though, they didn¡¯t have a direct business of selling real estate, they have some connections in the area and found a buyer.

    Sam and Watt went to mansion in the Rich zone to look at the mansion. The mansion isn¡¯t as big as the one in the Falcon-cliff city, but it has a good yard and there is even ake in it. The yard has a lot of trees and lush grass.

    Even the interior is more exquisite than the previous mansion.

    Sam immediately bought the mansion for 150,000 spirit stones. The price is higher than the pervious ones but the greater the city the higher the price.

    After settling in the mansion and resting for a day, Sam left Watt alone in the mansion and went out. He stood on his hover-board as he moved faster and without walking. Hiszy and frustrating aversion to the walking in crowded streets was finally satisfied.

    All the people are looking at him with surprise and shocked expression. Some of them even followed him due to greed and desire.

    Even though they didn¡¯t see any other uses of his hover-board other than the floating a little higher from the floor. They know one thing, some rich noble will like this to show off and they can make money off of it.

    Sam knew this, but he didn¡¯t care. Because, even though his status as a rank 3 Schr artisan which is the highest, he has now might be not so much in this city, but it isn¡¯t something that a normalmoner can offend.

    The few people who have their eyes on him followed him. Sam moved without hurry and went into the Noble zone. He hovered his way to the Artisan tower. When staff from the tower saw himing on a weird looking floating board, they wanted to stop him, but Sam shed off his three artisan badges to them they immediately made way to him.

    Sam went to the reception, he asked where the examination room was. The receptionist is very polite as she saw his badges and immediately assigned an attendant to send him to the examination room and at the same time, the receptionist moved from the reception and went to the highest floor of the tower to meet the tower head.

    Sam¡¯s age, three professions, one pseudo rank- 2. One pseudo rank-3, one rank-3. These ranks may not be too big in the Marquis city as the highest ranked artisan in city is rank-5.

    But at Sam¡¯s age the rank 3 is actually very big thing and a genius like that should be reported to the head of the tower.

    When the head of the tower, who is a rank 5 Artisan heard this, he is immediately surprised and came downstairs.

    By this time, Sam is already in the examination room.

    Sam isn¡¯t taking the weapon Artisan or Tailor Artisan test; he is taking his test for the schr Artisan.

    Because, he didn¡¯t want to go through all the process by forging an equipment and other things. He didn¡¯t have patience for this now. Schr Artisan test is a bit different though.

    All he has to do is, ce the finished product or the design on the testing tform. When his conscious enters the dimension. The conditions will be in such a way that, the candidate just has to imagine the whole process urately and the process will be visible in the dimension and it will be simted.

    If the virtually finished product really did work, he will be considered as passed in the exam. But there is one thing, the idea must be fresh, and the information of the product will bepared with the data base of the Artisan association.

    It is just like a patent data base in the modern world. The tower spirit will approve only if the idea is new.

    Sam took out an arm guard he made and ced it on the tform. The arm guard is has a circr energy cell inserted in it on the top of it. This is one of the by-products of his experiments.

    This arm guard is a device Sam designed to let a normal mage or warrior have some back-up spiritual energy.

    This is just like a fiery ruby, but the main differences are, the fiery ruby is only used in a direct spell or technique.

    But this energy cell has a small formation inscribed under it at the junction of the cell and the metal guard. This will help a cultivator to not only use it in a spell or battle technique but also to absorb and cultivate.

    Sam used eight cores to make this energy cell and he wants tomercialise the product. Because, the feature of having a backup to cultivate with a huge amount of energy which is easily essible than a normal spirit stone as well as choice to use the energy directly in an attack is a very useful in battles and hunts.

    The tform glowed with brilliant light and after more than an hour, Sam regained his consciousness and the result appeared on the screen. A rank 5 Schr Artisan.

    When Sam saw the number he was pretty disappointed. He thought that he might be ranked a bit higher. But he didn¡¯t think much and immediately walked out of the room after cing the number on his badge changed and walked out.

    Everything he did is in a lot of hurry.

    There isn¡¯t a lot of crowd around the room, as they were pretty used to Noble youngsters taking the exams. Only the tower head who seldom showed his face was standing there in daze as she looked at the hurried young man.

    When she was about to call him out, Sam took out his board and stood on it and immediately disappeared from the spot. She opened her mouth wide and after a second followed him.

    Sam went to the business zone which is the centre of the city and entered a restaurant. This is a restaurant which serves high level beast meat. But Sam didn¡¯t sit on any table and walked straight to the counter where manager is sitting and immediately kicked the other party squarely on the chest.

    The counter was destroyed as the other party looked around in confusion and rage.

    "Who the f.u.c.k is that? Do you even know whose ce is this? Do you not want to live anymore?"

    But just as the manager finished this, Sam held the other party¡¯s cor and punched him on the face. But this time the other party retaliated.

    After all, the other party isn¡¯t some pip squeak. He is a Level-3 Novice. But just when he was about to swing his sword, he felt a hit on his nape and lost conscious for a brief second.

    The whole restaurant is silent. But when Sam took out his hover-board and was about carry their boss away, the workers prepared to make a move, but Sam shed his newly acquired badge and they immediately stood in their ce.

    Not only them, While Sam was moving on his board in a rapid speed, and when the city guards were about to stop him, he did the same and with sh of his badge, they moved away. Even though, some of them suspected that it might be fake, but if it is real, they would be in deep shit. Anyway, the party who got abducted isn¡¯t a noble child or something, they can just report to higher ups first.

    And just like that the second day, he entered the city, Sam made the whole city bustling with new of him. He made his presence known in a very high- profile way.

    Zeke and hisckeys didn¡¯t even know that a person who they ambushed and didn¡¯t even bother to remember his face is already here in the city.

    The hunter has already taken away his first prey and the remaining are quite oblivious to it.

 Chapter 90: Gifts

    Next day before the dawn, a person was found lying in the centre of the Business zone. His whole body is covered in scars, and all his limbs are broken to a great extent that the bones almost became powder.

    Very small shards of bones were piercing out of his skin. And the one thing that made them even more baffled is, that guy¡¯s cultivation is sealed, and all his body is covered with a kind of fire type herb which is mostly used to increase the vour of the heat and spiciness of the fire type beast meat.

    All his wounds are stuffed with this herb powder. His nails were pulled out. His face was swollen.

    All the people who came to see him have only felt pity for him. They were scared by the cruelty of the person who tortured him.

    When the city guards noticed the person is still alive and immediately picked him up to take him to the healer, they noticed there is a bit burn on the back of the person.

    When they saw, it with their own eyes, they almost dropped the guy.

    Because, that isn¡¯t a burn, but instead more like a brand. There is huge ¡¯20¡¯ branded on the back of the person. But, even more worse thing is that the brand is already healed and it was healed in such a way that if that person wants to get rid of the brand they have to dig out the skinpletely and heal it all over again.

    After they took the person to the heal, they immediately left to investigate into the guy. At this exact moment, elsewhere.

    This is the time when all the city guard exchange shifts with the people on the patrol during the night. At the headquarters of the City guards, in the Captain¡¯s room.

    "What about the incident yesterday? Did you guys got any leads on the person who is supposed to be rank 5 Artisan, kidnapping a restaurant manager?" The guard captain of the Business zone asked his subordinates.

    "Captain, we enquired in the Artisan tower and found out that the guy is indeed a rank 5 Artisan and he just took the exam yesterday. He is a schr Artisan. But the tower didn¡¯t give us any of his details. All we know is that he owns a mansion in the Rich zone and he just bought it the day before. Our men didn¡¯t dare to enter the mansion.

    From the observations, he is just a Novice and that too at the lowest stage. He only moved fast because of his weird floating board and from the looks of it, he made it himself.

    We didn¡¯t have any leads on the guy he kidnapped. We didn¡¯t even know whether they have any disputes and grudges, but there is one thing, we found out that the restaurant he is managing actually belongs to Zeke."

    When he finished the report, the subordinate saw the change in expression of the captain. The restaurant manager of the marquis¡¯ son¡¯s restaurant is kidnapped. For now, Zeke seemed to be oblivious to this, but it won¡¯t be long before he came to know it.

    Before he could think of what he should do, the guard captain heard a knock from his door. A guard hurriedly came in and reported.

    "Captain, we found out the person who was kidnapped yesterday. He is found in half-dead state in the business zone. His condition seemed to be critical and there are signs of brutal torture on him."

    The guard captain immediately stood up from his chair. He did ce some people near the house of the Artisan but it seems all of this is useless. He immediately went to see the victim.

    When he saw the state he was in, he felt uneasy all over.

    "Sir, what is his condition?" The Captain asked the Healer who is in-charge of the treatment and thetter responded.

    "It is not good at all. The other party seemed to have a very high understanding of the human body, almost all the bones are broken into numerous shards, but all the shards avoided every vital part of the body.

    Even the scars and the wounds all over the body, aren¡¯t deep. The bleeding was stopped just in time and all these wounds are stuffed with fire chilli.

    The worst part is, everything was done to him after his cultivation was sealed. The pain must have killed this guy, but the perpetrator must be a good healer or must have a very skilled healer with him. He just made the person to barely stay alive.

    He will definitely live, but we can¡¯t be sure if he can turn back to his original state. We might need a very high-level healer." The healer is a rank 2. Because the other party is a Novice and the people who took him are the City guards, they just contacted a rank 2 healer. But from the looks of it, the healer should be at least rank 4 to treat the ailments of the guypletely.

    At this moment, Zeke came with some of hisckeys. He has a furious expression when he saw the state of hisckey. After getting the details from the healer, he said.

    "Stabilize his condition for now." After that he paid the fee and went outside along with the Captain.

    "You better give me a good exnation." His voice is full of superiority and disdain as if the captain isn¡¯t even worthy to breathe the same air as him.

    "A rank 5 schr Artisan did this and there is brand on his back numbered 20. I think it is personal grudge, but at the same he seemed to be sending a message from the way he did things. He ispletely high-profiled, and he did all this openly without even bothering to hide."

    "A rank 5 Artisan? Are you sure? Since, when did our city has a third rank 5 Artisan?" Zeke felt puzzled.

    "He took the exam yesterday itself and just after he collected the badge he directly went to the restaurant and from the witnesses at the time, he just directly attacked without even talking anything."

    "Okay then, see if you can get any details of the person." after saying this Zeke left with his twockeys.

    At the same time, there is another person who is thinking about Sam.

    In the Upper-ss zone, at the top floor of the Artisan tower, a mature beauty is ying with her wavy ck hair as she was in a daze, thinking about something.

    She is the tower head of the Artisan tower. She is two whole cultivation levels higher than Sam. Which is the stage past the Great Mage/Warrior stage.

    She is thinking about Sam, yesterday after she followed him to the mansion, she didn¡¯t enter his house and came back.

    Just now an attendant came and reported about what happened to the person who was kidnapped by them. After some time, she called over an assistant and gave out her orders.

    "Send a representative from our tower and let him get the details of him from the Falcon-Cliff city." Since, she is the head of the Artisan tower, she has ess to know his previous city where he got his badge from.

    While many people are specting and talking about the incident two people came to the Blue me city to meet the Marquis. They are waiting for the Marquis inside his office.

    After a long wait, a dignified looking middle-aged man came inside and took the seat. After exchanging some pleasantries, the two city lords came to the point.

    "Sir, we want to withdraw from the special branch. Our students aren¡¯t willing and refused to ept the admission."

    "What do you mean?"

    "The candidates we selected thought that they are unworthy of this special branch and withdrew themselves. The remaining candidates are also unwilling to take the positions."

    When the city lords said this, Marquis Blue me waspletely dumbfounded. He didn¡¯t even know what to think of this situation.

    "Did someone threaten you to say this?" He asked as he felt the whole situation is confusing.

    "No, sir. The candidates are the ones who really thought this way. Nobody threatened us. We are here to apologise personally. Sir marquis is magnanimous and gave us this offer. But the candidates are too mediocre and they themselves felt unworthy of this opportunity. This is the reason, we are here." As they said this, both city lords stood up.

    They left the room with their heads held low. When they exited the Marquis mansion, they saw Zeke who gave them a nod which they replied the same.

    The Marquis is still thinking what is happening and he ordered an attendante over and asked him to bring the ranking list of the assessment.

    The Marquis city selected twenty candidates in total. This is a special privilege for them. But he didn¡¯t check the top 20 spots, instead he looked over the names after the twenty spots. When he saw Zeke¡¯s name at the twenty-first spot, and his remainingckeys¡¯ names below his, he felt that something is fishy and sent someone to investigate this.

    After confirming that the City lords did what they were told, Zeke went to the Rich zone. He wants to meet the new Schr Artisan, but when he went near the mansion, there are already a lot of people waiting there and all of them are the noble children. There are five noble families with Count rank in the Blue me city.

    All these families who got the news about themotion and got the news that the artisan is extremely young sent their children to interact with them.

    But Watt is standing at the entrance and didn¡¯t allow entry to anyone. Sam said clearly that he is busy and didn¡¯t want to be disturbed.

    When they heard this, all of them are unhappy but they didn¡¯t dare to make a scene here.

    Just then Zeke came to entrance and spoke to Watt. "I want to speak to your master. Tell him that the eldest son of the Marquis is here." He said as if his status should immediately get him the authorization to meet him.

    But Watt didn¡¯t move to report but gave him an weird look and said. "My Boss already said, that you woulde and visit him, he left a message for you."

    When the crowd heard this they felt that Zeke has some rtion with the Artisan, but next words of Watt made themugh.

    "It is not your turn to meet my boss yet. Your number hasn¡¯te yet and when it came, even if you don¡¯t want to meet him, you wouldn¡¯t be able to avoid it." When Zeke heard this, he was quite puzzled.

    "What do you mean?"

    "Oh, didn¡¯t you see the gift my boss left you today? There is a number printed on the back of the gift. You can check it yourselves."

    This time Zeke clearly understood and immediately grit his teeth in anger. The crowd also remembered the incident that is spreading over the city and understood immediately. The Artisan seemed to target the guy because of Zeke.

    Zeke immediately got furious and grabbed Watt by his cor. But hisckeys immediately held him back.

    Watt¡¯s face became cold.

    "You just made your situation worse. There is another message which my boss asked me to pass to you, if you did anything funny and you indeed didn¡¯t disappoint him." He adjusted his cor to normal and said.

    "You will get an extra gift today, you just have to wait." After that walked into the mansion to report to Sam.

    Right now, Sam is inside the divine dimension and made a pit in the fire region.

    Inside the pit, he dumped a lot of dung of the zing earth bull as well as the faeces of Yanwu.

    He wanted to experiment and see, if he will get a gas simr to the methane. And if he could really get the gas, he wants to see how good would that be.

    He closed the pit with a big wooden nk and went out.

    Watt is waiting for him, when he heard what happened, he only smiled and didn¡¯t say anything. He just walked to the backyard of the mansion and went out through the back door. But this time, he didn¡¯t use his hover board. Because, he wants to make the people in front of his mansion think that he never left the mansion.

    After Sam left the ce, he went to the business zone, and inquired about Zeke¡¯s shop.

    The shop is actually quite big and is divided into various zones. Each zone is quite big and is divided by the types of weapons that are exhibited.

    It is more like a supermarket. Each zone has a supervisor looking after. And Sam recognised two of them.

    They are the twockeys who followed him to the Falcon Cliff city.

    Sam didn¡¯t make his move directly and just waited there in ce. After some time, when one of theckeys went to take a break, he followed him discreetly and theckey didn¡¯t go back to the shop.

    Seeing this another supervisor went to find him, and he too disappeared. They are in the initial stages of Novice and Sam isn¡¯t least bit afraid to face them one on one. His speciality is fighting someone of higher level. He can face them head on if he wants to, much less sneaking up on them right now, is too easy.

    The next time, two supervisors came to check, and the Sam¡¯s second target is one of them. All the time, he made his moves discreetly. After abducting the two targets and putting them in the divine dimension, he went back to the mansion in the same way.

    The people who tried to get an appointment with him didn¡¯t know this, including Zeke and it is already toote, when he finally realized.

 Chapter 91: Plans

    That night Sam left the twockeys he kidnapped at the same ce where he left theckey yesterday. Their states are same as the previous guy, but the brands on the backs are different. They are numbered 19 and 18.

    At this moment, Zeke isn¡¯t aware of it. After leaving Sam¡¯s mansion he made himself busy with a task to make sure that he and hisckeys will enter the special branch. He hired people to spread the rumours about the news of two cities withdrawing from the Special branch and the rankings from top 21 to 40 will be awarded these positions.

    He ns to make the public believe this in order to force his father to make the decision.

    Even though, his ns are going well, when the news about his twockeys in half-dead situation made him even more frustrated.

    He didn¡¯t know why a rank 5 Artisan is targeting hisckeys and what his motives are.

    Sam did have motives and he is right track to achieve them. ording to his normal style, Sam would juste to the city and use some tricks to deal with Zeke and hisckeys directly.

    He was able to deal with a great mage with his wits and a Novice isn¡¯t a big deal. But Sam has different goals.

    He just didn¡¯t want Zeke to experience some physical torture.

    Why did Zeke so arrogantly attack him in Falcon Cliff city and walked away without giving a flying f.u.c.k about confidence? Because, Zeke is arrogant due to his three main aspects.

    First one is he has a lot ofckeys who are willing to work for him which gives him a sense of superiority that others should bow down to him.

    Second one, he has sessful business which helps him get required resources and gives him sense of superiority against poor people

    Third one and the most important aspect which made the first two aspects possible is that his father is powerful and influential.

    Since, Zeke wants to get into the special branch by hook or crook, he will let him. But before that, Sam intends to destroy the sense of superiority Zeke has and will show him how worthless these things could be.

    That is why, Sam is doing things slowly. By attacking hisckeys, Sam will achieve two things.

    First one is, by making theckeys suffer in this way but still leaving them a chance to get back to their original shape is to sow a seed of doubt inckeys¡¯ hearts.

    Even though, he crushed their bones and damaged their bodies, if a high-level healer takes action they will get back to his original shape.

    But is the high-level healer, so cheap to hire? Zeke will have to fork out hundreds of thousands of spirit stones if not millions to treat one person. Is he ready to take that much money out of his own pocket? Fat chance.

    From what he understood, Zeke is a selfish and ambitious brat. He would rather discard his injuredckeys and take in new people.

    But this will decrease the loyalty of otherckeys towards him.

    Second result he achieved is the unrest in public.

    Sam¡¯s actions were a form of revenge, but this news is only known by a very few people and they aren¡¯t sure of what sort of grudge this is.

    For the remaining public, they felt a sense of danger. Because, for all they know these three people are frommoner zone and they are attacked. They don¡¯t know the reason or motive and all they felt was they might also be in that position.

    Sam wanted to cause chaos in the city. The citizens panic will surely get to the Marquis. Even though, this is world of strong, the people are important resource to maintain a kingdom. Even if they can suppress them by force, the people will just take different approach. They might not be able to retaliate but they can just ignore them. They can just leave the country and migrate. They cannot tail all the people and stop them after all.

    That is why, Sam is going to cause a panic in the citizen¡¯s hearts and when the Marquis finds out that his eldest son is the cause of all this, he would love to see how he will react. He heard that Marquis is a righteous person and he wants to see how far he can go to prove this point.

    The third aspect is the business and Sam has already made ns regarding this. Next day, Sam came out of the mansion early and went to the Artisan tower to meet with the tower head.

    After he said his purpose to the receptionist and thetter informed to the superiors, he was invited into a small meeting room. There he saw a beautiful woman in herte twenties with long wavy hair reaching her waist looking outside through the window.

    When he entered the room, she turned around with a mesmerised smile and spoke.

    "Hello, Artisan Sam. Nice to meet you. I am Chaya."

    She introduced herself as she extended her hand. Sam shook her hands, and both got seated.

    "I actually wanted to meet you the other day when you took the assessment. But you seemed to be in a hurry and left immediately." She said before Sam could speak.

    "Oh, I had really important things to deal with."

    "I know. Your actions are quite well-known among public." She said with a smile.

    Sam didn¡¯t reply or feel offended. He knew that this news won¡¯t escape the bigshots. By now, even the Marquis might have learnt about this matter.

    "I have something to discuss with you." Sam saidpletely ignoring the statement.

    "Please, tell me. I am listening."

    "I want to make a business deal with the Artisan tower." Sam said without a change in expression.

    But Chaya thought that she heard something wrong. The Artisan tower is a huge entity and they have deals with a lot of noble families in supplying them with ores for weaponry and some other channels. Their scale of deals isn¡¯t small at all.

    Even if Sam is a genius, he shouldn¡¯t have enough money to make a deal with Artisan tower. After all, just earlier this morning she got the report of investigation on other party and he is an orphan. But she didn¡¯t say anything and asked.

    "What kind of deal are we talking about?" Chaya asked.

    "I want to open a weapon store in cooperation with the Artisan tower."

    "Artisan Sam, even though Artisans of the tower ept requests on some custom-made weapons, and we do sell the weapons here, we never cooperated with other people." Chaya said.

    After all the focus of the Artisan tower is still grooming artisans. The businesses are only for getting the necessary resources. So, the higher-ups don¡¯t care much as long as they have enough resources to self- sustain.

    "Artisan Chaya, even though you think that your business is sufficient don¡¯t you need to think about the younger generation Artisans. They are being trained and groomed by the Artisan towers and are being recruited away by other families and rich people. Why do you think they are leaving the Artisan tower easily?" Sam paused speaking up to this point.

    Chaya didn¡¯t answer, she knew the reason but too ashamed to ept it. It is because, the Artisans who work in the tower won¡¯t make much money. If they were to work in a noble family, they will be treated well and also get a lot benefits. But in the artisan towers, they have topete with the rest of the Artisans for the projects and they cannot get the special benefits they will get when they work for the families directly.

    Seeing her expression, Sam continued.

    "I think both of us know the answers. If you cooperate with me, you can stop these Artisans from leaving the tower."

    "How is it possible? No matter how big your shop is, there are a lot noble families who do business in the city. Thepetition is too high. Even if we use the name of Artisan tower, they might just buy the products from the normal shops because their families aren¡¯t any less influential. And the products are same and they have a very solid foundations in business."

    "Artisan Chaya, take a look at this." Sam said as he ced the arm guard he used for assessment on the table.

    Chaya started checking the details. The arm guard has a very fine craftsman ship. After checking all the details, she finally stopped at the energy cell. When she scanned it with spiritual sense, she could feel the highlypressed spiritual energy in it.

    Sam made this cell with normal spirit stones. So, it is pure form of spiritual energy. It has eight core, but energy stored inside is almost an energy of ten spirit stones.

    Chaya tried to pick the energy cell and rotated it in its position. It is circr in shape, and when rotated, it made a click sounds as it came out of the arm guard leaving a socket.

    She observed the metallic protrusions under the cell which are responsible for holding the energy cell in ce. She fixed it back and wore the arm-guard to test it.

    "Don¡¯t use your own spiritual energy. Try to use the energy inside it to make an attack." Sam said to her.

    She nodded her head and stood up and walked to the window. From the window, she aimed the hand which has the arm guard towards a tree in the yard and tried to use the energy inside the cell tounch a fire ball.

    The attack worked, just like normal. She didn¡¯t find much difference from using the energy from her spiritual core and the energy cell.

    "You can also cultivate with the energy." Sam said and she tried. When she felt that the energy is purer than a normal spirit stone and the extraction of energy is also easy, she couldn¡¯t help but feel surprised.

    This isn¡¯t because, it beneficial for cultivating. But this can be an important gadget when injured in a battle or some emergency battle situations. This can even save one¡¯s life.

    If a person exhausted all his spiritual energy, he will be very vulnerable in wild or battlefield and he can¡¯t concentrate to absorb the energy from the spiritual stones efficiently. But this cell makes it easier for them and they can use this energy to escape.

    "This is my invention which gave me the rank-5 Schr Artisan title." Sam interrupted her train of thoughts and when he got her attention he said.

    "Do you think this has amercial value?" Sam asked.

 Chapter 92: Partnership

    Both Sam and Chaya are sitting at the table across each other.

    "Artisan Chaya, how much do you think my invention is worth?" Chaya went silent for a minute and said.

    "It is no problem to sell it for five thousand spirit stones. But if you can increase the amount of energy stored and some other modifications, we can even sell it for more." As soon as Chaya spoke, Sam took out another arm guard.

    This arm guard is a bit different. The energy cell isn¡¯t circr in colour. There are two red bright cells in cuboidal shape which are inserted along the length of the arm guard.

    When Chaya saw this, she was even more dumbfounded. She didn¡¯t think that he could even use the elemental energy.

    "Artisan Sam, how many designs do you have and what type of elements can you provide?" She is down to get this business. If she could partner with Sam and use this special product as main product of the store and sell it, the rest of the products will also easily be sold, without any problem. The publicity itself is enough to make their business sess.

    "Right now, I can only make two type of elemental energies. Fire and Wind. Other than that, I can only make the neutral ones. As for energy capacity and shape, we can talk about thatter. Right now, we will only produce the two types you have seen."

    "These two are enough, the elemental ones can be sold for more than five times the price."

    She is very enthusiastic.

    "Since, you are okay with it, can we discuss other products. These aren¡¯t the only ideas I have." As Sam said that he took out a bunch of scrolls from his storage.

    Chaya immediately got excited and started listening to Sam.

    After more than three hours they finally, discussed all types of special products Sam wanted to ce in the shop.

    "There will be different sections in the shop. We will be letting the customers look at the products themselves and decide to what they want to buy.

    Your, Artisans will produce their own products and will ce them ording to the sections.

    The sections will be like Archery section, Sword section, Sabre section, Spear section, Armor section. If you want, you can even use the other products from Tailor Artisans and others.

    The normal products will have arge stock, but the smaller amounts will have a limited stock.

    The energy cell products will be sold only once a week and the number of products will be limited.

    So, can we talk about the dividends." Sam said as he looked at Chaya.

    "You can tell me your requirements, if it is okay with me, I will not object it."

    "I will be responsible for buying the ce, and I will provide the products with the energy cells and special products I told you about. All I need is some assistants. You are responsible for providing the materials, required. You are responsible for the production of the normal weapons. You can take all the revenue from your weapons and I won¡¯t interfere, from my products I will give you twenty percent of the revenue."

    Chaya went into deep contemtion. They are responsible for providing raw materials and they can do that because, their supply channels are high and can really do so. Even though, the forging process will be taxing in Sam due to his special products. But twenty percent still seemed to be a bit low.

    "Artisan Sam, don¡¯t you think that twenty percent is a bit low?"

    "Artisan Chaya, do you know why I am even giving you twenty percent? Because of the status of Artisan tower. The Artisan tower can have a lot of say in weapon business. But you couldn¡¯t make it a sess. Why do you think this is happening?

    Because, you have been too conservative. The Artisan tower didn¡¯t focus on the business at all. Their main ie is still the ore supply and the fee you get from the tests and tuition fee you get from the candidates.

    You focus too much on these things and neglect the business and fail to think of making profits from it. And your business location is within the Artisan tower. Do you think that normal people will dare toe to the tower to buy weapons?

    Your production volume isn¡¯t much lesspared to the other shops, but your tower portrays that someone of status can only approach it. And you also think that it is beneath you to reach out like other family shops to sell your products.

    But now, I am going to use your Artisan tower status to increase the market value. That is why I agreed to give you twenty percent.

    The most important thing is, I am only using cheapest of materials. Even though, my products cost a lot, they will only be using materials of rank 1 and rank 2 and that too very cheap one. After all, my products are mostly consumables.

    So, if the production is maintained properly and demand is met, the revenue will be quite high. Twenty percent will be a lot higher than the cost of materials you are providing."

    Sam exined in detail without giving Chaya any chance to retort or argue. She could only sigh and agree. This opportunity is too good to reject.

    They shook hands in agreement and Sam took out some scrolls and passed it to her.

    "I will be working on getting the shop ready. For proper production, I need this equipment ready. Even though most of the figures don¡¯t make any sense to you, don¡¯t think too much and make them ording to the requirements that I mentioned on the scroll." Sam said as he ced a storage ring on the table.

    He said his farewells and went out of the tower. His first step to set his business sessfully ispleted.

    One could ask, why Sam is doing this just to get back at a small fry like Zeke. His main target isn¡¯t just taking down Zeke rather, he wants to make an example out of Zeke.

    Since, came to this world, many people have provoked him time and again. Now, he must spend a long time in this Marquis city. He doesn¡¯t wish to be disturbed by these guys when he stays here. So, he came a month earlier and make a deration that he isn¡¯t a soft permission.

    Sam floated on his hover board as he went to the business zone. He stopped at Zeke¡¯s weapon store.

    He observed the surroundings and saw that the area is full of weapon stores, but the business of the other stores isn¡¯t good at all.

    Zeke¡¯s shop stole the major part of the business. The title of Marquis¡¯ son isn¡¯t just for show. Sam walked to the store opposite to the Zeke¡¯s store.

    The store¡¯s manager was ecstatic when he saw Saming to the store. This is the first customer in a long time.

    "Wee, Wee. How may I help you?" the shop owner asked as soon as he entered the store.

    "I want to buy something." Sam said.

    "Oh, what do you want to buy?"

    "Your store." The shop owner was dumbfounded. He didn¡¯t expect that the person is here to buy the store instead of the products. Looking at the silent shop owner, Sam asked.

    "100,000 spirit stones. I want your store." When Sam finished saying, the store came out of his daze and said.

    "Deal." Sam suddenly felt that he spent too much.

    The shop owner was so happy. After Zeke started his business, he is already making losses. Every shop except the ones that belonged to the noble families. He tried to sell his store and leave this city. But nobody is willing to buy his store and 100,000 is a significant amount and will let him start his own business in other city or he can just start doing another business in this city itself.

    Sam finished dealing with the deed and went to the next shop. And the next stop.

    After buying off the four shops, he started thinking of how to renovate this ce. After some thought, he took out hismunication token and called Chaya. They exchanged the contact info.

    "Sam, what do you want? I already assigned someone to finish the designs you gave me."

    "I want ask, does your tower have Architect Artisans?"

    "Of course. We have three of them. Even though, this profession isn¡¯t very popr here, we still have it in our tower."

    "Okay, I need them for a project. Send them to Zeke¡¯s shop. I have my board with me, they can recognise me easily."

    After hanging up, Sam waited there and after fifteen minutes the three Artisan architects came.

    Sam greeted them and started exining, on how to renovate the three stores. First thing they must do is, that they must remove the divisions in between the stores andbine them.

    After exining everything, he paid an advance to the three of them and went back to his Mansion.

    Meanwhile, the Marquis is having a headache.

    When he came to know the rumours that Zeke has started, he didn¡¯t know how to react. For some reason, all the know that the info is from Zeke himself.

    Now, he clearly understood that his son was responsible for the withdrawal of the two cities. Before, he could go and confront his son about this, he heard another thing.

    The new rank 5 Artisan is making amotion in the city. Particrly, he is targeting his eldest son. But the public doesn¡¯t know about this and are panicking. They are getting an impression that the new Artisan is psychopath who likes torturing people.

    He wanted to meet the new artisan directly on the day of his arrival itself. But he couldn¡¯t due to the arrangements for special branch.

    But his idiot son seemed to have offended the artisan.

    When he is thinking on how to salvage the situation and wanted to get more information from Zeke, his first wife, Zeke¡¯s mother already came to him demanding an exnation.

    She is demanding him to investigate and talk to the rank 5 Artisan and demanded an exnation from him on why he is targeting her son.

    "Are you going to do it or not?" Zara, Zeke¡¯s mother is shouting at Marquis. Due to constant pestering he lost his cool and shouted back.

    "Do you think that your son did something that can be solved easily? The other party is rank 5 Artisan. Do you think that he is so free and has a lot of time to waste on your son? I need to investigate it properly and know what has happened, before deciding what to do. Until then, don¡¯t you dare pester me."

    After saying his piece, Marquis left the room. He already sent someone to investigate who this artisan is and why is he doing this.

 Chapter 93: Meeting the Marquis

    Sam went back to the mansion and entered the divine dimension after he assigned the task of renovation.

    He needs to open another business too. He looked at the all the crystal bamboo nts which he nted in various elemental zones. The next business he wanted to enter was the alcohol business.

    He nned to enter this business even before his encounter with Zeke, now that he has one more reason and that is to, counter Zeke¡¯s restaurants he is thinking of making itpletelyrge scale.

    Sam checked on all the herbs he nted. They arepletely mature by now. These herbs are the ones he bought in Falcon Cliff city. He nted all the live herbs to have get the stock himself.

    But now he is thinking on how to proceed in preparing the liquor. He can prepare it with the herbs if he wants to. All the herbs he has are mostly the ones which will help a person to purify his body and reduce the impurities which will impact the cultivation.

    They aren¡¯t the ones which will act as elixirs and help them raise the cultivation. But he is a little worried about the taste and thought that he should need use some fruits to make the liquor. But finding the fruits suitable for cultivation aren¡¯t easy to find at all. So, he must think of the issueter, but opening a restaurant isn¡¯t that difficult.

    He went to the first-floor library and went to a corner section. This is a section named Elixirs and this included pill recipes, potion recipes etc. This doesn¡¯t include the techniques and fundamentals of these processes, but it only contains pure recipes and the actions to be performed to make the Elixir and at the corner of the section there is a divine will called ¡¯Spirit culinary¡¯.

    Sam took in the information to go through the recipes of various dishes which uses meat of various types of magical beasts and spiritual herbs.

    This spirit culinary is a way to make the required elixirs in cultivation through cooking. This is also more efficient than other ways like Pills and Potions, which might have some side effects. The risks are minimum with spirit culinary.

    After all, a human being¡¯s health is best when it was managed by diet instead of medicines. Just like in modern world, if a person takes heavy medicine for every small ailment his bodily functions will be damaged.

    Sam only came out of the tower at noon. He spent a lot of time just to digest the recipes. If he wants to practice it, he will have to spend a lot of time. Even though, he is good at learning, things like cooking are the skills which are honed with practice. He isn¡¯t an exception.

    At the same time Marquis is in his court room. He just finished his morning meeting with the officials, and everyone just left. An attendant came and gave him a scroll containing the info on Sam. Even though, the Falcon Cliff city and Blue me city are far from each other, he still has ways to get in contact with the Count Falcon.

    And he found that Sam is from the Falcon-Cliff city? Because, Sam intentionally conceal his tracks. He left a big clue to investigate and that is buying the mansion as well as using the Golden- Horse tradingpany.

    So, Marquis easily got the info and when he looked at this, he was quite surprised. A fifteen-year-old boy, at Novice level 1 and well versed in multiple professions, with a battle-prowess off the charts. He is a genius. That is the only thing that came to his mind.

    After reading the info, he only felt even more anger towards his eldest son. He still didn¡¯t know what his son did to this genius to be offended to this extent.

    Yes, he still doesn¡¯t know even after contacting the Count because, thetter didn¡¯t reveal Zeke¡¯s attack on the candidates to the Marquis.

    He doesn¡¯t want to get himself involved in between the father and son.

    Marquis opened another scroll which has info of Sam when he was still in Starwood city. When he saw the details about how he took revenge on the noble families by destroying the younger generation¡¯s chances of entering the academy, he felt even surprised. This 15-year-old genius is quite vengeful. And when he saw the news that he is orphan, he felt that he could get to stop Sam from his revenge.

    After all, if the other party has a powerful background, he must think twice. But now that the other party is an orphan, who only entered the cultivation world recently, he can use some carrot and stick strategies to get him to stop. As for, how the other party learnt all his skills, he isn¡¯t very curious about it. There are all kinds of people in the world and a very high-level genius who can learn on his own might be rare but isn¡¯t impossible. So, he immediately sent an invitation to Sam.

    When Sam received this invitation, he was just about to go out and buy some restaurants to get a ce to start his business.

    Watt brought the invitation over to him and when Sam saw that it was from Marquis himself, he smiled. Even though, he knew that marquis will find him, but he didn¡¯t that it would be this early.

    The invitation stated that he is invited for dinner. Sam could guess what the Marquis is nning. Even though, he is a rank 5 Artisan. He is a schr Artisan who is mostly important to the Artisan association and his cultivation is still far from marquis.

    Marquis cannot offend him, but he also didn¡¯t have to curry his favour.

    Sam smiled in amus.e.m.e.nt and sent back the message the he epted the invitation, but he also mentioned that he would be bringing a friend.

    After sending the messenger away, Sam went on his way. After buying the two restaurants in front of Zeke¡¯s restaurant, he went to his new bought weapon shops, where the three Architects are working. He took one of them back to the restaurants and exined him on how he wanted them to be renovated.

    After exining them everything and was done with his work, he went to the Artisan tower. He went to meet Chaya and when she saw him, she felt quite surprised.

    "Didn¡¯t we just meet in the morning? Why are you here again?" She asked.

    "I need your help with something."

    "Oh, what is it?"

    "I am invited by marquis to dinner. I want you toe with me."

    "Why is he inviting you and why are you inviting me?"

    "Well, I am targeting that Zeke for a reason, so the marquis wants to have a chat with me. Even though, I am someone of status, I have no considerable background to speak of. My power isn¡¯t enough to make him cautious yet. So, I want to use our business rtionship as a deterrent to him."

    "Sure, when?" Chaya replied after some thought. She clearly understood what Sam meant.

    "Now. We will be leaving in an hour you can take care of your work in this time."

    Chaya nodded and went back to work while Sam waited for her.

    Later that evening, Sam and Chaya went to the Marquis mansion on her personal carriage.

    When the attendant who is assigned to receive Sam saw Chayaing along with Sam, he immediately got tensed.

    Even though, he is an attendant, but he is still a confidant of the Marquis. He clearly knew what Marquis¡¯ intention for inviting Sam is today, but never did they expect that the friend Sam mentioned would be Chaya the rank 5 Artisan and the tower head of the Artisan tower.

    She isn¡¯t like Sam who has only rank but no cultivation, but she is someone who not only has a rank but also relevant cultivation.

    Sam and Chaya were led to the dining room where marquis was already waiting for them. Even though, he wants to suppress Sam a bit, he is doing this only because of his son. He still has respect for Sam and his achievements.

    But when he saw Chaya, he also felt stunned, but he quickly recovered and greeted them. After exchanging some pleasantries which aremon when ever this kind of meetings ur [and author is not interested in writing] they sat for the dinner and the food was served.

    After some time, Marquis stopped beating around bush and asked.

    "Artisan Sam, I think that you and my son Zeke are having some problems. Are there some misunderstandings?"

    "Oh, Marquis indeed has great insight. You found out quite early. It has only been two days since I came to the city after all."

    Seeing that Sam directly agreed, Marquis felt that matter isn¡¯t that simple. It seemed as if Sam is anticipating this meeting.

    "May I know what happened between you guys?"

    "I would like it if your son exined it himself. You can call him now. I don¡¯t mind." When Sam said this marquis frowned but stillplied and sent someone to call his son over.

    When Zeke came, he didn¡¯te alone. A middle-aged man came along with him and Marquis frowned at that.

    The person who came is none other than themander of the city guards. But he also has another identity, he is the brother of his three wives and Zeke¡¯s uncle.

    Both took the seat and the guardmander spoke. He doesn¡¯t know who Chaya is and he didn¡¯t care at all.

    "You are the new Artisan? Just because you are an Artisan, you cannot act as you like. Apologise to my nephew right now."

    He didn¡¯t notice that Zeke¡¯s expression turned ugly. Sam didn¡¯t reply and just looked at marquis.

    "You can ask you son what happened. After hearing his piece, I will tell you the remaining story."

    Seeing the Sam ignored him themander got angry, just as he was about to re up, he felt the pressure from Marquis.

    Then the marquis looked at his son. "Tell me what you did."

    "I.. I." Zeke stuttered. He really doesn¡¯t want his father to know all his dirty deeds. He never expected that the person he ambushed is an Artisan, that too a high ranked one.

    "I will tell you then." Sam then recounted everything that happened in the Falcon cliff city and said.

    "I heard the Marquis is a righteous person, but from what I see, you are no different from a father of a useless son. He can do whatever he wanted and all you could do is cover it up using his authority. The rumours almost fooled me."

    Sam purposefully said this to provoke the Marquis. He wants to put the marquis in a helpless situation where he can¡¯t take it out on Sam and remind him that he is supposed to be the person who looks after the people and not blindly side with his son.

    So, the marquis will only have one outlet other than Zeke.

    And when the marquis was reminded of how his son threatened the two cities from participating, he felt his anger reaching the limit.

 Chapter 94: Threat

    Sam looked at marquis in amus.e.m.e.nt. His judgement is correct and everything is going on as nned.

    But there is another person who has a bad judgement and that person is none other than the Guardmander. He is a Great Warrior atte stage, he thought that marquis was angry at Sam for spouting those ugly words, so he released his aura and was about to suppress Sam.

    But an even more powerful aura was descended on him and he felt shocked when he saw where it ising from. He looked at Chaya who is casually sipping her drink but he was beingpletely suppressed by her aura. Her strength even higher than the Marquis himself.

    Then only remembered something. Sam is an artisan and there is only one person who is a young woman and powerful than the marquis himself. The Artisan tower head. Even though, he didn¡¯t see her before, he clearly heard of her.

    Why didn¡¯t see her before? It is actually pretty simple. His status isn¡¯t enough.

    ording to norm, marquis is in one whole cultivation realm higher than the Count. He is a grand mage. And in every city, the tower heads of the various professions will be in same cultivation realms and a grand mage can only be an Artisan of rank 4.

    But why is a rank 5 Artisan here? Because, the marquis isn¡¯t the strongest person here. The previous marquis, the one who is the former blue me is in the next cultivation realm after the grand realm.

    A marquis who broke through that stage will be retired and next one will take the helm when he reached the grand realm.

    The organisations of various professions sent people who are on the same realm as the previous marquis to not to be at a disadvantage, so even the current marquis is of lower status than her. Chaya only has four more people who are equal to her in status and they are the former marquis and the three other tower heads.

    So, a lowly city guardmander isn¡¯t even worthy of her notice. She is here only because of Sam and she has to show her stance.

    Marquis became fl.u.s.tered and immediately pped the guardmander.

    "Get lost now." He said in a low voice and the guardmander felt like he got a new lease on life.

    Marquis took a deep breath to calm down and looked at Sam again.

    "Artisan Sam, is there a peaceful way to resolve this?" Marquis asked. Even though, this will be him agreeing with Sam¡¯s statement, right now he wanted to get his son another chance. He believed that with this, his son will change for better and which father wouldn¡¯t want that? He will try his best to get that chance even if he has to get ridiculed by a youngster like Sam.

    "There is. It is very simple. All you have to do is, just announce the whole matter to the people and just tell them that you want to end this matter peacefully. If you make this announcement, I will immediately stop." Sam¡¯s voice is quite sarcastic.

    Marquis¡¯ face turned green. The request was impossible. It will make him lose trust of all his people. He finally understood how much of a big mistake he did, when he closed an eye for his son¡¯s deeds. Not every time will be smooth sailing, some times it will cause disasters and the disaster his son got now is now sitting right across him.

    "Marquis, let me tell you something. Do you know why lions can be kings of the forest of ordinary beasts?" Sam asked with a smile.

    "Because, they are strongest?" Marquis said.

    "You are only partially right. Lions are strong, but do you really think that the lions are the strongest of all? Lions live in prides but are they match for a herd of bulls rushing madly? No.

    They are kings because, they are trained that way. A lion will through their cubs in to a valley and let them climb on their own.

    Their father is teaching them that the respect as a lion has to be earned and not given just because they are born from a lion. The rest of the animals in the forest might not want to teach them this harsh lesson, but the lion itself doesn¡¯t care.

    He will throw the cubs inside the valley earning the title of the most ruthless beast in wild. But in my eyes, that lion is a responsible father who is teaching his sons. That is why the other animals respect him and revere him."

    When Sam finished his piece, marquis was already feeling ashamed, he clearly understood what Sam meant by that. He is insulting him for being an ipetent father.

    Even a wild beast knows how to teach his son, but he as a human with a responsibility of a marquis and thousands of people under him can¡¯t even do his job. Just as he was about to say something, Sam started speaking.

    "Your eldest son, Zeke and I initially don¡¯t have any grudge, but he came with twenty people who have cultivation levels higher than me, and ambushed me when I am in my injured state.

    He even felt that it is all justified just because, you are the one responsible for his birth.

    I am here to today, not to make peace with you. But I am here to tell you that I will be paying back everything your son gave me. I am going to destroy everything that gave him confidence, that he can do anything to me and walk away.

    Regarding this, there is no way for me topromise. I will achieve my goal even if you the marquis himself gets involved with this." Sam paused to see the reaction of Marquis.

    The dark expression on thetter¡¯s face satisfied him and continued.

    "For now, only your son and hisckeys are my targets and I will be ying with them. But if anyone else gets involves in this for example, the city guards then the entire troop of the city guards will be included, if one noble child like your son steps in, his whole family will be included and.." He paused a bit and looked at Marquis straight in the eyes and said.

    "...If you get involved in this, the entire city will also be included. You won¡¯t want to harm the lives of all the citizens, will you?" Sam asked as if he was speaking about something insignificant.

    The three remaining people were stunned. Sam is threatening the marquis directly that he will take it out on the citizens if marquis gets involved. A Novice level young man is threatening a Grand realm marquis in the marquis mansion itself.

    But for some reason, they felt that the other party might really do what he said. Without waiting for the reply, Sam stood up and said.

    "I will be waiting for your letter. If I don¡¯t get the letter by tomorrow, I will take that you want to get involved." He signalled to Chaya and both of them turned around and left the room.

    Marquis just sat there in deep thought. Beside him, Zeke didn¡¯t even dare to look at his father.

    "Sam, don¡¯t you think you went overboard? You just threatened the marquis in his own territory."

    Sam just chuckled and replied. "This being his territory is his biggest disadvantage. I am a lone wolf now. I can do whatever I want as long as I don¡¯t get caught. If pushes to shove, I can just escape this ce ande backter to take revenge. But he doesn¡¯t have that option. He has to answer the emperor himself if he let his territory."

    Chaya thought for a moment and felt that what Sam said is right, but she still felt that Sam should tone down his attitude and said.

    "I think with your attitude, you will the whole world your enemies. You should give some leeway and solve problems peacefully whenever possible." She advised him out of good will. But Sam¡¯s reply stunned her.

    "I don¡¯t want anypromises in my life. No matter how big the enemy is, even if it is a single individual or the whole city, the whole empire or the whole world, the only difference to me is the amount of effort I need to spend to destroy them.

    She halted her foot steps and looked at Sam¡¯s back who is walking ahead. She suddenly felt that Sam¡¯s form is towering over the world.

    How bold and arrogant a person should be to make a statement like that.

    After separating, Sam took out his hoverboard and went to the business zone. He stopped at Zeke¡¯s shop and looked at the closed doors. It is already night and most weapon shops will call it day by this time, only some restaurants will be opened.

    Sam took out a normal spirit stone. He closed his eyes and destabilised the spirit stone before throwing it into the shop through a window. He immediately increased the thrust of the hoverboard to maximum and reached a height of 20 feet in the air and went towards his mansion in full speed.

    Next day, the news of the explosion spread all over the city. The explosion is in marquis¡¯ son¡¯s shop after all.

    This time, Marquis himself came to see, what happened. The ce of explosion is very peculiar.

    When he entered the shop all he could see was a circr area in which everything turned into powder. The armours, swords, every other material waspletely disintegrated into powder, the spiritual energy in the area is also still a bit unstable.

    He didn¡¯t even know what has caused the explosion, but he knew who did this. Sam is making a statement.

    If Sam was to use this method of explosion in between a group of people, the results will be disastrous. He immediately came to decision and that is he will not interfere between his son and Sam. Unless, Sam wants to kill his son, he wouldpletely turn a blind eye.

    Zeke is also looking at the explosion area. He received a different message from the explosion and that is, he shouldn¡¯t make any dirty moves to get one over Sam, if he did that, the other party can also do so, and the result is even more efficient for him. He can only y along the game Sam is ying and follow the rules set by the other party.

    He is now already regretting going after Sam. Hisckeys are second guessing about following him. His father also might not interfere and now the business he built is also under attack. He suddenly felt so suffocated.

 Chapter 95: Preparing for the shop opening

    Sam is in his mansion thinking about what to do next. Since, he wants to open a restaurant, he must find a way to get a source of supply to get the ingredients and along with that he also needs to find a suitable chef who is loyal as well as skilled to master the spirit culinary.

    But he isn¡¯t in a hurry. It is fourth day since he entered the falcon cliff city and he have 25 days to make his ns.

    Not only will it help him to teach Zeke a lesson, the two business will also be a source of ie for him. Even though, he has enough money with him, he still wants to earn as much as he can by the time, he entered the imperial capital.

    At that time, he would be facing the whole ck water organisation the empire and he need have enough wealth to go against a behemoth like that.

    And all these businesses are just some side ie, the main ie will still be the ck river branches themselves.

    Sam is still trying to separate the gases in the air but his concentration is still not enough. And the light energy is also same, he has to have enough mental power to use it for any offensive purposes.

    For that, he must spend his time on cultivating the Divine spirit soul technique.

    But before he could do that, there is something he has to do. He has to prepare somethings for the business opening. His main focus is not on the weapons. He wants to make some gadgets which will help these people in the hunting.

    Chaya mentioned that it will take almost three days to make the equipment, so he has thirty days inside the tower, to make some preparations.

    He brought along the manual pressing machine that he had it made in the Falcon cliff city. So, he can make some things that will make it easier to finish the gadgetster.

    Sam went out on his board. All the people just gave way to him without even daring to look him in the eye. By now, everyone knew that the new rank 5 schr artisan who arrived in the city will travel on a weird board and he is also a vicious guy as well.

    But Sam is inplete daze as he went into deep thought after he remembered something. He forgot to name the hoverboard. Even though, he is good at many things, on of his major w is that he is very bad at naming. [And so is author, so my dear readerse up with a name please.]

    He went to the pharmaceutical tower to buy some herbs and all of them have one thing inmon. They all have calming effects and mostly used in the pills to offset the side-effects of aggressive nature.

    He even bought a type of sandal wood which is used in ointments to provide the relieving effects. Generally, these items sales are very less and sometimes, the stock will be spoiled too. When, Sam came here and bought all the avable stock of these herbs, the reception is too happy.

    After that, he went to the inscription tower and bought the materials used for making the inscription ink.

    Finally, he went to Zeke¡¯s restaurant. Even though, he has designs to steal the business of this restaurant, he should agree that this one is the best restaurant in the city for now. So, he ate a hearty meal and after that he went to the manager room.

    Sam pinned his badge of tailor artisan, and greeted him. To not to alert them, he didn¡¯t use his board toe to the restaurant, so the new manager who isn¡¯t part of the twentyckeys didn¡¯t recognise Sam.

    "I want to buy the liquor from you." Sam came right to the point. The manager is courteous and didn¡¯t show any attitude. He gave the basic respect that should be given to the customer and asked.

    "Sir, if you want to buy less than a barrel, you don¡¯t have to consult me, as the counter will handle it directly. But if you want more than that, please tell me how much you want."

    "I don¡¯t want any normal wines, but I want a strong pure liquor without any vour. Is it possible to sell it?" Sam asked.

    "Err... Normally, we won¡¯t sell it. What you are asking isn¡¯t that suitable for drinking directly, so we don¡¯t prepare it in small quantities. How much do you want to buy?"

    "I need ten barrels."

    "Since, the order is big, we will do this. But we will charge same as the voured wine. Each barrel will be 5000 spirit stones."

    "Sure." Sam agreed and immediately paid the full amount.

    "Sir, your order will be ready in three days. You can just bring this token to retrieve the order." The manager gave him a token.

    "I will be sending a subordinate. Thank you so much."

    Sam took the token and left the restaurant. The manager is beaming with glee as he looked at the 50,000 spirit stones. He wants to show his achievement to Zeke to get some acknowledgement, but if he was to know that these 50,000 spirit stones were responsible for reducing their customers in the Weapon shop, one should wonder Zeke¡¯s reaction.

    Sam went to his mansion and went into the second floor of the tower. Today, he wants to do one of the most boring things he has to do to make the gadgets.

    He has to practice etching. One of the most difficult skills in inscriptions.

    To perform this skill, he has to be master in three things. First one is inscription mastery, second one is painting and the final one and the most important one is the energy control. If he could master this etching skill, he could make his shop sess easily.

    He has confidence that, he could use the inscriptions and inscribed formations in the most efficient way.

    So, for the next thirty days inside the tower, Sam only spent his time practising etching. His painting skills might not be the top of the world in his previous life, but they are considered very high and he was definitely a master of it.

    So, when he practiced the painting using the brush while infusing it with spiritual energy, he caught on to the feel pretty quick and the thirty days felt well spent.

    But he wasn¡¯t able to reach a point where he can makeplex inscribed rank 2 formations through etching.

    His skill is only enough to make the rank 1 inscriptions and formations and some of lessplex rank 2 inscriptions and formations.

    After the practice is done, Sam went outside of the tower and gave the token and his schr artisan badge to Watt.

    "Go to Zeke¡¯s restaurant and show this token, they will give you ten barrels of liquor and then go to Artisan tower and meet the tower head. Show her my badge and she will give some goods."

    Watt agreed and left the mansion. After that Sam informed Chaya about Watt through themunication token and told her that she should send some attendants who doesn¡¯t have much chance in advancing as artisans along with a list of materials he needs to make the gadgets at the evening.

    He will use the day to, assemble theponents and when the people from the artisan toweres to him, he can give them the tasks to make the gadgets. He will use them to make all theponents and he and Watt will perform the final assemblies.

    After Watt came, Sam immediately took all the items to the divine dimension. First, he took out the ten barrels of pure liquor.

    He took out the load of herbs which have calming and sleeping effects and started getting their nt juices. These juices itself are enough to fill more than three barrels. The number of herbs he had are that much.

    He then started injecting the nt juices into the crystal bamboos which are nted in various zones along with the pure liquor and let it ferment even more in the bamboo.

    Sam is doing this to let the bamboo add the spiritual energy of the respective zones to the liquor.

    With this level of concentrated calming herbs, the liquor would make one sleep if they took a swig of it.

    Sam spent more than a inside the tower.

    After that he took theponents that Chaya sent over and started assembling.

    There are four machines which Sam assembled. One of them is a pedalling grinding machine.

    There is a pedal, which will rotate a grinding wheel.

    The second machine is an extrusion machine which is used for making billets and rods of various shapes.

    The third machine is a punching machine. A machine which is used to cut specific shapes from sheet metals, but this time he also had the artisan tower to make different number of dies which will provide various shapes.

    Fourth machine is a roller machine, which is same is used to make the sheet metals. But this one is made of highly heat resistant metals instead of the make shift rollers he used in the Falcon Cliff city.

    After assembling everything, Sam came out of the dimension

    He went to the bas.e.m.e.nt and ced all the machines there to make a workshop here. He included the pressing machine he made in the falcon cliff city and some new dies, everything was ready in the workshop.

    That day evening, ten people who are way past the learning stage and still in the rank 1 artisan came to his mansion and brought the materials.

    Most of the materials aren¡¯t precious ones. They are peak of the rank 1 and lowest level of rank 2 materials. Since, most hunters will be at most Novices and they will only target the level 2 and level 3 beasts and their most dangerous targets will still be peak of level 3.

    They can be damaged by the rank 2 weapons.

    Sam took the people to the bas.e.m.e.nt and exined on how to operate the machines and what to do with them.

    The work started the very night and went on to the ten days. Sam took theponents made by the artisans everyday and assembled them along with Watt. The only thing that is left for him to do is to finish the inscriptions on all of them and he will be done with the products he needs to show case in the shop for the opening and also the stock foring months.

    There is still sixteen days left for the start of special branch. He wants to open the shop by the very next day.

    Sam entered the tower and started the etching on oneponent after another. Even though, there is only one day for opening, he has ten days which are more than enough toplete the task.

    And after the process is over, it is time for the shop opening.

 Chapter 96: Opening ceremony

    The next day, the opening of the shop. But the ceremony wasn¡¯t held at the shop, instead it was held in an open ground which is like a stadium. This is a ce where the people in the city holds their ceremonies, tournaments etc.

    A wide ground along with a stage in a middle, there are seats forrge number of spectators.

    The venue and other arrangements are all done by Chaya. She even sent the invitations to all the big shot noble families and even the marquis is here. They all sat in the VIP area.

    The ceremony was held in this stadium because, they need a ce to demonstrate the special product. There are some podiums which covered with cloth on the stage.

    Sam and Chaya are standing on the stage as they looked at the audience.

    After everyone was settled down, Chaya addressed the audience.

    "Greetings everyone. I am the Artisan tower head Chaya. I am very happy that all of you came here to show your support on the opening day of our Shop.

    Today, I am pleased to announce to all of you that, the artisan tower is cooperating with the rank 5 schr artisan Sam to open this Shop.

    In this shop, not only will we be selling the quality weaponry made by the artisans of the artisan tower, but also the inventions of Artisan Sam and now we are going to demonstrate the new products that are only avable in our shop."

    After she finished her speech, she gestured to an attendant who took the cloth off of the first podium under which a weird looking metallic object was ced.

    This might be an unknown object to the audience here, but this is a very familiar to the hunters of the modern earth. This is a foot hold trap mostly used to catch wild animals in the modern world.

    The foot hold trap is twice the size of the normal ones. An attendant came to the stage and exined.

    "This is our first product, the foot hold trap. The product is used to cease the moments of the beasts with a surprise attack."

    After saying his piece, the attendant took the trap into his hands and walked down the stage.

    The crowd was a bit confused when they looked at the weird metal piece.

    "What could it be? How is this weird metal piece be used?"

    "Yeah, he said something like foot holding trap. How can it even hold the feet of a beast?"

    The crowd broke out into discussions.

    The foot hold trap is extremely simr to the one from the earth, the only difference is the base te which is used to ce the trap on the floor. The circr base te is a rotatable disc.

    The attendant rotated the disc and opened the metallic jaws of the trappletely. As soon as he did that, the trap disappeared from the n.a.k.e.d eye. This is because, after rotating the disc, it activated a concealment formation which is etched on it.

    After that, some more attendants came and set the traps simrly. Then a cage was taken into the stadium in which there is a big tiger type beast is struggling. It is simr to normal tiger but the fur is brown in colour with the ck stripes and there are two tails. This is twin tailed earthen tiger. And it is now a Level-3 beast.

    The attendants opened the cage and left the ce immediately.

    The tiger looked at the stage and when it sensed the danger from Chaya it didn¡¯t dare to move in that direction and it didn¡¯t have balls to move towards therge crowd.

    The twin tailed tiger has no choice but to move around the ground. But when it entered the trap zone, itid its front foot on a trap and immediately the Jaws activated and pierced into the leg.

    *ROAR*

    The tiger roared in pain; the jaws of the trappletely pierced into its flesh. But the trap isn¡¯t strong enough to hold the tiger in ce. The disc base and the spring broke, but the jaws didn¡¯t loosen up at all and still stayed in the flesh. This is the major w, Sam left intentionally to make these traps as one-time consumables. The trap will be useless after the beast activated it.

    The beast wasn¡¯t able to move the foot and when it limped another rear limb struck in another trap.

    The crowd was stunned. They didn¡¯t expect the trap would produce this result. Basically, this is achieved because, the animals of lower intelligence will depend on their five senses than their spiritual sense, that is the main reason the trap worked.

    "Damn it, howe it worked?"

    "This weird thing is damn useful."

    "Hahaha, I am going to buy ten of them. My team is going to be rich." The crowd broke in uproar.

    "Our second product, the calming grenade." The attendant¡¯s voice got crowd out of their stupor and they looked at the new unveiled product. There is a spherical metallic object in the size of a baseball on the podium.

    The attendant took the sphere in his hands and held it in his two hands. He rotated the one hemisphere of the sphere and threw it at the tower.

    The audience couldn¡¯t see but when the hemisphere is rotated the upper half was filled with holes and when itnded a smoke started spreading out of it and surrounded the roaring tiger which limped out of the trap zone calmed down and it was so overly calmed down that it almost fell asleep.

    The crowd was surprised again. They are looking at the dizzy tiger which is only slowly walking like an old man.

    "How did that work? A metal piece of that size can work as well?"

    "What is that smoke, that made that calm and sleepy. That trap and this grenade are perfect match."

    "Yeah, when we tried to feed the sleeping drug, the beast will always sense it one way or another. Normal anaesthetics shot with arrows have little effect. If we use poison the flesh will be damaged. This calming grenade is a perfect thing to catch the beasts off guard and if we y our cards right we can even catch the beast alive."

    Just as the attendant was about to reveal the third product, Sam gestured him to stop and said.

    "No need to test the remaining items on the beast. Use a dummy." After that he didn¡¯t care about their reply and went to the tiger. He took off the metal jaws and let it rest for now. He took out a pill from his storage which he got from the ck pond and fed it to the tiger.

    Even though, he is cold and heartless, he really didn¡¯t want to torture a beast without any grudge just to advertise his products. He didn¡¯t want to use them in the first ce, but the trap and calming grenade can only be used on the live beast otherwise, their effects won¡¯t be known to the audience.

    The attendant looked at Chaya and when he got her approval, he and some other attendants brought some wooden dummies

    "Our third product is called pin grenade." The attendant revealed the third product and he took the spherical ball which has a lot of sharp protrusions in his hand and just like the calming grenade he twisted it and threw it between the bunch of wooden dummies.

    A small explosion sound came from the sphere and numerous think and sharp needles were ejected from the grenade and pierced into the bodies of the dummies.

    Again the audience started speaking.

    "If we use this on beast packs this would be super effective."

    "Yeah, it can be even used in gang fights."

    "Damn it, I am not surprised anymore. The products are really good. I am going to buy all of them."

    As crowd went on with their talk, the attendant announced.

    "Our fourth and final product. The invention which gave Artisan Sam to get the rank 5 promotion. Our shops most valuable item. I request someone from audience toe and test it."

    The audience hyped up. This is definitely the main product of the ceremony.

    A young man who sat beside the Marquis came forward. His looks have some simrities to Marquis and he is the second son of the Marquis, Luther.

    He came to Sam and extended his hand. "Nice to meet you Artisan Sam." He said with a smile. His face has a serene smile. Sam shook his hand and said.

    "Nice to meet you too. Please do take a look at the product." Sam gestured him towards the energy cell arm guard with neutral energy which was just unveiled.

    All the experts in the Great realm and above are looking at the energy cell keenly.

    Luther wore the arm guard and the attendant slowly whispered what the two functions are. Luther gave a shocked expression as he looked at Sam with bewilderment.

    He calmed himself and started the demonstration. He extracted the spiritual energy and threw a fire ball at one of the wooden dummies.

    The audience were confused.

    "What is the speciality of the product?"

    "Yeah, isn¡¯t it just a normal fire ball. What does it have anything to do with the product?"

    "May be, it didn¡¯t work?"

    "I think so too."

    But the experts were shocked as they watched Luther absorb the energy from the cell directly. They sensed the energy flow from the energy cell when he used it and immediately understood what the function is.

    "How did he do it?"

    "Damn, this is a very great invention."

    "Yeah, I will definitely buy one for my son. Even though, the amount is very small for me to use, it is very useful to my son."

    "I am going to buy more."

    The normal audience only grew even more confused.

    "What does it do exactly?"

    "Yeah, I didn¡¯t understand either."

    Sam coughed loudly as he stopped the chatters and turned towards Luther.

    "Maybe our guest can exin the uses?"

    Luther nodded and addressed the crowd. When he exined how to use it and what uses it have, the crowd was about be rowdy. But, Chaya interrupted them.

    "Our special product will only be sold once a week and only has thirty pieces. And out of thirty of them, ten of them are fire elemental, ten of them of wind elemental and the remaining are neutral.

    The neutral one will be sold for 5000 spirit stones and the elemental ones will be sold for five times the price.

    The shop will be open on today and all the products along with normal ranked weapons forged by the artisans of our artisan tower are going to be sold there. Please, do visit and support us. Thank you."

    The audience immediately got up from their seats and ran outside. They want to be the first ones to get the products and are afraid that all of the will be over.

    All the attendants left to help at the shop and soon, only around ten people were left in the stadium and all of them cautiously approached Sam.

    They are from the noble families and want to get the energy cells through back door and some even asked if they could get a bulk order. But Sam refused adamantly and they can only leave dejectedly.

    Marquis looked at Sam and his son Zeke who is beside him with aplicated gaze. He was certain his son is going to suffer a massive defeat this time.

 Chapter 97: Everything is settled

    After the shop opening, the stock on the shelves waspletely emptied. Even though, they produced a lot, Sam didn¡¯t allow to keep all of them on the shelves. If the products are too many, the price will be lower.

    So, he strictly regted the flow of all the products. These fifteen days, he taught the assembly process to the workers from the artisan tower.

    But the energy cells can only be made by him. He had already manufactured them in bulk. There are more than 500 of each type with him. After all, he just had to construct the energy veins and the positioning on the energy cores, the rest of the charging of energy will be done by the formation in the tower. So, he can rx for the time being and the business will be good.

    Chaya is even more excited than him. The stock of weapons from the artisan tower are also sold outpletely. She really felt d that she decided to work with Sam.

    Evening of that day, Chaya and Sam just discussed about the sales of the shop when she asked something.

    "I heard from the artisans that you are opening a restaurant. I wanted to ask about it earlier but forgot. Do you have a chef?"

    "No, I need to find one."

    "Great, I have someone who is really skilled. Do you want to consider him?"

    "Oh, who is that? If their skill is really up to par, I won¡¯t mind."

    "He is son of an attendant of artisan tower. He used to have a restaurant in front of Zeke¡¯s restaurant. When Zeke¡¯s restaurant opened his business isn¡¯t that much effected. But that Zeke used some under-handed means to make him lose his business.

    I haven¡¯t known earlier. By the time I have known this, everything is over. I wanted to help him, but he rejected it directly."

    "Can I trust him?" Sam asked. For him, trust is more important than skill. Skills can be cultivated through time and practice, but trust is a matter of character and a person¡¯s character isn¡¯t that easy to cultivate.

    "Of course, I can vouch for him."

    "Sure, introduce him to me tomorrow."

    The next day, Chaya came to Sam¡¯s mansion with a young man in his early twenties.

    "Sam, this is the person it told you about earlier. He is Mackey. A chef."

    Sam shook Mackey¡¯s hand as he sized him up. Mackey is an ordinary looking man and he has a lean figure. Most of all, he is level 1 Novice just like Sam.

    "Are you a mage?" Sam asked when Mackey and lit a me at the tip of his fingers. His mes are orange in colour and density of mes his high.

    "Chaya rmended you to this job. So, I won¡¯t ask much. I need to see your skill. There are already ingredients ced in the kitchen, so make your best meal." Sam said as he pointed at the kitchen.

    Mackey nodded and went to the kitchen.

    Both Chaya and Sam sat at the table and made some small talk. After more than an hour, Mackey came back with four tes in his hands.

    There are four types of dishes and each of them are piping hot.

    Sam was very satisfied with look and fragrance.

    When he tasted them, he was even more impressed by the taste. The texture of meat and the consistency of the vour. Usage of the herbs along with the meat waspletelyplimentary and elevated the taste to new level.

    Sam felt that this is the best meal he had since he came to this world.

    After enjoying the dishes, he looked at Mackey and said.

    "I am really impressed by your cooking. Take this book and practice the recipes. I will hire a team of people to work with you. But these recipes should not be leaked."

    Sam passed a book which he prepared before-hand. These are some of the recipes from the spirit culinary. Even though, these are lowest level recipes and doesn¡¯t give much improvementpared to other recipes, he didn¡¯t want to let these recipes go to other¡¯s hands.

    Mackey nodded and took the book. "I have a request." He spoke in a low voice.

    "What would that be?" Sam asked.

    ??I will bring back my old team. Many of them are still jobless. Is it possible?"

    "Sure. But the secrecy of the recipes will be your responsibility."

    "Thank you so much." Mackey thanked him and went back to the kitchen and opened the book.

    "He doesn¡¯t talk much; I hope you understand." Chaya said.

    "Not a problem."

    "Aren¡¯t you curious?" Chaya asked.

    "What do you mean?"

    "Even though, Novice at twenty isn¡¯t as good as your cultivation, he can still be considered a genius. Do you not want to know why he is settling to be a chef?"

    At this moment Sam looked at her and said. "As far as I concern, all the professions are same, a person¡¯s worth is not decided by what they do, instead it is decided by how good are at what they are doing." He paused before continuing.

    "If I am guy who is curious about anything, I would have been more curious about you. A person who can surpass grand realm at the age of 28 to 29 isn¡¯t someone ordinary as well. Then why would you be settling as a tower head in the marquis city? But, I didn¡¯t ask, right?"

    He smiled and just sat there silently.

    There is still fifteen days to the academy and he was almost done with his business things, there are only two things left to deal with. One of them is source of food and another thing is alcohol.

    Alcohol can still wait because, he is quite confident in the recipes and their taste will be enough to gather enough customer.

    After some pondering, he got an idea and immediately said to Chaya who is in some deep thought.

    "I need you to do something for me."

    "What is it?"

    "I want you to prepare some special tokens. Make a deal with the customers at the shop. Those who sell their hunts to us, can get this token and they can get five percent discount on the special products. The offer is only valid for the traps and the grenades though. We will buy the hunts at the market price."

    "Okay." Chaya said and went back to her own thoughts.

    The recipes which Sam gave to Mackey are of the herbs and Beasts that are avable near the area. He did his research and prepared them.

    If he went to look for a middle-man who buys the hunts and then sell them to the restaurants, he would have to pay some high price.

    Now, that he can get them from the people themselves, the five percent discount isn¡¯t that much of a high price to paypared to the price he has to pay for the mediators.

    After sorting this out, the restaurant can be opened as soon as Mackey mastered the recipes. So, he stayed in the mansion itself and Chaya left.

    Sam went to the yard where Watt and Falck are training.

    Watt stopped his training and went to Sam.

    "Watt, I want you to do something for me."

    "Yes, boss. Tell me."

    "Do you still remember that there are still sixteen members remaining in the Zeke¡¯sckeys?"

    "Yes, boss."

    "From today onwards, they are your targets. Right now, you are at middle stage Acolyte and they are near middle stage Novice. I will give you six months of time, not only you need to catch up to them, you also need to beat them. I don¡¯t care if you will do sneak attacks, one-on-one or even take them on at the same time. But I want you to make them suffer. This is a form of training to you. Take this." Sam said and gave him a rectangr metal box.

    Watt opened it and saw two packs of metallic cards in it along with a pair of daggers. They are all made of rank 2 materials. Watt looked at the pack of cards and couldn¡¯t help but feel satisfied. This means, the Sam is satisfied with his style. He picked a which has vey sharp edges and threw it. He tore through the air and pierced into the tree trunk.

    It didn¡¯t stop there, and went through it before getting struck in the wall. He improved a lot since thest time.

    "These are only temporary weapons. If you finish this mission, I will reward you with one of the best set of weapons." Sam said and left the ce.

    Watt immediately became delighted and went to train.

    Sam went back to Mackey and handed him another scroll.

    "These are recipes which you also need to master. But they aren¡¯t for the restaurant they are only for our personal consumption. Send a portion of each to the mansion for every meal time. After the academy is open, I will inform where to send.

    Don¡¯t mix up mine and Watt¡¯s dishes. If you perform well, you can do have this as well. As for the pay, you and your team will get twenty percent of earnings."

    After Mackey nodded, Sam went back to his room to cultivate his soul. Yanwu and Sky are cultivating and he is determined to increase his level of mental power with Divine spirit soul cultivation. By the time, the academy opens, he wants to achieve Level 3 Novice stage.

    This month, he wasn¡¯t able to cultivate at all, but Yanwu and Sky arepletely concentrated on that area. Before this month, along with the help of two of them and the special dishes that Mackey will make will definitely help him reach the desired level.

    Within three days, Mackey mastered the recipes. He is a very great chef that he was even able to master the special recipes Sam gave him separately.

    And the fourth day, the restaurant was opened grandly and again the bigshots were invited to it.

    This time, as there is a limited space in the restaurant, only the high-level people were invited for a free banquet.

    The restaurant which was built bybining three normal restaurants is the biggest in the city. But the number of people that could fit in it are at most double the normal restaurant

    They have ten tables in the open area and there are ten private rooms. The seating capacity of the smallest room is four while thergest is ten people.

    There is another floor on top of this and there is the banquet hall which needs to be booked in advance.

    The restaurant was instantly popr and the customer flow for the surrounding restaurants immediately took a great amount of damage.

    Zeke could only sigh and do nothing. Even though, his restaurant didn¡¯t lose all the customers immediately, with time, he could foresee the losses he would gain and how did he know this?

    Because, Sam specially sent an invitation to him and he couldn¡¯t control himself and came here to eat. When he tasted the dishes, even he himself didn¡¯t want to eat in his restaurant anymore.

    Now, Sam ispletely relieved of everything and all needs to do is to wait for the academy to open.

 Chapter 98: Special Branch

    The day before the opening of the special branch.

    Sam is in his mansion sitting along with Chaya. He passed a storage ring and said.

    "These energy cells will be sufficient for the supply for more than a year. Tomorrow, I will be joining the academy, I don¡¯t know when I will be able to contact you. So, I prepared them."

    Chaya took the spatial ring and said.

    "Do you know the news? Marquis re-invited the candidates from the two cities threatened by Zeke. But, some of them still refused toe and Zeke was able to get the slot. Hisckeys though, not very lucky."

    "I don¡¯t know. I was busy to care about those things." Sam haspletely concentrated on his cultivation of spirit and soul and made energy cells whenever he is stressed. Yesterday, Yanwu and Sky shared the energy and his cultivation immediately rose to the Novice level 3.

    His speed was just too fast. He just turned 15 few months ago. He is advancing very fast. But this time, he will be encountering a bottle neck. But this bottleneck isn¡¯t as difficult as others. They have to get an enlightenment, but Sam¡¯s cultivation is mostly breaking a barrier forcefully just like beasts.

    But the higher his cultivation, the more energy he requires and the stronger the barrier is. Advancing from Novice level 3 and Novice Level 4 is stepping from initial stage Novice to Middle-stage. The barrier is strong and he needs more time to breakthrough.

    Chaya left after some small talk.

    Sam didn¡¯t know if people from the Falcon Cliff city are here yet.

    Hepletely threw all thoughts and responsibilities out of his mind and went to his room. He is going toze around for this whole day.

    Even though, he has experienced all kinds of cruel circ.u.mstances in his past life and lived in a worse ce one could stay, that only made him cherish his vanity for these luxuries more and more.

    That is the reason, he neverpromised on the ce he stayed in any city. He used a very rare precious metal like silver meteorite sand and ck meteorite sand to make a hover board. Even though, it has some perks to do battle, the main reason is that he didn¡¯t want to walk these long distances in city.

    Even if his task is reaching the peak and to meet Ling Tian, he will never ever sacrifice theforts he earned. He will drown and sail in his vanity and enjoy his life to the best of his ability and his enjoyment lies in thefort he gained with his efforts.

    So, this whole day, Sam went to swim in hiske, took a sun bath in his yard, ate all kinds of street food he could get his hands on. Finally, he had a best sleep in hisfortable bed.

    The next morning, Sam went to the academy zone very early. The ordinary folk aren¡¯t allowed here at all like previous times in Falcon Cliff city and Starwood city.

    He saw a lot of people were there. There are ten Counts under the Marquis and a total of hundred participants were selected from all of them. The Marquis city selected 20 people, so a total 120 candidates will be participating in this special branch.

    Sam came to the gate and found the people from the Falcon Cliff city. When he went there, everyone greeted him with enthusiasm, of course, the weird trio is an exception.

    After some small talk, Philip asked.

    "So, what did you do in this month? Did you get your hands on that guy?" Philip is Philip after all. Even getting back at Marquis¡¯ son is fun thing for him.

    "Well, I nned a lot for him. Maybe, he is cursing my 18 generations as we speak." Sam said as he smiled. Until now, his n is pretty much sess.

    "Oh, what did you do? Tell me the details." Philip¡¯s interest piqued. He really didn¡¯t understand why Sam came a month earlier and that too when his cultivation isn¡¯t up to par. Being nosy is his nature and now his curiosity is all time high.

    "Nothing much, I just trimmed his tail which made him so proud a little bit and he is now hiding it between his legs." He replied clearly not wanting to borate and, in an attempt, to change the topic, he asked Hawk.

    "Why are there no representatives from the Count mansion are Falcon Cliff academy?" He noticed that there are no representatives for other groups as well.

    "This is the order from the Marquis. Yesterday, my father came along with us and Marquis immediately sent him back the very night itself. Not only him, every representative was sent away. They weren¡¯t even allowed to stay within the city." Hawk replied.

    Sam just nodded and didn¡¯t say anything. He started looking at the rest of the candidates.

    He saw, all kinds of people in the bunch. The excited guys, the nervous one, the arrogant guy, self-assumed leader. He could see all kinds of candidates. His gaze finallynded on the Marquis city group.

    There are twenty-one people and the extra one is Zeke who got lucky. Even though, Sam didn¡¯t expect that Marquis will bring back the people from the two cities, he is d that Zeke could still make it. He has something else nned for Zeke inside the academy.

    The only thing that Zeke could be proud of was that his ess to superior resources and his superior strength to Sam.

    Sam wants to remove that feeling also. He is the going to show him that these two will onlyst so long and he nned topletely crush his will. By the time he was done with the guy, he will feel so depressed that even if he saw a spoon full of water, he will consider diving in it tomit suicide.

    Beside Zeke, Sam saw two other people and one of them is Luther the second son of Marquis who he already met and the third person is someone who he is not familiar with.

    But he could easily guess his identity as the nose which is touching the sky and eyes climbing over to his head gave him away. That arrogance and Pride can only be possessed by one person and that one person is none other than the third son of the Marquis the inheritor of blue me.

    Sam didn¡¯t linger his gaze on him and looked at another familiar face. Thedy waved her hand as she saw him. He returned the gesture. She is none other than Jasmine Violet dew.

    He had already made a deal and it wouldn¡¯t hurt him if he was a little bit nicer to her. And the main reason is that Sam didn¡¯t want to pollute Jasmine¡¯s pure mind with his cynic nature. In his previous life, there are many sleepless nights he spent thinking that he could be as pure as her.

    Devoid all the darkness he saw in the society, he just wanted to be a pure heartedmon person. But the cold harsh reality didn¡¯t give him a chance and pushed him to the point of no return.

    Even though, he couldn¡¯t guarantee that she will never change and she could keep her pure heart, Sam didn¡¯t want to be the person who is responsible for that, he would do his best to ensure that she would remain same until his mission ispleted.

    A few minutester, the gate of the Academy zone opened and all the 120 members entered it at the same time. Just as Sam thought, the academy zone itself is like a self-sustained city.

    He saw thenes, houses, restaurants, shops everything run by the people wearing same type of uniform.

    An Elder guided all of them to a ce which seemed like the outskirts of the city where there is a very huge wall. The huge wall is as tall as the city wall of the Blue me city. It is more than 2000 meters tall.

    For that wall there is a huge metal door.

    Marquis and another middle-aged man were both standing in front of the door looking at theing students. There are some more elders of the academy standing behind them.

    Even though, starting the special branch is a grand event, the people who attended it are very few. There are not even any special guests and grand ceremony.

    Sam observed the wall and the door as he waited for the Marquis and others to speak. And soon he did.

    "Wee everyone. Today is the day you are waiting for. The special branch is going to start. I don¡¯t want to waste your time with small talk. But before we go in, keep all your weapons, armours, articrafts, everything in your spatial ring and please be quick."

    Everyone was puzzled when they heard his words and they exchanged nces.

    Sam took off his feather coat and ced it inside the spatial ring. Everyone took off their armours and weapons they held in their hands and threw them inside the storage rings.

    After making sure that everyone did as they were told, Marquis gestured and the huge door opened.

    "Everyone, please enter."

    They entered the door. Marquis or any other elder followed them. When they entered the door, what they saw shook thempletely.

    The whole ce stunk of odour. The ground is devoid of grass. Thend is covered with trees but the area isn¡¯t densely packed with them.

    Sam could see hundreds of meters of the area and it is just like that. The other side is covered by the same kind of tall wall as it was near the entrance.

    The spoilt nobles are clearly bothered with it.

    But before they could express their dissatisfaction the door closed behind them and a loud majestic voice was heard from the horizons.

    "I am the Principal of the Blue me academy. I will be announcing the rules you have to follow. From this day onwards for other six months, you will be staying here and these rules will dictate how you are going to stay.

    1. From this day onwards until the end of six months, you will not be having any ess to the outside world.

    2. From today onwards, you have no ess to your spatial devices, if you don¡¯t believe me you can give it try.

    3. You will not have any spiritual energy. You must have noticed that the spiritual energy around you is negligible. You will not be able to use your spiritual stones as well.

    4. The food provide is the only way for you to obtain the spiritual energy.

    5. Last and the most important rule of all, whatever your status is outside it is nothing for these six months. And anything can happen inside. The test is that you will have to survive until the end and any change of circ.u.mstances will be announced

    Now, the special branch shallmence."

 Chapter 99: First Mission -I

    When the candidates heard these rules their faces became ck, just as they were about toin.

    *Smack*

    A loud smack was heard and the principal¡¯s voice which gave a majestic feel immediately took a 180 degree turn.

    "You, old bugger, just because you are Marquis don¡¯t think I won¡¯t beat you to death. How dare you smack me?"

    The candidates were immediately floored. Particrly the twenty people who are from the marquis city. Some of them are previously students of this academy and they saw principal many times. But all those times, they only knew the dignified leader of the academy.

    Never did they expect that he would be swearing the Marquis like this. Marquis¡¯ voice interrupted their thoughts.

    "you, old fool. I wish I could really beat you to death. Can¡¯t you say the rules properly? Let me tell them. I will deal with youter." After a brief pause, he addressed the candidates.

    "Everyone, the rules stated by the Principal are all correct except the rule about your spiritual energy. I will make it clear to you.

    Your cultivations will not be sealed and you can use your spiritual energy, but in order to restore the energy and recover, you don¡¯t have any ess to spiritual energy sources. The environment around you doesn¡¯t have spiritual energy dense enough to allow to you to absorb and cultivate. Your ess to the spatial storage items is also gone and you won¡¯t be getting any spiritual stones from us.

    The only way you can restore your energy is from the food we are going to send you.

    Other than that, we will be giving you some missions and the ones who will achieve the best score will be rewarded. So, until the next announcement, take care of yourselves.

    As your principal said, anything can happen inside those walls and you can do anything. Your life is in your own hands regarding the status you have outside and you will have to be responsible for your actions. Nobody from outside is going to interfere, no matter what happens.

    Those who aren¡¯t able to take it anymore and want to give upe to the main door and shout out that you want to surrender"

    After that statement everything went silent and after that brief silence, the candidates started to chatter. Some of them are confused, some of them are looking forward to it and some of them are feeling vexed that their cultivation isn¡¯t going to improve.

    Sam probed to ess his normal spatial ring and he wasn¡¯t able to ess it. When he tried to do same thing to the divine dimension, he was able to see andmunicate with Yanwu and Sky inside it, but wasn¡¯t able to get anything out of it.

    But he still has one advantage over others and that is, his cultivation improvement isn¡¯t going to stagnate. Sky and Yanwu will cultivate for him and who knows, maybe by the end of six months, if he can meet them, he will even reach the Novice level 6.

    After some thought, he felt that it is useless to worry about it and started observing the surroundings.

    The ground isn¡¯t that damp, in fact it is a bit on the dry side and the trees are also not that dense in thisnd. There are a lot of open spaces with in this area.

    There are no residences, no trees which have edible fruits, not even a single beast could be seen. Even the trees are a bit unusual. They only have leaves and the wood seemed to be strong.

    Sam went to one of the trees nearby and scr.a.p.ed some bark. The bark isn¡¯t hard and tough, it is smooth and more like skin of bamboo. It has slight moisture content.

    He observed the wood, which is hard and dark brown in colour, he wasn¡¯t able to recognize the trees.

    While Sam is looking at the tree, members of the Falcon Cliff city are also doing the same except for Philip and Jack. They are waiting for Sam to say something.

    They knew that they are slightly vulnerable in a new environment, so they aren¡¯t trying to do anything that they don¡¯t know.

    Sam is very good at this, since their rtionship isn¡¯t that bad, they aren¡¯t ashamed of getting his help.

    The rest of the members are trying to do something, some of them are trying tomunicate with the people from other cities, some of them are checking the surroundings and some of them are still hung up on that vexed feeling because of the rules.

    After checking around, Sam started walking. First thing he did is get out of the crowd and went to look around the area. He walked slowly as he looked around seriously observing everything.

    Philip and Jack followed him hurriedly.

    Soon, they found something. They saw a stream which is more than ten meters wide flowing near the wall.

    Sam looked around and came to a conclusion. The area they are in is rectangr in shape and surrounded by the tall walls,pletely isting them from the outside.

    The only connection to the outside world is this stream which is flowing from one side of the rectangle to the opposite side. And even this stream didn¡¯t have any fish or other animals.

    Sam took a sip of water and after confirming that they are normal and drinkable, he sighed. He suddenly felt d that he enjoyed himself yesterday.

    "Sam, what do you think we should do?" Philip asked.

    Sam looked at both of them as if asking ¡¯Are you nning on following me blindly?¡¯

    Jack felt a little shy, but wasn¡¯tpletely ashamed as he felt that admitting what he doesn¡¯t know and asking for help isn¡¯t a bad thing. But Philip isn¡¯t least bit shy and in fact his face was proud as if saying. ¡¯Isn¡¯t it obvious?¡¯

    Suddenly, Jack felt that he shouldn¡¯t have told Philip about how good Sam was, in that wilderness test of the Falcon Cliff city.

    Sam didn¡¯t know what to say when he looked at Philip¡¯s expression and resigned himself to exin.

    "I don¡¯t think the test is as simple as they said. The main point isn¡¯t even following the rules but the missions. Particrly the statement, ¡¯anything can happen¡¯ is giving me a bad feel.

    The main thing is that we have to frugal about the spiritual energy. So, we can¡¯t stay openly and need a proper ce to rest to have enough energy. So, the first thing is we need to find a ce to stay.

    And we have to wait for the food they are going to send. Even though, with our cultivation we can stay without food, we can at most stay for a week or so at our level and it will cost spiritual energy.

    We will think what to do after we are done with these two things."

    "Okay, then where are we going to stay?" Philip asked.

    "We will decide but the resources we can gather."

    Even though, he can make a camp with resources of the wilderness, Sam couldn¡¯t find any of them here. The tress here are only suppliers of the wood, but there are no vines or any other things suitable to make long ropes.

    Even though, the bark is a little on the soft side, it isn¡¯t easy to do make a rope out of that.

    To have a camp, he needs to see, if he can gather any more teammates.

    So, three of them went back to the crowd, who are now sitting down and talking with smiles. The people from the Falcon Cliff city all sat together and when Sam and the duo following him went there.

    The weird trio are sitting separately seemingly not interested in joining their conversation.

    "What are your ns?" Sam asked Hawk and others.

    Hawk looked at Sam and said. "I don¡¯t know. I think we can wait for the mission first and see what type of missions there will be. After that we will n on what to do."

    Even before Sam could reply, Philip said.

    "We want to make a camp and have a ce to stay and rest anyone wants to join us?" He is pretty straight forward. The rest of them looked at them and then exchanged nces. Kelly is the first one to agree.

    "I don¡¯t mind." After some thought, Hawk said.

    "Sure. But where do you want to camp?" The rest of them also agreed.

    "We found a stream nearby, so we can find a ce near it to make a camp." Again, Philip took it up on himself to say. So, even without his effort Sam now has six teammates.

    Just as they were about to move, Sam felt some one tugging his vest. He turned around to look at Jasmine¡¯s innocent face.

    "Where did you go?" She asked. From her tone, she must have been looking for him.

    "Nowhere,e follow us." Sam said and now he has seven teammates.

    Soon, they came near the stream. But Sam didn¡¯t let them camp too near and moved them 50 meters away from the stream.

    There is a considerable area of open space surrounded by trees in this ce.

    Sam looked at the crowd and said.

    "Since, we are on the same boat, I will tell you how I feel about thispetition..." And exined his opinion just like how he did with Philip and Jack. After letting them digest the info properly and giving them a chance to contemte, he said.

    "Even though, you guys might think that it will waste your spiritual energy to make a camp and you will be having some hard time in missions. But in long term, I think it is necessary to have a ce t rest properly."

    After some though, everyone agreed and Sam asked.

    "Okay then, I need to know your abilities to be more efficient. One by one tell me you abilities."

    "I am wind and water dual elemental mage." Hawk said first.

    "I am earth and fire dual elemental mage." Kelly gave a surprise to everyone. Because, nobody knew that she is a dual elemental mage at all.

    Sam felt even more weird. He has been meeting this dual elemental mages and warrior mages too often, considering that they are supposed to be rare.

    "I am a warrior, swordsman."

    "I am also a warrior, Sabre wielder." Drew and Ray said. Sam didn¡¯t ask Philip and Jack since he already knew his abilities.

    Finally, he looked at Jasmine who is silent all along.

    "I am metal element mage." Sam nodded.

    Metal element mages have slight disadvantage as most of their attacks are close range and many of them use weapons. They are more like warriors. The metal element is one of less versatile elements.

    He thought for a moment and said.

    "Kelly, Hawk. Both of you are responsible for making shelter. Since the soil is dry it will be hard to mould it, so Hawk, you will use your water element to make it gain some moisture just enough to mould it.

    Kelly, use your earth element and raise walls using these seven trees as corners. Don¡¯t worry about the roof. It will take a lot of energy from both of you if you do it." Both of them nodded and went to work

    Sam took the remaining people along with him. He started cutting down the tress one by one and split them along vertically. All this time he used his wind element. Since, his control is high, he used minimum energy to make maximum work

    Soon, the remaining guys came while carrying the wood to keep them as room.

    Finally, Sam took arge bunch of leaves and covered the gap along with them. To finish the roof of the house.

 Chapter 100: First Mission-II

    The small mud house, has a eight small rooms and there is a circrmon ce for everyone to sit together.

    The rooms aren¡¯t big. Just enough to fit tworge people. If two peopley on the floor, the room will be full. Since, everyone has a room for them individually it would be sufficient.

    By the time they were done, they observed that the other people in the crowd are also moving around and they are also building the houses. But they were not like Sam and others.

    They started building big andfortable rooms and more than one third of the area of the rectangr zone is upied with the houses.

    They didn¡¯t care about the spiritual energy as they have one thought in mind. They thought that, they will be provided with the food and they don¡¯t have to worry about it.

    By the time everyone settled down, it is already evening.

    Sam suggested that they go to sleep early and just as they were about to go to sleep, someone came to their ce and all of them are from the Blue me city members.

    There are four people who came and all of them have haughty looks. Clearly indicating that they are from the noble families.

    "Jasmine, why are you staying with them, you cane and stay with us." One of them saidpletely ignoring the remaining members.

    Jasmine didn¡¯t talk to them and just walked inside and went to her room. Her master said to listen to whatever Sam said and since Sam said that they need to sleep she didn¡¯t want to waste any time and went inside.

    Just as they were about to enter, Sam blocked them and said.

    "You aren¡¯t allowed to enter. If you want to talk to her, you can do so when shees out."

    "Then call her out." One of them said impatiently.

    "And why do you think I would do that?" Sam said a bit coldly. Just that guy in lead was about to retort one of the guys whispered something and four of them stopped in their tracks and left without speaking anything.

    Sam didn¡¯t care much and went to sleep.

    The next day all of them didn¡¯t see any changes at all. There is no sign of the food that was supposed to be sent in and there is no sign of any mission. They just spent time idling around, since they can¡¯t even cultivate.

    Days passed, and they didn¡¯t do anything. They started to feel tired and Sam¡¯s team is the only thing that is faring better. Even the weird trio who used wood to make a small cabin are having a better time as they tried to make it as humble as possible.

    The remaining teams started feel the tiredness as they spent the most energy in making the camps.

    On fifth day afternoon, they saw a bunch of bird type beasts flying over the field. Everyone came out as they looked at them.

    The bird types beasts lowered their altitude and each of them dropped a package. All of them are puzzled and moved to catch them.

    "Everyone, try to catch one. Don¡¯t go for extra package. Catch only one parcel. If you cannot catch one, immediately ask nearest team member for help."

    Sam said and immediately moved. The rest of the team also started spreading.

    When the packages reached a certain height, the speed of the falling slowed down.

    Sam climbed a tree and leapt towards the sky. He reached onto one of the packages andnded. Everyone is trying their best to get one.

    Sam looked around and as he saw that Jasmine and Kelly are having trouble to get one, he immediately caught other two.

    The wind element really came in handy this time. The other team¡¯s wind elementals mages aren¡¯t idling either, they are also doing their best to catch more.

    After everyone caught one, they came back to their camp.

    Sam and his teammates sat down and opened the packages.

    All they could see is some kind of boiled meat paste. But they could feel one thing. It is filled with spiritual energy.

    "Dig in as fast as you can. Don¡¯t even think about saving up. There will be amotion soon."

    And they didn¡¯t need him to say that as they ate in rapid pace as they felt hunger and tiredness due tock of spiritual energy. After using their energy to catch the packages they were only left with ast bit of spiritual energy. If any person even an acolyte inte stagees back, they would be able to take one of them down.

    When they are halfway through their meal, they could already feel their body¡¯s spiritual energy replenishing. But at the same time, they could hear argemotion outside. When they wanted to go out, Sam said.

    "Finish your food first." They didn¡¯t understand why he insisted, but they just followed andpleted their food. After that they just left the containers there and immediately went outside.

    "Hey, did you find any packages that are dropped away?"

    "No, there are no packages. Seems like all of them are caught."

    "What should we do now?"

    "Someone might have caught extra packages. How could our packages be missing?"

    As soon as Hawk and others came outside, they heard a bunch of people discussing this. Hearing this they also felt puzzled. They also thought that someone might have taken extra packages and felt that it is unnecessary as one package is enough to fill their spiritual core. They even felt that it is a bit more than they needed.

    "There is a deficit of packages. They only sent hundred of them." When Sam said this, they immediately got shocked.

    "You guys might not have concentrated as you are fully focussed on the packages, but I counted the number of birds. They even sent them in ten rows and each row has ten birds. That is why, I asked you guys to catch one immediately."

    By the time, Sam finished, there is already a fight between some people.

    Those who didn¡¯t get any box started attacking some people who hadn¡¯t started eating yet. The people who used built the houses were the ones, that aren¡¯t able to catch anything and there are twelve people.

    The remaining eight people are the ones who dyed.

    Many people still haven¡¯t eaten yet and these twenty people started wreaking havoc.

    Even though, their spiritual energies are low, the people who caught the packages didn¡¯t have much energy left as well. they are in the same level now and those who didn¡¯t eat yet became the targets.

    Now Sam¡¯s teammates understood why Sam asked them to eat faster. If not, they might have been the targets for this fight.

    As time passed the fight grew intense. And finally, all of them came to truce and shared the food and that is not enough. But at least they were able to get half of the spiritual energy.

    Sam looked around and saw few people observing the situation calmly.

    One of them is Luther. Sam knew why they are looked like that, because, they are also the ones who moved as fast as him to get the packages. They also must have counted the birds.

    Only these few felt that the situation is odd and the first ones to find that out.

    Sam¡¯s initial guess was right. The test here is not as simple as it sounded. Even before they got the first mission, they were already having trouble and internal fights.

    That night, not only Sam¡¯s teammates a lot of people weren¡¯t able to rest at all.

    They already got some inkling of the situation and they knew that this special branch isn¡¯t what they imagined at all.

    They got really nervous. They didn¡¯t know what will happen tomorrow.

    The next day nothing happened but this made them even more uneasy, they felt like they were on pins and needles. On the seventh day, they finally saw, what ising.

    A majestic voice announced their first mission.

    "Attention all candidates, your first mission had been decided.

    A total of 10 tokens have been sent into the Special branch zone by using ten beasts.

    The candidates have three days to catch the beasts. The ten token holders at the night of the third day will have the right to choose, who can get the next meal.

    Each token holder can choose other nine people and a total of hundred people will be getting the meal. The remaining twenty people will not be served with any meals.

    From this moment onwards the first mission starts."

    As soon as the voice ended everyone became alert and started moving. They never expected the first mission will be suddenly announced and they only have 100 spots for food.

    The remaining twenty people has to suffer and nobody has absolute trust in the people they were with. The first meals sent by the bird types beasts made them suspect everyone and they don¡¯t want to ce the trust on other people. If they could get the token themselves, then only they would be guaranteed with a meal.

 Chapter 101: Taking Action

    Sam and his teammates didn¡¯t move at all. And they aren¡¯t the only ones that didn¡¯t move yet. There are still some people who just stood there without moving.

    Some of them are alone and some of them have their close friends or trusted teammates with them.

    But they are not more than thirty people who are just in ce.

    The remaining 90 people went on search.

    Why are these thirty still here? Well, for Sam¡¯s teammates it was because they controlled themselves on Sam¡¯s orders, but the remaining people, they also realised that this isn¡¯t that simple mission.

    If not for the fact that all the teammates are in a state of paranoia due to the incident with the food, they would have realized that the mission just won¡¯t end as soon as they caught the tokens.

    Because, the announcement clearly stated that the token holders by the end of the third day will be the ones that will decide the food allotment and there is no guarantee that the person who caught the beast and obtained the token will be the final token holder.

    All the people standing here are going to take the easy way after the chaos broke out.

    But Sam has another reason.

    Right now, he is staring at the wall at the front door side.

    From outside, he could see that the wall is two thousand meters high. Even though, he wasn¡¯t able to clearly see the whole wall, he was sure that the wall ispletely in his field of vision albeit vaguely.

    But from inside, he could see the wall was only a few hundred meters tall.

    Initially, Sam didn¡¯t particrly take notice of it, but when the food was sent by the bird type beasts, he noticed that the wall isn¡¯t that tall from inside. How is that possible? He doesn¡¯t know and he isn¡¯t very adamant about knowing it.

    At this moment his main thought is, how did they send the ten beasts inside.

    Even though, they are bit far from it, the main door is still in their field of vision and they didn¡¯t see the door opening and the beastsing inside, that is the reason is a bit confused. This fact, is not only noticed by him but also by other people who are still standing.

    After more two hours, the whole area waspletely searched by the ny people and they weren¡¯t able to find any beasts at all.

    This made them feel confused. Even the people who didn¡¯t move at first and thought of reaping the benefits without much effort are also confused.

    Every candidate started to be worked up, some of them are even thinking if the announcement was a prank. But they knew that it was impossible to be a prank.

    So, they picked themselves up and started searching again. This way, the first day of the first mission everything is chaos in the special branch zone.

    The candidates are in a frenzy as they kept on searching, even the stream wasn¡¯t left alone, but by the end of the first day, they couldn¡¯t avoid giving up the search.

    After all, they already searched almost every nook and cranny, but apart from the useless trees and somerge rocks, they weren¡¯t able to find out anything.

    So, the first day of the mission came to an end with all the participants tired and going to rest.

    The next day, something peculiar happened.

    Some people who woke up early to again search for the beasts came back to the ce all of them gathered by afternoon to see if any of them has found anything.

    Sam and his teammates are also there looking at the group of people who searched.

    Sam is also a little impatient now that the half time of the mission has already passed and there are seemingly no clues at all. He also wanted to look around.

    Just as everyone was in deep thoughts, one of the people who went to search in morning walked towards the nearest person and punched hard in the face.

    "You bastard. Why did you hit me?"

    The person who got hit immediately shouted. The other person didn¡¯t say anything and just ran away. The one who got punched immediately became even more furious and followed the other party.

    Just as everyone is feeling peculiar about this, same incident happened. A girl in the group hit the person beside her and ran away immediately without even saying anything.

    And soon, same incidents repeated again and again.

    Everyone became curious what is going to happen and why did these people hit others.

    So, everyone divided into groups and followed the people who ran in different direction.

    Even Sam and his team mates went to look and they went in the direction of the first attacker.

    By the time they entered the scene, they saw that the attacker isying on the floor with blood flowing out of his mouth while the one who got punched by the attacker is standing there panicking.

    The people who came along with Sam and his teammates are the ones who are from the same city that the attacker and the one who got punched came.

    The scene immediately made them serious.

    "Why did you attack him so viciously?" A young man who seemed to be the leader of the team asked seriously.

    "N- No, I di..."

    Just as the guy was about to exin another girl interrupted.

    "You don¡¯t have to kill him for this small conflict right, you can save your exnation. We will report this incident to the Count when we get back."

    "No, I didn¡¯t attack him, by the time I came here he is already like this." The guy who got punched in his face tried to exin himself. But the rest of them didn¡¯t listen to his pleas and left after they picked up the guy on verge of death off the ground.

    Sam felt that something is off about this situation. After all, even though they didn¡¯t follow the duo immediately they still aren¡¯t that far off and they didn¡¯t even hear any sounds of fight. They only saw a personying on the ground and another person standing there.

    Sam didn¡¯t leave the ce and just stood there along with his teammates. He started observing the ce and soon found out something. There are traces of person struggling to get out of a grip or choke hold.

    He thought of something and when he was about to ask the person who was believed as a killer, he was nowhere to be seen. He was in a distance walking towards the camping ce.

    Sam immediately turned around and was about to follow him, but suddenly the person disappeared as he turned around a tree and the tree blocked him from his field of vision.

    "Stay as a group. Don¡¯t stray off and everyone hold hands with at least one person." Sam said as he also held hands with Jasmine and walked slowly with his group. When he arrived at the spot where the person disappeared, he immediately frowned as he looked at the same traces of struggle.

    "Sam, he is there." Philip said as he pointed at a distance. Everyone turned to look at that direction and saw that ¡¯killer¡¯ is walking towards the camp. His walking seemed stiff and rigid at the same time very slow as well.

    Sam didn¡¯t follow him immediately and looked around. Then behind a bunch of rocks, he found the unconscious body of the killer.

    When the group saw it, they immediately had Goosebumps. If the young man is here, then who is the one that walked away. This is the only thought in their minds.

    Sam immediately examined the young man¡¯s body and he found some, scaly patterns on the torso.

    He stood up and seemed a little frustrated.

    Sam immediately ran after the ¡¯young man¡¯ who is walking towards the camp.

    When they are still half way there, Sam caught up to him and immediately jumped at the ¡¯young man¡¯ directly.

    Both of them struggled in the grip of each other. Sam activated elemental fusion. His hands which were choking the young man suddenly lit up with golden mes and the ¡¯young man¡¯ immediately started struggling even harder.

    By this time, the rest of the teammates also caught up with him and when they saw the struggle they don¡¯t know if they should attack or not.

    Suddenly, they saw something that gave them chills.

    As the mes around Sam¡¯s arms intensified, the ¡¯young man¡¯s¡¯ body suddenly started making some cracking sounds and in front of their astounding gazes they saw him turning into a big scaly figure.

    Sam didn¡¯t leave his grip and instead tightened it around its neck. The scaly beast¡¯s tail started whipping around and finally wrapped it around Sam¡¯s torso.

    But Sam didn¡¯t leave the beast alone. He tightened his grip and forcefully pried open the beast¡¯s mouth and put his hand inside. Before the beast could do anything, he immediately shot small fire balls continuously.

    The beast started making whimpers, but soon it came to rest as a burnt smell spread across.

    Sam finally stood up and the rest of the team, quickly came forward to support him. But he rejected.

    "Don¡¯t touch me." Sam said and went towards the beast. He used a wind de to cut open the beast and soon found the token.

    "Don¡¯t touch the carcass. Get back to the camp."

    Sam gave out the order and immediately ran towards the stream and jumped into it without a second thought. He started swimming around and scratching his whole body at the same time. He only came back to the camp after an hour.

    And the camp ispletely in chaos by the time he came.

    He saw some people fainting in the ce and some people having blood oozed out of their mouths. He went to their camp and saw that his teammates are all inside.

    "What happened? What type of beast is that?" Philip is the first one who asked as he saw Sam¡¯s half n.a.k.e.d body fully red due to scratching.

    "That beast is called Myriad mirage Chameleon. This beast is normally not that powerful, but at a situation where the spiritual energy is scarce is a nightmare.

    These beasts are a bit peculiarpared to other chameleon type beasts. Mostly chameleons roam alone, but this one will travel in groups.

    Their abilities are alsopletely peculiar.

    First ability is, it can change into any form depending on the cultivation level. The beast I took down is in Level 3 which is equivalent to a Novice

    Second ability is that it can immediately disappear and blend into surroundings. It takes a lot of effort to find it as they don¡¯t make any sounds at all.

    If we attack it from long range, they can sense it and dodge it. Even in short range, their defence is quite high and if they aren¡¯t killed in a single punch, they will immediately disappear and blend into surroundings. So, the only way to attack is either one hit kill or grapple. The current scarcity of energy doesn¡¯t grant us the liberty to attack it with a powerful skill to perform a one hit kill.

    Third ability is illusion. That is why a lot of people are unconscious outside.

    The final ability is, on itsst breath, it will leave a certain odour on the killer which will attract the killer, that is why I immediately ran away from you guys and washed away until I almost bled.

    Even more dangerous thing is you will be poisoned if you eat that meat. That is why I didn¡¯t want you guys to touch it. By this time, the rest of the beasts must have gone near the dead body.

    "Don¡¯t you think it is better to tell the rest?" Hawk asked.

    "No need. They will learn of it soon. If I am not wrong some of them must have realized that a beast is behind the peculiar incident, so they will take action." He said slowly.

 Chapter 102: First mission over

    Sam instructed his teammates to sit inside, while he walked out to see the situation.

    What he saw wasn¡¯t that much different from his expectations, the Myriad mirage chameleons are a type of beasts with a great sense ofradery. Seeing, that one of them is dead, the remaining of them would surely take out their anger on the killer.

    Since, he destroyed the odour on him which is the only way for them to find the killer, they will take the anger out on themon enemy, the candidates.

    The candidates are all in chaos. Some people are unconscious, some of them are injured, some of them are arguing on what the hell is happening.

    There are only a few people who are still a bit calm and they are the ones who assumed the leadership positions of their respective teams.

    Suddenly, the third son of Marquis made a move, arge blue coloured fire ball was shot from his hands and it flew towards a young man who is walking stiffly.

    Before the people could react, the ¡¯young man¡¯ was hit by the fire ball, but as soon as hended on the ground, he disappeared.

    This is the scenario, Sam wanted to avoid, if they became invisible, it is really hard to find them and if they really want to kill it while it is still invisible, the only way is to use an attack with high damage as well as arge area of effect.

    It is not a good idea to use those type of skill when they don¡¯t have a guaranteed supply of spiritual energy to restore their strength.

    But Marquis¡¯ son, doesn¡¯t have much choice, so after performing a series of hand seals, arge wave of blue me engulfed the area where the ¡¯young man¡¯ disappeared. And in a few seconds, they could hear growls from the mes and within a minute after the mes disappeared there was a fully burnt scaly figure, in between arge patch of a burnt area.

    Marquis¡¯ son, became visibly weak. Even though, his attack was powerful, it took an equallyrge toll on his spiritual energy.

    His two brothers Zeke and Luther, immediately moved forward. One of them stood near their third brother, and the other one went to check the corpse. After ransacking the corpse for a few minutes, they finally found the token and three of them immediately went back to their camp.

    Even if they had some differences and grudges among them, the three brothers are quite united for now in front of outsiders.

    As soon as the spectators saw that the token was in the three brothers¡¯ hands, some people from the marquis city who has a closer rtionship, mostly noble offspring, joined them.

    Looking at this scene, the remaining candidates erupted in frenzy. Everyone is looked at one another in suspicion, thinking if the other party was the beast. But their suspicions got lost in a few seconds as a few ¡¯young men¡¯ started running towards the three brothers to attack them.

    The candidates immediately understood, by the weird bodily movements of the ¡¯young men¡¯ and soon the battles started.

    Only at this moment, Sam started walking. He went back to the ce, he grappled with the chameleon and took back the corpse with him.

    Even though, the meat isn¡¯t edible, Sam has some other uses for this corpse.

    Since, they have scarcity of spiritual energy, they need to find a way which uses less spiritual energy for attacking. And a myriad mirage chameleon¡¯s body has a lot of this which mighte useful in future and one of them is its scaly tail.

    The tail is one of lethal weapons a myriad mirage chameleon uses to attack people. The tail acts just like a normal python.

    It wounds the tail around the abdomen and chest of the victim and the muscles of the tail will tighten at the same the scales will start to pierce through the skin. The tail bone of this beasts is one of the hardest parts belonging to the level 3 beasts.

    Sam took the beast carcass to a distance away from the camp, he took his team mates along with him. After it is dead there will be some secretions that the dead of this beast will release which is the major reasons the meat is contaminated.

    Sam along with Kelly and Hawk¡¯s help made an earthen pot with mud. Even though, it isn¡¯t useful for long term use and isn¡¯t that sturdy, he still made it for this short-term purpose.

    After preparing the pot, he started cutting open with the wind des. Hawk looked at the short and small wind des Sam is making without any hand seals and minimum expense of spiritual and couldn¡¯t help but open his mouth wide.

    After cutting open the carcass, he took out the tail bone. It isn¡¯t the whole tail but rather thergest part of the tail. It is about one and a half feet long and it is not that thick

    "This is for you. Even though, the handle isn¡¯t there and the edge isn¡¯t sharp, I think it is better than nothing. Hide it properly and do necessary arrangements as you seem fit."

    After that, he ced his palm like a knife and it is surrounded by the condensed wind, he started peeling the scales off of the skin and meat off of the bones.

    He piled the bones away separately and ced the meat inside the pot before burying it.

    After that, he picked up some scale which are the part of the tail and buried the remaining. There are ten scales in his hands. After that he took some intact and long bones which and buried the remaining along with the rest of the organs and waste of the beast.

    "This pot might be one of our greatest help in the near future. That is why, I am doing this in front of you. Remember the location properly. After three days, one of us wille here and take it back."

    Everyone nodded their heads and all of them left the ce back to the camp.

    Here most of the people are settled by now as they killed the beasts. Seems like somebody in the crowd is knowledgeable enough, that nobody ate the beast meat and all of them are on their way of burying them.

    But more than twenty people among the group are in a frenzy as they failed to find a beast and that included the weird trio. Because, none of the knew that Sam killed the first one.

    The night fell and everyone went to rest. The next day, thest day of the first mission. Sam made his teammates act like they were searching the beast. because, thest twenty people will go crazy if they find out about it.

    Even though, the fight might be inevitable as it would be revealed sooner orter, if others exhausted, the fight might be on their side and that is why, he ordered everyone to make sure not to use the spiritual energy.

    While they were searching, Sam sneakily went back to his room and took out the scales and bones he buried at the corner.

    He took a scale in his hand to check the sharpness. The scale is even harder than the bones and it is even sharp enough to cut through the bones. That is why it is not a good idea to let a Myriad mirage chameleon to sneak up on you.

    He picked up a foot-long bone and started sharpening one of its edges with the scale. Even though, the scales are sharp, they are short and since he has some things that can be made into weapons, he is going to make some which will help them in danger.

    And by the evening, Sam has more than ten bone knives. He passed on each to everyone and kept the rest to himself.

    They aren¡¯t that long and can be hidden inside their clothes.

    After the night fell, an announcement came.

    "All the candidates who have tokens with them,e to the front door."

    After hearing this announcement, Sam came outside and walked towards the front door. Even though, some of them were surprised that Sam got hold of thest token, no one said anything, lest they were monitored and leave a bad impression on the person who is inspecting them.

    After arriving at the front door, the voice instructed again.

    "Now walk towards the right side of the door and you will find some slots for the tokens, drop them inside."

    They did as they were told and smallpartments opened and there is a brush and a paper along with some ink in eachpartment.

    "Write the names, of the people you chose." The voice instructed again and when they wrote the names, they kept the papers inside thepartments and closed them.

    Soon, the names were called on by one in a loud voice.

    To their surprise, two of weird trio were also called along with Sam¡¯s team members.

    After everyone was gathered tenrgepartments opened with food packets inside them.

    After taking it out, everyone was happy but the twenty people who didn¡¯t get any food soon came towards them. They are even ready to attack.

    Looking at them all of them started to eat. Only the weird trio waited for their partner and three of them shared together. Since, they are smart enough to conserve some of their energy, the food was sufficient for three of them.

    After having their meal, when they were about to thank Sam, he interrupted them.

    "Thank Hawk. I am not that kind. Even though, our grudge might have been over, I wouldn¡¯t be so kind to give food to you."

    After that everyone, went back to their camps.

    The weird trio went back to their camp after thanking Hawk. Even though, their meal seemed peaceful, the remaining batches weren¡¯t same.

    Except for the twenty people from the Marquis city and Sam¡¯s group who ate faster than the rest, the remaining candidates who ate slowly, were attacked and just like the first time, the fight for food went on.

    And just like before, some of them had to agree for a truce. But this time, more than ten people didn¡¯t have any food at all.

    They could barely sustain for another day or two if this goes on.

    Sam looked at them and shook his head as a thought flew past his mind.

    The first batch of candidates who decided to give up will emerge soon and it is just the first mission, that ispleted.

    He was looking forward to the future missions and also want to see how many of them will be getting past these six months and continue with the special branch.

 Chapter 103: Second mission

    The next day after the first mission was over, the first batch of the people who gave up as well as people who were dead because, they weren¡¯t able to hold up due to injuries caused by the chameleons.

    Now, there are only 102 people left inside the zone and out of the 18 members six of them are dead and the remaining twelve people gave up.

    Sam is inside his room as he closed his eyes andid down. He is contemting on how to get past this stage with minimum effort. The first step for it is the pot filled with meat of Chameleons which he buried day before yesterday. By tomorrow it will be ready.

    But he wasn¡¯t sure if it is really as useful. Even the bone knives he made can only be used for few times and they aren¡¯t that powerful.

    The usefulness of these things will mainly depend on the task will be given next.

    Next day, Sam along with Kelly and Hawk went to the ce where the pot is buried.

    He slowly dug out the pot and opened the lid. A pungent and acidic smell came as soon as it was exposed. After looking at the liquid substance that is almost filled the pot, he closed it and kept it aside carefully.

    Then three of them started making some tiny finger sized small cups with the mud in cylindrical shape.

    One side of the cup is closed while the other side is openedpletely.

    The cup is so thin and delicate that it would break as soon as they apply slight pressure. Sam filled three-fourths of the cup with the pungent greenish liquid and they closed the other side with mud and again baked it.

    So, a closed capsule made of mud and filled with this weird liquid is made after so much effort.

    Even the making is time consuming, they didn¡¯t stop. After all, there is all the time in the world. Even though, it is twelfth day of the special branch, there is nothing much they did and it itself will create some mental problems to these people who are always busy with cultivating, training, or even squandering.

    So, making somethings that might be help full isn¡¯t a bad idea. So, they kept on making these small mud capsules and they were done by the night. Now therge pot is empty and there are around hundred capsules.

    Sam went back to the camp and called his teammates as he distributed the capsules to them. After everyone took their share of capsules to their camp, he said.

    "These capsules maybe small, but they will be useful in a fight in our current circ.u.mstances. Since, we can¡¯t use our spiritual energy carelessly, these maye in handy. All you have to do is throw them at the target and it will work as long as the target is a living being.

    By next day all the candidates knew about Sam¡¯s weird actions of making some small items with y and mud. They just thought that they are doing this out of boredom and some of them even threw some meanments like they lost their mind or they became crazy.

    But they didn¡¯t care.

    There is one thing that annoyed Sam and others though. The noble kids who came to get close to Jasmine are still trying to pester her and it is kind of annoying them.

    If not for the fact they should be careful about their usage of the spiritual energy, Sam might have fought it out with them... No more like he would have kicked their assess.

    Days passed and fifteenth day came and this day the food was delivered by the bird type beasts, but still there is a deficit of twenty packages. This time also fights broke out and Sam, Hawk and Jack also got into fights.

    Sam and Jack won instantly but Hawk has a tough opponent. Hawk is only at Novice level 2 while the other guy is at Novice level 3 which made his fight harder, but finally he won the battle as the other party doesn¡¯t seem to have left with much spiritual energy.

    After their meal, the days passed by again and on eighteenth day.

    Sam and his group are chatting to pass the time in their small camp.

    But suddenly sounds of rumbling and explosions came from outside and when they went outside, they saw that a camp was blown away by a huge me explosion.

    At the same time, an announcement could be heard.

    "Hello, candidates. Some of the prisoners of the marquis city who were sentenced death and were staying in jail to be executed are now with you in the Special branch zone. There are exactly 82 death row inmates which we painstakingly arrested within the whole of Marquis¡¯ territory.

    But they were given a second chance.

    Now they are your opponents. If anybody of you are killed by them, they will be given the chance to redeem themselves by joining the army.

    For the candidates who killed the inmates, they will be given a portion of food for every person you kill.

    And by the way, they are all at Novice level 3 to Level 5. So, all the best."

    The voice sounded mischievous and yful as if that person is watching a game yout.

    Every candidate felt frustrated. When they first got here, they thought they were going to learn something, but even though they are learning now, they are being forced to learn by these situations.

    Some of them are even regrettinging here and particrly those candidates who were once dropped out due to Zeke and were forced toe back again by the Marquis, their initial excitement was gone.

    Now, they are thinking, why the marquis even came to them to get them back.

    The worst thing is that they didn¡¯t even have enough time toment on these things. The death row inmates who were given a chance at second life are already near the camps when the announcement was made.

    They already started attacking people as soon as they came. After all a new lease at their pathetic and almost ended lives isn¡¯t something they can pass up on.

    The first attack on the camp already injured a person. If not for the fact that all the candidates are already on their toes and sensed the danger when it was about to strike, the injured wouldn¡¯t be just one person.

    "Keep the capsules in your hands and stay near the camp. Stay close. And don¡¯t let the capsule break in your hands. It would be disastrous if the liquid touches your skin. Don¡¯t attack the enemies with your spells and battle techniques.

    Finish them with the capsules if it is possible and only use your attacks for defence or killing blows. Stay together and don¡¯t spread."

    Sam immediately gave orders.

    It became beneficial that their camp is thest one and the inmates have to go through all the other camps to reach them.

    And the inmates seemed to be carefree as they were already informed about the situation of the candidates.

    Lack of spiritual energy to restore or cultivate and theirst intake was three days ago, and their cultivations ranged from Novice Level 1 to Level 4. For them this is a piece of cake, so they are enjoying themselves. And the most important thing is that they are no restrictions on what they do.

    But soon, they realised one thing, they clearly underestimated the elites. Even though, the candidates don¡¯t have a battle experience of years, they are still elites chosen from hundreds and even thousands of candidates.

    So, the inmates soon met with a wakeup call.

    The attacks of the candidates are even more vicious than the inmates¡¯ attacks. This gave them a surprise.

    And why are the kids so fierce, that is because, they are already very frustrated and since it has alreadye to a situation where there is a possibility of their death, they didn¡¯t hold back.

    After all, they can get the food to eat after they kill a person.

    So, they aren¡¯t conservative about the attacks at all.

    And the first body that fell was that of the inmates¡¯ and not of a candidate. The person who fought with Hawk yesterday used all of his remaining strength to sneak up on an inmate at Novice Level 3 and killed him.

    Just as he heaved a sigh of relief that he can have a full portion of food, a palm surrounded by sharp spiritual energy was pierced through the abdomen as a man with a vicious expression appeared behind him.

    An inmate tried to take the easy way to get a free kill without any effort.

    "Brother." A young man who is not far away shouted in agony and attacked the inmate and soon the inmate was dead.

    But the young man wasn¡¯t happy, he held his brother tightly and tried to stop his bleeding as he tore his shirt open and tied the wound.

    Sam looked as the young man carried his wounded brother to the front door. He looked at the tears and snot as the young man cried but still grit his teeth as he carried his brother over and ran. Suddenly, he felt a little uneasy.

    By this time there are already some inmates charging at him and his teammates.

    Just as he said previously, the teammates stood closely with backs against each other and threw the mud capsules over.

    The inmates didn¡¯t really care much as they knew that there are no weapons with candidates. They thought that the capsules are some stones and when they didn¡¯t feel any kind of spirtual energy they even felt likeughing and didn¡¯t even bother dodging.

    So, the capsules hit them and soon blood curdling screams of the inmates rang throughout the zone. All the fights stopped for an instant.

    Six inmates who made are near Sam¡¯s group held their faces or abdomens and various other parts where the weird liquid was sshed.

    The liquid is the result of secretion from the flesh of myriad mirage chameleon.

    This liquid has a highly corrosive property and it intensifies if there is no atmospheric air present. When a myriad mirage chameleon dies its corpse will bepletely corroded by this secreted liquid and it will soon disappear into the atmosphere due to the dilution by the spiritual energy.

    Since, Sam left it inside the a closed pot for some time and particrly since there isck of spiritual energy, the corrosive property is quite high.

    So, when it was sshed, all of the skin and flesh at that spot started to dissolve.

    The team immediately killed the six members and turned their targets to the nearest inmates. Before they coulde out of surprise from the cries of the first batch of inmates, two more people were targeted and became dead bodies.

    In this way while Sam was still looking at the young man who is carrying his brother towards the faraway front door, his team got enough kills to have sufficient meals.

 Chapter 104: Anything Can Happen

    Sam looked at the two brothers as he remembered something from his past life. He is in the same position as the one who is injured and the one who carried him isn¡¯t his brother but someone who was close to his heart but he didn¡¯t realise it until the other person was dead.

    That fateful day was one of the things that he would never forget.

    Now looking at these two siblings, he could rte to the situations but he was still hesitating. To help them or not.

    After some thoughts Sam decided to wait, he wanted to wait and see if they are worthy of his help.

    His teammates looked at his expression and didn¡¯t disturb him. And among them there are two curious people who are waiting to see what Sam would decide, they are Jack and Philip.

    These two are the ones who spent most time with Sam and one could even say that these two people understood Sam the best in this life. But their understanding is still limited as they didn¡¯t see the depth of his characterpletely.

    But Sam didn¡¯t know their thoughts and just looked at the two siblings.

    By this time, the fights already intensified and some are evenpleted. There are some candidates lying dead and there are some inmates¡¯ corpses.

    Many people already noticed the fleeing sibling pair and some inmates started chasing them. After all, who would reject an easy target.

    The person who is carrying his brother also noticed that the inmates are chasing him and grit his teeth as he started moving faster. Theck of the energy didn¡¯t help and the agony his brother is going through dues to the wound is making him even more anxious.

    There are three inmates chasing after him. The siblings are less than twenty meters away from the door but the inmates caught up.

    If he leaves his brother and runs by himself, that guy will be able to make it safe. But he didn¡¯t do, even when tripped due to anxiousness, he still grits his teeth and dragged his brother slowly. He clearly knew that it was hopeless situation but he didn¡¯t want to give up.

    Just when an inmate raised his arm and about to make a move,

    *Swoosh* a white shadow flew over and pierced through the neck of the inmates who was about to attack. Blood sshed over as he fell down.

    The siblings and the inmates looked at the direction where the bone knife came from and when they saw Sam standing there with an expressionless face, they didn¡¯t know what to think of it.

    The siblings are grateful for his help but the inmates are clearly displeased. Previously, all the inmates clearly gave up on the thought of messing with Sam and his team members as they were clearly afraid of the corrosive liquid.

    The painful screams of the victims of that liquid are clearly not so easily forgotten.

    But they didn¡¯t expect that Sam wille here looking for them even though they tried to avoid him.

    The remaining two inmates looked at him and didn¡¯t know his intentions.

    They wanted to test the waters by attacking him but the problem is that they are warriors and didn¡¯t have any long-range weapons and most important thing is that they are clearly afraid to get close to him, more precisely it will good to say that they are afraid of the corrosive liquid.

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything and slowly stepped forward as he took two bone knives which were hidden under the back of his shirt.

    The inmates didn¡¯t dare to do anything. They exchanged a nce and nodded at each other. Judging from their actions, they seemed to be quite familiar with each other.

    Both of them went to the corpse of the inmate who died by Sam¡¯s first knife and it looked it they were trying to lift him up to leave.

    But Just as they saw Sam nearing them, one of then took the knife from the dead body¡¯s neck and leapt towards Sam.

    Just as he was about to feel smug about it, Sam also moved but he didn¡¯t try to defend. His moves seemed to prepared as if he already knew that the inmate is going to do something.

    Sam jumped to the side as the bone knife just scarred his arm a little but at the same time, his other hand moved as he threw the knife at the other inmate and this time, it went through his eye.

    Before thest remaining inmate could react, Sam moved and cut the opponent¡¯s throat and moved towards the sibling pair.

    Before the siblings could react, Sam ced his palm on the injured one and started healing. Soon, the guy felt his pain reducing and except for the fatigue and exhaustion due to his blood loss, he felt fine.

    "Thank you." Both the siblings stood up and bowed to him.

    "Just stay here, until the battle ends." Sam said as he also sat there along with them.

    The siblings just sat there.

    Only a few people saw this scene and they didn¡¯t keep on watching them and went back to the battle.

    After some time, the battles finally ended. The surprising thing is that not a single inmate escaped. Everyone was dead.

    The inmates who came to get a new life all lost their lives. All they did was reduce the number of candidates.

    A total of 18 candidates died and more than ten people were injured.

    If they don¡¯t get healed properly even with the help of the spiritual energy, they won¡¯t be able to get past two days with the injuries.

    This time, the candidates were called one by one to get their portions of food and Sam got three of them and if he includes the one portion his team got for him by his team, he would be having four portions.

    And having multiple portions became a problem.

    Because, even though all the inmates are dead, not all of them were killed by the people who are still alive. In fact, out of eighteen people who died, ten of them are dead after they killed an inmate. After they exhausted their energy they were sneaked up on by the inmates as they became easy targets.

    So, there are twelve candidates who didn¡¯t get any food because they didn¡¯t kill anyone. And Sam is the only one who got extra portions as he killed multiple inmates.

    So, now he is a juicy prey for more than twelve people.

    When he came to the camp there are more than twenty people who are stood in front of him. Twelve of them are obviously for the food and the remaining are the ones who are injured or someone rted to an injured person.

    They wanted to get him to heal.

    But Sampletely ignored them. He already ate one portion at the wall itself and there are still three portions left.

    The food portions wouldn¡¯t help him cultivate as the energy isn¡¯t dense enough to expand the spiritual core.

    Sam is looking at the people and said.

    "I am not going to heal anyone and the food I earned belongs to myself. So, leave the ce while I am being nice."

    "How can you be so selfish?" The one who said isn¡¯t from the group, but a person who is standing a distance away and that person is the third son of the marquis.

    Sam didn¡¯t expect that he would interfere in this as they didn¡¯t have any prior interaction, but when he saw Zeke standing beside him, he understood and again confirmed something.

    No matter how many disputes these three sons had in between them, they are still quite united in front of outsiders or at least for now they seemed like that.

    Seeing that Sam didn¡¯t reply, the third son went on with his noise.

    "Look at them being injured and weak. You can clearly help them, but you choose not to. I never met someone as selfish as you. Can you be anymore inhumane?"

    The more he spoke, the more the candidates who surrounded him felt that he was right.

    Sam looked at that guy and asked. "What¡¯s your name?"

    "You can call me Blue fire." The third son said quite proudly. Sam raised an eyebrow at this.

    He understood one thing and that is this third son is quite conceited. There is no chance that his parents named him like that, so he must have renamed himself after he awakened the blue me attribute in his spiritual core.

    Since his father isn???t dead it would be not appropriate if he changed his name to Blue me, but still changing to blue fire doesn¡¯t make it any better, it is as if saying that I am the future marquis and all the people should remember this.

    After getting his reply, Sam didn¡¯t bother with him, he knew clearly what other party is trying to achieve.

    He wants to use the crowd to take revenge on behalf of his elder brother. Even they might not dare to kill him, he wanted to make him a target of all the candidates.

    But he underestimated one thing, that is Sam isn¡¯t just an ordinary person who is intimidated by a crowd.

    "You should really share the food."

    "Yeah, after all you can¡¯t fully eat them all and it wouldn¡¯t be useful to you anyway."

    Some people from the crowd are already forming some opinions on him.

    Blue fire was feeling smug about it.

    Even if Sam shared his food, there is no way it would be sufficient to all of them.

    Even if he did share it, he would be offending the rest of the people and the grudge will be higher, it would be better if he didn¡¯t share at all.

    As for healing them, it ispletely impossible. He would be emptied out of his spiritual energy and will put himself in a vulnerable position.

    So, he took a step back and ced the food portions on the ground. He took a bone knife and said.

    "Any one who is confident in getting a portion can get it. As long as you touch it that is yours. But think about the price you must pay before you make a move."

    Everyone was stunned. Even the blue fire was surprised.

    Never did they expect that he would make a decision to take on a crowd in these conditions.

    They looked at each other and just as they were about to make a move, Sam confirmed that they decided on making a move against him and he didn¡¯t even let them attack him, he held his bone knife and immediately moved.

    He didn¡¯t hold back at all. He stabbed the person who is in the front on his right chest. The crowd stopped in their tracks, but before they could make out what happened, he took out the knife and threw it at a mage who stood in the back trying to attack.

    The knife pierced him in the lower abdomen.

    But Sam didn¡¯t stop there. He reached out to a closest guy and broke his arm and when the people around him finally came out of their stupor and made a move at him, he concentrated his wind energy and swung his arm.

    "Breeze style: Silent sh"

    Sam muttered inside his heart. A gentle breeze flew past the candidates, but they immediately stopped in their tracks, because as soon as the breeze flew past them, they could feel as sharp sensation on their throats.

    Subconsciously, they touched their throats and saw some blood. They immediately felt a chill run down their spines.

    If Sam got serious, they would have been dead.

    Sam looked at Blue fire and Zeke and said mockingly. "As you father said earlier, anything can happen in here, so you better watch your mouths."

    After he said that, he took his food portions and walked to his camp as the candidates gave him way automatically.

 Chapter 105: Final mission

    The spectators who were anticipating a good show couldn¡¯t help but feel stunned at Sam¡¯s actions, not only did he make a move against twenty people but he also made it that the group can¡¯t even retaliate.Suddenly, Zeke felt a bad premonition. He has a feeling that they made a mistake by trying to make Sam a target. But Sam isn¡¯t bothered by them as he felt that Zeke and his brother were some small fries, he could handle anytime he wants.Right now, he is thinking about this special branch and what is the meaning behind this.From the principal of Starwood academy, he found out that this has something to do with the emperor himself which left him curious and one thing is he doesn¡¯t have that much of a good opinion of this emperor.Why did Sam think of him like that?

    Because, all the journey he made from a rural vige to the marquis city, even though the people¡¯s lives aren¡¯t bad, it isn¡¯t great either. It is more like an underdeveloped country. Not many people are having an average life and most important thing is, he never heard a single thing about the emperor.A good ruler will have a sufficient exposure that even the people from the rural areas will know about them.

    But Sam hasn¡¯t heard about him even once. There are no good things or bad things he could hear. It felt like as if the emperor isn¡¯t even ruling them and the people aren¡¯t even the part of the empire.That is the main reason, Sam didn¡¯t have a good opinion and since he knew that this special branch and all these continuouspetitions are created on the demand of the emperor himself, his impression only worsened.After all, what is the emperor nning so much that he wants to find a person who passed through all these trials filled with cruelty and rivalry.But these answers aren¡¯t something he could get just by pondering, so he threw these thoughts to back of his mind and looked at the food packets he brought to his camp.He called Jack over and both of them dragged the dead bodies of the inmates to the ce where they dealt with the chameleon corpse.Sam thought of something, but didn¡¯t know if he should do it or not.

    If it was his previous life, he would have done it without a second thought, but this time, he is considering whether he should this side to the others.Just as he was thinking, Jack¡¯s voice came from the side."What do you want to do with these bodies?" He asked with some curiosity in his voice as well some disturbance.Even though, he was surprised and admired by Sam¡¯s abilities of making most out of the avable resources, he wasn¡¯tfortable with the idea of Sam making something out of the human corpse.Sam finally came out of his daze and immediately shook his head."Nothing, let¡¯s just bury them. I was only thinking what we have to face in the future."After that, Sam went on and stated cutting the trees around his camp and made a log cabin. Their camp was a bit damaged by the previous attack from the inmates and that¡¯s why he made a log cabin.

    Even though, it isn¡¯t that much sturdier than the previous mud house, it is a little morefortable.But the most important reason is, Sam is really sick of being in that mud house, that¡¯s why, he took the extra food portions. So, that he could use his spiritual energy liberally.Those food portions might not hold the spiritual energy for long, so he finished the log cabin as fast as possible and consumed the food before it became useless.Soon, the third mission came and after that the fourth mission and so on...Like this, there was a mission approximately for every ten days and every time there is at least one casualty from the candidates.These candidates had to fight beasts, humans, and some times among themselves so that they could get a portion of food to replenish themselves.Soon, six months passed and Sam is nearing his sixteen. He is sitting in the log cabin as he looked at the night sky.

    If his guess is right after mid-night, the eighteenth and thest mission of this six months special branch education will start any moment.And just as he predicted after a few hours, an announcement was made and everyone immediately came out side of their camps."Dear candidates, this will be thest mission in the special branch zone for you and you can finally get out of this situation you are in.So, I hope you will perform your best in thisst mission."The voice paused briefly and the remaining fifty candidates are looking at each other.Yes, there is a total of seventy candidates who either gave up or died.The announcement came again."Your mission objective is to get out of the special branch zone alive. All you have to do is cross this front door."As soon as his sentence was finished the front door which they saw opening only when somebody gave up and went outside opened fully. But as soon as it opened, a huge tide of beasts started running inside towards them."But your mission wouldn¡¯t be that easy.

    You have to cross it without being killed by these beasts. And these beasts aren¡¯t your only obstacles. Please turn around." At this statement all the candidates looked around, Sam included and they were instantly struck dumb.The walls which they felt imprable had a lot of hidden doors and from those hidden and beasts started running inside.

    Even the stream is full of alligator and crocodile type beastsing out of it."All the best." The voice from the announcement immediately woke them up.Then only they felt the tremors caused by the beast tide. Sam immediately climbed on top of his log cabin to see how many beasts areing in. When he saw that there are more than five hundred of them.

    Sam became anxious.He immediately told his teammates to get to a higher position, so they too soon climbed a tree Even though, in a beast tide of this range, climbing a tree wouldn¡¯t help that much, it is at least as little better than staying on the ground.While the beasts are nearing them with a moderate speed, Sam is looking at them as if he was searching for something.And he really is searching for something. Because, there are mainly two cases a beast tide happens. One of them is that all the beasts are afraid of bigger predator or a natural disaster and wants to move away from that ce and the other one a strongest beast is directing them to do so.Since, a nned beast tide like this wouldn¡¯t happen for the first reason, so Sam is finding for the beasts which are in control of the tide.

    If he can subdue those beasts, the root of the problem will be solved. So, he started looking at he soon found three targets. One of them is an ape type beast, which has white and golden fur.

    It stood at a corner at the back end of the tide and is looking at all the beasts with some disdain. He immediately recognised the beast. It is Golden-fist ape.

    This is one of the closebat type beasts that uses its fists as if it was a boxer and the main thing is that this beast has no element and uses the neutral spiritual energy. He looked at the second target, which is in the stream. It is a Blue scaled alligator which is a water type beast.

    This beast is one of the predators in the water and its scales are in a shiny blue colour.The final target is near the front gate and that is a scarlet lion which is a red coloured lion type beast. It is actually a fire element and also blood elemental. Just like the blood hyenas he faced before this scarlet lion can also easily increase its spiritual energy by consuming the blood.Out of three beasts Sam liked the Golden fist ape as it has the best blood line origins of the three.It is a descendant of a Golden ape.

    Even though, its blood line isn¡¯t as superior as Yanwu or Sky it is just a bit lower.That means if we rate Yanwu¡¯s and Sky¡¯s blood line as 10 which is the top of the scale, Golden ape is one that has a bloodline at 8.And the Golden fist ape is the descendant of the bloodline and the purer the bloodline is the more the golden fur on the ape.And this ape has more than fifty percent of its fur in golden colour, so Sam is quite happy and decided to get this.But at this moment, Jack called him."What¡¯s the n?" Only at this moment, did he realise that hepletely forgot about the situation they are in. Sam thought for a moment and said."There are three bosses in the beast and all of them seemed to be in Level 3 which is equal to the Novice level. The beasts that areing at use are at Peak of Level 2 to Middle stage of Level 3.

    The bosses might be from Late stages of Level 3.If we need to get past this unharmed, I have to say that it is almost impossible.Because, I don¡¯t think this boss beasts are for show and by the time we make it past these underlings, they will definitely make it past these underlings, they will make a move and I don¡¯t think we would be able to make it past these underlings unscathed in our current situation."When Sam said these words, the teammates felt depressed.Because, the number of beasts is ten times the number of the participants and all the candidates are not in their best shape. So, this task seemed almost impossible."As I see it, there is one way to get out of this situation but the probability isn¡¯t that high."When Sam said this, they felt hopeful again, even though the probability isn¡¯t high, they still want to give it a try. It is better than nothing after all."First let us create a space where you will be less targeted."Sam then looked at Hawk and exined him something.So, after a few moments, both Sam and Hawk started cutting all the trees around them with wind des.

    They moved fast and started making piles of wood around the group, while Jack and Philip arranged them ording to what Sam said.Even though, the beasts aren¡¯t moving at a high speed maybe, the arrangement of the examiners to let the candidates think of way out, they still didn¡¯t feel that they have enough time.So, by the time, the beasts from both sides got closer to them and with in twenty meters distance, Sam¡¯s teammates surrounded a huge zing fire.All the candidates and beasts were startled. And the beasts that are now very near to them started to avoid the fire. From the fire one could see that there is still a lot of wood kept as reserve.Now, there are only fire type beasts which are actively moving towards the fire.

    But that is better than getting attacked by all the horde.So, Sam and his teammates stood in the square area which is about 10 square meters surrounded by fire as he thought of his next steps.

 Chapter 106: Battle

    Why did Sam make a fierce fire like that?

    That is, he is using the basic instincts of the beasts to his advantage. Any beast which isn¡¯t of a fire attribute is aversive to that and since, the beast bosses doesn¡¯t seem to be a higher level and can¡¯t control each and every beast to forcefully tackle the me.

    If not for the fact, Sam is confident in his speed to cut down the trees, he wouldn¡¯t think of the problem. Now, only the fire type beasts which aren¡¯t too manypared to whole horde of beasts are the only one¡¯s attacking them by jumping through the fire and they could deal with them.

    They are only left with about twenty capsules of the corrosive liquid.

    Since, he doesn¡¯t have any of the meat of myriad mirage chameleon it is impossible to create it more.

    But still, they are in a better situation than others. The other teams didn¡¯t even have the opportunity to copy this as the beasts already reached them.

    While everyone is fighting, Sam is looking at the Golden fist ape. Even though, the scarlet lion is the one that is guarding the entrance which they have to cross, Sam¡¯s first target is still the ape.

    There are two reasons for that and one is the ape¡¯s bloodline, if he can purify the bloodline of ape, then he would have a great pet under him. A tall ape butler wearing some modern-day formal cloths.

    Sam really liked the thought and there is another reason which he really isn¡¯t sure of.

    So, now he is thinking of way to get near that ape. He has one idea, but he is thinking if there is any other way since it is a bit risky.

    After some thought, he wasn¡¯t able to find an alternative, so he decided.

    Sam leapt through the fire and came outside of the area after instructing his teammates to maintain the fire as long as possible.

    He was already being attacked by some beasts. But Sam held two bone knives in his hands and started moving in the direction of the ape. He just stabbed every beast that came towards him in its most sensitive parts. Like eyes, ears, heart. He made every move with utmost concentration and with minimum effort to be most efficient in his attacks.

    When he reached his desirable distance, where the Level 3 beasts are of higher density, he halted his steps and looked for an elephant type beast which is near him.

    For the first time, he activated his elemental powers. And soon a huge raging fire tornado swept the beasts away from him and a huge open space appeared.

    Sam took out small cloth bag from the back of his vest and swallowed the food portion immediately. Thest attack was one of his moves which uses fire energy apanied by wind which increases the intensity of the fire.

    But it almost emptied him out and these food portions are the ones he stored from the most recent food distribution. Even they don¡¯t have full restoration effect now, it is still better than nothing.

    After swallowing it, his energy was half full, he immediately started tackling the elephant.

    He used his physical which is same as a level 3 beast and threw the heavy elephant high up in the air. When his teammates saw this, they were quite confused, but the next moment everyone in the special zone and also those who are monitoring the situation were dumbfounded and dropped their jaws.

    Sam concentrated his wind elemental energy below his feet as he curled himself and when he before they can understand what he is doing, a huge st ofpressed air through him upwards with a very high speed.

    When, he reached the point colinear with the elephant, he uncurled and twisted his body in the air and he tapped his feet on the elephant¡¯s body.

    Now, he is in horizontal position and his head faced the ape. With a smirk, again the huge explosion of air urred as he was shot towards the ape at the same time, the elephant was also shot and turned into a horizontal projectile crashing into the beasts on the ground.

    Sam was shot like a bullet towards the ape which caught thetterpletely off guard.

    But soon the ape quickly readied itself for the collision. Sam smirked at this and ced two bone knives in front of him at thest moment without giving the beast a chance to prepare.

    *Boom* The collision wasn¡¯t small and both parties got injured. Sam immediately started healing himself. But at this moment he noticed something and couldn¡¯t help but leave a smirk.

    That is the atmosphere has been filled with spiritual energy again and this is good news for him as he can control the spiritual energy around him. So, he took out thest portion of the food he had and ate it without a care. He is quite confident now.

    The ape, slowly stood as blood oozed out of it from many injuries. Its ribs got broken, and chest got caved in. The most damage is done due to the two bone knives that arepletely immersed themselves into its chest.

    Sam just waited at his spot. His guess was correct as the ape is definitely in Level 3te stage.

    But still controlling hundreds of beasts, it might be because of its bloodline power.

    The ape looked at Sam with an angry look. But it has lost a lot of blood and its injuries aren¡¯t light at all. If not for the fact that Sam¡¯s cultivation is lower than the ape it would have died right there.

    When the ape looked at Sam who is healing himself and getting hisplexion back while joining his broken bones, it almost lost its will to fight.

    But Sam didn¡¯t give that a chance and immediatelyunched an attack. He didn¡¯t use his elements and rather used his raw strength to hit the ape which is seven and half feet tall.

    Sam himself is tall for his age as he is already around five feet 9 inches. Even though, it isn¡¯t that tall, he is still in his teens.

    When his small figure jumped and hit the ape in his head, it almost looked funny, but the beast didn¡¯t feel like that.

    Sam¡¯s hit made it feel stunned and dizzy at the same time and it immediately fell on his knees.

    At this moment, Sam ced his hand on ape¡¯s chest and closed his eyes. He is looking at the ape¡¯s beast core with his observation ability. Because, if someone made a contract with a beast, their signature will be imprinted on not only the beast¡¯s soul, but also its core.

    But both of them are different. Because, the soul imprint will be the part of the contractor¡¯s soul and the core imprint is essence of his spiritual energy.

    This is natural phenomenon which is made of beasts so that they can differentiate their master even if someone skilled in soul arts managed to imitate the soul of the master and the essence of the spiritual core of a person is almost impossible to imitate and not many people don¡¯t even know about this.

    Sam only learnt this because of the knowledge he gained from the library of divine dimension.

    But when he found out that there wasn¡¯t any imprint, he became quite disappointed. Even though, it would be easier to tame the ape, Sam has another idea. If this ape a tamed beast of any elder or even marquis himself, he would be returning the favour to them if he forcefully took it away.

    But since it isn¡¯t there, then there is no point in dwelling over it.

    Sam woke the ape and spoke.

    "I want you to be my pet. I will purify your bloodline and I will open you a new door. You don¡¯t have to struck up in this city. But if you refuse my offer, then..."

    Sam paused briefly and said.

    "You can die." At this moment, his spiritual energy has surrounded the heart and the core of the ape. Just one thought from him and the beast would die. Sam also released his bloodline aura as he looked at the ape with cold look.

    The ape immediately nodded its head and soon Sam made a normal contract.

    Even though, the beast has a high-level bloodline, he still doesn¡¯t want to make the cultivation contract like he did with Sky and Yanwu. It isn¡¯t because of the bloodline level, but rather he doesn¡¯t want to waste the spot. If he made a cultivation contract with elemental beast, he would gain an element after all.

    As soon as he was done with the contract, Sam started healing the ape while he fixed its bones back in the ce. Even though, the beast felt the pain, soon the suffering ended and Sam immediately ordered.

    "Avoid every person in the fire square." Sam said as he pointed at his teammates. The ape nodded obediently.

    And with a roar all the beastspletely diverted their attention away from his teammates.

    Sam and the ape walked towards his teammates slowly, by this time, the area was filled with corpses of various beasts.

    Many people are already exhausted but they still killed many beasts, there are only few left but it would be quite difficult as all of them are of high-level.

    Sam found out that it is quite peculiar that these beasts are all listening to the three beasts. Because, even if the level wasn¡¯t high, the beasts at the middle stage Level 3 and in thisrge number is not an easy thing to control.

    Maybe they were trained for this moment.

    By the time, Sam reached his teammates, the fire died down long ago. All of the followed Sam as they walked towards the entrance.

    The two remaining beasts, Scarlet lion and the Blue scaled alligator are perplexed. But they didn¡¯t make a move against the ape as they didn¡¯t want to make an enemy out of it. The bloodline pressure of the ape, when they fought isn¡¯t a joke.

    Sam looked at all the candidates who are at their wits end and are ready to use their trump cards.

    He saw some of them using forbidden techniques and some of the realised the avability of the spiritual energy and took times to recover, but he really didn¡¯t care about them and just walked along with the ape and crossed the door.

    Even though, the scarlet lion showed some objection and roared at the ape, both of them seemed to conversed as they roared at each other and soon they ended the conversation with the lion having a vexed expression while the ape is having a haughty expression as it held its head high and walked away.

 Chapter 107: "My subordinate."

    After they walked a bit, they saw a few middle-aged men standing there. They are the examiners who came out of their monitoring station after they saw Sam and his teammatesing.

    At the lead of the group, the marquis and the principal are standing as they looked at them.

    "Congrattions." Marquis was the first one to open his mouth. But he didn¡¯t see any happy expressions on the candidate¡¯s faces. And he knew the reason.

    "For what? Not dying for your tricks?" Sam replied with aplete hostile tone. But the tone just didn¡¯t disy his hostility, it also disyed his arrogance to speak to the Marquis who is far stronger than him.

    Marquis didn¡¯t know what to say about that.

    "It is not good to talk like that, young man. You might be a genius. But it is always better to be humble when speaking to others. Your arrogant attitude wouldn¡¯t be taken lightly by others." Principal said with a tone as if he is teaching his student.

    But Sam didn??t really like it. Because, he is angry and frustrated. If not for the fact that his cultivation is low, he might have even attacked the marquis as soon as he came out.

    After all, it is not a pleasant experience to be toyed by others in such harsh conditions without any prior warning or information. They brought all of them for learning and were forced to endure this.

    "Who are you to teach me?" Sam asked directly. The principal frowned but still said in a majestic tone.

    "I am the principal of this academy and since you are a student of the special branch, I have every right to teach you." He wanted to put Sam in his ce and even raised his aura.

    But what Sam asked next made him stupefied.

    "Well, I am really surprised by his teaching methods. But I am just wondering what you want to teach them by killing more than half of your students?" Sam said that as he pointed at the special zone.

    Principal wasn¡¯t able to say anything about it. He didn¡¯t have any reply to that. Even though, he did have orders from higher authorities, all this time he just thought about it as his duty to follow the orders as he saw the suffering of the candidates, but when Sam questioned him and he thought from his professional perspective as a teacher. He felt ashamed.

    "As for me being arrogant. I am just being bold and honest now. If I was to act arrogant, both of you aren¡¯t even capable of taking it." He said his piece and walked off. But after he took a few steps, Marquis called him from the back.

    "Sam, about the next stage.." Before he could finish sentence, Sam stopped him.

    "I quit."

    "You don¡¯t have that choice Sam. From the minute you came out of this, you don¡¯t have a choice, you should have quit when you are inside. Now, you already riding on a tiger, you should either go through it or you have to bear the consequences.

    Trust me, the consequences are too hard for you to bear and even Chaya and background can¡¯t save you."

    Sam turned around and looked at the marquis, who is hesitating.

    Actually, Sam doesn¡¯t want to quit, he wants to see through why the emperor is doing this. What is the result that he is expecting? Because, Sam know one thing, if the further tests are like this, the person who finally survived all of them and get past this, will not be a normal person.

    He or she will be having a drastic psychological change. The final result would be a highly sensitive, ruthless, merciless monster. The person will lose his humanity bit by bit.

    And the person if further nurtured in a same way, he or she would be a walking disaster. That is why he is making these statements to guilt trip the Marquis to fish some information.

    Finally, marquis opened his mouth.

    "I can¡¯t tell you the details. But from now on, we are only the examiners and not the people in charge of tests. If you quit now, you will have to spend your youth on run and that is if you don¡¯t get killed."

    Sam thought for a bit and agreed as he understood that he wouldn¡¯t get more info. Then the marquis said.

    "You have two days to rx and you have to gather at the Marquis manner the third day at dawn."

    Sam nodded and started walking along with his teammates. But marquis called again.

    "What?" Sam asked as he looked a bit annoyed.

    Marquis slowly pointed at the ape. Sam gave a questioning look and soon the answer came.

    "Can you leave him here?" Sam didn¡¯t answer but just looked at him. Marquis cleared his throat and said.

    "I got all three of them when they are infants and it took a lot of effort. They are being groomed as the guardian beasts of the city. So, can you leave him here please?"

    Sam was a bit surprised when he heard this. Then his surprise turned into delight. He really felt sad when he found out that this beast is not a pet of anyone as he wanted to make them feel loss.

    But now, he is even more happy. Because, if these beasts are really being groomed as the guardian beasts, then their status is same as the young masters of the Marquis house.

    That is the reason they are not tamed as pets. Because, they will remain as the guardian beasts of the city as long as they are alive irrespective of how many marquises are retired.

    So, if they became pets of a marquis and get attached to that person, the next marquis will have a hard time to get their acknowledgement.

    But raising them as guardian beasts in a way is grooming them as equals. They will be given all the resources to grow strong and they will help them in battle and safety of the cities.

    That is why marquis is not willing to let them go. But when he saw the evil smile on Sam¡¯s face, he clearly lost all hope.

    "Oh? But now he is my pet. So, you have to trouble yourself to get a recement for the guardian beast." Sam said with that evil smile and the he looked at the remaining two beasts in the zone where the remaining thirty or so students are battling and said.

    "You might want to groom them properly. If not, someone might visit them at night and take them away. At least let them show some resistance, if they are too easy the thief might evenugh at you."

    Marquis almost puked blood at his sarcasm. Now, he became really worried that Sam might steal them.

    At this moment, marquis¡¯ personal attendant came running. All the people present were surprised at his fl.u.s.tered state.

    When the attendant saw that there are so many people, he whispered something to Marquis and the Principal. Both of them exchanged looks only to see each other¡¯s surprised expression.

    Both the big-shots turned to look at Sam and immediately walked forwards towards the academy entrance.

    Sam also felt that something big is happening and followed them along with his teammates and the ape.

    When they reached the entrance, the scene shocked everyone.

    Sam saw many familiar faces; they are all theckeys of Zeke which he didn¡¯t deal with yet. He gave the task to Watt to deal with them in six months and this day happened to be thest day of the dead line.

    And what is in front of him is the result of the task.

    Watt is standing on top of the arch of the entrance.

    And the sixteenckeys, are hung upside down to the arch.

    Their legs are tied up to a rope and the other end of the rope is tied to the arch itself.

    All theckeys are in a very bad shape. Their skin has been yed at many spots and the worst thing is that there are numbers carved on their backs.

    They have broken bones, stabs and mostly deep and long cuts. These long cuts might have been the result of his cards throwing.

    Watt is standing straight with a proud expression. He folded his hands across his chest. His clothes are tornpletely. His upper body is bare. His pants are torn at many ces.

    He has many cuts on his body. Many injuries, burn marks, bruises. He doesn¡¯t look like he is in a good state. But his face quite contrary to his physical state.

    With that blood, cuts and bruises on his face, he still has an emotionless face and those eyes are still sharp.

    When Watt saw Sam, he immediately jumped down.

    Marquis and the Principal wore gloomy and dark impression. The guards who are supposed to be at the entrance, are unconscious and the guards who followed both of them are waiting for his orders.

    When marquis made a gesture, the guards are about to make a move. At this moment.

    *ROAAAAR*

    The ape suddenly stepped forward and blocked all the guards with an angry expression. All the guards stopped in their tracks.

    Marquis looked at Sam with a confused expression. But thetter didn¡¯t care and walked towards Watt. He didn¡¯t say anything and started healing him without a single word.

    He fixed his wounds and bones and after everything is done, he looked at Marquis and said.

    "My subordinate." Then he pointed at the sixteenckeys who are dripping blood to the ground and said.

    "At least tell your son to pick better ones. My one and only subordinate is enough to take on these snobs. It is even embarrassing for me to fight with your son."

    Then only Marquis carefully looked at Watt. He is only at Level 2 Novice, but he took down even the Level 4 Novices. He didn¡¯t know how the fights went, but he really was shocked at one thought. Even if Sam¡¯s subordinate is like this, then how fearsome would Sam be.

    Even though, he saw Sam fighting in the special branch, he never saw him go all out. To be exact, no fight has forced him to exert his prowess like Watt until now. Suddenly, he felt pity for his son.

    At this moment, the remaining candidates which are only around twenty came out and walked towards the entrance with exhausted faces. Among them, Zeke was also present and when he saw hisckeys hung to arch at the entrance in their pathetic states, he felt his blood run cold.

    He looked at his father and when he knew what happened, Sam and his group are already walking away.

    Zeke suddenly felt his knees go weak. He is even more exhausted than when he was in special branch zone.

 Chapter 108: Watts Prize

    Sam went back to his mansion along with his group.

    As soon as they entered, Sam told Watt to rest and immediately went to backyard and dove into theke after removing his clothes.

    He is fully tired and need to rx. Even though, there is stream in the special branch zone, he enjoyed to swim in his ownke.

    After more than an hour-long rxing bath in his backyard, he wore his pants andid on the grass under the sun.

    Even though, he suffered in the special branch zonepletely isted from the atmosphere devoid of spiritual energy, Sam found one positive thing out of it and that is, his body is thirsty of the spiritual energy and the energy absorption rate became quite high.

    Although it is for a small time, it is still a bit beneficial and anyone who is on verge of breakthrough will have an extra advantage if that person in this condition.

    Sam rested there in the same ce got ready, before he went to the nearby woods on his hoverboard.

    He found a patch where there are not so many trees and after checking that there is no one around, he let out both Yanwu and Sky. Both the beasts are brimming with energy.

    Sam sat cross-legged and soon two beasts and one man, started sharing the energy.

    By the time, they were done it is already afternoon. There are a lot of used up spirit stones around them.

    This is because, after Sam took his share of his spiritual energy from the beasts, the thirsty feeling of his body still hasn¡¯t satiated yet and he immediately he took out the spirit stones and still went on cultivating along with them.

    So, by afternoon his body reached a stable state when he reached Novice level 5. He thought that he might reach the next level but the barrier between Level 3 and 4 is stronger than he thought.

    After that, he left the birds alone to roam around as they are struck inside the dimension for whole six months.

    He went back to the city.

    First thing, is he need to give the prize he promised to Watt and he has to make it.

    Sam went to the Artisan tower to meet Chaya, one of the reasons is that he needs to take his share of ie from the Artisan shop and the Restaurant.

    And when he looked at the ie, he is quite satisfied.

    For the total of six months he got a profit of 10 million and more than 8 million of it came from the Energy cells. He is very much satisfied that he couldn¡¯t remove a smirk on his face.

    "Your business idea is quite sessful. Even though, we didn¡¯t make as much as you do, we really did have a lot of revenue from this." Chaya said as she passed the spatial ring to Sam.

    He took the ring and asked something.

    "Do you have any spatial jade?" He asked with some hesitation. Because, it is a rare naturally formed spatial storage mineral. But this jade doesn¡¯t have many uses. The storage area is very small and the worst thing is the processing is a very hard job.

    But it has one use which Sam need. The items in it can be partially taken out. For example, in a normal spatial ring made by an artisan, if you put a thread roll, you can either take out the whole thread or you can keep it all in.

    But this jade has a special effect, Just like if you keep a roll of thread on one room and pull one end and drag it to other room through a door, the roll will stay in the first room but the thread that you unrolled by pulling can extend outside of that room while still being connected.

    He doesn¡¯t know where to get those. But some of the jeweller artisans use these even though they are minority.

    But when Chaya replied he is extremely surprised.

    "I have a lot of it. Nobody is buying it."

    "I will take all of it." When she heard Sam¡¯s reply, it was her turn to be surprised and rather it might as well be shock.

    "Are you serious?" She asked with uncertainty.

    "Yes."

    "But it doesn¡¯t have much uses. The storage is also fixed and it cannot contain the spiritual energy stagnantly. Even though the space is stable it is connected to the outside world unlike the spatial ring which has an independent space."

    When Sam heard her saying all these things, he didn¡¯t know what to think of it. When she saw his look, she restrained her lecture and said.

    "It doesn¡¯t have any use."

    "It has for me."

    "Okay, then." She called an attendant and instructed something and after a while the attendant brought a spatial ring. Sam transferred the items to his ring and then transferred the spirit stones back and gave it back.

    "Okay, I have work to do. See youter." Sam bid his farewell and went back to his mansion and immediately entered the divine dimension as soon as he reached his room.

    After entering the second floor, he took out the remaining cubes of the silver meteorite sand and a roll of Level 4 Heaven spirit silk with metal attribute which he got from a recently advanced heaven spirit silk moth.

    After making a fabric of the silver meteorite sand and tailoring something, he went to work with the spatial jade.

    The spatial jade is in a transparent white colour.

    Just like previously mentioned that the processing of the spatial jade is a horrendous task, the main reason is that there is actually a small intricate node to this material and this core is responsible for creating this space.

    If one wants to work with this, they have to find the node and also process the material to the point until the parts which are under the influence of the node are remained.

    Because any part that is away from the influence of the node are useless and just some pretty decoration and the processors use this part as decoration to the spatial object made by it.

    There is a small boulder on the table in front of Sam and he ced his hand on it.

    He started observing and soon found out the node. But he didn¡¯t mark it or remove his hand.

    All he did is increase his concentration a little and soon the boulder turned into powder.

    He started searching in that pile of powder and soon, he took out circr solid bracelet. He took out another boulder and soon another bracelet was made.

    And there is final product he needs to make and the prize he promised will be ready. Other than that, Sam has another thing he needs to do and that is working on his ws.

    Even though, he has two meteorite sands, he wants to find the best possible materials to make this weapon. Since, he didn¡¯t know what he has to face in the next tests, he decided to make his ws.

    But they won¡¯t be fullypleted leaving him room for improvement when he found suitable materials in the future.

    And just like that, Sam stayed in the tower all the time he had and only came out the night before their meeting for the next phase of this special branch.

    But before that, he has to give Watt his prize.

    So, that night both of them met in the backyard.

    "I gave you a task and you did it. So, now I am giving you your promised prize."

    After that, Sam took out a silver coloured Over coat which is exactly of his size, but all they don¡¯t have is the feathers that Sam had. But when Watt saw the coat, he was fully excited.

    He touched it and felt that the thread is hard and soft at the same time. There is a symbol of ¡¯W¡¯ with sharp corners embroidered on it. When Watt touched it he was confused as he didn¡¯t understand what that it.

    "Even though, you are my subordinate, you need to have your own identity that the whole world acknowledges and this is symbol of your identity. Just like this is mine."

    At thest sentence he pointed at the Double S symbol on his coat.

    Watt smiled and immediately wore the coat, then only he noticed that cuffs of the coat are hard. When he looked at it, the transparent circr solid white jade was attached inwardly on both cuffs.

    They are precisely the spatial jade bracelets Sam made previously.

    "I will exin that to youter. Take these." Sam said and passed over ten simr jade rings to Watt.

    "When they don¡¯t fit you anymore, I will make you new ones." Sam said and took out a final present and those are the cards. But he didn¡¯t take a lot of them.

    "I am giving you three types of cards. This is the first type." He paused and handed him a normal card he made with some normal metal which he gave him previously.

    "This is second type." This also is made of normal metal but it has his ¡¯W¡¯ symbol on one side.

    "If you want to kill a person and that is the only thing you are expecting, then use the first one, the second one is if you have any other expectations, like setting an example or that it is necessary to make his name known, use the second one.

    As for the final set. This is going to be your trump card and you couldn¡¯t throw them away, so I made a special arrangement for that. Look into the rings and cuffs."

    Watt did as he was told and his spiritual sense went into these objects, he saw that there are tens of cards with the ¡¯W¡¯ symbol on one side but other side the card was attached to a string and at the corner of the space there is a big roll of thread.

    "Take out a card." Sam instructed from the side

    Watt did as he was told and when he took out the card, the string also came with it, but it didn¡¯tpletelye out.

    "Throw it."

    When he threw the card, Watt felt the same as before when he did it with his normal set of cards. But after the card went through the tree and hit the second one, he pulled the string back as he controlled the air flow to get the card safely even before Sam said anything.

    "These cards are made of silver spirit sand. These will be your partners. Even though, it is easy to control when you use a single card. It will be difficult to use multiple cards at the same time. Even the strings are made of the same material and even your coat is made of that.. and then he mentioned the key points about the meteorite sand and finally finished his speech with these words.

    "Don¡¯t ever lose it."

    After that, he left the ce leaving the boy alone.

 Chapter 109: Next phase

    Watt was still in a daze. When he understood how precious the silver meteorite sand is, he couldn¡¯t help but feel ecstatic. Never did he expect that Sam would give him something this valuable.

    So, he couldn¡¯t help but feel that his decision was right when he made the decision to follow Sam back then.

    At this time, Sam is walking towards the backdoor of the mansion to enter it and just as he was about to step in, he halted and said.

    "You can go back now, the show¡¯s over."

    When he said this, Philip came out from his hiding spot on a tree.

    "Well, I never expected you to be this kind. Gifting away that much silver meteorite sand like that and that too when it is still grade 3. That really is quite a gift. I never thought you are that generous."

    "I never thought you are this knowledgeable too." Philip was stunned for a second. Sam continued.

    "Meteorite sands are one of the most difficult materials to grade and not even skilled artisans can get their hands on it and here a seventeen- year Novice has guessed it from a far away."

    Philip really didn¡¯t know what to say. But before he could react, Sam asked one more time.

    "You wanted to be an Artisan. Did you decide yet?"

    After that, Sam went inside leaving two guys in their spots both pondering about different things.

    After sometime, everyone gathered because, they already agreed to meet and go to Sam¡¯s restaurant to get a meal.

    Sam notified this to Mackey earlier and reserved a Private room.

    So, all of them went there and had avish meal. Came back to the mansion and had afortable sleep.

    Next day at dawn, All the candidates gathered at the marquis mansion. Sam wore his regr ck coat and walked along. The ape and all his beasts were sent into his Divine dimensions. Watt is following him in his new Silver coloured coat.

    His face was filled with newly found confidence and he have a new aura that is far superior than before. Everyone around him can notice this. Falck is flying near him.

    When Zeke saw Sam and Watt, he felt his throat running dry and he broke out in cold sweat. His face was full of regret. Blue fire is also looking at Sam. But his face is expressionless. Nobody could guess what he was thinking.

    After everyone was gathered, Marquis looked at all of them and started speaking.

    "All thirty of you are the only ones remaining who are going to the next phase of the Special branch. Many of you wanted to quit, many of you didn¡¯t want to participate, but from now on this is not in your hands anymore. You guys have to continue with this whether you like it or not. Or you will face some serious consequences.

    The next phase of thispetition, you will be sent to various cities under my territory. You will have one year of maximum time and in this time, you have to clean the underground forces of all these ces.

    You will be given full authority in the operation and the local authorities will cooperate with you in however you want. Those who can clean their given region earlier cane to the marquis city and try their hand at clearing the underground forces here.

    But clearing your assigned regions is a must. Whatever you get from those underground forces will be your reward.

    And if you can¡¯t clear any type of faction, you have to provide a detailed report on why you aren¡¯t able to do this and clearly provide the details on what you will need to ovee and clear that faction along with the most feasible method, which will give you half the score.

    Even if you clear all the factions, you have to provide a report on what factions there are in that city and what type of deals they make and all the other information rted to it, including the costs you spent to clear the faction.

    All these will be considered in giving you a score.

    Remember my advice. If you guys are having any thoughts about performing badly on purpose to escape, I suggest you avoid those thoughts. Because, if you really did that, you won¡¯t be able to bear the consequences."

    A lot of people had gloomy faces when they heard this.

    "You are divided into three teams and your assigned regions and your special authority tokens will be given to you." After that he gestured to his attendant.

    And the attendant immediately called out the names of the candidates in the order of their teams and surprisingly, Sam and his teammates including Jasmine are in the same team along with them were the two siblings Sam helped previously.

    When he saw the team arrangements Sam felt a little doubtful. He felt like the marquis deliberately made the arrangements like this.

    But he didn¡¯t care too much about it.

    After the teams got divided another attendant passed a scroll to each team and inside that scroll, there are the list of the Count cities under the Marquis territory and which is in charge of it.

    Even though, the three teams will be acting in the different areas, the scroll contained all three of their assignments.

    "Why is Falcon Cliff city not in the list?" Hawk is the one who asked this question. There are ten counts under the marquis but there are only nine cities in the list.

    "Recently, someone helped Count Falcon to clean up the Underground forces of the Falcon cliff city and that too, they eliminated the major organisation. So, the count already started tying up the loose ends and also clearing up the underground forces of the cities under his control.

    So, if you guys interfere you might slow down the progress, so the Falcon Cliff city is taken off of the list."

    When Marquis said this, Jack and Sam exchanged a look. They didn¡¯t know that the ¡¯help¡¯ Sam did will impact them this much. The Marquis continued.

    "From now on, all these regions are under you authority and that includes the cities under the authority of the count and the viges under the cities.

    Do the cleaning to the best of your abilities. I already have reports on the underground forces investigated by a special team.

    So, I willpare the results with these and don¡¯t even think of forging the reports by joining hands with the local authorities.

    You can depart whenever you want and wherever you want. All I need is a report exactly after a year in the same ce.

    All the best."

    After that the marquis left the spot.

    Sam also got out of the Marquis mansion and went back to the city. After some thinking he said.

    "Everyone, if you want to buy anything, that might not be avable in the region we are going in, you can go and buy.

    We will meet at the square of the Business zone at noon." Everyone nodded and went to do their own shopping and some went to have another hearty meal before leaving.

    Now there are only three people there and they are Sam, Watt and Jack. Jasmine left with Kelly to buy something.

    "So, what are we going to do about the reward from the ck water?" Jack asked directly even before Sam mentioned it.

    Sam is also thinking about this. He clearly doesn¡¯t want to share the reward of the ck water with others. If it is only, the spirit stones and even the herbs and themon ores, he wouldn¡¯t feel that conflicted.

    But the meteorite sand wouldn¡¯t be not an option at all.

    After some thought, Sam said.

    "We will leave the reward matter aside. We will divide the reward ording to the contribution of the team at that moment. But I am not fine with sharing the meteorite sand no matter what."

    "I have no problems with the arrangement and since most of the teammates aren¡¯t strangers they wouldn¡¯t mind if you took the most reward if you took the lead and achieve better scores." Jack replied.

    "We will see about that after we leave the city."

    After their discussion, Sam went to the Artisan tower to meet with Chaya.

    "Do you know where I can get a beast pouch?" He asked Chaya who is enjoying the fruit juice across him.

    She seemed to be thinking about something and gave an answer after a short silence.

    "The beast pouch is a bit high-level item and it is only avable in Capital cities of a Dukedom. If you really want one, you can try your luck in the Golden horse-tradingpany. They are on of the biggest tradingpanies in the dukedom and their branch leader here might have one on him."

    Sam thanked her and went back to the Business zone. He ate something in his restaurant and went to the city square to wait for his teammates.

    When everyone gathered, they went to the Golden-horse tradingpany on Sam¡¯s lead.

    After they arrived at the reception of thepany, Sam shed his artisan badge to the receptionist and requested a meeting with the man in charge.

    Fifteen minutester, Sam was invited into a private meeting room where a middle-aged man was waiting for him.

    After exchanging some hypocritical formal pleasantries, Sam came to the point.

    "Manager, I need a beast pouch and a friend of mine said that I can find it here."

    "Sir Sam is well informed. In a week there will be a carriageing from the Dukedom Capital, I willmunicate with them to buy you one. The cost is quite high. It is around 500,000. Do you want me to get it?" Manager replied with a smile.

    "Is it possible to get one right now? I have something to do. I am willing to pay more and if you have any conditions you can say it."

    "Well, since you put it that way, I do have one in my personal possession. But.."

    "I will pay you double." Sam said before the other party even finished their words.

    "I don¡¯t need you to pay me double. But can you pay me, in the form of amodity." The manager asked probingly.

    "Oh, what do you want in exchange?"

    "Energy Cell." When Sam heard this he was surprised for a bit, but this is notpletely out of his expectations, when he heard the manager wantedmodities. He put a hesitating expression and after a brief pause, he agreed.

    "Sure." With wave of his hand, Sam ced ten fire type and ten wind type energy cells on the table. He still has quite a stock anyway, so he doesn¡¯t care much about this.

    "Pleasure doing business with you Sir Sam." Both of them shook their hands.

 Chapter 110: Divide the work

    After noon, Sam and his teammates are now in a carriage of the Golden- horse tradingpany. They are going to their designated region.

    With Sam closing a deal, the manager has given them a whole carriage without any other passengers to that area.

    Sam is ying with a pouch, in his hands. This is the beast pouch, which is device created to hold the beasts. But this living space isn¡¯trge and the beasts will be put in a state of hibernation if kept in this pouch and cannot cultivate at all.

    He spent that much only to cover up his Divine dimension carrying, Yanwu, Sky, Panthers and the ape. For, now the pouch only has Falck in it.

    As for the energy cells, the manager bought, he could clearly guess thetter¡¯s intentions. The other party might want to reverse engineer the product and with the vast distribution channels of the Golden-horse trading union, they will make a fortune.

    But is it really that easy? They better not try to forcefully break it or pull out the metallic extension. Otherwise...

    The ce they are going to now, is the south western area. This ispletely different direction from where Sam came from. He came from the south. And in southern area, the empire doesn¡¯t upy thends fully and the Lava Rock city is the final point in south.

    Beyond that there are endless woods and then the sea.

    But in southwestern area, the that is coastal region near the sea.

    The three Count regions under their group are near the coast line and one count city is even part of the coast line.

    Sam looked over the scroll and clearly understood the situation.

    The Falcon Cliff city and the territory under it are smallerpared to any of these three cities.

    Each count has a territory of around seven cities like Starwood city under it and each of these cities have more than 8 viges each.

    Now, they are going to one of the count cities and it takes more than fifteen days to go on this carriage.

    If he was alone, Sam might have gone there faster on Sky, even his hover-board will be faster than this, if he just used a set of extra energy cells. But now, he has to waste half-a-month on travel itself.

    These fifteen days the group didn¡¯t encounter anything special.

    Sam is going to be the leader of the team and he is going to assign the tasks they are going to perform and reward them ording to their tasks.

    Anyway, most of them are not much interested in massive amount of spirit stones, as arge amount might not even be useful to them, so their prioritised payment method is in the form of the herbs and pills they find in the loot. And the rest of the payment can be done with spirit stones.

    As for ores and stuff, except for the two siblings, none of them are interested in the ores.

    And Sam isn¡¯t short of any of these things. Perhaps, even the loot from the Falcon Cliff city¡¯s ck Pond can easily satisfy as their rewards for clearing several viges and even some small tier cities.

    So, he can rest at ease on getting his hands on the meteorite sand.

    After fifteen days, they went to the first Count city. The Red Coral city. But they didn¡¯t meet the count instead, they walked around the city and after much effort he got a map. This map included the ways to all the small tier cities under the Red Coral city.

    They got out of the city and Sam took out his carriage and the zing earth bulls. The bulls are now on verge of breaking through to Level 3. After all, they are eating the herbs nted by Sam in the divine dimension, so it would be weird if they don¡¯t show any signs of breaking through.

    And soon they went to a named Silver carp city. This city is same level as the Starwood city, but it is on sea shore.

    Just when the teammates thought that they would settle in the city for the time being, Sam once again enquired in the city and found a map which has all the routes to the Viges under the silver carp city.

    So, after another two days, they finallynded in a small vige which is slightly bigger than the Lava rock vige. This vige is the closest to the Silver Carp vige and main thing is this vige is also part of the coastline.

    When Sam reached the vige, he could feel the fresh sea breeze. When all of the candidates felt that the fatigue and mental exhaustion clearing away.

    They got off the carriage and stored away the beasts. They entered the vige in a low-key way, so they can understand the situation better way if they looked at it as bystanders rather than the officials.

    So, when they entered the city, the first thing they did is find a restaurant to eat. Why? In most ces, a run-down restaurant in a corner can get you more info than some investigation.

    Because, a restaurant is a ce where a lot of people will meet and a lot info will circte and most of the info will be stored on some portable memory banks and they are the cleaners and Waiters of the restaurant.

    After some enquiry, they soon found out, that there are three ces which can be considered as restaurants. One is an inn where the people from the city stay, the other one is a normal restaurant and the third one is a sea food ce near the beach.

    They decided to visit three ces. But first one is the Inn.

    Actually, the teammates thought that they don¡¯t have to do this much, because they are all in Novice stage and they can be the overlords of this vige. They can do whatever they want and nobody would say a thing about it.

    But Sam didn¡¯t think so. Yes, they can do whatever they want. Those underground bosses might not be able to retaliate, but they sure as hell can hide until they leave.

    After all, for Sam and his team, this is just a small mission but for those goons, their lives are at stake. One can guess, who will be more patient.

    So, Sam decided to take a more subtle approach regarding this. At least until he got all the info he wants.

    As for if there is no underground activity in the vige, that is an impossible case.

    Even if there are ten people struck in a ce and two people are ones with superior strength. At least one of the would make others cater to his needs if not two of them.

    After visiting the inn and having a casual meal, Sam discreetly passed a spirit stone to a waiter and whispered something in a low voice.

    In a vige a spirit stone is a very valuable asset and soon, they got all the info needed.

    By evening they visited all three ces and came to a conclusion, there is only one gang with more than 50 members.

    And in one night, they wrapped the gang simply and went to visit the Vige head.

    Sam wrote something on a piece of paper and used the seal given by the Marquis to make stamp. He passed the doc.u.ment to the Vige head and said.

    "Seal all the info about us visiting here. You shouldn¡¯t even mention this to the City lord and if he finds fault with you, show him this doc.u.ment and if really try to take it out on you, you can visit the Count with this letter andin." The Vige head nodded meekly.

    After that, the group left.

    In the dining hall of the inn, Sam is sitting along with the group and there are no other people in dining hall.

    "Guys, today I shown you how to get the info and how to deal with them.

    And why did I show you this? Because, the mission given by marquis is an almost impossible one.

    Even a small vige like this, there is a gang of more than fifty members and you can imagine how many members there will be in a small tier city and in a count city.

    The main thing is, we will take more time in travelling and collecting info. As you can see, we have used up around twenty days toe here and a day is needed to get all the info on a small gang.

    So, think about how much time it will take to be done with all the viges and cities if we proceed like this." Sam spoke up to this point and paused. He is letting them contemte.

    After that brief pause, he continued.

    "To ovee this, I have a solution. We will divide here and proceed to perform different operations.

    Me, Jack and Jasmine will be one team and we will travel to the Count cities to deal with them and the remaining seven people will be travelling to the viges and clear the forces. Even though, we are only three people, we can manage on our own.

    As you have seen today, it will only take a single day to clear a vige and if you can distribute the work you can do it in half a day. In fact, you can even perform solo in vige. After all, the most you can encounter is a Level 1 Novice.

    I will leave my carriage and the Bulls with you to travel.

    After you are done with viges, you will be dealing with small tier cities and as for the intel at that cities..." Sam paused and took out the small beast pouch he bought and passed it to Watt.

    "Watt will be in charge of the intel on the small tier cities and you can deal with forces yourselves. And I want it to be done with in six months ten days. We will deal with the count cities together if we are not done with them by then. After that we will leave to the Blue fire city from there." He looked at Watt and said.

    "You know how to use them right. I left five of them. Just like I did in Falcon Cliff city." Watt immediately understood what he meant and kept the beast pouch carefully.

    Nobody understood what Sam meant, except for Jack. He is a bit surprised that Sam gave away five of them. Sam thought for a bit and said.

    "I will be honest with you. I am starting to think that you guys are being too reliant on me. Even though, if you are offended a bit, prove it to me otherwise with your actions. You can meet me at the Cougar city after you finish the tasks."

    Philip came to him and whispered.

    "Do you want me to apany you guys? You are short on man power."

    "No need, I think it is better if you are with them. I don¡¯t want any unexpected things to happen and you are the only one with enough wit to handle it. As for the count cities, it is moreplicated and I am not afraid to tell you the truth. It is not the first time for me to deal with one of them. The help Count Falcon got is none other than me."

    And then he walked away.

 Chapter 111: Red Coral City

    The next day the group left on the carriage. As soon as they left, Jack asked.

    "If you really just want to teach them how to do, you could have demonstrated at a small tier city, we would have managed to save some time, why did we have toe this far."

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything and just smiled. In a few moments the golden-fist ape came from the nearby woods, with a huge leather bag on his back and at the same time, there seemed to be some extreme moment from the woods.

    Within no time, tens of beasts came from the woods, carrying some type of trees. All of these are fruit trees that can aid cultivation in initiation stages andter, they can at most supply some spiritual energy to Acolytes and early stage Novices.

    Jack was dumbfounded as he saw all the beasts dragging and carrying these trees.

    Sam casually stored them all and even the golden ape away in the divine dimension.

    Since, this vige is far and the cultivators in this area aren¡¯t too strong they don¡¯t venture into deeper zones and possibility of these trees which aren¡¯t much desirable existing here is high.

    Sam¡¯s purpose ofing here is collecting these types of trees. Even though, they might not be highly useful, he can still use them to introduce the alcohol at his restaurant.

    So, Sam nned one thing. He will collect as many resources he can as possible to make profit out in his businesses.

    After storing away Sam took out his hover board and at the same time let Yanwu and Sky out.

    Jasmine and Jack boarded them and Sam stood on his board. When he unleashed the thrust and floated Jack spotted some words carved on the side of the board.

    "Harbinger." He read out loud and looked at Sam.

    This is the name Sam gave to the board.

    With the high thrust, even though his altitude isn¡¯t high, it is not low either.

    Yanwu and Sky also flew at the same altitude as him which is around forty feet above the ground.

    This way of travel is very fast as they reached the Red coral city in two days even when they rested at nights, but the price Sam has to pay is a set of Energy cells of his board, but he didn¡¯t feel the pinch.

    Because, his cost price is high and he also gained a lot in this trip. He plucked every fruit tree he or his beasts spotted on his way and the ape nted them inside the divine dimension.

    He even found some wild herbs which are beneficial for Novice levels. But since, he didn¡¯t have much benefit for them, he just let the beasts eat them.

    After all, their cultivation is beneficial to himself.

    After they reached the vicinities of the Red coral city, three of them started walking.

    They entered the city and after some enquiries, they went to some low-key inn.

    As soon as they entered their rooms, Sam let the remaining shadow mice out. He has five of them with him and he left the remaining five with Watt, to use them in the small tier cities.

    Even though, the five mice sound like the investigation might take longer, but the main thing is that mice also improved and their ability is also enhanced.

    With increase in the cultivation level, the shadow mice can perform a myriad of techniques, even though they don¡¯t have much use in battle, their control over shadows and their eavesdropping abilities are not to be trifled with.

    If they had any way to attack, they will make the best assassins and Sam is even thinking of making it possible.

    If their cultivation is high enough, the shadow mice can even ess the shadow world. And about the shadow world, that is the story for another time.

    Sam didn¡¯t leave the mice aimlessly, the three of them first went to the dining hall of the inn and in the same way, Sam caught some news on a small local gang.

    He is slightly missing the Vickers guy, where he can buy the info as he liked.

    So, after finding a guy from the small gang, he left the shadow mice, to do their work.

    Last time, it took him more than a month to gather all the intel and there would definitely be a ck water branch here also.

    So, shadow mice had one thought in mind, they should get the monthly report of the branch as soon as they find out.

    Sam also felt a little depressed when he found out, that there is no establishment known to public named ck pond in the city. But with the shadow mice abilities he didn¡¯t have a doubt that he can¡¯t find him.

    And two dayster, Sam, Jack and Jasmine. All of them are sitting in a dark room and in front of him is man in his thirties with some beard. He is injured considerably.

    He is the leader of small gang that Sam let the shadow mice investigate.

    "So, are you going to tell me the info I need or not?" Sam asked with a slight impatience. Just as the man was about to reject, Jack took out his ck sword and immediately pierced into the other guys shoulder.

    "One more rejection, you can lose a limb." The other party.

    "I will tell you." The man finally gave in.

    At first, they came normally and just asked for the info, but this guy had some loud mouth and Jack beat him to pulp.

    After that, when Sam asked him again, he rejected two times and third time led to this situation.

    After more than thirty minutes, the manid lifeless on the floor and so were the other gang members in the area.

    Anyway, their task is to eliminate all of them, since Sam got all the info, he doesn¡¯t have any use for them.

    Now, he has an understanding on the forces of this city. Unlike, Falcon cliff city, the gangs in this city are quite scattered and there are ten small gangs. Along with that ten small gangs, there are two big gangs which have most control over the city.

    He also learnt that there are some officials in ties with these two gangs and the two gangs are also said to be the rival gangs vying to get a chance to upy each other¡¯s territory and business.

    One of them is responsible for settlements, assassinations, missions and even hiring for teaching someone a lesson, they don¡¯t even care about the protection fee and the name of the organisation is snakehead.

    The other gang is rted to prostitution, ve trade and also something Sam never expected he would face in this world. Drug dealing. They are called the Tiger fish.

    Sam found something off, when they heard the names. They are just like Piranha and Candiru. Both of them are fish names and are rted to the ck water¡¯s branch. In falcon cliff city, both of them didn¡¯t have any connection to the public eye, but they didn¡¯t have a conflict either.

    But here, these two are fighting each other and there is even a ce that they have chosen to fight it out.

    They even sell tickets to that event. Sam was quite curious. He even thought of a possibility that the two gangs are making a fa?ade to not let others find out about it and them being the part of the ck water.

    And there is one more organisation that transitions between ck and white and that is the ¡¯Arena¡¯.

    This is an entertainment zone where the people fight for the spectators and the fight between the snakehead and the tiger fish are also organised by them.

    But they aren¡¯t open to the general public and timings are also closely constrained to the underground society only.

    So, Sam decided one thing. He will investigate slowly. He felt that there is only piece of puzzle that is missing and if he can find this, everything will be sorted out.

    But he is in no hurry. He has two months for each city and he can slowly collect the info and take them down.

    By the time he can slowly wear down the forces here, or even better he can use the same technique he used in the Falcon Cliff city. He can target them and make use of poison.

    But this time, Sam has other ideas. He wants to use the underground forces to wear each other out.

    Previously, he only has to deal with ck pond, so as a single entity, he can target them, but this time he has to take down remaining gangs as well.

    If he uses the previous method, the other gangs may go into hiding.

    So, he has to think of a different approach and he has already got the rough locations of the remaining small gangs and some contact points of the Tiger fish and the Snake head.

    If he uses his shadow mice from these points, he can trace back to the headquarters of the two big shots.

    Before that, he has to check out this ¡¯Arena¡¯ and determine whether it is illegal organisation or not.

    That night, Sam went to the location of Arena alone. Tonight, there is going to be a battle between the two big gangs.

    He came here alone that is because, he is using the special pass of the small gang boss, they killed earlier and that pass can only allow one person.

    When Sam went there is no fee because of the pass. So, he sat in a corner as he observed the ring.

    At the centre of the team, two men are looking at each other and the referee is announcing the conditions.

    The thing is, these big shot organisations also have some legal businesses as a fa?ade for their members and also their secondary source of ie.

    Today¡¯s match has a bet of some businesses from each side. They are using this strategy to not incur most losses in an all-out war.

    And soon the match began, both the candidates are Novice Level 4 and both of them are warriors. They are fighting tooth and nail while people are cheering to the person they bet on.

    At this moment from a special spectator stand a great mage looked at Sam who is sitting in a corner.

    "Why is he here?" He muttered slightly.

    Sam might not recognise him, but the other party has seen him in the Marquis city that is why he recognised him easily. Sam isn¡¯t exactly low profile in the city.

    Sam didn¡¯t know that a great mage is curious on why he came to this city. He waited until the fight is over and left the ce, but three small shadows entered deep into the arena. Two of them followed the two fighters and the third one went to follow the referee.

 Chapter 112: Investigation

    Sam sent the remaining two mice to the Count mansion, to keep a track on the officials. The info he got was that there are two officials supporting the two big organisations each in the dark and the gang leader he killed even mentioned that this is not a secret in the under-ground circle, it is just that they don¡¯t know who those two officials are.

    So, Sam decided one thing, he must deal with the two officials before he could get his hands on the two big organisations.

    The two shadow mice, which went to Count mansion are going to follow an official each for a whole week.

    If the officials are clean, then they will change the targets, this is what Sam thought out.

    Until then, he and Jack will slowly erode the small gangs.

    Midnight.

    In the Arena, the great mage who recognised Sam, is sitting with two people. Both of them are Peak Novices.

    "Rank 5 Artisan Sam is here." The Great mage who is a middle-aged man said in a low voice. The expressions of the two people changed.

    "He is one of the suspects behind the elimination of the ck pond in the Falcon Cliff city. Higher ups said that even though Sam might not be directly involved in the attack, there is a chance that he made the special poison that killed our people."

    "Maybe, the culprit has asked Sam to make them this item and he didn¡¯t have any idea where the culprit is using them. After all, he is an artisan and many people can buy things from him.

    And most importantly at that time he is still in Novice Level 1. It is impossible for him to attack all of them at the same time.

    Even though, the poison is involved, I think there is a great possibility that at least a Novice peak Level is involved in this.

    If possible, we can even ask him who that person is and investigate." A peak level Novice said.

    "We will observe things for now and see why is he here and then we can decide on how to proceed." The great mage then dismissed the meeting.

    After the meeting dismissed, the shadow mouse in the dark immediately left the room. Even though, he got some information, he is in no hurry to report to Sam.

    Sam has clearly mentioned that they have to report weekly and also told them to gather as much info as possible.

    Meanwhile, Sam is sleeping in the inn. Even though, he is wealthy enough to buy a house, he is not that interested this time, he has some ns to his wealth and he also needs to stay low profile.

    The next day, Sam went into the woods and let the ape out. He still needs to activate the bloodline of the Ape, but it would be better if he is on same level or higher level than the ape. Then he doesn¡¯t have to put much effort and risk being weak for days.

    He is here to practice somebat with the beasts here and catch some beasts exclusive to this region to have taste.

    As for the ape, it is responsible for the search of the fruit trees and the herbs.

    For the next week, Sam ventured into the woods every morning. Since, he was upied with other things, he doesn¡¯t have enough time to practice hisbat. Now, he has enough time.

    Every morning he was in the woods and night he and Jack investigated the small gangs slowly.

    The previous gang leader, he has killed is the weakest among them and his position was already taken over by someone else.

    But he isn¡¯t in a hurry to take them down.

    After dealing with the two officials, he can take these guys on as leisurely as he wants.

    And now all the shadow mice came to report to him.

    After hearing the repot he got some important news and that is the Arena is the ck water¡¯s branch in this city and they have suspicions on him.

    Then only he realised the mistake of not cleaning the battle field. He thought that, the count will make sure to clean it up after he sent the letter as robin hood. But now only he realised that he didn¡¯t.

    If not for the fact he was unconscious after the battle, he might have cleaned up himself.

    But Sam didn¡¯t know that it was his fault. Just after he was taken away by Jack, the great mage from the nearest city already came and took a look at the battle field and reported it to the higher ups. That happened even before he wrote the letter to the Count Falcon.

    But Shadow mice didn¡¯t have any evidence on whether the two big gangs are part of the ck water or not.

    As for the two mice following the two officials, the officials turned out to be clean and didn¡¯t have any connections with the other underground forces.

    So, Sam sent them back and he went on with his daily routine.

    Today night, he has some ns and that is to get his hands on the drug that is being supplied by the tiger fish.

    But since he is in suspect list of the ck water, he doesn¡¯t want to show his face yet. So, he sent Jack to buy some at a contact point of the Tiger fish.

    That night, Sam took a look at the pills Jack brought back and gave it to the ape to take a sniff and the ape gave an utterly disgusted expression.

    Why did Sam do this? The ape has another ability and that is distinguishing the herbs. But it doesn¡¯t know, the qualities of the herbs and their uses all it can sense is whether the herbs and fruits are tasty or not ording to its preferences and the preference of the ape is never wrong.

    So, Sam said some words.

    "From tomorrow, collect the herbs you think that are used in this pill."

    The ape nodded as it ate a fruit which looked like pear.

    Sam left the divine dimension and went into a deep thought.

    First, he needs to observe the effects of the drug to see what he can do with this.

    Sam had an idea on how to deal with the two big shot organisations. That is even if they are the two organisations operating together discreetly under the ck water, the info must have been only known to the people in charge and other important members.

    The remaining members though, are all in the dark. Otherwise the fa?ade will copse easily.

    So, Sam wants to use their disputes to take on each other and before that, he needs the effects of this drug on the people to see if he can use this to his benefit.

    Next day, Sam went to the woods with the ape, but this time he didn¡¯t practicebat instead he followed the ape inside the woods.

    And by the evening, the ape found six herbs which are supposedly part of the drug.

    When they went back, Sam went to a drug contact point, but he didn¡¯t buy any, rather he waited for a customer.

    He waited till midnight and finally a young man bought some and walked away hurriedly.

    Sam stealthily followed him and after an hour of walking in circles, the young man led the way to his home. When Sam secretly looked inside the home, he saw the young man feeding the pill to a crazy looking man who seemed to be in histe twenties.

    After taking the pills, the crazy look was gone and was reced with euphoria and ecstasy. He seemed to be in some kind of illusion as he muttered something about his love and a woman.

    Sam kept on observing and when the drug seemed to be wearing off, the young man fed another pill and the addict seemed to immediately fall asleep.

    He went back to the inn and the next day, he simrly followed other customers and what he knew is that the addicts themselves didn¡¯te to buy them at all.

    All the people who came are the rtives of the addicts and effects of the drug are simr to the first person he saw.

    For the first pill, they will feel euphoria and the second pill seemed to make them sleep.

    But the herbs that the ape found weren¡¯t sufficient to cause all these effects and there must be some kind of special ingredient.

    But Sam didn¡¯t find thest item in the next two weeks.

    The third report from the shadow mice gave him some news and that is that the organisations are really linked together by the Arena and this news seemed to be only known by three people.

    But there is no news on the officials and the list also narrowed down considerably. There are only few officials left who climbed their ranks up asmoners.

    All the officials from the noble families are clean. Even though, they are corrupt but they don¡¯t have anything to do with these organisations.

    In a week it would be one month since he came to this city and Sam wants to gather the info as soon as possible.

    Then only he suddenly remembered the monthly report the mice stole in the Falcon Cliff city and Sam immediately gave an order.

    "Steal the doc.u.ments, from all three organisations this week. Don¡¯t hoard all of them, just steal some which are well ced or treated as important."

    The mice went onto their duty and Sam is still thinking about the herb.

    Since, he wasn¡¯t able to think of anything, he went on a stroll.

 Chapter 113: Plotting against the gangs

    "Idiot."

    Sam scolded himself as he stood at the beach. He looked at the vast sea and scolded himself again.

    "I am really an idiot."

    Why is he calling himself an idiot again and again? Because, he felt that he limited his thoughtspletely for the past two weeks.

    These past two weeks, he was filled with confusion on what type of herb that gave the drug those effects, he limited his thoughtspletely to the herbs and searched the woods frantically.

    So, he is a little bit angry at himself.

    Because, the herbs aren¡¯t the only ones which can be used in the pills and the woods aren¡¯t the only source for the ingredients in the red coral city.

    The red coral city is a coastal city and there are number of resources in the sea. That might include some of the fish or any water bound creature which produce certain toxins.

    Now, he has to find out what kind of creatures are there in the nearby waters and he can find out what he can do with it.

    So, he went to the most prosperous sea creature¡¯s business in the city. There, he took a look at the catalogue of the creatures they can catch in the nearby waters, when he saw the list, he couldn¡¯t help but smile.

    Just from a nce he could see which are these can be used to produce the effects of the drugs. There are no more than three possibilities and it is not even that difficult to find out which of it is.

    Sam ordered some fish that will be good to eat and some other creatures to act as decoy along with the creatures he suspected to be a part of it.

    That is because, he has suspicions that this business is rted to the ck water and he might leave some clues like before.

    Next day, the creatures came and Sam took the parcel to the inn and immediately entered the divine dimension.

    In the second floor, he and the ape sat side by side and he started keeping the herbs inside the cauldron and took out the first beast he is suspicious of, the Emerald jelly fish. The tentacles of this jelly fish have some kind of toxin that will give some illusions to the victim.

    He heated them all together, even though he didn¡¯t have the recipe for the drug and don¡¯t know the right amount he has to use, he doesn¡¯t need the pill anyway, all he need is the confirmation on which ingredients they are using and the ape can smell if theposition is nearer to the drug.

    And soon, Sam performed some experiments and finally got the answer he wanted.

    Two creatures are responsible for the affects. One of them is the emerald jelly fish and Purple ink squid. Of the two, the first one is responsible for the illusions and the second one is for knocking them out.

    They are controlling the dosage and the proportions of the two toxins in order to function like that.

    Sam now went into a deep thought. He wants to create arge-scale conflict between the two gangs so that they will be more active and the lower rank members will be at each other¡¯s throats, before the upper-echelons could intervene.

    By the time they intervene, Sam can easily find out the two officials and after they are in the bag, he will use his authority and use the Count to take the gangs down without raising the suspicions of the ck water that he is involved.

    He can seal off the info that he is here with his authority, But the info will be leaked if the two officials are still in duty.

    So, Sam is now thinking on how to use these drugs, so he went into the tower¡¯s library to search on the info on the toxins.

    After more than a day, he found out something interesting.

    That night, Sam stealthily moved towards the sea and took out his hover board and surfed over the waters. With the thrust capacity, floating over water is not a problem at all.

    Sam went along the coast line and when he reached a more secluded area filled with reefs, he took out some type of special herbal powder and dropped it over the still water, soon a fish simr to koi, floated as it gobbled on the small amounts of herbal powder that it even ignored Sam.

    So, an easy catch.

    After catching some, he went to another spot and caught another batch of fish.

    Sam caught a bunch of fish and went back to the inn.

    He entered the second floor of the tower without dy and started making some preparations. Today, Sam caught two types of fish, first one is to make an antidote for the drug addiction and the second one is to change the effects to his liking.

    After spending more than three days in tower, Sam was finally with a powder and a bottle of special liquid.

    Now, he has to find a way to get the constant supply of the drugs and this problem is left to Jack.

    Jack took the small packets of powder and went to the first contact point where the drug is sold. Just like Sam he also waited for a customer. Coincidentally, the customer is the same young man Sam followed and Jack followed the guy.

    After reaching the home, when that guy is about to feed the pill, Jack suddenly spoke from behind.

    "Do you really want to feed him that?" Jack said in a low voice.

    The young man was startled and immediately grew vignt, he released his aura and when he was about to attack, Jack caught him and held him down. The young man was only an acolyte after all, how can be match for Jack who is a Novice?

    "Do you want to talk now?" Jack said as he subdued the man. After the other party realised that he is no match for Jack at all, he immediately stopped struggling.

    "I am here to make a deal, I have a cure for the drug addiction, but I need you to do something for me." Jack directly came to the point.

    "Why should I believe you?" The young man asked a bit resentfully.

    Jack threw a packet of powder and said. "Mix it with some water and feed him." The young man hesitated a bit, but at the end he decided anyway as he looked at his weak and feeble brother who is under the attack of drug addiction.

    But after feeding the ss of liquid, his brother calmed down and fell asleep, but this time, he isn¡¯t like before bing unconscious.

    Now, he fell asleep and his breathing andplexion turned somewhat normal, he started sweating and some kind of purplish green substance started getting out of his pores.

    "One dose is not enough topletely clean his system and get him out of his addiction, you need nine more of it, but if you want it, you have to do something for me." Jack said from the side.

    "What should I do?" The young man was excited. He never wanted to feed his brother these drugs, he tried many ways to make quit, but none of them worked at all. So, all he can do is continue on feeding him by spending all his hard- earned money.

    "Simple, all you have to do is exchange a dosage of drugs with this antidote. You can just buy it regrly like you did before and exchange. After ten doses, you have to buy for two more days and give me those drugs."

    "Is that it?" The young man asked.

    "Yes, that¡¯s it. I wille and collect the drugs myself."

    "But why are you doing this?" The young man agreed but asked Jack, even the Count was unable to do anything, even when some dealers were arrested, they always found a way to escape and get away. What can a Novice do about it?

    Jack didn¡¯t reply and left with the drugs. He went back to the contact point and waited for the next customer.

    In this way, Jack made deal with several customers who bought the drugs and he brought back the drugs to Sam.

    For the next ten days or so, this is his only duty.

    Meanwhile, the fourth report from the shadow mice, Sam got his hands on some doc.u.ments from the arena and one of them is some rules on how ck water should operate and one of the rules made him amused.

    ¡¯The reports, the rewards and the ie which should be submitted annually to the higher ups, all of them shouldn¡¯t be in the hands of the branch in-charge and they should be stored in the secret locker of the establishment they made.¡¯

    When Sam read this, he wanted to thank the higher-ups of the ck water, they would have never guessed that there is a creature called shadow mouse and that could even ransack their whole vault.

    Maybe they only thought of the scenario where the branch in charge might be killed and the other party will not be getting any of the above-mentioned things.

    If not for the fact that the great mage will go berserk if the spatial rings containing the meteorite sands and the rewards and the ie went missing, Sam would have got his hands on them and ran away.

    There might even be a chance of him being linked to the incident due to the previous suspicions.

    But since, his main aim is to eliminate them, he has to wait until he is dealt with and take the loot after that.

 Chapter 114: Red coral city Cleared

    One month passed since Sam came to the Red coral city and he did things carefully and stayed low-key.

    Right now, he got some necessary info on the businesses of the Arena and particrly the ie through the gambling on the fights, he waspletely excited to get his hands on them and right now, he is thinking of a way to deal with the two officials who has connections with ck water.

    Yes, he got the news on the two people, in Falcon cliff city, Sam got all the news in less than ten days due to the coordinated work of the ten mice, but now, the five of them are taking more time.

    All the ns he is making to not to get suspected are only taking more time.

    Now, Sam is inside the inn and in front of him is a small ss container with the weird liquid he made earlier and right now, he dropped some drugs in it and started shaking.

    After that, a shadow mouse appeared on the table and stored away the bottle into the spatial ring. This spatial ring is not a normal one though, it is made of the space jade and is now acting as a cor around the mouse.

    Even though, the shadow mice can use the spatial ring, they have to bear a high level of mental stress, but the space jade doesn¡¯t have that problem, so even when the space is little, it is still beneficial.

    The shadow mice are rather clever and they got their orders.

    That night, the whole upper echelons of the Count city were in uproar, two of their staff are dead, only the count himself was silent because, after he confirmed that the deaths of the two officials, a letter came to him out of nowhere.

    He looked at the content of the letter and was startled, he doesn¡¯t have time care about this incident and went to his personal residence and refused audience with anyone.

    He stealthily escaped from the mansion and went to a rundown inn and snuck into a room.

    Sam is sitting on the bed as he watched the Count slowlying inside. Thetter dressed in a very normal set of clothes.

    "Greetings Sir Sam."

    The other party immediately greeted him.

    Sam has sent a letter with the seal provided by the marquis himself, the seal has some spiritual energy signature which is identical to the marquis¡¯ seal, so the count never thought it was a duplicate.

    Sam gestured the other party to take a seat and said.

    "I am the one who dealt with the two officials. They are in connection with the Arena and that is the boss of the two big gangs. I don¡¯t know how much info you have on them, but take a look at this."

    Sam passed the monthly report on them and the count skimmed through the details as his face paled with shock.

    "I don¡¯t know what you will do, I can deal with them myself, but I don¡¯t want to expend my energy, so I want you to deal with them as soon as possible and most possibly tomorrow. Take this."

    Sam passed a spatial ring which is full of liquid that he made after mixing it with the drugs.

    "This is the toxin I created with their drugs as base, if you can make the great mage consume arge amount of this at the same time, you can deal with him easily." Sam exined.

    "Thank you, sir Sam., I don¡¯t know how you got the information on this, but I will definitely deal with them as soon as possible." The Count replied.

    "Don¡¯t be too quick to thank me yet. I have another which I didn¡¯t show you yet and I am not interested in showing you this.

    The loot of all these people doesn¡¯t belong to you. But I will let you have all the loot except the Novice peak and the great mage experts.

    And you don¡¯t have the permission to go through the lockers of the Arena and the other organisations. I have marquis¡¯ orders to take all of them back, that is the punishment for your negligence on this part.

    If the ounts don¡¯t tally with the report I have, all the officials can forgo their titles and can prepare to serve their time in the prison."

    The Count face turned red in embarrassment, he thought that he could hit it big from this loot and increase his contributions, but now, his ns are gone. He agreed with Sam and left the ce.

    After that a shadow mouse followed the count to keep an eye on him and another shadow mouse stood in front of Sam.

    "Steal the spatial rings inside the locker as soon as the battle broke out and bring them here." The mouse nodded and followed the Count.

    Now two mice followed the mice, and one of them is to keep watch and other one is to safely bring back the important loot from the locker. Even though, the count might not dare to go against the orders, Sam doesn¡¯t want to take the risk.

    If the meteorite sand and the millions of the spirit stones slip by just like that, he might not be able to get them back.

    Next day, something big will happen but Sam didn¡¯t n to rest tonight.

    "Jack, we are leaving."

    Sam and Jack started walking, they went to one of the contact points of the Snake head, the other party is just a Novice Level 1. Both of them subdued and Sam fed them the liquid then he took out some powder of the drug pill and sprayed around.

    Both of them quickly left the dead body and went to another contact point...

    After dealing with several snakehead gang members, they changed their targets to the Tiger fish members, but this time they didn¡¯t use poison rather, they slit their throats.

    By midnight, the news passed over all the gang members, some impulsive ones who lost their friends started fights with the opposite gang members.

    Before the matter reached the upper echelons there are already casualties. By dawn the fights surfaced to the public and still going on, the orders from the higher ups aren¡¯t even effective anymore as the fights went to personal level.

    The great mage in charge at Arena is frowning and just as he wanted to forcefully supress the war, a news brought him head ache.

    The Count visited him and is requesting for audience, saying that there is a business deal.

    He cannot decline him and can only pray that it would be over fast.

    But when they sat down together, the count took out some rare wine jars. And the other party was even considerate to prepare a whole wine jar for each and the Arena in charge wasn¡¯t even given a chance to reject it.

    But only after he emptied half of the wine, he felt that something is wrong.

    Before he could realise what is wrong, the count attacked him on the spot. Soon a battle erupted there and the gang members flew in panic.

    The upper echelons of the Count mansion all swarmed into the Arena head quarters and started attacking all of them, with so many peak stage and Late stage experts, soon the Arena was subdued.

    But nobody dared to take the loot all of them only stood there as the subordinates collected the corpses.

    The city guards swarmed the city and started dealing with the gangsters. By the evening the whole city undergone a crack down and was cleaned of gangs.

    The remaining measly members who are lucky enough to survive, immediately escaped from the city.

    Sam walked towards the pile of dead bodies along with Jasmine and Jack.

    They started collecting the spatial rings, the main three rings that are hidden in the locker are already in his hands, so he just took all the remaining scrolls and took them.

    After that all of the went to the Count mansion and Sam said.

    "From marquis¡¯ orders I have to bring all the loot from the gangs but since all the officials and city guards worked together to catch them, I will let you guys have the loot from all the small gangs and the small fries of the Big two organisations.

    But there is one important thing that you guys have to take note of and that is the information of us three involved in this matter and even our arrival in this city has to be sealed."

    Speaking up to this point he handed s doc.u.ment with permission to maintain the confidentiality and also an order to seal of the information.

    "With this, you don¡¯t have any obligation to reveal the information unless the marquis himself asks of it.

    I have all the records of your corruption. If my appearance of here leaks out and I found any evidence no matter how minor it maybe pointing out to this city, I will handover them to the marquis."

    All the officials immediately became tensed. They didn¡¯t dare think that Sam is just bluffing after all, all the info on the two gang members are given to them by him.

    Even they who are living in the city for decades weren¡¯t able to get the info on the gangs but Sam got it in a month, so they don¡¯t dare think that he wouldn¡¯t have any info on their activities.

    That day, Sam, Jack and Jasmine exited the Red coral city and set forth to the next count city.

    The Indigo sea city.

 Chapter 115: Indigo sea city

    Five dayster.

    Sam entered the Indigo sea city along with Jack and Jasmine.

    Just like before he didn¡¯t keep a high profile. It has been only one month and fifteen days since they started targeting the count cities.

    There is still four and half months to deal with the remaining two cities.

    Sam is sitting in his room at the inn as he examined the new meteorite sand. This time there are 12 cubes of it, but the sand is not silver meteorite sand.

    This is Grey meteorite sand, and it is not suitable for making sharp weapons, it is mostly used to make some blunt weapon like a hammer. It has high impact strength.

    For Sam¡¯s future ns where he wanted to get himself a highly functional production unit, this sand can be used to make the base of a machine or other rigidponents.

    But he is kind of confused, he didn¡¯t understand why the ck water is distributing different types of meteorite sands to different ces, even though, giving them as rewards is a generous thing, he still doesn¡¯t understand on what credentials they are giving off the reward and the judging criterion to select the type of sand.

    But he didn¡¯t care for long. Whatever the other party¡¯s intentions are they are benefitting him, but this grey meteorite sand isn¡¯t enough at all, he still needs a lot of it.

    Indigo sea city is also a coastal region and this city is very famous for venomous fish. The name of the city came from an indigo patch in the sea.

    That zone is called Indigo zone, where the sea water is in indigo colour. The water there is extremely dangerous and the creatures are all venomous in nature.

    Nobody, who ventured deep into the zone were able toe outside alive.

    The water itself makes people dizzy and unconscious easily. They had to create a barrier of spiritual energy around them and that too won¡¯tst long as the air inside the barrier will not be breathable after sometime.

    Sam is very interested about the indigo patch.

    So, he actually left the most of the investigation to Jack and Shadow mice. All he has to do is give the weekly reports of the investigation to Jack and he can deal with the rest.

    After all, they can still use the Count and his forces. After the shadow mice is sure that there are no officials involved with the ck water branch or find out the involved officials, he can give a greenlight to the operation.

    There is still a lot of poison that he created with the drugs from the Red coral city. Even if there is none of that poison, he can still make use of the venomous creatures in the indigo patch and create a variant poison.

    Even though, there might be antidotes for the poisons of the sea side creatures, he can still make use of them and create a brand-newplex poison and use them against the gangs.

    So, he immediately left these things to Jack. Since, the world is full of mysterious things, he wants to see if there is any opportunity in this ce that will be of use to him

    Every morning, Sam went to woods just like before and practised. But this time, he is not practising anybat instead, he is practising the wind element. He wants to see if he can identify the gases and separate them.

    So, every morning, he is in the woods practising his Divine spirit soul cultivation and after noon tried to identify the gases and he mostly tried to practice identifying the oxygen.

    Because, the trees emit the oxygen and he is surrounded by the tress.

    If he divided the whole cultivation of Divine spirit soul cultivation into levels, he is now at Level 3 and he doesn¡¯t have ess to further levels and didn¡¯t know how many are there.

    Each and every level until now are unlocked with the improvement of the soul and spirit.

    At every evening, Sam started venturing into sea with some fishermen. Even though they don¡¯t venture deep into the indigo patch, they move at the outskirts of the indigo patch.

    Sam started observing the beasts at the outskirts of the indigo patch and he observed one thing. These creatures aren¡¯t normal.

    They are mutated creatures. More urately they are basically not venomous but they became like that because they were forced to adapt to the venomous environment created by the indigo patch. They evolved to defend themselves against the venom.

    Sam collected some water and took it back with him to check it out.

    That night after he returned to inn he went inside the dimension and kept the water in front of Yanwu.

    Yanwu is from higher realms and might have seen many things, that is the reason Sam asked him if there is anything he can observe from the water.

    "I cannot sense anything from the sample, but there is a minute familiarity from its smell. But I can¡¯t seem to identify it."

    When he heard these words from Yanwu, he became even more interested in the indigo patch.

    He cleared an area in the neutral zone of the dimension and nted some basic herbs there and some seeds of the herbs all of neutral type. He watered them with the indigo water and went out of the dimension.

    Days passed, without Sam¡¯splete help in tactics, Jack is having a bit of hard time to plot against the big gangs, even though he is getting the info required from Sam, he wasn¡¯t able to use the info efficiently to its maximum use.

    If he asked Sam would help, but he himself wanted to test himself this one time. They still have a lot of time, so he is in no hurry.

    Sam continued on observing the effects on the seeds and herbs he nted. After some repeated usage of the indigo water the herbs withered with a faint indigo shade on them.

    But Sam observed something different from the seeds. They germinated and the sprouts all have that faint indigo shade too, but they didn¡¯t seem to be withered, rather they are quite healthy.

    He didn¡¯t take them and let them grow.

    Everyday, he made some experiments in the second-floor simtive environment. Even though, the replica of the indigo water was created and he performed the simtion on many animals.

    The results aren¡¯t that urate as they kept on changing and that is probably due to the insufficient analysis of the indigo water he had on his hand and wasn¡¯t able to create a simted replica of the indigo water.

    He didn¡¯t give up though. He started examining the creatures from the indigo patch, topare them with their normal unmutated counter-parts.

    Everything is going on.

    One month passed, Jack is starting to make preparations to make some big moves against the gangs because, Sam confirmed that there are no officials that are linked and the situation of the gangs is simr to that of Falcon Cliff city.

    So, Jack is going to stir some shit up in between the gangs, at the same time he informed the Count to take the actions immediately.

    On the day of action, Jack still didn¡¯t ask help from Sam and thetter didn¡¯t volunteer.

    Since, the former wanted to test himself, he will let him do it all the way.

    Sam went to the woods as usual. He felt like he is close to identify the oxygen and differentiate it.

    As long as he can identify the oxygen separately in a mixture of gases, his spiritual core ability manipte cane into handy and he can do as he pleases.

    Sam stood under a tree as he closed his eyes, he started concentrating as he simultaneously cultivated his mental energy.

    Hours passed; Sam could feel the air around him started to view itself in a different spectrum. He could see various gases with different densities. But he was still a bit away from exactly pinpointing the oxygen or any other gas.

    After a long time, finally he got an inkling. He could finally differentiate the gasing from the leaf pores.

    But Sam didn¡¯t stop, he just went on with his cultivation.

    He stood there for more one and half day and finally opened his eyes. With his spiritual sense, he can finally differentiate the gases, but he couldn¡¯t identify all of them except oxygen.

    Sam opened his palm as he collected the condensed wind. Soon, the wind became so condensed that it became visible.

    But he is not done yet, he concentrated even more and another small sphere of condensed wind was formed with in the big sphere.

    Sam took out a small space jade and he forcefully pushed through therge wind sphere and started pushing the smaller wind sphere into the space jade.

    He is trying to store the pure oxygen inside the space jade.

    Because, his next research is going to be done on the indigo sea patch and he need to make a device that can make him breathe freely underwater.

    Because, from what Sam could guess, the main reason even the water type elemental mages weren¡¯t able to explore the indigo sea fully is because, even if they can stay underwater for a few hours and take the water pressure, the indigo water isn¡¯t normal water and it is fully contaminated.

    And it seemed there are no proper antidotes to get over the effects of the water fully.

    So, Sam is going to make a breathing equipment along with some diving equipment to venture deep into the indigo patch.

    Now, his immediate research direction will be making a diving equipment which will save his energy expenditure to avoid water touching his skin and for that he has to find a resin or any alternative product to make the suit.

    He even has some ideas on how to move inside the water with less effort.

    So, Sam went back to the inn and holed up inside the library of the tower to findout, if any tree or another resource is avable to get him the required material.

 Chapter 116: Preparations

    Sam holed himself up in the library as he browsed through the information on various trees that produce resins.

    The first thing he wanted to do is find a tree that is simr to rubber tree to make some form of material which will not allow the water to go through it.

    But he wasn¡¯t able to do so, because, there are no records of those type of trees. To put it more bluntly, nobody ever bothered to make a record of these trees which they didn¡¯t know how to use.

    Then, Sam started thinking in another way. Beast organs. He went through the bestiary again and started recalling all the characteristics of the beasts that were mentioned and after more than ten days inside the library, he found a possibility.

    That is to use the stomach sack of a ded white shark, this is one of the beasts with strong stomachs that is both physically and against the corrosive and poisonous effects and one more advantage is, there are mutated ones in the indigo patch and he can just buy them off.

    Next day, Sam went to the Golden- Horse tradingpany of this city, there is he requested he needed twenty ded white sharks and the only condition is that their stomach shouldn¡¯t be injured.

    Within two days, Sam¡¯s order was ready, by this time, Jack is already done with his task and gave the loot to Sam and they mainly consisted of the millions of spirit stones and the fourteen cubes of Grey meteorite sand.

    Even though, Jack is bit happy that he was able toplete, there are many hups and he wasn¡¯t able to coordinate properly with the Count mansion.

    When he asked Sam when they would move to the next city, he got a reply that Sam needs more time for research, so he easilyplied, they are way ahead of their schedule and he can use this time to catch up on his cultivation.

    Sam went to the second floor of the tower and he stood at a table which has ded white shark on it.

    This ded white shark is one of the beasts which is thrice the size of a white shark in his previous life.

    Sam used a knife, to cut open the shark and started taking the guts out and after some cleaning, he finally had a big sack in his hands.

    This is the stomach of the shark.

    But this ded white shark is mutated and most of its organs including the stomach is a bit indigo in colour.

    Sam didn¡¯t make anything out of this stomach immediately, instead he ced the stomach in a big ss container filled with the indigo water and he also started increasing the water pressure with his wind ability.

    He just startedpressing the water with his wind element.

    And just like that he is performing all kinds of tests on it and the final one is a test on fire resistance and Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel disappointed but that didn¡¯tst long, because he has many different alternatives to make it work.

    Sam started working on a body suit. Since, the stomach is stic in nature, Sam had to use a small knife made of ck meteorite sand to cut open it. This is thest product of the ck meteorite sand he made and he has nothing left of it now.

    At least he made the first stage of his w weapon, so he isn¡¯t that worried. After all, he is getting his hands on the meteorite sand sooner orter.

    After working for more than two days, Sam finally made his suit. It even has a mask covering all his face except his nose, mouth and eyes. But he doesn¡¯t like the colour of it for which he couldn¡¯t do anything about.

    Now, he has to prepare the devices for his motion and breathing.

    He started taking all the ores he had and started thinking on which is more suitable for him.

    And the experiments began.

    Outside world, more than one week has passed and Jack didn¡¯t see Saming out of his room. Before going in Sam said only thing and that is not to disturb him no matted how many days he stays inside.

    But he couldn¡¯t help but worried, even then he didn¡¯t dare to open the door on his own ord and one more thing that is bothering him is that Jasmine started to be restless.

    Since, she is just like a child, Jack didn¡¯t take any problem with her, but she is getting more and more anxious about Sam.

    He just hoped that Sam woulde out as soon as possible.

    As if his prayers have been answered, Sam came out the very next day and when he saw Jasmine, he didn¡¯t know what to do at all.

    She is just like a kid, she seemed to be extremely anxious and afraid as she didn¡¯t see Sam at all. If he left her and went on this sea expedition, he could imagine what could happen to her, so he has to make her feel less anxious.

    So, the next day Sam took her to woods and let Ape and the panthers out, he introduced them and kept herpany for the whole day.

    Just like a kid, Jasmine isn¡¯t afraid of dangers or beasts, she is only afraid of loneliness.

    By evening, she is even running around with panthers and hugging the ape, the ape even gave her a piggy back which she seemed to enjoy a lot.

    "I am going to go out, I will be back soon, you stay with them." Jasmine nodded happily and informed the situation to Jack.

    Jack made a camp in the woods, so they can stay for few more days. Sam went back to the inn to make some preparations; he needs to move just before dawn to avoid other cultivators who goes to the indigo patch.

    Sam made some final adjustments to the suit he made.

    Next day, Dawn.

    Sam entered the sea on his hover board and as he moved towards the centre of the patch, the more he felt that concentration of the contamination is high.

    When he almost reached the centre, Sam took off his dresspletely except for the underwear and took out his suit.

    The suit is still in indigo colour, it is so tight that he has to struggle a lot to get into the suit.

    The suit ispletely tight and it is a bit translucent.

    One can even see the outline of his muscles over his suit, if not for the fact that he feltpletely warm due to the suit, he almost felt n.a.k.e.d.

    But there is something special about the suit and there is a solid bump on the suit at certain ces and they are on his upper back, back of the fore arms, calves.

    The bump is made of metal and is covered with the shark stomach.

    There are numerous holes of one-inch diameter on the metallic bumps, all the bumps are made in such a way that they are in same shape as the muscle structure on the ce they were set.

    They are specially made energy cells Sam made and they are of wind element. The cylindrical holes are metallic tubes, he attached to the metallic frame that is attached to the energy cell. But they can¡¯t be seen clearly through the suit.

    After wearing the suit, Sam took out the mask he specially prepared.

    It is also the breathing equipment, he specially made.

    The mask is a helmet type, where he has to wear it over his head. There is a ss section over his eyes and a groove which let it sit on the nose bridge. The borders of the sses are embedded with small light energy cells.

    Below the nose bridge there are two pipes which will go into his nostrils although not too deep, just enough to act like plugs and these two pipes are connected to a space jade filled with oxygen.

    Below these two pipes, there is a single pipe which entered his mouth and this is also not long at all it just barely touched the tip of his tongue.

    This pipe is also connected to a space jade, but this one is empty and it is to exhale the air out.

    Sam wore the mask and stored his hoverboard away, which made him fall into the indigo coloured sea.

    After he dived in, Sam started using the light energy cells and the light shot into the depths of sea, even though he cannot see to far distance, he can still see his surroundings.

    Then dived a bit deeper and started activating his wind energy cells.

    He ced his hands backwards and the wind with high pressure was being discharged from his pipes, giving him the thrust to move around in the water.

    Sam kept his head downwards and his feet up as he dived deeper and deeper.

    Around thirty minutester, he is already hundreds of meters deep. Due to usage of energy cells, Sam didn¡¯t feel that tired, except he has to concentrate more and as he moved deeper, there are less and less creatures he can see.

    The reason is the concentration of the toxicity is getting higher as he moved downwards. If Sam just used normal beast skin instead of the stomach sack of the shark, he would be in a big trouble, because, the corrosion resistance of the shark stomach is not something to be scoffed at.

 Chapter 117: The imprisoned Beast

    After getting down for more than one hour, he estimated that he is more than 1500 meters deep and Sam found a rocky terrain on the sea bed.

    He moved towards it and the ce filled with rotten carcasses, some of them are of water bound creatures and some of them are of humans, there are a lot of carcasses.

    Even the bones are corroded so much due to the toxins.

    Sam went deeper and deeper into the rocky terrain and he only stopped when he found something weird.

    There was arge area with some concentrated energy and when he used his observation, he wasn¡¯t able to understand what it realty is.

    But when he moved towards it, he was able to sense that energy is distributed in that particr area and it is making all the water repel from it.

    The pressure on him increased when he moved towards it and he has to increase the thrust so much to go against it.

    If not for the fact that his body is physically as strong as a beast at the same level, he would have had his bones crushed under his pressure.

    He not only found that formation is quite high grade, but it is very much erodedpletely, as if the energy source ispletely depleted.

    Sam drifted towards the formation, but he wasn¡¯t able to enter easily.

    The formation ispletely sealed and even though there are some loop holes, Sam wasn¡¯t able to pin point them.

    The loop holes are small and sparse and didn¡¯t appear all the time, so he waited as he swam around the formation to find out if there is any way to go through it.

    After a long struggle, he finally found a loop hole in the formation and slipped into it.

    *ssh*

    The water level inside the formation is strangely not full. Sam fell into the knee-deep water as soon as he entered. At this moment, even his suit started having corrosive problems and he immediately took out his hoverboard and started floating.

    Inside the formation it seemed like a room with hemispherical dome. Itpletely deterred the water from entering inside and even the knee-deep water also came inside due to small loop holes appearing for split seconds.

    But Sam¡¯s concentration isn¡¯t on the dome or the water, but on the skeleton right before him. The skeleton so massive that is not even as long as its w.

    Sam felt so in significant in front of the skeleton, but the massive size isn¡¯t the reason. The reason is the powerful aura that ising out of the skeletal remains. Even though, it is not giving him enough pressure to buckle him.

    He is still feeling insignificant. His bloodlines of Sky sovereign roc and Golden sun crow activated subconsciously to repel the pressure and then only he felt relief.

    There are nine snake like heads to the massive figure, hind legs like dog and talons for front limbs, a d body like a hound, and tail like a dragon.

    The bones have slight hint of purple on it. The skeleton is so majestic even in this state.

    "Hydra." Sam could only mutter this word subconsciously.

    Yes, the skeleton in front of him belongs to the mythical beast Hydra, but the hydra isn¡¯tpletely same as that of Greek mythology of earth.

    The on in the Greek mythology is Lernaean Hydra and that is only one in the world which is killed by Hercules.

    The hydra in front of him are descendants of that immortal beast.

    Sam let out Yanwu and Sky from the divine dimension. The formation provided him enough space to fly.

    "Imprisoned Variant Hydra." Yanwu immediately muttered after seeing the skeleton.

    Obviously, Sky didn¡¯t know about it at all.

    Sam looked at Yanwu with a questioning gaze and thetter exined.

    "Back at home, the story of this hydra is part of history. The basic hydra having nine heads will have same abilities to all his heads but the variant hydra is not same. Each head has different type of poison and each has different ability.

    The hydra tribe ostracised these variant hydras from them due to their powerful abilities and eliminated them, but the story is that a normal male hydra from royal family and a female variant hydra escaped together.

    But the whole tribe sent the power houses and even sought help from other tribes and chased them. Even though, the male is a prince and one of the strongest from the tribe, he waspletely surrounded.

    Since, he was from the royal family he was subdued and taken back to the tribe, while the female variant hydra was chased.

    Then only they knew one thing, that the female is stronger than the male and even when surrounded by them, they were only able to subdue her and the instant kill waspletely out of question.

    So, they subdued her and imprisoned her in a very powerful formation, and the energy source is the beast itself.

    In this way they left her to die after continuous depletion of energy. I never thought that I would encounter the imprisoned hydra here."

    When Yanwu finished the story, Sam looked at the skeleton again and saw that there are some long chains attached to spikes.

    Each long chain had one spike on end which was inside the skeleton, meaning it was stabbed to the beast core and the other end of the chain is connected to another spike which is stood like a pir.

    In the same way, there are lot of chains and spikes which are acting like the energy nodes and the source of energy.

    The chains and spikes are full of runes. Sam closed moved towards the skeleton. The water is almost purple in colour, the concentration of the toxins is quite high.

    He though of something and started immediately entered the divine dimension. He made a clearing in the water zone and created a formation.

    He came out and started observing all the water to the divine dimension, this would not only help him to explore this ce, he can also use this water to make some potent poison.

    A pool was formed inside the dimension within the formation.

    Soon, the formation became empty, but there is some water seeping slowly from outside, but it is not enough to fill the formationpletely.

    But when the water ispletely empty, Sam took a step back in astonishment.

    There is a huge egg in front of him which was ced horizontally, he wasn¡¯t able to find out earlier because the water level near the skeleton is high and the egg waspletely submerged.

    The egg is full of runes. Which seemed to be written with purple blood.

    Sam didn¡¯t move forward and just probed it with his spiritual sense. A voice rung in his head.

    [Whoever you are, I don¡¯t know you. But you are the only person I can ask you help now. I was chased by my kin and was separated from my love. The only thing I was left with was my own offspring.

    If you are hearing this, my offspring is still sealed from birth and still alive.

    But I don¡¯t know how many days the remnants of my energy will be able to save it for.

    So, I hope you will unseal it and let ite to this world.]

    Then the process of unsealing was transmitted to Sam¡¯s mind.

    [I know that I don¡¯t have any right to ask for help. But I am not asking you as a beast, but as a mother.

    My only sin is to be born as a variant and my child has nothing to do with it. I hope you can give my child a chance to live and you can have my remains aspensation.

    My remains no matter how old they might be, are one of the valuable treasures in the world. Even the single w or the fang can be made into a powerful weapon. So, I hope it is enough for you.]

    This is thest message that came to Sam¡¯s mind before a glow disappeared from egg. But the runic seals which seemed to be from the blood of the hydra itself still remained. Apparently, they are runes that maintained the seal.

    Sam looked at the formation which is still working, there are no restrictions on the egg though. So, he first stored inside the divine dimension.

    So, after that he thought of the way to remove the restrictions of the formation to take away the skeleton.

    Because, he wasn¡¯t able to move the skeleton and it seems that the chains are restricting the spatial transfer as he failed to move it into the divine dimension.

    This only makes sense, as a top-level beast from the higher realms, the hydra might even be able to tear open the space, if there were no restrictions ced on it. He started his brain storming as he observed the formation and the spikes responsible for maintaining it.

 Chapter 118: Blood Ghoul

    Sam went to the edge of the formation. Due to long term depletion of energy from the hydra, the formation has eroded.

    But even after it was eroded, it is not easy for him to break.

    His level of attainment in the formations and the inscriptions is not high enough for him to break the formation open

    Even a stone wall which is tens of meters thick was tested with time and became as weak as a mud wall, digging a mud wall of that size isn¡¯t a normal person could do and Sam is in same situation.

    But he didn¡¯t give up.

    Sam thought about the energy flow in the formation and checked each and every spike. There are more than twenty chains which are acting as energy channels. There are a total of forty spikes out of which twenty of them are buried inside the earth acting as nodes.

    He started observing all the nodes individually to where the formation is damaged causing these energy loop holes.

    Even if he wants to deal with this, he has to take care so that there wouldn¡¯t be any damage on him due to energy backsh.

    After a long time, he found the spot where the energy is depleted and the node with which he can work to destroy the formation without much bacsh.

    He ced his hands on the ground near the spike, and slowly started eroding the earth around it. If the node is removed the formation will be destroyed, then he can surely make use of it to store away, but he needs to be prepared to face the rush of the water as well as the energy backsh.

    Sam immediately wore his helmet back and kept the hoverboard back inside the storage.

    Sam worked more than ten days, topletely take away the earth and rocks. The spike is buried vertically. It is more than ten feet long and more than eight feet is buried.

    His mental energy was used up a lot after making some rocks into powder and the fact that spiritual energy is concentrated on the rocks near it is not helping. He will face minor backsh every time he unearthed some part of spike and he needs to recover.

    In this way, he is dividing the bacsh into minor parts and taking it on, if he were to pull it all at once, with the depleted formation, even though it might be possible, he will definitely have to face major bacsh and under this sea, he might even die.

    He has to take care that the energy spike wouldn¡¯t be destroyed or the runes will be damaged, that is why he worked around slowly and now he is at the final step.

    Sam finally ced his hand on thest piece of the rock and another hand on the spike, and after destroying the rock, the spike was finally free, but he could visibly see the formation being destroyed slowly.

    The huge force of water came inside, but Sam was also fast, he immediately started storing the chain inside his divine dimension and while the water is flooding in just before drowned the skeleton, Sam reached the skeleton and stored it in.

    If he it wasn¡¯t for the fact that the formation was damaged a lot and the energy source which is hydra itself ispletely depleted, he would have never had a chance to make it with his current level.

    He also has to thank all the people who left this ce alone. Maybe a person beyond Grand level cultivation might have been able to make it if he is water type mage and has elemental fusion.

    If he could take some precautions against the poison, maybe they might have a chance to encounter the formation even if they weren¡¯t able to identify it immediately.

    In this way, other powerhouse wouldn¡¯t leave it alone.

    Sam was sure that if there are any resource used for cultivation had appeared instead of mutated water creatures, they would have definitely ventured in even with the risk of poison.

    But since there was nothing else and all the people who entered the zone ended up dead, they left it alone.

    Sam really did feel grateful for them for leaving

    He let the water drown him first instead of struggling and went along with the flow, but he wasn¡¯t throw far away and still stayed in the vast rocky terrain.

    After stabilizing for a bit, he went upwards with full thrust

    He is faster whening up than when he went down.

    But he didn¡¯te up to the surface directly, because the indigo patch was destroyed due to Sam taking away the formation. This indigo water was diluted and the whole sea region became indigo but the colour was a lot lighter and the water was close to normal.

    In a few days, the water might even turn back to normal again.

    But if he goes out now, he might have to face the people who are on the top and witnessed the scene.

    He stayed underwater and travelled near the coast line as he went away from the city. After he reached the coast near woods, Sam came out of the water and removed his suit.

    After wearing his usual clothes, he didn¡¯t take out the Harbinger, but called out Sky and soared higher to get the direction of city. And soon he is on the way back to the Indigo sea city.

    This trip was way beyond profitable and it is more or less time to move to next city.

    Sam came back to the vicinity of the city and went to the ce where Jack and Jasmine camped.

    When he was there, Jasmine is ying with ape. She sat on ape¡¯s shoulder and was eating a fruit.

    When Sam came, she came down and ran over to greet him.

    He just smiled in reply. At this moment Jack wasn¡¯t in the camp, jasmine said he went to hunt.

    After a while, Sam brought a Green horned deer with him, he greeted Sam.

    "Is your workplete?"

    "Yeah. We can leave today."

    After that short exchange, all of them sat to eat.

    Later, they packed everything up, Sam took Yanwu and Sky out along with Harbinger.

    Soon, three of them are soaring towards theirst Count city and that is the Cougar city.

    This city is a bit different because, the city wasn¡¯t named after its surroundings or resources, rather it was named after the noble family who holds the count title. The Cougar city is under the jurisdiction of the Cougar family.

    They are also first-generation nobles who earned their title during the establishment of the empire just like how the Blue me city was named.

    Within three days the three of them are near the city. It has been only a little more than three months since they started the journey to clear three count cities¡¯ underground forces.

    Now, all they have to do is deal with the Cougar city and wait for the remaining people toe. Then their mission can be consideredplete and they can return to the Blue me city.

    When they are near the vicinity, theynded and started walking, but in the middle of their short journey in which, ape is working on finding some trees and herbs, they smelled something very ominous.

    There seemed to be a thick blood smell, nearing them and the ape became more sensitive, because blood smell doesn¡¯t feel delicious at all.

    Then suddenly a blood red figure stopped them in their tracks. It is like a lump of blood red matter with two arms. It is five feet tall and there are two hollows on its ¡¯face¡¯ which seemed to be the eyes.

    Sam never saw this before, but Jack seemed to know about this.

    "Blood spirit ghoul." When Sam heard this, he furrowed his brows.

    But there is no more time to get answers as the ghoul started attacking them.

    Sam deliberately blocked the punch, the body of the ghoul seemed to be in semi solid state, but the punch felt like he was hit by a lump of solid iron.

    He took a step back, Jack started fighting it with sword and soon he finished the fight with a stab. The ghoul doesn¡¯t seem to be the strong.

    Sam walked towards the ghoul and he saw Jack taking out his sword and at the tip of the sword a round shaped red coloured gem like thing was present.

    Seeing Sam walking towards him, Jack said.

    "My mom said to me about the Blood ghoul and apparently, the person who killed my father was one who uses the blood spirit ghouls.

    They are actually one of the creatures created by most vicious of methods.

    These ghouls are formed from the blood of the deceased people, people filled with the resentment.

    The people who were tortured to extreme and ughtered at a same ce will have a collective resentment towards a single person, their blood essence will gather together and all their negative emotions along with the spiritual energy will form this blood core made of those blood essences.

    But the maker will mark the blood core with his spiritual brand and control it, but this seemed to be a stray one."

    When Sam heard Jack¡¯s exnation, he was surprised. He never expected that he would encounter something like this here.

    He crouched down and ced his hands in the puddle of semisolid blood. It can be called as condensed blood. But that is not what surprised him most.

    The most surprising thing is there is a metal that is on par with the meteorite sandpletely dissolved in the blood and that is none other than the Blood iron.

    Yes, the iron that is present in human¡¯s blood. Since, the blood along with a person upgrades with a cultivator, the iron in the body also generates that quality, but the only difference is the Blood iron is upgraded with the Blood essence only.

    So, if a person forges a blood with this iron, he or she has to walk the path of ughter to improve the grade of the weapon, they feed on their enemies¡¯ blood essence to improve the grade.

    The acquisition of the blood is also quite inhumane, that is why even though the blood iron is not scarce, it is not seen anywhere at all.

    He is surprised that the Blood ghouls will use this Blood iron to attack.

 Chapter 119: Surprise meeting

    Sam and Jack checked the surroundings and found a ce filled with corpses, but all their faces are messed up and can not be identified at all. The corpses are also is pieces. They are also close to rotting.

    Then they came to conclusion. The Blood spirit ghoul is not created intentionally, but rather an ident due to these corpses.

    But they question is who is the person who carried out this massacre and why did he do it?

    They didn¡¯t linger on it for much longer and walked towards the city.

    Just like the previous times, they entered the city discreetly and went to a most rundown inn.

    But there a surprise awaited him, actually not only to him, even Jack was surprised because, there was another group of people checking in and they knew these people.

    They are none other than their teammates.

    Philip is the first one to notice them, and he didn¡¯t seem surprised at all. He waved his hands as if meeting here was natural.

    Philip said as he saw their surprised expressions.

    "Do you think you are the only one who canplete the tasks faster? If not for the fact that it took time to travel, we might havee back a long time ago. Almost all the cities only took two days to clear them out.

    I don¡¯t know what you gave to Watt, but the intel gathering took less than a day. And we taking them down didn¡¯t prove to be a challenge at all."

    When Sam heard this, he didn¡¯t even know what to say. But at least he was d. Because, he didn¡¯t find the time to work on ape. He needs to upgradetter¡¯s bloodline, he first thought that he should do that after dealing with the ck water.

    But since, all of them are here, he can use this chance to upgrade thetter¡¯s bloodline while they simultaneously carried out the task. All he has to do was, get involved when the situation turned sideways.

    Sam greeted them and all of the checked into their rooms. Jasmine excitedly talked to Kelly, about how she flew on a Golden bird and how she yed with Ape and panthers.

    After going into his room, Sam immediately entered the second floor of the tower.

    The trouble with unleashing Golden fist ape¡¯s bloodline is a bit troublesome.

    Because, unlike shadow mice with impurities and Sky with partial bloodline, the Golden fist ape is a but different. The Golden ape bloodline ispletely inside the ape.

    But the problem is that 50 percent of the bloodline was under the suppression of the natural seal which is due to the conditions of environment it was born.

    Since, the Golden fist ape of his has around 50 percent bloodline activated, its birth environment must have been above average.

    But unseal this national suppression, he has to work on it. The process itself is notplicated at all, but it is extremely taxing, not only to his body but also his mentality.

    He will mentally exhausted and the recovery time would be quite high.

    He can even recover his body within a day if he cultivated, but the mental exhaustion will take more than that and he needs to cultivate his soul and spirit continuously otherwise, he wouldn¡¯t be able to stay peaceful and he will be extremely sensitive.

    He informed Jack to not to disturb him for the next two to three days and gave away all the other mice he had.

    With ten shadow mice taking action, the investigation will take an exponential leap in speed and might even be finished.

    But before going in Sam listened to City¡¯s situation from Watt.

    The City has recently changed its counts. The son of the previous count who is in Great warrior level 2 just took the position a week ago.

    The rumours are that the old count has gone out to search for further cultivation opportunities as his own son caught up to him.

    Sam didn¡¯t find anything strange, he only warned him to not involve with the count until all the info was obtained and ready to take action.

    He also told him to cooperate with Jack as he managed to clear the previous count city and with the help of ten shadow mice the time will greatly reduce and they can even finish the job in ten days.

    He didn¡¯t bother mentioning the loot as he knew that the loot will be his no matter what. If these guys really the type to y any tricks, he might have gone with Watt alone and left them to fend for themselves.

    Sam sat in the second floor and started grinding the herbs along with some types of beast blood.

    He started painting the runic inscriptions on the floor.

    He took more than ten thousand spirit stones and ced them inside the inscription runes.

    After that, the ape sat inside its designated spot and Sam stood in his designated spot.

    He started channelling the spiritual energy. The energy was forcefully directed towards the beast core of the ape.

    The process has to be done with extreme precision, if it was even a little bit off, the beast would die.

    After the energy entered the beast core, it started channelling itself into all the meridians and all the vital organs.

    Apletely impure looking blood which is almost ck in colour started seeping out of the ape¡¯s body until the fur waspletely covered with it.

    This is the first step.

    The next step is activating thetent bloodline and let it resonate with the active blood line.

    This is the most taxing as Sam has to concentrate to fullest and the process is not a short one, he will be taking more than ten days for this finish.

    Meanwhile, outside world at night after the dinner time of the inn is over, Watt and the remaining teams are sitting inside the dining hall. Because, even the first day of the information is something made them stunned.

    The underworld of the city ispletely controlled by only one gang. Of all the count cities, this might as well be the only count city which has only one big gang.

    They still didn¡¯t know how to feel about this, that is why they gathered here. Only Watt and Jack are a little bit normal. Of course, there is Philip who is always same no matter the situation.

    "We are still going to proceed the same. We will enquire for a small-time member who likes to unt his authority. He would be our lead to rest of our gang." Jack said to the group.

    Their general procedure is to enquire about the smallest gang member and get the required info out of him.

    After all, they will be more informed about the info on territories, contact points and all other stuff. But now that there are no small gangs, they don¡¯t have any choice other than to find a lowest level member.

    But even then, it is not that simple, they just can¡¯t get info out of him by interrogation. Because, once that guy was abducted the remaining gang members will find out sooner orter and they will be more cautious and an unrest this early is not what they desire.

    So, they proceeded to find that loud mouth of a person.

    The next day, when they met for lunch someone has good news and that someone is one of the two siblings assigned to the team.

    From his lead, Watt followed the guy and when they went to a certain area in the slums where the street vendors aremon, they could hear a person¡¯s shouts.

    "Do you know, who I am? How dare you ask me money? I am the member of Alligator gang. I will f.u.c.k.i.n.g thrash your shop if you ask me again? Do you understand?"

    Watt couldn¡¯t help but shake his head. This guy is definitely a new recruit and he definitely not so strong. Otherwise, why would he harass a few vendors in a slum if he all that powerful.

    Watt left after just taking a look. The guy who brought him here, one of the siblings was confused. He never knew how Watt gathered information and he wanted to witness it today.

    He thought that Watt might have some stealth skills or tailing skills in order to get info to that level. But it seemed that he isn¡¯t in luck to see them.

    But he didn¡¯t know that Watt already did his job. He left five shadow mice to follow the guy and they will slowly prate into the gang.

    The remaining five will be directed into the Count mansion to keep a track on the officials as well as Count.

    So, that day Watt made a trip to the street opposite to the count mansion and left the remaining mice.

    Now all they have to do is wait and think on how to use the situation in the gang to their favour.

 Chapter 120: Suspicion

    While Watt and the remaining members are thinking of how to make their moves on the gangs, Sam is struggling inside the tower.

    At this moment he stood there at the spot with his eyes closed. He is sweating profusely that his hair was soaked. He is feeling an intense head-ache as if someone was splitting his head apart.

    The ape is also going through extreme pain. But the pain is all over the body as its blood underwent a transformation.

    Sam is doing his best to hold up. He is at the final step. Only one percent of blood in the ape has to be activated and he would be done with it.

    After more than five hours of struggle, Sam rxed a bit. The stress on his brain and body reduced, he opened his eyes as he watched the ape undergo its final physical transformation.

    The ape¡¯s muscles became smaller but the density increased and its form became closer to humanoid form.

    The posture also became straighter and one can even see the strong muscr outline even when it was covered with the light golden fur.

    When the process was finished, the aura of the apepletely changed. It became more imposing and also more superior.

    Its presence reeked of brutality but that onlysted for a second.

    Sam shifted both of them to the location of garden. The ape immediately went on an eating spree over all the fruits.

    It needs a lot on energy to recover and so do Sam.

    Sam looked at a patch ofnd in water region. The surroundings of thend becamepletely withered and the earth was even corroded.

    That is the ce where the toxic water he collected from the indigo patch was kept.

    Even though, it was surrounded by a formation, it only to prevent it from flowing.

    Inside the formation, the majestic skeleton was left within the pool along with the egg.

    Last time on the sea bed, Sam was unable to examine the skeleton closely to study its features.

    All he did is to identify key parts of the skeletons to identify the species. He nned to look into it after the mission was overpletely and then he will have a lot of time to observe and he can unseal the egg and let it hatch.

    Right now, he is in a pathetic state. He is both physically and mentally exhausted.

    At this moment, he didn¡¯t even have energy to eat.

    Sam came outside and sat in his room cross-legged.

    He took out a formation disc which he made himself and ced it on floor before filling the room with spiritual stones.

    He needs to cultivate for some time to regain his physical strength and mental strength.

    He started devouring the energy from the spirit stones.

    At this moment both Yanwu and Sky also came out of the divine dimension in their smaller forms. When they saw the absorption rate of Sam, they felt that it might be a good time to breakthrough to thete stages of Novice

    After finishing the blood line activation, Sam is like a dried-up sponge, if Yanwu and Sky formed an energy link with him and started sharing his energy, he will take forever to recover.

    So, the best choice is to wait until he is stabilised and then form a link. With the momentum of his absorption, they can achieve a breakthrough.

    But they have to wait for more than a day for Sam to get back in shape.

    Meanwhile, all the remaining teammates are busy. They don¡¯t know what they have to do, when they learned of the city¡¯s situation.

    The crime rate of the city is extremely high, in fact more or less all the illegal businesses are being done quite openly.

    The city guards arezy and they don¡¯t seem to care less about the situation. They are likep dogs of the officials, continuously doing their bidding.

    The officials are even worse. They are even morezy and their only active time is when they collect taxes and embezzle their money.

    The Count himself seemed like a bandit. Because, he is the person who takes the major portion and this news didn¡¯t evene from the shadow mice, all this news came from somemoners they enquired.

    The lives of people here are terrible.

    They even learnt that the previous count, the current Count¡¯s father is also same and they lived same.

    Some people after getting stronger will leave the ce, but themoners don¡¯t have that chance and the cultivators who are strong enough will not be messed with.

    The only people who have better lives are some cultivators who act as mercenaries and hunters who sell their hunt. The external traders will also go through some terrible plight if they want to do business here.

    Only big dogs like Golden horse trading and some other tradingpanies can survive peacefully, even they didn¡¯t have much profit in this god-forsaken city.

    After two days, they still kept on roaming around the city while investigation.

    Sam is still inside the inn, after he recovered his physical state, he became better, but his mental state was still in a mess.

    Yanwu and Sky formed an energy link as well as consciousness link in order to make a breakthrough as well as sooth his mental frustration.

    He didn¡¯t know what is happening with his teammates and didn¡¯t know the situation of the city.

    Because, when the city was in this state, the reason will not be simply theziness of the officials, but also their involvement in the crimes.

    But the teammates failed to think about it. They felt that the shadow mice will bring them the news if and they can confirm it.

    At this moment inside the count mansion, Meeting hall.

    "Father, I am pretty sure that they are candidates from the Special branch."

    A young man said who sat on the seat beside the head seat.

    "Then why do you think they are here?"

    "I heard that they are given a mission, but we don¡¯t know what that mission is." The young man replied.

    If Sam and his teammates saw this young man, they might recognise him. Because, he is also a candidate who participated in the first phase of thepetition and he is also part of the group who surrounded Sam.

    He gave up in the middle and didn¡¯t manage to stay till the first phase ispleted.

    "I stayed back in the marquis city only to learn of their mission, but the details are tightly sealed and no one from my friends made it to the next phase. But I think there is one more person who is missing and he is the leader of this group.

    He is also a rank 5 schr artisan, he has quite a big business in Blue me city. The most famous weapon shop and the most famous restaurant shop are his. He would have a lot of possessions on him." The young man said with a greedy light.

    "Oh, do you have some problem with him?" The middle-aged man who is also count of the city asked. He knew his son too well.

    "You could say that. But I am not lying to you about him, he is really rich" Obviously, he is not willing to swallow the warning Sam gave him. Count cougar thought for a second and looked at another middle-aged man who is standing beside him.

    "Keep an eye on them and find out if that guy is here with them."

    The middle-aged nodded his head and left the ce.

    After the man left, the young man asked.

    "Father, did you find the candidate for your ritual. Time is running out. If you don¡¯t do this early, your cultivation will drop."

    "I didn¡¯t. I am also getting anxious over it. Too bad, even after killing half of the n for that girl, that girl turned out to be not suitable. Damn it, I even risked my life by killing your grandfather just to take over the authority and killed half of the family just to finish thest step. Just thinking about it is making me angry."

    If someone heard this, they might even feel the viciousness of father-son duo as madness and the sharp crazy light inside their eyes didn¡¯t help to give a good impression.

    The middle-aged man who left them already knew what they might be talking about and he didn¡¯t mind that at all.

    He just left the ce like nothing happened.

    At this moment, Watt and the remaining people didn¡¯t know that they were targeted by the Count even before they found a problem with him.

    They are still actively investigating,pletely focussed on their jobs.

    Sam, is stillpletely oblivious to what is happening and is still cultivating. He is trying to break through thete stage of Novice and he is on verge of sess.

 Chapter 121: Abduction

    The next day the whole team are sitting inside a single room of the inn as they are listening to the report Watt is reading after the shadow mice came back.

    At the same time, the simr thing is happening inside the Count meeting hall.

    "They seemed to be investigating about some gangs and illegal businesses. I heard them when they are talking about a person named Sam who seemed to be busy with something inside the inn."

    The middle-aged man who looked was tasked to keep an eye on them was giving his report to the Count and his son.

    "Didn¡¯t you find him at the inn then?"

    "I tried, but the other party ced some kind of formation, it will not only rm the party, it seemed to have some offensive functions as well, so I didn¡¯t probe him further. Itpletely concealed him from my vision and spiritual sense."

    "What, a Peak stage Novice like you, can¡¯t even see through a formation from a person with a cultivation less than you.?"

    "Yes, Master."

    The Count was deep in thought on how to proceed about this, killing all the members crossed his mind, more than once. Because, only he, his son and the servant standing in front of him knew that he is the big-boss of all the crimes.

    If they are really investigating the underground business and it is part of their mission, he can¡¯t let them go at all.

    But the middle-aged man interrupted his thoughts.

    "Master, I have something else to report."

    "Do tell."

    "A youngdy among their team seemed to posses the qualities you are searching for."

    When he said these words, the room was silent for a second before the count became frenzied.

    "What did you say? Are you sure?"

    "Yes, master. She has exact same qualities you mentioned. Her spirit and aura are something different and she seemed to possess the mercury marrow constitution you mentioned."

    When the count heard him, he immediately stood up and said.

    "Immediately bring her here. Try to con her, if not possible use force. But don¡¯t kill anyone openly. We will secretly deal with in dark and nobody of them will be going out of this city alive."

    Count immediately ordered and after the middle-aged man left, he said to his son.

    "Gather every member of the n and gang and be on high alert. We don¡¯t know of they had any power house escorting them. Gather all our members in our family estate and guard the door. I will make the ritual arrangements.

    Even if the girl is not someone who we are looking for, the conflict will already be started. So, we need to prepare to take them down, but if she is really the one and even if the powerhouse did show up. I need an uninterrupted 3 hours with the girl to perform the ritual, you are in charge of it."

    After that both father and son went on their ways.

    At this moment the team members are already done with the report and when they got the news from on of the mice that the Count is suspicious of them, they realised their mistake of being overly active.

    They decided that they will put on an act of being on a vacation. So, they separated and went on to various ces.

    Watt is the only one inside the room with Falck, thinking on how to deal with the situation. He and Jack went overboard with the investigation and somehow their group has been recognised by Count¡¯s son.

    But at this moment a shadow mouse streaked in and when he heard the news on what it is, he waspletely shocked.

    The news is about the peak stage Novice making a move to catch a girl from their group. But Watt didn¡¯t know who that girl is, but he was d that the mouse came as soon as it got the news.

    That person might not have made a move yet.

    But Watt didn¡¯t know where the girls are and he didn¡¯t know whether their target is Kelly or Jasmine.

    He wanted to ask Sam on what to do, but when he opened the door and saw, the ape didn¡¯t let him in at all. He tried to say something and Falck tranted. Ape also gave an answer.

    In short, "Boss is in a critical stage and we cannot disturb."

    Watt didn¡¯t have any choice and came out of the inn, and immediately boarded on Falck.

    Both of them flew in the sky as they made loud noise attracting all the attention. Many people only looked at them with curiosity, but they didn¡¯t care much.

    But the teammates recognised them and followed the duo. Watt was searching for the girls as fast as he can. He finally spotted them at the beach.

    When Wattnded, he was alreadyte, the Peak stage novice already reached the ce and is talking to the twodies.

    He ran towards them as he looked at the frown of their faces, when Kelly made eye contact with him, he signalled to get out of that ce, but before they could react, the middle-aged man reacted and abducted Jasmine.

    When Kelly tried to resist, she was knocked out.

    The middle-aged man was fast as he immediately moved.

    At this moment, their remaining teammates came running.

    "The count sent someone to abduct Jasmine, I got info that he is using her for a ritual. We only have three hours; Boss is in a critical stage of cultivation, inform as soon as possible. Jack let¡¯s go.

    Philip, they are also nning on eliminating them, you lead the rest and stay with Boss, until hees out you have to hold on. If it is possible, we will try to get her back."

    Watt said, he immediately flew on his beast as Jack followed him bynd.

    The rest of them immediately went back to the inn to inform Sam at any moment.

    Watt is really anxious on what is going to happen. He didn¡¯t know, if they can find a loop hole and get Jasmine back, at this moment all he wished was for Sam toe out.

    He didn¡¯t know if Sam can turn the situation around. But he felt that there might be a chance, if he was really here.

    Even though, Watt flew, he mainly did so, to not lose the sight on the abductor and also give Jack a direction.

    They finally stopped outside, the Cougar estate. They saw as the middle-aged man entered the estate and run towards a building deep inside.

    But they didn¡¯t dare go inside, because, there are a lot of people gathering inside the estate and all of them are Novice stage.

    There are a lot of people from the Novice early stage to Novice peak stage.

    When the flow of the people stopped, there seemed to be more than three hundred people. They didn¡¯t know what to do. Sneaking is almost impossible.

    At this exact moment, Sam finally opened his eyes. He is at Level 7 Novice, finally at thete stage.

    If not for his exhausted mental state, the breakthrough would have been easy.

    He stood up and looked at Sky and Yanwu who just opened their eyes, at this moment, the ape came forward and said something, Sam¡¯s expression changed, the happiness on his breakthrough just a moment ago was gone.

    He came out of the room and saw Philip and the rest are running towards him. From their expressions, one could say that they are really d that Sam came out.

    "Thank goodness, you are out." Philip exined the whole situation on how Watt and Jack went after the abductor to get Jasmine and also about the whole ritual.

    His expression grew colder.

    Apart from the anger, there is only one thought in his mind.

    ¡¯Why?¡¯

    This is the only question in his mind.

    In his previous life, Ste was also in same situation, even when he was in top of the world, they still dared to do this.

    Now, when he was still a Rank 5 Artisan, the status, all of it seemed nothing now.

    Even though, Jasmine is not as close as Ste, he is still frustrated.

    The scenario was extremely simr to what happened in his previous life.

    The family heads of those ns in didn¡¯t dare to do anything to him, but their sons, who don¡¯t how dangerous he is dared to do this.

    Now, the situation is almost same. The marquis, who is a lot stronger than him, didn¡¯t even refute him when he tantly went to him mansion and threatened him.

    But here, a count, who isn¡¯t half as strong as the marquis is tantly making his move on a person under his wing.

    Why?

    Why is this happening?

    Even though, he was gued by this, he didn¡¯t stop one second. He took out his hoverboard and moved towards the estate. Yanwu, Sky and ape who are outside, also moved out and started following him.

    His teammates are thest ones to follow him as they were still in daze by Sam¡¯s speed.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop for his teammates, today he is determined to know the answer that is guing his mind. He doesn¡¯t want to let the history repeat again and the same scenario shouldn¡¯t happen in the future as well.

 Chapter 122: Enlightened

    Sam reached the estate in blink of an eye, but he didn¡¯t move inside. Not because, he was afraid of therge crowd, because, he was thinking on how to solve this once and for all. He doesn¡¯t want to face this situation again and again.

    If he wants to do that though, he needs to find the answer to that question.

    That answer will let him know what he iscking, and if knows what he iscking, he is confident enough that he can get that.

    He looked at therge entrance of the estate. He is thinking on how to proceed.

    Watt and Jack came to him and stood behind. They didn¡¯t know what he was thinking and soon even the beasts and the rest if the teammates caught up.

    "Sam."

    Jack called his name.

    "What should I do to avoid this situation again and again? Do I really look like a pushover? This is not even the first time. What should I do to make them think thrice before making a move on people under me?"

    When his teammates heard him, they didn¡¯t know what to say for a second. After a brief silence, Philip is the one who answered.

    "You are not a pushover man, there are many reasons to not to mess with you. You are an expert in more than one profession, you can have an overbearing status in a society, you have great potential, your battle prowess is off the charts, you are so ruthless that you will kill a person just because he cursed you.

    But there is one reason which is offsetting everything and making them move against you and that is theirck of knowledge.

    A normal person and a person with minimum social knowledge will definitely know better than to mess with you, if they know what you are capable of.

    But what if that person doesn¡¯t know? What is that person doesn¡¯t know what you are capable of? What if that person doesn¡¯t know, you are ruthless enough to ughter him for a single curse word?

    Hell, you might even be able to ughter the whole n, but what if they don¡¯t know about it?

    The saying ¡¯Ignorance are fearless¡¯ is not for nothing.

    If you really want to prevent these types of situations, make it known that it is a bad idea.

    Make them know, that you are not one to be messed with. Make it known to the whole world and no one would dare to have these ideas."

    When Philip finished his speech. Sam felt as if he was enlightened.

    He understood now.

    Why did those second-generation young masters make a move on Ste, because even if they knew Sam¡¯s status, they didn¡¯t know the significance of it, because only a select few knew about this as these young masters aren¡¯t qualified toe across that information.

    But that only made them more fearless, if they really knew what he was fully capable of, they might have peed their pants at just the thought of him.

    Now, he understood what he has to do? But he is regretting it now, if he understood this before Ste might have lived.

    He looked at the sky and sighed.

    He is determined now, he will make sure that the past doesn¡¯t repeat itself. Even if a person doesn¡¯t understand why they shouldn¡¯t mess with him, he will still make them known that, it doesn¡¯t matter whether they understand or not. They still shouldn¡¯t mess with him.

    How to do it? Sam didn¡¯t take long to think about it. He stepped forward and stored away his board. Actually, if he used his board and all its functions he installed, he is more than confident on taking on all these guys without much effort at all.

    But that would ruin the whole point. They will think that Sam relied on his gadgets and if they can make him separate from the gadgets, they can think of a way to deal with him. They will keep on finding these kinds of excuses.

    They will still bother him like house flies.

    He took away his feather coat and gave it to Watt, then he took out the ws he made. These are actually iplete ones ording to Sam¡¯s design, but they are pretty much full as all ten nails are present and he can fight with them all the same.

    The only things that arecking are the additional features which he wasn¡¯t able to make due to hisck of materials.

    When they came face to face with all the people gathered, Sam stopped and said to his teammates.

    "Don¡¯t get involved in this, if anyone of these guys tries to escape, just kill them immediately."

    When he said those words, everyone including his teammates were dumbfounded.

    "Jack, I need a favour."

    "What do you want?"

    "Take out your sword and be ready to attack." Jack nodded as soon as heard those words, but Sam¡¯s next words he was dumbfounded.

    "If I try to escape or runaway. Kill me immediately." His words are cold and emotionless as if he was talking about something insignificant. Looking at Jack¡¯s expression, he said. "If you don¡¯t do so and I get to live, I will kill you."

    His words only mean one thing. He is nning to take on all the members himself and if he can¡¯t do so, he would rather die. Even the him who is one verge on losing tries to escape, he doesn¡¯t want to ept that person to be himself. He can¡¯t ept himself to be that person who flees. Sam is determined.

    At this moment, the people from the group also heard Sam¡¯s words.

    Some of them areughing and jeering at him, some of them are looking at him as if he was retarded.

    Someone came forward from the back of the crowd, he is none other that the young master cougar, the son of the Count. He had an arrogant smile as he looked at Sam.

    "If it isn¡¯t the arrogant and powerful Artisan Sam. Aren¡¯t you all powerful, right now your teammate is going to be a tool for my father¡¯s cultivation, try and stop him if you can."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and was waiting for Jack¡¯s answer. When he finally got a nod of acknowledgement from Jack, he turned towards the young master.

    "Why aren¡¯t you speaking? Aren¡¯t you so cool when you are attacking me in that god forsaken ce? Try and make a move now and I promise you I will gouge your heart out."

    Young master Cougar stepped forward from the crowd and another guy who seemed to be in histe stages of Novice also followed him. Otherwise, the young master might not even dare toe forward anyway.

    Sam didn¡¯t look at the young master. But he looked at the other guy who is walking with a sabre his hands. He immediately hacked his sabre in his hands. But before he could cut through Sam,tter moved and threw a Brazilian kick.

    But the difference is this one didn¡¯t hit the temple, rather his foot was directed the kick towards the opponent¡¯s throat.

    The sabre cut the vest Sam is wearing and his upper body became bare.

    The opponent was nailed to the ground, motionless, when everyone saw him, they were dumbfounded. Sam¡¯s toes were pierced deep inside the throat and his who foot was covered in blood, the opponent was dead just like that.

    Sam turned his head towards his teammates and said, "Don¡¯t get involved this fight is mine." Then he turned towards Yanwu, Sky and ape. "Kill anyone who tries to get near my teammates." The three beasts roared in acknowledgment.

    The n members were still in daze, but Sam didn¡¯t care and moved forward. He appeared before the young master and before thetter knew it.

    He caught his neck with his left hand and punched with his right hand on thetter¡¯s heart.

    *Crack* *Crack*

    One could hear the cracks from the bones shattering.

    But he isn¡¯t done, the next moment after he punched, he opened his hands and formed a w. All the sharp edges pierced into the chest of the young master and before he could even cry in pain, the whole palm came outside from the back of him.

    The whole ce became eerily silent.

    *Lub* *Dub* *Lub* *Dub*

    The bloody hand of Sam which went through the opponent¡¯s chest was now holding a beating heart.

    The young master of the Cougar family was dead just like that and the crowd only came to senses now as they thought about the consequences.

    They are in daze since Sam made the first move by killing ate stage novice in a single kick. But in a blink of an eye, before they coulde out of that shock, the young master of the Cougar family is dead right before their eyes and the death was just like what young master described.

    "Gouged the heart out."

 Chapter 123: Symbol 1

    All the cultivators gathered by the Cougar n are looking at the scene. They looked at the Sam¡¯s bloody palm which is holding the heart as it went through the young master¡¯s body.

    Then they looked at Sam¡¯s face. His face was cold, without a single emotion, they didn¡¯t even see anger. He didn¡¯t even have nervousness of facing three hundred of them, he didn¡¯t show any crazed excitement of facing this challenge.

    In both cases, they can ept it. Because, they saw both kinds of people. But now, they are seeing the third kind. The unfazed.

    Sam definitely didn¡¯t have the highest cultivation; he didn¡¯t have many people beside him. He is standing alone, in front of all these people he is looking as if he wasn¡¯t even considering them as a threat.

    Suddenly, they felt nervous. There is a voice in the corner of their minds, to get away from this ce as soon as possible.

    But when they looked at their teammates, they changed their minds immediately. They have strength in numbers and more than ten people have cultivations equal to or higher than Sam.

    While they are saying to themselves that they can win, that seed of fear and that voice are still rming them.

    That is the subconscious of the humans. No matter, how much you deceive yourself, your subconscious knows whether you should be afraid of something.

    Just like how, a person who never seen a tiger will be afraid as soon as he saw one. The instinct can never be deceived. One will be afraid when they see a real threat and a threat is standing in front of them.

    Sam slowly retracted his hand and dropped the heart on the ground. The dead body of the young master also dropped down.

    All the members are hesitating to make a move first. But before they could react, they could see something changing around them.

    The air around them seemed to raise in temperature. They started to sweat profusely. When they looked at Sam, they understood what is causing this.

    Sam¡¯s body is glowing in golden light, the air around him, started to whistle and the temperature is raising continuously.

    Soon, all the grass around Sam started wilting due to heat. Vapours started to emit from the nts.

    Sam is using the fire and wind elements together. When facing arge number of opponents, one has to ce themselves in the most convenient andfortable environment possible and these high speed and high temperature winds might not make all of them disabled but they will find it hard to concentrate.

    Before they could adjust to the new temperature. Sam made the first move which no one anticipated.

    He took out his golden staff and swung it hard at the person who is standing in fore front.

    Even though, the other party reactedte, he still managed to block the attack. But he didn¡¯t feel d at all.

    Because, the tail wind following the staff¡¯s movement was so sharp that it pierced through his chest and left a deep gash.

    At this movement another person was attacking Sam from behind. But he didn¡¯t turn around, instead he still swung his staff at his current opponent and this time, he poked the staff straight into the gash and nailed the staff deep into the person.

    Now, he swung the staff carrying the person and mmed him into the attackering from behind.

    He didn¡¯t stop. He took out the staff and immediately threw it like a javelin towards a person in back. It actually, prated into that person¡¯ mouth as he was chanting and busy making hand signs.

    Everyone was shocked. But they are the only ones who are in daze.

    Sam caught the nearest attacker and immediately broke his hand. The bone pierced and came out of the skin.

    His ws came into work as he tore open the flesh along the bone and pulled it out.

    "Ahhhhhhhhhh..."

    The opponent screamed. But before he could even finish his painful scream, he jabbed the bone directly into the throat making him die.

    He pulled back the bone and then pierced it into another person neck from the side.

    Before he could turn back, Sam was hit with a earthen rock and followed by a fire ball.

    Sam took a step back and looked at small gashes formed on his torso.

    He looked at the mages who are short on numbers but are still hiding at the back of the group.

    Immediately, Sam took out the normal staff he used to have before forging the golden staff.

    He didn¡¯t attack, but started spinning the staff on top of his head as he released the wind energy along with the fire energy, but the fire energy is only used to raise the temperature.

    The wind started circling around him as it created a massive tornado. The group saw his weird actions without doing anything and within two seconds they knew it was a mistake to do so.

    The whole battle field soon became a ce covered with tornado. When they finally tried to make a move, they were being repelled by the wind currents.

    Even the spells they are throwing at them, are being repelled.

    But before they could try any big moves.

    "Tornado style, Harvest." Sam slowly muttered. Then before the disbelieving eyes of all those who are present, the wind current naturepletely changed and became sharp.

    As if targeting the specific people, all the mages in the back became head less. More than forty lives just went away like that. All their heads fell down as blood spurted out.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop and with the increasing momentum, he turned towards the nearest opponent and mmed the staff on his head.

    The head split into two as if it was curt by a sword, but that is not the end of it. All the wind momentum was shot out in a horizontal line,pletely ravaging the ground. All the grass blew away and all the people standing that line were mmed to the ground as the sharp winds, riddled their bodies making the blood spurting from the wounds.

    When all of it was settled down, Sam is standing with a broken staff in his hands, while panting.

    This massive attack, even though made a lot of damage, also took some amount of energy away from him.

    But the opponents thought he might have been exhausted, so they tightened their grips on their weapons. After all, there are not many mages left. Only one or two scattered in between.

    Contrary to their thoughts, Sam wasn¡¯t that exhausted, he can use the surrounding spiritual energy to his liking, so he didn¡¯t use up all of his energy.

    He threw away the piece of staff into a person¡¯s eye and leapt into the group.

    With every kick, he made a person disabled. With every swing, his ws started tearing away the flesh.

    A sabre wielder was about to sneak up on him and leapt towards him from back. But just as he was about tond, a sharp bone was ced in front of his right eye and pierced right through it.

    Sam threw the guy away.

    There are asional gashes on him from the swords and sabres as it is inevitable to get hurt. But he didn¡¯t care at all.

    For every second Sam is killing a person, and the next second, he is taking two lives, and that next second, he is taking three lives. He is like a killing machine.

    Sam just broke a person¡¯s leg and tore the flesh away with the ws. Just as he picked the bone and pierced the person¡¯s heart

    *Roar*

    Arge beast suddenly sprang out from behind the estate. It is a cougar, more precisely, Silver w Cougar.

    "The guardian beast is here."

    "We are saved."

    "we have hope now."

    All the people who are now a little over half of their original number, are suddenly having hope.

    This is the only time, they spoke since the beginning, Sam didn¡¯t even give them a chance to spew their usual threats, he directly leapt into the group reaping lives as if he was drinking water.

    When they saw the beast, they heaved a sigh in relief. But Sam seemed to be unperturbed.

    "Yanwu." He only said a word and only at this time did they remember that there are three more beasts in the scene.

    Yanwu, Sky and Ape moved immediately. Their opponent is at Level 4. But the three of them are atte stage Level 3.

    But their blood lines are not making them afraid. Heck, they might even fight the beast one on one and now there are three.

    The opponents¡¯ nightmare started again. Sam started his harvest again.

    He is like a happy farmer with high enthusiasm harvesting his yield.

    Even the disparity between levels didn¡¯t matter to him anymore.

    Yanwu, Sky and Ape didn¡¯t n to waste their time on the beast. Theymunicated to each other and the ape immediately jumped at the cougar and tackled it. Ape opened the mouth of the cougar.

    At this moment, Yanwu and Sky started circling in the air in an incredible sound.

    Arge ming tornado started forming and when the Cougar was in dead lock with the ape with its mouth wide open, the two legendary bird directed all the tornado and shot towards the beast.

    When the two birds were about tond, the ape stopped its wrestling and jumped back immediately. The ming wind currents mmed into the beast.

    The scene immediately stopped the n members in their tracks. There is a smell of cooked game meat in the air. That¡¯s right the attack almost roasted the cougar alive. Then the group of the beasts went back to their original ces watching Sam¡¯s teammates.

    Sam is going on a killing spree. Every w of his took a life away.

    Within an hour, the number of three hundred reduced to thirty. Sam is standing as he looked at thest thirty people with cold expression. He is panting and was clearly out of breath.

    There are more than forty shes, but none of them are deep at all.

    He didn¡¯t even bother to heal himself as he stepped towards the remaining prey.

    Blood was dripping from his ws. They could even hear the drops hitting the ground.

    "n head. Pleasee and save us."

    "n head."

    "Save us."

    "Save us."

    They started calling for the n leader, but no reply came.

    When they thought of pleading Sam and looked at the corpses he left, they immediately swallowed back the idea of doing this.

    Some of them immediately gritted their teeth and tried to run away, Sam didn¡¯t even bother to follow them and took out the golden crescent.

    As he shot down one of the guys, Yanwu and others went to get the remaining.

    The final ten knelt down and were already sobbing.

    One of them didn¡¯t even have any hope and immediatelymitted suicide. As one of them did so, the remaining didn¡¯t know what to do and followed the first person¡¯s footsteps.

    Sam looked at the corpses and took a step forward. Just as he was about to enter the mansion, a middle-aged man came outside.

    He is none other than the servant who abducted Jasmine.

    When he looked at the sea of corpses, he said with disdain.

    "Pieces of trash."

    Immediately he pulled out a long sword and made his move.

 Chapter 124: Symbol 2

    When the sword was aboutnd on him, Sam raised his left hand and caught the de between his thumb and index finger.

    The ws and the sword de gave a nking sound of metal, but the sh of the spiritual energy buried the small nking.

    Both of the fighters didn¡¯t step back at all. Sam swung his right arm, but the other party blocked it with his sword, but the wind tailing the w, was so sharp and just like before, it made its way to other party¡¯s chest.

    This time, the damage isn¡¯t much but it is still there.

    Soon, both of them exchanged blows, every time, both of them blocked each other¡¯s attacks, but the middle-aged man was taking damage.

    The damage is slowly .u.mting. He started losing blood.

    The middle-aged man suddenly stopped and took the blood with his fingers.

    "You are better than I thought." Middle-aged man looked at Sam and started drawing something on the sword which seemed like some runic inscriptions.

    Then his life force started seeping out of his body and .u.mted into the sword.

    "Master gave me the mission to stop anyone from disturbing him, But from the looks of it I will die if the fight goes one for long run and it seemed that you are also looking for that, i don¡¯t believe you have what it takes to make a powerful move in an instant.

    So, if you take thisst move of mine, I will immediately...."

    *Whoosh* *Whoosh* *Whoosh*

    Before he could finish something whistled over the wind and three deep gashes were made on the middle-aged man¡¯s throat.

    Sam waved his hand and caught three cards in his hands. These are made of normal metals, simr to Watt¡¯s but the only difference is Sam¡¯s signature symbol was imprinted on it.

    Sam wiped the blood on the cards to his pants and stored them away as he looked at the fallen body of the middle-aged man and said.

    "You talk too much in a fight."

    After that, Sam slowly stepped inside the house.

    In the hall, the count is in sitting inside a inscription circle made out of blood and Jasmine was put to sleep andid on the other end of the circle.

    The count is making some chants and asionally a small part of the circle was being lit up. The Count seemed to not notice the new presence and seemed to be too involved in the ritual.

    Sam didn¡¯t care and was moved towards Jasmine. The other party is actually stronger than him and is out of his reach. If he battled him without holding back, he might have a chance, but Jasmine will surely be involved in coteral damage.

    When he was about to step into the circle, he was stopped by some kind of restriction which seemed to be caused by the inscriptions.

    He didn¡¯t have any patience to understand and break the inscription. He ced his hand on the floor and closed his eyes. The floor suddenly turned into powder in the ce near his hand.

    The inscription was forcefully broken and the Count was sent flying as he spurted some blood.

    Sam also took a few steps back to the bacsh, but most of the bacsh was taken by the Count.

    He slowly stood up and walked towards Jasmine. Seeing that she is still in unconscious state, he checked whether there is any other problem and after confirming that there are none, he immediately sent her into the divine dimension.

    He then looked at the Count, who also stood up.

    "How dare youe here? Do you have no ns of living? You should have obediently fled when you got the news that girl is abducted."

    The Count who seemed to taken some serious hit, took wiped the blood on his mouth.

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything, instead he took out some normal swords and started stabbing them around him. Before the count could make sense of the things, more than three formation activated around Sam.

    He took out some diluted indigo water, and started heating it up. The indigo coloured vapour started forming as he forced the gas to stay in the wind sphere.

    Count sensed something is wrong and immediately moved. He also seemed to be a warrior and he took out a sword and attacked the Sam, but the formation stopped the attack.

    Sam just stared nonchntly and drew more and more indigo vapour into the sphere and startedpressing it. As he did so, thepressed gas was now in size of an egg.

    Count continuously attacked and after five blows, Sam the formation broke. But the very moment, Sam immediately threw thepressed gas into the Count¡¯s mouth and immediately jumped back creating a distance.

    The other party immediately tried to move, but he felt something was wrong with his body, when he looked inside with his spiritual sense, he could see his lungs and heart are being spread out with an indigo hue.

    His blood was suddenly filled with strange toxins and his organs are being corroded. He knelt down as his legs grew weak.

    Never did he expect that he would fall for such a trick.

    Sam slowly walked towards him as he saw that his ploy worked. In fact, he doesn¡¯t have much energy left. If he fought directly, he will have very low chance of winning.

    That is the reason, he yed such a trick. The indigo vapor might have seemed like a special attack, but it is a poison, so if the Count has stayed far away and cautious, he might have been able to avoid inhaling it.

    But the over confident Count who saw Sam¡¯s exhausted condition, thought that this is an easy win.

    Sam picked the count up and dragged him outside of the mansion.

    The teammates were stunned, by this time some nobles and other officials also made their way here, all the city guards who are below Novice are also here. When they saw Sam¡¯s state they had goosebumps.

    Even with all the wounds and blood, he walked with his back straight without a hint of pain in his eyes.

    Sam looked around and found his golden staff. He erected the staff in the ground and tied up the Count to it.

    He walked towards all the Corpses and started piling them in front of Count.

    The day is far from over.

    Sam thought it over after what Philip said.

    He has to make it known to the world that he shouldn¡¯t be messed with.

    And he is determined to create a symbol for that message.

    A symbol which will indicate all the others to stay away from him, a symbol which will serve as the warning to others.

    When his teammates offered to help, Sam didn¡¯t agree and did all the work on his own.

    After piling up the corpses, which are more intact, he took out the blood extraction device he made, as well as his forging equipment. He couldn¡¯t care less about his storage capacity being revealed.

    He took out all the equipment that he would be needing and ced them around.

    He started extracting the blood from the corpses and filled the cauldron with it.

    After sometime, all the corpses were free of blood.

    Sam ced his hands inside the blood and started observing as he simultaneously heated it up. Soon, there is a blood red vapour emitting from it.

    But there is a solid forming in the middle, after some time, all the liquid was gone and only a lump of blood coloured solid was the only thing remained inside the cauldron.

    Sam took out the lump and ced it on the anvil. He took out his hammer and started beating it.

    After some red coloured soft textured powder was copsed, a metal nking sound came.

    This is the blood iron. A metal on par with Meteorite sand.

    Sam looked at the big lump of blood iron. He then walked towards the cauldron and cleaned it up, before cing the blood iron inside the cauldron. He ced a hand on it and made it into powder form.

    He started his process.

    Melting the blood iron.

    Making a billet by casting.

    Heating and rolling it into a sheet in rolling process.

    After the sheet is done, Sam divided therge sheet into two, one big and one small one.

    He took the big one and started his forging process. He heated it and started folding it. He is using the Japanese forging technique and he is also making a Japanese de.

    He heated, folded, hammered. The impurities remaining in the blood iron started appearing and .u.mting at one side.

    He removed them and re-forged it again and again.

    Soon, a blood red Katana was formed. Sam ced the dagger, knives and all the auxiliary equipment he made with ck meteorite sand into the cauldron to make two hilts. He fixed one to the Katana de.

    Then he proceeded to the smaller sheet and forged to make a Wakizashi. After fixing the second hilt.

    Sam took out the ck meteorite thread that was remained after making his coat, to make a grip on the hits of the two des.

    After everything was done, Sam took once again heated the des and ced them on the anvil.

    He wore his ws and used his index finger to carve on the de.

    On the katana he wrote ¡¯Executioner¡¯

    On the Wakizashi he wrote ¡¯Reaper¡¯

    Sam held two des towards the Count.

    He shed with the two des with making a cross on his body ending his life.

    "From now on, these two des shall act as that symbol which serves as warning to the whole world. These two des shall be the ones showing to what extent I Sam will go. I would like to see which moron would like to mess with me." Sam muttered.

    Then he walked towards his teammates and let Jasmine out of the dimension. Even though, a lot of them were surprised, they didn¡¯t have any thoughts of asking questions.

    They took her and checked her condition.

    Sam stepped back and sat on the stairs of the mansion. Suddenly, all the exhaustion came on to him and just as he was about to fall backwards, he felt a soft furry thing. He looked up to see the ape rubbing Sam¡¯s head gently.

    Yanwu and Sky came to him and stood on the either side.

    Sam closed his eyes and slept peacefully.

    When the teammates looked at the serious expressions of the beasts and avoided the thoughts of checking on him.

    Just as Hawk was about to seal the news, Philip said.

    "Don¡¯t, let the news spread. In fact, order them to spread the news. I would really want to see who will go against Sam after this incident. This day and this incident will serve as warning to all the world. This world might as well have a glimpse of what Sam can do if he is pissed.

    After all, Sam made all this effort to send a message.

    "A sixteen year old Level 7 Novice, battle against 300 Novices and a Great Warrior and ughtered all of them just because they abducted his teammate." When Philip said these words, the rest of the teammates shivered just by the thought of what would happen if Sam was their enemy

 Chapter 125: Return

    "I am sorry Ste; I should have done this sooner."

    Sam muttered in his sleep as tears streamed down his closed eyes. When he felt something rubbing on his chest, he was dragged out of his dream.

    Sam groggily woke up. When he looked at the surroundings, he saw all the blood, gore and the massacre he created.

    He was out for more than three hours.

    When he moved around, he could feel the soft fur of the ape and the ape¡¯s arm resting on his chest as if trying to console him. It is as if it could feel the sad emotions of Sam and was consoling him.

    Even Yanwu and Sky are rubbing their heads to him.

    Sam quickly took cleared the tear stained face. No matter how much fragile he was, he would never let the world know about it, there are only a select few that can see him in that state and except for these three beasts, nobody in this world is qualified yet.

    Sam stood up. His injuries are already scabbed and his spiritual energy is pretty much restored.

    He healed himself as he simultaneously looked at the grounds. His teammates are standing a bit faraway waiting for him.

    When they saw that he was okay and stood up, their mood also brightened. When Sam fell unconscious, they wanted to check on him, but the three beasts didn¡¯t let theme near him.

    Particrly, the ape is being very protective, even hugging Sam and giving them aggressive looks.

    Actually, the ape really grew closer to Sam after watching him exert himself to that extent when activating the blood line.

    He is the only one who saw how much stress Sam has endured and even though he recovered physically, his mental state is still a bit sensitive.

    That is why, if the teammates really dide and check on him when he is injured, due to his long battle and killing spree, Sam might have attacked instinctively.

    If not for the close feeling and familiar presence of his beasts, which he would trust unconditionally, he would have attacked them also.

    After a moment, Sam looked at the two swords that are ced near his feet, he picked them up and after examining for a bit, stored them away, he has other ns for them.

    His wounds arepletely gone, but the scars are still there. His whole n.a.k.e.d upper body was covered in scars.

    It is not because, he can¡¯t heal them, but rather Sam didn¡¯t like healing his scars. Even in his previous life, when the medical technology can remove the scars, he still kept them. Because, every scar is a reminder to him and it is a lesson from the past.

    Even if one person doesn¡¯t like the past, they should still treasure the lessons it taught them.

    So, with that point in mind, he never removed his scars and he is not going to remove them now.

    He slowly walked towards the exit, right now he doesn¡¯t want to talk. He even left the remaining corpses and his staff ton which the Count was tied just like that.

    He deliberately left the staff in this ce and also left the corpses like that.

    This ce shall be the grave-yard and the staff should be the symbol of this grave-yard he is going leave as reminders.

    Even though, he knew that the people who learnt of this might erase the thoughts, Sam should think of ways to avoid even greater danger.

    At the peak of the society, the people who make the rules of the society but are not bound by them in normal circ.u.mstances, will now have Sam under their radars.

    Being at the top of the pyramid, they didn¡¯t want their positions to be shaken and they want to supress the people who are capable of that.

    Now, they will start to examine whether Sam has that much potential and ambition to do that.

    But Sam do have his ns. All he has to do is make his name known all over the nation and he was sure he can use that and y off of that. And how he can do it... is story for another day.

    Right now, Sam wants to have some peaceful time, so after moving his stiff body a bit, he took his Harbinger and prepared to move.

    "Boss.??

    Just before he could do so, Watt ran up to him and helped him wear his feather coat. Sam just gave him a faint smile and immediately moved; the three beasts immediately followed.

    After a while, Sam noticed that there are no people on the streets and even the beach was empty. Hended on the beach and kept the Harbinger away, before heid down on the sand.

    He looked at the clear sky as he tried to empty his mind. He finally felt some peace.

    But the rest of the city are not at peace and that includes Sam¡¯s teammates.

    Watt being a good subordinate, immediately went to all the dead bodies and collected the spatial rings and weapons.

    When he took away the ring from the corpse of the Count and examined it, he was quite baffled.

    Because, he saw something familiar inside the ring, then he immediately called Jack over and showed him.

    Now, it is Jack¡¯s time to be baffled. Because, what he saw were all familiar cubes of meteorite sand along with the millions of stones and resources.

    This just like a loot from the ck water organisation.

    They started searching the scrolls and when they found some monthly reports, they got some startling information.

    The Cougar family itself is the ck water organisations branch in this city. It started from the previous Count and it seems that the current Count just took the mantle recently.

    Both of them immediately wanted to share the news with Sam, but when they thought of his condition, they abandoned the idea for now.

    The teammates immediately went back to the inn, since Sam was fine and they also have to find a healer to check on Jasmine¡¯s condition who didn¡¯t show any signs of waking up. She seemed to be under the influence of some drug and was still sleeping.

    At the same time, all the big shots in the city were in frenzy, the news even travelled to the Blue me city.

    Even though, themunication tokens have minimal range, some big shots like tower heads of various professions and even the Count and high ranked nobles, and even the Principal of the academy have ways to contact the Marquis city.

    At this moment, they are doing this right now and all the noble families, Chaya, the marquis, the principal of the academy all received the news.

    The Count of Cougar city kidnapped Sam¡¯s teammate for some reason and in retaliation, he went to the estate and single-handedly, ughtered the whole Cougar family and their subordinates and forged two des from their blood iron.

    The marquis had a head ache as he didn¡¯t know what to think of it. The first thought that came to his mind was this is an absolute joke, but when he remembered the cold eyes, emotionless face and the aura of superiority of the young man who even dared to threaten him the lord of a territory right in his own residence, made him think otherwise.

    Two days after the incident, Sam finally interacted with his teammates, Jasmine also woke up a long time ago, but she was still scared.

    When Sam read the whole information from Count¡¯s spatial ring, he was a little bit surprised but it was only a little bit.

    Sam would have been surprised, if the other party doesn¡¯t have anything to do with these shady things.

    After confirming that their mission was over, they immediately started their journey back to the Blue me city.

    The Cougar city is the closest city to the Blue me city. That is why, they kept it asst target, so that they can go back quickly.

    So, they arrived at the Blue me city after five days in the Golden- Horse Tradingpany¡¯s carriage.

    As soon as they arrived at the city, Sam took Jasmine and went to the Artisan tower to meet Chaya, the rest of the group went back to the Mansion which was being maintained by Mackey.

    "Arrange a meeting with Maya." Sam asked as soon as he saw Chaya.

    Chaya was dumbstruck as soon as she saw him. All the upper-echelons in the Blue me city learnt the news. She was shocked when she heard the news and didn¡¯t even know what to think about it.

    Then she remembered the sentence, Sam tyrannically said to her before.

    Measuring his enemy not by the threat they can create to him, rather by the effort he needs to destroy them. She just thought he was a bit arrogant at that time.

    But after learning the incident, she didn¡¯t know what to make of it except for believing it.

    But she understood one thing, a person like Sam, if he is an enemy, he should be killed in one swift move, if he was even given an extra chance they will be doomed.

    After a while, Maya, came to the tower in a hurry.

    Jasmine immediately hugged her and started bawling.

    Sam didn¡¯t see her crying after that incident, she is really putting on a strong front.

    "Withdraw her from the furtherpetitions. She is like a little child and let her live like that doing whatever she loves doing. Don¡¯t ruin her by forcing her in this pit." Sam said in all seriousness.

    At first, the deal between them was only taking care of Jasmine in dire conditions and giving her some advice, but after getting to know her a bit, he couldn¡¯t help but shelter her.

    He didn¡¯t let her do anything at all, because, behind that beautiful woman there is a small child hidden deep.

    Sam looks at the world with calctions and cynicism, the only exception are children, small kids who arepletely innocent.

    Now, even though Jasmine is not a child by age, she is still a child by heart. So, he doesn¡¯t want to let her enter the cruel side of the society.

    "It is not that easy." Chaya said slowly.

    Even though, she didn¡¯t give any exnations, he already has some spections. When he heard from the Marquis the previous time, he already has some thoughts.

    After bidding farewell, Sam went back to his mansion only to be receive the summons from the Marquis.

    Even if the other party hasn¡¯t summoned him, he already has ns to meet him anyway. So, leaving the team alone, he went to the Marquis mansion, but there was Katana hanging on his Waist.

 Chapter 126: Info Exchange

    When Sam reached the Marquis mansion, an attendant was already waiting for him at the entrance who guided him to the meeting room.

    Marquis is the only person sitting in the room with a gloomy expression.

    Sam entered the room and took a seat up on marquis¡¯ gesture.

    "Do you know what you did?

    Just because you are capable, that doesn¡¯t mean you can do things as you like. Do you know what killing a Count means?

    When the news spreads, the other Counts will all be restless."

    Sam didn¡¯t bother to reply and just looked at the Marquis ranting on him with a expressionless face.

    "I don¡¯t know what you think of it. But the fact is as simple as you heard it to be. A person with the support of his family kidnapped a person under my wing, so I went there to take her back. That¡¯s it. That doesn¡¯t have anything to do with his noble title.

    If the other Counts are restless and afraid of it, then I have only one thing to say. Don¡¯t mess with me.??? Sam opened his mouth only after the Marquis calmed down a little.

    Sam ced the Katana on the table, then only Marquis looked at the sword closely. Even though, it was sheathed he can still feel the Bloody aura.

    Sam didn¡¯t seem to care about it and took out a bunch of scrolls and ced them on the table.

    "These are the reports of the mission. There are more than eight months till the mission is over.

    I have two requests. First one, don¡¯t release the info about our missions and seal it as much as you can. At least, don¡¯t let any of the officials and nobility know about it.

    The second one, Eliminate Jasmine in this round."

    When Sam said his first condition the marquis was already surprised and confused, but when he heard the second condition, he was shocked.

    Why would someone eliminate their own teammate and particrly after Sam went through the trouble of creating a massacre just to save her.

    "Why?"

    Sam chuckled at Marquis¡¯ question, this only made him believe that the other party ispletely oblivious to the ck water and the situation of the under ground forces.

    "For the first one, you will understand once you see the reports, as for the second one, i don¡¯t have much reasons, but I can exchange something in return."

    Marquis was clearly surprised that Sam would exchange something with him.

    "What are going to exchange then?"

    "20 million spirit stones."

    Marquis took a deep breath when he heard the number. He didn¡¯t expect that Sam would outright give him a number, this isn¡¯t even an exchange, rather it is more of a bribe. He knew that Sam is rich, but he didn¡¯t think that he can give away that much.

    Of course, the marquis didn¡¯t take a look at the reports, otherwise he would understand that the twenty million is just the loot from one Count city.

    "I don¡¯t need that. I want you to owe me a favour." This time it was Sam¡¯s time to think. But he nodded his head anyway.

    "Sure."

    After that, Sam took his sword and left.

    All the guards and officials who faced him were all looking at the sword. Not because, they heard the news, but because they are surprised by the fierce aura. The Blood scent can even be felt in the air.

    Sam went back to his mansion.

    For the next few days, he didn¡¯t do anything at all, he is waiting for Marquis¡¯ call.

    He is very sure that marquis will call him, because, Sam left something crucial out of the report and that is the info about the ck water organisation.

    From, what he understood about the marquis, he is sure that the other party is a responsible person and if he is also a clever one, he could recognize that there is a gap in the info Sam provided.

    Just as he predicted, the personal attendant of the Marquis came to the mansion after five days.

    That day, in the same meeting room.

    "What is it with all these underground forces, why are all of them simr in operating and has simr businesses? And there are led by great mages, what is it with this report?"

    Marquis is clearly confused, but he was also shocked when he read the report. He knew that there are a lot of underground forces, but he didn¡¯t expect that there is this much of involvement and they have such great power in a single city.

    Sam only smiled and said.

    "You don¡¯t know a lot of things, Sir Marquis, it is not like you have been living at the bottom of the society to learn this, the involvement of these forces is much more than you think and the details in the report are only tip of the iceberg."

    "What do you mean by saying this is a tip of the iceberg?" marquis was stunned.

    Even if having a force as strong as the whole city guard as tip of the iceberg, then what is the wholework of this organisation. He is suddenly afraid.

    "I mean exactly what is said, I can give you information but that is not the part of my job, so I am sorry." He finished his piece and was about leave, when the Marquis stood up immediately.

    "What do you want?" He immediately asked. He knows better than anyone that Sam is not a person who will just divulge info under pressure and in fact he is in a situation where he cannot even pressure him.

    "An equivalent exchange and a simple condition." Sam replied as he sat back.

    "What is the condition?"

    "You will not under any circ.u.mstances reveal this info to your superiors and you will also hide the fact that I am the one who gave you this info."

    Marquis started to think, he is trying to guess why Sam ced such a condition.

    If the info is valuable, the superiors might even give Sam a great reward. But he clearly wants to hide himself keeping a low profile, which is not Sam¡¯s style at all. Then that only means one thing, the info will give him more problems than rewards, if he was known to get involved with this.

    "What do you want in exchange?" marquis asked in a solemn tone.

    "Of course, info for info, then only we can call it an equivalent exchange." At this statement marquis¡¯ face truly became solemn. He has an inkling, what Sam is going to ask.

    But after some thought, he said. "I agree."

    Sam nodded and took out a formation disc. This is actually a rank 3 concealment formation, which he made using special techniques. Only a person above Great realm can get through this.

    After activating the formation, Sam said.

    "You might not believe me, but the three big organisations in the three Count cities are actually part of an even bigger organisation.

    The organisation has branches all over the empire and if my guess is correct, it is much bigger than that." Sam paused for a second before continuing.

    "I am not going to divulge the organisation¡¯s name, but what I can tell you is, in every city they same force as the rulers of that territory of not better than them.

    In every count city, they have a Great mage leading the branch.

    They will have several legal businesses led by their people to have an identity and they are also in charge of all the profitable illegal businesses.

    They will send the profits they earned to their superior branch annually."

    Marquis expression turned gloomy.

    "How is that even possible? If such a powerful force is inside the city, how can they be hidden that deep?

    Even if they have alternate identities how can they hide it from the authorities and the city guards for that long period of time?"

    When Sam heard this, he nearly wanted tough out loud.

    "You truly overestimate your rule. There is more to that the society than that meets your eyes Marquis.

    Do you know that apart from paying taxes more than seventy percent of businesses in the business zone has to pay protection fee?

    Then do you think those people will notin to the city guard about it. If they did, then why are they still in that condition?

    Where do you think those protection fees are going? Who are collecting this?

    I have to say, even though you are one of the responsible persons I have known, you are still uninformed about a lot of things.

    Anyway, what I want to say is, there is a branch of that organisation in Blue me city and that is the head-quarters of all the organisations in the Count cities.

    And they are not even the final organisation, they are also subordinate of much bigger organisation.

    Even more interesting thing is their profits might be even higher than your taxes.

    Every year, not only will they send all those spirit stones, they also collect resources like herbs and ores and send them to their superior organisation."

    When Sam finished saying this, the marquis is already sweating, he didn¡¯t know that there is an organisation right under his nose and has more influence than him.

    At this moment, Sam took out some scrolls, these are the monthly reports he collected.

    When the Marquis skimmed through this, he was even more shocked. But the name of the organisation was torn away from the scroll.

    "Now, your turn." Sam said waking the marquis up from his stupor.

    "What do you want to know?"

    "Thepetition, special branch, what is this about?"

    Marquis took a deep breath, he knew this wasing, but since he made a deal, he has to say it.

    "All these special branches and thepetitions are for an event and that is the 18th birthday of his youngest princess.

    Even though, the info was stated like that, there is one more thing only select few can know and that chain stops at Marquis level.

    Thepetitions and everything held by the empire, but the one who ordered them is someone beyond the emperor. They are the true rulers of the empire.

    We don¡¯t know the exact details on why they are asking to do this, but simply put, they asked us to select the younger people with potential.

    Even though, the tests are designed by the emperor, your names are already sent to them, now your lives are under their protection. Even of you offend the emperor now, he has to shut it and keep silent.

    At the same time, you are all under their radar and quitting thepetition is not your choice anymore.

    Me agreeing to let Jasmine is that I have a valid reason to let her quit and that is her mental state andck ofbat prowess. If not for the pressure due to the ignorance of the Artisan tower, I would have never let her join in."

 Chapter 127: Deal with Marquis

    "As for why those people want these candidates, even I don¡¯t know about that, that level of info is not essible to my level. I think only the emperor knows about."

    When Marquis finished exining this, Sam started thinking of the possible reasons that the behind the scenes ruler might have to collect all the high potential candidates in a same ce. Some of the thoughts are,

    Devouring talent.

    Crippling the nation¡¯s future elites.

    Sending them to a mission only the younger people are allowed.

    Cannon fodder.

    Anyway, to put it simply, Sam¡¯s first chain of thoughts are absolute worst.

    But he didn¡¯t think much as Marquis asked a question.

    "Can you tell me the name of that organisation?"

    Sam shook his head and said. "Absolutely not. By any chance, if you leak that info to your superiors and spill the beans that I am the one who gave you the tip, I would be hunted down by that organisation.

    Even if I am not afraid of them, I am not so free to y a game of chase with them.

    But if you want, we can make a deal, I will give you the info on the Blue me city branch, while you supply the man-power for battle. We can run a joint operation on this, but the same rules as the mission apply, the loot will be mine."

    Marquis immediately became angry. "Can you be any more ck- hearted? from what you said, their ie is more than taxes and you want to devour all of that?"

    "Of course, I want to. Do you really have investigation methods to get the info? You will be blocked right after catching some small fries. I am doing a favour by helping you clean the trash which you can¡¯t see let alone clean it.

    So, obviously whateveres with the trash is mine."

    "Not a chance. Fifty-fifty."

    "I want at least ny percent."

    "That is impossible. If not for the fact that I don¡¯t know the scale of the loot, I wouldn¡¯t have let you swallow all the loot from the Count cities. Now, you even want to get your ws on this? Dream on." Marquis almost shouted on top of his lungs.

    Sam just chuckled and replied.

    "Okay then, that¡¯s your bad. Do you really think that I don¡¯t have ways to take down this organisation?

    I just don¡¯t want to waste my time too much. But on second thoughts, since I have eight months till the mission time, I will make use of it and deal with it. Just wait for my report then.

    I will just take my sweet time and take all the loot. Giving you guys ten percent for doing your job is already me being generous."

    With that statement Sam stood up and was ready to leave.

    "Sixty percent. You get sixty and me forty." Sam didn¡¯t bother to turn around and just kept walking towards the door.

    "Seventy." Still no reaction.

    "Eighty. Not a single percent more." Sam finally stopped and said with a smile.

    "Okay, then. I agree. I will give you the first batch of the info after a week. Till then don¡¯t contact me." He went back to the table and took the formation disc.

    Then only Marquis realized that Sam is not even thinking of leaving, he just wanted to get the bigger share. He felt anger rushing to his head due to the embarrassment.

    He quickly recovered and said to Sam.

    "Technically, your mission is over. So, I will tell you about the next phase."

    Sam¡¯s expression changed immediately. He really is not a fan of these missions and stuff.

    There is one time when Sam even thought that emperor who isn¡¯t even popr in a Marquis city is making use of thesepetitions and letting the candidates do his bidding. After all, what is it with the mission of clearing the underground forces?

    Seeing Sam¡¯s serious expression, marquis chuckled and said.

    "It is not what you think? All you have to do is learn and cultivate. You will be given ess to a tower library and they have insights on various things. So, all you have to do is read them.

    But this mission is notpulsory. You are not going to be forced to read them. That is entirely your choice. But the catch is only twenty members are going to be selected into the next phase. Ten members will be eliminated from the current thirty.

    And your team got lucky, since you all finished this early and also did more work than expected, no one will be eliminated. But since, we made a deal, Jasmine will be withdrawn."

    After confirming the details, Sam left the ce. He still has lot of things to do and one of them is to make a move against the ck water branch in this city.

    Since, this city¡¯s branch is the superior for all the Count city branches under Blue me city, there is a high chance, that the destruction of three branches and Sam¡¯s presence at those branches will make Sam a prime suspect.

    Even if they don¡¯t know about the first two cities, they will definitely think of ways to mess with Sam due to him taking the things from the Cougar family which is also the ck water branch in the Cougar city.

    But Sam didn¡¯t worry too much, because from the scale of operations and influence of the ck water, even if they don¡¯t know the internal details, they could clearly guess the significance of thispetition and fact that Sam is not touchable for now.

    So, Sam has some breathing space and he can plot against them. He cannot possibly let them pass the info to their superiors and have them suspect him too.

    That is the reason he made a deal with Marquis. Even though, he said he has time, in fact he doesn¡¯t. In a few months the year will end and ording to rules of this ck water, the yearly meetings will be held.

    So, the Blue me city branch leader will also have to report to their superior which Sam doesn¡¯t want them do.

    After he came back to the Mansion, Sam sent Watt to slums to enquire about some small-time gangs and leave the shadow mice to track their operations.

    The is actually the best way to proceed. Only the members of the underground will know about the other gangs operating and the best way to get the info is to corner one of them and show them there is no other way to be free other than giving away the info.

    Sam gave the necessary instructions and immediately went to his room where he entered the divine dimension.

    He has something important to do now and that is to examine the poison pool and the hydra skeleton. At the same time, he needs to unseal the egg, so that child coulde out.

    Sam walked towards therge pool of poisonous fluid and stood at the edge. He actually wore that breathing mask to make sure that he isn¡¯t infected by the air around the pool.

    In the centre of the pool, there is arge skeleton and a huge egg with runes.

    Sam was focussed on how to get the skeleton when he is under the sea, that he didn¡¯t get the chance to observe the skeleton.

    He stood on the Harbinger and floated towards the as he watched the humongous structure.

    The hydra has nine snake heads. The vertebrae of those neck are abination of thousands of small joints, Sam couldn¡¯t help but admire the bone structure of the legendary beast.

    The heads even though resembled snakes, they are a lot fiercer.

    Sam took a small dagger and scratched the surface, but the dagger¡¯s tip was chipped.

    He already expected this but he tried to do so to check if there are any auxiliary effects but the weapons aren¡¯t strong enough to check that.

    After admiring the bones, ws and fangs, Sam finally moved towards the pool.

    Sam took out the Katana which is named executioner and unsheathed it.

    He slowly dipped it inside the pool.

    Sam has a hunch that the pool is mostly formed due to the blood of the hydra and got diluted with the sea water.

    If it is really blood, then it there is definitely going to be blood essence.

    When Sam ced the de inside the pool, the poison started corroding the de, but before the effect took ce, the de glowed a little as it started absorbing the blood essence.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but smile.

    Now, he got another card up his sleeves. If he let the Executioner absorb the blood essence of the whole pool, then there might be some interesting abilities added to the de.

    He can use the reaper to collect the blood of his enemies outside and let the executioners develop by collecting the essence of the pool.

    Sam floated towards the center of the pool and ced it vertically with the skeleton as support.

    No matter, how slow it might be, it is still absorbing the blood essence.

    Now, the final task, unsealing the egg.

    Sam walked out of the formation with the egg in tow and went to an open area in the water zone.

    The water zone in the dimension is half earth and half water.

    The water is like argeke, but it is only useful for beasts and Sam can¡¯t use it to his liking.

    Sam took out arge number of formation gs and ced them. He needs a lot of water type spiritual energy.

    And Sam has a lot of water spirit stone from the loot of the three coastal cities.

    He ced the whole lot within the formation.

    After that, Sam pierced his finger with a dagger and drew out some blood. He ced the egg in the center of the formation as he started creating runes over the egg.

    Now, the final step is let the formation activate and let the egg unseal. The process until the egg hatches will bepletely dependent on the formation and the runes he drew.

 Chapter 128: Visit from the Dukedom capital

    Sam stood at a single spot as he controlled the formation. The blood runes he drew started to turn bright and started moving towards the Blood runes drawn by the Hydra.

    Soon, both the runes merged and started circling around the egg with bright light.

    After more than an hour, the runes disappeared with a sh.

    Now, the water spiritual energy will be absorbed by the egg, until it hatches.

    All he has to do is wait and he doesn¡¯t have to wait inside the dimension.

    Sam came out of the dimension and started heading out. Since, it has been around four months, it is about time he collects the profits from the business.

    But there are some guests in waiting for him downstairs. They are Maya and Jasmine.

    They immediately stood up when they saw Saming. Jasmine is still a little unstable due to the trauma.

    So, she isn¡¯t as bright as before when she saw Sam, but she still became a bit better and shown a smile at him.

    Sam returned a smile to her and gestured them to sit.

    "Thank you, Sam, for saving her and taking care of her. Last time I didn¡¯t have a chance to thank you." Maya said in a low voice.

    "Don¡¯t mention it. I already talked to Marquis; she is not going to the next phase of thepetition." Sam isn¡¯t even asking her opinion anymore; he just made the decision. He became even more resolved when he learnt that Maya used the Artisan tower to forcefully ce Jasmine in thepetition.

    After all, one has to think before they take actions. Does every grand thing lead to an opportunity? Maya didn¡¯t even think what type ofpetition it is and what could happen to Jasmine due to her child like personality and sent her to thepetition by pulling some strings.

    He really didn¡¯t like that.

    Jasmine didn¡¯t say anything about it. In fact, she is somewhat relieved. She really didn¡¯t like this tasks and phases.

    "Thank you. I also wanted to talk to him about it."

    Then she took a spatial ring and gave it to him.

    Sam silently kept it without any rejection. If he didn¡¯t do so, Maya might even think Sam has other intentions. At least, Sam would do so, if he were in her shoes.

    Some things are better just left as business.

    After that, Sam left.

    He went to Chaya again and took the earnings. He has made around 7 million spirit stones this time.

    After checking that everything is okay in the shop and the restaurant, Sam had a hearty meal and went back to the Mansion.

    He needs to think of a n to go against the ck water branch because, he is unsure of their strength this time.

    He didn¡¯t know whether the leader of the branch is a person at Grand realm cultivation or realm beyond that.

    From what he knew of the organisation they operate with same power as the authorities in a city. So, there is a possibility there is a person whose cultivation is beyond the Grand realm, which makes his ns a little bit difficult.

    If he nned perfectly, he is confident to take them down and he has more than one way to do that.

    And for the first n, he can use the poison of hydra, as for the second n, he needs to get out of the city and search for something.

    Sam went back to the mansion and entered the yard. Now that he can distinguish the gases from the air, he began practicing in that direction, but this time, he is also trying it with light element. He wants to separate the spectrum of light.

    If he can do so, he can have many uses, even if they are not offensive, he can still use them for many auxiliary purposes.

    So, he went practice in the yard.

    But when he went there, he saw Watt and Jack are already sparring while Philip is leaning against a tree as he looked at the duo sparring.

    Sam noticed that Watt is practicing his closebat, he is not using his cards or his wind des. He is not even using any martial arts, then only Sam remembered that he never gave any hand to handbat techniques to Watt.

    But when he saw Watt¡¯s movements, he was rather amused.

    Watt is using his body very crudely. There are no efficient movements. But he is trying to get his body used to the attacks and trying to find the most efficient movement.

    He wasn¡¯t able to gather enough courage to ask Sam for abat technique, so he is trying his best to fight in his own style.

    The most important thing of all is, he is copying what Sam did. Just like how Sam used the tail winds of an attack to be a sharp de almost making it undefendable, he is also making the tail wind sharp but he wasn¡¯t used to it yet and Jack was able to defend it easily.

    After a few exchanges, Watt was sent flying and then only they noticed Sam standing there.

    "Wow, jack you have guts. Bullying Sam¡¯s subordinate right under his watch. Aren¡¯t you asking for a beating?" Philip immediately said with a mischievous glint in his eyes.

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and just gave Philip a look. Then he turned towards Jack and said.

    ???That is true, you sure have guts, but you are still in Novice initial stages and it would be unfair if I beat you up, So Philip will teach you a lesson on my behalf."

    Philip immediately lost colour from his face. He didn¡¯t expect Sam could make such aeback at him.

    Jack smiled and looked at Philip. He took out his ck meteorite sand and said. "Want to go for a round?"

    Philip wanted to think for an excuse, but Sam cut his train of thoughts with his words.

    "Philip aren¡¯t we friends, I even let you stay in my ce for so long. You should really help me. Otherwise, you will be known as ungrateful and bad friend."

    Philip looked at Sam who kept a straight face all this while. But he is cursing in his mind.

    ¡¯Isn¡¯t shamelessness my thing? When did this all powerful and prideful Sam learn to be this shameless?¡¯

    But what Sam did next, made him grit his teeth even more.

    "Everyonee out, Philip is challenging Jack to a duel." Sam shouted to all the members inside the mansion.

    Soon, Hawk, Kelly, Drew, Ray all came to the yard as they looked with expectations and the main reason is, they never saw Philip fighting properly.

    Even in the Falcon Cliff city, he dealt with his opponents easily and Jack also did same. They are expecting to find a great fight.

    Philip didn¡¯t even know what to do and grudgingly ept the duel. But the result was he was defeated without much of fight. It onlysted ten minutes and all this time, Jack has upper-hand.

    But only two people knew that the actual reality is different.

    Philip deliberately lost. Jack and Sam are the only ones to see this.

    After the duel was over, Philip walked towards Jack and said. "Sorry."

    He is apologising because, he felt that it is greatest disrespect to not to give his all when fighting a person like Jack.

    But he has his reasons.

    He then looked at Sam and said. "Man, you are no fun." Only to get Sam¡¯s sarcastic smile.

    After everything was over, Sam and Watt stayed there.

    "I will give you abat technique tomorrow."

    Watt thanked him and left the yard.

    Sam practiced for the day and at night, he entered the tower to search for thebat technique.

    After a whole night of searching, he finally found one and copied it for Watt.

    Next day after giving the technique, Sam went back to the yard for his practice.

    For the next few days all he did was to practice and after a week, the first report from the shadow mice came.

    They got a hold of the head quarters of the biggest gang in the slums. That is called the Tiger gang.

    The leader is ate-stage Novice, which required Sam to make a move personally.

    Sam started making preparations and also told Jack and Watt to get ready.

    They nned to make a move the next night, but the next morning, Sam received a message from Marquis to visit the mansion and the details werepletely surprising because, someone from the Duke capital came to visit him and he was asked to visit urgently.

    Sam didn¡¯t know what has happened, but he still kept reaper on his waist and went to the Marquis mansion along with Jack.

    When he was near the Marquis mansion, there are many people waiting there pointing fingers at him and his sword as they whispered something.

    Sam guessed that the news about the Cougar family¡¯s massacre was spread.

    His expectation is right and his visit here was also regarding the same thing.

    When Sam entered the meeting room, Marquis was sitting in his chair as another young man who seemed to be around twenty sitting near him.

    Sam sat across that person as Watt stood behind him.

    Sam mainly brought along to broadentter¡¯s horizons as well as to introduce him to the world.

    The young man also has some subordinates who stood behind him and they are eyeing Sam and Watt with contempt since they entered the room.

    Sam didn¡¯t care about them at all as he disregarded their existence and looked at the Marquis with a questioning gaze.

    "Well, Artisan Sam. This is Young master Nichs. The Junior Duke of the Southern star Dukedom."

    "Young master Nichs. This is Artisan Sam. He is not only a Rank 5 Schr Artisan, he also proficient in weapon forging, Tailor artisanship."

    His words seemed more like a suggestion to both parties to act with caution by mentioning their status than an introduction.

    Both young men noticed this but they didn¡¯t seem to care.

 Chapter 129: Nicholas Carton

    Sam and Nichs didn¡¯t greet each other, they just stared at each other.

    Soon, the staring contest turned into a contest of aura.

    Sam immediately recognised the power level of Nichs. A Level 1 Great realm cultivator. But he didn¡¯t back down.

    He might not win a Great realm cultivator in a direct confrontation to subdue him with force, but he has more than one way to kill the other person in the battle. So, there is nothing to fear and back down.

    The auras shed and soon the spiritual energies.

    Sam¡¯s spiritual energy levels are quite high. He might have thrice the amount of a normal Level 7 Novice.

    His energy levels are at least equal to a Peak stage Novice.

    Marquis is gulping nervously as he stared at the two youngsters. This is the first time, he felt so useless being in the position of Marquis. Even in his own mansion, he didn¡¯t dare to stop these guys confrontation.

    He gritted his teeth and cursed inwardly.

    I am already having enough with Sam, now this Nichs came to add to my troubles. If there is a chance, I will trade ces with either of you and let you know how much I am suffering. Why are youngsters so heartless now? Can¡¯t they give me some breathing space?

    After some silent confrontation, Nichs first retracted his aura and said.

    "Well, since Artisan Sam is here, how about we talk over some meal, I heard that Artisan Sam¡¯s restaurant is quite famous for his delicious food. Brad, how about you arrange some food from that restaurant."

    He gestured to one of his subordinates standing beside him.

    The person who named Brad, looked at Sam with a contemptuous look and said.

    "Young master, what kind of delicious food can a restaurant in this city have? I think it wouldn¡¯t be too pleasing to your tongue." At this moment, Nichs gave a look to Brad from which thetter seemed to understand something and looked at Watt.

    "Hey, Kid. I am not too familiar with this city. Since, that restaurant is your boss¡¯, you should no about it. Go get some food to our young master." Brad threw a pouch filled with spirit stones on the table.

    This gesture is not only disrespect to Watt, but also Sam. But Sam didn¡¯t do anything and just sat there looking at Nichs.

    He doesn¡¯t know what is wrong, but he could sense that something is wrong with this Nichs guy. He seemed to be trying to do something he is not familiar with at all. He just couldn¡¯t put his finger on it.

    That is why he stayed silent, to see what is going to happen. But that doesn¡¯t mean Watt should stay silent too.

    "I don¡¯t do things for any Tom D.i.c.k and Harry. I am subordinate of Sam and Sam alone."

    Watt¡¯s words were cold and sharp. Just like how the others looked at him with contempt, he is also looking at them with something and that is Disregard.

    As Sam said previously, he is only subordinate of Sam and he doesn¡¯t have to bow or work for any other person, even if that person is an emperor, much less a Junior Duke.

    Nichs had a change of expression for first time.

    At this moment, Brad erupted in rage and made his move. He is a middle stage Novice at Level 5. Watt is only at Level 3 and is one verge of breaking through to Level 4. But he isn¡¯t least bit intimidated.

    "How dare you disrespect young master?" Brad roared as he swung his fist at Watt. But before his fist could reach Watt¡¯s face,

    *Whoosh*

    The air whistled and Brad felt some sharp pain on the right side of his neck stopping him in his tracks.

    He subconsciously touched the wound and could feel the warm blood. Everyone in the room, except Sam and Watt looked at the wall behind Brad.

    They saw a rectangr metallic card with a ¡¯W¡¯ symbol on it.

    Watt leisurely said, grabbing all of their attention.

    "I already told you. I am subordinate of Sam and Sam alone. My unconditional respect is only for him. As for the rest, they have to obtain it in the form of Exchange."

    *Cough* *Cough*

    Nichs drew his attention to himself and said.

    "Artisan Sam, you sure have one good subordinate." At the same time he gestured Brad to take a step back before turning back to Sam.

    "As for why I am here today is to question you about the massacre of Cougar family."

    Sam didn¡¯t respond, he wants to see, what Nichs clearly after. Seeing Sam¡¯s nonchnt expression, he continued.

    "I am here as Junior Duke to ask you some questions rted to the matter. What is the reason behind your actions?"

    "They kidnapped my teammate."

    "Just because one of them Kidnapped your teammate, you massacre a whole noble family which is present since the start of our empire. Do you have no regard to Empire¡¯s Law?"

    "Law?" Sam asked rather sarcastically.

    "Yes." Sam chuckled at the response and said.

    "Okay, then let us put it this way. I was there on a mission to eliminate all the criminal organisations. The mission is personally approved by the Marquis himself.

    Cougar family was found guilty for kidnapping and assisting in Kidnapping of a member of my team. So, I have executed them with my authority."

    Everyone in the room werepletely stunned. They knew he is just spitting nonsense.

    They only have one thought in mind.

    If you are acting on your authority, why on earth do you have that Blood iron sword with you?

    But nobody said it out loud. Sam can say so, because, the reason valid even if it is a bit farfetched.

    But Why did, Sam say such reason.

    Sam kept his attention full on Nichs since he came to this meeting room.

    The other party seemed to be acting natural, but Sam felt that there is some sort of difort and his actions including the provocations to be a little forced. Even the question about Cougar family wasn¡¯t asked natural.

    His target is clearly a whole different thing and he seemed to only using the Cougar family as an excuse to achieve that. And Sam soon found out what that aim is.

    "Whatever your reason is, you have to make a trip to Dukedom capital to undergo a trial."

    When Sam heard these words, he raised an eyebrow.

    "What if I don¡¯t want to?" Sam asked with a cold voice.

    "Well, we can decide with our fists whether you have toe or not." Nichs immediately stood up. Sam could have sworn that he saw a flicker of excitement in his eyes.

    "Let¡¯s take it outside." Nichs left those words and left the room.

    Marquis was acting as aplete spectator from start to end.

    After a few minutes, inside a training hall of the Marquis mansion.

    Sam and Nichs are facing each other in the ring. As marquis, Watt and Nichs¡¯ two subordinates are being the spectators.

    Nichs took out a long spear and looking at it, Sam unsheathed his sword.

    Even though, he forged the swords long time ago, he didn¡¯t get an opportunity to test his sword. He also wants to see if he got rusty in his sword skills.

    The Blood red de instantly changed the atmosphere.

    They could feel the Bloody stench from the de.

    Nichs smiled and immediately made his move. He lunged forwards as he stabbed towards Sam¡¯s heart.

    Just before it stabbed into his heart,

    *nk*

    Sam blocked the spear tip with the sword¡¯s surface.

    Nichs didn¡¯t seem surprised; he jumped to side and swung the spear.

    *nk* nk* *nk*

    Both of them exchanged blows continuously, but Sam didn¡¯t even move his foot.

    He just stood there as he blocked the spear. He didn¡¯t seem to be serious because, he could feel that Nichs is also not serious.

    Suddenly, Nichs stopped and his face showed a delighted smile. His aurapletely changed all of a sudden and he made his move.

    This time, Sam also moved and didn¡¯t stay passive.

    Two shadows shed on the stage, except Marquis the remaining three couldn¡¯t see anything at all. All they could see is the sh of the sharp metals in the fight.

    But they are not the most surprised ones. Marquis looked at the ring with his mouth open wide.

    He could imagine, Nichs¡¯ speed, since he is a Great Warrior, but he waspletely surprised from Sam¡¯s speed.

    They are on equal footing. At least for now. But if it went on for a while, Sam would lose due to his insufficient reserves.

    When the two candidates came to halt, there aura changedpletely.

    Sam took a stance. He stood sideward as he ced his feet apart. He stretched his left hand and kept his right wrist holding the sword near his face with de being parallel to his left arm.

    The sword tip was directly pointed at Nichs.

    Nichs, also held the spear with his two hands as he pointed it towards Sam.

    Both of them started raising their spiritual energy.

    Sam¡¯s sword started glowing, giving a sharp aura. His whole being seemedpletely changed.

    Nichs¡¯ spear tip has a concentrated spiritual energy which seemed to explode anytime.

    Both of them moved and seemed to disappear from their spot.

    Spectators, could only see and hear some mind-numbing scenes.

    Both the fightersnded on the opposite sides.

    And the half of the stage was crumbled and the remaining half was shed diagonally.

    All they heard was a metal shing sound, arge explosive sound, a sword keen. And finally, they only saw a big cloud of dust.

    When the dust settled, they saw Sam panting a little, but Nichs seemed to be in a better state.

    Nichs kept away his spear and smiled cheerfully as he walked towards Sam with an extended hand.

    "Let me introduce myself. I am Nichs Carton. I have a Nick name Battle Maniac. All that you saw and heard from me is a lie. I have only one reason toe here and that is to have a duel with you."

    His young master demeanour waspletely gone and his smile was even making him look like a fool.

    Sam chuckled at this and sheathed his sword as he shook his hand. Now only he clearly understood what is wrong with Nichs earlier. That guy is clearly pretending and this fool like face is his natural character.

    "Sam."

    "I know, I was quite impressed when you fought with a whole noble family. My hands itched for a battle since I heard about you."

    "Why the pretense then, you could have stated your intention directly?"

    "Well, that approach failed many times. That¡¯s why I wanted to try something new and it seemed to work."

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but shake his head. Nichs¡¯ character gave him a certain nostalgia.

 Chapter 130: Two Goals

    Sam and Watt are sitting beside each other in Sam¡¯s restaurant¡¯s private room. The table was full of food.

    Across them, there are three people who are stuffing their faces as if the food is going to run away.

    "Nick, stop snatching my dishes. Eat yours." Brad who made a move against Watt, yelled angrily.

    He ispletely different from his ¡¯arrogant subordinate¡¯ he was earlier and the thing is he is not a subordinate. The three people are close friends.

    Afterpletely emptying the dishes, then only the three of them stopped.

    "Hah, Sam the food is so delicious and they even have such spiritual energy. Even though it is little, it is still good. Damn it is even more delicious than the food made by the chef of the Duke pce."

    Nichs said as he patted his bloated stomach.

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything and just smiled.

    He didn¡¯t have any aversion towards Nichs and that is very rare, since they just met yesterday.

    The main reason, the people like Nichs are honest and straight forward. He could even find his happiness just by battling all day. One can trust them easily because, they don¡¯t expect much from others and they don¡¯t like to y schemes.

    Even if they want to do something to you, they will do thinks in a straight forward and a proud manner, even if the opponent is many times stronger.

    "Sam, the rumours aren¡¯t untrue, you really are a great fighter, but your cultivation is too low for now to fight an all-out battle, but from your speed, you won¡¯t take long to catch up and then we can battle to our heart¡¯s content." Nichs said with a grin.

    "We will definitely have an all-out battle. But next time, don¡¯t try to y these tricks, you suck at them greatly." Sam said as he looked at that grin.

    "Hahaha, Nick I already told you, this will not work, you didn¡¯t listen at all. See, you are busted." Brad said from the side only to get a p on the back of his head.

    "Anyway, don¡¯t you have anyone to fight with in the Dukedom capital? Why do you have toe all the way here, just to fight with a low-level cultivator?" Sam asked curiously.

    Sam didn¡¯t think, that Dukedom capitalcks fighters. Nichs can fight a person each day without repeating for more than one year.

    Even if there are no youngsters, he could fight with people of different age-groups with same cultivation level.

    "It¡¯s not that he doesn¡¯t want to fight, but nobody dares to. Some are afraid of his status and some are afraid of his strength. He even kicked the assess of the city guards and even the soldiers with same cultivation level as him in the army under the Duke.

    Where do you think, he got the name battle maniac? After he defeated all his peers in the academy, nobody in the city dared to fight him because, his way of fighting like there is no tomorrow is crushing their confidence.

    After that, he went to the army and then to other Dukedom capitals to challenge other Junior Dukes.

    Since, he became an acolyte, he started challenging like crazy and all the nobility started calling him Battle maniac Nick."

    Brad spoke in a single breath; his proud grin was clearly saying that he is bragging about his friend.

    "You sure wrecked some havoc." Sam said as he looked at Nichs¡¯ face.

    "What do you know, once a Junior duke didn¡¯t ept his challenge, so he disguised himself as a bandit and attacked him when he is hunting. He is only a Novice then, his father locked him up in the room and spanked his ass so much that a Level 4 healer was needed to reduce the swelling." Again, Brad went on with rambling.

    This time, Nichs¡¯ face turned ck as he looked at his friend¡¯s face with a very ¡¯kind¡¯ smile.

    "Brad, aren¡¯t you tired of talking?"

    But the poor guy didn¡¯t notice the ¡¯kind smile¡¯ and continued his rambling.

    "When he was about to go and challenge the Princes from the imperial capital, his father threw him in the dungeon."

    "Pfft" Sam couldn¡¯t control it this time. And he is not the only one, Nichs also lost control and kicked Brad. He wasunched through the walls andnded in the hall.

    "You are paying for that." Sam said as he looked at Nichs.

    After Nichs went back to his city, Sam went back to his mansion to get ready to his operation against the small gang.

    At night, three people sneakily left the mansion as they slowly entered the slums.

    Sam didn¡¯t n to deal with the small fries. He directly kept the leader as his target.

    And the target is in his hidden base within the slums.

    Three of them moved towards the most isted and run-down house of the slums. There are no houses or any other settlements near that house and nobody knew why this house is still there, but no one bothered to learn about it.

    Right now, under that house were three floors and within the deepest floors a man is lying on his bed with a n.a.k.e.d woman.

    Sam felt that the situation in this city is even moreplicated than he predicted as even a small-time gang boss is also using an underground hide out.

    There are not many people in the first two floors. The first floor, has some women, who are in a ragged state and the second floor have some guys who are drinking and chattering.

    This small-time boss is in charge of prostitution is the Normal people zone of the City, from the report of shadow mice he learnt that these people kidnap the women from the viges under the marquis territory.

    But Sam was surprised that they don¡¯t have much security, he didn¡¯t think too much though. The Boss of the gang seemed to be confident in the hiding of his base.

    It is indeed so, who would guess that there is a prostitution ring leader staying below a rundown house in slums.

    There aren¡¯t many people inside the hideout, at most there are only ten people but all of them are Novice Late stage.

    But Sam didn¡¯t take it any lightly, he took out the grenades he specially made. At first site, they are just like any calming grenade he made, but these are some upgraded version of that and contain a hint of highly diluted Indigo water. [This is not the Hydra poison in the pool, but the water from the Indigo Patch.]

    There are only two guards in the first floor along with the imprisoned women. So, there are a piece of cake with a sneak attack.

    The women are not in a condition to speak, so they didn¡¯t even make a noise when the guards are knocked out

    Sam let out the shadow mice, who went into the second floor and activated the grenades Sam took out earlier.

    After more than ten minutes, the ten people in the room are having struggle breathing and has their lungs corroding.

    Even though, the corrosion is light.

    Before they could create a big enoughmotion, the trio went in and Started knocking them out.

    After a few minutes, the three of them stealthily entered the third floor where the team leader is busy pleasuring himself.

    But just as they were about to unlock the door.

    "Who is it?"

    The man shouted towards the door. He seemed to be more vignt that Sam thought.

    Sam and the trio didn¡¯t answer and just stayed there.

    Sam looked at the door as he concentrated his spiritual sense which is a lot stronger than the opponent and tried to look for any energy fluctuations inside the door.

    The other party seemed to be a warrior as he quickly dressed up and took a sabre as he walked towards the door.

    Just as he was a few feet away from the door.

    Sam took out a metallic card and immediately threw it.

    The card made a small slit on the door and directly pierced into the opponent. The gang leader, was taken aback as he looked at the card pierced into his shoulder.

    "Now."

    As soon as Sam shouted, three of them entered the room.

    Jack and Watt attacked the woman, while Sam directly swung his sword taking advantage of the distraction.

    The leader hurriedly blocked the attack but due to his ill preparation, the sword cut through the sabre and left a deep sh on his chest.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop and took advantage of the situation and took a small ss capsule.

    He snapped an edge and immediately threw the liquid at the leader¡¯s wound.

    "AHHHHH."

    Everything happened in a swift second and the leader immediately felt something corroding his wounded flesh.

    Sam ced the sword on his neck and said.

    "All, I need is some answers and I will let you go. If not, I will dispose you and find another target."

    Jack and Watt also came and stood beside him.

    "I will answer. I will answer."

    And soon, Sam started asking his questions and the leader answered them hurriedly, because he could sense that something is wrong with his wound and the bleeding is also not stopping.

    After an hour, Sam left with Jack and Watt. But all the gangsters are killed.

    After all, if they left them alone, they will be only inviting problems.

    Sam has a puzzled expression on his face.

    Because, from what the leader said, there are no big gangs in the city. All the territories are divided and the most important thing is, he is not even the boss of this business.

    The Boss is someone else and what was even more shocking is he doesn¡¯t even know who that person is and what he looks like. All he said was that person wore a mask which couldn¡¯t be seen through at all.

    They only met at single ce every month, in the base and even his subordinates don¡¯t know about this.

    In conclusion, the leader doesn¡¯t have any contact with the rest of gangs because, there is a strict rule that no two gangs should meet and have any conflicts and these rules are set by a hidden expert from the Normal zones.

    These Hidden experts are called Lords and there are Four lords in the city.

    The Normal people zone Lord.

    The Rich people zone lord

    The Noble zone Lord and

    The Business zone lord

    So, Sam has two goals, one is to meet this Hidden boss of this gang and the Lord of the zone.

 Chapter 131: Zoi termite

    Sam left the shadow mice in the hiding ce. His only lead right now is that hidden boss who wille to this ce to check on the situation and he would most probablye alone.

    So, Sam gave instructions so that they will follow the people who came alone and if they can identify someone suspicious, they can notify him.

    If they miss to tail that guy, they have to work from the start by targeting another small gang.

    Sam went back to the mansion. He went into deep thought.

    The situation of the Blue me city is suspicious than he thought and it is moreplicated.

    The most annoying thing is that the two different gangs doesn¡¯t even have much contact. There are no direct enemy gangs, shing businesses. All the illegal businesses arepletely and systematically divided.

    The city waspletely divided by the small gangs and there seemed to be no big influence from the surface.

    But this made the situation even more fishy. How are they staying so disciplined? Who are these lords? Are they together or not? Are they individually working or working under someone? Where is ck water inside all this mess?

    These questions are bugging him. But Sam has a feeling that it is going to be a hared job to go against these forces.

    Next day, Sam went to meet the Marquis first thing in the morning. After telling him the situation, Marquis¡¯ expression turned sour.

    He wished that Sam¡¯s assumption of having the underground forces in his city might be wrong. But never did he expect that there are so many and so deeply hidden.

    "So, how are we going to proceed?" Even though the situation is not what he wished for, he really wanted, he still sucked it up and thought forward.

    After all, cleaning this up is more important.

    Sam thought for a bit and said.

    "I want you to personally contact the low-level city guards, who are responsible for patrols in all zones.

    Contact them one at a time and do so as discreetly as possible.

    Ask them if there are any officials giving them orders to ignore a specific ce in any zone during patrols or ordered them to ignore any suspicious person.

    No matter, how insignificant it might be, note everything down. Details about which officials, his exact words, the ce or person they wanted to ignore. Everything. Tell them that you would guarantee their safety.

    Record all the details and don¡¯t let anyone know about this.

    You do this personally."

    "Why?"

    "Do you really think, that this big of awork is running without anyone knowing? At least one official will be corrupt and might know a thing or two.

    Oh, almost forgot. Don¡¯t leak the mission details to anyone of your officials and keep it a secret that I am working on the Blue me city from the remaining participants.

    I might go out of the city for a while, so you finish the task within a month."

    After that Sam went back to the mansion and informed Watt and Jack about his departure.

    "You guys better catch up faster. Or you will be left in dust." Sam said giving them a blow mentally and left the ce after having a happy meal in his restaurant.

    Sam moved on his harbinger and moved towards the Falcon Cliff city.

    After half a day of travel, Sam finally reached the ce he wanted to go.

    The Insect canyon. His target is the Zoi termite queen. He wants to tame the Zoi termite queen and he can use these termites to do a lot of things for him.

    Even though, these Zoi termites are quite superior, they are quite inferior to the blood line of Sam¡¯spanions.

    Sam has some cards, to bargain with the Zoi termite queen, which seemed to be a Level 4 Beast on same level as a Great realm cultivator.

    Last time, he is only a beginner Novice, so he immediately fled the ce. This time though, he has raised his strength and there are some things he prepared before-hand.

    But there is one thing that has to happen, if he wants to do all this. That is the queen must ept talking to him. Otherwise, all the ns will go to waste.

    So, Sam collected the grass which hinders these termites and started taking those juices out and applied all over skin, before slowly entering the canyon on the harbinger.

    When he reached the spot where he saw the Queen termite, Sam started sending his spiritual sense and soon the foot ball sized queen came into his view and he carefully probed into it.

    {Human, you better get lost before I get angry}

    A husky female voice entered his mind.

    "Well, you might want to listen to me before sending me off."

    {I have nothing to talk to a creature from a Greedy race like yours}

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but shake his head. Even the insects are despising humans. He wondered what would those people who alwayspare weaklings to insects think about it if they knew this.

    He shook his thoughts off from his head and started releasing his beastly auras. These might help him to make a conversation and his guess was correct.

    {What is this aura? This doesn¡¯t seem like the one that belongs to humans. What are you exactly?} This time the voice wasced with curiosity.

    "Well, I am human at least partially. So, can we talk now?"

    {What do you want to talk about?}

    "Nothing, I just want to make a deal."

    {A deal? With you? I will never make a deal with a human. You lot or just too greedy}

    This time Sam almost cursed. Just how deep is this insect¡¯s resentment towards humans.

    "Can you at least listen to me?"

    {Talk}

    "How about you follow me from now on? We will have a mutual rtionship. I will give you and your children, the required food and also improve your bloodline and you have to work for me."

    {You? Providing food for us? Boy you are dreaming. Do you know how much food we need and how many children I have?}

    "Judging from your aura, you are a Level 4 and your whole colony will consist of a maximum of 5000 termites and among them most of them are normal soldiers at Level 1 and a 500 of them might be level 2 and 100 of them might be Level 3.

    Do you really think that you can survive in this small canyon?

    The stray beasts might keep you from starving and survival albeit barely. But can you really guarantee that you will be able to advance further. Here I am giving you chance."

    {How do you know about all these?}

    "Does it really matter? I said I will give you a chance."

    {How can I trust you? I don¡¯t trust humans.}

    "Do you trust beasts then?" Sam said as he waved his hand. Yanwu and Sky came out immediately.

    "I don¡¯t know if you know about these beasts. But Zoi termites are one of the oldest races and you might have heard them from your seniors. Three legged golden sun crow and Sky sovereign roc."

    {They are just your pets; I don¡¯t trust them} The husky voice trembled a bit. Maybe due to surprise or from the bloodline pressure of two superior races.

    "A correction. They are not my pets, they are mypanions, my friends. Think about it. I can unleash the true potential of your bloodline. You and your children can grow faster. I can give you all the food you want. Think carefully."

    Sam finished his piece and immediately left the ce.

    He went back into the forest without wasting his time here. For he has confidence that he can move the termite queen. He better focus on make some preparations on the food needed for these termites.

    So, Sam is going to search for some herbs or nts which grow rapidly as well as find some beasts which will reproduce rapidly.

    He can create a farm inside the Divine dimension.

    So, Sam along with his beasts went on a hunt over the nearby forests.

    His first target is the herbs. While, Yanwu and Sky concentrate on beasts. Ape is left to gather some fruit tree.

    The search waspletely fruitless for that day.

    So, he made a camp and took a carefree sleep.

    The next day early morning, he went to the nearby stream to see if he can catch something and he found something really interesting and that is a Boar.

    Boars and pigs reproduce faster and also the number of offspring is also quite high.

    But he has to find thatrge boar a partner and he needs to make it submit with force without making a contract. Otherwise, it would be painful making eating them.

    The Boar was a low level one, so that is not much of a problem. After that was caught Sam started searching for the tracks of the boar to reach its stay. He might find that partner there.

    {Please read the Creators thought, an announcement is there about mass release}

 Chapter 132: Chapter

    When Sam reached the boar¡¯s ce, he didn¡¯t find any other boars, it seemed to be roaming alone. He cleaned up the ce which has some herbs and left the ce. He kept on searching and searching.

    Finally, he found something that made him a little delighted and those are Spring fowls. These fowls look like a crossing between chicken and a pigeon. With chicken¡¯s body and pigeon head.

    Their size is also simr to a chicken. But the most important thing is that they are delicious to eat and they can be easily reared. They feed on worms, bugs, seeds, grass, grain, flowers. They don¡¯t even need beasts with spiritual energy to grow.

    But most people don¡¯t want to rear them, because their reproduction rate is quite high.

    For Sam though, this is exactly what he needs. These Spring fowls will not only be able to provide food for termites, they can also be used as a good food if they are properly reared.

    If these spring fowls are reared with water and food full of spiritual energy, their meat will be quite a bit of tonic food and it is mostly used for purification and revitalisation of blood and they can also be helpful in mending the internal injuries.

    But due to the ignorance of the most people, they don¡¯t know that rearing these will bring these many benefits and they only see their effort and hardbour required.

    This is a big opportunity to Sam though. He knew exactly how to rear and what to feed them to get these benefits. And he never thought that he would find them here and they seem to be only level 1.

    Sam immediately went on a spree. These spring fowls due to lowbat power roam in flocks and they can¡¯t fly much.

    So, Sam startedbing the area. These fowls can grow faster if they have good food, but with theirbat power they are lucky to get normal grass and earth worms.

    Sam couldn¡¯t hide his grin. He caught more than twenty fowls, a total of ten pairs of male and female.

    Even though, it will take time to grow them, he can still provide food from normal hunt to the termites until the fowls increase in number.

    The only disadvantage of these fowls are they can only grow until they are Level 5 and are only beneficial to those under Grand realm cultivation. Only they can see substantial benefits.

    As for those beyond that they can only see this is a delicacy.

    After catching the fowls and cing them inside the dimension, Sam went on to search for anything else and soon, he found something. It is a rank 2 herb which helps in making some spiritual energy recovery potion or pills.

    Just as he was about to pluck it, someone shouted from behind.

    "Hey, kid. You better leave that herb right there."

    Sam turned over and he saw a group of three people walking towards him. All of them are in Initial Novice stages.

    He didn¡¯t even put them in eyes and immediately stored the herb.

    The youth in the middle seemed to get angry.

    "How dare you? Attack him."

    He immediately gave an order to his two subordinates to attack, but Sam released his aura of Late stage Novice which halted them in their tracks.

    When they saw Sam¡¯s hostile look, the youth was frightened and when Sam walked towards him ,he became even more frantic and took a few steps backward.

    "Don¡¯te near me. You can¡¯t get away with it, if you do something to me. Do you know who my father is?"

    Then only Sam observed them and saw that these robes are of Pharmaceutical tower, he didn¡¯t know which city they are from, but judging from that guys words, he might be son of a high- level person in Pharmaceutical tower.

    Sam doesn¡¯t like these guys who throw away their father¡¯s names and get away with anything, these are also a type of young masters and these are worst kind.

    So, he got an idea and said.

    "I know who your father is." Sam¡¯s voice was a bit sarcastic.

    But the youth got puzzled, if Sam really knew his father then he wouldn¡¯t have that hostile look. ¡¯Maybe he mistook me for his enemy¡¯s son.¡¯ That youth thought and for confirmation he asked.

    "Who do you think my father is?"

    But Sam¡¯s response made him speechless.

    Sam made a surprised and shocked expression and said.

    "Poor child, you don¡¯t even know who your father is? Didn¡¯t your mother tell you that?"

    The youth didn¡¯t know what to say as his face became red, he gritted his teeth and shouted.

    "I am asking for confirmation. If you really know my father or not."

    "Confirmation? Why are so confused about your own father to ask a stranger like me for confirmation?"

    The youth got angry and embarrassed, he knew that Sam is ying with him, but the fact that he couldn¡¯t do anything about it is making him even more frustrated.

    He swallowed his anger and asked.

    "Do you know my father or not?"

    "Nope."

    "Then why did you say you know him."

    "Well, at first I thought I know him, but after you said even you need to confirm who your father is, how would I know whether he is your father or not."

    Getting yed by Sam, the youth almost cursed his eighteen generations.

    Sam smirked at the expression of this guy and just left on his harbinger. This is just a small interlude. He has a lot of things to do anyway.

    With Sam¡¯s harbinger, he is very fast as he collected a lot of herbs and trees and hunted some small beasts.

    After some thorough search, he found some bulb (Vegetables that grow in roots of a nt like Carrot, potato etc.) type vegetables.

    These vegetables are like carrots but the texture is a little different. He saw many small animal tracks which seemed to belong to rabbits and rats.

    For the next few days, Sam searched for these small beasts which grow easily and won¡¯t take much time.

    Particrly, the red-tailed rabbits which taste great are a lot in this forest. Sam never thought that this area is full of these weaker animals and there seemed to be a lot of them. He caught more than fifty rabbits in the next week.

    He will create a farm area inside the divine dimension and the beasts will take care of the rest.

    With Yanwu, Sky and Ape present, things would be quite easy for him to manage them. After all, they would disy absolute obedience with the pressure of these bloodlines.

    After this week, Sam went back into the insect canyon to talk with the Queen termite.

    "So, do you agree or not?"

    {Human, what is your name?}

    "Sam."

    {Sam, why are you offering this deal to me?}

    "It is simple. I need your help in doing somethings, because you along with your children make it easier for me.

    But I can¡¯t just take advantage of you right? That is why this deal.

    We will benefit mutually.

    For you guys, growth will stagnate as you grow in level and don¡¯t have enough food. But if you move leisurely and eat as you like, you will be a target of many opponents. Even though, you guys are formidable, you cannot take too many opponents.

    You have to reach a guy first and bite him. But if you face an opponent who is too strong, you will die.

    Why be so farfetched? If the people really knew enough info about you, they might have already taken you down."

    Sam¡¯s voice carried a hint of provocation.

    {Since, you know enough info, you think that you can take me down?}

    "It¡¯s easy. Do you want to give it a try?"

    {Why not? Since you want to make a deal, prove that you deserve it.}

    As soon as the queen finished saying these words, Sam could sense a swarm of insectsing out. These are not Zoi termites, rather they are the remaining insects who are under Zoi termite¡¯s care.

    Sam could see, more than three types of locust species. And even their queens which seemed to be at Level 3 came out.

    Sam smirked as he saw the situation.

    Suddenly, his ck coat was glowing gold. He activated the golden crow feathers using his blood line energy. He didn??t release the aura to pressure the insects, rather he surrounded himself directly with the golden mes.

    The Golden glow of the coat and the golden mes emitting from him, gave him aplete ethereal look. He is as bright as golden sun.

    The locusts who swarmed against him started burning and dropped as ashes. But there is a bunch of locusts that endured fire, they are immune to fire but not to a major extent.

    When they reached the core of the mes, which is Sam they too burned to death,

    {Your me is good. But how long can youst with that spiritual energy.}

    "you don¡¯t have to bother about that, I have my ways."

    As soon as he said that Sam floated a little higher on harbinger. He just moved his feet a little, and small rectangr openings appeared on the sides of the board.

    There are even some holes under the board.

    "See, how I am going tost long enough."

    With these words, a high-pressured red coloured gas was sprayed out of these holes forcefully and Sam threw a small me into the gas.

    The gas immediately caught fire. And the fire is Blue in colour.

    Sam started controlling the board as he hovered above the canyon. The blue mes started burning intensely burning the locusts.

    Only the queens of the locust swarms were immune to the fire and when they were about to make a move, Sam threw a Golden fire ball at them. Even though, they were able to take one or two hits, they weren¡¯t able to withstand this barrage of them.

    The Canyon waspletely covered with the Blue mes in between Sam stood with his Golden mes creating a fantasy painting.

 Chapter 133: Hatching

    The red colour gas is actually the methane he prepared from the faeces of the zing earth bull, he doesn¡¯t know why the gas came out red in colour but everything else was normal about gas except the colour and it became more explosive than normal methane.

    If not for Sam forcing the gas in high pressure and it was ignited when it was stationary it has high tendency to explode with a pop.

    He can even use it to make explosives. He already nned to do so.

    {Enough}

    The queen Zoi termite immediately shouted when she saw that the situation is going south. All the locusts backed down and even Sam stopped the gas flow and restrained the fire around him.

    {I agree.} The Queen immediately said after the battle stopped.

    Sam smiled.

    "Okay then, since we reached a deal,e out with all your children, I will take you away."

    As soon as Sam finished his words the Zoi termite which is in the size of a football came out.

    And followed by it around five thousand white termites starteding out of the hole.

    {I have another request.} The Queen termite said in a solemn voice.

    Sam looked at with a questioning gaze, indicating it to continue.

    {Let the rest of the insects here, follow you, you have to treat them the same as you do me, in the same way, they will help you just like I do.}

    He didn¡¯t think much, because, the Zoi termites only feed on spiritual energy from the living beings, even though their saliva drains the life force of the body, before it decays the remaining locusts and other insects can easily feed on them.

    He can find many uses for them in his ns anyway, so he readily agreed.

    With a wave of his hand, Sam sent them to the neutral zone inside the dimension and when he peeked inside, he could see that the termites started digging the soil. They already started making their new home.

    The remaining locusts also strated finding the ce for their stay.

    Sam finished everything and recalled Yanwu, Sky and the ape back. After they reunited, he started his journey back to the Marquis city.

    The journey is smooth and fast.

    By the time, Sam entered the city, Watt and Jack are already waiting for him with some news about the hidden boss of the gang.

    Apparently they located the hidden boss with the help of the shadow mice. But the identity is making them hesitate to act, so they waited for Sam toe.

    "What happened?"

    Sam asked as soon as they entered his study. He could see that they are troubled about something.

    "Shadow mice located the hidden boss, but we are not sure how to proceed further."

    "Why?"

    "That guy is actually a young-master of a Noble family."

    Sam raised an eyebrow, even though some nobles dabbling in illegal businesses, the core members will not directlye forward and interfere directly, if by any chance they were found out, they will have a hard time getting rid of the me.

    "He is from the Stone heart family; he is ate stage novice and is twenty-four years old. He didn¡¯t participate in thepetition as he was one of possible heirs of the family.

    From the past few days there are very few people who came to the Hide out, and over all of them this is the guy whose face waspletely concealed.

    Apparently, this Stone heart family runs all the entertainment houses which are mainly focussed on the Gambling, alcohol and some massage services, theatres, Dance Courtesan houses etc. There is even one legal brothel, under them except not many people knows of it."

    Wattpleted the report.

    Sam wasn¡¯t surprised when he heard that there is a legal brothel, even though he didn¡¯t see one he couldn¡¯t say he didn¡¯t expect one.

    From the info he got, the prostitution is not illegal as long as it is not forced, but not anyone can get permission for that.

    In fact, there is even legal trade ve in this time, but those are only for the war ves. The captured soldiers or the nobility of the other empires are sold as war ves and mostly only nobility can afford them.

    Sam went into deep thought. A noble family in a Marquis city is no joke, they are as strong as a Count city. There are around six noble families including the Marquis¡¯ Blue me family in this city.

    Out of the remaining five families, the Stone heart family head is the strongest with the family head being the early stage Grand realm Warrior. To be more urate he is the Level 1 Grand Realm warrior just three Levels below the Marquis himself.

    But the family head is not the strongest, rather the current family head¡¯s predecessor, who is also same generation as the Previous Marquis is the strongest of the family who might be as strong as the Marquis if not stronger.

    But nobody knows, whether the old family head is within the family or is roaming around. Not only him, all the current family heads are of same generation as the Marquis and the previous generation heads are ying behind the scenes.

    That is why, it is quite difficult to mess with the Noble families and now their target is a possible heir of the family head position of a noble family.

    Things would getplicated, if anyone found out even a small connection after they acted.

    After some thought, Sam asked.

    "His daily routine?"

    "He trains in the wilderness everyday from morning to afternoon, from afternoon to evening, he doesn¡¯te out of his estate at all. Every evening, he goes to stroll around to check any of their family¡¯s businesses, he seemed to pick that choice in random.

    He will eat a sumptuous meal every night.

    He cultivates the whole night, in his mansion. He has two guards who always stay with him.

    He doesn¡¯t mingle with the young masters much. He lives in and simply. He doesn¡¯t even have maids or other servants. The meal is the only materialistic thing he desires and he always eats a lot.

    He used to get this meal from the Zeke¡¯s restaurant, but from the past two days, he was getting the meal from your restaurant."

    When Sam heard this, he started thinking again.

    "Monitor his movements for the next week, check it if he is having any connection with other people, use shadow mice, and you act personally as well.

    Check if he is behaving strangely in any particr instance."

    Sam gave out his instructions. Watt and Jack immediately went out.

    After some thinking, Sam locked the door and entered the dimension. By this time, the termites and locusts are already adjusting to the new home. In fact, many of them are feeling happy as the dimension is full of spiritual energy.

    Sam went towards the ape and gave it some instructions.

    The ape started digging a huge circr pit. He is making preparations for his future business.

    Sam slowly walked towards the Hydra Egg. The Egg came to the final stage of hatching and it would be done in a few hours.

    He nned his trip properly to make sure that he would be back in the city before the egg hatches.

    After waiting for more than three hours, Sam saw small cracks forming on the egg within the formation.

    He could see the egg crumbling bit by bit and a small snake head popped out of the hole.

    Within a few seconds, the whole being came out and Sam could see the hydra with nine heads, dog hind, talons for the fore limbs, dragon tail but all of them in a miniature form.

    The nine snake heads were slithering and looking around curiously.

    Sam didn¡¯t walk towards the beast. He just stood there and looked at it.

    After some time, the small hydra looked at Sam and all its nine heads looked at him and immediately the small creature clumsily walked towards him.

    It took some time to get used to its body and the hydra finally came to his feet after some struggle and great effort.

    It nudged its centre head to his legs as if asking him to carry him.

    Sam gently picked the baby which is the size of a four-year-old kid and looked at it with a smile.

    The Creature snuggled into him as if he was the most familiar thing and safest thing to it.

    This is due to the unsealing.

    Since, Sam used his blood to make the runes, the hydra is familiar with his presence. This is the method the imprisoned hydra used to make sure that the baby will get along with the person who hatched the egg.

    Sam closely observed the baby. It is mostly white in color with purple patterns on the back of its heads.

    The purple patterns started from their eyes to the back of the heads, spine and ended at the tail.

    After checking the gender Sam found out that it is a girl and Sam started thinking hard about what he should name her.

    After all, this genius is an absolute dumbass in naming.

 Chapter 134: Mia

    Sam thought for a bit and tried to think of an appropriate name, after some thought, he still doesn¡¯t know what would be appropriate for a hydra which might possibly be a variant in future.

    After some consideration, Sam decided to name it Mia. Not because he thought it is appropriate, but he came to a conclusion because he knew that he would never be able to decide whether any name would be appropriate or not.

    And to justify himself Sam said. "As Shakespeare said, what is there in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet and no matter what you are named you will still be the strongest hydra who stays forever by my said. So, your name is Mia."

    Sam patted the heads of her as he said this. Mia seemed to be happy as it snuggled even morefortably.

    Even though, Sam liked this he has another problem at hand now and that is to improve the hydra quickly.

    Many people might think that the off-spring of the immortal beasts will be of higher-level, but they only have a greater potential, other than that they also start as the Level 0 beasts.

    But that is the problem. Sam is already at the Late stage Novice, If he needs to make a contract with Mia when he reaches the Great realm, he would have to wait till it grows to the peak of the Level 3.

    There is actually a way to make a contract even if the beast was of lower level, this also helps Mia to grow faster. The growth rate will be incredibly fast due to sharing the spiritual energy of his and the remaining beasts.

    But the problem with this method is, with his current power level, if he doesn¡¯t control the contract well, when he is connected to the beast of lower level, the beast might have side effects.

    Even after the contract is sessful, he would have to be extremely carefully control sharing the spiritual energy so that Mia could digest it properly, if there are any mishaps, the consequences will be dire.

    So, he didn¡¯t dare do that.

    Then he thought of the pool of Hydra¡¯s blood.

    He is still thinking why the Hydra left the pool of blood. From the formation, it would have been converted into energy just like the hydra¡¯s flesh if the beast itself, doesn¡¯t forcefully expel the blood from the body.

    Sam carried Mia to the pool of the hydra blood.

    When he entered the formation with the breathing device, he saw the Executioner sword in the middle of the pool.

    It was ced there with the skeleton as support.

    Sam observed some changes in the sword, even though he didn¡¯t examine it up close, he can still see that the Blood iron seemed to improve in its grade.

    He still didn¡¯t take it out, there is still a lot of room for improvement for it within the pool.

    At this moment, he sensed a little unrest in his hands and when he looked down at Mia, she is looked at the pool with all her heads still and all eyes focusing on the pool.

    She seemed to sense some familiarity.

    Sam slowly ced her down and she slowly walked towards the edge of the pool.

    She curiously ced his front limbs inside the pool.

    Her eyes brightened immediately and swiftly jumped into the pool. Sam was anxious for a second, and only after he saw Mia popping her heads out, did he rx.

    Mia swam around the pool slowly, after sometime it became more familiar and started swimming.

    Sam sensed that something is happening to Mia and he started using his observation ability.

    He could sense that spiritual energy from the blood is being transformed to Mia aster absorbed it quickly and from the look of things she didn¡¯t even know that she is absorbing.

    Sam came out of the pool and asked Yanwu on the situation.

    "Well, actually beasts of our level grow rapidly. I was deliberately left with Level 1 cultivation in order to assist you. Otherwise all the beasts grow in the infant stage by absorbing the spiritual energy from their mother.

    Now, Mia should also be doing that."

    Sam wasn¡¯t surprised as he already thought this might be the case, he even has some doubts on Yanwu¡¯s cultivation, but he refrained himself from asking. Now he knew that Yanwu was deliberately supressed, Sam is confused.

    The questions in his mind about Ling Tian and his actions of giving these many privileges is already confusing. Now that he knew that the Ling Tian forbade a Mythical beast for fifteen years to not to improve was something even more confusing. Why go to that extent to support a person?

    All he need is only on answer. Purpose. What is the purpose of all this?

    Even if he is beaten to death, he wouldn¡¯t believe that Ling Tian is doing this to really give him a chance to reach his potential. There is something brewing behind the scenes, which he waspletely oblivious about.

    Sam checked up on Mia again and left the dimension.

    He needs to think of the future ns.

    Even though, his business is going quite well, he has to move out of this city soon and he has to think on how to expand in the future.

    Once, he enters the Dukedom capital, he has to have some more products that only he can manufacture.

    As the economy is greater there, he can make use of it and milk them dry as much as he can and earn his pockets full.

    After all, hispanions are growing and he needs to find a way to feed them all.

    Even though, he is making ns to make a farm, he needs to find a way until the farm is grown to a considerable size.

    Until then, all he has to do is throw his money to buy the food. And the money is one thing he didn¡¯tck for now and he has to make sure that it stays that way even in the distant future.

    Before think about the future n, Sam went to his restaurant. He gave Mackey some instructions and after sometime, a waiter went out and ced a board on the street.

    "All types of beasts, carcasses, flesh, innards will be bought here. No matter how much damaged the beast is, you cane here and we will buy."

    When onlookers read the board, they were surprised.

    The damaged beast meat and carcasses are generally avoided and are really hard to sell, so the hunters will just eat them when they are still in the wild or they would abandon them directly.

    "Why are you looking for damaged beasts, don¡¯t tell me you guys are going to ce them in your menu."

    A customer asked. Then the rest of the customers also became doubtful.

    Waiter shook his head and said.

    "This restaurant is owned by a Rank 5 Artisan; it would be a damage to his honour if we sell damaged beast meat. The meat is for culinary practice of new chefs. We can¡¯t use the intact and best parts for their regr practice, right?"

    This is the excuse Mackey thought of to avoid raising negative opinions.

    But from Sam¡¯s instructions, they still have to train a batch of new chefs from his team. He didn¡¯t get the reason why, but he only has to follow the orders.

    After solving the food problem of the new batch of the locust, Sam went on a stroll in the Business zone.

    He walked towards the entertainment street where most of the businesses were under the Stone heart family.

    When he was near a gambling house, Sam saw three people walking out from it.

    The two people who seemed to be in his subordinates are walking behind him. The man in the centre who seemed to be nearing histe twenties was walking with hands behind his back.

    His face was serene and peaceful, but Sam could sense the aura around him was a bit different. He looked peaceful but from Sam¡¯s perspective and instinct it seemed more like emotionlessness rather than the peace.

    He seemed detached as if he doesn¡¯t belong in the ce and everything around him ispletely disregarded.

    The disregard is not like how Sam expressed. Sam¡¯s disregard to anything will happen only if he deems the thing unworthy of his attention.

    But this person¡¯s disregard feels like, he shouldn¡¯t be regarding anything, as if he shouldn¡¯t ce his attention on everything. It seemed a little forced.

    Sam observed all these things in one nce, this is his experience in meeting all kinds of people.

    Sam read about many things in his past life to learn as much as he can. The more difficult the topic is to understand, the more effort he gave and the more proficient he became and out of all things he read, the most things are People.

    Their emotions, their expressions everything is too difficult toprehend that we don¡¯t even know whether their expressions and words are really what they wanted to express.

    Some people are two faced, some three faced, some people with many faces that one couldn¡¯t count.

    Sam was most afraid of these types of people and to ovee this, he learnt how to read people.

    So, if he can catch a person in his most normal state, he can deduce a lot of information. And from the info he got from this person, he deduced his identity.

    Young master Stone-heart.

 Chapter 135: Interrogation

    Sam didn¡¯t meet with the Young master Stone heart. He just observed the other party for some time and went on his own way.

    He just wants to wait it out and see the investigation reports on this guy and then decide on what to do next.

    After a week, when he got the report, Sam decided on what to do.

    This guy has been meeting someone secretly in his private house.

    To that house, there is no ess to anyone except him and his two guards. But from what Shadow mice brought back, a person came to this private house stealthily and he seemed to be highly respected by the Young master.

    They talked about some cultivation, and then the main point. The destruction of the Hide out. They seemed to be investigating to get some leads on who is responsible to this but to no avail.

    Now that their suspicions are confirmed, Sam only has one thing to do.

    One of the shadow mice already followed the man who visited the young master on that night and they only have to wait for a report on who that guy is.

    Sam has to make a n to get this Young master, without anyone knowing at all. Even if there is a single clue left, he will be left with only two options.

    One is to run and two is to massacre another family again.

    So, it would be better to make sure that there are no clues left.

    After some brain storming, Sam got an idea.

    He immediately left the mansion and went to his restaurant to meet Mackey.

    After they entered a private room, Sam ced a formation and discussed for some time.

    Sam went back to his mansion and patiently waited for the nightfall to make his move.

    At this same moment, the young master stone heart is in his Private house and is watching the table full of Piping hot delicious food.

    After admiring the aroma of the food, he started drooling and slowly savoured the food. He felt that there is something new about the food, but it is even more tasty. He gobbled on all the food and without him even knowing, he fell unconscious on the table, with his mouth still open.

    The security guards didn¡¯t know what is happening inside, because Young master ced concealment formations. After all, this ce is the meeting ce for him and that Elder, so he didn¡¯t want to take any risks and the formation was ced there.

    After a few moments of silence in the room, a ck shadow entered slowly and when the shadow stayed still one could see a small blue coloured crystal.

    Sam emerged into the room out of the crystal and without waiting for much, he immediately picked the young master and threw him inside the divine dimension, he looked around and cleaned the remaining food before disappearing.

    The shadow vanished as discreetly as it appeared.

    Sam used the same technique he used when he attacked the ck pond in the Falcon Cliff city. Then he just used this to attack, and now he used this to kidnap someone.

    He just employed a simple tactic. Since, Young master Stone heart is buying food from his restaurant, he used the drugs he got from the Red coral city¡¯s ck water branch. He stored them in case he can find some use from it.

    So, he rigged the food with the drug and the dose was quite heavy. Since, he doesn¡¯t want any mishap to happen, he used high dosage which will knock out the guy senseless.

    Now that kidnapping ispleted, Sam didn¡¯t have to worry about him getting his required info.

    After sometime, within the Divine dimension. Sam ced a ne on Young master who is still soundly asleep and tied him up to a chair.

    This is ne is a restriction made of inscriptions to seal off one¡¯s cultivation. Even though, it is lowest of the ones and Sam could only make one at Rank 2 with his current cultivation, he used the quantity to make up for quality.

    Ate stage Novice, who is strong enough can counter this restriction if he made some effort, so Sam made more than ten restrictions and formed a small Inscription array of the restrictions on that Ne. Making the victim¡¯s effort useless.

    Now, Sam is thinking of something else. Should he bring Jack and Watt inside for the investigation or not.

    After some thought, he came to the decision to bring them in.

    He could trust Watt. Because, the silver meteorite sand products are the final test he gave him. Anyone who is not loyal and was only here for benefits, would have been tempted by those expensive and rare metals.

    There is another possibility that is Watt might be trying to squeeze even more, but Sam didn¡¯t think so. What could a normal fifteen-year-old who doesn¡¯t know the world know. Unlike some orphans, who are envious of the worldly pleasures, Watt was detached by them and was drowning himself with his self-pity.

    As for Jack, he already knew that Sam has some device which could store living beings, if he wanted to betray him, he already had his chance.

    As for interrogating the Young master in the mansion, Sam didn¡¯t dare to do so.

    If the Elder that has connection with the young master, realize that he was kidnapped and started searching, there would be trouble if he is too powerful and spiritual sense could reach the hidden rooms in the mansion.

    Right now, Sam is ying the Marquis city, a big field with lot of stronger figures than himself, he has to make sure he didn¡¯t leave a thread of doubt or suspicion.

    That night, Sam called Watt and Jack to his study room. He asked them to rx and with a wave of his hands, both of them were transferred into the divine dimension.

    When they looked at the massive tower and various vast elemental zones, they were dumb struck. They never expected that there is something of this scale in Sam¡¯s possession.

    Then they spotted the young master who was tied up to a chair.

    Sam deliberately left him in this open area, to create a mysterious feeling.

    He didn¡¯t wait for Watt and Jack to savour the surprise; he just walked towards the Young master and pushed some powder down his throat.

    This is the antidote of the drug.

    When The young master stone heart opened his eyes, he was dumbstruck with the view before him, he looked around to see that there are a lot of different types of herbs and trees nted.

    Before he could make sense of somethings, Sam pped him on his face to get him out of his shock and said.

    "Young master Stone heart. I don¡¯t know if you know me, I am Sam, a Rank 5 Artisan, these two are Jack and Watt.

    We are the ones who destroyed your prostitution den."

    When the young master heard these words, his face immediately changed, his expressions wereced with surprise. He didn¡¯t know what to think of the situation.

    After getting over his shock, he came to one conclusion. His involvement waspromised. Nobody knew he was the person behind the prostitution den other than four people. But it seemed like his secret was out.

    "What do you want?" He asked, trying his best to show a calm front.

    "Information."

    "You don¡¯t have to try. I am not telling you."

    "You do know, that your life is in your hands, right?"

    "I am going to die anyway. Why should I give you what you want then?" Samughed at these words, it has been a long time, since heard such words.

    Sam gestured his hands and a bunch a locust came flying.

    "What you said is right? But I would like to see, if you will say the same thing after a few seconds."

    He waved his hand and the insects moved. towards the Young master and started gnawing their way into his feet.

    Young master¡¯s expression changedpletely. His face became pale and he started sweating profusely. His feet started bleeding and he can feel his meat being eaten bit by bit by the insects.

    After sometime, the insects seemed to be full, they came out of the feet and went back to the group.

    But after that, another group of insects came.

    Sam smiled yfully and asked.

    "Do you want to go another round?"

    Young master shook his head repeatedly. He started spilling the beans as soon as Sam asked.

    Jack and Watt still didn¡¯te out of the shock from seeing the dimension. But they had yet another shock when they saw Sam¡¯s method of interrogation.

    They know he could be ruthless, particrly Jack who saw him tearing the noble children apart in the Starwood city.

    But he never thought, that Sam would do things this way. Letting a person feel his flesh eaten while he is awake, just the thought itself gave them goose-bumps.

    After the required information was obtained. Sam turned around walked away along with the duo before saying.

    "Queen, he is all yours."

    As soon as he said those words, all of them saw a huge white insecting out of the ground and crawled over the Young master¡¯s body.

    "Nooo,

    NOOOOO..."

    The young master started screaming with his eyes opened wide. Queen took a bit at the neck and sucked all the spiritual energy until his spiritual core cracked.

    Young master visibly aged right at the spot. His life force dwindled as his face and skin wrinkled and his hair started turning white.

    But before the transformation couldplete, a swarm of insects came over and cleaned the flesh off. Within a minute only bones were left on the chair.

 Chapter 136: Major Hiccup

    Sam came out of the dimension with Jack and Watt. The duo is still in disbelief.

    They didn¡¯t know what to think of what they saw in the dimension. They never expected that Sam could possess a swarm of those insects which could eat a person clean to his bones.

    All this while, Sam didn¡¯t even look back, he is thinking about the information he got out of the Young master.

    The information is nothing short of overwhelming. Even though, Jack and Watt are also overwhelmed but that is due to their visit to the dimension. The information shocked them but not more than the experience.

    After taking some time to calm themselves down, the trio took a seat in Sam¡¯s study.

    They had to process the info they got and think of ways to proceed further.

    First thought Sam had when he heard the situation of underground forces is a "Well-hidden."

    From what the Young master Stone heart said, there are a total of four people in every zone of these cities with same position as himself. That means in themoner zone, there are three more hidden bosses other than the Young master himself.

    All four of them are under the orders of the Lord of their respective zones.

    From what young master knew, these four lords are working together and there is a possible chance that they are working for someone.

    The most important thing is these four lords are at least at Late stage Great realm cultivation and the hidden bosses working under them have Late stage Novice cultivations at least. There are even early stage Great realm cultivators in noble zone.

    The main problem is that, Young master Stone heart only knew the identities of the people in charge of the Commoner zone.

    So, if Sam took action, the remaining three zones would be on high alert. That makes thingsplicated.

    First, he has to gather info on the remaining three zones candidates as well.

    On that thought, all ten shadow mice are on constant duty and out of them four followed the Elder who is in charge of the Young master Stone heart, the remaining six went to the different zones to find at least one hidden boss.

    After all, he has the identities of the hidden bosses of the Commoner zone with him.

    The month passed just like that and the shadow mice barely got an identity of a hidden boss.

    But they still weren¡¯t able to get the identities of the remaining hidden bosses due to theirck of number.

    Even though, he could use the zoi termites, their intelligence to clearly identify a person will only be activated when they are at least Level 3, but their size will gather a lot of attention inside a city.

    If it was a forest, he would have happily utilised the zoi termites.

    Watt and Jack are practically living on the streets for the past months trying to find out the hide outs, but there seemed to be too well hidden. There seemed to be thinking that they are being targeted after they noticed the destruction of the Prostitution den and the missing of Stone heart.

    While, Sam is thinking on how to get unearth these people, a message from Marquis came.

    When he visited the marquis mansion, the high and righteous Marquis has a face full of worry and anger.

    The report Sam asked seemed to be ready.

    When both of them sat down, Marquis passed a list of names containing the officials and also the ces they protected and one of the ces happened to be the Prostitution den.

    But the ces didn¡¯t seem to tally much. Because, from what Young master stone heart said, there are four different businesses in each zone and there are total of sixteen hide outs. But the list absolutely showing twenty hideouts.

    To search them all, Sam didn¡¯t have enough shadow mice. The four which left to tail the Elder are still on the same duty. The remaining lords are yet to make an appearance.

    Sam also shared the info he got with the Marquis and thetter almost coughed blood in exasperation.

    There are already more than ten officials who are corrupted, but now that he knew that there are more hidden bosses and when he learnt the few identities Sam traced, he couldn¡¯t contain his anger.

    Almost half of the nobility was corrupted. Even if the whole family might not have involved, some core members have direct participation.

    When Sam learnt of their names, he didn¡¯t know what to think of it. This empire has one of the most corrupt systems Sam has ever seen.

    He didn¡¯t know what the emperor is doing at all.

    "What should we do?" Marquis asked.

    "I have to know how strong the most powerful person in that organisation is to decide on how to proceed."

    "What do you mean? Aren¡¯t there four Lords the bosses? Are you suspecting that there is even more powerful person behind the scenes?"

    Sam nodded his head. Because, in all the cities, ck water has always matched the power of the ruling authority. Since, the old Marquis is the strongest one, Sam couldn¡¯t help but think that ck water must have that strong person acting.

    Just as he was thinking, the attendant came and gave Marquis a message and that is the second team also came back.

    Marquis led Sam to arger meeting room where the second team are waiting, this team is full of nobles of the Marquis city and some of the sons of Counts.

    They seemed to be tired and exhausted and when they saw Sam, their looks changed. They worked their assess off, by splitting up and doing the investigations.

    But still, Sam defeated them.

    Marquis took the reports and all they could see is that his brows are furrowed and there is an obvious disappointment in his eyes.

    "How did you gather the intel?" Marquis asked and someone answered immediately.

    "Lord Marquis, your second son Luther provided the intel, we don¡¯t know what method he used, but he seemed to already has certain understanding of various cities and viges under your territory. He will definitely be a great official in future."

    The one who answered was a girl who is a daughter of Count. Her eyes are filled with obvious admiration. She seemed to want to highlight Luther in front of his father and get noticed by him.

    But Sam noticed something different at this moment.

    When the girl said that Luther is the one provided intel, Sam looked at him subconsciously, only to see thattter has a flicker of anger and anxiousness forming.

    It felt like Luther doesn¡¯t want this credit. Zeke and Blue fire are also looking at their brother with excitement, but they didn¡¯t notice that flicker.

    Marquis dismissed everyone of them and led Sam back to the private room. Until night, they discussed on how to go against this ck water.

    At night, their discussion stopped because some messages came. One of them is from the attendant to the Marquis and another one is from a shadow mouse.

    Both messages were equally surprising.

    "The next phase of the examination is cancelled. Duke sent a message that the next stage will be beginning earlier, and all the candidates who passed the assessment shall report to the Dukedom capital in the next month."

    Sam was stunned, that means that the initial one year phase has been reduced to six months and thest phase has beenpletely eliminated.

    From what Marquis said before, there are going to be twenty candidates who will be promoted and only two teams came.

    "I shall inform the remaining team toe back immediately." Marquis said.

    But Sam stopped paying attention to him. Because, he just listened to the message of the shadow mouse and that message gave him chills.

    The four lords and their boss, all gathered their subordinates and are hosting a meeting right now, in an underground facility of the nearby woods. But that news would have made Sam excited because, all shadow mice would have gathered there and the intel would be with him in no time.

    The problem the next statement of the shadow mice.

    {Watt is captured.}

    When he heard this, he immediately stood up. But he didn¡¯t react immediately.

    "Sam, what happened?" Marquis asked. But got no reply.

    At this moment, Sam is thinking hard.

    ¡¯What happened? How did Watt got captured?¡¯

    He kept on asking himself. In one day all the situation changed.

    These past few days, the underground forces are underplete lock down. Sam barely got any info even with the shadow mice involved. Even yesterday, he didn¡¯t have any info.

    But in one day, the situation was changed, what brought this change? What happened exactly? What changed in this one day? This is the biggest hup he faced in his ns after he was reborn

    Sam closed his eyes and thought of all possibilities, it has been a long, long time since he used his brain to his maximum capacity.

    After a strange silence of around five minutes, Sam opened his eyes as a dangerous thought surfaced his mind.

    "Where is your second son?" He asked the Marquis and thetter asked his attendants.

    "He is in his quarters."

    "Lead the way." Sam said without hesitation.

    "But Why?"

    "Will tell youter, it is urgent." Both of them moved, but when they entered the quarters Luther is not there. When they asked the servants, they only said one thing.

    "Young master went inside and didn¡¯te out since morning."

    Sam suddenly had an understanding.

    "I will contact you when needed. I have to leave now."

    Sam said and without waiting for Marquis¡¯ reply, he disappeared on the harbinger apanied with his shadow mouse. He arrived at the mansion and immediately called Jack over before going to his study.

    At the same moment. In a deserted area of the woods, under the surface there was a huge cave illuminated dimly like a horror setting.

    An old man is sitting in arge chair. Many people are standing on either side of the room and all of them are wearing some masks, within the room, there are five people who arepletely injured and are on verge of death while a person is already dead.

    The cause of these deaths was a person who is in centre of the room.

    Watt was tied up, to a stone chair. In actuality, the chair has a lot of inscriptions which are restricting his cultivation.

    His face has a lot of bruises and a cut was formed on his right eyebrow from where the blood is leaking and even fell on Watt¡¯s coat.

    He has minimumbat power, but his eyes are unyielding and ferocious. He doesn¡¯t look like a person who was injured at all.

    That is the reason the old man didn¡¯t let anyone remove the coat and rings on Watt¡¯s hands.

    They caught him with great difficulty and if they gave away a moment of gap to take those items away and untie him, he will definitely take at least three lives along with him.

    "Are you going to tell me or not?" The Old man asked a question which he has probably repeated many times.

 Chapter 137: Leave this place and you might have a chance to live

    The Old man has burly physique with robust appearance. He has a think beard and moustache.

    His clothes aren¡¯t that expensive either. He is just like any other ordinary old man.

    "You have great talent to be at your cultivation at this age, your battle prowess is also great." The Old man looked at the five half- dead and the dead body in the corner. He continued after that brief pause.

    "Why don¡¯t you tell me what I need and I will let you join us. Even though, we keep low profile, since you took part in defeating those Count city organisations you should know our strengths.

    Just tell me who your boss is.

    Who is Sam working under and who is targeting ck water?"

    That¡¯s right, the old man is the in charge of the ck water organisation in this city and he is the guy who Sam wished he wasn¡¯t present in this city.

    The secret boss who is in the same level as the Old Marquis, a mage in the stage beyond the Grand Realm cultivation. A Nascent mage. (A/N We will talk about this cultivation stageter.)

    Watt looked at the old man and remaining core members with a condescending gaze. He is looking at them with obvious disdain.

    For the past hour, he was tortured and healed many times, his legs were broken, his eyes were poked, he was yed, he was stabbed. But they were unable to get a single word out of his mouth.

    The surroundings of his chair covered by his skin and blood. His face became pale.

    Watt spat out some saliva mixed with blood. These injuries are from the recent beatings.

    "Old man, I don¡¯t have any info for you but I can give you an advice."

    The Old man raised an eyebrow. These are the first words that Watt spoke after all this time; he was tortured. His interest was immediately piqued.

    "What would that be?"

    "If you leave this ce at this moment, you might have a chance to live. Within few minutes, you will all be dead."

    Everyone was stunned by his words.

    A prisoner, no less a Novice with his cultivation restricted, tortured, healed and tortured again is not giving his information rather giving a warning and to a person who is hundreds or even thousands of times stronger than him.

    "Hahahahahahahah....."

    Everyone couldn¡¯t help burst outughing and even Old man chuckled before saying sarcastically.

    "Do tell me, who is going to kill me?"

    "You will know soon enough."

    "Do you know what you are going to know, that is to keep your mouth on hold and think before you speak." He looked at a young man near Watt who is holding a dagger and said coldly.

    "y his face."

    The atmosphere changed immediately. ying ones face is cruellest torture and particrly when ones cultivation is restricted. If his mental state copsed, he can at least faint, but this Watt guy never even fainted.

    The young man with a dagger moved forward and slowly started ying Watt¡¯s face. Blood started dripping on his clothes.

    Skin is dropping on the floor. Scene is too much for even these criminals.

    But what made them afraid is not the blood and skin, rather Watt¡¯s expression.

    Under that pain and blood, he is not even blinking his eyes, there is not even a single hint of pain in his eyes.

    Those eyes, are just like before. Focused, proud, arrogant, ferocious, cold like a Falcon. He is looking at the old man without even a flinch.

    There are 31 people in this room apart from Watt.

    The Old man

    Four Grand realm cultivators

    16 Great realm cultivators

    10 Novice cultivators and out of them six Novices are taken down by Watt.

    If a normal Novice was surrounded by this force, he would definitely spill all the beans without even torture.

    But Watt is looking them dead in the eye while his face is being yed.

    He is like an inhumane figure devoid of feelings and emotions.

    All the members in the room are suddenly feeling nervous.

    At this exact moment, a shadow mouse is moving in its shadow state in high speed.

    When the shadow entered the underground cave through the secret entrance and blended in the shadows of the people, Sam activated his perception as he looked at the scene.

    He looked at the half-yed face of Watt whose eyes are still glowing ferociously.

    Sam suddenly felt his tremble. He didn¡¯t expect Watt¡¯s situation is like this. He knew that situation wouldn¡¯t be optimistic, that is why he moved as soon as possible.

    He doesn¡¯t have any helpers and also can¡¯t trust anyone particrly when he has a very dangerous spection in his mind.

    When he saw Watt, he couldn¡¯t help but feel his rage bottling up. He scanned the room and looked at the Old man sitting in his chair looking at Watt as if he was watching a show. One look and Sam could tell he is the boss.

    Sam then looked at the four Grand realm cultivators. They are all early stage Grand realm cultivators.

    His main threat is the old man, then these four Grand realm cultivators. As for Great realm cultivators, if he could handle the Old man, they can be handled easily.

    Jack is also within the dimension, he couldn¡¯t see what is happening outside, but when he saw Sam¡¯s face, he could understand that the situation is not good at all.

    Right now, Sam¡¯s face is full of rage for a split second and the very next moment, his face became eerily calm, the air around him seemed to be frozen.

    Jack then saw Sam opening his eyes and disappearing on the spot.

    Sam reappeared in the second floor, right now, the time is not his friend. He has to move as fast as he can.

    He took out a big log of tree and then the spikes and chains which locked up the hydra appeared on the floor.

    He didn¡¯t have enough time to study these chains, so he doesn¡¯t know if there are in a working condition. But he could only count on this, if he has to take care of this situation.

    Sam used the Reaper sword to cut the log into a pike.

    He created ten holes in which the spikes will be inserted. Apart from them there is another hole on the t end of the pike.

    Sam took out arge energy cell and ced it inside the hole of t end.

    He held an inscription brush and started etching the log with many spirit absorbing formations. He has to make sure that he seeds in one try and the formation works properly so that he can make sure that Watt can be saved without much damage.

    Otherwise, he only has one more way, which is a little risky for Watt.

    Sam inscribed several reinforcement inscriptions. His brain and body are working on full swing. He is sweating profusely.

    He started picking the chains and inserting the spikes one by one on the holes he made on the log.

    The spikes didn¡¯t enter the log much, the holes are small and only a small point has entered log.

    But they were held themselves in the holes. Even though, they might notst long, they will be held enough time for him to deal with these guys.

    After his preparations were done, Sam left the ce and came out of the tower and checked the perception outside.

    That guy was done with Watt, but thetter was still stubborn. His muscle fibres were fully exposed, even the air will sting.

    This time, the Old man didn¡¯t let healer heal Watt.

    Sam ordered the shadow mouse to move around.

    He let all the shadow mice in this room to enter the divine dimension. The only shadow mouse that is out is one that is carrying the crystal.

    The shadow mouse is going to be the most crucial link in this battle. He thanked the guy who is in charge that the cave is actually dimly lit and shadows are decent. The light is actually from normalmps.

    He doesn¡¯t know, why the other party are using these types ofmps, maybe they are creating a fa?ade. If by any chance their hide out was discovered, the person might even think that this ce is out of order and nobody is using it for a long time.

    This is the only reason Sam could think of. But it is helpful to him.

    On Sam¡¯s order, the shadow mouse moved. While the whole room, was being silent and all of them are looking at Watt, two people¡¯s expressions changed.

    One of them is the Old man. He is looking at a spot in front of the Grand realm cultivator. He could sense some energy fluctuations, which he couldn¡¯t understand and suddenly a blue crystal appeared in the air at that spot.

    The second person is Watt. He has a cold smirk on his yed face, the smirk with that blood looked really terrifying. Before, they could make sense of what is happening.

    A small ss vile filled with a violet colour liquid was thrown at the face of the Grand realm cultivator. He subconsciously let the liquid enter his mouth, nose and skin.

    The Old man frowned and was about to reach out to the blue crystal, but suddenly a sh of shadow took the crystal away.

    The room was in chaos. The Grand realm cultivator seemed to be infected by that liquid. The Old man could see that his life is in danger.

    He closed his eyes and spread his perception to search for the blue crystal, but he couldn¡¯t find it.

    Because, at this moment, the shadow mouse in its shadow formpletely merged in the shadow of this old man himself.

    The spiritual sense could only sense the souls and the other tangible things. Shadow is not one of them. At most the spiritual sense can act as normal perception technique and look at shadows and their movements, but it couldn¡¯t sense the anomaly in a shadow, at least not at Old man¡¯s level.

    After old man retracted his spiritual sense, the blue crystal moved appeared again, but this time, the old man moved immediately, but the shadow took the crystal away.

    But the worst part is that not only did the crystal escaped, it reached two targets this time and these two targets are Grand realm cultivators.

    The game continued. The Old manpletely kept his spirtual sense on. But at this moment, he sensed a shadow moving in a corner of the room, when he moved towards that direction though, he heard a scream behind him.

    "Ahhh.."

    Another Grand realm cultivator was done. Their spiritual energy masks are only for disguising, they are not useful for protecting themselves at all.

    Now all the Grand realm cultivators were down, they are trying their best to fight off against the poison but they are bing weak in seconds.

    All the remaining people are exchanging nces.

    "hahahahahaha..."

    Augh suddenly interrupted the horror filled silence.

 Chapter 138: How do you want to Die?

    "Hahahahahahaha...."

    Watt isughing like a psycho with blood all over his face.

    "Idiots." He scolded everyone in the room making them infuriated.

    "Do you want to die?" One of them asked with fury.

    "Moron, I already told you guys to f.u.c.k off from this ce when you still had a chance, now you are all fish on the chopping board,mbs waiting for ughter and you still have guts to threaten me. I DARE YOU TO KILL ME."

    Watt shouted as he looked at the people in the room, even the old man is being frightened. Even though, he is not showing it on his face, he is really afraid of that small crystal and that shadow.

    This is the fear of unknown. He mustered up his courage and shouted in the room.

    "Who is that coward, sneaking up on us, I dare youe and face me."

    When the old man said these words, the remaining members suddenly felt a little courageous and started taunting.

    "Come out you bloody coward."

    "Come face us, if you have guts."

    "Come on fight us like a man."

    When they were taunting, the blue crystal appeared again and immediately four people are sprawling on the floor.

    The room went silent. They didn¡¯t dare to make a noise.

    The Old man is concentrating so much that veins popped out on his forehead and he is drenched in sweat.

    But he noticed around five shadows moving and before he could make a move, another five people copsed.

    He was again disturbed by the screams and by the time he recovered his concentration, shadows disappeared.

    He moved his hands and a wave of water appeared on the floor, he wanted to use this to fish out that blue crystal and shadows, but he wasn¡¯t able to find out anything. At this moment, there is a shadow merged within the shadow of themp on the wall.

    "Come out, we can talk, otherwise I will kill him." The Old man pointed at Watt as he spoke. But as soon as his words were finished, six Great realm cultivators were attacked.

    He immediately shut his mouth.

    "Old man, you better learn how to hold your mouth and think before you speak." When Watt replied in exact same words, the remaining members immediately became nervous.

    The Old man is looking at Watt in a deep thought. He cannot use an Area of effect skill because of hispanions.

    To leave this ce is not an option as there is no telling whether their target has someone backing him or not. If there is an ambush, things would get messy.

    He wasn¡¯t able to find out, what is that thing that is pestering them and even if he can get rid of it.

    While he was thinking, he suddenly sensed a fluctuation behind him and when he turned around, he saw the blue crystal there and before he could react, a big foot ball size white figure emerged from the crystal and bit him on his abdomen (Dantian).

    Before he could react, he could fee the spiritual energy being leaked out of his body, when he was about to move, the white figure disappeared, everyone was stunned.

    The Old man, was in a hurry because the bite was near his spiritual core, so he didn¡¯t even see the fact was blue crystal was here.

    His subordinates doesn¡¯t even dare toe near him and took a step away as they looked at him.

    Before they could make sense of the situation, something even more astounding happened.

    A small highly concentrated energy object came out of thin air and exploded on the wound of the old man.

    The wound opened up even more and before he could react,

    A wooden pike which was pierced by several metal spikes attached to chains came out of thin air along with a ck figure.

    Sam pierced the pike in the wound near the spirtual core of the Old man. Even though, he couldn¡¯t reach the spiritual core directly due to his prowess, the damage is not something to be taken easily when it was done of the wound.

    When the pike pierced, Sam started throwing the other ends of the spikes immediately.

    Some, pierced through the people and some pierced into the walls and floor. But within no time, all ten spikes were thrown out urately and the runes on them started lighting up.

    All of this happened in a split second. Before Sam was about to hit by the Old man¡¯s attack, he activated the inscriptions of the wooden pike and vanished from the spot as he entered the dimension again.

    The Old man sent a water bullet on that spot but only hit the air, he was about to make another move.

    But then only he noticed that he cannot channel his spiritual energy anymore. His energy has been leaking out and the pike is being sucking his energy.

    He looked around and saw that the members are also locked inside the formation and they weren¡¯t even able to escape.

    Then only Sam came out of the formation along with Jack, they swiftly took the remaining vials and threw them at Great Realm cultivators, even if they tried to block, there is nothing then do.

    As long as the venom enters their system they are doomed.

    Sam took out his reaper sword and started iming their lives while they are still in frenzy.

    Only thest one was able to make some fight, but his will was totally destroyed when he saw his boss without any movement.

    As for Novices, he left them to Jack, who used his sword and venom at the same time to subdue them.

    Sam specifically asked him to subdue them. As long as they are not killed immediately it is okay.

    The Oldman didn¡¯t care about his subordinates anymore, he is trying to shake of the pike, but he wasn¡¯t able to do so, as the formation is in full effect.

    Even though, the energy input is low, since the restriction is also low, the formation worked.

    Sam¡¯s greatest worry was this, but he still has a contingency n.

    He walked towards Watt and removed the restrictions. He started healing him, he was mixed withplicated emotions. He knew that Watt was loyal, but he never expected this much loyalty.

    What touched him most was that the other party believed him unconditionally. Even when he is facing a Nascent Realm cultivator, even when he is facing a bunch of Grand realm cultivators, Great Stage cultivators all together which is a far more powerful force then Sam himself, he still believed him.

    The Proud and arrogant look, that fearlessness which stemmed from the belief in Sam¡¯s ability, no one in this world can ask for a better subordinate, follower, friend.

    The skin on Watt¡¯s face was healing rapidly and soon his face is back to normal. Sam gave a pill to Watt which he obtained from the loot; this is to recover his spiritual energy.

    After Watt recovered, Sam finally focussed on the Old man. He didn¡¯t say anything. One look and he could say that this is the ck water¡¯s work.

    "Do you want to deal with him or do you want me to deal with him?" Sam asked nonchntly.

    "I want the one who gave the info, not this guy." Watt replied.

    Sam walked towards the Novices who are trying to fight against the venom. The venom used on them is actually not the pure hydra blood, rather a very very diluted one.

    They are okay for now.

    But slowly, their spirtual energy masks are being deactivated as Sam waited there, and soon he found the face he was looking for.

    "Luther." Sam called out as he looked at the most low-key son of the Marquis. The one who is famous for not having any ambitions, one who is famous for not having conflicts, the one who is famous for being amiable.

    This guy is part of the ck water.

    Sam already got some suspicions when he heard about him gathering intel and him being nervous about his father learning about it.

    As far as Sam knew, there is only one big change that could affect his progress and capturing of Watt in the city and that is the arrival of this team.

    If the ck water directly captured Watt without a second thought, they should have known about Sam¡¯s mission cement, which apparently tallied with the timings of destruction of their branches in the Count cities.

    There is only one way, the ck water can learn of this and that is one of the hidden bosses of the younger generation are part of this organisation and from his earlier suspicions, Sam narrowed down to only one person.

    Luther.

    Sam let out Sky and said to Jack.

    "Both of you go and bring ask Marquis toe here." Jack walked to a corner and pushed a lever which opened a stair case leading to an abandoned cave inside the forest. He flew off along with Sky.

    Sam turned to the Old man who waspletely restrained in the formation.

    Sam truly loved this formation chains, because, they don¡¯t require him to be in a higher level to use as they feed on the victim¡¯s energy.

    "So, old man, how do you want to die?" Sam asked as he looked at the Old man dead in the eye.

 Chapter 139: Payback

    The Old man looked at Sam without blinking. His face is filled with pain, and he is sweating.

    His energy is being drained every second and his wound continuously bleeding is not helping either.

    Sam has brainstormed a lot for this to seed.

    He carefully nned step by step. Even though, it didn¡¯t take long but that doesn¡¯t mean his effort is less.

    For the n to seed, he used the shadow mice to the maximum of their ability.

    First step is to confuse everyone in the room and create a fear of unknown. He has to make sure that shadow mice clearly followed his orders to teeth without any hups.

    And they did.

    Second step is that he has to create a thought that his attacks have a pattern. That is why, the old man didn¡¯t react immediately when he sneaked up on his back.

    Sam only attacked his subordinates one by one in order to create an imaginary pattern which they thought he is following.

    The Old man himself subconsciously thought that he is not the target, because Sam initially didn¡¯t target him directly even when he had a chance, so he assumed that the blue crystal and the shadow doesn¡¯t have the ability to attack him.

    That only made him drop his guard down instinctively which helped Sam to do what he had done.

    He even ced an energy cell to activate the formation in case the formation failed to draw the spiritual energy from the old man directly.

    Now, the old man is captured without even a chance to move.

    "You don¡¯t know what you are getting yourself into boy. Even if you kill me, do you think you can live longer. If you continue this, no matter who is behind you, you will die eventually." The Old man said in a weak voice.

    "Do tell me what I am getting myself into?" Sam replied rather sarcastically.

    "You can mock me all you want for now. That arrogance will notst long if you go against ck water."

    "So, you are saying that ck water is so powerful that I would die if I go against it." Sam said in same tone.

    "You would you wish you would die." The Old man said clearly infuriated by Sam¡¯s mockery.

    "I took down the ck water branch in the Falcon cliff city when I just barely entered Novice stage and killed your Great mage expert you ced there.

    And after a few months, I am a Late stage novice and a Nascent mage is right in front of mepletely restrained, his life and death hanging on my beck and call.

    You have the guts to threaten with your organisation. You should look at your standard before you warn me. Bunch of trash." Sam sneered as he took out a chair from his storage and sat on it with his legs crossed.

    "You guys might be the biggest underground force in the empire or even the continent, heck even the whole world. But if this is really the standard of your organisation you better save your pep talk.

    Because, you are not worthy."

    When Sam said these words, the face of the Old man turned red in embarrassment.

    "Watt, tie him up to that chair." Sam said as he pointed at Luther.

    Watt tied him up. Luther¡¯s face is filled with panic and despair. He didn¡¯t know that Sam could catch them like this and even destroy them within minutes.

    Now, when he looked at Sam¡¯s eyes, he almost peed his pants. Because, the idea of abducting Watt is his.

    He clearly knew that there is something up with thispetition and they couldn¡¯t touch Sam, so he gave an idea to catch Watt and get the info out of him.

    But Watt turned out to be a monster, he killed a person on the spot and almost killed other five. If not for the intervention of the Great mage they would have definitely failed to catch this guy.

    He thought that the n was a sess but because he didn¡¯t know that Sam has a way to track them down just after a while of the kidnap.

    Sam just stared at this guy silently, he didn¡¯t even blink and just looked on coldly. Behind Luther the Oldman who is restrained is also looking at Sam and wasn¡¯t able to see what is going on that fellow¡¯s mind.

    After some silent waiting, foot steps can be heard from the stairs. Everyone in the room looked at the direction except for Sam and Watt.

    Marquis and Jack came inside leaving Sky outside.

    "Sam, what is happening here?" Marquis asked as soon as he entered the room but when he saw his son tied up to the chair, he didn¡¯t know what to think of it, his first thought was that Sam was pissed of by his son and the former is taking action.

    But when he looked at the Old man, he immediately became solemn. The Old man is clearly a Nascent stage cultivator, but his energy is being leaking constantly and he is bing weaker and weaker.

    Sam didn¡¯t look at the Marquis and said. "You better ask your son, what is going on here."

    Luther didn¡¯t even dare to look at his father much less talk.

    Watt looked at the silent father-son duo as he sneered.

    "Your son, an honourable member of ck water is presented right in front of you."

    When Marquis heard these words, he became more dejected than angry. He liked his second son most because of his first and third son, doesn¡¯t know how to be humble at all, they are ambitious, in fact, too ambitious that their ambitions are beyond their intellect and ability.

    His second son, was always content with what he has and always thought of the ways to maximise his own limited resources.

    And those habits are the only ones that let him get caught now. He used his resources in ck water to perform in the test and that small action led to this situation.

    Marquis looked at Sam, who stayed silent all the while and then looked at Watt clearly asking about what is the situation all about.

    When Watt recounted everything, Sam stood up, looked at Marquis and said.

    "What I am about to do, might make you hate me and make us both enemies, of course that depends on how you think about it.

    If I do it in your absence and you find outter, ande at me to take revenge. I don¡¯t have enough patience to deal with all that." He paused and gestured Watt.

    Watt took a step towards Luther, while Sam took out arge energy cell gesturing Jack to take a step back.

    Watt took out two cards which are made of Silver meteorite sand and moved.

    "Father Save me, Please father save me." Luther shouted on top of his lungs.

    At first, he resigned to his fate and epted his death, but when he looked at Watt¡¯s cold eyes, he remembered how much torture Watt went through and felt dread. He peed his pants as he asked for his father¡¯s help.

    "You are too noisy." Before Marquis could say something, Watt cut the tongue of Luther halting his screams for help.

    Watt started circling the chair as he started cutting and shing all over his body. He didn¡¯t even have a way to scream his pain out due to tongue¡¯s state.

    Marquis was about make a move, but he suddenly sensed an enormous killing intent. He looked at Sam who looked at him.

    Even though, the other party didn¡¯t say a word, he could understand the message.

    ¡¯You make a move and you die.¡¯

    Sam is actually nning to do so. All he has to do is, make the whole energy cell copse by destabilizing it. With in the time period of explosion, he has to drag Watt and Jack into the divine dimension along with.

    The remaining people will die for all he cares.

    Marquis looked at Sam and then looked at the Old man, he didn¡¯t make a move and said.

    "How about I execute him in public? I will kill him myself. Please ask him to stop, is it necessary to make him go through this much torture?" Marquis asked in grief.

    His son, is being shed right in front of him but he cannot do anything about it. Even if his son deserved this, he as a father rather not have him go through this.

    "I don¡¯t care if you will kill him yourself nor for your public execution. All I believe in is the payback that I can give.

    Because of your son, my subordinate suffered. He can only me himself."

    By the time, he was done with his words, the screams became louder, Watt is done with almost all the outeryer of Luther.

    His metallic cards, werepletely coated in blood, but he didn¡¯t stop, there is an unsettling rage in his eyes, he kept on moving and moving.

    The flesh over the bones started to fall downyer byyer.

    "Waaaawaaaaaaaa......."

    "Bwaaaaaa." Luther¡¯s iprehensible screams of agony. Marquis closed his eyes and tears started streaming down.

    Soon, Luther¡¯s screams died down as his soul left his body. His corpse stayed limp on the chair. Marquis looked at the skeleton which has some parts of flesh and even some internal organs are being visible.

    Sam left Marquis crying and walked towards the Old man who is gulping in his nervousness. After all, he is the one who ordered the punishments on Watt.

    The informer himself has suffered this fate, what about him?

    Sam closed in and asked in a low voice almost in a whisper.

    "Are you thinking about what you are going to face?"

    The Oldman subconsciously nodded his head.

    "You will see."

    Sam took out his Blood collector and pierced the man near his heart as he started collecting the blood.

    After almost half of the blood is drawn, Sam took a step back and let the queen out.

    The queen bit him on the neck for a long time slowly absorbing the spiritual energy. The life force started to leak out. His robust body already became weak after all the suffering, now he almost became a bag of bones.

    Just as he was on verge of dying, the queen left him and with a wave of hand, Queen termite is reced with three Queen locusts.

    They started gorging the flesh off of his body mainly the internal organs.

    Finally the normal insects came out and started eating the residual flesh only leaving clean bones. Soon, the formation died down.

    Sam kept the chains away.

    He walked away with Watt and Jack leaving a crying yet terrified Marquis in the room.

 Chapter 140: You are worth more than any reason

    Sam didn¡¯t speak on his way back. Jack is even more nervous and he didn¡¯t even dare to breathe.

    Now only did he understand what kind of freaks he is apanying. He kind of know what Sam is like.

    But he never thought that Watt is this dangerous. He didn¡¯t even flinch when his face is being yed. Even though, Jack didn¡¯t see the process, he saw the injuries after he came out.

    He is like some kind of psycho.

    This Boss and subordinate are both one of a kind.

    Day by day, he is feeling more and more d that he didn¡¯t make Sam his enemy. But now that he knew a lot of his secrets, he is getting worried.

    Even though, he knew that Sam trusts him, there is a small fear deep inside, if one day if he ever be suspicious and Sam decides to eliminate him, does he have a chance to escape?

    Sam also guessed what he is thinking, but he didn¡¯t have time to care about what is going on his mind.

    He is currently thinking about his past life, he did see a character simr to Watt, in fact he is the same person he remembered when he saw the two escaping siblings in the six months istionpetition.

    He never thought, he would another person like this, he desperately needs to find a way to vent out his emotions otherwise, he wouldn¡¯t be normal anytime soon.

    After entering his mansion, Sam entered the tower and holed up for some time, he forged, started fighting the simted battle, he only came out after he waspletely exhausted.

    Watt is sitting still in his room since he came back. He might have put up a strong front but he did take a lot of damage, he ispletely exhausted both mentally and physically.

    A lot has happened within a day.

    When Sam came out, he went to the backyard near theke, he didn¡¯t wear his coat, his pants and even his vest.

    He sat in his shorts while keeping as he ced his legs inside theke.

    His upper body is n.a.k.e.d as he felt the cold breeze on his scar filled skin. The scars from the battle with Cougar family are all there, which he deliberately left.

    He started at the starry sky as he tried to nk his thoughts.

    Inside the mansion, all the people are thinking on what happened to Sam, they knew that Sam got a call from the Marquis while Jack and Watt went to do something he instructed.

    They went on with their daily routine and when they were wondering what happened to them, three of them came together but they were surprised to see their condition.

    Sam¡¯s expression is cold, Jack seemed to frightenedpletely as for Watt, he ispletely exhausted, even the yful Philip didn¡¯t dare to fool around.

    After a long while, they rounded up Jack with a barrage of question, which he wasn¡¯t able to answer at all, if their operation against ck water is informed to them, he didn¡¯t even know how they would react and he didn¡¯t even want to tell them.

    In actual fact, it is his revenge n and now it almost became war between Sam and the ck Water.

    At least he yed a part in the Count cities, but now he didn¡¯t even know what to make of today¡¯s situation.

    He is even thinking of asking Sam to stop this, but he didn¡¯t know how to approach this topic.

    After fending off all the members by evading their questions, but there is one concern, Sam is staying at theke for long and he didn¡¯t know if he should approach him.

    So, since he didn¡¯t dare to approach, there is one thing he can do and that is to inform Watt who is the centre of the situation.

    Sam became like this after he saw how Watt suffered.

    So, all he can do is let them solve this matter themselves.

    When Watt heard that Sam is like this, he went towards theke.

    When Sam heard the footsteps, he didn¡¯t even turnaround to look at who it is, because, he knew that only Watt can dare to meet him when he is in this condition.

    Watt stopped a few steps away from him, Samid down on his back as he gestured Watt to sit.

    He sat down and didn¡¯t say anything, after a brief silence, Sam started speaking.

    "Watt, have you ever wondered why I am like this?"

    Watt didn¡¯t answer at all, though he was confused what is his boss talking.

    "Have you ever wondered why a fifteen-year-old country bumpkin have these many abilities, who can forge, can fight, has these many trump cards? Didn¡¯t you even have a single doubt at all?"

    "Those are irrelevant to me." This time Watt answered. Even if the answer is short, Sam got the point.

    What is the point of wondering and doubting where his boss got his abilities? He is still his boss no matter what. There is no use pondering things that are irrelevant to him.

    "I don¡¯t belong to this world." Sam suddenly said. He desperately wants to let this out, but he didn¡¯t find a person who is worthy of this trust.

    Watt was stunned for a second but didn¡¯t know what to say. Sam continued.

    "You may not believe me, but I am from a different world. There one¡¯s financial strength, cunning mind, excellent intelligence, wit all of these trumps one¡¯s physical strength, there is only one exception though, if your physical strength is the top of the world then only there would be a chance for that person.

    Normal fighters are only for people¡¯s entertainment, the more stronger fighters are for rich people¡¯s beck and call.

    In that world, a normal seventy year old man without any physical strength to walk on his own can .u.mte the wealth with only his wit, a person like that rules over themoners without them even knowing that he is ying with their lives and the most pitiful thing is, he can even order around a prideful soldier who can kill himself for sake of his country without batting an eye.

    That world is a ce where a normal person lives peacefully by trusting thews.

    And the ironic thing is that they don¡¯t know that people who make thews for them don¡¯t even care about the veryws they make.

    The world where a person is distinguished by a very fickle quality called wealth.

    But in that same fickle world, there is no difference between the two extremes, the extreme point on the top with full of money and power and the lowest extreme point where people kill each other for a piece of bread."

    Sam paused for a second and took a deep breath as he remembered his life on earth. Watt however, was stunned, because, he can never imagine that kind of ce, how can there be a wealthy person without any physical strength.

    In this world, he would be killed in a second for his wealth.

    But Sam continued his story.

    "In that world, I lived in all stages of society, I climbed my way through the ranks, I had many identities, when I am at my peak, in the world of light my single thought was worth fortunes and in the dark world my single word isw.

    But in both worlds, I lost two most important people, the first one in the dark world, he died protecting me, and the second one in the light world, because I was unable to protect her.

    After taking revenge for them, I lost all the reason for living, you know, when I was about to die, I really don¡¯t have any regrets, I am also quite happy that maybe just maybe if there was an afterlife, I could meet these two people.

    But the reality pped me in the face.

    Just after I died, a bloke who I never saw, whose power is beyond my imagination, just ced me in this world without even giving me a reason.

    At first, I just wanted to live this life just for the sake of living, but the thought that someone just put me here without even my consent almost killed me, that is the only reason that kept me moving forward.

    To find out why I am here and if the reason is worth it or not, but today I found another reason to live."

    He sat up and looked at horizons, before speaking.

    "I don¡¯t know if I am a person worth dying for, but I would consider I am not, however, you are ready to do that, so I think even if whatever reason I am here for is worth it or not I think you are worth living and apanying for.

    A man like you, who knows how to repay a drop of water with a spring, is worth more than any reason."

    Sam stood up and Watt followed suit.

    He took out a red coloured metallic card and passed it to Watt, there is Watt¡¯s W symbol on one side and Sam¡¯s symbol on the other.

    "I don¡¯t know how you see me as, boss, friend, rtive, whatever it is, remember that for me from now on you are irreceable. You will always be my side no matter how far I reach, no matter what I face I will face it with you."

 Chapter 141: Holing Up

    The next day, the whole city was in turmoil.

    Marquis summoned the whole city for an assembly in the stadium where Sam made his demonstration for his weapon shop opening.

    Almost all the citizens gathered.

    Marquis stood on the stage with a deste look.

    He took a look at all the audience and took a deep breath before saying.

    "Yesterday, I found that there are many officials and my second son, working with an evil organisation who operate the illegal prostitution, drugs, assassinations and all kinds of evil deeds.

    After looking into the matter and obtaining proper evidence, I personally raided the ce and after confirming the truth I executed them immediately.

    So, I want to say one thing, those who harm the society and the citizens of the empire, no matter who it is, they shall be executed and I hereby order all the remaining members of this organisation to surrender.

    If you surrender, you will be given a chance after doing your time in the jail, if you don¡¯t then you better pray that we will not catch you or else, you will be executed on the spot."

    After a big apuse, he dismissed the assembly and went back to the Marquis mansion.

    "How dare you kill my son? And you dare tobel him as a part of some evil organisation. You, sick bastard. Did those bitches pillow talk you do this? He doesn¡¯t evenpete for your position and he didn¡¯t even go against that Zeke¡¯s business. Why did you kill him?

    Is it because, he doesn¡¯t benefit you anyway? You bastard."

    As soon as he entered his personal room, he was hit by a barrage of words from his screaming second wife.

    He didn¡¯t know what to say and just stayed silent. He has obtained enough evidence to convince her, but he was also afraid, that if she can bear that heart break. After all, all three kids are closer to their mothers than him and that is even more true in case of the second son.

    "Why are you not talking?" *Pah* She pped him in his face directly.

    Only at this moment did he lift his head to look at her face. She is a beautiful woman and so are the two other sisters but of three of them, she is the gentlest one.

    Of all three of his wives, the first one is a person who is too wilful and the third one is too scheming. Out of all three, the second wife is the only one who acts normally and now she is not like her usual self at all.

    He finally opened his mouth.

    "You know me better than that. I might not love you but that is also the case with your two sisters, if I have to be blunt, you three are my liabilities which I cannot get rid of. As for the children, I treat them equally and I take my responsibility as a father.

    Don¡¯t even raise the question of me being biased or swayed by pillow talk, you should know better than anyone how many times you three have a chance to do pillow talk to even have a chance to sway me.

    As for your son¡¯s death, I only have one thing to say, he only brought this upon himself. He mixed with wrong people and targeted the worst person he could possibly mess with. If I give you anymore details your heart won¡¯t be able to take it.

    Just deny everything and live in peace."

    He didn¡¯t even wait for her reaction after finishing his piece.

    He has a lot of things to do and one of them is meeting Sam. So, he sent a messenger to arrange a meeting. It is not suitable for both of them to meet openly.

    The announcement he made is not detailed and many officials are still having spections on what really happened, if he meets a Rank 5 Artisan, then there might be someone who can draw some seemingly impossible, theories.

    They decided to meet at a secret room under the Marquis mansion. It has an underground path connecting to the woods.

    Sam and Watt went out of the city and went to spot where this underground entrance was. After walking for about an hour, they entered a dimly lit room where Marquis is sitting alone.

    He gestured Sam to sit and after a brief silence, he finally spoke.

    "After you left the ce, I found something over there."

    He took out three spatial rings. Sam could easily guess what they are. The three spatial rings of the ck water. One with the rewards, the second one with the spiritual stones which is also the ie of the organisation, the third one is the resources.

    Sam didn¡¯t take them immediately and just looked at Marquis who took out around thirty spatial rings and ced them on the table.

    These are the spatial rings of the people you killed; it also includes the ring of the Old man.

    But I took my son¡¯s ring. I hope you don¡¯t mind."

    Sam didn¡¯t talk and gestured Watt to collect the rings.

    "Where are the scrolls?" He asked.

    Marquis ced another spatial ring on the table.

    "I read the contents. I never heard of this organisation before."

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything and just took all the spatial rings and stood up.

    "Is there anything else?"

    He asked as he looked at Marquis.

    "Nothing, I will just add his name to the eliminated candidates and you won¡¯t have to worry about those guys targeting you. As for going to the dukedom, we need to start after fifteen days and after going there, please do take caution against General Spark.

    He is the father of my wives and with your beef with Zeke, my first wife might have already given him a message and he might target you."

    "Thanks" Sam said simply and left with Watt.

    Marquis slumped in his chair. He wanted to see how Sam is doing, he wanted to see if he is at least a bit nervous to meet a stronger person, whose son was killed by him. He wanted to see if he is at least a bit afraid.

    But from what he saw, he is not even a least bit afraid. He is as confident as he always was.

    After the meeting, Sam and Watt left the ce. He didn¡¯t check the things in the spatial ring immediately. He knew for sure that Marquis wouldn¡¯t do anything funny by pocketing some loot.

    When he came out of the tunnel and went to the woods, he went back to his mansion and holed up inside the divine dimension. He has a new thought and this can bemercialised in the Dukedom city.

    So, he immediately went inside the tower.

    Afterst night, he pulled himself together and he is already thinking of new projects.

    Apart from that, he is also thinking of doing some research on cultivation. Even though, the Marquis said that the phase was cancelled, there might be a reason for them to assign a whole six months just for studying.

    So, he can be upied for next fifteen days, till they started their journey or rather the 150 days in the tower.

    He checked the spatial ring of the meteorite sands and he got a delightful surprise.

    There are more than 100 cubes of meteorite sand and most of it is Grey meteorite sand which upied more than 80 cubes, the remaining is the silver meteorite sand.

    Even though, he can do a lot of things with the Silver meteorite sand, the Grey meteorite sand is not enough, he nned a lot of things for that, and the n is arge one.

    But he has one application for this Grey sand and that is to make an anvil and some hammers of different sizes.

    After making that, he forged for more than fifteen days inside the tower and the rest of the days, he just stayed in the library and asionally, he went to the simtion room to test some theories.

    He carefully studied numerous cultivation arts, he studied the cirction of various meridians and the affects of the spiritual energy cirction on the autonomy.

    Soon, he was hooked.

    These cultivation techniques opened a new world for him and when he studied the cultivation specific battle techniques, he was even more amused.

    His thirst for knowledge started acting up.

    He started experimenting with the simtions on how these things work, because, if he can understand these things, he could open a new door for myriad of possibilities.

    He has already nned on making use of his technology along with this cultivation. He almost forgot the rest of the world and got too involved with these theories.

    But there is one thing he is unsatisfied with and that is there are too many racks of divine wills that has information with cultivation techniques, cultivation specific battle fields.

    He was disappointed that he was unable to continue with his exploration.

 Chapter 142: To the Dukedom Capital

    Fourteen dayster.

    Sam came out of the tower; he is very reluctant toe out. But he has to move even if he doesn¡¯t want to do so.

    When he came back, all of them looked at him with surprise.

    Sam is not like his usual self. His eyes that are looking at the surroundings doesn¡¯t seem to be looking at them, he seemed to be thinking about something entirely different and he kept on muttering something like a madman.

    His confidence was nowhere to be seen; he didn¡¯t even have a proper attention on his surroundings as he walked towards theke with his lost senses.

    Only after he jumped into the pool did he calm down a bit. This is Sam in a zone, it has been a long time since he was like this and it is extremely difficult to get out of this state of mind.

    But he never hated this madman state, not only this, he never hated any part of him both physically mentally.

    He epted all his ws and drawbacks along with his plus points and he would never change it for anyone.

    Even thought, it might seem ironic that someone is not willing to change his ws even after he identified them, he didn¡¯t want to do so, because from the past life¡¯s childhood till death of all those twenty five years more than half of his life was under someone¡¯s control.

    His food, his health, his exercise, his attire and even his learning was under someone¡¯s control. Sam has found something new to learn and every time he did that he would have to show many reasons that it is useful to his ¡¯controller¡¯, if he learnt this in one way or other before he got the approval.

    So, when the major part of his life was in someone¡¯s control, he found out that his character was the only thing that is within his control.

    Thus, he just wanted to keep it like that. He would never change it for social norms and conventions. Only if a person is worth it for him to change its character, he would do so.

    Many people might think he is arrogant and he is behaving as if the world is revolving around him. But what Sam believed is, if you don¡¯t treat yourself special and don¡¯t have any confidence in you, then never ever expect someone to treat you that way.

    And if anyone does that, there are only two conditions first one is the unconditional love and the second one is that person might have designs on you in one way or other and he might be boosting your ego to destroy you.

    Sam swam in theke for his heart¡¯s content and when he saw that no one is near theke, he called out Mia.

    The little hydra was already a level 1 and is growing faster and faster. When she came out, it immediately jumped at Sam and started snuggling.

    Sam threw all the care for the world and started ying with Mia. They just yed inside the water for hours.

    Aftering out of the water, Sam wasn¡¯t satisfied and took out the formation gs. He cedyers up onyers of concealing formations and even activated the formation discs.

    He let out all the beasts, panthers, Yanwu, Sky, ape and Mia.

    He doesn¡¯t know what is going to happen in the Dukedom capital, so he just wanted to enjoy some peace with hispanions.

    The two panthers pinned him to ground and started licking him in the face. It has been a long time since the little guys got his attention. Inside the dimension they only have themselves to y with and don¡¯t have much to do.

    Yanwu or Sky would give food to them and they would run around, roll around, mess up some herbs that are nted, ruffle Yanwu¡¯s feathers and run away.

    They are just like any other kids.

    Sam called over Watt and asked him to bring over arge amount of food from the restaurant.

    In an hour, Watt also joined them with a lot of food.

    Sam didn¡¯t talk much all he did was y with the little beasts, panthers and Mia. He even let the Queen bugs out.

    While rxing Sam saw something interesting. Both the panthers are acting like superiors to Mia and are teaching her manners.

    He couldn¡¯t help but chuckle. Even though, they became hybrid because of the fire poison, both the panthers don¡¯t have much potential as Mia for now, after all she is a mythical beast.

    He imagined how Mia bing a behemoth sized beast and looking down on the now superior Panthers and shook his head with augh.

    But the problem is that Mia doesn¡¯t like to stay on thend for a lot of time and Panthers being the fire type is making it hard for her. Then only, he thought that it would be a good idea to capture a few water type beasts to have herpany.

    After the long rxation, Sam and Watt packed up everything and stored away the beasts. Now that both of them are alone, Sam took out the gift he prepared for Watt.

    When Watt saw this, he was dumbfounded. Because, it is also a hoverboard. But this is a bit different.

    This is a little thinner and it ispletely silver in colour.

    Sam made this because, he has to walk if wants to go with Watt for some other ces. So, if Watt also has same way of transport they can move faster.

    But this board is different in a lot of ways. For, Harbinger Sam can directly circte the wind elemental spiritual energy into the high-pressure air to get the required thrust.

    Even though, Watt¡¯s maniption and control over wind element are high, it is not high enough to provide same thrust.

    So, Sam used a variety of inscriptions to make this. This thing also operates on the Wind energy cells, but, they are not visible for outside.

    Instead they are covered with a te. On the inner side of the te there are a lot ofplex inscription matrices Sam made.

    These inscription matrices are actually made of a simple wind type inscription called air cannon. This is a normal wind elemental spell which produce a thrust of air for an instant and the scale of the effect will depend on the energy used by the mage.

    Sam made an inscription matrix of these so that when injected they would provide a continuous thrust.

    So, simply this thing runs on the continuous small-scale air cannons pushing the board upwards and even the forward thrust will be given the same way.

    As for others finding out and copying it. They can try and see if they can continuously pour the energy from their body since Sam is sole supplier of the energy cells.

    But before they could do this, they have to open up and examine, but Sam took measures. He stacked up the concealment formations inscribed with etching operation to conceal it from spiritual sense.

    For, now there would be no copying.

    Sam then showed the remaining functions of the board. There are some projectile shooting options on the front and even back of the board and there is one more function which he could use in the closebat too.

    The rest of the day was gone with Sam teaching on how to bnce and use the board effectively.

    The next day early in the morning, Sam and the remaining members arrived at the Marquis mansion.

    The twenty members were selected and the list was out. Sam¡¯s team didn¡¯t have any eliminations except for Jasmine.

    So, that is nine seats gone. For the remaining eleven, the second team which mostlyprised of noble children got seven while the third team only got four ces.

    As for the eliminated candidates, they were given enrolment to the special elite ss as the top priority students who will be invested in.

    Sam looked at Zeke who is also looking him with some sort of fear in his eyes.

    Zeke is particrly a bit overwhelmed and anxious as his father called him and his brother yesterday.

    "If you want to live peacefully, don¡¯t mess with Sam anymore. Even if your grandfather can oppress him for now, you will be regret it in long run. So, if you guys have any ns to deal with him with the help of your grandfather, abandon the idea."

    These are the exact words of Marquis yesterday night. Not only did Marquis warn them he didn¡¯t even give any further exnation.

    "You will be representing the Blue me territory and will bepeting in the Dukedom capital. Now you guys don¡¯t have any way back and have to move forward even if you like it or not. So, I hope you guys concentrate on the future and grab the opportunities that are being presented for you."

    After that, they were led to what seemed like a forest and when they entered all of them saw gigantic beasts.

    These are Fire-winged eagle. These are one of the beast squads of the Marquis territory and they are Fire and Wind dual elemental beasts.

    There is one more advantage for them. They are big and fast. So, they are also used for long distance travel.

    At this morning, five Fire-winged eagles soared into the air with the candidates and the Marquis riding them toward the Dukedom capital.

 Chapter 143: General Spark

    After flying for thirteen days, the five Fire-winged eaglesnded in the Dukedom capital.

    The Dukedom capital is three timerger than the Marquis city and most of the nearby woods arepletely cleared out of the beasts.

    One can stay without a worry of the beasts in these outskirts. There is only one worry and that is other humans.

    This time, Sam didn¡¯t n to bring his restaurant business here. He doesn¡¯t know what he would be facing in the tests and he doesn¡¯t have anyone to take care of his businesses in his absence. At least in the Blue me city, Chaya is there to take care of things.

    Afternding a person came and directed them to the quarters provided.

    As they walked, Sam watched the estate. This ce is isted from the city and he could see various beasts which seemed to be the transportation of the other Marquis teams.

    There are ten buildings in the estate and nine of the belongs to the nine Marquis cities and the remaining might belong to the Dukedom city.

    After they entered the quarters and settled down, Marquis Blue me gathered them and gave them the required briefing on the Dukedom.

    This city is called Southern Star city and the Dukedom is called Southern star dukedom.

    There are eight dukedoms in this empire and all of them are named after the direction they are in followed by star.

    And apparently all of them share a border with the empire which they are sharing the western continent with.

    The Blue me Marquis¡¯ territory is the southern most of all and didn¡¯t share a border. That is why, they are alsost toe.

    Almost all the other participants are here.

    The Dukedom city has three main experts and all three of them are Nascent stage cultivators.

    The Duke himself is a Peak stage Nascent and the remaining two are Generals who are middle-stage Nascent experts.

    One of them is the General Spark who the Marquis spoke of. He is in charge of all the troops of the Dukedom that includes all the army camps ced in various Marquis territories. And most importantly this guy is the father-inw of the Blue me Marquis.

    Even though, there are native in-charges of their ces, General Spark is the top of this pyramid and all of them are under his jurisdiction.

    The second one is General Mercury. He is in charge of the internal safety. All the city guardse under his jurisdiction.

    As for the rest. The Southern star academy is not only the best in the Dukedom, they also coborate with the four major professions and have the students learn within the academy. These four tower heads send the necessary instructors to the academy.

    Finally, there are a total of six noble families and all of them are of same level as a Marquis¡¯ family.

    But their scope of authority is less and they don¡¯t have any territory under them except their estates.

    By the time, the brief exchange was over, a visitor arrived.

    "Blue me Marquis."

    A man who seemed to be in early forties walked through the side as he called the Marquis who is facing all the candidates.

    Marquis turned around and seemed a little stunned by that person¡¯s arrival. He came out of his shock and greeted that person.

    "Greetings General Spark."

    The candidates were surprised. Just now Marquis exined that this man is one of the three most powerful people in the Dukedom.

    But two people are clearly delighted to see them and they are the Brothers Zeke and Blue fire.

    "Grandfather." (x2)

    Both of them greeted him in unison as they delightedly walked towards him.

    The man who seemed to be in his forties actually nearly seventy years old.

    But he looked only fifty because of the Nascent stage cultivation.

    In the Cultivation stages until Grand realm, the only changes in the body are health, physique, size of the spiritual core and the amount of spiritual energy. Other than that, there are not many changes in aging and life span of the person.

    In this world where the pollution is negligible and the environment is pure, the average life span of a healthy person is around 120 to 130 years and if a person is a Grand stage expert, his life span would be at most 150 years.

    But the Nascent stage changes everything. One can even divide the whole cultivation into different phases as before Nascent and after Nascent. Of course, this applies only in these lower realms.

    In the Nascent stage, the human body will be undergoing a physical reformation along with the spiritual core.

    In this stage the cells of the person will undergo a sort of rebirth and the vitality increased at the same time the spiritual core will start to resemble an infinite space.

    As name implied the Nascent stage is the start of realising one¡¯s full potential. The changes in this stage will not only decide their final point of cultivation, but also their stand amongst their peers.

    There are basically three things that can decide these things.

    The first and most important one is the infinite space of the spiritual core. This infinite space is not real but just something the cultivator has perceived in his core.

    In this infinite space, along with the development and advancement in the substages of the Nascent realm cultivation, a spiritual sea will be formed from the centre and the extent of its development are the indications of the final point of their cultivation.

    The second thing is the body honing or the spiritual sea density.

    During this reformation, the cultivators try to take advantage of it and try to hone their body if they are warriors and increase the density of the spiritual energy in their spiritual sea which are proportionate to the battle prowess.

    Okay we are way off topic, back to the room.

    The General ignored everyone as he talked with his grandsons and then looked at the group. He seemed to be searching for someone and his gaze has lingered on Sam for a tad bit longer.

    After that, he looked at Marquis and asked.

    "Why is there an extra person?"

    "He is not a candidate, but he is a subordinate of someone."

    The General frowned immediately and looked to be in displeasure.

    "Whose subordinate, is he?"

    Marquis pointed at Sam.

    General looked at Sam and said.

    "This is not your home and you cannot bring the subordinates here. This ce is for the participants who doesn¡¯t have living arrangements made in the city. This is a gesture from Duke to make it convenient for you, not to let you free load by bringing extra baggage."

    Sam raised an eyebrow and looked at the General with a cold look. When he looked at Zeke¡¯s mixed emotional face and Blue fire¡¯s gloating face and finally Marquis¡¯ anxious face, he knew that this guy must be targeting him on purpose.

    The message from the first wife surely arrived and this general is really taking it out on him. After all, if this is a rule, Marquis must not have missed such an obvious one.

    "So, that means we can stay in the city if we have our own arrangements?" Sam asked without replying for the earlier statement.

    "Do so if you can. But you cannot bring your subordinate here." He said those words and ignored him before turning towards Marquis.

    "The tests and other rted matters will be announced tomorrow; you can roam around the city as you wish but you have to gather in the estate by dawn."

    He then looked at Sam and said.

    "Send him out immediately or you can get out with him."

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything and took out his harbinger, Watt followed suit as he took out his board. There is a string of letters etched on the side. Silver Wind.

    Since, Sam is not got at naming he asked Watt to do it himself.

    Sam didn¡¯t even look at the Marquis as he spoke.

    "Contact me withmunication token if anythinges up."

    Then with the air whistling, Sam and Watt left the ce in speed of wind.

    "Damn it, he might be buying another house." Philip said under his breath, but everyone clearly heard it even the General.

    "Humph, not any tom, d.i.c.k and Harry can afford a ce here." He snorted and gestured Marquis to talk in private.

    But Marquis, Jack, Philip even Kelly and Hawk are shaking their heads.

    Its true not any Tom, D.i.c.k and Harry can buy a ce, but is Sam any Tom D.i.c.k and Harry.

    He is SAM, when has he ever failed in getting what he wants.

    But the general didn¡¯t think much of their thoughts.

    Even though, he was stunned by the hovering boards, he only thought that Sam and Watt would be finding an Inn.

    He took amunication token and said.

    "Mark two guys who are moving on some floating objects, follow them and let all the inns and restaurants know that he cannot be taken as a customer, if he was to dine or stay in any of these establishments, I will hold you responsible."

    He didn¡¯t even wait for other party¡¯s answer and turned the token off. But Marquis was stunned.

    General looked at him and said.

    "Do you have something to say regarding my second grandson?" His voice was solemn.

    "I have nothing to say. He is executed because he did something he shouldn¡¯t have."

    "Why should I believe you?"

    Marquis thought for a bit and said.

    "Do you know ck water?" General was stunned when he heard these words.

    "How do you know that name?" His voice was frantic and a bit anxious. If the neighbouring empire is an external enemy then the ck water is an internal enemy of the empire. Even though, he is not in charge of the internal safety, he knew who they are.

    "Luther is working for them, here, these are the scrolls I found in his ring." He took out a bunch of scrolls which contained the duties of Luther in the organisation.

    Marquis didn¡¯t ask for Luther¡¯s ring for no reason. He asked it for these scrolls, he can just take them away but he thought that there might be possibility that Sam might know about these scrolls based on his intelligence gathering scope. That is why he shot an arrow in the dark and it hit the target.

    When the general looked through them, he was stunned. He didn¡¯t know that a ck water branch was eradicated and that happened in his son-inw¡¯s city.

    If he knew that, Sam was the one who did the work, one must wonder how he would think.

 Chapter 144: Deal

    General Spark clearly understood that Luther was indeed tied up with ck water and didn¡¯t probe any further. But he still has a lot to talk about Sam.

    "Why did you let a brat walk over my grandson?" He asked seriously.

    Marquis didn¡¯t know what to say to his father-inw. Because, he didn¡¯t treat thetter like that.

    Their rtionship is more like a transaction. As for General Spark¡¯s rtionship with his daughters and Grandsons, he spoiled them because of an immense the guilt he has to carry.

    His daughters paid a huge price which cannot bepensated due to him, so all he could do is make it up by spoiling them.

    A few days back, his first daughter contacted him through the Marquis and Dukemunication system, which is also essible to her due to his spoiling attitude andined about how her son was being toyed around by a Rank 5 Schr Artisan who is only sixteen years old.

    He is angry at his Son-inw about this, but he cannot do much about it.

    Even though, he asked why he is letting him do that, he knew better than anyone what his answer is. After all, a schr artisan that too Rank 5 at age sixteen is not an ordinary person and it is not easy to control him.

    Marquis took a deep breath and said.

    "General Spark, I don¡¯t know what your daughter told you, but there is one thing I have to say to you. I don¡¯t want to handle anymore unnecessary enemies. You know better than anyone what would happen if we push someone to their limits.

    Your daughters are living examples. I just hope that you won¡¯t do the same foolish mistake again."

    General Spark immediately got angry at Marquis¡¯ words. Even if it was true, he didn¡¯t want to hear it since it is one of the dirtiest pasts of his.

    He snorted and said. "Are you saying, that I have to take your advice and cannot mess with a brat? Remember, even if we have a transaction it is not your time to advise me. As for that brat, I spent more time being a Nascent stage cultivator than his age. I don¡¯t have to care about that."

    Marquis didn¡¯t say anything and just stayed silent. Of course, he understood that Nascent stage is powerful, but that old man of ck water is also a Nascent stage, even if he is early stage one, from the point of you a Novice stage cultivator, it doesn¡¯t matter.

    Both the early stage Nascent and the Middle stage Nascent, both of them are same for a Novice, they both can kill him in a second.

    But what happened to that Old man.

    Marquis has only one thought in his mind.

    ¡¯You are a Nascent, Great. But it is not like Sam hasn¡¯t killed one before.¡¯

    Even though, Marquis doesn¡¯t know if those chains would affect this Middle stage, his instinct is telling him that General would end up in same way, if Sam put sufficient effort in making preparations.

    "I am leaving now; I would being back tomorrow morning. Make sure that all your candidates are here by that time."

    General Spark left that ce after that.

    While General and Marquis are discussing something, somewhere in the city, which is also called the central region Sam and Watt are in the Artisan tower.

    Sam came here because, with his Rank 5 Badge this ce is the best for gathering the info he required very easily.

    "Artisan Sam, I heard a lot about you from Chaya. It is an honour to finally meet you."

    A middle-aged man who is also a Rank 5 Artisan received him personally after he spoke to the receptionist.

    After exchanging some pleasantries, Sam spoke.

    "Artisan Ford, I have something to ask you. Since, you are an Architecture Artisan, you should no about the Real-Estate in the City, right?"

    "Of course."

    "Since, I am new to City I don¡¯t have much knowledge on how it works in here. So, I have no choice but to trouble you. I want to buy a house in the city."

    The middle-aged man was silent for a second and said.

    "Artisan Sam, since you came to me, you should know the situation of the city. The city is divided into three parts. The Outer region, wheremoners live, the inner region where some what rich people live and most of the business urs and finally the Central region, where upper ss of the society lives.

    And we the architecture artisans mostly work in the Central region only and some special projects. You should understand that the influence I am at, the price is pretty high."

    "We don¡¯t need to worry about the price at all, it is secondary. I want a house in the central zone and it would be better if it is near General Spark¡¯s house."

    When Ford heard this, he was dumbfounded for two reasons. First one is about price being secondary and second one is the house being General Spark¡¯s ce.

    ¡¯Is it a coincidence that this guy appeared just now?¡¯ This is the only thought in his mind and as if he was afraid that Sam would change his mind, he stood up and said.

    "I actually have a perfect ce for your choice. Please follow me."

    Sam was surprised at the response but he stood up. Watt and Sam followed Ford into his carriage and after travelling for a while they arrived at a building which has a logo Sam waspletely familiar with.

    "Golden-Horse tradingpany?" Sam said.

    "Oh, since you are already familiar with this name, I don¡¯t have to exin much. Thispany deals with all kinds of trade within the Southern star city and they have almost all kinds of businesses, even the four main profession towers also cooperate with them.

    The ce I am about to show is also a coboration project between them and us."

    They went in and were led by an attendant to a meeting room, within five minutes, another middle-aged man came inside the room. He came in rather frantically and after greeting Ford, he asked Sam.

    "Sir, are you sure those are your only requirements?"

    Sam just nodded his head and the other guy seemed to be ecstatic.

    "We will go right now."

    Again, after another carriage journey.

    Even though, the Central zone is the inner most part of the city, it is thergest of all three. It is twice the size of both inner and outer citiesbined. But the poption is not even one tenth of both inner and outer cities.

    Because the whole ce mostly has a lot of freend which are given to nobility and the other citizens as rewards for their contribution.

    There is still more than half of thend in the zone which is empty and Duke will employ the Golden-horse trading to create the mansions now and then to gift the people with enough merits.

    Sam and the rest arrived at arge estate. When Sam this he was surprised. It is actually an estate. He didn¡¯t think that they would show him an estate instead on mansion.

    "Sir, that is the Estate of the General Spark." The middle-aged manager whose name is Cane said as he pointed at the estate opposite to them.

    Then he continued with his exnations.

    "Actually, our current estate also belongs to General Spark. He decided to see it because he has some urgent need for arge amount of money."

    When Sam heard that the estate belongs to General spark, he was happy.

    Since, this old man purposefully made things difficult to him and did not let Watt stay with them, he might have even made some arrangements to make sure that they won¡¯t get any amodations.

    If he can get normal amodations in an inn what is the point of him making all the fuss and letting him go out.

    But now, if he knew that Sam is buying his very estate, he is wondering how that Old general would react.

    When they entered though, Sam was stunned.

    It is not your every day estate.

    There is a lot of greenery in it but it is not the type of greenery came with tree, rather a translucent green crystal-like stone was all over the estate, rather than saying that it is all over it, it is more appropriate to say that it is made of that stone.

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything, he just waited for these middle-aged men to speak. After they walked deep inside the crystallinend, they saw arge mansion.

    The ce around the mansion does have required scenery and the nts and tree along with a garden. But it is only for that space, the rest of thend is full of crystals.

    Both middle-aged men, exchanged a nce and Ford exined.

    "Artisan Sam, I would be blunt with you. The thing is General Spark got thisnd as a reward and but the main problem is, he didn¡¯t care about it when it was given and some nobles and officials set up a trap to get rid of thisnd.

    But now that he needs some money, he suddenly remembered thisnd which doesn¡¯t have any value.

    You might not no, these green crystals are called impact crystals. These react under any physical force and starts absorbing the surrounding energy, but if the energy crosses the limit, the crystal explodes.

    So, it is hard to clear thend and there are not many uses with these crystals to mine them carefully.

    But General started acting stubbornly and we don¡¯t have a choice to oppose him. We made a lot of effort to make this one mansion here.

    Don¡¯t worry though, we won¡¯t let you suffer a loss.

    Generally, a mansion of this size will cost 30 million in Southern star central zone and this estate even though a waste is almost as big as the size of estate of the Duke Family¡¯s. It is the second biggest estate with more than 1000 acres ofnd.

    If you want to buy an estate of this size you would have to pay at least 1 billion.

    But thend is barren andplete waste, so the General didn¡¯t ask much. All he needs is the 30 million for the mansion and another 120 million for the wholend."

    At this point, Sam only had one thing to say.

    "Deal."

 Chapter 145: Teams

    Sam¡¯s eyes are literally sparkling as he looked at the yards and yards of the green crystal in the estate.

    It is indeed called impact crystal, and even in the material catalogue he read in the Divine dimension, not many uses regarding this item are mentioned. At most, these can be used for some surprise attack.

    But Sam wouldn¡¯t agree to that point.

    As far as he was concerned, there is no material which is useless just the right person didn¡¯t get to use it for the right purpose.

    And Sam happened to see many possibilities with these crystals.

    For him, one hundred fifty million is not a lot. He earned quite a huge sum from his businesses as well as looting the ck water Count city branches which was more than 120 million altogether.

    And the Marquis city branch even earned him over 300 million in spirit stones alone.

    What is the point of him earning all this money if he didn¡¯t get to spend it? And seeing that there is such a profitable mineral which could multiply his profitsing over, he didn¡¯t even need to worry about this spending.

    So, Sam immediately finished the deal and all the procedures are finished. So, they went to roam around the city.

    In the evening, they went directly to the newly bought estate and stayed inside the only mansion that is present.

    That evening, the General has two people reporting in his mansion. His estate has many houses and all of them belong to his special squad who he specially trained and can be called his disciples.

    The first report is that the estate which he has a lot of trouble selling was finally sold. He needed his money really badly.

    He nned to give his special squad which consisted of twenty Great stage and thirty Novice stages a new set of weapons.

    All these people aremoner with high talent which he handpicked. All of them are in the age group of 20 to 35.

    Due to their recent break throughs, he felt that it is his obligation to reward them and need a lot of money for that

    Even though, he as a Nascent expert and the General does have enough sry or more likely called as resources allocated to him for his cultivation, he was still short on cash. After all, he nned to gift them with a lot of pills, weapons and new set of armours, specially designed for one¡¯s own requirements. Everything tailor made for them.

    And there are not many ways for him to get a quick cash and he couldn¡¯t wait for the next quota of his resources and with his pride as general he certainly cannot

    So, he nned to sell his long-forgotten estate and now only he recognised the problem with the estate. But he cannot back down and he immediately went to look for Golden Horsepany.

    He used his authority a little and acted stubborn for the sake of his students and thus made them ept this job.

    There are no results for a long time.

    Thus, when he heard that someone bought thend, he was happy. But the second report instantly soured his mood.

    The subordinate reported that Sam and Watt didn¡¯t stay in any inn, but bought a house.

    "Who sold a house to him? Didn¡¯t you make it clear to the seller?" He asked rather furiously.

    But the subordinate was also at a loss.

    "Sir, the person who sold the house is a Nascent stage cultivator and also a Rank 5 Architecture Artisan from the tower and the house he sold is your estate."

    General, immediately shut his mouth and his forehead was filled with ck lines.

    He is the one who is supposed to be making things difficult to Sam, not offering him a house to buy.

    He didn¡¯t even know how to react to the situation. Dismissing the subordinates, he waspletely immersed in his thoughts and after a long and hard thought, he finally muttered.

    "Anyway, I milked 150 million away from him, thatnd is worthless and the living environment is not any good. It is an absolute waste."

    Only now, did he feel better, but this very thought will p his face so hard in the future that he would rather not get a memory loss than remember such situation.

    The next day, Sam left Watt in the Estate and gave him arge amount to spirit stones to enjoy himself.

    When he went to their assigned building, all of them are looking at him weirdly.

    Philip and Jack and came to him and greeted him.

    When he asked them about what is happening, the answer really gave him some new understanding of the General¡¯s pettiness.

    Yesterday night, Blue fire went to all of them and clearly warned that thepetition would be something rted to forming teams and that is also voluntary. So, they are given a warning that no one should join Sam¡¯s team or they would suffer.

    Sam shook his head with a chuckle.

    Blue fire and Zeke are looking at him but were surprised by the unexpected smile.

    After some time, they were summoned to the grounds of the estate and a total of two hundred candidates assembled.

    Sam saw Nichs and both of them waved at each other.

    General Spark is standing on a big stage with some middle-aged men standing behind him. His back is straight and his burly physique while that aura of amanding presence as if he was forcing everyone to follow absolute obedience.

    He is a General indeed. Sam felt impressed and he could feel some respect for him

    "Wee everyone.

    You all are the candidates who are selected to the next phase of tests to get a life changing opportunity.

    In this stage of thepetitions, the duration is for 18 months.

    The first 16 months will be divided into two stages.

    And those two stages are Military and Business. Thest two months will be announced after the first two stages are over and required eliminations are over.

    Now before I exin anything more, for into teams, I don¡¯t care how many members are in a team, but it should be even numbered. You have ten minutes. You can be a team member with people from your own territory or even from the other territories."

    All this time, General Spark looked at Sam. He wants to see if he would have any teammates and guess what he was surprised.

    Because, there are a not one, but five teammates who came to him.

    And the first one is Philip and he has a mischievous smile on his face followed by Jack, Hawk, Kelly and Drew.

    Ray silently separated from them.

    Sam didn¡¯t think that five of them woulde. He only thought, Jack and Philip would surelye as for Kelly, he didn¡¯t know if she would.

    Jack and him have been through a lot so he woulde as for Philip, honestly Sam felt that Philip is more of a friend to him than Jack, it is just that they are not close enough. Both of them are not at a stage to share everything with each other.

    Maybe the day Philip finally decides on what to learn in the Artisanship, they could talk.

    As for Kelly, maybe there is still some stupid infatuation left and for Hawk and Drew he couldn¡¯t think of many possibilities except that they are here because Sam helped them a lot in the previous stages.

    Sam didn¡¯t think much and he wouldn¡¯t be surprised if everyone didn¡¯te to him except Philip and Jack.

    After ten minutes, the teams were formed.

    All the teams formed are the teams of ten, every territory has twenty candidates which made two teams from each territory. The only odd team is Sam¡¯s because there are only six and the remaining four were added to the Southern Star city¡¯s team.

    And the four people that are added to southern star city team are Zeke and Blue fire and two of their nobleckeys from Blue me city.

    General seemed to have pulled strings in a lot of ces just to get back for his Grandson.

    Samst all the respect he had for him in an instant.

    General Spark checked that everyone was done, then he spoke.

    "Now that everyone is set. Every team will be divided into two. Half of you will go to military in the first stage and stay there for eight months, the second one will start a business, and you have to earn money in a legal way.

    After eight months, you will change the positions, the first half will take over the business or conduct new businesses and earn money while the second half will be entering the military.

    The team points will be given c.u.mtively and the team members themselves will be distributing themselves among them.

    As for how you get the points, you won¡¯t be knowing until the final evaluation.

    But do remember, in the Military the instructors and the superiors have right to deduct your points for your misconduct and in the Business Phase, there would be a tight surveince on you and any underhanded means used will be charged by deduction of your points.

    You divide into two teams and I would decide on who would participate in military and who would participate in the business first."

 Chapter 146: Military structure

    Sam just left the matter of division to the remaining members but before that he had a few words to say.

    "I won¡¯t ask why you would pick me in this kind of situation, but I thank you for that. But one point I want to make is that you might have made a biggest mistake in your life, because you would be having a hard time because of your decision and that may even affect your advancement.

    If that really happens, I would do you a favour in show of my gratitude after this whole fiasco is over. But until then, I am sorry to say that you have to face the consequences of the decision you made and live with it."

    The group didn¡¯t reply to his words and they decided to make the teams in a few minutes. Sam, Hawk and Drew are in one team while Jack, Philip and Kelly are in another team.

    There are no particr reasons except that among the group only Philip and Sam knew how to conduct a business and Kelly is the other Artisan who can make some products for their shop.

    Jack is mostly a person who can follow orders and is familiar with Philip which makes it easier for them.

    As for Sam¡¯s team, Hawk might be amiable but taking orders from Philp might be a bit too much for him as he lived all his life in superiority and Drew might feel the same.

    Even though, it might make them look like being unreasonable, it is a fact that they might listen to orders of Sam because he can overwhelm thempletely, but Philip although capable cannot do that for reasons unknown.

    Anyway, Philip and Jack thought that this arrangement was better for them and it is being done like that.

    They stood in two teams of three members.

    After every other team sorted their things out, General gestured someone and that person came and started distributing some small tokens.

    The tokens have numbers written on them. And for Sam¡¯s two groups the numbers 20-1 and 20-2.

    They are considered as the tenth team and in that twentieth team, Sam¡¯s group of three has tokens with 20-1 and Philip¡¯s group of three has 20-2.

    After the distribution ispleted General spoke once again.

    "All teams¡¯ first halves will serve in the military for the first 8 months and second halves will do the business.

    Let me exin how this goes.

    There will be two wars with our neighbouring empire in the whole test time. And first war will ur at the eighth month while the second one will be on the sixteenth month.

    These two wars are only for your testing and the neighbouring empire is also undergoing the same test as you, so you would be going head on against them.

    The same test is going all over the empire in every dukedom at the same time, so you better be prepared and put your heart into it, if you want to stand out.

    For military batch rules, you will be sent to the military training camp which is being held in the military base of the Dukedom capital. You will be trained there and will be sent to the war in the eighth month, so your training will be there for seven months and for every fifteen days of these seven months, you will be allowed to leave the camp.

    But you are only allowed to move with in the city and nearby woods that are under the Southern star city control.

    The remaining rules on how your training goes will be exined in the base.

    For the business part, you are allowed to move as much as you like and you can conduct business in all of the Dukedom¡¯s territory.

    Even though, it is called business at the end of the day all you have to do it earn money, but you have to provide the means you obtained and make sure that you didn¡¯t do it in an illegal way.

    Any businesses and assets you have previously don¡¯t count. However, you can use them as investments.

    For example, if you have and asset and you sell it, that won¡¯t count as your earnings, but you can use that money as an investment.

    At the end evaluation, your returns and the investments will bepared and one with the points will be awarded based on the percentage of your profits.

    Now, the batch that is going to military, you have five minutes to talk to your team and get ready."

    After the speech, Sam didn¡¯t say much he only talked to Philip for a few seconds and that is.

    "Watt will be outside of the estate, you guys follow him, I bought a property you guys stay there with him.

    As for business thing, try to start something, I think Watt has enough money. Just test the waters for the time being in the capital for the first fifteen days, but from what I can see things won¡¯t be easy at all.

    Try your best and take care, I will see you guys after fifteen days."

    After the five minutes passed, all the candidates in the military batch are taken away. Sam looked around and didn¡¯t find Nichs, he seemed to be in the business batch.

    Sam didn¡¯t think much of it, so fifty students were taken in the carriages to the Military base of the Southern star city.

    Even though, it is called the military base of the city, it is a not present in the city and is in the nearby woods.

    When all fifty students were boarded down and entered the camp, they saw many squads and battalions training.

    Sam noticed one thing, there is not much order in the camp or even in the squads.

    Each squad has different types of cultivators, mages, warriors, warrior mages etc.

    Even though, they see pretty united most of them are mainly focused on their individual strength training and very few are practicing team attacks.

    On the way he saw a deserted zone with no people at all, that ce had a small building made of stone and there is a small stage. He didn¡¯t know its purpose but it has some weird atmosphere attached to it.

    Soon, they were led to some barracks. There a middle-aged man is standing with his back straight as he looked at the candidates. Behind him, there are five men who are also standing straight.

    When they arrived at the ce, the middle-aged man in the lead called out.

    "Stand in twenty files with each file having five people." When all the candidates stood in order, the middle-aged man continued.

    "From today until the eight-month time is over, I am your chief instructor. The five men standing behind me are also the instructors who have absolute authority over your tasks, training and even punishment.

    Generally, ording to our empire¡¯s military structure a squad will be consisting of seven members and apany consists of seven such squads led by apanymander who has to be flexible and capable enough to lead the wholepany as well as merge with any squad in a battle.[The military structure is purely fictional and something that yours truly made up. So, don¡¯tin about me not having much military knowledge]

    So, you all will form twopanies and there would be twopanymanders selected through procedures.

    To further exnation, a battalion has at least tenpanies in it and six battalionsbine to be a Regiment.

    In this base there are a total of five such regiments and another five regiments are stationed at various borders of the Dukedom. For every six months their duties will be exchanged.

    These things don¡¯t apply to you guys as your main task is to train for the war after eight months.

    But it is essential to know these details.

    As for this military structure, there are some exceptions which they are not valid for and one of them are the special squad our General Spark is training which is called the Thunder Wolf squad which has a total fifty members.

    And as for the rules, you have a fixed resting time, eating time, training time which will be noted in the schedule you will be given for you by the instructors.

    There is onemon rule in the Military that is valid to all the regiments and that includes the Thunder Wolf squad as well as you guys. That is, anyone can challenge you for a duel and you cannot decline if the other person¡¯s cultivation is not more than two levels higher than you. [Levels here means Novice Level 3 cannot reject a person at Novice Level 5]

    In the duel anything other than killing and crippling the cultivation is allowed.

    Some of you might think it is unfair to get beat up by the higher level, but this is the army and, in the war, there is no telling whether you will face the enemy at same level. So, suck it up and deal with it.

    If you have any questions, ask me now."

    One of the candidates who is the part of the 1-1 raised his hand and asked.

    "Sir, May I know your name?"

    "Why do you want to know my name?" The middle-aged man asked.

    The candidate was taken aback for a second and said meekly.

    "Curiosity?" He was uncertain himself; he just asked the name casually.

    ??I don¡¯t want to tell my name just because you are curious. My name isn¡¯t that cheap.

    If you just want to know about me, I will give you guys some details. I am the Deputy general of the Southern star military, you can call me Deputy general or instructor.

    I am an Early stage Nascent realm Warrior.

    But if you really want to know my name so much, there are two choices.

    First one, you can gain enough merits so that you would be worthy of knowing my name, or you the second one, climb the ranks to get ess to the records of the Military department so that you can read my name yourself.

    Until then you can forget about knowing it.

    In the whole Dukedom, there are less than ten people who know my name." He spoke and walked away.

 Chapter 147: No deals

    After that the Deputy general left and four out of five remaining instructors also gone, they also don¡¯t seem to have any intention to introduce themselves to them right now.

    The remaining instructor took the ce of Deputy general and spoke.

    "My name is Jian

    I am a Regimentmander and so are the remaining four instructors. We train our own regiments individually and each has our own ways.

    Your training will be conducted along with all five regiments and you will be tested in all types of qualities required by our Southern star military.

    For every three days, different instructor will take charge of the ss. So, for the next three days I will be your instructor.

    As for the rules.

    Everyone should assemble in the same ce by dawn and you should be here no matter if you had enough rest or not. It doesn¡¯t matter to me, if you have slept the night, cultivated or just roamed around.

    I would be expecting you to be here and if anyone fails toply, you would be facing the punishment.

    You will be receiving the same benefits of an ordinary soldier based on your cultivation levels. Every Novice would get 100 elemental stone every week and there would be three meals a day which will provide just enough spiritual energy for you to finish your training.

    Everyone will be dismissed after the supper is over.

    But, in some cases surprise drills will be conducted which expects you to assemble no matter what time it is.

    As for duels, any one who has a rank equal to Battalionmander or above has to supervise a duel, and if a person wants to reject it, he has to give a reason valid enough to convince the battalionmander.

    If you have any conditions or wagers for duels, the supervisor can act as a middle-man.

    Okay, that¡¯s it for today and you can rx for today. Your uniforms will be delivered to your assigned barracks tonight, and tomorrow morning you have to report to the ce in your uniform.

    By the way there is one more important thing I forgot to tell you, nomunication tokens are allowed to use. If you try to use it, the formation will find out and you would be held responsible for your actions.

    Disperse."

    After that the instructor left and all of them went to their respective tents.

    Each team has a tent of their own. Sam¡¯s group of three also has a tent of their own.

    Actually, the tents are made for five people but since they are only three, they have big enough space for them.

    Judging from this, Sam almost confirmed that General Spark just bent so many rules to iste him and his friends.

    But at this same exact moment, another tent is not asfortable. The Southern star city¡¯s team who joined with the remaining four members, now consists of the seven people in the team and out of seven people, two are Zeke and Blue fire.

    The people inside the tent who originally belonged to the Southern star team are quite frustrated.

    Out of twenty people of the southern star city, ten people are frommoners and ten are from Nobility.

    But Nichs picked his team of ten separately based on their abilities and left the remaining ten in which the Blue fire, Zeke and others were added.

    The original members are already quite upset that Nichs didn¡¯t select them and now they are even more upset because they had to follow General¡¯s orders and ept his grandsons.

    They are cursing the old general in their hearts. If he was so capable why didn¡¯t he push his two grandsons into the Nichs¡¯ team? Because, Nichs is Duke¡¯sst son and he don¡¯t give a flying f.u.c.k about what the General wants.

    ¡¯This Old General is such a hypocrite.¡¯ This is the only thought in everyone¡¯s mind.

    Sam is also curious about this issue, why is the General so adamant about helping his grandsons so much that he was willing to ruin his own reputation? That is the question that he has in his mind since their first encounter.

    As for the present situation, the original team members could only grit their teeth and allow these two Grandsons to have afortable ce and they have to adjust in the remaining space.

    At this moment, the business side of the teams are all moving along the city. Most of the teams are already moving all over the city and trying to buy over a best ce, some teams who doesn¡¯t have any business experience only have one thought.

    Explore the forests

    They decided on going hunts, gathering herbs etc.

    But none of them are thinking about moving to their Marquis territory, because it took a lot of time to travel from one ce to another, and the fares are not low either, all of these transportation costs will be added to their investments which would lessen their profit margin.

    The economy of the Southern Star city is bigger than all the nine Marquis territoriesbined.

    The people who has are on business side of the first stage, has a lot of pressure on them, because if they don¡¯t make a proper business now, they won¡¯t have proper results in theter half of thepetition when their team exchanged the ces

    Now, all the teams are looking for ce to conduct business and most of them are targeting the already established business ces.

    Some of them are trying to buy out the whole business, some of them are trying to lease the ce for the next sixteen months. All kinds of deals are being discussed.

    But one team is having an extremely hard time.

    Philip, Jack and Kelly ran around the whole city along with Watt, but they were unable to cut a single deal.

    Even the newly established buildings in the inner city and the shops in the worst spot are not willing to sell them.

    In fact, nobody is even willing to talk business with them. Some of them just blocked them at the entrance and some of them sent them out after learning their team number.

    They are having aplete hard time. They understood that the situation is not good for them, but they still kept on trying.

    Actually, all of this is within Sam¡¯s expectations, he knew that they wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything easily, so he didn¡¯t give them any ideas to test the waters.

    He only gave them some recipes and asked them to start a restaurant or look for a restaurant for a possible cooperation, but they didn¡¯t even have a chance to negotiate.

    By evening, they are left withplete frustration.

    On their way back to Sam¡¯s estate, they encountered Nichs. When thetter saw Watt, he greeted him with a smile.

    "Hey, Watt. How are you doing? Are you helping your boss with the mission?"

    "Well, I wanted to, but there seemed to be no chance." Watt replied. Actually, Watt doesn¡¯t talk much but when he saw Nichs, he has an idea on how to turn around the situation a bit. If Nichs can give them a rmendation, they would at least find a ce to start.

    After exining the situation, Nichs also has someplicated expressions.

    "The situation is a bit messy. It is not that I don¡¯t want to help you, but if I use my identity as Duke¡¯s son, I would be abusing my authority and I would have to put those people in a spot as they would have a hard time between me and General.

    The second reason is that it wouldn¡¯t be fair for my teammates if I help you in apetition." He paused for a bit and after some deep thinking he said.

    "How about this, I have a smallnd in the outskirts of the inner zone which I bought from a friend. The area is a bit remote and I bought thatnd to help a friend, I don¡¯t have any ns on using it and it is not an ideal location for doing business either.

    So, if you guys don¡¯t have any other options, you can find me again and I would sell thatnd to you guys, even though it is a bit bad, I guess it is better than nothing.

    Please forgive me for not helping you, even though I want to help you my teammates might not feel it is fair for them and this is apetition, I don¡¯t think helping you would be an honourable deed,"

    "Thanks for offering. We would meet you if we don¡¯t have any choice, as for apology, don¡¯t mention it. You are not the reason for our situation so you don¡¯t have any obligation to help us either."

    Watt answered and both of them went their separate ways after they exchanged their contact with themunication tokens.

    After that brief encounter, Watt led all of them to the new estate, when Philip looked at thend full of impact crystal, he couldn¡¯t help but ask.

    "Why did Sam buy a ce full of impact crystals? They are not easy to get rid of and they are not that useful."

    "I don¡¯t know, but Boss said that they are actually quite useful and they can be a treasure if used properly."

    Philip didn¡¯t answer as they slowly moved towards the Mansion. They called it a day and went to rest immediately after reaching the ce.

 Chapter 148: Oppression -1.... 15 days of military

    The Next day,

    There was a loud bell ringing all over the camp before dawn. This is the call for assembly.

    All the candidates came out of their tents as fast as they can and assembled just like the day before.

    Instructor Jian, is standing at the same ce as yesterday.

    After the people assembled, he spoke with a smile.

    "Everyone, todays, training will be along with apany from my regiment. You will follow their way for the whole day.

    But before that, divide yourself into squads. Each squad should have seven members and there would be a total of fourteen squads along with twopanymanders. These positions will be only valid for these three days.

    After three days, the new instructor wille and you will divide yourselves into new squads and newpanies.

    But this situation is only for first fifteen days.

    After the first fifteen days, the instructors will finalise your squads andmanders. Till, then try to prove yourselves and get the approval of the instructors to get the position you deserve."

    As soon as he said these words, many people became excited.

    Many of them raised their hands to speak and all of them are too eager as they wanted to get the chance to talk first and be thepanymander as soon as possible.

    "Discuss yourselves and decide. I will give you five minutes. If there are only two people left after that, I would just let them be, but if there are still more people, I will select the two from them."

    At this moment, a young man started walking over to them.

    He is wearing an Electric blue uniform and there is a thunder symbol on his chest. Everyone just looked at him in awe, particrly the people from the Southern Star city.

    Because they knew what that electric blue uniform signifies.

    But among the whole group, only more than ten people are looking at the legs of the young man, more precisely at his feet.

    Because, the young man¡¯s footsteps didn¡¯t have any sound or any foot prints. His feet seemed to be light and as if he is floating without any traces which showed the control of his legs.

    This guy, must be good at movement techniques or good at his kicking techniques, most probably both of them.

    The young man looked rather proud and his eyes are full of confidence. He walked over to the team members and looked around as if he was scanning them without even greeting the Instructor.

    His gazended on Blue Fire and Zeke, he waved at them and the duo waved back.

    Then only he looked at the instructor and greeted him.

    "Hello, Regiment Commander Jian."

    "Hello, Jim. What are you doing here? Is there no training in the Thunder Wolf Squad?" Instructor didn¡¯t seem to mind his attitude at all.

    When the candidates heard the words Thunder Wolf Squad, they couldn¡¯t help but feel the unwavering admiration, well not all of them at least ny of them.

    The young man whose name is Jim is only a Peak stage Novice and he seemed to be in his early twenties.

    Whenpared to the other candidates, their talent is around same level, but the Thunder Wolf Squad¡¯s Halo is making him look like he is above his peers and not all of them could see through that Halo.

    Jim looked at Jian and said.

    "Well, I heard that Teacher¡¯s (General Spark) Grand sons came to the city and are the part of this batch, so I came to greet them. If you don¡¯t mind, I want to talk to them for a bit."

    Even though, his words were like seeking permission, his tone of voice is saying otherwise.

    Instructor Jian, just nodded with a smile albeit a bit forced. Zeke and Blue fire walked out and the three of them walked a few yards a away as they talked.

    Jim looked at the batch from time to time and Sam could feel his condescending gazending on him.

    After a few minutes, Zeke and Blue fire merged back into the group, while Jim talked to Jian privately.

    Before leaving, he shot a gaze full of mischievous glint towards Sam.

    Sam knew at once that trouble hase knocking.

    And his guess was right, Jian looked at Sam with some hesitation before announcing to the group.

    "For the first three days, I will select thepanymanders. Zeke and Sam step forward."

    Everyone immediately fell silent; they didn¡¯t understand why the instructor suddenly changed his decision.

    But they didn¡¯t dare to talk back even though they are a little unsatisfied.

    Sam also didn¡¯t say anything and just stepped forward.

    The Instructor said.

    "You both will be thepanymanders for the next three days. You are responsible for monitoring the training and controlling your wholepany, you can decide on how the squads will be divided and who would be the squad captains.

    You are the only one responsible for your teams."

    After the announcement was over, Sam let them divide themselves as the squads on their own. He is not particrly interested, but he did do his job by solving some conflicts on squad leaders and their training requirements.

    There are many types of training facilities, target practices, closebat practice, arena, dodging practice. They are plenty.

    Sam looked through the info regarding their powers and started making the schedule for their training. After all, not all of them can practice at the same time.

    After divulging everything, he was about to go to his training, but suddenly he heard a shout.

    "Sam."

    Jian shouted on top of his lungs, to let the whole batch stop their activities in the middle and looked at him.

    Sam walked towards him with his back straight as he looked at Jian, he didn¡¯t expect that they would trouble him so desperately. But he still kept his patience.

    He decided that he would not, do anything for the first fifteen days, he would see how far they want to go.

    But these guys are even more desperate than he thought.

    Jian said in a strict voice.

    "Sam, your subordinate is idling and sat under the tree there, what are you doing without checking on him." He said as he pointed at the tree.

    There, Sam saw a person standing with his spear in his hand as he closed his eyes while facing the tree.

    He is a wood element Warrior mage, everyone with some expertise could see that he is trying to practice something special just from the activity of the spiritual energy around him.

    But the instructor who is a Grand Realm cultivator is saying that he is idling around.

    Sam didn¡¯t answer as he just looked at the instructor with a cold gaze.

    "Due to your ipetence, minus five points." Sam didn¡¯t say anything and just left the ce, but for the whole day he was being called out and being rebuked under the gazes of all the candidates.

    "SAM... Minus 3 points"

    "SAM... Minus 6 points."

    "SAM... Minus 8 points."

    Sam kept on hearing these words for the rest of the day.

    At first, the candidates thought that Sam did really make mistake, butter they understood something was off.

    When they thought of how, instructor changed his mind after Jim came and how he appointed Sam aspanymander and then kept on targeting him, they connected the dots and came to a conclusion.

    Sam is being targeted. But they are curious on who did he piss off so much to be targeted like this.

    After the whole day??s routine was over, Sam was about to go to his tent along with Hawk and Drew, but that doesn¡¯t seem to be so easy.

    But this time, Sam is not the target but Hawk and Drew.

    A soldier came out of nowhere and challenged Hawk. Leaving thetter in a battered state after the spar.

    Sam looked for medical help but that didn¡¯t go as nned.

    "What is wrong?" Sam asked the in charge of the infirmary.

    "Healers are busy." This is the only response; Sam has gotten in return.

    He couldn¡¯t do anything but carry Hawk inside the tent and heal him. Because, he has to be ready for the next day¡¯s routine.

    But before he could do anything, Drew was challenged.

    "I heard you are a swordsman, let me take a look at those skills."

    "As you wish."

    Both of them started sparring, as expected the soldier who came is of higher level than Drew.

    But the worst part is that he was not even being given a chance to admit defeat.

    And for the whole night, Sam kept on assembling their bones and fixing their bodies.

    Even the candidates were a little troubled, they didn¡¯t like how the instructor is troubling Sam that much. He lost more than 35 points in three days.

    The same thing happened for the three days and after the instructor changed and the new instructor was about to take charge and just when everyone thought that things go to normal, the candidates were surprised.

    Because, another person with Thunder Wolf squad¡¯s uniform came.

    Sam didn¡¯t know what to do. He could only shake his head as he looked at the instructor.

    All the candidates have a weird sense of dejavu. They could see that Sam is not going to have any good time soon.

    The same things repeated time and time again.

    But the instructors didn¡¯t go overboard as Instructor Jian.

    They acted a bit mildly in the aspect of reducing points but for the rebukes and scolding along with the shaming and insulting are on full swing. But they still lost around 80 points.

    For the first fourteen days, Sam, Hawk, Drew went through a lot. Thetter two took a beating and it is almost every day.

    On fourteenth day night, Sam is healing Hawk and Drew.

    Blue fire came into the tent and said to both of them.

    "You guys would save a lot of trouble if you distance with him. Even though, it iste for you to get out of the team, I would arrange you two be soldiers or I can even give you a chance to get into the Marquis academy. You better think carefully."

    Sam looked at the two of them.

    For the past two weeks, they didn¡¯t say a single thing. They just took the beatings and even though they won some battles it didn¡¯t make much difference.

    "You know what, his suggestion is not that bad." Sam said casually.

    Hawk just chuckled and said.

    "Well, we are here mostly because of your help, even if I believe I can make the cut, I am not too sure of it. You helped us before, how could we just leave you because you are in a bit trouble."

    "Yeah, and this whole thing came from Zeke, even if you haven¡¯t found a problem with him, I would have done so. Then I would have been in same situation." Drew said from the side.

    Sam just shook his head and said.

    "Anyway, rest well, we have a break tomorrow we would see what is happening outside. I will think of way to get rid of these troubles after seeing the outside situation."

 Chapter 149: Oppression-2.... 15 days of business struggles

    For the first fifteen days, just like how Sam¡¯s trio faced the trouble inside the camp, his teammates are also having quite hard time inside the city.

    They looked for the shops for three more days, but no amount of money is making them cut a sessful deal. So, all they can do is go back to Nichs.

    "I am really sorry that you are going through this. I will talk to my father to look into it." Nichs said to Watt.

    Even he felt like the General Spark is going overboard. He is bending so many rules just to get back at a young man.

    "Thanks." Watt didn¡¯t say much and they finished the deal.

    After they looked at the small piece ofnd, Watt is thinking on how to deal with it.

    "Let¡¯s go to the Artisan tower."

    Philip said and four of them went to the tower.

    Even though, it is difficult for them to find the high ranked Artisan, Watt was still remembered by the receptionist as Sam¡¯s subordinate of the Young Artisan. So, she immediately satisfied his requests.

    There are two things they had to do.

    "Watt, youmunicate with Blue me city¡¯s Artisan tower and ask Chaya to send Mackey here. From the situation here, it would be hard for us to hire any employees. As him to bring his whole team here."

    "Kelly, youmunicate with a Rank-4 Architecture Artisan, I will go to Golden-Horse trading to see if we can arrange a faster transportation for Mackey and his followers."

    Philip gave them some directions and went outside.

    Right now, their main problem is not money at all. Sam gave them around thirty million spirit stones and they can afford to spend.

    When Philip went outside, Kelly went to meet the tower head of the Artisan tower along with Watt.

    Because, he is the only one who has permission to let others ess the towermunication for another city.

    They saw the Rank 5 badge on the middle-aged man¡¯s chest who is checking some material. He is a weapon artisan.

    Yes, the tower head of this city is also a Rank 5. But what is the difference between him and Chaya? It is the number of stars. If you remember, in the beginning when Sam took the weapon Artisan exam his badge has nine stars below his rank.

    These stars indicate the skill level. As an inferior city, Chaya¡¯s is a Rank 5 one star where this man is Rank 5 seven stars.

    In the lower levels the stars won¡¯t make much difference, but as the rank grew the stars make a lot of difference.

    "I heard that you are friends of Rank 5 Schr Artisan Sam. May I know why you are here?"

    He asked as soon as they entered the room.

    "We would like tomunicate with Blue me Artisan tower."

    "Why?"

    "Well, this is the situation..."

    Kelly went on exined the whole situation. When it was all done, the middle-aged man said.

    "I heard about Artisan Sam from Chaya and from what I know, he has some keen interest in materials that are not popr. You know, we have a lot of space-jade in our tower. Do you guys know if he is interested?"

    The middle-aged man said. From his words one could clearly tell he is trying to take advantage of the situation.

    After all, the space jade is one of the least popr materials, but they still have to collect ording to regtions of the Artisan tower. So, he can only find a way to get rid of them.

    "Sure."

    Watt immediately replied.

    The middle-aged manughed lightly and led them to themunication room.

    When they are done there, both of them went back to hire an Architecture Artisan.

    They took the man to theirnd and exined how they would like the construction.

    Philip met them up there informing that they could get a Level 4 beasts for transporting Mackey and his employees, but the cost is a bit high.

    The Fire wing eagles, except for Marquis¡¯ the rest are Peak of Level 3.

    So, they can expect the journey to be done within a few days.

    The Construction of the ce went pretty smoothly. Nobody dared to make any moves on them as the work was under the Artisan tower.

    So, even general has to think before he does something.

    In a week, the construction was done and even Mackey and his team came.

    When the construction was done, they went to the tower to settle down the bills, they bought all the space jade which was worth more than two million spirit stones.

    And for Space Jade, it is quiterge quantity.

    But they have to decide on one more thing.

    How to make it popr?

    They have to make this ce known and after thinking long and hard, Philip has only one idea and that is to attract them with the word ¡¯Free¡¯.

    So, the four of them started gathering beast meat in morning and most of it was by hunting and at night, they started making fliers by hand.

    For the next four days, they kept on distributing the fliers. Watt floated over the city as he gave one to every person he saw.

    There is only thing on the flier.

    "Free food made of Magical beast meat for three days." Along with location of their restaurant.

    The word spread like wild fire in the city and they attracted a lot of people. Many people visited at first for curiosity and for confirmation if the info is right and they were not disappointed.

    So, on the eleventh day, the grand opening of the restaurant was done in a majestic way. Hundreds of people came to taste the food.

    When they tasted it; they were delighted.

    Until the day thirteenth, Mackey and his staff were very busy and so were Watt, Jack, Kelly and Philip. The first three were hunting and buying meat from the hands of hunters directly in the woods.

    Because, they were unable to buy any in the city.

    Philip is busy managing the flow of customers. He even saw some candidates who came to test the waters and they were really worried after tasting the dishes. They are delicious.

    The day fourteenth was their official opening for the business and many customers still came. They could feel the effects of the dishes immediately and many of them really liked the food and they even have a chance to exchange the food for the raw meat.

    So, they were really excited to eat again.

    "*Phew* This is the big day. I hope everything goes alright."

    Philip said as he sighed. His palms are sweating. He is clearly nervous and serious. No one has seen him this serious before.

    "I hope so too." Everyone has gone through a lot in these days. The constant rejection has almost made them lose their mind. They are cursing the general so much that if the words could kill, the general would definitely die a hundred times.

    When the business started, they were clearly happy. Because, the flow of customers is quite high. By afternoon, they recovered all the expenses on buying the ingredients for the past three days of free food and by evening they were clearly satisfied.

    Judging from the customers reaction, the business will be going quite well in the future and at this rate all their losses will be covered within a month.

    So, the next day which is also the first fifteenth day, they opened the ce quite hopefully.

    But as soon as they started the business and the customer flow was at its peak, a problem came knocking.

    A bunch of men came with menacing expressions.

    "Who is in charge here?"

    The leader who seemed to have a scar on his face asked.

    Philip walked to them with a frown with Watt on his side and asked.

    "What do you want?"

    "Who gave you the permission to open a restaurant here?"

    The man in the lead asked.

    "The Duke." Philip said and took out a piece of paper with Duke¡¯s seal.

    This is the permission exclusive for the candidates.

    The man didn¡¯t even bother to take a look and just said.

    "Whatever, you have to pay the protection fee, of you want to do any business here."

    Philip frowned. But he asked.

    "How much?"

    "100,000. Per month."

    Philip and Watt immediately became solemn. Because of the huge amount. It is not that they cannot afford it, but Philip has bad feeling that this might be another ploy from General. If the men really did work for General, they might use this money as leverage and make up a story for bribery.

    Watt didn¡¯t stay here and immediately moved outside on Silver wind. He went to look for city guards.

    Even though, they can fight off these guys, ording to the rules, fighting in the city is prohibited and they need a valid reason if the fight broke out.

    But if this is all a ploy, which has highest probability of being one, they didn¡¯t feel safe about taking action.

    But Watt didn¡¯t find any city guards in the vicinity. The situation smelled more and more fishy.

    When he went back to the restaurant, the situation already turned to worse.

    The men who came in started destroying the tables because, Philip was thinking about how to deal with the situation.

    Before he could retaliate, they already attacked randomly and started running away. This made them believe even more that this is a ploy.

    Their business got disrupted and after another hour, when they started settling things, another wave of people came.

    This time, they are prepared. Watt and Jack blocked their retreat while Philip attacked from the front.

    Just as they were about tond an attack.

    "Stop right there."

    A middle-aged man immediately came. He is one of the supervisors of the Business side of thepetition, he didn¡¯t even bother to ask, what is going on and said to Philip.

    "You guys are trying to fight here, Minus 10 points."

    "But Sir..." Philip tried to talk but was immediately cut off.

    "I saw everything and I don???t want to listen to your exnation." The supervisor immediately left.

    Philip, Jack and Kelly immediately felt dejected. They can now understand that they cannot do a proper business here. Only Watt is a bit normal, because Boss said that he would sort things out.

 Chapter 150: Suspending the business

    While Philip and the rest are dealing with the damage of the restaurant, Sam and the remaining candidates in the military are having a morning assembly before their departure outside.

    "You guys can stay outside for the remaining day and you have to report back before dawn tomorrow. I will be your trainer for the next three days in the next fifteen days session.

    One more rule you have to follow is that you have no permission to intervene in the business side of things, you can give suggestions to your teammates but you shouldn¡¯t perform any trade which will be calcted in thepetition or you shouldn¡¯t help them in forms of negotiations.

    The most you can do is financial help and personal suggestions and some advice.

    Dismissed."

    All the candidates exited the camp.

    Sam took out themunication token to contact Watt.

    When he got the location of the restaurant, the trio went there as fast as they can.

    By the time they got there, there are no customers. Everyone left, only his teammates and Watt are sitting there with the gloomy atmosphere.

    Sam was not that surprised by the situation. He casually picked a seat and asked.

    "Tell me the details on what happened since the day one."

    Watt slowly narrated everything on how, they were unable to buy or rent any shop, on how they finally bought thend in this remote location and how they built the shop and bringing back Mackey and his staff.

    Sam listened to the whole situation and just showed his assent that he understood.

    "Let us go back to the Estate."

    Sam said and stood up. They walked back to the estate slowly. On the way back he observed the situation of the market and how the things or going on here.

    One thing, he observed is that in this city, the average person can be considered as well-to-do than poor. They can afford a considerable luxury.

    He is thinking on how to use this to his advantage.

    Many people might be thinking that his team might be at a disadvantage for now, but he can make sure that it is only a temporary thing.

    He has enough confidence that he can turn his tables around.

    All the way back, Sam could feel a gaze on him. He knew that the General put a man to keep a watch on him.

    One mistake and he would be done.

    The General is behavingpletely beneath his title. He is using all kinds of despicable means by bending all kinds of rules.

    Sam just wanted to test waters and didn¡¯t take any measures in the first fifteen days, since they are trying so desperately, he would make sure that he would win.

    Since, the military general himself is making it hard for him, he would earn all the money from the military itself.

    This time, Sam also dashed out one of his self-made rules and that is not making the fire-arms and explosives.

    Since, he came to this world, he met so many people that he wanted to make the fire-arms many times, even though a normal gun won¡¯t be of much use, he can use the materials exclusive to this world and make it possible to make a weapon which could make some serious damage.

    There are two main reasons he didn¡¯t want to create these.

    First one is that, a gun is one of the inventions on earth which brought many changes to the world and he didn¡¯t want to bring that thing into this world. That thing can give someone the unfounded courage and guts which they actually don¡¯t have.

    If it wasnded in wrong hands, things would be disastrous. All this while, the people in this world depended on their abilities to kill and everything they had depended on their abilities to achieve. But if guns pose same level of lethality as in his previous world, things would change because the control over people¡¯s death in this world is less.

    Even though, he could control the exposure of the weapon, he didn¡¯t want to take a chance. But he slowly lost thepassion to the people in this world after spending all this time and meeting these people.

    The second reason is, guns are too addictive to him.

    Towards Cold weapon, Sam has endless adoration and admiration along with respect. For him, all kinds of cold weapons they might be some swords, spears, ws etc. They are like true love. Using them is like having a better half.

    You would be going through all kinds of tribtions with them and them being with you will give you courage and satisfaction at the same time. It is like having a wife.

    But guns and explosives. They are like a mistress. Using for satisfying the carnal desires like animals, without involving many emotions and just using it for some temporary satisfaction for some specific times. There are no strings attached. He can never rece a sword¡¯s position in his heart, if he made one himself.

    But guns are different. Every gun is a different kind of vixen, he likes to enjoy the satisfaction of using one and he doesn¡¯t get attached to it emotionally except if those guns are really, really special ones. But the problem is one can get addicted to the vixens and desire to enjoy the pleasure repeatedly.

    If he starts shooting, he will desire to enjoy to his heart¡¯s content.

    At first, he didn¡¯t have that many enemies. But now, he is gaining more and more people on his hostile side and having these guns might be helpful.

    But before making some for his personal use, he will make some average shooting devices to make some quick cash.

    If doesn¡¯t make the military bleed some money and blood for what they did to him and his teammates, he will can¡¯t sleep peacefully.

    For these fifteen days, his patience is stretched thin and he almost broke several times.

    Now that he knew the extent of the other party¡¯s determination to hinder him, he could shed all his cordiality.

    Right now, he is full of evil intent. If not for the fact that he is not strong enough and he personally wants to teach the general a lesson with brute force, he would be with his shadow mice on his way to deal with that Old man.

    He is at his breaking point. One more push and he would make designs to kill that general. His team lost almost hundred points without even doing anything.

    After entering the estate, Sam sent everyone to the mansion while he stayed outside as he looked at the impact crystal.

    He has some ideas on how to use these ¡¯worthless¡¯ things to make some money out of the military. Not only for now, but also for a near future. And he can save the best for himself.

    Before that, he has to do something and that is to extract the crystal.

    The main problem of these crystals is that extracting them is actually quite difficult.

    These crystals are just like piezoelectric materials from the modern earth. Those piezoelectric materials use the mechanical vibrations and convert them to electric energy.

    But these impact crystals can change any kind of physical force acting on it, the kic energy, the strong impact of wind force, the water force, even the pure impact strike of normal physical force which makes it absorb the surrounding spiritual energy.

    After the spiritual energy reaches the crystal¡¯s limit, it would explode andpletely disintegrates into the thing air if it didn¡¯t find a proper outlet.

    There is only one way to extract the crystal and that is to melt it with a high temperature fire and collect it when it is in the liquid state.

    This is the most feasible method and if there are any other methods and that is to collect the whole part of the earth as one and throw it away which is almost impossible

    Sam ced his hand on one of the crystal protrusions which is as tall as a tree. He started using his observation ability and he is handling the spiritual energy so delicately so that it would not absorb any of it.

    He is trying to probe the whole dept of it and when he was finally done, he was stunned.

    The impact crystal upied almost more than twenty meters below the surface. This will make this whole ce arge pit after extracting the whole crystal.

    And the whole estate is of 1000 acres that is a whole lot of impact crystals. And he is nning to make it into a whole lot of money.

    He started making is preparations. His main advantage is that he has an unlimited ess to the Artisan tower.

    That is more than enough for his ns.

    He went inside the house and entered his personal room and then entered the divine dimension¡¯s second floor, his time is a lot valuable now. He has to report back to the camp before morning.

    First, he imagined the design of the product inside his head and then after that he simted everything in the second floor¡¯s simtion mode. After more than twenty trail and errors, he finally got the satisfied result.

    Sam took out some scrolls and started drawing his new design. The design is mainly of various dies for the hand press. For his next ns, he would need a lot of casings, which in turn requires a lot of dies.

    After making some required dies and moulds, he went to the bas.e.m.e.nt and started taking out the equipment which his teammates would use in near future.

    He gave the scrolls and a list of materials which they would need to Watt. Along with that, he wrote a letter along with his spiritual signature and his Artisan badge. With this, Watt¡¯s words would be equal to his and there is no way that he cannot buy these things from the Artisan tower.

    He sent Watt while he went to the yard.

    He has to collect the crystals with his own methods and that is powder disintegration.

    Sam closed his eyes and started his operation from near his hard. Since, the melting point of this crystal is quite high, it would be quite troublesome for him to do the regr method, it is still a little earlier than after noon.

    If he can use this time, he can clear off several yards before the reporting time.

    Sam ced his hands on the crystal and started turning it into the powder, while throwing the powder directly into the storage.

    Since the crystal structure is not thatplicated and the crystal properties are mostly due to its molecr nature instead of granr structure, he has not qualms on turning it into powder.

    So, for the whole day, Sam just cleared the space around his mansion.

    He even ate while doing so, and even after Watt came back with the required material, he called up on his teammates of the business side and exined the procedure on how to operate the machines to them while clearing the crystal.

 Chapter 151: Retaliation

    Sam is concentrating on his work in the evening. He cleared more than 60 square yards by now and if he continues on with this, he can clear more than 120 square yards by morning.

    Right now, there is a ten meters deep pit which extended for 60 square yards behind the mansion.

    After working until now, he came to a conclusion, if he improves his mental strength, he can finish the work faster. So, he decided that he would cultivate his mental strength for the next fifteen days.

    As for the hindrances from the instructors and the Thunder Wolf Squad, he already sorted his thoughts and from tomorrow onwards, the people who would be walking on egg shells would not be Sam and his teammates.

    At this moment Philip, Watt, Kelly and Jack came to him. The things he needed were already manufactured by the Artisan tower and even the materials have been brought.

    So, now he has to delegate the work for these four.

    "Don¡¯t worry about doing business anymore. Just stay in the Estate and start manufacturing, what I told you to do. Make as many as possible.

    Philip, Kelly. Since, you both have fire element, try to clear the impact crystal as much as you can in the free time, but don¡¯t focus on it too much. Your primary job for now is manufacturing the things I asked.

    Make sure the dimensions[measurements] don¡¯t change and be as precise as possible.

    Make as many as possible for the next two weeks and I will bring them back to the camp with me to assemble them.

    Since, they shed all the cordiality with us, we don¡¯t have to care for their opinions. I will make them regret ever provoking us."

    After that, he exined their duties and sent them to start immediately. All this while he didn¡¯t stop clearing the crystal.

    By midnight, Sam noticed something, constant mental exhaustion and recovery, he noticed a slight improvement in his mental strength which is the only good news in the past few days.

    After sometime, Sam has a sudden thought.

    ¡¯Since, I don¡¯t need all of it in the powder form, will be possible to remove a big chunk of it by disintegrating the bond with the remaining crystal?¡¯ This question popped up in his head and he immediately took action.

    And when he knew that it is possible, he was ecstatic. His process is faster now, as for making the chunks into powder forter use, he can do that when he is working with them, until that point, he doesn¡¯t have to worry about it.

    He can even turn it into powder when he is idling at the camp at night.

    By midnight, Sam already cleared more than 120 yards. After working for two more hours, he stopped everything and went to take rest.

    If he is mentally frustrated due to overwork, he might act rashly in the camp. He already has a n and has to deal with it with some rationality, even though he would let loose and blow off of some steam, he still shouldn¡¯tpletely go berserk.

    But Sam is still worried about how to deal with this crystal.

    The whole estate is around 1000 acres out of which around 700 acres is full of crystal and for the remaining

    1 acre is 4840 square yards and now 700 acres is 338,800 square yards and now he was only done with 150 square yards.

    Even though, he had found a more efficient way to deal with this, he still has to work a lot. By his estimation in his current state, Sam can clear around 600 yards if he worked in the same pace and that is not wasting any time at all.

    He can do so twice a month and which makes 1200 yards for a month and in total he can only deal with 9600 yards in eight months around 2 acres.

    He cannot let this happen; he has to think of way to deal with this as fast as possible. He needs at least 500 acres ofnd for his n to work and he also needs to assign some work after clearing somend so that the construction process will work as soon as possible.

    Sam took rest for another two hours and along with Hawk and Drew who had a peaceful sleep in a long time.

    They reported without any dy and the instructor didn¡¯t find any fault with them. After the early morning routine is over, Sam went to find someone.

    From today onwards, he was done with being defensive. That General Spark may love his grandsons as much as he can and he can spoil them as much as he can, but to do that on expense of Sam and his teammates, the general should think of the consequences.

    Since, the other party used the loop holes of thepetition to make a move on him and oppressed him with the involving the thunder wolf squad and even the regimentmanders, he can do the same.

    Sam cannot vent his anger of the General directly, but he can still do so on the people who got involved.

    Is it unfair?

    Hell no, if it is unfair, then oppressing Philip, Hawk and others just because they teamed up with Sam is also unfair. The General¡¯s reasoning is that they can only me themselves for being with Sam.

    So, Sam is also using the same reasoning. You can only me yourself for helping the General.

    Sam went to find a person and that is the Deputy General who refused to say his name.

    "Instructor, May Ie in?"

    Sam asked as he stood up outside the tent.

    "Come in."

    Sam walked inside and looked at the Deputy General who is sitting behind a table as he examined Sam.

    "What do you want?"

    "I want to talk to you about something."

    "Is it about you being oppressed by the instructors? If it is, I am sorry, I cannot force them to do anything, even after all the things they did to you, it can only be considered being biased and I cannot force their bias out of their heads. They yed within the rules; I cannot take action."

    "Actually, no. I have two requests. First one, I am here to request you to give me permission to halt the training for the day, so that I can challenge some people."

    Deputy General, raised an eyebrow as he asked.

    "Why do you need a day off for a challenge?"

    "I won¡¯t need a day off if I have to challenge a single person, but I have multiple opponents."

    Deputy general seemed intrigued and said.

    "Granted. What is the other request?"

    "I want you to supervise my challenges."

    "Do you think that you are worthy enough for my supervision? Fights of your level won¡¯t need me to look after." His words are rather arrogantly spoken and one could smell the pride from the voice. But Sam didn¡¯t take offense.

    That type of arrogance is not inborn, rather it was cultivated on the basis of countless aplishments, nobody has a right to point a finger at a person like that.

    "How are so sure that they are not worthy? Besides, literally the whole military is against me. I cannot trust anyone except you."

    Deputy General didn¡¯t know how to reply to those words and said after some contemtion.

    "I will give you, half-an-hour. If your fights seem unworthy after that, I will leave."

    Sam smiled and said.

    "Sure. You won¡¯t be disappointed. Shall we go now?" Deputy general nodded and followed Sam out of the tent.

    In actual fact, he cannot be bothered with somemon duels involving a Novice.

    But seeing Sam¡¯s confidence and analysing his situation, if Sam really provoked a soldier from a regiment even if he won, the remaining people will take it out on him by continuously challenging him.

    And even that Regimentmander will take it out on him. Judging from the records his team already lost 100 points, this would actually be even more worse.

    But seeing Sam¡¯s confidence, he was intrigued. He wants to see how this boy will resolve the situation.

    Soon, they are in front of the fifth regiment camp. The regiment their current instructor is in charge of.

    As soon as they entered the camp, everyone is looking at the Deputy General who is walking beside a boy who is wearing a rookie soldier uniform. They are feeling peculiar.

    A regiment has three thousand members and more than sixty percent of them are Novices, the acolytes wouldn¡¯t make the cut in the Dukedom army.

    So, the novices upy the most part. And among those 1800 or so Novices, 800 of them might be at Middle and Late stages.

    Sam¡¯s target are those people.

    He slowly strode towards the Arena of the challenges and looked at the camp.

    This action gathered the attention of many people and slowly the crowd started growing. When he thought that he had enough audience, Sam shouted in a voice loud enough for the whole camp to listen.

    "I am Sam from the special batch who is undergoing thepetition. Today, I am here to challenge the Novices from the fifth regiment.

    From what I know, there are 1800 Novices in this regiment and I am here to challenge all of them. Th

    For every fight I lose, I will give ten thousand spirit stones to the winner and if the other party is a team, I will pay ten thousand for each of them

    For every fight I win, I will collect five thousand from the losers, and if a team loses, I will take five thousand for each member."

    The whole camp was stunned. They didn¡¯t expect that someone wille to their camp and challenge them like that.

    If it was a normal challenge, they might want to back out, since they weren¡¯t challenged individually. But the bait if wealth is quite tempting.

    Some of the soldiers recognised Sam. They are the ones who challenged Drew and Hawk. One of them asked.

    "What is your goal here?" He knew that Sam is being troubled by theirmander, so he wouldn¡¯te here for no reason or just to make some quick cash.

    "I think that the might of Southern Star military is overrated. I want to prove my point by cleaning up all the Novice trash here. After all, this military can only use the loop holes to make trouble for me and my friends. So, I am here to prove my point right."

    The soldiers immediately became angry.

 Chapter 152: Trash Talking

    "How dare you?"

    "Do you think you can walk alive from here after saying those things?"

    "You must be having a death wish."

    "I will kill you."

    The soldiers started shouting at him, but Sam just scanned the crowd and said.

    "Are we talking or are we fighting?

    Prove me wrong if you have guts. Our Deputy General will be the supervisor of the match. I will take as many challenges as you can give. I am not getting out of here until I clean up the trash of fifth regiment."

    Sam¡¯s words only provoked them, even more.

    "You little shit, I will take you on." One of the guys said as he walked onto the stage. Deputy general stood at the supervisor¡¯s spot near the stage.

    Sam and the soldier took the positions.

    "Are you guys ready?" Deputy General asked both of them and when both of them nodded, he said.

    "Fight."

    As soon as his voice faded, the soldier picked up his spear and lunged towards Sam. He is a Level 8 Novice. His speed is not bad.

    Below the stage.

    "Come on brother, show them what a soldier is."

    "Teach him a lesson."

    "Yes, how dare he look down on us soldiers and our military."

    They are encouraging him with loud shouts.

    Sam didn¡¯t care about the jeers and cheers and he didn¡¯t even move even when the spear was just a foot away from him.

    Just before the spear was about to touch his neck, Sam made his move.

    He moved in a blur and before anyone could react what is happening, they heard a m and a crack.

    Before they knew it, all they saw is Sam holding the neck of the soldier and the head of the soldier is nailed down on the arena as if it was a crater falling from the sky.

    The crowd grew silent. The Soldier isn¡¯t dead, but he is feeling dizzy and powerless.

    Sam slowly stood up and pped the dust away from his hands.

    The soldier slowly stood up with the support of his spear, he looked at the deputy general and said weekly.

    "I surrender."

    His voice is as weak as it can be. He took out the spirit stones from his spatial ring and threw them into the pile of spirit stones.

    Even though, he lost, he is not a sore loser, he still has dignity of a soldier and paid the wager.

    He stepped down the stage and tried to walk towards his tent, but after taking two steps, he fainted unconscious and his nose started bleeding.

    A Healer immediately tried to stabilize his condition, after some trails, he said to a man nearby.

    "He needs a level 4 Healer to recoverpletely."

    The man seemed to be thepanymander or the battalionmander, his colleagues are showing him quite the respect.

    But Sam is having none of it.

    "Are you guys going toe or not? I don¡¯t have much time to waste on pieces of trash like you."

    The crowd was provoked again. But nobody entered the stage boldly. Sam pointed at a person and said.

    "You,e up. I challenge you." This guy immediately became tense. He is one of the few people who knew why Sam is doing this. Theirmander is the one who provoked this madman first and he is one of the close aplices who beat up this guy¡¯s teammates.

    So, he is really afraid. He even has some thoughts of backing out, and if the deputy general is not here and the supervisor is from their regiment, he could have done so by exining the situation in secret and kicking Sam out of their camp.

    But Sam brought the Deputy General and breaking rules in front of him is akin to courting death.

    He slowly walked up and he decided in his mind. He would initiate the attack and if he couldn¡¯t get the upper hand, he would just surrender.

    "Fight."

    As soon as they heard themand, he was about to move but this time Sam didn¡¯t stay passive. He made the first move.

    He kicked of his feet and vanished from his spot before mysteriouslying in front of the soldier and threw a punch at the lower jaw.

    *Crack* The silent crowd can hear the joint at the jaw breaking.

    The soldier immediately got ready to surrender but his lower jaw is not moving and all he can say is some iprehensible sounds.

    Now, he understood why Sam hit his jaw. He is not even giving him a chance to surrender, before he could swallow the regret of provoking this madman, Sam held the neck of this guy under his arm and started hitting him on back.

    The bones on the back started shattering and even his spine broke into several pieces.

    Sam threw the limp body to away before he took away the spatial ring. He took out the 5000 spirit stones and threw the ring back at him.

    The soldiers got cold feet, nobody even dared to look at Sam, they are all wondering why he is doing this to their regiment, who provoked him exactly?

    At this moment, one of the soldiers who gave Hawk a beating before went out of the crowd and ran towards Sam¡¯s camp. The current instructor is the regimentmander of the fifth regiment.

    Sam saw this action but didn¡¯t stop him, the instructor also needs to see what are the consequences of provoking him.

    He wants to punish Sam to suck up to some superior, then he has to pay the price with will and strength of his subordinates, today Sam has only one motive.

    He has to kill the morale of the whole fifth regiment and he has to kill the morale of the remaining regiments one by one within these fifteen days.

    He will cripple the entire army of its novices. He would see how general would like if Sam yed by the rules just like him.

    Sam looked at the crowd and when everyone was turning their gazes away, he walked towards the end of the stage and threw a handful of spirit stones at the crowd.

    "Take this money buy some beautiful female clothes."

    He took out another handful of stones and threw them before saying.

    "Take this money and buy some cosmetics.

    You call yourselves men. Bullshit. No wonder even your general has to resort to some despicable means to have his grandson¡¯s back. Like superior like subordinates. Pieces of shit."

    He is clearly provoking them and he is intent on doing so. He would do so with all his might.

    Sam himself is not sopassionate by nature.

    And these guys are provoking for the past fifteen days finding fault for his every move. Even his teammates outside are having a hard time, if he doesn¡¯t teach them a lesson now, they will go overboard.

    As for these Novices, who is going to lose their will, they should me themselves for having such superior.

    Sam¡¯s words truly infuriated the crowd and a man immediately came up to the stage. He knew that he cannot win, but he only has one thought, he would at least hit Sam before getting defeated. But before he could make his move, Sam said.

    "Take out the money first. It is hard for me to take it myself." Even though, the man was infuriated, he didn¡¯t show it on his face. He took out the spirit stones and made a small pile on the side of the stage.

    Then he turned towards Sam, even before Deputy Generalmenced the fight, he leapt towards Sam head on.

    His moves are forceful and suicidal. He didn¡¯t care about the injuries, all he cared for was to get a single hit on Sam.

    But his hopes were dashed.

    Sam threw a wind de on the man, making a huge gash on his chest. This caught the soldier by surprise.

    Before he could realise, Sam is already in front of him and he started pping the soldier continuously.

    "You want to try kamikaze with me?

    *Pah* *Pah* *Pah* *Pah*

    You can do so in your dreams. What a trash? You call yourselves soldiers. The enemy must also be extremely weak since they can¡¯t even beat some trash like you."

    Sam is not even sparing them a shred of dignity. He is making them lose in such a pathetic state.

    After making his face a pig head and breaking several facial bones, Sam threw him towards the crowd like a trash bag.

    "Next." He shouted loud and clear.

    Another soldier came to the stage and said.

    "Can we just duel without wager?" He asked. After all, they are already losing and they have very little hope unless thepanymanders make a move. But losing their money which equals their growth is even more painful.

    "Do you think that my time is that cheap? The all-powerful Southern Star military cannot even take out some money as wager? What a waste of time? I wonder why Duke even let use here to train."

    "You don¡¯t have to be like that. You could just say that you won¡¯t agree. Must you put us down like that?" The soldier felt his face burning.

    A young man is making this light of us and they cannot do anything because of the supervisor present. If the deputy general is not there, one must wonder how they would have dealt with him.

    The soldier took out the money and threw them into the pile. Just like the previous one, he was beaten to brink of unconsciousness.

    After throwing this guy out, Sam was about to call another one when an infuriated shout came from a distance.

    "SAM."

 Chapter 153: Unfair Chapter

    Without even turning his head, Sam could guess who other party was. It is the Regimentmander of the fifth regiment.

    At first, he was happy that Sam is not there for training, he felt that he could use a legitimate reason to cut some points for the first time, but when a soldier from his regiment came forward and exined the situation, he immediately became angry and agitated.

    He didn¡¯t expect that Sam would retaliate like this.

    "Sam, how dare you put down the soldiers of the Southern Star military and injure him like that? You seemed to have forgotten that you are also part of this military now. From this point alone you could be branded as traitor and executed."

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to reply and only looked at the Deputy General. He wants to see thetter¡¯s reaction and since the other party is as calm as ever, he spoke to the Regimentmander.

    "It is not if what I say is true. I am here and fought four duels and won all of them without breaking a sweat. Trash is trash, no matter how much moral high ground you take. Seeing this trash itself is indication of your ability.

    And here you are trying to train me. You should have thanked your lucky stars that I am not a Grand Realm cultivator. Otherwise, I would have kicked your ass until you call me your grandfather."

    Sam didn¡¯t even hold back at insulting the instructor.

    The instructor¡¯s veins popped on his forehead. He didn¡¯t expect that Sam would be this unruly.

    How dare he, a small Novicee and say these words to him? He almost made a move on Sam right now. Only the presence of the Deputy general is stopping him.

    But the most infuriated people are not instructor rather the soldiers. They are ming themselves for not beingpetent enough to not to be insult to theirmander.

    "Deputy General, you have seen the impudence. We should punish him by militaryw." The Regimentmander asked with a loud but respective tone.

    Deputy General just gave him a sweeping look and said.

    "Just like he said, if what he said are just simply usations, I will take action, but if it is true, then I must think about you and your efficiency in doing a good job. After all, if a single Novice can beat all the Novices of your regiment, I must also say you are trash.

    So, if you want to take action, defeat him and prove him wrong."

    The soldiers couldn¡¯t take it anymore after listening to this. Sam¡¯s provocations along with the Deputy General¡¯s statement made them even more indignant.

    "You said you would take team fights, right?" A squad captain asked Sam.

    "Sure."

    "Are you okay with the squad?"

    "Come on, then. What is having one trash and seven trash. The only difference is the time of cleaning."

    Sam kept on with his trash talk. Actually, he didn¡¯t like this trash talk at all, but he has to do it to achieve their goal.

    First one, is he would empty the wallets of these guys. He would stand on high pedestal as if saying that even his beating is worth money which would let them to take out the money in order to not to lose out.

    Second one, the trash talk will not only rile the people up but if he won in the same overbearing manner, the people would feel the trash talk is true.

    Third one, once they really felt like trash, the novices which are more than half of the regiment will lose belief in themselves and their teammates and lose their confidence and morale which would in turn affect the morale of the remaining Great realm cultivators too.

    Whether he likes acting like this or not, Sam will continue this trash talking so that he can achieve his goals.

    The squad came up and all of them made a small heap of their spirit stones near the stage.

    Before they took the position. Deputy General gestured to start and Sam didn¡¯t stay passive anymore. He immediately made his move.

    "Restrain him."

    The squad captain ordered and a member of the team immediately ced his hands on the floor. A series of vines popped up and one of them hooked Sam¡¯s legs.

    "Block his retreat."

    An earthen wall appeared behind Sam¡¯s back while he was trying to get out the vines. But he was in no hurry.

    He looked at the remaining members who are nning for the big move.

    The squad captain ced his hands on the floor and big chunk of rock started materialising from the ground. It is spherical in shape. There are some grooves over the surface.

    Then the remaining three people who seemed to be fire types started making hand signs and chanted a spell and soon they directed the mes towards the spherical rock. The me entered the grooves and the rock started changing colours.

    Meanwhile, Sam is just looking at the scene calmly, he let the vines wrap around him and let them restrain him as they wished.

    He is looking at the rock with intrigue.

    At this moment the soldiers are relieved.

    "Finally, he will be done. Damn it, I was so afraid that he can win a squad."

    "Yeah, and he is not facing any ordinary squad, he is taking on one of our best squads. The ming meteorite is one of their best skills."

    The soldiers were discussing, when Sam sensed something, the core of the rock was melting and it is slowly making its way towards the surface. Only thinyer is separating theva from the surface.

    If this can be shot at a sufficient momentum it would have been a good attack, but this is only useful in war where their teammates can buy sometime and it is most suitable to attack a group.

    Just before the team could make the attack, Sam smiled.

    "You think you can stop me? Dream on." He was suddenly engulfed with golden mes, which burnt the vines.

    "Shoot." The squad captain shouted. But his hands aren¡¯t as fast as his mouth or Sam. Before he could make a move, Sam reappeared above the rock with a crooked grin on his face.

    He swung his leg as he kicked the top of the rock. The thinyer cracked by the impact and started crumbling.

    Theva exploded all over the squad members before they could escape. Sam didn¡¯t linger on them and went after the wood element mage who restrained him and the earth mage who blocked the rear.

    With a single kick for each both of them are out of the stage.

    Sam leisurely walked towards the injured four who are still burning with theva. The fire elemental mages are a little bit alrightpared to the squad captain.

    He looked at the four of them condescendingly and said.

    "I stood there and you guys cannoty a single strike on me. I think calling you trash is even me being generous with my words."

    He kicked them off the stage and shouted. "Next squad." Nobody moved.

    Sam looked at the crowd and spotted the person who called the instructor back.

    "Youe up with your squad."

    The soldier didn¡¯t have any say. As soldiers they have a rule to not turn down a challenge and the person who is challenging has a lower cultivation than his and he is even challenging his whole squad. It would be a disgrace to try and turn down.

    The soldier gave a ming look to the regimentmander and walked towards the stage with their squads.

    The added their spirit stones to the previous small pile created by the previous squad.

    This time, the squad is of the seven swordsmen. They are trying to surround him.

    Their coordination is impable and they are even better than the previous squad in cornering a single enemy.

    But Sam dealt with them all the same. This time, he didn¡¯t pull his punches at all. All his hits onlynded on their faces and every hit made them lose a tooth or crack a facial bone.

    Sam is toying with thempletely.

    The same scene continued for a while before they admitted defeat.

    And another squad came, then another squad came.

    Just like that, before afternoon, Sam dealt with fourpanies.

    "Trash" This is the only thing Sam has to say all of them. In fact, most of these people¡¯sbat prowess is decent. But the problem is that they are quite intimidated and disturbed by Sam¡¯s actions and words.

    Sam¡¯s words are all over their heads.

    Deputy general noticed that Sam is achieving his goal. He is observing every step of Sam.

    The huge pile of spirit stones is used as a bait initially and then Sam¡¯s words are greatest provocation to any army.

    He entered the heads of all these people without much effort and now they are delivering their dignity and money at the same time without even thinking straight.

    At this moment, the regimentmander said.

    "Stop."

    Sam didn¡¯t bother with him and was about to target next squad before the regimentmander said.

    "Didn¡¯t you say that military is trash? The military power never lies in individual strength or strength of a squad. It relies on the whole army. Do you dare to fight against the whole army?"

    Everyone was stunned by the shameless words.

    The soldiers also didn¡¯t expect that theirmander would make such ims.

    Actually, their novices are not that great. Because, the true novice experts are scouted by the city guards for their individual strength. The Novices in this military are quite used forbined attacks.

    But even then, losing to a single Novice is already a shameful matter much less fighting in squads.

    Now, theirmander is even more shameless to ask him to fight against an army.

    But the regimentmander still continued.

    "Your said that the military is trash. If the military didn¡¯t fight together then how can you say that it is trash? If you don¡¯t prove it, I will punish you with Martialw."

    "So, what is your point?" Sam asked with some impatience. However, he knew what is going to happen.

    "Fight a battalion and win. Then what you said can be considered true."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply immediately and just looked at the crowd. Seeing this the regimentmander pushed even more.

    "If you don¡¯t ept prepare for punishment. I would deduct every point for disobedience from your team and you will also be given the harshest punishment possible."

    He is hanging on to thisst straw, he knew that he is shameless and he really did regret provoking Sam. But he was on path of no return.

 Chapter 154: 1 Vs 500

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything immediately and just looked at the Regimentmander as if he was thinking about it.

    The Regimentmander thought that Sam was afraid and he started egging him.

    "What now, Sam? Aren¡¯t you all powerful and imed that the army is full of trash, why don¡¯t you prove it? If you don¡¯t then, get ready to face martialw."

    Sam took a deep breath and looked at the Regimentmander with an expression as if he was hesitating.

    "I have two conditions."

    "What are they?" Regimentmander is quite sure that Sam is going to propose some impossible condition, so that he can back off without losing much face.

    "I want ten times the wager, and my bet is ten million spirit stones."

    When the Regimentmander heard this, he confirmed his earlier theory of the conditions. After all, the 100 million spirit stones, is not a small amount and it is more than the annual budget of their regiment.

    But he felt that since Sam is trying to back down, he should make it harder for him. He is quite confident that Sam is not going to take the fight.

    "Deal, what is the next condition?" Regimentmander agreed. Sam gave a surprised expression and there is some panic shed in his eyes, which made regimentmander happier.

    Sam started looking around as if he is nervous and hesitating and his movements are rather exaggerated, but the regimentmander didn¡¯t feel so.

    After a brief pause, Sam finally opened his mouth again.

    "The second condition is lifting up the no killing restriction."

    When everyone heard these words, they were stunned for a second before thinking if Sa was crazy or pretending to be crazy.

    Removing No killing restriction in this case will only make it worse for Sam in this situation.

    Although, the soldiers felt shameful and humiliated, they are quite confident that Sam wouldn¡¯tst a minute against the battalion.

    So, when they heard that Sam is asking for lifting the restriction on killing, they thought he went nuts and take a couple of them with him in a suicidal attack.

    Even the Regimentmander thought the same way, but after some thought, he found a long-winded reason on why Sam would say that. And that would be Sam trying to use the no killing policy of the military to escape the predicament.

    When they said the rules to Sam¡¯s batch, they didn¡¯t mention anything about killing and death duels. So, might be thinking that they don¡¯t have such arrangement and the military might not want to change the rules for a single fight.

    Even though, the reason was long-winded, that was the only thing he could rte to the condition. Even the deputy General thought so.

    Sam¡¯s nervous face only made him feel all the more so and the regimentmander didn¡¯t want to let go of this opportunity to put down Sam, he thought that situation is already in his favour and ready to put down Sam, in case he would try to pull some kind of stunt like this again.

    "I agree."

    When Sam heard these words, his face was full of shock and nervousness. His expression was as if he didn¡¯t know what to do anymore. After some pause, Sam asked.

    "Can I use all my weapons?"

    The Regimentmander didn¡¯t even think much and just agreed. As far he was concerned, Sam is bound to back off, when the time really came to fight.

    "As...assemble your team. But there shouldn¡¯t be any great realm cultivators. Sam stuttered and his gaze was all over the ce.

    This nervous wreck of him was making it obvious to them, that he is just trying to save his face and they thought that he might be thinking that someone would definitely not let this fight happen, since it is so unfair.

    After more than ten minutes the battalion was assembled in a training ground. Sam stood in front of 500 people and looked at the Regimentmander nervously.

    After seeing that the regimentmander was clearly content, he knew that his n worked.

    All of a sudden, his nervous expression was gone. He is back to his usual confident self was back. He looked at the Regimentmander with a smirk.

    Regimentmander suddenly became tense, he had a feeling that he walked into a trap and actually, his guess was right.

    Sam really didy a trap. Otherwise, wouldn¡¯t he be letting them off too easily.

    He went against a three hundred people alone without using all his weapons. Now, even though he has to go against five hundred people, he can use all his gadgets and he didn¡¯t even have to use all of them to deal with these guys.

    Deputy General also observed the change and he also felt surprised but he didn¡¯t show it on his face, rather he waved his hand as hemenced the fight.

    "Start."

    Sam immediately moved. But he didn¡¯t dive into the crowd, the soldiers are still a bit surprised that Sam hasn¡¯t backed down.

    They are quite confident of it after all. With their expertise, it is quite difficult to notice the difference in Sam¡¯s demeanour in that small period of time.

    Before they knew it, Sam is on the Harbinger, floating more than twenty feet in the air.

    He smirked at the crowd and took out the Golden Crescent.

    When the soldiers saw it, they couldn¡¯t help but be tense.

    They fought aerial enemy, but those enemies are bird type beasts which are big in size. Their only option at that time are mostly the long-range attacks.

    Because of the beast¡¯srge size, they even have some chance in attacking by jumping up in the air.

    But Sam ispletely different from all those scenarios.

    He is small, fast, agile, spontaneous. They have to count their lucky stars.

    Sam didn¡¯t make the first move, he just looked at the crowd spontaneously. Today is the day the world will know why he named his board as Harbinger.

    It is Harbinger of the destruction and cmity.

    The soldiers started throwing the fireballs, water spears, wind des. All kinds of attacks are being thrown at him.

    But Sam is moving too fast. After a couple of volleys, Sam finally started attacking.

    He moved his front foot a bit forward and the toes touched a small protrusion.

    A small groove opened in the front part of the board.

    Then the board tilted a bit towards front as the groove was pointed in the direction of the soldiers.

    With a cold smile on his face, Sam made his first attack.

    A blue me shed over the groove with the sound of a small explosion as a small thin and sharp metallic disc was shot out of the groove.

    It is practically invisible for most of the crowd and they only saw it when one of them reminded.

    "Ahhhhh...." And that reminder is the cry of a soldier.

    Some of them could vaguely see a small circr disc was pierced into his soldier and before they could see it clearly.

    "BOOM." An explosion took away the whole armpletely from the shoulder. The arm was gone in the form of bloody mist.

    The soldier didn¡¯t even have time to scream as he waspletely fainted. If one couldn¡¯t observe the small movement of his chest, due to weak breathing they would consider him dead.

    This is one of Sam¡¯s addition to the harbinger. A small metallic disc which was shot with the propulsion caused by the methane.

    It is not dangerous. But the small formation that was ced on it is dangerous.

    That formation is called Explosion trap formation.

    It is used for trapping enemies and the formation will be activated once anyone enters it.

    Actually, the formation¡¯s rank is not more than rank 2. And it is not that much preferable if one wants to create a lot of damage.

    Simply put, both the disc and the formation doesn¡¯t work on these people individually.

    But when they put them together, the situation is different.

    Sam activated the formation and shot the disc. The speed of the disc is enough to prate an enemy within fifty feet radius before activation.

    So, after it entered the skin, the explosion urs from the inside.

    The damage is not simply 1+1=2

    If Sam targeted the chest area or any other vitals, the person would be dead.

    While the deputy general and the regimentmander are thinking about this and the uses it could bring to the military, Sam didn¡¯t stop.

    While moving swiftly in the air, Sam didn¡¯t stay in a spot for more than one second.

    He is like the king of the sky moving and avoiding all kinds of attacks thrown at him while he shot the discs as well as the arrows from the golden crescent.

    Him having the control of the wind flow with his wind elemental control didn¡¯t help the soldiers either. The situation ispletely one sided.

    Some of the soldiers tried to make attacks by jumping in surprise, but they were shot by the arrows before they could jump for more than ten feet.

    Even if some attacks really did make their way towards Sam, the Harbinger started glowing slightly and the attacks are almost nullified. There is not much damage being done to Sam at all.

    "BATTLE FORMATIONS."

    The regimentmander wasn¡¯t able to control himself and immediately gave amand.

 Chapter 155: Branded

    As soon as they heard the shout from theirmander, they came out of their stupor. They were so into their thoughts that Sam wouldn¡¯t make a decision of fighting a battalion and if he did, they thought that they would be able to deal with him with just sheer number.

    Now, only they understood that they are judging Sam based on their personal standards, that guy is way above their league. He is on a league of his own.

    The battle only started two minutes ago and their casualties are already in double digits.

    They moved swiftly to execute their battle formations.

    Generally, eachpany of fifty soldiers will have a battle formation of their own based on their elementary attributes.

    In fact, thepanies will be made with numbers of same attributes mostly or multiplepatible attributes which work better when they are together.

    Only, in the rare cases, they would make apany of soldiers with random and many attributes.

    Sam could see that there are more than sixpanies which are created based on their attributes which can utilise their battle formation.

    As for the rest, their members are down for the count.

    Sam stopped attacking as he looked at the formations of soldiers with interest.

    If the soldiers arepatible and their fighting spirit and coordination reaches a limit, the formation will be highly effective and some phenomenon will ur to represent that state.

    Otherwise, the formations are justbination attack tactics.

    He is interested because, he was hoping to see a true formation which could cause that phenomenon.

    And his hopes came true.

    Twopanies are emitting the wind elemental and earth elemental energy with a high concentration.

    Sam looked at them as he observed the spiritual energy bing condensed and taking a form.

    The wind elemental energy took a form of a Hawk and the earth elemental energy took a form of a brown coloured gori. They both are so massive and they are more than thirty feet tall.

    Sam was intrigued.

    This is formation of battle spirit.

    When the battle intent of the soldiers strong enough and they are coordinating in the most efficient manner with a single thought process this battle spirit will be formed.

    These battle formations are designed by formation masters also. They would select the appropriate positioning of the soldiers to get a desired battle spirit and the coordination will be depending on themanders and unity of the soldiers.

    There are other types of battle spirits, which are not designed previously and rather formed spontaneously due to the collective effort of the soldiers and their coordinated fighting style and even more rare battle spirit is, the individual battle spirit.

    When an individual battle intent is so high that it can rival an army, they can also condense a battle spirit solely based on their fighting style.

    But for that to happen on has to meet the right match and give each other enough pressure and also have an extraordinary will to battle.

    Sam was curious if he would condense a battle spirit but he didn¡¯t meet a match yet. That is why he is looking at the two spirits eagerly.

    After they are condensedpletely, Sam smirked and said in a loud voice.

    "Since, you two teams are interesting enough, let¡¯s have some fulfilling battle. I will eliminate the strays first."

    Sam immediately vanished along with the Harbinger in a swift manner.

    He floated over the soldiers in the remaining formations which didn¡¯t evenplete the formations or create a battle spirit and the rest of the individual members.

    One could see a circr opening under the harbinger and a highly concentrated spiritual energy filled substances were being dropped over the crowd.

    Sam is like a sh of light above them as he moved while dropping the small de-stabilized energy cells.

    Deputy General is seeing these energy cells for the first time, but he understood the degree of danger they possess as soon as he observed the spiritual energy turmoil they are causing.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Soon many explosions urred and when the dust settled, all they can see are the damaged bodies spreading all over the battle fields.

    Within half-a minute, Sam destroyed the whole battalion. Now, there are only twopanies left.

    They howling in grief and sadness. They are staring at Sam with incredible hatred. They finally understood how powerful Sam is and he has only been toying with them all this time.

    They knew that they would die as soon as Sam wished to do so. But they still want to take revenge. If they can¡¯t defeat him, they would at least hit him once.

    The Gori started roaring as the wholepany moved forward. At the same time, the Hawk floated over with its wings spread.

    Sam looked at the two spirits and took out the Reaper sword. He wants to try a new technique he thought of recently at the same time testing the Battle spirit¡¯s ability.

    When the deputy general and the regimentmander took a look at the blood iron sword, they remembered something.

    The news about the candidate ughtering a noble family of three hundred members and making swords out of their blood.

    They thought that the news is some exaggerated rumour. But when they saw the blood iron sword and blood aura it is emanating, they were stunned and immediately understood who that candidate was.

    So, it is not a rumour. Sam is the one who did that. No wonder.

    These are the thoughts in their mind. If Regimentmander knew that Sam is that person and the news was real, he wouldn¡¯t have provoked him and wouldn¡¯t have proposed this battle.

    But it is toote to regret now.

    Sam flew higher and higher towards the sky and after reaching more than forty feet, he dropped himself with head down off the harbinger before storing it away.

    He held the reaper sword with both hands as he dived towards the Hawk spirit approaching him.

    The kic energy increased as he moved downwards but the sword in his hands didn¡¯t even vibrate once from the winds. Rather, he is collecting the wind elemental energy from the surrounding wind currents as he condensed it into the sword de.

    As the force of his falling increase, right before he reached the Hawk spirit, he sliced the sword in the air.

    A huge wind de was shed downwards as it tore through the Hawk spirit as well as the Gori spirit below it.

    The wind de swept the ground like a typhoon as the soldiers who are in the two formations puked blood and some even fainted directly.

    Sam didn¡¯t crash on the ground. He took out Harbinger before he could crash and moved swiftly as he hovered away from the crash.

    After the dust cleared out, all of them could see a huge vertical crater formed by the wind de or rather the wind de created by the sword sh.

    The soldiers were scattered.

    But Sam isn¡¯tpletely fine. He was a bit exhausted. He took out some spirit stones as he absorbed the energy as fast as possible.

    His absorption rate is quite high, so hisplexion returned back a little.

    Sam looked around and then found a solid stage which is used for individual duels.

    He walked towards the stage and stood in the middle of it.

    He took out a fire energy cell. This one is a big one made of several fire elemental spirit stones,pletely unlike the ones he is putting on for sale.

    Sam closed his eyes, and the fire elemental energy flew out of the cell and started burning the stage.

    The spectators only watched the scene as Sam stood in the middle of the golden mes.

    The mes burned fiercely and soon they could see that stage is melting in some spots.

    After a few minutes the mes were stopped and the spectators can see that the stage is molten in a weird shape.

    It is actually, Sam¡¯s double S signature.

    Sam walked towards the Regimentmander and the Deputy General.

    "From today onwards, this is a brand I am marking on your territory. If you remove it before defeating it, I wille every day for a fight.

    This is a symbol which shows you are marked as trash by me."

    He then looked at the fallen soldiers. He didn¡¯t gopletely all out and didn¡¯t have intent to kill throughout the battle.

    Many soldiers are critically injured but most of them still survived. Though, it would be hard to say when they would recover.

    Even the energy cells he exploded are of lowest quality which would create least damage.

    "Next time, think before you blindly wag your tail like a dog and do someone else¡¯s bidding. If the same thing repeats again, the oue wouldn¡¯t be the same."

    The regimentmander didn¡¯t say anything and only held his head down in shame. What Sam said is right after all. He shouldn¡¯t have helped general to satisfy his personal grudges and target a Novice by abusing his profession.

    Sam started walking away and he suddenly remembered something and rushed back. He extended his hand and said.

    "Pay up."

 Chapter 156: Jians Outburst

    The fifth regimentmander immediately became tense. Now only did he remember the bet which he absolutely cannot pay.

    Sam looked at the Deputy general as if asking him to deal with the situation.

    After some serious discussion and negotiations, Sam finally left the regiment with a scroll.

    The scroll was the indication of the debt the fifth regiment owed Sam. It has Deputy general as the guarantor.

    The deed is signed with the blood and the spiritual energy signature. If within the time, they didn¡¯t pay the debt, Sam could take the deed to the higher authorities. In this case, to the Duke and even the superiors in the imperial capital.

    After Sam left, the fifth regimentmander assembled all the soldiers, who are clearly dejected and lost all the confidence and issued an order.

    "All the news has to be sealed. Don¡¯t say a word about what happened due to Sam¡¯s visit to any person outside of the regiment."

    Even if he didn¡¯t give the order, the soldiers didn¡¯t have guts or face to share the news to other regiments.

    Next day.

    The remaining four regimentmanders asked the fifth regimentmander about what happened the day before.

    Even though, the soldiers didn¡¯t leak the news, many people in the base saw that Sam along with the Deputy General made his way towards the fifth regiment.

    But they didn¡¯t get any reply and only had their questions shunned. They became more curious by these actions. But the thing is they didn¡¯t have to wait for long to know what happened, well for at least one of them.

    Because, someone saw that Sam made his way to the fourth regiment with the deputy general in tow.

    The same actions repeated again that day and by the time Sam left, he has scroll in his hand and there is a huge signature of his on an arena stage of the fourth regiment.

    This time the three remaining regimentmanders became perplexed. They knew that something is happening but they didn¡¯t know what is happening exactly. The two regimentmanders who kept their mouth shut didn¡¯t say a thing.

    Since, all of them are in this together, let us suffer together. That is the only thought in their minds.

    Among them Jian is the one who is most curious as well as anxious. The rest of the people only messed with Sam because they don¡¯t want to be in bad books of general.

    But he messed with Sam with the intention of getting in the good books of the general. He wants to be a dog under the General at Sam¡¯s expense, but the situation seemed to change.

    So, the second day, went to the camp of the Thunder wolf squad to meet the general, but his efforts are futile.

    Many people didn¡¯t respect or admire the general because, he didn¡¯t focus much on the army. The only thing he focussed on is his students who formed the Thunder wolf squad.

    He would always stay with them, even the residences of the thunder wolf squad outside the camp are within his estate.

    And the thunder wolf squad is the special ce in the camp. Either for their abilities or due to the general¡¯s backing, even the door guards and errand boys are arrogant beyond belief.

    So, Jian didn¡¯t get to meet the General to exin the situation.

    Meanwhile, Sam¡¯s conquest went on.

    On the fifth day, Sam is standing in the first regiment facing Jian who is fully infuriated. He is the one who pissed off Sam more and even deducted most points. So, the retaliation is also more.

    In other camps Sam only battled a battalion at most, but here, he made a move on all Novices. From early morning to the night, he stayed the first regiment, battling one squad after other. Hundreds of battles.

    But every battle was finished as soon as it started with an energy cell explosion. The squads were crippled. They don¡¯t even have much means to retaliate. And Sam marked each battalions ce with a brand.

    The whole regiment was dejected.

    This time he didn¡¯t even bother to keep a wager. Because, crippling the whole first regiment was more than enough to vent his frustration.

    Even after this much turmoil and mess, people from the thunder wolf squad is oblivious it and that includes the general too.

    Sam felt that this general is one of the worst ones he has seen in both lives.

    This guy didn¡¯t even care about the military and didn¡¯t even listen to the pleas and news that Jian brought to him. All his disciples are too arrogant to even pass the news.

    For the first three visits at least, Jian didn¡¯t know what is happening but after his regiment waspletely destroyed, he made his way to the thunder wolf squad the same night.

    This time though, he didn¡¯t request anyone to pass his message.

    "General Spark,e out now."

    He shouted at the gate from the top of his lungs.

    His eyes are red with fury. If not for following this general¡¯s orders, this wouldn¡¯t happen. If he didn¡¯t get his regiment ready to dispatch within next three months, he would have to face some serious consequences.

    Then even this general can¡¯t save his ass.

    As for taking revenge on Sam directly, What a joke? If that is an option, does general even have to resort to these despicable means to oppress Sam.

    Jian is quite shrewd and he could see that Sam cannot be touched directly or they would face consequences. So, he came here to rant on the General.

    When the members in the thunder wolf squad heard this shout, they werepletely surprised. They didn¡¯t expect that someone woulde at this time and shout out for the general directly.

    General Spark himself was quite surprised because, he knew who this voice belonged to. So, he came out and walked towards the entrance of the camp.

    All this while he has a frown on his face as he looked at the Regimentmander with a serious expression.

    If there is no suitable exnation there would be hell to pay.

    "Jian, what do you want? Didn¡¯t I tell you to not disturb me when I am in the thunder wolf squad? You are disturbing out training."

    When Jian heard these words, he was even more infuriated. Both the general and deputy general are entric people.

    The General is so self-centred that he doesn¡¯t care about anything other than his position, his disciples and their training.

    And General is also someone who is used to abusing the authority, so he didn¡¯t let the deputy general take charge of the duties regarding the welfare of the army.

    In the whole army, there is not a single person who has admiration and respect for the general, all they have is fear, which the general felt that it is sufficient for running the army.

    So, deputy general didn¡¯t bother about things as long as they are within the rules. And Sam knowingly or unknowingly too advantage of these two things and made such a mess in the base.

    "General Spark. I think it is about you understand that you are not only responsible for the thunder wolf squad but also the whole army."

    The General immediately became angry. Even his disciples are staring the Jian with hostility.

    "Jian, you better mind your words."

    "General Spark, with all due respect. I followed your orders along with the remaining regimentmanders and oppressed Sam going against all the professional ethics.

    But because of that, Sam destroyed the Novices of every single regiment. Now, not a single Novice has a will and courage of a soldier.

    The Novices who are the core of the army are mentally destroyed. Five regiments are literally crippled because of your stupid decision.

    And when I tried to reach out to you, your stupid disciples didn¡¯t even give you my message.

    If you are not capable, please step down that position. Or else you better clean up this mess and take responsibility of the circ.u.mstances."

    Jian was fully angry and he dared to say these words because of two reasons.

    One of them is that they are truth and the second one is that the General cannot kill him now, because he would have to give an exnation to duke himself. Jian took some measures so that if he was really killed here, people would report to the deputy general and the duke.

    Jian didn¡¯t stay there and left without saying anything else.

    General Spark frowned as he wanted to make sense of the situation. So, he sent some of his disciples to the Regimentmanders to ask what happened, but after an hour they returned with no news.

    "They don¡¯t want to say anything and said that we have no right to question them."

    General¡¯s expression immediately grew serious. This is the first time; the general¡¯s disciples were rejected.

    He thought for a moment about what changed and he himself made move to make sense of the situation. Which made even the boot licker Jian to spout such words.

    So, he went directly to the Deputy General¡¯s quarters and asked.

    "What happened to the regimentmanders?"

    "Nothing."

    "What do you mean by nothing? If nothing happened then why would Jiane looking for me?"

    "Nothing happened to the regimentmanders. Nobody broke the rules and everything went ording to the system."

    General spark swallowed his anger and asked.

    "Report the daily proceedings for the past week." He ordered like a superior he is.

    Deputy General stood in attention as he recounted everything.

    The General was frowning deeper and deeper as he heard and by the end of it, he is fuming mad.

    "Why didn¡¯t you stop him, when he is making so much mess?"

    "General Spark, you are the one who said that taking care of the army is your role and I should take it up on myself and follow the rules. You even said that it is not my ce to look after the army when you are still the general. So, I only followed the rules and your words."

    General didn¡¯t know what to say. Because, he is the one who said those words, because Deputy General who used to be a Peak stage Grand realm cultivator was sopassionate towards the soldiers and he himself didn¡¯t want to look like a bad leader inparison.

    So, he suppressed thetter with his authority. Now, the same words bit him the butt.

 Chapter 157: This is what i call a leg technique

    General Spark was just a bit away from blowing his top off.

    He turned around and was about to leave the room, when he heard the Deputy General saying.

    "General, just a suggestion. If you are about to go and confront Sam, I advise not to. Because, he is nning on visiting the Thunder wolf squad tomorrow so you can do it there.

    If you confront him in the camp, the soldiers who might hear themotion will lose thest shred of respect they have on you."

    When the General heard this, he clenched his fist so tight that his knuckles cracked and it can be heard aloud in the silent night.

    But he still followed the advice. He knew that his position in the camp is hanging on a delicate thread.

    Even though, all themanders and soldiers are under his control, it is mainly based on the fear of his high cultivation.

    And another reason is there is no other person who could substitute him, but then he noticed the current deputy general who is climbing the ranks, so he suppressed him.

    Until now, no soldierined about him because, even if he didn¡¯t care about them all this while he didn¡¯t cause them any trouble.

    But now, a Novice is taking his anger out on the whole army because that guy was oppressed by the general spark.

    Now they started hating the general and ming him for this trouble. Not only did they lose their confidence they also took some severe beating particrly the first regiment.

    If the general confronted Sam now and then thetter decided to let the matter known to all of them the soldiers would feel disgusted serving under someone like him.

    After all, what kind of person uses his authority to oppress a person in apetition making it unfair to him just make his grandson happy?

    So, he decided to wait till the next day and he even saw an opportunity in this.

    Many soldiers are unsatisfied with the way the thunder wolf squad operated. The resources that squad consumes are astronomically high and they are under constant care of the general.

    Since, Sam already destroyed the whole army, if the thunder wolf squad manages to beat him, then he can put the thunder wolf squad¡¯s name out and solidify their position.

    While this man is making his ns, Sam is inside his tent writing something on a scroll.

    After writing something, he called out a shadow mouse and gave the scroll along with another letter that he already wrote earlier and his schr artisan badge.

    They disappeared into the space jade of the mouse and disappeared into the dark.

    He is making some ns for tomorrow and it is not about the fight rather it is about the trouble he prepared for the general to deal with the aftermath.

    How can he let the general off so easily?

    The next day even before the dawn, Sam and the Deputy general walked into the thunder wolf squad¡¯s camp.

    The General is already prepared.

    He sat near an arena where the team battles would usually take ce.

    The fifty disciples all stood behind him.

    Some auxiliary members are training and doing odd jobs as if they didn¡¯t care about the arrival of the deputy general.

    But Sam and the deputy general are only looking at the general, particrly Sam who has a cold smirk on his face.

    Sam slowly walked on to the arena and shouted loudly.

    "I am here to challenge every novice to a death duel. It doesn¡¯t matter if theye in groups or one on one. I will take the challenge all the same.

    Today either I die here or destroy the novices of the thunder wolf squad, there is no other oue.

    If anyone in the thunder wolf squad is man enough to fight unlike their teacher who likes to y underhanded cane on to the stage.

    But beware, after I am done with you, you would wish that the death is a better oue."

    When the thunder wolf squad, the general and deputy general even the auxiliary members of the squad heard these words, they were stunned on the spot. Time seemed to have frozen for a second.

    They didn¡¯t expect that Sam woulde out this strong. Judging by the Sam¡¯s serious expression, he doesn¡¯t seem to be joking. He is serious this time.

    After a few seconds of pause, everyone came out of their stupor and particrly the squad members arepletely infuriated beyond reason. All they want to do now was to tear Sam into pieces.

    But their teacher said that he would be the one speaking and didn¡¯t let them speak unless he permitted.

    "Sam, do you know what you are doing? You are making a move on your own military." The general said. He also didn¡¯t expect Sam woulde up with the death duel straight up and began to hesitate.

    He also heard the news of the cougar family massacre but he knew better than anyone that the news is true.

    But he also has enough confidence that his disciples could beat Sam, even if they don¡¯t make it one on one, they can still do so in a squad.

    Even if it sounded unfair, their squad is meant to be a team-bat experts not the individualbat experts, he didn¡¯t find it shameful to do so.

    That is also the reason he didn¡¯t let the soldiers challenge Sam and let them make a move on his teammates instead.

    Sam just stared at the General with a serious look full of killing intent. He really wanted to kill this guy right here right now and if he nned a perfect night sketch, he would be able to make the whole body disappear without leaving a trace of the act.

    But he has other ns for this guy. Sam wants to give this guy a beating and he also wants to change a bit, so he didn¡¯t want to kill for every grievance. But if this general pushes his button once more, Sam would definitely show him hell in the future.

    Seeing that Sam is not responding, general frowned and understood that there is no backing down, but he has to test the waters first.

    He called Jim over and whispered something in his ear.

    Jim¡¯s expression changed clearly indicating that he extremely unwilling and unconvinced. But he still went on to the stage and looked at Sam.

    "How dare you toe here and challenge us? Do you think that thunder wolf squad is somewhere you cane and go as you please? I will make you regreting out of your mother¡¯s w.o.m.b."

    Jim is extremely angry at Sam, because his teacher only said that he is going to test the waters and estimate Sam¡¯s strength and he also said that he is not Sam¡¯s match which made him feel indignant.

    So, he started blurting some nonsense as soon as he stepped on the stage.

    But the reaction waspletely what he didn¡¯t expect. He could feel that Sam¡¯s gaze became icier and he is also looking at him in apletely different manner.

    He involuntarily took a step back and only after a few seconds did he realise what he did and became even angrier in embarrassment.

    He took a step forward and yelled.

    "I will show you why they call me thunder leg Jim. I will teach you a lesson you will never forget."

    He didn¡¯t wait at all and made a move immediately. He felt that Sam¡¯s temperament changed a lot within a second right after he made a statement but he didn¡¯t know what it is.

    Even the general and deputy noticed the changes but they don¡¯t know what changed.

    Only Sam knew what changed. He is suppressing his bloodl.u.s.t to not to show it outside. If he shows it out, then there is a high chance that they will let Jim quit.

    Sam is very sensitive about his birth and he didn¡¯t like it whenever someone mentions it. That is why the word Bastard is like a trigger to him.

    Now that Jim mentioned his birth, even without earlier frustration and grievance, he would make it living hell for him.

    Jim didn¡¯t know Sam¡¯s thoughts.

    He moved in a fast manner as blue colour lightning crackled around his legs. He stared sending powerful kicks at Sam at a lightning speed.

    This is the first time, Sam is fighting a lightning type warrior mage.

    Even though, he fought a few lightning mages before that is all in a group fight and lightning and thunder elements are very rare.

    From the looks of it, the best of these elemental mages of the southern star are all in this camp now.

    Sam didn¡¯t care though, he also moved like a phantom. He is even faster than Jim as he dodged nimbly.

    His moves are fluid, his face is cold and expressionless. He didn¡¯t even feel a little bit of pressure from the fight.

    After ying for a while, Sam got bored, his hand glowed in golden light and he blocked the kicking towards his face.

    He looked at Jim who is incredibly frustrated due tock of a single proper hit and said.

    "You call yourself thunder leg Jim with these pathetic techniques? All you can do is move a little faster and kick a little harder and you dare be arrogant in front of me? I will show you what a leg technique is today."

    As soon as his words finished, he swung his arm which held Jim¡¯s leg which made theter make a turn with his other leg as a pivot.

    By the time, he regained his bnce, Sam is already standing shoulder to shoulder with him facing the same direction and ced his hand around his left hand around his neck.

    Before he could realise what is happening, Sam took his neck as support and raised his two legs and locked Jim¡¯s hip in a leg scissor lock as he threw his weight downwards.

    Right before he could fall down, Sam ced his hand on the ground and stayed like that without touching the ground.

    His torso is facing upwards as he ced the second hand downwards on the ground.

    With his two hands as support his body stayed in the air while his legs held Jim¡¯s hip in a scissor lock.

    Jim was bent backwards as his feet stayed on ground.

    He was drenched in sweat and didn¡¯t even dare to move around.

    All the people in the scene are stunned by the move.

    This is Sam¡¯s version of modified Kani Basami. A move which is part of Kinshi Waza the forbidden techniques of the judo.

    Basically, Kani Basami is a scissor lock around the hip or legs and throwing the opponent. This will cause serious lower body injuries to the opponent and it is banned in the official judo on the earth.

    Sam¡¯s version though, is even more dangerous. Since, he can hold the who weight of the two bodies with his single hand, he modified this technique to his use. He could directly break the spine of the opponent as long as he wished and make him a cripple for the life.

    And if he wished so, he can even decide to paralyze the upper part of the body or lower part or even both.

    Sam looked at Jim and said. "This is called a leg technique. Now tell me, which part do you hate most in your body, the upper body of the legs or both. I can help you break it."

    "L... Leave me. Please. Let me go."

    "Don¡¯t say that. Aren¡¯t you the great thunder leg Jim? You are supposed to make me regreting out of mother¡¯s w.o.m.b. Why are begging like a bitch now?"

 Chapter 158: Poisonous words

    Sam¡¯s eyes were cold and full of malicious intent. He is like a wild beast out for blood.

    Jim could almost feel as if he was struck in a beast¡¯s maw.

    "SAM, you better let him go. Otherwise, you won¡¯t be leaving this ce alive."

    General spark said in a cold voice.

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to look at him.

    From what Sam understood, if even the Marquis can get the news that Sam cannot be touched, then the General would definitely know.

    As for why these candidates can fight each other. That might have something to do with those people behind the scenes not cing any rules about the infighting between the candidates.

    After all, they need the best person and the strongest is always the best in this world. If a candidate can outwit, outsmart and outy another candidate that only proves that the loser is not capable.

    This is just Sam¡¯s conjecture.

    So, he is not afraid of the general at all.

    Sam just looked at Jim whose legs are shivering.

    "I..I su..rrender."

    "I am sorry Jim. I think you got something wrong here. This is a death match and the life of the loser is not in his hands, the winner decides and, in this case, I decide whether you get to live or die."

    Jim shivered in fright, but that only increased the pain on his hip.

    Sam smiled ruthlessly as he said in a creepy voice.

    "You are feeling helpless, right?

    You are feeling the pain, right?

    You are unwilling to end your journey like this, right?

    But you have to go through this, do you know why? Because you involved in a matter you shouldn¡¯t have. You shouldn¡¯t havee to my camp and instigated the whole farce with Jian. Now, you are paying the price."

    When Sam said these words, Jim turned his head and looked at him with his eyes red in fury.

    "Why are you looking at me with that hatred? I am not the one who led you into this. Remember, you told you toe and make trouble for me.

    Remember why you even bothered toe and make trouble for me who doesn¡¯t even know you."

    Sam¡¯s words are like some directions pointed in a lost way. Jim involuntarily looked at General Spark.

    General Spark felt that something was wrong, but he didn¡¯t know what it is.

    He stood up and shouted.

    "SAM, let him go."

    But Sam didn¡¯t bother to reply. He continued. His words are as poisonous as a viper.

    "Yes, he is the one. Your beloved teacher is responsible for this. Do you even know why he is targeting me?

    Do you even know how we have this beef, when I came to this city for the first time?

    Because of his grandsons.

    Due to his grandsons¡¯ ipetence and jealousy, theyined to him and he is taking it out on me, but on whose expense?

    You are just a pawn for this y.

    He doesn¡¯t want to lose face, so he sent you to do all the dirty work but that is not the only reason, do you know why he sent you?

    He could have just introduced his grandsons to themanders and they would have asked them for the favours, but why did he choose you?"

    When Sam asked these questions there is confusion mixed in the pain on his face.

    General knew that situation is moving out of hand so he was about to make a move, but Deputy General stopped him.

    "Move aside." He barked coldly.

    "General Spark, you said everything will be ording to rules and everything is going on like that, Sam mentioned that this is death duel and it would be so no matter what.

    Loser dying or living will be decided by the winner.

    If you interfere now, I may not be able to stop you, but you also cannot stop me, if I make a move on your students.

    If you break the rules, I will also do so."

    "HOW DARE YOU THREATEN ME?"

    "General Spark, do you think I am afraid of you? I may not be your match now, but do you think you can kill me if I am hell bent on escaping? You seem to forget what I am good at.

    And by the way, it is also unknown if I go all out, then I won¡¯t be able to grab you to hell with me.

    You stayed in that pathetic Middle stage Novice for twenty years. And I might reach the same stage in less than three years. It is about time you stop putting yourselves on such high pedestal."

    General¡¯s face immediately sank, this is the cold hard truth and that is also one of the reasons that he suppressed the Deputy General before. He doesn¡¯t wanttter to have any aplishments, lest he would gather enough resources to surpass him.

    "Are you sure you want to go against me like this for a brat?"

    "I am pretty sure, as you said before I will do my duty to utmost capability to make sure that everything is going ording rules."

    While the two big-shots are having a confrontation, Sam is still speaking with Jim as he tightened his legs bit by bit.

    "Do you still not understand? He knew that I am a ruthless guy. He knew that I ughtered three hundred members alone because they hurt my teammate.

    So, he found you guys as a target for my anger.

    Since, you are the guys who started finding trouble to me, I would leave his grandsons alone. You are pathetic scapegoat for his grandsons."

    When Sam¡¯s words reached him, Jim¡¯s face was already paled. He didn¡¯t know what to think of it. But the pain was telling him that all this wouldn¡¯t have happened if his teacher didn¡¯t send him to do the dirty work that day.

    He felt betrayed and used.

    At this moment, Sam¡¯s voice came again.

    "So, whatever that is going to happen, you can only me it on your teacher."

    After that, the whole ce turned silent and only cracking sounds could be heard.

    Then came the sound of a painful and miserable wailing.

    "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH................"

    Jim cried on top his lungs. He could feel his spine cracking and he slowly lost the feel of his legs. It is as if he didn¡¯t even have legs at all. He couldn??t move them; he couldn¡¯t even feel the pain of his legs.

    Sam stood up leaving the now paralyzed Jim on the stage.

    General Spark stared at him with fury, but he held back because, once he made this move, there would be no stepping back, he has to kill the Deputy General and even make sure that his students are also silent so that the news will be buried.

    But that is impossible.

    Sam looked at him coldly and kicked Jim out of the stage and then walked back to stand in his original position.

    General looked at him coldly, he then looked at his students who also heard what Sam said to Jim. They also started doubting the motives of their teacher on sending them to mess with Sam.

    General now understood that Sam is here for more than just defeating his squad. He is here to destroy him.

    Sam destroyed his position in the hearts of the soldiers andmanders, now he is destroying his position in the hearts of his students for whom he even gave up on the army even risking his position.

    Now, Sam shook the foundations of their bond between him and his disciples.

    He looked at the young man standing on the arena who is staring right back at him fiercely.

    "I thought, that thunder wolf squad will be all that. But this isn¡¯t much.

    How about you guyse in teams, that would save me lot of time."

    These words from Sam back everyone out of their shock and they looked at Jim and Sam with a look of fury.

    They knew that their teacher is the one pissed the other party off, but they still cannot let that person walk all over them.

    From what they saw, they knew that they cannot beat Sam individually and there is only one way that can give them sufficient confidence and that is ganging up on him.

    Even if it was unfair, they are a team and they always work as a team.

    A total of twenty-seven novices walked on to the stage as they started standing in a formation.

    These are the real Novice squad of the thunder wolf squad. Out of thirty- three are reserve members which are also as strong as the rest of the members in the squad. It is just that they are not aspatible in the team.

    Jim is also one of those reserve members.

    These twenty-seven members have two goals in walking together on to the stage.

    One is that they don¡¯t want to take any risks with Sam and the other one is to make sure that they can beat Sam overwhelmingly.

    Sam didn¡¯t care either way.

    A young man inte twenties who seemed to be the leader of the group said.

    "You might have grievances with our teacher and some of our squad members might also take part in it, but this is not good enough reason to cripple a person like that, is it?"

    "Who are you to decide whether that is reason enough or not? I am the only one that gets to decide on every matter that involves me. Not even your pathetic General who is undeserved of his title is eligible to do so.

    Let alone you, who is a student of that pathetic life form."

    The air almost stopped flowing after Sam¡¯s words left his mouth. His words are extremely cruel and disrespectful.

    But nobody has anything to say to that, even the general has nothing to say.

    At this moment he is angry but there is one thing that is making him feel like pping himself.

    That is not heeding to his son-inw¡¯s words. He clearly said not to push someone so that we would regret it for the life and he could see why he said that.

    Sam is not like any normal person; he doesn¡¯t have as much tolerance as other normal people.

    Two weeks of trouble, that too nothing too overboard. After all, give some beatings to the teammates is not that much of a damage, thrashing a ce can be considered as acting of some thugs.

    In actual fact, nobody hasn¡¯t even made some serious damage to him yet and he is already out for blood.

    In fact, his actions cannot be simply considered as going out for blood. He is making the general lose everything he had except for the wealth and cultivation which cannot be simply taken away.

    Other than that, his position as a general, his position as a teacher and a mentor are all being taken away one by one.

    He could only pray in his heart that his students wouldn¡¯t fall in this battle. If that happens, he would really fail as a teacher.

    After all, he was supposed to protect them, but he brought them all this trouble.

 Chapter 159: Taste of his own medicine.

    Sam looked at the group of twenty-seven people who are making a formation.

    There are eight women in the team and they are in the rear of the formation. He looked at them and found out that the formation is something he was a little familiar with but he couldn¡¯t put a finger on it.

    The leader, the young man who spoke said as he looked at Sam.

    "Let us do it this way. We will attack with the full power with our ultimate move, which could take down even a mid-stage Great mage.

    If you can still defeat us in this exchange you will win."

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything and just nodded in agreement. This will make things easier for him. He took out the harbinger and reached the maximum height he could fly.

    He is more than fifty feet above the arena. But the novices didn¡¯t feel fl.u.s.tered at all.

    "Thunder-wolf squad. The thunder-wolf formation ultimate move. Thunder Fang."

    The leader shouted and all the members in the team started channelling the energy. Sam could see that Azure blue coloured electric currents started condensing and out of them a wolf silhouette was condensed.

    Sam looked at the intensity of the formation spirit which is clearly many times stronger than the earthen gori and Hawk he encountered previously.

    He took out the reaper as well as the Executioner.

    The Executioner is absorbing the blood essence of Hydra and it is evolving. Right now it is already at the peak of rank 3 and just a bit away from the rank 4.

    The rest of the gadgets are only at rank 2 including the Harbinger, and his ck coat when hepares them solely based on their material grades.

    Sam held the two swords in his two hands and looked at the still condensing wolf spirit.

    The sky above is crackling with lightning, but Sam still stood there on the Harbinger as if he was invincible.

    "ATTACK"

    The leader of the squad shouted on top of his lungs.

    The wolf raised its head. It is more than twenty feet tall. But it is still more powerful than the formation spirits he has seen before.

    Sam started condensing the elemental energies into two des one with fire and another with wind.

    As soon as the wolf leapt with its mouth wide open, Sam also stored away his harbinger as he dived head first.

    The executioner was filled with wind element while the reaper is filled with fire element.

    He crossed his hands while still holding the swords.

    Just before the wolf spirit and he met, Sam opened his hands as he swung the swords.

    "Two sword style, Dual wing sh."

    Two sword rays came out one with golden mes burning and the other with white light.

    First the fire raynded on the wolf followed by the wind de raging the me intensity.

    The wolf spirit which wasing at him in a ferocious manner shed with the attack and immediately dissipated into thin air.

    And the raging fire still moved in the same speed towards the group.

    The whole arena was covered in fire and the wails of the squad can be heard. But a loud explosive boom drowned their cries.

    *BOOM*

    The loud explosion was none other than Samnding on the stage.

    The stage exploded into ruins and stone fragments are flying around.

    "NO...."

    The Great mage level squad members jumped over to help their juniors. But when the dust settled, they stopped in their tracks as they saw a daunting figure who is standing in the centre.

    Sam¡¯s upper body was bare and was only covered with some rags of cloth revealing all the scars on his body.

    He held both swords in his hands as his back faced the group who fell unconscious but still effected by the fire. He looked at the Great mage members who are about to step up coldly.

    They didn¡¯t know why, but they felt afraid of going onto the stage.

    They felt like Sam is a predator who is lording over his territory and if they dared to enter the territory they would definitely die.

    Sam stored his swords away and looked at the surroundings before turning back to the Great realm cultivators.

    "You can save them if you want and if you want to take revenge, I suggest you let go of that ns and stay obedient.

    Because, I have already reached the limits of my tolerance. If you guys provoke me again, I won¡¯t have any qualms on reaping the lives of yours like fruits from a tree."

    He turned around and was about to walk away. But he turned around again and walked towards the General.

    He whispered in a low voice, so only two of them could hear it.

    "I know that you cannot touch the remaining teammates. If you still wish to oppress them then do so with all your heart, I am pretty sure that the next batch are not that easily pushed around.

    But there is one thing I am going to warn you about; you better open your ears and listen to me clearly.

    Don¡¯t you dare make a move on Watt. If I find out, something happened to him, even if it is the slightest attack, ambush, oppression whatever it is.

    If something happened to him, I wille and take your life."

    At these words, General almostughed up in mockery and sensing this Sam just continued his words.

    "You can mock me all you want, but you better ask your son-inw about it."

    Sam turned around and made his way out of the camp.

    General Spark, didn¡¯t bother with Sam¡¯s words and immediately tended to Jim and the rest of the Great realm cultivators tended to the injured members.

    Soon, a rank 4 healer came and took a look at the condition of the people.

    He was able to heal the wounds of the rest of the Novices, but when it came to Jim, he can only shake his head. He is the best healer in the military and even he cannot do anything.

    The spine was cracked in a peculiar manner. One section waspletely shattered as if it has turned into powder and there is a vertical crack all over the spine.

    The nerves are also damaged, but the healer cannot do anything about it.

    After all, not any healer can grow a bone, even if they have ability to regrow a limb, they cannot perfectly grow a spinal bone when the flesh was still intact.

    In this case, the healer has to do a surgery.

    Yes, a surgery. In this world a surgery is not too umon. After all, not everyone can use Sam¡¯s observation ability and they cannot heal all types of wounds.

    So, the surgeries aremon, but they don¡¯t take as much time as the ones in the modern earth.

    When general heard the diagnosis, he was stunned. He immediately carried Jim and ran towards the Pharmaceutical tower.

    The tower head here is a Rank-5 Healer and a Rank- 5 potion Master.

    General Spark is hopeful that he can save them, but the results shocked him. The tower head of the Pharmaceutical tower refused to see him and said that he was busy.

    When general heard this, he immediately became enraged and started releasing his aura and spiritual energy suppressing everyone.

    "General Spark. This is not your military and it is not your ce for you to behave as you like. You better behave."

    A man who seemed to be in his fifties walked out. He has a schrly look as he ced his hands behind his back.

    "I am not treating your disciple no matter what, you can get out of this ce. If you stay here one more minute, then I will remove the discounts the Pharmaceutical tower offers to southern star military."

    "Why are doing this? This is the matter of the future of a youngster. I don¡¯t even know how I offended you. But I apologize if I did anything wrong.

    Please help him."

    General Spark immediately calmed down and begged. He knew that Pharmaceutical tower is not a ce for him to throw his weight around. The tower head himself is a Nascent and he also have two identities as Healer and Potion Master.

    He is far more esteemed than his General title. If the discounts and contracts between the Pharmaceutical tower and the army are affected by his action, the consequences are something he himself cannot bear.

    "Of course, he didn¡¯t offend me, but you had clearly offended someone else you shouldn¡¯t have.

    General Spark, I heard you have already made a mistake in the past y offending someone you shouldn¡¯t have, you should have learned your lesson.

    You are saying that this matter is regarding the future of the youngster, so what about the future of the youngsters you have oppressed. I can only say this. But I cannot help you.

    Seeing that young man suffering is making me feel bad, but I cannot do anything, you should have foreseen these consequences.

    Now, please leave before I decide to take any further actions and nevereback."

    General Spark gritted his teeth in frustration. He didn¡¯t know what he has to do for his disciple to get treated.

    He is the reason that Jim is in this state and now the healer is saying that he is the reason that Jim is going to be in this state. What kind of grave mistake did he do to offend someone to this point?

    At this point of time, he didn¡¯t have enough time to ponder about it, his only option is to request Duke.

    So, he darted out of the tower, by this time the remaining thunder wolf squad members already came here.

    When they looked at General and Jim still looking lifeless in his hands, they understood.

    Jim looked even more devastating than before; his eyes are filled with despair. He looked at his fellow squad members and then his teacher.

    He said in a low voice.

    "Teacher, why did you do this to me?"

    When those hopeless and disappointed words were heard, everyone was silent to the point it became eerie.

    General Spark didn¡¯t know what to say.

    One thing was true, Sam clearly took it out on Jim because he did this. But he didn¡¯t who is troubling him from getting the required treatment.

    At this moment, a silver light shed as Watt came on his Silver Wind. He looked at the General coldly and took out a letter from the storage before throwing away and left.

    One of the squad members picked the letter and opened it to see the contents, once he looked at them he was stunned before reading them out loud.

    "General Spark, even though you are at the top of the game of oppressing others with your authority, I want to know your opinion. How does it feel like being oppressed by others? Did I do it right? Oh, by the way, I am a rank 5 Artisan and I do hope you are intelligent enough to guess that significance.

    -Sam."

 Chapter 160: Call from Duke

    After hearing the contents of the letter, General Spark became hopeless.

    The person who made Jim like this and the person who is stopping Jim to recover is same and that person is a Novice brat whose age is smaller than him being a Nascent.

    Suddenly, he remembered the previous setback he suffered, which led his three daughters to suffer along with him for offending someone.

    But the difference is, at that time, he offended a person who has same strength as him but he has high-level background. This time though, the person is weaker than him and the strength difference cannot be simply described as a lot.

    He only has one way now and that is to mediate the conflict.

    Even though, the four towers of profession are operated separately, they are still a lot closer to each other than the ruling party of the territory.

    ording to him, Sam must have used his potential as a bargain, since he is only sixteen and he is already a rank 5 artisan to prevent Jim from receiving the treatment.

    His guess was almost right, but the deal is not the future potential rather a recipe. Sam has so many recipes of potions and pills in the divine dimension and they are a lot more advanced than the ones that are in the market.

    Sam picked one of the lowest level recipes avable in the dimension library which is used for people below Grand realm to restore spiritual energy immediately and made a deal through Watt with the tower head.

    Even if he is a rank 5 potion master an upgraded version of the potion, if it can be in his hands and he offered it to the superiors, that would be his contribution which provides him more opportunities for his future development.

    But General didn¡¯t know this, if he did, he would have been surprised on how determined Sam is to oppress him by trading something so valuable.

    General Spark thought for a moment and decided to visit the Duke, but before that he has to do something and that is to talk with his son-inw.

    So, he led his students to the Duke¡¯s estate and he entered themunication room used formunicating with the Marquises.

    His students are waiting in room as one of themid Jim on a table whose expression is devoid of life and light.

    At this moment Sam is talking to the fourth regimentmander who is the instructor of the camp.

    "I want to go out."

    His voice is devoid of any respect but themander didn¡¯t mind and just asked nervously.

    "Why?"

    "I have something to do in Artisan tower. I am not going to interfere in the business mission of my teammates." Sam took out his tailor artisan and weapon artisan badges as he spoke.

    Instructor permitted him to leave and Sam immediately went to the artisan tower and that is to upgrade his status.

    If his guess is right, the Duke will be summoning him by evening and he should increase his own value to have more weight of his words in the discussion.

    So, he is here to work for it.

    By the time, Sam is at the entrance of the Artisan tower, Watt is already waiting there with his schr artisan badge.

    Sam went in and after a few hours he came out with a new upgraded badge and that is his weapon artisan badge.

    Now, he is a Rank 5 schr artisan, Pseudo rank 3 tailor artisan, Pseudo rank 3 weapon artisan.

    After that he didn¡¯t stop there, he and Watt made their way towards the formation tower and after that inscription tower.

    Now he is a Rank 2 formation master and a pseudo-rank 3 inscription master.

    How did he get the pseudo rank 3 inscription master? That has something to do with Etching and creation of inscription matrices using Rank 2 inscriptions, which has same effect as a rank 3 inscription.

    Now, he is done with his preparations.

    "The problem is mostly resolved. You guys can open the restaurant back. But ask Philip and Kelly to work on the impact crystals as much as possible.

    But don¡¯t over-exert yourselves if you don¡¯t make it with the restaurant. The remaining businesses are already booming and it will hard to pierce the market. So, try your best but be safe and don¡¯t fall into other team¡¯s tricks. "

    Sam gave these instructions to Watt and flew away towards the camp on his hover board, while Watt himself returned to the estate to give the news to the rest.

    Sam waited in the tent not even bothering to attend the daily routine, even the instructors didn¡¯t ask him toe.

    They are happy as long as they don¡¯t have any interaction with Sam. After all, they picked on him for no reason and Sam could so too. If he found fault for everything they do and visited their camps time and again, they will lose the rest of the army too.

    There already signs of soldiers wanting to quit.

    Sam is waiting for the duke to call him. He was so sure because, from what he understood about the general he knew that he deeply cared for his students.

    And if his hypothesis was right, he would try his best to save Jim from his current state. But since, the tower head of the Pharmaceutical tower didn¡¯t want to help, there is only one person who can convince him and that is the Duke.

    But it was almost evening and he still didn¡¯t receive any call from the Duke.

    This is because, the general went to have a talk with his son-inw and was lost in thought. He just kept recalling the things his son-inw said.

    Particrly thest part of the conversation.

    "General Spark, I already advised you to not to provoke him, but you still did. I withheld some info before, in case I would piss off that guy if I told it to someone, but since you are not a person who is not willing to listen, then I cannot do anything but tell you about this.

    The ckwater, Sam is the one who destroyed it in my territory. He destroyed the ckwater branch in Blue me city and the most important part of it is, the leader of the branch is a Nascent.

    But still, there are nothing but the bones left of that person.

    Sam killed him right before my eyes.

    That is one of the cruellest murders I have seen.

    That guy has to experience the blood leaving his body, his life force being sucked away, his internal organs being eaten and his flesh consumed by some really powerful insect type beasts.

    Other than a bunch of bones, there is nothing left of him.

    If you are thinking that any of the news you heard about Sam is exaggerated, then you better think again.

    If I were you though, I would resolve the conflict as soon as I can. Otherwise, you better kill him in a single blow and get rid of the trouble once and for all.

    If you don¡¯t though, you are going to suffer.

    From, what I understood, the most fearful thing about Sam is not his battle prowess or potential, rather it is his brain, his intelligence and his wit. Even a if a breath of life is left in him, he will definitely take his enemy¡¯s life away before he dies.

    Good Bye."

    General Spark fell silent and thought for a while. He understood that Sam is not a typical genius who is just arrogant because of their backing, battle prowess or some minor achievements which they think are big deal.

    He is different and at the same time dangerous. He is like a wild beast with a strong sense of territorial awareness. But instead of territory, he is so possessive of his things, friends, employees everything that is rted to him.

    Fifteen days of oppression. A typical genius will either endure or leave the ce in pride seeing that the opposite party is too strong to handle.

    But Sam went on his way to destroy the things that put the General in his position. He is an Insane guy.

    Only after a long time did the generale to himself and walked out of the room. He met his students and carried Jim as he ran towards the Duke Pce. He has to clear the conflict as fast as possible. Otherwise, he would be in for a treat which he couldn¡¯t enjoy.

    When the Duke saw that the General is running towards him like this, he thought that thee is some kind of crisis in the army.

    Well, technically there is a crisis in the army but it is not one that he thought of.

    General met the Duke in the Duke pce court along with his students and informed him of the situation briefly. He is too embarrassed to spell everything has happened because of his ego. So, he vaguely gave the hints

    But Duke felt that something is a miss Still he agreed to talk to Sam and sent an attendant to summon him.

    By this time, Sam is already sitting in the tent in his usual ck coat instead of the army uniform. He knew that he has to go meet the duke, so he would meet him in his own style, after all he is not just any soldier, he has a lot more identities than that.

    When the attendant came to Sam, heplied and followed the attendant. They rode a eagle type level 4 beast as they went to the Duke pce.

 Chapter 161: Threats- I

    Samnded in the Duke Pce and the same attendant led him to the Court room.

    All this time the attendant was nervous, because, Sam is wearing all the badges of his professions. Today, he is noting here like the soldier or the candidate Sam who is a Late stage Novice.

    He is here like the Rank 5 schr Artisan, Pseudo rank 3 tailor and weapon artisan, Formation master and a rank 2 inscription master, who is also a Late stage Novice at sixteen years of age.

    Both statements are his identities, but both identities are ofpletely different worlds.

    When Sam entered the Court room, he saw that General is standing in front of a middle-aged man who is sitting in the main seat.

    The man seemed to have just entered histe thirties. But since he is a Nascent, the appearances will be deceiving.

    Sam walked towards the centre and stood in front of the Duke.

    The first thing the Duke noticed when he saw Sam is how young he is and the second thing is the badges that are pinned on the left side of the coat.

    They are too dazzling to ignore. That many professions, that many titles and that cultivation when he is that young. He really is a rare piece and the Duke understood why the conflict escted.

    A young man with those achievements is sure to be proud. Why would he endure the abuse of some old man?

    Duke has a faint smile on his face which is pleasing to see and that face which resembled Nichs Carton a lot is so bright and pleasant.

    Duke and Sam exchanged some pleasantries then former came straight to point.

    "Sam, I heard that you have a misunderstanding with our General here, May I know why you are damaging the whole military because of your conflict with an individual?" Duke asked with same smile.

    His tone is not overbearing but there is still some strictness in it.

    "Does Duke Carton know about the whole situation? Did General Spark borate on it from start to end?"

    Sam asked instead of replying to the earlier question.

    Duke didn¡¯t get angry instead he replied with the same smile.

    "I have been told that General and you have some differences and you paid him back on the expense of the army and his disciples. Let us put the things about soldiers and the battles aside.

    He said that you are even hindering his disciple from getting a treatment, may I know why you are doing this?"

    Sam chuckled as soon as he heard Duke¡¯s words. He looked at the General who didn¡¯t dare to meet his eyes because of his guilt.

    Even though, the general wanted to bury the hatchet with Sam, he really didn¡¯t want to lose all his dignity and pride. So, he spoke by ying down the whole situation and most of his words suggested that Sam is overdoing it.

    He just wanted the Duke to end the matter by forming a truce. He didn¡¯t expect that he would ask all these things. Even then he hoped that Sam would justply and end the farce, but judging from how Sam made an appearance with all his badges of his professions, clearly indicating his status, there is a very little chance that would happen and the situation went on just like that.

    Sam looked at Duke seriously and said.

    "Duke Carton. I think calling the grudge between me and General as some misunderstanding and slight differences will be seriously undermining it."

    "If you say so, I would like to listen to your side of the story." Duke replied.

    "Well, the General himself might not like it if I tell everything and who knows what would happen to me if I really did say it. I still have to stay in the southern star city for a while, right?"

    This time, Duke clearly understood, how much General undermined the situation. Sam¡¯s words reeked with sarcasm. His words clearly meant that general could clearly do anything to Sam even if heined to the Duke himself.

    Duke turned a bit serious and looked at General Spark before speaking.

    "General Spark. You are a senior to me as you served as general under my father and due to both of your friendship, he overlooked a lot of your shorings and he even helped you when you are at your worst.

    I respected his decision and you since you are his friend, but that doesn¡¯t mean that you can make a fool out of me. I now demand that you exin the situation clearly without leaving a little bit of information.

    Otherwise, I might have to remined you that I am the Duke Carton now and you are the subordinate working under me, with the hardest way possible."

    As he said those words, Duke Carton released his aura of the Late stage Nascent, very close to peak.

    If his father and General are of same generation, then he is of the same generation as Marquis Blue me.

    And right now, the Marquis blue me is still in thete stage Grand realm while the Duke is in Late stage Nascent.

    General lowered his head in shame and then took a look at his disciples. All of them are havingpletely disappointed expressions. This is the first time they saw how despicable their teacher can be.

    Abusing authority, suppressing the weak and powerless, lying, unfounded pride. He is an absolute embarrassment.

    Those expressions made the General himself feel disappointed in himself. He took a deep breath and looked at the Duke before spilling everything out.

    Everything from how Zeke attacked Sam, how thetter retaliated. How the general used his authority and people to make trouble for Sam and his teammates. Even, how he involved the army.

    When Duke heard all these things, he couldn¡¯t even meet Sam¡¯s gaze. This is a great embarrassment.

    Everyone, knew that thispetition is a really important one, but Duke trusted General Spark and gave him all the responsibility.

    But the General broke all the rules which he himself made and troubled a youngster who is participating in thepetition.

    And that youngster is not any normal candidate. Just based on his battle prowess he might have been seeded by the people behind the scenes and now that he knew that he is adept in so many professions. It would be a miracle if they ignored Sam.

    So, the situation is more serious than he thought.

    He has simply put too much trust in Spark. He shouldn¡¯t have done that just because of his seniority.

    Seeing the silent Duke, Sam said.

    "Duke Carton, with all due respect, can I ask if you really even care for your army. Your General is an abusive psycho who uses his authority just for his selfish motives.

    Not only that, I heard that he even suppressed the actions of Deputy general who had tried to improve the welfare of the soldiers.

    Your regiment soldiers are full of trash and nobody has a moral bottom line. Your regimentmanders are hypocritical people who only fears the strong and bullies the weak.

    In the fifteen days, me and my teammates suffered in the camp while my remaining teammates suffered in the city. Not a single person came to my rescue.

    I only retaliated in the same way they did to me and I didn¡¯t even break a single rule unlike them who treated the rules like a pile of shit and now I am being questioned here.

    I had very good impression of you from your son Nichs, but I might have to change my opinion.

    If not for the fact that I am strong enough and I have some special identities, who knows what would have happened to me. I would have been killed in cold blood for all I know.

    A grandson who thinks that everything has to go his way and ambushed an injured person with twenty people and a grandfather who has his back by breaking every f.u.c.k.i.n.g rule in the military and a Duke who doesn¡¯t see it unless that grandfather himself confesses it. I really feel like a new world opened up to me."

    Hearing Sam¡¯s outburst, the general and the Duke are thoroughly embarrassed and that embarrassment became anger.

    Even if it true being lectured by a young brat is not a thing they can easily bear.

    "Sam, you might be a victim here, but you should watch your words. It is not a good thing to be this disrespectful. You might not be able to bear the consequences."

    These words didn¡¯te from the general or the duke, rather a Great mage who is the full- timemander of the Thunder wolf squad was the one who spoke those words.

    Sam just looked at him and said.

    "Who the hell are you to talk to me? Is it even your ce to talk here?"

    The squad leader was angry. Even if Sam is great in the Novice but he himself is a Great mage in middle stage, where did Sam has found the guts to talk to him like that?

    The squad leader is so self-centred that he forgot that Sam is picking a fight with his teacher who is Nascent much less a Great mage.

    "I am the squad leader of the thunder wolf squad. The conflict involves our squad as well. You crippled the spine of one of our soldiers and I can ask you for an exnation."

    "Thunder wolf squad? Leader? In my eyes you are just a bunch of overrated soldiers and you particrly are the leader of these pathetic life forms.

    Exnation? you guys better thank your lucky stars that I didn¡¯t start a massacre in your squad. If I wished so, even your teacher has no way to stop me and you have balls to demand an exnation?

    If you dare to utter a word again, I will visit your squad again and trust me, this time not a single novice can stand in their whole life. They can only crawl with their hands."

    Sam threatened directly. He didn¡¯t like to talk much, but there is a hidden agenda in this conversation he is making.

    In actual fact, Sam could have dealt with these guys the very second day, but why did he wait for fifteen days patiently and deal with all the regiments there are some reasons.

    Like taking the revenge on General psychologically, making some quick buck and the third and most important reason, points he has to earn.

    Who has so much time and patience to finish the tasks assigned by their instructors?

    He waited fifteen days to see if any instructor is normal, since all of them are against him and after revenge no one will support him or mess with him. So, he has to find a quick way to get his hands on those points.

 Chapter 162: Threats- II

    Duke Carton frowned at the words of the two young men.

    Even though, everything Sam said was on point, it is too hurtful to hear them and made them feel ashamed as their mistakes being pointed out by a youngster.

    As for the squad leader of the thunder wolf squad, he really didn¡¯t have any right to speak here. After all, the mistake is his teacher¡¯s, even his Sam¡¯s actions are overhanded, they can only me their teacher if they have slightest bit on conscience.

    "Sam, you are strong, I give you that, you are talented in many fields I give you that too. You are the biggest victim in this situation, but you cannot just insult the whole army of the Southern star." Duke said slowly.

    "Insult the army? Duke Carton, you got something wrong here. If anybody is insulted, then that was me. It is an insult for me to stay in the army. From top brass to the underdogs everything was messed up." Sam¡¯s reply made the general¡¯s face turn red in embarrassment.

    "You cannot just make usations Sam. What you are saying is that the General, Deputy general and even all themanders are just raising a bunch of waste all these years. Is that it?" Duke asked.

    "Yes. That¡¯s what I mean."

    "But you cannot simply say that. You have to prove it."

    "I defeated a whole battalion myself, even the thunder wolf Novice squad was beaten half to death. I think that is enough proof. If you are not satisfied, I can have a go again, but this time, I won¡¯t hold back and I think I can make another de after that."

    Duke was speechless, he knew what Sam did with the Cougar family, but saying that he would do the same with his army, isn¡¯t it asking for a beating?

    But he controlled the urge and said.

    "That only proves you are overly strong."

    "Then how do you want me to prove it?" Sam frowned and asked.

    "We will get to thatter, now let us first deal with the issue between you and General Spark. How do you want to settle this?"

    "I am not the one who started this. You should ask the one who started on what his end goal is. Who knows, he might have nned to toy with me and my friends to death, he might have wanted to steal my wealth, he might cripple us and leave us on the road.

    An ipetent leader who only knows how to abuse his authority can do anything?"

    Sam is clearly making a point; he is not done with the General. No matter, how they changed the topic he simply wouldn¡¯t let go of the point ¡¯abuse of authority¡¯.

    Duke sighed and said.

    "Sam, you should cooperate. Even though, General did those things, it was only on a moment of spite, he wouldn¡¯t do such things with his position."

    "How are so sure, Duke Carton? For all we know, he might have killed all the people that offended his grandsons and erased the evidence. Why do you think his grandsons are so confident that they can even ostracize us from the whole crowd?

    This is clearly not the first time."

    General gritted his teeth as he stared at Sam. This is unbelievably big usation for a person in a position like him.

    Yes, it is true that he used his authority to help his grandsons, but that doesn¡¯t mean he is cruel enough to kill people just because of them. Sam is clearly painting him as an evil guy.

    Duke shook his head and said.

    "Sam, what do you want exactly?"

    "I need an answer. What is the end goal of the general? When would he have stopped harassing us if I didn¡¯t retaliate?"

    Duke looked at General Spark, but thetter avoided his gaze. He didn¡¯t want to say, because, his grandsons clearly asked something big to be done to Sam and that is Sam kicked out of thepetition along with his teammates and there is one more thing they wanted to do, which he didn¡¯t want to say in front of Sam.

    Because, Sam just gave a warning yesterday about it.

    "General Spark. Please don¡¯t let me and your disciples, lose thest shred of respect we have towards you." Duke said in a tone of disappointment.

    But the General felt that he shouldn¡¯t say the truth even more after hearing it. When facing his grandsons¡¯ requests, he didn¡¯t think that they are wrong and that is mostly because of his guilt.

    But that doesn¡¯t mean he didn¡¯t know what is wrong or right. If he said those words, he would be painted as a ck hearted viin in his students¡¯ hearts.

    He took a deep breath and looked at Sam before saying.

    "Sam, it is really my fault for doing this to you and me and my grandsons will take the responsibility. As for what my end goal was, I will tell you as long as you let Jim get the treatment and we can discuss on what you want to bury this hatchet.

    A lot of innocent people are involved, please don¡¯t make this anymoreplicated.

    What do you want? I can pay you if you need money. If you want some resources, pills, ores I can get them for you. Can you let this go? After this we won¡¯t cross each other¡¯s ways."

    Sam looked at him coldly. He took out a bunch of scrolls and said.

    "Who needs your money? Your four regiments owe me around 360 million. You better think of ways to pay me back before asking me how much I want.

    You are not worthy enough to buy me with money.

    As for resources, do you think your connections can best mine?" Sam shed his artisan badges while looking at Jim.

    Then only General remembered what Sam could do. Jim¡¯s treatment is an example. He became silent immediately.

    Sam turned to Duke and said.

    "I have two conditions. First one, Blue fire the grandson of General Spark should be deprived of his right to seed the noble title from his father and General Spark should resign to his position.

    He can stay in the military; he can run his squad. But he should be deprived of his General title."

    Everyone in the room were stunned and then revealed myriad of expressions. Duke was dumbfounded, General was furious and the disciples are looking at Sam in horror.

    They all had one thing in their mind. "Sam has balls of steel."

    "Sam, all this time, even if you are being blunt at least you said some truth. But this is damn right outrageous. You are not qualified enough to decide the nobility titles and positions of the militarymand."

    Duke said, this time his tone is cold.

    "Oh, sure then you decide. What is the appropriatepensation then? The General wouldn¡¯t tell me what he nned for me to decide what sort ofpensation I should get, you are saying that my current demand is outrageous, you decide."

    At this moment, general understood that he has to reveal his ns he made, otherwise Sam is going to stay mum. He has a fleeting thought of lying through this, but when he saw Duke who knew how general is like, he knows that it won¡¯t end well and Sam is not a fool either.

    So, he decided and said to Sam.

    "I was nning to make you withdraw from thepetition and... Zeke asked me to deal with your subordinate." By the end of the statement, his voice was low. Earlier Sam had given him a warning, not to mess with Watt but his ns precisely included him.

    The whole room of people sensed a change in Sam.

    Sam is emitting a lot of killing intent. It is so much that the battle-hardened General and Duke also felt suffocating.

    They could almost smell blood from Sam.

    Sam gave an icy cold stare filled with murderous gleam.

    "You have guts, old man. Trust me. One day you are going to die in this very city and no one would dare say a word about it.

    As for your grandson Zeke, you better make sure that you hide him as soon as possible.

    You dare use your authority to deal with my people, I will destroy that authority. I will strip you off of your everything.

    Your title, your family, your disciples, they will leave to the gutter. Anyone who helps you, I will them in cold blood."

    Then he turned towards Duke and said.

    "There is no room forpromise."

    Sam turned to leave.

    Duke came out of his trance and immediately stood up. He felt like Sam is a god of killing. He only felt that much killing intent and blood l.u.s.t from a single person and that person in his life. So, he went into a stupor.

    "Sam stop." He yelled and immediately released his aura to suppress Sam unconsciously.

    Sam stumbled and felt his legs buckle in pressure. He spat a mouthful of blood even if the pressure for only there for a moment.

    He turned around and red at the Duke.

    "I apologise, that was a mistake." Duke immediately said as he saw Sam¡¯s paleplexion.

    Sam¡¯s cold re didn¡¯t subside. "I don¡¯t care if it is a mistake or not. But you better think before you make a move on me.

    You either kill me in a single blow or leave me alone. Otherwise, with your status the whole southern star territory will be implicated."

    Sam still kept his arrogance. He might be weak, but physical strength is not the only thing that can decide. He has enough resources to get lost from his ce. Save his teammates and escape from this empire. He can stay low for a while and he will destroy the southern star in a while.

    His ideas for creation might take some time, but for destruction. The more creative a person is the more destructive that person can be.

    Duke was surprised by Sam¡¯s words. That unwavering confidence made his hesitate.

    "Sam, even though General thought ill of you, he didn¡¯t do anything yet. We can still remedy the situation."

    "There is nothing to remedy. Nobody can think doing anything to my people and live to see another day."

    "Sam, even you insulted the whole army. From the usual rules you can be executed."

    "Not if what I said was true."

    "Then prove it."

    "How?"

    "Test. Since, you im that General is ipetent and youpletely believe so. I will give you a chance to prove it.

    Prove that you are a more capable than him and you would have the ability to judge him.

    If you really go against him now, the military and dukedom have to interfere. I will give you a solution for this too. You win this test and the General will only be a normal reserve of the army and after you think you arepetent enough; you cane challenge him. if you win you can kill him.

    Nobody will interfere.

    And I will even give you a thousand points if can clear this test.

    All I ask is you do not involve the soldiers and the innocent in this."

    Sam coldly smiled in his heart. His second agenda was met.

 Chapter 163: Speculations

    Sam thought for a moment and asked Duke.

    "What test?"

    "I will give you a battalion of soldiers and during the war after the first eight months, you will be tasked to defend a border town with that battalion. If you can do so. It is considered your win.

    If you lose. I will still award you with some points based on the performance and you have to bury the hatchet with General."

    Duke exined as he looked at Sam, like he wanted to see through himpletely. But he was unable to do so.

    Sam thought for a while and said.

    "I am okay with the deal. But I have some conditions.

    My team members in the camp will be given to my battalion.

    My training methods and practices cannot be copied, hindered or questioned.

    I need ess to the outside world without restrictions. I will be given authority to bring my people along with me."

    "Deal."

    Duke didn¡¯t even think twice before agreeing.

    Sam looked at the General with animosity and was about to leave. But the General stopped him.

    "The matter about Jim."

    "What makes you think I would agree?"

    "Sam, this is between me and you. Don¡¯t take it on him."

    "Then you shouldn¡¯t have involved him in the first ce."

    "What do you want in return? Just name it."

    "Do you think you could buy me? Do you have enough worth?"

    Sam said these words and left the ce. He was quite satisfied today. Not only did he get back at the General and Thunder wolf squad, he has fulfilled his hidden agenda too.

    That¡¯s right, Sam has a hidden agenda and that was fulfilled now.

    Since, the first day of the military camp, he hasid down an borate n to get two things out of Duke.

    One of them is obviously the points in the military test and the second one is the information.

    The information about thepetition and the people behind the scenes of thesepetitions.

    From the day that Marquis said that Sam is now under someone¡¯s protection and anybody who is not part of the candidates will be dealt with, if someone killed him, Sam became intrigued.

    He was interested in the people who can make the empire do their bidding. But it is impossible to get the required info from the authorities.

    But would Sam just leave it at that? Absolutely not. So, he wanted to pry into the info and gather whatever he can.

    And this time, he wanted to gauge the importance of the candidates and the tolerance of the empire¡¯s authorities towards the candidates and not only that he also wanted to know the factors that could influence the importance ced on a certain candidate.

    He felt that his conflict with General is the perfect opportunity and actually proved to be one perfect opportunity.

    Right now, Sam¡¯s actions can be considered outrageous. Demanding a General to step down from his position, asking a lord to remove his subordinate¡¯s nobility status, destroying the Novice¡¯s army, crippling a General¡¯s disciple and threatening a General and a Duke along with the lives of the innocent.

    Any of the actions can be used to sentence him to death.

    Even if his identities as an expert in various professions will not help him much. Because, the Duke and General can downy the situation since they have enough power and the matter will be ended by demanding an extraordinary amount from Sam aspensation in the best-case scenario.

    If Sam himself was in Duke¡¯s ce, he would have pped the offender to death and then would think of ways to coverup.

    But Duke didn¡¯t do so. There might be two reasons. The Duke is too good of a person which is most unlikely and farfetched reason and the second one which is the most possible reason is, the people behind the scenes.

    From what Sam could guess. The People behind the scenes seemed to ce an enormous importance of the candidates. Which can be observed from how Duke didn¡¯t want to kill Sam,

    And the importance is also rtive. This can be concluded by how Duke tried to create a test to stop Sam from taking immediate action and from the conditions after winning, he can onlye at General after he waspetent enough.

    If it was any typical candidate, even if Duke couldn¡¯t kill him, he would at least use force to put him in his ce.

    But he didn¡¯t do so and Sam believed that it has something do with his professional status.

    That is the reason for him to think that importance is varied. A Duke is obviously more informed than a Marquis.

    And from Duke¡¯s reaction, Sam spected somethings.

    First one, is the importance of a candidate can be influenced by their area of expertise. The candidates are tested in many ways.

    Their adaptability, will, endurance, mentality, investigation skills and now military and business ac.u.men.

    There could be two reasons behind this. One of them is that the people behind the scenes need a multi skilled potential youngster and the second one is the emperor is using this chance to find a bride and groom to his daughter and son.

    There is a high chance that both of them are right and in both cases the addition of his professional expertise will give him a high chance of seeding.

    That led to the second spection. Sam might have a chance to get some influential status and authority which could definitely lord over the Duke¡¯s and generals. That is why Duke proposed a test and conditions which would not affect the Southern star much except for the General.

    The third spection is, the people behind the scenes are keeping an eye on the candidates. If not, why would Duke be so cautious. He can just finish Sam and seal the news.

    The people behind the scenes have a very low chance of learning it because only very few people know about this meeting.

    That means Sam would definitely be marked by someone and any major moves of his might have been observed by them.

    But from Sam¡¯s experience he didn¡¯t sense any gazes or any person tracking him. And it would be rather difficult to follow Sam for every ce because, he moved out many times with the help of shadow mice.

    So, the other party might have employed some techniques to keep track of him. Sam had to figure this out and he has to do so as fast as he can.

    In his previous life, Sam spent half of his life time under someone else¡¯s control. Now, he doesn¡¯t want to do so.

    So, he has to figure out a way to find out how he is being monitored.

    He has many secrets after all.

    After Sam left the pce, he was again escorted by the same attendant back to the camp.

    General wore a dejected expression. He looked at his students who are also in low spirits.

    Then he looked at the Duke.

    "I will talk to the tower head of the Pharmaceutical tower. I cannot guarantee though."

    General nodded his head and after some hesitation he asked.

    "Why did you propose such a test? What exactly is happening with thepetition? What do ??they¡¯ want exactly?"

    Duke shook his head and said.

    "The less you know, the better. But there is one thing I have to tell you. Sam must be already a seeded candidate by them and you better not mess with him. If I don¡¯t propose this test, Sam would carry the grudge and then the whole southern star has to pay the price.

    As for why this specificpetition.

    The Duke of our enemy empire sent a messenger. He wants to have apetition of youngmanders at a border town.

    He might be trying to highlight his son in front ¡¯those people¡¯. I was thinking on selecting a person, but I can only use this to deter Sam.

    If Sam died in this battle, there won¡¯t be a need to worry, but even if he won, at least I have a chance to mend the grudge.

    But then you would be in the most perilous situation. I hope you understand that I don¡¯t have much choice here."

    Duke said and fell silent.

    General understood this point as well.

    So, he fell silent.

    Next day, two things happened. One of them is the tower head of the Pharmaceutical tower was invited to Dinner at Duke Pce and another one is an announcement in the camp of the military base.

    A battalion is going to be formed and Sam is going to be themander of the battalion.

    All the soldiers from various regiments can apply for a spot. If they don¡¯t the soldiers will be selected randomly and will be assigned to the battalion.

    There is three days to apply.

    Sam didn¡¯t care about the recruitment. For all he knew, no one would apply and he would have to pick the candidates himself.

    So, he didn¡¯t care much and made a visit to his estate.

    No one is at the estate at the moment and all them are busy with the business. Sam looked at the impact crystal excavation process and noted that there is not much progress.

    Even if Kelly and Philip worked full time, they might not have any progress, let alone when they are busy.

    So, Sam let out Yanwu, panthers, zing earth bulls. All the fire types beasts he had with him and let them work on it.

    The panthers are already Level 2. So, they can make some time to practice some fire control of the fire poison.

    The zing earth bulls stopped at the peak of the Level 2 and it is hard for them to grow beyond that.

    Sam let them use their fire to clear the impact crystals under the lead of Yanwu.

    He has some other things to do and one of them is finding the method in which he is being monitored. So, he took the Zoi termite queen out.

 Chapter 164: Soul Chasing Butterfly

    For gathering intel and tailing, shadow mice are the best, because they are highly intelligent and understand humannguage.

    But for scouting an area, the insects are the best things.

    Zoi termite queen let all the termites cover all the area around the mansion and started spreading throughout the estate.

    The mansion is in the deeper part of the estate and it is mostly covered with the impact crystals which are toweringly high in some ces and at the same time make it almost impossible to peer into the mansion from a distance.

    So, if the other party really wanted to keep an eye on Sam, by employing a human, he would be able to find them in no time with the zoi termites.

    Even if the shadow mice are good, they are better suited for gathering intel and tailing. But for scouting a particr area in a short amount of time, insects with a queen are best.

    But Sam waited for more than half-an-hour and he didn¡¯t find any person in the distance. More precisely, the queen didn¡¯t find anyone.

    Then he deployed the shadow mice to see if anyone is in shadow form. He might have overlooked this before. So, he let the shadow mice take a look.

    In the field of shadows, these shadow mice are the best, there are very few beings who can beat them in shadows when they are at their peak.

    After getting a negative result again, Sam felt that human following is out of question.

    So, he thought of something else. The watcher might be a beast or an insect.

    And there is another thing to consider and that is the watcher should be capable of identifying the person who killed Sam, if they want to deal with that person.

    So, the search criterion can be narrowed a bit.

    And when he looked at the termite queen, something came to his mind.

    He immediately went into the tower library and went through the info of the beastiary, he spent more than five hours before he came out. Now, he has a faint smile on his face.

    If his guess was right, the watcher must be an insect.

    So, he gave some instructions to the queen and took out the remaining locust queens and general of the termites and locust.

    Then all the remaining locust are let out to scout the area.

    After more than an hour, the termite queen finally gave him a positive answer.

    Sam immediately moved to an area the termites and locust spotted and he started using his observe ability. There he saw a small, thin, transparent butterfly flying.

    It is not visible to n.a.k.e.d eye and even the spiritual sense cannot pin point it.

    Only other types of insects can spot it and that is also very difficult.

    This is Soul chasing butterfly.

    A very peculiar and useful insect.

    This insect is not like other butterflies which are independent, rather these butterflies also grow in amunity.

    In fact, they stay with the caterpirs which would transform into the soul chasing butterflies.

    The soul chasing butterflies have a boss which gives the instructions and this insect species bloodline is only below the Zoi termite.

    These soul chasing butterflies are a great for tailing and marking a person. The butterfly will attach itself to the soul presence of someone on the orders of the Boss and from then on it will follow that person

    The Boss butterfly can record some instructions to the subordinates and infuse those instructions in form of memories or visuals into the souls of the butterflies.

    So, if something happens to the person they are tailing, the butterflies will act ording to the instructions.

    For example, if the target is killed by a person and if the boss instructed that the butterfly should mark the person who killed, it will do so based on the visual instructions that are ingrained in its memories.

    If the target is assassinated sneakily or from a long range, if there are any instructions matching the scenario like following the trajectory, the butterfly can do so and mark the killer.

    The Boss has a wide range of sensory when it came to sensing its subordinates which is almostpared to a satellite from his previous life.

    But it can only sense its subordinates and nothing else.

    And the main draw back is it cannot attack, it is only useful for tracking.

    Sam felt amused and relieved at same time. The soul chasing butterfly can only track and didn¡¯t have any abilities to ry the messages. They have very low intelligence and only the boss butterfly has some intelligence.

    A big shot of the people behind the scenes must have found and subdued this boss soul chasing butterfly and they must have found a way to mark the candidates and Sam felt that it must have been after the Marquis city tests.

    That person who caught this insect must have gone through a lot. Because, the soul chasing butterfly has many abilities that are suitable for tracking and one of them is invisibility. It can blend into the surroundings like a chameleon.

    And its presence is almost negligible.

    Sam doesn¡¯t have to worry anymore. Even if they track the person, they wouldn¡¯t have a way to see what Sam is doing and his secrets are safe.

    So, Sam didn¡¯t bother and recalled all the insects and went back to his mansion.

    He entered the tower and started doing some research and experiments. He needs to create a machine to get these impact crystals out as soon as possible. Even if they worked their ass of, in their current situation, they won¡¯t be able to clear the whole estate.

    But Sam has to clear it as soon as possible because, this estate is one of his main points to make money in thetter eight months.

    He is going to use the whole ce to get as much as he wants.

    So, he has to speed up the process and for that he has to find a way to get the fire that was strong enough to melt the impact crystals and also make the device collect the molten crystal.

    He can try and use the fire elemental crystals and make a device made of energy cells and some inscriptions, but the consumption would be too costly and the profit margin is very small.

    But Sam has an alternative for the heat source. The methane from the bulls.

    After he found out that the methane is powerful, he has ape dig somerge holes and trained the bulls to defecate in the pits.

    A single pit of methane gave him more than 20 litres of methane. [not liquid. Just volumetric measurement]

    The faeces of this bull are so powerful and they do defecate a lot.

    The calorific value of the methane is so high that it can even be used to melt the materials like tungsten carbide and titanium in his previous life if it is used like a normal torch without any pressure and setup.

    And with enough pressure and proper furnace like environment, he is quite confident that he can melt this impact crystal.

    But the question is how is he going to use this. He cannot just control the wind and pressurise the gas and increase me intensity manually and stand there.

    If he can do so, he could just use the disintegration process. The point is that he doesn¡¯t have to stay here but the work should be done.

    So, he buried himself in the research for the next two days that is twenty days in the tower toe up with a design. And when he was finally satisfied with a design and simtion in the second floor of the tower.

    After confirming the design, Sam started going through the materials he had and sorted them out.

    He wondered if the whole ten days [in the tower] he has would be sufficient or not. Because, this time, the mechanism is going to be a lot trickier and he has to make severalponents.

    This machine is going to be operated manually and it would be a multi-purpose machine.

    Theplexity of mechanism is not that high. The tricky part lied in cing and making theponents with precision and uracy.

    Any problems in manufacturing, he is going to have some serious trouble for the operator.

    That trouble would be risky and the operator might even die if it is not handled properly.

    So, Sam has to be careful and take his time in making the items.

    The first and base of the machine is going to be made with Grey meteoric sand. It has high strength and it has a very high refractoriness for heat. The melting point is almost highest in the meteorite sands.

    But it is still within Rank 2 materials and its melting point is about a above average rank 3 material.

    Whereas the impact crystal can at most be at lowest of rank 3.

    The Artisan ford didn¡¯t clear this wholend because, even if the rank 3 metal can be molten easily with a rank 5 and rank 4, they would have to take a long time and energy to do so.

 Chapter 165: First hundred

    Sam was sure that he wouldn¡¯t be able toplete this machine in ten days. So, he decided that he would do what he can and leave the rest toter and return to the camp.

    Anyway, with the aid of beasts at least the process of excavation would not stop.

    After working for ten days and making more than half of the required parts, Sam came out of the tower and was greeted by the sunset.

    His teammates namely Philip, Kelly and Jack returned to the mansion.

    Watt is the first one to greet him. They knew he was here as they saw the fire type beasts working vigorously in the estate to melt the impact crystal.

    But they don¡¯t know how they collected the molten crystal and cleared it up.

    This credit was given to the shadow mice.

    They used the space jade rings and delivered everything into the Divine dimension, to be precise to the second floor, where Sam prepared some moulds to let the impact crystal solidify.

    When Sam came out of his mansion, he saw Kelly and Philip working their fire control as they heated the crystal and Jack who is by their side practicing the sword.

    He is using the ck meteorite sword as practiced only one action. Sword draw.

    The sword ray hit the crystal and *BOOM* it exploded.

    But he didn¡¯t stop. Because, that is not his aim. After some observation, Sam understood his goal.

    Jack is trying to control the intensity of the attack. He wants to cut the impact crystal without exploding it.

    Sam felt that this is a great way of practicing, but he didn¡¯t want to do so. He just let them be and walked back into the mansion.

    He asked Watt on how they are doing business and then found out that it is not going well at all.

    "Why?"

    "The other teams are fifteen days ahead of us and by the time we entered the market, there already rumours spread about us.

    I don¡¯t know how but, the citizens are avoiding the restaurant like gue. I tried to pry some info and I found out that the citizens knew that we are being suppressed by the General. One of the teams of the Southern star city whichprised of mostly nobles spread the rumour.

    Since, we are already enemies with the General, they didn¡¯t bother holding back.

    The supervisors who didn¡¯t cause us trouble are also not helping us get rid of the trouble.

    The business is being threatened and there is deficit in the materials we need.

    We wanted to try any other business but thepetition is even higher than the food business and Kelly¡¯s skills are so-so to venture into the weapon business. As for the rest, you know better than me.

    But the main problem is these noble kids. They send people to our restaurant to disturb the ongoing small business.

    Those people who came will start a fight for no rhyme or reason and they are not afraid of getting beaten up.

    One time, they almost kidnapped one of us to do some bashing, but we are alert and escaped.

    The noble kids are getting more and more loose and doing anything they wished as we have only four members. They even have ns on the Mackey and his staff.

    We have to bepletely on guard and save them."

    When Sam heard this, he didn¡¯t have any visible reaction. He knew something like this would happen. Out of all the teams in thepetition, their team is the weakest in terms of numbers.

    As for strength, that is a whole different matter with Sam, Philip and Jack here. Even Hawk is not that greatpared to them.

    But the problem is Philip won¡¯t fight with his full strength no matter what. He always portrayed an average guy image.

    Every fight he had in the tournament was portrayed as if he barely won. But Sam knew otherwise. He has one thing on his mind and that is to bring Philip out of that shell.

    Even though, they might not seem that close, Philip is the first friend to him in this world. Although, the rtionship was a bit forced they are still friends.

    When Sam came to this world, his mental state is not good. Added with the fact that Oliver is torturing him, he waspletely annoyed by every little thing.

    Philip is one of the reasons he adjusted a bit quickly. Because, Sam is not strong at the moment and Philip shamelessly refused to let him go, Sam gradually calmed down as Philip¡¯s annoying banter served as the diversion.

    Whether intentional or unintentional, it is still a great help to him.

    So, Sam has to return the favour. From what he understood; Philip is not a simple kid from a tiny noble family in a rural city. He has a past and that past is so dangerous that he wasn¡¯t even able to exhibit his prowess peacefully.

    But Sam felt that this is wrong.

    If one is afraid to face a problem and keep on postponing to deal with it when they are sure that they are capable and even went on hiding in case they would be forced to deal with it, that is one of the stupidest things one could ever do.

    No matter, the situation, one must first face it and then think of means to escape if there is no way to deal with it.

    Hiding oneself even before facing the situation and knowing what is going to happen is not a great move.

    So, this time he only had one thing in mind and that is not involving in the conflicts Watt mentioned. Jack is a great fighter, but he is not witty enough and is too straight forward.

    Philip is not. He might be even stronger than Jack is battle prowess and he is witty and intelligent. He can deal the things here by himself.

    Sam didn¡¯t stay for long and left the estate. He has to return to the camp.

    When Sam entered the base and the allotted ce for his battalion, he was surprised by the scene he saw.

    He assumed that there would not be a single person who will join his team. But the situation ispletely different.

    There are a total of hundred people and all of them are either fire element or wind element mages and Warrior mages.

    Sam didn¡¯t even expect the scenario where he would have more than thirty members much less the situation, he is facing now with a hundred subordinates.

    He thought that since, he had made enemies of all the regiments there wouldn¡¯t be any people willing to sign up.

    But there are hundred people.

    Sam assembled all of them before a stage and said in a loud voice.

    "I don¡¯t know, why you came to join this battalion but there is one thing I can tell you, you better not regret itter.

    This battalion ispletely under me. No regimentmanders, or any other superior including the general is going to take part in this. They don¡¯t have any say or authority over me and you and in turn they don¡¯t have authority to stop my training and actions.

    If you are a part of my battalion, the first thing you have to know is that the training will bepletely different from what you have been through all this time. It will bepletely new and entric.

    Second thing, you have to treat yourselves as the part of the team. The team¡¯s interest will always be above yours. For me all of you are going to be a single entity. I will treat you as a machine and each and every soldier is a link of that machine.

    If one link or part fails, then the whole machine suffers.

    Third point, I will not be training you in what you want. I will be training you in what you need to be a great soldier and a great asset to the team.

    Fourth and most important point. My word is the rule that cannot be broken,w that has to be abided no matter what.

    Those who do not want to follow these four rules, can leave now."

    Sam paused and looked at them with a sweeping nce.

    Seeing that no one is responding, he said.

    "Now that the rules are over, there are somethings I have to warn you guys about.

    If any of you are here, so that they canze around, you better leave right now. Or else, you will regret this for the rest of your lives.

    For those of you who came here to take revenge by disrupting order and causing chaos in the team, you better leave right now. Because, once I find you, If you don¡¯t wish you are dead, I will change my name.

    Even if it is one the orders of your regimentmanders or some other seniors. I don¡¯t care.

    I am a person who will kill the person that stabs at me and at the same time will destroy the knife they used.

    If you are going to be the knives, I suggest you guys get lost.

    I am only giving you guys all these chances because you came voluntarily.

    As for those who are going to be selected. They would not have any choice.

    So cherish it. You have till dawn.

    Think carefully and for now, disperse."

 Chapter 166: New Battalion

    Sam gave them a choice because they came here on their own without any force or rules.

    So, he gave them a chance to get out of here as they might regret it after the training started.

    But from what he observed no one is willing to leave this ce at all.

    He doesn¡¯t know why, but he felt that these people are very much familiar with each other and are all here together and the decision seemed to be unanimous.

    Sam didn¡¯t mind though. At least, there are hundred subordinates which he doesn¡¯t have to beat into shape.

    The Next day, all the regiments are in a small-scale turmoil.

    The Regimentmanders are thinking hard on who to get rid of and send them to the Sam¡¯s battalion.

    But that is not entirely feasible because, the final say is based on the requirements Sam is going to provide.

    Sam doesn¡¯t have theplete authority to select the people from the battalions but he has enough say in what type of people he requires. And his requirements are as follows.

    Earth element mages or warrior mages: 50

    Water element mages or warrior mages: 50

    Wood element mages or warrior mages: 40

    Ten light element mages or warrior mages

    Warriors: fifty.

    Rest can be decided by the regimentmanders themselves.

    When the regimentmanders learnt these requirements, they are absolutely happy.

    They thought that Sam would take advantage of the situation and ask them for some squads or even apany from each of them, but Sam didn¡¯t do so.

    So, they started cleaning up their regiments and searched for the bad eggs so that they an be thrown into Sam¡¯s battalion.

    Sam didn¡¯t mind though. Everyone will be beaten into shape once they are under him. So, nothing to worry about.

    Two days passed and the five hundred members are finally assembled.

    Sam stood on the stage in his ck coat.

    He looked at all of them from the stage as he observed their expressions.

    Some of them are filled with fear, some with anger, some with frustration and some with eager ness.

    After observing the group for a while, he finally opened his mouth.

    "Many of you might already know, who I am. But I am going to introduce myself.

    I am Sam. I am a candidate in the special batch.

    But due to my qualifications and abilities being evaluated to be more than my peers, I was given a task to manage a battalion and a title of battalionmander.

    But there is a catch here. You are under me and only me. Even the General of the army has no authority over you.

    I know many of you are not willing to be here and if given a chance you might even want to beat me to death.

    But let us face the reality. Even if all of you guyse at me together, you will not be able to do anything to me. I can defeat you guys within minutes.

    If anyone of you wanted to create chaos or make the teamwork unstable, beware of one thing that here in this battalion I am the main fighting force and if I can take on a battalion here, then I can do so in the border too. I don¡¯t have much need for you guys at all.

    So, if anyone ys tricks, I will definitely dispose of them, be careful.

    In this battalion, I will be training you guys myself and training will be mostly depending on the individual strengths characteristics which will make you guys most efficient and most useful to the whole squad.

    I will train you ording to what you need and what you want.

    For the seven months, you will do what I say, eat what I give and rest when I tell. No questions asked, no answers given.

    Whether you like it or not, that will be done so.

    I will be dividing you guys intopanies and eachpany will be trained separately and then again, all thepanies will be then trained together for some better cooperation.

    From now on, eachpany is a single entity in my eyes. If one person makes a mistake, the wholepany will be punished.

    Correcting the person by force or help is up to thepany members themselves.

    The training will be hellish. Imagine the worst nightmare you have and multiply it by ten. You will be tortured and wish you were dead. But you are not even allowed to die on your will.

    No one is an exception from notpleting the daily routine. Even if one person misses the wholepany is doomed.

    I am not sure how many of you canplete this training and be safe.

    But I am sure of thing and that is the more torture you are going to go through, the more returns you are going to have.

    And for that, I have to show you my other identity."

    Sam paused and took out his artisan badges as well as formation and inscription master badges.

    "I am not just a candidate, but also a rank 5 schr artisan, rank- 3 weapon artisan, rank 3 inscription master.

    I am wealthier than a normal noble family.

    You don¡¯t have to train for me here, train for yourselves. Because, every month there would be apetition between thepanies and the winner will be having ample rewards.

    Other than that, there are going to be individual rewards also.

    In the camp there is going to be a credit system.

    There will be an exchange point in the camp and more credits an individual has the valuable thing an individual can obtain.

    Many of you have low quality rank 1 weapons, if you have enough credits you can exchange them for even a rank-3 weapon, a formation disc, a full body set armour, potions, pills. Any hing can be obtained.

    For obtaining the credits though, you have many ways.

    One can obtain some credits from winning the duels, winning thepetitions, performing well in the exercises, mock battles.

    I will give you a chance to earn them as an individual or as a team.

    You can do anything with the things you won, you can even sell them for all I care.

    In short, I only have few words for you and that is, the more you bleed here, the more you earn.

    So, work hard.

    For today though familiarize with each other. From tomorrow onwards the training will start."

    Sam didn¡¯t waste his time after saying his piece.

    All the soldiers though, were extremely unsettled.

    That is because they never expected Sam is an Artisan and also expert in many other professions. Many of them are excited about the part about rewards and from what Sam said, if they could get their hands, on extra goods, they can even make some money by selling them.

    This is one of the best opportunities one could hope for as they don¡¯t have much future in gathering enough wealth being a soldier.

    They only have some wealth from the savings they made from their sries.

    Their only other source is the battle field. They can loot the enemy soldiers they killed.

    So, Sam¡¯s conditions are extremely suitable for them.

    But there is a particr batch of hundred people who are calm and collected. They also have a change in their attitude after the briefing.

    But it is not excitement, rather it is more of a determination.

    They are precisely the hundred people who came to Sam¡¯s battalion on their own will.

    Sam though didn¡¯t know about these odd guys and instead focussed on making the new device for the impact crystal.

    From the past two days, he was busy with the matter regarding to the battalion, he has to take entries of these guys, check their previous recorded information that was passed to him and many other bullshit official work.

    So, he didn¡¯t make much progress in manufacturing.

    That is why he let these soldiers off for this day on the pretext of familiarizing themselves with the people and went into his new battalionmander¡¯s quarters.

    He immediately entered the tower and started working on making the requiredponents.

    This device is abination of various mechanisms, inscriptions and formations. He has to do this carefully and meticulously.

    After working tirelessly for another seven days he was finally done with theponents and he has to start etching the inscriptions.

    The inscription which he is going to do on this device are not going to be thatplicated.

    But the main point is that they are so many of them.

    He has to repeat the process time and again.

    He has only three days left for this.

    One day more time will make his whole ns dyed for one more day.

    He doesn¡¯t want to waste anymore time on this impact crystals and with this device ready, he canpletely rest assured that the whole estate will bepletely cleared out within the required time.

 Chapter 167: The new machine

    As the day passed and midnight arrived, Sam was in the tower finallypleting the machine.

    He came out of the divine dimension and slept in his tent to make up for all the mental fatigue he has been through.

    He woke up just before sunrise and went outside towards the stage at which the assembly urred yesterday.

    Sam looked at the five hundred soldiers who assembled neatly in order of their elements.

    "I hope everyone rxed yesterday, because for all you know there won¡¯t be much time for you guys to rx in the near future." Sam said and then observed the change in the expressions of these people.

    "Today, I will be dividing you guys intopanies. You better get along with your teammates, you guys are going to be the partners who you should trust your lives with."

    For the rest of the day, Sam divided all the candidates into tenpanies.

    Eachpany has fifty members. And all of thepanies are assigned with one healer each.

    Out of thesepanies, onepany is solely made of forty warriors and the remaining nine are the warrior mages of various elements.

    As for the remaining ninepanies, each of them has one healer and at least five mages of five different elements.

    They are fire, wind, water, earth, wood.

    There are no metal elemental mages or warrior mages. It is not because he forbade them from joining, rather there are very few in the army and most of them are recruited by the City guard squad.

    Just like how the General Spark maintained the thunder-wolf squad, the General of the city guard, the General mercury also maintained a special squad who are mostly of metal element users. They are like the FBI of the southern star spread far and wide within the territory.

    After Sam divided the squads, he didn¡¯t immediately train them. Because, unlike soldiers from previous world, these guys didn¡¯t need extraordinary physical training.

    These guys are mostly dependent on the spiritual energy, so if he wants them to be efficient, then he has to make them use the spiritual energy more efficiently, for that he has something else nned.

    But before all that the first thing he has to teach them is the teamwork and coordination and that can be obtained by the training techniques from his previous life.

    Those are most basic ones in any county¡¯s military and those are military drills.

    The standard attention, stand at ease, march fastmands helps with the coordination of the teammates.

    Even though, they are the easiest and simplest of the things and are mostly performed in the military parades of various different countries, many people think that they are for show. But in actual fact, a perfect drill without a single w is an indication of the perfect harmony in the team.

    If they can perform a perfect drill, even if the teammates have some differences internally, they can perform and execute all the orders perfectly without these feelings interfering.

    If these feelings of differences and resentment towards their teammates is too deep, then they won¡¯t be able to perform a perfect drill which in turn gives a heads up to the instructor and he can take necessary actions to bring the team to perfect bnce.

    Now the soldiers assembled in thepanies and each and everypany has certain gap separating them.

    When he started giving thesemands, the soldiers were bewildered.

    Sam first showed them the standard actions for the attention, stand at ease, right turn, left turn, march fast and also exined the necessarymands they have to follow.

    The soldiers didn¡¯t understand why their battalionmander was asking them to do this, but they don¡¯t have any choice.

    Sam stood on the harbinger up in the air as he looked down at the soldiers and started issuing themands.

    Soldiers also didn¡¯t fret and executed. The foot steps are not in sync at all and the sounds are like a horse galloping.

    Not a singlepany executed theirmands well.

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything and instead took out a staff and swung it in the air as he moved above all thepanies.

    The air currents flew like wh.i.p.s as the staff made movements in the air.

    "Ahh."

    "Hissss."

    Various painful sharp sounds came out of the mouths of the soldiers.

    "I want to hear a single collective thump of the feet. Even if a single soldier from apany missed that the wholepany will have to suffer."

    Sam didn¡¯t provide any further exnation and immediately started issuingmands again.

    "Parade, Attention." His voice echoed all over the camp. The soldiers came out of daze as they started doing the drill.

    Until afternoon, they just went on with the drill and received heavy whipping. They don¡¯t even know which side the whip ising, so they didn¡¯t even have a chance to defend.

    By afternoon, they are exhausted and many areining about how Sam is making them do all the nonsensical work.

    But they didn¡¯t darein out loud. Sam warned them clearly yesterday. He would dispose of everyone he found annoying andining.

    At leastst time, the rules stopped Sam from making a critical hit but now he is the boss.

    But when they saw the food provided to them, they were relieved. Not because, the ingredients are great, rather the cooking process changed.

    Sam called up some of the Mackey¡¯s staff who are idling around due to theck of business to cook for the soldiers.

    No matter how much you torture the soldiers, if you feed them well and provide the rewards for their efforts, they would work hard.

    Sam took advantage of this break to go to the estate. Since the new machine is done, he has to test it and see if this is practical.

    So, when he arrived at the estate, Watt is already waiting for him there.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop at anything and just entered the back of the mansion where the beasts are working continuously.

    After asking them to stop, Sam took out arge octagonal metallic object.

    The object is sorge that an average person can use it as a bed.

    Sam climbed on arge uneven impact crystal bed which spanned for hundreds of square yards.

    The machine is basically a hexagonal metallic prism. One face of the octogen has arge circr opening in the centre.

    The eight corners of the octagon have some metallic protrusions.

    Sam ced the machine with the circr opening facing down wards and then he grabbed the metallic protrusion on one corner and pulled it out.

    A foot-long metallic cylinder came out with one end having a pointed end and the other end was connected to a metallic flexible tube which is silver in colour.

    Sam dragged the cylinder with him as the tube kept oning out of the octagon.

    There was huge roll of tube inside the machine body.

    After walking for more than 30 yards Sam heated the surface of the impact crystal and after melting some, he pierced the pointed end of the cylinder there.

    The cylinder has some holes on the curved surface area which are being faced towards the machine body.

    Simrly, he pulled out the remaining seven cylinders from the body and ced them on the different spot.

    Now, arge area with a radius of more than 30 yards was under the machine¡¯s influence.

    Sam walked towards the machine body and stood on top of it.

    There are several rectangr markings on the surface of the body under Sam¡¯s feet.

    He signalled Watt toe on to the machine and afterter did so, Sam took out some long cuboids made of grey meteorite sand. These are connected with the bolts and Sam is using these as moulds.

    Right, Sam is using them as moulds. The impact crystal has a peculiar property and that is, it wouldn¡¯t mix or bond with any other substance no matter what state it is in.

    Even if it is in molten state and mixed with another molten metal it wouldn¡¯t mix at all, it either floats or drowns based in the rtive density, and even if they are solidified like that there wouldn¡¯t be any form of chemical bond or alloy formation.

    So, metallic moulds are best for this.

    The moulds are six feet long and the cross- sectional area is around 1 square feet.

    Sam then started exining the process to Watt.

    There are small circr holes on the machine base, precisely four of them.

    And there are some circr pipe protrusions on the one cross-section of the moulds Sam took out. Both of them perfectly formed a joint.

    After that, Sam exined about the rectangr markings, there are three pairs of rectangr markings each in different colour.

    First one is ck coloured.

    After Sam stood on it and injected some spiritual energy into it, a formation was formed around the machine base and another formation with the eight cylinders as nodes.

    Sam then moved his feet to the next pair. The red coloured.

    He infused his spiritual energy, this time there is some revving sound from the machine base. A red coloured gas was released from the holes of the eight cylinders and as soon as the whole formation was filled with the gas, the gas started burning.

    Highly intense, blue mes areing out.

    The machine base was isted sue to the formation and the mes didn¡¯t reach the area outside the eight cylinders.

    Watt saw the scene in awe as the whole impact crystal was being heated and molten right in front of him.

    The molten metal started flowing towards the machine base. Watt then noticed the machine base in now floating stably and it even moved a little downwards.

    But before he could absorb that, he noticed something else, the level of molten impact crystal is being lowered, then only he understood something.

    The machine base is sucking the liquid and is pumping it into the moulds.

    When the moulds are full and some small amount of metal was leaked from a small opening on top, Sam moved his feet towards the third pair of markings.

    These are like switches as Sam ced his feet, they moved downwards and stayed like that.

    Then Sam walked towards the moulds and removed them, Watt noticed that the holes on the machine body are blocked.

    Sam didn¡¯t stall and immediately reced the four moulds with new ones and then, he moved towards the third pair of the rectangr markings which are pushed downwards and pressed them again.

    The marking came back to normal and the moulds started filling again.

    And after an hour of repetitions, the machine base was now on the soil and the impact crystal was cleared out within the area.

    He deactivated the formations and then walked towards the cylinders. Sam showed how to change the methane tanks in the machine base and how to ce the eight cylinders to Watt and left.

    This machine will make the whole process easier, so he went back to the camp with one less worry.

 Chapter 168: Dragon Hawk Tribesman

    Sam immediately returned. The machine is aplete sess, so he doesn¡¯t have to worry about thend anymore. With in a few months, the wholend will be cleared of the impact crystal.

    He has only one thing to do now and that is train the candidates. As for his cultivation, he decided to suppress it for the time being.

    Because, he wants to sign a contract with Mia when he broke through the Great mage, but the little girl is still too far away from the level 4. Even with the help of the hydra blood and the herbs, beast meat, it is only at level 2 now, even though it is quite fast, it will still take some time to reach the Level.

    When Sam went back to the camp, all the soldiers are assembled and ready for the training.

    For thebat training, Sam has made some special arrangements and the first stage of it is to let them use the spiritual energy as frugally as possible.

    They have to have an absolute control over their spiritual energy and every attack they make, they have to achieve the effect with the minimum amount of energy.

    Since, they don¡¯t have any experience to this, Sam decided to first let them train in this control aspect and then he would train them in battle formations andbination attacks.

    Sam only checked the soldiers with a fleeting nce. They are fully refreshed after eating the food and some rest.

    Even though, the morning drill training is not that exhaustive, they suffered under Sam¡¯sshing. Now, after the delicious food, they are as good as new.

    Sam didn¡¯t address them and walked towards the training fields.

    As the military camp already has some specific training fields, for all kinds of practices. They include, target practice, duelling tforms, obstacle courses for practicing movement techniques etc.

    Sam walked towards each of the training fields and ced a formation disc in each of them.

    A formation was activated in each training field.

    Then he sent them to train themselves.

    The soldiers were quite perplexed, but still went towards their practice fields.

    As soon as they entered though, everyone¡¯s expression changed.

    They felt an unimaginable pressure and restriction on their spiritual core.

    "What is happening?"

    "Oh, F.u.c.k."

    "God, I can barely feel my spiritual energy."

    All of them started swearing and shouting, then Sam¡¯s voice came and interrupted their voices.

    "From today onwards, this is how you guys are going to train.

    A battle field is not a yground and you cannot use your spiritual energy as you please. If by any chance you are exhausted and your enemy has a trick up his sleeves, you guys can kiss your lives good bye.

    So, from today onwards, you guys have to increase your control over your spiritual energy.

    You have to use the minimum energy possible to achieve the desired result.

    For, the next week, you guys are going to train here every afternoon. You have to achieve the same damage as spell would cause with only fourth of its actual energy consumption.

    After the week, I will see the results and if you guys don¡¯t show me any, you are going to stay in the same formation along with yourpany.

    Only if all the members in apany has passed would thatpany go to the next stage of training."

    Sam left these words and boarded Harbinger.

    A soldier made some hand-signs and threw a water sphere. The amount of spiritual energy was cut down by more than seventy percent and the water sphere was very small and blunt, hitting the target and making no damage at all.

    All the soldiers looked at each other and shook their heads, this would be one tough training.

    Actually, even when using spells by making hand-signs one can control the effect of the spell by the amount of spiritual energy and control.

    But that requires quite some practice and most people wouldn¡¯t so, letting the attack by default and consuming a decent amount of spiritual energy.

    But many people cannot control their spiritual energy as they wished as they got used to using the hand-signs.

    That is where Sam¡¯s formation helps. This formation is created by his own effort. He modified the spiritual energy restriction formation used for restricting and negating their ability to use their spiritual energy.

    He modified the formation, so that the full restriction will change into partial restriction. Since, he cannot teach them how to control their energy like how he did with Watt, Sam decided to force their bodies and spiritual cores to adapt.

    Sam floated in the air as he observed everyone.

    After a few minutes, he noticed a peculiarity and that is the most of the fire elemental and wind elemental mages are unable to do anything. They were able to conjure spiritual energy but the energy is too minute for them to attack.

    And another thing is, they are not using any hand-signs for spells.

    He made a quick count and found out that these guys are the same people who came to his battalion voluntarily.

    He called them to assemble separately and asked.

    "Can you tell me what your problem is?"

    Sam asked directly. Even though, these guys are not able to do anything, he still has favourable impression towards these hundred than the rest of the battalion.

    No matter, what the bet and circ.u.mstances are, Sam took all these five hundred soldiers under his responsibility.

    He wanted to wait for these guys toe themselves, but from what he observed these guys are quite determined and wouldn¡¯t say that easily.

    Today, Sam is in good mood as he was able to finish the machine, so he asked these guys about their problem himself.

    After his question was made, he saw that expressions of the people became downcast. Two people who seemed to be leaders of both elements respectively came forward.

    The leader of the fire element group said.

    "Commander, my name is Marian and his name Amir." He introduced himself and the leader of the wind element group and then continued.

    "We are from Fire-Wind Dragon Hawk tribe. Our tribe is located towards the southwest of the empire.

    We are actually not part of the empire rather our tribe is a small vige within the woods. No beasts would attack us and we live in harmony with the nature.

    We are adept in fruit farming and ournd is good for growing fire element and wind element fruits which are quite useful for low-level cultivators.

    And only we can cultivate in thisnd as the skills were not recorded rather passed by one generation to other generation.

    But recently, from a past decade the war between the two empires was bing more and more intense and in turn the woods we reside in lost the bnce due to these battles effecting our livelihood.

    Our tribe leader who is Great realm cultivator tried to talk with themanders on both sides but to no avail and soon we had to move out of that ce and it was quite difficult for us to escape the warzone.

    After some long hard struggle, a Regimentmander who is the war zone gave our tribe, the refugee in a small vige, but the condition is that at least five hundred soldiers from our tribe should be in the army and we are always treated as cannon fodders.

    In our tribe, there are only two types of cultivators, either wind element or fire element. Apart from that our bodies are also quite strong.

    But the only problem is that, we cannot cultivate using any methods. Our breakthroughs are fast and forceful but only to a certain extent.

    We can only fight with the control of the spiritual energy forcefully and a lot of it will be wasted every time.

    We cannot cultivate spells or any warrior techniques.

    But due to our sturdy defence and reckless fighting methods, we are being used as cannon fodders in exchange for our tribe¡¯s safety.

    When we saw how you fought with them without any hand signs, we wanted to ask you for help, but couldn¡¯t bring ourselves to do so.

    But after that, we heard that you are going to be a battalionmander and so we have applied for transfer.

    We slowly wanted to ask your help but before that you already found out."

    Sam is staring at him as he was stunned.

    He only asked what the other party¡¯s problem is in the aspect of knowing about their in ability to spells and techniques.

    But the other party exined all his history. At first, Sam was bored and wanted to stop but when he heard the words and problem, he suddenly had a thought.

    These guys¡¯ problem and situation are too simr and are clearly aligned with the problem of a beast.

    Right a beast. A beast also cannot cultivate a technique designed for humans, neither it has spells or fighting techniques.

    Their break throughs are also due to natural consumption of food. After some thoughts, Sam felt that he has stumbled on something interesting.

 Chapter 169: Descendants or Mutants?

    Sam was intrigued. The people in front of him are clearly humans, at least they look like that but their inability to cultivate the techniques, spells and battle skills is something very simr to beasts.

    The spells and battle techniques are used by circting the spiritual energy through a particr set of meridians in a pattern exclusive to that technique.

    Humans after unlock these meridians in the initiation stage and after that with the help of cultivation techniques they use, they would be circting the spiritual energy in particr pattern for further breakthroughs.

    But the beasts are different.

    For beasts, there would be a particr set of meridian patterns already activated based on their genes which are decided by their birth and bloodline.

    The gic memory itself is responsible for their easier cultivation, breakthroughs, their skills of attacking, defence, movement etc.

    They are just like the fish having the innate ability to swim without teaching it specifically.

    The beasts cannot cultivate the human techniques, in fact many of the human cultivation techniques are made based on the meridian patterns of beasts and so are the battle techniques.

    But Sam never heard or read about these symptoms being in human beings. He pondered for a second and asked.

    "You said that you are Fire-Wind Dragon Hawk tribe. May I know how you got that name?"

    Sam felt that there might be something on with this name. Judging from the fact that these people are only of wind and fire elements and the tribe name is also of a beast, he felt that there is some catch here.

    "Our tribe worsh.i.p.s the fire dragon hawk and wind dragon hawk. These two beasts are said to be the totems of our race.

    There is a story that these two beasts who loved each other and descended in the ce where our tribe currently is and lived there until they died with time. We believe that these two totems are the ones that protect us from the forest and let us live along with the other beasts in harmony."

    Marian said in a low voice.

    Sam felt that these guys¡¯ condition might be rted to these totems.

    He extended his hand as he gestured the other party to extend their hands too.

    After Sam held Marian¡¯s hand, he closed his eyes and spread his spiritual energy as he used his observed ability to look at his blood.

    As Sam closely observed the blood, he felt that there is a stark difference between his and a normal fire mage¡¯s blood.

    It has too much fire energy, and the fire energy is also quite intense and ferocious as if it was wild fire caused by burning hundreds of acres of forest.

    Even though, it is not as intense as his golden sun crow fire, it is still too far aheadpared to a normal fire mage. Of course, there might be some exceptions.

    But these guys are definitely not, because, Sam found another interesting thing and that is the meridians of the person.

    Many meridians of this person seemed to be in a highly dormant state as if they have never been activated at all.

    Sam retracted his hand and then held Amir¡¯s hand, the situation is almost same, except that the dormant meridians are different.

    The situation is quite simr to a beast.

    Sam¡¯s curiosity was piqued. He has stumbled on the most interesting thing and he has studied the cultivation and meridian patterns of various cultivation techniques and also the battle techniques with are mostly cultivation specific.

    It may sound crude and all, but these guys are bound to be the best test subjects.

    Of course, he cannot say that out loud.

    "I have an inkling of your condition, if you guys don¡¯t mind, can I have a sample of your blood?"

    Sam asked the two people.

    They exchanged a nce andplied. Sam collected the blood in small ss tubes and said.

    "Your condition is actually not a bad one. You just chose a wrong path. I will teach you how to use the spiritual energy without the need of battle techniques. For now, just stay in the formation and try to conjure the spiritual energy. I will talk to you guys again tonight."

    After that, Sam checked the soldiers one more time and went back to the estate to talk with Yanwu.

    He passed the two blood samples to Yanwu and asked.

    "Did you notice any difference in these?"

    Yanwu carefully studied and said.

    "There seemed to be traces or Dragon Hawks, but it is very mild and it is more like a human blood. Where did you get these?"

    Sam beamed in excitement. Yanwu is most knowledgeable about the bloodlines and higher realms, for fifteen years all he did was learn as many things as possible to help Sam.

    Sam exined the situation and Yanwu said.

    "They might be descendants of the Dragon hawks. Even though, dragon hawks are high level beasts in this world, they are not considered so in the higher realms, at most they are above average there.

    Some of them might have slipped into this realm and stayed here to die. These people might have been either the descendants of a Dragon Hawk and a human or they might have mutated by the blood of the dragon Hawks."

    After hearing Yanwu¡¯s words, Sam pondered for a bit and went to the library. Other than beastiary there are other books which are rted to beasts. Beastiary mostly consists on the basic information of beasts like their habits, environment they live in, special features of that environment etc.

    But there are some books which give even more detailed exnation on some specific beasts, but they don¡¯t have any info on the low-level beasts.

    Fortunately for him, the Dragon Hawks are not low-level.

    So, Sam found the required information on the Dragon Hawks and he is clearly studying to understand the anatomy, the meridianwork and the fighting styles.

    After more than five hours, Sam came out with the new found information. From what he understood; these guys will be able to cultivate if they cultivate a technique which was created based on the Dragon Hawk.

    Because, the meridianwork of the Dragon Hawk matched with the meridians of Marian and Amir. The active meridians of these people bore a stark resemnce to the meridianwork a Dragon Hawk.

    So, if they cultivate a technique like that, they would be able to do. But Sam only has cultivation techniques suitable for beast warriors and there are some techniques suitable for Dragon Hawk beast partners, but the problem is they are not suitable for these guys.

    Sam is a special case as all his meridians are used for cultivation as he can absorb and share the energy with hispanions, but in case of normal beast warriors, even though they do share the energy that happens through a particr active meridianwork.

    Even Watt¡¯s case was same. So, if he gave them a cultivation technique of a Beast warrior¡¯s they have to make a bond with a Dragon Hawk which ispletely impossible.

    Sam found two ways to deal with this and one of them is create a specific cultivation technique that can work for them.

    As he was researching the cultivation techniques previously beforeing to the southern star city, he is confident that he can do so, provided that he canpletely understand the workings of the Dragon Hawk¡¯s meridianwork to the point that he shouldpletely familiar with all the possible oues that might happen when the spiritual energy is circted in various patterns within the samework.

    Because, the only active meridians in these people¡¯s bodies are of same pattern and it is hard for him to raise the remaining meridians from dormancy.

    But that takes a lot of work and time, which Sam didn¡¯t want to invest now as his immediate mission is to train the battalion and he cannot simply focus on these hundred guys only.

    The second thing is that refine the dragon hawk bloodline in these guys.

    Yes, Sam has an idea. From what he heard from these guys, until now, they have forcefully increased their cultivation with the help of spiritual energy. Just like beasts.

    So, if he refines the bloodline in their bodies, their breakthroughs will be easier and if he teaches them how to properly attack with spiritual energy, without hand signs and battle techniques and train them properly, they would be great warrior mages.

    Sam kept on thinking and he is in a great dilemma to choose on his further actions.

    He is even having thoughts whether he should go to this extent to help them or not. But those thoughts went as soon as they came.

    After all, Sam is a person of a self-discipline and a moral bottom line, since they are right now under his responsibility and also, they are going to be working for him in the near future, Sam felt like he has an obligation to help them.

    After much thought, he decided on one thing.

 Chapter 170: Offer to Dragon Hawk Tribesman

    Sam decided to refine the bloodline. Because, him doing some refining can be exined with some sort of excuses like meridian cleansing or other kinds of treatment to the body ailments they are naturally born with.

    But if he creates a cultivation technique and some of them spreads it, the powerhouses will be high on his heels.

    Although, he was not afraid of them, he should avoid the unnecessary trouble. After all, no powerhouse believe that Sam truly created a cultivation technique and attach the presence of cultivation technique with some inheritance or treasure, which would lead him to trouble.

    Even if he is under protection now, that is not going tost for long.

    One more reason is, even if he is responsible for these guys for now, that is only temporary, for them to waste his time and create a whole new cultivation technique, it is not entirely beneficial to him in the long run and they would be the one benefiting more than him.

    So, if he just refines their bloodline, he will improve their lives a little and they would stop being cannon fodder which will make them feel grateful enough for them to fight for him the uing war and help with pass the test Duke setup.

    That night, in the camp after the training session as well as the dinner is also over, Sam called two people Marian and Amir to his tent.

    His tent is spacious enough and it is as big as a tennis court.

    Heid a concealment formation around the tent and said to them.

    "I will tell you guys what I understood about your situation. Some meridiansid dormant in your body due to your innate bloodline since birth and that is the reason you guys are unable to cultivate themon techniques."

    Marvin and Amir¡¯s faces paled as they heard these words. They didn¡¯t expect their problem to be this serious.

    Even though, Sam¡¯s words implied that there might be a chance to cultivate some rare and umon techniques, how can they, people from a small tribe get their hands on that type of technique.

    If that is possible, they wouldn¡¯t have to resort to sacrifice their people as the cannon fodder for the military in exchange for the safety of the rest of their tribesmen.

    Sam looked at the expressions and continued.

    "Don¡¯t worry, because with the disadvantage came an advantage. As you guys have cultivated until this point, you must have noticed something.

    Even though, your breakthroughs are forceful and without any techniques, there is not much bottleneck until you are in the middle-stage Novice stage."

    Both Marian and Amir nodded their heads.

    "What I may say might not be to your liking, but I don¡¯t know how else I can exin it to you. All this while your breakthroughs are by forcefully absorbing the spiritual energy into your system which made you lose a lot of spiritual energy as waste in the process.

    The point is this type of cultivation is not suitable for you guys.

    Due to your special bloodline, your body is as tough as a beast and you guys have some simr characteristics to them and that is you can breakthrough by .u.mting spiritual energy by eating high quality food.

    In that way, your breakthrough process will be faster and a lot smoother. But the problem is that in your current state the intake will be quite high and that makes the whole thing expensive."

    Sam paused as he observed the dejected expressions on their faces.

    They started having hope as Sam said that he noticed the problem and also when he said that they can cultivate by the intake of spiritual energy, but the expensive thing struck them hard.

    Their two main drawbacks are that they don¡¯t have money and they don¡¯t have power.

    If they want to obtain them to better their lives, they have to perform well and gain enough resources and for them to perform well, they need some power and to gain that power they need money.

    All of this is an endless loop that is making their head hurt.

    "Since, you guys are under me now, I can help you." Sam said in a low voice, which made the two people look at him in expectation.

    "The bloodline in your body is what makes your cultivation progress with the intake of spiritual energy through food.

    But due to the impurities in your blood, the efficiency and the amount of the energy that your body can efficiently absorb is low.

    I have a method to clean your blood a little bit which will help you absorb the spiritual energy more efficiently from the food which in turn reduces the expense and I will also teach you how to use your physique as well as you spiritual energy in the battle without the aid of techniques or spells."

    As Sam paused, he saw that the dejected expressions changed into one that of tion and delight.

    "But not for free." Sam said.

    "What can we do? You know we don¡¯t have mone.." Amir started saying but was interrupted by Sam.

    "Money? I am not short of it. What I want is your cooperation. I will be open with you.

    In seven months, we are going to war in a border town and we are going to face another battalion of the other empire.

    I can win the fight alone and I am quite confident of that, but the problem here is that this is a test for me as amander.

    Even then, I am confident that I can win the battle, but what I want is an overwhelming victory and I want you guys, the hundred soldiers of the Fire-wind Dragon Hawk tribe to execute.

    Since, you guys are fire and wind elemental users, you are very suitable for attacking. You will be the main attackers in everypany.

    Even if there are others with same element as you, I want you guys to suppress them and be selected as the main attackers by yourpanymander.

    Other than that, you also have to satisfy another requirement of mine.

    There will be an individual ranking opened in the battalion and I want at least fifty of your tribe members in the top 100 positions.

    If you aplish it, I will get you guys a special battle technique exclusive to your tribe¡¯s people only.

    No other cultivators can use it.

    If you satisfy these conditions, based on your performance in the battle and the battle technique I give you guys, you will be able to easily climb the ranks which will be able to help you guarantee the safety of your tribe.

    If you guys outperform my requirements, I will even help your tribe to relocate to the Southern Star and I will give them jobs.

    Do you agree?"

    Sam asked as he looked at the two stunned men. Their faces showed excitement and determination. Even without their words, one could tell that these guys agreed to what Sam said.

    But still Sam waited for their response.

    "Yes, sir."

    Both of them came out of their stupor and said in unison.

    "Okay, then from tomorrow onwards, the training will go as per daily routine, and after the dinner and everyone goes to sleep, you guys wille and train here. Since, your problem is no secret to the rest of soldiers, there is no need to hide your visit here.

    But the things you need to hide are that you should not tell them what I am teaching you here and If any of them ask you about it, just tell them that it is only possible because of your peculiar body conditions.

    From tomorrow onwards, I will cleanse the blood of every ten members a day every night as the rest will train on how to use the elemental attacks without handsigns and spells.

    After that, I will teach you guys how to use the spiritual energy in thebat without battle techniques.

    You will only have around three hours of rest at night. But you have topensate it with the spiritual energy and the resting time which you will get in the afternoon and evening.

    Within two months, you guys will be on the same level as the rest of the soldiers if not better in the aspect of utilising your spiritual energy in thebat.

    All the drawbacks which aregging you behind your peers will be cleared.

    And from then on, you guys will be the ones who has to fulfil your end of the deal.

    But before that, let me tell you something in case you get over your heads after you get what you want or think that I am showing favouritism.

    If not for the fact that you guys came to my battalion to seek help and I need your cooperation to execute what I need in the battle, we wouldn¡¯t be having the discussion here.

    You guys might be pitiful, but there are a lot of pitiful people in the world, you are not the only ones.

    This time you guys got lucky and met me, so you better use this chance well and don¡¯t take my kindness for granted.

    But even more taboo is never ever dare to betray me and keep what kept to be a secret a secret. If anyone betrays me, I don¡¯t care if it is under pressure or death threat or greed or desperation, I will hunt you guys down and ughter you with the same hands I will help you with.

    Getting my help is same as contracting with a devil, if you don¡¯t fulfil your end of the deal, then even your deaths won¡¯t be sufficient to repay the debt.

    Tell this to your members and make them understand."

 Chapter 171: Refining

    That night, Sam sent a shadow mouse to call Watt to the camp. For teaching these people, he can handle the fire elemental mages while Watt can deal with the wind element ones.

    But Watt didn¡¯t visit him the very night, but he came next day in the dawn.

    "What happened?" Sam asked as he looked at the serious expression of Watt.

    "The other candidates are making their moves more ferociously. They are ambushing us at every possible moment. Not only us everyone is targeting each other. Except for the two teams from the southern star city, all the other teams started making moves on others.

    And since we are the shortest team, we are the main target. Everyone wants to make an example out of us by eliminating us first." Watt replied.

    "You don¡¯t have to worry about that. They can take care of themselves. We don¡¯t have to deal with every problem that pops up in thepetition.

    I even dealt with the general because the problem originated from me. You don¡¯t expect me to babysit them all the while, right?

    Anyway, they are capable enough. We can help them if their life is at risk, I am already helping them by given them Mackey and his staff."

    Watt didn¡¯t say anything and just nodded. For him, it doesn¡¯t matter what happens in thepetition. All this while he helped because of Sam¡¯s orders and another reason is that results of thepetition might have some effect on Sam¡¯s rankings.

    Otherwise, he doesn¡¯t care about it.

    "From today onwards every night visit the camp. I want you to train fifty members. All of them wind element users. Teach them how to control spiritual energy and attack with it without usage of spells and hand signs.

    The remaining time, just deal with the impact crystal and melt as much as possible. Thetter half of thepetition, I need thatnd for a lot of things. It is going to be my main point in conducting business. The business which the southern star has never see and will never see again.???

    Sam said these words and Watt took a look at the wind element users whom he has to teach and left the ce on the silver wind.

    After Watt was gone, Sam continued with the morning drill training and then done with the spiritual energy control training.

    They didn¡¯t have much progress in a single day.

    All the while, Sam looked at them and this time, he even released Sky to keep a watch over them.

    In the afternoon training he observed some people are trying to ck off and they met with a good beating with the staff.

    The main problem for these soldiers who go beaten up is the attack or injury is not to the whole body. It is only happening on the skin which is making them feel the stinging pain. The hot wind pping them like a whip. The could feel the skin burning making them grit their teeth until their gums bled.

    That night after the training was over, everyone heaved a sigh of relief and went to rest except for the hundred members.

    Out of all candidates, these hundred members stood out in both the training routines.

    In the first one, they are in perfect sync along with the most of their teammates. They are the best in the drill but in the second one, they are the worst. They are having trouble just controlling a small amount of spiritual energy in the formation which is suppressing and extremely resistant to their forceful usage.

    They have to feel the spiritual energy and connect it with slowly which they arepletely incapable for now.

    All of them assembled in the empty ground near Sam¡¯s tent. Watt already arrived while Sam alreadyid a concealment formation.

    Both Sam and Watt divided the members into two teams and both of them started teaching them from the basics with which they themselves trained.

    After teaching the first step of feeling the amount and movement of spiritual energy in their body and let them practice, Sam took five members from each group and took them to the tent.

    There are already necessary preparations made. There are many runic drawings of the formations.

    Exactly ten of them.

    These formations are based on the formation which is used to refine the bloodline of the dragon hawk. But this is not for theplete refinement. The bodies of these people wouldn¡¯t be able to hold up if hepletely refines the whole blood into that of Dragon hawks.

    So, all he has to do is partial refinement which even allows these guys potential to increase and gives them a chance to reach the Grand realm stage and that is only because these guys are way past their prime.

    If he refines the blood of a youngster who just awakened, then they might have a chance of Nascent.

    But he didn¡¯t say. That wasn¡¯t part of the deal at least not yet.

    Sam started refining process for one person after another one by one. After more than three hours all of them are finally done. Since, it is only partial refinement it didn¡¯t even take that long.

    By the time he came out along with the ten people, they are brimming with excitement as they can clearly see their body¡¯s strength improving and at the same time felt that their ability to sense and feel the spiritual energy also increased.

    For the next ten days, the same routine went on. The drill training and the whipping started to make some progress in the sync of the soldiers. Eightpanies arepletely in sync and only twopanies left.

    For the spiritual energy control training, there is some progress although it is little. But many people started to get a feel of using the spiritual energy frugally and efficiently.

    As for the test they had after the first week of the training, it was a disaster. The people who barely passed didn¡¯t even reach two digits.

    So, Sam just considered that the test didn¡¯t even happen and left them to train.

    After another five days, the fire-wind Dragon hawk tribesmen, got a grip on usage of the spiritual energy and they easily caught up with the rest of the members. But still they are far beyond the set target just like others.

    This went on for another fifteen days, it has been a month since the training started and finally all of the members passed the training.

    They also started realising how much benefit the training has done to them. When they are practicing without any restriction.

    Their usage of spiritual energy reduced and they canst long in the battle.

    Now that the training was done, they are feeling a little regretful.

    At this moment all of them assembled again just like the first day. Sam is standing on the same stage and the scene was extremely familiar to them.

    "Since, you guys already saw the results for yourselves, there is not much for me to say. From today onwards the spiritual energy restriction training will be reduced to an hour and if anyone wants to train more, they can do so in their free time.

    From today onwards, you guys will be focussing on the individualbat training. The exchange point will also be opening.

    As all of you took a month to finish the first phase, you will be rewarded with ten credits each.

    And along with that, there would be a new ranking system that is going to be implemented. This ranking will be decided by how many duels you win.

    You can duel however you want, but once you defeat a person, you cannot challenge him again just to rake up the credits.

    You can duel with a single person or fight one against two, one against three, one against apany, I don¡¯t care.

    The number of opponents you defeat, the number of credits you .u.mte.

    For every opponent you defeat you will get a credit and if a person loses three fights either they are team or individually, you will be deducted one point.

    The ranking is not based on the individual strength, rather it is based on the number of credits you .u.mted.

    From today onwards you will be training against each other and you will be training against beasts, the other regiment soldiers.

    I want you to fight as many battles as you can, I want you to practice as your battle techniques as much as you can.

    You can challenge anyone and everyone in the military base, even thunder wolf squad. Nobody is going to stop you from challenging you and nobody is going to ask you for an exnation.

    If anyone troubles you or wants to y some under the table tricks, just tell me, I will make a visit to their regiment and see who dares to take it out on you guys.

    But there is only one catch. No ultimate or critical moves."

    Just as the crowd was getting pumped, they were stunned.

    "You heard me right. You are not going to use your ultimate and critical moves. You will only use the most basic of the skills.

    This way, I want you guys to experience the battle and gain experience. I want you guys to .u.mte enough battle awareness.

    So, from today onwards and for the next fifteen days, each of you must win 100 fights with the other regiment soldiers.

    The first one to win will be getting 100 credits, the second one 99 and so on until thest one will only get one credit.

    This time, I am not giving you extra time, you must finish the battles in fifteen days otherwise I will just go on and you can forget about the reward."

    Sam said and was about to move back, but he remembered something and said.

    "Every other day, I will be sending a hundred of you to forest every morning, where each of you must hunt and kill a beast of same or higher level than yours. This will be conducted between midnight and sun rise.

    If anyone fails to catch a beast, they will be deducted of one point.

    Now, everyone get ready for drill training. After an hour of drill training and an hour of spiritual energy control, then you can practice your battle techniques or go duel.

    By the way, if any of you try to get past these things underhandedly by colluding with your friends in the regiments, you better hide it from me at all costs. You won¡¯t be able to bear the consequences."

 Chapter 172: New routine

    From that day onwards the whole military was in turmoil again. Members of the Sam¡¯s battalion are challenging people left and right there are hundreds of duels going on everyday and in the first two days, the members of the Sam¡¯s battalionpletely lost.

    Because, they are not supposed to use their ultimate and critical moves, they are only tied down with the most basic of the movements and that is making it very hard to fight.

    But from the third day, the scenes started to change. The first ones to gain the wins were the Dragon Hawk tribesmen.

    Since, they were taught how to attack without hand signs and spells, they caught with the situation very quick and started raking up the wins.

    From fifth day, the rest of the people also started getting a hang of it.

    Why this much enthusiasm?

    Because the soldiers saw what is being offered in the exchange point.

    With their ten credits which they initially have, they can buy five cultivation aiding pills which will increase their spiritual energy capacity a bit.

    They can even buy a medium grade rank 1 weapon. But nobody bought them, because when they saw the remaining rewards that are up, they arepletely stunned and filled with desire to possess them.

    With their position as normal soldiers they would never be able to touch or even see a rank 3 weapon in close proximity, but now there are rank 3 weapons, armours, inscribed formation discs, defensive arrays.

    There are all kinds of things and many of them can be obtained with hundred points each.

    The costliest item is of five hundred credits where Sam himself will tailor make a weapon for them.

    When the rewards are this good, they are pumped up and every credit seemed like a treasure.

    The duels within their battalion also increased, but nobody dared go overboard on their teammates. Because, they knew that no matter how many duels they fight within themselves they won¡¯t be able to gain more credits.

    The best way right now, is to gain the credits by winning the duels with the other regiment soldiers, which is going on full swing.

    After all, that is only valid for a limited time and the duels with their teammates can be put on hold for after fifteen days.

    Other than that, Watt took a hundred members to the forest every other day. In this trip, each soldier will be put up against a beast of same or higher level and they have to kill the beast with the basic techniques.

    These battles are even more bloody than the duels with the soldiers.

    As the beast at the same stage clearly has an advantage over a typical cultivator and it fights with its life on line, they experienced something they never felt.

    That is the blood l.u.s.t.

    Every time, they went on activities like this, they always hunt the beasts in teams to be safe. But now, they can only fight them with bare hands and the beast¡¯s reckless fighting style which is pushing them to the edge of life and death is making them feel the l.u.s.t for blood.

    Every time a battle was finished and the adrenaline rush was over, they have a myriad of feelings like them being exhausted, frightened and at thest excited. The beast is a trophy for themselves and they can pass it to the cooking staff and have delectable meals until the meat was over.

    So, when eating the beast, they killed with their hands in a life and death struggle started giving them a feeling of superiority. Which they can never get enough of.

    This resulted in the l.u.s.t for their battle and blood increase. And many people started going to forest every night and hunt like this and they are even hunting multiple beasts at a time. For the first time, hunting solo brought them excitement and pride.

    Not using their ultimate moves only made that feeling grow. They are having a new found confidence.

    After the first week, the second week became a nightmare to the soldiers of the remaining regiments.

    Sam¡¯s battalion is full of soldiers who are creating chaos in the army.

    The training changed them into different people within forty days.

    The spiritual energy control made them sustain longer in the battle which itself is a plus point and the fights with the beasts and the other soldiers without any ultimate moves, forced them to utilise their basic techniques in a new way.

    Due to the drill training, they also have some unity and they started sharing their battle experience with their fellowpany members to improve together.

    Now, this made the second week a nightmare to the soldiers of other regiments because they are being pummelled by these guys as if they are absolute weaklings.

    These soldiers are whom they are familiar with, just after a little more than a month, they felt that they didn¡¯t see them in a long time. They practically felt like different people.

    After ten days are over and five days before the deadline, the first person who haspleted hundred duel wins emerged and that person is Marian.

    Yes, the first person is from Dragon Hawk tribe. This drastic improvement struck some heavy blow to the remaining soldiers.

    The memory of Marian¡¯s reckless and inefficient fighting style was still fresh in their minds and they cannot associate the new Marian who has most stamina of all people in the whole battalion.

    He became an expert at dragging fights and exhausting opponent¡¯s energy before making his move. In the first three days, he lost every duel he was in but after that he just kept on winning and now, he topped the list.

    By the time, the fifteen days are over, almost all the people finished their hundred wins. They developed a sense of persistence. Only a few people haven¡¯tpleted this target and they are also almost near.

    After the fifteen days, the assembly again and at this moment the situation is different than previous times.

    They are excited. All this time, Sam only made them do their daily training which is simr to the one when they are in the previous regiment.

    But they are slightly tweaked and made these trainings most effective.

    The restriction of the spiritual energy when they practiced their battle techniques increased their control and efficiency.

    They used to hunt previously and they are also hunting now, but this way, they can feel the obvious improvement in their sense of danger as they fought the beasts who are practically putting their lives on line.

    Many people were injured many times, some were saved from the brink of death by Sam himself. But these incidents didn¡¯t stop them. They felt even more determined. Their confidence grew with their wins and their experience grew with their losses.

    Now, they are waiting for the next phase of training. They felt like they opened a door for a whole new world.

    They have been soldiers for many years, but the improvement was very low. At most they have a bit of battle experience but that¡¯s it.

    There is no lethality in them if they are not in teams. Their individual strength was always less.

    Now, they are waiting for Sam to say about the new training.

    "Now that this phase is alsopleted, from today onwards there would be a new routine and that is every morning one-hour drill practice, one hour spiritual energy control, one hour practicalbat where you can duel as you like and the rest of the day you will be having the teambat lessons.

    Till lunch, that means fore noon after the three-hour routine is over, you will be having individual training which will be useful in the teambat and also after lunch break you will be having three more hours of squad training.

    After that the remaining time until night, you will be having thepanybat.

    For the next five and a half months you will be going through this. The squad training andpany training will be varied based on the progress you have made.

    The training will be based on the members and their way of fighting.

    After five and a half months there is going to be a war and, in that war, I want an overwhelming victory. A victory that the whole empire didn¡¯t see before.

    By the time I am done with you guys. Every squad should be able to conjure a battle spirit.

    I have confidence to train you guys to that extent, but do you have enough will and strength to reach that stage with me?"

    Sam almost roared at the end of the sentence.

    "YES, SIR!!!!!"

    Everyone roared in unison.

    Sam nced at them and said.

    "There is one more test." As Sam said that Watt pulled over a beast. This is a Whirl tail tiger. A beast which is considered an alpha predator in the nearby forests. But the main thing is that the tiger is a peak stage beast.

    Watt activated a formation disc which enclosed a specific area around the tiger giving it a limited space to roam.

    "This beast is the best predator that is avable in the nearest woods.

    The final test that you became a real soldier is going to be a battle with this beast.

    But the battle is not of strength, it is of the battle of will and mental strength. Your blood l.u.s.t and battle spirit.

    Animals have a keen sense of danger, and you have to force this animal with just your aura. Make it see you as a biggest threat and it shouldn¡¯t even dare to face you even if you stand in front of it." Sam said these words and entered the formation directly.

    The tiger looked at him and was about to roar at him as it took a pouncing posture. But it suddenly stopped.

    Because, there is a change in aura around Sam. This is not the aura of Yanwu or Sky, rather it is Sam¡¯s blood l.u.s.t, the l.u.s.t which grew with countless battles. It is full of killing intent and the tiger felt that it would die the moment it takes a step forward. Sam didn¡¯t move at all and tiger itself prostrated in front of him as if asking him to let it go.

    Sam came out and looked at the soldiers again.

    "A beast can be best judge on the amount of threat you pose. If any of you can submit it and can make you obey you. I will gift this beast to them as pet.

    So, before the five and half months you can try your luck. You are a true lethal soldier of my battalion only when this tiger steps back when facing you.

    All the best."

 Chapter 173: Team Combat training

    After introducing the new routine, Sam continued on with the drill training and then let themplete the energy control and duelling time.

    Now they are going to be trained in the individual strength which helps the team most.

    Sam separated everyone based on their elemental use for this part of the training and the first batch he visited each batch to show them a direction on which they should develop to be the best asset of the team.

    In Sam¡¯s ideal squad with most efficiency, in a normal situation and a normal environment, the fire and wind element which are both lethal, versatile andplimentary to each other, they are more suitable for to be the main attackers, unless they are in a particrly different situation like snowy areas, wet areas, enclosed spaces etc. In that case, the water element, earth element might be better doing the attacks.

    And simrly, when in the general situation, the water element users, whose power is one most suitable for both attack and defence transition, will act as the support for the main attackers by having their back.

    The wood element users, whose speciality mainly lies in controlling the nts, tress and other types of flora, they are suitable for a support which mainly focus on disrupting the enemies.

    They can create confusion, restrictions, chaos in the enemy groups from a decent distance in between which lies the main attackers and supporters.

    The earth element is most suitable for defence in the most normal circ.u.mstance unless they are in a marshnds where they are water elementals can be major attackers as the earth in normal circ.u.mstances is too rigid and to be an active attacker one must have an impable control over spiritual energy.

    The sole light element user in thepany is the healer while the remaining elemental users will form seven squads.

    A squad will have the five above mention elemental users each at the very least and the extra two spots can be filled by any other element user and they will decide on what basis the squad will progress.

    If the extra two element users are of fire and wind, the squad will be focussing on being the attacking squad within thepany and if the extra members are of wood element users, they would be mostly focussing on the control and supporting the team by disrupting the enemies.

    If they are extra earth element users they will be focussing on defence of thepany.

    If the water element users are the extra ones, then the squad can undergo transition between attack and defence based on the circ.u.mstances.

    These things are mostly known to soldiers and the previous regiments also followed this, but the thing is they kept all the people of same element under onepany.

    Making thempletely focus on one thing. Merging all of them and making a squad which focusses on all of them is new to them. But even more new thing is the way of training.

    Sam¡¯s method for the individual training was something they didn¡¯t expect.

    In this session the fire element and wind element users are told to focus on attacking, multiple enemies at a time in the most efficient way.

    Even if the attacks didn¡¯t finish of them, they should still be enough to deal some damage and give them enough breathing space so that they could target on one enemy at a time in the battle and get enough time to finish one before the rest recovered.

    Even the other element users are also simrly trained and particrly the earth element users were in for a treat.

    Because, Sam invited Artisan Ford, the architecture artisan to teach them the stone and earth maniption.

    The Architecture artisans are basically earth element users but they are trained in modifying and manipting the earth, stones and some other rted materials to be sturdy enough to be as someone¡¯s house.

    Sam wants to use this in the defence training of his soldiers, but they don¡¯t need to know all of it rather all they need to know basics of the basics and that is to manipte different earthen materials so that they could use the terrain for their advantage.

    Most earth element users defence techniques are simply, earthen wall, stone wall, earth dome and so on are inefficient in Sam¡¯s eyes.

    He wants to use these techniques of artisan which are used to clear the terrain before building or using the terrain material to make thend or even make them part of the buildings so that they can work efficiently.

    These are the most basic things most architecture artisans learn, but the earth element users who don¡¯t want to be an artisan or those who cannot afford to learn these and be one cannot see the uses of these techniques.

    So, Sam paid millions to hire Artisan Ford toe and teach the soldiers these basics. As for money he spent on them, he doesn¡¯t need to bother as the army still owes him, he can just think that he used that money for this.

    Anyway, the benefits are far more valuable for him the money which he could easily earn.

    Till noon, everyone focussed on the individual training after some sumptuous lunch, they started their squad training in which they use their newly learnt techniques to use and then there is thepany training in which they cooperate as squads.

    But there is onepany whose soldiers¡¯ training waspletely different from the remaining nine and thatpany was mostly made of the warriors to be precise forty warriors, nine warrior mages and one healer.

    The people are going to be the best the oddpany of the whole battalion because they are the most versatilepany and they are going to be thepany from which the squads separate and join otherpanies in the battle if the need arises.

    They are the extra muscle. They will fight the battles as apany but if otherpanies are in a perilous situation then they would split up and help thosepanies.

    The forty warriors are mostly adept in close quarters and the warrior mages will be responsible for close to mid-rangebat.

    Sam trained them with this new style and within a week the whole battalion started seeing the improvements and there started a turmoil again in the camp.

    The soldiers from Sam¡¯s battalion wanted to test their new moves and cooperation between themselves and they started squad duels.

    The drill training helped them a lot this time and they are extremely cooperative. Maybe due to Sam¡¯s overwhelming presence and the shadow he cast in their hearts, nobody dared to have any thoughts that go against the collective goal of the team and the cooperation went smoothly.

    While the situation in the military side was looking good, the business side was exact opposite.

    Today, Watt came as usual but this time, he carried a message.

    "Philip wants to see you. The situation is getting worse and the attacks increased. Since, I am also not helping proactively they are having a hard time holding up. Now the opponents are targeting the staff too.

    Mackey still didn¡¯t say anything and just stayed put in the estate.

    Jack is a bit exhausted mentally from the pressure and Philip didn¡¯t know what to do at all, he just kept on asking for help."

    When Sam heard this, he was extremely displeased. He knew that Philip more than capable for dealing with this problem but thetter was unwilling to show his capability.

    Sam is even thinking what would have to happen for Philip to act.

    He decided to meet with Philip and make it clear.

    After all, he cannot keep clearing every problem. Philip is so capable and he is first human friend he has in this world. If he has a problem and he is willing to face it, Sam would dly help.

    But Philip is taking a cowardly approach. He is so afraid that he is not even willing to show is true cultivation and elements.

    He is dual element warrior mage and his cultivation right now, might even be same as Sam if not higher. But he is now only at the middle stage novice level while he is only a fire element mage.

    One can argue that he is being cautious of his enemies.

    But how can Philip tell that? No matter how big and powerful an enemy is there is a limit to their capabilities and time. Even if they knew where Philip is unless they send a Nascent or higher-level cultivator, they can easily escape.

    Who knows, they might not even be thinking of Philip now and dual elements and the cultivation speed of Philip is not rare at all.

    Heck, even Sam is superior in both of them.

    There are a myriad of geniuses in the world and so many youngsters are participating with Philip at this moment for him to highlight.

    Even Sam wasn¡¯t sure with his outstanding results until now, every supreme power in the empire might know him.

    Philip¡¯s cautiousness and paranoia is at the verge of turning into stupidity.

 Chapter 174: Waking up Philip

    Sam made his way to the estate and when he entered the mansion, he saw the gloomy atmosphere in the hall.

    Mackey, Jack, Philip and Kelly sat there in silence.

    All four of them are beat up and injured. Watt stood behind Sam as he crossed his arms.

    Sam walked towards Mackey and asked.

    "Are your people injured?"

    "Some of them, they are in that room taking rest."

    Mackey pointed to a room as he said this, Sam walked towards the room and checked up on the injuries.

    After confirming that they are fine, he took out some pills and potions which are part of the ck water loot and gave them so that they can recover faster.

    Then he entered the hall, when Philip was about to speak, Sam halted him and said to Mackey.

    "Can you leave for a moment? I will talk to youter."

    Mackey nodded and left the room. As soon as he entered the room upstairs, he heard a loud bang.

    In the hall, Sam kicked Philip as soon as Mackey went into his room.

    "Sam, what¡¯s wrong?"

    Jack yelled and ran towards Sam who is walking towards Philip to block him. But at this moment, Watt interfered and stopped Jack.

    Sam looked at Philip who crashed into the wall with cold gaze.

    As Philip stood up, he made his move again and sent him flying again.

    Sam didn¡¯t hold back at all, he attacked as if he saw his sworn enemy. After some beating...

    *CRASH*

    Philip made a hole through the wall and was thrown into the backyard which was formed by clearing arge area of impact crystals.

    He slowly stood up as he coughed some blood. His whole body started hurting.

    "Sam, what is wrong with you, why are attacking Philip?" Jack yelled again, he knew that going through Watt is a difficult task and even if he did go, he was pretty sure he cannot stop Sam, but he still cannot stop himself from asking Sam why he is doing this.

    Kelly is also quite frightened and she didn¡¯t even dare to breath harder. For some reason, she could feel that Sam is really angry and if he got annoyed by their words again, he might even make a move on them, which they absolutely cannot resist.

    "Sam, let¡¯s just talk this out." Philip said weakly as he was finally able to stand up, at this moment a golden fire ball came flying towards him, blowing him away.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop, he kept on hitting Philip aster kept on bouncing around the back yard.

    Slowly, Philip started to lose the will to even get up. But this only made Sam even more annoyed. He took out the ¡¯Reaper¡¯.

    His aura started exploding as he moved towards Philip in rage. He ispletely disappointed in Philip. This guy ispletely being a coward. What is making him so afraid? He is so afraid that he didn¡¯t even want to show his dual elements.

    Sam felt that Philip would show is true colours eventually, but now he lost patience.

    After all, thepetitions are getting more and more troublesome and more effort is required too. Even if the tastes are easy, they need a lot of time and effort toplete.

    He cannot be there for the rest of the team and keep on carrying them.

    Hawk, Kelly, Drew. They have limited abilities and they cannot survive through the next phase of thepetition of the Dukedom and there is a high chance that they would get eliminated.

    Jack is barely passable. His only forte is battle and he gives his hundred percent.

    But Philip, this guy is witty, calm, intelligent but he is not willing to show his true talent and keep on acting like a coward.

    And how did Sam conclude without knowing the situation?

    Because from what he could see, if the enemies or the people from who Philip is hiding are really bent on finding him and never stopped the searches, there is a high chance that he would have been captured by now.

    They are already in dukedom and the enemies, if they have enough background and experience would be able to identify Philip if they are clearly bent on finding him, because they wouldn¡¯t be stupid enough to wait until Philip released his powers.

    Even if Philip can think of hiding his elements to hide himself, they would be able to think so too and if they are really determined enough given the attention that thispetition brought to Philip no matter how low-profile he is, he is going to be found out.

    And Sam came to the conclusion that the enemies are powerful with strong background based on the fact that Philip recognised the rank 2 silver meteorite sand. No ordinary people can get their hands on them and he can say that even the emperor has a very limited amount if he had any.

    But Philip identified it with a nce, that shows that he is far more knowledgeable and that knowledge cannot be gained easily unless those people have ess to enough meteorite sand to let a youngster know about it and train him to identify it.

    From what Sam understood, Philip is being paranoid and dragging himself down.

    Many people may think that Philip is waiting for the right time to unleash his power, but that is just a load of bullshit a person who kept on avoiding a problem, will get the habit of avoiding it even after facing it.

    He doesn¡¯t want Philip to be a coward.

    Sam reached Philip slowly and looked at him with cold gaze full of fury.

    He swung the reaper which made a superficial gash on Philip¡¯s hand which made him cry in agony.

    He squatted down and whispered.

    "You might think, I would leave you after some beating, but this is thest chance Philip, if you still try to hide then there would be no need to hide in the future. It would be better of ceasing to exist than to live like this.

    I thought of you as a friend, the first of my friends in this world. I waited patiently for you to open up, but there is a limit to my patience and you are way beyond that. Today, you will either lose that fear or I will lose a friend forever.

    You decide. What does it take for you to open up and stop being a coward? Your team being hindered is not enough, your teammates getting beaten up is not enough. Does the risk of losing a friend is not enough too?"

    Sam stood up and took a step back.

    He looked at Philip who ispletely injured with torn clothes. His eyes were closed as his face shown a conflicted expression.

    Sam lost the intent to even hit him. He stored his sword away and coldly spat with disdain.

    "Coward."

    Then he turned around and started to walk away.

    Just as he was about to enter the mansion, he swiftly turned around and dodged a fire ball. This fire ball is dark red almost close to blood coloured.

    He turned around along with the rest as they watched Philip who is a mess standing with two hands glowing with blood coloured mes at the tip.

    Sam smirked and moved, soon there is a blood red sh and a golden sh shing in the air with loud bangs.

    After two minutes Sam halted as he looked at the feather coat, there is some molten metal residue on it. He looked at Philip and made his move again. Just as two of them were about to sh, Philip fainted on the spot.

    After all, the beating he took before in the hands of Sam is not for nothing. He was serious on teaching a lesson.

    Sam carried him and carefully brought him inside the mansion. He started healing him and after making sure that the injuries are healed, he left him to sleep and came outside.

    He looked at Jack and said.

    "It must have been hard on you for you to deal with the attacks alone, but from tomorrow you don¡¯t need to carry the burden all alone, he would help you and trust me from what I have seen now, the people who are attacking you guys should be the ones worrying." Sam said as he looked at the small piece of metal that stuck to his coat.

    Philip¡¯s attacks are way different and unique in his own way. He used the metal element and fire element together to create molten metal at the point of impact when he punched and kicked. If not for the meteorite sand being tough and Sam¡¯s spiritual energy is highly pure and concentrated, Philip could have dealt some decent damage.

    Anyway, Sam is satisfied that his goal has been reached. From what he knew of Philip, that guy would have just brushed off the topic if Sam has made him sit down and talk and Sam didn¡¯t have that much patience and glib tongue to handle a guy as sharp as Philip.

    So, he just gave a beating to make his words go through that thick skull of his. In this way things resolved much easier. Thosest exchange of attacks are a form of pact.

    Philip would slowly open up and wouldn¡¯t run away and Sam who is responsible for this will help him if any problem arises.

    Sam is okay with it. He agreed to challenge an organisation as big as ck water for the sake of some metal, for a friend he is okay to help him challenge the world if necessary.

    If not, what are the friends for...

 Chapter 175: Philips Change

    After some time, Sam left the ce along with Watt and went back to the camp.

    Philip woke up only at the evening, that¡¯s how much damage Sam did.

    After getting up, he looked at his body which is half-n.a.k.e.d. There are a lot of scars left behind by Sam. They are the reminders Sam left so that Philip would remember this day and stop hiding himself.

    Jack and Kelly came to him to speak, but Philip didn¡¯t reply to them and just sat on the bed without moving. He looked through the window as he saw the impact crystals spreading long and wide.

    There Watt is operating the new machine Sam made and melting arge area.

    He didn¡¯t observe anything; he is just looking as he faced an inner turmoil of thoughts.

    He has a past, which haunted him so much, all this time, he hid his true self behind the mask of a mischievous and naughty teenager who likes to make fun of his friends.

    All the sarcastic remarks, annoying jokes everything is a mask he is using to conceal himself. In fact, he is not that overly friendly guy, he only behaved such with Sam for the rest he would be at most sound friendly and polite and that is because just wanted to treat those people in way he wished to be treated.

    Which is extremely rare quality in a world governed by power and strength rather thanw.

    He was overly friendly to Sam because, he felt that he also had a story. The way Sam reacted as soon as he was called Bastard struck something in him.

    Because, there was a time when he wanted to react like that, when he wanted to resist and deal with every injustice he suffered, but the fear of being dead overwhelmed his urge to get himself some justice.

    From that time, he escaped that ce and took refuge in the star wood city, he trained like crazy as soon as he awakened.

    He wanted to be strong and take everything he deserved but the problem is that he is too scared do so. He subconsciously didn¡¯t dare to go against them. But he wasn¡¯t able to ept that self and created a mask to himself. A pathetic excuse he made up for himself to hide from the truth.

    ¡¯I will face them when I am strong and until then I wouldn¡¯t reveal myself.¡¯

    He clearly knew that they are not searching for him and if they did, he is too far away for their influence to spread. He knew that he doesn¡¯t have to be that wary because for them he is dead a long time ago.

    He was alive by a miracle. But he is too scared. Too scared that he might reveal his identity by using powers and then they will be at his tail.

    With this paranoia he thought a myriad of ways his identity which are too far fetched and if any other person were to know, they might even die ofughter. He used those reasons to build an invisible wall to hide himself deep.

    He wanted to be like Sam who never hid from anything. That guy stood in front of a Count, a Marquis, a General like an equal. Never bowing his head once.

    He saw Sam¡¯s journey up close. He faced all kinds of oppressions and many problems would have been over if he just made a simple apology but he never saw him giving in. He kept his pride, he respected himself, he never treated himself as inferior to any person.

    In short, Sam is a person whom Philip always wanted to be.

    That is why he stuck close to Sam if he can change but seems like Sam noticed this too and he just mmed open the wall that Philip built instead on waiting for it to wear down.

    He just gave a beating to make him realise how foolish he has been.

    He also got another message. That is if you want to be something then you have to start being and not wait to transform by some freaking miracle.

    They are called miracles because they don¡¯t happen easily and a person who is counting on such an urrence is nothing short of a fool.

    Now, Sam just woke up that fool.

    Philip shook his head and took a deep breath. He went out and ate something before going to back to his room again.

    Next day, he called over Mackey, Kelly and Jack.

    "We are going to reopen the restaurant. Get ready."

    His voice oozed of the confidence which was never there before. He has a change in temperament and his disposition also changed. He is like a new person.

    The rest nodded and made the preparations. All of them went to the restaurant and opened it for business.

    Their food is fairly famous and many people knew that it tasted amazing but there will never be more customers because they know that someone wille and start trouble.

    So, most of the people who go there are people shameless enough to get a free meal. They will eat slowly and when the trouble starts, they will just slip away in between the chaos.

    This day they went in the same way and soon after more than two hours, the troublemakers arrived. They ordered some dishes and after eating some, they started making a fuss that food is not good, it is not genuine meat or some other stuff and as soon as the waiter starts to soothe them, they would start throwing things.

    Today, just as they were about to throw them away, Jack interjected and was about to drag them out just like any other time. But this time, just as he was about to angrily drag them, a blood red coloured mass flew over and hit the guy making him fly along with it.

    He was then nailed to a wall. Jack watched as the metal started to cool right in front of his eyes as Philip threw water on him as soon as they hit the wall.

    "AHhhhhhhhhhhhh..."

    That person cried in pain, before he could use his spiritual energy though, Philip ced his hands on him and looked at thepanions of the trouble makers.

    He was thinking, how he should handle it. Should he just give some warning? Negotiate with them to not toe here? Just give a beating? These are the first things that came to his mind.

    But these thoughts were just like the old Philip he doesn¡¯t want to be, he took a deep breath and thought, how would Sam deal with it?

    He got an answer within a second.

    He should teach them a lesson that they don¡¯t want to create trouble again.

    Philip ced his hand on the troublemaker¡¯s belly as he said coldly.

    "You better listen carefully. I am not going to repeat again." As he said this, his arm started to release molten metal and the troublemaker started to scream.

    But Philip didn¡¯t stop, he kept on pouring cold water from other side which miraculously made the metal cool down rapidly.

    "I don¡¯t want to see you guys here again. I already lost all patience to deal with you guys."

    The man was struck to the wall as the metal locked his h.i.p.s and things to the wall. If not for Philip¡¯s control over the metal and heat, it would have prated the skin and made him a solidified metal statue.

    "I don¡¯t care who sent you here and I don¡¯t care if you ready to leave your life here for them. Because, the next time I see you here, I would just create some good metal sculptures with you making them some attractions of our shop.???

    As Philip said, he held the metal and pulled it with a strong tug.

    "AHHHHHHHHHHH......."

    The skin was peeled off from the man¡¯s lower body. He started rolling on the floor with an unimaginable stinging pain. He was able to stop the damage due to heat with his spiritual energy a little, but he didn¡¯t realize the effect of the molten metal going to be.

    People around can see the muscle fibres on the ce where the skin was peeled off.

    "I don¡¯t know if you think this much pain is worth it. But next time, youe here, you better prepared to die."

    As Philip said those words, the trouble maker¡¯spanions who apanied him ran over to him gulping nervously as they carried their leader and ran out of the restaurant.

    They never expected that they would face something like this.

    All these days they came here and made a fuss about a lot of things, they did receive some beating before but they are only superficial injuries.

    So, never did they think that the reaction this time would be this huge. The experience almost made them pee in their pants. Losing skin over the lower body.

    As soon as a small wind current touches the spot before it healed, he can feel the sting which is a lot worse than the blunt pain.

 Chapter 176: Pregnancy

    The next day Watt reported the whole situation to Sam.

    Sam nodded his head in satisfaction, seems like beating people up is a good way to make theme to their senses.

    He then looked at the soldiers who are training hard and after some thought, he shook his head in denial of his own theory.

    Now, the business will go on smoothly. Even though, Kelly is only average in battle, Jack and Philip are exceptional and can cover for her and rest of the staff.

    They can handle the rest of the candidates if they target them again. Now, their initial losses can bepletely covered and there is a chance to make some profit.

    But the main thing is that the market is already saturated with the businesses from the rest of the teams. They already shared the pies in various businesses and the food industry was also included.

    If Philip and the rest wants to enter the market and take a share, they have to make some big moves and create some amazing news spread about themselves in the city so they could create big enough impact to prate the market.

    Thinking of Big news, this early morning, Sam has got some big news from his beastpanions and that is, a female shadow mouse is pregnant.

    Since,ing to the southern star city, Sam didn¡¯t have much work for these shadow mice and it seems that they took advantage of this period and became ¡¯busy¡¯.

    Sam got this news first thing in the morning from the four younger shadow mice who are all young and singlepared to the remaining six.

    They didn¡¯t dare to say anything to Sam as they are afraid that Sam would get angry at them for not seeking his permission of getting his approval.

    But the four youngsters are quite daring and resolute enough to take up the task and reported the news to Sam.

    If not for the fact Watt came early and interrupted their meeting, Sam would have already met the shadow mice.

    After sending away Watt, Sam entered the divine dimension and walked towards the dark element zone where the shadow mice reside.

    After he went there he saw a the ten shadow mice standing there silently. The two shadow mice who are the couple that are currently expecting stood as they looked down.

    Sam felt quite amused at the guilty and fearful expressions. He knew that they are afraid of him but he doesn¡¯t know to what extent. Now, he understood.

    He doesn¡¯t know why they are so fearful about this.

    There are only few thinks he could think of and one of them is that they afraid that he might think that an extra mouse is burden which is absolutely ridiculous.

    He is breeding arge number of fowls just that he could make some food as well as a lot of rabbit species and boars to sustain enough food supplies for termites and locust.

    Shadow mice helped him a lot more than them, so why would he short change them?

    Sam didn¡¯t stand in front of them as hisrge figure might make them feel intimidating.

    So, he sat cross-legged in front of them and looked at the mice couple who didn¡¯t dare meet his eyes.

    He chuckled at their reactions and ced his hands slowly over their heads to pat them.

    "You don¡¯t have to feel that nervous. I am quite happy that you are weing a new life to this world."

    When they heard Sam¡¯s words, they are quite surprised.

    Sam then looked at the male mouse and said.

    "After all, you guys are bing parents, so you better be responsible. Stop being childish and stealing the food. Do you really think that you guys can hide it from me? You could have directly at the food openly. I just felt that you are being childish and didn¡¯t bother with you, now you better stop doing that otherwise your kids will also learn that."

    Sam paused and then he looked at the female mouse and said.

    "You gave me one of the good news in the past few days. I don¡¯t know much about you bing a mother, but for me a mother is a mother whether it is a beast or human. At least for the beasts who are apanying me in my life.

    Take care of yourselves."

    Sam stood up and quickly ced a formation, he dropped a lot of dark element spirit stones in it. He exchanged them in the military exchange point for soldiers. There are more than ten thousand stones.

    He let the mother mouse stay there and said to the father mouse.

    "She would stay here from now on, you take responsibility for the food and all her needs. You both can stop taking any missions. The rest will take care of that."

    After saying his piece, Sam went to the Herb garden in the dark element area and started picking all kinds of spiritual energy nourishing herbs of dark element.

    He went into the tower to look for some potion recipes. Potions are easier to make than the pills.

    The difficultly in potions only lies in the heat control and the fire strong enough to take the essence of the herbs. But the pills are of different story.

    There is a lot of spiritual energy in y which Sam didn¡¯t really like that much. When he just browsed through some info on both, his felt that potions are much better to make as the herbs and essence are also least bit modified. All the change that was done is the heat application, and mixture of various essences in required proportions.

    But the pills, there is a lot of a human being¡¯s spiritual energy interfering and modifying the herbs and formting pills with direct contact. This didn¡¯t sit well with Sam.

    So, he decided that if he were to enter the medicine market he would focus of the potions and he also saw many possibilities of mass production in case of potions.

    For now, he is going to brew a potion for the Shadow mouse who is pregnant.

    Sam didn¡¯t think that he was the kindest guy in the world and he also doesn¡¯t have deep sentiments. He himself killed many people and many of them are mothers or children of a mother. If it is an enemy he never thought about these things.

    But even for his pets, beasts,panions or subordinates, he felt differently. The shadow mice and his is a mutually beneficial rtionship.

    Even if the mice themselves feel differently and think of him as a master, he didn¡¯t think same. For his subordinates those who are working for him, he would never short change them.

    Particrly for the shadow mice who helped him so much by keeping their life on the line, he would take care of them at all costs. They are not his tools after all.

    Sam was treated as a tool for more than half his life in his past life time. He doesn¡¯t want to treat others like that.

    And his subordinate having a child, even if it was a mouse whose life might seem insignificant to many people is good news for him.

    Sam stayed inside the tower¡¯s second floor for a long time and made one of the simplest but most effective potion. After storing it in several ss bottles, Sam went back to the dark element zone to give to the pregnant mouse.

    But the scene shocked him. He saw there are two other mice couples in their special time within their small holes in the rocks.

    He was stunned and didn¡¯t even know what to say. Only the four young mice who are single and angry about the situation noticed him.

    He didn¡¯t even know whether he should make his presence known. But after some thoughts, he decided not be a third wheel for any couple and gave the youngsters the potion bottles and said.

    "Give them to the mother, tell her to consume as much as possible."

    As he was about to leave one of the young mice asked a question which made him regret being like this.

    "Boss, we are still single, can you get some mice from some..." Another shadow mouse closed that guy¡¯s mouth without letting him finish.

    Sam¡¯s face turned red in fury.

    ¡¯Damn it, I just congratted a couple who are going to have children and now you are treating me as broker. If not for the fact that I don¡¯t want to spoil the happiness and despised for disturbing their love time, I would have sted your ass off.¡¯

    Sam cursed that young mouse in his mind many times before moving away.

    He was thinking if he should make some wide andrge home for the mice.

    Even though, these are categorised under mice, they are actually very different from them.

    Normal mice actually have ten litters per year and each litter will have six to ten babies. But their life span is also between two to eight years.

    But the shadow mice are different. Their bloodline is of very high quality and they have veryrge lifespan which made their reproduction a little difficult, they can only get one of two litters in a decade and each litter will give from four to six babies based on the nourishment they take.

    But from these mice behaviour, there is a great chance that the remaining two mice also bing pregnant, and they obviously will grow in number.

    For now, since there are no more dark element beasts, there is no problem but once theye shadow mice might have problem adjusting with therge number of their family. So, he is thinking if he should build some ce to create a proper home for them.

 Chapter 177: Trouble from Noble Kids

    After that little episode with the shadow mice, Sam checked up on Philip for the next few days.

    He heard that he is beating quite some people up and they even included the noble children of the southern star.

    Sometimes, theplicated problems have the easiest solutions. From what he observed from Philip his guesses about his condition were almost right and thus his method of beating him up worked miracles.

    Now, the battalion is also quite stable. The squad training andpany training are going well and even Sam is not supervising, the soldiers didn¡¯t ck off.

    After all, who would want to reject the progress in their abilities by cking off.

    Now, the squads are training even more rigorously and now they are targeting the Great realm cultivators. Of course, it is not easy to defeat them but they are mostly trying to hold their ground against them.

    It is not impossible to defeat them, but the Great realm cultivators in the military are not average joes, they have high experience. So, the fights are pretty difficult and the squads have only one goal and that is to increase the amount of time they battled and also increase the damage they cause to the opponent.

    They are quite confident if two squads participate, they would be able to defeat the Great realm cultivator.

    After a few days of observation, Sam felt that he could move towards the next projects in his schedule.

    First one is to make uniforms for the battalion members.

    Second, some advanced preparations for the business phase of thepetition and this has something to do with the impact crystal.

    He entered the tower and looked at the tonnes of impact crystals on the floor.

    He is almost getting a headache after looking at them, but remembering the general¡¯s face and all the tricks he pulled, Sam didn¡¯t feel that it is that difficult.

    All he has to do is make the process easier by employing different things and the best thing for him right now is the methane gas and building a furnace that can help him process this.

    But looking at the amount of gas consumption, Sam is thinking if he should increase the intake of fire type beasts so the he could make their faeces useful.

    So, he went out of the camp and after looking around in the town and finding out that there is not much he can do, he only has one choice and that is going to golden-horse tradingpany.

    He ced an order for arge number of zing earth Bulls. Even though, other species might give him simr gas or even produce methane. Feeding and grooming this zing earth bulls is quite easy as they are low level and their faeces quantity is high.

    The representative is quite puzzled about the location of the zing earth bull and Sam dly told about the Lava Rock vige.

    After hearing the distance and the amount of money in the transaction involved, the manage of the Golden-Horse tradingpany who is familiar with Sam came out.

    After making sure that Sam is not making fun and quite serious, the manager asked curiously.

    "May I know what you are going to do with these beasts?"

    "I like their meat. Is there a problem?"

    When Sam answered like this, he didn¡¯t know what to say. Then he coughed awkwardly and asked something else.

    "Artisan Sam, are you interested in doing a long-term business with us?"

    "Like what?"

    "Energy Cells."

    Sam smirked and said. "Why ask now? Did the results from the experiments didn¡¯t yield any results? I thought you would be angry at me for the damage caused by the resulting explosion, instead you are asking me to do business?"

    When he heard those words, Manager was turned speechless.

    Because, the resulting explosion indeed made some serious damage to them. An artisan, formation master and an inscription master were heavily injured due to the explosion. But he didn¡¯t dare toin to Sam.

    After all, Sam made the payment using those energy cell, but they tried to duplicate it and failed. It is already asking for trouble for trying to copy a Schr artisan¡¯s creation and make money. The artisan tower isn¡¯t there for nothing.

    But if they seeded, they would have a bargaining chip with Sam. Since, they would already be familiar with the making process, they can use it to coerce Sam to cooperate with them.

    Now, that he heard these words after failure and losses, he was thoroughly embarrassed. That means, Sam knew they are going to do this and they are going to face that explosion.

    Sam didn¡¯t mind his expression and said.

    "Not now, I might think this in the future in a few months. Make sure that the delivery of the zing earth bulls goes well. I have a lot of work for them."

    Sam left the ce and went back to the camp. For some reason he has some thoughts to conduct some experiments on the methane.

    But that experiment is about possibility of increasing its grade.

    Sam entered the tower as soon as he arrived at the camp and started making preparations.

    He made three small pits one of them is normal pit without any modification, he made a metal door which would seal it and pumped the methane into it.

    The second pit is also same but this time he made some formations and ced some fire element spirit stones.

    The third pit though, Sam made a thin lining of fire energy cell inside the pit and pumped the gas as he closed the top. He wants to see if there are going to be any modifications to gas.

    Then he finally moved to the second floor to make equipment for his new product. As for uniforms for the soldiers he can do that when he was bored.

    So, Sam was holed up in his tower for the next few months onlying out asionally. He left all the training to Watt and Marian who is right now the top on the ranking list.

    At the same day that Sam went inside the tower for next production, Philip and Jack also started making waves in the city.

    Kelly felt that she is not on the same league as them.

    After reopening the restaurant and skinning the first person in the most unconventional way the trouble lessened for a few days.

    But as soon as their business started to pick up a bit, the other teams weren¡¯t able to stay put.

    They started making moves and on a particr night after closing down the restaurant.

    Philip, Jack and Kelly along with the staff started moving towards the estate.

    *BOOM*

    An explosion sounded but they didn¡¯t see any fire rather there was building wall crashing on them. Even if the debris won¡¯t harm them, their vision will be affected and their spiritual sense will be disrupted.

    Then suddenly the shadows shed as several people started attacking them.

    The attacks aren¡¯t lethal but they would definitely suffer some decent damage.

    But after the dust settled, the scene astounded the ten people who arrived.

    There are several formation discs which were thrown around Philip¡¯s group. Those discs are more than enough to dodge three times the attacks they just made. This ispletely overkill.

    Philip and Jack took a look at Mackey and the staff and after making sure that they are fine, they rxed a bit.

    Philip turned towards the rest group. Out of ten, the five people are from the southern star city¡¯s second team members, these five are noble kids.

    Actually, in every team the elites stayed for the business and the rest were sent to military. General seemed to have something to do with it.

    These five are those noble kids and the rest are their subordinates of same age from their family. These kids are the ones who are targeting them mainly.

    The first southern star team led by Nichs didn¡¯t involve in the conflicts. But this second team not only made use of his connections from their family they made it difficult for potential threats. And food Mackey made his obviously a huge potential threat for them.

    They even wanted to poach Mackey and his staff but they rejected resolutely.

    Mackey might be only interested in cooking, but he knew his sess in improvement is mainly due to the new recipes Sam gave him. And he doesn¡¯t n on stopping his progress. If he is loyal enough, maybe there is a chance that Sam will give him some more recipes which will improve his skill.

    Philip looked at the ten people with a smile. This is not the first ambush they suffered but the noble kids didn¡¯te at that time.

    There are ten subordinates previously and Jack fought them himself. They are obviously some elites and Jack has some serious difficulty. Philip and Kelly weren¡¯t able to help much. So, after they took some beating and more than half of the opponents were injured from Jack¡¯s beating they left.

    But after Philip¡¯s brutal warning the noble kids decided to take it up on themselves toe here.

    "You know what? A guy beat me to pulp a few days ago and I wasn¡¯t even given a chance to retaliate. Now that you guys are here, I have a chance to vent now." Philip said with his trade mark mischievous smile.

 Chapter 178: Teaching the Noble Kids

    Philip looked at them with that mischievous smile. Well, he learnt to open up but that doesn¡¯t change the fact that he wants to see the world burn it is just instead watching others burning the world, he decided to take the task upon himself.

    Jack and Philip moved at the same time.

    The remaining staff are inside the formation while Kelly is with them as guard. Even though, these staff are also cultivators they are not suitable or well-versed inbat.

    They only know how to use their cultivation to cook.

    In short, they are of no use in this situation.

    They all looked as the ten people surrounded Jack and Philip.

    "How many times, do you guys need a lesson? Can¡¯t you be more obedient and stay put? After all, with your status do you really want to reach more than you should? You are not worthy of the future endeavours thispetition provides."

    The one who is leading the team said this.

    Jack and Philip didn¡¯t bother to answer. These condescending fools are usually thick skulled. It is hard to get through. They are busy fighting with the opponents and just as the leader finished the words, a body flew towards him as he narrowly dodged.

    Philip looked at him and smirked. But his hands and legs are moving as he battled another subordinate.

    This time, Philip threw a rapid flurry of punches. All the people around them could see liquid metal drops flying around and the skin being slowly exposed as the cloths burnt to ashes.

    The remaining people who were about to attack stopped in their tracks involuntarily.

    They could see the liquid metal seeping into the skin of the limbs of theirpanion.

    "AHhhhhhhh...

    "Noooo..."

    "A"

    Various painful groans areing out of that person¡¯s mouth. Philip finally caught that person by hand and threw him towards the leader.

    When the bodynded, they could see ayer of red coloured metal being solidified on the limbs. They couldn¡¯t help but shudder at the ruthless move.

    All his body parts are intact, his spiritual core is left untouched but he cannot get up and walk at all.

    Even if he undergoes a surgery, there is a high chance that it would be unsessful.

    What can the healers do?

    They cannot pick out the metallicyer directly. If it is only on the outeryer, they might still have a chance, but if the liquid metal seeped into the pores and reached the muscle fibres, things are extremely tricky.

    They have to sever the limbs and regrow them again. But will the noble families willing to spend a bomb on a subordinate?

    One could wonder about this issue.

    While they are in daze of Philip¡¯s attack. The second group of three which went after Jack are not faring well.

    Jack swung his sword at the punch that ising his way.

    The ck meteorite sword sliced through the fist as it cut along the whole hand until it reached the shoulder.

    The whole arm was cut along into two. One piece still attached to the body and other on the group.

    "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH...................."

    There is a cry full of pain and agony which attracted their attention towards Jack.

    Jack¡¯s face was furious, he must have had a lot of pent up frustration. After all, in the exact same situations they encountered previously he had to take a lot of heat.

    He cannot kill in the city to end the fight, even if he ims it as self-defence, the other party has authority in their hands and he wouldn¡¯t be able to escape.

    For him killing is a lot easier than pulling punches and when facing ten or more people at a time and when the ten people are also considered as elites, the situation is a lot more troublesome as he would be onplete defensive as he had an obligation to save the staff.

    Now, he can finally let loose. When he recalled how Philip changed after Sam¡¯s beating, he kept on wondering if he should have beaten him up before.

    But after watching Philip fight, he wasn¡¯t so sure anymore.

    The subordinates are soon dealt with, but the remaining five noble kids are still here, just as they were about to make a run for it, they saw Philip activating a formation disc. This is a kind of restriction formation it creates a boundary which will not allow the people inside to go out and people outside to go in.

    Philip borrowed these formation discs from Watt. As for where Watt got them it is obvious.

    When the noble kids saw this, their hearts sank. There are only two ways to get past this situation and one if find the loopholes in the formation for which they need a lot of formation knowledge.

    The second one is breaking the formation disc which is same as attacking Philip and Jack.

    "I will take a look at the formation; you guys stall for time."

    One of the five who seemed to be a formation master spoke and started observing the formation. From the energy it is emitting it is quite obvious that this is a rank-2 formation so he was quite confident.

    But after looking at the nodes that are formed temporarily, he was quite confused. As he was trying to decipher the nodal structure of the formation suddenly, he felt a shift in energy and the nodes of the formation shifted.

    He was stunned in the spot. He didn¡¯t know what just happened. Meanwhile, the group confronting Jack and Philip didn¡¯t make a move.

    Since, their two opponents are just standing there without making any move they also didn¡¯t do anything. After all, they knew they are not the opponents for the duo and they are quite content if there is no fight at all.

    As for why Philip and Jack are rxed and didn¡¯t make a move, they are quite confident they wouldn¡¯t be able to get out at all.

    After all, they are seeing Sam up close. That guy never left a loop hole in anything he did. They might be making things, destroying things, plotting against others, everything. He always thought of all possible scenarios and he also thought of all kinds of possible solutions for every scenario.

    Unless the opponent is smarter than him in terms of thinking about ns and plots they wouldn¡¯t beat his scheme.

    So, a person like that, could he possibly miss the loopholes in the formations.

    Sam made sure that on the same level formations his formations would be unbeatable.

    If he used the formation gs, there would be manyyers that breaking through would sap out the other party¡¯s energy.

    As for formation discs, Sam¡¯s hundreds of experiments aren¡¯t in vain. He made sure that nodes wouldn¡¯t stay in the same spot for more than ten seconds. If other party can break it in ten seconds, he would take his hat off.

    Philip and Jack actually tried to go through this formation after they got if from Watt, they didn¡¯t know how to decrypt a formation so they tried brute force at the nodes which is the simplest way but also which gives some bacsh to the person.

    But they tried it anyway as for why they did it, Philip is the perpetrator.

    The ending is that they got serious bacsh even after all kinds of trails. They tried in many ways but they mostlyst at the first challenge that is pinpointing the node¡¯s weak point.

    After watching their futile attempts, Watt said that no one in the Novice stage could break through the formation.

    So, at this present moment they are quite rxed.

    The four noble kids have some hope and felt relived after seeing the Philip and Jack didn¡¯t make a move but when there is no response from their teammate, they looked at him running around the formation with a distressed expression which made them feel the despair.

    "What are you doing?"

    The team leader asked with a frown, He is panicking inside but he is still trying his best to hide it.

    "I cannot do this. This formation is strange."

    The man who is responsible for deciphering the formation said as he stopped moving and slumped on the ground.

    *Cough* *Cough*

    Everyone turned their attention to Philip as he coughed.

    Seeing his wicked smile, the team leader said.

    "You better let us go, you don¡¯t know what you would face if you do anything to us. Our families are the ones who have authority here, even if you are a genius you will not go unscathed."

    Philip didn¡¯t say anything and just looked at him with same wicked smile.

    The leader just went on rambling in panic.

    "You better let us go."

    "You have to leave us, or you would be in trouble." Soon his threats became pleading.

    "Please let us go."

    "Please at least let me go."

    "What do you want to let me go?"

    Philip finally responded. "Now we are talking business."

 Chapter 179: Fair Trade

    Philip finally got the words he wanted.

    From their brutal disy these noble kids certainly don¡¯t want to fight them. These guys are pampered kids, how can they deal with the brutal nature of battle.

    So, Philip used this intimidation to make them cough up what he wants and he also made those guys offer what he wanted.

    Philip ced his hand on his chin as he slightly tilted his side ways while looking at the team leader in his eyes.

    "I heard that you guys are in the restaurant business and you guys even have the best spot in the Inner zone. You see, our restaurant is in outskirts and doesn¡¯t have much exposure, how about we trade it."

    The five noble kids are dumbfounded for a second before all of the shouted in unison.

    "NO."

    "Oh, seems like you guys think I am making a request."

    Philip¡¯s remaining hand was immediately surrounded by the blood red mes. The noble kids immediately took a step backwards.

    "Guys, I don¡¯t want to make unnecessary damage to you, I am actually quite easy to talk to and in our whole group I am the friendliest person. I am like the nicest guy ever."

    When he paused here, everyone looked at the subordinate whose limbs got destroyed and then looked at Philip.

    "Oh,e on guys, you should leave those minor details and shouldn¡¯t care about them. Do you see, my friend right there? He is like a sword maniac; he doesn¡¯t sleep if don¡¯t get a chance to cut something up every day."

    Philip pointed at Jack as he said. After a brief pause, he said.

    "There is another guy named Sam who is in military right now. You might not know, but let me tell you, he is a big gigantic asshole. He doesn¡¯t even know how to smile. He always has a poker face and he kill people without batting an eye and do you know what¡¯s worse is, the people who got thrashed by him wouldn¡¯t even get a chance to negotiate or exin themselves.

    Even their parents would have hard time recognising them. He is extremely evil and he is quite bloodthirsty. He doesn¡¯t even have any interest towards girls and I highly doubt that he is gay and he is even stronger than me. So, think about it, if you encountered him instead of me, what would happen to you guys?

    Look at yourselves, you all are fair and handsome."

    *Cough* *Cough*

    Jack and Kelly almost choked to death by Philip¡¯s words.

    "Are your balls made of metal too?" Jack directly asked. He is quite shocked at Philip¡¯s guts.

    He wondered if Sam heard this, he would beat up Philip and force him to have intercourse with some men. Judging from Sam¡¯s way and resoluteness in taking revenge this is highly probable.

    "Philip you better make sure that Sam don¡¯t hear these words, otherwise..." Jack didn¡¯t finish these words. Meanwhile, Kelly was thoroughly embarrassed.

    She thought of Sam and then Philip¡¯s words, that handsome and ruthless man didn¡¯t match with Philip¡¯s words. Even she wanted to bash him up.

    The five noble kids though are having different thoughts. They didn¡¯t meet Sam at all and from Philip¡¯s serious and ¡¯concerned¡¯ expression they felt like he is not lying at all, which made them shudder in fright.

    Philip didn¡¯t let them think before adding.

    "I am not asking this just for my sake, you know Sam is the leader of our team and when we report these things, we have to report the fact that you guys created trouble and he has quite some status and very vengeful.

    You might not know, but he is rank 5 Artisan, so if hees after you guys, even your families can do little help, so if you just trade the ce with us, I can convince him that the restaurant is thepensation you paid.

    What do you think?"

    When the five noble kids imagined what the consequences if the Rank 5 artisan targeted them and when that person has some weird ¡¯tastes¡¯, they didn¡¯t even feel like thinking further and the leader immediately took the deed for the restaurant.

    After half-an-hour. Philip and the rest are walking home. Philip is quite happy as he whistled while looking at the scroll in his hand, this is the ownership deed of the restaurant that belonged to the noble kid¡¯s team.

    He really made huge bargain this time, then he suddenly remembered something and looked at the remaining people in particr, Jack and Kelly.

    "Hmm, I think we don¡¯t have to say the details about this incident to Sam, so we can just inform him that we got a new restaurant by making those noble kids pay. As for the rest, just tell him it was nothing.

    After all, he is quite busy training a battalion."

    He said with his signature shameless smile.

    Jack snorted in disdain.

    "What? Don¡¯t tell me you weren¡¯t able to find any nobler excuse? You dared to say those words about him, just you wait, I bet you are going toy in the bed for quite some time."

    Kelly also couldn¡¯t help but tease him. "You are going to suffer. I can still remember how he beat you up until your clothes are destroyed. This time you are going to get it.

    But I am looking forward to Watt¡¯s reaction. You know, that guy is quite sensitive to everything rted to Sam. I think we are going to watch a much-awaited fight between Watt and Philip."

    Hearing this, Philip became stumped. He totally forgot this. He just wanted to make fun of Sam to vent his anger for the previous beating, he didn¡¯t think of Watt at that time.

    Even though, he is ate stage Novice and Watt is in middle stage, he is notpletely sure if he can defeat Watt.

    If that guy really became serious and fought him to death after he learnt this incident, there is no way he would escape unscathed.

    The main thing is, he couldn¡¯t even kill him and even if tried, he is pretty sure how Sam is going to react, even if thoughtse to his mind, he might as well start making his funeral preparations.

    "Guys, you see... We are such close friends; we have to help out each other, right? Be a dear and just forget about the whole situation and then we all can live happily. How is the proposal?"

    He shamelessly begged after envisioning the situation.

    "HAHAHAHAHA..."

    Jack and Kelly burst intoughter. The batch went to the estate as theyughed and chatted. This is the first time; the group was carefree in a while.

    When, Sam rejected their request to help and even not giving them any suggestions, they began to panic. They felt that they have being carried by Sam and he must have been tired of it, so he gave up on them.

    Well, at least Kelly and Jack thought so. But they don¡¯t have any misgivings, after all that is almost real. Sam really did help them a lot and now that he is busy, he decisively rejected.

    But after Philip¡¯s beating session, they understood what is really happening.

    Sam isn¡¯t sick of helping them, he is sick of helping them when they are not giving their best effort.

    Now that without Sam everything else is resolved they are finally at ease.

    At first, the general¡¯s men, hindered them and make them lose the first advantage.

    Later, Sam resolved the general¡¯s issue and the rest of the teams started picking on them. They didn¡¯t even have a proper ce for the restaurant.

    Now, Philip solved the issue.

    That night, Philip and Kelly didn¡¯t go to the impact crystal back yard. Watt is working with Sam¡¯s new Impact crystal collecting machine. The process is a lot easier and he can just freely farm the ore.

    Even the beasts are working.

    So, they can take rest asionally and don¡¯t have to work every day.

    The next day, the inner zone of the city, particrly the business zone where the restaurants are usually run was in turmoil.

    After the restaurant which is obviously much bigger than their previous ones, and one of the biggest even in the whole street, along with a bustling location, in short, this restaurant is one of the most suitable and profitable ones in the city, was transferred to Philip and the team, how would he leave this chance.

    He brought Mackey and the staff as they made preparations for a grand reopening. They are sick of opening and reopening the restaurants so, they clearly hoped this is thest one and this time they hoped to make a profit in this business.

    They made a hugemotion by loud announcements which made the noble kids almost vomit blood in anger.

    This was their restaurant after all.

    Philip even made bold statements that most unique cuisine in the whole southern star.

    Of course, those bold ims although attracted attention from the customers, it also made the remaining restaurants¡¯ owners to frown in displeasure.

    Because, they are already having a hard time due to the involvement of candidates now out of all the candidates this team seemed to be most troublesome. This conclusion was further solidified the food¡¯s taste as this is really the most unique cuisine.

    They never tasted it after all.

    This way, the team¡¯s business was back on the track.

 Chapter 180: Marching towards the Border

    Days passed.

    In the city, Philip and the rest are having a somewhat semi-peaceful business.

    The trouble-makers didn¡¯t dare to show up in the restaurant while business is going one because, in the first few days those that entered were so seriously injured that they wished they were crippled or even dead.

    The psychotic punishments of the eighteen-year-old kid were circted thoroughly within the candidates and also the troublemakers who work for money.

    The most frightened of all are definitely the five noble kids, they didn¡¯t even dare to look towards the restaurant.

    Their parents although angry didn¡¯t dare to make a move or instruct someone to do something as they were on a tight watch of Duke.

    So, they could only grit their teeth and swallow the resentment. Their children though, didn¡¯t even want to think of a way to get revenge and that fear mainly stemmed from the thought of getting into the hands of Sam.

    Even though, Philip and the rest are sometimes targeted, threatened and even ambushed outside the business hours, they still managed to pull through and after a month of hard work, they covered their losses and started to see some profits which is far more than they expected.

    For the next few months, their lives are pretty much uneventful other than the cultivation breakthroughs. Philip entered the peak stage of Novice while Jack is in eight stage same as Watt.

    Kelly though is only on verge of breaking though the middle stage Novice and entering thete stage.

    Now there is only a month away from the shift change.

    As the outside the camp is peaceful, inside the camp particrly Sam¡¯s battalion is full of battle spirit.

    There is only a month for war and the main focus of this war is on the candidates and among the candidates Sam was even more special as he is a battalionmander.

    His battalion soldiers are inpletely high spiritspared to the other soldiers. Because, their training results made them full with confidence. They are quite sure that they can win the war as yesterday Sam exined to them that they are only responsible for defending a border town and their opponents are also only a battalion of soldiers.

    When faced with equal opponents, these people are not afraid at all.

    Every soldier was given uniform with their name embroidered on it along with theirpany number, squad number and a number indicating their position in the squad. They all have same type of uniform and the main differenceid in the colour.

    Eachpany was given a different colour uniform.

    And the ranks are separated by the stars on their shoulders. Their uniforms are mostly based on normal modern-day soldier¡¯s dress but the pockets are mostly reduced as there is minimum need for them. Every soldier uses a spatial ring so there is no need to worry about them at all.

    Their uniforms arefortable and stylishpared to their former uniforms. They felt a sense of pride and unity after wearing them.

    Sam stood on the stage as he nced at the soldiers who are assembled. He could feel their urge to battle from up there, he smirked and said in a loud voice.

    "We are going to start out journey today towards the border town, since it is one of the closest borders to the southern star city.

    The town we are going to guard is the Red rock canyon town. This town is separated from our enemy empire by arge red rock canyon. We are going to face our opponents head on as there is limited space for the strategies.

    But still, I believe in the soldiers I trained. I want an overwhelming and clean victory. Even if there are a battalion of soldiers that we are going to face, I don¡¯t want to wait there for days.

    Do you guys want to stay in a border towm?"

    "No." There is a loud roar in unison.

    "So, we are going there finishing the battle as soon as we can and upy the enemy¡¯s town. Then all we have to do is handover it to the authorities ande back to the southern star city.

    Now, Depart."

    As he issued thismand, all the soldiers moved in a systematic manner in seven files. Eachpany has seven files having seven soldiers each led by apanymander in the front.

    Eachpany has a certain distance distinguishing themselves.

    As the battalion started marching, Sam floated over on the Harbinger as he held the map and observing the route.

    As the group isrge, the transportation is a bit difficult as it would be quite difficult to rear the beasts to do this, Sam is thinking if he should make trucks to make some money off of it. He can even cut down in the speed part and all the requirements would only be the space and mobility. It just has to cut this journey of one month to ten days and they would dly buy them.

    But he needs a lot of materials and production process. He has a n to settle down for a bit after thispetition is over and open a factory to make his products in the empire and make some big bucks.

    Before that, smaller business to earn enough money is good. Out of all titles he had Sam treasured his identity as a creator, that is why he obtained his artisan badge first as it is one closest to the creator¡¯s title.

    And what does a creator need the most, his creations to be used for most appropriate purpose and be appreciated for their cause. If he can obtain money from satisfying this need, that is the best-case scenario.

    So, for now he has to deal with thispetition and then he can concentrate on the business.

    The journey to the border town will take around twenty-seven days on foot. Even the remaining regiments are dispatching their troops to the respective camps. After these regiments moved to the camp only then would the existing border military will return to the main base.

    But out of all troops, Sam¡¯s battalion made quite a scene as the five hundred soldiers moving an orderly manner is not something the people would see often. Their formation and the intimidating movements along with the uniforms and the uniform sound of footsteps in sync made people sweat from a far.

    This all looked magnificent to the people as they watched the army passed by. Soon, the news spread. A special battalion marched in a formation towards the border town and theirmander is floating over them.

    The most surprised of all were the Duke and General Spark.

    They didn¡¯t think that Sam would be able to train a battalion strong enough to deal with the enemy¡¯s troop.

    That is the reason they dropped all kinds of people they don¡¯t want to deal with in Sam¡¯s battalion, simply put it is a battalion made of cannon fodder.

    But the reality pped them in the face in the hardest way possible.

    As per the agreement they shouldn¡¯t copy Sam¡¯s training methods but that didn¡¯t stop them from observing them.

    When the battalion of soldiers are kicking up a fuss by challenging the soldiers left and right, they finally understood that the situation is not exactly what they imagined.

    Then only they started observing Sam¡¯s training.

    All of his methods are unconventional. Particrly the drill training didn¡¯t even make any sense at all.

    The rest of the training methods didn¡¯t seem that special even if they are unconventional.

    But the results are saying otherwise. The squad battles are one of things that they hated the most. Because no squad in the army is a match for a squad from Sam¡¯s battalion.

    At first, they at least have some wins, but after a few days, there are no wins to speak of and the worst part is, Sam¡¯s squad used only most basic of the moves and all the squad members didn¡¯t even attack at all.

    This made the Duke regret the bet he made.

    The main aim is that Sam has to die in this battle and if he does, then they would not have anything to worry about.

    Even if Sam isn¡¯t dead, if he is defeated, he can make use of that point and pressure Sam is dissolving this grudge.

    For the past few months, Jim is lying in the bed without any treatment. The Pharmaceutical tower head didn¡¯t even bother to listen to Duke and thetter doesn¡¯t have any right to pressure him. So, all they can do is hope that Sam lost or better died.

    But the soldiers seemed to be quite well trained and a force to be reckoned with. This made thingsplicated and now he can only wish one thing and that is the army sent by enemy Duke is quite formidable and they can wipe the floor with Sam¡¯s battalion.

 Chapter 181: Red rock canyon

    The twenty-seven days marching of soldiers from southern star city to the Red rock canyon was spread all over the dukedom.

    The main source of this news is the traders. As they travel a lot, the news also spread in so many parts of the Dukedom.

    Some of them are in awe as they imagined the scene, some of them just brushed off the news as an exaggerated rumour.

    Anyway, one twenty-seventh day, the march of the battalion came to halt as they reached the Red rock town.

    The town has two main entrances and one of them is in the direction of the southern star city and the other one towards the Canyon where the military post is located.

    Even though, it is called a town, it is no bigger than a normal vige. The only reason it is called a town is because of the better economic state than a typical vige.

    This is one of the smallest border connections with the enemy empire. The Red rock canyon narrows down the path connecting the two empires making it a strategic location which can be a path into either of the empires.

    If one empirepromises, the other empire will easily upy the other town and if that happens, the bnce between the two empires might break.

    If any of the two empires wins in this location, the winner can use this chance to prate into the loser empire. Since, the border is small and the both sides are covered with Cliff making it almost inhabitable and difficult to send the troops from different directions, the losers will have only one way.

    That is to gather the troops and attack from their other cities. But before they could gather enough troops and clear the citizens to make an attack, there is a high chance that the winner¡¯s forces would enter their empire and they will have a strategic advantage.

    Even if the winner who entered the empire, has a hard time dealing with forces, he can use this canyon as a retreat path to back down easily. The other party¡¯s army wouldn¡¯t be foolish enough to barge into the canyon and follow them into their territory before defeating the army as there would be a high chance ofnding into a trap.

    For this reason, this became a delicate location due to the natural terrain around.

    Sam read this report given to him by Deputy General, he also read something interesting and that is, a few decades ago, the armies of the two dukes are heavily stated near this red canyon and town and the counter part of this town in the enemy empire.

    The civilians were forced into the dire states withck of food and enough space and a safe environment. The red rock canyon became the battle field and the two armies faced some serious casualties.

    But both the parties didn¡¯t budge and didn¡¯t want to give up on the ce, as the first one who manages to upy the red canyon and town of the other empire, they will have a strategic advantage.

    They can take control of the surrounding viges slowly or they safely retreat into the canyon which would be an ideal location to defend as they can bring their enemies to a head on fight.

    But the problem is when the two sides wanted to get it, they are wasting so many resources and lives, so they can onlye to consensus.

    They both retreated their armies and only left a battalion each. Both sides of the canyon are cliffs which divided the two empirepletely and the next city with connected border is more than a week away.

    So, whatever regiment that is in charge of that city¡¯s border will arrange a battalion here.

    There are some more delicate spots like this and they are all guarded in the same way.

    The enemy duke proposing this challenge will not only help his son to get some exposure from those people behind the scenes but also recognition from the emperor by resolving the stalemate in this ce.

    Sam has to say that this n is amazing, the only variable is the win or loss of the battle.

    If the n really failed, then the life Duke¡¯s son be at stake.

    So, Sam felt that there might be something else going one behind the scenes.

    Will the Duke really leave his son to die in this ce?

    Will he really not care about this?

    Sam felt that it is highly unlikely, but Duke still sent his son to the battle, there are only two possibilities, the Duke is so confident that they are going to win this battle or the Duke might think of a backup n to save his son even if he lost.

    Sam is thinking on what might be the case. He knew that, even if the battle is an opportunity for him to get the points for assignment, it is also a high-level risk.

    He is an enemy of general and he more or less pissed the Duke off and even messed up their army. So, they might hold quite some grudge.

    Even though, Duke¡¯s proposal might sound like an opportunity, Sam thought otherwise.

    The duke could have sent Nichs or any other person who is on close terms with him, better he can even send Zeke or Blue fire.

    After all, this is an opportunity to amass the points. If they really won, they can hoard enough points to leave the second ce in dirt and if they lost, the duke can sugar coat the words by saying that the candidates bravely led the troops and tried his best.

    But sending Sam, who is their enemy, there might be only two cases and one is that they are trying to curry favour Sam or they want Sam to lose here and die. Sam felt that the second option is most likely.

    He shook his head and sent Zoi termites and four shadow mice out.

    As Sam expected the remaining two couples also started expecting soon after he took care of the first one. And soon ten new shadow mice joined the family.

    Now the parents are still teaching and taking care of their children, now Sam can only make use of the four young ones.

    Their jog now is to see, if there is any tampering down to the terrain.

    Generally, there is a restriction that both parties shouldn¡¯t do anything to the terrain. If the canyon copse, the connection between two empires would be lost, turning a strategic location into a dead end, which will anger the emperors.

    After a whole night of scouting and making sure that there is no underhanded scheme involving the terrain, he was relieved, he retired for the day.

    For the next three days, Sam only has to prepare his soldiers for the battle and after three days, they would have to fight and by the fifth day, Sam want to start the return journey.

    He doesn¡¯t want to wait here, test waters, make strategies and everything.

    Honestly a battle involving only two battalions means a thousand people, for Sam this isn¡¯t a war at all.

    And he is highly confident that his soldiers will win and there is a high chance that they are going to win with zero casualties.

    Even if the other party has whole army full of Novice elites who are individually stronger than the his soldiers, he can still confirm that it was his win.

    Because, the main strength of the Sam¡¯s army lies in the teamwork which was drilled into them until it wasmitted to their muscle memory.

    But he has only one concern and that is if there are any shady means involved, there is a high chance that the soldiers might be in danger, which he didn¡¯t want to happen.

    So, for the next three days, the four mice and the termites and even locusts are in full time watch mode.

    They didn¡¯t even bother to enter the enemy¡¯s army, rather they are only responsible for watching the canyon.

    That¡¯s it.

    Fortunately, there is nothing wrong with terrain and there is only one way that something might happen and that is a conspiracy which involves the army of the enemy or some hidden experts arriving.

    On the day of the war, before dawn, the soldiers are already awake and marched their way towards the mouth of the canyon. On the other side of the canyon more than two thousand meters away, they could see their enemy empire also preparing for the war.

    At this moment, a Great mage came towards Sam.

    This guy is one of the supervisors of this battle.

    There are five Great mage experts from both sides and these ten people are here to supervise the match so that nothing against the rules will happen.

    "I hope you know the rules. In this battle even if you are killed, we wouldn¡¯t interfere. The most we can do is carry your body back and give it a proper burial with the rest of the soldiers.

    The same goes for the other army, their Great mages also won¡¯t get involved.

    We are only here to keep a watch at things and make sure that no party breaks the rules.

    That being said, I do hope you will win."

    As the supervisor said, he extended his hand for a hand shake, which Sam returned.

 Chapter 182: Peac.o.c.k

    After the whole battalion was assembled, Sam and the main supervisor who just talked to him walked towards the midpoint of the canyon, where they would meet with the other party.

    Sam looked at a youngster who seemed to be in his early twenties and also a Novice at peak stage in a luxurious battle attire, with a high-quality armour of rank 4.

    Behind him stood a Great realm cultivator who is the supervisor from the other side.

    The Supervisor is an early stage Great realm cultivator and is he is in histe thirties.

    After the both parties met, the supervisors exchanged the doc.u.mental agreements, which has the seals of Dukes which states that the town of the loser would be in the winner¡¯s control and the loser cannot attack the winner and try to grab the town back until the eight months which means before the next war meant for testing the candidates.

    Sam was quite intrigued by this doc.u.mental system in this type of civilisation and particrly between two empires.

    In modern earth, there are simr treaties between various nations, but there is an international court and United nations to question the deal breaker.

    But who has that right and power in this world? Sam has yet to see them and for now there is only one group that Sam suspected, the people who are controlling thispetition.

    Anyway, Sam didn¡¯t think much about the issue and right now his focus is on the young man in front of him.

    This guy gave Sam a serious and most disgusting first impression. Rich and arrogant. Sam is even thinking if the whole world consisted of these guys. Wherever he went, he would at least on of this kind.

    The young man is looking at Sam as if he cannot wait to move away from him ce and it is his misfortune to breath the same air as Sam.

    He is way past a normal rich second-generation kid.

    After the brief exchange of the supervisors they then came back to the positions and Sam¡¯s supervisor spoke first.

    "Your battle is apetition between your two armies, the winner will be decided, if the one party surrenderspletely with no one willing to fight and that includes themanders which is you two.

    Or there is other way and that is if either of you two dies first, then the remaining one will be the winner.

    You can fight along with your troops or you canmand them from behind, that is your wish. But the main thing is the supervisors wouldn¡¯t interfere, otherwise it would be a massive breach of the rules.

    They are only here to see if any of you are using any forbidden means.

    Both of you may exchange a word if you want."

    Even though, Sam didn¡¯t have much of an impression on this guy, he still extended his hand to for a hand shake. After all, this is apetition not some life and death enmity. Sure, the soldiers might die, but they will have to face this situation even if not for thispetition.

    These two nations are warring for decades.

    But the reaction of the opponent didn¡¯t surprise Sam at all.

    "Punymoner. Do you really think that you are worthy to shake my hand? You must be dreaming if you think that you are my equal just because southern star Duke sent you here. I am of noble birth and I wouldn¡¯t even touch a strand of hair from a person of filthy blood like you."

    As he said, he turned his head away and left.

    Sam didn¡¯t take it to heart and only smirked to himself. His expectations were spot on. He is not just arrogant, he is a border-line racist, but his racism depended on his noble status not of colour ornguage.

    That means, everyone who is not a noble is filth to him.

    Sam smiled coldly as he thought of the expression this proud peac.o.c.k [1] will have after the battle and that won¡¯t be long.

    "You can begin the war as soon as you can."

    The supervisor said to Sam.

    Sam nodded and without speaking he took out Harbinger and disappeared in a sh.

    The Peac.o.c.k and his supervisor didn¡¯t notice this as they are too busy with their self-centred pride filled moment of humiliating Sam.

    Sam is back to the soldiers¡¯ temporary station in a minute. As soon as he came, he said in loud voice.

    "I am not going to give you guys any strategy and I don¡¯t think you need one. I trust my way of training you and I believe you already know how to defeat them without my advice.

    One thing I do want to say is, one day. I want the battle to be finished by today and I want to have dinner in the mansion of that town¡¯s head.

    So, begin."

    Sam said these words and as soon as he did, the soldiers started marching rapidly. It cannot be called as marching but more like running, but they are doing that too in an orderly fashion.

    The red rock canyon.

    It is around 700 meters wide but the space between the two cliffs is still filled with uneven rocks. The distance between the two armies right now is around two thousand five hundred meters. If not for the improved eyesight of the cultivators, they wouldn¡¯t even be able to see each other.

    Sam¡¯s army rapidly approached as they observed the surroundings. The earth elemental and the wood elementals are mostly looking around and their minds are working on high speed.

    The red rock is not that hard but not soft either. If they are fortified with spiritual energy, they can take around two hits from a normal Late stage Novice.

    As for flora in the area, there are mostly shrubs with a lot of thorns. There is not much greenery around, but these shrubs which are short and almost looked dried are full of thorns.

    They are having different thoughts and how to utilise the terrain to their absolute advantage.

    On the other side. Peac.o.c.k is only halfway through the distance towards his station, but he could hear the sound and feel the vibration of running.

    When he and the supervisor curiously turned back, they were stunned.

    The whole battalion is intimidatingly marching towards them in an orderly fashion, but with force and battle intent surging. They could feel the excitement in the soldiers.

    Only after a few seconds did the peac.o.c.ke back to his senses and he immediately panicked. The supervisor beside him was also shocked and immediately ran towards the nearby cliff as he climbed upwards.

    All the supervisors are on the either side of the cliff as the observed. They are mainly here to check if they are using some forbidden tricks exclusive to this match and those are, Great realm cultivators, the usage of high-level inscriptions and formations, they can only use the second rank items.

    Only the candidates, which means Sam and Peac.o.c.k have some privileges of using some life saving measures.

    Peac.o.c.k immediately started moving, he seemed to be a Warrior. He ran as fast as he can and he is using a movement technique.

    When he was near his soldier¡¯s station and they were in his audible range, he shouted.

    "Immediately move, the enemies are attacking all of you move."

    The Soldiers are stillzing around a bit.

    One of the reasons is that they are an elite squad of Novices trained by the Duke himself. They are a part of Duke¡¯s special regiment and they have intel from their spies that Sam is training the soldiers himself, so they are a little over-confident.

    Another reason is, generally the wars wouldn¡¯t be this abrupt and direct. Since, the cultivators are powerful and if they are underestimated the casualties will be severe. So, both sides have a tacit understanding and will test the waters with some small battles.

    Duels between individuals, squads,panies. All these are normal and these are the main reasons that War goes on for that many days.

    These small tests will not only make them dy the time, but also make themanders on both sides think and estimate the enemy¡¯s strength.

    Sometimes, a side will deliberately send weaker opponents to make the other party over confident and catch them by surprise.

    Sometimes, one party will have weak overall strength and they will deliberately send their trump card soldiers to bluff in the duels.

    In this way, there are way too many possibilities, which will make the people think and they don¡¯t dare to make a full-scale attack unless they confirmed the enemy¡¯s strength either estimation or spying.

    But Sam didn¡¯t feel like waiting. At first, he wanted to entertain the other party by making a couple of duels possible, but after that peac.o.c.k opened its feathers and started looking down on him. He lost his interest.

    After all, how dare a peac.o.c.k look down on a Roc just based on its looks. The Roc is the one that rules the sky and a Peac.o.c.k is just a small part of it.

    Foot notes:

    1: Peac.o.c.k from the saying Proud as a Peac.o.c.k. Describes a Vain and self-centred person who is proud of himself for nothing of substance.

 Chapter 183: Sams Battalion

    Sam might seem petty and he might be stooping low by acting like this. But he is also a normal human being. He is not a bigger man, who associates the other party¡¯s condescension to their immaturity and him ignoring them makes him more mature and a good human being.

    He doesn¡¯t want to be that good human being and wait for karma to do the work for him, he pays back every debt himself.

    In fact, he felt that him entertaining the other party by following the normal procedure of some, one vs one duel, beneath him. After all, he needs an equal to y, but the other party is clearly not at least in his mentality of looking down on people.

    So, Sam is not going to bother with these rules and let all his soldiers loose. He followed them from a distance on his harbinger as he observed their movements.

    He needs to make sure that they wouldn¡¯t be affected by any of the underhanded tricks or any other traps that might have beenid by the enemy. He wants this war to be won without a single casualty and he is going to make sure that happens no matter what.

    He followed the soldiers with hundred meters distance as he looked over.

    From the other side, the Peac.o.c.k¡¯s soldiers also started moving forward. Seeing the confident march of their enemies, they are hesitating whether to go head to head or to makend and defend.

    The man who seemed to be the Deputy of the Peac.o.c.k asked.

    "Young Lord, what should we do?" He was given orders before to follow whatever the peac.o.c.k says, so he is asking it. Even though, he knew that he will be better leader than the young lord, he still has to obey.

    After all, this ce is for the young lord to show off.

    But Peac.o.c.k is in full Panic mode.

    ording to what his father said, there would some one on one challenges and then the squad challenges to estimate, the enemy¡¯s strength.

    This way they can decide to make an all-out attack or make somepany level skirmishes and so on. But thismoner is not following these things, he just let his five hundred soldiers loose.

    "I.... I don¡¯t know." The peac.o.c.k stuttered as he answered the deputy. Sam¡¯s soldiers are already half way and his soldiers currently covered the half of their half way. So, within few minutes they would meet.

    No matter what they did now, they are going to fight the battle in their half which is a bit disadvantageous to them.

    The Deputy shook his head and said.

    "Young lord, I suggest you stay in the back and near the town gate. If you agree, I will take themand and if anything happens, you can retreat and defend with the remaining soldiers who will follow you back into it.

    As long as you guys are alive there is still hope forpetition."

    The Peac.o.c.k nodded his head and immediately moved as if he received a new lease on life. Looking at this behaviour Deputy only shook his head even more.

    A coward like him who is afraid to face apletely new situation in a war, how can he be fit to lead an army. He should have just stayed put in his mansion and be sheltered until he inherited his father¡¯s position.

    Why bothering to a war zone?

    As he thought of this, he looked at the rapidlying army.

    He then looked at the floating young man hovering above his army with a golden coloured bow.

    Even though, this young man has confidence, he didn¡¯t have enough experience by sending his army like this, it would be difficult if his army was to face some difficult situation. After all, there is only one retreat route and it would quite difficult to defend while retreating.

    He shook his head again and thenmanded the soldiers.

    "Defensive formation.

    This would be the ending line and they shouldn¡¯t advance past this. Defend this line with your lives. Let us defend for our victory." His voice was lour and clear and even Sam could hear it. All the soldiers started making defensive formations.

    Their spirits are high.

    Sam observed the crowd and he saw that the Peac.o.c.k is nowhere to be seen on the front line, he smirked again. His guess was right.

    He sent some termites to keep track on that Peac.o.c.k so that he wouldn¡¯t escape. He is determined about this war and if any unexpected things or tricks happened, which he felt that would definitely happen, he prepared several other things to cope with the problem.

    He has estimated more than ten scenarios where his clean sweep could go wrong and he prepared enough arrangements for these ten scenarios.

    Soon, the two armies met. The defence of the enemy is quite good.

    Sam looked at his soldiers with rxed expression, he has faith in his army.

    They are doing exactly what he taught and the first thing in this scenario is to test the extent of the defence of these guys.

    The defensive formation of the enemy soldiers is mainly focused on fending the attacks and make it a long duration battle, a battle of endurance. Their earth element users are in the fore front as they made the trenches and walls which would defend their army along with the warriors helping them taking on the attackers.

    The second line of defence is mainly of few attackers and semi defence users like water and wood. Thest line of defence is full of the main attackers,prised of many elements including the fire, wind, lightning.

    But Sam¡¯s soldiers are dauntless. Right now, they are inpany battle mode and the first thing they did is the main attackers attacking the first line of defence with their basic attacks to test how strong they are.

    The warriors didn¡¯t even act yet as they spread around with the remainingpanies.

    After gauging the extent of defensive strength and the counter attacks from the main long-range attackers from second line and third line.

    They decided their next step.

    There are some Javelin users throwing these javelins as the counter at them from the third line which has some chance of disrupting their attack pattern and the warriors who are in the front line supporting the earth users are the weakest points in the whole defence line.

    Since, the other party only focussed on defence their earthen walls are quite solid and being held up by thebination of all earth element users is making it harder for them.

    So, the next step Sam¡¯s soldiers thought of is entering this defence line through the weakest point. The warriors.

    Just like that there were concentrated projectile attacks like wind des and fire balls on the warriors. The attacks didn¡¯t even touch the walls and forts like they expected, this made the Deputy frown, but seeing that the attacks are most basic ones, he was still thinking on what to do.

    But he didn¡¯t notice, the wood element users and the earth element users making some movements as the attackers made their move on the warriors.

    Some areas in the ground started having some changes, the red rocky terrain started protruding with some small brick like structures, in centre of which there was a hole big enough to fit a foot.

    The movement of the warriors from the other side were suddenly impeded by the small rocky irregr protrusions which are popping out randomly and the holes hidden at the centre of the protrusions, making some of them struck.

    With this small distraction, before they knew it, the attacks came at them. All of them are mostly focused on their vitals. The wind des targeting their necks, eyes, the fire balls aimed at their faces and heart.

    The Deputy observed the small anomaly in which his warriors are being taken down, before he could observe closely, Sam¡¯s soldiers started prating into the formation and they are moving in the form of squads.

    Their next target is taking down of the earth users while fending off the second line.

    The Deputy noticed that the defence is going to crumble andmanded.

    "Second line and first line, eliminate the intruders first. Warriors stay defensive and don¡¯t move from your posts, earth users provide cover to the warriors and take some heat from them make sure that they don¡¯t advance further."

    He is in the third line and he is on top of a temporary watch tower. He observed the battle seriously. The first thought he had after watching Sam¡¯s soldier¡¯s performance is that he is wrong about his assumption of the other party being inexperienced.

    The strategy ispletely unconventional and new. He had led the same battalion for quite some battles. The cultivator¡¯s wars always tended to on the simple side without much tricks. He used this formation many times but all of them always targeted at the earthen wall.

    Because, even if they take down the warriors, the entry into the inner part will be minimal and at most a squad can enter before the gap was filled. The squad who entered will be dead as they would be surrounded by quite some people.

    This can be called a trap, but for some reason, he had a bad feeling that these squads of Sam¡¯s battalion shouldn¡¯t enter this and consequences wouldn¡¯t be good.

 Chapter 184: Sams Battalion II

    The Deputy¡¯s feeling was right. It really is bad idea to let the squads inside their formation because, as the second line and the earth users focused on three squads that entered, they didn¡¯t notice that the rest of the battalion¡¯s earth element users and wood element users are doing something.

    Earth element users ced their hands on the walls, while the wood element users ced their hands on the ground and both parties closed their eyes.

    And before they knew it, there is a huge change in the front line.

    The earthen wall made of Red rock suddenly underwent a metamorphosis.

    The earth element users responsible for maintaining the wall felt the change but before they could react, the ground under their feet started showing changes, they felt that their feet and legs being attacked by numerous sharp objects.

    When they looked down, they saw the shrubs in the surroundings all started growing to their maximum and size and their thorns became fortified by the wood element energy prating their skin and making them distracted.

    And this distraction changed the course of the battle.

    The Red rock wall, changed the shape and before they knew it, there are several gaps and the wall started moulding itself into small room around the earth element user and before they could react, numerous spikes made of the sharp rocks protruded inside killing them.

    From this one situation more than half of the earth users died and the other half who reacted fast enough were seriously injured bing unfit for the battle.

    The healers started helping some people with the protection of the second line soldiers.

    Right now, the first line ispromised.

    Deputy was in shock at what happened. As soon as he saw this scene, he immediatelymanded.

    "Go to a full-on mode, don¡¯t drag the fight. They don¡¯t even have a single casualty, try to do as much damage as you can and slowly retreat towards the town. We will defend the town no matter what."

    As he said this, he looked at Sam, who is pretty rxed. He didn¡¯t see Sam giving a singlemand since the battle started.

    The soldiers attacked on their own, there is not even a single strategy or order from the youngmander.

    He has thoughts if this battalion is a special elite army trained by some expert in the dukedom and they have lent it to Sam just for the sake of winning. After all, they are the same. If not for the Duke they would never be under this Young Lord¡¯smand.

    Deputy still looked at the battle. He is observing the attack patterns of the Sam¡¯s soldiers.

    He waspletely amazed, he noticed that there are no energy consuming attacks from those soldiers.

    All the attacks are done with minimum energy usage and simplest of them. The attacking speed, control and lethality are being carefully controlled.

    Particrly, the earth and wood element users are the ones that are quite intriguing. They are not even trying to make some serious damage to the soldiers. They arepletely focused on defending andying traps.

    He never thought, that even the shrubs can be this dangerous. Generally, the wood users, carry some special seeds which are of various vine type nts.

    These seeds are formed by various experimentations from a special branch of pharmaceutical tower. The Herbology. They study in improvement of various herbs to increase medical effects and also try to find ways to increase the production of these herbs.

    These types of vine species arepletely idental. They are vines which will grow rapidly and have very small life span, they can grow in very harsh environments provided that they have sufficient wood element energy.

    But Sam¡¯s soldiers are not using them. Deputy didn¡¯t know whether they had them.

    But if they really had them and yet to use, this is quite dangerous. He now understood that all their attack patterns and war techniques are useless. He saw for the first time the best coordination between different element users in a single squad.

    The most painful thing is the warriors who are on a constant move. They are not only making it hard for them to target them, they are even assisting all the remainingpanies and particrly the healers.

    The healers of the Sam¡¯s battalion are right in middle of battle, yet they are not being attacked at all. To be precise, they are being protected to that extent.

    When anyone is injured, these warriors and the earth element users are safely escorting the healer to the injured and let them heal.

    There are more than hundred casualties on Peac.o.c.k¡¯s side, yet Sam¡¯s side didn¡¯t even have a seriously injured person.

    Their usage of spiritual energy is frugal and they can take a longsting battle.

    Even when someone is having a deficit in spiritual energy, they will get near the nearest earth element user and take out a neutral energy cell to recharge quickly. The best advantage of the energy cells, they can switch to attack with the energy within the cell at any given movement.

    This became the ideal team. They are good as squads,panies or even the whole battalion.

    The Deputy waspletely envious.

    Peac.o.c.k who is even far behind the Deputy didn¡¯t know what is happening. He could see his soldiers being killed, but he couldn¡¯t understand the lethality and severity of the teamwork that Sam¡¯s team is providing.

    The Deputy is brainstorming on how to neutralise the situation. He knew that there are only two ways, either give ast life and death struggle or retreat to the town and defend.

    Either way, he has to take down some people first.

    So, he gave an order.

    "Target the healers. Third line, join the battle."

    As he said those words, the battle immediately became intense. The Deputy who was on the watch tower picked up a Javelin and aimed.

    The lightning energy surged as he threw the Javelin into the battle.

    Even though, the soldiers dodged it narrowly, the Javelin struck the ground like a thunder and made it tremble along with disrupting the order.

    Not only him, many other Javelin throwers are also doing the same. The worst part is their soldiers are also being affected.

    Sam frowned at this and he observed the directions of the javelins. They are being thrown at the healers. The earth element users are doing a great job, but these javelins are making them consume the energy faster.

    Just from one look, he could understand why they didn¡¯t use these kinds of attack earlier even though they used javelins before.

    It is like a Kamikaze effort. Their side although not deaths, are also suffering from the disorder.

    Sam looked at the people in an elevated spot in the back.

    He nocked an arrow and pulled the string of the Golden crescent.

    *Whoosh*

    The arrow made a hole through the forehead of a person who was about to throw a Javelin.

    Sam didn¡¯t use other elemental energies it is pure spiritual energy and it still produced its lethality.

    Next was the whistles of the arrows flying are bing more and more and every arrow took a life.

    The Deputy noticed this, he didn¡¯t think that Sam would also be this lethal, he estimated the other party¡¯s strength as same as the young lord¡¯s but he is dead wrong.

    They are very different. Just this archery level is enough to shake fear in enemies and judging from the rxed expression this is not even half of it.

    He cleared his mind and decided.

    He will give onest try and he can make it, he will proceed with a head on battle otherwise, he would retreat with his army and will defend the town from inside.

    He took out another Javelin, this one has a lot of runes on it, he closed his eyes, as he channelled a lot of lightning elemental energy into it.

    Meanwhile, the rest of the Javelin throwers are terrified by Sam and are having a hard time coping with this and seeing their leader use this special trick, they abandoned the Javelins and started defending, even the soldiers of Peac.o.c.k noticed their deputy and also went on defensive as they moved backward slowly.

    Their moves are as discreet as possible, but Sam noticed this. Then he sensed something and looked at the watch tower where Deputy stood.

    The temporary wooden roof and the walls of the observation spot were demolished immediately as the spiritual energy surged like crazy.

    Sam could sense the spiritual energy being drained from the leader and not only that there are some more lightning elemental users adding their energy into it.

    This way, there wouldn¡¯t be any life-threatening danger for the leader after throwing and to be safe there are two healers standing behind him ready to heal.

    Sam frowned. He knew that whatever that is happening is going to be trouble. The soldiers are still battling and even they noticed the energy, but they are still confident when they saw that Sam¡¯s expression although frowning was still a bit nonchnt, so they pressed on.

    Deputy opened his eyes and looked at Sam. The Javelin contained around three novice¡¯s full energy. This attack will be like a thunder strike from the sky. He was ready to throw, but he has yet to see a hint of panic on Sam¡¯s face.

 Chapter 185: Javelin Exchange

    Sam and the deputy although far away, are looking at each other, both had serious expressions on their faces.

    The soldiers from Peac.o.c.k¡¯s side are full on defence mode, they knew what the attack would bring.

    Sam shouted the firstmand since the beginning of the battle.

    "Come back a little, disengage from the battle and make defensive formation"

    The soldiers obeyed and came back, they started making a defensive formation with the earth element users as the main nodes and the rest as the secondary nodes.

    One could vaguely see arge mountain shape being formed from the connected spiritual energy.

    Sam knew that it would be difficult to handle the attack if the soldiers are dispersed, they will be a lot of targets and the deputy will have the choice to select.

    But if all of them are gathered in one spot, there is only one target that. It might be easier to attack but it is also easier to defend.

    Sam looked as the Deputy slowly and painfully lifted the javelin as he aimed at the group who currently in the formation.

    The lightning currents are crackling with purple colour. This moment, Sam understood the type of attack, it is not only an area of effect skill but it is also quite damageable to the point of contact.

    Deputy took a deep breath and threw the Javelin. Sam also moved in a sh on his harbinger.

    He is so fast, that he could feel the javelin moving in slow motion.

    He could see the sharp tip moving in the direction of the centre of the formation, even though with the formation, there would be less damage than the deputy expected, at the point of contact, the soldiers who are present there would definitely die.

    The soldiers are circted their spiritual energy. The attack¡¯s energy is very lesspared to that energy, but they could feel that the people who are near the attack point will definitely suffer.

    They couldn¡¯t do much.

    This is jus like the lightning striking a mountain, even if the mountain remains stable at least on the point of strike there would be some decent damage.

    But before the javelin could hit them, Sam arrived. He stood right in front of the Javelin when it was about to change the trajectory and move towards the soldiers. His right hand glowed with golden light. The light element fusion. He moved his arm sharply and caught the Javelin¡¯s pole right below the tip.

    *BOOM*

    Even though, the lightning cannot affect the light, the impact was stillrge enough and the residual force started pushing Sam backwards.

    He started using the thrust from the Harbinger to counter the force and toe to halt. The Javelin swept him in the air as he moved backwards and backwards.

    The ground below him was destroyed, there is arge cloud of red coloured dust, that is floating all over and the loud sound of tail wind from their motion.

    After moving more than five hundred meters, Sam finally came to halt. His Harbinger exhausted one half of the energy cells.

    His vest inside was shredded into pieces. As held the Javelin down, his right arm started spurting blood. It was badly maligned and the outeryer of the skin waspletely cleared.

    His bone broke, and his muscle fibres were torn like threads.

    Only his ck feather coat didn¡¯t suffer. Thebined defence of the Golden sun crow feathers and the ck meteorite sand in the rank 3 are quite something.

    He used his left hand and rolled up his right sleeve. His right hand cannot be used. It was almost crippled.

    All the soldiers looked at Sam in awe. That is the attack from multiple Novice cultivators emptying their spiritual core at once. That too, the lightning, one of the most destructive elements. Even the Deputy was stunned. He didn¡¯t expect that Sam would take the attack with single hand.

    Right now, the deputy himself was barely capable of standing and he was being healed while he was absorbing the spiritual energy his arm waspletely scorched and torn. This is the situation of attacker, but the situation of the defender is much better than himself.

    He felt like he never truly understood the attack at all. This ispletely beyond hisprehension.

    His soldiers are already moving into the town and someone came here and carried him and the remaining people who are exhausted.

    This was his n, Sam¡¯s soldiers have impable team work, their techniques are unique, they cannot battle them in direct confrontation, so the only thing they could do is, resort to other means.

    So, he used this big attack as diversion so that they could have enough time to retreat to the town. He felt happy when he saw the extent of the damage on Sam¡¯s arm. This made him feel like the attack worth it.

    But one person was quite indignant and that was the Peac.o.c.k.

    "Why are we retreating? Isn¡¯t the attack sessful? Why are we going back? Just make another attack like that and kill that guy."

    Deputy came out of his thoughts as soon as he heard the shouts.

    "Young lord, we cannot win in a head on battle. And that guy is notpletely vulnerable, only his arm was broken. And his army doesn¡¯t even need hismands. They are out of our league."

    "Do you mean, we have to be afraid of that filthymoner and his soldiers? I don¡¯t think so. You are the elite army trained by my father. The enemies are the soldiers only trained by a novice for a little over six months, what are you good for?"

    Well, this little peac.o.c.k clearly forgot how fearful and terrified he was when he saw the marching of Sam¡¯s soldiers.

    Deputy lost his interest to argue and just said a few words.

    "We have to leave."

    Sam and his soldiers just looked at them without so much as of a movement. His arm is still bleeding.

    The Deputy was thest one being escorted by a group of elites.

    Everyone else already entered and they took posts on the town wall.

    Sam looked at the Deputy who is staring right back at him, the healers temporarily stopped the healing.

    As Sam looked at the Deputy, his calm look changed to the one that of an evil smile.

    Then the Deputy saw the most astonishing scene, he ever saw in his life.

    The right hand of Sam that was holding the Javelin was covered with the faint golden glow and right as he watched, Sam¡¯s bones got realigned, his muscle fibres got reattached, even the skin started forming, before he knew it, the arm was as good as new and he could say that just by how the grip on the Javelin has tightened.

    Sam took a look at the runes on the Javelin after confirming that it was a neutral rune which is mostly for condensing and holding the spiritual energy for the attack, he took out an energy cell of fire element. This cell is as big as hand ball.

    As held, both of them, the Javelin was covered in intense golden mes.

    "Hurry, Hurry." Deputy shouted to his subordinates.

    He wasst in line along with some elites and some healers so that they could note down any movements from enemies.

    But what he witnessed made him a bit afraid, he had a bad premonition that the attack would be quite a blow.

    Sam didn¡¯t even flinch when they are speeding up. His targets are still there.

    Within few seconds, the whole energy cell was emptied and the whole javelin was engulfed in golden mes within which one could even sense the heat from the red-hot metal which was on verge of melting.

    Sam raised his hand and with all his might threw the Javelin at the Healers.

    That¡¯s right, his target was the healers and the main target was the best healer who healed the Deputy.

    "Quick, move. Defend." Deputy shouted on top of his lungs.

    By this time, the rest of them also understood the danger. At first they ignored Sam, because they didn¡¯t expect for him to recover.

    Yes, they were amazed but they didn¡¯t think he would be a threat at the immediate moment.

    But the next thing they knew is the Javelin flew with a dazzling golden me and pierced through the shabby defence they put together and pierced through the heart of the healer and the surrounding area was burned to crisp. Around twenty members were burned to ashes immediately. More than thirty others were injured. The Deputy was one of those thirty and he is severely injured.

    The Peac.o.c.k, who saw this scene from the town wall was shocked. He is already indignant about the fact that they are retreating but now they are still being attacked.

    That too by a filthymoner. He was raged with fury.

 Chapter 186: Impact Cannon

    Sam didn¡¯t attack further, he just let them in. He has to upy the town to win or he has to kill the peac.o.c.k. But if he really did kill him from the long shot, how can he achieve his remaining goals. A lot of things are at stake with this war and he has to make it y ording to his wishes.

    And letting them to go into the town is one of his wishes. This was he can showcase his newly made product and he can earn the big bucks from the southern star Dukedom. So, he is peaceful.

    But his counter part the peac.o.c.k is anything but peaceful.

    He is beyond angry. He looked at the Deputy along with thirty others being sent to a temporary tent for them to heal.

    It would take some time, Sam isn¡¯t any rush to attack, he just hovered with his arms crossed and his soldiers are also recuperating.

    The situation would have been ideal and most beneficial for the Peac.o.c.k¡¯s side, but peac.o.c.k just has to spoil it.

    He was now on the central watch post on the town wall, he looked at Sam and his soldiers with an incredibly hateful gaze.

    He opened his mouth as he shouted on top of his lungs.

    "How dare you, a filthymoner, stand against me? How dare you even put up a fight? You should have obediently surrendered as soon as you have seen my noble self. You even dared to fight and even hurt my army.

    I shall make you regret it,e in to the town if you dare."

    Sam was amused by this rant. He was thinking on where this peac.o.c.k got the guts to shout at him like that. After all, Sam¡¯s army just gave a great butt-kicking for them.

    But his question was answered immediately.

    "Don¡¯t be full of yourselves, just for this. You have yet to see my full might. Do you think, just defeating the army is enough, you might not know, in a war when defending a city, citizens can help the army in dire states."

    Sam¡¯s smile vanished. He didn¡¯t expect this to happen. He has to thank himself for not rushing into the town blindly. The second thought that came to his mind is that this guy is pretty stupid.

    Their n might be mixing the disguised soldiers into the citizens and they will attack Sam and his army as citizens. This is something he didn¡¯t expect at all.

    He thought, there might be some schemes but he never expected that there would this tant and open scheme.

    He observed his surroundings and noticed that no supervisor is objecting anything, so he this might not be against the rules or they might be even ignoring so that Sam could die.

    Sam felt like thanking this peac.o.c.k. This idiot is brainless enough to blurt out the n directly. If he just stayed mum, Sam and his army would have entered the gate sooner orter and the surprise attack would be almost unavoidable.

    But this peac.o.c.k spoiled his own ns.

    At this moment, the Deputy also heard the young lord¡¯s words and he clenched his teeth in anger and resentment.

    Having this backup n is not only underhanded and it is also the shame to their army. Here they are valiantly fighting with their lives on line and the opponents also respected that, now all those lost lives will lose the opponent¡¯s respect and if the word got out, rest of the army¡¯s too.

    After all, this is an agreement battle, with 500 vs 500. If they really did take citizens help that is a whole different thing, but if they deliberately kept the soldiers dressed as citizens, it is using a loop hole in agreement and in a way not honouring the deal.

    But he has no say in it.

    Outside Sam didn¡¯t say anything and said his soldiers to standby. Right now, they are anxious and angry. Even they can see through the peac.o.c.k¡¯s n.

    But since there is nothing much they can do even if they do get angry, they can only stay silent.

    Sam just hovered for a minute from left to right as if he was looking for something.

    After that, he ordered his soldiers to step back a little and then he took out something astounding.

    A cannon.

    This is new product. Actually, one of his new products. This cannon is same size of the old-time cannon. But it looked more like a turret.

    The base is a cuboidal short column which were mounted on small wheels. There is a barrel was not asrge as normal old days cannon, it is a bit slimmer and it was connected to the base. There was a lever in the base, so the barrel can be moved in vertical axis.

    And another lever on the other side, to move in the horizontal axis.

    the soldiers saw this for the first time.

    The whole cannon is heavy and cannot be used for normal close quarters, but this can be used for city wall defence and for attacking some ces like mansions or towers.

    Right now, he is going to use this to tackle the town hall. The Greyish ck metallic l.u.s.tre along with its robust structure amazed the spectators.

    He didn¡¯t stop there, he moved towards one spot to another and simrly dropped another nine cannons.

    After that, he asked all the fire users toe to the first cannon as he started demonstrating how to use them.

    He took out arge bullet shaped green coloured crystal. This is the shell for the cannon and this is made of impact crystals.

    He opened the back of the barrel and loaded the shell.

    After that, he pulled a lever, the third one other than the first two rods impaled themselves into the ground acting like the support from the bottom of the column.

    He ced his two arms on the either side of the barrel where there is a designated ce for cing the palms.

    He started channelling the spirtual energy which is obviously not his. This is from the energy cells that are ced inside the column.

    At the same time, he ced his feet on the bottom of the column which seemed like a foot rest.

    As soon as he ced his feet, the methane inside the column started entering some hollow pocket behind the shell in the barrel.

    In two seconds...

    *BOOM*

    With a loud noise and sh of Blue spark at the end of the barrel, the shell made its way outwards towards the town hall.

    The explosive nature of this special methane yed its role well.

    Within a second the shell reached the wall and

    *BOOM*

    Another explosion sounded, this time though, but this time, it is not of any fire type, this time it is a strong spiritual energy explosion and this is due to explosion of the shell made of the impact crystal.

    There was a gaping hole left in the town wall and many cracks started expanding.

    The impact crystal size and shape along with the distance of shooting as well as the methane explosion, these are the critical factors for this attack.

    The impact crystal will absorb any kind of physical impact and force. Sam made some experiments and urate calctions.

    The position he kept the cannon is the ideal position for this. In this way, the shell sized impact crystal after taking the impact from the explosion as well as the kic energy of the travelling has absorbed enough spiritual energy and that caused the explosion to ur.

    Right now, even if there is no wall at that point of impact it would have exploded.

    This is the ideal distance and this demo is for a normal loading of the gas into the chamber.

    This cannon even has various other modes so that they can vary the methane gas amount based in the distance of the target as well as the type of the target which influences the amount of impact the crystal would take up on crash.

    This way there is arge attack range for this cannon, but for now, he is not keen on exining this to his soldiers.

    All they need to know was to shoot from this position to copse the town wall.

    The fire type users immediately made their way towards their cannons after taking the spatial rings that contained the shells from Sam.

    Before the peac.o.c.k and his soldiers could make sense of the explosion caused by the shell, they are already barraged with the impact shells continuously.

    The wall of this town is quite sturdy as this was a critical war zone. But now that sturdy wall started showing the signs of copse at this moment.

    The soldiers positioned on the town wall are being affected by the attacks and the first full hole was made at this moment and that is the ce where Sam made the first hole.

    He came down from his cannon and removed the supports as he pushed the cannon a bit forward. Then he started his shooting again.

    Now, the shells started making its way inside the wall. Towards the town...

    {Please read Author¡¯s thought}

 Chapter 187: Chance

    The whole town on the Peac.o.c.k¡¯s side was in frenzy. Sam¡¯s shell which passed through therge hole in the wall,nded on the temporary military post doing quite some damage.

    By this time, the Peac.o.c.k and the soldiers are already trembling in fear. They didn¡¯t know what to do. They cannot directly attack them, as their strength is quite low and now with the addition of the impact cannons, they are even more hesitant to make a move.

    They don¡¯t know these are impact crystals, all they know is that shell is doing quite some damage to wall which is made to defend against thousands of soldiers.

    If they made a move and get hit by the shell directly... they didn¡¯t even want to imagine that.

    Particrly, Peac.o.c.k is terrified by the development. He just made a proud promation that there are more people inside the town and Sam cannot defeat him with his five hundred soldiers and now, Sam is not only destroying the town wall, he is also destroying the town without even entering.

    This time he is both angry and afraid and he also realized his mistake, he should have kept his mouth shut, he just wanted Sam to give up and tried to intimidate him by telling him about the trap.

    Now only, he realized how stupid he was. As he was thinking, the Deputy came out, his face is still pale and he seemed a little exhausted. He is already ashamed when he heard the n of the Peac.o.c.k, but after he heard the explosions, he felt that something was wrong and was about toe out.

    The Healers stopped him and only let him go after he was healed. But as he came out, he saw a shell dropping and destroying a nearby military post.

    He immediately climbed the watch station on the wall on which the peac.o.c.k stood, and looked at the situation. The cannons from a far and their expressions of delight when firing on shell after another, Deputy didn¡¯t even know how to react.

    He really wanted to smack the face of the young lord by provoking this madman.

    As the situation was going south, a supervisor suddenly made his way out of the nearby cliff. Sam gestured his soldiers to halt. This supervisor is from the Peac.o.c.k¡¯s side.

    Seeing this, the supervisor, who greeted Sam earlier came out and also started walking towards him.

    "I think you cannot use these weapons in this war. This war is test of the abilities between both you and the young lord and it is based on how well both of you will use the soldiers and citizens along with the surroundings.

    In short, this is a test for your abilities, you cannot just bring some new weapons from the duke¡¯s military and use them here."

    The supervisor from the Peac.o.c.k¡¯s side said with a serious expression. Sam didn¡¯t answer just yet and looked at his supervisor. Seeing that he isn¡¯t speaking at all and even trying to avoid Sam¡¯s gaze, he understood one thing.

    This supervisor is here only for namesake. Duke seems to have informed something to them.

    Sam turned back to the Peac.o.c.k¡¯s supervisor and said.

    "Well, these weapons don¡¯t belong to the southern star military. They are created by me and that too with in the past six months." As he said that he took out all his professional badges.

    This made the supervisor to swallow the words that he was about to say. He saw the rank 5 and pseudo rank 3 badges, he didn¡¯t even know how to react properly.

    "Is there anything else?" Sam asked with a smirk. He knew why the supervisor came. It is to help the peac.o.c.k and they wanted to find a loophole to remove the weapons.

    But it will not work. Sam already decided to not bother fighting head on anymore and just use his weapons he newly created to do the work for him. He is tired to deal with this peac.o.c.k.

    The Peac.o.c.k¡¯s supervisor was at a loss of word and left the ce, Sam them looked at his supervisor who is gulping nervously. He knew what the other guy was thinking. The Duke sent them for namesake. But he must have hid the fact about Sam¡¯s profession and also asked them to turn a blind eye if there is any foul y from the enemy.

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything; he will definitely deal with the Duke and get his paybackter.

    After the supervisors left, Sam didn¡¯t continue shooting. He floated over Harbinger and when he was about same height as the Peac.o.c.k and the rest, he said in a loud voice.

    "You better surrender, as you said the citizens can help the army in case someone invades the town, but at the same time, the invaders can make a move on the citizens too. I hope you guys don¡¯t want to go to that extreme. It will save both of us a lot of time and I might even let you guys alive."

    As soon as Sam¡¯s word resounded, the soldiers on the Peac.o.c.k¡¯s side are even hesitating. But before they could voice their opinions or discuss, the Peac.o.c.k already made another big and even the biggest mistake of his life.

    "YOU COMMONER BASTARD. HOW DARE YOU SPEAK TO ME LIKE YOU ARE BETTER THAN ME..

    $*^^&&%^**$^%^()*(*e&^^&)&**&(*^%&^t^(&&%(***^&%^."

    He let out a string of angry curse, but Sam didn¡¯t hear all of them, he is already looking at the peac.o.c.k as if he was a dead man after the first sentence, the rest of the insults doesn¡¯t matter to him at all.

    Sam didn¡¯t even reply and slowly descended. And went back to the line where cannons are ced.

    There are only ten cannons and they are ced wide with arge gap between them.

    Sam floated over his harbinger as he started taking one cannon after another. Now, there are a total of fifty cannons and the fifty fire element users from the Dragon Hawk tribe took one cannon each.

    The Deputy on the other side waspletely dumbfounded and he was ovee with fear.

    But this is not over at all, because Sam passed some space jade rings to the fifty members and said.

    "Use these after the town wall is copsed."

    After that he floated in the air again and stood with the Golden Crescent in his hands.

    He snapped his finger and for some reason in that still silence all the soldiers on Peac.o.c.k¡¯s side could feel the sound.

    And then... *BOOM* BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The cannons started firing immediately and the wall was bombarded with fifty shells at the same time.

    This time, the speed of shooting is also quite high, why is that so? Because the soldiers could tell from one look that Sam is angry and not just normal angry. He is out for blood. So, they didn¡¯t even think twice before using their fastest speed.

    Now most of the wall is in brink of copse only one portion was intact and that was the post where Peac.o.c.k and the Deputy are standing.

    Sam didn¡¯t ce the cannons in front of the main gate upon which the peac.o.c.k stood.

    He would deal with this Peac.o.c.k himself and pluck each feather. The shooter having fun as they enjoyed the impact cannon. But the soldiers on the other side are in a dangerous frenzy.

    The soldiers stationed on the wall are running for their live and they all ran towards the top of the gate.

    "STOP" The Deputy shouted on top of his lungs. Beside him the peac.o.c.k is trembling in fear, he is soaked in sweat.

    But his words have no effect.

    "WE WILL SURRENDER." He shouted again.

    Sam smirked and gestured to stop shooting.

    "And you have authority to decide that? There is only one chance I am going to give you. Hand over that guy and I will ept your surrender, you will get a chance to live, I won¡¯t even bother to deal with you. "

    "That is impossible."

    "Then consider I never asked."

    And the shooting began and soon the wall copsed in several ces and the town wasid bare.

    The shooter at that area changed the shells and ced loaded the cannon with a new one, he didn¡¯t see any changes in this new shell, but he used them as he was told.

    But after he shot, he saw what happened.

    The shell didn¡¯t reach the target, rather it exploded in the middle of the air, but some smaller objects came out of the explosion they are like some cross-bow bolts.

    That is all he can see, the people on the other side though can see, what is happening. The metallic bolts, hit the surrounding buildings with some serious damage.

    The buildings copse and as theynded, they exploded again.

    These are another kind of shells used for some scattered damage in a muchrger area.

    The shell is made hollow and there are some bolts made of the crystal inside the hollow area. After the outer shell exploded, they inner bolts will absorb the impact, and thennd on the ground absorbing the kic energy and the impact from the ground.

    The damage is severe than before and more random which makes it difficult to dodge.

    The Soldiers werepletely terrified and by this time the citizens are also terrified.

    They evacuated this area on the ount of war and when they heard the copse of the wall, they couldn¡¯t keep it to themselves and came towards the wall and the scene made them horrified. Their young lord was cowering in fear and the soldiers who hid in the disguise of citizens in particr and also stood in front of the crowd are having some serious expressions.

    They didn¡¯t expect things to turn out like this.

    "Kill Him, Kill Him." The Peac.o.c.k kept on muttering these words. But nobody cared.

    "I will say one more time on ount of citizen¡¯s lives, hand him over and you guys can leave."

    Sam said as he halted the shooting and pointed at the Peac.o.c.k.

    The citizens observed the effects of the cannon shells and particrly the second type and then they looked at the Peac.o.c.k.

    All of them are thinking rapidly...

 Chapter 188: Can you repeat that?

    This time, the extra soldiers in disguise has to take a step forward. They cannot just wait there. And some of them wanted to barge them with numbers and even the supervisors are thinking on how to react.

    They knew about the situation and this Duke¡¯s son although a jerk and a useless fool, he is still the favourite child of the Duke. If he was really killed here, then Duke might take their anger out on them.

    In fact, the extra soldiers in disguise are also for this type of scenarios.

    They even had some under the table deal with the southern star Duke....

    The Deal, is the southern star supervisors will turn a blind eye as long as they don¡¯t make it obvious and the glory of the Peac.o.c.k will be exaggerated and spread, in return the Red rock town will not be upied.

    After looking at Sam¡¯s performance Duke was even more worried about Sam taking action against them, so he made this deal...

    Right now, Sam is looking at the town citizens who are a bit away from the copsed town wall and then he diverted his attention towards the shivering peac.o.c.k and the Deputy.

    They are all thinking on how to deal with the situation, when a long spear was shot from the back of the crowd of citizens.

    The spear was covered in the wind energy and it was directed towards one of the cannons. Just from the energy Sam could see that it was work of a Great realm warrior mage but he seems to be in Level 1 or 2.

    Not much powerful.

    But Sam didn¡¯t move at all, just as the spear was about to hit the cannon, there are severalyers of defensive formations that appeared not only around the cannon but also the shooter. They are more than five low-level rank 3 defensive formations that he inscribed. They are more than enough to stop an attack from a middle stage Great mage.

    The shooter at the cannon was frightened but he didn¡¯t move because there was no order from Sam, this was ingrained into his bones, in a battle, he has to follow all the orders.

    At the same time, several other spears were also shot, some of them even shot towards him, but Sam didn¡¯t care, he swiftly dodged them and theynded behind him creating some decent craters.

    After a volley of unfruitful attacks, Sam started took out an arrow, he nocked it on the bow, the arrow¡¯s tip is somewhat glowing.

    As he stretched the bow string, he started drawing the energy from the energy cells of the Harbinger. As the arrow started glowing with the wind elemental energy, he aimed at a certain corner and released it at the same time as he shouted amand.

    "Fire."

    The arrow disappeared in an instant and it hit a person squarely in the chest at the back of the crowd as it made a long parabolic trajectory in the air.

    As soon as it hit that person, the spiritual energy explosion took ce. This is a special arrow whose tip is a small energy cell he made. He destabilized the energy cell before releasing it.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop there, he shot arrows after arrow while the cannons fired the shells. The Deputy is still conflicting on how to salvage the situation and the supervisors are also thinking on what to do next.

    The one who talked to Sam already passed the info that Sam is an expert in many professions and particrly the rank 5 badge is one that could deter them.

    Professions are important. They are essential for the cultivators and one had to respect those professionals.

    If Sam died in the battle normally, no one would say a thing but if he was killed unfairly, things would getplicated.

    It was okay if the information was sealed, but some many town¡¯s residents are here and the news will get out sooner orter which would make the artisans and other professions displeased.

    Many people pursue their professions and are proud of the status, respect and the protection it gives them. If these three things are invalid, what is the point of them being a professional and selling their services, they can simply use them for themselves andpletely hide them from the outside world.

    Which will make it hard for the normal cultivators.

    After all, if the news of Sam being sent to the war as part of thepetition and him being killed in not so fair means is already enough to shame the southern star dukedom and the empire, this will make the cultivators loose trust in the army and rulers.

    And if the person died is also expert and a genius in this many fields and was still killed in conspiracy, those in that professions will also despise them which they don¡¯t want.

    That is the reason, Duke only allowed slight and not so obvious traps and tricks. He didn¡¯t want to attract public outrage.

    Now they had to consider all these factors when dealing with Sam, but the time is tight. The cannon shells are making the whole ce chaotic. The citizens ran for their lives, and the cannons are slowly moving forward as they are closing into the city.

    Many soldiers in disguise who attacked Sam through spears are dead due to arrows and many normal citizens are also dying.

    Now the soldiers are close to abandoning their posts. Right now, they are not being targeted but the torment of the screams of agony and the chaos is making them loose their mind. They looked at the dead bodies, running citizens, destroyed house, everything is making them angry and despaired at the same time.

    They looked at Sam in trepidation and then at the Peac.o.c.k with determination, all of them are having the same thoughts. Even the deputy is having the same thought.

    Peac.o.c.k looked at the soldiers who has their eyes on him and immediately felt that something is going to happen to him.

    "NO, NO. YOU cannot hand me over. You cannot. My father is a duke, he will kill you all..."

    He started crying hysterically but the Deputy still caught him and another soldier near him also helped.

    They dragged him towards the cannon line up. Sam slowly descended. They threw the peac.o.c.k like a dog on the floor.

    Sam mmed his foot on the other guys shoulder making him prostrate in front of him, then he ced his leg on the back of his head and pressing his forehead to the ground as he said in an icy cold voice.

    "You called me something earlier, can you repeat that?" His voice was filled with killing intent and blood l.u.s.t he released without any boundaries. He let himself loose. All the surrounding people felt suffocated.

    They cannot help but divert their looks away from Sam and take deep breaths to calm down. Some even took some steps back so they could stay a bit far from him.

    All this happened when the killing intent is still directed at the Peac.o.c.k.

    Peac.o.c.k who is the prime target peed in his pants.

    Sam smirked and said in a cold voice that shook his soul.

    "You called filth didn¡¯t you, what makes you think you are noble than me, what makes you think you are superior than me?

    Your Birth as a Noble?

    Your father¡¯s strength?

    Your army?

    But none of them are stopping me from stepping on your head and none of them is making you stop peeing on yourselves.

    Remember one thing.

    A Peac.o.c.k who only knows to feel proud of its feathers, should never dare to, do you hear me, DARE toment on the majesty of a Roc."

    *squash*

    As soon as his words were finished, Sam crushed the head like a water melon. The head exploded as brain matter sshed around with the blood.

    The others looked at the scene as they shivered. They saw gruesome deaths, they saw clean deaths, they even saw someone beating to death, torturing to death, but death under the feet of the enemy while grovelling in weakness, is first time for them.

    It felt awful just imagining it.

    At this moment Deputy looked at Sam and said.

    "You can take him, but we have a request, treat us as war criminals and arrest us with a lighter sentence. We don¡¯t have any life in our empire anymore." Sam just nodded.

    The war criminals are verymon, they are mostly forcefully caught or people that are surrendered in a war. There are now around three hundred people left in the initial battalion and all of them became war criminals now.

    Since, they voluntarily surrounded and they might have some info that would be useful, they can get a lighter sentence and can live their life normally after that.

    As Sam agreed, all of the soldiers quietly came out of the town without any resistance. Sam looked at the supervisors who areing towards him and waited on the spot.

    Since, the peac.o.c.k is dead, then the challenge is over. The town of the enemy empire now officially belonged to the southern star dukedom.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother to entertain the supervisors, so before they could speak, he said to the supervisors of the peac.o.c.k side.

    "The town will be under my control, I don¡¯t care if you have any negotiations or any other deals in the upper echelon, but from the agreement you guys gave me, the time is under my control until the authorities on my side arrived.

    I think, you better go to the town and ask the citizens who are unwilling to join our empire move out now and you better clean up those particr ¡¯citizens¡¯ who are going to ¡¯help¡¯ you in the war.

    If I find any funny business going on, then there would be a mass genocide going to take ce."

    He then turned towards Marian and said.

    "Inform the nearest military base from the red rock town. Ask them toe here as fast as they can. And the rest round up the prisoners and follow me into the town hall. We are having our dinner there."

    As he said that Sam hovered on Harbinger towards the town hall and the remaining soldiers started working.

 Chapter 189: Return

    Sam really had his dinner at the town hall. Since it is a border town the in charge of the town are from military as well and this made things easier.

    As Sam was eating, he looked at the town, it is just a little after sunset and a lot of people are packing their things to move.

    Many of them didn¡¯t want to stay in this ce as they felt a sense of belonging for their country. Generally, the cultivator wars are not so small and the citizens wouldn¡¯t have much choice. After all, humans are also an important resource in the eyes of the people at the top of the pyramid.

    That is the reason thew is still in ce and the people are given some rights.

    Otherwise, this world would have already been in chaos.

    But that is not the reason Sam let them go, he just felt that it is highly impossible for these people to be loyal for the new rule. From his experience, the emperor is not much of a great ruler and even the southern star Duke is not much.

    It is almost impossible to get the loyalty of these people with their rule and they can only force them, Sam just wanted to leave these people a way out.

    The person from the nearest military came faster than he thought. Apparently, he rode a level 3 beast and came. He is a battalionmander. After hearing that Sam has cleared the town in a day and he wants to go back to the dukedom, the nearest military post who didn¡¯t make the preparations for the new town upation can only send this person as a representative.

    Sam just let him handle the details with the help of the authorities of the Red rock town and he started his journey back to the southern star city along with his soldiers and the remaining war prisoners.

    He didn¡¯t hand over them to the battalionmander who came to him, but rather brought them back.

    He is going to exchange them from the points.

    And after another twenty-seven days, he reached the southern star city. He is no the first one to arrive in the southern star.

    Many people who cannot take the heat of the war or some candidates who thought their achievements are enough returned on level 4 beasts arranged for their transportation specifically.

    But out of all of them his entrance was the most spectacr. As spectacr as his departure. The first thing he did was to enter the camp and settle his soldiers, he gave them a huge amount of bonus and even arranged a feast with Mackey and his staff cooking.

    He didn¡¯t go out, rather he studied the situation in the camp.

    He is estimating on when this phase would end.

    Right now, nine months have beenpleted since this phase began. Sam was deployed to border in the seventh month by the end of eight month he was back. His war only took him one day.

    But the candidates assigned to other regiments were deployed earlier for the people stationed in farther borders and some were deployedter for those who are stationed closer.

    Sam is the only candidate who came back on his own without the help of Duke¡¯s arrangement of level 4 beasts.

    The main reason is that he has time and he can also stay with the soldiers as respect to their effort for fighting the battle. As far as he knew being in amander position, he shouldn¡¯t just discard the soldiers after he the battle and return alone.

    As he was celebrating his return with his soldiers, he was called for a meeting from the Duke.

    He leisurely visited the Duke¡¯s pce.

    In the meeting room, there was the familiar scene. The Duke, the General and Sam. Only the rest of thunder wolf squad are not there.

    Sam didn¡¯t wait for the Duke to speak and passed him two scrolls.

    One of them is the agreement of the deal about thepetition and the second one is the deed of the transfer of the new town and for Sam¡¯s surprise that town in called Red Canyon town. He didn¡¯t care much though.

    As Duke looked at the scrolls, Sam said.

    "ording to our agreement, if I win this war, I will get 1000 points. Apart from that, I don¡¯t have any casualties, which I believe will qualify as a military merit, I killed an enemymander, around two hundred soldiers and caught around three hundred war prisoners.

    I hope the Duke will maintain his ¡¯impartiality¡¯ which you have been showing all this while. "

    Sam particrly emphasized the word impartiality clearly implying that he knew of Duke¡¯s little tricks which made the Duke gulp in nervousness.

    He received the information on the war and he also received the news about the impact cannon. He doesn¡¯t know how to react. He berated himself for being stupid enough to save General Spark¡¯s ass so as to get that old man¡¯s loyalty and favour.

    But that bit him in the back.

    Now Sam seems to be holding a grudge.

    Before he could sort these thoughts out and speak, Sam spoke again.

    "My four hundred million spirit stones which the military owes me. I need them by today evening. The deadline was over a month ago."

    Duke¡¯s words stopped and then only he remembered the agreement of the debt that Sam shown them.

    This became even more of a headache.

    ???Sam, about the war. I heard that you have a new weapon..." Duke started speaking, but Sam interrupted again.

    "I do have the weapon and I am the one who made it."

    "About that..." But Sam interrupted again.

    "If you want to buy it, I am sorry I am not selling it and can you please settle my ount first?"

    Sam is not giving any face at all. He lost all the respect he had for the duke.

    Duke only shook his head helplessly and tallied the military points. The two hundred soldiers killed will be counted as two thousand points and themander was three hundred points, the fact that there are no casualties gave him another two hundred points and three hundred war prisoners will be four thousand five hundred points. These points are solely for Sam as he was themander.

    Apart from them, his thousand points are also given ording to the agreement. The total of eight thousand points which will be more than the whole sum of the remaining ny-nine candidates.

    And the soldiers will be receiving their merits separately but since all of them performed equally good, it is difficult to judge, but the Duke has other ns. This battalion is too good and even the thunder wolf squad was a piece of trashpared to them.

    Duke also grudgingly gave the four hundred million stones.

    After that, Duke exined. Within three days the time limit will be over and all the candidates will arrive here and from then on they can start the business phase and the current business phase candidates will start the military phase training.

    Sam didn¡¯t wait after that and looked at General coldly and asked.

    "How is Jim doing?"

    His question made the two Nascent stage cultivators feel their eyes twitch in irritation. He is clearly gloating and he is doing it so openly.

    "Sam, we can settle our grudges ourselves, can you just let Jim off?" General asked with a pleading tone.

    He is indeed pleading. More than six months wasn¡¯t even enough to the pharmaceutical tower head wasn¡¯t convinced.

    "Why should I? Do I have an obligation to let him off?" Sam said nonchntly. He then looked at the general who closed his eyes and has a face full of regret.

    Then he turned around to leave.

    But Duke stopped him.

    "Sam, I have something to discuss."

    "Sure, please tell me."

    "About the weapons..."

    As I have mentioned, I have no interest in selling them, after all, I am not a businessman for now and don¡¯t wish to talk business now."

    Duke immediately understood what Sam meant. Sam is nning use this sale as the part of his business deal. So, he didn¡¯t ask further. The Duke then looked at the general and hesitated before speaking.

    "Can we work on a deal about Jim?"

    Sam thought for a bit and said.

    "I suppose."

    "What do you need?" General was the one who asked this, he was anxious at the same time excited.

    "Your most fabled and the mighty military seemed to held the Dragon Hawk tribe members as hostage and is ckmailing them to supply the soldiers to you to act as meat shields. I want the whole Dragon Hawk tribe including the people who are forced to join the military.

    Send them to my estate and then Jim can get himself treated."

    Sam said these words and without waiting further left the pce.

 Chapter 190: End of Military Phase

    General and the Duke were stunned, then they immediately called for a soldier and verified the information on Sam¡¯s battalion and after seeing the hundred soldiers from the Dragon Hawk tribe they understood the situation.

    This is one of the dirty secrets of their military. Holding a tribe hostage in the name of giving them ¡¯refugee¡¯ and then using their men in the form of meat shields and the cannon fodder.

    Even though, they are not extremely proud of it, they don¡¯t want to lose this opportunity at all, when they found the tribe and the worst thing is that the tribe only has a poption of around three thousand people excluding the five hundred people who are in the army.

    Now they understood what happened. The Dragon Hawk tribe members might have requested Sam¡¯s assistance.

    General immediately agreed without much thought and informed the regimentmander who kept the Dragon Hawk tribe members in a city near the border to send them here as fast as possible.

    Luckily, they are not that far away from the southern star city, it will only take four days on the Level three beasts.

    Even though, the southern star didn¡¯t have many beasts that can carry them all over, they used the beasts of the nearby area Marquis to send them over. All of them cannot be brought over at the same time, but they will be arrived within the two weeks.

    After three days, every candidate has returned and there was an assembly conducted. There was no announcement of the points, only about them changing to the business phase.

    But the individuals know the points themselves. Points although given to an individual they can be transferred from one another within a team.

    Their team identity tokens which consisted of their team numbers on them were the storage units of the points. If they want to transfer the points, there is an exchange point inside the camp where the teammates can transfer the points within themselves.

    But this is only open for this day and it will be closed until the second phase is over.

    As every team was divided into two, the military points are calcted for the two teams separately. The first team will be sharing the points themselves and the second team will also be doing so and after the two phases ended the two teams can share the points if they want to.

    But not many people are willing to share the points, after all at the end of the day it is every man for himself and every one wants to win. So, the more points the better chances.

    Sam transferred two hundred points each to Drew and Hawk. This ispensation for the plight they suffered because of him.

    He decided to share some points with Philip and the rest too as he was the reason general targeted them.

    Hawk and Drew have around one hundred points they gained themselves which is not that great.

    The top ten are all well above five hundred and the first ce is for a member of Nichs¡¯ team with nine hundred points.

    That was truly a great achievement.

    Now with three hundred points they are in the middle or else they are close to bottom thirty people.

    But when they looked at points of Sam, they didn¡¯t even know how to react, the top ranker was with nine hundred points and this is the news that was circting among all of them. But Sam¡¯s points are way head of nine hundred. They calmed down and decided that it would be better to keep mum.

    Now their military time was over, they have to start their business phase.

    As for the current business phase members, their points are not yet shared. Their profits are only evaluated but were still not converted to points because the evaluators took the situation of some businesses blooming a littlete inparison to others.

    So, they only evaluated on the capital and profits for this phase so that they could judge thetter half better based on this point.

    Sam has met with Philip and the rest briefly. But he didn¡¯t exin much, all he learnt was that their profits are only hundred percent of their investment and that includes the losses they suffered earlier.

    Sam didn¡¯t really care. He has big ns for this time around and this might stir something in the whole Dukedom if seeded.

    He entered the estate and inspected the huge pit ofnd. Thend is 1000 acres wide but the only thing is the wholend is a bit depressed whenpared to the rest of the city. But with over thatrge area it is not much of a draw back and the main thing is now the impact crystal ispletely cleared.

    Watt and Sam hovered over thend as they examined it. Most of thend is even because the earth element users from his battalion came over here to practice on their moulding abilities here and at the same time, they took it up on themselves to make it levelled.

    Now, it can be used for construction directly without much work.

    After absorbing thend, Sam said to Watt.

    "We have to go to the Artisan tower and hire all the architecture artisans, this time the project is going to be big and the investment is quite huge and I want everything to go without any hups.

    And also, from tomorrow there will be some people from the Dragon Hawk tribesmaning to the estate. Talk to them and arrange their amodation in the city book as many inns as possible there will be around three thousand people.

    Apart from that, buy a house for us, a normal house would do, it is for temporary stay only."

    He paused for a while and said.

    "Beat up Zeke every time you see. Day or night doesn¡¯t matter every time you see him make him lose a bomb to recover but don¡¯t cripple him or hit critically. By the end of these eight months, he should pee on himself every time he sees you.

    As for Blue fire, as long as he stays put don¡¯t do anything to him, but if he talks even a little bit beat him up too.

    Let Mackey and the rest close the restaurant in a few days. At most they have a month time and tell them that whatever money they make in this month is theirpletely."

    After giving some instructions, Sam and Watt floated over the city and visited the Artisan tower. The whole city is looking at the familiar and still fascinating floating duo as they moved.

    Sam met with Artisan ford and asked him to visit the estate and said that there would be a big project.

    And after ford visited, Sam exined everything he wanted in thend in detail. Artisan ford waspletely dumbfounded and confirmed every thing Sam needed more than twice before calming down.

    "Sam this project costs a lot, more than one hundred fifty million. Are you sure?" He asked for a final time and Sam confirmed again and said that it is what he wanted.

    "It will take a month to finish this. I will use all the architecture artisans at my disposal to do this."

    After making the deal, Watt went to secure the inn reservations and buy a house for them.

    Sam visited the battalion once and talked to Marian about the arrival of their tribesman and also passed a book.

    "This is a new and exclusive battle technique for your tribesman and it can be used by both elemental users. Do not pass it to anyone and even if you did, they will only be suffering some serious bacsh. But make sure that you keep this a secret.

    If anyone asks, all you have to say is that your tribe has this technique for generations but it has some problems which made it impossible to cultivate and then after you met me, I some how decoded them that and made it possible to cultivate."

    As Sam said those words, Marian was looking at the title on the cover. "Dragon Hawk w" That is the name of the technique written on it.

    He kneeled down in front of Sam and said. "Sir, I cannot thank you enough. You have already done more than enough by giving our tribesman a helping hand. And with this technique I don¡¯t even know how to express my gratitude. All I can say is if you want anything from me in future, I will do it even if you want my life I will surrender willingly."

    Sam pulled him up and didn¡¯t say anything. He just patted his shoulder with a smile and left the ce.

    He has many things to do to make this project a sess and he needs to find many people to cooperate.

    But the first meeting is not with any of them, he has to meet the Duke. That guy already sent someone to send him an invite to visit him as soon as the military points are allocated.

 Chapter 191: Deal with the Duke

    In a smaller meeting room of the Duke¡¯s pce.

    There people sat at a table with two men facing a young man.

    They are none other than Sam, Duke and the General Spark.

    There was a fresh fruit juice that was served after they exchanged pleasantries.

    Sam drank a ss of juice without much reservation and he didn¡¯t even wait for the Duke or General to speak.

    The Duke even served another ss with a smile.

    "Duke Nichs, I think it would be better if you get straight to the point, as you know I have to take care of many things so that I could take care of my business matters.

    After all, my teammates didn¡¯t have a good start and I have to put some extra effort."

    Situation turned awkward at Sam¡¯s sharp words.

    *Cough* *Cough*.

    He coughed to ease the tension and said.

    "Sam, as you know, your recent weapons are greatly useful for the border defence and even offence inrge scale wars. We would like to buy them for our army.???

    Duke knew that there was no use acting hypocritical and just came to the point.

    Sam calmly spoke.

    "I can sell one hundred cannons and each cannon wille with hundred type-1 shells and fifty type-2 shells. This will be one ammo set. And I will throw in a manual on how to operate the cannon.

    But the cannon operates on energy cells and the Special fuel. Of course, I will give a loaded set for every new cannon.

    But there is a catch here, you know the shells are made of the impact crystal and if you try hard enough you might re create them, but the thing is the energy cell and the fuel needed are only avable with me and if you don¡¯t buy ammo from me, you can find another way to get these things."

    After hearing Sam¡¯s words, they started thinking but didn¡¯t reply, Sam has yet to say anything about the price.

    Sam took a sip from his ss and said.

    "Each cannon will be five million and an ammo set will cost hundred thousand and the energy cell and fuel will also be sold in packages which will cost hundred thousand each."

    Duke and General took a deep breath.

    They knew that the price would be high and they expected Sam would demand this much but they were still surprised. This is a huge sum.

    They don¡¯t have immediaterge scale war, but there will be soon after this wholepetition thing is over as there were so many grudges will be formed.

    Just like Sam¡¯s situation, the father of the Peac.o.c.k will definitely want to find a way to deal with Sam after this thing is over.

    This situation may happen in many ces and they have to make preparations, if Duke can use these cannons properly and make some serious damage to the enemy by upying a couple of cities, his prestige will increase and he will receive merits at the same time, his territory will also increase giving him more resources.

    But spending this kind of money is still a bit painful, so they wanted to negotiate.

    "You see, Sam. The Price is a bit too muc..."

    Before he could finish his words, Sam already stood up and was about to walk away.

    "Sam, what happened?" Duke didn¡¯t catch the point of Sam¡¯s actions. But thetter¡¯s reply gave the answer.

    "I am too busy. If you cannot afford this, then there is nothing to talk. I would visit the south east or south west, I will see if any of the Dukes will be interested. The time is not on my side." He shrugged as if he was helpless.

    "Deal." Duke immediately said a bit loudly. And then continued.

    "I will buy hundred cannons and hundred extra ammo set along with fuel sets. But is there any other way than spiritual stones, maybe we can trade on something?"

    Sam sat back and though. There is indeed something. I need hundred million worth of cattle type beasts and half of them must be female.

    They were stunned again and they didn¡¯t know how to react. The cattle type beasts are one of the weakest types. They are not much suitable forbat and most of them eat them and some people make jerkies of their meat when they go on long trips. They cannot be sure that they can get enough food.

    As for the milk, they don¡¯t care much. Even though, the milk has some spiritual energy properties, it is not that popr. At most the spiritual energy is stable and it can help some recovery and some cattle with elemental properties arepatible for their respective elemental users.

    For 100 million, Sam will get more than ten thousand cattle. They are even wondering how can he manage.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care for their thoughts and said.

    "I don¡¯t care the elemental type they are of; I just need their worth. As for the rest, I don¡¯t need much things. The rest should be paid as fast as possible.

    As soon as the money was in my hands, I will give the cannons, the ammo sets, fuel sets will be given after the beasts are given.

    I need at least 10000."

    The cannons cost 500 million, the extra ammo sets cost 10 million and the fuel sets another 10 million.

    Sam traded for 100 million stones for cattle. So, the rest has to be paid. The four hundred million Sam has got from the Duke as debt from regiments was depleted by half for the construction of the estate and the remaining will be gone for the remaining additional arrangements for which he might need to hire the formation tower head and some other misceneous things.

    All of this can be considered to be his investment and that includes the one hundred fifty million he bought the house with, the rest of the money he had also had a dent as he provided for the rewards of the training and for the investment for the Philip¡¯s batch¡¯s business.

    Anyway, he got some returns but he didn¡¯t take it way from Philip and the rest, He just took the investment he made and let them have the profits. As he closed that business, he doesn¡¯t want to take a share from their points.

    In short, he needed money and this five hundred million will cover most of the investments he made and he is now only a hundred million away from the break even.

    After signing the deal and delivering the cannons to the military zone, Sam went to the estate where the construction ns began.

    Sam took out a huge pile of scrolls and passed them to Ford who is guiding the rest of the artisans. Even though, the artisan tower is rich a single project worth of 150 million is worth a lot and that is after the heavy discount to Sam who is a rank 5 artisan. There is around sixty percent discount for him and this is one of the privileges the artisans could enjoy.

    Ford has setup a temporary tent for n exnation and other management purposes in which Sam exined the construction n he himself made in detail.

    The first phase of the n is the farther end of the estate which is nearing the wilderness on the back of the southern star city. There the houses for the Dragon Hawk tribe and the farm for the cattle, spring fowls, pigs and the rabbits are going to be arranged. Atst there would some smallrge individual buildings for production purposes. These can be called small scale factories and these are for making some products for the future use.

    These are going to be the resources for his n and as he needs manpower and the Dragon Hawk tribe who are new to city andpletely unfamiliar with this ce and also doesn¡¯t like fighting much could be hired for his project.

    They will be his employees. So, the first thing he did is make their residences so they can move here, he doesn¡¯t want to lose more money on inns. So, if they can move here and help him look after farms.

    Even though, he would bleed some money for a month, that would be okay. He could give them same type of food he gave to his battalion. Although, it is not very high quality. It is still okay for now. If they want to have luxurious foods, they can leave the ce, earn money and eat.

    Sam might have helped them, but that is certainly not out of kindness. Simply put, the main reason is his whim. He is in a good mood when Marian said his story and agreed to help them and the second reason is, he need to hire employees anyway, so he can get them easily by helping them and doesn¡¯t have to bother going through so much trouble.

    As for the farms inside the dimension, for the past eight months the animals in the farms did grow more and did increase greatly. But they are still insufficient for his project, but he has other ns for that.

    But before that, he has to meet his possible business partners.

 Chapter 192: Discussing Collaborations

    Sam visited all four tower heads for the deals he has proposed and his many badges came very handy. As for the Pharmaceutical tower head of which he was not part of, Sam didn¡¯t even have same resistance he had at the other three towers.

    Their previous deal on the potion made the discussion easier.

    For the artisan tower head and the formation tower head, he has extra things to discuss.

    From artisan tower he needs the help of their special division which is mining department. He needs the supply of the impact crystal from the whole southern star territory and he asked the tower head directly.

    But the discussion didn¡¯t go smoothly. Because, this tower head is being a bit greedy. The impact crystal is purely worthless for these people and Sam is the only one who has proper use for it.

    He studied and researched on its molecr structure along with a lot of experiments to determine the most appropriate amount of crystal that should be use to make a proper shell based on theunching distance, desire damage and even the size of the shell itself.

    It was all his hard work. Even if the time spent wasn¡¯t high, it was still his hard work. This tower head might have sniffed the news of Sam mining all the impact crystal and guessed he might have a use for them, so he was trying to use this chance to get some benefits out of Sam.

    Although, Sam didn¡¯t know what he wants, he doesn¡¯t want to give in. So, their negotiation failed and they made an appointment for a dayter to think it over.

    Sam didn¡¯t have much to think, he didn¡¯t have anything to say and he is firm on his stand.

    The next stop was Formation tower. After meeting the tower head, Sam was a little bit surprised. He saw a beautiful woman in her mid-thirties.

    He was not surprised by the fact she is beautiful neither was he surprised for ady being a tower head. What he was surprised was the tower head is a little too soft. She didn¡¯t seem authoritative or imposing at all.

    She is slim and pretty with chestnut coloured hair tied in a bun. She does have a schrly aura befitting a rank 5 formation master. But shecked the powerful aura of tower head.

    But he didn¡¯t care much about it, it was only an observation out of his habit.

    This time the negotiation went smoothly.

    First thing, is Sam need a Rank 5 formation in his estate all around his project. But the catch is, he will be giving the formation design and all he had to do isy it ording to the design.

    Sam briefly exined the design to her, before she could even recover from the surprise of him asking to create the formation of his own design, which made her swallow the words she was about so say.

    In short, the design is to protect the whole estate from trespassing. Sam is not ready for the cultivators from the noble families. It is also a form of protection for the people inside and the design mostly uses arge amount of spiritual energy to block an attack.

    For the attack below Nascent, there wouldn¡¯t be any damage at all.

    For the attacks of Nascent, the formation will be able to withstand three average strikes on the expense of excess spiritual energy drawing from the atmosphere. Even if it is damaged due to an attack, given enough time, it can recover bit by bit.

    The tower head waspletely dumbfounded and even asked Sam about where he got this design, Sam just shook his head not nning to answer.

    He looked at her and said.

    "If you have ns to steal the design, you can do so, but the very next day I will release the method to deactivate it." After receiving her confirmation about not copying it, Sam talked about other matter, which is a business coboration and after a long discussion, both of them shook hands happily.

    After that the next two towers are only discussions about business coborations. Sam is nning a huge thing now and this would be one of his sources of ie in this empire and even the Duke might thank him for this.

    The next day, Sam went back to the artisan tower to discuss the deal. This time the tower head was bit pushier and more straightforward after seeing Sam¡¯s determined attitude.

    "Artisan Sam, you see as we all are fellow artisans, you came for me to help so it is only natural for you to help your fellow artisans too. One cannot only keep on taking from a ce.

    You made a deal with architecture artisans and you got a great discount, now you are already asking to buy an ore from the artisan tower and you would get a discount too. It doesn¡¯t seem fair. How about this? If you can ¡¯share¡¯ the knowledge on how to use the impact crystal properly so that we can collectively develop, it would be a contribution to the ¡¯welfare¡¯ of the whole artisan tower.

    Also, if you can share how an energy cell works, it would greatly help the growth of the artisan tower and the future generations will appreciate you."

    Simply put, this old man wants the manufacturing methods of the energy cells and the impact crystal usages. Sam didn¡¯t answer and looked at the artisan tower head coldly.

    He stood up and asked.

    "Are you sure you want to do this the hard way?"

    "What do you mean artisan Sam?" This guy just yed dumb.

    Sam shook his head and said before leaving. "Your loss."

    After that, Sam walked downstairs and there was hugemotion. After an hour, Sam came up again and ced a new schr artisan badge on the table before saying.

    "I need all the ore of impact crystals in the southern star, it doesn¡¯t even have a proper market price and the estimated value is 100 spirit stone for a cubic meter.

    As I was a rank 5 artisan, I would have already gotten a twenty five percent discount for ore buying and since it is a big deal, I can get additional two percent, so for I cubic meter I only needed to pay 73 spirit stones.

    But with my new status, I get an initial discount of thirty percent and there is an additional discount of 3 percent now, so now I only need to pay 67 stones for one cubic meter.

    Now the loss is around 6 percent and how much it is in the actual money; you can find it in the future."

    Sam leisurely sat on his chair as he spoke.

    In front of the shocked tower head there is a schr artisan¡¯s badge but it is not a rank 5 one, it is rank 6 one.

    Sam went downstairs to take the test as he understood the tower head wouldn¡¯t let go of his greed, so he used the most straightforward way he could possibly do this with his current strength.

    That is crush that guy with seniority.

    In any profession there is a strict hierarchal system and that is the people from the artisan tower of the lower rank, should respect and shouldn¡¯t y any tricks and try to make trouble for them as long as everything they were requested of was within their abilities and it was nothing underhanded.

    This is to give more privileges and also encourage more people to learn and achieve higher ranks which will in turn increase the status of the artisan tower in the society.

    Sam took a look at the shocked tower head and seeing he was not replying, he said.

    "I suggest you don¡¯t y any tricks, or you could just wait for me to make visit to the imperial capital. From, what I heard you seem to have some rtives in the imperial capital¡¯s tower, but I highly doubt that they are high ranked than me. So, I suggest you prepare these."

    Sam said these words and left the tower; he knew that this guy would get things done.

    Generally, the schr artisan badge is one of the most difficult things to gain and increasing the ranks is even more difficult.

    Innovation is not easy after all, but for Sam that is one of the easiest things he can obtain. Ideas are what he had in his brain.

    The news of his promotion didn¡¯t spread much as he took the exam in a private room.

    He didn¡¯t keep it deliberately but he didn¡¯t publish it deliberately either, so he wasn¡¯t surprised.

    The next day, a letter came to him from the artisan tower saying that his order was taken and all the impact crystal would be shipped within a month.

    He smiled at the letter.

    He didn¡¯t talk about the business coboration anymore. This guy with hisrge appetite just lost one of the biggest opportunities in his life.

 Chapter 193: Busy Month

    For the next month, many things happened, Sam was really busy.

    For starters, the cattle arrived. Just after the farm and the houses were built. The Dragon Hawk tribe also came.

    The three thousand people and half of them are kids who are not even awakened yet. They only need normal food, even if they were fed with the spiritual energy filled food, their bodies cannot take it.

    This also gave Sam one answer. These people might have beast characteristics but they also have equally human characteristics and mainly the awakening period of fourteen years.

    After their houses were constructed, Sam let them stay there. He didn¡¯t talk to them directly not even to the tribal chief who is only a Great mage and an old man.

    All their contact was through Marian and he only talked them at their work ces and that is to exin their job scope, duty, rules and the sry.

    Hundred of them are employed to take care of the cattle. Other than the children most of the people are married and thedies of the houses are not working.

    So, Sam had around 1200 employees who are willing to work for him. Out of 1200 hundred were assigned to the cattle farm and another hundred for the remaining farms.

    All the farms have expanded, because, Sam opened a shop in the town and offered a buying point.

    No matter how much the beast is damaged, he will buy and he offered another service and that is he would give them all the valuable items of the beast, like leather, fangs, teeth, blood, bones and also some inner organs

    Many hunters are not expert at handling these things, but these things are most valuable of all. That is the reason they will not get a high price.

    But Sam¡¯s offer was quite good for them. Sam would not only pay them a price for the meat based on the weight, he would also give them the processed materials which they could sell for more price.

    For example, a hide of an earthly bear is good for a leather armour, but when a carcass of the earthly bare was sold, it would fetch around 2000 spirit stones if it is a level 2 beast. But if the hide was processed and made into an armour, the armour would cost around 12,000 stones.

    So, if the hide was already taken and cleanly processed just ready for the armour to make, the hide will be pricier and will get them at least 4000 stones.

    As for meat, normal hunters cannot sell them to a restaurant. The restaurants will mostly rely on a constant supply from an organisation or a supplier who has a team of hunters who will hunt and some restaurants even has farms.

    So, individual hunters will always get less. But Sam¡¯s shop increased their ie.

    Sam trained around fifty dragon hawk members to process the animals and how to take the meat and the rest properly. The meat will be shipped to the farm where there will be stored in the space jades to keep the freshness.

    This business has been running for fifteen days.

    For the rest of the members, three hundred members are trained for shooting purposes, this is one of the Sam¡¯s new weapons and it would useful for his project security.

    For the remaining some, they have to wait till the project waspleted.

    And within twenty-five days, the construction was over and for another week, there would be duties of the formation tower, inscription tower and pharmaceutical tower. The coboration with pharmaceutical tower is lesserpared to the remaining two, so their work was easier.

    As for the inscription tower and formation tower, they worked for one week to settle everything and after that it was another one week for Sam toplete his things.

    As for the rest there are very small finishing touches.

    After this month there was a majestic construction in the southern star city.

    It was arge hemispherical dome. Except there is arge circr opening on the roof allowing the sunlight.

    There are two entrances and one of them is in the front and another one at the back which was only for the staff. The back entrance leads the way towards the residences of dragon hawk tribe and the farms.

    There were a few words above the front entrance and that is SAM¡¯S PARK.

    From thest fifteen days, Sam and Watt are on a publicity campaign about this SAM¡¯S PARK.

    The entry of the park is 1000 spirit stones.

    The experience would be worth it no matter what. They can stay in the park for twelve hours with this 1000 spirit stones.

    Many people were sceptical for this, but after that there came another news. The first day of the opening was free for everyone to enter and all the experiences except for the food and products are free.

    The hype was quite high. Even the people in the slums couldn¡¯t help but hear this.

    After everything was set, a day before the opening, Sam met with Hawk and Drew. These two people didn¡¯t know what to do in the business type. All the other team¡¯s businesses were saturated and it is quite hard for them to join the market as they don¡¯t have same money and people like others.

    But they are too ashamed to ask Sam for help. At the end they don¡¯t have any chance but seek him.

    Sam couldn¡¯t say much and said.

    "My project is huge and there would be millions of spirit stones that woulde into y. Can I trust you guys?"

    Sam asked directly

    He didn¡¯t want to put blind trust in any person.

    He wanted to make things clear, before getting them involved.

    Both of the nodded their heads and assured him.

    "Even if you do steal something from me, make sure that I don¡¯t find out. You know the consequences otherwise. My words may sound unpleasant and hurtful but let us face the reality. We are not that close; I am thankful that you guys stayed with me even after the threat of general but that is to return the favour you owed me and one cannot say what would happen if arge amount of wealth is involved."

    "We understand."

    They both replied.

    "Okay, then one of you will supervise the entry and the another one would be in charge of artisan shop."

    Finally, after forty days of the initiation of the project, the day of opening finally came.

    The city¡¯s poption was very huge with millions of people and more than forty percent of them are cultivators.

    But the first day of the opening attracted only a little more than 10,000 people. After all, all of them are not that interested in this but this ten thousand people are quiterge.

    The advertis.e.m.e.nt is only given about the entry fee and the free one-day entry offer nothing more, so this attendance is quite eptable.

    The ten thousand people also didn¡¯te at the same time, there are only around thousand people in the morning and the word got out from them as more and more people entered and finally by the end of the day the count reached ten thousand people.

    The maximum capacity is near fifteen thousand so, it is not bad at all.

    After they entered and until they left, they were in constant awe of the ce.

    The whole park is divided into three zones.

    The first one is shopping zones.

    The second one is challenges zone

    The final one is food zone.

    The shopping zone has four shops and they are all from the three towers and Sam¡¯s own weapon shop.

    The three towers opened three shops which are like supermarkets.

    These three towers have same problem as the artisan tower in the blue me city. The normal customers would rather buy in small stores than enter the artisan tower.

    Because, they feel like bypassing all the security and the formal shopping in the artisan tower is quite troublesome. The normal stores though don¡¯t have this problem stealing the market.

    But, now Sam provided a chance to enter the market.

    The three towers have exclusive shops with wide array of ss shelves, elegant and mesmerising disy and Sam even provided them with the ss bottles, boxes which will make the packing look more elegant attracting the attention.

    The inscription tower and formation tower doesn¡¯t have much market in this area, the consumables they can sell are quite small and the custom ones will be ordered in the towers by the customers.

    The main advantage of these two towers is from the challenge zone.

    The weapon shop of this ce was supposed to be a coboration with the artisan tower but Sam didn¡¯t proceed with that and just opened his own shop.

    This shop doesn¡¯t sell many normal weapons. Rather they are selling, calming grenades, pin grenade, hunting traps, and some other methane explosives Sam made and the most important thing is the energy cells and this time there was a custom section open for making the energy cells in the same shape as the customer desired.

 Chapter 194: SAMS PARK

    In the Sam¡¯s park, the shopping zone is the first thing and it was in a most unique shops they have seen, but that was not the most unique and surprising thing that was awaiting the customers.

    The next zone is a circr zone which surrounded the food zone.

    The circr zone is full of challenges hence named challenge zone.

    This is where the inscription tower and the formation tower.

    There are many challenges in this ce which would test many of the qualities and abilities of the cultivator.

    This is an amus.e.m.e.nt park for the cultivators, instead of rides and games, here Sambined the fun and tests to make money off of it.

    Some of these challenges arepletely under the formation tower and inscription tower. It was test for the knowledge of a cultivator on the formations and inscriptions and their ability to decrypt the formations and inscriptions.

    These two challenges are side by side and entry fee would depend on the level of inscription or formation they want decrypt.

    For a rank 1 formation or inscription they have to pay 100 spirit stones and that is only for acolyte cultivators, there would a set of ten formations they have to crack and if they do so they would win 1000 spirit stones. Same goes for the inscriptions.

    For the Novice stage cultivators, the entry fee is five hundred spirit stones and rank 2 formations or inscriptions would be there.

    For the Great realm cultivators, the entry fee is one thousand spirit stones.

    As for Grand realm cultivators, the entry fee is five thousand. The prize ofpleting the set is always ten times the entry fee, but the thing is many people are done in the third round itself.

    These two stalls arepletely under the towers and they will pay twenty percent of their ie to Sam.

    There are some challenges that are a coboration for between Sam and the two towers.

    One of them is a woods challenge.

    This is a team battle against the beasts.

    There would be a small forest created with the wood element users and in that a team of five to ten members will challenge a pack of beasts with an equal number.

    They will be provided with a list of beasts avable for challenge and these beasts are captured by Sam and have been tamed by him. This is an exclusive thing for Novices.

    In fact, Sam had nned this park for Novices as the main target.

    In this Woods challenge, the acolytes will be given a choice to select the beasts of Level 2 and the Novices for Level 3. And the Novices have more challenges and almost made this thing exclusive to them.

    The challenge is that the candidates have to leave a mark on the bodies of the beasts or destroy the token which were hung on their bodies. They are prohibited to use critical attacks and kill the beasts.

    In the same way, if the beasts make a mark on the men, they are out. This is more like a paint ball game but Sam made it animals vs humans.

    The entry of this challenge is 100 per person for the Acolytes and thousand per person for Novices, if they can clear the challenge, they would receive double the amount and as usual not many people were able to clear the challenge.

    After all, these are no ordinary beasts. Sam tamed them and even refined their bloodline and let Yanwu and Sky train them to understand how to go against the humans in the most efficient way.

    A part from them, there are element exclusive challenges.

    For example, there is a fire element challenge in which there would be a series of formations through which the challenger has to bypass. The formations are made in such a way that they would make fire element attacks, starting from fire balls, to infernos and many other attacks.

    This challenge can help the fire element users to increase their elemental control and for the rest of the elemental users they can increase their endurance and capabilities to fight against the fire type attacks.

    There are seven stages of formations for each cultivation stage. And entry fee is 200 stones for acolyte, 1000 for a Novice, 3000 for a Great mage and 8000 for a Grand realm expert.

    This is a coboration with the formation tower and the designs of the formation are done by Sam himself and the tower is responsible for maintenance and control.

    They would get twenty percent revenue from this.

    Just like fire element, there are several other elements. Wind, wood, earth, lightning, water and even metal, ice etc.

    They are all of simr price range and then there arebination challenges.

    There are five venues where thebination of elements can be selected. The challengers could select abination of various elements and prices would be multiplied by the number of elements they chose.

    There are other types of challenges like shooting ability. This is for ranged attackers to test their ability.

    For testing the ranged attacks, Sam made use of two methods and one of them is simr to skeet shooting except the targets will be more random, faster and there would be many obstacles. There are more than hundred levels for each cultivation stage and more levels one could clear the more points they .u.mte and the more prize they get.

    This is also from acolyte to the Grand realm cultivators. In this challenge the target would also have another segment that is not present in a normal skeet shooting and that is the hardness of the target.

    The shooters are from the Dragon Hawk tribe and the shooting devices are some small-scale impact cannons except the shells are reced by the targets. The inscription tower is responsible for making the targets and they will get twenty percent of the revenue.

    Another shooting ability is about mid ranged attacking practice.

    The challenger will enter arge room and the targets will be shot around the room and one has to identify the direction and the speed of the target carefully and deal with it. Just like previous ones, there are many levels and also based on point system.

    The entry fee is also based on the cultivation levels.

    There are some challenges which takes ce between two challengers themselves. One of them is earth element control contest.

    Two earth element users will be standing on two sides of arge field which will be having a dividing line in the centre. This line will separate two zones, one for each yer. The goal of the game is to manipte the earthen cubic blocks which are ced on the either side of the field and fill the opponent¡¯s zone.

    One who filled the other¡¯s zone will be the winner. In this thing, one has to control the cubes to ce them in opponents ce and also bypass the control of the opponent to hinder him to not ce the cubes in their own field.

    In the same way, there is a field for ice element users, a field for wood element users to upy the opponent¡¯s field with trees.

    There are some other tests like suppression test where the candidate has to go through the suppression caused by the formation and move forward.

    Then there are tests for senses, where the challenger would be restricted the use of his spiritual sense and has to rely on their senses and instincts.

    Some other tests for meleebat training, where candidate has to dodge the projectiles or hit the projectiles shot towards him.

    In this way there are many tests that the candidates can experience.

    Sam made sure that there shouldn¡¯t be more than 12000 people inside the park at the same time except for special people under his or Watt¡¯s rmendation. The three tower heads also have a quota to bring two people at a time.

    Thest zone in the park is food zone and this is first time the cultivators saw a food ce like this.

    There are no separate restaurants in the food zone.

    All the food stalls are arranged in a circr fashion inside which there are arge number of seats to have food.

    The people can also buy food there and can have it while walking in the park. There are some benches here are to sit.

    The food is also one of the unique things the customers have tasted.

    The food is not based onrge meals, rather every portion is small so that the people can taste many dishes.

    The food is served in a special kind of tree bark which is dense and clean and easy to carry. They can walk and eat.

    The food mostly focussed on fried and grilled. The most attractive dish is the fired spring fowl, inspired from the fried chicken of the modern world. It has minimum servings and is limited in order to sustain the farm. There are only hundred portions a day.

    The remaining are fried or grilled foods of various meats obtained from the hunters in the Sam¡¯s shop in the city.

    The most unique thing is not the food though, it is beverages.

    There is a fascinating wine, Sam created with the help of the ape. Apart from them, he introduced a new type of beverage which was the milkshake.

    This is the reason he obtained cattle.

    The fruit voured milkshakes which are served with a slight chill in a thing ss contained with a bamboo straw, are one of most refreshing things the visitors tasted.

    In short, the experience of the visitors can be exined in one word.

    Fascinating...

 Chapter 195: Returns

    The name of Sam¡¯s park spread long and wide. The publicity through mouth of people is beyond any other kind of efforts Sam could have made.

    The free experience for a day is one of the best decisions he made and that was spot on.

    After the opening day, many people came and queued up at the dawn the limited entry for the people made theme and line up. There more than twenty thousand people and after sending twelve thousand people in, Hawk, who is in charge of the entrance closed therge gate.

    Sam has invested a total of 650 million including thend, the construction, formations, the challenge arrangements, value of the cattle.

    For the first day, the revenue from the entry fee alone is 12 million. And the total revenue is around 150 million for all the challenges, the food, and the products from Sam¡¯s weapon shop.

    The people are obsessed with the challenges and one person cannot stop himself from trying it again and again and the fact that they are helping their control of energy is only prompting them to repeatedly do this.

    Even though, the one hundred fifty million seemed like a lot but a person is spending an average of over 12500 stones if we consider that over 12000 members.

    Out of this one hundred fifty million around 30 million is going away for running the whole park. That includes, the formation repairs, raw meat and other ingredients, the wages and also the prizes to the customers if they had won any.

    And around another thirty million are going to the towers for the cooperation in some challenges. With this Sam is making a 90 million per day and it doesn¡¯t seem it would take long before he would reach his 650 million investment and gain profits.

    When Duke and the remaining candidates learnt about Sam making a huge construction project in the estate, all of them thought that he might be doing real estate and sell houses in the central zone, but when they saw the results of this, they were dumbfounded.

    The candidates and the other businessmen, noble families are green with envy that even included the Duke himself.

    The people are taking out their savings to get into the park and spending them on the challenges for various reasons like tempering, improvement and even simply fame. After all, the challenges are awfully tough and clearing them will make them famous.

    For the next week, the Park ran normally and the poprity spread rapidly and Sam¡¯s investment was returned.

    Now, he is on his way towards earning profits and that is going to be huge. But, after one week the first problem came.

    The other candidates particrly the noble kids were consumed by jealousy, but what can they do, as soon as they started making troubles, there are serious consequences waiting for them.

    Sam had made some serious security measures in the park.

    More than three hundred dragon hawk tribesman are given some smaller cannons, there are several watch towers inside the park from which they can cover a lot of area. The construction is made in such a way that there are not many blind spots.

    So, as soon as they made trouble, they will be shot down. The shell this time is like a trap. This is just like a hunting trap, but a little different. As soon as it hit the person it a metallic coil wound itself over them and an inscribed formation was activate sealing their powers.

    The troublemakers as long as they are not above Great realm, they are taken down by the shooters themselves.

    Beyond the Grand realm, the towers are not cooperating with him for nothing.

    After catching the criminals, every night, Sam had an interrogation session and the consequences are based on their actions.

    If one was here to disrupt the order by kicking up a fuss, he beat them up and threw them at their master¡¯s door step, if they are here to make some serious moves by injuring someone, he broke their bones and sent them.

    If they are here to kill someone to stain the park¡¯s reputation, then he was killed and the body was hung upon the arch of that master¡¯s house.

    Anyway, the troubles are less since, the cooperation between the towers is not a secret. So, if someone wants to make some trouble, they will have to deal with the towers themselves.

    As the Park¡¯s situation was going well, Watt is busy with helping Sam for the half of his time and the other half, he roamed the city like crazy on the silver wind.

    Since, the start of the construction project, he beat up Zeke and Blue fire many times.

    All these times, he left a mark on their bodies.

    The number of times they got beat and left them unconscious on the roads.

    If there was any chance that the city guards could find him, he just took them away and fled on the silver wind and beat them up in a secluded location.

    All in all, in this more than forty-day duration, the two brothers underwent some serious trauma.

    It was to the point; they are afraid ofing out. But they cannot let that happen. Because, they are part of the southern star team and that too in which the kids are all nobility. They only took them in because of the General and they didn¡¯t have any good feelings.

    They even gave them more military points just to cate the general who will behave unreasonably. Now, in the business phase the general didn¡¯t hold much sway and the rest of the candidates started making them work more.

    If they didn¡¯t do so, they can forget about making points but every time theye out, Watt could find out their ce no matter what and they got a tough lesson.

    After all, how could they, Watt is using shadow mice. After the three couples gave birth, the male mice came back to the duty and the seven mice are on lookout.

    One mouse followed the two while the remaining scouted the areas to give Watt the news about their spot.

    This way, the two brothers were beaten left and right.

    After three consecutive beatings, they went running to their grandpa.

    But there was no result, Jim was healed recently and was still recovering and he also knew why Zeke and his brother are targeted. They wanted to kill Watt and he knew this would happen. But he cannot do anything for now. At most he can just save them from being killed and he cannot guarantee if he can even take revenge if there was no evidence that Sam is the one who killed them.

    So, the beating continued.

    They went toin to the city guardmand, but Watt is like wind as he hovered in the city and the city guards cannot follow him, they wanted to go to park to catch him, but their captain rejected the idea.

    The Park is the coborative business of the bigshots, they don¡¯t have guts to go there.

    So, the brothers suffered.

    Sam is facing some serious problem.

    He is having an irritating feeling as his spiritual core started bloating.

    He is at the peak stage of the Novice and he is on verge of breaking through.

    Yanwu and Sky are also at the peak of Level 3.

    But they have more control over their bodies. Unlike them, Sam¡¯s body is having some trouble coping with it. He has been suppressing this for more than twenty days and he needs to make a contract with the next beast.

    But Mia just entered the Level 3 and it takes at least another month or two before it reaches the Level 3 peak level.

    But it is bing unbearable for him to bear through it.

    After some thought, he entered the library in the dimension.

    He started searching through books so that he can find some ways to supress his cultivation without much difort.

    But there are no results.

    After all, any sane person will think of ways to breakthrough as fast as they can, no one will think of ways to supress.

    So, there is little to no information on this aspect.

    After days of unfruitful search, he found something else.

    The Body cultivation section. There are only three divine wills on it. He wanted to look at it previously, but he didn¡¯t get an urgent need for that.

    After all, his body itself is stronger than his peers and is even stronger than most of the beasts at the same level.

    His flesh is as strong as beast¡¯s.

    But he decided to take a look, he needs to find a way to channel this excess energy so that he can feel normal.

    Of course, he can just use up the energy and also seal the energy with an inscription or something. But if he was attacked suddenly, he would be in trouble.

    So, he decided to take a look at the body cultivation techniques. But he made an amusing discovery after he looked at the three divine wills.

 Chapter 196: Yoga

    As Sam observed the three divine wills, he found many postures and also the maniption method to cultivate the body.

    But that is not the discovery he was amused by.

    The postures of the three methods are very simr to something he was familiar with in his previous life.

    Yoga asanas.

    The ancient yoga which originated from India, is one of the most favoured practices to keep oneself fit.

    It is a practice that helps the body a bnce between strength, flexibility and endurance. It is somon in his previous life that many people from young to old practiced yoga as daily routine.

    But what he saw in the divine wills is not just yoga. The postures arepletely simr to manyplicated yoga asanas and they are extremely precise. But there is an attached breathing technique as well as the spiritual energy maniption which when practiced along with the respective posture will cultivate the body.

    The three methods have some simrities and three of them have focussed on different aspects.

    Like on method focussed on leg rted postures which increases a person¡¯s capabilities in the aspect of movement techniques and leg techniques.

    One method focused on honing the torso, so as to have defensive capabilities and the third technique is more focused on arms.

    Even though, three methods strengthen the whole body and increase the fleshly strength, these three aspects are something they focussed on.

    As Sam observed the postures of the three methods one by one, he only has one thought. If a yoga master was toe to this world and cultivate any of these techniques, he would no doubt be an expert who could finish a battle in a punch or a kick.

    These body cultivation methods didn¡¯t focus on the spiritual core and the usage of the spiritual energy much.

    In general, cultivators even if they are mages or warriors use the spiritual energy as the main medium to attack or defend.

    But these body cultivation technique uses the spiritual energy to cultivate the body. The energy will be forcefully entering the body cells which means, the skin, muscle fibres, blood, bones and even the bone marrow, internal organs.

    The methods increase the vitality and the density of the cells. The body would be hard to hurt and even if it was hurt it would heal itself.

    When in the battle, all they have to care is about strength and endurance

    The spiritual energy can only do little help in the battle and mainly used for relieving fatigue and exhaustion and makes healing easier.

    It is mostly suitable for warriors and warrior mages. But the pain of cultivation is something that is going to be unbearable.

    When the spiritual energy is honing the body cells, the pain is going to be unbearable. A person needs to have an extremely high will to ovee that.

    Another thing to worry about is the resources required would cost a lot. The body cultivation stages are simr to the cultivation stages of a normal technique. But to breakthrough towards a same stage the former would cost thrice as much as thetter.

    These two reasons make people avoid cultivating these techniques.

    But for Sam, these two reasons are not a question at all. He can take the pain and at the same time he can afford the cost.

    So, he browsed through them as he was trying to decide on which technique he should adapt.

    The three techniques have some simr postures which are responsible for honing the overall body and their specific aspects are the only different postures.

    And after a long thought and indecisive consideration, he finally couldn¡¯t take it and decided to cultivate the three methods.

    He would cultivate the arms, the body and the legs. Anyway, he has enough money to do so and he can do so without worries.

    But he is not keen on practicing one method after another he needs to find a way tobine them.

    So, he went into the second floor to start experimenting and simtion.

    He created an exact virtual copy of himself and made that copy do the asanas one by one in order to see the effects on the body. In order to do so, he even made the skin of the virtual copy disappear.

    He could see the effects of the asanas on the muscle fibres and the bones.

    He spent around ten days inside the second floor which is only a day outside.

    This time his research isparatively easier than before. Because he was familiar with yoga.

    Even though, he is not familiar with the breathing technique that was associated with each asana, he can figure it out easily as there are not many possible ways to regte ones breathing in a special pose.

    They are only limited ways of breathing and he can figure out the best method with the trial and error.

    And after these ten days, he came up with a routine of yoga asanas from simpler ones to the insanelyplex ones which would evenly refine his body.

    So, a new cultivation technique was created. Many people might think that a cultivation technique can only be created by a person who is very experienced and powerful, but Sam would call that statement nonsense.

    As far as he was concerned, creating anything is aption of analysed and calcted data with logic.

    For that one only needs, the data which needs to be analysed and good enough brain to understand, analyse and reiterate that data to create what they need.

    In Creating experience is a great help but that is not the only thing.

    Afterpiling the technique, Sam started cultivating it.

    There are 16 asanas in this technique. Covering the enhancement of all the body parts.

    The first one, Utkatasana poprly known as chair pose.

    The second one Adho mukha asana also called the downward dog pose.

    The third one prasarita padottanasana also called the wide legged forward bend.

    The fourth Natarajasana, the lord of dance pose.

    The fifth Poorvattanasana, the upward nk pose.

    The sixth Adho Mukha Svanasa, the downward facing dog pose.

    The seventh Bakanasana, the crow pose.

    The eighth chaturanga dandasana. The four limbed staff pose

    The ninth, Eka hastha Vrksasana, one handed tree pose

    The tenth, Sirsa Padasa, the head to foot pose

    The eleventh Pungu Mayurasana, the wounded peac.o.c.k pose.

    The twelfth Gandha Bherundasana, formidable face pose.

    The thirteeth, Sayanasana, Scorpion pose.

    The fourteenth, K Bhairavasana, the destroyer of the universe pose.

    The fifteenth, Taraksvasana, Handstand Scorpion pose

    The sixteenth, Yoganidrasana, The yoga sleep pose.

    As Sam performed one asana after another, he could feel the spiritual energy inside him prating his cells.

    He felt as if his muscles fibres are being torn apart and an intense sharp pain made him grit his teeth.

    He never felt so much pain in his both lives, even when he was undergoing torture training, he never felt this much pain.

    While he was changing from one pose to another, his movements became extremely sluggish. He felt as if his body was being suppressed by a very high pressure.

    It is as if he was being suppressed by a deep underwater pressure of the ocean bed.

    Many times, his body wanted give up instinctually. But he kept on going. He could feel the muscle fibres getting torn apart due to the torrential flow of the spiritual energy at the same time he could feel those fibres getting healed by themselves with multiplied density.

    Just after one session, his spiritual core became empty and Sam spit out a mouthful of ck blood.

    He felt as if he was given a new lease at life.

    But after that pain subsided, Sam started thing about something else.

    The yoga is a thing extremely popr and widespread in the modern earth. But it was high level body cultivation in this world.

    Who brought yoga here at all? How does these yoga techniques which are known to be invented in the ancient India, possibly appear in this mystical and powerful world?

    Is it because someone entered this world just like Sam, or someone from this world entered the modern earth?

    He felt that there might be something serious about the connection between this and that world.

    He was thinking if there really was a connection between both worlds, then what caused the both worlds to lose contact.

    If there really was a connection, Sam was sure that he would be one of the select few who would definitely know this even if it was kept secret frommon public, but he hadn¡¯t heard about anything.

    Then Sam thought about the search for other species in others. There was no result at all. He was also part of the international team which conducted these searches in every exo they could possibly find and the results were non existent.

    It was as if the people of earth are the only ones in an isted universe.

    As he thought up to this, a bold and far fetched thought appeared in his mind....

    [Read the author¡¯s thought]

 Chapter 197: End of the Business phase

    For the next months, Sam only practiced the body cultivation. He didn¡¯t further bother about the speed of Mia¡¯s cultivation as he wanted to cultivate his body to the same level as his current cultivation and then he would break through to the Great realm in both methods at the same time.

    But the only problem is that the body cultivation takes more time than normal cultivation and he cannot cultivate it in the tower. So, he could only cultivate in the residence that was built for him behind the park.

    Anyway, he has a lot of time until the business phase ends, so he doesn¡¯t have to worry.

    He wanted to share the cultivation method with Watt, buttter didn¡¯t want to cultivate for the time being. He is enjoying his cat and mouse game with Zeke.

    And speaking of Zeke, he is in the worst stage of his life. Every night before he sleeps, and every morning after he woke up and even in his dreams, his only thought was ¡¯I shouldn¡¯t have provoked that guy¡¯.

    The rest of the day as Watt beat him to the heart¡¯s content, his only thought was, ¡¯I had an opportunity to end the suffering by taking a step back, but I had to throw it away¡¯.

    After all, Sam concentrated less and less on him since he came to the southern star city, but after he felt that his grandfather has his back, he forgot the suffering and plotted against Watt.

    He couldn¡¯t help but scold himself for his stupidity.

    Every day at a point of time, he would have thoughts of quitting and escaping back to the Blue me city. But he vaguely felt that he shouldn¡¯t go, his instincts are telling him not to leave or he would regret it.

    His grandfather also told him to endure. Even he didn¡¯t dare to make any moves on Sam and Watt. He already had enough setbacks due to Sam.

    He is already a bit nervous about what Sam would do after he gained power.

    But Sam didn¡¯t know all this. He didn¡¯t even want to deal with Zeke by himself. All that guy has is relying on the status and power of his father and grandfather and he already taught him some serious lesson for ambushing him. So, he left the remaining matters for Watt to deal with.

    Now, everyday the citizens are always anticipating a show and are even guessing where the guy dressed in silver clothes would beat up the poor guy.

    The city guards also started ignoring it as if they didn¡¯t see that at all.

    After two months for the Park opening though, an unexpected visitor came to Sam. That person is a Nascent and third strongest person in the southern star city.

    General Mercury, the general in charge of the city guardmand.

    Sam didn¡¯t expect him toe looking for him.

    Sam weed him into the house and both of them sat in the living room.

    After exchanging some pleasantries, the general came to the point.

    "Artisan Sam, as you are a busy person let me just get straight to the point. I recently made a visit to your Park and I have to say that it is a fascinating experience. Even though, I didn¡¯t get to experience it myself, I visited the ce with my sons and they both participated in lot of challenges, unfortunately they could only spend one day and both of them had to go back to the military service. But what impressed me even more is the security measures of your park."

    As he spoke to this point, Sam understood what he wants, but he just stayed silent and looked at him.

    "As you know, even though there are a lot of city guards the city is too big for them to watch all of it. I believe even your teammates suffered due to this problem. So, if you could sell the capturing devices to the city guardmand that would solve the problem to the great extent and we could even install them on the city wall so as to guard against some stray beasts and sneaking intruders in case of a crisis."

    Sam stayed silent for a brief while before saying.

    "General, first of all I should thank you for appreciation. But there is one thing I should rify and I believe you know too that my teammates didn¡¯t suffer just because the city guards were unable to cover the whole ce.

    As for selling you the capturing cannons, I don¡¯t have many objections but I don¡¯t want my creations tond in the hands of a system who has corrupt people who will easily do other¡¯s bidding ignoring the rules.

    So, if you can clear the whole chain ofmand who involved in the ¡¯suffering¡¯ of my friends, I will consider it."

    General was dumbstruck as he heard Sam¡¯s words.

    It was not because that he didn¡¯t understand, in fact he knew clearly what he meant. He does know that some city guardpany took some orders from the General Spark¡¯s subordinates and made trouble for some candidates.

    But he didn¡¯t really care much as three Novices without any notable background are not worth his attention.

    So, he ignored it.

    After seeing the arrangements and the cannons in the park, he looked into Sam and his team and came to know that he they were the ones who got targeted by the city guards, so he just wanted to mention the situation and down y it before Sam could use that as a reason. He just wanted to bury the hatchet directly as the damage is not severe.

    Of course, the damage is not severe for the General but for Sam it is no different from ruffling his feathers.

    As the General stayed silent Sam said.

    "Just because I didn¡¯t do anything yet, that didn¡¯t mean that I wouldn¡¯t do anything. General Mercury, I have a good impression of youpared to the general Spark who is so self-centred. At least I could see from how your city guards are working.

    That is my only request. If you could agree to weed them out, I don¡¯t have any objections at all. If you are thinking of what reason you want give, you can even use my name there, I don¡¯t have any objections.

    It is not like they would have gall toe and seek an exnation from me."

    Sam said in a rxed manner. After some pondering the General agreed.

    "Sure."

    "Okay then, let us discuss business now."

    General was surprised by this response.

    "Are you not worried that I would go back on my word after I get my hands on the cannons?"

    "I am the one who created them and destroying them is even easier than that. Anyway, I already have a list, so you can even abandon any thoughts of using some scapegoats."

    General was speechless again, Sam proved to be even more troublesome than what he had heard.

    After they discussed the deal, the general let the estate and within that day two news started traveling throughout the city.

    First one, a number of city guard officials are dismissed and kicked out of their positions at the same time, they were charged for the crime of corruption.

    Second one, the introduction of new weapons for city guard and those are the same weapons which are used to deal with the trouble makers in the Sam¡¯s Park.

    Duke was dealt another blow after this news.

    Apart from that there wasn¡¯t anything noteworthy happened for the next few months.

    By the end of the business phase Sam was still in the peak stage Novice but he was a Peak stage novice in body cultivation too.

    By this time, all his peers broke through Great realm. In fact, almost all the two hundred candidates except a twenty or so people broke through. And he is the part of those twenty.

    But he wasn¡¯t depressed. Mia also slowed down her growth after he started body cultivation and started digesting the energy from hydra blood slowly.

    Now, she is also at the peak of level 3 and now the panther twins are afraid of her turning the situation around.

    He can breakthrough any time he wants, so he decided to do so after this business phase evaluation is over judging by the next phase ofpetition. There is still a week for the deadline of eighteen months so after that they could set forth for the imperial capital.

    Tomorrow will be the final evaluation of the two phases. Sam is the only one who didn¡¯t care at all. The rest of the teams are on tenterhooks. There are some conflicts about the sharing of the points even before the evaluation ispleted.

    The next day, Sam, Hawk and Drew went to the evaluation spot leisurely. It is the same estate where all the teams assembled at the start of thepetition. By the time they reached almost all the candidates already reached the ce and they are waiting for the Duke toe.

 Chapter 198: Evaluation

    Sam joined Philip and the rest and six of them made some small talk, he found out that Philip became a Deputy battalionmander in this short duration. This achievement alone is enough to get him around five hundred points.

    As for the points for the kills, there shouldn¡¯t be a doubt, even though this guy used toy low, Sam believed that he wouldn¡¯t do anything less than surprising.

    Jack is also brimming with confidence. These guys had some serious blow after they were done with the business phase. Because their profit of 100 percent only got them thousand points which gave them only three hundred and thirty -three points each, Philip got the extra one point totalling three hundred and thirty-four.

    The number might seem big, but that was one of the lowest scores in all the twenty teams.

    So, they were quite disheartened. But the military phase needed only their battle and coordinated effort. This is not that difficult to thempared to the restaurant.

    As for stopping them with the duels and all, they could at most make things difficult for Kelly, but Sam heard that all the women are assigned to a female only regiment and the male members didn¡¯t have contact with them.

    As for Jack and Philip, anyone who provoked them should count their blessings so that they would spare them without beating them to pulp.

    So, he wasn¡¯t worried that they would be hindered by other candidates and even the regimentmanders can only give so much trouble.

    After a few minutes of idle chatter, the Duke and the General Spark took the stage followed by the Deputy General and the ten regimentmanders. Seems like all the regimentmanders took a break from their duty to attend this even.

    Everyone stood in attention and bowed to the Duke as soon as he came, well everyone except three people.

    Sam just stood there casually with hands in his pockets, and looked at Duke coldly, see this Philip and Jack who are about to bow also halted their movements and looked at the Duke and Sam as they made eye contact.

    The rest of the candidates and the people on the stage also notice this, but they didn¡¯t say anything at all. After all, this is not their ce to speak. If there is any problem with Sam¡¯s behaviour the Duke can take it up with him, if they interfered it wouldn¡¯t do good for them if the Duke himself felt nosey.

    After they stood up, Duke looked at all the candidates and said with a smile.

    "Today marks for the end of the two phases of thepetition. All the candidates here participated in the chaos of the battle field and thebours of the Business field. I hope all of you learnt something from this experience and realize your full potential.

    But unfortunately, all of you cannot be promoted to the next phase and the majority of you would be eliminated.

    I hope those who are going to be eliminated are wouldn¡¯t be disheartened and continue to pursue the path of cultivation and reach greater heights.

    Everyone who is going to be eliminated will be given the admission into the southern star academy and will be admitted directly to the elite branch."

    As paused here, the candidates apuded loudly. Many of the candidates who were extremely tense a moment ago, were a bit rxed now.

    They are mostly people of other marquis territories and that toomoners. They came to this point with most effort and if they get eliminated which they had high probability of happening and left with no returns they would really be disheartened. That is the main motivation that is pushing them forward.

    Now that, they heard that they could be admitted into the Southern star academy which they never ever dreamt of admitting into, their worries mostly eased.

    The candidates from the two teams of southern star, some candidates from the various other teams who are only interested in the next stage of thepetition and burning with ambition and people like Sam who knew they would definitely pass. These people didn¡¯t care about this admission offer

    After some more hypocritical wise words and promises, Duke finally came to the point.

    "Now, the candidates shall go to the exchange point and collect your points there and at the same time distribute among yourselves. For your convenience, every team has one exchange point in a separate room and you have one hour to distribute your points among yourselves.

    After that, the rankings will be announced.

    So, Now go and collect your points in your assigned exchange point."

    All the candidates started running off. Sam and his team went to their assigned exchange point.

    When the team members saw their newly acquired points, they didn¡¯t know what to say, they almost forgot to breath for a while. Sam is the only one who is calm.

    He generously transferred some points to the teammates, but he didn¡¯t share equally. He distributed them varying on their efforts. Hawk, Drew and Kelly got lesser points. Even though, they might not be the least of all the candidates in those six they are not best.

    But they didn¡¯tin, because they understood what they did. Kelly could only help them in the kitchen at the restaurant all the battles Philip and Jack faced are out of her league and she didn¡¯t have enough business ac.u.men. Only them did she understood herpetence level. This ce is too big for her.

    Hawk and Drew only became employees under Sam in the business phase.

    But the main problem is that the business phase is the ce to reap more points.

    After all, the military phase offers limited chances as they have to vie for the kills with the rest of the army. The nine hundred points that a person got in Sam¡¯s batch is actually pretty great. Hawk and Drew are not on that level.

    They also didn¡¯t have much hopes on advancement. They are content with the admission into the southern star.

    Philip and Jack though, even though they didn¡¯t make much points in the business phase, their military points are unnaturally high. Sam was quite startled when he saw their points and felt that they really did go all out.

    They must have killed an entire battalion all by themselves to gain so many points.

    After an hour, everyone assembled again and the atmosphere was quite tense.

    Duke cleared his throat and said in a serious tone.

    "I am going to reveal the top fifty members but the rest of you are going to be eliminated."

    As soon as he said these words, all the candidates were ck jawed. They didn¡¯t expect that the majority elimination would be thisrge. The duke just removed three fourth of them in a single cut.

    But he acted as if he didn¡¯t see their expressions and he slowly stated announcing the results.

    "Rank fifty: Hawk 650 points.

    Rank forty-nine: Zeke 652 points

    Rank forty-eight: Blue fire 653 points

    .

    .

    .

    .

    .

    Rank ten: Josh Carton 1700 points

    Rank nine: Jinen 1756 points

    Rank eight: Amander Silver 1795 points

    Rank seven : Sylvia Tosh 1803 points

    Rank six : Aiken Joy 1825 points

    Rank five: Trevor 2015 points

    Rank four: Jack 2486 points

    Rank three: Philip 2984 points

    Rank two: Nichs Carton 3483 points

    Rank One: "

    Duke paused a bit as he observed the candidates who are already in discussions, his eyesnded on his youngest yet most capable son, Nichs whose face was full of confusion and curiosty.

    Many people here thought that Nichs is going to be the first ranker followed by Trevor who is the person who score more than nine hundred in the first military phase. That guy is also from Nichs¡¯ team. But there are three dark horses and two of them threw Trevor from the second ce to fifth and the third one even threw Nichs from first to second.

    Duke gulped a bit before he announced

    "Rank one: Sam 36307 points."

    As soon as his words left his mouth, everyone fell silent. It was the standard example of the phrase ¡¯pin drop silence¡¯.

    And the next second the whole crowd was in uproar.

    "Did I hear it right?"

    "I think I am still dreaming?"

    "What is with those numbers? Why are they five digits?"

    "How can one even get so many points?"

    All these voices are from the candidates who are not from Sam¡¯s batch but the candidates from Sam¡¯s batch have different voices.

    "Damn it, that guy was suppressed so much in the beginning, but now look at this."

    "Yeah, I thought this guy was doomed after he was assigned a separate battalion to lead, but those soldiers not only whopped our asses, they even brought him these many points."

    "Yeah, that Sam¡¯s Park. Even though, I know that he would earn profits, I didn¡¯t think he would earn this much, maybe we should have partnered up with him."

    But there are voices that are also not willing to ept this.

    "It is impossible to gain these many points."

    "I know this guy, he is the Artisan. Maybe something underhanded happened?"

    "Does Artisan tower have any hand in this?"

    Their words became more and more outrageous that Duke became speechless.

 Chapter 199: Final Round

    The announcement was over and neither Duke or Sam didn¡¯t bother to exin themselves to the candidates.

    Duke went on with the event after announcing the rankings as he addressed the candidates again.

    "The names I announced are the fifty people who are promoted to the next round."

    The candidates who were selected all cheered, but Duke¡¯s next words damped their excitement again.

    "So, now let us discuss the next round. There would only be ten people who are going to pass the next round and the rest of the forty will also be eliminated. So, do not celebrate too early.

    Because, the next round is going to be conducted today, right here, right now."

    The audience became silent. They didn¡¯t expect this turn of events.

    Ten minutester, the fifty candidates were assembled in the arena within the same estate, while the 150 eliminated candidates took seats as audience.

    Duke, along with the General Spark, regimentmanders and the General mercury who cameter, sat down at the special viewing tform to oversee the next round.

    "Thest round of thepetition in the southern star city will take ce now and that would happen in two stages.

    In the first stage, ten candidates will be selected from your fifty by a royal rumble.

    Thest ten candidates that are left standing will fight it out tomorrow in second stage to decide on the rankings within themselves.

    So, for the first round, the whole field is your battle ground. The stage the surroundings, anything beyond the barrier separating the field and the audience is off the limits and within the field you can do anything.

    The first round will end only if there are ten people left standing.

    A candidate will be considered lost and eliminated, if he surrenders willingly or knocked unconscious, left the field or died."

    As he spoke up to this point, his voice was still as calm as ever, but the candidates didn¡¯t feel so. Mentioning death means, killing isn¡¯t forbidden in the battle. This left them feel cold.

    Only Nichs is showing an excited expression.

    He is dying for a battle.

    Duke looked at the candidates with a sweeping nce and without even giving them any time to mentally prepare he said out loud.

    "Begin."

    The candidates were stunned a bit and then immediately came to themselves.

    One person evenunched the first strike on the person standing before him.

    Sam is in thest row, but he didn¡¯t attack anyone immediately. And he is not the only one who did so, the top ten candidates took a step back and didn¡¯t act offensive.

    As Sam was observing the surroundings, he suddenly sensed something and dodged to the side. A dagger struck the air in the spot he was previously in.

    He turned around and saw a person in ck looking at him coldly.

    "You are the weakest of all the people here, so why bother staying? You better surrender now or you might not survive this."

    Sam then looked around and saw that several people are looking at him.

    All of them want to take down Sam first. They might say that he is the weakest and has no right to participate, but they just want to eliminate him first because they are jealous of his points.

    They want to enjoy his misery of getting eliminated first even after obtaining so many points in the military and business phase. These guys have a disgusting quality which was hidden in almost all human beings. Schadenfreude.

    Sam didn¡¯t answer the guy at all and just stood there with his hands in his pockets. His expression was calm and collected.

    The person who attacked Sam was a bit pissed off due to Sam¡¯s nonchnce, he waved immediately moved as he blurred into a dark shadow.

    This guy is a dark element user and that too, his dark element is of shadow kind. After all, not all dark element users are same and the pure dark element is rare. Even the pure light element is rare, but since the light element is not deemed useful in the battle by this world, they didn¡¯t research it more.

    Sam saw as the guy skipped from one shadow to another with a dagger in his hands. He is using the shadows of the surrounding people and objects as transfer points as he moved from one ce to another.

    At the same time, he started making his move on Sam.

    Within a few seconds, Sam knew this guys battle style. He is an assassin. He is not even a Warrior mage, he is only a mage, but the norms restricted his shadow element from using it with versatility and he doesn¡¯t have many attacks.

    All was able to do was to sneak attack a person to kill, but if that one chance is lost, it would be difficult to attack again. Sam even guessed that this guy continuously attacked only because Sam is a Novice, he would have retreated if the opponent is a Great realm cultivator.

    Some of the people near them are observing the battle, they are keen to see Sam getting eliminated but that is not happening. The assassin moved agilely and swiftly but he wasn¡¯t able to hit Sam at all.

    Sam didn¡¯t even take his hands out of his pockets, but he kept on dodging. He is like wind, light and flexible. He moved agilely as he dodged each and every dagger strike and the main thing is that he didn¡¯t use a single unit of spiritual energy.

    He is solely using his body. He felt that since he has to battle anyway, he can at least test the results of his new cultivation.

    So, the first test is agility and endurance.

    As Sam stepped from one spot to another without even taking his hands from his pockets while dodging the dagger attacks without even breaking a sweat, the surrounding candidates grew interested in his battle more and more.

    They didn¡¯t expect Sam tost this long but his endurance is even better than the Great mage attacking him. They were surprised, but Sam has different thoughts.

    Those are thoughts of pity and that is not for the candidates or the attacker, it is for the shadow element of the attacker. Sam felt that this guy is really a donkey who couldn¡¯t appreciate the scent of the sandalwood. The shadow element is utterly wasted on him.

    So, he didn¡¯t want to entertain this guy anymore. This time, Sam didn¡¯t just dodge, he evaded an attack and gave a kick to the attacker¡¯s jaw making him unconscious.

    Before the surrounding people to react, someone from the crowd shouted grabbing everyone¡¯s attention.

    "Everyone, if you all fight each other from the start, the top ten candidates will gain an edge above us and we will be done. I suggest we join hands together and eliminate them first before deciding which one of us can get those ten spots."

    The one who shouted was one of the noble kids who didn¡¯t make the cut into top ten.

    The whole group started discussing and thinking but only for a while, within three seconds, one by one they agreed with suggestion.

    The top ten candidates are a bit startled. Well, not all of them. Nichs might be the most delighted of all people and the includes the noble kid, who came forward to propose this alliance.

    The top ten candidates started making their way towards the stage so that they could stay together. If a group of people ostracizes some people within them, they would involuntarily make another group.

    Sam who is nearest to the stage, was the first one to climb so that he could have more space around him to deal with the attackers. But he didn¡¯t expect that the remaining nine would follow his footsteps.

    Jack and Philip are near to begin with. As all of them went up to the stage, the remaining members also started surrounding them and Sam saw that the noble kid who instigated this is slowly moving to the back of the crowd inconspicuously

    This guy is a sly fox, he just wanted to wear down the top candidates. But What surprised Sam is that the two brother Zeke and Blue fire are also doing the same. In actual fact, none of them are moving back, rather the rest of the crowd are moving forward.

    Beside Sam, Nichs already took his spear out, his Level 3 Great mage aura was released to the full extent as the rest of the top ten also started making their preparations. Sam shook his head at the stupidity of the crowd surrounding them. They are just waiting to be ughtered.

    Even though, these guys are elites, this is not much of a deal for the top ten to fight one against three.

    And the next moment the fight started.

    Sam took out a staff and started fighting too. He only used his body strength and restricted himself from using the spiritual energy.

    He is facing two people and Jack who is also at the Great mage level 1 the second lowest cultivation stage on the field also got two people.

    Zeke, Blue fire and the instigator didn¡¯t even bother to make a move. They are just making some superficial spells and moves to bluff the remaining crowd.

    As Sam was dealing with the two candidates, he though of somethings and immediately changed the fighting style. For his convenience the two of them are warriors and one of them is the Great realm level 1 cultivator.

    Sam used his wind element and along with the forceful moves of his staff, the tail wind of each attack was quite ferocious and with the additive sharpness Sam added, it perforated the surface skin of the opponent with every move, exposing some muscle fibres.

    Within the next ten moves, they are already in a bad stage and even had thoughts of retreat.

    But Sam didn¡¯t let them and led them to do a mock battle as he wielded his staff with a single hand.

    After ten seconds. He threw a ss capsule on to a person who is right beside Blue fire and a small blue ming ball hit that person.

    "What is wrong with you?" That guy who was hit by the blue me turned towards the Blue fire who just conjured a fire ball.

    That blue coloured fire ball made the evidence irrefutable.

    Blue fire didn¡¯t know what happened and wasn¡¯t able to respond.

    That guy looked at the nk expression and said in annoyance.

    "Look where you hit next time."

    He is an archer and is busy covering for the crowd, so he just left Blue fire alone thinking it was an ident and since the damage was low, there is no need to make a fuss.

 Chapter 200: Mob fight

    Meanwhile, the two opponents opposite Sam are having a hard time. They just want to flee, or even surrender, but Sam is not giving them a moment of peace. If he gave them a second, they would quit.

    But Sam doesn¡¯t want to let them go. They are the perfect cover up for what he would do.

    After he hit first target with the methane me, Sam closely observed the crowd and for when he found a perfect time, he threw another capsule.

    This capsule is made for holding some normal liquid samples and they are unable to withstand the methane me and exploded due to thepression of the gas.

    In that chaotic time though, the sound of ss shattering is insignificant.

    Sam¡¯s target didn¡¯t change this time, but the dosage of me increased, it is not big enough cause any damage, however.

    That guy red at Blue fire again, but didn¡¯t take any action this time, but he was cursing inside about how this guy didn¡¯t even have basic control and still ended up in top fifty.

    Sam smiled and just went on with the fiasco.

    The third, the fourth and for the fifth time, Sam chose different targets in the vicinity of Blue fire. By this time, the big shots noticed that Sam was doing something but they didn¡¯t get how he was doing this.

    Within three minutes Sam hit around six members repeatedly without any candidates noticing and now he was making ast shot and this time he hit the first target and the attack was decent.

    This time, the target didn¡¯t stay idle because the attack did some damage. He became furious and turned his bow towards Blue fire as he shouted.

    "You Punk, I thought it was ident but now I am sure. How dare you sneak attack me?"

    His arrow shot through the air as it almost hit but Blue fire avoided it and looked at the attacker.

    "What do you mean sneak attack? You are the one who attacked first?"

    He immediatelyunched a fire ball. But the archer dodged and the fire ball hit another person and this person happened to be one of the people who Sam targeted which made this guy also join the fray.

    Soon, the situation was in chaos. Zeke who is brother of Blue fire, tried to stick up to him in the beginning andter he was dragged into fight too.

    Now more than fifteen members are in a mob fight while the opponents who are in direct confrontation with the top ten are also either eliminated or joined the mob.

    Sam looked at the group of candidates fighting like madmen with a smirk. For him all it took was three minutes and around twelve capsules made of ss and some methane to not only copse the alliance but also make them fight it out themselves.

    These people have typical mob mentality, they can be manipted in seconds and most of the people in this world have this quality.

    Suddenly, eight out of top ten doesn¡¯t have much to do. They just stood there and watched the show. At this moment, the instigator finally couldn¡¯t take it. He came to the stage and picked a fight with the person in rank ten.

    As their battle escted, the group started to calm down as some of them are eliminated and some of them are getting exhausted.

    At this moment, Sam made his move, since he was going away from the southern star city, Zeke outlived his time. It is about time he made a stop to this.

    He leapt from the stage and Kicked Zeke in his stomach, he flew out of the group and crashed into the ground.

    General Spark tensed up in his seat.

    Sam looked at Zeke coldly and walked towards him leisurely.

    Zeke looked at Sam with Pleading eyes and said.

    "Sam can we leave this behind us and let bygone be bygones? I have been suffering from past eight months and had to rely on someone¡¯s help to evenpete in thispetition. All I did is ambushing you with some people, I know my mistake can you please forgive me?"

    Sam shook his head.

    "Forgive you? I would have let you go if you had just learnt your lesson, but you have grown a pair of balls after you met your Grandfather and even dared to create trouble for me. You know the worst part is? Dragging the people around me into this and most importantly, how dare you make designs on Watt?"

    Sam¡¯s voice became colder and colder. He doesn¡¯t want to talk much when dealing with someone, but only words could achieve his desired effect, with his words he wants to make Zeke ept some facts which he kept on denying in his heart. He continued.

    "How do you feel? Zeke. When you attacked me, you had everything, wealth,ckeys, your father¡¯s status and protection, your grandfather¡¯s unreasonable affection and spoiling. How do you feel now that you have lost all of that?

    No, I should say, how do you feel now that I destroyed all of that?

    As soon as I entered the Blue me city, I destroyed yourckeys.

    As soon as opened my business, I destroyed your wealth.

    As soon as I met your father, I destroyed his support.

    And finally, after I dealt with your grandfather you are almost forsaken.

    How do you feel losing everything?"

    Zeke could feel his head bursting with pain. He waspletely consumed in his despair. He is asking himself. ¡¯What do I have now? What can I hope for? Can I even survive if Sam pursues me? Can my father even save me? Can my grandfather protect me?¡¯

    All these kinds of questions gued his mind.

    Sam squatted down as he ced his hand on Zeke¡¯s head who was now sitting weakly on the ground. He forced Zeke to lift his head and made him look straight into his eyes. Hepletely unleashed his bloodl.u.s.t and killing intent. His aura is simr to a God of killing.

    It was as if he just swam in a sea of blood.

    Zeke felt suffocated and went into a trance and heard Sam¡¯s words ringing in his ears.

    "Zeke, you are a hopeless piece of trash, you lost everything. You have no one who would care for you. You are abandoned. If I want to kill you no one will stop me, you don¡¯t have anything that can be called yours, anyone that can be called yours and anywhere that can be called yours.

    All you have is your pathetic self."

    As Sam said this, he released his spiritual energy and let it enter Zeke¡¯s body. As he saw this scene, General Spark immediately raised from his chair and yelled.

    "SAM, NOOOO."

    Sam looked at the general coldly and with an evil smile but still didn¡¯t stop what he was doing and with a snap, the spiritual core cracked. He didn¡¯t destroy it entirely but left a deep crack which is nigh impossible to heal. He left it so because, he wants to make Zeke feel more and more despair.

    No matter, how insignificant the person is, one must pay the price for targeting him and his friend.

    As Sam stood up arge spiritual energy wave hit him. He crashed into the ground and spurt out a mouthful of blood.

    The General Spark wasn¡¯t able to control his anger and released his energy wave which injured him, such was the difference in their levels.

    Sam wiped the blood and looked at the General with extreme cold gaze, he would have killed general if he can right now. And he can if he ns properly, but now he changed his mind.

    Sam stood up weakly and looked at General for a second. The old man came to himself and took a deep breath to calm down and this was mostly due to the suppression from Duke.

    Sam walked towards Zeke and gave him a kick which broke almost all of his bones in the chest but still sending him near the General¡¯s feet. Then without speaking he was about to turn back, when a person with a short sword attacked him.

    Sam narrowly dodged the attack but he was still grazed on the cheek and he felt a numbing pain on the wound, not because of the sword cut, rather it was because of some foreign substance entering.

    He was surprised that the opponent was able to attack him, but the opponent was even more surprised.

    "How can you survive that strike?" He thought out loud in shock.

    Then only Sam thought about the strike and felt that it is indeed extremely powerful. Even if he was able to dodge and was only hit lightly, he wouldn¡¯t be able to get away easily. If another Peak stage Novice was in his ce, his face would have been cut in half.

    This was all thanks to his body cultivation.

    Sam realized this and became furious, the other party intended to kill him.

    Sam didn¡¯t care about the foreign substance and was about to make a move and his fist moved in full force. His fist was covered in golden mes and a heated tail wind with extremely sharp aura and his body¡¯s strength was fully unleashed.

    He directly aimed at the opponent¡¯s heart and there was no doubt it would connect.

    The opponent was caught off guard and he didn¡¯t even have time to react.

    Just as the fist was an inch away, a loud shout was held.

    "HALT." Duke shouted on top of his lungs, which stunned the candidates for a second, Sam also slowed down, but he didn¡¯t want to stop at all.

    But at this moment. Two hands caught his arm and another pair held his body from the back and forcefully halted Sam¡¯s movements.

    Nichs, who held Sam from behind whispered to calm him down.

    "The fight is over Sam. The forty people are eliminated. Calm down."

    Sam withdrew his spiritual energy and shrugged the two people off, he looked at the person who attacked him coldly.

    He is none other than the instigator. Sam noted him down and then looked at the person who caught his hand.

    He is the person in rank 5 Trevor. Thetter also observed Sam with a keen look.

    Sam took a final look at the instigator and walked to the stage, where the rest are standing.

    After they assembled, Duke said.

    "Take a break for today. Thest round will be conducted tomorrow." He didn¡¯t say much and just waved his hands.

    Read the author¡¯s thought

 Chapter 201: Breakthrough

    Sam left along with the rest of his friends to his residence behind the park.

    This house is not as big as a mansion but it has enough rooms to fit everyone. After arriving at the residence, Sam entered his room and immediately sat cross-legged. He closed his eyes and used observe on himself.

    He observed the wound on his cheek. Sam sensed some foreign substance entering his body and it is making him a little bit ufortable.

    He was too focused on General Spark at that moment and didn¡¯t notice the surroundings in time otherwise he wouldn¡¯t even be hit at all and now he has to take care of whatever that entered his system.

    After checking the wound, Sam saw that the foreign substance which has a high possibility of being poison still didn¡¯t enter his blood stream, it didn¡¯t even enter his muscle tissue. It was still struck in the outyers of the skin due to the cell density.

    But Sam could observe that the surrounding skin cells are being contaminated slowly.

    Sam didn¡¯t have any antidote for this substance, so he can only physically remove this. As he said, this Sam took out a small de made of ck meteorite sand. This de is one of the tools he used to make special cloths.

    He closed his eyes and slowly cut out the piece of flesh on his face which was already corroded. After burning the piece of flesh, he started healing the wound and also the small internal injury he suffered from the General¡¯s spiritual energy wave.

    He was filled with fury for this General. At first, he wanted to take it out on General before leaving the southern star city. But now, he decided otherwise, he will wait for a few more days. He will return to this ce as soon as his strength hit General¡¯s level and overwhelm him with raw strength.

    It might be a bitte, but he can wait. After all, the General also wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything to him and if ites to it, he canpromise and kill him with the formation, insects, the energy cells.

    There was no hurry in this matter, he wants to see the General cowering under the overwhelming might.

    But there was one thing he has to hurry and that is breakthrough. When Trevor stopped his punch, Sam felt that his current strength might make it difficult for him to win, so he didn¡¯t want to take any risks.

    Sam went to the vast backyard. There was a wall separating his house with the Dragon Hawk tribe and there are a wide range of formations that are made to conceal his back yard.

    Sam let out Mia, Sky and Yanwu.

    Right now, Mia is asrge as Sky and Yanwu which is six times a normal human.

    The hydra nudged on to Sam as soon as she came out and Sam embraced the beast by fitting as many necks as possible.

    He took a step back after that and took out some water element spiritual stones andid them on the ground.

    Soon, he started making the hand signs and started the spell. Within a few moments a runic figure appeared out of his body and went towards Mia and a runic figure came out of her body and went towards him.

    As the runic figures merged, Sam and the three beasts formed a connected with him as the junction and the energy exchange started.

    This time, the main energy source is Mia as she is the new contract.

    She kept on absorbing the water elemental energy in the stone around her and started transmitting it to Sam while she tried to breakthrough as well and within a few minutes.

    The three beasts and young man broke through into Level 4 and Great realm respectively.

    Sam closed his eyes and started checking his spiritual core. In this transparent core, Sam saw two new additions apart from the golden light, the golden me, the small tornado.

    The new additions are one a water droplet and the another one is a small viscous ball of liquid filled with different violet shades. These are hydra¡¯s water element and the poison element.

    Sam already checked what are the different poisons a variant hydra can create by testing the venom of Mia¡¯s nine heads.

    The first one is corrosive poison which corrodes everything.

    The second one is the semi- anaesthetic poison, which makes one feel numb and extremely low consciousness blurring their senses.

    The third one is the poison of illusion. This makes a person dumb and muddleheaded. It is like a narcotic drug which makes them high.

    The fourth one, is the blood poison which makes their bloodstream venomous and slowly numbing all the internal organs and killing them at the end. This has only one problem as it acts slowly and wouldn¡¯t have any immediate effects and the lethality increases with a long period of consumption.

    The fifth one is a poison that puts a person to an instant sleep. They wouldn¡¯t know what is happening and will be down for the count for a short period of time.

    The sixth one is the poison that affects the spiritual energy. This poison itself isn¡¯t that affective on a person directly when ingested. But once that person starts using his spiritual energy, the poison will take affect and will make them weak and tired at the same time weakening their recovery rate.

    The seventh poison is the Poison of Paralysis. The person who was infected will bepletely conscious but the only problem is that he wouldn¡¯t be able to move or use his spiritual energy at all making them vulnerable.

    The eighth head don¡¯t have a poison rather it is a head suited for intake. Hydra is the most venomous beast in the world and that also makes it beast with highest resistance to all kinds of venoms.

    Apart from that this eighth head will allow the beast consume any type of venom externally and store it inside the body to nurture itself and can also use it as its own weapon.

    Thest head is one of the most troublesome venoms. The Poison of gue. This poison is not only harmful for the body making them slowly vulnerable and weak consuming their vitality and energy, if one came into contact with the bodily fluids of the person, there is a high chance they would be infected as well.

    Sam entered the tower with the beasts and started some practice to get a hang of his new abilities. The poison abilities which are highly useful has a problem though. Except for the corrosive venom which is inherent of all the hydras, and the ability of the eighth head to consume all kinds of poison the remaining have some limitations.

    The amount of venom they can manifest is not unlimited and has some restrictions on it. And it will also take some time to conjure if the current stock is emptied out.

    But the draw back is not that bad as the amount conjured and speed of conjuring is rtive to the level of beast, so as Mia increases her strength then the venoms are also more abundant.

    Now, Sam has also that facility and ability but he doesn¡¯t want to reveal the poison usage to the world directly. The element is bane to many users and it would work better if it was secret.

    After practicing for hours in his tower, Sam was quite content, Water element is versatile in itself but he can use it in more ways than the norms could.

    The training was over and the remaining time, he started his research till the morning.

    The next day, in the arena again.

    The whole field was repaired including the stage.

    The ten candidates are standing on the stage side by side. Duke addressed them from his spot.

    "Today, you will fight for ranking. Everyone of you will fight with all the remaining nine candidates and the one with most wins will be ranked first. The one with most losses will be rankedst.

    There are no limits to fight except for that stage. In a fight the person who is off the stage will be eliminated.

    The fight will stop if a person surrenders, loses consciousness or dies.

    You can take a break after a fight and in that time the other candidates are forbidden to challenge you.

    Sam, as you are the person with the most points you have to go first and you will be choosing your opponent."

    He sat down after ending his speech.

    Except for Sam, the remaining nine got off the stage.

    Sam scanned the nine of them and his gaze finallynded on the instigator who made a move on him yesterday. He pointed him and gestured him toe on to the stage.

    A referee who is in charge of making the record of battles announced.

    "First battle Sam Vs Taurus Van."

    Taurus is the only one who entered the top ten yesterday recing a guy named Aiken. The rest of the candidates didn¡¯t change at all.

    He is also a noble kid and the guy he eliminated is also from a noble family.

    Sam looked at Taurus who came on to the stage and took out two short swords.

    "Fight."

    As soon as the referee said these words, Sam made his move.

    He used both his Phantom step along with his fleshly strength as moved in a blur.

    Even before Taurus got into stance, Sam alreadynded a punch on that guy¡¯s face and mming him into the stage.

    *BOOM*

    The stage cracked slightly.

    Taurus felt as if his brain came out of his body. The audience were stunned.

    Sam slowly squatted down and whispered.

    "If you know what is good for you, you would say what I want to hear. Otherwise..."

    He paused a bit and continued.

    "You will still sing like a bird after I am done with you."

    Sam held caught his hand and broke it with a twist.

    "Ahhhhhhhhhhh...."

    Taurus shrieked in misery.

    "I SU..." As he was about surrender, a small wind current came and cut his tongue halting his words.

    He looked at Sam as he groaned in pain. His eyes wide in horror.

    Sam smiled coldly and said. "You won¡¯t be going anywhere before you say what I want to hear."

    An announcement in author¡¯s note.

 Chapter 202: Sam Vs Trevor

    Sam started showing the audience what instant torture can be.

    He started twisting his limbs in weirdest ways possible and after coiling his both arms and legs, he set the bones and started healing them in that position.

    Taurus¡¯ hands for bent and coiled backwards, entangled. The weird bone setting is making him hurt even with the slightest movement.

    The legs are bent in weird ways and heid on his belly as he groaned in iprehensible words.

    Sam moved forward and pped on Taurus¡¯ hands making him feel immense pain.

    Taurus looked at him with pleading gaze, he cannot take it anymore.

    Sam finally healed his mouth and let him speak.

    He immediately started speaking.

    "I... I didn¡¯t want to do that; it was my father¡¯s n. He said that since you have grudge with General Spark and the general is in a position where he couldn¡¯t deal with him himself. So, he asked me to do kill you, so that we can gain general¡¯s favour.

    That is why I made a move on you, I didn¡¯t want to risk it, so I first made sure that I got a ce in top ten and then made a move on you when you are injured. I am sorry, I am really sorry."

    He spilled everything in a single breath. He didn¡¯t even want to bear this pain anymore.

    Sam looked him coldly and didn¡¯t say anything, the audience watched him as he stayed silent for a few moments, but they can feel his cold murderous feeling.

    He suddenly extended his leg backwards and with pure raw force, he kicked the head crushing it on the spot.

    The groaning and sluggish movements of pain stopped in an instant.

    Sam didn¡¯t even wait for the referee to signal the match¡¯s end and kicked the dead body off the stage. He walked back to his initial position and looked at the remaining candidates to select the next person.

    His expression changed back to normal and didn¡¯t even show any signs of killing a person.

    "Since a person is died and a position opened up thest person who was eliminated yesterday will be taking the tenth ce." Referee exined.

    As he said that Aiken Joy who was eliminated yesterday came to and stood beside the remaining candidates.

    "Sam, do you wish to continue the next challenge."

    Sam nodded and pointed at Aiken Joy, but thetter shook his head and said. "I don¡¯t wish to challenge anyone count mine as nine losses. I am content with tenth rank."

    Referee nodded in eptance; Sam then pointed at another person to challenge. The fight was over very briefly.

    Sam didn¡¯t hold back at all and the candidates surrendered one by one in an instant. All these while he did only one thing. Make a move and a single punch or kick, making them feel the threat to their life and stopping just before seriously damaging them.

    Philip and Jack gave up right away without even bothering to put up a fight.

    The candidates who lost to him grew frustrated at the turn of events. But they couldn¡¯t catch Sam¡¯s speed.

    Finally, only two people were left to challenge, Trevor and Nichs.

    "Sam, how about you give us a chance to fight first, then we can havest battle and we don¡¯t have to hold back anymore?" Nichs asked suddenly making Sam stop choosing the next person.

    Sam thought for a bit and nodded.

    After getting down the stage, the remaining candidates took stage one by one and this time the battles are little bit long and fights are intense.

    Sam observed the battles nonchntly. Out of all the candidates, Jack and Philip only lost to Trevor and Nichs with six wins each.

    When it was time for their battle, Philip just threw in the towel.

    The remaining candidates, one of them is Josh Carton who is second son of Duke born on the same year as Nichs but to a different mother. He is one of the people with least prowess in the ten and he sat at rank 9.

    Followed by the two women, Sylvia at rank eight, Amander at rank 7.

    Jinen at rank six, Philip at five, Jack at four.

    Now only three ranks remained and three people, Nichs, Trevor and Sam has to fight amongst themselves.

    "You guys first." Nichs said these words and stepped down the stage letting Sam and Trevor fight amongst themselves.

    Trevor is son of the General Mercury. Sam thought that he was amoner and found out that it was indeed so. The military title gives them equivalent status as nobles but they are not. He felt funny at this system.

    The nobles who do nothing but use their authority for own good are given such lofty status but the man who is controlling the whole city guard and working his ass off is called amoner.

    Sam shook his head and went up the stage. Trevor also came on.

    Sam has observed Trevor¡¯s battle style; he is mostly passive and let his opponent make the first move. After defending for some time and getting a hand of the other person¡¯s attack style, Trevor took them down with a projectile attack which Sam wasn¡¯t able to observe.

    Anyway, he might find out soon.

    Sam didn¡¯t wait much and immediatelyunched an attack. His speed is invincible with the initial stage great realm cultivators. So, he has an edge over the rest of the candidates.

    Sam appeared on left side of Trevor and threw a side kick. Trevor¡¯s reaction was better than most people, but it wasn¡¯t fast enough.

    Sam¡¯s kicknded, on Trevor¡¯s abdomen sending him back flying.

    To no one¡¯s surprise, Trevor held his ground and vigntly looked around. He was waiting for Sam¡¯s next move and that wait didn¡¯tst long.

    Sam¡¯s next move was a punch to the ribs. This time, Trevor closed his eyes and only used his spiritual sense, he didn¡¯t let his eyes confuse him and...

    *ng*.

    A sound simr to a hammer colliding a metal te rang in the arena.

    Sam took a step back, Trevor didn¡¯t move. There was a small metallic structure formed on the point where Sam¡¯s hitnded.

    Sam suddenly smiled and moved.

    His speed increased. He moved like wind. His phantom steps and bodily strength unleashed fully.

    Trevor stood in the ce like a column unyielding to the hits. But he was troubled. As soon as he felt that he got a hang of Sam¡¯s speed and managed to defend a hit, he is having a wakeup call.

    Sam managed to increase his speed time and again.

    After two minutes of constant shes, Sam increased his speed and his leg was covered in a golden me. This time, his target was the liver.

    Trevor sensed that he couldn¡¯t keep up with Sam. His face showed a hint of frustration.

    Sam keenly observed his opponent and he knew that this hit wouldn¡¯t seed.

    *ng*

    And indeed so, the kick didn¡¯t connect.

    Sam took a step back and observed what was in front of him.

    Trevor is standing inside a semi-transparent dome.

    It has a metallic yet liquid like l.u.s.tre.

    It in fact looked like a dome made of viscous liquid.

    Sam moved once again andnded a punch.

    At the point of contact, the liquid turned into solid metal.

    At the same time, the liquid near that spot conjured into a metallic spike and came towards his face.

    Sam suddenly remembered an ancient anime he watched in his previous life. In that anime, a character named Gaara used same approach to attack rather it was sand instead of this metallic liquid.

    He dodged the spike and stepped back.

    "You are the second person in my peers who made me use this technique." Trevor said these words as he looked at Sam through that dome.

    Sam smiled but didn¡¯t reply.

    He knew it was difficult for him to attack this guy since it was hard to prate this extremely versatile and fluid shield yet attacking weapon.

    Sam kept some distance and started blowing the golden mes at the dome like a me thrower.

    But he felt that the attack is futile. Even though, the metal is expanding and there was a vulnerable spot created on the dome, the expanded metal is giving Trevor a better chance to attack and he kept on throwing the projectile made of hot liquid metal at Sam.

    Sam has to dodge at the same time he was attacking.

    In this gap, the metal is losing the heat which he painstakingly increased not letting it reach the higher temperature which might make it difficult to control.

    Even with Sam¡¯s elemental controlling ability, he was still unable to concentrate on a single point of the dome as he can only fire at a point he was facing and his constant motion is making it hard to concentrate on a single spot.

    After a few minutes of futile effort, Sam figured out two methods to deal with this, first method only requires his two elements fire and wind. The second one though, only requires new element, the water.

    Since, he got a chance he decided to go with the second one.

    Right now, Trevor is in a position which is neared to the centre of the stage.

    Sam stood at a certain distance from Trevor and raised his hand. He started using the water spiritual energy.

    A transparent crystal-clear water disc formed as the water conjured from the end of his hand. The disc slowly moved towards a point which is few feet on top of the dome.

    There was trail of water connecting the disc and Sam¡¯s hand as he controlled it and after setting the disc there, the sun light conjured a light beam fell on the dome¡¯s peak.

    The semi-transparent liquid metal wasn¡¯t able topletely neutralise the highly concentrated light beam and Trevor has to take the heat from more than half of the attack.

    He felt his whole skin burning and his armor started disintegrated.

    He coped with the attack and he gritted his teeth. But just as he was trying to concentrate on strengthening the peak of the dome, Sam raised another arm and started another ming torch from the side attacking on both sides.

    Trevor felt like cursing for the first time. He wasn¡¯t able to cope the two attacks. And soon the dome copsedpletely.

    But Sam stopped the attack right this instant.

    Trevor was already in a pathetic state. His skin was burnt, his clothes turned to ashes and even his hair was burnt. He looked at Sam in astonishment. He slowly stood up and said.

    "I lost."

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 Chapter 203: Sam Vs Nicholas

    Trevor stepped down the stage and looked at the referee before saying.

    "I forfeit the next match too."

    He meant the fight between him and Nichs. He is not stage of fighting now and he needs a lot of time to recover.

    Nichs took the stage and said to Sam.

    "Do you need time to recover your strength?"

    "Nope."

    "Good." Nichs smiled and took out his spear. He released his aura of a level 3 Great realm warriorpletely. He didn¡¯t even have a single thought about starting it slow. He already yed that game with Sam before and now all he need is an all-out battle.

    Sam also took out reaper and released his aura. Anyone can tell he is a Level 1 Great realm cultivators.

    But his strength is definitely beyond that.

    Sam looked at Nichs and with a smirk made his first move.

    The sword and the spear shed as both of them moved like sh. Sam is actually surprised that Nichs can catch up with his speed.

    Out of all the battle methods and techniques one can use, speed is difficult to counter.

    If the speed and control are together, it would be even more hard to counter.

    Sam used speed to attack all the previous people in order finish the battle more efficiently without wasting any time.

    But that is not going to work anymore.

    This time, Sam didn¡¯t use any elemental techniques right from the start, he wants to estimate how much he can handle Nichs with pure warrior mode.

    Their battle, became more and more intense. Nichs had a big grin on his face which grew wider and wider as the battle went on.

    The remaining candidates couldn¡¯t follow their movements all they can see are one blood red and another silver coloured cold gleams with a lot of blurry images.

    Their fight didn¡¯t seem like one that was on their level. The people who are fighting seemed to be on a different league. Only Trevor has some rity on the whole scene.

    Even the judges couldn¡¯t help but be mesmerized. The battle of two youngsters made them excited.

    As the sword and the spear collided continuously for two minutes, both of them finally took a hit.

    Sam and Nichs both took a step back. Nichs took some damage as the sword left a small gash on the shoulder, on the other hand, Sam was unscathed, the reason is nothing but the feather coat.

    The spear failed to prate the coat and all he took was the brunt force, the sharp stab wasn¡¯t able to harm him.

    "I haven¡¯t had this much fun in a while." Nichs said as he spun the spear once and made his move again.

    He leapt at Sam as he yelled.

    "You better fight me with all you got, or you would regret it."

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything in reply, but he was also having fun. He also didn¡¯t feel much pressured in a battle since he came. Every battle he either won with an overwhelming power or wit. This type of head on confrontation is rare for him.

    He also took a step forward and swung the sword, but this time he started using the wind elemental energy.

    That¡¯s right, even though Sam is always capable of fighting someone of higher cultivation, Nichs is also capable of that. So, fighting a person like Nichs, Sam is having a hard time with only warrior mode even including the body strength.

    This is due to level difference, if he was on the same level as Nichs, he is quite sure that he could win.

    But now that it is difficult, he is going to use the elemental energies, anyway they are his abilities too and there is nothing wrong in using them.

    As they shed Sam¡¯s sword aura became sharper due to the enhancement of the wind element.

    Every move is bing more lethal as not only the sword swing itself is dangerous now even the tail wind of every swing is also sharp enough to make Nichs feel threatened.

    But instead of panicking he grew more and more excited as if he was a kid in an amus.e.m.e.nt park.

    The battle grew more and more ferocious. Nichs is .u.mting the damage slowly. Even though, the attacks of Sam aren¡¯t ofrge scale, he is still facing some problem as they arepletely repetitive and continuous.

    Sam is also not having a good time either. Nichs noticed that the feather coat is extremely hard to pierce, but that also gave him away the remaining parts which arepletely open for attack. So, his attack space got reduced but he is not discouraged at all.

    Sam had at least three close shaves and there is one clear stab on his chest.

    But the one who got surprised was Nichs himself. He wasn¡¯t able to prate deeper into the chest. Sam¡¯s muscles and skin are so dense that unless he made a full power attack, all his other attacks will not finish off Sam, he would be able to make aeback easily.

    The two of them are enjoying the battle. This battle doesn¡¯t have any shy moves like the one with Trevor, there is no high-level control of elements andrge-scale spells. All that was present is a constant pressure of potential danger and a very high-level test to their senses and battle instinct.

    Both of them are on pins and needles. This is not only a battle of strength and technique but also for their will. The first person to back down and show a hint of fear will be done for.

    They are on an extreme edge.

    As both of them are fighting the audience also grew more and more intrigued and immersed in their fight. They arepletely drawn into this.

    Sam only used the wind element; he didn¡¯t dare to employ another element as he was afraid if he added one more and if lost control of the rhythm for a second, he would lose. He doesn¡¯t dare give Nichs a chance.

    As the both the candidates are fighting on those extreme limits, the audience saw something magnificent which they might not forget in their lives.

    The battle spirit of the two youngsters started conjuring into forms, that is the conjuring of battle spirit.

    Both the battle spirits are about to form on the same time. On Nichs¡¯ side they could see a four legged animal silhouette, which was prettymon as most of the human beings battle styles are driven from the animals and as the battle spirit is a form created by nature they will always show something that was rted to the wild.

    But on Sam¡¯s side, they saw something different. It was a silhouette they never saw in their lives or never even herd of, even the Duke and Generals have no idea what it was.

    But just as they were waiting for the two figures to conjure so that they could witness the miracle, the battle took a sudden turn.

    Nichs, who took most damage out of the two finally couldn¡¯t hold up and took a critical injury on this shoulder. Sam repeatedly targeted that area so that he could have an easier time and now due to the .u.mted damage of that small wounds on that shoulder, he couldn¡¯t take the pain and effects of blood loss.

    Sam is not in a very good stage either. He also had several small injuries of chest, abdomen, legs, wrists, he even had a tiny gash on his nape.

    But he didn¡¯t fail to take this chance and threw multiple attacks with his sword. Four sword rays came towards Nichs one by one out of which he evaded two but couldn¡¯t help but take the remaining two.

    He had a deep gash on his chest, and before he could buckle in for the damage, Sam came forward and ced the sword on his neck.

    "You lost." Sam said as he gasped for air. This is the toughest one on one battle without any tricks and external factors he had since he came to this world. This reminded him of his olden days from his previous life.

    Nichs used his spear to support himself, refusing to fall down and looked at Sam straight in the eye with a smirk on his face.

    "I guess I did."

    Only after that did Sam retract his sword and both of them copsed on the stage at the same time. They didn¡¯t lose conscious, they just wanted to take a break.

    "Next time, I will beat you."

    Nichs said in a soft voice.

    "You can keep on dreaming, next time I will beat you without any elements at all."

    Sam gave the answer showing that he doesn¡¯t want to be outdone, this rare for the cold faced and cold hearted Sam. He doesn¡¯t usually giveebacks or like these types of banters.

    But this time, he did.

    Heid down on the stage as he looked at the clear sky. Today he felt so alive. His heart was brimming with vigour.

    This feeling reminded him of the words one of the closest people to him in his previous life said.

    "No matter, how many things you excel in or how many titles you achieve, remember on thing Sam, you will always be a warrior and a battle is the only ce you feel most alive. Even if you dislike it, or deny it, that is the truth."

    Sam always liked his identity as creator and inventor, which gives him a chance of explore and learn. But it was only a escape for most of his previous life. After all, he spent half his life time on the battlefield and in between the corpses. Even if he disliked it, that quality was ingrained in his heart and soul and he couldn¡¯t deny or escape it. He only has one choice and that is to embrace it and stay alive."

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 Chapter 204: FireWorks

    Duke stood on the stage that was almost destroyed from the battle.

    He looked at the ten candidates who stood below the stage in an order and said.

    "You ten will be leaving the Southern star in week and be on your way to the Imperial capital. In a month and a half, the princess will be reaching eighteen years old and there would be a ceremony on that day which will be the final day of yourpetition in the empire.

    Before that you would be facing the challenges which you should surpass prove yourself to be worthy to attend that ceremony.

    One more thing, there is a clear significance of the rank you have attained and you will know when you arrive at the imperial capital.

    In a week, make all the preparations and bid goodbye to all your rtives, you might not be stepping in southern star city for a while."

    After that speech everyone went on their way. In this week there are a lot of things Sam has to do and that is to meet someone, send someone a gift and send someone a message andst but not least, avoid some people who wants to meet him desperately.

    For example, the artisan tower head. That guy tried to get in contact with Sam in the past eight months of the business phase, but was unable to do so.

    Sam knew why he wanted to meet him and he has no intention to do so. He had tried to give that man an opportunity, but he was too blind with greed so, Sam cut him off, and he has no intention to listen to that man even if he changed his nature.

    As for the people who he has to meet, they are the three tower heads.

    In their meeting, they talked about the future of the Park and everything and how they should operate in his absence.

    He only has few things to state.

    "The Dragon Hawk tribe members, under any circ.u.mstances cannot be removed of their employment without my permission. You have only authority over shifting their duty over.

    Our profit-sharing methods remain same except you will get additional five percent in every agreement, since you will be managing this.

    My share of profits, which I can estimate how much shouldn¡¯t undergo any embezzlement, as I might send a person with my schr artisan badge to retrieve my funds at any moment.

    The most important thing of all, any formation design or inscription design and even the business model shall not be leaked to anyone other than our four people.

    If by any chance they were leaked, I hope you would be willing to bear the consequences as I won¡¯t be bothering to investigate the happenings. I will hold everyone ountable all the same.

    So, you better hope that there are no traitors among your subordinates and not any other Dukedom wouldn¡¯t get hold of all my designs.

    As long as you do that, there is little chance for anyone to replicate our business."

    At Sam¡¯s words the three tower heads were a bit displeased after all these words showed that Sam has some doubts on their integrity in the business and it is not a good feeling being a Nascent and still get warned by a young man who just broke through the Great realm just now.

    Sam also knew they would feel like this, but he didn¡¯t bother hiding his intent. He only trusts a few people in this world and these tower heads aren¡¯t one of them, and it is even more so when there are billions and potentially trillions of spirit stones involved.

    Sam stood up and before saying.

    "I understand if you are displeased, but I hope you think about it and make a decision to follow my words or not after you see the fireworks I prepared on the night before my departure."

    After leaving those words, Sam left the ce leaving them confused about what the fireworks meant.

    For the next few days, the shadow mice were on the duty. He has to send a gift to Van family head who conveniently wanted to kill Sam to gain the general¡¯s favour.

    As for getting revenge on General, it would be too easy on the General if he was to die just like that. So, Sam has something nned for him.

    These six days, Sam stayed in the second floor working on something serious.

    Mia, started losing the effect from the hydras blood as it became too small for her to absorb, so she left everything for the executioner sword to absorb and the de is already a Grade 5 sword.

    It wasn¡¯t suitable for him to use it for now with his strength.

    Now, the effect of the blood lost all the essence and only the venomous effects were left which would be dissipated in a year or two without the effects of the blood essence.

    As it is extremely potent, Sam has a great use for it, and now he is using it for not only to make mutated poisonous herbs, he is also using it for another purpose.

    Inside the tower, these six days, Sam worked on arge, easy but a time taking project while the shadow mice gathered his required intel. That intel is not regarding the ck water. He doesn¡¯t want to target the organisation anytime soon as it would be quite hard for him to deal with them on this scale with his power level.

    The info is about the Van family and the General Spark.

    On the seventh day which is also thest day of his stay in this city, Sam came out early in the morning.

    He had a lot of things to do.

    He sneaked out of his residence using the divine dimension and the shadow mice and entered the Van family estate.

    In that estate, the shadow mice carefully hid in a shadow near the family head¡¯s mansion.

    The family head is in a gloomy mood for the past week.

    His son died, but he was not upset about that, he has many sons from many concubines and youngest of them is the only one who is lost he still has his eldest son who he is mostly proud of, he was upset that his son leaked his ns.

    He enquired about Sam and learnt that he is quite vengeful. But he is not entirely worried for now as it is not much of an immediate problem as Sam doesn¡¯t have enough battle ability to content against Van family. At least, that is what he knew.

    He is just afraid that Sam would use his connections to make things difficult for his family members, but there was nothing that affected them has been done yet which made him more and more worried.

    So, for the past week he was busy with nning countermeasures for any possible scenarios he could think of and this day he headed for the family meeting as this would be thest day that Sam would stay in the city and they had to make sure to be ready at whatever he would throw at them.

    The head of Van family is a Peak Grand realm expert. The shadow mice observed him as he left the mansion and they immediately went on to do their thing.

    From what Sam learnt from the shadow mice, the Mansion of this Van family head is a restricted area for all the other people from the family and they observed another interesting thing in a secret underground chamber under the mansion.

    Now, Sam is inside that room, as he looked at a cubic structure which looked like a Rubik¡¯s cube. Sam couldn¡¯t understand what it is, but he knew that the family head will stay most of the time here in this ce messing with this cube.

    The cube was guarded by a formation of concealment. But there are no other securities around it as the family head was very sure that no one knows about this.

    Sam cracked the concealment formation by finding a loop hole in the energy flow and took away the cube after that he didn¡¯t leave like a shadow as he entered the ce, he made a small tunnel big enough for the mouse to escape from this room and entered the divine dimension letting the mouse take him into the tunnel.

    Before they escaped though, Sam ced arge cubic shaped energy cell almost filling the entire room. there is only some space big enough for a man to walk sideways around the cube.

    He waited for the evening for the sun to set, so that he would give a great vision to the rest of the city.

    After the sun was set, the Van family head entered his mansion and as a routine habit he spread his spiritual sense to the underground secret room.

    But all he sensed was a huge volume of spiritual energy being emitted from the room, as he entered the room, he saw arge volume of the energy cell and it was extremely shocking but before they he could think of what is happening, Sam¡¯s words rung.

    "You are indeed quite ambitious and cunning, but you shouldn¡¯t have thought of using me as your stepping stone, now you have to face the consequences."

    As soon as he heard those words, he understood who that person is, he suddenly had a bad premonition.

    And his guess was right. On the opposite side of the cube, Sam stood with his hands on his cube and he was already on thest stage of destabilizing it.

    There is one advantage of using these energy cells, the bigger it is the more time it will take for destabilizing and it and more the buffer period it would take before exploding.

    Sam finished destabilizing the energy cell and entered the divine dimension which the shadow mouse carried through the tunnel and moved as fast as it can.

    After it reached the other end which is a few yards away from the mansion, it entered the divine dimension leaving the crystal out in the open.

    *BOOM*

    A loud explosion was heard and the ground shook. The divine dimension crystal was the only thing in the surroundings which was able to endure the explosion as it was made by a being who is powerful beyond any one on this empire and even the whole can imagine.

    So, it was the only thing which was not damaged by the explosion but it was still blown out of the estate.

    The whole City became alert as they saw the huge amount of fire elemental energy sting through the sky with a red glow. Everything around the Van family estate along with the core members¡¯ quarters werepletely disintegrated into a scorching and molten rocky pit.

    The Duke, the Generals, themoner, the noble families the tower heads all of them saw that huge explosion, half of the central zone could feel those tremors.

    After the divine dimension was blown out, Sam let a shadow mouse carry it and entered the General¡¯s estate.

    This time though, he left a letter in General¡¯s mansion and made a small explosion in an open ce of estate.

    *BOOM*

    Another explosion which wasn¡¯t asrge scale as the previous one happened in the General¡¯s estate.

    He ran out of the mansion and was surprised to find a letter in the living room on his way. But he still rushed towards the spot and after seeing that it didn¡¯t deal much damage, his thoughts calmed down and went back to read the letter.

    He knew clearly who was the one who wrote it after seeing the explosion from the Van family and his mansion.

    He was sweating as his heart beat rapidly in trepidation.

    There are only a few words in the letter.

    "I hope you liked the fireworks I nned specifically for you to bid good bye.

    But before I go, I want to tell you something and that is, your life is not yours anymore, it is mine to take and I am only leaving it with you temporarily, it can basically proved by the fact that I can take that pathetic life of yours whenever I want.

    Next time, I enter the Southern Star city, you would be losing that life of yours.

    You wouldn¡¯t know how I will take it, when I will take it and on what premises I would take it.

    Until then, you better life your life to fullest."

    General almost knelt as his legs gave away, he supported himself and forced himself to sit on the couch.

    This is the first time he felt fear so much that his whole body was soaked in sweat.

    He never imagined that he would have to live his life in fear, but looking at the letter and feeling the huge explosion in the Van family, he couldn¡¯t help but shiver at the thought.

    Now, for the first time, he started fearing for his life and that is due to a young man in his teens.

    That night, many big shots in the city got a wakeup call from Sam.

 Chapter 205: To the Imperial Capital

    The next morning, Sam, along with other candidates and Watt are assembled at the Duke¡¯s mansion.

    That day, the Duke looked at Sam in apletely different light. At first, he was worried about Sam only on the condition that he would use the whatever future influence he would get and take revenge on them.

    But the yesterday¡¯s fireworks are something that gave him a new understanding. He doesn¡¯t know how Sam did this, but the threat was real and even doesn¡¯t have enough confidence if he was caught up in that spiritual energy explosion.

    He visited the Van family estate which was almostpletely destroyed and saw that the spiritual energy was in aplete turmoil. An acolyte would die just entering the ce.

    He was in aplete astonishment and when he heard about the letter from the General, he couldn¡¯t help but think back to the situations and recall if he had offended Sam in anyway.

    He was also thankful that his son and Sam has some sort of friendship, which made him feel at ease.

    After everyone gathered, Duke took out ten cards which are in the size of a credit card.

    He gave a card to each of the candidates.

    Sam looked at the card, there was his name on one side and the other side has a number.

    It showed 46307. It is the number of points he got plus ten thousand.

    Duke then said to them.

    "These cards are important for you guys for the rest of thepetition and you cannot keep it in your spatial rings, so make sure they are safe.

    The number behind is your current number of points and you got extra points based on your ranking."

    After that he led them to the yard of the Duke¡¯s estate and said.

    "The imperial capital is not that far from this ce and we have a week to report so, I prepared some flying type beasts for your journey. I will be apanying you to the imperial, so you don¡¯t have to worry about the safety.

    Now, pick a beast you want."

    He pped his hands and some attendants led some beasts from the woods. There are all kinds of beasts there, there is even a whirl wind Falcon which Watt possess.

    There are mostly Level 4 and each person can pick one.

    There are only four people who are not interested. Sam, Watt, Nichs and Josh.

    "Aren¡¯t you going to pick?" Nichs asked Sam.

    "Why aren¡¯t you picking then?"

    "Well, we have our own ones." Even before he finished the sentence, three huge creatures came out of the yard, which frightened the beasts candidates are examining.

    Three tigers with golden winds came out of the forest, the one in the lead is ten times the size of a usual tiger and from its aura, Sam could sense that it is at least Level 6.

    The two remaining are Level 4.

    As soon as they came out, they ran towards Josh and Nichs.

    Nichs hugged the head of the tiger and smiled at Sam.

    Sam just nodded and stayed silent. He just observed the beasts that the candidates are trying to select.

    At this moment, Duke said.

    "Try to pick a beast you arefortable with, they can be handy in the imperial capital, you might be needed to move often in the capital and it would be tough to walk always as the capital is too big. This would be a present for you from me."

    At these words, Philip immediately ran back to Sam and asked.

    "Which beast is the best here?"

    "Why?"

    "It is going to be free, so why shouldn¡¯t I get one that is most valuable?"

    "I advise you to get one that is most suitable."

    "Okay, then tell which is most suitable at the same time, most valuable."

    Sam rolled his eyes at this and looked at the beasts. After some thorough look, he saw that the beasts although not too high grade, are still pretty decent.

    He pointed at a Hawk like beast with wind and metal elements and said. "Steel winged Hawk, that is more suitable for you."

    "How valuable is it?"

    "What is with this value you are obsessed about? that is a level 4 beast and it has a good blood line; it is pretty valuable."

    "Then how does it do when youpare it to Sky or Yanwu?"

    "That is at most on the level of Panthers."

    "Then it is not that good."

    Sam almost wanted to smack this guy to death.

    "You better pick that before someone takes it away."

    "Okay, I will just adjust."

    This time, Sam really smacked this guy on his head.

    After they picked their beasts, Sam and Watt didn¡¯t bother to pick one as they have their hover boards and if the beast ispletely necessary, he didn¡¯t have any problem with that. He has more than one that could make all these level 4 beasts disappear in a jiffy.

    If he really did take one in, they might lose all their might and confidence when they stay with the beasts he had.

    After repeatedly confirming he doesn¡¯t need a beast, the group took off.

    Duke rode the Level 6 Golden Winged tiger, which his two sons, rode their level 4 ones.

    The rest rode the beasts they picked.

    Sam observed one thing, these beasts don¡¯t belong to wild, they are caught as infants and then bred and trained by men.

    These people who train them are Beast tamers, which is a profession that doesn¡¯t have as much poprity as the four major towers.

    Because, the pets people get from these beast tamers, might be tame and mellow, but the buyer must spend great effort in truly forming a connection with those pets.

    Sam didn¡¯t really like them as the beasts would some of their wild nature which would be buried deep in them.

    Sam and Watt, followed the group on their boards.

    Even though, the journey is long, they would stop often, standing on a board doesn¡¯t take much effort than sitting on a beast. So, they perfectlynded in the imperial capital.

    There is a toll fee to enter, Sam and the other candidates have special privilege which also applied to the beasts but Sam has to pay for the watt and the remaining beasts.

    But it turned out that he doesn¡¯t have to pay for his personal beasts, all he has to pay is for Watt and Falck and that credit is for the new schr artisan badge he got.

    After that process, now they have permit to enter the city through flight.

    Theynded in an estate which is simr to the estate they had in the Southern Star, there are other Dukedoms who are just arriving.

    Duke left their assigned residence to report their arrival to the relevant authorities.

    That night Duke just gave them some advice on how to get by in the capital.

    He particrly stressed about not offending any noble families and exceptionally warning them to not piss off the scions from the four towers and even more about the princes and princesses of the Imperial family which are the result of the debauchery of the current emperor.

    Theirpetition would be tomorrow and that would go on for a month.

    Sam is very much looking forward to it, as after this month, he would be closer finding out what these people behind the scenes exactly want.

    He is also nning on what kind of measures he should take in order to increase his scope of business and earn more wealth.

    At the same time, he also has to find a way to deal with the ck water.

    From what he observed, the ck water¡¯s main head quarters will be in this city and the organisation has a very detailed information transfer among themselves and he is sure that all the information will be in the capital headquarters.

    If he could get his hands on that, he would be able to deal with the organisation more easily.

    Samid on the bed in his room. He is thinking about the things he is going to encounter in the capital and from the card he was given, he could predict some things which might or might not be right.

    He looked at the horizon and drifted to sleep.

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 Chapter 206: Cards and Points

    The next day as soon as sun rose, All the candidates assembled in the estate grounds where there was a stage simr to that of the southern star city¡¯s estate a man who has a sharp aura and looked aroundte thirties stood with hands behind his back.

    He had a long sword hung on the waist.

    His presence is as sharp as the sword he carried and itmanded absolute respect and acknowledgement. This aura cannot be born with, it was obtained with the efforts, failures and achievements.

    He scanned the crowd and after some silence, he spoke.

    "I am the Marshall general of the army of the empire of Orion. I am also known by the name Sword Marshall.

    All of you are the candidates that are selected from the youngsters who are younger than twenty-five from all over the empire.

    You all represent the talent, potential and future of the empire.

    But this is just the beginning.

    All of you will be facing the toughest of all thepetitions you have been through all this while.

    In all thepetitions that you have been through, you have been protected by the rules and regtions which limited the usage of deceit, schemes and traps se by your opponents.

    But this time, thepetition is not going to be having that many rules that would protect you.

    You can scheme, you can trap, but all that matters, is that you win.

    For this challenge, do you have an army of followers who listens to yourmand? you can use them.

    You can make the beasts do you bidden. Let them.

    You cannotplete the task but can rob others of their fruits ofbour, Rob them.

    You can mislead all your opponents, do so.

    For the next months, except for intentional kills and usage of the subordinates of superior level on your fellowpetitors almost all bets are off."

    He paused for a second and looked at the candidates who are now whispering and discussing in hush voices, they didn¡¯t even dare to talk out loud. They are subconsciously lowering their voices so that they wouldn¡¯t catch the Marshall¡¯s attention.

    After a brief pause of ten seconds, Marshall continued his speech.

    "Yourpetition will start from today for another thirty days, on the thirty-first day, the youngest daughter of the Emperor of the Orion, the Princess Natalie is going to turn eighteen and the winners of thepetition will attend that ceremony as the guests of honour.

    Now, for thepetition agenda and rules.

    All of you might have gotten the cards given to you by your Duke. Those cards are the vital to thepetition.

    You aim is to get your hands on the cards and try to transfer the points from your opponents¡¯ cards to yours.

    Apart from that, there are many empty cards hidden in the city in various ces and there are of many grades.

    Starting from Bronze card, Silver Card, Gold Card, Crystal Card.

    The higher the card grade, the higher the difficulty to obtain it and higher the number of points you would obtain from the card.

    The information on where to obtain these cards will be divulged by some specially hidden clues in the city itself.

    The third method to obtain the points is epting the military missions, City Guard missions, some special missions which might require your expertise on the various professions etc.

    There is a mission board in this estate and an office with a person in-charge who supervises the issue of the missions.

    So, the final and main goal of the mission is that all of you have to obtain points and as many points as you can.

    The ten candidates who has most points by the end of the month will be the winners and the rest of the candidates will be eliminated.

    The ten candidates who are selected will undergo hand to handbat on the birthday of the princess in front of all the esteemed guests to decide the rankings amongst yourselves.

    This is thepetition¡¯s goal and for the rules as I mentioned earlier.

    You can do whatever you want. But you cannot use your subordinates of higher level to suppress apetitor of lower level.

    You can steal the cards, and transfer the points from that to yours and the point transfer is processed by keeping both cards in contact and using your spiritual energy and spiritual sense to force points from one card to another.

    The cards which are hidden in the city work in the same way.

    You can work in teams and or you can work individually. And one more thing is you can use multiple cards.

    You can buy the cards in the mission office and you can also form a team card in case you want to store the points in the card meant to be for a team. The points in that card cannot be transfer to any individual of that team directly, there are only two ways to transfer them and one is at the mission office and the other way is for the person who wants to transfer the points to possess the rest of the teammates.

    The opponents of that team however, have no restrictions to transfer those points to their cards.

    Remember that by the end of the month only the points inside the individual cards will be counted and that too a candidate should only have all the points in one card, otherwise the card with most points will be considered leaving the remaining cards.

    As for those people who belong to the nobility and the imperial family, you cannot use any person who is working under any authority under the empire as your subordinate.

    They cannot divulge you any information, give you any assistance in battle, assist you in hindering your fellowpetitors.

    Those people include, the officials, soldiers, city guardmand etc.

    If those people vite the rule and do help, thepetitor as well as the person who vited the rule will be punished by the Military road to hell.

    The punishment will be executed by my own hands and even the people from the imperial family are no exception."

    As he made the deration, he gave a brief pause and continued.

    "Two hours from now, will signify the start of thepetition. Until then, those who wants to buy the spare cards, team registrations can proceed. After two hours you are allowed to start yourpetition."

    Saying that, the Marshall left the ce.

    Every candidate immediately started discussing with the members that are from the same dukedom as them to see if they can make a team.

    Even the people from the southern start are trying to do so.

    But Sam left the group and walked alone towards the Mission office.

    "May I ask, how much does an extra card cost?"

    He asked politely to the middle-aged man who sat at the counter of the office.

    "10,000,000 spirit stones."

    The middle-aged man said with a nonchnt tone, but he was observing Sam¡¯s expression to see any change.

    The multiple card scheme is actually an extra lifeline for the candidates. So, the cost is quite high.

    It is not easy to buy as 10 million is not an amount that anyone could fork out easily.

    But the officer was disappointed and surprised at the same time, because, Sam calmly took a space jade ring and ced it on the table.

    "Ten cards, Please."

    The middle-aged man was stunned for a second, before he reacted. He took the space jade ring and looked inside to find the one hundred million spirit stones. He again looked at Sam¡¯s ¡¯devil may care¡¯ attitude as he didn¡¯t even blink when pushing such huge amount.

    But he came out of his reverie and asked.

    "Do you want all cards to be registered under your name?"

    "Yes."

    After that, there is a process of attaching Sam¡¯s spiritual energy signature to the cards, within minutes, Sam came out and he saw Philip and Jack walking towards the entrance.

    "You could have waited for us. Why did you run away that fast?" Philip asked as soon as they met.

    "I am not interested in that pointless discussion on formation of team. They are going to talk all shit now and then fight to death among themselves on thest few days. What is the point of listening to it? I even thought, you two are interested in forming a team with them."

    Sam replied.

    "Nah, I just wanted to listen to all the highly righteous things they will say to each other, so that I could enjoy the fight at the end even more."

    Philip said with a mischievous smile.

    "I don¡¯t care about a psycho like you, you guys better hurry up if you want to buy the extra cards, I have to go into city to buy a house, I cannot stay in this ce."

    "Just wait a second." Both of them went into the office hurriedly.

    After a few minutes they came out with five cards each.

    Philip had a sulky expression on his face.

    "All the earning I got from the business phase are almost over, Sam you are filthy rich, how about you buy us these cards?"

    Sam rolled his eyes and said coldly.

    "As if the money you spent belonged to you? You better remember, who is the investor for the business you did, I am already generous enough for not asking my capital back, don¡¯t day dream. Watt is waiting, I have to go."

    This time he didn¡¯t wait for reply and simply walked away.

    Watt is waiting for them at the stage, as soon as they came, he walked towards him and four of them went to the gate.

    Any of them didn¡¯t mention anything about forming a team and team card, because they have enough trust to not need a team card for their cooperation.

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 Chapter 207: First target

    After exiting the estate, Jack and Philip boarded their new pets while Sam and Watt opted to their boards as usual.

    The capital is veryrge and many people here use their pets for travelling. The people who walk are not many.

    They went to the Artisan tower and Sam used the same way he used in the southern star, contacted a rank 5 Architecture Artisan and asked for help in finding a house.

    Just like southern star the Imperial capital is also divided into various zones.

    The central zone is for nobles and the imperial family and not anyone can enter that ce. Other than the nobility the officials and the big shots of the four professional towers also stay there.

    The guards wouldn¡¯t let anyone enter that ce easily. The person has to have an extremely high status or should possess an invitation from the people that reside inside.

    Outside that zone, the rich people who are not nobles stay there, this is the inner zone.

    The zone outside that is the business zone and the final one is the normal zone.

    Sam bought a house in the inner zone, this is not a mansion, rather it is only a duplex house, with a small yard but it still cost fifty million for him.

    After buying the house, the four of them went to a nearby restaurant to have a meal, while eating they started discussing about thepetition.

    Sam, first organized the data he knew.

    There is a team from every dukedom and from the imperial capital there are two teams.

    Each team has ten members each.

    Now, that thepetition started the teams are divided and there should be only considered as one hundred participants.

    During the assembly, Sam observed the remaining teams, particrly the two teams from the capital.

    One of those two teams ispletely made up of offspring from the nobility and officials. The second team is made ofmoners. The leaders of the nine teams seemed to be people of fame and wealth, as he can observe the pride and arrogance.

    These people might be the scions of the Dukes or Generals from their respective Dukedoms.

    As for the leader of the first imperial teams, he is called Nathan the Prince and the elder brother of the princess. He is the second most favoured prince after the crown prince, because both of them are from same mother and so is the princess.

    The leader of the second team though, is a bit interesting as that person wore an outfit which made it hard to describe if it is a man or an woman and even his face was covered with mask which seemed to be inscribed to make sure that their face is concealed.

    Even the second ranker of the second team wore the same outfit except the second ranker¡¯s was maroon, while the first rankers was ck.

    From what he observed the highest cultivation is of Middle-stage Great realm stage in Level 4 or 5. The lowest is a Peak stage Novice.

    These are all the things they saw, heard or known from the assembly.

    "So, how should we proceed further in thepetition, should we target one person at a time the teams?" Philip asked as he bit a huge piece of meat.

    "Well, from what I see, it doesn¡¯t matter what we do, because there would be very few people who will not be forming a team. There is a high chance that the first rankers will be left alone, because they are the major targets for any team.

    And the teams wouldn¡¯t be too big as there would be high chance of being betrayed as it would be hard to watch out for every person. So, it wouldn¡¯t be much difference if we target the solo yers of the team yers."

    Sam replied.

    "Doesn¡¯t that mean, you are the biggest target of all?" Philip eximed.

    Sam looked at him as if he was an idiot, why would be asking such an obvious question? The worst part is that Sam couldn¡¯t even guess if this guy is really asking or just being dramatic.

    "Why, you want to target me too, or what?"

    "I don¡¯t need a beating so badly." He immediately lowered his voice.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother with him and said.

    "I think the best course of action for us is to wait. Because, even if we don¡¯t go and find out our targets, there would definitely be some people who woulde looking for me, to hit a Jack pot.

    From what I could tell, the remaining first rankers are all below Nichs in battle prowess as every dukedom¡¯s young scion was battered by him, so I highly doubt anyone would cross twenty- five thousand points even with the additive bonus of the ranking.

    So, I am thergest target.

    Which means, the clever ones wille to me to fond trouble in thest week, the cunning ones will stay on the side as we fight and try to get all of it for themselves and the simple-minded guys will want to find me from the beginning.

    That¡¯s why, I suggest we don¡¯t seek them proactively, instead, let us finish the missions and find the hidden cards, while we just take care of the people whoe after us and we only go after other people in thest week.

    By that time, the most cunning and scheming batch would alsoe out and the most capable and straightforward people will already be having a boat load of points ready for us to take."

    Philip and Jack started to ponder on what Sam said. It is indeed true that the people who have most points since the beginning will be targeted the most.

    What Sam said is feasible.

    "Sure, let¡¯s do that way. The first three weeks, we will be solely focussing on the missions and thest week, we will target the candidates. Meanwhile, all we have to do is watch out for our safety."

    Philip said in agreement while Jack alsoplied. Watt is seriously focussing on his meal.

    After that, they had a sumptuous meal and are on the way back to their new home.

    But as soon as they exited the restaurant...

    *Swoosh*

    An arrow came towards Sam with the electric blue lightning crackling around it, but before the arrow could hit him, his arm glowed with golden light as he caught the arrow and looked towards the direction it came from.

    Sam noticed that the terrace of the opposite building from with the arrow should have been shot was empty, the attacker, ran away after the attack failed. But Sam didn¡¯t let that go.

    He boarded harbinger and hovered like wind and reached the terrace, there was no sign of a person who ran away, at all. No matter how fast the person is, it is almost impossible to disappear without leaving a trace, unless that person has a treasure just like Sam¡¯s divine dimension.

    He went towards the alley behind the building and searched around. Meanwhile, he discreetly let the shadow mice out and made them scout the area.

    Even though, they didn¡¯t see that person, if he is hiding in any discreet areas, shadow mice have a better shot at finding him.

    Sam looked around vigntly.

    He observed the people¡¯s expressions. There is no disturbance whatsoever. The surrounding people are behaving normally. They are looking at Harbinger curiously, but that¡¯s it, there is no other expression.

    This area is near the intersection of the Business zone and the inner zone, so it is pretty high-end. So, the crowd is very small.

    Sam felt that the attacker should be extremely close as it is difficult to run away that fast without even alerting the surrounding people.

    After a few seconds, Sam closed his eyes and calmed down, he took a good look at the surrounding people and his eyesnded on a old man, who came out of the bar and walking away, without so much as a nce towards Sam.

    This caught his attention, and after observing for a second, he took out the golden Crescent and nocked an arrow as he aimed at the old man without so much as an argument or confrontation.

    He stretched the thread and started condensing the spiritual energy, the ¡¯old man¡¯ freaked out and was about to run away, Sam released the aura which hit the old man squarely on the back.

    The tail wind of the arrow was as sharp as the tip, as it tore the several opening on the back.

    Sam moved and stepped on the old man¡¯s hand and tore the mask off of his face, before dragging him by his neck.

    This is a young man who is from another dukedom. Sam has seen this guy before in the assembly.

    He dragged the man back to the restaurant entrance, only to see Philip Jack and Watt holding two other people.

    "Five people ambushed us as soon as you left, but they left these two here and escaped. They don¡¯t have much points in their cards, just around three to four thousand."

    "Let us take them back to our ce."

    Later, after half-an-hour.

    The three people who attacked are kneeling in front of Sam and the rest, in the bas.e.m.e.nt. This is one of the reasons Sam paid for this house, the bas.e.m.e.nt wille in handy and especially in these kinds of situations.

    After some serious ¡¯convincing¡¯ the three spilled their beans.

    These guys are from a team and their team consists of six members; the interesting thing is that not all of them are from same Dukedom.

    The whole team was made up by the bottom two rankers or three Dukedoms.

    Sam was surprised that they not only made a team without much knowledge about each other, but they somehow tried to ambush them.

    He was even more surprised when he learnt that he is not their target. Their actual targets are Philip and Jack.

    They somehow learnt that Sam doesn¡¯t like it when someone pisses him off and he is very persistent in taking revenge, but they also heard that he is pretty strong, so they made a n. One of them would sneak attack Sam, to lure him away, the remaining five will attack Philip and Jack taking their points.

    The n is actually quite good, except that whoever they got the news from didn¡¯t say anything about Philip and Jack¡¯s battle prowess making them misjudge the situation.

    In fact, they said that this actually worked on some smaller teams and now they wanted to try their luck on a big fish.

    Sam is even more surprised that these guys took down some smaller teams. That means, since dawn these guys didn¡¯t take any break or waste any time. They are fully active. Now, because of their wrong target selection the three are now captives.

    "So, what are we going to do with them? Killing is forbidden right?"

    Jack asked.

    "Empty the points and give them their cards back, but don¡¯t let them leave the ce. I willy some formations to imprison them, let the remaining teammates take the bait ande here. As these three are separated the team card is worthless. Let us see if they wille here to take them so that they could ess the points in the team card or they would just let go of the points."

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 Chapter 208: Patrick

    For the next few days, Sam and his friends spent time in rxation. Although, it is not aplete rxation, but they didn¡¯t fight it over with other candidates for the points.

    The rest of the candidates are hustling to gain more and more points.

    In the first week, Sam and the group took three missions, which are rted to city guard and earned a considerable sum of points, adding around five thousand points to their ount.

    They felt that doing missions is actually an efficient way to earn points as the returns are decent.

    Apart from that, Sam is also plotting something else and that is to gain the info regarding the hidden cards.

    For the first week, he let the shadow mice follow the Sword Marshall, so that he could find out any information and the efforts are not entirely fruitless.

    There are six people assigned by the Marshall, who are responsible for hiding cards. This news was kept extremely discreet and the six people are actually Nascent stage cultivators.

    The shadow mice had to stay extremely lowkey and thanks to their recent breakthrough into Level 4, and improved mastery of the elemental fusion they are safer.

    From what the mice gathered, there is a fixed number of points divided amongst the fixed number of cards, and these cards would be hidden in the city, in fixed intervals.

    Sam was quite surprised when he heard the number of points. Apparently, there is a board in a specific room, where these six people gather and discuss which area, they would venture that day to hide these cards.

    That board even has the locations of various hiding spots.

    But the mice have trouble remembering everything and Sam felt that it is not a feasible method as there would be too many of these spots.

    So, he just let the six shadow mice tail them the whole day and after their respective hid the card, they woulde to Sam and notify him about that ce.

    About this whole thing although, Sam is satisfied with finding the ces, he is also felt that something is off.

    The Marshall doesn¡¯t have to make a room, a discussion meeting and mention all the locations on a board. The information and cards can be given to the six members directly and they can just do their job discreetly.

    But Marshall seemed to have made this choice deliberately to give a chance to the candidates.

    He openly provided a way to find the intel. After all, the six of them do not stay in that ce except for that meeting and if any one person can find that ce they can hit the jackpot.

    It took one week for the shadow mice to urately link their involvement through following Marshall because, the Marshall is in a cultivation stage beyond the Nascent stage and they can feel the presence of shadow mice even if they cannot see it.

    So, Sam repeatedly instructed them to not get too close which made them take some time.

    But for the six people in the Nascent stage, that was shadow mice¡¯s y field and they confirmed their routine after two days of tailing.

    Now, Sam can gain the points without so much as a fight with the rest of the candidates. But the hiding ces are not exactly without any trouble.

    Some of them are stored inside a wealthy person¡¯s personal chamber. Some of them are ced in the hands of a city guard station¡¯s head.

    So, the effort is not to be scoffed at. But at least, they don¡¯t have to worry about not getting the cards and points.

    Other than that, Sam noticed that the three people he locked up in the bas.e.m.e.nt were abandoned by their teammates, at least temporarily. No one came to their rescue.

    Now that their ways to .u.mtion of points was covered, Sam is also involved in some other matters and one of them is his research on light element.

    He was trying this since a long time. He is trying to separate various rays from the normal light, so that he could use various elements of light for his personal use. Even if he cannot use them for attacking purpose just yet, he can at least use it for tracking, detection and other supporting tasks.

    After these many days of work, he was finally able to diverge the ray of light into all the colours of visible spectrum by adjusting the wavelength. But he didn¡¯t change the wavelength above or beyond the visible spectrum.

    He is using his light element to ess the electromaic spectrum and if he can control the wavelength properly, he can have huge radio waves as tall as a building and very small waves of minute wavelength like X-rays which can help him see through and the gamma rays, which can be used to make aser of decent damage.

    Even though, the gamma rays are electromaic radiation from decaying electro-maic radiation, it is inherently a part of spectrum and the most obvious difference is the wavelength.

    So, Sam is trying to covert the ordinary light into a radio-active light.

    In his previous life, he is the part of the team which made the gammaser and one of the main people at that. It is safe to say that if he is not present theser wouldn¡¯t have beenpleted at that time.

    And ironically, theser was not created by a group of scientists funded by a government, rather it was created by the dark side of the society. In particr, the organisation which Sam used to belong to till he was eighteen.

    He still remembered the process of their experiments to obtain sufficient concentration of the resonant excited nuclear states for collective stimted emission to ur turns on the broadening of the gamma-ray spectral line.

    Simply put, he remembered every experiment they tired to turn the gamma rays to take the form ofser.

    As the Physicists in the light side of the society are trying to use that for research breakthroughs, the governments for including a powerful weapon on the arsenal, the dark side which created this only have two intentions, one business and second one power, which they obtained.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel nostalgic.

    As he practiced, he thought about the uses of this and finally his thoughts stopped at his past life.

    He stopped practicing for sometime and went into the tower. He suddenly wanted to y the flute.

    In his past life, if the academics and creation are the break from killing and battles if he was still emotionally burdened after that, the music is the only thing that saved his soul from losing the rationale and bnce.

    He suddenly had an urge to y the flute which he didn¡¯t have, so he went into the tower to make one.

    But this one is going to take some time, he spent the whole day in the tower and at night he was back with his flute. It only has some final touches to be made.

    The flute is made of the alloy of the Grey meteorite sand and Silver meteorite sand for the exterior and the intricate internal structure with the Silver sand alone.

    He is testing the flute and them doing the repairs ording to the tone he wants. It is already night and the remaining people came back.

    He gave Watt arge amount of spirit stones to rx and splurge in the city. In a way, even the test in the imperial capital is really the toughest, this is also the phase where he has a lot of time to spare.

    Watt has either been busy on investigation, fights and training since the Falcon Cliff city. Now, that he has a lot of time, he asked Watt to do only one thing. Be a young master for once.

    They all had dinner together, but at this time someone came to visit and Sam.

    A young man, who wear an elegant and expensive attire. One look and Sam could say that it was made by a tailor artisan and there is a badge showing that the guy is a Pseudo rank-4 Weapon artisan.

    But what got Sam¡¯s attention the most is that face. He saw this guy in the first team of the imperial capital, right behind the Prince. The second ranker of the Imperial capital.

    The man walked in, and unceremoniously took a seat before speaking.

    "You must be Sam."

    Sam didn¡¯t speak, he just looked at the man in same calm and nonchnt manner.

    "I am Patrick, the son of Tower head of the Imperial Capital Artisan tower. I am here to discuss a deal with you."

    Sam still didn¡¯t reply.

    "I heard that the ns for the Park, you currently have it under your name are with you. So, I want to buy them."

    He paused and took out a spatial ring and put it on the table.

    "Here, there are fifty million in this ring, I want all the formations, inscriptions you used."

    Sam looked at the ring and looked at the man.

    "You better leave right now. You might have been under the protection of the rules, but your men aren¡¯t."

    This is the only moment, that Philip and the rest showed the reaction. They didn¡¯t sense anyoneing to this spot, because every other person who surrounded the ce are outside the sensory zone of a normal Great mage at initial stage, but Sam can sense them because of his overly high mental strength for his current level.

    Patrick now lost his cold and arrogant demeanor.

    Just as he was about to retort, he raised his hand and waved it. The end of the arm was condensed with the water and the water was shot like bullet by the highly condensed air. It passed through the window and went towards the wall of yard. It broke the wall and hit a person standing behind it a few meters away.

    The manid unconscious.

    "Next time, it would be a life."

    Patrick immediately became alert, and walked out.

    "We should have taken his card."

    Philip said from the side.

    "Why bother now? Let him collect some more points for us."

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 Chapter 209: Brewing Storm.

    After Patrick left, Sam sat down there in silence thinking about something. Philip and Jack looked at him seeing his expression.

    "I have something to tell you guys." Sam finally said after an hour.

    The three others looked at him, waiting for him toplete.

    "I am going to be a bigger target than you guys could imagine."

    "What do you mean?" Philip asked.

    "It has something do with that guy¡¯s visit."

    "About the Park?"

    "Yes."

    "But how is that a problem? I think you are overthinking it Sam. Even if they cannot get your designs, they can still use the formation and inscription towers¡¯ help. They can still figure this out. I think that is why they just ced a price that low for the designs." Philip said.

    "It is not that simple. Do you think that I would just leave the core of a project which could make me hundreds of billions in long run in open?

    Do you really think, if they can figure out things that easily, they woulde and ask me? Do you think if they are capable of creating that, they would really wait this long, a whole six months after I started the Park to build that?"

    "What do you mean?"

    "From what I can understand, they already tried to build a Park, but they failed to achieve same level of awe from that."

    "Why would that happen? Isn¡¯t it just adding some tests and challenges? No offence, your idea is good, but if there is an adequate man power and brains, I think they could replicate it."

    "That¡¯s where you are wrong, Philip. They can make a Park, I don¡¯t deny that, but they are not capable of replicating that, because there is a lot more than people can see in that park. I am a creator Philip; I won¡¯t let others replicate my creation that easily.

    My design is what gives the Park the appeal and attraction it has. If they cannot replicate it the standards wouldn¡¯t meet and the people who already saw the magnificence of the Park, wouldn¡¯t be able to satisfy with a sub-par thing.

    Simply, put if they cannot replicate my Park, it will not be good enough, but if they do, they will be destroying it themselves. The Park I created in a whole is a destabilized formation under which, a formation which stabilizes it isid.

    This is something that the three tower heads didn¡¯t know, so the information these people in the capital got is iplete. They want my design and help if they want a sessful park, if they don¡¯t it will be copsed."

    Jack and Philip were stunned. They didn¡¯t think that Sam would make such a serious preparation, just so he could stop others from using it. Only Watt was not surprised, he was already brainwashed that Sam could do anything.

    Sam looked at the surprised expressions and waited for the news to sink in.

    Jack asked after that brief silence.

    "Wouldn¡¯t it be simple, if they just make a deal with you? Just like the tower heads previously."

    "If only it was that simple.

    Jack, I will tell you a story.

    There was a king, who loved his wife so dearly, that he would do anything for her. He loved her more than his kingdom, his children and all the other consorts.

    Due to health issues, his wife died before him and he wanted the whole world to remember her even in the death, so he hired the greatest artisans the kingdom could offer and made them build a monument as her grave with whitest of the stones.

    He was mesmerized by the oue; the monument was the best of its kind. Not many things can rival its beauty.

    He gavends, riches, titles, des to the artisans and thousands of workers who worked for it, butter he had a thought, ¡¯what if the greatest monument, he gifted for his dead wife, gets surpassed?¡¯ ¡¯What if his wife¡¯s memento will not stay as the best forever?¡¯"

    Sam paused and looked at the three who are curious and said slowly.

    "He doesn¡¯t want that oue, so he massacred the artisan and the workers, killing the people who can possibly make a much better monument than that."

    The three were shocked.

    Sam continued.

    "Such was the human mind, there is a storm brewing out there. The people who want to get their hands of this project doesn¡¯t want another thing simr to that emerging. That Patrick, didn¡¯te here to buy, he was here to see the reaction.

    Do you think, the big shots in the capital who are considered on the top of the food chain, will make a partnership with a teenager?

    If my guess is right, the four tower heads and there might even be someone from the imperial family, alreadyid their eyes on this and they want this to be only in their hands. It is impossible for them to let a person who knows all the loopholes, in their system free."

    "Are you sure? Imperial family? Then they can just kill you and that would be over, even if you are capable, if you are done in by the whole empire, you wouldn¡¯t be able to resist."

    Philip said in confusion.

    Sam just smiled and shook his head.

    "I can¡¯t exin this, but they cannot kill me. Anyway, do you think that the imperial family will let hundreds of billions slip away? If I am left alone and start a Park in each Dukedom and also in the vicinities of the imperial capital, in two decades, I would be wealthier than the imperial family.

    Do you think, they would just leave it at that? If my guess isn¡¯t wrong, that Patrick must have been reporting his father by now.

    Anyway, all you have to know is that you have to be careful for the next three weeks, there would be all kinds of methods they would use in guise of thepetition. This is one of the reasons I asked you guys to buy extra cards. Don¡¯t take your original card with you when you go out.

    From tomorrow, we won¡¯t be taking any missions, we are going to focus on the hidden cards. I will give you the locations and you will be retrieving the cards, if they are not in someone¡¯s hands, we don¡¯t even have to do that, I have a way to get them easily.

    But remember, you will be targeted by the whole candidates, their subordinates, hired thugs, assassins, the four towers¡¯ people, honey-traps, even the city guards will be giving you a hard time.

    It is going to be a real nightmare; you would experience an oppression that is hundreds of times higher than the previous time in the southern star.

    You cannot be killed, but you would be tortured mentally.

    If you take a mission, someone would steal it, you would be targeted by groups of candidates, you would see the real influence of the four professions and the imperial family to the full extent.

    Simply put, we are against the whole city."

    As soon as he said that he saw Philip dropping his head low.

    "Why am I even a friend with a guy like you?" Philip yelled as he pointed at Sam.

    Sam raised an eyebrow and said.

    "I am not the one who shamelesslytched on to you and stayed in your house shamelessly for days."

    "Okay, okay, don¡¯t bring out the dirtyundry. What is your n now?"

    "Nothing much, first thing is noticing the targets, I need to get to know who are the key roles that are targeting us, then we can take some precautions, leave your cards with me, and go to the ces I give you every morning, stay together if possible, even though they will target us, the pressure will grow on us gradually, so we can just get used to the situation gradually too.

    Always take all your five cards to the field. If you are in a pinch, just throw out your card with the lowest points at them and leave. We should thank the system that there is no possible way of getting info on how many cards a person has.

    So, use them as the life lines, if you are in a fight, take the opponent out as fast as you can or outrun the opponent as fast as you can. Try to escape, just don¡¯t get into a fight with multiple opponents, even if you are sure to win."

    "Why don¡¯t we just take them right now? Why don¡¯t we make the first move?" Jack asked.

    "Then we would be surrounded by all the enemies at the same time. If they get a slightest inkling of threat the, whole gang would mess us up.

    It is good thing that we are in thispetition, otherwise the day we entered the capital, I would have been captured. Now, thispetition rules are the only things holding us and them up at the same time.

    Be mentally prepared as it would be quite tiring."

    "Wait, what would you be doing if we are going to collect the cards? Are you going to stay here just like that?" Philip asked from behind.

    "Nope, I am going to guard the house, there would some peopleing here to sneak in or set some traps, if I leave this would be the most dangerous ce for us. We cannot move out of this ce now, if we do so, we wouldn¡¯t be able to get another residence except for that estate for the candidates which is nothing less than hell.

    And, I have to go into hardware mode a little, since we are battling in a city, I will show you my version of urban warfare. From tomorrow, you guys will be training with me in a special ce. Thest week before thepetition ends, we would devour the whole storm that is about to hit us. Till then, just endure."

    At the same moment, in the top most floor of the artisan tower.

    Patrick just recounted everything to the tower head and thetter went into a deep thought.

    "Are you sure, he just directly threatened with their lives without any visible expression?"

    "Yes, father. That kid is so arrogant."

    For this, the man didn¡¯t reply and only muttered.

    "That guy is interesting, how can he be so calm when his work and expert idea and design was valued so little, a normal young man would have flipped the table and kicked Patrick¡¯s ass."

    His voice is so low that Patrick didn¡¯t hear it clearly.

    "Father, that guy is so arrogant. How dare he reject the proposal? Why don¡¯t we just attack him directly?"

    *Pak*

    A crisp pnded on Patrick¡¯s face and the tower head said to his agonised son.

    "You are twenty-two and a Pseudo Rank 4, weapon artisan. He is at most eighteen, he is a rank 6 schr artisan, which equals my rank, a rank 3 formation and inscription master, which was only limited by his cultivation and a Rank 3 in two other artisan crafts.

    Yet you have gall to say he is arrogant? If anybody has right to be arrogant, it was him. Remember, Patrick, you can hate a person, but you have to respect the abilities of a man if you see one. All you have is given to you because of me, your father who is a rank 6 artisan, but he earned it from the scratch.

    He alone, gained all these with his abilities.

    You ask me, why we don¡¯t attack him, because he is not as dumb as you, he is a real genius. Once we are forceful, he would be alerted and he would leave this empire, with his abilities, he woulde back and take our lives like taking weeds in a field. Remember, we not only need his designs, we should make sure that after we get them, he wouldn¡¯t be able to retaliate against us. He has to at least be helpless and hopeless, even if it was impossible to kill him, he should die emotionally and mentally.

    Don¡¯t act impulsively and ruin this n, otherwise even I cannot save you from Nathan."

    As the father lectured his son, he didn¡¯t notice a small mouse was in the extreme corner of the room hiding in a shadow listening to everything.

 Chapter 210: Speed up the Plan

    In the next week, Philip and Jack really saw what Sam meant.

    They were being tailed, ambushed, outnumbered in many circ.u.mstances.

    The candidates and the people hired by the candidates, although not dealing them a great amount of damage, started wearing them down.

    Apart from that, the attacks on the house also increased.

    Many people tried to sneak into the house. Sniping with arrows, even the three people who are trapped inside got terrified.

    In the midst of it, Sam gave them the body strengthening manuals.

    "Sam, I lost two cards. Damn it, I never thought that this would this hard to deal with. All those wimps ganging upon me, if only I have a chance to get a one on one."

    Philip started whining as he came home, while Watt was cultivating the body strengthening and Sam is busy inside the tower.

    Jack also came running into the house while panting.

    He ispletely haggard.

    His clothes are almost ripped apart. The bunch of people who are chasing him, left the ce as soon as they saw him enter the house safely.

    The house was a bane to them as Sam set some serious traps inside. At first some of them entered, but the formation increased the pressure on them as soon as they entered making it hard for them to move.

    This made them easy targets.

    In fact, even Philip and Jack are having a hard time in this formation, the only thing that is helping them is the body cultivation.

    After they started practicing them, they are able to resist the pressure the formation is exerting on them.

    The same thing happened to the people who sneaked in. But Sam made sure that they didn¡¯t kill anyone, whether they are candidates are not.

    But as hard as the matters are, they did score many points. The hiding spots Sam gave them are spot on and while they gain at least one card each per day, Sam somehow without even moving from the house, managed to gather at least three cards a day.

    The people who are causing them trouble failed to notice this. If they do know that they can find the hidden cards, the candidates wouldn¡¯t even care about the mission or stuff that the big shots assigned them, they would risk everything they have to haul the house and get their hands on the info.

    Meanwhile, Sam is very busy for the week, inside the tower. He needs to find a way to properly control the wavelength of the light element and he has to make some ythings.

    He is very busy for the past week and finally created the first item.

    So, he decided to take a break and came outside.

    It is already night and he decided to take a stroll outside.

    He is not that afraid of getting caught like Philip and Jack. He has Harbinger and his speed is something they have to worry about.

    He decided to go for a round in the nearby woods, so that he can take a break from everything and feel rxed.

    He said the same thing to the rest and went on a ride.

    After half an hour, Sam is now floating in the nearby woods outside the city. He found an open space, where he could see the clear sky.

    He came down and stood on the ground, feeling the cold and fresh breeze on his face.

    He felt refreshed from the peace. Since, he came to this world, he was on a constant hustle. He went From Lava rock vige, star wood city, Falcon Cliff, Blue me and now Imperial Capital of the Orion. He was on a constant move and work.

    Even though, he is now in a much bigger and a worst situation he has ever been and he was about to face the biggest storm of enemies, this calm before storm is still a very great feeling.

    His exhausted heart has soothed a bit.

    He sat on a huge boulder nearby and remembered all the things he has been through in both lives. He remembered all the things he experienced.

    His eyes were full of nostalgia and mncholy. No matter, how great this world is, he still missed the previous life.

    He took out the flute which reflected the faint moon light with a silvery re.

    He started ying the flute with closed eyes.

    Slowly, the music flew along with the breeze.

    He recalled his previous life.

    His pathetic childhood.

    His soul searing torture and abuse from the so-called adoptive parents.

    Being betrayed by the most respectful profession of all, his teacher.

    Being sold to a most dangerous and darkest of the organisations.

    Trained to be a killer, a grim reaper.

    His most trusted senior and his death.

    His world- shaking battle.

    His most loved person and her death, Ste.

    The betrayal and the rejection of the human governments.

    His revenge.

    The faint flute melody was a plethora of emotions.

    His music went from his sadness, to his violence and finally despair and finally the death. He started experiencing the whole life all over again and finally when he entered this world.

    A second chance, a chance which is nigh impossible toe by.

    A chance one could only be met but could never seek.

    He forgot all the surroundings as he let himself go in these emotions.

    But his peace was disturbed by an explosive sound, which shook him out. As he turned around, he saw a girl running towards him and there was a group of men running behind her.

    Both parties are exchanging attacks.

    The girl saw Sam and screamed.

    "HELP." "HELP."

    She yelled on top of her lungs.

    Sam didn¡¯t show any expressions and looked at the group of young men following the girl. They are the first team of the Imperial capital.

    But there are only bottom five, the prince Nathan and Patrick along with the remaining three didn¡¯te.

    When they saw Sam, they halted in their tracks and became wary.

    The young girl looked at this and immediately felt as if she saw a ray of hope and ran towards Sam and stood behind him.

    Sam still didn¡¯t show any expression.

    He is still nonchnt which made the tears on his face look strange.

    The five candidates who are opposite him, seemed to be whispering something.

    "Isn¡¯t that guy the one boss warned us about?"

    "Yeah, what should we do? Should we take him down?"

    "Nope, I don¡¯t think, we should. Boss said we shouldn¡¯t fight him. He is too strong for us. Let us just leave. That bitch won¡¯t be able to escape us anyway. It is not like she could stay with him for long."

    As they left, they gave a hateful re to both Sam and the girl and left the ce.

    The girl immediately knelt on the ground as her legs gave in to the exhaustion.

    She sobbed as if it was the end of the world.

    Sam was still nonchnt. He is actually displeased by the whole fiasco and wanted to beat the crap out of all of these people. But he restrained himself because they at least didn¡¯t re him up after disturbing his peace, considering that this was a forest, he has no right to stop them froming here.

    So, he just stood up and turned to leave.

    "Sir."

    The girl called for him, Sam didn¡¯t bother to stop.

    "Sir, Please. Can I talk to you for a second?"

    Sam halted and looked at her.

    "Thank you for saving me. My sister is also in thepetition and she is the member of the second team from the imperial capital. She went on a mission and these guys are trying to hold me hostage to get her points."

    Sam looked at her with a ¡¯what has that got to do with me face?¡¯

    She recognized the expression and said.

    "They seemed to be afraid of you, so can you please save me for two days?"

    She lowered her head and showed an extremely pitiful and helpless expression.

    "Why should I?"

    Her face froze with a single sentence.

    She looked at him with bewilderment.

    "I.. I.." She started stuttering.

    "I don¡¯t even know who you are, so why should I offend all the bigshot kids in the city by saving you?"

    "I... Can repay you." She said with a shy face.

    Sam smirked and didn¡¯t say anything. The girl right now is a ssic white lotus.

    "Follow me."

    As he said that, he walked away followed by the girl.

    As soon as the two of them left, the five youngsters who chased the girl came out of their hiding.

    Sam walked back followed by the girl.

    As they entered the house, Sam looked at the three while the three of them looked at the girl.

    "She has some trouble, she would be staying here for two days, Watt you take care of her."

    As he spoke, he gestured Watt toe as he walked towards his room. Watt came out after half an hour and looked at Philip and Watt and gave them an eye signal. Both of them left the room.

    Watt pointed at an empty room and said. "That is your room, stay there for how many days you want. Ask me anything you want. You are not allowed to enter Boss¡¯ room. Every night we will be having dinner here. That¡¯s all you have to know."

    Saying that Watt left and went towards Philip and Jack.

    "Boss, said we would be speeding up our n. Tomorrow don¡¯t go to the card hunt, just cultivate, but there something we have to do."

    He took out a copy which looked like the blue print of the house and exined something.

    After half an hour of discussion, he finally said.

    "Boss said that we don¡¯t have to wait for the three weeks to be over and wants to cut thepetition short. He said that a week is enough from now."

    The three of them confirmed their ns for now and went to do their own things.

 Chapter 211: Declaration of War

    For the next two days, Sam was extremely busy and he didn¡¯te out of his room.

    At least, that is what the girl knew, because she could feel a strong presence from the room, but three young men knew otherwise.

    The girl wanted to meet Sam many times, only to be rejected entry by Watt. But the more times, she was rejected the more determined she was the next time.

    One could easily tell that something was up. Watt lost his patience one time and he yelled at her.

    "There are many important things in the room for which even your life will not be able topensate with, so just stay in your room."

    Only at that time, did the girl stop the pestering. Watt even saw an expression of understanding and discovery on her face. Albeit briefly.

    But what she doesn¡¯t know is Sam is outside in the city dealing with the things. He stayed every night outside while he would stay in the tower since dawn till dusk.

    He worked on making certain things for the operation in the tower while investigating to find a certain ce in the night.

    Only at thete night of second day did he find the ce and the object he wanted. In these two days, the whole city didn¡¯t know that he stole many things. At least, only Sword Marshall, his six subordinates and the one at the office might have noticed, but they didn¡¯t make any fuss, this only increased Sam¡¯s belief on certain conclusions he drew.

    After getting that, he is almost ready for the war he is going to wage and there is no better time than present to do so.

    But before that, he needs to send a deration of war. And why would be alert the enemies before attacking? What is the fun in catching them off guard? Making them feel despair even after giving them a heads up.

    Sam moved back to his home and called the remaining three into his room. He gave them threemunication tokens which he modified a bit.

    Now they are connected in amon channel just like amunicationwork of a squad.

    After giving them necessary instructions, he sent them to the various parts of the city and took out the shadow mice. The ten mice are also given some smallermunication tokens. They are also connected by a certainwork.

    Since, he can understand the beast tongue, it would be a waste to not use that skill and even more so that he has shadow mice.

    After sending them out, Sam took out his ownmunication device. This is even more different than the two. Sam modified it so that he can change themunication lines as he wants.

    He sent Sky and Yanwu out. Since, they can use Level 4 beasts, these two would have a very high advantage, with a single roar from them, the beasts with lower bloodline wouldn¡¯t even dare to move. Now, the sky is almost his.

    He let Ape, Mia and the Zoi termite Queen who now reached Level 5 inside the house.

    If his calctions were correct, there is a high chance that the Grand realm cultivators would intervene to tilt the bnce at least to get something out of house.

    So, he has to take some precautionary measures.

    After that, all he had to do was wait.

    Meanwhile, he was waiting, waiting for the things to be delivered to certain ces.

    At the same time, the girl who sat inside the room also became a little restless, sensing the powerful auras of the beasts and their movements.

    She carefully spread her spiritual sense to see what Sam is doing and judging from his expression, he seemed to be waiting to make a move.

    She also became ready.

    After sometime, Sam got a signal to themunication device which he wore like a Bluetooth earpiece.

    He smiled and went out of the house and boarded the harbinger and floated over.

    He clicked a small crystal acting as a button on the ear piece and said.

    "Hello, everyone this is Sam speaking."

    This voice although slow, was clear and dominant, was heard in the various corners of the city in the rooms of various big shots.

    The four tower heads, a certain general of the city guard and one of the most important of all and can be considered as Sam¡¯s peer the prince Nathan.

    The six of them were stunned atmunication token that appeared all of a sudden and now after hearing Sam¡¯s voice, they are even more stunned.

    They didn¡¯t expect to hear from Sam at all, they are thinking that he would be full of tension and confusion with the troubles they are causing, but that cold voice is telling them otherwise which also gave them a bad feeling.

    In this week alone, they stole five cards from Philip and Jack. They even thought that Sam is clearly afraid of them to evene out of his house.

    At this moment, Sam¡¯s house suddenly glowed and numerous formations popped up. Sam smirked at the sight and said.

    "Right now, the girl you sent for me to ¡¯save¡¯ is trapped in my house. You know, you should really do a proper job if you want to fool me, do you think the damsel and distress n would work on me? Me saving a girl and making the feud between us bigger? Clearly you didn¡¯t hear the warnings from the people you gained the information about me.

    Anyway, if you had heard those warning you should have never tried to make a move on me. Back to the topic.

    I am speaking to you now, to show my appreciation of your efforts, clearly you did a great job finding trouble for me and mypanions, except for the n involving the girl, everything is great, at least for the pea brained idiots like you." He paused again.

    The six people listening to the words were enraged, but Sam didn¡¯t give them time to retort and continued.

    "I know exactly why you are targeting me, but you guys must be foolish to think that I would give in and I know exactly why you guys thought so.

    It is because of your feeling of superiority.

    It might be due to your cultivation, experience, age and even some ridiculous reason like a superior birth.

    And you even yed by the rules, using only Great realm cultivators. I must say you guys invested a lot, hiring that many Great realm experts, you must have paid some huge price, but I also paid a price by buying extra cards as an insurance in thepetition, but it became a waste as soon as you guys interrupted.

    Don¡¯t worry, I would take back that amount.

    In short, I am making this call to tell you that whatever superiority, arrogance and almighty feeling you had about yourselves that your eyes are so clouded with it to even steal my ideas from me forcefully, I am going to destroy all of that.

    Every person who is involved in this, if they are candidates, they would lose their points, if they are not candidates, they would lose their lives.

    I won¡¯t give a shit if they are of noble birth, if they are artisans, healers, inscription masters, formation experts. The capital of Orion will experience a blood bath today.

    Prince Nathan, please do get ready to exin the situation to your emperor father and then get ready to take a hit from your crown prince brother, you might have to bury your thoughts about being the ruler of this nation.

    Oh, by the way your sister should being to you by now, after all you guys used her beloved friend and assistant as bait in your scheme, all the best dealing with her.

    Good Bye."

    He closed themunication channel, the six people wanted to reconnect the channel but they failed.

    But it wasn¡¯t long before their disappointment turned into anxiousness. The city soon turned into chaos.

    After cutting the connection, Sam talked with his friends.

    "Philip."

    "Here."

    "Watt."

    "Here."

    "Jack."

    "Here."

    "st your targets, on count of three.

    Three.

    Two.

    One."

    As the count was over, Sam took out a bunch of Grenades and threw them inside a house which is in the same street as his house.

    At the same moment, the remaining three did the same.

    This Grenade, is one of his recent inventions.

    It can serve as both hand grenade and a mine.

    It is a five-inch-long cylinder with a diameter of one inch.

    There is a half-inch switch on the top.

    After pressing the switch, the small cylinder will trigger numerous formations inscribed inside the cylinder which will destroy the space jade filled with an enormous amount of methane.

    All this process will be finished in a fraction of seconds and the huge amount of methane pressure will trigger the internal shell made of the impact crystal making it absorb the spiritual energy and activate the small inscription inscribed in it to light the fire.

    Even though, the small amount of methane explosions cannot damage a normal cultivator, an explosion of this level will make them lose a limb, now that ten explosions happening at the same time, every single person in the house was burned to death by the blue mes.

    These are some of the low level hired thugs that are hired by the big shots who made trouble for them.

    This is the explosion signalling their start of War.

    Now, they have to move towards their first target.

    "Okay, three of you, move towards the Artisan tower, the house of our first target is nearby and ording to my info some of the non-candidates who troubled you also live nearby.

    You guys enter the field, I will provide you the cover, nobody shall escape today."

 Chapter 212: First Target

    While Sam is starting a war, the girl in his house is in for a turmoil.

    She is Reena. The assistant and the friend of the most beloved princess Natalie of the Empire Orion. She and the Princess are also part of thepetition. But nobody knows that except a select few.

    They are the two people in the second team of the imperial capital who wore masks and dark robes concealing their identities.

    She infiltrated Sam¡¯s home, just like how they nned, she felt that n was pretty good and after Watt said that there are valuable things inside the room, she was convinced that Sam¡¯s card must be in there.

    After all no one is carrying their main card while they are on the streets, so she was sure of it.

    She waited, when the four men in the house went outside, she slowly went inside that room, but as soon as she stepped in, she was shocked.

    There was only a scroll ced at the centre of the room and the whole room was emptied out.

    She felt that something was off, and nervously walked towards the scroll. She took the scroll and looked at the contents. She was more and more shocked at what was written on it.

    "Hello, Miss Reena.

    I have to say that your act is mediocre at best, but I should still appreciate you for your persistence and determination to get into my house.

    Now, you are trapped in that house and since no one knows that you are contestant, I might not even have a penalty if I killed you, so before you die, please do contact the princess who sent you here to plot against me and gain my points and wealth toe and save you and of course, if she can.

    Good Bye."

    Her face turned pale and she didn¡¯t even know what to do.

    She forced herself to calm down and walked towards the door, but when she tried to open it, she sensed that there was a huge suppressing force which started suppressing her out of nowhere.

    She could feel that there are many numerous formations in this ce and when she grits her teeth and came out of the room, she saw Ape and Mia sitting in the hall as if waiting for her.

    She took out themunication token and contacted the princess and conveyed the details, the other party flew into panic immediately.

    By this time, Sam already ended hismunication and was already moving towards the Artisan tower.

    In the imperial pce. Princess Natalie ran towards Nathan¡¯s room and barged in.

    Nathan just put down themunication token Sam has left and looked at the Princess who is fuming red with anger.

    "Reena is trapped."

    The Princess with chestnut long hair and big eyes yelled on top of her lungs with her beautiful face filled with a frown.

    Seeing that the Prince is not saying anything she continued.

    "I told you not to use her, but you just have to insist on doing so. I am telling you if something happens to her, you would be dead meat."

    "Natalie, do remember that I am your brother. You are threatening me for a servant?"

    Natalie didn¡¯t reply and Nathan continued.

    "Sam, knew of our ploy since beginning, not only does he know that we are plotting, he even knows who is plotting and what kinds of measures we are taking. He started acting now. He is nning to hunt down every person who is after him for the past days.

    He knew Reena is from our side since beginning, he was never oblivious. In fact, he is watching us from the dark as if we are clowns who are entertaining him."

    His voice went colder and colder as he spoke. This is down right humiliation. With all thework and statuses, the six of them seven if they include the princess too, they couldn¡¯t deal with a young man who entered the capital few weeks ago.

    Even worse, that guy was watching them make fools out of themselves.

    At this moment, Natalie spoke again.

    "I don¡¯t care what you think of it now,e with me now and rescue Reena. From thepetition rules, only we can deal with this matter, if we use any of our sub-ordinates, things would get messy."

    "Why not, Reena is not known to many and no one knows she is participating except for us, if we can just make sure that we keep quiet, we can get back at him easily using our guards."

    "Then, that also gives him the reason to kill her. He still kept her alive only for this reason, that she ispetitor, if we want to use this loophole, then he could do so as well."

    Nathan became silent and nodded in agreement. Both of them left the pce on the beasts and went towards Sam¡¯s house, but on their way, they saw the spots where Sam and hispanions made the explosions.

    Their Pce made sure that they won¡¯t be able to see anything that is going on outside.

    They didn¡¯t know that Sam had made such a fuss.

    As theynded near Sam¡¯s house, they saw the formations around his house.

    Even with just a nce they could see that there are many formations ovepping on each other. It would be hard to just get in.

    Nathan was thinking the next step, when hismunication token gave off a signal.

    "Prince Nathan, Sam and his team are here, they are causing chaos at my son¡¯s residence, please remedy the situation, help me." Artisan tower head called over and made a ruckus, he was yelling left and right without even bothering to listen to what Prince had to say.

    Themunication was cut off, as tower head seemed to have left on emergency.

    At this moment, Sam is hovering three thousand meters away from the artisan tower. It is not that he doesn¡¯t want to deal with them up close, but rather he wants to cover arge area.

    He took out a sniper rifle out of the storage.

    This is one of the things he made in the past few days. He really doesn¡¯t want to make these guns and stuff, because they can tilt the bnce in the society.

    But he felt that this society is already a mess and even more, he was stupid to think that a mere weapon would change the social bnce. These guys are already rotten. He doesn¡¯t care anymore.

    Now, he will cover from this long range.

    The three-kilometre radius from this ce are all under his control. He remembered thest time he used the sniper.

    Having a person¡¯s life in his hands, taking that life without even the target knowing. He has to say; this is a great feeling.

    Now, Philip, Watt, Jack and the shadow mice all entered the area.

    Their first target is Patrick.

    Since, this guy is stupid enough to provoke Sam first, he is the first target.

    First thing, Sam did is taking down the guards, hired thugs that are ced at Patrick¡¯s house.

    He is taking them with head shots. The disadvantage of a sniper which is changing the ammo.

    Now he doesn¡¯t even have to do so.

    He is enjoying the process.

    Meanwhile, the trio on the ground are bombing the ce up. They remembered every face of the people who followed them and hunted them down, now the roles changed.

    They don¡¯t have to worry about being ganged up, because their surprise attack caught these guys off guard.

    Now, they are reaping the lives like it was nothing.

    Soon, more than hundred people are down. Only a few candidates are left and that was Sam¡¯s doing, he already informed them about this. They might not remember the faces of all the candidates but Sam does.

    So, whoever he shot in the arm are candidates and they don¡¯t have to worry about those guys, because Sam shot them with an anaesthetic bullet which would make them unconscious.

    All they have to do is collect the cards, meanwhile the shadow mice are responsible for searching the cards hidden by the candidates.

    Now only Patrick was left in the spot. Standing there shivering.

    The tower head came out and as soon as he saw this scene, he was consumed with fury.

    He looked towards Sam¡¯s direction and bellowed.

    "SAM, HOW DARE YOU?"

    He was ready to make a move but then a voice stopped him.

    "Old man, if I were you, I wouldn¡¯t do that."

    Tower head turned around and saw a man in his mid-thirties sitting on a tree. He is a Nascent stage cultivator.

    "First Sword of the Sword Marshall, what are you doing here?"

    He is one of the six subordinates of the Sword Marshall who are responsible for hiding cards, the shadow mice who are at the scene conveyed the message to Sam.

    Sam is also waiting for what would this guy do, so he moved further and arrived at the spot. The man leisurely got down from the tree and said.

    "I am here to make sure that an old man like you wouldn¡¯t cause any harm to the candidates."

    The tower head¡¯s face turned red in embarrassment and he said grudgingly.

    "How is this me, using my power to harm him? He is the one attacking the people from the artisan tower. He is abusing the safety provided by the rules."

    "But from what I know, I saw these guys hunted them down in the past few days, so you don¡¯t expect them to take it lying down right? This is just a retaliation."

    The artisan tower head was dumbstruck and he started gritting his teeth in anger but he didn¡¯t dare to make a move.

    The person who is in front of has a cultivation level lower than him, but he didn¡¯t dare to start a fight, because even if he does win, the fight won¡¯t end there.

    The six swords of Sword Marshall is not a name that could be taken as a joke. They are not one to be messed with, even the emperor has to show some respect to their team on the ount of their achievements and their prowess.

    He doesn¡¯t dare to make a move.

    The First sword looked at Sam with a smile and said.

    "You can go on."

    Sam nodded his head and raised his rifle and shot Patrick on his arm. This is not an anaesthetic bullet though, it is a normal ammo which tore open arge wound on the arm.

    He came down from the harbinger and took out the reaper.

    He walked towards the wailing and whining Patrick and cut down the arm and picked it up without even talking. He looked at Patrick as if he was looking at the lowest form of vermin.

    He turned towards Philip and others and said.

    "Take the cards of the big fish, don¡¯t bother with the small fries. But remember to take an arm from every candidate who are against us. They should have a memory of this day and have a reminder in their hearts.

    When they see us, their bodies should react on instincts that we are not touchable."

 Chapter 213: Clearing the Targets

    After finishing their first target, the team of four are prepared to leave the ce, but as soon as Sam hovered a bit, he could see the beasts flying from towards them and he saw three of his targets in the lead.

    They are other members of the first and second imperial teams. Patrick must have sent them a message. There are more than two hundred people following the three candidates on their beasts.

    The citizens are all running into their homes, thispetition shouldn¡¯t have been this chaotic if they didn¡¯t treat Sam as their universal target.

    The only team which isn¡¯t against Sam is the southern star team. The rest which means a total of ny candidates are against him and these rich scions could hire hundreds of people to make Sam more trouble.

    But now, Sam¡¯s move against them waspletely uncalled for.

    "Three of you, move towards them discreetly, don¡¯t worry about their long-range attacks. I will take care of that."

    He ryed his instructions to the three of them and let the shadow mice slip past to their new locations of search.

    The next target¡¯s home.

    He hovered in the air as he watched the three of hispanions move towards the approaching group.

    After some time, he whistled and two birds came out of the darkness.

    One of them is a crow and another one is a Falcon. They both looked like ordinary birds, but when they entered the sky from the darkness and the beastsing with the group sensed their auras thetter felt tensed.

    They slowed down involuntarily.

    But the people riding on it made them move forward.

    At this moment, Sam snapped his fingers and Sky and Yanwu took their true forms and roared at the beasts.

    The beasts immediately flew into chaos, their natural instincts told them to prostrate on the ground in sign of respect.

    The tower heads who are watching the scene frowned. Two beasts scaring the whole hoard of two hundred beasts, this is not something they could see every day.

    They are thinking about what type of beasts they are, but they couldn¡¯t guess.

    What they could see though, is that the approaching people are now in chaos. The beasts stopped moving forward.

    Sam took out the sniper rifle again and aimed at the group.

    He stood ram rod straight on harbinger and started shooting the candidates.

    He doesn¡¯t have to load as the magazine was reced by a space jade with numerous rounds.

    As the sound of the gun shots rang in the night sky with blue coloured me spark at the end of the barrel, one could see the people falling down one by one.

    The candidates in the lead are bing anxious and they realized that their beasts wouldn¡¯t listen to their orders.

    So, they jumped down from that height and protected themselves with the help of the spiritual energy.

    But the damage is still notpletely negated that easily.

    They still suffered the brunt of the fall a bit, but the worst part is as soon as theynded, they saw three figuresing towards them.

    Philip, Watt and Jack already arrived at the ce in time the group was in chaos.

    Sam is still doing his thing. For him, it is no difference if they are standing on the beasts or jumping down or even running on the ground. They are all easy targets and a head shot is all it takes.

    Since, these guys doesn¡¯t even know from where to expect the attacks, they are having even more trouble.

    The three lead candidates are already suppressed by the trio. They swiftly moved and searched for the cards and after that was done, there was no need to wait. They cut the arms of the three. The opponent of Jack is rtively lucky as it was just a clean cut, but Philip and Watt just tore the arms off their bodies.

    After the scene here was ended, the four of them continued their hunt.

    The whole imperial capital was turned upside down.

    When they arrived near the city guard quarters. Where the son of a City guard General is, they were halted by the guards and they are even threatened that if they barge in, they would be uwfully entering the ce.

    Sam smirked at the idea of the General. He looked at the General who walked out with a ck face.

    He knew that a situation like this would rise.

    But this is not enough to stop him.

    He hovered in the air and waited for the shadow mice to tell him about the position of the target and after receiving that, he looked at the house that heavily reinforced with formations andughed to himself.

    The general really went through great effort to save his son.

    Sam raised his sniper and shot the person from far. Far enough that the general has no reason to argue about this, but that is only partially. The other reason is there is a man who is simr in age and attire to the first sword of the Sword Marshall who stood there with his arms crossed.

    The General has right to stop their entry but nothing else other than the entry.

    As Sam Shot, the formations are sessful in blocking the bullets.

    Sam should say that he was impressed. Those formations are top notch.

    He can only partially recognise some of them from a far as there are too many of them.

    Sam looked at the formation and the general with a smile. It is about time that he should test his new attack method.

    A formation has one big w and that is if there was no extensive and highly detailed construction and preparation it wouldn¡¯t be able to block the light and shadows. They only use the spiritual energy to create different temporary environment in a confined space.

    But light doesn¡¯t have restrictions unless the formation creator made sure to iste it, but the people in this world are foolish enough to underestimate the light element and only used for healing.

    Actually, healing isn¡¯t even the direct effect of the light element, it is more like the light is a transfer medium for the vitality, same goes for the dark element, it is a medium of curses, necromancy and arts rted to death.

    Anyway, now he has a way to effectively use the light energy to attack. Theser.

    The gamma rays inherently are not visible to the n.a.k.e.d eye and the wavelength is very low. He wasn¡¯t able to reach that wavelength with his current level; he was still able to achieve aser.

    But it waspletely different from a normalser. He is eliminating all kinds of gas, crystal or chemical which acts as the basis for theser beam and just modifying the light energy into that.

    So, even if he wasn¡¯t able to reach the gamma level, he was able to find another way while experimenting.

    He can just replicate the wavelengths and frequencies of the othersers which he worked on in his previous world and if he can do that, he can attack just like that.

    He kept the sniper rifle away and extended his hand after he moved a bit forward. He is right now hovering at a certain height at the border.

    As be let the golden light .u.mte at the tip of his index finger, he looked at the general who is also looking at Sam¡¯s actions vigntly.

    Sam gave an evil smile and just them the end of the golden light turned into green coloured light. And before everyone¡¯s surprised looks, the light beam shot out from the finger and as the long beam prated through the formations, itnded on the arm of the target who didn¡¯t know what was happening.

    General was stunned and started moving towards the house. But Sam waving his arm a little bit and theser cut the hand off in a clean stroke. Even the flesh at the cut was charred.

    The General, barged into the house destroying the formations and all he could see was his son who was passed out and groaning unconsciously.

    He looked at the cut and then looked around in search for arm, but that was nowhere to be seen. It disappeared magically. Sam looked at the General who came out in anger and miraculously took out the arm that was just cut off.

    As he said before the shadows are not separated.

    And they acted faster than the generally.

    Sam just waved his hand at the dark expression of the General and went away with a smile.

    Now almost all the targets are done. They didn¡¯t target the small fries, because they have something else in the store for her.

    They would be in for a greatest surprise. And after an hour almost all of the targets are finished only two people are left.

    "Let us go back to the house. We have to host the Princess and the Prince."

    The four of them left along with the shadow mice, Yanwu and Sky.

    As they moved six other members followed. They are the six swords of the Sword Marshall.

    The first sword said.

    "Do we all have to go there? You guys could handle this right."

    "Don¡¯t whine. That guy already reduced all the work load for us for the remaining month. So, just stay for tonight and you can rx."

    "What do you mean, he reduced the work?"

    This time the third sword answered.

    "Marshall said that he stole the whole container of the cards earlier this evening. So, we don¡¯t have to go through the meetings and take our time to visit the hiding spots."

    "He did that? Man, I have to thank him for that. By the way, the rest of the candidates are idiots if you ask me. The hidden cards are a bomb if they can find them. They just focussed on the missions and other than that went after this kid. They left all about the hidden cards to chance.

    Now, this kid stole the biggest treasure along with his friends and now he is making them pay for their actions."

    "Do you know who he targeting now?"

    "Who?"

    "All the candidates who went after him are done except for the Prince and Princess. Now both of them are at his home, I wonder if he will deal with them the same way he did with the others."

 Chapter 214: Special Treatment

    Sam is floating on the harbinger, over his house which was illuminated with the formations.

    He saw there are more than hundred people trapped inside the formations, acting like they are crazy.

    Some are attacking others randomly, some of them are talking nonsense with sweat on their foreheads. Some of them are cowering in fear. They are all in an illusion. Sam made a diluted poison gas from the illusion venom of Mia and some from his own body through the poison element and ced it in the firstyer of the formation.

    Almost half of them are behaving like that and unfortunately the prince and the princess are not part of that category as they are still sane.

    But the sanity is what made the matters worse. Since, they are sane they moved forward and they were now facing a huge threat from the nextyer of the formation.

    The secondyer was full of leaves, but the leaves are made of the scrap metal Sam .u.mted over time, a huge wind is circting in the secondyer and the leaves are cutting the people left and right.

    They weren¡¯t able to do much. The Prince and the Princess who are the lightning element mages are trying their best to do something about the leaves, but failed, because whenever they tried to concentrate their energy after calcting the timing of the attacks, the formation somehow changed and the wind speed, direction and the attack pattern all of these factors changed as if the formation has a mind of its own.

    Sam looked at the struggling people as if he is watching a game show.

    He even called Yanwu over and sat on his back in afortable position and took out some fried meat snacks as he watched the show.

    As he enjoyed the scene while sharing the food with Yanwu and Sky, the remaining three arrived followed by the six swords and of Sword Marshall.

    When they saw Sam¡¯s leisure behaviour, they were stunned.

    The first sword even said. "Those snacks look delicious; I will ask him for some." But just as he stepped forward the next person stopped him.

    Sam saw Philip and the rest and called them over. He let their beasts which he stored in the dimension out and asked them to enjoy the show.

    He passed each of them a snack pack and they behaved as if they are watching a movie.

    When Sam saw the six swords and particrly the hungry expression of first sword, he took out a space jade ring and threw it over to him.

    There are some portions of fried spring fowl and the fruit wine in that. The first sword waspletely delighted from the taste and started gorging on the food. In few seconds the remaining five all joined,

    But the situation inside the formations ispletely opposite to the leisure atmosphere outside.

    The Prince and Princess in particr are having the hardest time, since they are just about to enter the thirdyer of formation which is also thestyer. Inside the formation they have to face the real threat of the house.

    The ape and Mia.

    But the two of them don¡¯t know this. They painfully crossed the secondyer leaving behind almost all of thoseckeys behind and entered the thirdyer.

    But as soon as they entered, they saw a huge Ape with golden fur standing in front of a huge nine headed creature and lecturing thetter on something in that beastnguage they absolutely didn¡¯t understand.

    Sam moved a bit and threw a stone at a point on the formation making it visible for the other members.

    They saw the two people looking at the two beasts in confusion.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop the munching the food.

    The next minute the beasts and the people looked at each other. The Prince and the Princess are already exhausted they didn¡¯t have any confidence in beating the beasts judging from their aura, but the two beasts didn¡¯t think so, they are already waiting for so long.

    Mia, even wanted to go through the formation and beat the crap out of them, but Ape stopped it before it did anything rash.

    But now that the two targets are right in front of them, they don¡¯t need to hold back and now the greatest beating of the lifetime for the two imperial scions begun.

    The ape chose the prince, and it performed moves that are simr to Muhammad Ali.

    Sam was a big fan of the old-time boxer and his no guard style, so when he was bored, he taught the ape who is also a natural born boxer some of the moves of his previous life¡¯s boxing legend and it also felt those moves are fun.

    It started giving punch after punch to the face of the prince before even giving him a chance to conjure a spell.

    This is the big drawback of the mages, they think they are better since they get to use the elemental energies but the warriors, if they mastered speed, they can toy with a typical mage, of course that is not same for all the mages.

    Anyway, the exhausted prince seemed to be from a simr case.

    Ape was in a serious boxing pose throwing punch after punch. The Prince has be a punching bag.

    Meanwhile, the princess is not having a good time, because Mia caught her in a bit on her shoulder and put her to sleep immediately.

    She is looking at Sam¡¯s direction proudly as if asking him to praise her.

    Sam smiled at the antics and got down along with Yanwu from a formation loop hole which he left deliberately.

    He deactivated the three formations and the rest also entered, as for the six swords, with their level they saw everything from the start to end including the hydra and the ape¡¯s performance, they are a little stunned by Mia¡¯s appearance but they didn¡¯t think much about it.

    There are all kinds of beasts in this world, they are interested in the ape¡¯s boxing and watched as the Prince got pummelled.

    Sam stopped the Ape after the prince was down and went towards Mia for a hug, he then asked her to suck the poison out of the princess so that he could talk.

    Meanwhile, Jack dragged Reena out.

    Sam first walked towards her and said.

    "I hope you are pleased by our hospitality."

    Reena didn¡¯t know what to say, she was clearly afraid of Sam, but next she screamed till the four directions shook because, Sam took the reaper out and cut off her left hand.

    Natalie who came to herself watched the scene and was visibly shaken.

    She looked at Sam with furious eyes and was about to yell at him, but was stopped by him.

    "I will talk to youter. Your brother first."

    Then he walked towards the Prince and said.

    "Your highness, how do you like the hospitality of this humblemoner. Is it for your satisfaction?"

    His cold but sarcastic words stung more than the punches of the ape.

    He felt the humiliation he never felt before.

    "How dare yo.." The Prince was about to speak but Sam pped him squarely on the face.

    "The host is talking. Where are your manners? Didn¡¯t they teach you manners in the imperial pce?"

    His words and actions are beyond everyone¡¯s imagination. Sam usually isn¡¯t this cheeky.

    But he continued.

    "Now, what is wrong with you? What is your problem? You are already born with a golden spoon right up your ass and you still want my wealth? If you had done all this for points, I could have overlooked it.

    But for my wealth and ideas? That is the whole different story.

    The worst part is you have involved your precious sister along with all these people. Now because of that, there are more than six hundred deaths in a single night right in the middle of the city and if not for thepetition rules, there should have been ny more deaths.

    That might have included a princess too."

    "Like you can do that, you don¡¯t have balls to do so, that is the reason you are talking all the crap."

    The Prince spoke in a low voice.

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything, and just snapped his fingers, Watt moved and took the de from Sam¡¯s hand and cut off the princess¡¯ left hand in a swift motion.

    The whole scene was silent. The princess is looking at the arm in a bewildered fashion.

    "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH....."

    She cried with agonizing scream. Watt handed the arm which Sam put away in the storage and handed the reaper back to Sam.

    Sam then ced the de on Nathan¡¯s left hand and said.

    "For me, a person¡¯s status, whether he is amoner or emperor will only matter until they mind their own f.u.c.k.i.n.g business, once they mess with me, it is all the same for me."

    Sam cut the left arm directly without even waiting for the prince¡¯s reply. He turned around and started walking back.

    The prince held the wound on the left shoulder and said through the gritted teeth.

    "How dare you treat the people from the imperial family like this? How dare you? You are going to pay sooner orter. I will make sure you would pay for this with your life."

    Sam halted and walked back to the prince and said with a thoughtful expression.

    "You are right, I shouldn¡¯t treat an imperial scion like you like this, I should have thought of this earlier."

    Just as the spectators thought that Sam is going to regret his actions, he raised the reaper and cut off the prince¡¯s right hand and put it away.

    "Special treatment for the special prince, I hope you like it."

    As soon as he said that he turned around ignoring the prince¡¯s painful scream, at the same time, the Zoi termites sprung into action and ate the whole group ofckeys directly leaving a pile of bones.

    This is a night to remember for the entire imperial capital.

 Chapter 215: Aftermath

    That night almost all the imperial capital was wide awake. Themotion itself was on a whole new level, but the news about Sam cutting off the prince Nathan¡¯s hands after beating him to pulp was passed through all the citizens.

    The news spread like wildfire.

    The six swords of the sword Marshall, who are the most carefreebat unit in the whole empire were also in shock.

    They don¡¯t fear the imperial family, because they have pride in their abilities and achievement and the imperial family has some leeway for them, but even they are not bold enough to cut the hands of the Prince, but Sam did exactly that and he did that in an overbearing manner.

    Even more highlight of the night is the Princess. The Princess¡¯ face was not revealed to the public since her birth and only a select few knew her, but Sam not only made here out, he also cut off her arm a few days before her eighteenth birthday one of the greatest events in her life.

    Even Philip and Jack are shocked by Sam¡¯s actions even though they have expected that.

    The only two people who didn¡¯t lose theirposure are Sam and Watt.

    Sam went into his room, while Watt cleared up the ce. He threw away the skeletons of theckeys who became food for the termites and the locust and even threw the prince and the princess who are fainted due to blood loss on the roads.

    Luckily, the six swords are kind enough and brought the princess and the prince away to the imperial pce.

    Sam went sleep, while the rest of them are busy cleaning up the mess.

    After the six swords delivered the two scions of the imperial family to the pce, they went on their own way.

    The imperial pce though was in turmoil.

    The imperial healer was assigned to heal and regrow the arms of the two scions.

    Meanwhile, three people gathered in a small meeting room.

    They are the Emperor Orion, the Crown Prince and thest one is a woman, the empress. She is the mother of the crown prince, Prince Nathan and the Princess Natalie.

    She is most beloved woman of the emperor and also quite powerful with Peak Nascent stage cultivation keeping the vast harem under her iron fist.

    These three important figures of the Orion empire are currently sitting in the room with a gloomy mood.

    The empress in particr has face darker than charcoal.

    "I want them dead. Four puny bastards dared to do this to my daughter and son, I want them all dead. Not even a normal death, I want them to die a horrible death that would make them feel the intense despair." The empress yelled at the emperor who is silent with a highly thoughtful expression.

    Empress wasn¡¯t satisfied with his silence and yelled.

    "What is the point of you being an emperor if you cannot even take care of your own children?"

    "It is because I am the emperor, I have to take steps forward with caution."

    Emperor said in a mild and calm tone.

    Crown Prince stayed silent and was contemting his father¡¯s words.

    The Emperor is still thinking after leaving those words.

    He was thinking about Sam¡¯s actions.

    Why would a young man be so bold as to directly handicap a prince and a princess in the imperial capital?

    There could only be two reasons.

    One is that guy is extremely stupid or the other guy should have a to keep himself out of danger regardless whatever the consequences may suffer.

    But this only applies, if that guy doesn¡¯t know the immunity the people behind the scenes gave the candidates.

    If Sam really knew about the people behind the scenes and their need for talented youngsters, then emperor can confirm that Sam is confident that he can do anything in the capital.

    But that raises another question. How on earth did Sam find out about those people?

    If it is solely based in observation, intuition and deduction, then Sam is a very dangerous candidate. He is an extremely dangerous person which a person should avoid making any enemy unless they are extremely confident in dealing with him.

    Because, a man who can guess this much just from somepetitions, then he can deduct so much from other things. He would calctive to the extreme and will have contingency ns for any possible scenario in which things could possibly go wrong.

    He already read all the information they could possibly get on Sam a day before. He knew from that point that he is not one who takes things lying down and it would be weird if a young man with such aplishments took things lying down.

    He wanted to warn his son to not push too far, but it was toote to do so. Sam made a move sooner than he expected.

    But there is one more thing, he is also an emperor and he also doesn¡¯t take things lying down, he has to take revenge for his son. Even if it is dyed and not possible immediately, he would surely do it.

    "You just stay put for the time being, thepetition is too important and if I make a wrong move, we would lose the whole empire out of our hands, so just hold it in for the time being. I will find a way to get the revenge."

    With those words, he sent away the Empress who is still indignant and then spoke to Crown prince about how to cate the citizens about the chaos in the city.

    The next few days, many events happened.

    Sam and his team didn¡¯te out, the only other group without any harm is the southern star group led by Nichs.

    Sam took the cards of all the seeded candidates who have a possibility of winning the top ten.

    They are all empty now.

    The small fries who are hired from them started to see a chance of them since Sam didn¡¯t bother to take their cards, that is only until the big shots showed their fangs.

    Since they cannot do anything to Sam and they desperately need points, they healed as quickly as possible and went all out on the small fries.

    So, the elimination began even before the evaluation.

    Even the Prince was on a spree to collect the points as fast as he can and then only the small fries understood the despair of being back stabbed and treated as pawns.

    They were used to target Sam and hispanions and now they are being hunted by the big shot young masters for their points.

    Some of them even wanted to shamelessly ask Sam for help saying things like, ¡¯we were being manipted at that time.¡¯ ¡¯A man of your stature shouldn¡¯t be this petty and you should help us.¡¯

    The only answer for them is their arm was cut off again.

    They painfully paid more than ten million for their arms to get healed but now it was cut again.

    So, nobody dared to bother Sam again.

    Meanwhile, Sam and his group and busy distributing their huge haul. What six swords said is right.

    The hidden cards are true treasure and it took them a whole day to transfer all the points to their three cards. They couldn¡¯t help but feel shocked.

    They truly hoped that these points have more significance than just ranking. They have too many of them.

    They spent their days cultivating and resting and soon the day came where they have toe out.

    The day before the ceremony. The day for the top ten people toe out.

    Since, Sam¡¯s trio took up the top three spots there are only seven for which the rest had to struggle for.

    Nichs was actually quite good and secured sixth spot.

    Fourth being Nathan, fifth Patrick.

    The remaining four spots are obtained by people named Fermi who is the pharmaceutical tower head¡¯s son in seventh ce.

    Tiger in eighth ce.

    Morgan in ninth ce and finally Jerry in tenth. Thest three are the sons of Dukes.

    The princess and her assistant seemed to withdraw from thepetition.

    Today only, their positions were announced and not the points.

    Sam, Jack and Philip took the top three respectively.

    There was another announcement that day.

    "Your positions in the ranking are not final, but I would advise you to keep the point cards with yourselves, those points arepletely yours and you will have many uses for them in the future.

    But the true rankings will be determined tomorrow after the banquet of the Princess Natalie. All of you will have to visit the imperial pce by sunset.

    After the banquet is over the ten of you will be going through the hand to handbat, simr to the way you obtained the ranking in your dukedoms.

    So, be prepared. And everyone must where formal clothes to the ceremony and you can change to your battle clothes afterward."

    After the announcement was over everyone went on their own ways.

    Sam is quite busy for the past few days, his actions are a bit weird because he collected all the arms they collected from the candidates.

    The remaining three were weirded out by his actions.

    But that night, the day before ceremony, they saw what Sam made from the past few days and were stunned.

    This is a piece of art.

    "I n to settle down in the imperial capital in the future for sometime and this will be ced in my meeting room. How does it look?" Sam asked them with a smile, his threepanions are too stunned to even talk.

 Chapter 216: Sam Won

    After Sam showed the item, they are stunned.

    They felt a myriad of emotions.

    What Sam has shown them was a chair. No, it was not even fit to be called a chair. It should be called a throne.

    But it was not made of dazzling golden colour or eye-catching red coloured metals. It was not embedded with shining crystals which shows the extravagance of the emperor.

    Rather it was made of a material with Greyish silver metal with a shining l.u.s.tre.

    It was created with the arm bones of more than ny arms they collected from the candidates who went against them.

    At first, they thought Sam just wanted to make them pay by this, but what Sam doing his something on whole other level.

    The skeletal throne made of the arms of every possible influential person¡¯s kids.

    And Sam is saying that he is nning on using it when he settled down in the imperial capital.

    He is going to stay in the imperial capital sitting on a throne made of bones of an imperial prince, princess, the tower head sons¡¯ kids.

    This is a tant and the greatest possible provocation for the bigshots if not to be called a p to their faces.

    But they are thinking something else.

    How big are Sam¡¯s guts to do this? He is making a statement. This action simply meant, that even if it is an imperial prince, he will deal with them all the same and he is confident enough to make the deration right under the nose of the emperor.

    Now, various thoughts are going through their minds.

    ¡¯Isn¡¯t Sam same age as them? Isn¡¯t he just like them thriving from the bottom of the society? But why is he so bold? So bold and courageous enough to do this?

    He is like a free spirit omniscient of everything that could happen to him and omnipotent in dealing with them

    He can do whatever he wants, he did whatever he wanted. He neverpromised. Even though, they saw all his journey till here, but they subconsciously ignored this.

    Now, with this throne, they saw what they missed.

    Suddenly, they felt like Sam¡¯s figure has grown too huge. He was like a behemoth who is shadowing them.

    They might have a battle prowess slightly inferior to him and can give him a fight if the conditions are good. But the courage he has, defying everything, everyone and only doing what he wanted no matter the scale of opposition.

    This is the time they truly felt inferior. Just a small imagination on how they would feel if the are in Sam¡¯s shoes, the blood boiled for a second.

    But they are sure they don¡¯t have balls to do that.

    The feeling of caring for no one¡¯s opinion, power and strength, irrespective of their strength, birth and position. This is not something they can do.

    Sam didn¡¯t care about their thoughts, he is still mesmerised by his piece of art and after sometime, he kept that away in the storage. [A/n: the appearance of the chair will be described intter chapters]

    They turned in early for the night, Sam was made in charge of the formal clothes. Because, there is no way any person in the city would dare to sell something to him.

    All the bigshots are looking for a way to vent their frustrations, if someone did sell them something, they would suffer.

    But Sam also had a problem with that, he doesn¡¯t know the formal etiquette of this era or the world.

    The only formal wear he knew was from the modern world.

    He didn¡¯t bother to study this world¡¯s etiquette as he didn¡¯t have any use for it till now, and there are no books on this seemingly useless matter in the library.

    There is no way that he would go out and enquire about this matter. So, he just made what he knew.

    By morning there are three tuxedos ready.

    As for Watt, he was shoved into the divine dimension thest night. Now, he is in grave danger. Sam, Philip and Jack are the ones with immunity not Watt.

    They can ughter him like amb with their power and might.

    The next evening, Sam and his twopanions made a move in their tuxedos. When they arrived on the beasts andnded, all the people near them are looking at them weirdly.

    Because, tuxedo is not something they are familiar with. There are pants in this world, vests, tee-shirts and rarely something resembled the shirts.

    So, the tuxedo is a very new thing to them, but they felt like that the dress is elegant and noble at the same time.

    Particrly, Sam who knew how to carry himself in a suit is having a feeling he missed a long time ago. He missed this feeling of being dressed up.

    To be honest, Sam has some psychological issues in his previous life. One of them is that he has a subconscious need for acknowledgement of others and it is not just the acknowledgement of any tom d.i.c.k and harry.

    He wanted to be acknowledged by the biggest fish in the sea. The biggest creature in the ocean has to stop and bow to him in acknowledgement this was one of his lesser goals, so when he wore a suit he remembered the days he attended the meetings on dark society in a simr attire.

    He would be meeting the top dogs in various industries providing him protection fee and closing the deals worth billions. He really liked that feeling.

    He walked towards the Banquet hall and took his designated seat.

    The banquet hall is a ssic imperial style. Showing the elegance and the extravagance at the same time.

    There is a stage on which there is a table for the imperial family.

    Below it, there are tables of various sizes arrange for guests based on their importance.

    The top ten candidates are assigned arge round table with ten seats and apparently, they are one of the nearest to the main table of the imperial family

    Sam sat there and his gaze wasnded on therge battle arena in the centre of the hall. Even though, it isn¡¯t toorge, it is still sufficient for the Great realm level fights.

    Everyone was mixing up with each other and socialized as anyone who could get in here is not someone who is an average joe, but even between them there arerge disparities.

    The remaining top ten candidates are also busy with everyone giving them toasts and greetings, except for the three. Of course, everyone knows who they are.

    After five minutes, the whole hall became silent and everyone rose from their seats. Sam also stood up as he didn¡¯t have any impression on the emperor till now, it is better to be polite.

    The imperial family of five came walked in their dazzling robes, they are also simr to the robes everyone is wearing, but they are much more extravagant with the usage of golden and red colours.

    The emperor, empress, Crown Prince, the Princess who is the star of the day and the Prince Nathan.

    They came here with a huge parade. The princess is not in a pathetic state Sam has left her. She was healed, walked like an elegant swan, her face was covered with a veil. Although anyone can see her face with spiritual sense, nobody dared to do so.

    That would be having a death wish.

    After taking the seat, the emperor gave everyone a gesture to sit down and said in a loud voice.

    "Today, I thank you all who came here to give your blessings to my daughter Natalie who has turned eighteen today....

    After some political and hypocritical jibber-jabber, the banquet wasmenced.

    Sam ate the delicacies without a care in the world. He must say it is tasty, the royalty are the true examples of the people living in luxury.

    The ingredients, the cooking everything is top notch.

    As the meal was about to end and everyone is congratting the princess, the time for the ranking battle hase.

    The emperor said again.

    "As you all know that today will be the end of the firstrge scalepetition which has been held in our empire.

    Now, we shall witness the battles of the candidates as theypete for the top ten ranks.

    What is the significance of that? They will be given an amazing opportunity that could only be called as once in a life time and they will be prioritized based on their rankings.

    So, I hope all the candidates will try their best to get what they deserve."

    He started an apuse signifying the start of the battles.

    The battles are same as before, just like in the southern star, every candidate will battle with the nine others and one with most wins will be the ones who will secure the rankings.

    The only difference is, Sam is not the first person to start the battle. He didn¡¯t even look interested after the first two matches.

    Because, the person with the highest battle level is actually Nichs. This guy is even stronger that the Prince and all other scions.

    Even Trevor who didn¡¯t make the cut for the top ten is a lot stronger than these guys.

    Sam only felt that he has to make a movest and things would be done.

    And after more than two hours, everyone¡¯s battles are ended and only battles of Sam are left. No one challenged Sam. They are waiting for him to best and see as he challenged one after the other.

    They knew that Sam is strong, so they want to make him exhausted so that at least one of them could win against him and give him a good bashing.

    As for why Nichs didn¡¯t challenge him. He needs an all out fight with Sam, that is best if saved forst.

    But Sam has some other ns for them.

    He walked towards the arena in his ck suit. He loosened his tie a bit and looked at the candidates who recovered their strength frantically.

    Sam looked at Jack and Philip who gave up the matches before it even started.

    As for Nichs, that guy is better saved forst, that is what Sam thought and then looked at the other candidates.

    One by one, the matches are over, the scene is like a dejavu. Same thing happened to the candidates at the southern star.

    Now only, two people left the imperial prince Nathan and the battle maniac Nichs.

    The Prince took the stage with a gloomy expression.

    He lost to Nichs and Philip. Jack tied with him. But he is still eager to fight with Sam. He felt that Sam¡¯s prowess is overrated and all of the action was dependent on the special weapon.

    Even after seeing him take down five candidates in row like they are nothing, he is still unconvinced. The excuse he came up with is that they are tired.

    So, he took the stage and said arrogantly.

    "Today, I will show you, why you should respect me. I will make you suffer for the humiliation I suffered.."

    Before the prince could say anything, a green coloured light ray brushed past his neck and stopped his words.

    Sam stood with his hand in his pocket. The ck suit, white shirt and ck tie, he is like a modern prince with his sharp eyes and perfect features. He looked at Prince and said.

    "I am already bored with the shitty battle I have seen today and now you are even pissing me off at this moment. I just wanted to deal you in a single hit, but you just have to poke a ho¡¯s nest. I will show you hell with a single arm."

    As he finished his words, Sam moved like a shadow and appeared in front of the prince. His other hand was still in his pocket. He held the prince¡¯s neck in his other hand and said coldly.

    "Do you believe, I have more than ten ways to kill you with this single arm in an instant?"

    He gripped the neck a bit tightly and said.

    "Crack your windpipe, you are dead."

    Nathan felt a small jolt of pain which said to his brain that he would be dead next instant, but was stopped just in the right moment.

    "Poke you brain through the ear, you are dead."

    Again, a jolt of pain saying he was about to die but not.

    "Poke your throat, you are dead."

    "Mash your brain with a single punch, dead."

    "A punch to your ribs, perforated lungs you are dead."

    "A punch to your heart, dead."

    "A punch to your liver dead."

    .

    .

    .

    After a series of close calls, Sam said finally pointing the finger near the earlobe and letting a smallser beam strike it.

    "One beam and you are dead."

    All this while, Sam didn¡¯t take his left hand out of his pocket. But Nathan was soaked in sweat and the whole venue including the emperor turned silent.

    Sam closed towards Nathan¡¯s ear and whispered.

    "You know what, you might be a prince for the whole empire, but for me you are a bitch that was being saved by the rules which constrained me. Otherwise, I could have f.u.c.k.i.e.d you up anytime I want. Do you understand?"

    He took a step back and the high and noble prince copsed on his knees.

    The referee came out of his shock when he felt Sam¡¯s gaze and called out.

    "Sam won."

 Chapter 217: Envoy

    Sam¡¯s arrogance and might made everyone in the banquet hall stupefied. He has shown death to a prince multiple times, yet not killing him multiple times, right in front of the emperor crushing his confidence.

    They couldn¡¯t even start to imagine the psychological blow the prince might have suffered.

    The Princess, who took her veil off for the first time in the public couldn¡¯t hide her emotions, she looked at Sam who is tightening his tie and walking back to his original position on the stage as if he did nothing of significance.

    His back looked like an immovable and unfathomable mountain. She was thinking what could he have done to her if not for the rules. She felt a wave of gratitude for her father for implementing such strict rules so they can survive. Otherwise, all the prideful geniuses that gathered here from all over the empire would have died in the hands of this monster including her.

    The emperor didn¡¯t show any expression, but inside he was enraged. He wanted to kill Sam right there and then, but he knew he cannot. He looked at the empress who was about to make a fuss and held her hand to forcefully restrain her.

    Nichs didn¡¯t care about all this and went on to the stage and looked at Sam.

    Both people exchanged a look and Sam took out his ws this time, he wanted to see what the oue would be if used the mostfortable weapon in front of Nichs.

    The ws are still the same. Only nails of the fingers are made and the rest of the palm is uncovered. There is only one modification for now and that is there is a small minute hole at the sharp tip of each nail.

    One could easily ignore this. But this is one of the most lethal tricks up his sleeve. These are for poison element.

    But Sam is not nning to use the poison this time around.

    After taking a deep breath, Sam made the first move. The spectators, saw the most intriguing battle they saw.

    Sam felt alive again but this time, there was less pressure on him. No matter what, the ws are the most suitable for him. The title of Battle Maniac is not wasted on Nichs.

    Sam could feel from his moves that Nichs has studied his swordsmanship just to beat him, but his efforts are in vain. This time, Sam¡¯s approach haspletely changed. His moves are more dangerous and unpredictable.

    Nichs felt as if he was fighting a wild beast. it is not like a duel at all. He felt as if he was defending against an assault of a predator.

    The pressure increased. And by the end of the fight, Nichs almost conjured a battle spirit. But Sam didn¡¯t give him the chance and ended the fight.

    The stage was destroyed. In the middle of the fight, a barrier was created so that after shock wouldn¡¯t affect the banquet hall.

    In short, this is the best battle of two top notch geniuses of same generation.

    The Crown Prince who is sitting in his spot. He was not attracting any attention at all since the beginning.

    He squinted his eyes as he looked at the two youngsters who are getting off the stage.

    He himself was also considered as a genius but he is already nearing his thirties so he wasn¡¯t able to participate in thispetition.

    But he wasn¡¯t upset. He is destined to be an emperor. So, he didn¡¯t bother to look up for these life changing opportunities.

    His only concern is making sure that his position is stable. His father was able to stay in his position because of his strength.

    He also needs that and keep thepetitors in check.

    He can ascend the throne with his father¡¯s support but he wouldn¡¯t be able to keep that, so he has to keep thepetitors in check before they could bloom and reach their full potential.

    He has to keep an eye on these candidates.

    After the battles are over and the stage was cleaned up, the emperor addressed them again.

    "Now, the rankings are confirmed.

    First ce Sam

    Second ce Nichs

    Third ce Philip

    Fourth ce Jack

    Fifth ce Nathan

    Sixth ce Patrick

    Seventh ce West

    Eighth ce Weasley

    Ninth ce Morgan

    Tenth ce Snake

    All of you candidates shall assemble at the imperial pce tomorrow.

    The banquet will end here."

    He finished this without any courteous words indicating his gloomy mood.

    Everyone went their own way.

    That night, the emperor came out of his chamber and went to a deste building in the estate.

    He started loading a huge amount of spirit stones in various circles.

    After he did that, he took a step back and waited and soon as bright glow shed and two people emerged out of that light.

    This is a Space gate. A transportation tool using space element. As the two people arrived, the emperor gave a bow and greeted them.

    "Greetings to the Envoys of the thunder god temple."

    His voice was full of respect and obedience.

    There is not even a single trace of his majesty of being an emperor.

    The people who came out of the formation looked at the emperor with a proud and nonchnt attitude.

    They greeted him only with a nod.

    One of them is a man who is in his early thirties and with a cultivation of Nascent stage.

    The other person is a young man who is around eighteen with a cultivation stage of middle stage great realm.

    After the greetings, the emperor led them to a specially arranged room for them. It is not for the rest, but a meeting room with arge table and chairs. There are all types of scrolls containing information.

    On the table there are blue coloured crystals in a cylindrical shape with namesbelled on them.

    The crystal will perfectly fit in a person¡¯s palm.

    Each of the crystal isbelled with the name of the candidates who ranked top ten.

    The man in Nascent stage sat down without saying anything and took the crystalbelled Sam into his hand and infused the neutral spiritual energy.

    A translucent screen popped up with Sam¡¯s image and all kinds of information in it.

    It is like a profile of a person. There are all kinds of details about Sam, from the ce of origin, his elemental details, his battle records, his business and military achievements and even his professional titles are named there. There was a golden star mark on the top right corner of the profile.

    The man changed the amount of spiritual energy and looked at a video it is the battle video of the Sam causing a mayhem in the capital and his duels with the candidates in the ranking match.

    After looking at the whole video, he reverted the screen back to the original profile and added three more golden stars on the top right corner.

    The young Great realm expert who came with the man looked stunned and said.

    "Senior Brother Moriya, don¡¯t you think it is excessive? Why does he get four golden stars? Doesn¡¯t that make him a seeded candidate even among the temple disciples?"

    "Yes, it does." Moriya answered nonchntly.

    "But why does he get that privilege, he is just a peasant."

    The young man seemed unconvinced.

    Moriya didn¡¯t answer immediately. His gaze turned cold and said.

    "Ben, since when was it your ce to question my judgement? Do remember that you are only here because of your influential father, you came here on excuse to see the candidates from here and you do just that, do not interfere in my work."

    The young man named Ben closed his mouth shut. But his expression was still unconvinced. He looked at Sam¡¯s image and tried to engrave in his mind.

    Both the envoys are in displeasure with other¡¯s attitude, but the person who is beside them, the emperor was pleased. He thought that he got the opportunity for his revenge.

    Moriya continued his evaluation; he was clearly focussed in his work and he did so with heavy responsibility. This is not the first time he did this.

    He is responsible for evaluating the candidates from the empire and selecting the seeded candidates with special talents when necessary.

    Until now, he only got four such candidates and Sam is first one in the list.

    Sam¡¯s guess is right, there is someone who is evaluating their progress in thepetition and they are giving orders for those candidates¡¯ safety.

    After the evaluation is done, Moriya stood up and said to emperor.

    "Assemble the candidates tomorrow morning. We will be leaving to the thunder god temple tomorrow itself.

    The actual ceremony will be taking ce in a week. If you want to, you can attend the ceremony with a guest." With that he gave an invitation card to the emperor which thetter took with reverence.

    "If there is nothing else, I would be taking my leave, I will send someone to serve a meal for the envoys. Please do tell that servant if you need anything."

    The emperor excused himself with that, he knew about Moriya because of his previous visits, he like solitude. So, he cleverly came out without outstaying his wee.

    Even though, that person is of lower strength their statuses are different.

    His emperor title is nothing but a joke for them, maybe even lesser than a joke.

    Before leaving though, emperor looked at Ben onest time, the young man is still looking gloomy and angry. Emperor smiled to himself and left the ce.

    He went to Nathan¡¯s room.

    Nathan is an extremely pathetic state, the emperor sat beside his son and started talking to him.

    The next morning.

    Sam and the remaining candidates assembled at the entrance of the imperial pce.

    After everyone is here, an attendant led them to the deste building where space gate is. But they didn¡¯t enter it.

    Moriya and Ben are waiting for them inside the building. While the emperor started loading the formations with the spirit stones.

    "Senior brother Moriya, the candidates seem to haveeback, let me test them out a bit."

    He didn¡¯t wait for Moriya¡¯s approval and left the ce immediately. Moriya furrowed his brows and walked out.

    By the time he was out, he saw Moriya confronting Sam.

    "So, you are the first ranker. I hope that you remember one thing, all of you guys no matter what rank you are all still peasants, so when you reach the thunder god temple, know your ce."

    He looked at Sam with condescension and waited for a rebuke, but when he was greeted with nonchnce and disregard, his anger grew and said as he pointed his finger at Sam, almost touching his nose.

    "What is with that attitude? Do you not know how to show respect?"

    Sam furrowed his brows and before he could speak, Nathan said.

    "So, it is senior ben from thunder god temple, it is an honour." He even bowed and surprising the rest of the candidates followed, at least except Sam¡¯s trio.

    Ben waspletely satisfied with this and also made his anger grow more. He looked at Sam coldly and made his move.

    He conjured a ball of lightning on his fist and threw it straight to Sam¡¯s face.

    But he didn¡¯t feel the expected impact, rather, he felt his body weirdly floating and the world rotating upside down, before he could make sense, he felt a strong kick to his guts which made him puke blood in gut wrenching pain and sent him flying.

    When he came to back to his senses, he was already crashed to the ground and was near the feet of Moriya looking at him in pain and confusion.

 Chapter 218: Central Continent

    Sam stepped forward and stood before Ben who is still rolling on the ground.

    He is still confused.

    But when he saw Sam¡¯s cold gaze, he came back to his senses and a myriad of emotions came to his head.

    Pain, embarrassment and anger, just as he was about say something, Sam took out the reaper sword.

    The bloody aura emitted by the de which is in colour of blood red itself, made him shut up instinctively.

    At this moment, Moriya extended his hand blocking Sam and Ben¡¯s exchange and said to Sam.

    "It¡¯s his fault, you paid him back, just let us leave it at that."

    Sam scanned the person and did take a step back, but before that, he looked at Ben with an extremely murderous re.

    "Se.. Senior Brother..." Ben stood up and just as he looked gloomy, he wiped the blood at the corner of his mouth and red at Sam¡¯s back and was about to say something. But was cut off by Moriya.

    "Ben, I think you better shut your mouth, anymore of your crap you would be done for, after all from the rules, he has more stars than you and even if you are dead, the temple head wouldn¡¯t find any trouble.

    The only person who will be pissed by that would be your father but I assure you, even he wouldn¡¯t dare to mess with the rules of the temple.

    I can save you once or twice, but not all the times, after all, who can make sure that you guys wouldn¡¯t end up together without anyone supervising.

    He will ughter you likemb in a single move. Don¡¯t think that everyone will be docile just because of your father¡¯s status in the temple.

    The only reason, I am even bothering to waste my saliva on you is because of former position as a senior disciple, if you cause trouble one more time, you are dead meat."

    Moriya, gave a cold and unfeeling lecture and then took a step forward towards the candidates.

    "I am Moriya, an envoy and also an elder of the thunder god temple. I wouldn¡¯t bother you with exining what thunder god temple is and its significance but you should have one thing in mind and that is your empire, Orion is under thunder god temple¡¯s jurisdiction."

    The candidates were stunned, except for Nathan, but no one didn¡¯t say anything and listened attentively as Moriya continued.

    "Thepetition you have undergone was organised because of the orders from the thunder god temple. You ten are the representation of the young talent of the Orion empire.

    You are tested and tested for almost three years for this day.

    In a week, you guys will be faced with a final test which also an opportunity.

    Whatever you gain from thepetition is yours and yours alone, trust me this may change your life in ways you would have never ever expected."

    He paused and took out some golden coloured cards and distributed each of them to the candidates. Each card has a person¡¯s name on one side and below the name there are stars. But the colour and number of stars differed from each other.

    Behind the card there is a string of numbers, after looking at the number, Sam understood what these cards are. They are the new card holders and Sam¡¯s card shown him the total number of points he has.

    It is 453,628. A six-digit number. That¡¯s right Sam got that many points and that is mainly due to the stolen hidden cards.

    Jack and Philip also have points around three hundred thousand. As these three guys monopolised the entire hidden card section, they made a great haul. Their points are hundreds of times higher than the remaining seven candidates.

    Sam looked at the four golden stars on his card and then he saw that that there are two golden stars and one silver star on the cards of Jack and Philip.

    "The points on your card are going to help you a lot in the near future, there will be someone who will be exining the remaining detailster, so before that we shall leave this ce and go to the thunder god temple.

    The group followed Moriya and Ben into the room, Sam saw a veryrgeplex andpound formation.

    After everyone entered the main circle, the emperor activated the formation from this side and the group disappeared.

    Sam felt as if he was being sucked by an intangible force all of a sudden.

    His head felt fuzzy and he almost lost his consciousness, but just when felt that, his body came to a halt and saw a blinding white light disappearing in front of his eyes.

    He saw that he was in a simr formation but in a different room.

    Moriya and Ben are the only ones who are unfazed by the journey.

    "The first time in the space gate will always feel like that, you will get better in a few minutes."

    They slowly walked out of the room.

    Sam felt a salty sea breeze on his face. He could easily guess that they are on an ind.

    "This ind is the space gate station of the thunder god temple.

    There are a group of inds near these surroundings which are under temple¡¯s control. The direction behind, you is where the Orion is located, but it was separated by a vast sea which is a bane to any type of cultivator.

    Trust me, the sea in between was unconquered and you wouldn¡¯t be able to survive it. Follow me."

    Moriya started exining somethings about the thunder god temple.

    There is a total of four empires under the thunder god temple and there is a space gate for every one of them.

    Apart from them there are a few other space gates, but Moriya didn¡¯t exin about them.

    As for the thunder god temple itself. It has a main ind which is the main temple base. And they upied tens of inds around it.

    This space gate station is only on of those inds.

    As they moved, they boarded some level 5 beasts and flew towards the main ind.

    Sam saw the beautiful scenery and was mesmerized by it.

    He was momentarily lost in the natural beauty.

    After travelling for a day, they arrived at the main ind.

    "Half of the inds you have seen are ces formoners to live and the other half are the residences of the disciples of the thunder god temple."

    Moriya exined and led them to a ce simr to a dormitory, there is a room for each person.

    "You will be residing here and rest for the night. Tomorrow, morning there will be a personing to you and will show you the surroundings. If you have anyins or troubles you can contact me."

    With that he exchanged the contact information with the tokens and left the ce.

    Sam entered the dormitory and closed the door without even waiting for the rest of them to speak. He has something to deal with because, Sky is trying to say something through their connection.

    After closing the door, heid a formation of concealment and let Sky out.

    "What do you want to say?"

    [ We are near the central continent.]

    "Central continent?"

    [Yes, the central continent, thergestnd mass of this world. That ce is and of beasts. The human influence is very scarce there and the continent is a treasure trove. In fact, this thunder god temple is on one of the ind groups near the borders of the central continent.

    There are more than six such ind groups surrounding the central continent,pared to this ce, your empires are ruralnds.]

    "So are you from the central continent?"

    [Yes, I wanted to tell you, but I figured it would be better if I tell you after you reach a certain strength. The central continent is a a very dangerousnd. It has vast deserts, marshnds, snowy mountains, volcanic regions.

    The humans are trying to explore and conquer the area from many years, but to no avail. The strongest existences of the continents reside there.

    I am from the Great roc tribe in that central continent and Bi fang tribe is our archenemy.

    Our tribe was almost destroyed in thatnd and the remnants like me scattered over the, I don¡¯t even know if there are any others left. But no matter what, do not enter the central continent at this moment, it is too dangerous for your strength.]

    Sam thought for a moment before asking.

    "Is there anything I should know about the thunder god temple?"

    [I don¡¯t know much, but the elders of my tribe said that the temple worsh.i.p.s a thunder god and the legacy was passed by him to the descendants. The temple is now managed by the members of that descendants at core.

    Even though, they are named thunder god tribe, all kinds of element users and warriors will be recruited. They have many inds with lot of resources under their control.

    In fact, there are a lot of inds that are unexplored around the central continent and all the powerful organisations try to gather their resources by conquering them.]

    "Why do you think, these people wanted to gather us?"

    [Basically, these people don¡¯t have a good impression on the people from the rural ces like you, they look down on the people like you, I cannot possibly guess why they gathered you guys here.]

 Chapter 219: Touring and Shopping

    After learning this new information, Sam went into a deep thought, before that he kept Sky away.

    From what he could think of, the thunder god temple is full of experts far beyond his level, so it is hard to say if the formation will work on them.

    After that he took away the formation and sat on the bed. He is thinking about what he could possibly expect tomorrow.

    Since, they said that there is a final test, he will only have a chance of know why they are truly here, after thepetition.

    So, Samid back on his bed for a good night¡¯s rest, after all there are still some after effects from the space gate transportation.

    The next day morning, the ten candidates gathered outside their dormitory. A person who is in histe forties came to them. He is a Grand realm expert.

    He handed each of them a chest badge and said.

    "These are the temporary identity tokens of the thunder god temple. So, please keep it safe.

    As for me, I am an attendant of elder Moriya and I would be the one in charge of your arrangements for your stay here.

    Today, I will take you to a tour around this area.

    Right now, you are in the inner zone of the temple where the core disciples and inner disciples reside along with the elders, Great elders."

    He paused and pointed at the huge structure in the centre of the ind and said.

    "That is the thunder god temple, in which the Temple head and the Grand elders reside. Today, I will take you guys to the trading zone.

    There, you can trade, barter or even buy any items avable. There is another currency apart from the spirit stones and those are points.

    The points which you have in your card are one of the currencies. One point equals ten spirit stones.

    Even though, it isn¡¯t much, it is still hard to get them and there is another use for the points and that is the temple exchange area and the temple library.

    The temple contains of a unique exchange area where there are very high-level weapons and treasures which are acquired and created by the temple¡¯s ancestors and predecessors as well as some of the rarest natural treasures like herbs and ores.

    In that ce, only points can be exchanged and the spirit stones doesn¡¯t work. So, the points are more valuable.

    In the same way, the points can be used to exchange for battle skills, cultivation techniques and other knowledge in the temple library.

    But, the bad news for you guys is that there is no way for you guys to ess those two ces as they are only for core disciples of the temple.

    You are only our visitors, so you can only get ess to the trade market. I will show you around, follow me."

    After that they walked for a few minutes before arriving at a bustling ce. The ce was packed with people. There are many shouts of vendors.

    "Spirit replenishing pills, freshly produced."

    "Spirit recovering potion, freshly brewed."

    "Fangs of Silver wolf and leather of Golden cougar, high resistance against physical and metal attacks, a great material for armor."

    Many people who have badges strapped on their chests are selling, buying, trading. The ce is as good as a city market. The attendant carefully exined everything in the market.

    "Even though, it is all temple¡¯s property, it is still same as a city. We have a trading department and real estate department too.

    People can buy ces for houses, or even shops in the trading market. We have restaurants, brothels, battle arenas, weapon shops, pharmacy shops which might be either run by elders or disciples.

    We even have the four professional towers in here and except for the core members who are sent here by their respective associations, the rest of the members are from the temple.

    The citizens of the inds under the temples alsoe here to trade.

    A part from that, there is a mining and ore department, where people can buy ores, sell ores and if anyone discovers a mine, they can make a deal with mining department.

    There is a herbology department specialised in scavenging herbs from wilderness and also farming them..."

    The attendant went on and on. He especially took his sweet time on the special departments and facilities of the thunder god temple and Sam could vaguely sense what is happening.

    This guy is selling off the benefits in the thunder god temple, one can easily identify it if they read between the lines.

    After a whole day of exining, they finally stopped at a ce which has arge stone pir.

    The stone pir is not cylindrical rather it is a cuboid.

    On one side, there are names of the ancestors of the temple engraved, on the other side there is something called the champion of decade list, the other side is called current ranking and thest one is the temple heads names.

    The attendant exined all three sides before stopping at the current ranking.

    On that side there are multiple lists.

    "These are ranking lists of outer disciples, inner disciples, core disciples, elders and Great elders.

    In all these categories, each category will be further divided into their cultivation levels and in each sub category the current top ten will be named here.

    These names will be changed constantly..."

    As the attendant exined, Sam looked at the names of the rankers and he saw one familiar name, Moriya, he is ranked first in the elders list.

    Moriya is of Nascent stage and since he is the best of all the elders, that means he is the strongest Nascent of the thunder god temple.

    Sam was impressed, then he saw the top rankers of the Great realm level.

    There are three sub categories even in the Great realm, the initial stages, the middle stages and thete stages.

    Sam didn¡¯t know anyone of them, but he is looking at the list because the attendant is exining about someone on the list.

    "Thete stage members are all off the age limit for thepetition and ten middle stage top ten are the ones who are going to be participating with you and among them the first ranker is the most talented person of the temple.

    The thing is, he just turned neen and he is already at the peak of the middle stage great mage. Hisbat prowess is off the charts and he is also Grandson of the Temple head.

    You know what, he is a heaven chose. I wasn¡¯t here at that moment, but there was a phenomenon at the time of his birth.

    There was a huge light on that cloudy night andnded on him as soon as he was born.

    That was called blessing of heaven and there are records in the ancient library.

    So, he is called heaven¡¯s chosen son.

    He has a very high position in the temple and is being groomed as the next temple head..."

    As he rambled on Sam looked at the name.

    Arthur.

    All the candidates are looking at the name with eyes dazzled, particrly Nichs, this guy would battle any person as long as he is strong.

    The attendant proceeded to exin about another candidate.

    "The second ranker Arman is also a genius at the age of eighteen he just entered the middle stage of Great realm.

    Even though, he is a genius, he doesn¡¯t have any notable background at least it is not considered great whenpared to Arthur.

    Arman is not considered a genius in beginning; he is just son of a working staff manager of mining department and his speed atpleting initiation is not even fast.

    At the age of fifteen he just barely became an acolyte and on that day, he even suffered an ident and almost died, but he survived due to his pure will and worked hard from then onwards. He is very skilled at short sword and particrly with the lightning element.

    He is also a promising member for bing a Grand elder of the temple."

    As the attendant was rambling, Sam is deep in thoughts.

    Arman¡¯s story intrigued him. Fifteen years old, almost dying , ident, survival, working hard, suddenly bing a genius, there are all coinciding with his story.

    He is wondering if it is really a pure coincidence of there is something special about this Arman.

    He has to meet this guy.

    After exining something about these guys, the attendant left them alone and let them shop. It is very easy as they can just simply exchange the points in the same way they transferred in the capital.

    Sam took a stroll and went to the Mining department.

    He has a better use for raw metal than the weapons and other goods.

    He entered the office and was greeted by a receptionist. The receptionist saw the badge of the temporary visitor and knew who Sam was as they are previously informed. He was a bit disappointed as he didn¡¯t expect much from a Peasant, but at least he kept his condescension in check as they were informed to be formal with these guys.

    "Wee, what can I do for you?"

    He greeted Sam with a professional smile.

    "I want to buy some ore."

    "Sir, I think if you want to buy for individual use it is better to buy them in weapon shops as most of the ore in here will be raw and was preferred to be sold in bulk, you would have a hard time refining it."

    "I want to buy arge amount."

    The receptionist paused for a second and said.

    "Please take a seat."

    After that he passed a small cylindrical crystal simr to the one Moriya used for checking details of the candidates after infusing some spiritual energy.

    "This is the catalogue of our avable ores, please take a look and inform me if you find what you want."

    Sam took the crystal and looked at all kinds of ores that are avable.

    After half-an-hour, Sam came out of the department, with a middle-aged man and the receptionist sending him out with smiles all over their faces.

    Sam made around six billion worth purchase after all.

    Sam felt like he had got a great deal. Many ores he wanted to find weren¡¯t there in the Orion empire and even if they are avable they are a lot costlier but there are more precious ores and avable at a cheaper price here, so he made use of the chance and spent a ¡¯little¡¯.

 Chapter 220: Palace of Inheritances

    Sam went back to the dorm after the shopping. He doesn¡¯t have anything to do for the next few days, they don¡¯t have any restrictions on their movements here so all the candidates are free to do whatever they want to do.

    He stayed in the dormitory and didn¡¯te out.

    He spent his time cultivating and since he doesn¡¯t have many bottlenecks, he entered the third level of Great realm in next four days.

    Apart from that, he focused on his body cultivation and this time, Sam actually experimented on something and discovered an interesting concept.

    On the next day of the breakthrough, Sam decided to catch up on his body cultivation, but this time, he made use of light elemental energy instead of the normal spiritual energy.

    The effects that came are something he didn¡¯t expect.

    He could feel his body epting the elemental energy and getting tempered by it and at the same time, he could feel that elemental fusion became a lot easier.

    He could feel that when he attempted the elemental fusion, he has a lot less consumption of his energy at the same time having less stress on his mental strength.

    A part from that, he also noticed another benefit and that is attack resistance. When Sam tempered his body with the fire elemental energy, he tried this by asking Yanwu to attack, and he didn¡¯t bother to defend.

    Leaving himselfpletely as a target when the attack did hit, his body didn¡¯t receive the expected amount of damage and it can even be considered high resistance.

    But the only problem is he cannot use arge amount of energy, he is feeling as if his flesh was being burnt with fire and ripped apart at the same time, so he has to gradually increase the amount of spiritual energy bit by bit.

    The improvement is faster though. So, after tempering with each element for half a day, Sampleted four elements.

    Light, Fire, Wind and Water. On thest day of their rest he has something else nned. He didn¡¯t want to try the poison element yet, because he is afraid of the after effects that would cause. If his body became venomous in nature, he would have a hard time around his beasts and friends and right before thepetition that is not something he want to face.

    But there is another experiment he wanted to do and that is trying to be aser himself.

    That¡¯s right. Sam can turn into light elemental body after he achieved the hundred percent elemental fusion which would be possible since he found a way to advance faster.

    But he is thinking, if he can convert the normal light energy into theser form and use that to temper his body, what the change will be like.

    So, as soon as the idea came across, he started applying it.

    The immediate result is, his muscle fibres were torn apart in an instant and Sam came to halt.

    But he didn¡¯t stop. He just thought a way around it and made a decision. So, he closed his eyes and first circted the normal light elemental energy andpletely healed the wounds and slowly, he started converting small wisps intoser forms.

    Tearing the fibres and healing them at the same time.

    This time, it worked. He could feel that his body was undergoing a metamorphosis. He could feel his body tempered at an incredible rate. The heat is even higher than the fire element but he was being healed at the same time.

    After more than an hour, Sam stopped the process and tried to do normal elemental fusion and after more than fifty percent of body was converted into elemental body of light, he tried to convert itself intoser.

    But he failed and then he reduced the amount of area he wanted to convert.

    At first an arm, then half of the arm, then the palm, the fingers, a single finger then pinky finger, the tip of the finger and finally the skin on the tip.

    He failed many times and only seeded to form aser body on skin at the tip of the finger, but he wasn¡¯t dejected, in fact he was extremely happy.

    As long as there is a possibility of sess in any way it doesn¡¯t matter how many days it would take. He can achieve it as long as there is a way.

    After that he didn¡¯t do anything and just took a rest.

    The next day, Sam and the remaining candidates assemble outside the dormitory. Moriya brought beasts along with him and all of them travelled to a secluded ind within the thunder god temple¡¯s territory.

    On that remote ind there are actually a lot of people who looked more like the security of the ind.

    There are actually other forty members who arrived on this ind along with other elders.

    Among them one group wore an electric blue uniform and their badges arepletely different from what Sam and the group are wearing.

    And from their haughty and arrogant behaviour one could easily guess their identities. They are the candidates from the Thunder God temple.

    There is no exchange between the five elders, they just nodded at each other and led them to the centre of the ind.

    They arrived at a huge mountain with a cave entrance. The five elders stopped at that ce and then only Moriya spoke.

    "This is a ce where your fortune awaits.

    This cave entrance leads you to the greatest opportunities that can only be achieved once in a life time.

    But please do remember that the opportunity coexists with the danger."

    The candidates including Sam are confused.

    "I will exin it to you guys.

    This is an entrance to a Pce of Inheritances. Beyond this cave lies an entrance towards a world where you can obtain a lot of things which you never imagined.

    This ce is controlled by the powerful beings of unknown origins.

    We don¡¯t know anything about them, but they are far more powerful any existence we have seen before.

    This ind appeared approximately three years ago.

    And there is a powerful being guarding this cave entrance.

    He summoned the Head of the temple here and asked us for the help in gathering you all.

    This ce is not under the jurisdiction of the thunder god temple. We are just helping that person to do their job, so after entering the ce, it is all on you.

    That person will take it from there and exin what to do.

    Now, you guys can enter the cave.

    But the entry will be done one by one in a particr order with a gap of five minutes interval.

    Now, the people with the four golden stars step forward."

    Sam stepped and two other people from the thunder god temple also stepped forward. They are Arman and Arthur.

    The other elders were surprised and so were the two candidates.

    Moriya was the only nonchnt person.

    "You will be the first batch to enter."

    He gestured them to enter the cave.

    Sam and the remaining two entered the cave and they could only see a dark path, but after walking for two minutes, they suddenly found themselves in a hall, where there is tform on which an old man is standing.

    He has a long beard and wore loose white robes. His long hair and beard are white in colour giving him an ethereal look.

    "Wee to the Pce of Inheritance, you must be the first batch.

    You can call me Avatar Sanchez and I am the guardian and the guide of the Pce of Inheritance.

    Before you ask me any questions, let me exin why you are here.

    The Pce of Inheritance is a boon bestowed upon you by heavens. This ce is here for your generation to train and improve by inheriting the legacies of your ancestors, deities and many more powerful figures who you might not even know.

    You have one month inside the Pce of Inheritances and in this Pce, there are many ces for you to visit.

    Each room of this pce will connect you to a different space where you would be tested, evaluated and if performed well, bestowed with the skills, cultivation techniques, battle techniques, weapons, pills, potions, herbs, artifacts and many more.

    Some of the rooms contain wills of some experts in their own right who will be giving you pointers.

    In this one month, you can visit as many rooms as you can and obtain as many ces as you can.

    Some, rooms are tests which will train and temper your will, resolve, energy usage and many others and those rooms will have rankings disyed outside of the room on a board.

    And you might meet other candidates from different location of this as there are other candidates who will also enter this pce through different entrance.

    The tests might kill you, but the more danger it has the precious the reward will be.

    As you guys are the first batch of the candidates, you have ess to all six floors of the pce. The higher the floor the higher the reward. Do take care and in one month you will be summoned back to the hall no matter which room you are in and I will send you out personally.

    So, any questions?"

    The old man spoke in a single breath exining everything, he almost exined everything, that there are almost no questions and Sam also have something else to focus about and that is there has been a burning pain on back.

    If not for his tempering with theser and fire element, he wouldn¡¯t be able to endure it. He looked at Arthur and Arman to see if they are feeling any pain.

    He didn¡¯t see any difference in Arthur¡¯s expression, but Arman is sweating profusely which aroused his doubt.

    "If you have no questions, then proceed towards the steps. Each floor has five rooms and each of them will test you on different things.

    By the way, the rooms which gives objects and skills as rewards they will only be awarded by the end of the month and the rewards will be based on the ranking you obtain among all the candidates from the."

    Sam exchanged a look with the two candidates and proceeded towards the steps while simultaneously observing his back.

    The sight stunned him. The back of his skin now has a big tattoo covering the whole back.

    It was a huge circle in which there are symbols of various mythical beasts circling around a spherical object.

    The first thing he did after observing it was activating a concealment formation which was inscribed on the feather coat to make sure that the other candidates wouldn¡¯t see it and proceeded to enter the first floor.

 Chapter 221: First floor

    As Sam, started going upstairs, he felt Yanwu calling him through their mental connection.

    [Sam, I know who that guy is.]

    "What do you mean?" Sam waspletely stunned; he didn¡¯t know that Yanwu would know a person who is in this ce.

    [I don¡¯t know him personally, but I know who an Avatar is. They are a n from the upper realms. Their race is actually not that strong and they don¡¯t have many restrictions moving along the realms. So, it is not surprising that they came here. But I don¡¯t know what this Pce of inheritances is neither do I know why he is the guardian of this ce.]

    Sam stayed silent and when he thought of his suspicions about Arman, he felt that there is something connecting him and this pce.

    But he didn¡¯t think too much of it and started moving upstairs, but at the same time, Arthur pushed him aside and went upwards with a condescending gaze.

    One look and Sam could guess that he met another d.i.c.khead who is so full of his birth and status. But he didn¡¯t care. As far as he was concerned, this guy is a fish on chopping board as long as he wanted it to be.

    Then he stepped aside and let Arman go first. Arman didn¡¯t think much of it, because most of the people who came to the thunder god temple will always be humble, so he thought Sam might have gone first by mistake and now realised it.

    But he didn¡¯t know that Sam let him go first just because he has something to do.

    Sam moved behind Arman and spread his spiritual sense as if he is checking the stairs and the building and he also took a glimpse on the back of Arman.

    As he expected the back of Arman also has arge tattoo with a circle in which a man with a sabre covered in lightning are standing on a cliff as if he was looking down on the entire world.

    Sam confirmed one thing, that is this Arman is also someone who is like him having a re-birth.

    But this confirmation gave more questions than answers to him.

    Why is there is another person like him and this shown him a possibility that there might be more people than this guy.

    And from the story attendant said, their rebirths are almost at the same time, this leaves with another question and that is if Ling Tian is the one responsible for this guy too.

    And the most confusing matter is what does the significance in the tattoos suggest.

    Sam has some thoughts and most possible on is the people who are responsible for their rebirths.

    His rebirth was done by Ling Tian and the cultivation techniques and others are mostly rted to beasts and their bloodlines which would exin his tattoo of the circle and the beasts.

    At the same time, from the story he heard, Arthur specialised in a self-taught Lightning element infused Sabre arts which is also the thing he saw on the back of Arthur.

    This possibility suggests that the guy has undergone rebirth with another person¡¯s help.

    Sam has myriad of thoughts in his head, but he didn¡¯t think much and forced himself to stop.

    As he entered the first floor, he saw that the first door is already locked and there is a light that showed that another person is inside it.

    Sam saw that there was a board on the floor indicating the nature of the rooms.

    "Lightning Array formations."

    As he looked at these words, Arman also entered the second room while Sam was thinking about the possibilities of what might be in these rooms.

    The whole floor was like hotel rather than a pce. Most of the corridor is coloured in different shade of blue.

    So, he carefully entered the third room.

    In the room, Sam was weed by a translucent screen which looked like a holographic image.

    "Your name"

    These words are disyed on the screen at the same time a mechanical female voice also said the same two words.

    "Sam."

    He replied with and his name was entered automatically and the holographic screen continued to disy the words.

    "Formation name: Lightning fence formation.

    Task: In this room there are severalyers of lightning fence formations. And all theseyers protect an object in the centre of the formations.

    The candidates need to get a hold on that object to finish the task. A candidate can destroy the formation or cross it or even doesn¡¯t need to deal with the formation as a whole. The only thing that matters is that the candidate has to get a hold on that object.

    A candidate can try as many times as they want and by the end of the month, the candidate with the least timing will be awarded with the Blue Prints and construction theories of the original Lightning Fence formation along with all the possible variants that have been created till date."

    Sam felt a bit weird as he saw the words on the transparent blue screen at the same time hearing them from the mechanical voice.

    Before he could digest the information, he got another notice.

    "Candidate can start whenever he is ready."

    At that moment, Sam saw that there was another opening on the other side of the room and another person came in.

    But he wasn¡¯t able to see that person¡¯s face at all even using his spiritual sense.

    As he tried to do so, a notice popped up. "Candidates from different regions are unable to perceive each other¡¯s identities."

    Sam didn¡¯t think much of the rule and went forward.

    The formation was activated. He started using his observation ability and was following the energy flow of the formation.

    The timer which has appeared in the form of a transparent screen didn¡¯t start counting, it seems that it will only count once the candidate stepped inside the formation.

    Sam could also see the other candidate is already trying to enter the formation and at the same time another door opened giving way to another candidate on a different side of the room.

    Sam didn¡¯t know how these doors are appearing out of nowhere. The only door he could see was the door he entered.

    The whole pce was more intriguing than the formation. Because, when he observed the flow of energy in the formation, he can clearly see how it works.

    The formation was made in such a way that there are very small loop holes left, but nheless, he could still feel some holes which he could exploit.

    The formation was framed with lightning bolts constantly striking vertically forming a fence.

    The lightning bolts will randomly increase in frequency in one spot and sometimes multiple spots simultaneously, making it difficult for them to enter the formation.

    In this way there are sevenyers of circr fences with varying thickness of lightning bolts and varying frequency of the powerful strikes.

    Sam carefully observed the flow closely. Even though, he wasn¡¯t able to perform the examination of the lightning particles with same uracy as other elements which he can manipte, in such arge-scale change in the flow of energy, he can still perceive them even if he was unable to observe.

    After a little less than ten minutes, Sam was able to get a clear grasp on the formation energy flow pattern.

    He is ready to go inside.

    But before that he looked at the two other candidates who are trying to make their way with brute force.

    One of them is in thirdyer trying to time the strikes of lightning, and another one is at the secondyer trying to bypass the formation with brute force.

    When Sam looked at that person, he also looked at Sam, both of them couldn¡¯t see the other person¡¯s face, but they can see their outfits and bodies.

    "Hey, are you just going to stand there or are you going to attempt?" His voice was filled with provocation. Sam didn¡¯t answer and turned his attention back to the formation as he counted in his mind.

    ¡¯3...

    2...

    1...¡¯

    And as the count ended, he activated light elemental fusion and made a move.

    In a blink of an eye, Sam was at the centre of the formation just before the podium which has a spherical light on it. He extended his hand and touched the object and with a sh he was sent back to the starting point.

    "Congrattions, your finishing time is 2 seconds." A holographic screen popped in front of him followed by the announcement of the mechanical. This announcement shocked the two participants who are in the middle and the participant who provoked Sam even identally got hit by the lightning.

    Sam looked at the formation for onest time and left the ce.

    He didn¡¯t bother to reply for the provocation as the result speaks for itself.

    When he came out, he saw that the first two rooms are still locked, he tried to pry it open and he realised it is possible to enter this.

    But he still didn¡¯t do so and went for the fourth room.

    After ten more minutes Sam came out and entered the fifth room...

    While Sam is busy clearing the first floor, the next batch of the candidates entered the pce and when he is in the fifth room, the candidates starteding to the first floor and some even climbed to the highest floor they can possibly do.

    Outside the cave entrance. The Elders gathered together and someone asked Moriya.

    "Moriya, why are we even doing this? You are the only one who knows the answer, can you tell me where is the temple head, Grand Elder and Great elders, even most of the normal elders disappeared. Now, the disciples are having doubts about this, if something news spreads, the Phoenix Mountain can attack us anytime."

    Moriya looked at the cave entrance with a deep gaze.

    "This isplicated."

 Chapter 222: Symbol

    Moriya took a deep breath before speaking.

    "The being inside that pce, is not just powerful for us he is like a deity.

    When this ind emerged out of nowhere three years back, our temple head got a call from that being. He summoned him just with his spiritual sense and sensing that much spiritual sense, the temple head, the grand elders and the great elders all came here together.

    After listening to the exnation of the pce, our elders became greedy and after they learnt that the person in charge of the pce cannote out, they tried to pry open another entrance so they could exploit the inheritances.

    Some of them even tried to enter the pce and now as a result all those people are under arrest. They are now prisoners of that pce.

    He even deliberately warned us that he can kill us anytime I want and all our territory is within his range.

    The Temple head was given a chance to contact the outside world and he contacted me to do the bidding.

    More than three years, I don¡¯t even know if they are alive, but I do know that the thunder god temple will be in chaos if they don¡¯te soon enough."

    At his words all the other elders shivered in fright, there is an existence within their territory which can kill them in a whim, but they didn¡¯t even know about it all this time, even the strongest person they knew was just a weakling in front of that person.

    They suddenly didn¡¯t feel secure.

    "Do not set your sights on the candidates whoe out. The knowledge they gained and the rewards they earned will only work for them and only if someone with an equal and fair strength defeats them, the winner gets those objects.

    He warned us about not try and take these objects with force, for now just let us leave them, I don¡¯t know what the exact consequences of breaking them.

    These are the words of that powerful being and I don¡¯t see any reason not to believe in them.

    I invited the emperors toe here today, meet them and tell them why we gathered the talents and also about the rule of not taking anything from them. They might face some consequences if they let their greed take over, at least do not let them do anything within these inds, we don¡¯t have to care what they would do on their ownnds.

    Also try to recruit the candidates if possible, I already gave instructions for the attendants to give them a tour of the ce, so there might be many interested people, but in any case, don¡¯t force them to join, we don¡¯t know what that person thinks of them and why he is doing this, so please be cautious.

    It is already a perilous enough with the absence of all the big wigs, if any more damage urs, we are done for."

    Sam and the other candidates don¡¯t know that they are here because the almighty head of the thunder god temple was imprisoned.

    Sam finished the first floor and he is already on the second floor. He cleared every formation in the first floor in the shortest time possible.

    He was confident that even without the observation ability he can do the same at the expense of some more time and effort. He also noticed that the actions of these people are borderline dumb, because they are purely focused on barging in the formations directly only learning after the failure step by step.

    It is crude yet straight forward method.

    It is like giving a person a blunt axe to chop a tree in six hours and he spent all the time disregarding the bluntness of the axe and chopping the tree.

    If Sam is in that ce, he would sharpen the axe for four hours and finish the tree in an hour before rxing for thest one.

    When he moved from the first floor, he noticed that the other candidates also entered the pce.

    But he didn¡¯t care much.

    He examined the second floor of the pce. This is also same as the first floor in appearance.

    Except the board showed something about supporting artifacts.

    The five doors have different names on them, one of them is speed, strength,bat awareness, defence and long range attacking.

    He assumed that the stages are prepared to test these aspects of the candidate and the reward will be rted to the said aspect which will enhance the candidate¡¯s expertise in that area.

    Sam noticed that all of the doors are upied. The candidates who came in must have felt desperate after seeing all of these things and went in without dy.

    But for Sam, there is no hurry. One month might seem short. But it is actually quite long.

    Sam only cleared the first floor to estimate the difficulty of these things and now that he has an estimation, he can explore at his own pace.

    Now the first thing to do is to get as much information as he can by observing all the surroundings.

    So, he made a quick trip over all the floors and since he has the highest ess to thest floor, he even took a look at that.

    On this top floor, Sam saw arge area and there is only one door in it leading to an unknown space there are no signs whatsoever.

    The room is still filled with the electric blue colours and other shades of blue.

    He found something interesting on the ceiling though and that is the image which is simr to the tattoo he saw on Arman¡¯s back.

    He was surprised and baffled.

    He now has a myriad of questions in his mind.

    "Yanwu, do you know that symbol?"

    Sam asked as he let Yanwu observe the ceiling through divine dimension.

    Yanwu observed the symbol for a long time in silence.

    Sam just waited without disturbing and finally an answer came.

    [I can¡¯t believe this.] Yanwu said in a shocked tone and now only Sam understood that silence is because of shock. He was too immersed in his thoughts to feel Yanwu¡¯s emotions through their connection.

    "What is it?"

    [That is the symbol of Indra, the god of thunder and storms. He is not only a god but he also has more deities under his rule than any other god. He is an extremely mythical character to even us. I don¡¯t know how powerful he is and he is not the most powerful god too, but from what I learnt from the history, all the realms will tremble if he is angry.

    He is also famous for his extreme power hunger, greed and l.u.s.tful nature. He is a ssic example of womanizer.]

    Sam frowned at the words. This is not what he expected. The description of the man is very simr to the Hindu Mythological character he knew from his past life.

    "How does Ling Tianpare to him in strength?" Sam asked in doubt.

    [Master Ling Tian? How can wepare both of them? Master Ling Tian is strong but I think he is nowhere near being a god. If he is a god, how can he interact with the beasts like us normally, they would be high and mighty. Master Ling Tian is a long way from bing a god.]

    This made Sam even more confused.

    He understood from Arman that there are more than one rebirths around same time and he is not sure how many.

    After hearing Yanwu, Sam thought that maybe if the Ling Tian is also on level of Gods and these gods wanted to give some people a second chance in this world out of whim.

    But now that Yanwu said that they are not on the same level, this made thingsplicated.

    There is another possibility that they really did that irrespective of their statuses and Indra being a higher god might have sent this pce down to help Arman or send some artifacts to Arman which actually makes sense because of the symbol and the lightning attribute, but if that is true why did the tattoo on Sam¡¯s back activate.

    There is another chance which has even more possibility of being true and that is this pce is something the lesser races sent here and it has nothing to do with indra and only from the lesser races whom Ling Tian is in contact with are worshipping Indra and using his symbol as their totem.

    His mind is screaming of endless possibilities.

    The more he thought, the more he felt that this whole situation is confusing.

    After minutes of fruitless pondering, Sam decided to let the thoughts go and went back to the second floor. He will just clear the floors and get whatever he can.

    Anyway, no matter the reason, all these knowledge and treasures are here for him to take, so he doesn¡¯t want to miss this chance in such fruitless thoughts and the faster he cleared the whole thing, the more time he would have to study the pce in detail.

    So, Sam went back to the second floor and entered the first room.

 Chapter 223: Second Floor

    Sam came back to the second floor. From what he saw this floor is the most upied of all, because no matter what batch the participants are from, they have entry to this floor and not many of them are interested in formations.

    The first batch candidates including Sam only went to the formations because they knew the importance of the formations.

    Many may look down on them, but if there is a proper formation in ce, it would increase the controller¡¯s winning rate by many levels and learning about formations will at least make them immune to getting struck in a formation and let them escape even if they are not able toy one themselves.

    Of course, Sam being a formation master himself is one of the reasons for him to clear the first floor.

    As for second floor, it is mostly focused on the aspects of a person in battle like speed, strength, defense, battle awareness and tracking the enemy in long range.

    All of these are very important in an open battle whether if it is in wilderness or in a city. After all, one can only do so much on training just for normal duels, real fights have no rules and restrictions, they would mostly end up with only one of them surviving.

    Sam entered the room which tests speed and the familiar holographic screen appeared.

    "Wee.

    In this room, the speed of person will be tested.

    The test will be conducted for every participant individually and each test willst a whole day.

    In this test, you will be targeted by an arrow which travels nonstop behind your back. It¡¯s speed will be increasing continuously and gradually in irregr intervals of time and once you be stationary for even a second you will be caught.

    The objective of the test is, you should avoid getting caught and minimise the number of times you get caught.

    Even if you get caught, the test will go on until the fixed time period is over. The test willst for half a day and you are not even allowed to quit in the middle while the test is still going on and time period is over.

    The person who got caught less will be the winner.

    The test begins in 3, 2 1..."

    Sam tried to digest all the information which was dumped on him and as soon as he the exnation from the screen was over, an arrow flew towards him.

    The room ispletely empty and there are no ces to hide, he ispletely open and the arrow came towards him extremely faster.

    Sam moved to the side with Phantom step and dodged.

    The arrow missed him, but its momentum was controlled well and it took a sharp turn after flying past Sam in an extremely precise manner giving him no time to think.

    The arrow is glowing brighter and brighter as the speed increased. Sam was able to cope with the speed with Phantom step for five minutes, but wasn¡¯t able to do so after that and he has to resort to the elemental fusion.

    He underwent wind elemental fusion and moved with the wind. Even though, his body didn¡¯t be as intangible as wind, he was still able to achieve the fusion to the extent that he can almost move like wind.

    The glow around the arrow started getting brighter and Sam noticed that every time before its speed increased, the arrow the glow bes brighter.

    And his conjecture was proven right when the arrow be less bright when it became slower. Sam also reduced his speed for a second, but he kept on looking at the arrow. The room is big and doesn¡¯t even have any obstacles, so he doesn¡¯t need to care about the room much.

    When he saw that the arrow was getting slower and slower, he tried to conserve his stamina, but suddenly as if sensed Sam¡¯s thoughts, it sped up rapidly with a bright glow.

    It almost hit Sam and he only managed to evade it in hair¡¯s breadth.

    Now, Sam understood the difficulty. The arrow should be treated like a person, it can witty and cunning and attack him when he is careless.

    In this test the speed is not concerned only with how fast a person is rather it is how a person can control and make own body move at will ording to the circ.u.mstances.

    After all speed doesn¡¯t rte to fastness. Sam needs to control his actions in such a way that he wouldn¡¯t exhaust himself. It is a test for person¡¯s control of speed and timing so that he can survive longer.

    Sam kept on dodging and moving without giving the arrow a chance...

    After half a day, Sam was almost down for the count, if not for the energy cells which helped him ¡¯cheat¡¯ so that he can replenish his energy instantly, he would have been got caught at least once. But now, he survived.

    The holographic screen appeared indicating thepletion of his test.

    He heaved a sigh of relief and sat down on the floor.

    "your results will be calcted and your reward will be given at the end of the month."

    Sam came out of the room and entered the next room.

    This time he entered the strength room. This room is all about attacking.

    There are brick walls which kept on protruding out of no where one by one and the candidates have to break through the brick walls, with any kind of attack. For half a day, the brick walls will being one by one and every time the new brick wall arrives it will be stronger and can take more damage.

    The next one is defence room, there would be lightning type attacks that will be attacking the candidate. In between every attack the candidate will be healed. In this room the tests are more about the maximum damage a person can take than the .u.mted damage.

    The battle awareness room. The participant will be attacked blindly and randomly from all the directions.

    He should survive as long as he can based on his instincts.

    Thest room is tracking a long-distance opponent.

    In this case, the opponents aren¡¯t strong, rather they will be attacking the candidate from a very long distance so much that a person cannot even guess the exact location even with the heightened senses.

    They have to track the location by the continuous attacks and that too when the opponent will be moving from time to time.

    In this room, once an opponent was taken down, then the number of opponents will increase for the next round.

    Sam spent two and half days in the second floor and there are no confrontations.

    When he was about to go to the third floor, he saw Arthuring out of one of the second floor¡¯s rooms and they both exchanged a nce.

    Arthur noticed that he was going to the next floor and his face turned gloomy.

    Because in the first floor, he noticed that Sampleted the formations with an incredible speed and he evenpleted in his very presence.

    He felt frustrated loosing to a person who he considered beneath him.

    At this moment, Arman also came and the three first batch candidates are in a stare down. Arman looked at Sam with an intriguing expression rather than a gloomy one.

    He also noticed Sam¡¯s abnormal speed inpleting the formations and he was very much interested in his capabilities.

    Sam nced at them for onest time and walked around Arthur as he took the stairs.

    "Do you know that guy? Why is he ranked along with us?" Arthur asked Arman in a cold tone.

    "Why do you assume that I would know him?"

    "Because, you are that battle hungry, I wouldn¡¯t believe with you battle hunger, you wouldn¡¯t inquire about him."

    "Well, your assumption is notpletely right. I am interested in battling him, but the person who got me more interested is a guy named Nichs, a scion of a Duke from Orion. Apparently, his battle hunger is bigger than mine and I thought we could be friends.

    As for this guy, I heard he is most dangerous of all, at least that is what Moriya said."

    "Just as I said, you wouldn¡¯t just stay put until you know a lot of details, tell me what else it is that you know about that guy."

    "Well, he is an expert in multiple professions and formations happened to be one of his fortes, but he is rank 6 Schr Artisan and also a weapon and Tailor artisan, has control over three elements at least.

    Can battle against multiple opponents, good at military tactics and training, great business man, had turnover more than fifteen billion in eight months, Once massacred a total of three hundred Novices single handedly."

    Arman went on and on about Sam¡¯s information and Arthur widened his eyes and atst he couldn¡¯t bear it and cut him off.

    "I didn¡¯t ask you to bullshit, you could just say that you don¡¯t know if you don¡¯t know, you don¡¯t have to bullshit like that. Do you think that a person like that exists? You have balls to joke with me like that? Don¡¯t you dare act like this with me again. Get lost."

    Arthur pushed him aside and went into another room. Arman shook his head and left to another room as well.

 Chapter 224: Third Floor

    When Sam went to the third floor, there are no other people in the corridor. Only two rooms are upied and that is it.

    The rooms which are upied are room fourth and fifth. Sam entered the first room and was greeted with the holographic screen.

    "In this room you will be tested on you battle prowess against the puppet, one attempt would be consideredplete if you are defeated or you defeat the puppet.

    The rankings will be published by evaluating your prowess based on the number of attempts you took to finish the stage and the time you took to defeat the puppet."

    After that, the screen vanished abruptly and Sam saw a wooden puppet around same height as him standing in front of him. The puppet is humanoid in figure it looked almost simr to the video game character Mokujin from Tekken.

    There are no eyes, nose or any other facial features.

    Sam looked at the puppet and threw a wind de, the puppet dodged it and replied with the same wind de. There are no hand signs and no chants, the puppet attacked in the same way Sam did.

    Sam dodged it and responded with same attack as he made his way forward, his arm was covered in golden fire and punched the puppet squarely in the chest, but what he expected didn¡¯t happen, the puppet blocked the punch and countered him with another punch to Sam¡¯s surprise it is a punch simr to his.

    Sam frowned at this sight. He didn¡¯t expect that the puppet to also possess a fire element ability and to his surprise even though it is not same golden me, the fist almost identical and at least in terms of appearance.

    It doesn¡¯t have an explosive ability that Sam used bypressing the fire, rather it is just a normal fist covered with fire.

    Sam took a step back and thought whether the puppet is copying his elements or does it possess all the elements.

    Sam didn¡¯t use any other elemental attack and rushed towards it, but the puppet started attacking with wind des and fire balls. There is no other elemental attack.

    Sam kept on dodging and when he was near the puppet, he took out the reaper and shed it squarely without any other elements. It was pure raw power. But the sword didn¡¯t cut through, it chipped away a piece of wood indicating some damage, but the puppet can still fight.

    At this moment, Sam was stunned. The puppet took out a wooden sword out of nowhere and before Sam could think further, it started attacking him with the sword and wind debination.

    The sword rays starteding towards Sam with extremely sharp and wind elemental traces.

    Sam dodged it by hair¡¯s breadth and looked at the puppet again.

    For the next few minutes, the puppet was onplete offence withbination of wind, fire and sword.

    Sam just defended as he observed the behaviour of the puppet. And after a long time he confirmed that the puppet is not copying his moves or techniques. It is more like a robot which was pre-programmed with certain set of elemental and battle techniques and they would only be triggered if the candidate uses a certain element or warrior skill.

    Since, Sam used the wind de, fire element and the sword. The puppet struck to them and used on these three aspects.

    To test his theory, Sam took a hit and healed himself with the light element and to his surprise the puppet did the same and the chipped piece of wood back.

    But the puppet¡¯s method is different from Sam¡¯s. Sam only concentrated the light within his wound, which the puppet used one arm to conjure light on the ¡¯wound¡¯ to heal itself.

    So, from what Sam could understand, the puppet has all kinds of elements pre-programmed within itself and they will only trigger if opponent uses those elemental skills.

    Sam suddenly thought of something and triggered elemental fusion. He transformed himself into fire elemental body and attacked the puppet in the close quarters. But the puppet didn¡¯t change itself into the fire elemental body, but after studying Sam for a while, it tried to cover itself in mes which didn¡¯t exactly work the same way.

    From this, Sam concluded that the puppet is also trying to learn and improve ording to candidate¡¯s strength.

    He was fascinated by the puppet and couldn¡¯t help admire the creator¡¯s excellent skill. For a second, he wanted to tear it apart and examine it which is almost impossible, but Sam doesn¡¯t have to do that, he has observation ability and all he need is a close contact with the puppet for a second.

    But Sam didn¡¯t do that. Since the first room already hosted such a puppet, there is a high chance that the fifth room will host a much more excellent puppet, so he decided he would finish this and at this moment, Sam stopped in his tracks and sent aser towards the head of the puppet and within two seconds, the head was on firepletely copsing the puppet.

    Sam walked out of the room and just as he was about to walk towards the second room, he noticed that it was already upied. He tried to open the door, but it didn¡¯t budge. Sam understood that in this floor only one person can upy the room at a time.

    He waited for five minutes, when the door opened and a person was sent out of that and more importantly that person seemed to be in a daze.

    Only after the door was shut loudly, the person came back to his senses.

    But he was still a bit confused. Sam walked around and was about to open the door, when that person who came out stopped him.

    "Wait, I am not done yet, I want to try again."

    Sam turned around and looked at him and then only he noticed that this guy is also from the thunder god temple. He is not from any other empire.

    "Then why did youe back; you should have just stayed in."

    Sam asked as the other person also observed Sam and understood he is from an empire and immediately his eyes turned condescending.

    "Why do you speak so much, just move aside. I came out by ident."

    Sam didn¡¯t like the tone of voice and he didn¡¯t bother talking anymore, he turned around and was about to walk in.

    "How dare you?"

    The guy didn¡¯t want to back down and threw a punch towards Sam, but before he knew it, he was sent flying and crashed into the wall.

    He puked a mouthful of blood and waspletely dazed. But Sam was not in front of his eyes after he came back to his senses.

    Sam didn¡¯t think much of the encounter and entered the room. This time, the puppet is same as the first one but it is stronger than previous one.

    The puppet in the first room has same cultivation level as Sam and in this room, its level is one step higher than Sam¡¯s.

    Now Sam is a Level 3 Great realm and the puppet in room two is Level 4 Great realm.

    Sam didn¡¯t use any elemental energy this time. He started attacking in close quarters and mainly with fists.

    He started punching rapidly, he wants to see if the puppet will also use only fists, but that didn¡¯t happen, the puppet used the fists and legs to attack.

    Sam suddenly grabbed the puppet¡¯s arms and held its neck in a standing choke hold.

    His fleshly energy was on full swing as he suppressed its movementspletely and Sam used his observe ability at this moment.

    The puppet¡¯s internal structure was simple and the joints are simple mechanical joints. Every mechanism is made of simple elements but with utmostplexity and precision. This kind of robot wouldn¡¯t be possible in the modern world because of the material avability, the power source and theck of precise manufacturing and delicate assembly facility.

    Sam only observed them for a second and noticed that there is a dark glowing object at the heart of the body.

    He didn¡¯t venture further as he knew that his main target was the fifth one. He wouldn¡¯t need to observe the rest. But his curiosity won over and he did this on an impulse.

    He suddenly released a full-blown ming ze as he held the puppet in the choke hold.

    The wood started to burn and Sam won in seconds.

    The door opened. Sam walked out with some charred wood fragments still stuck on his body. He didn¡¯t care about them because he thought that they woulde off by themselves when he crossed the door as he assumed that there would be certain measures that would be in ce so that the participants wouldn¡¯t be able to take all the items with them.

    But when he walked out, he was dazed when he saw that the wooden fragments are still struck on his dress.

    This left him shocked and he was in so much shock that he didn¡¯t notice there is a group of four people in front of him and one of them is the idiot he sent flying earlier.

    As Sam was marvelling whether he could bring the things outside or not, the group of four started attacking and Sam finally noticed them.

    Two minutester.

    Sam had a gloomy expression as his precious thought process was interrupted and around him were four people sprawling as they bled from their mouths.

    Their teeth arepletely knocked out and their faces are bruised and swollen.

    Sam didn¡¯t even look at them a second time and went towards the third room.

 Chapter 225: Plans

    Sam entered the third room and the puppet has two steps higher cultivation level than his, this time he didn¡¯t prolong the fight and used thesers as soon as he entered.

    As per the rules, the puppet first tries to use the same element as the candidate and when the puppet tried to make use of light elemental energy, Sam was already gaining the upper hand and when the puppet wasn¡¯t able to make use of the elemental energy, there was a light beam that came out of its heart and scanned Sam, then the puppet suddenly threw a fire ball at Sam.

    This move stunned him for a second and he almost stopped in his tracks. But he soon came out of his daze and continued pressing on.

    Sam made his attack and this time; he didn¡¯t use any other element except theser. And soon he was met with a wind de.

    He understood now, that there are almost all kinds of back up ns for every scenario. He was more and more intrigued from these puppets and he has to make sure that he would get his hands on the secret behind these things.

    This is most advanced technology of this era he encountered.

    And he is not going to leave it.

    This might even be the most important and valuable reward he could get in the tower.

    After five more minutes, Sam finished the battle and came out, but this time he has something else in his storage and that is an arm of the puppet.

    This is a test.

    A test to see if his conjecture is correct or not, whether he is allowed to take the parts of the puppet out or not and it seems it is not impossible.

    He was ecstatic as he was about to make his way towards the fourth room, but this time, he was blocked again and when he looked at the person, he wasn¡¯t surprised. It was Arthur.

    "How dare you, make a move on thunder god temple disciples?" He asked in a cold tone. Sam didn¡¯t bother to answer him and was about to walk around, but he was blocked again as Arthur extended his hand.

    Sam made his move and held the arm with his and started twisting it, and within no time, Sam held Arthur¡¯s arm as he made thetter kneel forward as continued twisting.

    He used his full strength after all, Arthur is not an average opponent and he is also a Level Great realm cultivator.

    But with Sam¡¯s enormous spiritual energybined with his physical body refinement, he could rival that person.

    Arthur struggled hard, but since Sam had an advantage with his initiative, he took out the reaper and ced it on the throat.

    "I have very little patience for the likes of you, next time you make a move, be prepared to engage in a death duel, because I won¡¯t stop until you die or I die."

    Sam¡¯s voice was as cold as ice and he didn¡¯t even bat an eyelid as he threatened him with death.

    He is really bored and pissed at the condescending and unreasonable arrogant and stupid people he has met in this world.

    He was once at the top of the world, who could be treated as an equal by any person on the top of the food chain, from that he learnt one thing, a guy who talks so much about his superiority due to some stupid and superficial reasons like birth, race, colour, creed and inheritance he obtained without any effort including money, power and authority. These guys are nothing but a waste of space.

    They wouldn¡¯t have enough capability to get what they want and they don¡¯t know how to be content with what they have, they are like goats, they will never have enough food.

    They will never have enough respect, enough wealth, enough superiority. If not for the fact that he has to leave this ce safely after this pce thing is over and he doesn¡¯t have means to confront the thunder god temple at this instant without any preparations, Sam would have killed them right there and then.

    But that doesn¡¯t mean, he will let them be, he can always think of the consequencester if pushes to shove.

    All he has to do is to make the evidence disappear.

    He took his sword back and left the ce. He entered the fourth room.

    In the fourth room, things got serious. The power gap is huge and Sam only has one advantage against the puppets and that is the energy cells and his quick recovery of the energy.

    Since, he understood the difficulty, he took his time and the fight went on for half a day. He finally, defeated the fourth room¡¯s puppet after half a day.

    After that, the much awaited fifth room was the only thing left for him. This room is his destination from the start and all the four rooms are used for his analysis of the puppets. He understood some things about these puppets.

    They are like programmed robots, every link is made of simple elementsbined into aplex mechanism.

    They have all types ofbinations recorded and programmed into them and they only use the same elements as the opponent.

    A part from that, the puppets wouldn¡¯t react like lifeless objects, they would react just like a human opponent for things like choke hold, head shots and attacks to heart. Even if there are no vitals there, the system is analyzing the degree of damage and is deciding who the winner is exactly.

    Sam was quite impressed by this. As Sam is preparing for the fifth room, Arthur is taking his anger on puppet in the third room.

    During his confrontation with Sam, he felt like he was being eyed by a predator and it left him stay put by instinct. His body and mind came together only after Sam left the ce and these actions made him hate himself.

    "How dare a simple peasant from an empire do this to me? How dare he threaten me? I am going to kill him. I will kill him as soon as he exits the pce." He yelled as he traded blows with the puppet.

    He cleared the first two rooms without much difficulty but the third room which has a stronger wooden puppet is giving him an extremely hard time, but he didn¡¯t back down, he started trading blows causing him mutual damage.

    But he didn¡¯t care, all he needed was a way to vent his frustrations for now otherwise he wouldg behind in the pce of inheritances.

    Meanwhile, Sam entered the fifth room and already met his first defeat.

    That is right, he was defeated and thrown out, but he didn¡¯t loose his calm. He slowly stood up and moved aside as he sat cross-legged and started thinking.

    He never thought of winning this stage in the first attempt.

    An opponent who is four steps stronger than oneself, it is not that easy to defeat him and particrly when other party uses same elements as you do.

    Sam managed to handle around five minutes but he wasn¡¯t able to do much more due to the overwhelming difference in the power.

    His only advantage till now is theser which the puppet wouldn¡¯t be able to use, but due to the power difference theser is barely doing any damage.

    Sam started analyzing things and he kept on going through all the things that happened in his mind. He didn¡¯t want to just use the energy cell and be done with it.

    He need the weird glowing object which is at the heart of the puppet no matter what. If he blew up the whole thing, he would be dered winner and he wouldn¡¯t be able to get his hands on it.

    He kept on thinking what are the advantage he has in his possession against the puppet and after some thinking, a word popped up.

    Engineering.

    He is better at understanding those mechanisms in that puppet than the puppet itself. He abruptly opened his eyes at the new gates that opened in his mind.

    That is right, the wood might be stronger and equivalent to the body of a Seventh level Great realm warrior¡¯s body, but it is still made of various mechanismsbined and guarded under that wooden shell.

    Sam has some new ideas in his mind and he wants to test them. But he cannot do so in the fifth room directly as he would be defeated before he could get any results which can be examined, so he went towards the first room again.

    This time, the people who are standing before the room gave way to him and even the person who came out just now, didn¡¯t make a fuss.

    Sam entered the room calmly and after a few minutes, he came out with a bright smile on his face with his eyes closed.

    Right now, his perception is inside the storage space, where he stored what he obtained in the first room.

    With the same zeal and enthusiasm, Sam went towards the next room.

 Chapter 226: Imprint

    For the next day, Sam is fully busy in room 2 and room 3.

    This time, he carefully collected whatever that he needed from those two rooms and went to the fourth room in which he spent the next day.

    After that, he ispletely satisfied with his ns as he tested them time and again in the first four rooms.

    Finally, the next day it is time to go and deal with the bigger threat.

    The fifth room.

    As soon as he entered the room, Sam met with the familiar looking wooden puppet.

    There is no difference between first puppet and this one all of them look one and the same. The only difference he noticed is the density of the wood used and the blue glowing thing that inside the puppet.

    The rest including the structure and appearance are same in all five puppets.

    Sam immediately made a move without waiting for the puppet to attack first.

    He went straight towards the puppet without any tricks and struck himself to the body of the puppet.

    He hugged it as if his life was depended on it and didn¡¯t show any signs of letting go.

    The puppet started waving its hands and hitting Sam on his back, but Sam didn¡¯t budge.

    He closed his eyes as he endured the beating. The feather coat showed its extremepetence, although it took most of the damage, the shock from every hit is still doing some damage on Sam¡¯s back.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care about this, because his mind is working on full speed as he concentrated on the puppets body.

    He is using the observation on the puppets body as he looked at each and everyponent that is making the puppet run.

    As he took the beating Sam coughed up some blood but he didn¡¯t stop at all.

    And soon enough, one of the puppet¡¯s arm stopped working and it hung like limp limb to the body. But this is just the beginning, within next two minutes the other arm was also limped and the hits reduced.

    The puppetid on the ground rolling around trying to shake off Sam, but Sam is doing something else.

    In his observatory vision, he is watching the glowing object in the chest of the puppet and he could see that there is a thin thread of spiritual energy connecting the puppet to the room.

    There is also a spiritual energy imprint on the object just like the previous puppets.

    Sam concentrated on the spiritual imprint which is acting as the joint between the room and the object and started destabilizing it.

    The spiritual imprint is just like a signature of a person. A personys his spiritual imprint by using his spiritual energy and spiritual sense.

    The spiritual imprint itself is a form of inscription except the ink is reced by the spiritual energy and it consumes the atmospheric spiritual energy to exist in a self-sustaining way.

    Sam is not extremely knowledgeable about these imprints, but he knew a little bit.

    Generally, an imprint can only be erased by a person who is of same strength or of superior strength than the person whoid the imprint.

    Clearly, the one whoid the imprint on the puppet is not someone who Sam canpare to at the moment, at least in the aspect of strength. But he figured out another way.

    His innate abilities of the spiritual core.

    No matter what, the spiritual imprint is essentially a form of spiritual energy and as long as it is spiritual energy, Sam can do whatever he wants if he can find a way to destabilise it and he seeded in doing so.

    And soon, the puppet started slowing down as the imprint slowly disintegrated. And the thread connecting the object and the room was disconnected. As if it was the cue, Sam put the whole wooden puppet inside the dimension.

    After two seconds of silence, Sam¡¯s winning was announced and the door opened.

    His back was still aching and the blood he puked was still on his mouth, but there was an extremely satisfying grin on Sam¡¯s face.

    He got what he wanted and he is happy.

    He sat down in between the corridor as he healed himself before walking towards the fourth floor.

    In the fourth floor, there are no traces of people. Very few people are qualified to enter the fourth floor and even Jack and Philip might not be qualified.

    Nichs might have a chance.

    Sam looked at the surroundings and there are no markings indicating any information about this floor.

    He opened the first door and went inside.

    As soon as he entered, he saw two other people inside but they are not from the thunder god temple or any other empires under the jurisdiction of the temple.

    They are people from other areas.

    There is a t form in the centre of the room and the two people are standing on either side of it.

    There was a hologram floating in the air showing an attack of lightning element.

    He took a step forward to observe it closer and a string of words popped up on the familiar holographic screen.

    "The person who can stay on the tform for a whole day will get enlightenment and the required knowledge to perform the technique.

    But the condition is that only one person can stay on the tform, and as soon as another persones on to the tform, the previous person has to start a fresh and the time he spent on the tform previously will not be taken into ount.

    The most important thing is that only one person can attain the technique and after that the tform will be useless.

    The candidates can use any method to stay on the tform and there would be no casualties as the injured ones will be protected by the pce and they would be safe from any life-threatening situation.

    But once the pce intervenes the person who was saved will be eliminated and cannot enter the same room."

    After those words, the screen disappeared again.

    Sam looked at the two candidates who also looked at him.

    The three of them are exchanging nces, now he understood why the two of them didn¡¯t make a move at all.

    The first person to step on the stage, will be attacked and they might lose the chance to get the technique.

    Even though, not everyone is a lightning user, one had to know that these people came from the other powers which are as strong as the thunder god temple and all of these people are against each other.

    Sam is pretty sure that these guys had a briefing in which their elders said that they should make the other powers lose the treasures even if they fail to get them.

    The first three floors have nothing much to do as all the prizes and the recipients of the prizes are kept in dark. So, they cannot interfere much.

    But now that there are some variables which they can control by their own interference, they wouldn¡¯t give up.

    Sam looked at the hologram and then at the two people, he was about to say something when the door opened and another candidate came and as if they are previously agreed up on a time, in the next hour many candidates entered the room.

    There are total thirty candidates who came into the room as if they are all called up on here.

    Out of them, from thunder god temple area has Sam, Arthur, Arman, Nichs and another candidate which he doesn¡¯t know the name of but he is also from another empire.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know why all these candidates appeared in this room. They could have gone to another room if they see the first room upied.

    Sam walked towards Nichs and asked.

    "Why are all of you here? Aren¡¯t there other rooms?"

    "We tried, they are not opening only this room gave ess, I think the next room will open only if this room is cleared."

    Sam stayed silent for a second and asked.

    "Are you interested in this technique?"

    "Nope. It is not useful to me, why? You want this?"

    "No, I just wanted to confirm."

    "I might not be interested in the technique, but I am interested in a battle though."

    "Well, I can give you a chance then."

    After that, Sam walked towards the tform and sat on it.

    The candidates surrounding the tform immediately became alert, but nobody made a move immediately and finally the one who made a move was the participant from another area.

    He is not a lightning user, but he thought that Sam might be one and their aim is to not let the other teams get the technique, so he made.

    An Ice spear came flying towards Sam, but Sam simply caught it with two fingers and threw it towards another participant who is the team mate of the first attacker who is also about to attack.

    The spear, impaled itself into that person¡¯s shoulder, stopping him from chanting a spell.

    Seeing Sam¡¯s nonchnt attitude, more and more people started getting riled up and the attacks starteding.

    Only the people from the thunder god temple side are not attacking.

    But Sam, didn¡¯t show any signs of fear or panic. He took out the reaper sword and swung it in the air. The sword light emerged with the wind and sliced the other party¡¯s throat.

    But just as the blood was about spurt out of the wound, a blue light emerged as it surrounded the person making him instantly disappear.

    The attacks suddenly stopped. Nobody dared to move, because there is no one who is going to make a move first.

    From the earlier attack, they understood Sam is strong, even though some of them are strong enough to provide him a good fight and even have confidence in defeating him, they would still be at a disadvantage.

    Even if they do defeat Sam, they won¡¯t be able to escape the situation unscathed, so the remaining people will take them down.

    Sam exactly believed in this situation and confidently made a move forward.

    But that doesn¡¯t mean, no one is having any motives. Some people who came here as a team are discussing a remedy for the situation, but before they could speak, Sam beat them to it.

    "To be honest, I don¡¯t have any interest in this technique as I am not a lightning user and I don¡¯t belong to any of the powers, so I don¡¯t have any interest in power struggles either. So, I have a proposition.

    I will let the person who pays me take the seat and I will guard them for the whole time period. All I need is a good amount of spiritual stones and you will get yourselves the chance to ess this tform."

    The whole room became silent. They didn¡¯t know how to respond.

    Sam looked at the group who are confused and smiled to Nichs. Nichs also understood what Sam is doing.

    Since, he didn¡¯t have any use for these battle techniques, he is using this for making money.

    Sam decided that every moment shall be his opportunity. After all, he has to stay so long in this ce.

 Chapter 227: More Tattoos

    Sam¡¯s words worked like magic and soon a person raised their hand.

    It is none other than Arman.

    "How much?"

    He asked directly.

    "How much are you willing to pay?"

    "Fifty million."

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "The technique is worth much more than fifty million, but I will agree, but on one condition. I don¡¯t want the spiritual stones; I need you to pay them in form of ores from the thunder god temple. I know that the ore management wouldn¡¯t sell some ores to the outsiders, you are responsible for getting those ores worth of fifty million.

    If you agree, then it is a deal."

    "Deal." Arman didn¡¯t even hesitate before agreeing.

    As Arman walked forward Sam stepped down and let him take the tform.

    "Arman, stop I need this technique."

    Arthur stepped forward as he tried to stop Arman, but thetter didn¡¯t reply and just looked at Sam.

    "You are responsible for stopping anyone until I get my hands on the technique."

    With those words, he sat down on the tform. But he didn¡¯t rx. Sam stopping them is ayer of defence.

    If Sam agreed to help him without expecting anything in return, he would definitely suspect him, but since he is paying a price, he can at least trust him partially. As long as he conserved energy and let Sam take the heat and erode the opponent¡¯s conditions, he is confident that he can manage.

    He took out his sabre and held it tightly.

    Sam looked at Nichs and gestured him toe forward.

    "Fifty-fifty, how does that sound?"

    Sam asked to which Nichs replied with a thumbs up gesture.

    As Nichs moved forward, Sam took out some formation discs and ced them on the tform activating them.

    Three formations activated.

    This is just in case that someone sneaked past them.

    If Sam just gave these formations to Arman, there is a high chance that thebined attacks of these candidates could destroy them, but now that Sam and Nichs are here to take the most heat from the candidates, the formations should be able to help defend the rest of the stray attacks.

    Sam then took out the reaper and stood beside Nichs.

    "How about a littlepetition? Let us see who takes down more opponents. The one who wins will get sixty percent." Nichs said.

    "Sure." Sam replied with a smile.

    The other candidates are still lost and confused. They didn¡¯t know what to do. If they take initiative and do attack Sam, they would bepletely exhausted even if they did get past him and even after that they have to face, the perfectly fine Arman and after that with that exhaustion they have defend against the remaining candidates.

    At this moment, someone spoke from behind the crowd.

    "Let us all make a deal."

    All the candidates turned around and looked at that person.

    That person continued.

    Those people are from the thunder god temple, who has no allies at all and them getting these lightning techniques is not beneficial at all.

    Let us all ally together against the thunder god temple and we will defeat them together. Later the disciples from the Lightning Spear Sect and the Thunder bolt sect will take the techniques.

    We will act in the same way for the next four rooms and the two sects shall paypensation for the remaining three powers.

    Are you okay with that?"

    Sam raised his brows as he looked at the candidate who spoke. The interference from the pce is still there and Sam couldn¡¯t see the face of the person. But he should say that he was impressed by this guy.

    He is essentially using Sam¡¯s trick of using this moment to gain something. Since, the lightning techniques are no use to them, they could either stop all others to not use them or they could choose the next best option and that is to let their allies get them.

    But he doesn¡¯t have any excuse to unite all the candidates to get what he wanted and Sam¡¯s trick just helped him.

    From his words, the thunder god temple doesn¡¯t have such good rtionship with the rest of the powers and now that Sam made the deal with a person from the thunder god temple, he can make themmon enemy and bring the rest to amon ground.

    Now, his n will work just fine.

    The crowd started discussing and a person from a group shouted.

    "Lightning Spear Sect agrees." And soon another voice raised.

    "Thunder Bolt Sect agrees."

    Arthur watched as the situation turned bad and his face turned ghastly pale. He didn¡¯t want to be the public enemy and he is not confident that he can defeat more than twenty people as for the teaming up with Sam, that thought never crossed his mind.

    He looked at the crowd who are slowly teaming up and said.

    "I am not interfering in this; I am out of here."

    Thest remaining person who is from another empire under the thunder god temple also left the ce after Arthur left.

    Sam looked at the rest of the candidates who are starting to team up and he got ready for a fight.

    His eyes met with the person who proposed for everyone to team up. Sam might be impressed by this guy¡¯s n but that doesn¡¯t mean he likes it and if one wants to scheme using him, they should first make sure that they have ability to bear the consequences that will follow the scheme.

    Sam looked straight at that candidate and he made the first move, surprising them.

    He swung his sword at the nearest candidate. The reaper moved leaving a red sh as it cut through that person¡¯s arm.

    Nobody in this room has higher cultivation than fifth level of Great realm, so Sam is extremely confident that he can take them down.

    He doesn¡¯t even have to fight harder. In this whole pce the only people who can give him some fight are Nichs, Arman and Arthur and now that these three are not in the way, he doesn¡¯t even have to worry about a single thing.

    Sam and Nichs started a rampage. The sword and the spear are only visible in the form of metallic shes. The screams of the people could be heard.

    As the fight continued, Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel more and more disappointed. After all the time he spent in this world, except for Nichs every fight was too boring for him.

    After some time, Sam noticed that there are four other people who didn¡¯t join the fight. They are watching closely and one of them is the one who instigated the fight in the first ce.

    Within ten minutes the fight was over, Sam didn¡¯t even break the sweat. After all, unlike the time when he usedser, he didn¡¯t pull his punches this time. More than six people are even an inch away from the death as the pce saved them.

    Sam looked at the final four who are also analysing him.

    But Sam is not thinking if they are going to make a move or not.

    From the fight earlier he found four other people who has tattoos on their backs which shocked him to the core.

    But he didn¡¯t budge as he was in the middle of fight.

    Now that he got some rest, he was thinking.

    In the rush he failed to notice what the tattoos exactly looked like and before he could notice that, the pce already sent them out.

    The four people are actually weaker now, and that is because their cultivation level is only at first level of Great realm.

    They actually are the toughest of the whole bunch.

    But the toughest of all are standing right in front of him.

    The four people exchanged nces as they got ready to fight.

    Sam is thinking whether he has to check these guys before he tears them a new one.

    He was so engrossed in this pce thing that he forgot about these weird tattoos and he put four guys out before he got a chance to examine the tattoos.

    Now that he remembered it now, he needs to make sure to see if the four of them have the tattoos and if they do what do they look like.

    He has to gather as much information as he can and he has to get that as soon as possible. Since the time he appeared in this world, he knew that Ling Tian has some purpose for dragging his soul and shoving it in this body.

    So, he has to make sure that he finds why he was here before Ling Tian¡¯s purpose is achieved so that he can prepare for whatever it is that is going toe towards him.

    He looked at the four who are still waiting and said.

    "You want an invitation or something?"

    The guy who instigated the fight gave some signals and the other three moved. One of them went towards Nichs with a spear, but he is also using lightning element.

    Two out of remaining three, came towards Sam and for a moment all of them are busy.

    As the parties are engaging each other, there was suddenly the wind whistling and within seconds, Sam made a huge move and caught something in the air.

    There was a small dart in his hands and the one who threw it is the instigator.

    Sam smelled the dart and said.

    "Poison, should have expected."

    That dart wasn¡¯t even aimed at Sam, it was aimed at Nichs.

    That guy was even thinking that Sam might be still alert of his surroundings and threw the dart at Nichs who is always straight forward.

    But Sam still caught it and as their n failed the candidates heard another whistle and the dart pierced on of the candidates that are engaging with Sam.

    But the attacks didn¡¯t stop. He moved towards the candidate who was hit and cut down his back and he saw what he expected to see.

    There was a tattoo on his back, the tattoo is of a huge wave and that coincided with the fact that the person is using water elemental energy.

    But he didn¡¯t stay there for long, after memorising the image he went on and finished the other two after watching their tattoos.

    All of them have tattoos on their backs and with these guys and including himself, there are a total of ten people who have tattoos and if his spection is correct, there are a total of ten people.

    This made him more and more curious and anxious at the same time. Why are there so many people like this and why did all of them gathered in a same ce?

    And are there really only ten people? There are more and more questions in Sam¡¯s mind but there was no way to find answers.

 Chapter 228: Armans transformation

    Sam sat down and started thinking about the info he got.

    After watching another tattoo on Arman¡¯s back, he was already stunned, but now knowing that there are eight other people just like this and all of them meeting at same ce, is something which cannot be exined as a coincidence.

    Sam didn¡¯t know what is going on exactly and he also don¡¯t know what are the consequences he is going to face.

    This made him feel frustrated.

    Sam can be considered as a control freak, due to his worst childhood in which the control of his life and decisions are not in his hands, he became obsessed with having all the events regarding him being under his control.

    At least, if he cannot control them, they should still be within his predictions and spections and he made sure that situation stayed like that in his previous life.

    And he tried his best to do so in this life as well, but now that he knew that he is involved in something big and he doesn¡¯t even know what role he is ying, he wasn¡¯t feeling well.

    He closed his eyes and calmed his mind.

    He doesn¡¯t like his situation and he doesn¡¯t like the way that he was in a game that he doesn¡¯t even know the rules of.

    But all he can do for now is to y along. At least until he gets more information and the day, he finds out what happened, that day he will get the situation under his control no matter what.

    After around half an hour, Sam opened his eyes. He saw that Nichs is also sitting beside him and trying to heal his wounds.

    Sam extended his hand and projected light elemental energy and healed him.

    "I won." He said with a smirk.

    "Yeah, you did."

    Nichs replied but there was not even a hint of sadness on his face, it only showed more excitement and determination.

    After healing him, Sam gave spirit stones for Nichs and some energy cells as the part of his share.

    Then there was nothing much to do. Sam wanted to look at that glowing object from the puppet, but on second thought he decided against it.

    He can trust his secret with Nichs at least the secrets rted to his tricks and techniques, but he wouldn¡¯t be able to do so in front of Arman, this guy¡¯s origins are highly suspicious and there is a high chance that this guy is just like Sam with different capabilities.

    For the whole day, he kept on cultivating his mental strength. This is only thing which wouldn¡¯t show his cultivation or Body tempering secrets as they are rted to his research and beast¡¯s bloodline connection.

    After Arman¡¯s time limit was over and the battle technique waspletely obtained, the three of them came out of the room.

    When he came out, he saw that the Arthur and the other candidate are already standing at the door of the second room.

    And as soon as they closed the door of the first room, the door of the second room opened.

    The two of them moved faster than wind.

    Sam and the remaining two followed them inside only to see, that the candidates from the other regions are already inside and they already got ready to set up defensive formations.

    When they saw Sam, they became even more aggressive on doing so. Atst there is a candidate who was also one of thest four Sam defeated in the previous room standing on the tform.

    Sam looked at Arman and said.

    "You want this technique?"

    Arman raised his eyebrow in amus.e.m.e.nt.

    "You can do that?"

    "As long as you pay a good enough price."

    "How much?"

    "Eighty million, same deal, only ores no need for money."

    "Seventy-five."

    "Deal."

    As Sam finished his words, he made a move. He took out some metallic cards and started throwing them towards the formations.

    He threw a total of four cards and theynded on the formation edges on the floor and as soon as they hit the nodes, the formation suddenly disappeared and before the candidates make sense of it, Nichs and Sam made their moves.

    They started beating them up again and after seeing their brutality in the first room, they don¡¯t have enough strength to put up a fight.

    And before they knew it, Arman is already sitting on the tform with three formations around him as Sam and Nichs sat down while chatting.

    Arthur watched the whole scenario with his mouth agape.

    He understood that Sam really did give the previous technique to Arman, but he didn¡¯t know this is how he did it.

    He didn¡¯t even know what to say.

    He felt that he made a mistake by not paying Sam for the technique. This is the best way to get his hands on a technique and he doesn¡¯t even need to fight at all.

    He felt like an idiot.

    After that day was over when they entered the third room, this time no one dared to make the first move, Sam looked at Arman with a questioning look.

    But before Arman could give an answer, Arthur spoke.

    "I want this technique."

    Sam didn¡¯t answer him and just looked at Arman, whentter showed his agreement, Sam turned towards Arthur and said.

    "100 million."

    Arthur widened his eyes and said.

    "You didn¡¯t take that much from Arman."

    "Take it or leave it."

    The remaining candidates started to get excited when they heard this.

    "I agree."

    Arthur agreed as he gritted his teeth.

    So, in that way the third technique went to Arthur while the fourth and fifth technique were bought by the Lightning Spear sect and the thunder bolt sect respectively.

    These five days, Sam sold the techniques which doesn¡¯t even belong to him in the first ce and made hundreds of millions of spirit stones.

    This is the most ideal business model through which he earned money in both the life times.

    After the five days are over the next floor is the fifth one and all the candidates who has ess to the fourth floor has ess to the fifth floor as well.

    When they entered the fifth floor there is only one door and when the entered the room, there was a very huge statue which resembled a male who is sitting cross-legged with a sabre strapped on his back and meditating.

    After they entered there was a string of texts that popped up.

    "This is the room where there is nopetition.

    The sixth floor of the pce opens o the twenty third day and until then the candidates can stay in this room.

    On the tform one can meditate and project any queries on your cultivation or battle techniques to the Master of this pce whose spirit was inside the statue.

    The Pce master will solve all your doubts and will be your teacher until the time that the sixth floor opens.

    So, make sure to use this time efficiently."

    After those words disappeared the candidates rushed towards the tform and started taking meditating.

    This time only Sam didn¡¯t do anything and just stood outside the tform.

    He is looking at the statue because he felt that silhouette familiar. It is simr to the silhouette that he saw on the back of Arman and the ceiling of the top floor.

    As for why he didn¡¯t want to get that teachings, right now he is finding the most fun in understanding the battle techniques and creating them, if he still gets the guidance that would robbing his fun out of it.

    Sam waited, there is almost a week till the sixth floor opens and he has to wait.

    He decided to cultivate his mental energy while as he waits.

    But on third day he saw a weird phenomenon on the tform and that is Arman¡¯s aura is raising higher and higher and the lightning energy started spreading throughout his body and tempering him.

    Many impurities are being expelled at a fast rate and his spiritual energy and elemental energy started getting purified.

    He could even see the muscle tissues getting torn apart and healed at the same time again and again.

    The rest of the candidates are quite oblivious to this as they are immersed in their own cultivations.

    Only Sam could see this and sense this.

    The process didn¡¯t change the cultivation level instead it changed the body, constitution and the spiritual core itself.

    This something that is beyond Sam¡¯s knowledge by many levels.

    This is the first time seeing this kind of phenomenon.

    He doesn¡¯t even know how this is possible but this is happening right in front of him and he couldn¡¯t find a way to exin the situation.

    Sam saw as Arman¡¯s skin peeledpletely his muscle fibres exposed and then getting torn, his bone structure, internal organs all of the exposed to the lightning and for a split second Sam could have sworn that he saw even the organs bing damaged by the lightning.

    After some time, the internal organs, the bone structure, and muscle tissues, everything started getting regenerated and Arman¡¯s body was now brand-new. His skin was smoother than before and he is like a whole new person.

    Sam saw the whole process without batting an eyelid. He then saw the tattoo on Arman¡¯s body appearing again.

    Then only Sam came out of his daze and looked at the statue.

    He felt that there is a connection between Arman¡¯s transformation, this statue and the tattoo behind his back.

    Things just kept on getting more and more mysterious.

    After all this new information, Sam felt as if he shouldn¡¯t have known this much, because there are only more questions and no answers whatsoever.

    This is truly frustrating.

 Chapter 229: Statue

    As Sam saw the whole process happening, he suddenly felt a chill run down his spine and he immediately diverted his attention towards the statue¡¯s face.

    In ce of the stone eyes which are previously there are reced by a pair of electric blue eyes with dark blue pupils.

    Those eyes are looking straight at him. He felt a huge pressure on him as the eyes bore down on him as if they want to see through his soul.

    For the first time, Sam felt a sense of inferiority in a long time.

    He didn¡¯t expect that he would feel that after so many years. He felt the same sense of inferiority when he was a kid in his previous life. Half of his life has gone by just to ovee that, and now in this new life, he is feeling the same thing again.

    His mind suddenly felt clouded. The darkest parts of his past started resurfacing again.

    Suddenly, Sam clenched his fists hard and gritted his teeth. He straightened his buckled knees and rose his head in defiance.

    He looked straight at thoserge blue eyes.

    He doesn¡¯t want to go through the same feeling again and he wouldn¡¯t let a being no matter how superior make him go through that again.

    When the eyes looked at Sam¡¯s actions, the pressure increased and Sam felt as if he was carrying the whole mountain.

    But Sam didn¡¯t budge, he doesn¡¯t want to kneel or fall for this being. The eyes that are filled with contempt are only making him more and more determined.

    Sam continued for another five minutes and by this time there are already cracks on the floor, but he didn¡¯t let his knees buckle and suddenly there are cracking sounds that areing from his bones.

    Sam clenched his jaw to bear the pain and then suddenly the pressure was off.

    Sam sweated bullets, he started panting.

    His eyes became cold and gloomy. A voice was heard in his head.

    "No wonder you are the wimp that Gambler go himself, you are just like him a stubborn pest that refuses to budge."

    When Sam heard this even though he was shocked by the sudden statement and the details that are mentioned in that statement, the anger is still clouding his mind and he let the statement slide for a second.

    He looked at the statue with that icy cold gaze and when he saw the contempt deep in those eyes, he couldn¡¯t hold back anymore.

    He took out the Executioner sword.

    The Katana is releasing an extremely fierce aura and this is the result of absorption of the Hydra¡¯s blood. The sword haspletely absorbed the blood essence and is now on the verge of being bing a fifth rank weapon.

    He took out a huge energy cell which is in size of a foot ball and dropped it on the floor.

    Sam ced his left leg on the energy cell which is filled with the wind elemental energy and started directing all of it to the sword.

    He looked at the blue eyes which suddenly seemed to be curious.

    With in two minutes, the energy cell was devoid of energy and executioner sword was full of fierce and sharp energy.

    Sam crushed the empty cell under his foot and leapt in to the air leaving a floor of cracked tiles.

    The blue eyes showed a different expression than the contempt and curiosity for the first time.

    This time, they showed surprise.

    Sam leapt towards those big eyes and with a sh, the executioner sword met with the statue right at the forehead.

    With a huge vertical sh, the statue was split into two vertically.

    The light in the eyes faded and the they turned back to normal stone eyes.

    Samnded on the rubble that fell on the ground.

    By this time, all the candidates woke up from their meditative state and already moved backward.

    They are looking at Sam with confusion and a little dread at the same time, they all felt that fearsome aura from before.

    When they observed they could see that there was blood dripping from Sam¡¯s right hand. His hand wasn¡¯t even able to take that hit.

    Some of them are clearly annoyed by the sudden interruption, but they don¡¯t dare to confront Sam about it when they felt that fearsome aura and the killing intent Sam was emitting.

    Sam looked at the statue and said.

    "I don¡¯t know who you are and if you are a god or a demon, I don¡¯t know who that gambler is and I don¡¯t even know how powerful you all are and most importantly I don¡¯t even know if you can hear me.

    If you are, then remember my words, if there is a way for me to find you and reach you, you better kill me before that dayes, or else you would wish you never even saw me on this day."

    With those words, Sam stepped back and found a clean spot before sitting there.

    He took off the coat which revealed a disfigured arm with all the bones broken and protruding outside of the skin.

    The candidates saw the most gruesome scene they ever did.

    Sam took out a small dagger and started cutting his own arm and made arge vertical slit and started arranging his bone fragments as he healed them after that.

    The bones joined slowly and then Sam started healing his flesh.

    Within ten minutes his arm is as good as before.

    But the most important thing is that Sam doesn¡¯t even have a single change of expression when he did all this.

    It is as if the arm he was cutting is not even his.

    Sam closed his eyes as he calmed himself down.

    Nichs approached him and sat beside him before asking.

    "Are you okay?"

    "I am good, don¡¯t worry."

    At this moment Sam saw Arman who is also looking at him, there was an invisible tension as their gazes locked.

    Sam knew why is that.

    That person whoever it was is somehow rted to Arman and with what Sam did, both of them now became rivals if not Arch-enemies.

    But Sam didn¡¯t bother and closed his eyes again.

    Everyone in the room including Arthur are walking on eggshells for the remaining time and they felt like dancing as the time for the next floor came and the door opened.

    Now there is only sixth floor left and from thunder god temple¡¯s side only Sam, Arthur and Arman are qualified toe. The first batch of the participants.

    Three of them entered the sixth floor and Sam once again looked at the symbol on top of the ceiling.

    The same image he saw at the beginning of this whole pce journey was still there, but this time, Sam is not looking at it with curiosity but rather with enmity.

    He doesn¡¯t like that feeling of being inferior. Many of his buttons are pushed and there is no way he could let this go. He should at least beat the crap out of that person before he could feel any better.

    But there is a long time for that it is not possible anytime soon.

    Sam shook his head to shift his focus and walked towards the door. He didn¡¯t wait for the other two and entered the room.

    The other candidates also starteding inside one by one and there are three candidates from each area.

    A total of eighteen people.

    The familiar holographic screen came and disyed strings of letters.

    "Congrattions on making this far. This is the final room and the most precious treasures of this pce are going to be here.

    Now, the final test is about to begin.

    There are three treasures which are rewards for this and you can take them without any tests. The only thing you have to do is refine the treasures with your spiritual imprint and that will be yours.

    All the candidates should try and make an imprint on the treasure and the person with the strongest will and mental strength along with the higher purity of the spiritual energy wins.

    There are three treasures and a person can try to refine all three at a time or one at a time, there are only seven days till the end of the one month and these seven days are the only time that you have.

    The three treasures will appear before you in a moment.

    Best of luck."

    The words on the screen are followed by a mechanical voice and after it was done, three different tforms came out.

    Each tform came out with a transparent sphere on it and there was an object inside the sphere.

    There are names on the tform indicating the identity of the object.

    In the centre of the tform there is a Sabre with a silver handle and the de made of a metal in electric blue colour.

    There was a tag with words. "Lightning Storm Sabre."

    The one on the left is a scroll with name. "Transference Scroll."

    The one on the right is a small cage in the shape of bird cage and named, "Thunder Prison."

    Sam looked at three things and his eyes settled on the Transference Scroll.

    He doesn¡¯t really need other two because he is confident and satisfied with the weapons he had, but if he can he will still take the Thunder Prison which might be a defensive item and if by the time he took the two treasures the sabre was still there, he could make himselffortable by taking it and he can sell it for an astronomical price.

 Chapter 230: Mental strength

    Sam sat before the Left side tform as his target was the Transference Scroll. He doesn¡¯t know what they are, but he can guess from the name itself, it might be an escape item which could save him in an unprecedented threat.

    As Sam started his refining, the rest also got to their own choice, some of them including Arthur focused on the Sabre.

    There are only four people for the Transference scroll including Sam himself.

    But right now, Sam is in a very shitty mood and he might stay in that mood until he finds a way to vent that so, he took out his two swords and stabbed them both beside him.

    He doesn¡¯t want topete with these guys for this, since heid his eyes on this, he is going to get what he wants and he doesn¡¯t have enough patience to fight with these guys.

    And just like that, he is alone in front of that tform.

    Sam spread his spiritual sense on the sphere and started imprinting it. It is not the same kind of imprint as the one on the puppets.

    This process is rather making the sphere disappear with their spiritual sense and mental strength and just leave a mark of their spiritual sense.

    If multiple candidates are trying to make an imprint on the single thing, there would be a wrestle between the senses and the one with the strongest mental strength will be getting the treasure.

    Since Sam doesn¡¯t have anypetition it was done in three days and he stored the scroll away.

    He then went towards the Thunder Prison.

    There are eight people at the Thunder Prison and as Sam came towards it, they started having some mental fluctuations, but they don¡¯t want to give up.

    Sam didn¡¯t want them to do so too. Of course, it would be great if they gave but since he already got what he wanted; he can at least give them a chance to get what they want.

    Sam sat down and sent his spiritual sense.

    His spiritual sense is a lot stronger than any of them here, he is a lot superior to his peers in this aspect as he cultivates his mental strength. His mental strength is on par with at least a Grand realm cultivator.

    When he entered the fray as the ninth person the remaining eight spiritual senses trembled. Sam is having a great time now because the eight of them worked hard and eroded the sphere and then now Sam is here to take them.

    He is mostly interested in this prison because it is a defensive item and also judging from its size it is equipment made in such a way that its size is maniptive which can give him some ideas in his further inventions.

    So, he is more interested in this.

    As the situation turned into a walk in the park to him, Sam suddenly felt a tug of resistance towards his spiritual sense and when he noticed, he saw that the eight remaining candidates are making a united attack towards him.

    Since three days are already over and he already got one item, Sam decided that he would test his abilities in mental attacks and improve in this aspect.

    So, Sam started his mental ¡¯spar¡¯ with these candidates and the candidates¡¯ suffering started.

    Sam closed his eyes and felt the attacks and the pressure from the other candidates. He is analyzing how mental strength can be used for attacking.

    When he felt the pressure from the statue, the one that hurt him most is the mental pressure than the physical one.

    He almost lost his confidence and arrogance as his mind was kicked into the abyss of his suffering and inferiority of his previous life.

    This almost made him lose his mind.

    That much overbearing power was just obtained with the mental pressure.

    Now that he has an opportunity to analyze something like this arrived, there is no reason for him to back off.

    Sam first started imagining his spiritual sense like y or some dough.

    He wanted to manipte it as he liked which proved to be a hard one to achieve. But since he has enough time and eight sparring partners there is no need for him to get anxious or disappointed. He can take it one step at a time.

    And the first thing is he has to stay alert so that he wouldn¡¯t take any damage because of thebined attacks and for that he has to make his spiritual sense and consciousness tight and guarded.

    The second thing he did was to treat the spiritual sense like a dough with the help of his strong consciousness.

    But that is not easy. It is almost as hard as hisser fusion.

    Sam spent his time in deep concentration and slowly but surely, he started having better control over his spiritual sense.

    In general, the spiritual sense is not used this way. It is mostly used in very limited ways and one of the mostmon and major usage methods is that a cultivator will use this to probe and learn about others¡¯ cultivation levels.

    A cultivator will use the spiritual sense to check the elemental or spiritual energy levels of an object, area, person, beast, or any other item.

    They will use it to check the ces within their range but not under entirely visible under their normal vision andst but not least, they will use it to sense the impending dangers or any unwanted presence near themselves so that they can stay safe.

    In all these uses, the spiritual sense will be controlled very liberally, there are no impossible constraints or any other restrictions when releasing the spiritual sense.

    The most they could control is the range they want to inspect.

    Other than that distance and rage there are not many restrictions including the amount of concentration in one area or on a person or an animal.

    Now, Sam¡¯s first aim is to achieve the necessary control so that he can manipte as much as he wants.

    As two spiritual senses ovep there would be some frustrating and disturbing collision mentally for both parties and Sam¡¯s second aim was based on this.

    If Sam can have the necessary control to manipte the concentration, he believes that he can use it to create the necessary attack that affects the opponent¡¯s spirit and mentality.

    And as he had clear goals, Sam is trying his best to achieve them.

    The eight candidates don¡¯t know that Sam is using them as a whetstone for grinding his mental strength and prowess.

    They are ecstatic when they found that Sam¡¯s spiritual sense became passive and when they found out that their attacks are having some effects, they became even more excited.

    As time slowly passed and another day went by, the candidates are still having a great time as they saw a small amount of hope.

    Because as they attacked, they felt like Sam¡¯s spiritual sense is not covering arger area as before. Even though the change is small they believed it is due to Sam taking damage from their attacks and felt like their moves are working which made them try harder.

    The next day, their attacks grew even more aggressive as the area of influence under Sam is bing less and less.

    The next day, which is also the sixth day, they could feel Sam¡¯s spiritual sense surrounded by their and when they saw Sam¡¯s frown, they felt like they are about to win and they pressed forward.

    But there came a surprise which they never anticipated.

    On the seventh day, when there are only a few hours left, one of the eight candidates felt as if there is a needle poking on his consciousness and then only he noticed that Sam¡¯s spiritual sense is not dormant anymore and when he observed closely he noticed that although Sam¡¯s spiritual sense is covering a small area, it is extremely concentrated and in fact, it is too concentrated that is very small.

    But there is something about that made him afraid and he knew what it is soon enough.

    There was a sudden surge of pain in the brain and he lost his footing.

    He fell on his back as he held his head which is throbbing in pain with his jaws clenched and veins popped on his forehead.

    He started rolling on the floor to control the pain.

    Many people in the room failed to make sense of the situation including the people who are trying to fight off Sam, but they didn¡¯t realize that they don¡¯t have the luxury to ponder things.

    Sam¡¯s attacks began and soon the remaining seven candidates fell on the floor one by one and the thunder prison became Sam¡¯s.

    He made an imprint which took him around half-a-day and then only he opened his eyes.

    When he saw the surroundings, he noticed that everyone is done with their things and the saber is already obtained by someone.

    By the look of things, it is Arman who got it which is not exactly unexpected.

 Chapter 231: Exchange

    Sam and Arman exchanged nces while many other people are sighing in frustration or resignation.

    The only two people who got the treasures are from the Thunder God temple¡¯s side.

    Although from what Sam said, he is not directly rted to the Thunder God temple and most likely belonged to an empire under them, they still believed that the treasures would belong to the thunder god temple eventually.

    That is the reason these scions are a bit angry as they didn¡¯t belong to their power.

    Sam sat down for a second to calm his mental state. He really did improve a lot in the past few days. Even though it is not exactly an increase in strength, it would be very useful in many other aspects when he was fighting an opponent at the same cultivation level and the fight would be even easier than it already was.

    After a few more hours, the one- month period inside the Pce has finallye to an end. The candidates on all floors vanished at the same time and they appeared in a hall in which the Avatar is standing.

    Sam looked at the old man and then his surroundings only to realize that he failed to see any other candidates.

    He clearly knew for one that all of the vanished at the same time and he doesn¡¯t know why he was isted.

    Not only Sam, but the rest of the candidates are also feeling the same. They are also facing the avatar in the same hall at the same time without anyone around them.

    As if reading his thoughts, the Avatar said.

    "Don¡¯t worry, you are isted in order to get the prizes that you deserve after this one month. You have performed exceptionally well and the first floor¡¯s five formations are cleared by you alone in the minimum time possible.

    You have far exceeded the expectations we had and you have been awarded theplete blueprints of the five formations which include their variant versions from rank 1 to rank 7.

    On the second floor, you again outperformed every other person in four cases. Battle awareness, Speed, Strength, and Long-Distance Tracking. You only lost and got second ce in one room which belongs to the Defence category and this might have been because the attacks are of lightning category and the first prize winner is better in adapting lightning than you.

    For this, you will be getting four battle techniques, which focus on the four aspects respectively, as for the second prize it is also a battle technique but it is not as profound as the first prize.

    On the third floor, you are the only person who cleared the fifth room and the rest of the rooms, you are the best of all dominating every other person.

    This floor¡¯s prizes are voluntary and you can select from the options which I will give you in a moment.

    The prizes from the remaining three floors are obtained from those floors directly."

    After finishing these words, the person waved his hand and a holographic screen appeared before him. There are many weapons, formation discs, daggers and blueprints of formations, inscription scrolls, and many more.

    "You can select any five from these things, if you have any doubts, you can ask me."

    Sam looked at all these and wasn¡¯t particrly interested in them. After some thought, he asked the Avatar.

    "You know that I stole something from the puppets, right?"

    "Yes."

    "So, are they mine?"

    "Of course, if they are not yours, you wouldn¡¯t have been able to bring them out, you fought directly and they are your spoils of battle."

    "Then, can I request other types of rewards apart from these options?"

    The Avatar was intrigued.

    "That Depends on what you ask for."

    "Since I have five prizes, I will exchange one for the appraisal of the two treasures I got from the sixth floor, I want to know how they are used and the most efficient way to use them.

    As for the remaining four choices, I would like to exchange them for the equivalent amount of raw materials required for making these devices."

    As Sam spoke, he took out the glowing object which he obtained from the puppet. It is actually a spherical object and it has neutral spiritual energy emitting from it.

    Avatar was surprised for a bit and said with a smile.

    "You really are the odd one. I never expected you would ask this.

    But I want reasons.

    Why do you want to exchange a prize for just appraisal, why are so sure that you won¡¯t be able to use them efficiently?"

    Sam stayed silent for a second before saying.

    "I have a feeling that they are not meant for me, my hunch is that they are sent to this world for someone else and I along with many other candidates are just here to make this a ¡¯fair¡¯ way to get these treasures."

    Avatar frowned for the first time.

    "You seem to know a lot of things which you are not supposed to be aware of."

    At these words, Sam smiled and looked at the old man with a mischievous glint in his eyes.

    Then only the old man realized that he fell into a trap.

    That is right, Sam isying down a trap to get more information.

    After the experience inside the pce, he understood that there is a lot more information he has to know and after seeing the tattoo on the back of Arman coinciding with the symbol on the ceiling along with the statue and Arman¡¯s strange phenomenon, he has one conclusion and that is the whole Pce of Inheritance is here for Arman and that is to deliver the inheritance from that person in the image to Arman.

    As for why he thought it was just to make it ¡¯fair¡¯, it is because of the remaining tattoos he saw. They must be people who are here just like him and Arman, they are also from another world and they also experienced the Re-birth.

    They are all here for a fair fight for the treasure and techniques that are sent here through the pce.

    So, he shot an arrow in the dark, and who knew that it struck right on the target.

    The old man just shook his head and said.

    "You indeed are a person selected by Gambler, you are not to be trifled with, getting this much info just from your observations is really impressive, but I suggest you don¡¯t try to get more info now, you will know what you have to know when the time is right.

    As for the exchange you wanted, if you want the whole device, you can get only one for the four prizes, but since you are asking for only raw materials you can get enough materials to make five of them.

    For the appraisal. The transference scrolls are used for escaping. And the value of the scroll represents the number of times you can use them.

    The scroll you have can be used three times and to have the most efficiency, you have to use a drop of your blood essence filled with the spiritual energy and it can send you a thousand kilometers away.

    In the center of the scroll there would be the core rune of the scroll on which you should drop the blood and spread it towards the direction you want to head towards.

    The Thunder Prison is mostly used for capturing the enemies of higher realm than yours.

    If you can find the core of the prison and your mental strength is enough to manipte it, you can change the form of the prison as you like and the possibilities are endless. For a person like you, I think the thunder prison is more than a capturing tool.

    If you understand what I mean and study it properly, you would be able to do much more than the inventor of the thunder prison himself."

    With those words, the Old man waved his hand and all the rewards that Sam deserved were sent towards him, Sam threw them in the storage and the old man said.

    "I also added a list of the raw materials you asked for, It would save you some trouble if you are searching for them in the future.

    Then there is only onest thing to do."

    The Avatar, made some hand-signs and closed eyes as he chanted something.

    A bright light shot out from his hands and entered Sam¡¯s consciousness all of a sudden.

    Sam was stunned for a second and closed his eyes to enter his consciousness and he can see a small circr token hovering there.

    "This will help you to enter the Pce of Inheritance next time, from this day onwards, every three years the Pce of inheritance will open in the same ces it opened this time and the same age group of people will be given opportunities to enter this.

    Apart from that, as the first batch of the people who entered, your generation will also have an ess to enter every time it opened until you reach a certain age.

    Of course, the tests you will face are going to be different.

    You got a badge since you have that tattoo on your back and the rest who have tattoos, in the same way, will receive the badges.

    Apart from that, there would be a certain number of badges which will be given to these powers which helped me gather you and they will conduct a tournament for your age group and then distribute those badges.

    The badges you have are special and gain permanent ess to the pce of inheritance until you reach a certain cultivation level and this is the privilege of being a person with a tattoo whom I would like to call as the acknowledged.

    If an acknowledged person dies, his badge will be transferred to the person who killed him and that is only if it is a fair fight and if the other person is a far stronger opponent, the badge will do onest favor and devour that person¡¯s soul.

    And that concludes every information you are entitled to and you can leave now.

    With those words, Sam didn¡¯t even have a chance to speak before he appeared in front of the cave entrance where Moriya is waiting for them.

 Chapter 232: Attack

    Sam looked around to find out that all the other candidates also arrived along with him and has same looks of surprise as him.

    Moriya looked at all the candidates and since there are all of them present, he sighed in relief.

    But he noticed something else.

    After the initial surprise, everyone has a guarded expression as they looked suspiciously at each other.

    He immediately understood what the matter is no matter how weak a person¡¯s performance is they should have at least gotten something inside the pce and now they are guarding it like a precious treasure.

    Moriya cleared his throat and said.

    "Don¡¯t worry everyone. Your things are yours and yours alone. Unless you are willing to share them yourselves, nobody is going to force you to hand them over, at least not on this Thunder god temple¡¯s territory. I promise you that with the honour of our temple on the line."

    Then only some people calmed down a bit.

    Then Moriya continued.

    "Today the thunder god temple is inviting you officially to join our temple as inner disciples, you will be given ess to the same resources as our inner disciples and can get mentored by our Elders and Great elders, if you can prove your worth, you can even be direct disciples of the Grand Elders and Temple Head himself.

    Of course, it ispletely understandable if you don¡¯t want to join now or if you want some time to visit your home, the thunder god temple will not force you and we still guarantee your safety.

    Many candidates from the four empires became excited as they felt that this is a dreame true, they started discussing more than half of them agreed to join and remaining half wanted to visit their home beforeing back,

    Philip and Jack asked Sam if he was going to join and Sam only replied.

    "I am not, I still have lot of things to see in the empire. What about you two?"

    "Well, I cannot stay in the Thunder God temple, I have some serious issues regarding that." Philip said with a smile.

    "I also have things to do in the empire." Jack also said.

    This way, three of them rejected the offer, while Nichs joined immediately.

    He didn¡¯t even consider for a second before agreeing. He came to Sam and said.

    "Our current battle record is two wins for you and one draw. Next time we spar, I am going to change that no matter what, so don¡¯tg behind too much."

    "We will see about that." Sam replied with a smile.

    Then he went back to Arman and said.

    "I want these materials, I will be leaving this ce, so please hurry up."

    Arman took the material list and then looked back at Sam, these are materials which are used mostly for themunication devices, recording crystals and other stuff. These are strictly regted and only the Artisan tower and the inner members of the temple have ess to it.

    Arman nodded and said.

    "I will hand them over to you at the Space gate."

    Arman then left with the rest of the thunder god temple¡¯s members.

    "All the people who wants to go back follow me; we would be going to the ind where the space gates are located."

    Sam and his two friends, Nathan are the only ones who belong to the Orion empire that are going back.

    They went towards the sea shore of the ind and there are already beasts waiting for them.

    They boarded the beasts and by the evening they went to the ind where the space gates are already being arranged.

    The spirit stones are also loaded.

    At the gate that was leading to the Orion empire there is a middle-aged man waiting along with the emperor.

    Sam and the rest walked towards the gate. As soon as he saw the middle-aged man, Sam felt like he was a bit familiar and frowned when he saw the cold look he has on his face.

    "The gate will be ready in a minute; you can rx until then."

    Sam went towards the nearby trees and sat there with his legs crossed. Philip and Jack followed as they spoke something.

    Around five minutester, the gate was ready and Arman also arrived at there from another Space gate.

    This ce seemed to be connected to the core region of the Thunder God temple and doesn¡¯t have ess to outsiders.

    He gave a storage ring to Sam and said.

    "We might meet soon and that is if you watch your back till then."

    With those words, he left the same way he came and Sam frowned at those words.

    He walked towards the space gate where the emperor and the rest are already in the formation.

    Sam went into the formation and soon the transfer started.

    The next moment, they arrived at the space gate in the Emperor¡¯s pce.

    Sam looked around to get rid of that dizzy feeling, and he slowly stepped out along with Jack and Philip.

    They came out of the small building in which the formation was and walked forward. Sam suddenly halted his steps and Philip and Jack leapt on him at the same time.

    Sam took out the transference scroll in an instant and opened before injecting the spiritual energy, he doesn¡¯t know which direction he held the scroll in but he doesn¡¯t have much time.

    He dragged Philip and Jack into the dimension and activated the scroll.

    They disappeared in a sh and just at the spot they were present, a huge lightning bolt struck leaving arge crater.

    Emperor is looking at the crater with a gloomy look on the face, he didn¡¯t expect he would miss this.

    He wanted to kill Sam a long time ago and he only stopped because of Moriya¡¯s instructions. Now that the whole pce farce is over he nned to kill him.

    He cannot even wait for Sam to enter the empire, but the elders repeatedly said that no candidate should be harmed on their territory.

    That is why he contacted Ben¡¯s father who is also pretty upset since his son was beaten up by Sam and learnt of the distance at which the space gate wouldn¡¯t be affected when he attacked.

    But why go through so much effort and has to kill him right at the space gate? Ben¡¯s father wanted to see Sam¡¯s dead body right away and he nned to kill him right there and then, but now that n also failed.

    Apart from that, if Sam entered the city and came into contact with the Artisan tower for any reason, things would again get messy due to his status.

    The Artisan tower will investigate the whole thing as they would lose a young talent as Sam and even though they might not pursue revenge there would surely be repercussions and his reputation as an emperor would be damaged. After all, it was his son who brought this up on himself.

    He went back to the thunder god temple through the space gate to give the news to Ben¡¯s father and he came back with a gloomy face.

    But when he came back, he saw his son was still waiting there with a nervous expression.

    "What happened?"

    "I found this near the crater."

    He showed a letter which was extremely crumbled.

    Emperor took the letter and saw a string of letters.

    "You just signed your death warrant. Good luck. ¨C Sam"

    When the emperor saw this letter, his spection was confirmed. He thought that Sam was already aware of their n when he escaped, but he wasn¡¯t sure, but now that he saw the note, he could guarantee that his spection was correct.

    He suddenly had a bad premonition and felt that he made a huge mistake. But that feeling just passed by and his pride as an emperor didn¡¯t want him to bow down.

    At the same moment, in far away woods, Sam appeared from within a bright sh and fell down on the ground. His head waspletely dizzy and he cannot even see properly that is his body¡¯s reaction due to two consecutive space gate travels.

    He almost wanted to puke, but at this moment, he saw a beast ring at him from a few feet away.

    It is like a huge leopard and thankfully, it is only Level 4.

    Sam felt that he would be in trouble if the forest he entered will have very dangerous beasts beyond his level and now that all he saw was a Level 4 Beast, he was relieved.

    He sat down on the ground and let Philip, Jack and Watt who is living in the Dimension for past month or so out andid down on the ground to rx until the dizzy feeling goes.

    At the same time, he let Yanwu and Sky out which chased the Leopard away.

    He said to them.

    "Go and scout a bit."

    After that he closed his eyes and took some rest.

    He woke up after half an hour and by that time the three boys already created a makeshift camp while Yanwu and Sky returned.

    "What¡¯s our position now, where are we?" He asked the beasts immediately.

    [There are some human activities towards North western direction and the north eastern direction is a bit troublesome as I can sense some traces of powerful beasts at least at Level six.

    As for the southern sides, there are only forests and they are thicker and thicker without any kinds of activities. We suspect that side is the most dangerous and it would be better to go towards the North west.] Sky replied.

    Sam sat down and fell into a deep thought.

    He couldn¡¯t guess where he is until he can enter a human settlement nearby and he has to make sure that his presence is going to be unnoticed all the while.

    He can use shadow mice but they are mostly useful in the cities than the wilderness.

    This is due to one of the main reasons why most shadow mice don¡¯t grow till the old age even with those incredible powers.

    That is because until they achieve a very high-level shadow fusion, there is a high chance that the beasts stronger than them can notice their presence purely based on instincts and if shadow mice became afraid due to their animal instincts, they will give their hiding position away.

    So, in the wilderness, Shadow mice are not ready to roam freely, at least not too deep.

    As for in the city they are the boss.

    So, they have to either travel by air or by foot and to be able to look at the tracks more clearly, they decided to go on foot until they find the first human settlement.

 Chapter 233: End Goal of the Journey

    Sam and the group changed their clothes and particrly Sam and Watt, they took off their eye-catching coats and wore some normal clothes.

    Yanwu and Sky went to do some scouting now and then and they traveled carefully on foot for three days before they found a proper road.

    They randomly picked a direction and started flying over it and after another three days, they saw their first City.

    On their way, they avoided any possible encounter they could have with other travelers.

    Sam doesn¡¯t want any of the info slipping as there is a possibility that the Emperor already took action to deal with him, and he didn¡¯t throw the rest of his friends in the dimension because there is a possibility of them is going to be stuck inside the dimension in the future, so he let them have some free reign for a bit.

    When the first City came to their eye-sight, Sam and the restnded nearby and he threw everyone inside the dimension along with him and let shadow mice follow a trading caravan and enter the City.

    Now, all he has to do is find out where they actually are and where they have to go from here.

    They entered the slums and hid deep inside some abandoned buildings.

    Sam came out from there and went into the city.

    The slums are the ce where a lot of new people enter every day and they could care less about a new face showing up.

    Apart from that, Sam wore a cloak around him making and he pretended to be old and weak which made his presence ignored.

    After that, he went to work with some shadow mice.

    He sent shadow mice to infiltrate the city guard stations and he went towards an inn where the most human traffic urs.

    He bribed a waiter and got all the info he needed.

    Right now, he is in a city named the scarlet city and this is a part of the Northern Star Dukedom.

    It is not very close to the northern border of the empire, nor was it close to the Northern Star city. It is exactly in the middle of the Dukedom and this city is one of the cities which has nothing special.

    The city is named after the City lord¡¯s family who got were rewarded with the city when the empire was founded.

    After getting some info, Sam went back to the slums and carefully slipped into an alleyway before disappearing into the dimension before reappearing at the old ruined building they are hiding.

    He told them everything that he learned and asked them to think of what they think is the best solution to proceed. Even though, there is a high chance that Sam would make the final decision there is no reason to not listen to any suggestions.

    By night the shadow mice returned and from what they learned in the city guard station there is no official notice among the citizens iming that Sam is a wanted criminal by the empire.

    Rather, the mice found out that some of the upper echelons of the city guards and the city officials who are discussing a person. Although the mice failed to see any picture of Sam in their position there is some info that made it most possible that they are talking about Sam and that is regarding his professions.

    The officials are talking about Sam¡¯s numerous professions and they have been ordered by their upper echelons that they should keep an eye on the three professional towers which Sam is a part of and they also noted that they should inform them if there is any young genius who appears inside the tower.

    Sam is almost sure that it is about him.

    The Emperor already broke all the decorum with Sam and he has no choice but to search and capture him. Because once, Sam escaped and he cannot get his hands on him, then with Sam¡¯s potential and talent he would be done for.

    But he cannot paint Sam as a deadly criminal before he knew his exact position. He has no evidence and everyone knows that Sam has a deep feud with all the big shots and the public would think that the emperor is extremely tyrannical and in the imperial capital and the three professional towers which Sam has some status in has to side with Sam because of their titles.

    Emperor knew that he has no good reputation in the empire but at least he doesn¡¯t want to get a bad reputation which the enemy empire can take advantage of.

    If Sam really did approach them, they have no other choice but ept and protect him from the empire¡¯s allegations, that is one of the reasons the Emperor wanted to kill Sam instantly within the pce grounds.

    From what he could tell Sam is a cautious person and n everything carefully, that is the reason he made a sneak attack but he didn¡¯t expect Sam to be this cautious and prepare for this scenario as well.

    Sam and the remaining three all sat down together inside the building and started discussing and now they have two choices in front of them.

    The first one is to cross the northern border and flee to the neighboring empire and the second one is to y this cat and mouse game with the emperor.

    They are in a dilemma because Sam is not that willing to cross the border at least not yet.

    Because he made a contract with Jack to tear down the ckwater nest and find his father¡¯s killer and his pride is not letting him ept this.

    One could say that a wise man bows down for the circ.u.mstances but Sam believes that a capable man can change the circ.u.mstances for his own favor.

    So, that night the group stayed there and the next day Sam made his decision.

    They are not going to leave the border yet.

    First, they will travel to the southern star Dukedom and check up on Sam¡¯s Park. If Sam¡¯s guess is correct, unless the emperor is willing to answer to the public and prove that his acts are not of any personal vendetta, he wouldn¡¯t openly take charge of the park and also fire the employees suddenly.

    At least, this is what Sam would do if he is the emperor¡¯s shoes, so to get a better understanding of the emperor¡¯s thought process Sam has to look at that ce ande to a conclusion and apart from that there is another big reason and more important reason for him to visit that ce and that is leaving a message and honoring the words he left behind in the past.

    After that, he would think of what to do next.

    So, their journey began.

    First thing in the morning they left the ce with the help of shadow mice and on the way, they stole a map leading to the south.

    The map has details up to the imperial capital and Sam can get to the southern start from there.

    From the map and the estimated distance, it will take around one month in the shortest route which will lead to the imperial capital, and this time Watt is responsible for bringing there.

    But before that, Sam has to give some makeover to Watt. He made his hair silvery white like an old man and added some wrinkles on the face and hands and other exposed his skin. He taught him how to walk like an old man and how to hunch like one.

    Why Watt though?

    It is because Watt is the only person who is out of the limelight for more than the past month. He was shoved inside the dimension even before their journey to the thunder god temple. So, his presence waspletely neglected and it would be sometime before the emperor concentrates on him.

    Sam is just being cautious, because there is a high chance that the searches are being done in the southern star continent now, because, the emperor didn¡¯t know that Sam himself has no control over the direction the scroll took him.

    So, he would assume that Sam went to the southern star where he has the most influence and an extremely profiting business.

    And his guess is almost right but the only thing is that Sam is only going there a littleter than he thinks.

    Watt is now traveling on Falck at a moderate speed and he dressed as an old man. His pace is as if he has all the time in this world.

    Meanwhile, inside the dimension, Sam is sitting along with the other two as they are discussing their future steps.

    Jack has a small question for Sam and that is.

    ??What is your final goal from this journey, we could just escape to the neighboring empire and we can take the revenge slowly? We are not on par with the strength of the emperor and apart from that, there are generals, Marshalls, countless Nascent cultivators including Dukes, and also the vast army under their control. And even worse, they have the manpower and the resources to make their work easier. We arepletely on different levels. We are against the whole empire."

    Sam smiled and said.

    "What you said is right, let us forget about the emperor¡¯s level for now, since the power level ispletely out of our league, it doesn¡¯t matter whether it is a Nascent or higher they all can kill us in an instant.

    As for what you said about the rest, yes, we are indeed against the whole empire and it is true that they have many resources in their control.

    And our end goal of this is also rted to that.

    Why do you think, the emperor has so much pride that he just attacked me without a second thought, even though all I did was just retaliate against his son?"

    Jack and Philip looked at each other and thetter answered.

    "Because he was the emperor?" He doesn¡¯t sound so sure, because, even he thought that it was kind of stupid. Just because he is an emperor doesn¡¯t mean he can do whatever he wants, right?

    But Sam¡¯s answer proved he was right.

    "Exactly, he behaves like this just because he is an emperor. And our goal is to pluck that title off of his head and reduce is head weight so that he can look at the ground for once and let us see how we would react."

    His voice was so casual that Jack and Philip even felt that they didn¡¯t hear anything clearly.

 Chapter 234: Gambler

    "What do you mean, you want to pluck off his position? Do you think it would be that easy? Can we alone threaten his position of the emperor? It is nigh impossible." Philip said in a gloomy voice.

    "Why do we have to threaten the position of an emperor."

    "Then how are you going to do this."

    "You just have to wait and see. You will understand soon enough."

    Around a monthter, they arrived at the southern star city. But they didn¡¯t enter it immediately.

    In the nearby woods of the southern star, there is a small hill. They climbed that hill and went dug a small cave where they made a camp for themselves.

    "I will visit the Park and will try to get some information on the situation. If you guys want you can stay here or you can stay inside the dimension."

    "We will take a look around the surroundings and see what is the position here. The hunters usually have some first-ss information, we will see if we get some."

    Philip said and the four of them went to do their own thing.

    Sam entered the city stealthily and infiltrated the staff quarters of the Park.

    Evening.

    The time for the shift change was here and the staff who just finished the shift came back.

    Right now, Sam is in the residence of the leader of Mackey.

    So, when Mackey came in, he slowly came out of the dimension and scared the hell out of Mackey.

    Sam closed his mouth, not letting him yell in fear, and whispered in his ear.

    "It¡¯s me, Sam."

    Mackey rxed a bit and his usual emotionless face came back.

    "You are indeed capable Boss; you can even enter the city in these circ.u.mstances."

    "What is the situation?"

    "Well, the Duke came back a few days ago along with a middle-aged man and had a meeting with the core staff of the Park.

    He said that you are a criminal on run and they are going to confiscate the park in a discreet manner. The three-tower heads didn¡¯t agree as they are still afraid of your fireworks, since the duke didn¡¯t confirm that you are not dead, they don¡¯t want to do this, I heard that even the tower heads of the imperial capital are not willing to do so and they seem to say something about the peers of the same trade and the pressure from their professional associations.

    So, they are trying hard to win over the tower heads. But they are not willing to budge and they are also saving up your share diligently.

    But the city guards, the nobles all of them are on tight guard to get you, even the military was involved except for your battalion. I am actually quite surprised that you are able to get here without anyone noticing."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply for a second and then asked.

    "Are you really just a chef? How do you get all these details in the first ce?"

    "I just pay more attention. And the tower heads know that I am your original subordinate, so they told me most things."

    "Then, who is holding my money?"

    "Formation tower head."

    "Okay, then I will see youter, just be careful. Things would get messy, extremely messy, and chaotic."

    "See youter, Boss."

    Sam left the ce and came back to the cave.

    The remaining three also came back and they are roasting a bird on the mes.

    "It is just as we thought, the southern star became the primary target and they even tried to take over the park, but the resistance from the tower heads is more than I thought it would be, seems like I attracted the attention of some big shots in the thunder god ind towers, otherwise these people wouldn¡¯t be able to control their greed at all.

    Anyway, the military also got involved along with the nobility and all the other city guards. We are actually on a tight leash, what did you get on your side?"

    Sam said as he took a bit of the roasted leg.

    "Well, you truly became a big shot this time, there is a bounty on your head, but for some reason, we are not the talk at all. They arepletely ignoring our presence and for some weird reason it is pissing me off."

    Philip said with a gloomy face.

    "What kind of bounty?"

    "All kinds, we met a hunter team who are also part of an underground gang, there is a bounty on your head in both hunter circle and the underground circle.

    Watt sneaked upon them to listen to their discussion, they even have a portrait of yours."

    "Well, seems like I did be famous, but don¡¯t be too rxed, I think you are also part of the bounty but the prizes might be less on your heads so some ignorant fools chose to ignore you. But a capable person wouldn¡¯t leave you like that."

    "Forget it, I doubt that with your level of threat, they would even care about us," Philip replied as he started munching on the food.

    "Okay, rest early tonight, tomorrow morning we have some work, find every poisonous beast there is in the surrounding forest. And search for these grasses, from what I know this area¡¯s climate is the best for these types of grasses.

    Apart from that, catch the Wild root Roons, Red fur kos, Yellow blood monkeys as much as you can. Try to be as discreet as possible. But find as many as you can."

    "Why do you want them?"

    "Didn¡¯t I tell you earlier, I have to honor my words and leave a message in this city."

    Four of them went to work, although everything went slowly due to their discreetness the process was very smooth.

    Meanwhile, in the distant realms, in a majestic Castle which is floating over the clouds, a white-colored winged elephant was guarding the entrance.

    Inside the castle, in a dining room, two young men are facing each other.

    One of them has a long hair with majestic looks tall stature with the electric blue eyes, Sam would recognize this person immediately from far away just from his silhouette because it is the same silhouette that he saw on the ceiling of the pce.

    In front of him, a man whose face was blurry and clouded was sitting with his legs on the table.

    He was dressed in ck and a dangerous aura that would keep anyone at bay was emitting from him.

    "Why are you here, Gambler?"

    "You know better than anyone why I am here, Indra. You know the rules, don¡¯t you? Why did you still break them and trouble my yer?"

    "Hmph." Indra only snorted in response.

    "I know actually, did your pride take a hit because he rejected your teachings? How did you even be a god with that fragile ego of yours? Trust me, you would be in big trouble these days because of that."

    "Are you here to threaten me or something?"

    "No, I am here to just remind you, as for this time, I will let it slide because he already tore down your statue in a single strike, I will consider that as a payback.

    As for the next time, you would not escape scot-free. I will tear you down a new one right in front of all the deities that respect you."

    "Do you think, you can walk away after talking to me like this in my territory? You must be dreaming."

    As soon as his words ended, the White-winged elephant trumpeted as the sky shook and lightning roared.

    "Do you think you can really deal with me with this Indra? Just with you and your Airavath [name of the winged elephant]? It seems like you are the one who is dreaming."

    He finished his speech and snapped his fingers.

    Suddenly, the sky tore open and a ck dragon roar came from it. A ck dragon came out of the void as it roared at the Airavath while looking at the elephant dead in the eye.

    The two immortal and mythical beasts stared down at each other as they released their auras without any signs of backing down. Both of them are extremely fierce as they don¡¯t want to outdone by the other.

    But Indra who is facing the gambler is in apletely different mood. His face was filled with a mixture of surprise, shock, and fear at the same time.

    "Vo... Void Dragon, when did you?" gambler didn¡¯t let him finish his words and said.

    "There are a lot of things you don¡¯t know about me and don¡¯t assume that I am all meek and weak from all the inactivity. I am beyond what you can imagine. Just because I am ying a game with you, don¡¯t treat me like your equal.

    You are a god for all the deities and living beings in your territory but for me, you are just a flower boy, don¡¯t show your pride ego, and all that shit in front of me and if you interfere with the game again and make a move on my or any other yer, trust me, I will feed your Airavath to my pets in my ranch."

 Chapter 235: The Preparations

    Sam doesn¡¯t know that two people who can crush the he is living in a second almost had a fight because of him.

    Because he is busy with nning something.

    From the hill they are staying in, he can watch some ces in the Southern star city, although they are notpletely visible and he cannot see what is happening there closely with a n.a.k.e.d, he doesn¡¯t have to use a n.a.k.e.d eye at all.

    So, while his friends went on to collect the required beasts, he started building a telescope so that he can observe what is going on in the city, particrly in a person¡¯s home.

    That is none other than the General Spark. Sam is here to honor his words about General Spark.

    And he can use this chance to send a message to the emperor as well as all the other nobles and officials who are after him.

    He is going to deal with the emperor sooner orter and in that process, Sam doesn¡¯t want to deal with all these officials on his journey. That would be a real pain in the ass.

    So, since he already has some past grudges with the General, he can use this chance to avoid some trouble.

    Although all the officials might not back down, there would be at least half of the people who will not make any trouble for Sam and that is for sure.

    So, now he is going to n and one of the main parts of that n is this hill.

    That is why he chose this hill as their campsite.

    Sam wants to use one of the first elements he gained since he came to this world and the knowledge, he gained from his previous world to deal with the General, and this hill will be the main contributor to his n.

    So, he started marking the necessary positions to start digging the hole hill hollow so that it can station the necessary things that can help him.

    For, the next month, the trio of Philip, Watt, and Jack are on hunt searching and bringing the beasts that Sam wanted and the main problem is that Sam wanted them alive.

    So, they can onlyply with him.

    This month, Sam started hollowing the peak and the upper part of the hill.

    Apart from that he would observe the routine of the General and spend the rest of the time researching a formation which he is designing for this purpose.

    From the start, Sam has a feeling that the formations of this world are being restrained by their thinking of not using anything other than the energy nodes.

    So, now he is going to circ.u.mvent that idea and use both energy nodes, runes, and inscriptions along with normal physical objects to get what he wants.

    After that one month is over, the search for Sam and his group intensified in the southern star. It seems that the emperor doesn¡¯t want to give up at all.

    He learned from Mackey that the Park waspletely taken over.

    Sam also found some posters of himself in the city and he is sessfullybeled as a wanted criminal.

    Sam thought that the emperor must have waited for this long, almost two months just to paint Sam as a criminal. Because, after this long time, there is no way that the citizens would rte to this incident as an act of revenge.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know what crime he was attached to but he knew that it certainly is not a small one. So, from this point, the Duke represented the government in taking over the park, but only Sam¡¯s share. The three-tower heads are still holding their own share.

    He also learned that from this acquisition the government didn¡¯t take Sam¡¯s previous ie and his earnings are still in hands of the Formation tower head.

    Sam wasn¡¯t the least bit surprised by this, he knew that this would only be a matter of time and even acquisition of Sam¡¯s park might be a provocation directed at him.

    The emperor must have thought that Sam is very possessive of his things and the whole thing started because his son went after Sam¡¯s possessions, so he is taking over Sam¡¯s possessions tantly and he wanted to lure Sam out.

    If this is really, the emperor¡¯s thinking, then he is half-right. Sam is indeed possessive of his things, but the only thing that he is wrong about is his way of retaliation.

    Sam is actually waiting for this toe out, he is waiting for the emperor to make a move and paint him as a criminal and make his name known all over the empire.

    This way, he would achieve his future ns much more efficiently.

    Now, his next step of the n is to assemble the new equipment he specifically made and ce them in the hill and then send a gift to someone.

    Apart from that, there is a secondary task of writing something and it was handed over to the three people who are apanying him.

    For the next week, Sam started assembling the whole room he made by hollowing out the whole upper part of the hill.

    The room is as big as a basketball court and Sam made a tform for himself to stand and operate the whole room in the position of the one goal post. And there is a long metallic cylinder which is ced at the other end of the court at the position of another goal post.

    The cylinder is mounted on a tform and is horizontally pointed towards the southern star city.

    To, Sam¡¯s side half of the room is filled with small metallic cylindrical tubes with one end mounted with a convex lens and the other end stuffed with the energy cell of light element.

    Each tube is mounted on different heights by some thin metallic stands and those stands are connected to the tform by a ck metallic wire and there are some runes on the wire, the tubes, stands, and even on the tform.

    The tform is made of a metallic bed on which there is ayer of crystalline object and then covered with numerous runes.

    The tubes are also high in number with around one hundred and twenty. And for every ten tubes that are mounted there is arge convex lens he made hungover from the room.

    From there, for every fourrge convex lenses, there is one evenrger convex lens hung from the wall andstly, these threerger lenses faced the inner end of therge metallic cylinder that is facing the southern star.

    This inner end also has arge convex lens and there are some runes that are inscribed on the inner surface of the cylinder and the outer end which is facing the southern star is also a lens.

    After mounting everything ce while checking if everything is in a right ce and every object is made with urate size and shape and if all the runes are still intact, Sam spent the next week, while the remaining three are working on the letters they have to write on behalf of Sam.

    After these two are over, there is onest thing to do and it is to prepare a gift.

    With that, the preparation phase for the n would be done.

    The preparation of these gifts is where the animalse into y.

    All these days they collected a lot of animals which Sam requested and from each kind of animal Sam needed a different thing.

    The first kind are the poisonous and the venomous Level Beasts. Sam collected all the venoms and poisons on their body and made the same poison liquor he made in the past.

    Even though the level 4 poison is dangerous, it wouldn¡¯t have much effect on a nascent stage cultivator. They certainly cannot kill them but there is something that can be achieved from that poison and that is making the person numb and weakening his immunity a bit.

    The poison of these creatures has one thing inmon and that is they all have an immediate but longsting effect; they wouldn¡¯t die so easily.

    So, the immune system of a cultivator which uses the spiritual energy to fight and expel the foreign objects will first try to send the poison out.

    And since, the cultivator himself wouldn¡¯t want to keep the poison for a while even if it doesn¡¯t damage him much.

    But this is not the whole gift, it is only a secondary one which will help him increase the effect of the primary gift.

    As for the primary gift, Sam collected various excrements of the three beasts they collected, the feces of the Wild root roon, the urine of the yellow-skinned monkey, and the mucus of the Red fur Ko.

    Sam collected these things and started doing experiments inside the divine dimension and apart from the experiments one thing he did was to feed vitality through the light element everyday to them.

    After one week of the treatment and experiments, the gift was finally ready.

    Now, it is time for the first step in his journey.

 Chapter 236: Message

    The next day after Sam was done with making his ¡¯Gift¡¯.

    In the study of General Spark¡¯s Mansion.

    General is sitting there sorting out some paperwork for his military recruits and the budget.

    While he was sitting at his desk and looking at the scrolls, he came across the results of their investigation towards Sam¡¯s case.

    Even though he is from the Military and in charge of border security and their training, he is deeply involved in the investigation of Sam¡¯s case.

    He knew better than anyone that is definitely not a person who is projected by the emperor. Sam is so prideful that if he wants something he would rather kill the party and take it out openly, but the Emperor actually reported that Sam stole something from the prince and killed numerous guards who tried to stop him and apart from that he also said that he tried to s.e.x.u.a.lly assault the princess as he tried to kidnap her when he was fleeing.

    But he wasn¡¯t able to because of the pursuit of the soldiers and the imperial guard.

    But General Spark didn¡¯t believe a single thing that was in the report.

    He believed one thing though and that is Sam must have pissed off the emperor big time.

    Since he has a beef with Sam and for some reason, General Mercury doesn¡¯t want to lead the investigation of this case, so he got the case for himself.

    But there is no substantial development. He has been searching for two months and there are no positive results.

    He is starting to think that Sam is not in southern star dukedom and that is if he is really still in the Orion empire.

    But suddenly, he sensed something moving above him and when he looked up he saw there was a ss jar on top of the wooden beam. But before he could make sense of what is it, he saw a bright lighting from the window on his right.

    The bright green light was so blinding to his eye that he felt his eyes burn as soon as he saw it.

    At this moment, all the people in the southern star city saw a bright green lighting towards the city.

    Some are marveled and in awe with the majestic sight but the powerful people and the experts have apletely different reaction, they can sense the danger and threat that light beam can do to them.

    This all happened in an instant.

    The person who is the target of the light beam, General Spark could also sense the threat as the second strongest person in the city.

    But it is light, can some be faster than a light beam?

    General felt his whole-body burn, the Armor started melting and soon his flesh started burning making most of his muscle fibers expose.

    He could feel that he could die at any moment, but before that happened, the light beam disappeared suddenly and he fell backward in pain.

    All of this happened in a fraction of a second.

    As the man fell down, he saw the ss jar he noticed earlier drop on him.

    He knew that whatever the liquid that was inside the jar is not exactly a good thing and he has a vague hunch on who did this to him.

    When the ss jar dropped on him, he noticed that it was open and the liquid started entering his body.

    He could feel the pain of his body burning and the liquid added made it much worse and his consciousness slowly slipped away.

    Within two minutes, many bigshots started moving towards General Spark¡¯s residence and a squad of people started moving towards the direction from where the light beam came.

    When the Duke entered the General¡¯s residence, he saw a half-burnt body and a cracked empty ss jar with some blood around him.

    He quickly checked and sighed in relief when he found that he is still alive.

    Soon, he was shifted to the bedroom carefully without waking him up and the tower head of the pharmaceutical tower, the best potion master, and also the healer from the Duke mansion all came to take a look at that person.

    At the same time, the squad who was led by the deputy general himself are all shocked when they saw what was left in the ce of the hill.

    The whole hill disappeared from the ce, leaving a huge pit spreading over many yards of the forest. And in ce of the hill, there is a letter left.

    He picked the letter and immediately brought that to the General¡¯s residence. And by the time he arrived there, there is something that he didn¡¯t expect at all.

    The healers and all the other experts are in extreme panic.

    He handed the letter over to the Duke and then walked towards a person who seemed to be the assistant of one of the healers and asked about the situation.

    "The upper body waspletely burnt and a weird liquid was spilled on the wounds.

    The healers, potion master, and even the poison masters weren¡¯t able to fully identify the liquid.

    All they could find are some traces of the venoms from some beasts and they suspect that the poison is concocted from the venoms of many Level 4 creatures.

    But they weren¡¯t able to do much since they weren¡¯t able to find the exact proportions and the nature of the poison.

    They are afraid that healing the burn before curing the poison will leave any serious after effect."

    Before Deputy General could ask more, he was shocked by Duke¡¯s action, who suddenly released his aura in extreme agitation, at the same time, he dropped the letter.

    The Deputy general picked the letter and was shocked to see the contents.

    "Good day to whoever that is reading this letter.

    This message is for the honorable General Spark and for the Duke of the Southern Star.

    I am Sam. Yes, the same person who is the wanted all over the Empire and also the same person who is supposed to be the one person who stole from the prince, who kidnapped the princess with the intention to s.e.x.u.a.lly assault her.

    I am writing this letter because I just wanted to say that I honored my words to General Spark.

    And at the same time, it is to send a message.

    First, let me rify one thing. I am not going to plead that I am innocent, or anything else about how the Emperor wanted to frame me.

    But the one thing I would do love to say is that this is my deration of war, against the emperor of the Orion.

    From today onwards, I am going to start a war against the Orion Empire and since I am already a wanted Criminal, I would behave like one.

    For one month, I am giving a month for all the officials and citizens in the empire and anyone who is still in my pursuit is going to be my enemies no matter who they are.

    This is between me and the Emperor and if you don¡¯t involve in this, I will not involve you too and in a month if I see a person who is interested in me, I will involve them too.

    As for the situation of the General. He is going to die and the more you try to save him the faster you would die. So, I would ask you to not waste much effort and increase his pain.

    - Sam."

    When he finished the letter, Deputy felt his heart turn cold. He knew Sam. In fact, he saw him up close, tearing down regiments and building a battalion that could rival a regiment. He knew how prideful that guy is and for a young man with those achievements, he has every reason to be that prideful and arrogant.

    He was rather surprised that Sam showed no retaliation at all, but now that he showed the retaliation, he was stunned and now he was a bit afraid. He doesn¡¯t know how to react at all.

    For the next two days, there were numerous events happening across the city.

    There are several letters which are been falling over from the sky thrown down by the birds all over the Southern Star territory with the same message that was written in Sam¡¯s letter to the Duke.

    The whole Dukedom is in panic mode.

    Apart from that something even worse happened to General Spark.

    They took two days to find the correct mixture of poison and after that, they took one more day to create an antidote, and then they healed him normally.

    Until then, they kept him stabilized with adequate treatment.

    But the whole new problem started after that.

    The General¡¯s internal organs started falling apart one after another. There are rotting one after another. They tried to heal it and for some time, they can regenerate the organ but the next attack started happening faster.

    After the first attack on his lungs, the second attack happened two hourster, but after they healed him, the next attack happened in one hour and forty minutes.

    The same thing happened with his liver, abdomen, intestine.

    What made it even worse is that they noticed after six hours, his body started rotting starting from the bone marrow and the muscle fibers.

    They were afraid of healing him as they knew that they would only speed up the next attack.

    They knew that something passed their eye and they don¡¯t know what it is. But one thing they know is that this is the cruelest killing method they have ever seen.

    Duke, Deputy, and everyone who knew who did that and why he targeted the General is thinking only one thing.

    The most the General did to Sam is oppressing using his authority unreasonably and threatened or thought of killing Sam¡¯s subordinate Watt. And yet his revenge is so cruel that even though Sam had a chance to kill the General with a single light beam, he is using this method to kill him.

    After four days of this constant torture, the Healers saw something they didn¡¯t see before and that is the vitality they are producing with the help of the Light elemental energy stopped directing towards the General¡¯s internal organs and is being absorbed by some foreign matter that stayed in the blood.

    Then only they noticed that there is something else that entered the General¡¯s body.

    On that day, another letter arrived at the house of General.

    "You should have seen it by now, I advise you to not let anyone touch any bodily fluids or fleshly contact with the General, do not touch any of his wounds, and stop healing him.

    Because, the more you heal, the more torture he would go through and if youe into contact with any bodily fluids or the flesh, you would also go through what the General is going through and you will be the transporter of a new gue to the kingdom, as I said before, themoners and all the officials are not my enemies, at least not yet.

    But I would say that all you leave this empire for your own good.

    _ Sam."

 Chapter 237: Herb Village

    In the forest near the southern star city.

    Sam and the rest are having a break.

    They are now moving towards some towns in the southern star to carry out their next n. But they stopped moving on the roads that areid down for regr traveling.

    Sam is taking the most dangerous route that they could possibly take and that is the forest route.

    When the empire started to build and the routes between the cities and towns are made in such a way that they wouldn¡¯t disturb the habitats of therger predators. There are many other beasts with Level 6 and higher in the nation.

    So, the normal citizens wouldn¡¯t disturb them are bring a disaster upon themselves.

    But this time, Sam doesn¡¯t want waste much time, for the journey and right now due to his improvement in cultivation and the Harbinger¡¯s upgrade in the rank, the speed he can travel is on the same level as a peak stage Level 5 beast and taking the route through the forests will cut any journey within the whole empire to not more than fifteen days, if he moves nonstop.

    But before he starts the journey, he has to give them some briefing on what their next steps are and Sam is sending three of them to the two floors of the library so that they could gather enough knowledge so that they would know what they are facing.

    As for the threat of the beasts that might ur in the area, Sam¡¯s beastly aura was fully released while he traveled and with that speed and the route he took, there are not many beasts that would care to try and mess with him and if one of them did. He had arge energy cell ready for some quick destruction.

    The beasts wouldn¡¯t really care if there is no apparent provocation from the intruder in their territory with the only exception being the intruder is as strong as itself. And from what Sam observed the humans of this world and the beasts don¡¯t exactly have a peaceful rtion, so there is a chance that there would be a problem if they detect him as a human.

    That is why he is indicating that he is a beast and that is passing by in an extremely urgent matter.

    The officials didn¡¯t know this and they are only searching for all the main routes of transport.

    They all didn¡¯t know that the fancy board Sam used to float around the city can actually turn this fast.

    But the journey for Sam is not exactly smooth sailing.

    The wind currents he is facing while traveling in the speed is actually making him face and all the other exposed skin bleed until he thought of a method and that is tempering with the wind elemental energy that he is facing on that board.

    But for now, they are talking about their immediate ns.

    "I stole the map of the whole empire from the Duke¡¯s Pce. Our next stop would be the Herb Vige of the southern star."

    "Herb Vige?"

    "Yes, the Herb Vige. That ce has the most wood elemental energy in the whole Dukedom and the second most wood element energy in the whole empire.

    That ce is a great ce to grow all kinds of herbs of the Neutral spiritual energy category and wood elemental category. Most herbs which assist in healing are cultivated there and it controls ny percent of the herb supply of these categories in the southern star and thirty people of the southwestern star dukedom."

    "What are we going to do there? Didn¡¯t you say you are going to give them a month¡¯s time, why are we moving this far?"

    "I only gave them one month for their decision to be on the empire¡¯s side or not, but that doesn¡¯t mean I will stop bothering the empire.

    Right now, we can move throughout the southern star dukedom in fifteen days and that only includes the journey time.

    In one month, we are going to move throughout the territory and visit several special ces that hold the specialties of their respective regions. And these specialties are mostly held by the Imperial authority so that they profit from selling the resources of the empire.

    As I said earlier, I will pluck the title of the emperor off that guy, and for that, I don¡¯t need to kill him or threaten his position, I just have to make sure that there is no empire left for him to call himself an emperor.

    And for that, all I have to do is eliminate the things that make thisnd an empire and this is the first step in that.

    We will strike all thends under the imperial authority in the herb vige. The supply of the whole southern star would be cut off and from there we will move to the ze Count territory and then our stop will be towards the three seashore counties."

    As Sam exined, the remaining three were surprised and didn¡¯t even know what to say for that.

    They only came out of a daze when Sam started telling them their next targets.

    "Aren¡¯t they in apletely different area, they are literally three corners of the whole Dukedom."

    Jack asked in confusion.

    "Yes, and you would know why I want it that way."

    After that, the next day they arrived at the Herb vige.

    It is only called a vige because of its limited poption. This vige is mostly surrounded by the forests and it is situated on a small slope.

    Most people cannot easily gain ess to the vige due to their importance and outsiders cannot easily buy the property here.

    The natives protect their knowledge of growing herbs as it was their lifeline. Even though ny percent of the cultivatablend is under the imperial authority, the people who work on thatnd are also the natives of thisnd.

    Their herb cultivation techniques and the maintenance techniques are not taught to anyone that easily and they would rather die than give that knowledge away if they are forced.

    Right, now Sam is inside a field that is under the imperial authority and he is checking the boundaries of the field. Actually, the vige is guarded because it is one of the important resources in the empire, but with the shadow mice as long as the person doesn¡¯t have a higher cultivation level than a Nascent, then they are safe.

    The person who is in charge of this vige¡¯s security is actually only a Nascent at the initial stage. So, this operation is as good as done.

    At this moment, Watt and others are scouting some other areas of thend. Thend is so vast that it is almost impossible for people to be at all ces at every instant of time.

    And this time is the shift changing time and along with the fact that there are no attacks for at least the past decade, they are extremelyx.

    After scouting the area, the four of them left the field and went into the nearby forest to discuss.

    Sam exined the n and they are good to go at the night time, but there is a beast that has to do its job before they could proceed.

    This beast was caught by Sam on his way here and it is an extremely versatile beast that can even survive in the territory of a Level 6 and Level 7 beasts because they are too troublesome to catch even if their residence is known.

    This is a Drunken Mole. That is right, this is a mole and it is extremely good at digging in every direction.

    It is extremely simr to a normal mole. The Drunken mole is only a given nickname given by humans due to its infatuation towards the wine. It likes to drink alcohol more than an alcoholic.

    So, Sam caught it by baiting it with a huge vat of wine and when he showed the amount of wine, he can provide it directly obliged and made a contract with him.

    That night, this Drunken mole which is named as the Drunkard is on tiresome duty.

    It went deep into the ground with a Space jade cor to store away the earth it dugout.

    The drunken mole actually lives alone unlike a general mole, and it makes its home by digging a huge way down underground and this process will be slow and it is not because of the digging speed rather the method it uses to throw away the earth. Far away from the hole.

    Now, this problem is taken care of everything goes smoothly.

    Sam noticed that the formations around the fields are not exactlyplex and he knew the reason. They don¡¯t want to mess up the energy flow of the spiritual energy too much so that it wouldn¡¯t affect the herbs inside. And particrly the formations wouldn¡¯t cover the underground part of the field, which made it easier for the mole to do what it is best at.

    After it dug the hole, it came back, and now it is the turn of the shadow mice and the Zoi termites.

    The shadow mice made some small holes inside therge hole that the drunkard made so that the small lines will spread all over the field.

    Then they took out ss bottles poured the fluid in the main hole and the liquid started spreading all over the field.

    At this moment, a bullet was shot by Sam in the night and it created a nick in the formation, enough for the termites to enter the field.

    The guards who are on guard are alerted by the bullet sound and made their way towards Sam¡¯s spot only to find nothing.

    They were alerted and distracted with the smallmotion and started searching for the intruder.

    But what they didn¡¯t know is the termites that are slowly moving inside the formation are having a feat of their lives. The herbs are slowly withering.

    "Is the liquid the same thing you used on the general?"

    Philip asked Sam curiously.

    "No."

    "What is the difference?"

    "What I dropped under the field is the concentrated urine of the yellow-skinned monkeys. It has a corrosive effect on the vitality and it doesn¡¯t have much effect on the bodies of humans and other beasts. But for the nts, the constant or concentrated application will corrode them and this is due to some microorganism in the urine.

    What I used, in general, is a c.o.c.ktail of microorganisms from the feces of the Roon, mucus of the ko, and the urine of the monkeys.

    Mucus has an ability to resist the attacks of the spiritual energy, the kos will use this mucus to stop their predators from using the spiritual energy, and the bacteria in the feces has a high rate of reproduction while the effect of urine I already exined.

    These three organisms will make it hard for them to heal because they are wounds or poison they are living beings and the vitality that the healers emit will be consumed by that c.o.c.ktail and they will grow reducing the effect of healing on their host. The organs will slowly rot away by the long duration and the fast reproduction inside the host.

    If the body is not disposed of properly, there is a chance it would spread, of course, that is on the premise the person who is touching lets his guard down and let the spiritual energy make way to the organisms without any resistance."

    "Doesn¡¯t that mean, given enough time, it can kill any person?"

    "No, a healthy person might notice in the initial stages, that is my I made an attack on the general and used the poison as the distraction. With the burns and the poison, the general is in his weakest stage letting the c.o.c.ktail grow."

    "Damn, it must suck so hard to be your enemy."

    "That is actually true."

 Chapter 238: Blaze City

    Next day morning. The herb vige is in utter chaos. Therge fields under the imperial authority werepletely emptied out.

    The lush vegetation of the herbs of various ranks waspletely gone and what reced it are the rows or withered stalks of herbs in line.

    Apart from that they noticed a letter left in the center of the field and when the person in charge read the letter, he was dumbfounded and when he remembered a portrait that came with a wanted notice a while ago and when hepared the name and the signature of the person, he was stunned and his face turned pale in fear.

    "SAM WAS HERE."

    This is the only line that was written on the paper with the symbol of Sam¡¯s signature the double S painted in the background like a watermark.

    He didn¡¯t know what to say about this and he felt his legs shaking because the word got out that Sam who recently broke through the Great realm, just dealt with the all-powerful General Spark who is now rotting away in his bed and no healer can take care of it.

    He quickly started his journey towards the southern star and he has a peak Level 5 beasts at bay luckily and he went back to the southern star territory.

    When he wanted to enter the central zone though, he was blockedpletely, because there was a gue that started inside the central zone.

    Some of the people who visited General Spark is infected and those who didn¡¯t take immediate actions are already suffering.

    Only the powerful experts such as the Duke and the tower heads are safe and even some Family heads of some noble families are no exception.

    So, the Duke ordered a lockdown just in case it turned into a Pandemic.

    The guards who are blocking sent him to a temporary meeting room that was set up in the nearby woods and the Duke came to him after some time.

    When he looked at the letter, he almost broke the table and destroyed the residence. But he gritted his teeth and controlled the anger and heard the details.

    "Ask the herb experts to see what happened to thend, that guy wouldn¡¯t take so much effort just to destroy the yield."

    He tried to sound as calm as himself, but inside he was burning from anger. He knew that Sam meant what he said, he is going to do whatever he wants and the main problem is Sam is so smallpared to the whole empire and since the whole empire is his target, he can attack wherever he wants and do whatever he wants to do and it would damage the empire.

    But they have many difficulties in finding a trace of Sam.

    "Sir, May I know how General is doing?"

    Duke came back from his thoughts and answered in a bitter tone.

    "Three days at most."

    The person who came here, understood clearly what that means, so he didn¡¯t push further and asked something else.

    "What should I do next?"

    "Don¡¯t get involved in Sam¡¯s investigation, your priority is checking if thends are okay, and if the spiritual energy in the area is alright or not. I will deal with the rest."

    The man left after that and the Duke who couldn¡¯t control himself anymore smashed the table into pieces.

    After he calmed down a bit, he conducted an urgent meeting on how to deal with Sam. Sam is now like a fishbone in his throat.

    He doesn¡¯t know how to report the matter to the Emperor.

    And after some long and hard discussion and debates, they came to the conclusion.

    "We will organize a special investigation team which would be led by a Nascent and the rest being Grand Realm cultivators. Since there is a high chance that thends will be damaged, then we will report to the emperor after we catch him and hand him over.

    Send someone to visit anyone who he was friendly with in the past. Everyone who had a rtionship with Sam and is still in the Southern Star, enquire them and bring them here. After catching them release a rumor that we caught them and are nning to use them as hostages for Sam toe out."

    Even though all of them agreed for the first half of the n, the second half waspletely surprising them and there was a person who rejected as soon as the Duke spoke.

    The Deputy General.

    "Sir, I strongly oppose and disagree with this." He stood up from his seat and said this out loud.

    The rest of them although someone disagreed internally, didn¡¯t have that big of a reaction.

    The Deputy general continued.

    "You might have forgotten the report on Sam. He is very sensitive when the people near him get targeted because of him. Why do you think the Cougar family disappeared? You would just increase his rage and his wrath is not something that we can estimate.

    Because, from what I saw and observed, the most dangerous trait he has is not his professional titles, not his high talent, and not his off the charts battle prowess. It is his calm during rage.

    He wouldn¡¯t act like a normal person. If you try to y with his emotions, he would just leave thempletely and if you start using the people who have a rtionship with him, he might involvemoners and the military. We have more to lose."

    "Do you have a better idea?" Duke asked frustratingly.

    "I think it is better to negotiate and if possible and you want to save the Dukedom out of the mess, drop the whole Sam thing and wait for the thing to pass and that is if we cannot catch him."

    "Negotiate? Leave that guy and drop the investigations? The whole Dukedom against a Great realm youngster."

    One of the officials yelled even before the Duke and the Duke himself silently approved of the question.

    That meeting ended and they don¡¯t know what they have brought upon themselves and the worst part is the Deputy General was in charge of the investigation while another squad went to bring people who are friends with Sam previously.

    But Deputy General didn¡¯t want the things to blow out of proportion and followed them in the name of investigating the ces that Sam previously stayed which are ¡¯coincidentally¡¯ same ces as the previous friends of Sam.

    At least, he made sure that they aren¡¯t hurt or mistreated by the arrogant officials.

    They got their hands-on Shawn, Freya, Haley and they didn¡¯t even leave Hawk and Kelly despite their elders¡¯ authorities, and even Drew and Ray wasn¡¯t spared despite their not so close rtionship.

    But the Deputy General got something else when the rumor started flying around about the hostage situation.

    The person from Violet dew family contacted him on his own ord when he was in the Falcon Cliff city as he was searching for clues in Sam¡¯s old house.

    And he got the most shocking news which he was most afraid of and wanted to contact the Duke as soon as he can and he was praying that the rumors didn¡¯t reach Sam yet.

    So, he went to the Marquis city as fast as he can so that he can talk to the Duke in the emergencymunication device.

    While all this happened, Sam was also busy.

    As soon as he was done with the fields in the Herb vige, he went towards the ze city. This is the fire elemental herb and fire elemental spiritual stones of the southern star.

    This city controls the forest in which they made fields of fire elemental herbs and a mine of fire elemental stones with a mine.

    He came two days after he was done in the Herb vige. The ze city¡¯s core is the Earthen fire of the magma that was under the ground and all the fields and the mine are above that earthen fire which spread over thousands of yards.

    After Sam entered the city, they didn¡¯t have to do any preparations because Sam already prepared whatever he wanted.

    At night, the guards are having a meeting with their superiors, because they just got the news that Sam dealt with the Herb vige and they have to be careful. But they didn¡¯t know they made the stupidest decision because of their assumption that Sam wouldn¡¯t be able toe to the ze city at all in this short time.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is Sam is fully busy with his new invention, he was directly using here for the first time and he came up with just now.

    This is a formation he made based on the design of a formation blueprint he obtained from the Pce of Inheritance.

    The formation he referred was a formation named Lightning Cage. This one is actually a way to userge elemental storage that will be ced under the ground and the nodes will make the energy to form a cage around them.

    It is used for defensive purposes and guarding a post or a house.

    He looked through it and understood what is happening almost instantly. He knew that it is aplex design and it is a high level on at that, but it is still very simple as he followed the energy patterns and, in few hours, he was done finding an equivalent form of this formation for fire elemental energy.

    So, they scouted the whole field which has earthen fire and when they got the proportions right and when the meeting was held which saved effort for Sam to make a distraction, he and his friends started nting the specially made formation nodes which are a form of a fire elemental energy cells.

    But before activating the formation, he blew up arge energy cell in the middle of the field and escaped the field and started the formation.

    By the time the guards came to the field all they could see was a series of fire pirs around the whole formation and the magma seeping outside from the center on to the fields and the mine going unstable with the spiritual energy currents.

    The in-charge understood they are in a formation but before he could decide what they have to do, another explosion was heard and they ran back to the office in which they just had a meeting.

    And over the rubble there was a letter.

    And the content was the same as the letter that was obtained in the Herb Vige. But there is an additional note.

    "Sam was here.

    And by the way, if you want to smash open the formation I advise you don¡¯t because, once you do that, the mine will be unstable and out of control at the same time, the magma will start spreading all over the city.

    With that, all the fields, homes, and the lives of the citizens will be gone."

 Chapter 239: Porpoises

    ze city was ruined in just a single night and all the people in charge were dumbfounded by the letter.

    He could see the formation and its level and even though he is not confident to understand it, he is confident that he can break it, but now that the magma is filling up inside the formation, he is having a hard time because just as what Sam said, the whole city has to be moved in order to control the loses and even then, the mine will be closed and rest of the farmers¡¯nds will be ruinedpletely.

    But would convincing the farmers be easy? Absolutely not. Evacuating the city, because the farmers are the citizens withnds, houses, and other property, they wouldn¡¯t leave it, when they knew that there is a chance that they can retain them.

    So, all he can do is report the letter to the Duke.

    Deputy General came to the Marquis city at the same time as the in charge of the ze city to the southern star city.

    At this moment, both of them got news that surprised them and that is the General Spark was dead and there was nothing intact left of his remains, not even his bones and skull. The worst thing is that there is not even proper burial for those rotten remains as they are afraid that the gue would increase and a pandemic will raise.

    Deputy started his journey towards the southern star city to attend the funeral and this funeral is done in the most unnatural way.

    And that is burning the whole house along with the remains.

    But due to this dy of them delivering news something else happened.

    Sam is moving towards the Indigo Sea city at that time and to get some reason, he wanted to get some new info and sneaked into a vige.

    And the news he received made his gaze grow cold, he didn¡¯t want to interrupt or involve the citizens too much but the Duke is involving the people who are acquainted with him. This is again pissing him off. He just wanted to fight against the authorities directly, but since the authorities want to involve the innocent, two can y this game.

    All this while, he only damaged the property under the imperial authority and he made it so discreet and nomotion that not many people would know about it. The authorities can still make up some stories to save their faces.

    But if the people really know that the supply of the herbs would be cut off, then there would certainly bemotion and many things change. Sam wanted to y a long game and he wanted to see a gradual growth in themotion.

    He never wanted to have an active part in increasing themotion at all. But now that they want to change the rules of the game, he would love to y along.

    Sam restarted his journey towards the Indigo sea city.

    This time though, he changed his n a little bit. Two days after he entered the premises of the Indigo sea city, which now doesn¡¯t have that its signature indigo sea, he entered the forest instead of the city and that forest beach and his three friends went on different ways to search for something.

    As for Sam, he went dived into the city with the diving suit he made previously and started scouting the shallow waters.

    The attack this time would be his biggest attack of all three he would be doing and this time, the results might not be as immediate as in two other cases, but this time, he would be doing something that would have the most impact on all the shores in this whole sea.

    This time, his target is the spiritual stone mines of water elements that are near the shores and shallow waters of the three Count territories.

    These mines are actually a way more important and prideful source because there are some wars with the enemy empire near that seashore. Even though there are not many transportation methods in water, the wars were very intense with flying type and water type beasts, and the most bloodshed was done here than thend borders.

    Thus, four mines were under the Orion empire and two mines which are a bit far from the Orion empire are upied by the enemy empire.

    Underwater mining is a lot moreplicated because essentially the number of underwater beasts is more near the mines whenpared to the beasts ofnd near their respective mines.

    The sea is one of the things that man could never fully conquer. It is the most dangerous thing after outer space. Even in his previous life, there was a lot of sea that was still unexplored.

    And in this world where the technology rted to the seas is limited it would be very difficult to do something in the sea.

    Sam is also sure of one thing and that is the strongest existence of this at least in terms of beasts will definitely in the seas of this.

    Anding back to the mines, there is a high level of danger and two mines of the four are attached to the shore and the authorities mine it from thend by isting the shallow waters by the formations.

    As for the other two, there are a bit far from the shore and arepletely submerged.

    In those mines, there was aplex structure of formations are created and many constructions are done with so much effort and they are done with the help of very high-level formation masters and the formation nodes are made by the very high-level artisans and Sam guessed that even the tower heads of the imperial capital.

    The formations not only have to deal with the water pressure even though it is less, but it also is still not that small.

    Apart from that, they have to see the attacks of the water type beasts all the time.

    But the most important thing is that there is a great chance that there might be a high-level beast that might get attracted by the spiritual energy from the mines and attack.

    The formations are made in such a way that they could buy enough time for the people inside to escape even if they are attacked by a very high- level beast.

    Sam got all these details just by scouting for the next three days.

    And he also noticed the reason for no high-level beast attacks, because the area is shallow for the truly bigger beasts toe here.

    On the third day, the four of them gathered to share the information and Sam has onest thing to check.

    "Get inside the dimension, we need to go deeper into the sea. Even though the waters at the indigo sea are deep, there is a reason for the rest of the beasts to not show up and now they just abandoned the area because of that.

    But I have to see if there are any beasts near the vicinity and check their size to confirm my assumption if they are really avoiding the area because of the constraints made of the sea bed.

    Or any other issues and I have to confirm which type of beast is the king here for the next step of our n."

    "Isn¡¯t it too dangerous?" Jack asked

    "Well, I have an escape route, don¡¯t I?"

    After that, Sam dove into the water again and after crossing all the areas where there is a slightest of the human activity, he entered the deeper regions of the water.

    He took out Mia so that she would get some more exposure and freedom.

    After they swan for more than a thousand meters, Sam noticed something on the sea bed.

    The sea bed is filled with a type of crystalline structure. Sam dived deeper and crossed that crystalline structure and entered another region. But after going a few meters deeper, he and Mia sensed a very fearsome aura. This made their hearts grow numb and Sam instinctively walked back.

    His beast bloodlines are acting upon instinct and even though he is confident that the beast is not a high bloodline species, it is a beast which is definitely a lot stronger than him, he didn¡¯t even feel this much trepidation from the emperor.

    After some time, he saw that there was a school of fishing towards them and he realized that they are not a school of fish but a shoal of porpoises.

    He didn¡¯t immediately recognize what type of porpoises they are, but he did recognize they are far stronger and both of them turned their tails and swam back.

    The porpoises followed him very fast and he felt as if he wouldn¡¯t make it, he let Mia into the dimension and was about to take the scroll, but he saw something that made him surprised, and then he noticed that the porpoises stopped their pursuit and turned back.

    Sam noticed that this happened right at the line of the crystalline structure. He dove deeper into the sea and went near the crystalline structure and noticed that there are many crystalline structures like this and almost made a long wall on the sea bed.

    Sam picked up a smaller crystal and he even tried to break some from the wall which was easily done.

    He stored them inside the dimension and went back to the shore. Now, he has to look into what type of beast he was facing and how he can make use of them, and how does this crystalline structure help in achieving this goal.

 Chapter 240: Aqua Crystal

    Sam and the gang are now inside the dimension and the crystal is hidden underground by the Drunkard.

    As the guys are having a meal, Sam is going through the bestiary, to see what kind of Porpoise beast is that came after them and the only clues that he has are the crystalline wall that stopped them in their tracks and the unclear view of the creature itself.

    It took more than two days and a revision of the data of both minerals and the beasts.

    They are called Grey Fin Porpoises and they live inrgemunities and the crystal that is forming a wall is actually an active material just like the rubies he got from Maya. I.t is called Aqua crystal

    But the energy it emits is not pure and the water around it will be contaminated by this, it was all too coincidental that the Grey Fin porpoises don¡¯t like these crystals as they would numb their senses gradually of, they stay in that region.

    Thankfully, the Aqua crystal¡¯s contamination range is not toorge and the water is not polluted with high concentration as it would be diluted by the entire ocean.

    Now, Sam understood why the Porpoises didn¡¯t attack the spiritual stone mines. The aversion towards this crystal is more than the attraction towards the mine.

    And judging by the aura he felt and the shoal that came after him, Sam knew that the leader of the wholemunity of the Porpoises is very high-level and it would definitely be a Peak six level at a minimum. Otherwise, judging from the bloodline of the Grey fin Porpoises it is actually quite difficult to control shoals and shoals of Level 4 Porpoises.

    There is a high possibility that the leader would be a Level 7.

    Sam is now thinking of how to use this.

    There are two ways and one way is to irritate the Porpoises so much that the aversion towards the crystals would be ovee by their irritation he causes and the second way is a very gradual way and it would be slowly mining away the whole crystal wall which almost covers the whole seashore of three count territories.

    But the second method would be more effective and the results would be longsting, the only thing is it would also take considerable time and effort to do this.

    So, he has to think about what to do, to reduce the time and effort of this. One way to solve the issue would me making a suitable machine but that would also take too much time even with the consideration of the time advantage he has from the second floor of the tower.

    After some serious thought, Sam had a mischievous but a sure-fire n.

    After that, he exined the n to the remaining three and they started moving again. The first step of the n is to sneak into the Indigo Sea city and go to the Golden-Horse trading union in disguise.

    Sam walked in like an old man and a cloak. He had a hunched back and a staff in his hand to support himself while walking. The cloak has several concealment inscriptions which made his face invisible. He even used an illusion inscription to subconsciously make the people think and make them ignore his face.

    Sam walked towards the section where the minerals are traded and ced a piece of Aqua crystal on the table.

    "Do you have this crystal in stock?" He asked in a husky and shaking voice.

    The person-in-charge started examining the crystal and didn¡¯t find it familiar and Sam knew why because unlike the rubies, this aqua crystal doesn¡¯t have many uses other than spoiling something, at least he didn¡¯t find any in all the data he has. This is actually a minor mineral that only upied a small space even in the whole database that Ling Tian provided him.

    But this is going to make things easier for him.

    "Excuse me, sir. May I ask, if I can ask my supervisor to take a look?"

    "Well, I am notfortable about parting with the crystal, it is highly valuable." His voice sounded hesitant and ufortable.

    This made the person in charge eye the crystal once again and said.

    "My supervisor, woulde here and take a look in your presence, please don¡¯t worry."

    After that, a middle-aged man came towards the counter and examined the crystal with no results.

    "Sir, we don¡¯t have this crystal in stock, if you could exin what it does, we can ask around in our other branches."

    "If you don¡¯t know, what it is then let us just leave it at that. It would be no use asking it in other branches if you don¡¯t have it in yours."

    Sam took the crystal back like it was a treasure and left the ce like he was in an extreme hurry.

    The Golden-Horse employees didn¡¯t stop him. But the supervisor has a different expression and he called over a young man and whispered something in his ears which made the young man follow Sam into the streets.

    Sam walked slowly as if he is really weak and the young man caught up. He held Sam by his cor and dragged him into an alleyway.

    "Now, old man. I heard from a bird that there is crystal in your possession from a mysterious origin. Come and tell me all about it, if you don¡¯t want any trouble."

    He released his aura of a Peak Novice which is kind of a big deal in a Count city. Sam shivered in ¡¯fright¡¯ and took out the crystal and gave it to him before spilling the beans.

    "I heard that this crystal can be obtained on the sea bed of the seas of the three count territories. I heard this from a dying young man in the woods, I read from his journal and research that these things can be made into a device that can help a cultivator underwater. The research was mostly destroyed and only this page remained.

    He took out a damaged page with a title of the project of the underwater breather and then the sketches of the crystalline structure and the properties of the crystal.

    "I just wanted to try my luck and first see if you have any stock of this crystal."

    The young man kicked Sam and said.

    "If you want to live, you better keep your mouth shut." He stole both the crystal and the research note and left the ce.

    Sam smirked under his cloak at the scene. This is exactly what he wanted to do.

    He left the city and in the next few days, there are simr scenes in all the coastal cities and old men were being kicked and stolen from the aqua crystal and the research notes.

    Sam and his friends went into the forests near the shore and then started cutting the trees and left an open ground with stones piled in a particr pattern which indicated.

    "SAM WAS HERE."

    He made it in an extremely isted ce but it was big enough.

    After that, he slowly disappeared without any trace as usual and started thinking about his next target while he monitored the reactions that he did.

    Soon, in a week there are many mining operations that started at the seashore. Even though it is hard to mine underwater, the aqua crystal is not that hard and is even brittle and from the ¡¯research notes¡¯ they learned that the crystal can even be powdered and still be used.

    But the thing is, there is not even a single high-level power involved in the mining, because they are not stupid enough to trust some news without confirming all they did was try to find out how this crystal and the technology worked.

    Sam guessed that it would at least take fifteen days or more for his n to be effective.

    Meanwhile, he is starting to n something else. Now, that he distracted all the attention of the officials and they think that he is going after herbs, it about time, he started changing his direction and for that, he has to find a type of beast which would do his bidding.

    And beasts might not be an appropriate description for those creatures because Sam is out there looking for some rodents a long-tailed chinchi.

    And along with that, he is also searching for a type of nt. A type of vine to be exact.

    Both of them don¡¯t coexist, but once they do, there will be something that Sam desired extremely.

    And this search wouldn¡¯t be that easy if he searched it personally, but once he takes the help of the cities, that would be a whole another thing.

    Now, Sam is moving towards the northern part of the southern star where the chinchis would be avable and Watt along with Jack is moving towards the city next to the Indigo sea count city so that they can find the nt that they wanted.

    They would meet at the location of their next operation which is the north-eastern corner of the southern star.

    As Sam¡¯s ns are being smooth sailing, the situation in the southern star city was not at all same.

 Chapter 241: Headache for Duke

    In the southern star city, the Duke is having a great headache, the next day after the funeral of the General Spark, he got two important news. One is the ze city fields were destroyed and, in that ce, there is a formation which would let the magma flow out like a river if destroyed.

    The next thing is the news brought by the Deputy General or now the new General of the military from the Violet Dew family.

    The news is about how Sam threatened them that if Kelly is harmed then he would massacre the whole Violet Dew family irrespective of the age, gender and their innocence.

    From what he understood; Sam never did anything to the innocent people no matter how much he craved revenge. He didn¡¯t kill the soldiers when he was going against the whole battalion by himself.

    Even now, he destroyed torge fields and a mine, but there are no casualties at all.

    The Duke has to agree that he wouldn¡¯t be able to do so even with his power, there would definitely be some casualties but Sam is ying carefully in order not to cause that.

    But now, if Sam gets pissed off about his method, by holding his friends hostage, then this streak of careful nning might end and he might go on a rampage.

    But it was toote. Now that the news was already spread there is nothing much we can do.

    They have to wait and see how Sam would react. But there is one more thing that grabbed their attention.

    Sam¡¯s, travelling speed. He was at Herb Vige one day and in the ze city two dayster.

    This is something out of their expectations. They didn¡¯t expect that Sam would have a transportation means of this level.

    They felt that it is almost impossible and there is also another possibility and that is a group of people are helping Sam do these things. But they don¡¯t know which to consider and only has one choice left and that is to consider both possibilities. From the first one they have to think of Sam¡¯s next attack n and for the second one, they have to increase the investigation and also consider the possibilities that there are more groups out there.

    But the amount of skill and the methods of nning these attacks are very high end that a person who is not as skilled as Sam wouldn¡¯t be able to execute it. He felt as if the emperor had opened a pandora¡¯s box.

    He doesn¡¯t know how to react and he has yet to report to the emperor about the fields and how Sam is going on a rampage all over the southern star.

    "General Mercury. Alert all the people who are in charge of guarding all the government properties and mostly herbs, do not let them ck off, increase the manpower and make sure that they stay on the spot around the clock.

    We need to make sure that Sam doesn¡¯t get to attack the third time.

    Also, make the word spread that using his friends as a hostage is just a rumour and the Duke himself rejected it directly.

    Stop the word of Herb Vige and ze city spreading, I don¡¯t want the word to reach the Emperor before we catch Sam."

    "General Fischer." The Deputy General who just got promoted stood up.

    "You will be investigating the ze city and Herb vige. See what method he used to destroy the fields and also see if there are any clues and traces left and see if it was a single operation or a group one and how many members if it was a group one. Tighten the leash on the transport routes.

    Check the forests deeper in every city and viges surroundings. Publish his friends who are with him on the run and also increase the bounties. I want the whole Dukedom to be skimmed and searched. I want Sam alive or dead in a week.

    In fifteen days, the time he gave us will be over. We have to think and find a way to stop him before that, otherwise, there would be hell to pay.

    From what he said, he would definitely start targeting the officials from that day. We should definitely find a way to catch him from that. Use all the means necessary."

    But before he could finish giving his orders, his face changed, he immediately stood up and went towards a small room in the mansion. There a screen was blinking wildly and the tform was in front of it. He ced his hand on that tform and the screen stopped blinking revealing an image of Emperor.

    "Duke Carton, it seems like you have something important to say to me, but you didn¡¯t say it yet. What is the matter?"

    Duke¡¯s face turned pale and he bowed down his head as he sweated profusely. He doesn¡¯t know what to say and he certainly didn¡¯t expect that Emperor would know this sooner than he expected.

    "I heard that wimp gave you guys one month and it is almost over, so what is your n?"

    "Your Majesty, I will definitely catch him in a week. Dead or Alive. Please give me another chance."

    The emperor stayed silent for a second and said.

    "How did the General Die?"

    Duke suddenly gulped in fear as he remembered the death of the general, he exined what happened step by step and how much the General has to suffer as his body was rotten gradually. He shivered at every sentence.

    Emperor frowned and said.

    "Publish that Sam is a traitor to the core and killed the General because he was in cahoots with the enemy empire, he is a terrorist who entered the empire discreetly so that he could cause chaos. Anyone who can kill him will receive an amount of 100 million spirit stones.

    I will give the same order all around the empire.

    Since he wants to be my enemy, then let him see how it feels to be hunted by every citizen in the empire. Make sure that he doesn¡¯t do more damage."

    The Emperor cut themunication off and Duke was feeling a great headache regarding his order.

    He doesn¡¯t know how Sam would react. He has yet to see his reaction on using his friends as a hostage and now they are attacking Sam¡¯s character again. If that guy goes crazy and takes it out on every citizen who is tempted by the bounty, the empire will see a greater loss of lives than war.

    He is worried, but he cannot just ignore the emperor¡¯s orders, so he wanted to downy it a bit. Nobody likes it when their character is attacked and Sam wouldn¡¯t be an exception.

    Sam even trained an excellent battalion and upied a strategic war location near the Red rock canyon. And now he is beingbelled as a terrorist just because of a personal grudge.

    If it was himself, he would be pissed off too but since he was loyal to the empire, he would try to prove his innocence but Sam is not like that, he can stay where ever he wants and do whatever he wants and he is extremely vengeful. So, much that it is more troublesome than poking a ho¡¯s nest.

    He will haunt them like ghosts and they don¡¯t even know how they got killed at all.

    He knew that the emperor is angry but this is just adding fuel to the fire.

    But there is nothing in his hands but to obey orders and do some damage control.

    He walked back to the meeting room and gave out the new orders gloomily.

    Meanwhile, Sam is travelling towards the northernmost forests of the southern star to catch the chinchi.

    When he visited the count city of that area which is also called the Brass county, he was thinking about something. What if his action implicated the guards and all the people who are in charge of the ces he started damaging?

    Although, he wouldn¡¯t be bothered with some lives that would be lost in the struggle the problem is that he is a man of his word and he wouldn¡¯t take any lives until this month is over.

    So, he started thinking of a n to see how he can not implicate these people and he found a usible one.

    He stayed for three days in the Brass county and did some research on the underground forces and finally found the ckwater Head Quarters.

    There is a secret point where one can give a mission, he disguised himself and entered the ce.

    "What do you want?"

    The agent asked.

    "You wouldn¡¯t be able to ept the mission of this scale."

    "Oh, really?" The agent was amused. "How much do you think the mission would cost, that I wouldn¡¯t be able to process it?"

    "This would be a longsting mission and for starters how about a billion?"

    The agent was stumped. He didn¡¯t know if Sam was joking or he is for real.

    "You can ask your boss to show up, and he can deal with this. If I don¡¯t make a real deal, I would die anyway, don¡¯t you think so?"

    The agent nodded and said after a brief silence.

    "GO to this ce, he is the supervisor of all of us. He would be able to deal with that mission and if he cannot do that, I don¡¯t know who can."

    He gave Sam an address, which Sam actually knew. He only paid a visit to this ce to avoid suspicions.

    Sam visited the address in the evening, it is a house in the slums, and in the whole house, there is only one table and two chairs on either side of it.

    Sam walked in and sat on the chair and soon a middle-aged man came out.

    "I heard that you have a very big mission, May I know what is it that you want to pay that much? How many do you want to hire for this?"

    "I want to hire the whole ckwater in the Orion for a while, with a billion per month."

    The middle-aged man was shocked and then a faint killing intent started emitting from his body.

    "Don¡¯t even think about killing me. If I don¡¯t go back in half-an-hour, there would be the news of ckwater delivered to the doorstep of the Count and then in two days to the Marquis and so on."

    "Who are you?" the middle-aged man controlled his emotions and asked.

    "I am someone who you probably heard off; I want to talk to your boss. I have a big mission and all the ckwater has to do is do some publicity for me and you will get paid a Billion per month. It would be in spirit stones, herbs and minerals.

    I don¡¯t think you are fit enough to make the decision, let us go and meet your boss."

 Chapter 242: Miners town

    That night, Sam came out of an old house with a smile on his face. He just made a huge deal which will also give him some advantages.

    Although, ck water is something he would destroy sooner orter, that doesn¡¯t mean he cannot use it for his own reasons.

    The next day, the whole empire has rumours starting about something. Sam has destroyed the fields under the imperial authority due to his conflict with the emperor and because the officials are ipetent that they cannot catch Sam, they started taking their anger on Sam¡¯s friends and the people low level guards who are responsible for guarding the fields.

    They are even nning on executing them. This rumour was fresh out of over and the people who have nothing better than gossip started spreading out like wild fire. Even the authorities started hearing the news soon enough and they started to panic.

    They wanted to quell the rumours but the source is nowhere to be found.

    Sam is using the ckwater to do this. In a war particrly an internal war, the one with most information will have a higher chance to win. And one with the control over the information will have even higher possibilities.

    Sam knew how deep the ckwater prated into the empire and he has enough money to use them.

    Now, the whole ck water will not only be providing intel to him, they will also be manipting the information ording to his wishes.

    This will make things very much easier for him and after that, there was another news that spread that Sam is in the Indigo city.

    The officials of the Indigo city got alerted and didn¡¯t know how to react. General Fischer though started his journey towards the Indigo city.

    Meanwhile, Sam is far away from the Indigo city and is now catching the Long-tailed chinchi.

    This chinchi is unlike other rodent species. Generally, the rodents will be a bane to all types of vegetation but this chinchi is a boon for them.

    This chinchi is a natural fertiliser machine and that fertiliser is something that works wonders.

    The Long-tailed chinchi generally feeds on all kinds of nts whether they are spiritual herbs or not. And the excrement of this chinchi has a sixty percent chance of producing a seed of the herb it consumed or the excrement will be a highly valuable fertiliser for the same kind of nt.

    But the problem is if they eat spiritual herbs, they would be dying soon due to spiritual energy poisoning and their carcasses are something that the beasts would go crazy about. But the problem is the nts that grew off of these excrements will not be too pure and they would be like a mass-produced knockoffpared to a handmade antique.

    So, nobody would use these for cultivating herbs and when they are in the forests, they would increase the vegetation a lot which would attract all types of herbivore beasts and which would in turn attract the carnivores. This small rodent can start a food chain in a ce.

    But the main ability of these chinchis that attracted Sam here, is that their digestion. They are almost incapable of diarrhoea. Yes, they actually don¡¯t take the nutrient content of any nt rather they would take the vitality of the nt that too notpletely. This is the main reason for their excrements to have this type of quality.

    And why does Sam need these and not just one? That is for the next operation, he is going to use these small harmless chinchis and these would be one of the major yers too.

    They are going to execute the operation and Sam doesn¡¯t even have to do much work.

    After four days, he went to the ce where he nned to meet with Watt and Jack. They are already waiting for him there and what is Philip doing, he is in the library.

    He is in the library browsing through all the Artisan data.

    Even though, he is already a Great realm cultivator, he is still fixated on being an Artisan, Sam doesn¡¯t have many objections. Even though, the information is valuable, Sam doesn¡¯t have a problem sharing it with a friend.

    And now he doesn¡¯t have much to do anyway.

    The ce Sam met with Watt is the north-eastern corner of the southern Star Dukedom andst main source of the Dukedom.

    That is right, this is Sam¡¯sst target in the southern star.

    Authorities are having a misconception that Sam is destroying all their resources one by one, but no. Sam is destroying only the main resources of the Southern Star. The main ie and the supply sources right under the imperial authority.

    He doesn¡¯t have time or energy to mess with the minor resources of the southern star. And the presence of these minor resources is going to be one of the yers in his big n, so he is not going to deal with them.

    Now he is in a town named the Miner¡¯s town. The name of the town is self-exnatory. Near this town, there are many metal mines and this ce is where the miners and their families stay.

    The majority of the weapons, armors and all kinds of war supplies that uses metals get their source of metal from this town.

    The elemental metals are not thatmon and most of them use the neutral metals. The elemental metal wines arepletely under the Artisan tower control as they leased them from the empire that is for almost a century.

    How does Sam know? That is one of the perks of being an Artisan that too a high-level one. Chaya gave him this information.

    Now, these mines are going to utter waste at least the people of the empire.

    Because, Sam is going to use a nt and the Chinchi inbination.

    Yes, the nt that Watt and Jack went to get.

    This is looks just like a type of grass and it grows where the mineral content is high, particrly a metallic one and an abundance of rocky terrain. This nt has another function and that is releasing some kind of gas.

    This gas is invisible and it causes extreme nausea.

    The main advantage is that this grass doesn¡¯t even grow that long.

    It will grow very short and in very small creeks. It doesn¡¯t even take that long. Even though, due to its size the gas expulsion is not that effective and only works in the smaller range, the mines are ces where the space ispact and dark.

    This ce is an extremely great ce to use this.

    In this ce it is extremely great to use this, since getting rid of it is also difficult. As for just burning the whole thing, it is actually a worst thing to do, because if it burn in arge quantity, there would be some serious diarrheal affects for the inhaler and the entire Miner¡¯s town wouldn¡¯t be able to escape from the effects.

    If inhaled in high amounts, even the Nascent stage cultivators will have bear the suffering.

    But before he does that, Sam has to train these chinchis.

    Even though, he doesn¡¯t like doing this, he has to and at least these chinchis wouldn¡¯t be seriously harmed.

    Right now, Sam is using the negative reinforcement training.

    He ced all kinds of nts that these chinchis eat along with the Nausea grass. If these chinchis eat any other nt than the Nausea grass, they would receive a ssh of water from Sam.

    This went on for two days and after that, Sam had the shadow mice over and exined them how things work and what to eat what not to eat.

    Why didn¡¯t he tell them earlier? The chinchis don¡¯t have as high intelligence as other beasts, they only act on their instincts.

    After two days of exnation. Sam left these chinchis discreetly in the mines.

    But he didn¡¯t leave them by themselves, he stayed in the mice for the next week along with these chinchis. So, that they won¡¯t die in the hands of the miners, but his worries are unfounded, the miners didn¡¯t care much about the rodents because they are actually looking exactly like a type of mouse species that live in mines.

    And since the miner got used to them, they didn¡¯t care much about chinchis.

    After a week in the mines, Sam caught all chinchis back and went away.

    He visited one of the abandoned mines and made a mark on it.

    "SAM WAS HERE."

    His friends all sat there and had a barbeque in the open.

    As they drank some fresh fruit juice along with the beasts.

    Samid down and was thinking how far he hase since the start of his journey in this world.

    It has been three years and now he is starting a fight with the whole empire. The Emperor who can kill him in a wink is now his enemy and not only did he piss him off, he is ying with the whole empire and making him even more mad and now he is have barbeque out in the open with his friends.

    "What is our next n?" Philip asked.

    "You are asking as if you are doing something. You are going to hole up in that library again."

    Before Sam could reply, Jack already fired back.

    "I am trying to increase my arsenal of knowledge so that I can work better in the future, what the hell do you know?" Philip said in mock anger.

    "Okay, stop it. We have to see the results of the work before going anywhere. So, we will wait for a while and see how the Empire will react."

    "Then, we are on leave till then. Hurray."

    Philip started cheering.

    "Tssk. Like you care. You are on holiday from the start." This time it is Watt.

    "Watt, you are also going against me? Don¡¯t think I would beat you up."

    "Like, hell you can beat me up. I am not afraid of you."

    Just like that, the four youngsters who are in a war with the empire are having barbeque while cheering and bickering.

 Chapter 243: Label as Terrorist

    Sam moved to the nearby forests with his friends and this time, he arranged his stay deep inside ake.

    He is waiting for the aftermath of the things he had done. He is waiting for the imperial authority to realize that he is not messing around and their threats and smearing his name is a form of Childs y.

    From his calctions and predictions, the day his deadline would be over is the day the results of his actions would be famous around the empire.

    The first thing is when Sam is messing around in the miner¡¯s town, the investigators found the message he left near the Indigo Sea City. The message he left with the stone arrangement.

    Then they knew that trouble is brewing and the newly foundrge traffic of people who are mining the aqua crystal is not helping.

    They don¡¯t know what Sam even did. But one day, they learned what he did in a hard way and that came after the first attack of the Grey Fin porpoises.

    A shoal of Porpoises directly entered the region and went straight ahead towards the Under Water mine.

    They attacked without even caring about the defensive formation and the worst part is that the leader of that Shoal is a Level 5 Beast and the underlings are Level 4 Beasts. They didn¡¯t expect a single shoal would be this powerful and the attack is only a starting point.

    They finally managed to defeat the shoal with great difficulty, but the main problem came after that.

    The whole Porpoise family seemed to have gotten angry because of their attack and all of them attacked as a whole and then only the guarding team felt a huge pressure.

    The huge pressure of tens of Level 6 Beasts and an aura that is even beyond that. A level seven beast is actually a very high level and it is on par with the Marshall. But if the fight is in the water then even the emperor would have some trouble dealing with them and they can feel more than one presence of such caliber.

    "There seemed to be several Pre-transcendent beasts and that only means, there would be a transcendent beast leading them. What is happening? How did we ignore this level of threat all these years?"

    The level of cultivation of the Beasts and humans is almost same. Level 6 equals a Nascent cultivator. The next one would be Level 7 beasts which would equal a Pre-transcendent cultivator, which is the next stage of cultivation after Nascent.

    And the next one Level 8 beasts, include the Transcendent Mortal Cultivators.

    Because after the Nascent stage, a cultivator will not be a normal human but he is still mortal. These names are given based on their unnatural lifespan which would increase drastically after their breakthrough to these stages.

    Sam is still far from this anyway, but he did have his info and when the news got to him, he was stunned. The Transcendent Porpoise wouldn¡¯t even be attracted to the Spiritual stone mines, but theirmunity is so close-knit and this would make thingspletely different.

    The first shoal which strayed into the area of the mines, only charged at the mine as they are attracted to the spiritual energy, but the humans attacked them. Although they fled in the defeat, the rest of the porpoises wouldn¡¯t be so lenient.

    The next attack was apanied by hundreds of Level 4 and Level 5 followed by tens of Level 6.

    They didn¡¯t even have to attack, because as soon as they entered the area, the humans in charge of mining in the two areas left the ce.

    Just like that the underwater mines are gone and the mines at the shore are the only things left but within ten days, they are also gone.

    Now, the seashore became a restricted zone.

    Even Sam didn¡¯t expect that things would be like this. He didn¡¯t expect the scale of the threat these porpoises would cause. He obviously didn¡¯t expect that the Porpoisemunity have a Level 8 as their leader.

    He also wondered no matter how big the beast is and how strong it is, they are still irritated by the small aqua crystal which causes irritation to them and they are averse to it.

    He was stunned about this because, from what he understood, the Level 8 can just ignore all of these, heck, it can ignore the attack from a lightning strike while it was still in the water at that level. But now it is still showing an aversion to aqua crystal, and it is still sticking to its basic instincts.

    Anyway, simply put, the whole coastline was a lost cause for the Empire.

    They lost all the resources, including the mines, the seafood, coral materials for auxiliary purposes, everything.

    Now, if they want to have some seawater they have to think twice.

    The Porpoises took a hold of all the coastline.

    At this moment, General Fischer was shocked by the sudden development and he has a feeling that this situation is somehow rted to Sam.

    But he doesn¡¯t know, how and at this moment, a letter was dropped at the doorstep of his temporary house.

    "How are the Porpoises? By the way, if you want to me someone, me the people who plundered the Aqua crystal. The crystal is the one keeping the Porpoises at bay, and now that they took them out you all have new neighbors to share the sea.

    _Sam."

    General Fischer, copsed into his chair and he didn¡¯t know how to react. Sam really did up his game. Since the Duke kidnapped his friends, he made the people themselves ruin the whole coastline. A sea which is a treasure trove is now a danger zone where they can only go but never to return.

    If the people knew that their greed was the one which made this, how would they feel? If they knew that their emperor pissed off someone and their Duke pissed off that person even more by holding his friends hostage and that person just went on took their anger out on them. How would they feel?

    Now, the people of the empire are also getting involved. He has a feeling that if things haven¡¯t escted Sam would have just taken care of the mines and left the ce.

    At this moment, another shocking news came to his notice and that is Sam¡¯s signature was left in one of the abandoned mines near Miner¡¯s town.

    This made his heart turn cold. He can guess what Sam would have done to the mine.

    So, he asked.

    "What is the situation?"

    When he understood the situation, he doesn¡¯t even know what to do anymore. Everyone is Nauseated in the mines? When they tried to burn out any form of gases, they are having diarrhea?

    He didn¡¯t even know to react or report the situation so he left the job to the person in charge. After calming down a bit, he went over all the situations and he found out one thing inmon. And that is Sam didn¡¯t harm the people directly and he didn¡¯t do any drastic.

    He made his moves, discreetly and he didn¡¯t even damage the core of any resource with an irreversible attack.

    Of course, the fields and mines cannot be remedied and not anytime soon and they didn¡¯t have any methods, but that doesn¡¯t mean, Sam doesn¡¯t know about them. As far he was concerned if Sam wanted to damage them permanently he can just st them off as he did with the Van family.

    But there is no such thing.

    He immediately called Duke from the nearby Marquis mansion and reported his observation.

    Then only they came to the conclusion that Sam is going easy on them and when the Duke recalled the Emperor¡¯s new orders, he suddenly became fearful.

    All this while, they only smeared Sam as a thief and he acted mildly, if the order of the Emperor reaches and that makes all the people hate Sam. This might make him act like a terrorist.

    After all, no matter how much a person avoids the opinion of all the other people¡¯s opinions, it is still too much for a prideful youngster to bear millions of people calling him a terrorist, cursing him.

    Emperor wants to use public opinion to make it hard for Sam. He wants Sam to lose his cool and go crazy in which situation a person is very highly prone to make mistakes.

    Better, if Sam¡¯s breaks downpletely mentally, that would be great for them.

    But is Sam really a normal person?

    All this time, they just saw Sam doing damage, but they didn¡¯t gauge the scale of the damage he did and certainly didn¡¯t analyze his actions. Now, if they consider their new observation, things might not be good for them.

    It would be better if those things don¡¯t happen, he took a deep breath and gave an order to manipte the rumors and made his subordinates not publicize Sam as a terrorist. But the worst part is that he is veryte.

    Right now, Sam is looking at a letter passed to him by the ckwater agent about the news of him and his friends being terrorists. He has an extremely evil smile on his face.

 Chapter 244: The Guardian

    Sam held the letter in his hands and closed his eyes. Right now, he is back in theke in which the divine dimension was held.

    Philip looked at the letter and the contents in it surprised him too.

    He didn¡¯t expect that they would bebeled as a terrorist. He was thinking if Sam is sad, or angry or depressed, but he wasn¡¯t able to guess his emotion.

    After some time, he braced himself and asked.

    "How are you? What should we do next?"

    Sam opened his eyes and an evil smile appeared on his face.

    He stood up and said.

    "I have had many titles in my like and I earned every one of them and to be honest I don¡¯t like anything thates free without my efforts and qualifications. So, now that I am awarded a title I never possessed or worked hard for, how about I make it real?

    They have seen me as an artisan, they have seen me being a fighter, they have seen me being a formation expert, they have seen me being a military trainer and they have seen being a businessman. They have seen me in all these forms, so they gave me those titles.

    Now, they haven¡¯t seen me being a terrorist, but now they are giving this to me.

    So, I will let them see me being a terrorist."

    He looked at Philip who was surprised by Sam¡¯s words and said in a cold voice.

    "And what does a terrorist do? Create terror.

    Emperor was too long in that ce that he felt, the vanity, greed, luxury, respect, reverence. He felt them for too long that they went into his head and made him think he can do whatever he wants, but now, I will make him feel terror.

    Everything I have being, I was always unique and now I will be a terrorist who is one of a kind and will show how the terror feels.

    The whole world shall tremble and think once, twice, thrice... tens of times and hundreds of times, beforebeling me with something.

    I will make the Emperor, quiver in his boots. I will make him regret being born. By the time I am done with him, he should feel like asking my permission to breathe."

    Sam yelled at the end of the sentence as he looked upwards.

    He looked at Watt and said.

    "Get ready, we are going to be really busy."

    After that, he came out and took out the Harbinger as he moved towards his next location.

    He is traveling towards the South-western star Dukedom.

    The next target of his ns.

    But this time, he is not going to use the same methods as before.

    Everythinges with a price. Even though he doesn¡¯t care what other people think, he doesn¡¯t care how people curse at him. The Emperor still doesn¡¯t have enough right tobel him a terrorist.

    His pride and arrogance are not allowing that to happen, at least not without paying a certain price and for every title he earned, Sam paid a price. And for being the terrorist they called him; they have to pay the price.

    All this while, he didn¡¯t cause much harm to the natural resources because he didn¡¯t think that nature is the one that has to suffer due to man¡¯s mistakes and every natural resource is a gift.

    And after this empire is dissolved, the neighboring empire will take the lead to merge this one.

    At that time, the people will not have any problems as the ces he had messed with can be repaired back to normal, but now, since he is a terrorist and people chose to believe so, they have to suffer a bit.

    Since the Emperor wants to use people against him, two can y this game.

    At the city which is the border of the south-western star Dukedom and the southern star. Sam stopped a bit and visited the local ckwater branch.

    He has a token in his hand which will give ess to all branches in the empire and he can collect info and give tasks from any ck water branch.

    But how does he know that ckwater won¡¯t betray him? Because, in most cases, shady organizations have more integrity than the government.

    That is true in both of his lives.

    The government due to its dominance and their face of ¡¯righteousness¡¯ always feels superior and conceited. They slowly forget the fact that they are in a symbiotic rtionship with the people, but the shady organization who do organized crimes stays in the dark enjoying the little freedom they have to know that their existence depends on their payers who are essentially people.

    And a big client like Sam is not something they want to lose. So, they finished their tasks sincerely.

    Right now, Sam is here to look for information and to pass on some information.

    "Pass on the info that I entered the Southern Star and add a statement, Any man who has balls can try and catch me and give them info on which ces I am going to attack. And this time, I wouldn¡¯t care about any person that is on guard. I am not responsible for their lives.

    Tell the citizens that Sam who is now a terrorist is going to be one for real since authorities painted him to be. Tell them that their lives are just now sold away that since the empire doesn¡¯t care about him, he doesn¡¯t care about the citizens of the empire if they want to live, tell them to stay away from me.

    Then do some publicity in Southern Star..."

    Sam gave all the information left and right and moved away.

    He went into the divine dimension in the woods and said to Philip and Jack.

    "I think this is thest chance you will get if you want to leave. This time, the shit is real. It wouldn¡¯t be as smooth sailing and this time a lot of other people other than authorities will also be our enemies, the history will write me down as the viin who tore down the empire into pieces and if you don¡¯t want to bear the guilt or weight on your shoulder, it is better to leave now.

    I will drop you at the border of the empire, and you would be able to leave and escape, you can even join the thunder god temple."

    All he got in reply was silence. If you want to prepare, then go and train yourself. We are having tough days ahead and go train for sneaking and assassinations and escaping techniques."

    For these words though, both of them ran towards the second floor of the tower. Sam looked at Watt and said.

    "Go and train. I have to go hardware mode."

    Meanwhile, in the imperial capital and the imperial pce.

    A man whom Sam is familiar with just walked in. He is the person that Sam was warier the most in this life and a man who Sam didn¡¯t understand at all.

    He entered the imperial pce as if it was his own home. He entered the imperial court and yelled.

    "Emperor Orion,e out here."

    Emperor came out and looked at the man angrily.

    "Vickers, how many times did I tell you? Don¡¯t call me like I am your servant. I am the emperor."

    Yes, this man is Vickers who is also the person who Sam met before.

    The creepy middle-aged man who deduced that Sam has two elements with a nce. This man is the one whom Sam couldn¡¯t deduce.

    "You can bber about your fragile egoter. I am here to take about something else." Vickers was pretty serious, unlike the time when he talked to Sam.

    "What is it?"

    "What is my promise for the empire?"

    "Why are you asking that now?"

    Vickers just stayed silent and the emperor continued.

    "You will guard and save the empire in case of invasion to save the empire."

    "What is my role then?"

    "Guardian of the Empire."

    "You do remember that I won¡¯t bother about the internal conflicts that your government and you create right?"

    Emperor frowned at this and said.

    "What do you mean by this?"

    "Sam."

    "You know that guy?"

    "Better than you think? Do you know what kind of person he is? Are you tired of your authority?"

    "Do you think a little wimp can threaten my authority?"

    "Authority? Your head will roll in a few months. Do you think he is some kind of little kid that you can throw your weight around? Now branding him as a terrorist? Are you out of your mind? If he really does defect to the enemy empire, the armies of yours wouldn¡¯t be much use at all.

    Do you know, how he can train a battalion and won a city that your big ass armies couldn¡¯t even get?

    If he trains their armies, what do you think happens?

    And he killed a General a Nascent stage cultivator like a dog which died of rabies. Just because you are stronger than a Nascent, you think you can escape fate?

    You might be stronger than a Nascent, for him, a Nascent or a Transcendent doesn¡¯t differ much since the power difference is too vast.

    He can think of a way to kill a Nascent, he can think of a way to kill a transcendent. It doesn¡¯t matter. If you don¡¯t try to make a truce with him, you don¡¯te running towards me. I wouldn¡¯t care and by the way. The indigo sea and all the coastline ispromised.

    There is a transcendent level Porpoise along with more than ten Pre-transcendent level Porpoises upying the whole coastline. Good luck dealing with that."

 Chapter 245: Attack and Escape

    After saying what he has to say, Vickers left the ce. His promise to the empire was only guarding external threats, not internal threats and issues, and certainly not an issue that involves the fragile ego of the emperor.

    He has to keep an eye on a lot of things himself. He came here so that he can show how serious he is about this whole thing and advise the emperor to not push Sam¡¯s buttons.

    And most of it is because of some selfish reason. That is, he is not confident that he could handle Sam if he defected to the enemy empire.

    That is right, he has followed Sam¡¯s actions and the most important observation he made was about his talent in military training. He can fight with the enemy emperor of his level, but he cannot attack the lower-level soldiers which would be hical.

    But if Sam is on the other side, he has absolutely zero confidence that the Orion could win.

    It is crazy that one young man could make this much difference, but that is the sad truth, which he cannot deny.

    But his efforts are wasted, not because the emperor didn¡¯t heed his words. But rather it is already useless that Sam is already pissed off plenty and he lost all kinds of thoughts on a truce.

    Right now, he is moving towards a metal elemental spirit stone mine in the Southwestern star Dukedom.

    The word about his challenge to the emperor and his deration that he would be the terrorist theybeled out to be stunned the citizens, now they started questioning the authenticity of the emperor¡¯s notice.

    But the next information diverted their attention. It is news about how Sam killed a General by careful nning.

    This news coupled with the first news that Sam would be behaving like a terrorist, they suddenly have a fear of being attacked.

    Particrly, the workers in the mines and fields.

    They don¡¯t know how to deal with this. They felt as if there was an invisible sword hanging over their necks.

    And they are seriously considering leaving the mines. But at this moment, an interesting announcement came from the son of the Duke of South Western Star. He is not of the same age group as Sam.

    He is a Grand Realm cultivator and he is the same age as the crown prince.

    "Nobody has to worry about this person named Sam. He is just a toddler who doesn¡¯t know what he is ying with. I don¡¯t believe he can kill the General nor does he have the probability to.

    All the people from mines and fields work properly. And if this bastard wants to deal with you guys, he has to go through me."

    When Sam heard this word to word notice, he smirked and said to his friends.

    "I think we need to take a detour."

    After that, they went straight to the Dukedom capital and since it is not that far away, he reached in a day. They are inside the South-western star city and Sam is already nning to deal with this guy. After all, he did say the b-word and he has to pay the price for that.

    And three dayster. In the night, there was a projectile that was shot over towards the son of the Duke and a huge st urred. Completely tearing down the whole manor along with the son of the Duke.

    This is due to the impact cannon. But what Sam shot wasn¡¯t an impact crystal shell, rather is an energy cell.

    He just destabilized the cell and shot it fast enough for it to hit that person.

    Although, the st couldn¡¯t harm a Nascent a Grand realm cultivator is still within the reach. After the death of the Person, Sam shouted on top of his lungs in the south-western star city, his voice reaching almost half of the city.

    "If you want to live, you better keep your mouth shut and mind your own business. Because, if I want you dead, then you are dead. There is no safety guaranteed for your life and even your imperial family cannot guard you, from me."

    He left the city as fast he got in here.

    This almost made all the Nascent stage cultivators and Grand realm cultivators look like fools. Sam turned out to be a real pain in the ass.

    And the worst part is they cannot request any assistance from the Imperial capital because Sam is only a Great realm cultivator and a Dukedom has multiple Nascents, this is embarrassing to even ask.

    But what can they do? Sam has a pretty versatile and useful object. The Divine dimension. In the higher realms, the Divine dimension is something very valuable and precious. Even Ling Tian who gave Sam this Divine Dimension wouldn¡¯t have thought that Sam would use this like an escaping device.

    This can be considered as borderline shamelessness. Because Sam is using the ignorance of the people at themselves toe and go into their houses as they please.

    But this time, the attack didn¡¯te without any repercussions. Every official was afraid of him now, but one person is enraged by him and that is the Duke himself.

    This time, the reaction is not that mild as in the southern star. This Duke threw caution to the wind and sent the whole city guardmand and the soldiers in the base after Sam.

    They just swarmed all the surrounding woods and Sam who is getting ready for his journey towards his original destination was stunned by this.

    He can move as fast as a Peak Level 5 beast that is when is only concentrating on traveling.

    And now that the whole forest is swarmed and disrupted, things wouldn¡¯t be so smooth.

    He didn¡¯t expect that the reaction would be this strong. Sam is actually impressed by the decisiveness of the Duke.

    And although his decision might seem to be in a fit of anger, it is actually the right thing to do.

    Because they knew that Sam is using the woods to travel and since they don¡¯t know his destination or location it is hard to locate him as the area of the search will berge.

    But now they knew where Sam is due to thetter¡¯s dominant deration. Although it struck fear in people which as Sam desired, it also gave away his location, and judging from the ce he is, one can easily imagine his next location.

    The metal mines of the south-western star.

    There is only one proper route and if they can swarm the forest surrounding this area, they have a possibility of catching Sam.

    Yes, of course, there would be some lives that would be lost in the process. But considering the amount of threat Sam could pose towards the empire, it would be the best choice. This choice is something that the Duke of the southern star couldn¡¯t make and Sam went away scot-free.

    Now, Sam is in the middle of the forest standing below a tree.

    He has two options and one of them is travel with shadow mice and be careful that the beasts wouldn¡¯t disturb, which almost impossible because shadow mice are great nutrients for snake type beasts.

    One of the reasons they wouldn¡¯t be able to survive in the wild.

    The second option is for him to just enter the divine dimension and wait it out. Slowly move with the Drunkard underground.

    But the problem is that there is a chance that these guys might try to search underground and thest thing he wants is getting his divine dimension crystal in the hands of these guys.

    They wouldn¡¯t be able to store it in their storage rings, but they might just put it in close monitoring. Of course, he can still escape but that would expose his secret.

    He chose the third option and that is getting rid of these guys forcefully. He wouldn¡¯t change his n, he has to go and destroy those metal mines, but before that, he has to force these guys to stop following his trail.

    From what he estimated, there is a Nascent and more than ten Grand realm cultivators along with many Great realm cultivators.

    They are advancing very cautiously and Sam might have another five minutes before they reach him.

    Sam took out an energy crystal and destabilized it. But he didn¡¯t throw it towards them, he threw it towards the deeper sides of the forest.

    And with that, he made his move. After the explosion urred, the beasts suddenly became restless and Sam moved towards the explosion. The troops who are after him followed him towards the explosion area.

    But this didn¡¯t stop. Sam took a smaller sized energy crystal which is as big as his fist and threw it deeper and deeper inside the forest.

    By now, the chaos in the forest grew too much and suddenly there is a huge aura that came from deep inside the forest. Sam smirked at this, he took out another smaller energy crystal and threw it from the ce where the aura ising from and this time, he suddenly changed directions and moved towards the troops.

    Arge elephant type beast followed him. And behind that elephant even more, elephant type beasts starteding.

    These are the lords of this territory and the forest is their home, since their home was being destroyed of course they woulde out.

    At this moment, the Nascent who just entered the forest due to the explosions was stunned to feel the aura of the elephants charging towards him.

    His mind went nk and his attention was sessfully drawn away from Sam.

    And this all Sam needed.

    After luring the beasts towards them, he took out harbinger and suddenly hovered in the sky.

    He disappeared in a sh as if he was never there.

    The Nascent who is in charge of the pursuit couldn¡¯t even decide what to do.

    Because he knew about these elephant beasts. The ones that came out are only Level 4 and Level 5 but the elephants live inmunities and their leader is Level 6.

    If he doesn¡¯t handle the situation properly, there will definitely be a problem awaiting them.

    The elephants might damage the city.

    So, he started ordering the soldiers to retreat slowly.

    Sam escaped the situation smoothly. Even though, it seemed like the situation was easy for him. He is on tenterhooks. The energy cells are a pain in the ass, as it can mutually destruct him along with the enemy.

    The shadow mice are not very suitable in the wild. Because their presence is not insignificant but it is not strong enough for the beasts to avoid it.

    The drunkard can only fool the vision, not other senses.

    He can still escape by using the divine dimension. But this would bring some spections. Sam might consider himself superior but he would never think that all the people in the empire are stupid.

    He knew better than anyone else, that spections based on logic tend to be right most of the time and Sam disappearing from a ce instantly will draw some spections and if this report went to the higher-ups and someone who knows about the divine dimension might give him a hard time. After all, there is no guarantee that the divine dimension is invincible.

    Now, with his actions, he can stop some of the spections and the people will think that he always used the forest as the only cover.

    As for his sneaking into the city, they can employ it to the disguise techniques and his skills.

 Chapter 246: Metal Mines

    The Metal mines are quite close to the Southwestern star and it is quite risky for Sam to make any shy moves.

    If it was like previous mines in the southern star, it is still alright because all his methods are discreet andplicated.

    But now that he needs to teach the emperor a lesson for painting him as a terrorist. Sam has to do something shy. He has to create terror in the citizens, workers, and officials.

    The best way to do that would be killing people left and right, but Sam doesn¡¯t like that much, so he is going to choose the second-best option.

    He will do the damage in a fearful way. He doesn¡¯t need to kill the people directly, but it is necessary to make sure that they know that he can kill them.

    And the fear of an unknown person holding their life in their hands and a motive behind him to act. This is something hard to ovee.

    Sam moved towards the Metal mines at his full speed.

    Unknowingly, he made a good decision by luring the beasts towards the forces from the south-western star.

    Because, of that, he realized that the metal mines, wouldn¡¯t be able to get reinforcements that easily and with this, he got a new idea and discovered a new way of attacking the cities and Dukedoms.

    That is using the beasts and he can do the same to the Metal mines.

    These metal mines of this dukedom have three mines. One of them is the metal elemental stones and the other two are the mines of two different metals.

    If the three spots that he destroyed in the Southern Star are the three major resources of the southern star. Then this ce is only one major resource of the Southwestern Star.

    Of course, there are some minor mines and herb fields but they can hardly satisfy the needs inside the Dukedom much less exporting.

    But this mine is major source of trade of this Dukedom. Not only does it satisfy the needs of the Dukedom¡¯s metal elemental stone supply.

    The southern star and the southeastern star get their metal elemental stone supply from here.

    Now, Sam is staring at this ce from a nearby mountain and was nning on how to deal with this.

    He can use the Chinchis again, but the required effect couldn¡¯t be achieved at all.

    He has to make some big scenes leave a seriously big and bright symbol that terrifies the people around it.

    And all of it is a metallic ce.

    The problem at the southwestern star city will take at least a week to be over and that is judging by the fact that they can intimidate the elephants and send them back. If it bes a battle, it will take more.

    And two days are gone in the journey. So, Sam has five days to deal with this ce and move on.

    Since this Dukedom doesn¡¯t have any other major resources, he can just move away from here.

    When he saw the metallic zone like this, he is tempted to do something with electricity. But he doesn¡¯t have a lightning element which would make it easier for him to create electricity and it is hard to create a trap like the one he created in the ze city.

    He has to make sure that the resource wouldn¡¯t be lost and the people wouldn¡¯t be able to ess it while delivering a serious blow that would cause fear in people.

    He is thinking hard and after a day of thinking a single Idea popped up.

    But for this, he needs the help of all his friends.

    The first part of the n is to create disorder and chaos in the area. He has to make the miners and the officials go into a state of unrest.

    And for that, he has a perfect option.

    The Methane Grenades which he used in the Imperial capital to deal with the trouble makers.

    These grenades are great to cause some shy damage.

    The next day, four of them hovered in the sky on their beasts. They started dropping the grenades on the formation of the Metal element spiritual stone mine.

    "What is happening?"

    "Someone is attacking."

    "Oh, shit look at that. Someone from the sky is dropping something on the formation."

    The workers are in extreme unrest and Sam and the gang left the ces as fast as they came.

    There is no real damage at all.

    "Shit. Jack, Philip formation is stronger than I thought, let us leave this ce." Sam yelled on top of his lungs and four of them left the ce in a hurry on their beasts. They disappeared into the nearby forest.

    The formation protected all the workers, but the main thing is that the workers saw the effect of the grenade, and Sam¡¯s attack was like a probing attack, it is as if he doesn¡¯t know that the formation is there in the first ce and since his attack failed, he left the ce to escape.

    This made people afraid. Now, that Sam knew that mine wouldn¡¯t work, what if he attacks them next. What happens to them when they are in their residence. They already heard that Sam wouldn¡¯t care about their lives now and is a full-fledged terrorist.

    Even though they didn¡¯t know that the attacker was Sam, they could guess that much from the rumors, the rumors the ckwater guys created.

    The Nascent who is the guardian of the ce is the one who is most frustrated.

    He has kept a lookout on the surroundings of the ce and is checking, the ground and sky, all the same, to see if Sam would attack.

    But Sam easily sneaked past the perimeter he setup and attacked the mine. And the worst part is before he could go back to the mine, he escaped.

    Sam is like a slippery loach. It is hard enough to spot him and even he was spotted he can escape swiftly. The worst part is now his friends are also attacking.

    The Nascent read the report before. There was very little activity of Sam¡¯s friends, in southern star. But as soon as they arebeled as terrorists, they are also attacking.

    One genius is already troublesome enough.

    The guardian is cursing the emperor left and right in his heart.

    The miners slowly started feeling fear and fear is extremely infectious. One by one everyone is afraid to stay near the mines and this way, the Nascent was forced to give a holiday to all the miners in three mines.

    The whole mining activity was stopped and special formation has been activated which would activate on the presence of an intruder in a certain range.

    But what they don¡¯t know is even before the mine was closed, a shadow mouse entered the minepletely.

    Yes, Sam and his teammates are inside the mine. As soon as they escaped, the miners are in a frenzy and this is the best time toe in.

    After the mine was closed, they came out. The mines are equipped with the best concealment formations that they could possibly afford. Because the leakage of the spiritual energy will attract beasts and if a powerful beastes here, there would be some serious damage.

    Right now, Sam and his friends are inside the minefield. In this minefield, there are a total of three mines. Two metals and one metal elemental spirit stone mine.

    Sam has a lot of spirit stones with him and his wealth almost equals the annual output of the mine.

    Generally, the spiritual stone mine wouldn¡¯t run out of supply for centuries.

    They are formed by a spiritual meridian as a core which is a naturally formed concentrated spiritual energy substance and the energy that is being dissipated from it, and deposited to the surroundings causes the formation of spirit stones.

    So, they stay there for centuries and Sam can only destroy them temporarily. That is why he set up a trap in the ze city and now also he is nning the same.

    But before that, he has one more thing to do and that would be the duty of his friends and his beasts.

    That is the extraction of the spirit stones.

    Right now, the whole mine is surrounded by soldiers and they are allpletely concentrated on protecting the perimeter.

    So, now Sam and his friends have a great opportunity to mine the spirit stones.

    The metal element spirit stone will fetch at least four normal spirit stones.

    So, while Sam is getting ready to set up his n, his three friends along with the beasts are on their way towards getting the spirit stones out.

    Of course, the cannot take them out all at once, they can at most get a hundred thousand or two. But the spirit stone is not major goal and they are just doing it to get a quick profit.

    Meanwhile, Sam is making his preparations.

    After four days, Sam and his friends are done. They are ready to leave and at the same time, the people outside are having a hard time. They are feeling that Sam is only bluffing and their patience is running thin.

    So, it is about time they leave.

    But before they left, they entered a special ce in the minefield and that ce is the Inventory.

    The mined items are handled in a certain manner, they are absolutely not going into any person¡¯s personal storage. The miners have to strippletely and wear the provided uniform and their storage rings should be handed over.

    They will be given a temporary storage ring in which they would store the mined things.

    These items would be stored in a special room, where only the guardian could enter. He will deliver these storage rings every month to the Dukedom.

    Right now, there is a fully stored store room inside.

    Sam took all the storage rings and tweaked with the ce a bit to leave some gifts.

    After that, they silently sneaked out of the ce and this time Sam was surprised because the rm formation actually detected the shadow mouse when it passed through it, then only he felt relieved that he sneaked in before the formation was set up. The formation might have a feature of detecting life force.

    But now he didn¡¯t care. After leaving the formation, they sneaked into the woods and before the people coulde, they are gone.

    The Guardian immediately went into the room and only found it empty with a letter stuck on the wall. He was stunned by the scene and after a brief silence, he pulled the letter with shaky hands. He was surprised that the letter was attached to a wooden stick that was pierced into the wall. He pulled the stick out of curiosity and...

    *BOOM*

    More than twenty methane grenades sted the surroundings of the room.

    There is no damage inside the room because it would be a pipe dream to damage a Nascent with that level of methane.

    The guardian read the letter which has one familiar message.

    "SAM WAS HERE."

    At this moment, a worker came running.

    "What happened?"

    "The... The Mines."

    The guardian came running towards the mines and was stunned by the scene.

    The mines arepletely filled with green colored translucent crystal structures. All the walls are almost as if they are carved out a green crystal.

    This is the impact crystal. Yes, Sam used the impact crystal on the walls and floors of the mines.

    Now, if they want to mine, they have to go through the impact crystal first.

    While the guardian was in distress, the workers are having already quivering in their boots. The twenty sts that urred when the guardian pulled the stick achieved their purpose because they are ced near the miners changing areas. The room was empty but that is still not okay for them.

 Chapter 247: Deal with Arian

    The news went all over the empire. The miners immediately quit the job and, in many ces the same things kept happening.

    The miners are not happy with the situation and slowly the butterfly effect happened.

    This news actually intrigued someone who is far away from Sam.

    The Arian empire.

    The enemy empire of the Orion.

    In the imperial capital, two days after Sam was done with the Metal mines, the emperor of the Arian empire got the news and was surprised at first and was then delighted.

    He has heard of Sam. Not only because of the Red rock canyon issue but also because his son also visited the thunder god temple and saw Sam¡¯s deeds.

    When he heard of how Sam even sold the techniques in the Pce to the remaining candidates, he couldn¡¯t help but feel extremely surprised. Because it is not every day that a character as unique as Sam pops up.

    His spies in Orion reported back on how Sam was dered as a wanted criminal, how he killed a General, and how he made short work of the major resources of the Dukedom.

    He is very interested in this unique genius.

    So, the next thing, he was on a Level 7 Thunder Vulture a Pre-transcendent beast, and within one day, he is near the border of the southwestern star.

    He traveled at an altitude that wouldn¡¯t let anyone see him. He traveled above the clouds andnded in the nearby woods, and slowly made his way towards the border camp.

    He gave the person in charge, some instructions, and waited for the results.

    Three days after dealing with the metal mines, Sam sneaked into the nearby city to know the reactions and the waves he caused by the ckwater.

    But what met him was an invitation. That is right, an invitation from the emperor of the Arian.

    This quite surprised him. The agent from the ckwater saw this and said.

    "We give spy services too and they asked if we can get to you and if we can give you this message. They don¡¯t know we have this contract. You don¡¯t have to worry about that."

    Of course, the invitation is not a card or something. It is just like Sam¡¯s message on how he would attack the metal mines. But this message is low-key than Sam¡¯s and the general public has no way of knowing it.

    There was a location along with the message and funny thing is that the location is actually a barrack in the military base.

    Sam went back to the slums where they actually made a residence and discussed it with his friends.

    Sam actually has a n to meet the emperor of Arian. But it is not now. Because meeting an emperor is not something that easy. And to make a deal he has to have more aplishments on his side to have enough leverage.

    But the emperor contacting him now is not something he expected.

    As he thought about it, he decided to make a visit and see what the emperor wants from him.

    So, that night, Sam started his journey towards the border of the southwestern star.

    The way to cross the border was left to the Shadow mouse and after entering the territory of Arian. He came out in a dested solution and directly walked towards the military base.

    Why didn¡¯t he enter the base directly? Because there is no way he would do something right inside the territory of a Transcendent.

    So, he walked in, directly. He pinned all his professional badges on his ck feather coat and entered the base like a normal person.

    The soldiers are not surprised by his presence and apparently, they seemed to be informed about his visit and they even guided him to the barrack he was supposed to visit.

    Inside the barrack, there was only a single table with two chairs on either side. A middle-aged man sat down on the other side of the table.

    The man has sharp features. His body is sturdy and his robes are simple. He didn¡¯t see any luxury that he saw on Emperor Orion¡¯s clothes.

    His majesty didn¡¯t depend on the luxury, rather his aura, his presence is the one gave him the majesty an emperor should possess. He has a sharp and clear gaze and a small smile.

    He stood up as soon as Sam entered the room. He extended his hand towards Sam for a handshake and greeted him.

    "How do you do? Mr. Sam. Nice to meet you."

    "Nice to meet you, your highness." Sam shook his hand.

    The other party is polite and the politeness is what he gets back from Sam.

    After some pleasantries, the emperor sat down while gesturing Sam to take a seat.

    Then, an attendant came and served some food, but Sam didn¡¯t eat it immediately and looked at the emperor, and said.

    "Your, Highness wanted to meet me. May I know why?"

    "Well, seems like Mr. Sam is a straight forward person, then I won¡¯t waste your time. I wonder if Mr. Sam knows about the history of the feud between two empires."

    "They are once a single empire?"

    "Yes, and a hundred and twenty years ago the empire got separated. Even though, it might be a long time. Only two emperors changed since then. I am the third emperor and so is the current emperor of the Orion.

    I want to reunite the empire again and I want your help in doing that."

    Sam raised an eyebrow and asked.

    "Your Highness, you are kidding, right? I am a mere Great realm cultivator who is eighteen years old. I didn¡¯t even reach the limit of the growth spurtpletely. What can a person like me help a Transcendent like you."

    "Well, it seems like you are the one who is joking Mr. Sam. If you were what you said, then you wouldn¡¯t be sitting in front of me right now. You would be either quivering in your boots near the entrance or you would be hysterically yelling out words of admiration for me.

    You wouldn¡¯t be doing what you are doing."

    "Well, that didn¡¯t answer my question, your highness. What can I possibly help you with?"

    "Yes, I will answer it to you soon.

    To be honest, I don¡¯t necessarily need your help, if all I have to do is upy the empire, not only me, even my father could have done that. But the problem if, the loss of life would be too high for me to start a war of that scale.

    I don¡¯t want a blood bath.

    I want to reunite the empire with the least amount of bloodshed and this is where you can help me with.

    I have been devising a n for taking over the empire for two decades, which is the time when I became an emperor.

    I have a big enoughwork in the Orion that would be on par with the ckwater. Of course, I don¡¯t have the same amount of power they have, but I do have a simr level of the information channel.

    I made many preparations to crumble the Orion from inside, but the point is, the ns can only be executed when either there are no variables or there is enough adaptability in the person who executes it to deal with the variables.

    Icked that one person and was desperately trying to cultivate one. My son, who you might not remember but surely met in the thunder god temple also the same person you just described yourself to be.

    Even though I am proud of what he has achieved today, I realized that he is not the person for this.

    I am almost losing my hope and then one day I woke and heard the news about you.

    Believe me or not, I wanted to thank Orion in person for being stupid, because for the first time in life I was afraid of a person and that person didn¡¯t be my enemy by default. Emperor Orion gave me a chance to be a friend or at least a partner with that person."

    The emperor finished and looked at Sam with a smile.

    Sam looked at him quietly without any response, because he is thinking. He met a person who he thought he would never meet in this world of pride and prowess.

    A man who knew he was afraid of something and a man who can admit openly that he is afraid of something.

    Sam always believed in something. If a person wants to improve himself, the hardest part is finding their mistakes or shorings and admitting them by throwing their insecurities away.

    And if a person can do so, one has to respect him because he would be a winner for sure.

    An emperor openly admitting he is afraid of something. Some might think he is a joke, but Sam could see a real man.

    A man who can ept his shorings and work on oveing or walking around them.

    "What do you want me to do?"

    Sam asked directly. He doesn¡¯t want to carry out the earlier conversation of him being incapable of helping. That is just for probing.

    Now, from what heard from the emperor, it is in stupid for him to do that.

    "I want six months of yours. In these six months, I want you to train nine regiments. In six months, do what you have to do and what you want to do. I only want your best effort and I would ept the results no matter what.

    And the other thing is to do what you are doing inside the Orion.

    Cooperate with me. I will invade from outside, while you reduce the resources inside. This will push the soldiers to the edge and they wouldn¡¯t be able to keep their will to live like usual.

    In exchange for that, what do you want?"

    He was straight forward and on to the point.

    Sam took a deep breath and said.

    "For the second point, I don¡¯t have any problem. Just invade the parts when I told you to do so. As for the training part. I am too weak to hold the whole armies in my leash and train them.

    Give me ten people. The most loyal and obedient. For them, all that should matter when given order is only how and when not what and why.

    In a month, I will make them trainers and I will give you a detailed training program.

    I assure you they will reach your standards.

    In a year, the Orion will be no more.

    And for all this to be done, I need somethings in advance and another thing after the whole thing is over."

    "Well, I didn¡¯t expect you to agree straight away. It sounds too good to be true."

    "It surprises me too to an extent, but that is how I deal with a person who is smart and straight forward. It has been a while since I met a man like you."

    "So, what do you want?"

    "For starters, a Level-6 Beast, for now, preferably a wind element flying type. The second request..."

    Sam said his requirements and at the end of the sentence all he met was a hand extended for a handshake to seal a deal."

 Chapter 248: The White Winged Vulture

    For one month, Sam disappearedpletely from the limelight. His presence waspletely lost. But nobody forgot about him.

    The more time he took and the more he stayed silent, the more panic they caused. The Emperor Orion was also on tenterhooks.

    He was taught a lesson with what Sam had done in the southwestern star.

    He didn¡¯t take him seriously before but now that he lost main resources of the two dukedoms, he is having a hard time thinking what is Sam up to.

    The metal mines are the worst problem of all.

    Because, the impact crystal Sam threw in is all of the impact crystal he got from the estate and even more. If they really did melt all of it with high level heat, the spiritual stone mine can be saved but the metal mines would be in deep shit. And even that they would need months before they can do so.

    It is not possible to do that without any harm.

    And from some instigation from ckwater, there was a start of the economic issue. The minor fields owners recongnized the scarcity of the resources started increasing the prices which the users didn¡¯t like that much and the robberies increased at the same time.

    The supply is not meeting the demand and there is a desperate situation where they have to import them from other Dukedoms, but that is not easy. The import is another way which increases the banditry.

    The pressure of the south-eastern star is increasing with these exports.

    Perhaps, the officials had it too good all these years, they couldn¡¯t handle the situation and definitely not in a month.

    But in this month, Sam had a lot of progress and that has a lot to do with the deal he made with the Emperor Arian.

    Why did Sam make that deal in the first ce?

    Because, he has this deal in mind from the start. From the first time he started this whole thing, he had a n to make a deal with Arian.

    After all, he cannot deal with the whole empire on his own. He can at most create some problems that could really annoy them. And make chaos, but that doesn¡¯t mean, he canpletely destroy the empire and build a new authority.

    That would be a pipe dream at least until he achieved the same power level as the Emperor.

    But he doesn¡¯t have that much time to wait, he has to deal with this guy as soon as possible and establish an ie source, so that he can explore this more.

    For that, he is going to make use of the Arian empire.

    In this month, Sam had a minor break through and so did the rest of his friends. He is a Level Great realm cultivator while the remaining three are Level 3 Great realm cultivators.

    Apart from that, he took this month to teach the ten instructors to be the trainers. He took a battalion as an example and clearly exined the ten people on how to train them, why they had to train them like that, and how those training methods will affect them.

    Even how to execute the punishments and how to maintain the rtionship between them as instructors and the soldiers.

    He gave the formation discs that had to be used for the soldiers.

    The beast battles, the team working. The elemental control.

    The battalion that was given to him was the most elite, and he noticed that these guys are even better than the guys from the thunder wolf squad.

    They caught on to everything easily and the training he gave to the previous battalion in the southern star in three months was done in a single month.

    They are almost ready for a war. Almost.

    After that, Sam met with the emperor again.

    "Train them like this for another fifteen days, they are great at teamwork and learning. The ten trainers are good they know how to prioritize and what to put first.

    Start a war on the southern star and the southwestern star at the same time. They have some scarcity in resources and from my analysis they have the imports from the western star dukedom and the south eastern star dukedom.

    Imports from the eastern star will be difficult.

    Now, I will be leave now and enter Orion. Since, you have the informationwork, you would know when to attack and which border to attack.

    For now, I need that Level-6 beast. And for the final n, I need you to help me with something."

    "Sure, what do you want?"

    "I need feces of a Level-7 fire type beast. Collect as much as possible."

    "Feces?"

    The Emperor was surprised. He didn¡¯t expect what the feces are for?

    "Of course, you heard me right."

    Emperor was really surprised. He didn¡¯t expect that Sam would ask for feces. He stopped thinking much into it and asked something else.

    "I am curious, would you be able to deal with the Level 6 beasts, do you need me to send a Nascent as an escort for you. He would be able to help you better than a beast, right?"

    "I trust the beasts better than humans. They are all true to their characters. And, I don¡¯t need the beast for my protection, rather I want it for something else. But I would need your help for some time, you have to suppress it for some time, before I manage toe into consensus with it."

    "Sure, shall we go now. The beast is already arranged."

    Both of them moved to a beast which is proudly standing.

    It is a white winged-vulture.

    Sam knew this beast; it is actually a beast with a good bloodline heritage.

    White-winged vulture is a descendant of silver winged vulture a beast which has a bloodline on par with the Golden fur ape.

    He was actually surprised. There is another Beast on the side which is also a vulture, it is a thunder vulture a Level 7 beast which is also Emperor¡¯s ride.

    It might be a Level 7 beasts, but he is not actually interested in that. The white-winged vulture can easily surpass that one. It is the one with most potential.

    "You do have a great taste in birds. A vulture. Not bad." Sam said to the emperor.

    "Really, I am ttered."

    Sam has a particr understanding of Vulture. A vulture is a tyrant of the sky, they travel in flocks, they eat live prey to dead carcasses. One might think it is not that great, but an eagle wouldn¡¯t give a shit about a dead carcass, it would rather die with its pride, but the vulture is one of the most practical thinking beasts.

    It would do anything to survive. Whatever it takes. No being in the sky will do what a vulture does for survival and Sam can rte.

    He might have pride and arrogance which was built on his achievements and hard work. But there was a point where he did everything for survival. No matter what it takes.

    He looked at the White winged vulture which was being suppressed by the Thunder Vulture. He walked towards it and sat down. With a wave of his hand, he took out most of his beasts, except for the shadow mice.

    Emperor was surprised.

    He didn¡¯t expect that Sam had these many pets.

    He brought out Yanwu, Sky, Ape, Mia, the panther twins and even the termite queen.

    He looked at the Vulture which is looking at the beasts in curiosity.

    "I am here to make a deal with you."

    Sam spoke out loud gathering its attention.

    "As you can see, these guys are my friends, and you can have a talk with them about what kind of deal I want to make, if you want to make that deal by the end of the discussion, you can tell me."

    Then he sat there as he examined the wings and feathers of the bird. He is looking for the number of silver coloured feathers among the white ones.

    That¡¯s the indication of the purity of the bloodline.

    Meanwhile, the beasts are in a discussion. They are cawing and roaring and it is very chaotic and noisy.

    Sam didn¡¯t talk about the deal with the vulture himself because he doesn¡¯t want to reveal the details to the emperor. He didn¡¯t want to reveal the cards like bloodline refinement to anyone.

    After an hour of roaring, the vulture turned towards him and spoke.

    [You can guarantee what they are saying? You can actually improve my bloodline?]

    "Yes."

    [what if you cannot?]

    "You can leave the next minute, you feel like I am going back on my words. I may not fulfill all of it now, but I can do it partially and you can decide whether you can trust me or not."

    [Okay, you have to deal with that tonight and if you can prove me that you can do so, I would make a deal with you.]

    "Sure, tonight."

    Sam stood up and put all the beasts in his dimension and left the vulture with the emperor.

    "You know beast tongue?"

    Emperor asked in a surprised tone, but Sam didn¡¯t reply.

    "I need an extremely isted ce with no disturbances whatsoever, I need extreme privacy and if I discover it was vited, we can call off the deal."

    Sam said in conviction.

    Emperor thought for a second, he wanted to ask why, but he didn¡¯t do so in the end and said.

    "Sure."

 Chapter 249: Start of the War

    That night, a whole battalion was evacuated from their quarters so that Sam can carry on the bloodline refinement.

    The deal he made with the White-winged Vulture is simr to the one he made with the shadow mice and the queen termite.

    The bloodline improvement and a better environmentpared to their current ones.

    But the power level of him and the Vulture are too far apart, so it would be difficult to for him topletely refine the bloodline, so what he made a deal that he would do a partial refinement and he is doing so now.

    The situation of the Vulture is simr to Sky. So, all need is an adequate amount of spiritual energy, but Sam cannoty down a formation of that type that would be suitable for a Level 6 beast with his current cultivation level.

    So, he madeid the best formation he couldy which is for a level 4 beast, although it wouldn¡¯t change the beast¡¯s bloodlinepletely, it can still have some partial improvement, which is what he promised to the beast.

    The process went on for two days straight and the Vulture could feel its body changing a little bit. The feathers turned more silver and it could feel its overall bloodline more superior.

    [I will give you five years, by then I want you to purify my bloodlinepletely.]

    "Deal."

    The next morning, after the refinement was over, Sam bid his farewell to the emperor and left Watt here to help them in training the regiments, and started his journey back.

    This time, he didn¡¯t use the Harbinger and used the vulture. He flew above the clouds and the journey was very fast.

    He soon entered the southern star Dukedom. In two days, the Arian would start a war on the southern star but for that, he has to create some chaos so that the war would be pretty one-sided and the reinforcements wouldn¡¯t arrive that easily.

    The soldiers are trained to follow orders, so what happens if the people who give orders have a handful.

    So, his n started.

    The first thing is, he announced his presence through the ckwater and the officials are once again tense, they know that Sam has nned something big if he was away for a month, so they are praying that he wouldn¡¯t do anything to the ces where they are staying.

    Most of their prayers were answered because, this time, Sam didn¡¯t attack any resource point, rather he made a move on the Dukedom capital itself.

    He entered the woods near the southern star Dukedom and released the ape, yanwu, and Sky. Along with the vulture, the three beasts started stirring up the whole forest.

    It became chaotic and the beasts which truly rule the area deep inside are getting annoyed and with the Vulture clearly throwing the challenges left and right, the beasts almost went crazy.

    Soon, the vulture was able to provoke five beasts which are at Level six and all of them started moving towards the outer areas of the forest where the people generally wander.

    And this situation caught the eyes of the General and the Duke.

    They thought that Sam would move towards another resource point and sent general Fischer there while General Mercury is guarding the city.

    They didn¡¯t expect that the beasts would rile up at this moment and from the looks of it, things are pretty serious.

    They immediately arrived at the forest and sensed that beasts from Level 3 to Level 6. All of them are suddenly extremely active and the outer areas arepletely upied.

    If the animals get annoyed by the human traffic now, they might consider charging at the City.

    The Duke didn¡¯t expect this situation. He immediately called all the cultivators who are Novice and above so that they could guard the perimeter.

    At this moment, Sam already flew into the clouds along with the Vulture and there are two people who are in the forest regions where Level 4 beasts are present.

    They are Philip and Jack.

    They sneaked there and suddenlyunched an attack on the Level 4 beasts and started running towards the human perimeter.

    The beasts who are clearly annoyed by the constant pestering and unfruitful results of their search all these days, are nowpletely pissed off and started following them.

    When the human camp was visiblepletely, beasts increased their momentum at the sight of massive numbers.

    At this moment, the vulture dove down and picked up both Jack and Philip with his talons and flew away.

    Before the Nascent stage cultivators present or other level six beasts could react, the vulture disappeared from their sight.

    Sam left the ce as if it doesn¡¯t have anything to do with him.

    But the Duke and the rest are having the hardest time.

    The soldiers and the city guards became busy and the beasts and humans are at a small-scale war at the borders of the Southern star city.

    And this is not the worst thing that could happen.

    Because at this moment, Sam arrived at the military base. Since all of the big shots and more than two regiments are away from the base, Samnded domineeringly with the vulture and went towards the food section of the base.

    In that section, there would be some beasts that are farmed. Just like how Sam kept a spring fowl farm and the farm for rabbits and boars, there are some types of pigs and cow type beasts here that are reared.

    These beasts are reared for the daily food consumption of the soldiers and Sam is here today to take that away.

    The resources are one of the most important factors in the war and now Sam decided that he would take that away.

    They can make sure that the soldiers can feed on the spiritual energy but how many days can they survive. They surely wouldn¡¯t be able to survive the whole period of the uing war.

    Sam, then left the ce and flew towards the southwestern star dukedom. The journey took a day and the same thing happened. Here the situation is even more severe because the elephant beasts that attacked them a month ago are still pretty pissed at humans and the forest is pretty vtile now.

    Even the hunts are banned for the time being.

    And now with Sam¡¯s intervention, there was hell all over again.

    Two dayster. The problem wasn¡¯t quelled at the city borders but the cmity struck them again at this moment.

    The Arian empire dered the war against the Orion empire in the southwestern star and the southern star territory.

    This made the dukes and the generals go pale with fear and red with anger at the same time.

    Right now, it is the worst time for war. Their internal fights are already tough, to begin with, and now an external fight ising.

    On the second thought, everything was too coincidental, Sam¡¯s return the cities being attacked, and the war at the border.

    A revtion struck them which they don¡¯t want to happen.

    Literally, every high-level noble knows what kind of training Sam could provide. Sam¡¯s battalion could be ranked as the best battalion of all. But they weren¡¯t able to get the training procedure out of the battalion.

    They were so resolved that they would rather die than reveal a single thing out.

    Even after Sam was painted as a criminal, they still didn¡¯t give a shit about the rumors, they didn¡¯t even agree for a name change.

    They are still Sam¡¯s battalion.

    Sam didn¡¯t want to give up his training methods to them, no matter the money or rewards, because with Sam¡¯s wealth he can get whatever he wants, he can make billions in a month, so what is the point.

    But if it was revenge, Sam might have given up the technique. After all, he is not a king or an emperor or any military personnel. He is more of a businessman than any of those before and the rewards from their government might not entice, but if the revenge towards Orion could entice him, what would happen?

    Come to think of it, where did Sam go for a month? Why was there no news of him at all? Everywhere he went he proimed he was there, with a deration that SAM WAS HERE.

    He made it so as if he didn¡¯t give a rat¡¯s ass about the whole empire, then why would he disappear for a month without a word. Was he that passive? In a war between him and the empire, the empire was always the passive one. He made sure it is so.

    The emperor is still unable to deal with the damage Sam had done and they are researching the ways to undo the damage done to all the resource points.

    Now, Sam came back and there is an extremely high possibility that he is helping the Arian. This is going to be a nightmare.

    The news of the war went to the Imperial capital quickly and there is also news about how Sam came back.

    When he heard that Sam was missing a month ago, he felt that Sam might have escaped since the protection was increased in the rest of the Dukedoms.

    Now, after a month, Sam came and was followed by wars.

    What Vickers said might have be true at this rate.

    He didn¡¯t think that he would be right, but it happened. He thought, that why would an emperor of Arian make a deal with Sam? Why would he lower himself to a brat¡¯s level? He wouldn¡¯t do so, that is why he presumed that the Arian Emperor wouldn¡¯t do so as well.

    That is normal because people do tend to judge others based on their own standards.

 Chapter 250: Thunder Prison and Mechanisms

    Sam is on a repetitive process now. On the Level 6 beast, moving from one dukedom to another is only a day¡¯s worth of journey.

    In every Dukedom, his first target is a resource point and his second target is the Dukedom capital, luring the beasts towards the city and then again the third target is the remaining resource points.

    He took over fifteen days in a single Dukedom and he is making great progress.

    In next month. The western star and the Northwestern star are in trouble. Emperor is fuming mad because in every border that Sam attacked there is a deration of war from the Arian empire.

    He can invade on the remaining borders if he wants to, but the main problem is the resource scarcity.

    For every major resource that gets eliminated, there will be more stress on other fronts. So, he cannot take the initiative.

    He is clearly regretting not sending a Marshall, a Pre-transcendent to attack Sam when he escaped at the first time.

    He didn¡¯t think Sam as much, even when he dealt with the ze city and Herb Vige, he didn¡¯t think much of him, only after he dealt with the metal mines in the Southwestern star and the Vickers¡¯ message did he understand the threat he is facing.

    Never did he meet a cultivator who would use his brain to this extent.

    In this world, where one¡¯s power derived his authority, politics are of little use, unless there are peers with equal strength to vie for that power.

    He didn¡¯t expect Sam at his level can cause this much damage to him.

    But now it was toote. Since the war started he had to make preparations and has to keep his Marshalls by his side, so he sent the six swords of Sword Marshalls to deal with Sam.

    And all of them are on Level 6 beasts.

    But when they reached the Northern Dukedom, which could quite possibly be Sam¡¯s next target, they didn¡¯t find any traces. Some of the patrolled the skies all day long to see Sam and the started looking near the forests of the Dukedom.

    But before they could manage, there was an attack at the Eastern Star, which waspletely unexpected of Sam.

    Now, only three dukedoms remained. They wanted to make sure that they find Sam and emperor deployed all the possible Nascent cultivators who are under the city guardmand to pursue Sam.

    They didn¡¯t know that it was a lost cause for them. Because Sam didn¡¯t bother attacking the remaining three Dukedoms.

    In forty- five days, he dealt with three Dukedoms and revisited two old dukedoms. In total, he damaged the natural resources and the food resource of the five Dukedoms which are more than half of the Dukedoms of the empire.

    Now, it is about time, he takes a back seat and rxes for a bit. Because, even with the resources of three dukedoms, it would be a great stretch to sustain the war. The Arian already had an upper hand and they are maintaining a slow-paced war with minimal attacks.

    When the empire in this state, what is thunder god temple doing?

    This is the same question Sam had for Emperor Arian.

    "They don¡¯t care. All they need is the tax ording to the territory we have. Based on thend and the resources we have. Whether we are a single empire of two empires, it ispletely same to them. As long as we pay taxes they don¡¯t really care."

    This is the answer he got from Arian.

    Sam wasn¡¯tpletely surprised by this. After all, by the strength of the thunder god temple¡¯s standards, the people here are really not that powerful and neither these resources are also not that great.

    Simply put, the conditions in the thunder god temple are too god for producing low-level products, so they are using these vassal empires to be those providers.

    This is that simple.

    So, now that Sam is clear from his Duty, he can take some rest and n for the final show-down he nned in the future.

    He crossed the border sneakily and went into Arian Base camp near the western star.

    This ce is where Emperor Arian is currently staying, so this is the safest ce for Sam for now.

    While the war was going on, he started his closed-door research.

    First thing in his list is the Thunder Prison.

    The treasure he got from the Pce. And ording to the Avatar, this is the most versatile and if used well, most useful weapon.

    Sam is now inside the Divine dimension, while Watt, Philip and Jack are sitting together in the tent.

    With the crystal in the centre.

    He held the thunder prison in its unused condition is like a small cage meant for a single pet parrot.

    But in ce of the hook which is used to hang the cage, there is a groove big enough to ce a person¡¯s five fingers.

    Sam took out a scroll, which has some information on Thunder Prison, this is the scroll given by the Avatar Sanchez along with the list of raw materials and the raw materials themselves.

    At first, Sam didn¡¯t notice this scroll, but onlyter when he was going through all the info did, he see this information.

    It is basic notes on how to use the thunder prison works.

    It is actually quite simple.

    For every usage, all one has to do is, ce his palm inside the groove on the top of the cage.

    Then they have to infuse the spiritual sense and some spiritual energy inside through the groove.

    If the prison is chargedpletely, then all he has to do is ce the prison on the ground and activate imagining the cage erging and surrounding themselves.

    They can manipte the size for a particr extent. From the size of a birdcage to the size of a medium-sized house.

    For charging of the prison, he has to keep the thunder prison in either in an environment of the neutral spiritual energy or lightning elemental energy.

    After sufficient charge which would take more than a hundred thousand spirit stones normally. But that didn¡¯t matter.

    Sam is thinking about how to manipte and how to use this more efficiently. After all, the avatar did say that.

    So, he started using observation ability on it, but what he got was an absolute shock for him.

    The cage is as small as a birdcage, but what he saw in the observation ability is veryrge.

    It is as if it was arge gigantic structure, he couldn¡¯t fathom the dimensions of it. But one thing that he could still see and feel is a glowing object.

    It looked like a brain of some sorts. Sam was stunned to see that because although it looked like a brain it is definitely not made of flesh, rather it was a brain which was made of some material unknown to him.

    At least with his level of observation, he couldn¡¯t identify the materials.

    But one thing he can say is that this brain is like a Central processing unit of aputer.

    How did he know that? Because, when he trailed his spiritual sense into the brain, he could feel himself being inside it.

    It was as if there are a huge number of small rooms inside a pce with him being in the ground floor hall. In the middle of the hall, there is a huge pool of lightning type elemental energy.

    There are many doors leading to different rooms and when he entered the first room, which has a specific glow, he saw an altar of some on which there was a diagrammatical structure engraved on it.

    He infused some spiritual energy inside and then the whole diagram lit up.

    He could feel the energy inside the pool of the hall getting excited and passed towards the first door and then spreading all over the pce.

    Inside the divine dimension, Sam opened his eyes and now, he was sitting inside arge metal cage which was covered with lightning.

    He could feel the power and could feel a sense of security.

    At this stage, it can take a full-blown attack of a Pre-transcendent and even a moderate attack of a Transcendent.

    Sam looked at the gigantic structure and started examining it.

    He is looking at various joints, observing the energy flow and many other aspects. One thing he could say about this is that is a marvel of engineering.

    Even though the engineering might not be aligned with the modern engineering he was familiar with, this prison or cage was built with so that it would have the most efficiency and effectiveness in the defence. He also noticed that not only does it block the outer attacks, but a person also cannot attack from the inside with only one exception.

    The person who is in charge of the cage can do the damage using the cage¡¯s energy.

    After two hours, the cage turned back to its initial size. Sam once again flew his conscious inside and noticed that the pool in the hall was empty and only some small fog was lingering around it and he can also observe that the fog is surely but slowly increasing in thickness.

    He took out some spirit stones and ced it near the cage and he can sense the cage absorbing the energy faster and he can also see the fog thickness speed increased a bit.

    So, he drew arge formation a million spirit stones in it before cing the cage at the centre.

    In this way, the formation will facilitate absorption more.

 Chapter 251: Glowing object of the Puppet

    After understanding enough about the thunder prison, Sam went on to the next object he has to evaluate.

    The next object is the spherical glowing object he took out of those puppets.

    First, he took out the one that belonged to the first puppet.

    Without using any ability, Sam first observed it normally. Now that there is no glow covering it, he can now observe it clearly.

    Just from his n.a.k.e.d vision he can get many details and first thing is that the object although spherical in shape looked like abination of small cubic sections.

    It is light blue in colour and each section can be felt as a separate entity.

    He pressed some sections which acted like buttons, but nothing happened.

    It was as if it was puzzle box and something would happen only if he presses the buttons in a right order.

    He closed his eyes and used the observation ability.

    He could see that the outer surface which is giving the object a spherical look is nothing but a shell or casing.

    He could see the mechanism which is making this spherical casing as a lock. Inside the hollow structure, he can see a different mechanism upying half the space inside.

    After hours of studying the mechanism, Sam finally figured out the rightbination and as soon as he keyed it in, the upper hemisphere split into four quadrants and moved towards four diagonals, revealing a mechanism inside.

    The mechanism is not an orderly looking one. It looked like a random arrangement of small cubes, but when Sam used the observation ability, he found something familiar and that reminded him of the mechanism he just saw a little while ago.

    It is simr to the brain of that thunder prison, but it is very, verymon ce and smallpared to the brain.

    In this structure also, there are many rooms. But he could sense that they are way lesspared to the thunder prison. There must be around hundred or so rooms inside.

    He sent his spiritual sense into the first room and he saw an altar but on this, rather than the diagrammatical sketches of a structure, there are some type of fist techniques that are engraved on it.

    They are detailed and precise. Sam could sense that these are some of the moves that the puppet used on him.

    He entered the next room. The altar is filled with movement techniques, the next one with kicking technique, the next one with some sword moves, wind moves,bos, fire spells,bos, water spells,bos... Every room was filled with something.

    In the centre of the hall, instead of the pool, there was a tform. It looked like it was made for a person to sit.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know how a person would enter, but he sent his conscious over to that and he himself felt as if he was able to sit there. And when that happened, he could sense all kinds of rooms and all kinds of techniques the rooms amodated.

    When he willed to get out of that, he returned back to the hall and was again looking at the tform.

    He felt that the tform is from where a person can control all the rooms.

    Since, this is a bit different from the thunder prison, he started listing the details of both mechanisms.

    In thunder prison. Only one room was filled, it has power source, which is the pool. The room will be having a detailed drawing of the structure that the prison has to change into.

    As for this one. It is simr to the brain in rooms, except for that, he could see that the rooms are already filled with techniques and the spiritual conscious of a person can take the control.

    There is no power source.

    From this he can deduce one thing and to verify that, he took out the puppet he stole from the pce and ced the sphere back inside. He created the gears with some random metal, so that he can use temporarily and fixed the puppet back.

    He ced the puppet and once again he entered his conscious inside the spherical object which was inside the puppet.

    Sam then spread his spiritual sense and suddenly the whole pce structure lit up.

    He could sense his surroundings, along with his body, he can also sense the spiritual energy in the surroundings and he can also feel the limbs and the body of the puppet.

    When he thought of walking, the puppet moved, but at that time a small wisp of spiritual energy entered the puppet from Sam¡¯s body and the surroundings and the spiritual energy travelled towards the pce and then converted itself into the motion energy. The gears and the links of the leg and the hip started moving and then the puppet took a step forward.

    Soon, it took another step forward, and another one.

    He stopped walking and sent the spiritual energy to the first room with the fist techniques and suddenly as set of techniques entered his mind and he even felt inherently familiar with the technique and once Sam thought of using them.

    The hands of puppet punched through the wind as if it was cutting through it. He didn¡¯t feel that he controlled the motion or he performed it, rather it felt as if he was driving a robot.

    He withdrew his consciousness and started drawing new spections.

    First one, the whole puppet and the sphere can form a robot.

    The whole puppet is the body of the robot, the power source will be the person that is controlling it as well as the spiritual energy in the surroundings.

    The sphere, is a Central processing unit and all the rooms inside the pce are like a storage which stores a programmed code of operation that the robots need to be performed andst the Intelligence which drives the robot, is the conscious of the person.

    Sam felt that there are some drawbacks to the system.

    Yes, the first thing he noticed are the drawbacks. First one being, the power source. If the puppet has an inherent power source, it can be more versatile, more powerful and more efficient.

    The second one, is the intelligence unit. If he can create an artificial intelligence that could handle the control of the puppet, then he would be gaining another soldier by his side.

    And this soldier is more trustworthy than any other human.

    But he was stumped at one thing though. How did the pce of inheritance control a puppet? What is the use of the imprint that Sam destroyed?

    He started thinking, he has some ideas of how to solve the issues. First one in particr, all he has to do is install an energy cell as the power source and he can even attach a magazine of energy cells near it. The magazine will be made of space jade and after one energy cell was emptied, another one can be used.

    As for the second problem, he wasn¡¯t able to think about anything easily.

    He is thinking but his knowledge is clearly limited by his abilities. Then he had a sudden epiphany after a day of brainstorming and entered the library inside the tower.

    He went towards the data rted to dark element and researched the soul section in particr.

    After more than two days inside the library, he finally got what he wanted.

    A skill specific to the dark element. An inscription master with the dark element can only use this. The Soul enchantment and Soul imprint.

    These two practices made it possible for the puppet to be controlled.

    First skill, soul enchantment, is summoning a stray soul from the death. Souls that escaped the reincarnation cycle.

    Or by forcing a soul to escape the cycle and cing attaching to an object.

    The soul which is highly rted to the conscious of a person.

    This can rece Sam¡¯s conscious in the puppet.

    As for soul imprint. This is the imprint which bounds the soul to the enchanter.

    If Sam were to use this, he can ce a soul which will use its sentience and intelligence to activate the attacks that are engraved in the rooms and the soul imprint will let himmand the soul to use the puppet as he wants and not let it cross his words at all times.

    In this way, Sam can indirectly control the movements of the puppet without leaving his body. Now he understood why there was an imprint on the back of the puppet and the string of spiritual energy that was holding the imprint.

    The pce must have used a simr method, if not the same and that string is the one that connects the puppet to the pce through which the spiritual energy will be transmitted acting as a power source.

    Sam felt that his deductions have a very high possibility of being right and after discovering the existence of this technology right in his hands and also having the raw materials in his possession, Sam felt thoroughly excited.

    Now, he has one more research direction he has to pursue.

 Chapter 252: Preparations

    After checking the mechanisms and the thunder prison, the only thing left for Sam is to create something that can help him in the near future and for that, he has to use something the Arian Emperor gave him.

    The feces of the fire type Level 7 beast.

    When the emperor gave him the feces, he was still quite confused about how Sam would use something like this.

    He passed the feces which are stored inside the spatial ring and asked.

    "May I know what you are going to do with this? I am quite curious."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and chuckled.

    The Emperor might have even got the answer if he dumped all of this in a pit, but he stored it in a spatial ring as if it was a treasure, and judging from the size of the ring, it seemed to be quite a high grade one.

    Sam just took the ring without answering and threw then inside the pit arge pit that was dug open by the ape.

    After he closed the whole pit, he went on with designing something.

    This time he started designing and simting the designs on the second floor.

    He has a lot to do and there is no way he ising out anytime soon.

    Meanwhile, the war started across all borders. The whole Orion is a restless state. Due to Sam¡¯s actions, there is an extremely high deficit in the resources. The taxes increased and the citizens have to pay with materials, herbs, beast corpses, or any other form if they don¡¯t have spirit stones.

    It has already been two months since the beginning of the war and now they imposed the new war tax as an emergency measure.

    Meanwhile, the artisans, the herb experts, mining experts, and so on are all trying to solve the problems that are caused by him.

    They are trying to repair thends and the mines. But the results are minimal. For metal mines, they know the problem, but they don¡¯t know how to solve it without affecting the mines.

    For the ze city, they even know the solution but the results will be devastating and it would take a long time to clean up the mess.

    For the Herb vige, they weren¡¯t even able to figure out what the problem is. Thends just lost all vitality.

    They tried doing many things like light elemental treatment and so on, but they weren¡¯t able to see any progress.

    After all, even though, these people did research on the beasts, they didn¡¯t go so far as inspect and memorize the effects of the urine and excrements of the beasts.

    They didn¡¯t know how to react to the situation and even the worst part is that some officials and nobility in the southern star are still infected by the gue.

    Remembering the lesson from the General Spark, they stopped trying to use the light elemental energy and only tried to suppress the gue by themselves.

    Some are not able to withstand the effects and s.u.mbed to their fates, but some people are able to suppress but there is another problem awaiting them and that is their battle effectiveness has decreased sharply.

    They have to suppress the whole gue inside their bodies while holding their feet against their enemies.

    This made them feel totally frustrated.

    But they are still okay because for now, there are only small probing attacks from the high-level cultivators.

    Because of this, they have some time to either get rid of the problem or to adapt to the problem.

    Time passed.

    Three months after the war started.

    The war till now was just a passive sluggish one. The battles are not totally intense.

    But now, the newly trained battalions from the Arian empire started entering the battle and now the war became aggressive.

    The scalepletely tipped and they are dealing with the Orion is having a very hard time dealing with them.

    They didn¡¯t know why there was so much difference all of a sudden.

    But the southern star army knew this all too well. Because they saw these techniques and tricks before. They knew this way of fighting. They experienced this style of opponents.

    This is the same as Sam¡¯s battalion.

    They knew how efficient their methods are. Even though they can also do some of their attacks, they cannot get efficient usage and the adaptability just by copying.

    The borders slowly started to shake and the bnce waspletely gone.

    Orion is in theplete losing end. At least for the soldiers who are still in the Novice stage.

    Orionmanders and the generals are starting to lose it. The worst part is that only the Marshalls are at the Borders, but the Emperor is still nowhere to be seen.

    He is still in the imperial capital thinking over things. He is cursing Sam day in and out and he is just pushing the me and responsibilities to the officials. When they tried to push him towards the responsibility, he only has one thing to say.

    "I am the Emperor, if I have to do everything myself, why would I need you lot? You are being pathetic."

    He ispletely frustrated. He was an emperor for more than two decades and all the time, his life was extremely great, there was nothing he has to do except waiting for the taxes and riches, the only people he has to bow down are the people from the Thunder god temple.

    But all of a sudden, all the problems came to him at the same time.

    In an instant, his life became a living hell from heaven.

    He didn¡¯t know how to deal with the situation.

    He didn¡¯t think for once in his life that this day woulde. All he knew that being an emperor will make him feel respected and make him the greatest person of the empire, but now, he was being tested.

    Even before this, all the wars are small he was never needed to go to the border, now he was being pressured by the ministers and the Marshalls too.

    And all of this was caused by Sam. He was cursing all the eighteen generations of Sam and is doing it so with all his heart.

    While the Emperor is cursing, Sam just came out of the tower, it was a month since he entered the tower, which means he stayed more than three hundred days inside the tower.

    He only came out asionally when the emperor wanted to meet him.

    Other than that, he waspletely busy.

    Histest invention was ready.

    This is the most expensive and mostplicated thing he has ever created since he entered this world.

    And this thing used the Level 7 beast¡¯s feces.

    The first thing he did was obviously, create a Level 7 methane. Although some properties are different from the methane he created by the cattle type beasts, it still works and this methane has a high calorific value.

    It burns with the same intensity as the fire of a Peak stage Nascent and that too if it was in its free state.

    Things will be different if it is properlypressed. With the increase in pressure and using the gas as a jet, the intensity increased by many times.

    After the methane is obtained, he used his wind element topress the gas which gave him a high-intensity me, which would give him the heat required to melt at least a low-grade, rank 7 material.

    So, he started making things one by one. He created the biggest mold he created in this life and he used the deeper regions of the ice element zone in the tower as the molding material.

    He dug out the shape he wanted and poured the molten metal inside.

    The only advantage inside is the movement of objects within the dimension can bepleted just with his will.

    Otherwise, this wouldn¡¯t even be finished.

    He worked on this for more than three hundred days.

    After everything ispleted Sam came out.

    After listening to the battle status, he knew that it was about time that themanders and Generals entered the battle.

    The frontlines are already under Arian¡¯s control, at least in the battle between Novice soldiers.

    It is about time; the next phase begins.

    After discussing somethings with the emperor, Sam and his friends went back to their tent and discussed their n.

    The new invention Sam made requires multiple users. Four people are needed for it to join and it will be using a lot of power.

    Sam has done a lot of hard work on it and it could be considered as the second most destructive invention he ever made.

    After he made preparations for the training, so they could cooperate better, they trained for a whole day beforeing out again.

    Philip went to get that day¡¯s battle reports and the next deployments.

    When Jack saw the body count, he stayed still for a few seconds and asked.

    "Why do these people have to die in this war? Wouldn¡¯t it be over, if the emperors fight and the one who wins takes the other empire?"

    Sam chuckled at the question and said.

    "The meaning of war is not just about theparison of the might of two parties.

    It is also a test for an emperor¡¯s ability. The emperor who invades has to prove that he has capabilities to lead them through this war and the emperor who decides has to prove that he can protect them.

    Apart from that, it is also a baptism for the citizens. The soldiers who are essentially part of the citizens have to go through this and this will cause the people to feel that this empire is truly theirs, they would get the feeling that they truly belong to the empire and they have some contribution in the position their empire will be in.

    It is necessary to have these requirements met if you want to have a stable empire.

    If the emperor doesn¡¯t lead them and just take over the empire by defeating the other emperor, all they would think is that it was an act of tyranny.

    So, war is not a choice that one could make, it is a necessity."

 Chapter 253: To the front lines

    The war is going on and, in a month, all the generals and the Marshalls are on the front lines. The Novices took backseats, even the Great realm and Grand realm experts are now only minor characters.

    The Nascent cultivators themselves are now having the major battles, which means it is about time, Sam and Emperor Arian moved to the Front lines and they did.

    The Orion¡¯s border was moved backward, all the territories are conquered by at least half and the southern star is the worst as the whole territory was conqueredpletely.

    The southern star Duke was extremely disheartened. Now the southern side is cleared and Arian can invade directly.

    Duke who is a Peak stage Nascent moved towards the imperial capital so that they can guard this side.

    Sam along with Arian Emperor moved towards the southern star.

    The whole dukedom which he was very familiar with came to his sight again.

    Now, he can walk around openly and no one would dare say a word about it.

    He is looking at the signs of war and the new temporary personnel from the Arian taking charge of the city¡¯s activities, the officials being captured and being interrogated.

    He sighed at the sights he had brought upon this once-stable empire.

    And all of it was caused because an egoistic prince and his father looked down and coveted his possessions and are so conceited to ept their defeat and tried to kill him.

    Now the whole empire which gave that arrogant prick his status as an emperor has to pay the price. But Sam has a feeling that it was for the better.

    Because, from all the journeys he had been in this empire, he didn¡¯t hear a single good thing about the emperor, the citizens are so indifferent towards him and they almost behaved as if the emperor never existed in the first ce.

    But the few days he was in the Arian, he saw the exact opposite. The soldiers¡¯ conditions are hundreds of times better than that of the soldiers in the Orion.

    There are many training facilities which would improve various aspects, even the food is extremely delicious and nutritious.

    Even the citizens give great respect to the soldiers and as for the poprity of the emperor, he is like a god to the citizens. They respect him so much and they identify him in a single nce.

    There are very few slums in this area and those are also only upied by some small-time criminals rather than the dirt poor.

    Even the people who have no cultivation are being given adequate safety, the city guards are working properly and there is a very less percentage of tax being collected.

    Simply put, the Arian empire is a great ce and the emperor Arian is a great ruler.

    This whole might have started based on Sam¡¯s personal agenda and there is a lot of his help in winning this one, but it is going to be a good thing for both the empires.

    Sam along with the emperor is stationed near the imperial capital. But they didn¡¯t advance. Because, in at most two weeks, the whole territory will be upied and that would be great timing to have an all-out battle at the imperial capital.

    This is always the norm, the most damaged will always be the imperial capital. The most elite of the forces are all stationed there.

    Even Sam¡¯s battalion is stationed at the imperial capital.

    As for the beasts in the wild, they all stayed put and this mainly ounted to the Thunder Vulture of Emperor Arian.

    All the beasts stayed put deep inside under the guidance of the kings of the respective forests.

    Now, all they have to do is wait it out for the final battle and show them who is the boss.

    But the waiting was only for Sam, Emperor, and other big fish. The normal troops have to move and they are now attacking the southwestern and southeastern through the border between the southern star and those two territories.

    They started doing a pincer attack and now the territories are being upied at a rapid pace.

    This increased to the point that they finished the whole thing ten days. The Dukedom¡¯s surrendered.

    Some Dukes escaped to the imperial capital and some of them surrendered. Now, only the final battle is remaining.

    On the eleventh day of them staying near the imperial capital, they finally surrounded the city wall and the emperor yelled with all his might.

    "Emperor Orion, your capital has been surrounded, yournds conquered and your armies defeated, it is for the better if you surrender, there is no need for further bloodshed."

    At this moment there was an uproar in the city, the most loss was suffered by the soldiers and then the merchants and the secondary nobles, their assets have been annexed by the government in the name of the war tax, and the most profitable are the four professional towers, their business boomed like never before.

    Their towers are only things that cannot be attacked, they are like foreign embassies in another country. They cannot be touched no matter how great the war is.

    At the same instant, inside the imperial pce.

    There are many people inside the imperial court. They are the strongest of the Orion empire.

    All of them are discussing how to deal with this when the voice of the Arian Emperor was heard.

    Many of them are having a hard enough time already and this announcement only made it worse.

    Many of them looked at the emperor viciously. If they had enough power, they would have smacked him senseless right there and then.

    This guy brought this all upon them.

    This guy and his stupid son did this and right now that stupid son is not even in the Orion, he is now in the thunder god temple receiving training safe and sound.

    Now, because of the temper of this useless father and son pair, their lives are hanging on a thread. They cannot just surrender because they might get killed by this stupid emperor and they don¡¯t have any other choice but to fight.

    Now, there is a well in the front and a pit in the back, they cannot just walk away.

    Vickers who is beside the emperor shook his head and sighed.

    He didn¡¯t expect that his suggestion was tooter, Sam didn¡¯t even give the emperor a chance to consider, he just went away and did what he wanted to do. He clearly didn¡¯t take the habit of Sam purchasing the information into ount and dyed his visit and now because of that information, everything was over just like that.

    There is no way that Orion could recover, even if by a miracle Orion could win, what¡¯s next, all the territory was upied and they can at most rule this imperial capital.

    He made his move and appeared at the entrance of the city.

    He looked at the Emperor of Arian and said.

    "How are you Arc?" He asked as if he was meeting his old friend and it turned out to be true.

    "Nice to meet you again, Old friend." Arc, the Emperor said in reply.

    "Do we have to do it this way?" Vickers asked but his gaze is not on Arc anymore, it is on Sam.

    His question was not answered. Vickers looked at Sam and continued.

    "Sam, why do you have to do this? You could have had your revenge a few yearster, with your talent, you would be able to take revenge in just a decade. Do you have to go this far? Do you have to take it to this extent, even causing a whole empire to copse?"

    Sam looked at Vickers with no expression but inwardly he was surprised, he didn¡¯t know that Vickers is someone this powerful, he didn¡¯t expect this creepy middle-aged man was an existence on par with an emperor. But the surprise didn¡¯tst long.

    "Revenge, you say. You are actually right. I can kill him in a decade, in fact, I can ughter him like amb right in the center of the Imperial capital while the whole city is watching.

    But until that time, what should I do? Do you guarantee that I can have a peaceful night after escaping? Can you guarantee that an inted and unfounded arrogance filled person like him would be able to let go of the fact that I would be able to leave unscathed?"

    Vickers was stumped. He only thought of things from his side and the empire¡¯s side. He didn¡¯t think much of Sam though. What kind of person is Sam? He saw it first hand, he is an extremely prideful person who is capable of the glory and majesty he disys. He might be arrogant but he had every right to be. Would a person of that caliber able to take a loss?

    Of course not.

    But before he could answer, Sam continued.

    "Above all else. I can still do the same right now, so why should I let the vermin that came after me, live an extra second if I can kill him now?"

    This time Vickers replied.

    "You seem to be too confident of yourselves. Are you sure you can do this? All I could see is you using tricks to make both empires fight. If you had the ability why do you have to do all this?"

    "I want to kill the emperor before killing him."

    Sam replied to him in one sentence and the spectators are confused only a few people understood what he meant.

    Sam not only wants to kill the emperor himself he wants to kill whatever that makes him an emperor. He was so arrogant enough to make an attempt at Sam¡¯s life.

    So, Sam wanted to kill that arrogance before anything else.

 Chapter 254: Duel

    The exchange of words ended between them with Sam¡¯s reply.

    He stood on his vulture and along with his friends flew away without waiting for them. He didn¡¯t fly towards the city, rather towards the woods into the clouds.

    Neither Vickers nor Arc stopped him. Because Vickers didn¡¯t stop him because he didn¡¯t think that Sam would be a variable in the uing battle.

    As for Arc, he has a whole another reason for that.

    Arc looked at Vickers and said.

    "Today, you can finally go home. You don¡¯t have to guard this ce anymore, regardless of whatever the oue of the battle was."

    "That is true. So, how do you want to do this?"

    "Whether it is an all-out battle or a duel, I don¡¯t mind. But I prefer to choose thetter. I am honestly tired of this bloodshed."

    Before Vickers could reply, there is amotion at the entrance and all the remaining experts who are thest line of defense came out. Following behind them, Emperor Orion came walking with a grim look.

    "It would be an all-out battle. The people of Orion are not cowards. We will take you on till thest person."

    Emperor Orion shouted on top of his lungs.

    "Since, when did you know what your people are thinking Oscar?" Arc asked with a smile.

    Oscar who is the emperor of Orion gritted his teeth as he looked at Arc and then turned towards Vickers.

    "Are you done reminiscing? Or did you get cold feet after seeing your old friend again? Don¡¯t you dare go back on your word? Otherwise, that old man would lose a lot of face in the thunder god temple."

    Suddenly, Vickers¡¯ gaze turned cold and he looked at Oscar. His body is emitting enormous intent to kill.

    "Come again." Oscar suddenly lost hisposure and looked down; he didn¡¯t even dare to meet the eyes of Vickers. He knew that he crossed the line.

    "I... am... Sorry." His voice shivered as a dark memory came to him.

    He had revisited his memory after many years. Due to his life of vanity and luxury, he had almost forgotten who Vickers really is and now he ran off his mouth.

    The three Transcendent people stood there in a triangle and the war had already begun.

    At the borders of the Imperial capital. The Nascent stage cultivators are the main fighters and the Novice stage cultivators, Great realm and Grand realm cultivators are just sitting ducks.

    There are some small skirmishes, here and there but most of them are looking at the battles and Sam is no exception.

    He is in the sky along with his friends and he is holding a telescope in his hands.

    He is observing the battles and one battle that interested him is the battle between two groups of Nascent stage cultivators.

    One of them is the one who he is extremely familiar with. The six swords of Sword Marshall.

    And why is that only this fight interested me, when the Marshalls are fighting? Because he is not able to catch their fights movement by movement. At most he could see their figures and some major movements.

    Nascent stage fights are his limit.

    The Six swords of Sword Marshall. These six people really deserved their reputation. Sam saw as they fought with eight Nascent stage cultivators of the Arian empire.

    Each of them is using different words. Rapier, long sword, a pair of short swords, a single-edged de, a double-edged sword, and a flexible sword.

    These six people are at great sync and the eight opponents are the ones who are having a hard time dealing with them.

    But apart from that, the rest of the fights are mostly inclined towards the Arian empire and it even included the Marshalls.

    The sword Marshall and the saber Marshall are fighting two Marshalls of the Arian empire and they are being repeatedly pushed back.

    Apart from that, Dukes, Generals all of them are fighting and it became too intense that the wall on one sidepletely copsed.

    Sam is having a hard time observing the whole battle.

    Meanwhile, the three main characters of the war. Arc, Oscar, and Vickers.

    "Shall we take it somewhere else? I don¡¯t want others to suffer."

    Arc is the one who asked this question and soon three of them disappeared.

    They arrived at the nearby woods where there is an empty ce.

    "Where is that little wimp? I want to kill him with my own hands after I am done dealing with you."

    Oscar asked as soon as they came here.

    Vickers and Arc looked at him in disdain at the same time. Even though he was angry behind the meaning of their looks, he still gritted his teeth and said.

    "What are you looking at? Between you two, there was never a winner decided. I am here to backup Vickers; do you think you can still win?"

    "Oh, why did you be so sure of that? Oscar." Arc suddenly raised his aura. The blue lightning crackled around him as the air around became suffocating.

    "You.. Did you break through Middle-stage? When did you?" Oscar asked as his throat went dry.

    At this moment, Vickers also released his aura and an aura of the same level erupted. But this one was bright light indicating the neutral spiritual energy.

    "Vickers the Warrior mage, Neutral energy. Ready for the Duel 350." Vickers said as he moved his waved his hand and the spiritual energy drew a line in the air.

    "Arc the Warrior mage, Lightning elemental energy. Ready for the Duel 350."

    That¡¯s right, these two had more than three hundred duels till now and the fact that Vickers is a Warrior mage with neutral energy is also right.

    Vickers raised his hand and made the first move. A beam of spiritual energy sted through his palm as it went straight towards Arc¡¯s eyes.

    But theter didn¡¯t budge, lightning appeared right in front of the beampletely blocking it.

    Oscar opened his mouth wide open. He didn¡¯t know that his peers became this powerful while he was enjoying a life of vanity.

    He is only an initial stage Transcendent. They entered the middle-stage. The difference might not be much, but in theter stages of cultivation, even a small gap is highly difficult to cross over.

    That¡¯s why, if a person can battle people beyond his cultivation level inter stages, they would be revered and can be treated as extreme elites.

    So, he was stunned and this is the first time, he watched Vickers using a beam. He only thought that Vickers is a warrior, but little did he know that he is a warrior mage and that too a warrior mage of a unique kind.

    A warrior mage of Neutral energy. It is actually the first time he saw one, but that doesn¡¯t mean he never heard of it. He heard of it in the lectures of the thunder god temple.

    That¡¯s right, the thunder god temple. The three of them are the students of the thunder god temple in the same generation.

    As for Vickers¡¯ ability, there was a lecture about the basics of spiritual core and stuff and the teacher said that even though, it is not seen, theoretically, it is possible for a mage to exist of neutral energy.

    He didn¡¯t expect that he would see one.

    Meanwhile, the battle has already started. Vickers is on the aggressive side and suddenly, the spiritual energy condensed into a huge axe and he swung it straight on Arc.

    Arc blocked the attack with his hand and both of them started a battle.

    Oscar himself is having a hard time catching up.

    Vickers is changing the weapon forms one by one an in-between he started using the beams. Arc however was on the passive side. He didn¡¯t even move from his ce.

    His feet didn¡¯t even budge, he only moved his hands and he managed to block every single attack, and all this time there is a smile on his face.

    He didn¡¯t seem bothered at all.

    "It is indeed as I suspected. I didn¡¯t expect you to be this strong. Were you always like this?"

    Vickers asked as he stopped attacking.

    "No. But I had some serious training over the past decade. Now, my turn."

    This time, the situations reversed. Vickers who is aggressive all this time started being passive.

    He started creating shields left and right. All of them getting shattered as soon as they were hit by lightning.

    The battle became too intense and Vickers started sweating too much.

    He is having a hard time. He didn¡¯t expect that he would be in this state.

    At this moment, arge lightning bolt suddenly struck at the back of Arc.

    And both of them suddenly stopped. They turned to see Oscar standing there with his hand extended.

    "You seem to have forgotten Arc, this is a war between two empires, not your personal duel." He said in a sinister tone.

    The three of them felt this scene extremely familiar. But only the circ.u.mstances are slightly different.

    Arc did take some damage head-on, due to it being a sneak attack, but he didn¡¯t say anything.

    While Vickers was in a daze, he smirked as he looked at Oscar and suddenly jumped at him and mmed him on the ground.

    He held his neck pressing him to the ground and said.

    "I should have killed you that day itself, but your fate is too good and I am too exhausted at that time, I would have loved to kill you this day too, but your head is coined by someone else." He said these words, with his face close to Oscar¡¯s that Oscar cannot even see the sky.

    Suddenly, he stood up and moved back. At that time, Oscar something falling from the sky and that left him no time to react.

 Chapter 255: Dealing with Oscar

    Sam was watching the fight all this time. He is above the clouds watching the whole scene in his telescope and his friends are all waiting for his cue.

    When Arc choke-mmed Oscar to the ground...

    "Its time, get ready," Sam said these words and stored his telescope away.

    "3.

    2.

    1.

    Let¡¯s go."

    With that, all four of them jumped down from the back of the vulture.

    They faced down as they let the gravity take over and when they reached a certain altitude, all four of them waved their hands and a metallic cylinder which is seven feet tall appeared below them and four of them disappeared into each cylinder.

    Within the air, the four of them are falling on the ground at the same altitude and in few seconds after their entry, on both ends of the cylinder two pipes appeared out connecting the four of them.

    Now it formed a square cage with top and bottom uncovered.

    But before long, one of the pirs shined and the thunder prison opened at the center of the cage, creating the top and filling the open sides creating a cage.

    At this exact moment, Arc got off of Oscar, and before Oscar could react, the cage over him.

    And before he knew it, he was inside a cage formed with lightning and there are four cylinders acting as nodes.

    He was dumbfounded and before long, he started feeling the power of the cage. When he realized that it is not that powerful and with some effort, there would be a chance to escape, he becamecent and said.

    "Is this one of the tricks of that wimp? Hmph... Like hell, this can stop..." Before he could finish the sentence.

    Several small holes opened on the surface of the cylinder and the Level six methane gas Sam created starteding out of it in very high pressure. The pressure was so high that the gas almost came out in the form of des and in an instant, a bright blue colored me ignited out of nowhere.

    Oscar felt some threat from the heat of the fire, but he soon adapted to it.

    "You can¡¯t do anything to me, you little wimp." He yelled as he increased his aura.

    "We will see about that." Sam¡¯s voice resounded and from one of the cylinders a muzzle popped out. The muzzle was big enough to fit a normal grenade.

    And soon, energy cells started shooting from it.

    Even though it didn¡¯t have much damage on Oscar, its spiritual energy is good enough to disrupt the energy so that his attack wouldn¡¯t work.

    This happened time and again.

    Oscar was about to go crazy. The blue me is blinding his senses and the energy cells are not allowing his spiritual energy to concentrate at all. His veins are about to pop up and then only he noticed that the energy cells are being targeted in one ce and soon a small hole was open on his abdomen. At that moment, both the mes and the energy cells were stopped.

    "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH... Are you out of your little tricks, you have no idea what a transcendent is do you? I will show you hell, you bas..."

    Before he could finish, he was stunned because, a metal spike came from the center of the top of the cage and pierced itself in the hole, but that is not what shocked him, the most shocking thing is that his spiritual energy waspletely halted.

    Then only he noticed that from the outer side of the cylinders there are some chains that extended outside and at the end of the chains there are spikes that impaled themselves into the ground.

    He could feel that this small metallic flexible spike that pierced him in the abdomen is also a part of it.

    He wasn¡¯t able to do anything. He couldn¡¯t even move his body and feel his spiritual energy. Then he noticed that the upper half of the cylinders opened and four people came out of it.

    Sam and his friends came out and Sam said in an extremely gloomy voice.

    "You are about to call me something, but I wasn¡¯t able to hear it. Can you repeat that again?"

    Vickers was stumped. He was a bit surprised when that thing dropped from the sky.

    But when he felt the low-grade rank seven materials and the level of the mes, he didn¡¯t think Oscar would be defeated, he thought that this is also one of Sam¡¯s wasted yet desperate attempts. But when he noticed the spikes that are moving and the explosions of the spiritual energy, he was surprised and before he knew it, Oscar was trapped.

    He now understood the danger and yelled.

    "Sam, this is not the ce for you. Leave him be. He wouldn¡¯te after you again. I can guarantee that."

    Sam didn¡¯t listen to his words. Vickers condensed a beam and was about to shoot, but Arc stopped him with his own attack.

    "Do you think that I am dead, old friend? Our Duel is notpleted yet."

    And suddenly within a sh, huge lightning struck, and before they knew it, Vickers was on the ground, and Arc was left standing, but he was exhausted.

    "Winner of the Duel 350. Arc. With a total of 349 wins." He said with a smug smile on his face.

    Then he turned towards the cage where Oscar was locked up.

    Sam created a small opening for the remaining three to rest. They are exhausted. Even he himself was exhausted. But he has to finish this. No matter what, he has to deal with this guy no matter what. After all, it has been months since he is holding himself back.

    "Oscar, or should I call you Emperor of Orion. I asked you, you are about to call me something, why don¡¯t you say it again? I failed to hear it earlier."

    Oscar didn¡¯t dare make a sound. He knew this was it for him. He knew that he would be dead if he provoked Sam even a little bit.

    He turned his head and looked at Arc before saying.

    "Save me, Arc. Save me. I will be your subordinate. I will be loyal to you. Please save me. It is definitely better to have a Transcendent that this Great realm cultivator beside you. Please."

    Yet, he received no reply. Arc just smiled and sat on the ground looking at the scene.

    Sam walked towards him and forcefully turned the chin towards him and said.

    "I asked you a f.u.c.k.i.n.g question. Can¡¯t you hear it?"

    "You.. you... What do you want exactly? Why the f.u.c.k did you have to do this? Because of you, I lost my empire, my status, and authority. Using these underhanded tricks to kill me? You think you are great."

    "Hahahahaha... Me? Great? I don¡¯t give a f.u.c.k if you think I am great or not. All I care is that you attacked me and I am killing you that is it.

    I want you to see, how you would feel. How does it really feel to have lost everything?

    Isn¡¯t it because you are drunk with your vanity that you dared to kill me? I took all your wealth away.

    Isn¡¯t it because of all the respect and fear you are receiving from the citizens as an emperor that you felt that I am beneath you? I took your status away.

    Isn¡¯t because of the superior cultivation strength that you dared to attempt killing me? Now I took that away.

    What do you have left with you? I will stay right here. Show me what you can do."

    Sam crossed his hands, but he didn¡¯t get a reply.

    "You cannot do shit to me. After this, I will hunt down your son and take his life. As for you, I would enjoy your death bit by bit."

    He took out the skeletal chair and sat on it. Arc was stunned to see this. His three friends are somewhat okay. Because they have already seen this.

    The chair ispletely made of arm bones.

    The forearm bones are used to make the seat and the backrest. The armrests and the legs are made of the upper arm bones. The fingers are used as d¨¦cor at the edge of the backrest.

    All the bones are coated with silvery metal giving a great metallic sheen.

    He sat on the chair and waved his hand.

    Queen termite came out. He started sucking out the life energy bit by bit. Since, this guy is transcendent, he has a lot of energy, and Queen can make a breakthrough and be a Level 6 six beast and still there is a lot of life energy left.

    Sam then let some locusts out.

    The emperor was conscious enough to feel the tremendous pain caused by the gnawing of the bugs.

    The bugs started at his toes and started eating his body bit by bit. Since he is transcendent, the body is quite dense and the bugs get easily full.

    But he has quite a lot of them, enough to finish off the whole body.

    "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH...."

    Oscar started screaming his heart out. He started sweating like crazy. He doesn¡¯t even know how to react.

    "PLEEEEAAAASSSSEE. LEAVE ME. PLEASE. I BEG YOU."

    "AAAAAAAHHHHHHHH. NOOOOOOOOOOOO NOOOOOOOOOOOOO"

    "SAAAAMMMM. NOOOOOOOOOO. SAVE ME."

    ".

    ".

    "PLEASE KILL ME. I CANNOT BEAR IT ANYMORE. PLEASE."

    His screams were heard until the city walls. His wailing started from pain to despair. He wanted nothing more than his death at this moment. In this utmost despair, he remembered one thing that could save him from this hell.

    "THERE IS ANOTHER PERSON, BEHIND THIS. THERE IS ANOTHER ONE."

    He frantically yelled and his pain eased a bit.

    "Speak," Sam said coldly. He was surprised that there is another person behind this, as he didn¡¯t expect this at all.

    "BENEDICT. IT IS BENEDICT. ELDER FROM THE THUNDER GOD TEMPLE. HE IS A NASCENT THERE. HE IS THE ONE WHO GAVE ME THE INFO THAT YOU REJECTED THE THUNDER GOD TEMPLE AND HE IS THE ONE WHO TOLD ME TO KILL YOU BECAUSE YOU MESSED WITH BEN."

    "Sure, then. Is that all?"

    "Yes... yes."

    "Then you can go. That benedict will soon follow you."

    And then he pierced the blood collector and collected some blood from near the heart and the bugs finished their meal. He stored the skeleton away and with another wave, started dismantling the cage.

    The thunder prison and then the cylinders all were thrown into the dimension.

    Sam then sat down and finally heaved a sigh of relief.

 Chapter 256: War is Over

    The war was over. The Orion no longer exists.

    The western continent reunited. And all of this happened because of one person. A young man who is a little over eighteen years old did all of this.

    He is the one of the most important reasons in the start of the war. He is one of the key factors in weakening the country and he is also one who killed the emperor of Orion.

    He did all of this because, the emperor wanted to kill him. All for revenge.

    But his revenge brought catastrophic changes to many people.

    Some of them are officials, some of them are soldiers, some of them are noble scions who lost their wealth and properties to their rtives because their parents are dead. People, who didn¡¯t want to get punished and tried to escape became war ves.

    But Sam didn¡¯t think much of this. Because, if these people wants to me someone, they can only me the Emperor himself.

    After all, he repeatedly warned them, threatened them and exined to them, that if the empire goes against him, he would go against the empire too.

    The empire didn¡¯t heed his advice and now they are paying the price. Many people cursed Sam to death in their hearts because their lives are affected. Many people became happier because they don¡¯t have to live in the corrupt empire anymore.

    But some people are curious. How did the Emperor die?

    The most curious of all are Vickers and Arc. Arc even saw the whole process, but he didn¡¯t understand it at all.

    But Sam is no mood to exin at all.

    As for how he did it. The four cylinders are made of Rank 7 materials of lowest grade. He used Arc¡¯s influence to buy them. Of course, he paid for it from his own pocket.

    The four cylinders have the puppet controlling mechanisms he found inside them. He engraved the usage of the cylinders in an empty room of the mechanism and as for the thunder prison merging with these four cylinders, this is also a result of him engraving this formation inside the second room.

    He used the mes to blind the senses, energy cells to create a small hole in his abdomen and at the same time, preventing from using any techniques and finally, he used the formation chains he found with the hydra skeletons. He merged it with the cage and the cylinders and used this to bind him.

    He doesn¡¯t know the difference in strength between the Hydra and the Transcendent. But he does know that a transcendent is an insignificant beingpared to a Hydra, so he was sure that it would work.

    And soon enough, it was done.

    He killed the emperor with his own hands.

    He did so with his measly strength as Great realm cultivator. His avenged for himself. But the two other people who are in the Thunder God temple are still alive, but since they are minor characters and he doesn¡¯t have a way to enter the thunder god temple now, he will leave it for another day.

    As of now, he has to clean up the mess. And the mess is not at all small.

    After resting for a while, he walked towards Arc who is also resting with Vickers. Both of them are not talking at all.

    Even though, their duel is not that big, the attack used by Arc is very strong that it consumed almost all of his energy.

    Sam extended his hand for a hand shake, for which Arc reciprocated and said.

    "With this, my end of the deal ispleted. Now, it is all on you. I hope you wouldn¡¯t back down. I don¡¯t have enough patience to deal with another empire. At least, I don¡¯t have enough patience to be lenient like I have been all this while."

    A threat. Sam tantly threatened him like this. Vickers was stunned and even Sam¡¯s friends didn¡¯t expect this.

    Only Arc was still smiling.

    "Of course, I will officially announce this in the Imperial capital of Arian in a few days. Take this as me officially inviting you for the ceremony.

    The ceremony will be held in a month. By that, time I will give you what is due. It would bepletely clean and everything that should belong to you will be given to you as well."

    After that, Sam and his friends left the ce. They went to the imperial pce. The soldiers and officials of the Orion surrendered when their emperor had died.

    Arc made a loud announcement while Sam entered the pce.

    There are some officials from Arianing inside to inspect and take the loot. But Arc¡¯s yell stopped them.

    "No things, shall be touched inside the Imperial Capital. People of the Imperial Capital, those who reside here, please evacuate. You will be provided a same level of residence in the Imperial Pce of Arian. As for nobles, you will be investigated, evaluated and then be assigned with your new status..." He continued on with his speech. Sam entered the pce and looked around.

    The officials arrested the princess Natalie and the Crown Prince along with the queen.

    The Harem of Oscar is quite big and all thedies have no choice but to surrender. Some of them are d because they were forced into the harem and some of them are sad because they don¡¯t know how to deal with the change in status all of a sudden.

    They were beneath queen, that is true. But that doesn¡¯t mean they don¡¯t have any authority at all.

    They have maid at their beck and call. They can do what they want to do and no one in the imperial capital other than the Emperor and the queen.

    They have riches, luxury and their lives are full of vanity.

    The luxury over the years made it almost impossible for them to expect this situation. They never thought that there would be a day when they would get to this situation.

    So, what would happen to all the people that are captured?

    They would be turned into ves.

    That¡¯s right. The captured people, no matter who they are would be turned into War ves.

    They would be in the very for a certain period of time. But it is not exactly a normal very. The people would be auctioned, but the money wouldn¡¯t be gone to the auction housepletely. Seventy percent will be going to the ve himself.

    For a decade, they would be providing services for the person who bid the highest price.

    They can be used as soldiers, assistants and such. Any duty which wouldn¡¯t go against the moral code can be assigned to them.

    If they are forced to do something that they don¡¯t want to do, they can contact the authorities with a specially assigned token or they can visit any city guard station or any other official working under the imperial authority.

    It is not as extreme as very.

    But there would be consequences if the ves go against the people who bid for them.

    There are some measures, such as ve contracts and such.

    After the decade they can either leave their job or continue their job.

    After few days of rest, Sam started his journey along with his friends on the Vulture.

    This time, he didn¡¯t rush at all. He can actually reach the ce in less than ten days on Vulture in full speed.

    But his journey was slow and rxing. He has been running around, traveling in extreme speeds all over the ce for the past six months. He needed a break.

    So, he decided that he would travel slowly and steadily. He looked all over the empire of Arian. He only travelled in high speed when he was in some barrennds or some forests.

    He stayed in the cities with not much trouble. He avoided all and any kind of confrontations.

    He didn¡¯t want to deal with any arrogant young masters at all.

    The Arian empire is something that gave him a new outlook. He saw a great society.

    At least greater than the one he saw in Orion. Maybe it was due to the contrast between twonds.

    But he didn¡¯t care much about the society at all.

    He just felt that it is a bit pleasant.

    After he arrived at the Imperial capital, he was a bit surprised. The city was at least twice as big as Orion capital.

    The people are leading a great life.

    There is still two days for the ceremony and he already saw the people who evacuated the imperial capital of Orion.

    They were transported on Level-six beasts and are given the same level of amodations they had previously.

    After entering the city, he met with the Emperor and after some pleasantries, he was led to a temporary residence that was arranged for him.

    "There is an auction going on tonight. If you want, you can have a look." Emperor said that and left the ce.

    Sam and his friends settled down and went to take a look at the city. Since, they had nothing to do, they decided to take a look at the Auction.

 Chapter 257: Vouching

    Sam and his group attended the auction house and when he arrived at the ce, the Marshall who he saw during the war came forward and guided him to a special guest room.

    "Thank you. You don¡¯t have to trouble yourselves anymore." Sam politely thanked him and sat down. After a few seconds, an attendant arrived and said.

    "Sir Sam. The head of the Auction house wants to meet you because of an urgent issue. If you don¡¯t mind, can you make a visit?"

    The attendant asked cautiously. Sam frowned and looked at the attendant carefully. He didn¡¯t know anyone in this empire, except for the emperor and the two Marshalls. He didn¡¯t even interact with any other generals andmanders.

    So, he was stunned when he was asked to visit the head of the auction house, but he still decided to make a visit. Because he knew that he can escape if he wants.

    "My friends would being too. Is it alright?" Sam asked.

    "It would be our honor." The attendant replied and led the way. The four of them walked out of the room and within two minutes they were led towards the back-stage, where the auction items were kept.

    Most of the auction items are the weapons, weapon sets, treasure, etc they gathered in the Orion. Apart from that, there are some war-ves.

    Judging from their clothing, they are all previously nobility. Sam and his friends looked at them curiously as they made their way towards the deeper parts of the auction house.

    They entered another room, which is a bit isted, and inside there are several people sitting with their cultivations sealed. They are Nascent stage cultivators of Orion.

    They are nobility and generals, who fought in the war.

    They looked at Sam and shook their heads. Sam looked at them and especially for some familiar faces.

    Then a woman walked towards him from outside all of a sudden.

    He turned around and saw a mature woman. She is as tall as him which is around 175 centimeters. For a woman that is very tall. But Sam¡¯s growth spurt has yet to stop. But judging from his growth, he could at most grow another eight to nine centimeters.

    The woman, even though tall, has a body of great proportions. She has golden proportions with the right curves. Her hair is long and thick. It was braided and even then, the braid was tall enough to reach her buttocks.

    She walked towards him with a smile and extended her hand towards Sam.

    "I am Nayana. I am the head of the auction house. I am the one who invited you here. Sorry, for the trouble, since I am the one who should be visiting you. But there is someone here among the war ves who said that you can vouch for him for bail. That is why I had to ask you toe here."

    Sam scanned her from head to toe. She really is a one-of-a-kind beauty. She kind of reminded him of a client he protected in his previous life.

    "I don¡¯t recall having that much of a close rtionship to vouch for someone. May I know, who that person is?" Sam asked.

    She pointed at a corner and said with a smile.

    "He is there. Please, follow me."

    Sam followed and saw a really familiar face. The Duke of the southern star. Duke Carton is here.

    Carton squatted down on the floor with his head down, he seemed to be so depressed that he didn¡¯t even notice that Sam has arrived.

    When he noticed that he saw someone standing before him, he saw Sam and he immediately gained some vigor.

    "Sam. Sam. Please save me. I don¡¯t want to be a ve. Please, save me. I didn¡¯t do anything to you, did I? I even stopped the notice of you being painted as a terrorist. Please save me, Sam. At least, on the ount of your friendship with Nichs. Please save me.

    I don¡¯t want you and Nichs to turn into enemies because of me. Just let me go. I will live a normal life. I don¡¯t need any work or welfare. Just let me be.

    If I be a ve, my son will definitelye after you, then I would lose him too. Please for sake of him, leave me."

    He didn¡¯t even give them a chance to speak and started urging. Sam looked at him and went into a deep thought. What Carton said is right. If he became a ve, he would definitely be a target of Nichs¡¯ anger and then what follows would be nothing but thetter¡¯s death.

    Nichs and he have a strange friendship together. They don¡¯t have any conflict of interest in either politics or riches. Their only matter of interest is also battle nothing else. He doesn¡¯t want to ruin that rtionship.

    Sam looked at Nayana and she said.

    "There are two ways, one is to bid for him and another one is for the emperor¡¯s direct approval for the bail." Sam has little patience to go to the emperor and he doesn¡¯t like asking favors.

    As for money, he still has more than seven billion on him. So, he is confident in bidding.

    "I will bid for youter and free you. You can decide what you want to doter." Carton heaved a sigh of relief and thanked him repeatedly.

    Sam walked back followed by his friends as he looked at all the people.

    "Where are six swords of sword Marshall?" Sam asked Nayana.

    "Oh, they are bailed out by the emperor himself. Do you want me to ry the message to him?"

    "No need."

    Sam walked out and they started returning to their room, but while they are crossing the weaker war ves, they heard a shout.

    "Are you happy now?" It was a female voice, which is filled with grief and fury. Sam and his friends halted in their tracks and turned around.

    He saw a young woman running to the front of the group of ves and pointing at him while yelling.

    "You. Because of you, we became ves. You are the reason all this happened. Are you even a human being? Why would you let us suffer like this? Just because of you, an empire was destroyed, my father and brother are dead. My mother and I became ves. I hope you are satisfied with this oue."

    It is none other than Princess Natalie. She was also sealed, but now that the auction is about to begin, she was allowed some mobility.

    Sam looked at the former princess whose face was tear-stained, he walked towards her and said in a cold tone.

    "Tell me something. What will happen, if you enter a dragon¡¯s den and pull its tail?" His voice was ice cold and threatening and she subconsciously answered as if it was a part of the natural order.

    "I.. It kills the person."

    "So, what happens to the people who are waiting for him at the entrance of the cave?" He continued on.

    "Th... they will die too."

    "Now, you know the answer. I am just like that dragon. Do you think, that I have enough time and patience to deal with small fries like your father and you? It is your father that has brought this on himself and you are suffering because you are his daughter and they are suffering because they are his subjects.

    me the one, who pulled the tail and disturbed my slumber."

    By the end of his sentence, his voice grew very cold, and killing intent oozed out of his words.

    At this moment, another female voice came from behind.

    "Sir, Sam. Please forgive her for her impulsiveness."

    He turned around to see a blond woman looking at him. She was dressed in a red colored robe and her face looked weary.

    She noticed Sam¡¯s gaze and said.

    "We know, that we have no right to me you. She just said those things out of her spite. If I were in your ce and with your abilities, I would do the same. I totally understand. But please forgive her. I am pleading on her behalf." She finished her sentence and bowed to him

    At this moment another young man, who looked the same as this girl with blond hair came forward and made her stand up.

    "Felicia. Why are you pleading on her behalf? It is a good thing that the father and son are dead. Don¡¯t tell me you forgot how many atrocities theymitted. The whole Orion imperial family is sinned by their heinous deeds which theymitted in the mask of their righteousness.

    It is only a matter of time, that they are going to be ended up like this. Our lives as ves are better than the lives under them."

    He then turned towards Sam and said.

    "In fact, I have to thank you for your deeds." He bowed slightly and took a step back with his sister.

    Sam just took another look at her and left the ce with his friends. He sat back in his room and waited for the auction to begin.

 Chapter 258: The Auction house fiasco - I

    The Auction began and Sam threw a spatial ring to Watt and said.

    "Buy whatever you like and don¡¯t forget to bid for Carton. I will tell you if I need anything. Don¡¯t care about the price.

    The money would be the least of our worries.

    Sam rxed after saying this, as he spectated the Auction.

    There are many people who attended the auction. This auction ispletely full of war spoils. There are special weapons of some generals, special treasures and heirlooms of some Dukes and Marquises. There are many other things. Apart from that, there is also the equipment collected from the dead bodies of the enemy soldiers which are auctioned in bulk.

    The war ves are thest category. Watt didn¡¯t buy any of the treasures. They have a boatload of them, but he doesn¡¯t use the treasures of this quality. Everything Sam makes is more efficient and of more effectiveness in the battle.

    The turn for War ves came. The Nascent stage cultivators arest, so it started from Acolytes who are auctioned in groups of thirty people.

    After that, the initial stage Novices are auctioned off and soon the time for Peak stage Novices came. From then on, people are auctioned individually.

    Sam looked at Watt, who didn¡¯t buy anything but he seemed to be eager for something, so he didn¡¯t mind. He is waiting for the finale. He didn¡¯t know if the finale is a great object or a powerful ve, but if it is something interesting, he can buy it off.

    Sam observed the ves closely, to be honest, this auction is quite boring. The people who came to buy are mostly nobility and they want these things to be in their collection to increase their status and glory.

    But for the ves, they would be bought ording to their ability.

    While he watched as the auction went on, finally some special ves are out for the auction.

    These peopleprised of the noble scions anddies. They are well-groomed and taught greatly and there is a high chance they have the arts of their families in their possession. Thedies will make a great collection in their harem. Apart from that, they are young and at Peak stage Novice after some brainwashing, they can be good assets to groom for their potential. So, they are hot stuff in the auction.

    Soon two familiar faces appeared on the auction. They are Princess Natalie and a blond woman in a red dress who pleaded Sam to leave Natalie alone.

    He was a bit surprised. He does know that Natalie would be a special treat, but this Blond woman is a whole different story.

    The auctioneer announced.

    "The Princess of the Orion Natalie and the Fiancee of thete Crown Prince of Orion Felicia.

    The contract for a decade.

    The first bid for Princess Natalie.

    Initial bid 1 million spirit stones."

    "1 million and one hundred thousand."

    "1 million and three hundred thousand."

    "1 million and five hundred thousand."

    The bidding started.

    All of the have only one aim and that is to first bid for the princess, then put her through some cruel tasks and after a month or two offer her a hand in marriage. This way, they would have the princess of the defeated empire as their wife or consort.

    But Sam is not interested in the bidding war. Rather he was a bit surprised by the revtion that blond is the fianc¨¦e of the Crown Prince.

    He didn¡¯t know this at all. He didn¡¯t here any family names too and no nobility in the former imperial capital has ever bragged about their girl being the future empress.

    And from what her brother spoke earlier, there is a high chance that she was forced into the marriage.

    Then there might be something special about the girl and Sam is not stupid enough to think that it is because of her looks.

    A crown prince giving a girl his fianc¨¦e status just for her looks, it is almostughable. And from the mindset of the emperor, he wouldn¡¯t do something so silly without any benefits and he has to say that Felicia is ten times more beautiful than Natalie, but he is still unwilling to believe that she got all of this because of her looks.

    He was quite curious, but it was only that much, not to the extent that he has to bid for her.

    But he noticed someone else was interested and that is Watt.

    Soon, bidding for the Princess is over with over twenty million. He would say that it is pretty cheap. After all, she is a princess.

    Next up was Felicia and for her, the bidding was not as fierce. It only reached ten million and the highest bidder was also a special guest in the private room and obviously, Sam doesn¡¯t know who that person is.

    But from the voice, he is pretty young.

    "Fifteen million." Watt raised his bid. Sam is still nonchnt, but Philip and Jack are surprised.

    "Oh Watt, you want a ve now? Why are you bidding?" Philip asked casually. Watt didn¡¯t reply.

    Sam looked at Felicia all the time, she is looking towards the backstage time to time and he noticed that her brother was the next person on the auction. She seemed to bepletely unconcerned of who bid for her.

    Her only concern seemed to be being separated from her brother. Sam gave an amused smile. He could understand this situation all too well.

    Meanwhile, the bidding continued.

    The person who bid for her earlier and Watt are having a bidding war and now the price is at twenty-five million.

    "Twenty-Six million." The other guy said and Sam was already getting tired of this.

    "What are you doing giving such small rises? Did you not learn anything from staying with me? Just crush that guy. I don¡¯t like this type of bidding war." His words came outzily and filled with some frustration.

    "Thirty million." Watt bid again and the crowd was already in an uproar. Natalie had her face sulking. She was sad because someone was putting a price on her, but it was oddly infuriating for her when she saw that Felicia is valued higher than her.

    The person who bid for Felicia was in a slight pause and bid again.

    "Thirty-One million."

    "Forty million." Watt followed up.

    "Forty-one million."

    "Fifty million."

    This time, there is no bid rather that person spoke.

    "Friend right there, you should think before you bid. After all, it is safe to know the depth of waters before you try to jump in." This is clearly a threat. Watt looked at Sam. He was asking for the confirmation. After all, his main priority is not to bring any trouble for Sam.

    And thetter only replied with the same nonchnce.

    So, watt replied.

    "Are we bidding or are we talking?"

    This made the crowd go silent. So, that must mean this guy is quite a famous one.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care. He was bored to the point of walking away and if not for his curiosity towards the finale and for Watt finish purchasing, he would have done so.

    He is also thinking that Watt is not good with his words, just now his words are too passive and he has to teach him a thing or two.

    But he doesn¡¯t know that Watt already pissed someone off with just those words.

    "Well, we will see how far you can go?" That guy replied and bid.

    "Sixty million."

    "Seventy million."

    "Eighty Million."

    "One hundred million." Watt¡¯s bid stunned that guy for a second and then he started bidding again.

    "One hundred and ten million."

    "One hundred and thirty million."

    "One hundred and fifty million."

    "Two hundred million." Watt increased his bid again. He knew that with Sam¡¯s money this is peanuts and as Sam said. Money is one thing they don¡¯t have to worry about at all.

    "Two hundred and ten million. This time the voice sounded a bit hesitant.

    "Two hundred and fifty million." Watt wanted to deliver a final blow and this time it worked. There was no following bid.

    "I suspect you don¡¯t have that much money to pay. You are only doing this to falsely increase the price. I demand an auction house to check that person." That guy started throwing a tantrum and now it is Sam¡¯s turn to be pissed.

    Nobody likes to be called out like this. And certainly, a billionaire like wouldn¡¯t either.

    The auctioneer stopped the bid and started thinking. Judging from this he understood what is going to happen, which increased his irritation.

    An attendant came and said.

    "Sir, we request to have your cooperation..."

    Before he could finish, Sam broke the one-way ss and threw the spatial ring to the stage and said in a loud voice.

    "Just for this pocket change? You dare to ask for my cooperation? Sure, you can check the spatial ring and after that, I demand that person to be inspected as well, and if the result is not as open as mine and not as satisfactory, be ready to face the consequences."

    Sam¡¯s voice was loud and ruthless, which indicated he meant business.

    Auctioneer took the spatial ring and carefully inspected the ring and when he saw the amount, he almost bit his tongue. Generally, the transaction will not bepleted with just spirit stones when the amount is high.

    They will exchange that in form of other resources, but seeing that much amount all together blew me off.

    At this point, Nayana also recognized that problem hase. She just took a back seat to see how Sam would handle this and this is normal to check the new customers to maintain the integrity of the auction. Even though it is disrespectful for the customers, they wouldn¡¯t say anything in fear of pissing off someone powerful who is behind the auction house.

    She thought that Sam would be the same and she couldn¡¯t be more wrong.

    He is as straightforward as he was told to be.

    He would never swallow an insult no matter how powerful the opponent is. This is going to be troublesome.

 Chapter 259: The auction house fiasco - II

    The auctioneer was put on the spot. He clearly knew the guy who asked to check on Watt and he is a person he didn¡¯t dare mess with.

    But based on how Sam threw the spatial ring full of spiritual stones, he can guess that Sam and his group are also not one to be trifled with.

    "How dare you ask to check on me? Do you think you have any right to demand that? Do you even know who I am?"

    That guy started yelling at Sam.

    Sam didn¡¯t reply, he yelled at the auctioneer again.

    "I am giving you ten seconds. If I don¡¯t get the proper answer, you will see how I got that right to check on that guy. Trust me though, the way you learn it would be the hardest one possible."

    He just threatened the auctioneer and at this moment, Nayana appeared at Sam¡¯s door. She knocked on the door which Philip opened as he was closest to it.

    "Sir, Sam can you not do this? That person is not someone we could offend carelessly. I might be okay, but the auctioneer and the other staff will be in trouble for that. Please understand." She asked in a soft tone.

    Sam looked at her and said.

    "He is a person you cannot offend and I am someone who can be offended easily? I think you know damn well, what happened to thest person who offended me. And since you know that, I am pretty sure whether I can afford this or not and that leads to the point I am about to ask.

    Since you know me, why didn¡¯t you stop that attendant then?"

    Sam knew some possible answers but he still asked, he wanted a confirmation. Since she knew who he was, then she couldn¡¯t possibly just know only his name, someone would have informed her not to mess with him.

    But her elitism must have kicked in and she just wanted to see how capable he is. But would Sam just allow that?

    Does she really think that he would just blindly go after that person who asked him to be inspected? Since that guy can poke the insult using the auction, so can Sam.

    Nayana was stunned for a second and she didn¡¯t know what to say to that. She couldn¡¯t possibly say that she wanted his way of resolving the issues, right?

    Seeing her mum, Sam understood that his spection is almost right.

    So, he asked.

    "Either, you check that guy or I will be forced to do so on my own. By the way, the ten seconds are over."

    She became extremely infuriated by Sam¡¯s stubborn character and she can do nothing. She bit her lower lip in anger and stormed out of the room.

    She then walked towards the room of another guy and knocked on it.

    She knew that any other person would have to face that guy¡¯s revenge. Only she is immune to it and she also knew that this guy doesn¡¯t have that much money.

    Every time, he made a purchase, his father was the one who is going to payter. That is the normal urrence and he wouldn¡¯t have that much amount. Now, that she has decided if she just faked, it and didn¡¯t reveal the amount he has on his hands, Sam wouldn¡¯t let go of it and she would be in for a scolding from her father.

    So, after she entered the room and quickly finished checking, she announced out loud.

    "Guest in room number three doesn¡¯t have enough amount on him. He only has an amount thirty million spirit stones on him and it is now proven that he is deliberately hiking the price, so he is now withdrawn from the auction and as a punishment for the offense, he wouldn¡¯t be allowed to enter any auction for the next three months.

    This bid was won by the guest in room four for thirty million spirit stones. Please continue with the auction."

    As Nayana announced, she had her hand over the mouth of a young man and pressed him against the sofa in the room not allowing him to speak.

    "I am telling you. Right now, I am in the worst mood possible and you better leave this ce without making a sound. Trust me, if you even make a sound, that other guy might rip you apart in two right here right now.

    If you don¡¯t leave now, I will beat the crap out of you, every time I see in the next three months."

    She threatened him and left the room. The guards who are supposed to guard him are looking at him from the corner of the room.

    They didn¡¯t dare to go against thedy and they knew the consequences of they did.

    So, all he can do is look at the whole fiasco.

    "Let¡¯s go. We will wait outside the auction house. I want to see him take thatdy away from me. And he seemed to be rich, but he should know that in this city he still has to bow down to me no matter his wealth and power."

    He ordered his guards and they stood at the entrance of the auction house.

    There is another person who is as pissed as that guy. That is Natalie.

    She is pissed off but the reason is not her very, because she knew that if she agreed to marry that guy wouldn¡¯t reject her, the reason is the intense bidding war between Sam¡¯s group and that guy¡¯s group.

    She is pissed off that Felicia is considered more valuable than her and her irritation only grew when she realized that Watt, the person who bid for Felicia was from Sam¡¯s group. she didn¡¯t recognize the voice earlier but now that she knew it she is angry, but she cannot do anything about it.

    The auction continued.

    After bidding for Felicia, an attendant brought over the spatial ring Sam threw earlier without a single penny less.

    The next person up for the bid is Felicia¡¯s brother.

    Watt was the first person to bid and his bid is straight-up ten million. No onepeted with him, because this guy is nothing special.

    Felicia¡¯s brother was over the moon when he realized that the person who bid him and his sister is one and the same.

    And the auction went on. Sam didn¡¯t bother with the auction for any other ves.

    When the Nascent cultivator¡¯s time came, thepetition was fierce and there is a great bidding war happening for every person.

    Watt bid for Carton with a whopping four hundred million and won.

    After that, the next auction items arepletely are unknown to all.

    But Sam was intrigued as soon as it was relieved. Because, the next one is not a single entity, rather it is a set.

    It was a whole set of materials collected from dead beasts.

    From the aura, Sam could sense that these beasts are all of Level 7 and there are at least items of three beasts.

    "This is the processed material of three Level 7 beasts. All these three are the guardian beasts of the former Orion and are killed by our Marshall.

    All the materials that can be harvested from the beasts including the edible meat are all here. These beasts are namely, the lightning tailed fox, Winged Spider, and Three tailed fire scorpion."

    Sam was immediately attracted to the items, because of two beasts have what he needed and they are elemental poisons of the Winged spider and the Three tailed fire scorpion.

    He has been looking out for beasts with elemental poisons. Because the panther twins need them.

    The panther twins have beast cores of wind and fire elements initially, but after Sam changed the fire element part to the fire elemental poison, the wind element one was on theplete passive side.

    Now, Sam can covert the wind element to wind elemental poison if he can use the same method, he used to covert the fire element to fire elemental poison.

    So, he has to get these things no matter what.

    But it wouldn¡¯t be easy. Materials of a Level 7 beast are too valuable. These cannot be bought easily and the nourishment and advantages thate with them are not that easy to obtain.

    They could go for almost a billion and that is a conservative estimate.

    So, as soon as the auctioneer announced, Sam yelled his bid.

    "One billion and five hundred million spirit stones."

    A single bid silenced the whole auction house. Even Nayana dropped the ss and spilled the drink all over her in a daze.

    The auctioneer was stunned and didn¡¯t know what to say. He knew that the items are valuable but a reasonable price would be around a billion, to raise the price by five hundred million is unheard of.

    He didn¡¯t know where this guy learned to bid.

    The audience is all cursing in their heads.

    It is almost like Sam was showing off and in fact, he is indeed showing off.

    He is showing off his crushing wealth so that these guys wouldn¡¯t bid for it and he was ready to throw anotherrge raise if there is any other bid that is in forpetition but that didn¡¯t happen.

    Just like that, the auction ended with an unfeeling finale.

    Sam paid for the items within his room and waited until the guests left. All the special guests will leaveter to not be bothered by the normal guests and even among the special guests, Sam was thest to leave.

    But as soon as he came to the front gate, he stopped in his tracks.

 Chapter 260: The auction house fiasco -III

    Sam was stunned. Because of the line up at the entrance.

    Two people are in a staredown. One of them is a person Sam is familiar with. He is the Marshall who escorted Sam to the private room.

    Behind him, Nayana stood with her arms crossed and face filled with frustration.

    On the other side, there is another middle-aged man, behind whom there is a young man whose face was filled with anger and fury.

    He didn¡¯t know both of them at all but he recognized that all the guests from the auction are there watching the scene.

    "Minister Brian, you better tell your son to behave, or next time he wouldn¡¯t escape scot-free."

    Marshall said in a cold tone.

    "Scot free? Marshall, are you threatening me that you would make a move on my son or are you saying that your daughter Nayana is going to deal with him?" The other middle-aged man opposite Marshall replied.

    "Do you think that we have so much free time like you? My daughter is so busy with the auction house and the Trading chamber, why would she go out of my way to deal with your flower boy?

    In fact, if she didn¡¯t interfere today, your precious son would have been killed and trust that death wouldn¡¯t be pleasant at all. And here you are being ungrateful for our good deed and even smearing our name."

    Marshall said in a stern yet proud voice. Sam was a bit surprised. He didn¡¯t expect Nayana who is only a Great realm cultivator be in such a high position, but this also reinforced his opinion of Arian. Here, cultivation is only a symbol of strength, not a factor that decides everything and Nayana being in charge of trading of auctions shows that she is more capable in this area.

    "Who are you calling a flower boy? Marshall, you better think before you speak? You are talking about the nephew of the Emperor himself. What are you implying by calling the rtives of the emperor a flower boy?"

    Sam almost puked at this. Can someone be so shameless?

    From that middle-aged man???s words, he can get that this boy is a rtive to the emperor but from what Marshall said, he is this man¡¯s son.

    Did he be, your son or nephew of the emperor first? How can someone be this shameless?

    "If the Emperor knew this, he would have already been skinned alive right in the middle of the streets."

    Marshall sneered and then only he noticed that Sam is here. His expression changed immediately and he greeted with a smile.

    After some pleasantries, Sam wanted to leave the ce. He wanted to deal with the new elemental poisons he got. He needs to upgrade panthers so their potential would increase. As for this conflict, he is not that interested.

    But he realized that is a pipe dream. Because the middle-aged man¡¯s main target is Sam and then only Sam realized who that young man is. He is the guy who got into a bidding war with Watt and now his father is here.

    "Hey you, do you think you can leave just like that? How dare you humiliate my son? Just because you have some wealth do you think you can do anything? My son can buy whatever he wants and I can pay for him. So, what is it that you are putting him on the spot?

    Do you think you can do whatever you want just because you are rich? I am telling you, you better handover whatever you bought. Otherwise, you would be facing my wrath."

    Sam didn¡¯t even know how to react, this guy is clearly trying to overwhelm Sam with his speech, without giving him a chance to react at all. Typical shameless politician.

    Sam just stood there and let the man finish his part and said.

    "So, what do you want to do now?"

    "You handover the items and apologize."

    "Not going to happen. Anything else?"

    Sam just reacted as straight forward as he can. Killing the conversation. Minister didn¡¯t know how to react, he has kept a lot of words ready to reply for whatever Sam had to say.

    Isn¡¯t it normal that a person would try to argue if someone was unreasonable to them? Why is this guy acting like it is nobody¡¯s business? This is the only thought in his mind.

    "If there is nothing else, I am leaving."

    Sam turned to leave and obviously, he was stopped.

    "You, do you even know who I am, do you know who my son is? We are the rtives of the emperor, disrespecting us is the same as disrespecting the emperor."

    Sam raised an eyebrow and said.

    "Then, are you implying that what your son did, is emperor¡¯s will as well?"

    Minister thought for a second and said.

    "Yes."

    He didn¡¯t know he just stepped in the trap. He didn¡¯t think that Sam is someone important and he didn¡¯t even bother to know who he is, he has been enjoying everything going his way in the imperial capital, so he didn¡¯t care what the other guy thinks.

    "Then, I would deal this with the emperor himself." As Sam said these words, Marshall¡¯s face turned serious.

    "Sir Sam. This is not what he meant, he is an idiot don¡¯t take his words seriously. Please, just forget this ever happened, I will take him away."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and just looked at him calmly.

    The minister though is not happy, he started yelling.

    "Marshall, you better watch your words, who are you calling an idiot?"

    The minister is having none of it.

    At this moment, Marshall couldn¡¯t control the situation anymore, so he took themunication token and sent a message.

    The minister is ranting nonstop and bragging about his position status and stuff, Sam just stood there. He knew his position in this empire very well.

    He is a time bomb. But the area of the explosion isn¡¯t determined yet and Arc has to make sure that the area of the explosion is not his empire.

    Meanwhile, Sam is thinking about he hasn¡¯t seen a piece of work in a while. He was just thinking of the positive traits of the empire and now appeared a guy who is about to give him a new opinion.

    Soon, the rant came to an end and that is because another person came into view.

    The Emperor Arc came and everyone became silent. They are just thinking about how Sam would escape from this shameless guy because all of the suffered in one way or another under this guy and they thought that Sam would another one of the victims, but their anticipation is unfounded.

    Emperor ignored everyone and went to Sam and greeted him.

    "Mr. Sam. I hope that you liked the auction and I heard that you bought the finale. I really appreciate your patronage."

    "Never mind that. But I heard that you don¡¯t want to let me keep the things I bought. Of course, they didn¡¯t say it directly, but they did say that not giving in to them is the same as not giving in to you. So, I am afraid that I have to leave the products behind."

    When Arc heard these words, he shook his head. Sam is doing this purposefully. He is making sure that the emperor owes him at all points and not the other way around.

    Now he just tried to make the foolish actions of this stupid minister as his will. It is hard to deal with cunning people.

    "You are Jesting Mr. Sam. With all that you own, would I be making a move on something so simple? If I wanted, I will try to steal something bigger. I will deal with this matter, please return and rest. Tomorrow is the ceremony and you will be having an early start."

    Sam looked at the Minister and said.

    "You better think before you speak, next time I wouldn¡¯t be this patient." With that, he left and the crowd was also dispersed, the bustling street was empty with only a few people standing in front of the auction house.

    "Brother-inw, how can you let him go. He insulted us..." Arc stopped the minister¡¯s rant in a single re.

    "I am telling you. I was most afraid that you would encounter him and my worst fear came to pass. You really did encounter him. He is the one person I don¡¯t want to make an enemy and you are pushing him to be the empire¡¯s enemy.

    You better know your ce and how you became a minister. I am already being lenient to your son and you just because of my sister. But in this issue, I wouldn¡¯t side with you no matter what. He is the worst enemy I can make."

    Minister was unwilling but he couldn¡¯t do anything about it. So, he left the ce along with his son.

    The conflict was nipped before escting and that even required the emperor¡¯s presence.

    Marshall has seen the whole destruction of Orion from a first-person perspective, so he knew what Sam is capable of and he knew that he can vtile easily.

    It is a good thing that he called emperor, otherwise, things would have taken an unusual turn.

    Meanwhile, after returning to their residence, Sam went to his room, while Watt guided the two people to the hall.

    Philip and Jack followed there curiously.

    Watt stood up and circled around Felicia as if examining her. He noticed that the two siblings are extremely simr and it seems that they are twins.

    After some examination, he took out the two ve tokens which restraints their movements and broke them.

    "I don¡¯t need these ve tokens; I am not extremely fond of them." He said then and after a brief pause continued. The siblings are surprised by his actions. But he didn¡¯t care.

    "You, from now on, you are a personal assistant of Boss. You will deal with all the appointments, meetings, and people whoe to meet him. Other than that, you have to remind him to take three meals and sleeping time. But you cannot disturb when he is researching..."

    After another half-an-hour of ranting some duties, he sent the twins away.

    Philip and Jack are stumped at the side.

    "What are you doing? Watt."

    "Well, don¡¯t you think that boss needs someone to take care of his needs? Some of them which we cannot fulfill." Watt said in a low voice.

    Both of them were stumped again and with a slight pause, they startedughing until their stomachs were hurt.

 Chapter 261: Ceremony

    Sam doesn¡¯t know that Watt is thinking of his needs and is possibly looking for a mate. He entered the divine dimension as soon as he entered the room.

    He immediately started working on the panthers. The first thing he has to do is make them consume the fire poison of the scorpion and the wind poison of the spider.

    Then he has to use some refining techniques so that the body and the beast cores would be stable.

    He doesn¡¯t have do all the work himself, he can leave that to Yanwu and Sky who have a great elemental control inherently.

    He just has to make sure that the beginning is stable and has no hups.

    The next day, at the dawn the city is bustling with life and vigour.

    All the citizens and nobles are celebrating. Although the war was won a few days ago, the celebration was held on this day because today was the day of the official announcement.

    Sam along with his friends attended the ceremony escorted by a Marshall in a special carriage dragged by a Level 6 Horse type beasts. Sam must say that he was ttered.

    He didn¡¯t expect this level of reception.

    They were led to their designated seats.

    The ceremony was being held in the imperial pce grounds.

    There is arge stage in the ground. The stage has a long horizontal table with seats for Emperor, empress and some important officials.

    Below the stage, there are thousands of seats arranged in rows and behind the rows, there are numerousmoners who are here to watch the ceremony.

    The seats are divided into two parts. On one side there are invited guests like nobles, merchants, people from the four professional towers and so on the other side there are soldiers, generals and many other people who contributed highly in the war.

    There are some people who are rted to the deceased and they are arranged to be seated in the same division.

    Sam and his friends have first row seat in the second division.

    In five minutes, the emperor and the empress arrived onto the stage. Followed by the two Marshalls, the ministers and so on.

    All the audience stood up as a show of respect and after that, the ceremony began.

    Arc stood spoke to the people after letting them take their seats.

    "Today, I am here to announce that the Arian which has been divided into empires due to acts of some foolish rebels has now reunited again. I am proud to announce that the whole western continent is now Arian empire.

    Today, we are all here to celebrate this victory and appreciate the efforts of the people who contributed for this to happen...

    Soon, the awarding started. Many people have gained merits in the war and are awarded the newnds they conquered. Some were given new noble titles, some were given promotions, some are given medals of honour.

    The award ceremony went on for hours and after more than five hours, it is Sam¡¯s turn.

    That¡¯s right. Sam was also being awarded and it is more of a transaction than an award.

    This is thest part of the deal Sam made with Arc.

    When Sam¡¯s name was called, most of them are surprised and bewildered. Only few people knew who Sam was and what type of contribution he made in the war.

    He is the reason that the whole Orion copsed that early. His military training methods, his contribution in destroying the resource points, he even killed the emperor.

    Every single one of his contributions can give him a title of War hero but he did all of them.

    Sam is wearing his everyday ck feather coat and his professional badges are all pinned on his chest.

    Emperor stood beside him and spoke to the audience.

    "He is Sam. An eighteen-year-old Great realm cultivator. Not many people know him. But he is the biggest contributor in the war.

    He destroyed the mines, herb fields and so many resources of the Orion. He is the person who created the training system of our army and he is the person who killed the Emperor of Orion."

    His words shocked the whole audience including the ministers who are on the stage.

    Only Marshall, some generals and some other soldiers know Sam¡¯s involvement. The ministers and even the empress was left out of it because of the possibility of them using politics to disturb the war.

    Nobody wants a variable which could influence their position.

    So, he didn¡¯t reveal anything about Sam or his involvement.

    Now, it wouldn¡¯t be possible, because Sam¡¯s reward is something too eye-catching to give him without any notice or word.

    "For all the outstanding contributions Sam has made, I am rewarding him with a city and that is the former imperial capital of Orion empire.

    From now on that city will be called Sam¡¯s city.

    By awarding the city, I don¡¯t mean to make him the city lord. The city is literally his.

    Including all thends and the properties. Everything with in the walls of the capital now belongs to Sam."

    His wordspletely silenced the uproar of the people. They werepletely stunned.

    Some ministers stood up from their seats and are about to say something, but one re from the emperor they sat back down as if it was an instinct.

    Sam took the scroll which is the deed for his city, while Arc slipped something into Sam¡¯s hands and went back to his seat.

    This is his deal. This is the part of the transaction he made with Ark.

    The whole imperial capital.

    This city would be the base he is going to build and the same time, his new cash machine. He would be the highest tax payer of the empire based on this ce.

    The ceremony ended and everything was done. He came to his house and got ready to leave the capital, but before that he has to visit the professional towers to discuss about some construction project.

    He has to redo the whole thing in the imperial capital for his purpose and also discuss some deals which they could possibly cooperate together.

    But even before he could go and discuss someone came to his home and that guy is an attendant from the Artisan tower.

    He didn¡¯t know what this is about, but he has to go no matter what.

    That evening he visited the Artisan tower. The attendant who invited him was already waiting for him at the entrance and escorted him to a meeting room and he was surprised to see the line-up.

    There are more than twenty people inside the room all sat and the thing is recognized more than half of them. Because they are from the Orion. The tower head of the imperial capital tower and some main staff are here, then head of the southern star tower and he even saw Chaya here.

    He didn¡¯t know what is happening, but he sure as hell know that it is something big.

    He sat at his designated seat and a middle-aged man who sat at one end of the long table stood up and said.

    "Artisan Sam, I am the head of the tower head of Arian.

    Since, the Orion empire was no more, there is a need to restructure the wholework and we are here to discuss things regarding that. Since, you are an artisan with same rank as us and also a neutral party, I hope you will be giving your opinion regarding this issue without any bias."

    When Sam heard this, he was surprised. He didn¡¯t think that he can have this much say in the Artisan tower¡¯s issues.

    He thought for a moment and said.

    "I wouldn¡¯t interfere in the opinion of the higher-level members of the imperial capital tower. As for the tower heads of the dukedoms of former Orion, I have some impressions on their workings.

    If you show me the details of the person who is the current tower heads of the dukedoms and their counter parts who are vying for that seat, I can give you my opinion on the matter as third party.

    Apart from that, I think it is not appropriate for me to be the deciding factor as the person who is not involved in the workings of the Artisan association."

    The Artisans went into a deep thought at these words and felt that it made more sense. They cannot just let an outsider decide their positions, but taking the opinion of the outsider into ount while considering their positions is certainly a more eptable alternative.

    And soon the screening began. To his surprise, there are more artisans who are qualified to be tower heads of various levels in Arian that he imagined.

    In contrast, Orion severelycked these many artisans.

    The screening seemed to be going to take forever. The data is just like a bunch of resumes, with their trades, character traits, personal information, their speciality, there is even a bunch of information on the amount of ie they brought to the tower.

    He unexpectedly stumbled on this now and he has to deal with this long meeting which go on for who knows how long.

    But he has to do so, because he just thought of something after looking at the number of artisans that are going to be removed of some real authority within the association. They could still be within the tower, but they were stripped of their titles and are now just some normal elders or so in towers, if he can use them, his n to gain wealth would be a great sess and can also save him a lot of man power.

 Chapter 262: Discussing Business

    The meeting went overnight. They have been looking over all the details of people.

    Many people are taken down from their posts. Many people from the Arian took new posts. Of course, some people are still the same position and one of them is Chaya.

    Since, she was one of the first people to cooperate with Sam in business and he learnt some interesting news and that is Chaya is daughter of the former minister of the Orion.

    Now he understood where she came from. But even then, her talent is too high and it is rare for someone like her not being recruited by the thunder god temple.

    After all, she would have been thirty years at most and she is in Nascent stage.

    Only the emperors and Marshalls might have achieved that stage.

    But it was only a fleeting thought, he has enough faith in himself that he could reach that within his early twenties.

    After more than five hours of the sorting out and rearranging the jobs, the meeting was finally over. Unknowingly, Sam was drawn into this whole mess and onlyter did he know that it is actually a rule in the artisan association to take the opinion of the artisan who is not part of the association to be a witness and a decision maker at the same time.

    As the people are about to call it a day, Sam asked something.

    "I have a business proposal to the artisan tower. Is anyone interested?"

    His voice was like a bomb, and that is particrly for the people who are from Orion. They knew Sam¡¯s potential and they definitely knew how profitable his businesses are so they are looking forward for that.

    And just like that, the meeting continued.

    Sam has used the whole wall as a board and a piece of metal in his hand as a chalk and started exining the whole business n. The people are stunned. They didn¡¯t expect that Sam would think of such a big and borate project. The investment will be billions. And it is no way a small amount.

    Currently Sam has less than ten billion on him and Sam¡¯s park still has around two billion or so in hands of that formation master.

    But this amount is still not enough, there is a need of at least one hundred billion for and Sam has to take out at least half of it.

    But does Sam have that much wealth?

    Actually, yes.

    Arc actually slipped something into Sam¡¯s hands on the ceremony and that is a spatial ring. That spatial ring consists of all the wealth that has obtained from the Imperial capital. That includes the loot from the imperial pce, from the Emperor¡¯s personal collection, the wealth from some harem members.

    He has around three hundred billion on him only in spirit stones and apart from that there are some weapons of Rank 6 and Rank 7, high grade herbs and so on.

    So, he is not short on wealth, but what he need is the man power, which he didn¡¯t have on him.

    After more than three hours of rough exnation, Sam was done.

    The artisans are dumbstruck, they never ever thought that there would be one day that they would have an opportunity to work on a project of this scale.

    The project is too big and it really does need an extremelyrge manpower and wealth.

    There is a need of arge-scale management and staff requirements to operate it carefully.

    But the most important thing of all is that the cash flow is pretty high.

    So, the staff working on this must be reliable. That is the reason, Sam tried to reduce the involvement of the humans as much as possible and at every point where the high amounts of cash are involved, he would appoint someone reliable.

    After all, there is never a person who got away after eyeing his wealth.

    The artisan tower head of former Orion who is about to go back to the thunder god temple decided to stay back.

    The project Sam proposed has a veryrge scope and a powerful representative is indeed needed.

    After the initial excitement died down, Sam said.

    "I am going to own fifty percent of the whole business. I am going to provide you with the designs of the buildings and all the necessary infrastructure.

    As for the machinery, some auxiliary parts can be manufacture by you in the respective ces, where the machinery has to be made. But the core parts of the machinery will still me manufactured by me and then shipped to the different branches.

    Apart from that, I am providing half of the budget myself.

    As for the remaining fifty percent, I want you guys to cooperate with the remaining three towers. The pharmaceutical tower is going to be having the least of the contributions as we don¡¯t have many requirements from them.

    As for the shares you are going to investing and dividing among yourselves, I don¡¯t really care.

    At the end of every month, after deducting the necessary taxes and the required cashflow for paying sries and maintenance of the things, we will divide the profits among ourselves.

    We will be forming an enterprise and all the money that is required for the maintenance of the whole chain will be stored there and the funds will be used carefully.

    If any of us have a new idea, that might be any service, product or anything else. Then the enterprise will buy that idea from that person at a certain price.

    No matter who that person is, but the idea has to go through all the core members including me before going for an approval.

    But there is one thing I have to tell you. The whole n shouldn¡¯t leave the western continent and if it does, just remember one thing. I am the one who created it and I can easily destroy it without a problem.

    If I find a single mistake anything, if I find out about any form of embezzlement or any form of corruption, I will copse the whole system.

    Any person, who tries to mess with the core machineponents I made and try to get their hands on those designs, I will personally kill that person and whoever the staff that cooperated with him disregarding the circ.u.mstances."

    Sam threatened directly. In fact, it is more of an information rather than a threat at this point.

    Many people might not know the role he yed in the destruction of the Orion. But that doesn¡¯t mean, the artisan tower heads didn¡¯t know about that.

    The Orion tower head, has seen from the front seat what happens when Sam has enough time to prepare himself.

    So, there are no thoughts of embezzlement and corruption in their minds. After all, they are smart enough to know that maintaining a proper rtionship with Sam is an extremely beneficial thing a long run.

    They are not stupid enough to cut open the goose for the extra golden eggs.

    So, after some small discussions, Sam left the ce. The first step in this big project is to convince and win over the partnership from the remaining three towers.

    That was left to the artisan tower to deal with.

    Sam is now nning to leave this city to go to the imperial capital. He has to survey the area so the he can build his own new home.

    This is not like all the ces he lived in before. This would be first true home, a ce where he can return to.

    But his luck is not that good. That day, after he returned to his ce, he learnt that Emperor has something to speak to him and this made him feel frustrated.

    When he looked for Watt to see if he has any other extra information, he was stunned.

    Because, he saw Watt guiding Felicia as she cleaned the body of the Vulture.

    He didn¡¯t know what to say.

    He was a bit surprised that Watt bid for Felicia, but he didn¡¯t care much as it is the privilege he gave for Watt.

    So, he didn¡¯t even ask Watt for what purpose he bid for her.

    But now, the situation is different. He is extremely curious of why he wanted to bid for her.

    He called Watt over. Felicia was still cleaning therge body of the vulture. And the bird seemed to be enjoying the feeling of cleaning.

    When Philip and jack noticed Sam, they came over.

    "Why did you bid for her exactly?" Sam asked in confusion.

    Philip and Jack tried their best to refrain themselves fromughing.

    "Boss, you are a healthy young man, so you would have some needs to be taken care of. But any random woman cannot be selected for that. Even, if it is only a fling, to be beside you they have to qualified in many ways and I think it is impossible to find a girl as strong as you.

    So, I am trying to see if that woman can help you in other ways. After all, you have a lot of beasts and many other things that needs constant monitoring.

    I will assign her some tasks and you can rest assured. I will inform, when I think she is ready, so until then please bea..."

    Sam didn¡¯t let Watt finish his words, he sealed his mouth with his hand and pped his forehead with another one.

    "What is going on with your brain?" Sam didn¡¯t even have enough patience to talk sense into Watt and left towards the Imperial pce.

 Chapter 263: Inheritance

    Sam went to the imperial pce and met with the emperor. He is actually pretty frustrated because he didn¡¯t want to stay in this ce. He is very much looking forward to going to his new ce. But there is a boatload of things that are being thrown at him.

    After exchanging some pleasantries, Arc came straight to the point.

    "Do you remember the tower of will?"

    Sam was surprised a bit, but he nodded his head.

    "The tower of will is a part of the entrance test for the inheritance of a person named Murali. He is a very powerful cultivator on the whole and it was said that when he was in his prime, there are less than five people who are able to contend with him.

    Apart from that, he has high mastery in Inscriptions, Paintings, and formation. His swordsmanship is highly efficient and difficult to master."

    Arc went on exining these things. But seeing no reaction of Sam¡¯s face he said.

    "As you might have known, due to his love for the continent he hailed from, Murali left the four towers as keys to his inheritance within the western continent, so that people here will have a high chance of attaining it.

    And the tower of will, thest one of all the keys is recently cleared by you.

    The remaining three are already cleared before you did and the sessors are all currently at the same level.

    All of you are in the Great realm.

    One of them is my son, another one is a person from the Thunder god temple and the final person is a cultivator from a tribe that lives in the northern snow in of Arian.

    They don¡¯t react much with the outside world, but Murali hadid one tower in that area which gave them a chance to get their hands on one.

    Generally, the inheritance only opens when all four people are in the Great realm. If anyone of them crosses the Great realm without entering the inheritance, the key they got from the inheritance tower will be gone and another person must clear the tower again."

    Sam was surprised because the info he got was different from this.

    "Well, you might have heard that there is a chance that one can kill that person and get their inheritance key, but that is the trick of my father. He manipted the information so that only people of our family can get their hands on the inheritance.

    In this way, every time a chosen person died, then there is a chance for a new batch to get their hands on the key."

    Sam shook his head at his and asked.

    "So, what should I do now?"

    "Right now, all the candidates are ready to enter the inheritance ce and for that, all of you have to activate the keys on the top floor of the tower.

    When all the four towers are activated, you will be moved to the ce of inheritance."

    "So, when do we need to go?"

    "In fifteen days. On the fifteenth day from today exactly at midnight, you visit the tower and activate the key."

    Sam was a bit frustrated; he was never able to catch a break. And he doesn¡¯t know how long it will take if he went into the whole inheritance thing.

    He doesn¡¯t know how to deal with the situation at all. Because he has to work on his uing big project.

    After some thought, Sam heaved a sigh and agreed reluctantly, but after that, he has something else to say.

    "I heard that I can bring five people along with me, is that correct?"

    "Sure."

    "Then, I need that guy named Hawk. I think you might have known him. He is the son of Falcon Cliff count. I promised that I would take him to the inheritance, so please find him and send him to the Falcon Cliff city.

    Apart from that, I have a proposal in which I need your approval."

    He then started exining the new business project. The business project will have some certainrge-scale constructions. So, he has to inform the government beforehand before he starts construction at a ce, but if he can get the approval of the emperor himself, then he can save a lot of trouble for himself.

    After exining the whole situation, he said.

    "Please give me back Sam¡¯s battalion. I heard they are conscripted into the military. I will pay for their release. They are some people I can trust a bit. So, I would be needing them."

    There is no need of many persuasions.

    After some business talks, he was about to leave, but Sam stopped and asked.

    "Oh, by the way, where are your brother-inw and nephew? I didn¡¯t see them. Generally, there should be a visit by now."

    Sam asked in a meaningful tone.

    "Don¡¯t worry, they wouldn¡¯t be meeting you anytime soon. You can forget about that." Arc replied with a smile.

    After Sam left, Arc walked towards a room in the pce, and in there the shameless minister and his stupid and son arepletely restrained.

    "He really did n something for you. He even expected you guys to visit. Seems like it was the right to call for me to restrain you guys."

    He said to both of them.

    "Brother-inw. Is it how you treat me? I am your rtive, that guy is an outsider."

    "Do you really think that you would be still alive and kicking if not for your status? I am telling you right now. Don¡¯t even try to guilt-trip me with my sister¡¯s name.

    She was dead indeed, but that is not because someone killed her, it is because of her inherent disease. You are the one who fooled her into marrying you so that you can use this as leverage against the imperial family.

    Don¡¯t think I don¡¯t know anything. I know exactly what your ns are. I am cleaning your asses not because of the guilt but out of responsibility towards my sister.

    But I am not tolerating anymore. You guys just had to piss off a person you shouldn¡¯t even talk to. My patience ran out. One more mistake and I will behead both of you, so you can meet my sister, about whom you guys love to reminisce about."

    With those, words he left the ce without even turning back.

    Sam didn¡¯t know that Arc had made extremely high precautions just so there wouldn¡¯t be any conflicts with him and the empire.

    Sam got ready to leave. Now all things are finished and he can now return to the Orion. But he has to give some instructions to the Artisan tower officials, as he would be leaving to get the inheritance.

    So, he started his journey on Vulture immediately. This time though, there are two extra people.

    Felicia and her brother Fred. The twins also traveled with them. Sam is still a bit curious about Felicia. Because of two reasons, one is the Crown prince tried to marry her and the second one is that guy from Arian wants to get her no matter what.

    So, he is a bit curious, but just a bit. He couldn¡¯t possibly ask her to let him examine her right. He might be cold and unfeeling that doesn¡¯t mean he doesn¡¯t have any manners.

    When Watt saw that Sam is looking at Felicia, he closed into him and whispered.

    "Boss, the tests are notplete yet, just wai..." Sam almost kicked this guy off the vulture.

    He really is pissed at this guy¡¯s behavior.

    This time, the journey is unlike before. The vulture is moving full speed ahead. He doesn¡¯t have much time and after thirteen days of exhausting journey, they arrived at the falcon cliff city.

    Sam¡¯s amodation was quickly taken care of, because his mansion was left untouched. When the temporary count who is in charge of the ce heard that Sam ising, he even sent someone to clean up the whole mansion.

    Afternding there, Sam immediately went into his room for another retreat. He has to design somethings and hand them over to the artisan tower. These would be the designs of the auxiliaryponents that would be needed for the project.

    Since he is going out anyway, he might as well assign the tasks so that by the time, he came back, he would have fewer things to worry about.

    He worked in the divine dimension for the two days andpleted a boatload of designs. All the calctions arepleted while he was on the vulture.

    These designs consist of some machineponents and then some building constructions. He was confident that no matter how many people involved these would take around three months to bepleted.

    By then, he might return from this so-called inheritance.

    On the day of the journey, he came out and saw that Hawk is already here. Apart from that, the people from Sam¡¯s battalion are also here.

    They are conscripted into some local military, so all that needed was a message and here they are.

    "Thank you," Hawk said as soon as he met Sam. His face looked haggard and he seemed to be going through a rough patch. Sam just nodded at him and he went to meet people from Sam¡¯s battalion.

    Unlike Hawk, these people are quite cheerful. They had some small talk and Sam got ready to leave.

    Fred and Felicia are left with the battalion and Sam along with the remaining four people went towards the tower of will.

 Chapter 264: Island

    Sam entered the tower of will. It waspletely closed off after that day of the examinations. Some people wanted to try their luck, but they weren¡¯t able to do anything.

    When Sam entered the tower of will, the usual room with inscriptions etched on the wall are nowhere to be see. Instead it was just like a normal empty tower, he suspected that this must have something to do with his entry.

    They climbed the thirty floors and he saw the familiar tform. He ced his hands at the smaller version of the tower on the tform and started pouring in the spiritual energy.

    The next moment, the whole tower was lit up. Inside and outside there is no difference. It waspletely covered by a white light.

    Within few minutes, the whole tower disappeared from that spot and reappeared at another ce in faraway seas.

    Sam opened his eyes. He was looking around and all he can see are the familiar walls of the tower. But a small entrance was opened on one of the walls leading to balcony.

    When, Sam came out of that entrance, he saw arge expanse ofnd and can also feel the sea breeze.

    He walked around the balcony and noticed that there is arge sea behind the tower.

    The tower was ced on arge cliff. On one side is a vast expanse ofnd and on the other side, there is vast sea.

    Sam and his friends looked at thend and he could feel something. Even in that night time, he can sense the presence of other three towers on the other three corners of thisnd. More precisely, the other three corners of this ind.

    Yes, for some reason he has a feeling that he is on an ind.

    At this moment, something happened.

    A sh of light appeared in the tower. Sam and his friends ran towards it.

    There a familiar silhouette of Murali appeared. It is the will of Murali.

    "Wee to my Ind. I hope that your journey is smooth.

    I am Murali.

    And if you are not in the wrong ce, then you are here for my inheritance.

    Before, I tell you how to obtain it, let me tell you what you can find in this ind.

    ording to the regtions, the candidates who cleared the four towers, can bring five people each.

    If you are here, meaning you met that requirement.

    In this ind, not only the four candidates can get the inheritance, the helpers who came can also get the inheritance.

    In this ind, there are a total of sixteen inheritances out of which four are mine.

    The remaining twelve inheritances are from the twelve greatest opponents I have killed in my life.

    A part from that, there are many consumable scrolls which could save your life in a time of desperation. Inscription designs, weapons and some other treasures that appear from time to time on this ind.

    You have to stay on this ind for two months.

    In these two months, at random moments, an inheritance will appear untilst week. On thest week, the four candidates shall contend for my four inheritances of mine.

    The inheritances that appeared on the ind at any random moment, anyone can contend with them.

    There is no certain time limit and the inheritance will disappear only if it was cleared or the two-month time period is over.

    I advise the four candidates to not participate in these and let your helpers deal with them.

    Apart from that, some random treasures will be guarded by the beasts in the ind.

    So, the more you explore, the more danger you encounter and the more the danger the more the treasure.

    The four towers are absolute safe zones. Every person inside will be safe no matter what. Even if you are bleeding to death, you can recover inside, even if you are suffering with poison, you can still get well soon.

    As for outside of the ind...

    My final advice is, you better focus more on your survival than the inheritances because, this ind is treacherous.

    As soon as you get out of that tower, you will be having the hardest time, you ever had in your life.

    But the hardest the obstacle you ovee, the greater the reward.

    Every danger here has a reward attached to it. No matter how small it might be, no matter how insignificant it might seem, you can find a form of reward if you can see through it.

    But do, remember, the survival is the most important.

    From tomorrow morning, your tests in this ind will start. So, rest well, while you still can."

    With those words, the silhouette disappearedpletely.

    Sam looked at the tower walls and went down stairs.

    They can stay in the tower, but Sam doesn¡¯t want to do that.

    After that, Sam walked out of the tower and floated on his harbinger to check the surroundings, but after moving a few meters away from the tower, an invisible barrierpletely halted his advancement.

    He tried to move in another direction, but there is no way for him to go and he soon realized that with a tower as centre and one cannot move past the radius of twenty meters.

    He checked the rocky terrain of the cliff but he found nothing wrong, everything was same.

    There was nothing wrong at all.

    He picked up a small stone and threw it outwards, it passed through the barrier and the next thing, Sam threw a fire ball, it passed through as well.

    Only a person is restricted, the attacks aren¡¯t restricted at all.

    The cliff is small and Sam can see the normal soil a hundred meters away and he can also see a slope connecting the cliff and beach on other side.

    He just wanted to familiarize with the terrain, but there is no other way, he can only do so much.

    He went back into the tower and waited for the morning toe.

    Tomorrow, he will see what this ind is all about.

    Next day, Sam came out of the tower at dawn. Even though, Murali mentioned it to be tomorrow, it didn¡¯t work at midnight and even before the dawn. Only after the sun rose, did the restriction was lifted.

    After confirming that, first thing they did was split up and search.

    Philip, Jack and hawk are responsible for searching the immediate area near the tower within a radius of around fifty meters.

    That means, they will search the area a little after crossing the cliff and the beach as well as under the cliff.

    Sam and Watt are going on their hover boards to the nearest forest and search through another fifty meters. Their search is for both animal habitats as well as other traps that might be here in this ce.

    After confirming that within the first fifty meters radius of the forest there are no habitats and no immediate traps, they returned and shared the findings.

    This took two hours. Even though, the area covered is small, they have to make sure that their immediate surroundings are safe, so that they could make ample preparations in presence of any danger.

    "There seemed to be some sort of shellfish habitat at the sea under the cliff. The waters are clear, but I can sense a great presence inside the water.

    They might be some type of shell fish or star-fish, even though the water seemed clear, I couldn¡¯t see anything and I didn¡¯t dare to go deep into it."

    Sam started thinking. This is the first habitat they encountered in this ce. First, he has to confirm what is in there.

    After all, Murali did say that the danger is the reward. So, even if he is dangerous, he has to take a look.

    The second thing is, Sam is quite curious. This ind is in the middle of nowhere. So, he is looking forward for whatever animals he might encounter.

    So, now that they knew there is a habitat inside the waters, that shall be their first target.

    They moved towards the beach and Sam hovered over to the ce under the cliff on harbinger.

    He projected some light into the waters.

    The water seemed to be clear at first nce, but nothing can be seen other than the blue colour of the water.

    Even after the light was projected, nothing could be seen. It is as if there was an opaque object blocking the light.

    Sam frowned at this. He took out a piece of meat from the storage and dropped it into the water.

    There are some ripples initially and soon, the water was clear again.

    Even in these shallow waters, he couldn¡¯t see the sea bed. And the piece of mean he dropped seemed to be mysteriously disappeared.

    He increased the thrust of the harbinger and the still water was suddenly disturbed.

    But there is still no vision.

    He floated a little higher and took out a hand gun. He made this hand gun along with the sniper but never got to use it.

    He also took out some normal metallic bullets and shot in the water in a few ces. He peered his ears open to listen. Even with the enhanced sense of a cultivator, all he could hear was the bullet hitting a rock.

    From all the conditions, he could deduce some possibilities on which beast exists here.

    But he still needs some confirmation.

    So, he took out a rabbit and threw it inside. As the rabbit was still alive, it should struggle a little bit. But after the initial struggle on the surface of the water and drowning a little bit, the rabbitpletely disappeared.

    Sam swiftly dipped his hand and with a pull dragged the rabbit out.

    Its leg was bitten and the rabbit was whimpering in pain. Sam healed the rabbit quickly and left the ce.

 Chapter 265: Exploring the Island

    Sam confirmed his suspicions.

    There was indeed a type of beast in this area.

    Only one beast. But rather than calling it a beast, it is more suitable to call it a nt species.

    This is called Blue mucus algae.

    Even though it is called algae, unlike other algae it doesn¡¯t require sunlight, in fact, it is quite repulsive to it.

    This type of algae is somewhat peculiar. The blue-colored mucus it excretes gives on an illusion that it is perfectly clear water.

    But one couldn¡¯t be more wrong. Ittches on the rocks underwater and there will be some tendrils that will be formed over its surface.

    These tendrils envelope whatever prey thates towards them and will suck the flesh away. That¡¯s right, they will suck the flesh bit by bit. There would be only bones left no matter the beast.

    They are quite repulsive to light and heat. They can even deal with some beasts stronger than them if they are high in numbers.

    What makes them terrified is that this thing will grow even if you ce a small piece of it on the rock. To kill it, one either has to overwhelm it andpletely destroy everyst one of them. No matter the type of attack they used they have to deal with once and for all.

    Even if there is a little bit of it left, then it would reproduce rapidly until there is a break in rocky terrain.

    Sam wanted to collect these as soon as he confirmed. These can be used as a perfect trap in water and there is no need to find proper resources, these are just like termites and locusts, they can feed on anything.

    But for that he needs to make ample preparations, the level of these algae is determined by their area of expanse. Right now, Sam could confirm that they upied at least ten square meters, which means, they can devour a Great realm cultivator with ease.

    So, he needs to make a proper n.

    He left the ce but he suddenly remembered something.

    Murali said, that every danger is a form of treasure for them.

    Since these algae can be considered as dangerous, he has to find a way to bypass them and see if there really is any treasure.

    So, he has to make other ns.

    One advantage of these algae is that they can be sure that there wouldn¡¯t be any beasts in the nearby waters.

    So, for now, they are safe within one hundred meters radius.

    Now it is time for them to move forward. First, they have to be familiar with as much terrain as possible.

    Sam climbed on top of the tower¡¯s roof and took out his telescope.

    He was trying to get a glimpse of the other towers¡¯ position and he really did find out.

    The ind is most probably in rhombus shape. The four towers seemed to be in four corners.

    And judging from what he could see from the telescope, his tower is at the end of a longer diagonal.

    Because he cannot see a tower straight ahead but he could see two towers at two angles towards the left and right side.

    He wished that he had one of those positions because he could monitor all four towers.

    Now, he has a vague idea of how vast the ind is and he can explore a certain amount of territory without interfering with others.

    Since this whole thing is apetition, there is no way that they would be friendly with other people. There is a high chance that the teammates might turn on each other, much less on other teams.

    Sam decided on how to proceed. He would avoid these people at all costs. He has to do so. They would only appear when an inheritance appears, otherwise, they would harvest some treasures or resources by finding a suitable ce where there was no interference.

    The lesser the encounters the more probability for them to be safe. As Murali mentioned that the ind is prone to extreme dangers, there is a high chance that the beasts could be attracted by the smallest of themotions.

    So, it is better for them to avoid others.

    In a ce and situation like this, one must have as much information as possible, and the more variables they have in control the more benefits they have.

    The first thing they have to do is explore the area and implement somethings Sam has nned.

    So, the next moment the team of five started moving. When they are walking in a certain direction, Sam and Watt moved on the hoverboards to scout a certain area beforeing back.

    And leading the way, so that they could avoid any attacks. They kept on examining the woods for all types of species. Insects, pests, snakes, rodents.

    Sam doesn¡¯t want to take risks. Shadow mice are small, but the things they can do with proper guidance are beyond imaginable.

    Sam has divided the whole ind into four equal parts and after three hours, they didn¡¯t even finish one-sixth of the area under their tower.

    Even though there are some beasts, there are norge habitats and there are absolutely no traps. But this area can be still considered somewhat dangerous if they travel alone. Because there are some spots, they could be struck between two beasts.

    After that, when they moved forward, Sam and Watt didn¡¯t notice any peculiarities when they saw some expanse ofnd free of trees. This could be a nice camping spot.

    But as soon as, Philip stepped on thend, his feet suck into the ground and the clear hard ground just before suddenly turned into a quicksand swamp.

    But this didn¡¯t seem like ordinary quicksand. Philip didn¡¯t try to move much after the initial shock and Sam also quickly caught him while he stood on the harbinger.

    Sam tried to pull Philip up with all his might and using the thrust of harbinger, but there is an extreme resistance.

    "There seemed to be vine-like thing coiling around my leg, I think it is sentient," Philip said in astonishment.

    Sam was stunned immediately and said.

    "Increase the heat of your legs, don¡¯t let it hold on to you for long."

    He increased the thrust to its full capacity and finally able to pull up Philip.

    They moved back to the normalnd and Sam examined Philip¡¯s leg and to his astonishment, Philip is holding a piece of small red-colored vine-like thing in between his toes.

    Philip smiled and said.

    "We might get something out of it don¡¯t we?"

    Sam smiled and first cleared the mud off of Philip¡¯s leg with the water element. After that, he carefully took that thing in his hands and carefully examined it.

    The red thing has some very small sharp protrusions on it, like a tiger¡¯s tongue. This thing can rip off the flesh on a person, at least the skin if they are not strong enough. Luckily, Philip is a warrior-mage with a good physique, so the damage is not high.

    After ten minutes, Sam finally identified that thing. It is not a vine, rather it is a tongue. It is a tongue of the beast and a very peculiar one at that.

    This beast is called swap swallower. This thing resides underground and the area above it will turn into a swamp.

    It can sense vitality and if any living objectse over it, then they would be in deep trouble. They would be swallowed into the swamp as the beast would devour them whole.

    The only disadvantage of the beast is it wouldn¡¯t move. It will only move when it is in infancy and after growing a bit, its speed will be incredibly slow, so they will settle down after finding a suitable ce.

    This is indeed a great natural trap.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but shake his head. This Murali guy seemed to be a little too perverted. The way he set the traps is somewhat peculiar.

    Using beasts and a very unique bunch at that.

    After that, they carefully crossed the whole area. Because, Sam has other ns for this ce, so he has to look around so that he can use these surroundings to his benefit.

    After some time, and changing directions, they finally found a habitat of considerable threat.

    Jade horned rhinos. These rhinos travel in groups and despite theirrge size, they are incredibly fast. The main thing is although it is called Jade horned, the whole body of the rhino can be converted into a jade-like structure. Just like elemental fusion.

    Although it is called Jade, it is only because of the looks, in reality, they are stronger than most metals.

    The skeletons of these rhinos are just like the skeletons of the Gold Blooded tiger he killed in the start of his journey in this world.

    Sam and the rest carefully avoided the rhinos and went towards other ces.

    They circled the whole part which Sam marked as their territory in the ind until midnight.

    All in all, the foundation around six habitats, which have multiple Level 5 beasts in them, seven different traps like the swamp swallower.

    More than seven individual beasts which are Level 5.

    More than forty or so individual beasts at Level 4.

    Out of all these a single Level- 5, beast might even be capable of dealing with them.

 Chapter 266: First Inheritance

    At night, Sam and his friends gathered in the tower.

    "Take adequate rest and don¡¯te out unless necessary."

    Leaving those words, Sam went on the Harbinger, back into the woods.

    He is going to continue scouting. There are two reasons, one of them is moving in a group at night is dangerous and he is not confident to rescue all of them in case something unexpected happens.

    The second reason is Sam has something he could rely on at the night and that is night vision.

    That¡¯s right, he mastered night vision.

    Generally, when the light rays which are reflected from an object hit the retina of the eye, the photoreceptors turn that light into an image in the form of electrical signals and transmit to the brain.

    And the retina can only perceive the light rays that are within the visible spectrum.

    Now, Sam is using the light element in such a way that he can use he can perceive the infra-red rays with his eyes. This all stemmed from his ability to change the frequency and wavelength of the light ray.

    Even though Sam was busy, he never stopped working on improving his abilities.

    At the night, the cultivators can truly perceive their surroundings with their spiritual sense, but that is limited by their cultivation and mental strength.

    So, Sam opted for the night vision or more precisely thermal vision is that he can rely on his enhanced eyesight of a cultivator by modifying it.

    Without any obstacle ahead, Sam can see something hundreds of meters away, even though he might not notice minute details, he can still perceive it to an extent.

    Now with this thermal vision, as long as there are living organisms within a certain range even out of his spiritual sense, he can still see them.

    It might not be omnipotent and but he can still have some advantage and with his skill, he is sure that he can sneak and escape in this forest no matter how dangerous it is.

    So, for the whole night, Sam scouted the territory on towards the right side of the tower.

    He managed to check half of it and came back at dawn.

    He started drawing a rough map with all the traps and habitats they discovered yesterday and he discovered at night.

    Now, he is nning to take these guys towards the ce he scoutedst night and continue from there, but he has to change his ns because there was the bright light that was shot into the sky.

    At the same, time on the top floor of the tower, a que was erected out of the floor. Sam could sense it and immediately went to check.

    On the monument, it was noted.

    "The Wave Inheritance

    Opened."

    They immediately understood that the bright light is the ce where that inheritance has opened.

    It was on the other side of the center point of the ind ording to his measurements.

    Sam and their teammates had mapped out a certain route till the mid-point. So, they moved full speed ahead.

    Sam and Watt are having the easiest time, the rest are grudgingly looking at the two of them.

    But they can¡¯t do anything about it but to swallow and ept.

    They sessfully avoided all the dangerous ces and arrived at the center point of the ind.

    There is a huge circrke at this spot and the ce of inheritance is right across theke.

    Yesterday, they didn¡¯t explore theke, because this ce is the junction at which all the four territories join, so the probability of meeting all the other teams is higher.

    But now, they have to cross theke.

    Sam and Watt looked at each other and came to a conclusion.

    Sam held hands of Philip and Jack while Watt held Hawk¡¯s hand and they floated more than twenty meters high above the ground.

    The three of them couldn¡¯t help but curse at Sam and Watt for carrying them like ragdolls.

    But that was only a safe way, after crossing theke, they finally escaped their embarrassing situation and ran towards the ce.

    When they reached, the saw arge rectangr stone pir erected from the ground.

    On the stone pir, there is a cavity in the shape of the palm. Apart from that, there is already another group of people who are just approaching. They are people who arepletely unfamiliar with Sam.

    He guessed they might be the people from the northern region. They exchanged nces and stayed vignt, but they didn¡¯t exchange any words nor did they start a fight, because they knew that the rest of the teammates wille in a while and they would be one reaping benefits.

    And why did Sam estimate that they are from the northern region.? Because he is familiar with the thunder god temple¡¯s elite Great realm cultivators and he also saw the son of Ark who is leading the Arian team.

    This team is definitely not one of those two.

    Soon in ten minutes, the two teams arrived.

    One of them ispletely haggard as they seemed to have survived some serious attack.

    The other team is also out of breath, seems like they faced some troubles on their way, and from the way they came, they have ess to this ce without reaching theke.

    Only, Sam¡¯s team has to cross theke, since this is the opposite area.

    Sam looked at the familiar faces. From the thunder god temple, the one who came is actually Arthur and another five people.

    Arman is nowhere to be seen.

    From the Arian¡¯s team, he only saw Arc¡¯s son, Andrew. Other than him, Sam didn¡¯t remember any other person.

    After everyone came, the bright light disappeared and a string of words projected from the stone pir.

    "Only four people are allowed to enter the inheritance. ce your arm on the cavity and you shall have a chance to contend for the inheritance.

    More suitable for water element users"

    These words came and disappeared.

    Everyone looked solemn.

    "One member of a team." Arthur raised his hand and proposed it. Sam doesn¡¯t have any problem with that.

    Even though he has a water element, he has zero interest in the remaining inheritances, he is here mainly for the inscription and the formation side of the inheritance.

    As these two trades are the ones one needs to constantly research, he is more curious about the inventions of Murali.

    He was genuinely impressed by what is inside the tower of wind.

    He gestured Hawk to take this one for which thetter thanked him and moved forward. Simrly, three other people came out of the remaining three groups.

    Now, it is time to decide who should go first. Sam just gestured Hawk to go first.

    When the rest were about to say something, he looked at them coldly. Two teams Arman and thunder god temple stopped in their tracks, they knew Sam.

    Particrly Arthur and Andrew. This guy can even sell the techniques which are supposed to be the part of the inheritance to them. They don¡¯t want to experience the same thing.

    Seeing the reaction of the two teams, the team from Northern Arian also stopped. Sam noticed that a person from that team is looking at him constantly. He just gave a look and didn¡¯t bother with him much.

    As soon as hawk ced his hands on it, he disappeared in a sh. The remaining three followed.

    Sam looked at the remaining members vigntly.

    He doesn¡¯t want to waste his time here, but he doesn¡¯t know where the person woulde out and if hees out at this ce only, then there would definitely be trouble.

    After all, everyone is here for fortune, and out of four members, there is a high possibility that only one of them can get their hands on the treasure. Then would the remaining three just let this go?

    Of course not. There is a high chance that a might battle might ur. He has to ensure their safety.

    But wasting this much time, on an unexplorednd, is something he is extremely unwilling to do.

    After some thought, Sam took out a few formation discs and a bunch of methane grenades and gave them to Jack and Philip.

    He is confident in their abilities and with these he can be rest assured that even if they weren¡¯t able to win, they can at least hold on until Sam and Watt arrived.

    After that, both Sam and Watt flew back on the hoverboards. Arthur is looking at the two people hovering on the boards with eyes filled with envy.

    Sam got used to these gazes. Many people want to have a board like that, particrly these young masters who like showing off.

    But they cannot get their hands on one. Because there are only two in the whole world and one could easily guess where they came from if they robbed it from Sam.

    The second thing is that there are many artisans who are researching the principle of these hoverboards. The only thing they can guess is that Sam used the wind element. Other than that, there is nothing else they knew.

 Chapter 267: The Wave Inheritance

    Sam and Watt left the ce so that they could continue the exploration from where Sam left off at Dawn.

    He already mapped more than one-fourth of the territory. The ind might be big, it is only thrice as big as the imperial capital of Arian.

    If it is the only journey, Sam is confident that he can circle the whole ind more than twenty times in a single day that is only on feet, if harbinger was included, he can do that five times faster, but observing the surroundings and checking for trails of beasts and traps is something hard.

    The territory to his right belongs to the Thunder god temple team and the territory to his left is the Arian team while the territory opposite to his is of the Northern region team.

    Now, that he knew where the remaining candidates are situated, all he has to do was deal with the mapping problem and then start implementing his ns together with his teammates.

    At the stone pir, the people from the remaining three teams are looking at the direction in which Sam and Watt left.

    They wanted to know why these guys left and some even have thoughts of following them. But after seeing their speed they got rid of those thoughts and asked Philip.

    "Where are they going?"

    "Why do you need to know?"

    "How can we know if you guys are not plotting against us?" The person who asked this question was the leader of the Northern region team.

    "Do you think, he needs to plot something to deal with you guys? You guys might be strong, but don¡¯t poke into his business, can¡¯t you see even the thunder god temple folks are staying quiet?"

    These wordspletely infuriated that guy, just as he was about to make a move, another person from their team stopped his actions and whispered something. The leader could only ept this grudgingly.

    Meanwhile, the people who entered the stone pir.

    The four of them appeared in a deste ce. A deste seashore.

    They appeared in the shallow waters as waves hit them on by one.

    They tried to move back to the shore, but there was an invisible barrier blocking them. They have to stay in the waters no matter what.

    The waves started hitting them one by one and their intensity increased by each wave.

    But they didn¡¯t feel the pressure, instead, they felt their spiritual energy reacting to the waves.

    Hawk felt the waves and started moving forward.

    There was certainly some resistance but he was able to move forward.

    He remembered the name of the inheritance. The wave inheritance.

    He felt that whatever the inheritance was about, it has to do with the waves, so instead of escaping them, he tried to move forward by embracing them.

    But he met a barricade soon enough, he wasn¡¯t able to move after two steps.

    Then he closed his eyes and felt the resonance of the waves with his spiritual energy. He wanted to understand this feeling and wanted to control it. He could feel the changes both in terms of form and nature of his spiritual energy.

    Soon, the rest of the candidates also figured this out.

    They also closed his eyes and started feeling the wave energy once they can truly resonate with their water element with the waves, they can take a step forward.

    Three minutes after encountering the first barrier, Hawk was able to take another step.

    He didn¡¯t open his eyes and moved forward. He started resonating again.

    They couldn¡¯t see where the end of this is, but their instincts are telling them that this is the correct path in here.

    So, the four of them patiently started advancing.

    Meanwhile, after a few hours, the teams waiting at the stone pir felt a bit bored and a waste of time, some of them wanted to explore the surroundings and see if they can find anything.

    So, they left two people at the pir and left the ce.

    After more than half-a-day, they changed the shifts.

    By that time, Sam and watt are almost done mapping the second part of the territory, in an hour or two, they would be done here and then they could start mapping another ce.

    Time passed.

    At night, Watt returned to the stone pir, while Sam was still in the third territory. But this time, his luck was not as good as the previous day.

    Because three people from the Arian team are now hunting a beast. A Peak Level -4 beast in the territory.

    They seemed to have nned something ahead of time to ambush the beast. But they failed and for some reason, they are extremely weak for that beast.

    So, the three people started fleeing and the beast chased them. This Earthen tusked Boar. The tusks of this boar are like sharpened rock and it uses earth element which gave the name to these boars.

    As Sam was trying to map the territory, he felt the tremors and saw these three people running towards his direction.

    He cursed under his breath. Nighttime, beasts might sleep or take some rest, but that doesn¡¯t mean they arepletely carefree. In fact, they are extremely vignt, and disturbing their rest is one of the stupid things one could do.

    Because once a beast goes on a rampage, they would attract the attention of other beasts. That is the worst thing that could happen, in a forest like this where there are numerous Level-5 beasts.

    This is the reason he didn¡¯t want to travel in groups at night. The beasts might make a move and they wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything about it. There is a high possibility of casualties if it is a Level-5 beast.

    Sam has now two choices, that is dealing with this beast or flee. But both are dangerous. If he didn¡¯t deal with this beast as fast as he can, the Level-5 beasts might arrive, but the same problem might arise if he left it like that.

    He is an extreme dilemma. He is only a Level-4 Great realm cultivator and a peak level 4 earthen tusked boar is not exactly an easy target.

    As he was about to flee, he changed his mind immediately, because these guys did another stupid thing and that is, they activated a consumable inscription scroll.

    But their target missed and arge explosion happened. Themotion shook and Sam could sense the auras of some Level-5 beasts from the surroundings.

    This caused Sam to grit his teeth in anger. Now, even his escape routes are tight. There is the only route left without any presence and that is the way the wild boar came.

    Sam took out the ws and shed towards the boar on his hoverboard. Right now, this route is by far saferpared to the remaining directio0ns, but even for that, he has to deal with this boar.

    The only thing he is superior to this boar is his speed on the hoverboard.

    He started shing the boar on the sides when it is concentrating on the three of them.

    His ws prated on it, but he didn¡¯t stay there. He started nking the boar left and right. And two minutester, the boar¡¯s movements turned sluggish.

    This is not because of the injuries but due to the poison in the ws. This is the only time he used the poison in battle. And he used a poison that makes it lose its consciousness and paralysis agent.

    After the movements turned sluggish, he made a final move, he made a turn in the air on harbinger and arge wind de was formed from the edge of the board, beheading the boar. The deep gash made the boar bleed continuously and it lost its life in an instant.

    He didn¡¯t wait long and stored the body in his storage.

    After the risk he took, he should definitely get some reward.

    So, he took away the body, then he turned around and said to these three guys.

    "If you want to live, you better leave this ce and run this direction."

    After that, he didn¡¯t stop at all. With full speed, he flew towards a location he already explored previously.

    This is a rtively safe zone.

    He rested for a while and decided to call it a day.

    He moved towards theke and decided to join with his teammates.

    When he reached the ce, he saw something abnormal n the stone pir. The bottom part of the stone pir, about one-fifth of it, was illuminated with a light blue glow.

    He was a bit surprised and so were the rest of the people.

    But he didn¡¯t care much. He just sat back near a tree.

    The forests are now being roamed by the beasts. They can hear the grunts and growls of the beasts. The members at the pir started feeling nervous.

    Sam closed his eyes and leaned back. He wanted to rx a bit.

 Chapter 268: Trouble

    Sam wanted to rx. But his expectations are short lived. Because another ident happened at this moment and this time it is people from the thunder-god temple.

    They identally provoked a Level-5 beast and that ce is too near to the pir.

    The group didn¡¯t move towards the tower since it is too far away and instead ran towards the stone pir.

    All the candidates are rmed at the roars of the beast and the screams of the people, who are running towards them.

    Sam and the others who are rxing at this moment, woke up from their daze immediately and were on high-alert.

    From the roars, Sam was sure that this beast is at least a middle-stage Level 5 beast. its aura was too terrifying to even from this distance.

    Sam activated the thermal vision and looked towards the direction where the roars areing from and from what he saw he waspletely stunned.

    Just from the silhouette he saw from the thermal vision, he had a few beasts in his mind and no matter which beast this one is, it is not exactly good news.

    "We have to escape now." He nudged Watt and both of them immediately caught Philip and Jack before fleeing into the forest. The remaining members are also alerted by Sam¡¯ actions and prepared to flee.

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother warning them.

    After entering the woods, he stopped for a second and threw everyone into the divine dimension. Watt is not as fast as him. So, it is better this way.

    Sam increased his speed to the limit and now he is as fast a Peak level ¨C 5 beasts, but he is still not that confident that he can escape.

    Because, if the beast is really what he thinks it is, then there is almost no escape. Because, it is kind of a beast that can be considered as a predator in the Level ¨C 5 beasts. It can fight against the beasts with strength higher than itself.

    The main thing is the speed of this beasts is faster than any level-5 beast. its main ability lies in its speed.

    So, Sam is not exactly confident.

    Then how are the three people able to run away from it? Actually, that is the main factor that made Sam flee immediately. Because he knows of a beast that likes to toy with its prey. It likes to make its prey think that there is the hope of living, but then it would toy the prey to death leaving unsurmountable despair.

    At this moment, Sam only wished on things that the beast didn¡¯t take the same route as him.

    If not, he can only do one thing and that is to enter the divine dimension and stay there until the beast escaped.

    He didn¡¯t dare take out any beasts from the divine dimension, because they are not strong enough and he didn¡¯t bring the vulture, because that bird has yet to know the existence of the divine dimension.

    Level-6 beasts have a certain level of intelligence, he doesn¡¯t dare to send a beast which he didn¡¯t have enough familiarity and trust into the divine dimension.

    There is also another beast, the termite queen, but it is not suitable for a head-on confrontation, rather it is suitable for an ambush.

    Sam felt d that he remembered the mappletely. He escaped towards the tower and only heaved a sigh after he entered it.

    Even though the beast was not after him, he didn¡¯t dare to stop. He just came back to the tower on instinct.

    After reaching the tower, he let the remaining three out.

    They also looked at the familiar tower walls and sighed.

    They didn¡¯t see the beast, but from Sam¡¯s reaction, they could feel that this beast is truly dangerous.

    "Just cultivate and breakthrough. We need to increase our strength as much as we can. We cannot simply run away. For now, let us not bother about Hawk. I highly doubt that the inheritance will throw him in such a dangerous ce after the tests are over.

    Focus on cultivation. I will see what we have to do from tomorrow."

    After that, Sam took out the corpse of the boar. He also needs to speed up the process of cultivation and due to the beast cultivation, rather than absorbing the spiritual energy of beasts, he is better off getting spiritual energy through the consumption of food.

    Since he has a Level-4 peak level of food, it will be great nutrition.

    When the remaining three people saw the corpse, Sam said.

    "It is poisoned. Don¡¯t even think about eating it."

    Sam cut open the belly of the boar and while cleaning it, he found something interesting. Inside the body of the boar, he found a spatial ring.

    It was fixed into the spine of the boar is a small corner.

    Sam took out the ring and looked into it. He found a bunch of scrolls and books inside.

    Most of the scrolls are some consumables that can be used as traps to hunt.

    Every trap is rted to earth usage.

    All one has to do is, open the scroll and ce it on the ground where they want to activate the trap and inject some spiritual energy into it.

    Then the trap would activate and any living being that entered the trap would be done for.

    There are three books in total.

    Two of them are filled with the theory behind the traps and thest one is a design theory of some other formation. This one is arge-scale defensive formation and Sam was amazed by it.

    After examining it for a while, he finally understood what the words of Murali meant. There is a treasure apanied by every danger.

    He ced them aside and started roasting the boar

    He let out Mia and both of them ate everything. Their spiritual energy increased.

    With this, he had an idea. If he goes to the wild and hunts some stray Level-4 beasts with his beasts, he might be able to advance faster than now.

    But when he was about to take the beasts out on the ind, they werepletely blocked just like the night they arrived here.

    This also raised some suspicions. He was able to leave the tower without any obstructions, he went to the shallow water at the cliff and then let Yanwu out, there he came out, but when he tried to enter the ind itself, he wasn¡¯t able to do so.

    There seemed to be some sort of restriction ced so that their pets cannot help them on the ind. Sam felt d about one thing though and that is his decision to flee without counting on his beasts to fight that beast earlier, otherwise, he would have been in big trouble.

    Sam went back to the tower. He only has one choice, he has to break through by spiritual energy, because, hunting the beasts is not yet a feasible option.

    The absorption of spiritual energy is a slower option.

    Right now, he can do nothing but absorb as much as he can. But after some thought, he has a new idea.

    He took out the cylinder he used to kill Oscar. He sat at the corner of the tower and then activate the fire and started bathing himself in it.

    Since the fire is essentially made of spiritual energy, if he can consume this me, his spiritual energy might increase.

    So, he and Yanwu tried this and after finding out that it is indeed feasible, he and Yanwu went on with it.

    Within a few hours, he had a minor breakthrough. This is due to the fact that he .u.mted spiritual energy from the past month.

    But he could clearly feel the spiritual energy from this fire is indeed effective. He and Yanwu absorbed it while he shared it with Sky and Mia.

    Until the sunrise, Sam was constantly cultivating under that fire.

    He just discovered a new way of cultivation suitable for him.

    This is just like how beasts could advance faster in an environment with an extremely high-level presence of their elemental energy.

    He wasn¡¯t able to take the me at full intensity, so until he can do that, he can cultivate using that me.

    He found yet another advantage of his beast cultivation.

    The next day, Sam went to the top floor of the tower and noticed that the stone que that emerges was also glowing in a simr way as the stone pir. But it is glowing more than half from the bottom.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother with it much and went out again. This time, he didn¡¯t let anyone elsee with him.

    He alone went out on harbinger. He has to map the ind no matter what. His future ns arepletely dependent on them.

    When Sam went towards the left side territory, he saw the remains of a person. His head and some bones are the only things left. When he took a closer look, he recognized the person to be from team Arian.

    The beast must have eaten him up here.

    He left the ce and continued with his mapping.

 Chapter 269: Gorilla

    Fourth day on the ind, Sam was done mapping three-fourth of the whole ind. On the fourth day, he saw that candidates from the other towers are starting toe out slowly to look for some stray beasts they can feast on.

    As cultivators, they can indeed live on with the spiritual energy, but that is not feasible in earlier stages, they have to be stronger, far stronger topletely survive on the spiritual energy alone.

    So, then have no choice but to hunt, but they didn¡¯t dare to hunt brazenly. These arrogant geniuses finally got a reality check after that night.

    They didn¡¯t even dare to move alone past the tower even if it is in the very close vicinity of the tower.

    On this day, Sam came back to the tower so that he can map the three territoriespletely, it is already noon. Beforeing here, he went to check on the stone pir and the blue glow almost covered the whole pir.

    Aftering back, he checked the top floor stone que and it turned out same. It is also almost filled.

    As he was thinking what would happen, suddenly another bright shed at another ce in the ind. At the same time another que emerged in the top floor of the tower.

    Sam came downstairs and immediately moved. They started their journey and this time, Sam didn¡¯t use normal method, he threw them inside the divine dimension and took all of them on his own.

    Within twenty minutes he is near the light and he saw a familiar stone pir there.

    He is the first toe here.

    After arriving, he took out some formation discs and started cing them in the surroundings, he didn¡¯t want to be the victim of other¡¯s stupidity. But this time, they cannot just escape at will. At least, not before one of them entered the stone pir.

    After more than half an hourter, the remaining teams starteding one after another. Only after the people from the four teams came did the string of words appeared.

    "Metal force Inheritance.

    Suitable for Metal element users. Warrior mages are preferable." Sam looked at the string of words which almost looked like an advertis.e.m.e.nt for recruiting employees and didn¡¯t even know what to think of that.

    He looked at Philip, who is the only person who can use metal element and gestured him to go first.

    He looked at the Arian team which is missing one person.

    Their mood is quite gloomy and they seemed to have been affected quite a bit.

    As for the people who need to go to the inheritance, only the person from the thunder god temple seemed to be having a suitable candidate.

    It is rare for people with metal element in these types of elite teams.

    After they talked within themselves, nobody wanted to take this chance because they don¡¯t want to lose a chance to enter a suitable inheritance that might appearter.

    But the leaders used forced them and chose the least useful person to enter that.

    Sam didn¡¯t think much of it.

    These people probably just wanted to see if there is anything like weapons or skill books inside, they can be used for their organizations.

    They knew that without the element it is almost impossible for them to gain it, but they don¡¯t want to take any chances.

    After they entered the stone pir, remaining people didn¡¯t stay there at all.

    They already learned their lesson and they don¡¯t want to experience that again.

    Sam already gave some formation discs and grenades to Philip. Even if he appeared right here when there is beast, even if he couldn¡¯t defeat it, he can still create some distraction and hold on for a while until Sam came here.

    He went to the tower first and left Watt and Jack there before returning to thest remaining part of the territory which he has yet to explore.

    Today, this will bepleted.

    That night, Sam finally finished the exploration and is going back to the tower, he noticed that the beasts started bing more vignt and their movements became more and more diverse. He didn¡¯t see any tracks of these beasts on the first day of exploration.

    He felt that this is a one time thing, but the next morning he noticed the movements of the beasts near the vicinities of the tower increase.

    There is only one thing he can deduce from this. The beasts might have noticed the new presence that was added due to theming here. They started noticing on them which is not exactly a good thing.

    At least for now, they are only Level 4 beasts that areing here, so, they don¡¯t have to deal with much threats, but it wouldn¡¯t take long before the Level-5 beasts enter this region.

    Even if they are inside the tower and safe there, they are not here for being safe, they are here for inheritance.

    They had to go out no matter what.

    Sam had to make his preparations and he had to do it fast. Things will get really scary.

    At this moment, there is a reaction on the top floor of the tower and when they went there, they saw the que that appeared when the first inheritance appeared.

    The que brightened with a blue glow, Sam got ready to move, if this is a sign Hawk would appear, there is a chance he woulde out near theke, he might not make it back safely.

    But before he could make a move, Hawk appeared out of that blue glow.

    He heaved a sigh of relief.

    Seems like this Murali still has some conscience.

    He didn¡¯t ask him about the inheritance, rather he checked for the injuries or any other anomalies, before leaving himself be.

    He went back down stairs and started preparing the map.

    The map mainly consists of the routes they should take, the position of the solo-level five beast territories, the habitats and some traps he discovered.

    With all these info, they can avoid many dangers. Of course, they couldn¡¯t be fully confident that there is no danger, the beasts might appear suddenly in their supposedly safe routes, but this is better than nothing.

    Sam and Watt moved out and started their preparations. Since, he came here, he had to maximize his gains no matter what and the first step towards it is to clear al the supposed dangers that are avable in his own territory.

    For this, the first targets are obviously the weakest ones. The Level-4 beasts and first choice are the ones which roam freely rather than the groups and habitats.

    There are at most 35 solo beasts in the vicinity, out of them twenty-two of them are Level-4 beasts.

    He had to choose one beast after another carefully.

    That day, Watt and Sam are moving to deal with their first target.

    It¡¯s a gori.

    A metal element gori. This is called Dark steel gori and this is also a closebat type beast just like the Golden fur ape.

    This beast also has some peculiar characteristics. It resides beside a tree and consider that tree its property.

    Everything that tree produces shall belong to that.

    If anyone dares to do something to that tree, they will be having the hardest time of their lives because the gori wouldn¡¯t let them have a single second of peace unless one of the two dies.

    Watt and sam appeared the vicinity of the Gori¡¯s territory and it is sleeping as it leaned against its tree.

    Sam gestured Watt and thetter took a detour and appear behind the tree.

    Both of them started their attack at the same time. Sam threw a wind de at the gori and startled it awake. He could hear a metallic ng as the de stuck the chest of the gori.

    Sam now gathered all the attention of the Gori and Watt made his move, he started throwing grenades on the tree as soon as the gori moved towards Sam.

    The tree started burning immediately.

    Now, the beast is furious. It was in a moment of confusion and started looking for the person who attacked the tree.

    When it noticed, itpletely ignored Sam and started moving running towards him.

    Watt immediately increased the speed of the silver wind and started fleeing. The goripletely forgot about Sam.

    Sam didn¡¯t engage in a direct fight, because all beasts are in the peak stage of Level-4 at least all the solo Level 4 beasts are with such strength.

    In this forest, if he fought with a beast like that, there is a risk of injury and if he encounters a Level 5 beast then, he would have some real trouble.

    So, now his aim is to make the Gori move, with minimummotion and at least, he has to lure the gori away to a rtively remote location.

    Soon, the luring started. After arriving at the desired location, Sam and Watt started nking the gori from a longer distance, confusing it from both sides. Soon, it became angrier and followed Sampletely ignoring the injuries from their attacks and Sam is exactly waiting for this moment.

    He stayed still on harbinger at a single spot and when the gori appeared near him, the earth suddenly became soft.

    The goria felt its feet getting lower and lower. This is the swamp swallower. Sam lured the beast here, so the he could take care of it without many signs of battle.

    He took out a hand gun and shot the gori twice, its blood started seeping out and slowly the gori disappeared as the swamp swallowed itpletely.

    Sam and watt returned to the tower to n for the next target.

 Chapter 270: Banyan Expanse

    Sam was done being passive, now he is going to be in the active role.

    Now that he has ayout of the whole ind in his hands, he can afford to be a little more aggressive and he is going to use this to his maximum advantage.

    After dealing with the Gori, his next n is to deal with the rock panther. This time, he needs the help of Jack and Hawk.

    These Rock panthers have a high affinity with the earth element and but they also know how to detect the enemies within a certain range based on the vibrations of the earth.

    The main problem is they are extremely cautious and they don¡¯t like to take risks at all.

    Unless they are confirmed that the prey ispletely weaker than them and they are confident that they can certainly win.

    They are cunning and intelligent, they can blend in the environment easily and attack the prey. Their only drawback is their character of greed. They eat a lot. In fact, a little too much for a beast of their size and level.

    So, Sam is going to use this situation to his advantage.

    The four of them appeared at the territory of the Panther and they stayed put without moving. All of them are in the same spot and without doing anything and retreated their aura to the point of appearing week.

    Sam took out some blood and applied it all over the three of them.

    "It would be quite dangerous if you are like this, so reduce your activity as much as possible. Wait for my signal."

    Sam then disappeared into the woods.

    At this moment, the panther smelled the blood and moved towards them. Like any other beast, that didn¡¯t move and jump on them crazily.

    It slowly started moving towards them, so much that it didn¡¯t even have them in its vision it is only moving based on the smell.

    After a few seconds, Sam used themunication token and said.

    "Move."

    Suddenly the three of them moved a few feet backward. The panther stopped in its tracks. It felt something a miss but the smell of blood was still there, so it moved cautiously and it saw some bloody trails.

    It is as if some injured people are moving with the blood dripping all over them.

    So, its suspicions were reduced a bit and moved.

    After a few of these movements, the panther finally spotted themying weakly fainted on the ground.

    It looked around and sniffed for some time and just like that, it leaped at them at this exact moment, Sam made his move. One kick. He kicked the panther on top of the head and crashed it on the ground.

    The head crashed into it and the swamp opened.

    Again, the swamp swallower.

    But this time, the panther struggled a lot. Its body shined and it activated the earth elemental fusion and tried to move.

    In fact, it almost came out. But Sam didn¡¯t let ite out. He took out the reaper and shed it on the back of the panther. The blood started to gush out and the swamp swallowed the whole beast.

    Another beast was taken care of.

    Now, Sam didn¡¯t do much about Philp who was in an inheritance, he would be safely delivered to the tower, so their duty is clearing the beasts one by one.

    The next target is a flying beast.

    A Golden-Winged eagle.

    This thing rules the sky in a specific location, but near the territory of that beast, there is another creature that rules everything there.

    So, now it is Sam¡¯s turn to be the bait and lure the beast there and the remaining three are going to stay at a safe distance apart so that they could make move at the right moment without any dy.

    Sam directly went to the nest of the beast and plucked a feather off of it.

    He then turned the tail and ran.

    Well, he actually hovered over on harbinger and the eagle followed. The massive eagle can carry at least four people on its back and they can eveny down and sleep.

    The beast and a man are in a chase and soon Sam saw an expanse of a banyan tree.

    The banyan tree has vines hanging on over and every vine will have roots at the ends. When they grow long enough, the roots touch the ground a new tree will form from that ce.

    In his previous life, he knew howrge a banyan tree expanse can be. In West Bengal a state of India there is arge banyan tree expanse there was a banyan tree expanse that expanded for kilometers.

    But this one expanded for only a few hundred meters and stopped.

    Sam dived into the banyan tree expanse and the harbinger waspletely full of wind elemental energy and fire elemental energy.

    At the same moment, the remaining three people threw some attacks at the trees.

    Suddenly, all the vines on the banyan tree reacted, at that exact moment the eagle also dived into the expanse following Sam.

    But what it met is a bombardment of vines.

    The vines started coiling over the bird and its wings are soon affected. It is losing its ability to fly.

    At the same moment, the vines moved towards Sam too, but thebination of wind and me elementbined with his extremely high speed, he managed to ditch the vines in a nick of time.

    How is that possible, because they are aversive to fire and Sam also didn¡¯t dive too deep. He made sure that he can escape.

    Aftering out, he floated over the expanse and looked at the eagle that was dragged down and soon became a dead body.

    But before long, the eyes of the eagle opened and a pink colored glow was emitting through it.

    The eagle slowly stood up and looked at Sam, it opened its wings and flew into the air. But this time, the vines didn¡¯t stop it.

    Sam just hovered higher and higher, soon the eagle halted and didn¡¯t fly higher.

    It looked at Sam for a while and went back down into the expanse the dense vines and leavespletely hid the beast.

    Sam went back and met with the rest.

    They flew towards the tower to have some rest and then they woulde back.

    Sam is using this method to obtain what he wants.

    Out of all traps in his territory, these two traps are the best and he can use them to his full potential.

    The first one the swamp swallower, increase its strength based on the consumption of the number of living things it devoured.

    The more it takes, the wider it bes and it will upy arger area.

    He is now using the Level-4 beasts to feed them.

    That is the reason he is not killing the beasts directly. After all, no matter how powerful the beasts here are, he has a myriad of ways to escape. Even thunder prison can be used for defending.

    But what he needs is a way in which he can deal with the Level -5 beasts and also keep their bodies. At least the skeletons.

    After all, there are all treasures hidden inside them and Sam doesn¡¯t want the treasures to go to waste.

    As for, the bodies of the beasts he just sacrificed? Who said they are going to be waste?

    That is the reason, he employed the two traps for his own purpose. The swamp swallower and the banyan expanse.

    Actually, the banyan expanse itself is not a threat. The threat is something that has been living inside the banyan expanse. It is a parasite.

    It uses the bodies of nts as host and uses the parts of those nts to attack everything that enters its territory. Apart from that, it can also temporarily zombify the beasts and other living fleshly creatures

    As for the time limit, it can do so until all the muscles and the flesh are naturally dposed.

    How long can the body of a beast at that levelst? Many days and months even in some cases.

    But the only drawback is that the zombified beasts cannot leave the area of influence and also cannot use the elemental techniques and the bloodline skills of the beast.

    He is using these two traps for his own purposes and he is going to do so.

    This is the fifth day on the ind and he is already on a major move. Two inheritances are already out, one of them is evenpleted.

    When they reached the tower, the hawk didn¡¯t eat and seemed to be hesitating about saying something.

    Sam asked him directly.

    "Is everything okay?"

    "Well, it is about the inheritance."

    "What happened?"

    "I got the inheritance, but I only got half of it." With that, he took out half of the scroll.

    "This is the most important part of the inheritance and a person from the thunder-god temple and me are tied.

    So, the scroll was divided. The inheritance will only be obtained once the two scrolls are united. I have to meet that guy."

    Sam immediately understood and said.

    "Let us go tomorrow then. Why waste time? The stronger you are the better."

    Hawk was actually, having a hard time asking for help.

    He has only a small friendship with Sam. He had received help a few times, but now he didn¡¯t dare to ask for help. Both of their statuses are very far apart. His father lost his power, but Sam can have a meeting with Emperor on a whim.

    He was relieved when Sam agreed that easily.

 Chapter 271: Hawks Duel

    After some rest, Sam went to the top floor, to see how Philip¡¯s inheritance and he was not surprised that the inheritance is already halfpleted.

    Maybe by the dawn the next day, Philip wille, and then would be the time for them to go and im half of Hawk¡¯s inheritance.

    Before that, they could deal with another two or three beasts within their territory.

    Four of them went hunting.

    Meanwhile, the people from the remaining teams are also making their moves in the Northern Arian Team.

    They are currently discussing something.

    "The Wave inheritance wasn¡¯t obtained yet. It was only divided in half and two of them have to face each other to evenplete it.

    I think we have a chance."

    The person who went inside the wave inheritance said to his leader.

    "Did you say one of them is Hawk?"

    Another person said this, but the leader stayed silent as if contemting something.

    "Yes."

    "If possible, I advise we don¡¯t have any conflict with Sam." This made the person who proposed the idea unhappy.

    "Why? Don¡¯t tell me that you believe the bullshit about him killing the emperor? I don¡¯t believe it. It is just some hype."

    "I am not advising you based on that. I am just telling you based on his battle-prowess. Trust me, you don¡¯t want to experience how it would feel to battle him. In thepetitions, I fought with him directly and I can say that he is not even using a fraction of his strength.

    His raw power might not be high, but his usage of the skill set in the most efficient way. I couldn¡¯t see that even in our Uncle and his killing intent and bloodl.u.s.t. It is like facing a primordial beast.

    It was as if he even disdained to kill me, but that doesn¡¯t mean he could be provoked."

    The person who is talking is part of the weird trio in the Falcon Cliff city. Yash.

    After the test in the marquis city, they disappeared as if the wholepetition has nothing to do with them.

    It is clear that they only came for the tower of will, but failed.

    But Yash couldn¡¯t forget Sam no matter what. But that person is having none of it.

    "I don¡¯t believe he can fight it out with all of us. If my guess is right then both the parties will definitely fight, we can just take them down after they are exhausted.

    I propose we move to the thunder god temple¡¯s tower and wait there. There are two cases, in one the thunder god temple people will make a move on Sam¡¯s team or Sam¡¯s team will go after the thunder god temple.

    We can fish in the muddy waters no matter the case."

    Yash tried to convince the team otherwise, but he wasn¡¯t able to do so. After the unfruitful effort, they decided to move and hide near the vicinities of the thunder-god temple tower.

    At this moment, the people from the thunder god temple are also having a discussion.

    In front of them, there is a corpse of Six tailed wind Zebra. A Level-4 beast.

    They just discovered the spatial ring that was ced in the spinal bone.

    "I think, we need to n and take down the beasts carefully. The Level-5 beasts are powerful, but I think we should at least take down the Level-4 beasts. They might be at the peak-stage, but I think we can take them down if we try a bit more.

    The gifts are too valuable to ignore them."

    Arthur said to all of them, but even he wasn¡¯t feeling extremely confident. Generally, beasts are stronger than a normal person. He is confident that he can fight with ate-stage Great realm cultivator and even if he cannot kill him, he can at least fight to tie.

    But beasts in this forest are quite different. Not only they are peak Level-4 beasts, it is being quite hard for them to fight even as a team.

    This is inconceivable. But it is happening here. It might be hard, but at least it is still possible.

    So, they are starting to n, but they don¡¯t have much information on the beasts. They decided to scout and see what types of beasts are in the vicinity.

    Meanwhile, the people from the Northern Arian are moving towards the thunder god temple tower and Sam¡¯s group is hunting down the beasts using traps, specifically the swamp and the banyan expanse.

    The Arian team led by Andrew, there was also a discussion about the wave inheritance.

    "No. We are staying out of it. Anything that has to do with Sam, just leave it to him. Even if we get nothing from this ind don¡¯t provoke that guy."

    "But boss, he couldn¡¯t make many preparations here, if we can..."

    "I said no. Do you think that it is easy just because he is going to fight with Arthur? There was a time when he even beat the crap out of Arthur along with tens of other people who are as good if not better than Arthur.

    Don¡¯t try to piss him off. That guy got a temper." Only this group stayed put and did nothing but to wait for the inheritances.

    That next dawn, just as Sam predicted the metal force inheritance waspleted and Philip came out of it.

    As soon as he came out, he startedughing out loud.

    Sam went upstairs and from what he could see, Philp is now inte-stage Great realm cultivator and his spiritual energy and elemental energy seemed to be a bit different.

    When Philip saw Sam, there was a mischievous smile on his face and then he yelled.

    "Sam, I am challenging you right now. How dare you bully me all these days? I will take revenge." With that, he didn¡¯t wait and made his move.

    His hands gleamed with a metallic light and his fist turned into a metallic mace and then started glowing read with his fire element.

    Turning the hand into a mace, this must be one of the skills, he learned in the inheritance.

    Sam was a bit surprised but it ended with just that.

    He immediately leaped at him for the battle and after half-an-hour. Sam is panting hard while Philip is sprawling on the floor with both his hands bleeding and his face was swollen. One couldn¡¯t even see his eyes.

    The remaining three came running and when they saw the whole scene and Philip¡¯s face, they couldn¡¯t stopughing.

    Particrly, Watt and Jack.

    Watt even pokes his swollen face and then startedughing until his abs are hurting.

    San healed Philip and said.

    "Rest for a while, we need to go somewhere, since you improved a bit, you wille in handy."

    With that, he also sat in meditation and healed himself.

    After an hour, five of them moved. It is only the sixth day and two inheritances are already over. It seems like there would be a lot of time for them to deal with the beasts.

    They arrived at the Thunder god temple tower.

    Coincidentally, they are also preparing to go for a hunt.

    When they saw Sam, Arthur frowned and halted in tracks.

    "what do you want?" He asked vigntly.

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and gestured for Hawk. Hawk pointed at the guy who has an inheritance and said.

    "You know, why I am here. I want to challenge you for a fair duel. The winner takes the inheritance."

    That guy looked at Arthur asking him what to do.

    "Is it possible for me to buy that?" Arthur asked Sam. He knew who can call shots here.

    "You think you can buy me off? Seems like you didn¡¯t do your homework when you came here." Sam replied without a direct answer. He just sold the lightning element techniques, because when he saw the simtion of the techniques, he felt that they are not of much use to him. He didn¡¯t want to lose out in the pce of inheritances and suffer a loss for wasting his time in there.

    So, he sold the techniques. But that seemed to have given Arthur a wrong idea about him being materialistic.

    "Fair duel, no interference from both sides. Deal?" Sam counter-offered.

    "No killing blows," Arthur added.

    "Deal." Sam agreed. Then both teams took a step backward and only hawk and his opponent are standing in the middle facing each other.

    Soon, the battle began.

    Sam could notice the change in the fighting style of Hawk. The water elemental attacks he used are now more turbulent and have more power.

    He could see a new difference. There is almost a qualitative change in the way his elemental energy operated.

    He must say that he was impressed, but what surprised him, even more, is that the opponent is equally skilled if not better. No wonder, they are tied.

    Even the system or the judgment mechanism whatever that Murali employed to judge the whole test is not able to do anything.

    But Sam knew that the battle wouldn¡¯t go on like this. Because hawk doesn¡¯t have only one element.

    He also possessed a wind element along with the water element.

    He might not have been able to use the wind elements in the test, but now in a normal duel it is fair for him to use and just like that, the battle was soon one-sided and Hawk won.

    The other party was still un-resigned and looked at his teammates for help, but Arthur shook his head indicating his disagreement.

    He can only take out his half scroll and hand it over to Hawk.

    Sam and his group turned around to leave, but before they did that, he took out his handgun and shot at a corner of the woods.

    The bullets prated three trees and this made the people present feel odd.

    But on the three trees, there are six people waiting to ambush Sam and his team after seeing that he got the inheritance. But now they changed their ns as the cold sweat dripped down their spines.

    They didn¡¯t expect Sam to discover them that easily and they don¡¯t want to expect what would happen if they fought him, just his detection skills are hard for them to fathom.

 Chapter 272: Level-5 Beasts and Habitats

    After leaving the ce, Sam and the rest once again started hunting till night.

    In two days, they have done seven beasts.

    They went back to the tower at night to rest.

    For the next two days, they went on a hunt again. Their difficulty increased as the beasts are far from these two traps and they are difficult to lure that far without disturbing the Level-5 beasts.

    They were only able to deal with four beasts in two days. They are not exactly ready to involve the Level-5 beasts in the game.

    ording to Sam¡¯s calctions, the swamp needs another beast to increase its level to be good enough to deal with a Level 5 beast and the banyan expanse needs another one.

    But these two proved to be challenging for him. The beasts are too far away from him and they have to slowly lure them.

    That took another two days. One day per beast.

    Now, it is the tenth day and on that day two lights shed signifying two inheritances. Both of the inheritances appeared side by side.

    When they arrived at the spot they saw two stone pirs. Both of them are lightning type inheritances.

    There are a total of eight spots maximum.

    But Sam didn¡¯t enter any of them. From what Hawk and Philip described, the candidate must be of the same element to have any use after entering the inheritance, it would be a pure waste of time.

    And the candidates from the thunder-god temple couldn¡¯t be happier.

    Out of six, four of them are lightning element users including Arthur. The remaining two, one of them is a water element user and another one is a Warrior.

    Sam¡¯s group just returned without even bothering to enter it.

    They started hunting again and this time, the n is a little too big.

    Because they are going after Level-5 beasts. There are thirteen solo beasts in his territory and after that, the real challenge starts. Six habitats.

    Sam and his group went to lure the beast. Their first target of Level-5. It is called Blood horned Leopard.

    A leopard-like beast having two horns in blood-red color.

    The horns are one of the deadliest weapons that a beast could have at that level.

    If a person gets stabbed by this horn, the material of the horn will pollute the blood-stream and as if the whole blood cells are infected with the virus, the telets will stop functioning, so the victim will keep on bleeding without stopping.

    One can only be healed after cleaning the whole blood. It is a type of poison to be precise. The horn will only dissolve in blood and not in any other solvent.

    Luckily Sam is immune to it too. The Hydra blood can take any poison. This is the nearest Level-5 beast to the banyan expanse.

    Sam was the only one who is fast enough to bait this beast and for that too, he needs his harbinger.

    So, he made the stay in the way so that they can deal some damage to the beast and provoke it enough to not leave him.

    In this way, Sam canpletely concentrate on escaping.

    If not for the fact, he has to refrain from using the energy cells so that the treasures inside the beasts wouldn¡¯t be damaged, he wouldn¡¯t have to go through so much trouble.

    Now, it is time for them to implement the n.

    Sam entered the territory of the leopard and sprayed a huge amount of water on it.

    No matter the world, the feline creatures don¡¯t like water that much. So, when the leopard was sprayed with the water, it was pissed so pissed that she didn¡¯t see that the color of the water is a little bit different than normal.

    It directly leaped towards Sam and Sam flew away on the harbinger, after more than five minutes, when the leopard has about left its territory it was considering whether to give up the chase or not and at this moment, another wave of water hit its face.

    This time, it didn¡¯t notice where it came from, but it was pissed nheless and med it all on Sam and resumed the chase.

    In the same way, after another ten minutes, it started feeling like giving up and at the same time, its body started feeling a bit numb and hard to move, this time when it was about to turn around, a wind de hit it hard on its tail making it screech in anger.

    Sam looked at it and provoked it.

    The beast couldn¡¯t hold it any longer and followed Sam with a furious expression.

    In another five minutes, they reached the vicinity of the Banyan expanse, and just as they were about to enter it, Sam increased his altitude abruptly.

    The leopard came to halt with great difficulty as it reached the edge of the expanse. It felt that something is odd, but before it could make sense, it could feel a hot metallic hit on its butt and due to the sudden piercing heat, it leaped into the expanse.

    The vines moved abruptly and caught hold of the leopard. It tried wriggling out of the grip and in-process cut the vines.

    But at this moment, a golden eagle, arge boar, and red color elephant, and four more beasts all came from behind the trees.

    Their eyes are pink in color. They soon started beating and pulverizing the leopard and it soon became an unmoving corpse and then it became a zombie.

    Sam is watching the whole scene from the top. At least a part of it.

    He could feel a sense of hostility and at the same time a sense of gratitude to him from the whole banyan expanse. The parasite was happy that Sam was able to bring all the food it can have, but it was having a hard time controlling its urges to devour him too.

    Sam can also observe this, right now, the parasite is in the phase of expanding. Since it got some new hosts like these beasts, it will give some leeway to the banyan expanse to grow a bit more, but it will take months and that too on the premise that it survives till that day.

    Sam and his group, took more than half-a-day to deal with the leopard. It only took around twenty minutes to lure it.

    But to scout the area again and again, so that no mishaps will happen and to check that the beast is in a normal condition and all, it took a lot of time.

    After all that, Sam sprayed the water on it mixed with poison of paralysis so that there wouldn¡¯t be any surprises and executed their n

    After dealing with another beast, they went back to the tower.

    By now, the candidates in other territories also started dealing with the beasts. But they didn¡¯t dare attack the Level-5 beasts. The beasts here are abnormally strong and their bloodlines are pretty high. Of course, not as high as Yanwu and the rest.

    But they are enough to make these people afraid.

    For the next three days, Sam and his group dealt with six more beasts, leaving only four of them,

    And by this time, the beasts also noticed the peculiarity. They could feel the changes the Sam and his group brought and are now extremely vignt.

    But that is okay, because, the beasts mostly act on instincts rather than their thoughts, and in another three days the four beasts are also done.

    Now only six habitats and the traps are left.

    Traps can be dealt with he already has more than one way to deal with each trap.

    But the habitats are the most troublesome somethings.

    The six habitats are Dark mane lions, the Steel Wolf tribe, the jade horned rhinos, the ck tusked elephants, Red-winged Ravens, and Sand badgers.

    Out of all these things, the badgers are the smaller tribe but also most troublesome to deal with. Because the badgers are the ones with the least sense of danger and also the least amount of fear.

    Just like the honey-badgers of the modern earth, these badgers will fight to the death with its opponent without any fear, reverence, or any other feeling.

    These beasts are actually the only contradiction of the unspoken rules of the beasts and that is the weak fear the strong by instinct. But these badgers do have one restriction though and that is cultivation restriction.

    They feel fear or rather aversion and reluctance to attack a being who has higher cultivation that itself. That too if the cultivation level is divided by a whole Level, not a sub-stage.

    On the night of the fourteenth day, Sam is thinking about how to deal with the habitats and he couldn¡¯t help but look at the map he drafted.

    In this, all the positions of the beasts are marked and now almost all of them are crossed. Only the six habitats are left.

    As he was thinking about various scenarios on how to deal with these beasts, he got an idea after hours of brainstorming, and if this n seeds there is not much need for him to attack personally.

 Chapter 273: Turned out to be easy

    Sam really did find a way to deal with these habitats, in fact, there are two for two possible cases.

    One of them is considering every beast in the whole habitat as an individual threat or danger, then there would be having a treasure individually which will lead him to kill every single beast.

    But when he thought of this whole thing another way, he felt that there is another possibility.

    What if the whole habitat is considered as a single threat? Then there would be no need for him to necessarily kill the whole habitat. He has many other ways; he can even just steal the treasure if it was just guarded.

    So, the first issue they have to deal with is, whether the habitat is considered as a threat or each individual beast is a threat.

    The next day, he went to the nearest habitat, the Jade horned Rhinos.

    He was very careful as he went to that ce, if he was discovered, he would have to use extreme measures and the treasure may as well lost.

    So, he started spying on the habitat for a whole day to find their routines and find any ces that they are using as a special spot or any ce that has most danger within the whole habitat.

    But on that day, he didn¡¯t find any ce and it took him more than three days to find the spot.

    There is a ce like a cave within their habitat where no beast goes. When the small baby rhinos run around and try to enter that ce, the parents reacted very harshly and hardly.

    The Rhinos which passed that ce, look at that ce with reverence and respect.

    Sam guessed that ce might be the one and he was thinking about how to go there without alerting the Rhinos. After all, it is always better if he refrains from killing so much.

    After thinking long and hard, he decided in a most direct way. Create a distraction.

    But that distraction has to be good enough to have caused more than a hundred rhinos to not concentrate on that ce.

    So, all he did was simply st a sizeable energy cell in the air above the habitat. The huge explosion and the massive fluctuations of spiritual energy, the rhinos did get distracted, but the weird thing is an exactly opposite thing happened. Instead of going away from that cave, all the rhinos instead huddled together towards the cave as if they are trying to feel safe.

    It is as if the thing in the cave is the one that is protecting them. This is making things difficult for him.

    But he did have another n.

    He went back to the tower and started dealing with some herbs, creating a liquid, and the next day, he came with all the group members.

    All five of them upied a certain ce within the vicinity of the whole habitat and on a cue threw a grenade.

    But the grenade is not the methane grenade, instead, a blue-colored gases out of it, and soon enough, all the rhinos are a mess, they are bing drowsy and started slumping. They becamezy slobs all of a sudden.

    Sam moved on the harbinger and flew into the cave.

    The first feeling he got was a surprise, he couldn¡¯t even see an ounce of blue gas in the cave, it waspletely blocked at the entrance.

    In the middle of the cave, there is a formation disc along with a scroll. He didn¡¯t check them right there and left the ce first. Because the gas he used is not high level enough to deal with the beasts for a long time.

    So, before the effect wore off, he has to leave the ce and he did.

    They went back to the tower to check on the formation disc.

    While he was doing that, the rhinos have recovered and they are now in a frenzy. The king of the tribe the rhino which is a peak Level-5 beast went to the cave and as soon as it saw that the empty ce where the formation disc was supposed to be, it started roaring in fury.

    The rhinos started ravaging the whole territory around them. Of course, they didn¡¯t leave their own vicinities and enter the areas under other habitats.

    Sam opened the scroll first and it depicted a lot of images drawn on it indicating the usage of the formation disc.

    This formation disc immediately impressed Sam.

    It is called the seven-stage divine rhino formation.

    As the name implied, the formation has seven working stages. When it is activated, the first stage is will form a single Rhino spirit and attack the enemies who are within the formation range. It is an attack-type and the defense type formation.

    For the second stage, two rhinos, and for the third one three rhinos.

    In the final stage, the whole formation can defend and deal with a Transcendent level cultivator at ate stage.

    This formation is a piece of art in Sam¡¯s eyes and how did the spirits enter the formation. There are two ways and one of them is natural spirit generation.

    For example, just like how the weapons made of meteorite sand forms a spirit over time and the spirit that formed will depend on the atmospheric factors or the materials that are used to make them.

    There is a high chance that a ck feather coat can generate a spirit that has high simrities to the golden crow as it was made of golden crow feathers.

    The other way for the formations to possess spirits is by adding the spirits that are forcefully extracted from the beasts or any other human. It is a very high-level skill and very hard to master and even after mastered the sess rate is very low.

    The thing that impressed Sam, even more, is that the integration of multiple beasts in a single disc.

    There is a high chance of failure due to the fact that the seven spirits try to devour each other and try to be the only one upying the disc.

    Taming and restricting them is one of the most difficult things in the formation makes.

    With this Sam is looking forward to the remaining five habitats and the traps.

    On the fifteenth day, he was done with the first habitat, and that night, another inheritance appeared. This time, it is even more niche than the previous one. The dark element. Only people from Northern Arian have them in their ranks.

    The fifth inheritance was only attended by two people.

    Sam went on concentrating on dealing with the habitats and they always used the same tactic. Scouting for a day or two finding the proper location and throwing the sedative gas, stealing the treasures.

    In this way, dealing with the habitats which should have been the toughest tasks of all, has be the easiest of them all.

    In the next ten days, it was over.

    And two more inheritances appeared. This time, it is an inheritance of swordsmanship and another on of fist techniques.

    Philip entered the one with the fist techniques and jack entered the swordsmanship.

    With these seven appeared and there are only five toe and only twenty-five days are over.

    Now, Sam has to deal with the traps in this territory and start focusing on the remaining territories.

    In the middle of this, his cultivation has raised to the Level-6 Great realm. Yanwu is continuously devouring the fire in the tower, while he is working.

    The twenty-sixth day, he made his move.

    The first trap is the one which is closest to him, the algae.

    Sam took out ten long energy cells of fire elemental energy and stood them in the sea bed in the shallow waters outside the influence of the algae.

    After cing the tenth one whichpletely surrounded the whole algae territory, a formation was activated and water started heating up.

    As the algae are quite aversive to the heat, they will be passive and protect themselves within the rocks with the rise of temperature, which is the best opportunity for Sam.

    But there are very few ways to heat up the whole ce and maintain a certain temperature so he created a fire elemental formation inside the water. Sam dove into it and swam inside to see a small cave. He barely fit in it and inside he saw a weapon.

    He had received quite a few of them actually. After the divine rhino formation, he has expected something simr, but most of them are weapons, only one formation appeared after that and it is not as impressive as the rhino formation.

    Now after seeing another weapon which is a water attributed spear, he was a bit disappointed.

    But that¡¯s about it, he can still see it or gift it to the future subordinates of his. He doesn¡¯t like using the weapons made by others, the weapons he made for himself are always the best.

    He came back and collected some algae before storing inside the dimension.

    After dealing with four more traps only two remained. The swamp swallower and the banyan expanse.

    These two traps, even if they don¡¯t have treasures inside them, they are akin to treasure troves.

    Sam¡¯s first stop is the swamp swallower. He hovered over it and took out a metallic pipe. He infused the metallic pipe with the vitality of the light element and poked it down, immediately the swamp started dragging the pipe down, but at this exact moment, Sam took out the cylinder used for defeating the Oscar and connected the me outlet to the open end of the pipe.

    The gas started blowing first without any me. The swamp didn¡¯t seem to notice it and just kept on dragging the metallic pipe in.

    Sam held the pipe and offered resistance as moderately dying the swallowing, the has was filling the cavity under the swamp. Only when Sam noticed a small fissure appear on the surface to release the gas, did he leave it alone and started a fire.

    The swamp stopped swallowing the whole metal pipe and started shrieking.

    Sam infused the spiritual energy into the feather coat and the coat turned golden color defending again the me.

    As his teammates watched, Sam held the me outlet without moving as he constantly absorbed the mes at the same time.

 Chapter 274: Feeding On Flames

    Sam is glowing with golden light. The golden me surrounded him as it started devouring the intense blue me, they could see Sam¡¯s pants and the vest burned down along with his skin.

    Only his coat was left alone. Even his hair started burning. His pupils also turned golden.

    His friends watched him as he turned into a whole different being.

    Sam is trying to do use this swamp swallower as his medium for a breakthrough. Of course, he has to share it with his bestpanions, but he is going to store the whole energy in him till visited the tower.

    He nned this from the start.

    The swamp swallower which expanded with all the energy obtained from the beasts, Sam gave it as food.

    He is going to take it all. He is going to burn it all of the beings and burn the spiritual energy into mes which he will take it has his.

    It is risky, if he couldn¡¯t covert the raw mes into the spiritual energy, he would die but he wants to take this risk.

    He knew that his growth was fast, but that is not enough. He wants it faster, at least before he leaves this ce, he would reach the peak of the Great realm cultivator and he would do so with the resources that are provided here.

    At least, even if they are not here to be his resources, he would make them his resources.

    He converted his bodypletely into the fire element, the hundred percent elemental fusion. He achieved it.

    The state, the condition, and achievement which many experts beyond the transcendence element desired and obsessed over it but never to achieve it.

    Sam achieved it as a Great realm cultivator, but he was not satisfied.

    It has been a long time since he has this much desire for power. He almost forgot his feeling. These past few days, he might have been busy with this whole inheritance thing.

    But since the time he had the sh with Oscar, he is having this burning desire deep inside his heart. In fact, it is burning his very soul. From then on, he felt one of his long-forgotten emotions.

    If not for the fact that he needs with the city and the resources thate with it, he would not have visited Arian at all.

    But he didn¡¯t have a particr immediate ce or goal for increasing his strength. So, this whole inheritance of Murali came at a perfect time, so he came to this ce.

    There are many treasures here, but not much to increase his cultivation. So, he is growing to create one. Nope, two of them and if possible, more.

    The me intensified. Sam¡¯s body raged even more. The whole blue me and the golden me are shing and Sam is trying hard to devour everything.

    The me raged, the small beasts which are the underdogs of the forest and even the beasts in the habitats are also feeling this aura.

    He is like a whole other being.

    After more than one hour, Sam suddenly opened his eyes, he left the cylinder there and left the ce.

    He left on the harbinger and he zoomed with the golden me.

    On his way, he didn¡¯t take any diversions, he just passed through every obstacle. He was like a crater, destroying everything in the path and creating a burning line in the forest. In between many trees, beasts and many creatures perished.

    He shed into the tower and let Yanwu and the rest of the beasts out as they shared the whole built-up energy in him.

    Most of the energy was losing out and getting wasted. He even let the panthers out as they absorbed it.

    He had a breakthrough along with them. Now he is a Late-stage Great realm cultivator. With all the energy, he only broke through one level. But he is nor worried with the next resource, he can pull of another one without a doubt.

    Meanwhile, Watt and Hawk are looking at the swamp which waspletely burned and almost molten

    Hawk used the water to cool the whole thing down and they saw a cracked ground inside arge pit.

    Both of them walked toward the pit and they could still feel the heat. Watt sent a wind de down and ayer of earth cracked and broke down like a y pot.

    There, a bunch of beast skeletons appeared.

    These are the beasts that swamp swallowed. Sam showed such an amount of extreme self-control that he didn¡¯t harm a single skeleton while dealing with the swamp swallower.

    This time, Sam really had outdone himself. If not for his superior mental strength, this would be simply impossible.

    Watt and Hawk collected the skeletons and kept them all in the storage ring, after removing the spatial rings in their spines.

    By the time they returned to the tower, Philip and Jack are already there. Their inheritances are finished and Jack is meditating with ck Meteorite sword in his hands as he emitted an extremely strong aura.

    But Philip is watching Sam with an extremely peculiar gaze. This time in his inheritance he didn¡¯t have any growth in cultivation, so he didn¡¯t dare challenge Sam as soon as he appeared.

    But when he saw Sam, who is emitting the terrifying aura, he could help but feel a bit surprised and shocked. He was still rejoicing by the fact that he overcame Sam in cultivation practice, but within days, Sam caught up to him.

    When he saw Sam cultivating, he was very tempted to punch him in the face in frustration. In the end, he refrained himself not to do so.

    He doesn¡¯t want to be a punching bag for Sam.

    After a while, Sam woke up and looked at them. After confirming the excavation of the resources and the cylinder from the swamp, they once again moved out. This time, Philip also joined them while Jack is alone in the tower.

    After arriving at the Banyan Expanse, Sam looked at the whole expanse of trees from the top.

    This time, he didn¡¯t want to just use the High-level methane. He wants to deal with the expanse on his own.

    The harbinger suddenly disappeared and he dropped into the expanse, but before he could touch the ground, the vines popped up and the beasts came out of their hiding all moving towards Sam to subdue him with all their might.

    But Sam is not ready to get subdue that easily. His body turned golden and his new pair of clothes burned to ashes again.

    The fire elemental fusionpleted and the vines weren¡¯t able to get a hold of it as they burned as soon as they touched.

    Even the beasts came to halt.

    The parasite¡¯s natural enemy is fire. That is why Sam is confident with the recent breakthrough he can deal with this.

    Even though there are some Level-5 beast zombies, they all lost their elemental attributes and only have the strength of their fleshly body which Sam is not afraid of and if he can loosen the influence of the parasite with his fire, the bodies couldn¡¯t be controlled efficiently and Sam can deal with them easily.

    Sam is like an otherworldly golden beam as he stood with the golden mes enveloping himpletely.

    He didn¡¯t use any other shing moves, because in this state every breath of his can be a fireball and even his fart can be incineration.

    Sam moved as jumped from one tree to another using the vines.

    He is like Tarzan.

    He moved carefreely without a single trace of worry in his eyes. Every tree he touched started burning.

    The parasite soon understood the predicament it was in and also understood that the vines are useless against Sam, so the beasts came into y.

    But Sam was the least bit bothered.

    No matter how many beasts are surrounded, all he would do is try to evade them and if not possible create an opening with an outburst.

    In one case, he burned the feathers of the golden eagle and kicked to the nearby tree and the tree was caught on fire.

    He let go of all his frustrations and just went on burning the whole thing one by one.

    Soon, the parasite started losing control of some of the beasts.

    The movement of the vines was also restricted.

    Soon, the whole forest was burning along with the beast carcasses in it. The bright orange colored mes raged and, in those mes, Sam¡¯s fire elemental body shone with a golden glow.

    He slowly started floating in the fire.

    As he himself has turned into a fire elemental being, now he is the fire itself and inside a me medium, he can travel no matter what or how.

    He can float, he can fly, he can even swim in the mes.

    After a few moments of feeling, Sam slowly flew within the medium and closed his eyes as he spread his arms.

    He started absorbing the total mes with his eyes closed. The whole scene looked fascinating. Sam is now like a god of mes, embracing with open arms.

 Chapter 275: Break through

    Sam is bathing himself in the mes.

    He discovered this ability to use direct mes for his consumption through a guess. He is just disintegrating the mes using his manipting ability and using the absorption ability to make it his.

    After all, the fire is also essentially a form of spiritual energy and the fire doesn¡¯t have manyponents in and itself. So, it is easy for him to do so.

    But will any firework for him in this way? In a sense, yes, but the burning object which acts as fuel should consist of more spiritual energy to be able to have any actual benefit for Sam.

    The whole banyan expanse and the beasts within it including the parasite consists of a high amount of spiritual energy which is going to be burnt into the mes and bes Sam¡¯s food.

    As he was busy devouring the mes, someone else other than Sam¡¯s group are approaching them after seeing the huge mes and smoke.

    They are none other than the people from the thunder-god temple.

    There are only five of them, thest one is not traveling with them. When they saw the huge fire, they immediately shot towards it. They felt that two parties are fighting and from the ce, they are in, it is highly probable for Sam and his friends against a beast.

    They felt that they can take the gains from the two parties¡¯ sh.

    But as they neared the mes, Arthur felt that something was off. The intensity of mes is too high and he can feel the heat waves from afar.

    As he was thinking they slowed down their pace and started walking carefully.

    But they are not the only ones who are attracted by the mes, some beasts from the habitats started making their moves. Thisrge of amotion is not something the beasts which took this forest as their home can ignore.

    Sam is still devouring the energypletely. He is in a trance-like state.

    After absorbing most of the energy, only some insignificant amount of mes are left which are not much use to him. The beasts¡¯ bodies and the banyan trees are already devoured.

    As he was about to move towards the tower again, he saw some beasts and Thunder god temple. He doesn¡¯t have much time to waste but it would be hard to avoid a confrontation. He looked around and turned towards the direction where the tower is.

    "Just hold on, if there is any confrontation. I will be back as soon as I can." He was not extremely worried. Because the beasts which came here are from the habitats which act as scouts to check the situation, they wouldn¡¯t start a battle without the orders from their tribe leader unless they were attacked.

    The confrontation would be with the people from the thunder-god temple.

    There are more than fifteen skeletons inside the ashes of the whole banyan expanse and every skeleton represents a treasure. Even with Sam¡¯s presence, there is a high chance of having a confrontation.

    From what Sam observed, there is a chance to increase the cultivation when they entered the cultivation inheritance as Philip has a substantial increase in a short amount of time.

    Arthur has entered an inheritance too and there is a high chance that he could have increased the cultivation and there would be treasures on him too.

    This increases the chances of battle erupting here. So, Sam is a bit worried. Jack is not here and Watt is not that strong at the moment. Hawk and Philip might not be able to hold on if Arthur really did have a great increase in strength along with his teammates.

    Sam moved with the increased speed at his extreme limit.

    He crashed into the tower and by this time, Jack already stopped cultivating.

    "Follow this route."

    Sam said as he pointed at the freshly created fire crater. Jack didn¡¯t ask for any details and started moving.

    Sam sat down and went into cultivating after he let out Yanwu and the rest.

    He started integrating the power as fast as he can. This time, the energy is far greater than the previous time. He closed his eyes and started making the energy his. This time as the bottleneck between Level-7 and the Level-8 is not that hard to ovee, so there is not much effort, and became easy.

    But he soon encountered the problem. The energy is too excessive. He reached the Peak-stage within no time.

    The beasts cannot take it anymore.

    Sam once again looked at the ce he came back from. He couldn¡¯t help but feel frustrated all of a sudden.

    This is the first time, he felt that the cultivation technique he performed has some major draw-back. For every breakthrough, he got if he couldn¡¯t just share it with his beasts immediately because of the circ.u.mstances, he would have some extreme troubles in some cases.

    But right, now, he has to deal with the excess energy as soon as possible.

    Sam started concentrating on the energy and tried topress it. He has to store it temporarily so that he wouldn¡¯t have damage to his body.

    For that, he can only do one thing. He has to find a way to unleash the whole energy.

    After that, he gave up onpressing it and just tried to stabilize it.

    He slowly started moving out of the tower and followed the crater to go back to the burned banyan expanse.

    Meanwhile, Jack reached the ce and so did the people from the thunder god temple.

    Arthur and four other teammates of his are already in a confrontation with them.

    They are already in a battle-ready situation and with the addition of Jack, they have enough confidence they can hold on to it.

    Arthur¡¯s teammates are burning with desire. The skeletons of the beasts, two inheritances with Philip, and one inheritance with Jack. They are confident that if they could obtain these and stay safe in the tower until thest week onlying for the inheritances, they could even avoid Sam.

    Anyway, there is no saying that Sam wouldn¡¯t be the one who has to be on the defensive side if they really gang up on him as they do have more inheritances and with this new edition of the treasures, they could have a shot at defending against Sam wlessly if not defending against him.

    These thoughts went through Arthur¡¯s mind and with a smile, he made his move. Not even for a second did he stop and think how the beasts and the expanse are burned to this state and what the crater signifies.

    Sam¡¯s team is holding against them quite well despite being having fewer people.

    Jack and Philip aren¡¯t exactly some soft permissions. As for Watt. They have to first catch him if they want to attack him.

    The silver wind isn¡¯t there for the show.

    They are holding up and Watt is even dealing with the skeletons in the ashes throwing them inside the storage one at a time.

    Jack is even toying with them.

    Sam didn¡¯t know the exact situation. But he is starting to get the hang of holding the energy and once he got it, he took out the harbinger and sted through the crater once again.

    He appeared at the spot with a bang and Arthur and the rest were momentarily stunned. They didn¡¯t expect that Sam would return so early.

    When he saw the whole skeletons, he forgot to think where Sam went and only rejoiced on the fact that he is not present at the moment.

    Now only did he think what kind of situation he was in and sensing the vast amount of energy that was coursing through, he immediately ordered for a retreat.

    Sam didn¡¯t let them off that easily, he followed them into their territory behind them, but he didn¡¯t intercept or attack them.

    His true goal is scaring them away while picking his next target.

    Why would he waste this free energy on these guys as he can defeat them with his normal strength?

    He is only scaring them and as for why chase that far is that he can find an early-stage Level-5 beast in their territory and can deal with it with the excess amount of energy.

    The chase went on for a few minutes until Sam stopped in his tracks and took a diversion. There was arge python coiled up against a gigantic tree. When the python saw Sam who was brimming with energy, its eye lit up and immediately went into action.

    Sam let the python coil him for a few seconds and after it was done coiling, he immediately burst out all the excess energy as held the python¡¯s throat in his hand.

    Just like that, the python waspletely burned right in his hands without even having a chance to escape the predicament.

    After clearing the ashes he looked at the skull of the python in which a spatial ring was present and left the ce.

 Chapter 276: Hunting in other territories

    Sam went back to the tower with his teammates. He has to take some rest and stabilize his cultivation.

    After that, he took the day off.

    Twenty-eighth day. A new inheritance opened and this time it is a wind elemental inheritance. Watt went there and the thunder-god temple people are extremely cautious when they arrived at the inheritance stone pir in the fear of attracting Sam¡¯s attack power.

    But after seeing that it is a wind element one, which they don¡¯t have candidates to, they left cautiously.

    Sam didn¡¯t chase them or bother with them. He will deal with them when the time is right and at the most crucial moment. They would curse his eighteen generations in that situation.

    Now, Sam is in a great form and it is time to deal with the Level-5 beasts in the remaining territories.

    The first stop is the Thunder god temple¡¯s territories. The Level-5 beasts arepletely left untouched in there. They only dealt with the Level-4 beasts and after they are finished, they moved to Sam¡¯s territory.

    After seeing the number of skeletons in the ashes on that day, they abandoned any thoughts on Sam¡¯s territory and are now moving towards the Northern Arian territory.

    This time, Sam is not as cautious as before. He has enough strength and he is confident that he can employ more dangerous ploys than before. Anyway, he is not doing this in his own territory, so even if the beasts do notice something wrong with his methods, they would take it up with the Arthur and the rest, he would bepletely safe anyway.

    So, he picked his first target. The remaining people who are now inte-stages are traveling to other territories so that they can fight it out with the Level-4 beasts there.

    They have to hone their cultivations and adapt to the new strength; this is the perfect opportunity.

    Sam arrived at a ce and looked at a beast. A Magma Fox. His first target. He is even surprised that this beast is here when he first saw this andter he understood how it was staying here.

    Because this fox likes the smell of the rocks made of the cooledva. They live in the vicinities of the volcanoes and don¡¯t like the other environments and are quite aversive to adapt to any of them until they be Level-6 or higher and gain enough intelligence. Until then they would go crazy and wreak havoc if they don¡¯t stay within that vicinity.

    This is a typical average forest with nothing special much less a volcanic zone. That is the reason he was extremely surprised when he saw this and only examined itter. The rocky terrain in which it was living was manually created by the volcanic rocks with a mineral called volcanic iron as the core on which the fox sleeps.

    The volcanic iron is a fire attributed metal used by the fire elemental warrior-mages.

    It is not so valuable but it is still an okay metal.

    After discovering this, Sam had an idea in his mind. And he is here now to execute it.

    He waited until the fox went hunting for a daily meal and made his move. The first thing he did was disintegrate the volcanic iron and started pouring the powder all the way as he moved and when he reached a cave, he threw the remaining powder into that cave and ran away.

    In a distance, he stood on a tree branch as he looked at the cave waiting for some reaction and in an hour it came.

    The Magma Fox felt the disappearance of the volcanic iron and went into a frenzy and when it saw the trail of the powder, it started sniffing and followed it until it reached the cave.

    The thing inside the cave is something that Sam escaped from before.

    The Wicked tiger. That¡¯s the name of the beast. It uses neutral spiritual energy and its name was given due to its wicked nature to toy with the beasts.

    Sam didn¡¯t throw the metal powder too deep into the cave, otherwise, if it had even taken a look or sensed him, he would have had to be on another chase.

    After the fox reached the cave in a frenzy the tiger also noticed the presence and became angry. It was its territory another being who is in simr strength shouldn¡¯t walk in as it liked.

    So, it directly attacked without a warning. The fox, which is also a ferocious beast by nature started attacking.

    Its body glowed red and its ws started spewing magma as it pounced on the tiger.

    As the two beasts are in a ferocious battle, the person who instigated it is watching the whole scene with an amused expression.

    This is one of the most optimum methods to deal with them. But he didn¡¯t opt to it for his territory due to some reasons. One of them is trying to create those two traps as his ¡¯food¡¯ and the other one is if the n failed and he was discovered and remembered his face, they would track him to his ce and could be more troublesome. He would then have to use the energy cells, which would destroy the spatial ring inside the beast.

    Now, he is free to do these things, because he has confidence that they couldn¡¯t leave that far away from their territory to his tower and if they recognize that a human is giving them trouble, Arthur can deal with that.

    Sam watched the battle of the two beasts as they tried to tear each other apart. He took out the sniper rifle and loaded a different magazine which is a small space jade. These are the energy cell bullets.

    Now, he is using the fire element ones and he did that... for no reason. Just because he felt like it.

    He aimed the sniper and started shooting.

    This is the perfect time as the beasts are too engrossed in a fight with each other, their senses for other external dangers would be a bit less and as per Sam¡¯s calctions, the energy cells, hit the tiger¡¯s torso and just before it did, it exploded.

    The destabilized energy cell bullets, he had to be in a perfect distance and position so that it would explode exactly at the point of contact.

    The people of this world might not even figure this out. But Sam the creator of this can do so. After the first hit, the tiger didn¡¯t even get the chance to look at Sam but was already being forced by the fox to ground.

    At this exact moment, another bullet was shot out and the next of the fox had an explosion. Both the beasts are in an extremely dangerous and vulnerable situation.

    Sam made his move, he appeared at the spot and finished the beasts and threw them in his storage ring.

    Next, he went after the next prey.

    For the next few days, Sam is after every Level-5 beast which runs solo on the whole ind and his movements are soon noticed by the rest of the teams, but no one dared to make a move, because, if Sam just threw them to the beasts, they would have to deal with them and they are not confident in doing do.

    For the next fifteen days, Sam is on the hunt for these beasts and there were only two weeks left on the ind and one week for him to enter the main inheritance.

    This time is for dealing with the habitats. These teams didn¡¯t even dare to deal with the Level-5 solo beasts and by the time they are strong enough that they can deal with some Level-5 beasts as a team, Sam took away all of them.

    Now, the habitats are the only things left for them and he is going for it. These days, there are various inheritances of fire, wind, leg techniques, and so on. But he wasn¡¯t interested. He only nned to take the formation and the inscription parts of the inheritance.

    His first target habitats are of the thunder god temple¡¯s side.

    But he didn¡¯t take the same approach as before. He has other ns. Since Arthur had made a move and tried to take away his treasures, he has to pay dearly.

    So, after every attack on the habitat with the sedatives, he stole the treasure at the same time, he took away the cubs. He didn¡¯t store them inside the divine dimension instead brought them with his hands.

    He increased his body heat so that the cubs would sweat leaving their scent all over and left the cubs near the thunder god temple tower.

    After that, he repeated the same for the remaining habitats and left around seven types of cubs near the tower and took a seat near a tall tree.

    Only the snacks are the ones that are not in his hands.

    And soon enough, the guests arrived.

 Chapter 277: The Final Inheritances

    That night, at the entrance of the tower, Arthur looked at the hordes of beasts as if he was dreaming. He has avoided these beasts like gue, when he noticed their habitats. But now, they came searching for him.

    The beasts got their cubs, but they are still angry, how dare a human can do such a thing as stealing their cubs.

    They started charging towards the tower, some beasts attacked with the elemental powers and some beasts just rammed into the walls. But as Murali promised the beasts are not able to deal with the walls and enter the tower ignoring the defence.

    Even the attacks aren¡¯t prating.

    But there is no harm for them either. They tried a few times and then just waited there. Even the beasts of different species didn¡¯t show any hostility towards each other. This, time they are quite united and whole-heartedly treated these people are their enemies.

    Arthur and the rest are at a loss of words, they don¡¯t know how to deal with the situation. They didn???t dare to fight them. Sneaking past, them? It is almost impossible with these many beasts.

    So, all they could do is hole up right there waiting for the time of exit.

    At that moment, a scroll came flying into the tower through the entrance, Arthur picked up the scroll and the strings of letters, made his grit his teeth in anger.

    "Since, you wanted beasts¡¯ remains that badly, I guessed that you would like the beasts even more, so I took it up on myself to invite them here. You don¡¯t have to thank me. ¨C Sam."

    He immediately understood how they are struck in this scenario. This is Sam¡¯s payback. He was even thinking that Sam didn¡¯t pursue for some other reasons, rather he is using the most frustrating way to take the revenge that too in a grand scale.

    They are now nning to deal with the rest of Level-4 beasts and try their luck at the Level-5 beasts at the territories. But they don¡¯t know that Sam not only dealt with all the beasts, he even stopped them at their door step so that wouldn¡¯t find any stray that was left by any possible mistake.

    Sam ispletely unbothered by this, if not for the fact that killing these people would bring him some extra trouble in his next ns and hinder him extremely, he would have dealt with directly and in that tower it is impossible to kill them.

    He is having a hard time to control and suppress the killing intent. He is even thinking of using the hidden means without leaving any evidence, but he might find a way for Arthur to be useful for him in his future preparations as he is heir of the thunder god temple, these are the only reasons that are letting him breathe peacefully.

    Living in fear is one of the worst possible ways of life.

    Sam went on dealt with the remaining treasures in the habitats. After that he started sorting out all the treasures he obtained. There are more than one hundred and fifty rewards he got from this ind and among them seventy are weapons of various attributes. Ten of them are formation discs, twenty are various types of formation designs. Ten skill books for some weapon techniques, thirty consumable inscription scrolls of various types and the rest are inscription design scrolls.

    His teammates took whatever weapons they wanted and shared it among themselves, they took some inscription scrolls and even some formation discs, Sam decided to sell half of the remaining with abel of the things from the inheritance of Murali and the remaining half of them will be in his possession to be used as extras.

    As for the remaining inscriptions and the formations, they can be used for further research.

    Soon, the day of the final inheritance arrived.

    Seven days before the period of two months, the four main candidates disappeared from the towers.

    Sam, Arthur, Andrew and the leader of the northern Arian all disappeared from their respective ces and appeared in front of each other in a room, It is a vast hall which has four doors on four sides leading them to different rooms.

    Soon, a projection of Murali appeared in the middle of the hall and started saying these words.

    "Wee candidates. I hope you all have increased your strength andbat power in the past duration you have spent on the ind.

    Right now, you are only a week away from gaining the inheritance I have left for you.

    As you might have already known, I, Murali am famous for my expertise in four fields.

    Swordsmanship. Painting. Inscriptions and the formations.

    I must say that I am really proud of the heights I achieved. Before leaving this world, I wanted to share my knowledge to the younger generations of this world as my sign of gratitude for the all the resources and the experience this world has provided me.

    So, that is the reason, with the help some friends I created this ind and the four towers. The four towers are keys to activate all that this ind has to offer.

    Now, you are in a ce which leads you to the four inheritances I have left you. You have a chance to obtain, all four of them or any one of them. That solely depends on your efforts, will, strength and desire.

    That is why I created the four towers and you are the four people who overcame the trails of the towers. Everyone of you have an advantage so I think it is a fairpetition.

    Out of four of these inheritances, the Painting, Inscriptions, Formations takes two days. As for the Swordsman ship, that is my weakest ability of all four and for that reason it would have less to offer to you than the other three resulting in only one day.

    After a week, all of you will be sent back to the ces you have came from along with your team members.

    As for the people who are deceased identally, I mourn for their death and I apologize.

    Now, the inheritance trail shall begin."

    With those words, the projection disappeared and one of the doors swung open.

    Four of them cautiously walked inside and all they could see is a tform on the other end of the room. There is a glowing sphere at the centre of the tform emitting a vague glow.

    They knew at once that, it was their goal, but they couldn¡¯t reach that at all.

    Because between the tform and the ce they are standing there is arge valley.

    Arge abyss is separating them from their goal.

    As they are thinking of ways to cross the whole thing and tried to use their elemental energies and such, they realized that it is impossible for them to even summon a wisp of the spiritual energy.

    At this moment, fourrge blocks of stone raised from the abyss exactly at the edge of the valley.

    Everyone exchanged a nce and looked at each other before each upying a block.

    At that moment a holograph appeared all of a sudden and in that there is a hand holding the paint brush and using it to paint something. It is just a line, a straight line, but the main thing is the usage of the spiritual energy.

    The hand or rather the owner of the hand is circting the spiritual energy in a certain manner such that the paint which is being used is giving the line the required attribute that it should possess.

    Generally, the painter artisan uses this technique to create a painting., The painting is quite simr to an inscription scroll in the initial stages. The more it advanced the more a painter artisan do, but in the initial stages it will serve the same purpose the inscription scrolls which might be consumables or of multiple uses.

    It can be used fir attacks, sealing, defence and many other uses. The inly differences are the usage of the materials and also instead of the runes they would use the images they paint as the medium to give us the required effect.

    After the scene in the holograph yed once, paint brush with paint and a white canvas appeared floating in front of them.

    The test is the most straight forward thing.

    All they have to do is understand and imitate the whole move and if their move passes the stage, they would be able to advance further.

    The move kept on ying even after the appearance of the canvas and the brush.

    If they observe closely, they can even see the flow of energy in their hands.

    Sam observed the whole action closely time and again. He hasn¡¯t researched the whole painting thing deeply. He is proficient in painting in his previous life and he used the expertise to learn the painting techniques which helps him etching inscriptions. He didn¡¯t try of use any normal painting artisanship techniques.

    But he can see how the energy flow works and can see how to do it based on his etching experience.

    So, after ten minutes he picked up the brush and made his move.

    Even though it is one line, it clearly differed from the way he etched the inscriptions, because he used the special inscription ink as paint at that time and now he is using a paint specifically used for these purposes. It clearly differed in the whole energy flow and process.

    So, for the first few attempts Sam failed.

    Only after his seventh attempt did he pass and another block appeared in front of him while the canvas and the paint brush disappeared.

 Chapter 278: Painting Inheritance

    After clearing the first block, Sam stepped on the next block. He looked at the remaining candidates who are still stuck in the first block.

    The experience of the etching indeed helped him.

    He looked at the next holograph which formed, this time theplexity increased by a lot as he needed to draw a pattern formed bybined a number of straight lines.

    The energy flow is the same as the previous one, but maintaining the same energy flow constantly while making sure that it is sufficient without any interference in the energy even when the lines ovepped.

    He started doing this and after a few tries, he understood why it would take two days for the painting artisanship.

    These trails are designed with the most variation in difficulty andplexity that it tests a person¡¯s capability to learn things ofplex nature in a short time in the most efficient way.

    This method of learning is not feasible in regr situations. But it could surely give a person a certain level of expertise in a short amount of time.

    This method should opt-in extreme situations but the person must have extraordinary intelligence level and a certain level of genius.

    Sam also opted for this method in his previous life so that he could execute certain assassination assignments.

    He didn¡¯t expect that he would use this method again in this life and that too in this kind of situation.

    He started practicing the whole thing again and again. He only passed after more than three hours of practice and by this time remaining candidates also passed the first stage and moved to the second stage.

    Sam looked at the third stage of the test as he stood on the new block. The third one is even moreplicated there are two patterns one which is made of straight lines and another one with the curved lines.

    He has to create two patterns with the same energy consistency.

    He started practicing it again and this time, he has to work for at least three hours to even have partial sess in the whole pattern.

    After more than another three hours, he was finally able to create two patterns perfectly.

    The next step though made him feel defeated and it became a test of patience. Because in this thing he has to merge the patterns into a single one without letting it sh and turn chaotic.

    This time, the failures are not as calm as before, rather they arepletely chaotic and they arepletely sted and created ripples of spiritual energy at the canvas.

    If it was a real canvas, Sam is quite confident that the canvas would have sted away.

    He now understood the difficulty, for every st a normal person would have lost his focus bit by bit, even Sam with his highly tempered mental state is having a hard time focusing on it, he understood the significance of the tower of will now.

    Only after another nine hours did he have sess.

    He was wondering how he would deal with this whole inheritance in two days as already more than eighteen hours in the four stages.

    But he got his answer on the fifth test because he has to copy a whole painting using the expertise he gained from the first four stages, The painting is a smaller one. Only three elements are in the painting.

    They are a volcano, magma,va st.

    A painting depicting the volcanic st, an attack-type painting.

    This time, it didn¡¯t take as much time as the previous test, because, he doesn¡¯t need any extra knowledge or expertise to do this, all he has to do isbine and repeat the things he had done in the previous four tests, except in an extremely different way.

    Hepleted the test in three hours, and the next is another painting with around five elements. The tidal wave attack. In this, the water, the direction, the wind assisting the water, the intensity of the wave and the nature of collision all these elements have to be depicted.

    This is the great thing about the painting artisanship. One doesn¡¯t need to possess the elements to wield attacks or defenses of that certain element. All he has to do is possess the elemental paints to create a painting. Of course, possessing the elements will further increase their sess rate and the efficiency of the whole thing.

    It took another six hours with a total expense of twenty-seven hours.

    There are still twenty-one hours left and six tests arepleted.

    At this moment, only Andrew reached the fifth test, the rest are still at the fourth one.

    He is d that he has some expertise in this area and able to go past this, otherwise, it is really hard for someone without any knowledge.

    The tests are not just tests though, they are actually lessons too, ayman can even get some expertise in these stages. Murali actuallypressed the basics and the rest of the steps in each test so that they can learn this as fast as they can.

    He didn¡¯t waste any time, so he immediately went into the next test.

    The seventh one is also a painting and this time, it has more than seven elements. Sam took around three hours and the eight one with nine elements, he took around four hours.

    Even the ninth one was easy for him, but the tenth one took almost all the time he had left/

    Because it is one of the mostplex paintings Sam has ever seen even in both lives. The painting is an illusion world painting.

    In simple terms, a person has to depict the whole world inside the paint and create an illusion on the canvas.

    This way they have to trap a person¡¯s soul into the world and attack the soul with the number of elements that are present inside that painting world.

    The world he has to depict is a prison or rather a torture chamber. It is simr to a cage in which the person is going to be tortured with various primitive methods, like intense mes and metallic spike being stung into his system.

    Sam is having a hard timepleting this one. The main problem with this painting is that the paint is made of some delicate substance and made of materials that are suitable for creating illusions and if there is any problem is maintaining the bnce of the energy.

    He sted more than ten canvases and was still unable to deal with the painting.

    He has an extreme headache at this moment, there was only an hour left when he finally dealt with the whole painting.

    Then only he was able to cross the tenth block and finally step on the tform that was amodating the glowing sphere.

    As soon as he stepped on the tform, the glowing sphere disappeared and some form of light particles entered Sam¡¯s mind and a new load of images entered his mind particrly in the form of images and incidents.

    He saw Murali¡¯s image in his mind. Murali is practicing the painting artisanship.

    There are many broken canvases and brushes that arepletely damaged all around the ce as he practiced the basic movements and strokes one by one without rest.

    This orb is filled with the experiences Murali has gone through before.

    The experiences are not just ying everything Murali learned and the process he used for mastering every technique was being ingrained in his mind directly.

    The inheritance ispletely in a literal sense. He is inheriting everything that Murali learned directly.

    The inheritance was over. But the tests didn¡¯t stop. They are still going on and the candidates are also not stopping as they are curious to find out if the can find anything worthwhile if they couldplete the whole thing.

    There was only an hour left and Sam was already transferred back to the main hall but he also had a paintbrush in his hands. This is the same paintbrush Sam had seen in Murali¡¯s experiences particrly of the experiences when he is an a.d.u.l.t and is in his prime of artisanship.

    But the rest are not transferred. Then only he understood why there is a certain time limit without and he also understood that the time limit is still there even if the inheritance is already obtained by Sam.

    What Sam understood is that no matter who won the inheritance, anyone who can participate in the inheritance can obtain some form of knowledge.

    Now, the remaining three candidates who didn¡¯t get the inheritance were still able to learn the painting artisan techniques.

    Even if they wouldn¡¯t let the whole artisanship as their profession, they can still use this knowledge to deal with the problems in the future that are caused by other painter artisans.

    After all, the knowledge once obtained is the most valuable treasure for any person. It is almost impossible to take it away from a person.

 Chapter 279: Inscription and Formation Inheritances

    Sam examined the paintbrush in his hands. This is a very high-level paintbrush. So, high that with his current cultivation, Sam wasn¡¯t even able to appraise the exact rank of the brush.

    But it sure is valuable as Sam saw the scenes within his head when the experiences were transferred to him. This is the brush Murali used when he is at his prime.

    One can only guess just what any Painter artisan would be willing to pay for this brush.

    As Sam examined the experiences or the memories of Murali in his mind, the one hour passed soon and the remaining candidates returned. From their expressions, Sam could guess that they didn¡¯t gain anything else.

    Arthur is the most frustrated of all. Because he couldn¡¯t stop his sense of rivalry against Sam.

    He believed that he was the best among his peers since his birth, his talent, his resources, his prowess, and cultivation, he won in every aspect among his peers, but one day Arman started raising right under his nose.

    He was having enough with one guy andter Sam appeared. He couldn¡¯t help but have a sense of existential crisis,

    After all, he was heaven¡¯s choice. One of the ten in this world. He had everything catered to him and he has been arrogant all these years. And now with the rise of these geniuses, he is having a hard time digesting the facts that came with the reality check.

    This is giving him the fear that he might not be able to stay arrogant forever. And the painting artisanship inheritance showed him just that.

    He was worried that Sam would just sweep the rest of the inheritances without care.

    After all, from what he knew Sam didn¡¯t have any expertise in painting, but he had expertise in the remaining three aspects. He already dealt with his weakest link.

    While he was being conflicted, Sam already moved to the next room which just opened. He was excited about the next test.

    The reward this time enticed him so much. The knowledge and the experiences that a person has .u.mted over decades after mastering a trade with his blood and sweat are being shared with him. He was never this happy with any reward, with the exception of Yanwu and the Divine dimension.

    The remaining three followed suit after Sam and entered the room.

    The room is the same as the previous one. There is an abyss separating the tform from them and four blocks appeared before them.

    Each of them once again upied the blocks and stood on it.

    This time the test is a bit different though.

    As the basic inscriptions require a lot of space, the blocks arerge and vast. Good enough to create a Rank-6 formation at least.

    The first test is to create a Rank-1 inscription with the normal process. It has been a long time since Sam even created an inscription without etching.

    He didn¡¯t like the aspect of wasting so much time on making basic runes. But this time, Sam doesn¡¯t have to be bothered about it. Because he has a water element. An element that helps the inscription masters.

    Sam only took a single nce at the holograph to understand the inscription and then ced his finger in the ink bowl. He started controlling the ink with the water element and the ink followed the motion of his finger.

    As he started moving his finger in the air, the ink gracefullyid itself on the floor and within seconds, the required runic pattern appeared and the final step drawing the inscription to the scroll.

    Sam threw the scroll to the center and within a second, the runes lit up.

    The inscription was finished. All this happened in two minutes. A new block appeared and Sam moved.

    The remaining three candidates who are trying to finish the inscription are dazed for a second.

    They have learned a thing or two about the inscriptions as they expected the requirement of that knowledge in the tests here so that they could deal with them.

    But Sam¡¯s speed in this aspect is a whole new level.

    Even Arthur and Andrew who knew Sam¡¯s expertise are having a hard time. They didn¡¯t expect him to be able to deal with this in two minutes.

    The holograph is showing how to create the inscription step by step and they are all following it, but judging from Sam¡¯s speed. He might have even processed the whole inscription just from a mere nce at the picture and did it on his own.

    While they are in a daze, Sam is looking at the second test, this time it is not creating an inscription rather cracking an inscription. This seemed to be one of Murali¡¯s original works as he never saw an inscription like this before.

    After checking the energy flow in the inscription and the arrangement of the runes, all Sam had to do was use the brush and spiritual energy to clear a couple of lines and inject some spiritual energy.

    That¡¯s it, the inscription disappeared in the form of spiritual energy particles. Once again all Sam took was two minutes.

    The remaining three lost their fighting will.

    But they remembered the first test. Although they didn¡¯t get any benefits, they did learn some aspects, so they wanted to follow the same principle and thus the three of them suddenly felt no pressure as they tried to understand the various aspects of the inscriptions.

    Meanwhile, Sam isn¡¯t the slightest bit bothered by their astonishment. He is maintaining his rocket-like pace without any reservations.

    Within four minutes he was done with the third test in which he has to create a Rank-2 inscription and in the next round, he has to crack a Rank-2 inscription.

    As expected, it was done in a sh.

    Sam is in a zone until the sixth round. He finished a total of six rounds within half-an-hour.

    Now there are only four rounds that are left and the seventh round is the one in which he has to create a rank-4 inscription.

    This time, Sam took a little more time as he has to guide the ink a little bit careful as the size increased by many folds.

    The whole rune drawing process took around ten minutes for him and another thirty seconds to create the inscription on the scroll.

    As for cracking it didn¡¯t take as much time, because, he just used the disintegration on the inscription and it is gone.

    He was very excited and don¡¯t have enough patience to deal with the inscription step by step.

    He was thinking that he might encounter a Rank-5 inscription, but to his disappointment, it is a rank-4plex inscription array built with five Rank-4 inscriptions. In terms of might, it can be considered as a Pseudo-rank 5 inscription.

    This time, Sam worked on the inscription and within half an hour, he was done as for thest one inscription which needs to cracked, Sam studied it carefully.

    Since there is no challenge he expected, he wanted to try his hand at a challenge without using his disintegration ability. He has a lot of time anyway.

    But he still wasn¡¯t able to help himself. Hepleted the task in forty-five minutes, even when he worked in his slowest pace.

    He shook his head and stepped on the tform. The same thing repeated again. Another set of memories surfaced in his mind as he felt the experiences of Murali practicing the inscriptions in his past.

    He disappeared from the spot and entered the main hall. This time with a Brush-pen in his hands. This is a brush-pen that looked extremely simr to the modern-day brush-pen which uses the brush tip instead of a nib.

    This one is used for creating the inscriptions. The body of the brush-pen contains various slots for different inks and every slot is separate storage space.

    This brush-pen also gave him the same feeling as he got from the Paintbrush. Its rank is far too high.

    Samid down on the ground as he slept for a while and did all kinds of things to get over his boredom. After two days of this boredom, the remaining three came out with a relieved expression.

    They seemed to have gone through a lot.

    They have indeed gone through a lot. When they saw Sam¡¯s speed, they started having doubts about the meaning of their lives.

    They don¡¯t know how to react and what to think about his pace. But after some time they got over it and wanted to try their luck in learning these things, but then only then recognized how na?ve they were.

    The inscriptions are far more difficult than the paintings. There is a lot of foundational requirements to learn these inscriptions, they suddenly had immense respect that formed deep inside their hearts towards the inscription masters.

    But they don¡¯t know that they have to go through another round of suffering. Because, the next room, is for formation inheritance.

    The three people felt that they are just hallucinating about the previous day or just struck in the previous time span. Sam moved just as quickly. No, in fact, he moved quickly because he could just throw the formation gs at many ces without any worries like losing control of ink when creating runes and this time, he didn¡¯t even bother to hold back at thest obstacle, dealing another blow to their huge egos.

 Chapter 280: Swordsmanship Inheritance

    Thest inheritance. The swordsmanship inheritance.

    The remaining three candidates almost lost all theirposure as Sam swept through all the three inheritances.

    They don¡¯t have many hopes in getting this one away from his hands and provided that they are not even swordsmen, to begin with. They are now thinking about why they even came over to this ce.

    They don¡¯t have anything to do with the Murali and his expertise at all. They don¡¯t have any of the abilities. All they came here is because of their greed, rather the greed of their superiors who forced them toe here.

    Now they are regretting this. They could have at least let the people who are experts in these fields toe here and they could have had a shot.

    Now, all they can do is being the backdrop and enhance Sam¡¯s image.

    There are feeling extremely down.

    But Sam is not caring about anything they are thinking. He is very much satisfied with what he got. Even the reward from the formation tower is quite amusing.

    It is a formation simtion disc.

    On this disc, one can mark the nodes and key points of arge- scale formation in a smaller scale, so that they can see if the formation really works or not.

    This helps the people who research their formations and see if their theories are of any technical and practical feasibility.

    Although he has a better version, the simting second floor of the tower in the divine dimension, he was still impressed.

    Of course, he is most impressed by the experiences he got as a present.

    As for the fourth inheritance, even though he is not interested in any battle techniques he might possibly encounter, he is looking forward to the treasure he will get as a present.

    As far he was concerned the weapons he encountered all this while didn¡¯t impress him much, he did see some impressive craftsmanship, but he didn¡¯t see anything that impressed him to the extent that he wanted to possess it.

    From the pattern of presents he got from three inheritances, Sam guessed the next present to be a sword and he is looking forward to a sword used by the person who shook the whole in his prime.

    Sam took the first step confidently and this time, it is to copy a technique. It is the most basic one of all. The sword-draw.

    He looked at the posture, the energy flow the grip strength, the hand position. He was impressed by the silhouette which has showcased the move.

    It is near perfection.

    But Sam copied the move easily and he did the same with the next move and the next move. It all happened just because the moves are too basic. Any person who is familiar with the sword would know every move.

    After five moves though, the sixth block is not to copy a move, rather he has to control his sword aura.

    Until the fifth test, even the remaining candidates were able to pass after a few tries, but from here on there is no such thing as an easy pass.

    Because the sword aura can only be obtained based on the level of practice and the understanding one has for a sword.

    They have to be in perfect synchronization and feel like a sword is a part of them and they themselves have to feel like a sword.

    So, the sixth test is that he has to resonate with his sword aura to the aura that is present on that block.

    Sam closed his eyes and started rxing. He made sure that his mind and body are inplete unison and in his mind, there is only one thing sword.

    He started trying to get the feeling of being a sword himself. He slowly started forgetting everything about his body. His legs, arms, skin. He started forgetting everything on his body. His breath became sharp and slowly all he could feel is the sword aura around his body and his body unconsciously resonated with it.

    He could even feel his breath vibrating with it. Sam lost all his senses all he could feel is an instinct. That was the only thing left for him and with that instinct, he stepped forward.

    A block appeared under his feet. The seventh block.

    On that block, Sam could feel the suppressive effect of the sword aura. The aura here is sharper than the previous one and he could feel the sharpness suppressing him and trying to devour him. But he didn¡¯t back off.

    He started countering, His breath became sharper, he could feel the sh between two sword auras and soon he confidently took the next step. Meanwhile, the remaining candidates all struck at the sixth block.

    The tests in this inheritance are quite simple. They are straight forward and simple in nature. All Murali tested are the basics and the consistency of the practice with the basic moves and the sword aura.

    This is the most straight forward way to validate a person¡¯s swordsmanship.

    Sam stood on the eighth block for an hour, because this time the sword aura on that block is not steady, rather it is fluctuating. It is like a wave of sword aura and at this Sam was also stumped. He never expected or thought that Sword aura can be manipted like that.

    He never even tried this.

    But now that a situation arrived, he started doing the unknown.

    And soon enough, he was surprised by the reaction. He could feel that the amount of mental strength required for this is quite high and for a normal cultivator of his level, it would be quite taxing.

    Sam carefully tried to get a hang of the frequency of the fluctuation and in another half-an-hour, he was able to do so.

    He moved to the next block and this time, what he has to go through is another thing altogether.

    There are two sword auras instead of one. He has to divide his sword aura into two and match two different frequencies at the same time. This is even more difficult than the previous test.

    Sam waspletely stumped. He can multi-task, but he never knew that the sword aura can even be divided into two.

    He didn¡¯t know how to proceed and it even took more than an hour just to make sense on how to proceed further in this situation.

    He started thinking of two things at a time for a start and slowly started working his way upwards.

    He imagined himself to be two entities, two bodies altogether, and slowly converted himself to be two swords. He is trying to use the same method he used on the sixth block to create the sword aura.

    Sam is really having a hard time. If not for his high mental strength he would have lost him mind by now.

    After more than three hours of exasperated struggle, he was finally able to deal with the problem. Two sword auras at different frequencies.

    He was thinking about how difficult the tenth test would be and he almost lost confidence. The tenth test is creating two sword auras and fluctuating both of them between two different limits.

    Sam almost wanted to go crazy. The tests are simple and straight forward, he couldn¡¯t be happier of this aspect in the first three inheritances, but now, he waspletely stumped.

    He is a master of multiple weapons as he practically lived with them in his previous life. But he never practiced a weapon to this extent the only exception being his ws. But he doesn¡¯t want to use his ws too much.

    They need a muchrger and worthier target to be worn. He loves them like his second life. That¡¯s why, he wouldn¡¯t wear them easily and only does so in case of creating a massacre, battling a worthy opponent, or aplishing a major mission.

    Sam started concentrating. No matter what, he has to see the reward for this round.

    He carefully concentrated and repeated what he did in the previous test, to create two sword auras and after doing that, he concentrated on fluctuating them. The problem is that two of them arepletely in sync. Sam would have appreciated this great if it was before, but now it is a great nuisance as he doesn¡¯t want them to be in sync.

    They both have to fluctuate in different frequencies and limits altogether.

    Since he couldn¡¯t do that at the same time, he divided the work. First, he kept the two sword auras active and made on of them stationary fluctuating only one of them. Then slowly, he started fluctuating another one, with very slight variations, and soon, he was able to reach the goal and with sh, he was able to cross the tenth test.

    This time, though there is not just a simple sh of the sphere, there is a holographic projection of Murali in the air. It peered down at Sam and said.

    "Congrattions on clearing the sword inheritance. Before you gain the treasure, I have to tell you something.

    Apart from the memories and my sword training experiences, there is one more thing and that is a sword.

    This is the greatest sword, I ever held in my possession, but I was never able to wield it. To be more precise, I didn¡¯t dare to wield it.

    Because it is a cursed weapon.

    I have to warn you, that take that sword only if you have the utmost confidence that you can wield it, otherwise, you wouldn¡¯t be able to bear the consequences.

    So, if you are not confident, I hope you just leave the sword here and it would be sealed in this ce forever."

    With those words, the holographic projection disappeared. Sam noticed his surroundings and saw that the rest of them are also listening to Murali¡¯s words.

    He frowned at this. And after some thought, he came to a realization.

    He is trying to force the person whoever obtained the treasure to leave the sword here. The Cursed weapons are not ordinary, only a select few can deal with them.

    But if it is really that bad, Murali might have not ced it in the first ce, but there might be another possible exnation that there might be a possibility that a candidate who is really worthy of this sword mighte.

    He couldn¡¯t help but shake his head.

 Chapter 281: Cursed Sword

    Sam looked at the ck colored single-edged sword. It is fully covered with ck colored fog.

    It is a Cursed weapon.

    Cursed weapons are inherently weapons which are possessed by the spirits, but they will be considered cursed when a person who nurtures the spirit of a weapon couldn¡¯t control and gain eptance of the weapon spirit which makes the weapon go astray and the cultivator¡¯s spirit would be devoured by the weapon spirit if he forcefully tries to wield it despite not being epted by the weapon.

    If it is only that then there is nothing much to worry about, but the problem is the cursed weapons which gained sentience will start nurturing themselves, they might nurture themselves with a certain element of neutral spiritual energy.

    And when reached a certain level, they will have their inherent special move.

    This special is a great enticement to the cultivators which makes it highly desirable. It will increase the attack power by many folds. So, every expert wants to try their luck at a cursed weapon.

    But the normal spirit weapons are rarity themselves, much less cursed weapons.

    So, the enticement is too high.

    Murali used this enticement as thest obstacle for the winner. If the winner¡¯s will is strong enough and he can deal with all the greed and obstacles he might face, he might have a chance to tame the sword.

    The rest of the candidates are watching the sword with brightly lit eyes. They are from various powers, but they heard about the cursed weapons and particrly this weapon, the Shadow Sword.

    The cursed weapon that appeared in this world¡¯s history time and again.

    Every person who wielded this sword was a tyrant in their own time. They all stood above their peers and ruled an era, but they eventually defeated by the sword¡¯s spirit.

    Sam looked at the aura that this sword is projecting, he walked towards the tform slowly and held it by the handle.

    He could feel the unknown presence that is trying to resist his grip on the sword.

    The spirit weapons have one thing inmon, and that is they are too prideful and the pride is so much that there are some rules they abide by willingly.

    The Spirit will give a chance to the wielder bypeting with him in a mental battle. It would even restrict its level to that of the wielder andpete fairly.

    Nobody knows, how this thing came into existence, but these rules were followed strictly.

    Another thing is, before obtaining the eptance from the spirit, the weapon couldn¡¯t be kept inside any storage device.

    Essentially, they could still teleport and move with the wielder. But they wouldn¡¯t be prone to any spatial transfer which might move them to a restricted space.

    Sam tried to move the sword to the divine dimension, but this rule still applied to that and restricted the movement.

    Sam didn¡¯t think. Currently, the spirit seemed to be dormant and this could be rted to the ce they are in.

    Sam took out a cloth made of Heaven Spirit silk and wrapped the de in it as he hung the de on his back.

    As the candidates are watching the scene, all of them suddenly shed, and before they even realized, they reappeared at the respective cities where the towers were present before.

    Sam and his friends re-appeared at the same spot, where the tower will used to be.

    As soon as they appeared, they were stunned a bit but soon realized that they are in a familiar ce.

    Sam could feel that there is still a temporary seal on the sword, it is as if the spirit was forcefully put to sleep for some time by an external force. Anyway, that is still helpful to him as he has some matters to deal with before he could concentrate on the sword.

    They went to Sam¡¯s mansion and after some rest, the next day, they all sat in the hall as his friends wanted to say something to him.

    Hawk decided to leave, as he knew there is nothing much he could do to Sam, not only that, he also realized the gap between him and the rest of the candidates from the other regions and the world is much bigger than his imaginations.

    "I don¡¯t know, how I can repay you. But if you want me to do anything in the future, please do not hesitate. I am eternally grateful for everything you have done to me." With those words, hawk left after giving Sam a bow. It is just as Hawk thought, there is not much help he can give Sam at this moment and it is even a mystery if Sam would need his help in the future.

    The Goodbyes didn¡¯t stop there though. Sam was surprised when his three friends wanting to leave as well. Seeing his looks of surprise Philip chuckled and said.

    "What? Do you think, you are not having enough of your one-man show? We are not much help to you in many things and we are also bing quite spoiled with you around us. We will see you in six months in your new city." Philip didn¡¯t wait for his reply and boarded the Level-4 beast which he obtained from the Duke previously and left the ce.

    Jack also nodded at Sam without saying anything and left. Now, only Watt remained.

    "You want to go as well?" Sam asked.

    "Yes."

    "Then, what are you waiting for? Just be careful on your journeys. If there is any problem, just visit the nearby Artisan tower. They would have had our pictures in their possession by now. You wouldn¡¯t have any problems there."

    "No, boss. It is not about that. It is about Felicia. I wasn¡¯t able to examine her character due to this inheritance thing. So, before Ie back, don¡¯t cook the rice."

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to listen to his nonsense and sent him flying with a kick.

    "What the hell going through your mind? Do you think, I am that thirsty?" Sam is having enough of it. He doesn¡¯t even know where Watt got this idea. He waspletely exasperated. He is even suspecting that Philip has influenced Watt very badly.

    Philip, who took off on his beast sneezed. He doesn¡¯t know that he who waspletely innocent was being implicated by Watt¡¯s actions.

    "FELICIA," Sam called her with a shout. The blondedy ran towards him in anxiousness.

    "Pack all your stuff, you have to leave with Watt and travel with his for six months, do not leave his side. Ask your brother to prepare too. He will follow me to New city."

    He didn¡¯t even give her enough to greet him and just gave out instructions.

    Felicia nodded her head and left the ce in a hurry. Watt who just stood up and still feeling groggy from the hit tried to say.

    "But Boss..." His words stopped in his throat when he saw Sam¡¯s gloomy look.

    "You have something to say?" Sam asked with eyes full of fury. Watt gulped in fear and said.

    "N... No... Boss. Good Bye. See you in six months." With that, he left the ce on Falck.

    Sam looked at the horizons as he thought of all the time they spent together. He felt that they are right. Subconsciously, he was being too possessive taking all the pressure off of them.

    And in turn, he is robbing away their opportunities to grow their strength and will.

    He started making preparations to leave for his city. Sam¡¯s City.

    Sam now has to speed up the ns for everything that he has nned.

    He traveled on Vulture to reach the city, but when as soon as hended in the city, the first thing that greeted him is the presence of the Emperor. Arc is here for some reason and he seemed to havee here overnight.

    Both of them sat in a private room.

    "May I know, why you are here?"

    Sam asked directly.

    "I heard that you cleared all four inheritances of Murali and even have a Cursed weapon named Shadow Sword in your possession." He nced at the shadow sword which was still wrapped in silk as he spoke.

    "Yes, it is true."

    "I am here to warn you about this situation. Murali is not a small figure and the news about you might have reached all the powers on the. There would be many attempts on you and your friends. May I know where they are?"

    "They went on to travel the continent." Arc seemed to be a bit troubled by this.

    "It would be difficult if they have to deal with the troubles alone. Is there a way to contact them?"

    "There is no need for that. They want to face some trouble themselves to see how they can fare without me and I am quite confident in them. Anyway, the Space-gate formation is in your control, isn¡¯t it? Wouldn¡¯t you know if they reallye?"

    Arc sighed and said.

    "That is the main problem. There are other methods in the hands of these powers. They can send anyone below the Nascent stage to certain locations without needing Space-gate formations, just based on coordinates."

    "Really?" Sam was surprised.

    "Yes, these major powers all have the spatial element users within their hands. From childhood, the people who are awakened with space elements are trained in all kinds of transportation and auxiliary abilities in restricted conditions so that they will be used for these aspects.

    They wouldn¡¯t even be able to develop highbat power due to ack of skills and resources provided. But still, they are considerably elites just that they wouldn¡¯t be able to take the authoritative positions.

    All of them are quite afraid that a person with spatial abilities can easily ovee them if properly cultivated.

    They could have just killed them, but they just wanted this ability to transfer their people to different ces which made them keep their lives.

    Be careful. I heard that you would be taking care of your abilities for the next six months. You would be constantly moving, I hope you would be safe."

    Sam thought about this and nodded.

    "Thanks for the reminder. But don¡¯t worry. As long as they are not Nascent stage cultivators, I might be able to handle things. By the way. I have something else to discuss with you.

    Since you have newly expanded the empire, wouldn¡¯t you be short on funds to recover the damages and renovate the cities? You want to earn some easy money?"

 Chapter 282: Making a Deal

    Arc was surprised by what Sam said. What Sam said is indeed right. He needs a lot of money to recover the damage caused by the war and he also has to cover the rewards for the soldiers. Although, he rewarded the prime contributors, he still has to give rewards to other remaining soldiers.

    "What do you have in mind?" Arc asked curiously.

    "ck Water." Sam¡¯s words directly stumped him. He didn¡¯t expect the method Sam said would be this.

    "ck water is not a small one. Even with all the efforts I put in, I wasn¡¯t able topletely snub them off.

    It is the biggest underground faction, in the western continent and the leader of that is a Transcendent. I don¡¯t know where he lives, I once battled him after I took over the regime, but he escaped.

    In Arian, his influence dwindled a lot. But he escaped to Orion. If we want to deal with the ck water, just destroying the bases is not enough. I have to catch him too. But one sign of crackdown, he would escape."

    Sam smiled at Arc¡¯s words.

    "Are you sure that ck water is only part of Western Continent and that too Orion?"

    "Yes. Even though, there might be some traces in Arian, it is still not much they are at most some influential gang there."

    "Then, that makes things easier. From what you said, that person who is leading this behind the scenes can only be dealt by you. Do you have confidence in defeating himpletely?"

    "Yes."

    "Then, I have a way. All you have to do is attack all the branches of ck water at the same time."

    "How could we even possibly achieve that?" Arc couldn¡¯t believe it. "Even though, you did have some dealings, I highly doubt that they took you to their head-quarters, at most you would have met them in a meeting point. It is not feasible."

    "You don¡¯t have to worry about that. I will give you locations of all the ck water Head Quarters in the Nine Dukedoms. All you have to do is, attack them simultaneously at the same time and make sure that you cut off their leadership.

    There you would be able to get two things, one is the location of the subordinate factions and their details and the second one is the location of main headquarters. All you have to do is catch the boss and take information out of him.

    Just make sure that you could bury the newspletely and don¡¯t give them a chance tomunicate within themselves.

    The very next day, you can raid the remaining ces."

    Sam said it so simply.

    "What do you want in return? I don¡¯t expect you to help with this much without expecting anything in return."

    "Every ckwater leader will have some hidden spatial ring, namely three of them. Which are put aside. In them, you can take the rings with spatial rings and materials, all I need is the third ring with these boxes." Sam said as he took out a cube of meteorite sand.

    "What is this?" Arc asked in confusion.

    "It is my research material. They wanted to steal my invention at a point. Of course, they didn¡¯t know it was mine. This is the partially developed invention of mine and they distributed among themselves so that they can test it to finish it.

    But they were not able to find anything. I want them back. It is my Blood and sweat after all."

    Sam lied with a straight face. If Arc doesn¡¯t know about Meteorite sand, it is all good, but if he is ying dumb, two can y this game.

    "They are extremely important to me. Tell your subordinates to search every nook and cranny of their bases. And don¡¯t even think about stealing it away from me. I know the exact number of cubes that are present in their hands and I know for a reason that they are not used.

    After the whole operation is over, your nine heads who will deal with the nine-dukedom headquarters shoulde over and hand over the things to me.

    Apart from that, I have something else that I need.

    A person who uses Blood Golems to attack. I want that person alive. No matter what. I want him captured and handed over. He is definitely a part of ck water and is supposedly working in the main head-quarters.

    If you are okay with the conditions, we can proceed to work together."

    Sam exined his terms in a single breath.

    Arc went into a deep thought. He doesn¡¯t know if he should ept this and that ss cube is another thing that arouse his interest. He doesn¡¯t know if Sam is lying about this or of what he said is really true.

    After considering the Pros and Cons, he finally agreed to the arrangement and epted the deal.

    Anyway, ck water is a malignant tumor in his empire, it is best to deal with them.

    Sam gave the locations of the ck water bases.

    He might not have dealt with all the dukedoms individually, but he passed through all of them in his journeys and in every Dukedom capital, he met some people from ck water to get information.

    The ck water might think that Sam doesn¡¯t know anything about their bases, but the shadow mice are not for show.

    After discussing the remaining details, Sam sent the emperor off and went to check with the former Artisan tower head of the Orion.

    After the empire has copsed the people from the four professional towers of the Orion can leave to the thunder god temple tower to take on some auxiliary jobs or go to their respective association head-quarters and wait for their new assignments.

    But Sam¡¯s n gave them a new choice. They can now work here as they coborated with Sam.

    As Sam travelled over the city, he could see the constructions going on. They all have massive structures. The whole architecture artisan manpower of the former Orion has been moved to work.

    He saw the buildings being constructed. They are quiteplex huge; the work is going on slowly.

    After seeing all of this, Sam entered a temporary building which is used by the Artisan tower head as his residence.

    Sam was received by an attendant and was sent to a private room where there two people discussing something.

    One of them is the former tower-head and another one is actually someone familiar with Sam, the artisan tower-head from the Southern Star city. His face was gloomy and frustrated as he saw Sam walking inwards that displeasure only increased.

    Sam could guess what is happening. This guy might have been here for something rted to his position.

    He took a seat and said to the Artisan tower head whose name is Aasif.

    "Artisan Aasif, I hope that the construction is going well without any problems. You know, that I don¡¯t like any variables right?" As he spoke, he nced at the southern star city head, Beaver.

    Thetter looked angry, but didn¡¯t dare to re up.

    Aasif immediately understood what Sam was implying and looked at Beaver before answering.

    "There are no problems with the construction Sir Sam. A part from the construction of the city, the remaining constructions at the cities also started. Even the secondary base also started its construction." He handed over some doc.u.ments regarding the construction progress of various buildings.

    After examining them, Sam asked.

    "What about theponent manufacturing?"

    "We already met the target. All theponent manufacturing wasplete and we are waiting for your further proceedings." Now he passed over another doc.u.ment.

    After checking them too, Sam said.

    "I will be working one the coreponents now. Send the second rate artisans who are less skilled with ordinary aspects, even the attendants with less expertise would do. They will be working in the factories where they would produce the requiredponents."

    He took out some scrolls and handed them over to Aasif before saying.

    "Hand these over to the formation department and these to the inscription department. Ask them to study them properly. They might have to start working in a month.

    A part from that, use this structure and start creating themunication tokens, they wouldn¡¯t work as some coreponents are missing, but do it anyway. And select the best..."

    Sam started exining all the details of the scrolls.

    After dealing with the whole thing, he left the ce and went back to his residence. He has to work on the coreponents.

    While Sam is busy working, there are many people all over the who are all over the and are discussing about him and his friends.

    At a certain corner of the world, in a majestically built pce of the ind, a man who seemed to be in his twenties sat down with a shocked expression on his face. His fingers are clutching his ck hair as his ck eyes widened in surprise.

    In his other hand there is Sam¡¯s picture drawn on a small scroll.

    The subordinate who was kneeling in front of him was also surprised, but not for the same reason.

    The man came out of his shock and said to his subordinate.

    "Seal of the picture, don¡¯t send it to the rest of them. Only give them details and descriptions and it is fine to release the rest of the pictures."

    "Your subordinate understands." With that the servant left while the man burned the picture to ashes with just a thought.

 Chapter 283: Meetings in the Distant lands

    On the middle-eastern side of the. An archipgo just like thunder-god temple inds.

    On thergest ind of the archipgo, there is a majestic pce inside which there is a meeting being held. The scene greatly resembled a royal court where the emperor sits on high ground and the ministers below him.

    A middle-aged looking man is sitting in the seat of the head which is on the high ground, while several other people who care about the same age as he upied the seats of ministers.

    They are discussing something.

    There are five images that are hungover five stands and four of them are images of Jack, Philip, Watt, and Hawk.

    The fifth image is Sam¡¯s but it didn¡¯t really show much of his features. One might not even recognize it if they don¡¯t observe it extremely keenly.

    There is a subordinate standing in the middle of the court, who happened to be the same person who gave the picture to the young man before.

    After much talk and discussions, the head of the court dered.

    "We will send a team of three, who are in Initial stages of the Grand realm. We must get our hands on the Shadow sword and there is a high chance that the Astral paintbrush also might be in his possession. So, we will try our best to get that in our hands.

    As per the information, the person who possesses the sword has a Level-6 beast as his guardian, so the team we send shall not confront him directly. Hispanions shall be our targets and we will hold them hostage to get what we want.

    But before that, we shall extend an offer for them to join. They are talented and they can be a part of us.

    Send, Tran, Sylvia, and Rid. Ask them to finish the assignment as fast as they can. There are only a year and a half for our Ten-year meeting. They shall use this as a practice mission."

    At this moment, deep inside the pce, the young man who burned Sam¡¯s picture sat on a rocking chair and murmured in a low voice.

    "Practice mission, you say? We shall see who practices with who."

    Meanwhile, in the same archipgo on an inhabited ind which was densely filled with woods, a young man who is wearing a dark cloak with a Chain Sickle in his hands sat beside a fire on the beach with a huge shark skewered over the fire.

    He too had the same ck eyes and ck hair as the young man on the rocking chair.

    At this moment, a hawk type beast flew over to him and delivered a scroll.

    He opened the scroll and saw the details and turned over towards the woods as he yelled at the top of his lungs.

    "Tran, Sylvia, Rid. Report immediately."

    As soon as his words there is a huge movement in the forest and within a minute three beasts started running towards the beach.

    One of them is an Elephant type beast, another one is a Tiger and thest one is like a Wolf.

    The three beasts carried three people on their backs.

    Two men and a woman. All of them looked like they are in their early twenties.

    Then came down from their beasts and gave a slight bow to the person who is roasting therge fish. The young man in the cloak didn¡¯t say anything and just threw the scroll to them.

    "One month. Deal with this."

    The youngdy took the scroll and bowed again before leaving with the two other men on their beasts.

    Sam¡¯s type of meetings and incidents took ce in many other ces and in the southeastern area of the world, there is another archipgo where the meeting was still going on.

    At this moment, a man came into the court while limping. His clothes were tattered and his body waspletely drenched in blood. One of his arms was gone and the wound didn¡¯t evenpletely stop bleeding.

    He had a small orb within his another hand which was mostly still intact. All the people inside the court stopped talking and looked at this approaching man with shock.

    Even the head of the court is having the same feeling. He almost couldn¡¯t recognize the person, but he did in the end.

    "What happened? Captain? Why are you in such a condition?"

    The head of the court asked anxiously.

    "A¡ªA ¨C Horde. We were caught in a beast horde." The man said in an extremely low voice which doesn¡¯t have any strength at all.

    "W- We got that orb though." He extended his still intact hand.

    At this moment, the door was swung open as she entered the court without regard to anyone. She is rather tall for a girl. She has a near-perfect body that would make any man take an extra-long meaningful nce.

    The long ck silky hair that flowed down like a waterfall only made things more difficult to whoever was observing her.

    She has blue eyes that looked like icy crystalkes whose depths are unfathomable but desired to bepletely explored.

    Her sharp but small nose and the ruby lips, she is a woman any man desired.

    She walked to the middle of the room gracefully as her h.i.p.s swayed side to side.

    The injured man is not in a state to notice her presence and continued.

    "Our team waspletely wiped out in the beast horde as we went to retrieve this orb. The opponents knew there is a no way that they could escape, so they..."

    The young woman who came inside just came to him and grabbed the orb from his hands. She examined the orb and frowned when she found a small dent on it.

    The injured man paused for a bit and said.

    "The whole team died to save this one orb. I hope Sir will take care of their families."

    "Why is there a dent?" An extremely melodious voice came from the side of the injured man.

    The youngdy has an extremely deep frown as she asked him coldly.

    "It happened due to struggle with the beasts."

    She shook her head and threw the orb away as if it was worth nothing and asked.

    "Where is the other one? That is the most important." The injured man is looking at the orb which was rolling on the floor towards the corner. He didn¡¯t know what to think of the situation at all. All those people sacrificed their lives just to get this but it was disregarded.

    He looked at the youngdy expecting a haughty and proud face, instead, she was emotionless. He expected that she treated the lives of others as worthless, but rather she seemedpletely unbothered and indifferent towards the whole concept of their lives and death.

    "Where is the other one?" The youngdy repeated herself again.

    The captain came back to his senses and said to the head of the court.

    "Sir, the Garuda King took away the other object. His subordinate beasts are the ones that are leading the horde. He said that he felt a peculiar presence in the object and took it away."

    At these words, the whole court stilled. There is extreme silence.

    The Garuda King is a beast beyond the Transcendent stage. The beast king who rules a part of the domain of the Central continent.

    They have a long term hatred with this Garuda king and they have tried to hunt the beast many times but to no avail.

    Anything rted to the best results in a war between them and the beasts.

    Everyone was thinking of the threats garuda king can pose, but the youngdy¡¯s words dragged them back to reality.

    "I want that thing." She directly said to the court head. She doesn¡¯t have any emotions on her face to the point it almost felt as if the woman is a robot. She didn¡¯t even consider the threat of the Garuda king.

    Before the court head could reply one of the people who sat below the court head seat stood up and said.

    "Little-girl, you seem delusional. Did you just say you want something that is Garuda King¡¯s possession?"

    She didn¡¯t reply at all and just looked at the court head. While the person who called out was furious, he didn¡¯t dare to do say anything as the head opened his mouth.

    "Dear, there will be a lot of blood that would be shed if we demand that thing. Many people will die in the war and it would be a difficult time for the whole organization."

    When the youngdy, heard these words, she looked at the head and asked.

    "So, what?" These words almost made the head choke to death.

    "It is not beneficial to all of us."

    "But it is beneficial for me." Her reply didn¡¯t even bother to hesitate.

    The court went silent and another person in the court yelled with frustration.

    "Are you telling that the thousands of soldiers who will lose lives in this war are worth less than your experiment?"

    Thedy looked at that person and said.

    "I didn¡¯t say that..."

    "Then what is the meaning of your words."

    "They mean that their lives have no worth to me at all. For me they are worthless. I want my property. It was gone due to the ipetence of your guards and servants, so you be responsible for that." Her face didn¡¯t disy any emotion at all she looked at that man.

    The whole court was angered by these words.

    One of them stood up and pointed a finger at her and started yelling.

    "You little bitch. How dare you say those words? You are raised by the..."

    *Whish* He wasn¡¯t able to finish his words.

    Because at this moment, a pir behind his seat opened and a metallic de was shot out towards his neck.

    The man evaded the attack based on his instincts but was still hit on his shoulder.

    His eyes are filled with horror as tried to stop his bleeding but to no avail. He could feel his blood started warming up, but couldn¡¯t find a way to stop it.

    At this moment, the youngdy spoke up.

    "I don¡¯t like it when people call me names." Then she looked at the head again still emotionless and said.

    "I heard someone got Murali¡¯s formation inheritance, from the records I gathered there is a high chance there is a formation simtor with him. I want that."

    With those words, she left.

    Only then did one of the court attendants help the injured man and another minister spoke up.

    "Sir, are you going to leave her like that? How can she behave like that, for all the things we have done for her?"

    The head looked at him and sneered.

    "For all the things we have done for her? It is because of the things we did for her that she became like this. I remember saying that every genius is a double-edged sword if you try to manipte them. All these years it her who suffered, now it is us who is suffering under her.

    You reap what you sow?

    Ask the informers to stay alert and observe the targets, we will make a move once we observe the moves of others."

    A/N Read Authors thought

 Chapter 284: Production lines

    Sam doesn¡¯t know that there are some big heads thinking about him day and night. He knew some trouble will being towards him, but he doesn¡¯t know to what extent.

    Right now, he is inside the second floor of the tower, making some machines. One of them is an old ssic. The steam-engine.

    There are not one but multiple of them in varying sizes.

    Sam gave the auxiliaryponents of these engines for manufacturing and for some other machines which will help him in production progress.

    There are some machines which he assembled after the steam engine and they are milling machine,the machine, airpressor, etc.

    At first, he wanted to design a methane fuel-based engine but gave up on the ideater as there is no need to waste time on that. All he needs is something that gives him required shaft power and as the time is running tight, he can deal with the whole methane engine thingter.

    Sam assembled the machines one by one and after finishing the task, went to a nearby ce, where themoner area of the capital used to be.

    Now there was arge building with a lot of space inside resembling a factory.

    He started assembling one machine after another. There are some stone structures on one half of therge room and Sam started assembling airpressors and in turn, assembled a steam engine to it.

    These are furnaces. They will be helpful for the workers to either create alloys or just create molds of some objects.

    The furnaces use the methane as fuel and the airpressors act as blowers to increase the intensity of the mes.

    With this, even a low-level cultivator can deal with highly ranked metals.

    As for steam engines themselves, instead of a furnace where coal or firewood burns to form steam, there would be a fire-element energy cell and there is a permanent inscription injected to the water chamber.

    There is nearby water well, which would be connected to this chamber and the steam outlet was guided to the vicinities of the well, where it is again cooled by some wind inscriptions and water inscriptions.

    A person who just became an Acolyte can operate this.

    In the same way, the milling machine, drilling machine, Lathe machine, Grinding machine. The same made almost every machine in multiple quantities, which can help them machine theponents. After all, someponents are really not suitable to make through just molding.

    Apart from that, there is another building near this building. This building is for manufacturing apletely different thing and it is even many times bigger than the first building expanding from themoner zone to the Inner zone. It is almost as big as a small town.

    Now it is time for Sam to teach the new trainees or soon to be workers to make the differentponents and on how to work on these machines.

    He proceeded to do so and the supervisors who will deal with this work are from Sam¡¯s battalion, who he could trust more.

    Among them, the presence of the Dragon-Hawk tribe members is a bonus for him.

    Sam started training his new Production workers who are mostly attendants of the artisan towers who are talentless and have no room to grow.

    Meanwhile, in the vige of Arian.

    Jack is walking in the streets which are bustling with people. This vige is unlike others, this one has a very high poption and visitor¡¯s rate and that is because of one reason. There is a waterfall in the nearby forest, which attracts the attention of quite a number of warriors who use des.

    They might be users of swords, sabers, knives, daggers, etc, all of them will visit this waterfall to get enlightened.

    This waterfall has a very unique structure as the water streams down in very sharp streams that they behave like des.

    Many people just observe and some even try to copy the movements of the stream with their des, some who are daring will even stay under the waterfall to feel the water des on their bodies to understand it well.

    Jack also visited this ce for that enlightenment. But that is not the only reason. The inheritance he got on the ind is not exactly aplete well-rounded inheritance and it is certainly not as great as Murali¡¯s with all kinds of memories and experiences.

    It belongs to a sword cultivator who used to be Murali¡¯s enemy. The inheritance was preserved by Murali in form of some training in basic movements and the disy of the sword style of that person and finally, a sword technique.

    In fact, it would be more appropriate to call that sword-style rather than sword technique. But there is only a basic introduction to the sword style which follows the nature of water.

    Jack has never learned the exclusive style of swordsmanship since he cultivated. All he learned are basic sword moves and tried to perfect them himself.

    His life-goal was to create his own sword style.

    But he understood that to create his own sword style, he has to first understand the sword deeply and has to learn the potential and the limits of the sword.

    At least, the potential and limits on the sword in his hands.

    He always wanted to know why is Sam stronger than him even when their cultivation levels are the same. There is still a huge disparity in the fighting prowess. Sam¡¯s moves no matter what type of weapon he used are always efficient, precise, and on point. He can use his body to extreme limits and to his full potential.

    He uses all his senses no matter the situation.

    He questioned himself, why his moves are not as precise and efficient? Because he doesn¡¯t know which move to be performed to be really efficient.

    So, to know that, he has to explore. He has to try the unknown, he has to get out of hisfort zone and since he already came across some skills to the water natured swordsmanship, he wanted to start his exploration with the water.

    And to his luck, there is a waterfall, like this, which is a natural de stream. That is why he came here.

    Jack stood at the edge of the waterfall, watching the water streaming down. He can feel the sharp aura from afar. It felt as if a sharp de ising at him.

    There are many swordsmen watching it, Jack observed it for a bit and took off his upper-robes. He only wore his pants and held the ck Meteorite sand and walked towards the waterfall.

    While everyone was watching his action, he leaped andnded on a t rock on which the waterfall is hitting.

    He crossed his legs and sat down as the water hit directly on his head. Right now, his body ispletely covered with the spiritual energy shielding from the damage at least partially.

    He closed his eyes as he started slowly retracted all the spiritual energy that is shielding him. He held the sword in hisp tightly.

    Everyone was shocked at the scene. Even the people who are standing under the waterfall were stunned.

    They are also experiencing the sharpness of the waterfall. But they didn¡¯t dare to withdraw the shield of the spiritual energy.

    "Is that guy nuts?"

    "Yeah, it must be. He would die if he stays there long. The de waterfall is not something to be underestimated."

    The people nearby burst into endless whispers.

    Jack, felt the sharp currents of water striking his body and slowlycerations formed on him, but he didn¡¯t even flinch. His spiritual energy slowly covered the wounds so that they would heal slowly. Since it is only a fleshly wound, it would heal in a day even if he didn¡¯t do anything to it.

    But there is still some blood loss after every smallceration.

    Jack started observing the sharp currents of the water that are striking and slicing his body. He could feel the water being rigid, strong, and sharp when it shed his body and immediately turning into a formless flow of water.

    He could also feel the versatile flow of water before hitting him, but turning into a strong and rigid strike at the exact instant it touched his skin.

    He let the sharp water ravage his body. It is as if countless swords are shing him in various spots.

    He could feel the precise incision on his shoulders at the same time a cold and hard sh on his chest. A precise but shallow strike which only pricked his skin on his back.

    Every current of water that hit him is like a sword. Slicing, piercing, shing. Every injury suffered, he could feel as if a sword had struck him.

    It didn¡¯t feel like water hitting him at all. It is more like a swordsman is attacking. Jack visualized the attacks one by one.

    In short, he is not experiencing a waterfall, rather he is using himself as a test dummy to take the attacks of a swordsman so that he can observe that person¡¯s moves and learn them. Steal them to make it his.

 Chapter 285: Training Methods

    Jack lost himself in the feeling of experiencing the sharpness. His body was beingpletely damaged and recovered slowly. Unknowingly, his body is being tempered slowly but surely.

    But for the viewers, the scene is terrifying. The blood is flowing down along with the water that is flowing off of Jack¡¯s body, even his face was being cut in various ces.

    All of them can only stare at him as if he is a madman.

    Some of them stopped their jobs and stared intently at Jack to see what will happen and see how long he can take it.

    "What is so amazing about it? Anyone can do it."

    One of the spectators said these words and took off his shirt, he held his saber and stood right under the waterfall.

    His skin immediately startedcerating and he felt immense pain. Instinctively, he blocked his body with the spiritual energy and left the ce. He was horrified by the experience. He is a Grand Realm cultivator. Although he is from the initial stage, his body is still strong.

    At least as strong as Jack¡¯s who practiced body strengthening. But he wasn¡¯t able to bear the pain for even a second. The waterfall is really dangerous.

    Everyone now has deeper respect when they looked at Jack.

    But Jack didn¡¯t know what they are thinking. In his mind, he ispletely in a trance as an image of a swordsman formed. For every wound, he received from the waterfall.

    At first, he wasn¡¯t able to perceive a single movement, all he could see is a sh of an image in his mind.

    But he didn¡¯t stop. He kept on receiving the wounds one after another and kept on observing.

    Time passed slowly. Only after one day, could he observe the image in his mind and perceive a single movement. The easiest one. It is a sword drawn.

    The sword is drawn from the sheath in a particr manner such that move is sharp yet gentle at the same time, flowing like water.

    He waspletely immersed in a whole new world of swordsmanship.

    Meanwhile, at the same time Jack entered the waterfall, Philip also reached his destination.

    He actually came back to theva rock city.

    And now, he is on the top of the Volcano staring at the Magma inside.

    There are two inheritances which he received on the ind. One of them is a metal element and another one is a fire element one.

    The Fire element one only has a secret art that will save him in extremely life-threatening situations.

    As for the metal element one, this is used for many aspects either for closebats or forging purposes. This is aplete method of metal molding. But before he could practice that technique, Philip has something else to do first and that understands his own elemental powers and spiritual core¡¯s nature properly.

    He has abination of dual elements and he is also a warrior. He used the dual elements in many ways bybining them to create molten metal in battles. They indeed helped him create more damage.

    But he felt that he can use it more flexibly and create more possibilities in the battle.

    So, what is the natural resource that is closer to molten metal? The magma. So, he came to the Lava Rock vige, which is the closest volcano he could think of.

    However, Philip had more peace of mind than Jack as there are not many people within the Lava Rock vige.

    He climbed down into the volcano and stood on the small rocky tform which is on the edge of the magma pool.

    He looked at the nature ofva which is moving slowly. From what he can see there seemed to be a small underground Lava river.

    He didn¡¯t think much and sat cross-legged on the bank as he keenly observed the nature of the magma.

    He observed the intensity of the heat that it could create, the asional burst of gas thate out due to the formation of bubbles, the sudden increase of heat, and melting the rock at the boundary of the pool albeit a small portion. He observed everything that could be perceived by the eyes.

    Next, he took off the clothes and took out the breathing device, Sam used for diving. He borrowed one for this purpose. He equipped the device and covered his whole body with fire elemental spiritual energy and slowly walked inside the pool.

    He didn¡¯t dare to spiritual energy shield no matter what. The Lava is far dangerous and with his current level at the peak of a great realm, it is impossible for him to resist. He can still manage theva near the boundaries, but if he wants to go deeper, he would be done for.

    He even specifically asked Sam to create a series on inscriptions so that he wouldn¡¯t be troubled by the gas and the mask itself reacting tova and the heat.

    He closed his eyes as he floated over the Lava surface and he started feeling what theva could do to his body.

    His approach is somewhat simr to Jack. He is also using the crudest way to gauge the strength of something and that is experiencing the strength by using his body.

    He would just take all the damage he could do determine the strength and benefits of thisva.

    As he experienced the feeling, he kept on increasing the strength of the spiritual energy shield as he started sinking inside slowly but steadily.

    As the depth increased, the heat increased. At this moment, he could feel the Lava flowing densely. His initial guess was right.

    There was indeed a Lava river flowing down. Even though he doesn¡¯t know where it goes, he let it flow, and then only he understood the nature of Lava.

    It might be dense and slow, but that is what gave it that much intensity of heat and the weight behind the damage it could cause. In such a way he was immersed in his own world at the immense amount of possibilities that could be created.

    At this moment, Watt is doing something else. He is near a Wild-wind Canyon. Another natural training ce in Arian. This Canyon is also quite dangerous as it is shaped in a certain way that there are extremely wild and howling wind currents that go on all around the year.

    They might change with every season or other climatic conditions, but they are equally dangerous in every possible way.

    No one has ever entered the canyon as it is quite difficult for even Nascent to control themselves in the wind currents. They might not receive any damage, but they will surely be having a hard time. As for Grand realm cultivators, they will definitely receive damage.

    And that is not just because of the wind currents but also the hard edges of the whole canyon. They will slowly bleed to death once they are inside if they don¡¯te out in time and receive treatment.

    The Wind element users stay at the edge of the canyon as they experience the escaped wind currents and try to gain enlightenment. There are even rumors that the wind elemental spell, Wind de lotus which is abination of wind des in form of a flower that attacks the enemy from all sides was created here.

    Watt, at this moment, is climbing a cliff from the outer side of the canyon. There is no other entrance to it as the two entrances big enough couldn¡¯t be used due to the wind force.

    After more than two days of climbing, he finally climbed to the top and he can peer into the canyon. The winds are wild and energetic on the top of the cliff.

    Watt took out a small space jade and ced it in his mouth.

    Then he took a deep breath and jumped into the canyon.

    He fell for a few seconds and before he knew it, he was carried away by the wind current.

    *BAM* He hit a rocky edge of the canyon strongly and almost saw the stars. He took off his silver coat beforending in the canyon and because of this, his skin cracked slightly due to the impact.

    He was no longer in the same wind current, he fell down a bit and another current carried him away and soon enough.

    *BAM* another collision.

    Watt is like a kite that broke loose of its thread and struck inside a cyclone.

    He smashed to the walls of the canyon non-stop and was getting injured badly and soon enough some people at the entrance noticed him and the crowd grew bigger.

    "What the hell? Is that guy nuts?"

    "Yeah, he is definitely courting death no matter how you look at it."

    "Damn it, look at him, he just puked blood for that hit."

    "I bet he would die in a minute."

    "I bet he wouldn¡¯t be able to hold back for more than half-a-minute."

    As all of them are discussing, Watt noticed that he is bleeding much and immediately willed for the space jade in his mouth to activate. At this moment, a pill went down his mouth, followed by some meat that could nourish his blood faster.

    As the people who are talking about Watt¡¯s death watched his wounds getting scabs, they are stunnedpletely and didn¡¯t know what to think of it.

    As Sam¡¯s three friends are training in some inhumanely extreme methods, some people are watching them from an extremely long distance.

    Somewhere near the central continent on arge single ind. This Ind is called Seer Ind. Just like how six major powers that participated in the pce of inheritances exists, there are some other powers that are mostly neutral and auxiliary that upy arge single ind near the central continent.

    Apart from the four most major professions, there are some other professions that deal with issues that are rarer and umon.

    Seer Ind is one such ce. They are people with a peculiar spiritual core. Theirbat power is less, but they have some useful abilities like tracking, prediction, and many others.

    Unlike the artisan tower and the remaining professions, they didn¡¯t expand much as their abilities are somewhat special.

    They only have enoughbat power if they are born as Warrior-Mages with the same ability as their tracking, prediction and some other abilities will give them an extreme edge along with the warrior abilities, but those cases are few and far between.

    Now, in the major tower of the Seer ind, a middle-aged man is using his abilities on the screen as he disyed Watt who is in the canyon, Sam who is teaching the new workers, Jack who is under the waterfall, and Philip who is immersed under the Lava and Hawk who is still traveling.

    As he watched, he couldn¡¯t help but marvel at the intensity of the training and extremes they are going through to be stronger.

    "I couldn¡¯t sense that guy named Sam for a few days, but now that I got him, I should note down their coordinates."

    After noting somethings down, he came out and passed it to an attendant.

    "The youngsters from the six major powers wille. Ask for the name of their targets and sell them these coordinates."

    He gave the notes and went back to his room.

    "I wonder what method that Sam guy used to block my seer vision. Maybe I should keep an eye on him for a while." He mumbled to himself.

 Chapter 286: Guests

    The middle-aged man is absolutely correct, there are guests that came in five groups.

    Except for the thunder god temple, all the remaining five powers sent a team each. As for the thunder god temple, they have more people in the empire and even have ess to space-gate.

    But they didn¡¯t dare to send the highly powerful people, because all the powers are now seeing Sam as their treasure, and since they only have ess to send people up to Grand realm cultivators they wouldn¡¯t just sit and wait if the thunder god temple sends some high-level cultivators.

    So, they could only sit and wait while sending the same level candidates as the remaining powers, but they didn¡¯t send a three-man team instead, they sent four people and one of them is Arthur.

    Since he is the only one who has more contact with Sam, he just broke-through the Grand realm, so now he is not the top dog in the Grand realm rankings of the thunder-god temple, he didn¡¯t even reach the top thirty.

    So, for now, he doesn¡¯t hold much sway here.

    He entered the Arian empire from the space-gate along with other three members who are within top-fifty. From their source of information, Sam and his group haven¡¯t broken through the Grand realm. All of them are at the peak of the Great realm.

    They don¡¯t know the reason why, but they just sent the initial stage Grand realm cultivators to deal with them.

    Unlike some people, the thunder god temple took another direct approach and that is to deal with Sam directly.

    Arthur said that four inheritances are with Sam himself and they also knew how possessive Sam is of his friends from their investigations. If by any chance they missed and Sam knew about their involvement, they would take huge coteral damage.

    After all, they heard about how Sam is capable of destroying all the natural resources in the former Orion. Even if he was incapable of dealing with the whole thunder god temple, it is not worth it, even if he behaved like a rabid dog and bit everything that came into his sight. They would surely lose two to three inds under their control.

    The thunder god temple made sure that Arc wouldn¡¯t tip off Sam about the arrival of these four people. But they didn¡¯t know that the moment they entered the vicinities of Sam¡¯s city, Sam already knew of their arrival.

    The thing is there are some restaurants that are still operating in Sam¡¯s city and they are run by Mackey¡¯s staff.

    Different restaurants open in various ces with different styles of cuisines and there is always an influx of new citizens whoe and go out of the city every day.

    Thus, the four of them just sneaked into the city and tried to blend into the crowd.

    But what they don¡¯t know is that the citizens that move in and out of the city, the people who are temporarily staying in the city, and every other person who is breathing inside the city are all Sam¡¯s people at least they are now working under Sam.

    They move in and out because of the construction project that is going on near the vicinity of the capital inside the woods.

    All of them are wearing their casual clothes and as the people from the thunder god temple don¡¯t know Sam¡¯s ns, they just gave themselves away.

    And how did that happen? Many people wouldn¡¯t notice that there is a small mark embroidered on the chests of every person working under Sam. It is just a tick mark and it is done so stealthily that one would only know it is there if they observe closely.

    They also have information that if anyone who doesn¡¯t have a mark enters the city, then they are intruders and they have to just ry the information to their supervisors and if possible, bring the images without alerting the intruders at all.

    After two days, night time the four of them are having dinner in one of the restaurants.

    "Arthur, I think we can take action tonight itself. From what we saw from the past two days, he is retiring to his residence and no one is disturbing him, even the Vulture is being kept afar. There is only one precaution, we have to take him down before he reacts and if not possible, we have to retreat without leaving any evidence of our identities."

    The person who seemed to be the team leader of the group said but Arthur didn¡¯t reply. They are just asking for his opinion for the sake of it. Since the time they came to the Arian, they didn¡¯t bother caring about his opinion or insight.

    He is walking on egg-shells since he entered Sam¡¯s city. He has a feeling that their sneaking in is not exactly sessful and they are about to receive a perfect p anytime soon. It is his intuition told him.

    But these guys didn¡¯t bother listening to him. These four people are taking pleasure in defying his every word as it is impossible to do so in the thunder god temple.

    "Do whatever you seem fit. I am only here to give you insights about Sam¡¯s techniques in battle, the rest of it is your call." The leader seemed to be quite satisfied as the answer fed his ego.

    As the order came, they started munching on the food.

    By the time they finished their meal, they unknowingly felt dizzy and by the time they came to sense, they are in a dark room and there are restraints ced on their hands and legs as they were tied up to chairs.

    "Who is it? Why am I here? Someonees out and releases me."

    "Who has guts to restrain us like this?"

    "We seemed to have been drugged. Damn it, I will smash the restaurant into pieces when I get out of here." All three of them are spouting curses as soon as they opened their eyes.

    At this moment, Arthur is the only one who is staying calm. Because he knew who could have caught them.

    "Wee, My dear guests from Thundergod temple. How is your stay for the past two days in my city?" Sam came out with a smile on his face.

    The lights were turned on and at this moment, he could see sitting on his bone throne.

    There is a new addition to it and that is the edge of the whole chair¡¯s backrest and the arms rests are covered with the Blood iron coating. This is made from Oscar¡¯s blood he collected before.

    The three people arepletely dumbfounded by his arrival. They didn¡¯t expect that Sam would catch them so easily. After all, the city is vast and there are many peopleing in and out. It is a pity that they don¡¯t know every person in the city is Sam¡¯s employee now.

    "Isn¡¯t it rather rude to not answer a question?" Sam said in a cold voice. Then only they came to their senses.

    Sam then looked at Arthur and said. "Its good to see you again. I didn¡¯t think we would meet so soon."

    "What does it take for you to leave us?" Arthur came to the point directly.

    "Well, is there any reason for me to leave you guys alive? After all, I do know why you guys came here and I think I have enough reason to kill you."

    "All four of them gulped at his words."

    "Do you know, who we are? Do you think you can escape scot-free after killing us?" One of the three said these words.

    "Hahahahaha..."

    But Sam onlyughed but within a second, a metal card flew over and slit that person¡¯s throat.

    A Grand realm cultivator was killed just like that. All it took was capturing them with an anesthetic drug and sealing their cultivation and throwing a metallic card at that person¡¯s throat.

    "Does that answer your question?"

    Sam said rather sarcastically.

    The remaining two who are about to hurl out some threats immediately gulped and swallowed their words.

    "Sam, I have some information about your friends," Arthur said these words in order to escape this ordeal.

    Sam smiled and asked.

    "So, what?"

    "Just leave us and you can get that info."

    "We can talk about that in fifteen days," Sam replied and left the ce without even caring for their reply.

    It simply means they have to stay here until then. Arthur was confused that Sam is unconcerned and why he wanted fifteen days to discuss just this. After fifteen days, the information would be almost useless.

    By now, the teams of the remaining powers are already preparing to make their moves and their main targets are Watt, Jack, and Philip. Their information source said that Hawk is not that close with Sam.

    But not everyone is willing to be the first bird. After all, they are not going to catch worms to be excited about being an early bird. They want to wait and see and particrly two powers are extremely unwilling to move first.

    The lightning spear sect though is too eager. They don¡¯t want to dy the process as they are in an extreme rivalry with the Thunder God temple, so they sent their people first and four of them at that.

    At this exact moment, the Lightning spear sect disciples entered Arian.

    Author¡¯s note:: read the author¡¯s thought. An announcement regarding the chapter updates

 Chapter 287: Jacks Battle

    After fifteen days.

    Arthur and the remaining two are still tied down in the same room and for their dismay, the dead body wasn¡¯t even removed, not being able to ess their spiritual energy due to their cultivation being sealed, they are almost starving to death.

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to let them eat to their fill, only giving them some bread at a random time, he has more important things to do.

    On this day, he came back with three recording crystals in his hands.

    His bone throne is left there intimidating them further, they weren¡¯t able to see the throne clearly when they first saw, so they couldn¡¯t identify the material. But after fifteen days, they clearly saw what kind of materials were used and that gave them chills.

    Arthur was sweating buckets with barely any sleep. He has been in odds with Sam many times and he was afraid what would happen if Sam wanted to settle scores.

    He might be an extra decoration for this chair.

    At this moment, there was a table ced in front of them on which Sam ced three recording crystals.

    "Arthur, before we discuss the deal, I have something to show you and you can decide if your information is valuable or not."

    As he said, he activated the first crystal and Jack¡¯s figure popped up. At this moment, he is still sitting under the waterfall. But he is not in the same state as before.

    He was covered by a think aura and even though, it is a recording they can still feel the sharpness of it.

    This is a video recorded after a week of Jack¡¯s training.

    At that moment, he was countering the waterfalls with nothing but his sharp sword aura which he developed over the week.

    In a week he became a person who can only deduce a single movement to the point of countering it.

    As Jack was still training, suddenly a person appeared in the scene and a spear was shot at him.

    As the spear zoomed in, the surrounding people became alert and looked at the attacker. There a young man stood with a smirk on his face as he looked Jack coldly.

    Jack didn¡¯t move, as the spear moved towards him in an extremely high speed. But just before it could touch his face, he raised his hand and held the spear in its ce by holding the spear head. The sharp tip just stopped in front on his nose with only a hair¡¯s breadth. His palm which held the spear head was cut open and blood dripped from it.

    He opened his eyes and looked at the person coldly. His face waspletely filled with anger and frustration due to the disturbance.

    He slowly stood up and stretched his body and came out of the waterfall. His body was still wet and his pants are almost shredded. His body was full of scars that were left by the waterfall.

    He made his way downwards as he held the spear with his left hand and the ck Meteorite sword in his right.

    He observed the attacker as he watched him closely, He is a person who seemed to be a Level-2 Grand realm cultivator.

    "You better have a damn good reason for what you did." Jack said in a low voice. His throat felt husky as he didn¡¯t speak for more than a week.

    "Or what? What are you going to do about it?" The attackerughed it off sarcastically.

    "Well, you will see in no time." Jack threw the spear to him and held the sheathed sword by his hip.

    The tension in the air grew and the attacker sneered at Jack¡¯s words. Purple lightning crackled around him as he waved his spear. He swung the spear and made a piercing motion.

    Jack moved his body and dodged it fluidly. His movements were extremely smooth and looked almost slow motion.

    But it is actually extremely fast. He didn¡¯t even bother to unsheathe his sword and just dodged it.

    He still remembered the time when they are on the ind and have to worry about being attacked by every single beast. He couldn¡¯t even dream about fighting a Level-5 beast much less killing it.

    Now, he is going on toe to toe with a person who has strength equal to that of an initial stage Level-5 beast.

    He now understood how Sam used to battle those higher than his level. He used the maximum potential his body and the spirtual core, cultivation level, his techniques could offer.

    Now, with his Peak Great realm cultivation along with his tempered body, he is sure that he can defeat this person. In fact, he is so confident that he can visualize his winning.

    But the power gap is not that easily surpassed and the only thing he can do is rely on technique.

    Jack halted his movement after dodging repeated strikes. This time he held the hilt if his sword and just before the spear could strike him, he unsheathed it. The sheathe disappeared into the storage.

    The sword hit the spear tip with a blinding light stopping the lightning that was about to strike him, but it was not just defence. The de tilted a bit when he blocked it and the blinding light that covered the sword a few moments ago flew past the spear in a miraculous curve and hit the opponent squarely on the chest.

    The opponent felt a sharp pain on his chest and took a step backward instinctively. There is a smooth cut on his armour and a small cut appeared on his chest from which he was slowly bleeding with a searing pain.

    He looked at Jack who is stillpletely drenched. His face is calm as a stillke. He didn¡¯t even show any expression as if the attack working was just a natural urrence. His pride took a huge hit.

    "Seems like I underestimated you a little. But don¡¯t be happy yet. I will be serious now." As he said that he swung the spear and started making the same piercing motions, but this time the lightning bolts were being shot at Jack.

    This is a mid-ranged attack. Not only the spear is keeping Jack at bay, this lightning is keeping him even more far. His sword attacks might be able to attack somewhat mid-range, but this is still a bit far for swordsman at his cultivation level.

    But he is not disappointed, rather he is actually curious to see how he could counter this attack from his current distance itself. Even though, he is confident that he can cover the distance, this is his training phase and he can use this spar to execute what he has learned.

    He closed his eyes and his sword aura was released. He stopped relying on his eyes and limited his perception to his spiritual sense and that too only for the area of him and his opponent.

    His sword aura which was only sharp slowly morphed itself and it became gentle. All this time, he kept on dodging but suddenly he stopped.

    He stood still and moved his sword. His sword emitted a sword light every time he moved and every sword light hit the lightning urately deflecting the attack.

    His move was extremely fast and fluid. He not only used his spiritual sense, but also his skin and instinct. He could feel the faint ripples of air when the spear is moved, he was able to block every move without even moving his feet.

    Every lightning bolting at him was being deflected and after ten moves, Jack stepped forward. He shed the sword diagonally and the de of the sword hit the spear head from the side deflecting it, but what happened next shocked the attacker.

    The sword light curled around the shaft of the spear as it moved forward like a snake and a deep cut appeared on the palm of the opponent.

    "Ahhhhhh...."

    Blood started dripping down as he felt an immense pain. He dropped the spear by an instinct. Jack opened his eyes and looked at him with a smirk.

    "You better use your strongest move. Or else there is no chance to defeat me." He said confidently. But he is not as calm inside, because his spiritual energy will run out soon. After all, he is not a Great realm cultivator and he doesn¡¯t have same amount of spiritual energy stored in his core.

    His moves might have been effective all this while and he didn¡¯t receive any damage, but his consumption is not low. Every attack that came from the opponent need a veryrge amount of energy from him to be deflected.

    So, he is taunting the opponent to let him reveal all his cards and his trick worked. The opponent grabbed the spear and said in a cold tone.

    "I wanted to capture you earlier, but now I will definitely kill you." He gritted his teeth and held his spear with both of his hands.

    Jack also got ready as he changed his stance, he looked at his opponent with extreme concentration as his grip became harder.

    The opponent, started concentrating his spiritual energy at the tip of the spear and a sharp spear head was enveloped with even more sharp lightning almost making it impossible for the de to be visible.

    "Lightning Spear style, The Tempest thrust." The opponent muttered these words and yelled. "Die."

    Jack closed his eyes as the spear made its way towards him. His spiritual energy took shape around him and it morphed into countless sword lights. His grip on his sword tightened with a deep breath, he made piercing motion with his sword.

    A sharp sword light let the tip of the sword and following it, the remaining sword light surrounding went towards opponent.

    The tips of two weapons collided and both of the sted away. But the sword lights didn¡¯t stop, they flowed like streams as they made their way towards the opponent. The sword lights shed him left and right as they bombarded him from all sides.

    Ten sword lights, only one of the took the attack head on and nine attacked the opponent. Tearing his skin in multiple ces.

    But Jack wasn¡¯t escaped scot-free.

    As dust settled, people saw two people lying on the ground. Jack¡¯s abdomen has a big round hole on it revealing his damaged muscle fibres. His ribs are broken and he puked some blood. He supported himself weakly as he stood with his sword.

    The state of his opponent is worse. That guy had exactly ninecerations on his body.

    One of them on his upper chest, two on both sides of his abdomen, two of them to cut the tendons on wrists, two to cut tendons on his feet and two others on his thighs.

    Jack made sure that he didn¡¯t hit the vitals, but it would be still impossible for him to move.

    Jack popped a pill inside his mouth and slowly made his way towards his opponent.

    "What¡¯s your name and purpose?" He asked weakly but his sword was ced on the opponent¡¯s neck.

    "I... I am from the Lightning Spear sect, you can¡¯t kill me. If you kill me, you will be hunted down by my sect members." He didn¡¯t forget to threaten Jack.

    "Oh, really?" Jack smiled and looked at him dead in the eyes.

    "I would like to see, how they will hunt me down, Good bye." With that, he thrusted the sword tip into his throat, ending his life. He took the spatial ring walked back to the waterfall. After healing his wounds until they scabbed and recovering some spiritual energy, he went back to the waterfall to cultivate.

 Chapter 288: Philips Battle

    Six days after Philip entered the volcano.

    On the third day, he has changed his training method, right now he waspletely submerged inside theva and is performing the yoga poses which are used for body cultivation. But he is not solely concentrated on the body, he is going for the elemental fusion.

    Three days earlier, he has a very peculiar idea. All this while, he has been treating himself as a Dual elemental Warrior-Mage. But what if he treated his metal and fire element as a single entity. What if he stopped looking at it as two different entities co-existing together?

    But he cannot find a proper way to visualize it and then came this idea. He had a conversation with Sam on thest day on the ind about elemental fusion and Sam said that the body cultivation along with the elemental energy could help.

    Thus, he wanted to absorb the energy from the Magma which has both fire and metal inside. And to his surprised, his not somon idea actually seeded and he could feel his body conditions changing a bit.

    For starters, his skin was hardened quite well and when he tried to use elemental fusion., he could feel more at ease. And the percentage of fusion definitely improved, albeit very minutely.

    So, for the past three days, he was working on improving his elemental fusion.

    But on the sixth day, he was suddenly jolted awake, because he felt that the magma around him bing more turbulent, the calmness and stillness were nowhere to be seen. It is aplete mess, which made Philip frustrated. He came out to see what is happening only to see a person is standing on the edge of the mouth of the volcano.

    He is looking at Philip who came just popped his head out of the magma pool. Even before, Philip could ask what that guy¡¯s problem is, he was greeted with a series of wind des one after another hitting him and his vicinity.

    Philip became furious. He is barely staying safe in ava pool with the help of the spiritual energy shield he created if, by any chance the attack disrupted the spiritual energy, he would have died.

    Even though he could resistva for a few minutes and make his way out, he highly doubted that the uninvited guest would let him do that.

    Philip, immediately jumped out of the pool, without a second thought. Hended on the small tform at the edge of the pool and looked at the person coldly.

    He is in a disadvantageous position now. He cannot deal with this person directly from the bottom and he has to climb up as fast as he can.

    Philip immediately sprung into action. He leaped towards the wall of the volcano and started climbing up as fast as he can. His senses arepletely on high alert as he sensed any iing attacks.

    And soon, many wind des starteding towards and every time an attack came, he thrust against the wall and jumped to the opposite side.

    But, after three times, the move was cracked. When he leaped to the opposite side, he was attacked again and this time, the wind de brushed past his cheek leaving a scar on his face. He was quite gloomy and looked at the opponent while cursing inside.

    ¡¯I have to ask Sam to make one of those floating boards for me.¡¯ He swore in his heart that he should definitely pester that guy until he made one. As for, how he would make it feasible for his elements to be useful, that guy can decide himself.

    Philip¡¯s started bing metallic. This is the basic technique of every metal elemental user. They can solidify their skin in such a way that they can increase their defense a bit.

    Philip continuously ignored the attacks he didn¡¯t care anymore. He could take these few hits. The face of the opponent changed, He wanted to take down Philip with the help of the environment. He can save a lot of effort, but Philip didn¡¯t allow that.

    But he didn¡¯t dare to use veryrge movements. This is the mouth of an active volcano, if he made huge turmoil in the wind and created tornados, then he would change from hunter to a being a prey.

    He started concentrating wind des at the tip of each finger as Philip climbed at maximum speed.

    When Philip is just four feet away from the top, the opponent waved his hands, ten wind des crisscrossed each other as they formed a and shot towards Philip. The more distance they traveled the gaps between the widened and covered arge area.

    The intensity of the attack is also quite strong. Even if Philip can escape at a little, the surrounding rock could break without giving any ce to move as for jumping to the opposite side, it is almost impossible.

    But Philip seemed unbothered because he covered himself with spiritual energy and jumped diagonally upwards on the opposite side. He twisted his body in extremely weird angles in the air as he passed through the gap of the wind de andnded on the top.

    It would be more appropriate to call it a crash, rather thannding, He slowly stood and looked at the opponent.

    "Now, we can have a proper chat, don¡¯t you think so?" Philip said with a cold smile and extended his hand and sent an extremely intense fireball at the opponent.

    The opponent sneered and easily dodged but there is not much distance on the mouth of the volcano. They only have a ring of rock with a thickness of two feet. Fall on either side is not a great experience.

    Philip also made his move. The other party is clearly a Wind Mage, so he would try to keep a distance between them so that he can have an advantage.

    But the battleground now is disadvantageous for both of them at least Philip can still take it if he fell into theva, but the opponent cannot even do that.

    Philip started throwing fireball one after another

    But the man used the wind elemental energy and blocked every attack.

    Soon, the man was annoyed, he is a Grand realm cultivator and Philip is attacking very frequently and repeatedly with the same moves, so he sneered and said.

    "You should have wasted enough spiritual energy, I just need you alive, so it is about time I end this fight."

    With those words, He breathed in a lot and his lungs expanded to an unnaturallyrge size like balloons, it is as if he doesn¡¯t even have any rib cage at all.

    And arge wind cannon was shot at Philip who is on the exactly opposite side of the volcano mouth.

    He smiled at the person and prepared himself for the attack, if it hit him, he would crash down the mountain into the woods and he would be barely alive and that is if he is lucky enough.

    His feet shone with red hot light and the metallic extension appeared on the bottom of the feet and drilled themselves into the rocks below.

    After that, he extended both his hands and ced them right before his chest with his palms wide open. The metallic hands morphed into a thinrge bowl-like structure. The ends of the bowls are emitting mes.

    As soon as the wind hit the bowl, the rocks under Philip¡¯s feet cracked due to the impact, and the wind which hit the bowl diverged and turned back towards the opponent, at this moment, the mes are intensified, and with the help of the wind current, the mes enveloped the opponentpletely.

    He wasn¡¯t able to take the impact and fell off the mountain. Philip didn¡¯t rest and leaped to the opposite side. He wasn¡¯t surprised to see the person bncing himself with the wind, but he could stop moving down the mountain.

    Philip jumped down and as his feet hit, they morphed into smooth t surfaces as he slid down the mountain.

    Unlike the opponent, who is having a hard time controlling it, he is actually a bit more rxed and confident. He skated down and due to that, he caught up with his opponent who waspletely stunned.

    Before he knew it, Philip raised his fist which was covered with metal and then heated as several spikes protruded from the surface of the fist. He punched the man squarely in the chest puncturing his lungs.

    The opponent who just barely bnced himself lost it again and crashed into the rocky protrusion breaking it squarely before crashing down.

    Philip slid down slowly and the person was barely able to move.

    As he walked towards him, he noticed that he has some kind of token in his hands which he was about to crush, Philip morphed his leg again and with a kick, the arm was cut apartpletely.

    He squatted down and said with a smile. "Why the hurry, my friend, we just met and you are already trying to leave? Come on. now let us start with your introduction."

    The other party didn¡¯t talk at all. Philip took the spatial ring and forcefully opened it. He took out a token and smiled.

    "Well, the Lightning Spear Sect. When did you guys be so bold? You can¡¯t even conquer your inds fully and you already trying to spread your hands towards thunder god temple¡¯s territory?"

    The opponent was horrified at Philip¡¯s words.

    "So, what is your goal? Don¡¯t tell me, you are here to kill me?" His words werepletelyced with killing intent.

    The opponent became desperate and shook his head in denial and opened his mouth.

    "We have orders to take you hostage. I don¡¯t have any intention of killing you."

    "Oh? Hostage? Don¡¯t tell me you wanted to threaten Sam?" Philip looked at him as if he was an idiot.

    The other party stayed silent but the answer is obvious.

    "You guys are pretty dumb aren¡¯t you? That jerk goes crazy whenever someone threatens him, do you know he became a mad man and ughtered more than three hundred members when someone tried to kidnap his teammates and the worst part is he doesn¡¯t even have a proper friendship with the person who is under threat.

    You should do your homework better. I bet your higher-ups didn¡¯t even think twice before giving you the mission when they saw he is a Great realm cultivator. Can¡¯t your chicken brains even think why he has his own city? Stupid."

    The opponent became horrified as he heard the words and didn¡¯t know how to react. But he felt that everything Philip said is correct. They didn¡¯t think much when Sam is their opponent and they only targeted his friends due to the presence of Vulture.

    "Well, it is toote to realize it now. Better luck next life." With those words, he stood up, and before the other party could plead for mercy, he kicked again and the head was severed from his body.

 Chapter 289: Watts Battle

    Watt is floating in the canyon with his eyes closed. He has be one with the wind. All the spectators seemed to have grown used to it but they were still amazed at Watt¡¯s persistence.

    But Watt was in a whole different world. The main reason he came here is to achieve elemental fusion. He was amazed when he saw Sam¡¯s fire elemental fusion and he understood the advantages. The spiritual energy consumption might be high, but in certain cases, the elemental fusion state gives many more advantages.

    As for his wind element, the wind is present in almost all the possible locations of battles and he can use it to increase his speed, dexterity, senses, and battle awareness. His attacks will be easier to execute and he can control the metal cards even more efficiently as the surrounding wind will be easier to manipte.

    Even though he can still go through the body tempering using wind elements which will increase his chances at elemental fusion, he doesn¡¯t have the sameprehension abilities that Sam has and he is using the most straightforward way he could think of.

    Since he needs the wind elemental fusion and wants to be like the wind, he will force himself to feel how wind acts and be one with it.

    Although this method seemed brutal and hard to persist, he was still able to see the results and he can easily execute partial fusion.

    After a week of progress, he was able to undergo elemental fusion with his skin.

    And this time, he can control himself to be part of a certain wind current without being throw away towards the cliff walls like a ragdoll., but he wasn¡¯t able to deal stay stillpletely.

    In fact, if Watt failed to obtain at least fifty percent elemental fusion, he would stay stuck in this wind currents forever, provided that he can stay alive for that long.

    As for his survival, he is absorbing the wind elemental energy from the currents and asionally taking in some minced meat directly into his throat through the space jade.

    While he was immersed in his training, he suddenly felt a sense of crisis and he immediately opened his eyes. An arrow whizzed towards. He tilted his head a bit and caught the arrow with his hands.

    He immediately tiled his body so that he can get a better view and used the partial elemental fusion so that he could resist the wind flow and move slower. He saw a person standing on the cliff where he jumped in from.

    It is a young man in his early twenties. He is holding a longbow and is staring at Watt with a peculiar smile.

    While Watt is watching him, the man once again shot an arrow and surprisingly he didn¡¯t aim at Watt, instead, he aimed at some random spot in the canyon, but the wind current deflected the arrow and it whizzed towards Watt.

    Watt barely dodged it and the arrow flew past him, after some deflections, it struck itself into the canyon wall.

    He looked at the opponent coldly, he doesn¡¯t know who this guy is, but he does know why he is here. Sam already warned him before that some trouble makers wille looking for him. He just didn¡¯t expect to be caught in such a difficult position.

    Right now, he is stuck inside the wind currents and it is extremely difficult to get out of here. But the other party seemed to be taking the wind currents to his advantage and is attacking with the arrows.

    One after another arrows came from a different directions and Watt is starting to have a hard time dodging them.

    He sensed that arrows also wind elemental energy infused and the energy is also morphed in such a way that it will take the assistance of the wind currents and move ordingly.

    After more than ten arrows, the person shot two arrows consecutively into two directions.

    This time, Watt could feel the arrowsing from two directions. Due to the presence of more than a dozen wind currents, there are some intersection points where the wind currents collide partially and deflect from each other creating a chaotic space filled with torrential wind.

    Watt used those points to change the wind current he was in every time.

    Now, this guy is also using these points to shoot two arrows towards Watt.

    Watt should say that he is impressed. This guy can actually deduce the direction of the wind currents and the intersection points and get the perfect timing which is almost impossible for any normal person.

    But, Watt is not at all nervous. He still has a trump card and that is his silver wind. If pushes to shove, he can use the silver wind to surf on the wind currents and can find a way to escape the canyon.

    Watt started concentrating on the person intently, The opponent is a Level-1 Grand realm cultivator at most and Watt is extremely confident that he can deal with his if they fought normally.

    Now, it is a test for his abilities to fight him in these conditions.

    Watt left the arrows that were being shot at him alone and didn¡¯t bother with them for a second and huddled himself into a ball and he fell down from the ce and entered another wind current.

    The attacker was a bit confused as Watt repeated the same thing again and again and only stopped it after making the same move dozens of times.

    But when Watt stopped, the attacker was surprised. Right now, Watt ispletely covered by wind elemental energy as he floated in the same spot without any movement.

    This is the intersection of the point of six wind currents. Although being stable at this ce is difficult for Watt at this point, he can still stay there for around half-an-hour.

    And he believed that Half-an-hour is enough for him to deal with the opponent.

    As he floated there, the opponent smirked and shot arrows in all directions rapidly, but this time, Watt is still on the defensive, but in an extremely different way. He took out the cards and started throwing them. The cards have even less resistance than the arrows and every arrow was cut apart vertically and the cards went up and stuck on the cliff walls.

    And with that, the serious war of projectiles went on.

    The attacker was shooting arrows one by one and his face grew darker and darker as every arrow was being cut apart. And to his dismay, Watt doesn¡¯t even need to use the same amount of spiritual energy as him.

    Watt is mostly using the wind currents, although he might not be able to calcte the currents and timings like the archer, he has spent enough time here to be familiar with all the wind currents and their patterns.

    By this time, the spectators near the entrance of the whole canyon saw the battle and werepletely surprised. Either the archer¡¯s attacks using the whole wind currents or Watt¡¯s methods to counter them, both are unfathomable. All they can do is watch it in awe.

    The archer slowly lost patience and he took out another arrow and this time it is a lot different than the previous cases because this one has some runes engraved on it.

    He concentrated the elemental energy to the arrow and bow as they shined brightly. The amount of energy is far behind what Watt could use. That is due to the difference in levels.

    As the archer pulled the bowstring to the extreme level, he looked at Watt with a hint of admiration. The veins on his hand are on verge of bursting and all his body is surging with power, this is his ultimate move, he believed that he could take down Watt with this.

    Although it might not be able to kill Watt, his goal is not to kill him anyway.

    As he was about to release his arrow, he saw a peculiar smile on Watt¡¯s face and his expression grew serious, but he was toote.

    At this moment, Watt released another metallic card, it flew through the currents and impaled itself on the cliff wall and suddenly there was a torrential explosion of the wall and that wall happened to be the ce where the archer is standing.

    The archer immediately lost his footing and fell into the canyon and to his dismay, the attack which he was conjuring bacshed making him puke blood.

    He was like a kite in a typhoon, just like how Watt was on his first day, he couldn¡¯t control his body and crashed several times beforeing towards Watt.

    Watt extended his hand and caught him by his neck. He took the spatial ring of the person and used a metallic card to cut his throat before throwing him away.

    Even, before dying he doesn¡¯t know how he died and his soul left his body in confusion.

    In fact, it is quite easy. Watt threw the cards in such a way that they would impale on the cliff walls in a certain position.

    The cards might be small, but the attack and the damage it can do is not exactly small. Due to the repeated attacks on the wall, Watt finally used a card with an inscription etched on it.

    There are some cards with inscriptions that are given to him by Sam. And due to an explosion caused by the inscription the already damaged rock was destroyed. Actually, the damaged rock volume is very small, and it barely amodated the two feet of the attacker but that was enough to make the other party lose his footing and enter the canyon.

    Watt has nned this from the start, he might not be able to attack him from inside the canyon, but that doesn¡¯t mean he cannot get the other party inside. And once, the other party is inside, it is his territory.

    Unlike, the previous two these guys didn¡¯t even have any conversation, but Watt didn¡¯t care. He just left the dead body to stray away with the currents and he went back to train. After a few days of straying, if crashed towards the entrance of the canyon, where people cleared to not let it block the entrance.

 Chapter 290: Reaction from the shadow sword

    Sam is looking at Arthur and the remaining two. The contents of three recording crystals have already yed and the three guests have seen the three battles.

    Sam has sent three people to follow them and record the battles if urred and send it back to him.

    And he made this not for the purpose of showing them to Arthur and others, just in case if something happened, Sam would have a specific target to focus on.

    He did give them some trump cards so that they can escape in some cases.

    Even though the recording crystals didn¡¯t capture everything in the battle particrly in Philip¡¯s case, they still have the most critical parts.

    After showing the three recordings, Sam leaned back and rxed as he observed the change in the facial expressions of the three ¡¯guests¡¯.

    "If the information you have is about these kinds of threats, then you can keep it to yourselves, I have faith in my friends."

    Arthur was conflicted. This means, that Sam has already made some preparations for these kinds of scenarios. And from what he saw the three of them are not some easy targets, they can still hold on their own. Even in the powers like thunder god temple, they would elite group.

    Sam spoke again, interrupting Arthur¡¯s thoughts.

    "Arthur, how are you doing in the Thunder god temple? How are Arman and Nichs doing?"

    His sudden question surprised Arthur, but when he heard the second part, his face became incredibly ugly.

    He clearly understood what Sam is implying.

    Arman has be his long-term rival and to his dismay, the appearance of Nichs is giving him even more pressure.

    He might be the current heir of the Thundergod temple, due to him being the descendant of the current head and him being the best among his generation, but now with the appearance of these two people, his position is in trouble.

    Sam continued.

    "I know why you guys are here, you want a shadow sword, but that is not gonna happen. Nobody can take any of my possessions unless I give them up myself.

    Your mission is an utter failure. I can kill you right now without any problem. And your thunder god temple doesn¡¯t even have to trouble themselves to be a substitute and I even doubt that they sent you here as cannon fodder. After all, with all the news your organization possibly got, I don¡¯t believe they don¡¯t know my involvement in the destruction of Orion, and even with that, they still sent you.

    You seem to have been forsaken by your organization, what a pity."

    Sam said in a rather mncholic tone. Arthur¡¯s expression kept on changing. Because he knew all about the whole destruction of Orion thing. Sam really did y a deciding role, in fact, he is the cause of all, although there is not much of his battle prowess involved in all this and only his tricks and resourcefulness along with the unique thinking, the organization should have foreseen the scenarios where Sam is going to take necessary precautions.

    But they didn¡¯t seem to do so. They even sent him here as a dead giveaway. He is even thinking that the behavior of the remaining three is also due to this.

    But he doesn¡¯t know that the three of them just merely wanted to throw their weight around a big shot like him so that they can satisfy their egos and neither did the thunder god temple knew that due to the immature acts of someone, Arthur the heir and the number one seeded candidate for temple head position is doubting the whole organization.

    All it took was some words from Sam and his train of thoughts is running wildly.

    Sam spoke again at this moment.

    "I don¡¯t have any advantages in killing you, so I can let you go if you can give me enough reason to do so," Sam said in a casual tone and Arthur started thinking rapidly, he wanted to say something about thunder god temple retaliating but he didn¡¯t say it in the end.

    All six powers are on Sam¡¯s heels now, the threat is useless. He wanted to offer money but remembered that Sam has a lot more of it than he could give him. He was running out of ideas when Sam said again.

    "I want to make a deal with you, to be precise with the whole thunder god temple and I want you to be the mediator of it. Of course, you can benefit from it along the way as you would get the mediatormission.

    You want to listen?" Sam asked with a smile.

    Immediately Arthur became excited, now that there is a chance for him to live, he would take it with open arms.

    "I am ready."

    "Then, for that, you have to wait for five months, after five months I will give you a deal that you wouldn¡¯t resist until then be my guest, you can stay within the vicinities of the city try the delicacies and stay in whatever ce you want except for the restricted areas, but of course there will be a leash on the amount of power you could generate.

    Meanwhile. Please do inform thunder god temple about the deal I want to make and ask them to not disturb my friends and me."

    With those words, Sam left the ce and Felicia¡¯s brother came forward and ced some sort of bracelets on three of them before untying them from the chairs.

    They could move around as they wanted but they can only ess a faint amount of spiritual energy, barely enough to use the spatial rings and such.

    After that, Sam left that ce and got busy. It has been almost a month since he came back from the ind.

    He is staying with the Shadow sword all this while as he tried to get a reaction from it. It is high time, he had a breakthrough again as for the beast, he nned to use the shadow mouse as his next beast.

    All this time, he kept a shadow mouse as a reserve without using it when he reached the Great realm.

    Now, he doesn¡¯t have any beast to make a contract with, only options being the ape, zoi termite, and the shadow mouse.

    Among them, Shadow mouse is the best choice depending on the abilities he can gain.

    Initially, he wanted to keep the shadow mouse aside and decided to explore the for beasts which would be suitable for him to make a contract and only use it when he doesn¡¯t have any other choice, but he didn¡¯t think that the scenario will arise this quickly.

    Now, he is stopping from breakthrough, because of the shadow sword.

    The curse weapon will give the wielder a chance and that is a mental battle. If Sam broke through, the shadow sword would use the mental strength of a Rank-5 weapon, which he is not confident in facing.

    Within the Great realm, he is confident that his mental strength is strongest and he is confident in subduing the shadow sword in its rank-4 state.

    Time passed and exactly a month after his return from the ind, the shadow sword finally showed some reaction.

    The silk that was wrapped on the sword waspletely shredded and the whole room was filled with the sword and dark aura. Every object inside the room waspletely being shed and the walls are also being cracked.

    Sam is looking at the whole scene as he sat in a chair before the sword and after ten seconds, he ced his hands on the hilt and his arm was cut apart with his musclespletely torn. His hand was bleeding and even his bones are visible.

    The room waspletely full of the dark creepy aura. Sam suddenly felt an extreme cold and a voice appeared in his mind.

    "Human, release me." The voice is sharp and cold.

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and his spiritual sense enveloped the sword.

    "A Great realm cultivator wants to wield me? Do you think that you are worthy? Human, you are overestimating your worth."

    With those words, Sam¡¯s consciousness disappeared from his body and when he opened his eyes, he was in a dark world. Everything he could see wasplete darkness.

    Within that darkness ahead of him were two eyes that are oozing some ck smoke. For some reason, he could still perceive the eyes within the dark.

    This is the spirit world of the sword, where they would undergo a battle.

    Sam could see his whole ¡¯body¡¯ which is made of his consciousness being suppressed, but with a mere thought he resisted and the suppression was gone. The dark eyes looked at Sam deeply and a voice echoed.

    "You are not that bad, you can at least perceive me and resist the suppression, but that doesn¡¯t mean, you can wield me. I highly doubt you can control me."

    With those words, the darkness around him morphed and dark vine-like things started crawling all over him.

    He could feel the energy being devoured slowly but surely, the spirit was surprised because Sam¡¯s mental strength was too dense. Unlike other people who metal strength would be like water or even a gas, Sam¡¯s strength was like a solid brick.

    This was the first time, the spirit has to use this much effort to absorb the mental strength.

    Sam observed the movements for a while and he made his move.

    His mental strength started morphing itself and took the shape of a sword. The sword was glowing brightly with dense light.

    He swung the sword as the dark vines were severed immediately and disintegrated. At that ce, there seemed to be a grey patch formed.

    When he observed his body though, there is a small portion which was ckened.

    He immediately understood. This is like a game. If he was ckenedpletely, he would lose and he would suffer severe mental damage and if the whole ck area was grey out, then he would win and the shadow sword would be his.

    Sam held the sword tightly, a ck humanoid figure formed in front of him with a ck sword in its hand. A sword fight was triggered in a battle to gain the eptance of a sword.

 Chapter 291: Mental battle and the breakthrough

    Sam didn¡¯t wait for the shadow to make the first move, he shed diagonally and the sword hit the shadow that just appeared squarely in the chest and a portion of the darkness that is surrounding him vanished creating arge grey patch.

    But it is only one-hundredth of the whole darkness. So, Sam has a bitter battle ahead of him.

    The two figures exchanged several sword moves, Sam¡¯s first move was due to the unpreparedness of the shadow and since then, it became hard for him tond a solid strike on the shadow.

    As they were exchanging moves, Sam¡¯s skin was being ckened bit by bit. But with his whole body, it was very minute all that was ckened is half of the pinky toe.

    But the darkness around him was also receiving damage and was being eroded bit by bit creating grey patches randomly all over the ce.

    The spirit didn¡¯t say anything at all. The eyes on the horizon are carefully inspecting Sam.

    The battle is unlike the battle of cultivators, it is a pure swordsman battle without sword lights and sword rays. It is a battle of pure skill.

    Since the start Sam didn¡¯t move much from his original position. He had used his moves to the bare minimum as he battled.

    Even though he didn¡¯t cover arge portion of the area, the area within the range of the sword ispletely in his control.

    The shadow¡¯s moves are being read and he was bing more and more proficient in stopping, at the same time, Sam¡¯s moves are also being read as he noticed that he wasn¡¯t able to do much damage.

    Sam stopped receiving any damage when his left foot waspletely ckened. The shadow could be seen bing more and more restless.

    At this moment, Sam made his first huge movement. He started attacking the shadow from all the sides, his speed was used to the extreme and in a second all the sides of the shadow have shes.

    Arge amount of darkness was greyed out, leaving only one-fourth of it around the shadow.

    "Human, you are the only one who forced me this far, but this is as far as you can go." The spirit said after a long silence.

    The darkness around the shadow slowly disappeared and concentrated into the shadow¡¯s body. The sword became extremely bright and a dark aura was being emitted from it.

    Sam also started concentrating all his remaining mental energy, his whole ¡¯body¡¯ became dull and translucent and the true body of Sam outside was bleeding through the nose.

    In a second, the bright and the dark sword collided fiercely and the whole space rippled due to the collision.

    Sam crashed backward into the grey surroundings like a ragdoll and the shadow which was standing there waspletely greyed out. The eyes looked at Sam who is barely conscious and there seemed to be a glint in them.

    Sam waspletely ckened. From a foot to his whole body everything was ckened except for a small portion at the forehead.

    A small portion which is only as big as his eye was still in normal bright color.

    "You are an interesting kid." The eyes disappeared and Sam¡¯s consciousness returned to his body.

    When he opened his eyes, Sam felt his head spinning and there was blood all over his clothes which dripped down from his nose. His hand was holding the shadow sword and as he was in confused whether he had seeded or not a voice boomed in his head.

    "Human, you are not that bad, although you only have a fraction of ability of my master, you are not the worst one, you are better than an average cultivator.

    I will stay with you for now. But don¡¯t think about wielding me in battles, my power is too much for you to bear, even a single swing will cost you a limb. Except you are in a desperate state don¡¯t use me and even then, I will be the one who is in control, or else you would die sooner orter."

    Sam smiled at the sword spirit¡¯s words. He was extremely excited to see the capabilities of the sword, but as the sword said he is too weak to wield its power.

    "Thank you, but I cannot carry you around, I will send you somewhere, don¡¯t resist." Sam sent the shadow sword into the divine dimension, where reaper and executioner are present. The sword circled around the other two and sent a voice to Sam.

    "Boy, who made these two?"

    "I made them myself? Why?"

    "Hmm, you are not that bad. Although they are not as great as me, the materials and craftsmanship are not bad."

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything and just chuckled. He has been unconscious for a whole day; he has many things to do.

    At this moment, the remaining four teams of people from the remaining powers all got the news, the seer tower is in for a great business.

    The lightning spear sect members are all dead.

    Even though they expected this, the members are all shocked when they found out how they died. In all three battles, the lightning spear sect members all have the advantages in strength and in preparedness. The three targets are all training and more or less in a weakened state.

    After all, they are not cultivating rather improving their skills, which will exhaust their energy. But the three attackers are killed.

    When they saw the scenes, the ThunderBolt sect, which is the second closest to the thunder god temple¡¯s territory and also afraid that it would fall in the thunder god temple¡¯s hands, were already preparing to leave, but after seeing the battle they wanted to make some additional preparations.

    But, even before them. Tran, Rid, and Sylvia are even in more hurry. Their time limit was about to be finished. They have to find a way to deal with them.

    They left for their territory. The Beast Faction.

    They went to the ind where they received the orders and met the young man with the chain sickle.

    They exined the battle and the results.

    "Are you not confident?"

    "There is a fifty-fifty chance for us to kill them, it would be difficult to catch them alive."

    The man with the chain sickle frowned at these words and exined something before they left.

    While these teams that are deployed are making preparations, some people are holding Sam¡¯s picture with gnashing teeth.

    They all recognized Sam due to his signature ck feather-coat.

    They are none of other than the people who have tattoos on their backs in the Pce of inheritances. They couldn¡¯t forget the beatings they took from Sam. But the frustrating part is they cannot do anything about it.

    They are all waiting. Waiting for the time to be right and reach a certain threshold and once they reach that level, they would hunt Sam. No matter, where he is.

    The higher-ups of the Lightning spear sect received the news about the deaths of their elites and are now thinking on how to deal with Sam and his friends. Three Grand realm cultivators is a small price and they didn¡¯t expect them to bring back anything.

    They sent them just for probing. But their results are not worth it, considering that there is no estimate on the battle prowess of the targets.

    While, all over the world, various big-shots are trying to think of ways to deal with him, Sam is preparing for breakthrough.

    He is preparing the shadow mouse number one as his fourth contract.

    Since, the day he got the shadow mice, he has the thought of making a contract with one of them, but he decided to explore and find suitable beasts and in case he was in a situation where he couldn¡¯t find any, he decided to make a contract. In short, he always wanted to have one beast in reserve.

    But now, the situations are a bit demanding and he need to breakthrough as soon as he can. The enemies will surely find him eventually and he would be in bitter battles. Aside from that, he also need the dark element and the shadow mouse has mutated dark element with shadow nature.

    Another reason being the shadow sword having a special attack of shadow element, he this really is a great time to make a contract with shadow mouse.

    So, he is now in the backyard of his residence with arge formation concealing them along with the beasts.

    He made handsigns and formed a contract as four of them shared a bond. This time, there is no trouble of the beast being weak or any bloodline purification matters.

    He closed his eyes and started checking his spiritual core. There is a new small sphere along with the wisp of light, the golden me, wind tornado and the water.

    The sphere is a fusion of two shades one half being in ck indicating the pure dark element and the other half being a bit smoky with ck colour smoke indicating the shadow element. Now he has the dark element and it is time for him to learn a new topic that needs dark element.

 Chapter 292: Learning new art

    Sam went into the tower¡¯s library. He is going to learn a new art. The Spirit enchantment. This is also a minor profession like the Seer tower.

    They are dark element users, who use a form of necromancy to attach spirits to the weapons, formation discs, artifacts, Puppets, and so on.

    These spirits wouldn¡¯t be a good as the naturally formed Spirits of the weapons and they can be destroyed easily if the object which was enchanted was of low rank and the user is of far superior cultivation level.

    If the user is powerful, he can even kill the spirit with just a mere thought.

    But why do they still use it? It is used for better coordination between the user and the weapon. They will have a contract after the spirit is enchanted and if given enough time, the spirit could grow strong with sufficient nourishment, and along with that, the weapon should be reforged from time to time to adjust will the level of the weapon spirit.

    This is mostly suitable for weapons that are made of materials like meteorite sand and blood iron as these weapons can improve ranks with time.

    But it would be a waste to enchant those weapons as the natural spirits born for those weapons are more powerful. Just like the shadow sword, they can be extremely powerful, powerful enough to destroy the consciousness of a user just like that.

    Compared to the natural spirits they can only be considered mediocre at best.

    Why does Sam need this mediocre spirits then? It is because he doesn¡¯t need them for battles or to enchant his weapons, rather he needs them for their intelligence.

    He wants to use the spirits in the same way the artificial intelligence is used in his previous life.

    One of his next choices of research is puppet artisanship. And after seeing the ¡¯brain¡¯ mechanisms he collected from the puppets of the pce of inheritance, he has many new ideas.

    But to execute them, he first has to learn these necromancy skills, so that he can perform the best enchantment.

    He started absorbing the divine wills in the necromancy section.

    In this world, necromancy is ssified into three categories.

    The Undead Necromancy. This is using the dead bodies to create the physical army of undead. This is the most basic necromancy and easiest of them all.

    The second one is soul necromancy. This is using the souls of the dead to do their bidding, It is either for an enchantment or in battles. The army they could have or the souls they summoned are mostly intangible and they mostly cause mental attacks.

    The third one is the shadow necromancy. This is the necromancy that uses both physical properties of the undead necromancy and the intangibility of the soul necromancy.

    Thisst method uses the shadows of the dead. There would be a shadow for every life in this world and as the person grows strong, the shadows of the person also do. But not many people can use the power of the shadows as they truly reside in the shadow world.

    The shadow world is not essible to anyone. After a person dies, within that shadow world thews will make the shadow disappear.

    In the shadow necromancy, after the necromancer kills as a person, he will use his skills to barely ess the shadow world and pull out the shadow which was about to disappear and form a contract with it.

    Allowing it to exist as it gathers power with his help.

    It can now freely transverse between the shadow world and this world with the help of the necromancer.

    Sam wanted to learn all the three of them, except for the first one which is only useful in some specific situation where he was outnumbered and he just needs some immediate manpower, the second one is used for enchantment, which he would be using very often in future.

    As for the third one, he is most interested in this one. This shadow necromancy can be used for both numbers as well as many other purposes, like tailing, tracking, and many others.

    But the necromancy does have its drawbacks and it needs an enormous mental power, which is not everyone¡¯s forte.

    The more read through the information, the more Sam felt that there are immense possibilities with the dark element.

    This also gave him thoughts that the opposite of the dark element which is the light element is left unexplored.

    He doesn¡¯t believe that it can only heal and he has enough proof to back his im as he himself has explored it and even created pure light energy-based attacks.

    As Sam sat on learning the things, the things about his new project are going in full swing.

    At this moment, Jack and the rest also finished the first phase of their training.

    They are done with the three spots they chose and are traveling to a single destination.

    It is a city where all of them decided to meet after their first phase is over.

    They each spent one month in their current training locations and arrived at the city.

    They spent the day together, chilling out and eating all kinds of food they can. Even in that city, some type of construction is going on which is rted to Sam¡¯s project, and even when they traveled there are many signs on the project all over the way.

    The next morning, they met up in the woods near the city and their purpose is to test themselves out. For a Spar.

    They are going to be the fighting together in the future and it is necessary to be aware of each other¡¯s abilities and another reason is, all three of them want to be the best among the three.

    Jack, Watt, and Philip stood in a triangle and are staring at each other. Just as they were about to start the fight, all three of them suddenly turned around, having each other¡¯s back.

    Jack held his sword to his waist and Watt held a card in his hands and Philip¡¯s hands are already turning red.

    "Wow. You really are good, no wonder the lightning spear sect lost to you guys."

    Three people came out from three different directions.

    One of them has a hammer in their hands and out of the other two one has a longbow and thest one held a pair of daggers.

    There is a crest of thunder embroidered on their chests.

    Philip narrowed his eyes as he looked at them carefully.

    He found the crest familiar and after some thought, he said in a low voice.

    "Thunder Bolt sect?"

    The three neers stopped in their tracks and the man who spoke earlier said with a peculiar smile.

    "Seems like you know who we are. So, be prepared. We are not like those weaklings from the lightning spear sect. We are a perfect team. Even though we only wanted to capture one of you, by our luck, all of you started traveling to the same destination, giving us a perfect opportunity.

    Hehe. If we catch all three of you, the rewards will be great."

    As he finished his words, the three of them moved. The archer started firing arrows non-stop. He is a lightning element user and the arrows he shot were surrounded by azure blue lightning.

    His first target was Watt.

    As Watt was the only one who showed the moves with long-range, he first targeted him and kept him busy.

    The one with the hammer is bulky and huge.

    He swung therge battle hammer as his whole body and the weapon arepletely surrounded by the lightning.

    He moved towards Jack. He seemed to be a person who is proficient in defense and thest one is the person who spoke earlier and seemed to be the leader of the group.

    He wielded two daggers as he made his move towards Philip.,

    He is also a lightning element user and he is using the lightning element to increase his speed and the efficiency of the attacks.

    He moved like sh and even if Philip could see and guess the moving pattern and his eyes can keep up, he is still having a hard time for his body to react and to their dismay, the opponents are all Level three Grand realm cultivators.

    Seems like they wanted to up their game since the trio managed to defeat Level-2 cultivators.

    Although Philip is having a hard time keeping up and getting the same speed as the opponent, he has other ways to counter it and that is precision.

    Of all types of abilities, speed is the one that is hard to counter, but that doesn¡¯t mean it cannot be ovee.

    The precision is one of the best methods suitable for that purpose.

    He closed his eyes and he applied metal element fusion to his body. His whole skin was transferred into metal and it became extremely hot and turned red as he applied fire element.

    He noticed that for his metal molding technique, it has better results when the metal is hot as he can mold it easily.

    After taking a few hits, he finally got a hang of the other person¡¯s ability and was ready to counter-attack.

 Chapter 293: Three Vs three

    Philip stood there like a metal statue which is burning hot.

    As the dagger user made his way with lightning crackling around him. He swung his dagger as he wanted to stab Philip right in his heart from behind.

    Even before the dagger made contact, the electric arc was shot out on to Philip, this to achieve the paralysis effect and since Philip is a metal element user, he will have a greater conduction rate.

    But Philip didn¡¯t show any reaction, even though, he did feel a small electric sensation but for some reason, it didn¡¯t cause him any damage.

    Both the attacker and the Philip doesn¡¯t know is, that the reason is simple. Philip who currently is a red- hot metal, has high resistance for electricity, although the fusion is partial at this level of attack it is enough for him to resist it.

    Neither the attacker nor Philip noticed this though. The dagger was thrust directly towards the heart, but before that could make contact. A metallic spike abruptly came out of Philip¡¯s back almost piercing the eye of the attacker.

    He barely dodged it and the spike left a deep mark on the face of the attacker.

    He took a step back and frowned at the development. He didn¡¯t think, that Philip who is only a Peak Great realm would make a move like this.

    He is capable of resisting a Grand realm cultivator who achieved Level-3. But the attacker wasn¡¯t discouraged. He is superior in cultivation and he can fight a battle of endurance. From what they saw in the seer tower, the trump cards of these people might really be able to harm them.

    So, he decided on the battle of endurance. He sneered and started making his move.

    Meanwhile, the remaining two attackers are also facing the same type of situations.

    The bulky man with the Hammer is mainly focusing on defending as he .u.mted power for a while and onlyunched a single attack which will cause a lot of damage.

    But Jack¡¯s newly learned skills are perfect counter. Now his moves are gentle and flexible like flowing water. He is very good at dodging and attacking from very different and unpredictable angles.

    The hammer guy is having a hard time dealing with him and when he is focusing on defense while .u.mting power for the attack, he was being nked by Jack who is wearing his defense bit by bit.

    But he is still confident that he can deal with Jack as long as the fight dragged out long enough.

    As for the archer guy and Watt.

    Their battle is the most amusing one. The archer felt that he has an advantage with the distance and power and speed at which he can attack, but he couldn¡¯t be more wrong. Because Watt started using his card tricks and he has been throwing them in many different angles and sometimes he is even throwing them without directly aiming at him.

    But the cards are taking a weird curve in the air as if the wind itself is carrying them and it is reaching him no matter what.

    And this way, the archer wasn¡¯t even able to make attacks of proper damage, and what annoyed him the most is that Watt seemed to have possessed endless cards. He just kept on throwing them one after another.

    They are faster than his wind des and every time the archer did manage to make an attack by shooting an arrow it would be intercepted by a card and if one card is not sufficient multiple wille and all in all, not a single arrow reached Watt.

    And he also can only rely on the battle of endurance. They don¡¯t dare use their trump cards easily, because, there is no way to be sure that the opponent¡¯s trump cards don¡¯t harm them when they shed and if by any chance, they took severe damage, they would be done for.

    But what they didn¡¯t know is at this moment of deadlock, Watt, Jack, and Philip all three of them had a cunning gleam in their eyes.

    They carefully took out a small space jade and ced in their mouths without letting their opponents notice.

    They knew that their enemies will choose the battle of endurance as this was supposed to be their disadvantage and even pills, potions, and food with very high spiritual energy cannot solve this issue as they need time to digest. But they have a solution to this.

    The battle went on.

    The Hammer guy was the first to see that there is something wrong because by now there are some injuries on his sides and limbs which are showing significant hindrance in his battling.

    He is trained as a tank for this small three-man team, but even he was having a hard time taking the hits now. The battle has been going on for so long that he was already brought to this stage, but Jack is not showing any form of exhaustion at most he was sweating and panting. His spiritual energy did seem weak, but that is nowhere nearplete exhaustion.

    It only seemed half empty.

    The problem is that even their spiritual energies also half empty, which should be impossible due to the level difference. He suddenly stopped in his tracks and Jack who was halted said with a sarcastic smile.

    "So much for the thunderbolt sect. We are of weaker cultivation and we have yet to suffer a single critical strike." His words were sharp and sarcastic.

    The hammer guy was immediately enraged. They were really proud of their ability and they even boasted that they would take them down. They were so confident because they had seeded in many operations before.

    The burly man was always a tank, who would stop the most powerful one of all. Meanwhile, the archer deals with the person who could possibly be a variable affecting the battle, and the third one who is an agile assassin will take care of thest remaining person.

    And based on the vision they saw on the seer tower, Jack seemed most powerful with his sword skills and him being the one who was able to let the other guy use a trump card.

    Philip¡¯s victory could be seen as a fluke as the main reason was due to the bad fall from a volcano and as for Watt¡¯s battle, he was treated as a person who could be a variable, because he disyed some high-level prediction and calctive abilities by taking down arrows and making the opponent bacsh for their own attack.

    They followed the pattern based on their spections and they failed to know that three of their opponents might not have revealed all of their cards and their battle styles which they thought was their styles might not be true at all.

    When they noticed that three of them are moving to one destination, they were overjoyed and immediately came here with full confidence in their abilities to defeat a team.

    But now, the situation didn¡¯t seem too good.

    The hammer guy became furious by the provocation and swung his battle hammer in full power. It cracked thend leaving a crater.

    Jack leaped into the sky and directly attacked the person without dy.

    Both of them started exchanging blows in an extremely straightforward way without caring for anything.

    The team leader who was an assassin was alerted by the sudden change and immediately thought of something.

    He left Philip entirely and ran towards Jack to deal with his two-on-one. But as soon as he turned around and made his move, Jack suddenly left the hammer guy in a sh and leaped into the air towards the assassin. The hammer guy is slow in his movements and he wasn¡¯t able to catch up at all.

    And before the assassin coulde out of the surprise, Philip came from behind with his two fists a bit erged and metallic spikes protruding out of it.

    The n of the assassin reversed instantly.

    The archer and the hammer guy were about to make a move to save their leader, but Watt suddenly threw a bunch of cards at the same time from both hands.

    The cards are different from before. They have all strings attached and Watt closed his eyes as he concentrated to the extreme.

    Every card was focused on the vitals of both archer and the hammer guy.

    Every individual attack is direct and can be avoided, but it is impossible to escape unscathed as there are numerous attacks at the same time.

    The Archer waspletely stunned at the range of attacks Watt covered. He controlled the wind an extremely delicate manner that there is no noticeable w. Every card will reach its target.

    At this moment, Jack blocked the daggers and shed the chest of the attacker while Philipnded the punches straight into the spine of the guy one by one. He is like a Gatling gun throwing a punch after punch and in a second the spine was cracked and the whole back became riddled with holes.

    The hammer guy and the archer tried to evade Watt¡¯s attacks but were still unable to do so. They have some tendons cut and several cuts appeared on their face.

    Philip and Jack used up some of their energy, but their energies are recovering slowly. They turned their attention to the hammer guy who was still recovering from Watt¡¯s attack.

    Watt recalled all the cards and threw them again at the archer. But this time, the archer did something unexpected.

    He took out a scroll and activated it. With that the scroll and the archer turned into a sh of lightning and reappeared near the hammer guy and shot two arrows at Jack and Philip, making them step back.

    This time, the archer didn¡¯t conserve any energy.

    Watt ran towards them and joined Philip and Jack. Now the battle became three vs three to three vs two.

    The leader of the attackers is as good as dead.

    Archer looked frustrated, he was is constantly looking at the leader who is feebly breathing and then their conditions, the battle which was in a deadlock has suddenly turned and their teammate is the one who caused the scale to fluctuate.

    He was thinking between escaping and continuing, but when he remembered the identity of their leader, he only has one way. They have to either save the leader and take him back or die along with him.

    There would be no life, even if went back to the sect if they don¡¯t bring back to the sect.

    He looked at the hammer guy and made a gesture.

    At this, the hammer guy ced his two hands on the back of the archer and started transferring all his spiritual energy. The archer nocked an arrow on the bow and stretched it to its limit. All the spiritual energy was being transferred to the arrow and his legs.

    The whole energy didn¡¯t even take a second to transfer and before the trio could react, he jumped straight into the air as azure blue lightning surrounding him.

    With a single leap left a crater on the ground and also reached more than fifty feet high.

    He aimed the bow at the trio and released it.

    The trio reacted as soon as he jumped, but they weren¡¯t able topletely escape the st radius as the arrow hit the ground.

    They didn¡¯t expect thisst-ditch attack and that too a full-fledged one.

    They were blown away by the explosion like ragdolls to all three sides.

 Chapter 294: The Demon Trio

    The reason why they suffered on thisst attack is not just because it is fast. There is another reason and that is the three of them received a signal. As they stood up, Watt, Philip, and Jack all looked towards the woods.

    They didn¡¯t even bother to check their wounds, the archer and the hammer guy are still vignt. Although, the trio is injured it is not life-threatening. But when they noticed that they are looking at the woods, they also felt that something was wrong.

    Falck flew through the woods extremely fast and crashed before Watt, the beast has many wounds on its body and there are several bite marks on it.

    This is the signal Watt received., Even Philip and Jack also received a signal which is the death of their beasts which they are using as mounts.

    They left the beasts to roam free so that they wouldn¡¯t feel suffocated in the beast pouch, but they didn¡¯t expect that they would die like this.

    Watt took out some pills and fed Falck while he transferred some spiritual energy through their contract to digest the pills.

    After making sure that the beast is not in critical condition, Watt stored it in the beast pouch and looked coldly towards the direction Falck came from.

    All of them could hear some beasts running fast towards them and from the aura they are emitting, they are definitely Level-5.

    At first, they thought that they are beasts of the forest, but when they revealed themselves, they saw that there are three people riding the three beasts.

    The people from the thunderbolt sect were horrified.

    "The demon trio." The archer muttered as his face turned pale.

    They are none other than Tran, Rid, and Sylvia.

    The tiger, elephant, and wolf all three beasts are sniffing at the blood of Falck which was spilled on the ground.

    Watt has the coldest expression. He has never been this furious in his entire life. Falck was severely injured and he knows the reason why.

    But, right now there is nothing much he can do. The other party is too strong, even if they are on their full power, it is almost impossible to defeat the opponents as the other party has three beasts at Level-5 and the cultivators themselves, one of then being level-2 grand realm and the remaining two being the Level-3 Grand realm.

    The battle would be one-sided. Watt, Jack, and Philip are regretting not breaking through earlier. They stayed in the Great realm for training and tempering, but now it seemed that the opponents wouldn¡¯t always y fair.

    They only have one way to deal with this and that is to flee, but the opponent has blocked their way towards the nearest city and even if it was open, the city is barely on par with the Starwood city. There is no help they can get from there.

    Watt immediately took out the Silver Wind, while Jack and Philip took out the methane grenades. The grenades made of Level-6 methane. They threw the grenades and leaped to Watt.

    Watt activated silver wind as he caught both of them by their arms and flew away.

    He has no confidence in fighting and even the methane sts are powerful he is not confident that the enemies would be killed by it.

    They might be injured, but once it was cracked, then there is no waynd the second grenade as they would dodge it immediately.

    And even while escaping, Watt kept high vignce. This is not a harbinger and he is not Sam. He cannot reach a Peak level-5 beast¡¯s speed.

    He can at most reach an Initial stage Level-5 beast¡¯s speed and the beasts behind him are of the same level.

    The only advantage he has is the versatility of the hoverboard.

    He didn¡¯t travel in a straight line. The demon trio has finished off the people from the thunderbolt sect and started chasing after Watt.

    They have nned this carefully, When the thunderbolt sect noticed that the trio is moving to the same ce, they noticed it as well and prepared this surprise attack.

    They didn¡¯t want to take any risks at all and wanted to deal with them as easily as they can. So, they let the thunderbolt sect exhaust them and then made their move at the final movement.

    But they didn¡¯t expect that the trio can still have enough energy to escape.

    They didn¡¯t worry much though, since they blocked the way to the nearest city, they can only travel to another city through woods and it would take a long time.,

    The normalmunication tokens wouldn¡¯t work as the range would be at most one city.

    They cannot get any reinforcements.

    At this moment, from an inconspicuous corner of the previous battle-field, a man and a Level-4 beast came out and moved towards the nearest city.

    They entered the artisan tower abruptly and started contacting their immediate superior artisan tower through themunication channel and the news soon arrived at Sam¡¯s city.

    Watt and the rest are flying desperately, they are trying to recover their energy as much as possible.

    The space jades which they ced in their mouths are the ones they are using. There are many energy cells that can fit in the mouth inside the space-jade. They used them so that they canst long in the battles when they are fighting people of higher realms.

    And since it is extremely easy to draw energy from the energy cell than the normal spirit stones, this works perfectly for them.

    But the chase is not just flying and running.

    The trio on the board is throwing attacks at the demon trio as the demon trio is also attacking the trio on the board.

    But the board¡¯s advantage of size and versatility has been disyed to the fullest. Watt can avoid the attacks no matter how many they are and how many directions theye from. But the demon trio doesn¡¯t have that advantage, the three beasts are huge and are unable to dodge without straying off of the way.

    And when a methane grenade was thrown, they don¡¯t have any other chance except for them to halt and hinder themselves.

    Watt is moving towards the nearest Marquis city. That is the only ce the people at the Grand realm cultivators are present.

    He is not extremely worried though, he is confident that if he can maintain this pace, they can definitely escape.

    And he has a feeling that they wouldn¡¯t need to escape fully. There is a possibility that the hunter and the hunted roles would be reversed.

    The chase went on for two days and Watt was almost at his wit¡¯s end. He considered every possible thing but ignored one. The energy cells.

    The energy cells on the silver wind are about to be exhausted and for changing them, he has to halt for a second. Even though it takes on three seconds there is a high possibility of them being trapped.

    And on the third day, morning, when he was in the vicinities of the Marquis city, the energy cells ran out.

    The three of them have recovered their energies and wounds are almost injured.

    They took out the formation discs Sam gave and activated them.

    More than four formations activated and all of them are defense formations.

    Watt immediately changed the energy cells of the board. But before they could move again. Three spears one after the other flew towards them hitting the same spot again and again.

    The formations shattered and three of them were blown away from the impact.

    The three beasts that are chasing them came to halt.

    "This cat and mouse game has almost bored me to death. This tool he is using is really efficient. He can evade all of us like this for three days. I wonder what other goodies he has in his storage."

    Tran said as he got off of his tiger and walked towards Watt. He is the one who threw the spears. He has waited for a long time tounch this attack and he even prepared, three of them in advance just in case.

    "You guys better cooperate ande with us. All we need is something in exchange and I even heard that you guys will be given a chance to join us."

    He took out a spear and this time, it is a bit more special than the previous three. It seemed to be his main weapon.

    The remaining two didn¡¯t bothering down.

    The reason why Watt and others ran away is that there is no chance of defeating them. As for dying with dignity and all, that should be done in a fair fight, not in a sneak attack made by people stronger than them.

    In fact, if it was just these three Watt¡¯s group would have tried their hand, but the problem is the presence of beasts.

    Watt was really nervous and he wanted to activate silver wind again, but Tran¡¯s spear was locked at him.

    Watt, Philip, and Jack, all three of them closed their eyes. Actually, they are not afraid, because no matter what happens to them, Sam will take revenge, but the whole n for the training is not to be a burden to him and improve their skills.

    They are being used to depending on Sam too much and getting rusty.

    As they thought about ways to escape, they sensed something and shook their heads. Wry smiles appeared on their faces.

 Chapter 295: Lessons

    Watt, Philip, and Jack. All three of them opened their eyes and exchanged nces and smiled wryly. They truly regretted not breaking through earlier and now they have to face this. If they had been in the Grand realm, they would have tried to deal with these people, even with those beasts.

    But now, what they wanted to avoid the most hase.

    They immediately rxed and sat down on the ground.

    They didn¡¯t even feel that tense anymore.

    Because they sensed some extra presence nearby and there are four of them who are all Grand realm experts who seemed to be in theter stages.

    The demon trio also looked in a direction from where four middle-aged men are running towards them.

    They all have badges of the four major professions on their chests. They are here to save Watt, Philip, and Jack.

    When the demon trio looked at the four peopleing, they couldn¡¯t help but frown. They looked at them coldly and Tran asked.

    "This is a Private matter; I hope you guys don¡¯t get involved." They are on verge ofpleting the mission and they don¡¯t want any interference.

    But artisan tower head of the city said.

    "I am sorry. But these three are our esteemed guests. We cannot let you harm them."

    With that, he released his aura of ate-stage Grand realm user and stared at Tran refusing to back down.

    Watt, Philip, and Jack heaved sighs of relief. They were really afraid they wouldn¡¯t make it in time, but the tower heads seemed to be expecting them. Even though they don¡¯t know how they came to know they areing, they didn¡¯t care for now.

    But after that relief, they felt truly frustrated. If only they have broken-through before they wouldn¡¯t have had to run this far like this.

    They were chased for two days and nights and almost got caught.

    Particrly, Watt, he looked at the demon trio as if he wanted to swallow them whole. Falck was injured severely.

    The demon trio backed down and didn¡¯t attack. They came to thunder god temple¡¯s territory and they came to deal with the individuals, if they mess with the four major professional organizations they would be in trouble.

    If it was at least weaker people from the organizations, then they wouldn¡¯t have cared, but these people are even stronger than them and they cannot afford to mess with them.

    Tran heaved a sigh of frustration and asked the artisan tower-head.

    "We can enter the city, right?"

    "You are most wee. You can do whatever you want. All you cannot do is disturb the construction works and attack our guests while they are under our care."

    With those words, the four tower heads left along with Watt, Philip, and Jack. The three of them had their heads down, they knew they are f.u.c.k.i.e.d up.

    This was extremely humiliating and their faces burned in shame.

    They could guess how they are saved and there is no way other than Sam who could save them and their guess is indeed right.

    When the news about the attackers reached Sam, he didn¡¯t make a move instead, he just informed the marquis city¡¯s artisan tower to save them, and that too on the premise that they reach the vicinities.

    Since they wanted to train, he would let them train. Even though, Sam knew that they have great battle potential, in ways of the world they are too green and he was to me. All this time, he subconsciously became too protective and didn¡¯t let them deal with the matters that much and took it upon himself.

    Now, he will let them experience all of it.

    Being beside Sam, they could experience enough losses except for losing to Sam himself and after some time, they subconsciously got used to it and moved on. They have imnted the idea that it would be impossible to surpass Sam and there is no need for that as they are his friends.

    Even when they went to training, they went with a thought that they shouldn¡¯t fall behind Sam too much.

    Another side effect of their attitude is that they don¡¯t look up to their peers anymore other than Sam. They feel like the others aren¡¯t worth that much and they can deal with all of them except Sam.

    Even if they don¡¯t voluntarily develop that thought, it would form subconsciously. But they should kill that voluntarily.

    That is why Sam didn¡¯t make a move. If he made a move this time, they will feel that it is okay as Sam was the one who rescued them from this situation. Of course, they will feel indignant, but that doesn¡¯t change their attitude.

    They will just take it for granted. It is just like how every child wants to surpass, their father, mother, teacher, or their mentor. They would strive to be better, but they wouldn¡¯t feel any setback when they were helped by any of them in that process.

    That is the reason, Sam didn¡¯te. Now, they were chased for two days and some external people have toe and save them.

    If they are not here, then they would have been captured.

    Now, they are all thinking. If not for Sam having these connections, they would have been done for. Even if not for the connections, if just these people just decided to ept some bribe and left them since Sam is not here, then what would happen?

    They only have one thought, they wouldn¡¯t be this lucky every time.

    This time, they are lucky that Sam has connections, lucky that the energy cellssted until they arrived near the city, and lucky that these people cared enough about Sam¡¯s words.

    Luck. The most unreliable factor of all.

    They were saved with this most unreliable thing.

    After they arrived at the quarters arranged by the tower head, thetter didn¡¯t show much courtesy and said.

    "We can only save you for a week. After this week, we have something to do and couldn¡¯t stay in the city, we also cannot take you with us as this is a confidential meeting. I hope you would make your own arrangements after this week."

    After that, the tower head left. The trio is in a solemn mood.

    They were fearless all this while. Even faced with the lightning spear sect and the thunderbolt sect, they are not exactly affected. They were with full confidence.

    They even felt that they can use them as their whetstones. But now, the situation changed. They understood that the enemies are not exactly fair and the dangers wouldn¡¯t let them have their sweet time growing.

    They wanted to suppress their cultivation for a while, but now they could wait for a breakthrough.

    Watt is the first one to make a move, he brought Falck to the pharmaceutical tower and healed him there beforeing back to the yard.

    He prepared himself for the breakthrough. Even before him, Jack and Philip are already cultivating.

    If they can break-through to the Level-1 of the Grand realm and also temper their body using body cultivation, then they can fight with their opponents, even though, the addition of beasts will make it troublesome for them, they can still manage it.

    So, for the next week, they cultivated non-stop. Right now, their hearts are burning. Even though they were chased by the whole empire previously they didn¡¯t feel bad. But now, they are being chased by people who are just a few years older than them, they couldn¡¯t control the feeling of frustration and inferiority came from theirck of strength.

    Jack is the first one to have a breakthrough. Since they are already at the limit, all they needed was a little push.

    Jack went on to cultivate his body as soon as he broke through,tter Philip and Watt had a breakthrough almost at the same time.

    After the week, they are ready to leave the city.

    They decided to separate after dealing with this bunch.

    But this time, they don¡¯t want to be at aplete disadvantage like before.

    They are in their best condition and they confidently walked out of the city wall and entered the nearby woods, as they waited for the demon trio toe.

    They didn¡¯t stay idle and made some preparations for the battle.

    There is one of the most important lessons they learned from these experiences and that is the battles are never fair. They had to win by hook or crook.

    It is well and good if the opponents want to battle fairly, but now that they are even ganging with the help of beasts, then they have to get out of these chivalrous thoughts of ying fair and all.

    So, they chose the battle-field. It is a narrow valley.

    The beasts have bigger sizes and are not suitable to freely move around in this valley.

    They chose this to reduce the threat of the beasts as much as possible, if the battle isn¡¯t fair then they will make it fair.

 Chapter 296: Battle

    The demon trio also left the city after a while and came to the valley.

    When they entered the valley, they immediately understood their disadvantage. Their beasts don¡¯t have much freedom of motion here.

    If the beasts do attack, then the whole battle will be a mess as they would lose sight of their opponents.

    At this moment, Watt opened the beast pouch and Falck appeared above the valley flying in the air.

    Falck can attack from above, if needed.

    The demon trio frowned. They know the battle prowess of the three people they are facing. They can fight with people of higher-levels, even if they are elites, now that they have broken through the Grand realm, they are already wary, now their only advantage has been eliminated.

    If they don¡¯t attack here, Watt¡¯s group can actually bide their time here as they don¡¯t have any particr constraint on time, but the demon trio has a mission toplete.

    They are already past the deadline of one month by a week and now they cannot wait any longer, they can only gamble and defeat the three of them.

    They started entering the valley.

    Soon, the two groups are face to face.

    The demon trio are all seemed to be warriors. Tran used spear, Sylvia has a sword in her hand and Rid wore a pair of gloves.

    Jack faced Sylvia without hesitation, while Philip faced Rid and Watt is left with Tran.

    The atmosphere became tense and they had an intense stare- down.

    Atst, Sylvia made the first move. She unsheathed the sword and swung it in a horizontal arc. The sword ray covered all three of them.

    The attack isrge, but it has little power. Watt and the rest easily blocked the attack.

    The battle started. Jack drew his sword, but this is not a horizontal or vertical arc, the sword ray was shot like a bullet. Sylvia is using a long sword which is more than three feet long, she blocked the sword ray, but it didn¡¯t disappearpletely.

    Rather the sword ray is like a ssh of water as soon as sylvia cut the ray, it split into and hit her.

    One of them went over her head, but the other half hit her in the abdomen. The attack was minimized a lot, but it still left a small scar on her skin.

    Jack didn¡¯t wait for her to make a move, he took advantage of the attack and followed up with his next move.

    As he attacked, Sylvia started blocking. But Jack¡¯s attacks are getting trickier by every move.

    Every time, he made a move and Sylvia blocked them and the sword ray wouldn¡¯t stop there, the sword ray behaved like a drop of water and followed along the long sword and started injuring Sylvia¡¯s arm.

    It is just like how, he attacked the opponent from the Lightning spear sect.

    But Sylvia¡¯s defence is much stronger as she held the sword with both hands and her skill is more stablepared to the previous opponent.

    The battle between two sword users started bing intense. Sylvia¡¯s defence is great and so is Jack¡¯s offense, he didn¡¯t even give her any time to cope with the attacks and counter it.

    Philip, has taken the same approach as he did with the thunder bolt sect disciples. He abandoned his speed and carefully maintained the precision.

    But this, Rid is even faster than the previous dagger user, he is just like a wolf, agile, dexter and critical.

    His every punch and kick are extremely fierce and vital. This time, Philip¡¯s counter didn¡¯t work as it did previously.

    Rid attacked from the side aiming for a Lever Blow, as Philip let out a metallic spike from that ce, he didn¡¯t back down, instead, Rid bent his body backwards in an unnatural angle as he changed the punch from lever blow to body blow.

    The spike barely grazed on this chest, but Philip took a full hit. Even though, he is covered with metal, he still shook and took a step backwards.

    For his precision attacks, the main factor is stability, but he wasn¡¯t able to get that. Once, his stability shook, he was forced into a fist fight.

    Philip didn¡¯t see any other way, and opted to a fist fight. His fists are covered with metallic spikes and they are in red hot condition.

    Philip didn¡¯t attack directly instead, he started dodging albeit it worked barely. He started moving towards a huge rock and ced his back towards it.

    The rock has several protrusions and there is a gap which could fit two people in. As soon as Rid attacked, Philip took the hit and got hold of Rid¡¯s Arm.

    He immediately used all his strength to force Rid into the gap between the rocks and covered the opening to go outside.

    Philip has an extremely cold gaze, but his whole body became red hot and several metallic spikes protruded from his front body and even in the face. He grinned at Rid, who was in a shock.

    He was so full of himself that he forced Philip out of hisfortable precision attacking, he didn¡¯t notice what Philip is doing. Now, he was stuck in a narrow space and Philip is right in front of them covering the only entrance.

    He has an extremely bad feeling and that feeling only got stronger when he saw Philip¡¯s actions.

    Philip¡¯s whole body was filled with spikes, and there is no gap for him to attack. If it was in a normal free terrain, he would have used his feet to attack, but now, he was stuck, he could barely take a step, much less kick.

    Philip raised his fists. Now not only there are spikes at the knuckles of the fists, there is another addition. Philip switched back to his old style, the molten metal.

    The molten metal started seeping out of the fists and is dripping from the spikes.

    Philip then started his bashing. He didn¡¯t give a chance for Rid to even make a sound.

    Rid can only use all his spiritual energy to create a shield so that he could block the attacks before his friends could save him.

    Meanwhile. Watt and Tran are having an intense battle.

    Watt the started the battle with his cards. He didn¡¯t hesitate and threw card after card to Tran. Tran whose is skilled in spear wasn¡¯t able to block thempletely as Spear requires extremelyrge movements to block.

    After some time, he grew frustrated and forcefully covered the distance and in process two cards leaf deep gashes on this chest and abdomen. They were struck there, but Tranpletely disregarded them and didn¡¯t give Watt a chance to throw the card anymore.

    But Watt wasn¡¯t worried a bit.

    Just because he used cards, doesn¡¯t mean his ability to attack in close quarters is not bad. In fact, Tran was even regretting getting hand to hand.

    Because, Watt¡¯s attacks are extremely ferocious. He activated the silver coatpletely as he didn¡¯t care about the loss of spiritual energy, so he was able to take damage and as long as the spear didn¡¯t hit his torso from the front, he is not worried about the little damage he would face while facing the attacks.,

    Tran wasn¡¯t able to be that carefree, because he has never seen any fighting style that is as brutal as Watt.

    Tail wind of every punch and every kick of Watt are acting like wind des. This would waste a lot spiritual energy, but Watt doesn¡¯t seem to care about this at all.

    He has been making every move to kill. He wasn¡¯t able to take the humiliation from the day before and he took the greatest hit of all three. He still remembered how Tran destroyed the four formations with his spears and made a move. They are on verge of their deaths at that time.

    Now, he is taking it out on Tronpletely.

    He started making his moves concentrated on the two wounds on Tron¡¯s upper body. Suddenly, the spear became almost useless. Watt is attacking like a madman.

    Just like that, the three people who escaped from the demon trio are pummelling the demon trio.

    At this moment, the Death eating wolf became restless. As Rid was been attack viciously inside the rock corner, the wolf has be extremely ferocious and leaped over to attack Philip. The valley is not big enough to amodate the movement of the other two beasts and even wolf has very less space to attack to its full potential.

    At this moment, Falck joined the frey, wind des started pouring down on the wolf from the sky.

    Falck is at a safe distance from the three beasts and they cannot do anything about it.

    As Tron saw this whole scene, he went into a deep thought and closed his eyes for a movement. The tiger and the soul devouring elephant started roaring and the whole valley was resounding with that.

    Suddenly, Watt, Philip and Jack felt some external interference in their spiritual consciousness, someone is attacking their souls. Jack is the first to recover and looked at the elephant coldly.

    He could sense that the interference is from that elephant and he is extremely angry. These beasts are the reason they escaped in the first ce, now they made preparations and brought the fight to his valley just for this reason. But this elephant still has this type of ability.

    But it seemed quite undeveloped.

    Suddenly the elephant moved its huge body and covered theplete view of the other side of it as itid down. It seemed exhausted just from one move.

    Sylvia, regained some momentum and stabbed Jack, directly. He took the hit and the sword left a scar on his abdomen.

    But soon, the fight went back to the initial stage, where Jack simply overpowered Sylvia with his skill. Sylvia¡¯s swordsman seemed to be focused mostly on defence rather than attack, so she was unable to regain the battle into her hands.

    As the fight went on. Philip was the first one to deal with his opponent. The rock that surrounded them started cracking slowly and soon it shattered. In between the pile of rocks, Rid was like a pile meat paste. His whole body was full of holes and he was bleeding from head to toe.

    "RID."

    Sylvia hollered in rage as she looked at Rid¡¯s body. He is barely breathing.

    But Philip who was also exhausted, ended that breath with a single kick and Rid¡¯s head rolled to the side.

 Chapter 297: End of the Black Water

    Rid is dead and suddenly the wolf went crazy. It spat out a mouthful of blood and its eyes became extremely ferocious.

    Watt noticed the change in the wolf as it howled to the top of its lungs and was surprised.

    "They are Beast warriors. Take the man down and the beast will be damaged."

    As soon as Watt said this, Philip and Jack were confused, they don¡¯t know the term beast warrior means, but they did believe Watt said.

    The opponents thought were extremely surprised. They didn¡¯t expect that someone from a rural empire would know about beast warrior cultivation.

    The beast warrior cultivation has be rare and only the beast faction of the six major powers cultivate these skills. The beast warriors are great in many aspects as they have more affinity with spiritual energy than the normal warriors and they can fight well with the coordination of their beasts.

    But their only drawback is that if either the beast or the cultivator is dead, then the remaining one will receive serious damage to their soul and their spiritual consciousness.

    Now, although the wolf went berserk, its state of mind is not the best one and it cannot control its body as well.

    Philip, who cleared his opponent first, went straight to the wolf and started wrestling with it.

    The beast and the man started exchanging blows and every hit Philip gave it to its head,

    Of the three beasts that are present here the wolf is the smallest, but it is still ten times bigger than the normal wolf.

    This time, Philip has an advantage as the wolf doesn¡¯t have much space to move and it doesn¡¯t even have its state of mind clear enough to use its body.

    Philips attacks which are piercing through its skin and tearing the flesh bit by bit. It started crashing to the valley walls and rocks causing more damage to itself.

    Soon, the wolf was about to go down, but Philip doesn¡¯t have much energy left in him. Even though he is using the energy cells, it only helps with the energy exhaustion, not for the wounds.

    *ROAR*

    He was about tond the finishing blow when a thunderous tiger roar resounded all over the valley.

    Watt, Philip, and Jack are all surprised. The tiger hase from another side of the valley. They are so focused on the battle that they didn¡¯t notice the tiger missing. The elephant blocking their view didn¡¯t help much.

    Philip immediately grew alert, he hurriedly finished off the wolf and consumed a pill.

    He was extremely vignt.

    He is in no position to fight another bitter battle. The elephant also started getting riled up.

    Watt, Jack, and Philip exchanged nces and shook their heads, they had made some preparations and wished that there wouldn¡¯t be an instance where they had to use it.

    Watt and Jack suddenly went all out, they abandoned the defense and started attacking aggressively.

    Sylvia and Tran who are just excited that the beasts are able to help were suddenly surprised, because, Philip took out a space jade and leaped towards the tiger and forced its maw open.

    The teeth pierced into his shoulder, but he didn¡¯t seem to care, he started throwing one grenade after another and threw a total of six grenades into its mouth.

    He let himself out of the mouth and ran backward. The tiger was sted open.

    Tran stumbled and spit a mouthful of blood, his face became pale as he held his head to endure the soul-searing pain.

    Philip was sted away by the impact and his chest was torn open from the shoulder. His shoulder joint waspletely visible outside.

    Sylvia waspletely stunned by the sudden change of events, she thought that they could get the upper- hand in the situation, but Watt¡¯s side suddenly went crazy.

    What surprised her, even more, is that Watt didn¡¯t deal with Tran, instead, he leaped into the air and started throwing cards to on the valley walls and suddenly there is a series of sts causing the walls to copse.

    The rocks crashed into the elephant making it suffer some serious damage, then only Sylvia came to her senses, but it was toote, Jack is already ready with his trump card. More than thirty sword images surrounded him as he concentrated all his spiritual energy, his arm which is holding his sword was split open and was bleeding.

    With a single sh, the thirty sword imagespletely attacked her from all sides, she waspletely overwhelmed.

    She was only able to repel three sword rays and the rest pierced all her vitals.

    Jack couldn¡¯t take the extent of the attack and knelt down clutching his hand, the elephant which was trying to clear off the rocks that are falling on it felt the shock of Sylvia losing her life and lost the concentration, which made the rocks topletely bury it.

    Watt is the only one who is in shape, he walked towards Tran who is still suffering from the soul attack due to the tiger dying.

    He finished him off and collected his spatial ring, he looked at Philip and Jack who arepletely injured, particrly Philip his injuries are somewhat critical as they are close to his heart and lungs.

    If beasts are not here, they would have dealt with the three people easily. But now, they had to do some crazy things due to their presence. Watt called Falck down and let it carry Philip and Jack.

    They went to the city to get treated and start their journey again.

    At this exact moment, in the core region of the beast faction, three mes have been extinguished in a room full of mes of different colors, the person who seemed to be the caretaker of the room has widened his eyes and immediately ran out of the room to send the news.

    Soon, the news went through a chain ofmand andnded in the ears of two people, one is the man with the chain sickle, the other is the head of the faction.

    Both of them immediately walked to a ce to meet, as if they have previously agreed on it.

    "Three of my subordinates died." The young man with chain sickle said in a cold tone.

    "What do you want to do?"

    "Since they are dead, we have already paid a price the mission must bepleted no matter what. I will be going to the western continent and deal with the matter."

    "But the remaining powers will be sending people after them."

    "I would deal with it myself." With those words, he left the ce without even waiting for the Faction-head to reply.

    After two days, Philip and Jack recoveredpletely and they wanted to start their journey again.

    At first, they wanted to travel in their own ways, but after the previous battle, they felt that it is better to be together.

    So, they started their journey, this time, rather than normal training, the decision to go for more battle experience. And then began the challenging spree of the trio.

    They visited every city and started challenging all the people who are in the early stages of the Grand realm.

    The days passed and it has been two months after they left Sam¡¯s city.

    This day, Sam hase out, stopping his research, because there is some news and Arc visited Sam¡¯s city.

    The news is about ckwater. The whole Orion underwent a crackdown and a Transcendent level battle has urred. Arc has brought meteorite sand and the person who used Blood golems to attack.

    The person is none other than the person who killed Jack¡¯s father.

    Jack previously mentioned that his father¡¯s killer is a user of Blood golem and that is the only clue they were left with.

    As per their agreement, Arc took away all the resources except for the meteorite sand.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know whether, he was given the total amount or anything was stolen, but he cannot do anything about it even if it is. He doesn¡¯t know the exact amount of allotment of meteorite sand allotment, he just threatened that way so that they wouldn¡¯t do anything silly like stealing it and will bring everything back to him.

    Sam felt that his threat would work definitely.

    The person who uses Blood Golem happened to be a Pre-transcendent cultivator, which surprised Sam. Jack is around neen years old, which means this person would at least be a Peak-stage Nascent at least at that time.

    If Jack¡¯s father was really able to go on an expedition with this guy, then that means Jack¡¯s father is actually quite strong.

    Anyway, that guy¡¯s cultivation was crippled when he was taken to Sam and he was just thrown into a dark room.

    Sam would gift this guy to Jack and their deal would be over.

    But Sam has something else he needs to know from this guy.

    "Meteorite sand¡¯s Ind. Where is it? And how many people know about it?"

    Sam asked this question as they sat in the darkroom.

    The man was stunned. He doesn¡¯t know how Sam knew about this matter. He went into deep thought and asked in return instead of replying.

    "Are you son of Jason?"

    "Nope. But if Jason is someone who you killed after the expedition of the Meteorite sand ind, then my friend Jack might be his son. Now, answer my question."

    The man waspletely surprised.

    "So, she really did escape and survived." He muttered in a low voice and asked again.

    "Is it because of him, did you destroy ckwater?"

    "Partially yes, but I needed the meteorite sand."

    The man shook his head. The loose end he left untied has made aeback and devoured the whole organization.

    "Well, the meteorite sand is present on an ind which is in the middle of the ocean towards the north-west of the continent. We have departed from the northern snownds of the Arian at that time and traveled for five days on a ship to reach that ind.

    As for who it belongs to, it definitely doesn¡¯t belong to ckwater alone. The four major continents have four big under-world organizations that rule the dark side of society. ckwater of the western continent, the ck wind of the Northern continent, the ck rock of the southern continent, and the ck me of the eastern continent.

    These powers altogether own this ind. The ind is as big as half of Orion and it has various sections that have different Meteorite sands.

    But the problem is, itpletely covered with tundra all over the year and is only open for three months of every year. Even at that time, only small portions are exposed outside, which we were able to mine.

    But the main problem is, we don¡¯t know the properties of the meteorite sands, in fact, we were only able to identify them because of the maps. TO be honest, no one in the four major continents and other isted empires knows much about the meteorite sands, only the six major powers know about them. That is the reason, we distributed the sands to the staff members so that they would experiment and tell the advantages of the various sands, even the remaining three organizations are doing the same.

    There is a pact, that after we gathered the properties and uses of different meteorite sands, we would produce one weapon every three years and sell them to the six major powers.

    But now, the ckwater cannot do so anymore."

    The man sang like a bird without any need for further interrogations.

 Chapter 298: Projects-1

    Days passed slowly. Watt, Jack, and Philip are on their journey all over the Arian challenging every cultivator possible.

    They have challenged and battled many people in the Initial stages of the Grand realm, they fought with soldiers, city guards, Marquises, Military personnel everyone they could their hands on.

    They are now making their way towards the Arian¡¯s imperial capital and it is mainly for Jack as he wanted to meet some people there.

    There is something weird in their journey, though. They haven¡¯t met a single attacker from the six major powers, they seemed to havepletely disappeared.

    There are only twenty days for the six-month time period to be over, once they are done with the thing in the imperial capital, they have to start moving back to the San¡¯s city.

    By now, they had a minor breakthrough and reached the second level in the Grand realm.

    Everything seemed to have been going smoothly for them, but what they don¡¯t know is there is a dangerous pair of eyes that are watching them from hiding.

    From a nearby tree, there is a young man, who is wearingpletely ck robes, even covering his face. Only, the ck eyes are visible outside. There is a chain-sickle hanging on his back as he watched Watt¡¯s gang eating some roasted meat.

    The young man with the chain sickle suddenly turned around and threw his chain sickle into the woods. The chain extended and the sickle seemed to have pierced into something.

    He slowly walked deeper and discovered a corpse hanging on to the chain sickle as it pierced to that person¡¯s neck.

    He looked around and once again started throwing the chain sickle it made a circle in the air and when pulled it back, there are some trees that crashed down as they were sliced down by the sickle.

    When the trees are cleared, two more dead bodies can be seen along with the fallen trees.

    He is the person who ordered the demon trio to deal with Watt and the gang, after their death, he came to here to deal with the situation himself, but to his surprise, he became interested in these three.

    Since his subordinates were killed, he has to take in three new subordinates and when he saw these people, he was intrigued, they are training diligently and are participating in more and more duels. He was impressed and wanted to see their growth in theing days.

    So, the remaining major powers had a series of losses as their subordinates disappeared one after another.

    They couldn¡¯t do much as they don¡¯t know who the killer is and even in the seer tower, all they could see is a person in ck robespletely covering his face and a chain sickle which severed many throats.

    Watt and the rest heard themotion, but didn¡¯t react as they are inside the woods there would be beasts for sure. Since there is no aura which they could sense, they didn¡¯t take it seriously.,

    The next day, they reached the capital and Jack started enquiring about somethings and had to take several permissions before they could finally reach their destination.

    It is the special Imperial training academy and within that academy, there is a specific swordsman section.

    This section has been established recently after the Sword Marshall and the six swords of the sword Marshall has joined the Arian.

    Before they could join the force again, they have to finish ten years of teaching.

    So, now there are seven incredible swordsmen in the academy and Jack is here to exchange knowledge with them.

    He wanted to test his swordsmanship and the skills, he created recently against the master of the craft. They might not be of the same cultivation level, but since this is the true test of the skill, they don¡¯t need to consider the cultivation level and fight on equal terms after suppressing cultivation.

    For the next week, this is his n and as expected, he wasn¡¯t able to win any one of them. The battle experience of the seven people is not something that Jack could fathom and even when their cultivations are suppressed, Jack wasn¡¯t able to deal with them.

    One of the reasons is that his skill is not as good as theirs and the second reason being their body which was reformed during their breakthrough to the Nascent.

    They can change their cultivation strength to that of the Grand realm, but it is not possible to change their body condition and reduce its strength.

    But Jack wasn¡¯t extremely disappointed. He took pointers on his new style of swordsmanship gained new knowledge on the ws and suggestions on how to reduce these ws.

    After that, they started their journey back to Sam¡¯s city.

    Meanwhile, In Sam¡¯s city.

    The city haspletely changed its shape. All the old buildings are reced by new constructions. In the middle of the city, there is a majestic skyscr.a.p.er and Sam¡¯s name was engraved on it.

    The sky-scr.a.p.er has seventy floors built tall and could be seen miles away from the city.

    With the sky-scr.a.p.er as the center, the city is now like a circle divided into four quadrants.

    The first quadrant has all kinds of factories. There are some essential staff quarters, the second quadrant is full of homes for the staff and staff¡¯s families. The remaining two quadrants arebined and it is the same as Sam¡¯s park.

    They are full of activities, tests, shops, and many others. There is one corner of this area with arge building, which is the starting point of one of Sam¡¯s projects.

    Sam is doing the finishing touches so that everything would be ready by the time of opening.

    By this time, Arthur and his team are slowly adapting. They saw the construction projects that are built from scratch. The majestic buildings, the machines in the size of beasts, he was extremely surprised when he visited a factory once. There are some machines in particr for which the user doesn¡¯t even need spiritual energy to manufacture things.

    He never thought that such machines existed and the things he deemed impossible have been happening here daily.

    He was now looking forward to the type of deal, Sam is going to make.

    As an heir of a major power, he has ess to much deeper knowledge than ordinary folks and he knew that the shadow sword is not something that can be easily controlled. In fact, other than the artisan and the first person who wielded the sword, there is no one in the world that was able to tame the sword.

    Even, Murali one of the top experts in the world wasn¡¯t able to make the sword submit, he was only able to seal the sword with his knowledge in formations and inscriptions.

    So, Arthur doesn¡¯t have much hope for the sword, even most powers don¡¯t need the sword for their own use, they just want it so that it wouldn¡¯t be in the hands of a person who might be able to wield it and there is a possibility that person might be their enemy.

    There is no practical benefit from that sword, but when he saw the machines creatin various things, for example, he has seen a pressing machine which is used for grenade shells and when he saw the tests of the grenade, he was extremely impressed. Because, the assembly line of the grenades, didn¡¯t even use their elemental abilities, all they needed was a small amount of spiritual energy.

    There are many other things that can be manufactured without any need for too much stress from the artisans. Some of them are arrows, throwing knives, the empty formation tes, grenades.

    There are even many gears and cylindricalponents along with many other different metallic structures that he hasn¡¯t seen in his entire life. But he has a feeling that these things would be another big thing.

    He is extremely excited about what kind of deal Sam would make.

    Meanwhile, Sam is inside his skyscr.a.p.er. The five floors of the skyscr.a.p.ers are for residence. One for him, one for Watt, one for Jack and another for Philip. The fifth one is for the assistants like Felicia and her brother, Marian who is the former leader of Sam¡¯s battalion.

    In the remaining fifteen floors, five are for training purposes. There are many machines which Sam created just so that he and his friends could train, even his beasts have some ces where they could train.

    As for the remaining ten floors, the first floor is for appointments and meetings, the second floor is an Artisan manufacturing point, where Sam would create somethings for custom orders and this is only for special cases where the customer might want to observe Sam doing it.

    It can also be used to fool others so that they wouldn¡¯t stress over to find Sam¡¯s real workshop.

    As for the remaining eight floors, they are surveince rooms.

    Among the city, there are some crystal towers that are ced in the form of attraction, but what people don¡¯t know is that these small towers are ced in such a way that they act as nodes for the whole city to create a massive formation.

    They act likemunication towers. As Sam has bought numerous materials that are required to makemunication tokens and recording crystals from the thunder god temple, he created his new invention which is a surveince system.

    There are many street lights ced in the whole city which has crystal tops, apart from that there are many other ces where these crystal nodes are kept.

    Sam called these crystal eyes. The incidents happening in front of the crystal eye will be sent to the Sky scrappers through thesemunication towers and shown on the screen. Along with the crystal eyes, there are many devices Sam made using themunication tokens as a base, which will direct sound.

    There is an individual screen allotted to each crystal eye and there is an individualmunication device attached to each screen that will give the sound.

    In this way, the whole city is under Sam¡¯s surveince.

 Chapter 299: Projects-2

    Sam is in his sky-scr.a.p.er looking through the screens in a floor.

    There is no personnel operating on each floor, rather every screen was enchanted by Sam.

    The low-level spirits will be responsible for watching over the whole city and all of these are like Sam¡¯s artifacts and they can contact him directly, but he didn¡¯t let them.

    Rather, he is nning to perform a huge enchantment to the whole building so that spirit would be responsible for reporting Sam.

    It would act as an A.I assistant.

    He is nning to do so, but before that, he has to check all the nodal points in the city.

    The towers that are acting as nodes are not the only ones that are a part of the formations.

    The positioning of the street lights, the buildings, the park-benches that are arranged, the restaurants the pirs of the city walls. All in all, there are around twenty-five formations within the city and some of these formations are interlinked and there is another massive defensive formation that uses these twenty-five formations as nodes.

    Apart from that, there are three types of cannons and each type of various sizes, ced inside on some watchtowers and on the city walls, which will make nine types of formations which will give the massive defensive formation, nine types of variations upon integrating with them.

    All of this is Sam¡¯s work. But the formation masters weren¡¯t able to detect that, because the formations are made with the most inconspicuous of things.

    They couldn¡¯t possibly think that the streetmp ced by the workers they themselves supervised would be part of the formation node.

    This is only one of the projects Sam has undertaken.

    And this is not the biggest one of all.

    The other projects involve the whole of the western continent and one of them is the establishment of Sam¡¯s parks.

    In every Dukedom capital, there is a park opened, even Sam¡¯s park in the southern star was remodeled. In every park, there is a tower constructed.

    Apart from that, every Dukedom city had three smaller towers constructed.

    And every other city and even every vige has towers constructed in the same way.

    In the whole Arian, every city and every vige has these kinds of towers and on the top of the tower, there is a room, in which some people are working which is simply controlling the energy flow from the spirit stones to the crystal inside the tower.

    This is themunicationwork, Sam designed.

    In this world, there are two major necessities that Sam has identified and on which he could make cash on and the first one ismunication.

    Apart from the four major professions and the person-in-charge of the city, there is no way to contact the people out of the city for normal people and Sam decided to change this situation.

    This is one of his major projects and that is monopolizing themunication sector.

    Sam has designed a new type ofmunication device, which works like a cell-phone. But it doesn¡¯t have any other function other than talking. Because Sam still has to master the technology enough to integrate the calling and sending messages at the same time. He was still in the beginning stages and he doesn¡¯t want to waste too much time on it.

    Anyway, thismunication tokens use a spiritual signature instead of numbers.

    Sam used these towers to create formations in every city which are further interlinked to form an array of formations that act as amunication channel and there are two main hubs for thesemunication channels which act as the main nodes. One of them is Sam¡¯s city and the other one in the Imperial Capital of Arian.

    All the people have to do is, register their spiritual imprint in the nearby tower in their city and they will bepletely registered in the database.

    The only problem is, just like how they exchange the spiritual imprints in the previousmunication devices, they still have to follow the same procedure.

    Once they exchange the spiritual imprints within their devices in person and if their spiritual imprints are registered in the tower database, they canmunicate no matter where they are in the whole Western continent. Except for the northern icends.

    They still prefer to be secluded and don¡¯t want to interference from the outside world, but that is still under Arian though. Arc still did give them enough respect to leave to their traditional ways, so Sam didn¡¯t make his hands reach that part of the territory.

    Anyway,munication is still his. Every person should pay a hundred spiritual stones to register their spiritual imprint in the database. Every three months, they have to visit the nearest tower and renew theirmunication imprint.

    As for themunication device, Sam has designed various ways. There are some which can be used as Bluetooth headsets, some will be like smartphone, like a te in hands.

    They can also be categorized with size, shape, length, and the number of imprints they can register in their device.

    The price starts from, hundred spiritual stones and raises up to thousands of spirit stones and there is a custom device feature, in which they can order a device ording to their tastes and the number of the imprints they could share.

    Apart from that, there are some squad specific and organization-specific packages, in which they could buy a miniaturemunicationwork.

    In this way, when a squad is out hunting, they can ce the smallmunication hub in the wilderness, which covers a certain radius, in which the squad can talk freely.

    These things are also categorized by the number of members that can register in the portable hub and the radius of the coverage.

    This way, Sam decided topletely monopolize the industry.

    In just a single Dukedom capital there will be at least two million people it estimated conservatively. If only twenty-five percent of them, registered and bought the least pricedmunication device, then there are five hundred thousand people which means, five hundred thousand people spending two hundred spiritual stones on it.

    From each Dukedom Capital, he will get one hundred million, and ten percent will go for tax and in the remaining fifty percent will go for four major powers.

    That means, in every dukedom capital, there would be at least forty-five million profit for him, and they¡¯re a total of Neen Dukedom capitals in all of Arian.

    This gives him eight hundred and fifty million in profit just from the dukedom capitals that too in a worst-case scenario.

    The actual profit would be in hundreds of millions just from one city. After all, if thesemunication tokens are the new trend, then the most advanced their device is, the more their status shows in the public. And this is a cultivation world, people will face dangers all the time, and losing a device is not a surprising scenario.

    Anyway, any person in the city can do much better than a hundred spirit stones. There is no way he would lose and the portable hubs will go like hotcakes.

    Sam is not worried; he will get returns in the first week.

    As for Sam¡¯s park. That is already a sessful venture and it is going to be expanding. He made sixteen billion in six months in a single park. Now there are neen in total. Since then he has reduced his profit percentage by a bit, he is still going to make it big and even bigger.

    This is not the end of it though.

    Sam has finished three major projects in these six months. One of them is Sam¡¯s city and Parks. The second one is the Communication venture.

    The third one is also the second problem he noticed in this world. Transportation.

    This project is the biggest of all three. It might be in terms of investments, manpower, and time is taken.

    In all these aspects, this project beat the other two by an extremelyrge margin.

    For this, Sam has taken out one of the most important part and the most sophisticated metallic beasts of the modern world.

    The train.

    Sam has recreated railways on this whole continent.

    On the whole continent, there are some routes for people to travel from vige to another, or from city to another or from one vige to another city.

    Sam has widened the routes and created railways. He didn¡¯t create new routes, he just used the previous ones andid down the tracks.

    Apart from that, he didn¡¯t connect every city and vige to this.

    In this world, where people live longer, one week is not even a long time period.

    So, he created these railways only in some major cities and major travels.

    Every Dukedom has only three major stations and the train routes cover the cities or viges only within these routes.

    Even the trains that are moving from one Dukedom to another will also transverse within these stations.

    If a person wants to travel from the southern star to the Imperial Capital of Orion, then he has to change the trains after traveling for every dukedom.

    It might seem inconvenient for the modern people, but for these people who have to walk, of travel on beasts within the dangerous forests and some even abandon the thoughts of traveling just because they are afraid of these dangers, they can take these railways and the most important part is that these railways reduce the travel time by half whenpared to the average time taken by a Level-4 beast.

    After all, how many people are capable of getting a Level-4 beast as their travelpanion.

 Chapter 300: Encounter

    Sam decided to inaugurate all the projects with a huge ceremony and the inauguration will be done by Arc, the Emperor of Arian.

    Two days, before the inauguration, Sam is walking around the city for some peace.

    His schedule was totally hectic for the past six months, he didn¡¯t take proper rest at all.

    Now that his part is over, all he has to do is to wait for the time. One thing, he was worried about is that his friends are not here yet.

    There is only two days for the end of their six months journey.

    As he walked around, he entered the biggest restaurant of the city.

    It is called Mackey¡¯s Kitchen. And the name itself is self-exnatory on who the chef was.

    He wanted to rx and have a meal, but when he went inside, he saw that the atmosphere is somewhat weird.

    One part of the restaurant waspletely empty and the other was packed. It is as if the remaining tables couldn¡¯t be used at all.

    Right now, the city is not still open for the outsiders, so the only people here are the workers, artisans and other people from the four major professions and their rtives who get visit some of the ces before opening.

    This is the privilege Sam has given to these people who have worked hard. They can visit all the ces in the city that are open for public and experience everything for free of charge.

    And everyone knows, who Sam is.

    There is a special table in the restaurant for Sam. Even though, he didn¡¯t ask for it, Mackey specifically arranged it out of gratitude.

    The table will always be empty and it has the best view of the skyscr.a.p.er. This will give Sam a reminder on how big his development was, at least that is what Mackey said.

    The table will only be full, if Sam visited it but now, to his surprise there is a youngdy sitting on table as she seemed to be in a deep thought.

    Sam was stunned, when she saw the youngdy. She is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen in his both lives, at least just based on appearance.

    If she was born in the modern world, she could just rule the modelling world, the fashion designers would go crazy about making clothes and essories for her.

    But that is not the thing that impressed him the most. He was torn, broken and remade, l.u.s.t is not something that could cloud him.

    It is what she is doing that made him more stunned than the beauty.

    She has a small metallic te on the table and there are some spiritual stones in her hand. One look and Sam recognized what it is. It is a formation simtor.

    A person can do some experiments on how the formation works on this te, but it is not as good as the formation simtor that Sam got from the Murali¡¯s inheritance, because the formation simtor this girl is using can only be used once. The formation simting disc will copse after once formation is activated, no matter the result. The formation might be right and feasible or it might be utter bullshit, but the simtion disc would surely copse.

    The youngdy is noticing the table positions and cing the spirit stones on the simtor ording to them.

    After cing more than ten tables, she activated the simtor and... there was a small explosion. She wasn¡¯t able to replicate the formation.

    Even though, there is an explosion, there is no real damage and that is because Sam¡¯s table is a bit special. There would be no iing damage and if a person can manipte the numerous small formation variations on the table, then the things happening inside the table area also wouldn¡¯t go out.

    That is why Sam is surprised, because, there is not a single person in the city who was able to notice the formations that are inscribed on the table. Much less identify the variations and manipting them.

    He walked to the table and just stood there as thedy took out another simtor and started cing the spirit stones, but this time, when she looked up to mark the table positions, she was greeted with a ck-feathered coat.

    She frowned and said.

    "You cannot sit on this side of the restaurant, go sit on that side."

    She said in an emotionless tone, not even bothering to look at Sam.

    Sam was intrigued but the rest of the restaurant has bepletely silent. It is the epitome of the words pin-drop silence.

    After all, there is no one in the whole western continent that would dare to say these words to Sam, not even the current emperor Arc, maybe Philip would say that, but that is a whole different matter.

    The youngdy noticed that, Sam is not moving and looked at him. She didn¡¯t seem to recognize him as she said.

    "I told you to leave."

    "This is my table." Sam said in the same emotionless tone.

    Thedy seemed surprised, but she said.

    "Oh? But I need it."

    She even pushed Sam aside to look at the table arrangements and started cing the spirit stones on the spirit stones.

    Sam still looked at her as she arranged the stones, without even need to do the calctions of scaling.

    Sam sat on another chair and gestured for the waiter, who nodded his head and went to the kitchen to get Sam¡¯s food.

    In five minutes, there are tes of food brought to him. Sam started eating and the girl didn¡¯t seem to mind as he didn¡¯t make any sound at all. She ispletely immersed in her own world.

    After another explosion, which shook the tes of food on the table, she finally nced at him and when he saw his feasting, she also without any manners or formalities took a piece of meat from a te and started munching on it.

    But she was still in the daze of finding the mistakes to no avail.

    "You wouldn¡¯t get it."

    Sam said, finally gaining her attention.

    "What did you say?" She asked him in the same tone.

    "Your thought process is wrong you wouldn¡¯t get it."

    "Oh? How do you know that?"

    "I made the formation." Sam finished his meal by now and was ready to make a move.

    The girl finally showed another expression other than the frustration and thinking expressions and that is the look of surprise.

    As, Sam was moving out, she followed him and walked beside him as she asked.

    Her long hair that was tied into a bun waspletely messed up as she hurriedly picked up her things and shoved a piece of mean in her mouth.

    "Wait, how did you make it?" Thedy asked as she chewed on meat.

    "Now, why would I say that?" Sam asked in return. One look and Sam knew that this girl is not from the families of the workers and employees, because there is no mark on her chest. The same protocol is going on.

    She is definitely someone who sneaked into the city, so there is a high chance that she is from one of the six major powers.

    Since, he wasn¡¯t informed yet, then that means she just came. After seeing her though, Sam didn¡¯t want to take action immediately and one of the reasons is, she is alone and another one she seemed to be more interested in the formation than him, who is her target.

    So, he decided that he would bother her to when she made a move.

    As Sam looked at thedy, he repeated his question.

    "Why would I give you the details of my formation?"

    She hesitated for a second before saying in a hesitant voice.

    "Because... I asked?" Sam was stumped. He doesn¡¯t know how to reply immediately. The first thought that came to his mind, is that this girl is being sarcastic. But when he looked at her eyes, he felt that she really meant what she said.

    This girl is too na?ve.

    He observed her face slowly. The blue eyes are as clear as ice and her forehead was like piece of carved jade.

    Her hair almost looked like a ck waterfall. He closed in and looked at her lips and there is a small mole on the left side corner of her lower lip.

    "Why are you here?" Sam asked in a calm tone.

    "I am here to meet Sam."

    "Oh? You don¡¯t know how he looks?"

    "Nope.??

    "Why do you want to meet him?"

    "I want the formation simtor he has."

    "You don¡¯t want the shadow sword?"

    "I don¡¯t want it."

    "Why?"

    "I don¡¯t want it because, I don¡¯t need it. I can make my own weapons."

    "So, why don¡¯t you just make your own formations then?"

    "I don¡¯t need this formation for my use, I want it for research."

    Sam stopped his questions and looked at her. He doesn¡¯t know if she is just that na?ve of in stupid. She kept on answering the questions no matter how many Sam has asked.

    "What if he doesn¡¯t want to give you the formation simtor?"

    "I will kill him and take it."

    She replied with the same tone. Sam smirked at her words. She really is like that. She is just that na?ve.

    He waspletely surprised and amused at the same time. A youngdy is telling that she would kill him and he is not even angry. He felt likeughing.

    "Are you telling me about that formation or not?"

    "Oh? Follow me." Sam said as he led her to the nearby building and ced the formation and exined.

    "I didn¡¯t say that your formation is wrong. It is your thought process; all you did is ce the nodes in the wrong order..."

    After ten minutes, she showed another expression, an expression of amazement.

    He shook his head and thought, how can someone be so smart and stupid at the same time.

    These are the first thoughts, but as he continued the conversation, he noticed that it is not stupidity of naivety, because there is no hint of confusion on her face or no trusting smile and pure look of someone who doesn¡¯t know the ways of world and of pure innocence.

    Rather it is more of a carefreeness and confidence.

    She is so confident that even if she said all that on her mind, nobody would be able to do a thing.

    And Sam needed more than an hour to know that which terrified him, because this is the first person he failed to read in this world. The first person he failed to understand aftering to this world.

 Chapter 301: I am Sam

    Sam for the felt that he was being toocent, of course, he himself knew that he was arrogant, but that arrogance is what he developed from all the achievements he got. All the steps he climbed to reach the ce where he is, but he was nevercent.

    He never thought that there is no room for improvement, he always strived for that. It is the same in every trade and every field he enters and that includes, reading people¡¯s minds and understanding their characters.

    But this time, he felt like he failed and this made him ponder over the factors that led to this failure, but before that, he has to correct his mistake. He has to read this girl like an open book for now.

    So, for the rest of the conversation, he waspletely silent and when the girl finally figured out how the formation works, she asked him.

    "You are good at formations, what is your name?"

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and said.

    "Follow me."

    With those words, he started walking, the youngdy, started pacing after him and when they reached argely closed stadium, she was extremely surprised.

    It was constructed by taking the modern-day gymnasium in schools as a temte. As she marveled at the construction and the details, Sam asked.

    "You are here for Sam, right?" He asked.

    "Yes."

    "I am Sam."

    He replied looking at her straight in the eyes, she was stunned. She didn¡¯t expect that the person she was talking to all the time was her target.

    She then came to her senses and said.

    "Oh, then can you give me that formation simtor?"

    "Not really."

    Sam¡¯s voice was cold, for some reason he was extremely frustrated with himself for not being able to read this woman. He was sure that he was not captivated by her beauty but he was really blinded by the way she looked at the formations.

    Her thought process and her way of speaking, these things stunned him and made his whole brain to stop working in its usual way. For him, this felt like a sign of vulnerability. He has to ovee that.

    "But, didn¡¯t I tell you already, I will kill you if you don¡¯t give it to me." She said in the same tone. With the same confidence.

    There is no disdain or contempt in her tone, just too much of her self-confidence, but for reason, he was really annoyed now. Earlier, when she said the same words, he reactedpletely differently.

    Now, thinking about this, he was annoyed at himself for being so contradictory. He wanted to beat himself up so much.

    "Sam, I will really kill you if you don¡¯t give me that." She repeated at Sam¡¯s silence.

    "Why don¡¯t you try and see, if you can really kill me."

    Sam said in a cold tone and his aura surged. Right now, he is a Level-2 Grand realm cultivator and his aura was raging. He didn¡¯t even bother to conceal it and looked at her, waiting to make the move.

    She seemed to have thought of something and shook her head.

    "What a pity? I wanted to take you away with me from this ce since you are so good at the formations. But you are not listening at all."

    She waved her hand and Three puppets came out of nowhere. Sam looked at the puppets and was surprised. They are all made of Level-6 metals and looked quite artsy.

    The three of them are humanoid in structure. Two of them looked lean and tall. One of them held a sword and another one held a saber. The third one though is bulky and huge.

    Its body is mostly cylindrical and its hands are not as flexible.

    "Generally, I wouldn¡¯t take my puppets out to deal with a person of your cultivation, but I heard that you are quite powerful, so I am going all out from the start. You can still change your mind if you want to."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and wore his ws. This time, the ws have new additions. After the ckwater was dealt with, he got lots of Meteorite sand.

    There are many types and one of the sands which is called Ash meteorite sand works well for his next addition.

    This meteorite sand when molded into certain forms is simr to Graphene in his previous world. This got its name just because of its color and nothing else.

    These are really suitable to make strings. The strings would be so sharp that they can even mark on the Gray meteorite sand which has high resistance for cutting and abrasion.

    It is also extremely flexible and can be used as threads too.

    Sam used the ash meteorite sand to make a new addition to the ws. It was made into strings and weaved so that it would be something like fabric as it entwined his fingers. The five nails are connected with this weaved fabric and the remaining ends of these fabrics are connected to two circr metallic objects Sam made.

    These two objects are made of an alloy of ck meteorite sand and Grey meteorite sand.

    One of the circr objects is ced on the back of his palm and the other one is ced inside his palm exactly at the center. The palm is not entirely covered though, there is still a lot of skin that is exposed which resembles the gap and the potential for future upgrades.

    Sam didn¡¯t have a proper battle in a long time and when he saw these puppets, he felt like it is about time, he tested his new abilities and a new weapon.

    He noticed that the woman in front of him is at Level-3 Grand Realm.

    Sam took a deep breath and made the first move. The woman closed her eyes and sat down. The three puppets whose eyes are nk all this time suddenly glowed.

    The three of them moved and Sam noticed that there is an energy thread connecting thedy and the three puppets.

    The first one to make a move is the swordsman puppet which leaped high into the air as it wielded the sword and the Sabre puppet dashed towards Sam.

    As for therge puppet, it sat down on the ground and the cylindrical case which is the torso opened and Sam saw many holes which are filled with knives.

    It seemed to be a long-range attacker.

    Sam didn¡¯t attack thedy, if she was defeated, then the puppets are nothing but metallic heaps.

    Since he wanted to vent through the fight, he would vent on these puppets.

    Sam raised his left hand and blocked the sword strike, as the swords struck him, he moved to the right side as he dodged the saber and threw a liver blow to the saber puppet.

    The puppet doesn¡¯t have a liver, but there are many mechanisms that make the whole thing work. The mechanisms shook due to the punch and there is a small indentation on the surface.

    The metal is too hard for him to cause severe damage with a single punch.

    Sam moved back and started using the phantom step. He moved like a sh and went after the sword puppet. He opened his ws this time and wind energy started concentrating at the w tips and with a wave of his hand, four wind des, flew towards the puppet, but the puppet moved like an experienced swordsman and was able to block three of it.

    The fourth one hit it squarely on the chest leaving a small scratch.

    After throwing the wind des which kept the sword puppet busy for a few moments, Sam made his move towards the saber puppet. He struck his right w at the indentation he created and held the hand of the puppet which was holding the saber with the left w.

    He suddenly started spewing golden mes from the small holes of the ws. The mes are thin but extremely intense. He started heating the metal and, in a few seconds, the metal was slightly red, but before he could heat it further, the sword puppet came to attack him from behind.

    Sam gave it a back kick and used the recoil to push the saber puppet to the ground and swung the w at the chest and tried to tear it apart.

    But that thing only resulted in a scratching sound of the metal and three scars which are only a few millimeters deep.

    He didn¡¯t feel bad though, Sam felt his blood boiling. He really needed this battle and he is having it, he pushed all the thoughts to the back of his head lived for this moment.

    After a few moves, Sam noticed some things, the battle techniques of the puppets is the real deal and there is another thing he noticed and that is the puppets don¡¯t have spirits, Thedy is multitasking and is fighting with Sam with three puppets, although the third one didn¡¯t make a move yet, the eyes are still bright which means, thedy is dividing her thoughts between three entities in three different ways.

    Sam waspletely impressed.

    As he was thinking, he caught hold of the sword puppet by its hand and heated it. He has been doing this continuously. He only used the wind element and fire element so that he can heat the two puppets continuously.

    When the two puppets performed a pincer attack, Sam felt that it was a perfect moment.

    He smirked and leaped into the air as he caught hold of both the puppets by their arms. He activated partial fusion and the two turned into golden mes as the two puppets started getting heated.

    He used partial fusion because he has to manage the spiritual energy usage and full fusion takes up a lot of energy.

    His feather coat sleeves are also glowing golden as the feather reacted.

    The arms of the puppets started turning red, but at this moment, Sam felt an extreme sense of threat and left the puppets as he rolled on the floor.

    Three knives passed through the position he was in a moment ago. He looked at the third puppet which has three empty holes and he saw in surprise as the three holes were filled with new knives again.

 Chapter 302: Battle over

    Sam observed the direction at which the knives are pointed at and roughly estimated the possible trajectories, there are very few blind spots and it hard topletely stay in a zone where there is no threat of these knives.

    Sam, came back to his senses and when he saw the red-hot condition of the arms of the puppets, he aimed his hands and sprayed water on them.

    The whole suddenly was full of steam. The youngdy frowned. Even though the steam didn¡¯t hinder her spiritual sense much and Sam could be sensed easily, she felt distracted by the sudden addition of steam and it is a bit frustrating.

    She tried to concentrate on the battle and what greeted her was the Sam is using the same tactic again and again. He is only trying to dodge and every time, he gets to hold the puppet, he is heating it and once he was forced to release by a flying knife or attacks from another puppet, he would spray the puppet with the water releasing the steam.

    This continued for a dozen times and the youngdy was even getting annoyed.

    But suddenly, Sam¡¯s style changed.

    He didn¡¯t use heat anymore. As the sword puppet made his way towards him while the sword emitted a concentrated sword ray, Sam dodged it and ced his hand on the back of the puppet.

    The palm was ced squarely on the back and he gave the puppet a p.

    Suddenly, the metallic disc inside Sam¡¯s palm reacted and the Ash meteorite sand threads formed web simr to that of a spider¡¯s web.

    The web spread on the back of the puppet and as soon as Sam pulled back, it cut through the metal and web caught a chunk of metal with it.

    In a second, there is a hole on the back of the puppet and Sam thew the chunk of the metal in his hands into the spatial ring as the web retraced back into the metallic disc.

    This is the new addition he made for the web.

    As for how, a low-grade Ash meteorite sand pierced through the rank-6 metals, it is due to the constant heating and rapid cooling.

    When Sam scratched and attacked the puppets a few times, in the beginning, he noticed that they are extremely resistant to any form of abrasion, it is difficult for him to cut through them.

    So, he opted to basic chemistry. If metal is rapidly heated and even more rapidly cooled, it will be brittle as the grain structure will be damaged due to constant expansion and contraction. There will be a small crack that would appear in the metal and those small cracks are all he needed.

    The sword puppet can barely move and it can definitely not move its arms as he pulled out the mechanism that is running its handspletely.

    He ced his hands inside the cavity and used his ws to get a hold of a joint and tore it apart from inside.

    No, only two puppets remained. But reaching the sabre puppet is not an easy task because the third puppet is not as passive as before. The knives were being shot at him and Sam noticed something when a knife was pierced into a wall.

    The wall seemed to have corroded a bit and the knife fell down. Then only he noticed the floor. The knives are capable of corroding the floor too.

    Sam¡¯s expression grew serious. For now, the knives are only being thrown at the ce where he was standing giving him a chance to dodge, but that situation wouldn¡¯t remain long, if the knives flew from all the directions, then he would have trouble dealing with them

    As he was thinking of ways to deal with them, he noticed that he is near the sabre puppet, but not in the way he wanted.

    His back is facing the sabre puppet and the thick sabre light stuck him squarely on the back.

    He was barely able to inject the fire elemental energy into the feathered coat to activate the feathers which stopped the de to cut through, but he wasn¡¯t able to dodge the full brunt of the attack.

    The force made his internal organs shake and he bled a little from the corner of his mouth.

    The youngdy is using the knives to reduce Sam¡¯s movement and making him move closer to the sabre puppet, but when he reached the puppet, he would be in such a position that the puppet is the only attacking.

    Sam grew increasingly alert as he looked around, this time he didn¡¯t dodge the knives, instead he stood in a spot and started diverting the knives with his ws.

    The ws are not being corroded, but because, Sam using the wind element and causing a small pressurized wind at the point of contact between the ws and the knives. The wind gap explodes diverting the knives¡¯ trajectory.

    As Sam diverted the knives randomly, he suddenly sensed something and leapt to the side and a knife that he was about hit back passed through that position and pierced into the Sabre puppet behind him.

    In general, the puppets, shouldn¡¯t be damaged by these knives, but after Sam¡¯s ¡¯Heat treatment¡¯ the puppet is not as sturdy as before.

    When he saw the knife doing damage to the puppet, he had an exciting gleam in his eyes.

    He was troubled on how to deal with the sabre puppet when these knives areing at him, now the knives themselves showed him the way.

    And then began the youngdy¡¯s distress. This time, whenever Sam deflected a knife it would change the trajectory and hit the puppet at the same spot again and again.

    Soon, the small hole turned into a big one, big enough for the whole knife to go in.

    But at this exact moment, the knives stopped and there is no movement from the sabre puppet too.

    Sam understood instantly, that the youngdy was thinking about how to make a further move. No matter, what she did the sabre puppet will be a lost cause.

    But Sam didn¡¯t wait for her to make a decision and made his way to the sabre puppet. The sabre puppet is a lot sturdier than the sword puppet and a lot bulkier. He started pping the puppet with his palms and soon one hole after another appeared on the puppet.

    By the time, the puppet fell down, Sam noticed that something is off.

    When he turned back, therge puppet which is shooting knives has stood up and stretched its legs to the side and even the arms are stretched to the side. Before he could make sense, the legs and the arms opened up and a series of chains popped out of it.

    There is a de at the edge of the chains and they all moved as if they are tentacles.

    The head also split open and short metallic pikes are being shot at Sam. The chains, the knives and the pikes, the puppet was doing some crazy damage to the arena. The artisans who have built this would puke blood in distress if they saw the scene.

    But Sam is experiencing another type of distress. He was being attacked from all sides and it wasplete chaos. He activated full-body elemental fusion and he turned into a bunch of golden mes.

    This prevented him from getting injured due to the corrosion of the knives, but he still has to deal with the chains. The metallic pikes, particrly when passed through are giving him an excoriating pain.

    His spiritual energy which is five times more than a normal Level-2 Grand Realm cultivator was being depleted rapidly and Sam¡¯s brain is also working in the same speed.

    There are only two ways to be out of this and one of them is using bloodline forbidden arts. It has been a long time since he even thought about these. These arts are some forbidden arts inherent to the beasts of the superior bloodline.

    Sam has the blood of four superior beasts in his body and he has the ability to activate them. But if he used them, he wouldn¡¯t be able to use his strength for at least a week as his spiritual core would be depleted of all the energy.

    There is another way, which he was thinking whether to try or not as it wouldn¡¯t probably work twice if the first time failed or seen through by the opponent, but he still decided to give it a try.

    He halted his movements and the elemental fusion was stopped. His whole body was suddenly covered with ck fog. And he disappeared from that ce in a sh.

    This is the ability of the shadow mice. He decided to sh between the shadows of the knives and chains and to his surprise, this actually worked.

    Unlike shadow mice, Sam wasn¡¯t able to move that fast and cover a long distance in a single instant.

    But he was able to do so for a few metres.

    As Sam shed down, the attacks were slowly reduced and before the youngdy could understand what is happening, Sam is already behind her and ced his hand on her neck. The third puppet which is a gigantic obstacle wasn¡¯t even dealt with by Sam.

    He just simply took a turn around it and held thedy by her neck from behind.

    *CRASH*

    She immediately lost control of the puppet and the huge metallic structure fell down causing the debris and dust to raise.

 Chapter 303: Took Away

    Sam finally calmed down after holding her neck, he is just a single move away from breaking her neck and killing her, but for some reason, he couldn¡¯t bring himself to do so.

    He has enough reason to kill her, as he was the one who started it, but the small interaction made they had made him realize that the killing intent was not due to the animosity rather it seemed as if she doesn¡¯t know any other way other than killing if Sam doesn¡¯t agree to give her the formation simtor.

    It kind of reminded him of some of the incidences he survived in his previous life and he felt a faint reluctance budding inside him, making him hesitate to kill her.

    The youngdy kept silent and as Sam was contemting, she threw a fireball made of dark red mes on him. The mes are of high intensity. Although they are not on par with the Golden sun mes, they are extremely strong, but the attack was too weak as she lost all her strength in the fight earlier.

    The three puppets consumed her spiritual energy to fight him and there is no way she would be able to defeat Sam in this state.

    Sam shook his head and let her down, without doing anything. He took out the formation simtor and gave it to her before saying.

    "What is your name and where are you from?"

    ....

    After about half-an-hourter, Sam came out and let her go in her own way. He was thinking deeply.

    He could rte to many things from that girl. Her thirst for knowledge and pursuit of the things that could improve her skills and even the unwavering determination on verge of death, he has been through all of that in his previous life.

    That is why he left her to live. If the situation arises and he gets to meet her again, he would like to see how much she would change.

    Their conversation after the battle should bring some changes to her.

    "Sirona," Sam muttered her name as he walked towards the skyscr.a.p.er. The sun has already set and it would be great to rx for a while.

    But Sam doesn¡¯t get a chance to do so. A man ran towards him with a scroll in his hands.

    When Sam read the contents, he frowned and took out harbinger to leave the ce immediately.

    At this moment, five hundred meters away from Sam¡¯s city, the young man with the chain sickle is sitting on a rock and there are signs of an extreme battle. He popped some pills and he is back in shape.

    He looked at the three people in front of him.

    Jack, Philip, and Watt are looking at him with extreme anger, this guy just came out of nowhere and made a sneak attack. Even though he is only a Level-3 Grand realm cultivator, he is powerful than any normal cultivator they encountered.

    They have been through a bitter battle but only to be subdued by him.

    What is even more infuriating is that, if it was a direct confrontation, they could have escaped, but this guyid a trap and there was no way for them to escape, they are just five hundred meters away and they weren¡¯t even able to escape to the city.

    The only silver lining is the battle is not one-sided.

    At least, they were able to wear this guy downpletely. But right in front of their eyes, with just a single pill, not only this guy healed, but also regained all his spiritual energy.

    This stunned them greatly. All it took was five minutes for him to get back to his peak state.

    As they were thinking of ways on how to deal with the situation, they heard the wind whistling and Sam arrived on Harbinger.

    He looked at the situation and frowned.

    The surroundings showed that the battle has been really intense but the other party who defeated the trio doesn¡¯t seem injured at all.

    His attire does have some tears and skin exposed, but the wounds arepletely healed.

    Compared to him, Sam who just had a serious battle is in a pretty bad state, even now, he is absorbing the energy from the energy cells of Harbinger.

    The battle he had with Sirona was nowhere near mediocre.

    He still has some wounds and some muscle aches from that and the spiritual energy is only half full.

    He sized up the other party who is wearing a ck dress from top to bottom, even his face was covered with ck cloth and his eyes are the only thing that is visible.

    There is a chain sickle hanging on his back. As Sam was sizing that person up, he is doing the same and there is a hint of surprise in his eyes.

    In fact, it is more of a shock than a surprise.

    "Who are you?" The man asked Sam in a surprised tone.

    "You wouldn¡¯t be here if you don¡¯t know me," Sam replied in a nonchnt manner. There is no way that a person who could defeat the trio single-handedly a normal person, should be extremely strong, but that doesn¡¯t mean, he is afraid.

    When the other party heard his answer, he came back to his senses and he said.

    "I want you toe with me to the Beast faction." He asked as if there is no enmity between them.

    Sam frowned, this guy is so full of himself, he is not just asking a shadow sword, he is even asking Sam toe to his faction.

    "You better leave them now, otherwise let alone taking me, you wouldn¡¯t be able to go back to your Beast faction."

    When Sam said these words, the young man frowned and then looked at the remaining three.

    "It seems like, you would be following me if I take them away." He said to Sam and took out three scrolls.

    Sam frowned when he looked at the scrolls and made a move. The Harbinger whistled through the air as he shed on the board. He took out the reaper and shed directly at his head.

    But the sickle appeared at the contact point entirely blocking it.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop there and his target is not the man, rather the three scrolls.

    He concentrated wind element energy in his sword and shed at the scrolls.

    One of the scrolls which have numerous inscriptions on it exploded and there are some spatial tears at the ce.

    This is a transference scroll and quite a high level one at that. In fact, rather than calling it a transference scroll, they are keys to a portable space gate from which the people from the six major powers entered the western continent.

    The young man with the sickle looked at Sam with a serious expression.

    Sam put away the harbinger and stood there motionlessly. He put a space jade inside his mouth and started taking the energy from the energy cells.

    The opponent could feel that Sam is recovering at a rapid pace.

    But the shadow sword and their recruitment are not his goals anymore. He has to take Sam to the Beast faction to verify something.

    He doesn¡¯t even want to kill Sam. He must verify the case.

    He slowly stepped backward and arrived near the trio who could barely stand up.

    Sam became vignt, even though, there is no one who is making moves among them, the tension is too high.

    Both of them are observing each other and if anyone of them raises their energy to attack, then it would cause utter chaos.

    The problem is that one of them wants to escape and the escape would be an instant transmission. If Sam made a move, then it would be extremely difficult to stop that guy, even if he used the shadow shing, he wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything.

    The worst thing is the other party is also trying to take the three people away and his spiritual energy is in full capacity.

    Sam has all kinds of disadvantages in the battle.

    Even if he took out the beasts, the same thing might happen, a small energy fluctuation is all it takes and the battle will be over.

    He managed to deal with the first attempt and there is no way it would work again.

    Sam is extremely baffled on why this guy who sent a scroll to the city with such bravery wasn¡¯t even willing to fight him now. Thispletely baffled him and doesn¡¯t know what to do. He is at a loss.

    He looked at the trio and started gesturing with his eyes. They are also slowly recovering their spiritual energy.

    When the opponent saw these gestures, he made a move. At this exact moment, Sam spat out three energy cells which are in the size of spiritual stones.

    The opponent pasted the three scrolls on the three of them, and the three cells are flying towards the scrolls.

    The opponent looked at them and tried to divert them with the chain sickle but was only able to hit one of them as he was busy activating the scrolls.

    The energy cells dropped on the scrolls of Philip and Jack and the one that was sent to Watt missed.

    The energy cells exploded and the scrolls failed to work as the spiritual energy flowpletely halted.

    At this exact moment, the opponent and Watt shimmered as their spatial transfer began. Sam¡¯s shadow shed and was about to sh, but missed as they disappeared.

    "I am Sanjay. Come and find me in the Beast faction in a year, if you want to find your friend. Don¡¯t worry till then your friend would be safe."

    Sam was devastated, he looked at the spot from where Watt disappeared angrily, he wanted to hack himself to death for being incapable.

    But he pulled himself together and started walking back.

    "Come back and rest." He didn¡¯t want to let his anger out. He will be storing this emotion in and let the beast faction see what it takes to bear the consequences of kidnapping his friend.

    He would show them what a living hell is.

 Chapter 304: Inauguration Day

    They went back to the city and Sam assigned Felicia to show them their rooms. Felicia who was supposed to be following Watt around on his training journey was left here in the city discreetly by Watt before he left.

    Sam decided to deal with him after the trip was over, but now it seemed like he has to wait for a bit, before he could get the chance.

    Sam didn¡¯t speak to them on their training and left them to take rest after the long arduous journey for the six months.

    At this moment, in an ind of the beast faction.

    Sanjay, appeared with Watt in tow. There is a formation in the open air on the ind.

    Watt¡¯s eyes were bloodshot as he looked at Sanjay, thetter only replied with nonchnce, he took off the restraints on Watt and said.

    "You don¡¯t have to feel restrained, feel at home. I will arrange residence with the core disciples of the faction and you can stay there, just feel around and see if you like it here. You can attend the lectures along with other disciples and will be treated the same.

    If you have any problems, you can contact me.

    I did tell your boss, that I will take care of you, but still your talent is good and your battle awareness and prowess are above average.

    I think you have great potential and if you like it, you can join our faction as I feel that your boss would be joining here very soon."

    Watt stayed silent for a second and said.

    "I think it is better if you start finding another faction to join."

    Sanjay frowned and asked. "What do you mean?"

    Watt stood up and said. "You will know exactly what I mean in one year."

    With those words, he started walking confidently and even gestured for Sanjay to lead the way. This puzzled Sanjay, this is not how a person who was abducted would behave.

    He was confused on where Watt got this confidence from. As for Watt, he himself took this chance as another training exercise. It is just a year and since this ce is one of the six major powers, then there is no reason for him to give up a chance to get the battle experience of fighting the elites of this organization.

    He would be an idiot if he gave up this opportunity.

    At this moment, Sam is taking a shower. He let go of all his powers and is taking in the cold water pouring on him.

    There are some bruises on his body and they started to sting when they came in contact with the water, but there is no expression on his face. He just closed his eyes and was taking everything in.

    Two days passed and soon, the day for inauguration is here. For these two days, Sam didn¡¯t meet anyone, even though there are some administrative matters to deal with, he didn¡¯t bothering out as he wanted to do nothing but rest for some time period.

    Philip and Jack took it up on themselves to greet the invited guests and arranging them amodation, in the newly built hotel.

    The hotel situation ispletely new for these guests. They werepletely stunned by the presence of the room service and the house-keeping. All they knew are inns and guest houses. A multi-storey hotel is definitely a new thing.

    Some of the Dukes who have never met Sam also came and they have beenining about Sam not receiving them personally.

    For that, Philip went to Arc and said few words.

    "Sam ispletely pissed and not in a good mood and your Dukes seemed to have some verbal diarrhoea."

    He just left his statement went on to do his own work.

    Actually, these Dukes only want to test some waters, they were warned by Arc not piss off Sam and how dangerous he could be. But these geezers didn¡¯t give Sam much credit, at most they thought he was intelligent with his inventions, but that¡¯s it.

    After all, people tend to judge others by their own standards, but their actions resulted them to pay a price. That night, Arc went to all the hotel rooms and gave a good beating to every duke.

    On the day of inauguration, Sam showed up.

    He is back to usual self, there are no signs of anger of frustration of Watt¡¯s disappearance. He is back to his cold, smart and difficult to read self. The inauguration took up the whole day and all kinds of things are being exined one by one.

    There are even visits to some factories, where the Power hammers and Circr saws which can be used for cutting metals and are run by the steam engines are being tested. He didn¡¯t show them the full production line, but showed the testing phases and demonstrations.

    After the whole day, there was a banquet at night, where all the guests gathered and exchanged pleasantries and widened their connections, Sam only stayed there for a few minutes and left to meeting room.

    Inside, Arthur is sitting with his two more subordinates. He sat opposite to them and said.

    "You have seen, what I can do. I can provide many things to the thunder god temple and since, we don¡¯t have much animosity, I don¡¯t mind partnering with you., Anyway, I want to enter the society of the six major powers.

    As for shadow sword..."

    He paused and took out the shadow sword and let the sword release its might aura.

    "I gained the acknowledgement and it is mine now. I have an alternative for this."

    Sam ced a spatial ring on the table and continued.

    "You go back and show this to higherups. If possible, go straight to the temple head and tell him that I have ten times more of what is inside this ring and I am willing to offer it to you in exchange.... "

    He went on to exin what he brings to the table and their discussion went on for more than two hours.

    After that, the three of them from the thunder-god temple got their restraints lose and they left the ce with the scrolls.

    Sam went back to his room in the sky scr.a.p.er the top floor as he looked at the new city. He would be earning hundreds of millions in a single day and the first day¡¯s ie alone will be in billions. The hundreds of millions of people in the continent are all his customers. He essentially took away businesses from many families, he made the products of the four major towers essible to the people and there is an extreme attraction of the park.

    The businesses from many noble families and other merchants would bepletely down, at least in the Dukedom capitals.

    The other cities still have business potential, but the major business happens in the Dukedom capitals. They are all gritting their teeth in anger, but they could do nothing.

    All they can do is hold it in and shut their mouths.

    Sam started sorting his thoughts out on what happened until now and what will happen in the future.

    It has been a little more than a year since the pce of inheritances and there is still around two years for it to open again and from his cultivation speed, Sam would be in Nascent stage.

    As for the exact cultivation level, he doesn¡¯t know as there are many possibilities on how long it would take him to reform his body and the mental strength.

    And there is another issue as it would take longer periods of time to even have a minor breakthrough as he continued on improving and in the Nascent stage, he might even spend more than a year in the initial three stages.

    As for other things, he has to visit the Beast faction as soon as possible. He doesn¡¯t know why, but Sam felt that Sanjay has more reasons than the shadow sword to force him to visit the beast faction.

    His actions are too defensive and he is not even willing to do any damage to Sam as there is definitely a choice of beating Sam up and take him forcefully.

    Of course, that is only a choice and no one knows the final result. But from Sam¡¯s state at that point, that is indeed a feasible option with fifty percent of sess.

    Sam threw that thought to the back of his mind, no matter the reason, he has to go and find that guy as fast as he can.

    But the problem is that Sam doesn¡¯t have any ess to the information and the workings of the six major powers. He has too little information and how the things work in vicinities of the central continent.

    As for the meteorite sand ind, he has to wait for six more months before he could go there. As the essible period of this year has already passed.

    At the thought of the meteorite sand, Sam suddenly remembered the guy who uses Blood Golems and went over to tell Jack about the matter.

    Jack was stunned for a second, but went over to meet the killer of his father and when Sam came back to his room, he noticed that Philip is waiting for him at the entrance.

 Chapter 305: Situation of the Planet

    Philip and Sam sat down in Sam¡¯s room. They are both holding some freshly crushed fruit juice with some ice in it.

    They didn¡¯t speak for a long time as they sat on the floor and looked at the scenery of the city from the floor to ceiling window.

    They are absorbing the majestic beauty of the city that Sam created in six months.

    After more than half-an-hour of silence, Philip finally spoke.

    "When are we leaving?"

    Even though he didn¡¯t mention any specifics, Sam understood, there is the only ce they have to go now and that is to the Beast faction.

    "There is more, than six major powers to the vicinities of the central continent." Philip continued after taking a sip.

    "There are basically five major continents, six countries, six archipgos and tenrge inds on this which are discovered and explored or being explored by the humans.

    In them, the central continent is thergest of all and the beasts rule thend.

    Around the central continent, there are six archipgos that are upied by the six major powers, and the twelverge inds are upied by eight minor powers and the four major professions.

    Although the four major professions are powerful, they don¡¯t have much territory, rather they have some camps in the central continent from which they gather resources.

    Apart from that, there are some small inds which are upied by some minor professions like seers.

    Apart from the central continent, the remaining four out of the five major continents are not that significant when wepare the resources. That is why the major powers didn¡¯t show much importance to these continents.

    They are namely, northern, western, southern, and eastern continents.

    As you know, now the western continent has the only country, but the remaining continents are pretty divided and have no less than three empires.

    There are six countries that are scattered near the continents. They are alsorge inds, but they are ssified as countries for some reason.

    As for the six major powers, they are namely, Thunder-god temple, Lightning Spear sect, Thunder-bolt sect, The beast faction, Usaine Sect, The Garden.

    The thunder god temple, the lightning spear sect, and the thunder-bolt sect are once only lightning cultivators¡¯ sects, butter, they started epting others too.

    The Garden is a sect that is mostly focused on the wood elemental users and there are some herb experts, pill masters, potion masters in them and they have quite a sway in the pharmaceutical tower.

    The Usaine Sect is a sect that is quite diverse and has all types of cultivators, but they have numerous artisans, formation masters, and inscription masters. They do have some influence on these three major professional associations, but they wouldn¡¯t involve in the operations of these towers.

    The beast faction.

    This is the only faction that involves too much with the beasts in the central continent.

    The beast faction has some allies from the beast tribes in the central continents, they are neutral beasts which are not hostile towards humans and don¡¯t mingle with other beast tribes that attack humans and are in constant wars with the human powers.

    That is mainly because they cultivate in Beast warrior arts."

    Sam was surprised when he heard that, he is almost thinking that the beast warrior arts are extinct in this world, as he couldn¡¯t find a single record on the beast warrior arts.

    Even though Watt noticed that they are beast warriors in their previous battles, he didn¡¯t get to talk with them about that and hence doesn¡¯t know the details. So, he was quite surprised.

    But Philip didn¡¯t notice his expression and went on with his exnation.

    "They will have a beastpanion since their birth and they would make a pact with the beast and they will always fight together. They are actually, quite powerful. But this also made them hostile with some beast tribes as they disliked the fact, they are using the methods to brainwash some cubs since they are born and forcefully making them coexist with the cultivators instead of the cultivator gaining the beast¡¯s approval.

    The beast faction is essentially made of four families and each family had a different approach regarding the beast cultivation.

    One of them believed to gain the beast¡¯s approval, one of the forces the beast and makes it act like a puppet, one of them injects the bloodline directly without any pact or contract, andst one of them relies on taming.

    There was an internal conflict among them approximately twenty years ago and since then their rtionsh.i.p.s have been rough. But when facing enemies, they are actually quite united."

    Philip chugged down the juice in his ss and took a deep breath before saying.

    "I actually don¡¯t belong to the Western continent and certainly not to the Evergreen family.

    I was born in the Usaine Sect.

    My father used to be a great artisan who is quite adept at making puppets.

    But he is not from any of the prestigious factions which are formed within the Sect and always maintained a neutral stand.

    I was raised in that ce for eleven years. In all the six major powers, every child will be enrolled in education at the age of four.

    They would have to study various knowledge rted to cultivation, trades, the history of their own organization, their enemies and usage of elements, and so on.

    It also includes quite some brainwashing along with the education so that their younger generations would be loyal to the organization and clearly contain a deep-rooted hatred for their enemies.

    My father doesn¡¯t have much presence within the organization as he wouldn¡¯t involve himself with the activities and operations of the organization.

    Anyway, he joined it as amon disciple. He would create weapons, puppets, and some other things customized for the core disciples.

    But everything changed one day when my father found something on the central continent.

    It was something like a treasure box that couldn¡¯t be open. It works based on a puzzle and my father was fascinated by the mechanism.

    When he started doing research and going through the ancient records, he found little information, there are no exact details except for the fact it is mysterious and there are some secrets that can be revealed.

    I don¡¯t know, how the a.d.u.l.ts in the major powers think. But they will link the word mysterious to the treasure and one of the Grand elders of the sect just wanted to keep the box to himself and that¡¯s it.

    My father was poisoned, but the person wasn¡¯t able to find out the box as it was with me. I just wanted to y a prank on my father by hiding it for a night and that was the same night my father died.

    My mother doesn¡¯t know that it was due to that box, but that grand elder was after our lives.

    We didn¡¯t know where to go as we were isted. He seemed to have put his Grand elder status for good use. We didn¡¯t even get a chance to ask for help.

    My mother desperately ran away with me and we arrived at the space gates. Usage of any space gate would lead them to our location.

    So, my mother chose a different way. Just like how the people from the six major powers came to find us, she opted for a one-way space gate. She destroyed her cultivation and activated some inscriptions to set the space gate to a random location and we arrived at the Western Continent.

    The Grand elder couldn¡¯t use the same space gate as his cultivation is too high. And since my mother didn¡¯t even select some coordinates he couldn¡¯t find the exact location.

    I only knew all of this after I read my father¡¯s diary which I hid away from the box.

    I still have the box with me. Every time, I see it, I will be reminded of my father¡¯s death.

    I wanted to be an artisan like my father, but I didn¡¯t have enough courage to take the final step to learn."

    Philip finished this and heaved a sigh of relief, although he didn¡¯t go into full details, this counted as him telling his past and he felt a weight lifted off of his chest.

    Sam didn¡¯t feel particrly emotional. There is no use in being emotional. If being emotional could solve things, Sam had cried for hundreds of hours in his previous life.

    After learning that crying couldn¡¯t solve anything, he decided to value his tears more.

    Of course, he was sad for Philip¡¯s past. He doesn¡¯t need much thought to know what might have happened to Philip¡¯s mother, she destroyed her cultivation forcefully which might have brought harmful effects to her internal organs, and could have died. He didn¡¯t want to ask.

    But there are also other thoughts in his mind.

    "Do you know Sirona?" Sam asked in a low tone.

    Suddenly, Philip was stunned.

    "How do you know her?" Philip asked in surprise.

 Chapter 306: Going to Thunder god temple-I

    After that night¡¯s talk, Sam is sorting out his thoughts on how he should proceed and every scenario will be based on the attitude of the Thunder-god temple towards his proposal.

    While he was thinking, three out of six major powers are currently in a heated discussion about Sam.

    The first one is the Thunder-god temple.

    He was in a private meeting with the Temple¡¯s head. As a direct descendant, he does have some privileges.

    Arthur has brought back some recording crystals and showed them to the temple-head andstly gave him the spatial ring, which Sam asked to pass.

    The temple head is already stunned when he saw the things Sam has done. Of course, many of them are not that useful for the temple, but the main factor to consider is the change that Sam could bring.

    With his unique formations and versatile thinking, when he saw the recording about the city, he could see that there are many unique things and there are some training methods that are employed in the tasks Sam ced in the park which can be essed by cultivators.

    Even, he didn¡¯t think of that.

    Particrly, there is one promise that Sam made, he would create them a chance to conquer their surrounding seas.

    This is the main problem for the six major powers, although, they have conquered their inds, the seas are the major threats for them. Sometimes, some amphibious beasts woulde in and wreak havoc and there are wars between the major powers and the beasts asionally.

    The beasts on thend and beasts in the seas have friendlier rtionsh.i.p.s and this makes things difficult to the cultivators as many wars take ce at the seashore.

    The six major powers have only one goal and that is to conquer as muchnd on the central continent as possible.

    But they don¡¯t dare to move in as the threat posed was too great. Even the warfare happens at the shores which shows that humans really don¡¯t have much power in the central continent.

    If as Sam said, they can find a way to gain ess to the waters around them, at least they can be rest assured that they wouldn¡¯t lose lives there and there are many unexplored things on the seabed which they couldn¡¯t get.

    If they want to explore them, a transcendent has to step in as there is no way anyone below can hold back their breath for that long, but if the transcendent reallyes, the beasts in the sea wille as well and the bitter battle would be their only choice.

    Temple-head was thinking of all these factors, but he was still unconvinced as this doesn¡¯t seem like something that could outshine the shadow sword.

    There is only one more thing that he has to see and that is the spatial ring.

    When he took out the item inside, he was stunned. It is just some Blue colored Sand which has rather coarse grains, but as he examined it more and more, he was shocked to his core.

    This is the thunder meteorite sand. He knew of its characteristics but never had he seen. For all he knew, only the Usaine are in possession of some meteorite sands and that too a small amount, which could only make two weapons at most.

    They are trying to test their characteristics in order to find the ces and the conditions of the environments they might be able to find them. They treated the meteorite sands like sacred items. And it is a rumor that the head of Usaine was the only one who has a meteorite sand weapon in possession.

    They don¡¯t know why they didn¡¯t make any more weapons.

    But now, the thunder-god temple head has some meteorite sand in his hands and Arthur said that there is about ten times the amount in Sam¡¯s possession which Sam is willing to offer up.

    "I will make my decision in a few days, you may leave." The temple head sent Arthur away as he continued examining the sand.

    Meanwhile, in the Usaine sect. All the elders and the researchers who work with the Sirona are having an extremely hard time.

    Something seemed to have changed, since herst escape.

    Yes, Escape.

    The Sect leaderpletely rejected her idea of going to the western continent, but since she wanted the formation simtor badly, she escaped, by threatening the space gate operator.

    After she came back, the formation simtor is with her, and the sect leader who was angry at her escape waspletely shocked and summoned her to the meeting.

    "Sirona, is it true that you have the formation simtor?"

    "Yes."

    "Did you get the shadow sword then?" He couldn¡¯t hide his excitement when he asked this question. Even the remaining elders are also thinking the same.

    But the answer disappointed them.

    "Nope." She said it with utmost honesty.

    The sect-leader frowned and asked again.

    "Why did you not bring the shadow sword with the formation simtor?"

    "I didn¡¯t ask the sword, since I don¡¯t want it."

    The frown on the sect leader¡¯s face got deeper and he asked.

    "Didn¡¯t I tell you before that if you kill a person, you should take all their possessions, and even if you don¡¯t want them, you should still get them back for the sect? Why didn¡¯t you do so?"

    Sirona looked at him as there was a flicker in her eyes. "I didn¡¯t kill him."

    "If you didn¡¯t kill him, how did you get the simtor?" The sect head is losing his patience, but he couldn¡¯t do anything, this is Sirona¡¯s nature. She wouldn¡¯t say anything more than necessary. In fact, they trained her like that and he has a huge role in that training, but now their actions are biting their backs.

    Sirona recounted everything that has happened except for the conversation she had about Sam after the battle and looked at them.

    Their faces showed myriad expressions, from speechlessness to suspicion and disbelief.

    The Sect-leader looked at her deeply and said.

    "You can go now. We will talkter."

    Sirona left the ce and when she entered her room, there are many metallic pieces, scrolls, formation discs are all over the ce. There are some forged weapons, half-drawn inscriptions etc on the floor.

    At this moment, in the meeting hall.

    "Sect-leader, I think she is lying. How is it possible for Sam to handover his simtor even after defeating her? There is no way that could happen. She must have taken him down and stole the sword and let him live to make up that story." One of the elders said so with extreme confidence.

    "Yes, as she is an expert artisan, she could have noticed the value of the shadow sword and stole it away from him."

    Like this, there are myriad spections that used Sirona as a thief of the shadow sword.

    "I will look into the matter and see if what she said is true." The sect-leader said as he ended the meeting. Even he doesn¡¯t have any confidence in his own brainwashing of Sirona.

    He felt that the value of the shadow sword might have changed her straightforward character.

    Meanwhile, Sirona who is sitting in her room is holding amunication token in her hand as she listened to their conversation.

    There is an inexplicableplex mixture of emotions in her heart, but she couldprehend what she is feeling right now.

    She didn¡¯t care about worldly possessions, strength, fame, or power. Since childhood, there is only one thing she had in mind and that is she has to pursue and gain as much knowledge as she can and her knowledge has to be useful for the Usaine sect.

    And when she got some results, she has to show them to the sect and gain acknowledgment.

    Her desire for this too strong and she even felt that her life only has a meaning if she lives it like this.

    Once, there was an assassination attempt from an enemy spy and she was afraid that if she died, that would be meaningless and since that day, she decided to spare her time to improve her strength and make some ¡¯toys¡¯ so that she wouldn¡¯t die when she is still in the sect.

    Apart from that she only makes a move on the sect members when they call her names.

    But now, she is feeling that her life doesn¡¯t have any meaning at all and at least not for these people.

    She wouldn¡¯t have noticed if not for the conversation she has with Sam after the battle.

    He clearly said what would happen and she would be better off if she finds her way out of the sect. But she refused to believe him at that time.

    Even though she didn¡¯t believe Sam, she wanted to confirm to erase the small seed Sam has nted, but it seems like she has to believe Sam on this one.

    Although there is not much that happened in the meeting hall and so many people directly used her, there is only one person she cared about and that is the main brainwasher for hers the sect-leader.

    Sirona is a simple-minded person and she might be easy to manipte, but it is also easy to lose the trust of that simple-minded person. If the sect-leader has argued back that she wouldn¡¯t that, then everything would have been over.

    But now, due to conflicting replies, there is a dangerous seed sprouting in her heart.

 Chapter 307: Going to thunder god temple-II

    The Beast faction.

    Sanjay is still wearing his ck robes covering his facepletely.

    He is inside a private room where the man who ordered to block Sam¡¯s report was staying.

    "Who is Sam?" He asked the man with confusion and curiosity.

    The man only smiled at the question, with no intention to reply.

    "Uncle, is there something I have to know? Or am I not qualified to know about this? Who is Sam, why does he look so much like that person?"

    "You will know when the timees. I just hope that you wouldn¡¯t do the same pathetic mistakes your father had done. Now, leave."

    Sanjay could only leave the ce in dejection.

    He wanted to learn who Sam is because that face is all too familiar to him. Even though they are slightly different, they look mostly the same, with some normal makeup one could even pose as another.

    Since the time he saw some secret records in his childhood by ident, he has always admired that face.

    But there is no luck for him to learn about what happened.

    At this moment, Sam is inside his residence taking a call.

    It was from Arc. Sam has received an invite from the Thunder god temple.

    Sam informed Philip and Jack. The trio started their journey.

    ording to Sam¡¯s previous ns, he would be taking some time off from all this and focusing on the business and research.

    He wanted to enjoy the feeling of the home he created himself.

    But luck is certainly not on his side. Watt¡¯s disappearancepletely changed his flow.

    The trio started their journey. He arranged another beast pouch for Vulture and too it with him.

    They didn¡¯t travel on the beasts or harbinger. They went on trains.

    Sam wanted to at least enjoy some fruits of his creation. He watched as he visited all the stops and looked at the parks running there.

    It took three days for him to go from his city to the Imperial Capital.

    Arc has already prepared the space-gate formation and Sam arrived.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know when he wille back, so he made a deal with Arc. Arc woulde and handover the earning every month and Sam would pay five percent from his personal profits.

    Even though Arc might do this small favor without any payment, it is not good for a transcendent stage cultivator to run errands without any profits.

    When Sam arrived at the thunder god temple¡¯s space gate ind, Arthur is standing there waiting to receive him.

    After exchanging some pleasantries, he was escorted to a meeting room, where a middle-aged man with a thick beard and curly brown hair sat down waiting for him.

    The Middle-aged man had a scar on the left side of his face, from forehead to the temple. The scar crossed across his eye. As if showcasing his battle glory.

    "Greetings, Temple Head."

    Sam greeted the person as soon as he entered the room.

    "Greetings... Mr. Sam."

    Sam was confused at the hesitation of the person and then the middle-aged man said with a smile.

    "You might be of junior generation, Mr. Sam. But you are a person of many trades and talents and master of many crafts. One has to respect any type of knowledge and skill. So a person as skilled as you deserves some respect. It is just, that I was confused about which title should I address you with."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and just looked at the person¡¯s eyes, one could see through a person¡¯s soul through their eyes.

    It is easy to create a fake feeling or sentence with the voice, but it is almost impossible to fake it through the eyes.

    Sam has very little information regarding this temple-head. So, he has to be careful.

    "May I ask, why do you want to give me such a precious ore, just to exchange a ce in the thunder god temple? You could have easily been selected as a disciple and I believe Moriya still hasn¡¯t closed the offer."

    Temple-head asked as he looked at Sam.

    "Of course, it is not just for a position, I also want a favor," Sam said in a calm tone.

    "Please do tell."

    "I will give you the thunder meteorite sand and I will even give you a lead on where to find more, in exchange for that, I want you to create a diversion for me.

    I want the attention of all the major powers to disappear.

    All you have to do is ask one of your elites, who is highly revered and famous to act as if he was injured after trying to tame the shadow sword and make the world believe that the sword was destroyed in the process."

    The temple-head raised his eyebrow and asked.

    "Why go through so much trouble? You don¡¯t want thunder god temple to help you in this matter?"

    "Nope. I just want some superficial support from the thunder-god temple. Just tell the world that you gave me the privilege because I exchanged the shadow sword with you and an ind would be destroyed that¡¯s it."

    The temple-head thought for a moment and asked.

    "What is your aim? What do you want to be? Your talent, your strength? What are all these for?"

    Sam sighed at his words and said after some thought.

    "I don¡¯t have any particr goals except for one. I have to find a person in this world. Maybe, I will think of my goal after I met that person."

    Temple¡¯s head thought for a second and said with a smile.

    "We have a deal. You would be a core disciple of the thunder-god temple. You would receive all the benefits that a core disciple gets. In three months there is a chance for you to test waters with the Beast faction.

    I cannot grant you any other special treatment, of course except for the artisan duties. I don¡¯t want you to directly create things to clear all the problems. You can open service and let the disciples and the elders ask you the solutions for the problems they encounter and notice.

    After all, a sudden solution would make themzy.

    Apart from that, you are the same as any other disciple in the temple."

    Sam ced a spatial ring on the table and stood up.

    "This is the thunder meteorite sand. It is enough to make three decent weapons and can be stretched to four if the weapons are smaller. As for the lead..." He then gave some details about the Northern continent¡¯s underworld organization and left.

    Now, all he has to do is, join the organization and create a scenario that the shadow sword is destroyed.

    If not for the fact that Watt kidnapped, he would have just let it be. But now he realized he might have gone too far in pushing their training. He could have interfered earlier and this wouldn¡¯t have happened.

    He also has a vague feeling that Watt was taken away because of something rted to the original Sam of this world, which he had to bear since he upied his body.

    Sam asked for a barren ind and started making preparations for the next step in his n which is to make the world believe that the shadow Sword is destroyed.

    While he is working here, someone in the beast faction is looking at his portrait and is gritting his teeth in extreme anger.

    Before him, there is a person who is kneeling on both legs and another person standing with his head bowed down.

    The Faction head looked at the kneeling person and said. "Since, when did you be a dog of that guy?" The kneeling person is none other than the person who received orders from the man in the darkroom to seal Sam¡¯s picture.

    Seeing that the person is not replying, he kicked him in the stomach and stormed off of the room.

    Soon, he entered the darkroom and yelled loudly.

    "How dare you cover up for that Bastard son? Who gave you the right to?"

    "The man sat on his chair peacefully, with his eyes closed."

    The Faction-head calmed down and said in a low voice.

    "Brother, why did you do this and how is even alive?" This time, his voice is so low as he doesn¡¯t want anyone else to listen to it.

    "Why? Just because you wanted to kill him, he cannot live?"

    "Why are you siding with him? Just for that Bastard¡¯s son?"

    "Faction-Head. Stop fooling yourselves by calling him bastard time and again. You and I both know what he is and how he got thatbel."

    "Hmph! I would like to see, how he will stay alive? Since he has stayed put, he should have done so for the rest of his life, now I will give him a dog¡¯s death."

    He stormed off from his room.

    The man in the chair smirked at his behavior.

    That day, Sam¡¯s picture was all over the Beast faction¡¯s territory and there is news along with it.

    It was said that there was a traitor of the faction who was the reason for the civil war which urred around two decades ago. He escaped and it was found out Sam was his son. There is a possibility to find the traitors whereabouts when they catch Sam.

    When the Grand realm experts are getting ready to take the mission, the faction had got some news from the Seer tower. That is, Sam is currently in the thunder-god temple.

 Chapter 308: Meeting Nicholas Again

    Sam doesn¡¯t know that someone hasbeled him a Bastard far away. One must wonder how he reacts if he knows that.

    Right now, he is on a deserted ind that doesn¡¯t have any living beings. Even the trees are dead. Except for some weird type of grass and some thorns, there is nothing there.

    He had dug out a big pit and there is arge energy cell of Dark element inside it.

    He is going to create an illusion that the shadow sword is destroyed. He has to agree that he was being overconfident when he just kept the shadow sword with him given that all the major powers wille after him.

    If it was Past Sam with nopanions his attitude should have been alright. Now that he has friends, he believed that he should think before he made decisions.

    Now, he is waiting for the expert the temple-head is going to send here to be the decoy and to his surprise, the person is Moriya.

    "Nice to meet you again. I heard that you joined the Thunder-God temple."

    "Yes. I needed a ce to start since I decided to expand my horizons and thunder god temple is the nearest choice."

    Sam is extremely blunt with his words. Moriya didn¡¯t seem to mind and said.

    "Everyone has their own reasons, no matter how trivial or important that reason might be, you still joined us. Anyway, I heard that you need me for some act. What should I do?"

    "Just stay within the vicinities with full-on defense. Don¡¯t let your guard down. Not even for a second."

    Moriya nodded and stood at the seashore, while Sam is at the center of the ind.

    After a few minutes, Moriya felt a huge wave of energy fluctuations and the dark element energy was in extreme turmoil in the ce.

    He saw that the spiritual energy all over the ind getting into turmoil and the waves hit him really hard.

    If he is not guarding himself, he would really be injured.

    After the explosion, the spiritual energy on the whole ind is a mess.

    He ran to the center to check on Sam. He has no confidence that he would survive if he was the one in the center of the explosion.

    The Dark element energy is wreaking Havoc everywhere and he saw Sam standing in the center of the crater without any damage. The only stable spiritual energy zone on the ind is around Sam.

    He walked out slowly and said.

    "We are done here. All you have to do is say to the world that you are injured and are in the process of healing. It would be better if even your disciples don¡¯t know."

    Moriya subconsciously nodded. Sam boarded the harbinger and was about to fly away, but he remembered something and said to Moriya.

    "The soul chasing butterfly that is following me for two days has died and you might want to tell that guy whoever it is that controlling the queen butterfly to send the new one."

    With those words, he left the ce.

    Moriya came to his senses when he heard Sam¡¯s words. Soul chasing butterfly is one of the biggest secrets of the Thunder-god temple. Only a select few have ess to the information about it.

    Even among the elders, Moriya is the only one who knew about it.

    He doesn¡¯t know how Sam knew about it, but those words are not just a reminder. He once again looked at the destroyed ind and went back to the temple to report to the temple-head.

    Sam created the st for two reasons and one of them is obviously to tell the world that the shadow sword is destroyed and another reason is to give the temple-head of the thunder god temple a message.

    Two days ago, when he had the meeting with him, Sam noticed that the temple head is a bit weird. He smiled and his words seemed genuine, but he couldn¡¯t shake off the feeling that is warning him against trusting that guy.

    Even if it wasn¡¯t for that feeling, he still has to give them a warning. Human greed is hard to predict and control. Although Sam gave them enough meteorite sand and they could create spirit weapons given enough time, there is no telling, what the temple head will think.

    The world might be fooled that the shadow sword is destroyed, but the temple head knew it wasn¡¯t and he might covet it.

    So, Sam created this st and revealed the existence of the soul chasing butterfly to tell them that he is resourceful enough to know about their spying system and also has enough means to deal some damage to them.

    He has to go through this all because he doesn¡¯t have enough strength.

    Sam went back to the quarters that are given to him. Jack and Philip are also given one near them,

    As they agreed, Sam has every privilege as a Core disciple, except for one. The entry to the Temple library.

    Even though they didn¡¯t talk about it, Sam knew his boundaries. Even if he wants to go, nobody would stop him, but he would have to deal with the consequences as when he wants to leave this ce, the temple can use this as leverage to hinder him.

    So, the trio agreed to not visit the core areas of the thunder god temple.

    After his arrival in his residence, Jack and Philip came in to discuss something.

    It is about the whole thing about the chance with the Beast faction. Philip and Jack went to ask around about what this is all about. They even made some acquaintances as the people in the core residence zone are curious about the new core disciples.

    This is the ce where the Core disciples, Elders reside, so the people here are of some status. If there are any newly promoted disciples, then they would have already known it, but there is none of that.

    That is why they are extremely curious, which reduced their effort.

    They made some acquaintances and learned that there is an event that is happening in three months.

    "They said that there is apetition among the six major powers to settle some disputes of resources among themselves. We don¡¯t know the exact details. But there are three categories in thepetition.

    Candidates below Age fifty and cultivation below pre-transcendence

    Candidates below Age thirty and cultivation below Nascent

    Candidates below Age twenty and cultivation below the Grand realm.

    The factions will send their elite teams and even the killings are allowed. It would be in a tournament-style and there is no need to hold back and no strings attached."

    Philip gave a gist of the event.

    "So, what are the requirements for the entry?"

    "Only the people in the top ten list can enter. There will be new ranking lists released based on the requirements and the top five people are the only ones who have a choice to enter thepetition.

    The rankings are decided based on the duels between the candidates. Any candidate can challenge another candidate who is within the ten ranks higher than him.

    Since we just arrived, our names are not even on the list, so we have to challenge thest candidate and climb up the ranks."

    "How many candidates are there?"

    "Three hundred and twenty-five."

    Sam was dumbfounded and Jack exined.

    "Most of the internal disciples are eligible. There are only ten core disciples suited for this category and they are already upying the top ten ces, although the remaining candidates don¡¯t get to participate, these act as some status symbols so they are extremelypetitive of this thing."

    "I will go alone. We don¡¯t have to win this thing for the thunder god temple. You guys keep a low profile. We don¡¯t want to involve in their affairs much."

    As they were discussing, someone came and knocked on the door.

    "Come in."

    The door opened and Nichs came in. He looked more robust than before. He wore the same clothes as the rest of the core disciples.

    "How are guys you doing? It has been a while" Nichs is as bright as ever as he greeted them with a smile.

    "Well, it has been a while, but you didn¡¯t seem to have changed at all. You are wreaking havoc everywhere you go." Philipmented from the side.

    Sam looked at him with a puzzled expression then Philip exined.

    "Nichs is a star here. He recently broke through the grand realm and he is already knocking on the doors of all the people who are in the initial stages of the grand realm.

    The fresh news is thatst night some of the guys had enough of his shit and decided to beat him up, but he identally let of all restraints and beat the crap out of them. You should have seen them. There are five of them and they will need at least a month before they could recover.

    They are currently removed from the ranking list."

    Sam smiled at this. Nichs must have been carried away with excitement instead of being angry for the ambush.

 Chapter 309: Meeting Arman

    Nichs took a seat and spoke to Sam. His expression changed as if he remembered something serious and said in a solemn tone.

    "Sam, because of you, my father almost became a ve. How dare you? I challenge to a battle right now."

    Sam rolled his eyes and said.

    "Philip is wrong. You did change. Your acting skills went from bad to worse."

    Nichs¡¯s face became red with embarrassment.

    "If you want a battle, you could just ask, why would you embarrass yourselves like that? Philip said from the side."

    Nichs turned to Sam and asked.

    "How about a Spa.."

    "Nope." Sam immediately rejected it as soon even before Nichs could finish the word Spar.

    Nichs turned to Philip and said.

    "That¡¯s the reason." He then turned to Sam and said again.

    "Anyway, thanks for releasing my father. I owe you one for that."

    "You don¡¯t owe me anything. Even though I didn¡¯t mean to do that, it was indeed because of me your father ended up in such a state. It would have been better if I had contacted me before the way though." Sam replied.

    "I don¡¯t think so. If you had contacted him, from his character he wouldn¡¯t have chosen your side in fear of losing his status in case the empire wins. And if he did that, you wouldn¡¯t have let him go like that.

    In my opinion, it is better this way."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply to that, but he agreed with what he said. He definitely wouldn¡¯t have let the Duke go as the rejection would have made him his enemy. At least in the present situation, he is a bystander.

    After some small talk, Nichs asked.

    "Are you guys joining the resourcepetition?"

    "Only I am going?"

    "What? Why? Phillip and Jack have a shot at the position. Why are they not going?"

    "Well, unlike you we are not real members of the temple. We don¡¯t want to involve in the affairs of the temple much." Sam exined their situation vaguely without giving many details.

    Nichs also didn¡¯t ask for more information and said.

    "You guys would miss some great battles. We can observe the battles of the seniors. Even though, you don¡¯t want to be in the main team, how about a reserve team? You can at least get to spectate the battle."

    "There is a reserve team?" Philip asked in surprise.

    "Of course, there is. The first five rankers on the list will be the main team and the next five will be the reserve team. If any of the candidates die in the battle, the reserve members will join the main team."

    "Sounds good. I will join the reserve team. What about you?" Philip asked Jack. Jack also nodded.

    Sam didn¡¯t object and agreed.

    Nichs left after some time and just as the trio was about to go out and start the duels for rankings, another guest arrived.

    This time it is Arman.

    "Hello, I hope I am not intruding." He greeted with a smile.

    Philip and Jack are not acquainted with him, so they didn¡¯t recognize, at most his face is a bit familiar, but that is it.

    But from Sam¡¯s expression, it seemed that they knew each other.

    "How are you?" Arman asked.

    "I am fine, thank you. How are you?" Sam replied in a polite tone, but he was expressionless. He knew that Arman¡¯s identity is special. Just like how he is not the real Sam of this world, Arman is also not the real Arman of this world.

    That is why he felt that there is a need for him to stay vignt of this guy.

    He doesn¡¯t know the reason, but he does know they are forced to be in this world for a purpose. Until he knew the exact purpose, Sam doesn¡¯t want to be close to any other people who came just like him into this world.

    Arman was not affected by his perfunctory reply, he ignored itpletely and said.

    "I heard; you made a deal with Arthur. If you wanted to you should have made that deal with me, after all, we are old-time business partners. Aren¡¯t we?"

    "Seems like you are not that experienced in the business. There is no use in having the capability of making a deal if you are not in the right ce, right time, and the right thing to sell.

    I needed that deal with the thunder god temple. With your capability I have no doubt you could arrange that, but that you are not avable to me at that moment. If you are in Arthur¡¯s position at that time, you could have gotten that deal. Hard luck, what can we do?"

    "So, now that I am here, how about I take an opportunity?"

    Sam raised an eyebrow as he looked at him.

    "Thunder Prison. How abou..."

    "No deal."

    Sam didn¡¯t even let him speakpletely. He doesn¡¯t even care about what the deal might be, because, he is not going to give the thunder prison away. He had obtained it and even gave up the chance to get some other treasures, just to know how it works.

    And after he knew how it works, he just knew that this is one of the most suitable tools for him. No matter what, he cannot recreate a more versatile tool than the thunder prison, at least not for now. So, there is no way he will be giving that up.

    "You could at least listen to me first, before rejecting."

    "There is no need of wasting your time since I am selling it."

    "Really? It is not that useful in your hands, it can be used to its full potential only in my hands. You can ask me whatever you want. I will definitely find a way for you to get it if it is within the thunder god temple."

    "Not interested."

    "I can give you millions of spirit stones worth of resources, that cannot be sold by normal sellers. You know, some of the things cannot be obtained by just money. You have to have proper channels."

    Sam smiled and said.

    "I don¡¯t need them for now, but if pushes to shove. I can create my own channels. I might not be able to buy what I want for its original worth, even if it is just a hundred spirit stones.

    But what happens, if add another zero and make it thousand, and another zero and make it ten thousand and another zero to make it a hundred thousand? It is just a matter of time before the channel opens by itself. [1]

    You don¡¯t have to worry about that."

    Sam said in a casual tone.

    "Judging from the determination to not to sell that for me. It seems that you know somethings which you are not supposed to know. How did you even know that?" Arman asked suspiciously.

    "Oh? There are somethings that I am not supposed to know? What are you even talking about?"

    Sam asked with feigned confusion.

    Arman stayed silent for a second and said.

    "Why are you so stubborn about the thunder prison?"

    "It is definitely a treasure and even I am not able to use it now, that doesn¡¯t mean I wouldn¡¯t be able to in the future. I am an artisan and I am confident that I would figure that out given appropriate amount of time."

    Arman almost sighed in relief when he heard these words.

    "I hope you will change your mind."

    Arman said and left the ce. He didn¡¯t ask a thing about the shadow sword or the thunder meteorite sand.

    Philip and Jack looked at Arman, they were extremely curious as to what Arman is talking about, but they didn¡¯t ask as Sam would have said it if it is necessary for them to know.

    After Arman left the ce, he entered his residence and activated the formations provided to his residence. He took out a saber from his storage.

    The Sabre has an electric blue de and a silver handle. This is the lightning saber which he got from the pce of inheritances.

    "Did you get the thunder prison boy?" A voice came out of the saber. It is the weapon spirit.

    "No. He is stubborn."

    "I think you should get that thunder prison. Although this saber is useful in the short term and can increase yourbat prowess, ultimately it is still a fake which is created with my copying my original. Even me you are talking to is not the full consciousness. I am just a small fraction of the original spirit in the original saber.

    This saber will prove to be less and less useful to you, the more you advance in your strength.

    The thunder prison is a different thing. That is an original weapon and created by one of the greatest artisans of the heavens. Master didn¡¯t even use it before sending it to you. You missed it."

    Arman is not happy with those words, he rebutted.

    "How can it be called sending it to me. I am not the only one there."

    "What do you know? Even after the power boost, you got after master¡¯s blessing, you still lost to another guy and he even got two items, it is your disgrace. Don¡¯t you dare point fingers at master¡¯s decisions."

    Arman stayed put as he thought of ways to get the thunder prison from Sam.

 Chapter 310: Three Months Passed

    After Arman left, Sam went out to take a look at the ranking list.

    Out of five people on the top of the list, he knew three of them. Arthur is first, Nichs second and Arman is in third ce.

    He was surprised that Arthur was able to stay in first ce with Nichs. After all, Nichs is a battle, crazy person. He would have beat the crap out of Arthur.

    As for Arman¡¯s rank, he has his doubts. Because, from what he heard from the people around, the fight wasn¡¯t even that exciting and intense as they thought it would be.

    Arman admitted defeat after five minutes as if he was exhausted.

    As far as Sam could think, Arman might have just let it go and didn¡¯t want any attention.

    As for Arthur upying the first position, it was said that Nichs didn¡¯t get a chance to battle him as he was in the western continent all these days.

    And even after he came back, he is nowhere to be seen.

    Nichs is waiting for him toe back.

    Right now, if Sam wants to participate and gain a position in the main team, he has to fight more than thirty duels at least. He doesn¡¯t need to get first ce and as long as he is in fifth ce which will make him eligible is enough for him.

    He didn¡¯t wait for anything and just started noting down the names of the people he has to challenge.

    But before that, he has to finish the battle with the 325th ranked and upy his ce.

    Luckily all the candidates are in the initial stages of the Grand realm cultivation and thest ten rankers are even Great realm cultivators.

    So, this is going to be easy.

    The first duel was over as soon as he challenged because the person is a Great realm peak state cultivator.

    As soon as he sensed Sam¡¯s cultivation, he just gave up.

    The next person, he challenged is a person is 315th ranker.

    The next person, 305th.

    As there is still three months time, he didn¡¯t rush it and settled with three matches per day.

    He doesn¡¯t want to attract too much attention as he is not prepared to deal with the six major powers. ording to his original n, he would stay in the western continent, keeping tabs on the money he is making and do more research to be stronger for a while, at least the pce of inheritance.

    Then only he would set his sights on the rest of the world to explore it. But now, he was forced toe here because of Watt¡¯s situation. That is why he thought it would be better if they are lowkey.

    That is also one of the reasons he wanted Jack and Philip to be out of thepetition.

    As they are famous as the team, they would attract more attention if they are too bright and outstanding.

    It would have been better if they don¡¯t join the reserve team too. At the end of the day, he has no right to stop them and force them to act against their wishes.

    So, the trio is set on challenging people. But unlike Sam who is doing three challenges for a day, both of them are much more low-key.

    They decided to fight a challenge every two days.

    They will be in the top ten if they win every challenge more or less within sixty days.

    ..........

    Time passed. As much as Sam wanted to stay low-key, it is impossible to be out of the limelight when he is upgrading thirty ranks every day.

    But it has its uses as Philip and Jack escaped the lime-light.

    Compared to Sam, their ascension of ten ranks for every two days is not as eye-catching. Sam is relieved as this is one of the results that he hoped to achieve.

    Even though this might look like he is undermining their talent, but the talent is a double-edged sword. It is useful as it will give a person more opportunities, but it will also deal a definite blow to them as humans are the species who get jealous easily.

    He believed that there is no other being in this universe or any other universe which is more jealous and greedier than human beings.

    Right now, they are walking in the territory of Giants and they don¡¯t have any protection, He knew more than anyone else that the thunder god temple, wouldn¡¯t bat an eyelid to sell them off if they get enough benefits.

    Philip and Jack are not ready to face that at this moment, both physically and mentally.

    Soon, the three months passed and it is time for the resourcepetition.

    Sam reached fifth ce and only defended his position. Philip and Jack got ninth and tenth ces. Their only purpose here is to spectate the battles of seniors to learn something out of it.

    That day, they were escorted to the space gate ind.

    Nichs is still in second ce as he didn¡¯t get a chance to fight Arthur, as, for the reason, Arthur was in a special mission given by the higher-ups, but there is a rumor that the higher-ups didn¡¯t let them fight so that the leadership of the team didn¡¯t go into hands of a disciple who is not a descendant of the thunder god temple.

    They might have even let Arman take this, but Nichs is aplete outsider who came from the western continent.

    Sam could totally understand this and there is a high chance that this is true.

    But what he is most interested in is, from what he knew Nichs would be thest person to be interested in the positions, fame, and status. He wondered how these higher-ups would think, that the ce they guarded with their honor online, is extremely worthless in the eyes of a green young man.

    There is an extremelyplicated space gate in a secure location of the ind.

    Sam looked at the two other teams. Right now, he is in the category of Below thirty-year-old cultivators.

    Sam is just neen, meanwhile, Jack and Philip are twenty, but their cultivations are high for their ages and can only content in the under-thirty age category.

    As for the remaining two teams, the under-twenty team is nothing special as theirpetition doesn¡¯t affect the whole resource distribution much.

    At most, they are only here to expand their horizons.

    As for thest team, which under-fifty category. Moriya is leading it.

    He is the best Nascent stage cultivator of the thunder-god temple. He is as calm as usual.

    Sam observed the Nascent stage cultivators and could sense their battle-hardened spirits.

    They are emitting an aura which is filled with the smell of blood.

    One look and he could say that they have been through all kinds of tough battles.

    Only Nascent stage cultivators Sam knew, who couldpare to them are the Six swords of the sword Marshall from the former Orion.

    They have the same kind of aura these guys had.

    After everyone gathered, the temple head came and led them to the space gate.

    After the transference, they arrived in arge stone building.

    "You guys, stay here. Moriya will lead you when it is time."

    Temple¡¯s head said those words and left. Moriya guided them outside the stone building.

    When they came out, there is arge expanse of forest.

    The stone building is not even that big. It is as big as a single bedroom apartment in the modern world and there are only two rooms, one of them is the space gate and another one is just a meeting room which is almost like a mini-auditorium.

    "Recover as soon as you can. There is not much to discuss. Don¡¯t expect a majestic ceremony or something. There wouldn¡¯t be any superficial things like that here.

    Everything will be straight forward and all you have to do is fight when you are asked to. The team with the first ce will get some prizes which would be useful for your cultivation.

    There are almost no restrictions in a fight except for the weapons, inscription scrolls, and formation discs.

    You cannot use higher ranked weapons than your cultivation level.

    You can kill the opponent if you want. The only way the fight would end is one of two faints, one of two dies, or one of the two surrenders."

    Moriya exined the rules.

    Sam was d when he heard that there are no ceremonies.

    As Moriya was about to exin the remaining rules, his expression changed and started leading them somewhere.

    "Follow me."

 Chapter 311: Frenzied Sam -I

    Moriya led them to arge clearing in the middle of the forest.

    There is a stage in the hexagonal stage in the middle and it is surrounded by six seating arrangements each facing a side of the hexagon.

    For every seating arrangement, there is the main seat in which the leader of that particr major power sat down.

    Only two of them are standing right now and they are Thunder God temple head and another man who is in his early thirties.

    They are staring daggers at each other.

    "Seems like your Beast faction is having it easy for a long time, how dare you threaten me and ask me to handover a disciple of thunder god temple? Even your father didn¡¯t dare to talk to me like that." Thunder god temple head yelled at the man.

    "Hmph. This is the final chance; I wouldn¡¯t ask again. Handover Sam. Or else we wouldn¡¯t guarantee the lives of the candidates of thunder god temple in the match."

    Sam was stunned when he heard these words and so did the rest of the candidates.

    The seating positions of the Beast faction and the Thunder god temple are adjacent and Sam could hear the disciples of the Beast faction talking about him.

    They are openly pointing at him and talking without restraint.

    "Look, that is the bastard of our Beast faction. His father is sc.u.m and traitor and heard this guy is no better."

    "Yeah, I heard that this Bastard even used the resources of our Faction his father stole and made a name for himself. Otherwise, where would he get all those skills and be an expert in so many professions?"

    "*Scoff* A traitor¡¯s son can only be a bastard, what can you expect from him?"

    .

    .

    .

    Everyone is calling him bastard, traitor, sc.u.m, and so on. The Beast faction head is coldly observing him with a faint smirk.

    He actually doesn¡¯t have any need for the thunder god temple to hand over Sam.

    He just wanted to make Sam feel ostracized and deal with some mental blows to his confidence. Which, a young man can tolerate being called a Bastard and sc.u.m by the peers?

    By now, all the other candidates from different powers are looking at Sam weirdly.

    They are whispering between themselves.

    This is what the beast faction head wanted. And he is rejoicing when he saw Sam¡¯s changed expression.

    His petty trick is working. If thunder god temple, really thought about handing Sam over, it would have been even better because, then Sam will lose his will to fight, because ording to him, Sam¡¯s position was bought over with a shadow sword.

    At least., that is what the world knew about.

    By this time, even the candidates irrespective of the age group are all looking at Sam and that includes, the thunder god temple¡¯s candidates too.

    Only two people at the scene are having different expressions than the rest. Philip and Jack immediately came to either side of Sam and put their hands over his shoulders.

    They knew how crazy Sam would get when he hears the word bastard. He would lose his mind and go crazy like a beast.

    At the Starwood academy, the situation is not any different, in that crazy state, Sam can only think about one thing clearly and that is torture. He would be a genius psycho killer.

    But today, the situation is different, Sam is surrounded by too many powerful people, he would die the minute he let loose.

    Sam already lost all the reason, when the candidates from the Beast faction started calling him out.

    He started emitting an immense amount of blood l.u.s.t. With all the mental strength he had .u.mted, he only has one drawback and that is whenever he was called some names, he couldn¡¯t control himself.

    The bloodl.u.s.t is so high and intense, that the normal candidates cannot even understand or recognize it.

    At this moment, all the big wigs started looked at Sam with an examining expression and at this exact moment, Philip and Jack put their hands over his shoulders.

    Sam¡¯s fists are clenched and veins are visible on his hands and his forehead. He is gritting his teeth really hard and two of them can even hear it.

    His eyes are in so much frenzy that they have never seen eyes like that before. It is like a hungry beast that woke up from a long sleep because of some disturbance caused by other beings.

    But that is their greatest mistake, because the beast which has forgotten about its hunger and is sleeping peacefully, now wants to Binge eat to satiate its hunger. It wants to hunt like crazy.

    Philip is extremely afraid, that Sam would do something crazy.

    In this state, he would only be clear about killing using all the methods in his arsenal.

    They wanted to cover Sam from everyone else¡¯s vision. Moriya who is the closest one with the sharpest senses looked at Sam. He could feel the killing intent and a vague beastly aura which is continuously increasing as he stood there.

    Philip noticed this and he slowly started whispering in Sam¡¯s ears.

    "Sam. Get a hold of yourselves. Sam, it¡¯s okay. You are not one just because they call you. Get a hold of yourselves. Sam, a mountain shouldn¡¯t give a shit for the dogs¡¯ barks.

    Get a hold of yourselves.

    Sam, I am here, Jack is here, Watt is still waiting for us in the Beast faction. Sam Please."

    He didn¡¯t know what to say, but he couldn¡¯t not say anything. He has to get Sam out of his frenzied state.

    Only after thest sentence, Sam started controlling his aura, but the Beast Faction candidates are not stopping there. Sam is out of his frenzy.

    But he couldn¡¯t control his killing intent.

    After all, go near an orphan who lives in a shelter home and try calling him a Bastard. If he doesn¡¯t try to beat the crap out of that person, then at least curse the shit out.

    That is if the person is living in an orphanage.

    And what kind of childhood did Sam have? He was abused mentally, physically, and s.e.x.u.a.lly. And they always give the only reason for that, him being a Bastard child that his parents didn¡¯t want. He doesn¡¯t know what circ.u.mstances led them to abandon him.

    But he never loathed any other person than he loathed his parents.

    He loathed himself for being born.

    He loathed the whole world for calling him a bastard. After all, he didn¡¯t ask to be born. Heined, cried, endured, and became the twisted person he was.

    But there is one thing he couldn¡¯t get out of his system and that is someone calling him a Bastard.

    He ughtered every person that called him a Bastard in his previous life and the only person that survived is Philip¡¯s brother and that is because of the favor Philip did when he is in the lowest point of this life.

    But now, there are people calling him a Bastard. At least the people from the Beast faction are doing that and he can hear them clearly.

    Sam tried to calm down a little bit, Philip who noticed his effort couldn¡¯t think of a solution and asked Moriya.

    "Can we just challenge the Beast faction first?" All the spectators were stunned, except for Jack, he is holding Sam¡¯s right arm tightly to not let him go crazy.

    Moriya was at a loss for words. He couldn¡¯t understand the situation except for the fact that Sam desperately wants to kill someone.

    Moriya looked at the temple head who looked at the Beast Faction head and said.

    "Since, you want to take him away so bad, let us make a deal. The other four powers will do lotteries in selecting their first match, and we will start with the Grand realm candidates.

    Beast Faction Vs Thunder god temple. An all-out battle. The winner will only be decided if one of the teams¡¯ candidates including the reserve members.

    If you want to take him away win him over."

    When the people, heard it, they arepletely stunned. They didn¡¯t expect that temple-head would propose something so brutal.

    Sam is the only one who is excited.

    "Team Battle?" Beast Faction head asked.

    "Whatever way you wish it to be."

    "Team Battle, then."

    Sam suddenly grinned from ear to ear in an extremely creepy way and said to the rest of the team.

    "Just hold them on the stage, don¡¯t let them escape. You don¡¯t even have to attack them."

    Sam didn¡¯t even wait for anyone¡¯s reply and just jumped on the stage.

    The Hexagonal stage is more than a thousand square yards. So, it isrge enough for all of them to battle. They could even y tennis on it.

    The Beast Faction head looked at the candidates and smiled.

    "Get their heads and let the thunder god temple get down from their high horse. You will be given Rank 6 beast meat for your beasts."

    The candidates immediately grew excited and went on the stage.

 Chapter 312: Frenzied Sam- II

    Both the teams slowly started getting on the stage. They don¡¯t have enough authority to even request the temple heads to stop this battle.

    They have to. The thunder god temple candidates are a bit nervous, while the beast faction people are a bit more confident.

    Because some of the Beast Faction candidates will have beastpanions to fight along with him.

    The beasts are not restricted from the rules and that is why every year the beast faction people have an edge over the rest of the candidates.

    But Sam didn¡¯t seem to care. He is just looking at the candidates who are slowlying onto the stage.

    For some reason, ll of them are kind of freaked out by his aura. They know that something is different, but they couldn¡¯t put a finger on it.

    After all of the got on. The thunder god temple candidates are standing on one side, while the Beast faction candidates are standing on another side. Sam is standing in the middle.

    There is no neutral party to act as referee, so every time two teams are battling, the idle team will act as a referee and now it was the Herb Garden who are acting as referees.

    A Nascent stage cultivator stood beside the stage to act as a referee.

    Sam coldly observed the beast faction candidates as if they arembs ready to be ughtered.

    He couldn¡¯t find Sanjay there, but he is not sane enough to think about the reasons of his absence.

    "Fight."

    When the referee signaled the beginning of the fight, the beast faction members took out their beasts.

    Only six out of ten have beasts as theirpanions and Sam could recognize that out of three only three areplete beast warriors with a contract with their beasts, the remaining three are just ordinary tamers.

    This is their n. The faction also agreed for the same reason. Since they can overwhelm the others with numbers, why would they let go of such an opportunity?

    And thunder god temple is always a toughpetitor for all of them, in all categories. So, they didn¡¯t even bother to stop them. They are actually extremely d that the two toughpetitors are dealing with each other.

    Philip and Jack are on tenterhooks, while Nichs is extremely excited, he controlled his urge to start a fight, he noticed that Sam is really pissed about this, he would really piss him off more if he wants to take a share in the battle.

    The Beast faction candidates first decided to send the beasts instead of fighting themselves.

    But as they took a step forward, Sam looked at them with a smirk and released the beastly aura of the five beasts. All the beasts Sam had a contract with are of far superior bloodline, in front of them, these six beasts are like vermin.

    He didn¡¯t even bother with to battle them.

    "Kneel." Sam spat out coldly and the six beasts prostrated as if they received a goldymand.

    All the spectators are stunned. Particrly the seniors from the Beast faction. He could sense the primordial beastly aura from Sam.

    He is one of the knowledgeable persons, regarding beasts on this, but he couldn¡¯t recognize the beastly aura.

    What surprised him, even more, is with a singlemand, he made the beasts kneel and made thempletely disregard themand of their owners.

    The Beast faction members felt something was off and ran towards the beasts hastily. The beasts are theirpanions, not meat shields, so they are not going to leave them like that. They were afraid that the thunder god temple candidates will make a move directly.

    Sam looked at Jack and Philip and said.

    "Try to hold them off for a few seconds."

    With that, he made a move and arrived at the nearest corner of the hexagon. He poured some inscription ink and controlled it with the water elemental energy.

    The rest of them couldn¡¯t understand what he is doing, but one of the Beast faction candidates who held a spear was about to make a move on Sam, but Jack interrupted him.

    The rest of the candidates are also about to make a move, but Philip and Nichs also sprang into action.

    Sam didn¡¯t even take a nce at the situation, he moved from one corner to another and soon covered all six corners and before they knew it there is a barrier formed around the hexagonal stage.

    Sam used the inscriptions to create energy nodes and created a formation and now all of them are trapped inside, there is no way out for them.

    The thunder god temple candidates have yet to make a move, except for Philip, Jack,and Nichs, the rest of them didn¡¯t get involved yet as the beast faction candidates are mainly focusing on dealing with Sam.

    Suddenly, the spear-wielding guy from the t faction escaped the siege of Philip and ran towards Sam, who is still turned outside. His arms started glowing and the muscles became extremely tense as he used maximum power to thrust at the of Sam.

    Sam evaded to the side, but still couldn¡¯t dodge the attack properly, he threw a left hook at the shaft if the spear, making the attack deflect to the side.

    A hole appeared on the stage.

    Sam¡¯s knuckles are bruised and there is a small cut in his fist, but he didn¡¯t even bother to heal.

    He made his move and took out a spear from his storage, this is the spear he got from Murali¡¯s inheritance and this is only one of the spear¡¯s he got.

    When the spear wielder turned around to face Sam, all he could see is, Sam,impaling the spear in his right abdomen forcefully.

    The spear went through him diagonally and the tip pierced itself into the stage, making the opponent stuck to the stage.

    Sam walked closer and looked at the man in the eyes. The opponent felt his heart turn cold and he started sweating profusely.

    "What did you call me?" Sam asked in an extremely cold tone, which is almost like the per of Grim reaper.

    "I... I.."

    The opponent wanted to say something but Sam didn¡¯t give him the chance. As soon as he opened his mouth, Sam stabbed a knife right into his tongue. The knife came out of the lower jaw barely missing the esophagus and the windpipe.

    "Ahhh.... Ahhhhh..."

    The opponent started groaning, but Sam didn¡¯t show mercy. He took out another ordinary spear and impaled it into the abdomen. He started harming the non-lethal areas.

    "AHHHHHHH...."

    "Ahhhhhh..."

    "Noooo...."

    One spear after another started piercing into this body and every tip went straight through him and got stuck on the floor.

    Even when, he was about to faint, Sam didn¡¯t let him. He started pping him awake and even used the water sprays to wake him up.

    He pierced a total of twelve spears into him and took out two more spears.

    He leaped into the air andnded on the spear shafts protruding out of him. He looked down on the opponent right in his eyes and impaled them straight into the two eyes.

    The spears have thinner tips than the rest and they prated right through the head taking off most of the head and impaled itself into the ground.

    The audience is stunned by the gore. There are many veterans at the scene and even they couldn¡¯t see Sam¡¯s brutality.

    They all had goosebumps as they watched the soul-searing torture.

    Only Philip and Jack are a bit normal, not because they got used to it, but rather they prepared themselves for such a scene beforehand.

    But they still held a tight guard on the remaining candidates not allowing them to gang up on Sam. Not because they are afraid that Sam wouldn¡¯t be able to handle them.

    They are afraid that Sam would kill them faster and his blood l.u.s.t wouldn¡¯t be satiated.

    Sam turned around and looked at the remaining beast faction members.

    Philip suddenly rxed a bit and let one guy go out of his control.

    That guy is a water elemental beast warrior with a turtle as his beast. Right now, the turtle is hiding in its shell in fear of Sam¡¯s aura.

    The water element user didn¡¯t know what to do. Philip and others are stopping the rest and are not letting them go. He looked at the corpse which is still standing because of the pierced Spears and gulped.

    The next second, he turned around and wanted to jump off the stage, but the formation blocked him.

    He started sending one after other water bullets as if he is going crazy, he didn¡¯t even care about his spiritual energy usage.

    But the formation is not budging at all.

    Suddenly, he felt a hand over his shouldered and he shuddered. He didn¡¯t even dare to move a single finger when a cold voice was heard.

    "Why the hurry? I will send you."

    He abruptly turned around and involuntarily backed away, but his back was against the barrier.

    He made some hand signs whilst they are shivering and kept all the energy in his final attack.

 Chapter 313: Frenzied Sam-III

    The water conjured into arge missile as it hit Sam directly, it is a huge and continuous jet of water which is strong enough to cleave through a mountain directly hit Sam in point-nk and full force.

    He didn¡¯t even bother to dodge as a golden glow appeared in a spot as the whole stage was covered in steam, the whole water jet didn¡¯t even cross Sam as itpletely turned into vapour. The temperature on the stage increased and even the cultivators who are at the Grand realm are sweating due to the heat and even their senses are being interrupted by the dense water vapour.

    The attack went on for three minutes straight, but Sam didn¡¯t even budge and soon water jet stopped.

    All the seniors could see is a human silhouette with golden mes in the spot, the mes disappeared and Sam stepped in and only foot distance between him and his prey ispletely disappeared.

    He whispered in a cold tone.

    "Great move. You are using the water element in a great way, but you wanna know something? I can also use water element and another fun fact, seventy percentage of the human body is made of water."

    He ced the hand on the person¡¯s chest and suddenly there is a blue glow all over his body, the spiritual energy is surging in a concentrated way.

    The opponent felt his blood running speed increase. The Blood reaches almost all parts of his body and he could feel the blood speed is decreasing when it is reaching any of the vital parts.

    Sam is controlling the Blood as he made it circte in its own cirction path but is only regting the speed and converting the blood into a stream of highly pressurized liquid.

    But his control is precise enough to not hurt the vitals as he might die too soon.

    "AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH......."

    The victim felt like hundreds of needles are running through his veins and soon he fainted.

    But Sam didn¡¯t let him. He made sure that he would wake up as he pressed some acupoints to force him to stay awake and experience the pain.

    Soon, the veins couldn¡¯t bear the pressure and wear and soon popped., But the blood didn¡¯t deviate. It came in contact with the muscle fibres but it is still running as if the vein is still present.

    The Victim widened his eyes and tears of blood stared streaming down and his vocal cords are gone, he couldn¡¯t even yell to show his pain. The candidates whose senses are being disturbed by the steam couldn¡¯t see these minute details, but the experts outside can see this.

    Some of the weak-minded candidates in Nascent cultivators couldn¡¯t even keep their senses on it.

    Coming back to the victim, he started gasping for more air to endure the pain which he was forced to endure, but there is no use.

    The Bloodstream started tearing the muscle fibres and the tongue started bleeding followed by the skin on his face where the muscles are not that dense and soon the genitals tore open and his clothes are drenched in blood.

    He lost his consciousness again, but once again Sam poked his soul awake with his mental strength and made him experience the pain all over again.

    By the time, the skin started tearing, there is an addition of fire elemental energy to the bloodstream jet.

    And soon enough, cracks opened on already bleeding skin, there is not a single inch of skin that is uncracked.

    Soon, red coloured vapour started seeping out of the cracks and a portion of the stage which was trapped and already full of water vapour was reced with blood-red vapour.

    Only small portion though, the rest is still normal vapour and due to the density difference, the blood-red vapour started going up and upying the topmost portion of the stage and deposited there like a crowd when it reached the topmost point of the barrier.

    The person died and copsed, but even then the internal organs are undamaged.

    Sam looked at the corpse and turned around.

    By this time, the steam is condensing an is about time, it bes water again.

    Sam slowly stepped back. The beast faction members want to make a move on Sam together so that they might have a chance, the beasts are absolutely useless and they sent them back into the Beast pouches.

    But they couldn¡¯t get past the trio. These guys might be the elites, but Philip and Jack are not some soft permissions. If not for the fact that they don¡¯t want to take their lives and left them for Sam, they would have finished the fight and there is no need to even mention Nichs.

    Even that Battle maniac is keeping his blows under control.

    But when the candidates from beast faction saw the state of their twopanions, the remaining eight started trying really hard and the trio couldn¡¯t help but let two of them go. One of them is a sabre wielder and the other one is an earth element user. The sabre wielder happened to be a wind elemental Warrior mage.

    The earth user made some hand signs and his skin turned to stone as he jumped at Sam, while the wind element user started concentrating the wind elemental energy on the sabre de. They moved in sync as they got ready for the big attack.

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to dodge as the earth element user hugged him with that stone skin and turned around, exposing his back to the wind elemental user.

    Sam looked at the earth user and scanned his face, which is full of anxiety and thetter saw Sam¡¯s face too and all he could see is calm and coldness. He couldn¡¯t see a hint of worry which increased his own worry.

    Soon, a wind de stuck Sam on his back and just at the time it hit, the point of contact glowed in gold as Sam wore the coat. The attack didn¡¯t cut through the coat, but Sam jerked forward and some blood came out of his mouth due to the impact to the internal organs.

    Even the earth user didn¡¯t escape from the attack as his hands which are hugging Sam on his back are getting hit.

    The Wind des didn¡¯t stop, the attacks kept oning and Sam¡¯s body kept on jerking.

    The earth user looked Sam who bled from his mouth, but all he could see is a wicked grin.

    "I thought, you called me a Bastard, why are you hugging me as if I am your long lost lover."

    The earth user didn¡¯t know why but had a bad premonition and he is right.

    Sam continued. "Anyway, since you are loving me so much, let me reciprocate." The calmness in his voice made him shudder.

    "Don¡¯t worry, I will be extremely gentle and make it a longsting experience."

    Sam slowly hugged him and rested his chin on his shoulder and his spiritual energy started seeping into the other person¡¯s body. The earth user whose skin is like stone, suddenly felt the gentle stream of spiritual energy entered the body.

    Sam¡¯s spiritual energy upied his whole body and slowly seeped into his internal organs.

    After upying the whole body, Sam said.

    "Your grip is a little tight, let me loosen it." And with a single thought, he applied the disintegration and the arm of stone skin to a bloody mush.

    "AHHHHHHHH...."

    He gripped his other arm a little harder and Sam said in a cold tone.

    "Why are you tightening again?" And just like that, another arm was turned into a bloody mess.

    "AHHHHHH..."

    "Let¡¯s go for legs, you must be tired to hold me like this and stand your guard against the attacks."

    One after another the feet popped and there are only the remaining legs hanging to the torso and head of the person.

    The earth user couldn¡¯t take the pain and fainted.

    "How can you fall asleep like that?" With those words, the spiritual energy which is surrounding the kidneys of the person reacted and the left kidney turned into meat paste.

    "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...."

    The victim woke up with a start and screamed in agony.

    "Hey, you are too noisy, my ears are hurting." The Vocal cords are broken.

    And as the wind des kept oning and hitting Sam, one by one the internal organs are being disintegrated. The intestines, the stomach, the liver, the lungs and finally the heart."

    Sam dropped the corpse.

    He turned to the wind user, who stopped the attacks abruptly, Sam waspletely drenched in blood which was puked out by the earth user, but he didn¡¯t care and said to the user.

    "How can you disturb our union like that?"

    He slowly walked to that person and the opponent stepped back involuntarily. And soon he couldn¡¯t move as he was against the barrier.

    "Let me give you my take on the wind element."

    Sam held the throat of the guy and forced him to open his mouth to gasp for air and he started concentrating and the surrounding air started going in like a stream.

    By now, the steam already condensed and the sun is blocked.

    The wind started entering like crazy, the stomach bulged a little.

    His lungs and stomach are pumped up like balloons and the pressure increased as he forced more to enter.

    The veins popped, the heart rate decreased. As Sam made a slight change in his wind elemental energy the wind started churning inside the stomach and lungs and ...

    *PSssst* Blood sprayed on Sam as the chest and the stomach were torn open with the chaotic and sharp currents on the wind.

    He dropped the corpse and turned around.

    By this time, the remaining six candidates stopped fighting the trio as they looked at the gory scenes.

    They lost the will to go and fight Sam.

    His moves are suicidal as he took so many hits just for sake of torturing his opponents and he is still going on.

    His face is still extremely cold and the blood which was sprayed on it is not making it any better.

 Chapter 314: All dead

    The six remaining candidates of the beast faction doesn¡¯t even know what to do. They couldn¡¯t even bother to break the siege of Philip and rest and attack Sam.

    In their eyes, Sam is a psychopath. If he battled normally, they might have a chance, but Sam¡¯s moves are suicidal, he is not caring about any damage he is taking, if any of them were to take the same amount of attacks Sam took, they would die six minutes at least.

    Philip, Jack, and Nichs took a step back. Sam has dealt with four opponents so fast that even the steam barely started condensing and turning back into the water.

    Suddenly, there are blood-red liquid raining from above and all the candidates who are watching the scene in a daze woke up from their stupor.

    There is blood raining on them and their bodies shuddered from the gory scene.

    Sam looked upwards and coldly smiled at the remaining six candidates making them turn rail and want to run.

    All of them ran to a single corner and wanted to break out of the formation.

    Sam didn¡¯t worry they would escape as he walked slowly and his right hand was extended as he used the water elemental energy to collect the blood droplets that are dropping down along with the water.

    The small liquid sphere in his hands is getting bigger with every step he took.

    Meanwhile, the experts all looked at the seating positions of the Beast faction. The Faction head is looking on the scene with a gloomy face.

    He desperately wants to stop the fight and p Sam to death, but there is nothing he can do. Because he epted the terms and he has to deal with the consequences of his decisions no matter how shitty they are.

    The thunder god temple-head is not some soft permission either. He would be an idiot to let the Faction head to make a move.

    And the rest of the powers would definitely side with the thunder god temple in the name of ensuring fairness. He would only embarrass himself if he tried to make a fuss of the matter.

    He cared more about his face that the ten elite Grand realm cultivators.

    As they watched, Sam made his way to the corner, the candidates weren¡¯t able to break the formation, it is not that the formation is too strong, rather they could identify the node positions. If the formation is made by the formation gs, they would have easily noticed it, but using the runes as the formation nodes made it hard for them to understand and identify the way to deal with the formation.

    Sam ced his left hand on the shoulder of the nearest candidates and forcefully turned him to this side.

    He pried open his mouth and forced the liquid sphere in his hands into his throat, but the liquid just didn¡¯t flow down like normal, as the victim widened his eyes, Sam closed his eyes and ced his utmost concentration.

    He is controlling the diluted blood which entered the body.

    He let the liquid disperse into numerous droplets and spread across the body. As for how they are leaving the digestive system and spreading to other parts, it is rather easy. They are just making holes in all obstacles.

    With a single thought, all the spectators saw is the body of the candidate getting riddled with holes. He lost his life as he bled through all the new orifices Sam created on his body.

    There are only five more candidates left and one of them tried tomit suicide as he took out a knife and stabbed himself in the heart.

    But, just as the knife was about to make a contact with his skin, Sam moved to him in a sh and forcefully, held the hand and stopped the knife from making contact.

    "Who said you can kill yourselves?" He spat coldly and grabbed the knife from his hands. He held the man in ce by his neck with his left hand and started wielding the knife with his right hand.

    He moved the knife so fast that the remaining candidates can only see the sh of the de, but what they can see is that the flesh is being sliced thinly and is falling down in small, thin pieces on the ground as blood sprayed all over the ce.

    Sam is like a blood craving monster as the blood sprayed all over him as he sliced the flesh off of the torso of that person.

    And soon the bones started showing and the rib cage is visible for the n.a.k.e.d by along with the lungs and the faintly beating heart.

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother killing him and threw him away like a ragdoll.

    The victim is struggled between life and death and wished that he is dead right away as he went through the most painful seconds of his life.

    Sam looked at the remaining five candidates and walked towards one of them. He held the knife in his hands and raised it at him.

    "Please. Just kill me instantly..." He started begging as he looked at Sam, but Sam didn¡¯t seem to care, he looked at him with cold eyes.

    The other party knelt on the ground and started begging, Sam held him by the chin and pried open his mouth. He ced the knife handle vertically making the de protrude upwards.

    The kneeling person was confused, but Sam¡¯s cold smirk raised goosebumps and he was alerted.

    Sam held the de in his grip and the fist was covered with the golden mes all of a sudden.

    The knife started heating, the people who are watching all started closing their eyes unable to watch this.

    The kneeling person wanted to escape, roll over and even end his life, but there is no way for him to move as Sam held him in his ce, and soon, the groans that areing from his mouth are stopped as the red-hot molten metal flowed into his throat.

    One of the remaining fainted on the spot as he was unable to take all the deaths in and coincidentally another person wanted to run to the other side where he can see the faction head and ask him for help.

    But Sam held him by his cor and then gripped the back of the head by the hair.

    He turned over the man who fainted and made him face the sky.

    He dragged the man he caught in his and mmed the head on the head of the fainted man.

    "Ahhhhhh..." The fainted man woke up in a start, but all he could see is a familiar face zooming into his face.

    *BAM*

    "BAM"

    *BAM"

    Sam hammered the head into another one without even giving them a chance to yell in agony.

    *BAM* *BAM* BAM*

    *CRACK*

    "CRACK*

    Soon, the cracking sounds could be heard as the brain juices spilled out from the cracked skull. Sam mmed them so hard that the skull, one of the strongest bones in the body cracked open and the brain was spilled out.

    After confirming the deaths. Sam looked at thest two.

    There are quaking in your boots as they looked at the corpses of the eight of theirpanions. They don¡¯t even know what to do to save themselves, they felt that getting a quick death would be a blessing much less, saving their lives.

    Sam held one of them who is gasping from the air and wanted to try something new.

    He started spreading his spiritual energy into his body and surrounded the spiritual core with his spiritual energy.

    Whenever he destabilized a spiritual stone, there will be an explosion, he always wanted to see first hand what would happen if he did so with a spiritual core.

    He took off his hands and threw the man away towards another end of the stage.

    The victim hit the barrier and...

    *BOOM*

    A spiritual energy explosion happened, but this time it is of arger scale and the formation copsed immediately.

    A bloody mess was flying all over the stage and even off the stage as the barrier was gone and all the candidates on the stage along with some front row seaters who are Great realm cultivators on all six sides are sshed with the bloody spray.

    Sam looked at the explosion and the aftereffects with a thoughtful expression. The Blood l.u.s.t surrounding him was almost gone and he looked saner now, but the controlled killing intent towards thest candidate and the rest of the beast faction members didn¡¯t disappear.

    He looked at thest candidate and walked towards him.

    As soon as he ced his hand on that person, the eyes of thest prey widened and his breathing stopped.

    He lost his life just from the fear of Sam¡¯s touch. As his body was about to copse, Sam held it by the cor and..

    *PAK* pped him twice. After confirming that he is dead, he kicked the body off of the stage and spat coldly.

    "Such a P.u.s.s.y and you dared to called me Bastard. You are lucky you died out of fear."

    With those words, he looked at the referee who came back to his senses and dered.

    "Thunder God temple-wins."

 Chapter 315: A Courier

    Sam walked down and walked towards the seats and sat down without even giving a single nce at others.

    He closed his eyes and started meditating as he slowly recovered.

    He might not have fought much, but he did take some damage due to him being all suicidal.

    The members of the Beast faction are all solemn. Even the Nascent stage cultivators who came are all looking at Sam grudgingly as for the remaining powers, no one in the Grand realm dared to look at Sam, they are extremely afraid that they might piss him off.

    As the candidates started walking down the stage and the beast faction members started cleaning up, Philip ran back to the stage as if he remembered something and started taking all the spatial rings.

    The ones who came on to the stage to clean up, the great realm cultivators, were dumbfounded, but couldn¡¯t say anything as he is clearly a lot weaker than Philip.

    The rest of the faction didn¡¯t say anything because it is an unspoken rule that the loser¡¯s possessions belong to the winner.

    After everything calmed down, the remaining four powers started conducting their battles normally. After two rounds, the Lightning spear sect and the Usaine sect are the two powers who won and now they are going to a battle between themselves and the winner will be battling Thunder god temple.

    But that is not going to happen now, they will do that tomorrow and the finals will be the day after tomorrow, to ensure that they will have enough recovery time from the battles.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother with the battles and focused on recovering himself.

    After the Grand realm battles, the Nascent stage battles took ce, then only Sam opened his eyes to see Moriya¡¯s fight.

    The results of the Nascent stage battles mainly decide, the major distribution of the resources.

    Sam is interested in Moriya¡¯s battle, but he couldn¡¯t help but get disappointed as Moriya didn¡¯t even get a chance to fight.

    Then he noticed something different and that is the other Nascent cultivators are all trying to get a battle with Moriya and even more than for resources, they seemed more interested in defeating him.

    There are even whispers about his supposed injury caused by the shadow sword.

    He then turned to the discussions of the other juniors of the thunder god temple and understood what the situation is all about.

    Apparently, more than seventy percent of the current Nascent stage candidates who came here are former Grand realm candidates of the same generation and at that time Moriya swept through the whole division and the remaining candidates didn¡¯t even get a chance to fight in the tournament.

    He is a swordsman and barely five people are able to exchange some moves with him and there was barely one battle with some intensity.

    As for the rest are defeated with one sword strike.

    Sam was impressed and looked forward to Moriya¡¯s battle. He also noticed that the thunder god temple might be using the situation he created with the fake destruction of a shadow sword to cover up Moriya¡¯s strength by faking in the injury to n something.

    So, if he thinks through that logic, then there is a possibility that he might not even be able to see him in a battle.

    After that day¡¯s battles, they went to the stone building in which they arrived through the space gate and stayed there.

    Sam climbed to the roof andid down as he gazed at the stars. He wanted to have some peace.

    The frenzied state of his earlier is one of his greatest weaknesses. He could stayposed when he is facing an army, he could stay calm when facing an enemy who is immensely powerful, he can stay patient and do research to achieve a seemingly impossible goal for months.

    But be couldn¡¯t stay sane in the face of a person who calls him some names.

    He would almost change into a different person; he couldn¡¯t get past that state and doesn¡¯t even know what to do to change that.

    There is not much he wants to change, he will still kill them, he just doesn¡¯t want that immense amount of bloodl.u.s.t which raises involuntarily.

    As Sam was thinking, he heard sensed some movements nearby.

    He became alert and took out the reaper and looked in a specific direction.

    He saw a woman who is in her thirtiese out from the lush of trees. He became more alert because he recognized her to be one of the Nascent stage cultivators of the Beast faction.

    "Don¡¯t worry, I am not here to attack."

    The woman said as she examined Sam top to bottom.

    "You look so different without your blood l.u.s.t." She said that and took out a token and threw it towards him.

    Sam caught the token and looked at it with confusion.

    "This will help you get to the Beast faction. All you have to do is enter the one-way space gate with this token on you."

    Sam frowned and looked at her in askance for which she replied.

    "Sanjay sent me. There is a family meeting in nine months and he wants you to be there."

    Sam nodded and kept the token in the storage.

    He still didn¡¯t let his guard down and looked at her cautiously.

    She doesn¡¯t seem to have any intention of leaving anytime soon.

    "Why are you so brutal? How much of a grudge do you have with the Beast faction and if you really do have that big of a grudge, why would Sanjay give you these coordinates? He should have killed you on the spot."

    Sam raised his eyebrow.

    He didn¡¯t even understand why she is asking him this question. In fact, he is the one who has the least amount of context regarding his rtionship with the Beast faction.

    As for grudge, if he really told her that he just killed them like that just because they called him Bastard, he wondered how she would react.

    He stayed silent for a bit and asked.

    "Do you know Watt?"

    "Watt? That guy in the weird silver robe?" She asked in surprise.

    "Yes."

    "How do you know him?"

    Sam didn¡¯t answer the question and asked instead.

    "How is he doing? Is everything okay for him there or is he facing any troubles?"

    She stayed silent for a second trying to figure out the rtion between Sam and Watt and said.

    "He is some sort of special guest there, but that guy is aplete psycho. He has been wreaking havoc in the faction and he beat up almost all the Grand realm cultivators in the initial stages.

    He even beat the crap out of ten people who ambushed him."

    Sam heaved a sigh and muttered.

    "That¡¯s good."

    "What is your rtionship with that guy?"

    "You can ask Sanjay about that. And give Sanjay a message on my behalf."

    "Do tell."

    "If something happens to Watt, even the slightest injury, I will make the Beast go down with me even if I have to die." His voice sounded so casual as if he is reading a story or a script.

    *Pfft*

    The woman startedughing, but Sam didn¡¯t care.

    "Lad, you are way too arrogant to say those words, you might even die if I decide to make my move right here. How can you even dream about taking down the whole beast faction?"

    Sam looked at her coldly and said.

    "Why don¡¯t you make a move and see, who dies first?"

    Sam is pretty confident when he said that. He is not the least bit afraid, if he goes all out, even in his current state, he could kill a Pre-Transcendent and escape with some serious injuries. He might be vulnerable after that for a few months, but he can still go away, walking out alive.

    The woman looked at Sam and clearly felt that he is not joking. She was really tempted to teach Sam a lesson by putting him in his ce and making him a bit humbler.

    But when she looked at him in the eyes, she knew that the moment she made a move, she would definitely regret it.

    "I am leaving." She said and turned around to leave, and heard Sam¡¯s words.

    "Tell the people, who are here with you to get ready to die. I am killing all of them. The Great realm cultivators, the Nascent realm cultivators, all of them. The strength difference today only dyed their deaths for a bit.

    Their heads are all mine sooner orter."

    With those words, he jumped off the roof and went back into the stone house.

    Philip, Jack, and Nichs are in the meeting room sitting in a corner.

    He walked to them and said.

    "Thanks for today."

    He doesn¡¯t know what to say. He clearly knew what would have be if Philip and Jack didn¡¯t control him for that exact moment.

    He never had a hand on his shoulder at that kind of moment, but that small gesture really helped him a lot.

    [An important announcement read the auxiliary chapter]

 Chapter 316: Moriya, the swordless swordsman

    Sam didn¡¯t talk much with his friends and only waited for thepetition to be over.

    He doesn¡¯t have much interest in thepetition or any rewards that he might get for performing better, one thing he does know is that the Grand realm category was theirs to win.

    The seeds of fear are one of the hardest things to remove once nted in the hearts of youth.

    Sam¡¯s maniacal behaviour and torturous deaths he gave would make them quake in their boots.

    The next day, the matches continued, Sam doesn¡¯t have anything to do but wait for Moriya¡¯s turn, so that he could watch his fight, but he didn¡¯t get the chance on the second day too.

    On the third day, the finals of the Grand realm cultivator division ended in a rather anti-climactic manner.

    There is no exciting intense battle, no deaths and the whole thing was extremely nd.

    The Usaine sect who made it to finals just gave up as soon as the match started. The sect doesn¡¯t seem to have any intention of losing even a single candidate. Nichs and the rest couldn¡¯t help but feel disappointed.

    They came here to challenge their limits, but the only they can do is challenge the limits of their boredom.

    The final for the Nascent stage too was a bit disappointing.

    Thunder god temple really made it to finals, but all the members of the team are injured and are in no condition to have a battle of high intensity.

    In the first two days, the battles they had been fought to the tooth and nail by four members of the team, not letting the final member who is Moriya to take part in it at all.

    It is to the point where they would be critically injured than let Moriya take part in it.

    The Nascent stage cultivators seemed to be of the same strengths and are equally formidable as they rivalled each other to a great extent.

    On the second match, even the reserve team was not spared as they too were injured. Now only three people are left unscathed and Moriya is one of them.

    Another final contestant for the finals is actually the Beast Faction.

    The Beast faction candidates have rtively fewer injuries because they use their beasts.

    And the reserve team ispletely full. Those are the things that make the whole beast cultivators advantageous.

    There is also a drawback because since they have to ensure the growth of their beasts along with their individual strength, it takes more time and resources.

    So, they are always left behind by their peers and as the level grows, the disparity grows, for example, when two cultivators are on the starting line and one of them in a normal cultivator and another is a beast cultivator, they both would be in more or less same pace until they reach Novice stage.

    After that, when they break through into the Great realm stage and improving, the beast cultivator would be left behind by a month or two and the in Grand realm stage a few months and in Nascent stage, it might be a year to a few years.

    This is the generic situation and most of ites from theck of resources to develop. If this generic version is taken into consideration, Sam should have been left behind by years, but he isck of anything but resources.

    The drawback doese with some advantages and one of them is they don¡¯t have too much of a bottle-neck when breaking through.

    And why did all of thise up? Because these are Sam¡¯s thoughts as they observed the faces of the candidates from the beast faction. Although the category is under-50 years old, the thunder god temple people more or less looked around thirty years and Moriya looked like he was in histe twenties.

    That is due to their early breakthrough into the Nascent stage while he was still in his twenties, but the Beast faction candidates all looked to be in theirte thirties almost ten years older than their counterparts.

    As Sam was randomly thinking out of his boredom, he noticed that Moriya hase onto the stage.

    He was surprised and excited at the same time.

    The opponent also became excited as Moriya who is a legendary figure among the peers.

    Getting a chance to defeat him is a dreame true.

    But the opponent¡¯s fantasies arepletely gone under the drain because Moriya¡¯s aurapletely changed.

    All the experts who are around and swordsmen all narrowed their eyes.

    As soon as the fight started, Moriya¡¯s aura suddenly turned extremely sharp. It is sharp to the point, the wind started whistled around him as he looked at his opponent.

    As the opponent was in a daze, Moriya, took a sword stance, without any sword and made a shing move.

    There are no visible sword rays or any other major spiritual energy movements.

    They could feel the wind cleaving as aceration appeared on the body of the opponent.

    There is no sword ray, light, spiritual energy visible to the eye.

    It is the sheer power of the strike that made the wind in the surroundings turn sharper as it stuck the opponent.

    Blood started seeping out of his hand as he knelt on the ground and fainted. The fight was over. The opponent who is a beast warrior couldn¡¯t even summon his beast from the beast pouch.

    The stage was cleaned up and the next candidate from the beast faction entered the stage.

    "I head you got injured, how is it possible for you.." The opponent started speaking but before he could finish his words, he was also sliced.

    The same went for the rest of the candidates, just as the remaining powers were about to think that the whole injury was a hoax, Moriya, who just got off the stage and is walking towards the seat, stumbled and puked a mouthful of blood and his face became pale.

    He started trembling as he was drenched in a cold sweat. The rest of the powers had a face full of realization. They thought that Moriya might have just endured through the injuries just to fight and now he had paid a price.

    Even though, they realized that they didn¡¯t feel good, particrly the people who are just defeated. They are still consoling themselves, that Moriya lied about his condition and are cursing him for that.

    But now that it was noted that Moriya is indeed injured, they felt worse. It was a huge blow to their confidence and self-esteem.

    They couldn¡¯t even bring themselves to find any excuses. The younger generation of those powers are looking at the Nascent stage cultivators. But there is no trace of respect and admiration which was once present.

    There are hints of pity and even disdain.

    Only Sam, Philip and Jack knew that the whole thing is utter bullshit. They knew better than anyone else that Moriya is extremely well.

    They don¡¯t know why the thunder god temple is causing this whole drama, but he does know that they are using the situation Sam caused for their own benefit.

    After that fight he lost interest. But he was already impressed with this Swordless Swordsman. But when he closely observed Moriya¡¯s hands after he sat down, he understood that Moriya is indeed a normal sword user, by the calluses on his hands.

    Moriya is a normal sword user and one of the most hardworking at that, it is just that the opponent is not worthy of him to wield the sword.

    There are another two people who are extremely excited. One of them is Jack, he almost behaved like a lovestruck fool as he marvelled at the swordsmanship and the other one is Nichs. His battle spirit is raising. If he was a Nascent, he would have already fought it out with Moriya.

    After the wholepetition is over, Thundergod temple ranked first and they have obtained the major stake in the resources.

    They went back to the thunder god temple and so did the rest of the powers.

    The Beast faction is thest ce when it came to the Grand realm section and second ce in the Nascent section.

    They are the team which lost the most.

    After the beast faction people returned, Sam¡¯s killing spree was spread all over the faction and everyone was stunned.

    The woman who brought the token to Sam entered the ind where Sanjay is training.

    "Did you meet him?" Sanjay asked as soon as she came.

    "I did. Who is he exactly? Do you know how brutal he is when he dealt with all the candidates? I almost puked in disgust. And thest candidate even died of fear. He killed him without even making a move."

    As she spoke, she took out a recording crystal and passed it over to Sanjay, who yed over the battle.

    Even, he couldn¡¯t bear to look at the recording and closed eyes sometimes.

    He couldn¡¯t help but frown and think, why Sam hates the Beast faction to that extent.

    "I heard, he is rted to that new guy Watt, what¡¯s the matter?"

    Sanjay looked at her and said.

    "You don¡¯t need to know too much."

    Thedy frowned and yelled at him as she pointed her finger at his face.

    "Is that how you should be talking to your elder sister?"

    "The only sign that you are older than me is your body. Grow your brains to and I might treat you like an elder sister."

    She gritted her teeth and hurled curses at him, before calming down.

    "How is Watt doing? Did you control him yet? If he goes on like that more than seventy percent of Grand realm cultivators will lose their will."

    Sanjay just stayed silent without answering. She heaved a sigh and said.

    "Sam said, he would take down the whole beast faction along with him if he has to if something happens to Watt. Is that why you are not controlling him?"

    Sanjay was surprised, but he still stayed silent for a brief second before saying.

    "I don¡¯t know exactly who he is, but there is a chance that he might be rted to us and what our father is saying might actually be true."

    "He is really the traitor¡¯s son?"

    "He is his son, but I am not sure if he is a traitor."

 Chapter 317: Secret meeting

    Watt is in an intense battle with the Grand realm cultivators of the Beast faction, right now he is battling a Middle-stage Grand realm cultivator, the opponent is also a Wind element user and he has a Vulture type beast, in the air, Falck and the Vulture are tearing at each other.

    The birds are crashing each other into the nearby trees as they started digging into each other¡¯s bodies with the talons.

    Watt is having a battle of endurance with the cultivator. He is causing a lot of external injuries and didn¡¯t even bother to make vital hits.

    After more than an hour-long battle, Wattpletely gained an upper-hand and started pummelling the opponent. He started kicking the opponent who fell down in his face as the tooth fell out.

    He did so until the opponent has fainted and walked into the residence. He took out a card simr to what he uses but there are markings just like a modern pack of ying cards and this one is a two of diamonds.

    He threw the card to the wall and it impaled itself into it.

    He walked out and said.

    "This ce is mine for now, if you want to take this back,e and beat me."

    With those words, he left. This scenario has been happening for a few days. He battled an opponent to tooth and nail and made sure that the opponent cannot even get up and took away their residence in a bet.

    He put a hundred million spirit stones as a wager and everyone is too greedy to not participate and Sanjay¡¯s intervention only made worse for the disciples rather than Watt. Because, Sanjay specifically instructed that they should entertain Watt as long as it is a fair-challenge and they have no right to reject that.

    This is to keep Watt at the bay and make sure that he wouldn¡¯t try to escape or think of some suicidal ways to damage the beast faction and himself.

    Every day, Watt is taking a residence and cing a card to leave a mark that it is his.

    Sanjay didn¡¯t think much of it, Watt is just trying to vent his anger and since he couldn¡¯t beat Sanjay, he is taking it out on the remaining disciples and making them suffer by dragging the residences.

    All he is doing is just to bring Sam to this Beast faction and learn the whole story behind it. But from the looks of it, Sam would be done for if hees here, but he has confidence that his uncle who stays all day in the darkroom woulde out and save Sam if that really happens.

    After all, even his father has to think twice to talk to his uncle.

    To put it bluntly, all this is to satisfy his curiosity, but the price is the grand realm cultivators who are numbered in hundreds are suffering. Watt is beating the crap out of all the Initial stage Grand realm cultivators and even some Level-4 Grand realm cultivators, which is annoying the elders, but Sanjay has enough backing that even his own father who is the faction head of the Beast faction couldn¡¯t do anything to him.

    At the same time, Sam who returned to the Thunder god temple is in a meeting with Arthur.

    "I need the info regarding the beast faction, as much info as you can get with your ess level. I will pay the amount no matter how much it is."

    "I will see what I can do." Arthur left the ce with those words and came back after two hours.

    Sam was surprised to see the info which only took two hours to bring back.

    "How much?" Sam asked.

    "There is actually no price, it is in the core disciple library. You might not know this but the thunder god temple doesn¡¯t have allies, two of the remaining five powers are enemies and the other three are on neutral terms, and from now on we think the Beast faction is also on our enemies list.

    Because of that, there ispulsory knowledge that has to be learned by all the core disciples and elders, and this beast faction record just came into the library.

    Since no one is particrly enthusiastic, I just brought over the copy."

    Sam is surprised, that the thunder god temple is meticulous. "Okay then, ask me if you need some help," Sam said and sent Arthur off, before looking at the info.

    It has info on all the core members of the faction. People from above the Grand realm and the Nascent stage are mostly detailed. He even found out thedy who gave him the token and she turned out to be Monica, the daughter of the one current faction head.

    The worst thing is, he couldn¡¯t find any information on Sanjay apart from that he is the son of the current faction head.

    He even saw the details of the three people who are killed by Philip, Jack, and Watt, and their status was left unknown as they didn¡¯t know the life and death of the trio.

    After studying this, Sam went to another info which was bought from a normal trading area in the thunder god temple and that is the beast catalog near the beast faction.

    This ismon knowledge as it has been explored hundreds of years earlier. So, it is avable for even normal internal disciples to buy.

    Sam spent two days studying it. He doesn¡¯t need any details on beasts as the bestiary he had in hand has more details than this info.

    All he wants to know is the type of beasts that are avable for the beast faction people to get their hands on so that he can learn the beasts used for their contracts to make some preparations.

    "Try your best to reach ate stage in the next nine months, if you guys want to follow me to the Beast faction."

    Sam said to Philip and Jack, before going out.

    He disappeared for more than two days and came back with an excited expression on his face.

    "If you guys go tobat practice, bring some beast blood for me." When Sam asked this, Jack nodded, while Philip was puzzled and asked.

    "Why?"

    "I need to do some farming." Philip had more questions than answers by this reply, but before he could voice out, Sam continued.

    "By the way, everyday morning, you will be having four hours lecture. Your elemental usage has so much potential, but you are wasting it. I will teach you somethings and you can also be an artisan while you are at it.

    You will be introduced to a new world of knowledge."

    Philip became like a deted balloon as he looked at Sam. Four hours lecture? That would be a nightmare for him.

    But Sam¡¯s tone suggested that there is no room for negotiation.

    Sam felt that Philip¡¯s ability is limited because of his knowledge. There is more to metals than just making spikes and maces.

    So, he decided he would start teaching him about material science and focus mainly on metals along with some metallurgy and forging process and with a touch of engineering and manufacturing knowledge, Philip can be a great artisan.

    Because most artisans have trouble mostly with the control over the molten or heated metal. They only have tools like hammers and tongs along with an anvil to beat the metal into shape.

    But for Philip, he can just mold the metal into whatever shape he likes it to be and whatever form it should take.

    Apart from that, this knowledge helps Philip in metal elemental fusion. There are many types of metals in existence, if he could manipte the metallic nature of his fusion body into different states and replicate the properties of various materials, then he could have a great increment in battle prowess.

    After all, metals exist in all forms and that includes liquids, like mercury.

    As Sam is nning here, there is a meeting held in a different part of the world. A stray ind to the eastern part of the, in a small room, three transcendence realm cultivators, and around ten pre-transcendence cultivators are talking.

    The three transcendent cultivators, who took the main seats around a round table wore three ck robes with different symbols on it.

    One of them has fire, one of them has a tornado symbol and thest one has rock symbols embroidered on his chest.

    There is an empty chair on the ck round table.

    The remaining pre-transcendent stage cultivators didn¡¯t take the seat.

    "I heard that ckwater is destroyed, what should we do about our n? We don¡¯t have anyone who can deal with this on the western continent." The head of ck rock asked.

    "I talked to Boss about this. He said that he would think of a solution by himself. We shouldn¡¯t worry about the western continent matters...."

    ck fire exined somethings and after taking the instructions the pre-transcendent stage cultivators, left the room.

    "What about our trip to meteorite sand ind? Boss doesn¡¯t know this, right? All these years it was okay since, we are our own, but now the boss took over, we still had to hand over this information to him.

    What should we do?" ck rock asked ck fire.

    The ck fire stayed silent for a while and said.

    "We don¡¯t know the properties or the forging methods of the meteorite sands that we have in our hand. Every experiment we are doing is giving us a loss. Even if we get more from the ind, there is no use for now.

    Right now, Boss is also looking out for our every move and we don¡¯t have a chance to go to the meteorite ind.

    So, we will wait and after the n reaches the peak stage, Boss would be busy for a great amount of time and we will use that situation to get the information we need.

    We will keep the sands that are useful for us and hand over the rest to the Boss. Until that we just have to be careful and not cause any doubts to the boss."

 Chapter 318: Resting Place

    Sam is making preparations for his visit to the Beast faction. While Jack and Philip are cultivating.

    On the third day after his return from the Resourcepetition. He got an invite from the temple-head.

    "There is a reward for winning first ce in the resourcepetition and you yed a huge part in the victory. You get to visit the ¡¯Resting ce¡¯ and you will get to stay for a week. You have to be careful though as the Nascent stage cultivators will be joining after three days.

    You are the number one target of the Beast faction and you would have a hard time saving yourself from them.

    You will get the information regarding the Resting ce to your residence and you will be leaving in four days, so be prepared."

    Sam didn¡¯t get to speak at all, and he came back. Soon, an attendant brought a scroll that has the records he needed to see.

    The Resting ce is basically an ancient battlefield hundreds of years ago and it was the ce near the central continent, an ind which is one of the most dangerous locations of the whole.

    It is dangerous not because of the presence of beasts, it is only one of the reasons, rather the main reason is because of the cultivators, that is the ce with no rules at all and everyone can do what they want.

    The ce is filled with the remains of the people. Centuries ago, there was arge battle between the six major powers, and many experts lost their lives there. The battle stopped only after every power lost many people and powerhouses and reached their weakest points.

    After that, every time a high-level cultivator of Pre-transcendence or above reached the final days, either due to their own life span or some internal injuries and ailments, they will enter thisnd to leave their legacy.

    There is no information on why they are going to a forsaken battlefield to leave their legacy instead of giving it to some juniors within their own power.

    Anyone with somemon sense could understand that there is no valid reason stated in the information given. There is a reason why dying people are going there.

    And it is also obvious that the reason was not mentioned in the given info.

    But one thing that was mentioned is, there are a lot of legacies in thatnd and those legacies attract all kinds of people which made it the dangerous ce it is today.

    There are many stray cultivators, teams from the minor powers, and the major powers who roam around with no rules to restrain them as they search for treasures.

    But every time the resourcepetition happens, the elite teams of the major powers step in and there would be strict regtions on thend restricting the normal cultivators to enter or stay in that area. When the Grand realm candidates of the major powers enter the Nascent stage and above candidates are not allowed to stay.

    When the Nascent stage cultivators entered though, there are not many restrictions because the Pre-transcendent and Transcendent stage cultivators generally don¡¯te to this ce that often and they wouldn¡¯t bother scavenging for the legacies even if theye.

    As for how the candidates are going to enter.

    There is a pattern in sending the teams.

    First, the Grand realm cultivators would go and the winning team gets to take all the ten members including the reserve team, and stay inside the Resting ce for a week. The second-ced team will stay a week as well, but they will only get to take five members. The remaining teams couldn¡¯t send anyone.

    As for the great realm cultivators, they are too weak to get to this ce.

    After the first week is over, the Nascent stage cultivators will enter, while the Grand realm cultivators will have to leave, they do have an option to stay there, but it was at their own risk. They would be considered as stray cultivators and wouldn¡¯t get the safety they will get in the first week.

    As Sam looked at the information, his head is working in full-on.

    He already made some ns to deal with the Beast faction, but there are some things which he couldn¡¯t do as he doesn¡¯t have any idea on how the internal things in the beast faction work and there is no data regarding the characters of the core members, maybe he can use this chance through which he can contact the Nascent stage cultivators.

    As he was thinking, he immediately went inside the divine dimension and started working on it.

    For the next four days, Sam spent his time forging somethings that he might need in the expedition.

    He worked day and night for forty days inside the second floor of the tower.

    After four days, they went to the Space Gate. They arrived at another location in which the six major powers have control within the central continent.

    This ce is the closest to Resting ce Ind.

    In fact, the ind is the centermostndmass of the whole.

    They boarded some beasts as a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator escorted them to the ind and they are going to keep an eye on the Grand realm candidates.

    The killings are allowed within the resting ce even between the candidates, but there should be no interference from the people of higher cultivation, even though they had strict regtions, there is no way they canpletely stop them from entering and there is no way they can regte the beasts in the ind.

    So, they have to make sure that the candidates stay safe. But ording to the rules, there is only a week of this protection time and after that, they are responsible for their own lives.

    When Sam and the rest of the candidates entered the ce, all they could see is chaos created by the war. The chaos is not just from the war centuries ago, after all, time beats everything. The chaos of that war was erased.

    The chaos they saw is from the aftermath of that war which is still going on for centuries. It is caused by the regr battles which ur for the sake of treasures and legacies. They could see the destroyed vegetation and the chaotic mess of cliffs, rocks, and even the seashore was full of carcasses of both beasts and human beings.

    "You have one week, search as much as you want and if you can get any treasures or techniques, they are yours. After one week, you can still stay here, but if you encounter any danger, I am not responsible. Even now, if you die in the hands of someone with the same strength, don¡¯t expect me to save you guys.

    Your mounts will stay here and you can go back to the space gate, whenever you want."

    All the candidates moved away in search of some fortune.

    Sam¡¯s first destination is arge mountain in the centre of the ind.

    After nearing the mountain, he could see more traces of battle, many ces in the mountain arepletely damaged and there are many dead bodies surrounding it.

    The runner up team didn¡¯t even bother to get near Sam and his friends.

    After Sam looked at the mountain, he found a spot to explore and made a camp near it. Philip and Jack decided to check other areas, but they camped together, just to be safe at night.

    For the next week, Sam continuously explored the spot he decided up on.

    On the sixth day night, he came back to the camp and said to Philip and Jack.

    "I think I found something near the foot of the mountain in the north western side. There is a small hole which is connected to a tunnel path which leads under the mountain. There seemed to be something rted to the beast cultivation, you guys want to take a look?"

    Sam asked both of them. Philip and Jack are not exactly interested in this, as they do not cultivate beast cultivation, but they decided to tag along as the next day is thest one.

    The next morning, when they reached the ce, they could see a small hole has been uncovered and Sam started erging it.

    As they erged the hole bit by bit, they started encountering some traps. There are many formations and inscriptions in which hindered their progress.

    Only by evening, did they encounter the tunnel and they are almost exhausted.

    Their progress got slower and they slowly started exploring the tunnel.

    As they moved forward, they got more and more careful as the traps increased. Sam¡¯s expertise in the formations helped him a lot as he deactivated the traps as soon as they encountered one.

    But it is still time consuming.

    By the time, they entered the other end of the tunnel, it was already morning.

    There are some illuminating devices which are mounted on the walls. Sam looked around and activated a formation by moving a lever and the whole room was illuminated.

    They were amazed by what they saw. There arerge stone sculptures of the beasts all around the room.

    The statues are numerous and there are too many, probably in hundreds. There is a foot- long metallic cylindrical container with a diameter of around three inches ced in front of each statue.

    Sam and the other two walked towards the stage and looked at a statue of a human. His face was obscure and couldn¡¯t be seen clearly. As soon as they stepped on the stage, a light came out of the statue as a human silhouette came out of it.

    "Greetings. You have entered the legacy of the beast faction. I don¡¯t know who you are, but this ce contains the techniques suitable for a Beast cultivator and each statue here represents a technique rted to that type of beast.

    Since you found this ce, you are destined to attain this fortune, I hope you will make good use of it.

    As for how to obtain them.

    Every cylindrical object ced in front of the statue holds an extremely high-level technique, which can be a lifesaver and is most suitable for people who are at the Nascent stage and above.

    All you have to do is, take the cylindrical container and undergo a test of patience. You have to feed your spiritual energy to the container and wait until it opens. You have to feed the container continuously and the steps for cultivating the technique will be revealed in stages with the progress.

    It will take a few months topletely unlock the technique, the test of patience is to see whether you can cultivate the technique or not as it would require a lot of time to cultivate it.

    The longer it takes for you to unlock the technique, the higher the quality of the technique is.

    I hope you seed and spread the techniques and won¡¯t let them die in this ce."

    The silhouette disappeared after the speech and the stone statue of the human crumbled.

 Chapter 319: Escape

    Sam is looking at the rubble of the statue in a daze and so were the remaining two.

    At that exact moment, a voice came from the tunnel bringing them back to their senses.

    "We will take it from here, thanks for discovering this. We are extremely grateful."

    They turned around and saw five peopleing out of the tunnel and entering the room.

    He recognized them instantly, they are the Nascent stage team of the Beast faction and they are actually the reserve team. The main team couldn¡¯t make it to this ce because they are injured by Moriyapletely.

    He also saw the woman who delivered the token to him at the resourcepetition. Sam and his friends became extremely vignt.

    These guys came here as if they marked this ce. The nascent team¡¯s time barely started a few hours ago and here they are.

    Sam looked around for an escape route. He doesn¡¯t have much interest in the techniques that are in the ce as he had so many of them inside the tower. He doesn¡¯t want to fight with these people.

    He has to make preparations for his visit to the beast faction and he is in the middle of his preparations, he doesn¡¯t want to waste his time on healing after having a dangerous fight with them.

    As for dying here or losing the fight, that thought never crossed his mind at all.

    Sam immediately took out some methane grenades and threw them towards the group. As soon as they sted, the team which was dispersed to avoid the grenades could feel the wind whistling and they could see a streak of cklight creating a line in the dust which was raised due to the st. Before the dust even settled, Sam was already out on his harbinger with two of his friends hanging on both of his hands.

    He didn¡¯t stop and just moved as fast as he can towards, the ce where their beasts are mounted. The Nascent stage cultivators didn¡¯t get hurt much and only had some superficial burns on their skins.

    After the dust settled, they didn¡¯t go after Sam. Although they really wanted to kill him, they have much more important stuff to do.

    They heard what the spirit said and was extremely excited. This whole room has hundreds of statues, which makes them hundreds of techniques, although they didn¡¯t get to see what the face of the silhouette is, they think that it is one of the founder members of the faction, who died during the great war and left this during hisst days. After all, this mountain was a grave of many people.

    Particrly, the north-western side. They heard that many people from their faction died at that ce in the ancient war.

    So, they started collecting all the cylindrical containers one by one. But they sensed a problem and that is, it is impossible to ce the containers in the spatial ring, but the statues are going in. So, they ced all the statues in the spatial ring and then tried to ce the containers inside the beast pouches which actually worked.

    So, they shoved everything inside their beast pouches, even Sanjay¡¯s sister, who is a bit mad and confused about the sudden ambush on Sam without her knowledge forgot to ask her teammates about it and was busy collecting all the containers.

    After that, they didn¡¯t dare stay on the ind and went back to the Beast faction.

    Their treasure was too precious and they couldn¡¯t wait to take it back to the faction and im enough credit for that.

    When they returned, there was quite amotion in the faction as soon as they revealed the news about the treasure.

    In the court of the Beast faction, the faction-head and all the other core members are gathered.

    Sanjay is also there. When they looked at the neatly ced cylindrical containers on a row of tables, they were stunned and when they heard the exnation of the five members, they were even shocked to the point, their mouths were opened wide as if they are idiots.

    "Test it." The faction-head asked their artisan, who took a container in his hands and started checking it. First, he tried to see, if he could trigger any mechanism, but he didn¡¯t dare to use force, if it was destroyed, his life would be doomed.

    After trying for more than half-an-hour, he nearly came up with nothing, even the metal is not something he is familiar with.

    "There are too many restrictions, which are restricting my spiritual sense to check inside. There are so many inscriptions and formations inscribed on it."

    The formation took over as soon as he heard this and he probed the restrictions a bit. His face beamed with a smile of excitement.

    "Incredible." He gasped in awe as he looked at the container.

    "What is it?" The faction head asked kind of impatiently.

    The formation master came out of his daze and said.

    "The one who made this container is a man of great skills, there are more than thirty formations etched on it. He must be an excellent formation master and an inscription master. He created arge restriction array by stacking each of them on one another. He has an excellent understanding of formations and inscriptions. In the current era, there is almost no one who could do so with etching..."

    The faction-head didn¡¯t bother to listen to the rest of the words as they arepletely rted to the trade, which he was not exactly familiar with. He walked out of the room real -quick and went into a secret room, where there were a bunch of scrolls arranged in the racks. He took the scrolls on the topmost rack with a wave of hands and read the details.

    He already knew the details in it and so does all the major powers, this is a story of a founder member of the Beast faction, but he is not the founder of the four families, rather the fifth member, the only one who left no descendants, but only a disciple. The greatest genius of the beast faction in that era.

    He is a genius in many trades and that includes his research in the study of beasts and their natures, formations, inscriptions, and many others.

    The Beast faction is one of the younger six major powers, it was founded a lotter than the first three powers.

    Before that, this man, the fifth founder member is a solo cultivator who is extremely famous, he was basically a pioneer in beast studies, in fact, he could be considered as the pioneer of this¡¯s zoology. He has traveled all over the and records about him are present in all the powers as his teachings and theories were never privatized before the establishment of the beast faction.

    So, all the factions have a record or two about him in their library and it is not even secret as it mostly rted to the basic knowledge of beasts, their favorable and unfavorable environmental conditions, and many other things.

    After confirming some facts about him, he was again reassured about the whole container thing and believed it is from their founder.

    He went back to the court and he could see that the remaining containers are left untouched, they didn¡¯t dare to touch them without his permission. That is his hold over the faction as the faction-head.

    He walked smugly as he took this as a stroke to his inted ego and took his seat and spoke seriously.

    "ording to our ancestral records, there is a high possibility that this is left behind by our fifth founder member. But we can never be too careful." He looked at the attendant, and thetter walked forward and picked a container that has a symbol of the tiger typed beast.

    He held the container in his hands and closed his eyes, as he gently injected his spiritual energy.

    *Click* A gentle click could be heard from the container and they could feel some sort of metallic movement inside. He stopped the spiritual energy flow and the sound of the metallic movement was reduced to a minimum, he could barely feel it through his touch, he couldn¡¯t even hear it properly.

    He injected the spiritual energy again and the sound increased again. He exined the whole thing to the rest of the people and they became extremely excited.

    The Faction-head was also delighted by this news. Since, he could confirm that it was from their founder and if their assumption of the sound being the progress of opening the container, then they could have more than two hundred life-saving arts with the main requirement being patient.

    And which cultivator doesn¡¯t have patience, it would be developed over time, due to their life spans. Everyone who cultivated for more than the Nascent stage would have their life span increased and they would be extremelyid back and takes the days passing as one of the trivial things.

    They would wait for years to learn an art that could save their lives.

    The Faction examined all the containers and noticed that there are arts for almost all kinds of beast cultivators in their faction.

    Many people are already staring at the containers with greed in their eyes as they searched for the container suitable for them.

    The Faction-head cleared his throat and said.

    "We will be distributing these to all our core members. They will be given a container based on their merits till now and their rankings. If there are two or more people who are eyeing the same container, then it could be settled with a duel or any fair means agreed by both parties. In three days distribute everyst one of them."

    After he gave the instructions, he looked at the whole cl.u.s.ter of the cylinders and his eyes lit up when he saw the one, he needed. He picked it up and went on his way.

    "You three,e with me." Just as he was about to leave the room, he turned around and called three of the five team members.

    The three of them followed him instantly and when they reached a secluded corridor, he asked them.

    "Now, tell me. Have you dealt with Sam? Did that guy from the thunder god temple give you the information?"

    "Sir, we got the location and we chased him, but.."

    As he was hesitating, the faction-head grew impatient and looked at him coldly making him speak.

 Chapter 320: Guide

    "Actually, this is not found by us, directly, it was found by Sam and his friends, when we reached the ce, he was just listening to the stone statue and the statue crumbled right in front of him. He escaped on the weird board with his friends.

    We didn¡¯t chase him, since we thought that this fortune is extremely important." The man who is in charge of the reserve team said with embarrassment.

    At first, they are not shameful enough to say this in front of all people, and the fact they are getting information from a person belonging to the thunder god temple is a secret, so they didn¡¯t dare to reveal the thing about Sam.

    But the Faction-head knows it, because they got this contact from a candidate from the thunder god temple at the resourcepetition.

    That person didn¡¯t contact the faction-head, he only contacted the reserve team of the nascent stage cultivators, but they didn¡¯t dare to make the decision themselves and immediately reported it to the Faction-head.

    Only after the faction-head approved, did they take the tip from that candidate.

    Since there are spies ced by every major power in other major powers, there are certainly some means for them to keep in contact.

    So, they agreed up on this and they would get the location of Sam if he stayed in the resting ce after the grand realm cultivators¡¯ time is over. And they did get it.

    But they didn¡¯t concentrate on this after getting to see all the containers.

    The Faction-Head thought for a bit and said.

    "Keep in touch with that guy, and see if he can find any other situation where we can take advantage of, make use of all our men who are nted inside the Thunder god temple and nearby minor powers if needed.

    You guys can get your art now and keep all of this is a secret. I will not be tolerating any form of leak in the information."

    With those words, he left the ce and went back to his personal room, as he started feeding the spiritual energy to it.

    Meanwhile.

    The Usaine sect is also in a state of turmoil. But unlike the beast faction, who had a good news in their hands, the Usaine sect is full of bad news.

    And most of them are rted to Sirona.

    Since the day she heard the conversation which showed that the higher-ups from the Usaine sect doesn¡¯t trust her, she stopped doing her usual job.

    Generally, in the sect, she is in charge of research in formations, inscriptions and artisan ship. She might not be the best in all of them, but she still knew how to use the formations and inscriptions to augment the products to create the artisan products.

    She is in charge of designing the weapons and formation discs and making them if they are within her abilities, for all the core members within the sect. Apart from that, she is in charge of research and maintenance of the sect¡¯s defences.

    To be blunt, it is fair to say that many things in the sect regarding their defences are mostly dependent on her.

    But she stopped caring about all of them. Instead, she went on a huge retreat and closed herself from the remaining sect as she trained her battle-skills.

    She is extremely confident in her puppet skills, but Sam made a short work out of them making her realize the defects in battling using puppets.

    She realized that she shouldn¡¯t rely on her puppet too much and has to concentrate more on her personal strength.

    So, she started researching her own battle skills. She didn¡¯t really use any spells with hand-signs, rather she started researching how to use her me type abilities to their maximum efficiency.

    She is quietly training herself and this continued on even after the resourcepetition, the Sect-leader even offered a position in the team of the resourcepetition so that she could enter the Resting ce, enticing her with the treasures, but his efforts are in vain.

    Now, the whole Usaine sect is waiting for her like a mother waiting for her Otaku son toe out of his room.

    They don¡¯t know how to deal with this and on this day, they grew extremely impatient as there are many things that are stagnated. Particrly, the people who work in the formation and inscription tower.

    Generally, the people who are sent to work in these two associations has certain requirements to meet and they have a duty of climbing as high as possible so that they could get more information and opportunities, which they would share with the sect.

    But not all of them are suitable to climb the ranks, after all how can there be so many experts in one ce, so Sirona is in charge of letting them gain the status.

    She is in-charge of giving the research as well as the solve the problems the other people encountered regarding the research. Now, all of it was gone. The sect members were still okay when she took a break from the internal workings, but now that it is getting to disturb the external works, they are getting angry.

    "Bring her to the court, by force if needed."

    The Sect-leadermanded a Nascent stage cultivator. The person nodded and immediately left toplete the task.

    But he came back with his foot limping and an arm severed, along with that there are many sharp metallic des impaled into his chest. He was bleeding all over the floor and they can trace the path back to Sirona¡¯s room.

    The sect-leader frowned and asked.

    "What happened?"

    "She.... She doesn¡¯t want toe." The person barelymented, before fainting. The attendants brought him to the healers and the frown on the face of the Sect-leader grew more and more irritated.

    It was all good andfortable when she listened to every word he said and got naively manipted. He knew dealing with her was difficult, but he never encountered that because of her trust in him as well as she felt that she is only paying back what she owed to the faction, since she was a part of it too.

    But, since the original trust was broken, there is no way for him to easily manipte her as he wished.

    She is not a genius for nothing. She was trained to use her intelligence in a particr way since childhood, but once she was forced to find a new direction, these naively manipted geniuses are the worst people you could encounter.

    They would now be extremely cynical and self-centered.

    Now, she recognized that there is no benefit for her by helping the Sect all the time, she can only do so if she has any work with the sect. Then would they agree to her conditions? She would force them to agree to those conditions.

    Her requirements might be important for her, but her help is more important to the sect.

    As the higher-ups of the sect are having a harder and harder time dealing with Sirona¡¯s change.

    There is something else that is changing in the corner of the.

    In the eastern corner of the in a small vige.

    Three youngsters are beating the crap out of the middle-aged man. They are all acolytes, while the middle-aged man is a normal person with no cultivation.

    "How dare you refuse to pay up? Huh? You seem to have grown balls in the past week."

    The one in the middle of the three youngsters spoke with an arrogant tone.

    "Please forgive me, I was ill for the past week and couldn¡¯t get to earn anything. I will pay you next week."

    The middle-aged man replied with an extremely pitiful and feeble voice.

    "You better pay up. Otherwise, I will kill you." The youngsters left him and the middle-aged man stood up weakly as he walked back to his home.

    On the way back, she started crying his heart out and tears streaked over his face and the vision became blurry.

    "Why do I have to grow through this? What sin have Imitted? Is being unable to awaken and being weak is my mistake, why is the world so unfair?" He muttered to himself as he opened the main gate of his house.

    He entered the house and sat down as he started weeping even more. He was sick of all the suffering. The three youngsters who are half his age beat the crap out of him since he didn¡¯t pay for the ¡¯protection¡¯ fee he owed them.

    He couldn¡¯t take it. All he wanted was to make an honest living, but it was so difficult to get by in this world, he is even thinking of ending his pathetic and miserable life, but he couldn¡¯t do so as he was too much of a coward.

    As he was lost in his thoughts of his pathetic life, a voice woke him up from his daze.

    "Do you want to improve your life and be strong enough to control your own decisions?"

    The voice was melodious, even though he didn¡¯t see anyone, he still replied.

    "Yes."

    "Do you want to stand up for yourself and against this unfair world?"

    "Yes."

    "Do you want to be treated equally and experience the fairness of the world?"

    "Yes."

    "Then take this. I will be your ¡¯Guide¡¯ in this path to fairness and equality." With those words, a pill rolled over the wooden floor as it reached him.

    The middle-aged man took the pill in his hands and was hesitating.

    "Why are you hesitating? What do you have to lose?" The melodious voice continued and he became resolute.

    "That¡¯s right. What do I have to lose?" He muttered and swallowed the pill.

 Chapter 321: Chaos in Usaine Sect

    The next day, the middle-aged man who was beaten up by the three youngsters, walked out of his house with new vigor, any cultivator could see the traces of spiritual energy raging around him.

    It is clearly showcasing hisck of control over the spiritual energy. He staggered along the streets proudly and went to search for the three youngsters who beat him up yesterday.

    As soon as he saw them sitting in a restaurant to have their breakfast, he mmed the leader¡¯s head into the table, without even caring about giving an exnation or any form of talk.

    "You..." Theckey on the side was about to say something but he wasn¡¯t able to do so, as he the middle-aged man kicked his squarely on the chest.

    After more than five minutes of bashing, the middle-aged man finally said.

    "From today onwards, I, Monti doesn¡¯t owe you guys anything. I hope you guys don¡¯t bother people like and make an honest living." He spoke righteously as he walked back to his home proudly.

    An almost simr situation urred in another corner of the vige. A middle-aged woman who was being tortured by her daughter-inw tied her up and lectured her while pping some sense into her.

    The same type of situations arouses in different locations in different continents, even the very vige Sam originated from, the Lava Rock vige also had simr situations urring. As for who the cause, is it was yet to be known.

    Sam is thinking of making preparations, this time, he doesn¡¯t have many new inventions up his sleeves. With all his means, including the energy cells detonation, he could at most take a pre-transcendent directly and leave with some serious injuries in case of a surprise attack.

    If he made sufficient preparations, he can still use the thunder prison and deal with a single transcendent.

    But a Major power is formed with at least one person who is beyond the transcendent level and that is a cultivator at Consummate realm {A/N: Cultivation stage exnation will be given in ater chapter}

    He has no hope of defeating or confronting a person at the Consummate realm with his current level. No matter the tricks and the number of designs he had in mind, he couldn¡¯t find the items he needed to execute them in a short time frame of nine months.

    He would need high-quality minerals and sufficient resources to make them into what he wants them to be. He has neither power nor influence to get these resources, he believed that even his money is not enough.

    Some things can only be gotten in equivalent trades and the spirit stones, no matter the amount wouldn¡¯t make the cut.

    He was having a hard time thinking about how he should proceed.

    He has to bring back Watt, no matter the price he has to pay. A single Beast faction is not going to be enough to stop him.

    He started sorting his thoughts and came to a conclusion, he has to make a hit and run. He has to create chaos and get back Watt before they realize what is happening, but the Beast faction should know that it is him, Sam who brought his friend outside the stomach of the beast faction.

    He came to this conclusion even before he entered the resting ce. Now, he is thinking of ways to find the most efficient method.

    And the first step in it, is him growing stronger and reach the maximum limit of the cultivation within these nine months.

    Apart from that, he has to achieve another two elemental fusions at least. As for the technical side, he has most of the things taken care of and there is only onerge thing remaining for him to deal with.

    That is a new weapon, he was inspired by Vickers¡¯ fighting style. His spiritual core was unique and he is probably the only Warrior mage with a neutral attribute on the and Sam wanted to be a second one. After all, one of the abilities of his spiritual core is maniption, so he would try and see what he can do.

    But if he can really achieve what he wants, then there might be another card up his sleeve which would make him feel a bit more reassured when he visits the Beast faction.

    The days passed slowly as they worked their ass off. Philip and Jack didn¡¯t get to ck off at all. Sam only has one thing to say to them and evenzy Philip started practicing.

    "If you don¡¯t break through to thete stage, don¡¯t even bother thinking abouting to the beast faction."

    The breakthroughs in the Grand realm cultivation will take longer than the previous three, as they would be undergoing the metamorphosis after this and reach the peak of the life-span and health as a normal human.

    There are almost no cases of people bing Nascent stage cultivators before they turn twenty. Heck, they are a one in a million genius if they can make it before twenty-two. And now, from the Deadline Sam ced on them, it is true that they would be on the verge of breaking through to Nascent at twenty-one.

    And in Sam¡¯s case, he would barely turn twenty. Their growth rate is too fast, but they knew that the younger generation of the six major powers is also quite outstanding this time, there might be cases where they would turn Nascent at twenty years old too.

    They didn¡¯t dare to think further and only went on cultivating and practicing.

    Every day, their routine is pretty much fixed. They would wake up before dawn and start cultivating. As Philip and Jack need enlightenment in their cultivation techniques that is one of the perfect timings.

    After around four hours, Philip will go to Sam¡¯s lecture, while Jack would try toprehend the sword from the things around him.

    His current focus was still on the water and after that, they will enter the divine dimension and will have sparring practice for five hours straight to check their regr progress.

    The next thing will be fighting the beasts in the hunting zones of the thunder god temple.

    After that cultivating and rest.

    Sam is the only one who is focusing on some other aspects.

    One of them is his elemental fusion, he doesn¡¯t need enlightenment so there is no need for him to directly spend his time cultivating as the beasts would be busy munching the herbs and the meat of the beasts.

    Hepletely decided to give up on the herbs he has grown till now and decided to let the beasts feed on them.

    He would use that time to get better at the elemental fusion.

    Apart from that, he would be spending his time making things that are needed for the trip.

    The people from the thunder god temple didn¡¯t ask them for anything. Although Sam was supposed to be the artisan and many of his peers initially wanted to ask Sam to make their weapons, they didn¡¯t dare to ask him directly after the resourcepetition.

    Now, that their training is going smoothly.

    The training of someone else in the Usaine sect is making the whole sect tremble.

    Sirona who was just in secluded training came out a few days ago and started dueling the remaining grand realm cultivators, within the sect.

    Many cultivators don¡¯t even know that Sirona exists in their sect. Because, she is a secret in the sect, and only the people who have enough right to have a ce in the court knows about her.

    But now, she is on her sparring spree. She is trying her newly learned techniques and she is showing no signs of holding back.

    After all, she never experienced a normal sparring match. All she knew is sparring means fighting and she is beating the crap out of everyone. There are more and more candidates who are being injured fatally and the whole sect is in chaos.

    But the sect leader has to say anything about it, he did order some Nascent stage cultivators to restrain her a bit, but every time she was weirdly prepared and the more and more of her cards are revealed.

    All of a sudden, the sect leader didn¡¯t want to restrain her, he just sent one Nascent after another to check all the preparations she made in the whole sect.

    And the results are shocking for him to see.

    There is no way for the people who went to deal with her to even touch her. There are all sorts of traps in the sect which he, even the sect leader doesn¡¯t know about.

    Even though, he knew that there are some traps that are known to everyone and she made it with the sect¡¯s consent. He realized that they are not even half of what she set up in the sect.

    No matter, where she stood, she could activate at least three different formations, she could trigger at least four different traps and she has enough capability to kill a Nascent on her whim.

    But she didn¡¯t kill anyone, at least not yet.

 Chapter 322: Wanted Sirona

    Three monthster.

    Sam made a breakthrough to the middle-stage Level-5 and also achieved a second elemental fusion. The light element.

    He was very d that he was able to achieve it and this would increase his speed a lot, but there is a problem with this. The light elemental fusion is costing more spiritual energy than the fire elemental one.

    He couldn¡¯t sustain in this state for long and can at most stay for fifteen minutes continuously.

    After fifteen minutes he would bepletely dry.

    So, this is not an extremely feasible option, but one thing for sure is that he has the advantage of speed in this state.

    He is literally a sh of a light beam as he moved from one ce to another, but this also gave him a lot of troubles, he could control this state at all. The fire elemental fusion can be considered as elementary school math whenpared to the light elemental fusion, which is as difficult as advanced calculus.

    He has serious control problems with the light elements as the light is everywhere in the day time, he could merge into the environment easily.

    But he didn¡¯t give up. He immersed himself deeply, trying to master it and his ambition didn¡¯t even stop at just mastering it. He has some further ideas on how to use this light element particrly when he discovered what he can do just by manipting the frequency.

    As for the other things, he did have some minor progress in using neutral spiritual energy like a mage.

    Vickers used pure spiritual energy without any elemental attribute to create beams of energy and even used it to consolidate weapons physically. This is something he hasn¡¯t seen before, and he could see many uses for this.

    He did try to just condense the spiritual energy and try to manipte it forcefully and he is actually able to change the form quite well, although it was in the size of his fist, still, it is some progress.

    But the most important problem regarding this is the spiritual energy usage and the mental strain he has to undergo to make the spiritual energy particles condense and make them dense enough to be visible to the n.a.k.e.d eye and transform into a single entity and shape he wants.

    For the first try, he bled from his nose. He clearly understood the difficulty of this and as for shooting the spiritual energy as a beam, he didn¡¯t even dare to consider it for now.

    He tried to do so with the spiritual energy from an energy cell. This reduced the requirement of the spiritual energy from his own body, but the mental strain increased.

    Meanwhile, Philip and Jack are having a hard time as well.

    Particrly, Philip. He not only has to deal with the intense training, he also has to deal with Sam¡¯s lectures, which arepletely unfamiliar andplex. He doesn¡¯t know where Sam got this knowledge, but some theories made him question his very existence.

    He has so many doubts about Sam¡¯s theories.

    But after every doubt was rified, he has a new world opening for him. He has always thought the metal element is just an essory for him in closebat and simply assistance.

    After he got the metal maniption, he has a variety of additional methods he could use the metal element in closebat.

    But after these three months, he has apletely new perspective, he didn¡¯t think he can see possibilities in which he can use the metal element to be his primary one. He could batter, kill, defend, and anything he wanted.

    But the main requirement being two points, he has to obtain metal element fusion and also has to obtain the highest level of control he can in the metal element.

    He might bezy and ck off. But he really liked exploring these possibilities. The only thing is every time, Sam gave a lecture to him, he felt like he was dumber and dumber.

    As for artisan lessons, he has wait until he mastered the precision control of the metal element.

    Jack is still as hard-working as ever. Practicing all the basics every day and many times at that.

    All in all, their training is a kind of smooth sailing.

    But after these three months, there is some news which made Sam halt his training.

    It is about the Usaine sect.

    The news is that a youngdy has torn the whole Usaine sect apart and there are more than five hundred deaths. She escaped and the people are still in pursuit of her.

    The news was passed by the Usaine sect themselves and thedy¡¯s portrait was distributed for all the members in the thunder god temple.

    He was surprised and amused at the same time when he saw the picture. It is none other than Sirona.

    ording to the news, she betrayed the faction, created a massacre, and escaped.

    He couldn¡¯t help but smile at this. He knew this would happen. He knew that after they talked that day, there is no way that the sect could keep her.

    Sam has experienced this in his previous life. His previous life was simr to hers. He was controlled, manipted, and was made to think from only one perspective.

    But once he got a new perception and thinks differently, everything changed and the change is pretty much simr to what happened now.

    He could guess how the events led to his. He was oddly happy for some reason when he heard that Sirona escaped. But he is not extremely worried.

    If she can escape directly from a Consummate realm cultivator, then there is a high chance they wouldn¡¯t be able to find her. So, there is no need for him to worry.

    Meanwhile.

    Sirona is in the western continent and precisely at Sam¡¯s city.

    Ten days ago from the present day.

    Sirona was in her usual training when themunication token she used to spy on the court meetings gave her an alert.

    She picked it up and started listening.

    "Sirona is getting too out of hand. There are twenty-five people who are crippled and ten of them are Nascent stage cultivators. There are even traps everywhere in the sect. Every disciple is getting worried about identally triggering a trap and dying from that mistake.

    We have to stop her." One of the higher officials said in a solemn tone.

    The sect-leader is in a dilemma. He thought that Sirona might have caught a new interest and let her be for some time to not force her too much. But now from the past two months or so, her behavior has be intolerable.

    He doesn¡¯t know how to control her. If he really did force her to the corner, he might lose someone who is a genius in multiple trades. That is the reason which stopped him from taking any action against her.

    But now, he has to think again. As more and more hidden traps are being revealed, he started to realize that Sirona might have more control over the lives of sect members than he, the sect leader himself.

    Even if he wanted to kill them all, there is a high chance that there would be some people who might live, but Sirona¡¯s preparations are saying otherwise. She might really have made enough arrangements to kill everyone.

    This is a big hit for his ego. He couldn¡¯t digest the thought of having a person who is supposed to do his bidding hold more control over him.

    He tried to brainwash her to be a fool, for this very reason in the first ce.

    But he realized that there is no way for him to really control a geniuspletely. His ns would be in vain sooner orter.

    "We will execute her, but before that, we have to get all the details regarding the traps she had set up." The Sect-leader made the decision. He might lose her genius works and expertise, but he still needs his position.

    Only, the sect leader can have the power of controlling the lives of the sect members. They all have to be at his beck and call. Not the other way around.

    He already sent a team of Nascent stage cultivators led by a Pre-transcendent to her residence.

    But to their surprise, she wasn¡¯t there.

    They became extremely alert and had a bad premonition.

    Before they knew it, they heard a huge gale of wind from the core disciple yard and when they looked over, they could see arge tornado sweeping over the residences of the core disciples, tearing down everything and anything in the way.

    The Elders who also live in the core disciple yard looked at Sirona who was escaping and made a move to stop her, but before they knew it, Sirona changed her direction and stood on top of a fountain in the middle of the yard and injected her spiritual energy inside.

    The yard is full of rich spiritual energy and all of it was absorbed into the fountain and then passed through the ground as it moved towards the houses. The formation was activated and ten houses as nodes, the rest of them are being torn down and metallic beams of the house and all the rubble are killing the people due to the extreme wind force. Before they knew it, the entire core region is a graveyard.

 Chapter 323: Fled to the Western Continent

    After killing almost half of the core disciples and the elders of the sect, Sirona didn¡¯t stop, she boarded her beast, which is a Fire-Bird, and flew as fast as she can.

    The pursuit didn¡¯t stop, the team which is responsible for dealing with Sirona came and boarded their beasts as they gave chase.

    Sirona flew into the next region, where the manufacturing of the products of the Usaine sect happens, and flew over the buildings.

    She took out some huge metallic puppets and dropped them on specific locations of the Buildings. By the time, the chasing team arrived, she is already floating in the middle of the region as she sat on the fire-bird.

    She closed her eyes as she held arge crystal in her hands. Before the team could realize what is happening. The puppets moved and as all of them are humanoid, they stood up and bent over as they ced their arms on the building and spiritual energy entered the buildings.

    With a single shine of spiritual energy, the whole manufacturing area, suddenly blew open as the earthen magma which was the main source of the fire elemental energy for the artisans in this area, spew out as it drowned the team and the buildings. The formation which was activated, operated in a certain way as the Pre-transcendent realm expert was only barely able to escape.

    He was also severely injured as the earthen Magma is of extremely high-grade as it can be the foundation of the whole Usaine sect¡¯s manufacturing zone.

    But all the Nascent stage cultivators died, even their bones disappeared and that is not even half of the casualties. The whole buildings and all the artisans, cultivators, or anyone who is present within the range of formations, are dead. Only some pre-transcendent cultivators are able to escape.

    The body count would be in the hundreds andbining with the deaths in the core region. Sirona has already killed more than four hundred people and severely injured many Pre-transcendent cultivators.

    But the chase didn¡¯t stop. There are still some towers which are within the outside range of the formation, they are the sentry towers, Sirona flew towards them and ced her hands on one of the towers.

    She destroyed brick and took a metallic box out of her storage and ced it inside. As soon as the hole was filled, the sentry tower split into two and several metallic pikes made their way towards the Pre-transcendent cultivators who barely caught their breath from the damage of the Magma.

    The Pike is numerous and they were shot one by one as they covered all directions within the magma range. The Pikes prated them into their body and they are immediately paralyzed, they could see a faint ze indicating the pikes are coated with something.

    They lost all hope.

    Sirona didn¡¯t stop after dealing with them. She flew towards the court building. That building is the only one which has a space-gate to the ind which has space-gates connecting to the other ces.

    By this time, the other people in the area are already alerted, except for the sect-leader and the Grand elders, almost everyone knew what is happening. But there are people who already made a move to inform the sect leader so that he would take action.

    The transcendent cultivators started chasing her. even though the Fire-Bird is only a Level-6 beast, it is still fast as it has some sort of superior bloodline-mutation.

    The transcendent cultivators don¡¯t have transcendent beasts, but they are still faster, though, but they couldn¡¯t catch up to her because of the sentry towers.

    Sirona activated the sentry towers and the pikes are continuously raining down. Once activated, the tower has to deactivate to stop the pike shooting.

    Sirona just left the towers like that and ran away.

    Although the transcendent cultivators and their beasts are strong, they don¡¯t dare to take the pikes head-on, the poison that was on the pikes is no joke. Some of them are even the ones who collected it.

    This inevitably slowed down their pace.

    After fifteen minutes, Sirona is already in the Court hall. She has triggered all kinds of traps and security measures that are employed in the whole sect.

    The sect leader has learned of thismotion by now and came to the courtroom, followed by the Grand elders and other important members of the sect.

    "How dare you Sirona? How dare you betray the sect?" The Sect leader yelled at her righteously. She didn¡¯t even bother replying. All of them knew why he had gone crazy all of a sudden and knew that their n was leaked.

    They are just saying this to save face before the disciples who are gathering near the court.

    Seeing her silence, the sect-leader was just about to finish her, when Sirona made her move.

    She stood at the center of the court and ced bit her finger as she drew a rune on the floor with her blood. The rune lit up and the whole room suddenly shook.

    The roof of the court suddenly had holes opened up as eight metallic humanoid puppetsnded on the floor.

    Sirona made some hand-signs and said.

    "Protect me from any harm."

    With those words, she didn¡¯t even bother to look at the crowd and ran towards the room behind the courtroom.

    The eight puppets closely followed her. But this time, the sect members are in a daze and were unable to follow her in time. Only the metallic shing sounds of the puppets when they are walking woke them up.

    "H.. How? How did she know how to activate the Eight guardian puppets?" The sect leader looked at the puppets in disbelief.

    The Eight guardian puppets are one of the trump cards of the Usaine sect and only the sect leader and the Grand elders have the right to activate it.

    But right doesn¡¯t mean, they can activate it. There is one rule for activating it and that is the sect leader and the Grand elders have to master the control and activation methods of the puppets and based on their expertise, the number of puppets activated will be decided.

    The current Sect leader was barely able to activate all eight puppets a few years ago. Sirona who is barely twenty has already mastered it and she can evenmand them freely.

    The Eight Guardian Puppets are made by the founder of the sect, who is a great artisan and they are extremely high-level. They have the souls enchanted and they will work on for the person who activated the puppets.

    Each puppet will be loaded with spiritual stones and many arrays so that they can absorb the energy directly, but it is only temporary as the user has to restore the energy after some time and a lot of spiritual energy will go to waste when working.

    But Sirona doesn¡¯t need that much time.

    Each Puppet can take on a Transcendent cultivator and can even defeat them. When four of them are together, even a Consummate wouldn¡¯t be hard to defend against. They are eight of them all working together with no intention to attack and only aim to be the safety of the youngdy. This couldn¡¯t be any easier for these puppets.

    The Sect leader is extremely frustrated. If he was really an enemy, he would have tried his best against the puppets, but those puppets are trump cards of the sect and he doesn¡¯t dare toy his hands on them and make some damage to them.

    He would extremely regret it. There is no way for him to repair it. There used to be a person who was able to repair it, but he was no more, if they are damaged now, there is no way he can repair them.

    So, they have to give up on pursuing Sirona. The Puppets didn¡¯t attack them as they only had to defend.

    After half-an-hour, the puppets suddenly lost the glow in their eyes and leaped into the air. They entered the same holes they came from and go themselves sealed again.

    "Damn it." The sect leader gritted his teeth in anger, this can only mean one thing. Sirona must have escaped to a faraway ce, making the connection between her and the puppets cut off.

    He was extremely angry, because, if she didn¡¯t cut the connection, there is no way for him to summon them again. Unless she died.

    "Send the notice to all the major powers, minor powers, and the four major professional associations.

    She is a traitor to the sect and is an extremely wanted person. Ask them to kill her if they see her right away."

    Sect leader gave the instructions coldly and walked away.

    Sirona arrived at the Space-Gate ind and used the same method she used before toe to the western continent.

    As for why she came to this ce, even she doesn¡¯t know. She just felt like it. She wanted to meet Sam once again and ask him, how he knew that her sect is lying to her. But to her disappointment, she noticed that Sam is not in this ce at all.

 Chapter 324: Departing to the Beast faction

    Sirona learned that Sam went to the thunder god temple. Although she doesn¡¯t know the reason, she is rational enough to know her current predicament and didn¡¯t go there.

    She stayed within Sam¡¯s city as she explored one ce after another without a bother about the disaster, she caused within the Usaine sect.

    Just like that, days passed while Sam, Philip, and Jack are training in the Thunder god temple, Sirona taking a refugee in the western continent, Watt training in the Beast faction, in the mouth of the enemy.

    Another Six months passed like this without much change.

    There are only a few days for the Family meeting of the beast faction when Sam, Watt, and Jack finally came out of their training. They went to the Space gate ind and Sam paid a huge number of spirit stones for them to use the one-way space gate.

    All this while, Arc specifically sent the earnings to Sam, so he is notcking at all. More than a quarter of the annual production of the spirit stones within the western continent is currently in his pocket.

    After entering the space-gate, Sam looked at the horizons as he extended his hand and caught something from the air.

    A butterfly appeared out of nowhere in his hand as it pped its wings to get away from his hand.

    A Golden me appeared and burned the butterfly to the ashes, Sam took out the token which was sent by Sanjay in his hands and the trio disappeared in a sh.

    At this exact moment, somewhere in the thunder god temple¡¯s territory, deep within a cave of the cliff, there are numerous butterflies flying around and some of them are revolving around a middle-aged man who is meditating with his eyes closed.

    He abruptly opened his eyes and looked in the direction of space gates. He thought for a moment and called for an attendant.

    "Call Arman here." The attendant nodded his head and went to call Arman.

    Five minutester.

    "Grand Elder, you wanted to see me?" Arman came inside with a smile.

    "Sam killed the butterfly." Arman was stunned for a second before taking out a token from his spatial ring.

    It is a small rectangr token with a butterfly mark on it. Generally, it would emit a faint blue glow, but now it was cracked and there is no blue glow, rather it looked like normal rock with a symbol engraved on it.

    "How does he know? Since when?" He asked in bewilderment. He has pulled many strings to ask for this Grand elder to ce this specially mutated Soul-chasing butterfly on Sam. All this while, he has kept tabs on Sam.

    But now, he is afraid that Sam might have known this all along.

    He is the one who sold out Sam¡¯s locations and whereabouts to the Beast faction, but since Sam did fall into the trap, he was sure that he didn¡¯t know earlier.

    Only after this thought, did he calm down a bit.

    "I don¡¯t know the exact time he found out, but he killed it just now and as you know, he moved towards the Space-gate ind.

    Since I am responsible for telling you this, I told you. Nothing more, nothing less.

    I don¡¯t know if Sam will make a ruckus of this situation and I don¡¯t know, how much he knows, but if you dare to put my name out, when it was found out, you better not dream of staying alive. I don¡¯t want the temple heads attention at this moment.

    That¡¯s all I wanted to say, you can leave now."

    Arman is a bit confused and anxious. He needs to get the thunder prison, but Sam is adamant about not giving it to him. He didn¡¯t dare to fight it out with him openly as he is not exactly confident, that he is going to win.

    He wanted to borrow the hand of the Beast faction and use their feud to kill him. He always followed Sam¡¯s movements and only after he confirmed that he can get the thunder prison after his death, he sent the position.

    Even in these nine months, he tried many times, but Sam waspletely unscathed. There is no situation that Sam was affected and he escaped every single time.

    He was extremely agitated and wanted to give up for some time. But he couldn¡¯t as the spirit of the saber is continuously reminding him of the importance of the thunder prison.

    But now that Sam has known about the existence of the butterfly, he was a bit anxious and nervous.

    After all, anyone who did enough homework on Sam would know, they shouldn¡¯t give him a chance to prepare if they decided to deal with him.

    If Sam only knew about this, then there is still some chance, but if he knew it for a long time ago, then it is extremely dangerous.

    He went to the Space gate ind to see if he can get information on where Sam went, but there is no feasible way for him to find out where Sam exactly went.

    Meanwhile, Sam and his friends arrived in the middle of the woods. There is no one in vicinities except for the lush forests.

    Right now, Sam has grown a bit taller and he is around six feet tall. This might be thest stage of his growth, even if there is any feasibility there is no way his body would have other changes like this after he stepped into Nascent.

    Even Philip and Jack had some changes in their appearance. They looked a bit robust and rougher than before.

    The three of them didn¡¯t wear their usual clothes as they started exploring the woods.

    All three of them broke through thete stage of the Grand realm. While Philip and Jack are in Level-7, Sam is at level-8 and is on verge of breaking through the Level-9. This year, there is a high chance that he would break through the Nascent stage.

    They didn¡¯t encounter anything in the vicinities, not even beasts.

    After more than half a day of exploring they finally found some traces of people.

    They didn¡¯t let them notice and followed them out sneakily until they reached the nearest human settlement.

    This is because Sam is afraid that the coordinates of the Space gate might have been leading them to the mouth of the Beast faction and there would not be many chances for him to escape.

    He had many ns and he doesn¡¯t want the people to suspect them, this early in the journey.

    That is why they reached the first human settlement and wanted to investigate the situation.

    And when they reached the vige, they understood that they are not exactly in a vige, rather they are in a temporary camp of the Normal disciples of the Beast faction within the hunting grounds.

    Technically this is still considered as the deeper regions of the beast faction, but the hunting grounds happened to be the least monitored of all the deeper regions.

    They sneaked in with the help of a shadow mouse so that they wouldn¡¯t get caught as they tried to find a way to get into the core region.

    Because Sam should be there in two days for his n to seed.

    But in process of their search, they found out some interesting things.

    One of them is the fact that Sam is extremely popr here. Although it has been nine months, for some reason, there are still talks going on particrly regarding him attending the family meeting this time.

    He was genuinely surprised, but he was relieved by the fact no one is badmouthing him. The one who is most relieved is still Philip and Jack. If they really didn¡¯t control their mouths, there is no guarantee that Sam wouldn¡¯t go out of control again.

    As for the second thing is, they don¡¯t have to worry about getting into the core region of the faction. Because, they learned that the family meeting, by the name sounded like a gathering between the four families of the faction. It is in fact a gathering of sorts of all the people in the faction. And there would be some duels as performance and rewards for the merits and so on.

    The most pleasant thing is that all the people will be gathered as an audience and that meeting is also in two days.

    Sam was extremely pleased by this.

    His n would definitely work if this thing happens.

    That night, Sam and the group abducted a disciple and interrogated him in the woods.

    After some threats and bluffs, they got the way to go to the Inner court of the beast faction which is connected to the core region.

    He has tomunicate with Watt before the n is executed and for that, he has to be within a certain distance from Watt.

    He gave some sedative to that guy and stole all the uniforms he had before leaving him in the woods.

    At this moment, Sanjay already sent a person to investigate if Sam has arrived at the hunting grounds.

    But the person returned with no results.

 Chapter 325: Family Meeting

    Sam arrived at the Inner region the next day morning.

    They started scouting the ces to hide and find a way tomunicate with Watt.

    After finding a secluded ce, he took out a portablemunication tower, which has enough range to cover the inner region and the core region.

    Meanwhile.

    Watt trained his ass off, for the past nine months, he beat the crap out of all the candidates who are within the grand realm in a one-on-one fight. The only person he wasn¡¯t able to beat is Sanjay.

    Even though Watt reached level-7, he was still far away from Sanjay¡¯s level as that guy is at Peak stage. His progress is faster than Watt and even Sam.

    He is not able to beat Sanjay when they are at the same level, there is no way for him to deal with him now.

    Even though he is frustrated about this, he took it out all on the other candidates.

    Right now, he is preparing for Sam toe here. He knew that he doesn¡¯t have the means to escape here, he would definitely need Sam¡¯s help and from what Sanjay said, Sam should being tomorrow and he has something to do with the family meeting that is happening the next day.

    He has heard the rumors about how Sam isbeled as the traitor¡¯s son and being called as Bastard all over the sect, that is also one of the reasons for him to bash these guys.

    He knew Sam¡¯s past and also knew the soul upying the body of Sam doesn¡¯t belong to this world, but he still couldn¡¯t help but get angry.

    For him Sam is an omnipotent person, he can do whatever he wants and achieve whatever he wished for. These people in the Beast faction, who are sheltered and groomed and with their egos which are inted due to their position as a disciple or a member of major power are not even suitable to be Sam¡¯s servants, much less be his family members and even being called names by them.

    Sam came to this position all by himself. He might have resources and all kinds of knowledge, but he is up against the world and the society, he was all alone and still climbed to where he is today, does these guys who are enjoying the power and influence built upon by their ancestors, does they have enough qualifications to criticize Sam?

    Absolutely not. At least, that is Watt thinks.

    So, he decided to crush the confidence of the members, because once he starts killing, he would die and if he dies here, Sam would go crazy and be irrational. That much he knew for sure.

    As he is making preparations for tomorrow in case Sam arrives, Sanjay came in.

    There is a possibility that Sam arrived in the Beast faction. We found a person tied up in the woods and leftpletely unconscious. When he woke up, he said that someone infiltrated and asked for the information on entry to the Inner region.

    If Sam contacts you, tell him to just meet you. I know you cannot trust me, but I can assure you that both of you will stay safe, I have more authority than you think within the faction. Think it over."

    Sanjay said these words and left without waiting for the answer.

    After he left, Watt was a bit excited and expectant, he took out themunication token from his pocket. He didn¡¯t keep it in the spatial ring because it would lose the connection.

    After waiting for an hour or so, themunication token suddenly lit up and Watt¡¯s lips curled into a smile.

    . . .

    The next day, the family meeting was about to begin in a few hours. The preparations are done and everyone is moving towards the special area which is specifically left for the family meeting only.

    All the disciples who are selected to participate in the duels of the meeting are already in their specified locations and are waiting for their chance to show off, in front of the higher-ups.

    Some of them are proudly standing in their spots to receive rewards for their merits.

    Soon, the ceremony started.

    The family meeting is basically divided into two parts.

    The first one is the Inner Court and Outer court disciples¡¯petitions, rankings, rewards, and merits. As for the second part. It is for the four families¡¯petition.

    The Core disciples who are promoted from the inner court would have to choose one of the four families to join.

    So, in the second part, the Core disciples and the newly promoted elders who belong to the four families willpete to show their might and prove their worth to gain more resources in certain areas.

    This also includes, the fight to be the future heir.

    Generally, the leader of the six major powers wouldn¡¯t be changed for many decades and sometimes, even centuries.

    So, the future heir will not be selected for every generation. But they will select an outstanding genius in a certain generation who has prospects to be a future heir and once that candidate appears, anyone who is in the same generation canpete for the title.

    Once the holder of the title bes strong enough to defeat the current head easily, then he can take over the position.

    So, every family meeting will be apetition for the future heir position if there is a future heir in the ce.

    Sanjay sat in his position and Watt has a seat arranged right next to him. He didn¡¯t let Watt stay in the room and he doesn¡¯t want to leave Sam an opportunity to sneak Watt out of this ce.

    Today, he is determined to know what happened twenty years ago. He has to know if what he identally read is right or wrong.

    He has to know what happened to the uncle and why has he been staying in the bas.e.m.e.nt for the past twenty years without even thinking ofing out.

    What does he always have a certain tinge of resentment when it came to faction matters and the Faction-head.

    Who is this person who wasbeled as a traitor?

    Today, he wants to get an answer to all of those questions.

    Right now, Sam is sitting in thest row at the back of the crowd as he watched the whole ceremony.

    There are more than a thousand members in the venue. And he could still find Watt who sat along with the core disciples on the front row seats.

    The Faction-head stood up as he spoke in an amplified voice.

    "Today is the auspicious day our Beast faction. The Family Meeting is not just apetition to show our might or a venue ofpetition. It is a celebration of our glory and the achievements we have obtained..."

    The Faction-head spewed all kinds of powerful words that would rile up the audience with a straight face.

    He made it sound like being a member of the beast faction is the most valuable thing in the whole world.

    Sam listened to this as he patiently observed every detail he can see and tried to y various scenarios in which he can use the surroundings to his advantage.

    As for Philip and Jack, they are nowhere to be seen.

    The meeting went on and the battles started.

    There are some mini-tournaments between the top rankers of all categories within the outer disciples and the inner disciples.

    Manypetitions are held simultaneously. Sam didn¡¯t care as he observed the whole venue silently.

    It is like a Colosseum. The Outer disciples and the inner disciples all took the seats as the audience except the participants took the front row seats.

    The Higher-ups like the faction head, the heads of individual families, Grand elders all of them sat in a VIP Booth from where they could see all the venue.

    As for the core disciples, they have their seating positions in another booth, which was ced directly under the main booth of the Faction head and the rest.

    These booths are open and are simr to the seating positions of the royal families and the important guests of the Colosseum.

    If chaos urred, there is no way for all the disciples to move instantly and many lives would be lost.

    Sam¡¯s heart was beating fast as he trembled in excitement. He is weirdly excited by the fact that he would be taking on the whole beast faction now and taking away his friend right under their nose when they are all watching and all the power of the beast faction is gathered in one ce.

    As time passed, the first part of the meeting was over. Now it is time for the four family battles.

    The battles would be team battles and will be the deciding factors of the resource distribution until the next family meeting.

    The four teams got ready to perform their best as the core disciples and the elders stood up. Sanjay didn¡¯t go as he is the holder of the future heir position.

    The current head and the holder of the future heir position will be part of their family but they are banned to interfere in the resource allocation and all other stuff which has to be distributed among the four families.

    By the time they held their positions, they have to be impartial towards all four families, so they are directly banned from participating.

    And the second part of the family meeting thus began.

 Chapter 326: Flood-Dragon

    The four families¡¯ candidates started fighting and after every match the candidates has to go back to recover, at least the candidates who won every battle went back to recover as soon as possible, because, they are all aiming for the Future-heir position.

    Sanjay was appointed as the future-heir when he was just a Novice. Since then, they have beenpeting, but they weren¡¯t able to go anywhere near winning.

    The ce was just so close yet so far out of reach. Sanjay is like a huge abyss they have to cross, if they want to fulfil their desire, but they are just not capable enough to do so.

    But no one gave up. They tried topete for any chance they got. Of course, there are only so many asions where they canpete for that and the family meeting is one of them.

    So, every grand realm cultivator in core disciples who are of same age as Sanjay are trying their best to recover.

    As for Sanjay himself, he is looking into the crowd in search of Sam. He wanted to find any possible signs of him. He ispletely nonchnt about thepetition for his position. He didn¡¯t put any of these elite core disciples in his eyes.

    Hisck of interest only fuelled the mes of determination in the core disciples.

    By afternoon, the four- familypetition hase to an end.

    The final phase of the family meeting, thepetition for the future heir has begun. All the injured candidates who are injured earlier are now in top shape again. They consumed pills and potions, which are highly valuable and potent. Generally, they are saved for most life-threatening situations, but now, they didn¡¯t hold back and consumed them.

    Sanjay also came onto the centre of the battle ground along with nine other candidates.

    The Faction-head stood up and announced.

    "Now, it is time for the final-phase of the family meeting is about to begin, thepetition for the position of the future heir.

    The Battle Royale. Thest man standing out all ten will be the future heir of the beast faction."

    Thepetition for the Future-heir position is pretty simple and straight forward. All of them have to battle and the winner will take the position.

    All the candidates took a deep breath, they were just waiting for this moment for very long. They couldn¡¯t wait to jump into the battle.

    But they were surprised by the Faction-head¡¯s next words.

    "The title and rewards for the winner will be given by the Ancestor himself. So, try your best."

    All the audience was stunned. They didn¡¯t expect that there would be such a thing.

    The Ancestor of the Beast faction is the grand father of the current Faction-head. He is the former faction head and is one of the best in their generation. He went into seclusion after the current faction-head took the position.

    He is a legendary existence in the whole sect and every chance to meet the ancestor is taken as a blessing as his teachings are considered invaluable.

    There are many people who wanted to be his disciple and considered that chance to be more valuable than the position of the future-heir. Because, the position of the future heir doesn¡¯t give any guarantee of taking the position of the next head.

    Because, it can be challenged andpeted for. But they believed that once they became the disciple of the ancestor, they would definitely be able to surpass the future-heir and take over that position in one way or another. And that position would be only be one of the benefits.

    As the candidates are running various scenarios and spections on what it would the reward be, the fight has already started.

    The one who made the first move is Sanjay himself.

    *Whish*

    The chain sickle, cut through the air as the de revolved all over the field tried to hit the nearest candidate to him.

    But the candidates became vignt as soon as they heard the whistling sound of the wind.

    The attack was defended and everyone looked at Sanjay vigntly. Sanjay is still wearing his usual with his face covered in the ck cloth with only his eyes being visible.

    All of them exchanged nces and made Sanjay theirmon target with a tacit understanding.

    They all knew he is the strongest of them all and there is a little chance fighting against him and winning one-on-one. So, they decided to eliminate him first by ganging up on him.

    Sanjay didn¡¯t seem surprised about this he is wielding the chain sickle as he kept all the ten candidates at bay. He might be the one who is surrounded, but he was the one who is controlling them with the single weapon as he set the perimeter. But he is not standing in a single position. He is continuously dodging against all the ranged attacks.

    Unknown to the candidates, they are all moving ording to his rhythm. Sanjay is like the centre of the circle formed by all other nine candidates and he is moving the circle bit by bit as he controlled their rtive positions.

    Suddenly, one of the candidates felt his back against the wall. It is literally his back against the wall because he reached the end of the battle ground before he knew it.

    The chain sickle came swirling as it made a huge sh on his chest as he was unable to react to the sudden entrapment. He wasn¡¯t able to move sideways as quickly as the sickle.

    The sickle impaled itself into his chest and stayed there. Sanjay pulled the chain and the man came along with it like a fish that stuck to the hook.

    Heid unconscious in no time.

    In just few minutes, one out of the nine opponents were down.

    They all felt chills, they didn¡¯t expect that one hit is all it takes, they do know that they don¡¯t have much chance against Sanjay, but now they truly felt the gap.

    Six guys took out their beast pouches all of a sudden.

    They don¡¯t want to hold back anymore, they felt like they should go all out on Sanjay, if they want to have any chance at winning.

    Sanjay swung his chain, throwing out the candidate who was unconscious.

    He looked at the six beasts, there is a fox type beast, a wolf type one, a tiger, arge snake, a lion, an ape.

    All of them started roaring and hissing as they came out, they are all looking at Sanjay with hostility. In this situation, even Sanjay has to back off a little. He could take these opponents without using his beast, but that would take a lot of his energy and might injure him, but he has some other ns.

    He called back his chain sickle and took out his beast pouch as well.

    Suddenly, the atmosphere turned chilly and they felt freezing cold. They saw a long figuree out of nowhere.

    The fog has blurred everyone¡¯s vision and all the candidates could see is the silhouette of a being with long body.

    The higher-ups all frowned and looked with confusion, while the candidates are extremely nervous, the disciples in the audience are extremely excited, because this is the first time Sanjay is using his beast.

    He has never used neither his beast nor his element in a battle, there are only few instances where he used his element in battle, as for the beast, he never used it.

    Only the closed confidants know about his beast.

    Soon, the fog cleared up and a majestic flood dragon appeared, its long body with the ws all covered up with icy blue scales.

    It looked at the rest of the beasts which are extremely vignt and cautious due to the bloodline suppression and roared.

    *ROAR*

    There was a freezing cold air and a faintyer of frost was formed on the backs of the beasts and the sweat on the candidates was also frozen.

    This is the Frost Flood dragon which lives in the ciers of the north pole.

    Sam looked at the flood dragon and couldn¡¯t help but feel surprised, he never expected that he would meet a dragon type beast here.

    Although, the true dragons don¡¯t like to associate with the flood dragons and Wyrens, they do have some faint traces of dragon blood in them.

    The remaining nine beasts quivered in their spots and instantly their presence turned out to be more of a hindrance than an assistance in their battle.

    Sanjay started swing his chain sickle as the de of the sickle was covered with frosty blue ice. He made a move when the candidates are still stunned.

    The sickle bypassed the beast and struck a candidate on his shoulder and instantly the shoulder was frozen on the spot.

    The candidates lost their will to fight when they saw the flood dragon. All of them are extremely afraid and the battle became a walk in the park for Sanjay.

    "The Future-Heir is still Sanjay." The Faction-head announced the victory after a few minutes.

 Chapter 327: I need Answers

    "The Ancestor will present the reward for the Future-Heir Sanjay." The Faction said as he stood still and the rest of the candidates, the elders, and every other person stood up.

    An old man came into the seating area of the faction head slowly. He has long white hair and a long white beard. He wore loose robes and has an aura of a monk.

    Behind him, another person also came out, and he is the uncle of Sanjay who is holed up in that dark room.

    He decided toe out since his grandfather ising out as a sign of respect.

    All the people in the faction are looking at the old man with respect.

    They are more respectful to him than the Faction-head. Even though he is not the strongest and definitely not stronger than the current Faction-head, he is not weaker than him either. If anything, he can at most tie with the Faction-head.

    But what is making them give his respect is his status of the older generation and his wisdom and experience been far greater than the Faction-head.

    The Consummate Realm of cultivation has much more than strength and since he stayed in that realm far more than the Faction-head, his experience is more valuable.

    "You did a good job." He looked at Sanjay and said. Sanjay looked at him and gave a deep bow before saying.

    "Ancestor, with all due respect, I want to say a few words before we proceed." The Oldman nodded his head without much thought.

    "I need some answers and I would like you or the Faction-head to answer me genuinely. If I don¡¯t get the answer today and if I was lied to, I would relinquish the title of the Future-head."

    His words shocked everyone, including Sam and Watt. They are outsiders who do not belong to the faction and even they are stunned by this, because even they who don¡¯t know all the privileges of the position, they could guess how important that is.

    But now this guy is straight up saying that he is leaving that if he doesn¡¯t know the answer.

    They are all wondering what is it that he wants to know so badly.

    As everyone was staying silent, Sanjay continued.

    "Twenty years ago, what happened? Who is the man who wasbelled as a traitor and also why is hebelled as a traitor? I read some hidden records identally and knew, before that incident he is the man who brought glory, his achievements were way past his peers, even my father the current faction-head was left behind far away.

    Who is he?"

    The Oldman widened his eyes in surprise, he took a deep breath and looked at Sanjay with a discerning look. He could see those eyes are full of determination and knew that Sanjay would do what he said, if he really didn¡¯t say so.

    He then looked at the Faction-head whose face is distorted with anger and shook his head, before turning to Sanjay again.

    "Why do you want to know this all of a sudden?"

    "Because, a few months ago, a young man who resembled that person a lot wasbelled as a bastard and was targeted as the most wanted criminal by the Faction-head himself. Some people of our faction, even resorted to using our spies in other major powers to deal with him.

    Why so much hatred towards that person? Even though, his father might be a traitor, why show so much hatred towards that person who doesn¡¯t share anything from his father except for the blood and kinship?

    Today, I am determined to know."

    The ancestor was extremely surprised, he looked at the faction-head whose face was extremely dark with anger, hatred and a twisted expression and understood what Sanjay said was truth.

    He looked at the audience and the rest of the candidates, elders and everyone else.

    "This is not something to be discussed in front of everyone. We can talk this after the ceremony is over. Let the rest of the ceremony continue and we will be discussing it after that in private."

    The Faction-head looked at Sanjay with extreme anger, but thetter didn¡¯t care.

    The next part of this will be awarding the winners and other rewards for the merits obtained by other people.

    But there is no excitement in anyone as the ceremony moved on, rather the atmosphere is so tense that one could cut it with a knife.

    Meanwhile, Sam is pondering. He knew for one that Sanjay is talking about him and from what he heard, it seemed to be something rted to the father of the Original Sam to whom his current body belonged to.

    He didn¡¯t feel anything when he knew this, because, he was orphan through and through in both lives and even the previous owner of the body went through a horrible childhood and has no sense of kinship towards his parents who he doesn¡¯t know.

    Even if that person who is supposed to be the father was still alive, Sam might have beat the crap out of him in anger of letting him suffer that horrible childhood, rather than feeling happy about that.

    Because, one could wait only so long for their parents and they need them when they are in most vulnerable state.

    One might say, that one has to be grateful for their parents for giving him the life, and he knew that is true, but if the situation was like his, where dying would have been better off than living by million times and the worst part being, not being able to kill himself when he wanted to, there would be no gratitude left.

    He didn¡¯t ask for birth and let him into the world and once that father and mother gave birth to him, they have to take their responsibility, no matter whatever the circ.u.mstances might be.

    If they are not capable of facing the circ.u.mstances and not sure whether they can survive the circ.u.mstances, then they better off not giving birth to the kids.

    Sam felt that it would be better if that father is really dead, because at least that would be eptable reason to abandon him. [A/n: These are not exactly my views, these are the opinions of Sam¡¯s twisted mind. Please take the story as a story]

    He waited and waited for the right time, so that he could execute the n. He is a little bit interested to know the father, but that is only a little bit, for him saving Watt is priority. He doesn¡¯t have anything to do with the Beast faction and neither does he want to find this body¡¯s birth parents. Since, he was already separated it would be better to keep it that way.

    The ceremony continued and the outer sect disciples are making their way out. Sam who is wearing the same uniform and a cloak to cover his face in the back, just stayed there even after almost all the outer court disciples left.

    When the ceremony reached an end and the Inner court disciples and the Core disciples are also about to take a leave, Sam suddenly made a move.

    His body turned into a dazzling light as activated the light elemental fusion and leaped off of the seat and jumped into the battleground.

    At the same time, Watt also leaped towards the battle ground and surprisingly he reached the full wind elemental fusion.

    A bright light sh and a concentrated wind, both met in the ring and were about to zoom past the way.

    "Block the entrance, now" The Faction-head who noticed the moves,manded and the nascent who is incharge of the only entrance which was open blocked the entrance.

    Sanjay who noticed Watt¡¯s movements also made his move and the Flood dragon roared.

    A giant Ice wall appeared and surrounded Sam and Watt.

    Both of them shed into the wall and broke it, but this slowed them down and the entrance was already blocked and the inner court disciples and the Core disciples who are yet to take their leave all got ready to attack.

    Now, Sam and Watt are standing inside the battle-ground along with Sanjay all three of them surrounded by more than five hundred disciples and other Nascent stage cultivators, Pre-transcendent cultivators, Transcendent cultivators, three Consummate cultivators all ready to make a move.

    There is a worst possible position.

    Sanjay looked at Sam with an excited expression. He knew he woulde.

    But the rest of the people had surprised expressions, they didn¡¯t expect that someone woulde for Watt and he would be stupid enough to make his move here in middle of all these people.

    Sam removed his cloak and the uniform and is with his ck vest, he didn¡¯t wear the coat.

    He looked at Sanjay calmly without any expression.

    The Ancestor and Sanjay¡¯s uncles are looking at Sam with stunned expressions, they could see the resemnce to that person who they are all too familiar with.

 Chapter 328: Sanjay Vs Sam

    The Ancestor looked at Sam¡¯s face as if he wanted to etch the face in his mind. He could never forget that face, the impact that face left on him, the current faction-head and the whole of the beast faction twenty years ago, was not something that could be forgotten easily.

    One day, that was all it took to change the man who possessed that face from their best fighter to the worst enemy.

    The face that brought destruction to the beast faction, the destruction which is second only to the devastation of the Ancient war.

    The lowest point of the beast faction, which lost all resources, disciples, and many other major fighters and barely survived due to its ties with some beast tribes in the Central Continent.

    One man dragged the whole faction, a Major power on this, to its knees in a single day.

    He was not a traitor; he was forced to be a traitor.

    The Ancestor turned towards the Faction-head. The face is horrible to look at, there is no majesty of being the leader of a Major power.

    There is a reason for that. That one face cast a huge shadow in his heart, it would have been etched in his memories.

    His spiritual energy is being riled up, he wanted to make a move so badly, but at this moment, he sensed another spiritual energy fluctuation and when he turned to look, he saw his brother, Sanjay¡¯s uncle looking at him coldly.

    He could get the meaning of that look, if he tries to make a move on Sam, then his brother would make a move on him.

    Sam didn¡¯t care about their expressions, he looked at Sanjay and said.

    "You asked me toe and I am here, I will be leaving if you let me now, otherwise things would get nasty."

    There is a weird smile on that face.

    "Why don¡¯t you stay for some more time? Don¡¯t you want to listen to what I want to hear?"

    "Not really."

    They were stumped, they didn¡¯t expect him to be this uninterested.

    "Aren¡¯t you the least bit concerned about your birth? Your parents?" The Ancestor asked in confusion.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "I can guess most of it." He paused and looked at the Faction-head before saying.

    "It seems like some salty ass has dug some holes. I don¡¯t have any kind of rtion or memory of my parents. They must have gone before I got a chance to meet with them. Which resulted in my current situation."

    "Don¡¯t you feel angry? Don¡¯t you have the desire to know at least?" The Ancestor continued on.

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "It is better if I don¡¯t know some answers, at least not for now. I wille back one day and the answers wille to me even if I don¡¯t ask."

    "Do you think, you can leave this ce alive?" This time, the Faction-head said these words with bitter hatred.

    "Hahahaha... There is no ce on this that could stop me from entering and forbid me from leaving." Sam said with an arrogantugh.

    "Kill him." The Faction-head couldn¡¯t stomach this and gave amand, but no one moved, because the aura of Sanjay¡¯s uncle raised and his intentions are clear, he ispletely opposed to this.

    "Brother, don¡¯t tell me you are going to make a move on juniors with lower cultivation." The Faction-head said sarcastically.

    "Shut up." The Ancestor coldly spat and turned towards Sam.

    "If you want to leave, you can leave, but there are some people who don¡¯t want you to leave and he happened to be the faction-head, I might be his senior, but I cannot just let him lose face and damage his dignity.

    You can leave as long you clear a fair challenge thates to your way."

    He then looked at the Faction-head and said.

    "As long as it is a fair challenge, you can make him stay here or even kill her. I owe a lot to him and his father, so you better stay within the rules." He warned the faction-head.

    Sam looked at all the Grand realm cultivators who are already perked up and turned towards the Ancestor and said.

    "How can I trust you?"

    "That is the only thing you can do for now."

    "Then do me a favor. Let all of theme at once, I don¡¯t have enough patience."

    Ancestor raised his brow and asked.

    "There are more than four hundred Grand realm cultivators in Late-stage of Grand realm and all of them are beast cultivators with more than three hundred of them with Beastpanions. Are you sure you want to fight with them at once?"

    "Who said anything about fighting? This is going to be a massacre, after all, whatever might have happened in the past, I am sure that it is definitely something I wouldn¡¯t like and the whole beast faction might enter my kill list, so it would be better to clear some load off whenever I can."

    His words stunned everyone; they arepletelyced with arrogance.

    As for why Sam wanted the whole Beast faction to be on his list, even though he did think that there is no rtionship with the beast faction and his body doesn¡¯t belong to him, he is a bit frustrated now that he guessed some story.

    At first, he thought that his parents are dead and someone who doesn¡¯t like them, threw him out of the faction,beling him as a bastard. He would have left that alone, as it doesn¡¯t matter for him if he lived in the faction or any other ce.

    But the traitor mark and all the other stuff seemed to be pointing to something else, if his parents aren¡¯t dead, but plotted and killed by the faction, he would definitely take revenge.

    Because his current situation as an orphan and the horrible childhood is all because of them, he who could have had the parents love which he didn¡¯t get in his past life.

    But if they are still alive, then he wouldn¡¯t have been thrown out and Sam couldn¡¯t havee to this world. The whole situation turned out to be a paradox and he is feeling a bit contradictory.

    That is the reason he wanted to leave straight away after somemotion, but this Faction-head is making it hard for him.

    He wanted some time to sort out his thoughts, but before that, it is not bad for him to vent some frustration.

    He looked at the candidates and said.

    "Any one of you,e forward only if you are ready to die. I assure you, it is not the first time for me to fight against this type ofrge crowd and I came out alive from those battles. I don¡¯t see a reason, why I wouldn¡¯t live past this."

    No one answered, they are all hesitating, by this time the people who are notte stages of the Grand realm stepped back.

    Sam is fully ready to fight it out with them, he doesn¡¯t have much time, he has to finish this quick. Just as he was about to make a move, Sanjay¡¯s voice was heard.

    "No need for that. If you want to leave, just defeat me. If you win, you and Watt can leave and I will send you to the Thunder god temple myself through the space gate. If you lose, you will stay."

    Sam looked at him with amus.e.m.e.nt. He doesn¡¯t know why this guy is showing so much interest in him, but he felt that this deal is much better.

    Sanjay turned towards the crowd and said. "get out of here."

    He didn¡¯t even bother to ask for the Faction-head¡¯s permission.

    Sam looked as the people around him evacuated as they took the seats in the audience. He gestured for Watt to stand at the entrance and walked to the center of the Battleground.

    He is also a bit excited about this battle, He wanted to beat the crap out of this person since he took Watt away, and now the opportunity has presented itself.

 Chapter 329: Sanjay Vs Sam II

    Sam and Sanjay both stared at each other dead in the eyes. The atmosphere is tense. Both of them didn¡¯t make the first move. The flood dragon moved back to one end of the battleground as it spectated the battle,pletely ready to enter the battle at any moment.

    Sanjay noticed that Sam is extremely calm as the time passed, he seemed to have be calmer and have no intention of making any move, at the end, he got impatient and made the first move.

    The Chain sickle whistled as the de cut through the air and made its way towards Sam.

    Sam is already wearing his ws. He didn¡¯t move from his position as he moved his left hand.

    *nk* The nail of the index finger shed with the chain sickle as he diverted the trajectory of it.

    The attack is too direct and too simple. Without any power behind it. It is just a symbolic attack signifying the start of the fight.

    The next second, Sam made his move. He didn¡¯t use elemental fusion directly; it would take too much of his energy.

    He used Phantom steps as he moved like a sh.

    But as soon as he took two steps, the chain sickle whistled through the air, as it halted his movement in that direction, he forcefully kicked the ground as he changed his direction of movement.

    But the sickle followed his motion and halted his advance.

    The Chain sickle might be versatile, but it is one of the hardest weapons to control, but Sanjay showed utmost control as he maintained the speed of the sickle and its motion at maximum.

    Even though there is quite a distance between two of them, it didn¡¯t take long toplete a whole circle with the chain sickle as Sanjay halted Sam¡¯s advance.

    With his current speed, Sam couldn¡¯t find the opening, even after using the phantom step.

    Although he wasn¡¯t able to advance, Sanjay also didn¡¯t get any upper-hand in this situation.

    Sam is easily blocking the attacks.

    After more than ten exchanges, Sam suddenly made a move and this time, when Chain sickle was about to hit his shoulder from upwards, he dashed forward extremely close to the chain, this move is not much suitable, because, in this way, Sam¡¯s back would be wide open for the sickle and when Sanjay pulled the chain back, the sickle could be impaled into Sam¡¯s back.

    Sanjay did exactly that. But Sam does have a remedy to this situation. He created a small air pocket in his arm and sted it on the chain.

    The chain shook a bit and the trajectory was altered a bit, as Sanjay was about to control it, Sam condensed wind elemental energy in his hands as he swung it in Sanjay¡¯s direction. The Wind des condensed into a w as they moved in conjunction, towards Sanjay.

    Sanjay only has two options, one is to dodge and another one is to block. If he chose to dodge, he would lose his core position from where he could keep the situation under control and if he chose to block, he would lose control of the chain for a moment and Sam would cover the distance.

    Sam is ready to take advantage of both situations and Sanjay chose thetter, he extended his hand and a thick ice wall was conjured in front of him.

    Sam didn¡¯t waste his chance as he hit the chain away with his ws and the sickle fellpletely away from him, although the chain is still in Sanjay¡¯s hands, it is still off control now.

    Sam dived in further and tried to close in the distance.

    The Wind w sliced through the ice block and it was cut into pieces before losing its lethality. As Sam closed in taking the advantage of Sanjay¡¯spse in concentration, the ice block fell down and suddenly three icences made their way towards Sam.

    Sam is a bit surprised, but not to the point he lost hisposure.

    He kicked the ground as leaped upwards and cannonballed towards Sanjay, dodging twonces, just as he was about past the third one, a sickled flew out of nowhere and hit thence changing its direction upwards.

    Thence came straight towards Sam from the bottom. This time, he is really surprised. As thence made its way towards him, he came back to his sense for the immediate threat and rolled in the air as he extended his leg.

    The foot of the leg was covered with concentrated spiritual energy as it created a wind de, which sliced through the icence.

    But Sam didn¡¯t reach his destination andnded early, by this time, the chain sickle already made its way towards him, which he has to block.

    All this happened within seconds. Both of them didn¡¯t even use a single lethal or critical move. All the moves are basic and only relied on skill and judgment.

    Even if they had taken the hits, they wouldn¡¯t have fallen, but both of them are feeling a weird sense ofpetitiveness which is making them unwilling to take the first hit.

    The situation turned back the same and the only change being, Sanjay is holding two chain sickles.

    Sam narrowed his eyes at this. This second chain sickle is the reason for the icence to divert its direction suddenly. He didn¡¯t see the second chain sickle before. Right now, the lower half of the chain is wound around the arm as he held the sickle in his hand with the rest of the chain hanging in the middle which ispletely unlike the first one which has its chainpletely unwound.

    The hand holding the new chain sickle has its sleevepletely gone. That is why he wasn¡¯t able to see the chain sickle before. It was hidden under the sleeve with the sickle de folded.

    Not only him, but even most of the people from the Beast faction are also surprised, this is the first time, Sanjay has revealed this.

    His desire to avoid the first hit is higher than his caution towards revealing one of his hidden cards. Sam couldn¡¯t help but smile. Because the hidden sickle has been revealed just because of the simple moves at the beginning. He has a weird sense of pride.

    But Sanjay has apletely opposite expression on his mouth behind that robe. His mouth is twitching non-stop. He doesn¡¯t feel good about having his hidden card revealed.

    He took a deep breath and suddenly felt like he shouldn¡¯t care anymore. Since he revealed one, he would go all out. He has to bring Sam down today, that is the only thing on his mind.

    He wound the chain of the first chain sickle to his left hand simr to the right one and started his fight.

    This time, he didn¡¯t fight from the long-range, instead, he dove headfirst as he took the fight to close quarters by himself.

    He reached Sam, who stood there calmly as he weed the iing attack.

    Sanjay swung his hand as he shed Sam diagonally with the sickle.

    Sam bent forwards and twisted his torso towards the right as he dodged the de and made swung his right w straight towards Sanjay¡¯s face.

    Sanjay, bent backward as he dodged the w in hairsbreadth. He rotated his body as he swung the sickle diagonally upwards.

    The series of blows continued as both of the dodged extremely. None of them is willing to take the first hit and is to hell-bent onnding the first hit.

    After more than a hundred exchanges, Sanjay made sudden andrge movements as he used the ice element. The chains which are Grey in color turned icy blue as theypletely absorbed the ice elemental energy. The two chains which are hanging on both his arms, formed arge loop as they enveloped around Sam, who just dodged a sickle attack.

    Sanjay pulled the sickles and came to a halt and just like that Sam¡¯s arms are locked to his body.

    He was extremely surprised; he didn¡¯t expect that Sanjay has this trick up his sleeve and in the heat of a moment he didn¡¯t see it.

    All of a sudden, his limbs are unusable as they didn¡¯t allow have many degrees of freedom due to the chains.

    Sanjay is panting heavily as he looked at Sam.

    Sam is also panting. He has used almost all kinds of moves that are possible with his ws without using the spiritual energy and the essories of the ws, but he wasn¡¯t able to make a single hit.

    All this while, Sanjay was portrayed to be a chain sickle user who fights in long-range, but today even the beast-faction members have their eyes opened. His main forte is closebat.

    Although both of them are unable tond a single hit, all the spectators could see the expertise and the finesse in their moves.

    Sam tried elemental fusion and his body transformed into golden mes, but to his surprise, he wasn¡¯t able to directly escape the chains. After all, it is not possible to catch the mes like this physically.

    But there is another possibility and that is using spiritual energy. After all, even the mes are a form of spiritual energy, so the chains which are wound around Sam are binding the mes with spiritual energy too. This is the only possible counter for elemental fusion.

    Sam turned back to his normal state as he looked at Sanjay, he could feel the number of spiritual energies in the chain. The chain seemed to have been made of some special alloy which could enhance the property of the ice element restraining the opponent. The expenditure of spiritual energy is not small at all.

    But he wasn¡¯t worried, he gave a smile when Sanjay came forwards tond the first hit of the battle.

 Chapter 330: Sanjay Vs Sam III

    Sam is rxed, but Sanjay is anything but that. He is extremely cautious and he became even more cautious after watching Sam¡¯s calm face.

    He and Sam are only two feet apart and they are linked with the chains.

    But he didn¡¯t want to leave this chance, so he raised the sickle as was about sh at Sam.

    But at this exact moment, he frowned when he noticed the change in Sam¡¯s body. He sensed two types of movements, one of them is the wind elemental energy at the surface of the body and also the spiritual energy in his body was concentrated in his muscles.

    His movement slowed down a bit, but he determined to make the first hit, even if he takes the next one. As he proceeded and swung the sickle, but just as he was about to make his move, Sam squatted down a bit and his body bent forward along with the chains.

    He is forcing the spiritual energy that is binding him to move the chain along with him. As they are connected, Sanjay felt the force pulling him by his hands, as he wanted to control it, he noticed Sam¡¯s movements.

    His body suddenly became flexible as he moved like a snake in the air. He moved towards Sanjay¡¯s left leg with his head first.

    Before Sanjay could react, he ced the head between the legs and coiled his body towards his back and his head came out of the gap between Sanjay¡¯s right hand and the torso. Meanwhile, Sam¡¯s legs coiled around Sanjay¡¯s left leg and forced him to stretch his legs.

    Sanjay was about to stumble due to the sudden change in the bnce, but he didn¡¯t get a chance to stabilise himself.

    Sam bit the chains on Sanjay¡¯s right hand and rolled to his side forcefully making his back to stay against Sanjay¡¯s back, but in the process, Sam¡¯s ws tore his armour and then pierced into his back.

    But that is not the end of it, Sanjay stumbled backwards due to the sudden movement and his head hit the ground hard.

    Even though, Sam is under Sanjay, the main attack is not the fall, but the impact it would bring to the w which is already pierced in his back.

    The spiritual energy inside the chain which is binding Sam, waspletely dissipated and Sam threw Sanjay to the side and stood up.

    He looked at Sanjay with a smirk. It has been a long time, since he used these moves. He hasn¡¯t used these techniques since he came to this world.

    These are the techniques he created himself to use them when he wore ws or fighting barehanded.

    He never got a chance or the situation where he has to use these techniques and suddenly, he felt like thanking Sanjay.

    This person is the first person who forced him to use these forms.

    As for how these techniques are formed, he created with the inspiration from the Origin Martial art of the previous world, the martial art of ancient India, Kripayyattu. He doesn¡¯t dare say, he learnt this martial artpletely, but he did learn this just like how he learnt all the other martial arts and he created his own fighting techniques based on this martial art.

    Because, Kripayattu is most versatile martial art which not only focuses on usage of the body parts, it also emphasizes and focuses on various kinds of weapons suitable for various asions and situations of the battle.

    And this martial art was developed mostly based on the forms of various animals and these forms include an animal asrge as an Elephant to an animal as small andplicated as a scorpion.

    There are eight different animal stances which are used in this martial art, but apart from that, there is another phase which is called Kri chnam in which the martial artists, observe, practice and make the movements of the animals theirs and make them part of their battle moves.

    With this as an inspiration, he observed various animals and other species and made himself some moves which are suitable for himself.

    As for his current movements, he got these from the movements of a python. Of course, it is almost impossible for him to replicate those movements as his body is not as flexible as a python, so he concentrated mainly on his limbs and mouth.

    Sanjay didn¡¯t stay for long and stood up. He felt the back and could feel the blood. He felt extremely irritated. Sam gave the first hit and did so in such an extreme condition.

    The ws went deep into the back and almost a small piece of flesh was almost torn off.

    He held the sickles as he gritted his teeth. Right now, both of them almost forgot the surroundings as they got involved in the fight.

    Sanjay lost his cool a bit and there is no calmness that was present at the beginning of the fight.

    The exchanges went on as they fought and after another dozen or so moves, it almost turned into the initial dead lock, Sam noticed that the elemental energy was starting to rile up around Sanjay and the next second.

    He shed towards Sam¡¯s chest but it didn¡¯t connect as thetter dodged, but this time there is a small change.

    Thin fog appeared in the form of the streak of the sh and an extremely thin and transparent ice formed in the shape of that sh, like a de.

    Sanjay waved another sickle and shed the thin ice de. It broke into two and both the des shed Sam in his chest and his movements came to a halt.

    Two scars appeared on his chest and started bleeding.

    He never guessed that he would meet such an attack.

    He was already surprised when he noticed that Sanjay is using his Ice element very scarcely. Generally, the ice element attacks are extremely eye-catching and massive in size.

    They will influence the surroundings a lot and wouldn¡¯t move too much. Almost all of them are ranged or area of attack attacks.

    He saw the first unique user of the Ice element in this world.

    The next few exchanges revolvedpletely around these ice des and Sam was injured a couple of times.

    He mainly focussed on dodging the thin des which are bing harder and harder as the vision is not even useful in this scenario.

    Sanjay is about to gain the upper-hand and at this exact moment, he suddenly took a step back as he loosened the chain of the right -side chain sickle and rotated it with extreme speed.

    The sickle revolved around the two of them and created ayer of fog around them while leaving the icy des.

    The whole scenario happened in an instant as Sanjay dragged the chain-sickle as he struck from above.

    The des which are surrounding them, moved towards Sam from all directions.

    Sam who is the centre of the attack, felt a bit anxious and raised his fire elemental energy. His whole body was surrounded with the golden mes as they raged with an extremely high intensity and the ss des which are about to contact him turned into water and then into a steam before they could even hit him.

    Of course, there are a couple of des which bypassed the mes and hit him, butpared to taking the brunt of the whole attack, this is much better.

    The Steam covered his vision and as he was concentrating on avoiding getting hit by the des, he didn¡¯t notice that Sanjay is making some hand-signs.

    As soon as Sam¡¯s concentration came back, he was greeted with a thick transparent dragon head made of ice behind him.

    The dragon maw covered his whole body as it closed its mouth. Sam was trapped inside the dragon¡¯s mouth and the head froze on thend as soon as it took him in his mouth.

    Sanjay is panting hard as he looked at Sam who is frozen behind the dragon head.

    It is like a work of art, but he is not least bit interested to explore or appreciate it.

    He wanted to see if this could trap his opponent or not. This is the most he had exerted his strength in a while when he fought with his peer.

    He took a breath as he looked at Watt, who is near the entrance and all he noticed is a calm person standing with his back against the wall in a rxed posture with his arms crossed.

    It is as if, he was watching an entertainment show which he already knew the plot of.

    He seemed extremely uninterested in the way it goes as he already knew the result.

    And in fact, that is true, Watt is extremely sure that Sam is going to win.

    Sanjay is wondering what gave Watt this confidence.

    As he thought this, he turned around and what he faced next made him think to understand why Watt is confident.

 Chapter 331: Battle-Spirit

    Sanjay looked at the Ice dragon which trapped Sam.

    But it is not as transparent as before. He could only see Sam¡¯s silhouette, which is surrounded by golden mes, and the surrounding ice has turned into water. Only the outer shell of the dragon was left, trapping the water which is turbulently moving within the shell making Sam¡¯s image extremely blurry.

    Sam looked towards Sanjay and punched straight towards him.

    The turbulent water current punched a hole through the icy shell and made its way towards Sanjay. The water is extremely hot as it emitted vapors.

    Sanjay felt a sense of crisis as he looked at the jet of extremely hot water. He made some hand-signs and created an inclined ice-wall and continuously poured his spiritual energy into it.

    The water which hit the ice wall was diverted upwards, even though the water is hot, Sanjay¡¯s continuous reinforcement of the wall with the ice elemental energy made it hard for it to melt.

    The whole battle-ground suddenly turned damp as the water rained down.

    Just when the stream ended, Sanjay couldn¡¯t even get enough time to rx as he felt a huge physical force hitting the ice wall.

    The wall copsed as he was sted away.

    When he was sent flying backward, he vaguely saw Sam making his move.

    Sam squatted until his things are parallel to his ground and leaped into the air.

    He extended his body to the full and arched his back as he ced the arms above his head and forearms facing the sky. He followed a parabolic trajectory and his whole body was covered with wind elemental energy.

    He condensed all the wind elemental energy towards his arms and joined both of them as he smashed the elbows towards Sanjay¡¯s chest.

    The wind elemental energy condensed into the form of an elephant and the dual-elbow strike represented the elephant striking with its trunk and Sanjay felt the full brunt of the attack on his chest and his ribs caved in.

    He was crushed into the ground and a huge crater appeared.

    Sanjay felt his bone crack and he felt extremely dizzy as he stood up. Before he coulde to his sense, he felt a sudden sense of danger and became alert.

    Sam leaped towards Sanjay to take the lead. The duo went through the exchange of blows just like the previous time, but this time, Sanjay was barely able to hold himself in ce and he has to use the ice element to enhance his defense.

    After this exchange, Sanjay took a step back and created a distance between himself and Sam.

    He wiped the blood off of his lips and looked at Sam with trepidation. He was never pushed this far. He is gradually losing the upper hand and already taken some serious strikes.

    He has a vexed expression as he closed his eyes and took a deep breath and tried to calm down.

    Suddenly, the spiritual energy in his body turned chaotic, and slowly his body started turning into ice.

    He is performing elemental fusion. Apart from that Sam also sensed another dense spiritual energy erupting inside Sanjay.

    The energy is extremely dense like mercury, even though he couldn¡¯t sense it clearly, he knew that it is not good news for him.

    At this moment, the faction-head, the ancestor, and Sanjay¡¯s uncle had solemn expressions.

    "He removed the limiter." The ancestor said in an extremely frightful voice.

    Sanjaypletely turned into ice and he opened his eyes as he looked at Sam.

    "This is the first time, I am using my full strength, I will use my strongest form to defeat you." He left those words and his whole aura raged.

    The atmosphere became terrifyingly cold and the surroundings turned foggy. The fog started condensing behind Sanjay and it took a flood dragon form. A battle-spirit formed. The audience turned excited.

    Some of the core members know about the limiter that was ced on Sanjay. The limiter acts as a reservoir that stores spiritual energy in a dense state.

    This given excess energy for the cultivator for a short period of time.

    Sam looked at Sanjay with a smirk. He could feel the energy rumbling within Sanjay. This burst of energy can give Sanjay enough strength to battle an Initial stage Nascent stage cultivator.

    Even he felt his whole body trembling with excitement. Nichs was the only rival he has in this world, but now he felt like battling an equal after a long time. The only difference being, he never wanted to kill Nichs, but he wanted to desperately take that head off of Sanjay¡¯s body.

    He wanted to battle until only one of them left. He didn¡¯t go through the elemental fusion, for him due to the unique nature of the bloodlines and the effects they caused on the elements they provided, it is not feasible for a long battle in his current level of cultivation, he has to master the control over the fusion if he wants to have any idea of using the fusion.

    But he didn¡¯t think, that he needs to use these to battle the current Sanjay.

    Sanjay made his move and the dragon battle spirit moved along with him.

    The two chain sickles are also covered with the ice as he started making his move, but Sam didn¡¯t move from his spot, rather he changed his stance as he squatted a little as he made a w with his hand and folded it to his chest making it parallel to the earth.

    Just as Sanjay swung the chain sickles and the dragon spirit dove towards him, he struck with the w straight at the chest.

    The neutral spirit energy turned into a lion form and it struck the w at the dragon spirit.

    Both the attacks struck together and eliminated the impact as both of them were blown back by a few steps.

    Sam¡¯s smirk turned into a grin as both of them started exchanging blows, and for every attack, Sam threw at him, the spiritual energy was condensed into an animal. Lion, tiger, fish, monitor lizard, horse, elephant.

    Every move was inspired and adapted from the respective animal and none of them is a spiritual beast.

    And none of them is a battle spirit. This is just the manifestation of his moves indicating the effect of those animals in his battle techniques.

    As both of them are continuously exchanging blows, the whole battle-ground was filled with ice and frost.

    Sam also started feeling pressure and this due to the sheer amount of energy behind Sanjay¡¯s moves.

    But he didn¡¯t feel a little bit anxious, rather, the grin turned wider and wider. A spirit started manifesting behind his back and it slowly started turning into a human silhouette.

    The face and the body are still a bit blurry just like what happened with his fight with Nichs, the spectators all looked at him in disbelief. They never thought that they could witness a battle-spirit today and they happened to see two of them.

    Even though one is a little blurry, they knew it is only a matter of time.

    Sanjay, who also noticed the improvement in Sam which is making it difficult for him tond a clean hit, took a step back and noticed the blurry battle-spirit. The manifestation of battle-spirit for a single individual represents the person being in his best state.

    Sanjay felt an intense sense of crisis and prepared to make a final move. But this time, his upper garments arepletely gone and the situation is not that different for Sam.

    Sanjay started condensing all the spiritual energy into his arms, Sam who is also panting with wounds all over his torso also started condensing the spiritual energy in both his ws.

    The battle-spirit became clearer and clearer and there is only a faint trace of blur on its face making it hard to recognize whose face it is.

    As for the body, they could clearly see a silhouette o the human, with a bare upper chest which ispletely full of scars and wounds. There are metallic ws mounted on his fingers and he is wearing a pair of ck pants.

    Sam and the image are extremely simr, except for the taller build of the person in the spirit and the face, there is no visible difference. Even the stance was simr.

    Only Sam could recognize the person in the battle spirit or maybe Ling Tian would recognize. This is the image of Sam in a previous life.

    He himself manifested as his own battle-spirit. But the spectators are looking at in extreme confusion, they couldn¡¯t recognize the person, after all, they have never even heard of battle-spirits taking humanoid form, they might be in form of beasts, natural objects like mountains and trees, clouds and even some man-made things like musical instruments, weapons and so much more.

    But the humanoid was never seen.

    Sanjay was also surprised, but he was too focused on defeating Sam, that he doesn¡¯t have time to react to this. He kicked his legs off of the ground as he threw the two chain sickles into the air.

    The two chains coiled together as they formed a dragon figure manifested by spiritual energy.

    The battle spirit and the spiritual energy dragon, both made their way towards Sam.

    Sam also kicked his ground as he leaped towards Sanjay.

    His battle spirit tackled the two dragons and dug the ws into their heads and pushed them to the ground.

    While Sam himself dug his ws into the chest of Sanjay as he tried to tear open the chest diagonally.

    He looked at Sanjay directly in the eyes as the sickles were shed into the shoulders and tried to enter the body.

    He was bleeding like crazy, but there is not a single expression of hurt, his face is a bright as sunshine as he dug his ws to rip the heart off.

 Chapter 332: Plot

    As, Sam was about to finish off Sanjay, he felt a sense of crisis and dodged to the side. The chain sickles that are entangled to him were dragged away by him.

    The huge flood dragon mmed its maw close as the chains at the other end got struck into its teeth.

    As the flood dragon crashed into the surroundings, Sam felt his body being dragged away and only felt a little better when the sickle on the left side tore open the flesh and fell down.

    He tried his best to bnce himself to get away from this situation, but he could feel the flesh which was being gradually torn on the right side extend to his lungs, at this moment, he couldn¡¯t help but ask for help and just like that, a golden crow came out of nowhere as itnded its three legs on the head of the flood-dragon and crashed it into the ground.

    All the ice and frost in the arena suddenly became water and there is not even a sight of a single snow ke.

    The audience who were still in the shock of Sam¡¯s battle spirit and the awe of the finishing move of the battle finally recovered, they couldn¡¯t even recover early enough when their future heir was being forced to death.

    But when they saw the majestic mythical bird which came out of no where and put the high and mighty flood dragon in ce, felt their eye balls pop out in disbelief and all of them had goosebumps irrespective of their positions and cultivations.

    The Golden-sun crow, the mythical beast which they had only seen in conceptual images hase to live right in front of them.

    Many people in this might have some difficulty recognizing the beast, just like Arc who couldn¡¯t identify it immediately, but these people are from the Beast faction and they have most valuable and extensive information in their hands about these mythical beasts.

    If none of them recognized, Sam would have been surprised.

    "Protect Sanjay." The Faction-head yelled and some nascent stage cultivators made their move as they brought Sanjay to safety.

    The flood dragon is groaning as it looked at Sam hatefully. The ws of the golden sun crow made it bleed and the heat is making the dragon sweat and with those icy scales it almost looked like an ice dragon melting.

    But the dragon is only looking at Sam, not giving a damn about Sam.

    He let Yanwu, release the dragon and after that the dragon didn¡¯t take issue with Sam as it went towards Sanjay and started sharing its energy.

    Dragons inherently have great healing and it started sharing the blood-line bond. The bleeding stopped and the bones slowly started forming, bit by bit.

    Even with that it would take weeks for this genius to heal and no one knows how many months he would take to be as strong as before and no one knows whether he would be able to get over the loss.

    But none of the members of the beast faction are concentrating on this aspect at this moment. The mythical beast is the only one in their eyes and they don¡¯t want to take them off of it.

    Sam recalled Yanwu into the dimension and just as he was about to say something to Watt, a loud voice halted him in his tracks.

    "How dare you try to take the life of our future-heir? This offense is punishable by death. Everyone, capture him."

    Faction-head yelled at the top of his lungs and his voice sounded really concerned and one might really mistake him for caring, if not for the fact the greed that was present in his eyes is fully visible to everyone.

    Sam looked at the Ancestor and said.

    "Is this the worth of your promise?" He asked in rather sarcastic tone, the old man¡¯s face blushed as he didn¡¯t dare to make eye contact.

    He doesn¡¯t want to lose face in front of a junior and added with the fact that he just said that he owed him greatly, made him extremely embarrassed. But he couldn¡¯t help but hesitate a little, when he thought of the golden-sun crow.

    The Faction, head took advantage of the situation and was about yell and order, but Sam¡¯s next actions, made him forget to say what he wanted to say.

    Sam took out a metallic cylinder and held it high up in the air.

    This is the same type of metallic cylinder which was found by him in the Resting ce.

    All the core members who has the cylinder felt a bad premonition as they felt their hearts skip a beat.

    Before they could react, Sam injected a small amount of spiritual energy and the metallic cylinder popped open, but there is no scroll, spirit or anything, a small fog appeared out of it and disappeared into the atmosphere.

    They were all puzzled at first and felt that Sam might have mastered the technique in the container, they never gave a thought whether the whole thing is fake or not.

    Only until, they noticed the movement in the cylinder which was kept in their robes or pockets. After all, everyone is carrying the container, so that they could feed the spiritual energy to it continuously.

    When all of them looked at the container, they felt their minds go nk as a ck coloured vine suddenly creeped out of it and expanded to all over their body and pierced straight into their heads, hearts and dantians.

    They targeted the three main important aspects of a cultivator and a human. One of them is their heart, the spiritual consciousness and the final one the spiritual core.

    The vine crazily started drinking the spiritual energy.

    The faces of everyone turned pale. The only people who doesn¡¯t have this are the Ancestor, Sanjay¡¯s uncle, the non-core members and Sanjay himself.

    The higher-level cultivators are barely able to resist it, but the spiritual energy was still leaking away, but the nascent stage cultivators, felt their world go dizzy, but they were forcefully stood up by the vines themselves.

    All of this is Sam¡¯s trap. The fifth founder and the whole treasure and fortune is utter bull-shit he created from the info he was able to gather.

    The vines are called Devouring vines. They devour the soul, the spiritual energy and even the blood. But these do have some drawbacks, they need any of the three to grow up and they have toe from a living being other than flora.

    But in the stage of infancy, they wouldn¡¯t be able to hold their own against the beasts in the wild, so they are never the worries of any cultivators.

    But Sam used this quality to his own advantage.

    He created these containers with the same principle as the spatial device which was given to him by Vickers when bought the Crystal Bamboos.

    The only difference being, the fact that they can grow in their level when they are still inside when the spiritual energy is injected inside.

    For the week he stayed within the Resting ce, he created this ce and only said this to Philip and Jack on thest day and lied to them about finding it.

    He did so, because of the fact he knew that Arman is sending his info to the Beast faction with that special butterfly.

    After all, he is the best when ites to gathering info and he left a shadow mouse with him since the time he came to him with the thought of needing the thunder prison.

    He felt doubtful, because he knew that there is no way for Arman to naturally know the importance of the thunder prison and after all, he only knew so much info because of the exchange he made with the Avatar Sanchez.

    And he learned about the source being the spirit of the de and made this n carefully after he received the info about Arman trying to giveaway his location to the beast faction.

    So, he carefully kept the fact about him plotting all this from Arman.

    As for the vines, they are bred and grown by the cultivators of the beast faction themselves and now it is the same energy which they crazily and delightedly delivered to the vines, which is trying to kill them.

    While they are trying their best to take control of the situation, they felt strong spiritual energy getting into a turmoil at the ce of their residences.

    The turmoil started spreading in different ces in just a few seconds and that included the libraries, their beast farms, court etc.

    The Ancestor who was about relieve the Faction-head of his pain, suddenly diverted his attention towards the other areas.

    This is what Jack and Philip are doing.

    Sam took out the harbinger while, Watt took out the silver wind, they both hovered outside in a blink of an eye, but just before they were about leave the Battle-ground, Sam three an destabilized energy cell in the middle-of the Nascent stage cultivators, who almost made their move on him.

 Chapter 333: Dark Soul Raven

    Sam didn¡¯t dare to stay anymore. He knew what would happen if he dared to stay here.

    His energy cells destroyed many nascent stage cultivators and even managed to damage some Pre-transcendent stage cultivators.

    After throwing the energy cells, he took out a sniper rifle and aimed at the back as he moved forward. He didn¡¯t care what is in the front for now.

    He started shooting energy cell bullets as he aimed at the cultivators.

    Some Pre-transcendent stage cultivators and transcendent stage cultivators tried to resist the Devouring vines and started pursuing Sam and Watt.

    The Faction-head who has the most resistance towards the Vine wanted to make a move as well, but Sanjay¡¯s uncle blocked him and looked at him and the Ancestor coldly.

    "If both of you want to make a move, then you can do so after going through me."

    With that, he raised his aura and got ready to battle.

    "Hmph," The Faction-head snorted and said. "Do you think, just by stopping us, you can save him?"

    With those words, he took out a token and crushed it.

    Sanjay¡¯s uncle and the ancestor both widened their eyes and yelled.

    "Are you crazy?" Both of them wanted to make a move, but the faction-head forcefully tore the devourer vines physically and spat out a mouthful of blood.

    He closed his eyes and soon his body also started releasing dense spiritual energy. He released his limiter.

    "Today, he has to die. No matter what price I have to pay, that bastard who has the same blood as ¡¯that¡¯ person." His expression was twisted and heughed crazily.

    At the exact moment the faction-head crushed the token, the whole faction rumbled and huge spiritual energy started raising from the hunting grounds.

    Sam and Watt who are running arrived at the residence area and reduced their altitude. Philip ran towards them and Sam let him into the divine dimension.

    They increased the altitude again. There are tworge formations active in the ce and one of them is the formation arranged by Philip and Sam the night before and another one is the formation that wasid out by the beast faction to increase the spiritual energy.

    The two formations are ovepping each other and that is the reason for the spiritual energy turmoil.

    After increasing their altitude, Sam aimed the rifle at two spots and shot energy cell bullets.

    They are the cores of the two formations and the spiritual energy started roaring.

    And the whole area under the influence of the formations is under turmoil and all the infrastructure has been crushed and reduced to rubble.

    The pursuers who arrived a secondter to the same spot felt their whole body under the loss of control and they fell off of their beasts and some Pre-transcendent stage cultivators even died on the spot.

    He picked Jack at the next spot and some shadow mice in the next few ces.

    The same thing repeated at every ce in the faction. The whole faction¡¯s infrastructure is being damaged.

    In the middle-of-the streak, Sam suddenly felt a sense of crisis as he looked at the mountain in the hunting grounds.

    The Space-gates are near that ce and he has to go there, but an aura which is far more powerful than anything he has ever experienced was being released from that ce and the aura seemed to have locked on Sam and Watt who are in the forefront and nearest to the ce.

    A huge bird flew up to the sky.

    It is a raven and the dark elemental energy is beenpletely seething out of it without control.

    It is a Consummate realm beast and seemed to be a higher level at that.

    Its aura ispletely locked at Sam and Watt. Sam halted in his tracks and dragged Watt into the dimension. He took out a transference scroll and activated it without thinking the direction is going to move.

    He disappeared from the spot and arrived at a new ce a thousand kilometers away from the faction.

    He doesn¡¯t know where he is at, but it seemed to be an empty ind within the Beast-faction¡¯s territory, but to his surprise and trepidation, he couldn¡¯t feel safe at all.

    He still felt the same sense of crisis and this time, it came from above.

    When he looked upwards, he saw a huge raven eye appear in the sky and it is locked on him.

    This is a Raven of Dark element and soul attacks are its specialty. He used the transference scroll just because he doesn¡¯t want to get locked on by the raven.

    But it seemed that he was toote.

    He took a deep breath. The raven is creating its attack and he has to get ready for this. He took out the shadow sword.

    "Oh? Dark Soul Raven? Kid, you seemed to have provoked the Beast faction too badly."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply to thatment and said.

    "I want your help."

    "Kid. You are not strong enough to wield me. You have to reach the Transcendent realm to even fight normally, even now, because of my self-control, you are able to carry me. Otherwise, you would be dead for sure."

    "I have an idea."

    Sam took out the thunder prison and started modifying its structure and the thunder prison started changing its form into a metallic arm, he threw the shadow sword into the air and made the thunder prison catch it.

    The energy within the thunder prison helped him take off the burden on him as he wielded the shadow sword through it.

    "Not bad. But you won¡¯t be able to escape unscathed." The sword spirit said in a solemn tone.

    "I know."

    The might of the thunder prison mainly depends on his own power. The higher his individual power, the more he would be able to unlock the abilities of the thunder prison.

    The current thunder prison is still not enough to eliminate the bacsh of the shadow sword, he has to take some damage.

    The thunder prison hovered in the air as it held the shadow sword, the sword is extremely small in the gigantic hand and to his surprise, the sword condensed the dark elemental energy condensed it into a sword shape in the middle of which the sword stayed.

    The sword image fits perfectly within the arm.

    Sam looked at the raven eye which is about to attack and Sam could feel his soul tremble to indicate the beginning of the attack.

    He shed his arm and the thunder prison followed his movements which made a dark colored sword ray fly towards the eye.

    Sam felt his spiritual core tremble and a small crack appeared on it. He spat out a mouthful of blood. The eye disappeared but Sam wasn¡¯tpletely safe from the attack, he felt a soul-searing pain.

    He clutched his head with his arms and knelt down to endure the pain.

    Meanwhile, the Dark soul raven which is in the middle of the beast faction spat out a mouthful of blood and it became extremely furious.

    It closed its eyes again and an evenrger eye appeared in the sky above Sam.

    Sam¡¯s face turned pale and he couldn¡¯t help but feel despair, the raven is stronger than he thought and he is not strong enough to make another attack on the eye, so there is only one thing he can do and that is to find a way to escape.

    He took a deep breath and sat down cross-legged. He endured the pain and made sure that he doesn¡¯t lose concentration. Since, he doesn¡¯t have any use for the transference scroll at the present situation, he only has one way for this.

    He doesn¡¯t want to use this, but it seemed like he doesn¡¯t have any other way out of this situation.

    His spiritual sense entered his spiritual core. There is a small crack in the transparent core, but the spiritual energy is not leaking out of it and he can see that it is healing slowly, it would take months to heal at this pace, but at least, he still has a way out of that predicament.

    Now, his spiritual sense entered the dark element within his core and he could. The bloodline of the shadow mouse activated as he activated the bloodline technique.

    The surroundings arepletely filled with dark elemental energy as a huge shadow formed under him.

    The raven eye which was about to attack looked at Sam in confusion. Before the raven could recover, the shadow¡¯s swallowed Sam and he disappeared from the spot.

    Sam felt his whole world turn dark and every where he could see, there are only shadows present. This is the shadow world, he used the bloodline technique, the shadow world transference.

    He didn¡¯t stay idle and the dark elemental energy started moving violently, all the shadows wanted to attack Sam who is an extremely foreign entity.

    But he didn¡¯t care about that only focused on moving. The shadow element made him move like a sh as he moved from hundreds of kilometres in a second.

 Chapter 334: After Math

    Sam never felt this overwhelmed in his two lifetimes.

    As he moved within the shadow world, he saw the shadows of beasts, cultivators, and even some trees that gained sentience.

    Every shadow exerted huge pressure on him and he could see the shadow energy corroding his body.

    Even his soul and the spiritual core are under pressure.

    After ten minutes, Sam finally exited the shadow world.

    He reappeared at another end of the within some woods.

    His body is bleeding and all the cells are corroded by the shadow element, but the spiritual core is absorbing the shadow elemental energy from the body, albeit slowly.

    Sam, felt like the whole world is spinning, this bloodline technique is not something that can be used lightly, this took a toll on his body.

    This is the price he had to pay for trying to use the power of the beasts. Entering the forbidden realm.

    That is not the ce or a position a puny human should tread on, but he broke the rules and made it, that is why he never used any of them. The shadow mouse is the bloodline with the lowest quality, he dared not to think what would have happened if he used the forbidden move of the other three beasts.

    He was barely able to stand up. He let Philip, Watt, and Jack out before copsing again, but this time, he lost consciousness.

    Watt caught him in his arms without letting fall to the ground. The three of them looked at the surroundings.

    They could feel that there is not a single powerful aura around. They don¡¯t know what exactly happened in the Beast faction, but ording to the n Sam said previously, they should have been able to leave the ce safely and arrive at the vicinities of the thunder god temple.

    But Sam suddenly sent a mental message when he threw Watt inside.

    The Dark soul Raven is not in their ns at all, they don¡¯t anything about the presence of the Dark Soul Raven, so they didn¡¯t n anything at all.

    So, Sam said they might not be able to arrive at their initial destination.

    They are d that they are able to escape this. But when they saw Sam¡¯s state, they are extremely amazed to the point they don¡¯t know how to react to the situation.

    This is the weakest Sam has ever been.

    Nothing has forced him to this state in this life.

    Watt carried Sam, as the three of them surveyed the forests, they need to find a ce to stay, they could easily survive in this level of the forest, but Sam couldn¡¯t stay here in this condition, they need to find a clean ce for him to recuperate.

    Their first goal is to find the traces of any human settlements, and if it is not possible, they would create a small clean, and closed space within the woods.

    Meanwhile, the Beast faction is a Complete Mess.

    The whole faction ispletely crashed and demolished, there is not a single intact space in the whole faction and no one would believe that this ce is one of the six major powers.

    Near the hunting grounds of the Faction, the Dark soul Raven ispletely demolishing everything and everyone within its reach as if it has gone crazy.

    It is extremely angry and furious because Sam got away.

    The Dark Soul Raven is one of the trump cards of the beast faction, it is an extremely high- level beast, which was sealed in those hunting grounds with painstaking efforts, a person who is not at the level of the head, wouldn¡¯t be able to control it.

    The beast was to be let go only when the whole faction is under grave threat, where mutual destruction of the enemy and themselves would be a best-case scenario.

    But now, the Faction-head destroyed the seal let the beast go just so he could kill Sam.

    The Faction-head, Ancestor, and Sanjay¡¯s uncle. All three of them who are in the middle of a confrontation heard the intense roars of fury from the Raven and stopped their dispute.

    They made their way towards the Raven only to see all the destruction happened in the way, there are many dead bodies on their way and some of them are in an extremely mangled state that they felt like puking just by watching them.

    They are the bodies of the people who are stuck in the spiritual energy storm caused by the ovepping and destruction of two formations.

    They felt their throats run dry as they saw the scene, the destruction of the whole faction which was painstakingly built for centuries, there is nothing left.

    Even twenty years ago, when that person destroyed the ce, there is not this much destruction within the faction, because the fight didn¡¯t involve the infrastructure and the weaklings of the faction.

    Only the powerful people are either killed or severely injured making the faction extremely vulnerable, but now, the top experts are not deadpletely, only the cultivators who are Pre-transcendent stage or lower are dead, some transcendent stage cultivators are dead too, but they are extremely low in number as many of them tried to get rid of the devourer vines.

    But most of the transcendent stage cultivators and the Consummate cultivators arepletely okay.

    But all the things which represent their heritage and status werepletely destroyed and there is no way for them to recover this.

    Almost all the Nascent stage cultivators arepletely dead, it is a huge loss and it would take years for them to recover this loss, only the grand realm cultivators who are still inside the colosseum are spared.

    Apart from them, all the candidates from other ces are killed.

    The most bitter one is the Ancestor, he has never thought that this would happen, he never thought that there would be a day when he would have to see this type of situation in the Beast faction again.

    Twenty years ago, he swore to his brother who died in the hands of that person that he would never let Beast faction reach the same state as it did that day when he was still alive, and within twenty years, he could only say that he didn¡¯t keep his word.

    The whole faction turned upside down.

    When they reached the raven they felt even more shocked because the left eye of the raven was gone, the socket is bleeding non-stop as the beast ravaged everything in its sight.

    They looked around for the remains of Sam and his friend Watt, but they could find them, which made their hearts skip a beat.

    They never thought Sam would be able to escape this situation, the raven has a habit of binge-killing, so when they saw the faction-head undoing the seal, they thought that Sam who is nearest to the spot will definitely die.

    But from the looks of it, Sam not only escaped, but he also took out an eye of this Raven.

    Now they understood why this raven is in so much rage. All three of them joined hands and controlled the raven before sealing it again, but this time, the seal was not ced with the Faction-head, because he is not the Faction-head anymore.

    Sanjay¡¯s uncle became the new Faction-head, while the former faction head was relieved of his duties.

    They focussed on dealing with the aftermath of this incident.

    The news couldn¡¯t be kept under wraps. All the other five major powers got the news about the whole situation, a young man who came out of nowhere brought the Beast faction to its knees.

    The other factions couldn¡¯t help but feel happy, they have an intense rivalry and that applied to all areas such as the number of disciples, elders, members, territories, and so much more.

    They decided on the resource distribution bypeting in all these aspects.

    But now, a major power lost more than half of its power and all of that happened because they offended a young man.

    This made them lose their reputation so badly. There is no way, the people under the beast faction would feel secure and join the faction as disciples.

    Many people join the faction as disciples for their reputation, status, and the extrayer of safety that title provides, but now a young man took lives of elders and disciples all the same without any difference right under the noses of the four Consummate entities, there is no way they would feel secure joining this faction.

 Chapter 335: Anxious Arman

    Philip, Watt, and Jack searched for a few hours but couldn¡¯t find any traces of human life near them, even the beasts are not high in number.

    Sam is still unconscious and his body has several ck patches all over, they are oozing ck foggy aura.

    Except for the small patches, his skin turned pale and the worst part was, the wounds on his shoulders and the chest. He didn¡¯t get enough time to heal his wounds.

    He entered the shadow world with those wounds on and the corrosive energypletely entered the body. They looked visibly dangerous. They didn¡¯t even dare to move Sam randomly lest they increased the damage. They couldn¡¯t understand his physical situation, but they do know that this is a life-threatening crisis.

    In fact, they are right, if not for the presence of Shadow mouse bloodline, Sam would have already died as soon as he entered the shadow world, his current cultivation is nowhere near qualified to get him entry into that world.

    He defied the rule and now this is the price he has to pay.

    His current condition is indeed extremely bad and this is due to thebination of the damage he took.

    First, the spiritual core was slightly cracked. Although the damage is light and it is healing bit by bit and the problem wouldn¡¯t be threatening until he overexerts himself, the problem is he did overexert himself, and that too he entered the shadow world immediately.

    Just like any other body part, when injured, the spiritual core would also heal if it was given enough rest and nourishment.

    But before that nourishment could reach it, the shadow world corrosion impacted his soul and body. Just like any environment, the shadow world also rejects and repels the foreign entities, and the soul and body are the foreign entities for the shadow world.

    Now, Sam¡¯s soul and body are somewhat corroded and the shadow mouse bloodline is slowly absorbing it.

    If the spiritual core has been in its best state, this would have been faster and to make it worse, his spiritual energy reserves are almost empty with the battle, thunder prison, and bloodline technique.

    The recovery of spiritual energy is taking a long time because part of it has to heal the wounds on his body which is taking longer with the shadow corrosion, it is almost a paradox and everything was linked.

    Only time can make one of these aspectsplete and break this chain. Until, then they can only give him some low-level spiritual energy recovering pills to make sure he would take in the spiritual energy.

    They don¡¯t dare to give high-level pills in fear that his body wouldn¡¯t be able to absorb the energy and suffer a bacsh.

    Now, they are in middle-of-nowherepletely unclear of Sam¡¯s condition.

    They decided to make a temporary residence in the forest and stay there temporarily and take turns in scouting the area to find any traces of society.

    Meanwhile, the news about the destruction of the beast faction spread among all the major and minor powers. At first, only the higherups, knew about this, but now even a small servant came to know about it.

    And the worst part is Sam¡¯s name and age are extensively publicized in the gossip.

    There are many stories about Sam¡¯s origin and how much damage he really created. Some said, he came for his rightful ce as an heir and some said that he went to the beast faction purely to damage because of his ancestral feud.

    Some even said that he went there to steal something and some said he went to steal a bride.

    The stories got more and more ridiculous.

    But none of the stories confirmed his death. Although many of them thought that it is almost impossible to leave a faction alive after creating that much damage, the fact that a young man can kill more the seventy percent of the faction members is also deemed impossible until they heard this story.

    So, either for the sake of leaving a possibility of achieving that impossible feat or just for the sake of these storyteller keeping some sort of mystery, Sam¡¯s death was not confirmed.

    Many people are dying to know whether he is dead or not. Some of them to make sure that he is dead if not make sure to make him dead, some of them try and recruit this guy and some of them are just curious.

    But there is one person who is extremely worried.

    That is Arman.

    By now, his continuous and anxious spections led him to believe that Sam knew that he is monitoring him and he was extremely anxious and afraid at the notion of facing his retaliation.

    He started thinking and making preparations for his own safety and to his delight, he is still the genius of the thunder god temple and he is still trusting the temple to involve if pushes to shove

    Then, he was hit by the news about the destruction of the beast faction and the names of the perpetrators.

    When he heard the name of the main perpetrator who made the attack, he literally felt his legs shaking and he couldn¡¯t even utter a single word.

    He felt so afraid that he a Grand realm cultivator almost caught a fever. He holed himself up inside his room and didn¡¯te out till then.

    He desperately wanted to know that Sam is dead.

    If Sam is still alive, he couldn¡¯t feel safe, but at the same time, he doesn¡¯t want Sam to die. Because he needs the thunder prison.

    If Sam is dead, then the thunder prison would go into the hands of some other person possibly some higher-level person in the beast faction.

    It would make it hard for him to take it from his hands and that would only be more difficult if that person knows the significance of the thunder prison.

    As he was contradicting himself and living in his own thoughts, he got a summon from the temple-head of the thunder-god temple.

    He was shocked by this. He did the temple-head many times, but every time there was an asion or a reason.

    So, for the temple-head to call him at this moment, he has some bad premonition.

    When he entered the private meeting room, the temple-head went straight to the point.

    "You should have heard of the news about Sam."

    Arman became nervous, but he did his best to hide it and nodded his head.

    "Then you should know you might be his next target."

    Arman shuddered and said.

    "Wh..What do you mean Sir?"

    "Do you think you are the only smart one in the whole thunder god temple? Do you think everything is safe as long as no one saw meeting someone else and secretly made a deal with Grand elder?"

    There are very few things that are able to hide from me and even fewer people who are capable of hiding them. You chose the wrong spy. You should know that there are people called double-agents who do the spying job."

    Arman felt his throat run dry, he doesn¡¯t know what to say or do.

    Should he admit it? Should he make a run for it? Or should be tantly denied it? Before he could decide it, the temple head continued.

    "If I am not wrong, Sam is not as ignorant as you and would have already known about your actions and you being safe and sound means, he used you to serve his own purpose.

    Now, you have outlived your usage, so you will be his next target.

    I called you to say, that to deal with a person like Sam who could deal with this much damage to a major power just for the sake of genius is not practical, so if the situation arises, the temple wouldn¡¯t side with you."

    Arman started to panic; all the preparation he had made revolved around the fact that the thunder god temple would keep some resistance to Sam.

    Even if they don¡¯t fight with him, they should at least hinder him a bit, after all, he believed that Sam wouldn¡¯t possess the same tricks, he used on the Beast faction all the time.

    How does he know that? Come on, how can someone possess those kinds of dangerous tricks on them all the time?

    But the reality pped him in the face. The temple is not going to side with him, they don¡¯t even want to get involved much less hinder Sam.

    As he panicked, the temple god said.

    "There is only one possibility that you could escape this predicament, but I don¡¯t know if it is a definite possibility and it is a hundred percent feasible."

    "Please do tell me. I will do whatever it takes to be safe."

    Arman saw a strand of hope in that despair. The temple-head turned around and there is a faint smile on his face which Armanpletely failed to notice.

 Chapter 336: Finding a Safe Place

    The temple-head doesn¡¯t need to turn around to take a look at Arman to know how desperate he is.

    He spoke casually and collectedly.

    "There is a faint possibility that Sam is in his weakest state right now. From the information I got from the beast faction, this is the conclusion I came to.

    There is no way for him to be unscathed after dealing so much damage, but there is nobody of his or his friends and any other remains that are found at the battle-field.

    So, I am sure that he is alive, albeit weakly.

    He has to recover after that and there is only one safe ce for him. At this moment, the whole world has its eyes on him and it would be extremely difficult for him to recover to his health and even after his health is recovered to reach his prime and reload his arsenal, he has to find a source of ie and resources.

    There is only one ce in the world which could provide him all this and that is the western continent.

    This ce is the only ce where he can hide, recuperate, defend, and recover without any hindrances. He has many sources of ie, information, and resources in that ce.

    So, for him to not have the previous amount of resources and arsenal, you have to stop his ess to those resources.

    If it is only him without any of his tricks, you can fight him directly and even the thunder god temple could help you.

    But if he gets ess to them, there is no way for you to escape." Temple said slowly.

    Arman went into deep thought and said.

    "What do I have to do?"

    "Go to the western continent as an envoy from the thunder god temple. There are around fifteen months for the next pce of inheritance trails and we have to recruit a new batch of candidates anyway. The trials andpetitions should have already begun a long time ago.

    So, I will be helping you by sending you as an envoy from the thunder god temple to overview thesepetitions and candidates and this will be the only help, I am going to provide you.

    This is also at the price of all your merits and credits you have gathered in the thunder god temple.

    After going there, you have to work hard on your own, to slowly prate Sam¡¯swork and take over that, at least try to get a major part of it under your control, in this way you can stop Sam from essing the resources.

    If this seeds you will live and if you fail, you will die and thunder god temple willpletely refrain from taking any responsibility regarding your actions,"

    Arman fell into a deep thought, he is too involved in himself as he bowed his head and bit his nails and failed to notice the crafty grin on the temple heads face.

    But that grin is gone as soon as Arman looked up.

    "I will go." Arman agreed and his tone sounded a lot calmer this time.

    After that they discussed some more details, Arman left the room and soon Moriya entered the room.

    "You will be apanying Arman to the western continent, that is Sam??s territory and they both seemed to have some disputes and Arman seemed to want to do something to Sam¡¯s things while he disappeared.

    Generally, we don¡¯t allow this to happen if any of our members are in a situation like Sam, but our rtionship with Sam is more of a business deal than that of an actual disciple, so leave him be.

    Unless he involves innocents and heavy casualties, you don¡¯t have to interfere.

    If Sam returns and a dispute arises while you are staying there, don¡¯t interfere no matter what happens. Arman should be responsible for what he is doing."

    Moriya nodded his head and left.

    While the temple head is plotting something against Sam¡¯s territories, he is still unconscious.

    At dusk, when shadows are at itsrgest state, Sam¡¯s body started reacting weirdly.

    The ckness of the patches became intense as they oozed that ck foggy aura even more.

    Right at that moment, he is inside a cave that the trio dug on a hill.

    They created a makeshift bed and Sam wasid down on that.

    The trio is looking at him as the ck fog oozed out intently as time passed by, they tried to control it by injecting spiritual energy, applying medicine to them, feeding some pills to Sam, and so on.

    But there is no solution.

    As they watched helplessly, the time passed and the night arrived. Only at that movement, the ck fog receded and to their surprise, it became lesser than the morning time.

    The next morning the fog returned to the normal state.

    The trio examined Sam¡¯s body inch by inch to see any form of difference and they indeed noticed on.

    At the tip of his left pinky finger, there is a small space where the dark patch was reduced a bit.

    It is very minute and not more than a millimeter or two. Even the cultivators would ignore it due to the insignificant size.

    But the trio was overjoyed. They are extremely afraid and anxious about Sam¡¯s condition.

    All this while, Sam was in the lead and they don¡¯t have to face many problems, most of the times all they had to do is train and fight when the situation arises, this is the first time they are facing a serious issue like this and to their dismay the one who always there for them was nowying on the bed with no consciousness whatsoever.

    They suddenly felt like they are bearing a huge burden.

    Particrly Watt. He is the only one who got a glimpse of the Dark soul Raven. He also felt the huge pressure at that time and he knew first hand how terrifying it was.

    He has no confidence in living past a roar of that beast.

    But Sam is still alive, he might not be safe and sound and be in his prime, but he is still breathing and his heart is still beating.

    On one hand, he is feeling extremely proud of the fact that Sam has escaped such a strong existence, one might argue it is due to the things he had on himself, but everything he had was a reward for the hard work he has done, even the cultivation technique he obtained from Ling Tian which was the main reason for his escape.

    There is always a price to pay for everything and as for the price he has to pay for the things he got from Ling Tian...

    Anyway, Watt really wanted to fly up in the air and scream to the top of his lungs and announce Sam¡¯s achievement to the whole world to know. He wanted to see Sam¡¯s very namemanding the respect of everyone for his acts.

    But at the current state Sam was in, he couldn¡¯t express any of his emotions.

    That day, Philip stayed with Sam, while Watt and Jack moved as they scouted two different areas.

    They only came back after the day isplete. Watt covered more distance as he had the silver wing in his possession.

    "I couldn¡¯t find any traces of humans, but there are some traces of beast tribes. There is a possibility that we can find any traces after crossing the territory of the beast tribe.

    Our current location is almost like a dead ce, there are no powerful beasts or barely any beasts that are considered strong for that matter."

    Watt exined his situation.

    "There is actually a dead-end to the side I explored. There is a sea and there are no traces near the sea for me to explore. I wanted to scout another way."

    Jack exined his discoveries.

    Philip thought for a moment and asked.

    "Should we explore a bit more or shall we move towards the beast tribe?"

    "I think we better move. Even if we don¡¯t find any human traces, from what I saw the beasts are not that strong and even their boss would be a Level-4 at maximum. We can still gather some information from them with the help of Falck." Watt replied.

    "I agree too," Jack said.

    "Okay, then tomorrow we will move in that direction first thing in the morning."

    The next day, the trio moved towards that direction as they carried Sam over on the bed with two of them holding on both sides. Although they could carry him over their shoulders, they are afraid of hurting his wounds. Since they don¡¯t know his condition, they decided to take the utmost care they could take.

    After traveling for a day and a half they finally arrived at the said ce. It is a tribe of boars and Watt entered the tribe alone.

    After an hour, he came back with arge boar on his shoulders and said.

    "There is a vige nearby, but from what they said, it is an extremely remote ce and doesn¡¯t have any powerful entities there. We should be able to go there in three hours at this pace."

    "We will rest here for the day and will move there tomorrow." They decided and made a small camp there as they waited for the night to pass.

 Chapter 337: Peculiarities in the Nation

    [A/n: I wasn¡¯t feeling well yesterday so I turned in early. So, Only one chapter for today. There will be a mass release on November 20 to make it up for thesepses. Thank you. Dont forget to vote by the way]

    At Dawn, the trio started preparing for their journey. The first thing they did was cover Sampletely. They wrapped his body in clothes so that the ck patches would be invisible.

    After all, they are visiting a vige where people might be less knowledgeable, if they mistook Sam¡¯s situation for a disease, it would be hard for them to stay there. They have to keep low-profile at that, so they shouldn¡¯t use force to stay there.

    Two hourster, they reached the vige. Watt carried Sam on his shoulders as they roamed the streets.

    The vige is small and there is nothing special about it. It is just like any other vige they visited, except there are an awful lot of cultivators in this vigepared to any other vige.

    But they didn¡¯t think much about it.

    It is also normal for a vige to have more cultivators.

    They found an inn and checked-in. Watt and Philip went out to ask about the information on the nearest city.

    Actually, they have a lot of information to learn. First, they have to find out which empire or territory they are in and if they are still in Beast faction-s territory, they have to be careful enough to hide from their search.

    Apart from that they still have to find out a healer and show them Sam¡¯s condition.

    If they are really in the Beast faction¡¯s territory, they couldn¡¯t even find a healer of a higher-level just in case the info will be leaked to the higher-ups and they would be in a goose chase.

    They will be in a tough spot as it would difficult for them to even escape with Sam in this condition.

    The two of them visited a lot of areas in the vige where the people are gathered most.

    They didn¡¯t go and straight-up asked these questions because they don¡¯t want people to get suspicious about them.

    As they are getting as much information as they can get they noticed something weird in the vige.

    When people are gathered in a ce, there seemed to be a scarcity of spiritual energy in the vicinity.

    The bunch of people is hungrily absorbing the spiritual energy and it even seemed like apetition of absorption.

    The second thing is, they have yet to meet a single thug. It might seem a little weird to think that the absence of thugs is a bad thing, but it is indeed peculiar that there are no thugs in the vige.

    In the inns, restaurants, streets even on the outskirts there is not a single thug.

    That afternoon, they reunited in the inn and decided to leave the vige.

    They got their required minimum info and that is they are in the eastern continent at the moment and their nearest city is the Lock City. The only good news being, the eastern continent is under Usaine Sect¡¯s jurisdiction. Not under Beast faction

    They have to move north to reach the city and it would take three days by walk. The three of them started immediately, they flew towards the city on their beasts. Watt sat on Falck along with Sam as they moved slowly.

    They reached the Lock city in a day and checked in a luxurious inn.

    This city is just on the same level as Star-wood city.

    The City-lord is just a Novice stage expert, they have nothing to worry about, but they did notice a simrity with the vige and that is something that made them uneasy.

    The spiritual energy started bing scarce within the city. At every ce where people gathered, the spiritual energy is being absorbed by them, the atmosphere will generate spiritual energy continuously, but these people are absorbing it.

    Particrly in the slums of the city, where the ordinary people live.

    Generally, the spiritual energy variation in that ce should be almost zero, because the non-cultivators live there, but they noticed that throughout the slums there is not a single non-cultivator.

    Only the children below their awakening age and the elderly above fifty years of age are the non-cultivators left.

    The people belonging to the rest of the age groups are all cultivators, they suddenly felt like their world view itself is copsing.

    The number of cultivators is too high. It is higher to the point it is causing them chills. Watt went out to look for a map to the nearby Count city. They decided to show Sam¡¯s condition in a Dukedom Capital because it is almost impossible for the people below the grand realm to examine Sam¡¯s body and they also noticed something else when they wrapped Sam¡¯s body.

    There is a certain repulsion from those ck patches that are threatening them when they tried to touch them.

    So if people with lower cultivation touches this, they might get into trouble. They don¡¯t want that to happen lest they couldn¡¯t face the consequences.

    At least, Sam is not showing any signs of deteriorating. For the next two weeks, they spent finding maps and moving from one city to another. They moved slowly to make sure Sam wouldn¡¯t be affected by the journey.

    After they reached a dukedom capital which is called the Orange me city, they finally hired a healer to look at Sam¡¯s condition.

    The healer took a look at Sam and the ck patches, but couldn¡¯t identify anything. He diagnosed the whole body and gave a report and that is although, Sam¡¯s body is weak and unconscious, it is more like a condition of sleep, even the wounds are not showing any signs of increasing or deteriorating. His vitals are fine and his condition is stable with no signs of life threats.

    The ck patches are currently not showing any negative signs on his body. He advised them to take Sam to meet the head of the Pharmaceutical tower.

    He even offered his help in booking an appointment. In this country, they don¡¯t have any influence. They only have their individual strengths and the boatloads of spiritual stones, there is no fame and people don¡¯t just attribute them to Sam and they couldn¡¯t ess the connections they get from Sam¡¯s professions due to him being unconscious.

    They took him to the head of the Pharmaceutical tower after another two days and the result turned out to be the same there is nothing they could do.

    They couldn¡¯t understand Sam¡¯s situation. The tower-head gave some extra statements though.

    That is about the presence of dark elemental energy in Sam¡¯s body which is the result of those ck patches.

    The tower-head couldn¡¯t identify why those ck patches appeared or what effects they could lead to, but he did find out that the ck patches have highly concentrated dark elemental energy.

    The second thing is that he said Sam¡¯s body is recovering. He said that Sam¡¯s current vitals are stable but weak, they are not showing any signs if worsening but he is definitely recovering slowly and steadily.

    Normal people might have trouble recognizing it, but the tower-head with his experience and expertise was able to discern it.

    The trio felt somewhat relieved after hearing that.

    They are not that experienced with the dark elemental energy and couldn¡¯t understand its concentration in Sam¡¯s body, but they do know that Sam does wield dark elemental energy which made them feel relieved.

    They decided to stay in the same city until Sam recovered.

    They bought a residence and stayed arranged for their own residence for the time being. They don¡¯t have any problems economically.

    After a few days, they noticed another peculiar thing in this city too. As usual, this city is full of cultivators and there is an awful lot of scarcity of spiritual energy in some ces. Along with that, there are street fights breaking out in every ce and there are new hunters and mercenaries getting registered every day.

    Almost everyone within the age group of fourteen to fifty is a cultivator, which is impossible to happen.

    The most astounding thing is they saw more Grand realm cultivators in this city than in the thunder god temple or the beast faction.

    This is something that is extremely overwhelming for them. By this time, they understood that something is extremely wrong with this country and it is not just possessing a high number of cultivators.

    But they choose to ignore it since, whatever the situation that is wrong doesn¡¯t concern him for the moment.

    Meanwhile, on the western continent.

    Arman arrived at this ce two weeks ago along with Moriya.

    While thetter holed up in the room as he analyzed the candidates for the next pce of inheritance trials, he is roaming around the cities to see any way for him to prate into Sam¡¯swork to no avail.

    He wasn¡¯t able to find any possible way to get into thiswork directly. After these two weeks of futile effort, he decided to try another way.

    From the next day, there is news of Sam¡¯s disappearance that started spreading throughout the city he was staying in and soon in a week, the whole nation came to know about the issue due to the impablemunicationwork Sam himself created.

 Chapter 338: Rumors

    The word about Sam¡¯s disappearance spread like wildfire. Sam is kind of a celebrity within the western continent. Even though, not many people know about his involvement in killing Oscar directly.

    They do know him by the wanted notice ce on him by the former emperor of the Orion, his involvement in causing war, his rampage which destroyed almost half of the resources of the empire, and the most recent thing about him is histest inventions in themunication device field and the railways.

    Almost every person in the western continent has heard of his name if they didn¡¯t see him.

    He has disappeared from the public scene over a year ago. But themoners and low-level officials don¡¯t know that he went to the thunder-god temple, because they don¡¯t even know the existence of that ce.

    All they know is that Sam stays in that majestic skyscr.a.p.er and there are not many people who can meet him.

    At first, when the news spread out, the high-level officials didn¡¯t care much about this, butter even they felt panicked because they knew of the secret behind his actual disappearance in the Beast faction.

    But unlike the six major powers, these people got second-hand news which mostly portrayed the impossibility of Sam¡¯s survival.

    Many people in the higher positions of the workingwork Sam created are anxious for some reason and some high-level people went to Arc to confirm the news about this.

    Arc who is also unable to ess the first- hand information like the major power, couldn¡¯t help but feel uneasy and visited Moriya to confirm the news.

    "Mr. Moriya, May I know if Sam is okay?"

    Moriya stayed silent for a little bit and replied.

    "He is not in the thunder god temple currently and we don¡¯t know where he is at. But from the information we received, he visited another major power named Beast faction and encountered an incident after which no one knows his current status."

    Arc felt numb after listening to it.

    "Is there no way to confirm if he is alive?"

    "As of this moment? No."

    Arc didn¡¯t know if he should publicize this news outside, but before he could decide on his next course of action, the news already spread out.

    For some reason, some higher-ups in Sam¡¯s city who manage the factories and themunicationwork contacted him and asked whether Moriya really said that or not.

    This left him quite puzzled. He was already wondering who spread this news in the first ce and he is already troubled by this now such sensitive information leaked and he doesn¡¯t know if he can handle the repercussions.

    The authority Sam held is not something that can be reced and once its presence disappears there are a lot of people eyeing the piece of meat that he has left behind, the wholework and a source of ie he created will bepletely destroyed, there is no way another person can take over this unless it is under the control of the empire itself, it is hard to maintain the bnce.

    But it is impossible for the empire to take over that, because the four major towers are extremely involved with this project and there is no way they are going to let the empire take away this piece of fat meat from their hands, particrly in this kind of situation.

    While he was brainstorming on how to think of a solution in this kind of situation, the wholework is already in chaos.

    The factions are already formed and the four major powers who are responsible for the most workforce arepletely divided into four major factions to get a major share apart from that there are some other minor factions that are formed by people in various professions. Some management staff is already selecting which faction to suck up to.

    Arc almost fainted from the tension. Many people from these factions are trying to get in touch with him to get support.

    They are trying to use his force to suppress the rest of the voices because Sam¡¯s presence is the only thing that hindered them from trying anything funny and now there should a simr deterrence and the emperor be the perfect one.

    They don¡¯t want him to take over the wholework but they still need his strength to take over that themselves.

    Anyway, Arc is not particrly enthusiastic to take over thework, because he has his own responsibilities and a lot of them as an emperor, he doesn¡¯t want to burden himself more.

    But he still must find a way to get away from this pestering.

    And this exact moment, he got a visit from Arman.

    "I heard there are some problems caused due to Sam¡¯s disappearance. May I know the exact situation?" He asked with an amiable smile.

    Arc who was being pestered every day wanted to vent and started telling everything to Arman.

    After saying everything, he couldn¡¯t help but ask.

    "Can you tell me what are the odds of Sam permanently gone?" He asked hesitantly.

    Arman wore a sad face as he said in a heavy tone.

    "I don¡¯t know, it is actually a very dangerous situation. Contending with a major power is no joke after all and it is even more so if they are hell-bent on killing them. I really cannot imagine what kind of situation Sam really is in.

    We actually had a great rtionship, since thest time he visited the thunder god temple for thepetition. I tried to talk him out of this situation several times, but he still insisted on leaving like that.

    He didn¡¯t even go directly, he actually sneaked out of the ce and we only knew that he is missing after two days."

    His voice and the expressions made his words feel extremely genuine.

    After a slight pause, he said.

    "He didn¡¯t tell me that he was going because he didn¡¯t want to alert the thunder god temple, you might not know this, but he never really joined the thunder god temple, it was actually a deal with the temple-head.

    Since I and Nichs are part of the thunder god temple, I think he didn¡¯t feelfortable about telling us and now both of us are extremely worried about his situation. I just wonder if there is a way for me to help him out of this situation."

    He left the room with those words.

    Arc looked at the back of Arman with a scrutinizing gaze. At first, he felt really doubtful of his words no matter how believable they sounded.

    Because, he knew Sam doesn¡¯t really make friends that easily and his circle of friends is extremely small, his three close friends are always with him at all times.

    But he felt his words a little believable when he heard the words about Sam not joining the thunder god temple truly.

    Because he knew of this situation. Sam has specifically told him this to make sure that neither he nor the members of thework will have any ideas of taking over Sam¡¯s ce.

    He went into deep thought for a while and just let the things be, for the time being, he decided to keep the thoughts of thiswork aside for a while and will deal with them when the situation turns desperate.

    While the situation is like this, Arc suddenly encountered another situation. He was looking through the criminal records of the various ces. He does so asionally, from time to time so that he could analyze and improvise the way the city guard handles thew and order of the empire.

    And to his surprise, the crime rate decreased a lot, there are not many robberies as before and there are at most some beatings in public and even these victims are former bullies.

    He doesn¡¯t know how the situation suddenly turned this good, but he suddenly felt relieved as this is the only great news he heard in a while.

    Another person who is roaming the empire in a while doesn¡¯t think so.

    That is none other than Sirona.

    Since she came to the western continent, she has been roaming all over the nation, to just explore and she noticed some peculiarities in the viges and lower-level cities.

    And these peculiarities are simr to what Philip, Watt, and Jack saw in the eastern continent.

    The unnatural absorption of the energy and an unnaturally higher number of the cultivators who are popping out of nowhere.

    She has been observing this more than the trio because she doesn¡¯t have any tension attached to her and she who was curious discovered something they didn¡¯t.

    Most of the cultivators who are having this strange condition are actually not cultivators at all, they are people who didn¡¯t awaken at the age of fourteen and are destined to live likemoners without any power.

    But all of a sudden, they are awakening out of nowhere without any visible signs. Amoner a day is turning into a cultivator at the Novice stage the very next day.

 Chapter 339: The Church

    Two months passed since the trio appeared on the eastern continent. They are having a peaceful life.

    They don¡¯t have to deal with any arrogant young masters or any scheming old men. Sam is still unconscious. But his body showed some changes, the ck patches are receding slowly but steadily and hisplexion also got a lot better.

    They are leading a pretty uneventful life.

    The only thing that interested them in this boring routine is that there is a religion that entered the city.

    It is called the ¡¯Church of Guide.¡¯ There are surprisingly many people that are joining the church and most of them are the cultivators.

    The weird thing is, this church appeared out of nowhere, but ording to the news they heard from a trading union, this church appeared in all the viges and almost all the major cities in past two weeks.

    There are an awful lot of people who joined this church and the number only seemed increasingly high.

    There is even a rumor that, in a particr vige, every single person became a follower of this church. That included the vige-head, the guards, and even the street thugs. they became devout followers overnight.

    Every church member wears a white robe and they travel in groups advocating their religion.

    There is no certain hierarchy that was known to the public yet, but one thing they do know is that there is not a single person who came to contact with the church and came out like a normal person, every single person who came into contact with them will be a follower.

    At first, the authorities didn¡¯t take seriously, only after they saw more than half of the viges are under the church¡¯s control and the rest are joining at a rapid pace.

    The emperor was probably thest person to know about this church.

    And there is a reason for that.

    The church started as discreetly as possible and the operations of recruiting more people ran even more discreetly.

    It all began in viges and soon slowly spread to the small cities and now within two months it already reached the Dukedom capital.

    The city suddenly became chaotic. Everymoner in the slums who is supposed to be a non-cultivator has now be a cultivator and all of them became church followers. The only silver lining for the authorities is that being the church follower only seemed symbolic and there is nothing they have to do as a follower.

    Every person is carrying on with their same daily routine

    The same thing happened in all the empires of the other three continents except there is a small anomaly.

    In the western continent. The Church activities are not able to spread at the same pace as the remaining three continents.

    Because the people behind the church are having a hard time with the presence of themunicationwork.

    Due to the presence of themunicationwork, there is nothing that was being hidden. The news is traveling fast and wide, so they cannot take any big movements even within the remote viges.

    So, they opted for a different n. At first, they started making people join individually, there are no mass gatherings or norge rituals. After making every individual within their target group join them, they started forcefully cutting themunicationworks off.

    Just like that five viges were isted from the rest of the world in the first week.

    In the same week, the other continent¡¯s church groups are already done with almost all viges.

    But the church didn¡¯t give up, they felt that there is nothing wrong and proceeded with the same n and by the end of two weeks, which is the present-day they are done with another fifteen viges, while the other continent¡¯s church spread to the Dukedom capitals.

    The difference in progress was huge, but there are some internal reasons for that.

    As they were thinking about proceeding further, they didn¡¯t know that the emperor of the western continent already started looking for the information regarding those twenty-one viges.

    That is also due to the presence of themunicationwork.

    Sam has created two majorwork hubs and one of them is in Sam¡¯s city and another one is in the Imperial Capital.

    Both the hubs got a notification as soon as themunicationworks are blocked inside these viges, at first, the operators didn¡¯t think much. They only felt that there is a problem with the tower and sent the necessary technicians.

    But after two weeks the blockages only increased and the people who are sent to repair the problems disappeared with no way to contact.

    On this day, while the trio is feeling wary of the church in the eastern continent and Sirona who finished her trip over the western continent is returning to Sam¡¯s city, Arc sent troops to the twenty-one viges that have their connections blocked.

    There are twenty-one teams led by twenty-one Nascent stage cultivators as each team headed to each vige.

    While Arc is worrying about the anomaly in the twenty-one viges, there is another problem that knocked on his door and that is the people from the pharmaceutical tower are starting a dispute within Sam¡¯swork.

    They are suddenly demanding to increase their share in the profits and are iming that they are being underrated. They brought this issue to the emperor directly, who is waiting for the news from the troops he deployed.

    The imperial court.

    There are four people who are sitting in the guest seats while the emperor is in his own chair.

    The four people are none other than the former tower heads of the four major towers of Orion.

    The Pharmaceutical tower head is sitting on one side alone while the other three are sitting opposite him.

    "I need the pharmaceutical tower shares in profits to increase by five percent. We are suffering a great loss in the hands of the other three professions."

    The Pharmaceutical tower head said in an extremely solemn tone.

    "What do you mean loss? The wholework is mainly working based on our three professions, while the pharmaceutical tower is only taking part in the business and administration. Our three professions are overseeing the manufacturing, maintenance, transportation, and all the other services.

    Just how do you think you are suffering a loss?"

    "What do you mean by saying we are only responsible for business and administration? You seem to have forgotten the employee welfare. We are the ones supplying the necessary pills and potions for all the employees and also, we have to provide rare herbs and medicines in the merit exchange.

    Although, we are making money from the things that are selling and getting a fair share from them, everything else that is going for the employee welfare and merit exchange is not fair exchanges at all.

    We are losing a lot of money."

    The argument went on back and forth and so on, theypletely forgot that they are in the emperor¡¯s presence.

    Theypletely started hurling curses at each other and the whole thing is almost out of hands.

    After more than an hour of chaos, the artisan tower head loudly dered.

    "Old man, you can dream about getting a higher share in profits all you want, there is no way we are going to let you take our share of profits."

    The pharmaceutical tower head snorted in contempt as he replied.

    "If you are not going to give out your share, so be it. There is still Sam¡¯s share. We will take it out of that."

    The atmosphere turned solemn as soon as he said these words, he is looking at the emperor from the corner of his eyes.

    Arc finally understood, what this old fox is up to. His main aim is Sam¡¯s share from the start.

    He gritted his teeth in anger as he said.

    "Sam is currently not here. How can you decide?"

    "I think the emperor should ask Sam about this after making a visit to the thunder god temple. Don¡¯t worry, our pharmaceutical tower will bear the expenses of the trip."

    Arc frowned. He was still thinking about how to handle the situation about Sam¡¯s disappearance, but now these guys are in an even more hurry to confirm Sam¡¯s disappearance.

    Once they confirm his disappearance, there is no way for them to stay amiably in thework. The whole organization is going to be torn apart into pieces.

    He thought long and hard for a movement and took a deep breath before saying.

    "I will be visiting the thunder god temple. But not right now. I have an issue at hand at the moment and I need to deal with it as soon as I can.

    I will inform you back in ten days until them I expect you to maintain the whole organization peacefully.

    If you guys are having problems with dealing and another dispute arises, I believe the tower heads of the Imperial Capital, will be more than happy enough to take care of the organization while you guys step down and sort out your issues before taking your positions back."

 Chapter 340: Escape

    A weekter.

    The troops reached the designated viges and started investigating it. They found the peculiarity as soon as they sneaked into the vige.

    There are a lot of people who are wearing white robes and even the vige guards who are responsible for keeping a watch at the entrance are doing the same.

    The whole vige seemed eerily silent as the only people who are roaming around are the white-robed people. The troops sneaked into the vige at night, in order to not alert anyone and it turned out to be a great thing.

    Because at night they witnessed something that blew their minds away. A fifty-year-old man who is apletemoner entered a newly builtrge house and came out wearing a white robe. But this time, his body is releasing spiritual energy waves and at the same time absorbing the spiritual energy frantically.

    Apart from that the rest of the normal cultivators are in a dazed state lying around in their houses. Some of them are killed, some of them hypnotized and some of them arepletely tied up with restrictions in ce.

    The situation is the same in almost all the viges and in every ce, there is a person who is wearing a white mask who is feeding pills to thesemoners.

    The Captains of the teams knew that situation is anything but good. They immediately left the vige and informed Arc about the situation.

    Arc suddenly felt his head go numb. He was feeling relieved that the crime rates in the viges have been reducedpletely but it seemed that something major is going on behind his back and he doesn¡¯t know what it is.

    "Capture the leaders of all twenty-one viges. I need all of them alive. As for the rest, try to arrest them and release the normal cultivators.

    If they dared to resist, cripple their cultivations. There is no such thing as bing an overnight cultivator and if there is something like that it is definitely not a good thing.

    There seemed to be someone hatching a huge n behind our backs.

    After arresting them, ce them in istion, don¡¯t even let them talk within themselves.

    Bring back the leaders as fast as you can."

    With those orders, the very next night, the troops took action and arrested the leaders. They put the rest of them in captivity andpletely sealed their senses within the vige. The troops were left behind to monitor them and the leaders were escorted by the Nascent stage cultivators.

    Themunication towers are also unlocked.

    Arc who was supposed to go to the thunder god temple two dayster didn¡¯t even think of going until he investigated this matter.

    While he was waiting, something else is unfolding on the other side of the world.

    In this week, the activities of the church were escted to a new height within the eastern continent.

    And slowly, the people are reaching out to every door and advocating the church of guide. They are preaching equality, fairness, impartiality which will be only granted once they joined the church.

    The trio felt extremely vary. From what the healer said, Sam¡¯s health will get better in around three months.

    So, they have to be wary for the next three months. But these church followers are making too much of a ruckus.

    Watt sent the only shadow mice that he had in the beast pouch. It was sent to Watt when Sam infiltrated the beast faction. He sent the shadow mouse to the streets where the church followers campaigning door to door so that they could understand the situation.

    When the mouse entered the house, it saw that the church members who are wearing the white robes walked inside directly without knocking.

    The one in the front, held themoner by his neck and forced a pill inside his mouth.

    There are two more people inside the house, one of them is ady who seemed to be in her forties and a son who just awakened barely.

    They seemed to be having a feast at his awakening.

    But the intruders made itpletely hard for them to even smile. They forced the same type pf pill in thedy¡¯s mouth and forced apletely different pill in the boys¡¯ mouth.

    After the three of them fainted, they even left a statement.

    "It is hard to exin the situation to the ignorant. So, we took it upon ourselves to show you the correct way.

    The ¡¯Guide¡¯ is the only one who can lead us to a true and fair world. Please forgive us."

    The mouse didn¡¯t leave the house immediately, instead, it stayed till the three of them woke up.

    The first to wake up is the couple. After waking up, they seemed to be in a daze but soon left the house.

    After that, the boy also woke up and he also seemed to be in a daze.

    He mumbled something incoherently, about why he was there are why is he is wearing those clothes and what his name is.

    He seemed to havepletely lost his memory.

    The next morning, the mouse returned to Watt, who got the gist of the information through Falck¡¯s trantion.

    He suddenly felt chills, he didn¡¯t know how the whole church worked, and they couldn¡¯t understand, how it prospered so quickly, but now it made sense.

    They are forcing their numbers to grow and for some weird reason, they are not targeting cultivators, their only target beingmoner people.

    He suddenly thought of something, all the grand realm cultivators he sensed in this city previously are now wearing white robes.

    Which means, they all belonged to the church. He connected the dots and immediately felt chills run down his spine.

    He doesn¡¯t know what exactly is going on, but he does know something big is about to happen and it is not safe to stay here anymore.

    He exined the situation to Philip and Jack and the trio decided to move to the imperial capital the same day.

    They made their arrangements and started moving discreetly at night.

    But to their surprise, all the city gates arepletely blocked.

    The city guards vanished and all that stood there in their ce are people in white robes.

    They too noticed the trio¡¯s movements and stopped them at thest gate.

    "We need to go to the Imperial capital immediately. Our friend is not feeling well and we have to take him to the healer as fast we can, can you please give way."

    Philip said in an extremely worried tone. Watt and Jack exchanged a nce as Watt tied Sam to his back and took out Silver wind immediately.

    The two of them took out methane grenades in both their hands and sted straight at the four people that are blocking them.

    They took out the beasts from their beast pouches and made their way into the sky.

    Watt looked below, only to find out that the four people who are in the middle of the explosion and got all their bodies sted away were recovering rapidly, their skeleton waspletely intact and only the flesh seemed to have been affected by the st.

    They still had a smile on their face as they wore another pair of white robes. They didn¡¯t seem to have any beasts on them, but two of them are running towards them.

    "While two of our fellow believers follow them and teach them the correct way of truth, we shall calm down the chaos caused by them within the city.

    There is only a week till the big day and we shall be finishing the spread of faith by that time.

    The two people are running behind as they flew, they didn¡¯t even wear any footwear as they made long and strong strides.

    They are using nothing but pure physical force like brutes.

    They didn¡¯t take any turn or diversion while chasing.

    They crashed into rocks, boulders, and even trees.

    The trio led them deep into forests and this turned out useless as they started using the trees as their footing to jump and even sometimes to try to reach their height.

    The trio is attacking rapidly from the front and some attacks are even cleanlynded which led them to observe something.

    The bodies of these people are different.

    The spiritual energy wavesing from them are giving off the same vibes as that of a Grand realm cultivator at peak.

    They cannot use any form of elemental attacks and could only rely on physical force. They couldn¡¯t even control the absorption of the spiritual energy of manipting it at their free will.

    In fact, they seemed quite oblivious of everything that regarded spiritual energy.

    They arepletely brainwashed and they don¡¯t seem to have any form of sanity left, their words are calm, but they are utter nonsense.

    Last but not least, their extremely peculiar healing ability.

    As long as their skeletons are intact andpletely joined, they seemed to have no problem with healing no matter how serious their injuries are.

 Chapter 341: Emperor of the Eastern Continent.

    The trio ran for two days and they are followed by these people for two days without any rest.

    Only after some beasts within the woods hooked up with these two guys did they have enough privilege to take a break.

    After that, they continued to move towards the imperial capital.

    They don¡¯t know what exactly these church guys are nning, but they seemed to bepletely weird and extremely dangerous.

    Particrly, their brainwashing methods and turning a normal person into this weird freak like this.

    From what heard from the shadow mouse, the couple turned into Novices, but the people who chased them are on verge of being Nascent stage cultivators. No, it would be rather fitting to call them organisms than cultivators.

    After another four days, they finally arrived at the imperial capital.

    Now, their first objective is to report the situation to the emperor, but it would be too difficult to reach him directly and they couldn¡¯t just go and tell him that some freaks are wreaking havoc right under his territory.

    It would be a surprise if they don¡¯t beat the crap out of them just when they tried to enter the imperial pce.

    They couldn¡¯t think of any solution went straight towards the imperial pce to try their hard luck, but as expected they were kicked out, at least not physically, they were sent back politely.

    After thinking of all kinds of weird ideas, they finally came to a decision and that is use a most straight forward method they could possibly think of and that is creating a scene.

    They immediately went on to work. After an hour, Watt is flying near the imperial pce as he started showering the streets with pamphlets, they created themselves.

    This caused quite a bigmotion and soon, a beast flew into the sky and they caught Watt.

    Philip and Jack joined them in the middle. Sam is tied to Philip¡¯s back.

    They surrendered quite peacefully and didn¡¯t cause any scene; they didn¡¯t answer anything too. Only after they reached the court did they speak and that too because there is the Emperor sitting on the top.

    "From the looks of it, you guys seemed to be quite talented, but that doesn¡¯t excuse the fact, that you caused ruckus over the imperial pce.

    Considering your talent and amount of hard work you should have put, I will let you exin yourselves, but before that can you tell me what happened to your friend on your back?"

    The trio exchanged nces and Philip opened up.

    "We will bepletely honest with you right now. We are not from here, I am Philip, he is Watt and he is Jack, the one who was tied to my back is our friend Sam.

    There is a faint possibility that you might have heard of his name at least, but I would still exin.

    Two and a half months ago, Sam caused a ruckus at the Beast faction and we killed more than half of their mid-tier members, their Nascent stage cultivators are almost all dead and there are countless Pre-transcendent stage casualties too in the fight.

    Finally, in a desperate situation he used a forbidden technique to transport use here and this is the bacsh he is suffering." He paused and looked at the emperor who stood up by now with his mouth wide open.

    "Call the crown prince over." He ordered an attendant and then turned back to Philip and said in a hurried tone.

    "Are you telling the truth? That guy is Sam from the western continent, who survived the Beast faction?"

    "Yes."

    He didn¡¯t know what to say, he didn¡¯t expect that he would be able to get to meet a person who ispletely legendary right now.

    Not just him, every emperor in the whole knew Sam at this moment, his name was publicized like that.

    After a few minutes, a young man walked in and saw Philip, Watt and Jack. He was shocked to see Philip and Jack as he saw them before, he looked at Sam whose head is resting on Philip¡¯s shoulder and halted in his tracks and gulped for a second.

    That face is not something he would be able to forget in this life. For him, that sleeping face which has a ck patch covering half of it, is a symbol of terror and fear.

    The Emperor who wanted to ask his son for confirmation, didn¡¯t even bother to ask anymore.

    After a while, they sat down in the court talking privately, there was even a bed that was prepared for Sam in the room.

    Turned out that this kid is a member of the Usaine Sect. and he is also part of the core members who came to resourcepetition.

    At first, he felt wary, but he didn¡¯t think soter, because he remembered that even the Sect head wasn¡¯t able to recognize him in the resourcepetition, there is no way for this guy to even realise who he is.

    "May I know what you wanted to tell me? The pamphlets you threw in the air are extremely vague."

    "Have you heard of the Church of the Guide?" Philip asked the emperor¡¯s face turned solemn.

    "I heard of this organisation. I even received a news yesterday from one of my scouts that they are nothing but a cult. Why are asking me about this?"

    The trio didn¡¯t even know how to respond to that.

    "Just a Cult? Seems like your scout is also part of the Church, there is no way they are just a normal cult, they started converting the non-cultivators into cultivators with some weird pills.

    The people will turn into a strong creature overnight. Not only will they gain strength, they will also be brainwashed. Apart from the brain washing thesemoners, they also targeted a wide range of young cultivators just to not let out their secret.

    We literally escaped from them in your Orange me city and came here..."

    Philip went on the exin the situationpletely and the face of the emperor turned extremely grave.

    He doesn¡¯t know what happened to the scouts, the Dukes and many other officials that are stationed in the whole nation, but it seemed that hiswork has beenpletely annihted and wasbined into the church or whatever.

    He doesn¡¯t know how to react to this situation or how to take care of it.

    He was just staying the pce thinking that everything is f.u.c.k.i.n.g great and didn¡¯t even find out that a great power is growing right under his nose.

    He felt like he was failure of an emperor.

    "Wait, even if they could do what they wanted to with the normal people and my staff, but what about the four major towers?"

    "We honestly don¡¯t know. They didn¡¯t seem to target the towers, they might need the towers themselves anyway, so they might have just left them alone and anyway, there is no way they would make a fuss with the four major towers, there will be repercussion from the central continent."

    Philip replied again.

    "Please stay here for a moment, I will juste." The Emperor left the ce and startedmanding all his subordinates.

    "Empty out all your treasuries and store them with you, alert all the people in the imperial capital andmand all the troops including the imperial guards, the city guards, the personal guards of the crown prince, the harem guards everyone should gather right at this moment.

    Transfer all the citizens to the imperial pce grounds and make sure to stay on standby to activate all the defensive formations of the city.

    Call, for the Old dukes, old marquises and all the other retired candidates from the Bamboo pavilion, including the old emperor.

    Unlock all the guarding beasts including the forbidden cave and stay standby at that cave until the old emperores.

    Anyone who is a Grand realm cultivator or stronger who are within the citizens should join the reserve troops.

    Publish a new list of assignments within the mercenary guild. Hire every mercenary in the Imperial capital.

    I want everything to get ready by noon." The Emperor came back and looked at the trio and Sam.

    "Are you going to join the battle?" They thought for a moment and Philip asked.

    "What is your back up n?"

    "My back up n is to activate the teleportation formation to transfer everyone to an empty ind of the Usaine Sect.

    It was actually, my reward for the highest tax they got from me. My nation is extremely prosper and there is a lot I have gained from it, it was just I was too used to the peace, I kind ofpletely let go of my guard and didn¡¯t care about the whole situation.

    Although, the ind is a superficial thing that they used to just brush me off, I spent a bomb on it and created a space-gate on that.

    But the only thing is that there would be a scarcity of the spiritual stones."

    "Maybe, you don¡¯t have to worry about that..." Watt said as he exchanged a nce with Philip.

 Chapter 342: War against Church

    The trio decided to pitch in the spiritual stones to transport the remaining people.

    They might seem like doing a good deed, but there are some reasons for that, first one is they have to use the same space gate and the second one is they couldn¡¯t just enter Usaine sect¡¯s territory.

    They don¡¯t know if the Beast faction has put a huge bounty on their heads and the six major powers although have some rivalries, in situations like this, they would help one another.

    So, they decided to transport as many people as possible so that they can blend in with the people from this nation and since the Usaine sect will not care enough to inspect each and every one of the people that came, they have a higher chance of hiding.

    So, the trio, Sam and the crown prince all five of them are at the Space-gate formation, making preparations to transport all the citizens.

    The orders of the emperor are executed rapidly. All the troops assembled and are given a briefing about the weird qualities of the people from the church.

    Everyone is a full-on war mode.

    Even the mercenaries joined the fray and started making preparations. Only people at the Grand realm stage or above are stationed.

    For some reason, the emperor felt that even this is going to be futile. So, they started sending people one after another. Theypletely crossed out the idea of defending or victory. Because, from what the trio exined, the emperor felt that the whole country is already within the Church¡¯s control.

    Their nation is smaller than the western continent, only about one-third. But still, the number of people the church might have taken into control is not small, there is no way the emergency troops can take on that.

    So, all these preparations are for only one thing, to buy enough time to take all the people away.

    Two dayster, almost all of the citizens are taken away, there are only troops are some more citizens left. Another two hourster, they could start evacuating the troops too.

    But at this moment, there are some tremors on the ground and their hearts resonated with it.

    All the citizens started to run towards the Space-gate and if not for the fact that the troops are present, there would have been real chaos.

    The Emperor looked through the balcony he was in and got rooted to the spot.

    There is an enormous crowd in the streets of the Imperial capital, all wearing white. There is a feeling of worship in everyone¡¯s eyes as they followed the person in the lead.

    Many people in the group are wearing white masks and from what Emperor could see, they seemed to be normal cultivators, only people without masks are giving off a weird vibe.

    The person in the lead is also wearing a mask, but it is not a white mask-like other, it is a golden mask with some patterns on it.

    He is also a normal cultivator and he seemed to be a transcendent cultivator at that. The Emperor turned solemn as he looked at the advancing group.

    After the crowd reached a few hundred meters away from the Pce, the one in the lead started speaking loudly.

    "I am the Priest, who serves the ¡¯Guide¡¯. The Guide is the only one who can show the path of truth for us.

    The Guide is the only one who can lead us to a fair world.

    The Guide is the only one who can lead us to a just world.

    The Guide is the only one who can lead us to a truly liberal world.

    I am here representing the guide and asking you to join us on this great journey."

    He spread his hands as he spoke. His voice is majestic and has some divine effect on it.

    The crowd standing behind him started cheering as soon as he finished his small speech.

    When the people in the Pce heard this, they didn¡¯t dare to ck off, they sped up the process of loading the spirit stones as the space gate was activated.

    The Priest looked at the Emperor who is standing on the balcony of the pce and said one more time.

    "Everyone, who doesn¡¯t join the Guide, will be considered a sinner and everyone, who is a sinner must be cleansed. So, please rethink and choose the path of truth."

    This time, he even pointed at the emperor directly.

    The rest of the crowd also pointed their fingers at the emperor and started calling him out.

    "Sinner."

    "Sinner."

    "Sinner."

    As the situation started to get rowdy, the troops are all on guard ready to fight.

    The Priest is smirking behind his mask as he heard the chants of the crowd.

    This is just him asking the emperor to surrender directly.

    As for the guide and the truth, well it is great to use the higher ground to take the other party down.

    After more than an hour of standby, the Priest once again spoke.

    "I already gave you an excess of time, it seems like your hearts arepletely rooted with evil, today, we will take this chance to eradicate the sinners within you by cleansing."

    As he said that, he pointed towards the troops that are stationed at the front lines, and just like that the people in the white robes came running.

    They don¡¯t have any order or any form of discipline.

    They are like an extremely angry mob without any form of training.

    "We shall cleanse."

    "We shall cleanse."

    "We shall Cleanse."

    They started chanting as they made their move.

    The Priest and the Emperor also came forward as they started making their own move, there was an extremelyrge empty space cleared just for them, the normal troops didn¡¯t even dare to stay in the vicinities.

    Although there is no chance of winning for the troops with their numbers, their main aim was buying time and they are doing it perfectly.

    But they are having an extremely hard time reducing the enemy numbers, their abnormal recovery rate and extreme suicidal attacks are a real threat to them.

    "Nice to meet you again." The Priest said to the Emperor with a smile, although the emperor couldn¡¯t see that smile through the mask, he can still feel it.

    "Are we acquainted?" Emperor frowned.

    "Acquainted? More than that, I would say." He took off his mask for a second and when Emperor saw his face, he felt like the world lost all meaning.

    "How are you guys capable of doing this?" He asked in an extremely tense tone.

    "Hahahaha.." There is a lot more than we can do and you can do nothing to stop it."

    With that, the fight between the Transcendent stage cultivators, both of them happened to be warriors and both of them wielded sabers.

    The two transcendent stage cultivators, hacked at each other as the battle went on.

    Meanwhile, thest batch of the citizens is just sent through the space gate. Philip sent a fire ball into the sky as a signal to the emperor.

    "All troops, defend, and retreat."

    The Emperormanded and the troops started retreating carefully.

    "Hahaha, where can you go, even if you decided to retreat? Do you think you can escape to the Usaine sect? I am sure that they wouldn¡¯t let all the troops with you.

    Even if you go there, so what? We are going to take over the whole world and nobody can stop us, not even the six major powers.

    We are going to take over the world. Hahahahahahaaaa...." He madly startedughing at this.

    The Emperor suddenly took a step back and swung his saber at the white-robed mob who are engaged at the front line, arge saber ray cut straight through them as a gap appeared between them and the troops.

    At this exact moment, the defensive formations activated immediately and the white-robed mob is a restricted entry into that.

    The troops immediately ran towards the space-gate.

    The space gate was being used a maximum capacity and luckily for them, it is arge space gatepared to the one at Orion.

    The Priest was in a daze for a second, he really didn¡¯t expect that the emperor went on a full defensive mode.

    He thought that he might have estimated wrongly and the Usaine sect might have epted their refugee already.

    That is because, he has no idea about neither the space gate that was connected to the ind, nor does he know anything rted to the ind which was presented to the emperor by the Usiane sect.

    If he had known this earlier, he would have definitely made enough preparations.

    The Emperor took the core of the formation under his control as he made sure that no one will be able to cross the restrictions ande inside. He would need to halt them for at least four hours for the troops to leave this ce.

 Chapter 343: Undead

    The battle stopped on all fronts, the emperor just defended the whole Pce with the defensive formation and blocked all the invasions at the same time.

    But four hours is a lot a time and he was not sure whether he would be able to stop all their attacks for the next four hours.

    He started ughtering the minions who are in the front, to try and instill some fear into the people at the rear, but it turned out to be a futile action and the waves of people never stopped.

    After more than half-an-hour, there was a first nick on the formation.

    At that moment, a saber ray flew out from the emperor and hit the priest right in the chest.

    The formation seemed to have an attack function too and its attacks are even amplified. Theceration on the chest of the priest is a clear show of might.

    The priest raised his hand and stopped the advance of all the followers.

    "Followers of the Guide, I priest request you to beseech me with the power to cleanse the sinners.???

    With that, more than a hundred members of the followers who are not wearing any masks all sat cross-legged and all of sudden their bodies started turning ck, the life started escaping from their bodies and soon, their bodies turned to half to their original weight and at the same time, there is no life in the eyes.

    A weirdly formed energy escaped from their bodies and entered the body of the priest.

    There is a sudden surge of might within the priest and he immediately made a move.

    The formation started having cracks and a hundred followers who turned ck and became like zombies suddenly stood up and moved towards the formation sluggishly as they started attacking it.

    The Emperor looked at them recognized what they are in one single nce, they turned into undead, they don¡¯t have any form of intelligence left except for the fact they would listen to the orders of their in-charge and kill without thinking twice.

    The formation was almost at its end and only two hours passed, two more hours needed for everyone to go.

    At this moment, the hundred or so undead suddenly jumped at the formation and exploded. This is called undead explosion and there is a swirl of death energy that decayed the formation.

    The emperor felt all his hopes lost.

    "Ye Ting. I will take it from here, you go back and leave with the rest." An old voice was heard and the emperor turned around abruptly.

    "Father? Why are you still here? You are in your twilight years, why do you have to push yourselves so hard? Let me handle this."

    "Ye Ting, when did you be so disobedient, leave right now."

    The emperor looked down in deep thought and teardrop rolled down from his left eye.

    "I am sorry father."

    The old man didn¡¯t reply as he watched his son leave the ce, he took his son¡¯s ce in the formation and behind him, a majestic beast walked to the front.

    A three-tailed winged lion.

    The Beast is also of a transcendent rank and along with the old man both of them faced off against the Priest and the followers.

    The Beast is a trump card, but they had to let it out even two hours before. At least, if anything unexpected happens and the situation stays the same, they can still escape.

    And even take this guy down.

    The priest tried his best to fight the two of them. The old man is rusty with his skills as he was dwindling with age, but the beast is something else altogether.

    He does have other cards that could help him deal with them easily, but that doesn¡¯t mean he wants to use it.

    He doesn¡¯t know that the opponents only need two hours of time, so he is just ying the endurance game.

    Time passed in a sh and soon there is only a few minutes left, the old man and the beast suddenly didn¡¯t care to hold up anymore.

    The old man puked a mouthful of blood as he made smirked at the priest.

    And before the priest could reach, he mounted the beast and flew into the depths of the imperial pcepletely destroying everything in their way.

    The Priest suddenly had a bad premonition, he is feeling reassured from the start only because he is sure that they couldn¡¯t escape through the space gate and why is he so sure? Because, he made sure that the imperial pce doesn¡¯t have enough spirit stones, this period of the year is the most vulnerable period for the royal treasury. This is the time, even the imperial treasury is waiting for the taxes.

    There is no way they could transport all the people. But he understood that he is extremely wrong as soon as he entered the pce grounds, there is not even a sign of life within it.

    Everyone is gone, he saw the old man escaping on the lion and gritted his teeth in fury. He felt like he was being yed like a fool. He thought that the emperor took it upon himself just because there is no use in sending his soldiers.

    He thought that the old man took over his son¡¯s position just to make sure that his son gets enough rest, but never did he expect that this would happen.

    His whole body trembled in fury as he coldlymanded.

    "Don¡¯t let them get away, we are going to chase them to the ends of the earth."

    As soon as he said that, the masked individuals who are in the middle of the followers all sat cross-legged and their surrounding followers started turning into undead, giving them power, all the masked followers who are nascent stage cultivators, suddenly turned into Pre-transcendent cultivators and made their move.

    The first they did is, pick up the undead and throwing them at the old man and the beast, the surroundings turned into a mess of death energy.

    They didn¡¯t even care that the undead they are throwing in are the very beings that sacrificed themselves to give them energy.

    Even the surrounding followers are cheering with anticipation.

    Just like that, the old man was being tailed by the fifty Pre-transcendent stage cultivators and a Transcendent cultivator.

    But he didn¡¯t even turn to take a look. When he reached the space-gate, there are two space-gates one that will lead to the Usaine sect and another one which will lead to the Ind.

    The emperor is loading the gates with the spirit stones and said to his father.

    "Father, everyone is already gone, I suggest you leave to the ind and deactivate the gate over there and I will go to the Usaine sect and inform the situation."

    The old man nodded and entered the gate, the spirit stones turned into dust in an instant and the old man and the beast disappeared immediately.

    The Emperor immediately attacked the gate as soon as the transportation was done,pletely destroying it, and at the same time, he entered the second gate leading to the Usaine sect and activated the gate.

    At this exact moment, a saber ray full of death energy entered the space gate andnded on the emperor who was barely able to escape with a wound.

    The Priest looked at the destroyed space gate and then looked at the space gate that leads to the Usaine sect.

    He was extremely angry, thepletely intact space gate that leads to the Usaine sect almost seemed like the emperor mocking him.

    Why did he destroy the former and didn¡¯t do the same with thetter?

    Because the emperor knew that he shouldn¡¯t dare let these maniacs enter that ind and he also knew that these maniacs wouldn¡¯t dare to enter the Usaine sect at the moment.

    At this moment, in the Usaine sect. Emperor¡¯s son already arrived at the sect earlier and used painstaking efforts and his master connection to get an appointment with the Sect head.

    At this moment, he was waiting for his father toe through the space gate and all of a sudden the space gate started shining and the wounded emperor came out of it.

    There was extremely concentrated death energy oozing out of that scar and the emperor seemed visibly affected by it.

    The Prince immediately hurried him to a healer, who skilfully performed surgery and saved the emperor in an hour.

    The Emperor didn¡¯t even bother to take adequate rest and requested a meeting with the Sect-head as soon as he was conscious.

    The Prince didn¡¯t stay for the battle and left the day before, so he doesn¡¯t know the horror of this church and the followers.

    As soon as he was taken to the Sect-head, he exined everything without missing a detail.

    "I noticed that the people who are wearing masks and the particr that priest who was once the ruler of the underworld of my empire are able to turn the followers into undead by absorbing their energy and increasing their cultivation.

    He broke through the middle-stage Transcendent and reached thete stage in a blink of an eye, just by absorbing a few hundred people, there are hundreds of thousands of followers under him, I don¡¯t even dare to imagine what will happen if he could absorb all of them."

 Chapter 344: Emergency Meeting in Western Continent

    While the Eastern Continent has turned into chaos and waspletely subdued by the Church, it is night time in the western continent and the emperor had an extremely solemn face.

    He called for an emergency court meeting and the rest of the imperial court officials and the nobles could see how serious he was.

    There are even the four-tower heads and four former tower heads who are currently running Sam¡¯swork.

    He called everyone important.

    "Tonight, I called you at this wee hour, because I have an extremely important matter to tell you guys.

    Approximately a week ago, we found an anomaly in themunicationwork, I am pretty sure that Sam¡¯s city hub might have also noticed this, and we also sent the technicians, but there is no response from them ever since.

    I sent troops to investigate the matter and the news I got is extremely grave.

    There are some weird people who are iming themselves to be followers of the Church and are converting the normal people into cultivators forcefully.

    Amon man turned into a Novice overnight and since then the growth rate of their strength is extremely high.

    They transformed twenty-one viges and, in every vige, whoever was an eyewitness was robbed off of his memory and the rest of them are subdued forcefully.

    Their target age groups aremon men between fifteen years old and forty-five-year-old.

    The troops I sent caught them red-handed and stopped their invasion forcefully. They captured the twenty-one heads and brought them back to the Imperial Pce today evening."

    He paused and looked around to get the reactions of the court and it seemed like he really got the undivided attention. They are all looking solemn.

    "We used the Imperial family¡¯s secret methods to extract information from the soul andplied with all the data gathered through these twenty-one people.

    The result is horrendous.

    We discovered that the main aim of this church is to change all themon people into these cultivators, but they wouldn¡¯t be cultivators for long.

    The leaders we caught all wore masks and these masked people are considered as priests within their system and the person who wears a golden mask will be a High Priest.

    The people who are converted are called followers. This is their hierarchy"

    Arc stopped his speech to let all of this sink in.

    But someone spoke.

    "Your highness, what is the purpose of gathering us thiste at night if they are all caught and imprisoned. This sounded like a cult and from what you said, you already seemed to have subdued that cult, so what is the purpose of this meeting?"

    "I will tell you that after I am finished with exining about this church.

    Even though we caught them, this is not their entire poption, they are only spreading slowly because, they are extremely vignt about themunicationwork, but actually there is another reason for them to tread this slowly and that is because their originalwork was actually eradicated by the empire before."

    Everyone exchanged nces. They didn¡¯t know that there is this sort ofwork existed and they even eradicated this before.

    "The ckwater." Everyone was stunned.

    "You heard me right, the underworld organization that spread throughout the empire was actually the base work for the church and all the twenty-one people who we caught now are the strays that escaped the previous crackdown. All of them are peak-stage Grand realm cultivators.

    The main aim of theirwork is not to get their hands, on power, or to just earn some money.

    Just imagine, if the ckwater which has the formerwork and strength tried to deliberately force themoners to eat these pills and made a move, the whole empire will be usurped before we knew it.

    I am saying this, not because of the army they would obtain from this, but what they can do with the army.

    The cultivators who are created with these pills will have certain qualities.

    They cannot be killed without being decapitated, will be healed as long as they have an intact skeleton, which includes the scenario of them being able to regenerate the whole arm even when it waspletely skinned to the bone.

    They don¡¯t use spiritual energy when attacking, they would only use pure and brute physical force without any aid of spiritual energy.

    They don¡¯t listen to anyone, for them, anyone who is not a follower or a priest is actually a sinner and ording to them every sinner must be either cleaned or destroyed.

    But these are not the worst things about them. The main purpose of the whole followers is to act like food.

    They are nothing but a means for the priests and the high priests to absorb and increase their cultivation at an extremely rapid pace.

    Just imagine, there are more than a million people who belong to that age group. If all of them are converted and were absorbed, the results would be disastrous.

    There are two things for us to worry about and that is there are still four people who are still out there and the scale of this church is not just limited to the Western Continent.

    From the information, we gathered the ckwater belongs to an organization formed with the other three under-worldworks all over the world.

    And they are all doing the same, lucky for us the ckwater was cracked down, but the other nations are not so lucky, so there is a reason for me to believe that there are already wars taking ce within other nations.

    But one thing we are not sure is, from one of their memories, the organization seemed to have another boss. They are not sure about that.

    If there really is another boss and someone is controlling them to do all this, then stopping them would be the least of our worries, we have to find out who the boss is and find a way to stop his actionspletely.

    If there was any kind of backup n, then we would be screwed."

    He stayed silent after finishing his speech. The crowd was also silent and slowly digested the information.

    This is too much to take in, they are actually feeling lucky that the ckwater is gone and also the presence of thework was a huge hindrance to the Church.

    None of them thought that the emperor is bullshitting for a second, the reason for that being, Arc only invited who take shit seriously. There will always be snobbish characters in any kind of serious situation, so he decided topletely avoid their attendance.

    "What does your majesty intend to do?"

    Arc is waiting for this question, he cleared his throat and started giving his orders.

    "From now on, activate themunicationwork¡¯s emergency line monitoring. Feed-in the words church, follower, priest, Guide, faith, fairness, liberty, and truth. Listen in to all these calls and pinpoint their location every time they spoke.

    Dere a siege order in all the cities and viges. No one is allowed to leave or enter any city or vige.

    Search for any remnants of the church and their followers, their key features being the weird behavior of the spiritual energy around them, there would be some sort of spiritual energy scarcity around them.

    From the info, there are still four priests, and this situation will continue until the four priests are caught, but do not mention the word church, or priest, or any other rted words while executing this.

    Create check posts and temporary camps at every vige or city entrance. I want everyone to be examined.

    Tower heads, you might note under my jurisdiction, but I ask for your cooperation in these difficult times, please go through the same type of searches with your towers and report to me if you find anyone rted to this."

    He then turned towards the former tower heads who are in charge of thework and said.

    "I hope you guys put the conflicts behind for the moment and manage thework, thework is really tight-knit and hard to prate but it is also hard to find out once it is prated and corrupted.

    So, I ask you to skim through thework and find out if anyone is involved in it.

    I will be leaving for the thunder-god temple, first thing tomorrow morning and I am going to talk about this situation to the thunder god temple head and see if he will react to this.

    I just hope he could believe this and take action regarding this.

    If he doesn¡¯t, and this turned into a global crisis, we need to find a way to create a safe ce for the people of our empire.

    So, our priority is to kill the traces of church within our empire and the next will be to create the safety measure required."

 Chapter 345: Bringing the Info to the thunder god temple

    Arc gave all the instructions that need to be given and left the court after sending the rest of them off.

    He walked back into a room, where Vickers is waiting.

    When Arc sat down, Vickers asked.

    "Is it really necessary to make this muchmotion? You already said you already caught twenty-one of them, so what can the other four do. You already stopped the majority. I think you are overreacting a bit. Even if all the other nations didn¡¯t identify this and war really did begin, the possibility of all of theing to the western continent to attack is very low.

    They have to cross the six major powers if they want to visit our continent as there are no space-gates that directly connect the four continents and the empires."

    Arc stayed silent for a while and said.

    "I know all that, but I feel a bad premonition about this. If by any chance their hidden boss is powerful enough to get his hands, on one-way Space-gates, you do know what would happen.

    If all the information I get is true and those four people who I haven¡¯t caught yet could secretly create more followers, they themselves can turn into Transcendent stage cultivators.

    Of course, the possibility is really less, but that doesn¡¯t mean there is no possibility at all."

    "Okay, you do your thing. What do you want me to do?"

    "I want you to stay within the imperial capital for now. I will be leaving for thunder god temple tomorrow morning, I have two goals, one of them is meeting the temple-head and exining the situation and another one is finding information about Sam.

    I believe he can find a way to create some safety measures."

    After discussing some more details, both of them left the room.

    The next morning, Arc first went to Moriya¡¯s room who is currently looking through the possible candidates¡¯ list.

    He has been doing the same thing since he came here and he has repeated the procedure multiple times, but it seems like he doesn¡¯t feel bored or unproductive doing that.

    "Moriya, I want an appointment with the temple-head."

    He went straight to the point as soon as he entered the room.

    "Why are you asking me? As an emperor, you can take an appointment once every year and from what I know, you haven¡¯t used your chance for this year."

    "I know that, but it would take at least a week for me to meet the temple-head. I don¡¯t have that much time."

    "Can you tell me what is the problem then? I will see what I can do if the problem is really serious."

    Then Arc went on exining everything to Moriya, who became solemn after hearing that.

    "You do know that you would suffer grave consequences if you turn out to be lying, right? This is not something to joke around. You better confirm it thrice before you bring out this info to the temple head."

    "In fact, I prepared enough proof. I left one of them alive and didn¡¯t extract his soul yet. I think the thunder god temple will surely have someone who can look into his memories. So, I would like you guys to confirm it yourselves.

    Apart from that, there are pills that they brought and someone even brought a couple of followers just to get some information.

    I will be bringing them all to the thunder god temple and you can take action only after you confirm it."

    After that, both of them left the ce and entered the space-gate and left to the thunder god temple.

    Moriya, brought Arc along as they entered another Space gate in the Space gate ind and directly went to the core region of the temple, where the temple-head resides.

    Nobody stopped him as he walked to the Temple-head¡¯s private room directly. Arc waited outside the door for Moriya to call him.

    As for the prisoners they brought along, they are not allowed to the core region and are being held captive within the Space-gate Ind.

    After half-an-hour, Arc was granted entry and he was able to meet the temple-head.

    He exined every detail and the temple-head went into deep thought.

    "Where are the pills you collected from them?"

    Arc passed some pill bottles. The temple-head took a look at the pills and smelled them. He frowned after that as if he smelled something disgusting.

    He passed the pills to Moriya and said. Pass some to our personal pill refinery section and send some to the Pharmaceutical tower. Ask both of them analyze the contents of the pills, I need results as soon as possible."

    He then turned towards Arc and said.

    "We will take over the captives you brought, you can go back for now and make your preparations, I will send someone to notify, if we find anything else regarding this situation."

    "Thank you, Sir."

    Arc left with those words.

    "Send them captives to interrogation and examine the followers¡¯ bodies. Try to get every detail they can possibly get. No matter, how minute it is, you have to get that information.

    Send an Invite for the Grand Elders for a meeting. We have to talk about this and see if other two nations have any simr scenarios."

    The temple-head gave these orders to Moriya and went into a deep thought.

    Moriya left and executed each and every order.

    After half-a-day, all the results came out, the followers are first interrogated and they seemed to have nomon-sense. No matter, what questions they asked there is not a single normal response.

    All they talk is the nonsense about being a church follower is the only truth and the church is the only thing that brought them fairness. Some of them doesn¡¯t even seem to remember their own names.

    Their body conditions are also peculiar, they couldn¡¯t find a spiritual core, but the muscle fibres, the skin and the bones are all trying to absorb the spiritual energy and they became extremely dense.

    The process is still on going. And there is vitality that has been .u.mting continuously within their systems from the suroundings.

    After that, they finally tried to extract memories from the soul and the results they got surprised them. Most of the memories they have seemed to havepletely gone. One of the followers they extracted is forty years old and all the memories he had are the memories of past few days before he joined the church.

    The few days in which he was normal, except for those few days¡¯ daily routine, there is not a single normal memory.

    All the memories, regarding his childhood, teenage and youth were all gone and in ce of them there is only one thing that was filled in their minds.

    The church.

    All the time, they are only thinking about the church and the priest.

    The same thing happened to with the rest of the followers.

    The memories from the Priest are clear for them to see and they could confirm what Arc said about the whole thing.

    As for the pills, that is where the results are not positive.

    They did get some results onposition and both the pill refiner of the temple and the tower found almost allponents of the pill except for three unknownponents which they don¡¯t know how to identify because they are dissolved in the rest of the ingredients.

    After getting all these results, the temple-head and two grand elders both held a meeting and are looking through them carefully.

    "From the information we got, all Arc said seemed to be true, but what should we do about the situation and how should we proceed further?" The First grand elder asked the temple head.

    "I think we have to first verify if this really is happening in rest of the countries, since we cannot verify the countries in others¡¯ jurisdiction, we can only verify in the two nations that are under our jurisdiction.

    Both of you will visit each nation just in case.

    Even though, it is hard to believe that a Transcendent will be created just like that, it is better safe than sorry.

    After your return we will see if we should proceed further and ask the rest of the major powers to confirm if it is same for them or not."

    With that the meeting ended.

    Meanwhile, within the Usaine Sect.

    After the emperor of the Eastern continent exined the situation, there is an extreme debate going on within the upper echelons of the sect.

    Some of them chose not to believe whatever the emperor said and felt that it might just have been a coup de tat in an attempt to usurp the throne indirectly.

    As for the undead and the followers turning into it.

    All of them are going on about how it is impossible for that to happen and kept giving examples and reasons for their exnation. Only two people in the entire room apart from the emperor are calm enough to think straight and even gave food for thought to believe what the emperor said is true.

    "I will be sending a Grand elder to look into the situation and if what you said turned out to be true, I will contact the rest of the major powers and if it is not, you should be ready to face consequences."

    "Thank you, Sir."

 Chapter 346: Meeting within the Major Powers

    That day three consummate realm cultivators moved out of two of the six major powers to check on the situation of three different empires and understand what exactly is going on.

    The first grand elder of the thunder god temple, he went to the first empire in the space gate, and as soon as he entered, what greeted him is a nasty sight of destruction. There is nothing left intact within the whole imperial pce grounds.

    There is no one near the space gate, so none of them noticed the sudden appearance of this old man in the pce.

    But the old man can see almost half of the entire pce grounds with his n.a.k.e.d eyes, the white-robed people are clearing the rubble and the dead bodies which are struck below the debris of the pce walls.

    Apart from that, he also saw the signs of a bunch of people who are being held captive and taken outside the pce grounds.

    The Oldman concealed his aura as he tailed them sneakily.

    He doesn¡¯t know who these people are, but he did hear something like this when the white-robed people threw them outside.

    "We of the church of guide, wouldn¡¯t kill the surrendered. From today onwards, you are no longer the royalty. You have to live like normal people. This is to understand fairness and justice. Under the guidance of the church, all of you shall live equally with the only goal of serving the guide at your pursuit."

    The first grand elder didn¡¯t have a problem sneaking out without alerting anyone with his abilities. Within a few hours, he made around throughout the imperial capital.

    Many people who seemed to have captured earlier were released onto the streets, there are signs of some war and the death energy could be seen going rampant at some ces.

    The captives are all cultivators and even their houses seemed to have been returned. It almost seemed like they are going back to be normal citizens again without any strings attached.

    All this while, he looked at the followers and the priests who wore masks. The behavior of the followers matched exactly with the captives Arc brought to them.

    The situation also matched what he said and he can also see some undead beings doing some menial works.

    After confirming all this, he decided to leave this ce. He just wanted to sneak away just like how he came here without facing any problem.

    But this time his luck seems to have run out.

    Because there are a lot of Priests who wore masks standing near the space gate room.

    They seemed to have captured someone.

    He concealed his aurapletely and hid behind a wall as he looked at the situation.

    He recognized the person who was captured. It seemed to the Emperor of this nation.

    The Grand elder expected this person to be dead by now, but he seemed to be still alive.

    This emperor is only at the Peak of Pre-transcendent and he is surrounded by four priests who are all pre-transcendent stage cultivators and from the looks of it more areing.

    After more than half-an-hour. He is still standing there are more than thirty Pre-transcendent Priests standing there are a person who wore a golden-mask otherwise known as a high priest also came out and stood before the emperor.

    "You are still alive, only so that I could use as an example in the public execution and bring fear in our new subjects who happened to be your former subjects. Not for you to try and escape to the thunder god temple and bust us up.

    Be obedient and you can peacefully die in an execution otherwise, I would be forced to torture you to death.

    With all the things you have seen, you should very well know what exactly I am capable of"

    When the first grand elder heard these words, he was extremely intrigued. He went into deep thought for a second and came to a decision.

    The High priest is surely transcendent and he seemed to be at early stages, so he was quite confident in executing his ns.

    Just like that, he came out of his hiding and took action. He appeared out of nowhere and didn¡¯t even give the group a chance to express their surprise.

    He immediately threw a few punches in the air and the fist images formed out of spiritual energy prated right through the several Pre-transcendent stage cultivators who are surrounding the emperor.

    The High Priest who is about to leave turned around and was immediately shocked, he could feel the overwhelming power of the Grand elder and immediately decided to flee without turning around.

    And in that process, he started absorbing the energy from the priests threw attacks at the old man with this excess power.

    The old man dodged the attacks but was unable to tail the person due to the fact that he decided to safe-guard the emperor. He wanted him for more info, so he couldn¡¯t get rid of him.

    But the problem is not over, the few pre-transcendent priests who are absorbed by that High-priest turned into undead and are ready to explode.

    The Grand elder face turned grave and he decided to drag the emperor and jumped into the Space-gate room.

    His actions are extremely quick as he made sure to throw all the spirit stones, he can inside the space gate and disappeared.

    He should feel extremely lucky. Because, there is an undead explosion of at least ten Pre-transcendent stage undead beings, which would have at least cost his arm or a leg just to defend.

    He left for the thunder god temple with the emperor safely by a stroke of luck.

    He reported the situation to the temple head and they got the gist of the situation in that nation from the words of the emperor who is the direct witness and also the subject of execution.

    The other grand elder returned almost at the same time, but what he witnessed is not the same as the first grand elder.

    When he reached that nation, the people are already sorted out and the church already took control of the nation. They are not just cleaning up.

    They are already building the church and even the citizens are already chanting the name of the church and the guide in a spirit of worship.

    Meanwhile, at the Usaine sect¡¯s side, the grand elder who went to see the situation of that nation also saw the same thing as the first Grand elder of the thunder god temple.

    After two brief meetings,ter both the major powers sent direct messages to the heads of all the six major powers.

    The Sect head of the Usaine sect and the thunder god temple head was still most surprised about this situation.

    Because there is no way they imagined that another power also discovered this situation and that too almost at the same time.

    The remaining heads of the major powers are a bit skeptical about this though.

    Because, both the messages said almost the same thing. ¡¯Send a Grand elder to one of the nations that are under your control and after understanding the situation,e to the central continent meeting spot.¡¯

    They are quite puzzled and only felt like doing this because the message was sent by two but not one other major power.

    And after the inspections are over, they couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit of panic.

    All of a sudden, almost all of the nations that are under the six major powers¡¯ control arepletely gone out of their hands into some other entity¡¯s control.

    They sent the message to the four major professional associations, the ten minor powers, and other minor professional associations like Seer tower.

    This is possibly the greatest possible lineup the could muster.

    All the heads of the association currently blocked the Space-gates that gain ess to the nations and arrived at the meeting point in the Central continent.

    "As you all know, what kind of situation we are in, right now we are here to discuss how to proceed further in this situation."

    The thunder god temple head is the first one to start the topic. Nobody replied though, waiting for him to continue.

    "From what we know, the high priests who are wearing the golden masks are only the regional leaders. There is a hidden boss, who is manipting the things behind them and that person could possibly be part of any of our organizations.

    Thankfully, we are able to recognize the situation this time, before it turned worse. But we have to make sure that there is no next time.

    So, please give suggestions on how to find out the mole within us."

    With those words, he sat back down and the meeting went on for more than six hours.

    All this time, Arc and Ye Ting, the emperor of the eastern continent are also present at the meeting, although they are not the weakest of all, they don¡¯t have any voice in the present situation.

 Chapter 347: Meeting Between The High Priests

    While the major powers are all discussing what to do and the church is trying to establish themselves within their newly acquired nations, within the western continent, Arman is struggling.

    He has been meeting all the factions which are formed within thework for the past few days to see if he can enter thework one way or another.

    And he has to say that, there is some progress. Him being the genius of the thunder god temple, helped them quite a bit.

    While he was thinking about how to further his progress, he was ordered to halt all his actions from Moriya.

    To be honest, he doesn¡¯t want to stop, but after he learned the situation, he also decided that there is a need to stop at this moment.

    If he really did cause some chaos at a moment like this, he can kiss his life goodbye.

    Currently, he is wandering among the streets of Sam¡¯s city. He has made some acquaintances within the city and there are quite some people who knew about him. Many people in Sam??s city came to know of the importance of the thunder god temple recently due to the four former tower heads.

    Now, that they knew that Sam is with the thunder god temple and this guy was his friend from there, they are extremely respectful towards him.

    As he was walking around talking in the hustle and bustle of the city, his eyesnded in one of the restaurants and in particr a table within that restaurant.

    He had visited that restaurant many times. Because he heard that the owner of the restaurant is Sam¡¯s long-time business partner, he wanted to try and convince this guy, but his attemptspletely failed when he got the cold shoulder from the owner.

    That guy didn¡¯t believe one bit when he said he and Sam were friends and there is even a look of contempt and ridicule in his eyes.

    After that, he learned his lesson and didn¡¯t bother the owner of the restaurant, but he did visit it for its delicacies.

    But now, he is looking at the restaurant not because of the food or the owner, rather it is because of a youngdy who is sitting at the Special table.

    He felt like she is familiar.

    So, he entered the restaurant and took a seat at a nearby table and started brainstorm, and finally, he remembered.

    He saw her in a picture once and that picture happened to be a wanted notice.

    As he was thinking about how to take advantage of this situation, the youngdy is already standing in front of him.

    Sirona was studying another formation as she sat in the restaurant. After roaming all over the western continent, she came back to Sam¡¯s city.

    She decided to study the formations within the city for a while and took a seat in the restaurant when she noticed a guy looking at her and his looks seemed to be full of ill intentions.

    At first, she wanted to leave without causing anymotion, but after listening to the people on the next table saying that guy is from the thunder god temple, she changed her mind.

    There would only be one reason for a person from the thunder god temple to look at her that intently, that is because, they wanted to collect her bounty, but she wanted to ask somethings before dealing with that guy.

    That is why she approached him directly without having any second thoughts.

    "Why are you looking at me like that?"

    Arman was honestly quite surprised that she approached him.

    "No, nothing. I am not looking at you." He tried his best to stay normal.

    "Are you from thunder god temple?"

    "Yes."

    "Where is Sam?"

    "What?" Arman was in aplete daze for a second and dint know what he was saying.

    "Where is Sam?"

    "Sam? Why are you asking about him?" He finally got the point, but he didn¡¯t answer the question, rather asked his own question.

    "I want to know."

    He thought for a bit and felt like it would be better to have a long term contact with Sirona. Apparently, she is extremely important to the Usaine sect and if he can surrender her to them, he will get the bounty and he can get some favors from the Usaine sect.

    But he has to make sure that it is safe for him to do so, after all, the warnings given in her wanted notice are not short at all.

    "He went on a secret mission. We don¡¯t where he is."

    Sirona thought for a bit and said.

    "If you try to catch me, I will kill you." She gave a warning with a t face and left the ce without even giving a chance for Arman to reply.

    Arman didn¡¯t expect to be read this easily. He is already formting a huge n inside his head and that is why he told her that Sam is on a secret mission, otherwise, he wouldn¡¯t have tried to lie like this.

    He is having pretty bad luck.

    All his ns are being stopped in a budding stage.

    Meanwhile, within a small corner of the central continent, three people are having a meeting. They are none other than the head of ck Rock, ck me, and ck wind.

    But this time, they are no longer wearing the same thing they wore earlier, rather they wearing the white robes and the golden masks.

    They are the three main high priests who are leading the operation of the church in the three major continents.

    As for the high priests in the remaining empires, they are all created by the Undead absorption. They are not normal transcendent stage experts like these three.

    "Our boss cannot contact us for the time being and he instructed us particrly that we shouldn¡¯t contact him unless it is an emergency.

    Our current goal has reached, but there seemed to be some hups. The Western continent realized earlier than we thought and the eastern continent empire escaped along with the whole imperial capital.

    The Six major powers already held a meeting with heads of all the powers within the.

    Our boss is also there and he gave us our next target.

    Our first targets are the minor powers near the central continent. Apart from that, we have to take two of the four minor professional associations. Two of them have our hidden spies and allies and it is better not to attack them directly.

    We either make them surrender to us or demolish thempletely. But we have to act in a sh. The whole thing should be over within a week.

    After that target is ours, then we will move to the Western continent.

    As for battle with the Six major powers and the major professional associations, we are going to make it for thest.

    If they interfere in any other battlefronts, which would probably happen more often than not, we have to drag the battle as much as we can.

    Let us just keep them busy no matter where we encounter them.

    If we are able to exhaust them, then we can deal with them pretty well.

    From the calctions boss made. Us three and the rest of the high priests can be Consummate realm, from the absorption and it will take at least two months.

    Don¡¯t add any more priests and just maintain the current number.

    All the priests could be Pre-transcendent Cultivators, which is sufficient for us to overthrow the current.

    There should be no mishaps.

    You two go back and get ready to invade the minor powers.

    Out of the four minor professions, which are Miners Association, The Seer tower, The Space-gate association, and the fortune tower, our first target is the Miners association.

    Go and collect your armies and start the attack by tonight."

    The meeting didn¡¯t take long and only one of them spoke all the time, the rest of them didn¡¯t even bother to raise their voice and speak.

    But there is a reason for that.

    Right as they are moving the major meeting between all the higher-ups on this is still going on. They are arguing about several things, like where should they take action first and how they act.

    The main argument is on identifying the person who is the boss or an ally of the enemy.

    They are pretty sure, that someone from the upper echelons of one of these powers belongs to the enemy.

    Everyone is pretty convinced about this, but none of them is satisfied with the method of preparations.

    "We will take a break for five minutes to calm down and once again talk about the situation."

    One of the proposed and they went for a break.

    At this moment, Arc started walking towards the executives of the Seer tower. He needs to find a way to get in touch with Sam if he is still alive and for some reason, his gut feeling is telling him that he really is.

 Chapter 348: Smuggling Sam

    Arc wanted to find Sam¡¯s location through the officials from the Seer tower, but before he could reach them, Ye Ting approached him and whispered something in his ear and both of them went to a silent corner to discuss.

    "Are you sure? Sam and his friends are with you?" Arc asked with anticipation.

    "Yes, Philip asked me to speak to you about this. Sam is injured and it would take approximately two months for him to heal. He is still unconscious.

    The remaining three are all okay and they want to leave for the western continent as soon as possible.

    Currently, we moved to my ind and they are staying there pretty safe. But it is still dangerous if you let them stay there as the Usaine sect has eyes on the ind. We don¡¯t know if the beast faction has any bounty on his head, but you can trust the sect."

    "I know, but what kind of situation can we create, we cannot directly ess Space gates within the Sect and the only way for us to use them is by approval of the core members of the sect otherwise, there is no way for us to get them here."

    They discussed for some more and tried to think of some ideas to send the trio and Sam away to the Western Continent.

    But there is no practical feasibility, for everything they have to find a way to bypass the people from the Usaine sect, they could still manage the thunder god temple as Sam is still considered a part of the thunder god temple, at least in the name.

    They parted ways temporarily as the meetingmenced again.

    In this break, the heads of the six major power are the only ones who didn¡¯t move from their positions.

    They just kept on talking and in middle, the formation association head joined them as they asked him.

    Now, they seemed to have figured out a way for them to deal with the situation of finding the mole.

    "There are some results in our discussion and all the six major powers came to a decision on how to find a mole.

    There is an ancient formation called the Judgement formation and it needs one formation master at the Consummate realm, three formation masters at Transcendent realm, and two inscription masters at Transcendent realm.

    The formation association head Old four will take the position of the Consummate realm formation master and the rest of the formation masters and the inscription master will be picked randomly from all six major powers and the minor powers.

    In this judgment formation, everyone that is present here and every other official of every organization, if he is a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator, he will bepletely questioned and the formation spirit will judge the person.

    All the people who fit in the criterion of inspection should be here.

    For the formation, the following materials are required and all of us will be pitching them in."

    This time, it is the head of the Usiane sect who took the lead and they distributed the list of the ingredients to everyone.

    After three minutes of silence, some raised a question.

    "Some of these materials are only avable in the nations which are currently upied by the church, how can we deal with them?"

    This caused everyone to halt in their thought process.

    But someone else¡¯s brain is working at full speed. Arc got an idea as soon as he heard the question and he quietly scooted towards Ye Ting.

    They whispered something and soon it was time for everyone to reveal what kind of materials they have in their possession and sharing the responsibility on who should bring what materials.

    When it came to Ye Ting and Arc¡¯s turn they already said what they can provide and everyone was surprised to see that Ye Ting has some important herbs. They thought that he doesn¡¯t have any herbs with him as he just shifted to the new ind, but it seems like he prepared beforehand and grew some herbs on the ind.

    With all the tasks distributed, they left the ce in their own ways.

    What they don¡¯t know is that the meeting of the Church¡¯s three main high priests is also over and they are quite busy preparing to attack the minor powers.

    The heads of the major powers, decided to hold the next meeting two dayster in the same ce, while they transfer the necessary ingredients through the space gate in these two days.

    As everyone is moving in a hurry, Arc is preparing tworge ck boxes which arerge enough for two people of his size to sleep.

    Apart from that, he prepared another set of the same boxes, but this time, they are loaded with some kinds of herbs.

    Some herbs cannot be stored within a spatial ring and have to be kept in this type of box.

    For the next day, many attendants with herbs from the western continent and all the Pre-transcendent cultivators moved to the thunder god temple, with Arc supervising them carefully.

    He constantly kept on the four big boxes by his side though.

    On the Usaine sect¡¯s side, a simr thing is happening and Ye Ting has brought two boxes that looked extremely simr.

    All the goods are to transported to the meeting spot that night and only some attendants are running around the Space gates to bring some freshly picked herbs and stuff.

    That night, the preparations for the formation are going on full swing and the herbs are being ground to ink in that very ce by creating a suitable environment artificially.

    Arc unknowingly became one of the attendants of the thunder god temple, meanwhile the same thing happened with Ye Ting on the other side.

    The heads didn¡¯t think much and thought that this is the emperors eyeing for their own safety.

    And with those thoughts and that much of amotion, they didn¡¯t notice the fact that the two emperors skilfully transported two boxes multiple times and before they knew it, there are no boxes in the whole set up at all, and when one became puzzled all the came were four empty boxes out of both their spatial rings and an answer of the herbs being used up.

    Back in the western continent within the Imperial Pce grounds, four people came out of a box and an attendant who is loyal to Arc escorted them to one of the secret rooms within the Pce.

    They decided not to move carelessly and tried their best to stay low-key.

    If they came out of the imperial pce, the news will pretty sure go back to the Thunder god temple and the other six major powers at this sensitive period, nobody would believe that Arc is just worried about his nation¡¯s safety too much.

    Added to the fact, that he really trying to get the help of a twenty-year-old young man than the major powers which have numerous experts with experience and genius at their disposal.

    At first, they would think of all this as an attack on their own ego, and then the second thing, they will be too suspicious about this.

    That is why they decided to hide them for now and secretly send the four of them back to Sam¡¯s city and make them appear out of nowhere.

    Arc thought this through and is ready to execute it. Tomorrow will be the Judgement formation interrogation and everyone who is a Pre-transcendent or above shall move out.

    For now, there are not more than twenty people within the Western continent, who fit in this criterion.

    While the decision-makers are trying their best to finish the process, there are several minor meetings going on within the nations.

    Most of them are of the Church Priests, getting ready to spread their faith, the very next morning.

    But there are some meetings which arepletely unrted to that and about which one person ispletely delighted.

    That person is none other than Arman.

    The meetings are between all the factions that are present within themunicationwork.

    The meetings happened individually within the factions and some happened even between multiple factions.

    All these meetings are about who gets the temporary control of thework and everyone tried to vote up their offspring, but they are being rejected by the rest of them.

    All this came into existence because Arc said something about not being able to return the same day, and just like that they are panicking.

    After an intense amount of arguments, they finally decided on one name and that name happened to be Arman.

    Yes, Arman who haspletely no rtion to them and possibly has a great rtionship with Sam, was given the helm of themunicationwork temporarily.

    Arman, who was dragged into the situation, turned unexpectedly delighted, because this is what he wanted to do, with all the failures, he has been through he almost wanted to shed tears of happiness.

 Chapter 349: Old One

    Arman is feeling extremely ecstatic, but he doesn¡¯t know that just because he was chosen to be the temporary in-charge, doesn¡¯t mean he would have any real authority.

    The main reason being, thework is pretty much self-sustaining and there wouldn¡¯t be any problems in the short term even if there are no leaders present.

    They are just letting him in that position for the namesake.

    In fact, he wasn¡¯t appointed or anything, all they did was tell him to look over things, that¡¯s it, nothing more and nothing less.

    Meanwhile, in the meeting ce on the Central Continent, the formation got ready and everyone was ready to do the testing.

    Not all of them are present though, the people kept oning.

    The first one to go through the Inspection is the people from the Empires. To be precise, it is Arc¡¯s people and Ye Ting¡¯s people, they are the weakest group and the group with the weakest connections that are present, that is why it was easy to clear them.

    After dealing with them, the next set of people are the people from the Minor powers and the Minor Professional associations.

    Although the tests are going on, not all people are present. The six heads noticed that some people who are supposed to be here and some who even came yesterday in order to help with the preparations are not present right now.

    They are silently noting down the names and remembering them. But for now, they didn¡¯t do or say anything.

    As the Minor powers are going through the interrogation or the inspection, their Inds are left bare for the church to attack.

    On an ind belonging to a minor power, at the beach, there is a small glowing out of the waters on the shore and soon a bunch of people in white robes surfaced from the water and they started swimming towards shore.

    Soon, the whole ind¡¯s beach was filled with numerous white-robed people, led by two people who are wearing white masks.

    Since the minor powers took most of their Pre-transcendent stage cultivators and the Transcendent cultivators to the meeting, this is the perfect chance to deal with them.

    The two Pre-transcendent stage Priests stayed at the beach without moving, but the remaining white-robed people already started running towards the center of the ind frantically.

    Although it is called an Ind, it is as big as a small nation and there are many cities divided within by the minor power.

    A minor power will have multiple transcendent stage cultivators and there are many Pre-transcendent stage cultivators, both will be of a greater number than any empire.

    Even though all of them have to be inspected, they are not going to take them away all at once. That would be leaving the minor powers to die in the hands of the church.

    So, the six heads gave leeway to the minor powers to leave some people stationed and they will exchange positions when the first batch of the candidates are inspected.

    But what they don¡¯t know is the invasion already begins. Simr scenes are people appearing at the beaches of all ten minor powers are happening and everyone beach is led by two Pre-transcendent stage cultivators followed by around one-hundred thousand people who are normal followers.

    The minor powers are all being surrounded and the cities are being attacked by the followers.

    There are already warnings given and the soldiers are stationed, so they didn¡¯t panic entirely, but they are still anxious.

    They locked all their space gates, except for the one that leads to the Central continent¡¯s meeting spot.

    They even searched all the corners of the ind for the signs of any possible gates being constructed or for any of the already constructed space gates in secret.

    But they didn¡¯t find any and the space gate is where they least expected it to be present.

    In the shallow waters.

    The news of the start of the war came to the central continent, through the representatives of the minor powers.

    The heads of the minor powers are in tenterhooks.

    Almost all of the current candidates of the minor powers for inspection are already done and only a few of them are left.

    When the heads of the ten minor powers consulted the Six heads for a solution, there is only a basic reply.

    Drag the war out.

    They wanted them to have a longsting battle, but they are not going to let them off from the inspection.

    Some of them even asked.

    "We are clearly not their allies, that is why they are attacking us, if we don¡¯t defend them all the way, what would happen to our territory?"

    But the reply is even more straightforward.

    "What if it is a ploy for us to make believe that the minor powers are not the moles, but in fact they turned out to be the true moles, we cannot risk it."

    After some persuasion, the ten minor powers are given some leeway.

    The heads and the major decision-makers and other core members can go back along with the people who havepleted their inspections.

    But they still have to send the remaining people and there needs to be one decision-maker present to handle the situation.

    Then only the heads of the minor powers felt a bit relieved.

    From the information, they have got every minor power is being led by twelve Priests.

    Two on each front and they are invading a single ind from six sides.

    From the info the six major powers gave them, the six priests cannot be taken as normal Pre-transcendent stage cultivators.

    They can be transcendent cultivators and even more just by absorbing their soldiers. So, they are extremely cautious and they wanted to y a battle of attrition because they decided to eliminate the number of followers slowly but steadily before the Church could realize.

    They don¡¯t want to attack the Priests directly and make them absorb their followers immediately.

    And just like that, a greasy war has begun.

    As for the people who are at the meeting spot, the inspection went on.

    And all of a sudden, a person was caught in the inspection and he turned out to be from a Minor professional association. The Space gate association.

    The Head of the Lightning Spear Sectpletely took control of the investigation of this person personally to get as much information as they can get.

    Since he is from the Space gate organization, then the info is also valuable to them.

    The Space gate organization head is on pins and needles.

    In fact, this organization is made to suppress the people with the Space element, and the true boss behind this organization is all the six heads.

    They will send all the Space elemental users to this ce on the very beginning days of their awakening and they will be trained in using their space element to create Space gates and other transportation techniques.

    All except for any form of battle techniques.

    The Inspection sped up after catching one of them as they finally have hope in finding the moles.

    They soon started finding one mole after another and some of them happened to caught in the formation and some of them are caught due to overreacting. Anyway, they caught moles from the Space gate association and the Seer tower.

    As they are half-way through it.

    The Thundergod temple head suddenly noticed something and whispered something to the rest of the five heads before walking out of the meeting spot.

    He started walking towards a direction in an extremely discreet way before he halted his tracks in a ce.

    A person appeared behind him and looked at the temple-head with a frown.

    "What are you doing here? Old one?"

    "I can ask you the same question. Why are you here?"

    "I am here to catch you."

    "Catch me? What for? I didn¡¯t do anything wrong. I just came for some scouting."

    "Why didn¡¯t you inform anyone that you came for scouting?"

    "I am also a Consummate realm expert and a person who is in charge of the Major professional organization, did you forget? I am the head of the Pharmaceutical tower. why would I need to ask permission from you guys?"

    "Permission? That is indeed a big word. Anyway, since you came for the scouting, lets just go back. Since all the other space gates are sealed temporarily except for the minor powers, the inspection of their remaining people who exchanged posts is also done.

    Now, only the major powers are remaining. Let us go and finish our inspections before we deal with the people who are not present here.

    We have toplete the tests and undo the seal on the Space gates, otherwise, we have to keep worrying about our organizations"

    Old one didn¡¯t say anything about going and showed no signs of it, instead, he asked something else in astonishment.

    "the Space-gates sealed?"

    He asked in astonishment.

    "Why would they not be? There are many suspicious people within our group of people, this massive group cannot possibly be controlled by any person who has less power than a Consummate realm.

    So, for us, the inspections are obviously strict.

    Out of all people, we are the most suspicious.

    Anyway, you are there when we sealed right? Why are you surprised?"

    "I am not actually surprised; I am shocked because of how I missed such a silly fact. I seem to have been on edge and came to scout to be safe. Since the Space gates are sealed, there should be no one entering the premises, I am such a stupid to forget about this.

    Both of them exchanged nces and started walking towards the meeting area.

 Chapter 350: Old One Escapes

    "Who has the seal for the Space gates?"

    Old one, asked the temple head.

    "Why do you ask?" Temple-head replied without giving any response.

    He turned around and didn¡¯t even wait for Old One to reply to him or re-ask the same question.

    When both of them got to the meeting spot, the decision makers and the rest of the people from the Minor powers and the Minor professional associations are already sent.

    They even gave orders to look for the ones who are absent today and ced them on the wanted list and their pictures and details are already ready to be publicized all over the.

    But that has little use, because they are sure that those people are working for the Church.

    Now, only the decision makers of the Six major powers and the professional associations are the only ones who are remaining for the inspection.

    Even the subordinates are investigated.

    As soon as the temple head and Old one entered the meeting space, thetter asked.

    "Who has the seal for the Space gates?"

    Everyone looked at each other in confusion. They remembered noticing the temple head going out of the meeting room, but they didn¡¯t remember Old one going out at all.

    In fact, till that moment, they didn¡¯t notice that Old one is actually missing from that ce.

    They suddenly felt like something was amiss.

    The temple head exchanged nces with the rest of them and all of them looked at Old one.

    "Why are you guys not replying? I am asking, where is the seal for the Space gates?" Old one got overly frustrated as time went on.

    But at this moment, he suddenly realized something is not right and his theory was confirmed when he saw the serious looks on the faces of his peers.

    He became vignt and looked at them one by one.

    "Why are you all looking at me like that?"

    "We never sealed the Space gates. Old one." Old two, the head of the Inscription association said in a solemn tone.

    "What do you mean by that? He said that..." He paused and looked at the Thunder god temple head and gritted his teeth in anger.

    "How dare you trick me?" He yelled at him, in exasperation.

    "What do you mean tricking you? You should be answering questions. I already felt that something is not right as soon as we sat at the meeting. We are all working busily interrogating and judging everyone since morning, but I felt like something is amiss.

    ording to our estimate yesterday, us heads of the organizations, shouldn¡¯t have this much work in our hands, if distributed evenly.

    I was continuously counting and I never felt that something is wrong with the number of people present, but only at that moment, did I understand that something is gravely wrong. The more I felt it is normal, the more I contradicted myself and as soon as I walked out of the meeting space, I realized that something is wrong with the ce we are sitting.

    You deliberately used some tricks to make sure we don¡¯t notice your absence while you are hiding in the back taking a look at the whole inspection, when the person from the Space gate association got caught, he was taken away by the Lightning Spear Sect head.

    He waspletely involved in the investigation and didn¡¯t care about your presence.

    If he wasn¡¯t caught, you would havee back, but he was caught, so you seemed to be too worried about that and didn¡¯t conceal your aura properly.

    At first, I thought it was just Lightning Sper sect head, but he already is back.

    That is why I came out of the meeting spot and felt like some type of cloud has been cleared.

    You really wanted to get away with it and for that, how dare you make fools of all of us?"

    The thunder god temple head looked at him for a second and said.

    "Tell me, honestly what type of drug did you use? How can we just forget about a particr person in a particr space and in a particr period of time?"

    Old one listened to it all and the frown on his face finally rxed, his lips curled up as his serious face turned into a smirk.

    "Since you already knew who I am, do you think I would give you any more info?"

    The rest of the heads are all surprised. He continued casually.

    "I didn¡¯t expect yourziness is the reason for me get caught. Really? You actually calcted for the workload in such a simple thing? You have nothing to do but give energy to the formation and you even calcted effort for that too and you know what the worst part is me getting caught for a single question. Damn it, I am such a fool in believing you as soon as you said such a stupid thing.

    Why would anyone dare to seal their own Space gate at a moment like this, when the enemy can attack any of us at any moment.

    You really got me good there, Old Thunder."

    As the rest of them are slowly surrounding him, Old One continued.

    "I didn¡¯t think that my n would be seen through in such a stupid way, but if you really want to know how I made a fool out of all of you, it is simple, it is the weird habit of Old three, who wouldn¡¯t sit for a meeting unless he has incense on the table.

    He couldn¡¯t stand the smell of others and he has specially made incense sticks and they happened to be made by the Pharmaceutical tower."

    When everyone looked at the Incense for a second which is almost about to go out, they then realized that something is not wrong, why would all of them look at the incense when that guy pointed out at such a tense situation?"

    As they are trying to shake their heads to get some sense, the Old oneughed and said.

    "And do you all know, why I am talking so much so that I could buy some time for the Incense to get to your head and now that it seemed to havepletely influence on you, goodbye."

    With that, he turned tail and run. The remaining five felt like they are in a daze, their bodies are not feelingfortable and they are feeling as if they are being stuck to the ground.

    "It seems to be some type of high-level Hallucinogen. I knew this guy loved to make these things when he was young but never thought he would be so good at them."

    Old three who is the Artisan association head, spoke through bitter struggle as he tried to move his body.

    They noticed that they can use their spiritual energy only after two minutes. In fact, they are getting a sense of a situation and that is they are feeling struck only because of the hallucinogen. But they are only feeling struck, only limbs are not working, their spiritual energy and everything else is good to go.

    Soon, the auras raged in a concentrated spot of this Central Continent, and the rest of the people who are still waiting for the Inspection outside the meeting Space are feeling a little ufortable.

    Another two minutester, they are free.

    They felt extremely stupid when he thought about how they fell for that n.

    Most importantly, they don¡¯t know how that medicine works and if they can control themselves if they are trapped in that again.

    Old two and Old three left the ce and chased in the way Old one left and are trying to see if they can still catch up to him.

    But when they reached the Space gate of the Pharmaceutical Association, that Space gate was sealed from the other side and they came back in an extremely dejected fashion.

    Meanwhile, they finished the Inspection of the rest and decided to prepare for the war.

    Since they know theirmon enemy and their possible allies who are present in the Space gate association and the Seer tower, they are finally ready to take some serious action.

    The first thing they did is send the people who are clear back to their posts and then the heads went to Formation Association.

    The headquarters which was located at the edge of the central continent is the nearest to the Pharmaceutical tower and by the time they reached the ce, all they saw is the whole tower in a wreck and many dead bodies.

    When they checked the remains, they noticed that almost all the members of the tower are either dead or injured and there are no reserves of ingredients that should be present. The Garden waspletely wiped clean and Old one seemed to have left the ce right after looting it as soon as he arrived.

    Now that they don¡¯t know where their enemy is hidden, there is no way for them to deal with him head-on, the only option is war.

 Chapter 351: Devil Guided Incense

    The Next day Arc was allowed toe back to his nation without any mishap.

    But he was furious when he heard that Arman was made the temporary overseer of thework. He has doubts about Arman from the start and he also met Nichs when he was in the Thunder god temple and learned a thing or two about him.

    Whatever there is between Sam and Arman, it is definitely not friendship.

    He still didn¡¯t tell them about Sam and his friends being back, he went to meet thempletely cursing the stupidity of the officials to appoint Arman this illogically.

    But he felt that Arman seemed to have some serious glib tongue to gain this favour from various factions.

    He was thinking on how this guy visited each and every faction and might have even used all kinds of cards, including his ¡¯friendship¡¯ with Sam, his authority in the thunder god temple and so on, to fool the executives.

    Later when Arc inquired, it turned out that Arman yed an extremely emotional card at one of the most vulnerable factions saying that he would use all the authority of his in the thunder god temple to take revenge if something happens to the Network on behalf of Sam.

    He doesn¡¯t know how he managed to fool the rest of them, but he felt like it is still a bit far-fetched.

    Anyway, the first thing he did aftering here is get Arman out of thework.

    After sending him off to do whatever he wanted to do for the thunder god temple, Arc inquired everything and learned that in these past two days, Arman tried to learn as much about the internal workings of thework as possible.

    But to his dismay, the workers are extremely loyal and tightknit, they didn¡¯t spill any beans.

    Later, Arc started making arrangements for Sam and his friends to get back to their ce.

    He didn¡¯t use any beast but rather used the Train service. He blocked a wholepartment and didn¡¯t let anyone board that and made an announcement that they are for the soldiers who are dealing with church. They made it to the Sam¡¯s city in a week.

    He used that Specialpartment to let them get to the Sam¡¯s city as discreetly as possible.

    Meanwhile, the war is going on full swing. After his disguise and the trick with the hallucinogen was exposed, Old One, seemed to have dropped cordiality and is not using intricate strategies.

    He has been sending attacks all over the Minor powers and some asional attacks on the Major powers¡¯ Inds.

    Meanwhile, the six major powers are still trying to find the number of secret Space gates Old One arranged within their territories.

    And in this one week, they even researched on what kind of hallucinogen that was used by the Old one within their experts and they got the news.

    They found in the records, that is called the Devil guided Incense. One of the greatest Hallucinogens which was discovered from the ancient times.

    It is actually a lost form, and they didn¡¯t know that Old one was able to recover it.

    The Devil Guided Incense, is a spirit induced hallucinogen. When inhaling this incense in right amount, the spirit which was summoned by the Incense enters the spirts of the inhalers and guides them in a specific way the creator wants them to be.

    This is actually a very dangerous Hallucinogen and the creator needs to have an extremely level of control and technique which almost defies logic.

    They even need the blood of the creator to make it and it takes toll on the body and spirit of the creator.

    They felt like Old One has gone crazy for power, when they read this.

    The most surprising thing about him is that there are almost no people within the Pharmaceutical tower that are involved.

    Almost half of the association was even killed in his very hands. He seems to have gained the whole idea from his sense of superiority in the field of medicine.

    Meanwhile, in the Western Continent, two days after Sam and his friends are secretly departed to the Sam¡¯s city, there is an announcement made subtly within the employees of the city, that Sam returned and he is alive, but a little bit injured.

    It is still a little over a month- and-an-half for him to get back up.

    When the news spread throughout the city, soon it reached the mouths of normal people after crossing the employees. Two people in the public has two sorts of contradictory reactions.

    Arman is scared shitless, while Sirona is a bit excited.

    She has been waiting to ask a question to Sam since she escaped and that is how does he know what her family is thinking, but she wasn¡¯t able to find him.

    That day, she wanted to meet him, but she doesn¡¯t know Sam¡¯s current stay. They said, he is still recovering in a secret location.

    Watt, Philip and Jack immediately took over and started looking into all the things rted towork.

    They heard from Arc that the situation was pretty bad when the rumours about Sam¡¯s missing situation has been spread.

    But to their relief there are not manyplications, except for some troubles caused by these factions.

    Although, Sam didn¡¯t make an appearance, the trio¡¯s presence is enough to have them on their best behaviour.

    In their minds, four of them are inseparable and if Sam is really dead, there is no way they would be here without thinking of getting revenge and such.

    At least, thework is pretty stable. One thing that bothered them is the interference of Arman.

    They didn¡¯t expect that Arman who is aplete outsider is able to take on the role of overseer.

    Even though, it is only for a very small period, it is still vexing.

    When they asked the officials and investigated, all they got is a hesitant ¡¯I thought that was best idea.¡¯

    Philip is trying to make sense of situation as he roamed around the whole city. He went to Mackey¡¯s restaurant to get something to eat.

    As he was having his delicious meal in a long time, he noticed that there is someone other than him who sat on the same table.

    This surprised him, because he sat on the Special table reserved for Sam.

    He looked over and saw a girl ordering something to the waiter in a stern voice.

    The food was served pretty fast and she started eating without caring for any grace and elegance everyone expects from ady.

    Soon, the youngdy seemed to have noticed that someone is looking at her and threw Philip a re as he dragged the te a bit closer to herself.

    Philip felt likeughing and nostalgic for some reason. He felt like that cold re is simr to what Sam has given him and his friends in Lava Rock vige a few years ago.

    He shook his thoughts off of his head and started eating. The girl only felt relieved after Philip took her gaze off.

    But after a few seconds, he felt that something is familiar with this girl, this time he just gave a curious nce towards her face and thought deeply.

    Within five minutes he got the idea and his eyes widened in surprise and disbelief with a hint on happiness in them.

    "Sirona?" He asked cautiously, without showing any emotions.

    Sirona looked at him with a frown and felt guarded immediately. She is extremely vignt about whoever visits her, because there is a possibility that they are from the Usaine sect.

    Seeing her vignt expression, Philip smiled and said.

    "It is me Philip. Little Stick."

    Sirona suddenly threw her caution to the wind as her eyes widened in disbelief. She has used those words, Little Stick in her childhood, that is the only part of her memory, she has without anyone influencing it.

    And she liked it extremely.

    There is a faint trace of sadness hidden within her deep icy eyes.

    "Little Stick?" She asked hesitatingly as she looked at him up and down.

    "You are big now?" She asked in a daze, she couldn¡¯t find the words grown up and this came out.

    "PFFT." Philip couldn¡¯t help butugh at these words and thus started their conversation.

    But it is extremely short lived.

    Philip and Sirona happened to be cousins and he knew of her when he stayed in the Usaine Sect. That is where the nickname came from.

    They have very small memories, like ying together when they are infants and some sses which they took together when they are undergoing training.

    They only spent time together for a few short years as Sirona was soon transferred to some special ce to get special training due to special traits.

    From then until now, Philip and Sirona never got to meet each other.

    When Sam asked about her, he didn¡¯t mention about the fact that they actually met. He only saw her image when they are at thunder god temple. He saw her first time on the wanted notice. Apart from that, he never felt like they would meet in such a scenario.

 Chapter 352: The Hotel Manager

    After that small talk, both of them turned silent and just ate their meal.

    The atmosphere started turning awkward. But Philip is the only one who is feeling the awkwardness, there is nothing that is bothering Sirona as she ate her meal in the same manner.

    But once again, she suddenly halted her actions and asked.

    "You are Sam¡¯s friend, right?"

    "Yeah. Now that you spoke of him, he also mentioned you before, how do you know him?"

    "We met once in this restaurant. I wanted the Formation Simtor that he got from Murali¡¯s inheritance."

    "Oh." From her expression Philip understood he wouldn¡¯t get any details, so he didn¡¯t ask her any further.

    "I want to meet Sam."

    Philip suddenly turned alert.

    Sirona might be his cousin from childhood, but he doesn¡¯t know how she is as a person now. He is not sure if he can take her to Sam at this moment.

    "He cannot meet anyone; he is not feeling well," Philip replied lightly with the intention of brushing off the topic.

    "What happened to him?"

    "Haven¡¯t you heard of the news about him?"

    "I heard that he went on a secret mission."

    "Secret Mission? Who said that?"

    "A guy from thunder god temple. He has been staying in his ce for a while."

    "Arman?"

    Sirona thought for a bit and nodded. "I think so."

    Philip was confused about why would Arman do such a thing.

    From what Sam said, Arman is the one who sold them off to the Beast faction time and again. So, why would he coverup their matter of going to the beast faction?

    Apart from this, he also noticed that something is wrong with Sirona¡¯s speech. She is not beating around the bush or trying to get some info from him or anything.

    She is straightforward. Too straightforward in fact and he felt that this situation is weird.

    He wanted to see if he was the one thinking like that or if is really true, so he asked again.

    "So, why did Arman tell you this?"

    "I asked him."

    "You asked him? But why?"

    "Because he is from the thunder god temple."

    Philip confirmed that it is really her. The way Sirona conversed is too mechanical. He started wondering what she has gone through after they are separated in the Usaine Sect.

    Philip stayed silent for a while and asked.

    "Why are you in conflict with Usiane Sect? I heard that you created heavy losses for the sect."

    "They wanted to kill me."

    "Why would they do that? You seemed to have been selected because they are quite confident that you would turn out a genius.

    They even invested a lot in you. Why would they suddenly want to kill you?"

    "Because they said I am out of control."

    "Just that?" Philip felt more and more confused as he listened to Sirona. She is not giving any details in the conversation.

    He shook his head and didn¡¯t want to think about Usaine Sect anymore as he asked.

    "Why do you want to meet Sam?"

    "I need to ask him something."

    "What is that?"

    "He said that once I take the formation simtor, they wouldn¡¯t believe that I didn¡¯t bring the shadow sword. So, he said that I would need to be careful and cautious about what I do and speak.

    I listened to the conversation of the sect head and they don¡¯t believe me, they even wanted to kill me, so I escaped.

    I want to know how Sam knew about this."

    "Sam told you all that?"

    He felt like he understood the situation a little bit more now. Particrly, about Sirona¡¯s behavior. She seemed to be an intelligent and logical thinker, but what shecks ismon wisdom.

    While he wondered why would Sam initiate a conversation with a girl like that, at the same time, he felt like these two would fit right in. Since Sam and that girl both wouldn¡¯t talk much and only gives answers with the minimum words possible, these two would be a sight to behold in a situation.

    But Sam jokes around sometimes and he curses when he is frustrated, but he couldn¡¯t see any emotions on her face. Except for the time when he said that he is Little Stick, he didn¡¯t see any sort of emotion no matter what they discussed.

    Even the time when she talked about the sect wanting to kill her, she didn¡¯t show the slightest hints of anger or frustration.

    He felt like, it is extremely difficult to understand her.

    "When can I meet Sam?" She asked again after noticing his silence.

    "I don¡¯t know. Maybe a little over a month. At least that¡¯s what the healer said."

    "Oh, I will see youter."

    Sirona left the ce after the talk.

    Meanwhile, in a hotel where Arman is staying, he is rolling over his bed in frustration.

    He has been in this room since the time he learned about Sam¡¯s arrival.

    He doesn¡¯t know what to do at this moment.

    He got the news that the whole world is in the war now. He doesn¡¯t want to go back to the thunder god temple at this moment, because it is definitely not safe for him. He has too many rivals in the thunder god temple and the wartime the restrictions would be a bit loose.

    At the same time, the news of Sam¡¯s return must have reached the thunder god temple. Now, they wouldn¡¯t even think of offending him.

    Because, the people who offended a major power and came out of it alive could be counted on one hand, but Sam tore down a Major power, killed half of its manpower, and still came back.

    So, Arman decided that he would leave this ce only after he was sure to find out the solution.

    While Arman is thinking, he felt like it is not a big deal and some thoughts came out.

    If Sam is really well and good, then isn¡¯t it easy for him toe and find him particrly when he was in this territory. Most importantly, Arman somehow tried to enter thework and there is no way Sam wouldn¡¯t know it.

    Arman suddenly had a wild thought, he felt like Sam could be in a state, where he doesn¡¯t have any way to move. He might be in aa recovering, otherwise, someone could have alreadye for him.

    To test his theory, he felt like he needs to do something.

    As soon as the thoughts came to his mind, Arman left the hotel.

    After he left, someone entered the room and he carefully removed the Incense that was put in the room.

    Days passed.

    Arc is receiving the news about the war that was going on through thunder god¡¯s temple.

    As for the progress within the country, there have not been any attacks for now and they caught three out of four people who are still in the nation. Two of them didn¡¯t have any info and the fourth one is putting up a great resistance for the technique they are using for extracting memories.

    His mental state is too strong for them to get.

    It has already been a few weeks and now it is only a month away from Sam¡¯s recovery.

    Right now, Philip is in a meeting with Arc in Sam¡¯s city. He came here to see if Sam has improved a bit or not.

    After learning the situation, they are having chat about the workings of thework and such.

    Suddenly, Arc got a call.

    "Sir, we got the info that we need on thest person."

    "Who is he?" Arc is visibly excited.

    "Thest person¡¯s duty is actually not to spread the followers and such. He has apletely different and role and that is to break thework internally.

    He works in a hotel in Sam¡¯s city and he seems to be the manager there. He seemed to be in possession of Devil guided Incense."

    "Which hotel?"

    "The one nearest to Sam¡¯s tower."

    Arc and Philip immediately made their move and ran towards the hotel.

    By the time they went there, the manager seemed to have been waiting for them. He doesn¡¯t seem surprised at all at their presence.

    "I already told them, that it is impossible to deal with this nation discreetly, they didn¡¯t listen to me. Now, we got caught sooner than they estimated."

    Arc caught hold of him and the first thing he did is check the amount of incense he has in his spatial ring.

    "What did you use this incense for?"

    "Oh, that? It works wonders by the way. At first, I tried to make that guy Arman who is trying to get his hands on thework, the leader of thework temporarily.

    It actually worked. All the factions almost conducted their meetings here and it was easy to manipte them.

    But the n failed miserably because you guys came back faster than I thought.

    You know what, but I used that Incense a week ago. And the effects should be seen today."

 Chapter 353: Armans actions

    As soon as the manager finished speaking, a call came to Philip. It is from Watt.

    "Come to the Train station, somebody seemed to have messed with the Rail tracks and the train ising within an hour. I am going there."

    He turned off the call without even giving Philip a chance to reply.

    Arc also followed Philip. They handed over the manager to someone to keep watch over and left to check the situation in the train station.

    By the time they reached there, Watt and Jack are already present.

    Arge portion of the tracks is destroyed. It covered the whole portion, upon which the train slows down.

    Philip walked towards Watt and asked.

    "What is the situation?"

    "We informed the Loco-pilot who is responsible for driving the train and we also diverted the tracks. Although this problem is currently solved, we cannot do this in a long run. We have to clear the damaged tracks andy down news ones as soon as we can so that we don¡¯t have deal with the dys and keep on adjusting the tracks."

    As they were speaking, the workers who are responsible for track maintenance already made their way to clear the damaged tracks and even started the process of constructing the new set.

    While they are looking into the situation, they found someone unconscious in a corner of the station, he is the one who is supposed to monitoring the tracks.

    He was knocked unconscious, there is a gaping wound on his neck.

    He was sent to the healer and they are waiting for the answers while Watt moved to the tower to look into the surveince.

    Philip and Jack are still investigating the situation at the station when they got another call. This time it is from Mackey.

    "Someone is breaking the formations outside the restaurants and a girl is confronting him. I think you talked to that girl previously. So, I thought you might want toe here and check the situation."

    Philip and Jack left the ce leaving the matter at hand to Arc.

    Within a few minutes, they are near Mackey¡¯s restaurant.

    There Sirona has her Sabre puppet out as she battled Arman who is standing with that semi-transparent Blue colored de in his hands.

    Both seem to be in an intense confrontation.

    Sirona is on aplete offensive and Arman is constantly dodging.

    At this moment, Philip and Jack simultaneously got calls, one of them from Watt and another from Arc.

    Both of them got results. The one who messed with tracks is actually Arman.

    Arman who noticed Philip and Jack¡¯s arrival immediately turned his tail and ran towards Sam¡¯s city.

    He doesn¡¯t want to confront them at this moment.

    Philip didn¡¯t follow, he simply took out anothermunication token and gave instructions.

    "Activate the defensive formations and put the city on lockdown. This guy is getting on my nerves for a long time and he is now behaving like a pest.

    Just use every city security system to attack him on the sight, there is no need to hold back.

    Ask every security official to take their emergency position.

    These guys should know that it is not easy to mess with something that belongs to Sam just because he cannot defend it himself."

    Philip took the responsibility of being the chief of the security after they came back, so he has amunication channel activated for all the security personnel.

    Now, his n is to make Arman feel despair. He was being a pain in the ass for a long time.

    On top of that, they still have bad blood. It is already great enough for them to stop themselves from taking revenge on him.

    They are just being safe due to Sam¡¯s situation and felt like it is not a great time to antagonize the thunder god temple.

    But now, this guy is just pushing his luck.

    The whole city now came to a lockdown.

    When Arman ran towards the city¡¯s gate. It was already closed and no matter how he tried, it is not opening again and the bullets are being locked and loaded with the guns aimed at him.

    There are many impact cannons and impact rifles stationed on the walls of the gate and they all have only one agenda that is to stop this guy.

    Philip went back to Arc who already had all the information they need at the moment.

    The one who made Arman do it is that manager. He used the Hallucinogen to hypnotize him to wreak havoc in the city.

    Philip read all the details of the drug and must say, that the drug is really impressive.

    The drug even made more than ten Consummate realm cultivators forget a person temporarily and even hypnotized them to stop moving their bodies for some minutes.

    It was no wonder, the drug can even manipte a Grand realm cultivator to do things after a week.

    Arc interrogated the captive to get the information he needs, but there is nothing much he can get.

    The Manager is just a normal member of the church and he is just simply brought over because of his greed, he is not a foolish cultist nor does he have the ability to absorb the followers and increase his cultivation.

    All he knew was one useful thing and that is the cement of one of the Space gates.

    Arc immediately sent a team with Vickers in lead to destroy that space gate as soon as possible.

    After settling everything, Philip just made an announcement in the city so that people wouldn¡¯t feel panicky about the lockdown and search for Arman, to calm the citizens he even made the statement in the name of Sam.

    Then only the citizens and the workers started calming down.

    They even started making jokes on Arman for being foolish enough to mess with the city arrangements.

    As Philip was dealing with the after the match and monitoring Arman who is in a cat and mouse game with the city security, another troublesome visitor came to him.

    It is none other than Sirona.

    "I want to meet Sam."

    "It is not even a month since we met and I said it would take more than a month for him to meet anyone. He is not in a position to meet anyone at this moment."

    "But you announced that Sam gave a statement on catching Arman."

    "I just made that up, to calm the citizens down."

    Sirona seemed extremely confused. But Philip didn¡¯t give a chance for her to reply and continued saying.

    "I know what you are going to say. Why would I need to make that up for the citizens to calm down right?"

    Sirona nodded. Philip facepalmed himself and said.

    "Because this is Sam¡¯s city and any statement which was given by Sam has that much weight. It was just like how your Sect head¡¯s words work in the Sect."

    "But Sect head is the strongest of all, Sam is not the strongest here, right? Why would they heed his words?"

    Philip took a deep breath to calm down and said.

    "My dear cousin Sirona, sometimes strength doesn¡¯t just equal battle prowess. Even though Sam¡¯s cultivation is not the highest in the city, he has proved that he can still kill them all the same if he wants to.

    Apart from that, half of the citizens who are the workers of the city respect him, because he made their lives better.

    How can you not understand this? What has the Usaine sect been teaching you all these years? You can¡¯t even grasp these basic things."

    "Oh, they taught me a lot of other things like Artisanship, Puppet making, Formation...."

    "Stop."

    As she was about to go on, Philip interrupted her.

    "I now understand how you became like this, you probably never had a proper conversation with anyone. Damn that shitty Sect head. He really is good at ruining people¡¯s lives."

    The conversation ended there and Sirona suddenly asked once again.

    "Are you lying about Sam being unable to meet anyone? Is it not wrong for you to use his name without his permission?"

    "Damn it." Philip almost wanted to hurl curses. If not for the fact, he vaguely understood her living conditions back in the sect, he would have done so.

    He thought for a moment and made a call to Watt and Jack.

    "You guys,e to Sam¡¯s room in the tower. I am bringing someone there to show Sam."

    He led Sirona to the tower and they went to Sam¡¯s room.

    As soon as they entered Sirona was shocked to see Sam¡¯s situation. She thought he was just injured and didn¡¯t want to meet any outsiders until he is healed, she never thought he was in aa.

    By now, the ck patches dimmed greatly and even the wounds of Sam¡¯s chest arepletely closed. The whole body is actually showing some normal signs.

 Chapter 354: Sironas Help

    Sirona ced her hand on Sam and closed her eyes, she felt that Sam¡¯s condition is peculiar and became curious.

    The trio became extremely vignt and their auras are on full release, one mistake or even a sign of a mistake from Sirona, they would just kill her right on the spot.

    After a few minutes of standstill, Sirona removed her hand and said.

    "His body is trying to absorb the shadow energy. His consciousness seems too busy to control his own body, he is busy with controlling and guiding the shadow energy.

    He might even be able to break through before the process is over.

    The problem is the energy seemed to be concentrated in specific areas, that is why it is taking such a long time."

    The trio were extremely surprised, because that is what the healer of the Eastern continent said.

    As for the healer within the western continent, they didn¡¯t let him see Sam. If by any chance this healer bes greedy and does something to Sam to get better share of thework, they would be in deep trouble.

    But they didn¡¯t expect Sirona to urately state Sam¡¯s problem with just one observation.

    While they are still digesting this surprise, Sirona continued.

    "I think I can help him."

    "Help him? Are you a healer?" Watt asked in suspicion.

    Sirona shook her head. "No, I am not a healer, but we don¡¯t need a healer to help him. All we have to do is make the shadow energy disperse faster and spread all over the body for him to digest it faster."

    "And how can you do that?" This time it was Philip who asked.

    He knew that Watt might not want to listen to this, with his overprotective nature, so he decided to ask her instead.

    "It is simple. All I have to do is create a small formation with him as core and let the energy which was clogged up disperse evenly with the help of the formation."

    "How can I trust that you are not just bullshitting just to harm him?" This time Watt asked before anyone could speak.

    He has seen first- hand, how much if a damage can be done with the bacsh of the formation.

    In fact, they used the same thing to damage all the infrastructure within the Beast faction. There is no way he would trust Sirona just because she wants to create a formation around Sam with the intention of helping him.

    He is not ready to trust someone that easily, particrly when he is sure that Sam is going to wake up in a month.

    "Why would I want to harm him?" Sirona asked him with genuine puzzled expression on her face.

    Watt suddenly felt lost.

    How would he know why she wants to harm him? It was just his paranoia speaking. How can he even answer her question?"

    Philip dragged Watt towards a corner and started speaking.

    "She might not look like it, but she is kind of a big deal in the Usaine Sect. She is an expert in formations, artisanship and even some inscriptions.

    She once tore down half of the Usaine sect and escaped from that ce toe here."

    "Why would she do that?" Watt asked in surprise.

    "Well, that is because our dear Sam seemed to have sensed something is wrong with her position in the Sect and seemed to have given her some instructions.

    From what she told me, the sect felt that she is out of their control and wanted to kill her to get rid of the problem. And Sam seemed to have predicted that and told her earlier.

    She is back here to know how Sam knew this is going to happen."

    "What do you mean? Is she really that oblivious of everything that happens around her?"

    "Well, that is kind of the Sect¡¯s fault. My guess is they made sure she grew up like that, they manipted her thinking from childhood only making her think about all the useful things for the sect.

    And they made sure she wouldn¡¯t think of herself and her own well-being and emotions.

    It is my guess, but I am sure that it is not that far off."

    Watt thought for a moment and asked Philip.

    "How does any of this supposed to convince me to let her create a formation around Sam?"

    "What I am saying is, there is no motive for her to do this, in fact, she would rather announce directly if she wants to kill someone, she wouldn¡¯t bother going through so much nning and plotting. That is her character.

    I think that is reason enough to trust her. And her expertise speaks for itself."

    "Expertise?"

    "You might not know, when we are at the thunder god temple, we got a wanted notice on her. Usiane sect imed that she has plotted against the Sect and do you know how she did that, she created a myriad of formation traps within the Sect right under their nose, without them knowing.

    She is good at what she does. I think if she says there is a way for him to wake up earlier, I would say we take that.

    The war is going on, we don¡¯t know anything about the enemy, even the six major powers are not sure about this war, we need Sam to wake up as soon as possible."

    Watt reluctantly agreed with Philip¡¯s persuasion and Sirona who is ready to create that small formation is already preparing the materials.

    But when she isying formation, the trio felt like they are taking too much of a risk.

    Because the formation gs Sirona used are actually very small and more than half of the nodes happened to be on Sam¡¯s body.

    She created a very small formation that barely covered Sam¡¯s body.

    As they looked at the formation which was glowing over Sam, they could see the ck patches which are stagnant all this while started to expand and the color seemed to have dimmed.

    It is like diluted paint. Just like how when we spread the paint which is thick in one area to the rest of the areas, the paint would be lighter, the ck patches also became lighter.

    Except for this time, there are no more patches left.

    Sam¡¯s body haspletely changed color and Watt is on the verge of losing his mind, thinking that something might have happened to him.

    Philip and Jack who are more patient ones understood that they have to wait a bit to see what truly is going on. But they are also a bit afraid.

    Most of the nodes are on Sam¡¯s body and if the formation copses, his body would be taking the bacsh too closely.

    But after more than an hour of observation, they noticed that the whole skin of Sam which turned a lighter shade of ck has dimmed down and turned even lighter.

    The reduction is minute, but they could still recognize it.

    "I think he will wake up in a week," Sirona said in a calm tone.

    The trio was actually stunned, they didn¡¯t know that she could do this. Although Philip convinced them to trust her, he only expected her to speed up the process by a week.

    But it seems like the process will end in a week.

    He never expected that a formation master could cure Sam.

    Watt even felt like they wasted too much time and should have consulted a formation master a long time ago.

    What they don¡¯t know is, no formation master would dare to use a person¡¯s body part or his body as a node to cure him. In fact, no formation master will try their knowledge in curing someone.

    It is only because of her versatile thinking and out of the box ideas that Sirona was able toe up with an idea which used Sam¡¯s body parts as nodes and his whole body as the core to cure him.

    If they even show this to someone, the formation association will go crazy and will start criticizing the formation master who did this with all the criticisms.

    They would never dare to experiment on human-like this.

    But the trio doesn¡¯t know this, but they still felt like there is something wrong with what Sirona did.

    It is just that since they can¡¯t point out the mistake, they just chose to ignore itpletely.

    After dealing with this, Philip arranged Sirona¡¯s stay within the tower, in fact, he arranged a room within his floor, this is not because of the gratitude rather it is because of their paranoia.

    They don¡¯t want anything to happen to Sam and if anything happens to him, they can hold her ountable right there.

    After arranging for her amodation, Philip went to deal with Arman, who is still on the run.

    The only exit out of the city currently is through the train, but his face was noted there and there is no entry for him.

    If he wants to escape, he can either sneak out through the entrance or climb the towering walls.

    But neither of them seemed current.

    Philip has only ordered to chase him around just to make him despair. He is neither letting him gopletely nor does he finish him instantly.

 Chapter 355: Attack on the Empire

    Arman is having the worst time of his life.

    He is not even able to freely roam the streets, because there is at least one shooter who will be aiming at his ass once he shows up on the streets.

    He was thinking on how to get away, but he couldn¡¯t find any other way. He was barely able to hide for sometime when someonees chasing him.

    He is extremely regretting all the things he did. At least, the things he did in the past day. He has ruined the train track in hopes of causing an ident, but he got the timing wrong and they were able to rectify the mistake easily before the crash could happen.

    He doesn¡¯t know what he was thinking when he was doing, he just felt like doing that stuff and no reasons came to his mind to not to do them. But now, he can think more than dozen reasons to not to do it. It was like he was possessed.

    Arman who is away from the thunder god temple, was obviously missed on the information regarding the Devil Guided incense.

    In fact, he is not even bothered to think about the war.

    And in his current situation, he couldn¡¯t think even if he wants to.

    For the next week, within the western continent, Arman is like a sewer rat. He lived in dark corners and barely got any rest. No matter what time is, his resting ce would be busted in at most three hours.

    Philip, Jack and Watt just checked on Sam. Hisplexion almost returned to normal and his energy levels are also quite high with the absorption of the ck patches. His skin is almost back to normal.

    Except for therge gaping scars of the two chain sickles on his upper chest, his body is same as it is before the incident.

    In the past week many things happened.

    Philip and Jack broke through Peak stage Grand realm. They have been treading on the edge for this break through for a long time. But due to all the running around they weren¡¯t able to concentrate on cultivating. Now is the only time they had free time.

    Watt also reached the peak stage of Grand realm for some time, a little before the other two and he seemed to be just a step away from break through to the Nascent realm.

    Currently, the news about Sam¡¯s return was already sent back to the Thunder god temple, but they didn¡¯t call them back for some reason.

    They seemed to be too busy with the war to care about them.

    At this moment, the trio and Arc are sitting together in a room going through the war reports that are being read by someone in the Imperial Pce.

    In this one week, there are great changes in the war. Actually, the church is able to deal with two minor powers and they took control of those two minor powers. The major powers were not able to intervene in the situation because, the nearest two major powers Usaine Sect and Beast faction are were attacked by the church at this moment.

    But those attacks are minor and didn¡¯tst long, they even revealed two space gates the church ced in both ces. Although, there might be other gates it is still considered a loss for them to be exposed for a probing attack and got blocked.

    But it cannot be calcted like that and the church could be said to have won because, their twelve Priests who are Pre-transcendent cultivators when the war started, out of them eight of them became transcendent cultivators while the war is going on. And the situation was same for both the minor powers.

    For every minor power, the church sent twelve priests and in that sixteen already turned into Transcendent cultivators and these sixteen are the reason for the loss of the two minor powers.

    The newnd and the new powerful cultivators, they are gaining in. But the church is not without any losses.

    Usaine Sect and Beast faction realized that something is off with the attacks that are made on them and then only realised they were being distracted.

    So, they reacted fast enough and checked the situation with another minor power and they were able to stop the invasion of the church in the third minor power. They reacted fast enough and eliminated the churchpletely.

    But for the past few days, the church tried to gain their upper hand back in the minor power which they were eliminated.

    There, the sixteen newly transformed transcendent cultivators started attacking.

    In fact, all the minor powers should have been dealt with in a week, but they failed in doing so because, the meeting in the central continent ended faster than expected and the retaliation from the minor powers is faster than they imagined.

    After the Old one was caught, he didn¡¯t care about the strategy anymore and just went along with the long-sting battle with the minor powers and in between, he is been sending a unit or two of followers to any of the major powers.

    Simply put, the church is extremely focusing on the vicinities of the central continent.

    After they read through the report, Arc and Philip are discussing the things regarding the war and how they should react if a sudden situation arises.

    Their main problem is the followers of the church who are also the soldiers who will be in the front lines are currently all Grand realm cultivators.

    The minor powers and the major powers can handle them, but that is going to be a serious problem if the empire is invaded in the same way. There are not many Grand realm soldierspared to the major power and the minor powers.

    In fact, the Grand realm cultivators are not even soldiers in the empire¡¯s army, they hold a position of at least a Regimentmander.

    As Arc and Philip are discussing all these factors.

    At that exact moment, the attendant ran in and said.

    "Your majesty, the church followers are invading through the woods on the western side of empire and the northern icends also informed that they have been attacked by the church followers. The soldiers are all seemed to be Novice stage cultivators. They are awaiting your orders."

    "Tell them, to be defensive, don¡¯t let them invade the city and if there is no other way, ask them to use the Impact cannons.

    As for the Northern ds, what is the exact situation?"

    "They are defending themselves well and they said that the first wave of followers that came are no threat to them, but they are feeling a bit panicky about these new invaders and they seemed to have been searching for the Space gate."

    "Send a regiment over to the northernds and ask them to stay strong, if they find any space gate, just ask them to attack them from long range, it is almost impossible to seal them without any formation knowledge."

    After giving the instructions, Arc went into a deep thought.

    He was thinking why the empire was being attacked all of a sudden.

    Philip is also thinking the same. The church is focussing on taking over the minor powers and even battling the major powers. The beast faction and the Usaine sect are both onto the church too. They are even trying to get their nations back.

    But at this moment, the church should have been focusing their manpower at those positions.

    While they are thinking.

    In Sam¡¯s tower, inside his room.

    Sam¡¯s body turned back to its original colour and there is a faint ck smokeing out of him.

    His whole body started twitching a little as smoke escaped through the pores of his skin.

    His body started to have a change as the dark elemental energy started spreading all over him.

    Inside his body, near the spiritual core and even his spiritual consciousness, the shadow corrosive energy was almost disappeared.

    Due to Sirona¡¯s formation the shadow energy in the patches which spread all over his body was also clearly absorbed.

    Even the crack on the spirtual core has disappearedpletely.

    But what Sirona did, still have some side effects, because the energy spread all over the body, there are many traces left all over the muscle fibres and now Sam is subconsciously trying to digest them by attempting a shadow fusion.

    Meanwhile, Arman who is running around the city, finally came towards the factory area and he noticed that one of lotive factory is not working. So, he decided to escape there.

    While he decided to hide in there for the time being, Philip has already sent out an order to capture him. He decided to put out this cat and mouse game, seeing that Arman is turning more and more desperate.

    He was supervising Arman¡¯s capture and Arc is still trying to make sense of the situation.

    But at that moment, there are sudden calls to Arc and his attendant.

    The gist of the news was such.

    After there is a probing attack in the morning in the western part and the northern part, the Arian empire was being invaded by the church.

    The followers are being appeared out of the woods. And at this moment, there are more than fifty cities which are being invaded directly and to get the trouble even more serious, Philip got another call and that is the church followers are appearing out of thin air near the vicinities of Sam¡¯s city.

    Then only they understood one thing. Not only is church deciding to use the man power on them, they are even using one-way space gates from who knows where to invade the western empire.

 Chapter 356: Attack on the City

    Philip was on the way to capture Arman along with a team, meanwhile, Arc is getting ready to go back to the Imperial Capital so that he can better organize the troops.

    But at this moment, they got the calls about the sudden appearance of the church followers from nowhere. There are a total of fifty cities which are being attacked and Sam¡¯s city is one of the main targets.

    The city guards who are responsible for the watch duty on the city walls all have only one thing to report and that is there are hundreds of white-robed people surrounding the city from all sides.

    Philip who was about to go after Arman halted in his tracks and changed his mind. He is pretty sure, that Arman wouldn¡¯t be able to escape, but just to make sure. He gave another order.

    "Close off the gates of that empty factory and lock him in. Don¡¯t open until I give an order to."

    With those words, he left with the city guards in tow.

    The first thing they did after reached the city walls is to see how many numbers they are up against.

    When he did see that, he felt dumbstruck. He didn¡¯t expect to see so many people outside the city walls blindly attacking.

    There are more than two thousand people when they counted on all sides. Philip could already guess how they came here. Since they already skimmed the vicinities and even in the woods, there are no space gates at all.

    One- way Space gates are the only way. But he has another question. The major powers only have simple one-way gates through which they could send a squad of people at most. But now, the Old One, the former head of this¡¯s Pharmaceutical Association, was able to get his hands on a Space gate of suchrge capacity.

    Philip shook off his thoughts as he started organizing the city guards on the walls.

    After Sam¡¯s project waspleted, every city has Impact cannons on its city walls and Sam¡¯s city has even more of them.

    Around the city, the wall ispletely mounted with Impact cannons and the shooters already took positions ready to attack.

    After the initial panic everyone already calmed down. Even the numbers didn¡¯t seem as scary as when they first appeared.

    Philip gave a signal to shoot and the barrage of Impact Shells started hitting the white-robed swarm of people.

    They don¡¯t seem to care about the attacks though, they are still blindly charging as if their life depended on it and there is one more thing Philip noticed.

    Whenever a follower is on verge of dying, the nearest follower is absorbing the energy off of that person and that person who was supposed to die is bing undead and was being thrown at the city to cause an undead explosion.

    "Don¡¯t stop after you hit a vital shot, if you see a dying man, shoot him one more time. Don¡¯t show any mercy."

    Along with the impact shells, there is a shower of Methane grenades that are being thrown at the crowd asionally.

    Just like that, the two thousand people are being easily made short work of with the cannons and weapons within an hour. The war didn¡¯t even cross the city wall and was almost over. There are some followers who grew their cultivation within the battle who survived the normal grenades and they are too loose for the Impact shells.

    A special team led by a Nascent stage cultivator is targeting them to finish them off.

    Arc who saw the whole scenario felt extremely relieved and he took off on his beast to leave the Imperial Capital.

    He came on his transcendent beast to save some time off. He would return to the Imperial capital within two days if he went on full speed.

    But as soon as Arc left, the situation took another turn.

    Even though the situation under the wall waspletely under their control, there is a sudden change in the atmosphere, and before they realize there is an explosion near the train station.

    Philip has already given orders to stop the train services for the time being and the trains are in the stations without any passengers.

    When they heard the sudden explosion, they felt extremely panicky.

    Watt who is the nearest to the station went on the Silver wind to look at the situation and when he reached the ce, he could confirm that these are the signs of an undead explosion.

    But the problem is how did the person enter this deep inside the city.

    The answer to their question soon came. While Watt was still hovering over the air, he saw a white-robed person appear out of nowhere and explode a few meters away from him.

    Luckily, he was alert enough and was able to move far enough to be out of the explosion range.

    He immediately called Philip and Jack to report the situation.

    "They are using the Space gate to throw the undead in the city. The explosion in the station is caused by that."

    "Damn it, Watt go and check up on Sam and see if he is showing any signs of waking up. We have to activate the city restrictions and fully activate the formations, but only he would be able to do it, instantly, we would take too much time.

    If he didn¡¯t wake up, ask Sirona to check up on his situation."

    Philip said to Watt, before concentrating back on the city wall.

    After once more organizing the ce, he went back into the city, to activate the city restrictions.

    One-way Space gates do have their own drawbacks and he learned about them when they are in the thunder-god temple. When he learned that they are going to go to the beast faction through a one-way space gate, he did his research and found out many things.

    Unless there is a certain mark left by the Space-gate maker, there is no way for a one way Space-gate to ignore the Physical restrictions that are formed due to the formations.

    Philip, Watt, and Jack are extremely busy because they do have some restrictions which they can activate, but it wouldn¡¯t cover the whole city. Those restrictions cannot cover the top portion of the city, they are mostly restrictions that are covering small areas within the city.

    But they are still activating them as fast as they can.

    But after a few minutes, they started panicking. Watt who is nearest to the tower and was about to reach Sam¡¯s room halted in his tracks.

    Because, this time, the undead are falling off of the sky. And they are falling in extremely random spots.

    They are feeling desperate. But at this exact moment, the dome of the tower opened ad arge ss Sphere was revealed to everyone. The sunlight is falling over the ss sphere majestically as it shone brilliantly all over the city.

    All of a sudden, light beams emerged from the sphere and hit all the undead that are falling down.

    Before they could even touch the ground, almost half of their body is evaporated by theser beam that came out of the tower.

    Philip, Watt, and Jack felt extremely relieved. They knew who could have done that and they are extremely excited.

    They immediately made their way towards the tower.

    At this moment, the formation of the whole city was activated with the tower as the core and severalyers of restrictions could be seen forming over as all the defensive formations are activated in an instant.

    A few minutes ago.

    Sam who is emitting the ck smoke and body undergoing some phenomenon, suddenly opened his eyes.

    But when he opened his eyes, he felt his whole body was weak and turned vignt to his surroundings. He doesn¡¯t remember anything except for the fact that he used the Shadow world transverse and was corroded by the shadow world energy.

    Thest thing he remembered was checking his own body before bringing Watt, Philip, and Jack out of the divine dimension.

    He doesn¡¯t know when he would wake up or where would he wake up.

    But he expected himself to be stuck in some unfamiliar environment and woke up with just those thoughts,

    But as soon as he opened his eyes, he was in an extremely familiar environment. Particrly, within his room.

    As he was trying to make sense of the situation, he noticed that he wasn¡¯t able to use his spiritual energy. As soon as he is activating the spiritual energy it waspletely dispersed all over his body.

    Then only he noticed that there is a weird formation ced on him.

    The first thing he did is remove the formation and look at a mirror.

    When he looked at himself, he couldn¡¯t help but feel sorry for himself. His face looked extremely weak and his muscle-mass waspletely gone. He became pale and weak and looked extremely sickly.

    While he was thinking of himself, he thought of calling the trio, but before he could do that, he looked outside the window and noticed that somethings are falling off the sky.

    When he keenly observed, he noticed that they are human bodies. He doesn¡¯t know what exactly they are and why are they falling, but he understood they are bad news.

    So, he immediately made his move and used one of the tower¡¯s attacking measures to make a move on them.

    Then he activated all the formation defense restrictions of the city and finally looked for hismunication token to contact his friends.

 Chapter 357: Sam Wakes Up

    Sam picked up hismunication token and called his friend¡¯smunication channel.

    "Hey guys, I don¡¯t how you guys got me here, but great job. Someone please, get me a meal from Mackey. I am starving."

    The trio was overjoyed when they heard his voice and Watt who is on the silver-wind and on his way to the tower turned back and went to Mackey¡¯s restaurant to get some food.

    He packed every avable dish there at the moment and rode back to the tower.

    When they reached the tower, Sam is inside the shower and he didn¡¯te out for over an hour.

    He came out refreshed and Watt served him the meal on the table.

    For some time no one spoke. They left Sam to eat as they saw him devour dish after dish.

    After more than half an hour, his meal was finally over.

    He finally looked at his friends, who are eagerly waiting for him to finish the meal, and said.

    "What¡¯s up, guys? I am sorry. I was really starving."

    They hugged each other and after some small talk, they finally got to the point.

    "How long have I been out for? How did you get me here?"

    "You have been out four more than two months, you should have been down for one more month. Sironaid out a formation with your body and sped the process of you absorbing that ck energy."

    "Sirona? Seems like you guys have met and the reunion between longst cousins seems a positive one. I am surprised she agreed to help me."

    "Well. actually, she is the one who wanted to help you. It seems like she has something to talk to you. She has been pestering me continuously. So, I decided to show her your condition and tell her to back off a little. But she said she can speed up the process and from looks of it, it worked."

    They talked about how the emperors smuggled them right under the noses of the six major powers.

    The church, the war that is happening, and so on. After a while, Sam spoke.

    "So, the four major underground forces which upied four empires are the foundation of the church and by luck or coincidence, we destroyed the ck water here and along with the establishment of thework, they are not able to work their magic in the empire.

    That ispletely unexpected.

    Then are the guys who are falling down, are they part of the church as well?"

    "I aming there.

    The church hasn¡¯t done anything to us until today. Today we got thetest battle report and that said two minor powers are gone under the church¡¯s control. But in one of the other minor powers, the church lost its footing.

    No matter how we look at this it is not a good time to deal with us. We don¡¯t understand why they are sending the troops to us." Philip exined.

    "Wait, didn¡¯t you say that followers that you saw in the eastern continent are all Grand realm cultivators and higher? Why are they novice stage cultivators attacking us then? Shouldn¡¯t they be sending us the Grand realm cultivators?"

    "Nope, they don¡¯t directly be Grand realm cultivators, they actually be Novices when they are converted and they would grow until they are Grand realm cultivators."

    "That means they are freshly converted followers."

    Sam thought for some time and felt like something is off. Even he wouldn¡¯t concentrate on an empire in the corner when he has to fight against the six major powers and waste his soldiers who are the ones that are dragging the war.

    He suddenly has thought and asked.

    "How long does it take for them to be Grand realm cultivators from Novice cultivators?"

    "Fifteen days or more."

    After some more silence. Sam suddenly said.

    "I think, the war would reach its final stages in the fifteen days."

    "What do you mean?"

    "If I were that Old one, there could be only one reason for me to send the newly converted followers here. Since he is fighting it out with the major powers, he needs all the manpower he can get, but the Novice level fighters are not much use against a major power.

    Because they use Grand realm cultivators as normal soldiers.

    Now that he upied two minor power, there would be an influx of newly created followers and for him to use them, he needs at least fifteen days.

    Normally, fifteen days is not much of a long time, particrly now that the six major powers are clearly showing that they want to do a long battle. But this guy is not keeping them for the uing longsting war and sending the extra people he had to deal some damage to the empire so that he could deal with us on the side.

    This could mean only one thing and that is OId One is not seeing himself needing these extra thousands of soldiers in the next fifteen days."

    Sam exined his conjecture and the rest of them also thought in that direction, even though what Sam said sounded a bit farfetched it does make sense.

    "Call Arc and inform him about what we are thinking and let us see if the thunder god temple will listen to his conjecture," Sam said to Philip for which thetter nodded and left the ce to make a call.

    After a few minutes, he came back and said.

    "Arc is currently on his way back to the Empire, I think he is traveling too fast, I couldn¡¯t reach hismunication device."

    "Sure, then we will talk to him after he reaches the empire. Anyway, what do we have at hand regarding this church and its followers?"

    "We caught one manager of the hotel who turned out to be a church member, but he is not a follower or anything, he is just a normal person who was sold out for greed.

    Apart from that Arc caught some followers and they are still in captivity. He sent some of them here since we said you will be waking up today, if not for the attack from church, he would have been here."

    "Then what are we waiting for, let us see what we can find out from their bodies. These church followers will be a pain in the ass even with the city formation if they continuously blow themselves up.

    We need to find some countermeasure against them before the next wave."

    After that, Sam went to talk to Sirona while the group went to bring the captives.

    "Thanks for helping me."

    He thanked her as soon as he saw her.

    "You don¡¯t have to thank me, I just wanted to talk to you earlier, so I made that formation."

    "About that? Don¡¯t you know it is dangerous? I would have died if the formation failed. You cannot just use my body parts as nodes."

    "Why is it dangerous? I am great at creating such a simple formation."

    Sam shook his head and didn¡¯t bother to argue with her, anyway he still woke up earlier because of her, so he decided to not take it up with her.

    "What is it that you want to talk to me?"

    He finally came to the point.

    "How do you know that my family will try to kill me?"

    "Is this what you want to talk about?"

    "Yes."

    "I guessed."

    "You guessed?"

    "Yes, from the way you spoke, I understood how they raised you and what purpose you serve for them, so I guessed what would happen if you don¡¯t take the shadow sword with you and that is what I told you."

    "But why did they behave like that? I spoke the truth."

    "Haha, sometimes the truth doesn¡¯t matter Sirona. In your case, it never mattered. They never truthfully cared for you, for them, you are just a valuable asset that they want to control, and to achieve that, they pictured a beautiful lie in front of you and you made your whole life thinking that the best thing of your life is working for them.

    But that is not reality, what you saw before you escaped the Usaine sect is the only reality."

    Sirona didn¡¯t speak for a second and one could see that her beautiful eyes have turned watery.

    "But why did they have to lie to me all the time?"

    She mumbled to herself. Sam didn¡¯t answer that question.

    If he can say that he understands her situation, he was sure that he understands her situation.

    Because he went through the same thing in his previous life. He felt all the emotions that she is feeling now.

    At this moment, he can easily answer her question about why they cheated her and why did they create such a fake world around her. But if he did say that, she wouldn¡¯t explore herself anymore and would just wallow in her self-pity.

    But now, she has a choice. She can find the answer to her question herself and explore herself more. She has to find her own new life.

 Chapter 358: Research

    After talking to Sirona, who went into a deep thought at Sam¡¯s words, he left to handle the captives.

    Sam felt like this war is toorge scale for him.

    Old one, the former Pharmaceutical association head, is battling the whole world and he seemed to have made sufficient preparations. He is not even considering the empire seriously and sending followers through Space gates at his whim.

    As for Sam and his friends, they are just some small fries in Western Continent. It is almost impossible for them to make any difference in war with their battle prowess and cultivation.

    But there is one thing Sam felt like he must do. That is not changing the course of war or defeating the enemy by himself. He wanted to secure his territory and defend against all these attacks.

    The best way to defend himself is not even letting the opponent attack.

    So, now Sam¡¯s idea is find a way to influence the war in such a way that Old one, wouldn¡¯t have time or followers to concentrate on the Western continent.

    With that intent, he took some captives to theboratory he created within his floor of the Sky scr.a.p.er.

    The first thing Sam did is, strap one of the followers to a table and use his observation ability to examine all his body.

    When he did that, Sam could see even minute muscle fibres in the body of the follower.

    And he noticed many peculiarities. The first one is the high rate of absorption of spiritual energy.

    The followers might not be able to use the spiritual energy to fight, but spiritual energy is still the basis of their strength. Sam noticed that their bodies are absorbing the spiritual energy through the pores and the muscle fibres are absorbing that spiritual energy constantly bing denser and denser.

    It is just like the situation when he is tempering his body. His muscles fibres and skin will absorb the spiritual energy to be denser and stronger.

    The second peculiarity is the Vitality.

    Sam noticed an intense amount of vitality gathered in the body of the follower. At first, he felt like this is not normal and thought that only one follower is peculiar like this, but as he went through the remaining two followers who are captive, he noticed the same phenomenon going on in their bodies.

    Their bodies contain a very highly concentrated vitality. Generally, any living organism will have vitality present within their systems, but the vitality of a follower is equal to ten times a normal person.

    This is practically impossible, as far as Sam knew this much amount of vitality is only present in either some high-grade pills or some extremely valuable medicinal herbs.

    But to see that in one person is something he never would have expected.

    Then only he increased his concentration on observation and found out that their bodies are not just absorbing the spiritual energy, but also emitting endless vitality through the pores.

    Even with that much Vitality in their bodies, the most peculiar thing is that it kept on increasing with time and there are no signs of stopping.

    He noticed that the spiritual energy which was being absorbed by the person is not just being converted into the physical strength, but also intorge reservoir of vitality.

    The presence of this much vitality exined another, weird phenomenon within their bodies and that is healing.

    Their bodies are extremely peculiar such that every strike thatnded on them physically will be recovered in an extremely fast pace.

    Sam is holding a dagger and making wounds all over the hand of the follower. The follower is not even making a sound of pain and he still has that foolish smile of a cultist.

    Even Sam felt a bit weird when he looked at that face.

    After making some superficial wounds and some deep cuts, Sam started observing the pace of healing.

    When he used his observation skill while the healing is going on, he noticed that the amount of vitality that was being consumed to heal the injuries, is actually a lot more than the vitality it takes to heal the normal people.

    But in normal case, a healer has to simte the vitality and control it. But for these people, there is no need of a healer, the vitality is just overwhelmingly healing the wounds.

    But the recovery rate of the vitality is something that astonished him.

    After healing the wounds, the vitality reservoir only took half-an-hour to be full again, but in this time, the spiritual energy was not being absorbed by the muscles, it waspletely converted to vitality to fill the reservoir back.

    Sam wanted to test the limits of healing and he started making various degrees of injuries.

    After another half-an-hour, he came to a conclusion that as long as it is a non-vital fleshly wound, the healing is almost instantaneous.

    After that, he took out a sword and severed arm of the first follower.

    The arm didn¡¯t grow back. The stump of the arm healed, but there are not any signs of regrowth of the arm.

    He observed the whole process and noticed that the vitality is restricted to heal the whole arm and he felt that there are two reasons.

    One of them is that there is no guidance for the vitality to heal the arm. To regrow an arm, it is not just the simtion of the vitality that is needed, there is a need for guiding the vitality in such a way that the cells would grow in a certain way so that the arm will be restructured, here there is a lot of vitality, but there is no guidance to restructure the arm.

    Sam checked the theory by severing half of the arm on other side and only severing the wrist for another follower and after that only a finger.

    The final conclusion is no matter how small the permanent separation is, it is impossible for them to restructure a severed part of the body.

    Now, Sam learned of all the peculiarities and the reasons for those peculiarities within the bodies and now it is time for him to think of something to counter them.

    Before that, Sam tried to look into the pills that made these people like that. He wanted to see what are the ingredients but it is not easy to deconstruct the pills and see what those ingredients are.

    He tried all kinds of experiments, but was only able to find around two ingredients and those two happened to be the blood of two different beasts.

    One of them is a Illusion Snake. Everything regarding this snake and its body is rted to illusion, hypnotism and brain washing.

    The second one is the blood from a special part of another beast called ck shelled turtle. This sea turtle has extreme amount of vitalities and they live the longest on this.

    Although, Sam found these ingredients and can rte them to some of the peculiarities in the bodies of the followers, there is no way for him to directly use them to counter them.

    But there are still other ways. First thing, Sam did is try to heal one of the followers whose arm was severed. From what he understood, theck of guidance to the vitality is the only thing that is making it impossible for them to regenerate the arm, so he wanted to see if he can provide the guidance.

    But as soon as he started healing, the vitality his light elemental energy generated was being repelled by the rest of the vitality. It is like two fluids not mixing together due to density difference.

    What surprised him even more is that the reaction of vitality, it is extremely turbulent and even sentient. It is like a wholly different entity staying within the follower¡¯s body.

    It is more like a parasite residing in a host and this gave him some ideas.

    Sam felt like they could make use of this thing.

    He started conducting various experiments to see what this weird behaviour of the vitality is all about and found some details which he ignored before.

    The Vitality is not just immense in amount, rather it is dense to the point of visibility. The vitality healing them is also not exactly a part of privilege, it is more like a side effect.

    The vitality which is behaving like a parasite is healing the person just because, it wanted to protect the host.

    After some time, Sam wanted to confirm one more thing and he killed one of the followers right there on the table.

    All this time, he ced his hand and kept his observation ability on full limit.

    The lump of the vitality started jumping left and right, it slowly escaped the body and started dancing wildly in the air.

    As Sam watched the vitality mass jump around, it reached the nearest follower and started merging with the vitality that is already present in that person.

 Chapter 359: Liquid

    Sam looked at the dead body which didn¡¯t show any signs of movement, but the body instantly aged due to the escape of the vitality, the body became extremely dry and skin cracked.

    He checked the body once again and he found out that except for the escape of the vitality and the immediate change that happened to the body due to that sudden escape, the body is still extremely strong and solid.

    He watched as the body slowly turned into the Undead. Sam doesn¡¯t know why this happened, because from what Philip said, they only turned into undead when they are absorbed by others.

    If he doespare the vitality escaping his body to another person as absorbing, then this undead phenomenon does make sense.

    Sam observed the body and noticed that he only killed the person by damaging the heart with his spiritual disintegration. But the rest of the body is extremely intact.

    Sam wanted to confirm this, but this time, he severed the head of another follower and made sure that both the body and head are extremely distant without any form of contact, this time, the vitality did escape but most of it was diffused into thin air.

    Apart of the vitality though waspletely absorbed by the third remaining follower.

    He looked at thest remaining follower who absorbed the vitality and noticed that his strength really did increase, but he is still a Novice.

    He felt like he needs more subjects to determine how this undead system works.

    But now, he has a live subject and an undead subject and started doing experiments.

    He started gathering herbs that are rted to the vitality. He started experimenting with all the avable herbs at his hand and other types of ingredients like beast blood and all the stuff he could get his hands on.

    He shifted the experiment to the Divine dimension tower. He let out the beasts into the sky scr.a.p.er so that they would have some free time.

    Their reunion has happened after a few months, they don¡¯t know what the situation is, but they do know that something is wrong with Sam, when they were unable toe out.

    But to their dismay, they don¡¯t have much time to have some free chat.

    For the next three days, he spent the time inside the tower as he kept on simting various things that are avable to him.

    After so much time, there is not much he could do and finally, he decided to use the things that are of Yanwu and the rest.

    After trying so many things, he finally got some results after trying everything and he is trying to decide whether he should use test their blood or not.

    That is the excretions of the Yanwu.

    That is right, he finally saw some results when he got the faeces of Yanwu. This idea came because of what he observed from one of the experiments he conducted before.

    He has once stored the faeces of Yanwu within the divine dimension and noticed that there is something wrong within the surroundings of the faeces pit.

    More than half of the fire elemental zone in the divine dimension was filled with most of fire elemental grasses which act as feed for the cattle type beasts that are inside the dimension.

    Ape is responsible for renting them as soon as they are finished. The grass grew stronger at all the other faeces pits which contained faeces of zing earth bull and even other fire type beasts.

    But the one pit, which contains Yanwu¡¯s faeces doesn¡¯t have any form of grass around it.

    That is not because of theck of vitality, rather the vitality that was present on that spot was being disturbedpletely due to these excretions.

    At first, he was almost ready to give up and just focus on defending the city properly and doesn¡¯t want to get involved in the war unless he was implicated.

    But now, he just wanted to give a final try, he felt that the vitality within the bodies of these people are the key to deal with this.

    Yanwu¡¯s faeces are not useful to him until now and the methane is also not mmable enough due to the mixture of the light element in Yanwu¡¯s blood line.

    This light element has some effects on the vitality.

    Sam collected some of the faeces, they are mostly in liquid form just like any other bird¡¯s excrements.

    Sam started processing it to make it more liquified and sprayed it over the follower who is still alive.

    And he noticed a difference, the small amount of spray was instantly absorbed into the body due to the spiritual energy content and the lump of vitality was extremely disturbed.

    The lump of dense vitality started getting dispersed and became extremely diluted. A small amount of vitality was escaped from his hand and started diffusing into the atmosphere.

    He created more of the liquid and started changing the concentration of the fluid along with various herbs that influence vitality.

    Time passed.

    He came out of the tower only after he was done with the liquid that works on the followers for sure.

    When he came back, there is a new wave of attacks and Philip came with a new battle report from the major powers.

    "The Church got a hold of another two minor powers and lost in two more minor powers. They seemed to have sped up the process and they seemed to be dealing the whole war as a do or die thing.

    The Church seemed to be in an extreme rush, they are dealing with the minor powers and doesn¡¯t seem to care whether they win or not at all.

    But there is a really an influx in the followers appearing in the western continent.

    Even our city is fully surrounded by followers, but there are no more people raining out of nowhere since the formations are activated.

    And by the way, the amount of undead are increasing, in thest wave of attacks, twenty percent of people who came are undead."

    Sam thought for a moment and asked.

    "Did you say my conjecture to Arc? What did he say?"

    "He did think that there is some sense in your words, but there is no news from the thunder god temple."

    "Okay, then, send this liquid to the front lines and see if it works, if it doesn¡¯t work, I will try something else. Don¡¯t forget to record the whole process of what happened after using that liquid."

    That day, there is an extremely huge change in the war situation within the western continent.

    Particrly within the vicinities of the Sam¡¯s city. Instead of firing the impact shells, they sent wooden drums full of golden- brown coloured liquid that was sent flying into the air and rained down on the church followers.

    The followers who were soaked in this liquid felt their bodies absorbing it continuously and the vitality that is supporting their bodies and strengthening their bodies suddenly felt like copsing and their bodies turned extremely weak.

    Right in front of the astonished soldiers, they started ageing in a rapid pace and the young men and women turning into old men.

    Their muscle mass was gone, the hair fell down and their kegs started trembling as they were unable to hold the weight of the bodies for a moment of time.

    Within an hour, the troops arepletely gone without a trace. Only some undead remained and they are also taken care of within a few minutes.

    Philip came back running to Sam, who is sitting on the roof of the sky scr.a.p.er with the rest of his beasts.

    He missed them for the past few months. At least, he didn¡¯t lock them up inside the tower.

    "Sam, what is inside that liquid? the troops arepletely done in an instant."

    "Did you record everything?"

    "Of course, I did."

    "Send the recording to Arc. Call him through themunication tower and y it in front of him. Tell him all the affects you have seen and ask him to send the news to the thunder god temple."

    "Sam don¡¯t you think there will be problems that arise due to the major powers. What if they want the liquidpletely?"

    "What is the point? They don¡¯t have any use for it after the war. Even if they want to cash in with this liquid, we have to see if they want an extra enemy other than the Old one at a time like this.

    We are not just some youth who are trying to make it Philip. We are already established. We might not directly make any difference in this war with our fists alone, but it is apletely different ball game if they want toe and knock on our front door.

    I don¡¯t know about the rest of the world, but I can assure you of one thing no matter who it is in the world, they wouldn¡¯t be able to kill us within this city. Even if we have to die, I will take down three Consummate realm cultivators with us.

    We don¡¯t have to be afraid of anyone, at this moment, we are doing them a favour. Let us hope they are at least a bit grateful, otherwise I do have my ways to deal with them."

 Chapter 360: Pinning Suspicions

    For the next four days, the war in the western continent cooled downpletely. Sam sent the Barrels of liquid to the remaining cities through the train service and within a week, almost all the cities got the barrels with the liquid and the followers turned into meat on the chopping block for them to kill as easily as they can.

    On the fourth day, someone visited Sam¡¯s city.

    Sam is expecting one of them sooner than this and that person is Arc, but he only came now, but judging from the guest he brought, he could understand the dy.

    The guest who came is none other than Moriya, the leader of the Nascent stage cultivators within the thunder god temple.

    When Sam got the news that Arc and Moriya both visited, he asked an attendant to direct them to a meeting room within the skyscr.a.p.er.

    "Hello, how are you doing?" Sam greeted both of them as soon as he entered the meeting room.

    After exchanging some polite pleasantries, Moriya directly came to the point.

    "How did you get that liquid?"

    "Oh, I made that myself."

    "You made it yourselves? But even the Pill masters and the Potion masters of the Six major powers are nowhere near developing a cure for those pills, and from what we know, you are not supposed to be in a health condition good enough to conduct extensive research..."

    "So, what do you want to say by pointing out all this? Do you think I stole it from you or do you think I stole the idea from one of your refiners?"

    "That¡¯s not what I meant..."

    "Then what do you mean Mr. Moriya? Just because the people you hired don¡¯t have a solution, do you want the rest of the world to be sitting ducks?

    Whether you believe it or not, this is something I made with my very own efforts.

    Anyway, sometimes it is not necessary to find the cure for the main cause, there are many other ways, if the person who wants a solution is flexible enough."

    Sam really became angry at Moriya¡¯s question. He doesn¡¯t know what he wanted to achieve from asking those questions about how he got his hands on the liquid, it might be trying to pin Sam as an acquaintance of the Old one and make him an aplice to the war.

    This way, ording to their plot, Sam would be desperate and deliver all the liquid and recipe for free just to clear his name.

    But the thunder god temple or any other power who is behind this clearly underestimated Sam.

    Sam stood up from his chair as he adjusted his clothes and said.

    "I am sorry. I don¡¯t think I can help you with anything and I don¡¯t want to help you with anything now that you seem to have some doubts. I hope that you go back and clear your doubts ande back to discuss.

    But after this, I highly doubt we have anything useful to discuss between us."

    With those words, Sam was about to leave the room, but Arc stopped him and said.

    "Sam, I am sure Moriya didn¡¯t mean what he said, you can understand the situation, right? Please don¡¯t be like that."

    Arc then looked at Moriya and tried to gesture something with his eyes.

    Sam looked at both of them and said.

    "I will give you guys some privacy, while I deal with something. After Ie back, we can discuss, that is if we really have something to discuss."

    With those words, Sam left the room leaving the duo alone.

    "What is wrong with you Moriya?" Arc couldn¡¯t hide the frustration in his voice.

    Moriya also sighed and said. "What do you want me to do? I have orders to follow."

    "I don¡¯t know what kind of orders you have and what goals they have in mind, but trust me. Don¡¯t try to push your luck too much in front of him. His brain is too sharp and lethal to allow that and you would be creating a new enemy and I don¡¯t have to tell you how bad it would be for you to make him an enemy.

    Because, I only heard details about the Beast faction, but I am sure you knew more than I do.

    Just because, he is away from the scene for a few months, you cannot just forget what he is capable of doing.

    In fact, if he really disappeared for a few months, I would bother about what he was nning all this while.

    Just give what he wants and take what you need."

    Moriya exerted a long sigh.

    Even he felt that this whole farce is stupid. His orders are simple and that is to pin some suspicions on Sam.

    And why would they do that? To avoid the price they have to pay for what Sam would bring to the war. But that is just in greed and tant underestimation of Sam¡¯s intelligence.

    When he was talking to those higherups there is one thing he noticed from them and that is they are clearly underestimating Sam due to his age and cultivation. Even the loss of the beast faction was simply attributed to the carelessness and stupidity of the Beast faction themselves, Sam¡¯s role was downyed.

    And there is one reason for that happening and that is one of the basic qualities of the people, they tend to judge people by their own standards, all the higher-ups have only one thing in mind.

    ¡¯Will they be able to do that when they were at Sam¡¯s age?¡¯ when their answer is no, they would think that what happened is a load of bullshit and there is no way to convince their in stupidity and selective ignorance.

    Meanwhile, within the central continent. A group of people is running around and the one in the lead is none other than the former head of the Beast faction, Sanjay¡¯s father.

    He is leading a group of six transcendent stage cultivators as he explored the central continent bit by bit.

    He has been doing this since the day Old one was confirmed to be the leader of the church.

    There are four more teams just like this that are sent to the central continent. They are here because they wanted to find the ce where the old one and the rest of his team are staying.

    The human explored area within the central continent is not vast and the ces they had to explore also not enormous.

    Apart from that the Fortune tower, which specializes in fortune telling is also trying to see where the future crux of the war lies and where it all starts, but since Old one is too strong, even the tower head of the fortune tower is having a hard time showing an exact location, but he did give an area of manageable space for them to explore.

    As for the help of the Seer tower, it waspletely out of their hands, more than half of the Seer tower¡¯s higher-ups are missing from the Judgement tests. Half of the experts of the Seer tower are in Old one¡¯s hands.

    Apart from that there more than half of the higher ups of the Space gate association and had too much ess to the rest of the world, they knew that it is hard to fight with Old one in this way and they are trying to find his hideout.

    There are not many ces that are unexplored in the world and except for the central continent, there is no better ce for hiding.

    As Sanjay¡¯s father is searching for the ce for a few days, he almost covered the entire region and there is only a small area left for them to search.

    After more than an hour, they finally reached a seashore and the scene at the shore shocked him.

    There are a lot of followers who are gathered around some tforms on which various people are sitting with their faces covered with golden masks.

    There are more than thirty Transcendent stage high priests who are absorbing the strength of the followers one by one.

    The followers who are absorbed are turning into undead and all the undead are being sent to various space gates that are near them.

    Sanjay¡¯s father who is looking at the whole scene from far away is having a hard time digesting the matter.

    From what he understood, all these transcendent cultivators are trying to be consummate realm cultivators.

    He wanted to make a move and end some of them while, they are still unprepared, but to his dismay, he saw something even more horrible.

    There are four people who are wearing the golden masks who came out of the tents and their aura shocked him.

    They are all already turned into Consummate realm cultivators.

    All this while, they thought that there was only one Consummate realm cultivator and that is why Old one is dragging the battle.

    But from the looks of it, he understood that Old one is not looking for an endurance battle. He is just looking for the new followers so that he could sessfully ascend the rest of his high priests to be Consummate realm cultivators.

    As he was thinking about what sort of consequences they have to face, if this happened, one of the consummate realm cultivators, sensed his presence and looked towards him.

    Sanjay¡¯s father immediately turned around and started running as he signaled the transcendent realm cultivators who are at the rear to run as well.

 Chapter 361: Deal

    Sanjay¡¯s father didn¡¯t hesitate to take out his beast as he made his escape. A Wyvern came out of nowhere and its enormous wingspan even shocked the rest of the transcendent cultivators who followed him.

    He didn¡¯t leave them to curb though. The main reason for taking his beast out is for this, the Wyvren has enough space on its back to fit fifteen people.

    He started picking up each and every person within the group and made sure they stayed stable on the back.

    Meanwhile, the four Consummate realm high priests started following him by foot and they leaped over one tree after another.

    The whole seashore which was extremely silent and tranquil has turned extremely chaotic.

    Sanjay¡¯s father looked back to make sure that they are not catching up. He is not afraid to fight it out with them since he noticed that their auras are that of early-stage Consummate realm cultivators.

    He is extremely confident that with his limiter lifted, he would be able to deal with these four no problem. But his instinct is telling him not to pick a fight at this ce and move as fast as he can.

    His instincts would never lie to him. That is what he believed and made his escape.

    As he was flying away, he saw Old oneing out of one of the tents in an extremely calm manner.

    It looked like he is not at all fazed by the fact that someone found out his hideout.

    Even from theyout which has no restrictions and such, Sanjay¡¯s father felt like he is not even trying to hide the whole camp.

    And that expression on his face only reinforced his belief.

    Coincidentally, the location is not far off from a Space gate that leads to the meeting point of the Six major powers and he would be able to move on the Wyren in a day and he can use that Space gate to visit the meeting point to report the situation.

    Meanwhile, on the western continent.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know that the person who wanted to kill him the most is the one that found the ce of the enemy??sir and is even running away from there to report the situation.

    He came back after a short break to meet Moriya and Arc who are extremely silent and there are no signs of them having any conversation whatsoever.

    "Are you ready to have some proper conversation now, or are you still thinking of ways to guilt trip me into giving you some free benefits?"

    "We can talk properly."

    Moriya said as he took a deep breath.

    "Okay now, I know the situation is difficult at this moment and the major powers are all in abined crisis. From what I guess, within a week, the war will reach its final stages, there is a huge possibility that the Old one is only biding his time to make his subordinates absorb the followers so that he would have high-level cultivators enough to challenge the six major powers.

    For that, there is only one way to stop them and that is trying to find their hide out and try to get stop the process.

    I don¡¯t know if you guys even tried to find his hideout, but if you really did find out, then I can give you the chance to render all the followers useless, you can make sure that they wouldn¡¯t be able to finish the process of creating a bunch of Consummate realm cultivators and you can take it from there.

    What are you willing to pay for this to happen?"

    Sam said all this in a single breath.

    "What do you want? Just be straight forward."

    "I need thunder god temple¡¯s protection."

    "What do you mean?"

    "I need thunder god temple to protect me from the rest of the world, I know the Beast faction will be targeting me from now and even if the rest of the major powers are not showing any interest now due to the crisis, I am pretty sure they are interested in me since the Beast faction incident.

    I want the thunder god temple, to hinder them from sending all those people who will target me. It is not that I am afraid, but there is no need for me to fight over all the pesky flies thate to disturb me.

    I want zero interference from any of the major powers or minor powers that are rted to the Central continent and their surroundings."

    "Just that?" Moriya asked in surprise.

    "Of course not. I want these items too."

    Sam took out a list of items that need to be delivered. Moriya looked at the list and his eyes widened in disbelief.

    "You are not kidding, right? They are signature resources of the six major powers, there is no way they would be willing to give you this much amount of these things."

    "Of course, I am not kidding. Do I look like I am kidding to you? Of course, you don¡¯t have to give me those items for you to give me for free. I will be exchanging some of my products to them for half the amount and I will be giving another half of the amount in spirit stones."

    "You want to pay for all these?"

    Moriya is really shocked this time because he never expected Sam to offer for paying anything. In fact, the six major powers all got ready to be fleeced by Sam, that is why they are trying to y the petty tricks of pinning mes and suspicions on Sam.

    But Sam never intended to take too many things from them. He was even ready to pay for the things. That is because he has seen first hand what a major power can do. All this while, he stayed in the thunder god temple, he understood what a major power is capable of doing.

    He can, of course, take advantage of the major powers, but there is no way he would be unscathed from the fleecing he could do. That is why he is nning to take any form of materialistic gains. Rather he would use this to get them to sell the things that would normally be impossible to get his hands on.

    "Of course, I am not going to pay you a full market price, I want them at the cost price, maybe I can bear a little cost and give ten percent profit." Sam continued after speaking till now.

    Moriya was still stunned by this fact and didn¡¯t know how to react for a moment and only came to his senses after listening to Sam¡¯s words.

    "I think I can agree to this, but provided you will pay for the resources you are going to buy."

    He said as he looked at Sam.

    "Of course, the cost is a bit huge. We can do the deal in batches. I will provide the money and the products that I am going to exchange in three installments and I would expect you guys to do the same.

    If you are down for that, then we have a deal."

    "What do you mean to deal, we didn¡¯t discuss the whole thing about how much liquid you are going to give?"

    "Why bother discussing? I am going to supply as much as you want and will send it to you through the Space gate you guys are building in the woods."

    Suddenly, Moriya stopped in his train of thoughts and looked at Sam in disbelief. He felt extremely vignt and his face turned red. He started looking around as became highly alert.

    "How do you know?"

    He knew about the Space gate that was being constructed. In fact, the thunder god temple has hired the Space gate association to do that a long time ago and it was even being constructed underground.

    Arc was also kept in the dark because these people are sent along with Moriya and Arman. The only reason for the Space gate not being constructed was due to the war thing. They are suspicious of the people from the Space gate association with all the war happening.

    Currently, those people are staying within Sam¡¯s city in the guise of visitors.

    He never expected that Sam would know all of this, even when he is not in the scene for a few months.

    This is an extremely secret operation.

    "Don¡¯t get too surprised, I knew about it as soon as I woke up. We just let them be just because we don¡¯t see any threat from this Space gate, in fact, this is quite beneficial to me.

    You don¡¯t have to keep it a secret anymore. I would even give you an area within the city if you want."

    "No need."

    Moriya rejected immediately. He doesn¡¯t know how to take this, he felt like they should reevaluate Sam again.

    Sam passed a Spatial ring and said to Moriya.

    "I suggest you use them in the front lines and take them by surprise, from my guess, in the next week, the transcendent stage cultivators will attack the Major powers and you guys wouldn¡¯t be able to stop it unless you find their hideout."

 Chapter 362: Finding the Hideout

    After taking the liquid Moriya and Arc left the meeting room. Arc hurried to return to the Imperial capital, but Moriya didn¡¯t go.

    He stayed in the hotel as he supervised the Space gate construction in the woods nearby.

    The Space gate was actually not hard to construct provided that there are all the materials avable. And they have all the materials and almost finished the work prior to the war. But due to the war, they were asked to stop this construction and now that the suspicions are mostly cleared, they finished the construction within a day.

    Moriya used the newly constructed Space gate to go back to the thunder god temple.

    The Space gate near Sam¡¯s city was there for them to have easy ess to the ce so that they can keep watch over it and from the looks of it, there seemed to be too many encounters with Sam and the Space gate would be useful.

    After reaching the thunder god temple, Moriya immediately went to the meeting spot of the central continent through another Space gate.

    There the heads of the six major powers are already waiting for his report.

    By now, all these people knew who Sam was and they even understood what kind of person he was. In the beginning, they only sent people to get Shadow¡¯s sword from Sam. But they never took him seriously due to his age and cultivation.

    And now, they are forced to concentrate on him due to the war.

    Moriya, quickly exined the details of the deal and the six heads frowned at this. They didn¡¯t expect that Sam wouldn¡¯t try to fleece them and instead use this chance to only get ess to the materials.

    This is a new thing for them. If any of them were in Sam¡¯s position, they would have taken full advantage of the situation and fleeced the Six major powers, they would have gotten their hands-on high-level herbs, pills, medicines, cultivation resources or techniques, and so on.

    But they now realized that they are judging people by their standards too much and realized their mistake.

    Sam¡¯s conditions are quite eptable to them. Not only will they get their hands on the liquid that hinders the followers, but they also don¡¯t have to lose too many resources to pay for them. They will be getting money in equivalent exchange. Of course, they wouldn¡¯t be able to make extra profit. But they are still not making any loss.

    After some initial surprise, they started discussing on how to deal with the followers and where to use this liquid and at this moment, another Space gate was activated and Former Beast faction head and Sanjay¡¯s father came out of it along with his beast.

    Both the man and the beast are injured and they seemed to have been through a great battle.

    The rest of transcendent cultivators are nowhere to be seen.

    "Sravan. What happened to you?" Sanjay¡¯s uncle the current beast faction head asked as he ran towards him.

    Sravan was panting hard and said in a painful voice.

    "We found the hideout and prepared to escape, we even ran away as fast as we can, but there was an ambush waiting for us and we are not able to escape.

    The transcendent stage cultivators, couldn¡¯t take the attacks and they all died and some of them fled in random directions within the woods."

    He stopped talking for a second and tried to take deep breaths as he held the wound on his right abdomen tightly.

    "What is the situation at their hideout?"

    Thunder god temple head asked in a serious tone.

    "They have a lot of high priests and there seemed to be arge ritual going there for converting all the high-priests into Consummate realm cultivators.

    They have Space gates that are connected to various minor powers and major powers through which they are sending their troops.

    The followers who are injured and became unable to fight, areing back and joining thisrge ritual.

    There are more than thirty high priests who are slowly absorbing the followers and they are increasing their cultivation as we speak.

    Currently, there are around Seven Consummate realm cultivators no including the Old One."

    Everyone went to a deep thought after listening to this. The situation is actually graver than they thought.

    All this while, they are still a bit rxed about the war because they are sure that Old one doesn¡¯t have many Consummate realm cultivators by his side.

    Even if all the six major powers and the major associationsbined, they are around twenty-five consummate realm cultivators in the world.

    It is not easy to break through to the stage and they felt that the high priests are also having a hard time breaking through to this stage.

    But while they are contemting things, the other party already arranged things and even got ready to make big moves.

    "What should we do about this situation?" One of them broke the Ice as he spoke and the discussion began.

    After getting enough details from Sravan, they learned that all the followers are gathered in one ce. So, they decided to attack the ce and use the liquid on the followers so that they can stop the high priests from ascending, they are extremely confident that as long as the thirty of them are not Consummate realm cultivators, there is no need for them to be afraid.

    While they are making preparations and assembling a team to send them to that ce, on the other side of the Space gate from which Sravan escaped.

    The Consummate realm cultivators who ambushed Sravan are feeling a bit disappointed at the fact that they missed their target and already made their way back to their hideout.

    Meanwhile, in the hideout, another Consummate realm cultivator is asking the Old one about what to do.

    "Boss, he escaped. The Six major powers will now know of our hideout."

    The old one is looking at the Sea as he stood on the beach.

    "Let them know, what would be the issue? We are going to be done in a week and if they don¡¯t make it in this week, there is nothing they would be able to do after that week. Just close the Space gate for the week, they wouldn¡¯t be able to find a way toe here and we will open it after the week for us to go there."

    "But what if they find another way toe here?"

    "What can they do in a week? Even if they travel on beasts, they wouldn¡¯t be able to reach this ce. They would need a Consummate realm beast at middle-stage to make it here in a week. And the requirement only goes up if they want toe faster."

    "Okay, Boss. We will close off the Space gate now."

    Meanwhile, in the meeting spot, a team of ten consummate realm cultivators was formed and they are nning to visit the hideout. But before that, they sent half of the liquid to the other minor powers so that they could pressure their church by reducing their troops at the frontlines.

    The team will be visiting the hideout and use this liquid to deal with the ritual of the thirty transcendent cultivators turning into Consummate realm cultivators.

    But they also noticed that the Space gate was closed off a while ago. But the current beast faction head Sai, still reassured them about going there.

    He is the one leading the team with Sravan in tow to show them the exact location.

    After the team was formed, the rest of the major powers are extremely nervous and anxious as they thought about the ways to go there as fast as they can.

    They don¡¯t know about the deadline of the week, but they do know that theter they go, the more Consummate realm cultivators will be ready.

    After that, the team of ten who are supposed to raid the hideout made their move and started walking deeper into the woods.

    After walking for more than an hour, they halted in their tracks because of what appeared in front of them.

    There is arge Finch with golden feathers sleeping under a humongous tree.

    The aura the bird releasing is not that intimidating to them, because they are also Consummate realm, but the presence of the bird near their meeting spot and them not knowing it made things somewhat weird for them.

    They are reevaluating themselves as they thought about their safety.

    This beast is a Golden finch and it is actually an early stage Cosummate realm beast, but the speed of this bird is already invincible even among the Middle-stage consummate realm beasts.

    The Golden Finch, has very few attacking abilities due to itsck of strength, and its talons on beak are not as strong as other birds of the same level, but the speed of the bird is not something other birds can catch up to.

    Sai looked at the rest of the team and said.

    "He is the one that is taking us there. I think we will be able to reach the ce within a few days."

 Chapter 363: Attack on the Hide out

    The Space gate association. The Church is attacking them currently with extra manpower and the war is in full heat.

    Even though the battle is still at the level of Grand realm cultivators and Nascent stage cultivators, there is a huge number of casualties every day.

    "What is the situation? What did the heads of the major power say?" The Grand Elder of the association asked the leader of the association, who just came from the meeting point.

    "How is the situation on our end? How long do you think we canst?" The head asked as he fiddled with a Spatial ring.

    "What do you mean, how long we canst? Why are you not answering my question?"

    "I don¡¯t know what to do. I went to the meeting spot to ask for assistance, but all the major powers did is hand me over some kind of liquid. They said that we have to spray the liquid all over the church followers and we would be free of trouble.

    I don¡¯t know if this thing works, but I have zero belief that a simple liquid can change the course of the war. If we don¡¯t deal with these people as soon as we can, the pre-transcendent cultivators, will turn into transcendent stage cultivators, and at the same time, the transcendent stage cultivators of the church mighte and join the war here from the ces they already won."

    "Why are you so pessimistic, who knows it might actually work."

    "What do you mean it will work? They said that it was made by a Grand realm cultivator from the western continent. What can a youngster do that even the pill masters and potion masters of the association are helpless."

    "I don¡¯t understand why you are being so down? Do you really think that the major powers are nuts? Why would they give this, if they really don¡¯t trust that guy and his creation?"

    The head fell silent for a while and said.

    "I am sorry. It is just that the major powers are still too suspicious of us. I feel like they are brushing us off with this liquid thing, they didn¡¯t even bother to fill me in with the situation regarding the hideout search."

    "Come on, they wouldn¡¯t do that to us. Why would they brush us off? it is true that they are suspicious, that is because half of the Space gate association betrayed us defected to the Old one.

    What do you expect?"

    In fact, it is not that they don¡¯t want to fill in the situation to them, it is just they are busy assembling the team and sending them to the hideout to stop the break throughs.

    They are in an extreme hurry to deal with the issue at hand, they don¡¯t have time to exin the liquid and all the findings they had from the exploration.

    But the suspicions are real too. Half of an association has betrayed, there is no way they wouldn¡¯t be suspicious.

    The head of the association sent the liquid to the frontline soldiers.

    Actually, he was just overthinking things because he was on tenterhooks since the start of the war.

    But as soon as he received the battle report, he almost freaked out.

    The whole follower poption waspletely done for within an hour. All the followers who came into contact with the liquid, the battle is almost finished within a few minutes.

    The reaction is a lot slower than when they used it on the followers that attacked the western continent.

    That is because the followers are of a high-level. But they are still losing the vitality within half-an-hour.

    The same situation repeated within all the battlefields of the minor powers and some major powers.

    The followers who are supposed to drag their battle for a week arepletely gone within a single day.

    In the next four days, the same things repeated within the whole.

    On the fourth day, at the hideout.

    Old one is looking at the beach, but there is a look of frustration apparent on his face, the high priest who was also a consummate realm cultivator is giving him the battle report.

    The losses are extremely high and more than half of their current followers turned into old men on death bed.

    "What is wrong? How can the situation turn into this within four days? The losses are humungous.

    The followers on the front line arepletely gone."

    Old one asked his subordinate through gritted teeth.

    "What do you want us to do? Do you still want me to send the followers to the Western continent?"

    "Nope, we cannot afford to divide the soldiers at this moment. We have to halt the high-level cultivators from battling for another three days at least. We are at a critical juncture and we need the lower level cultivators to battle to drag the time."

    Both of them turned silent for a moment and Old one spoke.

    "Call the troops that are stationed within the empires. We have to halt them for the three days no matter the cost, they already knew our location and since we have enough followers for the thirty people to absorb, halt the Pre-transcendent cultivators from absorbing and send them to the minor powers."

    "Boss, is it really necessary to do this? We can just halt our attacks for now. We don¡¯t know what they are using to deal with the troops. If we send the troops and they are also gone, we would be losing so many troops.

    We can let some Nascent stage cultivators can absorb them and we will have Pre-transcendent stage cultivators and even some transcendent stage cultivators."

    "No. We can¡¯t do that. If we don¡¯t send the troops, all the advancement till now will be wasted. I don¡¯t want to give them time to think. Since they already saw us and know our n, there is no way we can let them have the time and space to think about what our next move is.

    I have to keep them busy for this week so that they wouldn¡¯t n something to think of our future n. There is also a chance that once we don¡¯t send more troops they might speed up the journey to the hideout and use the same trick on the troops here, the breakthrough would be stopped."

    "But sir, they could have already sent some other people to do that."

    "You are right, but they are eithering on foot or on a beast, and the war has to go on so that we can figure out a way to counter that before theye here with whatever they are using."

    Old one said one more time and this time his voice is a lot colder.

    The subordinate also understood that he asked too many questions and Old one is not interested in exining things to him.

    So, he started making arrangements to move the troops from the empires and send them to the minor powers and major powers.

    Old one still stood on the beach. His eyes are red and he clenched his fists in exasperation.

    "Who interfered in this war? Damn it, don¡¯t let me find you."

    While he was thinking to himself on how to proceed further, the space gates are being activated nonstop as the followers are being sent from empires to the Minor powers.

    At this moment, the bodies of some of the followers who died due to the liquid were brought to his tent and Old one went to examine them.

    "How could anyone find the cure for the undead gue? It is impossible to find any cure in the lower realms."

    He started examining the bodies and within an hour, the subordinate came back again and said.

    "They seem to be using a liquid to deal with the troops, this is what I could gather from the battlefield."

    He ced some liquid in a small ss container on the table.

    The liquid is muddy and there are signs of sand particles within it. One look and anyone could understand that it was squeezed out of the soil.

    Old one started doing experiments as soon as he got the liquid in his hands.

    After a few hours, he has some details about the liquid.

    "This is not a cure for the undead gue. This is just a vitality disturber, but why can¡¯t I identify the key ingredients? I could only guess that the key ingredient has a fire element in it and frost grass juice was added to it to neutralize that.

    Whoever made this is an absolute nutcase."

    As he was talking to himself.

    *BOOM*

    An explosion urred and he came back to his senses.

    When he came out of the tent, he noticed that the Golden finch flying on the horizon and the clouds started forming all over the sky.

    From the clouds, the golden brown liquid started raining on the followers and the high priests who are in the middle of the ritual.

    "Damn it. Who was the one that could tame a Golden finch? They are not supposed to be here within this week."

    As he was cursing his bad luck, he noticed that the followers in the middle of the ritual started aging and he knew that the situation is turning from bad to worse.

 Chapter 364: Battling Old One

    Old one felt a bitter taste as he looked at the followers dying one by one under the rain.

    As he looked at it, he noticed that even the high priests and the priests are having effects on themselves and their skin started aging.

    Even though their cultivations are high, there is still some damage. The Golden Finch dropped the ten Consummate cultivators and escaped into the woods.

    It doesn¡¯t want to involve in the battles and only came to repay a favour for Sai.

    "Thank you. Gold. I appreciate your help." Sai looked towards the flying bird and yelled.

    Then he looked at the remaining Consummate realm cultivators who are all preparing their attacks.

    One of them has his hand pointing towards the sky, he is a person from the herb garden and he is the one who is controlling the rain of the liquid.

    All ten of them have faint spiritual energy shielding them from the rain. They don¡¯t know what the contents of the liquid are, but they felt like it is not a good thing to be absorbed into the skin excessively.

    They don¡¯t understand another thing too, this liquid was being easily defended against with a thin shield of spiritual energy, but it is still having such an effect on these followers and even the priests and high priests.

    This doesn¡¯t make any sense. Only Sam and the Old one understood that this is because of thepleteck of spiritual energy within their bodies. They are nothing but physically strong beings if we put it bluntly.

    They are not even cultivators.

    Old one is looking as the rain started falling.

    Sai and the rest of the team are looking at the tforms to count the number of high priests and they seemed to be only twenty of them remaining.

    That means, around ten members broke through the Consummate realm.

    But they didn¡¯t have to wait much longer to confirm it. By the time they finished counting, they were already surrounded by the high priests wearing masks.

    They could judge from their auras which are the same as early-stage Consummate realm cultivators.

    The ten cultivators are not even fazed by the show of power, they are surrounded by fifteen high priests and Old one is standing a short distance away.

    Sai made eye contact with Old one, who is gritting his teeth in anger.

    He could understand how he feels. All the effort he put into and all the things he had done to wage the war, it was all a farce to buy time, so that he can create these thirty or so consummate realm cultivators, but the Six major powers sessfully managed to stop his ns.

    From the looks of it, there is nothing he can do about the rain, other than killing the person who is controlling it, but when he looked at the person, he knew that the battle is not going to be an easy one.

    The line-up is too strong.

    But deep down there is a small hope within him saying that if he can finish off these ten people, it would be a lot easier for him to deal with the rest of the major powers.

    With a single hand gesture, the attacks started.

    The high priests who have the same strength as the initial stage Consummate realm cultivators started attacking the ten men team at the same time.

    But their movements are a bit forced and sluggish, Sai and the rest noticed this as soon as they moved.

    Initially, they didn¡¯t care, but as the battle progressed, they noticed that the rain is even affected the high priests.

    That¡¯s right, unlike the followers who immediately started aging and dying with the liquid and priests and high priests at pre-transcendent and transcendent realm cultivators, who started showing signs of aging and weakness, the Consummate level high priests are showing only faint sluggishness which was improving with the constant contact from the liquid.

    Sai and the team felt extremely thankful to Sam at this moment and there was an extremely bright grin on their faces.

    Their fight was bing easier than they thought.

    But at this moment, they suddenly felt a sense of crisis and that came from the person they least expected to act at this moment.

    The old one, looked at the ten people as he slowly stepped forward. His whole body is covered in Dark orange mes as he made his way towards the battle.

    He is a Late-stage Consummate realm cultivator.

    Out of ten people that came only three of them arete-stage Consummate realm cultivators and as for the rest of them, four are middle stage Consummate and the remaining three are initial stage cultivators.

    It seemed like an easy fight considering the fact that the opponents are barely initial stage Consummate cultivators who just broke through.

    In fact, it is actually true for the most part as they are having an upper-hand in the battle.

    But it is a whole different if the Old one joins in. Because, although he is also ate-stage cultivator he is at Level-9 which is the highest stage of cultivation this has ever seen.

    That is what they sensed from the aura Old one is releasing. In fact, this even surprised Sai and others.

    "When did you breakthrough?" Sai asked in surprise.

    "It has been a while." The old one answered without any expression.

    "Why are you doing all this? With your cultivation you are the strongest man on the, why bother going through all this? Can¡¯t you just stay on the top unbothered with all these things?"

    Sai asked with a faint trace of irritation.

    But Old one only smiled and said.

    "What do you know about my plight? I might be the strongest on the, but this is as far as I can reach. No one might be my opponent with my cultivation, but that is the word a decade ago.

    Because I was being worn down by the greatest opponent I couldn¡¯t possibly win and that is time. How old do you think I am? I am from the same generation as your grandfather, you weren¡¯t even born when I was a nascent stage cultivator, trying to get a position within the headquarters of the association.

    Even the Ancestor of the Beast faction has to address me as Big brother when I see him.

    But what is all of it worth if I cannot stay alive?

    I lived for centuries but this is not enough, I want to live more, but that is not possible staying within this. This is the limit, there is a constraint of energy and resources that stop me from advancing.

    I wanted to wait and find away, but I am reaching the end of my lifespan. All the injuries I .u.mted from the battle and all the perilous situations my soul has endured, it cannot take it anymore.

    I am on verge of dying, even with my cultivation level being superior, I am getting weaker. I am not even confident that I can fight the three of unless I go all out.

    That is why I wanted to take this step.

    The Undead gue, I found this pill form from some ancient remains when I was searching for escaping from my plight. I didn¡¯t want to use this at first, but a few years ago, I couldn¡¯t see any other way. I either have to travel to the higher realms or find a resource that is big enough to give me enough vitality to live long enough time to find a way to go to higher realms.

    That is why I started this undead gue.

    The main aim of this pill is to increase self-cultivation while creating an undead army.

    But from the looks of it, my n is also on verge of failing."

    The old one went on and on as he felt lost in his own thoughts, he seemed to have been holding this up for quite a while.

    Sai and the other twote-stage cultivators stood in front of him as they started raising their auras.

    "Enough talk, let us just start." Old one spoke and the dark orange mes started flying all over.

    The three on one battle was extremely intense as they fought to their tooth and nail.

    The three of them are Level-7 and two of them are Sai and Sravan.

    As they are fighting, Sravan suddenly remembered something and felt like they missed some people.

    He looked around and didn¡¯t find the ones he is looking for.

    It is none other than the people that ambushed him and his transcendent team.

    "Sai, three middle-stage Consummate realm cultivators are missing."

    He yelled in the middle of the battle.

    Arge streak of fire hit him in the back and threw him into the air and Old one¡¯s voice came from behind.

    "Where did you even get the time to worry about others? But it is the right thing to do."

    As he spoke the three middle-stage cultivators came out of nowhere and made a triangle formation around the four of them.

    "They are actually my support and now it seems like a fair fight."

    Sai started panting hard as he looked at the three of them who surrounded them.

    "I didn¡¯t want to use this, but you leave me no choice."

    With that, he waved his hand and a Wyvern appeared out of nowhere. It is almost the same size as that of Sravan¡¯s. But Sravan¡¯s is an Ice-type while Sai¡¯s is a fire type.

    Not only that, Sai closed his eyes and his energy levels started raising.

    He removed the limiter.

 Chapter 365: Old One escapes

    Sai removed the limiter on himself and his Wyvern started roaring towards the sky.

    The surrounding raindrops of the liquid are evaporating due to the excess heating from its body.

    Sai looked at the Wyvern and thetter nodded its giant head as it extended its wings and made its move.

    In a single leap, it caught one of the middle-stage cultivators with its mouth and flew away so that it could reduce the effort of its master.

    Sai looked at Sravan who is still not doing anything and frowned. Sravan also noticed his expression and immediately started taking action.

    He let out his Wyvern too and soon enough the temperature of their surroundings started dropping. He also removed the limiter on himself.

    The new Wyvern also did the same thing as thest one and took away another cultivator.

    Now, the fight became three vs two.

    Old one had a deep frown on his forehead as he looked at the situation.

    "I should have expected this from the members of the beast faction. I overestimated myself a little."

    With that, he didn¡¯t halt and made his move. He started battling Sai and Sravan at the same time and the remaining e-stage cultivator is in a one on one with thest high priest who is a mid-stage cultivator.

    The battle slowly started tilting towards Sai and Sravan.

    But with this battle, they understood what Old one is saying. He is bing old and time is taking its toll on him, but he was not satisfied. He wanted to live more and thus made use of this undead gue.

    Even though, Old one has his cultivation level higher than them, due to the aging he wasn¡¯t able to deal with them.

    But he is still giving a tough fight though. The battle is extremely intense and cutthroat, that there is no way for them to win this in an instant. But the signs are showing that they would surely win in a long-term battle.

    All of a sudden, Old one got hit by Sravan on his back and blood started dripping from his mouth. Old one took out a pill and swallowed it, his back has argeceration with blood dripping all over. He was expecting it to start healing after he took the pill, but to his surprise, the wound was a bit frozen and although the bleeding stopped soon, the wound was still exposed openly making it a vulnerable target.

    He started surrounding himself with mes, but to his surprise, the ice is still not melting. He noticed that there are some peculiar qualities to the ice and looked at Sravan in askance.

    "Don¡¯t even bother trying to get out of that. It will take a lot of effort. That is a thousand-year frost essence. If not for your expertise in fire usage and experience in battles, you would have already frozen by now."

    Old one raised his eyebrows as he said.

    "You seem to have invested a lot in battling me. Too bad it will go to waste."

    With that, all of a sudden Old one extended his arms and started chanting some weird words. As if they were stunned by a taser, all the followers, priests, and high priests who are battling froze in an instant.

    They didn¡¯t even bother hiding and protecting themselves from the rain as they stood still.

    Sai and his team are extremely shocked and stunned at this moment.

    They didn¡¯t expect this move at all.

    "I only wanted to use this as ast resort, but you give me no choice."

    His power levels started raising and the frozen wound on his back suddenly started healing itself.

    The wrinkles on his face also disappeared slowly and his lean body gained some muscle mass.

    He is bing younger as they looked at him.

    "We cannot let him absorb all of thempletely, let us make our move."

    Sai called for the whole team and the ten members who are now free of opponents all surrounded the Old one directly.

    One of the ten, who happened to be the grand elder of the formation association made him move as he took out a formation disc.

    Arge glowing runic circle appeared around Old one and there are ten small circles within that runic circle indication the positions of the ten people.

    The ten people stood in each circle and they started infusing the energy into it.

    This is the trump card they prepared against any unexpected circ.u.mstances, they also had a thought that if by any chance Old one could absorb his subordinates, they knew it would make it hard for them to fight him.

    So, just to be sure, they made this arrangement, and now it seems like they are right to do so.

    Old one looked at the ten of them and his surroundings arepletely covered with Orange mes.

    Even his body started going through elemental fusion and soon he achieved the fire elemental fusion and his body turned into a mass of orange mes.

    He didn¡¯t use any fancy moves, in fact, he didn¡¯t use any moves for that matter, he just controlled the mes and they started forming a tornado around the group of ten trying to consume them with mes.

    They felt the intense heating from the mes and their robes started turning into ashes.

    At this moment, ten forms of energies that entered the circle started converging in the middle of the circle where Old one is standing and the ten energies formed a human silhouette that has a sword in his hands.

    There are many elements within thebined energy. Fire, Ice, water, wood, metal, Dark there are multiple people with the same energies and there are even two of them who are sword and saber users.

    The human silhouette conjured with the energy leaped into the air as it stabbed the sword into the chest of Old one with all the energies forming a chaotic state within his body.

    Old one conjured all his excess energy and started opposing the human silhouette.

    Both the energies shed and the collision of energies did a number on all eleven people involved.

    All of them are injured and Old one has the most injuries of all. But he was still able to neutralize an attack of ten other Consummate realm cultivators.

    Old one is in his weakest state and he is having a hard time standing straight.

    "How did you do all this?"

    Old one asked Sai.

    "What do you mean?"

    "Who came up with that liquid? Who made it?"

    Sai looked at the old man and could feel his weakness. There doesn¡¯t seem to be any immediate threat, he is also tired and wanted to recover some energy, so decided to make the small talk.

    "It is made by a Grand realm cultivator in a western continent."

    "What did you say?" Old one was extremely stunned. He would have been okay if it was created by a veteran pharmacist or even a senior cultivator. But never did he expect that a youngster is the bane of his n.

    "Yeah, you should have known about him. His name is Sam. The one who tore apart the Beast faction a few months ago."

    "That guy?"

    "Yes, you seemed to have sent your troops there, no?"

    "That guy who named a city after himself?" Old one didn¡¯t hear what Sai said next. He was still struck on the fact that his grand n was defeated by something a Grand realm cultivator created.

    In fact, with his cultivation level, he shouldn¡¯t even think of joining the war, he should be in his city and defend his city if he sent the troops.

    Who gave the guts for him to even involve in these affairs?

    If Old one really knew that Sam only did this so that he doesn¡¯t need to bother with the follower troops, one should wonder his reaction.

    Because, Sam¡¯s n since the start is not to involve in the war. It is actually simpler than that. His only aim is to find a way to deal with the followers and send it to the Six major powers.

    In that way, Old one wouldn¡¯t have any spare troops to deal with the western continent. The western continent is thest target on his list.

    If not for themoner base it has, he wouldn¡¯t even concentrate on that continent and now it seems like his involvement made it hard for himself and bit him in the back.

    "How did he evene up with this? When did hee up with this?"

    Old one asked seriously and Sai replied.

    "It is actually a few days ago, from what we knew he was recovering from the injuries for the past few months and as soon as he recovered, he was greeted by the attack from your troops, one thing led to another and this happened."

    Old one took a deep breath as he thought of what to do. His eyes turned colder and made a move.

    He didn¡¯t attack them, rather he ran towards the Space gates that lead to the six major powers.

    Sai and the rest didn¡¯t expect this and weren¡¯t able to react in time, before they knew it, Old one is already in a tent which has a Space gate leading to the thunder god temple.

 Chapter 366: Sams City Vs Old One- I

    Old one moved at his maximum speed he can reach in his current state.

    Just when Sai and his team are about to chase him, they realized they are not able to move. Old one looked at them from the tent and smiled.

    Sai looked around and saw some incense emitting some kind of smoke.

    He realized that they fell victim for the same hallucinogen, but this time they came prepared.

    All of them .u.mted the spiritual energy within their lungs and started sending the smoke that filled their lungs out of him forcefully.

    But Old one is already on his way to the thunder god temple. He entered the Space gate and appeared in one of the inds which is present in the outskirts of the thunder god temple¡¯s territory.

    This is one of the secret space gates he created to send the Consummate realm high priests to this ce after the whole absorption wasplete. But his n failed and now he is moving to find out the person who spoiled the n.

    After he entered the Thunder god temple, he made his way towards the Space gate ind.

    He knew that there is a Space gate to the western continent and the centuries of his presence gave him the opportunity for him to know theyout of most major powers.

    He reached the Space gate ind within a few minutes, because the ind that he arrived is quite near to that one.

    As soon as he came to the Space gate ind, he was greeted by some Nascent stage cultivators who are guarding the Space gates.

    He released his aurapletely and walked forward, the Nascent stage cultivators couldn¡¯t get handle the pressure and felt suffocated.

    "I want to go to Sam¡¯s city. Where is the gate leading to the western continent?"

    He asked in an overbearing tone.

    The Nascent stage cultivators didn¡¯t even make a noise, in fact they are unable to talk.

    Old one held on by the neck and asked.

    "Which Space gate should I use?"

    The guard raised his hand weakly as he pointed at the newly made Space gate. This Space gate leads to the woods near the Sam¡¯s city.

    Old one doesn¡¯t know that, although he did send soldiers to Sam¡¯s city and even attacked the city but he doesn¡¯t have enough informationwork to get the new information as soon as something happened.

    He walked towards the Space gate and looked at the person in charge of the Space gate and made his shiver in fright. He started depositing the spirit stones to send him to the western continent.

    As the Space gate activated, Sai arrived at the secret Space gate in the outskirts.

    They don¡¯t know what this ce is and didn¡¯t recognize it immediately.

    "Where are we?" Sravan asked in confusion.

    At this moment, they sensed the raging aura of Old one from there from the tracks he left when he travelled to the Space gate Ind.

    They followed the tracks and made their way towards the Space gate Ind.

    Only after they reached the Space gate Ind did they understand where they are, they recognised the ce by the uniforms that the guards wore.

    The guards are making picking themselves up as they felt relieved after the pressure was gone.

    But when they saw the new batch of peopleing, they felt their hearts tighten again.

    Sai asked about what happened and the guard sung like a bird about where Old one went.

    "You, go to the core region of the temple and inform the Grand elder that Old one is in western continent."

    Sai gave instructions to one of the guards and then looked at the team.

    More than half of them are badly injured by the collision of the energies.

    He doesn¡¯t know if they can take another Space gate journey and still fight. They need to recover a bit.

    "You guys stay here. We will go chase him and you recover until the Grand elderes here ande along with him."

    With that they got ready to go on the Space gate and the guard started making the preparations.

    Meanwhile, in the western continent, Old one is running towards the City after he appeared in the woods.

    The Sky scr.a.p.er is a dead giveaway.

    He reached the city within a few minutes.

    The city is sealed right now due to the war and the guards on the city wall are on high alert.

    When they looked at the Old man who is injured all over, they felt like this is extremely weird.

    They called and reported to their higherups and the news soon reached Philip.

    Philip immediately reported the situation to Sam.

    But Sam is already watching the Old man in the tower through the surveince screen.

    He just waned to go through the surveince of the whole city and he came across this situation.

    He watched the whole fiasco calmly without doing anything.

    Old one is looking at the formation restriction that was blocking him entry into the city.

    He looked at the city guards and said.

    "Bring the guy named Sam here, I don¡¯t have a lot of time."

    The guards didn¡¯t day anything, they just received the orders from higherups to not to do anything and just stay put.

    They also noticed that the spiritual energy waves around the Old man are extremely chaotic and high.

    Old one didn¡¯t ask them again and just walked forward.

    When he encountered the restriction, he extended his hand and sent a spiritual energy wave and the formation broke and he walked forward casually.

    At this moment, Sam finally made his move.

    He got on Harbinger as he shed past to the top floor and reached the roof.

    One the roof, there is a small room which couldn¡¯t look any more normal.

    Sam walked in and sat on the chair which is in the centre of the room and the chair has a helmet ced on it.

    He sat down and wore the helmet and it glowed with some runic patterns. Followed by that the whole room lit up with the runic patterns followed by the whole building.

    Philip and the rest of his friends are extremely astonished as they saw the whole building glowing with runic marks.

    Then they remembered something and went to their respective floors and took seat that they are supposed to take. This is what Sam exined to them when the city was built.

    "Attention everyone in the City."

    Sam started speaking and the whole city was resounded with those words.

    All the workers and the permanent citizens of the city including the city guards all looked towards the Sky scr.a.p.er.

    Sam¡¯s voice continued.

    "This is Sam. The person in charge of the city you are living in. As for why you are hearing my voice, it is because the city is under a crisis at the moment.

    The crisis is strong enough to wipe out everyone in the city. He is a dozen times stronger than Emperor of this continent."

    He paused a little and the citizens are already feeling anxious. They have some sort of blind trust in Sam that they didn¡¯t even suspect for a single second that he might be bullshitting.

    As they are thinking of what to do, they heard his voice again.

    "I can avert this crisispletely and for that I need your help. All you have to do is ce your hands on your nearest wall and inject your spiritual energy into it. Do not stop the spiritual energy flow no matter what happens."

    As soon as his words are finished everyone ran towards their nearest wall and started injecting their spiritual energy.

    All the walls and every structure started glowing with runic symbols.

    At the same moment, there is a quake in the earth as they looked towards the sky scr.a.p.ers.

    Around the sky scr.a.p.er some doors opened on the ground andrge pir came out of it.

    The pirs are made of energy cells and all of them are fully engraved with runic marks.

    All the runic marks on the structures started glowing and even the roads are glowing with weird patterns.

    The energy crystals started sending the energy towards the buildings.

    The huge ss sphere which appeared on the day Sam woke up appeared once again.

    Apart from that a lot of ss prisms appeared on the walls of the city and all the structures of the city.

    In the room, Sam closed his eyes and the veins on his head are throbbing.

    Old one looked at the city which was suddenly glowing in lights.

    He could sense arge amount of light elemental energy, Just as he was about to advance further, many light beams emerged from the ss sphere on top of the building and they are reflected all around the city through the prisms that are ced in certain positions.

    Old one watched as the light beams danced all over the city and before he knew it, the light beams formed a curtain around the city, restricting his ess.

    He extended his hand and ced his finger on the light curtain, but as soon as he ced his finger, he felt a burn and the flesh on his finger waspletely incinerated.

    He didn¡¯t expect that these light beams can even damage him.

    At this moment, the light curtain had some ripples and Sam¡¯s face appeared on it along with a loud voice apanying it.

    "Who are you? Old one or his subordinate?"

    Sam asked in an extremely calm voice.

 Chapter 367: Sams city Vs Old One II

    "Are you Old one or one of his subordinates?"

    Sam¡¯s voice might be loud but it sounded extremely calm.

    Old one looked straight into the eyes of Sam¡¯s face that appeared on the light curtain and said.

    "Old One."

    "Oh, so you are here for revenge, right?"

    "Who gave you guts to meddle in the affairs of the top dogs. Even the heads of the Major power treaded carefully throughout the war and you a pipsqueak who is still green behind his years just had to butt in and ruin my ns.

    How dare you do that?"

    Sam also looked at the man calmly, he is not fazed by the show of strength of the old man as he raised his aura, he is just looking at him as calm as a stillke.

    "All I needed is some determination. I am confident that I can save myself, my friends and my properties. It would have been troublesome to defend against the wave after wave of undead and brainless followers.

    As for meddling in the affairs to the top dogs and changing the course of war? In fact, you are the one who meddled in my affairs first, by sending troops to my city. If anything, you can only me yourself for what happened."

    Old one was furious at Sam¡¯s words, the Orange mes raged as he clenched his fists and jaw.

    He wanted to see Sam quivering in fear. Normally, that is what would have happened if a Grand realm cultivator came across a Consummate realm cultivator. No matter what, as far as Old one could see, the obstacles between him and Sam are only some formations.

    This shouldn¡¯t give Sam any sense of safety.

    But Sam is mocking him directly without a hint of dread.

    His ego took a big hit.

    After all these thoughts ran through his mind, he ounted Sam¡¯s guts to one thing and that is Ignorance.

    Yes, he ounted Sam¡¯s courage to stand up against him to his age and ignorance.

    Sam would haveughed at this because Old one should have heard the initial announcement of Sam to the citizens when he asked them to infuse spiritual energy within walls of the structures in the city.

    Old One is just finding excuses to satisfy his ego.

    But that is not the main point at this moment. Old One started making his move.

    This time, he didn¡¯t even bother trying to enter the city, he just extended his hands and the dark orange mes started conjuring at the edge of the formation.

    He just wanted to burn the whole city without even bother to enter it, all this to just vent his anger.

    But to his surprise, the light curtain is not allowing the mes to get past it. The defense of the city is stronger than he thought.

    Sam¡¯s face didn¡¯t even flicker on the screen.

    It is still intact.

    Old one was extremely frustrated.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is, the runes that appeared all over the city are glowing brighter than ever, the spiritual energy from the city was being gathered into the building.

    And the Sphere is glowing brighter than ever.

    The citizens are all panicking at the pace their spiritual energy is being drained from their bodies.

    Old one doesn¡¯t know the amount of fear he created in the citizens, as far as he knows, the formation and the light curtain is still stable and there is not a single sign of weakness in it.

    But he didn¡¯t stop, he just raised the intensity of mes and by this time, he started sweating and there are signs of pressure on his face.

    He just finished a huge battle against ten other consummate realm cultivators, he is in his weakest state.

    He can exert the strength of an Initial stage Consummate realm cultivator at most.

    But he is confident that he can use that strength to defeat Sam and his city.

    While Old one is estimating the strength of the light curtain, Sam is also looked at Old one trying to estimate his strength by observing the extent of his injuries.

    It is still hard for him with his current strength.

    But suddenly, Sam felt the aura of someone else in the direction of the Space gate.

    In fact, Sam doesn¡¯t have enough sensory level with his current strength to detect the people that far off.

    But the addition of the formation is something different. He made sure to enhance his sensory perception when he activated the formation and the perception is actually quite huge.

    Old one though, he doesn¡¯t need the formation to have the same level of perception. He looked towards the Space gate and his frown got deeper.

    "Seems like yourpany has arrived."

    Sam said calmly.

    Old one also knew that hispany has arrived and felt the need to get past the light curtain.

    He activated elemental fusion and became a fire elemental body as he forced his way into the light curtain.

    Even though he is an elemental body, it is still spiritual energy that made him like that and other spiritual energy attacks would make some damage, but the damage wouldn¡¯t be physical, rather it would consume his spiritual energy faster than usual.

    The light curtain proved it was not there for a show.

    The thickness of the light curtain is far higher than they could imagine and Old could feel the soul-searing heat even in his fire elemental body.

    The light beams are having their way with them.

    But he was extremely determined to cross it no matter what and he did so with determination.

    Sam who is sitting on the roof of the skyscr.a.p.er is observing the situation and just as Old one entered the center of the light curtain surrounded by light beams.

    He started concentrating, his veins almost looked as if they are ready to burst apart as the pressure on his brain increased.

    All the light beams which are in light golden color suddenly changed and turned green.

    They turned from normal concentrated light beams toser beams.

    Sam felt like his head is about to burst open, this is thergestser beam transformation he has ever done.

    He started bleeding from his nose, but he didn¡¯t give up, he held the armrest of the chair so hard that it started cracking.

    But at this moment, Old one who is inside the light curtain is the one suffering the most.

    The light beams which are already hard to bear suddenly turned denser, concentrated and the color change made it hard for him to bear.

    He halted in his trackspletely and didn¡¯t dare to take a step forward.

    Theser beams didn¡¯t stop though, every light beam that was just searing his elemental body earlier, suddenly made holes through it, his elemental body couldn¡¯t resist theser beams and just let them pass throughout of instinct.

    Now, Old one is only halfway through and if he dared to move forward or backward, theser beam will have to cut through the elemental body horizontally and it is not even a single cut, there are more than twenty beams passing through him.

    Old one has currently a face full of resentment.

    He wanted to burn the whole ce to ashes in a second and escape before Sai and others chased after him.

    But it seems like he couldn¡¯t do that.

    He could sense Sai, Sravan, and one more person nearing him and in fact, he is absolutely current.

    Sai is already here along with the other two and all three of them have the same expression when they looked at Old one¡¯s current situation.

    They didn¡¯t expect Sam to possess something that can defend against a seasoned Consummate realm cultivator.

    When they watched the change of the light beams tosers, they only have one thought in mind, they don¡¯t want to be in Old one¡¯s position.

    Sam¡¯s voice was heard at this moment.

    "Old One listen to what I have to say. Carefully.

    I am but an ordinary young man, who lives on his own terms. A young man who doesn¡¯t like his life getting disturbed.

    But if I do get disturbed for whatever reason it is and whoever the person is, they can only suffer."

    "Hahahahahahaha."

    Old one startedughing maniacally after Sam finished his words and replied.

    "You pathetic worm. You are but a small weakling, who relies on these tricks to get by and defend against the strong.

    In this world, weak like you shouldn¡¯t possess more than what you should and shouldn¡¯t meddle in the affairs you are not supposed to even know.

    But you did both of them. That is against the natural order of heaven. You a pathetic and puny human who didn¡¯t even live past two decades trying to go against it is a pipe dream."

    With those words, he released a heavilypressed spiritual energy and theser curtain had ripples for a moment and there is a small break for Old one to move and he didn¡¯t let the chance go.

    He bypassed theser curtain and could see the entrance to the city. The door is right ahead of him.

    He ced his hands on therge door and it started burning down.

    "See that, all these tricks can only bring you so far, I will still kill you." Old One said smugly.

    "Whatever you said is right. But there is only one mistake.?? Sam¡¯s voice was heard again and ever so calmly. He continued.

    "The heavenly order you are so proudly iming to be the deciding factor of lives and deaths doesn¡¯t have a right to judge me.

    Because I am born to defy it. And no other order other than me can decide what I do, where I stand, and who I stand against."

    With those words, Old one suddenly felt a sense of crisis, as he walked past the entrance and at this moment, he noticed that theser curtain disappeared because all the prisms are rotating and the light beams are all concentrated towards therge ss sphere on the top of the tower as they conjured into one.

    Sam¡¯s words rung again in Old One¡¯s ears.

    "For the people, I stand against, it is I who decide their fate irrespective of what the natural order dictates."

    With that, the ss Sphere shot arge light beam straight at Old one and his whole body which is already exhausted was enveloped in thatser beam.

    Before Sai and others could make sense, the light beam disappeared and all that left there is are some bones of Old One.

    A Consummate realm cultivator who can challenge the whole world and wage a war against them. A cultivator who could slip past ten of his peers ande this far, couldn¡¯t even get past the entrance of Sam¡¯s city.

    This is the only thought in the three people¡¯s heads.

    But what they didn¡¯t see is that more than three hundred thousand people are infusing their spiritual energy into the city and more than half of them are feeling drained.

 Chapter 368: Attacking Sravan

    Sam could sense all the citizens and the situation of the whole city at this moment and he noticed that half of them are drained of their energy.

    Even the energy cell pirs are half drained. Sam felt like the light curtain and the Laser curtain and the finalser beam seemed to have used too much spiritual energy, a lot more than he thought.

    The battle is finally over, but he didn¡¯t rx one bit and so did the citizens of the city, they don¡¯t know what exactly is happening outside anyway, so they are still infusing the spiritual energy.

    Sam shifted his concentration to the remaining three people who just arrived before Old One¡¯s death.

    His perceptionnded on Sravan and the three consummate realm cultivators could feel a faint sense of hostility.

    Sam¡¯s voice once again greeted them.

    "It is good that you guys are here and particrly you, Faction head of the Beast faction. Oh, I am sorry. I think I should call you former head of the Beast faction now."

    His words contained obvious mockery and Sravan felt his face burning.

    Sam could see the hostility in his face.

    "Since you came this far, it would be great for you to stay here forever."

    With that, there is another moment within the city, but this time, instead of theser beam, something else came out of it.

    From the top floor of the tower, arge circr door opened and Arge metallic cylinder with a pointy end came out.

    That is actually a missile.

    But the main fuel was the high-grade methane of a Level-7 fire element beast and along with it, there are many other things and Sravan was about to witness that in a second as the missile wasunched at him.

    There is a Spirit enchanted to the missile and there are flexible fins that could help the missile change the direction. It is like a small guidance system.

    As the missile came closer, Sravan and the rest sensed the crisis and Sai is the first one to yell.

    "Sam, stop this, we are not hostile."

    But onceunched what is the use of yelling.

    The missile moved like a sh of mes as it made its way toward Sravan at an unbelievable speed and there are some runic symbols that are activated in the middle of its flight.

    What no one could see is that as soon as the runes are activated, some chambers within the missile opened and some chemicals started mixing with each other.

    There are seven chambers in the missile and two of them are fuel for travel and possibly an explosion if they reach the target earlier.

    In the remaining five chambers, one of them has a mixture of anesthetic poisons along with the anesthetic poison and paralysis poison of Mia which was diluted in a hundred percent alcohol.

    The fourth chamber was full of herbal fluids that are made into alcohol. All these herbal fluids are numbing agents that y with their senses.

    The fifth chamber is full of Impact crystal shards which will explode upon the impact.

    The Sixth chamber and Seventh chamber are holding the Space jades full ofpressed methane which will act as primary explosives.

    Sam designed this to deal with a Transcendent stage cultivator, three of them could kill a fully healthy peak stage transcendent stage cultivator, provided that he took three hits squarely.

    He is using them because he needs some time to charge for anotherser beam attack.

    So, he started firing these missiles so that he could buy time.

    Sravan felt like cursing Sam and his eighteen generations of ancestors when he saw the missiles flying towards him.

    There are five of them and he is extremely weak at this moment.

    The toll of the energy collision aside, he was recently ambushed by three middle-stage consummate realm cultivators and is still recovering from that.

    To his dismay, his wyvern is not with him at this moment.

    He started running away like crazy.

    He doesn¡¯t want to stay near the vicinity of the city, he already saw what happened to Old one and doesn¡¯t want to experience it himself.

    Even if he can attack the missile that ising, he decided to do that after he left the surroundings of the city and that turned out to be a big mistake.

    The Spirits in the missiles started burning the fuel in the second chamber and their speed increased and the first missile reached the target.

    Sravan felt helpless and made some hand-signs as he chanted.

    "Blood Line Forbidden Art: Frost Coffin."

    With that, he covered himself with an Ice Coffin that is made of the thousand- year old frost essence.

    The Ice that was formed used the bloodline energy and even its color is Blood red.

    One Missile after another, the five missiles hit him.

    Sai, who is hesitating whether to make a move or not, saw the whole scene and gulped.

    The Frost coffin is one of the greatest defensive techniques in the history of the beast faction.

    There are only a few people who were able to master it. It uses a person¡¯s blood essence and frost essence to create the strongest ice possible.

    When the smoke of various colors disappeared, what left of the infamous frost coffin was a thinyer of ice with some holes.

    The worst part is that he wasn¡¯t able to stop the vapors of the anesthetic poisons and the numbing herbs.

    The five explosions tore the coffin apart.

    The missiles didn¡¯t kill him neither the impact crystals all destroyed most of the coffin.

    If it was just that physical attack, one could argue that Sravan easily blocked the attackpletely. But the problem is that his body was extremely damaged from the injuries he got from the ambush and the energy collision with Old One.

    Sai even felt like they all battled so that they coulde here and die in Sam¡¯s hands.

    Sravan felt numb from the vapors and the anesthetic poisons are working their magic.

    At this moment, Sai and the other person sensed highly concentrated energy and they saw the ss sphere is condensing the light beam. The finishing blow ising.

    "Sam, stop it." Sai is yelling at the top of his lungs. Meanwhile, the third person is confused and asked.

    "Is he really with the Church?"

    He asked in a low voice, but Sam¡¯s sensory perception couldn¡¯t help but pick that up.

    "You better watch what you say." Sam¡¯s voice came from afar. That person shivered at the thought that a light beam will be directed at him.

    "No, it is more of a personal feud. It is due to what happened in the beast faction a few months ago." Sai exined.

    That person seemed to remember something and said.

    "Oh, but I heard that kid tore open the beast faction a new one and he is still holding a grudge after that?"

    Sai couldn¡¯t help but shake his head and suddenly he felt hopeful. Because, he sensed a bunch of strong aurasing from the Space gate and when he saw, The thunder god temple head, the grand elders of the thunder god temple and the rest of the team areing in their fastest speed.

    The light beam is still condensing and it seemed to have been taking even more energy than the beam that attacked Old One.

    It seemed like he doesn¡¯t want to leave any possibility of him escaping.

    But Sam also seemed to have sensed the new visitors andunched theser beam.

    The light beam attacks take a lot of energy, but there is one advantage to it and that is its speed.

    Before the thunder god temple head and others could make sense, the light beam has already reached Sravan and made a hole in his chest. The light beam this time is a lot more condensed than the previous one and didn¡¯t cover Sravan¡¯s entire body.

    Sai, who is already exhausted, made his move at this moment, he activated partial elemental fusion and used his hand covered in mes to push Sravan out of the light beam¡¯s trajectory, this is the time he was waiting for.

    He knew the speed of the attack, and it is impossible to dodge, they can only let the person take the hit and move him off the track instantly to make them absorb minimum damage.

    Sam who sat on top of the tower, is already bleeding like crazy. His three friends on the floors below are also starting to feel the stress on their mental strength because unlike others in the city, they are lending the spiritual energy as well as the spiritual sense to support Sam¡¯s attacks.

    Simply put, they are here to take some mental burden off of Sam.

    Sam also noticed that the mental burden is increasing and felt like they wouldn¡¯t be able to take it anymore.

    He tried to move theser beam a bit more and tried to follow Sravan.

    But this time, the thing that defended is not Sai¡¯s fire, rather a shield of concentrated water came in and deflected theser beam.

    "You guys really like meddling in other¡¯s things." Sam¡¯s voice was heard but this time it is shaking a bit and felt a lot weaker than before.

    They looked at Sam¡¯s city to decide on what to do, but at this moment Sai¡¯s voice came.

    "Leave him alone, Sravan is still alive. It is a personal feud anyway."

    The thunder god temple head acknowledged and asked.

    "What happened to Old one?"

    "Dead. Killed by Sam. The War is over."

    They all looked at Sam¡¯s city and the ss sphere, the damage caused by the missiles, and the hole in Sravan¡¯s chest.

    "How did he even do all of that?" Someone asked in genuine surprise and curiosity.

    "Answer for that is something that only he knows."

    Sai said these words and all of them started moving back to the Space gate. They have to tie the loose ends of the War.

 Chapter 369: Preparing for the future

    The Consummate realm cultivators left the ce without doing anything. The victim is Sravan and he is in no state to fight back or even talk for that matter.

    As for his next to kin, Sai. He doesn¡¯t want to pursue the matter any further.

    So, they decided to just make a move.

    They have a lot to do with the war. They have to deal with the aftermath and the first thing they have to do is eliminate all the traces of the church, including the left-over followers, the priests and high priests, their traces in the subordinate empires, everything.

    Apart from that, they have to create new governments and authorities. They have to establish the chain ofmand, repair the damage caused by the church, and deal with a lot of things.

    This will take months toplete.

    But first and foremost, they have topile the battle reports and all the details and record everything clearly so that the future generations will refer to this data if any simr situation arises in the future.

    Sam also gave an announcement for the citizens to rx and went down to meet up with his friends.

    They rested for the remaining day.

    But the whole city was still in turmoil and particrly the higher-ups who are from the four major professions.

    These people are the ones who wanted to get more share in thework when Sam is not here.

    The problem was there in all four associations and that is mostly due to theck of Sam¡¯s consolidation of power and chain ofmand.

    It all started with Watt¡¯s abduction. Due to that, Sam didn¡¯t focus too much on the city and left the ce right after it was opened.

    He went to the thunder god temple since then, without any show of power within the city. These people grew tails and horns due to greed and felt like they are the bosses since they are the ones who are majorly operating thework.

    But today, the Old One¡¯s intervention was a wake-up call.

    Even though they didn¡¯t witness the battle, they did feel the presence of Old One due to his overwhelming aura when he attacked the city.

    They knew that Sam made preparations, but they didn¡¯t expect that they are to this extent, to kill a Consummate realm expert ispletely out of their question.

    They quaked in their boots at this situation.

    In fact, this wake-up call worked for a lot of other people other than the higher ups, the workers, the citizens, and so many people.

    Anyone who had doubts of any form regarding Sam got this wake-up call.

    With a single incident, Sam consolidated his position and no one dared to harbor any thoughts against him.

    There are some people who didn¡¯t have any negative thoughts from the start and are even a little surprised when Sam dealt with such a powerful enemy. They are the people of the Dragon Hawk tribe and Sam¡¯s battalion.

    They are the most loyal workers under Sam.

    They literally see Sam as an omnipotent god.

    They are not even surprised that the strong enemy just died at the doorstep of the city.

    The Next day, Sam and his friends woke up with dizzy heads. Particrly, Sam. He felt like he is having a hangover after a night of drinks.

    After they got somewhat better, Sam is having some faint frustration.

    He didn¡¯t feel good about leaving Sravan like that, he was just there and Sam almost took his life. If not for the thunder god temple and the rest of the team intervening, he would have seeded. He is really irritated by this.

    But the energy charge in the city almost came to an end just for dealing with them. He still had a card or two, but the targets have to be within the city for that to work.

    Currently, he is waiting for the thunder god temple to call him.

    That¡¯s right, he is waiting for the thunder god temple to call him. Not only the thunder god temple, but there is also a good chance that he would be called by the Six major powers.

    Their number one enemy was killed right at his doorstep. There is no way for them to leave him alone. He has to make some preparations so that this trip would be safe.

    Currently, in the whole world, Sam is the most uncontroble variable. All this while, these major powers will not feelfortable letting him out in open.

    Particrly, after the two incidents of tearing down the beast faction, killing Old one, and almost killing Sravan, it would be weird if they don¡¯t hold a meeting just to discuss how to deal with him.

    But Sam didn¡¯t stay on this topic for long.

    He has work to do and this is rted to future development.

    He got the best opening he could possibly get due to the church and the war.

    All the empires are at their weakest and there is a need for new authorities to enter the fray.

    This is the best moment for Sam to enter these empires and take the market into control.

    The noble families and such are almost eradicated and the economy of these empires is in its lowest state. There is no way for them to reject an offer given by him.

    But for that, he has to enter the other empires and before that, he has to meet the major powers to get ess.

    Even before that, he has to make preparations.

    Sam started giving orders and the production rate of the products increased. People are working overtime and there is even a new batch of workers that are recruited.

    At this moment, for the sake of increasing productivity, the Old factories which are not used in normal days are also ordered to be opened and this made Philip remember someone.

    Arman. He is still trapped in the Old factory for days.

    He ran towards Sam and exined the situation.

    Sam fell into deep thought; he knew what Arman had done. Either in the thunder god temple or in the western continent, Arman continuously pestered him and tried to mess with his ns.

    He even dared to try and damage the city.

    If it was anyone else, Sam wouldn¡¯t hesitate to kill him.

    But he is hesitating now, because of Arman¡¯s identity.

    He is definitely not from this world and there are ten more people who belong to the same category.

    From the Pce of inheritances, he understood that all twelve of them are in this world, because of different gods and there is a purpose for their presence.

    Sam is extremely curious about it, but he couldn¡¯t get any more information no matter the means.

    There is only one more source of information left at this current state and that is the remaining eleven people.

    That included Arman.

    If he can find out about their situations in previous lives and how they are transferred here, he might make some sense of their purpose here.

    There is also another reason, Sam has a divine dimension and there is no reason that these people will not have an equivalent treasure.

    He is contemting robbing, killing, or even leaving Armanpletely.

    He felt that there is a need for him to live and that is for two reasons. If Arman is alive, then he is an extra source of information. One way or other, there would be some information he would gather in the future from the god that sent him here.

    He doesn¡¯t want to miss that opportunity and the second reason is the future treasures.

    Ling Tian, clearly told Sam that there would be future benefits from the divine dimension once he reached a certain level.

    There is no reason for the other gods to not give their candidates these benefits of the same level.

    If he killed Sam, not only would he make the god behind him his enemy, he will also lose out a potential chance of gaining these treasures.

    But he decided that he shouldn¡¯t leave Arman without any consequences and the best way would be leaving a shadow in his heart.

    Just like how a high school bully traumatizes someone for the rest of their lives, Sam also wanted to be a bully that would make Arman quake in his boots just from a single thought of him.

    He decided upon this and went back to work. Arman was captured and sent back to the prison in the city temporarily.

    Meanwhile, Sam went back to the tower in the divine dimension.

    The first step in proceeding further is setting the defense back in the city. Out of eight energy cell pirs, only two are left with some energy, the rest of them are wasted.

    He only has five Spare energy cell pirs which he made in his spare time. So, he stayed within the tower to create the Energy cell pirs.

    Meanwhile, in the meeting point of the Six major powers, they are all sending the teams to the empires to clean up the remnants of the church.

    As for creating new governments, they can wait for a while, but there is another situation that can¡¯t wait.

    Now, they are in a meeting about Sam.

    "What do you mean, he has to be eliminated? Do you think he is some sort of soft permission that would let you kill you as you please?"

    Sai looked at the Usaine Sect head with a frown. Thetter suggested that they eliminate Sam.

    "So, what do you propose, he is a threat and a huge variable who can disrupt the bnce of powers?"

    "A small correction, he is a person who has the capability to disrupt the bnce. Do you think, he just likes to kill people for fun, or do you think he has thoughts of conquering the world?

    For the record, from the information I got, he never made the first move on anyone who has killed him. It was he who was provoked andter paid back.

    That is the same situation even with the former emperor of Orion. I think Old thunder can justify my im."

    Thunder god temple head nodded at his words.

    "Why are you supporting him so much? You should be the one that should be most angry. He destroyed the beast faction."

    Sai took a deep breath and said.

    "As I said, that was also done because one of us abducted his friend. He is not some bloodthirsty maniac."

    "Then what do you suggest we do."

    "I think, we need to talk to him first. We need to get details on Old One¡¯s death and then we can discuss what his future ns are and what exactly his goal. He does have power, but he needs sufficient time to do something when he is up against people of superior strength.

    So, we don¡¯t have to worry too much about his tricks.

    As far as I know, he will be an enemy only if we make him one."

    "I will arrange a meeting, but I highly doubt he wille here, the meeting will be arranged in the thunder god temple."

    Thunder god temple head said and everyone nodded.

 Chapter 370: Meeting

    Sam came out of the divine dimension after three days. He spent thirty days in the second floor and made the remaining three pirs. With the increase in his cultivation, the process of making energy cells also sped up a lot.

    He didn¡¯t stay anymore inside the tower, because he is waiting for the call from the thunder god temple.

    Before that, he has toplete some other preparations and that is to find some loyal workers within thework.

    Currently, most of the people from Sam¡¯s battalion are already Grand realm cultivators, most of them are in initial stages and some of them are in middle-stages.

    They are spread among the key areas of Sam¡¯s city so that he could be reassured that these core areas are under his loyal management.

    Even the people from the Dragon Hawk tribe advanced since the time Sam used bloodline refinement and all two hundred of them who entered Sam¡¯s battalion are Grand realm cultivators.

    He decided that it is about time to spread them wide since his uing development ns would need some loyal people as it would be hard for him to keep watch over it.

    After arranging some training for some select few people. Sam also started making preparations for his next project.

    His next project will be focused on puppetry. He wants to use modern robotic mechanisms to make puppets. Simply put, he wants to make robots and that too of various forms.

    But the only catch in this project is the main raw materials are not with him yet.

    All this while, Sam examined the wooden puppet core which he got from the Pce of inheritances. It has been more than two years since he got his hands on them and the raw materials needed to make them.

    He researched through the knowledge he has in the Divine dimension and finally figured out the alternate raw materials he can use to make these cores.

    But from all the simtions he did, he came to the conclusion that the cores will be of a lot lower quality than the ones he obtained.

    As for the raw materials he obtained in exchange with the Avatar Sanchez, he didn¡¯t dare to use them immediately. They are suitable for making high-quality cores with a lot more rooms to engrave the movements and techniques, which grants more abilities to the puppets.

    Currently, Sam decided to busy himself with creating new designs and calctions required for the next project.

    As for production, it has to wait until the raw materials from the Six major powers arrive.

    Even if not for the core, the outer materials he is going to use will be needing some high-quality materials which wouldn¡¯t be avable in any of the empires.

    Sam started creating the designs for the new puppets.

    The calctions take a lot of time, to get the sizes and proportions of all the parts right.

    Sam spent another ten days inside the tower and a day passed outside, but he is not even finished with a single design.

    In spare time, whenever Sam encountered a bottle-neck in his thinking, Sam forged somethings. But this time, he didn¡¯t use any ordinary metals, he started using meteorite sands.

    There is ck, Silver, Gray, and newly acquired Fire meteorite sand and Earth meteorite sand.

    He has nned to build a machine a long time ago. Since he started his artisan career in this world.

    He has nned to build this so that he could say goodbye to longsting forging procedures.

    But he didn¡¯t proceed to build it because of theck of meteorite sand.

    He even used one of the puppet cores in this machine and that too he used the mostplicated one which he obtained in the fifth puppet.

    These ten days inside the tower went by even before he could finish the first design or the machine, but there is some great progress in both of them.

    He came out of the tower again after this one day passed. Because the long-awaited call he was waiting for from the thunder god temple finally came.

    Moriya appeared in the city on this day and he seemed somewhat cautious. He visited the hotel where Arman was supposed and couldn¡¯t find him there.

    He has two goals on this day. One of them is to bring Sam back and the other one is to bring Arman back. But after almost half-a-day of search, Arman is nowhere, to be seen.

    When he tried to get some information, all he learned about what Arman did, and couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit disappointed.

    He knew that there is some n involved in Arman¡¯s visit, the worst part is it failed and he probably got caught.

    Now that Sam is ssified as a threat dangerous enough to make the six major powers nervous, this is extremely bad news.

    Moriya arrived at the same meeting room he came before.

    Sam is already waiting for him at this moment.

    "May I know why you are here again? I would appreciate if it is the first batch of my raw materials. After all, I had delivered what I promised. The Six major powers wouldn¡¯t want to go back on their words just because I am young and powerless, right?"

    Moriya felt like cursing Sam. His face twitched as he controlled his urge to do so.

    Samughed lightly when he saw this scene. Moriya is actually a cold person who wouldn¡¯t even show his emotions that much, but here he is losing his cool just after one sentence.

    Of course, who can me him? Moriya just received the orders and warnings along with those orders about how dangerous Sam could be and how careful he has to be when he entered this city.

    That warning came straight from Consummate realm cultivator, but here the same guy is iming that he is powerless.

    Anyone would lose their cool.

    "Temple head is inviting you for a meeting to talk about the trade." He calmed down and said to Sam.

    "Didn¡¯t we already talk about all the details required? I don¡¯t see a reason for more talk."

    "It is about the products you offered in exchange, they would like to know more details about the products and offer their own requirements if possible."

    Moriya already had an excuse ready for Sam.

    Sam fell silent for a while as he looked straight at Moriya. Thetter felt cautious and got ready to make a move at any moment. Sam chuckled all of a sudden and said.

    "Okay, then let us move."

    Sam agreed and Moriya heaved a sigh of relief.

    "Do you know where Arman is?"

    "Arman is here? Why didn¡¯t I know about that?" Sam asked with an expression of genuine surprise. Moriya almost puked blood in anger. He wouldn¡¯t believe that Sam doesn¡¯t know Arman was here if he was beaten to death.

    With Sam¡¯s character there is a possibility that Arman is dead by now.

    But there is a token in the thunder god temple indicating that he is still alive.

    So, he is pretty sure that Arman is still alive and he might even be Sam¡¯s captive or he could have run away and stayed somewhere within the western continent.

    But Arman is not the most important at the moment.

    They moved towards the Space gate to go to the thunder god temple.

    A few hourster, Sam is standing inside a meeting room that has a lot of chairs on a tform. But there is no chair for him to sit in as he was told to not climb up the tform.

    After another few minutes of waiting, some people came inside and took the seats on the tform.

    They are ten people. Two of them being the Grand elder and head of the thunder god temple while the rest are the heads of the remaining major powers and the major professional association.

    The temple head looked at Sam and said with an expression of confusion.

    "They seem to have forgotten about your seating arrangements, maybe we can continue like this, it won¡¯t take long."

    Sam smirked at this petty trick. Thebined age of these ten guys will probably reach two thousand years old, but they are trying to put Sam down by employing such childish tricks.

    Perhaps, they treated Sam like any other youngsters who would lose his cool when his ego took a hit. They wanted to y off that disturbance in his emotions, but Sam did something they didn¡¯t expect.

    He took out his bone majestic bone throne and sat on it.

    Everyone was stunned when they saw the chair, they could identify the arm bones that are coated with metal. Even these Old people felt cold all over. How many people¡¯s arms did Sam sever to make this throne?

    "Don¡¯t worry. I made my own preparations. So, I heard that you want to talk about the products that you want in this exchange. What is it that you want? And if I remember correctly, I only have dealings with Six powers, not the professional associations, is it appropriate for them to listen in our business deals."

    "You talk a lot, young man."

    The Artisan association head said in a cold voice.

    Sam didn¡¯t reply, he just crossed his left leg over the right one as he looked at them.

    "So, what do you guys want to talk about? I am waiting for the first batch of material actually."

    At this moment, the thunder god temple head replied.

    "Before we talk about business, we want to know how Old one died."

    "I think someone has seen it and that person is right here, what more do you want to know?" Sam replied as he looked at Sai.

    "What we want to know is, how is that possible that you possess such a power?" Another Old man asked.

    "Well, is it really the case that you don¡¯t have an answer, or do you have trouble epting the one you have?"

    Sam replied with the same smirk.

    "What do you mean?"

    "Nothing. Simply put, I have made some preparations to defend myself in case someonees after what I possess and those preparations served their purpose. Old One attacked and I killed him."

    "We don¡¯t think that you possessing such power is a good thing, we are notfortable in you possessing such power which would threaten other¡¯s safety."

    One of them finally came to the point.

    "And who are you to decide that?" Sam fired back.

    "You seem tock respect for your elders, do remember your age and strength before you talk back." The Old man replied back and along with the words, Sam was greeted with the pressure of a Consummate realm cultivator.

 Chapter 371: Threat

    Sam felt like he was forced to carry a mountain.

    His shoulder crouched a little and there is a ton of pressure on his soul. He felt suffocated, but he didn¡¯t bow down at all. He still forced his back to stay straight.

    By this time, some blood started seeping out of a corner of his mouth.

    Even under that pressure Sam started talking.

    "Petty tricks. How do you feel, Old man? With an age around two centuries and cultivation many levels higher than me, how good do you feel to pressure a youngster with such lower cultivation?"

    The face of the old man turned red, in both embarrassment and in anger.

    "Since you know your cultivation and worth, be obedient." The Old man snorted to hide his embarrassment.

    Sam smirked at this and all of a sudden, he extended his hand under such immense pressure. His hand was covered with dark elemental energy as he gripped something in the air.

    "AHhhhh...." A ghostly wail could be heard in the room as the dark elemental energy in Sam¡¯s hands made something visible.

    The old man who is pressuring Sam had a look of surprise on his face and the pressure was lifted in his shock.

    Sam looked at the spirit which was struggling in his hands and looked at the people in the room.

    "You probably have balls of steel to enchant my coat right in front of me. That too, you stooped to the point where you have to divert me using the pressure."

    With that, Sam crushed the spirit and a middle-aged man who is hiding in the dark corner spat a mouthful of blood.

    Sam looked at the old men and his face turned colder.

    He made eye-contact with the thunder god temple head and said.

    "Thunder god temple, doesn¡¯t seem to care about their disciples."

    The temple head and the grand elder were puzzled at this. They knew that Sam is not talking about himself, he never viewed himself as the disciple of the thunder god temple.

    Their thoughts ran towards Arman, but they quickly abandoned it, because Arman is only one disciple no matter what and he is not even the candidate for being the next head. All they would lose is a genius. They didn¡¯t think that Sam is stupid enough to use him as a bargaining chip with his intelligence.

    After a deep thought, the temple head had a solemn expression at the conclusion he came to.

    Sam¡¯s smirk felt a lot colder at this moment as even his voice became colder and colder by the moment.

    "I ced a trap that could kill more than half of the beast faction nine months before I could visit it. And you seemed to have forgotten where I stayed those nine months."

    The thunder god temple clenched his fist so hard that the arm rest had cracks on it. All the other old men also felt shocked. Only Sai is shaking his head. He felt that the whole fiasco is unnecessary. They could just talk it out. But his peers are making so that Sam would extreme methods and if this conversation continued down the same way, he would actually do so.

    The thunder god temple head, kept hisposure, but the grand elder didn¡¯t.

    "Sam, how dare you plot against the thunder god temple, which groomed you?"

    "Pfft." Samughed sarcastically. He looked at the grand elder and said.

    "Do you even believe what you are saying? Groomed me? Your thunder god temple would have visited hell and back to have a person like me in their ranks. Don¡¯t try to put yourselves on a high pedestal to make move and justify it.

    If you want to make a move, just stop being pretentious and make a move.

    But I shall warn you. If you couldn¡¯t kill me in your first blow, you wouldn¡¯t have a chance tond a second blow."

    He then looked at the remaining old men and said.

    "You seemed to have been on the high horse for far too long and got used to having everything your way. But remember my face and name and etch it in your hearts that I am the bane of your natural order.

    You ten people don¡¯t intimidate me, because with my power it is no difference if you are one or ten, the difference is too huge either way.

    I can still escape and I can still start over from the scratch and even before I reach your level, I can still kill you with my own hands."

    At this moment, another old man is trying to increase pressure on Sam, but Sam¡¯s next words halted his actions.

    "One more attempt to show your pathetic disy of superiority, I will take half the lives in thunder god temple as I leave this ce. If you think I am bluffing, try me."

    The Old man stopped immediately.

    Even though, the thunder god temple and the lives of its disciples have nothing to do with him, he doesn¡¯t dare to be the cause of their deaths.

    All the Old men toned down their auras and became more docile.

    Sam straightened his back and said.

    "That¡¯s more like it. I am here to talk about business and we will be talking business.

    I need the first batch of my materials within a week. I will be paying the first instalment of products and money at the same time.

    I am a fair business man, so here is the list of the products, samples and the number of them I would be giving you in the first instalment."

    He paused and threw a spatial ring to the middle of the ten people. Sai caught it so that the rest of them wouldn¡¯t start another pride tantrum.

    Sam continued without bothering to notice that.

    "We made a deal and I upheld my end of it. In the same way, I expect you to do the same.

    If you guys don¡¯t do so, that is your wish, but remember one thing before you decide to do so. You have to bear the consequences of your actions.

    As for the weapons and the formations that killed Old One. They are my creations. I made them myself and they will stay with me.

    You can yap about bnce and control all you want, for that I only have one thing to say.

    ¡¯Who the f.u.c.k is responsible for my death, if Old had killed me?¡¯ I don¡¯t owe you guys anything. In fact, I am the one who should be demanding an exnation here.

    When the world is at its worst due to ipetence of its rulers that is you, I am the one who came up with a solution and even gave it to you. But what have you done? Not only did you sell out my name to the enemy, you even let hime to my door step to kill me.

    Now, what do you have to say about that?"

    Sam¡¯s voice became louder and louder as the conversation went on. The Old men were tongue-tied, they didn¡¯t know how to respond to this.

    If Sam really put it that way, it really is their ipetence to let an enemy who is a Consummate realm cultivator escape and attack a grand realm junior who even helped them avert their crisis.

    "If you dare to talk shit anymore, I will have to settle scores with you and this time, the war wouldn¡¯t be as simple as it was with Old one. I would love to see, how you will protect your asses when that happens."

    Sam stood up at this moment and adjusted his coat. He put his throne back into his storage and was ready to leave.

    "We are not done talking yet."

    One of them said and Sam looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

    "How did you use the light element to attack? Where did you obtain the method? That couldn¡¯t have possibly obtained within the western continent?"

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "You are right. That is not obtained in the western continent. It was obtained from right here." He pointed at his head.

    "What do you mean?"

    "Are you dumb or are you acting dumb?"

    The Old man became furious and was about to make a move but his peer on the side stopped him and asked Sam.

    "You are saying that you created a method to attack with a light element when many people from thousands of years are not able to do so?"

    "Hahaha... Don¡¯t judge me by your standards, just because you are not smart enough to make one, doesn¡¯t mean I can¡¯t."

    This time, the ten people are ticked off. Sam is calling them dumb directly.

    "Sam, you should mind yournguage. You have been yapping your mouth too much."

    Sai said in a strict tone.

    Sam turned around and looked at him with a smile and said. "Your tone suggests that I should give a f.u.c.k about what you say and that means you are being delusional.

    Oh, by the way. You seem to be having difficulties repairing the economies of the empires under you. I believe that I can help you with that. After all, you should have known about mywork on the Western continent. I have some ns which would repair the whole thing in six months. Contact me, if you want to discuss this in detail.

    I could use some partners since I want to expand my business."

 Chapter 372: Offer

    Sam walked out of the room like a boss.

    If any historian was present, he would have doc.u.mented the whole incident to show the future generations that there lived a man who dared to threaten ten strongest people of the world, when he is twenty years old and weak as a twig in front of those strong men.

    Sam walked out with his head held high, proud, and strong in front of a force that he couldn¡¯t even imagine tackling in the next few years.

    And the proudest part is the force cannot do anything to him.

    As he left the room, the ten people who are at the top of the pyramid of this that was constructed by their ancestors thousands of years ago and the pyramid which every person on the is a part of, without even their knowledge.

    Now, as they looked at Sam, they realized he is not a part of that pyramid like they thought.

    They have an impression that should be a part of this and are trying so hard to control him. They are afraid that he would get out of this system and go beyond their control. They couldn¡¯t digest this for some reasons like their pride, ego, and the fact that Sam is young and weak.

    That is why they tried all these petty tricks, but they now realized their mistake.

    Sam is already out of the system a long time ago. In fact, it is almost like he was never a part of it in the first ce.

    Their efforts are in vain.

    They gathered here today not only to get the method Sam used to use the light element to create such lethal attacks, but also to threaten him and put him in his ce.

    But now, they understood their own position.

    They are living in a pyramid that was already in ce for thousands of years, while Sam who they are looking at is constructing his own monument in the world.

    All these years, they are socent andfortable in the already created system with their life depended on it.

    But now, therees a young man who just disregards the system and the rules that are governing the system by which everyone in the world lives.

    They didn¡¯t know what to do. On one hand, they arepletely pissed off and on the other hand, they are amazed and helpless at the same time.

    There is also a faint curiosity to see how far will Sam go.

    There is one thing they all have in mind, that is thest statement Sam left. The partnership.

    They are curious that a youngster dared to suggest a partnership with him.

    So, they were curious and wanted more information, when all the heads of different powers asked him about the information, the thunder god temple head couldn¡¯t hide it.

    That would be too much pressure.

    Just like that in an hour, there is a bunch of information in the hands-on everyone that included the recording crystals which clearly caught the image of Sam¡¯s city.

    With that, they are intrigued and looked into the spatial ring.

    The sample products all included grenades of various kinds, the breathing device,munication devices and portablemunication hub, hunting traps, and so on.

    They are actually quite impressed with what Sam had done.

    The most impressive thing that they saw is themunicationwork.

    The formation association head is more impressed than the rest because he understood the principle behind themunicationwork. Sam actually created a formation spanning over the whole western continent with themunicationwork.

    Which is actually something no one would do, at least until now nobody dared to do this.

    This is something that they didn¡¯t expect.

    The next thing that took their mind away was Sam¡¯s park.

    There is a recording crystal full of the recording of the Park.

    This park has a lot of money circting within a day.

    Now, they suddenly felt that they need a ce like that in the empires which are currently not in track.

    The systems copsed due to the involvement of the church and currently, there are teams deployed from the major powers to the empires to hunt down the remnants of the church.

    This is being used as a practice and the missions for the candidates.

    Every disciple in the major power and even the elders are eagerly taking the missions. But that also brought a drawback.

    There are no city guards at this moment, there are no city lords, not many noble families have any remnant people left.

    There are no marquises and the small amount. of soldiers and the generals that are left are straying and everyone was separated.

    There is no order in any of the empires except for the Western continent.

    They ced missions for their disciples to temporarily establish the order. But no one is interested in taking it.

    After all, they have an opinion on these empires and that is not exactly a good one.

    In their minds, these empires are rural areas, those are there for them to pick their junior disciples on whom they can fling their authority and egos over.

    The resources in the empires are not of high-quality and their growth rate will be limited with these resources.

    They know that the current situation of the empires is not good and they are in desperate need to keep order, but they are afraid to take initiative because there is a chance that they would make them permanent in charge there.

    But the higher-ups couldn¡¯t just let them go.

    They forced some people to start maintaining order and some of them even found the noble families that are on the run during the church incident and are using them to maintain order.

    The only problem is the number of people in the major powers is not enough to achieve.

    While they are thinking of all the problems they are facing in the empires and trying to think of how Sam and his arrangements can help them, Sam returned back to the city.

    This time, he directly went to Arman. He dragged him while his senses are still sealed and threw him in one of the training rooms that are built in the city. These are rented out for the visitors who wanted to test their skills after they improved in the city¡¯s park.

    Sam just stopped the booking of the training room for the next one month.

    He has nned this for a while and currently, he felt like this is the best time to implement it.

    Because he is pissed at the moment. Even though, he gave the threat to those old men and walked out proudly, that one moment when he was suppressed was still fresh in his mind and he is not exactly proud of that.

    He wanted to vent some anger.

    Sam unsealed Arman after they entered the training room.

    Arman looked around and when he saw Sam, his body turned stiff.

    This is not the view he wanted to see when he was released.

    "How are you doing Arman?"

    Sam asked with a smile.

    "What do you want to do?"

    Arman directly asked as he put his guard up. He knew all his moves against Sam till now are revealed and there is no reason for him to be pretentious and deny it.

    "Nothing much, actually. I am here to offer something to you."

    "Offer?"

    "Yes, an offer which you cannot refuse."

    "What is it?"

    "I will not use my authority in the city or anything. We will have a fair fight. Only you and me. Direct one on one battle. As soon as you can beat me, you can leave the city. You will stay in this same room until that happens."

    Arman went into deep thought, he didn¡¯t know what to expect of Sam. He is not extremely confident that he can defeat Sam directly. That is the reason he avoided the confrontation.

    But now, the confrontation turned out to be his only way out.

    "What if I lose?"

    Arman asked cautiously.

    "Until you win, I wille here every day and we will have a battle. You can study me, try to force me to use all my cards, you can do everything you can. You can even break through the Nascent stage and fight me, I don¡¯t care. You can even pull dirty tricks if you can use everything in your arsenal and if you can beat me, you can leave. If you can kill me, you can take whatever it is that you want from me. Philip and rest wouldn¡¯t even involve as long as you don¡¯t go after the city."

    Arman was tempted by the offer. He felt like he has a shot at taking Sam on in a one-on-one match.

    He is not entirely confident that he can win, but that doesn¡¯t mean there is no chance for him to win. He used these kinds of arguments to convince himself and decided to ept the deal.

    "I will take that offer."

 Chapter 373: Deal with Space gate association

    Sam smiled when Arman agreed instantly.

    He wanted this to happen and it happened. As for what Arman got himself into, he would understand it in a few days.

    Arman took out the lightning de saber instantly. Sam also took out the reaper sword. They started their fight without any dy.

    Sam must say that Arman is actually quite good in saber skills, but he is not exactly fazed by it.

    He has been wondering why these people are selected toe to this world, for some reason he felt that they are too weak to be especially reincarnated to this world.

    He did beat up the ten other candidates in the Pce of inheritance. He does have a reason to wonder about this.

    His strongest fights to the date are with Nichs and Sanjay who are both from this world.

    Sam maintained the same pace as Arman and dragged the fight. Arman is only a Level-8 Grand realm cultivator, while Sam is already a peak stage cultivator. Even if the fight is with a higher- level cultivator, Sam is confident much less a person who is weaker than him at the moment.

    After seeing Arman¡¯s skills for a while, Sam took the initiative.

    His speed increased exponentially as he moved like a sh.

    Arman couldn¡¯t keep up the pace as Sam started shing at Arman from all directions.

    Before he knew it, Arman was surrounded by a of sword raysing towards from all directions without any chance for him to escape.

    He felt a sense of crisis dawning upon him, he almost saw his own death at this moment. He closed his eyes and tried to raise his guard up. He does have some trump cards, but he doesn¡¯t have time for that.

    He felt that he could drag the fight for a bit longer and then use these special moves, but Sam didn¡¯t even give time for that.

    As the sword rays neared him, he felt like he was going to die but even after a few seconds, there is no damage, all he felt is the sharp aura brushing past him.

    When he opened his eyes, he saw himself butt n.a.k.e.d right in front of Sam.

    He dropped his saber and started covering his genitals with his hands as he looked at Sam.

    Sam didn¡¯t attack further and just looked at him with a mocking expression.

    "Pathetic. Next battle would be in front of the audience, you better improve otherwise, the thunder god temple¡¯s name would be tarnished by you."

    With that Sam left the ce and returned to the skyscr.a.p.er and went into a meeting room, where a middle-aged man is waiting.

    "You must be the Elder of the Space gate association. I am Sam."

    "I am Zeke." The man introduced himself as they both shook their hands.

    "So, what do you won¡¯t talk about?" Zeke asked directly.

    "I want space gates to all the empires from here."

    Zeke raised his eyebrow at this and seemed surprised.

    "Can you even afford it? Why would you need to travel between all the empires?"

    "Afford it? Of course, I can. As for the need to travel, I want to expand my business.???

    "I don¡¯t think the major powers will take this positively."

    "And I don¡¯t expect them to. I don¡¯t need their permission to do what I want to do. Whether they agree or not, I will definitely expand my business to various empires."

    "But why would we agree? Even though we are the Space gate association, we are formed and backed by the six major powers, there is no need for us to make an enemy out of them."

    "Precisely because, you are under them, I would advise you to take the deal. I have an offer that you cannot refuse anyway."

    With that, Sam took out a scroll and ced it in front of Zeke.

    Zeke opened and read through it. As he read further and further, his frown got deeper and deeper.

    He looked at Sam and eximed.

    "Where did you get this?"

    "Is it really important?"

    "But everything you mentioned is notplete in this."

    "Of course, why would I give you theplete versions before what I have. You can choose three of them and I will have the Space gates constructed at half the price. Apart from that, I need an intercontinentalmunicationwork. I hope you arrange that too. You can ask your higher-ups and contact me."

    "I will get back to you in three days, can I take this scroll with me?"

    "Of course, help yourself."

    Sam watched as Zeke left the ce.

    The offer he gave Zeke is really not something they would refuse.

    Sam has contacted him when they came here to secretly construct the Space gate leading to the thunder god temple.

    They arranged a meeting and he is actually surprised that they coulde here with the same Space gate. They must have had their methods.

    Sam knew that it is hard to convince the space gate association, but this is the best time for him to do so.

    The Space gate association is currently under a lot of pressure.

    From the start, the Space gate association is always in a pinch. Although it is called an association, they are essentially a prison where the space element users are supressed.

    In every empire, after the awakening, the people will go to the authorities to see what element they awakened. This is the mostmon thing, but the rule among the authorities is that as soon as they encountered a person with a Space element, they would not only report it to the higher-ups, they also have to take the person captive.

    The information would be sent to the respective major power and that kid would be transferred to the Space gate association by that major power.

    This is one of the regr processes.

    The Space element users wouldn¡¯t be given adequate knowledge of their element. Every one of them will be trained in formations as the Space gate is essentially a formation.

    From the start, they can only create formations and inscriptions regarding the supporting facilities of the major powers. Their inscriptions are used for intercontinentalmunication.

    From the start, they would be trained like that and as for thebat skills, they wouldn¡¯t learn anything but some defensive moves.

    Sam had tried to get some information on this when he was in thunder god temple. He is curious about why the major powers held such a tight leash over the Space element users and he got some information.

    Apparently, there was an incident where an extremely powerful space element user waged a war against all the world and almost one. That war is even brutal than the one with Old one.

    From then on, the major powers came to an agreement that they should suppress the space element users.

    Thest person who has any form of attacking methods with Space element is actually the current head of the association, who is only a transcendent realm cultivator.

    He is under a tight watch and is not allowed to pass the techniques, in fact, he cannot because the cultivation methods and techniques arepletely destroyed.

    Due to this frustration, half of the Space gate association defected to Old One. They couldn¡¯t take the suppression and the pressure from the major powers and get tired of the lives in which they couldn¡¯t live up to their full potential.

    It is easy to manipte them and Old One took advantage of that.

    Currently, everyone in the Space gate association arepletely frustrated, the major powers are suspecting them, they don¡¯t have much freedom, and the people the major powers put there in the association to keep watch on the association members are doing whatever they can.

    They are being bullied, pressured, isted, and frustrated.

    If Old one could have a go at this moment, the whole Space gate association would have defected.

    Sam wanted to take advantage of this situation.

    He has so many things in the divine dimension¡¯s library.

    At this moment, Sam offered some battle techniques and some blueprints on some formations that can only be used by the Space element users.

    At this moment, the resources for the Space gate association are cut out. They need something to get back on their feet.

    Sam has offered them two types of things. One of them would increase the power of the Space gate association by practicing these techniques.

    This would at least give them some confidence and there would be new goals in their current boring lives.

    The second things are the blueprints. These blueprints are of some formations and some inscriptions which are useful for Spatial transfer.

    If they take them, they can show them their research achievements and offer them to the major powers.

    This would take the pressure off of their shoulders.

    Either way, Sam can throw them out of their current predicament and they have to pay the price for that.

 Chapter 374: Armans Plight

    While Sam discussed the deal with Zeke, Arman who ispletely butt n.a.k.e.d after the fight dressed up and is trying to heal his wounds and took some pills.

    He tried to get out of the ce from the entrance, but all the entrances are blocked and there is no way for him to exit.

    He even attacked the walls and the doors but was unable to get out of the ce.

    He just sat there thinking about the humiliating experience he just went through.

    Sam has every chance to kill him, but he decided against it, he has so many choices and the strength gap is so huge that Sam decided to leisurely humiliate him like that.

    Arman felt a myriad of negative emotions through his head.

    He wanted to desperately take revenge for that, but he doesn¡¯t have enough strength. He decided to cultivate and sat cross-legged.

    The lightning de floated in front of him and said.

    [Kid, your mind is a mess, if you break through now, the foundation wouldn¡¯t be strong.]

    Arman didn¡¯t open his eyes and replied.

    "What do you know? You are just a weapon spirit. I am the one who is stripped n.a.k.e.d. Anyway, you saw the strength difference, if I don¡¯t a breakthrough, there is no way for me to get out of here.

    And tomorrow he said he would bring the audience to watch the fight.

    What do you expect me to do? Stay like this and get my ass beat every time hees? I have to increase my strength no matter what."

    {Who asked you to be so slow? What is the use of me being here if you don¡¯t use me? Tomorrow, attack him as soon as he entered without waiting for him to prepare. Just go with the trump card.]

    Arman thought for a bit and agreed. He also agreed that his state of mind is not exactly great. Nothing goodes out if he forcefully broke through at this moment.

    He started meditating to calm his mind so that he wouldn¡¯t lose control and affect his mental state.

    Meanwhile, Sam doesn¡¯t know all of this is happening, he went into the divine dimension and then to the second floor of the tower to continue his production and design.

    The day passed and the next day, Sam came out at sunrise and met Philip to ask him to send a bunch of people to the arena Arman was trapped in.

    Philip didn¡¯t ask for much as he sent a bunch of workers who are not on their shift to the arena.

    They took the seats in the audience. Arman who is meditating sincest night noticed this.

    But he is not surprised. He knew that Sam would be entering the arena at any moment. So, he became alert and got ready for the fight.

    He stood up and took out the lightning de as he looked at the entrance from which Sam would enter. He started condensing his spiritual energy and deposited it into the de. Some runic marks could be seen on the translucent de as the lightning crackled.

    The de started transforming the lightning elemental energy which is already tyrannical to begin with and gave it an extremely sharp aura along with that destructive force.

    He stood there for more than fifteen minutes and all this time, Sam is nowhere to be seen.

    The Spectators who don¡¯t even know the reason they are here only watched as Arman is surrounded by the lightning sparks.

    After fifteen minutes, Sam finally entered the arena.

    As soon as he stepped inside the door and closed it, Arman swung the de towards the entrance.

    The lightning elemental energy which was concentrated in the de transformed itself and formed the shape of therge saber that could reach Sam from his ce.

    Sam wasn¡¯t extremely surprised by this. He is anticipating such a move from Arman.

    He didn¡¯t panic. Rather he is calm and collected. As soon as he saw therge sabre made of lightning was about to hit him, his body started emitting a golden glow and Sam activated the light elemental fusion.

    He shed through the arena as he moved at an unbelievable speed and before anyone could make sense of it, he is already right in front of Arman with only a few inches between them.

    His body is glowing with the golden light as he extended his arm and held Arman¡¯s hand which is wielding the saber.

    *BOOM*

    There is a collision of forces and the floor has cracks.

    Sam¡¯s legs buckled a bit as he tried to negate the force that wasing from the swing.

    The light elemental body didn¡¯t conduct the electricity.

    After a few seconds of this force negation, Sam looked at Arman who was shocked and surprised.

    Then fear started creeping into his mind.

    Sam undid his elemental fusion as he looked at Arman.

    He had a cold smile on his face.

    He noticed that there is no increase in Arman¡¯s cultivation and understood that he has nothing to worry about at all.

    He twisted Arman¡¯s arm and turned him around so that he would face Arman¡¯s back.

    What came after next is a phenomenal ass kicking.

    And that ass-kicking is a literal one.

    Sam didn¡¯t show a hint of courtesy as he kicked the ass in front of everyone.

    Arman¡¯s face turned red as he couldn¡¯t take the humiliation.

    His face is directly facing the audience and this made the situation even worse.

    They are all looking at him with a weird expression.

    Sam¡¯s kicks didn¡¯t stop though. He even added the wind elemental energy and slowly the clothes on Arman started shredding.

    Soon, Arman became butt n.a.k.e.d and the audience¡¯s jaws dropped to the floor. They have the weirdest expressions possible on their faces.

    They don¡¯t know what to do. There are some women who are looking at the situation and felt like leaving.

    But they stayed stubbornly because of Philip¡¯s orders, but from every kick, they are seeing the genitalia in a weird motion.

    They are looking at things they didn¡¯t expect to see.

    There are some youngsters in the scene who are weirdly enjoying the situation.

    They are looking at Arman with extreme ridicule and mocking expressions.

    Arman felt his face burning, even Sam¡¯s kicks aren¡¯t hurting that much. Until this moment, he at least tried to resist with his spiritual energy which was almost depleted.

    But after this embarrassment, he couldn¡¯t hold his anger in and twisted his body forcefully and his arm broke at the shoulder joint. Bone even protruded outside.

    He burst his spiritual energy into his fists and tried to hit Sam in the face, but this time, Sam¡¯s kick came and hit him in the nuts.

    Arman halted in his tracks as he fell down on his knees.

    He felt like the whole world stopped and held his genitals in his hand and slowly fell to the ground.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop there and extended his leg behind himself to the maximum and kicked with pure raw muscr strength as he kicked Arman in his face.

    Arman¡¯s teeth fell from his mouth and he slid on the ground like a ragdoll.

    The audience even felt the pain for Arman.

    Sam walked towards Arman who is rolling on the ground and said.

    "Genius of the thunder god temple and he only amounts to this much. With this capability, you even dared to mess with me."

    He kicked him in his stomach and he continued to so as he said a statement after statement.

    "How dare you spy on me?"

    "How dare you enter the western continent?"

    "How dare you have ns on mywork?"

    "How dare you even try to make a fuss here?"

    For every sentence, Sam kicked Arman in his guts as he spat a mouthful of blood for every hit.

    Arman felt like his whole life was worthless.

    He didn¡¯t feel this much pain and humiliation in his whole life.

    He was stripped in front of people, kicked in the nuts, and being stomped on like a bug. He felt like this situation is worse than dying.

    Some of the audience are sneering at this as they heard Sam¡¯s words and some of them are pitying him. Some of them are having the time of their lives, they never saw this level of an ass beating.

    After kicking to his heart¡¯s content, Sam left the ce and went back to his room and entered the divine dimension, and went on with his daily routine.

    The audience went back to their work and the whole city soon knew about Sam beating Arman¡¯s ass. The worst part is that the whole city knew who Arman is.

    Arman did meet everyone possible when he tried to enter thework with the name of Sam¡¯s friend.

    They really thought he is Sam¡¯s friend. They even acted warm towards him and some of them acted friendly. But now the story was known, they felt like the beating is a bit underrated. Then they got some news and that is there is another duel between Sam and Arman the next day.

 Chapter 375: Copying

    While Sam¡¯s city is bustling with the increased production, something else is happening in the powers near the central continent.

    Half of the minor powers are gone; the rest of the minor powers are trying to get a hold of the inds that were previously under those minor powers which are eliminated.

    And those thoughts automatically brought friction.

    As for the major powers, they didn¡¯t care about those inds at all. They already upied the most resourceful inds besides the central continent.

    As for the major powers, they are thinking about something else.

    Now that they need to send some people and restore order to the empires, the selections for the lords are being done. They are sending teams of people to recruit a suitable leader from the locals and also restore some of the nobility who are lucky enough to escape the church¡¯s elimination and survive.

    The process is going in full swing. While the order might be restored in a few months, there is something else that needs to be done and that is restoring the economy.

    Currently, there are no businesses that are going on, and the natural resources that are mined, cultivated, or developed by the empire are stagnant. There are no new productsing into society.

    Even though the professional towers are still intact, they are restructuring, because they realizedter that the reason Old One left the professional towers without any attacks is not that he is considering letting them off, rather the church has long invaded them.

    Now, they are all in the process of restoring their ranks.

    Even though they can handle businesses and restore some form of economic order, they need some time to consolidate. But still, people are not willing to buy something directly from these towers, for obvious reasons like price and the overbearing nature of the people in the towers.

    They are not exactly suitable for the retail business.

    The major powers then decided on something. After looking at the images and recordings of Sam¡¯s park and Sam¡¯s city, they are extremely intrigued. But the first thought that came to their minds is not cooperating with Sam.

    Rather it is to copy Sam¡¯s work and replicate it.

    They were really intrigued, interested, and curious about how the partnership with Sam could be, but their inted egos are telling them that they can create this.

    For that, the professional associations are more than happy. Because, after leaving the thunder god temple and returning back to their respective ces, they used their special methods to contact the Tower heads of the western continent.

    They learned that the city and parks are actually a partnership between Sam and the four towers, but Sam takes fifty percent of it.

    They also said that the blueprints of the formations, inscriptions, and even the construction of the infrastructure were all designed by Sam.

    They particrly stressed the fact that Sam could have done this alone if his cultivation was high enough and only his cultivation is the reason for him to not able toy down the said designed formations.

    After listening to them, the most disappointed person is actually, the artisan association head, because the tower heads who are in charge of looking after thework in the western continent, didn¡¯t possess the blueprints and designs for the grenades and other products Sam made.

    As for dissecting the samples and reverse engineering them, they tried and all they got is some spoiled, burned, and exploded scraps of metals in their hands.

    Like hell, would Sam let them copy his creations?

    But one thing that did give them relief is that the pharmaceutical association is notpletely essential in this project.

    Currently, the pharmaceutical association is in its worst state, so there is no way they would include them.

    After confirmed all that needs to be known, they sent someone to take the designs of formations from the former tower heads.

    They brazenly used the inspection of the towers as an excuse to send someone from through the space gate that is connected to the thunder god temple.

    They even visited Sam¡¯s city and met with the former tower heads in the name of questioning them for not reporting back to the association and got their hands on their blueprints.

    The former tower heads, who didn¡¯t even dare to share a glimpse of designs to their spouses didn¡¯t even show a hint of hesitation and fear when handing these over to their superiors.

    They felt like they don¡¯t have anything to fear as long as the associations are backing them.

    They also have other thoughts and that is once the associations intervened, they dreamt of kicking Sam out of thework and taking over the whole authority.

    But what they don¡¯t know, is Watt is watching the scenes of them exchanging these from one of the monitoring screens and the atmosphere he is burning with killing intent.

    But he didn¡¯t dare to make a move himself without Sam¡¯s permission and instructions.

    So, that day after Sam came out of the divine dimension to get a daily report, he also received the news about the exchange.

    "Leave them alone for now. We will deal with themter."

    That is the only thing Sam said.

    That night, he didn¡¯t enter the divine dimension because the first installment of the materials came to him.

    These materials are the things extremely essential for his next project because they are the materials that would be useful for him to make the puppet cores.

    That¡¯s right, they are the ones which would be useful for him to make the lesser quality cores which would be the next batch of his products.

    He started sorting out the materials and also sent the first installment of the products and money he has to send. This emptied his savings by more than half. But the amount of materials he sent is not something that can be equated to money.

    He has far more uses and far better uses for these materials than these spiritual stones that justid around.

    After sorting out the materials, he didn¡¯t return to the divine dimension.

    He has to sort some of his thoughts. He knew that it is hard to keep these people loyal to him just with fear. But he couldn¡¯t tolerate the fact that they dared to give away his own designs to someone and from the recording, they seem to be quite proud of this.

    Sam is not exactly worried about those blueprints; he has his own preparations regarding this.

    But he has to solve the problem of these people. Things can be remade, but trusted people cannot be found that easily and trust in these kinds of people could never be found.

    By this point Sam is not even considering the four former tower heads¡¯ lives, they are already dead meat.

    His major concern is how to get the payback from these four associations and how to set an example and take measures so that this wouldn¡¯t happen in the future.

    Sam is really in deep thoughts.

    But the association heads are not, they are extremely happy that they got their hands on those blueprints, when they looked through the designs the only thought in their mind is that they did a good thing by taking these blueprints, it is the same for the inscription association, as, for the artisan association, they gave up on reverse engineering other products, they just decided to keep their own products.

    As for the formation head and inscription head, they are actually quite impressed by Sam¡¯s designs, they agreed that they wouldn¡¯t be able toe up with such creative designs due to their orthodox thinking.

    They started making preparations to start the businesses and the first step is training their subordinates to be good enough toy down the formations.

    They are socent with themselves that they couldn¡¯t stop grinning even while resting. While the major association is feeling so good about themselves for taking something away from Sam, there a minor association who are extremely respectful and favorable towards Sam.

    The Space gate association.

    The higher-ups of the Space gate association are all in a meeting and are in an extremely intense and heated discussion.

    Only half of the people are left and surprisingly when Zeke brought the scroll with a partial description of the techniques and blueprints, there are no opposing voices against the deal.

    Generally, in this type of situation, there would be definitely some opposing voices. After all, they will be going against the major powers and associations.

    But this time thesecent major powers made a mistake, they just pushed their buttons for too long and too hard that they unanimously agreed to make a deal with Sam.

    As for the intense discussion, it is about the three choices. They are in a discussion to select what they should take.

    And after long and hard discussions, they came to a conclusion. They would take two battle-techniques and a blueprint, they would increase their power themselves and also show some achievements to the major powers so that they would off their backs.

    This time, they got ready to discuss the deal further with Sam. But along with Zeke, the association head himself wanted to go there.

 Chapter 376: Meetings

    The next day, Sam continued with this new routine. He went to beat the crap out of Arman and this time, he didn¡¯t have to order people to watch, because there are already workers who are not in the shift to watch the fight.

    This what Sam wanted to achieve and it did work out well.

    Arman took the beating with his clenched fists and jaws. There are some changes in his expression.

    Sam guessed that he wanted to endure it for a while until he had a breakthrough. But that is not what he wanted, so he did something else.

    He installed a small surveince system in the arena so that Arman could see and hear somethings and those screens followed the activities of the workers who came to watch the show that day.

    With such a great fiasco happening early in the morning, it would be weird if they don¡¯t talk about it for the rest of the day.

    Arman who is trying so hard to build his will and determination crumbled again. But the effect is not as bad as Sam though. So, he did something and realized the weapon spirit in Arman¡¯s hands is the reason for that.

    It is trying to encourage Arman and keeping his mind sane.

    Sam started thinking about what to do with that weapon and how to deal with it.

    As he was thinking and was about to go back into the divine dimension, he got the news that the officials from the Space gate association came back.

    He was surprised that they came this early, even though Zeke said he would be back in three days, he didn¡¯t expect him to reallye back in three days. After all, this is a big decision. He expected some reluctance as they would be going against the rules of the six major powers.

    It is a bit reckless to take that decision this fast. But this also gave him some other knowledge on how much these major powers are suppressing them.

    They seemed to have been pushed into a corner.

    Sam went to the meeting room; there an old man is sitting beside Zeke.

    When Sam came, both of them stood up. This surprised Sam a little.

    He did expect some seniors toe this time, but he thought they woulde to pressurize, bargain, or even try to suppress Sam.

    Sam shook hands with both of them and sat down in front of them.

    "Sam; I don¡¯t know where you got these techniques and blueprints from. I don¡¯t even want to know. But I do want to know something. Why are you doing this? You do know that you are going against the major powers with this.

    You have an established city here, you are rich, stable, and even have great potential. Why risk everything by helping us?"

    Old man directly came to the point.

    Sam chuckled and asked.

    "May I know your name?"

    "I am Stephen."

    "Mr. Stephen. Why did you even think that I am helping you guys? I am helping myself. To bepletely honest, the Space gate association doesn¡¯t have anything except the Space gates and intercontinentalmunication devices and at this moment, they even lost the backing of the six major powers.

    I am pretty sure, that it would take a few more months if not years, for the association to gain the trust of the major powers.

    To put it bluntly, you are at your most vulnerable state, you are in extreme demand for safety and stability.

    I saw an opportunity there. I need Space gates and you need these arts. That¡¯s it."

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to hide his thoughts, because he truly understood what thesecent major powers would do.

    They don¡¯t know what they are doing and what kind of damage they are causing to these people.

    In fact, the damage is to themselves, the Space element users are not just rare, they have many inherent advantages, if Sam really had to suppress them, he would rather bind them with some kind of contract, brainwashing, ve contracts, or any other way. But he would not stop nurturing them.

    He would make them his loyal soldiers no matter what, but these major powers are stupid enough to push them to the corner.

    Stephen looked at Sam and went into deep thought for a while.

    He didn¡¯t expect Sam to be straightforward. But he is d that Sam is like this. If Sam had taken the chance and said that he is helping because of something this and that and pulled all the hypocritical bullshit, he would have been disappointed.

    He took a deep breath and started speaking.

    "Is there any way to get all those techniques?"

    "At this moment, No."

    "What does it take?"

    "Not for the time being. I cannot afford to give them to you, no matter the price."

    "Why?"

    "I am just a twenty-year-old Grand realm cultivator. You might have heard how I killed Old One. But there is something you are forgetting. I cannot handle too much pressure from my current state. As you said, I cannot risk what I have.

    If I sell so much to you, it is difficult to cover up. If the major powers trace it back to me, I will have a hard time keeping everything safe."

    Stephen didn¡¯t reply, he doesn¡¯t know what to say about that. Simply, put there is no trust between both parties.

    Sam doesn¡¯t have enough reasons to trust the Space gate association to sell these things to them and Stephen didn¡¯t see anything wrong with that.

    After some thought, Stephen said.

    "Okay, we will take the first two techniques and the third blueprint. We will give you all the Space gates for one-third of the price. We do have a new type of Space gatework, it is not suitable for the rest of the major powers, because they have too few ces to move in between.

    If you want to give it a try, we can exin it to you."

    Taking the cue, Zeke took out some scrolls and started exining to Sam about the Space gatework.

    Sam is actually impressed.

    This is aplex transportationwork.

    Thework itself isplex to make, but it is actually based on an easy concept.

    In thiswork, if Sam wants to have thework in six ces, each ce will have on Space gate and they can use this one Space gate to visit the rest of the five space gates as they wished.

    It is more efficient, he doesn¡¯t need six space gates in the city to visit six different empires, he can actually use a single gate to visit all the ces.

    Apart from that, a single space gate is easier to hide than multiple gates.

    But it does have its disadvantages. It is a bit expensive.

    And it is not a suitablework to use when connecting a few ces. Any major power that only has four to five empires, wouldn¡¯t want to spend such money and they don¡¯t need these empires to stay connected. They can make do with a normal Space gate.

    But Sam wanted a connection with all the empires. There are around thirty empires, on this under all the major powers.

    For that, thiswork will be more useful and it is a bit more economical. Anyway, Sam could use this connection between empires for good use.

    He can transport materials which are beyond one empire and sell them there, he can even transport people and make a business out of it.

    If pushes to shove, he would open a refugee escaping tform, where people who wanted to seek refugee from the authorities can escape to other empires.

    He can make a fortune and earn back whatever he spent on these Space gates.

    So, from now on the discussion is all about how Sam wants thiswork and how they should proceed further.

    Meanwhile, the major powers are in another meeting.

    The one who conducted the meeting is the three major professional associations.

    The Formation association head took the lead and stood up.

    "Today we are here to discuss something very important. This could bring economic order and the money and material cirction in the copsed empires back on to the track."

    "What would that n be?"

    One of the six asked.

    "The Park."

    Everyone looked at him with a disdainful expression. They knew exactly where this idea came from, even they have thoughts to copy that, but they are not shameless enough to take the lead and even conduct a meeting like this.

    Formation head cleared his throat and said.

    "I know what you guys are thinking, but I have something to tell you. We were able to obtain the core formation blueprints for the construction of the park and along with that we also have blueprints of the inscriptions and formations that are used within the park.

    We even have the architectural blueprint of the whole park and can proceed to construct an exact replica and even an improved version of a Park that is already running in the western continent."

 Chapter 377: Partnership between major powers

    The heads of the major powers looked at him weirdly. They also had thoughts of copying Sam¡¯s park and even the city, but they didn¡¯t think about stealing the Blueprints.

    They still have some individuality left in them. Why would they stoop so low as to steal from a Grand realm cultivator?

    They did like Sam¡¯s ns, so they asked their in-house Formation master and Inscription masters to replicate or even create an improved version of the design. They could even refer to this and create apletely new design, but there are no results.

    Forget about the fully finished design it is impossible to finish in a few days. But there are not even any creative ideas. Every n they came up with fell short of Sam¡¯s ns.

    But they still didn¡¯t give up. They are trying. It is not fair to drop it just after a few days.

    But now, when they heard the formation association head, they are actually feeling a bit tempted.

    Yes, they are disdainful, but that doesn¡¯t mean they are not interested in the designs. They are also in a bit of a hurry to do something about the situation in the empires.

    Thus, they stayed put. Well, except for one.

    Sai.

    "How did you get them?" Sai asked with a frown.

    "I bought them." The formation association head said.

    "Sam sold you that?"

    "Nope. But someone who owns these designs just as much as Sam owns them."

    "Is that even possible?"

    "Sai, I don¡¯t know what is wrong with you, but you have been supporting Sam an awful lot more than a Faction-head should support the person who tore those faction apart."

    "Old Three, you don¡¯t have to spite me. There is something that you might want to know. The enmity is not between me and Sam, nor is it between faction and Sam. It is between Sravan and Sam. The faction suffered as a form of coteral damage. Because Sravan used the faction to deal with Sam. Sam dealt with the faction himself.

    As for your designs. You have a feeling that all the major powers and the people who are ruling them, otherwise we are giants overseeing the world and thinking of Sam as a puny human no matter what he showed.

    But there is one thing you don¡¯t understand, like giants, our bodies are too big, we are slow, we are clumsy. To put it bluntly, Sam who is a human might as well be considered as the most dangerous human who can easily target a giant, in front of him our powers, our manpower, and our territory which makes us the giants are just our body being easily exposed and serving him to be attacked.

    I am out of here."

    With that Sai left the ce without any second thoughts.

    The rest of the heads are thinking about Sai¡¯s words, but their greed won over and they started discussing the ns with them.

    Old three, the formation association head started exining his ns.

    "We are going to cooperate to establish this Park project.

    The three associations will each hold twenty percent of the whole project, the major powers who are the rulers of the empires will have the remaining forty percent.

    We will be in charge of construction and management, but there is a need for a lot of manpower,nd, security, and many other things. You will be in charge of that.

    It is not easy for us to individually make this happen. We do have all the products and we can construct anything, but the problemes when we have to deal with security and criminal. This big project makes it a big target as well.

    As for you guys, you can manage the security but you wouldn¡¯t be able to provide the products and other things.

    If we make a deal, we can both prosper."

    After that, there was a series of discussions on how to proceed further and proceed with the project.

    After their discussion, they went back to their respective powers, but at this moment, every one of the six major powers received news from the Space gate association.

    It is a request for inspecting the Space gates in the empires.

    The Head of the major powers are puzzled by this sudden request, when they asked for an exnation, the Space gate association answered that there might some sort of modifications left in the Space gates of the empires by Old One¡¯s sub-ordinates.

    So, they wanted to check and see if there are any troubles with that.

    Along with that, they also submitted the blueprint they got from Sam.

    The blueprint is regarding the One-way Space gates. Generally, there are very few ways to return back when they traveled through the One-way Space gate. One of those methods is the one Sanjay used to abduct Watt.

    That method needs the scrolls which are inscribed with a lesser-version of a Space gate formation and connect it to the One-way Space gate.

    It needs a lot of resources to make it work. With Sam¡¯s blueprint, not only the cost is reduced, the spiritual energy required and limit of people that can be called back in this way is also increased.

    When the major powers saw these, they are extremely ecstatic, they felt like the bad luck which came in the form of Old one, and the war is finally over and they are experiencing good days again.

    They got their hands on the blueprints of Sam¡¯s park and are constructing their own, they are slowly but steadily stabilizing the empires by forcing their disciples to take temporary in-charge.

    They are even dealing with the stray nobles, ex-military officials, and everything now they got the new cards up their sleeves.

    They are extremely ecstatic. They didn¡¯t even bother about what the Space gate association is nning in the name of inspection and just let them do it.

    The Space gate association used this to construct the Space gates for Sam.

    This is a ploy all along. From the deal they made with Sam, they have to find a secure ce in the empire where they would construct the Space gate.

    For that, they did something which is extremely easier at this moment.

    They bought a house from someone else within the imperial capital and decided to construct their Space gate there.

    Once the Space gate is constructed, the association has its own ways to enter it from the association itself. Of course, the owner of the formation can stop them, but the Space gate association never revealed it to the major powers.

    They left this as one of theirst resorts to escape if the major powers ever decided to eliminate them.

    Anyway, back to the topic. The Space gate association decided to construct the Space gate within the house and send someone from the association there to keep guard until Sam takes over.

    At this moment, in Sam¡¯s city.

    Sam is inside the tower going through the library, his brain is in a mess and he is in no mood to design or produce.

    He doesn¡¯t want to mess up one of his greatest projects when is not in a good mood.

    He is not so pleased with himself, with all the problems that are going to crop up.

    With Sam not there to guide and only a bunch of blueprints, it will take months for them to construct. They will have to spend more than what it took for him to build the first park.

    He does have time to stop them and what is the use for him to stop them this early, he has to make them know what would happen if they want to steal something from him.

    His main issue was about loyalty. For the next operation, he needs some powerful people but extremely loyal to him.

    He has abandoned the idea of working with the tower heads in the empires.

    He was done with that, the tower heads that he has here are nothing but a bunch of greedy individuals who would sell out his hard work.

    He now understood what Old One was thinking when he used his pills to create forced loyalty. He wanted to do that too and although he supressed the thought, he didn¡¯t abandon it.

    If pushes to shove, he would definitely do that.

    At this moment, he is currently looking for the details about the drug Old One used.

    He didn¡¯t have details that like the major powers and even those details are not much.

    He is sure that whatever they got from the scraps of Old One¡¯s things they found at the camp because Sam checked the spatial ring that Old One wore when he died. In that Spatial ring, all he found are tons of pills.

    He started doing experiments with the pills to see if he can find the ingredients so that he can pinpoint the details easily in the tons of information he has in the divine dimension¡¯s library.

    And after a lot of research, he did get some information that is pretty simr to what happened and there is even more information which exactly what Sam needed.

 Chapter 378: Pill of Servitude

    Sam looked through the information of what he got.

    It is the information on a pill, including its recipe and even the history of the pill making and the invention of the pill.

    The Pill is called the Pill of Servitude.

    This is a pill that creates a contract of a master and servant between two people.

    As for the duration of the contract, it depends on the manufacturing of the pill. It is decided by varying the number of certain ingredients.

    But this is not what surprised him the most.

    History before the invention of this pill, there are many types of other pills which are made in an attempt to make this pill and one of the pills in that is the Undead gue.

    It is one of the first inventions in an attempt to make the servitude pill.

    It was told that the person who invented the pill experimented a lot of soul and dark element rted herbs and beast blood. He focused mostly on the beasts which have necromancy abilities. Although they cannot be a full-fledged necromancer, some beasts do have the ability to create some undead either upon their death or in some special circumstances.

    The creator might have thought of using the unwavering loyalty of the undead to its master and the servitude of the soul to achieve his goal.

    But it didn¡¯t work. He did notice the loyalty objective, but the people who are under this pill doesn¡¯t have any form ofmon sense left.

    Their brain ispletely useless and apart from that, they lose their spiritual energy usage and only gaining physical strength before they turn undead.

    After some modifications, he made the second pill under the undead gue category which allowed them to absorb energy from each other.

    Sam chuckled after he went through all the information in it.

    There are a bunch of recipes under this Servitude pill which are as deadly as the Undead gue and some are even deadly than this Undead gue.

    If he should say, the Servitude Pill is the weakest of all of them. The servitude pill doesn¡¯t have any other effects than the servitude.

    The recipient of the pill doesn¡¯t have any effects on his brain, his strength or even his character.

    Sam was actually impressed by what the creator achieved, he was able to create more deadly, more versatile, and more lethal drugs, but he didn¡¯t stop his pursuit to create a simple servitude pill.

    That too, a temporary servitude pill.

    That tenacity is very rare to be seen. Generally, people would gocent at the fact that they created a more effective one by a fluke and think that it is their ability.

    But what this creator did is something most people wouldn¡¯t be able to do. He treated the rest of the deadly products he came up with as failures. He treated any result other than what he aimed as a failure, even if the result has more variations and more uses than what he originally desired.

    After looking through so many recipes, Sam is actually surprised to see that these pills are created by herbs that aremon.

    If you take their ranks and grades into ount, they are considered rare overall. They are made of Rank-6 and some even had rank-7 herbs.

    But if wepare those herbs to the rest of the herbs of the same rank, they are considered quitemon.

    Another thing is the main ingredients of these pills is not the herbs, rather the beast blood. From the amount of beast blood that is being used, if he didn¡¯t know any better, Sam would have thought that it is actually a potion recipe.

    An ordinary pill master will definitely think that it is impossible to create a solid pill, but the catch they have to condense these types of blood into solid to achieve the pill.

    The efforts the creator put behind this pill is not something that can be expressed in words like excellent.

    This is a symbol to indicate the epitome of the dedication of a person who put his soul into the craft.

    Sam started studying the information regarding the pills. When he encountered the followers and conducting the research, he didn¡¯t go through the library because there is too much information. He was confident that he would be able to identify something simr and find some information.

    But at that moment, it is extremely urgent for him to deal with the followers and Old one to save his city, he didn¡¯t have enough time to go through all this information and now he felt d that he didn¡¯t turn towards the library.

    Because the solutions provided by the information here for the undead gue will not work in this world.

    Although the beast blood and the herbs used for making this are quitemon, the cure for this is extremely extravagant to the point, even Sam started sweating.

    The ingredients required would be hard to obtain even in some of the upper-realms. There is no way for him to use them to create a solution using the resources of this empire. He might have even given up on curepletely if he has concentrated on this.

    After going through, all the information Sam is feeling hesitant. He wanted to make this Servitude Pill. This would solve all his problems and he can even use it for the long term.

    But the forced servitude, the forced loyalty is not something that interested him. He would rather have a person stay loyal to him in fear, in respect. That would be good because all it takes his ability, but to force someone to stay loyal with some medicine.

    Sam always felt that it is beneath him.

    But now the circumstances are forcing him to make a decision. He is extremely conflicted.

    After a long time, Sam did find a solution for one of his problems and that is to create his own force.

    He did have this thought for a long time, but he didn¡¯t find the correct time to do so. If not for the fact these people are pissing him off so much, Sam wouldn¡¯t even find it necessary at the moment.

    His original n was to focus on the city to see if there are any problems in running it and making sure that there are no problems and create the most efficient and problem-free environment.

    But these former tower heads and the major powers are now just being a pain in the ass.

    But creating a force is a veryrge matter which consumes a lot of time.

    He has to find the current people to target. He couldn¡¯t just randomly recruit and train.

    Sam had apletely different n in recruiting people, but if he has to create a force in his current situation, there is no way he would be able to create something that would be most efficient and most useful ording to his preferences.

    He would have to recruit some already strong people and he even needs some extremely strong ones.

    The major powers are of no joke.

    After some deep thinking, Sam came to a decision. He is not extremely willing but he couldn¡¯t do anything about it.

    One has to act ording to circumstances and do what needs to be done.

    With that, he came out of the tower and met with Philip. He gave him a list of herbs and asked him to gather them.

    By now, Sam already has a certain idea whether these herbs would be avable in the empire or not and he gave the list of all the avable herbs to Philip.

    As for the herbs that are not avable, Sam has other ways to obtain it. Because some of the herbs are actually only avable in the Herb Garden which is one of the major powers and coincidentally these herbs also part of installment the major powers have to send.

    But there are some special herbs, which he cannot obtain in either ce and he tried another way.

    He contacted Zeke who is within the city. He was appointed as the supervisor of the current project of Sam¡¯s Space gatework and he would be in this city and oversees the first Space gate construction in Sam¡¯s city.

    Sam met him and asked.

    "I want the Space gate association to help me with something."

    "What would that be?"

    Zeke is extremely surprised and delighted, at this moment, what he or rather the whole Space gate association wants is Sam¡¯s favor and trust, so he would definitely help.

    "Well, I am in need of some herbs and I couldn¡¯t find them within the Western continent, but I am certain that they would be avable in other empires. So, I want you guys to buy these herbs for me. I will pay double the price. You can keep one share as a service charge."

    "No need, no need. You can just pay for it normally. It is not such a big deal. Currently, all the people within the Space gate association are moving around various empires, we can just buy them on the way. There is no need to pay the extra charge."

 Chapter 379: Recruitment Plans

    After sorting out the problem regarding herb supply, Sam went back to Philip.

    "Post a recruitment order. We are recruiting people at all cultivation levels, but people at Nascent stage are preferred. We are getting new employees. Mention in the post that any form of expertise and any skills are appreciated. That might be as simple as cooking, carpentry to assassination and arson skills.

    Apart from that, call the Architecture Artisan who was in-charge of the city¡¯s construction, do not let that former tower-head know about this. Ask him toe alone and without informing anyone. If he does y any tricks, just deal with him.

    Ask Watt to meet me."

    With that Sam went back to his room.

    After a few minutes Watt appeared and Sam started speaking.

    "Recruit every orphan in the empire. I want all of them in the City in a few days, arrange the temporary residence within the inns, they can adjust a bit and ce multiple people in a single room. If they are too many, arrange the residence in some of our arenas.

    The maximum limit for recruitment is that they are fifteen years old or lesser and their cultivation limit should be Initiation stage. As for the minimum limit, even if they are infants you can recruit them.

    Apart from that order some earth and wood element users under us to create a levelled ce in the nearby woods.

    In a week, it should be good enough for the construction to happen."

    Watt nodded and went to execute the task. He doesn¡¯t even have to make a move himself, with thework having this many branches, all he has to do is make a call and that would be it, but he decided he will take care of this task himself.

    He kind of understood why Sam wanted these Orphans toe to the city and he felt that it is a great opportunity for those orphans who are suffering in slums.

    He doesn¡¯t want anyone of them to miss this opportunity. Even though, he picked up the cynicism from Sam, he still felt like he should handle this properly.

    He just went for the earth element and wood element users and made sure to clear enough ce in the woods ording to Sam¡¯s requirement.

    After that, he stood on the Silver Wind as he flew away from the city to aplish the other job. But before that, he did contact Jack who is the only one out of three without any extra jobs to receive orphans through trains.

    With that the new mission began.

    After an hour or so, Sam is in a meeting room with the Architecture artisan who is in charge of the construction of city.

    It has already been quite a while since they met, but Sam hasn¡¯t spoken anything, he just looked at the artisan as if he was searching thetter¡¯s soul. Thetter obviously felt ufortable.

    After a long time, he picked up the courage to speak.

    "Sir Sam. May I know why you called me here?"

    He asked nervously. He is a Pre-transcendent cultivator, with a variant of earth element, he is quite strong himself and his architecture skills speaks for themselves, he was able to aplish the task of building this huge city.

    "You are a Rank-6 Artisan. What does that title mean to you?"

    Sam asked after his long silence.

    "What do you mean?"

    "I meant exactly what I asked. What does that title mean to you?"

    He thought for a brief moment and said.

    "It is an evaluation of my expertise. Without that no one would acknowledge my skills no matter how good I am."

    "I have an offer for you and I am offering this chance to you only because I acknowledged your expertise and skills not because of your rank. Do you want to take it?"

    "Please do tell."

    "Resign from the Artisan association."

    "Excuse me?"

    "You heard me. Resign from the Artisan tower and join thework truly, I will give you the chance to explore a new world of architecture. Something that is beyond the information and skills you can pick up from the artisan association even with the thousands of years of its research.

    I will open the door for that new world."

    "You are also an Artisan, why are you asking me to relinquish my title?"

    Sam took out his badges and said. "As you said, these things are the evaluations which the society follows. I was just a weak cultivator when I explored the Orion and climbed my ranks up. These badges are a necessary hindrance for my enemies as well as a resourceful key for me to open some new doors.

    But at my current position they mean nothing to me. They are nothing but scraps of metals."

    "Why are you asking me to do this?"

    "Because, the professional associations are my enemies, there is no war at this moment, but that wouldn¡¯t remain the same in the future. And I do have to mention that four former tower heads just betrayed me and sold all my designs to the associations. I don¡¯t know what they got in exchange, but you should know what they will get from me."

    The Artisan gulped when he heard this.

    He does know how savage Sam can be, in his view Sam is a mad man. Who would construct such a city and even name it after themselves? but Sam did exactly that.

    Even though, he felt that way, he did feel d that he got an opportunity to construct a city like this and the most amazing thing in that process is the things he learned through the blue prints and the design.

    He improved a lot.

    He felt d that Sam chose to do business with Artisan association, but now he is going to sever ties.

    No, that is not right, it would be more urate to say, the former leaders wanted to sever ties.

    He kind of understood their actions though. They might have thought that with the association¡¯s backing they can take over the wholework, but he has other thoughts.

    He felt that the tower heads are stupid. If the association can really take down Sam that easily, why would they even have to contact the tower heads to get the designs, they would have gone to Sam directly and took the designs with force.

    From the incident of Old One, he has some understanding of Sam¡¯s strength. He doesn¡¯t have the strongest cards in the world, but he is sure of one thing, Sam would take some people who are at the top of the world along with him, if he was to die.

    It is foolish to make Sam an enemy.

    Looking at him in deep thoughts, Sam didn¡¯t want to force him and said.

    "I will not force you, but I do value talented and skilled people, I will give a chance to all of them, but there will be some cleaning within the city.

    So, you better pick your choice. Even if you don¡¯t want to resign, you should know who to keep your distance from and you might have to leave the city. You have a week to decide.

    By the way, you should know to keep quiet, right?"

    For the rest of day, Sam had many meetings with many people.

    He has his eye on many people, as for the rest, they will be dismissed along with the partnership with the associations.

    Since, he would be able to recruit these people for himself, he doesn¡¯t need the association¡¯s help.

    Anyway, currently all the factory workers and other staff are under thework, they have nothing to do with the four towers.

    He can easily maintain thework by himself without breaking a sweat. The four tower had outlived their usage a long time ago, but he didn¡¯t kick them to curb, since he agreed to partnership as he wanted to honor his words.

    Now they made the first move towards burning the bridges, they set the bridge on fire, he would just add fuel to that me.

    He would show them what it means to betray him.

    Meanwhile, Sam has to convince some other person to join him.

    He went to the room Sirona was in.

    She didn¡¯te out of this room, since the time they have had that discussion, she holed herself up in that room.

    He didn¡¯t disturb her and neither did anyone in the building.

    After this long time, Sam knocked on her door.

    "Who is it?" She asked in a cold tone.

    "Sam."

    There is a brief silence and the answer came.

    "Come in."

    Sam entered the room only to see her sitting a chair near the window looking outside. The formation simtor is ced in front of her on a small table.

    He just stood there and spoke.

    "What are your ns for the future?"

    "None." The answer is almost instantaneous.

    Sam could understand the grief behind that one word.

 Chapter 380: Stealing Saber

    The hardest way of living a life for anyone is living without a purpose.

    At this moment, Sirona is leading life in the same manner.

    All these years her purpose has been or to be more precise her purpose was made to be a tool for the Usaine Sect.

    There is nothing more important to her than researching and making new formations, inscriptions, weapons, and traps. Every research she undertook was chosen and applied in such a way that they serve the purpose of the sect.

    All she derived from that is the satisfaction of making a new thing, creating something, and getting the praises of one person whom she strived to receive an acknowledgment from.

    But now, all her purpose, her goals turned out to be a hoax. The trust she ced on the sect waspletely gone and she doesn¡¯t know why she is living.

    At this moment, she is living because she is still searching for a reason to live.

    After a certain period of time, there wille a day when she will find out that there is no such purpose and her thoughts would be focusing on the ways to die.

    In this phase, it is important for a person to explore themselves as well as what life has to offer.

    Sam didn¡¯t want to see her die, if he really wished, he could have killed her the very first day they met. He could rte to her in many ways and that is why he is interested in her.

    He looked at Sirona and said.

    "I need your help."

    Sirona has a puzzled expression on her face as she turned towards him. Sam said once again.

    "I want you to work for me."

    "I am not interested in doing any form of research at this moment."

    "I don¡¯t need you to perform any research. I want you to be a teacher. No, not a teacher I want you to be an examiner."

    "Examiner?"

    "Yes, in the near future I will be recruiting some people and for that, I need to test them in some areas, I am all alone in this and it would be hard for me to do it all alone. So, I need your help.

    Along with that, I also need your help with something else. You can be an examiner for some of the future new recruits.

    You don¡¯t have to do much work. All you have to do is asionally test them ording to criterion I will set."

    Sirona went into deep thought and said.

    "Can I think it through?"

    "When will you answer?"

    "A day or two."

    "Okay."

    With that, Sam finished his conversation and left. He knew Sirona¡¯s current condition as he was already there in that position. He could just leave her be, but Sirona is too great a talent for him to lose.

    He has to get her to his side.

    As for the price he has to pay for that, he would get her back on track in life. He doesn¡¯t have to manipte her; he doesn¡¯t have to brainwash her. Sam has enough confidence that he can win her over fair and square.

    If he wasn¡¯t able to do so, he wouldn¡¯t stoop so low as to force her or coerce her to work for him. He would let her go.

    An unwilling talent is nothing but a working machine. Sam has no need for machines, he can make them himself.

    Sam left the ce without any dy. He has many other things to deal with.

    One of them is the regr beating he has to give.

    Arman is still taking the beating, there is some change in him showing the disturbance he is facing. He once destroyed the screens which are showing the talks of the workers.

    But Sam just doubled the size of the screens and installed protection around the screens which would make it hard for him to destroy.

    Today, Sam has another goal in beating Arman.

    He has to deal with that Sabre. That spirit in the saber is really creating a great deal of trouble for him.

    It almost became a counselor for Arman. All these days he was seeing if the saber¡¯s effect will reduce.

    But this saber spirit was so strong that it even made Arman a breakthrough.

    He lost his patience. And at this moment, he is already having so much pent up frustration due to all the troubles that are being umted.

    He desperately wanted to let loose and battle to his heart¡¯s content.

    But there is no opponent for him at the same level, he would have to fight with Nascent stage cultivator if he wants to vent.

    The worst part he doesn¡¯t have enough time.

    The most important thing is dealing with Arman and his de.

    He shouldn¡¯t interrupt the ns that are already in ce just to vent.

    When Sam entered the Arena, the gallery was already full.

    People are waiting for him to give Arman an ass beating. But Arman is a bit confident this day.

    He broke through and wanted to deal with Sam. All this time he felt that the only drawback he has is the deficiency of his own. He is confident that he could take Sam down if they are on the same level.

    But he came to know he was delusional as soon as Sam made his move.

    Like the other days, Sam didn¡¯t even have any intentions to see what Arman is capable of.

    He couldn¡¯t care less if this guy improved. There is one thing Sam is sure about. Once he surpassed someone, then he would stay ahead for the rest of his life.

    No one would be able to re-surpass him. This is something that he would make sure to happen.

    Even if someone surpasses his cultivation level, he would still die in Sam¡¯s hands if pushes to shove.

    This is not because of his talent or genius. It is because of his pride. He wouldn¡¯t let them do so. Many people will ount for his achievements to luck, talent, and many other things, but what he prides himself on most is the effort.

    He would put more effort than anyone else that if he surpassed someone, he would never take a step back.

    After a few minutes, he smashed Arman¡¯s head to the ground.

    He did so until he heard the nose cracking and jaw cracking, teethpletely gone, and finally fainted.

    He forcefully took the saber into his hands.

    As soon as he did so, Sam didn¡¯t move for a second, everyone could see that he is struggling a little.

    Sam gestured for them to leave the arena.

    After they left, he looked at the saber and muttered.

    "A weapon spirit and quite a nosy one at that. Let us see what you will do now."

    At this moment, there is a lightning elemental energy trying to get into his arm as the weapon tried to free himself.

    Sam released the de, the de started floating in front of him with the help of the lightning energy.

    "You puny human, how dare you to belittle me?"

    Sam raised an eyebrow as he looked at the saber.

    "I didn¡¯t want to undo the seals until Arman improved his cultivation, but you are being a pain in the ass, so don¡¯t me me."

    With that, the aura of the de started increasing.

    The energy seemed to have been stored in the de and waspletely released.

    Sam looked as the de spirit is raging.

    He took out the shadow sword and said.

    "I think you can take care of this easily, this de is not following the rules of the weapon spirits."

    The shadow sword floated and said to Sam.

    "It is in contract with that guy, why would it give you a chance to battle for it. Stop ying dumb."

    The sword then turned around and looked at the lightning de.

    "I don¡¯t know who made you, but the craftsmanship is not bad, but don¡¯t think you can just show off here."

    "A weapon made in this mortal realm is trying to scare me. How dare you?" The lightning de replied.

    Sam was extremely intrigued as he heard the conversation between the two weapons.

    He took a step back because the shadow sword is raising its aura.

    "I wanted to leave you a way out, but you lost the chance."

    With that, a sword ray appeared from the shadow sword and the ray is full of dark elemental energy.

    The lightning de countered with a de ray of lightning energy.

    Both attacks canceled, but the very next second the lightning de spirit almost went crazy.

    Sam was also quite puzzled.

    "How dare you sever the contract?" The lightning de yelled.

    The shadow sword didn¡¯t care, it floated towards Sam and said.

    "Its all yours, It will follow the weapon spiritws now." With that, it disappeared and went back into the divine dimension."

    Sam smiled and made his move, he shed towards the de and held it before it could react.

    "NOOOOO..." Even with the de spirit screaming, the spiritual battle was about to begin. But before it started Sam called Philip to stand guard for him.

    And within five minutes Philip came, by that moment, Sam was unconscious while still standing and holding the de.

 Chapter 381: New Problem

    Arman woke up feeling hurt and dizzy.

    He felt pain in his face even with just simple breathing.

    That pain didn¡¯t even let him stand up and he didn¡¯t do so.

    He noticed that the whole Arena is silent and felt that he was left alone. But Just in case, he extended his spiritual sense and then noticed that someone is here.

    He forced himself to sit up and looked at them.

    When he noticed that Sam is holding the lightning de in his hands, he waspletely shocked and then he knew what is happening. Even though the lightning de was obtained and he didn¡¯t go through the spiritual battle because of Indra, he still came to know how a spiritual battle works.

    He didn¡¯t feel safe at all and had a bad premonition as soon as he came to his sense.

    But before he could stand up, Philip came to his side and looked at him.

    In his current pathetic state, Arman is not a threat at all. But he is still notfortable letting him near Sam.

    He stood in front of Arman and said.

    "I don¡¯t know why Sam kept you alive all this while, but it might be because he is too bored and frustrated will all the things piling upon him. You might as well be his stress buster. But if you make a single move now, I don¡¯t think I can stop myself from killing you. So, stay put."

    Arman looked at him and didn¡¯t answer, he was about to take something out of his spatial ring, but as soon as the item appeared in his left hand, even before he could use it, he felt a crushing blow on his hand.

    It is almost as if it was hit by a huge sledgehammer.

    He groaned in pain as he held his arm with the other one and looked at Philip whose leg was on his arm.

    "I said not a single move."

    Philip said coldly and looked at the thing Arman took out; it is a pill bottle. It turned out to be a healing pill.

    But Philip didn¡¯t go easy on him. He increased the density of the metal in his leg and the weight increased. Arman felt an overbearing pain.

    Philip held the pill bottle in his hand and looked at him.

    "Seems like some extremely high-quality pill, I would take them." Only after that did he take his foot off.

    Arman had a relieved expression. With the gradually increasing weight on his arm, he felt like cutting it off would have been a better choice. His arm was crushed and bones turned into powder.

    But this time, he didn¡¯t take out any healing pills.

    He didn¡¯t want to lose them to Philip. It has only been a few days and he is already at wit¡¯s end, if he has to survive for the rest of the month, he has to manage his supplies.

    After five more minutes, Sam opened his eyes and the lightning de in his hands is also glowing. Sam has a victorious smile on his face.

    He was experienced in the spiritual battle with the shadow sword, at that time, he fainted from the pressure.

    But now, he didn¡¯t faint and he felt as strong as ever, except for the slight headache, there is no more damage to his body

    Sam felt extremely ecstatic, because now not only did he rob of Arman¡¯s mental support, he also gained an information source.

    This weapon came from the upper realms, and it is sent by Indra himself. It has been guiding Arman since the time they spent in the thunder god temple.

    It should know more about why they are actually here and why are these twelve candidates who possibly came from different worlds put in this world at the same time.

    He didn¡¯t even look at Arman as he disregarded himpletely, he took the Saber with him and left, Philip followed him out.

    But he didn¡¯t forget to show off his little gain in front of Arman, which made thetter almost go mad at the spot.

    The loss of healing pills is nothingpared to the lightning de, but Philip showing off is nothing short of a crow poking the wound.

    After they left, Arman justid there as he thought about his life.

    He started thinking about how he came to this world.

    He was a soldier in his previous life, in a world where spiritual energy is not as dense as this ce.

    He was a soldier of great achievements and got promoted, he became the king¡¯s personal guard. No knight in the kingdom was his opponent.

    He was at the prime of his life at a young age, he survived the chaotic wars, deadly beasts, and even the strongest soldiers of other kingdoms as he helped the king be an emperor by conquering morend.

    But with his adrenaline on raise every day and so full of his achievements, he lost one important thing, the shrewdness he used to have when he was an ordinary soldier.

    That time, when he became a soldier, he wanted opportunities and he has to fight for them to gain them from the hands of the rest of the army, he used to shrewd, calctive, and driven by ambition.

    After reaching his prime, he lost all of them. With all the rewards he got, his ambition turned into vanity and his shrewdness turned to arrogance.

    These changes made him unable to survive the politics of the empire and he was dead before he realized what went wrong.

    He has so many regrets when he died, he wanted to be the greatest warrior in the world, but he died before he could achieve it.

    In his dying breath, he was thinking about what has changed and realized how foolish he was, he didn¡¯t have any ns of gaining more authority, he only wanted to gain more strength and battle more to achieve what he wants.

    But the people didn¡¯t think so, they justbeled him as a power-hungry person and that is the reason he was dead.

    In hisst breath, he suddenly felt that strength doesn¡¯t mean anything if he doesn¡¯t have authority. He could take on the king ten times over, but he was still killed because the king felt that he is a threat.

    He only had one thought, if he ever had another chance, he would gain the strength and use it to gain authority.

    He was ecstatic that the chance came as soon as he wished, Indra appeared before him and sent him to this ce.

    He waspletely shocked and surprised at the same time ecstatic when he found out that he is a part of arge organization and his main goal in this world became to be the leader of that organization and one could argue that he achieved half of it.

    Apart from Arthur, he became the most favorable candidate to be the next head.

    He developed and he entered the first pce of inheritance and the first happened to be Indra¡¯s inheritance, he doesn¡¯t know why Indra a god above all gave him this chance.

    But he didn¡¯t care at all, he liked this chance and the opportunity along with the gains from the pce of inheritance.

    But that Saber spirit egged him to get that thunder prison and everything went sideways.

    His biggest regret is messing with Sam.

    Sam is against everything he believed in. All he believed in is authority. But Sam never batted an eyelid for that.

    He defied the most authoritative figures, even if Arman got the authority he wanted and became the head of the thunder god temple, he wouldn¡¯t dare to walk in the beast faction alone.

    But Sam as a grand realm cultivator not only made it, he kicked the ass of the beast faction.

    Then he knew that he is fucked up. He shouldn¡¯t have been too greedy. All this while, just because he was selected by a god, he felt that he is the best in the world.

    But Sam shoved his head into reality. He realized he almost made the same mistake again.

    As these thoughts came over to his mind, he just went to sleep without even healing himself.

    Meanwhile, Sam who went back to his ce didn¡¯t interrogate the Saber.

    Because, today the next big problem which could probably take precedence to all his problems, because he reached the peak of his cultivation realm and his spiritual energy is acting up.

    He was in the peak of the grand realm for a long time and with all the things piling up, he forgot to find the beast for the next breakthrough.

    He is feeling a piercing headache.

    After some thought, he made a visit to Zeke and asked.

    "I need to go to the central continent. Is there any way?"

    Zeke waspletely stunned. He calmed down and said.

    "The central continent is the most dangerous ce to go into. If I may ask why do you want to go there?"

 Chapter 382: Sanjays state

    Sam didn¡¯t know if he should answer this question, but considering the fact that the Space gate association has traveled far and wide, he could use some help.

    "I need to find a beast."

    "A beast?"

    "I am looking for a beastpanion with a rare bloodline, it would be great if the beast has a unique ability."

    Zeke went silent, he didn¡¯t know why Sam would want this, but he felt that this is bizarre.

    "Do you need this urgently?"

    "Yes."

    Zeke really wanted to ask why, but he didn¡¯t dare to. He knows his boundaries.

    He does have some information, but it is not a positive one. He hesitated before exining.

    "I will be honest with you, in my opinion, it is absolutely not a good idea to go to the central continent at this moment, it is better if you don¡¯t go there until you be a Pre-transcendent level cultivator.

    As for the beasts you want, it is extremely difficult to get a hold of them.

    In the central continent, the beasts you can easily spot in the outer boundaries are justmon beasts that could be found in any other empire. As for the beasts with a rare bloodline, they don¡¯t stay alone, they actually live in tribes as they are lead, by the beasts at Consummate realm, which is Level-9.

    They have intelligence on par with humans and have created a society amongst themselves.

    There is no way for you to steal a beast. It would be a disaster if they knew that a human did something like that. This might even start a war between humans and beasts."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply immediately, he is extremely conflicted, he has enough enemies, at this moment if he was spotted in the Central continent, the major powers couldn¡¯t be happier. They would kill him at first sight at this opportunity.

    But he cannot stay in this Grand realm for a long time, he has to find a beast to make a contract.

    What Zeke said is right though, he has to find another way. He doesn¡¯t want to waste his chance and make a contract with a bad bloodline. His beasts are at the top of their game and the best in the world, it is hard to find a match for them even in the upper realms, he wouldn¡¯t want to lose that.

    Sam left disappointed and Zeke is also thinking of how to find a viable solution for Sam.

    But what both of them don¡¯t know is someone is desperately trying to get into Sam¡¯s good books and could possibly solve his problem.

    It is none other than Sai.

    After the meeting, he walked out from, about the Parks and the partnership. He is extremely busy at this moment.

    After Sam made a mess in the Beast faction, he has to clean up after it, but Old One started making a mess, which he has to involve even more.

    After the war is over, he is trying to stabilize the faction.

    But after this meeting, there is a new mess in the whole faction.

    It is about the parks.

    The professional towers in the Beast faction spread the word within the faction to bring trouble for Sai.

    The reason is simple.

    They are greedy. They don¡¯t want to let go of the six empires under the Beast faction. They don¡¯t want to lose that enormous business.

    So, they wanted to use the opinion of other elders and grand elders to pressure him into agreeing.

    Sai is having a headache. These guys just don¡¯t learn a lesson.

    That is what he understood when he tried to exin why he rejected the partnership.

    Sam just fucked them up like a bunch of bitches almost every person who tailed him on that day, but now they are just going crazy over the park which is being created with the ns stolen from Sam.

    He just couldn¡¯t go through their heads.

    Sai has a hunch. That is Sam might already know everything about the stolen ns and he wouldn¡¯t just sit there is watching. That leads to only one scenario where he is only waiting for a chance.

    He so desperately wants to inform Sam if he didn¡¯t know already. From what Sam said, he will be expanding the business to other empires, so he would know sooner orter.

    Sai just wanted to separate himself from this whole endeavor.

    There is also another reason for him to meet Sam and that is to make a request. He wants to make a request to Sam so that he would spare the Beast faction when he takes revenge on Sravan.

    He has to draw a hard line between them.

    At this moment, Sravan is still in bed.

    Sravan has taken a lot of damage from that day. He waspletely rammed with the missiles, then he inhaled a crapload of poisonous gas, the poison can kill a Nascent and a Pre-transcendent if they inhaled it, even though, it is anesthetic.

    As a Consummate realm cultivator, his body is trying to reject the poisons, but the attack of the light beam is not something that could be taken lightly.

    Apart from the hole that was in the chest, the rest of the body is almost like barbequed meat with coated herbs.

    He still didn¡¯t wake up till now, Sai although doesn¡¯t want to involve himself, couldn¡¯t just leave him to die at this moment.

    Sravan is an asset of the Beast faction and the faction-head has to protect the assets of the faction.

    At least, if it doesn¡¯te to a point where Sam is holding a de to their neck, he would try his best to save Sravan.

    But on the day with the de on their necks, he needs Sam to leave the faction alone and don¡¯t cause any coteral damage.

    For that, he has to make a visit to Sam¡¯s city, but with his partnership breakout, the thunder god temple wouldn¡¯t let him go using their Space gates.

    Because they are still pretty sure that Sam doesn¡¯t know about the park.

    They don¡¯t want Sai to sabotage this.

    So, Sai came to seek help from the Space gate association.

    He went to the Space gate association as it is connected to all the major powers with Space gates. He knew that there might be a way for them to send him, to that ce. But he didn¡¯t expect to meet with rejection.

    The reason being, that they cannot send him through their gate if he is not a Space element user. Space gate association has ways to ess all the Space gates in the world from their headquarters, but they can only send the Space element users that way. Normal people cannot go like that.

    Sai was disappointed and went back.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is the news soon reached Sam¡¯s city.

    The Space gate association are trying to get into Sam¡¯s good books there is no way they would lose an opportunity to warn Sam that a Consummate realm cultivator is looking for ways to meet him. Added with the fact that Sam had a feud with beast faction, they are pretty sure that it is not a visit with good intentions.

    Zeke reached out to Sam to give the information and Sam went into deep thought. He doesn¡¯t know what Sai wanted from him. He thanked Zeke and sent him off.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know that the answer for that wille to him sooner than he thought.

    Sai went to meet Sanjay.

    Sanjay was barely alive at the end of the battle. Sam was so lost in the adrenaline rush of the battle and didn¡¯t think of using his poison.

    Even if the slightest bit of hydra¡¯s venom entered Sanjay¡¯s system when he was that injured, he would have died.

    But Since that day, Sanjay was never the same person. He didn¡¯t even wake up for two months. Almost the same time Sam was in aa. But they are out cold for wholly different reasons.

    Even after that Sanjay didn¡¯te out of his room. He ispletely broken inside. All this while he was on the top of the world at least when considering the people at the same level. He dared to say that no youngster in any major power canpete with him.

    There is a certain level of importance attached to him in the Beast faction that no heir of the major power gets. He doesn¡¯t participate in any form ofpetition, because he doesn¡¯t need approval or the opportunity thates with it.

    He tried to drag Sam to the Beast faction to find some sort ofpetition for himself as he felt his growth was capped. But what happened is his long-lost cousin kicked his ass squarely.

    Now there was a shadow in his mind and he is even shivering when he picked up his chain sickles, forget about growth, Sanjay lost all his will to fight, the damage is so hard that he is now a useless cultivator at Peak stage Grand realm without any battle strength let.

 Chapter 383: Stephens moves

    Sanjay is currently sleeping on his bed, but there is not hint of peace on his face. He is sweating a lot and seemed to be in a bad dream, in a few seconds he woke up abruptly and his spiritual energy was out of control, the bed broke and the surroundings are frozen.

    Sai knocked on the door exactly at this moment.

    "Come in."

    Sanjay steadied himself and started cleaning up the mess.

    When Sai came in, he was not surprised by the sight. Because, this is the normal urrence for a while.

    "How are you feeling now?"

    "The Same." Sanjay¡¯s response is so dry with no energy.

    "I want you to do something for me." Sanjay stopped his actions and looked at him.

    "I can¡¯t do anything at this moment. I am even losing the control over my spiritual energy."

    "You don¡¯t have to fight."

    Sanjay thought for a moment and asked. "What is it?"

    "I want you to go to Sam¡¯s city."

    Sanjay was shocked, as soon as he heard the name his hands started shivering. He doesn¡¯t how, but the name itself became a bane for him. He started sweating profusely and almost shivered.

    Sai didn¡¯t try to help Sanjay get out of this condition; he was hoping he would do so himself.

    Because this might be Sanjay¡¯s biggest obstacle in life. Since, Sanjay¡¯s birth they are actually extremely ecstatic because there was a heavenly phenomenon on that day, they believed that he would be a great Beast warrior.

    As soon as he awakened, he was the only one who was able to get the approval of a frost flood dragon. Even from the previous generations, they have ties with the flood dragon tribe and there are all kinds of flood dragons there, many strong warriors tried to get their approval but to no avail.

    Sanjay was the only one who got the approval and was able to get a flood dragon¡¯s cub as his beastpanion.

    From then on, he broke records. He was the best disciple after that one person who almost destroyed the beast faction.

    The higher-ups are ecstatic, but now they are treating him like a burden.

    One fight is all it took for him to change his position at the top of the world to the bottom of the abyss.

    Sam left a shadow of himself in Sanjay¡¯s mind and heart. If Sanjay ovees this shadow, he will have a new life ahead, if not then he would remain like this forever.

    Sai looked at Sanjay until he calmed down and asked.

    "Why are you sending me there?"

    "You need to make a deal with Sam."

    "Why would he make a deal with me? I would be dead before I even get a chance to talk to him. Any of his friends and even subordinates can kill me."

    "That is the reason I am sending you."

    "To offer me as a sacrifice?"

    "Nope, to show our sincerity. I have to show that we mean no enmity but sincere in cooperation. You might be in your vulnerable state at the moment, but in his opinion you still the same authority as future heir in the beast faction.

    If there was a possibility, I would have gone there by myself, but there are some problems that cropped up."

    With that he went on and started exining about the whole Park partnership and his current stand on the matter. After exining everything, he said.

    "That is why, we have to make a point that we are not involved in any of this. Sam might not be a single person and if contended he wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything against all the powers, but the first power to make a move on him will definitely suffer and the worst part is, we cannot even make a move on him when he is in the Sam¡¯s city.

    In fact, it is more beneficial for the bnce of powers if he is eliminated, as much as I am against it, it is most straightforward and suitable option, because once he had a chance to grow, things are going to be messy.

    But eliminating is impossible, so he is definitely growing. So, it is better for us draw a line before he grows and retaliates. Get ready, I don¡¯t have any other option."

    He gave a long speech before leaving.

    Sanjay is still sitting in his chair with a clouded mind. He doesn¡¯t want to go to Sam¡¯s city no matter what.

    If possible, he doesn¡¯t even want to hear Sam¡¯s name for the rest of the life. But the situations are forcing him to face his worst fear.

    Sai went back to the Space gate association to get what he needs.

    The Coordinates token. This is the same token Sam used to visit the Beast faction. They are used in One-way Space gates to reach a certain ce.

    Space gate association is the only one who can provide these tokens and also the returning scrolls which Sanjay used at that moment.

    Sai, who thought that the whole process would be smooth sailing didn¡¯t expect to meet with an obstacle.

    The Old man Stephen came to meet him and asked.

    "May I know why you are meeting with Sam?"

    Sai frowned and said. "Why do you care?"

    "We don¡¯t want to risk it. We also heard what Sam capable of and he is not an enemy we would like to make at the moment. We are already afraid that he might know that we are the ones who arranged the transportation means to the youngsters of the major powers earlier. We don¡¯t want his retaliation."

    Sai was silent, in fact he was dumbfounded. He didn¡¯t expect that even the Space gate association would be afraid of Sam.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is, Stephen is just trying to fish some information. He just wanted to get his hands of this info so that he can sell this as a favour to Sam.

    Actually, there is no way that he could stop Sai if he really wants the token. So, he is only trying his luck.

    Sai who didn¡¯t know anything actually told the truth. He just said everything without hiding anything.

    Stephen who heard the news was surprised and his brain is running at full speed.

    Because, he recently got the news from Zeke that Sam wants a beast with a rare bloodline and now beast faction wants to make peace with him.

    This is the best-case scenario.

    But he didn¡¯t reveal the information immediately. He felt that he has to find a way to make use of this situation to the maximum. So, after taking the token order from Sai, he sent thetter off and travelled to the western continent immediately.

    He met with Sam and exined the situation in his own way.

    "I heard that you want a beast of rare bloodline, I think I found a way to solve the situation."

    "Really?" Sam was intrigued.

    "Yes, Sai is looking for ways to make it up with you. He just wants to draw a line between your revenge with Sravan and the beast faction. Beast faction, is the power which can solve your problem as they have connections with beast tribes in the central continent.

    Most of their beasts came from those tribes, at least those of the core members. So, they can solve your problem easily. I have already thought of a solution."

    "Please do tell."

    "Although, we don¡¯t have ways to let Saie without the thunder god temple¡¯s space gates, we do ways to send any other person who is below Nascent stage.

    If you want, I can make sure that Beast faction knows about your requirement and they will use their elite juniors to send the beast here. You can also make some demands regarding what you want from the Beast faction if you are willing to make peace, you can just use the beast to let them get a chance to negotiate with you."

    Sam looked at Stephen to see if he trying to y any tricks.

    What he said sounded feasible.

    But he is still a bit skeptical about it. Since, he is not afraid of anyone entering the city, Sam wanted to give it a try.

    "Okay then, give it a shot. I will return the favour. Maybe you might want some products of mine."

    "No need. No need at all. It is just a small favour. You brought us such arge business; you don¡¯t have to pay anything."

    After leaving Sam¡¯s city, Stephen immediately went to the Beast faction.

    He didn¡¯t even stop to take a break.

    He met with Sai and said.

    "I got some new information, which you might like. Sam is looking for a beast with a rare bloodline and he seemed to prefer a beast using an elemental energy other than what he already has.

    I got the information from the Space gate inspectors in western continent. I think you can get a chance to talk to him, if you can give him what he wants."

 Chapter 384: Tempest Valley

    Sai was surprised. He didn¡¯t expect that Sam needs a beast. He felt that this is his chance. He can at least use this as a chip to score a conversation with Sam.

    After all, he wasn¡¯t sure that Sam would make a conversation with Sanjay, even if he was sent there.

    Sanjay could get killed even before he gets a chance. Their enmity looked pretty serious in the beast faction.

    Sai came out of his thoughts and said.

    "Thanks for the information, is there any way that I can repay you?"

    Stephen started thinking whether he should take materialistic advantage of the situation or not and after a few seconds, Stephen said.

    "I don¡¯t need anything. I just hope you believe us. Association is under a lot of pressure since Old One¡¯s incident. That¡¯s all I could ask for."

    He got up and left right after speaking. He decided that it would be better if he didn¡¯t try to fleece the beast faction. He might as well forge a good rtionship with them. The major powers will go ballistic when theye to know about Sam¡¯s ns and there is a high chance that they might try to take it out on the space gate association.

    It would be a plus point if they have a major staying neutral at least.

    Stephen gave the coordinates token and the returning scroll before leaving.

    Sai took both the items and excitedly went out. First, he gave both of them to Sanjay and went to Space gates to go to the central continent.

    Whatever Stephen said to Sam is exactly right. There are many beast tribes he had connections with and there is ayer of personal connection with him above the connection he obtained due to the faction.

    He dealt with them so many times and he brought the young prodigies of the faction many times to meet them to get their beastpanions.

    The task is easy for him.

    But he was stumped when he just reached the central continent.

    He was confused about which beast he has to take and remembered Stephen¡¯s words.

    He has to find a beast that has an element other than what Sam has.

    He started recalling from the information he has on Sam on what elements Sam uses and then came a shock.

    Sam¡¯s go-to element is mostly fire and wind. Apart from that, he can use the light element. From the info, he gained he was said to be a water element user also. Apart from that at the meeting, they saw him using the dark element as he caught the spirit that was being enchanted to his robe.

    Sam is using five elements.

    All this while, the major powers and the heads of the major powers are too focused too much on Sam¡¯s achievements and his prowess theypletely ignored the thing about the element he used and the cultivation technique he cultivated.

    Now that he thought about it, he is even wondering why Sam even wants a beast and that too why he needs a beast that doesn¡¯t have an element that he would use.

    He was extremely puzzled and curious.

    He was also surprised at the fact that the heads and the Grand elders of this many major powers chose to ignore such valuable information.

    How can Sam even wield that many elements? He felt that he has to conduct a thorough investigation of the matter.

    But currently, he still has to finish what he came here for. He felt that he should get Sam a beast that could even be a symbol of pride. A beast that cannot be obtained by normal means. Something only him, Sai can get.

    After some time he decided to use one of his longsting connections and started making his way there.

    He moved towards one of the dangerous locations that were discovered in the central continent.

    That ce is called the Tempest valley.

    It is a valley where lightning strikes all over the year.

    No one, not even a consummate realm cultivator cane to this ce. Even the head of the thunder god temple, who is a lightning user will shit his pants with the concentration of the lightning at the center of the valley.

    The most important problem is that the color of the lightning. It is Silvery white. Almost white. The lighting intensity is far more than what the purple and blue lightning they saw until now.

    The major powers discovered this ce for the obvious attention the lightning gathers and some of them even sent people to investigate. The thunder god temple sent most people there and also that is a major power that lost most people there.

    It was discovered when the current heads are still young and many of them entered the valley at that time.

    Sai is obviously one of them. And he was one of the people who reached the center of the valley and came out alive.

    In fact, one of only two people. Many people would think that he is some kind of great fighter, but no. He was carried. Carried by one of the strongest people he ever has known.

    Sam¡¯s father. In fact, the connection he is using currently also belongs to Sam¡¯s father.

    Sam¡¯s father is a lightning element user. Which the rest of the world doesn¡¯t know until he showed his rage on the beast faction.

    Until then he only used a sword and a Fanged wolf as his pet. Fanged wolf one of the creatures with the strongest bloodlines on the.

    Everyone thought that it was his contracted beast as a beast warrior.

    But only Sai knew that it is not true. That wolf is just his pet, his contracted beast is something else. Even on that day, he didn¡¯t reveal his beast because it didn¡¯t stay with him in thest days of his life.

    Sai felt his vision turning blurry. He shook his head and deleted his thoughts and walked inside the valley.

    He took out small strands of white hair and the lightning didn¡¯t strike him. He stepped forward without any restrictions.

    But just before he was about to enter the center of the valley, an old voice halted him in his tracks.

    "Why are you here kid? I remember saying that the people from your faction are not weed here. Seems like you don¡¯t take things seriously or do you think that I wouldn¡¯t hold my end of the word."

    Sai trembled at the aura that wasing from the center, he could see the faint silhouette of the beast within the dense lightning.

    That¡¯s right, it is the beast that is talking. But not all the beasts at the consummate realm can speak. From what Sai know, the creature that is in the center of the lightning is the strongest creature on the and its cultivation is beyond the consummate realm.

    "I have something to ask?" Sai replied carefully.

    The Old voice snorted and replied.

    "There is nothing I want to talk to you pr any of the faction members for that matter. Don¡¯t piss me off. It is better if you leave now or I would really level your faction."

    Sai took a deep breath, the other party is not willing to listen to whatever he has to say, so he has to think of another option.

    After some thought, he took out a few recording crystals and started showing the videos.

    "Why are you not mov.."

    The old voice once again reminded him to move but stopped in the middle as he saw the first video clip.

    It is the clip of Sam and his battles.

    There are many videos in them, regarding the battles he had in former Orion and it even included the battle with Sanjay at the beast faction.

    Sai waited until the videos are over and said.

    "His son."

    "What is his name? Where does he live? How old is he?" The Old voice sounded like a long lost rtive.

    Sai sat down on the ground and started exining everything he knew about Sam.

    The beast felt like a grandparent as it heard all about Sam¡¯s journey and showed all kinds of emotional reactions.

    He was angry when he heard Sam was being suppressed, he was ecstatic when heard about Sam beating the crap out of his peers. He is brimming with pride when he heard about Sam killing Old One and almost killing Sravan.

    He was outraged when he heard Sam was threatened by the major powers and he was way over his head when he heard that Sam threatened them in return.

    The best part is when he heard about Sam ripping the beast faction apart.

    The beast surprisingly showed more emotions towards Sam, than any other person on the has ever done.

    Sam came to this world alone and apart from the beasts and his three friends, there is no one who would show any form of affection, even the subordinates only show respect.

    Sai felt like Sam would be happy to know that someone is showing familial love towards him.

 Chapter 385: Sanjays Visit

    Sai exined everything that he knew about Sam and all his endeavors.

    The Old beast didn¡¯t stop him and listened carefully. His voice turned a bit mellow.

    "Are you here, just to show this to me?" The beast asked Sai after the talk.

    "No. I am here because Sam needs something. I want to draw a line with his revenge on Sravan and the faction. I don¡¯t think we can handle is retaliation even if there is only some coteral damage. I want a chance to talk to him.

    I heard that he needs a beast to be hispanion and particrly a beast with an element he is not able to use.

    That¡¯s why I came here."

    "Hmph. So, you are here just to save your ass."

    "You could say so."

    The beast went silent.

    To be honest he doesn¡¯t want to help out the beast faction. But if the beast is for Sam, then he cannot refuse.

    "I will help you out, on one condition. You have to bring Sam here to meet me."

    "I cannot make any promises, Sam wouldn¡¯t believe me. In his opinion, all the major powers are his enemies."

    "I don¡¯t care, that is your problem."

    "I will try my best."

    With that and small silhouette walked out of the dense lightning revealing its figure. It is a wolf with white fur. The wolf has blue eyes and looked majestic. Even though, the beast looked small whening out of the lightning. It is as big as ten times the normal wolf.

    "My direct descendant of this generation, coincidentally he is also at the peak of Level-5 waiting for a breakthrough to level-6. They are of the same strengths and I think they will get along.

    Sai looked at the wolf and ced a Beast pouch in front of it. The wolf turned back and started exchanging some howls with the old beasts, after some time, the wolf disappeared and entered the beast pouch.

    "If something happens to Sam, do not me me. His father asked for a promise from our tribe not to do anything to the beast faction. Because, he was afraid that the legacy of his ancestors would be destroyed, that is the only reason we didn¡¯t do anything even though he was dead. My son is still quite angry about this and he might even kill you if he was present here.

    So, if even a strand of Sam¡¯s hair is harmed, then I will let my son loose. I would like to see how far humanity hase on this deste."

    With that, a small grunt could be heard and before he knew it, Sai is already outside the valley. As he tumbled and rolled backward until he crashed into a rock.

    His whole body trembled at the disy of strength. That small grunt released a pure force of spiritual energy that could throw a consummate realm cultivator like him out of the valley which is many kilometers long.

    Sai picked himself up and walked away. He looked at the valley onest time before leaving.

    He arrived at the beast faction by night.

    The next day, Sanjay held a beast pouch and the coordinates token and entered the one-way Space gate.

    Sai is looking at him as he took a deep breath before activating the formation.

    Nobody in the beast faction knows about this trip. That is also the reason why Sai did all the tasks like visiting the Space gate association all by himself. If the Grand elder and the elders know about this, the situation would not be ideal.

    Sanjay closed his eyes as went underwent the space gate transportation.

    When he opened his eyes, he has an urge to throw up, due to hisck of control over spiritual energy, he cannotpletely withstand the effect of the space gate.

    He tried his best to fight his urge but to no avail.

    After throwing up until only bile was left in his belly, he looked up and saw that he is very near the city gates, it is only a two-minute walk even for a normal person.

    He walked towards the city and entered it without any trouble.

    The operations of the city came back to normal.

    After he entered the city, he walked towards the tallest building and that is where he was stopped, the person in the reception made sure that no one enters the ce smoothly.

    He called Philip and informed him that a person named Sanjay wants to meet Sam.

    After five minutes, the receptionist led Sanjay to a meeting room, where Sam is already present with Philip and Jack sitting beside him.

    Sam gestured Sanjay to sit down. He is keenly noticing any faint movements from Sanjay because among his peers, he is the toughest opponent Sam has ever faced.

    But what he noticed made Sam think differently.

    Sanjay¡¯s body which oozed confidence when capturing Watt and challenging Sam was nowhere to be seen.

    His shoulders are slouched, his eyes are dull, his breath is uneven. His body trembled slightly as soon as he saw Sam.

    Sam came to one conclusion; Sanjay is a dead snake at this moment. He is no threat, rather he is meat on the chopping block.

    Sam can kill him anytime he wants. He wanted tough out loud. The best talent of all major powers is now a waste of space. This change is remarkable.

    Sanjay ced the beast pouch on the table and said.

    "This is a present from the beast faction. The faction-head wanted to send a message that the major powers are trying to copy your park and they already got the design ns in their hands, the three professional associations are the ones who are in charge of the project and they are taking the lead in building parks in all the empires.

    We don¡¯t know who sold out your designs, but the faction head wanted to inform you that the beast faction is not taking part in this project"

    Sam raised an eyebrow. He already regarded all the major powers as his enemies because they would be part of this. He didn¡¯t expect that the beast faction, not only didn¡¯t participate, they are kind enough to inform the issue, Sam.

    "May I know the reason?"

    Sanjay trembled when he heard Sam¡¯s voice.

    He closed his eyes and clenched his fists as he fought his urge to run away from here. He said with most difficulty.

    "Although the project is profitable, faction-head felt that it is hical to work on something that belongs to us and he has a feeling that something that was stolen from you will not have a good ending."

    Sam chuckled, he believed the second reason should be the main reason or the only reason.

    As he felt that the meeting was over, Sanjay spoke again.

    "I have other requests on behalf of the beast faction."

    "Speak."

    "We want to draw a line between your enmity with Sravan and the faction. We don¡¯t want to suffer because of your revenge on him."

    "That¡¯s funny. Last time I remembered your faction head is desperate to save him when I was about to kill him."

    "We know, that would be thest time we are saving him. That is what faction owed Sravan. From now on, we will not butt in between you two."

    "Don¡¯t you think it is quite hypocritical of you to say that? You already interfered and you want to leave just like that? Do you think I am your bitch and you cane and go as you please?"

    Sanjay had cold sweat all over as Sam¡¯s voice grew colder and colder.

    "We can negotiate about what you want to leave us out of this situation. What you said is right? So, we are ready to pay a price to leave."

    "You are not suitable to make a decision on this matter, I need to meet someone with authority."

    Sam didn¡¯t want to discuss it with Sanjay, a dead snake. He has to talk to Sai about this.

    Sanjay took a deep breath and said.

    "There is one more thing. Faction-head said there is someone who wants to meet you and that someone is extremely close kin to your father, although they are not rted by blood, they are extremely close and he is like a grandfather to you. Please consider meeting him.

    This way, you can also meet with the faction head and negotiate the deal. It is difficult for us to use the thunder god temple¡¯s gate toe here."

    With that, Sanjay stood up and said. "I will take my leave."

    Sam didn¡¯t stop him.

    Philip and Jack are looking at Sanjay and are a bit amused. They didn¡¯t see the battle between Sam and Sanjay, so they are curious to see who is the person that pushed Sam to his limits.

    But they are disappointed, he is nothing like what they imagined him to be.

    He is like a weak person looking for an escape from a bully.

    "What¡¯s wrong with him?"

    Philip asked him in confusion.

    Sam smiled a little and exined.

 Chapter 386: Going to central continent

    Sam exined what Sanjay¡¯s current mental state is which left both Philip and Jackpletely dumbfounded.

    They didn¡¯t see the battle, but now they are regretting it, what kind of lesson did Sam teach in that battle that Sanjay became like this?

    After exining them, Sam left, he has to check the beast as soon as he can.

    He entered his room and let the beast out.

    As soon as he saw therge white wolf, he was stunned.

    His mouth was opened wide and his eyes almost popped out of their sockets, there are small silver lightning crackling all around the wolf.

    "Raiju?"

    Sam said somewhat doubtfully.

    [I didn¡¯t think this guy will be able to recognize me, not bad. At least, I am not stuck with some peasant.]

    Sam came to his senses as soon as he heard the growls of the beast.

    The beast probably doesn¡¯t know that he can understand the beast tongue.

    "Not only do I know about you, I know that you are not supposed to exist in this world. How did you even get here?"

    Sam asked as he ced his hand on the beast.

    He is checking the bloodline concentration of the beast and when he noticed the highly pure bloodline, with very minute impurities, he was extremely surprised.

    The beast is shocked by this.

    Sam knew of this Raiju in two ways. The first one is that when he studied the beast when he was still in his past life. It is a beast of Japanese mythology that was formed because of the lightning and the pet of the thunder god Raijin.

    But that mythology didn¡¯t describe the beast clearly and there are even depictions that the beast looked like a wolf, cat, hound, and even dog. With these many depictions, there is no proper interpretation of the beast¡¯s figure.

    But after he came here, he learned from the bestiary that the beast is actually a wolf.

    The one thing that shocked him is that these beasts are not supposed to be in this realm at all. They belong in the same realm as Yanwu and Mia.

    He is already troubled by the fact that he was able to meet Mia in a mortal realm, but now herees another beast and it was even given by the beast faction.

    He wondered if these beasts are faction¡¯s secret weapons. Because he believed that a Raiju army can wreak havoc anywhere in this whole world.

    [You can understand beast tongue?] This time, the wolf¡¯s tone was full of surprise.

    "That didn¡¯t answer my question."

    [For that, you have to answer my grandfather. I was born and brought up in this world. Even though, I didn¡¯te out of that valley.]

    "Your grandfather?"

    [Yes, does that guy from beast faction didn¡¯t exin it to you? My grandfather is the one that wants to meet you.]

    "My father¡¯s kin are the beasts?"

    Sam was surprised again

    [We are not rted by blood, but from what my grandfather said, your father is a great son anyone could ask for. I heard many stories. Grandfather said, if you want to hear them you should meet him.]

    "How strong is your grandfather?"

    [Very strong. When he sneezes half of the will go through a thunderstorm.]

    "So, you are here because your grandfather and my father are close?"

    [Not only my grandfather, my father, mother everyone in my tribe is close to your father. But your father died before I was born.]

    "So, your grandfather wants to meet me?"

    [Yes.]

    "How do I meet him?"

    [That person from the beast faction can take you there.]

    Sam went into deep thought; he has to decide whether it is a good idea to meet that beast.

    But he is thinking whether it is a trap nned by Sai.

    His gut feeling is telling him that it is not a trap as Sai is extremely reluctant to fight it out with him since the start.

    The main concern of Sam is the grandfather that this beast is talking about.

    Raiju is an extremely high-level beast. If this grandfather beast is someone like Mia¡¯s mother or something like that or a beast that is living on thisnd just for its leave or something, then Sam would be in big trouble.

    He can manipte human minds. He can create fear and halt the major powers and their heads to stop thinking about attacking him.

    But the beast such as Raiju, and a high-level one at that don¡¯t take a shit. Sam is confident in taking three consummate realm cultivators when he uses the city, but if he has to take the Raiju at the same level.

    One beast is enough to level the city down. It may die in the end, but the next second, Sam is meat on the chopping board for the rest of the world.

    And why is he afraid that he would piss the beast off?

    Because he is not real Sam. The people in this world might not realize this, but if this beast even in the future realizes this, he would be in big trouble.

    He has a long way to be consummate. Above all, Sam felt like it is beneath him to use someone¡¯s emotional attachment to someone else to his advantage.

    After some push and pull, he decided to meet with this grandfather.

    But before that, he has to find a bargaining chip to at least try and save his ass.

    He made some arrangements and a few minutester, he is in the middle of refining the bloodline of the Raiju.

    Sam must say that Raiju has the purest bloodline with the least impurities. Except for Yanwu and Mia.

    The purification process is actually quite simple.

    That is one of the reasons why he is so surprised.

    After the refinement isplete, the fur of the beast changed a bit. The fur looked like lightning sparks, it is straight and has that bright and spiky sheen.

    Sam didn¡¯t sign the contract with him and to be honest, he didn¡¯t dare to until the whole situation was exined and settled.

    He very much wants this Raiju to be a part of his group, but not like this, he will try and see if he can get his Raiju himself.

    After that, Sam left to meet Sanjay, he didn¡¯t want to waste time anymore.

    Sam sent Sanjay off through the returning scrolls with the message that he would be visiting the Beast faction in a few minutes.

    Then he went to meet Zeke, who can send Sam to the Space gate association, with a returning scroll from which, he can go to Beast faction using normal Space gate.

    After reaching the beast faction.

    Sai is already waiting for him at that ce.

    Both of them only nodded at each other in the form of a greeting and went to a meeting room.

    "We will discuss the matter first and then we can go to meet them," Sai said as they sat down.

    "Sure."

    "What do you want to leave the beast faction alone?"

    "A trade rtionship."

    "Trade?"

    "Yes. Even as we speak, my n to expand my business to other empires is already being executed and that includes your empires too.

    Since we now have a chance, I will propose a partnership. I will be developing my business in all the empires under the beast faction and offer you a partnership of five percent in the whole venture, in exchange for the security.

    The empire, authorities, governments, locals. Your responsibility is to guard my business against everything and also allocate the necessarynds.

    Apart from that, we will have a trade agreement with the beast faction directly. I will be needing some beast cubs and I will trade them with the beast faction in exchange for products. Not any products, I will be the personal artisan and any beast faction member can contact me to make a weapon.

    One weapon for one beast each. Both of the same level.

    If you are okay with this deal, then you guys are safe. I will only take that guy¡¯s head."

    Sam exined everything in a single breath.

    Sai was stumped. He expected Sam to fleece him directly, but he is talking deals. Although, the deals are a little advantageous to Sam, at least it is better than fleece.

    He only thought for a little while, before agreeing.

    "Deal."

    They shook hands and Sam said.

    "My people will be in contact with you, we will meet in the kali empire under you for all our meetings. I have my ways to get there. So, you better send a representative there. The first meeting will be in two weeks.

    They will exin the details of the construction n. Make sure that you don¡¯t have any information leaks and it will be better if you don¡¯t let my name out. Just inform the rest of the major powers that your faction has their own research results on the parks and you are doing your own thing."

    Sam finished the exnations and stood up, both of them walked towards the Space gates and went to the central continent.

    "We have to go by foot, beasts will attract too much attention," Sai said.

    "Sure." But Sam took out Harbinger the next second.

    When Sai looked at him, he said with a shrug.

    "I don¡¯t like walking."

 Chapter 387: Meeting

    Sam and Sai arrived at the tempest valley in a few hours. Sai initially felt that he has to walk slower because of Sam, but it turned out to be another way around. Although Sam wouldn¡¯t be able to beat his top speed, he is as fast as Pre-transcendent on the Harbinger.

    He can vaguely see that it is not his top speed.

    After reaching the tempest valley, Sam stored his harbinger and stood there with Sai.

    "It is better to let the beast out," Sai said and Sam let the Raiju out.

    Sai was a bit surprised when he saw the beast. There is some change which he can put his finger on. But he is sure that there is something that changed with this beast.

    He took out the white fur just in case and all three of them started walking inside.

    When they reached the vicinities of the central area with the most lightning, Sai said.

    "Sam is here."

    In fact, his words aren¡¯t necessary. What he doesn¡¯t know is that the gigantic Raiju behind the lightning is already looking at Sam after they entered the valley.

    It is just too lost in that face, that it didn¡¯t talk anything. The beast is all too familiar with that face. The first person to cross this valley and enter its core without dying that too, when he is just a Nascent stage cultivator.

    He has seen that youth grow into a fine young man with an excellent battle prowess.

    The Raiju let his very own son form a beast contract with him. After all, there are only a few people who can tame a Raiju. That is a beast which is a manifestation of pride. They are almost as arrogant as dragons.

    Even in the upper realms, not all gods could tame a Raiju. There are many instances when the beast chose tomit suicide than submit.

    But this powerful beast, let its direct descendant be a contract pet with a human.

    One can understand their bond.

    There is only one person in the world who is the witness of their rtionship and that is Sai. He doesn¡¯t know why Sam¡¯s father left his Raiju in this valley before the battle. But if they were together, he couldn¡¯t guarantee the survival of the beast faction past that day.

    "Sam. You look so much like him."

    Sam heard the Old voice and was shocked. He didn¡¯t expect that this beast has the ability to speak.

    "Don¡¯t be surprised. Your father and I had a great rtionship. He is such a great person that the heavens couldn¡¯t stand him and took him away with jealousy."

    Sam didn¡¯t know how to reply. He looked at Sai and said. "Can you wait outside?"

    He has somethings to say to this beast, but he couldn¡¯t say that with Sai present.

    Sai nodded and was ready to leave. He was already prepared for this, but he thought that the beast would be the one to ask him to leave.

    While Sam is looking at Sai¡¯s receding figure, the old beast is sniffing something and there is a frown on the beast¡¯s face.

    After Sai left, Sam finally turned around and the beast said.

    "You have a smell on you, that shouldn¡¯t exist in this world."

    Sam smiled. His expectations are right. This beast is not from this world. It is from the upper realms. As for the smell the beast was talking about, it is the smell of Yanwu and the rest.

    Only at this moment, did the Old beast look at his grandson and the frown turned into astonishment.

    "Why did his bloodline be pure? What did you do?"

    "Bloodline Refinement," Sam replied. This is the first thing he ever said to the beast.

    "That is not possible. Bloodline refinement doesn¡¯t exist in this world. It is a higher-level technique."

    "You are right. Bloodline refinement doesn¡¯t exist in this world and so does these." With that, he let out the beasts. Yanwu, Sky, Mia, and Shadow mouse appeared in front of them followed by Golden Ape.

    The Old beast was shocked.

    It didn¡¯t expect that he would see these beasts, he didn¡¯t understand why they are here. They are beasts that should roam in the upperyer of the heavens.

    But now, he has seen them in this mortal ne.

    "How?" The beast asked in astonishment.

    Sam took a deep breath and said.

    "I am not his son." His words shocked both the beasts.

    "What do you mean? I can clearly smell his bloodline. You are his son."

    Sam pursed his lips for a second and decided toe clean. He doesn¡¯t want an enemy of this level. No matter how arrogant Sam might be, he still knew his worth. With his observation, Sam can see more than what meets the eye.

    If his guess is right, the beast here is trapped. Or rather imprisoned. The constant lightning is a form of suppression. But that lightning although a suppression is also helping the beast grow. It is also feeding on the lightning.

    He doesn¡¯t know if the beast could move out of this valley. But if it could, the lightning would follow. Even before the beast could attack half of the empire would be destroyed just with this lightning.

    "This body indeed belongs to Sam. But he died five years ago. I, which means my soul doesn¡¯t belong to this world. An entity named Ling Tian captured my soul after my previous death and ced me in this body.

    I merged with Sam¡¯s memories and living his life as Sam ever since. The arts that I acquired are a result of the knowledge that the entity gave me which includes the bloodline refinement.

    Currently, I am Sam and he is me."

    The beast went silent. Not just that beast there are some other beasts who are listening in on the conversation.

    Sam couldn¡¯t see them or sense them. But they are sensing him and scanning with the spiritual sense to see his face. All these beasts are Raijus. Initially, they have an expression of happiness and delight.

    But now, they have frown because of what Sam said.

    "You got a rare beast with excellent bloodline and you can even perfect the bloodline, you have every chance to take away the beast. Why did youe here and exin? I can see that these beasts and you have a special contract binding you. You would have been able to make the contract with him too and live with your life."

    Sam thought for a bit and decided to go with the truth.

    "I don¡¯t want to make an enemy out of Raiju. I have enough on my te. I have enemies that are far more powerful than me and they are numerous. I am already living every day under pressure." He paused for a bit and said.

    "It is beneath me to use someone¡¯s familial to my benefit. I need the beast, not as a pet or a mount. I need the beast as a friend. Apanion I can rely on. For that, at least trust is the basic foundation. What is the point of lying and living? I couldn¡¯t even pretend to be the Sam which I am not for a few days."

    Sam sighed after he let it all out. That is why he came here. He just felt like he didn¡¯t deserve this Raiju and decided to return it. Maybe if the beast is only in the Consummate realm, Sam would have negotiated with it.

    But he lost all the hopes after seeing that the beast is talking.

    Sam was ready to return. But Raiju still has something to speak.

    "How are you so sure that you are not Sam?"

    Sam was puzzled. He is sure because he remembered being in the past world and dying there and the rest of the following events.

    The Beast grunted a bit which is almost like a chuckle.

    "Sending a soul is not as simple as you think. Do you think the rules of this world will ept a soul that came from another world? Even an entity like that is able to exist it would be so strong and beyond the control of the world¡¯s natural rules. You are not of that stage yet.

    As for what you thought, indeed you are not Sam from this world, at least notpletely.

    But the memories you got are from the soul remnants of the Sam of this world. They just didn¡¯te here. The entity who brought you here just didn¡¯t push your soul into a body. He broke the soul of this world¡¯s Sam and escaped it from achieving samsara.

    Those broken pieces merged with your soul which was forcefully brought to this world.

    That mean¡¯s you are the Sam from this world as well your own person. You two are not separate people.

    As for why your personality from the previous world reigned over the one belonging to this world¡¯s Sam, it is a form of his eptance. That Sam must have desired something so much but couldn¡¯t achieve, so he decided to get it from you and disappeared.

    So, never say that you are not Sam anymore. You are Sam, but not the same Sam as before. That¡¯s it."

 Chapter 388: The family of Raijus

    Sam froze on the spot after hearing what they said.

    He already thought about who he is many times. He took shelter in this world Sam¡¯s body but he never thought the both of them are same.

    This world¡¯s Sam is a great tailor, but he is a weak person. not physically but mentally. Since childhood he never fought for anything. He lived just for the sake of living. Just because he is an orphan he just wallowed in self-pity.

    But Sam is on the other end of spectrum since childhood. He was also an orphan. But he was abused continuously. After some time, he stopped his pity game. He felt thatck of parents meantck of restrictions, he can be whatever he wants.

    By the time he is fifteen, he killed more than hundred people. He became the beast mercenary and best assassin of the year in the organization.

    That was why, he was so troubled epting his new identity in this world and that is why he left the Lava rock vige, before anyone could notice changes in him.

    He didn¡¯t even dare to say goodbye to Michael and Robert.

    After leaving that city, hepletely cut ties with that identity. Until, the beast faction the people who knew of that identity came into picture. Even Sravan¡¯s current state is because he tried to kill Sam, not as revenge for turning the original Sam into an orphan.

    But now, with what the Old Beast said, he felt like a burden is lifted off. The burden is what he carried for the old Sam. But now that he epted this identity, he felt like those things are not a burden anymore.

    The Old Sam¡¯s father is now the new Sam¡¯s father. So, Sravan turned him into an orphan and he has to take revenge and what would be a great revenge other than turning Sravan into an orphan. Sam felt like this is a good idea.

    "Thank you." Sam thanked the beast.

    The beast chuckled again and looked at Sam. "Someone would like to meet you." The Old beast said and suddenly the whole valley rumbled, the lightning falling on the beast cleared a bit and Sam saw the silhouette of the beastpletely.

    He is asrge as a mountain.

    There is a hole inside the valley out of which many beasts came out. There are more than ten of them all at Consummate realm. Sam gulped at the sight of this.

    Out of all beasts, the first one seemed a bit stronger andrger. There is a scar on its face.

    All these beasts arerger thirty to forty timesrger than a normal wolf, but in front of the towering beast which could be seen from kilometres away, they are so short.

    The beast with a scar came forward and looked at Sam closely with its eyes extremely close to Sam¡¯s.

    Sam felt the breath of the wolf on his face.

    The beast looked at Sam carefully and there are hints of tears in his eyes. He licked Sam¡¯s face and turned towards the beast Sam has brought back.

    [Son, take care of him well. He is like your brother.] Sam looked at both of them and didn¡¯t know what to say. The beasts didn¡¯t know that Sam knows the beastnguage.

    Sam ced his hand on the beast and said with a smile.

    "Thank you."

    The beast was a bit surprised.

    [He understands beast tongue]

    The son said to father and father rubbed his furry head to Sam in a loving manner. The same scenario repeated with all the beasts.

    Sam noticed that, the beasts are on verge of crying. He felt somewhat weird but there is a feeling which he never felt welling up inside his heart.

    Sam felt like crying too.

    The raiju with the scar looked at Sam and said.

    [If you ever encounter a problem, just find a way toe here. That¡¯s all you need to do and everything else would be resolved.]

    *HOWL* *HOWL* *HOWL* *HOWL*

    With that all the beasts started howling at the sky.

    All the howls only meant one thing, their agreement to his words. After that, they entered the hole and the Old beast sat back down.

    "They grew up with your father. They have been together for a long time. Your father treated this ce as his training ground. No one in the whole world would dare to explore the central continent like he did.

    The one with the scar is my eldest son. They are both so close. The one I sent to you is his son. You will be greatpanions to each other."

    The Old beast went on speaking.

    That day Sam heard a lot about his father. How he used to be when he was young. How powerful he was. How daring he was. How smart he was.

    The Old beast exined everything except how is father came and how this friendship grew. He didn¡¯t ask either.

    After all that, Sam asked.

    "Why are you trapped here?"

    The Old beast looked at him and felt a bit surprised. It didn¡¯t say it was trapped. But Sam did notice this.

    "How did you find out?"

    "I read in my free time. From what I know, a beast that can speak is not something that is world can bear. In fact, anyone who is stronger than a Consummate realm cultivator is too much for this ce to bear and even the density of the spiritual energy is too thin to cultivate one.

    An entity such as you; it is not hard to guess. Anyway, I also encountered the skeleton of a variant hydra in this. Mia is her daughter.

    I just guessed."

    "You are indeed insightful. I am really trapped. Not just me, even the ten who came to see you are also trapped here. We don¡¯t belong to this world. Me and my partner are banished to this world when she conceived.

    The spiritual energy I require ising from this lightning. It is not just some suppression but also a form of nutrition.

    My children are not willing to leave.

    It is a long story anyway. I will tell you when the timees."

    Sam and the beast had a long chat.

    He even stayed the night. He went inside the hole and shared the meal with the rest of the tribe.

    He waspletely dumbfounded when he entered the hole.

    The hole is a way to an underground pce.

    There are many caves and every cave are upied with Raijus.

    He felt like he is looking at the strongest force of the and it happened so that this force his backing.

    Sam felt that he should make the Space gate association construct a Space gate near this ce. But felt that it would be affected by the lightning outbursts.

    The lightning is making the rest of the spiritual energy chaotic. This ce is only suitable for training of the lightning element cultivators, but they have to proficient in physical techniques and have an extremely strong physique too. Otherwise, they would be charred to death. That is why no one from the major poweres to this ce.

    Sam wanted to hug the old beast before leaving, but even with his light elemental fusion, he wouldn¡¯t be able to take the force of lightning. The lightning will reach his spiritual core easily.

    It is finally time to leave.

    Sam started his journey back at dawn and then only he remembered Sai is waiting for him. Sam and the young Raiju started walking back to meet Sai.

    He is near the region of valley where the lightning doesn¡¯t strike much. There are a lot of rocks that have a metallic sheen.

    Sam noticed that the lightning around it is acting peculiarly.

    So, he walked towards the rock and ced his hand on it.

    After some observation, he took out a metal which has high iron content and it stuck to that rock.

    Sam smiled at this.

    This is a naturally formed permanent ma.

    After he got Raiju, he is already thinking of creating an artificial permanent ma, so that he can dabble in the electricity.

    But now he doesn¡¯t have to.

    There are many permanent mas in this area, probably formed with the rocks having high metallic content struck by the lightning.

    He started collecting the rocks into his storage and there is arge hole left inside the valley.

    After that he felt the valley with a big grin.

    He sent Raiju back into the divine dimension to let it stay with the rest of the beasts.

    Sai, who is waiting for them looked at Sam¡¯s smile and feltplicated. He knew what kind of force this valley is hiding, the major powers and associations should think before they do anything.

    Otherwise, it is going to be big trouble.

    He knows how powerful a Raiju can be. And there is an army of them waiting in this valley to do Sam¡¯s bidding,

 Chapter 389: Breakthrough

    Sam returned to the city.

    He was in an obvious hurry, there are two many things to do and the one week¡¯s time limit is also ending tomorrow. It is going to get busy. But his brain didn¡¯t feel as much pressure as before.

    The only pressure came from the thinking he has to do for finishing the tasks, not for extra thoughts like consequences and actions.

    Sam didn¡¯t mess with the stones yet. The first thing he has to do is a breakthrough to the Nascent stage.

    But before that, it is time for Arman¡¯s daily dose.

    After that, he came back and broke through to the Nascent stage.

    Nascent stage is a very special stage of cultivation.

    It decides many things for a cultivator and decides the strength of his foundation.

    Spell time for mages and physical features for warriors, both of them for a Warrior-mage.

    This stage will decide most of them.

    As for how the nine stages are decided when the body reformation and spiritual sea formation that urs in this stage vary for different people; it is the reformation of the spiritual core.

    That¡¯s right, in this stage, the spiritual core for every person will be reformed nine times and each time signifies each sub-stage within the Nascent.

    When Sam broke through, he saw a small ball of lightning which is silver in color appear inside the spiritual core.

    As soon as he broke through, Sam noticed a faint glitter from the divine dimension crystal and frowned, he didn¡¯t even get the chance to explore his own cultivation breakthrough and when he involuntarily sent his spiritual sense into the dimension, Sam sensed that there are some changes with the tower.

    He can now perceive the third floor.

    He immediately moved inside and entered the tower to check the third floor.

    But when he reached the third floor, he frowned. Because there is arge table in the middle of the room. It isrge enough to be a board room table and the table seemed to have a shiny crystal surface.

    As soon as Sam stepped forward to see what this table is all about, a voice was heard from the side.

    "Hello, Sam."

    Ling Tian¡¯s silhouette appeared on the crystal table.

    Sam was stunned, he didn¡¯t expect that he would meet Ling Tian¡¯s will again, but now that he saw it, he felt that there is something in his memory indicating that this would happen.

    Ling Tian¡¯s will spoke.

    "Since you unlocked this room, then you must be a Nascent stage cultivator. Congrattions on your breakthrough.

    I am here today to tell you some important things about your existence in this world."

    Sam frowned at this. He wanted to know this so much and he bets that Ling Tian doesn¡¯t even know how much Sam desires this.

    The voice continued.

    "You are not the only one who got the second chance in this world and I am not the only one who gave those second chances.

    There are twelve of them and if I am right, you should have already attended one of the Pce of inheritances.

    Twelve gods gave the second chance to twelve people and each god will be sending the Pce of inheritances for every three years. They mostly send battle techniques, rewards, and treasures to reach their own candidates.

    My Pce of inheritance is going to be sixth and you have to make sure that you go there. As for the rest, I am sure you can decide for yourselves.

    Now let¡¯s talk about other candidates.

    Until now, if you have met them, you would have easily beaten them up. In fact, that is the reason I chose you. You have enough brains to be strong even in your weakest state.

    But it is going to change now, every cultivation technique of immortal grade or higher will only start showing its real effects after one broke through to the Nascent stage.

    There are going to be staggering changes in the candidates. But I am sure, you can manage yourselves.

    Apart from that, there is something else I want to tell you. That is about the gifts they got.

    As you got a gift as valuable as the Divine dimension filled with all kinds of information, they also received gifts of equivalent value.

    But it ispletely different from what you have. What they have is something that will help them in the long term and coincidentally the rest of them all chose to give Sam a present and that is the Dimension crosser.

    This is something they received as a gift from the gods at their rebirth. It is a device that will help them cross over to the upper limits.

    It will let them move to the upper realms from your current realm and also can give them an opportunity to transfer between the upper realms.

    As for how, they can use it, after they reach certain cultivation stages, they will reach the threshold for various upper realms to which they could travel.

    They all got this because they don¡¯t have faith in their disciples to aim for the higher realms as it would be difficult to leave the realm for an upper realm without a Dimension Crosser.

    I bargained with the rest of them and refrained from sending the Dimension crosser and sent the divine dimension, Yanwu, and all the information within the divine dimension. I haveplete faith in you to find your own way to cross the dimensions.

    And why is this dimension crosser necessary? Because you have to move to the upper realm at a certain time. The third pce of inheritance wouldn¡¯t be held within the same realm you are currently in.

    You will have to climb to the next realm closest to you.

    Since you don¡¯t know any information about this crossing, I will give you a hint."

    With that, a holographic box appeared right beside his silhouette. Sam started and this and frowned, after looking at the image, he took out the box he obtained in Van family.

    As he was thinking about why the box was showing, the voice continued.

    "There are six boxes like this in the world and you will only able to truly open them when are the six are together. Collect all of them and this will show you the way.

    Try to stay away from the rest of the candidates and don¡¯t kill them if possible.

    All the best."

    The silhouette disappeared and Sam shook his head.

    He got a lot of information. But nothing is too important and most of it is what he already deduced.

    After that, he stepped forward and ced his hand on the table.

    He got new information engraved in his head and he waspletely surprised by the uses of the table.

    But it is a pity that he didn¡¯t have any use at that moment.

    After he came out, Sam checked his body, the spiritual core, and stuff.

    Sam is looking forward to what he can do with this element. But that has to wait. He has to finish the current projects he has in hand.

    One of them is the manufacturing of his new equipment which he was working on for a long time and the design for the first puppet.

    Both are in their final stages.

    After these two are done, Sam is thinking of the next research project and that would the energy source.

    Sam wants to make a new form of an energy source that could make the puppet work. His current choice of energy source is the energy cell. It is the most feasible and also a more lucrative business idea for him.

    He can just retail energy cells like batteries. But it is extremely, hard for him to maintain the production.

    He is the only one who can create energy cells and this is a serious problem. He would have to stay for a month in the divine dimension, which means at least three hundred days, and just focus on creating energy cells to have the whole world have some limited edition sales within the empire. Otherwise, he could bepletely wasted just by creating these energy cells.

    He has to find another way to deal with this problem.

    His current thoughts are revolving around some sort of a fusion. But instead of using nuclear, he is trying something with the spiritual energy particles.

    But even that has to wait for a while. He knew that he has to work overtime.

    And also post-pone this work. Currently, he has to find a way to deal with his problems at hand.

    After settling the outside affairs, Sam slowly started working on his machine production.

    The next day is the big day for Sam.

    Not because, of the work he has to do, rather there will be many people choosing the sides tomorrow, those who will the associations and join him will stay others will be either dead or leave the city.

    He started making arrangements, for interrogation. This is the start of his payback against the associations. The first step will be to deal with these former tower heads.

 Chapter 390: Started making Pills

    The next day, the first one toe visit Sam is the architect artisan who Sam met. They didn¡¯t talk much, all the other party said is a sentence.

    "I will join you." Sam smiled. The architect also didn¡¯t wear the artisan uniform and the badge he generally wore. He seemed to have thought it through.

    "From now on, don¡¯t call yourself an artisan. It is but a categorized title forced upon you. Architecture and construction are arts of their own right, they don¡¯t have to categorize into some other names.

    From now on, you shall be titled Architect of my organization.

    Wee, Architect Austin." Sam extended his hand and both of them shook it.

    After that, Sam said. "There are somethings which I need to handle, you will be informed of your duties and rights after another week. Until then, please cut the contact with others. If you need any help to alleviate any form of pressure you are facing, you can exin the details to Philip, he will deal with them."

    Sam sent him away after he said that.

    That day went on like this and many people joined Sam¡¯s organization resigning their duties from the associations.

    The former tower heads felt that something is odd as many people didn¡¯t report to them that day.

    Since they have authoritative positions, they got used to the fact that many employees of the association wille and talk with them every day. But today, something felt amiss.

    They don¡¯t know that their actions are being monitored. They cannot even touch their wives without Sam knowing.

    While Sam is busy, his friends are not free. Philip is handling the overall supervision and the security of the city while dealing with the matters of newly appointed people.

    The city is currently filled with people who came after seeing the recruitment notice. He is also in charge of supervising the selections. And the selections started today.

    Sam just left the whole to his head and Philip is extremely bothered. But he did take the job and handling it pretty well.

    As for assessments, they are simple. Sam doesn¡¯t need talented people from these new recruits. Of course, he would take in talents but they are not the main target.

    The targeted people are people with skills and capabilities. They can get assessments for any form of Skill. Even cooking, carpentry, and Philip even mentioned that a masseur and masseuse can take part in the assessment.

    So, there are so many people who areing.

    As for the judges, finding them is the most troublesome. Sam just gave him the requirements of the recruitment and left out everything else. Thankfully, Philip is smart enough and just used the newly joined people who used to work for the associations. He just asked them to be the judges and naturally, they didn¡¯t refuse.

    Philip just gave them the standards of grading. As for cooking, that was the easiest, Philip just gave everything rted to that to Mackey. And for the inscriptions and formations, the candidates are going face a nightmare. Sirona was the judge there and they didn¡¯t expect the judging to be strict.

    They are looking for uniqueness and individuality in all the people. Sam doesn¡¯t need too many orthodox practitioners of any art.

    This world¡¯s arts and crafts are stagnated for many years due to this orthodox style.

    Sam is going to change it.

    Out of all of them, Jack had the most difficult duty. He is handling the orphans. He didn¡¯t know how Watt handled these fellows, but they are all quite noisy.

    For many of them, this is the first time even having a proper meal. But now, they are staying in luxury hotels and having a feast for every meal.

    They are quite grateful, there are kids of all ages and everyone is getting used to this ce. But Jack who liked peace and quiet, this job is a nightmare.

    And at this moment, some self-proimed bigshots of the Nascent realm even wanted toin to him about theck of hotels they want to stay in.

    At first, they just stayed put, but they didn¡¯t like the fact that the people who are staying in are orphans. They felt that is beneath them to stay in the hotel rooms where once these filthy and dirty orphans stayed at.

    The customer service of Sam¡¯s organization is always good and they always made sure to make the customer feel superior. Particrly, in the hotel business. That is why they forgot who they are dealing with.

    Jack was outraged. Even though, he is frustrated they are still kids. These are Sam¡¯s hotels and it is he who ordered this.

    Jack immediately made an order and the city guards started kicking people out. Not just the hotel, they are kicked out of the city.

    The whole city is fully chaotic.

    As Sam dealt with all the newly recruited people from the associations, the delivery from the six major powers arrived.

    This is the second installment and this time most of them are herbs. At this moment, the herbs from the Space gate association also came.

    He felt like the luckiest person in the world. He halted the production process and designing and started pill production.

    This is the first time Sam is going to produce the pills. All this time, he made some potions and some powders.

    But he never made pills, in fact, he disliked pills. The herbs are processed too much and so much of its essence will be lost in pill making.

    As for the pills he had on him, they are all from his victims/ Every time Sam slew some big figure, he would get a ton of pills.

    He might not run out for a few years.

    Even though he doesn¡¯t like it, Sam has to make pills this time.

    Pill of servitude.

    It is actually a high-level pill and Sam can use it on people who are at Consummate level. But the pills that can control the level of the cultivator are different. Either due to the ingredients or the procedure of manufacture.

    Of course, Sam¡¯s cultivation is actually not enough to make all those pills. His me is not intense enough at this level to create enough heat to produce a pill.

    As for this, Sam has the obvious solution which he has been using since the start. The methane.

    He used the same pirs he used to kill the Emperor of Orion and ce the cauldron in the middle of them.

    Sam doesn¡¯t need to use his me directly. Even though the control would be good if he used it, he can also achieve the same level of control with these pirs.

    And just like that, Sam started his adventure of Pill manufacturing.

    He didn¡¯t directly attempt the servitude pill.

    He started with some basic healing pills.

    While he is inside the second floor of the tower doing this, Ape is busy sitting nearby.

    There are loads of herbs that came from the major powers and the Space gate association. Now it is carefully sorting them with his burly hands.

    It is looking for the freshest of the herbs so that it could nt them in the garden, they maye in handy in the future.

    While Sam¡¯s city ispletely bustling with activity and preparations are being made, the major powers are also not exactly calm. They also started the process of construction.

    All this time, they are busy managing the chaos in their nations and finally it is settled down.

    Even though all the problems are not resolved, they are itching to start the construction of Parks.

    Thends are allocated and the Architect artisans from the artisan association moved with the bleu prints to all the nations.

    The construction activities are running in a full swing.

    The major powerheads are ecstatic. Because they are all feeling indignant about something and that is Sam disregarding them.

    Sam doesn¡¯t have any fear and respect they deserved. But they don¡¯t have balls to go and take the frustration out on Sam.

    They knew for one, that Sam¡¯s city might not be invincible but the first few would die definitely.

    That¡¯s why they don¡¯t dare to take any action. They lived until the Consummate realm and they don¡¯t want to die like this.

    But now the construction of the Park is a stroke to their egos.

    They might not be able to do anything to Sam, but that doesn¡¯t mean Sam could do something to them.

    They are tantly stealing Sam¡¯s ns and copying his creations to make money.

    In their opinion, Sam doesn¡¯t even know about this, but what would he do even if he did know. He cane knocking at their doors. That is what they are waiting for.

    To catch him outside Sam¡¯s city.

    If they can do that, Sam is as good as dead.

    While they are feelingcent about all this, what they don¡¯t know is, the construction process is not going smoothly.

    Because, in an empire, where the construction began earlier, the foundation they built immediately copsed as soon as they finished it and they don¡¯t know what the reason is.

 Chapter 391: Execution

    That day, the artisans of the major powers stopped the construction of parks as soon as it started. The first copse, made them feel like there is something wrong with the formation and they immediately conducted a meeting.

    "No, there is definitely not something wrong with the blueprint, this and the Park video we saw perfectly matched. I think we should think in another way about this problem."

    An architect artisan once again looked at the blueprints and said. He is the chief architect of the whole project and he is from the association.

    He really did check the blueprint many times, but what he didn¡¯t notice is the presence of English numbers on the blueprint.

    He just felt like they are some form of symbols Sam used.

    As they are minute and showed no relevance, he ignored them.

    At this moment, the formation masters from the association who is responsible for all the formations of the project came into the tent.

    The chief of the formation masters asked.

    "Have you found the problem yet?"

    "No, the blueprints are one hundred percent right."

    The formation master looked at the person who built the copsed foundation and asked.

    "Are there any other anomalies when it copsed?"

    "Nothing, there is only a sudden movement of the spiritual energy and it was destroyed."

    The formation chief thought of something and asked.

    "Show me the blueprints."

    He started observing the blueprints. In fact, he should be able topletely understand the construction blueprints.

    But as soon as he started observing them closely, he noticed that the construction is not as simple as it looked.

    He is examining the foundation part and wanted to see what is wrong and after some time, he frowned and took out a formation simtor, it is not a permanent one though, it is a single-use one.

    He took out some spirit stones and ced them on the simtor and after some time. *BOOM*

    There is a small explosion and the formation copsed.

    He looked at the rest of the members and said.

    "The foundation is not as simple as it looks. All the separate blocks of the foundation are creating a formation, they are acting as nodes.

    What materials are you guys using?"

    "Sea Greenstone and White Sand,"

    The formation chief was surprised. He didn¡¯t expect that they would use such low ranked materials which are only used for construction to create a formation.

    "Aren¡¯t the materials mentioned different?" The formation chief asked.

    "Well, it would be too extravagant to use them, right?"

    "Don¡¯t make anypromises on your own, every part of this construction seems to be a formation and they are formingpound formations and even the ovepping formations. We have to figure out the order of construction and also figure out the order of constructing each element separately.

    This is going to be a long process."

    The formation chief sighed. He also has blueprints of normal formations from Sam and knew that they are created by someone excellent, but only after looking at this did he understand that the other blueprints are all bullshit before the park construction blueprint.

    This is an extremelyplicated blueprint and since they don¡¯t know the order of the formation nodes, that means they don¡¯t know the order of the construction.

    Every structure in the park might be a node to a formation which bnces the whole building and if it is not built in the correct order, then the whole building would copse.

    He felt like the owner is a psycho.

    The news went to the heads of the major powers and the associations. They are stumped. They thought that understood Sam¡¯s idea now. He didn¡¯t bother maintaining the tight leash on the blueprints because he is confident that others wouldn¡¯t be able to make this.

    But what they don¡¯t know is, Sam didn¡¯t maintain the leash because this gives him enough time to deal with them in the time they waste their resources to figure out the order and execute each formation.

    The heads of the major powers only said one thing.

    "We handed over the construction responsibility to the associations, so we don¡¯t care how you build it, it is up to you to decide what to do."

    They just separated themselves from the issues.

    The association heads also didn¡¯t bother them further. They assigned the people who are more well-versed in theoretical knowledge to figure out the orders and such.

    But for the whole day, there is no progress at all and the rough estimate to even figure out the Foundation¡¯s order turned out to be one week, the heads didn¡¯t like it though.

    The foundation is not for the whole park, rather only one of the core buildings, even if one building can make it this hard for them, then what would happen to them when they have to deal with the rest. How many days, they would have to wait?

    Thus, they grew anxious and decided on a different approach. Consult the three former tower heads who sold the designs to them.

    The association heads are already surprised with the fact that these tower heads didn¡¯t mention this, but if they thought deeply, they felt that maybe Sam deliberately left them out and supervised the construction himself.

    They don¡¯t know the exact reason, but they didn¡¯t think for long, they can find the answer for that after they reach Sam¡¯s city.

    So, the formation chief and architect artisan chief both went to the western continent and reached Sam¡¯s city.

    They inquired about the tower head¡¯s whereabouts as soon as they entered and what greeted them in reply shocked them.

    They immediately ran towards the center of the city.

    There is a dais near Sam¡¯s tower and on that dais, four people are bound to the stone chairs which are filled with runes.

    They are the chairs that negate the usage of spiritual energy. It will only restrict the usage of spiritual energy but the cultivation wouldn¡¯t bepletely cut off.

    The four former tower heads all had a distressed expression. They don¡¯t know what happened, but all of a sudden, the residences they are in started showing weird signs and before they knew it, they arepletely bound by unknown energy.

    They don¡¯t know the reason, but they are still embarrassed about the fact that they are not even able to see the formation of the residences even when they are living in them for about a year.

    The most embarrassed is obviously the formation head. This is his area of expertise, but now he is being bound to a chair in the middle of the city.

    Philip and Jack are looked at them on the stage and looked at them coldly. These assholes have balls to stay in the city even after selling Sam¡¯s designs, they don¡¯t know how to scold them.

    These guys are truly idiots if they think, they can win the support from the associations, if the associations are all that, then why do they have to buy the designs. They could have taken them from Sam directly.

    They didn¡¯t dwell on further and Philip turned around to address the audience.

    "Today, all of you are gathered here for an important reason. The four former heads of four towers have betrayed Sam¡¯s organization.

    Sam, the person who is the owner of this city, has trusted the four heads and handed the designs of Sam¡¯s park and others to the four of them so that their job at the maintenance can be easily done. But the people from the four towers betrayed us and sold the designs to someone else.

    With that, he took out a recording crystal and a screen was projected, the screen isrger than a usual recording crystal and almost all of them can see it.

    In the recording crystal, the video showed theplete conversation and the whole transaction, even the discussion of the four heads after the people from the association left.

    The four heads are shocked. They didn¡¯t expect that someone would have recorded the whole conversation.

    They were caught red-handed. Then a thought crossed their mind.

    Why did Sam wait all these days to deal with them? This is not his style at all. At least that is the style they thought Sam had.

    "You are ndering us; this is clearly one of your tricks." The artisan head yelled at the top of his lungs."

    Philip looked at him with disdain.

    "nder you? Do you think we have so much time in our hands? Or do you think that you are so great that people couldn¡¯t stop ndering you? You are nothing but pathetic bugs in his eyes. He can kill you anytime he wants and no one would be able to find out. Do you think we have to go through all this trouble?"

    After that, he pped his hands and some equipment was brought up onto the stage.

    There are a small formation disc and arge cylinder.

    The attendant ced the formation disc under the first chair and activated it, there is a small forcefield generated around the person along with the chair.

    Philip looked at the audience and said.

    "Today, we are going to execute them for their betrayal and all the employees and partners of the organization shall remember this example if they ever want to betray us. They only have one path and that is to follow their footsteps."

    He said as he pointed at the four heads.

 Chapter 392: Execution

    Philip walked forward and ced his hand on top of the cylinder, there is a small metallic pipe fixed to it, he pulled it out and the tube extended with the metallic pipe as he inserted the pipe into the forcefield, there is a small rune on the pipe that it can ignore the forcefield.

    Then, Philip pressed a button on the cylinder and gas escaped into the forcefield, as the gas is almost colourless, nobody in the audience is able to guess what Philip is doing, after sometime, Philip looked at all of them and said.

    "This is the fate of a traitor."

    With that, he pressed another button, and the gas caught me.

    "Ahhhhhhhhhh... Ahh.. AHhhh."

    The man inside the forcefield started screaming, he is the pharmaceutical tower head, the least involved on in the whole endeavour.

    The pharmaceutical association is still under construction and they have to establish yet again and prove to the rest of the major powers and associations to get their status back.

    Until then, the Pharmaceutical towers in the empire can be considered to have no backing.

    But he is still involved in this situation, so there is no way he would escape scot free.

    The death like this torture and the torture intensified because his cultivation is still present, he is barely restricted and the innate resistance will only make the burning more torturous to the person.

    Now, he is dying first, at least he can ignore the psychological pain the remaining three are currently going through.

    They didn¡¯t anticipate this. Sam has already known this matter and yet here they thought they kept it a secret. But still they didn¡¯t think Sam would do anything to them, after all the associations are omnipotent in their minds. Such was their training.

    "Sam, you are burning bridges like this. The associations wouldn¡¯t leave you alone." The artisan tower head yelled at the top of his lungs. He knew that nothing woulde out even if he argued with Philip and Jack.

    They only take orders and no matter what they will execute them. The only one who has power to stop this is Sam.

    Philip smirked as he looked at him coldly. He didn¡¯t even bother to stop him and let him yell.

    After yelling some nonsense, all three of them increased the struggle to escape.

    The pharmaceutical head, stopped his cries and that is because his vocal cords are burned. Now, only faint screams could be heard.

    The three of them are sweating bullets.

    The next in line is the inscription head. He started begging Philip.

    "Please let me go. I have a family and children to take care of. Please. I don¡¯t want to die like this. What we did is wrong, but they are from association, we don¡¯t have power against them. We could only give in."

    Jack snorted in disdain at this. He saw the video; he knew whether what he said is true or not. He felt disgusted breathing the same air as him.

    Now they are talking about the association being powerful and them being helpless, but in the video, there is no intimidation of power. They are desperately trying to get in bed with those superiors and these designs are the only options they could get

    Now, they are trying to act pitiful.

    Philip activated the trap again and the me started again. The Inscription tower head started burning with the screams.

    The audience are looking at the scene in astonishment.

    They all now understood that Sam who can protect them from any threat can destroy them as well.

    The citizens of the city are mostly employees. They all have deep respect to Sam when he saved the city from Old One. But that respect clouded their fears and now their fears are reminded by this incident.

    They cannot betray the organization or else Sam would kill them.

    The Architect Chief and the Formation chief looked at the scene with their eyes open wide. One of them is recording the whole incident with the crystal.

    They came for the information regarding the designs, but now they are met with this.

    They have to inform this to their higher-ups urgently.

    But they didn¡¯t go immediately.

    They want to see how Sam will handle the situation; this is rted to them after all.

    After the execution of four people, Philip looked at the audience with his back straight.

    "Due to the betrayal from the four towers, the people from the four towers who are working in the city are relieved from their duties, you shall leave this city by evening or else prepare to face the consequences. You are not the part of this city anymore and even if you want to visit this ce as a guest, you can onlye back after a month.

    As for the partnership with the rest of the towers in the empire, it is going to be temporarily suspended affective today.

    All the parks will be shut down temporarily and all the employees belonging to the four towers that are involved in the project at any part of the empire shall pay a visit to the Sam¡¯s city in a week.

    They are to bring all the necessary documents regarding the ounts, management and maintenance of the Parks.

    The employees list is already in our hands and in case anyone goes missing, the said city¡¯s four towers will be responsible for this and have to bear the consequences.

    The people¡¯s hearts shook. Sam really is taking the betrayal hard and all the officials better be prepared. They felt pity for them.

    The assembly was dismissed.

    That moment, the news was sent to all the parks and all the cities¡¯ employees under the towers who work in the park are sweating bullets.

    Because, they knew that something big is going to happen. They are going to face the big change head on and there is no way out.

    Simrly, the new went to the imperial capital. The emperor and the four tower heads are shocked.

    They didn¡¯t expect Sam to make such big moves.

    Emperor in particr had a bad premonition. He knew about the situation in the central continent. He was in touch with Nichs who is a core disciple of the thunder god temple. He was updating about the happenings in the major powers.

    He knew that parks are being built by the thunder god temple in other empires. But he didn¡¯t expect that designs are stolen along with the idea.

    From Sam¡¯s character one should be surprised, if he takes this lying down and his retaliation came swiftly.

    He immediately boarded his vulture and moved out of the city.

    The four tower heads also boarded the train in order to go as fast as they can. Not only them all the tower heads in the cities and the employees are waiting for the train. The nearest people are already leaving.

    They all wanted to enter the Sam¡¯s city as fast as they can. No one wanted to face Sam¡¯s wrath.

    But everyone is nervous.

    With thework being this big, it is inevitable that some corruption would happen. Particrly, when it involves billions of spirit stones and Sam being absent for a long time, there is no way these officials can keep their hands clean from the money.

    That is why they are nervous. Most of them changed the documents ordingly, but they are notpletely sure.

    But what they don¡¯t know is, while they are trying to forge these documents and stuff, themunication towers are doing other things.

    No one in the wholework knew that eachmunication tower is enchanted by a spirit and the spirit only listens to Sam¡¯smands.

    But it has other function too and that is surveince of the city. As long as they used themunication token to discuss anything about money and corruption, the spirit will listen in and sort out the information. Apart from that, there is a spirit in the Park itself that only has one job. To remember the data of the finances that go through the park. This spirit can contact themunication tower.

    Sam might not be able to get all the information, but he can get most of it.

    Philip assigned some soldiers from the Sam¡¯s battalion and made them sit inside the Sam¡¯s tower¡¯s room. This ce is where they receive the information from the cities¡¯ spirits.

    They only have one job. Document all the information the spirits are throwing at them.

    If the people that areing knew that there is such an arrangement, they wouldn¡¯t dare toe here, they would go to imperial capital to seek punishment for their crimes.

    In two days, Arc entered the Sam¡¯s city. He came at the full speed and the vulture almost looked like it was on itsst legs.

    He rushed to the tower and asked the receptionist for Sam.

    Everyone was stunned to see the emperor like this.

    But to their surprise, Arc wasn¡¯t able to meet Sam.

    He could only meet Philip who said with a smile.

    "I am sorry your majesty. But Sam is busy in making something and it is an extremely critical time. You have to wait for five more days."

    The attendants and all are feeling shocked. That is the emperor and even he has to wait for five more days. Even though, they are afraid of the emperor¡¯s reaction, there is a faint sense of pride building up in their hearts.

    Arc hook his head and said.

    "Can we talk in private?" He didn¡¯t care about the rejection, but he needs some information and he can get it from Philip.

 Chapter 393: Inspection and Terminations

    After a few hours, Philip and Arc came out of the meeting room and thetter has an extremely dejected expression on his face.

    Arc wanted to ask why Sam is taking such drastic measures, but he got no answers, all Philip did is to dodge questions with superficial answers.

    All he could do is wait in the city.

    For the following days, the city was being flooded with the tower heads from all over the empire.

    At the end of the week, Sam finally came out of the tower. But he didn¡¯t look normal. His body was slumped a bit as it he was exhausted and his eyes showed his immenseck of sleep.

    He did many things in the past week. He reached a bottleneck in designing the first puppet and it is in its final stage. If he can finish thisst step all that left is finishing the production unit, he is building.

    After he came out, he took a long nap and woke up at night.

    Sam had a meal and stretchedzily.

    He looked at Philip and said.

    "Are all of them here?"

    "Yeah."

    "Then call for a meeting now."

    Philip was stunned.

    "It is the middle of the night."

    "So what? Are you worried about disturbing their rest?"

    Sam replied and walked away.

    Philip definitely smelled trouble. Sam is deliberately making it hard for these people.

    After a few minutes, everyone has gathered in front of the dais again. But this time, Sam sat behind a table which was ced on the table and there is a stack of small booklets on it.

    These booklets are the information they got from the tower and park spirits.

    Philip and Jack are standing beside him. Philip is managing the booklets and Jack has a list in his hands.

    "Southern Star city and all the subordinate cities under them, line up ande on to the stage one by one. Submit your reports." Jack called out and the southern star city people shuddered.

    They are the ones with the longest partnership with Sam. And the artisan tower of that city is still not involved in the project.

    The three tower heads nervously walked forward and started handing over the documents one by one. Sam nced at the documents and looked through the booklets one by one.

    After tallying the data, he said.

    "There is not much problem with the money, but why is the shop in the park lent to someone from the Artisan tower?"

    His voice was cold befitting the night time. The three-tower heads didn¡¯t know what to say. They do have some rtionship with the Artisan tower and the shop was rented to him by an alias. They thought that since Sam is high and mighty at the moment and felt like he wouldn¡¯t care about these trivial matters. But it turned out they guessed wrong.

    He is as petty as ever.

    "I clearly mentioned that Artisan tower of that city wouldn¡¯t be participating and we are not going to do any form of deals with them. But why was shop leased to them?" Sam asked once more and his voice turned colder.

    As he spoke, Sam is already checking the documents and revenue details from the subordinate cities and themunicationworks.

    The tower heads didn¡¯t dare to reply.

    "I am terminating the partnership between the three towers and the park. All the employees belonging to the three towers can resign if they want to stay in the three towers, they cannot work in the Park. But if they want to work in the park, they have to let go of their duties in the towers."

    Sam¡¯s words stunned everyone. They didn¡¯t expect that he would give such a harsh punishment to them just for lending a single shop.

    "Sam, this is outrageous." The formation head finally spoke.

    Sam coldly looked at him and said.

    "Partnership is only based on trust. You betrayed my trust by doing what I told you not to do. I didn¡¯t ce many restrictions in the first ce, but you cannot follow such a simple thing. Do you think I am an Idiot?"

    "But this is too big of a punishment."

    "Yes. It is too harsh." The other people below the stage started speaking.

    Sam nced at them and spoke. "Is it your ce to speak? Shut the fuck up and wait for your turn."

    The crowd was silenced.

    He then addressed the employees.

    "All the employees of the towers working for the park. There is no concession. If you want to work at the park, you have to cut your ties with the towers.

    Of course, you guys might think that towers are giving you benefits. But I don¡¯t see what the organization can offer and the towers can¡¯t. Anyway, the Organization will be opening ess to the new knowledge to the full-fledged employees.

    The knowledge contains all kinds of aspects including artisan techniques, knowledge of formations, inscriptions, and even pharmaceutical methods. Methods that are unique and unorthodox and I guarantee that no tower can provide you that.

    You have seen the park. Everything there is my creation and if you want to be able to gain the knowledge of that level, you can join the organization.

    Of course, it is not free. You have to gain trust and merits."

    He then turned towards Philip and said.

    "Post a recruitment notice. For the four major professions. They can join the organization irrespective of their levels. The only requirement being them not being affiliated with any organization."

    "Sam, this is too audacious of you. You might be a genius, but don¡¯t forget the recognition of the associations is the only way for you to gain the approval of your methods. Now, you are trying to poach them belittling the four associations.

    What do you take us for? On what basis are you doing this?"

    As soon as he spoke, Sam took out a handgun and shot at him.

    The other party is a Nascent, but the bullet being an energy cell, he received some damage.

    "One more word and I will take your life." Sam coldly replied and then turned towards the rest of them.

    "Listen carefully. I don¡¯t care for your approval nor your recognition. If you piss me off, then it would be a massacre that is happening.

    You neither have the right or authority to be the approver of my methods. The business was proposed by me, created by me, and run by me. I only gave you a part in this because I don¡¯t like to do anything by myself. If you are ungrateful and betrayed my trust and still expect me to bear your nonsense, you will be truly testing my patience.

    Trust me that never ends well for those who do it.

    So, until I ask you to speak, shut your damn mouth."

    After that, no one dared to speak. Although they are grumbling, they didn¡¯t dare to speak up.

    As for the emperor and the four tower heads of the imperial capital, they are not at the scene, but they are observing the situation. The four of them didn¡¯t speak up because all Sam did was terminate the contract with one city. They cannot have a say in any of this, because, that city was the first partnership Sam made with those people and they did betray Sam¡¯s trust.

    Particrly, aiding Sam¡¯s enemy. They shouldn¡¯t have done that.

    Sam finished the southern star city and the subordinate cities and terminated contracts in all the Dukedom.

    Then only they frowned. Sam didn¡¯t tolerate a small mistake. He even fired many people and only kept a little more than half of the employees and even they have to resign from the towers.

    They are feeling that he is going overboard. But they are a bit fearful to make a direct move.

    They met the emperor a day before and learned somethings. Emperor doesn¡¯t want them to be reckless. He doesn¡¯t want to face the heads of the associations who might get pissed off if something happened to them.

    Sam went on to the next city and this time, there are some revenue mistakes.

    There is some corruption in this ce. Sam didn¡¯t even ask the reasons and just terminated the contract and the rest of the subordinate cities followed suit.

    All the shops that are jointly managed by Organization and towers are being terminated of the partnership.

    The remaining people turned incredibly nervous.

    The tower head, sweated bullets and out of nervousness, he made a big mistake, he made a move on Sam and what he received is a head shot.

    He is just a Nascent that too someone at an early stage. Sam doesn¡¯t fear anyone.

    The Spree continued.

    Sam continued and when he didn¡¯t find some big differences, he told the employees and the tower heads.

    "The association doesn¡¯t deserve you and in the near future, they might lose their worth. There is a reason for the other ces to be this corrupted. When a system is corrupted, there is no growth. I advise you to join the organization. We will groom you with the way ought to be groomed."

    Simply put, he didn¡¯t terminate the contract yet. But he is extremely willing to terminate it.

 Chapter 394: Full termination

    Sam continued on with his onught of contract termination and he was done in a few hours. It is already nearing dawn.

    He then stood up and looked at the table which has two stacks of booklets. One of them is about the areas which are terminated and the other are of which still held the contract.

    But the second stack has only four booklets. While the other has nine. The whole western continent has fourteen dukedoms and out of them, nine were terminated.

    Sam looked at Philip and said.

    "Where are the representatives of the imperial capital? Are they traitors who didn¡¯te?"

    Everyone was stunned. They didn¡¯t expect that Sam would say something like that. He didn¡¯t see the imperial capital tower and he simplybeled them as tower heads.

    The four tower- heads, who are looking at the situation from the hiding all frowned and felt frustrated. They couldn¡¯t do anything and came out.

    "Sam, what you are doing is extremely out of line. How dare you terminate the contract with those many parks."

    The formation tower head said directly.

    "Yes, do you think, you can maintain the wholework without the help of the towers? Do you think the business would even exist?"

    Sam frowned and his gaze emitted extreme coldness.

    "You better watch your tone, if you want to leave the city alive," Sam said in a low voice.

    Suddenly, the tower heads shuddered.

    Sam has been on edgetely. The continuous refinement of pills made him extremely irritated. He desperately wanted to vent. He couldn¡¯t do much to Arman, because he is weak.

    He doesn¡¯t have time to go looking for people and battling them because of the threat he has to face.

    The major professional associations are not doing anything to him, yet. But that doesn¡¯t mean they will stay put like that.

    It is just like the story of Taj Mahal.

    Shah Jahan the ruler, used the most skilled artisans he could find to build the tomb for his wife. Which has turned into a wonder of the world for its beauty and splendor.

    The Artisans were givennds, riches, status. Anything they could dream of. But the twisted y of fate made Shah Jahan the love stuck fool an emperor to make him think of a possibility.

    What if the artisan who is this skilled creates a monument that surpasses the Taj Mahal?

    And thus, the artisan¡¯s hands which are their livelihood were severed along with the workers who numbered in thousands.

    The beautiful wonder which is a symbol of love has resulted in much blood and gore.

    The same thing will happen to these Association heads. Sooner orter they will know that with their learning methods and orthodox thinking, they will not surpass their limits and build something on par with a park or surpass it.

    Then they will be afraid of Sam surpassing it and thus, they will try their best to make sure that wouldn¡¯t happen.

    Those thoughts wouldn¡¯te now, but they will surelye when the Park is almost finished.

    As they are still in the middle of construction, they don¡¯t know the true worth of Park. But they will surely understand as they reached the finishing stages, then it will spell trouble for Sam.

    He could just make trouble for them now, but if he did that, they might get enraged.

    As of this moment, Sam is not a threat, just a thorn that is not even hurting the top dogs. But once he was seen as a threat, he has to be careful. The city can only do so much and he couldn¡¯t activate its full potential without his mental strength increasing.

    Otherwise, Sravan would have been dead by now.

    As he looked at the tower heads Sam said.

    "The four associations have been corrupted to their core. Not even half of the association is working properly.

    I hereby announce. Sam¡¯s organization is terminating the partnership. We do not encourage such despicable acts as corruption, Nepotism, and selfish ideals.

    The four associations are set up so that they could spread their knowledge and encourage more professionals, but they are not following the will and being greedy.

    I am now offering a chance to the experts in the four associations to join the organization.

    You will give ess to new resources, new knowledge, and new methods. No matter what your expertise is, you shall not be discriminated and the organization will treat you fairly to nurture you in the direction you want.

    If you think that the badges are the acknowledgment for your skill. You are utterly wrong. The true glory of that badge is only represented when you wore them, not the other way around. Here, in our organization, we will not be looking at those superficial metallic pieces.

    We will be judging you based on your expertise."

    Sam announced loudly and not many minded themunication device he wore on his ear. The same thing is being heard all over the empire in every city, through themunication tower.

    This is another feature. He can make announcements in all the cities at the same time.

    The four tower heads are stumped. Not only did Sam draw a line between the four tower and himself, he even dered the badge of an association is worthless and, in his eyes, but they are also the ones that are bringing the badges respect.

    He even called for recruitment all over the city.

    Sam felt his head aching. The announcement is indeed a convenient ability, but it would take too much of his energy.

    He turned around and walked inside the tower, not even bothering with the associations.

    Arc finally couldn¡¯t hold it and ran towards Sam.

    "We will talk inside."

    Sam said to him and led him to a meeting room.

    They sat down and Arc who is already on the verge of exploding used all the patience he could muster to stay calm and said.

    "Why are you doing this?"

    "I was betrayed."

    "But that is only done by those four people."

    "That is why those four are the only ones killed. Otherwise, there will be a massacre."

    Arc was speechless and Sam continued.

    "If there was any shred of hope and I saw more than half of the cities operating perfectly without any corruption, I wouldn¡¯t have done so. After all, suddenly recruiting so many people is also a task for me.

    But more than half of the dukedoms are heavily corrupted. I gave them a share in the goldmine, but they are still being greedy over my wealth.

    These people will sooner orter betray me. After all, fear can only get me so far. They are forgetting the fear. I can take enmity, I can take resentment, I can take scorn and I can take contempt. But I would never take betrayal."

    "But the associations wouldn¡¯t tolerate this."

    "Let theme. I also want to see if they will care about this one empire¡¯s partnership or all the other empires¡¯ constructions. They don¡¯t have enough time on their hands."

    Arc sighed and gulped the ss of wine that was ced on the table.

    He was extremely frustrated. If he was strong enough, just like Sam said, he would have waited for them toe. He is the emperor and he is not being able to take care of his empire and had to stay fearful of everything.

    Both of them didn¡¯t talk for some time.

    At this moment, the association heads are in a meeting in the central continent.

    Right now, they have two recording crystals on the table and they had seen both the videos.

    One of them is from the week earlier. The video of the execution, the second one is the one of today, the video of today¡¯s contract termination.

    The two chiefs that went to the Sam¡¯s city on that day felt that things would change on this day, so they sent someone to record the video.

    When the three heads saw this, they have extremely ugly expressions.

    They are already pissed when they saw the first video and this second video made he them infuriated, but the formation head suddenly chuckled and said.

    "I think we are getting angry for nothing."

    The other two were puzzled.

    "Old three, what do you mean?"

    "Think about it, Sam cannot do anything to us. Although, he is a threat, he cannot do anything beyond that Sam¡¯s city.

    He is just venting his anger after he came to know that we stole his designs. But what can he do other than this? Is the influence of the four associations, so easy to get rid of in the empires?

    When people want a weapon, thene to the artisan tower, that would never change no matter what.

    Just because Sam said those words, do you think anything wille out of it.

    I think this is a chance for ourselves. We can just use this chance to iste ourselves from him and construct parks in this western continent as well.

    All this while, the association is already in partnership and we wanted to slowly absorb the organization.

    But now, we have a chance. I think we shall establish our own organization. We will use the influence of the towers topete against him. Sam doesn¡¯t have any other force to back him up and provide manpower, now that he terminated the contract, he will soon face troubles."

    He said these words as he grinned sinisterly.

 Chapter 395: A Chance

    Back in Sam¡¯s city.

    Arc is still in the meeting room with Sam. He wanted to persuade Sam to not push too far, but he felt that his words made sense, but he quickly lost in thoughts about his own weakness.

    If he really is strong, he should have been able to not care about the whole situation from the major associations at all and let Sam do what he wants.

    The towers are indeed arrogant for their own good. They control many things in society.

    And all that stemmed from these associations. His father tried to free the empire from the influence of the central continent. He didn¡¯t like being a subordinate of the thunder god temple.

    But he died of old age. Cultivators wouldn¡¯t have kids when they are in their twenties, with the breakthrough past the Nascent stage, their life span changes and they have apletely different take on their youth.

    A transcendent will stay in his youth for over a century.

    Arc also wanted to try his best to get out the influence of the thunder god temple.

    But for that, he has to reach the Consummate realm. With all his ability, all he was able to reach was the Peak of the middle-stage of Transcendent.

    He is seeing improvement, but he couldn¡¯t find himself breaking through anytime sooner.

    But is just breaking through that realm is enough? He doesn¡¯t know. Because the weakest head of a major power is a middle-stage consummate realm cultivator.

    Even if he reached the initial stage, he wouldn¡¯t stand a chance against the thunder god temple.

    As he was drifted in his thoughts, a small tapping sound brought him back.

    Sam¡¯s finger tapped on the table and he asked Arc.

    "What are you thinking about?"

    "Nothing much. It is just how pathetic I am. Sam, you tell me. Am I destined to stay like this? Being an emperor only in name and only doing their bidding."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and just looked at him. Arc started chugging ss after ss of wine and let it go to his head without using his spiritual energy.

    He was being thrown around by the thunder god temple and almost turned into an errand boy since the Old One¡¯s incident.

    He wanted to get drunk. Drown his sorrows in the wine.

    He paused his drink and said to Sam.

    "Sam, you are the person I envy the most. You are actually, a young man, a puny teenager who came this far on your own. Even the major powers don¡¯t dare mess with you.

    If only I have the same level of abilities you have and the same level of intelligence you possess, I would have seeded in changing my fate.

    I am sick of being a puppet."

    He downed another ss. Sam didn¡¯t say anything to him. He didn¡¯t drink any wine either. He normally wouldn¡¯t drink alcohol. Only when he is overthinking and his brain and the thoughts within overwhelms him would he drink so that he could numb the mind and rest.

    He looked at Arc deeply and thought for some time, before finally opening his mouth.

    "How about a chance to escape this fate?"

    Arc was stunned and shook his head. Trying to sober up.

    "Did I hear you right?"

    "A chance. How about it?"

    "What do you mean?"

    "I will give you a chance to be a Consummate realm, to create a power solely led by you. I don¡¯t care about how you rule or what you rule. All I ask is that I want to use that ce as my base. How about it? Do you want it?"

    "Such a chance wouldn¡¯te for free, right? What is the price?"

    "Loyalty."

    Arc frowned; he didn¡¯t know how to prove his loyalty. But he can understand, where Sam ising from. At this moment, what Sam needs are loyal people around him.

    Even if it was loyalty, to what extent does he have to be loyal to Sam.

    If he has to maintain the rtionship the same as the one with the thunder god temple, then he doesn¡¯t have to do that right? He can just stay in the present situation.

    Sam ced a Crimson red pill and ced it on the table.

    "This is a Pill of Servitude. If you want to stay loyal to me, take it.

    I am doing this because I cannot trust anyone at this moment. You might think, you are going to be my puppet. But that is not exactly true.

    Because, for one, I don¡¯t have any intentions of controlling territory and ruling an empire. I would rather do business.

    As for what I will give you, it is only fair that I exin it as well.

    From what I observed, the main thing that is making the Transcendent stage cultivator iscking is not the talent or resources. But guidance.

    There are not many Consummate realm cultivators in the world and in every generation, only less than ten cultivators appeared.

    Anything regarding that realm waspletely sealed off by the major powers making it hard for normal Transcendent stage cultivators to breakthrough. In fact, it has be nigh impossible.

    But, I have a way to grant you that guidance and I am pretty sure, even the major powers wouldn¡¯t have ess to that level of guidance"

    Arc went into a deep through and took a deep breath.

    "If you don¡¯t trust me, why should I trust you?"

    "I don¡¯t have an answer for that, you might feel this is unfair, but there is one thing I am sure of, If I want to destroy you, I don¡¯t need to y the trust game and all, I can kill you anytime I want and if I really wanted to take over the empire. I would have taken over it by now.

    All I really want is a peaceful ce to stay with and if you be a Consummate realm cultivator, you will be acting as a form of deterrent.

    So, simply put you cannot do anything but trust me.

    The same couldn¡¯t be reciprocated for obvious reasons. My enemies are too big. So, big that it isughable that someone of my age and strength being their enemy.

    If I ce trust in you and you betray me, I would lose everything that I worked hard for.

    Even if you are an emperor, that makes you more vulnerable in face of threats. At the end of the day, you will think of me as a single young man. And if the question came if you have to sacrifice me or your imperial family, it is easier to see who you will pick.

    My distrust in you lies in your weakness. I hope you understand."

    Sam didn¡¯t speak further after this.

    He hadid out the situation entirely.

    Sam gets nothing from the empire even if he destroyed. There is nothing the empire can offer that he cannot get himself.

    But he really needs a Consummate realm cultivator. He could just bring a Raiju to the city, but that would make it hard for him to keep the tempest valley a secret, and even such, he doesn¡¯t want to use such a force for trivialities.

    He would try his best to get out of his situation himself. Unless he waspletely cornered he wouldn¡¯t resort to using the strength of Raijus directly.

    But Arc is going through a rollercoaster of emotions.

    He doesn¡¯t know what to say, in fact, he doesn¡¯t have any words to refute Sam. Because he is exactly right.

    At this moment, it is still okay because they don¡¯t have too close of a rtionship. It is just Arc¡¯s slip of the tongue to vent his frustration in front of Sam.

    But if Sam really helps him and trusts him, he would be a vulnerability to Sam.

    Because, on the surface, he still has to follow the thunder god temple¡¯s orders. Sam couldn¡¯t be sure without any form of reassurance.

    But he also has his reservations. What if Sam really wanted to gain control of the empire.

    If he really used the pill¡¯s effect to gain that, then Arc would be the one at the losing end.

    Sam looked outside the window and watched the sunrise.

    He stood up and stretched his body a bit.

    "I have something to do. If you agree, you can take the pill, and if you don¡¯t, handover the pill to Philip before you leave."

    Sam then went to the Arena where Arman is. By this time, Arman already lost his will. He is living like a dead man.

    And now, Sam is not just beating the crap out of him, rather bullying him. Forcing him to do things and punishing if he didn¡¯t do as he was told.

    This is also happening every day in front of an audience.

    This day was just like any other day, but this time Arman couldn¡¯t hold himself and started crying.

    Sam kicked him on his head and said.

    "Who said you could cry? I don¡¯t want to see those tears?" Arman hurriedly wiped his eyes.

 Chapter 396: Submission

    Arc sat in the chair as went through all of his thoughts. He is thinking of everything about Sam. Toe to a conclusion about his personality.

    And when he thought about all of it, he realized one thing, Sam might be considered greedy if one looked at his endeavors and the business ns. But there is one thing no one could deny.

    Sam was never greedy for something that didn¡¯t belong to him.

    He never eyed other people¡¯s wealth, he never targeted someone else particrly in fear his business would fail. He is way beyond petty tricks.

    Everything he achieved waspletely based on his own abilities.

    He never desired for things that are not his own, in fact one could say he disdained doing so.

    He looked at the crimson red pill that was on the table and after taking a deep breath, he reached out to that pill and swallowed.

    He felt the faint trace of spiritual energy entering body and there seemed to be some of spiritual sense infused into it.

    After pill was dissolved, he felt the spiritual sense entering his brain and the spiritual energy that came from the pill is aiding the body to ept that spiritual sense and in his Spiritual sea of consciousness, Arc felt an imprint appearing out of nowhere.

    He couldn¡¯t make out the shape of the imprint but he felt the aura of the imprint is familiar and giving same vibes as Sam.

    At this moment, Sam who is beating up Arman halted in his movements and felt something.

    A faint trace of spiritual energy flew towards him and as he closed his and looked at this consciousness, he saw a small ball of light floating.

    His spiritual sea is recently formed as he broke through the Nascent and is still small. He looked at the ball of light and as he concentrated, he could feel that Arc is sitting cross-legged and letting the pillpletely dissolve.

    He couldn¡¯t perceive Arc¡¯s surroundings all he could feel is what Arc is doing. He opened his eyes and smiled.

    He looked at Arman who curled up into a ball and is trying hard not to cry.

    "Today is your lucky day. Now go and clean up the mess of this beating."

    Arman was quite relieved and he walked towards the rubble that was created by the beating he took. He started cleaning heaving sighs of relief. He seemed happy even if he is used as a cleaner. The genius of the thunder god temple seemed to have disappearedpletely.

    Sam walked out to meet with Arc.

    "Stay within the city for a few days, we will go somewhere."

    He then walked towards a hall where a lot of people are gathered. These are the newly recruited people from the four towers.

    The three association heads actually underestimated Sam¡¯s influence, just his words made almost everyone quit their duties in towers. Anyone who worked for the organization will not want to quit there.

    The job is great, benefits are great and they learn something from the intricate formations and such as for the Artisans, they are mesmerized with the machinery Sam gave them in the factories, their jobs have never been easier and productive. Why would they leave?

    But these are not all of them. These are the ones Sam previously contacted and in front row, Austin could be seen.

    "You are all gathered here, because, there is a new project awaiting you all. As the whole Organization is going to recruit our own employees, there needs to be a ce to learn. Our next project is precisely that. There is a newnd recently cleared in the nearby woods and we are going to construct the greatest learning ce of all time.

    With a wave of his hands, he threw a spatial ring to Austin.

    He is the architect so he is will handle the construction.

    Sam continued.

    "These blue prints contain all aspects of the construction project. Buildings, formations, inscriptions or all of thembined.

    Even if the construction might dy, I hope all of you guys can go through the blueprints and understand the concepts and intricate details, which might help you get a break through in the art.

    After roughly six months, I would be going out of the empire to settle some business. Until then, I will allocate three hours a day to rify any doubts you may have in the project. We will meet in the same room."

    All of them are extremely excited, they didn¡¯t expect that the very first project as the new employees would be this important and helpful.

    This time they don¡¯t have to blindly construct something, they must understand the principles and concepts behind the designs which is a great opportunity as they have all been learning so much from just their working time in the city and Park.

    As they are looking forward to it, Sam said something else.

    "But before that, I need you guys to pledge your loyalty to me. And to do that, all of you shall take a pill from this."

    Sam threw a spatial ring towards them. One of them caught it. All of them frowned.

    "I am sorry to say this, but I have been betrayed time and again from the four towers and even the higher-ups in the associations are all eyeing me, I have to make sure that there are no spies and there are no people who are trying to betray me. This pill some sort of entrance test."

    They nodded in understanding, but that doesn¡¯t mean they are happy to take it, they are somewhat unwilling, it feels bad to be suspected after all. But they can see from Sam¡¯s standpoint because of their good impression.

    Sam gave the four towers a just and fair treatment from the start. He took care of employees and he never ever cut something that has to be given to the employees. Many of them got bonuses and their working lives have been great.

    But still, he was betrayed. Even after all that he had done, people still turned his back on him.

    Austin was the first one to take the pill and swallow it.

    He already made his choice and there is no need to turn back. After his lead everyone followed.

    Within a few minutes everyone took the pill and Sam could sense their spiritual sense entering his body. There are many light balls appearing in his mind.

    After they opened their eyes, Sam said.

    "Don¡¯t worry. This is not a ve imprint or anything, it cannot control your will. Rather it only stops you from doing anything that betrays me."

    Sam said and left the room. Even though, his words are not true, it is a white lie. He doesn¡¯t need to use force to control them, he would be using this just for what he said.

    "Where are you going after six months?" Philip asked. He never knew about this.

    "Thunder god temple."

    "Why?"

    "Pce of Inheritance." Sam said and exined about the badge. Of course, all he said was that only a select few were selected by the pce toe back and he got a badge.

    "But wouldn¡¯t it be dangerous?"

    The rtionship between them and the Pce is extremely strained. Philip is extremely worried.

    He left the ce and went on to deal with his daily routine. In two days, the design of the first puppet will be finished.

    And he has to finish the production equipment which he started. Once it was finished, his future manufacturing endeavours will be easy to finish.

    Meanwhile, the whole Sam¡¯s city is chaotic. It has only been a few hours since the announcement of recruitment was released, but there are already many people who arrived for assessments.

    Because, this is not the first announcement, it is just that the announcement made by Philip earlier didn¡¯t hold much weight and many of them had been fence sitters.

    So many of them are inside the city for a few days.

    But they are now interestedpletely and chose to join.

    That evening.

    Sam finally came out of the divine dimension and went to meet with Arc.

    Sam walked towards the newly constructed Space gate within the city, it has been nearly a month since the construction started and the first space gate is obviously the city¡¯s. The second one that was constructed is the Space gate in the Kali empire under the beast faction. Sam has halted other gates to increase the speed of these gates.

    Because, they can use the Space gate of the Kali empire to enter the Beast faction and then to the central continent¡¯s tempest valley.

    Apart from that there is also another thing, they have a business deal with the Beast faction and in two days, he will be sending the representatives to the Beast faction. For this business purpose, he needs this Space gate.

    Sam and Arc reached the Kali empire and the Beast faction and finally the central continent.

    They walked towards the tempest valley.

    Arc is looking at the valley from a far as he walked, it is extremely heart shuddering.

    When they reached the valley, the Old beast looked at both of them and squinted its eyes.

    "Pill of Servitude. Where did you get that kid? Don¡¯t tell me you made the pill."

    Sam wasn¡¯t that much surprised that he knew of that pill, but guessing the pill from the smell, that is surprising.

    Old beast looked at Arc without any hostility, since he ate the pill of servitude, he is loyal to Sam.

    "I want you to train him."

 Chapter 397: Philip to the Kali empire

    After handing over Arc to the Old beast, Sam returned. Of course, the Old beast easily agreed to train him.

    Arc is quite talented as he reached Level-6 transcendent stage with the limited resources he had. In fact, from what Sam knew there is no specific lineage of Transcendent stage cultivators in the empire. Arian family, the imperial family is trying to create a lineage, until it is established, they will have to face the Transcendent cultivation as an unknown thing and face it all by themselves.

    But now, things are going to change.

    Arc for the first time after he reached the Transcendent stage is going to receive guidance. He is a lightning elemental user, Old Beast is a Raiju who is at an extremely high cultivation level.

    From what Sam knew and heard from Yanwu, the Raiju n should be in the same realm as the Golden Sun crow n. But Yanwu doesn¡¯t know much about them as their territories are too distant.

    Such Raiju was locked down in the mortal realm.

    There are only a handful of entities that might best Old beast in the understanding of lightningws.

    And that valley is indeed a great training ce for lightning users, but Old beast doesn¡¯t like anyone toe there so they weren¡¯t able to obtain any form of benefits from there.

    But now that Old beast agreed to let Arc in, then he can train there.

    He would breakthrough the Consummate realm sooner orter.

    Sam returned through the same series of Space gates and after he reached the city, the first thought that came to his mind is to look in the divine dimension¡¯s library to see if there is any form of information on returning scroll designs. If he used the returning scrolls that could send people beyond the Nascent stage, then they can travel faster.

    The Space gates are honestly too time-consuming and three constant space gate travels are giving him a headache.

    He walked to his residence and entered the Divine dimension.

    He has to finish the first puppet design.

    He has six months to Pce of inheritance and he has to go there, if there is something on par with the thunder prison, he wouldn¡¯t want to lose it.

    In these six months, he has many things to do, manufacture as many puppets as he can. Cultivate, and start working on the second design of the puppets.

    Apart from that, he would have to make arrangements for the new construction that is happening in the nearby woods.

    Two dayster. Philip led a group of people to the newly constructed Space gate and they appeared in the Kali empire of the Beast faction.

    They ventured into the city and went to meet the Emperor.

    As soon as they visited the Pce and gave their names to the attendants along with the details of where they came from

    They were led to a meeting room.

    The room was empty and no one is there.

    After a few minutes, a pre-transcendent cultivator of the Beast faction, followed by several Nascent stage cultivators entered the room and took the seats opposite to them.

    Behind them, the Emperor of the Kali stood obediently.

    The Pre-transcendent cultivator looked at Philip and said coldly.

    "How arrogant can Sam be? When dealing with the beast faction, he didn¡¯te personally. Is this deal even sincere?"

    Philip looked at him and didn¡¯t reply.

    He ced a booklet on the table.

    They are the contract details required for the partnership.

    Looking at Philip¡¯s silent treatment, the other guy snorted and looked at the Booklet.

    The thing is, the whole beast faction is not exactly happy about the deal.

    Sam beat the crap out of them and their former faction-head. They don¡¯t know the full story of Sam¡¯s past. They don¡¯t care enough to confirm what the exact enmity is.

    They do know one thing though and that is Sam is their enemy and so are his friends who apanied him in destroying their faction.

    But all of a sudden, the faction head came and said that their enmity with Sam is now over and they are going to make a business deal with them.

    All they have to do is reach the consensus on whatever terms that Sam ces.

    How can they ept that? They wanted to protest, but the faction-head simply didn¡¯t care.

    As he read through the documents, the Pre-transcendent stage cultivator became angrier and angrier.

    The partnership is only five percent, but they have to give away thend and even have to protect them. This is definitely a losing deal.

    Apart from that, they also have to submit a catalog of the beasts which they are farming in their faction. And Sam would buy some beasts with seventy percent of the market price.

    As they are the Beast faction, there is naturally a farm for the beasts, in fact, they have multiple farms.

    But this is outrageous.

    Farming is not something they do for selling. In fact, there are some minor farms which they use to farm the beasts to sell them.

    But they are not the best of the best and the rare beasts wouldn¡¯t be there.

    But what Sam asking is not those beasts, he is asking for the rare beasts that are being reared in the beast faction.

    He mmed the document on the table and a crack appeared.

    "How dare you ask for these preposterous conditions? Do you think the prestige of the Beast faction is that easy to challenge?"

    Philip still didn¡¯t reply, he leaned back on his chair and crossed his hands.

    "If you don¡¯t give me a satisfactory answer, no one is leaving here. How dare you humiliate the Beast faction? At first, your boss didn¡¯te and now the person who came, you are not even bothered to reply? What is the meaning of this?"

    He pointed his finger at Philip and bellowed.

    Philip still didn¡¯t reply.

    The Pre-transcendent went on to hurl insults. After some time, he lost patience and said.

    "Detain them here, we will be going back to the faction and discuss this with the rest of the Elders and grand elders.

    The faction-head did a big mistake."

    Just like that, Philip and his group are escorted to the Beast faction, even before they opened their mouths and spoke.

    After reaching the Beast faction, they are even thrown into their prison.

    As for why this Pre-transcendent stage cultivator was this arrogant, that is because he is son of a Grand elder.

    There are two grand elders in the faction and one of them is currently Sravan.

    The other Grand elder is not present in the beast faction when Sam attacked, so they don¡¯t know, but his son has been there.

    His ass was kicked due to the Devouring vines and he held a grudge.

    Within the Beast faction, no one would dare to provoke him, but he was humiliated by a junior.

    So, he deliberately intercepted the original representative, who should have gone to finish the deal, and took the role himself.

    But one must wonder if he has a brain. If all he can do is capture Philip and the rest, then he seemed to thought truly highly of himself or utterly ignorant.

    The previous destruction of the beast faction also started with kidnap after all.

    Philip didn¡¯t speak all this while.

    He guessed something like this would happen and there is little surprise in that.

    They don¡¯t even have to deal with this matter, because there is someone who will do It in his stead.

    The Beast faction was in uproar, many disciples in the faction are ecstatic when they heard about the incident.

    They all came to prisons to take a look.

    Many hurled insults at him one by one and some threatened him.

    The news soon traveled to Sai when he was in the middle of meeting with some elders and the chair and table broke from the shock wave when he heard the news.

    He immediately ran towards the grand elder¡¯s residence where the remaining elders are already gathered.

    He frowned when he saw the line-up. He felt that they are indeed plotting something behind his back.

    He didn¡¯t bother with anyone, not even the Grand Elder, and directly looked at the Pre-transcendent stage cultivator.

    "Who gave you the right to lead the representatives? Who gave you the authority to imprison them?"

    The Pre-transcendent didn¡¯t say anything as he sweated bullets.

    Sai¡¯s pressure is too much to bear.

    "Faction-head, even though he didn¡¯t act upon orders, he did capture someone from the enemy¡¯s side and the prisoner seemed to be second inmand. You shouldmend him for his services. Not rebuke him."

    "Commend him my ass." He coldly spat and looked at the Grand elder who spoke. The Grand Elder was stunned, he didn¡¯t expect this strong of a reaction from Sai.

    He coldly continued saying.

    "Where do you think the previous destruction began? Kidnapping. With your intelligence, how did you even cultivate to this stage? Sam¡¯s most trusted subordinate was kidnappedst time, Half of the beast faction was the price.

    Are you trying to force another massacre upon us?"

    "But.." The Grand elder wanted to say something, but Sai cut off.

    "Do you want to die? What do you know about him? Old One died in his hands, Sravan is still lying on the bed. Next, it would be you if you pursue this matter further. If I know that you did something, I will personally kill you and hand you over to him."

 Chapter 398: Machine is Complete

    Sai dragged the Pre-transcendent cultivator and went to the prison area.

    He released Philip and said.

    "I apologize for your inconvenience. I didn¡¯t control my disciples well. Please tell me how to deal with it."

    Philip didn¡¯t say anything and just took out the same booklet that he gave to the Pre-transcendent cultivator.

    "Everything is the same as previously, but hundred beast cubs per year, for five years. Otherwise, the deal is off."

    This is the first sentence that Philip uttered in the journey. Sai was troubled, hundred beast cubs is actually quite arge cut. He is feeling the pinch. That too five years, which means five hundred, this is quite a loss.

    "Can we do it for three years?" He asked without much expectations. But Philip smiled and said.

    "Deal."

    He then looked at the Pre-transcendent cultivator and smiled.

    "Do you think he wille and meet you personally? You are not worthy. Good luck living in the faction. After all, you just lost them three hundred beasts. Is your life worth that much?"

    Philip said those words and left with his people. On his way, he looked at the disciples who are at the Prison area to make fun of him earlier with extreme condescension.

    These people don¡¯t know what is happening in this world. They don¡¯t know or even qualified to know for that matter. The situation on the was changing, and these people don¡¯t know the implications of their actions.

    They don¡¯t know that Sam although a small variable can trigger a great involving all major powers. There is a force behind Sam that could reduce all the major powers to rubble. Only Sai knew about this.

    Sai has a feeling that the rest of the forces will resent him for taking Sam there.

    But he didn¡¯t regret it. Even though, Sam wouldn¡¯t be in a good rtionship with the Beast faction, at least war has been avoided with the business rtionship.

    But even if one day, War arises, he would just submit. After all, the beast faction was supposed to belong to Sam¡¯s father and if that had happened, Sam would have been the young master of the ce.

    He and Sanjay would have had a great rtionship and they would have held the rest of the peers in the same generation in contempt.

    He shook these thoughts of his head and sent Philip and his members off.

    Philip came back and reported the situation to Sam.

    That day, Sam went towards Arman and he didn¡¯t beat him up this time.

    Arman folded his hands and stood there without doing anything.

    He is shivering all over as Sam¡¯s gazended on him.

    "What will you do if you see me in the future?" Sam asked.

    Arman bowed ny degrees.

    "What will you do if there are others present?"

    Arman stood back up and looked at Sam. His arms are left to side and his eyes suddenly changed. His bodynguage waspletely different at this moment.

    This is the same demeanor of Arman before everything with Sam transcribed.

    "Now what is your duty?"

    "To do everything you told men to do."

    "Don¡¯t you dare say anything to Indra. To him, you are just as normal."

    Arman is surprised as he looked at Sam.

    "I know more than you think. Don¡¯t think about unnecessary things. Breakthrough to Nascent stage as soon as possible and return to the thunder god temple. You will be giving the information to either Arc ore to the city and find any of us four. Understand?"

    Sam said with a tone of authority.

    Arman nodded. All this while, he didn¡¯t dare to look Sam in the eye.

    Sam left after this.

    With this, almost all of his immediate goals are achieved.

    Arman waspletely changed and it is faster than he thought. Generally, Sam only took one week to achieve this goal in his previous life. This is in fact one of his specialties.

    This is him using the basic instincts of a living being.

    If an average man sees a snake, he would jump to his feet.

    If he sees a tiger, he will know that he is fucked and his body freezes on spot.

    This is the natural instinct. Humans are animals by nature. No matter, how much they think they are different, no one can change that fact.

    So, there is no way for them to leave those primal instincts.

    And Sam just made sure those instincts are unearthed and they will activate.

    If not for the fact Arman was a cultivator, he would have broken far earlier.

    Sam went back into the divine dimension and started continuing his production unit.

    All it needs at the moment are some finishing touches and some minor assemblies. After two days of tower time, he finished it and the unit is ready to go. All he had to do is finish up the design. Sometimes, he really liked this simtion effect of the tower. In fact, he wanted to thank that Ling Tian, or gambler, whoever it is that gave him this chance.

    Because that made many things easy for him in creating new things.

    For starters, he doesn¡¯t have to bother with the prototype manufacturing and such when designing a new product. He can just conjure the simtion and can decide if it works or not.

    He didn¡¯t have this type of facility in his previous life until theter stages, he only got to use it for thest few months, that too it is not detailed.

    As for normal simtions that are obtained on theputer are not exactly suitable. They would still need a prototype and many other ways to test the product.

    After he was done with the design, Sam finally get to finish the product.

    He walked to the production unit.

    There are a bunch of long paper scrolls in his hands with ink drawings he just made.

    The production unit is huge. It is half the size of a basketball court.

    The base of the unit is arge metallic cuboid block with one end chamfered down. Sam stood in front of that chamfered end. It is like a nt table and the face of it waspletely covered with some type of crystalline ss.

    There is a sliding door ced on it which at the moment was open and in turn the ssyer was exposed.

    Sam ced all the scrolls on one of the side tables he arranged near the machine and only held one scroll and that too he opened it fully. He ced the scroll on the ss surface, with the drawings facing down. With that, he closed down the sliding door holding the scroll in ce.

    He then moved to the side on that nted edge where there is a small rectangr te, beside which there are numerous buttons and switches on it.

    Sam then looked at the base of the machine. There are twelve rectangr pirs on the base and apart from that, there are many flexible robotic arms mounted on it. The whole base could be divided into two portions, one is smaller which only holds one-fourth of the base and the other is the rest of it.

    Two pirs are on the smaller portion while the rest are in therger one. The portions in the smaller portion also have some flexible arms mounted to them.

    Therge portion of the table has two things on it, one of them is argepartment which was further divided into smallerpartments with lots of raw materials and some tools in it. The other one is a square metallic tform which is more like a work table.

    As for the pirs, they have multiple things mounted on them, some of them have tools so that the workpiece which Sam would be working on could suspend in the air, some of them have tools that can be receable and some of them are just there to support the flexible arm.

    Sam pressed a button and the smaller portion of the base opened up. It is also a pit, but inside the pit it ispletely zed with fiery red metal. The fire meteorite sand. The Sand which can take on extremely high temperatures. This is the most troubling part for him in manufacturing the whole thing.

    There are small holes on the walls of that pit which are there to allow the methane gas so that he could produce enough me, there are also other ways to do so, and that uses the energy cells.

    As for how to load them, Sam walked to the side of the machine and held a handle which was arranged on the bottom and pulled open, there are several tanks of methane and Sam ced an energy cell of fire type in there as well.

    After checking the whole unit, it is ready to start production. Sam finally is going to check his new invention and see how it works.

 Chapter 399: First Puppet

    Sam pushed a button on the machine and the small rectangr te besides the ss screen opened.

    It also revealed a crystalline ss screen but this is Green in color.

    He ced his hands on it and willed his spiritual consciousness to travel into the machine. Sam could feel him leaving his body and entering the machine.

    His senses changed and he felt like whole different entity. His body just stood there motionless.

    His spiritual conscious went into the Puppet core which is inside the Machine. He could feel all the parts of the machine and also the raw materials, energy cells, tools and fuel tanks which are not inherent part of the machine.

    The best part is Sam could see the design he ced on the ss screen. He can see every detail in a close manner.

    The energy from the energy cells is being drawn and the arms started moving, Sam picked up material from the pit. Then he ced it inside the opened fire pit and closed it. He started the methane gas and the fire was raging inside the pit.

    The metal soon entered red hot condition. Sam didn¡¯t let the metal melt directly, if he wants to make a molten metal casting, he has to make some changes to the machine. They are minute though, but important.

    The arm moved and removed the metal from the pit. It is now a lump of the bright red metal. The arm picked the lump and ced it inside one of the grooves of the pir.

    Of the two pirs near the fire pit, this is the main purpose, one side has grooves and the other side has some suspended beam.

    The next second, a circr metallic cylinder which is extremely solid came out of the beam and hammered the metal into the groove.

    This is not actually an efficient method, the groove box which is technically called the swage block will make the metal take the required shape, but it was mostly done on the floor to avoid instability. Of course, Sam was able to do it because of the stability of the machine and some extra inscriptions which prevent the metal from falling down.

    After hammering into the groove, another arm moved and pushed the metal out, the metal didn¡¯t stick inside.

    Now, Sam has a small metallic cylinder in his ¡¯hands¡¯. The workpiece changed arms and came to the second portion of the machine, within thepartment, there is a small emptypartment, and Sam ced the hot metallic piece inside. With some wind and water inscriptionsbined, the metal was cooled.

    He then brought back the solid metal and ced it inside one of the pirs, the ce where the workpiece was held has a circr device with four jaws, between which the workpiece was held. This holding device was called the chuck.

    After that there is a small sounding from underneath the bed and the chuck started rotating. Another metallic arm picked up a took from thepartment, and then ced it on the workpiece which is rotating at an incredible speed.

    The tool removed the metal off of the workpiece in the form of small metallic chips and a smooth surface appeared.

    This operation is called turning. After normal turning, Sam started to turn the object in various lengths and various diameters.

    Now, the cylinder has many grooves on it. After that, another arm appeared and this time it held a drill bit. The drill bit is not rotating, rather it is stationary and it was held along the rotating workpiece and a hole was made along the length of the cylinder.

    After that, Sam performed many other operations, like Knurling, threading, and such before cutting the workpiece off of the holder, only this portion of the workpiece is useful.

    After that, he ced the scraps and the chips of the metal in the raw materialpartment.

    The firstponent of the machine was ready and this happened in a few moments, with this machine not only was he able to do the whole process faster than normal, he did it with more efficiency. It is more efficient and uratepared to him being normally trying to create them on machines.

    He doesn¡¯t have to move the object from machine to machine and he doesn¡¯t have any errors, Sam felt ecstatic at the sess of the production unit.

    But then, a thought came to his mind. What should he name it?

    Sam is extremely bad at naming but he always liked to name his products which had extremely bad effects.

    Every time, he named a product there will be one thought in his mind. ¡¯This time, I am going to think long and hard before deciding.¡¯ And almost every time, he screws up.

    This time is also the same, he decided to think long and hard and all we have to do is wait for him to screw up.

    Sam went on making oneponent after another, the arms of the machine moved as if they are his own hands, after one day of continuous manufacturing, Sam finally finished all hisponents and now there is another thing to be done to theponents before he finished his assembly.

    A metallic arm¡¯s end was removed by the other metallic arm and another tool was attached in that ce.

    It is a tool that looked like a pen.

    The arm started moving as the remaining arms held eachponent in ce. Then it started the inscriptions.

    After all the necessary inscriptions areplete, the assembly started.

    There is an intricate mechanism in one of the arms and it is the coreponent of the puppet. The puppet core which Sam created and the Space jade contains the energy cells that act as the power source.

    Then came the outer shell of the puppet and now the extra arms are all assembled and the welds are made where necessary. After that, Sam took out two crystal-like objects and ced them in the ce of eyes and the final assembly are the thing wings.

    They are made of Sam¡¯s new alloy. He created the alloy after various experiments. The wings are translucent and thin. But they are extremely sharp. They might look easy to break, but that would be quite a feat to achieve.

    All the metals Sam used are of Grade-7 metals which are capable of forging a high- level weapon that could injure a Pre-transcendent easily.

    Even the Transcendent stage cultivators will not be able to do so.

    After the assembly isplete. Sam finally has only one step before his puppet is ready and that is Spiritual Enchantment.

    He has to enchant a spirit. The puppet is of such a type and has abilities that would be better disyed if a spirit is enchanted and not puppeteering.

    Two metallic arms that have pens at their ends started drawing a runic circle on the square tform while the puppet is suspended in the air with the rest of the arms.

    After the runic circle isplete, he ced the puppet on the tform and activate the circle. A dark void seemed to have opened within the center of the circle, but the puppet was still there without falling down into the void.

    Within the void, many stray souls seemed to have been roaming while making gory sounds.

    As the runic circle glowed, one of the souls near them was caught by it and was forcefully dragged into this world. The spirit which is now looking like a ball of light was forcefully dragged towards the puppet and entered it.

    Within the puppet on the puppet core, an imprint was left indicating the spiritual enchantment sessful.

    Sam¡¯s consciousness came back to his body and he opened his eyes. He looked at the puppet, whose crystal has a faint glow at this moment.

    The wings pped as it flew up and started floating in the air.

    With just a thought, the puppet flew towards Sam and floated in front of him.

    The puppet he made is not arge one, it is actually quite small. It is as big as a toddler. And it is not humanoid as well.

    It is actually a puppet that looked more like a bee.

    There are six limbs that are attached to the metallic thorax, but in actual fact, they are connected to the internal core mechanism.

    The tips of the limbs are sharp and there is a metallic tip at the tail end of the bee, which seemed to be acting as a stinger. Due to the finer craftsmanship, no one can observe this easily, but they could see that the tip of the tail end of the stinger is not welded to the rest of the body if they see it closely.

    Apart from the main mechanism, there are several other objects inside the shell that are of secondary purpose.

    After checking the puppet and made sure it is working. Sam went back to the machine and started making something else and this time it is a small screen. This is the same screen that is used for the surveince of the city.

    After making the screen which is the size of an I Pad, he took out a small energy cell in his hands and ced it in a slot at the rear of the screen.

    He went back to the puppet and made took out a small metallic object from the neck of the bee. He ced that object in the rear of the screen beside the energy cell and the screen started showing an image.

    It is live surveince. The screen is showing whatever the eyes of the bee are watching.

    And this is only one of the functions.

    His first puppet design is sessful all he has to do is mount it with the necessary essories required for its attacking moves and everything would be as good as done.

    But this is not the time for it to enter the market. The only reason made this faster because he needs a lot of time to focus on other thingster. As for selling and business, it could wait for a while.

 Chapter 400: After Seclusion

    Sam entered seclusion.

    Five and a half months passed.

    Sam broke through to the Level-2 of Nascent, his body was partially morphed and with the addition of the body tempering, the cultivation has be extremely painful.

    But he still reached the second level.

    In these five and a half months many things happened.

    Although, he waspletely immersed in manufacturing and cultivating, he still kept in contact with the outside worlds.

    Five months ago, Arman broke through the Nascent stage and went to the thunder god temple. He even made up a story that Sam has chased him for three days and severely injured him, but he still escaped.

    And he even med all this on Sam¡¯s arrogance for not using any tricks and wanting to kill him all by himself, so he was given a chance to escape.

    He took all that while just to heal himself and recover. The story was quite usible and the higher-ups didn¡¯t doubt him.

    They are also ecstatic that Arman was able to break through to the Nascent realm.

    Actually, with the will destroyed, Arman shouldn¡¯t have broken through that easily, but the thing is his will was remolded. From now on, whatever Sam said he would do and his sole focus would be only on that aspect.

    Even though, this sounds foolish, that beating did really give him an advantage in cultivation. All his unwanted thoughts and instincts were suppressed and only his thoughts for a breakthrough which stemmed from themands of Sam remained, making him seek enlightenment faster than he should.

    He didn¡¯t contact Sam after that, he has something to say and Sam guessed that must have been something rted to that of Indra, but he didn¡¯t want to be disturbed.

    Apart from that, he mostly spent his time making the Bee puppets and the screens for them.

    As for why he chose Bee as his first puppet, there are not many reasons, he felt like the body is easy to design and theponents are easier to make. If he has designed an animal like a dog or any bird theponent requirement would be too high and he doesn¡¯t have enough experience inbining modern robotic designs with spiritual energy.

    So, the Bee puppet only has few abilities which and its main ability will be scouting.

    Even though it uses the spiritual energy from the energy cells, to work, the concealment formations are inscribed on it and there is no way it would be easily recognized. Even the powerful beasts and cultivators, could only sense a faint amount of energy waves.

    So, they will be here easy for scouting and such. The attack abilities of the Puppet are also not so bad. They can be used for sneak attacks on beasts when hunting, military scouting, and so on.

    As the puppet has its own spirit, if the spirit is nurtured further, then its memory will increase.

    But there is one more important function for them that is only useful for Sam. He can override any of the other¡¯s control on the puppet and the puppet has amunication device in it with which it can send information when it is in vicinities of thework.

    With the new machine, he can make a puppet in four hours. Everything that takes time, heating, cooling, and molding, everything was done on the machine easily and efficiently. If he has to do that with bare hands, he would die of exhaustion and might take a whole day. That¡¯s almost twenty hours of time wasted.

    He did produce the puppets in arge number and they all are not exactly for sale.

    Apart from puppet manufacturing, he practiced his battle moves and started working on his design for the next puppet. Since the first one seeded and after the examinations, he has opened doors for a lot of improvement.

    As for other things, the whole western continent underwent a huge change.

    Five months back, all the parks are shut down for a period of time and even the railwaywork was stopped, that is because of the contract termination.

    The lockdown went on for fifteen days until the organization finally recruited individuals good enough for the job. But what the outside world doesn¡¯t know is, they have to swallow a pill before they could join.

    Sam was almost overwhelmed with the number of light wisps that appeared in his mind.

    But they have no choice, even though, he didn¡¯t force the lower employees, everyone in the management roles should take the pill no matter what.

    He doesn¡¯t want to take any chances. The organization slowly went back on to the track.

    Even the new construction that was being done in the nearby woods was almostplete, Sam spected that it would be finished by the time hees back from the thunder god temple, it would be done.

    As for the things with the associations, they arepletely frustrated. The business for the associations has declined. Half of their manpower was gone and they are looking for new recruits. They wanted to recruit the ones from the noble families, they wanted to get into the tower at that time and are rejected.

    After all, the status of a tower¡¯s employ is far better than an artisan in a family, but they couldn¡¯t help feel disappointed when they tried to recruit.

    They were rejectedpletely, almost every artisan or any other professional for that matter are all travelling towards the Sam¡¯s city.

    That is because after some of the recruits in the first phases of the recruitment are assigned the roles in the parks and the perks that they were given, the families started to send their people to the city one by one.

    To their surprise, there is not much prejudice in selection. It is just that the position of their recruitment is affected based on their capabilities.

    But along with the position, assignment of the role, and all the perks, they are given some books on the knowledge. Actually, knowledge is the basic knowledge of materials, metal properties effects, and some other basic workshop methods that can be used.

    Even though they are not extremely advanced, they are still useful and solidifies their basics. These are for the lowest positions. Simrly, the books on the other professions also differed.

    But the matter of the books is not being disclosed to others. Almost every professional in the organization knows about it, but no one other than them knew. That is the only possible due to the Pill of Servitude.

    The associations are stumped, what infuriated them, even more, is that the people who wanted to join the organization doesn¡¯t even need badges or anything else, as long as they are able to showcase their abilities at the assessment, they can join.

    As for Philip, Jack, and Watt. Three of them broke through the Nascent stage, but they were busy. They don¡¯t have any time for stray thoughts. Watt is in charge of all the Orphans. His duties vary from giving them some physical training to that them teaching them some disciple.

    On how to behave, how to talk and how to eat.

    Jack is also extremely strained as Philip took his assistance; assistance is just a sophisticated way to it. In fact, he dumped half of the work on him. The only one who is extremely free was Sirona. She worked the least out of all people who are involved.

    Philip received many of their old friends this time. Kelly came to the city and took on assessment, she is in thete-stage of the Great realm. Apparently, her cultivation was stumped.

    But her artisan skills are excellent and she was able to recruit.

    Shawn was there, this self-proimed handsome genius was able to reach the middle-stage grand realm and he even met Jack to boast about it.

    But he was kicked out of the room because Jack who is already frustrated by the duties was extremely annoyed by this guy.

    Chaya, who was a tower head in a Marquis city and descendant of the former duke of the Orion, also came. Even though her family was destroyed and many of them are sent to be War ves, she still has her title and position in the association.

    But after the termination of contracts, she resigned from the job and came for the recruitment of the City.

    She was quite decisive actually and didn¡¯t even hesitate.

    While everything calmed down, Sam who just came out is currently watching the reports from Arman, it is about the progress of parks in the other empires under the thunder god temple.

    The construction of the parks is about forty percentplete. Almost six months and they couldn¡¯t even construct half.

    In fact, the construction part is very fast, the main problem is actually the decoding, Sam taught the English numbers to architect and thus they can understand the order of constructions, but the three organizations have to decode step by step.

    They don¡¯t want to give up.

 Chapter 401: After the seclusion II

    Sam is getting ready to go to the thunder god temple. There is still two weeks of time for that.

    But he was shocked by something else. There is a notice from the Imperial capital. The thunder god temple has taken the candidates for the Pce of Inheritance earlier and they particrly gave instructions to Arc.

    Sam is not allowed to go to the thunder god temple.

    He was honestly surprised; in fact, he thought the thunder god temple very much wanted him to visit so that they can just deal with him for once and for all.

    As he thought, suddenly something shed in his mind and that is the protection of Avatar. Last time in the thunder god temple territory, Avatar Sanchez mentioned that no one in the thunder god temple shall harm the candidates within their vicinities.

    Maybe, he felt that it is the same situation. But he wasn¡¯t extremely disappointed with the thunder god temple¡¯s ban, because he can go through another ce. The Beast faction.

    In these past five months, all the Space gates are finished construction in all of the empires. Sam has even sent an employee to those Space gates to manage. This concluded their business with the Space gate association, but surprisingly Zeke didn¡¯t leave, he bought a house in Sam¡¯s city and stayed there for no apparent reason other than that he liked that ce.

    But he didn¡¯t care.

    As for the Pce of Inheritances, they can go to the Beast faction and this time, he is looking forward to meeting the cultivators that will be returning. Because only the twelve people who got the token cane.

    But to his surprise, Arman sent another news through the Imperial family and that is new token were sent out from the Pce of Inheritance.

    From the thunder god temple¡¯s entrance, three tokens came.

    Sam then contacted the people from the Kali empire¡¯s Space gate. There is an intercontinentalmunication device in both ces, of course, he can talk to his employees, then they contacted the people from the Beast faction through the Imperial family of Kali.

    Sam confirmed that the same thing happened in the Beast faction.

    Three tokens were sent out of the entrance and they are for the Nascent stage cultivators.

    The only problem for the major powers is that they are feeling that fifteen days is too little of a time. Because every elder in the faction is a nascent stage cultivator and the Grand elders also have Nascent stage cultivators as their descendants.

    Everyone wants entry into the Pce of inheritance for themselves. After all, the previous visit has given them extremely high rewards, the battle techniques, which Sam sold off are of extremely high value.

    Thunder god temple, who got the most out of them, felt like they gained the most out of all of them. They couldn¡¯t find a single battle technique in their faction that could rival those techniques.

    And these things will most certainly can¡¯t be hidden at all, the spies did their job and at this moment, they are extremely excited.

    That is also the reason for all the elders to go crazy over it.

    Sam didn¡¯t mind though; his only regret is that his friends didn¡¯t have permission to enter the Pce.

    Watt didn¡¯t even enter the first one. If Sam wants, he can certainly take a token from the Beast faction, but he didn¡¯t want to do so.

    Today, they might not have been able to do anything, but that doesn¡¯t mean they wouldn¡¯t get any other chances in the future.

    He would surely take them. There are still ten more turns after all.

    Before he left, Sam sent the Bee puppets to the high-level management positions.

    He gave each a puppet as aplementary and he also gave them the viewing tablet which is connected to the puppet.

    Most of them are fascinated by the Puppet. They don¡¯t have many uses for them as they mostly stay within the city and in the parks.

    But they still felt great with the puppet by their side. But that doesn¡¯t mean it didn¡¯t have any use at all. Their inspection rounds are a lot easier now that they don¡¯t have to visit every corner of the ce themselves, they can just let the puppet take the role.

    As for other uses, they don¡¯t know if they would need to or get to use the offensive measures of these puppets, but they are using it for showing off.

    A personal puppet; that too with a spirit enchanted, they are having the time of their lives with a personal assistant beside them.

    But what they don¡¯t know is that the very puppet might be their bane if Sam willed it so.

    It is like a ticking time bomb, whenever Sam wanted to kill them, that would be done in a second.

    Soon, the Bee puppet became popr, particrly the hunting teams who often visit parks. Now parks are the main business hubs. Even the businesses of the families are being affected, so they are trying to make partnerships with the shops in the park. The new arrangements even made it avable for them to take shops to lease within the park, but they have to reach certain standards.

    As for the hunting groups, they felt like the Bee puppets are one of the most suitable devices for scouting when they venture deep into the woods.

    Apart from the hunting groups, even the government caught sight of these puppets, they are great for the city patrol and even the military.

    But currently, the military of the Western continent is extremely obsolete.

    There are no wars and the most they could do is guarding the people in the hunting grounds. Which will change soon enough.

    After arranging everything, Sam left for the beast faction. He went there a week earlier and decided to spend this time with the Old beast and the Raijus.

    Arc is surprisingly still training there.

    When Sam entered the valley, Old beast said.

    "His potential is not much; he would probably touch the peak of Consummate. He is currently at Peak of transcendent stage cultivation, he has umted energy in his body and wasn¡¯t able to forcefully breakthrough because of theck of guidance, hisck ofprehension made him just absorb energy like crazy, and now it is exploding resulting in continuous breakthroughs.

    This is also simted his potential and might reach the Consummate realm in a few months and continuously advance for the next two years."

    Old beast exined to Sam and left thetter in shock.

    This is not something he expected, it seems like Arc was truly frustrated with the oppression of the major powers.

    He almost destroyed himself by umting too much energy. He is not a beast after all. Beasts have lineages inherited from their ancestors, so they only need energy, they already have an innate understanding of the cultivation ingrained into their blood and bones.

    But humans don¡¯t possess such lineage, the only thing they inherited is the spiritual core. In some cases, some constitutions of the body.

    Sam stayed within the tempest valley to train until now there are no obstacles for him in the cultivation, but it is going to change soon. Because, after the breakthrough to the Nascent realm, he got some new information.

    Then only he understood that he is just beginning his cultivation.

    In fact, his strength is way too puny and there is a long road ahead.

    He started tempering his body with the lightning in the tempest valley, to increase the resistance and this training has to start at the ends of the valley where the lighting is weakest.

    But even then, Sam wasn¡¯t able to resist the attack much less use it to temper himself. Although it didn¡¯t cause any form of significant damage, he is still feeling uneasy all over. If this happened even a little deeper into the valley, he would have be a lump of charred flesh.

    He sat cross-legged and let the lightning rage through him. The Raiju bloodline in his body ispletely activated as he started activating the lightning element in his body to resist the lightning strikes.

    But both of them are not neutralizing instead, there is a collision and his body is the one being affected. At least, this could serve as some endurance training.

    Sam knew that there are drawbacks in doing this, in the Nascent stage cultivation of the body and spirit will be metamorphosized and the difficulty of metamorphosis is extremely high if the body and spirit are too strong.

    Sam¡¯s spirit is far stronger than his body and that is creating an unnecessary imbnce between body and spirit.

    This is what he observed in these past five months.

    That is why, he is trying new ways to temper his body, he wanted to use his body cultivation asanas in the lightning, but he realized from the first strike that he would end up dead if he did that before he could find a way to resist the lightning he would be dead meat.

 Chapter 402: Going to Beast faction

    After one week, Sam finally saw some results, he was at least able to resist and let the lightning energy stay within his body for a second without letting it damage him or dissipate. But that is only for the outermost lightning strike.

    Even if he wants to move inside, there is actually no chance for him to do so, because the time to visit the Pce of Inheritance is here.

    He is looking forward to meeting these people from the previous time, those that had tattoos on their backs are just like him and Arman, from what Ling Tian said, they would be stronger only after the Nascent stage and he shouldn¡¯t take them so lightly.

    But he really wants to see if it is the truth.

    At this moment, while he is making his way towards the Space gate leading to the Beast faction, all the other candidates in the major powers are gathering near the entrances.

    Particrly, those candidates who are able to acquire tokens are extremely excited for two reasons, one of them is that they can go into the Pce again and another one is that Sam is barred from entry through the thunder god temple.

    The thunder god temple just banned him from entering without any rhyme or reason just for the sake of it.

    Since they are the only ones who are at the top of the world, they are the ones who make the rules, so they can justify themselves for being petty.

    The major powers all wanted to do something against Sam, but they are unable to retaliate, so they have to deal with this no matter what.

    The candidates couldn¡¯t forget how Sam sold the battle techniques previously. At that time, their faces are blurred. But Sam¡¯s overbearing nature is not something that could be easily hidden.

    In fact, he was quickly known among themselves, because the young talents of the major powers all have interactions before.

    They are familiar with each other and to be honest every knew who got what in the previous pce of inheritance.

    The same is true in the Beast faction.

    In the previous time, the candidates of the beast faction are not the top-notch experts. The thunder god temple is the only one who sent their top-ranked talents, as for the rest, they sent only the secondary ones and that is mainly because the thunder god temple pissed off the Avatar Sanchez and thus they were all captured to be taught a lesson.

    That is why the thunder god temple didn¡¯t cut any ck, they sent their best of the best.

    But for the rest of the major powers, they didn¡¯t take that risk and didn¡¯t want to risk their top talents either, but since they also understood that the other entity is a stronger being, they sent the secondary elites who are just raising in their positions and coincidentally the people who are chosen just like Arman and Sam are all just raising in their ranks and were selected to go to this ce.

    It is almost as if the whole this nned and it should be set in this ce. Sam is sure that if the objective given to the rest of these chosen ones is the same as the one given to him by Ling Tian, that is to be stronger and reach the peak of the world, then they wouldn¡¯t take unconventional routes like him.

    They would definitely reach the major powers to reach their objectives.

    Anyway, the appearance of all twelve candidates in the first pce of inheritance might not be a pure coincidence, it could probably be some kind of premeditation but Sam doesn¡¯t know.

    Sam had all these thoughts in his mind, after he crossed the Space gate and appeared in the Beast faction, Sai is waiting for him.

    He led Sam to his room for the temporary stay.

    "There are still two hours for the Pce of inheritance to open. How are you going to enter it?"

    Sai asked.

    The situation is a bit tricky at the moment, all the major powers acted pettily to stop him froming to the thunder god temple, but it showed up in this ce out of nowhere, then there is no way they could answer the remaining powers.

    Sam¡¯s Space gates are still a secret.

    The business with the Beast faction is also a secret.

    The recent cleansing of the Beast faction made them lose the spies of all the other powers and things are extremely tight. There is no leak of information. Although the beast faction is extremely weak at this moment, when they counted the strength of the lower level cultivators, they are at the moment the cleanest major power without any moles and spies.

    Sam doesn¡¯t want to break these secrets at least not yet.

    He should maintain this secret and for that, there is only one way, he has to enter the pce but none shall recognize him.

    Sam changed into a new set of ck clothes and wrapped his face with ck cloth. Only his eyes are visible outside.

    But that is not all, he etched the concealment formation on the cloth and even enchanted it with a spirit to make sure that he stayed concealed all the time.

    He willed and the token which was in his spiritual consciousness appeared in his hand.

    Sai left the ce and went away, an hourter Sam sneaked out and came to the entrance of the Beast faction. This is the main entrance used by the people of the Beast faction territory.

    He was stopped by the guardian and Sam showed him the token. The guardian is an elder of the faction and knew that the token is special, so he immediately went to get the higher-ups.

    An old man came, he is the Grand Elder of the faction, whose son troubled Philip, he took a look at the token and then asked.

    "Where did you get this?"

    Sam spoke in a different voice, it is easy for him to change it with the skills from his previous life. He used that in many assassinations.

    "I am a stray cultivator and was traveling through the world when I chanced upon some ruins, the will of a very strong cultivator is stored there along with this token, and that person¡¯s will guided me here."

    The Grand elder frowned, he very much wanted to grab the token, but the powerful figure who is in charge of the pceid strict rules that the token holders must not be attacked.

    Sam is already in their territory, so if he attacked things would get tricky.

    He returned the token and said. "Follow me."

    Whatever Sam said might be true but there is a possibility that it is a lie and he might have hidden somethings about how he got the token, but they couldn¡¯t do anything to him since he is already here.

    In fact, they couldn¡¯t do anything to Sam is he was present here, that is why the thunder god temple directly issued a ban by not allowing him toe to their territory.

    To prevent the Avatar from interfering.

    Sam followed him and soon they are in the hunting grounds, where a lot of people are gathered. Many people are there and many of them are only at Great realm cultivation.

    Only a handful of cultivators are of the Nascent stage and Sai is also standing there. The grand elder whispered something and they talked for a bit.

    Then he came back and said to Sam.

    "Since you came to this ce and able to obtain the token, then you are eligible to enter. Whatever you obtain in that ce is yours and no one would take it away from you."

    Sam sped his hands in respect as he bowed his head slightly.

    Soon, there is a rumbling sound from the cave and the pce of inheritance finally opened.

    The first people to go inside are obviously the juniors at the Great realm and then only the Nascent stage cultivators are allowed to enter.

    The people from the Beast faction are only four people.

    One of them is in the initial stage of the Nascent Realm, the remaining three are in the middle-stage. The three of them are obviously the senior members of the faction and this newly acquired member might be the one who visitedst time and that means, he is also one of the chose just like Sam and Arman.

    Sam couldn¡¯t recognize all the others directly, but the others could identify him because he beat the crap out of all of them and thunder god temple didn¡¯t keep it a secret they learned about his name, but he doesn¡¯t have any connections in the major powers, at least in the same level.

    But he is not in a hurry to find out. Since he found one of them now, he can find otherster.

    The young man also looked at Sam and sized him up, his spiritual sense swept over Sam¡¯s face and Sam¡¯s face became colder. This is obviously a rude thing to do as they met for the first time, the young man looked at Sam and his expression and said.

    "What are you looking at? You want a piece of me?" He is obviously arrogant and particrly when he found out that Sam is a stray cultivator.

 Chapter 403: Survival Test

    Sam and the other four entered the cave and when they looked at the familiar ce they are standing, they felt a faint nostalgia.

    Of course, not all of them. The three other Nascent stage cultivators are all entering the Pce for the first time an they are in extreme awe of the ce.

    They didn¡¯t see anything like this.

    Sam looked at the old man standing in the same familiar tform.

    It is the same person he met a few years before. Avatar Sanchez. The old man scanned all of them and frowned when he came to Sam, and the frown rxed when a small spark was shone in the Old man¡¯s eye.

    At that moment, Sam waspletely stunned and turned still as if the whole cover waspletely in vain. But he recovered fast enough, because Sanchez is not the person he wants to hide from.

    At this moment, the old man spoke.

    "Wee to Pce of Inheritances, this is a ce where all of you can inherit the techniques, weapons, skills and other kinds of treasures of extremely superior beings.

    Some of you came here previously and some of you are here for the first time. The rules will be different from the previous time, so the newers need not be flustered.

    This time, you don¡¯t have to climb floors and do anything of sorts.

    All you have to do is enter the room and then you will be informed on how to proceed.

    With that he pointed towards the only door in the hall. The five of them slowly walked over and entered the room.

    At this instance they saw quite a dazzling site. They didn¡¯t expect that something like this would exist behind a door.

    After all of them entered, the door behind them disappeared. They are left like that in the middle of some woods. That¡¯s right, they are in middle of woods and it didn¡¯t seem fake at all.

    They could feel the breeze on their faces and the soil and the trees all of them felt real. In fact, too real. Even the spiritual energy is far richer than outside.

    They tried to absorb all the energy around them hungrily. But only at this moment, they realized that they are unable to umte any more energy than they already have and they even felt like their strengths are shackled. There is look of shock when they realized that all of them are in Nascent stage Level-1.

    This is not something they expected or experienced before, so the three newers are particrly panicky.

    At this moment, a voice came and made theme back to their senses.

    "Hello, young ones. Wee to my pce.

    You might be feeling surprised with a forest in a pce, but that is my style, I will store any ce in my pce if I want. Anyway, today you are all here for inheritances, while the junior of Great realm participates in the boring tests and obtain whatever they want, you guys can y inpetition of adults.

    Before we go into details, let me make this clear first, you are stuck at the same level for the rest of your stay inside the Pce. No matter the circumstances, you will not be allowed to use more power than a Nascent stage Level-1.

    As for the tests, why go through so much trouble to make everythingplicated. Let us be clear here and simple.

    All the nascent stage cultivators who are in the Pce total up to thirty people. So, all of you will have to survive in this forest until only five of you remains.

    There will be opponents in the forests, who up on being destroyed, will give you something in return.

    This time, the test is not limited to a month, if you can finish it in a week, then it is done in a week and if takes more than a year, you will stay here for a year. Now, good luck. And by the way, as long as they are of same grade, you can use your weapons as you like.

    This is not something hard to understand right. The only thing I can guarantee you is that you don¡¯t get killed in this ce.

    If you understand what I said, what are you waiting for? The Competition already began."

    The tone of voice is extremely majestic and there is a hint of mischiefced through it. The man seemed to be unrestrained and undeterred by anything and everything in the world.

    As soon as the voice faded away, Sam noticed that he was being locked by the rest of the candidates.

    The four of them are looking at Sam with an extremely cold expressions, since they only five slots, then it is extremelypetitive thing and naturally, they wanted to eliminate the outsider first and they will think on how to preserve.

    From what they heard from the elders; Sam is naturally a stray cultivator who doesn¡¯t have any background. In their opinion that guy only got the token by luck.

    The token and right to entry only belong to people of the six major powers, there is no way they would let a stray cultivator take part in this.

    They simply surrounded him and are ready to make a move.

    One of them even took a staff and that is the chosen one. Sam already had the burning sensation on his body and he knew what that is without even knowing and his spiritual sense now went towards this guy and he noticed that there is indeed the tattoo.

    The tattoo is of a monkey sitting in the clouds.

    He didn¡¯t know what the tattoo is, but he can soon find out. He also took out a staff so that he could y with this guy for a moment.

    As the three of them are ganging up, Sam made his first move. Hended the hit on the one on his back without targeting the two of them in front, the person was surprised and took the hit directly.

    There is a sound of bones cracking. The hit was filled with wind elemental energy and the wind cannon pierced through the chest and rocked the heart of that person.

    A green light appeared from the trees and wrapped around that person just stopping the injury from killing him.

    This is another form of healing, the wood elemental healing. This is not at all popr in the whole, in fact no one knows about this.

    Sam is actually quite surprised. Because, from what he knew the wood elemental healing waspletely lost with time in the current they are staying in, there is nothing left. Even the pharmaceutical tower isn¡¯t able to find anything regarding that.

    But he didn¡¯t let his thoughts stray, the defeated cultivator disappeared from the ce.

    He focused on the two of his opponents, he observed their posture, eyes and bodynguage, he can tell that the chosen one is more of a threat to him than the senior cultivator.

    There are two reasons for that, one is the confidence and the aura of the spiritual energy raging inside him at the same time, the posture itself. He noticed that he has seen that battle posture before.

    The staff technique is familiar to him and he practiced, it is the same Monkey¡¯s staff skills he practiced at the start of his journey.

    At that time, he practiced Staff techniques on a whim, since then every time he trained, he practiced those techniques. But from the looks of it this person seems to be more well versed that Sam.

    Sam swung his staff and this time he went for the remaining senior cultivator, the but the chosen one didn¡¯t stand there.

    He blocked the attack, the spiritual energy in his body is extremely turbulent and tyrannical. Sam felt extreme force on his hands and felt numb.

    The chose one is not unscathed. His hands are also numb and his staff vibrated continuously.

    Both of them red at each other and the chose one asked.

    "Where did you get these techniques?" His voice was cold. Sam knew that he would notice. These techniques actually doesn¡¯t have specific forms and styles, only one thing is there and that is the initial battle posture, apart from that everything is ording to cultivator¡¯s free will.

    But precisely because of that it is easily recognizable. Every form of fighting and battling techniques will be created by certain constraints and rules that they follow, except for these techniques which are extremely free and unhindered.

    While the two of them are in a dead lock, he noticed the senior cultivator didn¡¯t interfere, something is telling him that he is not qualified to do so.

    As they are about to make a move, suddenly both of them looked towards nearby trees, they sensed something and soon, they realized what it is.

    It is a monkey type beast. In fact, there four of them.

    The beast is of mostly humanoid silhouette but the hands are extremely long reaching just the point right above their knees.

    They even wore robes, some of them have bare upper body and some of them arepletely covered, they are holding various weapons.

    One of them held a saber. One of them held a spear and another one wore fighting gloves and thest one is wearing some metallic gloves.

    They all are releasing the Level-1 Nascent stage auras, they immediately understood what these are the creatures mentioned by the voice, they are here to eliminate them.

 Chapter 404: Testing

    Sam looked at the beasts. The four beasts stood on four different trees as they looked at the three of them. The beasts are called Monkey Warriors. The name itself is pretty self-exnatory. They don¡¯t have any elemental abilities.

    They are like normal warriors. Their lineage is also limited towards their inherent attacks, but that disadvantage was covered by something else and that is their strong physique.

    Their physiques are so strong that they areparable to high-grade metals. It is so hard to cut their bodies and even if one pummels them, they will have to take some serious damage themselves because of the strong bacsh thates from their bodies.

    Apart from that, they have an innate resistance to elemental attacks, and no matter what element it is they won¡¯t work on their bodies that easily.

    But this is not their main advantage. Their advantage is their iparably monstrousprehension of the warrior battle skills.

    Coupled with their innate control over their bodies, thisprehension enables them to understand the battle skills, like sword, saber, fist, kick, movement, spear, staff, or any other form of physical battle skills easily.

    All they have to do most of the time is to see the technique multiple times and they can easily replicate the skill.

    All this information popped up in Sam¡¯s mind. He doesn¡¯t want to confront four of them, even if he was to team up with the other three, which is not exactly feasible, Sam doesn¡¯t want to face them in a group.

    He might be able to handle two of them and if they are three, he can defend and fight to a stalemate, but if they are four, Sam only has one option.

    His body glowed with golden light and he zoomed past leaving the remaining two there. The Monkey Warriors are stunned as they didn¡¯t think that Sam would move like this.

    They didn¡¯t expect this at all. Two of them immediately ran after him. They are actually quite fast, so fast that they can always keep Sam in their visible range.

    Sam also sensed that he was being chased. He only activated partial fusion but he is still fast. The elemental fusion is not exactly a good thing after all. It consumes a lot of energy.

    Sam is frustrated as he looked at monkey warriors who are using their incredible dexterity to use the trees to their advantage. The terrain is in their favor. Sam might have copied some of the monkey moves and could move by taking advantage of the terrain, but he would never be a match to the real monkeys.

    He noticed that the monkeys that areing at him are spear user and the other one is the first user.

    He is a bit relieved by the fact that only two of them are following him, not the four of them. But he doesn¡¯t want to get into closebat with them unless he waspletely cornered. The damage that he could take in the battle will make him the target of others.

    And lucky for him, he is always prepared because of his paranoiac overthinking. Sam stored his staff away and made sure that he is not traveling towards other people.

    He took out two handguns.

    As he ran continuously, he suddenly took a diversion and climbed a tree, and zoomed back towards the monkey warriors.

    If the opponent is a cultivator, they would be caught off guard, but Sam noticed that the monkey warriors are extremelyposed, the Fist user monkey came to a halt and stood on the ground, the spear user took him as support as he climbed up on his shoulder and jumped straight up intercepting Sam¡¯s trajectory.

    This time, it is Sam who is dumbfounded. He made this move because he noticed that there are very few trees and the monkeys have to run on the ground.

    He wanted to shoot the monkeys from an upper position so that their heads would be vulnerable added with the supposed element of surprise.

    But to his dismay, there is no element of surprise and the monkeys even caught me off guard.

    He changed his aim and shot at the spear monkey, but it didn¡¯t care. The bullets are made of metal and they barely did any damage.

    The monkey didn¡¯t even bother to dodge and swung the spear, Sam increased the fusion rate and changed his trajectory. He is almost a light beam and with a thought, he diverted towards the ground barely dodging the spear swing.

    He crashed into the ground, but he didn¡¯t stop, leaving a small crater which burned the surrounding grass and debris of leaves, he started running again.

    He understood one thing, he either has to use the impact crystal bullets or the Energy cell bullets. Otherwise, there is no way he would be able to do any form of damage. As for closebat, his swords and ws might have some form of effect, but there is a risk of exposing his identity and also, he never used his guns much in public and only used them in few ces.

    Even at the beast faction, he used a sniper rifle. These handguns wille in handy for him in this test. They are also easy to hide when he is using them in battle.

    He can use them to fight from hisfortable range and he doesn¡¯t have to risk revealing his identity and the rest of the major powers wouldn¡¯t have a reason to pick on the Beast faction.

    At this moment, the Beast faction is his business partner so there is a need for him to make sure that they are safe and sound and kept their status as it is within the six major powers.

    Sam looked at the two monkeys still following him. After running for fifteen minutes, he finally halted in his tracks. He aimed the guns at the monkeys. They are in an area surrounded by rocks and there is a river nearby.

    The trees are not in the vicinity.

    Sam looked at the two monkeys, who also halted in their tracks and looked at him. The Spear-monkey threw the spear straight at him. Sam easily dodged, but to his surprise, the Fist-monkey appeared right in front of him at this moment.

    He crossed the distance in an instant, it is almost as fast as Phantom steps Sam used. Sam hurriedly dodged the strike and he was barely able to move back missing the punch by a hair¡¯s breadth and he aimed the gun at the Spear monkey as he shot an Impact crystal bullet which hit the spear that was running towards him.

    The explosion made the spear divert the direction and the monkey¡¯s appeared puzzled for the first time. They didn¡¯t expect the bullets which they didn¡¯t even care to dodge at the first ce also appeared to be changed at this moment.

    After some dodging Sam finally realized how terrifying it would be to deal with these monkey warriors. They are beings of the higher ne and although he did possess a lot of theoretical knowledge about them, he doesn¡¯t know how difficult it would be.

    Just based on pure estimation, he felt that he could handle two of them. But these are not average beasts and they are cooperating well.

    They are even cleverer than some humans.

    Sam took a deep breath after dodging some consecutive moves and spears. He decided on how to proceed and his body is surrounded by ck smoke.

    All of a sudden Sam disappeared from the ce.

    The monkeys¡¯ eyes widened and both of them are making iprehensible sounds. But they failed to realize that a shadow is moving and appeared a bit away from them. Sam reappeared and before the monkeys could realize.

    The guns are shot continuously.

    The monkeys are hit by impact crystal bullets at the same point. Their flesh is so sturdy that even this spiritual energy explosion is not enough to prate.

    But Sam didn¡¯t stop. After the initial hit, there is a continuous assault of bullets and after ten shots the first monkey is finally down.

    Sam is seriously surprised. The Spear monkey is gone and only the fist monkey remained. Its defense is even more powerful than that of the Spear monkey.

    Sam kept the guns away and took out the staff.

    Since he confirmed that no one was near this ce, he wants to see what he can do in closebat.

    He swung the staff and targeted his head. The monkey dodged and went for a body blow.

    There is a continuous exchange of offense and defense. The staff Sam has in his hands is made of normal Grade Six metal; it is not special in any way.

    After some tough fight and taking some hits, Sam finally took down the monkey.

    If anyone saw this battle from start to end, they would think that Sam is extremely stupid. Because, half of it doesn¡¯t make any sense, because if Sam could use shadow transfer, why did he bother running that far?

    If he could continuously fire the gun, why did he avoid that and use a staff?

    That is because Sam is not actually seeking battle with these two monkeys. The whole battle has been an experiment.

    The whole battle is to gauge various aspects of the monkey warriors. Sam knew little about Monkey warriors and there is nothing he knew about how they work in groups or teams.

    He doesn¡¯t know how good are their battle instincts or how good is their strategy going to be.

    So, he tried to find out by himself. The first thing he did is, see how good these monkeys are at chasing. He deliberately changed the speed of his travel by varying the rate of fusion and initiated the chase. He could now estimate how good they are at preserving their energy.

    Then, battle instincts. He climbed the tree and jumped back to attack them. To guess their battle instincts. But their instincts turned out to be too good to fall for his trap.

    That also gave him a rough estimation of their trust between them, their teamwork is impable.

    He wanted to see how much of an advantage the shadow transfer and guns would be and how effective the bullets would be.

    Finally, he estimated his normal defensive capabilities against the monkey¡¯s attacks and also his brute force attacks with a normal metal staff on the monkey.

    He gauged all the factors of the monkey warriors that could affect his battles and survival in the near future.

 Chapter 405: Chosen one from the Herb Garden

    Sam looked at the two dead bodies on the ground. He walked to the fist Monkey warrior first and wanted to examine it first.

    But as soon as he ced his hand on it, the dead body disintegrated into light particles and disappeared into thin air.

    In the ce of the dead body, there is a pair of fighting gloves and a pair of boots along with a scroll.

    They are the spoils and the scroll turned out to be the fist arts practiced by the monkey warrior.

    Sam only nced at it and didn¡¯t look at it further. This is not the time after all. He then walked to the Spear Monkey warrior and ced his hand. The body disappeared in the same way leaving a Spear, a pair of boots, and a scroll.

    Sam stored the scroll away and ced the gloves, spear, and boots in front of him to see what is special about them.

    He is looking for the resourcefulness of the monkeys. If the monkeys are resourceful enough to get high-level inscription or worse the formations and such inscribed on their weapons and essories, then he has to re-evaluate their strengths on the battlefield.

    But he didn¡¯t find a single rune on all of them, but he did find something else. These are made of an extremely high-level metal. ck Star Gold. The metal is on par with the Meteorite sands. These metals though don¡¯t have as many properties as the meteorite sand. The metal only has on the property, high strength. It is almost indestructible.

    It is ck in color and just like the meteorite sand, this metal grows stronger as time and spiritual energy were consumed.

    As for why it is called gold. That has to do with the source of obtaining this metal. They are mostly avable in only liquid forms.

    In fact, it is a naturally formed alloy mostly found in the extremely high-temperature zone and is always found in the form ofva which is golden in color. The area surrounding theva will always shine like it was in the presence of starry night. That was why someone gave this name to it. Sam felt that the person who named it might have been toozy.

    Because how much of a Lava glow could really resemble a starry night.

    Sam didn¡¯t much and stored the items. Since they are of such high quality, there is no way he would leave them here.

    He is even trying to see if he can find the other candidates who wouldn¡¯t know anything about this ck star gold and con them.

    But this makes him a public enemy. He has to find all others and defeat them before taking the items, there is another catch that he couldn¡¯t finish them with a single blow. The ce is not only healing but also taking them away after they took critical damage.

    After that, he made his move. He held the staff in his hands. For the other cultivators who came here, he should be seen as a staff user.

    As he zoomed past the trees, he sensed something. He also noticed that there are night and day in this ce and the sun is setting as time passed.

    Sam changed his direction and moved forward, after two minutes, he arrived at a ce where a group of people is fighting. They are not from the Beast faction, only three people are left of the Beast faction, but this group has five members and from their robes, he guessed that they might be from the herb garden.

    Sam climbed a tree and looked at the scene vigntly. The five of them are working together as they fought with three monkey warriors.

    The three monkey warriors are using sword and spear and one of them seemed to be more proficient in leg movements.

    He didn¡¯t interfere. It would be best if both sides got eliminated.

    Sam scanned the herb garden members, he wanted to see if there are any chosen ones. His initial guess is that there are two people who are chosen. That is because of the information he got, there are only three tokens that appeared in each major power, as for the rest they can only be tokens from the previous time, which means, they are chosen ones.

    Two people are chosen from a single major power. Maybe the gods who chose them wanted them to have the best medicinal resources.

    The battle is extremely heated, although the humans seemed to have an advantage in numbers, their teamwork is not exactly a good one, they are extremely disorganized and everyone is trying to gain control and be the one to lead the team, which is making it hard for them to cooperate, as for the monkey warriors they are like a single entity.

    The three of them are easily overpowering the five, if their opponents are one member short, then it would have already been their victory.

    At this moment, the five of them recognized that they couldn¡¯t win and wanted to flee. But even then they have differing opinions.

    "We need to disperse, so they will also split up." One of them said.

    "No we need to stay together, otherwise we wouldn¡¯t be able to hold our ground against another team like this."

    Sam looked at them calmly, these two people are the ones trying too much to be the leader of the group and now the group seemed to be in extreme confusion.

    They don¡¯t who they should listen to and the one who said they should disperse, became angry and said.

    "You guys can die on your own."

    With that he didn¡¯t stop and let, the other four all ran towards another direction without caring for that person.

    The monkey warriors also split up. One of them followed the loner and the other two followed the remaining group.

    Sam waited for a bit and decided to follow the single person.

    If he is the chosen one, Sam would like to get some information. In the first pce of inheritance, he did see the tattoos but he didn¡¯t observe keenly enough to get any form of information out of it, except for Arman¡¯s tattoo that too because the previous pce belongs to Indra.

    This time, he knew more things and confirmed a lot of spections after his talk with Ling Tian recently.

    He figured that the others also gets some information, which Sam got. But that is still the only scratch on the surface. His next target is guessing which gods that chose them.

    After all, he has seen many creatures and even a god who is part of the mythology of the previous earth, and the character of Indra actually synced with what the mythology said.

    So, if he could find and guess which gods are involved, he could get some more information, maybe he can think of some reasons based on their characters.

    He followed the solo person and soon watched as the monkey warrior caught up, a fierce battle began. That person is a wood elemental user and he is using the surroundings to his advantage.

    The Monkey warrior who is following him is using a sword and with a swing, he cut through the vines that are holding him and the sword ray traveled through the air as it shed the chest of the opponent.

    Sam who is watching the battle intensely suddenly had a change of expression. Because he noticed that after the robe was cut open the person from Herb garden has a white cloth tightly wrapped around the chest and there is a bundle of white cloth that almost padded the waist of that person.

    He knew who would do that, the females who wanted to disguise themselves as males. He noticed that there is a faint glow of runes all over the white cloth, they seemed to have been inscribed so that she wouldn¡¯t be discovered with the spiritual sense.

    He then shifted his attention towards the robe which fell on the ground and noticed it is made of some extremely strong fibers. Even from afar, he could see how dense the fabric is, it is almost as good as armor.

    But even that armor waspletely destroyed by the warrior in a single swing which is thoughtworthy.

    Sam just looked at the battle, thedy from the Herb garden who is passing herself as a man, seemed to have gotten serious and suddenly the surrounding trees, grass, and all the flora started moving. The Monkey warrior frowned and the sword aura raged from his body. He is extremely vignt.

    The tree which Sam sat is also moving and all the roots, vines, and everything that is flexible nearby is moving towards the monkey warrior like crazy.

    The Monkey warrior started concentrating his spiritual energy on arge attack and with a single swing, he cut half of the tree around him, there is a loud crash, but to his dismay, the remaining half already entangled him. The trees started absorbing the monkey¡¯s vitality and his body seemed to have dried.

    Thedy is looking at the monkey warrior coldly and then she turned towards the direction where Sam stood and yelled.

    "Are you nning toe out or should I drag you out?" Her voice turned back to her original voice, she didn¡¯t see any reason to keep up with the acts, since Sam already saw the whole battle.

    Sam came out with the staff in his hand.

    He already got the information he needed, not only she is ady, she is also a chosen one. Previously when her back faced Sam, he saw the outline of the circle tattoo on her back. The upper portion of hers is covered in cloth.

    The cloth exposed the cor bone region and its counterpart on her back where the small arc of the circle is visible.

    He knew she is a chosen one, but there is only one thing he has to know, what is the tattoo on her back.

 Chapter 406: Being a trouble maker

    Sam and thedy looked at each other, the atmosphere is tense.

    Sam could see the cold killing intent in her eyes. He knew that she wants to kill him at this moment. But he is not exactly worried. Themotion caused by the vines and trees is extremely loud that the other monkey warriors should have already started making their way here, even if the monkey warriors didn¡¯te, the other cultivators who are in the vicinities would certainly want toe here and take a look.

    After all, who would want to leave a chance when they can go to a ce where a great battle took ce and even the winner might be in their most vulnerable state. They could take advantage of the situation.

    By this time, it is almost night and Sam activated his night vision as he looked around, he could faintly see the silhouettesing towards them.

    He doesn¡¯t have enough time to wrestle with her, with that he made his move.

    The spiritual energy was sent into the staff and he went towards her swinging it.

    Thedy doesn¡¯t want him to get close, she is not a warrior mage, she is a normal wood elemental mage.

    The vines which are all over the floor all made their way towards Sam, interrupting him on his way as thedy started moving backward. As she kept him busy, she took out another robe and wore. She is back to her male form again, it is just that it is more like a pretty boy look.

    Sam started spinning his staff as the wind elemental energy swirled around, the vines that are approaching are all being cut away, Sam¡¯s main strength in the usage of elemental powers, is actually not their uniqueness or even number, it is rather his ability to use the surrounding spiritual energy to his own attacks which helps him not only to reduce the burden on him and the spiritual energy consumption, it also scales the attack much bigger.

    The wind des that are streaking from the spin of the staff are extremely short, but they are extremely lethal at the same time.

    Sam concentrated his wind elemental energy below his feet and used air cannot leap forward, bypassing all the vines that are increasing in the ground which are obstructing him in his path.

    Thedy frowned at the trajectory, from the leap, she is sure that Sam wouldnd right in front of her, she ced her hands on the ground and all of a sudden some thorny vines appeared out of nowhere making a. If Sam was to fall in it, he would be done for.

    But just before hended, Sam suddenly unleashed another air cannon which is actually very small, but it made himnd where he exactly wanted tond, behind thedy, this caught her by surprise, she realized the situation she was in immediately and started concentrating the spiritual energy on her back to defend the attack. She doesn¡¯t even have time to turn back.

    Sam concentrated the spiritual energy at the end of the staff as swung it at her back.

    The attack is actually not that hard, thedy was even surprised that the attack is that weak, but suddenly she noticed that the runes on the white cloth stopped working.

    Sam unleashed his spiritual sense and scanned her back. He could see the tattoo. It is a symbol in which thedy is elegantly standing in the midst of nts as they grew towards her, there are some vines which are coiled to her, but it didn¡¯t seem like they are binding her, rather it almost looked it she was embraced by them.

    Sam retracted his spiritual sense, thedy also covered her whole body with her own will when she noticed Sam¡¯s spiritual sense is scanning her back.

    She noticed that tattoo and she seemed to have seen it just now, her eyes widened.

    "Nice Tattoo. I like girls when they have tattoos." Sam said in a low voice.

    The girl¡¯s surprise was reduced after listening to his words.

    For one moment, she thought Sam is also like her. When she broke through to the Nascent stage, she talked to that being once again and she wanted to see how others are doing. But she doesn¡¯t know how to recognize them. Now only she remembered the tattoo which appeared in the previous pce of inheritance.

    When Sam wanted to see it, she almost thought that he is part of them, but his words dismissed her thoughts, particrly when she saw Sam¡¯s eyes which are filled with lust as he sized her up.

    That¡¯s right, Sam is looking at her like a lecher and sizing her up as if he wanted to eat her.

    Her expression grew cold and suddenly she made a move Sam is extremely close to her at the moment and the Thorny vine she created suddenly moved, it directly surrounded Sam and the thorns directly entered his body as they prated.

    Sam noticed that some purple lines appeared near the pration. He frowned and looked at the woman, whose surprise waspletely gone, and only killing intent remained.

    Sampletely surrounded the vines that are still holding him with his spiritual energy and with a mere thought, they are torn into minute pieces, almost disintegrated. This is the quick version of his normal disintegration.

    As soon as he did that, the purple lines on his body are also disappeared, his hydra bloodline is circting all over his body.

    Thedy was surprised.

    "How can you take it? You couldn¡¯t possibly know the antidote for my poison?"

    She said as he pointed her finger at him.

    Sam didn¡¯t give her a chance, his staff was swung upwards and it hit directly in her armpit, while her arm was feeling numb, Sam directly mmed the staff at her shoulder joint. But it is not a normal hit, the wind element formed an extremely concentrated wind cannon just before the contact.

    Thedy felt her whole skeleton shaking, she heard a crack on her shoulder bones, and her arm wouldn¡¯t work any time soon. But it is not over yet.

    Before she realized it, the staff came from the other side, directly hitting her on her left abdomen.

    She felt like puking her guts out.

    Sam wanted to finish her off at this moment, but suddenly he saw her taking some out. As soon as he dropped, various vines popped out and along with it a tree immediately came out of the ground all of them are coiling around Sam. They are not attacking him. They are just making sure that he doesn¡¯t move at all.

    Sam didn¡¯t care much about it, these are consumables and short-lived, all he needed was a wind cannon to make them explode. He was about to chase her, but he sensed some movements and realized that others areing, he wanted to leave, but before that, he ran towards the monkey warrior¡¯s corpse.

    With a touch, the corpse disappeared and Sam took the sword, boots, and the scroll.

    He didn¡¯t wait for a second and used shadow transfer to disappear and reappeared in the nearby woods.

    From there he made sure that no one is around and ran with an elemental fusion of light like his life depended on it.

    At the empty battlefield, two groups of people appeared one after another.

    One of them is the thunder god temple¡¯s group. the other one is actually the Usaine sect¡¯s group.

    Both of them looked at each other. The Usaine sect¡¯s group has four people by their side while the thunder god temple has three people.

    They are at a numerical advantage.

    "Are you the one¡¯s in the battle?"

    The Usaine sect who are theters asked as they looked at them. The thunder god temple¡¯s group seemed to be a little ragged. They are not exactly in their perfect condition.

    "Nope. No one is here by the time we came."

    Both of them didn¡¯t speak again, they are contemting whether they should battle or not.

    Arman and Arthur are both in the group and they are not exactly unpopr, that is why the other group is wavering, but they also don¡¯t want to give up their opportunity to eliminate the opponents who are toughpetition.

    As they are thinking a loud explosive sound was heard from a distance, they looked there and then exchanged nces, with a tacit understanding they ran towards that direction.

    And that direction happened to be the direction where Sam ran before.

    At this moment, Sam is in a deadlock.

    Moments ago, when he was running towards a direction, he activated his night vision to see if he can find any visible targets and he saw that there are a group of people waiting in an ambush as one of them is running towards the ambush point while two monkey warriors are chasing them.

    He understood what is happening and ran towards the group. He wants to fish in the muddy waters.

    When the group of five surrounded the two monkey warriors and are battling, he made his move. He made a sneak attack on one of the candidates of the group, they are from the lightning Spear sect.

    And he took down the guy with a single hit to his head and without further ado, he moved back.

    The others from the group looked at him and then went into a frenzy, he seemed to have used a trump card the two monkeys are dead on the spot. In fact, their bodies disappearedpletely. But that lightning will surely expose their location to a lot of people.

    Now, the four people from the Lightning Spear sect all surrounded the tree Sam is on.

 Chapter 407: The Origin Places of the Monkey Warriors

    Sam looked at the four of them who are waiting for him down the tree. He smiled at their expressions and he also saw the tattoos at this moment.

    There are two people at this moment. One of them is a man holding a hammer as he stood in the clouds and the other one is

    The tree is extremely huge that they wouldn¡¯t be able to deal with Sam at this moment. Even their spiritual energy wouldn¡¯t be able to reach the top of the tree. But Sam can perceive them from the top because of his extremely high spiritual sense.

    They sensed the spiritual sense and are quite surprised and confused at the same time, how can their peer has such a broad range of spiritual sense, it is something they couldn¡¯t understand.

    But Sam is thinking entirely differently. Out of five, two of them have tattoos on their body.

    Two of them have human silhouettes and both of them held spears in their hands.

    But on one of them, one is surrounded by lightning and the other is standing in the middle of a battlefield filled with broken weapons, dead bodies, and such.

    The Lightning Spear sect is actually a sect specialized in two things, one of them is the lightning element, and the other Spear arts. These two candidates seemed to have held both of them.

    The person who attacked the monkeys with a secret art is the lighting spear one. He is also the weakest at this moment.

    At this instant, Sam looked towards the horizon, from where the people from the Usaine sect and the Thunder god temple areing.

    He can see them because of the night vision and he is waiting for them toe. Until then, all his intentions are to waste the time without making a move.

    At this moment, the Spear tattooed guy asked coldly.

    "Who are you? Which major power are you from?" Sam didn¡¯t reply to that.

    The lightning spear tattooed guy said coldly.

    "Why would a coward who covered his face reveal which faction he is from?" He seemed to be trying to provoke Sam.

    Sam just chuckled at this attempt.

    These things actually seemed foolish to him. He just stayed there for a few seconds. And soon they lost their patience and the lightning spear guy threw a spear of lightning at him. It is an extremely concentrated attack and the might is actually quite good. The tree would be damaged and Sam would fall down even if he managed to dodge that.

    But Sam didn¡¯t do so, he instead concentrated his own lightning energy in his left hand. It is silver in color and it is extremely concentrated and stable, unlike the chaotic lightning. This is Sam¡¯s control so that the lightning element wouldn¡¯t be exposed. It would be apparent only if he attacked. If he just kept it like this it wouldn¡¯t be visible.

    He extended his hand and caught the spear directly. But he wasn¡¯t able to catch hold of it firmly. Because he doesn¡¯t have stable support under his legs, he wasn¡¯t able to exert much force. He slightly flew upwards along with the Spear.

    But Sam is not worried, there is no damage. He held the spear in his hands and made sure that the lightning concentration on it wouldn¡¯t disappear and aimed it at somewhere else as hended on the tree.

    The four of them frowned in confusion as they looked towards the direction and they are horrified when they saw the scene.

    Seven people areing from that direction and Spearnded exactly right before their feet.

    Sam who justnded on the tree wasn¡¯t there anymore. He turned into a shadow and appeared on another tree which is a bit deeper into the forests.

    This action went unnoticed by the group under the tree as well as the people who just came.

    As the dust cleared the lightning spear sect members wanted to exin, but they didn¡¯t get a chance to the seven of them who are still a bit far away from them already started conjuring their attacks.

    The long-distance attacks flew. Initially, the group wanted to exin, but when they were attacked their fragile egos got better of them and they also reciprocated with their own attacks.

    Sam sat on the tree and looked at them with a smile under his cover.

    "Little kids. Still doesn¡¯t know how to keep their Egos in check."

    Since the start, Sam yed this game on their egos. He sneaked an attack and beat one of them and tried to go away. The people wanted to give chase because one of theirrades has fallen to sneak attack.

    They are hurt by this notion and wanted to take revenge and in this frenzy, they failed to take the face that Sam is just standing there without running into consideration.

    Their only thought of how to take down Sam as to why they didn¡¯t want to destroy the tree, they don¡¯t want Sam to have thoughts about fleeing. If Sam jumped from the trees while this tree fell, they would have trouble chasing him. At least, Sam would get a jump start in the escape. The tree is toorge anyway.

    The same thing happened when the two groups came. They felt that they shouldn¡¯t have been treated like that, no matter who another party is, in their opinions, they don¡¯t have the right to attack them and it is a sign of disrespect.

    That¡¯s why they attacked them back. And the lightning Spear sect group also attacked them again.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother with the fight anymore. They are all in a frenzy and none of their strength is incredibly overwhelming. So, nobody would be willing to listen, unless there are some eliminations.

    Sam looked towards the direction from where the lightning Spear sect group lured the Monkey warriors.

    If there are only two there is no need to lure them and fight, then there must be arge group of them.

    That area of the woods is also a ce that he didn¡¯t explore.

    He slowly made his way towards that direction all the time his night visionpletely activated.

    After running for some time, he finally saw arge heat signature. In his vision, there is arge group of silhouettes gathered in a ce.

    He deactivated the night vision and slowly walked towards the ce and what he saw shocked him. There is a group of monkey warriors bustling in activities.

    There are tworge buildings in that ce and from one of them, a Monkey warrior ising and entered another building. He then came out with a set of gloves and boots which are used for battle.

    There are many groups of monkey warriors, who just sat there and every time a monkey warrior which came from this building joined a group, another monkey warrior from that group is leaving and going into the woods.

    Sam felt that this might be the origin of the monkey warriors. At least one of the origins.

    His eyes sparkled when he saw the second building from which the monkey warriors are taking the weapons.

    There would be a lot of ck Star gold equipment in that ce.

    But the number of Monkey Warriors is insane. Even Sam doesn¡¯t want to do that.

    The thoughts are running through his mind.

    He has to make a n to take away all the weapons and for that, he has to do something first. Explore the forest.

    He figured that if all the Monkey warriors entered the forest at the same time, it will be a cakewalk to deal with all the candidates and the people will have to struggle to survive.

    The first thing he wanted to do is to check the terrain and familiarize with the whole ce.

    He also has to see if this is the only ce the Monkey Warrior stayed. He doesn¡¯t want anything unexpected happening before he nned everything perfectly.

    He spent the whole night and the next morning exploring the area and all this time, he tried his best to avoid everyone and by the afternoon, he was finally done.

    He checked almost all of the forest and he rode on Harbinger. Even though, there is a risk of his identity getting exposed, as long as no one didn¡¯t see him and he didn¡¯t use them in any battles, everything would be fine.

    After familiarising the forest, they are in, he saw a total of three ces where the Monkey warriors are grouped up and that includes the one, he saw first.

    Not only that he also observed that the other groups of people also noticed these ces and are trying to think of methods to deal with them.

    But for now, all they can do is trying and luring the monkeys and try to deal with them bit by bit. But they noticed that the Monkey warriors are appearing from that building making that number up. The building is almost like a factory of Monkey Warriors.

    For a moment, all the conflicts between the groups are cooled down. He even saw the Lightning Spear sect, the thunder god temple, and even the Usaine sect all three of them joining forces, it seems that their battle was halted after they reached a deadlock between themselves.

    A/N: An important announcement in Author¡¯s thought, please read

 Chapter 408: Experiments

    Sam couldn¡¯t think of many ways to steal everything, he even tried to get the shadow mice out, but he wasn¡¯t able to do so.

    The ce is restricted for other living beings to enter, he could take all the non-living things from the dimension except for the beasts.

    He felt frustrated.

    From what he could see there are almost fifty monkey warriors in each origin ce of the Monkey warriors all time. The Monkey warriors which areing out of the building will be a new addition and topensate that the Monkey warriors who are already a part of the group are leaving maintaining a constant number in the group.

    When the candidates lured two or three Monkey Warriors out of the group, the monkey warriors from the building will be sent to the group until the members reached the initial number and until then no monkey would go out on its own ord.

    Maybe, the owner of the Pce the current god who is testing them wanted to maintain the monkey warriors as constant obstacles until only five of them are left for the final test.

    Sam is thinking if it is wise for him to provoke thatrge group of monkeys. Even if he only targeted one origin ce, there are still fifty monkeys and if they are out at the same time and works together to deal with them, then he would have to face some serious trouble.

    He was thinking of ns for the rest of the day and in this process, he roamed all over the ce trying to find any ces that he could take advantage of.

    But he couldn¡¯t find any of those sorts. The terrains of this ce are not exactly designed for that purpose. They are extremely normal, so normal that it almost felt weird.

    After some serious thinking, Sam decided to do something else by evening,

    He wanted to see how the Monkey warriors would reach for various levels of provocations.

    He picked one of the three origin ces, which was targeted by the least number of candidates. The Beast faction is here and thedy who disguised herself as a man is also here with the Herb Garden candidates.

    The candidates of the Herb garden reduced by two. Only three of them are left which is not so surprising.

    The Beast faction still has four of them, but one of them seemed to have injured.

    Sam is watching them from hiding, he didn¡¯t appear in front of anyone since yesterday night. After all, hiding in the forest is a piece of cake for him. These candidates wouldn¡¯t have enough experience.

    He looked at the ¡¯man¡¯ of the herb garden and noticed that her arm was bound by some vines until the shoulder and held it in ce with the strap so that she wouldn¡¯t move. She seemed to have taken an extremely potent pill because Sam could sense some extremely highly vtile vitality emitting from her body.

    After all, if she wants to set her bone back, she must use that much. Particrly, when there is no ess to a healer.

    But she is still fighting, her job is mostly to wait in ambush.

    These guys are trying to defeat the Monkey warrior origin ce for the same reason as Sam, they also want to see what is inside the buildings, they want to see if they can get their hands on a treasure that might be present in this ce.

    After all, the Pce of Inheritance is an extremelyrge treasure trove. From the previous experience, they knew that one simple battle technique is more powerful than a full-fledged cultivation technique of the major powers.

    That is the conclusion the powers came to when they saw the techniques that came out of the pce.

    So, they don¡¯t want to leave any form of opportunity.

    As for Sam, he is at least in a better position, because he at least had a clear target.

    Sam hid in the tree which has the thickest branches and dense vegetation. He waspletely hidden and he covered his spiritual energy wavespletely.

    The tree is coincidentally behind the two groups who are dealing with this ce.

    As they are nning another ambush and this time trying to get more monkeys out of the group, Sam decided to execute his n at the same time.

    He stood on the tree and held his ck sniper rifle in his hands as he aimed at a group of ten monkey warriors in the origin ce.

    He didn¡¯t make a move though, he waited for a long time. Only after a few hours, the two groups of people who are cooperating are making their move.

    The ¡¯man¡¯ from the beast factionid a trap with the vines and trees at a ce which is far behind Sam¡¯s current position.

    Along with her another person from the herb garden also waited in ambush who also controls trees.

    The rest of the group are scattered a bit and are waiting tounch attacks at this moment, the decoy went to the origin ce and even then the monkey warriors didn¡¯t react, he is standing at the entrance and all the groups are full and the neer monkey warriors areing slower than usual.

    The decoy aimed four wind des and attacked four monkey warriors in the group of ten.

    The four monkey warriors who arepletely unbothered without any form of emotion in their eyes suddenly became angry and jumped out.

    The decoy started running away.

    Sam looked at the rest of the group, none of them reacted, he has a theory in his mind and wanted to test it.

    He aimed the rifle and shot a monkey warrior after the decoy and the chasing monkey warriors left the vicinities.

    This time, he used some special bullets, these bullets are made of elemental metals which are used for special weapons of warrior mages, this is made of a metal which is specially used by wind element users and it was full prating inscriptions.

    The bullet length, impact are far more than that of the normal bullets he used on the monkey warrior when he used the handgun. Even the handgun¡¯s impact crystals cannot have the same impact as these bullets.

    The bullet went straight through the monkey warrior¡¯s hand and hit a rock behind it, there is arge hole in the hand and a chunk of flesh was sted away due to the heave prating force of the wind along with the bullet.

    The monkey warrior that got hit looked in his direction but couldn¡¯t find anyone. It grew angry and ran towards the woods and after sweeping the spiritual sense, it still couldn¡¯t find Sam. Because at this moment, Sam is standing on a formation te which is used to conceal his position. He is careful just in case.

    The Monkey warrior tried to search and went deep into the woods.

    Sam then aimed at other monkeys and shot two consecutively. The two of them had the same reaction.

    He halted the shooting and came to a conclusion. If the monkey warriors didn¡¯te out naturally they are almost devoid of reaction unless they came outside on their own, they would onlye out if they are provoked and wounded and that too the monkey warriors which are not injured wouldn¡¯t even bother to react.

    Currently, seven out of ten of that group are out of it, only three of them should have left, but in this gap, two more monkey warriors joined them and there are five of them.

    Sam wanted to test another theory and aimed at the head of the next monkey. Precisely speaking, he aimed at the eye.

    The bullet shot through the air and prated the skull of the monkey through the eyeball and came out of the other side.

    The monkey warrior copsed right in that ce.

    This time, the remaining four monkey warriors that stayed in the group actually had a reaction.

    They all became angry and started screaming in rage.

    They started running out and ran towards the woods, they don¡¯t what killed theirpanion, but they do know that is from the woods; they started going on a rampage and started hitting all the trees that are at the edge and ran into the forest as they started smashing everything that came into sight. They even started hitting the tree Sam was standing on, but it is an extremely tall tree and it is quite sturdy for some reason. Sam stood on it and held to the branches as his life depended on it. The monkey warriors gave up when they saw nothing drop and left. This something unexpected.

    If one of them dies, the whole group is reacting like crazy beasts.

    Sam looked towards the empty ce where the group is supposed to stay.

    He waited for a bit and the new monkey warrior came to fill the spot and start the new group.

    After the monkey stood there, Sam shot him dead directly. Nothing unusual happened, he once again waited and this time when the new monkey appeared from the building, Sam directly shot it before it reached the group spot.

    And once again the wait continued.

    Then only Sam saw some reaction here. The Monkey warriors which are freshlying out of the building no longer came to that spot.

    After thest one came, Sam waited for four more turns and all these four new monkey warriors joined new groups directly and the cycle of maintaining the monkey warriors, numbers same continued in the other four groups. But this fifth group is nowpletely empty.

    Sam understood, that if he shot the new monkey which was supposed toe to the empty spot right before it entered the spot, then the group wouldn¡¯t start again.

    It is like that monkey warrior is a warning sign for the rest of them and they wouldn¡¯te to this spot anymore.

    While Sam got a lot of information in this ce, the other people who ambushed the four monkey warriors are facing the rage of the rest of the monkey warriors that came out due to Sam¡¯s experiments.

 Chapter 409: Using Others

    Sam is still standing on the tree and is thinking about what to do next.

    But the people from the beast faction and the Herb garden are having the hardest time of their life.

    Their first ambush on the four monkey warriors is actually not something difficult and it is well nned which led them to extreme sess.

    Theypleted the task with minimum injuries and wanted to deal with the remaining in the same fashion. They even wanted to increase the number of monkey warriors they lured.

    But at that moment, a monkey warrior came running towards them, with a wound on his right hand and when the monkey warrior saw them, it went berserk without any form of hesitation.

    The monkey warrior is hurting a lot and it doesn¡¯t have any care for the number of opponents it is going to face. The group which has just joined is looking at the monkey warrior with a peculiar expression.

    They didn¡¯t know where this monkey warrior came from. After all, since they lured four of them out, then it should take some time to fill the group back in before monkey warriors came outside.

    They might assume that the addition is fast, but they could exin the injury on the monkey warrior. Before they think deeply about it, they decided to take the monkey down first, but before they could even make a move, they saw two other monkey warriors running towards them, they frowned.

    There are seven of them in total and they can deal with three of them directly but the direct confrontation is actually time-consuming with these beasts with their extremely high resistance, they would have to use trump cards.

    But since they believed that the area is clear of other people, they decided to take on the beasts but just before they were about to beat them, they saw something horrible. There is a group of four monkey warriors whose faces are filled with rage and anger trampling on all the nts and destroying every tree they can in their way.

    It wouldn¡¯t take a genius to know that these beasts are on a rampage and this small distraction made three beasts counterattack.

    Now there are seven beasts for the seven cultivators, whether they like it or not, they have to deal with beast singlehandedly.

    They felt vexed, they don¡¯t want to use up all their strength, even though the monkey warriors are tough opponents, they can beat them in a one on one fight, but that fight would be like a battle of two geniuses, it will take a long time and more energy, that is why they resorted to ambush. Even Sam doesn¡¯t have an easy time with the beasts.

    But now, they are forced to fight.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know that his provocations are making it hard for the cultivators of the Herb garden and the Beast faction.

    But he couldn¡¯t care less.

    At this moment, he is thinking whether it is a good idea to provoke the rest of the groups in the same manner.

    But he is worried that if he didn¡¯t deal with the beasts fast enough, thatrge group would really rage and destroy the whole ce.

    He has many escape means, but he doesn¡¯t want to use them, the more abilities he used before the people of other major powers, the more likely he would be caught.

    While he was contemting, Sam looked around. It is already evening and the sun is set. It is slowly getting dark. Sam activated the night vision as he looked around. The Monkey warriors who asionallye out didn¡¯t wander too much, they casually picked a direction and are slowly wandering the whole forest, unlike the berserk ones which are going in a straight line.

    As Sam is checking the surroundings, he saw the seven cultivators shing with the seven monkey warriors. Although the fight is on equal terms, three of the Monkey warriors took some serious damage before the other four joined them and three of them are injured by Sam¡¯s bullets already.

    So, there is no way they can overpower the candidates and after some hard struggle, the candidates won. But they took some injuries and they didn¡¯t even move towards the Origin ce as they decided to rest for a bit.

    Everyone is popping pills and healing themselves as they recovered.

    Sam suddenly got an idea and a wicked smile appeared on his face.

    He didn¡¯t make a move and just stood on the tree quietly. After around an hour, the group started walking towards the Origin ce.

    Sam smiled and once again aimed at another group of Monkey warriors, He aimed for the head and the head exploded with a bang.

    The remaining nine monkeys looked towards his direction in a mad frenzy and before they could react, another head was sted and this made the monkey warriors even angrier.

    But this second shot also allowed me to narrow down the location.

    Then the eight of them moved towards the tree, but at this moment another bullet was shot another monkey was gone just like that.

    The monkey warriors are extremely sure of where the bullets areing from. Sam also didn¡¯t bother to hide anymore and started shooting, the monkey warriors became vignt so they are able to avoid the headshots.

    That is the drawback of a sniper, once they shot too many bullets from the same spot, the opponents can find their location and they would have a hard time hitting, but still, Sam was able to get some shoulder shots, chest shots, and so on.

    The damage is not too much, but it definitely reduced theirbat effectiveness.

    By the time, the Monkey warriors arrived at his tree, five of seven are injured.

    Sam immediately used the shadow transfer and moved back to another tree.

    The monkey warriors are stunned by a movement, but their keen battle instincts allowed them to find where Sam is, immediately.

    Sam didn¡¯t fight them or shoot them anymore. He just transfers from one tree to another silently. There are no signs of him and if one didn¡¯t observe they wouldn¡¯t even know a person is there.

    And soon, the Monkey warriors raged at the same time, the group of seven also released a shriek of horror.

    Seven opponents once again and this time there are more.

    Before they could think about what is happening, the beasts attacked them without a care for the world.

    Another battle started and this time, it will take less time than the previous one because more than half of them are damaged, so the candidates can handle them quickly.

    As they are stuck in the battle, Sam once again went back to the same tree and once again stood there, as he watched the battle with the night vision on.

    He doesn¡¯t want to spend a lot of time being chased by the monkey warriors, so he decided to use the group of seven to do his bidding.

    After all, they are here anyway, it would be a waste to not use their abilities before eliminating them.

    Sam waited until the battle is over and once again let them heal.

    As they are concentrating on healing, they also started discussing, two waves of attacks, it is not normal.

    "What do you think is happening now? Those two groups of monkey warriors are certainly not normal."

    The ¡¯man¡¯ from the herb garden asked others.

    The rest of them are silent for a second and didn¡¯t reply, after a brief silence one of them said.

    "Is it possible that other groups are provoking them to wear us out?"

    "Not likely, if that is true, now is the best time for them to take action. But no one is here."

    "Then do you think, the beasts encountered someone powerful and escaped to this side?"

    "It seems to be too far-fetched, from what I know the other groups are camping at the other gathering ces. They don¡¯t have that much time toe and hunt here and the other ces cannot be considered as close."

    As they thought of many spections, they only have one decision and that is to go to the ce and see what exactly is happening with their own eyes.

    They can onlye to a conclusion after they saw it.

    So, a few hours went by and it is just a bit away from the dawn. At this moment, they cautiously moved towards the origin ce and they even maintained a good amount of distance between themselves.

    But the wave of monkey warriors came all the same.

    They couldn¡¯t help but feel frustrated.

    After they defeated this, the same break time and by the time the sun rose another wave came.

    After dealing with it, they almost wanted to give up. But they suddenly thought of something one of them spoke.

    "I think this is one of the trials. Do you guys remember how the monkey warrior corpses disappear as soon as we touch?" He asked with enthusiasm, he is none other than the chosen one of the Beast- faction.

    Everyone nodded and he continued.

    "That means they are not real I think these injured monkey warriors are also like that, they are also not real and they might be part of a trial that gives us the treasure of that ce. If we clear the test, we might win a treasure."

    As soon as he said that, all of them who had wanted to leave this ce and abandon thoughts to searching those buildings, suddenly felt refreshed.

    If Sam would have heard, he would have thanked him many times. He was also worried that these people would leave.

    Now that they seem to be more determined Sam aimed the rifle back at thest monkey Warrior group.

 Chapter 410: Eliminating after serving their purpose

    Sam didn¡¯t hesitate as he pulled the trigger. As a monkey warrior fell, the rest of the nine looked towards his direction and ran in a frenzy just like the previous time.

    This time though, he didn¡¯t kill the other two, he let all the nine chase him. That is because he doesn¡¯t have any use for the rest of the groups. He is ready to eliminate them at this moment.

    There is no reason for them to stay in this pce of inheritance anymore, they can just leave at this moment.

    As the seven of them walked forward, they saw the wave of Monkey warriors and got into positions. But they frowned when they saw nine of them. They have to deal with all nine of them which will make it hard. And this time, they also noticed that they don¡¯t have any injuries.

    At this moment, Sam didn¡¯t choose to observe the battle like before. He arrived at the Origin ce and entered it directly.

    He looked at the two buildings and noticed that the monkey warrior from the first building ising, he aimed the rifle one more time and shot him.

    At this moment, the whole area is full of Monkey warrior corpses. They are all killed by Sam.

    Sam started collecting all of them at this moment and while he did this, he kept on looking towards the battle.

    This time, the battle is a bit nearer to the origin ce, even though he cannot perceive the battlepletely, he can still see the faintmotion from that far.

    He proceeded to the second building from which the monkey warriors collected their weapons. This is the ce he came for. As he walked inside, there is a statue of the monkey in the middle of the room and the monkey¡¯s hands are extended forward as it held something in its palms.

    It is a crystal ball.

    Sam ced his hand on the crystal ball, but nothing happened, he injected spiritual energy, but still there is no response.

    He then sent his spiritual sense and then only something happened.

    A voice that is simr to the same voice which announced the start of the survival test appeared in his mind.

    "You have cleared the Hub of the Monkey warriors and this ce is where the warriors collect their weapons, since you have cleared this, then all the weapons shall be yours, apart from that, this orb is a part of the map which leads to a treasure that I have stored somewhere in the higher realms.

    Until you enter that dimension, this orb is nothing more than a shiny rock. Once you enter that dimension you will directly get a signal from the orb. Don¡¯t worry though, you will sooner ortere to that ce."

    After that, the voice disappeared. At this moment, Sam opened the eyes, the whole room is full of weapons of ck star gold.

    He felt like the current god whoever it is, is more generous than Indra. A treasure in higher realms is not something that can be easily obtained. It is not something one could seek, they could only encounter it.

    But now there is a map.

    But it is indeed hard topare Indra and this god because Indra mostly gave treasures in the puppet area, the treasures are varied by the performance. He didn¡¯t know what those treasures are as he exchanged them for highly valuable raw materials.

    He shook his thoughts and went to the second building, from where the monkey warriors areing from.

    He entered the building and saw that there is another monkey statue and a tform in front of it, he walked towards the tform and climbed it.

    As he stood, a beam of light shot towards him and the monkey statue in front of him moved. A fruit appeared in the hands of the statue and another voice entered Sam¡¯s mind.

    "This is a peach which will refine your body. An extremely high-level treasure, do not take it when you are still in mortal cultivation. You can only digest it after you shed your mortal skin. That means you have to cross the consummate realm. Until they take care of it.

    Don¡¯t be greedy and nt it though, it would be hard to raise a tree of this fruit with your current progress. And that statement is valid no matter who you are."

    Sam looked at the fruit with interest, it looked like a peach and it is not like a normal peach, rather it has blood-red color.

    Sam took the fruit and carefully ced it in the divine dimension.

    He came out and looked at the hub. It lost all the luster that it should have had. He walked toward the woods and moved to the battlefield slowly.

    There are still faint sounds of battle, the seven of them are seriously exhausted this time and some of them suffered injuries.

    Three of them already finished some of the opponents and only four monkey warriors are present at this moment.

    The remaining four candidates are dealing with the remaining four monkey warriors at this moment, Sam who is standing on a tree a distance away raised his rifle and aimed at them.

    Their work here is done, so there is no need for him to leave them here. Anyway, only five people are going to be qualified in this ce, so it is no different if he eliminated them orter.

    He doesn¡¯t have any opinions on who will be the other four members, except for one spot. Arman will have to stay. Just because he became ackey, Sam couldn¡¯t just leave him to the curb.

    Rather he wanted him to be stronger. If he could be the thunder god temple head it would be beneficial for Sam, even if he didn¡¯t and had to leave this dimension before that, at least if he bes an heir apparent, then he could influence some decisions of thunder god temple.

    There is a possibility that Sam would have to wage war on these major powers, so he has to nt as many moles as possible so that he would have an easy time in the future.

    Sam aimed and his first target is a person from Herb Garden. The ¡¯man¡¯ is still fighting. So, he targeted someone who is resting.

    Sam aimed at the heart of that person. He is pretty sure that the person wouldn¡¯t be killed here, so there is no need for Sam to hold back.

    As he pulled the trigger, the bullet tore through the air and prated the heart of that person. He is sitting cross-legged and meditating at this moment. He abruptly opened his eyes, which are filled with pain and shock.

    He is looking around without knowing what happened.

    The rest of the group is also startled, they all looked around and even the people who are fighting became vignt. They don¡¯t know who the attacker is, but this only made the fight with the monkey warrior harder as they gain an advantage with this small opening.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop. He still aimed at the same man but this time, the target is the left-hand palm of that man, what he wants is the spatial ring. There is no way Sam is letting them take away the ck star gold when he was the one whoid the plot.

    One must wonder how these candidates who fought through wave after wave of Monkey warriors would think.

    Sam didn¡¯t care and just shot through the palm. The finger which has a spatial ring was dissected, the person who got shot is already slowly losing consciousness, so he was shocked when another wave of pain hit him.

    Before he could realize what happened, the green energy from the tree wrapped him around as he slowly disappeared. Only his finger with the ring was left on the ground.

    One of the candidates who is resting earlier and now looking for the culprit saw this and was about to pocket the finger and the ring.

    "He is my friend. I will give it back to him." He is also from Herb Garden, so no one stopped him. But they are still looking around for the culprit when they heard a scream.

    "AHHHHHH..."

    The man who was about to pick the ring is holding his hand with extreme pain written all over his face, his hand is bleeding and four fingers are missing.

    When he extended his hand to pick the ring and finger up, Sam aimed at the palm and it went from one side to another side, through all the fingers. Four fingers just fell off and one of them has a spatial ring.

    Sam didn??t stop and finished him with another shot.

    But by this time, the candidates realized where the bullets areing from.

    The ¡¯man¡¯ from the Herb garden, even closed her eyes and extended her hand in this direction.

    Sam felt a sensation of the tree and the branches are bending in unnatural angles and their goal seemed to be tying him up.

    But just before Sam was entangled, he turned into a shadow and disappeared.

    In fact, the distance is not ideal for sniping, but Sam is doing it anyway because the people from this world doesn¡¯t know much.

    The candidates already ran to the first tree by this time, but they are stumped when they saw nothing there.

 Chapter 411: Second Hub

    Sam who arrived at the new tree didn¡¯t stop his sniping, he aimed immediately and shot another candidate with two consecutive bullets.

    Another spatial ring fell to the floor and another candidates was gone.

    The rest of them looked towards the tree he is standing on and made a run for it.

    The trees around him all started reacting differently, it seems ¡¯man¡¯ of the herb garden didn¡¯t get his location and is trying to use the trees to find him and at this moment, the trees he was in trembled slightly and Sam understood his location was revealed.

    But this time, he didn¡¯t move immediately, the tree¡¯s movements are sluggish and slow, the candidates are running towards him. Sam aimed the rifle once again and shot two times and another person fell.

    By the time the candidates appeared, he disappeared from the tree.

    The same situation repeated itself for one more time and only three of them are still there.

    As for how they survived it is not forck of trying. The three of them are really good at their instincts and skills they were able to defend themselves. Maybe it is luck or coincidence, out of three two of them are chosen ones Sam knew. As for the third person, he doesn¡¯t know yet.

    After some time, Sam halted his attack.

    He couldn¡¯t crack their defence, in fact they couldn¡¯t just block it fluidly, they are also struggling, but one way or other they are able to block the bullet just before it hit them.

    Sam is getting sick of it. So, decided to change the bullets.

    This time, he loaded the Energy cell bullet.

    Since they want to block them, they can block all they want.

    Sam shot three times consecutively.

    Three bullets are aimed at same person and that person is the other one who he didn¡¯t know.

    She is a fire elemental user, from herb garden. She might be one of the Pill makers or potion makers.

    All this while, her defence is the weakest and also most edgy one. She is using the fire elemental fusion. Of course, it is not full fusion, she is using partial fusion of fire element but her partial fusion is different from others.

    The spot of her body where the bullet is going through will bepletely turned into fire elemental body and the metallic pration bullets couldn¡¯t hurt her, it would directly go through her body.

    As for head shots, it is almost impossible as they are moving too much and she is using her hands to guard the head as much as possible.

    The partial elemental fusion intrigued Sam. That is because this is not how orthodox fusion works. Normally a cultivator will activate elemental fusion byyer byyer of their body, but this person seems to have followed different approach where she wouldplete fusion but only to a small portion of the body.

    But it is only some form of intrigue. Nothing much.

    Sam made sure that he is in perfect distance from them and shot the energy cell bullets and that too energy cells of fire element.

    Thedy did the same thing and activated elemental fusion on her chest where the bullet was about to hit. The bullet entered her body and just before it was about toe out from her back, she widened her eyes. She could sense that something is wrong.

    The bullet suddenly exploded and her fusion was cancelled. There is a hole in her chest which can fit a baseball.

    She looked at the remaining two bullets came and dismembered her arm.

    The remaining two were shockedpletely.

    They didn¡¯t expect that something like this would happen. The girl who was hitpletely disappeared instantly and her spatial ring was also left behind.

    At this moment, Sam decided to shoot the next target, but just before he did that, he noticed that they are not staying there, nor they are trying to find his location, they are escaping.

    It is almost like their life depended on it.

    Sam still wanted to shoot, but their speed is too high and they are not moving towards his next target anyway. So, there is no need for him to worry, at least for the moment.

    Sam then stored his rifle and started moving towards the next hub.

    The second hub has three groups and the most number of people. The Usaine sect¡¯s five members, the Lightning Spear sect¡¯s four members and thunder god temple¡¯s three members are there. With a total of twelve members.

    The third hub was only targeted by the four members of the Thunder bolt sect.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know why the three groups decided team up. Maybe, they felt like chances are higher. But he got his answer when he reached the ce.

    They are able to eliminate one whole grouppletely. Now only four groups are left. Sam watched it from hiding and saw that there are a lot of spears in the hub. The spears are not of ck star gold. They are the spears that the candidates threw.

    From the looks of things, these people also seemed to have experimented in the same way Sam did, to get as much information as they can. But they are slower than me.

    Sam saw one corpse of the monkey warrior which was impaled by three spears.

    He didn¡¯t dwell on it further and snooped around the camp of these three groups.

    At this moment they are resting and first group seemed to have been just eliminated.

    They are healing at this moment.

    Sam decided to stop and see what these people are going to do. He wants to see if he has to use same tactic as before or he should take another approach.

    After two hours, the people started moving and the groupid in ambush.

    The two chosen of the lightning spear sect came towards the entrance of the hub.

    They decided to act as decoys.

    Both of them held spears in their hands and one of them even had their spears fully covered with the lightning.

    Both of the started concentrating all their energy into their attack. They are not even trying to preserve.

    It is almost as if they are their final attacks.

    They both aimed at the second group and threw their spears.

    With an explosion, the ground below their feet cracked with the exertion of pressure.

    The Spears tore through the air and impaled into two Monkey warriors who are in the group. Those attacks were followed by another round of Spears and both monkeys had two spears impaled into their chest. Only then did they fall.

    This is due to the impable defence of the monkey warriors. After all, they don¡¯t have Bullets like Sam which could go through the eyeballs sneakily.

    All their attacks even if they use archers are actually quite eye catching whenpared to sniper bullets. At the same time, they are too big to aim at the eyeballs of the Monkey warriors.

    They could only deal with them like this.

    After the two monkey warriors are dead, the group raged and ran towards them.

    The two candidates who threw the spears didn¡¯t stand there, they knew what would happen, so they ran as if the hell is on loose.

    The Monkey warriors ran after them, but Sam surprised to see that there is an archer who isying in ambush. His attacks are not powerful, at least not as powerful as the sniper bullets or the Spears, but he started attacking the Monkey warriors like crazy. Sam was stunned when the archer attacked so the chase would slowdown.

    He is not trying to kill the monkey warriors, but he is pretty good at slowing them down.

    At this moment, the ambush started and the whole group attacked the Monkey warriors.

    The ambush is an absolute sess and the eight monkey warriors are soon dead.

    Sam felt like he should just leave them be for the time being. He might as well let them kill a few. At this moment, he noticed that the archer didn¡¯t participate in the battle and went to the hub.

    He stood on a tree and started shooting the monkey warrior who is about to take the empty spot.

    His arrows did make their way towards the eye, but it is not deadly enough. The arrow head is too broad and the skull is obstructing the arrow from going in.

    At this moment, he didn¡¯t give up and shot continuously, the next arrow went through the shank of the first arrow and hit the arrow head and the next followed the same.

    Finally, after four arrows, he hammered the first arrowhead right into the Monkey¡¯s brain.

    The group is eliminated.

    Sam was impressed, these people are doing a great job. There are only three groups left and Sam felt that they would do a great job clearing them up, but what is he thinking at this moment is to how to clear these people up after they cleared the hub.

 Chapter 412: Trapping

    Sam looked at the groups as they are at rest. He felt that it would be okay to let them deal with this hub.

    As for the rewards, he cane back at that time.

    Meanwhile, he went towards thest hub which was upied by the ThunderBolt sect. They are only four of them, but they still decided to go to the hub and try to deal with it all on their own.

    When Sam arrived near the hub, he noticed that the two people who escaped from the first hub are already here.

    The ¡¯man¡¯ from the herb garden is scanning through the group of four and said.

    "Did something weird happen to you guys?"

    The leader of the thunderbolt sect asked in return.

    "What do you mean?"

    "At the first hub, someone somehow got the Monkey warriors to go berserk and targeted us. They came after we wave after wave and finally, he made his move. We couldn¡¯t even see him, but he took down five of us.

    If it is a real battle, the body count would be huge."

    The thunderbolt sect seemed to have been surprised. But they still replied.

    "Nothing of that sorts happened. In fact, it is quite peaceful. We tried to take down the monkey warriors, but we could only handle four at a time. We feel like if we take the ten of them at once, we would be able to finish the group and no additions would happen."

    Sam looked at them, he couldn¡¯t hear their conversation, but that didn¡¯t matter. He wanted to see their performance at first, but since these two people came here, they would alert the rest of them, even if he used wave after wave of the monkey warriors.

    So, he decided to deal with them all together.

    There is no need for them to stay here anyway. But he wants to use them onest time. So, he slowly started formting a n.

    The first thing he did is take out some Grenades which also act as Landmines and started nting them in the area. He covered almost all the escape routes leaving only one. Even that one route is notpletely clean, rather they are nted in such a way so that he can use them.

    He did the work until it is evening and stopped. He went to the second hub and see how much progress they made.

    He was surprised to see that there is only one group left.

    They are making progress and by the time Sam went there, they are already making preparations to deal with thest group.

    He didn¡¯t do anything there and instead ran towards the third hub.

    Here, even though there are only six people, they still were able to deal with the first group. This is something he didn¡¯t expect.

    But that is all they are going to do.

    As they are recovering Sam appeared on the closest tree to the hub and aimed at the groups.

    There are four groups of monkey warriors.

    But before he shot, he noticed that the ¡¯man¡¯ from the herb garden is keeping a close eye on the hub. She wants to see if he wille back and the same thing will repeat all over again.

    But she doesn¡¯t know that Sam has improvised.

    He aimed at the first group and shot one of them and he didn¡¯t stop there, he moved his aim to the second group and took one of them too.

    He did the same to the remaining two groups.

    He provoked all four of them. Thirty-six monkey warriors all of them started running towards the exit of the hub.

    The ¡¯man¡¯ from the herb garden didn¡¯t know what is happening. She is looking at the hub without blinking an eye, but before she knew it, the Monkey warrior was dead. She knew that the person who yed with them at the first hub came here too, but before she could react, all she saw is the remaining three groups also raging.

    She doesn¡¯t have time to mind that guy anymore. She turned around and ran like crazy. She started yelling at the rest of the group.

    "Leave. Run. All the monkeys are on loose." She started yelling at the top of her lungs, Sam felt funny when he heard her struggling to keep the male voice.

    He didn¡¯t stop there and ran after the group, but he only used shadow transfer and shifted from tree to tree.

    As the group wanted to run in different directions and split up, he aimed the rifle and shot into one of those directions and all of a sudden.

    *BOOM*

    An explosion happened and that triggered the nearby two more grenades and the candidates who wanted to run in that direction halted in their tracks and even some monkey warriors got their sanity back which increased the trouble for these candidates.

    The same thing repeated again and again and the forest around them ispletely burning like hell.

    They only have one way left. The ¡¯man¡¯ from the herb garden and the chosen of beast faction could see that guy already came and he is trying to lead them into that way, they don¡¯t want to do that, but they couldn¡¯t stop. Because the thirty- six monkey warriors are on their tails.

    They couldn¡¯t help but feel frustrated and wanted to kill that guy to death. But they still ran in that direction.

    Sam kept on shooting from time to time as he blew the grenades that are buried as he guided them towards the second hub, where the group is battling thest group. When they heard the explosions, they are stunned. But they don¡¯t have the luxury to divide their attention.

    They could only continue the fight.

    When they saw the group of six running towards them, they are relieved. That relief onlysted for a few seconds, as they saw therge group of Monkey warriorsing towards them. Their faces paled.

    All of thembined there are only eighteen of them and the monkey warriors are forty-total which is more than two times.

    The Monkey warriors are already a pain in the asses even when they are lesser in number, but now they are outnumbered by them and to their bad luck, they are surrounded too.

    At this moment, Sam made his way towards the second hub.

    There he saw the archer of the group, still dealing with thest monkey warrior of the hub which appeared just now, he used the same way, the arrows continuously rammed until the arrowhead finally reached the brain and killed the monkey warrior.

    The archer also noticed themotion of the group and decided to check, Sam wanted to wait there and then, but at this moment, the archer suddenly nocked the arrow to the bow and shot it towards Sam¡¯s location.

    Sam didn¡¯t move from there, he aimed the rifle and shot down the arrow.

    He didn¡¯t expect that the intuition of the archer is this sharp. He probably felt his gaze and shot an arrow.

    The Archer narrowed his eyes and yelled.

    "Who are you and which power are you from?"

    Sam didn¡¯t reply, he just waited there. The other person also wasn¡¯t surprised by what Sam said. He looked towards themotion and spiritual energy gathered in his eyes.

    A frown appeared on his face. Sam looked at his actions and felt like that it is some kind of eye art. He might have seen the fight happening there.

    A suitable art for an archer. Sam thought in his mind.

    The archer looked at Sam and said.

    "You are the one responsible for this, aren¡¯t you?"

    Sam still didn¡¯t answer.

    He started loading the arrow on the bow.

    Sam also stored his rifle and took out the handguns.

    All these actions are not seen by the archer because, even though he sensed Sam, that is purely based on instincts and also because of Sam¡¯s action of shooting the arrow. But Sam is still concealed at this moment.

    As for why he changed the guns, it is simple, he cannot be seen with the rifle and there is a chance that he will be seen if the fight broke out.

    At the same time, the rifle is toorge to freely move and the time taken to shoot is higher. The handguns are the best at this moment.

    Archer aimed at Sam again and started shooting. Sam just aimed his gun at the arrows that areing towards him and took them down. It is a piece of cake.

    At this moment, Archer smirked and loaded two arrows and shot them, and followed by that he shot another two. But surprisingly the second ones are faster than the first ones and as Sam concentrated on the first pair, the second pair already reached the tree. They are not even aimed at him. As soon as the arrows impaled into the tree, the tree shook and cracked at the contact point.

    Sam revealed himself and jumped to another tree. But this time, he took the initiative to shoot. His speed is obviously higher than the other guy and it would be hard for him to keep pace with the bullets and shoot the arrows.

    So, the archer also lost his stable position as he had to dodge the bullets.

    As such, the battle between the Arrows and bullets went on.

 Chapter 413: Truce

    Sam and the archer faced each other with a series of attacks. The archer is quite skilled and he is too agile to be a normal archer. Because his attack rate is quite slower than normal and there is no way for him to beat Sam¡¯s attacking frequency at this current state.

    After all, all Sam has to do is to control his will and let the bullet load, which happens with a single thought, load the methane gas which propels the bullets and that happens with a single thought as well.

    Finally, a single pull of the trigger.

    But the archer has a physically demanding job. But with his impable agility, he was able to dodge Sam and use archery skill tounch attacks at Sam.

    In fact, Sam couldn¡¯t just shoot down all the arrows, he has to dodge at least half of the time. This is extraordinary and Sam must say, he is not as skilled in archery.

    He is skilled in many weapons and he learned most of them in his previous life, but unfortunately, he never learned archery good enough for a battle. He only learned archery for hunt. Because, in modern warfare, sadly this ancient and sophisticated art no longer has a ce.

    He was never able to face a true blue archer in his previous life. But now that he got a chance, he is extremely impressed.

    The opponent used some extremely difficult moves, which involved twisting, pulling, and bending the bow-string and some even used the weird angles of bows to shoot the arrows.

    With these tricks, the arrows always had weird trajectories, which Sam wasn¡¯t able to predict. Sam who is a control freak, who is obsessed with control of the situation is feeling a faint irritation from this.

    The arrows which are traveling in these weird trajectories are almost making their way towards his position.

    He has no choice but dodge.

    After some time, both of them halted as they hid behind thick trees. Although they are unable to make decisive moves, there is no way the battle will be okay for a long time. Sam is not even using much spiritual energy. In fact, his usage can be considered negligible.

    "Who are you, man? And what are those weird weapons you are using? They are crazily good." The guns are easy to carry and they are easy to use, but they don¡¯t have many tricks with them. For example, the weird trajectory and such, Sam couldn¡¯t do that with the bullets normally. There need to be some special circumstances and ces for that.

    Sam didn¡¯t reply, he is thinking of using energy cell bullets to see if he can deal with him easily. But the Archer¡¯s voice came again.

    "I am Arkiv. What is your name?" Sam only replied with silence.

    "Okay, it seems like you don¡¯t want to speak. Then it is okay, let us do something else. How about this? There are two buildings, you take the treasure from one and I would do from another. The group couldn¡¯t intervene at this moment anyway.

    From the looks of it, they started using their trump cards. We can just get away with it and we don¡¯t have to get in each other¡¯s ways. Are you down?"

    Sam thought for a moment and replied. "Sure."

    "Okay, then let us go inside and see what it has first."

    Both of them walked inside and first entered the weapon room.

    "I want half of those weapons. I am not giving up on that." Arkiv said as soon as they entered.

    Sam just nodded in agreement, he has too many weapons anyway. There is no need for him to bother about this.

    He is looking at the crystal and ced his hand on them. To his disappointment it is exactly the same as the one he got in the first one, in fact, there is even a notice indicating that it is useless to him.

    "If you are the same person who took down the first hub, then it is not useful for you."

    Sam looked at Akriv and probed him with a spiritual sense.

    When he noticed that there is a tattoo behind him, he nodded to himself and threw the crystal to him.

    "You can keep it. The treasure in the next building is mine."

    Arkiv looked at the crystal orb and injected his spiritual sense. He got the message and his eyes shone brightly, that is because he is excited. Maybe the excitement came from the fact that he is extremely confident that he would be going to higher dimensions and probably waiting to go there.

    But after a few seconds, he looked at Sam and asked.

    "Why did you give this away?"

    He is suspicious, and about two things, he is wondering if Sam is also a chosen one and the second suspicion is if he got the first hub¡¯s treasure map.

    "I don¡¯t think I will be able to go to another dimension anyway, even if I want to, I don¡¯t know how to. What use is it for me?"

    With those words, Sam left the room after taking his treasures, his words made Akriv lose the first suspicion, but the second suspicion is there.

    "Are you the one who took the first hub?"

    "Yes."

    "Then what did you do to the map there?"

    "I just left it there." Arkiv is dumbstruck and both of them entered the next building and once again, there is a tform and Sam got another fruit.

    But this time it is a different one.

    Sam didn¡¯t care though He stored the fruit after he listened to the instruction.

    "What fruit is that?"

    "An extremely highly potent healing fruit. It can heal all kinds of things from your body. Including curses, poisons, soul damage too."

    Arkiv was surprised, but only for a bit. He didn¡¯t say anything. Since they agreed on something, they have to stay true to their agreement.

    Sam looked at him and made his way outwards.

    He lied to Arkiv, the fruit is not as simple as a healing fruit. It is also the same as the first one. The first one is rted to the body and this one is rted to the soul. That is all there is to it.

    After they came out, Arkiv asked.

    "Do you want to raid the third hub together?" But when he turned to see, Sam is not there. He disappeared from that ce.

    He shrugged his shoulders and went to the battlefield. To his surprise, the battle is still going on. There he saw many dead bodies of the monkey warriors and then only he remembered what he saw earlier.

    Therge group of monkey warriors couldn¡¯t havee out of thin air. That means Sam already dealt with the third hub.

    He was stunned and started running towards the third hub. But how can he be as fast as Sam? Arkiv might have enough agility that could rival a closebat fighter.

    But when ites to speed of running, there is no way anyone in this ce could rival Sam.

    As for the battle near the second hub.

    Out of eighteen, only ten people left. But they still did a lot of damage to the monkey warrior group.

    Even though they are of arger number, they are still extinguished by half.

    In normal situations, this wouldn¡¯t happen, but the eighteen of them, who are elites of the major powers, have their fair share of trump cards to rely on and they are exhausting all their means to stay in thepetition.

    As the battle went on, a few of them noticed that they wouldn¡¯t be able to win. Because the true battle is not between them and the monkey warriors. The true battle is between Sam who caused the monkey warriors to chase the cultivators and caused this much damage to them.

    All of a sudden, the ¡¯man¡¯ from the herb garden looked at the chosen from the Beast faction and said.

    "Cover for me for thirty seconds. We need to escape."

    That person nodded his head and suddenly spiritual energy surged. His body seemed to have buffed a little and his eyes became ferocious.

    He swung his staff with such a force, that monkey warriors avoided dodging it at all costs.

    The ¡¯man¡¯ closed her eyes and started spreading her spiritual sense and spiritual energy all around. She is using the nts as a medium to extend the range of spiritual energy.

    All of a sudden, a vast number of vines, roots, and branches started moving towards them and suddenly, the monkey warriors who are being pushed back by the chosen of the Beast faction are all entangled. The attack doesn¡¯t have many offensive uses.

    But it can be used for arge scale entrapment.

    The whole situation turnedpletely upside for a brief moment.

    The ¡¯man¡¯ from the herb garden and the chosen one from the beast faction, didn¡¯t hesitate. They trapped ten monkey warriors to clear an opening for themselves.

    So, they simply ran away. As for why both of them teamed up instead of going for thepanions of their powers. there are none left. And at the same time, they also have some knowledge of each other since they escaped from the first hub together.

    Anyway, she needs someone to cover for her and he needs someone to make an opening. Their n is achieved.

 Chapter 414: The Great Sage

    Sam didn¡¯t know that two fish escaped the heid down. At this moment, he is in the third hub taking the rewards.

    The weapon room, once again only has the same crystal for the treasure map, this time he didn¡¯t leave it there, he took it and then stored all the weapons away.

    When he entered the next building, there is another fruit. But this has a different colour than the first two fruits.

    Of course, this haspletely different uses.

    After taking everything that he could take, Sam went back to the battle field and as soon as left the hub, Akriv arrived and when he noticed that the treasures are gone, he couldn¡¯t help but curse himself for being slow.

    By this time, Sam is already half way back to the battlefield.

    After some time, in the battle field. After the two candidates escaped, the rest of them also tried to escape the ce, but the vines let the monkey warriors go and they are besieged again.

    In fact, they were let go intentionally, because the ¡¯man¡¯ from the beast faction also noticed that this is the best chance to eliminate the whole group in a faster way. She doesn¡¯t know how many people are left to fill the five spots, but she is confident that this battle will be thest until they get to the final obstacle.

    Sam looked at the remaining candidates, by this time, the monkey warriors are not attacking crazily, they simply surrounded the remaining four candidates who are left and let them fight one on one. They are also exhausted and the monkey warriors are conserving their energy to prepare for unexpected situations.

    As for the four people, two of them are of thunder god temple and the remaining two are from the Usaine sect.

    Arman and Arthur both survived. But they are extremely exhausted.

    There are around ten more monkey warriors and the candidates are clearly in a disadvantageous position.

    "Fuck, even if I have to lose, I am taking these monkey bastards down with me." A candidate from the Usaine sect went berserk and started attacking two monkey warriors.

    He didn¡¯t care about the attacks of the monkey warriors and took them all in. He is determined to kill the two monkey warriors even if he is dead. Looking at him, the other Usaine sect candidate also went all out for one final struggle.

    Sam didn¡¯t feel a single wave of emotion. This is apetition after all. The two of them disappeared while they took four monkey warriors away.

    The remaining monkey warriors learned their lesson and didn¡¯t want to give such chance to the remaining two.

    "Shall we try and escape together?" Arthur asked Arman. A monkey warrior came in between so that both of them wouldn¡¯tmunicate, they are trying their best to not repeat the same situation.

    At this moment, when the monkey warriors were about to gang up on them, one of them who was nearest to Arman fell dead out of nowhere.

    Sam shot him straight in the eye. He didn¡¯t follow up though.

    The monkey warriors halted in their tracks and didn¡¯t know what is happening, the situation is simr to what happened before.

    They don¡¯t know who the attacker is so they decided to direct their anger at Arman and Arthur.

    But at this moment, one more Monkey warrior who is near Arman. Now only four of them left.

    They suddenly felt that they shouldn¡¯t mess with Arman, because the monkey warriors who are near Arthur didn¡¯t stop in time and attacked, but no bullet came for them.

    They suddenly had a faint idea on what is happening, so they wanted to confirm it, so the monkey warriors once again attacked, but this time only Arthur.

    They left Arman alone and no bullet came.

    They immediately targeted Arthur.

    Arthur is no idiot, he also observed the situation and looked with his eyes wide open.

    He understood that the person hidden in shadows is helping Arman, but he doesn¡¯t know why.

    "Arman, save me too? Please. We can cooperate with each other."

    Arman didn¡¯t say anything stood there. He doesn¡¯t know what to reply. He knew that someone is helping him, even though he has a faint spection on who would do so, he couldn¡¯t confirm and if his thoughts are correct, there is no way he could ask him for something.

    "I don¡¯t who it is, but he seems to have chosen me to save in random. I am really sorry Arthur." With that he ran away without looking back.

    "Whoever you are Please save me?" Arthur yelled at the top of his lungs.

    But there is no reply.

    Sam didn¡¯t care about the situation. From what he knew, there are already four people including him and Arman is the fifth person.

    As for saving Arthur, he doesn¡¯t have that close of a rtionship with him. In fact, Arthur has almost clearly drawn a line with him after their few business deals because of his enmity with the Beast faction. He doesn¡¯t want to get involved. So, Sam is also not bothered to be involved in this mess.

    Even if he wants to save him, then he has to eliminate one of the remaining candidates, the ¡¯man¡¯ from the herb garden is dangerous and slippery, the archer is a tough opponent, with all the restrictions ced on himself to hide his identity, Sam doesn¡¯t have enough confidence to finish the battle easily.

    The chosen one from the Beast faction is also tough to deal with. His defence and physical strength are quite hard to deal with.

    Arman is hisckey, so it is obligation to help him. So, there is no chance for Arthur to survive. He has to get lost even if he doesn¡¯t want.

    The battle was over soon and Sam aimed his rifle at the monkey warriors as soon as they dealt with Arthur.

    He went to the battle field and collected the spatial rings and the weapons from the dead bodies.

    As he finished storing everything, he looked towards a direction, where a bright light shot towards the sky.

    Not just him, all the five of the remaining candidates who are strayed in various ce all looked towards the light.

    At this moment, the voice which gave introductions to them, came again.

    "You guys finished faster than I thought. Only a few days, less than a week. I thought you would take at least a month to deal with the three hubs.

    But well done.

    The five candidates,e to the ce where the light is arrived, yourst test will be here."

    All five candidates immediately moved towards the light. The final test.

    They like this pce of inheritance better than the previous. At least they don¡¯t have to stay in for a month inside and the gains are more.

    Indra didn¡¯t give these many treasures.

    When they reached the centre all five of them faced each other.

    They are extremely vignt, the pir of light still didn¡¯t disappear.

    They are looking at it with curiosity.

    At this moment, Arman is looking at Sam. He is familiar with that silhouette. He has seen that silhouette, when he was awake and when he was sleep in the form of nightmares, how can a mere mask make him not recognize that.

    Sam also looked at him, but didn¡¯t say anything.

    Both of them stayed silent after that brief exchange of nces and looked at the pir of light.

    After a few seconds the lightpletely disappeared.

    There are a total of six tforms in front of them.

    One of them is in centre and the remaining five are around that.

    All of them are circr tforms.

    On the five tforms, high above in the air, somethings are floating in a spiritual energy bubble.

    Apart from that, on the six tforms, there is a monkey statue holding a staff. The one in the centre is a golden statue while the remaining five are stone statues.

    The Golden statue moved and started speaking.

    "Hello, my dear candidates, congrattions on making this far. I didn¡¯t expect that everyone who came this far will only be yers chosen by gods. I expected at least one of you would be a normal kid."

    When the statue spoke like that, everyone was stunned. They didn¡¯t expect that this guy wouldy it bare like that. It seems like their identity within themselves is not much important.

    The statue continued.

    "My name is Sun wukong. The Great Sage; Heaven¡¯s Equal." The monkey statue said proudly.

    The five of them are stunned. They didn¡¯t expect that someone would proim that he is an equal to the heaven. But Sam was even more surprised. He didn¡¯t expect that he would meet such a character.

    Even though, Sam¡¯s origins are from India, how could he not know about Sun Wukong? He is in fact very familiar with that. He did have a faint spection about this, but didn¡¯t dare to confirm.

    First Indra and now the monkey king. One who belongs to Indian Mythology and another one Chinese.

    Sam felt extremely intrigued from this development and wants to meet other gods.

 Chapter 415: Battle

    Sam and the rest of the candidates are looking at the tforms excitedly. The treasures are something they don¡¯t recognize, but they knew they are valuable.

    The golden statue looked at the candidates and said.

    "I know by this time, that asshole Indra has given you some enlightenment or something the previous time. But don¡¯t expect that from me. Okay.

    I was such a genius of my time that I don¡¯t need things like enlightenment to cultivate. Before you knew it, I was already strong enough to rival the heavens.

    So, I will not be giving you crap like that. Even if you need enlightenment, it is better if you get it yourself.

    As for what I will give. I have five tforms here and those statues are a representation of me when I am a Nascent stage cultivator.

    They will perform only the techniques I learned when I made it to the Nascent stage, any form of attack that I learned after that will not be used.

    So, that means, you guys are fighting, the actual Sun Wukong when he was a nascent stage cultivator and that too at Level-1.

    Pick a tform and defeat him, you will get the reward of that tform.

    If you are strong enough and there are still other tforms left, you can try and challenge them too provided that there are no challengers on that tform.

    After the five tforms are cleared, you get to face the final test. But for that, you have to defeat at least one opponent. If you didn¡¯t do so, there is nothing left for you here.

    If you understand what I said, then you can start."

    The five stone statues took a battle stance at the same time.

    The five candidates looked at the rewards on the five tforms. They don¡¯t know what they are. At least, not everyone. Sam is trying his best to remember every detail of the story he heard and read about the monkey king.

    He has to understand what these treasures just by looking at them.

    One of them is a scroll with a symbol of an eye on the fire. He could guess, something along the lines of the Golden eyes-fiery gaze. Of course, it wouldn¡¯t be real art. Because they are not cultivated, they just popped up for the monkey king.

    Then he looked at the next one, it is a wine gourd. Maybe, it is a type of wine.

    The other one is a peach. He doesn¡¯t know what type of peach that is, but the peach is also wrapped up in some type of energy container.

    The fourth one another scroll. In that there is a symbol of a person sitting in between fires and there is a depiction of smoke emitting from his body. Maybe a body tempering technique.

    Thest one is the hair strands. There are five of them. Sam is most interested in them. He does know something rted to the hair of Sun wukong. It can summon the clone of the monkey king himself and there are some other things as well.

    But he knew that it is not real, that is because if the real monkey king arrives, then there is no way for this world to survive, the sheer force of his sneeze will cause an apocalypse to this world. Even though they might not be real, there is no way he is going to let it go.

    He is the first one to make a move andnded on the tform with the hair strands. The rest of the candidates are puzzled, they don¡¯t know anything about the things present here. Even the chosen one from the Beast faction, the one who is chosen by the monkey king himself doesn¡¯t know anything about them.

    When Akriv looked at them for some time, he went towards the peach. As for why he didn¡¯t go for the eye art, he must have had his reasons. Sam felt that he might go for it. Even though the Golden eyes- Fiery gaze is not an ability suitable for archers, that would be the only known after he cultivated it.

    Anyway, he is not bothered much. In fact, he is relieved. Out of all people, he is worried about Akriv most. This guy might be an archer. But he is still good in the close range too.

    Ten feet in a cultivator¡¯s battle can almost be considered as hand to handbat, but he could still use his bow and arrow there.

    And the tform allows more than that distance.

    The rest of the candidates also moved. Particrly the monkey king¡¯s chosen one. He leaped towards the scroll which has the person sitting in the middle of mes.

    Sam took out the staff and got into a battle chance. The monkey king¡¯s stone statue looked at him with an expression of natural confidence. It is as if the whole world cannot defeat him and the heavens are beneath him.

    Particrly, when he saw the stance, even the golden statue started looking at him.

    Sam made the first move. He swung the staff from the side to hit the statue on the left side of the face, but the body bent backward in an extremely unnatural angle and the statue backflipped. Then he whipped the staff towards Sam.

    Sam who is an expert in battle, felt like it is the first time, he couldn¡¯t read the opponent¡¯s moves. They are unconventional. They don¡¯t have any form of rhythm.

    Sam started feeling the pressure. As he was attacking, he started using the wind elemental energy with his attacks and there are sharp tail wind des that are attacking the statue.

    There are some small scars appearing on the surface of the statue.

    Sam is already sweating, but after exchanging more than twenty moves, the statue somersaulted and smashed the staff in Sam¡¯s chest.

    He was flung away and crashed into the ground.

    Sam lost.

    Then only he noticed the others, and they are already down even before him and are already halfway through healing their wounds.

    Seeing that they are not concentrating on him, Sam started using his light element to heal himself. he doesn¡¯t want to waste time with the digestion of pills.

    He closed his eyes as he healed and started recollecting all the information he has from the previous fight.

    The monkey king is more of a monkey than the warrior when he is at the Nascent stage, that is what Sam understood from those moves. It is not following any form of style of stance. The statue is behaving the same as a monkey.

    Unpredictable is the only word that could be used to describe that fighting style.

    After healing himself, he walked up to the tform once again. But this time, there is some other reaction from his body.

    Sam started sending all his spiritual energy to his muscr fibers.

    His body is enveloped with spiritual energy. His body seemed to have buffed up a little and the skin under his robes tightened.

    Sam decided that this is the best time to utilize the results of the body refinement.

    Due to his body cultivation, the natural strength, defense, endurance, and stamina of his body improved greatly and his physical attacks are stronger than normal, but the real prowess of the body temperinges, when the muscles are fed with the spiritual energy.

    This is the best physical form of his body.

    At this moment, due to his disguise, Sam couldn¡¯t use his other elements and weapons, so he has to find a way to deal with them and the physical attacks are the mostmon things and are easy to cover up.

    Sam¡¯s body is emitting a dangerous aura. At this moment, the spiritual energy around his body is being repelled due to the force emitted by the body.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother to use any form of elemental powers.

    He took his battle stance and swung his staff straight at the statue¡¯s head. The statue¡¯s eyes turned mischievous and nted its head to the side to avoid hitting its head and used its staff to block the blow fromnding on its body.

    But as soon as both the staves collided, there is arge spiritual energy outburst. The spiritual energy at the contact point was sted away and cracks appeared on the ground below the statue¡¯s feet.

    For the first time in the fight, the expression of the stone statue and the expression of the golden statue turned serious.

    Sam resorted to the most straightforward way to counter the unpredictability of the statue. The brute force.

    With his skill, Sam was able tond at least a few hits in the first bout. So there is no way he would lose.

    The exchange began and every time, the statue blocked Sam¡¯s hits, the whole body of the statue started trembling.

    Sam¡¯s moves are fast, precise, and most importantly tyrannical. Every move he is making is driving the spiritual force away.

    After a few exchanges, the monkey king statue back down and suddenly opened its arm and blew on it.

    A lot of sand appeared on the palm out of nowhere and the vision is blocked for a second.

    The statue isughing his heart out at its trick.

    But Sam didn¡¯t bother, he held the staff in his left hand and punched with his right hand in full force.

    Half of the sand cloud cleared away with just one punch. The force of a punch is almost like an explosion.

    As he hit a few times, the sand cloud disappeared and then lunged forward as he swung the staff on the statue. The statue was caught off guard due to the surprise from the punch.

    As for why Sam threw punches instead of staff, which is the question the rest of the candidates who are watching the scene are all wondering. They knew the answer.

    As Samnded the hit on the statue¡¯s head. Even before the point of contact, they could hear a cracking sound from the staff. It couldn¡¯t take the energy and force from Sam¡¯s attacks.

    Sam doesn¡¯t want to waste the staff away withoutnding a proper hit.

    And the proper hit it is.

    Even though the statue reacted in time to block with the staff, it broke apart and Sam¡¯s staffnded straight on its left shoulder and

    *BOOM*

 Chapter 416: Against the Monkey King

    Sam¡¯s staff left a deep crack on the statue. The upper half of the statue was almostpletely riddled with cracks and there is a hole on the contact point.

    Sam¡¯s staff waspletely broken, the metallic staff almost broke like a rotten wooden stick.

    Sam didn¡¯t halt his attacks there. He stepped forward and then held the broken staff tightly before stabbing the broken side straight into the hole that was created by the hit.

    The stone pieces flew to the back of the statue and the statue copsed.

    Sam took a step back and he is panting.

    He exhausted a lot of spiritual energy. His main aim when cultivating the body refinement is to improve his defense. Not for the attacking purposes. But it sure dide in handy when needed.

    Sam jumped high into the air and grabbed the spiritual energy bubble. As soon as he touched it, the bubble disappeared and he caught the five strands of hair in his hand. He threw them straight into the divine dimension without a second thought.

    After dealing with that, he stepped down the stage.

    He didn¡¯t deactivate his body transformation. Rather he ced a space jade in his mouth and started absorbing spiritual energy continuously.

    Even though he won, he too some injuries. But this time, he couldn¡¯t heal directly. The rest of the candidates are watching him cautiously.

    Sam felt his internal organs are shaking. This is the shock from the staff hit hended just before it was broken.

    He sat cross-legged and stabilized himself. He stayed like that for a few seconds and after noticing that others are still looking at him. He frowned in displeasure and took out a pill. He has tons of pills that he got from the Old one. There are even healing pills that can heal Consummate realm cultivators.

    Some lower-level cultivators might even die just by taking such a healing pill.

    Sam started digesting his pill.

    In his mind, he was thinking that he should beat the crap out of these people when he got the chance. Because of them, he has to take these disgusting pills. In his opinion not only, they are bitter and tasted awful, they don¡¯t do any justice for the precious herbs that were put into them.

    In fact, he preferred the dishes that were cooked with those herbs over pills. That is why he wouldn¡¯t take them unless it is an emergency or absolutely necessary. But because of these guys, Sam had to take these pills.

    His anger can be felt from his aura and Arman further confirmed that it has to be Sam.

    Because only he would have such a reaction when taking pills. And how did he know about that? That is not a pleasant thing to remember as Sam beat the crap out of him because he saw him taking pills in one of their sessions.

    He kind of understand why Sam has such a reaction when he linked the disguise and not using other elemental powers.

    He felt like it is not going to be good for the rest of them.

    Sam opened his eyes and walked towards the next tform. The eye technique scroll.

    Sam didn¡¯t cultivate any form of eye techniques and from what he knew the original Golden Gaze-fiery eyes could see through good and evil, hidden things, thoughts, and many other things. So, he figured that this lesser version might be simr to the original even if it is not as powerful.

    The person near the eye technique scroll is actually Arman himself. He picked that because there is nothing left for him to take.

    When Sam is near him, he secretly gestured him to target the next one the tform which has wine gourd.

    At this moment, the ¡¯man¡¯ from the herb garden is still healing herself and the tform for wine gourd is already empty.

    "Just go for it. Don¡¯t preserve anything." He whispered and dropped a space jade at his feet.

    Arman picked it up without raising any suspicions.

    And entered his spiritual sense into it only to see the lightning saber inside.

    This is the same saber that waspletely subdued by Sam. But since Sam is giving him permission and the spirit is sentient and also familiar with Arman, he can use it. But the full prowess of the de couldn¡¯t be shown.

    Arman is still satisfied.

    Next time, he entered the one with the gourd of wine and took out the saber. He started concentrating his energy on the de and arge lightning saber was formed. With a single sh, Arman made a devastating attack.

    This time, at least the monkey statue didn¡¯t understand what he was really doing and waited. Unlike Sam who held his hand directly in its ce not letting him attack at all.

    The fight was almost over after that attack. The statue became extremely weak and Arman started squeezing his energy reservoir dry.

    The battle is bloody at least, Arman is soaked in blood while the statue was filled with cracks.

    Slowly, Arman was able to grab the victory and the winended in her hands. The ¡¯man¡¯ from the herb garden is speechless. She didn¡¯t think that her tform was the first one to be targeted.

    Sam nodded at Arman¡¯s performance and climbed up on the next tform. He took out another staff and spiritual energy roared around him.

    The same scenario almost repeated. Except for this time, as soon as Sam broke the statue¡¯s staff and stabbed the piece of staff inside, he felt a piercing pain in the left abdomen.

    The statue also stabbed him back.

    But Sam didn¡¯t let go. He just went through with offense,pletely ignoring the pain he is feeling.

    After the fight is over, he took down the reward and stored it in his storage.

    He came down and leaned his back against the nearby tree.

    He lifted his shirt up to see what the damage is like. There is something wrong with the wound. He could feel that the staff didn¡¯t just pass through him. It was stabbed diagonally upwards and it hit the rib.

    Both the rib and the staff broke. The stone fragments of the staff were stuck inside and some of them even pierced his lungs.

    He took off his shirtpletely. When the candidates saw the scars on his body, they felt chills all over.

    Sam¡¯s body looks perfectly sculpted, any warrior will have a great body like that of course, all of their bodies are not aesthetically pleasing, but Sam¡¯s bone structure makes him look great.

    But those scars are like the art of a crazy person who wanted to ruin the look of the body and failed. All that gave him is the scarily handsome look. The men are jealous except for one ¡¯man¡¯ though.

    But when they thought of the battles that they have to go through to get what Sam got on his body, they abandoned the ideas.

    The watched keenly on what Sam is doing.

    To their surprise, he didn¡¯t hesitate before pulling the staff out like its nothing, his eyes are still cold and unfeeling. No one saw a hint of pain from it.

    When they saw the staff¡¯s edge, then only they understood that the injury is more than what they thought.

    Arkiv who got acquainted with Sam previously stepped forward to see if he can help. But as he neared Sam, he got a dangerous feeling creeping down his spine. He felt that if he took one more step, he would be dead.

    At this moment, Sam is emitting the killing intent and if they really dide here, he might kill them.

    He is pissed off because he was injured this badly.

    After all, if not for the fact that he had to maintain the disguise, he wouldn¡¯t have to worry about using all the attacks in his arsenal. He is confident that he could defeat the statue without taking this bad of an injury.

    He is pissed at the major powers. If the major powers stopped being nosy and minded their own businesses, he would havee into the Pce of inheritances without a care in the world.

    But now, he has to disguise so that the war wouldn¡¯t start prematurely. If the Beast faction is implicated because of him, he would have to intervene.

    Sam shook his head to clear these thoughts off his mind.

    He took out a dagger from his storage and started cutting the wound. He made arge incision. It would fit his whole palm without any problem.

    He cut the flesh and ced his palm inside. When it brushed past the internal organs, he felt a soul-searing pain, but he made sure that he has as little contact as possible.

    He reached the lowest part of the lung, where the shards of the stone staff are punctured in.

    He delicately held one of the shards and plucked it out. He felt like the air waspletely pumped out of his lungs forcefully.

 Chapter 417: Against the Monkey King II

    Sam picked out on shard after another until it waspletely done. The next step was healing. But when he looked at the people around him, he really wanted to beat the crap out of them. They could have just minded their own business.

    Why would they want to look at him all the time?

    There is no need for them to continuously observe him. Ge gritted his teeth and took out a formation disc. A concealing formation appeared around him. He then started cleaning up the wound and the internal organs, his palm is not the cleanest of all things, he has to be careful.

    He took out any possible impurities with his spiritual energy and started healing himself. The light elemental energy enveloped the wound and slowly recuperated. He didn¡¯t bother taking pills, he just took out an energy cell of light element and stood there weakly.

    Hepletely unclenched his muscles and rxed as he took small low breaths.

    After healing the lung and other internal organs along with the bone crack the rib suffered, he started healing the flesh.

    Just like every time, he left the scar.

    After healing himself, he took back the formation disc and started eating some food. This is made by Mackey. Sam got used to his food and decided that he would bring the food wherever he went. Anyway, the food will not lose its heat, in the spatial ring.

    The others looked at him with a dumbfounded expression. They didn¡¯t expect that he would just eat a meal that casually.

    It is almost as if he didn¡¯t care about the injury. They don¡¯t know what he did behind the concealment formation.

    But they do know that he didn¡¯t stay for a long time, behind the formation and there are not many things that could be done in such a short amount of time.

    Sam looked at the remaining tforms and saw that the candidates are still looking at him without fighting the statues.

    There are only two statues left and there are three candidates.

    Sam then looked at the treasures that are floating on them. One of them is a peach and another one is the scroll of the body tempering.

    When they noticed Sam¡¯s gaze the candidates suddenly came to their senses, they realized that if they don¡¯t take the chance immediately, Sam might take the treasures away. Then they wouldn¡¯t be able to fathom the regret they would have to swallow.

    Arkiv is the first one to make a move.

    He didn¡¯t hold back any longer. He knew that he couldn¡¯t get past the stone statue if he was still like this. From what the golden statue said, he knew that all of them are of the same kind. They are chosen ones, the people who got second chances from the gods.

    There is no way they don¡¯t have trump cards.

    When he saw this, the chosen from the beast faction also leaped on to the stage, the ¡¯man¡¯ from the herb garden who is observing Sam the most, didn¡¯t react fast enough and missed the chance.

    She knew that she lost the opportunity topete further.

    These candidates wouldn¡¯t just give up anymore. If they did, then it wouldn¡¯t be her ce to get the treasures, Sam would take them no problem.

    Both the candidates on the tform seem like they have gone berserk. They used their most powerful attack without any reservation, but still, it became a bloody battle instead of a clean sweep.

    The monkey statues are only lost because of their stone bodies. If they are really made of flesh and blood of the monkey king, they could dream of defeating him even on the same level.

    They might be geniuses, but even they are notparable to the Monkey king.

    Even Sam, who is well versed in a myriad of arts wouldn¡¯t think he is better than Sun Wukong.

    After the five battles are over, everyone is in a ragged state, the ¡¯man¡¯ from the herb faction is in the best shape. But she doesn¡¯t have further qualifications to take part in the final test.

    As for the remaining people, Arman decided to withdraw from the test.

    It almost cost his arm and a leg to deal with the statue, the final test wouldn¡¯t be simple. Anyway, with Sam here, he wouldn¡¯t dare topete and humiliate himself further.

    The man from the beast faction chose to take it, while Akriv was hesitant.

    The five tforms disappeared into thin air and the Monkey King said.

    "Okay now, the final test is to fight me. I will be using a special technique and you have to fight me. If you arepetent enough then you can even learn this. In fact, I am doing it so that you can learn it.

    Even if you don¡¯t learn it, if you can beat me, you can get the final prize.

    Since all of you are here, I am feeling extremely generous today. If you three of you manage to defeat me. Then I will reward all three of you in the same way. But if none of you defeat me within the next few days and decides to give up, then I will not give any reward and after all three of you gave up. I will let you all leave."

    The chosen from the beast faction was the first one to climb the tform. He doesn¡¯t want to give the chance to Sam or Arkiv.

    If by chance they seeded, then he would regret it.

    At this moment, several lines appeared on the Golden statue as it turned translucent.

    All these lines looked like the muscr fibers and the meridianwork of the body. They could see the energy flow that is going through his body.

    He is showing the energy flow of the technique that he is using so that the candidates could learn it.

    In fact, the energy cirction is also not extremely different, Sam could see that this is somewhat simr to the physical state he was in previously.

    The spiritual energy is spreading through the meridianwork at the same time, the muscles are also being used as a medium.

    The muscr lines contracted a bit and they felt as if the whole statue has be leaner. The energy cirction is mostly uniform.

    The monkey king didn¡¯t use the staff. He struck the staff into the tform making it stand straight.

    He then threw a casual punch.

    The candidates could see the spiritual energy movement over the meridianwork and the muscle fibers.

    The spiritual energy moved in waves and at the point where the punch struck there is a small energy explosion, the energy explosion doesn¡¯t have any sound because as soon as the energy exploded, there is a certain vacuum created on that spot and the surrounding spiritual energy hurriedly tried to upy it.

    And due to the overflowing of energy into a single spot, the energy collided and created a force. Everything in the surroundings showed a reaction. Sam who is below the tform could also feel the might of the punch. The spiritual energy in the atmosphere is in turmoil and the wind also sted on his face.

    As for the chosen from the beast faction, he tried his best to defend from the force but he was still blown back and was almost out of the tform.

    "I call this the Void technique. Looks great right. That is the best technique in the world. It can be used in all forms of techniques as long as it involves physical attack." The monkey continued exining and picked up the staff.

    He swung the staff and they could see the spiritual energy passing through the staff. Once again the body¡¯s muscle fibers started making the same type of energy waves. And they noticed that the longer the wave, which means the more area of the body is covered the stronger the force would be.

    The waves started passing through the staff and he struck the staff in the air.

    The air suddenly roiled, the spiritual energy is in chaos. This is almost as good as destabilizing a spiritual stone.

    This is what Sam thought after he looked at the attack.

    The chosen from the beast faction couldn¡¯t handle the force and fell from the tform. It is hard to even take the forceing after the attack ispleted. One should wonder what it would be like to take the hit directly.

    The Monkey king looked at the candidates and said.

    "This is just the force of Nascent stage cultivator. Imagine if you were to be a Consummate realm cultivator and attack someone. What would happen?

    Imagine if you are a cultivator of a higher level and fought like that?

    Of course, there are some drawbacks. The spiritual energy consumption is high. There is no such thing as a free meal.

    If you guys master this technique, I don¡¯t think you have to worry about energy consumption though. All you would need is a single clean hit anyway."

 Chapter 418: Against the Monkey King III

    Sam felt like going up, but Arkiv beat him to it.

    "Great sage, you said any form of attack would work with this technique as long as it is physical, how about archery then?"

    Arkiv asked humbly. His tone is full of respect.

    "Of course, archery is also useful. Let me show you." The Monkey King seemed to have enjoyed someone calling his Great Sage. After all, from what Sam knew this is his self-proimed title. Maybe no one calls with that. After all with his strong temper, it is already great that no one is calling him rogue and such, the Sage is really not a fitting title to him.

    The statue took the bow and arrow and started channeling his energy once again. At this moment, they noticed that as the energy formed waves in the arrow and the bow, the link with the energy in the body was cut off.

    Unlike the time, he used the staff, the energy wave in the body and the staff are all a single cycle, but now, they are both having individual cycles.

    After he trapped the energy within the arrow and formed the energy wave, he let the arrow go.

    The arrownded right at the feet of Arkiiv and he was sted off from the tform, straight towards a nearby tree.

    Sam looked at him and tempted to go up. He knew that he wouldn¡¯t be able to stand a chance. This situation is the epitome of the scenario when the strengths are equal the skill reigns supreme.

    He¡¯s quite confident that even his body and elements might not be of equal level to that of the monkey king¡¯s constitution.

    But he is sure that he is not far off. But the monkey king¡¯s skills are something is far off from.

    Sam always used basic skills, he didn¡¯t like shy moves, he always used the simplest moves to the maximum advantage.

    In fact, this move is also a simple move. It doesn¡¯t have any fancy hand signs and shyrge moves. This all depends on the energy flow.

    He held the staff tightly and said.

    He slightly bowed in respect to the monkey king. This is his respect for a person who is willing to teach such a precious technique to them without any prejudice.

    Sam knew that there is something going on between gods and the twelve candidates that came are not going to have an amicable rtionship. At least, they are going to have some rivalry. These gods chose these candidates as yers in their stead and they can just teach to their own candidates.

    No one would me him. In fact, Indra did just the same. He personally didn¡¯t even talk to anyone except Arman himself.

    But the monkey king is different. Maybe this magnanimity is what makes him worthy of Sage¡¯s title. When Sam thought of this, he chuckled to himself on how he is contradicting his own thoughts.

    He said to the Monkey King.

    "Great Sage, I would like you to create a barrier around us. I don¡¯t want to reveal my skills to anyone due to some personal reasons."

    The monkey king thought for a moment and nodded. There was a barrier around them and Sam took off his cloth that is covering his face.

    He held the staff in his hands and his whole body buffed up a bit, the spiritual energy waspletely roaring around his body.

    But this time, it is not normal spiritual energy, it has fire elemental energy mixed in the temperature within the barrier increased.

    "Your technique is good, but the spiritual energy is too violent and making the muscle fibers to have some space between themselves, they are not quite close and a lot of strength is being lost, you might want to rectify that."

    The Monkey said, Sam nodded.

    He made his attack and the monkey actually let him. When the staff shed with other¡¯s staff, the fire elemental energy exploded and golden mes sted at the contact point.

    The Monkey king raised his eyebrows as he was a bit amused, that he is because he noticed that the attack is not finished, the tailwind of the strike is still acting and it made the me sharper and more ferocious at the same time.

    Sam wanted to test his own prowess at this moment. He wanted to see how he will reign in front of a supreme existence like the monkey king himself. The one who is arrogant enough to im himself to be Heaven¡¯s equal, how magnificent would he be?

    He wanted to see how he couldpare to him.

    After Sam¡¯s first hit, he quickly made the second one, he didn¡¯t dare dy much. But the monkey king is no pushover and he didn¡¯t stand there just to take a beating.

    He made a move and the energy waves made Sam extremely cautious, his hair stood at the end and he immediately kicked the ground hard, there is a crack in the tform and with that force, he jumped to the side.

    When the staff move of the statue was finished, a huge force went and hit the barrier. Sam felt his heart shudder. He didn¡¯t expect that he would feel this scared when he is this close.

    The attacks starteding at him continuously, Sam didn¡¯t dare be careless and moved like crazy.

    He started kicking the tform so that he could use the force to dodge. He didn¡¯t want to block the attack.

    After a few hits, the aura around him suddenly changed and all of the purple mist seeped out of the staff¡¯s edge.

    He mmed the staff into the Monkey king. He is using poison. He doesn¡¯t know if it works on the statue but the answer came.

    The Monkey King took a step back and shook his head.

    "Hydra¡¯s Poison. Not bad. The Gambler¡¯s candidate is as resourceful as him." He praised Sam. One could see that the dazzling light of the monkey king dimmed a bit.

    As the body is translucent Sam could see the poison mist which seeped inside do its job. The monkey king didn¡¯t y dirty. He made sure that things like poison will have the same effect on the statue as they would have on fleshly beings.

    But Sam was surprised to see the next development. The whole poison which was seeping into the muscles suddenly started moving along with the energy waves.

    When the monkey attacked one more time, the poison came out along with the spiritual energy.

    This is the amount of control that the Monkey King has over his body and spiritual energy. He can contain the most potent poison in his body without letting it affect him much and expel it as he wished.

    This is the epitome of control.

    Sam became incredibly vignt, he dodged the attack by hair¡¯s breadth andnded another hit on the monkey king, but this time, it didn¡¯tnd cause external damage, because what Sam used is water elemental energy and his main aim is to disrupt the energy flow.

    Since the effects on the statue are the same as fleshly beings, Sam used the water element to send tremors through the blood in the body.

    The Monkey King stumbled for the first time.

    Sam didn¡¯t want to miss this opportunity.

    Suddenly two types of auras raged around his body. One of them is silver in color and the other one is ck in color. Sam¡¯s silver lightning is raging all over his body. Out of all his elements, the lightning element has the most destructive raw power.

    He disappeared from the ce with the shadow sh and appeared right behind the monkey king, who is stabilizing his blood cirction.

    Sam¡¯s staff was brimming with energy and as hended his hit squarely on the back, he also felt a extremely powerful blownding on him.

    Then only he noticed that the monkey king already made his move and the elbow was emitting the same energy waves.

    Sam took such an attack squarely.

    Both of them flew to opposite sides and Sam hit the barriers quite strongly.

    The monkey king also fell down. But he stood up immediately.

    Sam couldn¡¯t do anything, he sat up with difficulty and once again started covering his face. The robes on his body were tattered.

    The barrier disappeared and Sam walked down. The spectators are stunned by his state.

    They didn¡¯t expect that the battle is so fierce. They did hear some sounds, but they all thought that most of it are caused by the monkey king himself.

    Then they saw the monkey king¡¯s statue and the dazzling light covering it is a lot dimmer and it is gradually increasing as if recovering.

    This is what shocked him even more.

    They weren¡¯t even able to dodge the attacks.

    But Sam seemed to have done more than just dodge.

    Sam walked down and leaned against the tree.

    Then only they saw the gaping wound on his right abdomen. That is where the elbownded.

    They could see that his flesh almost burst apart and they could faintly see the ribcage.

    They couldn¡¯t imagine the hit that he took.

    They want to see his face all of a sudden.

    Sam didn¡¯t care about them and took his concealing formation disc once again.

 Chapter 419: Against the Monkey King IV

    Sam set the barrier and took off his face cover again.

    He is gasping for breath; he doesn¡¯t want to cover his nose at this moment.

    He started coughing and blood spewed out of his mouth. His internal organs are shivering and he could see a rib piercing out of his body.

    He didn¡¯t take this much of beating in quite some time. His whole body is shaking and he has yet to stabilize the spiritual energy wreaking havoc in his body.

    He took that Void elbow directly. Sam finally understood the true horror of the attack.

    It is not just the vacuum explosion or the sudden injection of atmospheric spiritual energy gathering and colliding at this spot. Rather the vacuum is sucking the spiritual energy from the body itself.

    The spiritual energy of his own body caused this much damage to his body. Sam felt like dying. This one true vicious style of fighting he must say.

    Sam wondered how it would turn out if the energy used is not normal spiritual energy and elemental energy instead.

    He doesn¡¯t want to find that out at this moment at least not on himself.

    Sam took out some herbs from the divine dimension and started extracting their juice. It is a herbal gas that is used to deal with impurities and has a faint cooling effect. He didn¡¯t want to ce his hand inside the wound again. At least not immediately.

    After crushing the juice and pouring it all over, he felt the burning sensation was gone and he is feeling slightly numb. Then he took out an energy cell and ced it on hisp. This is of light element. He first absorbed some energy to replenish his reservoir. After that, he covered his hand with the light elemental energy and held the broken rib which was in a disced weird position.

    He gritted his teeth and started adjusting the rib and cing it normally. He doesn¡¯t have enough energy to heal the bone anew.

    First, he started healing the lung that was perforated and then healed the rib carefully. After the bone was healed, he started healing the injury slowly. This time too he left the st mark on that ce.

    It might be ugly to look at, but he doesn¡¯t want to lose the remainder.

    These scars will show him how much pain there would be if he gets injured again.

    After healing the injury, Sam started eating another meal. He wanted to replenish his blood loss. But as he took a bite, Sam suddenly felt something and frowned.

    He hurriedly grabbed the cloth to cover his face and then closed his eyes once again. He started using dark elemental energy and he disappeared from his spot all of a sudden.

    He reappeared right behind the ¡¯man¡¯ of the herb garden and held her in a chokehold with the dagger in his hand pointing into her ear. One stab and he is sure that he can slice the brain in half.

    The ¡¯man¡¯ from the herb garden couldn¡¯t help but shudder and the cold killing intent Sam is emitting.

    "There are some things that are not meant to be seen." Sam¡¯s words are extremely dangerous and cold. She felt her legs go weak all of a sudden.

    She felt like she is paying too much of a price for a small thing.

    After all, she only got curious about what Sam is doing and wanted to peek a bit. Who wouldn¡¯t be curious when someone is trying to even use concealing formation? And from what she saw earlier, Sam even healed himself to his top condition after using the concealing formation.

    She just wanted to see what he is doing.

    That is why she used her ability to extend her spiritual senses with the help of the grass within the concealing formation.

    But to her dismay, Sam noticed as soon as her spiritual sense entered and retaliated before she could see anything. All she was are the scars and the tattoo on his back indicating he is a chosen one.

    And that is not a secret from what Monkey said at the beginning of the final tests. She felt like Sam is overreacting.

    Arman was also surprised.

    "Let me go. I apologize."

    "Apology. If every offense can be forgiven just for the apologies, do you think there is a need for cultivation in this world? Half of the cultivators in this would lose their motivation to cultivate.

    Anyway, since you also have something that you don¡¯t want to show, how can you just watch other¡¯s secrets?

    Here I am being a good human being by not letting out your secret and yet you are trying to vite mine."

    Sam said as if he is saying nothing wrong.

    "What did you see?" Sam asked as he concentrated on her breath and heartbeat. He wanted to see if she is lying.

    "I don¡¯t have time to see your face. I only got to see your scars and tattoo. You reacted too fast." She said. Sam found no signs of lying, but he is still a bit suspicious. He slowly released her from his grip and said.

    "I don¡¯t care if you saw me or not. If my secret is out after we leave this pce, I only have you as my suspect. I woulde for you and take your life myself."

    With that, he went back to his formation.

    The Monkey king heard the whole thing and was a bit amused.

    Sam healed himself and went back onto the stage, the remaining candidates already lost twice already.

    They don¡¯t want to give up that early though. They still want to put up a fight.

    They are trying so hard to replicate the technique.

    Sam closed his eyes before he climbed the tform. He wanted to memorize the energy wave when the monkey king attacked.

    He is confident that once he could get the hang and rhythm of the energy waves, he can replicate the attack. Because he has an inherent advantagepared to others. His spiritual core abilities, observe and manipte.

    He is confident that if he can use the manipte ability and observe the ability to make sure that he is following the correct flow, he can replicate the attack.

    He didn¡¯t use this staff at this moment. He wanted to try fists first before he could go to staff.

    He once again fed his spiritual energy to his muscles and remembered the monkey king¡¯s words from earlier and tried to contract the muscle fibers together so that they have much more collective strength.

    His body is not as buff as before. The monkey king raised an eyebrow. He waved his hand and raised a barrier and said.

    "What are you so afraid of? Trying so hard to hide like that. Who are you trying to hide from?"

    The monkey king asked him.

    "I am not as talented as you Monkey king. Not everyone can teach jade emperor a lesson whenever they want. I am not as talented as you, so to protect myself, I have to stay low profile."

    The Monkey King is surprised for a second and said.

    "So you are originally from the earth. Huh. You must have some serious talents for the gambler to consider to take you from that ce. After all, the spiritual energy of that ce is dried up."

    "You have to see that for yourself."

    Sam said with a smile and made his move.

    This time, he closed his eyes and started to get a feel for the spiritual energy as it passed through the muscles, monkey king, who is standing in front of him didn¡¯t make a move immediately. Sam is trying to use Void style. He wants to see what is going to happen.

    Sam started manipting spiritual energy. His mental strength is taking a toll due to this. But he endured it. After continuous usage, his body and brain will get used to this and he wouldn¡¯t have to use maniption to forcefully do this.

    Then he doesn¡¯t have to endure this stress.

    As Sam let the energy flow, she started to get a feel of what is happening in his body and threw a punch straight at the monkey king.

    *BOOM*

    An intense explosion sounded and Sam felt an excruciating pain in his hand. He opened his eyes only to see that the monkey king has slid back a little. But his arm which is still extended was torn. All the muscle fibers were torn open and they are bleeding, he can even see the bones of the fingers as the skinpletely disappeared.

    Sam didn¡¯t shout, but gritted his teeth and endured all of it. The Monkey king rxed, but at this moment, Sam made his move, he jumped in and threw his left hand. He connected directly as he caught the opponent off guard.

    *BOOM* an explosion urred and Sam first time saw a crack on the golden statue.

    But the crack is so minute that it didn¡¯t take even a minute to heal.

    "So, you can bleed too?" Sam said with a smile. His left hand was also wasted, but he is more ecstatic that he was able tond a hit on the monkey king and cause some damage.

    The Monkey King looked at him and said. "Maybe if it was my true body when I was nascent, then I should probably have bled for real."

    Sam shook his head and went down the tform after the barrier was taken down.

    Everyone was stunned once again.

    Sam¡¯s two hands are hanging down with blood. He left two trails of blood when he went back to the tree.

    Then they looked at the monkey king who is still looking at Sam with a curious expression.

 Chapter 420: Knock out

    The next two weeks went by and all these days, candidates didn¡¯t give up at all.

    They are trying to replicate the void technique. They are trying so hard actually.

    But unfortunately, there is not much progress. After all, it would be hard for them to suddenly gain this much control in such a short period of time.

    The major powers although powerful, only teach their disciples in the conventional ways and ording to them, the bigger the spell, the bigger the technique, the more damage it does, the better it is. They generally, wouldn¡¯t ount for the disadvantages and bacsh of the technique.

    So, these candidates although chosen didn¡¯t get their training from God¡¯s themselves, they are only trained in these major powers and in the same ways.

    They will learn the importance of control and efficiency of the spell or a technique when they truly meet a person who is a suitable rival.

    They will only learn this the hard way when they experience what a second of time makes the difference in a cutthroat battle.

    But they are still far from that. Sam is the only one who has at least some experience in this field. All his techniques are based on efficiency which relies on the control of his energy.

    But even he has extreme difficulty in controlling this.

    He has sted his limbs many times due to theck of control.

    And for some reason, Monkey king is talking to him in a friendly way as the days passed.

    As for the ¡¯man¡¯ from the herb garden and Arman, they are just cultivating calmly. They don¡¯t have anything to do here. They are extremely calm and utilizing this environment to improve their cultivation.

    As they are not qualified for the final test, they couldn¡¯t see the energy flow in the body of the statue no matter how much they tried, so they gave up.

    Now, at this moment, Sam is setting back the bones in his palm. The fingers are all distorted in weird angles.

    His expression is still so calm as if he is fixing someone else¡¯s bones and not his.

    This time, the damage is not just because of the void technique, rather his punch and the monkey king¡¯s punch collided straight and his body is obviously not as strong and the monkey king¡¯s void punch is the better one withplete technique.

    So, naturally, he lost.

    But he is getting a hang of this. He could find a way to draw with the monkey king, if not defeat him. Of course, if a special situation arises, he could even win, the probability is less than two percent though.

    After healing himself, he started meditating. Out of all people, he is the one who has taken the most damage.

    The rest of them didn¡¯t get so close to the Monkey king. The chosen one from the beast faction is the only one who damaged his leg and the staff and stayed put for four days.

    Sam is the only one who is constantly fighting back, he has fought three battles a day. Continuously, healing and destroying his body. At some point, he even stopped wearing the upper robe.

    After all, for every battle, it is being torn into shreds.

    Sam is the only one who has significant progress in the technique.

    After some time, Sam came out of his formation and made his way towards the stage.

    He held the staff in his hands and stood ramrod straight in front of the Monkey king. The Monkey king created the barrier around the tform and looked at Sam.

    "So, are you confident in doing it this time?" He is asking about defeating him. Sam¡¯s expression is serious and he said in a low voice.

    "No."

    Sam started channeling the energy wave and is ready to make the move, this time the energy is being channeled into the staff. He kicked off the ground as he leaped towards the Monkey king.

    He spun the staff around his head and aimed it straight at the head of the monkey king.

    Thetter didn¡¯t move immediately. He just smiled and moved his head to the side and ced the staff on his shoulder.

    He also channeled his energy and just moved the staff a bit upwards. Both the staves collided and Sam¡¯s body took the most damage. The recoil of the attack is making his arms tremble and a cut appeared on his right palm, making him bleed.

    The monkey king pushed the staff upwards one more time, wanting to push Sam away, but at this moment, his eyes shed in surprise. Because Sam held both the staves in ce and used the shoulder of the statue as his support and swung his high up into the air.

    The Monkey King was surprised and wasn¡¯t able to react in time.

    Before he could react, Sam is already making his. He kicked straight at the chest of the monkey king with his two legs.

    The energy wave of the attack this time has covered the whole body and the impact is actually huge.

    The kicknded squarely on the chest and Monkey king flew backward. Sam¡¯s legs are bleeding, the muscle fibers are torn apart. But he didn¡¯t stop at all.

    As the monkey king is flying towards the barrier, Sam held his own staff and started channeling the energy.

    He lunged forward and swung the staff with all his might.

    He hit the monkey king in the abdomen with the staff and he could see the cracks that appeared on the chest and abdomen.

    The Staff was broken and only a small piece of the metal rod was left in Sam¡¯s hands. But at this moment, both his hands are torn and bleeding.

    But he didn¡¯t halt at that. He stood there and channeled his energy into the small piece of the metal rod.

    He didn¡¯t go for the closebat. Rather, he is trying for a ranged attack. It is the same as the arrow the monkey shot.

    The metal rod tore through the air and stabbed itself into the chest of the monkey king.

    The three consecutive spiritual energy explosions happened in a mere second. Sam moved extremely fast and extremely decisively.

    The Monkey king flew in the air and passed through the barrier as if it was not there and crashed into the ground below.

    Sam who is on the stage couldn¡¯t stand anymore and fell down on the tform. He noticed that the barrier is dimming so, he tried his best to move his broken hands and cover his face back.

    By the time, the barrier broke Sam is already disguised. Right now, he used all his energy to sit straight.

    The Monkey also sat straight and looked around in confusion. He was making sense of what happened. In this small exchange, Sam actually took more damage than the monkey king himself. But thetter was thrown off the stage.

    Sam also realized at this moment, that the barrier is only applicable for Sam. The reason why Sam was blocked by the barrier is that he doesn¡¯t want to be revealed outside.

    As for the monkey king, he made sure that barrier shouldn¡¯t stop him. How can he rob the glory of a junior who was able to send him off the tform? That should be seen by the rest of the candidates and give him due credit.

    The monkey king slowly stood up and took out a gourd. He walked towards Sam and slowly made him drink some wine from the gourd.

    Sam¡¯s body started healing and he is as good as new in a few seconds.

    The Monkey king sat beside Sam and took a swig of wine.

    "Damn it. It is a pity that I don¡¯t have the real thing, otherwise, we could have shared a drink. You can keep it." He passed the wine gourd to Sam.

    Sam felt extremely honored.

    This is the first time he is feeling this in this life.

    The Monkey looked at the rest of the candidates and spoke to the chosen one from the Beast faction.

    "Akhil, I chose you because you have a rtionship with monkeys and apes in the previous life. You are doing great, and I have to say that I don¡¯t regret my choice.

    But you have to work hard. Harder than now. You have to face many things and this is but a minute ce that was in this vast universe."

    With that, he extended his hand a light fell on that person. His body slowly started going through the metamorphosis, which is simr to what Arman has gone through.

    He then looked at the rest of the candidates and said.

    "I am doing this openly because all five of you are chosen candidates by some other gods. You will get your chance sooner orter. Work hard.

    And it is better to keep this topic on the down-low. The powers you all are in, you are not going to stay there forever. Don¡¯t get too involved in the disputes and don¡¯t pick a bone with the rest of the candidates."

    He then finally turned towards Sam and said.

    "Your talent is impable and I am not talking about the talent of cultivation, I am talking about your talent to learn, you might be the best candidate of all at this moment. I look forward for you to climb the realms and reach the highest ce.

    Then we can have a drink together."

    He said that and stood up and pulled Sam up as well.

    With a wave of his hand, the golden staff came to him. He then gave it to Sam and said.

    "A spirit weapon. This may be useful for you. This is a replica of my own staff. Although it doesn¡¯t change the size, it still posses the spirit and will which are enough for you to save yourself. The seals will be opened along with your cultivation.

    These are transference scrolls. You might be familiar with them."

    He gave three to Sam and gave two to Akhil and Arkiv. Then passed one each to the ¡¯man¡¯ from the herb garden and Arman.

    "There is one more reward I can give you. What do you want?"

 Chapter 421: Sanchezs Warning

    "Great Sage, you do understand the weight of your words, right?" Sam asked with a smile.

    The monkey king also returned the smile and said.

    "I do know what I am saying and I mean exactly that. You can ask me whatever you want and I will make sure ites to you sooner orter."

    Sam was smiling, but he was shocked inside. He doesn¡¯t know what to think of this promise. From the looks of it, the monkey would give him whatever he asked. Even if the current world couldn¡¯t handle the item, the monkey king would deliver it to him when he was in higher realms.

    That is what he meant by sooner orter.

    Sam took a deep breath and went into deep thoughts.

    After sometime, he felt like anything materialistic is too shallow and at this moment he doesn¡¯t need anything for his immediate use. Sam felt like he has to ask for something he could use in the future.

    "Great Sage, the rest of the candidates all have dimensional crossers and for the next pce of inheritance, we have to go to other dimension. But I don¡¯t have one.

    Even then, I don¡¯t need a dimensional crosser. It would be better if I have a way to cross the dimensions with my friends. I hope you will show me the correct path to achieve this."

    When the monkey king heard this, he frowned and said to Sam.

    "Are you looking down on me? Such simple request? I can deal with it with my eyes closed. Are you sure you don¡¯t want some other thing?"

    Sam shook his head with a bitter smile and said.

    "Great sage. It is not that I am looking down on you. But any other reward you give me, might have too huge impact on me and my cultivation journey. I wouldn¡¯t be able to find my own path. No matter what great thing I ask from you, it will clear my obstacles way too easily.

    There would be no growth without hardships. As for materialistic things, I am confident in myself that I can earn them myself, I don¡¯t need to bother the monkey king for such shallow things."

    Sam said calmly.

    The monkey king rubbed his chin with his fingers and said.

    "Okay, tell me what do you want to know about this dimensional crosser and stuff and how do you want me to resolve this."

    "Can you tell me how these Dimensional Crosser works and what is the suitable alternative for me to go with my friends?"

    "Why are you stressing on with your friends so much?"

    "I once travelled to the peak alone, I don¡¯t want to go there once again. The one I truly loved has asked me to change and I am changing now."

    The Monkey king chuckled and said.

    "I would be honest with you Sam. The twelve chosen ones are yers and you are in a game. Just remember this. Other than that, you are not yet qualified to know anything else other than this matter.

    As for Dimensional crosser, it was created by a bunch of us just for this game you are ying.

    The dimensional crosser, is a dimensional traveller. It would be hidden within an independent space that is connected to the yers.

    They couldn¡¯t perceive it until the time is right. Once they reach a certain cultivation level or a certain time period was spent in a realm, they would be able to ess.

    But they couldn¡¯t just leave to whatever realm they want. They can only go to one realm and they cannot travel back to the realm they came from with the dimensional crosser.

    There are upper realms which you have to visit and the order was already decided, so every time, they reached a certain cultivation realm or the time limit, they can leave the realm and enter the next realm that was predetermined."

    He paused and looked at Sam.

    "As for you, kiddo. You don¡¯t have any restrictions. At first, we all felt that it is ridiculous that Gambler wanted to withdraw the dimension crosser and give you a divine dimension with a load of knowledge.

    We never ever considered the people from your earth in this game, as there is no cultivation.

    But now, it seems gambler is not something.

    If I am not wrong, if you go through the knowledge that you got from the divine dimension, you would be able to create a space tunnel which you could ess from here to the next realm.

    You might have heard of some boxes from your mentor. Those boxes not only contain the coordinates of the next realm, they will also have the formation core required to make the way to the next realm. You can even use that to return back anytime you want.

    But that wouldn¡¯t be useful to the next realms. You have to do that all over again. But I can help you with that.

    All you have to do is, attend the next Pce of inheritance in the next realm without fail. Then you can receive the thing that would enable you to travel between dimensions from Sanchez.

    Are you okay with that?"

    Sam bowed and replied.

    "Thank you. Great- sage."

    "No need to thank me. It is what I promised." The monkey king patted Sam on his shoulder and said.

    "If you brats don¡¯t want to challenge me anymore, I will leave. I don¡¯t think you guys can win me anyway. You guys don¡¯t have enough experience or resolve."

    The rest of them felt ashamed. Their peer has done what they couldn¡¯t do and the Monkey king himself said that what they arecking is not talent, rather it is resolve and experience.

    Sam is same age as them, that much they know even if they don¡¯t see his face. Then how can he have more experience and resolve. They are puzzled. But when the recalled the number of scars on Sam¡¯s body and the number of times he got wounded in the past two weeks, they didn¡¯t dare take such risks.

    But they are not willing to ept their shorings that easily, their brains are trying so hard to find excuses for their ipetence.

    The Monkey king waved his hand and they suddenly disappeared from their ces and reappeared from in the hall where Sanchez is present. There the remaining candidates are also waiting.

    But Sanchez is not concentrating on them, instead he is talking to the Great realm cultivators. Their session also ended along with the Nascent stage cultivators.

    Unlike the previous time, there is not much schematic andplex test involved for the great realm cultivators. All they have is free for all and they can get whatever they can from the independent space they entered.

    They waited for the great realm cultivators to leave.

    And that wait took an hour. After the great realm cultivators left the ce, Sanchez finally addressed them.

    Sam suddenly felt like the surrounding space is disappearing and he was transferred to an independent space.

    This is the same feeling experienced in the first pce of inheritance.

    But this time, in this independent space ten more members appeared.

    "Greetings yers, since you have all reached the Nascent stage cultivation level. You might have already spoken to your mentors. This time, only eleven out of twelve candidates came to the pce of inheritance.

    The next pce of inheritance you would enter wouldn¡¯t be in this realm. Even though, the pce will appear every three years that is only for the Great realm cultivators and it is a small price the gods are willing to pay for using this realm as their starting stage.

    As for the next pce of inheritance, you have to climb the next realm andpete with the geniuses from that realm.

    You would be having the most difficult time of your lives ahead.

    If I may suggest personally, I would advise you guys to not be each other¡¯s enemies. You guys can have a healthy rivalry no matter how intense that might be. But don¡¯t be archenemies. Because, there is a lot of journey ahead of you guys and you will face each other often than not.

    But what I am giving you is a mere suggestion. After all, your future is boundless and I might have to address you as lords in the future.

    So, one more suggestion is. Don¡¯t get involved with the forces of the lower realms and try to make trouble for yourself. You can cultivate, make a family and even wage a war for those forces, but make sure that you stay alive.

    If you die for some selfish reasons like friends, family, force and favors. The gods wouldn¡¯t tolerate. You wouldn¡¯t die simply. Your lives are given to you by them and from now on, they are theirs to take. You cannot die without their permission. If you want more help to stay alive, then perform well in the Pce of inheritance.

    If you die without fulfilling your duty, your soul and the souls of the family members would have to serve the lords to pay for that price.

    Please keep that in mind."

    With that all of them reappeared at the entrance of the cave.

 Chapter 422: Joining Beast faction.

    Sam looked around and saw that many people are looking at him. The nascent stage cultivators who are eliminated also, just came along with him.

    This means, they are not just sent away earlier just because they are eliminated.

    They are given a chance to cultivate in the pce. The spiritual energy is purer and denser there and it is hard to find a ce like that within the.

    Sam and the chosen from the beast faction Akhil exchanged a nce and nodded at each other. Even though, they don¡¯t have any form of friendship, the words of Sanchez are still ringing in their minds.

    Since, they would be facing each other and meeting often, there is no need for them to evasive to each other. Even if they cannot be friends, they can at least be acquaintances.

    Sam started walking wanting to leave, but the grand elder stopped him and said.

    "Please stay, young friend. The Beast faction is going to arrange a banquet on the asion of the pce of inheritance. We would like to extend an invitation to you."

    While speaking, his spiritual sense trying desperately to see what Sam¡¯s face looks like, but the formation is not letting him. Because, Sam actually just stacked uponyers andyers of concealment formations.

    Even if the person has enough patience to by pass all of them, due to the energy flow of formations, the spiritual sense will be distorted and deviated. The bypassing is actually easy, but to concentrate on bypassing this many will make his head explode.

    "I am not interested."

    Sam said calmly and turned around to leave.

    "Young friend, are you looking down on the Beast faction? How can you reject us like that? Particrly in front of all our subordinate empires."

    Sam frowned and then only noticed that a Nascent stage cultivator who came to the Pce of inheritances is looking at him. These guys didn¡¯t have a lot of treasures, but they knew that Sam and the rest who hasest must have gotten many more treasures than them.

    So, they wanted to see if they can get their hands on them. Even though, the pce of inheritance states that they shouldn¡¯t force anyone to give them or take them by force, what if the other party is ¡¯giving up¡¯ willingly or they made a ¡¯fair trade¡¯?

    Sam could sense that these two fellows doesn¡¯t have any good intentions. He doesn¡¯t want to gain attention though, the character he created hase to the beast faction without any signs and will leave the beast faction without any signs. He doesn¡¯t want to gain unwanted attention and be in the eyes of other people.

    There is no way, he would let them have an opportunity to spend more time with him.

    "I have many things to attend. I don¡¯t want to trouble you. Thanks for the invitation anyway."

    When Sam said this, the Grand elder frowned. He felt like Sam is too haughty and too arrogant. How can he be so arrogant to not give face to the Grand elder of the academy? By this time the emperors are looking at him.

    He blocked Sam¡¯s way and said.

    "Young friend, you areing to the banquet. Anyway, you couldn¡¯t handle the treasures you have on you. I heard you stayed for a long time. With treasures of such value, it would be extremely troublesome for you alone. How about you trade some with the Beast faction? We can create an illusion that everything is traded and you would be safe from the greedy people?"

    The Grand elder didn¡¯t care and revealed his intentions.

    Sam felt like he was looking at an idiot. He could feel that the grand elder said all this because of his ego. But does he really not know that is would be throwing mud on his own face?

    He was probably thinking that he is powerful to make a junior stay here and trade the items even if he is unwilling to do so.

    A Consummate realm cultivator, trying to force a nascent stage cultivator. Talk about overkill.

    Sam couldn¡¯t be bothered with him anymore and said.

    "So, you mean that only if it belongs to beast faction does the items stay safe, or else there is no way they would stay safe with me?"

    "Yes."

    "Okay then." With that, Sam walked towards the Faction-head, who is busy talking to the Great realm cultivators all this while and only watched the situation just before Sam started walking towards him.

    "I want to be a cultivator of the Beast faction. But I don¡¯t want my freedom to be restricted. Your beast faction¡¯s disciple can testify for my talent."

    Sam said as he pointed at Akhil. Thetter was stunned for a bit and then understood what Sam was doing, he is trying to use this method to brush off the grand elder.

    But the faction head is thinking something else. He was trying to see if Sam really meant it or not, and after sometime he understood that it couldn¡¯t possibly the real Sam. It is just Sam trying to brush off the grand elder and create an alibi for this character.

    The Faction-head nodded and said. "We ept."

    "Then I would like to ask the permission of the Faction-head for something. I want to go to the Kali empire of the Beast faction, to temper myself. I would like to get permission."

    "Sure. You can use the Space gate." Sai said nonchntly with an expression showing that he didn¡¯t care. But inside he is cursing the grand elder.

    Even though, Sai wanted to get closer to Sam, that is because he is his brother¡¯s son. But currently, Sam doesn¡¯t have any form of trust towards beast faction.

    Even if he stayed closer to the faction, he wouldn¡¯t really get to make a rtionship with the faction.

    At this moment, even though Sam seemed to make a connection with the faction, in actual fact, he is despising it. He already had a bad impression on the faction since the kidnap and all the conflict they had.

    Now, this Grand elder and his son are showing the ugly side of the faction.

    Sam then turned towards Akhil and threw him a space jade ring.

    He didn¡¯t speak anything and saw what is inside. He wore a look of surprise. They are some of the weapons they got in the pce.

    They are made of ck star gold.

    Even though, Akhil stayed in pce for a long time, he didn¡¯t really get much. He only had ten sets of weapons at most.

    But from the looks of it, Sam seemed to have hoarded all the weapons in the pce. Because, even the weapons in the space jade are more than what Akhil got as spoils.

    There is noparison. As for why he gave this, it is apensation.

    Sam didn¡¯t stay anymore, the Grand elder also doesn¡¯t have any reason to stop him. He just let him go.

    Sam went to the Space gate and left to the Kali and then went back to the City.

    After this is over, Sam went straight to his building and asked for the details of the recruitment and the construction details.

    He didn¡¯t even rest for an hour. He went straight back to work mode. The construction project is almost over. In a week it will bepleted. As for bee puppets, they are distributed along all the upper management.

    Many new recruits who doesn¡¯t have any talent for cultivation or any desire for cultivation are given these pills and sent to the newly ced monitoring division within the city.

    There are many old people who are still Novice or even Acolytes. When they heard that Sam¡¯s city is recruiting without any bias, they also came to try their luck and to their surprise, they do have jobs. They can just sit there and concentrate on their said monitoring devices, while they could cultivate as soon as their shift is over.

    After all, it would be a waste to use some top-ss fighters to be inside the monitoring division.

    The production has increased and the recruitment also almost hit the target.

    Sam is now in a meeting with the three of his friends.

    "After the target is hit, close the recruitment. If there are still some people thinking that they can increase their benefits if they waited for long leave them be. We wouldn¡¯t recruit anymore unless there are some special circumstances.

    As for out next target, I need all of you to send some senior members of the Sam¡¯s battalion to the remaining empires. Our first target will the two of our neighbouring empires.

    We need to increase the territory.

    The major powers wouldn¡¯t stay put for long. As soon as the construction projects of these parks reach eighty percentpletion, we will be making their move. After all, I cannot let themplete the construction even if it is an iplete design.

    We need to expand our territory. Arc is current cultivating in a secret location and by next year he will be a Consummate realm cultivator."

 Chapter 423: Arrangements for the future.

    For the next week, Sam started copying the information in the books and scrolls.

    He is taking all the basic knowledge that could be found in the divine dimension¡¯s library and started copying it in the books. In fact, even his friends are doing it.

    No one can get inside the divine dimension, so the four of them are the only ones who can do this task.

    All they did was get the information from the divine wills and copy each and every word in the books. They stayed in the tower and just put all their effort into the task.

    Seven days outside means, seventy days inside the tower. There is no way they wouldn¡¯t feel exhausted and irritated.

    But they have to do it. These books are necessary for the next project. The construction in the woods is finished after this week and Sam and others only came after that day.

    Aftering out, Sam went back to the Tempest valley to bring back Arc.

    Arc is in the peak stage of Transcendent realm. Even though, the growth is fast, it is because of Arc¡¯s reckless and relentless umtion for years at the same time it is the grace period of the boost given by the Old beast.

    After a few months, his speed will be back to normal.

    He brought him back because of some reasons and asked him toe back to the Sam¡¯s city in another week along with the Dukes and Marquises and other high- level officials of the empire.

    For the next week, Sam is extremely busy. He has to make the finishing touches of the construction, so that all the formations hidden in the construction structure of the buildings will be activated and ready to be used.

    This is the same trick he used in the city ns and the park ns.

    He has to ce some energy cells in certain hidden ces of the city to create a chain reaction of the activation of theplex formations.

    Within the construction, thergest formation is made up of some smaller formations as its nodes. This is the technique Sam is using to ce the formations far beyond his cultivation level and is seeding at activating them.

    As for recing the energy cells, they don¡¯t actually act as the main supply, they are just catalysts which makes them almost inexhaustible.

    There is no reason for them to change in the near future. So, Sam would be able find a candidate trustworthy enough to change them and take the responsibility.

    After cing them, he called for the Architect Austin and gave him the tons of books he and the other three copied. There are many rune marks on the covers of the books, which will not let them be stored inside the spatial ring. Only Sam can store them in the divine dimension.

    Apart from that, Sam nned to infuse the books with spirits if this n doesn¡¯t work out.

    Within the newpound that is constructed. There is a building which was especially built for these things. The library.

    The books are arranged in the library. The books are ced in an order of their value and importance.

    On the top floors, the books belong to the cultivation techniques, the recipes of pills, the blue prints and designs of some inscriptions and formations, some potion recipes etc.

    Even though, these are valuable, they only belong to the tip of the iceberg of the total knowledge that is stored in the divine dimension.

    He only copied around ten percent of the total knowledge of the library.

    A part from that there are three more buildings in thepound, all of them arerge and had spacious rooms and one of them is the dormitories for the orphan kids that came.

    The newly recruited chefs are ced in that dormitory to provide the three meals for them.

    Inside thepound, there is another ce which is the farm. This farm consists of the animals which are raised for the purpose of the food.

    Apart from that there is another smallpound near thisrgerpound. Even though it is smaller, it is only when it waspared to thergerpound. It isrger than four parksbined.

    Thepound was notpletely emptied out. The woods are still kept intact and the only thing that changed the environment inside is theck of beasts.

    It was left open and there is even ake that was artificially made.

    After checking the construction and arranging everything regarding it, he went back to the tower and called for all the Nascent stage cultivators who they recruited. He only called the people who joined the organization with only their battle prowess as their expertise. They don¡¯t have any form of other skills.

    They are more than hundred of them who joined the organization. Actually, nascent stage cultivators are not dime a dozen, but all of these people came and some of them are even people who are in high positions in some families.

    But they still wanted to take the opportunity, because they couldn¡¯t see any growth when they are in the families.

    A hundred nascent stage cultivators, included, former military generals, city guard, war ves who belonged to the former Orion and mostly stray cultivators.

    Sam assembled them together today to make sure that they put their battle prowess and intelligence to their best use.

    He stood on the stage and addressed them.

    "Today, I gathered you guys, here because of the first assignment I am going to assign you.

    But before that let us get your sry straight.

    Everyone of you will receive five hundred thousand spirit stones for a month."

    When Sam said this, they gasped in surprise. Five hundred thousand is a huge amount after all. But for Sam, it is peanuts. His weekly turnover is in billions of spirit stones. He doesn¡¯t have to worry about wasting them all, in fact he has nowhere to spend.

    "But to earn that five hundred thousand, you will have to work your ass off.

    The first assignment you guys have is to go to the neighbouring empire of us. The one which was also under the thunder god temple.

    There are two empires and we are going to target the nearest one which is towards our northeast.

    All hundred of you will arrive in that empire and your job is to disperse yourselves. You will be divided in teams of five. Each team will go to a city of their choice and establish a mercenary guild.

    Each team will get a chance to pick three subordinate teams of Grand realm cultivators, Great realm cultivators and Novice stage cultivators.

    You can choose any of the new recruits or even some from the Sam¡¯s battalion. But there are age limits.

    You guys have to choose the Grand realm cultivators who are already forty years of age or older, Great realm with thirty- five or older and Novice stage cultivators with thirty years of age or older.

    As for the people below that age, I have other ns for them.

    You will be given the best of the best weapons that are crafted by the best weapon makers of the organization, your own bee puppets, the initial working capital and other hunting gadgets that are created within the organization.

    You are not to sell any of them. All you can sell is your services to them. You don¡¯t reveal your identities to anyone and you wouldn¡¯t let your own devices get stolen.

    Your task is to set that mercenary team and start gaining the influence. Within the city you are in you have to gain the influence second only to the government, in fact it would be better if you have more influence than the government,

    All this while, you will try to recruit some new members. But do remember that I don¡¯t need junk. I want the best fighters you can possibly find.

    As for the revenue you can get, only thirty percent of that is mine and the rest of seventy percent is yours and you can distribute to your own team in your own way.

    There should be no corruption or any other petty things going on.

    I am giving you a year. And after that year, your team leaders wille and report to me in the same ce and I will check all your achievements.

    Any form of bonuses like finding live beast cubs for the organization, new materials, new recruits, high revenue, any form of benefit you obtain, you will get a bonus from me.

    The bonus you never imagine, it could be a medicine which will help your breakthrough. Or a new cultivation technique to improve your cultivation or a top- ss battle technique, or a weapon that you could only dream of, a beastpanion that could be your life time partner in your thick and thin. I can give you everything and anything that you could only imagine in your dreams.

    So, who wants to be the leader of a team?"

 Chapter 424: Ceremony

    After Sam finished, almost everyone raised their hands. Sam smirked at this and said.

    "I don¡¯t know who among you is the right guy for the position of the leader. But this world is judged by might, so all you have to do is prove that you are right.

    With that he pointed towards the door and Philip led them to an arena.

    Inside the arena, Sam entered after them and sat on a chair and said.

    "I don¡¯t care what you do. You can use, techniques, tricks, bitch moves, sneak attacks, poison, ganging up. Make sure you are thest man standing. I will set the rankings and the top twenty will get the leadership.

    I don¡¯t want to see any deaths though."

    Sam just sat there and in the next two hours, Sam saw the biggest dog fight that could happen in the whole western continent. But instead of dogs, there are hundred nascent stage cultivators fighting left and right.

    There are sts, shes, smell of blood and the spiritual energy rocking around.

    After two hours, only one guy stood in the middle with a spear supporting him to stand.

    Sam walked towards him meanwhile, some attendants came and started feeding the potent high-grade pills to them and they could see their bodies healing with the naked eye.

    Sam extended his hand towards the guy who is barely standing with the help of his spear. There is a lot of damage on his body. There are scars all over and burn marks, there is even a ce where the flesh was crushed.

    He is bleeding all over.

    Sam started emitting light elemental energy and started healing him. Actually, he didn¡¯t heal himpletely. He just healed all the skin and left the scars there. After all, the candidate¡¯s time is actually very much higher than that of Sam. He is inte stage nascent realm. But Sam is actually only in the initial levels.

    After he fed the pill the guy slowly recovered and the spiritual energy is slowly flowing through his body.

    "From now on, you are the leader of all the nascent stage cultivators under me. But this applies only to the people who are specialized inbat.

    If I am not there to rely orders, he will be the one to take charge. Do you all hear me?"

    Sam said loudly.

    "Yes." All the cultivators shouted in unison.

    Sam then looked at Spear guy and asked.

    "What¡¯s your name?"

    "Dustin."

    "Dustin, you will get a new cultivation technique and a brand-new weapon. This is the reward for you. I don¡¯t know if you have leadership qualities, but what I do know is that, it is hard to just control hundred fighters with mere leadership skills, after all at the end of the strength reigns supreme.

    So, I have onlymand for you. Lead them with whatever brain you have. If you think you are unfit, then find the person who is fit and ask him to help you make decisions. But if I hear that you are showing favoritism, then you are dead.

    Learn to be a leader. After one year, anotherpetition would be conducted and that time, the might is not the only thing that is going to be tested.

    And in that assessment, the organization will also announce the titles.

    I don¡¯t say things like equality and bullshit. Because, there is no such thing as equality. The one who performs better gets the benefits.

    If you feel unfair, prove it to me why I should be fair to you.

    I want my nascent stage cultivators to be the best there is in the whole. For that, I will provide anything that is needed, the only condition being you guys prove to me that you deserve to be the best of nascent stage cultivators this has to offer.

    Now, everyone is dismissed. In five days, there will be a ceremony in the newpound and after that is conducted, you are to leave to your duties, in this while find your teams. A team of ten from Novice cultivators, ten from Great realm and ten from the Grand realm cultivators. That is all I am going to give you.

    Find them and select them. I am not going to order them to join. All I provide them is the sry they deserve and the benefits they should receive ording to the organization rules. As for the rest, you should convince them yourselves."

    Sam then looked at Dustin and said.

    "I am sorry that I left your scars deliberately. But I wanted to do you a favor. Look at the scene around you and your scars. Every time you see them you should remember why you deserve to be the team leader and at the same time understand why you should work hard to not lose that title.

    The only reason you lost the title to another nascent should be by the fact that you became a Pre-transcendent cultivator."

    With those words, Sam left the ce without turning back.

    Simr situations happened in different ces, but the tests are not exactly fighting. For formation master, their formation skills, inscription masters for their inscription skills, artisans for their artisan skills, healers for their healing skills.

    Intensepetitions are set on ze. But not all of them are for deployment.

    They have their own problems.

    Sam didn¡¯t send any of the candidates with other skills with the mercenary teams. At least not yet. Sam has other ns for that.

    After conducting the final tests and arranging all the things that needs to be arranged the fateful day came.

    All the employees of the organization who are in the city are there, some nearby cities¡¯ high-level employees also came.

    Along with that the Emperor Arc came along with the ministers, Dukes and even some Marquises who are of some higher statues.

    Along with that the four tower heads are also there, but they are not the centre of attention.

    At this moment, the whole thing was being heard by all the other employees and the citizens of the whole empire at the same time.

    In the newpound, tens of thousands of people gathered. Some of them are normal citizens. They are the ones whoe to city and stay there for a few months to indulge or explore. After the city¡¯s park is the best in the whole empire, so they would definitely people who could afford to test their limits here.

    Philip, Watt and Jack came onto the stage andnded stood in their positions. In fact, there are no seats on their stage at all.

    The crowd quietened down after they saw them and Sam slowly walked towards the stage. He is wearing his usual ck coat. As he walked to the centre of the stage, he looked at all the people in front of him with faint arrogance.

    He is the man of the moment and he achieved it all by himself. He would be lying if he said he don¡¯t feel proud of himself.

    He is the man capable of summoning so many people to his ce when he willed. And more than ny percent of them are at his beck and call.

    He had a specialmunication device mounted on his ear and this will transmit his voice all over the empire.

    "Good Morning everyone.

    I am Sam and many of you know me or many of you might have heard of me.

    You might have heard many stories about me. Let me give you guys a brief introduction and the orphans who are seated in the group, this mainly for you guys, so listen up.

    I am an orphan. I don¡¯t know who my parents are. I was brought up by a tailor in the outermost vige of the former Orion.

    There a Novice is the strongest person. I learned tailoring from the person that brought me up and along with it, there are some other skills I picked up because of some fateful circumstances.

    That is all I had. All I had is some knowledge and a beautifuldy from a nearby small city came to our vige to get some cloths, that is the time my life changed. Fifteen spirit stones, that is my first payment. I started my journey went to a small city.

    I studied my ass off. Every chance I get I studied and learned. I took my artisan exam, formation master exam, inscription master exam. I went to an academy in which I barely cultivated.

    Then my journey started because of apetition that was hosted by emperor.

    In the whole way until I reached the imperial capital, I didn¡¯t have any form of strength topete with all the figures that I made enemies with. All I had is these three people who are standing on the stage with me.

    We four struggled like no other. Many of you might think, the luxury mansions I had, the food I eat and the way I spend and think that I am bullshitting, but the thing is the money I had is the biggest bane. I used all cards up my sleeve to protect my ass.

    I even beat the crap out of a prince and the Emperor wanted to kill me. After the wholepetition is over, I was targeted and due to my luck and some other treasures that acquired with my ability, I was able to escape.

    Now, we are standing in the same city that the former emperor used to live and rule the whole empire.

    I don¡¯t know how to put it nicely, but simply put, I yed every fucker that wanted to deal with me. Even the former emperor of Orion was dead in my very own hands.

    Now I have a city under my name, riches, men under mymand, but everything I achieved was due to my knowledge and also the my resolution which is strong enough to make me harbour thoughts of killing a Transcendent realm emperor when I was barely a Great realm cultivator.

    And behind all those miracles I made, there are somethings inmon. The desire to learn, the desire to raise, the desire to persist in front of a formidable enemy.

    To the orphans that are here, I am telling you. I cannot give you all three of those things that I have, but what I can do is that if you do have those things, I can make sure they are put to use with the aid of the resources and the opportunities they need.

    To the western continent, I hereby announce the opening of the THE SCHOOL."

    With that a que was revealed on behind Sam with the words The School engraved on it.

 Chapter 425: THE SCHOOL

    Everyone was stunned as they looked at the que.

    Sam didn¡¯t look back and continued saying.

    "For all the orphans that are present here. All these years, you didn¡¯t have a home to stay, food to eat and enough to support to survive in a dignified manner.

    But from today onwards THE SCHOOL is your home. Here no one will look down on you for yourck of parents, no one will look down on your loneliness and from now on, no one will be able to tell you that you are the orphans.

    You will be given clothing, food and ce to stay and live here. But those who hasn¡¯t awakened yet, has to go to the general ss which will give you guys enough theoretical knowledge of all the elements, battles, skills, professions, beasts and many other things.

    You guys will have to attend all the sses whether you like it or not and you guys will have to study. I am not going to feed you for nothing. I am not that selfless; you have to study and prove your worth to be fed and show me that you deserve to helped.

    You will be taught about all the possible options that you might have in your cultivation path and will be given demonstrations on how things will be. So, you have to learn about these things so that you guys can have more choices in your future.

    Apart from that, you will trained on many other basic skills, like scouting, military tactics, group battles, team leading and many others.

    You shall learn these things and make sure that you are not as useless as the world proimed you to be.

    And for the rest of the western continent, I hereby wee all the people below age twenty who are still in their early stages of cultivation, to get a chance to join the school.

    You along with all the orphans who are already awakened can attend the sses that are avable in the School.

    There will be hundreds of sses conducted everyday within the school. There will bebat specializations, some professional specified courses, some auxiliary courses.

    And we don¡¯t just wee people who want to be a great fighter. I personally believe, no matter what profession it is, it has a value in this world. Every profession is equally important.

    So, if you want pursue your passion you cane here.

    Even all you want to be is a chef, a person who wants to explore the flora of this world, a person who just wants to study the fauna of this, a person who just wants to be a cleaner, a person who wants to be a masseuse. A person who just wants to manage an enterprise. A person who wants to be a mercenary, a person who wants to grow nts. A carpenter who only wants to make furniture. No matter what it is.

    As long as you have passion and are willing to learn for it, work hard for it, you cane to school and you can pick the sses which you think will be useful for your passion and if you couldn¡¯t decide or didn¡¯t know find the teachers, and if they don¡¯t know you can find me.

    We will help you achieve that.

    But there is one thing all of you must remember and this includes all the people who are appointed as teachers too. This ce is only a ce of education and there is no tolerance towards any form of faction struggles and trying to breed your own forces. If two students of the school wants to fight, then they have to fight in the school arena or any other arena within Sam¡¯s city.

    The rest of the rules and procedures will be announcedter.

    Nowing to the employees of the organization.

    Those who are older than twenty, no matter what cultivation level you are at, will be given a chance to enter the school and go through the library we have arranged here to improve yourself.

    That will be given to you based on your performance in your role. At the same time, the time you can stay in the school also depends on the performance.

    In that time period, not only will you get the chance to enter the library, you would also get the chance to attend the lectures or consult a teacher.

    And mark my words, every teacher is responsible for answering and teaching the students without bias. In this school only I am the person who is allowed to show bias and favoritism and that depends on the people¡¯s abilities.

    As for the rest of you, particrly teacher, should I hear a single word about you being biased and find conclusive proof, then you are dead meat.

    As for maintaining your favorite student and such, that is your wish, but once a studentes and asks you a question you have no right to brush him off or act prejudiced against and any student who was subjected to that treatment, can report to me or the three that are standing behind me directly without any hesitance.

    Of course, this rule is not valid for the guest lecturers.

    As for the new recruits that are recently be a part of the organization, Nascent stage cultivators below forty, Grand realm cultivators below thirty-five and Great realm cultivators below thirty shall be the students of the academy.

    They will be given special guidance by the seniors and if the nascent stage cultivators find that they don¡¯t have any suitable teachers, they can learn themselves from the library.

    The School will be arranging thebat missions in form of internships in different times and this applies to all the students who are pursuing their professions as well.

    At the end of the day, strength take precedence to everything.

    Nowing to all the distinguished guests.

    You are all people of high stature and of noble birth. I invited you all today not only to make announce the opening of The school, but also to say something outright.

    I see the teaching as the most noble profession in the world. Even nobler than a fighter, soldier, a healer and everything. There is a saying once heard that says "Mother, Father, teacher and then God" I take this very seriously.

    So, for such a noble profession, I don¡¯t want to show any bias. You can send the kids from your ns to the school if you want to and once their studies arepleted, they can return to your ns, I will not force them to work for me or leave the n.

    But there is one thing I am going to say. If you send people inside the school to try and recruit talents, form factions, create rifts, form alliances and any other political bullshit, then I will exterminate the entire n for the next nine generations. I wouldn¡¯t let a single survivor alive.

    Any kid thates from the noble family, even if he is the son of the Emperor Arc himself, shall follow by the rules and will be treated only as students. He will be treated the same, taught the same and if necessary punished the same.

    All their identities only matters outside of the school walls and once they are inside, they are just students.

    For me, this ce is a sacred ce.

    If anyone of you is responsible for sullying it, you shall see the devil in me. And trust me no one knows about that character as anyone who saw that never lived past to tell the tale."

    As Sam spoke to this point, many auras raged and the dukes, ministers, nobles all stood up from their seats, they all looked at Sam coldly and an old man who is the minister of Arian said.

    "Sam, you are a young talent which the emperor admired and gave you this city as a reward for contribution in the war.

    You are proven to be a great business man and has amassed great wealth and you have proven your character by establishing a great ce such as School, but the way you talked to the nobles is out of line.

    Particrly, naming his majesty himself and threatening the nobles with the extermination is a sin that wouldn¡¯t be overlooked easily, you better apologize."

    Sam didn¡¯t speak to him and looked at Arc and said.

    "Emperor of Arian, I have proimed that even if your son enters the school he shall be treated as the same as the other students, is there anything wrong about what I said? Do I or do I not have enough authority to set rules in my own institution?"

    "You have every authority." Arc replied surprising everyone else.

    "The city that I am living in, is it something that was rewarded by you?" Sam asked loudly without any hesitation in his voice."

    "No, it is a business deal."

    "Tell your subordinates to be in check, with all due respect to you as an emperor, I don¡¯t get this city or anything else by anyone¡¯s appreciation and admiration. I have obtained them all by conducting business and even this city is part of a business deal.

    I don¡¯t want to hear these voices ever again. I have respect for you as apetent emperor, but that doesn¡¯t mean I will bow down for whatever your subordinates say.

    In the deal we made, we acted as equals and in the deals we will make in the future we will be acting as equals.

    Thank you everyone foring. The ceremony concludes."

    Sam turned around and walked away.

 Chapter 426: Deal

    Sam didn¡¯t bother to look at the rest of the nobles.

    Today, he has two reasons to invite them all over, one of them is, of course, to announce the opening of the school and the other thing is to warn them.

    Soon, the situation in the western continent will change, he has at most a year and a half before the major associations and possibly the whole six major powers. And this is a conservative estimate.

    If they could find Sam¡¯s next course of action then they woulde and make a move earlier.

    No matter when that attack happened, Sam is not worried about taking them head-on. He has many ways to survive. If pushes to shove, all he has to do is escape and start it all over again. He might not be able to make another business of this scale on the.

    But he can still make do with it. He has loads of money at this moment, he doesn¡¯t need to do anything. At this point, the organization and institute are for developing his own force.

    The main problem during the collision of the major powers and he would be the nobility of the empire.

    These politicians of the nation are so much involved in themselves and they are extremely self-centered. If the timees, they wouldpletely disregard Arc¡¯s existence and would voluntarily be the dogs of the major powers.

    It would be troublesome for him to deal with them at that time. So, what he has to do make sure he either wiped them out before the war, or he should put them in their ce so that they wouldn¡¯t have any thoughts.

    And today, he used Arc¡¯s prestige as a stage to finish this first step in the process.

    With Sam¡¯s speech, there is no denial that he is extremely disrespectful towards the Emperor.

    Even his actions are so. He didn¡¯t bow to the emperor; he didn¡¯t even personally receive him. He just came and treated the emperor the same as any other audience.

    Many of the noble families are thinking that the emperor is showing favoritism towards Sam and are ecstatic when he did all this, but only by the end of the speech did they realize what is happening.

    Arc himself seemed to be treating Sam as an equal. There is not a single hint of anger on his face. They don¡¯t know what to do anymore.

    After everyone left, the new teachers of the school started organizing the rest of the structure.

    The first they did is make arrangements for the admissions. Sam didn¡¯t ce many restrictions on the school. Students get admitted every year and once a year there would berge recruitment.

    As for the assignment of sses, the students who are touring the whole school saw a ce which could help them with that.

    This ce is the ss registration area.

    Here every student should register for the sses they wanted to attend.

    Every candidate was given a metallic card which was engraved with some runes and on one side there is Sam¡¯s signature symbol.

    The other side has his name and picture. There is some space under this name and signature.

    This is the identity card and it has many other uses.

    The main purpose of the identity card is credits.

    The credits are the school¡¯s currency. It is just like spirit stones, but they are actually a lot more valuable.

    A fixed amount of credits will be given to the students and lecturers every month. They have to use these credits to enroll in the required sses. Apart from that, if they are enrolled in a specific course, like formation master or inscription master, there are some fixed sses they have to attend and their freedom to select other sses would be limited by number.

    After all, they would have to finish their own course before trying to learn more than what they need.

    As for how they would enroll in sses, it is simple.

    There are various subscription levels for every ss. They could subscribe for the whole course if they want to, or they could just attend the course for a month and decide for themselves to attend the next month and pay for it if they want to.

    They can even pay only for a single ss and attend that day if all they want is to learn that specific thing in that course.

    Of course, the ces are limited.

    As for how they could get credits, they can take the asional exams that are held in the courses they enrolled in and get the credits from the teachers, take the missions assigned by the school, work part-time in Sam¡¯s city or exchange the external resources such as beasts, meat, herbs, metals, etc.

    But only raw resources are epted.

    As for the teachers, their credits will be depending on the performance of their students and the number of students that actually attend their ss and course.

    The credits that teachers give out to students are not taken out of the teacher¡¯s personal ount.

    Sam carefully nned everything.

    After the announcement that Sam made, the whole western continent is in turmoil. There is no way people would stay calm. The biggest academic institution of the whole western continent was created.

    There is no way they would be able to sit still.

    The most shocking news for some of the higher-ups is some children from the imperial family areing to join the school and the Emperor himself approved of this.

    The Imperial family is huge, the emperor only has one son and he is in the thunder god temple at this moment, but his brothers and sisters have a lot of children altogether.

    And when all of them are sent to the school, the ministers and the nobility followed suit. It is almost as if the whole thing that happened between Sam and them has never happened at all.

    They don¡¯t want to lose the opportunity for their offspring to maintain a good rtionship with the offspring of the imperial family.

    Sam figured out that for the next few days he would be busy along with the rest of the staff.

    There is no way he could escape this time.

    But at this moment, the next day of the ceremony, Sam has received an unexpected visitor.

    Zeke, the person from the Space-gate association.

    He didn¡¯t expect that he would pay a visit out of nowhere.

    "Sam, we would like to integrate ourselves with the school program. It is aligned with most of our principles and the Space gate association would like to be a part of this great endeavor."

    Sam was surprised by this.

    He knew that the Space gate association wanted a more friendly rtionship with him. Even though they might have offended the major powers when they created the Space gates for them, they do have a chance to escape the me at this moment in their current situation.

    Because, Sam has many things on him that don¡¯t match the norms, so this new type of Space gate would naturally be ounted to one of his miracles.

    The Space gate association could even just extricate themselves from this. But if they really join the school, there is no turning back.

    Sam didn¡¯t outrightly say his decision but asked.

    "Your kids join the major powers after they awakened right? The six major powers will recruit them depending on their elements and spiritual cores. Why do you want to join the school then?"

    "The major powers would only take notice of the awakened people in the organization and even their main target are a specific set of people.

    The six major powers arrange marriages to the most talented of the space gate association with their own members, they would have no choice at this. They would be monitored any offspring that was born to those couples are taken to their respective major powers.

    The rest of the offspring are left for the Space gate association. They wouldn¡¯t care for them if they don¡¯t have a Space element or if they are exceptionally talented. That too only after they are awakened. Until then, they wouldn¡¯t even care how many offspring we have.

    They don¡¯t want to groom the direct descendants of the Space gate association. They are afraid of revenge. So, even if they talented, they would just let that talent rot in the association."

    Zeke¡¯s voice contained hints of helplessness and anger.

    The situation couldn¡¯t be changed that easily after all.

    "But you couldn¡¯t send the awakened here right? It would be easily recognizable."

    "No, we are not in need of sending the awakened. We will be sending the kids who are six to ten years old.

    And even then, we are not sending all of them. We will be sending only select few. After they enter the school, we are confident even if they are Space element users, they can have the freedom we don¡¯t. We will only select a few members secretly. Only the head and me will know anything rted to this.

    For this help, we will also send some experts who are well versed in Space element to the school. Even though, there are currently none of them, we can always hope for the future."

    Sam thought for a moment and extended his hand for a shake.

    "Deal."

 Chapter 427: Assignment of Jobs

    After the talk with Zeke, Sam went on to deal with the other matters and one of them is the Nascent stage cultivator teams.

    It is time for their departure to their neighboring empire, the Adrian empire which is in the Northeastern direction of the western continent.

    And this empire is also the one closest to the thunder god temple. At least that is what Sam learned from the thunder god temple library.

    Even though, no one traveling by sea or flying to the major powers nowadays, there must be a way which the predecessors followed when they first discovered these ces. The major powers are obviously the oldest of them all.

    So, there is a definite possibility that they found some path towards these empires.

    Maybe, they just went to explore the sea and identally discovered thesends and went on with their journeys.

    But no matter what it is, Sam decided that he has to find the way, even if it involves the sea journey, he wants to find that sea route.

    But before that happens, the first he has to do is gain a foothold in Adrian.

    Since it is said to be the closest to the thunder god temple, then he should start his exploration from this side. And the target for next year would be this. But this is not going to stop there.

    Sam doesn¡¯t have much time in this world, he has to cross the dimension and get to the next realm to get to the next pce of inheritance. At first, he didn¡¯t want to there at all. Because, the next one is not his, even though he might lose the valuable treasures thate along with the pce, he could still afford to skip one.

    So, at first, he wanted to skip this one and focus on building his influence in this world. He wanted to create a firm position within this so that he could have some decent starting point and ce where he could groom his own forces and resources without worry from his future enemies. This ce will be his foundation.

    He doesn¡¯t know what he is being in this world for, but since he is here anyway, he should make sure that he prepares whatever scenarios he could possibly cultivate.

    He doesn¡¯t know when the construction of the parks of the other empires will reach the final stages, but that would be the start of the sh between him and the major powers.

    But the war wouldn¡¯t blow on full scale from the start, the major powers wouldn¡¯t even get a chance to understand what hit them until Sam has taken down at least one of them. He doesn¡¯t have to fight the Beast faction and there is even a chance of alliance there.

    So, all he has to do is find the breaking points where he could enter the major powers without worry.

    The first one of them would be Adrian.

    Even though he said that they would have an assessment after one year, the empire might be taken over before this one year. In fact, he wants to make sure that the empire would be taken over. He would make Arc invade this empire and take it down within the next nine months.

    In the half a year, he would find the way to the thunder god temple.

    But before that, Sam has another thing he has to do. He has to go get the meteorite sand ind.

    It would be opening in a month and for the next three months, the ind would be essible.

    He would have to go there and see what this ind is all about. Coincidentally, the third floor in the divine dimension could help him do that.

    After dealing with the things and sending all the required personnel towards their designated roles, Sam went into another retreat.

    There is still a month for the ind to open, so before that, he has to make necessary preparations.

    Sam is actually tight on time.

    In three years, he has to destroy the parks that are being constructed by the three major associations and at the same time destroy their thoughts and uproot their influencepletely, so that he wouldn¡¯t have any form of apetitor in the future.

    He has to fight it out with the six major powers and upy the whole. He doesn¡¯t want authority, rather he wants the resources, he wants to monopolize the resources of the whole.

    The resources include and not exclusive to the spirit stones, herbs, nts, trees, metals, and even people.

    Sam felt like swallowing the whole. He is suddenly feeling greedy.

    He was forced to live this life, without any rhyme or reason. He was forced into the role, when he was at his lowest point, with all the power and strength he wielded in his previous life, he wasn¡¯t even given a chance to die freely.

    Now, he is going to retaliate, he doesn¡¯t know who that God is, but he is going to make him pay no matter what.

    After all these things, there is one more important thing Sam has to achieve on this. The way to enter the next realm. The method to cross the direction.

    There are some clear instructions given to him by Ling Tian and that is to find some boxes and coincidentally Sam has one of them.

    That is the reason Sam was extremely surprised, he already got one of the boxes from the Van family in the southern star, he doesn¡¯t know where they got it, but from what they said, there are four more boxes like this.

    At this moment, Sam is holding a meeting with his friends.

    The meeting is inside the second floor of the divine dimension tower.

    They all sat together and Sam has his eye closed as he simted the previous conversation with Ling Tian after his breakthrough into the Nascent stage cultivator.

    This simtiones in handy as long as it is in his mind, he can create it in here. Of course, it is an illusion.

    When the three of them saw the whole scene, they are extremely stunned.

    Till now, they are already overwhelmed by the fact that there are six major powers. They are surprised by the fact that there are people who are controlling their lives without even knowing.

    There is a reason for them to be this overwhelmed, after all, all this time they are living like bosses of arge organization Sam established, one must admit, if they only consider the forces of low-level cultivators, the whole force he canmand can easily contend with a minor power at the central continent.

    But now they realized that they are in a small corner and they are talking about crossing the, dimension, another realm. The first time, a question popped into their heads. How big is the world and how small are theypared to it?

    Philip was most stunned and he hurriedly went through the spatial ring and brought out another box. This is the box that caused the death of his father and mother and this is a box that is an exact replica of the box Sam is showing.

    Now it was Sam¡¯s turn to be stunned again and he looked at Philip.

    "Don¡¯t tell me, this is the box that brought you here?" He asked the obvious.

    Philip threw the box towards Sam and said.

    "You can take it, but you have to pay me back. I want the whole Usaine sect."

    He said it as if he was talking about a piece of meat. But Sam didn¡¯t even have a change of expression.

    "Sure, I am going to talk about that anyway.

    Our next three years will be hectic, we will bepletely tight on time. The first task for us is to depart and reach the meteorite sand ind in the northwest of the western continent.

    To reach there, we have to either fly or go through water. But from what I knew about the information, flying is an extremely stupid idea. There are some bird type beasts staying onnd of snow near that region.

    They are Ice sparrows. Even though the name sparrow seems less intimidating, the beast is savage, they travel in groups and they cause mayhem for the intruders.

    This is the information I got from the thunder god temple regarding the geography of that area.

    If by any chance, we invade their airspace, we are screwed. We wouldn¡¯t be able to handle them that easily.

    Even going through the water is not exactly advisable. From what I heard from that guy, the casualties of their every trip is actually a disaster and they lost more than sixty percent of their men every time during the round trip.

    I do have an idea of how to travel, but it will take me some time to build, even with the new production unit I built.

    At this time, I want the two of you to visit the Arsin empire near the Usiane sect. From what I read, the Arsin is the closest to the Usaine sect and that is the ce they first entered and conquered.

    So, enquire and see how much does the Usaine sect involve itself in the governing, We are familiar with the thunder god temple, so we can actually proceed without any consequences, but the Usaine sect is different.

    Familiarize and collect as much information as you can. We will start to that ind in fifteen days, so try your best."

    With that, the meeting is concluded and they all went to do their jobs.

 Chapter 428: To the Snowlands

    For the next fifteen days, the team didn¡¯t have any contact with each other. Sam is inside the tower, Philip was doing administrative tasks while Watt and Jack went to the Arsin empire to gather their required date.

    Only after fifteen days did they appear in the city again and met each other.

    On that day, they are set to start their journey. They didn¡¯t discuss the matters of the Arsin at the moment, they only talked about the meteorite sand ind which would appear in another month and Sam is not sure if the three underground organizations arepletely dissolved or not.

    In the war with the Old one who used the ck fire, ck wind, and ck rock to do his bidding in spreading the Undead gue, Sam didn¡¯t have many details regarding the heads of these three organizations who are Transcendent stage cultivators.

    Sam wasn¡¯t able to get any definite information on these three people because a lot of transcendent stage cultivators popped up in Old One¡¯s army by the end of the war and many of them are killed.

    They could identify all of them and Sam doesn¡¯t have any form of identity information regarding these people.

    If they are still alive, they would surelye to this ind.

    After all, their current situations will be extremely pathetic even if they were to survive the attack. They would surely try to use the benefits the meteorite sands could get them at this moment. If they could get enough of sand in their hands, then they might try to buy their way into the major powers or better yet, they could get somece in the Artisan association which has enough influence and has ess to resources that are beyond some major powers.

    After all, the major powers only control a certain area of the while the associations have influence in all the areas. They can get whatever they want.

    Sam doesn¡¯t want to confront these guys. They would be extremely powerful.

    Even thoughing there will be difficult, there is a chance they could be there. So, Sam has to reach the ce as early as possible and deal with it as fast as he can.

    He is mostly betting on the fact that it is actually hard for them to cross the continents without the help of the major powers.

    After making necessary preparations and picking up everything they needed to, the four of them went out of the city. There Sam waved his hand a metallic object appeared out of nowhere.

    It is Sam¡¯stest creation. One look and any modern person would think that it is a car and in fact, it is actually true.

    But it is not a normal car. It is a hovercar. It is created by a Meteorite sand alloy Sam made. If the artisan association head and the Usaine sect head knew that Sam is mixing up the meteorite sand alloys, then they might beat him to death.

    After all, no one in the world would think of doing that. Generally, the weapons in this world are not made from a single metal, alloys are always used, even if they don¡¯t use a premade alloy, they would mix up the metals in the process of making them.

    But the meteorite sands, ck star gold, and any other metals of such grade wouldn¡¯t be alloyed so easily.

    In fact, this is the second time Sam doing this. He once alloyed the Gray meteorite sand and Silver meteorite sand to make some tools in the machine.

    But this time, the amount of sand he alloyed is nowhere near that. At this moment, Sam is almost running empty on all his meteorite sand stock. He might be able to make some daggers or a couple of swords with them.

    When the three of them looked at the car they are a bit surprised and didn¡¯t know what to think of it.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care. Actually, if he made a real car, it would have taken a long time. Even the one hundred and fifty days in the tower wouldn¡¯t be enough. But this time the concept behind this working is not much.

    The hovercar has the same principle as the harbinger and the silver wind. There is noplicated engineering design that would make his life difficult to manufacture.

    The bottomyer of the car has four energy cells which have the same shape as the energy cells Sam used on his board. But the size is a lot different.

    Even in the back, the thruster pipes are rectangr and there are two of them side by side.

    The design is not so overly posh. There are two seats in the front and two in the rear for the four of them.

    As for the defense and offense, there are not many arrangements regarding attacks, and only defensive arrangements are made.

    Sam didn¡¯t care much about offense and strictly speaking there are only three attack methods.

    The main reason for that is that it would take a lot of time.

    Sam needs to conduct extensive research and experiments to create a strong enough vehicle that can be focused on attacks.

    Sam opened the doors and four of them took their seats.

    Instead of the steering wheel, Sam has two joysticks like handles to control the vehicle which is attributed to the thrusters of the rear which provide the forward movement as for the lower end thrusters those would be operated by his feet.

    The car floated in the air as they zoomed past the streets, people and after a few minutes, they are traveling towards the imperial capital along the rail track.

    The speed of the car is extremely high. High enough to leave the car far behind. Due to the increase in Sam¡¯s mental health and the lot of wind elemental energy that involved along with the size of the energy cells, the speed is fast enough to catch up with a transcendent level beast.

    That is the reason Sam made sure that he made the car strong enough and used the alloy of some meteorite sands so that it would be hard enough to resist the force, air resistance, and any form of possible damages that might happen in the journey.

    And he also had to make sure that the whole thing is light enough to pick up such speed.

    They traveled to the imperial capital in less than two days. From there, Sam has to use some of themunication means that Arc has with the people of snownds so that they would be informed about their arrival and not take them as a hostile party.

    Sam has a faint idea about the location they should go to. That would be the ce where they should take to the sea.

    After informing the people of snownds, Sam and the group once again went on with their journey.

    In another half a day, they are able to reach the snownds and entered their territory.

    After they entered deep enough and see human activity, they decided to travel by foot and stored the car away.

    The people are all dressed in smooth white fur garments and they are looking at Sam and his group in a weird way.

    After a while, the head of the tribe came over to greet them. He is a transcendent stage cultivator and behind him, a familiar person is walking towards them. He is none other than Yash, one of the three people who came to the Falcon cliff city to participate in the tower of will.

    "Wee to our tribe. His majesty has informed us about your arrival. Pleasee, I will show you your residence, the food is being prepared and we can talk over a meal about what you need our help for."

    They followed and after settling in a small ice house, Yash was left to keep thempany and see if they would need anything.

    But there is nothing much they need and there was an awkward silence for a moment before they were called for the banquet.

    When they entered the area, they noticed that there are a lot of people on the main table sitting on all sides.

    Sam noticed that more than half of them are pre-transcendent cultivators which surprised him.

    "So, Sam. What is it that you need? You came all the way here from the city." The tribe leader asked.

    "I need to find an ind in the northwest."

    Sam said without any reservations, everyone was silent and didn¡¯t speak. The tribe leader said after that awkward silence.

    "Sam, tell me you are kidding? There is nothing in the north-west but danger. What ind can you find there?"

    Sam was puzzled. "What do you mean?"

    "We go to fishing in the northern part of the seas and we covered most of the coastline, the sea blessed us with many resources. But the north-western coast is something we don¡¯t dare to enter.

    We believe that there is something wrong with that Sea?"

    Sam frowned and asked.

    "But I am sure that there is a team of explorers who went in that direction and came back, almost twenty years ago. They even discovered an ind and that is the same ce I am going right now."

    Everyone was dumbstruck and Sam could sense some sort of strange atmosphere in the air.

    "The exploration is the one that made us realize not to step in that direction. Since you know of this, there is no point in hiding from you.

    That ce is actually not that dangerous in the past, except for deep seas, we could roam in those shallow waters all we want, but the problem started after that exploration team. They came with a map and took most of our skilled explorers of the sea with them and by the time they returned, only one of our explorers survived and even the explorer team was almost wiped out. Only a handful of people returned.

    From that time, that region ispletely covered in thick fog and no one who ventured inside was able to return.

    Rumour has it that only a transcendent stage cultivator would be able to travel that ce and even their safety is not guaranteed. I advise you guys to withdraw."

 Chapter 429: Beast Attacks

    Sam and the group stayed in the tribe for the next few days. Sam¡¯s travel speed is different and he doesn¡¯t have to worry about anything.

    He is confident that he could reach the ind area within a few days and there is still ten days more for the ind to appear.

    He stayed here because he wanted to keep a close eye on the area. He wants to see if the cultivators from the three organizations woulde.

    That is one of the reasons, they came this early. No matter what, if those cultivators really decided toe here, even if they don¡¯t have any form of contact with the tribe, they would have to move through the same coast.

    But after four days, there are no signs of someone. By this time, Sam already lost interest. It is about time he moved. There is around a week for the appearance of the ind.

    Sam has to find a safe way to go there. When the cultivators of the tribe heard that Sam is going to the Northwest no matter what, they didn¡¯t stop him. Even though, they felt like it is a wrong decision Sam is not someone they could control.

    Sam is relieved by this. As for the warnings of chief of the tribe on that day, Sam still believed that the reason for so many deaths might not necessarily be attributed to sea and the dangers of the sea. After all, in these kinds of ces, the most dangerous creature will always be human.

    Sam and the group boarded the car and hovered towards their destination; Sam arrived at the shore of the sea. There is no sand here, onlyrge blocks of ice.

    This shore is familiar to them, they are staying most of their time here from the past few days, Sam even left some shadow mice here so that they would give him info if someone went through here in his absence.

    But till now, they discovered nothing.

    No one came over. Sam doesn¡¯t know how these people will navigate to the ind if they don¡¯te to this shore. After all, from this ce, it is said to be straight line. From other ces it is not the same.

    They noticed that something is weird as soon as they left the shore. The mist became denser than the previous days and they also felt like their spiritual sense is restricted, it is not leaving the confines of the car.

    Sam and the group all have solemn expressions, they didn¡¯t expect that their journey would be this hard right from the start.

    At this moment, Sam looked left and right and popped his head out of the window to see if he could sense anything, but there is nothing. Even when he tried to use his night vision there is nothing he could see.

    Actually, if night vision is used in morning time, the eyes might burn, but there is not much sunlight in this area and the mist dimmed it even more. The mist is so dense that even when Sam looked towards the sky nothing happened to him.

    "What should we do?"

    Philip asked serious, they didn¡¯t expect that the start of journey itself is this dangerous.

    "We will move slowly; I have a way to see for a certain distance. We will not float too high above the sea level and we shouldn¡¯t be low enough to attract the attention of any sea creatures." Sam replied and closed his eyes for a moment.

    At that moment, within the divine dimension¡¯s third floor therge crystal table glowed. After a few seconds, a hologram started floating above the table and that is the hologram of the car.

    And soon many holographic images started appearing around the car, even though they looked holographic, they are pretty realistic.

    With in a few seconds, the whole table is glowing with arge holographic image appearing on it.

    This is extremely simr to the radar function, Sam could see what is around the car to a certain extent and he could also see what is beneath the car under the ocean water within the perceivable range.

    Sam willed and the holographic image started moving downwards and he could see what is underwater and he was surprised to see, that most of it is actually wooden and metallic junk. They are scraps of the crashed ships.

    Sam didn¡¯t find any form of wreckage, but he could understand that whatever it is that is in front of them, it is not something easily manageable.

    Just from the sheer amount of scrap items, he understood that the number of ships wrecked in this ce is not something small and insignificant.

    Sam didn¡¯t open his eyes; his spiritual energy is being drained too fast.

    This function actually uses Sam¡¯s spiritual energy and forms the image, even though they could see what is around them and in three-dimensional way which is just a scaled version of the real thing, the amount of spiritual energy one paid still makes them exhausted soon.

    Sam has only tested this function before but only for a few seconds.

    He didn¡¯t have much use for it in the city at this moment, but in the war times, it will be extremely useful.

    The current image that Sam could see is limited by his cultivation level. If Sam increased his cultivation and he covered a certain range, along with a propermunication, they could gain huge advantage in a war.

    It is not easy to gain the real time information of any creature in their vicinities after all.

    Sam moved extremely slowly, if he reduced the range of the perception and the holographic image, then his spiritual energy consumption would be slower.

    But he didn¡¯t want to risk it and Sam was on verge of running out in an hour. But he already took out the energy cell and started absorbing the energy. At the same time, he directed the energy through his body towards the divine dimension ring.

    Sam has a problem with the divine dimension and that is it wouldn¡¯t take spiritual energy like other devices.

    It is only absorbing the spiritual energy that went through his spiritual core.

    Sam¡¯s spiritual core and body are now a transfer channel of spiritual energy to the divine dimension, while they moved slowly.

    Even though, their journey is slow, it is slow only whenpared to the top speed. They are still travelling at a speed of Level-6 beast.

    Sam halted their journey only half a dayter. Because, they could see normally by that time.

    The mist is still there, but it is not as dense as before, and what they saw left them stupefied. There is arge wreckage of ships piled up on one other. Sam once again closed his eyes and looked at the hologram and noticed that the wreckage is reaching the sea bed.

    It is a mountain of ship wreck.

    It is notpletely blocking their way though, there is till way for them to go in fact it is almost as if a way was deliberately left there for the ships to enter.

    But they didn¡¯t dare to enter carelessly. They don¡¯t know what is beyond, the scraps of metal and wood they saw on their way all belongs to this ship wreck.

    Sam didn¡¯t dare to be careless and they slowly hovered over.

    There is a reason for him to make a hover car and not a special boat, which would give him more ess to the sea. He doesn¡¯t want to venture into the sea. He didn¡¯t dare to. After all, treading the unknown waters is noughing matter.

    As for not using something that could fly, he doesn¡¯t want to be in too high of an air space and the beasts couldn¡¯t be trusted no matter how powerful they are. As for his own beasts, there is no way he would put them in such a danger.

    He decided to go with this because of its speed, and he could also be adaptable. His car wouldn¡¯t be suppressed just because of a sheer force from the bloodline of random beast in the sea.

    After floating for a while, Sam suddenly slowed down the whole car and even reduced the thruster. The car is lowered down and, in the spot, he was before, arge creature leaped from the water and dropped once again.

    The huge ssh of water caused his car to drift a bit. But Sam controlled the situation and moved once again. He increased thrust and moved higher and higher. This time another creature could be seen jumping around.

    They are huge and in modern earth they could be passed on as whales. But they are actually dolphins. They are called cial dolphins.

    Sam recognized them easily. But he is not in a mood to analyse them because there are a lot of them in the water and they are trying to target him.

    Sam decided to increase the altitude to extreme, but as he increased his thrust and reached a certain height, he noticed that there are other creatures in the sky which are zooming fast towards the sea and he quaked in his book.

    They are called Tundra Sea hawk. Sam didn¡¯t expect both of these lunatic beasts woulde at the same time and they are in groups.

    He now understood why there is a mountain of wreckage and he is also d that he is not on a beast. No matter what type of beast he was on, even if it was Yanwu or Sky, at their current level they wouldn¡¯t have even moved a single inch forward.

 Chapter 430: Crossing the hurdle

    Sam is feeling the pressure. He still has his eyes closed.

    He is focusing all his mind on the hologram. In this space the spiritual sense of a cultivator is nothing. They even got their eyesight robbed off until now and even that is not covering a lot of distance.

    The seawater and mist above them are covering the dolphins and the seahawks which are randomly zooming towards the car.

    Sam¡¯s veins popped up as he controlled the car with his eyes closed. Even at this moment, the beasts are not using any form of elemental attacks, they are only using their physical bodies to try and crash the car.

    But Sam is using his mental strength to the extreme to see the attacks before they came.

    The car missed the crash many times by a hair¡¯s breadth.

    The remaining three all had their hearts falling into their pants. They are having the worst nightmare of their lives. They could see the beasts, but they could only see when they are too close. They are feeling their bodies move in an extremely ufortable way.

    Even with their cultivation levels, they are feeling like throwing up.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care, he popped a space jade in his mouth and started absorbing spiritual energy from the cells and the spirit stones all the same. He doesn¡¯t have time to care anymore.

    The power consumption is toorge. If he stops the absorption for a single second, he would lose the image and that¡¯s it, the four of them would die and buried down in the sea.

    Sam is trying to estimate the cultivation levels of the beasts and was only able to estimate that after more than half an hour. He doesn¡¯t have time to see the energy waves around them to estimate the cultivation with the speed he and they are moving.

    All the beasts are mostly pre-transcendent level and since they are moving in such arge groups they do not have a high level of authority or position in their own groups.

    This gave chills to Sam. If the leader of the tribe is strong enough to control the tribe which has beasts of the Pre-transcendent level as themon poption, then the beast should be extremely strong.

    A whole Major power would be destroyed down to ruins in a single day if they fought with these beasts seriously.

    As Sam dodged continuously, Philip and Watt already puked their guts out within the car. Only Jack was able to stayposed. There is a faint sword aura around him and his eyes are closed.

    No one knows what he is thinking, but from the veins that are popping out on his skin and the clenched fists, one could guess that he is also trying his best to stay stable.

    After continuous dodging which also implied the failure of the beasts to catch him, the beasts seemed to have been annoyed.

    Suddenly a cial Sea hawk dove down from the sky and Sam who is watching the hologram estimated the trajectory and evaded, but to his horror, the sea hawk¡¯s wings suddenly turned into ice wings and a sharp and cold aura surrounded it, an icy sharp ray of spiritual energy was shot towards Sam.

    Sam hurriedly tried to dodge the attack but the ray hit the car at the tail end to one edge and the car suddenly started rotating randomly. There was a dent on the rear end.

    The members in the cars hit their heads to the roof and crashed back into their seats.

    The ray then went on to hit the seawater under which a cial dolphin was waiting to jump up.

    But the ray hit it hard and a strong roar came from the sea. The roar is not of the beast, rather the roar of the seawater.

    The cial dolphin¡¯s spiritual energy was in turmoil which caused the seawater to roar. The water shot out in the form of a ray and hit the Seahawk whose concentration was still on the car.

    The Seahawk and the dolphin both had a staredown and exchanged roars, but still didn¡¯t start a fight. Clearly, they are capable ofmunication and intelligent enough to understand and reason between themselves.

    Sam didn¡¯t hear the whole conversation but he still picked some bits and pieces, then only he got an Idea.

    The Car¡¯s attacks are clearly not strong enough to deal with these beasts, he couldn¡¯t kill them with just the car.

    But Sam can make use of it to deal with them in an indirect way.

    Sam pressed a button and some fins popped up on the sides of the car. There are three fins on each side at the rear ends. The fins are not big, they are as big as a side-view mirror of a car.

    The energy from the wind energy cells started moving upwards and Sam¡¯s face is fully red by now, the veins almost looked as if they are going to burst open at any time.

    When the energy raised upwards, a faint line of runes which aren¡¯t normally visible all appeared again and the surrounding wind elemental energy started surging.

    Right now, Sam is connected with the car. Both of them are one and the same at this moment. As the wind element surged it also grew sharper and just when the other Seahawk was about to attack, Sam suddenly made an extremely hard turn with the car, and that too in a weird angle.

    Threerge wind des flew upwards from the fins and shed towards the Seahawk which was just about to release the attack, in fact, it is already activated and the bird couldn¡¯t even take back the attack.

    The wind des shed the bird in the wing and the bird stumbled a bit in the air, the Icy de of the birdpletely missed andnded on a Dolphin in the water.

    At this moment, Sam made another Hard turn, and the wind des from the other side hit a dolphin in the side which just jumped at him, the dolphin twisted its body in the air and turned to another side which hit a Seahawk that was zooming towards Sam.

    He didn¡¯t stop just there. The wind elemental energy once again started surging around the car and Sam didn¡¯t stop. But this retaliation by Sam made the beasts extremely mad.

    For a second, Sam actually got some rest, he just hovered in the air without moving at all.

    The whole surroundings are filled with roars of spiritual energy. Even though they don¡¯t have any form of spiritual sense, Sam could still feel the pressure and so do the rest of the members in the group.

    They all watched the whole situation and there is nothing they could to help. After all, they are weak at the moment. Sam didn¡¯t make any arrangements to use thebined energy of four. Maybe, if they did that then they would have had a decent chance to escape this ce easily. In fact, they could have fought their way out of this situation.

    But Sam doesn¡¯t have enough materials and time. The meteorite sand ran out and any form of other metal would just degrade the whole machine.

    Sam started concentrating on the hologram. His head was facing downwards, there is a faint trace of blood in his left nostril and his face is fully red.

    He has to take care of this situation no matter what. His main focus was on the way out which is actually straight ahead. He could feel that the ce is a little different and all this while, the beasts made sure that they didn¡¯t trespass and it seems to be a form of division in the sea territories and the division is also made of some shipwrecks.

    Sam has to race to that and he couldn¡¯t go back. There is no way out of here. The way back is very small which ispletely blocked. He has only one way.

    Sam pressed another button and some metallic tes slid and energy cells of the light element were revealed.

    They are in the ce of the headlights of a car.

    Just as the beasts are about to move, Sam made his move first.

    He didn¡¯t go in a straight line, as the dolphins and the hawksunched the attacks, Sam drove the car like it was a roller coaster and the wind des andser flew like crazy.

    Philip and the rest didn¡¯t know what happened, they crashed around in the car and they closed their eyes as they could handle the visual effects of their random motion and are on the verge of vomiting once again.

    But when they opened their eyes, they were shocked, because they are seeing all the beasts that were about to attack them, but from an opposite view.

    They crossed the beasts and they are at the exit. All they have to do is turn around and leave this ce and continue with the journey.

    But they didn¡¯t have any intention of saying those words because their brains stopped thinking at this moment.

    In front of their eyes, the beasts which are attacking them wildly are also slumped down. Some dolphins are injured and two of them are even dead. As for the Seahawks almost all of them crashed into the ground.

    The wounded beasts are angry and wanted to chase him, at this moment, Sam opened his eyes for the first time. He pressed a button which was on the left joystick and the car suddenly plummeted down a bit, but with another press, the car recovered the thrust.

    Sam gave onest cold nce and turned the car around and moved on with his journey. In a few seconds the beasts reached the spot he was in and

    *BOOM*

    The energy cell st happened in the ocean and half of the beasts died at that point. Because Sam dropped tworge energy cells that are under the car and providing the thrust after destabilizing them.

 Chapter 431: Whirlpools

    When they crossed the area and the st happened, the beasts didn¡¯t follow them.

    The st caused the water to rain down on them and the four of them entered the next sea zone as it rained all over.

    The entrance of the area is once again shrouded by the mist but this time it onlysted for a few seconds, when their vision returned, there is a region of the sea which has some rocky inds right in front of their eyes.

    The inds are very small and they couldn¡¯t be considered a full-scale ind, they are some extremelyrge rocky surface in the middle of the ocean.

    Sam looked through the hologram and after confirming that nothing is there in the vicinities, he immediatelynded the car on one of the rocks and came out of it.

    As soon as he came out of the car, he knelt on the ground and started coughing blood. Even his nostrils are bleeding continuously. He felt like all his internal organs are about to explode and his brain is something that took the most damage.

    As much as putting this much pressure will train his mental strength, Sam doesn¡¯t want to be a retarded person. He almost suffered brain damage. All this while, Sam could almost hear his nerves throbbing with pain.

    He couldn¡¯t stand it anymore. He would have copsed in between the battle itself. But he couldn¡¯t die. He shouldn¡¯t die. So, he made sure that they escaped even if he has to fight tooth and nail.

    But now that he has somece to rest, he couldn¡¯t be happier.

    Sam justid down on the rocky surface and looked at the three of them who are also sitting down.

    "You guys better clean the whole thing, otherwise you can find your own ride back home."

    Sam said that, closed his eyes, and fell asleep. He doesn¡¯t want to stay awake for another minute.

    His body which is exhausted from the spiritual energy started absorbing the surrounding energy slowly and started recovering.

    Meanwhile, the other three exchanged nces and started cleaning up.

    None of the three has any water element, so they have to pour the water themselves. To their relief, there is a lot of water around them.

    They dragged the car to the edge of the rock and Watt took out the silver wind as he made arge drift on the sea surface which made the waterunch into the car. Philip¡¯s job is to scrub and clean the whole thing. As for Jack, he is the only one who puked.

    For some reason, he was able to control the urge and remainposed. Even though he hasn¡¯t seen most of the situation, he knew that he was of no help, so all he could do is to not add extra trouble for Sam.

    If he became sick on the sea, then Sam would have endless trouble as they are in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by many people. At that time, he couldn¡¯t think of the divine dimension, but still, he could be considered considerate and used all his willpower as a swordsman to maintain hisposure.

    Sam slept like a baby for three hours. His headache was finally gone by the time he woke up.

    When he looked around, he saw that only Philip and Jack are on the rock, Watt is nowhere to be seen.

    Both Philip and Jack are sleeping, he didn¡¯t disturb them immediately and wanted to look for Watt by himself, but before he could do anything, he saw Watting towards the rock on the silver wind.

    "Where did you go? This ce is dangerous, don¡¯t roam around on your own."

    Sam said with a solemn tone.

    "I went to scout the area, the surrounding area until the mist is actually a safe zone. There is nothing in this ce. Even in the sea, there are no creatures.

    It is almost as if this ce was arranged so that the people who came will rest after they battled those beasts in that area."

    Watt said calmly. Sam was stunned for a moment and then took a look in the hologram.

    The scene shocked him. There is no living creature within the vicinity, just like watt said. This made him think of the possibility ording to Watt¡¯sst sentence.

    If this ce is really arranged for resting, then the first ce could be considered as a test and it couldn¡¯t be the final test because, instead of the reward which the destination of their journey, the meteorite sand ind, they just arrived at a small ce which has no living organism.

    A ce in the sea this close to shore without any creature when there are dozens of beasts just a few meters away is notpletely normal.

    If that is really the case, they can expect another form of danger in front of them once again.

    This made Sam tense. He couldn¡¯t feel assured that he would be able to cross that danger. He is thinking if it is the right thing to bring these guys there.

    He is just thinking if it is right to bring his friends, as for himing here, there is no doubt at all. He thinks that it is the only right decision. Even though he didn¡¯t want to die, he didn¡¯t fear death, he has already experienced that and for that experience, he has nothing but respect. That one experience consumed all the fear he had towards it.

    As for fear of losing everything he created in this world, he didn¡¯t grow that attached to the new life yet, but since he is alive all he has to do is try his best to stay alive or die trying.

    But his friends don¡¯t have to go through all this. Their lives are worth more than an ind of meteorite sand.

    He looked at Watt and the other two before saying.

    "We need to go into the divine dimension for a minute, wake them up."

    Watt looked at him weirdly, he noticed that Sam¡¯s expression is not right.

    But he still did as he told.

    When the three of them are ready, Sam waved his hand and threw them inside the divine dimension.

    But he never went in. He walked to the car and started his journey again.

    Sam is confident that he can escape. He still has four transference scrolls. But he is not confident that he would be able to pull all of them together into the divine dimension before he could escape.

    Even if something really happened to him, he is confident that he could make sure that they will be at a rtively safe ce than his ce of death.

    Meanwhile, in the divine dimension, the trio understood that something is wrong.

    Sam is noting inside, suddenly Watt thought of something about what he said earlier, but he is not smart enough to think deeply ande to a conclusion and exined it to Philip.

    They understood what Sam is doing and their moods turned cloudy.

    They might be touched that Sam is doing this to save them, but that doesn¡¯t mean they want to be treated like this. They would have faced the danger together. This action just made them feel useless. But they knew deep down that they couldn¡¯t take an attack like thest one.

    Sam traveled towards the mist and after a few minutes, the vision became clear again. But Sam was stunned by what he saw.

    The whole ce is full of whirlpools and there are extremelyrge pieces of ice are rotating in the whirlpools. Sam is quite sure that his guess is right. This ce has a series of tests.

    He doesn¡¯t know how many, but he is sure that they are some. Sam is happy that he is not on a boat as he slowly started moving. When he was in the vicinity of the first whirlpool, the water started increasing in speed and all of a sudden, the suction force increased by too much.

    Sam could feel even the air around him started to get sucked inside.

    He increased the thrust but at this moment, the ice blocks in the whirlpool started shattering and turned into sharp shards of ice and they were shot toward Sam.

    Sam dodged them and when he tried to advance further, some kind of force is not allowing him to leave. The ice waspletely being shot towards him and Sam kept on dodging.

    He kept on doing this until the ice waspletely over, and the force that stopped him from moving disappearedpletely.

    Sam didn¡¯t understand, but he decided to move on. At this moment, all of a sudden Sam felt the car was sucked towards another whirlpool which is on the left side of the first whirlpool which attacked Sam.

    His car was being forced towards that with a greater suction force than the thrust and there is no use even after Sam went full throttle.

    Sam was dragged along with his car towards the whirlpool and the suction force was reduced, it is still more than the first one, but it is a lot less than the force he just felt. He felt puzzled, but he has some spections.

    But he couldn¡¯t think of them because the attacks from this whirlpool also began. As he was dodging the spikes, Sam was suddenly left ck-jawed from what he saw.

 Chapter 432: Ice Figures

    In front of Sam, there is a humanoid figure made up of ice and also holding a spear made of ice. The whole body of the figure is emitting fog all over and it is facing Sam directly.

    Sam¡¯s spiritual sense is still not working, he once again closed his eyes and looked at the hologram inside the tower and this time, he noticed that Philip, Watt, and Jack are on the third floor of the tower.

    They are also looking at the hologram along with Sam.

    They don¡¯t know if Sam is looking or not, so they didn¡¯t make a sound.

    Sam just observed the energy waves of the Icy figure and noticed that it is also a pre-transcendent. Just like the beast that is outside.

    A pre-transcendent stage Ice warrior appeared out of nowhere and that too when Sam was pulled towards a whirlpool by an invisible force.

    Sam has a faint idea, that every whirlpool is a part of the test and he seemed to have to clear every one of them, this would be a pain in the ass. This is the only thought he had when he saw this.

    All of a sudden, Sam made the car disappear and boarded the Harbinger.

    Sam made this decision so that he couldn¡¯t be a big target to the warrior standing in front of him, the space he could ess here is very small and he couldn¡¯t move the car freely within such a small and confined space.

    Anyway, the car doesn¡¯t have a good enough arsenal. He would take hours before dealing with a single one of them. And he doesn¡¯t know how many of them woulde in the next whirlpools.

    The warrior is standing on the water and Sam doesn¡¯t know how it was achieved. The warrior pointed the spear at Sam and threw it towards him as soon as he boarded the harbinger. At that moment, Sam dodged the spear easily.

    The attack is too direct and Sam is maintaining a healthy distance from the warrior. The Ice warrior conjured another Spear made of ice and the amount of ice in the whirlpool decreased by a lot.

    For some reason, Sam had more vertical ess than horizontal ess to move. The Spear has great momentum and power behind it, but it is not something Sam couldn¡¯t dodge when he is on harbinger.

    Sam looked at the warrior and started dropping the energy cells from the harbinger. He has no qualms in doing this, he doesn¡¯t feel ashamed. The opponent is far stronger, he doesn¡¯t want to fight a losing battle for some kind of fake chivalry and honor that couldn¡¯t keep him alive.

    Sam dropped three small energy cells from the harbinger, the Ice warrior dodged one of them, but itnded right next to it and sted itself, the warrior to lose bnce and wasn¡¯t able to react, after all, it is standing on seawater not a solid ground once the water is overly turbulent it would be hard and Sam¡¯s estimation is correct because the next twonded straight on the warrior right before theynded and half of the warrior was destroyed. The upper halfpletely disappeared.

    Sam only used normal energy cells for now and the results are not bad. He has to see what would happen.

    Sam didn¡¯t move this time to see if another whirlpool will suck him towards it.

    But when he stood there quietly, there is no forceing towards him and even this whirlpool is not sucking him. It seems that it is allowed to rest in a ce after clearing the test.

    Sam moved towards the next whirlpool, he doesn¡¯t even have to determine which one it is, because the whirlpool invited him there by itself.

    This time, the ice content isrger than before and it converted into two warriors with spears.

    The situation went on simr to thest time, the ce being limited is actually a blessing to Sam as it would be easy to restrict the warriors and they would take damage no matter what happens.

    As Sam did so and became soaked in the rain-induced by the st of energy cells, he wondered how the st of a water elemental energy cell would be in such a ce at the same time what would it be like sting a fire elemental energy cell in the middle of the ocean.

    He decided to try the fire elemental energy first and took out those. He watched as the third whirlpool revealed his opponents. This time only one figure appeared, but it appeared much leaner than the previous one and there are no weapons.

    The figure looked at Sam and started waving its hand, suddenly the water under Sam shot upward with such a force that could instantly destroy him.

    Sam hurriedly dodged, he nted his board and barely evaded the strike and looked at the person below once again. The statue moved once more and this time, the water attacked from different directions.

    Sam only focused on dodging and dodging and finally threw in a fire elemental energy cell.

    As for why he waited and dodged for this long, that is because he wants to read the moves of this figure. He had faint spection that these figures might repeat themselves, it would be easy for him to deal with them when they are alone.

    But once the number of icy figures increased and they attacked him at the same time, Sam wouldn¡¯t have many ways to deal with them. So, before that scenario happens, he has to make sure that he gets as much information as possible.

    When the fire elemental energy sted the impact is better than he thought.

    The st is huge, and the fire elemental energy upied a certain space and the elemental energy evaporated the water bodypletely.

    The st is effective. The water couldn¡¯t handle the heat and the steam would be a great advantage. Because due to the energy st, the spiritual sense wouldn¡¯t be as effective, all they could pursue was chaos. It is just for a second though.

    But for that one-second people has to rely on their eyes to see their opponent and the steam is a perfect deterrent for that.

    Sam analyzed as he moved to the next whirlpool.

    As for why Sam analyzed the effects in the sea, there is a chance that he might have to wage naval war against other nations.

    The Naval wars are not exactly umon even in this world, in fact, the other two nations under thunder god temple have extremelyrge naval fleets.

    They share amon sea that is not invaded by the beasts of the sea, so they fought over it for many resources.

    Even some minor powers maintain Naval troops.

    For the next battles, Sam only has one option dodge on the hoverboard, the hover board has brought him a great advantage. Its size is small and he can evade flexibly. He understood that these attacks are designed for the people who came on the boats and beasts.

    They are not for an individual who can fly.

    With the overwhelming barrage of energy cells, Sam was able to clear ten whirlpools within the day.

    There is a rock near the tenth whirlpool. Hended on it and sat there to spend the night.

    He couldn¡¯t continuously battle. Even though he could recover spiritual energy and almost have an endless amount of it, Sam¡¯s physical fatigue will be umted. Even when healing, it was only for the injuries not for the fatigue, it can only be ovee by proper rest.

    Sam is also facing mental fatigue on top of the physical one.

    He sat there on the rock cross-legged and went on.

    This time, the difficulty clearly increased, Sam couldn¡¯t find the right opportunity to shoot the energy cell whenever he wanted.

    Yesterday, he was able to clear ten of the tests in half-a-day. But today, the next ten tests made it hard for him and consumed a whole day.

    And there are still tests.

    Until now, only one more new ice figure appeared and this guy is like abination of both first and second icy figures, he used the water to his advantage and disyed some tremendous spells of water and ice at the same time, he is good at close quarters, he even used the aid of the water to try and get near Sam to hit him directly.

    Sam wasn¡¯t sure that he would be able to handle it.

    All he did was escape. In his whole life, Sam never thought dodging could this taxing.

    And this also made things tricky for him as he wasn¡¯t able to lock on the target to destroy him easily.

    In the ten battles that he fought today, these three types of icy figures appeared and the difficulty varied with the variation in the number of these figures that appeared in each stage.

 Chapter 433: Lost hearing

    The next day, in the twenty-first whirlpool, Sam encountered a figure made of ice. There is only one figure, but this time it is bigger than all the previous ones and there is a weird glow in its eyes that made Sam frown.

    There is still a Spear in its hands and it looked at Sam, intently.

    All of a sudden, the figure leaped to the air and at the same time, the surrounding water has turned into arge humanoid figure which enveloped the smaller ice figure.

    At this moment, Sam is facing this new type of water figure which is asrge as an average-sized building. He couldn¡¯t help but feel some pressure.

    The water figure waved its hand arge ice spear appeared in its hand and waved it in front of Sam. The huge gust of icy wind hit Sam hard in the face and he felt like shivering in cold.

    The edges of his coat are struck with some faint frost and even the ends of his hair are not spare. This cold is too unbearable.

    But what he didn¡¯t observe is that following the motion of that spear and the wind, the water under their feet has formed into an irregr wave and covered Sam.

    It was so discreet without any sound and only because of his battle instinct did Sam notice the changes. He felt weird when he saw this, the water body that hit him is gigantic, it didn¡¯t make sense that it could stop his hearing.

    But the same thing happened, again and again, but this time Sam is watching it with his eyes and made sure that he dodged.

    After a few minutes, Sam realized that not only his spiritual sense is blocked off, even his hearing is gone at this moment.

    His enhanced hearing which increased with the increase in his cultivation was nowpletely useless.

    All that left was that he could hear his thoughts at least. At least, Sam was able to dodge the attacks with his eyes and his sense of feel through his skin. Due to the movements of the water beingrge, he could feel the airflow changing and he could estimate the rough direction of the attack.

    But due to his unpreparedness for the unexpected situation, Sam just couldn¡¯t get a chance to aim the energy cells, if he just bombarded the opponent with his full-scale attack, he would also get caught up. He can simply escape if he could just enter the divine dimension, but he would be thrown off along with the dimension to a distance away, and based on direction he would most certainlynd in the previous safe zone.

    If at that moment, he was forced to cross the whirlpools from the beginning, things wouldn¡¯t be so pleased.

    So, Sam tried his best for another half-an-hour and suddenly made a hard turn in the air on the harbinger as he dodged the attack of the spear.

    When he made the turn an energy cell disc was shot into the water body¡¯s arm and an explosion urred that rocked the whole sea.

    The same scenario repeated continuously. Sam started throwing energy cells on the spear, the water body and sometimes he even aimed at the ice figure directly, but it was blocked.

    After some time, Sam didn¡¯t even bother attacking other parts, because he noticed that the ice of the figure is not as dense anymore, due to the attacks the water body suffered, Sam noticed that the ice body is melting bit by bit. At the same time, the ice figure also noticed the problem and started dodging.

    It didn¡¯t block Sam¡¯s attacks, but it is not that easy for such a huge body to dodge everything.

    So, to increase the sess rate, Sam has only one way, all he has to do is fire at the ice figure¡¯s position and it will have to block no matter what.

    And at this moment, he started using fire elemental cells.

    He only aimed at the center and his predictions are right. The water body was being used to block the ice figurine, but it is still being damaged and the ice is bing thicker.

    The situation turned extremely advantageous to Sam and after a few minutes, the water body disappeared, the ice figurine seemed to have realized that the damage to the water body is too much and it became an easy target.

    But it is also not beneficial for it, because while it was in the middle of diffusing the water body around but it is also the time where It couldn¡¯t do anything and Sam threw three energy cells and the st sent the whole ice figure to evaporate.

    The fire elemental cells work great here. Because the st wouldn¡¯t be as intense as using a normal energy cell of the same size. Because some of the elemental energy has to neutralize the water elemental energy which is extremely high in this area.

    When Sam was pulled into the next whirlpool, he was shocked because there are two ice figurines now and his hearing still didn¡¯t return.

    But he still opted for the same strategy. The only drawback in his n is that he will have to endure some significant pinch in his wealth due to heavy usage of the energy cells.

    Although he has many spirit stones, he didn¡¯t have them all converted into energy cells.

    He has to make more energy cells when he goes back.

    While, Sam is working hard to deal with the whirlpool monsters, within the firmament, a tall and burly humanoid silhouette could be seen moving forward with a golden headband. His body has fur all over and looked like a monkey.

    His bearing is majestic and simple at the same time.

    He walked in such a way as if to show the world that nothing can stop him at all.

    He was near a pce and the guards at the gate looked at him with a vignt expression. They knew who this guy is, generally, they don¡¯t have the authority to even catch a glimpse of him, but now he is standing in front of them.

    To perform their duty, they have to stop him from entering, but they didn¡¯t dare. They don¡¯t have the balls to even talk to him about stopping, they don¡¯t even have enough guts to think that they have to talk to him.

    At this moment, while they are contemting, a voice came from deep within the pce.

    "Let him in."

    The Monkey King walked inside with swag, and soon he is in arge hall in which a person is sitting on a small tform with his legs crossed.

    He is just meditating there and in front of him there is a quill which was ced in an inkpot and a scroll spread open.

    The old man has a schrly aura all around and he slowly opened his eyes after The Monkey King¡¯s arrival.

    "What do you need Monkey King?"

    The Old man looked at him and asked. Monkey king smiled and said.

    "Don¡¯t act like you don¡¯t it Old man, just take it out already."

    After more than an hour, The Monkey King walked out of the pce with a small metallic spear in his hands.

    He started ying with it as he whistled with his out. He didn¡¯t go to his residence, rather he went in another direction.

    After a few minutes, a mountain appeared in his view and at the entrance of the mountain, there is a spear that stood ramrod straight with its head pointing to the sky.

    There are no guards at the foot of the mountain, only the spear. But the aura releasing from the spear can kill anyone easily. As for those who can bypass this aura, there is nothing the guards can do about them.

    Monkey King swaggered to the top of the mountain as if he owned the ce.

    But half-way through, a bearing pressure came down and pressed towards him, but his walk didn¡¯t stop, it is just that the smile is no longer present on his face.

    Even with that pressure, he walked towards the top of the mountain, and arge building with a gigantic door appeared. The door didn¡¯t open and even normal gods can do nothing to it.

    There is a rule in this ce. The owner doesn¡¯t like to talk to people, but someone wants a meeting they would have to climb the mountain and open the door. They can forcefully enter and talk to him.

    The Monkey didn¡¯t even bother to take a second look at the door, he extended his hand and was about to [ush the door open, but before he could do so, the door opened automatically and a voice said.

    "My bad, Monkey King. Pleasee inside."

    The Monkey King walked in and here there is a hall with a number of seats which are empty and on the central seat which is for the head of the meeting, there is a tall young man sitting and there is a peacock type beast behind him. It looked exactly like a normal peacock, but one could never judge that thing with just looks.

 Chapter 434: Karthikeya

    The Monkey King walked towards a seat which was arranged right in front of the young man who is seated.

    "What do you want Sun Wukong?"

    "The next Pce of Inheritance is yours isn¡¯t it?"

    "What if it is?"

    "I want you to do something for me?" The Monkey King said casually.

    "Are you asking for a favor? Your tone suggests otherwise."

    "Think of it as you may." With that, the monkey king ced the sphere on the table and said.

    "Next time, ask Sanchez to deliver this to Sam."

    "Sam?"

    "Gambler¡¯s Pick. Among the yers, I think he is the best. At least, he was the only one among the people who were able tost until the final round and even master the Void style partially. Your yer was down because of his tricks by the way. That guy has got brains."

    The young man raised an eyebrow and said.

    "Isn¡¯t this against the rules?"

    "This is the reward I promised. So, there is no vition of the rules. After all, it is not stated in the rules that we cannot deliver the required rewards with the help of others."

    "So, you are trying to make use of the loopholes of the rules."

    "I don¡¯t care what you think of it, you know me, I y by the rules as long as there is no vition."

    "But why should I give him this. Didn¡¯t the gambler say that he is confident in his yer that his yer can cross dimensions without any of his help? He is so confident and even used the dimensional crosser to exchange a lot of knowledge.

    Didn¡¯t he know that a person couldn¡¯t do much with that much knowledge? After all, what use is it if he doesn¡¯t have the strength to preserve it and the ability to utilize it? We all thought that his yer would be down first, but now you are helping him."

    "Help? You look down on me too much don¡¯t you? I am Great Sage heaven¡¯s Equal. Not anyone can deserve my help." His demeanor changed with his tone and he continued.

    ??He won, fair and square and he exceeded the expectations of mine. So, I promised the reward which exceeded my current limit at that time. I am now asking you to give him some reward. He doesn¡¯t need my help. He earned it himself."

    The young man didn¡¯t say anything and looked at him. The Monkey King felt that something is wrong and then a look of enlightenment came over his face.

    "Don¡¯t tell me, you are jealous of him. After all your yer didn¡¯t even get anything in the first two pces. And it seems that this guy is the biggest winner in the first two pces."

    The young man¡¯s gaze turned gloomy and said in a cold tone.

    "Watch your tone, Monkey King. I am the Divine general of the Hindu Gods. I don¡¯t need to be jealous of some manipted mortal."

    "Since you say that, why don¡¯t you deliver this."

    "It is beneath me to do so. I am not your courier."

    "Is that so? If you don¡¯t do so, I might want to make you."

    "You can try."

    "Okay then, see you in the arena."

    With that, he disappeared from the spot and reappeared in another dimension.

    "The Great Sage Heaven¡¯s Equal, Monkey King is challenging Karthikeya."

    As soon as his voice rang ten bright lights shone down from all sides and ten human silhouettes appeared.

    One of them is Indra and another one of them is Gambler the rest are the remaining gods who chose yers just like them.

    The next second, the young man who talked to Monkey King appeared out of nowhere with a spear in his hand.

    "Karthikeya, the God of War, the Divine General of the Hindu Gods, and the Son of the Shiva the Destroyer epts the challenge."

    Indra¡¯s silhouette looked at them and said.

    "State the terms."

    "I have an errand that I want Karthikeya to run for me." The Monkey King said without exining much.

    "I need the Monkey King¡¯s Heavenly wine. Twenty Gallons of it."

    After that, one of them took the staff and another one took out a spear. The whole dimension quaked and it was on verge of copse. But after one hour, the remaining ten gods announced the Monkey King as the winner, even though it is a neck and neck fight on the premise that he had done more damage to Karthikeya.

    The fight was stopped because Karthikeya was about to use his trump cards. It would lead to catastrophic damage.

    They don¡¯t want to see that happen. After all, two gods might perish with this. It is not exactly a good thing.

    Karthikeya is gloomy, he didn¡¯t want to agree but he has no choice. After all, it is a dispute over some exchange of words, if the Monkey King didn¡¯t take it to fight he wouldn¡¯t have done so. All that damn monkey had to do was ask a bit more politely.

    That was why this whole fiasco happened.

    He didn¡¯t want to just do whatever the Monkey King asked. After all, he has his pride and he thought he deserved more respect from the Monkey King and particrly when he was the one asking favor.

    But it seems that damn monkey would fight to the death than change his behavior.

    He has all these thoughts in his mind as he returned to his pce.

    Meanwhile, back in the mortal world, Sam doesn¡¯t know that the two gods fought over them because of him. Even though it is their own pettiness that caused this, he was the starting point. He is busy dealing with the third whirlpool for the day.

    The third whirlpool is actually something he didn¡¯t expect because the water turned green as soon as he entered which affected his nose. There is a pungent smell of sea creatures rotting for thousands of years assaulting his nose.

    One must think this is trivial. But imagine a sense of smell which is thousands of time stronger than a normal wolf. That is the sense of smell of a cultivator, but Sam is different, he has bloodlines of beasts and it is not wrong to say that he is a partial beast.

    His sense of smell is way stronger than any cultivator at his level and the Raiju???s new bloodline he got made it worse.

    He almost puked his guts out as soon as he entered this. He couldn¡¯t help but take out the breathing device and wear it so that he could keep himself from distracting by this smell. But it is notpletely effective, he could still smell it. Not as intense as before, but sure it is not much better.

    Sam never thought that one could use the sense of smell to this extent.

    The contaminated water body didn¡¯t exceed the limit the whirlpool is covering. Sam has never felt his exceeding sense are a bane to him. But now it seemed so.

    The battle was hard-fought and Sam has suffered some damage due to this disturbance.

    After fighting for a while, Sam suddenly couldn¡¯t bear the smell anymore and felt like puking. As he tried to control this urge, he flinched a bit and all of sudden the water wave towered from above and copsed into the water.

    He could feel that the surrounding water is trying to crush him and his blood ran cold. He couldn¡¯t take it anymore and immediately entered the divine dimension and dragged the nearby Harbinger which just fell on the sea.

    The crystal entered the sea and slowly started descending downwards.

    Sam entered the divine dimension and started breathing heavily, he took out the breathing instrument and went on to deal with the injuries he had. His whole body was actuallypletely red at this moment and it ispletely swollen.

    The blood clotted in many areas. He closed his eyes and started healing himself, the first thing he did is control the spiritual energy and his muscle at the same time, to clear the blood clots, even if they tore open it is still better for him. It would be easier to heal.

    After healing himself, he once again prepared to go out.

    Sam closed his eyes and looked out to see the situation and he noticed that the crystal was stuck inside the whirlpool¡¯s eye on the see bed.

    This is the only ce with the least amount of motion.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know if he could climb and the depth is too much, he doesn¡¯t know if he could take the pressure.

    He wants to see if he could get out of this situation without taking any more damage.

 Chapter 435: Lost Sight

    Sam is thinking about how to escape, he doesn¡¯t know what will happen if he just entered the water directly.

    If he were to be crushed again as soon as he entered, then there is nothing he can do, and has to go back into the dimension. He is truly in a pickle.

    The whirlpool is too aggressive for him to swim upwards easily. If the ice figure once againes into action as soon as he entered the water, he would have to suffer some serious injuries all over again.

    After some thinking, Sam decided to try something which he didn¡¯t know would work.

    Under the water, an energy cell appeared under the crystal of divine dimension.

    Even though he is confident that these energy cells couldn¡¯t damage it, he is still nervous as he did this. The energy cell sted as soon as it appeared and the crystal was shot up along withrge amounts of water.

    As soon as the crystal appeared in the air above the whirlpool, Sam came out along with the harbinger and desperately tried to increase his altitude. At the same time, he didn¡¯t hesitate to drop three more energy cells as he saw the ice figure forming.

    Sam barely escaped the st range and hovered and when the water vapor was cleared, he saw that the water body that usually surrounded the ice figure is actually much smaller than before. And even the contaminated water this time is much lesser.

    This time, Sam tried his best to distract himself from the whole bad stench and started throwing the energy cells at the Ice figure.

    While doing so, he is cursing his bad luck for not having more space. Because, all this while, when he threw energy cells, he threw only small and thin discs which are using in the harbinger which he used before for smaller ranges. Because, if the st intensity is too big, he would be blown away even if he entered the divine dimension and if he failed to enter, he would die.

    After the Ice figure was done, Sam didn¡¯t move further immediately, rather he took off the Breathing equipment and started puking his guts out.

    He hasn¡¯t puked in a while.

    But just the smell is enough for him to make him feel like this.

    He took a rest for an hour and decided to restart the journey.

    This is the fourth whirlpool for today and as soon as he entered it, he was dumbfounded because this time the smell is even worse than the previous time.

    Sam felt like killing himself. Thest one is at least the waste of the sea creatures, this time it seems to be abination of human waste, sea waste and all forms of wastes that have foul smell seemed to have dumped together and was brewed for hundreds of years. When he looked at the watercolor Sam didn¡¯t even want to touch it.

    As the ice figure is forming, Sam once again threw the energy cell, but this time it didn¡¯t reach the target, the water flew up and blocked the energy cell and even though it was sted, the ice figure didn¡¯t receive any damage for some reason.

    This made Sam frown.

    He repeated the same time many times and there is still no result.

    The energy cells are being blocked but there is no damage to the ice figure. This is something he didn¡¯t expect. After a series of attacks, Sam finally understood.

    The ice figure in the previous stage has taken some damage while blocking the attack was mostly due to the fact that it used the water body that surrounded it to block, but this time it is using the water which is not from the water body and even after blocking it, the ice figure seemed to have let go of the control of the water before the explosion.

    By abandoning the control, there is minimum damage done.

    Sam felt like cursing himself. How can he get past, if energy cells didn¡¯t work?

    He is confident that if he bombarded with arge amount of a huge energy cell, the ice figure would die, but the ce is too small and he would be sted away along with the crystal. It is not exactly useful.

    The water within the range is mostly in motion and only the extreme edge has considerably less motion which is almost negligible.

    Sam started to think of the ways to see if he could use any of the circumstances to his advantage but the thing he had to keep on dodging and has little to no time to think.

    After some time, he wanted to see if he has any other way to deal with this.

    He took a methane grenade and threw it

    He didn¡¯t even throw it, he just dropped it as he dodged.

    This time, the water didn¡¯t block it directly, maybe it only registered the energy cells as a danger that should be blocked like that, and moreover there are no spiritual energy wavesing from the grenade.

    As the grenade dropped, it submerged a bit. Sam thought, there is a little possibility of it working.

    After all, it¡¯s a bomb and even though it is air-tight and wouldn¡¯t allow the water to enter, he didn¡¯t think the methane could create a st inside the water.

    But the result actually surprised him. Because, as soon as the grenade exploded, the st wasn¡¯t minimized by the waterpletely.

    Not only that, for some weird reason, the gas didn¡¯t escape from the water and stayed under the topyer. Then only he noticed that the greenplexion of water is due to some strange mixture which is not letting the gases travel from within.

    This might be due to the fact that it wanted to kill the people who fell into the water with no supply of oxygen in it.

    But this can be used for his benefit too.

    The next moment, Sam reduced his altitude to a dangerously low level and he almost appeared to be surfing on theyer of the water.

    The two nozzles under the harbinger opened and the methane was being pumped out and blue mes started to appear under the surface.

    Sam noticed that the Ice figure is losing control over water because of the heat and at the same time, the methane is not escaping the topyer no matter how much he pumped in and how much it is burning.

    This is something he didn¡¯t expect. He doesn¡¯t know what the other party used to make this water gross and smelly, but it is biting them back really bad.

    Sam moved at his top speed leaving after images and this continued for more than half-an-hour. Then only the ice figure finally lost control of the water and was all alone and even the ice is not dim at all.

    Sam finally used the energy cells to finish this off.

    In this battle, Sam noticed something, the water in the whirlpool range is notpletely connected to the remaining sea. There is a type of division within them. The Ice figure of the whirlpool can only control the water within this division. Even if he evaporated the water within and the void was refilled with the surrounding water, the ice figure couldn¡¯t control it anymore.

    Sam rested for some time to go for the next ce.

    This time there are two ice figures. The increase in difficulty was done by an increase in numbers and the defense against the grenades was already prepared.

    The ice figures are gathering data from the previous ones and are trying their best to counter all the possible threats.

    This is a real pain in the ass.

    But Sam fought tooth and nail and was able to ovee the next few whirlpools and by the end of the day, there is only one whirlpool left.

    The whirlpool is thest one of this stage.

    He didn¡¯t proceed immediately.

    This is the third day of their journey and there are four days for the ind to appear. Sam doesn¡¯t know if there are any other tests and whether or not the time would be sufficient.

    The next day, Sam moved onto the next and the final whirlpool in this stage.

    But as soon as he entered the whirlpool, Sam halted in his tracks, because his eyes went blind. That¡¯s right, he couldn¡¯t see anymore. With this all his senses are gone, his nose is being affected by the pungent smell, his ears are cut off and there is not much he can do with the sense of touch.

    All that left with him was his sixth sense which could warn him of some dangers. But it is not entirely reliable as the opponent is too strong. He is lucky that he was able to dodge the opponents, with his harbinger and he used all his might to do so. If he couldn¡¯t see, the situation wouldn¡¯t be good.

    Sam though hard and felt that he only has one choice, that uses the hologram projection to see but that will also reduce his time to deal with this, he has to deal with the whole thing as fast as he can, because, he wouldn¡¯t be able tost long in the state while he battled simultaneously.

 Chapter 436: Last Whirlpool

    Sam closed his eyes and concentrated on the hologram. He could see an ice figure which has an aura far stronger than any other ice figure he faced.

    He didn¡¯t have a n to proceed. All his senses are cut and if he dealt this with a battle of attrition, he is not sure he would be able to deal with the ice figure before his mentality drained.

    After all, it is not easy for him to maintain the hologram for a long time. At least not when he is outside of the divine dimension like this.

    He has to be a Late-stage Nascent to use the hologram for more than an hour without taking any mental damage and he is far from that level. He has to go back and concentrate on his mental training if he wants to use that extensively.

    After all, the functions of the table are not just limited to holograms.

    He shook his head of these thoughts and started thinking about how to deal with the current situation.

    He hasrge amounts of methane and he hasrge amounts of energy cells and spirit stones, but would he be able to deal with them without taking any damage?

    Sam didn¡¯t have time topletely focus on this thing, he started dodging the attacks. At this moment, he felt more relieved than ever that even though the ice figures have strength their moves and attacks are limited. But just when he thought so, he realized he was celebrating too early.

    The Ice figure which was surrounded by the water body suddenly moved. Sam just dodged the arm of therge water body, but the Ice figure used the water body to move like a sh and appeared right in front of Sam and swung its fists.

    Sam barely dodged and the fist still hit the edge of the harbinger which made him tumble in the air.

    If not for his sheer control over the board, Sam highly doubted that he would have been able to survive that punch.

    He couldn¡¯t help but frown at this. The same thing repeated time and again and in half-an-hour Sam is already bleeding through his nose. He knew that he is reaching the hologram limit.

    Sam has to finish this soon. But he couldn¡¯t find an opening. The energy cells are being blocked and so were the grenades, at the same time, he couldn¡¯t use the harbinger and methane as he did before because this ice figure is too fast unlike the previous two.

    Even though he wasn¡¯t severely injured in this situation, he is still umting damage.

    Sam couldn¡¯t think of any other way to deal with this situation. He could just st arge energy cell, but he would definitely fly and reach an unknown ce.

    After some time, Sam is feeling the toll of exhaustion and decided to take another approach all of a sudden.

    He activated water elemental fusion as he dove into the water. He stored the harbinger away and since he is already wearing the breathing equipment, he doesn¡¯t have to worry at all.

    After diving, he let the whirlpool take him in, in fact, he swam in the same direction to increase his speed of entering the whirlpool.

    The water pressure increased and he could sense the ice figure manipting the water around him to make his body hurt.

    But the attack isn¡¯t severe. It is almost as if the ice figure is only stopping him from escaping the whirlpool and it would be fine as long as he stayed in the whirlpool.

    But the reality is different actually. The main reason the attack isn¡¯t severe is that Sam activated elemental fusion of water. Even though it is partial and only around sixty percent, it still has resistance towards the attack.

    Sam didn¡¯t care about what would happen to him or how long he could bear but from the looks of it, he can bear it for quite some time. Hepletely cut his signal with the hologram and he stood at the eye of the whirlpool. He started utilizing the water element to its extreme and controlled his body to stand still and avoided spinning.

    He took out a cylinder of the highest-level methane he had in his hands and slowly leaked the contents, but he didn¡¯t let the gas spread all over, rather he created an air bubble around the methane gas and started filling it up.

    The air bubble is surrounded by the whirlpool as it rotated with the eye coinciding with its axis.

    The Ice figure looked at Sam without doing anything. It is smart and it could sense that Sam¡¯s aura is weakening and didn¡¯t care much.

    This is what happens when the smartness is trained. Even though the Ice figure is smart it didn¡¯t have enough wit to think that Sam could fluctuate his aura and this all would be a ploy. In fact, Sam took a gamble and he won at this moment.

    He reduced his aura intentionally so that the ice figure wouldn¡¯t concentrate on him much. Just being smart enough is not enough, experience is important and even though, the ice figure could gain experience over time, Sam felt that there are not many people on the who took these trials which made it easy for him to fool it.

    After forming a considerablyrge bubble and making sure it wouldn¡¯t explode due to the water flow. He has expended most of his spiritual energy to control the water flow and the wind flow. It has been a while since he used two elements at the same time.

    After some time, he ced his finger inside the bubble and ignited the methane.

    A huge blue me appeared under the water and the cylinder still continued on providing gas so that it wouldn¡¯t be extinguished easily. The me intensity is extremely high and the water temperature raised rapidly. The Ice figure suddenly felt the temperature raising and tried to reduce the temperature of the water.

    But it realized that it was toote, currently, the water is too chaotic for it to gain control back. The whirlpool was almost destroyed due to the explosion of the gas which caused the water to flow turbulently in all directions and due to the sudden rise of temperature it is hard for the ice figure to move.

    As Sam held the gas cylinder, he saw the ice figure making its way down towards Sam.

    It swam down with its spear so that it could attack Sam directly. But the heat in the water is making it hard for it. The Icy figure could feel its body melting slowly.

    Sam grinned when he noticed that the icy figure came towards him and even though all his other senses is lost, he could feel the pressureing from that guy, all of a sudden he halted the me and at the same time took out a formation disc and ce it.

    It is a high-level formation that can block a few blows from a Pre-transcendent cultivator. It was made by one of his new recruits. That guy is only a nascent stage cultivator, and ate-stage one. But he was still able to create that.

    He is one of the elites under his wing. Due to the sudden loss of the me and gas flow, there is a small air gap that appeared in the ce and Sam immediately activated the formation which blocked the water from entering.

    But time, Sam is already on hisst legs, if he continued elemental fusion he would only be able tost for another ten minutes, but it is all he needed. He and the ice figure both are stuck in the formation and Sam immediately deactivated the water elemental fusion and activated the fire elemental fusion.

    He once again started the methane me and the ice figure finally realized the danger.

    This level of fire will melt this ice figure easily and it just happened like that.

    After five minutes the formation was deactivated and Sam swam upwards. He took out the harbinger and left the ce as he moved forward. He didn¡¯t want to be in this ce for one more second.

    He crossed the mist and entered a safe ce simr to the one he entered after the first test.

    Hended on a rock and started eating so that he could recover some energy. He is extremely fatigued.

    He didn¡¯t care for anything else as he ate to his fill andid down on the rock as he tried to get some sleep.

    He didn¡¯t want to think much about anything else as he rested.

    After a long time, he woke up, but it is already evening. He was deciding whether he has to move or not. But after some time, he decided to stay here for the night. He would have a fresh start tomorrow. He has endured enough for the day.

 Chapter 437: Poison

    Sam had the greatest sleep he had in a while. And he also noticed that his perception range increased. Due to constant mental stress he has been in and continuous expenditure, his spiritual sense and the mental strength increased by a lot.

    Sam once again started his journey on the harbinger.

    He hoped that there are no more tests out there, but he knew that it is impossible. If it is the end, there would be no resting area, he would be delivered to the ind directly. Not a resting area.

    His only better option would be that the next test would be thest test.

    In a few minutes, Sam arrived at the third location and he moved extremely slowly.

    All of a sudden, he felt a little energized even before he could see anything. The bloodline of the Hydra in his body is excited.

    When he crossed the mist all he could see are green and purple vapours. The water is in apletely different color. The vapours are being emitted from the water. The intensity of the vapours is different.

    They became denser as he looked deeper he couldn¡¯t see anything but the vapors. That is the densest ce.

    The poison vapours.

    Sam knew that these tests are designed for the people of this. But he didn¡¯t expect it would be by this much. ON this, there are not many people who are versed in poisons. The poison masters are pharmacists who specialize in creating and curing poisons.

    But there are not many people who cultivate poison. At least, Sam hasn¡¯t seen anyone and he even spent time with some major powers.

    So, Sam could guess that this ce is extremely dettermental to the normal cultivators just like the previous two stages.

    He is like an anomaly. He made new type of vehicle to travel, he used new type of weapons to fight and now, he has new type of bloodline which is hydra¡¯s bloodline, which can be considered as new rtive to this.

    This ce is not much detrimental to him. In fact, this is an opportunity. Sam let Mia out so that she could absorb the poison.

    Any form of poison entered into her body would be useful for the cultivation. She entered the water and swam around.

    Sam knew that with her current level, the amount of poison and the intensity of the poison might be too high to bear. But they are linked and the excess energy Mia generates when absorbing this poison can be transferred to him and the remaining beasts.

    He is confident that by the end of this stage, if they could just absorb all the poison here, then he would break through to Nascent stage Level -3 and would be on verge of breaking through to level-4.

    If by chance they could find the source of this much poison, then he could let Mia consume it and they would break through to Level-5 and even Level-6 depending on the poison¡¯s grade and level.

    This is the first treasure he is going to take from this trip.

    Mia swam in the waters as if she is in a heavenly spring as her skin and body absorbed the poison from the water.

    Sam felt extremely excited not because of the gains, rather the hydra bloodline is acting up. He could actually empathize the feelings of Mia.

    His animal instincts are acting up. There is a grin on the face which he didn¡¯t intentionally put.

    All this while, Sam¡¯s own emotions kept the animal instincts in check. It is his superior mentality that made him supress his animal part in check and that happened because, he is more of a superior animal than all those beasts.

    Not gically, but emotionally. Its his confidence and his own sense of superiority that he built with his experience.

    But his overexerted mentality from the past few days and the environment that is suitable for the beast, its instincts are itching. He suddenly wants to go on a rampage and im this ce as his. He wants to be recognized as the top of the food chain.

    He closed his eyes and started controlling these urges. It would be a disaster if he were to encounter an opponent at this moment. If he relies on the instincts too much will get him in trouble. That too when he has to deal with the opponents of higher level.

    He might either sweep the floor in this case, the sea bed or get his ass whooped.

    And all of that would happen in an incredible fashion. He once again peeked at the hologram to confirm if he has any form of creatures within the certain range. He couldn¡¯t cover the whole area, but at least the extreme positions beside him are threat free.

    He stood there on the harbinger floating in the air as he thought of how to swallow all the fog. The water would be swept clean by Mia for sure. All he needs is time and they have three days.

    After thinking for a long time, Sam first decided to roam around for a bit, he didn¡¯t let Mia to swim deeper. It would be better to go to the centre after umting whatever they can.

    The first thing Sam did is cover the area in which the intensity is the lowest, their current location. The whole area ispletely divided into five areas with their current location being the outer most and having the lowest intensity of poison and the fifth one being the centre with the highest intensity.

    He took out some formation gs and started nting in their current region and after sometime, half of the area started having some reactions.

    The poison water and at the same time the poison vapours started umting to the centre.

    Mia stayed at the centre of the formation and started absorbing the poison that is umted in the centre while Sam floated right above her and started absorbing the poison in the air. The poison kept on umting.

    Only after three hours, did the surroundings became free of the poison. As soon as that happened, he let the beasts out. Yanwu carried the shadow mouse, while Sky carried Raiju on his back.

    They are out here so that they could share the digested energy. Although, Sam couldn¡¯t digest the whole energypletely, with the link between him and Mia, he can do that.

    The poison that was kept here for killing was being used for feeding him. He felt lucky after all, it is not everyday that he would get to enjoy a poison of such high grade that he can use it to increase his cultivation. Since, everything in this world is spiritual energy, Sam could use it to cultivate.

    The beasts slowly started sharing the energy through the link as Mia and Sam started synthesizing the poison and transmitting the energy continuously.

    They stayed another three hours like that.

    After absorbing, he let the beasts go back inside and went to the remaining half of the first region and it took another five hours. It is already almost night. But he didn¡¯t stop this time like previous times.

    There is no threat for him.

    He startedying down the formation in the second region. This region is smaller than the first one and it wouldn¡¯t take as long as the previous one.

    Time Passed.

    By the end of the two days, Sam is absorbing the poison from the fourth one. He already finished the third one. Even though the space is less the amount of poison is actually more than the previous ones.

    The fourth region was only finished after sunrise.

    Before entering the fifth region which is also the final region, Sam noticed that the regions he emptied out earlier are recovering slowly. The water and the air are bing poisonous. They are notpletely recovered at this moment. But they are still recovering slowly but steadily.

    He realized that if he really wants to take all the poison for himself, he has to find the source.

    Sam and Mia both jumped down into the fifth region and swam around. By this time, Sam¡¯s skin is already a bit green and purple, due to the constant ingestion of poison.

    He has to find a way to digest itpletely so that this side effect would disappear.

    But before that, he has to find the source no matter what.

    When he went under the water, he saw that he couldn¡¯t find anything. His spiritual sense which was cut off in the start of the journey was still not back yet. As for his eye-sight, there is nothing he could do with it. His eye sight is not so much of an advantage. With the Roc¡¯s bloodline, he could see far and wide, but not the energy waves.

    He thought of an idea though, what he need is the energy waves which are the key to find the source as the difference in the energy waves would be apparent.

    So, Sam activated the water elemental fusion and started spreading his body as much as he could and closed his eyes. His body which was converted into water, tried to cover as much distance as it can.

    After that, he started using his observation ability. The observation ability of his spiritual core is different than the spiritual sense. Of course, the spiritual sense gives him more wide range, but the things which have direct physical contact can be perceived directly with just the spiritual energy.

    And he started perceiving the range he had covered to find the source.

 Chapter 438: Heart

    Sam started observing the surroundings and after finding out of the area where the energy waves are higher than normal, Sam moved in that direction.

    Mia slowly followed him along. This process continued for half-an-hour. But when they reached the ce with the most energy concentration, there is nothing they could see. This made Sam frown, and he extended his hand as he touched the floor. Even without his spiritual sense and observation, Sam could feel the energy here.

    It is too thick to be unnoticed.

    When he ced the hand on the floor and started observing, Sam found that there is some sort of energy maniption here.

    So, he started examining the area and he finally found the traces of formation. There is something that is hiding within the Sea bed and a formation is made to hide it. Sam doesn¡¯t know if this is a dangerous thing to open.

    He even checked with the hologram in the divine dimension but it was still hidden. The formation although, the grade is not higher and could be broken by a Normal Nascent stage cultivator, there seemed to be something wrong with the type of formation.

    Even if divine dimension couldn¡¯t see past it, then it wouldn¡¯t before formation from this at all. The formation is practically foolproof.

    Sam steeled his resolve and started dealing with the formation. The formation is clearly of higher grade and if brute force was used from a transcendent stage cultivator, it would be easily destroyed, but no one can guarantee that the thing inside would be able to stay safe.

    The same thing would happen with the energy cells.

    Sam has to deal with it slowly steadily. After half-an-hour Sam was able to find the nodes of the formation and started his operation.

    Sam¡¯s main goal is to use the disintegration on the sea bed. He doesn¡¯t want to destroy the formation directly, all he wants to do is to force the nodes out of their original position so that the formation wouldn¡¯t be able to sustain.

    But he has to pick the right nodes because if the wrong nodes are moved, the energy wouldn¡¯t stop, rather it would collide and there would be an energy st which he couldn¡¯t handle head-on. This will also result in the destruction of the thing within the formation.

    Sam started wearing the sea bed. He simply turned it into small grains and the seawater did the remaining job. The nodes are impaled too deep inside and Sam almost took half an hour to deal with one node.

    After deviating one node, he finally noticed the formation clearly, the formation happened to be aplex formation with ayered structure. It is created by using multiple formations asyers and molded as a single formation.

    He went on with his process to deal with it.

    But with every node removed, he is receiving a bacsh. But at this point, he didn¡¯t care. He doesn¡¯t have anything to do and can rest for sometime before the next stage. But he also noticed that although the formation isplex, it is not high level and dangerous enough to cause his death. Because the person who nted the heart might have thought that no one would think about getting the source.

    After three hours, the formation was finally done and Sam could see what is in front of him and this made him forget about the time and effort he put and washed the frustration away.

    This is something he didn¡¯t expect at all. Mia by the side is also excited. In fact, too excited beyond belief as she saw the thing.

    It is a heart, live, and beating heart. Just from the structure, Sam could guess that is the heart of a snake-type beast. The heart is asrge as a yoga ball in a gym.

    There is nobody or a corpse around the heart and there are no veins connected out of it, it is just the heart all alone, but it is still beating continuously.

    And it is emitting these poisons from it.

    Sam could guess what type of beast it is, but there are too many which has this property of a poison heart. He couldn¡¯t immediately pinpoint. He wanted to see the internal structure to see, but as soon as he extended the hand, he felt his spiritual consciousness under attack.

    He only noticed after he got the attack, due to the absence of the spiritual sense. Sam frowned but he still ced his hand on the heart.

    He lost his consciousness and his will entered another world. Sam frowned at this. He is all too familiar with this area. He hase here twice before. This is the spiritual battlefield and he could only enter this when he has to battle a weapon spirit.

    As he looked around, arge ck snake appeared before him. Sam recognized it immediately and he got answers to many questions in an instant.

    This beast is a snake type beast, whose poison is on par with the hydra, it is just that the effects are not as instantaneous. The Shesh.

    Apart from that, there is something else interesting about this beast. That is the life force of this snake. It has a life force which couldn¡¯t be seen normally in a poisonous beast and it can actually use that life force at will. It can not only kill, but also save a person at its will.

    Even more interesting thing, the heart of the beast can be refined into a spiritual weapon. The heart of this beast is actually very special because it is as poisonous as the poison sac. This makes the blood, flesh, skin, and even the scales of this beast are extremely poisonous and they are not even suitable for consuming directly.

    But this is a treasure to poison cultivator.

    A healer and poison cultivator can transform this heart into a spiritual weapon with theirbined effort. But it takes a lot of time. They could take breaks, but it still is a lot of effort at least if they are from this.

    If they have higher-level cultivation it would be easier.

    And judging from the size of the heart, Sam could guess that it would be a Consummate realm beast, maybe which just broke through.

    Sam looked at the spirit and started the spiritual battle. There is no backing out now and since the battle is on equal terms, there is no way he could lose.

    After an hour, Sam finally came back to his body and there is no resistance from the heart. Now the big question is, how should he use this.

    The best option would be to let Mia eat it. Of course, with her level, it would be hard for her to absorb this thing directly. But she can still eat it after it became a Pre-transcendent stage beast. Which would make it easier for her to digest.

    Until then Sam could use this as a cultivation aid. Right now, it is a living heart without anybody, so the poison it secrets is used to deal with the intruders here.

    Anyway, since they already absorbed the poison that is umted in this ce for years, the growth wouldn¡¯t be too fast from the poison Mia could absorb from the heart, but it would be steady.

    He stored it first and ced it with the skeleton of the Hydra. That is already a zone that ispletely filled with poison, it is the only safe ce.

    After that, he let Mia go inside. If the source of the poison is some other thing, he would have let Mia eat it all. Now, they have to stop. At least, they broke through to the fourth level of Nascent stage cultivation.

    This is thest day before the ind opens, but he doesn¡¯t know if this is thest test. But he has a gut feeling that this would be thest one.

    The tests are designed well and this would be the best to be thest one as after the fear from the first round and the mental exhaustion from the second one will make them easily die in this third one. There is no need for more torture of the people who crossed.

    He made his way towards the mist in front and slowly crossed it.

    After a few minutes, he finally saw a clear area without any mist and it turned out to be an ind. Sam felt relieved, he almost jumped in joy.

    As he wanted to enter the ind and go deeper, he was stopped by some barrier. It is invisible but still stopped him from entering.

    But he is not disappointed. He decided that he could rest here for the night.

    So, he took out a mattress and slept on it. He is just a bit happy that he wanted to rx a bit. All this while, he didn¡¯t care aboutfort. But he felt like he should indulge himself a bit with all the annoying tests he passed through.

    The next day, he woke up before dawn, because he noticed some energy fluctuations around him and he also noticed that his spiritual sense hase back finally.

    But the range of spiritual sense is extremely limited. He could cover for more than five hundred meters normally. But he could only sense the next fifty meters.

    Sam looked at the ind that is in front of him. The seashore which he was on was filled withrge rocks which are not giving a view to arger distance.

    He took out the harbinger and started moving.

 Chapter 439: Complex Formations

    Sam hovered over as he crossed the nearby rocky terrain. After a few minutes, he still couldn¡¯t find a tnd in the near vicinity. He even reached the maximum altitude he can on the hoverboard, but he still didn¡¯t see anything within the next few kilometers.

    But he didn¡¯t give up. He just traveled slowly. As he moved forward, he suddenly felt as if he passed through some energy barrier, because he felt a jolt of energy, and then suddenly a voice sounded in his head.

    "Wee to Meteorite Ind.

    This Ind is created by some god who is bored out of his mind and threw it to this. For those who crossed the three stages, they can explore this ind for the next three months. The ind is full of meteorite sands hidden in various ces and every ce is covered with a formation.

    The formation adjusts its level by your own strength and the main difficulty lies in itsplexity rather than just the energy level.

    If you can crack the formation, you can take all the meteorite sand within that formation.

    There are hundreds of formations like that. In fact, the whole ind is locked in here with some formations, if you can find them, you can take the whole ind with you.

    But by the end of three months, if you couldn¡¯t crack even a single formation, you will be allowed ess to three meteorite sands, but only a limited amount for each person.

    There are no threats from the ind, except the other humans who might have entered with you. So, please be careful."

    Sam frowned at the voice. It is extremely yful and carefree as if he couldn¡¯t care less about what is going on. As for god creating this, he knew that someone from the higher realms must have done it.

    Otherwise, there is no way the Shesh would havee to this world. Even if it was here like the Raiju or some other beasts which are present in this world, there is no way one could refine the heart into a spiritual weapon. It is almost impossible to do so on this.

    Sam waved his hand and the three of his friends came out. He wanted to see if the barrier will allow them toe. And when they came out, the first they did is re at Sam, but before they could follow up with the next actions, they are appeared stunned for a second, which means the voice seemed to have said the same thing in their heads.

    But after that initial shock, they looked at Sam once again and are ready to have a go, but suddenly Sam raised his aura. His recent breakthrough made them halt in their tracks.

    "Don¡¯te near me, or you guys will regret it. You wouldn¡¯t be able to handle it." Sam said with a proud look. The three of them gritted their teeth.

    They looked at his face and noticed the green and purple shades all over.

    "What happened?" Watt was the first one to ask.

    "Well, it is a new poison which I used to breakthrough. But it is extremely potent, which left these side effects.

    Okay, let¡¯s get down to business, find the meteorite sands as fast as possible. There are only three months, it might seem like a lot, but it is not considering we couldn¡¯t even estimate the whole area of the ind.

    By the way, try to find out the formations which are holding up the ind. If possible, let¡¯s just take this away.

    Try your luck."

    With that, he didn¡¯t wait. If the three of them ganged up, Sam couldn¡¯t retaliate with full power, they would die if he couldn¡¯t control so he wouldn¡¯t obviously fight them.

    Which means, he couldn¡¯t stay there until they realize. By the time they meet again, they would forget about it.

    After all, they are no archenemies. They could understand why Sam did that.

    Sam moved fast. The terrain didn¡¯t change much, but it is still a bit different.

    He started moving all over the ce and after half-an-hour, Sam found the first formation. This is the sand Sam is extremely familiar with.

    The ck Meteorite Sand.

    And it is not actually a single formation.

    There are three formations in ce but two of them are already empty. There are some traces of the ck meteorite sand there.

    The people who came here before seemed to have done a great job.

    The underground forces seemed to have some decent candidates who did a great job. But they didn¡¯t seem to have taken all of it.

    He doesn¡¯t know how many meteorite sands are there on this ind and how many formations are there, but at least he got one here.

    He started examining the formation.

    He noticed that the formation is not a fixed one. It is a variable formation. It changes with time. But it is not like how Sam designed previously; it doesn¡¯t change the nodes. Rather, it is aplex formation with fiveyers and the activeyers change one by one.

    The change of theyers is extremely random and with the variation, in the activeyers, aplex formation will be formed.

    This will quite confusing. Sam never thought about using formations like this.

    It gave new possibilities. Because for a minute when formations one, three, and five are active, one kind ofplex formation which is specialized in defensive attacks is activated and when formations two, four, and five are active it is a closed ughter formation.

    This is something he never thought of. All he cared about isplexity in activation and deactivation.

    But now that he saw this, Sam is going to research in this area.

    But before that, he has to find a way to deal with the formation. He started studying the energy flow which proved to be extremely difficult. Due to constant variation and the random activation of various formations, Sam is having trouble pinpointing the timing to crack.

    As long as he could crack the activated formations at that instance, then it would be done.

    To catch the timing is the hardest task. He couldn¡¯t even observe the energy patterns of the first one. Rather the energy fluctuations of the remaining formations are interfering and by the time he is close to cracking them, the first formation is going dormant and a new sequence ising up.

    All his analysis is going to waste.

    In fact, there is another way, the most straight forward method, to break the formation with brute force.

    But he doesn¡¯t want to do it because thebinations of the formations and variations include attack type formations. If he is not confident in dealing it with a single blow, then there is no use.

    As for using disintegration and taking the nodes out, due to the cycles of variation, the bacsh wouldn¡¯t be limited to him, the insides of formation will also be affected and the sand will be damaged.

    As for energy cells, it is even more unusable. If the formations are affected by the energy sts no matter how small it is, there is a chance that the energy of the formation would be chaotic and it will cause another energy explosion which would damage the meteorite sand.

    He is not ready to sacrifice even a small bit of the meteorite sand in this ce.

    This will bring him to a deadlock. He doesn¡¯t want to battle and he doesn¡¯t want to destroy, then he can only crack it.

    As for his friends, all they could do is battle and brute force through the formations.

    Sam just wanted to avoid that, because it would take a long time. Even though it takes time to crack them, he is still okay with this approach because, once he gets past the first formation, he would get away to crack the rest of them easily.

    If he could crack one formation, Sam could use the same method to crack the rest of them. Even if that means spending a lot of time on the first one.

    After many trials, Sam sat down on the ground and decided to take a look at the nodes. He wants to see if the nodes are formation gs or any other methods that are used.

    And when he noticed that they are not formation gs, he is not one bit surprised.

    The formation gs are indeed the best nodes to be used. But the working method would be rigid and there are not many things one can do with that. The formation gs are only good until they want to make a standard and proper formation with a standard blueprint.

    A formation like this with these many features is almost impossible to do, at least Sam couldn¡¯t do that at his level.

    After continuously observing for more than three hours towards the nodes, Sam had a look of extreme shock.

    He hasn¡¯t seen a formation of thisplex in a while.

    If Sam¡¯s guess is right, this formation can adjust itself ording to the opponent¡¯s cultivation level without a need for a spirit. This is something he absolutely didn¡¯t expect.

    That is only the tip of the iceberg. He noticed that this is abination of not only five formations, but there is also an array of inscriptions that areid down in between the five formations which are responsible for the activation and variation of the formations.

    For the first time, Sam is actually feeling extremely numb from the amount of information he has to process.

 Chapter 440: Cracking

    After confirming the nodes and the array of inscriptions, Sam is thinking on how to proceed further.

    He doesn¡¯t want to damage the Meteorite sand. After trying many things, Sam decided to try something on the inscription array.

    This is the most sensitive area of the formation. It is responsible for varying the energy flow an activating the formations. If by any chance, the energy flow of this array is messed up and the energy ran chaotic, then the whole formation will create arge energy st which will not only give bacsh to Sam, but also destroy the meteorite sand.

    But that is only loop hole Sam could find in the whole formation. The rest of the formation is not even showing a small opening.

    He started using the observation ability on the inscription array so that he could get a hang of the energy flow.

    But the array is too big and too many inscriptions are used to form that array to study it quickly.

    For the next two days, Sam just stayed there and studied the inscription array, there are a bunch of papers that are crumbled all around him.

    He is trying his best to understand and decrypt the inscription array so that he could find an opening. Only after these two days, he finally had a change of expression.

    He seemed to have found something within. He looked at the formation and couldn¡¯t help but feel a great respect to the person who created this formation. There is no way a normal formation master who follows orthodox methods would be able to create something like.

    This is something that could only be created by someone who is extremely crazy and has some twisted nature to his head. That¡¯s what he thought of it and he wants to meet that guy. After all, Sam must say that he himself is a bit twisted beyond repair.

    He slowly started spreading his spiritual energy throughout the inscription array and used his observation ability.

    As the concentration increased, he focused on a small runic symbol which is in the middle of arge number of runes that are stacked on one another.

    This is the thing he found after so much research in these two days. This single rune which seemed to be the part of arge set of runes, but was actually isted is the key to the array. Of course, not the only key though. One of the keys and the other keys are extremely simr to this.

    This is the only rune which has a time period in which there would be no energy flow through it. Because, this is the single rune which is used as bridge between two different and smaller arrays.

    Simply put, this is the only rune he could destroy without facing any bacsh and that too in a certain period of time which is an extremely short interval.

    Sam sat there in a squatted position for more than an hour and only after that did, he has small fluctuation, his hand moved and the rune which waspletely enveloped with his energy a few seconds ago, waspletely gone.

    At this moment, the formation is using abination of one, three and four, but all of a sudden, the fourth one stopped glowing.

    He moved to another direction and started using the same process. After another hour, he was able to destroy another rune.

    Due to this new experience it became hard for him to finish the rune, he is confident that if he could get a hang of it, he would definitely finish it faster.

    He moved to the third point and did the same and then the fourth point.

    It took four hours to destroy a formation without any form energy bacsh or any other form of the damage. But he is sure that destroying it with brute force might take even more time.

    As for the initial two days, he could say that it is a form of investment.

    He collected all the ck meteorite sand and emptied the whole pit.

    After doing so, he came out of the formation and as he was about to board the harbinger and go away, he saw something that surprised him. The formation ispletely closing back. The formation which Sam tried so hard to destroy was recovering slowly.

    He was surprised because, he didn¡¯t see any signs of recovering when he is collecting the meteorite sand at all. This is something that he didn¡¯t expect. But he didn¡¯t think too much of it and moved to find the next target.

    After another half-an-hour of travel, he finally reached the next destination and this is also ck meteorite sand, he didn¡¯t feel disappointed though. As long as it is meteorite sand it is great.

    He started working on the formation, this time, he didn¡¯t need the two days to study it. All he had to do is find the four runes, but provided that the formation is simr to the previous ones.

    After examining, he heaved a sigh of relief. The Inscription pattern is same. Even though the formation types and thebinations, variations all of them changed, but the working of the inscription array remained the same and it is still the four of them.

    Sam wanted to see if he could find a way to deal with the four runes faster, but decided otherwise. There would only be a single interval for one hour and the interval is only for only a minute. If he tried to deal with the four of them at the same time and failed he would be in a deep shit.

    So, he decided to spend those four hours, even though it will dy the process.

    But this time, he didn¡¯t just stay idle, instead he let out the beasts. Yanwu, Sky, Raiju and the Mouse. As for Mia, she is still consolidating the cultivation.

    The four beasts ran in four different directions. He wanted to see if he could catch up to the next formation within the gap of one hour and deal with it.

    After that, he just sat there and waited for fifteen minutes to get the interval and dealt with one of the runes.

    From this point there is one hour for the next interval. He stayed there and waited for the beasts toe back and after another fifteen minutes, Raiju is the first one toe back.

    He has the nearest formation of all, Sam decided to go there and on the Harbinger the journey was cut down to the five minutes at full speed.

    When they reached the destination, Sam is ecstatic because, the formation is just entering the stage of that time interval. This is the best-case scenario.

    He dealt with this and went back to the first formation. He waited for the remaining beasts and by the time they came back it is already forty five minutes and there is only a fifteen minutes break for the next interval, so it is not advisable to go for the next one.

    So, he waited there and dealt with this formation and once again went to the formation spotted by Raiju.

    He came back and waited.

    So, for this period of the four hours and a few minutes, he was able to deal with two formations. One of them happened to be the Gray meteorite sand.

    After collecting them, he went towards the formation Yanwu spotted. The formation spotted by him and the formation spotted by Sky are both near each other. Sam could deal with them both together, just like how he did with the previous two. This time, both of them are silver meteorite sand.

    Another four hours passed.

    It is already getting dark by this time.

    Sam went to the formation Shadow mouse spotted and once again sent the beasts in different directions from that spot. But to his surprise, there is only one formation in that area. That is because, this ce happened to be near the border of the ind.

    He decided that he would deal with the two of them. One of them is silver and another one is grey.

    After dealing with them, Sam didn¡¯t proceed further immediately, instead he decided to take some rest. The continuous use of observation ability and running around made him umte some mental fatigue. His mentality is still a bit sensitive after all the stress he has been on for the past few days.

    He has to be careful of it, anyway he has a lot of time to deal with them and his speed is fast enough. The onlyin Sam has is that the quantity of meteorite sand inside a single formation is a bit small.

    Ifpared to the cubes of meteorite sand he obtained from the ck water, there are three cubes of meteorite sand in each formation. He has to say that the ck water and the other organization did a great job considering that they are able to obtain so many cubes of meteorite sand. After all, they are able to current tens of these boxes.

    Sam didn¡¯t think further and rested for a few hours until dawn.

 Chapter 441: Valley

    For the next month, Sam is on the constant move, he cleared almost one-third of the ind. Then only he realized that it is almost impossible to clear the whole ind in three months. Because it is hard to find the formations on the ind. It is just that Sam was initially lucky enough to enter a ce with many untouched formations.

    But most of the formations which are easier to find are almost emptied by previous visits and due to Sam¡¯s extra advantage in numbers which made it easier for him to explore more area in the same time and resulted in him find a few unexplored parts.

    The whole time, he acted near the borders of the ind and a little deeper, he didn¡¯t go too much inside to explore this ce.

    He wanted to deal with the ce step by step.

    As for his friends, he didn¡¯t see them all this while, they must have been far inside.

    He cleared the shore and some of thend of the ind and got every single of the formations in this specific area. But even then, he didn¡¯t find a single formation that is rted to the ind movement, at least he couldn¡¯t identify one.

    But this one month did help him a bit. His research for the inscription array has increased and every time he took a break, he started researching and experimenting over this array arrangement to see if he could crack it faster. He did get some breakthrough.

    After a myriad of experiments, he found a small chink in that tight seal, he was able to identify another small break in the runes which could get him to deactivate the formations faster.

    This happens in a different way than before. Sam is good at cracking a formation itself if it is a standard formation without any variations.

    So, what Sam found out is that after he deactivated a single rune, he has a way to modify the remaining inscription array by disturbing the runes which will halt the cycle of the formations for a time period and make them stationary in a single state.

    This is no different than two to three standard formationsyered together and Sam is confident enough to deal with that. That small modification he would be doing with the inscription is just interrupting the energy flow and forcing it to stop the cycle of variations for twenty minutes or so.

    This is all he needed. The variations will go for every three minutes and there would only be a small break of a few seconds for every one hour, which he used previously.

    And it took almost four hours for his deal with them. But with this, he can deal with the formation in an hour by thetest.

    That is if it works.

    He walked towards the nearest formation which is supposedly thest one in this one-third of the ind ording to his search and exploration from the past month.

    He started his n. He waited until the second gap appeared and destroyed the rune. Then started dealing with the forced modification of the array and just like he thought the cycle halted and the formations one, two, and three are activated and stayed like that.

    Sam ced his hands on the formations and started manipting the energy and in the next twenty minutes, the three formations are down, because these three are familiar to him.

    But this time, the mental strength he required is a lot more than normal. The more formations Sam cracked, the more he wanted to meet the person who created these formations, they are the epitome of formations.

    If Sam was pitted against the guy who made them, he is sure that he would lose pretty badly. His experience and expertise are far from the formation master, even if they arepeting in the basics and a small concealment formation, that guy would beat Sam¡¯s ass like it was nothing.

    This is the first time Sam is burning with envy in this life. This expertise is something he desired, if he could have this much expertise in a field and reach the pinnacle of a craft, he will feel really aplished. In front of it, all the riches and status seemed a lot less significant.

    As he was feeling salty and moving towards the next region, the remaining friends are trying their best to deal with the formations in thest one-third of the ind, the left the middle region and started in the one that is opposite to the one Sam is dealing with.

    They wanted to meet in the middle. But once they dealt with one formation individually, they understood it is going to be hard.

    The formations are at the peak of their current level. If they want to destroy it without damaging the contents inside, a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator should make a move.

    Otherwise, there is no way for them to deal with it instantly. So, they decided to team up. They actually noticed something Sam couldn¡¯t, if the formation is left like that after it was damaged halfway, then it is self-restoring.

    On one night, they left a formation half-destroyed, and by the next morning, it is back to its original condition.

    So, they have to destroy the formation in a single streak. No breaks.

    But along with this, they also noticed something strange because, they are staying in the same area a lot longer than Sam did, when they cleared an area off of the meteorite sand, they noticed that the formations even after being empty are still forming back again and in the area where they cleared out they noticed that the formations themselves, seems to have a connection.

    But they couldn¡¯t decipher it.

    As for the person who has the highest probability of deciphering, he didn¡¯t stay in the same ce for a long time to observe this situation and he didn¡¯t care much about the recovering phenomenon, at least not yet.

    At this moment, Sam is getting busy in the central region, the second one-third of the ind and he is moving faster than usual.

    That is not because, he is cracking them faster or they became easier, rather there are more formations than the first area.

    Sam and his friends are dealing with them as fast as they could. And two months have passed since they came to this ind. In these two months, the three friends, even had breakthroughs into Level-2 As for Sam, he has not improved in his cultivation, because it is stagnated due to the rapid growth.

    But he is not worried, he almost forced the breakthrough by absorbing so much, so he figured that he would have a slower growth for the time being.

    After two months, almost everything is done except for the extremely central zone of the ind. Sam and his group had some serious haul. Except that almost seventy-five percent of the umtion was done by Sam.

    Now, the four of them are at the extreme core region of the ind.

    By this time, the trio already informed Sam about the weird connection they felt with the formations and Sam also tried to rte to it, but they didn¡¯t dwell on the matter and continued their exploration.

    The reason for them toe herest is because it is a valley.

    There is arge valley in the center and they couldn¡¯t see the end of the valley, so they didn¡¯t explore it immediately. They decided to leave it for thest.

    But this answered some of Sam¡¯s questions. He has his doubts about how so many formations and meteorite sands are left alone, after all, the number of people the Underground organizations can mobilize is not exactly small.

    But with this valley Sam received some spections, it might be because most of them are obsessed with taking the whole ind away. The message they received at the beginning of their exploration did indicate that.

    So, they might have just focused on that went on to explore the valley instead of getting the meteorite sands in their hands and there might be some conflicts within the organizations as four of them are inherently different entities, so they lost precious time due to theck ofpetition.

    But he didn¡¯t think much anymore, it is a little fishy but not fishy enough to make him lose his focus on the valley.

    Four of them boarded Sky and Yanwu to go inside the valley.

    As they slowly descended down, it became darker and darker and they finallynded without any mishaps.

    They started looking around in different directions and Sam even left the beasts to roam around to see if they can find any clues.

    After a few minutes, Watt¡¯s yelling could be heard from one of the corners of the valley.

    Sam who is nearest to them, went there and was surprised to see there is a cave.

    Inside the cave, there is arge circr stone table that has a crystal surface on it. This resembled the table on the third floor of the divine dimension a lot.

 Chapter 442: Stone Tables

    Sam could recognize the table and he could vaguely specte the actual functions of it.

    But the problem is there is argeyered formation around the table. There is no way for it to actually open before the formation is not cleared. Sam checked the formation and it is simr to the ones above, except that there are around tenyers on this formation.

    As he was observing, he noticed that Raiju is running towards them. It can sense Sam¡¯s presence and can easily find a way; it gave a message of finding a cave too.

    Sam decided to check that on before dealing with this. So, he went there and started checking another cave, and there too, there is a circr table covered byrge formations around them.

    After looking at them, Sam walked out and decided to wait at the meeting point and when all of them gathered, they got the news that there are four such caves in the valley in total, and all four of them have the same things inside.

    The table, the formations.

    Sam went into deep thought and said.

    "Let us first break the formations and see what will happen."

    He went towards the first cave and started scanning the inscriptions arrays which are responsible for the cycles of variations and noticed that the array is actually the same one, but here there are three such arrays. One to unite the first fiveyers of the formation, the second one to unite the second fiveyers of the formations and the third one is joining both of these stackedyers.

    After confirming this, Sam was able to break the formation in the next two hours and went onto the deal with the remaining three caves.

    Meanwhile, he left one of his friends in every cave and ced the portablemunication hubs within the valley tomunicate.

    The day is almost over by the time, they are done with this.

    Sam is standing in front of the circr table and ced his hand on the extension and injected the spiritual energy.

    A hologram appeared on the crystal surface all of a sudden and there is some glowing star-like lights in the hologram. Most of them are bright andrge while there is some glowing sphere which is rtively dim. But they are only a few and far between.

    "Inject your spiritual energy inside," Sam said through themunication device.

    "Done" [X3]

    All three of them replied simultaneously.

    All of a sudden they heard a rumble of a huge rocky structure moving. The four of them are startled and Sam asked shadow mouse to take a look at what is it and concentrated on the work at hand.

    "Do you guys see the glowing stars and the dim spheres?"

    "Yes." [X3]

    "Okay how many dim spheres are there and how many glowing stars are there?"

    Sam said and he himself started counting.

    He has twenty-one glowing stars and four dim spheres, but by the time he got the count, the others also started replying.

    "Philip: Twenty glowing stars and five dim spheres"

    "Watt: Twenty-two glowing stars and three dim spheres."

    "Jack: Twenty-one Glowing stars and four dim spheres."

    Sam frowned at this and his brain is working fast to find the connections and the first connection which he almost made instantly is that there are twenty-five objects on each table.

    If they ignore the number of the stars and spheres individually, theirbined total is twenty-five in each cave and at the same time, the grand total of all the objects is a hundred.

    As he was thinking, the shadow mouse came back to the cave and Sam frowned at the message it carried.

    "Meet at the center of the valley."

    Sam said in themunication and he ran towards the center of the valley.

    As he reached, he was stunned by the sight before him. There is arge stone tower that appeared out of nowhere standing tall in the center of the valley towering far above the mouth of the valley.

    Sam let out the Sky and started flying towards it and he only saw the ending a little above the mouth of the valley.

    There are some weird symbols on the stone tower. It is cylindrical in shape and Sam felt quite weird looking at it. He could feel guess that this existence is linked with unlocking the ind, as it appeared right when they activated the stone tables.

    The tower is divided into smaller sections, it is almost likerge stone discs stacked together to form a long tower.

    When he came back, his friends are already back and Philip is observing the statue.

    On one of the sections, there is a palm-shaped grove on it. Watt and Jack who are walking around the statue noticed that there are three more palm grooves just like the first one.

    Sam walked to one of them, ced his palm, and started injecting the spiritual energy inside.

    Some bright-line glowed on the stone structure and it started spreading in the form of lines for the next section upwards at the same time another line is spreading towards the section downwards.

    But it didn¡¯t stop, after it crossed the two sections it broke and stopped spreading, and immediately the bright lines stopped glowing.

    But the section which has palm grooved still kept on glowing and there are some patterns on each stone of that section which are also glowing.

    For the three of them, they are weird patterns, but Sam could recognize them. Because they are symbols showing the formations. They are the symbols which are the short forms given to indicate a type of formation.

    And all of them happened to be basic formations that should be known by even a novice formation master. If any formation master imed that they don¡¯t know any one of these formations, then they can be considered ipetent and easily stripped of their title as a formation master.

    There are sixteen such symbols on the rocks in that section along with the four of them palm grooves.

    Sam frowned at this, he could understand what these indicate, but he couldn¡¯t understand what these things signify. It is quite troublesome.

    One thing he knew is that it is connected to the tables in the caves.

    But he couldn¡¯t understand anything from the glowing lights in his cave.

    He went back to the cave and started looking at the star patterns. After some hesitation and remembering something he touched a star and then induced his spiritual energy inside, the star highlighted and glowed brighter, at this moment, Sam moved his finger within the hologram and a three-dimensional line appeared within the hologram from that star, he moved it to another star and the line connected both the star.

    He didn¡¯t stop there and connected the next star and the next one. He connected six stars and a closed figure appeared.

    At this moment, the stone pir gave a slight rumble, and it is not audible to Sam in the cave, Watt contacted him through themunication.

    "The stone pir has some changes. The two sections moved a bit."

    Sam moved towards it and when he once again ced his hand on the pal groove as he injected the spiritual energy, this time the line pattern appeared a bit different than before, because of the changes of the sections, but it was still cut off.

    Sam confirmed some of his spections.

    But it is not enough, he went back to the cave and noticed that the small closed figure is still there, without disappearing.

    He started creating another closed figure, but this time something happened. He couldn¡¯t pass through the dim spheres. He couldn¡¯t use the dim spheres as the nodes for the closed figure. He frowned at this.

    He understood the meaning of the stars in the hologram, but he couldn¡¯t understand the significance of the dim spheres.

    After some thought, he decided to check up on another cave. But he still couldn¡¯t understand and moved to another cave, only when he entered the fourth cave, did he get some ideas.

    The fourth cave is actually the one that gave him hints.

    Because, he saw three stars that are forming a triangle and are closer than the rest of the stars on the table and when he marked the positions of other stars from this triangle, he could feel a familiar path.

    He has seen the same path in the first region and that too the very first formation he has cracked. This is the ce where there are three formations close to each other and apart from that, there are no such formations that are close to each other. At least not that close.

    He marked the ces of the dim spheres on it, this is the one which has twenty-one stars and four dim spheres and went out.

    "Look for other clues, I have something to confirm." He said to the rest of the group and left the ce.

 Chapter 443: Sequence

    Sam moved at his full speed and arrived at the location of the three formations in an hour. Then he started identifying the directions ording to the hologram and started moving towards that direction, after some time, he came to face something which cleared some of his doubts.

    There is arge formation created on the ind, the formation itself is one of the most basic, but the nodes are actually the formations that are cracked.

    And this formation was created by Sam and that happened, by him activating it through the stone table in the valley.

    This is the purpose of the stone table.

    He knew this because, therge stone table in the tower has a simr function, but there are some differences and the functions of his table are far more advanced.

    After confirming this, he started moving in another direction but frowned when he saw nothing visible at that ce.

    From Sam¡¯s spections, every star in the hologram represents the position of a cracked formation. And what he concluded is that the position of the dim spheres represents the position of an uncracked formation. But when he came to the ce, he didn¡¯t see any.

    But he didn¡¯t give up immediately, he made sure to check the surroundings and see if made an error in distance calction. But there are no results.

    Sam is a bit frustrated, if this spection is wrong, then there is nothing he could about it, he would have to waste more time on this.

    After thinking for some time, he looked towards the ground and had a thought, but he felt that is too farfetched.

    Just before he was about to leave, another thought came to his mind.

    What if it is really as farfetched as he thought? He wanted to try andnded on the ground, he tapped the ground with his feet for a few seconds, before spreading his spiritual energy towards the feet.

    He closed his eyes and started using the observation ability. After another few seconds, there is a look of shock on his face.

    This is something he didn¡¯t expect at all. Even though he tried to find something underground, but he felt like this would be too farfetched.

    Most of it is because this is not exactly possible.

    The formation is underground. It is not a big deal initially, but what made Sam think otherwise is that each formation is acting as a node and they are creating basic formations that don¡¯t need many nodes.

    This makes things extremely different. These formations are basic so they have some rigid rules and one of them is that the nodes should be at the same altitude to create the formation. But if it is underground, then it wouldn¡¯t be the same, they have to change the nodal positions and think of a different energy flow topensate for the miscement of altitude.

    But then, it wouldn¡¯t be the same formation anymore.

    That is why he didn¡¯t think there would be any formation at this ce.

    All of sudden, Sam had another thought which is also extremely farfetched, there is only one way for this to be possible, and to confirm it, heid t on the ground and closed his eyes to see his blood cirction.

    He is using his body as a leveling device to see if the ground is really t and then he got the answers. After standing up, he suddenly didn¡¯t want to be just like the person whoid these formations.

    That guy seemed to be extremely crazy and nuts.

    Who would alter the terrainpletely to hide the formation? Certainly, Sam wouldn¡¯t do so.

    Yes, the terrain ispletely altered and it was done so subtly, that no one would think they are climbing the slope. The slope is very minute whenpared to the length of the slope.

    In this way, it could be said that Sam is standing on a higher altitude than the previous formations and the formation underground could be considered to be on the same altitude as the remaining formations.

    He cursed the maker under his breath and started digging. Less than an hourter, he was done with the formation and took the meteorite sand away.

    He then moved towards the next position. The next one is even more ridiculous.

    The formation is hidden within a rock. The rock is like an eggshell around the yolk, but a lot harder.

    He went on to discover the other four formations in the region which he marked in the hologram. After that, he returned to the valley.

    The trio is searching for the other clues and they are experimenting with the stone tables and so on. But there is not much they could find.

    Sam went to the stone table and looked at it with a smile.

    Now, there are twenty-five stars glowing on the table. He didn¡¯t waste any time and walked to the next stone table.

    He took out a paper and started marking the locations to get a rough map. He divided the ind into four regions now.

    The four regions had different positions for the formations and each cave represented a direction.

    For the next two days, Sam is on the constant move, he could have sent his friends to other ces, but there is not much they could do. He is the one who could crack the formation fastest. So, there is no need for them to exhaust themselves.

    After two and a half days of constant search, Sam found the formations in extremely weird ces and some of them are just open but in an isted ce.

    Now, they have to deal with the stone pir.

    Aftering to the valley, he and his friends sat down and he started exining the formations to them. Not all of them, at least the sixteen formations on the stone statue.

    They don¡¯t need to know how toy down the formationpletely, but if they knew how to connect the stars ording to the structure and energy flow of the formation.

    Simply put, they have to know the sequence of connecting them.

    As for why Sam is not doing that himself and spending time to exin, he doesn¡¯t know if there are any extra conditions like activating the four tables at the same time as such after the person who made the formation seemed to be too cranky from all the things he had seen on this ind.

    He doesn¡¯t want to take the chance. So, he might as well meet the conditions. Even if there are no such conditions, there is not much he would suffer.

    The four of them went to the four caves and started connecting the stars ording to the sequences Sam gave.

    But there are some problems there. Not just from the trio, but for Sam as well.

    The stone statue is showing some movements, but there is no extensive result because they couldn¡¯t identify the correct sequence in which they have to activate the formations.

    From the symbols, he knew that there are sixteen formations to be activated, which means to connect the stars and create sixteen formations with four formations on one stone table.

    From the direction of palm grooves, they could even identify which stone table is for what formations. But the problem is which formationes first on which stone stable and which stone tablees first and that is even if it was the correct way to do it.

    For this, they first tried a trial and error method. But the situation is turning difficult as they couldn¡¯t figure it out no matter what.

    After three days of seeing no results, Sam couldn¡¯t take it and think of another bizarre thing, He boarded Sky and flew towards the top of the stone pir.

    And he was shocked by what he saw on the upper surface of the stone pir. It really does have some markings on the circr surface and it is so clear too.

    Sam is feeling extremely frustrated, they have been made fools by this cranky guy. He kind of felt like there might not be any other special reason behind the existence of this ind, the person whoever it is that kept this here must have been bored out of his mind to do this.

    And he must be a person who is in an extremely high position and even a god on par with the ones Sam knew for now.

    This much meteorite sand will leave a pinch for anyone other than those gods because if a weapon like the thunder prison was made, there is no way this much meteorite sand will suffice.

    There is a need for a lot more, in fact, if the whole ind was made of meteorite sand that includes, the rocks, stones, and every substance which has mass, then it might be possible to create a weapon like thunder prison, but then also they need some extra materials which will give ess to the weapon which extend, expand and shrink in sizes depending on user¡¯s requirement.

 Chapter 444: Guardian

    The markings on the top surface of the stone pir are actually quite easy to understand, it doesn¡¯t need extreme formation expertise or any other expertise for that matter. All it needs is some IQ and logical thinking.

    If Sam has topare this difficulty, he would say that this is simr to one of final stage puzzles in a Murder mystery mobile game.

    He went back to the cave and sent his friends back to their caves.

    He activated themunication device and started giving instructions.

    "I think, I now understand the sequence, I will give you instructions and act ordingly. Please be careful, if we make a mistake, it woulde back to square one.

    First, Watt, activate your third formation."

    Watt did as he was told and replied.

    "Done."

    "Philip your first formation."

    "Done."

    The instructions went on and slowly but steadily all the formations are being activated in Sam¡¯s estimated sequence.

    The stone pir in the center is in constant modification. The sections are rotating in a different direction and in different speeds.

    After an hour or so, the stone pir stopped moving and all four of them came towards it. They ced their palms in the grooves and injected the spiritual energy at the same time.

    This time, the lines on the stone pir started brightening up and extending all over the pir. There is a huge pattern of lines forming on it.

    The four of them could feel some sort of movement within the stone pir, but they don¡¯t know exactly what it is, but the movement is too strong to ignore and within a few seconds, the whole ind is quaking and shaking.

    They felt like there is something wrong, but they didn¡¯t take their hands off. But if they saw the rest of the ind, they would have changed their minds, because the ind¡¯sndmass started copsing.

    From the outer side of the ind, thendmass was falling down bit by bit and drowning in the sea. Slowly, it crept inside and reached the parts where the formations are present. Thendmass around the formation is alsopletely copsed, but the formations didn¡¯t disappear.

    The formations along with thendmass underneath is floated in the sea as the rest of thendmass drowned.

    As the ind slowly reduced in size, the four of them also noticed that something happening. But Sam felt like, this is something that is supposed to happen, so he didn¡¯t stop at all.

    The whole ind underwent a huge metamorphosis in the next five hours. Thendmass was gone and even the valley started shaking. The walls of the valley slowly copsed and the surroundings are drowning in the sea slowly.

    The caves though are still floating just like the formations. The energy waves are too much and the four of them closed their eyes tightly because of this. They could feel that their positions are locked in that ce and it is toote for them to back down at this moment.

    As they stood there with their eyes closed, the seawater hit them like crazy, the surrounding valley is nowhere to be seen.

    Soon, thend beneath their feet is also gone, but the pir is holding them in their positions and they are floating as if the roaring sea under them couldn¡¯t devour them no matter how much it desired.

    The chaos continued and after more than an hour, they could feel that everything is settled again and then only they dared to open their eyes.

    By now, there is some solid under their feet and when they looked around, they were stunned by what they saw.

    The stone pir seemed to have been standing on the stone tform upon which they are standing too. They noticed that the shape and size of the stone pir changed a bit and there are some transformations.

    They could see the vast sea around them without any form of disturbance, but this made them even more agitated.

    There is nothing left. As for the rooms and the formations that are floating, they don¡¯t even know about them much less think about it.

    Only at this moment, did they notice that the pir is decreased in length and the palm grooves are gone too.

    Their palms are ced on the normal surface of the stone statue. As soon as they removed their palms, a human silhouette emerged on top of the pir.

    At first, the pir is actually as tall as a small hill, but now it is only around fifteen feet tall. So, they can clearly see the top and the silhouette.

    "Now, you four guys are the ones who got the pir. I am the guardian of this Pir by the way. You call me Guardian. So, out of four of you, who wants to take the pir. Decide quickly, or fight to the death. I will prefer if you choose thetter option."

    The guardian sat on top of the pir as he spoke.

    The four of them looked at him with a weird expression.

    "What are you guys looking at? Just finish it. I will transfer the ownership quickly."

    "I need answers to some questions before that."

    Sam spoke at this moment.

    "Let¡¯s get this over with." The guardian seemed to be a bit frustrated, but Sam spoke.

    "Where are you from?"

    "A ce which you don¡¯t even know the existence of."

    "Are you the owner of the pir?"

    "No. It is my boss."

    "What is the purpose of the pir?"

    "Why do you have so many questions, kid?"

    "Answer or all four of us will forfeit this and the pir can stay here," Jack said from the side.

    "Okay, you stupid brats. This is the divine heirloom of the family of my boss. Its main purpose is to create the test ind, which you guys might have just crossed. It is used by my boss¡¯ family to test the younger generations and reward them.

    But something happened and the pir disappeared along with the ind that was created around it the night before the exam.

    We tried really hard to find it. But a prophet finally determined its location in this damned world. We couldn¡¯t enter this ce. So, they sent a fraction of soul a bit to this world by paying a significant prize to find a suitable person to finish the ind tests.

    You must have gotten all the meteorite-sands, right? That is the most treasured ind trial ever held in history. We almost lost hope. If you guys can pass the final stage, you can win a ce in the family of my boss in exchange for the pir.

    And you will also get the chance to climb into the higher realms. Trust me, that ce is a lot better than this ce many times."

    Sam frowned. He doesn¡¯t know if this guy is telling the truth. But it sounded like bullshit for the most part.

    Who would give so many secrets away?

    "What would happen, if I could keep it permanently?"

    "Do you think you can handle that kid? It can only be permanently controlled orpletely owned by my boss¡¯s family member. The bloodline is important."

    "Then, what¡¯s the point of us being here?"

    "Did you even listen to what I said? I am here not just as a guardian, but also to find a suitable candidate who has the potential to climb into higher realms. No matter how you cracked all those formations, you are qualified to do so.

    I am here so that one of you can temporarily control the pir. I will guide you to climb the realms and you will be rewarded after youe to our family estate."

    "Then, you could just take the pir away? Why bother with us? Don¡¯t tell me you guys are magnanimous and are feeling like grooming a person from a lower realm such as this?"

    Sam asked with a hint of sarcasm. Something is not adding up. The words of this guy are being minced and confusing.

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "Don¡¯t tell me, this wouldn¡¯t move past this realm unless there is no owner. That or, you guys don¡¯t have the means to cross it remotely and you need someone from this realm. Otherwise, why would you look for a worthy candidate on this?"

    "We are looking for a candidate of potential since the ind appeared in this anyway. Don¡¯t malign our generosity." The man¡¯s voice became a bit colder and Sam felt like he hit a bullseye.

    The man is saying all about Sam handing over from the start but not the reason why they waited this long or why they didn¡¯t take the pir away in the first ce.

    Sam had a myriad of thoughts running inside his head. But no one could understand it.

    "Okay, then. I will take ownership."

    Sam replied with a calm gaze.

    "But would they agree?" The Guardian pointed at the three of them.

    They nodded their heads and Sam was asked to make a spiritual imprint on the pir.

    "How do I carry this?"

    "It can change the size. Don¡¯t worry." The guardian replied and all of a sudden it turned into a small-scale model in Sam¡¯s hand and at the same time, they fell into the sea.

    The guardian is still attached to the pir and said.

    "As a reward, I will not only help you guys enter the higher realms, I can also help you to kill three enemies who are extremely powerful than you."

    Sam nodded and the guardian disappeared into the pir.

    Sam took out his hovercar at this moment and the four of them boarded it and nned their return journey.

    What they don¡¯t know is a Middle-aged man is looking at them from afar and has a deep contemting look on his face as he looked at them leaving.

 Chapter 445: Patent

    Sam and his friends are on a return journey.

    It has been almost three months since they started their journey and it will take around a week for them to return.

    This time, he did gain something. Even though, his friends didn¡¯t have much to do in this journey. It would have been difficult without them.

    They destroyed a decent amount of formations to the point that it would be almost impossible for him to take the whole ind without them.

    He also understood now, why it is so difficult, if it is just like what that guardian said, then hundreds of people will be sent to the ind and the formations would be cleared faster than normal. That is why it was too much for just four of them.

    As for what to do with the guardian and handing the pir over to the people in higher realms he has his own ns for that.

    After a week, Sam is back in the city.

    As soon as he came back, there is a boatload of reports waiting for him. Most of them are from the Nascent stage teams he sent to the Adrian empire.

    It has only been a little over three and a half months since they went to that empire. There should be at most three reports from each team, but it seems like they are working around the clock and the reports exceeded.

    One of the teams already took control of the mercenary scene in the seashore city. This is something he didn¡¯t expect.

    The Adrian is actually a lot smaller than even the former Orion and they wouldn¡¯t take too much time traveling the whole empire. With a beast of Level-6, they can travel the whole nation a little over a week.

    The goods from that ce are already sent back through the space gate and the people in charge already distributed them between various departments. The productivity of the organization increased and there are new types of armor, weapons, and so on.

    There is a special department in the school. In fact, it is not fit to call it a department. It is more like a club. This is mostlyprised of people who are skilled and interested in more than one profession like Artisan and formations at the same time.

    And their main aim is to study Sam¡¯s products.

    When Sam reached his office within the school, the first thing that caught his eyes is the hunting trap. The good old hunting trap he released to the market when he is in the Southern star.

    The one on his table is the new product created by two students in this special club.

    Sam started examining the trap. The whole mechanism is actually quite simple and most of it is the same. Except for the metallic spike and other extra essories that are added to it.

    They used the same concealment formation and at the same time, the spikes are reced by something new.

    Those are the fangs of a snake-type beast. These fangs which the snake uses to inject the venom into the body of the prey.

    They created a new mechanismbining six of these sets and created a sac that contains an anesthetic poison.

    It all activates just like before. The poison enters the beast and they will be done.

    Sam looked at it and felt like this thing is not bad at all. Even though the improvement is not extremely creative and there are not many elements that changed, the changes are substantial.

    It is a straight forward approach without damaging the core mechanism. When he saw this, Sam felt like he should reward the students a bit and an idea popped up in his head.

    He started making preparations. He called some of the artisans and ordered a special paper. By evening, the paper bundles appeared in his office and he is quite satisfied with this. They are actually not papers, rather metallic sheets that are as thin and flexible as paper.

    He held an inscription pen in his hands and started using special ink to write.

    After everything was done, he stamped it with his symbol at the edge after signed it. He repeated the same procedure on another blue paper.

    After that, he made two copies of the blueprints of these new types of hunting traps and called for the various department heads. The departments in the school are different. The architecture itself is a separate department not a part of the artisan department. There is even a department of painting separately.

    After everyone gathered, Sam said.

    "There are some new things I am going to introduce to the school. The Patent system.

    From now on, we are going to give some rights to the students or the teachers or anyone else from the school who invented a new thing, modified a previous invention and improvised it, discovered a new herb and its new applications, new medicine, new functions and properties of beast organs, the discovery of new materials, alloying, new forging method, a new method in skill and so on and so forth.

    As long as they do it, they can submit it to the Patent department and get it registered. They will be awarded a certificate like this."

    With that, he pointed towards the blue metallic paper in his hands.

    "The colors, of the paper depend on the type of achievements they had. The blue-colored paper indicates the invention is a variation of an already existed one.

    The same exact copy will be framed and hung on the wall of the room. The spiritual sense and the spiritual energy signature of the person who made the contribution will be sealed in both copies. Apart from that, every invention will be rewarded in exchange for a copy of the blueprint which will be ced in the library.

    Every patent shall be marked with a serial number which will be noted down on the blueprint to find it.

    If the creator agrees, they can give the blueprint to the organization, where the product is suitable for business will be produced and sold. Of course, there will be a contract made with the patent holder on how much they get from the share of profits with the organization individuals.

    The blueprints from the library are only for reference and can only be studied within.

    Any threats and giarism, theft of patents and inventions will not be tolerated, they will be stripped off of their cultivation and also used as ves for the rest of their lives, apart from that if anyone wants to use the patented design of a product in their own invention, they must get the permission from the original inventor.

    If any vition of these rules urs, then they can file theint to the patent department. In this department, I and my friends and the strongest three of you will present. The situation will be investigated with absolute integrity and priority and the patent holder shall be given a satisfactory answer.

    They can even sell their patentpletely, but only to the organization."

    Sam went on to exin other rules. Since his organization will be one of the most influential ces in the world soon, he felt like he should employ a new system and standards.

    He has to make sure that everyone is willing to work for him, they should see it as an honor and opportunity of their lifetime, for that, he is willing to do all that he can.

    Later that day, the whole school is in an uproar, because a student who is at the peak of the Great realm was able to meet Sam.

    Sam is an existence that is unfathomable to the students, so they are clearly surprised. But what surprised them, even more, is the details the student revealed after returning. He showed off his new patent document and exined everything to him.

    He received a reward of a million spirit stones and a thousand credits for the invention. Not only that, he was able to sign a contract with the organization that they will pay him three percent of the total profit made on these special hunter traps and this contract is for a lifetime.

    He was practically overjoyed. He is actually an artisan, but due to his age advantage, he was able to enter the school instead of duty.

    He is extremely young. So, he was able to get more ess to the documents. He also attended a course on venomous beasts which is amon course taught by a poison master of the Pharmacy department.

    He not only taught about the venomous beasts and venoms, he also taught about how to escape them, how to deal with them, and which parts of them are valuable.

    All students who are interested in bing hunters took this course and he just took it as an extra one. Since knowledge wouldn¡¯t go to waste, so why not.

    There he got this idea and met with a lecturer in the department who is enthusiastic about Sam¡¯s inventions. This invention came about that way.

    Now, he is having tears of joy. At first, he was hesitant about leaving the artisan tower. After all, the school starting phase was of a rocky start, butter the knowledge and the teaching methods are different. Here he was almost forced to think out of the box and in unorthodox ways.

    He was already happy with that, but now he is feeling like this is the best decision of his life.

    He will never leave this ce. That is the only thought in his mind as he looked at the patent document. Today not only did it bring him riches, but it also brought him honor.

    His patent was the first to be hung in a newly built building. The patent building. He is so happy that he teared up.

 Chapter 446: Tables function

    Sam didn¡¯t dwell on the patent thing by much. He has many other reports to deal with. Some of them really important and needs urgent attention.

    One of them is the reports of the parks in the other empires. In more than twenty empires, the three major associations and the major powersbined to make this project happen. Compared to this, Sam¡¯s projects till now seemed extremely small.

    Their construction is finished and all they need are some finishing touches and some time to research why the hell half of the formations are not working even after they built the whole park just like the blueprint said.

    Meanwhile, the parks in the Kali empire and the other empires under the Beast faction are all in their final stages too. Even though their construction process is faster, they are still dyed because of the scarcity of manpower, and at the same time, Sam doesn¡¯t want them to finish faster.

    If they did, it would be really troublesome. The rest of the major powers and the associations will not let it go if they felt that something is fishy. The partnership between him and the Beast faction is not something to be known by others at this moment. It is still a secret.

    The reports about the Parks came from two ces one of them is from Arman. He got some first-hand information from the thunder god temple about the inauguration, the troubles they are facing, and ongoing research of the parks.

    As for the second one, it came from the Adrian empire. The teams he sent there are twenty and they are good enough to settle themselves in all the major cities, imperial capital and some semi-major cities with special situations.

    Some of them might have to stay in the same cities. There are parks that are constructed in all major cities. Sam has got some information from them on how the construction is going, how much trouble they are facing, and how the situation is.

    He is getting all the information he can. As for from Beast faction, it is almost impossible to get anything valuable from that.

    After all, they are isted from the rest of the organizations, at least in this case. But he heard that the beasts are being delivered ording to the contract.

    The beasts are being bred on the farm with the best of resources and this even became a chance for the students. There was already an announcement that once someone gets enough credits, they would be given a chance to select the beasts and try to form a contract with them.

    And the Special offer is that Sam is going to increase the bloodline, of course, this is a secret for the rest of them.

    After looking through all the reports, Sam felt like it is about time, he started his movements. The first move is that he needs to increase the efficiency of the defenses in the city.

    And the table in the third floor is the best option for that.

    Sam roamed around the city and started marking all the formations. Every formation was marked with a sapphire blue mark which is only visible when it was activated.

    After that, he started marking all the weapons within the city. That includes the Cannons and mounted guns on the city walls, the prisms which he used to create the light beam attacks, the cannon which he used to shoot the missiles from the top of the building, and one of the trump cards, the ss sphere which is responsible for shooting thatrgeser, the light curtain every defensive system he controlled when Old One attacked was marked.

    He went back to his room after this is over and took out the table in the third floor. Yes, the table in the third floor can be taken outside. But once it was taken out, it couldn¡¯t be moved from the spot. It has to stationary and could only be taken inside.

    Otherwise, there is no use for that. And it upies too much space.

    The table is connected to Sam¡¯s spiritual consciousness and now that it is out, he doesn¡¯t need to channel the energy through the divine dimension which only epts the energying from his own body.

    That way, his mental strength wouldn¡¯t be as affected.

    There is arge energy cell near the table and Sam ced his hand on that and another one towards the table as he channeled the energy.

    The crystal surface glowed and slowly the hologram started to appear.

    But this time, it is not small. It is literally the scale model of the whole city and some of its surroundings, the trees, bushes, even the people that are walking and working all over can be seen. If this is in ce there is no need for him to have any other surveince.

    But there is a need for a constant supply of energy and it is not exactly small.

    He has to invent a spiritual energy engine, which can flexibly and independently absorb the spiritual energy and supply it to the desired object. But thinking is easy, making it is extremely difficult.

    Sam looked at the hologram and started touching the formations and other weapons which are marked. They can be seen on this due to the markings and he tried deactivating some formations and reactivating them.

    If not for the fact that the cannons and the missiles are mostly mechanical and don¡¯t rely on formations for its core operation, he could control them too. Even now, he could control them, if he enchanted them with a spirit which would be in charge of activating the mechanical part.

    After making sure that everything necessary is marked, he put the table back. This is something that woulde in handy when he was defending the city.

    With his current cultivation, the city is the limit and if he broke through further, maybe he can even cover the routes and arge forest area.

    But it is notpletely necessary at the moment. If everything is as smooth sailing as his n to proceed, they wouldn¡¯t be able toe to the city.

    For the next step, he would have to talk with his friends. Jack and Watt went to Arsin to get the info regarding the Usaine sect and their influence.

    The four of them are in their private meeting room.

    Watt is exining the situation.

    "The Arsin is aplete production house and the influence of the Usaine sect is more than what meets the eye.

    The Arsin has so many mines but it is barely half the size of Orion but the mines are almost double in number.

    And that is the only number of known and opened mines under the control of the artisan association and the imperial authority.

    Unlike the thunder god temple which doesn¡¯t care much about who the emperor is as long as they paid the taxes, they have a tight leash over them. In fact, the imperial family is a family of a highly ranked Elder who is also a Transcendent stage cultivator in the Usaine sect.

    His brother is the one who is the emperor of Arsin.

    The Usaine sect recruits more members than the other major powers from the empires at the same time, they also involved in every affair. Simply put, all the high-ranking nobles are part of Usaine Sect.

    It is just they are not exactly on par with the people in the sect itself and their potential is limited. So, they were sent there.

    It would be hard to have any form of activities in Arsin, without alerting the sect."

    Watt finished and Jack spoke.

    "Actually, their influence spreads past the imperial authority, the second most influential people are the four associations in the empires, but they have infiltrated this as well.

    Most of the high-ranking artisans, formation masters, and Inscription masters all from the sect. Even though they follow the association rules, their first priority is always the sect.

    From what I heard the three associations actually took quite some effort to stop this from happening in earlier years. But things didn¡¯t go well for them.

    But the Usaine sect is too shrewd, they waited for a few years, to train the artisans and other professionals within the empire under the disguise of weapon shops and such.

    They started small, but they did train the people from the empire other than the sect itself. Their approach is simr to ours in this aspect.

    They taught orphans with a passable talent and aptitude and made the infiltrate the associations slowly.

    The result is more severe than what would have initially happened. There is actually a time, where the associations of the empires under the Usaine sect could havepletely left independent.

    But these things changed because of a war between Usaine sect and a Beast tribe. From then on, the associations are trying their best not to force the Usaine sect."

    Sam nodded and asked.

    "Where did you get this much information from?"

    He didn¡¯t get it; fifteen days is not enough for this info if they only sneaked in and eavesdropped. They couldn¡¯t have kidnapped someone, right?

    "Well, there is one thing that can let us have our way in the Arsin, in fact, any other empire under Usaine sect is the same and that is the food and wine. Wine for the most part.

    Due to the excessive presence of mines andrge barrennds, the main source is the beasts and the seafood. They have the best naval fleets of all the major powers.

    They don¡¯t have proper wine though. They make wines out of limited things they have, they even use the blood of some beasts for some wine, but none of it tastes as good.

    Most of the people are rough and depends on hard work. Due to the dictator-like ruling, everyone has to work in some kinds of mines once they are of a certain age. So, alcohol is like staple food there.

    Our wine is best of the bestpared to those and it gave us a lot of info even without us asking."

 Chapter 447: Pick a Side

    Sam went into deep thought after thinking this. He has to prate the Arsin empire to get into the Usaine sect no matter what.

    And it has to be the second major power he has to take down and bring under his control.

    If not for the fact, the thunder god temple is the one which is right beside him, he wouldn¡¯t have thought so. He would have made the Usiane sect the first target.

    Because the resources of the area are far too valuable. Once the war is on a full scale, Sam has to make sure that he has enough consumable weapons like explosives, formation discs, and even weapons. Everything would be in short supply with such a scale of war and the resources like that y an important role in a long-term war.

    If that happens, the Usiane sect will have an edge over others. So, he has to find a way to deal with them and bring that territory under their control.

    At this moment, Sirona entered the room. She doesn¡¯t have much presence in here, because she is been making herself busy all this while because of her current mental state. As calm and intelligent as she is, she couldn¡¯t get her thoughts in line and she barely broke through to the nascent stage a while ago.

    As for why she is here, Sam called her.

    "What do you need me for?" She asked in her emotionless tone.

    "I am going to wage war on the Usaine sect."

    Sam said nonchntly, Sirona frowned at this and a storm of emotions was stirred in her heart. Philip also looked at her calmly, he doesn¡¯t know what happened to his cheerful and loving cousin to turn into a cold and nonchnt machine like this.

    The hatred towards the Usaine sect is going more and more.

    "Why?" She asked after some thought. She never asked him such questions, not when he asked her help in assessments, school, teaching, and research. All this while she only did what he asked her to because she has nothing to do and nowhere to go.

    But this time, she couldn¡¯t help it.

    "I have my reasons. The next actions I would take will cause them to lose their control. They stole my designs, even though the three associations are to be med, they are notpletely innocent. So, the major powers will all suffer significant losses and sooner orter they will connect it to me.

    From my next course of actions, the Usaine sect will probably be the one who is going to hate me the most. They will want to destroy me no matter the cost. So, war is inevitable."

    "Why are you telling me this?"

    "I mean, if you are still confused, this is the best time to pick a side. I am okay with you being neutral and just staying in school, you can continue your research. But if you suddenly turn affectionate towards your sect and betray me, I couldn¡¯t handle it.

    After all, I am more worried about you than a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator going berserk in the middle of the city."

    Her face didn¡¯t show any expression, but there is a slight frown on her face and her eyes got a little sharp. Even Philip is looking at him with a somewhat angry expression.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "I have more than ten thousand people working for me, do you want me to risk it? I know what I can do and in the same way, I know what she can do, do you think the damage is something we can handle if she tries to destroy the school? The students in there are more than three thousand of them and all of them are going to be our future foundation.

    With her knowledge, she could destroy my parks, sabotage the city formations, if I am notpletely sure of dealing with someone with just my formations and inscription tricks, then it is her.

    Think about what you want. But I am not going to mince my words." Sam said bluntly and then looked at Sirona and said.

    "I don¡¯t have any conflict with you, I only helped out of my way because I could rte and understand your situation. I am happy to employ you and give you enough freedom given your expertise, but that doesn¡¯t mean, I am okay with a variable like you.

    Think for a week and give me your answer. If you want to go back to the Usaine sect, I will send you back there, without harm, if you want to join the war and ally with us, then sure you cane on board but I am going to put you against the Usaine sect.

    If you just want to stay out of it, sure you can. You can stay in school and research. But until the war is over, you would be in a task given by me.

    I cannot risk my organization which is a hope for many people who came to me leaving their previous posts, it is too much of a gamble even considering the stakes. I cannot take that risk just because of your expertise, your emotional state, your trauma, or even your beauty.

    I am sorry, but you better make a decision."

    Sam finished and didn¡¯t say anything else. Philip who wanted to say something hesitated and didn¡¯t say it in the end.

    He could understand what is Sam thinking. In all the parks, the hunting teams, the new recruits, the workers in the factory everyonebined will be more than ten thousand employees. Ten thousand is a conservative estimate. And there are really three thousand members in the school with pure student identities.

    He couldn¡¯t stake all their futures on his word. After all, from what he knew of Sam, he is not someone who would just let his employees¡¯ future be in an uncertain situation because of his own decision.

    Sirona didn¡¯t reply and just left silently, she understood what Sam is getting at, but she couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit lost. Why did the Usaine sect didn¡¯t think of her like that? She is a valuable asset; she knew that much.

    She dared say that apart from Sam, she could beat anyone in the art of formation provided that they are of the same levels, the Usiane sect treated her with utmost importance at first, she has priority over resources and everything. But why is Sam is ready to kick her out for the sake of students who couldn¡¯t even contribute to his fighting force?

    She is now understanding the Usaine sect more and more. They only paid lip service and superficial things so that she could be under their thumb, once she was out of control just for a bit, she was being plotted against and was almost killed.

    At least, Sam is treating her the same way all the time.

    As she thought about it, she halted in her tracks and turned back into the room.

    "I will participate in the war and leave everything rted to Usaine sect to me, but I only have one condition. I want the eight guardian puppets of the Usaine sect."

    She said confidently with a calm expression. The four in the room are surprised by the sudden change of expression.

    "Sure. Be prepared then. You have three months maximum to engage directly with the Usaine sect. You are in charge of the matter regarding the Usaine sect and it empires.

    The first agenda is to prate into the Arsin empire. That is the only ce that shares the border with the Usaine sect.

    I will give you the instructions on when to make a move openly. Until then, you can deal with it as you like. The only requirement is that you have to be in the Arsin¡¯s imperial capital three months from now."

    This time, Sirona received her instructions and left the ce.

    She understood something today and a long-stretched band snapped. She wants to see what this Usaine sect which put her in this position and all the confusion that is eating her brain away.

    When Sam thought of his own employees, this far ahead to make sure that she wouldn¡¯t cause them trouble, what is she doing when the Usaine sect made her like this, there was no retaliation. Sam is not even willing to risk it and trust herpletely, but she is here moping and whining without any reaction.

    Is her care for herself so much less than Sam¡¯s care for his employees?

    Sam doesn¡¯t what Sirona thought at the moment. He didn¡¯t want to use Sirona in any way and there is no hidden meaning behind those words.

    He really meant what he said. He is not clear about Sirona¡¯s feelings. When he was in her position in his previous life, he already started nning his revenge after two months and already held the heads of those people half-way through the third month.

    It seems like it took this long for her to snap out of the daze.

    Sam thought to himself as he started exining his ns.

 Chapter 448: Move on Parks

    The next day, the whole of Sam¡¯s city was in full action mode. The factory production increased and there are some new designsing into y. There are new parts for manufacturing. But the original production was not stopped at all.

    Because, there was a rule ced by Philip before his journey that, in the idle times of the machines of the factory, people can make parts and try to create new production machines, likethes, drilling machines, power hammers, etc.

    He said that they would have rewards. Apparently, it worked. After all, most of the workers are cultivators, even though their strength is less and battle prowess is not good, they could still endure the hardship of working in a factory.

    They all wanted to work extra hours to be more skilled on the machines and at the same time to get more promotions, but the overtime is out of option for most of the time, as there are few slots for that and to give a fair chance to all the employees, they avoided favoritism.

    But that doesn¡¯t mean, there are no other ways, most of the factory workers who operate and create someplicated parts are artisans who weren¡¯t skilled in their craft. They weren¡¯t able to create great weapons and such,

    But they are skilled enough to make parts for the machines. And just like that, a new production line was manufactured in three months.

    This happened between the lunch breaks and other resting times.

    Philip got this idea; he might have thought that the wartime would be a loss if they don¡¯t conduct their business normally.

    So, he decided to increase machinery and production.

    Anyway, now that the new production line appeared, there is actually a great chance for the workers to prove themselves and many of them understood what is happening. If they want to work more, they need more machines and the best option would be to make them in break times if they really want overtime.

    At the same time, for the past three months, a batch of new recruits are being trained in the factories for various jobs. These are also the people who don¡¯t have much aptitude and past their primes. They couldn¡¯t qualify for the full-time student position and can only use these means to get a chance to enter the school asionally and gain knowledge.

    Simply put, the war preparations are being gone on and many new parts came to the production line.

    The farming is also going in full swing. All the students who are interested in herbs and farming are given more practical sses. The lecturers of the pharmacy department are busy with making pills, potions and the students who enrolled in the courses will get practical sses too.

    The same with Weaponsmithing, Inscriptions, and Formations. The sses are being theoretical and practical and they are going on around the clock. The arena is also full. The new sparring candidates havee from all over the western continent.

    Apart from that, there seemed to be something happening in the Beast farm.

    Yanwu, Sky, Ape, and Raiju are all in the beast farm and the hunting for capturing lives beasts is also going on full swing.

    There is some good news as well, there are some Pre-transcendent cultivators, who newly emerged within the ranks and one of them is the Architect Austin.

    Arge order of returning scrolls was given to the Space gate association.

    At the same time, Arc has hit the peak stage of transcendent and most of the momentum of his cultivation was exhausted here. He would breakthrough to the Consummate stage earlier, that is for sure.

    But they still have to wait for some time, but before that, he has to make some preparations.

    The first thing on the agenda is stopping the parks and creating some sort of conflicts between the major powers.

    The next day a team of people left the city and went to the empires under control of thunder god temple, Lightning Spear sect, and ThunderBolt sect.

    The person leading the team is the Sword Marshall of the previous Orion. Since he was taken as subordinate by Arc, now he is working under Arc¡¯s orders which implies he is under Sam¡¯s orders too.

    Sam has sent them towards these empires to do only one thing and that is ce some metallic cylinders he created in some ces within the park. They omitted the Adrian empire because there are already people capable of dealing with that.

    Currently, all the major powers and the associations have only one goal and that is to activate the internal formations and the overall formation of the parks, everyday several tests are going on why they are not being activated, but there are no results.

    Little did they know that they are missing some energy cells which have to be buried in some ces.

    These things are just like the Spark plugs of an engine. All they have is one function and they might as well be never used again once they are ced.

    But they are still important. They are like keys.

    Sam didn¡¯t send the energy cells though, he sent something else after that he called Sirona and instructed.

    "I want you a few parks in the Arsin empire along with it chose any other empire within the Usaine sect¡¯s control, even eastern continent if fine.

    The losses should extremely superficial and there shouldn¡¯t be any damage to the core areas of the park."

    Sirona took the instructions and left, she didn¡¯t take any methods or resources from Sam directly and this made Sam feel relieved. It is always good to work with smart people. They knew exactly what they have to do and there is no need to exin everything to them.

    A few dayster.

    In the imperial capital of Adrian.

    The construction team of the Park is still in the city and this is early in the morning and they are starting their experiments once again.

    This has been happening for more than fifteen days. They are having trouble with the formations. The calctions are correct and there shouldn¡¯t be any troubles. The worst part is they couldn¡¯t simte this. If they have to simte this, they have to create a new type of formation simtors that are extremelyplex and have high energy capacity. If they started researching it, there is no way they would be able to finish any time soon.

    So, they are taking turns at this moment and every day one of them will think of ideas and try to activate the formations.

    Today, it is the turn of an Old man from the formation association. He doesn¡¯t have any expression on his face, except for his body is slouched a bit, and he even a bit fat. His eyes screamed ofziness.

    From his nonchnt actions, anyone could say that even he doesn¡¯t believe that he could do it. But as soon as he tried to activate it by changing a few things, the whole park lit up and all of a sudden, the people are stunned.

    "Damn, did it really work?" The Old man yelled out his thoughts and was shocked, in fact, he is more shocked than anyone else in the crowd.

    He didn¡¯t put in any effort in this at all, but there is suddenly such a movement. He suddenly beamed with joy. But all of a sudden, the expressions of the crowd changed because the formation is emitting a strange-fluctuations and one of them yelled.

    "Everyone within the park gets out. The formation is unstable."

    This is the supervisor of this area.

    The people inside the park are all shocked and started cursing that old guy.

    "You Old bastard, what have you done?"

    "If something happens to me, I will haunt you as a ghost."

    "You sick bastard."

    The old man wasst to realize the perilous situation and wanted to run away. But he was toote.

    *BOOM*

    The formation exploded, and more than twenty Nascent stage cultivators, of three major associations and the Thunder god temple, are all dead with the st.

    One-third of the city ispletely gone and even the rest of the city has many infrastructural losses.

    The supervisor felt heavy in his heart as he recovered from the aftershock of the explosion. His face became extremely serious he didn¡¯t think that something like this would happen that too on arge scale.

    They seemed to have been messing with a dangerous formation.

    He went back and immediately reported to the higher-ups, they also felt cold, but when the news went to the three association heads the formation head didn¡¯t care.

    "Are you guys stupid or just born without brains? All the formations are basic ones and they are just made on such arge scale. Theplexity only lies in the arrangement, don¡¯t tell me you guys can¡¯t even maintain that. No matter what happens, I want the whole park activated. Don¡¯t report to me until now. I am going into seclusion."

    This is the reaction and the simr reaction came from the other heads and they all went to seclusion.

    But no one knows what they are really thinking.

 Chapter 449: Suspicion

    For the next ten days, the parks of the thunder god temple, Lightning Spear sect, and ThunderBolt sect, have the same scenarios.

    After the first incident in Adrian, although the supervisor there, tried his best to pass the message so that people at other Park¡¯s would be careful, there are still some losses overall.

    Many people died due to the unpredictable explosion. Even in the Usaine sect, there are some explosions but not all of them. The only difference is they don¡¯t have any casualties.

    Nobody died there, the people who caught up in the mess had injuries at most. This time, the Supervisors from all the Empires couldn¡¯t take it anymore and go back to the Associations.

    This is getting out of hand. Even if the association heads didn¡¯t want them toe back, they have to still go on.

    But what they don¡¯t know is, even the association heads didn¡¯t know anything. The Park is a product of three craftsbined. In every phase of construction, there would be at least two craftsbined and everything isplex.

    This is the only possible exnation they have when they looked at the Blueprints.

    When the situation reached this deadlock, they also understood that something is not right and all three of them are trying their best to crack the blueprint and see what is wrong. But they couldn¡¯t understand.

    If their calctions are correct, every formation in this n should work properly without any problems. But they are unsure of what is wrong. They only have spection about that after some research. Because, they could calcte the whole structure as a whole because they couldn¡¯t anticipate the energy flow of the whole park.

    They could divide them into parts and they did exactly that, but they couldn¡¯tbine it properly.

    They didn¡¯t have face to talk to their subordinates about their ipetence, that is why they made an excuse of seclusion and went away.

    As for backing down now, it is almost impossible. The major powers had invested too much into it. All this while, they have some influence over the major powers due to their professional status.

    And now, they did go a bit overboard with the major powers after they got the blueprints. Now, too many resources went into this to give up easily.

    If they gave up now, not only do they have to repay all the losses, they will fall out of favor with the major powers.

    The four associations are actually in a mutually beneficial rtionship with the six major powers.

    The Pharmaceutical tower was gone for the moment and there is no strict hierarchy left. The Major powers who have transcendent level healers and pill masters are trying to take over the tower to gain more influence, but nobody dares to make the first move.

    As for the remaining three, they wanted to gain more benefits through this method at this moment. Although, in empires and the minor powers, the professionals have more sway in things, at the top of the world the situation is different.

    If pushes to shove, the heads of the major powers wouldn¡¯t tolerate the associations. After all, unlike the major powers, the associations don¡¯t haverge armies and such. If a real war breaks out, they will die.

    That is why the association heads are really trying so hard to get these parks running. In this way, they could prove their worth with the financial means and also gain more pull over things because of that.

    But the situation is not getting any better, the three heads are trying day in and day out to find ways to deal with the problems in the formations.

    But they are not able to change the situation and now the losses are starting to pile up.

    Even after the superiors came, they didn¡¯t give up, all they said is one thing.

    "Rebuild the damaged parts and don¡¯t try to activate it at the moment. Study it before you guys try to do anything else."

    With that, the activations are stopped all over the empires and teams sent by Sam also retreated.

    It is easy for these elite Nascent stage cultivators to sneak in and ce a few cylinders in those vast parks. There are too many openings, apart from that these guys are even socent that no one would be able to interrupt their work and left no security.

    If they knew that someone just bombed them with some small cylinders they might die from their anger.

    After the teams returned, nothing much happened for the next few days and concentrated on the reconstruction, but the supervisors who are overseeing the process are having some doubts.

    The damage for the parks under the Usaine sect and its empires are not much damaged. The rubble is high there, but the damaged areas of the park are not important at all.

    At most, two to three formations nodes are the only things that are damaged. The herb garden parks are also not damaged at all. The supervisors are not okay with this and reported it to the higherups.

    They are suspicious of something and small conflicts rose.

    That is because, the associations might see this as just their ipetence, but it is not the same for the major powers.

    They received the damage reports and they frowned. The thunder god temple has the most damage and when theypared this to the damage of Usaine sect and the Herb Garden, they became extremely dissatisfied.

    The heads immediately went to the Three association heads to confront them.

    "Old Three, why are the damages to our parks too much,pared to that the Usaine sect doesn¡¯t have many losses all the damages are superficial and the Herb garden doesn¡¯t even have any damages. How do you exin this?"

    The head of the lightning Spear sect asked. The thunder god temple head and the Thunderbolt sect head didn¡¯t speak, but their expression said it all.

    "There is nothing to exin. It just yed out like that, even in your empires all the parks are not damaged in the same way. It is just a coincidence." Old three, the formation association head said.

    "Coincidence? don¡¯t make meugh. Do you think there is such a coincidence in the world?"

    The lightning spear sect head asked in fury.

    The Herb Garden head didn¡¯t like this and stood up and said calmly. "I don¡¯t why my properties are not damaged, but from the investigation I made we did get some results. The Chief supervisor of the Herb garden area said that he gave a silent order to not try and activate the formation.

    They are not exactlyfortable, ying with such vast resources, so they didn¡¯t try hard enough. They waited for others to figure out the formations and then wanted to copy their things. They don¡¯t want to try and be the know-it-all and destroy precious resources. That is why there is no damage to our territory."

    Even though what he said sounded normal, he is clearly implying that it is because of the know-it-all behavior of the association that this happened.

    The supervisor of the Herb garden suddenly became the center of attention, but he tried his best to stay collected and repeated the same thing, and all the other people who are under him testified.

    Even though the three major power heads felt like it is too far-fetched, they still reluctantly let him off the hook.

    But now their aim is the Usaine sect. from the start, the Usaine sect is the source of their main suspicions.

    Because the Usaine sect has some special rtionship with the associations as there are quite a few officials within the associations from the Usaine sect in the associations.

    They are the highest producers of the artisans, inscription masters, and Formation masters.

    Even though they are not given higher positions, some of the supervisors of this project still belonged to the Usaine sect.

    With that, they started having some lingering suspicions on both parties and this couldn¡¯t be erased easily.

    At least for the moment though, the conflict was cleared and the Major powers backed off. Sam got some information about this meeting from Sai and Arman.

    As for why Sai even got this information, he heard that the major power heads are suspicious of him and tried to interrogate him. But Sai is no pushover. Except for the thunder god temple head, there is no one who could fight him and if his beast came out and both of them tried their best, then they could certainly deal with them.

    As for war, they would have need balls to steel to start a major power battle for such a trivial issue.

    Since Sai is not involved in this project at all and trying on his own to make a knock-off version of parks, they have some doubts, but still, let him go.

    Samplied with the information he got and prepared for his next step and that is the first outdoor assignment for the architecture department, Artisan department, formation departments, and inscription departments.

    Since it has been a little over four months since the school started, it is about time, he sent them on their first field assignment to gain experience.

    Some of them are even part of the major project and that is a construction project in Adrian.

 Chapter 450: Cement

    This is one of the major construction projects of the organization to increase its influence in the Adrian Empire.

    The whole architecture department was moved, anyone who has the cultivation of the Great realm and above is sent to the construction project.

    Their main goal is to construct towers for the Mercenary teams. At the moment, there are around a hundred members in each mercenary team that was being led by the Nascent stage cultivators in Adrian.

    Due to Sam¡¯s promised rewards, they are extremely excited and involved in the project. They tried their best to get new recruits. Particrly the team that established themselves in the Imperial capital.

    That was led by the Overall leader of the Nascent stage cultivators, at least for the Mercenary corps under Sam. That guy is the one that is ranked first in the rumble.

    He noticed that Sam need more people who have potential and started sending orphans back to the city. He was the one who has ess to the Space gate, so naturally, it is easier for him.

    Apart from that, they are extremely good at recruiting new members. Most of the new members got into the mercenary teams after being saved from the life and death situations by the mercenary teams. In fact, they didn¡¯t let go of any of that chance.

    Apart from that, they focused on people who are betrayed by their teams, trying to find the people who are retired from the military and city guard because of some mistakes, some solo cultivators who are being oppressed by some noble families, and so on.

    Of course, there are normal people as well, who joined the mercenary team because they are strong and have great prospects.

    But they didn¡¯t reject them, in fact, they tried to brainwash them to the loyalty with rewards, opportunities, enticement with their superior ss weapons, the Bee puppets, and so on.

    They expanded far more in these three months, more than Sam expected. Even though they didn¡¯t bring extremely loyal and permanent members into the group, they could still be used.

    As for the towers, they are not the puremunication towers that were built on the western continent.

    Rather, they are residential towers and at the same timemunicationwork hub will also be ced. But thatmunicationwork will not be known to others and will not be open to the public. This is amunicationwork of Sam¡¯s troops.

    At the same time, these things have another purpose. That is they act as the business joint of Sam in that empire until the Parks are built.

    Th architecture departments paired with the required formation department and inscription department are divided into different groups. The mainmander of these teams is obviously Austin, the first pre-transcendent stage cultivator under Sam.

    There are not many Nascent stage architects under Sam. There are only around ten of them.

    But most of the construction doesn¡¯t need them, they have to build the foundation and the other core structure, the secondary structures will be done by Grand realm cultivators and the rest can be done by great realm cultivators.

    This time, Sam gave a myriad of designs. This time, he didn¡¯t integrate the formationspletely into the tower¡¯s structure.

    Rather, the formation department people are responsible for using the structure of the tower to their advantage and set the defenses.

    So, the designs are not extremelyplicated. In fact, Sam only gave the outer appearance for more than half of the designs, with the new-found knowledge the architects are more than good enough toe up with a good enough design.

    The Inscription masters are responsible for the inscriptions of the tower to enforce the defense.

    But the construction is not going to start simultaneously in all ces. They are going to start the project in the sea-shore cities of Adrian and slowly move upwards in the next two months.

    And they did exactly that.

    A team of more than three hundred people arrived at the imperial city of Adrian in batches. This much of arge movement will be too eye-catching if they moved together.

    So, the formation was activated in batches of ten and even then, they moved out of the building in which the formation was constructed extremely discreetly.

    When all of them are spread out, they traveled for more than a week to reach the Coastal cities and three towers started their project. Due to the presence of more Nascent stage cultivators in the initial phases, it would go faster than normal.

    And from what they spent all these days in the school, one of the students came up with a new method of construction. At least, it is a new method in this world, and it is simr to the method of Pre-casting of walls of a house.

    All this while, the construction process was done step by step andyer byyer even with the presence of all these architects, he decided that he would try to make use of a method which would let him construct the structure in pieces and join them.

    And in that process, he created something simr to cement. But this won¡¯t have any form of simrities with the modern-day cement except for the solidification process.

    Thises from a mixture of three types of materials turned into powder and mixed with two types of liquids. One of them is a nt-based juice and the other one is the mucus of a beast.

    He is a grand realm architect and he is in histe twenties, which made him eligible to be a student in the school. As for why he was able to get these nt-based juices, he was also a dual elemental user.

    So, he attended some sses and read some books on herbs in the school¡¯s library. He has this idea for a long time, but he was only able to try and find a way recently.

    After the patent thing a few days ago, he felt that he should definitely show the practical application of this and was trying to find an opportunity to meet with Sam or his three friends. As for the department heads, he didn¡¯t believe in them.

    He only believed a lecturer in the architect department and asked for his help. But they couldn¡¯t reach the four of them no matter what they did.

    The four of them are busy making preparations.

    But still, they were able to get a chance to talk with Philip and exined his idea.

    Philip ced them in the first tower construction project and he should use his technique and record the whole process with the recording crystal. If everything adds up, he would be able to get the patent and also the prize money that woulde with it.

    Here he is.

    Currently, the architect department is making the door section with a ck stone to make an entrance for the tower and the foundation and the wall surrounding the entrance were already built.

    The first step is to attack the stone entrance to the wall and see if it works and if it does, then they would continue.

    And working doesn¡¯t mean just sticking together and attaching themselves, the two surfaces shouldn¡¯t have any problems in conducting spiritual energy and should be able to retain the inscriptions.

    They did some tests, and this is the final one to convince the rest of the department.

    After joining the door, they waited for the day and left it to solidify as they proceeded with the rest of the construction. But the guy who made this cement is making a structure on the side and it is not the first one, he is making the window frames from simr ck stones and he even started constructing the adjacent sections of the windows and sunshade for the windows.

    Even when his colleagues wanted to stop him from this and asked him to wait until the experiment is proven he didn¡¯t stop. He has full confidence in his own invention and the next day, the results really did surprise everyone. Not only did it work, it even exceeded their expectations.

    Generally, the architects have a lot of trouble when construction, because they have to make therge uneven, and irregr stones into neat and clean structures.

    For that, they have many skills trained which are achieved by manipting the earth¡¯s elemental energy.

    They use that energy to not only shape the stones, they will also create smooth surfaces and forcefully bind the two stones to make them one object.

    This binding is actually the toughest of all, but this new cement will eliminate all those problems.

    The news sent cheers to everyone. Now, they could see a lot of possibilities with the help of this new binder.

    The shapes of the structures, the choices of the size are all flexible now. All this while due to this binding problem they wouldn¡¯t use smaller stones rather they would bindrge stones so that they could make do with fewer bindings. But now the stone bricks can be used to createrge surfaces which give more freedom in design and less effort from them.

 Chapter 451: Wine Tavern

    The Cement is a sess. So, the construction process was extremely easy. As cultivators, one thing they don¡¯t have to bother about was lifting weights. So, they can create structures of any size and bind them with the cement.

    There is no longer a need to wait for oneyer after another to do so.

    The student who created this didn¡¯t rush to file the patent, he is confident that no one would dare to steal this from him.

    Within four days, the construction wasplete because of the new binding agent. Due to arge number of architects, they could make this happen faster.

    When the citizens saw the majestic structure appear in the city in such a short amount of time, they couldn¡¯t help but be in awe of it.

    After that, the next four days, the formation of masters and the Inscription master took over and started doing their job.

    On top of the tower, some of the artisans are working on installing themunication hub.

    After they are done with it, they stayed within the city for the next two and days a mercenary from another city came to visit them, to invite them over to construct a simr tower to their mercenary team.

    The same thing repeated for the next few days and the architect department team started spreading. With a Nascent stage cultivator leading each team, there are ten teams and everyone started working on ten towers at the same time.

    Even though it wouldn¡¯t be possible for them toplete the whole thing in four days, like this time, they would still be able to deal with this in a little more than a week.

    There are twenty mercenary teams and their n is to finish the construction in a month and a half. After all, the time is on tight here. The higher-ups know that there is going to be a war. So, there is no way they would ck off.

    While this construction is going on, Sam is once again in seclusion. With the war nearing, he has to make something that could help them. Of course, most of the new essories are outsourced to his factories, but there are some things which are better for him to make.

    He drowned himself in research while the training of the troops increased. Their resources increased. Mackey and his team are going through hell to retain spiritual energy and increase the effectiveness of the meals. On top of that, Sam just mmed a hundred or so recipes on his head and he has to make sure that more than half of the troops should have a breakthrough.

    Apart from that, even the students are receivingbat training. All this while, it is optional. But Sam decided that it would be better to be prepared and at least the students would have enough knowledge to escape the crisis if pushes to shove. He doesn¡¯t want to see a ughter.

    The training was led by Watt as he is more experienced in this area. He has seen firsthand how Sam will train his troops and he even helped him train the first Sam¡¯s battalion.

    Now, he is going to train more of such battalions at the moment.

    Although, Sam¡¯s troops are not exactly toorge and there are barely five thousand members at present and if he counts the three thousand students, they would be eight thousand. He is concentrating on quality over quantity.

    Apart from that, Sam¡¯s beasts all took some important roles at this time.

    Mia is responsible for eating and creating poisons. Her body is a natural reservoir for poison and an even more astonishing thing is, one of her head has the capability of consuming any poison and making it her own.

    So, she started consuming two to three poisons and mixing them up within her system and see what the effects are.

    The Pharmacy department does have a subsidiary department of poison masters. But they are only around twenty people in that department who are focused on developing and curing poisons.

    Luckily there are two Nascent stage poison masters and they are having the time of their life.

    The poisons Mia created are not only a new research material, they are also thinking of new possibilities.

    As for the remaining beasts, they started roaming the forests of the Western continent for the past half a month. Nobody knows what they are doing except for Sam and his friends.

    But even then, there are some exceptions and one of them is Shadow mouse. The shadow mouse led the rest of the shadow mice and this time, they are not ten with the addition of six new members out of which four are now considered grownup. The fourteen of them started making their move.

    They are sent to Arsin along with a new modified device Sam made.

    It is a recording crystal simr to the body came. But its size is so small that they are fit on the shadow mice perfectly.

    They are there to gather as much intelligence as possible, so they could assist Sirona.

    He decided to take different approaches in Adrian and Arsin.

    Adrian doesn¡¯t have the thunder god temple¡¯s influence by too much, because the empire doesn¡¯t have any specialized resources, and all the temple needs are taxes. As for the Arsin, it is full of metals which are used for weapon-making and formation discs, and many other things.

    This is the foundation of Usaine sect and they are in total control of the nation.

    So, he couldn¡¯t just send a bunch of mercenaries there and let them grow the influence. No matter how much they develop, they wouldn¡¯t be able to surpass the Usaine sect in a short amount.

    That is why, he took a new approach and since Sirona is in charge, all he gave her are some things that she can use to her advantage based on the situation of Arsin.

    As for how she uses it, it is her business. He only helped her with the intelligence by sending Shadow mice there.

    He exined about shadow mice and gave the beast pouches to her, she was surprised at first, because she doesn¡¯t know such a beast even existed.

    After that, she took them and the spatial ring Sam gave which also consisted of the details on how to use them along with the items themselves.

    These items are mostly from the spatial ring Sam got from the Old One.

    He already gave out the pills which are of increasing spiritual energy and aiding cultivation to the School and organization so that they would be given out as rewards. But there are some high-level pills and some pills with nasty uses with him.

    And he is using some of theter ones.

    Sirona started thinking of a n when she read the contents and the next day, she decided that it would be best to enter Arsin right this moment, but just when she was about to leave, Philip came running to her and said.

    "I will alsoe with you."

    "Why? I can deal with this alone."

    "I am sure you can. But it wouldn¡¯t hurt to have an extra hand."

    Sirona didn¡¯t refute him and just let him be.

    And in a few days, in the city of Arsin, a new tavern appeared and the people are saying that the wine of the tavern is extremely exceptional and that is the best wine they ever tasted.

    Sirona and Philip are wearing some normal clothes and some disguises as they tended to the customers in the tavern.

    "Yo, kid. Where did you get this type of wine? We never tasted this stuff ever before."

    One of the customers asked.

    "Well, that is the result of years of our research from my master and me. He dedicated all his life to creating the best wine on the. He recently passed away and here I am trying to pass down his fruits ofbor to the rest of the world so that his glory will not disappear."

    "Great master, Great wine."

    That person raised the wine to toast.

    At this moment, the shadow mice are already all over the city and covering as much information as possible.

    Within a few days, the news of the tavern waspletely all over the city and even the officials started focusing on this.

    But the high-level officials are not going toe here directly, the first people who came are the city guards.

    When Sirona saw them, theirs wasn¡¯t taken out from the same Wat as the other customers. Of course, they don¡¯t know that.

    When they drank that wine, they couldn¡¯t help but feel ecstatic. There is not just one kind of wine in the tavern and in fact there are five kinds of wines and each wine is in two wats.

    The business is booming, but there is no shortage of wine there. At this moment, Mackey has arge team of more than two hundred people and fifty of them are only responsible for brewing wine.

    After the first week, they even brought a chef from the team to make some snacks for the customers who demanded that their own snacks are not going well with the wine.

 Chapter 452: Wine is too good

    The wine business is going in a full swing actually. But it did attract thepetition to hold some grudges against them, but they didn¡¯t care. There are not tons of Nascent stage cultivators in the empire toe and mess with them.

    Much less a Nascent who wants to do wine business.

    The workers of the mines and even the officials are extremely happy with this wine tavern. The whole thing is extremely hyped up and the officials who are in love with the most expensive wine in the tavern areing every day within a week.

    They became regrs in one week.

    And the shadow mice are doing their work extremely well. One week is almost enough to mark all the officials. Philip didn¡¯t understand what she was doing.

    He doesn¡¯t know what Sam gave to her and what she has nned. But she seemed to have been collecting the information on the officials and the nobility and even after the list is made, she is only marking some of them.

    He didn¡¯t disturb her and just let it be.

    After another three days, after closing the service for that night, Sirona and Philip are talking in the tavern.

    "We are moving out tonight."

    She said all of a sudden. Philip who is eating halted and said. "Why?"

    "This is the n, we are not staying in any city for more than ten days. We wouldn¡¯t stay in any ce. We are going to cover all the cities."

    "Are you sure? The information we got from here is enough in just ten days?"

    "I am not gaining new information, rather I am justparing the information I have in my mind. You will understand in a few days."

    The next day, when the regrs came back, there is nothing in the tavern and it ispletely deste. The empty room felt extremely cold.

    One of the tables was engraved with some words.

    ¡¯I want to let my master¡¯s wine known throughout the empire. So, I am moving on with a journey.¡¯

    When they saw this, they didn¡¯t know how to react. But they still went back to the work after cursing them.

    In the next city, the wine tavern appeared, and once again the wine was extremely popr. But in the first city, the officials who entered the tavern are the ones who didn¡¯t have much reaction initially. But as days passed, they started talking about the wine too much and since they couldn¡¯t get it, they are drinking their local wine like crazy.

    They are barely sober for the next two days. Even that was okay. But the situation turned to worse when they couldn¡¯t get the same feeling with this wine and wanted to get this. They ordered their subordinates to search for the wine tavern and in which city they are located.

    When the subordinates did get the address and tried to buy the wine, they werepletely rejected. Because they were told that the tavern has a rule and that is they are not going to let you take away the wine.

    This is like a bomb and the official wanted to threaten them, but he is a grand realm cultivator, what can he do?

    The situation is the same with a bunch of other officials but not all of them. Every official in the city drank the wine at least once, only one-third of them turned out like this. Nobody knew why are they so obsessed with this wine.

    The situation is something no one couldprehend but was bound to repeat itself.

    Meanwhile, in Sam¡¯s city.

    Sam just came out of the divine dimension. He has been busy since the new ns started their execution.

    He is extremely busy since then because he has to make many of the things for himself. Particrly the research process.

    At this moment, he took out the gourd and started drinking the wine from it. No matter, how Sam prided over his wine recipe, he couldn¡¯t think of a better wine than the one he is drinking.

    As soon as he took a couple of sips, his exhaustion was gone and he once again looked energized.

    This is the wine the Monkey King gave him.

    This wine is truly miraculous. It not only heals the body but also reduces fatigue and exhaustion. A person would be brand new after a couple of sips and the best part is, the wine is almost limitless.

    That¡¯s right, the wine almost unlimited and Sam couldn¡¯t finish it for the next two decades even if he drank it 24x7.

    The gourd happened to be a type of storage device.

    Sam is really shocked by this. This alone is worth his trip.

    As for the techniques such as the replica of the Golden gaze fiery eyes and the five strands of hair, he didn¡¯t want to use them at this moment.

    He has to deal with this shit show for now. Anyway, his individual prowess will have little impact on the war as he is using the collective might.

    Currently, at this moment he is researching something for naval warfare. Naval warfare was always something that turned easily chaotic.

    The main reason being, there is nondmass and they have only boats to stay onboard. The boats will be easily destroyed and they have some nasty dog fights in the water.

    The losses are always too huge for both sides and the beasts of the sea are not there just for shore. With this muchmotion, many species will run away for sure, but some daring beasts wille and have a feast of their lives with the meat of the cultivators.

    So, Sam has to find a better way to move in the sea and the movement should be both in the form of group movement of a vehicle and also the individual movement of the people.

    They have to have enough flexibility topletely conquer the Naval battle. Not only that, they have to win against arger army with their deficiency in numbers.

    For that Sam is seriously researching a ship and a new puppet. This time, the puppet is extremely different and he is trying to create something inspired by some fantasy movie back on his earth.

    Even though the full capability of that fantasy movie wouldn¡¯t be achieved, and he didn¡¯t desire that he is trying his best on this one.

    All he wanted to do was to let this puppet aid these people to move easier in the water and maybe support them in attacks.

    He is in continuous research.

    The training of the students is going as well.

    Days passed with the situation still like this and that month was finally over.

    Sam wanted to make the next move another fifteen dayster. There are only six months left in this year. This means, there is only two and a half years¡¯ time for the next pce of inheritance and he has to find a way to get the remaining four boxes before that.

    By this time, the construction of the twenty towers in the Adrian empire is almost done.

    The journey for that is not exactly smooth sailing, rather they did encounter some difficulties and one of them is the artisan tower. They fell under the association¡¯s radar after their continuous movement.

    At first, they are ignored because of the Parks which are being reconstructed, but by the end of this month the construction was in its final stages and recently they sent some architecture artisans to get these architects to join the association and find their identities.

    But all their efforts only gave them negative results, but they didn¡¯t make any big moves, because they are already involved in a big project.

    So, currently, the construction is almost done and themunication between Sam¡¯s subordinates will be established.

    In the Arsin, three cities were covered. Sirona and Philip are moving to their fourth city.

    All the cities they visited have only had low-level cultivation than them, so the officials couldn¡¯t do anything.

    When they reached the fourth city and started their business, they finally saw the results they wanted to see.

    The official who became a regr in the first city came to the tavern in this city. His eyes are dark and his body seemed to be under tremendous stress.

    No one would think that this guy is a person who is an official. He calmed down only after he drank the wine.

    All of a sudden, he suddenly got an idea and approached Philip.

    "Brother, I would like to improve your sales. Since you want to make this wine throughout the empire, we would like to assist as I am a lover of your wine. I can help you get the connections needed."

    But Philip just rejected him. This is not the n. At least this phase is too early. There is a reason why only some officials became like this, so they shouldn¡¯t make such a deal at this moment.

    But soon, their n will take form and they would be able to take the next step.

 Chapter 453: Warning

    Sam took his first break after this one-month period. After the next fifteen days, is the day he wanted to make his next big move.

    But now, he wants to meet someone and he used Arman¡¯s help for that.

    He is none other than Arkiv from the Usaine sect. Another yer just like him. There are some meeting spots where the six major powers¡¯ people will gather from time to time and Arman went there to find a way to contact Arkiv.

    For some reason, Sam wanted to pull him to his side. Even he doesn¡¯te at least he should be neutral. That is because he couldn¡¯t be present on all fronts and this Arkiv guy will be a threat in the Nascent realm cultivation.

    He is not afraid of other candidates, but this one.

    That is why he arranged the meeting.

    He wore his disguise and went to Arsin to meet him. He sat in a private room of the restaurant.

    "I didn¡¯t think you would want to meet me and I never would have guessed that you are Arman¡¯s friend. How did you even tolerate that guy?"

    Arkiv started speaking as soon as he entered the room.

    Sam waited until he sat down and said.

    "How strong is your rtionship with Usaine Sect?"

    Arkiv was surprised.

    "Why do you ask?"

    "Just tell me."

    "It¡¯s a sect and I am its disciple. That¡¯s it."

    "Then leave the ce."

    "What do you mean?" This time, the confusion grew even more.

    "In the next few months, Usiane sect will go through a major change, you would be neck-deep in troubles if you stay there. It is better if you leave."

    "Why should I believe you?" Arkiv became serious.

    "You don¡¯t have to. All you can do is ce a bet. If you think I am right, you should leave the sect and if you don¡¯t you can suffer along with it. I just came here to talk to you because of what Sanchez said. It wouldn¡¯t be great if you are dead earlier and since we would be seeing each other a lot. I just wanted to warn you."

    "How do you know all this?"

    Sam didn¡¯t answer that question though, he just looked at him calmly. Of course, he would know. After all, he is the one making those changes.

    "Can¡¯t you even reveal a little?"

    "The details shouldn¡¯t be out. But it is rted to the Parks you guys are so desperate about."

    "What do you mean exactly? Can¡¯t you reveal the details?"

    "Why, so that you can be a good boy and tell your sect all this and start a hunt against me to get the remaining details?" Sam said sarcastically.

    "Why would my sect do that?" Arkiv asked with a frown. For him, if Sam gave them the details, they would reward him, why would they do that?

    "I am not here to change your world view. I don¡¯t care if you believe me or not. I just thought it would be a pity to lose apetitor like you. After all, the people I have seen till now are really not much noteworthy.

    As for more details, the main reason I am not giving them is that I don¡¯t like the Usaine sect. They are about to do something really crazy to get profits from these parks. You would surely understand when the timees. At least, escape at that time."

    With that, Sam made his move and left the ce.

    The reason he did this is to really let Arkiv go, but the main reason is notpletely to have a goodpetitor, of course, Sam is interested in his abilities and he wanted to get him to his side. But when he came here, he changed his mind.

    He felt that this is not the right time to do this. If he directly tried to recruit this guy and this guy got the necessary information and sold him out, then there would be a hell of trouble. The situation will escte even before Sam is ready.

    He wanted to see how Arkiv would act. If he really is just going to be a yer, then its fine, Sam could make a friend, but if he is too attached to the Usaine sect, then he would deal with them.

    After all, a yer would be having too much of a high potential to make him an Archenemy. Sam would be safe, but what about the rest? After this operation, he would have a domain of his own which is toorge and makes it an easy target.

    So, if Arkiv is deeply attached to the sect, he might as well take care of him earlier.

    After Sam left, he went back to the divine dimension to continue his work.

    And after fifteen minutes, the next move should be done.

    This one is a big move in the sense of the unrest it would cause, but if one looks at the actual execution it is actually a small move.

    This one once again involved the teams sent to the other empires and the parks.

    On this day, once again various parks started exploding. Although the damage is not as severe and not all parks are damaged, the situation is not exactly ideal at all.

    But something else happened in Arsin. One of the parks which are closer to the imperial capital not only received any damage but suddenly activated.

    This made the people dumbfounded. As for some other parks which are damaged, they are superficial.

    This made the attention of all the higherups in the major powers and major associations to look their way.

    The Usaine sect suddenly became the target once again. The first explosion is already suspicious enough. But now, they have to deal with this situation once again.

    But this time, it is not as easy of brushing off. Because most of the people including the supervisors of the park involved in the construction are from the Usaine sect itself. They joined the associations to get some more power and the association couldn¡¯t just stop by saying they wouldn¡¯t ept them.

    Because the Usaine sect is one of thergest suppliers of the metals to them and they have some considerable heritage in these fields.

    So, they are worried that Usaine sect will announce its own associations. That is why they are letting these people enter and keep them under their watch.

    Even then, these people will mostly be appointed to the ces under Usaine sect and the same thing repeated with the allotment of the artisans, formation masters, and inscription masters.

    Once again, the meeting happened.

    "We need a proper exnation of why the parks exploded again." This time, the one who spoke is the head of the thunder god temple. They still didn¡¯t speak much about the Usaine sect¡¯s activated park.

    "It is same as before, the energy collision happened because of the improper handling." The formation head said in a low voice.

    "I don¡¯t care about the cause, but I want the reason why same mistake happened once again. Are you ying with us or is this a ploy to hinder our progress with hidden motives?"

    As he spoke, he looked at the Usaine sect head.

    Thetter looked at him with a cold gaze and replied.

    "You should be responsible for what you say. What are you implying by that?"

    The thunder god temple head looked at him and said.

    "What are you so worked up about. I didn¡¯t say your name, did I? It¡¯s almost like you are too eager to defend yourself."

    His voice was calm and cold at the same time.

    The Usaine sect head realized what happened. The remaining also looked at him with a strange gaze. The thunder god temple head then looked at the three association heads and said.

    "I don¡¯t want to ask you once again. I will give you guys fifteen days and I want the formations to be activated by that time. The Usaine sect¡¯s formation is activated now and I don¡¯t want to make any assumptions yet.

    By the fifteen days, if you couldn¡¯t do it, then don¡¯t me us for assuming that the three associations and the Usaine sect are in cahoots with each other and are trying to gain our resources.

    It has been almost a year and we have yet to see any substantial results from this project. Since the first one appeared, then there should be the next ones that came. If you don¡¯t do this, you are answerable to all four major powers."

    He said all of this to the three association heads.

    Old three¡¯s face turned ck and he pointed his finger at him and yelled.

    "Old Thunder, you are being preposterous. What is with that tone and usations? Do you think you can talk to me like that? I am an association head; do you hear me?"

    Old Thunder suddenly increased his aura and an electric arc crackled around him.

    "Old Three, seems like you forgot who you are talking to. Don¡¯t you remember the ass-kicking you received the previous time you pointed your finger at me?"

    Old Three suddenly turned silent and he started sweating.

    Old thunder continued.

    "I am telling you guys to deal with this. If I see any more suspicious things, then it wouldn¡¯t be a meeting in a room."

    With that, he left the ce.

 Chapter 454: Pressure

    Old Thunder¡¯s warning rang some bells in the minds of the three association heads. Particrly after he mentioned the incident of him beating up Old Three.

    In fact, that was not after they reached Consummate realm cultivation, rather when they are still transcendent stage cultivators.

    The current family heads are all younger than the three association heads. But there is not a difference of a generation. If one has to put it in words, it¡¯s almost like half a generation.

    But just like everyone else, these old men were caught by the family heads after they stagnated in their cultivation. But they still remembered the days when Old Thunder was still reigning supreme. Only inferior to the monstrous genius in the Beast faction.

    After so many years, they really did forget the bitter days of the past and got drunk with their authority.

    Now with the warning, they were forced toe back to their senses.

    They also looked at the Usaine sect head, who is the only one left besides the three of them.

    "Don¡¯t tell me you are behind all this." Old three asked furiously. He didn¡¯t want to do this, but he was forced to. After all, one time is a coincidence, but two times, it definitely is not. Even he has some suspicions on this.

    "Old Three, don¡¯t you dare use me. Do you think I would stoop so low for some profits?"

    Old three snorted at this reply, they themselves knew how low they would stoop to get what they want. There is no point in acting all and mighty in front of them.

    He thought for a moment and said.

    "I gave you face and let your people enter the association without any bias, but if you really don¡¯t appreciate this and make things difficult for us, there is no way we would tolerate this. You better spill the beans about the activation method of the park."

    The Usaine Sect head felt like pping the old guy.

    "What do you mean by that? Do you think that I would hide something like the activation method.? If I knew anything of it, I would have already given it out."

    The three association heads snickered at this. No one believed him at all.

    "Then why did the formation activate? Just tell us what you want. IF it is reasonable, we could consider this as a reward for the achievement of the activation method."

    One of them said coldly. Usaine sect head was dumbfounded.

    "I really don¡¯t know any method. We don¡¯t even know how the park is activated. It might be an ident."

    The inscription association head had enough of it and said.

    "Do you think everyone is an idiot? Don¡¯t be too greedy and spill out. We already said we could give you if the cost is reasonable. Can you just jump into negotiations?"

    Clearly, he thought that this guy is trying to y hard to get and obtain more resources, simply put he was being greedy. At least, in their opinions.

    "I really don¡¯t know."

    "Then how can you exin how that formation was activated."

    "Maybe it is an ident?"

    But he felt stupid after saying that. After all, such aplexwork of formations and if all he thought was that it is only took an ident to activate, then the associations might as well disband.

    All of a sudden, there is a silence in the air and the sect head finally said.

    "Why are you guys only suspecting me? The Herb garden didn¡¯t have any damages. Why can¡¯t you suspect them?"

    "Suspect them for what? For not even trying to activate the formations. The rest of the major powers including you couldn¡¯t wait to activate the formations because you guys have some ns behind that.

    You guys want to get some credit from this and gain some benefits for your own. But the Herb garden is different. They don¡¯t have any form of benefits for themselves in getting this and they don¡¯t even want to suffer any losses. In fact, they are trying to re-establish the pharmaceutical association.

    Do you think they will be stupid enough to mess with you?"

    "I think, maybe they are trying to put me and you in this situation, so they can weaken the parties and try to establishter. So that they wouldn¡¯t have too much pressure from others." Usaine sect head spected.

    But the three heads didn¡¯t want to hear it.

    "Don¡¯t go spraying mud at others. Do you think Garden head is as scheming as you?"

    "Then it could even be Sam. It must be him. He might be trying to destroy our alliance by ying these tricks."

    The sect head is trying his best to get himself out of this situation and he didn¡¯t hesitate to specte no matter how far-fetched things sounded.

    This time, though he was spot on, there is no way the heads would believe this.

    They even came to the conclusion that this guy is just trying to avoid the me and pointing fingers at others.

    "You even have the gall to say that Sam did it? That guy might have some tricks, but at most he can defend himself. He couldn¡¯te out of that city at this moment. Own up to your own actions. We are giving you a week¡¯s time and you are going to give out that information."

    With that, the three heads left the ce and that guy doesn¡¯t know what to do and how to react. He went back gloomily and by that time all the supervisors are in the imperial capital and all of them are surprisingly gathered in a tavern whose wine recently got popr.

    They wanted to taste some of this famous wine before getting ready for the serious stuff.

    Sirona and Philip are serving the wine as they are thinking about what Sam did to cause this muchmotion.

    For all, they knew they only activated a single park which is already quite absurd. After all, why would he give such a gift to these people? So, they activated the formation and arrived at the imperial capital.

    To their surprise, in a few days, the supervisors from all over the empire started moving and came to this city.

    And of course, the wine is the talk of the town as soon as they came and these people definitely wouldn¡¯t miss this and this made the job easy for them.

    They got some bits and pieces of news from their discussions.

    They were surprised, they didn¡¯t expect that their small action has done this much.

    After the sect head came back to his sect, he didn¡¯t stay there and immediately came to Arsin.

    He wants to talk to the supervisors and that is why they are gathered here. He even sent the Transcendent level beasts to fetch them from the outermost regions.

    He is extremely adamant about getting to the bottom of this.

    Particrly, the supervisor of the park that was activated.

    The meeting was arranged and the Sect head is in a gloomy mood.

    "How many of you are from Usaine sect previously?"

    He asked coldly and more than half of them raised their hands.

    "You guys get out and wait in the next room." As he spoke he saw that the guy who is the supervisor of the activated park is also in the group.

    After they left, he said.

    "I don¡¯t want any information from you guys, although the suspicion is low, I am still going to keep an eye on you. If any of you fuckers turned out to be behind the activation and trying to bring trouble to us, you better pray that the associations woulde and save you from me."

    With that single warning, he left the ce and went to the next room. The supervisor of the activated park sat in the first row and looked at the sect head respectively.

    "Are you really not involved in this? Do you really not know how the formation is activated?"

    Sect head asked in a low voice.

    "I really don¡¯t know sir."

    "Then how do you think that formation is activated."

    ...

    The meeting went on and by the time it ended, he didn¡¯t get any information or any clues. From the looks of it, all of it is really an ident.

    All the supervisors in the room are kneeling on the ground, panting hard for breath, their expressions are like they just let go of some mountains on their shoulders.

    At this moment, while the Sect head is thinking about how to deal with the situation, someone came running towards him and reported. He is the emperor of Arsin.

    "Sir, we have trouble. I received a message that the Associations are calling the employees back, particrly the people who belonged to Usaine sect. They are saying that they are reassigning their jobs and changing up the position."

    The sect head was gloomy. If this happened any other time, he would be happy because his sect members would have covered arger area. But now, he is not feeling good at all. Because he will lose control over them if they were gone at this moment.

    The association is trying to regte these people, they seemed to have had enough already, they decided to increase the pressure on Usaine sect.

 Chapter 455: Changing Situation

    As the days passed, the deadline given by the Thunder god temple was over. But the Usaine sect head didn¡¯t find a single clue on the activation method.

    Thus, the event of the activation of a park which has to be a happy one has turned into enmity between the major powers and the major associations.

    The same type of meeting was held in the central continent one more time and even this time, the head of the thunder god temple, Old thunder didn¡¯t engage with the Usaine sect head. Rather, he looked at the three association heads and started speaking.

    "The deadline is over and the formations are not ready yet. I either need a proper exnation which might barely convince me or all the money I invested along with interest and more aspensation for wasting my time.

    I don¡¯t what option but you have five minutes to choose."

    "I have the same conditions as him."

    "Me too."

    "Same for me as well."

    The heads of the remaining three major powers also said after the Old thunder is finished.

    The association heads did expect that from the two other sects, but they didn¡¯t expect this from the Herb Garden. Old three is a bit pissed off and said.

    "Garden Head, you are notpletely out of suspicion. It is better if you give us an exnation before you ask forpensation."

    The Garden head had a faint smile as he said.

    "It¡¯s simple. I did ask them to not experiment in my empires. That is because I am not confident in their abilities and if the property was indeed damaged, I don¡¯t want to be the one to bear the expenses.

    I have already invested a lot in this project and we are also trying to re-establish the Pharmaceutical association and even the former members of the association who barely survived are also in our ce and we are trying our best to track down the rest of the members who are capable of administrating.

    We have to invest a lot to recover the buildings, resources, fields, and many others on the ind of the association. I didn¡¯t ask you guys who are initially part of the four associations to contribute and I am doing my part to revive the pharmaceutical association so that we can produce new healers continuously.

    But I don¡¯t think it is appropriate for you guys to point fingers at me."

    His words made their faces go dark.

    Old thunder snorted and said to Old three.

    "I don¡¯t have all day. "

    Old three couldn¡¯t take it and said to Usaine sect head and yelled.

    "You better tell the technique now or it will be toote. You have dragged this for more than enough days already."

    "I said that I don¡¯t know anything about it. Whether you believe it or not, I have nothing to exin or give to you.

    All I can say is that you believe it as an ident. Or else, I do have spection and that is the three associations have gotten greedy just Old one and wants to take over the world. That is why you guys are making this so as to sow discord between the major powers."

    This caused the Old thunder and others to frown. Now that they thought about this, they really did find this possibility feasible. And it is more feasible for them to do this than the Usaine sect deceiving all the other major powers and associations.

    "You are spouting bullshit." Old four yelled at the top of his lungs.

    "Then what is it that you are doing. It is so suspicious that you are trying so hard to me us and absolve yourselves."

    Both of them started arguing and it is getting intense.

    Old thunder¡¯s frown became deeper and deeper. He doesn¡¯t want to deal with this nonsense and said.

    "Shut up both of you. I don¡¯t care who is behind the conspiracy. But I want my money back. Or else, you will see what happens."

    "Do whatever the fuck you want. Who are you threatening?" Old three blurted in anger and the rest of them looked at him in surprise.

    Old thunder¡¯s face is extremely gloomy. He stood up from his chair and said.

    "Sai took the correct decision. I shouldn¡¯t have involved. Three Old men, who lived for more than two centuries couldn¡¯t even crack the method of a kid and made us lose so much money and resources.

    Not only does it show hispetence, but your ipetence is also as clear as a day. I would do what I want since you so benevolently gave permission."

    With that, he left.

    "Old Thunder." Old three called for him, but he left the ce without any reaction. He regretted it immediately. They all knew that Old thunder has some kind of split personality and he is the worst person to piss off.

    At times, he would be like the amiable person who is very easy to get along with and that is the person who Sam met, but when he is angry if anyone fires back at him, particrly when he is in the right, then he would be a pain in the ass. And the pain couldn¡¯t be measured with anything.

    It is almost like shoving a volcano up their ass. It will continue on burning and they still have to worry about it exploding and causing devasting damage that would tear open their asses.

    They are worried something would happen to their subordinate towers in the empires and wanted to contact them. They left the meeting and all the major powers left on a sour note. Only the beast faction is exempt from this scuffle.

    For the next two days, the situation between the major powers is still extremely tense. The first thing Old Thunder did after he returned is to cut the inter-continentalmunication between the associations¡¯ headquarters and the towers of the empires under the thunder god temple¡¯s control.

    He didn¡¯t give any announcements and didn¡¯t respond to the requests of the Old three and the rest. He is stubborn. Not only that, he visited the three towers in the thunder god temple¡¯s territory and gave them a stern warning.

    "From now on, you are no longer part of the associations, your professions are still valid and you will still take the same duties you did previously. But you have to cut the ties with the associations from now on and you are no longer answerable to them.

    You guys are part of the thunder god temple and only serve under me."

    His voice didn¡¯t give any room for argument and he is extremely stern.

    They understood that whether they like it or not, they are going to be forced to ept this decision. So, they could only swallow this and ept the situation. Not only did Old thunder make this happen, he even made them send a notice to the three associations that they are cutting ties with them.

    The news spread all over the major powers like a wildfire.

    They clearly understood that he is not kidding around.

    When Sam got this news, he was also dumbfounded. He never expected that three major associations are the first ones to be antagonized, he wanted to make the Usaine sect crumble first. But it seemed that the association heads are stupid enough to make themselves the enemies of the thunder god temple.

    This is not something he expected, but he is not exactly worried. After all, everyone is his enemy since the time they stole his blueprints. There is no need for him to think too much on which order they are destroyed.

    Seeing this action, the associations are also infuriated, but they don¡¯t know how to react, the three of them three different opinions. One of them wants to deal with this aggression and just attack. One of them wants to apologize and make peace and thest one wants to just leave the situation be and see how it would proceed.

    While they are like this, he received another news and that is from Arsin. Philip and Sirona got a piece of news that the Usaine sect also took some drastic measures.

    They also made their towers cut ties with the associations and they even wanted to cancel the contracts with the associations regarding the materials and such. They are even bold enough to make this announcement in their empires too and proimed that all the employees of the towers couldn¡¯t go back to the association until the association sends back their artisans who are reassigned to various ces.

    This time, the associations really became angry.

    They knew that the sect head is trying to make the pressure increase on the associations.

    They suddenly felt that situation is getting out of hand and Old three decided to do something.

    He along with the other two heads visited the remaining major powers including the thunder god temple and met with the heads except for the Usaine sect head and the details of the meetings are not revealed.

    But after that, the news came out that they also severed all the ties with the Usaine sect and will make sure that they would take back everything they gave them.

    But the conditions are severe because the associations are the ones who made trained their people and they would not be sent back to the Usaine sect again.

    If they want to retrieve them, they have to exchange the method of activating the parks and they also have to send their employees back otherwise they would dere war.

    This situation stunned the Usaine sect head and Sam who learned the news was happy, this is the situation he wanted to see.

    He wanted to have the Usaine sect under pressure, so they would loosen the control over the empires and he can use this chance to do his thing. He would see how the Usaine sect would react if most of their members in the empires backstabs them that too in their most perilous situation.

 Chapter 456: Unrest in Adrian

    On the day the Thunder God temple¡¯s deadline is over, Sam also came back. He is ready with his blueprints and came out to check the situation.

    At first, he felt that he has to change his ns as association heads are stupid enough to make themselves the targets, butter the Usaine sect still managed to be the target of animosity.

    In fact, he achieved the result faster than he thought he would get. He felt like he should do some more and push them some more to make this happen.

    But the Sect head seemed to be a numbskull who worsened the situation himself.

    At this moment, he is deciding on what to manufacture.

    He has two sets of blueprints at hand, one of them is the new type of ship and the other is the second puppet which has functions to support the soldiers in the water.

    But he couldn¡¯t make them fast enough to wage a war and equip all the troops. After some thought and looking at the map of the area between the two empires he felt that it is not exactly necessary for him to do this.

    The sea area between the two empires is actually very small and the war wouldn¡¯t be too long. The war might intense at that point but it wouldn¡¯t be too long for sure. So, it would still be okay if the ships and troops aren¡¯t numerous. Anyway, if their main source of transportation is really the ships, then they would have to worry about this situation.

    But it is not. He can send the troops from the space gate slowly.

    After that, he decided to give the puppet blueprints to the factory and let them deal with that. He would do the spirit enchantment after they are manufacture. Anyway, it is not like, he would be giving these puppets to every one of the troops. Only a select few elites would be going to get them.

    As for the rest, they would have to earn this.

    At this moment, even the armies of the Western continent under Arc¡¯smand are undergoing training and preparations to attack. He also has a naval troop under him.

    Sam¡¯s troops will also merge with them and in fact, will be on the front line of the war. But nobody would know about it.

    Sam decided to go back into the divine dimension and start making the ship. But before he could do so, he has another small matter to deal with. It is another patent.

    He got a message that a new patent was pending because they don¡¯t know how to deal with this.

    Sam felt confused and intrigued at the same time and he went to his office to deal with it.

    He was surprised by the newly made cement. Even though it has not other simrities with cement other than the binding strength, he decided to call it like that.

    He met with the student who made this to his office and spoke to him.

    "The prize money for the cement is ten million spirit stones and ten thousand School credits. You will be awarded that along with your patent document. But the thing is, do you want to make a deal with the school and the organization?"

    The student nodded his head without saying anything. His eyes are dazzling at this moment. He is star-struck.

    "Then, we have some options. Do you just want to sell the patent or do you want a royalty charge?"

    The young man didn¡¯t reply, Sam looked at him and shook his head.

    "I have a better option for you. We will not care about selling the payment. With this cement, a lot of effort would be reduced in the construction process. So, the cost is also reduced. Therefore, I would give you a different royalty contract.

    As long as there is a construction project and this cement is used to do the work, then I would give you two percent of the construction project budget. Not only that, the Patent can be inherited with your direct blood descendants or any other sessor you want to pass it on for the next generations. But thetter one needs your will and a witness.

    Your sessor will also get the money after you."

    He didn¡¯t even think about it and the young man nodded straight away.

    Sam drafted the Patent and signed it. He took the spiritual imprint and the spiritual energy signature from the young man and sent him back with the rewards.

    The news spread and caused another uproar in the school.

    But Sam didn¡¯t bother with this. He went back to the divine dimension and after giving this new blueprint to the factory. Half of the production of factories is halted. Anyway, at this moment, the most important thing is to prepare for the war. There is no need for them to worry about profits and such. Anyway, the revenue wouldn¡¯t take too big of a hit at this moment.

    The people who are skilled in thethe and other machines are excited about the new project. Although it is called a puppet, the parts that are being manufactured for this didn¡¯t make the people realize it as a puppet.

    They are marveled by the new design and new dimensions of the objects they are manufacturing. The workers also worked around the clock when they heard that it is something important for the organization.

    After a week, they finally stopped manufacturing. But still, the parts manufactured are more than enough for them to make more than two hundred puppets.

    When Sam came out, he only managed to make two ships and he worked for seventy days in the divine dimension to do it. And most of the time, he didn¡¯t even sleep or rest. He made to with the wine given to him by the monkey king.

    But even with that high-tension work, he was only able to build two of them. He stayed one more day inside and went on to assemble the puppets that are delivered to him. He also has to deal with the inscription and the spiritual enchantment of the puppets at the same time.

    After that, the next week would be the new training for the two hundred elites who will be on the water in the war.

    He took them to ake and started the training, he trained them himself and all of them are water elemental users, either mages or warrior-mages.

    When the two hundred of them are done with the practice day in and day out, it is already halfway through the eighth month of the year, Sam decided to make his next move.

    While the troops gathered at the northeastern sea of the western continent to start their journey towards the Adrian in Arc¡¯s lead, the troops of Sam and some other elites are entering the empire through the Space gate and slowly spreading over. By the end of the ninth month, Sam figured that he would take over the empire. Only two weeks will be needed for this conquest.

    But before that, he has to do something else and that is to divert the Thunder god temple from this. He has to distract them and what better way than making them send their troops towards the Usaine sect.

    On that week, in the wine tavern of Arsin, only Philip is doing the service while Sirona disappeared.

    And in the past week, three more parks are activated and this caused the rest of the major powers and the associations to be extremely hostile. All the major powers sent notices to the Usaine sect that they would wage a war if they don¡¯t get the method in two days.

    Usaine sect head is pissing in his pants. He tried so hard to not turn the remaining major powers to turnpletely hostile towards him and make them stay neutral towards the conflict between associations and them.

    Now they have to take the full heat from them. This is the worst-case scenario.

    The major powers are showing arge movement and the central continent hunting areas where the people from the major powers train turned into a hunt for the Usaine sect people.

    The disciples and even the elders are being hunted and ughtered.

    The other major powers arepletely rejecting the meeting from Usaine sect head and they could do nothing but retaliate.

    They started making moves against the people and the central continent training areas arepletely messy.

    The major powers are all focusing on damaging the Usaine sect.

    And at this moment, the war horns are blown in the western continent. Arc stood on his vulture as he led the ships filled with troops from the western continent. The two ships which Sam built are in the lead of the fleet.

    The two ships are inspired by the old-time pirate warships with cannons on the side. But the whole ship is made of metal and the sail is not the main source of movement. There is a room at the bottom of the ship where these people took turns riding the ship.

    At the same time the journey started, the movements in the Adrian empire also started.

    The Mercenary teams made their move and they didn¡¯t just go and start a war. Rather, they started challenging the city guards and the troops of city lords. Whether they are dukes or marquises. Every major city is having a hard time and particrly the Dukedom capitals.

    Because the mercenary teams challenged the nascent stage cultivators of the Dukedom.

    The emperor couldn¡¯t do anything directly as he doesn¡¯t know the ploy behind this and only thought they are challenging them normally.

 Chapter 457: Flat Fish

    Adrian is in silent chaos. Because the citizens are not at all involved in this. But the authorities of Adrian are having hard times dealing with the mercenaries.

    They are challenging every person under the imperial authority to duels and every duel is ending up with some serious loss for the authorities. All the mercenaries didn¡¯t have certain victories, but they did gain more wins than losses.

    The emperor is having a hard time keeping calm and sent some messages to them. It is an invitation to join troops and get some special treatment. That is what the emperor thought about this.

    He thought these people are trying to get his attention.

    But he received no response and he got some unexpected news. A fleet of ships with the gs of the western continent ising towards them and they were spotted by some patrol ships.

    The sea between the two empires so small that they covered the distance in two days and in a day, they will reach the coast.

    The emperor freaked out and since Adrian is a lot smaller than the western continent, on a Transcendent level beast and at full speed he was able to reach the coast by the next day night and he saw Arc and the troops still a bit away from the coast waiting there.

    The troops of the Adrian empire are all gathering. But the superiors of the troops are not in the best of conditions.

    They are just mauled by the mercenaries and now they barely recovered before preparing for the war.

    With no announcement whatsoever, they knew that is a war. After all, would Arce with these many ships just to visit and sightsee?

    "Arc what do you mean by this?"

    "Don¡¯t tell me, you don¡¯t understand this. This is an invasion." Arc replied sarcastically.

    "That is what I am asking. Why are you invading? There is no bad blood between us. We barely have any form of connection between the two empires."

    "Does an emperor need a reason to invade? It is for the conquest. Nothing more, nothing less. Anyway, I believe I am a better ruler. So, I will take thisnd as this is what I deserve."

    "Since, when did you be this cocky. I don¡¯t remember being like this in the thunder god temple?"

    Arc didn¡¯t reply to this and asked.

    "You want to jump right into it or do you want to have some challenges? I will leave that up to you."

    The emperor of Adrian looked at him with resentment. He understood that war is inevitable, there is no way they could go back now.

    So, he looked at the tworge warships in the lead and sent two warships of a simr size.

    The naval troops of Arc aren¡¯t too many. That is something that puzzled him. Where did he even get that confidence without sufficient troops?

    But he didn¡¯t care about that. The tworge metallic warships are something that he didn¡¯t see before. So, he decided to test the waters and sent the same sized ships with troops.

    There are not many people on the decks of the warships. Those who are present are few and they upied some entry points of the deck.

    The warships Sam made have two floors below the deck. Thest one has the core and movement mechanism responsible for the motion of the ship and the floor above that has cannons all over. The deck is rtively empty and only has few cannons.

    The ships have two cannons each on the bow side and two cannons on the stern side and six cannons on the starboard and six on the port side.

    When the tworge ships entered the range of the cannons, the cannons on the bow side are aimed at them and they fired.

    The impact shells moved through the air andnded on the ships before sting on the deck. The ships are made of extremely high-level. Which made it hard for it topletely break it. But there are some cracks on it.

    The damage didn¡¯t end there though. A purple mist came from the impact shell and it spread all over the deck around the st region due to the energy st.

    This made the purple mist gather and when it touched the crew, they felt some burning pain on their skin. Then only they noticed that the purple mist is slowly depositing in the form of some purple liquid on the deck and the ce is starting to corrode a little bit.

    It is still not enough to cause structural damage yet. It is only some surface damage. But this made the warning bells go on in their minds.

    "Defend against the shells, don¡¯t let them reach the ships."

    Themander of the ships yelled at his troops and everyone got ready with long-range attacks.

    There are two teams of archers on both ships.

    Each team has five archers. They started attacking in the same way. But these attacks are not as straight forward as the impact crystals. They don¡¯t have arge effect on the deck. Rather they are aimed at the people who are on the deck.

    But more than half of the attacks are neutralized and the remaining half lost most of their attacking power when they reached the ships. Because of the formations.

    These formation nodes have actually formed the railing of the ship.

    It is a bit stic and versatile. It wouldn¡¯tpletely block the attacks. Rather it wears down the energy of the attacks.

    This way, it wouldn¡¯t absorb the attack by too much and the damage to the formation would also be minimum. But there are its drawbacks and that is if the attack is too much, no matter how much the formation erodes it, it will still reach the deck.

    After the first failed attack, the archers didn¡¯t get another chance to make another move. Because they are keen on defending the ship from the impact shells.

    They don¡¯t know what material it was made of. But they only wanted to destroy it in the air.

    But what they didn¡¯t know is that the purple mist is seeping into the sea and if the st is too close to the ship. It is still condensing on it.

    At this moment, themander once again yelled.

    "Widen the distance and go to their sides, keep both of them in the middle."

    The ships started moving and when they arrived on both sides, they realized they made the biggest mistake. The six side cannons made them realize they made a bad move. Themander didn¡¯t see the cannons as they are hidden from the front view.

    The ships started shooting the cannons without any reservation. But this time, the two ships of Adrian didn¡¯t hold back andpletely activated the formations. They don¡¯t want to back down because they are confident in their abilities to attack the ship.

    The troops from the two ships jumped into the water and some of them started running on it. One could see the water is trying to support their feet instead of dispersing. This is the technique of the water elemental warrior mages.

    Apart from that, the water elemental mages are also moving on the water and one could see that some fish types of beasts are supporting them. They are trying to get near the warships, while the archer teams are trying their best to cover them.

    But they soon realized that the purple mist that is seeping into the sea is affecting the water type beasts. They halted for a few seconds, but this is enough for the impact of crystal shells to wreak havoc.

    The formation copsed after around ten shots and the deck waspletely cracked and started corroding.

    But suddenly the cannons stopped shooting and they saw the room which has stairs leading to the lower floors was opened on the warships and the people areing out. Most of them are Great real cultivators same as the people they sent out.

    Themander saw the peopleing and squinted his eyes. The opponents that came out are not many.

    Only ten of them came out from each ship. Six of them are Great realm cultivators and four of them are Grand realm cultivators.

    Themander of the ships of Adrian is actually nascent and the soldiers who are trying to reach the warships are mostly the Great realm and Grand realm cultivators.

    The Commander felt that something is not right with the number of peopleing. But before he could think of it. He saw the twenty of them jumping down and just before they reached the water they took something from their spatial storage.

    The water sshed and after it was cleared, they noticed that the twenty of them are standing on some metallic object which is oddly shaped like tfish.

    Not only that, but they also noticed that the soldiers are wearing some sort of helmets.

    Before they could realize what is happening, the twenty of them moved in their respective directions. The metallic tfishes started moving and they surfed towards their opponents.

 Chapter 458: Naval war

    The twenty soldiers moved on the tfish like metallic objects. This is the new puppet Sam made. Although the from the looks it resembled a tfish. It is far from it. The whole body is tapered and at the front, it is indeed simr to a tfish, but the rear of the puppet is a bit bulky.

    The water seemed to be forming a jet as it made the puppet move on the surface of the water.

    Seeing this, a water mage who is traveling on a beast cast a spell and the surrounding water turned chaotic all of a sudden.

    But the soldier didn¡¯t get flustered, with just a thought, the puppet shot into the air with a water jeting from below and after reaching a certain height, the water jet stopped and hended on a normal surface of the water.

    For some time, they kept on dodging the attacks. Because they wanted to get used to this. The helmets they are wearing has a ss cover to protect their eyes.

    As they moved all over the ce with incredible speed, the opponents halted their advance and started battling. Now, the water elemental warriors also started taking aid of water type beasts and are trying their best to take these twenty down.

    The Great realm cultivators are engaged with their counterparts, while the Grand realm cultivators did the same.

    The Adrian troops clearly outnumbered them, but the battle is still in a deadlock even before they attacked.

    All of a sudden, a Grand realm cultivator on the tfish puppet leaped into the air with the water jet and started diverting the energy of the energy cells ced in the puppet towards the edge of the puppet, and all of a sudden, arge metallic pike was shot out of the puppet towards the opponent.

    The opponent dodged this, but the pike impaled itself into the beast he was riding on. A Shark type beast and the pike didn¡¯t stop there, it went through the shark¡¯s body and came out from the other side and went deeper into the sea.

    The cultivator who was just standing on the beast is still in the air as he leaped too high and he was thinking ofnding with the water as a cushion. But he noticed that the attacker who shot the pike is not done yet.

    A huge water bullet shot towards them and his whole body lost bnce and was about to copse, but this is not over yet, the attacker shot another pike and it went through the opponent¡¯s heart and fell into the sea.

    The attacker on the puppet closed his eyes andnded on the sea as the people are watching what he is doing, the saw the pikes which traveled through the sea after impaling their targets returned as they utilized the surrounding spiritual energy from the water and reattached to the puppet. Then only they saw that the pikes didn¡¯te from inside of the puppet¡¯s body but from the bottom of it.

    They don¡¯t how it was possible. But they couldn¡¯t care less about that.

    Because the person once again went into action.

    And soon the tfish puppet troops started a massacre.

    The opponents are dying one by one.

    The people on the two ships wanted to provide cover, but at this moment, the cannons once againunched. But this time, they do not impact crystal shells, rather they are some type of ming grenades, but of extremelyrge size.

    As soon as theynded on the ship, they started an extremelyrge me and the me appeared to be green.

    This is one of the new tricks of the person from the Pharmacy department¡¯s poison master. A mmable poison which created some poison mes.

    These mes burned the flesh and wood as a normal me would, but the effects will bepletely different than normal. The wood wouldn¡¯t be burnt step by step, it would also rot at the same time.

    The effect on the flesh is also the same. The me wouldn¡¯t be able to burn a personpletely in a short time, but it would definitely cause a burn on the injury, and at the same time, but the pain would be too intense.

    Compared to the normal terms, imagine if a normal First-degree burn happened, but the pain is equal to a third-degree pain even in that small space. That was the effect, as the battle is happening the guy who created this is looking at his patent with a grin on his face as he drank wine.

    But the most important effect of this is that the flesh will rot from burn and the rot would spread all over its surroundings, based on the severity of the injury.

    If a small patch of skin on the shin is burned it would be able to rot the whole let in a day. And before that, they have to find the remedy for that to treat it.

    And that would need not only luck but also a lot of expertise in both fire and poison arts.

    And the mes are not easily going off even with so many water element users present.

    The battle has be one-sided and this made the Adrian emperor frown. He doesn¡¯t know what to do. Should he wait or should he make move and start an all-out war? He doesn¡¯t know.

    The troops of the western continent are considerably lesspared to them and this might be a great time for them to deal with this. As for the two ships and the people on it.

    They arepletely gone. Only the Nascent stage cultivator managed to escape the ughter.

    Adrian emperor felt frustrated and decided to wait it out. He would deal with them when all his troops gathered.

    The troops from all over the empire are moving towards this ce for the battle. Since the troops are less in this ce, he doesn¡¯t have to worry at all.

    So, he went back and stayed in a temporary tent. But all the ships are ready to move at any given moment.

    Meanwhile, the tfish puppet troops started collecting the bodies of the beasts and the spatial rings of the soldiers from the bloody water.

    No way they would let these things go. All the beast meat can be given to the organization for rewards and there are some students who could exchange it for credits. Sam with the resources in the spatial ring. They could sell the pills to the pharmacy department if they couldn¡¯t use it.

    One thing they got obsessed with since joining the school is that they would strive for the reward in every situation. They need to get maximum out of it no matter what.

    They shouldn¡¯t lose any form of payment they could get out of such situations.

    After that, both sides didn¡¯t make any moves at all, except for the two war ships. They formed a barricade as the starboard side faced the enemy ships and cannons aimed at them, ready to fire at any moment.

    But they didn¡¯t. It seemed like a defensive measure. They might only make a move when they were attacked.

    The time passed slowly

    At night.

    Even at this moment, the atmosphere ispletely tense.

    At this moment, what the Adrian troops didn¡¯t know is that a door opened at the rear end of the cannon room and the soldier started jumping into the sea. Half of the t Fish Puppet troops entered the sea without a sound.

    But they didn¡¯t float on it. Instead, they took out the new type of breathing device which doesn¡¯t include the mask, and wore, and then they changed their standing posture. Their legs are extended towards the outermost end and closed their eyes as they pressed something.

    All of a sudden, some metallic mps came out of the ends and covered the feet and held it together. Then, the bodies of the cultivators fell forward as their chests and abdomennded on the surface of the puppet and their hands are ced on the front end.

    Then some transformer magic happened as the sections of the puppet moved. Some cable like extension cords full of tension appeared like the hands and legs spread along with them. The tension cords are exactly following the limbs and the hands and legs are held by the mps of the puppet.

    The remaining metallic puppet body was attached to the torso while mped to it.

    There is a circr hole on that body and that is the water jet which allowed them to move upwards or maintain a certain level in the sea.

    Even the mps around the hands and legs have smaller jets that are responsible for the forward motion in the surfing mode of the puppet.

    On the rear side of the hands, the pikes could be see attached to it. The pikes are not exactly long and are only a little longer than the forearm.

    It wouldn¡¯t restrict the elbow movement. Even the mps holding the palms didn¡¯t restrict the movement of fingers. Most of the body is exposed to water. So, it wouldn¡¯t be fit to call it an armor, but it could be called an exoskeleton.

    They dove deeper into the water as they made their move towards the enemy fleet.

 Chapter 459: Naval War II

    The Soldiers dove deeper into the water as they used the water jets on their hands and feet to move. Their speed is extremely high and they reached the Adrian fleet and a few minutes.

    They didn¡¯t waste any time and started taking out some cylindrical metallic objects from their spatial rings.

    There are two sections of the metallic object, divided by a small partition horizontally.

    The soldiers held the upperparts and twisted it. The upper part rotated without any motion in the lower one and after turning it for a few rounds, they stuck the lower part that has some kind of sticky substance on the bottom to the ship.

    They did this rapidly and almost every ship is marked.

    They started moving away as soon as they did this. But they didn¡¯t move too far.

    After a minute or so.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Continuous explosions could be heard even from under water one after another and they waited underwater for the shock wave and the wave of water created by this shockwave to pass.

    The Ships started drowning withrge holes on the bottom of their hulls. After the shock wave has passed, the troops started moving towards the wreckage.

    Those sts are clearly not strong enough to kill all those people. At most, it would only damage the people who are on the lowest levels of the ship and the damage might be just some slight concussion.

    Now, they will still be in a state of shock as they fell into the water and try their best to recover from it.

    This is the best time.

    The hundred tfish puppet soldiers started moving like some predators of water and started attacking the troops that just fell inside. The pikes zoomed past in the water as their pierced their targets.

    Along with this, many water bullets, water spears, and many other water elemental spells ravaged the whole sea.

    By this time, Adrian came running along with his troops to make sense of the situation.

    He didn¡¯t know what was happening when the explosions urred and still took some time toe out of the shock.

    As the massacre of hundreds of people urred, he looked at it in disbelief andmanded.

    "Go and engage immediately, don¡¯t let them get away no matter what."

    The soldiers behind him, who are also in the same level of shock started jumping into the water without waiting any further. But the only ones who jumped are warriors. Because, the mages who don¡¯t have water element, didn¡¯t dare to jump inside the water when facing hundred water elemental mage elites.

    That would be suicide irrespective of the number.

    They stood on the docks as they started shooting with long-range spells. But no matter how much they tried, they couldn¡¯t get a clean hit. The tfish puppet troops are slippery like eels.

    They just started moving towards the Warships after finishing. When the Adrian troops started recovering their bodies, they couldn¡¯t help but feel angry as they saw that not one of them has their spatial ring attached. Not only that, the beast troop which always acted as a support for their naval troops, are also gone, theypletely took everybody of it.

    This made them extremely frustrated. They didn¡¯t expect that something like this would happen. Almost all of their ships are destroyed and only a few of them remained. Who would have thought that the western continent¡¯s army would be able to make such a move?

    Now, Adrian is thinking whether they should continue the war or if they should take this beating and wait for the opportunity. Because, at this moment, there are no significant Naval troops left. He has to wait for the other naval troops which are stationed in the sea border with another empire under the control of the thunder god temple to move here if he wants to battle in water.

    Otherwise, it would be of no use. But still, it would be too much if they lost this situation just like that. The morale of the troops would hit rock bottom. Almost a thousand people are down at this moment. And the only people who are save from the Naval troops are the ones who are not on watch duty.

    Otherwise, the casualty count would be significantly higher.

    After some time, he said. "Send out Green Wind Sea Hawk troops. Don¡¯t engage too directly follow the battle of attrition. Wear them down slowly. At most, they only have a thousand troops on the ship.

    Destroy them as much as possible.

    Don¡¯t let them retreat at all costs, you guys get ready on thend, they would have only this way to save themselves, if they don¡¯t want to die in the sea. Let them swim back to the Western continent in the sea if they dare."

    "Your Majesty. The Sea Hawk troops are minimum in number and they can be used as support in the Naval warfare. If the stress is too high and something happened to them, then the situation wouldn¡¯t be too good for us. We have already incurred severe losses."

    Themander from the side advised.

    "Then what do you want to do? The morale will hit rock bottom at this range. It would still take time for our troops to gather. We have to make some damage, even if we can¡¯t take them down at this moment.

    We shouldn¡¯t let their troops have too high of a morale and once again attack us. It would be too dangerous."

    As soon as he said this, themander didn¡¯t refuse at all and started making his move. Soon, three beasts soared into the sky.

    They are in Sea green color and extremely fast.

    There are soldiers riding these beasts as they made their way towards the Western Continent troops.

    They reached the top of the fleet within no time and started attacking. The formations of the two warships activated and defended the attacks. As for the rest of the troops, they also took out their flying beasts from the Beast pouches and started flying to confront in an aerial battle.

    The beasts started roaring in the sky as the midnight silence was torn apart.

    The wind des of the Seahawks are directed at the troops, while the water attacksing from its mouth are directed at other beasts.

    Arc looked at the surroundings calmly. Even though the Sea Hawk troops are strong, it is not strong to the point they are invincible.

    His troops although didn¡¯t have the same beasts as their mounts, it is still not bad, they have their own suitable beasts as their mounts.

    As the battle continued, Arc noticed that his troops are slowly forced into a corner and being surrounded. The Sea Hawk troops seemed to have more experience in this type of aerial battle.

    The people on the ship who are here fornd battle couldn¡¯t help much. Some archers and mages are doing their best to help, but there are no significant results. The opponents are just too strong and co-ordinated.

    Arc didn¡¯t panic though; the aerial war far wouldn¡¯t be decided just by surrounding them. He looked at themander of the two warships under Sam¡¯s control and gestured to him.

    The Commander smiled and started giving his orders.

    And all of a sudden, the upper decks of the two warships opened up. The floor of the upper deck turned out to be arge metallic door.

    There are eight cannon barrels that started extending upwards. They have stepped cross-section. Some soldiers went into the room and entered the controlling areas of the cannons. There are four of them.

    These cannons are not too long and too big. They are actually quite small whenpared to the normal cannons on the side of the ship and they are even thin.

    When the shooters are already in ce, they activated the cannons and arge metallic pike appeared in the barrel of the cannon. The shooters started injecting the spiritual energy from the neutral energy cells within the cannon body and converted it into their own elemental energy as they fused it into the cannon.

    This is a new type of cannon which doesn¡¯t need fire elemental users to shoot. Because Sam made a trigger mechanism that works on the basic fire type inscription which works as soon as the spiritual energy is injected.

    Actually, there is a catch in this type of trigger because they are not suitable for permanent use. But Sam temporarily implemented this method, but cing the space jade in the gas umting chamber, this small space jade is fitted into the small hollow cylinder and it sends out a small disc which will have this inscription on it after it is activated, it will be useless and be sent back into the space jade and reced by another disc.

    Since there is a lot of inscription masters and students in the school who would practice, he decided to utilize that practice for the benefit of the troops. Which resulted in umting a lot of these.

    After all, these are the basics and it is extremely beneficial for the inscription masters to practice for a solid foundation and the students are doing this without any pressure.

    The metallic pike lit up with runes as the elemental energy condensed on it. Each shooter has different elemental energy and metallic pike is surrounded with such energy.

    As they activated the trigger and shot the pikes, they tore through the air and pierced the seahawks.

 Chapter 460: Adrian is no more

    The four cannon barrels can change the direction to some extent and pike after pike were being shot at the Sea-Hawks.

    There is a reason why they didn¡¯t choose explosives and impact shells to shoot.

    It¡¯s because there is a high chance of getting damaged by them. If the opponents just tried to use some methods that could block their ascent and let them fall down back on the ship, the results would be disastrous.

    Rather, these metallic pikes are a good recement for that.

    They are mainly focused on damaging a single entity rather than an area of effect damage. On top of that, they could also integrate any form of spiritual energy into them and have different properties when they attacked.

    The fire element can cause an explosion of mes, the wind element can form a sharp wind de, and the earth element or metal element can form a crushing brute force. All of them are possible.

    Soon, the tables turned once again and the Seahawk troops returned. It could be said as a tie at this moment and that is because they retreated, if they continued to stay, they would die.

    Six Sea-Hawks fell and the people from the warships didn¡¯t waste any time in catching their bodies.

    There is no way they would let these babies go after killing them.

    The soldiers of the Western continent are looking at them in a speechless manner. This is not something they expected from these elites of the School.

    They are just too greedy for their own good.

    It almost made them look like they are not taking this war seriously.

    The Sea Hawk troops returned and the Adrian emperor¡¯s face turned gloomy. He doesn¡¯t know how to ovee those two ships. They were quite some deterrence, the only way for them to win this battle is to bring this to the ground.

    He decided to wait it out. He wouldn¡¯t make a move until the other party did. After all, Arc is the one who is invading. He could just focus on defending.

    After that, he went to the city lord¡¯s ce and sent a message which passed through all the cities and reached the imperial capital. There someone went to the Thunder god temple, to contact Adrian Prince who is studying in the thunder god temple.

    They want to see if they could use the thunder god temple to pressure the Western continent into backing down.

    But the reply he got is not something he wanted to hear. He learned that the Thunder god temple is extremely busy and there is no one who could help him. He heard that there is some serious unrest going on between the major powers.

    He couldn¡¯t help but curse Arc. That bastard really chose a perfect time to make a move.

    As he received the message, suddenly he heard somemotion on the other side and the connection was cut. He wanted to connect once again, but it is not happening.

    He has a bad feeling about this and tried to contact the nearby remaining cities but the result is still the same.

    He had a bad premonition and the next morning an injured soldier came to them on a beast which is also injured.

    They copsed at the edge of the city and the patrol soldiers tried their best to save him. When he woke up, he immediately said something.

    "Ambush.. Ambush. We are ambushed."

    He started saying frantically.

    "What happened? Calm down and say it clearly." The captain near him frowned and felt like something is wrong. Who would ambush them at this time?

    The soldier drank a potion and calmed down before saying.

    "The troops from the nearby city and are marching towards this ce, but on the way we are ambushed. All the soldiers are dead. I am the only survivor. We are even ambushed at the convergent point where the three city¡¯s troops are supposed to be assembled."

    When the captain heard this, his eyes became wide open and his body started shivering. This is not just some bad news this is the worst possible news.

    "Who did this?" He asked trying to calm himself as much as he can.

    "I don¡¯t know."

    The captain didn¡¯t press further. There is nothing he could do if the soldier really doesn¡¯t know.

    He went out and reported everything to the superior and the news soon reached the Emperor and he frowned.

    This is the worst-case scenario. He didn¡¯t expect that there would be an ambush within his country.

    He immediately stormed out of the tent and yelled at Arc who is on the Warship conversing with themander about the Warship.

    "ARC YOU BASTARD. HOW DARE YOU?"

    His voice sounded all over the city and many low-level cultivators felt their ears piercing and they bled from their ears.

    Arc didn¡¯t care, he knew what is happening within the Adrian better than the Adrian emperor. As for the emperor himself battling, he could give it a try. Even before the tutge he received, he is already considered one of the strongest emperors on the, only when considered with the emperors under the major powers.

    Now, he can definitely say he is the strongest of them all. He could probably kill this guy with a single hit.

    But the war is necessary. This time there are even two reasons to consider that. One of them is, when they are taking over a new territory they should definitely go through the hardships otherwise, the people would take everything for granted and mainly soldiers. They wouldn¡¯t know the value of it.

    Bullying and such will grow by too much.

    The second reason is that they need to maintain a fa?ade to fool the thunder god temple and the other major powers.

    They shouldn¡¯t attract too much attention from them this soon. It would need at least another year before they could deal with the major powers at that time, they would go knocking on their doors even if they don¡¯te for them. At least, that is what Sam said.

    Arc looked at the furious Adrian emperor and flew towards him on his vulture. He looked down on him from above and said.

    "You are an emperor, behave like one."

    Adrian emperor didn¡¯t care what Arc said, he is extremely furious.

    "Why did you have to do this? We have no enmity between us. We don¡¯t even have any connections. Why are you so adamant on this?"

    This is something he didn¡¯t understand. Arc waging a war on Orion is something understandable. After all, they were one empire, to begin with.

    Why would be he wage war on apletely unrted empire? But Arc only gave a calm answer.

    "I already told you, there is no reason. This is my conquest. That¡¯s it."

    "I will see. I want to see how you will seed in this conquest."

    Arc smiled and said.

    "You still don¡¯t understand; do you? Do you think your armies wille and save you? Do you think you have a chance? Do you think only three cities received ambush?"

    With that Arc left.

    He didn¡¯t want to say more.

    The Emperor felt like something is wrong, but he didn¡¯t want to believe anything. He still wanted to be hopeful.

    Anyway, the Naval fleet arrives by that night. So, there is no need for him to worry too much. The two borders are near each other, so there is no need to worry too much, except for the remaining empire attacking them. But he knew they wouldn¡¯t do so.

    Because, his son is the only one who has a higher position in the Thunder god temple, just like Arc¡¯s son. The remaining emperor doesn¡¯t have any offspring who is influential in the thunder god temple. So, he made a gamble when he contacted his son.

    That is, his son is now holding the son of the other emperor hostage. If they really attacked then he would die.

    So, the remaining empire couldn¡¯t fish in these troubled waters. He even wanted to ask for their military support but they didn¡¯t ept.

    As he waited, he saw the glimpse of his naval fleeting, this one is bigger than the one that was destroyed yesterday.

    As soon as the troops entered, they could see the beasts flying over it and recognize they are in extreme battle formation ready tounch attacks and this the battle started.

    The Adrian emperor is still waiting for the troops toe from the rear, but when he finally saw the peopleing inrge groups, his face went pale.

    Because he understood now that Arc led only the troops that would only tackle the naval troops, they are not fornd troops.

    Because he saw the mercenary teams that are extremely popr are alsoing with arge army from the rear. Hisnd army that is on the seashore is now blocked. They could either run into the sea and die in the hands of the troops or die in the hands of these troops.

    "Fight to the death."

    Themander yelled and some soldiers went to fight with them but some kneeled down and surrendered.

    At this moment Arc arrived and gestured for Adrian emperor to a battle.

    The result is obvious but he still went for a battle and on that day, the Adrian emperor was no more.

 Chapter 461: Subduing

    Arc moved to the imperial capital of the Adrian empire to control the situation. He has to handle it and must gain the recognition of the people.

    The first thing he did after entering the imperial capital is to send back the tfish puppet troops and one-third of the Mercenary troops back to the Western continent.

    They will be having new mission soon.

    As for the invasion of the next empire, he would deal with at the start of the next year. It has been nine months in the first year and his n has finally kicked into full motion. He should take a cooldown period.

    After sending the troops back, Arc went on to do some more things Sam asked. The first one is to send the death row inmates to the western continent, they will be forcefully fed the pills of servitude and added to troops.

    Sam didn¡¯t want to do this at first, but he decided he would force them mentally not physically. Since they are going to die anyway, they might as well be of some use and get a new lease on their lives.

    But the exception being, the sexual assaulters, rapists, child traffickers, and such. More than three thousand death row inmates are taken out from the prison. This is something they didn¡¯t expect. But Arc is not extremely surprised. He knew that Adrian has a weird hobby of performing executions on his birthday. So, the local authorities also followed the same.

    They were also sent in the warships, after all, wasting too much of the spirit stones is not a good thing. Anyway, there is still a lot of time.

    Apart from that, even the prisoners of the dungeons in Adrian are also given some chance. The prisoners are ounted for more than ten thousand. And almost all of them epted. Who cares about what they have to do? It would still be better than staying in the prison.

    These thirteen thousand people are almost enough to form three regiments. This is why Sam decided to umte the empires first. Not only would he have a chance to get the resources of these empires, the scarcer of the resources, but the trusted manpower also is not adequate.

    No matter, how many times he posted recruitment notices, he wouldn¡¯t be able to recruit so many people from normal citizens.

    But he is not going to use all of them as troops. Most of them would be appointed in odd jobs. After all, new territory means, more market, more demand, more work which would need more workers.

    Out of these guys, half of them would definitely be factory workers and those will be of the lower cultivation levels with no potential.

    If they do have potential, he would send them to mercenary groups and train there before throwing them in school.

    Anyway, after deciding on these two things, there are some other things he had to do and that is to send the orphans and also some other poor people who are interested in going to the school.

    There is no way Sam would lose such an opportunity.

    By the time, he could go to the upper realms, he might leave these major powers intact withoutpletely eradicating them, but he is definitely going to make some major changes to the whole.

    The first thing is his organization which would span all over the world, would be the only organization without a specific region. Just like the four associations. Then his organization would be the strongest of all.

    Thest thing is that his organization is the most popted of all.

    He has to recruit new people with talents.

    The orphans and the people will easilye to the school, but the professionals are different. He has to establish the park and reduce the influence of the associations before recruiting them just like the Western continent.

    For that, he just left the duty to Arc. Because he is busy. Arc thought of a crude but effective way to spread this.

    He decided to take screens from Sam and disy the school, the parks, the professional working environment, the benefits, the knowledge, and the opportunities. All of them would be yed continuously for the next three months in every city.

    He decided to not even leave a small city. Not even a city like Starwood city would be spared. He doesn¡¯t know if he would be able to reach the corners of the nation, but he has to get this thing going.

    While the situation ispletely stable but active in Adrian, the situation on the Usaine sect¡¯s side is extremely interesting.

    The major powerheads seemed to have gone crazy. They are pushing the Usaine sect head with full force.

    Usaine sect head is actually feeling like dying. He doesn¡¯t know why these things happened, but he is feeling extremely frustrated.

    Even after the war ended in Adrian, this guy doesn¡¯t have any peace at all.

    Arkiv at this time has holed up inside the sect and didn¡¯t dare to go out. He knew that when he goes out, he would definitely die. The disciples of the other major powers are like hungry dogs, he even got the news that there are bounties on the heads of the core disciples of the Usaine sect.

    He remembered Sam¡¯s words that day. The Usaine sect seemed to be in big trouble and no one seemed to be going to cut any ck for the sect.

    He wanted to see how long it will take for the sect head to control this. After all, the sect has more than a thousand years of heritage, it is not easy for it crumbles for some stupid reason. He was wondering if Sam is behind this chaos and if yes, why?

    And that answer is to achieve one of Sam¡¯s purposes and it is happening right at this moment.

    Sam wanted to divert the sect¡¯s attention towards the major powers and the Arsin should be thest thing they should worry about. Even if they did worry about that, they have to do so only about the parks, the rest of the matters should bepletely ignored and their goal was achieved.

    At this moment, no one noticed that half of the empire¡¯s officials are missing. That is mostly because, from the past month they are not in their duties, they went to have that wine in the imperial capital and didn¡¯t return.

    But they are not having wine at this moment, Because, their hands are not in a movable condition as they are locked by some metallic mps locking them to their chairs.

    Their faces looked pale and their eyes arepletely surrounded by dark circles and looked lifeless.

    Their bodies are not looking like a cultivator body, they are like some old men, who are half dead.

    Sirona and Philip are looking at them as all of them sat in the darkroom and every official is asking for the wine.

    This is the effect of one of the nasty pills Old One made.

    This is like some cocaine or heroin. They shouldn¡¯t touch it, because once they took it in, they wouldn¡¯t get enough of it.

    Sam made sure that his wine is strong enough to eliminate any signs of that pill¡¯s properties when mixed with it.

    Simply put, he turned them all into junkies. Now, they couldn¡¯t control their spiritual energy at all, they are almost like some normal citizens with the only difference being their bodies leaking the spiritual energy continuously.

    Sirona looked at them coldly and gestured to Philip. He walked towards them and started asking some questions.

    This is what their n is, they have to interrogate for some days, to get as much information as they can get. The government of the Arsin ispletely infested by these Usaine sect members, they will directly report to the Usaine sect.

    They would definitely have some serious secrets in their minds. But more importantly, Sam also wanted to know what their positions are within the sect and what ces they can ess to.

    He would decide to keep the people who have more ess and their privileges which are suitable for him. As for the rest, they wouldn¡¯t die, but they would wallow in this addiction and would act as reserves for him.

    After getting all the information they needed and recording them into the recording crystals, Philip went back to Sam¡¯s city to hand this over to Sam.

    While Sirona will keep them in this state until Philip returned with the results.

    The next day Philip came back and gave the list to Sirona.

    She looked at it and started taking out pills from the ring Sam gave her.

    She took three types of pills from her storage. One of them is the Pill of servitude.

    The other one is the pill that would cure the addiction permanently and thest one is the one that would cure the addiction temporarily. The first type of pill ismon for everyone and the second type and third type distinguish the people from the needed ones and the reserves.

 Chapter 462: War between top dogs

    After the pills are fed, the officials slowly became sober and their senses came back to them. Then only they understood what happened to their bodies. They started having cold sweats. This is not something they experienced before and they sure as hell don¡¯t want to experience this again.

    Then they remembered to owners of the wine tavern and felt a faint shudder in their hearts. This time, the Usaine sect is screwed. That is the only thought in their mind.

    They understood that from now on their life is sealed. There is nothing they can do about it but go with the flow.

    Slowly, the officials starteding back to the duties and they didn¡¯tin about the wine anymore. In fact, they decided to quit drinking.

    The wine tavern still went on running just like that. And everybody still talked about it just like before.

    By the end of the ninth month, the officials almost caught up with their duties and the empire seemed to have toe to a normal state.

    But everyone in the Usaine sect ispletely frustrated. They are not leaving from the sect and this made them frustrated. Half of them were already outside before and came to the sect running for their lives. They almost gave a kiss to death god many times on their way.

    They don¡¯t know the exact reason for their predicament, but they do know that it has something to do with the Parks and they are cursing the guy who caused it.

    As the situation is already worse as it is, there is something that made the Usaine sect vignt and that is the parks sted one after the other

    All the parks that are activated are around the Imperial capital and all those activated parks are now inplete ruins. Not even a single structure was saved and everything either broke or turned into powder.

    Even the other major powers felt that something definitely wrong with this. Usaine sect head and the three associations lost a significant amount of resources, but at least Usaine sect got some breathing space because of this incident.

    Usaine sect head took the chance and held a meeting with the rest of them except for the three associations.

    "I don¡¯t why you are so sure that I have the method. But as you have seen all the parks that are activated are exploded by now.

    You guys, really think that I would explode the parks than sharing the method with you? Particrly, when all of you are breathing down my necks, do you think I would just let the sect go to this stage, just for the parks? Don¡¯t you think that is inconceivable?"

    The Usaine sect head didn¡¯t stop there and started overwhelming the six major powers with all the questions and finally, he managed to convince them that it is not his greed and the parks are indeed a conspiracy.

    "I will let bygones be bygones. From now on, we have no enmity between us."

    He finally made this statement with a lot of reluctance in his heart.

    I mean, who would take this lying down?

    They just ganged up on him without giving him a chance and even nonsensically believing in their own spection.

    But he has to let go because he doesn¡¯t have the strength to battle all six of them.

    All the major power heads are still a bit suspicious. Looking at this, the Usaine sect head became extremely angry and said.

    "I would take the Judgement test." He said this with gritted teeth. The other heads are stunned, they didn¡¯t expect that he would take this decision. The test which already happened once and the formation is still intact in their meeting ce, so it is not too bothersome to take the test.

    The thing is, they are contemting if they should let him take the test or not. Because, they knew that if he really took the test, then there is no turning back.

    He would definitely take revenge in one way or another.

    "No need." Old thunder said at this moment. He could see that Usaine sect head is truly pissed at this moment.

    The rest of them also started rejecting him. the sect head stood up and said before leaving.

    "I am waging a war on the Three associations; I hope you wouldn¡¯t interfere. Then, we will really have all of the bygones be bygones"

    Nobody said anything. It is understandable that the Usaine sect head is pissed off at the current situation.

    The three associationspletely pushed the Usaine sect into the firing range of the major powers and they took the back seat when the major powers are dealing with the disciples and the elders who are outside the sect.

    There is no way the Usaine sect head will let go.

    Anyway, they do believed that if they did interfere, a world war would be triggered. Because, even though they are on the same page in the current situation, once the war began, they would remember they are pathetic humans even with that high cultivation, their greed and lust towards their own goals will act up and the results would be disastrous.

    Anyway, they wouldn¡¯t be at aplete loss, even one of them ispletely eradicated, the remaining party would establish the new associations.

    There is no need for them to worry at the moment. All they have to do is keep the associations they have for themselves.

    Soon, the news about the Usaine sect getting ready to wage a war against the three associations caused some uproar in the core disciples and even the minor powers of the central continent.

    When Arman brought this news to Sam, even he was shocked. He clearly thought that the situation will y out exactly like this. The Usiane sect will absolve the me but will still have some suspicions attached to them.

    That is what he thought, but from the looks of it, the Usaine sect head seemed to have gone crazy from all the pressure they received.

    But this change didn¡¯t make Sam disappointed, in fact, he is too happy that he couldn¡¯t take a grin off of his face,

    Because this is going to be a recruitment drive for him. He has an excellent n at this moment.

    But before that, he has to deal with another matter at hand.

    He is in an underground secret room in the city. There a human silhouette is sitting on a chair with his body all charred ck. There is no single inch of his skin that is devoid of damage.

    His hair ispletely gone and blood is slowly oozing out of the cracks of his skin. He is barely alive. In fact, he is a living example of the term barely alive.

    This is none other than Adrian emperor. The person who was supposed to die in Arc¡¯s hands.

    In fact, in the eyes of the world, he is really dead. He was killed by an arc in a single blow and his body fell into the ocean and buried underwater.

    This is all Sam¡¯s n. He wanted to fool the world by making the scene y out like that. He wants this guy. Right now, Sam has everything with him. Quality troops, weapons, resources to groom them, and even young talent. But the only thing he doesn¡¯t have are the powerhouses.

    He doesn¡¯t have anyone besides Arc who is a transcendent level being.

    He needs them badly. Because once the direct conflict blows out there should be someone who could offer deterrence to the powerhouses of the major powers.

    He doesn¡¯t want to use the help of the Raijin tribe at this moment. It should be kept a secret. As he was moving towards the upper realm, he has to be more careful with the beasts under him.

    Only at the top of the upper realms, do the people feel normal about the existence of his beasts, even they would be surprised of him having a contract with them.

    But in lower realms, there is no way they would let this go. In fact, he would attract more heat than in his current realm. Because the people here wouldn¡¯t know anything about the true value of the beasts.

    Why is he hesitant about using them in his current realm? That is because the information will spread fast. There is a high chance the rest of the yers will recognize his true identity.

    And the words will spread faster and the spections will lead to some serious consequences for him.

    At this moment, Sam is trying to avoid that.

    He is talking to the charred figure in front of him.

    "So, what do you say? I will give you a new chance at your life and even a chance to break through to the Consummate realm. But you will have to work for me."

    "How can I believe you?" Adrian Emperor asked in a husky voice.

    "Didn¡¯t you see Arc? Do you think he became this strong all on his own? If you agree, all you would have to do is change your appearance and stay low for the next two years, after that you will still be a subordinate but will be crowned on Adrian back and rule it in my stead.

    You wouldn¡¯t have any real interference except for the tax and resources you have to pay. It would be just like how you lived with thunder god temple."

 Chapter 463: A Drug Deal

    Sam and Adrian¡¯s emperor had a long talk throughout the night.

    Adrian emperor whose name Sam decided to call Adrian, tried to get healed before epting the termspletely.

    Sam didn¡¯t let go though. He is no soft permission. For the whole night, he brushed off the threats, offers, and even coercion.

    But still won in the end. The next day, Adrian is back out of that room, but he wore a mask and he worepletely ck. He ate a pill of servitude.

    Sam took him to the tempest valley.

    This guy is a water element user and couldn¡¯t get any form of help from the tempest valley in terms of cultivation resources or training.

    But he could get some seriousbat training and he could also experience an environment with more spiritual energy so that he can train faster. One of the Consummate realm Raijin would be to keep an eye on him and force him to train.

    Apart from that, he skimmed through the pill recipes in the divine dimension and took out three of them and some other potion recipes.

    He went to the Beast faction in his second persona and met with Sai.

    "Do you have a Pill master and Potion master at Transcendent level?" Sam asked.

    "We do. Actually, it is a single person who is an expert in both crafts. We recruited him when the Old one is retaliating. He is one of the people who noticed something is wrong and escaped first before Old one caused that massacre over the tower."

    When Sam heard this, he suddenly had an idea but didn¡¯t speak about it.

    "I need some pills and potions made. I need to talk to him."

    Sai agreed and both of them went to that person.

    Sam was surprised to see the residence of this master of dual arts. The ce ispletely decorated in two different styles fused together forcefully.

    He frowned at this. One¡¯s choice of decoration can tell a lot about them.

    When they went in, a middle-aged man could be seen doing some calctions. There are a lot of scrolls and paperspletely filled with writings and then ink strokes indicating his rejection towards them.

    He seemed extremely busy.

    "Oh, Sai? What do you want?" Then only he looked at Sam and a puzzled expression appeared on his face.

    He has a cleanly shaved face and short hair which was cut sloppily. One could guess its only purpose is to get rid of the long hair. He wore some loose butfortable robes and doesn¡¯t any other essories other than the spatial ring, which is very rare. All the pill masters liked to unt theirvishness and luxury.

    At least, that is what he saw until now.

    But this guy doesn¡¯t have any. He is not old. He is on the younger side of the spectrum even in the middle-aged category.

    "He needs some pills and potions. You can agree with him after the discussion. You don¡¯t have to be obligated towards the Beast faction while epting the offer, it is your personal business."

    Sai said those words and left the room.

    He knew from the start that since Sam asked to directly meet the person, then it must be something confidential.

    After that guy left, Sam looked at the Dual craft master in front of him and asked.

    "I have some pill recipes and potion recipes which I want you to make. But I am not going to pay you a single thing and you have to make me three hundred of them each for every year until the next ten years. You can keep the recipes and do whatever you want to do with them."

    Sam said without beating around the bush. The Master in front of him looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

    "Who are you?" He asked withoutmenting on the ridiculous deal Sam proposed.

    "Is it important?"

    "I don¡¯t do business with the people I don¡¯t know."

    "Then I am a disciple of the Beast faction." With that, Sam took out the token he got from Sai.

    "Seems like it is the identity of the person with that cloak, then what about the person without the cloak."

    "You won¡¯t be meeting that person, at least not yet."

    "Then, why should I conduct business with you?"

    "Okay then, goodbye."

    Sam turned around and started to walk away. There is no way he would beg someone. He is offering a fair deal. In fact, he felt like he is losing something in this. But this guy just wants to see his real identity.

    "Wait. We can still do the business. Let me see the recipes." The Master Pharmacist felt like he should at least check this out. After all, surely the head of the faction wouldn¡¯t bring a retard, right?"

    Sam came back and showed the abstract recipes of the pill recipes. These are just like the abstracts of theses.

    One can get a gist of the information.

    The Pharmacist had a big frown as he read through and then his eyes turned to the dazzling stars by the end of it.

    "Where did you get these?" He asked in an excited state. But all he received is Sam¡¯s cold gaze.

    He understood that he wouldn¡¯t get any answer. But there are some emotions running in his heart. He remembered the price. Three thousand of each of these is too much of a price to pay. Even for him. The Faction head said that this has nothing to do with the faction.

    His hands are itching to make a move and runway right at this moment. But after some time, he felt that this is not good to jump to a conclusion and wanted to negotiate.

    "How about two hundred?"

    "Three hundred, no more no less."

    "Two hundred and fifty?"

    Sam didn¡¯t talk at all, he just looked at him calmly.

    The Pharmacist gritted his teeth and thought of what to do. He could really earn a lot if he sold this to the faction and the cost price of these things is actually a bit less than some expensive pills and potions that existed in this world.

    The most important thing about these things is expertise. That is why Sam didn¡¯t try his hand at this with some high-level methane me.

    He could sell one set of these things and the returns would be enough to buy ingredients for more than fifty sets, in fact, he could even raise the price and get eighty sets worth of ingredients.

    That is why Sam made such a deal, he knew what he is giving him and in fact, Sam really is on the losing end. But he doesn¡¯t have another choice. These things have little use and in two years after he goes to the upper realm, these recipes might not be toomon, but only slightly rare.

    He forced that person to ept this deal because he has his own things to deal with. He has to raise some powerful high-level forces in the Pre-transcendent stage, the Transcendent stage, and Consummate stage.

    The problem, It will hard for these categories to achieve even a minor breakthrough and there are two reasons for that and that is provided that they have required enlightenment.

    One, the cultivation techniques. This reason was recently understood by him. The cultivation techniques are extremely underwhelming and low in quality. It makes it hard for them to gather enough spiritual energy to cultivate and raise their level when they are already in higher-levels, which brings us to the second reason which is, theck of spiritual energy around the world.

    Theck of spiritual energy makes even a talented person with the enlightenment and a good cultivation technique tog in breakthroughs.

    The first shoring can even be ovee by solving the second problem which is to have an environment with extremely dense and pure spiritual energy.

    But it is not possible. That is why they are going to use these pills and potions.

    These pills and potions are actually medicine sets.

    And there are actually three types of sets in these. They are the Pre-transcendent set, the transcendent set, the consummate set.

    Each set has six medicine with pills and potionsbine, which have to be taken in a certain order. These medicine sets draw out the hidden potential of the body and make it absorb the spiritual energy more hungrily.

    They can use any number of sets provided that they are in the same cultivation realm.

    This might be a treasure in this world, but from what Sam read in the library, but in higher realms it is amon drug people use to increase their cultivation speed.

    It would only try to ignite the potential of thetent body and wouldn¡¯t cause too much harm.

    Some true prodigies wouldn¡¯t use them as there are still some minor side effects, but for the old men who are past their prime and don¡¯t have any form of means to breakthrough, this is a Divine elixir.

    Sam figured he might need these things and from the people he has at the moment, three hundred sets of each category will be enough. In fact, they are actually more than required in the initial stages and after two years, they wouldn¡¯t need these things, because he is confident in finding a better training ce.

    But he still asked for three hundred just in case.

 Chapter 464: Deal with Arkiv

    After the business deal, Sam directly went back to the city and got busy again.

    Since war is going to happen between the Usaine sect and the three associations, this is going to be a perfect time for his new idea.

    But he has to be fast.

    He contacted Arman and asked him to do something for him.

    And then he started making the remaining preparations.

    Meanwhile, the Pharmacist back in the Beast faction has stopped all his works and started going through the recipes. He is like a little kid who is so happy with the amount of candy this Halloween.

    After going through all of them, he thought of something and went to meet Sai.

    "Faction head, who is that person?"

    Sai didn¡¯t feel too surprised. He expected this already, so he responded casually.

    "It is better that you don¡¯t know."

    The pharmacist didn¡¯t give up at all and persisted.

    "Please tell me, Sir. Who is this guy? Is he really reliable? He only seemed to be a Nascent stage cultivator, but the deal he discussed is toorge scale. I should have an idea of the other person if I want to continue my deal. Don¡¯t you think so?"

    "Whatever he said he would give, he would do so and whatever you should give in exchange, he must give it to him. Otherwise, you will be in some big trouble. Maybe at that time, I would have to catch you myself and handover to that guy.

    But trust, you would rather prefer suicide.

    I can vouch for his integrity and that is all you have to know. All these years, you have been cultivating and perfecting your craft without involving in others too much. It would be better to stay like that for the rest of your life.

    Don¡¯t get involved in the problems that you are not part of."

    The Pharmacist understood that he wouldn¡¯t get any form of information today and also felt that this guy has to be too powerful to make the faction head this determined to not reveal any information.

    He left the ce in disappointment. But it onlysted for a while and he went to work on his newly acquired recipes.

    He would need a lot of practice before he could perfectly create a set of these.

    Back in Sam¡¯s city.

    Sam is working on how to proceed with his new n, but couldn¡¯t find a prating point. But at this moment he got a message from Arman who just came to the western continent and felt that he could have a possible prating point.

    Arkiv wants to meet him and he wants to do it as fast as possible.

    Sam smirked and went to Arsin to meet with him. But this time, he is in the newly famous wine tavern. But he is not drinking any of the specialties, he is drinking his own wine.

    When Arkiv came in and saw that Sam is still wearing that disguise, he felt a little disappointed. He wanted to know who this guy really is to know that Usaine sect will be in trouble.

    He sat down and asked Sam.

    "How do you know that something is going to happen to Usaine sect?" He asked in a low voice afraid that others will hear them. At that time, Sam took out a formation disc and ced it on the table. A small formation that canceled the noise surrounded just the table.

    Sam didn¡¯t reply immediately and took a sip from his wine. There is a small opening in the cloth covering his face near the mouth as he drank it.

    "Is it really important how I know it or is it important what I know? Didn¡¯t I warn you already? The Usaine sect is stupid and entered this mess. They wouldn¡¯te out unscathed."

    "What do you mean, stupid and noting out unscathed?"

    "Think a bit more my friend. You will understand soon enough. So, why do you want to meet me?"

    "I want to know exactly what is going to happen and who is behind this if possible. Are you the one doing all this? Pulling strings behind the back?" He asked carefully.

    Sam almost burst outughing.

    "Are that na?ve or are you just pretending to be na?ve? Do you think I trust you enough to tell all of these?"

    "Then why did you even say those things in the first ce?"

    "To probe."

    "Probe?"

    "Yes, I wanted to probe your mentality and see if your rtionship with the sect is really as you said."

    "Why would you want to do that?"

    "You know, just in case. What if you are too deep in the rtionship with the sect? I would advise you to take a backstep. After all, you have a lot to do and I don¡¯t think the person behind you will ept if something like that happened.

    I just didn¡¯t want you to be on the sinking ship."

    "Sinking ship?" Arkiv has a shocked expression. Sam didn¡¯t reply and took another sip.

    Arkiv felt frustrated and raised his aura as he said.

    "What do you mean sinking ship? Tell me Damn it."

    Sam raised an eyebrow as he looked at him and had a faint smile on his face as he said.

    "Now, young sir. Do you really want to fight me? I think you do know what would happen if we fight. Do you really want to do this?"

    Only at this moment Arkiv controlled his aura and calmed down as he closed his eyes and took deep breaths.

    He clearly knew what would happen. Not just him some other yers also saw this and knew exactly what kind of fighter Sam is and they don¡¯t want to fight him at all costs.

    He opened his eyes and said.

    "Please tell me."

    "I don¡¯t trust you. What if you rat me out to your sect? What if theye after my life? I am but an unaffiliated cultivator who has his own small organization with a few friends. If something happens to them or me, who is responsible?"

    "If I wanted to do it, I would have done it already. At least, tell me what do you want?"

    "I do need something. My organizationcks some personnel."

    "You want to recruit me?" Arkiv asked with a frown.

    "You mistook me. My friend. How can I afford to recruit a genius like you? I need some artisans and other professionals."

    Arkiv didn¡¯t say anything, he felt extremely exhausted. He doesn¡¯t have any form of energy in his body left.

    Sam looked at this chuckled. He decided to give this guy some leeway and said.

    "I wouldn¡¯t y with words anymore. I will be straightforward and will let you in for information. There is something big happening in the background and someone was able to manipte the six major powers and associations to be in this situation.

    Their target is Usaine sect and they are at a war with the three associations. Half of their goal is already achieved.

    After they are done with the Usaine sect and by that time, you are still there and involved in the war, there is no way for you to be able to escape without any repercussions.

    If you really fight till the end, the enemies will chase you to the ends and will definitely let you live. After all, you have great potential, if you held a grudge and want to take revenge, they couldn¡¯t just sit idly, can they?

    That is why I asked you to get out of the organization."

    Arkiv fell silent for a moment and asked.

    "Don¡¯t you think the major powers will sooner orter realize this and there would be some big trouble?"

    "Of course, that is their goal. To cause trouble."

    "Then, even if I came out now. No ce is safe for me. Where do you suggest me to move?"

    "If you want toe, then you can join my organization."

    "Are you trying to fish me from the start?"

    "Why would I even need you? What I am after is those professionals. If you can really join my organization or even if you could just cut ties with the Usaine sect, you can stay at my ce for some time.

    I can tell you that my ce is the most secure ce on the at the moment. You don¡¯t even have to think twice about that.

    But as an exchange for the information and safety, there is something you have to do."

    "What would that be?" Arkiv asked as he thought deeply about how to proceed.

    Sam exined what he needs and Arkiv¡¯s frown got deeper and deeper as he listened to this.

    After that, Arkiv started thinking about whether or not he should ept it. Anyway, he doesn¡¯t have any form of special connection to the sect. It was a ce where he went to gather resources. Even in that, he worked his ass off to solve missions for the resources he needed. And even then, he has schemed against so many times.

    He would let go of the sect when the timees, that is why he was asking Sam so many times, he wants confirmation and now that he got one, he has trouble deciding on what to do.

 Chapter 465: Plans

    Sam went back to the city after discussing everything with Arkiv.

    Later Arkiv directly went to the artisan tower of the Imperial capital and met with the tower head to talk to him for a long time, after that he kept on visiting the remaining three tower heads for the next few days.

    After a few days, for some reason, the tower heads all called their employees in the different regions toe to the imperial capital through their specialmunication which will allow them tomunicate through the cities.

    They dismissed the low-level employees and the low-ranked artisans with no potential for any form of growth whatsoever and could only perform misceneous tasks. Then the rest of the professionals started moving towards the imperial capital.

    As for the professionals who are rted to the Usaine sect, they are already taken away by the three associations in the beginning and Usaine sect head sent them to take some pressure off of his shoulders. Now it directly bit him in the back.

    All these movements are done extremely discreetly because all the other personnel and officers under the direct control of the Usaine sect are all moving towards the imperial capital in a rush too and those who are already a part of the imperial capital actually left to the Usaine sect.

    All these people are currently summoned by the Usaine sect in the preparations for the war. This time, the Usaine sect head fully lost it.

    The three associations simply pushed things too far and they lost some of their inner sect disciples and the core disciples for no reason.

    In this frenzy, he didn¡¯t even think about investigating who truly caused the disturbance with parks.

    Even the major powers and the three associations didn¡¯t care for the cause of the problem. Of course, it is not like they wouldn¡¯t bother with it at all, but it will take some time and some beatings in the war and a lot of blood to realize and think about what really happened.

    These people who are at the top have this weird mindset, where they will feel like whatever they say goes and they would think that everything about them is too big and too great.

    So, they wouldn¡¯t tolerate being oppressed and pushed around. That is why they went mad and are starting a war.

    Now Arsin almost became defenseless because of his actions and Sam can have as many ns as he can.

    The first thing he is going to do is rob the nation of its talent and skill. That is what he used Arkiv for.

    He just wanted to gather all the professionals who are part of the associations. The Pharmaceutical association is gone and the towers of the empire are almost working on their empirical hierarchy.

    As for the Herb faction re-establishing it, it would be taking a lot of time and money and before the park¡¯s issue is fully settled, they wouldn¡¯t harbor any thoughts and doing so.

    The three associations¡¯ time is already done for on this.

    At least that is what Sam thought, the remaining major powers will surely devour the three associations after this war even if the associations won.

    The major powers already recognized how much influence the associations have on the people, and if the parks are sessfully established and the influence of the associations grew, then things would be even more disadvantageous for them. If the association heads once again tried to do the same thing as Old One, there will be troubles.

    But they didn¡¯t want to lose a cash cow like the park.

    What Sam did, not only created a small crack in their current partnership but also gave them an opportunity.

    There is a great chance that the associations would be destroyed, even if they didn¡¯t, then there is an extremely high chance that they would be turned into ruins and rubble. They could devour the remaining slowly.

    As for the parks, Sam is still there, right? At least that is what they thought.

    But what they don¡¯t know is that Sam is the one making these things happen. He is making the Usaine sect and Associations enemies and he is making the war happened.

    The ending of the year couldn¡¯t be more eventful.

    There are still two months left of this year and the war started to happen.

    The Usaine sect is the one taking the initiative to make the move and they decided to attack. But they didn¡¯t directly attack the people in the empires. After all, they would make good subordinates.

    Indeed, because, they make good subordinates and Sampletely agreed with the thoughts of the Sect head, he stole them.

    That is where Arkiv helped a lot.

    With Arkiv¡¯s identity as a core disciple of the sect, there is a lot of sway to his words and all he did was make some lies and truths. The truths are that the association will bepletely destroyed and even if it survived the war, it would be devoured.

    But the lies are that the sect has decided to execute all these people without a worry after the war is over and Arkiv is feeling bad about losing these people and he is also thinking of leaving the sect, so they should escape.

    But where could they escape to? And that is where Sames in.

    Arkiv will help gather all of them in the imperial capital discreetly and Sam would definitely convince them to join him and recruit them.

    This would make his tasks easier. There would be four new Pre-transcendent stage cultivators in his organization. At this moment, there is only one person who broke through and if he counted the people under Arc, then he would have at most four Pre-transcendent stage cultivators under him.

    But with these four, it would be good enough for him for the moment.

    As for the nascent stage cultivators, they will also increase. But currently, the Nascent stage cultivators within the organization are trying hard to make a breakthrough.

    They suddenly had ess to arge number of pills and potions that could aid their cultivation. Sam is confident that when he tackled a major power, he would certainly have enough Pre-transcendent stage cultivators.

    He went back to the Arsin empire once again and met with the gathered professionals.

    And after three hours of discussion, everyone slowly agreed to join, because Sam brought someone to convince them and that is Austin.

    He has seen the most growth in the whole organization since the start of school. He is the best person to show these guys what they are being offered and more than three hundred artisans who came from the associations directly and another two hundred artisans who climbed the ranks are slowly transported to Sam¡¯s city discreetly.

    The numbers of the other three professions are not too smallpared to this one and they temporarily stayed within the imperial capital until their turn came to enter the city as he sent them in batches.

    Meanwhile, Sirona and Philip are dealing with other things.

    These two months, while Sam would be busy with scouting, recruiting, and producing, these two have another job.

    The war wouldn¡¯t be finished in a day or two. At least, these two months would be their best time. And the best situation is the actual battles didn¡¯t start, there are only some shes between people of lower level on the central continent.

    So, these two months, the empires will not much concentration on them. That is why, both of them took it upon themselves to rob as much of Arsin as they can, so Sam only kept his ns for recruiting and left the rest for these two.

    Now they are touring the mines of the Arsin I the next two months.

    They only have one thought in their minds, to rob every single ore that was mined in the next two months and if any reservoirs that could possibly exist in the empire.

    Sam went back and stayed in the city. For now, there is nothing much he could do.

    Everything was handed to his subordinates and even Arman is busy with something within the thunder god temple.

    He is concentrating on beating the crap out of Arthur every chance he could get and apart from that, he is busy winning over the elders and other important figures that can influence the position of the future heir.

    The future heir of the thunder god temple is select differently than the Beast faction.

    They have many things to consider and there are many factors that y in the decision. And one of them happened to be birth.

    If all the factors ying to be the future heir are ounted for a hundred points, then the birth alone has thirty points.

    Arman doesn¡¯t have a noble birth in the thunder god temple while Arthur is the son of the thunder god temple head himself.

    There is too huge of a disparity with Arthur having thirty points and Arman only having one point.

 Chapter 466: Fleet

    Days passed slowly with the people on the top of the world full of tension and themon people without a single ounce of knowledge of these tensions.

    Sam came back to the city and became busy in his own preparations for the future.

    While Philip and Sirona are nning their own things. Arkiv is still in the Usaine sect.

    Everyone is immersed in their own tasks and Sam has left the task of recruiting the personnel from the remaining empires of the Usaine sect to Arkiv and Austin.

    Arkiv finished this task and went back to the sect.

    Coincidentally after their activities are over, the first serious and significant battle between the Usaine sect and the three associations took ce in the central continent grounds.

    To everyone¡¯s surprise, although Usaine sect is the one responsible for the first blow after the war started, this attack wasunched by the associations and the troops are formed by thebined soldiers from the three associations.

    This battle took ce in one of the resource providers of the Usaine sect. It is a mine that provides a type of metal that is mostly used for making formation discs and formation gs.

    This is a significant resource point in the war considering the production activities will increase as both sides are proficient in the formation making.

    In the war and after the war, this ce is of high value for both parties.

    Even though the associations wanted tounch apletely surprising attack, the sect members reacted fast enough to avoid a massacre.

    And the battle became a nasty dog fight for all the cultivators to tear each other apart.

    The battle involved more than three thousand cultivators from both sidesbined and this led to the continuous chain reactions of revenge attacks and schemes, ambushes, and sneak attacks on camps.

    Any region belonging to both the territories in the central continent is in chaos.

    And the middle of this chaos a troop of artisan association appeared out of nowhere in one of the inds of the Usaine sect and took over silently. There the Usaine sect suffered a severe loss. A loss so bad that not a single soldier survived to even carry the news back.

    Even the activities of the people went without any obstructions. Nobody knew who took over the ind, but they did quite a number on that.

    This ce is one of the inds with active volcanoes and the artisans of the Usaine sect used this ce for their weapon production as the fire control and recovery, even assistance from theva of the volcanoes is extremely beneficial for them.

    But now it is gone.

    By the time, the Usaine learned about this, they surprisingly lost the first resource point too.

    To everyone¡¯s surprise, the Usaine sect lost the first two big battles in the war.

    No one, even Sam didn¡¯t expect this.

    Then only he understood that the associations are stronger than he imagined. He was now thinking about whether he should get involved in the war or not.

    While he is contemting like that, some other news popped out and that is three small inds near the central continent which are the beast farms of the Inscription association were captured by the Usaine sect and the two mines of the artisan association are captured.

    Not only that, the next day another news came out and that is when the three associations wanted to capture another mine of the Usaine sect, they fell into a trap and more than half of their troops in their regions are done for.

    Apart from that, troops of the formation association and Usaine sect engaged in naval warfare.

    All of this is happening because both Usaine sect and the three associations are too close to each other.

    Sam really wanted to pull the strings and make it more chaotic; he is extremely tempted to do so. But he has to wait because there would be some form of trouble after this war is over and he is waiting for that. This could happen in the next two months by the end of the year and that is the war being stopped in the middle and the Usaine sect possibly aiming at Sam after realizing their stupidity due to the blood-shed.

    If that doesn¡¯t happen, he has other ns. He took out some more blueprints and gave them to the production team.

    There are new types of ships and one of them is a major project they are going to do. For that eighty percent of the production team is going to work and even the students from various departments could take part it in and most of the work is going to be done outside because it is definitely a multiple-person project, not a single-person project.

    Except for the parts that could be manufactured on his production unit, everything is going to be made by others.

    This is going to be a full-fledged naval fleet. Except for the aircraft carrier and the submarines, everything will be there and there is some kind of formationalbinations in it.

    When designing the first ship, Sam got more problems in designing the moving mechanism. It would use the water jets controlled by the water element users to move. And there are backup engines too which are actually steam engines.

    The ship would definitely work with the steam engines but it wouldn¡¯t be as fast.

    Now that the motion of the ship ispleted and the backup engine design is also done, Sam doesn¡¯t need to worry about the rest.

    He could use the same mechanism with slight modifications to the remaining ships.

    When the Production members and artisans saw the designs, they are stunned. They didn¡¯t expect there would be this much work and this much ofplicated work.

    But they were even more stunned when Sam said that most outstanding of all the workers will be selected and trained in specific Marine style weapons, vehicles, and other kinds of engineering stuff. Sam promised to give them a thorough course on how to approach these.

    And thus the manufacturing began in the eastern sea of the western continent.

    From the map of the world, there is actually a possible sea route to the Usaine sect from this ce, but it would be almost impossible to bypass this sea with the strong beast unless a Consummate realm expert helps them.

    While they are at it, Sam went to the tempest valley to bring back one of his beast uncles.

    He brought him in the Divine dimension and went to the western sea.

    It is about time he expanded his troops beyond the human army. Although, there are some preparations going on towards the beast army it was only fornd. Now he is going to recruit the beast army of the waters and after two weeks, the three cities of the southern star which were being infested by the Porpoises in their sea waters were freed from their troubles.

    The porpoises disappeared.

    After two months, Sam realized that his trouble is noting as he expected. The war escted to new heights as people died one after another on the battlefield.

    It seemed that only one party is going to survive and that will be heavily damaged.

    He kept up with the news from time to time and focused on the manufacturing and at the same time, the new formation technique he saw on the meteorite ind.

    One wasplete production activity and the other one is the research withplete brain activity.

    The ships are being assembled a day in and day out and the ships are being manufactured simultaneously.

    This is going to be one of Sam¡¯s masterpieces to date.

    The fleet is going to be having five amphibious assault ships as the center of the formation and have a total of fifty corvettes, forty frigates, forty destroyers, thirty cruisers with a total of one hundred and sixty ships in a single fleet.

    The work is going on with around a thousand artisans in ce. Even the new artisans are allowed to work.

    Sam decided to increase the speed of the work because his anticipated attack didn¡¯te and he would have to prepare to attack himself after the war was over. And that too, he has to move fast enough before the other major powers make the move.

    He has to destroy the Usaine sect with his own hands. Otherwise, it would be a waste of all this effort.

    He ignited this war with so much effort. It took so many people and so much nning and execution.

    What he doesn¡¯t know is all the major power heads are also waiting in the same way.

    They knew what is happening and there are some shady things going on which are being led by some major powers and the war is being escted by them.

    What should have been a minor scuffle has been dragged to this point. The major powerspletely stopped the employees who took positions in the tower to assist the three associations which led to the deficit of the troops and the damages of the associations to be increased greatly.

    Slowly, six months passed since the war started and four months passed in the second year.

    In this time, Sam made many things. He sent some mercenaries to the remaining empire under the thunder god temple and it is almost subdued. It is almost as good as done.

    At the same time, Sirona and Philip are wreaking havoc in the Usaine sect empires. They robbed a lot. In fact, a little too much than Sam thought. Except for the Eastern continent, which is rtively independent of the Usaine sect, all the other empires are almost stripped out of their resources. Sam achieved a breakthrough to the nascent stage level five.

    Finally, his speed is slowing down for others to look at. But he slowed his cultivation down because the Nascent stage is somewhat important. He started refining his body and spirit so that he can have a greater foundation for the next stages.

    Even though he is a middle stage Nascent, thebat power is extremely high due to constant suppression. He decided that he would only breakthrough to the next stage after another year.

    And the next one would take even more than one year. This way, he might fall behind others but he would have some great results in the future stages.

    He realized thister only after he broke through to the fourth level.

    Anyway, the war finally came to its final stages and the news is that the Consummates already had some skirmishes and they are going to have their final battle soon.

    Sam decided that he should make his move at this moment. Because Arc, his strongest subordinate had already broken through the Consummate stage thest month and he even brought one of his beast uncles with him just in case.

    Along with that, he has the guardian of the meteorite ind¡¯s stone pir, the hairs of the monkey king, and his Naval fleet.

    He is ready to tackle a Major power. But before that, he has to find a suitable base from where he could deploy these troops in a disguise and he had a perfect ce in mind.

 Chapter 467: Minor Power

    Sam had a big n this time and most of it is due to hiding his direct involvement in this matter.

    Even though he has many cards and with enough time he can outdo all these major powers, he didn¡¯t have much time. He has to do things early and it is already four months in the second year. He has barely one year and another eight months left.

    Within this time, he has to gain the remaining four boxes, and luckily, he got some news on the third box. It happened to be in the possession of thunder god temple.

    Due to the constant rise in Arman¡¯s performance, he has recently gained ess to the core treasury to pick up a reward, and there he saw this box.

    The box has been in the thunder god temple for a long time and they knew it belongs to the central continent and some ancient secret must be hidden inside.

    But they weren¡¯t sessful in opening it.

    Anyway, since he knew one of the locations, he can deal with it afterward. But before that, he has to deal with the Usaine sect.

    Currently, the war is in the final stage and the Consummate realm cultivators are shing directly. Sam didn¡¯t expect that war would escte to this point, ording to him, the battle would have been over after two months and the consummate realm cultivators shouldn¡¯t even have joined the battle.

    Then, the Usaine sect would target him and he would use the newly gained pawns within the sect to damage its foundation and make a move on the sect.

    But now that the original n has changed, he wanted to make a head-on move.

    On this day, all the troops required for the naval fleet and thend armies all gathered on the shore of the eastern sea of the western continent. Arc who broke through the Consummate realm is wearing a mask. Adrian is also wearing the same type of mask.

    Sam let all the Naval soldiers andmanders of the fleet to enter the ships and take their respective positions. That included the beasts that are also part of the fleet. Sky along with many other wind-type flying beasts upied the deck of one of the Amphibious assault ships.

    Another deck was upied by Yanwu and other fire type flying beasts.

    As for the remaining three decks, there are three new beasts at the nascent stage upying the lead position and all have an additional element other than the wind element and their beasts are all of their same race.

    These are the beasts that are subdued by Yanwu and Sky and they almost subdued the beast tribes all over the western continent.

    Below the Amphibious assault ships, where the submarines can be docked in the modern warfare there are Porpoises of Pre-transcendent and nascent stage as for any beasts below that, they are not included.

    It is not too good to let them die.

    Sam hovered in the air as he watched them board the fleet and when everyone is in their positions, Sam said.

    "Do note outside, no matter what. Keep your spiritual energy to yourself and don¡¯t try to scan anything until I told you so.

    You have to stay as if you are in a meditative state and nothing should bother you. No matter who let their spiritual sense wander around, I will know and you are dead by then. So, please be careful about what you would do.

    Now, don¡¯t resist and let my spiritual sense envelop you."

    With that, Sam closed his eyes and extended his hand, and spread his spiritual sense all over the fleet.

    He scanned the beasts, soldiers, captains, and even themanders of the ship.

    His veins popped his face has be red and he started sweating and all of a sudden, the whole fleet disappeared and reappeared in the divine dimension.

    There is argeke inside the dimension which was not present before. It was something Sam made just for transporting the fleet.

    There is no way he would taking the fleet through the sea even if there is a route. Any ident can ur in the sea.

    No matter how strong he became at least within the Consummate realm, the sea is something that couldn¡¯t be conquered that easily. It always wins no matter who the opponent is.

    Now, only Sam, Arc and Adrian are there. They went back to his city where some other people are waiting for them.

    They are fifteen people. They are the Pre-transcendent stage cultivators and a Transcendent cultivator.

    These are his main forces now. More than half of them are recently broken through. But that is enough for them.

    Their current operation is going to be something sneaky.

    They went to the Space gate and arrived at Arsin.

    Arkiv is waiting for Sam in Arsin. He is the one who gave then most information from the Usaine sect¡¯s side.

    Sam just wanted him to not get involved in the war, but this guy is siding with them by too much and he would know why he is doing so.

    They are about cut a deal.

    "So, what do you want?"

    "Your identity?" Arkiv asked in confusion. He still doesn¡¯t know who Sam is. Sam is still wearing a disguise.

    "Is it sufficient?"

    "It would be better, no? We could be friends."

    "We will see that. You would know who I am after we enter the next realm, until then tell me what you want. Don¡¯t tell me you did everything I asked you just for my friendship."

    "The Core library. I want something in the core library of the Usaine sect. The rift between me and the sect happened there.

    There is some sort of secret art of the Usaine sect in the middle of the core library and it was locked. In the past three centuries, I am the only one who unlocked it, but I was denied ess to it.

    All of that because I am not of the direct lineage. From then on, the Usaine sect has been trying to give the art to people of direct lineage and they even started impregnating their wives hastily to give birth to a possible prodigy.

    I want that art. And everything is yours."

    Sam was surprised, such a thing happened. They don¡¯t even know what the future of this guy holds. They just isted someone who could change their bum lives and now that guy is even willing to make a deal with someone who he doesn¡¯t know to get back at them.

    Poor Usaine sect.

    "Deal."

    Sam agreed without hesitation. He doesn¡¯t need anything from Usaine sect as for what his friends want, he asked Philip and the only answer he received is that he wants the destruction of the Usaine sect, he didn¡¯t even need any treasures or such.

    Arkiv shook his hand and left the ce.

    Sam and the rest of the people who came with me went to do their work.

    They are moving rapidly towards a sea city of the Arsin empire. This city is closest to a minor power and this minor power doesn¡¯t have any noticeable points. Out of all minor powers, this one has the lowest profile.

    They don¡¯t involve resource disputes and mostly kept to themselves.

    But they are not weak. They do have considerable power even within the minor powers. So, Sam decided to target this ce and convert this ce into his base of operations.

    That night, they flew over the sea and arrived at therge ind of the minor power.

    The minor power does have some viges and towns on the ind. It is like a small kingdom and self-sustainable.

    It is the size of a state of a third world country.

    Sam and his group traveled as stealthily as possible. Their aim is not to attack. But to subdue with minimum effort and they do have some new inventions from the new healers he recruited.

    From what he knew, there are ten transcendent stage cultivators for this power and over thirty Pre-transcendent stage cultivators with most of them being in the early stages.

    After a day of travel at their full speed, they reached the headquarters of the minor power. They hid in the surrounding woods of the area. Arc made his move. He is going to capture the leader of the minor power who should be ate-stage Transcendent stage cultivator.

    If the leader is captured, everything else could be manageable.

    And within half an hour, Arc returned with an unconscious man. The whole city couldn¡¯t detect a Consummate realm cultivator if he decided to hide.

    And that night, the remaining officials couldn¡¯t find where their leader has gone, while he is chatting something with Sam while his cultivation was sealed.

    Sam first talked to him normally and offered a chance to break through the Consummate realm, but the other guy is not listening at all and the situation turned forceful. Arc has to show that he just broke through recently and the credit to Sam.

    Just when Sam was getting frustrated and wanted to forcefully feed a servitude pill, the leader asked what he wanted.

    "If you can cure my son, then I will follow you, and even my whole family and the subordinates will follow you."

    Sam was surprised to hear this.

    "Deal. Don¡¯t go back on your words then."

 Chapter 468: Different Constitution

    That night Sam and Arc went to take a look at the son of the Leader of the minor power.

    This Minor power is called Yellow sand Ind.

    And the head of the power is titled Ind leader. His name is Martin. Since Sam got a deal with Martin that he will follow Sam as long as he cured his son, then he chose this option other than forcing them.

    After all, the more loyal followers the better, and less forced the loyalty the better.

    He went to see his son and the problem of this young man is that he is twenty years old but couldn¡¯t cultivate. He is almost the same age as Sam, just a little younger.

    Sam was stunned when he heard that he couldn¡¯t cultivate. Because they could feel that his core is an Earth elemental core and he happened to be a Warrior mage. The Yellow Sand Ind is also a major power who are specialized in earth elements and they tried every possible method of cultivation they have in their possession. But there are no results.

    This puzzled Sam and he ced his hand on that guy¡¯s head and let his spiritual energy flow as he used the observation ability.

    The son who is named Martin Jr looked extremely lifeless as he didn¡¯t even show any form of reaction to what Sam is doing. Even when he was introduced, he spoke very inly almost as if he is burdened to even breathe much less speak.

    As Sam used his observation ability, Martin Jr¡¯s every secret was revealed to him. there is nothing about this guy¡¯s body that he couldn¡¯t see.

    The first thing Sam did is to observe the spiritual core. The main problems rted to cultivation would be mainly rted to the spiritual core, from what he could see the spiritual core is actually normal with its operations. It is still trying to absorb the spiritual energy like normal.

    There is nothing wrong with it, but the elemental energy of this spiritual core is something that gave Sam some doubts.

    Because, at one nce when a person used normal spiritual sense, they would feel that this spiritual core is earth elemental spiritual core and since it is dense and solid with the obvious warrior indications, it is an earth elemental warrior.

    Even Sam came to that thought, but due to his observation ability of full gear, he felt that something is different in this earth elemental energy that is emitted by the spiritual core.

    Sam reduced the range of observation skill and only concentrated on the spiritual core for a moment.

    His veins could be seen on his forehead as he increased his concentration to observe the spiritual core to the atomic level.

    Then only he saw the structure of the spiritual core.

    Even though it is solid and a warrior-mage core, there is something Sam noticed which ispletely different.

    The Solid earth core is not exactly solid the whole thing is a lump of golden-yellow colored sand particles that are moving in a weird pattern at an extremely slow pace. Of course, they are not really some sand particles, but the spiritual energy took that form.

    Sam thought that this might be a variant. He remembered the key features of the core and started examining the rest of his body and the meridianwork and then he noticed something different.

    His body and blood have some sort oftent earth elemental energy which also felt like the energy in the spiritual core.

    It seems that this guy had a variant spiritual core and a special physical constitution.

    This is the thought in mind and Sam closed his eyes and went through the information in his mind. He is revisiting the memory of the first books he read in this lifetime.

    The book Ling Tian gave him, a book on the spiritual cores and the physical constitutions.

    This is something he never expected. After searching through the whole information for an hour, Sam finally got an understanding and when he opened his eyes, they are filled with surprise and shock.

    He didn¡¯t expect that there would be a special body type on this.

    He looked at the head and some of the family members who are behind him and said.

    "You might want to make them leave here before I reveal the information."

    Martin nced at them and they left.

    Sam learned that the whole force is actually a single-family, more like a noble family of sorts and they have a few viges and towns on the ind that they govern.

    This made things extremely easier for Sam.

    After all, a family only has one head of the family and there is no need for him to try and convince all of them to be his subordinates.

    After they left, Sam said.

    "Your son doesn¡¯t have any problem actually; his body is not a damaged one rather it is a special one. In fact, he can be considered an extreme talent.

    His body has a special constitution called, the Golden Sand Constitution. It makes his body and spiritual core have a special property.

    He really is an earth elemental warrior mage and he can even achieve a full elemental fusion. But it is not a pure earth element. He can only perceive earth elemental substances if they are sand, at least in his initial stages of cultivation. He doesn¡¯t need any spells or anyrge moves, he can control the sand as long as he has spiritual energy left inside his body.

    He doesn¡¯t need any weapons, all he needs are some high-grade sands and he can make them into whatever he wants. The only drawback he has is that he cannot cultivate techniques of low-level earth elemental energy. The techniques you gave him might not have drawn enough spiritual energy from the atmosphere. To fully utilize his body, he has to have a high-grade earth elemental technique, and also the energy consumption is extremely high.

    Martin looked at Sam and then his son whose eyes have some light returned to them.

    He is looking a little hopeful when Sam said about his condition, but when the statement reached the end, he was once again disappointed, he had tried all kinds of cultivation techniques that are avable in his family and his father even got one from the artisan tower which is actually of a higher grade and used by the Architecture artisans.

    But there is no use. The small light of hope was once again lost, he doesn¡¯t know how to react and tears starteding from his eyes.

    Martin looked at Sam and bowed his head.

    "I don¡¯t know who you are, but you can make a Transcendent breakthrough to the Consummate realm without the aid of major powers, so you might have some methods up your sleeve. I beg you. If you have a cultivation technique, I am willing to pay any kind of price.

    I will even sell my soul to you."

    Sam fell into contemtion. He did indeed have a technique. This constitution is actually quite easy to deal with because only a high amount of energy is the requirement. Some constitutions would need some special methods and techniques which are tailor-made for them.

    He would have trouble if he needs such kind of technique, but a high-grade earth elemental technique is too many in his possession. He is contemting whether he should give them or not.

    Sam looked at Martin and said.

    "I will be honest with you. I am going on a war with the Usaine sect and I want you guys to follow me with utmost loyalty. Don¡¯t worry about the result, it would definitely be our victory.

    I ask of you for only one thing, I want your family to be in charge of thends under the Usaine sect and the rest would follow me and join my force. Not only will I give you the technique, but also will give you chances beyond your imagination.

    You can be Consummate realm cultivator and beyond."

    "I agree."

    "Can you make that decision for all your family?"

    "Yes."

    "But I can¡¯t take your word for that. I need you guys to take these pills."

    With that, Sam took out a pill bottle with Pills of servitude. Martin didn¡¯t even hesitate and swallowed a pill. He thought it was poison but nothing happened. Martin Jr reacted a littlete as he was still in a bit of a daze and yelled.

    "Father, don¡¯t."

    He stood up and tried to catch his father, he too thought it was poison.

    But nothing happened.

    "Don¡¯t worry, it is not a poison. It is just something I use so that you wouldn¡¯t betray me. It wouldn¡¯t affect your bodies in the slightest, but it wouldn¡¯t allow you guys to betray me that¡¯s it."

    With that, Sam turned around and took a seat and said.

    "You guys leave for a while,e back in half-an-hour."

    They as they were told and in half-an-hour, Sam has finished copying a technique. These cultivation techniques suree in handy.

    All of the techniques in the divine dimensionbined couldn¡¯t bepared to the Myriad Beast bloodline technique Sam cultivated, so he always thought why would Ling Tian give him all these, but every time he used them like this, he felt like that was the only purpose.

    Anyway, this technique gave him a new force.

 Chapter 469: Making a Move

    Sam stayed in the Yellow Sand Ind for the next two days, waiting for the news he wanted.

    He wants to see if the Usaine sect members would be back or some other Mishaps would ur.

    For the next two days, he walked around Yellow Sand Ind and met with many people. He didn¡¯t expect that he would be able to recruit them. His n is to only recruit them for this one battle even if it was forceful andpensate them with a chance of breaking through the Consummate realm and leave them alone.

    The minor powers and him, didn¡¯t cross paths and there are little chances they would do so in the future. That is why he didn¡¯t care about them before. But now that he thought about it, they have a great number of Nascent stage cultivators and manpower.

    Anyway, he got them now and it didn¡¯t cost him much at all.

    They are already making preparations and getting their Naval fleet ready to deploy anytime.

    Now, they have to wait for Usaine sect¡¯s return.

    Meanwhile, in the central continent. A region of the forest has disappearedpletely and there is not a single de of grass in that vast area.

    Six people are fighting like crazy and the shock waves are destroying the surroundings, the disappearance of the vegetation is also because of that.

    The three association heads are in a pinch. At first, they were able to fight back with them and even had an upper hand, but as time passed, they realized they have little chance of fighting.

    But at this moment there is no turning back.

    Meanwhile, in the surrounding forests of this region, there are several people who are hidden in the trees as they watched the whole spectacle unfolding.

    They are the fishing teams of the other major powers.

    Even the six people who are fighting also knew it and that is why they are looking to drag the fight out; they just want to dy the inevitable.

    At this moment, all of a sudden, the Inscription association head felt like his Spiritual energy is running out and reached the final stages, looking at this the old man who is fighting with him, didn¡¯t waste any time at all, he directly swung his sword and was about to sh his head off.

    At this moment, the Inscription head looked at him with resentment and bit his finger hard, and started drawing some runes on his body as he dodged the attack of the Old man.

    The Old man felt that something is off and soon realized that he made a mistake by not stopping the Inscription association head. Because red-colored vapor starteding out of the Inscription Association head¡¯s body and he is burning his blood and the life force as the runes on his body became evident.

    This is a secret art.

    He started burning his life force and attacked the old man. The Old man panicked and started using all the defensive measures he can think of. The other two members from the Usaine sect looked at them and wanted to help him. But the two association heads held them tightly.

    As the Old man and the Inscription head shed, a huge explosion urred andrge crater was formed.

    When the dust settled, the Old man from the Usaine sect looked extremely mangled as he bled all over. His left arm was gone and even his left leg waspletely broken.

    There are cracked bones all over his body. But he is still standing albeit barely. But the Inscription head is in a worse condition.

    His body became a dried-up corpse, the only difference is that it is still barely breathing and the skin cracked all over. He wouldn¡¯t make it no matter what.

    At this moment, the Old man still gritted his teeth and dragged his left leg as he made his move. His face is full of resentment and one could see how much he hated the Inscription head, just for this attack.

    He reached the body and continuously stabbed the body of Inscription head.

    "Die, you bastard."

    "Die"

    "Die"

    He almost looked like he lost his sanity and became a madman.

    At this moment, the sect head of the Usaine sect and another Old who are fighting with the remaining two heads understood that the situation is dire and are worried that these two association heads might also pull this kind of stunt.

    So, they decided to use their trump cards and kill them before that happened.

    And thus, the final and the most intense exchange began with them shing relentlessly.

    The two people from the Usaine sect became injured and the two association heads have suffered some severe damage.

    Their spiritual cores cracked and one of them has their handpletely crippled.

    At this moment, as the Usaine sect members were about to make a move and finish them off, the hidden fishing teams came out all of a sudden and made their move.

    They blocked the finishing blow and saved the two association heads.

    They are the Grand elders of the other major powers. There are two of them, one from the thunder god temple and the other from the Lightning Spear sect. The Herb garden didn¡¯te as they are not willing to involve in any disputes from the start and the Beast faction is not even part of this mess from the start.

    The thunderbolt seemed to have another n and only these two people came.

    They didn¡¯t send more people just in case the two parties in the battle will misunderstand their intent.

    They are here just to save these association heads so that they could use their expertise to raise their next generations.

    "What are you doing? Do the Old thunder and that Spear guy want a piece of this as well?"

    The Usaine sect head asked.

    "No. you seemed to have misunderstood the intent. But the thunder god temple just wants to know what happened to the parks and wants to ask them for an exnation. So, we have to take them away. Since they are injured and their recovery rate is minimal, you don¡¯t even have to worry about revenge.

    Our temple head also said that they would agree to disband the current associations and the Usaine sect shall lead the establishment of the three associations. All the territories under the three associations that are captured by you shall be yours." With that, he even forcefully took the Spatial ring of the association head and gave it to him.

    "Our lightning spear sect has the same intentions." He repeated the same action.

    Usaine sect head looked at them with resentment. He knew that it is not as simple as asking for an exnation of the parks. He knew damn well what their intentions are. Parks are only one of the reasons and a minor one at that.

    But he couldn¡¯t fight with them. He is injured and not at his prime condition as for the association heads, they wouldn¡¯t be recovering for their lives.

    He could only grit his teeth and agree to this.

    He has many things to do and deal with the aftermath of the war, so he could only give up and walk away. Anyway, his main goal was established, but he has to quickly spread his influence all over, otherwise, these two powers wille into conflict with him once again.

    With these thoughts, he returned to the sect.

    The remaining team members the two grand elders brought proceeded to see if there any people left alive in the war. They only checked the people from the associations. They wanted to see if they can capture any of the talents. Not only that, these things are happening in many battlefields and the Thunderbolt sect which didn¡¯t send anyone to capture an association head actually sent people to the properties of the associations which were left uncaptured by the Usaine sect.

    Even the other major powers did the same. Except for the Beast faction and the Herb garden.

    Sam got the news he was waiting for, the war ended and this time, he got the news directly from the Ind leader of the Yellow sand Ind.

    This is the right time.

    By the next morning, the troops of the Yellow sand Ind saw arge naval fleet appear on their seashore. When they looked at the types of ships and the number of them which arepletely filled with beasts and cannons of different sizes and styles, they arepletely dumbfounded.

    Even the Ind owner, felt extremely threatened when he saw the fleet. Even though every ship is a separate entity, they felt like they are a single entity at the same time.

    And thus, the fleet moved towards the borders of the Usaine sectnds over the sea.

    Behind the fleet, the fleet of the Yellow Sand ind also followed closely.

    Arc is standing on an Amphibious assault ship with his mask on as he stood straight.

    Their movement is too big and they would surely alert the other major powers and they exactly wanted that. Sam also wore his disguise, the one he used to enter the Pce of inheritance and he held the staff in his hands.

    Now, the time has finallye to take down a major power and mark his own name in this world.

 Chapter 470: War with Usaine sect

    The news that arge fleet is moving towards the archipgo of the Usaine sect was spread all over as they were just a few hours away from their destination.

    Sam made sure that everything goes ording to n. The Usaine sect head and the grand elders who came back also heard this and frowned.

    At first, they thought that they are being attacked by another major power but the rest of the major powers who also got the news made sure that they don¡¯t have any involvement in this by sending their envoys.

    This made them puzzled and after some investigation from the scouts, they recognized them to be the people from the Yellow Sand Ind.

    The Usaine sect people didn¡¯t understand why a Minor power would try to attack them. So, the sect head sent a nascent stage envoy to talk to them.

    "Why are you moving towards the Usaine sect?"

    The envoy stood on his flying beast as he asked haughtily.

    Sam looked up and said to him coldly.

    "We are waging a war on the Usaine sect."

    "A minor power? Waging a war? Are you joking?"

    "You will see if we are joking or not. In two days, ask your sect to get ready their troops. We will start our attack whether you got ready or not."

    With that, they didn¡¯t bother with the envoy anymore, who went back.

    The first destination that Sam and his troops are nearing is an ind with the Space gates, this Space gate Ind is not the one that connects with the empires, rather it is for transporting the resources of the surrounding inds to the main sect. This is an important transportation point.

    This is the first ce they decided to take over and as they said they stayed on the shore for the next two days as the fleet of the Usaine sect slowly made their preparations in front.

    As for the sect head and the grand elders, there is no way they are going toe just like that. Instead, they sent a bunch of transcendent stage cultivators with them. The Usaine sect members are still fresh with their wounds, the casualties are not exactly small and even if it is a minor power, there is no saying what would happen.

    And after two days, the fleet of the Usaine sect moved forward. The fleet is actuallyrger and there are more than five hundred ships.

    They wanted to surround Sam¡¯s fleet but as they moved forward, Sam gave hismand and the cannons fired immediately.

    The tfish puppet troops started jumping in the waters as they moved into surfing mode and started attacking the ships.

    They want to see if they can upy the ships.

    The fleet of the Usaine sect is actually quite goodpared to the ships of the Adrian Empire.

    They are made of metals and they are quite sturdy.

    Sam figured it would be better to try and capture them. All he would have to do is capture them. All he would have to do is repair them and modify them a bit to add to his fleet at least, they could be secondary ships that act as backup.

    That is why he offered a reward and the soldiers are clearly excited. Even the cannons shooting is targeting carefully to not damage the hub and such.

    The Usaine sect troops suddenly had a wake-up call. This is not what they expected. They didn¡¯t expect they have such powerful ranged attacks and they didn¡¯t see these kinds of cannons before.

    At this moment, the flying troops of the usaine sect area also mobilized, but Sam did the same. In fact, he even let the Porpoise troops to start the attack and the ships of Usaine sect had the hardest time of their lives.

    The amphibious crafts suddenly became empty on both above the deck and below the deck.

    The flying troops of the usaine sect arepletely surprised because, Sam¡¯s side didn¡¯t send too many soldiers on the flying troops, rather they are mostly just flying beasts.

    They seemed too ferocious and there are too many of them as if they are out of control, but they are all working.

    The battle continued for half an hour. The beasts that are wounded came down andnded on the amphibious assault ship which is providing air defence.

    There the healers came from the room and started healing them. Even the troops that are injured were being directly sent to the amphibious ship for healing and even the porpoises are entering below the amphibious ship and healers are doing their work.

    The transcendent stage cultivators looked at the battle and are immediately dumbfounded. They didn¡¯t expect that the battle would be this one-sided.

    They decided to make a move, while one of them entered a space gate to inform the others of the situation.

    This time, the real problem is going to raise. The Transcendent stage cultivators are too many and there is no one here to enforce any rules of the battle field. So, they decided to attack every ship by themselves.

    The Transcendent stage cultivators from the yellow sand Ind tackled them directly, but still there are simply too many.

    As the Pre-transcendent stage and below are being dominated by Sam¡¯s side, they decided to just attack everyone and finish it, but they received the biggest shock in the world.

    When a Nascent stage cultivator threw a fire type spell at a frigate ship which is in the formation with the rest of the naval fleet, the spell didn¡¯t even reach the frigate and was blocked by an invisible formation which fluctuated brightly and showed its presence for the first time.

    The Transcendent cultivators are stunned in their spots.

    They didn¡¯t expect to be a fleet formation. This is something they didn¡¯t see and the formation seemed to be extremely strong. They couldn¡¯t damage it easily.

    They stood on their beasts as theyunched ranged attacks.

    Sam who is in the Nascent stage battle with a t fish puppet under him, used hismunication device to give amand.

    "Get the Energy Cannons ready."

    Sam spoke as he started eliminating his opponents in a faster pace.

    Because, he wants to look at the might of his new toy up close without missing anything.

    His new method of destruction, but also one of his newest creations. This is something Sam made with the inspiration and working principle he decoded from Vickers¡¯ fighting style.

    As he moved towards the Amphibious Assault ships, the upper deck of the room opened up and a cannon came out of it. The same thing happened in the remaining four ships and they all aimed at different directions.

    Meanwhile, in every ship within the fleet there are many people who are steering the ships who closed their eyes and started diverting energy from the energy cell of the ship to the amphibious assault ship.

    The cannon lit up brightly as its aim rotated a bit and locked on the Transcendent stage cultivator.

    The blue coloured concentrated water elemental energy lit up and shot towards the cultivator as if it wasser.

    But it is the Elemental energy beam. Sam tried so hard to crack this technique and he got it from a moment of inspiration when he is researching theyered and varying formation from the meteorite sand ind.

    His main problem when he first researched the energy cannon was that he couldn¡¯t find a way to shoot the gathered energy. Even though he tried experimenting with some special inscriptions that mainly focus onrge scale energy modifications, there are no results.

    But the inscription array which is responsible for connecting the formations and creating a varying formation with a sequence, he figured out that the portion of the array is responsible for the changing the state of the energy and diverting its direction when the formation sequence is varying.

    So, he tried to use the same principle to shoot the energy by changing the diverting part to extreme so that the motion would be fast and huge.

    Even though, it was called an Energy beam, in fact it is a lump of energy that was concentrated in one small location. An energy ball. Due to its glowing nature, it looked like a beam.

    And due to the amount of concentrated energy being insanely huge and an extremely small ce, even Transcendent stage cultivators couldn¡¯t handle the attack.

    The cultivator wanted to block the attack, but the water elemental energy exploded and made his body unstable at the same time, it made a hole through the body while it almost rained around him with mist and water appearing out of thin air.

    This attack, once again halted the tracks of everyone in the battle field, but it is not the end yet, the five cannons fired and therge energy cells which are as big as a yoga ball in a gym are being consumed rapidly, but the people are recing them as soon as they are done.

    And the battle once again became one-sided.

    Meanwhile, the news travelled towards the Usaine sect and the sect leader and the grand elders were rmed greatly. It is already a surprising thing of the Yellow sand ind to knock on their doors and they are still winning. This is something they have to take seriously.

    So, they left the injured grand elder who killed the Inscription association head and decided to go and see what exactly is happening.

 Chapter 471: Clone

    As the Sect head and the Grand elder tried to ess the Space gate for that Ind they realized that they couldn¡¯t do so.

    The Space gate was blocked from other side.

    They widened their eyes in shock and horror as they understood the implications of this happening. By the time, they decided toe and see the situation themselves, their ind seemed to have been captured and they already suffered some serious losses.

    The captured Ind have Space gates connected to the main ind of the sect and some other ces where people of higher-levels might stay.

    That is for the easier inspection of things. There almost eight inds surrounding this one with various resources. This one-third of the Usaine sect¡¯s foundation.

    Once this captured, it would be almost impossible to evade the capture of the remaining inds.

    Sam sent the fleet forward and didn¡¯t left them stay within the ind, rather some of the troops from the ships are deployed here.

    Half of the Sam¡¯s troops are traveling with the fleet even though they don¡¯t belong to Navy and that is because of situations like this. Since, there are many inds, Sam thought that this would be the best way to deal with it.

    After the troops arrived, they started surveying the whole ind to prepare for the defence. One Pre-transcendent stage cultivator and four Nascent stage cultivators and the remaining are Grand realm and Great realm cultivators.

    These troops are more than enough, at least that is what Sam thought and they started nting all kinds of bombs and traps along with installing the cannons on the Ind border and the construction structures.

    They didn¡¯t waste the single second and so does the fleet.

    They moved towards the next ind in the vicinity and captured it within half-an-hour. They left some troops and moved forward.

    On that day, they sessfully captured three inds and finally the Consummate realm cultivators made their move towards the fleet when they are near the fourth ind. Due to their injuries, they wanted to wait for a while. Seeing the confidence of the troops that attacked them, they thought that the Yellow sand Ind might have a person breakthrough to the Consummate realm.

    In their current states, they are notpletely fit for fighting a long battle. Due to unleashing their trump cards, they have self-inflicted some injuries themselves and now they tried their best to heal themselves.

    The main problem is there is no way they could heal themselves faster, because the only person who could make them medicines that could work on the consummate realm cultivators is dead. Maybe, at this moment no one on this has such medicine other than Sam.

    Because, he is the only one that picked up the Spatial ring of Old One and he still had a lot of medicines.

    But that is not the case here.

    Both the Consummate realm cultivators reached the fourth ind on their transcendent level beasts as they saw the Naval fleet approaching them.

    They didn¡¯t let their troops go and battle yet and let the fleet reach the ind. After the fleet is at a kilometre or so from the ind, they halted right there and Sect head made his move.

    He didn¡¯t attack, but just neared the area and looked at Arc who is in forefront of the troops with a cold look in his eyes.

    "Just Back off. You are not my level yet." He said coldly. Clearly, he could sense that Arc is a Consummate realm cultivator.

    "It is not good to be so sure about something."

    Arc also replied calmly as he stood on his vulture and increased his altitude to face the sect head.

    Not all Consummates have a Consummate level beast as their mount. Only Beast faction has such a great opportunity due to their familiarity with beasts.

    Some other Consummates do have one, but Usaine sect is not one of them.

    As both of them looked at each other, Usaine sect head didn¡¯t even take arc seriously.

    Arc also looked at him and said with a smile.

    "I will only make one move and that is my strongest move. If you can block without taking any damage, I will leave this ce."

    "You are weak, why should I give you that chance?"

    "I might be weak, but not weak enough for you to kill me in a single blow. Before you managed to capture me, my troops can level yours. My soldiers and methods are clearly superior to yours. Why loose so much manpower?"

    "Sure." Sect head agreed after some contemtion.

    Arc who started concentrating the lightning energy into the palm of his hand. It started enveloping his handpletely as he squeezed a lot of energy. Not all of it is from his own energy. His remaining arm which behind his back is holding a space jade from which he is absorbing energy non-stop.

    After three minutes, the lightning surrounding the palm of his hand is extremely potent and lethal. Sect head frowned. Even though, he felt that this is strong but not strong enough for him topletely quiver in fright. If he is careless, he might receive some critical damage which would reduce his fighting ability.

    And there is a big ¡¯if¡¯ ying a role in it.

    Another Consummate realm cultivator is also hovering on his beast a bit far away as he waited for this fiasco to be over. Because, he still has to recover from his injuries, he is not exactly in the best of his conditions.

    At this moment, what both of them didn¡¯t notice is that two energy beam cannons are concentrating the energy and just as Arc leaped towards them and Sect head started gathering his energy for defence, the two cannons fired.

    But they didn¡¯t target the Consummate cultivators themselves, rather the target was their mounts.

    They didn¡¯t expect this as they couldn¡¯t sense any threat to themselves.

    Both of them were surprised and couldn¡¯t react in time.

    Both the beasts took the full blow of the attack and started descending. The Consummate level cultivators doesn¡¯t have any way to fly in the air other than their mounts and they felt shocked.

    The Sect head had his energy disperse which was supposed to be his defence.

    At this moment, he noticed that Arc also leaped towards him followed by the vultureing from behind him.

    Arc stabbed the palm straight into the chest of the sect head. The Sect head tried his best to dodge and avoided hitting his heart, but the palm still stuck inside the chest and the left lung was pierced and the whole body became paralyzed due to the electric jolt it received as he fell into the shallow waters of the ind.

    Even the Grand elder fell like that, but before he could fall another energy beam hit him. But the damage is not something critical. Arc didn¡¯t fall down, but his beast caught him before he did so.

    He still floated in the air and once again threw another lightning attack using the sea water surrounding the two for his advantage.

    But this time, the grand elder defended himself and jumped out of water, but the sect head took the full brunt of the attack and paralyzed more.

    He started circting spiritual energypletely and tried his best to move. Even with his body like that, he still kicked of his legs and jumped out of the water before the next strike came.

    Both the sect head and grand elder looked at Arc with extreme resentment.

    After all, this is not what they agreed on. One could say that Arc¡¯s methods are despicable, but they can¡¯t me him. After all, they are the ones foolish enough to believe what their enemy said on the battle field.

    Now, the sect head is seriously injured and hisbat power dropped very much.

    Arc jumped off on to the ind to engage with him, when the Grand elder about to make a move, he realized that some has already locked on him and when he looked to the side, a golden silhouette formed beside him and took a monkey with humanoid structure.

    Sam threw the staff he got from the monkey king towards the illusory clone which had formed from the strand of hair he just threw.

    It is necessary to stop this guy no matter what.

    Sam¡¯s face is already pale as he used all his energy to make the clone manifest. For some weird reason, the clone would only form if his energy tank waspletely empty forcing him to use this as ast resort.

    He didn¡¯t try the clone before and watched it intently. The clone formed has same cultivation level as the Grand elder standing before him and it held the staff Sam threw towards him and made his move.

    The clone is extremely powerful and its battle style is extremely simr to the monkey king. He started ying with the Grand elder as if he is enjoying himself in a party.

    The battle is extremely one-sided. After all, who among the universe would dare say that they could contend with monkey king in a one on one fight of same level.

 Chapter 472: Revenge

    The battle between the four Consummate realm cultivators became extremely intense.

    Particrly, the one with Arc and the Sect head.

    Sect head is already injured from fighting the association heads and he even had to use his secret technique, which is extremely taxing to his body and causes some internal injuries.

    But before he could get a chance to recover, he has toe here and Arc¡¯s sneak attack didn¡¯t help him.

    If not for the fact that Arc showed so much power on the palm strike, both the Consummate realm cultivators wouldn¡¯t have just focused on him and gave up the surroundings.

    Even if they did notice, they might have not cared, after all a transcendent level attack is not enough to graze them much less injure them. But theypletely forgot about their mounts and they paid a price.

    The Sect head is having the hardest time of his life as he waspletely being overwhelmed by Arc.

    He couldn¡¯t think straight. Particrly, when his brain is a mess with all the frustrating thoughts he is getting at this moment.

    He is thinking maybe, it would have been better if he didn¡¯t wage a war.

    Not only did he lose some core strength in the battles, but he is also in an extreme predicament. Even if he survived this, he is not confident that Usiane sect will see tomorrow. The Major power heads would be stupid to leave the Usaine sect alone in this situation.

    He defended continuously as he looked at Arc with extreme resentment, he started activating the secret technique. He spat out a mouthful of blood due to his bloody state, but he didn¡¯t care anymore. He wants to eliminate Arc with all he got.

    As he was about to move and finish Arc with one strike of all his remaining strength, he suddenly sensed a tingle on his neck and he turned around abruptly, only to meet with a golden shing straight to his face.

    When the staff hit his face, he almost lost his consciousness and his whole spiritual energy is in a mess.

    He spat out another mouthful of blood and this time it is a lot more than the first time. He took the bacsh of the secret techniquepletely and his internal organs are shaking.

    He looked at the Monkey King¡¯s Clone who once again went on to battle with the Grand elder who is extremely agitated with the situation of the Sect head.

    He didn¡¯t want to end up like this. But he knew that this is the end.

    Arc didn¡¯t waste any time and just stabbed his palm straight into his heart ending his life.

    The grand elder felt shivers all over and he wanted to retreat immediately, thus he attacked the clone frenziedly and wanted to run away.

    But the clone is not letting him move one bit.

    After some time, when he was contemting using the secret technique at the risk of facing the same oue as the sect head., he found a small opening and ran for his life towards the main ind of the sect.

    After crossing a distance, he felt that he was saved, but when he turned back, he saw arge staff image conjured in the hands of the clone and it extended all the way towards him and with a single smash, he could almost hear his spiritual core cracking.

    This is somethingpletely unexpected, just when he thought, he is surely going to die, the clone or Arc didn¡¯t follow up and he didn¡¯t hesitate to run towards the Core of the Ind.

    "Isn¡¯t it better to finish him off here?" Arc asked Sam in a somewhat worried tone.

    "His head was already coined; it is just enough to cripple him," Sam said and gestured for the fleet to move forward.

    Hended on one deck and sat cross-legged to do onest thing that could conclude the war between the Usaine sect and them.

    Meanwhile.

    At the border of the Arsin and the Usaine sect. There are actually some guards whose duty is to guard the borders against the people who want to enter the Usaine sect territory.

    Even though, Arsin is under the Usaine sect, not every citizen could get ess to the sect. At this ce, Philip is standing with the Sirona and behind them, there are the remaining half of their troops.

    This is the reason they targeted the Arsin empire.

    Thisnd border which was often neglected was the perfect pration point.

    There are some Pre-transcendent cultivators, some Transcendent stage cultivators who were recruited from the Yellow Sand Ind and most of them are Nascent stage cultivators and Grand realm cultivators.

    They just cleared the guards of the border and they are moving into the Sect area at their top speed.

    Even though this Ind is the core Ind of the Sect, this side of the Ind ispletely devoid of the disciples.

    But the energy waves of theserge troops are not there just for show, the other disciples and elders could feel this and they couldn¡¯t help but shiver. The major strength of the sect is not here. The strongest Transcendent stage cultivators to the Strongest Nascent stage cultivators, all of them left to defend against Sam and they didn¡¯t expect someone would dare to attack this ce just like that.

    All the disciples and elders left in the sect started preparing to intercept the enemies, but what they didn¡¯t notice is that more than half of the Grand realm and Nascent stage cultivators in the sect all suddenly became dazed for a few seconds.

    It is for a short amount of time, that no one was able to detect it.

    But after that, these dazed members ran in different directions and twelve of them, in particr, ran towards the deeper parts of the sect, where the Ancestor stays.

    The Ancestor has also detected the situation and is getting ready to make a move and see who had the audacity to make a move of Usaine sect, but all of a sudden, he saw some people of the sect are running towards him and frowned at this.

    They seemed to have beening from different directions which made him contemte what happened.

    When they arrived at his doorstep, he came out and asked in an authoritative tone.

    "What happened?"

    But they didn¡¯t answer him, instead all of them surrounding him and kneeled on the ground before looking at his face with some reluctance and some of them even had tears in their eyes.

    The Ancestor was puzzled and all of a sudden his facial expression turned from confusion to horror.

    Because he noticed that the energy fluctuations in their bodiespletely became chaotic.

    This is the sign of self-destruction, he is not horrified because they are dying, but they are self-destructing here and that too together. Before he could make a move, all of them already exploded.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    "AHhhhhhhhhhhh."

    The ancestor cried at the top of his lungs as he was stuck within the explosion and that too right in the middle of it.

    When the dust settled, he was there barely breathing with blood and all over. His energy is barely fluctuating, He wouldn¡¯t be able to recover his energy nor his energy anytime soon, and that too if he was able to recover at all.

    At this moment, the same types of explosions came from all over the sect, but this time they are not targeted at the individuals, instead, they are targeted at the formation nodes of the defenses of the Sect.

    Now, the Usaine sect isid bare in front of Philip and the troops.

    The rest that followed is a bloody and one-sided battle.

    Sam opened his eyes on the deck and stretched a little as he looked towards the horizons.

    By the time, Philip and Sirona entered the core area of the ind and conquered all the ces in their away.

    Sirona directly went to the main court where the Eight guardian puppet stays and activated them to make them her personal possessions.

    The Grand elder who is injured in the battle with the Inscription association head is still unconscious.

    At this moment, Arc started moving towards the sect with full speed as he was told by Sam that the only Ancestor is still an unknown factor.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know how much damage the Ancestor received and how much time they had for him to recover, so he thought that it would be better for them to deal with that guy when he is weak.

    As the conquest continued and reached its finishing stages.

    The Grand elder who was crippled by the clone of the Monkey King and doesn¡¯t know what is happening in the sect just reached the sect only to meet with Philip who is waiting at the entrance.

    When he saw Philip¡¯s face, the grand elder frowned due to the unknown familiarity.

    "Who are you? Are you a disciple? Why is sect so silent?" He asked in a cautious tone.

    "Why so hurry Elder? Don¡¯t worry too much, you will know what happened once youe inside."

    Philip said and started walking towards him.

    The Grand elder frowned and asked.

    "Who are you?"

    "What? You still don¡¯t recognize me? I am genuinely disappointed." Philip said with a vexed and hurt expression.

    "Stop ying games and say it, who are you?"

    "I guess, it is really hard to recognize me since it has been almost eighteen years. I was just a kid back then"

    When Philip said those words, the Grand Elder was shocked and looked at Philip as he struggled to speak as he recognized that unknown familiarity.

    "That¡¯s right elder, the same child of that person who you chased all over the sect just to get the treasure. I hope you have been well because you wouldn¡¯t be anymore."

    As Philip said, he took out a dagger and walked towards him. The elder wanted to escape but he wasn¡¯t able to outrun Philip because he is crippled.

    "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh..."

    The screams of this person echoed throughout the sect and all the disciples who are surrendered or imprisoned are shivering.

 Chapter 473: Boxes

    Sam reached the ce the next morning and entered the sect. Arc already took care of the half-dead ancestor. He is more injured than they thought.

    Arkiv already entered the library to get that secret art.

    Philip and Sirona wanted some alone time as they themselves are responsible for the destruction of their former homes.

    At this moment, Sam went to thest remaining grand elder who is severely injured and, in a state, simr to the meat on a chopping block.

    He just woke up, but that is due to the pain Sam had inflicted not because of his recovery.

    Then the discussion started.

    Sam felt that it would be a loss to let a Consummate realm cultivator go, only his association with the Usaine sect is the enmity they had.

    There is nothing else other than that, if this guy can let go of that prejudice, there is no need for them to stand against each other. He could use a strong subordinate.

    This time, Sam didn¡¯t wear a disguise, he talked to him openly and after two hours of some serious convincing and considering the threat to his life, he agreed. Sam reluctantly took out a ss of wine from his gourd and gave him, so that he would leave.

    After the injuries came to a moderate state, he could heal himself. Anyway, the ss of wine did more than moderate recovery. The Pill of servitude did the rest of it.

    For the next two weeks, all Sam did is to manage thend he newly acquired Half of the major people of the Yellow Sand Ind moved to the Usaine sect. Sam met with the Eastern continent emperor.

    He is the only one Sam didn¡¯t do anything to. The remaining two empires under the Usaine sect are being regted.

    The professionals are absorbed into the organization and the titles they have as the professionals in the four organizations are already being eliminated. The association employees didn¡¯t have any choice and they could only join.

    The architects and the other artisans came to the empires to finish the parks so that he could start his business.

    At the same time, the parks in the Beast faction are also activated. Now, Sam doesn¡¯t have to worry about anything at all.

    After the activation, the construction team hase to the Usaine sect, to start another construction within the archipgo.

    Themunication system within the archipgo and the empires.

    It also helps him with the training of the newly recruited artisans.

    The other major powers didn¡¯t trouble them yet, as they are busy with all the things.

    After weeks, Sam started sorting out the gains and in one of the spatial rings which he figured out to be the spatial ring of the formation association head, he found something he urgently needs and that happened to be one of the boxes he has been searching.

    This is the third box he got and he is halfway there and when the Ind leader of the Yellow Sand Ind saw this box, he was surprised.

    "How can you have this? Isn¡¯t it the family heirloom of the Fire scale Ind?"

    Sam was stunned, he just felt like he is already half-way there and is quite satisfied as most of the preparation phase is over and he would get what he wants in no time and the task just got easier.

    Sam thought for a bit and looked at Martin asked.

    "Do you have a good rtionship with them?"

    "Not that close. We are the most neutral force of all the minor powers on the. Fire scale Ind is one of the strongest minor powers."

    "Well, we will see if we can get that box by cutting a deal before the friends of the other major powerse and talk to us."

    And the next three days, Sam went on this business trip and with some intimidation, coercion, and threats along with some valuable exchanges and simply put it is the carrot and stick.

    He came back after the three days with the fourth box. Now only two left.

    And after two days, the call he has been waiting for finally came. From the space gate leading to the meeting spot of the central continent, the Envoy of the other five major powers came to meet with Arc who is on the front of the leader of the Usiane sect for others.

    He still had a mask on his face and he and Sam decided to go to the meeting.

    When they arrived, Sam didn¡¯t go to the meeting directly, but they can stillmunicate with Arc through themunication devices and the portable hub he has on him.

    Inside the meeting room, the major power heads all are waiting for him.

    Including, Sai. This time, it is not a matter of their parks and goals, it is a matter of a new power emerging in theirmunity.

    They have to find if they are worth that much to upy the position as their equals.

    "Hello, Nice to meet you. Your name?"

    Old Thunder asked as soon as Arc took a sea.

    "rk." Arc replied. But it is not he thought of, Sam is the replying for everything that is happening here.

    So, even though they are speaking with Arc, they are actually having a conversation with Sam.

    "We never knew that a man named rk is in the Yellow Sand Ind. Where were you all these years?"

    "Staying low, I guess." His voice is somewhat cold as if he doesn¡¯t want to talk to them at all.

    But the major powers didn¡¯t care at all, they just continued on with questioning.

    "We heard that your fleet is actually quite excellent. We never know that yellow Sand Ind has such skilled artisans?"

    "No, we don¡¯t actually have them. They were bought."

    "Bought?" Old thunder was stunned.

    "Yes, Bought. Customized and specifically designed."

    "Who sold you? The associations?" Old thunder¡¯s voice is kind of agitated.

    "No, actually. It is from someone you guys already knew earlier. His name is Sam. He has a city under his name and he seemed to be under your empire."

    "What? Sam?"

    Old thunder was stunned and so were the other heads. Sai has the minimum reaction because he already kind of guessed something before when the chaos started.

    "Why would he sell you something? Is he open to a business like this? We didn¡¯t know that."

    "No, it is a part of his revenge. He sold them solely because he wants to destroy the Usaine sect. he said that his friend had some past grudge with the Usaine sect.

    In fact, he gave us the whole n for this invasion.

    We even made a deal with him about the parks."

    "What did he take for that?" This time lightning Spear sect head asked this question. He is pretty agitated about this. The parks are too big of an investment for letting it go."

    "Well, he would pay a sum of money and gave ten percent of the profits. But I think he wouldn¡¯t ept such a deal with you guys."

    "Why would that be?"

    "Working with some people who are aplices of the thieves of his designs? Come on man. You should know he wouldn¡¯t agree to that easily."

    With those words, all of a sudden, the conversation started diverting from skinning Arc with a question and pressuring them to do business with Sam.

    "I have advice if you want to do business with him."

    When Arc said that the rest of them turned silent and looked at him to continue.

    "Sam seemed to have been researching on some ancient puzzle boxes that he found and he learned that they are a set. He wants to find thest two boxes of the set to see if he could improve his formation and inscription expertise.

    If you guys can find it and pay somepensation for all you did, you might get a deal."

    "Puzzle Boxes?"

    "It¡¯s about time, I need to go."

    Arc said and decided to leave, but no one stopped him. Everyone is thinking to themselves as they left one after another.

    Their n to grill Arc was gone through the window and everyone only wants their parks to go running. The percentage Arc said is definitely not eptable, but they knew that they are going to find a way to cut a deal.

    And one of the first ones to consider this is the Old Thunder who got a cue as soon as he heard the Ancient Puzzle boxes and the second person who thought of this is actually the Beast faction head, Sai.

    Because they had these puzzle boxes sitting in their own treasuries for hundreds of years without any use.

    Sai decided that he would exchange it for some more friendship as for the Old Thunder, he wants to make some big money.

    Meanwhile, Sam left the Usaine sect along with Arc toplete another Invasion.

    The other empire under the thunder god temple doesn¡¯t have to be independent anymore and by the end of the month, it would be under his control.

 Chapter 474: Business

    One monthter.

    It has been one year and six months and there is still another one year and six months for the next Pce of Inheritance to open in the higher realm.

    In this past month, Sam has been recruiting the new people left and right and giving them crash training and creating mercenary groups all over.

    In fact, the new mercenary groups appeared in all the empires under all the major powers. But the Major powers still didn¡¯t learn from their past ignorance.

    They didn¡¯t know that these discreet movements of Sam are actually the ones that almost caused a world war between all the top dogs.

    This time, Sam didn¡¯t even send the mercenaries straight from his ce, instead, he recruited them in that same nation and made the mercenary groups there itself which didn¡¯t raise too many suspicions.

    After all, there are many mercenary groups emerging every day and disappearing every day.

    He just upied some previous mercenaries and didn¡¯t even change the name.

    He is increasing his force like crazy and within this month, he built awork that is as big as the underground forces that previously existed.

    While the situation is like this, Sam got his fifth box from the Beast faction without even paying anything.

    Anyway, he is not in a hurry to pay them back.

    But all of a sudden, Sam felt like he is a little lost in the current situation.

    He thought that the boxes would be difficult to obtain. But this turned out to be one of the easier than he thought.

    He wanted to tear down the major powers for these things if he has to, to obtain them.

    But before he knew it as soon as he took down a major power and three associations, he already got what he wanted.

    Thest box is in the hands of the thunder god temple.

    He is sure that he can deal with them sooner orter.

    At this moment, he is currently contemting what to do.

    Should he still destroy the Major powerspletely? But then, he would have to go through the situation in which he has to take care of the people¡¯s needs.

    After all, if he really decided to take on the authority and eliminate it, he would be the one who would be responsible for the consequences of the chaos that follows the destruction of the authority.

    There is no need to make life difficult for himself.

    At this current position, he has all kinds of metals and materials avable at his beck and calls and anything on this would be avable for him in a week.

    So, he is thinking about whether he should still proceed with the n he made before.

    He decided to leave it at that for the moment. Anyway, since he got so much time on his hands, he might as well try and see if he can go to the next realm earlier. He might be able to get a feel of the new world he would be entering and get some foothold if possible.

    As he is contemting this, he got some news that the Old Thunder wants to discuss a business deal with him and sent Arthur as a representative.

    When Sam heard this, he wasn¡¯tpletely surprised.

    This is already one of the results he expected from the situation Arman is putting Arthur in.

    After all, Arman is thirty points deficits whenpared to Arthur and it wouldn¡¯t be too hard for him to make them up.

    So, it is impossible for Old Thunder to not give him chances. In fact, this is one of his ploys.

    No matter, how much better Arman might be as a future heir candidate, he would never stay in this ce and he couldn¡¯t stay in this ce. He has to move to higher realms and if possible, he has a chance to go to a ce where the greatest of gods reside.

    Why would he decide to stay on this rundown?

    Sam knew this perfectly well and that is why he didn¡¯t take any key administration role in the organization no matter how big it was.

    Anyway,ing back to Arthur¡¯s situation, since Arman cannot stay and even Sam knew it but he still tried his best to get this future heir position, then Arthur will also try topete and Sam would be the best bet.

    In other words, Arthur is in front of him right now, because Sam willed him to be here. He manipted the major powers without even them knowing that he has his eyes on them.

    Sam went to meet with Arthur, this guy still has the same tense expression when he spoke to him.

    "Hello Sam, I will get straight to the point. We want to do a business deal with you and that is regarding the Parks. We only recently learned that the designs that the three associations provided are stolen from you, we deeply regret doing business with them.

    Now, if you can tell us the design charges, we would pay you and you can further ask for the payment regarding the activation and management."

    Sam chuckled as soon as he heard that.

    "Arthur, you seem to have rehearsed the lines quite well, who taught them to you? Your father or some other elder?" When he asked this Arthur suddenly felt a bit afraid. Sam¡¯s voice turned cold as he continued.

    "Recently learned? Deeply regret? Don¡¯t make meugh. Do you guys think that I am oblivious to what is happening between the six major powers? Do you guys really nit know what happened? Seems like you must have met rk otherwise, why would you even bother to meet me?

    You guys might think that I can¡¯te out and knock on your door because I would lose the protection of my city, but your father must have forgotten that I spent more than three months in your thunder god temple and definitely didn¡¯t remember what I could do in three months.

    Seems like the Beast faction is not really that great of an impact.

    You better re-evaluate the situation and rearrange the words better. You can leave now."

    With that, Sam didn¡¯t even wait for the response and left the ce.

    Arthur was stunned. He expected that Sam would reject this, but he didn¡¯t expect that he would be this stern and this stubborn.

    He outright didn¡¯t leave any room for negotiation.

    But the remaining major powers are in an even more difficult situation, at least the thunder god temple has an opportunity to probe Sam¡¯s stance in this situation, but the rest are not even getting any ess to meet him directly because of the thunder god temple.

    They are all thinking that It would have been great if there is a Space gate between them and Sam¡¯s city, one must wonder what they would feel when their empires are connected to them by Space gates.

    After a few days, once again someone came to Sam¡¯s city from the thunder god temple.

    This time, Arthur and another person came, Moriya. The elder with most Prospects came with the future heir.

    He is already a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator which is not much surprising to Sam.

    "We apologize for disturbing you and also for the fact that we have cooperated with the three associations on the park matter. But it is not our intent to steal your hard work and make money off of it.

    It was just a slight moment of greed that we could save money from working with the associations and we knew our mistake.

    I hope you can be the bigger man and forgive us.

    This is a small token of our apology."

    With that, he ced a spatial ring on the table. Sam took the spatial ring took a peek into it.

    This is something he expected thest box of the six is inside the ring. He looked at Moriya and asked.

    "Apology epted. Is that all?"

    "No. We want to have an opportunity to cooperate with you in the park business. We have invested a lot and most of the construction wasplete. But we couldn¡¯t activate it. We want to discuss a partnership with you."

    "Five percent. If you guys want to cooperate with me, you can only get five percent. All the staff would be mine and no one from the thunder god temple can involve themselves in any form of administrative and financial affairs of the parks."

    "Sam, you are cutting us too short don¡¯t you think? We have made the constructionpletely and it cost hundreds of millions in each and all of it is worth only five percent?

    We need at least fifty percent of the stake."

    "You think too highly of the construction you made. There is no way you would be able to anything with the parks you have made even if you activate them.

    Because the construction was notplete, to begin with.

    Like I would let the whole n fall into the hands of those guys. There is still some core construction that was yet to bepleted."

    "How can that be? Some parks in the Usaine sect are activated,"

    "Then what happened? They should have exploded already."

    Moriya couldn¡¯t help but widen his eyes. Now they understood the whole matter. It seems like that the fifty percent is but a pipe dream.

 Chapter 475: Herb Garden Head

    The negotiations with the thunder god temple went for more than a day. They kept on arguing as the thunder god temple started their baseline at the forty percent stake and keep on reducing their rate step by step and Sam stayed in the five percent line for more than half-a-day.

    And after persistently staying there for such a long time, he increased his offer by two percent, and finally after another half a day of Moriya¡¯s persistent struggle Sam finally agreed to give nine percent away.

    After that, Sam started preparing other things, now there is a way for the citizens to move from one empire to another because Sam started making sea transport possible.

    It is made as a luxurious cruise. Now, he doesn¡¯t have to worry about the thunder god temple finding out their troops¡¯ existence directly in the empires.

    Within in a week, they already started doing business in the parks. The activation doesn¡¯t need much more than the instation of the energy cells.

    And he did it within a week. As for the so-called core construction with the cement and Pre-casting method and they just added some superficial decorations all over the parks and be done with that.

    The thunder god temple couldn¡¯t find anything regarding this. But this time, since the existence of the associations arepletely eliminated from the face of the earth and the Usaine sect which was supposed to be the one recing the three associations and maintain the standard was also gonepletely.

    Sam could take advantage of the situation and decided to make preparations topletely eliminate the orthodox thinking and methods.

    He would be the pioneer of this world¡¯s interpretation of technology.

    And the first step would be to establish his teachings on all sides of the empire. Simply put, he would set up a school in an empire of every major power.

    Since there is one on the western continent, he doesn¡¯t need another one.

    His next school will be in the Kali empire of the Beast faction and the third one in the Arsin empire.

    Since he recruited the new members and have a lot of new members, he can do this and give them more opportunities and at the same time expand the horizons of the teachers and the students with an asional rotation of the employees and even student exchanges, interschoolpetitions and such will allow them to grow and develop with a broader perspective.

    This might take a while and thisrge-scale construction might take a while, but this would allow him to set the standard and wouldn¡¯t let the previous unorthodox and stubborn methods with no room for creativity, (Just like Indian Education System)e to light once again.

    And he would be the one setting the standards and designating the professions. The world will have a new industrial revolution making the stubborn professional hierarchy and methods vanish.

    Anyway, he has got all three spatial rings which have almost all the important documents of the artisan associations. As for the orthodox methods and techniques of the library that are plundered by the major powers, but they are not something Sam doesn¡¯t have.

    The major powers might want to create their own standards with this knowledge and resurrect the associations, but it would be toote.

    Because, Sam already made his move and the Beast faction, Thundergod temple, and Usaine sect regions¡¯ professionals are all mostly injected into his organization. There are only three more major powers left.

    And Sam¡¯s guess is not too far off, that is also the reason why thunder god temple and the Lightning Spear sect took away the two association heads.

    They are nning to take over one of the associations each and spread throughout the world and create the next generation of the artisans with the help pf the association heads they took away and the Herb Garden is still setting their sights on the Pharmaceutical association.

    But they don¡¯t know that they are toote. And it would take time to realize because their initial and most important task at hand is to activate the parks and cut a deal with Sam. Particrly, after they realized that the thunder god temple has already made the deal, there is no way the remaining three major powers would sit still.

    At this moment, the Herb garden head has visited the Usaine sect, now known as the Dusk Organization.

    Named after the trantion of Sam¡¯s Indian name. [Syam: Evening]

    The Herb garden head visited to meet with rk to ask if he has any way to meet Sam and he was greeted with a pleasant surprise.

    The Space Gate of the Arsin was now put to use.

    The first thing Arc did when he took over is to destroy the area surrounding the Space gate as if it was newly created. He did that so discreetly that no other major powers couldn¡¯t pick on that.

    The Herb garden head made his way through the space gate and arrived at Sam¡¯s city and was surprised to see the majesty of it as a whole.

    He has seen the videos of the city and even the prototype products that Sam had given them. But the real thing is nothingpared to the video. He could feel the overall energy connection between the buildings of the city.

    Arc didn¡¯t stay with him for the journey and just led him to an administrative officer of the city and went back to the Dusk.

    The admin officer took him to Sam¡¯s office inside the school and all this while the Garden head kept on asking questions as if he was apletely curious little child who came out for the first time.

    The most interesting thing for him at the moment is the bee puppet. The Bee puppet is following the admin officer as if it was his pet, he even saw other officers having the same type of puppet but with different colors all over their bodies following them.

    Even though, the puppets didn¡¯t perform any of their usual tasks, that only increased his interest in this puppet.

    When they reached the office, Sam is busy with a lot of paperwork and brainstorming. There are some special patents he has to verify and something rted to the new ns of the schools and so on.

    But as soon as the herb garden head came, he stopped his work and greeted him. After both of them exchanged pleasantries that arepletely fake, the garden head finally came to the point.

    "We want to make a deal with you regarding parks."

    Sam replied with a smile on his face. "I am always open for business."

    "Then, can we talk about the stake?"

    "I will assume you would have already known about the deal with the thunder god temple, but I cannot give you the same amount of stake. I can only give away five percent."

    "Mr. Sam. Don¡¯t you think you are being a little biased here? Four percent is arge piece. You cannot show that much favoritism."

    Sam chuckled at his words and said.

    "You are getting the wrong idea, Garden head. There is no favoritism, in fact within the current major powers, I have most conflicts with the thunder god temple as I have some enemies who went for my life there.

    The reason I gave them that stake is because of another exchange, you might have already heard from rk that I am looking for the ancient puzzle boxes that use formations and inscriptions to unlock.

    They exchanged that thing with me and I gave them that stake in the exchange. On top of that, if I have to blunt you are an aplice of the three associations when you agreed to make a deal with them regarding the parks even after you knew that the designs are stolen from me.

    The only reason I didn¡¯t react is that the parks are still not activated. Now, that you couldn¡¯t do it, you are asking me for help.

    That is not fair for my side if you think."

    Sam said in a somewhat mncholic tone.

    The Garden head turned awkward at this moment.

    He didn¡¯t expect that Sam would directly bring this up.

    "Is there no way around this situation?"

    Sam had a deeply thoughtful expression and said after some silence.

    "I do have a way to work around this issue, but I don¡¯t know if you will agree with it."

    "Please do tell. We can negotiate."

    "I neednd in one of your empires. You must have seen the size of thepound we are in. I need the same size ofnd and permission to open the school."

    "School?"

    "Yes, a school. This is one of my life goals. To educate people. That is why I established this school we are in. All the city, parks, and other things I did are all for this. I will be teaching orphans. I am an orphan myself. So, this is something very dear to me."

    Now it was Garden head¡¯s turn to be silent and he didn¡¯t know what to say for a moment.

 Chapter 476: Puzzle

    The negotiations with the Herb garden head are just as tense, but this time Sam didn¡¯t budge as easily as the first time.

    He was even more stubborn than the first time and just didn¡¯t agree to anything more than eight percent.

    The Garden Head felt vexed at his stubborn stand. He almost stood up from his seat and smacked Sam out of the building in a single p. But he didn¡¯t let the frustration get into his head and do something rash.

    Unlike the ten Consummate realm cultivators, he didn¡¯t take a look at how he killed Old One and almost killed Sravan.

    But he sure as hell, heard of the deeds and tried to be as careful as he can. If that guy can kill someone who is far away from his ce, there is no doubt he would have some ns when the target is right within his property.

    Even though Sam rejected to increase the stake, the Garden head took a different approach. He didn¡¯t raise the stake, but he started asking for other benefits and finally, after almost an entire day of arguing back and forth, they dide to a conclusion and that is the stake is still eight percent, but the Herb Garden will get a discount for all the purchases in any Park.

    And after another tense negotiation battle, they finally settled on a three percent discount for the disciples of the Herb Garden.

    After the deal ispleted, he sent some people from the Architecture department to take a look at thend.

    But then only he realized, he is working on the bare minimum staff. Their lives became extremely hectic.

    But they cannot do anything about this current situation but topromise and send a single Nascent stage artisan and check out thend and if possible to make it t and ready for construction.

    The Garden head didn¡¯t have anything to do and wanted to return, but for some reason, he wanted to take a tour over the city and taste the food.

    By the time he was done, he had a Spatial ring full of some delicacies and wines that he liked. He even wanted to make a bee puppet, but couldn¡¯t.

    Because currently, the Bee-Puppets are out of stock. Now, only Pre-order deals are being done. The regr retail of the puppets was halted.

    After looking at the city, he wanted to stay for a bit longer and also experience the high-end hotel service of this ce.

    But he didn¡¯t stay in the end because he is also the Sect leader and he couldn¡¯t be away from the Sect for several days. So, he made his move back with the architect Sam sent to take a look at thend.

    They didn¡¯t directly go to the Herb Garden or the empire under the garden. They first arrived at the dusk organization and then moved through the central continent meeting point to arrive at the empire of the Herb Garden. The empire is called the Sage empire.

    After handing the architect over to the emperor of that ce, the Garden left.

    After a few days, the head of the Lightning spear sect and ThunderBolt sect also appeared at the Dusk Organization.

    They also heard something about the Herb Garden¡¯s head going to Sam¡¯s city and making a deal.

    This only strengthened after the parks are activated by the team sent by Sam after re-arranging the staff. So, now it is their turn to panic.

    They are extremely vexed at the fact that they are thest two major powers who are left out, they even wanted to take it out on the thunder god temple head. After all, in the previous scuffle with the three organizations, the three of them teamed up.

    But as soon as the deed was done, the thunder god temple head seemed to have returned to his previous rivalry and didn¡¯t even inform them of the deal.

    They entered Sam¡¯s city and want to use all means to get a better deal than both of them. But they wouldn¡¯t help but be disappointed because they had to negotiate for two days and they barely got the same deal as the Herb Garden.

    This is the first time, they saw a young man negotiating as if he was negotiating with a grim reaper on his deathbed for some more time.

    He is not even letting go of a single spirit stone, much less a percentage of the stake.

    After the two of them left, Sam stayed in his office and suddenly felt like half of the weight he was carrying waspletely lost.

    When he made a list of the construction projects he made and then calcted the budget, he couldn¡¯t help but feel that the life of a student is about to be settled.

    It is none other than the second patent holder.

    The Cement Patent holder. If he knew that there is this much value for his seemingly insignificant invention in other¡¯s eyes, he might want to cry in happiness for three days straight.

    After settling the matters at hand and assigning the tasks, Sam went to his room. He suddenly heaved a sigh of relief. He doesn¡¯t even know where his friends are at this moment, but he didn¡¯t want to think too much about that.

    Hended on the bed and slept till the next morning.

    After he woke up, he went to take a shower and changed into some other clothes. This is the time he became free in a long while. For more than a year, he has been in aplete mess. He lived chaotically without any kind of rest.

    He worked his ass off to get what he needs. But he didn¡¯t hurry to open the boxes immediately. He just sat there on the floor as he looked at the majestic view of the city from the floor to ceiling window of his room.

    He could faintly see the School building in the woods. He wanted to get drunk all of a sudden. Even for Sam, all this seemed a little overbearing and overwhelming. Even he felt that this is too much of a pressure for him to bear. But what can he do? He was under constant threat.

    For the whole day, hepletely idled away, and only at night, he went on to the top of the building and started taking out the six boxes.

    This is the next step. If he finished dealing with the six boxes and figure out the way towards the next realm, he can finally rx a bit and doesn¡¯t have to bother himself with unnecessary tensions. He can rx a bit and focus solely on his cultivation and battle prowess.

    He wasn¡¯t able to practice in a long while that he is feeling a little rusty himself. Not only that, he is feeling that he wasn¡¯t using his prowess with great enough efficiency.

    There is no way he is okay with that.

    After he took out the six boxes and ced them on the floor, he looked at them intently. There is no immediate reaction, but he could feel there is some sort of energy fluctuation around them and soon, faint mechanical sounds could be heard.

    The gears inside the boxes started moving slowly and there is a strange glow on the boxes and within a few seconds, there are some protrusions of different shapes and sizes and also grooves of various shapes and sizes on theteral surfaces of the boxes and when Sam looked at them, he felt like he is seeing a giant three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

    He sat down and started figuring out how to finish the puzzle.

    Actually, it is not that difficult. It only took three minutes to figure out the correct order and ce them together and creating a muchrger rectangr box.

    When he connected the whole thing, what he saw on the top surface of therge box stunned him a bit.

    Because it reminded him of a sliding puzzle. In fact, it is a sliding puzzle. But the thing is it wouldn¡¯t make an image or a sequence. Instead, it would create an inscribed formation.

    But the main problem at the moment is what kind of formation would that be. If he doesn¡¯t know that, it would be quite tough to actually unlock this.

    There are just too many slides in the puzzle and they are quite small. The possibilities are also endless due to this and the number of actual formations is also numerous.

    So, he started looking at the boxes continuously to see and figure out if he can find any clues regarding the formation that should appear on them.

    After looking all around the box and even using the observation ability, Sam felt like he would be having a handful with this box.

    There is no way he would be able to focus on the cultivation for the next half-a-month at least. That is what he understood after he saw the clues around the box.

 Chapter 477: Next Realm

    Sam almost made the rooftop his residence for the next few days. He continuously tried to experiment with the runes on the box.

    He even made a replica of the slide puzzle and started carrying it wherever he went when performing his regr duties in the organization.

    He is extremely busy and vexed at the same time. At first, with the clue ced around the box, he thought he would be able to solve this in half-a-month, but he clearly overestimated his own abilities and thought too highly of his skills.

    He barelypleted half of the puzzle in this half-a-month and he is not confident that it would be done any time soon.

    But on the fifteenth day afternoon, a message arrived that Arkiv came to meet him.

    By this time, Arkiv already figured out who Sam is, but he didn¡¯t say this to any other person. Only he knew that Sam¡¯s involvement in the destruction of thisnd is too much and it would be no exaggeration to say that he yed all the major powers big time.

    This taught him a lesson that he should be more cautious when dealing with Sam and shouldn¡¯t make any rash decisions.

    Sam came back to his office, where Arkiv is waiting as he looked around curiously.

    Even though he figured out who Sam is earlier, he still didn¡¯t visit him till now. He was extremely busy assimting the knowledge of the new secret technique he got from the Usaine sect.

    When Sam came, both of them exchanged pleasantries and he directly came to the point.

    "My dimensional crosses opened."

    Arkiv said in a serious tone.

    "When?" San also became extremely serious and asked.

    "Yesterday, I broke through into middle-stage of the Nascent stage with Level-4 and the dimensional crosser opened.

    I don¡¯t know where it exists and where it came from, but all I know is that is definitely present and I can gain ess to it anytime I want."

    "Can I see it?"

    Sam asked curiously.

    Arkiv nodded and closed his eyes as he extended his hand. The next second a ck sphere appeared in his hands.

    It is asrge as a ser ball andpletely ck in color emitting a metallic shine. He opened his eyes and with a thought, the smooth ck sphere suddenly opened up and spread with some metallic structures inside which arepletely engraved with runes.

    A holographic screen appeared above the metallic structural mechanism and there are some kinds of words and numbers written on it.

    The words are showing the name of the realm and the numbers might be the coordinates of the ce they are going to appear.

    When Sam saw the name of the realm, he was surprised and it is actually not a good one. Because the name of the realm is actually something he is familiar with.

    It is one he read about from the Hindu Mythology.

    He doesn¡¯t know exactly which mythology is true, but he studied many of them in his previous life and he did it mostly for inspiration in the weapon designs and technology breakthrough.

    And most of it has helped him understand many things in this world. And apparently the mythologies he read and not just some simple myths.

    Many of them seemed to be real in this world and even though, they slightly deviated from what he knew and read, at least he has some head start above the rest of the yers.

    Coming to the Point, the ce they are going next is actually Naga-Loka.

    The lowest of the seven Pat Lokas in Hindu Mythology.

    From what he knew from the mythology, there are fourteen Lokas and out of them, seven are the realms of celestials and mortals and the remaining seven are of the mortals and Demons.

    The realms belonging to the Celestials are Mortals are where higher-level humans and the deities live and the realms belonging to Mortals and Demons are where the demonic mortals like lesser demons, Nagas the Serpentmen, Yakshas nature spirits or the elementals of lower status purity live in this ce.

    Of course, the same races live in other Pat Lokas, but even in these races, there are various families and Bloodline difference and they maintained their residences in different realms based on their statuses by the most powerful upying the realms with the most resources.

    The Naga Loka is actually a world that is ruled by the Naga Race and from a mythology standpoint, only Nagas used to stay in this ne and ruled by them.

    Of course, there are other beasts and such there which aremon, but other demonic mortals and other demons were not present in this ce at one point in time. But Sam didn¡¯t think his knowledge canpletely reflect who is staying in this ce.

    But one thing he surely knows is that, no race that he knew of likes humans. No matter which demonic race might have taken residence in this ne, they don¡¯t like humans.

    It would be hard for them to survive in this ce.

    He also remembered the numbers just in case.

    When Arkiv saw that Sam was dazed, he felt like something is wrong and asked.

    "Why are you dazed?"

    Sam came out of his stupor and said.

    "It¡¯s nothing. When are you leaving?"

    "I haven¡¯t decided yet. I met with that guy from the Beast faction and it turned out to he has also broken through and got the dimensional crosser recently. But he has different coordinates. Not by much though. Only three digits changed. We don¡¯t exactly know how to decode these things, but my gut is telling us that they are not that far away.

    We are thinking maybe they are the different entrances¡¯ locations in that other realm."

    "Are you sure? I mean, they had opened six entrances previously in here. So, there is indeed a possibility that you are true. But don¡¯t you think there is a chance that they are sending you guys to the different corners and have to find a way to the Pce of Inheritance?"

    Arkiv thought for a moment and said.

    "There is indeed such a possibility, but we are thinking a bit positively. I am also contemting if I should leave right now or should I leave a bitter.

    After all, there is still around one year and five months for the next pce of inheritance.

    I don¡¯t know if I would be able to survive that ce with my current strength. I don¡¯t even know what kind of dangers we face."

    Sam looked at him and said after some thought.

    "From what I know, Naga Lok should be somece that is ruled by the Naga Race and I know this because I read in some ancient text that Naga Race is a special race that can be demonic mortals to the Greater Demon Celestials.

    The most important thing is, they don¡¯t like humans. I hope you will be making the decisions carefully. It is not a safe ce."

    Arkiv frowned after listening to this. He doesn¡¯t know where Sam read this and how he got this knowledge.

    But from the looks of it, he doesn¡¯t seem to be joking at all. He took the advice and decided to consider his next step as he asked.

    "When are you going to leave?"

    Sam halted his train of thoughts and immediately felt a headache. He was trying his best to figure out that too. But what can he do? He couldn¡¯t get past that stupid sliding puzzle.

    "I am working on it, I got the boxes with a lot less effort than I anticipated, but now I am having trouble cracking the secret behind it.

    The puzzle is extremely frustrating. But I think I would be able to deal with that by the end of the month."

    Arkiv made some small talk and left. He decided to check with the remaining yers and see when they wille.

    He is the only one who tried to have contact with the former teammates in the second pce of inheritance. Not all of them talked to him when he reached out, but there are three more people.

    After he left, Sam has sat on the chair once again and felt rather vexed.

    The box is taking too much of his time. Actually, he could have unlocked that in the Divine dimension, not only would he save time, he would also be able to use the simtion inside. But he just doesn¡¯t want to go inside this fast.

    He has been spending an awful lot of time inside this since his ns to get these boxes, even though it is saving him time, he also figured out that he is losing his sense of time. His body for some reason is not aging in the divine dimension. But his mind is aging.

    He doesn¡¯t want to experience that for some time. Simply put he wants a break. But sometimes, one has to do what they need rather than what they want.

    After some thought, he decided to proceed with the box opening inside the divine dimension which means he is confident that it would be cracked in the next two days.

 Chapter 478: World Coordinates

    The next two days, Sam once again spent in the divine dimension. Since, he already knew that the other yers are getting their ess, it is better for him to finish this as soon as possible.

    As for not using the divine dimension as often as before, it seems like it is not really possible for him at this rate.

    Many of the things in his life are dependent on the Divine dimension at this moment. At least, the only bright side for him is that he was able to take these fifteen days¡¯ break.

    After the puzzle was solved, there was a clicking sound and Sam opened the box. Inside the box, there are sixpartments. One of them has documents and all the other five have some kinds of metallic structure inside.

    He didn¡¯t touch the metallic parts and instead only took out the stack of documents and started reading them.

    He sat in his office as he went through the documents one by one.

    The stack of documents contained all the information regarding the dimensional crossing and the usage and structure of the device that is inside the box along with the system of the world co-ordinates.

    The thing the interested him the most are actually the world coordinate system, as for the rest about the structures and the mechanism, the most he understood is the working principle but the internal structure is a far cry for him, without knowing the method of creating such arge device and making it extremely short.

    It is just like the thunder prison. He couldn¡¯t understand the whole structure just from what he is seeing in front of him.

    So, he decided to focus on the coordinate system.

    The world coordinates are mainly responsible for this type of interdimensional travel. And they are calcted by great difficulty.

    The world coordinates are calcted by first finding a nodal point of the world in the open space at which the warping urs. These points of space are the ones that connect them to the other worlds.

    From every such nodal point of space, there would be a certain range the device can transport them and with that nodal point as an origin, the whole area under its range is coordinated like a three-dimensional space.

    It is actually veryplicated.

    So, by the time he read it, he understood some things. The world coordinates are indicated by a string of numbers. For example, [008-012-0133,0521,04152-165,156,246] These are the world coordinates of the realm numbered 008, and the Spatial node 012 and the next coordinates represent the coordinates of the and thest three are the coordinates of a location within the.

    After he read through all this, he then started looking at the documents on how this thing works.

    As he went through all that, he understood how this thing works and how these coordinates are actually useful in this device.

    Apparently one of the fivepartments that have theponents of the device is a metallic sphere which is responsible for setting the world coordinates and inside this metallic sphere they would be some sort of specially made tes that contain the coordinate locations of the various realms¡¯ nodal points and thes.

    Thest thing which is the coordinates of the location on the could be varied normally.

    But the problem is the metallic sphere in the device is a spoiled one and it can only reach Naga Loka. He cannot change the world, nodal point, and even the. He can barely change thest coordinates of the ce he wants to visit on the.

    This greatly stunned him.

    He didn¡¯t know how exactly this device ended up like this, but he sure as hell knew that these gods must have set Naga Lok as the next stop because of the Gambler.

    He believed that Gambler made sure that they would stay that way because he didn¡¯t want to give Sam any chance to get past this world other than the device in front of him.

    After that he focused on assembling this thing and this time, he didn¡¯t do this inside the divine dimension. He assembled on his rooftop.

    He did this extremely carefully so much that he doesn¡¯t even want to carry twoponents together.

    After all, this is the one and an only ticket out of this world.

    He took his time as he slowly assembled the whole thing and there are some parts which need to be charged with spiritual energy as they are sealed for a long time.

    Heid formations for them and to increase the recharging speed before he assembled all the parts.

    When he was done, it is like arge metal crate. He looked through the documents on how to activate it and pushed a small square section on the corner of the box and all of a sudden, the box shrunk in its size as it became a metallic cube in his hands.

    Now, he pushed another button in another corner and the box once again became therge crate and opened up.

    After itpletely opened up there are three things which arepletely noticeable to the naked eye one of them is the circr tform which could probably let six people stand at once and the second one is mounting beside the circr tform on which the metallic sphere which has the world coordinates in it and thest one is the holographic screen.

    There is a string of numbers on the screen.

    They are the world coordinates. He ced his palm on the ck sphere and started trying to manipte the coordinates with his mind.

    Thest three sections of the coordinates kept on changing. But the rest of the numbers no matter how much he budged it, he wasn¡¯t able to do anything.

    He felt excited that at least it is working. The only thing that is bothering him is actually the energy consumption of this object. The mounting that ck Sphere was on is not just there to ce the sphere but also to inject the required spiritual energy and apparently, the spiritual energy can be injected directly from a person, and also the spirit stones can be used directly.

    Sam felt the pinch because of this reason.

    Yes, even Sam with his immense wealth felt the pinch.

    He would need to take hundreds of millions to transport all his friends along with him.

    As he figured this out, he closed the device once again and went back.

    Watt, Philip, and Jack are already back even Sirona came back and started teaching the sses. She is even working on the other school construction projects as she took students there to teach them practically.

    Not just her, every other lecturer is doing the same.

    They are trying their best to train the students in the most efficient manner.

    Now that his main obstacle is cleared, he is good to go as long as the tasks at hand arepleted. But there is another dilemma in his mind.

    To take his friends or not. For some reason, he doesn¡¯t want to take them to the Naga Lok. He is still considering if he should believe the knowledgeplete. Even if half of it is true, he would have to think twice even for his own survival. If his friends did tag along it is not going to be an easy task to survive.

    As he was thinking Philip just came into the office and sat down in front of him.

    Sam came out of his thoughts and asked.

    "How are you feeling?"

    "I am okay. It is not like this is the first time I killed someone."

    "Yeah, right. But it is the first time you killed your kin. There is a difference."

    Philip took a sharp breath and said.

    "Forget about me. What are you going to do now? With the current project going on, I think it would be impossible to conquer the world in the short term. If you really want to eliminate the major powers, it would take some time and you have to stabilize your position.

    I don¡¯t know how these heads be so stupid. They didn¡¯t even bring the suspicions towards you. Maybe we should have continued on with that chaos and destroyed everything.

    Even if they wouldn¡¯t disappear, they would have been beaten to theirst legs. You could have taken your time and finished them off."

    "What you said right. But what for? I don¡¯t have any aim towards being the ruler of the world. The world could have a single ruler divided into small powers for all I care. The only thing I want is freedom from that single ruler or all the rulersbined.

    I shouldn¡¯t be in their clutches or influence. I should be truly independent and I could have all the freedom I want. I want to create new things and sell them and spread my name all over the world.

    I don¡¯t want the world to remember me as a conqueror. Nor do they have to remember my battle prowess. As much as I am beast on the battlefield, I still like the me who works his ass off in theb and who pulls off his hair to find the solutions for theplex problems."

 Chapter 479: Information about Naga Loka

    A few days after the boxes arepletely unlocked, Arman also came to the city to tell the news about the unlock of his dimensional crosser.

    Sam checked the coordinates on his dimensional crosser and turned out thest set of coordinates are also different for him.

    But from what he saw the is the same. He came to the conclusion that every yer is being deployed to the same.

    Sam wanted to get as much information as he can. So, he decided to have a talk with every possible information source he had.

    The first one is his long-timepanion, Yanwu.

    And after talking with Yanwu, he finally got some idea. Even though, he doesn¡¯t know too much about how the internal workings of Naga Loka work, but then he has some useful information.

    The first one is as Sam guessed, the realm is ruled by the Naga Loka and a houses the Naga race of the highest bloodline within that realm. That houses the current Naga King as well as all the other subraces of the Naga Race that have rtively superior from the bloodline of themon Naga.

    But that is not the only like that. There are manys that are ruled by the nobles of Naga.

    Apart from that, there are also other races including humans on almost every. But from what they came to knew there are no normal humans on the. The humans in Naga Loka were mutated due to their stay in that realm for the longest time.

    And Yanwu also said that Naga Loka is one of the realms that is most beautiful. Including the vegetation and just thends of Naga Loka. Everything screams beauty.

    But the is not habitable for normal humans, at least not for people at Sam¡¯s level. Because, even though the is extremely beautiful, the only problem is that it is a realm of Miasma. The air, water, soil, nts everything has poison in it.

    Even though there are many Naga races that have different elemental attributes, but they have something inmon and that is their venomous ability. They would have some kind of venom in their arsenal and they have great immunity for many poisons in the world depending on their bloodline superiority.

    Apart from this news, Yanwu doesn¡¯t know anything about the ce. So, Sam turned towards the second information point and immediately gave up after some thought. It is none other than the Lightning-de, the saber he got from Arman.

    He took away the Sabre to interrogate the weapon spirit and to his disappointment, the weapon spirit doesn¡¯t know anything but the weapons and tools. As for the issue regarding the yers and the gods who chose them, it only knows their existence other than that, the spirit doesn¡¯t even have details on exactly who these gods are.

    But still, the weapon knowledge is extraordinary and Sam could identify the treasured weapons in all the other realms and even in the Pce of inheritance, he could use it to pick if he was in a dilemma.

    Now, his final and possibly most knowledgeable resource, the Old Beast Grandpa.

    The Old Raiju.

    Sam did develop a good rtionship with this Old Raiju. But there is only one problem and he encountered the same problem this day as well.

    "Heh, Brat. You came at the right time. I am craving some wine. Come on take it out."

    Sam felt his heart hurt as he took out the wine gourd. He has arge supply of this wine, but it still pains him to take it out. But this Old man wouldn¡¯t let go of the issue if he doesn¡¯t give him any.

    Sam would have to deal with the quirky old man who would constantly pester him.

    He took out arge bowl that could fit three infants in it and filled the bowl up with the wine before cing it near the lightning, the lightning curtain cleared up, and the old man extended hisrge paw to take the wine bowl as he took it to sip by sip.

    "Oh, that is great. Even though it is not the best wine that the monkey can offer, he is still generous. Okay now, why are you here?"

    "I am going out of this realm."

    The slurping of the wine stopped for a second and the Old Man asked.

    "Where to?"

    "Naga Loka."

    "Did you say Naga Loka? Are you sure?"

    "Yes."

    "So, what do you want to know?"

    "Anything I should be careful of? Should I take my friends or should I go alone? What kind of precautions or arrangements I should make?"

    "Don¡¯t take anyone with you. In fact, if possible don¡¯t go there. With your current strength, it would be hard for you guys to even adapt there.

    Take the wine and don¡¯t drink it all before you go there. It mighte in handy.

    As for the races in the Naga Loka, even though there are some humans, don¡¯t trust them at all. If you really want to have any form of rtion, whether it is business-wise or a friendship, you can only do that with Yakshas.

    Even though not all Nagas are stereotypes, there are very few exceptions and the rest hate the humans to guts.

    Because, there was a time that humans and the Nagas used to have the same mortal status, despite them having more talent due to their special bodies, the rivalry against humans was ingrained into their bodies.

    The Only reason that the humans are still able to exist in the Naga Loka is to satisfy their own vanity and superiority at the same time, use the fast reproduction of the humans to increase their troops.

    They are the cannon fodder. As for the humans who are living normally and extravagantly, don¡¯t trust them.

    Look out for illusions and seductions. The Naga race is notpletely righteous neither they boast of any unnatural pride. They are prideful of their own race and bloodline, but not prideful enough to stop scheming against others.

    Try to disguise yourself a bit. The mutated humans there don¡¯t have this clear skin. Their skin would have changed color a long time ago. It would be simr to the soil of the area they are staying in and humans happened to be staying in every area of the realm because they are considered to be great servant material.

    The clearer the skin, the more you would be desired to be their servant.

    You wouldn¡¯t be able to get away like this.

    "Then what about the strength of the races."

    "Well, that is what I am about to say next..."

    The discussion went on and on as the Old Beast exined every detail he knew. He didn¡¯t say anything about the rulers and other stuff, because the Old Beast is stuck on this due for a very long time.

    But Sam asked just for the sake of knowing. Sometimes, the history mighte in handy, we never know.

    After having the discussion, Sam came back to the city and started thinking about how to proceed. He didn¡¯t expect that the whole world is poisonous. If it is true, his friends certainly couldn¡¯t withstand their current cultivation.

    Maybe, he is the only one who can work his way through this world. His hydra bloodline is something that could take all the poisons, it wouldn¡¯t have any other reaction unless the poison is too potent for his current cultivation and the entity that secreted the poison has far superior cultivation to hydra in its current form.

    If that is true, then it would be truly hard for them to proceed. But from what Old Beast said, they could still take in the atmospheric poison and some potent poison. For now, Mia could digest the poison up to the Consummate realm.

    So, he and Mia are safe from the environment. But the rest of his beasts and his friends couldn¡¯t handle it. He might be able to make something that could help them, but first, he has to see the atmospheric reactions and the way the poison attacks in that world to even think of anything.

    Otherwise, he would have to make some astronaut suit or something that would make them lose their mobility and the ability to fight if the situation arises.

    After much thought, he decided to leave his friends here. Since he would gain ways to travel between dimensions, he doesn¡¯t have to worry about leaving behind his friends. Sooner orter, he can still take them to other realms, just not this one.

    As he decided to do so, he started hurrying the works he had to do and decided to make sure there are no loose ends before leaving the ce.

    As for the safety of the organization and his friends, his beast uncles are not just for show.

    They can level the four Major powers if they stopped considering any possible consequences. But they would receive damage, after all, no consummate realm cultivator would die without fighting back.

 Chapter 480: Before Leaving

    Days passed and one monthter, Arkiv came once again.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know why he came at this moment, but he still went to talk to him.

    "So, are you done with the boxes?" Arkiv asked as they sat for the meal.

    "Yeah, it¡¯s been a while. My device is ready to go."

    "So, when are you nning on going?"

    "Why?"

    "I am just asking casually. I didn¡¯t meet many of the other yers, but I did get a chance to meet some of them. They are going to leave at the end of the year. Exactly, one year before the Pce of Inheritance opens.

    This is the tacit understanding between all the yers. Except for you and the twelfth guy, the rest of us had contact with at least two or more yers."

    "I also had contact with two yers. You and Arman from thunder god temple."

    "That¡¯s fair I guess."

    "But the twelfth person is still unknown. We don¡¯t know where he is and if he ising to the next pce of inheritance or not. He didn¡¯te to the second one and we don¡¯t know if he came to the first one."

    "He did."

    Sam said all of sudden making Arkiv stunned for a second.

    "He did?"

    "Yes, remember the time when I beat up all of you guys in the first pce of inheritance?"

    "Yes."

    "That is when I know the existence of the yers, he definitely came. I deliberately tore a piece of clothing from the backs and saw the tattoos. Just to confirm how many of us are there. That day, I counted twelve people. So, he is someone who came into contact with the major powers, but he seemed to have deliberately avoided the second one."

    "You could have died," Arkiv said casually and Sam looked at him as if he was an idiot. Arkiv also understood that he didn¡¯t sound right.

    It would be stupid to assume that one of the yers died this early, of course, there is a possibility but that is low. Because every yer is a soul that was given a second chance, they wouldn¡¯t be so stupid to die an early death just after they came into this new world with new opportunities.

    The yers wouldn¡¯t want to die a second time, their desire to survive is too intensepared to a normal person of this world.

    After all, death is not a pleasant experience. No one would want to experience the situation twice.

    So, he did find Arkiv¡¯s words a little bit stupid.

    After that, they still proceeded with the small talk and Arkiv asked.

    "So, when will you leave?"

    "Didn¡¯t you just say that there is a tacit understanding between all the yers, why would I want to break it? I will also go at the same time."

    "Actually, it is more of a fear than the tacit understanding. It is the fear of entering a new world. Unlike you, we don¡¯t have a chance of returning back. Even if we can return back, it wouldn¡¯t be any time soon.

    That is why they are hesitant.

    In fact, even I am a bit hesitant."

    "Really, sometimes the best way to ovee the hesitation is to do things on a whim. Why don¡¯t you try it?"

    "Easy for you to say. Anyway, apart from that my intuition is warning me."

    "Intuition?" Sam asked with a smile.

    "Of course, don¡¯t you dare underestimate the intuition of an archer. Whenever I opened the dimensional crosser and think of going the intuition is warning me. I don¡¯t know what happens if we go there. I wish I could get some more information."

    Sam looked at Arkiv meaningfully; he could guess why he came here. Their rtionship is strictly a business one and all this small talk about yers is because they can only talk to this stuff between themselves.

    Sam doesn¡¯t have any rtionship with other yers, but since he did cross paths with this guy, he could still open up a little about this yer stuff.

    But other than that, they don¡¯t have enough rtionship to discuss anything personal. He is just ying along and waiting for him to open up and say why he was truly here.

    Now he seemed to being to the point.

    And just as he thought, Arkiv asked after a bit.

    "Sam, can I see those ancient texts?"

    Sam looked at him with a raised eyebrow and asked.

    "Why don¡¯t you take a guess?"

    "I mean we are both yers, why don¡¯t we make an exchange. I do understand that getting those ancient texts might not be an easy feat for you. I wouldn¡¯t ask for free. Just name the price, we can negotiate if it is beyond my means."

    "It is not about exchange Arkiv. Do you know how I defeated all of you guys in the second pce of inheritance?"

    "How?"

    "Information. I have more information than any of you guys in that ce. I learned about all of you guys and you all couldn¡¯t even see me before I decided to show up in front of you.

    Not just there, in every situation I managed to gain more information than any of my enemies, even in the destruction of the major associations and the Usaine sect, everything happened because of the information I have in my possession.

    So, now tell me. What do you think the value of the information I hold would be?"

    Arkiv was speechless for a second. He really just wanted to take a look at the ancient texts Sam mentioned because he is still doubtful about Sam holding the information and wanted to probe a little bit more.

    But Sam¡¯s words arepletely straightforward. In fact, Sam wouldn¡¯t have bothered with telling even the initial info Sam gave away earlier.

    He doesn¡¯t have much of a bad opinion on Arkiv and decided to share some info. But it seems like this guy got a bit greedy.

    Arkiv also realized this. Maybe he might have already known of his actions but his desire to be safe, made him forget that.

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "It is not that I don¡¯t want to give you some info, but I couldn¡¯t just lose my advantage over others that easily, even if you can keep this thing a secret.

    But still, we can be considered business partners as we once worked together, I will give you a heads-up."

    With that, Sam took out a breathing device and ced it on the table.

    "This might help you a little and make sure you cover your skin as much as you can. Don¡¯t get too close to the native humans there. Particrly, the humans who are living well.

    They are not trustworthy, try to stay away from the Naga race, they might take you as ves.

    That¡¯s all I have to say, in fact, I don¡¯t know anything more than that. Oh, by the way, I figured out that all of you might be going to the same. So, try and find a way to contact each other on that if you guys have any intention of working together."

    Arkiv looked at the breathing device. It is one of the devices that resembled the first device Sam made, used for diving.

    He kept it with him and said.

    "Thank you. I wouldn¡¯t leak the info to others. I wanted to ask; do you want to go together?"

    "Well, I think I will go with Arman. He is kind of like a subordinate to me. I can¡¯t let him go alone. Don¡¯t you think?"

    "Is there any way to contact you then? We can work together in the Naga Loka."

    "Are you sure, you want to work with me? I am not easy to get along with."

    "At least, you will be prepared. So, it wouldn¡¯t hurt to try and get along with you. I think it would be worth it. So, are you bringing your friends?"

    "I don¡¯t really want to, but I don¡¯t think they will agree that easily. If it was any other realm, I can take them. But this ce, I wouldn¡¯t do."

    Arkiv smiled and stood up, ready to leave.

    "Okay then, if you want to work together in the Naga Loka, you can contact me before we leave. If not, we can still cooperate if we meet there. See you."

    "Goodbye."

    With that, Sam also left the ce and decided that it is about time to tell these guys that he is leaving alone.

    He conducted a small meeting and patiently exined. Watt did make a ruckus, but he still understood the situation. He can keep them in the divine dimension, but their growth would be halted, unlike the beasts.

    So, After convincing them and assigning the tasks of managing the organization, he is finally free. In the remaining days, it is finally free time for him to concentrate on his cultivation and battle techniques.

    He should also find the perfectbinations for his elemental abilities so that he can make efficient use of all his tools.

 Chapter 481: Naga Loka

    One Year before the next Pce of Inheritance.

    Sam is still within the city. For the past few months, he was able to concentrate on his own training carefully and solidify his foundation.

    The Nascent stage is all about reforming the body and increase the quality and density of the spiritual sea of consciousness.

    Sam examined his own body and realized that he already achieved what many couldn¡¯t achieve, while he was still a Level-5 Nascent stage cultivator. His current state of body and spiritual sea is already enough to many people that they could only achieve this in the Ninth level of Nascent stage and they would choose to breakthrough.

    But Sam is only half-way there.

    Apart from that, Sam also concentrated on his attacks and defense. He has too many elements, whenever a fight breaks out, he is directly focusing on the hand-to-handbat in most cases and then he started concentrating on the elements only when the situation became dire.

    He is not using them in harmony to get the maximum desired effect. The only elements he used in harmony are fire and wind, apart from that, there is no such result visible in other cases.

    These few days, hepletely focused on changing and added some creative ideas so that he could be more efficient.

    Today, Sam came out of his training and is in his office doing a final check on the things. His three friends already took up most of the important roles and are already managing the whole organization.

    So, he didn¡¯t have to worry too much. Anyway, in the current state, they also don¡¯t need to pay too much attention to put too much effort into things.

    The chain ofmand has already formed and the operation is smooth.

    By evening, he is done with the things at hand and waited for Arman toe.

    But before that, there is one more thing he has to take care of. He left his office and went to visit Mackey. When Sam arrived at that restaurant, Mackey almost looked like a zombie.

    He seemed to have been cooking for a long time without rest. When he saw Sam, he finally walked away from the stove, took out a spatial ring from his pocket, and gave it to Sam.

    "I don¡¯t know if this is enough for the next year, but I tried my best. And one more thing, it is not that I don¡¯t want to cook thisrge amount of food, but can you inform me a little earlier next time. I don¡¯t have enough time."

    "Sure, Thank you." Sam is busy checking the food in the spatial ring as he gave a superficial answer.

    He left the restaurant with a satisfied smirk.

    At this moment, Arman also arrived and both of them met at the rooftop of the building. Philip, Watt, and Jack also arrived to bid farewell.

    Arman took out the dimensional crosser first as he activated it. Space rippled around him and within a few seconds, he disappeared from the spot.

    Sam smiled at his friends before taking out his Transporter. He took out the small metallic box and clicked the button, it erged and opened, he entered the circr tform for transporting and ced his hands on the ck sphere as he changed the coordinates to the ones on the Arman¡¯s dimensional crosser.

    But he hesitated a bit as he thought of changing thest coordinate a bit. He wants to see just how much one unit of this coordinate varies, but in the end, he didn¡¯t do that and kept the coordinates the same.

    It is noughing matter after all. There is a possibility that he might die in some wormhole in this vast space.

    As he activated it, his friends are havingplicated emotions. They didn¡¯t object when Sam said he doesn¡¯t want to take them with him, but they started contemting why and thought that they might be too weak.

    As soon as Sam disappeared, they looked at each other without speaking anything and left the building.

    They do have to manage the business, but the business is in almost a self-sustaining state, they only have to deal with the problems not with the regr deals. They decided to immerse themselves in training.

    ...

    Sam felt as if the whole world is spinning as he experienced a weird sucking force pulling him, all he saw is a ck blur before reappeared on thend.

    He couldn¡¯t stand clearly for a second and wanted to puke his guts out. This experience is far moreplex and torturing whenpared to his first Space gate transportation.

    He couldn¡¯t stand still and fell on the ground as he looked around.

    Only after a few minutes did he make sense of the situation. He sat on the ground with the metallic box still in his hands, this is the transporter that sent him here.

    It turned back into the small ck box after he arrived and fell into his hands

    He also noticed that Arman is nearby. He is only a few feet away sprawling on the ground struggling for breath. He closed his eyes and tried to stabilize his body.

    The skin is having some green spots as he looked as he rolled over the grass.

    All of a sudden, the lightning in Arman¡¯s body started running in chaos as it seemed to be trying to destroy everything that came into its way.

    After some time, Arman stood up and started puking some bad blood which has some green tint to it and even green colored smoke came out of his mouth.

    His body still didn¡¯t lose those patches of green though, but he clearly is feeling a lot better.

    But his breathing is still a bit heavy and he has to try his best to control his spiritual energy and continuously exhaled some faint green gas.

    Sam noticed that he is alright and gave him a breathing device. He could have given it earlier, but Sam was afraid that he might disturb the process of Arman expelling the poisons out of him.

    Arman is having a hard time seeing forward, he already closed his eyes but they are still burning, if not for his spiritual sense he would have gone crazy.

    Sam started examining his own body. Even though he is not feeling too many changes to his own body, that doesn¡¯t mean they are none.

    First of all, the air is indeed a bit heavy and the Hydra bloodline is trying its best to purify the air in his lungs so that he could breathe normally. But it is still a bit heavy. If Sam wants to really breathe normally, he might have to cultivate directly without any other activity.

    He also noticed that spiritual energy is a bit dense and it is also not pure. But the purity he is thinking is not the density and the richness of the spiritual energy rather it seemed to have some poison attribute.

    He could feel that the spiritual energy which his body absorbed slowly is having a hard time merging with the spiritual energy already present in his spiritual core.

    They are conflicted and trying to best each other.

    The external spiritual energy is trying to decay the internal one and the internal one is trying to purify the external one.

    He is also feeling a slight unease and faint pain inside his body due to this reaction.

    His reaction is not as obvious as Arman¡¯s because of his highly tempered body.

    He looked at Arman who is now sitting cross-legged and started cultivating, he seemed to be trying his best to make his body adapt to the environment and his cultivation technique is running throughout his body as it tried to reduce the conflict between the spiritual energy of the atmosphere.

    But Sam didn¡¯t do the same, he closed his eyes and looked at the spiritual core, one of his spiritual core¡¯s abilities is to convert and he used the same ability to heal Sky who was suffering from fire poison.

    Sam wanted to see if he can try to use this method to get rid of his situation, he used the pure poison attribute he got from Mia. Until now, Sam could only secrete a few poisons that Mia has and use them in his attacks, but it did give him full immunity to poisons he came into contact with until now.

    As he changed all his spiritual energy to his poison attribute, he could almost see it change color to an indigo shade. At this moment, he also noticed that even his skin has a faint indigo hue. This is something he didn¡¯t try before.

    He did use different elements, but not to this extent on converting all the spiritual energy in his body to a single attribute except for when he attempted elemental fusion. Now, he noticed that there is no more unease or pain in his body and it seemed like his body started to adapt.

    His breathing is still a bit heavy and he cannot use spiritual energy as freely, but he was still able to deal with it. By this time, Arman also had a faint adaptation to the environment and the breathing device did help him with this.

    Now only both of them had the mind to look around.

    What they saw is a beautiful grass in in front of them and there is even argeke nearby.

    They could see the faint image of a city with majestic buildings far away and mountains on the other side.

    They looked at each other and started making their way towards the city.

 Chapter 482: At the city gate

    Sam and Arman walked towards the city. Sam didn¡¯t even use Harbinger because of the unwanted attention he might get if he hovered.

    But as he looked at the beautiful grasnds around him, he couldn¡¯t help but look to enjoy the beauty of it. It is far too fascinating. He didn¡¯t see a single ce like this in the western continent or any other continent for that matter.

    Maybe he didn¡¯t venture into the central continent, where he might be able to get a view like this.

    A part of him even wanted to stay there quietly and enjoy the view.

    He looked at the son which he didn¡¯t expect to be present. From the Hindu mythology, there is no sun in Naga Loka. The realm was actually part of the underworld.

    This made Sam realize one more time, that he needs to take the knowledge he got from the previous life with a pinch of salt.

    After half-a-day of movement, they are entering an area that has too much grass and it is too tall that it is obstructing their movement. It almost reached their hips and Arman could feel the sting as it touched his skin. He couldn¡¯t help but take circte the elemental energy so much that the lightning cracked around him and the grass charred ck before it could touch him.

    After some time, Sam removed the goggles part from Arman¡¯s breathing device. So that Arman could get used to the atmosphere slowly. It is not a good option to let him be like this. Otherwise, he would be way too eye-catching with this device over him.

    As they walked and continued their journey, they finally encountered some beasts. The first beast they encountered is a Zebra. At least that is what it looked like. Because there are no white stripes instead they have purple stripes all over.

    Sam looked at the beast intently and identified in a few seconds. The Purple me Zebra. This beast is actually a me attribute beast and it is extremely suitable for being a steed.

    The mes of this beast are purple in color which attributes to its name and it has high immunity to poison. The special attribute of the purple me is that it can detoxify some nt-based poisons. Some pill masters use the mes of the beasts when they make pills with herbs that contain some toxic substances.

    Sam does know that they would appear in higher realms, but he didn¡¯t expect them to be in Naga Loka.

    In the Beasitary, not every beast has details regarding their origin ce, only some of the important and extremely special species that are almost impossible to find in any other realm other than a specific realm are the ones that have these details mentioned.

    This Purple me horse is neither the rarest of all nor is it of an extremely superior bloodline. But he didn¡¯t expect that they would appear in Naga Loka.

    As he and Arman are looking at the beast which seemed to be of a Level-5 beast equivalent to a Grand realm cultivator which any of them could easily take care of, they noticed another detail on the Zebra¡¯s back.

    There is a saddle on its back, which means that it is someone else¡¯s steed.

    This makes thingsplicated.

    They didn¡¯t want to be spotted by someone that early. They wanted to camp secretly in the vicinities of the city so that they could understand the situation better and n what to do in the future.

    As they are thinking, whether to kill the beast or just avoid it, they sensed someoneing from afar. They immediately ran towards a nearby tree to hide.

    Sam took out a concealment formation disc and activated it. A few momentster a few people came to this ce. They all rode the Purple me Zebras and one of the Zebras is carrying two people.

    They all wore the same clothes with a crest embroidered on their chests.

    They seemed to be part of some troops. Sam and Arman are not surprised by any of it though. The most surprising thing is that they looked human and even their auras are of humans. They are only Grand realm cultivators ofte-stage, so they couldn¡¯t find Sam and Arman, but both of them could really sense their auras from there.

    Sam started circting his spiritual energy and his eyes started glowing with golden mes. This is the Pseudo Golden gaze- Fiery eyes.

    He practiced this technique in these past few months. Even though he didn¡¯t master it perfectly, it is mostly for supporting him and the main function of this is to see through illusions and at the same time see through the energy flows.

    Sam felt that these people are indeed human, but there seemed to be something different in their bodies. The people took control of the Zebra and they once again and moved towards the city.

    Sam and Arman looked at each other and decided to follow them.

    There are many unique futures to these humans, they have faint green skin with some purple hue. It is almost like they tried to have body paint on them. As they moved closer and closer to the city, they noticed that the group is trying to hunt the beasts on the grass ins, they hunted some types of small animals like rabbits and such. After more than a day, they finally noticed some more activity.

    There are many humans just like them who are trying to hunt the beasts and all of them seemed to bepeting, the group Sam is following hase into conflict with many of them in a single day. Most of them were resolved just from sharing the rewards, but some of them broke into fights.

    As they went nearer and nearer to the city, it has be hard to hide their presence. There are just too many people in the vicinity and too few trees.

    Soon, they arrived at a ce that almost took their breath away. They could see the city more clearly from this range and the whole city is made of purple stone. There are different shades of purple and green used to make the city.

    Even though it looked weird but it was still beautiful in its own right. The city is surrounded by arge patch of nts that have purple flowers. Thebination of this green and purple is actually making it quite suitable for the city.

    They marveled at the beauty and didn¡¯t notice that someone ising in their direction immediately. They came to their senses only after they heard someone talking.

    "Squad four. Gather at the city gate. Young Master will being soon."

    Sam and Arman ducked immediately and tried their best to conceal themselves.

    They saw a tall and lean man walking towards the group.

    But one look and they understood he is not a human. Because he doesn¡¯t have normal skin. He has small and faint purple scales all over his body and his eyes are of that of the snake. Green with dark pupils like a reptile. Even though he is lean, he is still muscr and he dressed extremely elegantly in Bronze robes with a cloth turban on his head and long hair braided back.

    Even his tongue is split revealing the fact that he is a guy from the Naga race.

    He is approximately seven feet tall towering over the human troops and his hands are so long they almost reached his knees.

    His turban is Bronze in color with elegant stones embedded on it. Even though he is not human and each of his features like the scaly skin and the reptile eyes and the split tongue might seem like something unnerving and give creeps to someone. But when all of them were put together and made into this one guy, he seemed to have been made perfect, they fit in as if they were supposed to be made that way.

    When the group of Grand realm cultivators heard those words, they came down from the Purple me Zebras and started walking towards the city along with them.

    At this moment, Sam and Arman slowly crawled over following them from afar.

    If all they had to do is just see, Sam would have done so, but he needs to listen to them to have more information as the title young master means, they could get into contact with some big shot.

    As they ducked and waited in the purple flower bed, all the groups gathered and came towards the city entrance, and soon they could see a Pnquining from inside the city. Four humans whose skin is fair and clean and only has an extremely faint green hue are carrying the pnquin and it is followed by a Naga race man with purple scales that has a darker shade of purple than the person they saw earlier.

    This man seemed more aged and he wore ck clothes and a ck turban.

    The pnquin halted and the four humans kneeled down so that they could bring the pnquin to a height where the person inside wouldn¡¯t be troubled to get down.

    After that, a young Naga race man came down wearing golden robes and a golden turban as he looked at the groups of people condescendingly.

    His whole bearing is screaming of arrogance and his scales are an even darker shade of purple than the ck-robed man and he has a faint golden hue on his scales.

    The old man in ck came to his side and stood there benevolently.

    "Okay, your test is over. Show me your spoils. You might get a chance to be my personal servants if I am happy with that."

    When he said that, the groups of people started pouring out the beasts they hunted in front of them. There are too many and soon there are heaps of dead bodies that are still warm with blood in front of them.

    The young master looked around and checked the loot as he examined them.

 Chapter 483: Got caught

    Sam activated the concealment formation as soon as he saw that Old man of the Naga race. He didn¡¯t want to get noticed, because, with the Golden gaze fiery eyes he had, he could see the energy waves of that person are too strong for him to be careless.

    As the young master of the Naga race, looked around and started picking some teams out of all the groups, Sam could see that he is picking every team that has a decent hunt and has a female member.

    He could see that the female members are relieved but some of them had conflicting expressions. It wouldn¡¯t need the genius to figure out what this young master is picking them for. Particrly, there is a team that will all of the four participants being women. The young master didn¡¯t even look at the size of the prey, but still picked them.

    The fourdies looked at him seductively as they tried their best to showcase their alluring figures. Their skin is also mostly clear with a very faint green and purpleplexion. So faint, that one could probably ignore it.

    They are more or less just like the people who carried the pnquin.

    As Sam focused on finding as many details as he could, he suddenly felt something and became alert. He whispered something to Arman andter also became vignt. Sam took the breathing device back and gave a small space jade so that Arman could ce it in his mouth and breath through the mouth.

    At the same time, Sam took out all the spatial rings on his fingers and only kept one to one of his fingers and the divine dimension to the second finger. He threw all the rings into the divine dimension.

    All of a sudden, the two of them stood up and jumped upwards and shot to both sides and with that moment, there are some Nagas who suddenly popped out from all sides. All of them are nascent stage Nagas.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know how they managed to sense them, but they crept towards them slowly. He only noticed them because of his eye technique and the superior spiritual sense.

    Then he noticed that the Old Naga has a faint smile and he looked at their spot, he already understood they are surrounded.

    So, there is no way they would escape without any consequences.

    After sensing that the Nagas surrounding them are only Nascent stage cultivators, he decided to retaliate. He still has many trump cards and the transference scrolls for escaping. But he decided to use them only asst resort.

    As the Nagas started throwing spells after a spell at him, the reddish-purple mes took the majority of it as they shot towards the duo.

    Sam took out staff and he used the lightning element this time. He has practiced this quite a lot in the past few months, the lightning element and the staff techniques.

    Arman also started swinging hisrge saber as blue lightning surrounded him.

    All of the sudden, the me attacks, the earthen spells, the spears all seemed to have been overshadowed by the silver and blue lightning.

    Sam¡¯s staffnded squarely on the shoulder of the Naga closest to him and

    *BOOM*

    It is as if the lightning strike directlynded on the Naga straight from the sky.

    There is arge sh along with the explosion and the surroundings shook with the after effect. The ground which has the beautiful flowerbed waspletely charred ck and a pungent smell came.

    In the middle of it all, the Naga¡¯s corpse was present with the whole body burned into a crisp.

    There is arge gash diagonally from the left shoulder to the belly.

    But the only difference is that there are no legs, the legs seemed to have magically disappeared and arge snake tail appeared in ce of them and even the body of the Naga grew a bitrger. It seemed to be their true form.

    But Sam is not in a situation where he could care about this. He startednding the strikes as decisively as he could and the next four strikes took the lives of two and the third one was left half-dead.

    Meanwhile, Arman is also on a spree. Most of the attackers are the early stage nascent realm cultivators, this made things easy and they had seven casualties in an instant and when they are moving towards the next, thete-stage cultivators who were at the back and watching the show came forward all of a sudden.

    They had the spears in their hands as they covered them with various elemental abilities. As Sam looked at them he waspletely surprised. Not because of the abilities, but because of the shades of indigo and purple he has seen in just a day.

    They all have different shades of purple or indigo scales.

    Sam is almost fed up with this color. He started getting exchanging blows with these guys. Even though they are strong, Sam¡¯s strength is overwhelming. He is fighting just like a lightning. Strong reckless and chaotic all at the same time.

    He is dealing with three opponents all at once. All this while, he still kept a look on the Old man in ck robes. He knew that this is something the old man did. But Sam doesn¡¯t know how he found out. Maybe, it is about time, he upgraded the concealment formation.

    While he is thinking, he noticed that there are other energy fluctuations around, his eyes glowed as he looked at the Old Man. The energy around the old man is fully chaotic. It seems like he is ready to make a move.

    From the energy waves, Sam could guess that he is a consummate realm cultivator.

    Sam grabbed Arman by his arms and chopped on his neck with his palm making him faint before throwing him in the divine dimension, but just before he did that, he took out a few grenades and created a st right under his feet making it hard for anyone to see him and immediately he sted a spirit stone to disturb the spiritual sense around him.

    So, that he could avoid others seeing him put Arman inside the dimension.

    Sam activated the transference scroll and he immediately disappeared.

    But just after he disappeared, the whole scene froze at the spot he was in. The Nagas who are in the middle of attacking him are all frozen and even the grenade st was still there.

    The Old Naga¡¯s pupils became small and he looked into horizons.

    Meanwhile, Sam appeared a thousand meters away and he let out Arman immediately. Arman still doesn¡¯t know of the divine dimension and he is notfortable about revealing it.

    He sshed some water at Arman and made him wake up.

    At this exact moment, the Old Naga made some hand signs, and all of a sudden, he disappeared from the spot.

    Sam suddenly felt a chill behind his neck and looked around vigntly. He was about to take another scroll, his blood ran cold all of a sudden, and decided against it. He took out the divine dimension crystal and swallowed it without a second thought.

    And as soon as he did that and ced his hand back, he froze on the spot. All of this happened in a fraction of seconds.

    The Old Naga appeared a few feet away from them and smirked as he looked at Sam. Sam got ready with a hair strand in his mouth tounch as soon as he could feel a faint intent to kill, but that intent never came.

    Instead, the Naga looked at Sam and then at Arman as if he was examining the goods. Sam had a faint purple hue over his skin, but most of it ispletely clear as for Arman his skill is a little bit affected, but it has a green hue.

    "Such pure-blooded humans. It has been a while since I saw someone. You would be a nice addition in the arena."

    He said as he looked up and down.

    Meanwhile, Sam is cursing his luck. All this while, when he was on the previous, he was regretful that he didn¡¯t meet any space element attacker, and now that he saw one, he didn¡¯t feel the slightest bit intrigued.

    But when he heard the words of the Old man, he felt like there might be an opportunity here. He wants to go into the city and the old man is talking about some arena.

    He might use this chance to infiltrate. As they waited, some people came on the beasts in their full speed and the Old Naga ordered them.

    "Make them fall asleep and take them back to the arena. These guys will be our new attractions."

    At this moment one of the Nagas who just came fed some powder to Sam and Arman.

    Sam felt a little dizzy and his hydra bloodline is acting up.

    Sam slowly closed his eyes and was knocked out unconscious along with Arman.

 Chapter 484: Arena

    Sam opened his eyes only after an hour when he realized that no one was around him. Except for Arman.

    Even though he is not affected by whatever powder he was fed, Sam didn¡¯t show it to them, he just pretended to be asleep, to get inside.

    That is because it is almost impossible for him and Arman to get any information on the Pce of inheritance without getting in contact with a city.

    As for getting any information by kidnapping people from the city, it is actually quite hard to do so because, from what he saw those people on the Purple me horses happened to be the lowest-ranked soldiers, and from the discussion he heard the young master is trying to recruit some of them into his personal guard for training.

    If even the Grand realm cultivators are only ordinary soldiers, then he would have to kidnap a Transcendent to have any chance of getting decent information out of him.

    For that, he would have to use some of his trump cards which he is not willing to.

    Now, with this step, he entered the city without a worry. All this while, the Old Naga is beside them and for that reason, he didn¡¯t even dare to openly scan the surroundings.

    But he still tried to remember as much route as possible, even then he wasn¡¯t able topletely remember it. Anyway, he is not worried. There is almost a year and anything can happen in this one year.

    At this moment, Arman also woke up and looked around with shock. He was knocked out by Sam himself, since then he didn¡¯t know what happened at all.

    "We are caught by the people of this city. We don¡¯t know exactly what they want, but I heard something rted to Arena. Maybe we are here to fight or something. Be prepared."

    After that, Sam stood up and looked around the room. His cultivation was not restricted at all, then he took a look at this spatial ring. Everything is there, the pills, spirit stones, and even the formation discs. None of them are taken away.

    But Sam could sense that the spatial ring was checked, there are traces of another person¡¯s spiritual imprint on it. As for divine dimension, it is still in his stomach. He doesn¡¯t know if the people of Naga Loka can identify the divine dimension. But he doesn¡¯t want to find out.

    So, he decisively swallowed it. He looked around in the room and noticed that there is a bathroom attached to it and other than that, there is nothing else. The room waspletely sealed on all four sides.

    There is only one door on the ceiling and it is more like a lid. There are many devices that work on spiritual energy inside the room. they are some for illuminating and some to create necessary venttion and such.

    The walls arepletely ck and there is not much they could find in this room.

    Sam looked at the corner of the room and noticed that there are some crystal-like objects that resembled arge eye.

    They seemed to be surveince equipment to keep an eye on them.

    Sam walked into the bathroom and noticed, that there is no surveince here. He came out and looked at the floor and walls of the room. Everything is marked with runes. Even the stones are not some normal rocks.

    He ced his hands and tried to use observation ability, the spiritual energy entered the ck stone, but after a few seconds, even after his face turned red from mental pressure, he was barely able to sense a few centimeters into the stone. The density of the grains is too high.

    He does have some guesses about the material, but none of the guesses is good news for them. Because no matter what material he thought it was, it wouldn¡¯t even be destroyed by a consummate realm easily.

    Arman is in a tense state with all this happening and being locked in a room with Sam is not helping at all. He looked at Sam who seemed to be so rxed and taking a stroll.

    As both of them hadpletely different thoughts, all of sudden the lid on top opened with addering down.

    "Come up both of you."

    A voice could be heard from upstairs.

    Both of them exchanged a nce and climbed up. There are two people above the entrance and both of them have scaly skin and of different shades of purple. But they have human eyes and more human features.

    They seemed to be half-Nagas. The Old Beast mentioned them too. Sam felt a bit relieved when seeing them because he was already fed up with the Nagas. Even though, their features are not as irritating, that dark purple color is somewhat aversive to him.

    Maybe, that is because he saw too much purple in a single day. On top of that, these pure-blooded Nagas have too many brighter shades and if not for the fact that they do have different facial features in the humanoid form, he would have suffered trauma and went crazy.

    Who knows how many people will suffer because of that?

    As he was lost in his own thoughts, he looked around and noticed that a simr scene is happening. The Half-Nagas are all fetching the people from rooms. The Half-Nagas led them towards a room in a maze-like path.

    Sam almost felt as if he was in Hogwarts. Because, they didn¡¯t pass through a single door, instead of whenever they reached some walls, the bricks are opening up a path to another area.

    After ten minutes, they arrived at a certain area. A Naga with Purple scales that had a ck hue is staying inside the room and this is the first female Naga Sam has seen after entering this world. Even though she was scaly and tall, she still has that seductive aura around her, which made some of the prisoners, drool.

    She looked at them with a smile, which is not exactly a smile, and started shoving pills down every prisoner¡¯s throat.

    As soon as the pill entering his stomach, Sam realized that the hydra bloodline is acting up again. In the past two days, this bloodline is more active than I was in the past three months.

    After that, the prisoner is all led to a meeting room.

    Where everyone was forced to sit.

    Soon, a man appeared on the stage and he is also a pure Naga but with purple and blue shades on scales. Sam didn¡¯t use his eye technique, but he can still sense from just the pressure that he is too strong.

    "My dear humans.

    You are the new batch of recruits in our Arena. First of all, let me tell you something. The pill you just ate is a poison that would slowly kill you.

    And the only way to temporarily suppress it and still keep your body in its best state is by taking the meals we give you. If you don¡¯t take any meal for a day, you will slowly die depending on your natural immunity."

    All the prisoners inhaled a sharp breath.

    "But nothing could be earned easily. You have to earn every meal. For that, you would have to have a fight every day in the Arena.

    The audience will be the nobles, merchants, and anyone else that could pay money to enter.

    Since you are a beginner it is almost impossible for you guys to gather any attention. But the more fights you win and the more entertaining your fight is, the more ie you would generate.

    The more ie you generate, the more valuable you are to the arena and the more perks you get. Today, you are all going to have your first fight.

    For the next three days, your battles will not be promoted, they are just the extra matches we are providing for the audience in the break time. In these three days, it is your performance and audience¡¯s interest in you that would give you a ce on the fourth day as a real fight event or another bonus match, we provide for the customers.

    So, get ready and perform well.

    There are going to be fight divisions based on your cultivation level.

    The Nascent stage initial stage cultivators are all one division, the Middle-stage are considered another and finally, thete-stage cultivators are another.

    Once, you increase the cultivation level, you wouldn¡¯t be able to participate in a lower division match, but as a lower division contender, you can challenge a higher division contender but you should upy a higher rank within your division.

    If and after you be a great prospect and bring enough money, you would be promoted to better living conditions like a better cell with open venttion and if you can perform even better and generate more ie, then you can gain a great residence with all the luxuries.

    The perks are endless. So, try your best to gain them."

 Chapter 485: Arrogant Sam

    The prisoners all sent back to their cells.

    Sam looked at all of them vigntly and there is only one thing inmon. All of them are human beings and all of them are male. These are all humans who have rtively normal skin tone, unlike the soldiers who has the purple tone and normal people who get affected by the poisons in the air and have green tones, and people who have both of them with green and purple tones.

    Apart from that, there are other people who have red skin tone, blue skin tone, and even grey. From what Sam observed his guess is that these people are from different regions and might have worked under others before and got captured by the Nagas of this city.

    There is a total of thirty of them and from the words of the person who talked rules just now, not many people will be able toe out.

    That night, the meals are sent to their cells and Arman felt a lot better after eating it.

    Sam just swallowed a meal. After that, he closed his eyes and sent his consciousness inside the divine dimension that is still inside his stomach.

    After swallowing the pill and discovering that there is some kind of poison in it, he didn¡¯t immediately neutralize it, instead, he let the pill enter the divine dimension and fed it to Mia.

    Mia can replicate the poison easily, but the amount it consumed but would be enough for him analyze it.

    At this moment, he talked to Mia about how long it would take to secrete the poison and how the properties are. This mighte in handy after all.

    The next day, the thirty members are all taken to somewhere, once again it is like Hogwarts magic. Sam couldn¡¯t find the head-tail of the route. If he is not with the guards, then there is no way he could escape, even if he was able to get out of the cell.

    If not for the poisonous air, he would have already let shadow mice out and things would have been easy.

    But now, he could see no other ways in the immediate future.

    All he could do is y along and see if they could find ways. Anyway, it would be hard for someone to kill both of them here as long as they can fight within their divisions.

    He started making his n. The main goal is to get as much information as he can get and also get out of these people¡¯s influence so that they wouldn¡¯t kill him whenever they wished. He would have to escape and infiltrate some important ce to get as much info as I can.

    If he cannot directly change the situation in a system from the outside, there is only one best alternative, be a part of it, control and change it however you want it to be.

    Now, Sam needs that opportunity, he whispered something to Arman and both of them just walked, they soon appeared at the same Nagady who fed them pills and from then onwards, it is almost like a normal building, they started moving upstairs and the corridors of the upper floors are almost like hotel rooms.

    Simrly, some Half-Nagas are guiding some people out of these rooms. They seemed to be the higher-ranked fighters of the arena.

    After climbing up for ten more minutes, they arrived at arge room. There are many tables with Nagas sitting there and organizing something, they could hear the faint sound of the crazy cheers from the audience.

    And soon Sam someonee out of an entrance which is almost like a tunnel. His body is bruised and bloody, he broke some teeth, and thedy who fed the pills the day beforeid him on the stretcher and started healing him.

    At the same time, another man appeared in almost the same condition from another entrance whichpletely opposite to the first one and thedy went towards him to heal.

    She seemed to be the medic in this area and a high-level one at that. But she is using pills and potions rather than the light element.

    But he could still feel some wood elemental energy, she seemed to have been proficient in wood elemental healing.

    After that, there are some peopleing towards them and started collecting the details of thirty people.

    When they came towards them, even Sam and Arman gave their details, they didn¡¯t even change their names and just replied truthfully anyway, all they wanted are name and the cultivation level.

    Arman¡¯s at Level-4 and Sam is at Level-5.

    So, both of them are in the same division, the middle stage Nascent division.

    After everyone¡¯s details are taken, the Half-Naga¡¯s came and started taking one candidate after another way.

    The matches started.

    While the matches are going on one by one, some new people entered the room. Two groups of Half nagas are apanying two men who have a ferocious aura around them, they seemed to be Late-stage Nascent stage cultivators, he could hear the surrounding Half Nagas discussing them.

    Apparently, they are the current rank-1 and rank-2 of the Late-stage Nascent division.

    Today¡¯s main match is between them and it is not even the first match. This is the third time they are fighting and the ranks didn¡¯t change, the rank-2 guy was always defeated by the rank-1.

    But this event was quite popr in the market and they decided to go for a third match.

    As Sam looked at this, he suddenly remembered all the MMA promotions in his past life. The arena is almost following the same business model, except the fighters don¡¯t have any contract binding them, instead, they are almost taken as ves. At least at the beginning of the whole fiasco.

    He suddenly had many ideas.

    Soon, it was his turn. Sam looked at the candidate who is going to be his opponent is also a bulky guy with a blue skin tone.

    He looked at Sam coldly as he gave a threatening gaze. Sam doesn¡¯t know why he is reacting like that, but it seems that he is nning on bing a fighter and settle in this arena.

    Anyway, it is actually not such a bad idea.

    After all, there is food and the incentives will go on and on with the increase in their performance, it is not actually a bad Idea for an average man who knows nothing but fighting.

    As Sam exited the tunnel on the other side, he was overwhelmed for a second because of the cheers.

    There is arge square ring in the middle of it and there are no ropes or barriers and such. He looked at the blue guy who came from the opposite side of the arena.

    Both of them got on the stage and the referee who is standing on a bird type beast and hovering over said from the top.

    "You cannot use external inscriptions, formations, and high-grade consumable treasures including medicines and other protection items.

    The winner will be decided if one of you loses consciousness, crippled, dead, or decides to give up the fight.

    You cannot leave the stage until one of you guys gains the victory."

    At this moment, a transparent barrier appeared around the stage. The man gave out a loud shout.

    "Fight."

    The blue guy looked at Sam and said.

    "I am going to tear you apart, if you know what is good for you, you would give up. After being chased by them for so long and now I finally got a chance at a new life. Here I can kill as much as I want, this might as well be my dream job. You can do nothing but be my stepping stone.

    He licked his lips and his expression became a little twisted.

    Sam who is already thinking about how to make the most out of the situation heard this followed by loud audience cheers.

    "Go on, kill him. You are interesting. I will bet on you."

    "Haha, seems like another psycho has appeared. Go on kill him."

    ...

    Simr cheers were heard and Sam is surprised a bit. He didn¡¯t expect that the voice of the fighters could be heard all over the arena, it seems like some function of the stage.

    All the audience are mostly Nagas and there are some humans here and there, but they are mostly women who have very little colored skin and are of normal human skin and most of them are female.

    They are scantly dressed and are clearly ves, some of their masters are already groping them in public.

    There are some male people as well, and they happened to be the gigolos of the female Nagas.

    These people are all enjoying the humans beating each other, maybe this is their inherent hate for the humans.

    The blue guy became more ferocious and started making a move.

    He took out a sword and ran towards Sam with a crazed look. Sam didn¡¯t attack immediately and focused on dodging. This guy is a warrior.

    After continuous dodging, the audience started booing.

    "Are you fucking rat? As expected of you cowardly human."

    "DO you only know how to dodge?"

    "Oy blue guy, kill him instantly and I will give you a reward."

    Sam smirked at this and suddenly turned offensive.

    He started with a punch to the chest of the opponent and then grabbed the hand with the sword.

    He twisted the arm to the back and held him in a rear-naked choke with a single hand. Due to one hand being broken, he couldn¡¯t even try to do anything.

    Sam then started pounding on his face. He could definitely kill him, but he didn¡¯t. He instead his expression became as twisted as the blue guy and he started yelling.

    "What did you say? You fucker?

    Do you want to kill me? Kill me now.

    Kill me. You stupid piece of shit.

    You are going to use me as a stepping stone? I will fucking kill you."

    He started giving blows to the body and face alternatively and the audience cheered like crazy.

    "Do it,e on, hit him harder."

    "Come on knock his teeth out."

    They are making suchments and Sam actually followed with that. And soon, the guy became unconscious and the referee dered the fight.

    At this moment, Sam yelled from the stage.

    "All the fuckers from the Middle stage Nascent division, remember this. When you encounter me, you fuckers better stay put and give up. Otherwise, I will fuck up everyone just like this. From now on, I am the boss in the arena and I will y everyone in the division and im the top spot."

    With that, Sam kicked the blue guy and said in a whisper.

    "Nothing Personal buddy. It¡¯s just business." With that, he left the ring and went back into the tunnel.

 Chapter 486: Gaining Attention

    Sam¡¯s loud and arrogant words made the whole crowd go crazy in cheers. The Nagas whistled and the attendants started making rounds as the people started giving out the gifts for the fighters.

    When he returned back-stage, Arman went for his fight and came back with a wless victory.

    He didn¡¯t do anything like Sam. He just went there fought and came back.

    After the new fights are over, there was that day¡¯s main even. The fight between the top rankers of the Late Stage Nascent Division.

    Sam noticed that there is a small screen near the desk of the organizers who are making the fight matchups. Actually, it is far away from the ce Sam and the group are standing and maybe due to the properties of the screen they were unable to see it.

    But Sam activated his eye technique to see if he can witness it.

    He wanted to see the fight and estimate the prowess of these humans who have their skin tones like that.

    From what the Old Beast said, the Half-nagas, the people with the coloured skin tones other than the green colour are all offspring of a Naga and a human.

    He doesn¡¯t know what their status is, but from what he saw until now the Half-Nagas are a little bit of high status right below the Nagas and they can take up some supervisory and management roles.

    The people with the coloured skin tones are of lesser status than the Half-Nagas and they can be soldiers and guards.

    If the human bloodline suppresses the Naga bloodline, then they would be born like that and the darker the shade the thicker the Naga bloodline is and they are that close to the half-nagas. If the human bloodline and the Naga blood line bnce each other, they would be Half-Nagas.

    The two people on the stage are actually both really close to be Half-Nagas. They even have some physical changes like long limbs, but there are no scales whatsoever.

    Sam is wondering if his bloodline purification skill would work on these guys.

    He threw these thoughts away and witnessed the battle through the screen far away.

    The battle is pretty brutal actually and the first ranker and the second ranker seemed to have been evenly watched. This is like an old-fashioned fist fight.

    He could see the spiritual energy glowing around their fists and legs. But there is not much leg movement. They are grounded and the stage has cracked under the legs.

    There is not much dodging, they taking hits like crazy. Both of them are tall with six and half feet and their bodies are burly. If the glowing of the spiritual energy and the waves are ignored, it would be two drunkards fighting over a girl even before talking to her.

    He chuckled at this and deactivated the eye technique.

    From all of this, he could at most guess how many hits they could take before copsing. No skills, no techniques, no battle instincts, no prowess.

    After a few minutes the fight was over and the second ranker lost consciousness before the first one, so the first ranker was dered a winner. The audience cheers didn¡¯te this time though, they are extremely few and far between.

    They are all booing andining.

    "How many times we have to see this one? We are bored of seeing the same shit?"

    "I think these nasty humans are trying to do this intentionally."

    "How can the humans have balls to do that in Arena, it must be management that is doing this?"

    "I feel like I wasted my money today, we came here because of the fight between the top rankers, but they are just bashing at each other¡¯s face. It was fun for first time, but it is boring now."

    The organizers didn¡¯t seem to expect the reaction. They turned panicky and didn¡¯t expect that something like this would happen and that too for a ranking fight. They now understood that the hype of this fight is smaller than they thought.

    At this moment, the Half Naga who led them here came once more and started guiding them to their destination.

    Sam could remember the way until they reached the Healerdy¡¯s office, but after that once again he was confused. Because, he was sure that he didn¡¯te in this route earlier.

    After some thought, he gave up for the time being. If this was not the world full of poison, he would have been half way through his ns by now.

    They returned to the cell

    The next day, they took them back once again and this time, the main fight was between some high rankers in the Initial Stage Pre-Transcendent Division.

    This time, when Sam¡¯s turn came, there are some cheers for him, he smirked at this, it seemed that the yesterdays loud barking did have its effect.

    He walked on to the stage and the opponent on the other side is also looking at him gloomily.

    "I heard you challenged every cultivator in our division that you will y us, if we stand up against you. Even though, I don¡¯t like this ce but there is no way I would let someone talk trash about me like that.

    I will prove that you can only talk big."

    At this moment, the audience once again piped up.

    "Show it to him. He really did talk big yesterday. I aming here to take a look at how he is going to beat up?"

    "What, you came for a casual fight? I thought you came for main event like me."

    "You don¡¯t know this, but this guy really talked bit yesterday. He is a new fighter, but he said that he would take out the whole division."

    "there is a braggart? And in the first day itself? That¡¯s new."

    And soon, the fight started and Sam started humiliating his opponent, that guy is done for before he could even realize.

    Sam once again pped the crap out of his opponent and made him lose consciousness before leaving Sam to leave another statement.

    "For my next fight, I am going to break the left leg on any opponent that I face and will only use one hand to do that. These guys are too weak and it would be unfair to use both hands on them."

    When Sam said this, not only the audience and organizers are stunned, underneath the arena, in the rooms that looked like a hotel corridor, many fighters that are watching the fight through the crystal screen are also stunned.

    These fighters are actually, some high-rankers. The higher the floor they are staying in, the higher their rank is.

    And anyone who can make it into that room will get a screen in their room to watch the fight, they are the only audience that wouldn¡¯t have to pay anything.

    Sam returned and the day went on without any events.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is that all the fighters already noted him down irrespective of their division. Because it is hard toe by someone who will just adjust to the environment here and fight so willingly in the arena.

    That too when they just joined. After all, all of them are nothing but ves who are forced to fight in the arena without their consent.

    The rewards came in after Sam left and the organizers are happy about this. Because, when the audience gave rewards after the fight, there will be some categories for them. One of them is the winner reward, and the other one is the loser reward and thest one is the fight reward.

    The fight reward is something that goes to the arena directly for organizing a good fight and only a small share of it would be given to fighters. As for the remaining bonuses, they will go to the fighters respectively.

    But during the initial three fights, all bonuses are for the organization and now they got more bonuses than the previous day¡¯s main fight. And this is just a casual fight between unregistered and unranked fighters.

    They immediately reported this to their boss. The boss is also a Naga man with dark purple scales and a golden glow among them, just like the young master that appeared outside the city gates.

    When he heard the whole report, he couldn¡¯t help but grin.

    "There is a new admission like that? That is interesting, generally, only people that are here for years would like the atmosphere in the arena and much less a newly admitted one.

    And he is even causing such a ruckus? He is being so arrogant that it is almost like he is trying his best to antagonize the rest of the fighters."

    He paused for a bit and after some thought, he grinned once again and said.

    "Pay him today¡¯s win bonus and the winner bonus the audience gave. Introduce him to the store. We will see what the hell is he thinking by tomorrow. If he really does as he told today, then register him an Iron ss fighter and arrange matches for him like an Iron ss fighter.

    We might have encountered an interesting human this time."

 Chapter 487: Privilege

    After Sam was sent to his cell, he was about to rest and think about the next step, but he was disturbed by someone, a Half-Naga appeared out of his cell and opened the lid, to let him out.

    Sam frowned at this and became vignt, but what surprised him was that he was given a spatial ring and the Half-Naga said.

    "I am one of the supervisors of the fighters. My name is Fidi. Since you performed well and even earned a great bonus for the arena, if you win tomorrow¡¯s fight, you would be registered as an Iron ss fighter in your current division and your matches have some more priority along with the perks you will receive.

    Generally, one has to win five fights in a row to get this rank, but our boss appreciated your performance and gave you a chance.

    Come with me for now."

    With that, Sam followed this person to somewhere. Once again with that Hogwarts magic, they entered a room with no doors at all. Inside the room, there is a counter behind which an Old Naga with a beard sat down. His scales are not purple though. They arepletely blue. He doesn¡¯t seem to be a Naga that belongs to this city.

    Fidi walked towards the counter and whispered something to the Old man. The Old man looked at Sam and nodded his head which Sam replied with a nod.

    After some talk, Fidi came back and said to Sam.

    This is the store of the arena. This is for the fighters and some low-level workers who don¡¯t have ess to the outside world. You can ask him anything and he will give you if it doesn¡¯t vite the rules of the arena and you have enough to pay for it.

    Whether it is a food you like or an herb you want, the medicines or even a woman to warm your bed, he is the person. We call him the Shop Keeper.

    If you want you can buy something now.

    Sam looked around and did see a lot of items, there are many pills, potions, herbs, types of meats, and other materials that could be used for weapons.

    Sam was a bit confused when he saw materials and asked.

    "Are fighters allowed to make their own weapons?"

    "There is a forge within the Arena premises that only works for fighters. You can use it to make your own weapon if you know how to do so, but you have to pay a price.

    If you can¡¯t you can also pay for an artisan of Arena to make a weapon, but you have to get the required raw materials from the store.

    The artisan wouldn¡¯t provide any of them."

    "Okay."

    After that, Sam looked at a book on the counter and noticed that it seemed to be a catalog of the items.

    "These are all the items that are avable within the shop, you can get them anytime you want, there are even prices listed on them."

    The Shop Keeper said in a grumpy tone.

    "Thanks."

    With that, Sam checked the catalog and was surprised by the collection of the items that are for sale. There are all kinds of raw materials that arepletely unavable back on the previous, and the price is also reasonable.

    After some time, Sam picked up some type of beast meat. It is one of the beasts that has not be poisonous due to the environment, just like humans they are forced to mutate to this environment but they only got the immunity, not the poison attributes.

    This bird is actually a lightning type beast and a deer at that. It would be great to eat.

    "I suppose I can cook for myself, right?" Sam asked the supervisor. When thetter nodded, he started buying the beast meat of the deer and other herbs that might work as a seasoning.

    After almost emptying everything he got as rewards, he went back to his cell happily. Before the meal that could suppress the slow poison arrived, Sam already started cooking in a small cauldron.

    he didn¡¯t use the cauldron as a bowl though, he used it as a container to hold the fire and roasted the deer meat which was crusted with various herbs over it.

    Soon, the cell waspletely filled with a great fragrance. Sam gave half of the meal to Arman and both of them slept with satisfaction.

    Meanwhile, within a room, nearby somebody is watching what is happening in Sam¡¯s room within a screen.

    They didn¡¯t notice anything suspicious, so then only they let it go.

    The next day, once again the fighting time arrived. This day it is actually quite special, from Fidi, Sam learned that these three days are a special event that happens at the start of every year.

    These three days, there will be arge number of inductees as fighters into the arena, and those events along with some special main matches will be held, and apparently these three days, there will be fights throughout the twenty-four hours.

    There will also be new inductees into all divisions from the great realm to the Transcendent realm.

    So, there will be matches of the transcendent stage today as this day is thest of the three.

    Sam was now able to watch the match directly on the screen because of fidi.

    Fidi didn¡¯t seem to mind at all, because today Sam¡¯s future will be decided if he really does as he says, then he might be something that could be useful, but if he failed and disappointed them, then he might be some sex ve for Naga women who have some special interests.

    Sam is fully immersed in the battle as he didn¡¯t care about what others are plotting against him.

    The battle is quite good and these people are also almost half-Nagas. It seems like the Naga bloodline really does have great influence within them.

    He has to confirm it first-hand. The stage is almost destroyedpletely from the battle, but after the battle is over, it was recovered instantly as if the time has been reversed.

    After the new inductees of the transcendent stage division finished their fights, Sam¡¯s group had their turn.

    When it was Sam¡¯s turn he looked at the candidate and said.

    "I said that I would only use one arm and break the left leg of the opponent. If you know what is good for you, better give up silently."

    "Arrogant shit head. Don¡¯t fart so much from your mouth. It seems like you are used to eating shit all the time."

    When Sam heard this, he suddenly remembered the delicious dishes of Mackey and how he savored them. He suddenly became angry.

    How dare he, making him see this image?

    So, Sam made his move, he ced his left hand in his pant pocket and showed his left hand towards him provoking him toe at him.

    But this time, the opponent is a mage. Ans fire element one at that, he threw a fireball as an answer for Sam¡¯s provocation.

    Sam dodged this and suddenly his leg muscles bulged as he kicked the stage and lunged forward. He disappeared leaving an afterimage and arrived right in front of the opponent and

    *PAK*

    A clean and crisp pnded on the face of the opponent and a tooth flew out of his mouth as he fell down, face first.

    The arena has a stunning silence for a second andter there is augh that could shake the whole stadium.

    The opponent stood up weakly and was in a daze, he didn¡¯t expect that he would go down with one p.

    "Who did you say is eating shit?"

    Sam yelled loudly as he closed in once more. He hit him straight in the face once again. He didn¡¯t stop there and continued on beating the crap with a single hand. He even held the guy by his leg and started bashing him to the stage.

    Sam is extremely fond of food. After all, with his cultivation, he doesn¡¯t need to eat daily, in fact, he doesn¡¯t even need to eat all if he is continuously focused on cultivating and take some potions of pills. But not only does he not like the potions and pills, but he is also a fan of food.

    But because of this guy, every time he sees food and about to eat it, he will remember shit. How is that forgivable.

    After bashing him hard until all the bones broke in his body, only his left leg which was held by Sam was left intact.

    He said he would break the left leg, but he almost broke every other bone in his body.

    Sam finally got bored and threw this guy away and the referee finally announced the end of the match.

    The audience burst into cheers and one of them yelled at the top of their lungs.

    "What are you going to do in the next match, tell us?"

    When he said those words, everyone stopped their cheers.

    "I will make him dance like a chicken."

    With that Sam left within the cheers of the audience.

    Fidi, who is watching the incident was smiling. Sam¡¯s way of doing things is giving more profits, but it is a pity that this method cannot be used by all fighters. But he is not that disappointed, because he felt that Sam could probably bring him a big surprise.

 Chapter 488: Gamble

    After Sam came back into the room, Fidi is already waiting for him, he didn¡¯t take him directly back to the cell. Arman also won the third fight and he was actually going to continue fighting. Out of thirty only seven of them are left.

    As for the rest of them, no one knew where they were taken to.

    After the new guys went back to their cells, Sam was taken to a small private room with Fidi.

    They didn¡¯t speak and stayed silent for ten more minutes and Fidi only talked after an attendant came in and gave some spatial ring.

    After checking the contents of the three, he was a bit surprised but still gave him one of the rings.

    This is the winner bonus that was given by the customers. The audience had naturally given him many bonuses after his crazy performance.

    He took a look inside the ring and he was also a bit surprised.

    But he didn¡¯tpletely show that on his face. Fidi looked at him with interest and said.

    "From today on, you will be an Iron Level Middle-stage Nascent Division fighter. And I will be your supervisor.

    Before you know what perks, you get and what kind of fights you would experience, you should know how the system works here.

    In every division, there are five levels of fighters and it would be six if you include the new inductees.

    Now the five grades would be Gold Level, Silver Level, Bronze Level, Iron Level and thest one is a Casual fighter.

    Every time, the new inductees are taken in, they will mostly fight among themselves, before getting the status of a casual fighter.

    The Casual fighters will fight among themselves until they get into the higher ranks and try to be an Iron Level fighter.

    If a casual fighter is too strong and challenges opponents and gets a five-win streak, then he would be promoted to the Iron Level fighter.

    From here on out, the rankings will be attached.

    Right now, there are thirty Iron level fighters and you are the thirty-first one. You can increase your rankings by defeating the opponents.

    Above you, there are twenty Bronze-Level fighters, ten Silver level fighters, five Gold Level fighters.

    The three Nascent divisions have the most fighters of all divisions and three of them have more or less the same number of fighters.

    For an Iron Level fighter, you have to fight every three days, to be considered active and for the Bronze level fighter, you have to fight at least once every five days, for the Silver Level fighters once every week, and for the Gold Level fighters, twice every month.

    You will receive the monthly allowance only if you are considered active.

    Apart from that, you will have a new residence.

    One more thing you have to know is that there are many supervisors here and the supervisors are responsible for the fights to happen.

    Even though, the Nascent divisions have the most fighters the remaining divisions don¡¯t have a smaller number of fighters. The difference is not so big.

    As for the supervisors responsible for the Nascent divisions, there are four of them in total. They take the responsibility to not only organize the fighters but also take the fighters under their wing and take care of them.

    Any injuries, needs, necessities of those fighters under their wing are the supervisor¡¯s responsibility. Currently, the three supervisors have fifty fighters under them and I am the only one who has forty-five and you are going to be the forty-sixth one.

    We will sit together and see who is a good match to who and set the fight. Every time, the fight was set the tickets will directly go to the arena, the fight bonuses the audience gives will partly go to supervisors and the winner bonus will go to the winner, the loser bonus will go to the loser.

    If the supervisor wants, he can give some of their reward to the fighter.

    This is how things work.

    The ranking system will be decided by the arena and there are various factors thate into y. The number of wins, the fighters you defeated and such.

    For you to go to the Bronze rank from Iron rank, you have to have a ten-win streak. Otherwise, no matter how much you fight, you will not be able to be a bronze rank, you might stay in the Rank-1 of Iron Level, for a long time, but that doesn¡¯t mean anything if you don¡¯t have a winning streak.

    That¡¯s all you have to know for now. If you have any doubts, ask me."

    "Sir, why are the fighters so few? If what you said is right, there should be many more fighters in the division right? The ten-win streak is not that hard to achieve."

    "Of course, it would be easy to win ten times in a row. But what you don¡¯t know is, you cannot choose your opponents and we do that, so basically you lost the chance to fight the lower rankers than you who in most cases would be weaker than you.

    As for the win-streak, only the ten fights you won against the higher rankers will be taken into ount. That means you would be the challenger in those ten fights. As for the fights you win when the lower rankers challenge you, you will get bonuses and they will be counted as your activity, but not in the win streak.

    Even if all of it was achieved, they will have to survive all the fights. The death rate is not less. So, be careful and don¡¯t die.

    You have your next fight tomorrow with the thirtieth ranked Iron Level. The attendant will lead you to the store if you want to, otherwise, you can back to your cell. You will get your new residence after tomorrow¡¯s fight.

    Sam went to the store and bought another type of meat and went back to the cell. There he cooked the meat once more and ate with Arman.

    He began to think about what he should do next and soon the time for the next fight came. The next day, he was led to the arena, not just him many of the casual fighters also have fought and on that day he realized that there is more than just one battle arena.

    There are two more arenas that only host casual fights. Arman was led there for his fight today.

    When Sam¡¯s fight came, he did as he told. He made the opponent look like a little baby and toyed with him so much, that he wanted to admit defeat, but Sam didn¡¯t let him. He chased after him and didn¡¯t let him give a chance to utter a word.

    He stuck to him like white on rice and beat the mouth so much that Jaw almost crumbled and on Sam¡¯s demand he even agreed to act like a chicken.

    Only after that, did he let him go. The audience is cheering once again. For some reason, they liked Sam¡¯s cocky and sadistic behavior.

    But this time, he didn¡¯t make anyments and left the stage. When he went back into the room, Fidi is with another three men who seemed to be the remaining three supervisors.

    When he looked at Sam, he called him over and both of them went into the private room. Soon, the bonuses are there and Sam got his share.

    But Sam didn¡¯t leave immediately, instead, he said.

    "Sir Fidi, do you want to make more money?"

    "What?"

    "I can help you make more money. I understand the audience and if you want, we can sell the fight even better."

    Sam said in a serious tone.

    "And how do you do that?" Fidi said in a half sarcastic tone.

    "May I ask, if you are friends with any other supervisor in the remaining three?"

    "What if I am?"

    "If you have a friend, I have a way that could benefit both of you guys and the fighters under you. Of course, it is not some stupid match-fixing and rigging the oue. The battles would bepletely genuine.

    Just make a few tweaks and you can make more money off of it."

    "Really? You better not be bullshitting, I am in a good mood because of your fight bonus, so I would listen to it. But if I don¡¯t like the idea, you better get ready to face the consequences."

    Sam was confident and started speaking. Soon, Fidi has eyes full of surprise and he focused on the conversation as he asked doubts.

    After half-an-hour, Fidi came running out of the room and met with the three supervisors once again. But this time, he didn¡¯t engage in conversation instead he grabbed one of them and dragged him inside.

    Soon another round of discussion ensued.

    After another hour, the three of them finally came out and the three supervisors ran away once again to register the next day¡¯s fights.

    Sam is grinning from ear to ear as he left for his room. He has too many dead ends in this arena and it would be a bad decision toe here if the situation is like this.

    Even though he has a lot of time, he still needs to find a way to get as much information about this world as possible. So, he couldn¡¯t help but take risks and gamble with different approaches and the talk with Fidi is one of those approaches.

 Chapter 489: Making a scene

    The next day, Sam was led out of his cell. Actually. He should be getting a new residence yesterday, but Fidi wanted to try the new publicity stunt and forgot about it. Anyway, he is notining about this ce.

    Aftering to the back-stage room of the arena, Sam met with Fidi and the other supervisor who they are coborating with and his name is Farun.

    Today, both of the supervisors registered two matches between the fighters under them.

    One of them is for Sam. Both of the supervisors have their two fighters near them.

    Sam¡¯s fight is not the first one, the other fighters went into the ring and started fighting. Even today, the audience is not too low. At least, those who wanted to see Sam still came. Every day, after the fights are over there will be an announcement of the next day¡¯s fights within the Arena and there will also be a written notice at the entrance of the arena.

    There is no other marketing n other than this.

    Sam didn¡¯t know how this works, but from his yesterday¡¯s talk with Fidi, he understood that most people whoe here are Noble children who don¡¯t have much talent and asionally some high-ss nobles. The rest of them are above average working-ss people.

    They could still be considered rich. They are even some VIP audience in the front rows. Sam didn¡¯t get any more of the information. After all, Fidi has to trust him more to give me that. The first thing they learned in this ce is that they shouldn¡¯t give any chances to the fighters to escape.

    There are many cases, where the fighters tried their best to escape the ce and many of them tried their best to get as much information as they can without anyone knowing.

    There are even some cases that almost seeded. So, they cannot easily divulge any information, even though it would be stupid to think that Sam wants to escape by fishing the information directly from the supervisor.

    They watched the fight through the screen and soon, Sam started walking through one of the tunnels while his opponent went through another one.

    Meanwhile, the fight in the Arena wasn¡¯t over. But it is in its final stages. The battle is pretty much one-sided and the winner is the fighter that belonged to Farun.

    In two more blows, the fight was over. Even though it is as one-sided as Sam¡¯s fight, it is too boring.

    There is no craziness that Sam disyed in tormenting his opponent present in this fight. It is too nd and the crowd is not that pleased, at least the higher level audience who are the ones that provide the ie to the arena are not cheering or pping.

    As the fight was over, the winner showed off his victory by raising his hands up in the air. But at this moment, a cold voice poured cold water all over his victory.

    "Get the fuck out. How much time do you need to show off this pathetic victory?"

    The whole arena was stunned, they didn¡¯t expect this at all. After the audience saw who is talking, they burst into cheers once again. Sam is standing at the entrance of the tunnel with an impatient expression.

    When the winner of the fight looked at him, he felt frustrated and his face became twisted with anger.

    Sam is kind of famous in the fighters. Normally, the causal fighters don¡¯t have any contact with each other, but the same is not true for the ranked fighters.

    Every day, they have meals together and some of them would talk between themselves.

    They have individual screens within their room so that they could watch the fights.

    So, they knew that Sam has be the Iron Level fighter without a winning streak. And he is also the only one in the casual fighters who enjoyed the arena so much. His crazy battling methods and twisted torture towards his past three opponents made them remember him.

    They did hear the words he said about defeating every other person in the division, but nobody cared, this is not the first time they saw a braggart.

    But now, he is pissed, he didn¡¯t expect that Sam would rain on his parade.

    "Do you not understand? Get the fuck out, my fight is the next one."

    The fighter on the stage couldn¡¯t hold back.

    "Mind your fucking mouth, you little bitch.¡¯

    "Make me."

    Sam said in a condescending tone.

    At this moment, the fighter almost blew his skull off from anger and wanted to kill Sam. He is also one of the few who enjoyed the attention arena brought to him. So, he was enjoying his victory. But Sam just had toe and make things worse.

    He was about to make a move, but Sam beat him to it, he used Phantom Step and appeared right below the stage, as the barrier disappeared, there are no restrictions, he held the leg of that fighter with his hand and just dragged him down and pped straight across the face.

    The fighter was in the most embarrassing position, he was stunned and before he came to his senses, he dragged him down the stage and threw him towards the tunnel.

    Then Sam went up on the stage and gestured to his opponent toe up. The crowd startedughing hysterically.

    They didn¡¯t expect that the winner of the fight could be humiliated to this extent.

    The referee who saw Sam and his opponent didn¡¯t know how to remedy the situation, so he just started the fight.

    The fight didn¡¯t go for long, the opponent ispletely humiliated. He was almost as same as the previous winner.

    The crowd was satisfied by Sam¡¯s bullying persona and as he was about to go out, he saw that the previous winner is still there.

    "Oh? You want some more?" Sam asked condescendingly and that guy couldn¡¯t take it and made a move. Just as the two of them are about to sh, the referee held both of them at bay and the attendants came running to hold them back.

    Sam kept on yelling at him as he was dragged back.

    "Come on, you little piece of shit. Come at me if you dare. I will make you beg like my bitch."

    He started yelling all kinds of profanities like a madman and the crowd ispletely riled up.

    Soon, the supervisors entered the ring and held both of them back.

    And this disappointed the crowd, Fidi had a troubled expression as he said to the crowd.

    "Tomorrow, we will make a match between both of them."

    The crowd cheered once again.

    Themotion waspletely cleared.

    When the bonuses are calcted, the three of them are ecstatic. The remaining two supervisors are also gloating from the side. They thought that Fidi and Farun would get into trouble for doing this.

    But what they don¡¯t know is, after the boss, who is the Naga with the golden-hued scales called them, they exined the whole situation.

    This is all Sam¡¯s n to sell the fight.

    Sam made this n after understanding the crowd. The Nagas¡¯ hatred towards the humans seemed to be innate. They couldn¡¯t wait to see them tortured more, particrly in the hands of their own kind.

    So, they liked Sam¡¯s twisted methods and enjoyed it.

    Sam wanted to use their nature to get more profits. Since they like the conflict and battle so much, he wanted to give them a more vorful one. What happens if there is personal conflict involved? And they got the answer.

    The bonuses today are more than that of a sessful main fight and they got some serious benefits from this.

    The boss was ecstatic and he didn¡¯t pursue the matter further. In fact, he even gave more privileges for both of them and a new facility was given to the fighters on that day.

    The fighters can watch the fight of others in the arena along with the audience and their seats are even arranged on one side of the arena specifically and are not for sale.

    This is to make sure that more conflicts would happen between fighters and more fights would make more money.

    Sam didn¡¯t take the residence change. He needs to stay with Arman for the time being and there are some reasons for that. He decided they would change the residence directly after Arman became Iron-Level as well.

    He is also having continuous fights every day and from tomorrow he will be Iron-Level as well.

    As for the reason, he is researching something and Arman is his only test subject in the current situation.

    The next day, the fight went on and Sam started beating the crap out of his opponent, the arena was full and the fighter specific seats are also full. The fighters who sat there suddenly felt relief and a sense of freedom as they experienced the view as a normal audience.

    But one of them didn¡¯t take this as the rest. He is angry and exasperated because the one who got his crap beaten out of him is none other than his brother.

 Chapter 490: Making a bigger scene

    When Sam saw the killing intenting from that guy in the fighter audience, he knew his n was sess.

    He wants to create a continuous feud with a group of fighters and make it as the basis of his rise in this arena.

    He will increase his rank and he will increase the revenue at the same time, so that the Arena will see him as an asset and an asset that couldn¡¯t be disposed at all.

    Even though, he has to find a way to get past the Arena and enter the city to get more information and the method would vary based on the person who is sitting on the top of this Arena and controlling this whole business, but the basis would definitely be based on him being involved in the Arena by too much.

    Because, no matter who is operating the Arena, he is definitely not the top of the city, he might be one of the higher-level scions of the city, but not the top of the pyramid, if that is the case then the n would be easy and even if it is not, it would be a little harder.

    But that wouldn¡¯t stop his n.

    So, for the next few days, all Sam did is offend the rest of the Iron Level fighters and having match openly right in front of the Arena and the same audience areing day after day. What surprised Sam is that he didn¡¯t even need to use the elemental energy once.

    Except for the one time, he used Phantom step to start the feud, he didn¡¯t use a single elemental attack. All of them started thinking that he is a warrior and that include Fidi.

    After a week, seven continuous easy winster, Sam made a loud promation in the arena.

    "I have beaten the shit of seven Iron-Level fighters and no one forced me to use the elemental energy. I want to ask, is there even a real fighter in the Iron-Level? Damn it, I am getting bored. I want to challenge all these guys in a single day.

    A full day in the Arena, I will beat the crap out of all the remaining Iron-Level fighters, I hope our supervisor can take care of that."

    Sam walked away as he left these words.

    The audience was dumbfounded, but all of them burned in excitement. When Sam reached backstage, Fidi was panicking like crazy. He didn¡¯t think Sam would say something like that and make all the Iron-Level fighters his enemies.

    "Are you out of your mind? Why would you say that? Do you think it is that easy to start a fight like that? With your current rank, you have to fight at least twenty-five more to beat all the Iron-Level fighters."

    "It is just twenty-five. Please don¡¯t panic. Just go to your boss, tell him that I want to do that. After three days, when Arman has defeated the next three opponents and goes to the Bronze level, I will fight all the remaining.

    Imagine what kind of show it would be? The Bonuses aside, don¡¯t you think you will be able to gain the attention of the top dogs of the city?

    Just announce the fight and make the information of this flow all over the city. Invite the top dogs as special guests without any entry fee.

    Do you know what kind of attention you will get?

    Sir, if you want me to be brutally honest, I will tell you something. The Arena is not earning its full potential. There are no top dogsing here and watching the fights because there is no excitement in the fights.

    I will bring that excitement. Go and ask your boss and tell him to ept this and send invitations to the top dogs, if that doesn¡¯t follow the rules, buy the tickets to all of the top dogs from my money, I have been saving from the past five fights and I will pay from my personal pocket if you want.

    Just trust me and I will show you what real revenue is. If this doesn¡¯t work, then I will never take any form of fight bonus for the rest of the Arena."

    Sam said confidently and Fidi couldn¡¯t do anything but follow. Because deep down he wants to see what would happen.

    There is no fighter who dared do that in Arena and the Arena existed for a long time.

    He is a bit worried though. But still, he dared it and went to meet the boss.

    When he met him and exined everything, the boss sat there in contemtion. He was thinking whether it would work or not.

    "Are you sure, he wants to do that?"

    "Yes. Not only that, I think we can invite all the Dukes and Nobility and if possible, the Imperial family to the fight."

    "What did you say? The Dukes and Imperial family? Have you gone Mad?"

    "No sir, think about it. You and your elder brother are both prospects for the future head of the family. But he was given a lot more privileges than you.

    You knew that in your family, the young masters who sent to Arena are nothing but talent scouts to your family.

    They are here to make money and at the same time train, the fighters in thispetitive environment and finally your family will absorb them.

    They never got a fair shot at the family head position and I think this guy who is crazy about battles is your ticket out of this situation.

    All you have to do is, just be the talent scout and this guy is a great talent. From what I saw, he doesn¡¯t have any form of restrictions in terms of battle. We can use him as a whetstone for the rest of the fighters.

    If he can pull this off, let us put our elites to these tests and make the Arena known to the rest of the nobles and the Imperial family. If we can do this, we can just sell some of them off to the other families for sufficient support.

    Who doesn¡¯t need human elites as their subordinates?"

    Turned out the boss is another young master. If Sam knew all this information, then the situation would turn out differently. A young master with a desire for power but no power, this is an ideal puppet to y with.

    But it wouldn¡¯t be toote when he finally knew it.

    "Let us do it." The young master went into deep thought before answering.

    Fidi bowed down and said.

    "Boss Rana. I assure you, this will definitely benefit you in your aspiration to be the Master Rana of the household and it wouldn¡¯t be long. You will definitely not regret it."

    Fidi sessfully portrayed Sam¡¯s idea as his and achieved what he wanted before leaving.

    He came back to Sam¡¯s residence and agreed with it. For the next two days, the fights are already registered so, they could do this three dayster, which is what Sam wanted.

    At night, Sam and Arman went to the dining area where the Iron Level fighters take their night meals. All of them are looking at them threateningly and if not for the guards cum attendants that stayed there, they would have started a brawl.

    But Sam¡¯s provocations are not helping the situation. He just kept on provoking them as if that is his life¡¯s motto.

    The next morning, fidi came to him and gave him a warning.

    "Don¡¯t go around provoking others, there are still three days for this to happen. You don¡¯t want to get wasted by them ganging up on you."

    "Sir, you are being unfair here. Am I the only one who is provoking? With all the killing intent, you want me to stay silent. If it was outside, I would have killed every single one of them."

    "Then what do you think is the solution for this?"

    "How about this? We will have our meals with the staff in their dining room. You don¡¯t have to worry about your security and we can have a peaceful meal."

    Fidi thought for a moment and agreed before he left.

    He didn¡¯t notice the grin on Sam¡¯s face before he left though. Because Sam directly offended all these people just to achieve this. He wanted to enter the staff dining room.

    Because the talks of the staff during a meal are more than just talks. They are a source of information and that way, Fidi doesn¡¯t know what he did. He just let the man who relies on the information to destroy his enemies go and stay for thirty minutes straight in one of the greatest information sources of the city.

    For the next three days, Sam went to the staff dining room and heard a lot of things. If not for the fact that he didn¡¯t make small devices that could help him eavesdrop, he would have made some serious information collection.

    He also realized how much he is relying on the shadow mice and decided to rectify these things, once he got out of this ce.

 Chapter 491: Big day and VIP SCIONS

    For the next three days, Sam didn¡¯t do much, he went to the staff dining room for the meal along with Arman.

    They keenly heard as much information as they could and Sam also noticed that his hearing has improved since the Raiju bloodline.

    He wasn¡¯t able to notice it, but now that hepared it with Arman¡¯s hearing in this particr situation, he clearly understood the enhancement level.

    The bloodlines of the beasts brought these enhancements, but they are not too significant at his level, maybe once he crossed the Consummate realm, he might be able to see what kind of significant changes his senses had.

    As for now, he couldn¡¯t find any really valuable information that could make his work a lot easier, all he heard are the bitching and whining of the staff towards the supervisors and asionally something rted to fighters and their performances.

    For these days, Sam was the main conversation topic. Except forst day before the fight, he heard some interesting names and got some information regarding his position.

    From all the information hepiled, he knew that he is in the imperial capital of an empire. And there are five main noble families and some minor nobilities in the city. The five major noble families each as a Duke in their court.

    As for the ministers and other officials, they are either someone with no other noble family background and climbed the ranks asmoners or they are from the minor families.

    That was it.

    And from what he heard, many people areing to see the fight tomorrow and most of them are scions of the noble households and even thest prince of the empire.

    He also learned that the boss of the Arena whose name is Rana is also a scion of one of the five Dukes.

    He doesn¡¯t know if the empire itself only has five Dukes, but five of them are housed in the capital and their scions areing here. Even though, there is no real big-shot. This is a start.

    Sam could use this as a chance. Even though, the Arena wanted to invite the real top dogs, it has been a problem because an Iron Level fighter challenging the rest of the Iron Level is not such a big deal for them and Rana doesn¡¯t have that much of a standing to invite them directly.

    But once Sam impressed these scions enough and the information, they carry about him to their fathers, then they would definitely be intrigued and if Sam nned another crazy thing just like this, then he would have more information.

    Anyway, with this the next meal would be more informative as once the scionse and enter the arena, talks about them would inevitably happen.

    Next day.

    Sam went to the Arena early in the morning.

    Arman was already promoted to Bronze Level and he is taking this one-day break.

    The attendance of the audience was the highest that has ever been and the VIP section was finally full in a long time with the real VIP¡¯s.

    The ticket charge also increased a lot and there is a lot of ie.

    Sam is fighting twenty members today. So, not only did they charge for twenty fights, they even charged double the usual amount.

    When Sam entered the stage, he saw a lot of faces and among them in the front rows, where the VIPs took seats, he saw two familiar faces. One of them is the young master he saw at the city gates and the other one is the Old Naga man who captured Sam.

    Apart from that, he also saw other Naga scions in other VIP seats simrly with the body guards. The scions included six young men including the familiar young master and three young women.

    All of them have simr scales and the purple shade of the scales is also simr, the only difference is that they have different colored hues on their scales.

    The young master who he saw at the city gate has golden hue, just like that these people have different hues, like blue, orange, red, white, silver, pink, green and thest one who is also the most dazzling among all the young scions has dual colored hue and that is thebination of crimson and gold.

    He doesn¡¯t know who he is, but from the looks of it and the number of body guards around him along with the extravagant robes, he might be thest prince of the imperial family.

    Sam looked at them calmly only for a few seconds and soon, someone else came from the backstage route of the arena and Sam was a little surprised.

    Because, he is also the young Naga man and he is quite simr in looks with the young master at the city gate.

    He seemed to be the boss of the Arena.

    He came onto the stage and looked at the VIPs he first greeted the prince and then all the scions finally stopping at the young master at the city gate.

    "Greetings Elder brother Gnyan." His voice was a little cold, but there is an amiable smile on his face, Gnyan didn¡¯t take this lightly and replied in an equally cold tone.

    "Greetings Younger brother Rana. I didn¡¯t expect that within the short term that you took over the Arena you would organize such a big event."

    "I am just lucky that the Guardian brought such a valuable and interesting fighter to the Arena. Of course, we can¡¯t let his talent to waste. That guy is an absolute battle maniac and all his battles are too easy. So, an even as grand as this is a necessity to showcase his full potential."

    After that he went to thest VIP seat and sat there while the supervisors stood beside him.

    And with a single hand gesture the referee announced the first battle.

    Sam looked at Rana and thetter also exchanged the nce and there seemed to be a meaning behind it and Sam understood what it meant. It is a warning to Sam, to not fuck this up.

    Sam didn¡¯t think much of it, he only smiled and looked at the first candidate, the Iron Level ranked 20.

    He is a fist user, and his face is extremely gloomy. Who would want to fight in a battle which is solely going to be an elevating stage for one person?

    He wore a pair of knuckledusters and the metallic spikes would hurt a person a lot. When the referee signalled the fight, he didn¡¯t even halt for a fraction of a second and ran straight towards Sam.

    Sam was cool and calm, when that person started the fight with straight punch, he didn¡¯t block or counter attack, instead he just dodged it casually with a cocky crooked grin.

    He took a step back and also raised his hands and took a boxing stance; this made the opponent even more angry.

    Sam danced around the ring for the next two minutes, he just threw a jab all the time and he only use ten percent of his strength.

    He didn¡¯t hit with full power and he is not even using the full strength of his physical body much less the spiritual energy.

    The opponent became frustrated, no matter what he is doing he couldn¡¯t get past the jab. It is like a viper, never missing the bite.

    He also understood that Sam is only using the right hand for blocking and even the left hand that is hitting him in the face is not actually at full strength.

    He felt humiliated and his spirit is breaking, he is at the same cultivation level as Sam, but thetter is miles forward in skill.

    All of a sudden, he didn¡¯t care anymore and brought out his trump card. He started throwing hooks from left and right continuously as he advanced forward.

    Sam stepped back as he dodged.

    The knuckle dusters of the opponent glowed as if they are made of worlds most dazzling diamonds and the single hit would destroy anything in the path.

    Sam didn¡¯t have time to dodge, the punches are too fast, if he could endure it though, the opponent is meat on the chopping block.

    As he stepped backward, he realized that he is at the barrier, he couldn¡¯t dodge it anymore. He either take the hits or he finish the battle. And it seems like the opponent¡¯s fists are getting stronger with every hit and he would go on for another minute at least.

    He also noticed that the opponent¡¯s legs created cracks on the stage making him grounded on the spot.

    Sam decided that it is about time he finished.

    His fist finally showed signs of spiritual energy cirction. But it is very small and anyway it is used to power his muscle fibres. He still decided to use his physical strength to attack.

    Sam lunged forward and used his left hand to block the left hook as he punched the hand that wasing at him and used the same left hand¡¯s elbow to stop the right hook that was already on the way.

    The rhythm broke and all of a sudden, Sam threw his right hand for the first time in the fight. He threw it right at the body and that too in the form of an upper cut.

    The blownded cleanly, but the opponent didn¡¯t fly away, the air in the surroundings cleared away for a second as the cracks under the legs of the opponent became deeper and he puked blood on Sam.

    He just stood there as if he was a statue and blood spewed out of his mouth for three seconds. Sam didn¡¯t stand there when he saw the blooding and walked to the centre of the stage as he looked at his ck vest that was soaked in his opponent¡¯s blood with a frustrated look.

    The audience realized that the fight is over and the stadium burst into cheers.

 Chapter 492: Overwhelming

    After the first battle was over, the crowd started cheering, but it is not as great as the previous days. It is not because the fight is too short, rather the people who came here today didn¡¯t have a habit of cheering like this.

    They are too prudent and too high-ss to yell and shout like that.

    But one of them is not like that. It is the guy with the Purple scales and Orange hue. He is drinking wine from a table and he only has one body guard. He is the only one who doesn¡¯t have human ves, particrly the female ves around him in the VIPs.

    The rest of them all had ves, and even the three young women have female ves dressed in extremely short dresses barely covering the nipples of the breasts and genitals.

    The noble with orange hue whistled and pped as if he was normal audience when he saw Sam¡¯s finish.

    Sam was busy cleaning the blood with a cloth. As for why he didn¡¯t use the water element, it will ruin the surprise. If he really needs to use the water element, then it would be better to use it in a battle to give a huge surprise.

    The attendants came and took away the standing unconscious man and the someone started repairing the stage. Within a minute, the stage is back to its original form and the next opponent arrived.

    This guy is actually a staff user. It has been a while since Sam one and he is actually a bit excited as he took out his own staff.

    The opponent frowned, he is already frustrated that Sam is trying step over all of them to rise, but now he even took out the same weapon as his, it is clearly a provocation and he couldn¡¯t control himself.

    He lunged forward and swung his staff straight to his head.

    Sam once again went on with defence. Today, not only does he want to show off cockily, but he also has to show off hisbat ability.

    He would like to be a popr product amongst the nobility.

    For that his solid foundation inbat skills has to be disyedpletely.

    After three minutes of solid defence, the opponent lost all the patience and once again went on with the trump card.

    And that is the end of the battle, Samnded his first strike of the battle and all he did was thrust the staff¡¯s end straight into the chest of the opponent.

    The opponent was not sent flying, neither was he sted into pieces. But he stopped his actionspletely.

    His energy flow broke and the rib cage cracked all over along with the shaking of internal organs.

    He started spewing blood and stood still like a statue.

    One hit finish once again.

    The third opponent came and this time, this guy happened to be an archer. He stood at the extreme edge of the stage almost leaning to the barrier and aimed straight at Sam.

    His arrow-head was converged with a me and when shot out, it created an Area of effect type attack that burned a certain range within thending point of the arrow.

    Sam still held his staff as he tried to close off the distance and attack in close quarters.

    But there is no chance for him to get past this. If only he made a bow that could handle his strength. If he used the Golden Crescent now, it would break and even if it didn¡¯t break, the arrow wouldn¡¯t have enough force to deal with the opponent.

    As he thought of this, he decided to use another method to deal with this.

    He started circting spiritual energy in the staff and started spinning it between in his fingers.

    He spun the staff right in front of him like a propeller and walked forward like nothing could faze him. The audience and the opponent are stunned.

    It is not easy to block an arrow from an expert using this method. If they are skilled enough with the staff, one might be able to do this, but that is only for normal arrows that only prate, not for the arrows that can explode with mes.

    But some of the guards behind the VIPs who are some old experts could see something their young masters and the rest of the audience couldn¡¯t see and that is the spiritual energy waves that are surrounding the staff.

    The opponent shot the arrow straight at the staff as if challenging Sam¡¯s field, but when it reached a few centimetres of the staff, the fire elemental energy surrounding arrow disappeared or more like diffused into the surroundings with a red re and the arrow was hit away by the staff.

    Sam is nullifying the fire elemental energy by diffusing its condensed form on the arrow with the spiritual energy. With his maniption level, it is easy to do so, when he is facing same level attacks and the arrows happened to be not the full-scale attacks of the opponent.

    Sam advance further and further like this until he was only a few feet away from the opponent. The opponent took his trump card and made his move. But this time, Sam didn¡¯t wait for it to reach, he made his move and lunged forward with the staff barely dodging the arrow whichnded right behind him.

    As the me exploded, Sam¡¯s feather coat didn¡¯t even have to activate to reduce the effectspletely, he just took the force to his advantage andnded a hit straight on the opponent¡¯s head.

    This time, the opponent didn¡¯t even bleed, he just stood fell down like a ragdoll.

    Sam is a little disappointed, he wanted to nt him to the ground just like the first two. He wanted to make him stand up on the spot.

    The third opponent was gone and Sam didn¡¯t even break a sweat.

    The opponents continued on and most of the next people are mages and fought long ranged. But Sam finished them all the same.

    He is like fish in the water as he moved all over the stage like he owned it and swept everyone with a single shot.

    Until the tenth fight, nobody has even seen him pant. Only the tenth fighter made him use more than one move and that guy didn¡¯t go unconscious on the first two moves, but he was still down on the dumps for the third move.

    Only after the tenth fight, did they see some difficulty.

    And that difficulty is just the opponents blocking three to four of Sam¡¯s strikes. There is no realbat here. The audience saw one sided beat down from the start to finish as Sam ran through the opponents like a hit knife through the butter.

    Soon, it is time for the rank one candidate¡¯s battle and only around three hours has passed.

    And that too because, Sam made a short work of everyone present. The nobles and the guardians are having a conversation as they sized up Sam.

    What Sam did today, is really amazing and from what they saw he is not even tired yet. Maybe, the gold rank number one could do this, but Sam is one level below in terms of cultivation and he did this so easily.

    He didn¡¯t even show his full strength.

    The fight with the first ranker is duller than they thought, because the first ranker already knew that he would lose, so he straight up made a request.

    "Hit me with an elemental attack of yours and I would withdraw from this. At least do it for stepping on all of us. I want to get a glimpse of your true strength."

    When he said this, all the audience also got interested and even the nobles are looking forward to it, Sam looked at the audience and yelled.

    "Are you guys okay with that?"

    When Sam asked this, they all yelled in admission.

    Even the nobles said the same thing, so he didn¡¯t reject this at all.

    "You will die if you take the full blow."

    "We wouldn¡¯t know until we try."

    Sam didn¡¯t try to persuade further and lightning energy started coursing through the metallic staff.

    He has no reason to reject the other guy and he leaped into the air with silver after images and swung his staff.

    The opponent activated all kinds of defences and got ready to block the blow with all his might. Sam jumped really high and the intensity of lightning increased as he came down.

    Suddenly, the opponent felt like he made a mistake as he sensed the pressure from this. He didn¡¯t want to take that attack.

    It is too much for him.

    But he gritted his teeth, because his legs gave in and he couldn¡¯t move.

    As the silver lightning boltnded, he closed his eyes.

    *BOOM*

    The lightningnded and there is arge sh blinding everyone. But when every saw again, they didn¡¯t see the opponent dead, they were confused.

    Because, Samnded the attack right beside the opponent at the same time, he controlled the impact of the energy that the opponent wouldn¡¯t get any damage.

    But the opponent is soaked in sweat and shaking. He couldn¡¯t hold himself and his legs buckled as he fell on his knees.

    Sam defeated his opponent withoutnding a single hit.

 Chapter 493: Gaining more attention

    After the fight was over, the audience once again cheered, the opponent who didn¡¯t even take a single attack was needed to be taken away.

    He couldn¡¯t even take the pressure much less the hit.

    After they left Sam walked to the center of the stage and bowed down before speaking to Rana.

    "Boss, with all due respect, I think you should increase the standard of fighters, it is no challenge at all, and I didn¡¯t get to use ten percent of strength. I hope you can resolve this and throw some more challenging tasks at me."

    Rana who is grinning wildly because of the one-sided performance and the revenue he would get was surprised and flustered to be called out like this, but he didn¡¯t show it openly. He looked at Fidi, for him to provide an out.

    And Fidi also got a bit flustered, but he remembered the talk he had with Sam before the match has started and whispered something to Rana, who smiled and looked extremely excited as he stood up and said in a loud voice.

    "Our Iron-Level fighter Sam said that he needs more challenge and so does our audience. That is why I made a decision and tomorrow there will be another exciting for you to watch.

    A one versus five fight. Sam against the five bronze level fighters at the same time.

    Today, Sam proved that he can fight with twenty opponents and even more if theye at him one at a time, but let us see how he will fare against more skilled opponents in a fight and how he would deal with the fact that he was going to be outnumbered.

    I hope everyone cane tomorrow to see the fight and who knows, there might be a surprise waiting for us if Sam really did win."

    When he said this, the audience cheered. The VIPs stood up and looked at San with interest. They noticed Sam¡¯s excited expression when Rana announced and they all came to one conclusion.

    This guy seemed to be too much of a battle maniac.

    And Sam would be happy if he knew that they have that impression.

    His goal is that and he almost achieved it. He looked at the nobles and saw that the three Naga women are looking at him weirdly, he could sense the emotion they are feeling and it seemed to be a little bit of lust mixed with.

    He heard that sex is not that big of a deal in the Naga race, in fact, they liked to have sex with humans so much that their armies are mostly made with the humans that have faint Naga bloodline and some higher positions will be upied by Half Nagas.

    This perspective of sex is even spread amongst thedies of Nagas and the whole race. Except for infidelity after the marriage, everything they do before marriage ispletely fair in their nature as Naga¡¯s lust is almost top-notch in all races.

    Particrly, their lust towards humans.

    He shuddered at the looks of these three naga women in the VIPs and hoped that he wouldn¡¯t need to mess with them.

    Apart from that the Vip who is most casual of all and kept on drinking and yelling at the battles also looked at him with interest and threw a wine gourd towards the attendant who collects the winner bonuses.

    The attendant ran towards Sam and gave him the wine gourd. Sam removed the cork and sniffed the aroma of the strong wine and looked at the Purple-Orange scaled young man.

    He raised his gourd towards him as a toast and thetter reciprocated the gesture and two of them took a swig of the wine at the same time.

    Sam then asked the attendant.

    "May I know the young master¡¯s name?"

    "He is young master Yodha. He is the son of one of the Dukes and is quite famous for being a drunkard."

    When Sam heard this, he had a particr idea in his mind and took out a crystal bamboo jar from his storage. This is the spatial ring that contained the food from Mackey and it also has wine.

    He just said to fill it up with every food item they can and they also filled it with this wine.

    He gave the wine to the attendant and asked him to deliver it back to Yodha.

    The attendant nodded and went back with the Bamboo jar.

    Yodha became interested when he saw the jar and he looked at Sam with a smile. He opened the lid and took a sniff. This wine¡¯s aroma is not as strong as the one he sent. But it has a peculiar and mellow aroma enticing him to have it immediately.

    He took a sip and his eyes lit up in surprise. He once again toasted to Sam before leaving the ce as he enjoyed the wine from the bamboo jar.

    After they left, Sam went back backstage and waited for Fidi toe.

    Fidi¡¯s face is glowing as he looked through the spatial rings as he made his way towards the private room.

    He handed over one of the spatial rings to Sam and said.

    "There is not only the winner bonus of the arena and the audience, there is also extra bonus from the fight bonus for you.

    Boss personally approved of this special bonus to you, today¡¯s ie is off the charts. It is even more than the ie of the past weekbined."

    He is ecstatic. He earned a lot as Sam¡¯s supervisor and the rest of the supervisors are grinding their teeth. Even though they also earned some money because the people who got their ass beat by Sam are fighters under the other promoters and they did earn a lot, butpared to Fidi, it is peanuts.

    They are all grudgingly looking at Fidi and Sam from outside the room.

    They didn¡¯t expect that one of them would get such a jackpot. Sam really is like a pot of gold.

    Sam started sorting out some of the rewards and separated them into another spatial ring and handed it over to the attendant and said.

    "Distribute among yourselves."

    The attendant was stunned for a moment and didn¡¯t react for a moment, but when Sam gestured once again, he came to his senses and took the ring.

    He took a peek at the contents and was beyond joyful.

    He thanked him profusely and ran out of the room without a care for what Fidi or other supervisors would think.

    Fidi was stunned too. He saw the amount Sam separated and gave away. It is actually a lot. It is almost forty percent of the winner bonus. This is a huge amount.

    There are around a hundred attendants in this wing of the residences of the fighters and even for them, this is more than three months¡¯ worth of sry for each of them.

    "Why did you give away so much?"

    "What is the point of all the money? I have a sufficient amount for my immediate growth and more. And I am sure that I can get more before that. So, what is the point of holding so much? If it is some food, wine, or any other consumable, I might have been interested. It is just spirit stones. Nothing I can¡¯t get with little effort.

    Anyway, is there a way for the fighters to bet?"

    "Bet?"

    "Yeah, there is a betting section, right? Is there a way for me to bet on myself?"

    "There is, but it is not led by the Boss directly. It is mostly run by Boss¡¯s family. We only get somemission."

    "Why is that?"

    "Some family politics. Even though the subordinate who runs the betting is Boss¡¯ subordinate in name, he is actually working right under Boss¡¯ elder brother."

    Sam thought for a moment and understood. Even though the revenue would being to Rana, it would be no more than some pocket change.

    There is no way the full and exact amount wille to Rana. He wanted to take advantage of this situation.

    "How do they jumble the money proceedings? They should send the data regarding the number of bets put on them, right?"

    "They will just send some false data and pay the arena ording to that."

    "Then, I actually have a n that could benefit us a lot. If Boss, wants to know please do tell him to grant me permission to visit him."

    "I will talk to him."

    Fidi¡¯s and Sam¡¯s talk waspletely natural as if they are peers, because of the profits he made, Fidi is talking to him like this without even knowing.

    After a few minutes, Fidi is back and he took Sam to another room deeper into the building where Rana is sitting.

    Sam was offered a seat and both of them started discussing what they should do tomorrow regarding the matter of betting.

    When Rana heard this, he had an interesting expression. The Idea is actually quite simple, but they never got this Idea.

    But now, they are going to do this.

 Chapter 494: One Vs five

    Sam and Rana talked for more than an hour and he exined his n in detail.

    It is actually pretty simple and straightforward, but it involves a lot of money and that made Rana Hesitant.

    Sam shook his head and ce two spatial rings on the table and said.

    "This is my whole fortune. I am willing to bet all of this. All you have to do is, make sure that you have the betting data they gave you with you all the time.

    As soon as they try to reject anything and the ¡¯customers¡¯e and question you, all you have to do ise out and show the data, throwing them under the bus.

    If they still want to have their reputation, they will definitely pay up even before theye and ask you. After all, once the news gets out, there is no chance that they could keep this up and the money would return at the same time, Rana could use this chance to take away some of the influence of his elder brother in the arena.

    At least, the betting wing will bepletely gone and Rana can get control over it.

    Rana finally agreed and he also took out another Spatial ring and added his share too,

    Next day.

    The betting wing opened early. Sam is not the favorite for betting as they gave one to five odds.

    No many people are betting on him, because they knew that the Iron-Level fighters and Bronze level fighters are different and even though, Sam took out all the fighters one by one. They didn¡¯t think the result would be the same for five people.

    Because, if five members cooperated perfectly, the strength wouldn¡¯t be the addition of their individual strengths, rather it would be the product of it.

    Not many people are willing to bet on Sam except for some small amounts who wanted to try their luck and strike it rich.

    The betting agent is feeling a bit down. He felt that he went a little overboard with the odds and that is why they are not betting on this.

    As he was thinking like this, someone came and ced an enormous bet on Sam.

    "One hundred million spirit stones on Sam." The one who came seemed to be a regr Naga came and said this and the betting agent was dumbfounded. He immediately took a look at the spiritual stones and was a little hesitant about this.

    After all, the amount is a little too much. They would have to pay five hundred million if Sam really won. But his hand is itching to do so.

    At this moment, someone else came along with a guard. When the people saw him, they all moved aside as they gave way to him.

    That person is none other than Yodha. He ced another spatial ring on Sam¡¯s side and said.

    "One hundred thousand on Sam."

    He didn¡¯t even bother looking at the betting age whether he was taking it or not, because that guy has no choice. He would have to take this. There are not many people in the whole city that could reject Yodha.

    Much less, when someone is operating something. It is a great thing that Yodha is paying up and doing business like a normal person instead of not snatching it from them.

    If the betting agent rejected it now, after publishing the betting odds, he would be aughing stock.

    And it also forced him to ept the bet of the person beside him. The people are watching, he can¡¯t reject it.

    After that he closed the betting section and sent them to another table where another agent is collecting bets.

    He rushed to his manager immediately. His manager is the one who is the direct subordinate of Gnyan. He is the one who embezzles all the betting profits leaving some puny pocket change to Rana.

    If not for the fact, that Rana couldn¡¯t get concrete evidence and this manager was here far before Rana came in, he would have fired his ass off.

    When the betting agent exined the situation to the manager, thetter went into deep thought and finally said.

    "Don¡¯t worry about it. This could be a jackpot. The five bronze level fighters are randomly selected and I have some people inside the Arena who can help with this. We are going to send earth element users to fight him. That is a bane to his lightning element.

    We will make big money this time. Just send the data like every day. We have nothing to worry about."

    With that, the betting agent rxed a bit, but there is still a voice screaming in the corner of his head that there is something wrong with this situation. If they lost, they have to pay one billion after all.

    But he didn¡¯t think too much and proceeded with the routine. He made the datasheet that has false info and sent it to Rana.

    When Rana saw this, he couldn¡¯t help but get shocked. Because the two bets of a hundred million each are registered as one million each. He couldn¡¯t help but shake with anger when he looked at the numbers.

    He calmed himself down and went out to the Arena. It is about time, the match is going to start.

    In the Arena, the seats are full and once again the young master came back and this time, they brought some other people along with them. It seemed to be their seniors.

    Anyway, Sam doesn¡¯t have to wait too long to know.

    Soon, the five candidates with gloomy expressions came out and went on to the stage.

    They looked at Sam with unending resentment. But Sam didn¡¯t even care.

    He looked at them and asked.

    "Are you guys ready?"

    His question only provoked him even more and all of them started circting their spiritual energy. Two of them are warrior mages and they achieved partial fusion by fusing their skin with earth elemental energy.

    As for the remaining three, they are earth elemental mages and two of them are controlling the earth around the stage and thest one did the most surprising this, Sam has seen today.

    And that is thest candidate who disappeared all of a sudden with a puff of dust spreading all over.

    He almost seemed to have entered the stage.

    Sam frowned and just as he was thinking what is happening, he felt like the stage beneath him is not stable and before he knew it, he could feel his legs trapped inside the stage. The stage molded itself to the point it created a stone mp to bind his feet to the stage.

    As he was thinking of breaking it off, the other opponents made their move. The rocks that came from off the stage are already on the way to hit Sam straight on the face.

    And the sharp edges of the rocks are quite something.

    He could only block first, but he also saw the two warrior magesing at him a full force to make some damage.

    Sam took out the staff and got ready to make a move.

    As therge stones neared him, he didn¡¯t care about the damage that could happen.

    Sam just focused all his strength on his core and swung the staff at the boulders that areing at him.

    His posture is not good at all and there is too much stress on his legs, but he didn¡¯t seem to care.

    The opponents also didn¡¯t care. The stones are mostly a distraction for the two warrior mages.

    Sam could easily destroy the boulders, at least that is what they thought, but the next scene made them ck-jawed.

    As soon as the staff touched the boulders, they didn¡¯t break into pieces like they thought, instead they stayed intact except for a crack.

    The boulders were hit back and the aim is actually the two warriors.

    When they saw this, they widened their eyes and braced themselves for the defense.

    Sam used this time to break through the shackles and became free.

    At that moment, he didn¡¯t standstill. He started moving like a sh. He activated partial lightning fusion and zoomed past everyone like a sh of lightning.

    His silver lightning in contrast with ck attire provided a magnificent scene.

    Sam¡¯s first target was not the warriors, rather they are the mages in the back.

    As soon as he came close to them, Sam used a full-blown attack with the lightning spiritual energy fully enveloping the staff.

    The first mage was fast enough to react and raised a shield of the earth in front of it, but the wall cracked and turned into pieces before the staff made contact with the chest of the opponent.

    It is as if the lightning has really struck him. The opponent flew to the barrier and his whole skin is charred and paralyzed.

    It is still spasming and twitching due to the residual electric currents.

    Sam then diverted his attention to the second mage.

 Chapter 495: Fiasco started

    As Sam¡¯s focus was shifted towards the second mage and he was about to make his move, the stage was molded once again and arge stone section of the stage came up and blocked Sam¡¯s path forward and at the same time, the stone section under Sam¡¯s feet also moved to throw him off the bnce.

    Sam tripped and then the warrior mages who are on the other side of the stage are already here and one of them hit Sam from the back.

    Sam couldn¡¯t block it and took a square hit straight on his back and fell forward.

    But the stage section once again attacked him from the bottom.

    This time, there arerge spikes below him.

    Sam mmed the staff and the stage cracked a bit. It slightly prated inside and Sam held the staff to support him and leaped upwards.

    He spun the staff and swung it towards the mage from mid-air. A concentrated lightning bolt zoomed towards him and hit directly on his head.

    Even though, the earth element resistant to lightning, it is not to the extent ofplete immunity.

    If they have full fusion, then they might be able to have that type of immunity that too only if the lightning attacks are of the same level as them, much less these people will partial fusion.

    Sam didn¡¯tnd straight on the stage. Just before he was about to hit the stage, he would m the staff of the stage and use the momentum to propel himself again.

    He noticed that the moment he hit the stage with the staff, there is a brief moment of loss of control of the opponent who is controlling the stage.

    Now, Sam is jumping around with lightning circting around him as he wreaked havoc all over the stage.

    The two warrior mages and one hidden mage are all trying their best to defend themselves over this.

    Sam is also having a hard time finishing them off in a single blow.

    The stage was being used to provide defense for both the warrior mages and Sam could barely create any form of damage.

    As the fruitless shes went on for another three minutes, Sam lost patience. He activated his eye technique to see the energy flow on the stage and find out the approximate location of the hidden guy.

    If he is taken care of, everything would be easy to clear. And due to his constant movement, Sam took two minutes to estimate an approximate location. The opponent doesn¡¯t know that Sam is looking for him, so he is still a bit carefree.

    Sam took the support of the next stage section that protruded upwards to block him and jumped extremely high up in the air.

    The audience who are watching the whole scene with an extremely intense focus looked at Sam who jumped for more than twenty feet straight up and saw himnd in a different location.

    But Sam didn¡¯tnd directly, instead, he stabbed the shaft directly into the ground andnded on the tip of the shaft with one foot.

    Everyone was dumbfounded by this stunt and before they could make sense of it, they saw Sam injectingrge amounts of lightning elemental energy into the stage through the shaft.

    The shaft is like a pir of lightning. What everyone couldn¡¯t see is that the opponent hidden inside the stage was paralyzed by the electric shock.

    Even though his earth elemental fusion is great, Sam¡¯s lightning is extremely potent.

    Only after a few seconds did the audience understood that the stage stopped moving and even the blockades over the two warrior mages are frozen in ce. Then only they rted the attack to the hidden fifth opponent.

    Sam looked down once more and the next move was so showy that it was like a circus performance.

    He jumped upwards once more from the top of the staff and backflipped in the air.

    As he did the action, his right leg waspletely covered with lightning and his pant was burned exposing his skin.

    The experts in the scene can even see the muscle fibers and veinspletely injected with lightning spiritual energy and they could also see that the energy is sopact that the muscles would be torn apart if a normal nascent stage middle-level cultivator did that.

    Sam mmed his leg on the top of the staff and nailed it down into the stage.

    *BOOM*

    This time, the sh of lightning is different. The staff prated right into the stage as the lightning from the leg quickly passed through it and entered the depths of the stage.

    The hidden opponent took the full brunt of the attack and it would be hard for him to live even with the stage¡¯s full defense.

    The whole stage was infested with silver lightning and turned into rubble.

    Even the two warrior mages shook and fell into the rubble like little kids stuck in an earthquake.

    When the sh of lightning and the dust disappeared.

    Sam could be seen standing on the rubble and beside him, the staff is still standing straight with some residual electric arcs around it.

    Beneath the staff, there is a human body that is barely breathing and charred ck. His skin cracked all over and blood is seeping out. His hair waspletely burned.

    He is spasming and twitching all over.

    The staff is pierced straight into his belly.

    Sam walked forward and picked up the staff as he looked at the two remaining Warrior mages and smirked.

    They felt their hearts stop for a second as they immediately yelled in unison.

    "I give up."

    Sam shook his head in disappointment.

    He was just getting started. but the fight is already over.

    He spun the staff a bit and stored it away in the storage as he looked at the audience and raised his hands in victory.

    The audience is apuding at the fascinating disy of the shy lightning.

    The match was over and the attendants started collecting the bonuses of the audience and Sam once again got another bottle of wine from Yodha.

    Sam looked at him and smiled, he took out another crystal bamboo jar, and this time, it is green in color. This is actually the poisoned liquor he made previously.

    The Nagas are immune to most poisons except for the ones like Hydra¡¯s and Sesh¡¯s poisons.

    So, the liquor that contained most normal poisons of the beasts and the beast organs, it wouldn¡¯t hard the Naga race.

    Rather it might even be a delicacy for them.

    He did try it out and he actually liked the strong taste. It is like drinking vodka from a bottle directly.

    When Yodha saw another bamboo jar, he was stunned and excited.

    Both of them toasted from afar and took a gulp from their respective containers.

    The young master anddies all looked at Sam with a newfound interest. Even though they were impressed by yesterday¡¯s feat, that was not to the point of fascination.

    But today, it really is a fascinating disy for them.

    They didn¡¯t expect Sam to sweep their opponents like that.

    All of a sudden, a youngdy of the VIPs the one who had Purple scales with a pink hue asked Rana.

    "Rana, don¡¯t tell me that there is no fight for tomorrow. We still haven¡¯t seen the full strength of this person. Are you trying to have a special show for yourself?"

    Rana shook his head.

    "What are you saying Vasuki? Why would I hide such a fun fight from everyone else? We didn¡¯t see the full strength. So, all we can do is fix another match. But it wouldn¡¯t be today.

    After a few days, there would be another spectacr and different type of match involving Sam. I hope you guys wille."

    "That¡¯s better."

    The Nagady replied as she looked at Sam while licking her lips. Sam had goosebumps and felt a chill over his spine.

    He did want to attract the attention of others, but not this kind of attention. He doesn¡¯t want to lose the virginity of this world to Nagady.

    Sam didn¡¯t leave backstage immediately, because another wave of drama is about to ensue and soon he saw an attendant running towards Gnyan and whispering something making his face turn cold.

    "Rana,e out."

    At this moment, a drunk voice came from outside the arena entrance and Rana exchanged a subtle nce with Sam when he heard this.

    It is Yodha calling him. And Rana already learned that Yodha also ced a huge bet.

    So, now even if they don¡¯t screw Gnyan and his team over, Yodha wouldn¡¯t lose.

    Gnyan ran faster than Rana and went out and the rest of the noble scions all became interested as they walked.

    And soon the problem was borated. The attendants at the betting section including the manager are trying to cancel the bet that Yodha and another person put and they are not giving any reason. They are just begging and begging.

    This put a smile on the faces of Noble Scions, they wanted to see how Rana would handle this.

 Chapter 496: Is it really so easy to buy them off?

    Sam didn¡¯t go, in fact, he couldn¡¯t go. But he could still see themotion at the audience entrance from here with the eye technique and what he saw put a smile on his face.

    Yodha looked at Rana and said.

    "Rana, don¡¯t tell me that I am just a piece of trash in your eyes. I ced a bet of one hundred million on a fighter and now that I aming to ask the money I ced, your guys are not paying me and telling me to let this go.

    There are only giving out my initial deposit."

    "Young master Rana, same goes for me." Themon and most unsuspecting young Naga who ced the bet on behalf of Sam and Rana spoke at this moment.

    As for people who ced smaller bets, they didn¡¯t dare to talk at this moment. In front of Yodha, this well-known benevolent young master, no one seemed to have any form of authority.

    They are way too obedient and respectful towards him.

    Rana frowned and looked at Yodha with a genuine confused expression.

    "Brother Yodha, I think there is some sort of misunderstanding. From what I know you only bet one million."

    With that, he directly took out the betting deposit data and showed it to everyone.

    Yodha took it in his hands and looked at the data before saying.

    "Rana, you do know what will happen if you y games with me. You better spill the beans if you have hand in this matter, otherwise things would get nasty. I am in a good mood as I got some really great liquor. If you ruin my mood, I am going to skin you alive."

    "Yodha, I swear that I have nothing to do with this. You can interrogate him right here right now."

    Rana said without hesitation.

    At this moment Gnyan intervened much to everyone¡¯s surprise.

    "Younger brother Rana, you should admit if you do something wrong. Why are you trying to use your subordinates as a scapegoat?"

    Everyone looked at him with surprise in their eyes. Even though all of them knew that the two brothers don¡¯t get along, they didn¡¯t expect that they would make it public like this.

    And more importantly, they never expected that Gnyan would be the one who would break the decorum in public. From what they knew, he is the scheming one while his brother is the crazy and impulsive one.

    "Yodha, I have a clear conscience, I don¡¯t care what method you use or how cruel your interrogation is, but do it in public, and no matter who the culprit behind this is, if it is within my capabilities, I would hand him over to you, even if it was me, I will surrender myself and I swear I will cut my arm right in front of you before doing so."

    Rana didn¡¯t even bother to talk with Gnyan, he is so close to exposing his brother¡¯s schemes, there is no way he would let this chance go. Particrly when Yodha was mined up in this, this is the perfect opportunity.

    Even thest imperial prince is standing and watching the scene quietly.

    Even though, the noble scions respect the princes, thest prince is more like a little brother to them and is only a Grand realm cultivator. He doesn¡¯t have much pull over these people as he actually grew up in these people¡¯spany.

    As for him intervening in the matters of Yodha, don¡¯t even joke about it.

    He is most afraid of Yodha. No one else.

    Yodha has an extremely special identity and it is mostly rted to the army of the empire. Even his father the emperor would cut some ck to Yodha and no noble either Dule or minister would dare to piss him off.

    His background or personal strength is way out of everyone¡¯s league.

    Yodha looked at the manager who is kneeling in front of him and gestured him to stand up and said to his guard beside him.

    "Check everything rted to this betting system. I want to get to the bottom of this."

    The guard nodded and stepped forward. The guard is also a pure Naga, but his scales are a lot dimmer in purple and the scales doesn¡¯t have another color hue. Rather the scales have abination of colors with a merge of purple and ck.

    He looked in the eyes of the manager and the eyes of the guard turned misty and hazy.

    And soon, the manager started to sing like a bird.

    He spilled out everything rted to the Betting section.

    Including how he has been deceiving the Arena since day 1 and how much money he embezzled, how much money Gnyan took and how many elders knew this, but still covered the whole thing up in front of the family head.

    How many mistresses he is keeping and how much he gave away to the mistresses that came from the Arena.

    He told everything and it went on for a good solid half-an-hour.

    Yodha looked at Gnyan coldly and the rest of them are also looking at him with an interesting expression.

    They didn¡¯t expect that the whole thing woulde out right in front of everyone and Gnyan became theughing stock of the whole city and possibly all over the empire in the near future.

    Gnyan also didn¡¯t expect that something like this would happen. He could even bear this happening in front of everyone, but the situation was like this because Yodha was involved.

    He couldn¡¯t even take revenge. If this issue was gone out, even if the family head wouldn¡¯t have toe, the elders and grand elders of the family would definitely make a visit to Yodha and apologize personally.

    Much less five hundred million, they would give a couple of billions if it could calm Yodha¡¯s anger. But this guy wouldn¡¯t be so easily appeased.

    The situation is bad, really bad.

    Yodha suddenly spoke.

    "Rana, your family is really too pitiful, are you sure your father really gave birth to you? Are you not someone he picked up on the road? Your father will take the elders¡¯ words over yours no matter how many times you appealed? How shitty are your capabilities?"

    Rana didn¡¯t get angry at Yodha¡¯s words. What he said is truth after all.

    Rana too wanted to say out loud, that is not the matter of ability of his, rather it¡¯s the ability of the opponent¡¯s mother¡¯s pillow talk.

    But if he did, he would be in big trouble. It would be a shame to his father, who is a Consummate realm cultivator, but still being swayed by the pillow talk.

    He would be a biggerughing stock than Gnyan.

    Then Yodha looked at Gnyan and said coldly.

    "I don¡¯t care what your family matters are and how shitty is your brain that you wanted to steal from the ass of your younger brother, but since it is revealed that you are the one behind the scenes, I want you to pay me back ording to the bet."

    "Yodha.." Gnyan wanted to say something but cut off when he saw Yodha¡¯s dangerous gaze.

    At this moment, themon-looking young Naga and Rana exchanged some gestures and the former took two crystal bamboo jars out of his spatial ring and gave it to Yodha before saying.

    "Young master Yodha, I have also bet hundred million. It is not actually my own money. It is the money of all my brothers and colleagues. Can you please help me settle this?"

    When others looked at the crystal bamboo jars, they didn¡¯t think much. They just thought it was some wine. That too, when they saw the jar that was half-full in Yodha¡¯s hand.

    Yodha then looked at Rana and then at Sam who is still standing on the stage, he seemed to have understood something and with a wave of his hands, he took the two jars and said to Gnyan.

    "His share too, I want it to be paid in ten minutes, no one moves until ites. Also don¡¯t even think about going after him. I will cut your balls off if something happened to him whether you are the culprit behind him or not."

    He said in an extremely cold tone.

    When others saw this, they are dumbfounded.

    They didn¡¯t expect that Yodha would be bought over with two jars of wine.

    This technique was not something they never tried before. Some people traveled far and wide to get some special wines and Yodha will take no matter what elemental attribute the wine has.

    Although nobody knows what the reason for that is, he is a wine fanatic. But still, they couldn¡¯t get any favors from him. The best the wine could do is make up for an apology if they pissed him off unintentionally.

    But this no-name guy just got such a protection charm from Yodha.

    They are surprised, to say the least.

    Is it really so easy to buy him off?

    This is the only thought in everyone¡¯s mind.

 Chapter 497: Gnyans tough situation

    The betting fiasco has put Gnyan in an extremely tough position.

    At first, he thought he only has to cough up five hundred million, even though it is an insane amount and he couldn¡¯t take it out in an instant, he can still give it a try and see if he can arrange the amount by borrowing from his aides.

    But now, it turned into one billion.

    This made the situationpletely out of his hand. Even though his family is rich and powerful, nobody would give him, a young master hundreds of millions of spirit stones as an allowance. The allowance he would get from his family is merely a few million and he would have to spend it on his cultivation growth.

    Even then, the allowance is not sufficient at all, he still has to feed his subordinates and some elders to have enough power which made him even earn money.

    He could take a couple of hundreds of millions, as for one billion it is impossible without the family intervention.

    Sam looked at the whole situation with a smile.

    He could hear everything too because Fidi, who is standing behind Rana is holding amunication device and Sam has his ownmunication device.

    Things are going in a better way than they thought.

    When Sam learned that Yodha ced a bet too, he already thought of this situation and gave two wine jars to their proxy who bet in their stead.

    Even if Yodha doesn¡¯t have a great friendship with Sam, they still decided to count on him based on his character. That is the decision Sam made after he listened to everything rted to Yodha from Rana. He even felt that Yodha is the ticket for his exit from this ce.

    At this moment, Gnyan is talking in hismunication token, trying to raise the money. He wants to solve the issue before his father knows about it.

    After all, his father doesn¡¯t know his exploits in the betting section of the Arena, and if he really knows that he messed with Yodha, he wouldn¡¯t let him go, even his mother couldn¡¯t save him.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is that after he made his first call, the news already reached his father.

    Not just that, his call even ruined some of his ns in the family. He doesn¡¯t know that yet, but he made one of the major mistakes that ruined his ce in the family.

    As he was making calls continuously, a grand elder of his family came running towards the Arena and when Rana and Gnyan looked at him, both of them are surprised in different ways.

    Even the rest of the scions and the citizens that are watching the show with interest are looking at him in surprise.

    Because this grand elder is the person who works directly under the Family¡¯s head. He doesn¡¯t have any other position in the family and he wouldn¡¯t interfere in any matters rted to the family business and younger generations.

    All he would do is follow the orders of the family head.

    He has ck scales all over his body and could be easily picked out from this bunch of people who has purple scales all over. He doesn¡¯t have any hues and he looked rather in.

    He looked at Gnyan with a look of contempt and mockery and then at Rana.

    "Family head asked you two toe back, he has some matters to discuss."

    He then ignored the solemn faces of the two and looked at Yodha, he threw a spatial ring and said.

    "The One billion, he owes you. I hope this matter ends here. My family told me to convey his apologies on behalf of his stupid son."

    Yodha looked into the ring and noticed the spirit stones, he nodded at him after confirming the prize and didn¡¯t stay there anymore. He held the proxy of Rana and Sam as he left the ce.

    The crowd soon dispersed one by one, with only Gnyan and Rana in ce along with the ck Naga.

    "Uncle ck, what is the situation? Why does the father want me toe back?" Rana asked with curiosity.

    Uncle ck looked at him and said.

    "It regarding the current incident, he heard of it and wants to talk to you two. Let¡¯s go."

    He turned around and started walking, Rana hurried to catch up and gave Gnyan a cold look as he did so, Gnyan is having a hard time moving his legs, he felt like they are extremely heavy and he was stuck in the mud, unable to move at all.

    He walked with a heavy heart. He had an extremely bad premonition.

    When they reached home and entered the family court an Old Naga who is sitting on the main seat is waiting there sipping something.

    When he looked at Rana and Gnyan, his gaze became a tad bit colder, and said.

    "Seems like both of you have grown up too much that you don¡¯t even remember that two of you are from the same family. You are more like archenemies."

    Both of then clenched their fists as the man continued.

    "Gnyan, didn¡¯t I say when I assigned your family jobs to both of you, that no one should interfere in other¡¯s works. Why did you mess with the bettings of Arena?"

    Gnyan wanted to say something, but there is too much mental pressure on him, that he couldn¡¯t open his mouth on time, making the man continue.

    "Not only that, it seems like you have grown so much and even wants to create a rebellion inside the family."

    "Father, NO." Gnyan was quick to refute it.

    "But your actions say otherwise. Not only did you mess with the Betting section, you used the earnings for yourself and even made more than eight elders as your aplices.

    All of you are embezzling the family money from the profits of the business under you to increase your personal stash.

    Do you think, I know nothing?

    I was already observing you for a long time, I should have never listened to your mother and gave you all these privileges.

    You ipetent Bastard.

    From today, onwards you would only get the family allowance. You arepletely stripped from all your duties regarding the family businesses. Apart from that, you have to pay back two billion for the amount I paid today and the amount you and the elders embezzled together.

    I don¡¯t care how you are going to pay it off, but no one from the family will help you.

    Get lost."

    Gnyan bowed and left without saying a word. From the looks of it, he understood that his good days are over.

    He didn¡¯t even dare to stay here for one more second and even have a reaction to what his father said.

    The first thing he wanted to do was get out of here and so he did. But after some time, when he made sense of his own situation, he felt like beating himself up for all the idiotic things he did.

    He regretted messing with his younger brother¡¯s business and thinking that everyone else is a fool but himself.

    Now, his attitude bit him in the butt big time. He understood that his mother¡¯s pillow talk can only do so much.

    He has two billion spirit stones of debt on his head because of this.

    Meanwhile, back in the family court. The situation turned awkward between Rana and the family head.

    Rana had a cold look on his face and his father didn¡¯t make any eye contact with him.

    "Why did you do this?" His father asked him in a rtively calm tone.

    "Do what father?"

    "Don¡¯t y dumb. I know the second person who made the bet is your man. Why do you have to deal with this matter in such extreme fashion?"

    "Extreme?"

    "Involving Yodha and the public. Don¡¯t you think it is the prestige of the family that will go down?"

    "I think, the prestige will go down, if the city knew that a Duke is so smitten by a woman that he ced almost half of the family businesses in hands of her son and ced another equally talented son in a prison."

    Father became dumbfounded. He noticed that obedient and calm Rana is nowhere to be seen.

    As far as he could remember, Rana never talked back to him, he doesn¡¯t know how to act spoiled in front of him like Gnyan. And he never asked him for anything outrageous with honeyed words.

    But now that such harsh words areing out of his mouth, he couldn¡¯t fathom it for a second. He had a bad feeling in his heart.

    "If you are thinking of making amends, it is the toote Family head. Just because, my mother was in a state of vegetable and couldn¡¯t speak, doesn¡¯t give you the reason to ignore her and her son¡¯s well-being.

    But you already took that privilege. I was obedient, hardworking, and loyal towards you and your family, but was never appreciated, then only I realized that all you care about is the pleasure you get in the sheets and you seemed to be able to do anything for that.

    In my heart, you are only my father in name, since you and your favorite wife are so keen on making that corrupt and greedy Gnyan the family head, you can make him.

    But he has to make it past me.

    I lost any hopes or desire to get your attention and love, all I wanted was for a correct time to get out of my situation and I got that along with the capital I needed.

    You can keep all your fatherly love towards your favorite son, I don¡¯t need it. But you can forget about giving away the family head position because as an offspring of this family, I have every right to fight for it and I am going to do it.

    Goodbye."

    With that, hepletely turned around and left the ce without even waiting for his father to reply.

 Chapter 498: Business

    No one knew that Rana is hiding this much animosity and ambition within him. All his peers only knew that he has no standing in the family, at least as big as the one Gnyan had.

    But it seems like that he is more than what they thought he was.

    Rana agreed to Fidi¡¯s proposal not because he wanted to get his father¡¯s attention when he understood Sam¡¯s characteristics and the consequences of his actions, he didn¡¯t want to use this to propel his position, he wanted to destroy his brother¡¯s standing first.

    He only targeted the betting section this time, but Yodha¡¯s actions made his job easier.

    He lost all thepassion towards his peers in the family, his father, and the elders.

    The time he was dropped into the Arena he decided to make sure that he would destroy all the chances for the family and make himself the only choice as the family head. Unless they can kill him without a care in the world, they can forget about letting other candidates have a shot at the family head position.

    He waited for the right chance because he wanted to get a right breaking point so that he can prate the barrier holding him down.

    Now, Arena has be big, he can get his own resources and he also destroyed his brother. So, his next step is before the hype dies down, he has to use Sam and the rest of the special fighters like him and make as much as he can.

    He has to make the most out of this and reach his goal no matter what.

    For that, he would do anything.

    All the people in the city knew that he is an impulsive and angry kid with no power and schemes. They are right to some degree.

    He cannot scheme behind people¡¯s backs with borate steps and plots like his brother, but he is not going to.

    He only has one scheme and that is to not show his cards until thest minute.

    So, he was patient and let them think he is the person they thought he was. Found the right time and it is about time he breaks it up.

    He got more than three hundred million spirit stones from his brother at this moment and he is going to get more.

    After he returned to the Arena office, he received the spatial ring that contained the bet money from his proxy.

    Yodha has sent this back. He sorted the money and took out two hundred million from it and sent it to Sam.

    Now, he moved to the documents on his table.

    These are the requests from the Gold-ranked and Silver ranked fighters of all the divisions.

    They are requests regarding their matches, they also want special attention like Sam, so they also want to fight against multiple opponents of the division.

    But the thing is most of them are choosing Iron Level fighters and the Bronze Level fighters.

    Nobody wants to challenge multiple silver-level or multiple gold level fighters.

    But still, it is great.

    Finally, he picked up a document that is kept separately from the rest of these documents.

    It is a document regarding Sam¡¯s fight request, and it is not just for the next fight. It has a series of requests for the next five fights of Sam.

    And the first three are easy to make because they are one against five fights with Bronze level fighters.

    But thest two are against the silver level fighters.

    He wants to fight even the silver level fighters in the same way. Challenging multiple opponents at the same time.

    After some thought, Rana still approved of this. Now that the betting system is temporarily gone, he doesn¡¯t have to worry about losing money and can focus on earning money easily.

    After approving everything rted to fights, he found a note on the table. It is from Sam and he wants to talk to him once again.

    He thought for a moment before calling an attendant and asked him to bring Sam here.

    The attendant nodded and ran fast as he brought back Sam in just a few minutes.

    Sam was offered a seat and Rana asked.

    "What do you want now?"

    "I have a business proposition."

    "Business? What would that be?"

    Sam took out a blueprint and a prototype and ced them on the table.

    Rana looked at it and went through the blueprint before taking the prototype.

    The prototype is a crystal tab and a small crystal that was embedded in a groove on its back.

    As he pressed the crystal in, a video was yed on the tab.

    Sam then gave him another crystal and asked him to rece the one in the tab, when he did that another video was yed in the tab.

    Rana was stunned, he didn¡¯t expect that there would be this type of device. Even though holographic projections are good, they are not really that great when you are watching a fight. Even though they can get a three-dimensional view and such, the recording crystals are not really giving the same experience as the live one.

    That is why, the screens are a better option, but the screens cost a lot of money.

    But now that he saw this, he was intrigued.

    "What is the n?" He asked Sam.

    Sam smiled and started exining how this thing works.

    The crystal is a recording device he made. And it is a variant from the surveince system of the Bee puppets.

    He modified the blueprint a bit and now it can not only record things, but it can also share the recorded things between the same device and the tablet can be used for looking into these things.

    Thebined job of the recording crystal will be divided into two and even the perspective will be limited.

    But this thing gives the rity of the scene the recording crystal cannot give and at the same time, the cost is reduced by a lot.

    Sam¡¯s n is to record the fights in them and copy the fight into some limited number of crystals before selling them to the audience.

    The cost will be the same as the entry ticket for the fight and a little more for the cost of the materials. The fights will be exclusive in these recording crystals as the audience is not allowed to use the regr recording crystals.

    So, if they really want to enjoy the fight many times, they have no choice but to buy this product, particrly the tablet. With the presence of the tablet, they will be inclined to buy more of these crystals so that they can put this tablet to use.

    This is just a simple shopping trick used by corporates on the public.

    At first, they will release an irresistible product to the public and makes a condition that they have to buy a not so useful product along with it, they couldn¡¯t resist the temptation and would buy it,ter after the excitement was dead, they will think that the extra product has gone to waste.

    At this moment, the corporates will release something else rted to the product that would make it look more useful.

    Now, Sam¡¯s n is, they would make an extraordinary fight and make it so that they buy the crystal and the tablet. But after they got bored of the fight, they would think that this tablet was being a waste at that time, they would sell the other fight crystals and they would buy them.

    After exining the idea and getting approval from Rana, it is time to think about the price.

    "What do you want for this?"

    "A partnership? Five percent on all the profits thates on this."

    Sam said calmly.

    "It¡¯s a lot, how about three? After all, you are not going to do anything other than provide the blueprint, the raw materials, the production, everything else is my responsibility."

    "But I still have to train your workers to get the production and manufacturing right, before this thing can make a profit. So, I think it is reasonable."

    After a tense negotiation, they finally agreed on four percent.

    Sam shook hands in congrattions and got ready to leave.

    "Fidi said, you gave away half the bonus, why are you earning so much then?"

    "It¡¯s for the joy of earning. I feel excited to earn as much as I want, it is to prove myself that I am capable, as for giving away, there is no point in umting so much in my situation and position."

    Rana pondered for a bit as if trying to rte to Sam.

    Sam left the ce and went back to the residence. All his way, he was greeted by the attendants in a friendly way.

    Soon, it is meal time and Sam went to the staff kitchen along with Arman.

    There some interesting news fell on his ears.

    That is about Gnyan¡¯s punishments and also the news about Yodha who Sam is curious about.

 Chapter 499: Yodha the ticket for Exit

    One weekter.

    This is time for Sam¡¯s fight again.

    At this moment, Sam is not ssified in any ranks. He is just a fighter under Arena but he almost has the same ess as an attendant.

    He has made friends all over the attendant circle and he and Fidi even drink together often.

    This made the rest of the fighterspletely grind their teeth in frustration. Sam cameter than them and his cultivation is weaker than many of them, and some of them even have hundreds of fights, but even they are not receiving such special treatment.

    In the past week, many of them tried to imitate Sam, but they weren¡¯t able to do so. The fighters who got closest are the ones who sessfully cleared the multiple opponent challenge.

    Since Rana approved of the fights, these seven days, Sam couldn¡¯t get his fight.

    Anyway, it is not good to let Sam fight every day. Some things should be made scarce to get the most out of them.

    So, there is a stream of one Vs three fights and One Vs five fights in the Arena by most of the Gold and Silver Ranked fighters in all divisions and there are few and far between some exciting one on one fights.

    And one of these people is Arman, who fought one on one every day, so that he could gain the ranking and get more attention. He knew that he is not as crazy as Sam and his fights wouldn¡¯t be as shy and interesting, so all he could do is prove his might in One on One fights, challenging the toughest opponents all the way up.

    On this day, there is a series of multiple opponent challenges lined up with Sam¡¯s fight being the main even.

    These past few days, the Noble scions visited the Arena to see if there is something exciting. Except for Yodha and Gnyan, almost everyone came at least once.

    Yodha didn¡¯te because, he didn¡¯t see any originality in this, as for Gnyan, he couldn¡¯t show his face in public at this moment and he went out of the city to cover up his shame.

    Today though, the whole arena is full once again and the VIP scions are back. But this time, they took extra guests with them.

    Some brought their friends, some brought their subordinates and some brought their friends from a different ces.

    The fights went on and the crowd is cheering.

    Sam¡¯s fight is the main event and thest fight of the day. He came out and entered the stage. He waved his hands at the audience and all of them are cheering at the top of their lungs.

    At this moment, the referee stood on his beast in the air and said.

    "Today¡¯s main event. Sam Vs five Bronze level fighters ranked sixth to tenth."

    As he announced this the five fighters of the Bronze rankings came out one by one and looked at the situation nervously.

    They don¡¯t have any animosity towards Sam on their faces. Maybe they might have it in their hearts, but they didn¡¯t show in on their faces, because they knew their own situation.

    They saw thest fight and they saw how strong Sam is, he took out the opponents like dealing with some new fighters not some experienced fighters in Arena.

    If such a blownded on them, they are sure that they would die on the spot and even they wouldn¡¯t have an intact body.

    They might have a chance on Sam if they all worked together.

    But it is not easy to work together. They are not of the same element and they don¡¯t have any overwhelming strengths.

    So, they are nervous and their nervousness has ovee their animosity.

    The fight started and once again, Sam put up a splendid performance. He only used the lightning element and dealt with the five candidates, one after another picking on them like a bully.

    The audience cheered and cheered. They are extremely excited whenever it is Sam¡¯s fight and this time, Sam who could easily deal with them, gave them all a chance.

    He even took the trump cards of all these five people head-on and came out unscathed.

    In this fight, Sam didn¡¯t even directly fight back. He made them use up all their spiritual energy and fall on their knees exhausted.

    The whole battle was a bitical but entertaining.

    The audience was about to leave after giving the bonuses, but at this moment Rana came and made an announcement regarding the tablet and the recording crystal.

    He even made a lottery with the tickets of these people and gave away some free tablets and crystals.

    Along with that, he even gave the crystals and tablets to the VIP scions for free.

    They all left happy.

    Sam is actually surprised by this.

    He didn¡¯t expect Rana to go into action immediately, in just a week, he actually brought this back into production.

    And in this week, Sam took three days to teach them. That means, these four days have been apletely hectic time for the artisans.

    There is a new shop opened at the Arena counter where people usually buy the tickets.

    There is a limited amount of tablets and crystals put on sale for today.

    The audience who are interested bought a set and left.

    Sam looked at Yodha before he left and both of them toasted to each other from far away once again with the exchange of the liquor.

    This time Sam sent another type of liquor that has fire elemental ingredients. He heard from the attendants that Yodha would drink any form of liquor no matter what their elemental attributes are.

    He got this along with the many other valuable information.

    Then only he decided that Yodha would be his best ticket out of the Arena.

    His main challenge after getting out of the Arena would be finding a ce in this society, even if he was able to enter the wilderness, it would be hard for him to get the news on the pce of inheritance. It was about a month since he got here and there is still not any news.

    At least, he doesn¡¯t know anything of it and his badge in the spiritual consciousness is not responding at all.

    Still, there is enough time for him to get out here. But he must find an aide after gets out of here so that he could survive without any hups.

    As for why he chose Yodha, the first reason is he couldn¡¯t just choose anyone, after all thedy named Vasuki is getting more and more daring and open with their advances.

    She is sending all the winking and suggestive moves towards Sam whenever he looked towards the audience. It is as if she couldn¡¯t wait to eat him up alive.

    If all these people are like this woman, it would be hard for Sam to use them.

    The second and main reason is, he heard the Yodha is rted to the military of the nation and he is one of the few who can enter and exit the military anytime he wants.

    He also learned that he came back this time to recruit some new blood into his regiment.

    Yodha is a battalionmander in the army and he came here to recruit on behalf of his regimentmander.

    His father is actually as strong as the current emperor. But because of the immense trust between them and his voluntary move to leave the imperial capital and stay within the borders of the empire, the emperor didn¡¯t try to deal with his father.

    And he even heard that the emperor and Yodha¡¯s father are childhood friends and thetter has no interest in authority. He was only interested in the battles and the safety of the nation.

    That is also the reason no one wants to mess with Yodha, not only hisbat prowess is honed in the blood bath of the battles, his father is someone of that status. If something really happened to Yodha, then there would be some severe consequences.

    His father is one of the main reasons, why the empire is peaceful. They don¡¯t want to disturb that peace at all.

    If something happens and his father stormed the capital not only will the peacepromised, there is no guarantee that the emperor himself could stop his father from dealing with the people in the capital.

    That is why no one would piss him off and that is why Sam could like to use him as a ticket to get out of this ce.

    He would rather join the army and with his capabilities, there would be no doubt any army wouldn¡¯t want him

    He also heard that Army is the fairest ce for the humans in this empire, that is the only ce the humans are not treated as ves, but the bar for entry is high and the danger is great as the humans are the ones who will stand on the front line.

    That is the only reason the humans and Half Nagas are suffering inside the city without joining the army. But high risk implies higher reward. Sam is not against it.

 Chapter 500: Ranas moves

    Sam felt that Yodha is his best shot to get out of his situation, but that doesn¡¯t mean he can act immediately.

    He has to wait for a while to get the best timing to get out of here.

    For now, there are no immediate fights for him for the next week. He will be free and peaceful. Since he has some friendship with the attendants, he has some extra privileges of chatting with them.

    So, for every chance he got he started sharing some wine and chatting up with the attendants around him.

    He asked about many things and most of the time his conversation started with the question, ¡¯what¡¯s new?¡¯

    This can trante as both things like what¡¯s new in the city or around the Arena and what¡¯s new with your life. This might seem like a simple wordy, but it made a world of difference and the meaning doesn¡¯t depend on Sam but the person he is talking to.

    If that person is too gossipy and wanted to rant here and there, he would take the first question as his and if that person is not that talkative and interested in others, he would just talk about himself.

    Sam is okay with either of those.

    For the next week, he doesn¡¯t have fights. So, he got quite some information regarding the city, the noble scion¡¯s and also the disputes that are being fired up in Rana¡¯s family.

    Rana¡¯s family is called the Golden ze family, but that Golden ze is not theirst name.

    Oddly, enough only some families who have extremely pure bloodline on par with the Imperial families have thest names towards them, and apparently, even though the Golden ze family are considered nobility, it was not to the point they have ast name.

    Even though, it is surprising Sam didn¡¯t feel too much about it.

    Anyway, the important thing is that the chaos that has ensued in the Golden ze family due to this situation is not something small. All the other noble families are looking at them like Hawks.

    Apparently, Rana made visits to all the noble families about opening his own business and he also said they would get an invitation after the ce and time are decided.

    For him to do this even before he started the business, is clearly indicating them to watch a show from the side and also telling them that he is at loggerheads with the family.

    If he is still part of the family, the assistants would havee instead of him personally and he wouldn¡¯t be asking for help regarding the ce and the construction. His family would have taken care of that.

    Apart from that, he also attended a meeting with the family members who embezzled money with his brother and collected back whatever money they took away from the betting section forcefully. He took the rest from the family funds on the pretext that his arena was the one that suffered the reputation loss and he has to amend that himself.

    Since the family head is still in shock and dilemma due to Rana¡¯s sudden change, he couldn¡¯t stop all these and he doesn¡¯t even know if he should really stop this.

    After taking all the money, Rana visited therge betters and started paying their dues. It is impossible to track every one of them, but he tracked every nobility that ever made a bet since he took charge of the Arena and paid them back even if they didn¡¯t suffer too much of a loss.

    Some of them got back their bets and even made money, he didn¡¯t pay them back, but still made a visit to them to tell them about the situation and asked for an apology.

    In fact, he doesn¡¯t have to do that. At least to the winners of the bets, but he is deliberately doing that to make trouble for his family.

    When the situation turned out like this, the rest of the family couldn¡¯t sit still and wanted to pressure him with making things difficult for him by not allowing him to ess the family experts for him to start the business.

    But to their surprise, it turned out he already hired some experts, some from the family and some from outside and it is almost like he groomed them which showed that he is nning this for a long time.

    Sam heard all this in bits and pieces from the staff in dining areas and sometimes near his residence.

    After hearing all this, Sam felt like he could use this to his advantage.

    Since Rana is confident in making his business a sess and has all resources in his hands, it would be easier to gain a profit from him.

    And sooner orter, Sam would be out of this ce and he would need someone to get resources from this Naga realm, so it is not a bad choice to have him as his dealer in this Realm.

    But this is not the time yet, he has to wait until Rana faces some setback or he could get out of the Arena. If he does anything before that, he wouldn¡¯t be able to deal with things freely if he is stuck in this ce.

    So, he waited patiently and the one week passed without any more interesting news,

    It is time for Sam¡¯s fight once again.

    And his fight is always a celebration for the Arena because there is too much revenuepared to other days.

    This time, Sam is fighting with the top five Bronze ranked fighters.

    And he even gave himself a handicap.

    He drew a small square big enough for three to four people to stand and dered loudly.

    "I wouldn¡¯te out of this square for the next five minutes and in these five minutes I wouldn¡¯t attack as long as you are out of the square, try your luck."

    With this arrogant statement, the five Bronze ranked fighters are getting angry and the fight started.

    The first ones to attack are the wind element mage and a water element mage, both of them have some decent ranged attacks and tried to attack Sam together.

    One is responsible for attacking Sam while the other is responsible for blocking his dodging route.

    The remaining three are closebat fighters and they started surrounding the square waiting tond an attack.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care, he didn¡¯t dodge a single attack. He decided to block it instead. And even his blocking with unorthodox.

    He stomped his legs on the stage and they prated straight down. Now he is almost ankle-deep into the stage making it hard for him to move.

    But he is not trying to make a move, he took out his staff and started spinning it, the spiritual energy in the surroundings is like a chaotic storm.

    He didn¡¯t use any elemental energy, he just used normal spiritual energy and even controlled the atmospheric spiritual energy to revolve like a tornado, and this time, he made it on an extremelyrge scale.

    The spiritual energy became so concentrated in the tornado that they could it being sucked from all over and revolved with extremely high velocities.

    The audience is in awe at the astonishing disy. But they cheered within no time. This is the reason they wanted to see Sam¡¯s fights, he makes things shy and does everything in dazzling fashion at the same time trying something new in his every fight.

    For the next ten minutes, Sam¡¯s tornado and the spiritual energy storm surrounding it, grew bigger and bigger.

    And it acted as a perfect defense, they didn¡¯t dare to get near Sam because they are afraid that if the spiritual energy storm became unstable, they wouldn¡¯t be able to bear the damage and the bacsh that would hit all over the stage.

    They could die if the impact is significant enough.

    So, they are waiting for Sam to exhaust himself and trying to disturb him from afar, but what they didn¡¯t seeing is that after ten minutes, the spiritual energy within the storm started to change.

    They didn¡¯t understand immediately, but they could see the electric arcs appear here and there.

    Only Yodha, who looked as rxed as ever sat there with an understanding and excited smirk.

    He could see what others could see because of his keen sensitivity.

    As the others also watched what is happening, they got their answers soon enough without a long wait.

    The spiritual energy storm slowly started to be bright, and silver-colored electric arcs are growing more and more and they are also rotating along with the condensed spiritual energy and before they knew it.

    Arge amount of lightning elemental energy was rotating horizontally all over the stage and the people couldn¡¯t help but gulp hard when they saw this.

    They didn¡¯t expect that Sam would use this defensive measure for such an offensive move, it is too destructive and too ruthless, people could die in this easily.

    As the tornado expanded, the opponents couldn¡¯t defend anymore and got sucked into this. They are being attacked by the electric arcs and now they are nothing but lumps of flesh in the middle of thick electric stream.

    Sam stopped the move after five minutes with a bang and the five opponents were thrown away in five different directions and hit the barriers with their charred bodies, the audience could see that they are barely alive.

    Even with such arge-scale attack, Sam was able to control his power so much that he wouldn¡¯t kill them.

    He smirked and waved his hand at the wild cheers of the audience.

 Chapter 501: A big proposal

    After this battle is over, Sam is going to sit on that shelf for another week.

    But this time, he is not going to stay idle. He is nning for something big for his next fight and this time.

    Nowadays the multiple opponent fights becamemon and it is going to be hard for him to gain attention with them if he just kept on going with these types of fights, even though he was able to gain more audience currently.

    Sam is thus trying to make himself special once again and he is in the store of the Arena and discussing with the shopkeeper.

    He has been saving the money from the bet and some more money from the past bonus for this.

    He and Shop keeper are currently discussing the situation and they are currently at the end of the deal-making.

    "Are you sure you want to spend all your money like this? What is your goal? At this point, it is not even for fame and glory anymore."

    The shop keeper asked in a mild tone.

    "Before answering that, may I ask you something? Why is your scale color different from the rest?"

    The shopkeeper didn¡¯t expect such a question, but he was too used to chatting with Sam in the past few days and he didn¡¯t find it hard within him to answer the question.

    "I don¡¯t belong to this region. I am from a different nation. I crossed the border and came here along with my brother. Of course, we are from a friendly nation, and this type of immigration is still allowed. You can see many people like me in various cities of the nation. It is just it is rare to see someone in Imperial capital."

    Sam understood him and was about to ask him some more, but was interrupted.

    "Now it is your turn to answer."

    "Well, can I trust you?" Sam asked instead of answering directly.

    "That depends on your heart. Don¡¯t ask me. In fact, don¡¯t ask this question to anyone."

    "Okay then, I will take a risk. I just want to get out of here."

    "Get out of here?"

    "From the Arena. What? Do you think I like performing like a caged animal? I do like a battle and I do like earning money, but not in this way. You should have seen my position back at my ce. There every second I spend I earn money and every battle I was in would have already been noted down in history.

    But here I am working like a caged animal."

    When the shop keeper heard this, he looked at Sam for a second and said with a nk face.

    "if you want to get out of here, just say it as it is, why are you bbering so much nonsense. A ce with your every battle creating history and every second making money? Do you know how much you should have earned in that time? Do you think there is such a ce on this whole?

    Actually, there is, but you would have to be the prince of that ce to have such status, but you look nowhere like them.

    Damn it, it is true. My brother always said humans liked to brag. I didn¡¯t expect that would be true."

    "I know you wouldn¡¯t believe me. But I really do want to get out of this ce and that is why I am making all these ns."

    "Do whatever you want to do. I will arrange this after talking to Fidi and Rana."

    "Don¡¯t bother, they wille to you. I already wrote a proposal to them."

    "Proposal?"

    "Yeah, you might not know, but the proposals are the new trend in the Arena, every fighter is writing a proposal, or more like a request as they are trying their best to get a better fight and more money so they can grow faster and increase their ranks.

    Of course, I am the one who started this trend."

    "Damn it, why are you all over the ce? Are you the boss of the Arena or that Rana is? You are making waves wherever you go."

    "Haha, didn¡¯t I tell you already? I want to get out of this ce, so of course, I need some special impact. Anyway, I have to go. But let me tell you if there is a chance I will take you to my ce and you can see my glory with your eyes."

    "Yeah, Yeah. I will be visiting you in your dreams then."

    With that, Sam left not even bothering to argue.

    As for why is Sam behaving like an easy-going braggart youth, he just wanted to experience being one and he has to say that it is quite addicting.

    At first, he wanted to put up the act and knowing that he doesn¡¯t have many obligations he has to follow in this ce and there are not many responsibilities bearing him down, he can just be this carefree.

    And this shop keeper is the only one who didn¡¯t show any form of animosity towards Sam. In fact, he didn¡¯t show it towards any human beings.

    He treated Nagas and humans all the same and with more conversations, Sam found out that this guy is quite a good miner and excavator in this world and he had mined almost all kinds of valuable materials.

    From normal spirit stone mining to excavating the lost buried cities and tombs, he had done it all, in all kinds of environments.

    And this information slipped after Sam made him drink to his heart¡¯s content after all a long time and conversation started with the metals in the catalog.

    That is why Sam offered to visit his ce. He can use a man of such expertise. Currently, this mining and excavation field is not that prosperous on his, he only gave some knowledge in the divine dimension to the school.

    That too only basics, the people in the school are not able to understand or implement these things, but this Shop Keeper is different.

    Many people might not know, but Sam could see that this guy is a consummate realm cultivator and that is the most conservative estimate.

    No one can see the energy waves or any form of pressure, it would be more believable to say that he is just a simple Naga without any cultivation, but when Sam used his eye technique, he could see something else.

    Not only could he see the spiritual energy inside his body, but he could also see an invisible seal over him.

    His arms and legs are shackled with some invisible cuffs and there is an invisible symbol over him.

    The seal is strong, but not strong enough to suppress him permanently. Sam could even see the cracks all over the shackles and the seal and it is happening because of the constant erosion caused by his suppressed energy.

    Sam didn¡¯t expect that his eye technique could be used this way and it is potent enough to determine such a high-level technique. This ispletely unexpected.

    He seemed to be imprisoned here for some reason and if Sam could help him somehow and bring him to his side, he would have another powerhouse to his aid.

    But that doesn¡¯t mean, he couldpletely trust him at this moment, that is why he is having so many conversations with this man.

    After he left to his residence and cooked another special meal, the next day, Sam was summoned by Rana and the atmosphere in the room is not exactly harmonious when they reached the ce.

    "What the hell is wrong with you? Are you really nuts or something? Do you know what kind of test you are facing? You would die if something goes wrong. And do you think the silver rank fighters would leave you alone just like you left all your opponents without killing them?"

    Rana started yelling as soon as Sam entered.

    "Boss, why are you so anxious? Have I been wrong until now? I can judge my strength and honestly if you have let me take on all the fighters in the division at the same time, I would still be able to do so.

    Much less the Silver ranked fighters."

    Rana was dumbfounded. He is also a nascent stage cultivator and in fact, all the younger generation people are nascent stage and they are inte stages, but they are not confident that they could take all the Gold-ranked cultivators in Sam¡¯s division alone.

    Much less all of them.

    "Are you sure about this?"

    "Of course."

    Rana thought about this and decided something.

    "Then why don¡¯t you include the gold ranker fighters in this?"

    Sam was stunned a bit, but then he nodded.

    "I have no problem with that. But why did you change your mind easily."

    "Since you are blowing it up in such a fashion, you might as well do it in a muchrger scale."

    "That would be my pleasure."

    "But how are we going to facilitate the audience?"

    "I have a n, just give me a week¡¯s time and I would give you something that you would never forget. In fact, you can use it for the rest of these type of matchester.

    But I am not giving it for free. You have to pay me."

    "Sure, but I will only pay you after it was done testing."

    "Alright, but I don¡¯t have a blueprint for this thing, I got this as a gift."

    "Sure."

    Both of them shook their hands and Sam left the ce to go to the Artisan workshop which is right next to the store.

 Chapter 502: Time in the Artisan work Shop

    Sam went to the workshop and first time ever, he was without any surveince and that is because, the artisans don¡¯t like their methods being watched by others, so they have this special privilege.

    He locked the door and entered the workshop and once again checking the room for any type of surveince just to make sure, he finally puked out the divine dimension which has been in his stomach.

    He learned that he couldn¡¯t enter the divine dimension while it was in his stomach, so he didn¡¯t ess this at all.

    Even the blueprints he gave to Rana are taken out with great difficulty after moving the crystal to his mouth without letting it outpletely.

    The first thing Sam did after taking out the divine dimension is entering it and taking a swig of the heavenly wine. He missed this wine so much and had to cover up the craving with the normal liquor.

    He took a good chug of it before rxing a bit. No matter how much freedom he has the situation is not that great, so being in a ce in which he had absolute control is great.

    Sam sat in the divine dimension library and thought about what to do now. He needs to get a hang of the cityyout and his exact position within the city.

    In case, Yodha doesn¡¯t turn out to be the person he thought he would be and his n fails, Sam would have another n that can aid his escape from this ce.

    But he doesn¡¯t have trackers that can work in this environment. Shadow mice will be affected by the poison as they are only Level-6. Even the Zoi termites cannot survive in this environment.

    He has to find an alternative to his options so that he can get his information. He pretty much understood the situation of power. Since it is imperial capital, except for Yodha and his father, everyone else can only bow to the emperor and the imperial family.

    As for some high-level nobles like the Golden ze family, they do control certain businesses. For example, the girl named Vasuki who has a pink hue on her scales belongs to a family that has business in medicine and pharmacy.

    They have fields all over the nation and they cultivate any herb that could possibly be cultivated on the soils of this nation.

    Yodha doesn¡¯t belong to a family that has a long history, his father is the one who won the titles all by himself and his father is of the same generation as the current emperor.

    Since he learned of the powers of this city, the next thing he would need is ayout. It woulde in handy just in case he needs to destroy the city or escape from it.

    Of course, even though it is a backup n, it has to be thorough.

    But even after thinking long and hard, there is no immediate solution.

    Shadow mice, termites, locusts don¡¯t work. If he uses any spells, he would be easily detected. As for making something new, time is of the essence.

    After thinking long and hard, he couldn¡¯t help but take the bestiary once again. That is the only way out for him at this moment.

    He started collecting the clues from what he learned all these days.

    First and foremost, this is an area full of grasnds and the atmosphere is suitable for Purple me horses, apart from that, he started recollecting the catalog of the meats that he could buy in the store.

    He made a list of animals he ate and saw.

    After making that list, he started rounding up the beasts that could live in simr environments and after marking them, he crossed out all the other beasts that don¡¯t have a single thingmon to the remaining regarding the environments they naturally live in.

    After creating this new list, he started reading up on the beasts once more, even though he has the information in his head, he read once again just to be sure.

    After reading all the information, hepiled some data that could estimate the surrounding environmental conditions and some types of flora that could possibly exist in this ce.

    After that, he once again went through the beasitary and started looking for all kinds of beasts that could possibly live in the environmental conditions he estimated.

    Even though they spent two days in the grasnds, it seems like some sort of hunting grounds with a select few beasts, so he doesn¡¯t have enough data from it, but still, he is pretty confident in his estimation.

    After going through all the data, Sam finally found a feasible solution, but for that, he has to go out once, even if it is in a controlled situation, where he has no real freedom.

    After getting all the information he needed, Sam finally went through the next important thing and he came out at the right time because as soon as he came out of the divine dimension, someone came to the artisan workshop and it happened to be Rana.

    When he saw him, Sam was tempted to make a move and get it over with, but he still didn¡¯t do so in the end.

    "I forgot to ask, how you are going to manufacture something alone without any artisan."

    "Well, I don¡¯t have to manufacture anything, all I have to do is make some repairs and create some extra outer-shells, and who said I am not an artisan."

    With that, Sam showed the golden me at his fingertips and some metallic shells of the bee-puppets in his hand.

    He forgot that Rana doesn¡¯t know he is an artisan and directly asked for the workshop ess and Rana himself didn¡¯t think much of it and epted in a daze andter realized the mistake.

    "You have fire element?" Rana asked with an extremely stunning gaze, after all, Sam never used it in a fight.

    "I rarely use it in battles, my go-to is physical strength and the second one is lightning, the fire element is like a hidden card up my sleeves. Nobody forced me to use that yet, so you didn¡¯t see it. Let us hope that you would be able to see this week.

    I hope your gold level fighters are not too disappointing."

    "We will see. Oh, by the way, do you have any requirements for the fight other than what you wrote in the proposal?"

    "Actually, I just thought of some."

    With that, Sam started exining some details and Rana is not suspecting anything at all.

    After Rana left, Sam went back to dealing with the issues at hand, since the solution for investigation is avable, the next thing he has to do is find a cure for the poison that was left in the fighters¡¯ bodies.

    Actually, that is the only thing, Sam is trying even when he is in the residence and under surveince and he used the guise of cooking to do that.

    He just bought various local herbs as seasonings for the beast meat every day and he observed the effects of these herbs on the poison on Arman.

    Sinceing here Arman has been useful for little tasks, like being the test subject of the poison inside. Once Sam even asked if he could get rid of that and Arman said that he is positive if he used his secret blood burning technique.

    But he didn¡¯t let him do that and let him be the test subject, at least this is a great use of him.

    After continuous consumption of the herbs along with the meat, he did have some effects and these next seven days that he could spend in the divine dimension which will give him two months, he could make an antidote or at least a medicine that could reduce the effects, if pushes to shove, he can use the wine given by the Monkey King.

    But he doesn¡¯t want to do that. He couldn¡¯t use these special cards whenever he got into trouble, otherwise, he wouldn¡¯t be able to solve problems effectively. Particrly, since he had plenty of time, he doesn¡¯t have to resort to such things.

    So, now Sam went into research mode. But all the time, he kept an eye on the outside world, because Rana came to check up on him from time to time.

    Soon, the time passed and Sam did have some results. He swallowed the divine dimension once again and came out with around twenty Bee-Puppets.

    These are the same bee-puppets he made back on his, but there is only one modification and that is they are good for a single person scouting for a whole team.

    These twenty puppets have spirits and those twenty spirits have connections between then apart from that they can all be connected to one of therge screens which Sam brought out along with it.

    They work like a CCTV system and this is for his next special fight.

    There are plenty of theserge screens and they are for the audience to see Sam¡¯s next fight. Because the next fight is not going to be in Arena and not in a regr style.

    The next fight is a hunt. Between Sam and all the Silver and Gold-ranked fighters in his division.

    Sam went to Rana and started exining how to use these things before the fight happens. This is the chance he has been waiting for because the fight is outside the arena. In the woods.

 Chapter 503: Hunt

    The day of the fight. It has been one and a half months since Sam came to this ce.

    And almost all of this time was spent in the Arena, today he ising out of the Arena for the first time.

    But, it waspletely useless as he couldn¡¯t find a way to remember the route or surroundings because he was seated in a closed carriage which doesn¡¯t have any windows and has restrictions ced on it, so he cannot reach out his spiritual sense.

    After a long journey, Sam was let out and he arrived right in the middle of the woods.

    These woods are not too dense, but they are clearly not some normal grasnds. The presence of Level-6 beasts can be found anywhere, at least that is what Sam was told.

    After leaving him at the edge of the woods, the carriage and the guardian who is beside the carriage stayed there and gave Sam a token.

    "The area of the woods is covered by a formationid by a consummate level formation master.

    So, don¡¯t think about running away. Of course, the boss said you wouldn¡¯t do that, but I am saying this for the sake of saying.

    You can onlye out with this token and there are only some points in the formation that all you to pass through.

    If you try to force your way through from any other point, you will die."

    With that, he waved his hands and the Bee-Puppet appeared.

    The Bee-puppet was locked on Sam as it followed him into the formation.

    This time¡¯s fight is a hunt. Although no one knew who the hunter and who the prey yet.

    At this moment, the arena¡¯s top is closed, it ispletely dark and the audience is still seated in their own seats with a crystal screen before them.

    The normal audience has a screen for three to four seats and VIPs have a screen for one seat each.

    They are watching it intently and this time, they smelled an aromatic wine and roasted meat being brought by the attendants, so they didn¡¯t even think twice before buying it.

    In therge screen, there are different sections and therger section in the middle is focusing on Sam, while the smaller sections around it are the rest of the fighters in the patch of the wood.

    Actually, the area that is enclosed within the forest is not too big. It is actually quite small and they could cover the whole area within half an hour if they traveled at a full speed.

    So, they cannot hide from each other and can only fight head-on.

    They are watching this intently as they looked at Sam and the Silver ranked and gold-ranked fighters who just entered the forest.

    They are waiting for the first sh, but they didn¡¯t have to wait for long, because, Sam already moved like fish in the water as soon as he entered the forest.

    He is agile like a monkey as he jumped from tree to tree with minimum effort and started searching for his opponents carefully.

    There are a total of eighteen opponents to him at this moment.

    And within the first five minutes, he encountered his first opponent.

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to sneak up on him and directly appeared in front of him, the Silver ranked fighter who saw Sam was startled for a second but braced himself for a tough fight.

    But his anticipated fight was nowhere to be seen, he was already done for as soon as Sam made his first move.

    Sam made the opponent unconscious and searched for his token. This is his task, any person without a token inside the formation will be suppressed by the formation and if he can rob them off of this, it would consider his win.

    At this moment, the audience is pping at his first sessful hunt, but they also noticed something else.

    The six screens that are covering the Gold-ranked fighters brought attracted their attention.

    Because, they are all moving in the same direction, to the center of the forest. And soon they noticed that all six of them formed a group and are waiting for Sam toe.

    The audience were riled up at this.

    It is already supposed to be unfair to Sam, but these people already thought grouping up even before the match and they sessfully did so in the first ten minutes, they didn¡¯t expect this from gold-ranked fighters.

    But at the same time, they are quite excited about this. They wanted to have Sam fight the toughest battles to see his full strength and this might as well be their perfect opportunity.

    But what they didn¡¯t notice is that Sam is not just moving around aimlessly, while he is tracking his opponents, he is also looking for something else on the trees, that is why he is only traveling on trees and he is touching every single tree in the path as he made his way forward.

    Since the area is too small, Sam doesn¡¯t have much hope for this n, but still he didn¡¯t want to give up.

    He went through all the trees as he took down two more opponents.

    After some more search, he was finally able to see some traces of what he wanted. But he didn¡¯t make his move immediately.

    He looked around noticed that arge deer habitat is nearby, he lured one out and killed it before starting to prepare the meat and the pelt. As Sam is skinning therge body while sprawling over it, what no one noticed is that the crystal came out of his mouth and a ck shadow carried it away from the carcass without letting the bee puppet catching its movement.

    Of course, that is because Sam is the one controlling the Bee-puppet at this moment, the puppet would bypass all themands of others as long as Sam said so.

    As he delightedly put on a show to the screen, something else is happening right behind the puppet.

    Mia came out and started exerting her pressure, she is the only one who doesn¡¯t have any negative effects from this environment.

    As she used her pressure to the most and used the divine dimension crystal to collect a ho¡¯s nest on the tree.

    The ho¡¯s nest isrge and is as big as an adult male, but the hos are weak and powerless, just a little bigger than the regr hos.

    After mia collected them, she went back into the divine dimension and inside the divine dimension, the termite queen is having a talk with the ho queen.

    Sam finished his meal and made his move. And in that move, what no one noticed is that he swallowed a crystal in a sh.

    He was done with the things at hand and resumed his hunt.

    For the next two hours, Sam became busy with beating the crap out of all his opponents and finally, he arrived at the center of the forest where the six gold-ranked fighters are waiting for him.

    The sixth one is the newly promoted one, he was silver ranked for the past few days.

    As he moved there, now almost all screens are just showing this scene.

    This is the final battle for this hunt.

    But this time, Sam didn¡¯t directly confront the six of them, they are staying in a formation and are waiting for Sam.

    Sam is looking at them from the hiding.

    He smirked at the fact that these six members formed a group just to deal with him and all of a sudden, energy surged in his body and slowly his body started converting into a mass of silver lightning.

    He has activated the fusion, but he couldn¡¯tplete the fusion, at this moment his fusion is only eighty percentplete, but that is enough for now.

    Sam made his move, he kicked the trunk of the tree he was standing on and disappeared with a silver sh as he zoomed towards the nearest opponent.

    He didn¡¯t punch or kick, he just mmed himself straight into him like a lightning strike, but this guy is on his guard and waspletely defensive, tried his best to defend the impact.

    So, he wasn¡¯t down in a single attack, but he looked rather haggard and it would be hard to say if he would survive another attack.

    The rest of the group grew alert and looked at the lightning sh that disappeared into the woods once again as soon as it entered the woods, the lightning disappeared.

    That is because Sam deactivated the fusion to hide and move normally.

    As the group changed the formation and got ready to take Sam head-on, they felt somethinging from the rear and as soon as they saw it, they were stunned. Because the lightning sh that disappeared to their right ising from their back at this moment.

 Chapter 504: Troubles for Rana

    This time, Sam didn¡¯t bother creating a show so that opponents could retaliate a bit and drag the battle, but his hits are extremely decisive as he wanted to cleanly sweep the opponents.

    The lightning sh came from different directions. The opponents couldn¡¯t keep up with that.

    The audience is cheering at the one-sided onught, but some of the discerning eyes are in awe of the skill Sam has shown.

    The elemental fusion is somewhat difficult to achieve and it needs a lot of control which should be deemed impable.

    They are surprised at Sam¡¯s control over his energy that he can activate and deactivate the fusion as he liked.

    It is almost like being in the fusion is like eating and drinking to him.

    Yodha is also looking at this scene and he is thinkingpletely differently, maybe only the other Noble scions are the ones who are thinking in the same way as him.

    Because they are not just here for the show unlike the rest of the audience. Even though they enjoyed the show they are here for the skills and they have a gut feeling that Sam is showing his skills step by step.

    Yodha has this feeling even more because, he saw Sam¡¯s skill level before the rest, which prompted him to present wine for him after the first fight itself.

    Until now, Sam showed his longsting stamina by fighting twenty opponents one by one, then in the first fight against the Bronze ranked fighters, he showed his overwhelming attacks and in the second fight, he showed his impable speed and defense at the same time his control over the massive amount of spiritual energy.

    As for the fight now, he is showing his tracking skill, battle instincts, an overwhelming advantage in using the terrain, and such.

    From what Yodha is seeing, Sam is exhibiting his skills to be more eye-catching in every fight. In fact, as he progressed from one fight to another, he is showing off more and more.

    It is almost like he is trying desperately to be out in the spotlight.

    Even Rana might have noticed this, but he doesn¡¯t care about that, because what he needs most at this moment is the capital for his business so that he canpete for the position.

    Arena might seem lucrative, but it doesn¡¯t make it for the long term.

    He cannot depend on it if he wants to haverge scale growth and develop his own loyal forces.

    Sam also understood this, that is why he started bing more and more daring with his requests.

    If not for the fact that he is the prisoner of the Arena, he would have supported Rana directly, with the wealth he had in his hands, it would be a piece of cake for him to do this. But it is not suitable yet.

    If he can get out of this ce, he can do whatever he wants.

    At this moment, Rana only has one thing in his hands and that is wealth that too is not too much. He doesn¡¯t have his father behind him neither his family, he would have to struggle all alone.

    As for the rest of the families and other top dogs supporting him, it would only happen if he can give them enough incentive.

    Sam is thinking while he was busy dealing with the six gold rank fighters and he was done in five more minutes.

    After clearing them up, he took the tokens and started walking towards the entrance.

    This trip has been rewarding and he achieved the goal he was set out to achieve.

    Sam didn¡¯t expect that he would seed on his first try, but from now on he doesn¡¯t have to worry about theyout. He canplete his backup n.

    After leaving the ce and returning to Arena, Sam was gifted with the bonuses. Today¡¯s bonuses are by far the highest.

    He left to his residence to think of what to do next.

    Meanwhile, Rana is looking at the bee-puppets in his hands with a shocked expression. He has seen the performance of the puppets, this is used for broadcasting the fight, but it is not the best use for it. There are many more efficient ways to use this.

    He started examining the materials and the structure, but to his dismay, he couldn¡¯t see the internal structure with just his spiritual sense, there are too many restrictions.

    Not just him, even the noble scions are interested in how Rana showed them the whole fight.

    It is not like they never saw this before, but it takes an extremely high-level formation and it costs too much.

    Rana doesn¡¯t have enough resources or wealth to make the formation, he could barely put that restriction formation in that forest after renting it from the authorities.

    It would be hard if he really wants to get that formation that can broadcast, apart from that these crystal screens and the various angles, are allpletely new to them.

    If even they, the scions who are going to be the next heads of their families with full support doesn¡¯t know the source and existence of such technology, how can a person who is being bullied and isted from his own family get his hands on this?

    If Sam knew that all of these people are thinking about this, he would wear a grin from ear to ear.

    Because that is the result he expected. When he showed the bee puppet¡¯s demonstration, Sam didn¡¯t show the quality of the surveince to its full extent and even the angles it can capture and the speed it can follow are not shown to itsplete potential.

    But in the actual fight, they worked to their fullest extent and showed impable image.

    He wanted to put more pressure on Rana.

    If Sam is in Rana¡¯s ce, he would take advantage of the current situation and showcase the prowess of all his candidates and sell them to the noble families in form of favors or wealth, as for making them join his force, which would be a stupid decision.

    Because the resentment they feel for being toyed like an animal is not something they would be able to forget that easily.

    He could guess that Rana¡¯s n is the same. But Sam wants to elerate the n and make him do all this faster.

    He cannot manage the Arena on his own, he does have skills but he doesn¡¯t have resources or support and he is not capable of gaining them in short term.

    And he gave away the bee puppets and now they are like oil in the fire.

    All this while, Rana will only get pressurized by his own family, but now all families are concentrating on him.

    Meanwhile, Sam is meditating in the room with lightning surrounding him and the whole room was lit with silver light blinding the surveince.

    As his back is facing the surveince, what the people who are watching him don¡¯t know is, a shadow expanded from right below Sam and extended to his mouth. At the same time, something unbelievable happened as Sam¡¯s chest suddenly bulged and his esophagus expanded like a balloon.

    He used wind elemental energy to pressure his esophagus and created a tunnel from his stomach. At this moment, a small ho flew out of Sam¡¯s stomach and the shadow that was stretched out turned into a hand and caught it before disappearing.

    The shadow reappeared in the hallway and the ho was left to fly freely.

    The small ho whichpletely negligible in the eyes of everyone in the Arena left the ce that day and roamed into the city.

    The same process happened again and again and for the whole night, Sam is creating this blinding light in the distraction.

    Meanwhile, Arman is being a good and obedient test subject as he kept a space jade in his mouth and took one medicine after another from it as he experimented it on the poison.

    He took a minuscule amount as he made it react bit by bit to see if any of these things can cure the poisonpletely.

    The next day, Sam is still meditating as he closed his eyes. Inside his mind, there is arge nk space glittering with many white dots.

    This is the result of the exchange between him and the ho queen.

    The hos he sent away yesterday are one of the lowest-ranked insects of all time. They are ck hos and they have short lifespans. They wouldn¡¯t reach past Level 1 in their lifetime unless they get to have an evolution in their bloodline with enough resources that are generally not so easy to get.

    After estimating the environmental conditions around, Sam went through all the beasts that stay in these conditions and came across some insect species and made a list to find out what kind of insects could live in the vicinities based on his estimation.

    So, he picked a forest simr to that and he really did find one of them. But these hos are at the bottom on the list, he would have preferred if he could find other types, but he couldn¡¯t do anything about it. He has to deal with whatever he had in his hand.

    And just like that, he now had a decent estimation on the size of theyout and if he wants to, he can even look at some areas nearby, that is the ability of the ho¡¯s queen and due to the spiritual connection he made with it, they can exchange the information directly. That means he is not seeing the image directly rather he is seeing in the mind of ho¡¯s queen.

    While Sam is rather satisfied with the surveince, he ispletely unaware of the storm that was caused in Rana¡¯s office since previous night.

 Chapter 505: Change of attitude

    Rana is having the hardest time of his life. After the hunt was over, he collected the necessary bonuses and was rejoicing in his new ie. But his happiness is short-lived.

    He wanted to ask Sam where he got the bee puppets and get the blueprint out of him. He doesn¡¯t believe that Sam doesn¡¯t have a blueprint of it, at least that is his hunch.

    But before he could do so, he already started facing trouble and he understood how green he was. He is not the only one who saw the efficiency of the bee-puppets.

    The rest of the noble scions doesn¡¯t know about the bee puppets, but there is something up with that broadcast system.

    So, one after another the noble scions sent people to visit and Vasuki even came on her own. All of them are subtle about it, they didn¡¯t say it out openly, but they didn¡¯t hide the fact about wanting to know more about it either.

    Yodha approached the matter in apletely different way, he just rounded up the Arena attendants who finished their shift and returned to their homes.

    Clearly, he is the sanest and clear-minded of all the scions as he knew that Rana doesn¡¯t have that capability and there is something else going on.

    Rana is not too stupid to get that technology out in the limelight at this moment, he has to do at least after building some sort of foundation otherwise the rest of the guys will rip him off real good.

    That is why he took away the attendants as soon as they left the arena and started his interrogation, the whole thing went smoothly and the attendants didn¡¯t even bother to conceal a thing in face of Yodha.

    Apparently, they don¡¯t know the full story, but there are some of them who were present when Sam is giving the demo and that is enough for Yodha to draw a conclusion.

    The next morning, as Sam finished spreading his howork, he was called to Rana¡¯s office. He had a cold smile on his face and he walked with his hands on his pants¡¯ pockets. Arman noticed the change in his bodynguage and started to do his part as well.

    He moved out of the cell and went to the dining room. No attendants stopped him. When he entered the dining room, he even talked to the chef and gave him somerge pieces of meat, this s the deer meat that was hunted by Sam yesterday.

    This is going to rece the meat in today¡¯s night meal after that he went back and started speaking to some of the other fighters in the residences, at first there is some resistance, but Arman is no soft permission at least not in front of others.

    Sam reached the office while Arman is doing his assigned tasks. Rana looked at him coldly and said.

    "I want that blueprint of the Bee-Puppets."

    "I don¡¯t have it."

    Sam replied in a calm tone, he is back to his original self. There is no cheerful youth who loves bragging and likes showing off. His eyes are cold and calcting.

    "Do you think I will believe that? You are going to give it to me no matter what. But you should decide whether it is the hard way or the easy way."

    "You can think whatever you want, but you will never get that blueprint."

    "Do you think you are in a position to deny? All I have to do is make you lose your meal for two days straight and you will be dead."

    "Why don¡¯t you try that then? I dare you to do so."

    When Sam said this, Rana was stunned for a second, and then only he noticed the change in Sam as he continued to speak.

    "The family has essentially isted you, you want to start your own business and don¡¯t have enough capital topete against your family, at your current state the best you can get is a small shop which wouldn¡¯t provide enough revenue for your growth and your force.

    You need money, to develop your own force and at the same time, provide them with cultivation resources and stuff.

    Along with that you will need a ce to stay and situate your force.

    At this moment, you might be in charge of the Arena, but it belongs to your family, to begin with, they will take it back one way or other. The only reason they are still letting you stay here is that it would too obvious and their reputation will be affected.

    So, before that happens, you have to get as much money as possible from the Arena in this short amount of time.

    Your best bet would be to sell all the fighters to the other families and gain money and favors. As for keeping them yourselves, there is no way you would be able to do that because they can kill you in your sleep.

    But the other noble families will not buy the fighters at this moment, because at this exact moment, the only hotmodity is me and a few other fighters. So, to gain more build-up you have to maintain a few more fights and you will have to use me as the foundation for that.

    Then only you can sell us and get some money to maintain any form of force. Even after doing all this, you would barely gain one to two billion spirit stones.

    That could at most get you by for one more year if you maintain a decent force.

    That too if your investment in the business goes well without any intervention from the family of yours.

    After all, you just kicked the ass of your brother who is supposed to be the next head, so for the next few years, half of your family who is in support of him would create troubles and the other half would look at the show as a test.

    That amount would be barely enough, that too if there are no additional problems.

    The great thing is that your own family has coined almost all businesses rted to metals.

    Not only do they have a weapon shop, they even have an Armory in the west of the city where they provide basic armors to the military and the city guardmand.

    They even have a foundry where they sell metals for even the Artisan association in this ce. They even have deals with the formation and inscription experts.

    If you want to get the approval of the family, you might have to go into the same kinds of businesses.

    After all, the Bewitching hue family coined the medicine business, and other families have their hand in the auction house, the lodgings, the mercenaries, beast cub trading, everything is coined.

    If you enter any of those businesses, you are in trouble, because other than your own family in which at most half of them are going to trouble you, the rest of the families wouldn¡¯t pull their punches, they would just tear you apart."

    Sam said all this in one breath and paused for a second.

    Rana was stumped.

    But before he could react, Sam started said once again.

    "Before all this could happen, you still have to make it big and I am needed for that. So, once again I dare you to kill me.

    Apart from that, the scions might have already contacted you about the puppets. So, if I am not here you are in a more disadvantageous situation. Good luck with that."

    Just like that Rana was dumbfounded.

    "Are you not supposed to have just entered the city? Where did you get this information? How do you know all this? Wait, why do you know all this? Why are so clear about the family situation of mine?"

    He said frantically and started thinking about all the situation and after he thought this through, he realized Sam is a catalyst to everything that happened till now.

    He thought, he is in full control of him and using him to make money, but it turned out that Sam who is in a disadvantageous and submissive position from the start is the one manipting.

    Not only did he influence him and his family¡¯s situation while staying in the Arena, but his actions could also possibly influence some changes in the city¡¯s power bnce, at least when it is concerned with the young scions.

    He looked at him with a terrified expression.

    Sam looked at him condescendingly and said.

    "You better think before throwing someone in a ce like this.

    Do you think you are someone who can just through me in a ce like this and make me perform like a monkey? You are far too incapable of that. Now, you are forced to a path of no return. Not only do you have to make fights like want to in the next two weeks, but you will also have to control the rest of the noble scions.

    Of course, I can offer you a way out of that too. But there are some conditions. If you want to discuss it,e to my residence."

 Chapter 506: Discussion

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to wait after that. He just left the ce as if he owned it.

    Rana panicked and fell into his chair with an exhausted expression. He didn¡¯t expect that things would turn out like this.

    This is the situation he least anticipated. In fact, he didn¡¯t anticipate it at all.

    As he was brain storming what he to do, he got the news that the attendants are rounded up by Yodha and some of them spilled some information.

    The attendants didn¡¯t run away, because the chance of escape is not so great for them and they decided to surrender earlier. Of course, half of the reason is that they know that Rana couldn¡¯t afford to kill them at this moment and they are betting on that fact.

    This made Rana even more panicked. He ran towards Sam¡¯s residence to have that talk.

    After reached, he noticed that Sam is ying with a small ho in his hands. He didn¡¯t care much and sat down on a chair right in front of him and asked.

    "What do you want?"

    "Simple, for the next fights, arrange them with the next division. The Late-stage nascent division. I am going to fight them for the next few days continuously until they are finished.

    As for the rest, I do have some ideas on how you can get past this situation and I can even give you a way out of this current predicament. I can help you make a business, a force, and even make you the next candidate for the family head. But there are different conditions though.

    But I don¡¯t know if you will agree."

    "Why don¡¯t we discuss and see?"

    "Well, we can actually, but I don¡¯t like negotiating much, so it would be better for me if you agree to them straight away."

    "That wouldn¡¯t be good for me right?"

    "I don¡¯t think so. Trust me whoever makes a deal with me, will always turn out to be a winner at all times."

    "That is bullshit."

    "I don¡¯t care about your opinion, but if you want to do this you can think this through. My conditions would be extremely harsh and there wouldn¡¯t be much room for you to negotiate. Onlye here if you are decisive enough. But before that, just go there and prepare for the next fights. We can make some money first."

    Rana looked at him and left.

    For the next week, Sam and Rana are both busy. One with fighting while the other is making the fights happen.

    After the week, there is only one fight left for Sam and that is the battle against the Rank 1 of the Gold rankers of the Late-stage Nascent division.

    All over this week, Rana is under too much pressure, he didn¡¯t want to believe what Sam said to him in his office so he tried his best to stay positive and worked towards his goal.

    But as time passed, he realized that all he said was true and is moving in the exact direction he pointed out.

    The first thing is his family is trying to take the Arena away from him before he could do something drastic and the signs of their movements are all over the city.

    The second thing is the pressure from the other Noble scions is increasing, they are investigating left and right and they are also trying to get their hands on the attendants, but they are not as daring as Yodha who is a reckless and bold guy.

    So, all they can do is fish out some information.

    As he was facing all of that, the only positive thing is the money he is making with extreme difficulty.

    Meanwhile, Sam is providing various types of meats for all the divisions through the chef of the Dining staff and Arman ismunicating with all of them in the backstage of the Arena whenever he got chance.

    Since the attendants and the dining staff don¡¯t know how much of a storm Sam has raised, they are just letting them be and Rana is in no position to care about such things which appeared to be trivial on the surface.

    After this week, the day before thest fight of Sam, Rana couldn¡¯t hold it anymore and once again made a trip towards Sam¡¯s residence.

    "What do you want me to do?"

    Sam smirked at the question and said.

    "First of all, arrange a meeting with Yodha for me. We will talk about the rest based on how he reacts."

    "With Yodha?"

    "Of course."

    "Do you think he will meet with you? Even I am not sure getting a meeting with him."

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "You don¡¯t know this because you don¡¯t belong to the category. But a superior being can recognize another superior being."

    "What do you mean?" Rana was offended. After all, Sam is putting him on par with Yodha and is calling him inferior.

    "The reluctance to ept the obvious is the sign of inferiority and idiocy. Don¡¯t ask me when you know the answer. And for me superiority doesn¡¯te with birth and blood, ites with capability. The day you understand that you will also see how puny your ambition and that family head position is.

    Now just go and arrange a meeting tonight."

    Rana left the room with a ck face. He doesn¡¯t understand what Sam said and he obviously doesn¡¯t like this.

    His expression changed only after he went to Yodha¡¯s house.

    "I want to meet with Yodha."

    "Commander asked me to escort me inside if youe. Please."

    The guard greeted him and led Rana inside the house.

    Yodha is sculpting a small wooden piece that is the size of a fist.

    "What brings you here?"

    Yodha asked, but his expression is showing that he already knew the answer.

    "I am here because Sam requested to arrange a meeting with you." Rana tried his best to hide his surprise and curiosity as he said.

    "It is about time you did that."

    Rana couldn¡¯t hide his expressions and asked.

    "Why do you want to meet him?"

    "A person who can make waves in this city when he cooped up in the prison; of course I want to meet him."

    "So, you knew this already?"

    Yodha chuckled and said.

    "You guys are wondering since childhood, what is the difference between you and me. And I can now say this is the difference. I am not one to not see the flow. You wouldn¡¯t understand even if I exin everything to you.

    I will visit the Arena at midnight. Just wait in your office with him."

    With that Rana left Yodha¡¯s house and went back to the Arena.

    At midnight.

    Sam is waiting for Yodha along with Rana in thetter¡¯s office.

    Soon, Yodha entered the office and smiled at Sam.

    "It is nice to finally meet you. I am Yodha."

    Sam shook his hand and said.

    "I am Sam. Nice to meet you too."

    "So, we can go straight to the point, but before that, if you have some special wine; that would be great."

    "Of course."

    Sam took out two gourds that are extremely simr and gave one to Yodha.

    "I only have these two gourds of it left. I didn¡¯t want to share it with someone who cannot appreciate good wine. But since you are good at it, I will share this with you."

    With that, both of them clinked the gourds and took a gulp.

    Yodha¡¯s facial expression changed as he swallowed the heavenly wine. This is the diluted wine of the Monkey king. Sam didn¡¯t want to use it, but he knew something like this would need to win over a smooth conversation with Yodha. So, he decided to pay the price.

    But still, his hesitation caused him to dilute it with some normal fruit wine. But it is still better than any wine in this whole realm.

    "This is great. Thanks."

    Yodha thanked him and rxed a bit.

    Then Sam smiled and got to the point.

    "I don¡¯t know if you know exactly why I called you, but I think you would have some guesses.

    The first thing, I want to talk about is the broadcast system that Rana used in my hunt is my creation and I am the one who implemented that. Of course, that is not the main function of that system and not the intended use too.

    But I made it like that to gain enough attention.

    Second thing is, it will be most useful for the City guards and the military. So, if you want we can manage to cut a business deal. But I do have some conditions which I would like to talk aboutter. That is if you are interested and this system is not the only one I can offer."

    "So, what do you want in exchange?"

    Yodha asked.

    Sam smiled and said.

    "It is simple. I need to be out of here and you should guarantee my safety. I don¡¯t belong to any of the nations that ruled by Naga. I came from a ce that you guys never even heard of and I will definitely return to that ce. So, I would like to make a business deal between both our ces and I want the two of you to be my partners."

 Chapter 507: Business Deal

    Yodha and Rana were surprised if what Sam said is right, there is a nation that ispletely ruled by humans and not Nagas.

    But that doesn¡¯t make sense as they are sure that there is no such nation on their, which leads to only one conclusion, Sam is not from their.

    Even though it is not easily feasible it is still a possibility. They knew that human civilization is notpletely lost and it is still holding some weight on some others, but they didn¡¯t expect that they would meet someone and he is so confident in making such a business deal.

    Yodha thought for a moment and replied.

    "I don¡¯t know if you know the military situation of this ce. But the military weapon production is extremely limited. After all, if the artisans are directly associated with the military they might get conscripted directly into the army when a situation arises.

    They don¡¯t want to join. So, except for some high-level artisans who are in charge of making some special weapons and armor for the people in the army that are exchanged for their military merits, there is no production of the basic weapons.

    In fact, the Golden ze family already holds the deal for all the military bases of the nation. We only buy the things from them on annual basis within the military budget."

    Sam listened to every detail carefully.

    "I understand. I don¡¯t know why you are here. But if you are interested I can get you some great deal, which can provide ie to all three of us."

    "How is that going to happen? Anyway, right now doing business with Rana is not something beneficial to me, why would I have to do business with him." Yodha replied with a smile.

    "Well, if Rana is alone, it is indeed somethingpletely inefficient. But he will only be a middle man in the business. Although he would be a partner and receive a share of the business, his main role would be binding us two."

    "Then please do exin the deal you want to make."

    Rana looked at the two of them in a dumbfounded expression, this is his office and they are talking about him as if he is not worth anything. A middleman? He is a noble child. When was a human able to talk to him like that?

    Sam didn¡¯t know what he was thinking and there is a huge possibility that he wouldn¡¯t care if he knew of this.

    He took out some things from his spatial storage and the first one of them is the methane grenade. The grenades are one of the most lucrative things selling like hot cakes in his business.

    There are various types of grenades, depending on the degree of damage and purpose.

    Apart from the methane grenade, there is the decaying me grenade which is the cause of the weird poison and this is also used in cannon shells at the war of Adrian, the new model of the pin grenade.

    Smoke grenade and normal grenade whose sole purpose is pure explosive destruction and each type have various subtypes based on the degree of their damage.

    Yodha was surprised. Although these are not invincible, they really doe in handy with the wars and they are hard to detect whenpared to normal inscription based or formation based traps.

    They can be used as mines or for other purposes like a distraction.

    After that, Sam took out the hunting trap, as for the second model of the hunting trap that uses the poison, it is not that useful in the Naga realm. So, there is no need for it to be disyed.

    The next thing Sam showed was the Breathing device that could increase the proficiency in Naval warfare, this intrigued Yodha very much.

    He also knew that the least development they have in terms of warfare and technology is in the territory of Naval-warfare.

    After that was done, the next thing would be themunication hubs and variousmunication devices.

    Sam noticed that themunication techniques are a little more advanced here, but not as advanced as his ownwork.

    The most that these people have is the extra range. But Sam¡¯s portablemunication hub and therge-scalemunication hub area almost irreceable.

    Thest one is the Bee-Puppet. In fact, before he came here, Sam is already working on the third puppet design. Until now, the Bee-puppets are only of Nascent level puppets in terms of materials. But they can be used against the pre-transcendent stage cultivators at best. But that is it.

    The t-fish puppets are the same. But they are good as long as they serve their purpose which is mostly scouting and transport.

    Sam is still hesitating if he should show the t-fish puppet and decided not to after some thoughts.

    After that, he started exining how the Bee-puppets work and what their functions and features are.

    If things go right with these businesses, Sam would introduce the cement, cannons, and other thingster.

    In fact, it is too much of a risk for him to take out all these. But this is a gamble. He doesn¡¯t want to wait and slowly make his foundation in this world.

    He needs a rapid progression. It is almost two months since he came here and there is only ten months¡¯ time to the next pce of inheritance.

    So, he has to move rapidly.

    Sam exined everything and said to Yodha.

    "I know you would prefer these things to be on business as soon as possible. But I would prefer to deal with them slowly and make a contract on them one by one."

    "Why is that?" This time it is Rana who asked. He was awe-struck by these things and since he was involved in this deal, he couldn¡¯t help but feel excited.

    "Progression andck of resources. We cannot invest a whole lot at the same time to produce these things on arge scale.

    We have to progress this slowly.

    The first product would be the grenades and all types and degrees. Along with them, we will be selling all kinds of other weapons that are normally used. These grenades are responsible for attracting the customers while the normal weapons would be sold along with them due to this attraction."

    "I don¡¯t think it is necessary to limit this to just grenades in the first stage. And I also don¡¯t think it is a good idea to sell them to the normal public. It would be better if they are reserved for the military and city guard specific use." Yodha said from the side.

    "But wouldn¡¯t that limit the revenue?" Sam asked.

    "What do you mean to limit the revenue? The revenue would be exploded. Do you know how much each of these would go? Tens of thousands of spirit stones."

    Yodha said as he pointed at the grenades. Sam was dumbfounded. He is the creator of the grenades, but even he doesn¡¯t know that they are that expensive.

    But he didn¡¯t show it on his face.

    "We are going to write a military exclusive contract and I will be the mediator. All three of us would invest and since, the idea is you don¡¯t have to invest as much as we do."

    "How big is the military manpower?"

    Sam asked all of a sudden.

    "The military of the nation is very huge even if the imperial capital is not that big. Only the specially privileged are able to stay in the imperial capital.

    In fact, almost all of the normal citizens in the imperial capital are noble scions, of course, it is a small nobility rank and most of them are just empty titles gained through military service.

    So, you might have a very considerate estimation of the military. But our total manpower from the foot soldiers to the Marshallsbined will be around five hundred thousand."

    Sam was dumbfounded. He doesn¡¯t know what to think of this. The whole force of the western continent would be barely fifty thousand, if he counted the Acolytes too, then they barely reach that number. But these guys five hundred thousand people just for the army, that is somerge force.

    "What is the name of your Nation?" Sam asked in a bit awkward tone.

    "You don¡¯t know?" Both Rana and Yodha are stunned.

    "I actually came here by mistake. So, I don¡¯t really know."

    "It¡¯s called Mov Empire."

    Sam nodded, but he didn¡¯t ask further.

    He then proceeded to exin the next steps to Rana on how he should proceed to get away from the pressure of his family and also the rest of the scions.

    Rana is extremely unwilling to do some of the things as they are nowhere near the same as his own ns. But he was forced to do so.

    He cannot back down now. Even without knowing he is trapped with Yodha and Sam. He doesn¡¯t have any control of the situation, the only good thing is that with these two he can definitely get back at his own father.

 Chapter 508: Shop Keeper

    The next day, Sam went on with hisst fight in the Arena.

    For the next week, the fights went on and this is going to be thest week of the Arena in Rana¡¯s hands. Both Yodha and Sam agreed that the Arena will juste in their way and it is going to be taken away by Rana¡¯s family anyway.

    So, they decided to stop the Arena fights after this week.

    As for the fighters, they are not being sold away. At least not all of them. When Sam went to meet Rana, Arman talked to these fighters about something and that is rted to this.

    Sam knew that things would progress this way and that is why he already started preparing for the situation and sent Arman to talk to them.

    The meat that was given to the chef contains some medicine that can neutralize the poison a bit. This is Sam¡¯s gift to the rest of the fighters and Arman went to some of them to say this and also weave some lies to them.

    His n is that he would act like a mediator between Rana and them to make them believe that Rana doesn¡¯t like the Arena and these methods and is trying to get rid of it without his family knowing. So, the fighters would have to choose a different path from now on.

    Since Rana cannot get rid of them directly and let them get away, he has some options for them. The first one is that he would let them join his personal force and they can work for him as a soldier. There would even bepensation for all the torment they went through in here.

    As for the second choice, they would be auctioned off to the Noble scions and one-fourth of the amount you get will be taken away by Rana, with the remaining three-fourths going to the fighters.

    The fighters didn¡¯t believe this at first. After all, who would believe the person who acted as a gatekeeper of the prison?

    But Arman did a great job convincing them.

    He even tried toy a trap of guilt on them by saying that Rana¡¯s current situation of istion from their family is all because of them. Because Rana wanted to free them and stop this, he was isted and bullied.

    Surprisingly this worked. They are not from here and they don¡¯t really know the exact situation of the families. The most they knew is that Rana is from a big family and from the gossip of the dining staff, they came to knew that he is in trouble. That¡¯s it.

    They ignored it in the past and thought that whatever that is they don¡¯t have anything to do with it, but Arman¡¯s statement made them think.

    The same thing happened with the other fighters of Arena Sam talked to.

    While the situation was left to Arman to solve, Sam went to the store after his fight and met with Shop Keeper.

    Thetter was not really surprised by his visit as it became a daily norm for both of them.

    "Fancy a ss of wine?" Sam asked as he took out a crystal bamboo jar.

    "Sure."

    Both of them sat down together and started drinking. They didn¡¯t talk much as they drank, but when the first crystal bamboo jar was over, Sam finally asked.

    "How many days for your seal to break?"

    Abruptly, the shop keeper halted in his actions and looked at Sam calmly.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop though, he was as casual as ever.

    "How do you know?"

    Sam activated his eye technique and there is a golden glow around them. The shop keeper looked at him and sighed.

    "Where did youe from? The eye technique of this level is not that easy to obtain or cultivate. Are you really from some other ce ruled by humans?"

    "More or less, but it is not on this. As for where it is, I will tell youter. Before that, what is this seal?"

    The shop keeper looked a little mncholic and said.

    "This is a seal ced on me by my brother when he was taken away. Even though I want to tell you, I think it is beyond our means."

    "Why don¡¯t you tell me? Maybe I am someone who can help."

    "How can you help me when you are in your own shit?"

    "Well, the shit is clearedpletely. I will be leaving this ce by the end of this week. The Arena will be empty and all the fighters are also leaving along with the staff. So, if you tell me what your problem is, maybe I might take pity on you and take you with me."

    Sam said half-jokingly.

    Shop Keeper was shocked. He chugged the liquor and said.

    "You are more capable than I thought. Since you are so interested I will tell you, but I highly doubt you would be able to help me.

    Didn¡¯t I tell you that I am from a different ce? it ispletely true, and in fact, I am not from this realm at all. I came from another realm. There are also Naga¡¯s ruling a single in that realm. Of course, there are many powers, countries, and sects as such, but that ce is inhabited by only Naga and Yakshas.

    I and my brother belong to a mediocre noble family and we both have special constitutions due to our bloodline.

    That constitution gives me a different type of power than the elemental energy or pure warrior strength. My brother also had a different constitution that is not exinable by the normal elements and strength.

    The shackles and seal that you have seen are also the results of that power.

    There is a superior noble family that is interested in our power and tried to take us away.

    This is connected to that realm through Space-Warp gateway and we managed to escape.

    Of course, the noble family wouldn¡¯t be as considerate as letting us go right? They just chased us here. Then before I knew it, my brother who is far stronger than me ced a seal on me and threw me into a stream before they could catch us.

    Thest thing I heard from the stream is that his consent to be taken away by them.

    We don¡¯t know what they want from us, but they are still searching for me as they are sure I wouldn¡¯t die. I wanted to leave this ce through the Space-Warp gateway, but there is only one on this and that leads to the same as our home. Even that, was impossible for me to leave through.

    This seal not only stopped my cultivation for a bit, it even stopped me from going through the Space Warp gateway.

    That is why I am stuck in this ce and I took up such an inconspicuous job like this."

    "You are saying this all to a normal human, where is your aversion towards humans?"

    "Maybe, I grew out of it over time. In our realm, at least in my home, there are no humans and it has stayed that way for generations what is the point of me hating the race that we have never seen for so long.

    That is why I don¡¯t really care about that. The hatred towards humans is indeed innate, but that is not to the extent it ispletely intolerable or something that couldn¡¯t be ovee."

    "So, it seems like your seal will break in a few days, what would you do?"

    "It might look like that, but I still have more than a year for that. Even then I don¡¯t have a guarantee that it would break."

    "A year?" Sam was really surprised, the seal certainly didn¡¯t look that way. It is almost like it would break apart at any moment. If even that will take a year, just how long did this guy stay in this ce? Sam didn¡¯t keep this question to himself and asked.

    "Twenty-five years."

    Sam was dumbfounded. He didn¡¯t expect that he would stay here for that long.

    "Damn, even after twenty-five years they are still searching for you?"

    "Of course, like hell, they would leave me alone. There is even a person staying in this imperial capital and looking for those reports as we speak."

    The cultivation seal is the only thing that is saving me.

    My brother¡¯s seal not only stopped the cultivation it even changed the color of my scales. That is why there is no one who can identify me yet. But once this seal broke, I don¡¯t think I would be able to escape unscathed.

    They would definitely capture me."

    Sam thought for a moment and said with a smile.

    "I have a n, you want to hear me out?"

    "What n?"

    "First tell me, what your real cultivation level is?"

    "Level-9 Consummate realm, I would have broken through the next ne if not for the seal. But this seal is somewhat helping me solidify the foundation."

    Sam didn¡¯t hear the rest and felt like this is a great chance.

    "I do have a n that can help you out."

    The shopkeeper looked at him with a bit of doubt and excitement at the same time.

 Chapter 509: Auction

    One weekter.

    On this day, the regr audience and the attendants of noble scions all visited the Arena one by one only for it to be closed.

    There is no sign of people and not even the gate guards are present. It has been like this for the past two days.

    The fights for the Arena are over on that day and Rana stopped the fights and events further. The Arena will be closed, permanently.

    Even though they could operate the Arena further and the ie is pretty decent, at the end of the day the Arena is still the Golden ze family¡¯s property and it would be quite problematic for them to take over the control and make it independent.

    So, it would be better to discard itpletely and get away with it.

    On this day, Rana visited the other noble scions discreetly and gave them an invitation.

    This is the invitation-only for the scions of their generation and no other people are allowed.

    Today is the auction day.

    Sam¡¯s n worked perfectly, with the slight relief of the poison due to the consumption of the meat, the fighters are convinced, but most of them wanted to be auctioned off. Only a few of them are staying with them

    So, today that auction is happening.

    Yodha, who stayed out of the city for the past week is alsoing back to the city. He went outside of the city because he wanted to find thend and make arrangements.

    Yodha has special privileges which made it easy for him to acquirend. But thend is not inside the city. It ispletely outside the city premises.

    As for safety? Sam learned that apart from the hunting grounds there are no beasts around in this area and the ce Sam arrived when he came to this realm are also hunting grounds. The city gate he saw was also a rear city gate, not the main one.

    Even his hunt was done in a small part of these hunting grounds.

    This is something unexpected. Apparently, the hunting grounds are farrger than the city.

    Anyway, the safety of their factory will be guaranteed as Yodha is going to be a partner, he is also in charge of safety and he does have some personal guards apart from the military guards that he could assign.

    As for Sam, he is in charge of providing the blueprints of the grenades and the machines required for production.

    Even this doesn¡¯t have much improvement in the machinery and production, they also prioritize the individual artisans that could make some great weapons for individual prowess.

    The most they have are some pressing machines used for making basic armors for the lowest-ranked soldiers that are given for free when they joined the army.

    Except for that, there are no other machines.

    Sam started making the hand press, and other things for the production lines. Since, he has the production unit in his divine dimension, making and assembling these machines is faster than ever. Apart from that, he also needed some inscription masters that can make the inscriptions that are needed and the workers to carve out the Space jade.

    He found out that Space Jade is actually quite easy to acquire in this nation.

    As for the methane and the decaying has, there is no way he would set a nt here, this early. For now, he has these gas nts in his divine dimension and he would only supply the gas.

    Only after making sure that he can trust the other two would be, he set up the methane gas nt and the decaying me gas nt here.

    There is only one ce with these gas nts and that is the factory zone of Sam¡¯s city.

    In this past week, Rana made rounds all over the city, to hire an architect for the construction of the factory. Sam gave the blueprints for this.

    In fact, Sam¡¯s ns are the core of the whole business, so he has to invest the least amount of money into it. Meanwhile, Yodha and Rana had to invest a lot more than him and they still had to take care of security and the management respectively.

    Rana¡¯s job of finding an architect would prove to be difficult if it was normal time, but it has be easy when the architect read the letter that Yodha wrote.

    Due to Yodha¡¯s special identity, his authority and name have the same effect as that of an imperial prince. Even some of the imperial offspring don¡¯t have the same level as him. Except for the crown prince, the rest of the princes and princesses doesn¡¯t have that much sway than him. Perks of having a powerful father.

    After handling the job to the architect, their next step should be recruiting the people for the production workers.

    But that can wait. The factory would take at least a month to be builtpletely.

    There is a consummate realm Architect doing the bidding, but that doesn¡¯t mean it would be finished that easily.

    That evening the noble scions are all arrived at the Arena as discreetly as possible.

    They didn¡¯t even bring too many guards. Rana is waiting on the stage for them.

    After exchanging some greetings, they started the auction. The Casual fighters are all auctioned in groups of five. The ranked fighters are ranked separately.

    When it was Sam¡¯s turn, the fight is somewhat intense. Everyone wanted him and there is another lock in this, that is Arman and Sam are auctioned off as a duo and they have to buy two of them.

    For some reason, they didn¡¯t seem to mind and kept on increasing the price as if they don¡¯t have anything but money.

    From the looks of it, they seemed to have gained the approval of their family members to buy him off, but what they don¡¯t know is that the auction is rigged.

    Nobody knows that Sam is not just enved fighter, rather he is the business partner of the two noble scions. Anyway, since Yodha is also their partner, he would be buying him off without a single penny but just mere words and take him away to the army.

    This is nned to put on a show to the rest of the city and even the noble families. No one should know that Sam is a business partner with two Noble Nagas.

    It wouldn¡¯t be good for any one of them.

    After the auction was over, Sam and Arman are taken away by Yodha while the rest of the fighters are also taken away by the other scions. Before leaving, Vasuki made her way to Yodha and asked.

    "Yodha, how about you lend this guy to me for a few days? I promise I will send him back intact."

    Yodha looked at her and then at Sam. He is not against it, as long as there is no marriage or rtionship and impregnation is involved sex is an extremely normal thing for all the Naga race.

    Their lust is just taken as a simple emotion like pain and happiness, they would show it like it was nothing.

    Yodha looked at Sam if he was interested, he even whispered something in his ear, which made Sam stunned.

    Vasuki seemed to have understood what Yodha said and she closed her eyes and started circting her spiritual energy, she turned into a human woman with a pink sh. Sam was stunned.

    What Yodha said, is that she can turn into a human form and there would be no different from having sex with a human.

    This is something he didn¡¯t expect. He does know that other races have ways to turn themselves into human forms after certain cultivation is reached, but he didn¡¯t expect that the Naga race can do it this early.

    It is even when they are in the nascent stage.

    There is also something else Yodha said in his ears that made his mind go nk. The greatest pleasure of Nagas¡¯ sexual intercourse is apparently not when they are in their original forms or humanoid form, rather it is in their human form.

    He didn¡¯t expect this at all, but that doesn¡¯t mean he would ept it, he directly rejected her proposal.

    He is not that easy to obtain even if it was just physical.

    Yodha shrugged his shoulders at her and the three of them left, Vasuki pouted as if she was a little girl being wronged, Sam shuddered at this disy.

    After they started walking, he couldn¡¯t help but wonder about these Nagas¡¯ special shapeshifting abilities.

    These people have three forms which they can transform at will. One is their true Naga form that has no legs, they would only have a serpent tail and their stature would be big and bulky, the second form is the humanoid form, which is the form they would spend most of the time.

    This wouldn¡¯t take too much of their energy and there are many things they can dofortably in this form, thest one is the human form.

    They wouldn¡¯t have any scales or any other traces of them being nagas, they could easily be passed off as humans, if not for their unique aura.

 Chapter 510: To the Army

    The only thing good that came out of Vasuki¡¯s pursuit is that he now understood the Nagas more and he would have learned it anyway.

    Now, that the initial step in their n is done, they have to move towards the next step. But before that, Yodha, Sam, and Arman, three them went to the administrative office of the city, where they have required documents for the registerednd.

    The newnd they bought is currently under Yodha¡¯s name. Since humans cannot buy this muchnd in the vicinities of the Imperial capital, this is the only way for them to deal with this.

    After taking the documents, Sam observed something else about the Naga race, they are actually quite meticulous in the administrative work and everything is documented, he even learned that there is an Identity card system, but it is more like a crystal token that gives details about you on a holographic projection.

    This system is quite advanced.

    Sam didn¡¯t expect this, he thought that except for the luxuries of the Naga and based on their lust and other factors, he judged them to be living a bit more on the savage side rather than civilized.

    After that, the next step is enrolling in the Army.

    Since yodha ¡¯bought¡¯ him out of the Arena, it is best for them to join the Army. This way, Sam and Arman will have a new identity on them on this and they can roam freely when they came back once more. Anyway, Sam has his own business now, it wouldn¡¯t be a bad idea to have an identity and residence at this ce.

    But before going, Yodha still has something to do, so Sam and Arman are staying at the construction site of the new factory.

    No one knew that this ce is the business involving Rana too because in their eyes Rana haspletely disappeared after the auction in the Arena.

    Currently, Rana and the subordinates that included the workers, attendants and some fighters in the Arena are all staying at the construction site in the tents.

    The first phase of construction is argepound wall in thend.

    Thend is very huge for almost five hundred acres, Yodha said he got some deal since thend is outside the city and it was left to waste.

    At this moment, Sam is looking at the Transporter. He is looking at the coordinates in it. There is another function in the Coordinate system and that is noticing the coordinates of his current location. He didn¡¯t get the time to see this before, so now he is taking a look.

    The Realm coordinates and coordinates are all been fixed the only thing that was left are the Coordinates within the, so he opened the marking system to see if it is the function at all and he is not disappointed.

    When he changed the location and opened the transporter, he can see that there is a change in the coordinates when he activated the marking function. He could at least move to the required location when he needed toe back.

    After everything was done here, Sam used Rana¡¯s help to gather the information and knowledge regarding this. Since Rana belongs to the Golden ze family that has a great influence over the metals and raw materials, he got first-hand information on the mineral resources of this nation.

    Apart from that, he got the information regarding the number of states in the nation, the coastal line, and finally the number of nations on the and such.

    After that, Sam started studying the geography of the nation and the states to see what kind of medicinal herbs, fruits, beasts, and other things he can obtain here.

    The only regret Sam has is that he can gain the beasts and herbs and grow them in his divine dimension, but the problemes when he has to use these beasts on his own.

    Because some of these beasts cannot survive in an environment without Miasma.

    This is somewhat regretful, but there are many beasts that can survive without Miasma but just some poison herbs will do like purple me horses.

    Sam got busy with the details so that he can take advantage of this environment.

    Apart from that, he also has to teach the new workers how to do things in the factory. If only he could have brought some of his subordinates things would have been easier.

    Rana tried his best to discreetly hire some workers since the technical capabilities required are not that high, it has been easy enough for them to hire them.

    After teaching them how to operate the power hammers, thethe, the grinder, the cutter, and even the Pressing machine that makes the outer shell of the grenade and the assembly, he even recorded the whole process so that they could re-watch again.

    After this one week, Sam and Arman left the ce along with Yodha to join the Army.

    Along with them, there are other ny-eight new recruits. All of them are humans and most of them don¡¯t have any traces of Naga Bloodline in them.

    So, they are going to be the cannon fodder on the frontline.

    They were taken away on a transcendent stage beast, they traveled for two days straight and reached the Army camp.

    This is the nearest border to the Imperial capital. Generally, the imperial capital would be in the center of the nation, but this is not like that, the imperial capital is located at the border of the two states of the nation, and this area which is the gray zone has some cities in between the capital and the border.

    This is the most active border too as the enemy nation ispletely hostile and is trying to take over any moment.

    There are at least three significant attacks every year and even the timing wouldn¡¯t change. The next attack is going to be in a few days.

    That is why they are injecting new blood so that they can have sufficient cannon fodder.

    Yodha apanied them until they reached the camp, but after that, he left the ce and handed them over to someone else. Sam and Arman are going to be enrolled into Yodha¡¯s battalion along with the rest, but in whichpany, no one knows.

    There are many neersing that day and all of them are grouped up together in an empty ground.

    At first, they have to register identities and after that, they will be separated and assigned into differentpanies and battalions based on their abilities. Of course, that is how it was originally supposed to be, but Sam and Arman are coined into Yodha¡¯s battalion even before that.

    So, all they did was waiting for the identity registration and taking Id crystal token.

    With this Sam and Arman officially had citizenship in this Naga realm. They can roam freely in this one nation at least.

    Even though Sam and Arman are Nascent stage cultivators, they are still assigned as soldiers. Simply put, the average foot soldier has the cultivation of great realm in this ce, but they cannot just give a higher rank to a cultivator who just joined.

    So, there are some special battalions in the Army where the nascent stage soldiers are assigned to and Yodha happened to be the battalionmander of such battalion even though, he is an Initial stage Pre-transcendent cultivator.

    After Sam assigned to the battalion, or more precisely to thepany that has over one hundred members, including him and the nine other newbies, they were asked to take a rest for the day.

    The next day, early in the morning, thepany was called for an assembly.

    After taking the general attendance, the rest of thepany are sent to training, while the ten newbies are left in the assembly ground along with the Companymander.

    Thepanymander is also a Nascent stage cultivator but at thete stage. He too has purple scales but they are extremely faint in color almost close to white.

    He looked at the newbies and said.

    "The Nascent Battalion-1, which you are now a part of is a special battalion in the entire base. Because this battalion is used to break into the newbies who just joined the army after they reached the Nascent stage.

    In this battalion you would receive extensive training as a soldier and the required disciple will be drilled into your heads.

    Generally, a Nascent stage cultivator at the middle stage orte stage will be eligible to be apanymander and the Pre-transcendent stage cultivator can be a battalionmander and only a Transcendent stage cultivator can be a Regimentmander that too provided they have all the qualifications and required merits.

    Since a normal soldier would have joined when they are a Great realm cultivator, the promotion would not beplicated.

    But for the cases like you, it would be a bit difficult.

    So, there are a specific set of rules you have to follow if you want to be promoted and if you reach the rank ofpanymander you will be either appointed as one or will be sent to another normal battalion to take the role.

    Here are the rules regarding your stay and the promotions, it is better if you remember them by heart but you have to do it in your break time.

    So now, we need to see your abilities, so you will fight against the most recent candidates that came before you to see that. Get ready for the battle."

 Chapter 511: Arkivs situation

    After the battle on the first day, Sam was assigned to a squad that has lightning element users, and Arman who couldn¡¯t get as lucky was assigned to a different squad at random.

    Then, their days went leisurely, every day they have to train for themselves and can ask for instructions from their superiors. There would be asional duels to determine the rankings within thepany and then there would be team battles between the squads to determine rankings between the squads in thepany.

    Apart from that, they do get some leisure time, in which Sam mostly read something or yed his flute.

    It has been a while since he got such leisure time, in which he doesn¡¯t have to brainstorm or n to kill some people of superior strength.

    He can just rx for a change and have a regr life. The only problem is that he has to suppress his cultivation at Level-5 forcefully, which is proving to be a far difficult challenge than he anticipated. At this rate, it is almost impossible for him to maintain this for one year.

    Because he also noticed that this is the maximum body reformation and spiritual sea expansion he could obtain in the current condition and the spiritual sea is impossible to make denser and the body is impossible to temper anymore.

    The only choice is to expand by breaking through the sixth-Level.

    But he is unwilling to. It has been barely four to five months since hisst breakthrough and he wanted to stay at this level for a year. Even half-time hasn¡¯t passed and he was being forced by his body to listen.

    That is why Sam is so engrossed in flute these few days, he even made the flute with meteorite sand with the most exquisite of styles.

    He has spent a lot of time on making it. For a change, he didn¡¯t use any form of inscriptions or formations on the flute. Even though he has used this in the past beforeing to the Naga realm, that is only for training. This is the only time, he is using it for relief.

    While Sam is having the most leisure since his rebirth, the other people who have also experienced rebirth on the same day as him, are not exactly having the greatest time.

    Arman who adapted to the new environment eventually was also having not so bad, at least he has some problem blending into this structural lifestyle of the military.

    Apart from that, he is all good.

    But Arkiv who is far away from them is having the hardest time of his life.

    When Arkiv arrived in this ce, he was d that he was able to get information from Sam. Because, just like Arman, he could breathe properly and his lungs almost felt like they would burst open.

    His whole respiratory system was hurting. Even his eyes are getting affected by miasma in the air.

    After some struggle, while sprawling on the ground, he was finally able to take out the breathing device and sat down meditating.

    He didn¡¯t even dare to open his eyes immediately as he feared they would sting.

    He thanked Sam several times in his heart, but before he knew it, some people already observed some sort of anomaly in this ce due to the energy released during the burst of pain.

    From Arkiv¡¯s perspective, they looked like humans, but they have red skin and scales all over. He doesn¡¯t if they are Nagas or not, but he knew that he shouldn¡¯t be here.

    So, he started running from that ce like crazy. Luckily he didn¡¯t meet someone who is so much stronger than himself like Sam, whose opponent could stop him with a wave of the hand.

    After that, Arkiv was on the chase constantly. He realized the breathing device couldn¡¯t provide endless oxygen for him, after all, it is not a gas mask that will filter the air, and it is a mask mostly used for underwater purposes.

    So, he realized that he can only slowly adapt to the environment. He could see that his skin is also turning a faint green color due to the surroundings.

    With that point in mind, Arkiv started taking breaks and trying his best to breathe normally without the mask. He felt extreme pain in the initial stages, but he learned to control the pain through his spiritual energy and slowly started to adapt.

    Almost three monthster, he is barely able to breathe without a mask, but he was still stuck in the woods. To his dismay, even the food has be a problem.

    Even though he wouldn¡¯t get hungry that easily, this is not the normal environment, he is using too much energy through his body to avoid the miasma affecting him.

    In this aspect, he is far less capable than Arman who was able to force his body to adapt to the surroundings in just a few hours, even though his breathing was a problem initially, he was able to use his body normally.

    Arkiv didn¡¯t have enough supplies with him regarding the energy intake, he was so confident about getting his hands on the resources, but now only beasts in the forest are his source. He has a decent amount of pills on his hand, but it would be a problem if he doesn¡¯t store them for emergencies and instead used them just for energy intake.

    So, he started hunting. There was no problem for him to hunt, but there are some other problems though, for example, which type of beast¡¯s meat is toxic? He doesn¡¯t know.

    For that reason, he has suffered many times after eating toxic meat. Only a few beasts are able to gain immunity to the environment without too great of a mutation that would make even their meat toxic.

    But Arkiv doesn¡¯t know how to identify those beasts, so all he could do is an experiment for a bit and every failed experiment has brought him many side-effects. The most frequent thing he has to endure is stomach pain and diarrhea.

    After taking such meat, all he could do is puke his guts out and roll on the ground before trying his best to take a pill that could detoxify his body by emitting out every foreign particle. He became a patient all of a sudden.

    One has to wonder, that Sam who can identify the beasts in this realm in a mere nce didn¡¯t dare to enter the realm without any food and even prepared a supply for one year and Arkiv is so confident that he would be able to obtain the food from surroundings.

    After all, not even humans of this realm who are born here can take in the food of all the beasts, only Nagas gave the immunity to the most poisons and almost all kinds of beasts can be consumed by them. Even the meals given in the arena are made with specific meat.

    Even if they want to eat some meat, they have to go through a special detox method.

    Of course, Arkiv couldn¡¯t find out about that.

    All he can do is endure and only after these three months did he finally found a suitable food source, there is a small rodent type species roaming around the area, which he felt like a good choice to eat and he turned out to be correct for the first time.

    So, for a few days, he went left and right, high and low to hunt for this beast and collected a ton of meat in his spatial ring.

    Only, then was he able to rx a bit.

    Now that his breathing and eating are solved, there is another problem he doesn¡¯t know how to face, thankfully the thirst is not too big of a problem yet as he had some wine and juice on him, but it will soon be one.

    Apart from that the main issue regarding his visit to his realm, he needs to find a ce where he can stay and has sufficient information traffic that he should know about the appearance of the next Pce of inheritance.

    All this while, Arkiv did find some humans and nagas here and there within this forest as they came for hunting and picking herbs.

    But he didn¡¯t dare to meet them or follow them, because of his condition. On this day, though he decided that he should follow them back and see if he can reach a habitat.

    So, Arkiv waited for a human group and after he found one, he sneakily followed them for three days, before reached the vicinities of a town.

    He saw that there are humans, Nagas, and some people who seemed to be a blend between two of them walking in and out of the town.

    There are no guards for the town gates anyone can freelye and go. After much thought, he took a deep breath and walked in as confidently as possible.

    Only after entering the town sessfully and checking inside an Inn did he rx. From what heard from the conversations all the way, he learned one thing, this town is a ce where fugitives gather and are full of danger. But to him, this is a safe house.

    Because here the race doesn¡¯t matter. Sam explicitly said not to trust those of Nagas and not to trust the humans that are living well off in a city, but if it is a fugitive town, he can eliminate these possibilities.

 Chapter 512: Practice

    Arkiv finally had some time to breathe after he entered this town for fugitives that too after three months, meanwhile the rest of the candidates are not exactly this lucky.

    They are all going through extremely hard situations. Some of them imprisoned, some of them trying to get resources to survives, some of them in a remote ce where they wouldn¡¯t even find signs of any form of life.

    They spanned all over the.

    Another month passed.

    Sam is having the most rxed time ever, military training, the assignments, and the assessments are too easy for him, the only hardest part being the suppression being difficult, in a few days it would be six months, even Arman went past in his cultivation and already broke through Level-6.

    At this moment, Sam is inside the woods used for hunting training for the soldiers and there is ake in the middle of it.

    Sam is ying his flute as theke water danced and he stood on it as the dancing water is moving him from one spot to another, throwing and twisting, shoot him up, and dragging him down ording to the melody of the ck metallic flute he was ying at the moment.

    Sometimes, the water is turbulent to the extreme, and other times, the water is calm and toominar.

    He is ying with the water and practicing his elemental control of water at the same time.

    All of a sudden, his frown got deeper and the water below him started bing cooler by the second.

    This is what he achieved from the training beforeing here and he wants to improve the current water element and get ess to more versatile power in terms of offense and defense.

    That is to gain control over ice.

    Ice might be a hybrid of the water element, but it is still water nheless. After all, the water turning to ice is essentially the water molecules getting closer and the distance between them turning to a minimum. That is what happens when the temperature is reduced, the water molecules grow closer.

    Sam is achieving the result by doing the opposite, he is controlling the water at a molecr level and turning it into ice.

    The water in theke started cooling down and slowly, a faint mist could be seen on top of it indicating the temperature descent.

    As the temperature decreased slowly, he concentrated on ying the music in a particr fashion and if one who can observe the minute motion of energy waves is present they could see that the air is not the only thinging out of the flute.

    The energy is moving in a peculiar fashion as it slowly enveloped the water and seeped into it as it forced the water molecules to get closer and closer.

    The most peculiar thing is the energying out of the flute doesn¡¯tpletely belong to his own body, rather he is inhaling the surrounding spiritual energy of the atmosphere into his lungs as he blew it into the flute along with the air.

    Even though he is controlling therge water body which he didn¡¯t even conjure himself, the energy consumption has been minimized.

    As theke is slowly starting to show the signs of solidification, Sam frowns deeper and this time it is not the sign of concentration, rather it is a sign of disturbance, someone who is not supposed to be here ising.

    He undid all the spiritual energy and theke water turned still, he kicked on the water gently and hended on the bank with some soft ripples.

    He could hear the screams of hysteria and muffled groans around the corner, he didn¡¯t have to be a genius to understand what is happening and his frown got deeper.

    He started walking to exit the forest and forget about this nasty work. But luck is not on his side today, one of the guys in the group already saw him and notified the leader of the group.

    The leader of the group is Naga and the rest of them are Half-Nagas. The Naga is a neer and in fact, he is also from the samepany as Sam. As for the rest, they are Half Nagas from the naga¡¯s family and are his subordinates, who joined the army earlier than him.

    At this moment, the group of five is holding down a human girl and their hands are still in the middle of holding the clothes of the woman ready to tear them up.

    They halted their action because of Sam¡¯s presence.

    The human girl looked at Sam with a pleading gaze, her mouth was still held tight by one of the subordinates and she still didn¡¯t stop struggling.

    Sam didn¡¯t want to interfere, even though he could help her, he would have to deal with the Young Naga man. He seemed to be from a noble family, he would have to go back to scheming and nning all over again.

    He is enjoying the time of rxation in this beautiful realm, he doesn¡¯t want to get dragged into this.

    He was about to silently turn around and walk away. But at this moment, someone from the group yelled at him.

    "Stop right there."

    Sam didn¡¯t halt and continued.

    At this moment, one of the four subordinates took started chanting a spell and threw an attack at Sam.

    Sam dodged the fireball and looked at him coldly.

    But the Naga who looked back said.

    "Where do you think you are going? Didn¡¯t you hear him calling you out loud?"

    Sam didn¡¯t like the condescending tone or the way he is looking at him, he raised hisnd and the silver lightning materialized slowly, and with bam, arge silver lightning bolt struck down on the tree next to him and it didn¡¯t stop.

    The next three bolts attacked the three trees around them and the surroundings are on fire.

    This muchmotion will definitely get the attention of the members of the camp.

    There is no way that the group can carry out what they want to do. The subordinates couldn¡¯t do anything but let her go. She looked at Sam with gratitude before running away as he tried to swallow the hups that areing from weeping.

    Sam couldn¡¯t care less about the gratitude of the woman or the condescension of the noble scions, he turned around and walked away, within few minutes some soldiers who are curious about the sts made their way here, but neither Sam nor the group of individuals are present which made them go back in disappointment.

    Sam knew that this wouldn¡¯t be over, but he didn¡¯t expect that scion would be so dumb enough to provoke him as soon as they returned.

    As Sam entered his barracks, the noble scion already arrived and he is waiting for me.

    "Do you know who I am?" The noble scion asked directly.

    Sam didn¡¯t want to bother with him, but this guy is too persistent in getting into trouble, but he still stayed silent.

    "I am the son of the regimentmander."

    "So, you got two dicks or something?"

    Sam asked with an irritated voice.

    He doesn¡¯t want to disturb these noble scions, because every time they start a conflict it wouldn¡¯t stop with just them. The whole family and even their long-lost ancestors sleeping in their graves would also get involved.

    That is why he started to walk away, but this guy just has to step on Sam¡¯s nerves.

    Sam also noticed that he is being too sensitivetely and getting pissed off easily. Maybe the reason being him liking this peace too much.

    He doesn¡¯t want anyone to disturb it, but his prideful side is not letting him take anything lying down, even if it is the slightest condescension of some self-important noble.

    Some voice in his mind is saying words that could inte his ego.

    After all, Sam himself has tens of thousands of people working under him with andmass that is as big as this whole empire under his control, of course when hebined the western continent, Adrian, Dusk organization, and the yellow sand ind.

    Even the emperors at Transcendent realm and Consummate realm cultivators are doing his bidding, with an army of Raiju beasts being a family of him and finally, he is dealing with Gods on a regr basis.

    Even he is not bragging about all this.

    Why is this Naga man, trying to prove that he is so superior to him that the condescension could be smelt all over him.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but shake his head and pped the young man hard.

    The pnded square on the face and his neck he lost consciousness. Sam walked over his body and entered the barracks so that he could rest a bit.

    The surrounding people are shocked and the news went all over the camp and even reached the battalionmander yodha in a few minutes.

    Sam who stayed low-key became famous all over because of a single incident.

 Chapter 513: Mission

    Sam didn¡¯t want to bother with him and didn¡¯t want to prolong the conflict, but if he didn¡¯t make a statement, everyone else would think that he is soft permission just like this scion. That would be even more troublesome.

    Anyway, the war would start anytime soon, there is no need for him to worry about the ruckus caused by this incident.

    He would also like to see if the regimentmander himself would stop thinking about the war and fight it out with Sam.

    But nothing of sorts happened, instead, he got a call from Yodha to meet him in his office.

    Sam walked over casually without a trace of anxiety.

    "What happened?" Yodha asked calmly, he didn¡¯t point fingers at Sam nor did he warn him about the incident.

    "Just a self-important guy acting up. You don¡¯t want me to take that lying down, do you?"

    "You could have resolved it another way, the war is around the corner, his father is not the regimentmander just for the show, what if he uses the authority and rules to deal with you?"

    "Just let him do that, I want to see if the humans are the only beings that put their own agendas ahead of theirmunities, particrly one who has the responsibility to do something with authority."

    Yodha didn¡¯t reply, he is thinking about Sam¡¯s words.

    "Why go this far? You could have just avoided all of this."

    "I tried. What? Do you want me to take a beating or something? I am not a human of this ce and I agree that I don¡¯t know the rules, but that doesn¡¯t mean I have to take the shit thrown at me lying down. If those guys really don¡¯t want a problem, they would be the first to avoid me.

    Trust me, they wouldn¡¯t want me as an enemy. You only saw part of mybat prowess when I am fighting directly. There is a lot more to me than that meets the eye.

    Any way just leaves it aside, even if they want to kill me, it would depend on whether they have the capability or not. I assure you that it wouldn¡¯t be that easy.

    I want to know about the war situation. When would it start and are invading or defending?"

    Yodha shook his head at Sam¡¯s confidence, he is feeling that Sam is a bit arrogant to disregard the regimentmanderpletely. But he chose not to bother about this, he would cross the bridge when the timees.

    "This time, we are thinking about the invasion. The border between both nations is a ce full of grasnds, ravines, and creeks. So, most of them would be direct confrontations and very few ambushes and temporary outposts. This time, we missed some ces that we could have made the ambush points, so it is better to invade them.

    And this time we are going to start a bit earlier than usual. If I am not wrong the war notice and the scouting missions would being to the camps as we speak, there are some scouting missions that are secondary and optional, and they would be left to the squads andpanies to take voluntarily.

    As for thepulsory scouting missions, the teams of individuals will be assigned directly by the battalionmander based on thepatibility of the candidates."

    "Battalionmander Yodha, notice from the Regimentmander."

    As they are speaking, a soldier yelled from outside the tent.

    Yodha gave permission to enter. The man is a half-Naga and after saluting Yodha, he gave out a scroll and asked for permission to leave.

    Yodha gestured him to leave and opened the scroll.

    Inside there is a list of missions assigned to his battalion.

    This is the protocol, there is a general gist of what every battalion specializes in at the Regimentmander¡¯s hands and he could assign the missions that are required to be done by them during the war and send them to the battalionmander and the battalionmander is responsible for assigning the missions to the suitable soldiers in hismand.

    As Yodha went to thest mission, he frowned and looked at Sam.

    "He really is after you. Guess, Nagas are not really that different from humans."

    When Sam heard that he understood that the Regimentmander might have done something to target him.

    It turned out that the regimentmander took it upon himself to assign a suitable candidate from Yodha¡¯s battalion,pletely bypassing the chain ofmand and assigned Sam alone for a scouting mission, to a location which could be considered somewhat nearer to the enemy base.

    The whole camp is sure that there would be people there. There is no need to send a scout at all.

    Sam didn¡¯t worry too much, he has too many cards up his sleeve to be worried at such a lowly trick. Much less scouting he wouldn¡¯t bother if he has to take a walk in the enemy base, he is pretty confident he would be alive.

    That too, after he took a precaution regarding the Space element users at consummate realm after his failure to escape at the hunting grounds of the capital city.

    Sam is focusing on the point where the rewards are noted. Even though there is not much he desired from the military, he could exchange some decent things for the credits.

    If he could promote himself higher, he would have some respectable identity in this nation that woulde in handy in the future.

    He noticed that the rewards are based on the ranks as well as the cultivation level of the soldier.

    The war¡¯s tacit agreement is that people who have higher cultivation cannot attack the people of lower cultivation.

    The sub-stages in a realm don¡¯t count though. Ate-stage Nascent can definitely kill an initial stage Nascent without any reservations.

    The rewards system is interesting though.

    If a cultivator killed a cultivator of the same rank, he would get ten credits and if a cultivator managed to kill a cultivator of a higher realm which is somewhat unlikely to happen, the credits will be multiplied.

    Apart from that, there are credits based on the person¡¯s rank too. A soldier gets ten credits, a squad captain gets one hundred credits, thepanymander gets a thousand credits, the battalionmander with ten thousand credits and finally, the regimentmander was not mentioned.

    But Sam could guess, what that would be.

    He looked at the mission he was assigned to. The mission is to scout a forest that was a few miles away from the camp.

    The forest is the most delicate point of the border.

    With the border spanning many square kilometers, this forest is closest to the enemy base camp.

    The forest is always tightly guarded by a battalion simr to the Nascent Battalion. Every soldier will be a nascent stage cultivator and half of the battalion wouldy in ambush in that forest.

    The path leading to that forest is wide and clear without any ambush or hiding points, so it was pointless to battle in that path, the enemy always upies the forest and they wouldpletely guard the path to the base camp.

    It is pointless to scout this ce.

    Even the scouting requirements are quite high. Not only does Sam have to go there and see the situation, but he should also at least capture an enemy soldier and bring him back.

    Sam chuckled at the difficulty.

    As he was getting amused by what the notice is saying, Yodha was fuming instead.

    "There would be a meeting in few minutes, I will assign the teams for the missions and has to attend the meeting, I would deal with this matter then, you don¡¯t go anywhere until then."

    With that, he didn¡¯t even bother to wait for Sam¡¯s reply and made his move, he went to the meeting and came back twenty minutester.

    "What is the matter?"

    Sam said as he looked at his gloomy face.

    Yodha cleared his throat and started mimicking another voice.

    "If he really has that great and has so much capability that he could disregard the authority of mine, he should at least prove it.

    Do you think, I would let someone walk over my face just like that?

    He can hit my son if he really wants, but he should show me that he is worth it to let my son trampled like that in my own camp.

    That worth would be proven if he can really pull off this mission. If such a human can really exist, he can do whatever he wants in this camp.

    He can hit any soldier and he can evene and hit the battalionmanders if he can. Otherwise, he doesn¡¯t have any right to do whatever he wants, he would be dead, even if it was in my hands or if it was in the hands of the enemy. He would still die. He can decide what he wants."

 Chapter 514: Credit farm

    Sam couldn¡¯t hold back for a second and almost burst outughing. Seeing him like that, Yodha too stopped fooling around.

    "I am sorry, I would be like that when I am pissed."

    "Don¡¯t worry about it," Sam replied and started walking out of the camp.

    "Where are you going?"

    "Of course to carry out the mission."

    "Are you a fool, there would be half of the battalion waiting for you, if you go now."

    "Just wait and see."

    With that, Sam didn¡¯t listen to him anymore and started walking, all this while many soldiers andpanymanders are looking at him with pity and ridicule.

    Sam exited the camp and started moving towards the forest, after walking for a certain distance and making sure that no one is nearby, he took out the harbinger and started hovering with his speed increasing drastically.

    This time, he didn¡¯t control the board directly though, he is ying the flute with his eyes closed as the hoverboard took him towards his destination at a moderate pace, without any signs of a rush. He looked calm and collected.

    After an hour, he reached the vicinities of the forest. As he stood on the board near the entrance, he could feel all the gazes on him. At this moment, he not wearing the feather coat, instead, he is wearing the basic soldier uniform of the army, so he could sense the hostility from them.

    Sam didn¡¯t just enter the forest directly, he just hovered around the entrance of the forest, as if he is looking for something.

    Meanwhile, the soldiers lying in the ambush are talking between themselves non-stop. The soldiers in the outermost vicinity spotted Sam when he was a mile away. They reported this to their superiors immediately.

    The reaction is that everyone is angry that their enemy¡¯s army is looking down on them to the point, they sent a single person to this critical point of the border. If they cross this forest, they will encounter a path that is directly connected to the base and it is even hard toy an ambush in this path.

    So, they should have really taken this seriously.

    Sam is still hovering around the border without a care that he pissed off all the soldiers inside. By this time, everyone in the forest knew that he came alone.

    He wouldn¡¯t have cared even if he knew.

    After some constant movement, Sam finally picked an entry point and he zoomed fast into the forest.

    He did all this because he doesn¡¯t want to enter the forest where the soldiers alreadyy in the ambush. There would be no fun if all the enemies could see himing and know his whereabouts from the start.

    That is why he hid his presence and snuck into the forest.

    He let out a Bee-Puppet and started and let them fly as he took out a tablet and started seeing the scenes.

    The Bee puppets¡¯ specialty is that they wouldn¡¯t be a sense that easily, unless they are particrly sending the spiritual senses and find an anomaly, they wouldn¡¯t be able to observe its existence without their eyes, after all, they wouldn¡¯t get the sense of someone observing them just like how Sam got, through a machine.

    As the Bee puppets circled around the vicinities, Sam is looking for any traces left by the enemies.

    Sam even checked the area with his eye technique to see any energy remnants left behind by the enemies or the energy wavesing from the hidden soldiers.

    After two minutes of searching, Sam finally found some traces on the screen through the puppet.

    He changed his course and started moving towards it.

    A human with a red skin tone is crouching on a tree that is what Sam could see on the screen.

    He closed his eyes for a brief second to give amand to the puppet.

    The Bee puppet¡¯s crystal eyes glowed and it changed its position a bit, before aiming the sharp tail towards the person. The puppet¡¯s tail has some rune marking over it and they are glowing incessantly with a lot of spiritual energy and it disappeared with a small explosive sound with a blue sh appeared from the now remaining hollow tube point.

    Within no time, a new sharp tail appeared in the previous position.

    Meanwhile, the person who was shot by it fell off the tree andid dead on the ground. There is a hole on the side of his neck, that is spewing blood and a branch of the tree was impaled by a sharp object.

    In a few seconds Sam appeared on the spot, he first looked at the puppet and willed something in the mind, there is some metallic nking sounding out of its body, it is the change of the energy cell.

    Even though this attack looked like it small and worthless, in actual fact, the metal is a Grade-6 material that means, it would be used mostly by Nascent stage cultivators, the amount of energy that was injected into the tip is something that can let the puppet scout for hours. But all that energy was used up in an instant.

    The small and insignificant shot is sufficient to bepared to a full fatal blow of a Middle-stage nascent stage cultivator.

    That means, if they don¡¯t defend themselves properly, even thete-stage and Peak Nascent stage cultivators couldn¡¯t handle the attack and even die if it was shot in sensitive parts like eyes and ears.

    Sam collected the corpse of the person and was ready to move once again, but at this moment, he is looking at the second screen in his hands and there are three people on that screen.

    Sam started guiding the puppet near him to that region. These three are archers and might be there to provide cover to some other troops, this would be a great harvest zone.

    After the two puppets arrived at the area, both of them hovered for a minute before aiming for the throats of the two humans.

    After the two of them were down, the energy left on both the puppets is the bare minimum and they cannot fire another shot no matter what.

    The third remaining person who is a half-Naga was about to call for help in panic, but before he could do so, the puppets made their next move, there is a small metallic door opened on the bellies on the puppet, and two small grenades dropped.

    The grenades are actually made of the second-highest grade methane Sam could get, the transcendent stage beasts, he bought it from the beast faction.

    Beast faction, has almost all basic elemental beasts and there is even a consummate level fire type beast in their possession, but that is in contract with Sravan, who is still in a half-dead state.

    He even bought that feces to see if he can get anything and the results might surprise many.

    Anyway, this transcendent level of methane is enough to deal with them. Even though the grenade itself is a lot smaller than the normal grenade, the original methane is stored in the space jade inside, after the grenades are activated the space jade cracks and the methane will increase the pressure and the impact crystal coating with covert the pressure into spiritual energy which would activate the fire inscription inside.

    The grenade will explode and just like that they did.

    There was a huge explosion right on the head of that person.

    When the dust and smoke cleared, there was still fire burning the surrounding trees and in a crater formed on the ground, the Half-Naga has his whole upper body disappeared without a trace.

    Sam threw a water sphere at him and put off the fire burning the lower half of the body and stored the remainder of the corpse inside his storage.

    He was a tad bit worried that this corpse wouldn¡¯t fetch any credits. He then collected the remaining two corpses that are a little bit more discernable.

    After collecting the corpses, he didn¡¯t stay there, he turned around and changed his course, rest of the troops will being here in search of him.

    Now he is contemting, whether he should take care of the people who areing at him or hunt forpletely new prey.

    After some thought, he decided to take the second choice. He would kill as many as he could before getting marked and followed. Until then, he would avoid any direct confrontations. He decided not to use any other bee puppets, two are enough anyway.

    From the looks of it, there are five hundred people in this forest waiting in ambush and that is a conservative estimate, with a Pre-transcendent presiding over them.

    This is a credits farm.

    He will deal with them slowly and peacefully without a care in the world. He had a smile on his face and is thinking if he can control these puppets with the flute as he contemted while hovering to find his next target.

 Chapter 515: Hunting

    Sam is having the most leisure hunt in his life. The people inside don¡¯t know about the speed of the harbinger or the existence of the Bee-puppets.

    They are searching high and low, they don¡¯t know how Sam is killing them, or sometime, they don¡¯t even know if Sam killed any of theirrades. After all not every attack gives of an explosion like a grenade.

    Most of the deaths are swift and silent with the sharp shots that are being fired at them and Sam is neverte to collect the corpses before other people could notice the situation.

    By night, Sam has hunted down around fifty soldiers and only used the grenades for five times.

    As he hunted he was quite amazed by the forest. These fifty people are at the borders of the forest and most likely the surveince for the main force hiding inside deeper.

    Sam decided to continue his hunt, this would be easier at night.

    As he moved all over the forest, the troops deeper inside the forest also started to notice their missingrades.

    They are waiting to hear the news of Sam dying since he came all alone and they also received the news that he entered the forest.

    So, it doesn¡¯t make sense that theirrades are silent all of a sudden. So, they started sending teams of soldiers to take a look at the situation.

    As Sam decided to move deeper, he noticed a team like this in his path.

    This is a team of five and there are two Half-Nagas inside.

    Sam decided to sneak up on them with the two puppets. So, as the five of them are cautiously moving forward, they suddenly felt a chill pass through their spine and turned around abruptly.

    And as soon as they did that, two of them fell down immediately and Sam also shot a projectile from the Harbinger which sliced through the neck of the target.

    Two people remained standing and Sam decided to ask them some questions.

    But they took this chance to attack Sam, but Sam dodged to the side and along with that hard turn, the tail wind of the harbinger created wind des that sliced on backs of the two men.

    Their defense is much stronger than their human counterparts.

    But it is still not enough to handle this, they screamed at the top of their lungs, Sam waved his hand and one of them was caught in a golden mes slowly but surely burning bit by bit, he pointed his hand at the remaining person and said.

    "If you speak, I will let you die peacefully, or else you would die like this."

    The Half-Naga looked at the person burning slowly and didn¡¯t dare to experience it himself.

    So, he nodded his head slowly.

    "Why are you guysing out at this moment?"

    "The scouts on the edge are not reporting at all, we have to report our position to themander for every hour if we are not in any activity and if we don¡¯t report for three hours straight the person would be considered eliminated.

    Themander wanted to see if you are dealt with or not and also check with the scouts."

    Sam nodded his head and waved his hand, a wind des sliced the head of that person.

    It seems like he had overthought. Sam didn¡¯t expect that they would send teams out for him this early. After all, he is alone and he expected to be underestimated by the enemy¡¯smander, but that person seemed to be more cautious than he thought.

    Sam overthought the situation and felt like these teams are trying to make a move on their base in the middle of the night. It was just to deal with him, the single intruder.

    Sam pushed all the unwanted thoughts out of his mind and started dealing with the rest. He just searched for the remaining teams.

    For the next two hours, he took down three teams after searching long and hard. The forest too vast that even five hundred members can y hide and seek. It is bing harder and harder to search for individuals. If he went in a little deeper, he would definitely go to the ambush points of the regiment.

    He also found the tracks of the remaining groups that already went to the edge of the forest, so his deeds would definitely be reported back to themander and soon, they will definitely find out about the disappearance of the three groups too.

    So, they will move and try to search for Sam or they would wait for him toe and fall in the ambush.

    If Sam was in their position, he wouldn¡¯t choose the second option at all, he would search for the intruder immediately. Otherwise, the intruder will always have the option of leaving when he felt like it.

    And thismander also took the same decision. Sam felt extreme movements of energy from many positions in the forest, he could see the energy waves running rampant in many positions with his eye technique.

    But he didn¡¯t worry. As he decided earlier, he would hunt them down, discreetly until they caught on to him. He would avoid any form of direct confrontation until that point.

    Sam started scanning the whole forest with the eye technique as he went deeper inside. He noticed that there are some formation that are being activated. It would only take a few minutes for him to reach that area, so he moved.

    Bee puppets are going ahead of him as he watched the screen and whistled.

    Soon, he arrived at the formation area. The ce has twenty people and it seems like a formation that was suited to attack.

    As soon as the puppets entered the formation, the people are alerted and got in to their positions, the leader is connecting them and the twenty of them are acting as the secondary nodes that provide the sword rays for the formation.

    A killing formation using swordsmen. Sam couldn¡¯t say he was impressed, their unity and coordination are great but their technique and the formation itself are sloppy as hell.

    Even without hismands, the puppet spirits activated the defensive mechanism around them. A spiritual energy bubble appeared around them and the swords rays were unable to hit them.

    As they moved, the bubble moved along with them, and only after a few minutes did some minor cracks appear on it.

    Sam sighed and started controlling puppet. Two grenades dropped almost at the same time, in two different ces of the formation. They are not at the people, rather they are the formation gs that are creating the foundation of the formation and Sam destroyed it easily.

    Even though, the formation gs are not destroyed, he was able to destroy the energy flow of the formation without a problem.

    Sam arrived as the smoke and dust slowly settled to see that the soldiers are grouping together to search for the intruder. There are five Nagas in this group and all of them have red scales and one of them even has white hue over the red scales.

    Might be some noble scions. The puppets went after some loner in the mess and shot them down before reloading the energy cells. Sam took out the reaper sword, which he didn¡¯t use in a long time. Since, this is not the camp be can use his powers without any reservation.

    Sam came down from the harbinger and activated his wind elemental energy to achieve partial fusion. He zoomed towards the group of people and started a battle. They are all skilled swordsman, but not as skilled as Sam.

    As they shed, Sam¡¯s wind des started tearing them down, the whole formation zone is being torn apart as it a cyclone stuck it.

    In this mess, the only drawback towards Sam is that his puppets are not getting a proper aim at the people, they are moving constantly which is making them miss the vital parts like eyes, ears, throat and such.

    But they are still being shot and the each shot is immobilizing their limbs or causing them serious wounds in the abdomen, chest or somewhere else.

    Soon, the stage is almost cleared with only the five Nagas left.

    He noticed that the Bee-puppets regr bullets are not making much damage to them, the Nagas changed into their original form and they grew in size, now all five of them are at eight to feet tall and at the same time, their feet disappeared reced by snake tails.

    Sam didn¡¯t care though, the scales are acting like tough armor. And particrly, the scales that are on the spine, they are extremely hard that Sam had hard time cutting through them.

    But they were still cut and that too only because of the direct contact of the de, the wind des didn¡¯t go through the spinal scales.

    When the five of them are finally dead, Sam looked at the bodies a bit curiously, he was thinking that if he could use those spinal scales for himself.

 Chapter 516: Shadow Traps

    Sam collected the bodies, but before that, he skinned the backs of these Naga guys and stored them separately.

    He started searching for another group and didn¡¯t take too long to find it, it is already dawn and it is not too long before the sunrise will happen.

    But he didn¡¯t hurry, as he sent the puppets towards the next group he saw, he realized that apart from the formation, there are another group of people outside the formation lying in ambush, it seemed like a trapid carefully.

    But at this moment, he noticed that one of these people is taking out hismunication token and is talking about something.

    His face grew serious and there is a deep frown on his face as hemanded the troops.

    "We are regrouping and going to active mode. Commander gave us orders that the sword formation group was eliminated, we are taking the active approach from now on and we are not going to be waiting for him to attack.

    A team shouldn¡¯t have anyone less than ten people. Don¡¯t go any less no matter what. Form three teams, right here and move."

    He started giving instructions and made his move.

    There are thirty people in this group and Sam is looking forward to taking them out just like before, but it turned out that these people already learned about Sam¡¯s elimination of the first group, they are going from passive to active mode.

    This signifies one more thing, Sam¡¯s leisure hunting time is over, and he would have to be careful.

    Even though the forest is vast, there are more than four hundred people and they are searching in groups of ten, forty groups would be searching him.

    There is no way he could move without any of them noticing.

    Sammented a bit because his ytime is over, he has to start being serious too.

    He was thinking whether he should make use of guns and explosives or not, it would be a short work. He is sure that he would be able to deal with them within thirty-six hours no matter how many they could be, the whole forest could be turned into a graveyard in that time period.

    But after some thought, he felt like this is the best time to test his newly acquired skills.

    He trained purely to increase his battle prowess in thest few days before his travel and he spent all his time inside the divine dimension.

    But he didn¡¯t get to truly test these skills on the battlefield.

    Particrly, the elements that he rarely used. It is about time he used them.

    Sam went into the divine dimension for a second and looked at the Naga corpses that areying down.

    He ced his hand on them for a bit and after confirming that they are okay, he made some hand signs and bit hit finger to thrown something at the five corpses.

    All of a sudden, the space around the corpse trembled and arge hole appeared, with a lot of dark elemental energy seeping out of it, Sam made a dragging motion and fiverge shadows came out of it and the portal was closed.

    The five Naga shadows are still floating in the air without any reaction.

    This one of the skills, he learned and he even used them before. The shadow necromancy.

    For every living being in the real world, there would be a shadow created in the shadow world. This is not the shadow that appears when the light is present.

    After that person is dead, the shadow would slowly disappear in the shadow world, and that is time for the necromancer to summon that shadow and make a contract with it. The shadow summoned will have half of its original ability of the person and it feeds off of the necromancer¡¯s spiritual energy to survive.

    As long as Sam has enough spiritual energy he can let the contracted shadows survive and even nurture them by continuously feeding the shadow energy, the variant of dark elemental energy to them or even feeding the shadows of the opponents and dead bodies to them. And they will stay inside the contractor¡¯s shadows.

    Once the contract is canceled, they can only stay for a time period in this world and at that time, they wouldn¡¯t have any contract so they would whatever they want with their limited skill.

    Shadow necromancy is a skill that is not easily mastered and it is too advanced for even the Naga realm, but Sam preferred this over normal necromancy and soul necromancy because he also possesses shadow abilities innately because of the shadow mice.

    With Sam¡¯s current strength and mental ability, he can at most make contract with two shadows of Nascent realm.

    That is not a lot and it would take a lot for him to nurture them, particrly, when he also has to take care of the beasts. The part of the reason he made such arge business is to find resources for his beasts.

    For now, he is safe because the home can provide resources until they reach the Transcendent stage,ter he would have to venture to other realms to find them.

    Sam looked at the five shadows in front of him and took some metallic cylinders and ced them within their chests.

    The shadows can be solid or corporal based on their own wishes.

    After cing the metallic cylinders, he stripped the Naga¡¯s dead bodies and donned the shadows with their armors.

    He came out of the divine dimension and started moving towards the first group that already started moving away from this formation zone.

    After nearing the group, with a wave of the hand he let out of a shadow of the Naga and let him move, the shadows are in the shape of the true form of the Nagas, not the humanoid form, not the human form.

    The shadow looked at all sides with a confused expression, there is a faint shadow auraing out of it and it doesn¡¯t know what exactly is happening. It sensed the movements of the group and moved towards them.

    When the group sensed the shadowing towards them, they first rxed when they saw Naga silhouette and the armor, but when they received no response, they became extremely vignt and got ready to attack.

    The shadow doesn¡¯t have anything but survival instinct when it noticed the keen killing intenting from the group, it halted in its tracks and wanted to run away, but the soldiers didn¡¯t let it go just like that, they started attacking and when the physical attacks or elemental attacks no matter what reached them, the shadows the first reaction would be to turn into corporal state and swim through the shadow regions surrounding it.

    And it did that same and since it doesn¡¯t understand the significance of the armor and the metallic cylinder they are dropped.

    The troops ran after the shadow and when they reached the pile of armor and the metallic cylinder, they were surprised, but still approached it.

    Thepanymander called back the soldiers and stopped them from going after the shadow, they took the cylinder and examined it, they don¡¯t know what it is, but all they know is that there is a button on it.

    Curiosity is a demon. As thepanymander pressed the button...

    *BOOM*

    Arge explosion happened and a lot of metallic spikes sprayed all over them, there is even green me burning them all over as their flesh decayed slowly.

    Sam came out of hiding along with the bee puppets, the two puppets first went over the bodies to see if there are any living beings and indeed thepanymander and two more Nagas in the group are able to survive. Even though they are nearest to the explosion, they are the only ones to survive.

    These are the special grenades, which the factory-made. They are a modified version of Sam¡¯s original grenade and an experiment for a patent.

    Even though it is not purely original, the scale of explosion and the scale of damage modified perfectly and the decaying me is implemented to a degree that the bodies wouldn¡¯tpletely degrade.

    In fact, this grenade is not for mass killing, rather it is to make the enemies immobile. If it is thrown at the enemies or even stepped on, they can still recognize the danger and evade or defend, in those cases it would barely immobilize them. But these guys are really too foolish to press an unknown object right in the middle of their group and all of them all over each other trying to get a peek at it.

    He didn¡¯t expect this at all. Almost all the enemies on the home knew that Sam¡¯s organization produce some great grenades and they all have the necessary measures, so these types of new grenades are really useful.

    But here, they are more useful than they are supposed to be.

    The hunt that Sam thought would be a bit difficult is bing way too easier.

 Chapter 517: Using the formation

    Sam moved on to the next group andter the next one.

    All he did was bait them with shadows of the Nagas. He didn¡¯t form any form of contract with the Naga shadows, he just summoned them. It would take at most the energy of a nascent stage cultivator¡¯s attack to summon them.

    Since the contract is not here, he can do whatever he wants.

    So, at every position, after he found any Nagas, he would summon the shadow and insert a grenade inside before leaving the shadow near another group.

    It is as if Sam is on a lucky streak, as the next five groups clearly pressed the grenades without exception, at least they are little clever than the rest as only a single person would press the grenade a little farther than the group, but it is still useful to restrict the movements of half the group easily.

    Only the trick didn¡¯t work for the next group, apparently, they understood that something is wrong with the shadows and the gift those shadows left and they didn¡¯t dare press it or store it all they could do is carry it carefully towards the base of the camp.

    When two more groups did the same, Sam didn¡¯t try to make repeat the same thing, he followed a group and reached the temporary base camp of this battalion. This is the camp for half of the soldiers in the battalion while the remaining half will be merged with the remaining troops.

    The battalionmander is issuingmands through variousmunication tokens as he got the information.

    There are still around a hundred soldiers waiting in the base. They seemed to be the final group that is trying to struggle.

    At this moment, themander is giving orders for the rest of the groups to retreat. The deputy was extremely puzzled over this and asked.

    "Sir, if we retreat now then there would be a huge problem for us in the base, we wouldn¡¯t escape scot-free."

    "Who said we arepletely retreating? We are regrouping here to greet our guest."

    Themander said with a smile.

    Deputy grew alert and vignt, but themander continued before he could speak.

    "The groups are already spread all over the forest, they are spread in such a way that they wouldn¡¯t miss almost any zone of the forests. Last ten minutes, they are in the same position and they have also spread apart without being aplete group.

    Do you think, our guest would let go of such a chance to hunt prey one by one? Of course not, but there is not a single life gone.

    That means, there is only one ce he could be and that is the vicinities of the camp.

    Now go and activate the formations. We will greet our guest in the grandest scale."

    The deputy looked at his boss with confusion and doubt, he doesn¡¯t think that a single guy would be brazen enough toe to theirmand center, it would be a death wish.

    But he still followed orders.

    Sam is watching the tents and the soldiers from a tree.

    The battalionmander is even sitting in the open, a red-scaled Naga with a blood-colored hue. The color shades are a bit discernable although faintly. He sat in the open in the middle of all tents with a table in front of him.

    There are manymunication tokens ced on them and there is ayout of the forest that ced on thatrge table.

    He pinned some red-colored gs on the map as if he is trying to mark some ces.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know what he is doing, neither does he know that his opponent has guessed his existence in this ce.

    He is busy scanning the whole camp with his eye technique, he wants to see if he can do anything by taking advantage of theyout.

    As he thought of what to do, he suddenly felt the energy flow changing and all of a sudden arge formation activation has happened.

    At this moment, he saw there is a smaller formation that has appeared on the table of themander. The energy flow of therger one and the smaller one are extremely simr.

    He immediately understood what this is. This is remote formation control. This is an advanced method of controllingrge formations with a simr but smaller formation.

    It is mostly used in battles at least that is the most popr use.

    When Sam looked at themander¡¯s expression, he knew that his location might have been exposed and he also noticed that all the soldiers are being called back.

    He increased the energy in the eye technique and zoomed in to look at the remote formation.

    There are many red dots around and there is one blue dot on it and many red dots are entering the circle far behind the blue dot.

    Themander pointed his finger at the blue dot and Sam could feel something was off.

    He got ready with shadow elemental fusion and disappeared from the ce, at this moment, the tree he was standing on was vertically cut in the middle and two halves fell on either side.

    Sam appeared on the other side and looked at the damage of the attack. He is confident that this attack might not be able to kill him, but he would be either damaged or restrained if he took it directly.

    This formation is not for killing, it is for controlling the battle flow by interfering in individual battles.

    A controlling formation is very interesting.

    Sam immediately thought of the crystal table. The crystal table is also simr, but it has its own advantages and disadvantages, and advantages beasts the disadvantages by too much.

    He didn¡¯t get a chance to use it properly yet, he was really looking forward to it.

    As for now, he has to finish this fiasco off before thinking anything else.

    He started circting his eye-technique and looked through the smallest energy flows in the surroundings, he can use the observation ability to achieve a simr effect, but the eye technique is more useful.

    His surroundings all looking like a woven cloth of spiritual energy and he can even perceive each thread. Currently, he is looking for the threads that connected the remote formation to the main formation.

    After escaping the further attacks a few times, Sam found the required threads and started thinking of a n.

    The battalionmander is a Pre-transcendent and he would be a bit of trouble. So, he wanted to find a way to send an energy cell his way, but there is a chance that he would die, that is why he is thinking about how to proceed.

    But now themander himself gave him the answer.

    Maybe thismander is skilled in using formations to attack, but Sam can do much more than just attack.

    When themander activated one more attack on him, Sam did just dodge this time, he appeared at an internal node of the formation and tweaked a bit. This is an extremely risky move, but he still did it without any problem.

    As soon as he tweaked like that, the sword that should have fallen on his previous position fell on a group of people at the edge of the formation. They are the soldiers of themander himself and one of them died just like that.

    The formation couldn¡¯t tell whether the attack is sessful or not, the only reason that this guy knew that Sam is alive because he could see the blue dot once again.

    Sam once again reached an altitude to see themander from afar and noticed that hismunication token is glowing.

    But themander didn¡¯t pick up which is a good sign, but the bad sign is that themander seemed to have noticed the disappearance of the other people.

    Sam didn¡¯t like this, so he thought of something devious and took out all the shadows he summoned earlier but couldn¡¯t use.

    All of a sudden, there are more than ten blue dots that appeared out of nowhere in the remote formation and ck line appeared on themander¡¯s face.

    He doesn¡¯t know what happened but all of a sudden there are so many enemies on the map and they are moving in different directions frenziedly.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit tense and shoutedmands in themunication tokens for the groups to reach the positions of the enemy.

    After a few minutes, when he was sure that they are all surrounded, he decided to attack, but Sam who is also surrounded, but still near the internal node is still waiting there.

    As soon as the multiple attacks starteding out of the remote formation, Sam tweaked the node one more time and the next second...

    *BOOM*

    Something unbelievable happened and themander felt his mind chilled as he fell forward on the remote formation table.

    He started sweating profusely as more than ten explosions urred at the different locations.

    All the attacksnded in the shadows just like he thought, but the one that took the brunt of the attacks is not the shadow but the grenades inside and they sted as soon as the trigger was hit.

    The groups around the shadows are all in a mess, except for an attack that has tond on Sam, everything elsended, and that one attacknded on the nearby soldier.

    Once again, Sam didn¡¯t stay still, he raised his leg straight into the sky as he concentrated spiritual energy at the hell and mmed an ax kick straight on the internal node and...

    *BOOM* another explosion urred but this time it is in the middle of the camp and the affected person is themander alone.

 Chapter 518: Mission completed

    The explosion happened because of the bacsh Sam forcefully caused and themander, who is a young Naga couldn¡¯t help but take the original form to defend his best, he still couldn¡¯tpletely defend it and he received serious damage.

    His chest was sted to smithereens. One can even see the chest bones.

    Sam finished off the ten soldiers surrounding him with the reaper in one hand and the executioner in another hand.

    It has been a long time since he used the executioner, but the de is still great. All this while, the reason he didn¡¯t use is that the weapon¡¯s grade was way past his, but now they are both on the same level and it is about time he fed the de with the nourishment it needs blood.

    The executioner also has a special trait, the corrosion effect, the wound caused by the de wouldn¡¯t be easily resolved by blocking the blood flow with spiritual energy because it is impossible to block it. The spiritual energy, blood, flesh, muscles, fat, cloths, no matter what came into contact with the de and the shed area it is corroding.

    Sam didn¡¯t go for the explosion regions, instead, he first directly went to the base camp that is still in chaos. He jumped into the frenzy and started ying everyone around.

    Soon, due to his ughter, many people calmed down and started attacking Sam.

    There are some people affected by the energy wave caused by the bacsh, they are Sam¡¯s first targets.

    Almost half of the group are eliminated before they could calm down and all of them either had their head severed or the hearts pierced. Everyone died in a single shot.

    The remaining fifty are ganging up on Sam, but he didn¡¯t even blink his eye, but what they didn¡¯t see is that two bee puppets are silently flying towards them and soon the situation turned chaotic once more. The sniping of bee puppets couldn¡¯t be taken lightly.

    After cutting through all his opponents, Sam finally arrived at themander¡¯s table. He is unconscious due to loss of blood. The pre-transcendent stage, even though it is of the initial stage still saves him.

    Wood elemental energy started seeping out of his body and trying its best to heal the wounds. But due to his unconsciousness, this instinctive effort of his subconscious is not working.

    Sam called a puppet over and forcefully made themander sit up.

    The puppet came from the back and all of a sudden the limbs of the puppet extended with flexible metallic tubes and coiled around themander in many turns.

    His arms and legs arepletely bound and the sharp limbs that acted as the tips of this flexible metallic tube suddenly pierced into themander¡¯s body ignoring the scales and going through them directly.

    A metal limb even pierced straight into his chest and stopped a few millimeters away from his heart.

    The formations of the puppet are activated and a lot of anesthetic drugs are released from the tips.

    Even though Nagas are immune to most poisons, most of the herbs of this drug cannot be considered as poison, so there might be some effect.

    At the same time, the formation of the puppet that held is closely sealing his cultivation. Since there is no resistance, this is the best Sam could think of for now.

    But he wasn¡¯t really assured. He took out the chair that was used to hold the tower heads in Sam¡¯s city during their execution and made him sit on that, before activating the chair.

    The man couldn¡¯t sit properly because of the puppet handing on the back, but it is still okay as long as the seal is activated.

    Sam didn¡¯t wait anymore. Since his main mission is done, it is about time to clear the rest of the group. He should take down as many as possible before he leaves this ce.

    After all, the news travels fast. He made a quick round on the harbinger and this time, he is not slow at all. He is super-fast and finished the whole scouting an hour.

    After that, he came back to the camp to see themander who is barely getting alive but slowly getting better, before he took him back or got caught going back, Sam decided to settle one more thing and that is his cultivation breakthrough.

    Sam couldn¡¯t hold on anymore.

    It has been a little over six months, but he couldn¡¯t sustain the pressure, but the beasts couldn¡¯te out normally.

    Heid down a formation disc and created a sealed ce. He started concentrated his energy as he gathered the air in the formation towards his hands and started creating a vacuum

    Soon, the air turned concentrated enough to leave a vacuum all over the formation and the air being a concentrated ball of gas in his hands and remnants surrounding his body, there is some sort of weird reaction from his body that he couldn¡¯t put his finger on.

    But he knew it is dangerous, so he immediately forced this ball of air in a space jade and took some other space jades and cracked them.

    After cracking more than dozen or so space jades, the air pressure increased, and the oxygen-filled the formation back.

    Sam took a deep breath and calmed the abnormality in his body down. He would think about thatter.

    He let out all his beasts and started sharing the energy with them. Since they are on the border of this level for far too long, they didn¡¯t take long to breakthrough and the formation was destroyed. Before the beasts could get exposed to the surroundings, Sam let them back inside the divine dimension, and finally, he could rx.

    He noticed that his strength exceeded by leaps and bounds.

    He is super strong, maybe he could even try to take on someone in the first stage of the Pre-transcendent stage. But he had to make some critical blows to make them any significant to them. Those critical hits would be normal blows for that realm.

    He didn¡¯t think too much and carried this guy along with the chair on his back and zoomed on the harbinger.

    He went on full speed and he reached the vicinities of the camp in an hour.

    Sam looked at themander and couldn¡¯t feel sure that he would be safe. He rummaged through the pills of the Old One and finally found some high-level sleeping pills.

    These pills would definitely be effective on him, in fact, they might be too effective so he only gave half of the pill and shoved it down his throat, before unlocking the puppet and the chair.

    He carried him on his shoulder and stored the harbinger away before running to the camp at full speed.

    He didn¡¯t even stop at the battalion camp and directly ran towards themand center where the regimentmander is sitting.

    He stopped outside themand center and dropped the enemymander down and just stood there without speaking anything.

    Soon, the soldiers andpanymanders all gathered around him, the battalionmanders and the regimentmander are all having a meeting at this moment.

    Even they observed themotion and starteding out.

    When they saw the body in front of them with the red scales and sted out chest, they all were stunned on the spot even Yodha is dumbfounded. He is still waiting for Sam toe back running, but he actually caught someone.

    And when he observed the face of the catch, he was even more shocked, because he knew the person. He is a peer and can be considered a rival. He is the same as him in terms of military rank and cultivation.

    They oftenpeted and so they knew each other, but he didn¡¯t expect Sam would get him back here.

    Then that only means one thing, themanders are all swallowing hard, particrly the regimentmander, he doesn¡¯t know how Sam did it, but he went alone and caught a Pre-transcendent cultivator and brought him back alive.

    He went into an enemy camp of more than five hundred people all alone and still came back with themander as a prisoner.

    "I am here to submit the mission and take rewards," Sam said nonchntly.

    "Come in and give a report of the situation." The regimentmander replied.

    Sam walked behind him and one of the senior battalionmanders restrained the prisoner.

    After entering the tent, the regimentmander asked.

    "What happened? How did you do it?"

    "I cannot reveal the methods. I can only show the results." Sam replied bluntly. No matter where it is no cultivator can force another person to say their secrets, even in the military.

    The regimentmander changed the question. "what is the position of the forest?"

    "Cleared."

    Everyone turned silent at the answer. One of them even cleared their years as if they thought they might have heard wrongly and the regimentmander asked once again, this time Sam answer with more details and some evidence.

    With a wave of his hands, arge pile of heads wasid down on the floor and a single body with his upper body sted away. The pile of heads flowed out of the tent entrance and gave off some really nasty view.

    "Total of five hundred and twenty-one nascent stage cultivators. All cleared. Estimated escapees are around twenty to thirty people. The current status of the forest might be being investigated by the enemy camp."

 Chapter 519: Scheme

    Everyone at the tent and outside the tent is all looking at the heap of heads as they gulped hard. Even though many of them had been in many battles, they couldn¡¯t help but feel creepy when they saw heads piled up like that.

    The heap is sorge that the heads rolled down outside.

    The Regimentmander was the most shocked of all.

    The mission goal was to scout the forest and bringing back a soldier so that they could get more information.

    But Sam just went there and brought back all the heads of the enemies.

    This is inconceivable. But the proof is right before him to see.

    He looked at Sam in a whole new light, he also understood why he beat his son up. He could have killed his son in the spot if he wants to, but the only thing that stopped him is that he is in the military. Why would someone so capable bear with an arrogant young master in a ttering way?

    Even though, he acknowledged Sam¡¯s ability, the hostility in his eyes didn¡¯t dim down, in fact, it increased. Sam looked at him straight in the eyes and smiled coldly.

    His smile has so many hidden meanings that gave the regimentmander chills and made him extremely ufortable.

    After thinking for some time, he grudgingly started assigning rewards to Sam¡¯s identity token.

    The rewards for the Nascent stage cultivator are five thousand two hundred and ny, as for the Pre-transcendent cultivator there are extra hundred credits, but now that he has a position as a battalionmander and he was also brought back alive, then the reward is also higher.

    The battalionmander brings position gives him five thousand extra credits, which is almost the same as all the heads he brought, apart from that, there are a thousand more credits for bringing him back alive.

    In two days, Sam not only went on a suicide mission, but he also surpassed the requirements of the mission he was given and even gained more than ten-thousand credits.

    After receiving his rewards, he didn¡¯t wait there and went back to his barracks, he even whistled as he walked down slowly with his hands in his pockets.

    Everyone is looking at him and talking, he became a hot topic, just in one day.

    After reaching the area of the barracks, he didn¡¯t go to his own tent directly, rather he walked toward another tent, the tent that houses the son of the regimentmander.

    He swaggered his way inside like it was his own property and looked at the young master who is trying to get into the pants of anotherdy.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but shake his head at this horny dog. It is almost like his penis is the only part that is working in his body.

    When that guy saw Same inside, he was stunned to the point, he didn¡¯t even care about hispromising position.

    Only after he saw Sam¡¯s disgusted expression, did hee back to his senses and tried to cover up.

    After that, he pointed his finger at Sam and yelled.

    "How are you still alive?"

    Sam couldn¡¯t care less and jump from his spot and knee kicked straight into the face of the young master. The guy fell backward, with his teeth falling down, Sam didn¡¯t stop, he jumped once again and ax kicked him in the stomach making him yell in pain and distress.

    After finished what he came to do, Sam went back to his own tent and rxed for a bit, before taking out the two des he used today.

    It has been a while since he maintained them. Every time they are used to kill someone, they will absorb the essence from the blood and even some iron essence to increase its own density. Until the spirit is manifested, it would be hard for the de to absorb the iron uniformly to only increase the density.

    There is a chance that some extra metal depositing on the edges and such.

    He started grinding the des and polishing them with the meteorite sand. Only Sam could afford to use such precious metal as a grinding object.

    As he immersed himself into this, he didn¡¯t think of the time as he rxed his mind and soon Yodha came in hurriedly. It seems like the meeting was just over.

    As soon as he came in, he was about to talk, but when he saw Sam who is so involved and peaceful he changed his mind otherwise and sat on the side.

    He observed the two des. The blood-red des and the ck hilts of the des along with their extremely terrifying aura of bloodthirst are magnificent in his eyes.

    After a few minutes, Sam was done with his work and looked at Yodha.

    "Nice swords, can I see them?" Yodha asked a bit hesitantly, Sam didn¡¯t mind though, he handed over the two des and let him examine them.

    After looking at the sharp de he couldn¡¯t help but admire them even more. They are like pieces of art.

    "They are excellent, who made them? What material are they?"

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but smile and said.

    "I made them from the scratch, from collecting of raw material to refining it and making the sword, I did everything myself."

    "Wow, you are really skilled Artisan, but you didn¡¯t say the material name. It seems like great quality material."

    "Blood Iron."

    Yodha thought he heard wrong.

    "Blood Iron? What a weird name, where can you find this?"

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but chuckle at this. It is normal for normal people to not know about the blood Iron, but every artisan must have heard of this metal. He thought that the people from the Naga realm would be able to recognize this, but it seems like it is not possible.

    "Are you sure you want to know about this?" Sam asked casually.

    "Of course, why? Is there a problem?"

    "Nothing. I will tell you.

    The source of Blood Iron is nothing but blood, the blood that flows in the living beings, it was extracted from the blood of living beings. As for my swords,

    Three hundred men died making these."

    He said all of this so casually and didn¡¯t even blink while saying how many people died just for his swords.

    All of sudden, Yodha became terrified for a second, he looked at the two swords and couldn¡¯t help but gulp. How many people can do this? Even he killed hundreds of men if not thousands on the battlefield, but that doesn¡¯t mean, he is capable and cruel enough to make a de out of their blood.

    He understood the bloodthirsty auraing from the des. He carefully gave those back to Sam and asked.

    "How did you..."

    Before he could ask Sam interrupted him and continued.

    "There was an incident back then I was a Novice, someone kidnapped someone under my wing at that time and even tried to kill her in some stupid ritual, the whole family was in it and they are all blocking my way to save her.

    At that time, I was so frustrated that everyone is constantly provoking me, so these des are the symbol, a symbol that gives the message that it is unwise to harm someone under me. But trust me these des are excellent in battle, the aura they give them off is something that couldn¡¯t be replicated or reced.

    The three hundred men died for this didn¡¯t die in vain. I sometimes pray that their souls rest in peace."

    Sam said with a smile.

    But Yodha felt cold sweat all over.

    At this moment, a soldier ran over and whispered something to Yodha, thetter looked at Sam and asked.

    "Did you beat up Regimentmander¡¯s son?"

    "Didn¡¯t he say I could beat up anyone if I canplete the mission? In fact, I finished with much more than what they wanted, I think even earned the right to beat up that regimentmander."

    Yodha became helpless, he didn¡¯t expect Sam has this side, he is nowhere like the man who is trying to sell himself at the Arena.

    For the next few days, Sam wasn¡¯t given any missions, the war didn¡¯t escte to full scale at this moment, there are only small skirmishes and there is not much for them to do.

    But after two days, Sam heard something that made him want to kill someone.

    Arman was stuck in a valley that was surrounded by enemies. He didn¡¯t expect that Arman would be in such a situation.

    While he was thinking if he should go there and rescue him, he heard something else that made him start a massacre.

    Arman was stuck there because of the Regimentmander¡¯s plot. It was said that he was sent on this mission deliberately and he even instructed the rest of the soldiers to abandon Arman in the valley.

    The more peculiar news is that the regimentmander himself wanted to spread this news all over.

    By the time Sam learned this news, Yodha also heard of it and he came running to Sam, but Sam¡¯s face his colder than he thought and he is oozing killing intent.

    Sam said to Yodha. "Seems like yourmander doesn¡¯t want to win this war as much as he wants to piss me off. One more time, one more time I get pissed off, I am turned traitor to your stupid army. Trust me, the situation in the forest will repeat all over again and you will watch it in the full splendor."

    With that, Sam didn¡¯t wait for him and activated the lightning energy and ran towards the direction Arman was in.

 Chapter 520: Reporting back

    Sam didn¡¯t care about any possible mission that could be assigned to him nor did he give a shit about the war that is going on.

    All he cared about was to get Arman back, they might have had their difference, but Arman is someone Sam brought over to this army and he is his subordinates, if he needs to get hit, that would be only in Sam¡¯s hands.

    Who the fuck are the Regimentmander and his subordinates to plot against Arman.

    At this moment the regimentmander also heard about the news Sam leaving to save Arman. He was a bit relieved at this and everyone thought that this is the n from the start to send Sam to make him trapped in that ce.

    But the thing is the Regimentmander is relieved because there are so many other soldiers that are stuck along with Arman. Even though the rest of the team are in this matter and tried to keep Arman there, for some reason, more than three-fourths of the team was stuck in that ce and only a few people from the remaining one-fourth were able to return to the camp and report the issue.

    He doesn¡¯t know how the n failed, be he couldn¡¯t lose that team, there are four squads that went on to this mission; that is half apany of soldiers.

    The war has not blown to full scale yet, so there is no way he could take the responsibility for this many casualties if the general learns about this.

    So, he hoped that the soldiers woulde back alive and he is even nning to rescue them.

    But now that he heard Sam is going, he was relieved. He doesn¡¯t know about Sam, but he considered that he must be very capable and he would be able to fend off the enemies for a small period of time, allowing the team to return.

    As for Sam killing the enemies, he didn¡¯t think it was possible. He knew that he was capable to kill the five hundred or so people, but that doesn¡¯t mean, he did it in a frontal assault, from what he thought Sam might have ambushed them one by one in the forest.

    He hoped that Sam could get a chance to let the team escape, as for Sam himself, it was better for him to die there and then.

    Sam didn¡¯t care about what the regimentmander was thinking, even if he knew he wouldn¡¯t think much anyway.

    From what he knew of Arman, that guy wouldn¡¯t die that easily, he would be able to fend for himself, even amongst a hundred or so Nascent stage cultivators, but he still hurried and took the harbinger out when he made sure that no one is seeing him.

    He zoomed past like a wind storm and could see the valley in a few hours.

    The valley¡¯s entrance is narrow and is covered with rocks. It wouldn¡¯t be easy to cross over. Although the natural barricade of rocks isn¡¯t tall, it is enough to half the soldiers of the enemy nation halt outside the valley.

    He used his eye technique to observe the situation and noticed that there are around twopanies of enemy soldiers and half of them are at the valley entrance and the other half are trying to climb up from the side slowly without letting the people inside the valley no.

    The rocky barricade is helping the soldiers inside to halt them because if the soldiers outside climbed up, they would be exposed to the soldiers inside and easily get caught in the attacks.

    He didn¡¯t wait to understand the situation and zoomed fast with harbinger as he took out the two des.

    He covered his whole body with lightning and when arrived near the valley, he stored the harbinger away and jumped straight into the soldiers, and started a ughter.

    His sword rays filled with lightning energy flew everywhere as an intense battle took ce.

    Arman who is in forefront of the soldiers inside and attacks the outside soldiers even before Sam came, immediately took the opportunity and took off the lightning de Sam gave him to use and he started hacking the enemies.

    Two men are enough to start a one-sided ughter. Sam didn¡¯t feel like this is a big obstacle. He knew for the fact that Arman could have escaped this situation with some injuries, but he might have been afraid that he would be back-stabbed by his fellowrades.

    Sam¡¯s face twisted with anger as he looked at them.

    Within a few minutes, the enemies are done for, two men are all it took to deal with apany of soldiers. But they are bitching and whining about being trapped.

    Sam really overestimated these naga realm¡¯s people. They are not much better than the soldiers of his home.

    Sam and Arman are done with the enemies, but this time, they are notpletely unscathed. Their military uniform was tornpletely and there are some wounds on his chest, the same could be said for Arman, but he was injured a bit more and there are some serious stab wounds on his lower abdomen.

    Sam took out a potion and gave it to him to drink before he started healing him with the light element.

    The potion could recover his spiritual energy a bit, after all his tank is not as big as Sam. Sam has many times more energy than Arman.

    After settling Sam, he looked at the soldiers inside the valley and his eyes are dangerously glowing with sinister light.

    He doesn¡¯t care if they are soldiers or not, or if they are on the same side, if someone wants to scheme against him using his subordinate, there is no way he would let them go that easily.

    Arman wouldn¡¯t have too much of a problem dealing with him. He would be at most injured in the same way he was now.

    He might have restrained himself from making a move on them only because he was afraid of consequences that mighteter.

    But Sam doesn¡¯t give rat¡¯s ass about these consequences, if anyone has to be afraid of the consequences then that would be the people in the army. Not him. He looked at Arman and said.

    "Don¡¯t be a pussy next time and just hack the shit out of everyone whoes at you. What is the point of having strength but still bending over like a bitch? Don¡¯t think of these stupid consequences, wouldn¡¯t be better to kill first and think about hiding the evidence?"

    When Sam said these words, he didn¡¯t even care to keep his voice down, he directly said so that all the soldiers could listen.

    Arman shivered a bit at Sam¡¯s tone and looked at the soldier with resentment, these guys are the reason for this scolding; he took out the saber once again and jumped into action.

    "Wait, wait. We apologize, we are only following orders. Please don¡¯t do this to us."

    One of them started yelling at them. But both Sam and Arman didn¡¯t care at all. Sam didn¡¯t even make a move and just looked on coldly.

    Arman who just healed once again went on with a bitter battle with fifty members. Thankfully, the so-called valley is extremely narrow and only three to four people can stand together, there is not much space, which made it easy for him to deal with them.

    He only has to kill three to four people at a time and doesn¡¯t have to deal with all of them at the same time.

    Every strike of his contained the chaotic energy and destruction of the lightning and was aimed to kill every person that is in his way.

    He made a short work of them in thirty minutes, but he was extremely exhausted. Sam threw him another potion and gave him a portion of food and took one for himself.

    With fresh blood of their victims still dripping from their bodies, they ate food in the middle of more than a hundred corpses.

    After that, Sam looked at Arman and used his fire element to make some superficial wounds all over him and burnt most of his clothes, then he threw a big can of methane inside the valley and made it burn the whole valley along with the corpses of their soldiers.

    As for the soldiers of the enemy nation, he cut off their heads and burnt most of them lightly in mes, and gave them to Arman, he ced some in his storage and both of them went back to the camp slowly.

    When they reached the camp, they reported the matter extremely different than what the regimentmander expected.

    "By the time I reached the area, Arman and a few others are the only people who are alive and the rest are all dead as they used some weird tricks to burn the whole valley.

    I joined them in the battle and ughtered the enemies, but only Arman was able to survive and that too I had to use all the life-saving medicine he had in his possession."

    This is the report Sam gave to the regimentmander and didn¡¯t care whether he believed it or not. He just threw the heads of the enemies in the regimentmander¡¯s tent and collected the credits before leaving the ce.

    He directly went to themander¡¯s son¡¯s ten and started a beating of his life. This time, the whole camp saw Sam chasing after the regimentmander¡¯s son who is in his underwear as he screamed hysterically while running and rolling on the ground.

 Chapter 521: Trap

    Sam deliberately beat the crap out of the son of themander in front of all the soldiers in the camp. He didn¡¯t even speak at all, and when someone tried to stop him all he needed was a single cold look and they would shut their mouths.

    Everyone heard how he was able toplete the mission and brought back five hundred heads of the enemies. Many of them admired him very much, but they are also afraid of him.

    So no one was able to help out the pitiful son of the regimentmander.

    As for the battalionmander that has strength and authority to stop him, he is none other than Yodha himself, why would he bother to stop his business partner beating up a son of a Regimentmander?

    Does the regimentmander even have balls to question him? Even the general of the border wouldn¡¯t dare to do so. Much less him.

    So, the gossip spread all over the camp and many of them particrly the woman folk of the army is rejoicing at such a sight of this person.

    But this time, the regimentmander red up again. The next morning, the usual bell of the morning assembly didn¡¯t ring in thepanies of Sam and Arman. The soldiers were secretly ordered to assemble before the regr time.

    Both Sam and Arman who are soldiers of two adjoiningpanies are dyed, so the regimentalmander who was ¡¯coincidentally¡¯ making rounds saw their tardiness and punished them with flogs.

    Both of them didn¡¯t even utter a single word of apology or exnation, they just bore with the flogging without defending with spiritual energy. Sam was fine. His skin barely reddened. But Arman¡¯s skin cracked and the muscle fiber could be seen through the blood that is seeping out.

    Sam treated him and gave him medicine, after that both of them immediately went to search for themander¡¯s son.

    Regimentmander¡¯s son is still in the samepany, his father didn¡¯t dare to bypass Yodha and transfer him and if he really gave him some safe and biased mission not only would their original goal of gaining merits would be gone, but also Yodha will use this opportunity to grill him up in front of the superior officers.

    So, all he can do is make sure that Sam would stay in control and subdue to his authority.

    But he doesn¡¯t know that there would be very few people under the skies that can be as stubborn as him.

    When Arman and Sam were being flogged, themander¡¯s son is looking at him gloatingly and only left the ce after getting the cold stare from Sam.

    He immediately ran off to look for missions and escape temporarily so that before he coulde back, his father would torture them both and make them beg him for forgiveness.

    But before he could rejoice, his thoughts were interrupted by Sam and Arman.

    They didn¡¯t wait for even the discussing crowds to disperse before they got for revenge, this is something that no one expected.

    Sam held the young Naga by his braid and dragged him like a dog to the middle of the ground where he was flogged.

    Sam took out two metallic staves and gave one to Arman. Both of them stood on either side and filled the staves with lightning elemental energy.

    Commander¡¯s son was stunned and was about to say something, but before he could he hurriedly tried to defend himself with all his energy condensed in his arms and guarded his face.

    Bu the expected hit that was thrown by Sam didn¡¯tnd, instead Arman who is on the other sidended a serious hit on his legs.

    Themander¡¯s son couldn¡¯t help but kneel and scream in agony.

    And just like that he received twenty flogs from both Sam and Arman in the middle of everyone and even his battle armor was ripped apart by the hits. The medics were surprised when they saw the wounds, none of them are critical but they are extremely painful.

    The regimentmander got the news and almost destroyed the whole ten in anger, the next day, he found another petty reason to not only punish both of them, but they are also given another mission.

    They have to go to another obvious area, where the nascent army of the enemy nation will beying their base camp.

    This was sent along with an elite team who are obviously on themander¡¯s side. When Yodha protested, the regimentmander heaped praises over Sam and Arman about their two missions and forcefully sent them before they could have a chance to get back at his son.

    When the mission started, they were as expected betrayed discreetly by sending them to a wrong ce deliberately.

    The rest of the team are waiting for them to die and confirm, but what they saw is that the whole area soon started burning and there are explosions of golden mes, wind des, silver lightning crackling all over.

    Finally, the whole grasnd was burning and from within the mes, Sam and Arman came walking with some wounds and burn marks on their bodies.

    Their eyes showed killing intent and didn¡¯t even wait for the team to say anything superficial to escape the responsibility and started a killing spree.

    Sam deliberately left ten people alive and out of them he chose five of them and took out a recording crystal discreetly and made them kill the remaining five.

    He then showed the recording to them and forced them to obey what was said. Then he gave them wounds that would make them a convincing sight and brought them back to the base.

    All of them sang the same song and the regimentmander gritted his teeth, he couldn¡¯t help but want to kill Sam right there and then, but he couldn¡¯t. What agony he has to endure?

    As he was already feeling extremely angry, Sam once again poured out a heap of heads, and this time, even the five members that were deliberately left alive also took out some.

    But they only around ten to twenty, while Sam has more than a hundred of the heads.

    For the next two weeks, Sam was being punished and kept on being sent on missions and wasn¡¯t able to get a hold of themander¡¯s son.

    This is already the fourth month of his stay and his factory construction was also about to bepleted, he also learned that Yodha just sped up the production by temporarily using his estate as the production, he even came and got an extra load of gas cylinders from Sam.

    Yodha¡¯s n is to reap the first profits by taking advantage of the war that is about to go into the full scale in the next few days, from the looks of it, it wouldn¡¯t take more than ten days for the war to blow out of proportion.

    So, Yodha nned to use this perilous time to make some money. He also needs to get approval from the general which made him quite busy and this gave the regimentmander to flex his authority a bit.

    Sam didn¡¯t care though. He went on the mission that is too absurd for a Nascent stage cultivator along with Arman.

    These missions as dangerous as they may be, are all credit farms for Sam. After a few teams got destroyed in Sam¡¯s hands, the regimentmander learned his lesson and didn¡¯t dare to send anyone else with Sam.

    He just unreasonably sent both of them on missions.

    But every time, they came back with bodies full of wounds as if they are on verge of death, but they would always get recovered in one evening as if nothing happened.

    The worst part is apart frompleting the mission, Sam surpassed the conditions by leaps and bounds. He and Arman brought back hundreds of dead bodies and soon, they came to a conclusion that Sam alone killed almost a battalion worth of people in this war.

    He is just a few dozen away from making a battalion, while Arman was at half the battalion range.

    Their credits have already surpassed many others by leaps and bounds.

    Apart from that, there would also be missionpletion credits and at the end of the war, there would also be contribution credits and they will also surely get promoted.

    Even though the regimentmander is trying to take revenge, he wasn¡¯t able to do anything, instead, he was giving them opportunities.

    This also increased the regimentmander¡¯s pettiness that surprised the rest of themanders and advisors around him. Finally, it seemed like he couldn¡¯t take it anymore and plotted with another shameless scheme.

    That night, when Sam is inside his tent and ying with the bee puppet to think of ways to improve his next design, a woman ran inside hurriedly andid down a formation disc that would block them from outside, before hurriedly tearing her clothes off.

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to move from his bed and just threw an attack at the formation disc destroying it, but the regimentmander is faster than he thought and reacted before he could make his move.

 Chapter 522: Punishment

    Before Sam could throw the girl outside with an air cannon, the soldiers came inside the tent running just after the first scream of the girl.

    He couldn¡¯t help but snicker at the arrangements, it is so obvious that it is fake. If these people really want to frame him, they should at least do so properly.

    But they didn¡¯t care and neither did the regimentmander. All he wants to do is frame Sam and find an excuse, just to so that he could punish Sam and cover up the matter when the superiors questioned him.

    All the soldiers followed his orders and looked at Sam, they do know that if Sam wants to he can just break through their restrictions, in fact, that was the whole n. But Sam was extremely calm and he is ying with arge metallic thing that looked like a bee.

    What they don¡¯t know is, since the youngdy came over, everything was recorded.

    That is Sam¡¯s ploy.

    Earlier, he said to Yodha that he would be a traitor if the regimentmander schemed against him one more time, but at that point, he should already have turned traitor. But Sam is not going to do so, because it is no joke to say that he tried his best to gain an identity in this world, why would he ruin that by turning traitor.

    He just wanted to pressure Yodha and show off his capabilities, so that he wouldn¡¯t get the short end of the stick in their partnership. He should leave a deep impression on Yodha. He would have already made his move and did what he wanted to do if yodha was present, but he was absent and the regimentmander kept on giving him more chances so that his idea would work perfectly.

    Every mission and every scheme against him was not only a credit farm, but it would also be an extra card that he would use to bury the regimentmander and use him as the foundation for the influence he would build in this world.

    So, he just let the whole scene y out and soon enough Arman came running, he gave the control of the puppet to him before giving him some instructions.

    After that, he just proceeded to follow the soldiers and was made a criminal was stood up in the middle of the ground.

    The regimentmander came running and started condemning him with so many words that Sam felt his vocabry can be improved.

    Apparently, ording to this regimentmander, Sam has indeed earned the right to be arrogant bypleting all the missions, but he doesn¡¯t have the right to force himself on a woman like that.

    Since his contributions are huge and the crime has not beenmitted yet, he was given a ¡¯lenient¡¯ punishment.

    "All your credits are going to be confiscated and your right to promotion would be suspended for at least twenty years, apart from that you shall be sealed off of your spiritual energy and thrown in the furnace formation for the next three days."

    The regimentmander punished him with vicious eyes and went back with a cold and smug expression on his face.

    He felt like he finally won, but he didn¡¯t notice the cold smile on Sam¡¯s face.

    He doesn¡¯t know that Sam just decided to go with the punishment and just made him lose something precious among his soldiers.

    That is, his soldiers¡¯ respect. Everyone knows what kind of person themander¡¯s son is and how many women have been vited. Many of the women were grateful to Sam and even normal soldiers are happy that he kept that brat in check.

    But now, the regimentmander used such a cheap trick to do such a thing to a soldier who contributed immensely by almost ying a battalion of the enemy soldiers.

    A seed was sown in their hearts that no matter what contributions they made, they can only die under the vicious ck heart of the officials.

    Amander without any respect from his soldiers, Sam would love to see how he will guide them in a battle that is a life and death situation.

    Sam obediently let the other soldiers ce a seal on him and followed them to be thrown into the furnace formation.

    The furnace formation is arge formation that uses fire elemental energy stones and used to assist the artisans.

    This type of formation is not present in Sam¡¯s home, but here it ismon. The fire elemental formation will have some entry points through where the artisans will ce the metals that need to be heated or molten to make the products. The furnace can provide high temperature which will reduce the burden on them to provide their own mes to melt thempletely.

    After Sam was thrown to the center of the formation where the heat is extremely high, hisbat armor that the military provided slowly started melting.

    But Sam didn¡¯t even flinch. His spiritual energy might be sealed, but his tempered body can take more than this.

    His hair started burning along with the eyshes and brows, but he just sat cross-legged and closed his eyes.

    After a few minutes, Arman came and threw a cauldron, an anvil, and a hammer with some inscriptions and some metallic ore through the entry point towards Sam.

    He recorded everything with the Bee puppet, but when the people observed him, they are more attracted to his hand than the puppet, because Arman¡¯s hand waspletely mangled and his bones are all protruding out through the skin.

    When a soldier came running to give Arman a mission, he simply showed his mangled arm and used it as an excuse to reject the mission.

    Then only the rest of the people understood what is happening. They all pitied him a bit.

    After some time, themander¡¯s son came with hisckey and started throwing all the insults and started ying with the formation¡¯s temperature control.

    Sam who was calm, showed the agonizing expressions by sprawling on the ground.

    But as soon as the young master left, he tried his best to gather himself and sat cross-legged with an expression that showed his difficulty.

    After some time, Arman left the ce with the puppet, then the onlookers saw another scene that made them feel cold sweat all over.

    Sam opened his eyes and took the cauldron and ced all the metal ore Arman brought inside and even scooped all the molten metal on him into the cauldron, even though his skin is red, and is on the verge of burning up, he didn¡¯t care at all.

    Soon enough, the soldiers saw Sam making molds and create some metallic ingots, and forged some metallic spikes.

    That is the only thing he did for the three days.

    After the third day is over, the soldiers seemed to have been dyed by some ¡¯important¡¯ matters and came four hourster than his release time, and even after they came, there seemed to be ¡¯some problems¡¯ with the formation that they couldn¡¯t halt it immediately.

    At this moment, Sam stood up and didn¡¯t even wait for them to stop the formation, instead, he came out of the formation like he is walking in the park and he carried the metallic spikes, the anvil, and other tools.

    As soon as he came out of the formation, he asked the soldiers to unseal him. The soldiers looked at his cracked and burned skin and couldn¡¯t help but tremble at this tenacity.

    The heat of the formation is not enough to kill a Nascent even if his cultivation is not sealed, but it would extremely torturous.

    Even they felt guilty for following along with the regimentmander¡¯s ideas.

    But as soon as they unsealed Sam, they saw a scene that they couldn¡¯t forget in this lifetime.

    Sam stood there when golden mes came out of his body and started elemental fusion and soon the metal all over his body just dripped on the floor as he hovered a few inches above the ground.

    As the golden mes disappeared, before they could see his bare skin, bright golden light was emitted from his body, and all the wounds and cracked skin are healed in a matter of seconds. Within that dazzling light, Sam wore his usual ck attire with a feather coat.

    By the time the light disappeared, Sam is back to his usual handsome appearance, even though it was a punishment, he didn¡¯t lose anything, in fact, he even benefited a bit.

    With all the shocking gazes focused on him, Sam held the hammer that he used in the furnace and held the metal spikes he forged and looked straight ahead.

    The arrogant son of the regimentmander is standing right in front of him. He came here to see Sam begging and bawling, but instead he was stunned silly that he didn¡¯t notice the malice in Sam¡¯s gaze.

    Before hisckeys could remind him.

    Sam used his light element fusion and disappeared from the spot and reappeared before themander¡¯s son and pinned him to the ground.

    Themander¡¯s son started screaming.

    "Get off of me. Let go of me. Leave. Someone, save me."

    As he yelled, Sam ced the still red-hot metal spikes beside him and ced and only held one of them in his left hand and the hammer in his right hand.

    Before the young Naga could make sense of the situation, Sam already spread his hands to the side and ced the spike on the young Naga¡¯s arm, and hammered into the ground in one strike.

 Chapter 523: General

    Sam hit the hammer on the metal spike with all his strength and it nailed the hand to the ground.

    "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH..."

    A scream of agony made all the soldiers shiver in fright.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop there. He almost behaving as if he was working on a stone. He first nailed the hands and the young Naga turned into his true form that made the legs morph into arge tail.

    But Sam didn¡¯t stop and nailed down the tail in various ces. Even found a hole on the tail that was hidden in the middle of scales and shoved a red hot metal spike in it. That is the anus.

    The young Naga has no way to move at this moment and only cried in agony.

    But Sam proceeded with his work nonchntly.

    He started nailing the spikes on various ces of the body. If it was on hands or the tail, he just nailed them to the ground, but it was not he would only hammer them a little deep into the flesh and leave it like that.

    At this moment, the artisans who used to work near the formation furnace came and looked at what Sam is doing.

    They haven¡¯t been able to work here because of Sam¡¯s punishment, now that they came back to prepare for the war that is around the corner and finish their dyed works, they were stumped by the scene in front of them.

    When they saw Sam nailing the metal spikes, they know what he is doing.

    "He couldn¡¯t be doing what I think he is doing right?"

    One of them asked his colleague.

    The colleague gulped and said in a shivering voice.

    "I think he is doing the same. That much expertise and the regimentmander has turned him into that crazed state. What a pity.

    But why do I feel the pattern is a bit different?"

    As many of them are taking like that, Sam only had one spike left in his hands, he stood up and took out a whole heap of fire elemental stones and poured them all over themander¡¯s son. Themander is an ice element user and he felt a bit aversive to these spiritual stones.

    But he doesn¡¯t know that he would feel more than just aversion in a few seconds.

    After pouring the fire elemental energy, Sam held thest spike in his hands and jabbed it into the waist of this young Naga, and took a step back.

    All of a sudden, the fire elemental energy of the elemental stones started circting and the young man started feeling the temperature rise.

    "Somebody help me. Help me take this off.

    You all know who my father is, he will never let you off if you don¡¯t defend me.

    I am begging you, someone help me.

    Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

    Ahhhhhhhh, someone aaaaahhhhhhhhh.

    FAAAAAAAATHEEERRR."

    The young naga started with some threats and requests and was soon reduced to the state of incessant screaming with pain and agony that made the souls of people shiver.

    The reason is that there is a ¡¯furnace¡¯ burning his body up.

    Sam jabbed the metal spikes into his body all over, but everything was done below his neck. He didn¡¯t even touch a strand of his hair.

    But below the neck, there is a furnace formation working in its full glory.

    That is right, Sam made the metal spikes and used them as formation gs along with the fire elemental energy stones to use the body itself as the base for the formation and left him to endure the suffering of the mes.

    Its heat is not as big as the original furnace formation and the effect wouldn¡¯t be as great as Sam¡¯s punishment.

    But Sam¡¯s use for this is way beyond the physical pain.

    The main core of the furnace formation, wouldn¡¯t stay within the nodes, rather it will lie inside the abdomen on the young Naga¡¯s body.

    Since he is an ice element user, it is already great that he is enduring the burning on his skin, but how could he endure the burning furnace inside his body.

    As for the spiritual energy of the young man, it cannot be used at all. In fact, after some tries, he didn¡¯t dare to use it.

    Because the more he tried to use it the more he felt his internal organs burning.

    Soon, his skin on the face became dry and cracked.

    His clothes are already burnt and his scales reached their endurance limit and started falling off.

    But no matter how loud he screamed no one dared to help him.

    Sam and Arman who came a bit earlier are standing there watching the young naga scream loudly with a cold expression.

    Soon the news spread to the regimentmander and he came running.

    When he saw his son being nailed down and all the fire elemental energy over him, he couldn¡¯t help but feel aggrieved, he didn¡¯t even care about Sam for a moment and crouched on the ground beside his son as he tried to check the formation.

    But as soon as he ced his hand over, the pain intensified and the young Naga screamed even more loudly.

    The same thing happened when he tried to use spiritual energy. He was being tortured the more he tried to escape.

    The formation master whoid the formation furnace also came with him as they were in a meeting earlier. He was in a meeting because he wanted to dy Sam¡¯s release and the soldiers started acting like the formation is not working and their next step would be to search for the formation master who would be in a meeting and couldn¡¯te.

    But Sam directly came out.

    The formation master looked at the formation and he was stunned.

    He looked at Sam and said.

    "Youid this formation?" He questioned with surprise. But he didn¡¯t receive any answer. The formation master understood the situation Sam was in and also understood the reason for the gaze of resentment. When he looked at the formation, he really did feel like the regimentmander and his son are causing the army to lose great talent.

    He observed Sam¡¯s and Arman¡¯s attire. They removed their uniforms.

    He looked at the regimentmander and exined.

    "The formation is a bitplicated and is his original design to the variation of the formation furnace. It would be hard for me to crack it instantly. If we force it or try to pry it open, he would suffer endless agony that might injure his mentality.

    The only way is to break the formation, but only he can do it instantly, I will need six hours at least to even have any idea on how to proceed."

    He said as he pointed at Sam.

    The regimentmander looked at Sam and walked towards him with a colder than ice expression and released his energy to let it make waves, bearing all the pressure on Sam, and coldly spat.

    "Remove the formation."

    His voice was low and almost sounded like a whisper, but everyone could hear it.

    Sam looked at his straight in the eye.

    Sam is around six feet and he could only be considered short with the seven feet height of this Naga man, but Sam still looked at his eyes as if he was a dead man without a slight hint of change.

    "Remove the formation or..." The regimentmander once again said these words but was interrupted by someone at this moment.

    "Or what?" The regimentmander stiffened and looked at Yodha and a middle-aged Naga following behinding towards him.

    As soon as they saw the middle-aged Naga all the soldiers hurriedly saluted and that included the formation master and the regimentmander.

    "Regimentmander reporting to General."

    The regimentmander said as he looked at the middle-aged man.

    "Regimentmander, you still didn¡¯t answer my question. What are you going to do?" Yodha asked from the side.

    The regimentmander hesitated a bit, but he still steeled his resolve due to the general¡¯s presence. The dirtyundry was in the air and there is a great chance of him getting exposed. So, he has to escape this sneakily as possible.

    "Battalionmander Yodha, your battalion soldiers are truly bing brazen. I only punished him slightly because he forced ady soldier, who is ourrade in arms, and now he dared directly take revenge on my son. What do you want me to do? Just because you have background.."

    As he was about to continue a voice sounded.

    "Enough." It is the general who spoke and looked at the regimentmander intently. The background of Yodha is not something a mere regimentmander couldment on.

    The general looked at Sam and said.

    "Remove the formation." Sam didn¡¯t answer him and looked at Yodha.

    "I am going away from this nation. I will no longer be a part of this military nor would I be a citizen of this country. I don¡¯t even need your partnership. Goodbye."

    With that, he and Arman turned around and started walking towards the gate leading to the forest.

    "Who said you can go?" The general said in an authoritative voice.

 Chapter 524: Challenge

    Sam looked at the general who is looking at him a bit coldly with faint hostility. There is no contempt or any other superior feeling, it is true hostility.

    "I am resigning as a soldier and no longer part of the army, I no longer am anyone else¡¯s subordinate. I believe that I don¡¯t need anyone¡¯s permission to get out of here."

    "It is indeed true that there is no need for you to listen to mymands of mine if you are not a soldier, but the situation is a bit different. You are leaving the army when there is a war, you will be charged with treason, and at the same time, if you really are leaving the army and did this is to a soldier as a normal citizen, it is not a simple deserting case, you will be seen as siding with enemies and I would have right to detain you."

    Sam frowned at the words and looked at the son of themander coldly and thought for a bit before saying.

    "General, I never met you and I only joined the army recently but from what I heard from the other soldiers, you are fair and just. Please give me some answers and I will definitely save that person from this agony and even apologize to him."

    "Speak."

    The general gave the permission and Sam looked towards a soldier near him and called him over. The soldier was frightened but when he saw that general is also gesturing him toe, he came forward, and then Sam asked.

    "When a person is used of a crime in the military base, what is the procedure that should be followed?" Sam asked seriously. Although his voice is not exactly loud, the scene is extremely silent and everyone could hear this.

    All of them immediately looked at the regimentmander and some of them recognized the soldiers who are also part of the ploy and exchanged weird nces at them.

    The soldier who was asked also understood this and gulped nervously. He looked at the regimentmander who only has a nk expression and then at the general who is waiting for his answer. He gulped down and answered.

    "The used shall be taken into custody and kept in a cell. He should be given an answer to exin himself, meanwhile, the authorities would start investigating the matter. If the used¡¯s exnation has merit and was valid or if the investigation showed that used was falsely charged, he should be released and his innocence would be announced all over the military to clear his name."

    Sam once again asked.

    "What happened three days ago?"

    The soldier didn¡¯t dare to answer. He knew that this question woulde. The regimentmander looked at him with a warning gaze. The general looked at the three of them and said to the regimentmander coldly.

    "Who are you ring at? You better stay obedient while I am here. You might be the regimentmander, but I am the general and you are only one of the regimentmanders under me."

    He then pointed at the young soldier and asked.

    "You tell me what happened without any bias. If I find out you are lying you will suffer the consequences."

    "I.. I.." The soldier stammered under pressure and Sam patted his shoulder and said.

    "Okay, calm down. I will ask simple questions say yes or no that is it okay?"

    The soldier nodded and Sam continued.

    "Three days before, am I used of rape attempt or not?"

    The soldier looked all over the ce tensely but still answered.

    "Yes."

    "Did they take me back to the cell?"

    "No."

    "Did they investigate the matter?"

    "No."

    "Did they give me a chance to exin myself?"

    "No."

    "What is my punishment?"

    When Sam asked this, the soldier couldn¡¯t help but pause. He doesn¡¯t know what to do. The regimentmander will surely remember this. The general saw his hesitation and understood there is something off.

    "Tell me honestly, after this is over, you will directly be transferred to the General¡¯s troops."

    The soldier immediately wiped his sweat off and said confidently.

    "Comrade Sam was used of attempting rape on a human girl, when she yelled we arrived at the scene in less than thirty seconds so there nothing happened at all, but before the soldiers went there the soldiers from the regimentmander troops are already there and they already surrounded Comrade Sam.

    He was not given any chance to exin himself or the time for the matter to be investigated. Within ten minutes he was convicted and the punishment was already given.

    His cultivation was sealed and he was thrown into the Formation furnace for three days straight. The punishment should have ended at the crack of the dawn today, but the officers only came at this moment.

    In these three days, themander¡¯s son came to the furnace several times to increase and decrease the temperatures..."

    As he went on and on, the regimentmander couldn¡¯t hold on anymore and yelled.

    "Don¡¯t take non-sense. You must take responsibility for your own words."

    "I already told you to stay put, who are you to show authority in front of this General."

    The general yelled at themander and he looked at Sam.

    Three days in the formation furnace, he couldn¡¯t even imagine the punishment. When he looked at the heat emanating by the formation Samid that was considerably smaller than the formation furnace, he knew that Sam was being truly benevolent.

    But his face is still serious and directly said.

    "Even if you have such grievances, you should have reported it to higher authorities, what is the point of leaving?" His tone has a slight reprimand.

    "You must be jesting, sir. The highest authority as a normal soldier I can even greet is the battalionmander, I am already so pleased that a person of regimentmander¡¯s stature is already ¡¯taking care¡¯ of me so much. I don¡¯t have the fortune of being taken care of by a great person of status as you.

    Please just let me leave."

    "I will give you a proper exnation regarding this, until this matter is resolved, you are not going anywhere." The general sternly replied and looked at the regimentmander and asked.

    "What do you have to say about this?"

    "Sir, I will be honest, the regiment troops¡¯ soldiers are all goofing around a bit due to the high pressure of war, so they hid near hispany barracks to have a drink, but when they heard a woman screaming, they immediately went in and caught him in his act."

    "Is there any evidence that he indeed vited the woman?"

    The general asked once again.

    "He was caught red-handed and even the soldiers surrounding knew what happened. So..."

    He doesn¡¯t need to say much, the General understood and looked at Sam. He is thinking about how to proceed but the regimentmander wanted to sway him a little and said in a low voice.

    "Sir, you are wasting your time on him. From what I know he is the filth of the lowly birth and doesn¡¯t even have an identity until he came to the army, he wascent with little achievements and my benevolence that he did such a heinous act." The general got furious at hisment, it is not a good thing toment on one¡¯s birth.

    At this moment, before he could say anything, he could sense enormous killing intent and looked at Sam in astonishment.

    What is the worst thing to say in front of orphans? It is ndering their birth. And he has to provoke Sam who is the most sensitive of his birth. Particrly, when his birthce was ndered, he couldn¡¯t hold it, he might not have parents, the ce he was born, India was dear to him. That ce has taught him many things that he abided to date.

    There is one thing he abided by, one might have any resentment with their parents and birthce but they never should let an outsider malign them, not even with words.

    He looked ferocious and yelled at the top of his lungs.

    "How dare you call my birth lowly? Are you looking down on me, this human that much? What have you shown so much that is noble of your Naga birth, you filthy mongrel, your son vited a girl every day and yed with women¡¯s lives while you, his father is so eager to show him that you can wipe his shit off of his ass as soon as he excreted.

    Your son will provoke and provoke the people he couldn¡¯t deal with and here you are ready to get involved to oppress the victims with your authority.

    What kind of noble birth are you talking about?

    The ce where I am born, they treat the livestock that helped in farming to the tools they used to dig up the soil as gifts of gods.

    The ce I am from, a woman will get ready to burn herself to death than let another man touch him.

    In the ce I am from, a grown man would never run back to his father for every grievance and even feel ashamed to use the innocence of women to scheme.

    There the soldiers who fight are treated with respect and revered by all. Even the wild animals treat their prey with respect after the hunt and eat it.

    But I who in a battalion worth of soldiers enduring all your unreasonable missions have been schemed against again and again.

    Much less you, who used a woman¡¯s innocence to scheme against me. What nobility do you have? In my eyes, you are scum amongst the scum that would be disdained by even the worst of the pigs.

    With the sky, earth, wind, water, and fire as my witness, I Sam challenge your authority right here and right now. If you are even a man who has the noble birth you imed to be, bring all the army you can bring and all the support you can get. Try and dare if you can stop me from leaving this ce with my life intact.

    No matter who is in my way, today their blood shall be part of my swords and their flesh shall be food for my mounts."

 Chapter 525: Compensation

    Nobody has expected that Sam would burst out like that, but they don¡¯t know that if not for the fact that he didn¡¯t want to ruin his n, he would have already started a massacre.

    But the words are real. He never let anyone off if they maligned his birth. All this while, he saw many nobility in his both lives, who among them canpete with him. Who has the ability to challenge him and live to see the sunrise again?

    Even he never thought of their lowly birth, how dare all these people to insult him? He would never let anyone off.

    General frowned as he observed the killing intent from Sam. It is almost suffocating for the young soldier who Sam called on to previously. He didn¡¯t expect a young man in his twenties will have such a strong killing intent.

    When he looked at the des Yodha mentioned in Sam¡¯s hands, he was even more amazed. What bloodthirsty aura? the aura from the des is close to the resentment and despair of all the victims. It is far more ferocious than the simple bloodthirst.

    "Sam, I am still here. I would settle all the scores today and give you an exnation. But what do you mean by ying the battalion of forces?"

    Samughed sarcastically and looked at the regimentmander with resentment as he took out the bunch of papers from his storage and gave them to the general.

    The General looked at the papers and as he looked farther, his frown got deeper and deeper.

    At the end of it, he looked at the regimentmander and yelled as he pointed his finger.

    "You filthy vermin, is this how amander should treat his soldiers?"

    Sam¡¯s eyes are filled with a faint snicker as he looked at the regimentalmander, the papers are all the missionpletion documents regarding all the missions hepleted.

    Generally, no one would care about these things, they are just made to tally the rewards and such in busy times.

    But Sam really found the most important use for it.

    He directly gave the documents to the general. Sam¡¯s missions are outrageously hard and they are not even suitable for a Nascent stage, worst part is that there are some missions that are not even part of the missions that came from the general¡¯s camp.

    Apparently, our noble and great regimentmander created these missions, especially for Sam.

    The General looked at the two swords in Sam¡¯s hands and gulped, he heard how these swords are made, and from what he saw in the missions that Sampleted, if he really defected to the enemy empire, he would be seen as a treasure.

    A single man can change thendscape of the nascent stage battle. This ispletely uneptable. He looked at Sam and said.

    "Sam, please keep your swords away first and we can settle this matter without a need for battle. I should ask, why are you leaving with all credits you have? You would be a Deputy battalionmander in no time if you follow the same pace."

    Sam chuckled and generally also noticed that the faces of all the people changed into some sort ofedic expression.

    "What happened?" He asked with a frown.

    At this moment, Sam took out the tablet that connected to the bee puppet and gave it to Yodha.

    He knew how to operate this thing since he saw one in the Arena.

    He looked started ying the video and his expression turned colder as each second passed. The regimentalmander who near also saw the screen and his face turned pale.

    General is also watching this, he would definitely know everything clearly.

    When the General saw the part where themander stripped off of every credit Sam earned, he couldn¡¯t control himself and his aura changed a bit. The Consummate realm level pressure made everyone shiver.

    And since it was directed at the Regimentmander, there is no way for him to endure it, the video continued and they saw Sam being thrown into the furnace and then even armor melting over him, they looked at him once again and even felt the scorch through the video.

    After the video was done, they searched around with their eyes to identify the culprits, Yodha was impatient and immediately yelled amand.

    "Those who are involved in this incident,e forward now."

    The youngdy who acted as a bait to the soldiers who arrested Sam all came over and stood nervously.

    "I will give you thirty seconds to think, then I will ask one by one if you don¡¯t tell me the truth, then you would bear the consequences, you guys do know the military methods of getting information," General said coldly.

    Today, he decided to get to the bottom of this situation.

    It is not just about Sam and Arman, the Marshall, who is also Yodha¡¯s father has worked hard to change the army for the better, he promoted the favoritism, but that is not based on birth or the species, all it took for one to get promoted is hard work and achievements.

    The General is one such person who is from amoner naga family. But he was able to surpass all his peers in the nobility and he is the proud General of the Mov empire.

    He has seen many humans who worked hard for their development and be pirs of the military. In fact, there are even regimentmanders who are humans.

    He saw such potential in Sam.

    He bravely entered the enemy territory to bring back the heads of hundreds of soldiers all alone. He also seemed to a formation expert even the formation master of the military is having a hard time cracking the puzzle.

    General looked at Regimentmander and said.

    "From now on, you no longer possess any authority and you shall be demoted to the rank of the soldier right this moment and you have to serve the military for another fifty years and don¡¯t have any chance to retire before that.

    You will also be transferred to the troops under mymand, your son will be dismissed from the army and he can be sent home. He will be marked in the military cklist and would never be given a chance to get into an armed force under imperial authority"

    He paused and then looked at the soldiers who cooperated particrly thedy.

    "You are all dismissed and even the Ex-serviceman privileges will not be given for the next ten years."

    Finally, his gazended on Sam and said.

    "I know you will feel wronged by everything that happened to you, but this all I can do for now with the war around the corner. I cannot let go of someone of that caliber.

    But I am willing topromise.

    You will be given three times all the credits you have been cut off of and you will also get your credits doubled for the uing war.

    But the multiplied credits cannot be considered as merit and wouldn¡¯t be taken into consideration for promotion and rewards, you can use them to exchange things though."

    The General then looked at the soldiers and said in a loud voice.

    "There are people of different races and different statuses in the army. But those statuses are only useful for you to use it outside.

    This is the army our Marshall created. Here the only thing that matters is the capability. If you are capable and useful for the military, even if you are a beggar outside, you will be valued here. If you are incapable and only good for unting your authority here, even if you are noble scions, we don¡¯t need you.

    You have to listen to your superiors and obey them, but that doesn¡¯t mean you have to tolerate everything.

    From now on, if theint is seriouse to me directly and report. But if the report is not serious and you are just wasting my time, you have to bear the aftermath.

    Now everyone is dismissed."

    All the soldiers left, only Sam and Arman remained standing along with Yodha, the regimentmander, and the General.

    General once again looked at Sam and asked.

    "Can you take down the formation?"

    Sam looked at themander¡¯s son reluctantly took out another metal pike and threw it. The pike went through the formation light and prated into the abdomen right next to another pike.

    The regimentmander was about to show his anger, but he noticed that the formation has disappeared. He immediately went to his son and started taking the pikes out one by one.

    The General was surprised once again and said.

    "We need to talk,e to my office with Yodhater."

    With that, the general left.

    Yodha looked at Sam with a helpless expression and asked.

    "Where did you get the guts to do all this? Damn, I was afraid that General would kill you on the spot in anger."

    "It is not that easy to kill me." Sam replied in a usual tone.

    Sam said as he looked at the regimentmander with a smile. His n seeded. He has to destroy the power in this regimentmander¡¯s hands and he could do it in a lot of ways, he can just impede the sess rates of the missions of the rest of the candidates, then this guy wouldn¡¯t be able to escape taking the responsibility.

    But Sam did the opposite, he achieved too many things and still fell into such a low-level scheme deliberately. He also knew that Yodha ising back today and coincidentally, his release from punishment is also today so he decided to make a ruckus and totally bury thismander¡¯s future. As for how he knew he wasing, the hos finally came to handy. He might not have real-time surveince, but he can still get some images and the locations of the hos. It is easy as pie.

    The regimentmander would have to do a lot of meritorious deeds if he wants to redeem his previous position.

    Now with the contrast of his bad things, Sam¡¯s achievements are brighter than ever before and the military is also going to owe him.

 Chapter 526: New Mission

    Yodha dealt with some matters and took Sam and Arman back to the General¡¯s office.

    There the regimentalmanders and the nascent battalionmanders are all already gathered for a meeting.

    After Yodha was seated, a few more regimentalmanders came hurriedly and filled up thest empty seats and the meetingmenced.

    "The situation at all the borders is bing tense and it is already close to an all-out. This year we werete and all the strategic locations within the vast borders are mostly upied by the Rubrum Empire.

    They are especially active this time around and there are some reasons for that. We have received information that there is a special regiment formed in the rubrum empire, that are soldiers specially trained since infancy.

    They are Nascent stage cultivators and all of them are at the Late stage of the Peak stage.

    This regiment didn¡¯t contain ten thousand soldiers like a normal regiment. But they only have around five thousand soldiers.

    They are a result of a special program that was started more than three decades and it finally showed results. Apart from this little information, we don¡¯t know a lot about them.

    This regiment might be small but they are treating this regiment especially well and there is news from the spy that all the preparations of the war are specially made in such a way that these regiment soldiers could perform well.

    I couldn¡¯te to a decision on how to proceed on this matter, which is why I invited all the regimentmanders here to discuss this matter."

    One of the regimentmanders who are in charge of the border at different city said.

    "General, I think we don¡¯t need to take this seriously. It is not like we don¡¯t train the elites. There are also special divisions in our army, they might be the same as them. As long as the five special divisions shed against them, I think we would still be the one who is victorious in the end."

    Many of the regimentmanders agreed, but the General said in a serious expression.

    "I would like to think so too. But I still have a bad feeling about this situation that there is something wrong with his division. The thing is one of our extremely high-level spies sacrificed his life to get us this information. He was killed while he was sending the information and that is why we only got partial information."

    The regimentmanders and the Battalionmanders all felt that situation is more serious than they thought.

    They went into deep thought.

    "Do we have any information regarding the location they are stationed at?"

    Yodha asked.

    "Coincidentally they are stationed nearest to your battlefield. As all of you know, the nascent stage battle is the most important of all battles between us.

    Until the battle reaches any of the Dukedom capitals and the Imperial capitals, the Transcendent stage and consummate stage battles wouldn¡¯t matter much. At most they could affect some morale.

    But until that stage, the Nascent stage battles and Pre-transcendent stage battles are the deciding factors for the conquering of the border towns and cities.

    As you know, your battalion and regiment are stationed at a critical point on our border. Those are the cities that house some of the major resources of our empire."

    When General exined, Yodha¡¯s frown got deeper and deeper.

    He very well knew that would happen the city under his battalion¡¯s protection was under the enemy¡¯s control.

    The city has some mines and that too of extremely high-grade metal. The ore that could be refined from it and made into weapons is actually very limited, but this metal is the only thing that can be used to make the armors and weapons for people at Transcendent stage cultivators.

    There is no way that they could let this go.

    If the city is in the middle of the nation, then they would have just ced an extremely strong person to keep watch, but it is at borders and if they just tyrannically provided protection by an expert, then the so-called neutral empires will im injustice and interfere in the war.

    So, all they can do is fight a bitter battle.

    All themanders started giving various ideas. Yodha who cameter looked at Sam and Arman and pondered on why they were called for, the general wouldn¡¯t do so casually.

    All of Sam¡¯s missions are impossible for two people to clear and some of Sam¡¯s missions are done alone and they would need an elite squad to even attempt and that too with a high failure rate.

    He felt like he knew what the general is thinking.

    After some time there are no feasible ideas, the general said.

    "I do have an idea on how to proceed, but there is too much risk involved and it would be solely dependent on the efforts of a single person."

    As general spoke, he looked at Sam and took out the mission reports of Sam, and ced them on the table.

    Everyone started looking through them and the reports slowly spread all over the room for the next five minutes, nobody spoke in this time period.

    They just looked through all the details and slowly digested the unbelievable battle record.

    They really wanted to ask if it was real, but when they saw the serious expression of the General, it didn¡¯t seem like he was joking at all, and their question might sound stupid.

    After everyone looked through them, the general said as he pointed at Sam who is standing behind Yodha.

    "His name is Sam and he joined the army recently. The mission reports in your hands are all his. Actually, he wouldn¡¯t have a chance to get to do these missions, but the regimentmander has a personal grudge and wanted to use the enemy hands to kill him, but Sam provided excellent battle achievements and was able to get out of alive and even brought hundreds of heads of their opponents.

    I am thinking of sending him to the location and inspect what was happening. We need first-hand information and the more we get the better.

    But I don¡¯t want to lose such a precious soldier if something goes wrong, that is why I didn¡¯t mention it from the start. So, please give some ideas."

    "Why is general thinking of an alternative? It would be his honor as a human to serve the empire. If he rejected, it is better off throwing him off out of the military."

    One of the regimentmanders who is a naga said coldly as he eyed Sam.

    Sam didn¡¯t like the gaze, he also matched his gaze and looked at him with equally cold eyes.

    Day by day, the Nagas are getting a degraded evaluation in Sam¡¯s opinion. He is losing any form of respect he had towards a race because of these people.

    It is almost like every Naga is an arrogant young master, they have this condescending gaze whenever they looked at a human.

    If they are really capable, then Sam wouldn¡¯t mind at all, but the thing is most of them are cowards. In fact, the border here mostly contained humans because this is the most active border of all.

    All the noble offspring and even normal nagas wouldn¡¯t join this border force. All of them go and join the borders that the empire shared with other friendly empires.

    This is because they only joined for getting by in the military and try their best to buy their way up the ranks and improve their influence and the businesses using the benefits they get as a military man.

    "Get out." General directly sent the regimentmander out with a cold shout. He doesn¡¯t even have any patience to calmly deal with him. The regimentmander saw the cold face of the general and helplessly left the room.

    "Any better suggestions?" When he once again addressed the room, there are none.

    He then sent out all themanders and only four people are left inside the room.

    Sam, Arman, Yodha, and the general.

    "I have important missions for three of you.

    Sam, I want you to gather information regarding this battalion.

    They are stationed at the border of the city that is quite bustling, and we have a way to sneak you into that ce with a false identity. You can use any means necessary to gather as much information as possible. But the priority is that you shoulde back alive and give the first rank information.

    I could have sent a team, but they would easily get caught and you are also capable enough to fight against arge number of enemies.

    Arman, you will be sent to the special division that has a team that uses lightning element. Your abilities are way beyond the abilities of a normal soldier. There would be a special training session for the next two weeks. We already sent the letter to the General of the rubrum that we are going to start a full-scale war only after fifteen days, so no one is allowed to deploy more than a fewpanies worth of soldiers to the same ce and can only assign some missions for them.

    This will hinder the war from happening.

    Yodha, you will be once again taking over the training of the Special division teams for the next fifteen days. There are some special training methods that we got from some research, you are the only one that can make them obey and follow these instructions strictly.

    The oue of this war is based on all three of you. I hope you live up to the expectations."

 Chapter 527: Investigation

    Sam is in a secret route of a forest and is being apanied by another human.

    This guy is the spy who found this secret route to the city and he is also in charge of his fake identity.

    After walking for a few hours, they arrived at the city.

    When Sam saw the city, he didn¡¯t feel like it is a city at the border. People are bustling and every street is full of activity. There is no gloom or worry regarding the war that is going to happen in the next fifteen days.

    All the citizens are quite happy.

    Sam noticed that most of the city is selling the raw materials of the beast and the meat.

    There are shops full of animal furs and pelts and there are some that sell the bones and teeth. There are some that only sell the meat and there are some that sell all of them together.

    Sam didn¡¯t know that this much business is possible just with the beasts and the materials they provide.

    This ispletely unexpected.

    The spy took Sam to a rundown house at the edge of the city and gave some details regarding the current situation of the city.

    The west gate of the city leads to the border that there is their targeted regiment is stationed. There is also a northwestern gate from which they entered. This gate leads to the forest and there are a lot of hunting teams going in and out, so it is the least suspicious ce for them to enter.

    From what Sam heard, the forest is full of beasts that live in herds andrge packs along with a high reproduction rate. This ce has ideal conditions for beasts to live in and there is an impable food chain from normal animals that didn¡¯t have any cultivation to the animals that are of Pre-transcendent and transcendent level cultivations.

    Almost half of the city is making their living off of the forest and the other half is making the living off of the products the first half sold them.

    Everyone is wearing some sort of fur or pelt and even Sam is wearing one. His feather coat was too eye-catching in a ce like this.

    As for the information on the battalion, that is the only thing this spy couldn¡¯t get any information on. He even knows the corners of the city lord mansion, but he doesn¡¯t know anything about the soldiers that are stationed outside the west gate.

    There are too many strict restrictions and at this time period, nobody is allowed to leave through the west gate.

    Sam digested all the information and got ready to take a stroll around the city. After looking through it he realized that hunting is much more lucrative in this town than he thought. Every team that came out ising with at least one beast.

    There are some stores that specialize in preparing the beasts and separating the meat, bones, teeth, or any other valuable things like scales and such, fur and pelt, etc. They would prepare them all and handover the items back to the owner so that they could sell them for a higher price to the merchants.

    Of course, they arepletely raw and need some processing before they could be used to make products, but they still sell for more.

    Sam roamed around the city as he scanned it with the eye technique. He is just looking for a lucky break and sees if he can find any clue regarding the soldiers.

    From what he heard, now and then some soldiers wille and get some supplies from the city, and most of the time, they buy meat and a lot of it for their consumption.

    Except for that one thing, there is not a single connection that linked the city and the border.

    As he was thinking and roaming around, he saw a shop that specializes in selling inscription ink and other materials that make inscriptions.

    He was a bit interested and went in and he wasn¡¯t disappointed. The shop is selling a myriad of inks that are useful for many different inscriptions.

    He looked at the shopkeeper, who is talking with someone with a serious expression. Sam didn¡¯t eavesdrop and let them speak as he just stood at the door for some time.

    After they are done talking and one of them left, he walked to the shopkeeper and started a conversation.

    There is a catalog for the inks and Sam went through the book and was surprised by the variety of the inks that are avable in this shop.

    He started selecting them, but not all of them are avable at this moment.

    "What happened? When would they be avable again?" Sam asked in some disappointment.

    "I don¡¯t know, there is a shortage of the Beast blood for the past month and some smaller shops that depend on the beast blood to make business are already closed. We don¡¯t know what happened exactly, but someone seemed to be buying the beast blood even before us. There is very little supply in the market at this moment."

    Sam frowned at this. From what he saw there is no deficiency of the beasts in the market and the hunters are bringing in a decent intake every day. But the deficiency of beast blood is absurd when everything else is okay.

    He came out of the shop and walked aimlessly among the roads, until night. The house they are living in gives the view of the west gate and they can see if there is anyone who ising.

    Sam is on the watch that night along with the spy.

    As they waited for a long time, there is some activity at the west gate at midnight. Two people came through the west gate and started walking in the streets.

    Even though the cultivators don¡¯t need much sleep, they still take rest at night and the forest would be much more bustling and the beasts would be active at night than in normal times. So, they avoid it at all costs.

    After they saw the two mening through the city gate, Sam activated his shadow form and disappeared from the spot. He reappeared on the roof and then started tailing the two of them by shifting from one roof to another.

    He followed from afar and kept a great distance between them. They are even out of his superior spiritual sense range, he is only using the eye technique to see them from afar.

    Soon, these two people met a group of people at another end of the city and within the group, Sam recognized one of them.

    He is the person who is talking to the inscription ink shop owner.

    He frowned and went into deep thought. There are still fourteen days left till the war, even though that is not a long time, he didn¡¯t dare to be in a hurry. This time, he has to deal with a regiment of soldiers, he would have to be careful.

    After the soldiers took something and left, he could see the group of people angrily looking at each other and seemed to be scolding someone.

    He decided to go back to the house and the next morning, he went deep into the forest and looked for prey to hunt. After some time, he came across arge herd of elk type beasts and he caught two of them and brought them back to the city.

    He went straight to one of the processing people who specialize in separating meat, bones, and leather and gave the two beasts.

    The shop keeper processed the corpses within an hour. When Sam made the payment ording to the market standards, he only took three-fourths of it and said.

    "We identally wasted the blood, so we would buy the blood of the beast for the market price. You can take the rest of the materials."

    Sam looked at the man with some suspicion, but he still took the materials and left.

    This man is also a part of the group he met yesterday night. Sam didn¡¯t wait long and went into the forest again. He looked for another beast and went to another processor this time also he was surprised.

    This man directly asked for the beast¡¯s blood.

    "I have a son who is training to be an inscription master, I would like to buy the beast blood." Sam didn¡¯t show any expression and sold this, before leaving the ce. By night, he visited four shops and all of them made an excuse to buy the beast blood.

    And all of them are part of the group.

    He once again stayed on watch at night, but that night nothing happened. He continued his visits to the remaining processing shops and that included the shop run by the man who he saw at the inscription shop.

    After making sure that these people are buying the blood directly, he was sure that this is rted to the army at least there is a high chance of them being rted. He would need to investigate more and see what is happening.

 Chapter 528: Experimentation

    That night, Sam once again waited at his window. But no one came. He was a tad bit disappointed. Even though there are still fourteen days, there is no way he would want to stay here for that long.

    He wanted to finish this whole farce in the next five days and flee directly.

    The next day, he went back to the inscription ink shop and once again looked through the catalog. The prices of the ink inted like crazy.

    There is still no increase in blood supply. Sam doesn¡¯t know if they knew that the processors or taking the blood. But he didn¡¯t ask. He just wanted to see if he would meet that guy again. But he didn¡¯te. If he came and had the same discussion again, he would have some information avable.

    He went back to the forest and came back with arge number of beasts. He brought more than a dozen and when the processor saw this, he was dumbfounded. He didn¡¯t expect that there would be someone who would bring this many.

    But this is not the first time though, the hunting teams also tend to bringrge loots.

    With thisrge quantity, Sam was finally able to get a chance to wait for a long time at the shop and thus the shopkeeper invited him to take a seat.

    Sam entered a room which is made for waiting, he sat on a chair and closed his eyes. After confirming that nobody is near him, a ho came out of the divine dimension and moved to the deeper ces of the shop.

    The ho was good enough to move to some rooms, where there are special instruments, but it wasn¡¯t able to move to the processing room, where the work is currently going on.

    But he didn¡¯t worry at all. With another wave of his hand an even smaller ho came out and it went to that door. This time, this thing can fit inside the door gap. Once it went inside, he immediately connected his consciousness with the bug and got a view for a short period of time.

    It is the blood extraction of the beasts. The first thing they would do when processing is to extract the blood.

    He looked at the process which was being done meticulously as if he was afraid of spilling even a small amount, Sam smiled and brought the hos back.

    They would die if he let them stay there for a second.

    Soon, the time hase for Sam to leave the shop and even this time, the shopkeeper wanted to buy the blood.

    But Sam didn¡¯t agree and when he received the spatial ring he saw that the blood quantity was reduced by half.

    He didn¡¯t ask and directly went to the inscription ink shop and sold the blood to that guy. Even though, quantity smaller than he needed, he was still delighted.

    It was only noon, by the time this happened. So, Sam once again entered the forest and came with arge harvest and sold the blood to the shop in the evening,

    The shopkeeper was clearly so delighted by the favor, that he insisted that Sam had a meal with him and both of them went to the restaurant as the sunset.

    After the meal was done, Sam went to the outskirts, where the soldiers met with the processing shop owners. He took out a special recording crystal that extremely unnoticeable. It is a secret surveince device that was barely tested. And its range is only up to Pre-transcendent cultivators.

    He stuck the device to the wall and pressed a button that activated a formation and made the device blend in with the surroundings.

    After making sure it was set, he came back to his house and waited for midnight.

    Today, the soldiers came once again and went to the same spot. This time they discussed something with the shop owners. Sam didn¡¯t follow them though, the next morning he simply went there and took a look at the recording.

    The video yed.

    "Sir, it has been getting harder and harder to get the blood supply. The customers are not agreeing to sell the blood directly, there are only a few and far between. Because the inscription ink shops started offering more price due to our activities, everyone wants to sell their blood there."

    The one who spoke is the person who Sam saw at the ink shop.

    "If it is just a higher price, why are you even asking me? All you need is to spend more money."

    "If it is just the problem of money, then we could have really done as sir said, but the problem is everyone wants to curry favor the inscription masters, it is bing hard to beat that with just some mary value."

    "Convincing these people is your problem." The soldier replied in a cold tone.

    "Sir, please don¡¯t say that. We already resorted to some trickery and robbed the blood from the customers. They also started noticing, but since it is the initial days during the crime, it is still okay. If we continue with this, we will have a hard time maintaining our business."

    The soldier coldly looked at him and said.

    "I don¡¯t care how you deal with this problem, but you have to supply the blood. The name of the soldiers and the army shouldn¡¯te out at all. This is top-secret."

    With that, the soldiers turned around and left.

    He didn¡¯t care about the remaining video of these people throwing tantrums.

    He understood that the soldiers wanted this blood and since they are not even daring enough to buy it directly, then it must be something rted to their military secret.

    Sam thought of many possibilities that are absurd and crazy.

    He went into the forests and changed clothes. He wore a full ck cloak and a mask full of inscriptions. He can escape from most people¡¯s perception.

    The dark element energy surged in his body and he sneaked towards the camp. If he moved through the city, it would have been easy, but he has to move through the forest taking a long detour. He reached the destination in an hour and he could see the activities in the army camp a bit far away.

    He let out the hos in his possession and sent them to inspect the situation in the surroundings.

    As they sped up, he noticed that there is actually not much activity at all.

    All the people that are running around all weak humans that are only at the great realm stage. They are running around as they held some vats of blood and ran from one room to another.

    There is one room inmon though, from there they are carrying out the vats and taking them to distribute them all over to the other ces.

    Sam grew curious, after making sure that no one is outside the barracks, he moved swiftly and arrived at the one room.

    All the rooms are constructed with bricks and that included the supposed barracks of the soldiers.

    He didn¡¯t direction go in, but just climbed the single room that was constructed separately and after he went up. He ced his palm and started using his observation and disintegration ability to create a small hole on the rooftop.

    He must say that these people all made a lot of arrangements regarding so manyplicated methods of infiltration, but they didn¡¯t guard against the simplest and crude methods.

    He looked through the hole, but couldn¡¯t see, there is a concealment formation and Sam used the eye technique to see beyond that.

    What he saw shocked him.

    There is onerge concealment formation in the room and that is concealing the sounds, vision, and even smell.

    There are a bunch of humans and Half-Nagas that have a thick concentration of Naga blood inside them. They are all tied up and unconscious.

    There is arge vat of red blood that was freshly taken out of a spatial ring, it is the same type of vat he saw in the processing shop.

    There is a red-scaled Naga, with a golden-colored hue all over the scales and he seemed to be making calctions as he wrote some details on a book.

    He caught a human and slit the veins as he started collecting the blood. He mixed the blood with the beast¡¯s blood.

    After mixing, he poured the blood into some small vats. All of a sudden, he tapped a formation disc that was on the floor and it changedpletely.

    He pushed the vats out and the great realm cultivators came and carefully picked those vats to take them out.

    After that, the Naga closed the formation once again and started repeating the procedure.

    Soon, all the prisoners are dead and he collected the bodies and walked to the rear of the room. Sam slowly crawled over and saw him throw the dead bodies to some Blood Hounds. They started tearing on the flesh and devouring the meat.

    When the Naga came back, he started calcting once again.

    Sam felt weird all over when he saw this. The camp is not at all vignt. In fact, the security is too loose. Except for the few nascent stage Nagas who are standing guard at the entrance of the city and the forest, the camp is extremely easy for him to infiltrate.

    As long as he could maintain this shadow form and merge here, no one can find him unless, and of course they are shadow element specialists or they have higher cultivation than him.

    Sam doesn¡¯t necessarily need to be concealed all the time, all he wanted was a chance to see what is happening and he even has ns to make somemotion. So, he didn¡¯t waste too much time concealing himself to the superior cultivators.

    But the situation is far easier than expected.

 Chapter 529: Plotting

    Sam started moving from one building to another and peeked through to see what is happening inside.

    But what he saw surprised him. Because, he could see no one inside the rooms. All he could see are somerge flowers arepletely closed without blooming. They are all in blood-red color and they upied arge ce inside the rooms. There is a bloody vapor that is being emitted by the flowers.

    He could almost feel the stench from here.

    As he watched, there is somemotion in the first row of the barracks.

    He zoomed the view as he looked towards the barracks, and he saw Nagasing out.

    The scales are not even normal red and there are no hues. There are only blood-red veins and apart from that, there are extra scales that are protruding all over the vertebrae starting from the skull to the tail.

    These extra scales have crystalline structures and are glittering from that far.

    He also started feeling some vibrations from the room below him and he once again peeked inside. He was shocked by the scene.

    The blood-red flower started vibrating and bloomed slowly. From within the flower, the naga looked the same as the rest of the batch.

    He moved to another building and here he saw an even more surprising scene. Here there is a human being who has blood-red skin. Even his hair turned into maroon color and their crystal protrusions on both his shoulders.

    His bone structure also seemed to have been altered. He walked out as his bones cracked. Sam widened his eyes in disbelief. He moved to another room and the same scene appeared.

    Soon, the whole camp was filled with these blood-red creatures.

    One of them who seemed to be the leader of the whole regiment came out and said.

    "There is only one more session of this blood pod after that, our transformation would bepleted. Until then, control your emotions, after that, you can let the emotions go as you wish. You can be as wild as you want to be and your instincts wouldn¡¯t be suppressed anymore.

    Until then we have to be strict on security. Last time one of the enemy dogs was able toe here and get some information. These pod sessions are making it hard for us to keep a tight watch on this area and it is giving us a headache.

    The Master is also not here. So, it is hard to control if you lose your bearings."

    "Bro, where did master go? Did he inform you?"

    Sam already came to the vicinities and is listening to the loud conversation as one of the soldiers in the troops asked.

    "One of the enemies seemed to have caused some serious trouble. In the past month, we have lost more than two thousand Nascent soldiers and almost half of them are dead in the hands of a single person. So, they went to see how to salvage the situation.

    There forest nearby where our nascent stage cultivators used to ambush every year waspletely swept by him.

    There is a high chance that we are going to be deployed there, after thest session.

    So, get ready."

    Sam shivered for a moment, he didn¡¯t expect that he would get to see all this.

    From all the talk he only got one thing. These people are all the result of some sort of experimentation. He immediately got out of the regiment before they started tightening their security.

    Now he understood why the whole camp is toox. It was too easy toe in and get out. That is only because of their so-called Blood Pod session.

    He went back to the building where the blood is being mixed and some other buildings, attaching the surveince devices wherever possible. They concealed themselves and disappeared into their background.

    Currently, the soldiers all who came from the blood pod are still a bitx and there is no vignce and for most of the blood pods they still didn¡¯t evene out. This ce is only a small area within the whole camp. After cing a few more devices, he didn¡¯t stay there anymore and escaped.

    At this moment, Sam rushed back into the forest and contemting the situation. From the looks of it, the blood is somewhat rted to the experimentation of these people and they also said that there is thest pod session.

    From the pattern of these people getting the blood from the processing experts in the city, they might be doing this session every two days.

    He removed the disguise and went into the house to think about what he has to do next.

    For starters, it would be better to get a feel of these people¡¯s strengths and also try to get an idea of why they are doing this experimentation and what their goal would be.

    Apart from that, he also has to see if he should stop the experimentation and what other risks he has to take.

    He looked at the spy and said.

    "Get out of this city and meet Battalionmander Yodha. Just give him this letter."

    Sam didn¡¯t record anything yet, but for his next step things would be a bit more serious, he might have to take a detour if the situation goes south. So, if he sent this message, he might be able to alert them from making some arrangements.

    The spy nodded his head and immediately left the city through the forest. He seemed to be good at concealment, so he escaped easily.

    After that, Sam started making his preparations. He decided to stop the next experimentation session. That day and the next day activities of the camp will be recordedpletely and he would have some evidence and some information.

    Along with that, he is sure that these flowers are the things that are rted to the experiment. All he might have to do is destroy those flowers.

    If only he has more information on the flowers, he would have reallye up with some form for that.

    Now, he has to think of a way to deal with the situation without any base to work on.

    Since he didn¡¯t have any other way to deal with it, he decided to just go with the easiest and the most direct method of all.

    He went into the divine dimension and started sorting out some jars.

    These jars are the poisons that Mia secreted. Most of the jars are filled with the normal hydra poison and the minority are the poisons that Mia collected.

    Most of the time, Mia would consume a variety of poisons and merge them in one of her heads. She would create various mixtures of poisons. She is like a bartender of the poison kingdom. Expert in making cocktails of the cruelest of poisons.

    After some deliberation, he took two jars out. One of them is the normal hydra poison and the second one is the poison that was secreted after she consumed the heart of Sesh.

    Both of them are really effective. But first, he has to dilute them with something.

    He took out thest portion of the Indigo water he has. This is the only small portion that was left, even though all of the hydra blood essences was absorbed by the executioner de, it would still be enough.

    He started making a more diluted cocktail poison and the situation turned out that the first batch is wasted because the container couldn¡¯t handle concentration.

    He started making an energy cell that is in the shape of a container and started making the cocktail once again.

    After it was done, he went to make the remaining preparations.

    The next morning, he heard that the processing shops are buying the beast blood at a high cost. The cost is way overboard that the inscription ink shop couldn¡¯t evenpete.

    He was extremely ted. He immediately went into the forest. Today, the hunting teams saw a scene that would never forget, they saw the beasts escaping from a single hunter who is taking the beasts like they are little kids.

    Sam made a huge haul that there is nothing left for the remaining teams.

    They didn¡¯t even dare covet his hunt.

    After that, he collected all the blood in the vats and went to the processor. When the processor saw the situation he was ted by therge amounts of blood.

    But what he didn¡¯t know is Sam mixed the cocktail he made with the blood and sold it.

    The processor was finally able to feel the relief. The soldiers already sent the message that they would never ask for the blood, but they would need arge amount this time. That is why they had to take the bold step and make such an offer in the market.

    Now, at least his quota was fulfilled. He would be safe.

 Chapter 530: Master

    The day Sam sold the blood, he waited patiently, and soon at night, he saw the two Nagasing in and buying the blood.

    He focused his gaze on the two of them. Last time, he only cared about their presence, but he didn¡¯t see what exactly their bodies are like, but he carefully observed them and one of them turned out to be the Naga who is mixing the blood. He doesn¡¯t know who the second one is, but it wouldn¡¯t take a genius to figure that out.

    The camp is toorge and there is no way, one person can handle preparing blood for all of them, these two of them must be the people in charge of this.

    As he watched the transaction, he noticed that the two nagas made their moves. After taking the blood, they didn¡¯t even dy for a single second to kill the group of processors.

    Immediately, the group of processors is lying dead and their corpses were brought back by the two Nagas.

    After that, he went into the forest and is on the way towards the camp. He used the same route that he used yesterday, but he didn¡¯t enter the camp this time. Because he could see the tightened security.

    It is not like the other day at all, these experimental subjects are guarding the ce tightly.

    If anyonees at a normal time and looks at this tight security, no one would be able to steel their heart to still think about infiltrating the camp.

    It would be suicide.

    He stood there patiently waited for an opportunity.

    Hours passed and finally, he saw a movement, as soon as the sun rose, all the candidates started moving towards their barracks, except for the security guards he saw the other day, there is no one in the camp as if they deserted itpletely.

    All of them entered their rooms and sat down in the flowers.

    The camp is once again deste and free to roam. Sam made his move and entered the camp. The first ce he went is the Blood mixing room.

    He wanted to see who has got his special blood. He wished that it entered all the rooms that are used to mix the blood. But to his disappointment, he saw that the vat he sold in is actually only this ce. Since he sold a lot of blood, the processor didn¡¯t even bother to change the container and just sold it like that.

    The Naga checked some parameters and then took out the corpse of the processor as he added the blood to the vat and started mixing it.

    He sent the vat out just like yesterday and the workers went into the rooms one by one.

    After they entered the rooms, they carefully poured the blood all over.

    Sam didn¡¯t just stay in that ce, he started checking the camp to find out the remaining blood mixing rooms. From his spections, there must be at least two rooms for mixing blood. But judging from the number of barracks and the time they finished the process in the previous session, it is extremely unlikely. There might be more.

    And his guess was not wrong. There are ten such rooms, but not all of them are as eye-catching as the first one, they blended with the rest of the barracks and if not for the peopleing in and out, it would be hard to recognize.

    He patiently waited for the process to be over. Because he is not confident that before the session started and they poured all the blood into the flowers, the soldiers inside the flowers would be unconscious. If they are not, it would be busy fighting.

    But if he really did wait, the time margin would be extremely slim for him, however, he still chose to wait even if it is the small time frame.

    If he made a hasty mistake, they might juste out and surround him and they might arrange another session.

    Sam waited patiently for a few hours and finally, all the five thousand barracks were done. The flowers started emitting blood vapors.

    He thought that this is his chance and his first target was the blood mixing person in the first room. He went there from the main entrance, this time the people who are carrying the blood to and fro are looking a bit listless when saw Sam, but they weren¡¯t able to scream under the pressure he is giving out.

    Only one of them was able to withstand the pressure and run into the room to ry the news, the man inside frowned and walked out to see Sam leisurely walked towards the entrance.

    He didn¡¯t wait for the other party, he frowned and just attacked after noticing that Sam is also a Nascent.

    This is a crucial time and he didn¡¯t have the luxury to let a single mistake happen.

    Sam didn¡¯t care though, he also made his move. But this time, the fight is not a single move battle, the naga can handle Sam for a few minutes, but he was in the defensive position the time, after a few minutes, Sam finished him off.

    When he went inside there are some scrolls on the table and this man seemed to be recording the details of the final session. He took every single thing in thep, including the vats.

    He also took the spatial ring off of that guy and came out.

    Then he went to the rooms nearby that got the blood his personal cocktail was added to and took a look.

    His blood has reached at least a hundred people.

    When he saw the flower in the first room, he was delighted. The flower is notpletely blood-red anymore.

    There is a faint gray shade all over the flower with a small hint of green and purple vaporing out. The flower seemed to have deliberately clung to life by absorbing something. Even though he couldn¡¯t see what is happening inside, he could see the grey wilting has increased and there is a high chance that the experiment is a failure.

    He briefly nced at some of the rooms and after noticing that the grey wilting is indeed happening, Sam moved towards the next blood mixing room.

    On the way through, he threw ced a space jade ring on his finger and started using water element to throw the small quantities of cocktail towards the flowers.

    He noticed that the flowers that are going through the normal experimentation are different from the rest.

    So, he decided to destroy as many as he can by adding his special ingredient and if possible he would like to destroy all of them. On the way between this run, he already collected all of hismunication devices.

    But in the middle of it, the remaining blood mixers in the rooms seemed to have somehowmunicated and all ran towards him.

    Sam exchanged some blows and started dealing with them one by one.

    By the time, he dealt with all of them, he started looking at the rows of rooms. He is extremely vexed, if possible he would like to blow up all of them, but there are too many factors that are influencing him.

    If by any chance the flower can be opened by arge impact and he blew up some of them with arge explosion, the shockwave might wake up the rest. He doesn¡¯t want that.

    Because even if they couldn¡¯t kill him, they have a chance to escape.

    As he vexingly continued, he halted in his tracks just after a few minutes, because the low-level cultivators of the camps that he asked to sit in the corner are all yelling and shouting as they ran towards the camp gate. He looked towards the gate only to see a group of peopleing to the camp on the Blood Hounds.

    The Bloodhound in the front is extremelyrge and its cultivation is clearly high, even the person on that is also of higher cultivation.

    There are thirty more people who are giving off the energy waves simr to that of the people who went into the flower pod. But their aura is superior and they have crystal scales that are quiterge than normal protruding out of their bodies.

    Even their eyes arepletely different, there is a lot of lust for blood inside those eyes.

    There are men, women, Nagas, half Nagas, and even humans along with the thirty.

    Sam walked a bit closer to them and stood straight in front of them, it is rather impossible for him to continue his task anyway. All he has to do is make some final blows and leave this ce.

    But before that, he might be able to fish some information from them.

    When the great realm cultivators finished their tattle-tale, the young Naga beside the man in the front spoke as he sneered.

    "Another dog came to sniff out some information here. This time, they seemed to have sent some better dog. Didn¡¯t they learn a lesson from what happened to the previous one?"

    Sam raised an eyebrow, but that couldn¡¯t be seen behind the mask.

 Chapter 531: Testing

    Sam didn¡¯t even give the young Naga a second chance. He can yap all he wants, but they are going to meet on the battlefield sooner orter anyway, he would like to see what kind ofments he coulde up with at that time.

    His current focus was on the man in the front. He is clearly a transcendent cultivator, that too ate stage. Sam guessed this from the eye technique and the man felt like he was almost being stripped down.

    He coldly nced at Sam and said.

    "Why don¡¯t you take that mask off for me to see? I would like to see who is bold and skilled enough to make this much damage."

    Sam didn¡¯t bother to reply, he is trying to think of what to speak to get more information. In fact, it would be better if he could exchange some blows with one of them.

    He would get a better grasp of their strength and he would be able to gain more information. Every little information is a bunch of credits for him. There is no way that he would let such a chance fly by.

    He thought for a moment and said.

    "Why don¡¯t you make me? If one of yourckeys has ability they cane and try to take off the mask."

    His tone contained a hint of arrogance and his eyes which are the only visible parts of his face are being looked at by the thirty members condescendingly.

    "There are notckeys, they are my disciples. Anyway, since you want to experience something like that I would like to see what you are truly capable of." The man in the front replied and gestured for one of them toe forward.

    A mutated human who has crystal protrusions on the shoulders and knees came forward and looked at Sam arrogantly.

    He disappeared into a red sh as he arrived right in front of Sam and made his move.

    Sam didn¡¯t use any elemental energy as he defended the attacks. He is using the eye technique while defending and the fight almost seemed like he was being pummeled. But not a single clean hitnded. Sam¡¯s hands are fluid and dexterous as he parried every single hit.

    Meanwhile, the eyes are looking at the energy waves that areing from the opponent¡¯s body. Even though he could see that the energy waves are also a form of spiritual energy there is a slight change in the energy as if it was polluted, it almost stank of blood.

    It is almost like he didn¡¯t even care about the blows that areing, but the opponent couldn¡¯t see the expression behind his mask, all he could see is that Sam is unable to dodge.

    "Hmph, with this pathetic strength, you dared toe to our camp alone? It must be a suicide mission."

    As he said that, his fists that are already blood red due to his mutation glowed slightly and he punched towards the face. Sam noticed the energy waves and frowned.

    He immediately brought both his hands to cover his face.

    He took the full brunt to his hands and the fist made the ck clothes covering his arms rip into shreds and even the shockwave of the collision hit straight at the mask and cracks appeared on the outer surface.

    When the remainingpanions of the opponent saw this, they thought Sam was finished, but all they saw is that there are some red bruises on Sam¡¯s arms. But that is it, there is no additional damage.

    Sam took a step back and took off his mask and looked at the opponent.

    He looked at the opponent and his eyes gotten a lot colder as he jumped forward. This time, his speed changed. There no additional glow on the skin, but they could still feel the aura that the fist carried.

    Sam used all his physical strength and started throwing punches at the opponent.

    The first punchnded squarely on the guard the opponent put up against his face. And the situation is almost the same.

    He skids back as he created long streaks on the ground with his feet and his arms are extremely numb. He could feel the slight cracks that appeared on the bones.

    The bruise is much worsepared to Sam¡¯s and even was even pushed back a lot morepared to his opponent, before he could express his anger, he was forced to defend, this time though his body is glowing with a bloody light as he blocked the punch that was about tond on the temple.

    He blocked the punch with the hand and Sam was stunned. Because the recoil of the hit made his hand go numb, the surface of the hand of the opponent almost seemed like a steel te for him.

    Taking this small opening, he was once again pushed into the defensive position. The opponent¡¯s speed, strength, and defense all increased beyond reason and it doesn¡¯t seem to be his full power.

    Sam once again focused on using his eye technique and the spiritual energy wavesing off of the opponent are too muddy for him. It is almost like red soil dust flying in the air. He frowned at this and left another opening in his defense that made the opponentnd a hit on his chest.

    For some reason Sam is pretty pissed, he looked at the opponent and his speed increased, he threw used wind elemental energy and the physical strengthbined as he moved. His feet almost didn¡¯t even touch the ground when he reached the opponent and his punch full of wind elemental energynded on that guy¡¯s face. The skin tore open and the whole temple was mangled with the tailwind of the punch creating the wind des.

    Sam didn¡¯t even give him a chance to defend, he used only boxing to make as short of work of this guy. He didn¡¯t even cross the boxing rules as he only stood in front and only punched on the face and the upper body. All his hitsnded, not a single attack was blocked.

    He didn¡¯t even keep his guard up all the time as he made all the strength of the opponent useless with his skill.

    What is the point if he can pack a mean punch when he cannot evennd it? The opponent swung his punches left and right, clearly he is specialized in fists, but to his dismay, none of themnded. Even worse is the fact that every punch has been causing more damage in the form of counter punches.

    Suddenly, thepanions of that person are all looking at the scene in amazement. From the start, the fight is mostly on theirpanion¡¯s side, but it seems like Sam is not giving his all. There is noparison between the initial and the present situation.

    At this moment, Sam felt something and dodged to the side.

    A blood-colored wind de shed across the position he was previously in.

    He looked at the crowd and spotted the one who has thrown the attack. He spat to the side with a clear show of disdain, even the man in the front looked at that guy with a hint of anger.

    Sam once again looked at the opponent who has cuts and bruises all over. But his body is still strong and standing stiff.

    This is the best defense he ever encountered within the Nascent stage cultivators.

    All his hits would have made someone incapable of fighting or at least made some critical damage. But now they could at most cause the opponent severe pain.

    But Sam didn¡¯t back down, he could still win and he could have killed him any time he wanted.

    Still, he gave him the time, he would take the time so that he can gauge all the parameters.

    As he was about to make a move, he noticed that something is off, the eyes and the crystals of the opponent are changing a bit and both of them are turning blood red.

    He once again used the eye technique and saw that the energy waves arepletely blood red too. His frown got deeper. Then he noticed that the opponent took a ss bottle of blood and started drinking it. The aura changed a bit and he cold. But he just stood there and watched.

    After the opponent finished the blood, he became berserk and ran towards Sam madly. Sam dodged the attacks like a slippery eel and coiled around the opponent like a snake as he took him to the ground.

    He held him a guillotine and used the observation ability. He started checking the body of the person and noticed that the spiritual energy and even core are different.

    The aura of the opponent kept on increasing. Sam felt irritated as the resistance increased. The stress on his muscles increased. But he didn¡¯t let go, the lightning element activated and he let the lightning ravage the body of the opponent.

    Just because he is not using his full power to doing damage, this guy managed to survive.

    At this moment, someone the wind de and the fireball that is also in blood-colored came towards him.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but dodge. He could have finished his opponent off, but he doesn¡¯t want to show all his cards right here.

    The transcendent stage cultivator came forward at this moment and held his disciple. He took out something that looked like a seed and fed it to his opponent who is almost burnt ck, but when he examined he noticed that none of his vitals are damaged, he looked at Sam in faint surprise and said.

    "Why don¡¯t you show your full power? You could have killed him in an instant." He asked Sam.

    Sam only smirked at him and whistled into the air, the bee puppet that is in the hiding came to him. He took it and stored it away before giving a grin to the leader and was ready to move away.

    The transcendent stage cultivator wanted to make a move, but Sam actually used the transference scroll and disappeared from the spot.

    But before he disappeared, he threw an energy cell towards the barracks that are far away from them.

    The transcendent immediately felt that the situation would go wrong if he didn¡¯t stop that energy cell and a blood-colored liquid appeared in his hands as it shot forward and hit the energy cell away.

    But before the energy cell could fall down and more than a hundred rooms directly sted into smithereens with more than two hundred rooms affected by the shock wave.

 Chapter 532: Reporting

    Sam reappeared in the middle of the path that is connecting the enemy base camp and his camp. He is very near to his camp. He heaved a sigh of relief but felt a little regretful that he has to use the scroll.

    Now, there are only four scrolls left on him. But he knew that this is inevitable.

    He has a choice to either to kill him or to escape. But to kill him, he has to use the more valuable cards like the hair strand or the guardian of the meteorite sand ind. Or some other trump card. They are also consumables and he shouldn¡¯t use them carelessly.

    So, he just left a gift for them and escaped. He knew that the energy cell wouldn¡¯t do enough damage to clear the whole base camp, but it is enough for him to at least make them feel a pinch for the loss.

    He reached the destination within a few hours.

    As soon as he entered the camp, he went looking for Yodha, but he learned that he is in the General¡¯s tent at this moment, he immediately went there.

    Inside the general¡¯s tent all themanders are already in a meeting and they seemed to be extremely serious.

    At this moment, there is a letter on the main table that was sent by Sam. After Sam sent the spy back, they didn¡¯t directly reveal the contents to all themanders, rather it was only done for the General and Yodha and they both contemted whether to share this news earlier orter.

    Due to this contemtion, they are currently having a meeting and are discussing on how to deal with it.

    At this moment, a soldier came inside the tent and saluted as he said.

    "Soldier Sam is back from the mission and requested an immediate meeting with the general."

    Everyone was surprised, some of them sneered as they thought Sam came running as they didn¡¯t expect that he would be able toe back this fast if he really investigated anything.

    Some of them are anticipating the news regarding this supposed experimentation.

    Sam came in a saluted them with a ck expression. Before taking out the dead bodies of the Nagas who mixed the blood and cing their spatial storages on the table, apart from that, he took out a crystal tablet with a recording crystal attached to it, and ced the remaining recording crystals on the table.

    "These are all the evidences gathered and any form of information that I could obtain was here. One of the recording crystals contains the battle I fought with one of these special soldiers and he seemed to be the elite of them all.

    The person who is in charge of the group is happened to be a transcendent cultivator and I don¡¯t know what kind of element he uses. All the soldiers addressed him as Master."

    With that he took a step back, General and some regimentmanders started looking through these things and soon the whole room is busy.

    There is on extra spatial ring and when took the contents they are a bit confused. There are some ss bottles that contained blood inside them.

    "This ring was from the soldier I fought, I stole the spatial ring off his hand and broke the contract forcefully when we are fighting. I was able to seed in thest minute."

    After checking all the physical objects, they went to the scrolls and data and some healers went to check the corpses of the five blood mixers.

    One thing Sam regretted is not collecting one of those flowers and the body of that mutated warriors.

    Themanders all looked at the videos that are showing the whole process of these pod sessions. They also saw the body structures of these people and finally the battle video Sam testing the opponent with increasing his power bit by bit.

    All of them studied this and went into silence. They don¡¯t know what to talk for a moment. They didn¡¯t know that something like this is happening and they estimated that the abilities of these people are quite high.

    If there are really five thousand of those people, then the situation is not that great.

    "I was able to destroy around two to three hundred of those pods, but that was my limit, the Transcendent cultivator you saw in the video already came and I didn¡¯t think it was wise of me to stay there."

    "How did you escape?" One of the regimentmander asked this question. Sam looked at him and said.

    "That would involve one of my secrets, I would like it if we don¡¯t talk about that."

    "But how do we not know that you are not one of them, you might as well be one of them and trying to lure us into a trap. May be all of this is a bluff and the matter ispletely different than what is happening.

    After all, how were you able to enter the base and record all this; that is not your backyard."

    Sam looked at him coldly and replied.

    "Just like how all these people know that you are truly loyal to the empire and you really are the regimentmander and not some imposter trying to deny what you saw in the video and trying to make all of them side tracked."

    Everyone was dumbfounded at Sam¡¯s words. He turned to the General and said.

    "Sir, I was given a task and I fulfilled it sessfully. If you really want to just deny the facts of what is really happening and even try to pin the me on me to justify your delusions, then please with all due respect do so. Because, at the end of the day it is not me who is going to lose the war. It would be the whole empire.

    Because from what I saw, even though it is only half a regiment, your soldiers are not on par with them. Just one hundred of them will tear through your regiment like a sheet of paper and kill every single one of them.

    The whole nascent stage battle was already in their bag."

    All the people were focused on Sam at this moment, nobody expected him to be this blunt. With those words, he just walked away.

    Meanwhile, back in the camp.

    The transcendent stage cultivator who is in charge of the experiments is checking on the losses he incurred.

    Sam really did destroy around three hundred pods.

    Some of them by the st, some of them with the poison.

    He walked to the grey wilted flowers in the first row of rooms.

    In ce of the red flower that should have been in blood colored, there is arge grey wilted flower and inside the flower there is a dead body that waspletely sucked dry. Except for the crystal scales that now became real crystals that fell off of the body, there is nothing but the outer skin that covered a skeleton. All the muscle and blood are gone.

    This is the situation for the next two hundred or so. In fact, the st did less damage. As for the remaining poisoned flowers, they are notpletely destroyed.

    After all, Sam¡¯s blood mixture was added to almost five hundred of them, but only two hundred worked the rest of them are able to escape. But they did take some damage, their blood red skin tone was reced by grey skin tone, at least in some ces. It is almost like they are patching grey all over their bodies. As for the people that he added the poison manually, the result is not as expected. He was only able to stop the pod session, he wasn¡¯t able to kill them or harm them.

    When their master asked them about what happened, they said that they felt the flower started sucking the energy out of them instead of giving them and they tried to stop the energy flow and get out of it.

    And they seeded in the struggle for some reason while the other died. It seems like it is mostly rted to the metal strength.

    After all, in the same circumstances two hundred other died while the remaining three hundred people seeded in doing so.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know that three hundred people escaped his trap, he gave a conservative number to the general just in case. But he didn¡¯t expect that he would be right.

    After calcting the losses and the situation, the master couldn¡¯t help but grit his teeth in anger. He destroyed his barrack in rage and only after all that destruction did he calm down.

    For Sam these people are just some soldiers he killed. But for this master, they are his treasures, hundreds of millions of spirit stones are used to perform this project. Decades took for the research and he was barely able to seed recently and he kept everything else he had on the line to achieve this.

    As the time came for him to prove his creations, there was such a situation.

    He really wants to kill Sam right this moment.

 Chapter 533: Evaluation

    Sam walked out after saying what he wanted to say and didn¡¯t wait for anyone to reply. He did his job, there is no reason for him to stay there and deal with the hypocrisy and delusions of these people.

    After he came back to his barracks, he leisurely sat down and looked at some of the items he stole from the spatial rings. There is a blood-colored seed that is the size of a quail egg, a bottle of blood that the person drank, some scrolls, and some notes of the research from the blood mixers.

    There is also some information on the changes in the body.

    This process is called Blood Mutation and it increases the quality of the blood inside the body to increase strength and power. The spiritual energy that was morphed into this is called blood spiritual energy.

    These people havepletely different bodies and constitutions after the mutation happened.

    There is nothing in their bodies that is the same as before except for the appearance.

    Their muscles, their strength, their bone structure, their meridianwork, everything has changed in one way or the other.

    In short, this mutation will cause them to abandon their current cultivation methods and they have to cultivate differently.

    These people are trained like this since their awakening and the flower pod is responsible for filtering the energy from the blood and aiding their bodies.

    They have to use the flower pod until they reach Nascent stage power, after that they can evolve themselves and grow with just the direct consumption of the blood.

    The blood inside the ss bottle is also not something that was altered or modified, it ispletely normal blood, but that blood belonged to the humans.

    In the documents he had on hand, there is also said that the human blood is the most effective to the consumption, followed by the humans who are Naga offspring and then the Half Naga¡¯s blood and finally the beast blood.

    This is something that Sam didn¡¯t expect. As for using such arge amount of beast blood with a small amount of human blood that is to nurture the flower pod.

    The flower pod who is not only responsible for injecting the purified energy from the blood but also responsible for protecting their bodies from excess mutation needs some energy too.

    The beast¡¯s blood is to give it the energy so that it wouldn¡¯t prey on the person within the flower.

    Sam felt like his poison might have quite some effect on the blood flower. He guessed that the corroding and decaying effects of both poisons would have made the flower want more energy and killed the person inside.

    Actually, his guess was correct but not entirely, after all only half of the flowers are dead and the rest of them managed to escape the situation before they died.

    As he was reading the reports and all, he sensed that someone ising. He has activated a formation that could sense othersing to him.

    So, he immediately stored all the items away and justid down on his bed as if he was resting.

    Yodha directly came in and asked.

    "How was the mission this time?"

    "I already told everything there, what else could there be?"

    "Come with me, I want your opinion on something."

    Sam stood up and followed behind him and both of them went into the woods nearby in the middle of which arge open patch was cleared to make camping grounds. The ce is sorge that the forest they crossed over is smallpared to this, there are close to five thousand people and there are five colored tents here.

    They are red, blue, brown, white and finally purple.

    "This is the special division they talked about previously. These divisions are actually created by the Marshall and some of the Generals and previous generals, most of the time these five divisions act separately, and they are stationed near the imperial capital, they will be only deployed when the war became extremely serious and we are on verge of being defeated.

    These people are elites and specifically trained. Most of them are warrior mages and the rest are mages. They are solely based on the elements they use.

    There is a lot morepetition between themselves and every time they had to merge and fight, it was always difficult, since I became a nascent stage cultivator, I always came here to find sparring partners.

    All of them are mostlyte-stage and only a few are middle stage, the initial stages, and even Grand realm cultivators are still in the imperial capital¡¯s training camp.

    Right now, the main teams of the five of them are deployed.

    Many of these people are someone I surpassed and I am the only one whomands them and they will only follow mymands without any friction and prejudice they had between themselves.

    They just arrived and I need to practice battle formations with them. Since you fought with those weird creatures, help me judge these people¡¯s capabilities against the enemies."

    Sam doesn¡¯t have any choice. He just agreed. Apart from the tents, there are several formations within the forest that are used for the training. At this point, it is not even suitable for calling this a forest. It is a forest is all a ruse.

    One of the formations is simr to that of the formation furnace in which the fire elemental mages and warrior mages are practicing, there is a formation that has both ice and water properties, this is the formation of the water division. They are not a strict water element division, rather there are some ice element users too, the earth division is not using a formation, they are everywhere all over the camp.

    As for the wind element they are also using a formation, but they are not using arge one that could amodate hundreds, rather there are very few people inside and they are using smaller formations like that.

    As for lightning division, they are mostly practicing individually.

    They just arrived, but they already made so many preparations.

    One could easily guess this is not just prepared, this might as well be the training camp they used before.

    As all of them are practicing and also doing sparring; the leaders of the respective divisions are all supervising their training.

    Yodha whistled loudly after they toured through the camp once and all the people in charge of the respective training all gathered towards them.

    From every division, five people came and as for the lightning division six people came, the sixth one is Arman.

    Arman was sent to this division by the authorities, for every elemental user in the army, entering this division is a dream.

    They have different privileges, different stardom, andpletely different treatment.

    So many of them thought that it is Arman¡¯s honor to get this opportunity.

    But from the expression on his face, it wasn¡¯t. Arman is way too skilled to be dumped along with these people. Although Sam ravaged him mentally that period of time is also excessive training and he is an elite that is all above his peers on the home.

    "Spar with all you got, just refrain from killing and crippling. Apart from that do your best." Yodha said and took a step back along with Sam.

    Sam gestured for Arman toe towards him and both of them started talking.

    After hearing what Arman has to say, he lost all hope in these special divisions. Arman has said that he can fight three on one with these people. They are skilled and elite butpared to the blood mutants, they are just some paper tigers.

    Sam watched the sparring and was at least not bored, but after the fights are over, he marked a few of the twenty-five people.

    Two from each group, who has a chance at the blood mutants in a one on one.

    Apart from them, he marked one more person in each group who can be on par with them but with some improvements.

    As for the rest, he doesn¡¯t care. They wouldn¡¯t be able to endure the onught of the blood mutants.

    After everything was over, Yodha looked at Sam asking him to say something.

    Sam pursed his lips, he wanted to spare some dignity to Yodha and said.

    "It is better if we talk in private."

    With that, he walked backward and Yodha followed him.

    Sam told him his honest opinion on their capabilities and Yodha couldn¡¯t help but frown. He has some pride in these people but Sam is disregarding thempletely, of course, it is just some disappointment, not displeasure.

    Sam shouldn¡¯t mince his words at this moment, the war is right around the corner.

    Seeing Yodha¡¯s frown and tension, the twenty-five special division members are all anxious and when Yodha repeated Sam¡¯s words, they are all frowning in displeasure.

    After all, who will like being underestimated, particrly when they were told all their lives that they are some elites.

 Chapter 534: Advice

    When Yodha repeated Sam¡¯s words and wanted to discuss things with them on how to improve quickly, he was met with resistance and reluctance from the special divisions as they were not ready to ept such insultingments from someone who they never saw or heard of.

    When the lightning division people asked Arman about him, all he replied are a few words.

    "He is my Boss."

    From this, they knew that he might be someonepetent because even though these twenty-five people didn¡¯t fight against Arman, he has defeated quite a few people in the camp and almost destroyed every other elite other than these twenty-five people.

    Sam knew something like this would happen. These soldiers are fed with some bullshit all saying that they are so elite and strong and they did prove to be the elites in some battles, but thinking that they are the only elites there is, that is utter bullshit.

    He might not be able to beat them with a single strike, but nobody would get past the second strike and even if they did, they would they didn¡¯t do that.

    He wanted to leave the ce but was blocked by these people.

    Sam looked at Yodha and said.

    "I don¡¯t have the patience to deal with this. Ask them to let me go."

    The leader of the fire division said from the group.

    "You are not going anywhere unless you justify yourselves."

    "I have never seen a bunch of soldiers that worry about their fragile so much than they care about the uing war and that too when they were told that they are facing an enemy that is stronger than all the enemies they facedbined."

    Sam replied in a sarcastic manner.

    "Hmph, what do you know, you are just a rookie who is so full of himself just after getting some minor aplishments, you should never spew words that you couldn¡¯t take the responsibility of."

    Sam didn¡¯t bother with him and said to Yodha.

    "I am really tired off of your soldiers, that I am not sure I will hold back if I am fighting them. And I don¡¯t think it is a good choice if I did that as they wouldn¡¯t be able to heal their fragile hearts before they face the blood mutants.

    At least in their current situation, they might be able tost some time and do some damage if they are to sacrifice themselves.

    But from their words, they are too prideful to die on the battlefield and too pompous to think on their feet. The Blood mutants will feed on them like a lion feeds on a deer.

    Show them the video and let all of them see it, even after that they still want to trouble me, you can find me. But trust me, I won¡¯t hold back at all. Not even for a single second."

    Sam went back to his barrack after leaving his words once again.

    With Yodha around there is no way they would talk. All they could do is endure it in silence.

    "I will show a video of how these new enemies, I want all of you to see and estimate your own strengths. We need to think of a new way to see what we can do against them."

    With that Yodha took out the crystal tablets and the crystals. The videos went through all the people in charge of the divisions.

    After watching the video, they have extremely different expressions and thoughts.

    The people who are known to be battle maniacs are excited, the people who have a clear estimation of their own strength felt cold sweat all over their bodies. But most of them are still extremely delusional.

    Yodha couldn¡¯t help but shake his head in disappointment and sent a message back to the General. He then went to Sam¡¯s barracks.

    He is a bit frustrated and worried. He didn¡¯t expect that enemy would have such a big card under their sleeves and it seems to be an extremely difficult one too.

    When he entered the room, he sat down on the other end of the bed and said.

    "Do you have some wine?"

    Sam smiled and took out the crystal bamboo jars and gave one to Yodha.

    "What¡¯s the matter? Did youe to a consensus yet?" Sam asked as Yodha chugged the jar of wine and finished half of it in a single gulp.

    "Consensus? With them? They are some prideful dickheads. I haven¡¯t been this pressured in a long time. This might as well be the price to pay for me being the youngest battalionmander."

    "Are youining or are you bragging?"

    Yodha chuckled and asked.

    "Do you have any ideas?"

    "Why are you asking me?"

    "Of course, who should I ask? You are the only calm one at the whole camp. Even the general is nervous."

    "Of course, I would be calm. What is the point of me being nervous? To be frank, I am not even from this empire."

    "Now you are. Alright. The first batch of goods from our factory are alreadying here. You are about to receive the first share of your profits."

    "That would be great, it has been a long time since I have seen any ie of my own. How much am I earning?"

    "Around two million."

    "Two million? Seems like the general is impressed by it so much."

    "Of course. But they are not too many. He will buy more in the middle of a war. The production is still going on."

    "I am sure he will and he will order them so many that the production will not meet the demand."

    "How do you know that?" Yodha was surprised at how sure Sam is.

    "When the blood mutants meet the special division on the first day of the war, they will lose so badly that half of them would die while the other half will flee. After that all he could think of a weapon of destruction that has no control like this grenade and he will throw them at bulks that it would not see the friend or foe.

    You have seen them active one by one. But the destruction they carry if they are too many is not something you could fathom.

    But what they will realizeter is that these grenades are not much help to them. They might kill a couple of hundred of the mutants but after that couple of hundred deaths, they will see to avoid it.

    I know it is hard to contain the explosion and they will know too, but it is easy to avoid it once they knew that they can avoid it, it would be very easy for them.

    Unless you want to break the rules and kill them all with a stronger cultivator, then this war is your loss."

    Yodha didn¡¯t show any expression and said.

    "Why are you so sure?"

    "Because it is showing Yodha. Your soldiers might deny it or even the general might think he has a chance just to fool himself to be confident. And from the letter I sent, you might believe that they will only stay in the forest and the border.

    The forest is indeed an advantageous point, but it is small, you must have forgotten it. It can barely maintain an ambush of five hundred people. What do you think the rest of the four thousand and so people would do?

    Do you think they will stay like that?

    The transcendent cultivator that made them, do you know what I saw in his eyes?

    Hunger. He is hungry for achievement. Those of the eyes of a man who is tirelessly working for so much time and waiting to reap the results of his hard work. At least that is what I thought so.

    ording to my estimation, if there is any chance that they knew that the special divisions are here, they will send the mutants right at their faces. The straight path between the base and the forest that was never crossed by the rubrum empire will be crossed now and they will march with these savage soldiers to take the lives and get their glory.

    I hope you are prepared for that."

    Yodha became sober. He knew that the enemies are superior, even he had a faint hope in his heart. He was also blindly trusting towards the information Sam has given that these people will be stationed in the forest and they still have the upper hand. But now, he understood that the situation is serious than he thought.

    "Why are you so calm?" Yodha asked once again.

    "I already told you. I am not from this empire to worry."

    "But you would be dead if we lose the war. There is a high chance, no matter what means you have on you."

    "There is no one in the empire that could kill me. The only one who came close is the guardian and that too because he has space element. But he missed the golden chance and if it happens again, I have more than half a dozen ways to get away."

    "Do you have any way to deal with this situation?"

    "Of course, I do."

    Yodha stood up abruptly and pointed his finger at him as he yelled.

    "Why didn¡¯t say anything?"

    "There are two reasons, first one is that you never asked and the second one is that themanders wouldn¡¯t believe me."

    Yodha¡¯s finger is shaking in anger and he almost wants to beat the crap out of him.

 Chapter 535: Special divisions

    Sam sent Yodha way and sat in contemtion to think of a n.

    The only thing they have against the mutants is the numbers. And Sam is someone who used numbers to even kill a Consummate realm cultivator.

    But for that, the people have to be in control and they have to obeymands properly, which might not be the strong suit of these special division soldiers.

    Even then, he was not disappointed. He prepared a n and gave it to Yodha, who took it to the meeting the very next day.

    After some time, Sam was summoned to the meeting. He thought themanders might have agreed, but to his surprise, they didn¡¯t even open the scroll he sent, rather there are five extremely hostile gauges that almost bore through his face and reached his skull.

    All five of them are wearing the special division uniforms but they are not Nascent stage cultivators. Apart from the five of them, there are another five who wore the same type of dress with a faint difference and their cultivation seemed to be very high.

    Yodha who saw his confusion whispered.

    It turned out that the first five are themanders of the special divisions and the second five are the instructors or trainers of the special divisions. Sam could more or less guess what happened.

    "You think you are some bigshot due to some minor achievements? How arrogant are you to think that there is no one who is better than you? Do you know how much the special division soldiers put in to be the elites they are?"

    One of the instructors started scolding as soon as he entered.

    "Why bother telling him, if he really put that much hard work, and trained that hard, would he even be amon soldier now. Boy, you might have some abilities, but you don¡¯t have the reason or ability to look down upon our students."

    The scolding went on and the final instructor¡¯s turn came and he said.

    "Why are you even talking to him? He doesn¡¯t even have balls to prove his words in the special division, he didn¡¯t even dare to take up the challenge. There is no need for us to stoop down to his level."

    Finally, Sam heaved a sigh of relief, all of them are done.

    He looked at the general and spoke in an apologetic tone.

    "I am sorry Sir, I must have overestimated my judgment and abilities and did something I shouldn¡¯t have. I haveplete faith that the special divisions are going to seed and bring glory to our army, if you can, please return my scroll and I will go back and reflect on myself."

    The five instructors nodded their heads proudly as if they are showing they approved such meek behavior.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know what their problem is, they are still thinking of their stupid pride and face even when their students are on verge of dying, he suddenly felt a tinge of pity for all the five thousand special division soldiers.

    This situation also confirmed one thing, most Nagas are big-headed fools.

    He took his scroll and went back to his tent with a sad face and after reaching the tent, he threw it into his storage and sat on his bed leisurely as he took some fruits and started eating them.

    His face was full of pleasure as the juicy flesh of fruits got crushed between his teeth.

    After a few minutes and a dozen fruitster, Yodha came rushing into the tent, and seeing Sam¡¯s behavior, he heaved a sigh of relief.

    He thought, Sam really became docile due to pressure. Even though he understood that is not actually possible, he still had a slight panic.

    "You know how to act. But what about the n?" He asked in a worried tone.

    "What is their n?"

    "They are saying that we have numbers. Apart from the special division, the number of the Nascent stage cultivators on our side is high. Since it is the battle of the same level, they believe these numbers will make a difference."

    "Yeah, they will. The mutants will take more time to kill them, we can use that time to evacuate the city so that at least the citizens will be safe."

    Yodha choked on his words. He looked at Sam and said.

    "Why are you so damn pessimistic?"

    "I am not being pessimistic, I am being honest. The number means nothing in this situation. A thousand sheep cannot do anything for a single line much less a whole pride of lions. But if there are a hundred wolves of the same pack, even the lion wouldn¡¯t be reckless enough to get in.

    Do you know why?"

    Yodha shook his head. He only knew of the normal animals, it was hard for them to exist in this ce and most of them are extinct, but he knew their names and some appearances.

    "Wolves wouldn¡¯t just stay together like sheep, they hunt together, they live together, theymunicate, they are a whole family and knew of theirpanions as they know of themselves, they will unite under a single leader, the alpha of the pack and the stronger members of the pack so that they can hunt a bigger animal.

    They would never lust for some individual glory, the killing blow will almost be done by alpha or beta wolf, but none of them would get jealous or scheme within themselves. They are loyal to their kind to the bones.

    That is the exact reason for the failure of your soldiers.

    They are not like wolves, they are sheep.

    The sheep will follow the one in the front, but that is not because they are epting him as a leader, that is because they want to find food, more food, and even more food for themselves.

    All they care about is how more they atepared to the rest of the flock.

    Your soldiers are the same, they are like sheep, they want merits, they want achievements, it is not wrong. But the crisis came, they have to unite. What is the point of them getting away from the pack, when they are hunting a bear and go after some pheasant or hare.

    Your soldiersck some serious training."

    Yodha looked at him intently and he is thinking a lot.

    He was thinking back to see any of his memories of his regarding the special divisions, canpare to Sam¡¯s example and he became disappointed.

    He left the tent and his shoulders are drooping a bit.

    The days passed and Yodha tried to convince all themanders to look at Sam¡¯s strategy at least once, he took a look and he felt like there might be a chance if they followed it, but no one agreed.

    Soon, the day of war came and there is also news that the five hundred of Nascent stage cultivators of the enemies right now stationed at thousand meters away from their camp.

    They could literally see them and their tents from the camp.

    Themanders are still making ns for their march towards the forest.

    They thought that since they got information that the blood mutants would take that forest, they are defending it, but they didn¡¯t expect that they would send five hundred of them right in front of their faces.

    The regimentmanders and the battalionmanders all left to their camps a few days ago and they are nowmunicating by some special means. Anyway, even the farthest camp can be reached within a day, so it is not hard for themunication and the notice they got is that there are many other ces that the blood mutants appeared.

    For some viges to cities at the borders, there are hundred blood mutants at every vige and there are five hundred mutants for every city.

    There are five such important points and all of those important points have signs of these blood mutants after counting, there are approximately fifteen hundred mutants that are deployed.

    Every ce they targeted has more soldiers than them and they are extremely outnumbered, but the mutants are extremely confident.

    Yodha has already left the responsibility ofmanding the five special divisions, he did train them in thebined formations and such, but he didn¡¯t lead them into the battlefield andmand them.

    He believed in Sam for some reason. Maybe because it is his trust as a business partner, but because he felt like Sam is mysterious.

    At this moment, the special division soldiers are already deployed to the five ces. There are five thousand members but only half of them are deployed and for every ce that was being targeted by the blood mutants, there are special division members.

    They outnumbered them easily. They deployed five hundred members to every point of invasion. Even though one of them only has hundred blood mutants and another one has one two hundred and fifty, the third point has two hundred.

    Apart from that, the two cities have five hundred members.

    The special division members moved in secret, their n is to overpower the smaller groups with numbers and destroy therger groups by surrounding from sides and rear. In their heads, this is a perfect n.

 Chapter 536: Battle

    Sam stood at the vanguard of the normal soldiers. He was stationed here along with Arman.

    He and along with these few hundred soldiers has to ¡¯test¡¯ the strength of the blood mutants.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel amused at this.

    At this moment, Yodha came to him and said.¡¯

    "I tried my best, but they don¡¯t take this seriously, they still held blind hope that the special divisions can change the oue of the war. I am a bit afraid."

    "Don¡¯t worry, the special division might not be able to beat them, but they can still escape if they want to. Maybe they will retreat and regroup in the camp. I hope the formation of the camp is strong enough to hold for a few days."

    There are only a few minutes till the war started and Sam is on the forefront of the battlefield. As soon as there was any movement from the blood mutants they have to attack. If there is no movement, they have to wait until the superiors give them a signal."

    Sam could see the camp of the blood mutants from far away.

    After speaking to Yodha for a moment, he sent him away and looked at the situation calmly. After a few minutes, the blood mutants finally made their move.

    But they are not barging in by running, instead, they are in a rectangr grid-like formation as they marched forward in unison.

    Themander gave the signal at the moment and Sam charged along with the troops towards the slowly marching mutants.

    There are more than a thousand people attacking the five hundred mutants. This is essentially the entire Nascent battalion and all they are using them is to test them.

    As the two sides shed, the blood mutants still didn¡¯t move away from their formations. They are marching just like they previously did, it is just that they started attacking the soldiers from their position without anyrge movements.

    They threw all kinds of ranged attacks. The wind type, the water type, the earth, the fire. But all of them are in the blood-red color. Even when they used the earthen attacks that used the ground below, the blood-red pattern appeared on the rocks.

    The attacks are extremely powerful and many soldiers fell just after the first wave, they couldn¡¯t take the intensity of the attacks and many of them suffered a one-hit kill.

    The rest were able to barely defend and most of them did so by dodging.

    The formation of the mutants is as solid as it was when they started the march.

    Even though the numbers are high on this site, they are still being pushed back.

    In fact, the wave of soldiers couldn¡¯t even meet the rear lines.

    The formation stayed like that until Sam and Arman joined the fray.

    At first, they didn¡¯t attack at all and only defended. But the situation changed when a person who is at thest line of the formation saw him and yelled.

    "He is our target kill him."

    Sam looked at him and noticed that he is one of the thirty people who came along with the master, he seems to be the one in charge of these people.

    He also noticed that there are a few more people from that thirty within the formation and they also looked at him at the same time.

    All of a sudden, the mutants all only have one thing in their minds and that is to kill Sam.

    As for the rest of the soldiers, they are just fodder in front of them.

    Sam and Arman already jumped into the middle of the formation and all the mutants are charging towards him, but most of them are held up by the soldiers. Even though the soldiers are weak, they are not weak to the point that they would collectively die in a single move.

    The people who could die like that are actually dead. The people who are standing now can barely take it, but even then, they don¡¯t have any chance that they could kill the mutant.

    But still, they are trying desperately.

    This at least gave Sam and Arman some time so they can fight it out and the mutants wouldn¡¯t have time to gang up on him by too much.

    Sam took his two swords and attacked the mutant beside him.

    The two swords impaled into the chest and there is a reaction from the des, the blood of these mutants seemed to be so nourishing to the blood iron.

    When Sam took the swords back, the wound made by the reaper was healed, but the executioner left the gash and there is grey corrosion around the flesh of the mutant.

    The fight began. Sam used the wind element mostly and only used the lightning element for kicking the opponents. He used both the elements efficiently as he retaliated against the group of mutants that are attacking them.

    Arman is trying to fight one on one mostly and he seemed to hold an advantage.

    The battle is going on intensely and Sam never took more than a minute or two to kill a mutant.

    Within ten minutes, there are five bodies around him and the sixth one was just about to fall down.

    He noticed that the swords are bing denser and the blood essence they are absorbing are also too pure.

    The blood mutants are really useful to him. They contain the purest blood essence and if their blood iron was collected, that would be some finest metal to make weapons, but since he already has such weapons, there is no need for him to do more, all he has to do is use them as supplements.

    Sam is fighting multiple opponents, while the rest of the soldiers are dying quickly, soon only three to four hundred people are remaining of the first thousand and they are in a state of panic, all they want to do is retreat and run as far as they can.

    The casualties on the mutant¡¯s side are far fewer. There only twenty people or so who are killed and half of them are killed by Sam, some of them by Arman and the remaining are killed by the suicide attacks of some soldiers who managed to do so in their desperation.

    But the remaining blood mutants are notpletely out of damage. The ganging up was not able to kill them, but they did receive some damage and all of them are trying to drink the blood to supplement and recover the injuries.

    Sam and Arman exchanged a nce and got ready.

    This is the best situation, they cannot let this go.

    They abandoned their current shes and directly went to the weakest of the mob. There is to not even kill them, it is to make some critical blows and the rest of them would be able to kill it.

    At least, that is what they can do until the order to retreat was received.

    The remaining soldiers who are on theirst legs also followed his lead and ganged up three on one against the injured soldiers by abandoning their current battles.

    The mutants were surprised, they didn¡¯t think that they would make such a move. Before they could react, the casualty count increased and raised drastically.

    Sam and Arman are fast and four soldiers are following each of them. They used lightning element and made critical blows. Every blow could kill a normal Nascent and their energy is draining. Even Sam who has ungodly reserves of spiritual energy is feeling a pinch.

    The four people following them are responsible for not only finishing the opponent but also iming their spatial rings and the bodies.

    The mutants are the result of experimentation, their bodies might give them some sort of lead to deal with the situation.

    At this moment, there was a horn sounding from the camp, all the remaining soldiers were stunned and relieved at the same time, they jumped back and at the same time, all of them took the grenades into their two hands.

    Two grenades each. They threw all the grenades at the mutants and ran back for their lives.

    The mutants are stunned by the objects that areing towards them and they seemed to have no intention of chasing the soldiers down.

    They started using spells and throw the grenades back, but the grenades sted before their spells hit them and blue mes raged all over the mutants.

    Some of them who are right in the full range of explosion and blocked it with his hand, had his hand severed.

    The mutants that are in good condition barely suffered some bruises and damages from the pins that came out. The pins are also given by Sam. He has carried them just in case he has to make a trap and they are made in Sam¡¯s city, where they would only be made by poison.

    Sam who used the wind element to jump right before the explosion as he retreated, used his eye technique and zoomed to the maximum to see any effects, the grenades are of an only normal standard grenade made of methane and the pin grenade.

    Sam¡¯s main object of the check is the pins that are embedded into the bodies of mutants and small grey patches that are surrounding the pins.

    He has a smirk on his face and he ran back with Arman and the remaining soldiers who are trying their best to run for their lives.

 Chapter 537: Talk with Yodha

    Sam retreated along with other soldiers and even the mutants decided to halt and check their losses. The first thing they did is drink some blood and heal their injuries and then sort out the dead bodies.

    There are around eighty members dead. And more than half of their bodies are missing. After feeling sorry for themselves for a bit and trying to vent their frustrations on the corpses of their enemies, they started looking for the spatial rings of the enemies.

    But to their dismay, there are very few people who have spatial rings on them.

    As they checked, they realized that almost all of the dead bodies¡¯ hands are severed and in fact, some bodies are even missing.

    There are barely twenty spatial rings left out of seven hundred, this is something they didn¡¯t expect one bit.

    They looked through the rings and took out the grenades.

    Now they have twenty normal methane grenades and twenty pin grenades. They are examining them and one of them has even pressed the trigger foolishly right in his hand and lost not only his both hands, but he was also thrown back with his chest and face mangled.

    He screamed hysterically in pain, one of hispanions took some blood and started feeding him.

    Now they are all wary of the grenades.

    After storing the grenades, they went on to do the next important thing, to replenish their rations. They have to increase the stocks of their blood.

    So, they started collecting blood from all the human soldiers that are lying on the ground.

    Even though there are too many humans in the Naga Loka and even the rubrum empire, they cannot just collect the blood as they pleased, they have to find an alternative, even the people they used for experimentation are all death row inmates.

    There is no way they would have arge supply of them.

    Sam who is standing at the camp is looking at the scene with the eye technique. He used the eye technique to its limit and finally found some sort of weakness, although it is faint it might be useful.

    He met with Yodha and said.

    "Didn¡¯t I tell you that you would lose? Seven hundred and eight soldiers in exchange for seventy to eighty lives and there are only two of the main group members and the main group that has thirty members are far more powerful and I took them on myself.

    If they are still there andmanding them, you would have already lost all these people.

    I really pity you guys, what a waste of lives, apart from that, you guys are even giving them resources, they will drink the blood themselves and the bloodhounds will feast on the flesh and bones of the soldiers.

    It is as if you guys are worried that they are not strong enough.

    If I were you, I would n to evacuate all the citizens in the city and destroy the mines discreetly. After all, it would be hard to retake the city once it was gone, so it would be better to destroy the mine than let it supply to the enemies."

    His voice was rxed and calm but there are faint hints of mocking in his tone. But what can he do, if the situation goes on like this, then they would surely be in trouble.

    At this moment, Yodha got a notice, he looked at Sam and said.

    "The Special divisions are moving, five hundred of them. Themanders are saying that is their vulnerable time and since they wouldn¡¯t recover that fast, this would be the best time to fight."

    "Do you honestly believe this, Battalion Commander Yodha? At first, I thought, humans are unique creatures, they are petty and unnecessarily prideful when they should not be like that. Now I understand that it is a trait that is not too unique to humans.

    Now I also understand, why all the other races in the universe condemn the Nagas, you guys pretend to be all noble high, and mighty, but you are no different from human, yet you try so hard to prove that you are not, but enving them, fucking them till they are dead and treating them like they are the vermin.

    At least, in this regard, humans are better than you, they would at least look down on their own kind to make themselves good and when they see something superior to them, they will crave for it, lust for it, but still ept that it is superior.

    I am quite disappointed Yodha. All those young men in the special division and their bright futures all ruined by the stupid pride of your own people. What a great army, I should say.

    After that, if you want my help, it wouldn¡¯t be for free. You would need much more than just credits and honor to get me working."

    With those words, he left. There is a smirk on his face as he looked at the expression on Yodha¡¯s face.

    Yodha is feeling shame for the whole race at this moment. He never really cared about the differences between the races and at the same time, he never cared about very and all the other aspects that Sam has mentioned.

    He was raised in the army where the differences are not shown, at least there were none in his presence, but now that Sam mentioned it, he could see what is happening. The current disagreement of themanders towards Sam¡¯s words is the best case of these differences.

    Themanders are so reluctant to ept that their long time work of training the special division members is less than mere fodder in Sam¡¯s mind. They couldn¡¯t ept it and they don¡¯t want to listen to a human¡¯s words.

    That is the reason for them to do this.

    He stood at the entrance of the camp and watched the battlefield, the mutants who took rest once again got into the formation and got ready to move.

    Meanwhile, Sam is inside his room, as he looked at the dead bodies of the mutants.

    He exchanged all the human and Half Naga mutants¡¯ bodies to the Naga bodies with the rest of the soldiers because the crystal scales on the vertebrae of Nagas are extremely good looking. He couldn¡¯t help but want it.

    He only left some scales and peeled the rest of them off of their backs and went to submit their bodies. He only kept two of them and gave the rest, he doesn¡¯t want any more friction between the management and him, because the situation is still premature.

    Yodha looked at the battlefield and watched as the special division soldiers moved in an extremely shy manner. Their elemental energies are surging.

    But the retaliation of the mutants also increased. They reacted quite strongly than before and for starters, they threw the forty grenades straight at the special division, and then they started attacking crazily.

    Seems like the blood they took in earlier has an effect, their power is surging violently and when they met face to face with them, the special division soldiers finally understood what Sam meant.

    The defense of mutants is extremely high coupled with their regeneration. They are extremely strong and every time retaliated, the attack is stronger than the attack before.

    For some reason, they have a feeling that the casualty rate of the mutants would not increase at all. Their resistance is stronger than before and coupled with the fact, that they are more even-numbered, it became very easy for them.

    The only reason they were able to finish the eighty members off was because of their superiority in numbers and their suicidal attacks and of course, Sam and Arman were the main targets of their attacks.

    Before long, the special division soldiers are dwindled by half and the casualty range is increasing rapidly. Now they were the ones who is being outnumbered and it is their first time being so.

    They didn¡¯t even wait for the retreat signal, they just ran for their lives like cowards. Sam who finished with his work back in the room, came back to the entrance and saw the retreating special division that the whole armymanders and even the general is so proud of waspletely humiliated and came running towards the camp.

    The mutants once again stopped to heal back. The special division soldiers who saw Sam standing right at the entrance of the camp all felt ashamed as they passed him.

    But they didn¡¯t want to lose their stupid pride even now, so they could only grit their teeth and look at him coldly.

    Sam didn¡¯t care though.

    He looked at Yodha and gave him a mocking smile.

    By the time all this is over, it is already evening, the mutants once againid their tents and waited for a few hundred meters away from the camp.

    At night, Sam was summoned to the meeting once again after a long time, and this time all he could see is the cold and unwilling faces of thesemanders.

 Chapter 538: Warning

    Sam looked at all themanders with a calm expression, there is a mocking glint in his eyes that is constantly reminding them what their stupidity has cost them.

    At this moment there are two regimentmanders and the rest of them are all battalionmanders that are stationed nearby, only they can move between their posts and this ce in minutes.

    One regimentmander couldn¡¯t stand the mocking look of Sam and yelled at him after mming the table.

    "Sam, is this the investigation you have done? Because of you, we have lost so many soldiers, even if we execute you it would not be enough punishment."

    Sam raised an eyebrow and looked at him with amusement, the regimentmander looked at the other regimentmanders and some battalionmanders and starting giving signals and soon everyone is ming Sam for their stupid loss.

    Actually, Sam understood why they are doing this, he could guess what happened at their stations, the mutants must have ughtered the people sent and the little damage they managed to do was the credit of the element of surprise and the grenades.

    So many soldiers and the special division members must have died.

    As they tried to push their me on Sam one by one, they became more confident since Sam is not saying anything and even the general is silent.

    They just went on talking and talking as if this is thest day of their lives and they wouldn¡¯t get another chance to talk again.

    But soon, the silence of those two people made it hard for them to speak after some time. They became mute and that to the point that they felt like they would die if they let another word out.

    Sam smirked and said.

    "You know better, than anyone whether I gave you the information properly or not. You know better than anyone on the camp whether I did a proper investigation and you know better than anyone who is responsible for their deaths.

    More than one thousand men died while killing a hundred mutants, not so bad, right General?"

    As soon as he finished his words, the regimentmander who first started the ming game stood up and pointed his finger at him as he yelled.

    "I WILL KILL YOU FOR LYING IN FRONT OF ALL OF US. Trying to twist your words again." He still wanted to me Sam and use him as a scapegoat.

    Sam¡¯s voice became a tad bit colder and said.

    "What do you have that gives you so much confidence that you can kill me? Do you think you are the first Transcendent cultivator that threatened to kill me? And do you think you will be the first to attempt that?

    I probably killed more Transcendent cultivators than you ever faced.

    If I were, I would shut the fuck up and take my seat, before I decide to kill you."

    "How dare you threaten a superior?" He still wanted to persist and even aura raged.

    Sam didn¡¯t even back down from the pressure, he looked at him coldly and said.

    "Come on, make a move and see what happens. Not even your bones will remain when I am done with you. You would wish you never came out of your mother¡¯s womb and you will pray to the high heavens that you wish you never even met me."

    For some reason, the regimentmander felt chills. He has a feeling that he would die if he really continued to speak. As he was about to ovee and try to speak again, he felt an enormous amount of killing intent.

    Sam¡¯s body is emitting a killing intent they never ever felt, They could almost smell blood in the air. The regimentmander, the general, Yodha everyone looked at him as if he was a death god.

    The controlled and conquered bloodlust in that killing intent made them shudder in fear. The killing intent is a refined thing, except for the apex predators in the wild, the normal people can only get that by relentless killing. To develop an intent of that scale, one needs to kill armies of people.

    Sam looked at the General and spoke.

    "I have been nothing but supportive and loyal to my duty as a soldier. I am not a man from here. I came from far away. There my position is different, my status is different, but I still worked as a soldier since I took the job.

    But don¡¯t think that I am some soft persimmon just because I don¡¯t have a background. Since the day I came to this world, I never had a background. I climbed up one step at a time building those steps with my hands.

    If you really think you can get away with ming me after you relentlessly ignored my advice and even the ns I offered as a normal soldier, you are wrong. I had no interest in building and climbing my way up here, but now you created one for me.

    If you want to send the rest of the soldiers to their doom, by all means, do it. But don¡¯t me me once again that I didn¡¯t warn you. Every time you send a batch of soldiers, they will drink their blood and grow stronger until they reach the limit and atst, they will go berserk,

    But by that time, they will reach the camp and kill every single Nascent cultivator.

    And if you put me on me once again, while they ughter you guys from outside, I will be ughtering them from inside, trust me, I will be faster than them and by the time they reached the gate of the camp, nothing would be left of the camp.

    So, if you want to be safe and have any single ounce of a chance to win, then don¡¯t bother me.

    And if you want me to go and kill them. Fat chance, all the credits, and honor you gave me mean nothing to me at this point. If you want something from me, you have to buy it from me. I will stay here till tomorrow morning."

    With that, he left the room. The general didn¡¯t speak to him at all.

    Sam is really pissed off when they threw dirt at him.

    Anyway, this is what he wanted, although not this intense, he still wanted this friction and outburst.

    Now, all he has to do is wait. Wait for the battle reports of the remaining two ces to reach, wait for the general and themanders to confront the special division members who fled from the battlefield.

    Think so hard and despair at the end toe to him.

    Sam rxed in his tent, waiting for the news and the news came.

    The next day, he was called for another meeting, This time, only General and Yodha were present. The regimentmanders and the rest of the battalionmanders were gone.

    "What do you want?" Sam asked.

    "Take a look." Yodha gave the battle report.

    Sam looked at it and said with a chuckle.

    "Casualties are a lot less than I thought."

    "This is no funny matter," Yodha said coldly. His voice has a bit of anger hidden within. He was frustrated.

    General gave Yodha a gesture and said to Sam.

    "Yodha said you have a way to get rid of this situation. They started marching right at the dawn and from the looks of it they are stronger than before."

    "I already said, that if you want something you have to buy it. I wouldn¡¯t do anything for free."

    "It is your duty as a soldier."

    "And I did it extremely well and you are the ones who lost the right to enjoy the results of my duty."

    "What do you want?"

    "What can you give?"

    "I don¡¯t have time to bicker with you. I am only talking to you nicely because you are a man of talent. Otherwise what you are doing is considered treason."

    "You are not the first Consummate realm expert to threaten me either, Sir. But here I am standing.

    I will solve the problem of the current station as a gift for you. After you see it, you decide whether you want to talk business or not. The price will depend on the task you want me to aplish.

    But first, make the deputymander of this ce.

    I will be waiting for the announcement and my subordinates to report to me."

    With that Sam left and went back to his room.

    For the next hour, the whole camp is in turmoil, the next batch of forces that were supposed to be sent to halt the mutants was stopped and the announcement was made that Sam is the new battalionmander and he would take charge for the next battle.

    The soldiers were stunned, but many of them were not exactly d. Particrly, the special division members. But Sam didn¡¯t care and they didn¡¯t dare to push their luck and all themanders assembled in the tent.

 Chapter 539: First Transaction

    After all the supervisors andmanders came to his tent and talked for a bit, Sam finally came outside, but this time, he came out as the deputy battalionmander.

    The Mutants are still marching step by step. Very slowly. It is as if they want to make the Mov empire remember every step they took to conquer the city.

    After marching a bit farther, there is a very small distance, a distance short enough for a battle between a few hundred soldiers.

    They stationed there right in front of the doorstep.

    But Sam seemed as if he didn¡¯t care. He sent all themanders back to their own tents and visited some of the special divisions.

    The soldiers who were so cocky before a few days didn¡¯t even dare to speak.

    After that, he took themanders of the earth elemental and lightning elemental divisions and a hundred soldiers from each division and led them deep inside the forest.

    There are messages from Yodha for every fifteen minutes that the mutants are right in front of the camp and they have to hurry up.

    But there is no response from Sam.

    From what he saw till now, the mutants want to provoke. They want to deal with the soldiers, but not by attacking.

    They clearly showed what they wanted to do. They wouldn¡¯t attack first until their patience ran out at least.

    Sam would make it run thin.

    After two hours of some practice at the practice grounds, Sam finally came with a hundred men behind his back.

    Fifty of them are from the lightning element division and the rest are from the earth element division. He started walking towards the battlefield with them on both sides.

    When the mutants saw it was Sam their patience and provocations are gone with the wind. He is the bane for their ns, he would make them rage like wild beasts.

    There is only a small distance between them and him.

    He smiled at them and stood there calmly.

    "Take positions." As soon as the two words left his mouth, the soldiers in the back started moving.

    All the earth element users and the lightning element users moved as the two groups merged and spread all over the ce.

    "Wall."

    The earth element users squatted down and the earth elemental energy waspletely surging all over.

    Thebined energy of all the fifty members is being used in such a way that all the ground covering them and the mutants was under the range of energy.

    As the energy spread, all of a sudden, many earthen walls extruded from the ground as they surrounded the mutants.

    The soil in the whole area of influence ispletely in utter turmoil and it is growing more and more turbulent, even the soil under the feet of mutants is moving rapidly.

    The mutants became vignt and started attacking the walls, they threw attack after attack on the walls, but there was no use, the walls kept on increasing as if there is no end to them, one wall crumbled and another raised in its ce.

    Soon, the walls started having changed. There would be earthen spikes shot from the walls inside. Although the attacks are not strong, they are good enough for the distraction and some minimal damage.

    "Sparks."

    Sammanded once again and arge roof of lightning appeared on the top of the walls. The mutants suddenly looked at the sky as they observed the concentrated lightning bolts that could hit them anytime. But the roof disappeared, due to the irregr sync between all the soldiers.

    "Spark."

    Sammanded once again.

    But this time, the roof stayed as the lightning energy gathered gradually.

    All the mutants are trying their best to attack the lightning bolts, but that is good for nothing. They never expected that the earthen walls could be used this way.

    There is no damage for them, except for a little dy, but this is frustrating. But no one would take this approach, after all a frustrated strong enemy is dangerous.

    Two of the earth element users in the mutants used some hand signs and rammed them into the wall. They ran through all the walls and came out from the other side.

    But what greeted them is abination of the wind de and the sword ray from Sam.

    Even though they both came out of different sides, they got hit at the almost the same time.

    Arman is standing beside him and Sam gave him a gesture. He dropped some grenades in the ground more than a hundred of them and went to deal with one of the two who made it out.

    Meanwhile, the other person was allowed toe towards him without any obstacle, except for the soil of course.

    As he made his way, what he didn¡¯t notice is that the grenades that were dropped on the ground disappeared inside the soil.

    Sam raised his hand and silver lightning joined the lightning roof, the intensity of the lightning bolts increased.

    As the earth element user finally came face to face with Sam as he was his nearest target.

    Sam¡¯s body was full of lightning, the mutant looked at him and said.

    "Lightning doesn¡¯t work on the earth."

    Sam looked at him and said without any expression.

    "But an explosion does."

    With that, he stabbed his palm into the chest of the mutant. The edge of the palm has purple smoke all over when he did so and it left arge hole and a grey patch on the mutant¡¯s chest.

    Before the other party could react, a grenade appeared in Sam¡¯s hand and he ced it in that hole and pressed the trigger before kicking him.

    *BOOM*

    The mutant exploded and at the same time...

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    A simultaneous chain of explosions urred within the encirclement of the wall at the same time, the lightning bolts struck down on to the mutants, who are trying their best to fend off the explosion.

    The earthen walls couldn¡¯t take the impact of the explosion and sted into smithereens. The timely withdrawal of the elemental energy binding them only made the walls turn into dust not letting the explosion throw the earthen blocks at the fellow soldiers.

    When the dust settled. Sam and Arman are the only ones standing there.

    And as soon as he could see, Arman went to collect the bodies of the mutants, meanwhile, the special division soldiers who are sprawling on the ground due to exhaustion are trying to get up and see if they seeded.

    They wanted to cheer, there was a smile on their faces. There is not a single casualty.

    Sam stood there like a pir, there is not a single particle of dust on his ck feather-coat. He made sure that everybody of the mutant was collected and said to the special division soldiers that slowly stood up.

    "Wipe that smirks off your faces. Your still not wolves yet, you are still sheep trying to be wolves. Once you truly be the wolves and can fight on your own without me, then you can smirk all you want."

    Sam turned around and walked back and the special division soldiers meekly followed.

    After entering the camp, Sam went to the general¡¯s tent after dismissing the soldiers to their barracks. He didn¡¯t even say a word before submitting the battle report.

    After he finished reporting all of it, he asked.

    "This is what I can do is two hours. If you want more, you have to pay the price."

    General stayed silent for a while and said.

    "The four camps that are under attack from the blood mutants, I got the news that they are currently defending from inside the camp, they can at most hold on for a day.

    I want you to clear them."

    "I can do so, but what are willing to pay?"

    "What do you want?"

    "Beasts, I want beasts like Purple me Zebras."

    "What do you mean by like? Can you be specific?"

    "I have a list."

    Sam gave the list and there are names of horse type beasts in it. There are all kinds of elements, earth, ice, fire, lightning, dark, metal.

    "No matter how rare they are, I want at least two pairs for each beast I mentioned and a total of two hundred beasts. The best way would be them being pairs. Half male and half female."

    "Where do you want them delivered to?"

    "Yodha¡¯s factory. Thepound is really big, so they would definitely be able to find a ce for them."

    "All types of beasts wouldn¡¯t be able to survive there for a long time."

    "Use these formation discs and they would." Sam passed a spatial ring and said.

    "Why Yodha¡¯s factory?"

    "Because it was my factory too. You might not know, it is my factory too.

    By the way, I would like it if you guys are genuine and sincere this time, if something happens that betrays this alliance of ours, I will destroy the army and the city."

 Chapter 540: Victories

    Sam went back to the special division camp and gave out orders. The earth element users are almost gone with only two hundred of them left, the lightning users also left, but all of them didn¡¯t go.

    He assigned them missions to deal with the camps nearby.

    After that, he started assigning the training for some formations for the remaining elemental users. Even though, the earth element and the lightning element users would be able to finish his deal with the military, he knew that he would be needed.

    Another deal wille back rolling and after that, there would be the next one. This time, he doesn¡¯t have to prepare on his feet to deal with them.

    After assigning training to all special division soldiers, Sam went to the normal soldier camp, they are finally able to heave a sigh of relief.

    They thought they would just be fodders and meat shields for the special division again, but thankfully that didn¡¯t happen.

    Sam assembled them all ording to their elemental abilities. He stood before them as he looked through the battle records and the achievements they had in the missions.

    These people are actually more disciplined than the Special division soldiers, which makes it easier for him.

    After looking through all the data he could gather, he separated every single group into two groups.

    "From now on, you will work in the groups you are ced in.

    One of your groups is a group of main fighters. You guys¡¯ training will mostly be rted tobat, invasion, scouting. Mostly single hand to handbat and thebat in squads. Of course, there would be defensive training to defend the base and temporary camps. But it wouldn¡¯t be your main priority.

    The second group will do exactly the opposite. You will mostly focus on defending the base and camps.

    The hand to handbat training will be given, but that is not the main priority.

    You guys might think that I am robbing you of your chances, but every team will have a defender in the team.

    So, the training will be starting in half-an-hour. Know of your new teammates at this time. Get as much information as you can about your new teammates and hide as much information as you can about yourself. You have to hide the truth, but don¡¯t lie. A single lie from a teammate may cost a lot for the team."

    With that, he left the ce. When he got back to his tent, he was greeted by Yodha who is waiting for him.

    "This time, there is no other war except the one between the Nascent realm cultivators, they are not even trying to use other troops as if they are sure that blood mutants are enough to kill us all."

    "Of course, they are sure. From the information they have on you, they will surely be able to aplish that. A feat that no one has ever aplished, using half a regiment to destroy the whole army. That would be a great achievement if you ask me."

    "I heard you are training the soldiers once again. What are you going to do?"

    "Just preparing for the next transaction."

    "If they don¡¯t make another deal?"

    "Then take it as a gift. I will leave the camp after that and take my horse to roam the country."

    "Of course, you will."

    "By the way, I need a favor."

    "What would that be?"

    "There is a reason why I came to this ce and there are around six months or so for me to stay here. I need you to keep an eye out for me."

    "For what?"

    "For something that would make all the nations alert and even the emperor to feel conflicted, for something that could cause a lot of tournaments to be conducted. Make sure to find out if the emperor is looking for the best of the Nascent stage cultivators.

    And if there is something like that happening, please inform me."

    "What is it exactly?"

    "Well, I cannot tell you that, at least not now. When I am done with my work and I am about to leave the ce, I would definitely tell you what it is exactly."

    Yodha immediately went out and started using his connections in the imperial capital. He is so busy in the war he was not in connection with the city and the rest of the nation.

    He started pulling the strings he has on the matter.

    Sam asked this now because he felt like it would be in between six and three months before the pce of inheritance releases the tokens to the prodigies of Naga Realm.

    After requesting Yodha, he went back to the training sessions. The whole camp is extremely chaotic but in an extreme order at the same time.

    All the cultivators could be seen doing stupidly easy things.

    The rest of themanders areining to the general non-stop. But the general only have one thing to say.

    "Can you win the war?"

    If they can win, then they would definitely say yes and be done with it.

    The next day, the troops that left to other cities returned with a pile of blood mutant corpses.

    They didn¡¯t even bring them directly to the general or Yodha, they came to Sam. Sam once again collected the vertebral scales.

    The battles seeded. A total of fifteen hundred blood mutants died and there are around three thousand left.

    Sam once again submitted the battle report and waited for the General to talk about the next transaction.

    While the base camp of Mov is a bit cheerful due to consecutive victories, the base camp of rubrum is a mess.

    The information of the continuous losses made it hard for them to swallow.

    Particrly the price they paid for the blood mutants and the trust they had in them.

    At this exact moment, the Master of the blood mutants is getting the scolding of his life from his general.

    Actually, not all the regimentmanders supported the blood mutants. After all, they will lose their current standing if the blood mutants could win the war by themselves.

    They are even wishing for the rest of the three thousand blood mutants dead.

    Themanders added fuel to the fire and roasted the Master of Blood mutants.

    Now, as if the scolding is not enough, the general even ordered that Master should take the support of the normal soldiers, and even his range of action was cut down. He has to only take the city that Sam is stationed at.

    Master of the Blood mutants was extremely frustrated, but he couldn¡¯t do anything. All he could do is fulfill themand. At least he has to be happy that he was given a good ce to upy.

    The most important mines of the nation. He just hoped that would be a great enough achievement.

    The next day, Sam received the news that the troops are marching towards him.

    They crossed the forest and are stationed at its outskirts.

    When received the news, Sam was a bit curious and asked.

    "How do you guys get this information? How do youmunicate?"

    "Pigeons and Ravens."

    Sam was stunned. His jaw dropped to the floor.

    He was surprised that they are using such a method to send information. This is not what he expected. He skimmed through the information in his mind and found out some beasts that could do this task and asked.

    "Silver Pigeons? And Four-eyed Ravens?"

    Sam asked in amusement.

    "Yes."

    "Then can survive the Miasma of this world?"

    "Yes, actually. We don¡¯t know that either. It has only been around a hundred years since they were bred here. Before that, we only have normal ways like a person traveling all the distance."

    "Damn it, I am going to ask these beasts for the next transaction."

    "What is the next deal?"

    "Your general didn¡¯t say it. He said he would have to think and today he sent you here with the information like this.

    This time, fifteen hundred blood mutants are waiting there along with around five thousand normal soldiers. All of them are stationed outside the forest and inside there might be another five hundred blood mutants.

    We don¡¯t know their goal yet.

    But from what I think, it would be to take this city. But if it is then they should be marching forward, but they are not doing so. I think we only have to wait and see. Anyway, the next deal was not cut yet. So, there is no need for me to worry too much at this moment."

    "Then we will have to wait, anyway this might even give you more time to train the soldiers as you like."

    "That is true. By the way, where did you get these pigeons and ravens, both of them are not beasts of the same origins, in fact, they are ofpletely different ces and different natures."

    "No one knows, except for my father. He and his father went on an expedition hundred years ago. He was just a Nascent back then, at least that is what he said to me. They brought these beasts back when they returned."

    "I would really like to meet your father."

 Chapter 541: Taking the charge

    Sam just waited for the deal and for the invasion. He just sat there in his tent or supervised the training. He drank and ate various meals and wines made of different meat and fruits.

    He was like a vain lord who is living his vanity to the fullest, except when he was a trainer of course. He showed the soldiers what true training could be. He made it that everything he wants them to learn was drilled into their skull and brain along with the other parts of their bodies.

    The training is the closest thing they felt to the torture.

    Meanwhile, the army stationed at the edge of the forest that was a few kilometers away was still there and they didn¡¯t show any sort of movement and there is no call from the General.

    A week passed by just like this. The battles at different fronts and different cities are going on and on at full scale.

    After this week, Sam finally got some news, it was actually to the general and it was forwarded to him. The letter was sent in blood and it seems to be the blood of the spy the enemies caught.

    The letter was directly sent by the enemies not even the spy.

    It was a challenge.

    The enemies found every single spy within them in the past seven days and every single scout or spy that was in the vicinity and all of their blood has been used to feed the mutants and their flesh was given to the hounds.

    If that was true, Sam guessed that the Master wants to leave the berserk mutants at them. The Mov camp wouldn¡¯t survive the fifteen hundred normal blood mutants, much less when they are berserk.

    Even though, there is no direct mention of that in the letter, Sam could read between the lines, the master doesn¡¯t know if anyone was smart enough figure out the strength of berserk blood mutants and he doesn¡¯t know if the Mov side has understood the research papers that were stolen from them.

    He might as well thought, that if the Mov side knew of it, this would work a great provocation. Telling all the details on when they would be deployed and when they would meet them in the battlefield and if he added the whole vague meaning of them going berserk, this would be one of the greatest provocations in the history of the Mov Vs Rubrum.

    Sam held the letter and went to the General¡¯s tent.

    "What do you want me to do with this?"

    "I want you to attack their camp."

    "Which is exactly what they want?"

    "But the experts and healers who analyzed the research said that they will go berserk if they absorb too much blood and they are far more powerful."

    "You do understand what the word berserk means, right? They would lose rationale, they would lose their minds, they cannot think.

    You have to fear a person who goes berserk, I agree. But these are guys are not seasoned warriors who built their strength through the battles and hardships.

    Everything they were was given to them, forced into their bodies. Do you even know what you should fear when it goes berserk?

    A trained man, a trained man even if he only trained a single straight punch, but at least if he trained for a thousand time, then he has to be feared. Because that punch bes his instinct. In berserk state of mind all will be gone except for the instinct.

    All they have is superior power, no skill. In my experience these type of people are easiest for me to kill."

    "It might be easiest to you. But there is no way the soldiers could kill them in a direct sh. Why are you so confident in achieving this? Can you even take the responsibility of doing so? The soldiers will die in thousands if we don¡¯t do something."

    "There will be no direct sh, very few people will get handy directly with the blood mutants or any other soldiers for that matter. The problem with the cultivator wars is that they all think that they are mighty and to satisfy that meaningless thought, they would all battle directly.

    It is called a war because armies fight in that and it is called an army because soldiers are together. And in an army soldiers should fight together. Unless a person is superior to the rest of his peers all over the world, the armies will always win. But for that, the armies have to fight together."

    "We always fought together." General yelled as he looked at Sam belittling the army. He can take all the condescension and the anger and the resentment from Sam, but he is not ready to take the belittling and undermining statements towards the army.

    "Fighting together doesn¡¯t mean fight side by side. They are fighting side by side but do you think when they sh, they have any idea that they are fight by the side of their friends. Everyone is fighting a single battle. Your scout squads are working great and they are working together that is called working together because everyone has their role to y even if it doesn¡¯t look important to the rest of the world.

    You are army is a great one General, I meant no disrespect, but it was built on the fact that the soldiers can find the glory in their actions and that is only by killing or gaining Intel. I will show you what it means to fighting together and what they can do if they are really together.

    Anyway, I thought we were talking about the price."

    "What do you want?" General said grudgingly.

    "Pigeons and Ravens, two families of each."

    "They are not that valuable. What else do you want?"

    "I want the rest to be added to the credits."

    "That would be easier for us. When are you going to make your move?"

    "You will know soon."

    After the short meeting and giving the general a piece of his mind, Sam came back and went deep into the forest, before entering the divine dimension.

    He has made some ns to deal with the mutants as well as the enemy soldiers. He did some tests throughout the battles.

    The bodies are brought to him, not just because of the scales, there is something else as well. He made some modifications to the grenades that took the lives of the mutants by adding an extra ingredient.

    Now, that he saw the results of the tests, it is about time, he put the results to some use.

    He worked there while keeping some attention towards the outside world. He made some very important things added to the arsenal of the next attack.

    After two days, Sam and the rest started marching their troops. The troops are not too many actually. They are only the normal soldiers and he only took one battalion with him.

    But this time, there was no talk from the general and themanders, at least which was what the information that was sent to the rubrum camp.

    After two days of continuous marching, Sam is finally a few hundred meters from the rubrum camp.

    This time, they made their tents and created a temporary camp.

    As soon as they started making their tents Sam saw a familiar person stand outside the camp of the enemies.

    He is one of the thirty who stood behind the master of the blood mutants.

    When Sam faced them in their regiment for the first time and the thirty arrived, this guy was right next to the Master.

    He might as well be the leader of this base camp.

    Sam also stood there straight as he looked at that guy.

    While the rest of the soldiers are doing what they need to do.

    Soon, the night arrived and both of them stood there like that.

    At midnight, the mutant leader finally made a move, he started walking forward towards Sam and Sam did the same.

    Both of them met in the middle and stood there face to face.

    "So, you are the one that caused this many damages. You are the one that killed my brothers. I should have guessed. A dog that cane to our camp and go as he pleases must be some good hound. My blood hound likes to eat all other hounds. You might make a great meal for it."

    "I killed fifteen hundred of your men in the war and around five hundred of them in the camp and this is the best you got to say?"

    "I will say what I want when I kill all your soldiers, right before you and feed on their blood. The more you wait, the more powerful my brothers will be and the faster the battle would be over."

    "So, how much time will it take for them to get into their top form?"

    "Soon enough. Why hurry to your death? Anyway, why did they give thousand soldiers to a stupid like you?"

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "You think calling me stupid makes you smarter than me?"

    "Bringing food for my brothers in the form of soldiers. What are you if not stupid? You should have brought at least a ten thousand soldiers to swarm us. May be you might have chance."

    Sam looked at the person who is taller than him by a foot and said.

    "Have you ever wondered, how a human like me, whom you or your entire army intelligence has never seen or heard of, directly plunged into the war and caused you devastating losses? How do you think I did that? Do you know, I even joined the army just a few days ago? Do you want to know why?"

    "Why?"

    "Information. I learn, I read, I study and I analyze and Ipile the information."

 Chapter 542: One -sided

    "Today, I will tell you a secret of mine. If you can get a considerable amount of information and knew how to put it to good use, then you can win anything much less a war."

    *BOOM*

    As soon as Sam finished his words there was a loud and explosive sound and a lot of dust rose along with it.

    The mutant leader turned around and looked at his camp, at least he tried to look at his camp through all the dust that is in front of him.

    He heard many loud sounds. He was a bit worried inside.

    He knew that the mutants are growing stronger, but that doesn¡¯t mean, they are not invulnerable while staying there and getting stronger.

    When the dust settled he could finally see what is in front of them.

    Arge hole was being sealed by the rocks that are protruding from all the walls of the holes andpletely piled upon one another. But that is not what surprised them. At the bottom of the hole, there is magma which they don¡¯t know from where it came from. And it was freezing as they saw.

    One-third of the camp disappeared and before anyone could react there is a rocky patch on the ground, where once the tents and the soldiers stood.

    The mutant leader turned around and looked at Sam with a terrified expression. He immediately jumped back to stay away from him, but when hended on the rocky patch, he was even more terrified and his legs almost quaked.

    He forcefully calmed down and went back even more. By this time, the remaining soldiers who are resting and the blood mutants who are in the middle of consuming the blood and digesting the blood also came out.

    Their auras all raged. They wanted to charge at Sam.

    But there is a slight hesitation and they wanted to dy it, but before they knew it, a wall appeared on the back of the camp, and grenades were thrown out of it.

    This time when the grenades were sted, there was a purple smokeing out of it along with other pins.

    Blue ming explosions came out of the ground and created cracks, The people behind Sam started moving and spread around.

    A lightning roof appeared on the top of the camp and fire encircled the enemies, and water spears along with the ice spears areing out of nowhere.

    At this moment, swordsmen, saber users, and other warriors or mage warriors jumped right into the encirclement and started fighting. But no one fought a single person directly. There are two to one at least. They took advantage of the confusion and attacked and their first targets were the mutants.

    The berserk mutants who don¡¯t have a calm mind or any rationale don¡¯t know where to target. They could sense danger from all over and they are blindly throwing attacks. Due to them being in the middle of their own soldiers and spread among them, their berserk attacks did more damage to their own side than the enemies.

    It was total chaos, but the chaos created by orderly and coordinated soldiers.

    None of these soldiers here are stronger than the blood mutants, even the weakest of the blood mutants can kill ten of them in a single attack.

    But now, the tables turned.

    No matter how the opponents tried the confusion is not ending.

    The lightning is striking as if it was extremely random but it was only striking the enemies.

    The fire is encircling everyone and every breath of fire that is shooting inwards also looked random, but it is only burning the enemies.

    The ice and water spikes are appearing in thin air and looked like they areing at random, but they are only piercing the enemies.

    The earthen spikes and the grenades are also appearing at random, but stillnding only on the enemies.

    Out of all the blood mutants and the rubrum soldiers, there is only one person that was not in the encirclement is the leader of the blood mutants, he looked at the chaos with a terrified expression. He was the only person who is rational even after consuming all the blood at least barely.

    But now his mind waspletely clear. Clear to the point he knew that his legs are shaking and his throat went dry.

    He looked at Sam once again and tried to speak but no words came out. His lips are moving but there was no sounding out of it.

    Sam took out his flute at this moment and said.

    "Your emotions of out of control. Let me y something for you. It might help. Don¡¯t worry, I am quite good at this."

    Sam ced the flute on his lips and all of a sudden dark elemental energy seeped out of his body. Even that night, it was still visible.

    The dark energy surrounded all over the camp, it was an extremelyrge scale. Sam could feel the strain on his mental and spiritual energies.

    The dark fog entered the encirclement and it reached the first dead body of the enemy soldier, the first shadow came out and at the same time, the four nearest dead bodies also had movements. The shadows raised and jumped straight at the enemy soldiers and exploded into a dark puff of smoke.

    The ck smoke seeped into their bodies and caused severe fluctuations in their spiritual energy, mental energy, and physical body. At this moment, an ice spike pierced through his neck.

    After that, the new shadows appeared at the new corpses and the new soldiers turned into corpses. The chain went on and on.

    The mutant leader can see this scene. Even though there is a fire encirclement, the mes are flickering and in between the flickering, he could see what is happening.

    He took out a sword and swung it at Sam.

    The sword cut through the air with a blood-colored sword ray and went towards Sam, trying to end him.

    But he didn¡¯t stop ying the flute, he still has his eyes closed and he still has that pleasant expression as if he is not ughtering hundreds of people.

    It was like he is truly enjoying ying the music.

    As the sword ray neared, Sam¡¯s shadow morphed and became a curtain between them, blocking the sword ray.

    He didn¡¯t attack the mutant leader a single time, he just kept on defending or dodging all with his eyes closed. The mutant leader whose mind is terrified and desperate to stop the ughter couldn¡¯t think what he is doing.

    It is just like Sam said. He was really powerful, but his skill level doesn¡¯t match his strength.

    He was desperate and then the desperation soon turned into despair. All it took is a little more than thirty minutes to destroy the camp.

    A one-sided ughter and the only one who is remaining alive is the mutant leader kneeling on the ground with the sword beside him.

    Sam stopped his music and looked at him with a smile.

    When the leader looked at it, he didn¡¯t know what to say, after some time he startedughing like a madman.

    Sam¡¯s shadow moved and pierced all over his body. He diedughing like that.

    His face was already pale and he is facing energy exhaustion after a long time. He went back to his tent and started absorbing the energy.

    After one hour, a soldier came running in and said.

    "Sir, the battle report is ready."

    Sam looked at the report and smiled. The death rate is in the single digits, although there are a lot of injured people.

    Sam threw a space jade at the soldiers and said.

    "There is some wine in there. It will help them heal faster. Tell the healers to hurry up. We are going to move as soon as we can and they would be the next people who are going to fight. The forest is going to go down and so is the city."

    Sam took a bird from the beast pouch and it is a silver-colored bird that is the size of a normal bald eagle.

    He put the battle reports in space jade and gave it to the silver pigeon and ced his hand on its head. He closed his eyes and thought about the base camp and the general¡¯s tent in his mind along with the path leading there.

    When Sam opened his eyes and removed his palm, the bird disappeared in a silver sh as it flew out of the tent and went towards the camp.

    After two hours of rest, Sam came out of the tent and let the soldier pack it, he started moving forward towards the forest that is just half-an-hour walk away. He knew that they would be expecting them by now, but this time he is not hunting.

    He is ughtering, there would be no different even if they knew, not when he was hunting solo and not when he is ughtering with the group.

 Chapter 543: Vanity

    After the recovery, Sam marched forward to the forest along with the troops, andter, he crossed the forest and went to the city gates that are a kilometer away from the forest.

    He only stopped until he reached the city lord¡¯s office.

    He sessfully took over the city and he kept on sending the pigeons until the next day night and thest message has only one line.

    "It is hard to maintain the city with just the soldiers."

    Back in the military camp when they heard the news and watched the reports that were sent to them, they became ecstatic.

    Sam really did the impossible.

    This battlefield always ends up in a draw. Both sides could win and both sides didn¡¯t want to risk the lives of so many people and would order retreat sooner orter. This was the situation for many years.

    There will always be one or two battles that any could win, but no party could take over the other party¡¯s city.

    But Sam did it and did it with a thousand soldiers.

    It was almost like a dream.

    In two days, the people who are supposed to take over the city and maintain the operations came and they learned that Sam has let go of the citizens who didn¡¯t want to stay in the city.

    They are a bit frustrated and angry at this, but still, they took over the city silently and let and Sam and his soldiers return to the base.

    When he came back, Sam went to the General¡¯s tent directly and gave the battle report and along with that a list of gains and the losses in this small war.

    And the second list doesn¡¯t have much. Even though there is a lot of push back and retaliation, there is minimum damage done to them.

    It is so minute to the point that it is almost impossible to believe.

    The gains however outweighed the losses by arge margin that is because the gains contained the city and the fields and mine along with it.

    He looked at the General and said.

    "Half the credits to me and the other half distributed among all the other soldiers that participated in the war.

    I need the details of the family members of the soldiers who died in the battle. I think I did more than you wanted. For the next batch of the blood mutants unless they dropped from the sky right in the middle of the camp. Even then, the soldiers will be victorious and they will still be able to kill them all, but the losses would be more.

    So, I would like to leave the battle-field.

    "Go where?"

    "To the capital. Once the war is over I would like to get my rewards there. A who conquered a city that has never been breached might be qualified enough for a meet with the emperor, no?"

    "You want to meet the emperor? Why?"

    "No specific reason, but don¡¯t you think it would be great to take a reward from the emperor. I always liked that, the strongest man in the region giving me reward for the favors I have done for him. Goodbye then."

    With those words, Sam left the tent and met with Yodha.

    "I am going back, I hope the residence in the factory is ready."

    "They are ready. You can go anytime you want."

    "Call for me, if you need anything. But I think their battle strategy is extremely dependent on the mutants, so there is no need for you to worry about the situation. Is there any ce in the capital I can rx?"

    "There is actually. There is an entertainment center of a friend of mine."

    "An entertainment center."

    "Well, it isplicated, but maybe you will find something there that can make you rx, they offer a good massage, you can try it. Go and ask Rana. My friend knows he works for us, you would get the VIP treatment."

    With that, he took out a thin crystal card and gave it to Sam.

    Sam checked the card and thanked him before leaving with Arman.

    It would be better for him if the war is over and he stayed in the city. This way, he would be able to reach the Pce of inheritance faster and there is a guarantee that he will even reach the pce at all.

    After another day, he was at the factory and both of them stayed in the residence for a bit.

    After taking enough rest and getting the mental fatigue out, Sam first looked through the factory and its production. The military still ordered a lot more grenades and the money is rolling in. From what Sam could see, the war would go on at least for one month and this time would be enough for them to recover all the investment and much more profit from this project.

    After checking everything and adding some more methane to the stocks, he went to roam the city with Rana and Arman.

    He arrived at the so-called entertainment center and realized that he came to a high-ss brothel.

    He really wanted to beat the crap out of Yodha at that moment. Only after Rana convinced him that it is more than just a brothel did he enter.

    The ce is called Paradise. Even though Sambeled it as a high-ss brothel, it really is more than just a brothel. In fact, it is abination of a spa, restaurant, bar, and a brothel.

    Sam waited for Rana to make arrangements, he could use a good massage. The time he spent in the Naga Loka was the most rxed time in his second life, he might as well increase the pleasure and rx even more.

    The manager of the paradise said that the boss, who is Yodha¡¯s friend is not present at the moment and he arranged everything Sam needed.

    Sam is not deficient of money, all he has is money, and he spent it to his heart¡¯s content.

    He experienced the most pleasurable massage he ever had. A Nagady used her spiritual energy to rx the muscle fibers and it is so soothing that he wanted to sleep all of a sudden.

    After the massage is over, he went for a medicinal bath, and then he went for a great meal with the wonderful wine.

    Except for the wine that is extremely inferior to the one he had in his possession, the rest of the service is extremely good.

    From that day onwards, Sam came to paradise every day for the next one month.

    He experienced everything except for the sexual pleasures that this paradise could offer.

    He encountered many young masters some of them he has seen before and some of them he didn¡¯t see. Thankfully, no one found any trouble with him.

    Some noble scions anddies wanted to talk with him and tried to gain his friendship, but he tacitly ignored them.

    After some constant pestering, he finally understood why this is happening, they learned about him and his achievements in the battle, so they wanted to befriend him because they thought, he might be one of the variables in the future politics of the empire.

    They thought that his achievements will be more in the future and they wanted to be his friends while they still can.

    Of course, most of the major families that hold enough power in the empire didn¡¯te and some prideful Nagas didn¡¯t even care about him.

    In their opinion, no matter what Sam achieved, he is still not worth their friendship.

    But he didn¡¯t care about either party.

    All he cared about was enjoying himself. Apart from him, Arman is also enjoying the time of his life. He bedded almost every famous woman of the paradise. He even vouched for Yodha¡¯s im that the Nagadies in the human form are wonderful partners in the bed.

    After spending a month like this, he got the news he is waiting for, the war is finally over and this time, the Mov Empire has won a great victory and conquered some cities from their enemies and lost none of her own cities.

    The casualties also reduced as the most vtile region where the casualties are most likely to be highest was the one with the least casualties this time.

    Even after Sam left, the casualties didn¡¯t surpass two digits.

    Now, all the camps are sending their people in-charge along with representatives of the soldiers and the war heroes who had the greatest achievements of all.

    Sam received a golden-colored scroll from the imperial pce separately to visit the pce two dayster and receive the rewards he deserved.

    He was finally relieved. He doesn¡¯t know what he wants with the rewards yet. But he doesn¡¯t want to lose anything he worked for, he has something in mind, but he doesn¡¯t know if it is achievable or not.

    But he will find out soon, he will be meeting the emperor after all. No matter how difficult it is, if the emperor says it is possible, then it would be, and no matter how easy it is if he says otherwise, then it is impossible.

 Chapter 544: Not a Mention

    For the next two days after the notice came, Sam continued his daily routine of vanity. While the city is filled with all the Generals andmanders along with the war heroes. All of them came and the imperial pce booked the best inns in the whole city for them.

    After two days the imperial court will be conducted openly to reward every one of the war heroes.

    On that day, Sam first gave a bunch of spatial rings to Rana along with a scroll.

    "These are addresses, I want them to be delivered to them as fast as you can. I hope nothing wrong will go on with it and if it does, you better try your best not to let me know of this."

    With that, he and Arman went to the imperial grounds, where the open court is going to be held. Sam showed his golden scroll to the imperial attendants and he was guided to a seat. Sam is still wearing the ck-feather coat. But he felt like he was underdressed when he saw the rest of the people.

    The people surrounding are all wearing some extravagant clothes, but they are all wearing clothes of the same type of color with only slight differences.

    He asked a familiar soldier and found out that this is the military ceremonial uniform they got just recently. Sam really liked the clothes they are wearing. As he was contemting if he should also make some rules regarding the ceremonial clothes in his city, the imperial attendant came and announced the arrival of the Emperor.

    Everyone stood up and saw the Naga in dark violet scales with gold and crimson hues.

    The Empress whose scales are Golden in color is walking beside him while the princes and princess along with the Imperial stewards and Eunuchs all followed along.

    Everyone bowed to the emperor and only after he sat down did everyone take their seats.

    Sam could see the respect everyone is showing is not just a show, they are really respectful of the emperor and that respect is not just out of fear.

    It has been a while since he saw this. Arc has this kind of respect in the Western continent and even Sam has this from his subordinates, particrly the old subordinates.

    After sitting down, the minister who took up the role of the MC of this special ceremony started giving a long speech, and finally, the emperor got a chance to speak.

    "Greetings, My subjects.

    Today we have all gathered here for an auspicious event. The war between the Mov and the Rubrum has been going on for hundreds of years and I have been a part of this war for a long time. The result was always a tie.

    We could barely upy one another¡¯s small viges and recapture them once again.

    Apart from that, there is not much progress in any other aspects regarding this war. It was stuck and we tacitly agreed to fight every year, never giving up.

    But this year, we have broken the bnce. The people from the Rubrum even resorted to some ideas that are too evil and fiendish. They experimented on themselves and fed on the blood of the humans and Nagas alike creating abominations that can trump over their peers and feed on them.

    But those abominations weren¡¯t able to do anything. They weren¡¯t able to defeat the prideful soldiers of our nation. We not only defeated them, but we also upied five cities.

    This year in this war, our soldiers have shown great promise and made our nation proud. The rubrum Empire that was impregnable all these years was finally defeated. So, we are here to reward the contributions of those soldiers."

    When his speech was over, the minister once again took over and started reading the soldiers names, achievements, and their ranks along with the battalion and regiment they were supposed to be in.

    The soldiers sitting in the same row as Sam all went up and took their rewards.

    Even though there are more than a hundred people and it is taking a lot of time. But the emperor still stood there and gave the badges and rewards that are going to be the symbol of the honor they gained through the battle.

    But even after all the des were given, Sam¡¯s name was still not there.

    He was not called and he just sat there.

    All this while, they were a pile of golden scrolls on the podium the minister is standing and each scroll was the list of achievements of the soldiers. Along with the badge and others, the scroll was also given to them.

    But even when the whole pile disappeared Sam¡¯s name never came out. The minister went on with the rest of the program, awarding themanders and the generals and even then Sam¡¯s name never came.

    Sam looked at Yodha, the General and the regimentmanders who sat in a different row, they are also looking towards him with a frown. Their expressions said that they also don¡¯t know what is happening.

    Sam recalled the soldiers¡¯ achievements that were already on the stage. None of his achievements were read. That means, no one stole them, but his name still disappeared.

    Sam¡¯s expression grew colder and colder as time passed.

    At this moment, an attendant came over and passed a small slip of paper to him and in it, there is a message.

    "Dream all you want. But I will steal everything that mattered to you."

    Sam frowned and looked around, there is no one around and he couldn¡¯t feel anyone¡¯s gaze on him. No one seemed to be observing him, but they are still doing so.

    He called back the attendant and wanted to ask, but all he got in reply was a sneer and silence. Sam became angrier by the second and closed his eyes to calm down.

    He started thinking about the situation and what the other party might have wanted of him. There is definitely a hidden agenda, he just has to figure out what it is. What would they want from Sam that they even sent the message to him in the middle of the ceremony?

    He came to some conclusions and the most feasible of them is that the other person might have wanted him to suffer. His hard-earned achievements are taken away, he would be suffering already and they just wanted to increase his suffering and make him torment himself in silence.

    And why would that happen? Because no one would dare question a ceremony that the emperor himself participated in. Everything should be perfect and even if a person suffers he would just take it lying down as it would be dangerous in the face of the emperor.

    Any normal person would the same. But he is no normal person. It is Sam.

    Sam abruptly stood up and started walking away. There is a special way in the side for attendants to move and that would be the way that should be taken if someone has to leave in emergencies so that it wouldn¡¯t look bad on the ceremony.

    But Sam walked to the main aisle in the center and started walking out with his head held high.

    Everyone¡¯s attention was on him.

    The guards moved and blocked him while the minister stopped his speech, even the emperor is looking at him with a frown.

    "Where do you think you are going?"

    The imperial guard who is a middle-aged man asked Sam coldly.

    "I think I am in the wrong ce. I think was not supposed to be here. So, here I am leaving to not to overstay my wee."

    "What are you talking about? If you are not supposed to be here, you wouldn¡¯t have been able toe here."

    "You better give a proper exnation. Not respecting the emperor can be charged with treason and the treason could only lead to one thing. Execution."

    The minister who is in charge of the speech said loudly.

    Sam didn¡¯t look at the minister and said to the imperial guard.

    "This might be the reason I was here. To be executed."

    "What do you mean by that?"

    Sam took out a spatial ring and gave it to the imperial guard.

    The imperial guard took out a golden scroll and a bunch of battle reports along with Sam¡¯s military identity and looked through them with the rest of his guards.

    All of them were stunned as they saw this. They didn¡¯t expect that someone with this many aplishments would leave in the middle of the ceremony, wouldn¡¯t this make his glorious moment, but his frown grew deeper as he looked at Sam.

    His ck attire is too eye-catching, there is no way he would miss if someone dressed like that with those achievements came on to the stage. There can only be one reason, something is wrong here. This guy might have felt his pride took a hit, particrly when he was invited with a specialized golden scroll.

    He looked at the minister on the stage coldly and looked at the emperor.

    The emperor was silent all this while and gestured calmly. There is not a single expression on his face that could betray his thoughts.

 Chapter 545: Reason

    The imperial guard escorted Sam towards the stage, Sam still stood below, while the imperial guard who has the spatial ring and the documents in his hands he said the gist of it in a low voice, and the emperor took a deep look at Sam before he turned to look at the Minister in charge of the preparations.

    The minister felt something is wrong and he had a bad feeling, he walked towards the emperor and asked.

    "What happened? Your Grace." His voice was low and subservient.

    The emperor still didn¡¯t speak and looked at the imperial guard who passed all the documents including the battle reports and the golden scroll.

    He immediately understood that he fucked up because the writing on the scroll was his. He was the one responsible for sending invitations to the war heroes and it is tradition and a show of respect to sending the invitations with the minister¡¯s own hands.

    He remembered something and red at Sam coldly, only the nce is extremely brief. But neither Sam nor the emperor missed it.

    "It must have been a mistake your grace, but that doesn¡¯t mean he can just barge out and that doesn¡¯t exin his pretentiousness and disrespect towards the Emperor and the imperial pce. He could have asked us after the event was over."

    Minister said in a soft voice. He did remove one person¡¯s glory in this event, but he never thought that the person who was excluded will do something like this. He just thought that he would suffer in silence.

    After all, if his action enraged the emperor he would y him and no one would dare question him.

    That is what the minister would have done. If he was in Sam¡¯s position, he would have stayed put and if he was in the emperor¡¯s position he would have in him.

    That is just a ssic example of someone judging others based on their personal standards. It is not just humans who do that, even the Nagas who feel that they are superior themselves are also the same.

    Even though he said it in a soft voice, Sam who is near the stage and the people in the first row can hear it.

    Sam just took out the small slip that was given to him by the attendant and gave it to the imperial guard next to him.

    They passed it to the guard on the stage and it also reached the emperor and all of a sudden his aura raged.

    He looked at Sam and asked.

    "Who gave you this?"

    "An attendant that is trying to escape just now?"

    Sam said as he pointed at the attendant who is slowly moving towards the back.

    The imperial guard standing on Sam¡¯s right made a move and brought him.

    The emperor looked at him and said.

    "Who gave it to you?"

    The attendant couldn¡¯t speak, his whole body is shivering.

    Meanwhile, the audience slowly understood the situation and the news is reaching the rear lines slowly and gradually.

    Everyone has a different expression, some considered Sam as gutsy and some considered he is an Idiot because someone who can manipte things in the imperial ceremony is not someone who has low status, they might even be people from the imperial pce itself. If they were in the emperor¡¯s position, they would understand this and y Sam right here and be done with it.

    They don¡¯t understand what the emperor is doing trying to ask the attendant.

    Sam could guess what they were thinking and there is no way that he didn¡¯t understand that logic. But he knew what the emperor was thinking and how he should think if he really is the emperor he thought he would be.

    He is taking a gamble, but his odds to win are high.

    All these people and the minister on the stage have almost the same opinion that is to kill Sam if they were the emperor, but only the emperor, Sam, and some of the soldiers know that is the difference between them and the real emperor.

    Because, they don¡¯t know the situation and they don¡¯t know what Sam has done, only a few people knew and they only heard stories and rumors, but the soldiers,manders, and the generals knew about it. They knew what is happening exactly.

    Sam is the biggest war hero in the whole ceremony, they didn¡¯t acknowledge and deliver the honor and respect he deserves and there was clear evidence that someone with power has intentionally done it, if Sam was in, will there be another soldier loyal to the throne.

    Will there be another soldier thinking that it is their honor to fight for the nation? Will there be another soldier that would step up when the nation truly needs them?

    All the people who watch the world through the lens of their sense of superiority will never understand.

    The matter is not just Sam making a scene, it is a critical situation where the emperor should prove his word that he values the soldiers as much as he said he did. It is to prove that the whole ceremony really has meaning.

    Sam guessed that the person who did this is extremely immature but scheming, they also thought that Sam is a meremoner and that too a human wouldn¡¯t do this.

    The attendant still didn¡¯t speak, the emperor became impatient and his aura raged.

    "Ch... Chief attendant your grace."

    The attendant stuttered. The emperor looked for the Chief attendant whose face contorted into different shades.

    ¡¯He is lying your grace, I don¡¯t have anything to do with this situation. He is ndering me."

    He kneeled and said in a panicked voice. But his eyes are looking at the minister pleadingly.

    The emperor understood immediately, he is looking at the minister coldly, but he couldn¡¯t do this here. This is a tough spot. He only gave one gesture to the minister. It meant that the minister should resolve this mess now.

    As for Sam, the emperor didn¡¯t show any hostility or malice, he didn¡¯t me him nor did he desire to kill him.

    He just took a second nce at Sam, there is a faint trace of interest in his eyes.

    The minister didn¡¯t dilly-dally and looked at Sam.

    "There has been some mistake with the management and you will receive your rewards. But due to you will also be punished for your act of disrespectter. You can take your seat now."

    His voice had a hint of authority and threat. But Sam only smiled.

    "I desire neither reward nor an excuse, I want a reason, My lord."

    "Reasons. I wouldn¡¯t talk now, but I would need a promise from the emperor that he would resolve this matter in the form of a trial in the pce court after the ceremony is over."

    "How dare.."

    The minister is about to say something, but the emperor beat him to it.

    "You have my word."

    With that, Sam went back to the seat and looked at the minister smugly.

    Sam might not be interested in politics and ruling, but that doesn¡¯t mean he doesn¡¯t understand it. All these numbskulls can think what they want, but he knew how the people in the position such as an emperor should behave and how they should deal with the situations such as this.

    So he deliberately made a big deal out of this situation.

    The rest of the ceremony was nd and it was finished in a hurry. After the ceremony was over, Sam was called into the Pce court, escorted by the Imperial guard. The ministers and other court officials all came in.

    At this moment, Sam is standing right before the emperor, while the chief attendant and the attendant are standing to one side and the minister standing to the other side.

    The emperor looked at Sam and asked.

    "What is the oue that you desire?"

    "With all due respect, your majesty. I care little about what these rewards could bring me. The glory, honor, and rewards might be hard for others to achieve, but for me, they are just there for me to grab it.

    But I do have a habit of not letting go of what is mine and I would try to earn what I want with my hard work.

    Even though, the battle was easy for me to change, I did work for it and I do desire what I deserve for that work. From my experience, I learned that anything a person is good at, they should never do it for free.

    I am not a person from this nation or any other nation that you would know. I am from far away.

    As soon as I came here, I was a ve in the Arena once and fought to create a great show to the people, Yodha the battalionmander bought me and told me about the army and I joined, only to realize that it waspletely opposite of what I was told.

    I endured, I did every impossible mission that was thrown at me due to someone¡¯s prejudice, I was tricked, punished unjustly and all the army offered is some extra credits and they wouldn¡¯t count as military honor, they would only be used as currency.

    I still endured because the war that wasing is something bigger than me and just kept it to myself. I went to the most dangerous camp of enemies and brought the most valuable information, I warned themanders and general repeatedly, but they didn¡¯t listen to me.

    Because of that they lost and they tried to put that me on me, the one who warned them.

    I even endured that, I was threatened that I would die in their hands and I couldn¡¯t take it anymore.

    I snapped and warned every single one of them. Because they are not the first transcendent stage cultivators or the consummate stage cultivators that threatened to kill me. I might not look like it, but I am sure I can be the nemesis of them anytime I want.

    I made it clear and once again offered my services, but this time I demandedpensation because I lost trust in them. I don¡¯t want to be taken for granted once again.

    I asked for two hundred horse type beasts when I helped them kill the first fifteen hundred mutants, I asked for two families of pigeons and ravens and the rest of the contribution to be added to my military credits when I conquered them a city and killed the rest of the mutants.

    I came back and now I received this letter to attend the ceremony, to receive my reward. But what I received was humiliation and disrespect.

    I never betrayed the nation once, but why is the nation betraying me time and again. I want the reason. Why am I suffering? Why did a high-born targeted me and made me suffer on a day where I should have received my honor? I want that reason. I want a reason why I shouldn¡¯t betray this nation? I want a reason why I should respect the emperor who is letting all of this happen. I want a reason on why me or any other soldier should risk their life when all we receive is constant betrayal. Today I want those reasons."

 Chapter 546: Trial in the court

    Sam¡¯s voice resounded around the court that was already silent. They didn¡¯t expect Sam to have an outburst here.

    The militarymanders and generals who are in the court at the moment are all looking at him in awe.

    "What would you do if you don¡¯t get the reason?"

    One of the court officials who seemed to be extremely interested asked.

    "I will take back everything I gave to this nation."

    "Take back everything?"

    "The cities I conquered, the soldiers I trained, the glory I gave this nation. Everything."

    When Sam said these words, everyone took a deep breath. They looked at Sam as if he is a madman. He was already walking on a razor¡¯s edge but now he is dancing on it. He is directly saying that he would be a traitor and discussing treason right in front of the emperor in the middle of the Imperial court.

    There is no way he would survive this predicament.

    The emperor who is calmly listening to what Sam is saying, smiled and this is the first expression that he showed. Everyone felt that the emperor would kill Sam as soon as they saw the smile.

    "You are talking about treason right in front of me?"

    "It would only be treason if I betrayed first."

    "You are quite the talked aren¡¯t you?" Emperor chuckled and continued.

    "Today, not only will I give you a proper exnation for the humiliation you suffered in the ceremony, but I will also give you the reason why you shouldn¡¯t betray the nation."

    Only now did the court officials came out of their shock and one of them stood up and said to the emperor in a serious tone.

    "Your Majesty, I think we don¡¯t have any reason to do that. He is a treacherous person who is hiding so much malice for the nation. He would be a threat to the nation¡¯s and people¡¯s safety. We should announce his crimes and execute him."

    "Yes, your Majesty. A person as vile as he is and so arrogant and so greedy for money and glory would be a threat one day or the other. It is better to nip the bud while we still can."

    Everyone is giving various suggestions, most of them aimed at killing Sam.

    "Did I ask any of your to speak?" Emperor said in a cold tone.

    "Forgive me your Majesty." Everyone abruptly stopped and said in unison.

    Emperor looked at the chief attendant and said.

    "I was never a tyrant, but you made me look like this in front of a war hero. If you don¡¯t tell me, why you did this, you will wish you were dead. I will let you experience every torture there is in the Imperial dungeons."

    The chief attendant immediately dropped to his knees and said.

    "Your Majesty, it is Minister Soma¡¯s son, He told me to do it and he threatened to kill my family if I did anything wrong. There are already some people lurking near my home from the past few days, when I was still considering this.

    Forgive me Your Majesty."

    He started kowtowing with tears and snot running down his face.

    Emperor heaved a sigh and said.

    "You are too vulnerable chief attendant. I apologize on behalf of the minister and the court. But I cannot let this go unpunished, you are relieved of your duties as the pce attendant, you will be transferred to imperial ranch and you will be given a residence within the ranch. You shall attend the needs of the Imperial guardian Beasts. Take your family and report to them by evening."

    "Thank you Your Majesty." The chief attendant heaved a sigh of relief. With that emperor gestured him to stand by the side and looked at the minister who is standing on the other side. He is looking down and his right hand his trembling.

    "Minister Soma, I would like to meet your son now. I hope you don¡¯t mind."

    "Of course, Your Majesty. It would be his honor."

    He said it in a shivering voice.

    An imperial guard moved out and went to the Minister¡¯s residence. He came back just after a few minutes.

    The young man walking beside the imperial guard has a carefree attitude as if he didn¡¯t care about anything that is happening here.

    Sam recognized this fellow, he is one of the most regr customers of the Paradise. He whores around like there is no tomorrow. Even woman in the brothel section of the paradise was an acquaintance to this guy.

    Sam has seen him quite a lot during the time he spent in the paradise.

    But they never spoke. There should not be any conflict between the two, at least from his opinion.

    "Sarn greets your Majesty." He came in and bowed to the emperor.

    "Sarn, you are here because you are a suspect in an issue that urred at the Imperial ceremony. You should tell me the truth, otherwise I will throw you into the Imperial dungeon and give the tortures full ess. Do you understand?" Emperor said in a serious tone.

    Sarn became serious immediately, he looked at the rest of the people in the court and the chief attendant atst, all of a sudden and his whole body trembled in fear.

    He didn¡¯t expect that this situation came to light. As for Sam, he didn¡¯t think that he would dare toe out and blow things out of proportion.

    "I understand your Majesty."

    "This attendant imed that you are the one who gave the slip to him and asked him to deliver it to Sam. What do you have to say about that?"

    "I..." He didn¡¯t know what to say, he started moving his lips but no words came out, he looked at his father for help.

    His father looked at him coldly, his eyes hinting something else.

    "I did it your Majesty." He agreed in a low voice.

    "Why?"

    *PAK*

    At this moment, a pnded on Sarn¡¯s head and he was crashed to the ground.

    "Your Majesty, this impudent son of mine is a jealous one, he must have done it due to great achievements of Soldier Sam. After all, being the minister¡¯s son gave him a lot of pressure and he was burning with jealousy because of the achievements of a mere soldier.

    This can be considered as a squabble within the younger generations. I hope you forgive him."

    All the officials sneered at his response. Everyone knew he is trying to shield his son, particrly emphasizing their statuses as minister and soldier.

    "Your Majesty, I have one important question to ask. How did Minster¡¯s son Sarn get his hands on my scroll of achievements that should be on the stage with the rest of the scrolls? Aren¡¯t they supposed to be with the Minister? Where is my achievement scroll? And this is the imperial ceremony, it was supposed to be a ceremony that honors the soldiers¡¯ contributions.

    Is this something for the son of Minister to y around with? He can do as he pleases in this ceremony, I would like to ask, who is the master of this ceremony exactly?

    Does the son of the minister think that he is above the emperor himself?

    Even if that is aside, for the minister to consider this is a squabble between young men, is the worth of a soldier¡¯s honor so little in your eyes? Or are you implying that just because I ammoner? I am pretty sure, Yodha who is in same generation of your son has better achievements, bing a battalionmander at such a young age, why didn¡¯t he do that to him? Because he is the son of the Marshall.

    Or because he is a Naga and I am a human? Anyway, I don¡¯t even have any rtion with minister¡¯s son. I didn¡¯t meet him before much less talk to him to incite jealousy. If just serving the nation as a soldier and contributing in the war can incite this much jealousy in a noble man¡¯s son and he can take his anger out in such a prestigious ceremony, who should be held ountable? Is it just that we just have to die like that without any achievements to not be humiliated?"

    Sam¡¯s words made everyone dumbfounded. He is too eloquent and he exaggerated everything but they couldn¡¯t refute them. He is clearly implying that the minister has something to do with it and if the minister didn¡¯t exin it properly his work ethic would be questioned for the rest of his life.

    When there is no response from the minister except for the cold gaze, Sam said.

    "Your Majesty. I would like an answer soon."

    "Minister Soma, an answer."

    "I confess. I am the one who did it and I deliberately made this all to humiliate Sam."

    "Why?"

    "I don¡¯t have any reason, I just don¡¯t like his face." Minister¡¯s reply waspletely frustrating. Everyone knew he was lying.

    Emperor looked at him coldly and said.

    "Throw him into the Imperial dungeon and employ level-3 torture, his title,nds, honors are all stripped. Until he tells the real reason why he did that, don¡¯t let him die. Make use of the head Imperial user if you have to."

    Everyone looked at the scene with their mouths wide open, they didn¡¯t expect that the minister would lose all his glory in just a few seconds. But only few understood that this is not over and the emperor continued.

    "Take the minister¡¯s son and employ the same torture to him. Find any information they can give. I need the result in a week.

    The trial will be postponed for one week and after the trial is over, another open court ceremony will be conducted to honor soldier Sam separately.

    And on behalf of the imperial pce, the throne, I apologize for the humiliation you suffered."

    Emperor said as he stood up from his throne and Sam bowed in reply as he said.

    "I don¡¯t deserve your apology your majesty, I thank you for being fair and just."

 Chapter 547: Private Chat

    The details of the trial were soon announced through the whole city.

    Everyone was dumbfounded when they learned that a minister not only lost his title, he was even thrown into a dungeon to endure the torture.

    This is a first.

    They didn¡¯t expect a single soldier could bring the minister to his knees just because he suffered humiliation.

    The torture went on and on in the imperial dungeons for the father and son.

    The father didn¡¯t open his mouth and the son doesn¡¯t know enough details. But soon, the situation changed, the torturer just brought the son to the father¡¯s cell and tortured him right there.

    The screams of his pitiful son made it hard for him to look. Finally, a pair of pliers were held around the penis of his son, before he broke. He gave out a name, but this made the torturers to shiver, he doesn¡¯t know if he should report it back or he should just say that there is no one else.

    But he still hardened his heart and reported it back to the emperor personally.

    When the emperor heard the name, his face became cold and stoic, he went to a pavilion within the pce grounds where the concubines and the princesses live.

    He went to one of the concubine¡¯s rooms and asked.

    "Did Luna say anything to you?"

    "What do you mean? I don¡¯t understand your grace."

    "I don¡¯t know if you are acting or you didn¡¯t know, but I will find out soon, I don¡¯t care if you gave her this idea, I will be staying in the imperial study, I already gave warnings to you to not lead her astray, but since childhood, all you taught her is plotting and scheming. No matter how hard tried you have that knack her manipting her back into that track.

    Even though, I married you a promise to your father and there is no love, I always gave you my respect as a wife. I did every duty a husband should do. But that doesn¡¯t mean I will tolerate everything you do.

    I don¡¯t care what you have in your heart, I don¡¯t care if you resent me, if you can plot against me, do so directly, but don¡¯t you dare use the name of the imperial pce in your plots, this is myst warning and the next time, I will let the executioner drag you by your hair and cut your head on the executioner¡¯s block.

    I want Luna toe to the study along with you and I am only giving you an hour."

    With those words he left the ce and went to his study there he sat with this chief steward and the imperial advisor to think of a solution to the situation.

    After some time, two women came to the study. One of them is a young Nagady while the other one looked a bit older.

    The Emperor looked at them coldly without saying anything. But there isplete silence. He became impatient and said.

    "You better speak now and speak the truth, if you dare to lie or hide the truth, I will deal with this matter officially and professionally and if I find out how you are involved, there will be no leniency towards you. I will punish you just like I do to anyone."

    Both of them started tearing up and the mother said.

    "How can you be so cruel to your own daughter?"

    "You seem to have been forgotten, I am an emperor before I was a father."

    "Is the throne more important than your daughter?"

    "No, if that is true then I wouldn¡¯t have given her a chance. Let her speak now or I would wash my hands off of this issue."

    "Imperial father, I am the one in wrong, please forgive me."

    "Why did you do this?"

    "I.. I don¡¯t like him."

    "Is that a reason enough to rob a soldier of his deserved honor?"

    The daughter wept some more and asked in a low voice.

    "Is a soldier more important than your daughter?"

    "Don¡¯t try to y that emotion with me, your mother seemed to have taught you well, trying toy guilt traps on others, she was a master at this. Do you know the value of an honor to a soldier? They die on the battle field so that you could stay in this magnificent pce.

    They die on the battle field so that you could wear a new dress every day and have many servants who do your bidding and so that you could boss around and look down on everyone else in the empire.

    What would you have been if you are not the daughter of this emperor? What have you achieved all this while? I gave you everything as a father, you have luxury, riches, resources, but you just plot behind my back, make fool out of the imperial authority and humiliate the biggest contributor of the war who broke the stale mate thatsted for more than a century.

    I told you several times and I am telling you now, I am done with you making mistakes. I told you not to learn from your mother, but you are not listening to the soft approach, but I am telling the very next mistake will be your ticket out of the pce.

    Now, tell me why you did it or you will be in house arrest."

    This time, Luna was really frightened by her father and his cold aura which he didn¡¯t show her before. She was about to look at her mother for help, but her father¡¯s cold gaze made it hard for her to do so.

    She bit her lip and told the whole story.

    The Emperor mmed the table and made it crumble in anger.

    "You are an idiot Luna, do you know that? Your mother might have made you believe that you are the smartest person in the world, just beneath her. But did she not tell you that where would the schemes get you.

    You fooled by a guy who is not even staying in the city. Not everyone can be offended easily. Now get out and reflect on this issue. From now on you will follow me for the next month and observe people. I will make you unlearn what your mother taught you and also make you learn how you should really behave."

    Then he looked at her mother and said.

    "I have been disappointed in you for a long time, the respect I had for you since the marriage was slowly destroyed and now there is nothing left. You of all people should know what it means to steal the achievements from a soldier, after those achievements of your father and brother are the only things that gave you a chance at marrying me.

    If you ever dare to teach my daughter like this, I would definitely kill you."

    With that he sent both of them away.

    His head is aching and he looked at the imperial advisor and asked.

    "Bro, what should I do with this issue? Who is that Sam? He is giving me a headache."

    "Who asked you to be righteous? But I am also interested in him, that guy really has guts, with just a single argument and he already made you dismiss a minister and throw him in dungeon and he made you, scold your daughter and wife"

    "Whatever, what should I do to remedy this? I cannot let my daughter pay the price."

    "That guy seems like an intelligent guy, just tell him the truth and ask what he wants in return. Along with that just reveal that guy who used your daughter to make this mistake. Anyway, I am more worried about your daughter, she made such a long plot and this is just a first step, but that guy didn¡¯t even make any borate scheme and destroyed the threat in the bud."

    "What is there to worry about? I thought it is necessary for a child to be with her mother, but it turned out to be a mistake. I should probably teach her one more time. The way she looks at the world should change."

    "We will see if you would seed."

    After the week, the open court ceremony was once again held and this time, there is a speech directly by the emperor, not only did he apologize to Sam, he also named every achievement Sam made and the reward every achievement deserved.

    He was given a total of four badges and he was also made a special instructor of the military. His rank is on par with a battalionmander and he probably has more authority in some aspects.

    And his military credits are still there, in fact there are too many. He could get arge lump of Grade eight metal that was enough to cover his whole body ten times over.

    But he still kept them for now. He wished another war came so that he could get more credits.

    As for the culprit, Sam entered the pce court and the judgment was given that the minister and his son are guilty and they have some personal agendas regarding Sam¡¯s doings.

    Sam knew that things are fishy, as he was thinking what he should do, he was called by the emperor to have a private chat.

 Chapter 548: Mirage City

    Sam is inside a in-looking room within the Imperial Pce. He sat on a chair and is looking at the room¡¯s d¨¦cor, which is too in to be a room within the imperial pce.

    Soon, the emperor came in and Sam greeted him with a small bow.

    "No need for formalities." The emperor gestured and offered him a seat.

    "Why did you call me your grace?" Sam went straight to the point without beating around the bush.

    "I want to tell you something regarding your issue. The minister is not the culprit."

    "I know."

    "Then who do you think might be the culprit?"

    "Someone close to your Majesty."

    The Emperor sighed and said.

    "Yes, it is my daughter Luna. She was led astray by her mother and someone else manipted her and made a move against you. No matter how just and fair I am I couldn¡¯t bring myself to punishing my daughter in public. I don¡¯t want her to suffer the life of shame and resentment."

    "I understand your majesty. But what do you want me to do? It would have been better if you didn¡¯t say anything at all. After all, now I know the culprit but I couldn¡¯t take my revenge. This would be frustrating."

    "What will you gain from taking revenge? I willpensate you. Just tell me what you need, if it is not too much I will give it to you."

    "Are you sure, your Majesty?"

    "You have my word."

    "Then I wouldn¡¯t be courteous. I have three requests, but I don¡¯t think any of them is excessive. First, I want the name of the hidden culprit behind this, the one who manipted your daughter, the second one is, I might need somend, I would buy it, but I would like to have a discount, thest one is that I want you to make a promise to my safety."

    "The first two are okay, but what does the third thing mean?"

    "Can I have your promise that you wouldn¡¯t kill me after saying it out loud?" Sam said half-jokingly.

    Emperor also chuckled at this.

    "In the near future, at most in another month or two, you wille across something that would provide an opportunity to Nascent stage cultivators. I came to this ce because of that, there will be a limited number of entries for that ce and I have permission to enter it.

    When that ce is revealed, the people in-charge will send some entry tokens to the strongest person in the region and if my guess is right, you might be the one. So, you can distribute them amongst the Nascent stage cultivators.

    At that time, it would be hard for amoner like me to enter that ce with all the people around and they will try to snatch my entry token. I would like to be safe from that."

    Emperor looked at Sam intently and said.

    "How do I know what you are saying is correct?"

    "Time will tell, if I am right or wrong, anyway if it doesn¡¯t happen, you are the one who is benefitting in the deal. But if I were in your ce, I would already try to find out who the best Nascent stage cultivator in the nation is."

    The emperor thought for a minute and said.

    "That is a deal."

    After discussing some time, Sam came out of the imperial pce with a name.

    He immediately went to meet Rana who is taking care of the factory.

    "Where is your brother?"

    "Gnyan? He was sent to another city, he has been working on family businesses. Father didn¡¯t want him to stay here."

    "What kind of person is your brother exactly? I know he is scheming, apart from that. Does he have a lot of friends? How does he maintain interpersonal rtionships?"

    "I don¡¯t know how he maintains them, but he has some connections in the city. Before the betting incident happened, he is quite popr."

    "Girls?"

    "He has many friends, but I don¡¯t know if he has any rtionships."

    "Any close friends in girls?"

    "There are some actually. He is even close friends with Princess Luna."

    Sam nodded in understanding and said.

    "Which city is your brother in?"

    "Mirage city. I heard he is in charge of managing the family forge and the weapon shop."

    "I will be making a trip."

    Emperor said that Gnyan is the one who manipted Luna to deal with him. He doesn¡¯t know why exactly, but the greatest possibility will be him knowing that Sam is behind the tragic betting situation.

    He didn¡¯t expect that Gnyan would still hold this in and investigate deeper into that situation. Even if he thought about it, he didn¡¯t think that the retaliation would be in this way,pletely hiding behind the scenes and trying to use borrowed knives.

    That is why he is moving closer to him. He wants to see how many borrowed knives he can use. Anyway, there are still around five months before the Pce of inheritance and he has a lot of time. As for expanding in business, he doesn¡¯t have trusted staff in this ce, so he cannot start one in the near future.

    He has time and he also wanted to expand his knowledge of this world, so it is better if he can around. Mirage city is one of the business capitals of the nation anyway.

    It is a sea city and there is even a port. Most of the ships go to and fro between the Mov empire and other friendly nations across the seas.

    Even though, everyone has beasts nowadays not all of them can afford a beast that can cross therge sea and reach another nation.

    So many people go to and fro through the ships and they also export and imports.

    Apart from that, many foreignerse to this city and almost every noble family that specializes in any type of business has a branch over there.

    The city is also a beautiful one and many people juste to see this city and the beaches.

    He might as well rx while dealing with the situation.

    So, he set out on his journey. He covered most of the distance with the harbinger and reached the city on foot.

    The first thing he did after reaching the city is to find a ce to stay and have a meal in the most famous restaurant.

    After eating to his fill, he went around the city to look. He heard many things about this city from Rana and he must say that it really is a great ce, the sea city is the most beautiful one he has ever seen.

    The best view would be from the beach house that has private beaches. But the price is also extremely high.

    This ce doesn¡¯t have extremelyrge mansions, the houses are all moderate-sized and the extravagance was shown mostly in the way the house was built, the d¨¦cor and the materials that were used to build the house, and finally the appearance.

    Sam wanted to buy a house here immediately and he went to the city management office. His military Id helped him a lot as most of the procedures werepleted in the easiest way possible.

    After the honors he received, his identity has changed and every government employee showed him more respect despite being a human and amoner.

    Even the management itself arranged the meeting with the seller of the house and arranged everything for Sam.

    As for money, since when was it a problem for him. He just paid for everything without a blink of an eye and one of the most expensive houses in the whole city was his now.

    After settling in the house, Sam looked around.

    This area is a newly developed beach area.

    There is a lot of emptynds avable and Sam¡¯s house is one of the only three houses that are here.

    After looking at this beautiful city, he felt like it is about time he entered a new business other than the weapons and mercenaries.

    He sent a raven to Rana toe to this ce and he also sent another one to Yodha to bring his friend who is also the boss of the paradise here.

    He has a new business n and it would be great to use this on the beach.

    After doing that, Sam once again went to the city management office and made a huge offer that the city couldn¡¯t refuse at all.

    They all thanked Sam many times and finished the preparations in a few minutes and Sam came out as the owner of the whole newly developed beach area.

    Even the other two houses were bought over by him. He might as well be thergest property owner in the whole city and it happened right after he arrived in the city.

    Now, all he has to do is wait while keeping an eye on Gnyan.

    He decided to visit Gnyan¡¯s weapon shop and the forge to see how their business is going.

 Chapter 549: New Business

    Sam walked around the city while drinking wine. Nowadays he is drinking a lot and is almost bing a drunkard. But at least, the current wines he possesses are all weak in nature, except for the heavenly wine.

    As for that heavenly wine, he didn¡¯t dare to drink it too regrly, he only took an asional swig or two when he was exhausted and it has been a long time since he was exhausted.

    He went to the port and saw the shipping office of the Golden-ze family. The Golden ze family has a transport ship, since most of the weapons and materials are shipped through the spatial rings, only humans have to travel. But the family has many business deals overseas and many people will send raw materials to them.

    They cannot trust all of them, that is why they maintained their own ship and there will be their own employees and crew that would travel to different nations and collect their raw materials and deliver the finished products.

    At the same time, since they are maintaining a ship, they also provide passenger services. When Sam reached the vicinities of the office, he saw that everyone is busy and even Gnyan was there. There is a ship on the docks ready to move.

    It is arge Ocean-liner but it was still a sail-ship and there is arge symbol of the Golden ze family along with the family name engraved on it.

    Gnyan seemed to be listening to the report from the manager.

    The ship would travel for around fifteen to twenty days beforeing back. Even though it is a small ride and cannot be considered arge voyage, the ship moves fast and the drivers of the ship are the wind element users who manipte the sails and the water element users who manipte the water to provide stable yet fast motion.

    It would like moving on a train rather than a ship.

    Sam didn¡¯te in contact with him. He just took a look and observed for a minute, before leaving the ce. He went into the streets and saw the residential areas, the fish market, the food street, the medicine street, and finally arrived at the industrial street.

    The area where the forges of different families and some local forges are maintained. After all, just because the Golden ze family is conducting business in metals and weapons, it doesn¡¯t mean that the rest of the families wouldn¡¯t try their hand at it, who would be so generous when they can earn money and reduce ie for their rivals.

    Sam took a look around the street.

    Most of the forges are normal custom-made works or forges attached to a normal weapon shop.

    There are very few forges who work on the batch productions like the ship parts and such. This ce is also famous for its shipbuilding and many people who go hunting in the sea will need fishing boats.

    Some boats that can be stored in the spatial ring will be made in this street and therge boats or ships that cannot be stored inside a normal spatial ring will be made near the docks right beside the industrial street.

    The Golden ze family has tworge buildings here. One of them is a weapon forge. They make armors and weapons of all kinds. They are mostly low-grade armors that normal people use for short-term purposes or they are soldier uniforms that are not so great in quality. They always have arge number of orders and production almost never stopped.

    As for the second one, it is the shipbuilding factory. They buildrge ships, small boats, and even the boat parts that are used for reparation.

    Both of them are titans of the economy of the city. They pay the highest taxes in the whole city.

    Sam went to the weapon shop operated by the Golden ze and looked around all kinds of weapons they have in their possession and bought themon weapons. One of them for every type. It is actually not a small sum.

    Then he went to the shipbuilding store and looked at the catalogs, he saw the boats that are avable and bought two of them that are ready to take away.

    The city is a penins and it is surrounded by sea on the three sides. The harbor and the voyage docks are on one side.

    The beaches and the residential area Sam bought is on the second side and the third side is the shipbuilding area.

    After taking the two boats into the storage and leaving the shop, Sam went back to his new home and started doing experiments. He didn¡¯t even enter the divine dimension, since he has all the time he wants.

    He followed a routine for the next few days. He would go to the seafood market, where all kinds of fish that exist in this sea are avable and then he would collect the guts, the liquids inside the fish, the blood and so many others along with the seawater to experiment on the metals he got after dismantling the boats and weapons.

    As for the remaining parts of the fish, he would look for a recipe in the library and make a good dish for himself.

    After five days, he achieved what he wanted and was finally about to take the next step, and that day, Rana, Yodha, and their friend the owner of the paradise came.

    When Sam saw the owner of the paradise he was stunned for a second. Because that person also has a pink hue on the scales. He thought he looked at Vasuki for a second.

    Then only he noticed that he is a male and realized he was mistaken. All three of them are at the entrance of the city and they came on horse-type beasts. Sam came here since Yodha contacted him through themunication token when he entered the city.

    When the three of them came to the beach house, they also wanted to rx.

    "Here this guy is the boss of the paradise. He is Vasu, Vasuki¡¯s brother. And this is the war hero Sam."

    "Of course, who doesn¡¯t know him, he is the one who even made the emperor apologize."

    Vasu said jokingly as he extended his hand for a handshake. Sam smiled and said.

    "It is nice to meet you."

    "I heard that my sister wanted you so much, that she ignored all the other suitors, I was wondering how handsome you are and now that I saw you, you are beyond my expectations."

    Sam just smiled and didn¡¯t reply. Instead, he asked apletely different question.

    "How is this ce?"

    "You really don¡¯t know what saving means, do you? You just got your first profit and you bought a house?" Yodhaughed.

    "Not just the house, the whole area."

    All three of them are stunned.

    "Are you kidding me?" Yodha eximed, but looking at Sam¡¯s face it didn¡¯t look like it.

    Vasu looked around and said.

    "It really is a great ce, but why buy it all, you want to do real-estate here?"

    "No, something better than that, that is why I called you three. Take a seat, I will exin."

    After that, Sam started exining as he drew all over an empty scroll, all three of them are listening intently.

    Vasu pped his thigh as he said excitedly.

    "I was running Paradise for years, yet why did I not get such an Idea?"

    "Thend is mine, the Idea is mine and I will add twenty percent in construction. I want sixty percent of the project. You can both twenty each."

    Rana who is beside them looked at him and was about to say something, but Sam cut him off.

    "Don¡¯t worry, I will not leave you alone, we will be having another business. That would be more to your forte, than this one. You will need a lot of money for that and you have to hire many people. So, it is better if you keep out of this."

    "What business is that?"

    The one who asked is Yodha.

    "Don¡¯t get too greedy my boy. One step at a time. I know you want to be a rich guy and spend like the young masters, but don¡¯t get into everything. It will bite you on the back."

    Yodha looked at him and said in an embarrassed tone.

    "But you are damn greedy too."

    "I am damn smart too."

    "Stop tooting your own horn and just say it, what business is it?"

    "Shipbuilding and weapon forging."

    "But that is what my brother is doing here and there is no way we can get the best of him that easily," Rana said from the side.

    "Why are you afraid? Your brother will not be doing it for a long time anyway."

    "So, what are we going to do now?"

    "Yodha and Vasu will be dealing with the construction, ording to the n. Remember the preferences and don¡¯t mess it up. I and Rana have other things to do."

 Chapter 550: Plot

    After exining everything, all four of them left the ce. Sam and Rana went to the industry zone. They looked fornd, but there is none left suitable for such a big project. After roaming around, Sam once again wanted to use his identity and went to the city management.

    But they said the same thing, there is nond for that. The Golden ze is upying one-fifth of the total area and they will also need at least that muchnd.

    When they found no other way, Sam sighed and said.

    "I wanted to do this after we start our own business, but it seems like I have done that to start the business. You just look out for all the shipwrights and artisans in the street and see if there is anyone who has skills and wants to change their fates but doesn¡¯t have any chance to do so.

    Look for even a small shipwright who provides solo services. Don¡¯t leave any guy, even if he is in rags or even if he is starving to death, as long as someone ims he is a ship-wright or the smith or any sort of expertise with metals, find a way to test them."

    "But how should I test them?" Rana asked with a confused expression.

    "Just buy every damn damaged ship on the shore and test them on them, just go to him ask him to make a weapon. Find a way, we have money. While you are at it, swing by your brother once and make him known that you are starting a business with me. Don¡¯t forget to mention me and find an office on the docks, the best one you could find even if it was upied, buy it. Don¡¯t care about the money."

    "Okay, I am on it."

    "How long does this guy take to learn? Maybe the pillow talk that made his father ignore him is just a catalyst, this guy doesn¡¯t have any acumen for starting a business, he just knows how he runs it."

    Sam muttered to himself and went around to see the two factories of the golden ze, but not inside outside the factory. Trying to find a way to infiltrate.

    After checking everything, he went surfing. He saw a wrecked ship in the ship junkyard near the docks of the ship and looked for a wooden board of a ship. He took a knife and carved it for a bit and went to the beach.

    To surf. He didn¡¯t use any form of spiritual energy, he was a normal man without any powers on that board riding wave after wave. With his bare chest full of scars, he made quite a sight to many people as they watched the feat with interest."

    He did so till the evening and went back to his house to take a good bath, he waited for Yodha toe and had a talk with him.

    "I need four men, I want them to be loyal, it would be better if they are smart, but even if they don¡¯t, I need them at least smart enough to understand and do what they were told."

    "You will have them by tomorrow."

    "Do mention, that this will settle their lives. If they do it right, they don¡¯t have to struggle anymore, and if they do it wrong, it would be no use even if they struggle. Do mention this and ask them toe. The nascent stage will be better."

    "Sure."

    After having another delicious meal at night, Sam took a great rest.

    He sat in the front yard of the house which the beach. He looked at the waves as he had the breakfast, four men came to him and saluted.

    A single look and he knew they are soldiers.

    "Where did you serve?"

    "Navy Sir. Third brigade."

    "Why did you leave, then?"

    "We entered the Navy because that was the only ce that treated fairly and to reach Navy, Sir Yodha helped us, we would have been his servants if not for the fact that he wanted to us to join the Navy."

    "I hope he exined the consequences of screwing this up."

    "Yes sir."

    "Then sit down and have breakfast."

    "Thank you, sir, but we don¡¯t deserve to be seated with you."

    "And why is that?"

    "You are a war hero, your achievements are a soldier¡¯s dream."

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "I will decide whether someone deserves it or not, now I say you deserve it, you take the seat."

    "What are your names?"

    "One."

    "Two."

    "Three."

    "Four."

    "You are named after numbers? Who gave them to you?"

    "Ourselves, we are orphans."

    "Okay then, listen to what you have to do and in two days you will do it, in the meantime, you will practice it..."

    Sam went on exining what he wanted them to do and for the next two days training them.

    After two days, four people entered Mirage city on a ship. Two young masters and two of their servants. No one heard their names before, but they just came to the conclusion because of theirvish clothing and their generous spending.

    They threw spirit stones like copper coins, they threw them as if they are too heavy and they don¡¯t want to carry them.

    They threw tips enough for a year¡¯s sry for the waiters and they gave tips even for the chef that cooked their food. They just spent so much in one day, that many wanted to be their servants directly.

    No matter which street they go to, everyone is weing them with open arms. Everyone wanted to do business with them and the same thing happened when they entered the industry street.

    But they didn¡¯t stop at any shop, they directly went to the weapon shop of the Golden ze and out an order.

    "I want thesemon single-edged swords, two thousand. The basic armor to go with it two thousand, the helmets, the arm guards and the chain mails, everything two thousand each." One ordered casually as if he is buying cabbages on the street.

    After he was finished, Two started speaking.

    "I need ships, fishing ships. The ce I am from, we only know how to make proper navy ships, I like the design of your fishing ships I want five hundred of them."

    The storekeeper was dumbfounded. That was the biggest order they got, because most of the time, they get batches of hundred, five hundred, and the most they get is a thousand. All of them fromrge mercenaries or some noble family.

    But this is the first for them. Of course, except for the military order. The military order is alwaysrger, except for the special armors, the basic soldier armors and basic weapons are all forged in Golden ze forges, even though this is not the forge they will order, the main forge will outsource them here.

    And they have to give a discount to the military order, but now they don¡¯t have to. This is a civilian order. They can make a handsome profit, but dealing with this order is way above the pay grade of the storekeeper.

    "Please wait a moment, I will call my boss."

    With that, he ran away even before they can reply. Soon, he came back along with Gnyan.

    "Hello, young masters. I heard from my subordinate that you needrge orders."

    "Yes, we heard the Golden ze forge produces the best products of all Mov empire, we wanted to give it a try, if it is good, we will order anotherrge batch of products. This is just the beginning."

    Gnyan felt like his heart is beating fast. ¡¯This is my ticket back home.¡¯ That is what he thought in his mind.

    "Sir, pleasee to my office. We will talk there."

    All four of them went to the office that was in the deeper parts of the forge and started talking. At the end of the conversation, both of them threw a spatial ring full of spirit stones. Gnyan was delighted to see this, this is just the advance. The rest of the payment will be done after the delivery.

    He stopped all the orders that are currently running in the factory and outsourced them to the rest of the forges in the city and sent his artisans to supervise the work to maintain the quality.

    He then started using all his resources to finish thisrge project.

    Due to the advance payment, he doesn¡¯t even have to run dry in funds. He bought all the metal and started preparing that very night.

    Therge furnaces are running and the metal was thrown and the molten metal is ready by the night to drop into molds.

    What no one noticed in the forge is that a shadow moved into the factory. In the bustling sound of the hammers and workers, Sam poured some liquid into molten metal. He then moved to another furnace and poured another kind of liquid.

    He moved between both factories and poured liquids into all the molten metals. Then he went back and got ready to slowly enjoy the show.

 Chapter 551: Gnyans Plight

    Sam made sure, every batch of molten metal was mixed with the liquids he concocted and left the ce and went to his home.

    Now, all he has to do is wait for the show to finish.

    Meanwhile, the people in the forge don¡¯t know what happened and they wouldn¡¯t have cared even if they knew. They are tight on schedule.

    Gnyan took up the challenged and promised that he would finish both orders in seven days. So, the artisans and workers, couldn¡¯t stop, even if they want to. They must finish the job.

    Even though the order is big, the forge isrge and there are more than three hundred people working in it. From the lowest workers who only dump metal in the furnace and retract it to the highest person who supervises there are three hundred of them.

    For the next five days, the metal never cooled downpletely. It was hot most of the time as they forged one after another and they were left in arge oven to get the required surface hardening.

    For the next two days, the grinding process started. The cultivators being the workers is an advantage, they can grind things faster and easier with more precision.

    After finishing the whole process, they were tested for a bit and ced aside for final inspection.

    Even the ship manufacturing workshop is working in full swing. They had some easy time because they could outsource some of the misceneous parts and they even have some parts in inventory.

    By thest day, even their order ispleted and only ast check remained.

    But something happened in both the workshops.

    When they are conducting final tests and cing them in spatial rings, they noticed that the des and armors are different. For some reason, they could feel that they are brittle and when they shed the de on a wooden pole to test it, the de cracked into two.

    The same went with the armor. The armor could barely withstand one strike and it became full of cracks.

    The same thing happened to the next few and they started shaking on their feet. When the testing for the ships was being conducted, the basic test would be shooting high-pressure water jet and the water element users are hired for this.

    When they are testing them, every boat¡¯s hull was destroyed as if it was made of rotten wood.

    The two managers of the workshop are extremely frustrated and didn¡¯t know what to do, they became anxious and ran to the office on the docks, that is where gnyan is at the moment.

    They reached and exined what is going and Gnyan¡¯s face immediately went pale, he came to the workshops running and couldn¡¯t help but feel a trepidation.

    If this project didn¡¯t seed, not does he have to pay the money, he would also have to bear the losses of the production and from the looks of it, and the metal used on these weapons ispletely spoiled. It cannot be reused, this would be such a waste.

    As he was thinking about what to do and how to salvage the situation, the two young masters came along with their assistants to take their products.

    They were both directed to the factory office and served some juice. Gnyan was afraid to go into that room, today is supposed to be the date of the delivery, he doesn¡¯t even have a proper excuse to get them off his back.

    He nervously entered the office and looked at the four people waiting for him and before he could say anything, the other One started speaking.

    "Gnyan, we have something to say regarding the order?"

    "What would that be?"

    "Double the order. But the second should be a grade higher, the first batch is only suitable for Great realm cultivators, but this time, they should be able to be used by the Grand realm cultivators.

    As for the ships, for the next batch we need arger one, and the fish cabins should be wider. We would like to use them for shark hunting."

    Gnyan felt numb, but he started thinking of a solution, he felt like this will give him a way out. But before that, he needs to find more about these people."

    "May I know, what you are using them for?"

    "We are going to conduct a fishingpetition for the three hundred Great realm cultivators and to maintain the fairness, we wanted to provide everyone with the same ship, but I contacted my father yesterday, so we decided to create apetition for the Grand realm cultivators too.

    We have silver fin sharks in the waters near our city, they are mostly in Level-5 so they would be great way to test them, they will be the primary objective for the Grand realm cultivators, and the remaining fish are graded based on their raritypared to the sharks.

    As for armors, they are for conducting a special test for soldiers. It is also to maintain the fairness, we are giving the weapons to them ourselves."

    When Gnyan heard this, he starteding up with some conclusions regarding their identity and he has some guesses on where they came from and most important clue he got are the silver fin sharks.

    There is only one ce with so many silver fin sharks that they can even put up a huntingpetition. But when he came to that conclusion, he was a bit afraid that he would offend them if he messes up this order. That empire is clearly stronger than the Mov empire and he should be careful when dealing with them.

    "I can deliver that order, but we are having some trouble with the cash flow due to your previousrge order..." Gnyan didn¡¯t continue but One just smiled and said.

    "No problem at all, we will also give an advance payment for this second-order too and you can deal with the process, but after ten days, we need both orders. If something happens, we wouldn¡¯t be the ones to talk, my big brother and his big sister wille with their fleets and forces to discuss with the Golden ze family."

    Two just let out a threat with a friendly smile and ced a spatial ring on the table.

    Gnyan felt like he is riding on the tiger¡¯s back, but he steeled himself and took the ring.

    "Don¡¯t worry, let me just draft the contract."

    With that, the contract was signed and Gnyan didn¡¯t even realize what kind of pit he just jumped into.

    The first thing he did aftering out is to send a pigeon to his home. He needs to request some funds to cover the losses he suffered the previous, the whole batch of metal was scrapped and cannot be reused.

    Even if it can be used, the golden ze is not known for reusing the metal, they have a reputation to keep, but if it was reusable, he would have made sold it to some other forge that could use the metal.

    After wallowing himself in self-pity, he went to get new metal, he spent money carefully this time and the two dayster someone from his family came and asked about the situation, he didn¡¯t dare to tell them that something happened to the products, all he said is that he got arge project and he estimated the raw material cost wrong and didn¡¯t take enough advance.

    He managed the person who seemed to want to inspect this with some favors and was done with it, he managed to get the required funds and he started the process.

    This time, he was cautious and used a small portion of metals to make a small batch of products first and tested them, after he was satisfied with the products in terms of quality and durability, he finally heaved a sigh of relief and started for the big production.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is that once again a shadow entered the forge and left. And this it didn¡¯te once or twice, it came every other day at night and visited the furnaces and molten metals to give some additional ingredients to the raw metals.

    Time passed.

    The metal is not showing any negative features during the production, but once it was cooled downpletely, then it is slowly bing brittle.

    The artisans and workers are panicking. Gnyan is pacing left and right. He couldn¡¯t remedy this situation. He used too many resources and spent too much money, but there is no finished product, he couldn¡¯t even buy them from others. Because no other forge has the same production capacity.

    As for the armors and swords, he can try and get some from the main forge in the imperial capital, but he would have to exin it to his father.

    But what he didn¡¯t consider is that rumors wouldn¡¯t stop. The name spread that something happened in the Golden ze forge and the whole city came to know in a single night as if someone is deliberately trying their hardest to let the whole city know about it.

    The next day, Gnyan¡¯s nightmare came to life.

 Chapter 552: Refund

    Gnyan saw five people he didn¡¯t want to see at this momenting towards his factory. Four of them are one, two, three, and four and thest one is Rana.

    A few days ago, just after he took the order from the young masters, he met with Rana in the industrial street. He saw that Rana is going through the recruitment process and he is testing any shipwright or artisan in the street. He tested everyone who imed to be an expert.

    He gloated all over again and again and the gloating escted, even more, when he learned that he is doing business with Sam.

    He doesn¡¯t know that Sam already knew of his tricks, but he didn¡¯t stop his gloating nheless.

    He made fun of him so much, that the bosses of all the shops in the industrial street knew of the incident, now that he came at this moment, he was feeling extremely vexed.

    This time the project price is too big and he even took a loan from the family. There is no way he would be able to take any more from them. He would have to repay the current loan if he even has to dream about getting a penny from them.

    Now that Rana ising, then there is even more of a problem, he couldn¡¯t even hide it.

    "Gnyan, I am hearing a lot of rumors around, I want to ask if the production is going on smoothly, there are only two days left before delivery."

    "Young master, it is going on perfectly, rumors are just rumors, someone must have deliberately spread them just to spoil my business."

    He said seriously as he red at Rana.

    "Well, then I hope it is going well, can I see how many you have made. The production should be in the final stages, right?"

    "Well.."

    Gnyan was speechless, he couldn¡¯t possibly show the current situation to them, but if he didn¡¯t do so, they will get even more suspicious. Then he got an Idea and said.

    "Let us to the office young masters, I will ask the workers to bring the samples, then you can inspect them there. Then you can also rx regarding the rumors."

    They went to the office, but Rana entered the factory as he looked around. The guards didn¡¯t dare to stop him, neither the manager. Rana still has the family identity. Even if he doesn¡¯t have as much authority as Gnyan,pared to the small fries like them, he has a lot of ess to the family businesses, even Gnyan doesn¡¯t have the right to stop him.

    He looked through the factory.

    Meanwhile, Gnyan is looking for an instant solution to send the young master away and salvage a situation. So, he brought the sample pieces they manufactured and showed them. They are of good quality and there is no need to panic regarding this.

    The young masters looked at the weapons and left the ce saying that they wille and take the delivery themselves. But just as they were about to exit the factory, Rana who is looking through the factory picked up and armor and a sword. He stabbed the sword into the armor with a loud crunching sound, both sword and the armor broke.

    The young masters and the attendants halted in their tracks and looked at this. Gnyan felt cold sweat all over his body. He didn¡¯t expect that he would get caught like this and Rana is the one who made his ns go wrong.

    "What is it, manager? Is this the quality of the weapons in the Golden ze? What will happen to our family name, if you make things like this?"

    Rana said in an extremely reprimanding tone. Then he looked at Gnyan and the young master and said.

    "Gnyan, this is what you are doing with the family forge? I have seen ten batches of products and none of them are of good quality.

    They broke with just some small sh. I didn¡¯t even use any spiritual energy. What is happening? It seems like the rumors are true."

    Gnyan¡¯s face turned pale with fright. He didn¡¯t dare to make a sound as he looked at the furious expressions of the two young masters and their attendants.

    "Gnyan, this is what the promised quality means? You better give us a proper exnation."

    "I...I..."

    He was about to say something, but Two interrupted his words.

    "I don¡¯t care anymore, it seems like the rumors are true. We need a refund."

    Gnyan stuttered.

    "Young Master, please don¡¯t take hasty decisions. We can discuss this in the office."

    "No more discussion at the moment, first show me the finished products and then we can have any discussion, otherwise don¡¯t even think about bluffing your way out with words, I need the money right now."

    Before Gnyan could reply, they walked towards the manager and asked them to show the products, the manager couldn¡¯t take the pressure and involuntarily looked towards the inventory.

    Both One and Two started looking through the products and everything was destroyed in seconds.

    One of them yelled.

    "Get whoever in charge of the business management of the city right now. I want someone with real authority. I am not leaving this ce without a refund. How dare they cheat us off with these products?"

    As if they are waiting around the street corner, an officer from the city management who is in charge of the industrial street affairs.

    "Young Master, what is the situation?"

    Soon, the four orphans, Gnyan and the city management officer are all sitting inside an office.

    "How do you want to settle this, Young masters?"

    "We need the refund andpensation for wasting our time. We paid hundreds of millions of spirit stones for him. What he did to us is unforgivable. There is no way we can tolerate this without any consequences." One said angrily.

    "Young Master Gnyan, what is your take on this?"

    By this time, Gnyan is actually very frustrated with the situation. He has a hunch that there is something wrong with the forge, he is doubting that someone is messing with his business. But he couldn¡¯t find out who. He thought Rana might be behind this, but he couldn¡¯t bring himself to ept being tormented by him.

    Now that even the city management office was involved, he could onlypromise.

    "I have two suggestions. One, they can wait for a few more days and we can get the products from the Main forge of my family. I will deliver the whole order. Even the ships. I will finish my deal and I will even give some discount aspensation.

    The second one, they have to wait and I will arrange the money."

    "We don¡¯t want to wait and why should we? We are not the ones who is cheating here. I need my money now or I will storm the Mirage city in two days with a naval fleet. Do you think we don¡¯t have any power? These types are ships are well beneath the manufacturing level of the artisans back home. Otherwise, I wouldn¡¯t evene here to make a deal with them.

    It is my stupidity to even trust the rumors ande here believing that they have great quality service. It is all bogus."

    Gnyan became furious and said.

    "I will get you your money, tomorrow. I will pay from my personal savings. Come here tomorrow."

    One, who is silent all the time spoke.

    "Sure, then. Since you will pay, I will wait. Not one day, I will wait as many days as you want. But every day you dy it, I need ten percent more added to the original sum. For the two hundred fifty million spirit stones I paid you, you will pay twenty-five million extra tomorrow and you will have to pay ten percent of that total sum the day after tomorrow.

    It will go on and on. Do you want to make that deal?"

    "That is unreasonable."

    "What you did is unreasonable too, if you don¡¯t want that deal, pay up now."

    Gnyan gritted his teeth and felt extremely vexed. He yelled at the top of his lungs.

    "You think you are some hotshot because I am giving you respect? I am also a young lord of the Golden ze family. I will not suffer the humiliation silently. I will take this damn deal. I will pay not ten, twenty-five percent for every day I dyed my payment."

    He wrote the agreement instantly and the four orphans left the ce with it. Grinning from ear to ear. The officer left after them and Gnyan took out some wine and chugged the whole bottle calling all his managers.

    He started collecting the money from them to make the required payment. Some of them need until tomorrow to raise theplete sum and he could only wait. That is why he asked for one more day. He might be the young master, but all the earnings he made will be got to the family and all he would receive are the resources for cultivation and the monthly sry. His personal savings are less than a hundred million. And they are also stuck in some investments.

    He has to liquidate the money. So, before he did that, he decided to take the revenue from the current businesses and borrow some money from other family members and pay it first before he liquidates the money and pays them back.

    But when he is enjoying his ownpany along with the wine, he felt like he heard something and before he knew it, he lost consciousness.

 Chapter 553: Sweet talk and Backlash

    Gnyan woke up with a headache and when he came to his senses, he stood up from the floor in fright and checked his body for any injuries.

    After confirming that there are no external injuries, he looked for the internal ones as he closed his eyes. There are no traces of any harm. He was just knocked down.

    All of a sudden he had a bad feeling about this, he slowly looked at his hand and just like that, the color drained down from his face. The ring is missing. He felt cold sweat all over his body and shuddered at the thought of what is going to happen.

    He has raised nearly two hundred million and all of it is gone just like that. He didn¡¯t know what he should do. He almost lost himself in despair.

    After trying his best to calm down and drinking the wine that was left on the table, he started thinking of the solution. By this time, he knew that he definitely fell under someone¡¯s scheme. If only his guardian was here.

    But what can he do, his rights to have a guardian were stripped off due to the betting incident. He became angry at the thought that he didn¡¯t have any immediate solution and smashed everything in his office, beforeing out and sending some ravens.

    He walked out of the city and let out a beast from the pouch and left the ce. He decided that he would go home and get some money to repay the loan. He has a thought that he might as well use force and get out of this situation, but he really didn¡¯t know what the strength of the other party is.

    His position in the family is already is down in the dumps, so there is no way he could do that. As he traveled he started calcting his debts, now he has to dy it even more. His current debt is that he has to pay three hundred and twelve million and five hundred thousand for the young masters who came and then he has to pay a hundred million spirit stones back to the family.

    That is the debt for today, and for every day he dyed, he would have to pay more. And he definitely going to dy this for another two days at least.

    The beast he is riding on moved at its full speed. But no matter how fast he can move, he can only use a Level-6 beast, its maximum speed is not going to increase.

    After around a day of travel, he arrived at a city. The Grass city is the city that is exactly in the middle of the Imperial capital and the Mirage city.

    As soon as he entered the city, he moved in sneakily and the first ce he entered is a luxury inn near the Western gate, he booked a room and waited. Soon, hismunication token received a call and he went down.

    After a few minutes, he led a young Nagady who has scales with a red hue upwards to his room in an extremely sneaky manner.

    "I am sorry, I had to meet you like this. I didn¡¯t think I would have to take money from you. You are a great friend."

    Gnyan said with teary eyes. Although his lips said friend, his moves are so suggestive all the while. He hugged her for a while as the girl continuously blushed and felt her heart beating faster and faster.

    Gnyan seemed to be very experienced at this. He is throwing so many suggestive and awkward words and actions, but it also looked like he is only acting as a friend. He is skillfully making the girl think that it is her own imagination at the same time it is her desire that is why she is imagining so many things.

    One must say, he is skilled. He is not giving a way for the girl to break the ice and enter the next stage of the rtionship by not giving any confirmation.

    "I could only arrange eighty million. I know you need a lot more, but this is all I can do for now. I am really sorry." Gnyan really is skillful, not only did he take her money, but he also made her feel guilty for not giving him more.

    He really is a charmer, after two hours of lovey-dovey talk that has no mention of love, he sent her off secretly and moved towards the eastern gate.

    There he entered another rich inn and went into a room. He received another girl and had another talk before taking another spatial ring from here.

    Like that he went to the two remaining gates in the north and south until evening.

    He met four girls and he came to the city center by night to stay in another inn. He wanted to get some rest before going back. He has already dyed for three days in total, it is already big enough debt.

    He bought some wine and started thinking about how to deal with the person who caused all his trouble. He doesn¡¯t know who it is exactly, he still didn¡¯t believe that his brother has this capability but it is too much of a coincidence for him to be here and after some thinking, his thoughts went to a person he recently plotted against and he even heard that name from his brother¡¯s lips.

    Sam. As soon as his thoughts came to his name, he remembered the damage he caused due to this scheme. Luckily his father doesn¡¯t know and he is so confident that Luna wouldn¡¯t let his name out, otherwise he would have really thought, he is the one behind all this.

    *KNOCK* *KNOCK*

    There is a series of knocking on his door at this moment interrupting his thoughts.

    When he opened his door, his face turned pale.

    All four girls he met today are standing outside the door with cold faces. He felt cold sweat dripping down his back, he couldn¡¯t talk.

    The four women dragged him out and tied him up.

    Their guardians are outside too, waiting for him.

    Actually, they wouldn¡¯t care if their young miss had some fun with a young man, the sex is a normal thing. In fact, it is more like a physical game to them. But, loving and cheating is a whole other matter.

    And these youngdies have some positions within their families otherwise, he wouldn¡¯t have targeted them. But somehow they figured out he is ying the field very widely. If he wants to fuck around it is fine, they would have epted it.

    But he is clearly taking advantage of their statuses and ying with their feelings. To think that they did even fuck everyone because of him for a few years, they became furious and let one of the guardians hold him prisoner.

    Even before he could protest, he was already on a beast on his way to the imperial capital. They seemed to want to get some proper exnation from his father.

    But Gnyan is not scared of this the most. He is scared of the money problem he was facing.

    From the looks of it, this is not going to end well, but it seemed it is going to take a lot of time. If he dyed it for another few days, the debt will be so big that even his family wouldn¡¯t be able to afford it.

    He felt anxious, but there is nothing he could do. Women can be unrelenting when ites to their feelings.

    He understood this extremely hard way.

    When he reached the family grounds, his father is extremely furious about the situation. All fourdies are not some small fries, their families have some position in the capital. All family heads came directly to their home and asked for an exnation.

    They couldn¡¯t let their daughters get bullied right?

    Gnyan¡¯s father felt like his flesh was being cut off from his body. Recently, he paid a billion because of his son, and due to this issue, he paid another two billion to appease the families. Apart from that, he directly punished his son to be thrown into the dark cell of the family for a week without even listening to his exnation or his mother¡¯s pleading.

    In the dark cell, his cultivation would be cut off and he has to starve for this one week. He would just be a normal person with a stronger body, but that stronger body would also need some heavy nutrients to maintain the metabolism.

    While starving he is imagining therge debt he has to face. He knew that his father wouldn¡¯t receive any news of that debt in the meantime, after all, who would be stupid enough to expose the debt early when they can get more money the more they waited.

    He almost went into despair, he started cursing the person who put him in this state with all his heart.

 Chapter 554: Massive Debt

    Gnyan spent seven days in the dark cell and all this while, he is screaming at the top of his lungs demanding a meeting with his father, but his father already seemed to have instructed him to not bring anything rted to his disappointing son to his notice for these seven days.

    On the seventh day, he was finally able to get a meal but as soon as he ate it he fell unconscious and his spiritual energy that was locked couldn¡¯t help.

    Now this news was finally brought to his father¡¯s notice and the family healer took a look at him and said some absurd reason that they sounded stupid.

    "He ate food that was too good. He was served spiritual cuisine while his cultivation is locked. It was too much load for the body and he fainted. Unlock the seal, bit by bit, and let him absorb the energy slowly and he would wake up. Don¡¯t take it off immediately; that would be too much overflow of spiritual energy to his body as he wouldn¡¯t be awake to control it.

    Might result in spiritual core damage."

    This made the father furious. He didn¡¯t know if he should scold the kitchen for sending this food or if he should feel good that his family staff are so good to his son. He just stayed put.

    After two days, he finally woke up. When he saw himself in his room, he felt devastated. He immediately ran out and went to his father who is in the middle of a meeting and yelled.

    "Father, we have to go to Mirage city. How many days has it been? We have to go otherwise, we will be knee-deep in debt."

    "Get out now, we will talk after the meeting is over."

    His father didn¡¯t even say anything. But Gnyan didn¡¯t stop and yelled even louder.

    "You have to listen to me, I have a lot of debt to pay. I need money now. How many days has it been since I am here?"

    "I said get out."

    "Listen to me goddammit. We are in deep shit if you don¡¯t listen to me."

    At this moment, Rana came in and said to his father.

    "If I were you, I would listen to brother, my dear father. Your son has done some great deeds in Mirage city that would tear your flesh apart if you don¡¯t find a way to reduce the damage."

    Gnyan was surprised and turned to look at Rana.

    "When did youe back? You are supposed to be in Mirage city."

    "Well, I am having a bit of trouble as the people knew about our rtionship, they are pointing fingers at me whilebeling me as a brother of the cheater. It was a bit difficult for me to bear the brunt of your actions.

    Even your creditors are also after me, so I gave them a suggestion. On the fifteenth day, they would present this case in the imperial court.

    After all, war is a costly thing, so I offered them an easier alternative to let me leave the mirage city.

    Today is already twelfth, so if you don¡¯t want to go to the imperial court and stand for the trial, you better go back and pay the debt."

    Gnyan¡¯s body shivered, now he understood that it has to be rted to his brother, otherwise he wouldn¡¯t be so smug about it. But he doesn¡¯t have enough evidence to convince his father to take action and the agreement he had waspletely legit. He doesn¡¯t have a way out.

    "What are you talking about?" Only after Rana spoke did the father even tried to listen.

    After the betting incident, Rana left the family house and stayed outside. He didn¡¯t evene back to the family meetings and he heard that he started a business. The family head wanted to have a discussion, but he couldn¡¯t bring himself to. But two days ago, on thest day of Gnyan¡¯s stay in the dark cell, he finally came.

    But he didn¡¯t get a chance to talk with him. Now that he came to him himself, he is saying something about his eldest son¡¯s mistakes.

    He felt like something is fishy.

    He dismissed the meeting and only his two sons remained in the room.

    Gnyan who was panicking couldn¡¯t exin the situation, so Rana did the exining, while Gnyan downed the wine directly.

    "Stupid son, why didn¡¯t you contact me as soon as something happened to the forge? You idiotic bastard. I shouldn¡¯t have given you a chance at all. How much debt do you have now?" The family head became furious as he mmed the table. He almost wanted to beat his son to death. He already lost around three billion for the sake of his son and now it seems like he will be losing more.

    The problem is, he doesn¡¯t have that much in his hand. He just paid thedies who got cheated by his son a few days back and due to the loss of reputation, some business deals took a hit.

    He is trying his best to remedy the situation and he cannot afford to pay arge amount in the form of spirit stones.

    Gnyan didn¡¯t dare to say the number out loud. He is sweating all over as he calcted. It has been twelve days by now and they would surely take another day at least to pay it back. A total of thirteen days. It would be a horrible amount.

    The family head turned to Rana and asked.

    "how much is it?"

    "If you are paying it tomorrow, then it is four billion five hundred and forty-seven million spirit stones and it is a rounded up sum."

    There is a sudden silence in the room, the family head fell into his chair as he stared at his two sons.

    He knew that his son has dug arge grave for him. Four billion is a huge sum. Particrly, when he just got ripped and is still licking the wound.

    "I can¡¯t pay this, I am not paying this. Whoever it is thatid a trap to my family, they are going to pay. This is cheating. My son has been made a fool and he is being yed."

    "Don¡¯t be mistaken father. You can say all you want that you were cheated, but you better have a good reason and evidence. It is your loving son who signed that deal with all his ego inted.

    They normally asked for a refund when he failed to deliver the products they paid for but your son kept on dying them with excuses, they got furious and there is no way they would let him off easily if not for the fact he signed the agreement. If you want to me someone, you can me only two people.

    One is your precious son Gnyan and the second one is yourself for trusting your loving son so much.

    And the people he made deal with are not pushovers either. If not for the fact I still have some conscience left towards the family and I want to take your position one day, I would have never tried to stop them and by now, an army would have been at our doorstep.

    They are going to the imperial court on the fifteenth day that means three dayster. If I were you. I would immediately try to find a way to pay them back. Lest you would make a fool out of yourself in the presence of the emperor."

    With that, he left the ce.

    "Father, I think Rana is behind this trap."

    Gnyan said from the side meekly.

    *PAK*

    His father replied with a loud and crisp p right to his face.

    "Let¡¯s go to Mirage city, I would like to have a talk with your creditors."

    With that he and Gnyan both started their journey on a transcendent stage beast. They arrived at the Mirage city in half-a-day.

    Gnayn¡¯s father went to the city management directly and asked for a meeting with his son¡¯s creditors and he really did get a meeting.

    "I cannot pay such an insanelyrge amount. You cannot possibly think I would pay that."

    As soon as he took the sea, he went straight to the point. But he wasn¡¯t able to beat them in an argument. And all they said is that they would meet the emperor if they don¡¯t give the money.

    The family head was in a tight spot.

    "Do you think four and half billion is a small amount that I could pay just like that? It is a lot of money."

    "Of course it is, but that is your problem, to begin with."

    "Is there no other way we could settle this?"

    "Of course there is, you can pay us in the form of property. We will be generous, the two forges will be taken by us along with the management office. We will take all the employees, business deals all of them. We can value that at two billion in total and for the rest of the two billion and five hundred forty-seven thousand, you can pay in cash or give us something else."

 Chapter 555: Court Trial

    Both of them are in a deadlock.

    These four orphans are also Nagas, but their scale colors arepletely different from the purple shades this nation has.

    They are some bastard sons of the foreigners abandoned on thisnd. Yodha felt like they are the best for his job after hearing Sam¡¯s specifications, now theye in handy.

    Even though the Golden ze family head is a Consummate realm expert, the four of them are not even flinching at his presence and they are extremelyid back.

    This made the family head frown and feel frustrated. The Mirage city forge and shipbuildingpany are both important assets of the family, he couldn¡¯t just let it go.

    When he released his pressure and wanted to frighten them, the four of them endured the pressure all the same and puked blood immediately. After that, they just stood up and walked away.

    The family head felt weird. He didn¡¯t know what they meant by leaving like this. But when they are at the door one of them said to him.

    "We won¡¯t ask you for money anymore."

    With that, they left the ce and the family head heard that they even left the city.

    The family head felt like he escaped and felt like they sumbed to the pressure due to their absence in the city and went to inspect the two factories before his return journey to the imperial city.

    By the time he was back in the city along with his son, it is already the fifteenth day since the debt.

    As soon as he entered the house and wanted to look for one of his wives, his attendant came running and presented a red silk scroll. He immediately had a bad feeling about this.

    The red silk scroll means it is a summon from the imperial court and he also remembered that this day is the fifteenth day.

    And the call was not just for him, but also for his son.

    He knew that he fucked up immediately. He took his son and went to the imperial court and there the emperor is waiting for him along with all the court officials and the four youngsters he saw and the city management officer of the industries of the Mirage city were also there.

    He felt cold sweat. He knew that he messed up big time now.

    The court official read the whole trial once again. It started with the four orphans ordering the first batch of products and thening again for the second batch of products with an advance down payment.

    After that, he read about the failure of production and the youngsters demanding their money back and when they had enough of the excuses of Gnyan, they asked for high interest in hopes that he would pay immediately. But not only did Gnyan pay immediately he mysteriously disappeared from the city and came back with his father thirteen dayster.

    The debt then grew up to five billion six hundred and eighty million approximately, but the four youngsters are generous enough to not consider the payment for the thirteen days and offered to take only the twelve days¡¯ amount.

    But not only did they not take the offer, but they also threatened with superior cultivation. The four youngsters came here to seek justice.

    When the emperor saw Gnyan and his father, he had a hunch on why they are here.

    "What do you say, Bran? Is everything regarding the case a truth?" Emperor asked the family head and the family head wanted to refuse till the end. After all, he is the local guy and he felt that the emperor would support him.

    But he doesn¡¯t know that his son¡¯s activities and even trapping the princess, it is already great luck that the emperor has not found him to settle the scores.

    "Your Grace, I didn¡¯t threaten him, all I wanted was to see who is scheming against my family, they just left in the middle of the negotiations. Don¡¯t you see that something is fishy regarding this? I highly doubt that they even have any noble identity they proimed themselves to have."

    Emperor frowned and said.

    "Regardless of what identities they might have, answer me some questions. Did they or did they not give your forge arge order and even pay half the amount in advance?"

    "Yes, your grace."

    "Did they or did they not give you a second order and even pay half of the amount in advance?"

    "Yes, your grace."

    "Do you have any doubt or any reason to suspect that they are involved in the ruining of the products in your forge?"

    "No your grace."

    "After they found out that your products are ruined, did they ask for the payment or not?"

    "They did, Your Grace."

    "Did your son, reject paying immediately and asked for a time and agreed to pay an interest of twenty-five percent per day?"

    "Yes, your grace."

    "Did you or did you not talk to them and even used their aura to cause injuries?"

    "That.."

    "Yes or No."

    "Yes, Your grace."

    "If you have not threatened them, I would have helped you ce a good word, but your behavior is disappointing. The current debt is 8 billion and the eight hundred and ny million approximately, but after considering the total assets of the family and the heavy burden they will have to endure due to the financial strain, we are reducing the debt to six billion.

    I hope the intiff will agree with the judgment as the amount is still far more than the initial debt they owed."

    "But Your grace, our family cannot bear that much burden. Six billion is toorge an amount."

    At this moment, One spoke.

    "Your Grace, we thank you for your great judgment but considering that the rest of the hundreds of family members¡¯ situation that shouldn¡¯t be influenced by a single man¡¯s arrogance and inted ego, we would like to take the two forges and the office of the Golden ze family in ce of the debt.

    Even though it will not amount to a little more than two billion, we would still take it and we can erase the rest of the debt.

    That is if your grace agrees."

    The emperor looked at the four of them and then looked at the family head.

    "Bran, they already took a lot of steps back, what do you say?"

    Bran is now relieved. Even though, the forges will go away, at least it is better than losing assets worth six billion. His family would have to cut on the resources of the entire family forces and the rest of the families will slowly devour their businesses and assets.

    At least, now their losses are not that severe.

    "I ept this offer, your Majesty. And I thank the young master for that generous offer."

    Immediately one of the court officials drafted an agreement and the two factories are now named under the Dusk organization.

    All of them came out of the pce, but at the pce gates, a figure in ck is standing.

    Sam is waiting for them toe.

    The four youngsters saluted him and gave the title deed to Sam.

    When Bran and Gnyan looked at Sam, they are extremely dumbfounded.

    Particrly Gnyan. He has an extremely ugly face and when Sam made eye contact with him, he couldn¡¯t control his outburst.

    "You. It is all because of you. You colluded with that scoundrel Rana and schemed against me."

    He came running and was about to grab Sam by his cor. But before he knew it, he hit something hard and he was sent flying. He crashed into the floor and rolled over and when he came to his senses he saw his father looking at him with a frown from the top and in the next second and he fainted.

    "You better keep your hands where they belong. One more time and I will cut them up and shove them up to your ass and I meanpletely literally."

    Bran looked at Sam and asked.

    "Why are they giving the title deed to you?"

    "Oh, I am the owner of the Dusk organization. Which means, they work for me. They ced the orders in my ce and they did withdraw the orders and demanded a refund in my stead. They asked the factories in my stead and they are now giving back the factories to me."

    "Did you set this up?" Bran asked coldly.

    "Set this up? Isn¡¯t your son great at setting up? Using the borrowed knives and des. Using a woman to do his bidding. Go and ask him why this is happening. Ask him directly if he messed with someone named Sam because he couldn¡¯t keep his hands and brain in check.

    Ask him exactly what he did and you will understand why this happened and please leave him a message for me.

    ¡¯No one can steal what is mine. If you don¡¯t believe it by now, just give another try and see what he would lose this time.¡¯"

    With those words, he left with his subordinates.

 Chapter 556: New Businesses

    Bran didn¡¯t do anything to Sam. What a joke, if he really attacked Sam right in front of the imperial pce, he would be dead before Sam could die.

    As for the matter of Sam kicking his son unconscious, that is another issue, it is his son who made the first move and both of them are equals, Sam only did it in self-defense.

    He ordered his attendants who are waiting at the Pce gates to throw his son into the carriage before boarding it.

    They left the ce and went back to their family grounds. On their way back, Gnyan regained his consciousness, but he didn¡¯t even dare to speak when he saw his father¡¯s gloomy expression.

    After returning to their family, Bran sat Gnyan down and asked.

    "What did you do to him?"

    "I didn¡¯t ..."

    "Do you think I am stupid? A man who can y you like a fool wouldn¡¯t want to deal with you in the first ce, you will not be in his circle so why would he bother making enemies with you. Tell me."

    Seeing that his father wouldn¡¯t listen to his bullshit, Gnyan hardened his heart and said everything. When Bran heard about him using Luna to do his bidding, he couldn¡¯t help but p him straight on his face.

    *PAK*

    At least he controlled his power and didn¡¯t do too much damage, all Gnyan lost are half of his teeth.

    "You sick bastard. How dare you have designs on princess? Even if you try something, you have to be serious about it. How dare you y around with here like you did with others? Do you think if the problem gets serious, it will be resolved with just some money and gifts? Emperor will skin us alive."

    He took out some wine and drank it, he didn¡¯t use his spiritual energy to go sober immediately and just let the wine take over his body, before calming down.

    "From now on, you are in charge of rearing the Zebras for our troops. You will feed them, you with clean them and you will look after them day and night. Don¡¯t even think about taking up the jobs."

    Just like that, Gnyan who is the biggest prospect of the family to be the next family head lost all his advantages and went to be a stable boy for the rest of his life.

    All he did was to attack amoner using princess¡¯ hands and didn¡¯t reveal anything rted to him in any phase.

    But because of that one mistake, his family lost more than four billion and half of it are the second most profitable businesses of the family. He felt like killing himself.

    Meanwhile, Sam doesn¡¯t know the details of the doom Gnyan suffered. He was on his way back to the Mirage city.

    At this moment, two projects are going on the Mirage city and one of them is the project they took up at the beach area and the second one is the restructuring of the two factories. First thing is eliminate every single of the employees that are directly rted to the Golden ze family.

    He said Rana to fire them without any hesitation. He didn¡¯t care if they will feel down or their families might suffer. It is their problem. He cannot cater to everyone¡¯s needs. His own will always take priority. After firing them, almost ny percent of the staff is gone. Now, he has to recruit new staff.

    Thankfully, Rana did a good job at recruiting the talents that are rotting in the streets and filled one third of the previous staff.

    Currently, there are no business orders to them. The previous deals are all cut off when the news of the spoiled two batches of products came to light.

    And provided that the factories changed hands and new bosses came, no one would be giving them priority over the old one. At this moment, the small forges all got some great business because of that. Both weapons and the ship building.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care about that. He has no ns on going torge scale manufacturing of weapons. Many can do that. He already have a factory in his home, what is the use of another factory like that? He could earn money, but that is it.

    He looked at his new staff and said.

    "I am the owner of the new factory and the boss of you lot. Rana is my business partner and he will be in charge here most of the time. You will mostly get orders from him. At least when I am not here."

    Sam looked at more than hundred employees and said.

    "Since the factory is a new one, I must tell you something. There are going to be a lot of changes, are there any of you who only wants to participate in the weapon making. It doesn¡¯t matter if you are skilled, if all you want is weapon makinge forward."

    Twenty people came forward.

    "For you guys, there will be a weapon forging section in the previous weapon factory. You guys wouldn¡¯t me mass producing scrap in the name of weapons, instead you will be focusing on producing master pieces, the best you could produce.

    We won¡¯t take batch orders and mass orders. We will only receive custom orders and when there are no custom orders, all you have to do is make the weapons of your own liking.

    Some of you are extremely skilled and some of you are not so much. I don¡¯t know why most of you are here despite your skill, you might have had a better future at the noble families and such, even the artisan association might wee.

    There might be many factors like your race, nationality, birth or your past. But here you will have a new lease of life.

    I will provide some learning opportunities, if you are interested you can learn. If one day you be too skilled that you are too big for this ce, I will give you a chance to open your own workshop in any city of this nation along with the partnership with the organization.

    There is a need for some renovations in the factory, so I ask you to take leave for the next fifteen days. You will receive wages ordingly for these fifteen days."

    With that the twenty of them left with excitement for their futures after taking the payment from Rana.

    Then Sam continued on giving instructions to various groups of people. Some of them are the ship building batch, some of them are only skilled in making some parts of ship like a factory worker and some of them will just work with anything rted to metal.

    By the end there is no one in the factory except for Sam and Rana.

    "What are we going to do if we are not manufacturing the weapons?"

    "We are going to modernize the ship building. We are going to set the standards for the future of the ship building. So, why should we bother with following the current industry, we might get dyed in earning money, but we will definitely get thergest market there ever was. You would know soon.

    Don¡¯te to the factory for the next fifteen days and leave me alone.

    Unless it is some serious issue like death of someone don¡¯te and bother me. Take the four orphans with you and show them ropes in the grenade factory.

    Test the four of them and make one of them your substitute with a good sry. Don¡¯t be stingy, someone who can manage the factory all by himself can work greatly.

    As for the remaining three, bring them back after fifteen days we will see what they are skilled in and ce them in appropriate positions. Take these and given them their rewards."

    With that he passed three rings with a lot of spirit stones in them to reward the four orphans.

    Rana left toplete his tasks.

    Sam went to the beach area took look at the current process of the construction.

    The construction this time is a lot more different than normal, first thing is he is not using bricks or stone for the construction. He is using the crystal bamboo.

    After looking at the beach, he got some ideas and created some experiments with the crystal bamboo. This is the only thing that can be easily mutated to one¡¯s needs and it will not be rotten easily.

    At this moment, many wood element users are working with the long crystal bamboo. The crystal bamboos have light blue colored hue indicating its mutation with the water element and inside the translucent bamboo sections, there is a light blue colored liquid.

    This liquid is the result of some herb solution. He discovered this a long time ago for a long preservation of wine in the bamboo jars. Then only he realized that the crystal bamboos cannot be destroyed once they mutated as long as they are supplied with the required spiritual energy. So, he is now building this blue colored bamboo cottages. Translucent like ss and water. The true beauty of this will only be revealed after the full construction.

    After checking that, he went back to the factory to make further preparations.

 Chapter 557: News about Palace

    Fifteen dayster.

    The factory work was finallyplete.

    The two factories opened once again after a long time and when the workers returned, they were stunned. They didn¡¯t expect to see so many new machines in the factories. Sam has equipped everything they needed for the next stage of production.

    He sent the workers who wanted to work on weapon manufacturing to the weapon manufacturing zone.

    There is arge furnace there and all the artisans have to do is, drop the metal and use their own energy to melt, the formations on the furnace amplify and uses the fire elemental energy from the elemental spirit stones to reduce the burden on the person who is melting the metal.

    The furnace can not only be used to melt the metal, it can also be used as a normal forge to heat the metal to the desired condition. The quenching tanks, power hammers, power hacksaw, circr saw, belt grinder, grinding wheel, there are so many machines in the section and they can work efficiently.

    The shipbuilding factory was also filled will the kinds of tools required for basic manufacturing.

    He even ced new welding machines he designed recently, they have a special torch which has two nozzles one which produces the gas mes that areing from thebination of methane and oxygen. Even though he would have preferred if there is acetylene, the methane has no aversive effects on the metals. The second nozzle on the torch releases the powdered metal. As soon as the torch is activated a formation is projected as the metal powder and the fire are released in perfect sync and the small formation will protect the metal from not getting astray and dropping out of the welding zone.

    The formation also cools the metal rapidly, at least to the point where it doesn¡¯t flow down and stay in its ce.

    This way, most of the overhead welds can also be done.

    Sam eliminated the need for a lot of other things with the formations and the inscriptions, he doesn¡¯t need flux, the shield and he doesn¡¯t even need to worry about the metal staying in the ce in case of the overhead works.

    Apart from that, there are bending machines,rge furnaces and molds and so on.

    But the most exciting part was left to thest.

    The rest of the area in the former weapon workshop.

    There Sam took the rest of the people who are interested in any form of metal processing.

    He unveiled them their next big project, the steam engine. Even though, Sam used steam engines in his home and quite a lot of them, here he is using a modified version.

    For this steam engine, there is no need for too many operators who constantly use their own control to maintain the constant output.

    Rather, the operation is a bit easier. All they have to do is shovel the fire elemental spirit stones into the chamber like how they shovel the coal into a normal steam engine.

    But in this case, there is no need to use the same amount of spirit stones as they would have used in the case of coal and the machine is sturdier, a bit smaller, andpact and they can even mount one on a small speed boat used for riding a few people in a nice sea trip, to yachts,rge ocean liners, and even the Naval ships.

    He used different power sources and control methods in his Naval fleet. But there are some reasons for doing so.

    One of them is that he is in too much of a hurry at that time and the second one is that he didn¡¯t develop this steam engine at that time. But even without it, his fleet is the best on the whole.

    Now that his new design isplete, he will sell the old one and develop a new one.

    Sam has made some small models of steam engines suitable for various-sized ships. As for extremelyrge models, he didn¡¯t have enough patience or time to make one.

    He gave some books regarding the working principles of the engines and some more information to the workers to study for the next few days. But they had to take a pill in exchange.

    Apart from the engine, he also brought out some suitable steering and transmission mechanisms for the ships that make the work a lot easier.

    Now the workers understood what Sam meant by setting standards in the shipping industry. He would make all the wind element users who maintain the sails jobless and useless.

    His factory is the only one who can make an engine, and just like before, Sam has already set a lot of restrictions for the people who tried to reverse engineer it.

    They would bust it just like that.

    After that Sam went to the shipbuilding factory and gave the new boat designs for them to study. He gave the tasks to build these boats from scratch and see if they can understand how to manufacture them properly.

    While he let them do the work, he thought of something. The security of the business. At first, he didn¡¯t want to give Yodha any partnership because he was afraid that some military people might use him to get everything easily.

    But now that he thought about it, he will be leaving this ce soon and who knows when he woulde back. He has to find a way out for himself so that his designs and workers will be safe.

    While making machines, Sam was thinking of all this. After some thought, he finally came to a conclusion. He will give a small part of this to Yodha for security. His job is to ensure the safety of the factory and the workers that is it.

    He decided to go and talk to him.

    But at this moment, he received a raven. Sam took it and read the message. It is from Yodha. He is not in the construction site on the beach, rather he is in the imperial capital.

    Every time a war was ended, there would be a few months off for the major contributors. So Sam, Yodha, and the General got some time off and it is about to end.

    Not only did Yodha mention the time for rejoining, but he also mentioned the favor Sam asked.

    The favor regarding the Pce of inheritance.

    There are less than two months left for the next pce of inheritance. Sam knew that it is about time, the news regarding the pce appeared.

    So, he is waiting for the message and coincidentally it came right after Sam finished the basic preparations for the factory.

    Sam once again went to the imperial capital and met with Yodha.

    They talked about rejoining the army. But only for a little bit. Sam only has to train the special division soldiers and the normal soldiers before the war, so there is no need for him to worry about too much.

    As for the Pce of inheritance, this is something he needed to know urgently and the news shocked him silly.

    "There is something named Pce of inheritance appeared within the Imperial hunting grounds," Yodha said and Sam couldn¡¯t help but shake his head.

    "Imperial hunting grounds? Are they the hunting grounds towards the rear of the capital?"

    "No, there is a special forest to the northwest of the capital specifically maintained for the hunting of the imperial family members. The rest of the people, even the nobility rarely get a chance to get in there.

    It is mostly used for wilderness training for the Imperial scions and they get to take very few outsiders inside.

    The forest is actually a treasure trove, the beasts aside, many valuable herbs that couldn¡¯t be grown in farms, and many more wonderful things are left in there. All the predecessors of the imperial family will die there at their old age.

    There are special tombs constructed for them, with their wills still staying there for the suitable descendants to inherit their experience and legacy.

    The treasures they earned all their lives will also be buried along with them. It is one of the most guarded ces in the whole nation and the pce of inheritance appeared there.

    Emperor said he got a message from someone from the pce of inheritance to select three great prospects in the Late-nascent stage to go into the Pce and also gave three tokens.

    Some experts that guard the grounds already tried to pry into it, but they returned almost dead. They are all recovering in the Imperial pce now.

    Emperor is going to conduct a tournament for the best nascent stage cultivator in the whole nation and going to give away two tokens."

    "Only two?"

    "Well, he reserved the third one for him son. Even though he is righteous and generous, he couldn¡¯t let his son lose such an opportunity right? In fact, he didn¡¯t want to do that, but all the officials and even my father persuaded him otherwise."

    "Alright, but do you know if any of these Pces appeared in the other nations, is the message going to spread quickly enough?"

    "The rubrum empire also has this type of pce appearing inside their sacred ce, simr to the Imperial hunting grounds. As for the rest of the nations, it is not known yet."

 Chapter 558: Smuggling

    Sam went back to Mirage city after he received the news and met with the emperor to confirm that the Pce of inheritance is indeed somece that he wanted to enter and even showed him the token to make him believe.

    After that, he went on to develop the business of the shipbuilding. The two factories are going to be working together and one of them is responsible for the engine and the second one would make the transmission systems that could help vary the speed of the boat or ship and the steering system that helps in navigating the ship along with the whole structure of the ship.

    Why leave one whole factory to manufacture engines? That is because engines are going to be a separate business. After his ships are released into the market, many people will get some ideas with the engine and he doesn¡¯t want to monopolize every single idea thates with the engine usage.

    All he has to do is sell the engine and demand a price.

    For that, he needs to train his workers. Most of them are skilled artisans and all of them have decent cultivations with the lowest being a Grand realm cultivator at the initial stage. So, there is no need for him to worry.

    While, Sam is feeling relieved that the Pce of inheritance appeared and is looking forward to developing in this world, the rest of the yers are not feeling that good.

    Except for Arman, everyone else is somewhat exasperated. Most of them didn¡¯t move from the surroundings of the ce they appeared at first. Because they thought that the Pce of Inheritance would appear near them.

    They could only curse themselves for being Na?ve. All the yers came to know about the news one way or the other. But they are all troubled.

    If any of them are in contact with each other and talked about where they appeared in this world right after they came, they would have found a pattern.

    That is, all the yers only appeared in six main nations, and in every nation two yers appeared, except for Mov, where Sam intruded and made it three.

    Of the two yers, one of them appeared in a troubled ce near the Imperial Pce and if they couldn¡¯t get out of that, there is a high chance that they would be captured and sent to prison.

    As for the second person, they are sent into a less perilous situation far from the Imperial capital, but they would have to face dangers in their journey.

    The types of problems differ by too much, but the difficulty is about the same.

    But at this moment, due to the yers¡¯ thinking half of them are in an advantageous situation while the other half could onlyin about being unfair and make a long perilous journey.

    In the second category of the yers, Arkiv is having an even harder time.

    When he appeared he was in a special ce of the Rumbrum Empire. This ce is where the fugitives run to and the city guards, bounty hunters, and even special military forcese to this forest.

    The red-scaled Nagas he encountered are even part of such special force under training. But he was able to survive and managed to get into a town deep in the forest.

    The town doesn¡¯t have any form of human settlements nearby.

    But he didn¡¯t know initially, all he wanted was to stay alive.

    Soon, he realized that he is in a troublesome ce. The fugitive town is created by a famous criminal all over the Rubrum empire and it is a hub for many ouws.

    There are many people who have some dangerous background. Thankfully, the town is situated in the deeper parts of the forest and it is almost impossible to find it and even if the authorities did, they wouldn¡¯t be alive to send the news.

    Arkiv should be considered extremely lucky to even get to this ce. But the problem is, after he recovered he wanted to get out of this ce.

    He knew that the situation will not be good for him when the Pce of inheritance. But when he was on his way out of the forest, he was mistaken by some newbie city guards as some human criminal and was attacked, he wanted to surrender and clear up the misunderstanding.

    But then only he realized that they are looking for a scapegoat and he couldn¡¯t help but feel sorry for himself before attacking them and escaping, now he truly became a fugitive and there was a serious tail on him. He couldn¡¯t endure anymore and once again go back to the fugitive town.

    After searching the town up for a bit, he found some information brokers. They will sell info and buy info too. They only appear once a week in the town and are some pretty big-shots in here.

    So, from then on, he at least doesn¡¯t have to worry about not knowing anything when the Pce appears. He even got news about Sam and his deeds in the military along with his daring act of making the Emperor apologize.

    This made him curse in frustration. Sam is way too capable and lucky in his opinion. He wouldn¡¯t get an opportunity like that, because he cannot manipte the situation around him as Sam did. He is way too sure that Sam would have already made some sort of deal with the Emperor to get into the Pce of inheritance. He wouldn¡¯t just leave himself in a passive position as Arkiv did.

    While he was thinking this and that, he couldn¡¯t help but feel even more frustrated. What should he do if he wants to get rid of the current plight? For starters, he has to go to the capital and that too escaping the city guards, from what he knew he was one of the most wanted criminals and the city guards did bind him in aplicated case.

    Even if by chance he seeded in going to the capital, there is another thing waiting for him. He has to find a way to convince the emperor in allowing him to the Pce of inheritance and an identity as a fugitive wouldn¡¯t help this at all.

    Even if he was able to join thepetitions held by the emperor, he would soon be noticed by others easily and get into trouble once again.

    There is no way he would be able to get past the current predicament and he was thinking long and hard about where to go and what to do about it.

    After he roamed the town and the nearby woods endlessly, he was finally able to find a way out of this situation. He knew there still forty-five days for the pce to open since he cannot enter through the rubrum empire no matter what, then all he has to do is go to another country and try his luck there.

    And why did he think going to another nation is easy? Because he encountered someone that could take him there.

    A smuggler. When he was roaming around and reached the only bar in the town, he overheard a conversation and found out that someone is an expert smuggler and is very good at sending goods.

    He went to him and asked.

    "Can you take something to Mov empire?" He met with the smuggler directly and asked.

    "My next stop is there, I can go. What should I take? As long as you have money." The other party didn¡¯t take the sudden interruption in any bad light, he even smiled as he chugged the drink in his hand.

    "Can we talk in private?"

    After a few minutes, both of them are behind the bar and talking.

    "I want you to take me to Mov empire. Smuggle me in some way."

    "Smuggle you in? Boy, do you think sending a person is easy? You have to pay a fortune for that."

    "I will pay."

    "Are you sure you can afford it?"

    "How much do you want? Just say the number, as long as you can get me to a ce I can pay you as much as you want, if it was beyond my limit, all you have to do is take me to meet a person and he can pay you."

    "I need fifty million."

    "Done."

    "Eighty Million?"

    "Done."

    "One hundred?" The smuggler asked when he saw Arkiv¡¯s decisiveness.

    "Done."

    "One hundre.."

    "Any more of that would be pushing your luck."

    When the smuggler heard this, he shut his mouth and said.

    "One hundred it is then, get ready in two days, I will take you from here."

    "I have to tell you, I have some big case on my head and the bounty is also high, almost all the cities have me on their wanted list, you should be careful."

    "Don¡¯t worry. I will definitely take you out of this ce, even if you have killed an Imperial family member."

    With that, Arkiv finally solved his problem. But he didn¡¯t know what kind of plight he would encounter in this journey.

 Chapter 559: Smuggled

    Two dayster Arkiv went back to an inn inside the town where the smuggler wanted him to meet. After that both of them went to a deeper region of the forest. No one else is moving towards that direction and it was actually quite dangerous. After walked for an hour, the smuggler took out arge ss container with some sort of slimy liquid inside.

    "Apply this all over your body. Don¡¯t leave even an inch of your body open. You even have to rub this on your crotch."

    With that he started applying the smelly slimy liquid.

    Arkiv couldn¡¯t stop grumbling as he did what he was told.

    This area of the forest is actually quite dangerous with a special beast residing in there. No one would normallye to this ce. At least they never knew of anyoneing to this ce and returning alive.

    After a few minutes, the slimy liquid started drying and Arkiv felt an itch on his shoulders, he just rubbed it off, but then suddenly he felt an itch on his chest and before he knew it, he was scratching all over and the worst itch was on his groin.

    When he looked at the smuggler he saw him trying so hard to discreetlyugh.

    "What did you do to me?"

    "I have done nothing. It is the liquid that made things like this, don¡¯t worry too much."

    "Then why are you not scratching. How can you not be itchy?"

    "Experience kid, I have been doing this for years. The beast here is quite fond of human meat, but this slime is the only thing that could save us from it. Don¡¯t scratch too much, if even a single porting of your skin is exposed you are dead meat, don¡¯t expect me to save you."

    As they walked slowly, Arkiv is having the hardest time of life trying his best to not scratch. Only after they reached a flowing stream and the smuggler said that they are safe, he heaved a sigh of relief.

    "Now, the advance payment." The smuggler extended his hands and Arkiv took out a spatial ring and gave it to him. Inside there is fifty million spirit stones and Arkiv felt a pinch when he gave away that amount.

    Beforeing here, he has brought the maximum amount of money he could get and has some decent savings. But they are being depleted faster than he wanted them to.

    "Anyway, what do you even smuggle around, everyone has spatial rings, they could carry anything with them can¡¯t they?"

    "Of course, they can, but some things cannot be taken in a spatial ring or a beach pouch just like you."

    "Do you mean, you smuggle people?"

    "Sometimes, I smuggle the stolen goods, my expertise is not sneaking the items, rather find the most unconventional ways to transport people."

    "Then why are you charging me so high?"

    "Because you are a special case boy. You want me to smuggle you from rubrum to the Mov empire and I have to take you out of the fugitive town. Most of my dealings wouldn¡¯t be like that and not in such long distances. And I am doing a special solo transport for you, I wouldn¡¯t do so normally. I will transport a bunch of people at the same time."

    "Okay then, what should we do next?"

    "Wash up in the stream, anymore of the liquid your skin will blister."

    Arkiv felt delighted and jumped into the stream and started washing himself. After he was done, the smuggler gave some other liquid that could remove the remaining itchy feeling on his body.

    He felt cold and relieved when applied this liquid.

    After that, the smuggled took a small raft from his spatial ring and said.

    "We are going down the stream, you can swim all the way if you want to." He said jokingly, but Arkiv actually swam for half the distance, he really liked the feeling of the stream over his body after he applied the second liquid.

    The water and the liquidplemented and it is a pleasurable feeling. After half the way, he came on the raft and both of them followed the stream and soon the stream threw them into a small water fall leading them into a cave.

    There is arge pool of water inside the cave and there is very littlendmass.

    "Swim forward. We have to swim for another two hours." Arkiv noticed something else in the cave, the water is salty here and the stream has freshwater. He figured that they are nearing the sea.

    After two hours, they reached an edge of the cliff where the ship is docked. The ship is small and only has a few workers on it. Inside there are a lot of wooden crates on.

    He opened one of them and stuffed Arkiv inside, then he poured a green liquid in along with some type of fish.

    "There is a hole on top, so you can breathe, don¡¯t kill the fish. They are the only things that can provide the cover for you."

    Arkiv cringed at the live fish. These things can only transported like this, because normal beast pouches can only store one animal and each fish would be considered a single animal, this would make it hard for them to check it.

    After they travelled some distance on the sea, they were halted for some inspections by the navy.

    The border crossing is an extremely strict thing in this. The Mov empire and the rubrum empire only has a few ces that they could cross borders and most of them have to go through so many procedures.

    Even though, the technology the realm had is not that advanced the Visa procedures are strict, at least between the hostile nations. These points also has full database of wanted men, not letting them escape at all.

    When they came to check, after seeing a few boxes and the extremely stinky fish, they lost interest and let them go.

    After another day of travel, there was another inspection and this was from the officers of the Mov Empire.

    That night, Arkiv has finally arrived at the Mirage city.

    He was finally able to breathe again.

    "Where would you go now?" The smuggler asked Arkiv.

    "I have to find a friend of mine in this ce. I don¡¯t know where he is, but he was extremely high profile and I think I can find him fast enough as soon as I can enter the imperial capital."

    "You don¡¯t have an identity. You cannot enter the imperial capital." The smuggler just poured the cold water on his ns.

    Arkiv looked at the man and asked.

    "What? Do you have a n to sneak me in?"

    "Of course, I can. But it would take a lot of money. You know, this time I didn¡¯t think of doing any smuggling rather I had to take you here from the rubrum. My main task is to take people from here. If you really want me to help, then I can introduce some people."

    "Please do then."

    "But before that, you have to pay the bnce."

    Arkiv grudgingly paid and the smuggler said.

    "I have to go to the industrial street to look for some boat parts, you cane with me there. The person I am going to introduce you to, might be there as well."

    When they went to the industrial street though, Arkiv was shocked, because he saw a familiar logo and name.

    ¡¯The Dusk organization.¡¯

    He knew that clearly well and he immediately ran into the factory.

    The smuggler was stunned and ran after him.

    Sam who is teaching about how to repair the steam engine to his subordinates stopped in his tracks, when he saw Arkiv. He didn¡¯t expect to see him here.

    Arkiv ran to him and leaped towards him for a hug, but Sam dodged and let him crash into therge steam engine beside him.

    "What the hell are you doing here?" Sam asked.

    "It is a long story, can we discuss itter. I would like some food. Normal food. Do you have any?" Arkiv asked immediately as he dusted himself. He was too excited and even he felt embarrassed.

    After all, this is the first known person he saw in a long time.

    "We will continue thister." Sam dismissed his subordinates and took Arkiv to the meeting room along with the smuggler.

    "So, why are you here?"

    "For Pce of inheritance of course...." Arkiv went on and said the whole story.

    "So, you are here to use my influence and get into the Pce of inheritance?"

    "Yes, is it possible?"

    "I would say that it is a better option to get into thepetition for the token. From what I know, thepetitions here already reached the Imperial capital and I can at most use my influence to get into thepetition pool as a candidate from the Imperial capital.

    As for directly entering the Pce, I think I would need to pay a price. Let me ask my friend first, he has some pull in this empire. So don¡¯t worry too much."

    Sam didn¡¯t make things difficult for him. After all, it is hard for everyone to be in this faraway world. There is no need to make things difficult for him.

    "But, you owe me big time."

 Chapter 560: Resort

    Sam took finished his work in the Mirage city and brought Arkiv to the Imperial capital. He has to meet Yodha and ask about the possibility.

    The smuggler went on to do with his regr business after saying goodbye.

    After they reached the Imperial capital, he directly took Arkiv to Yodha.

    At this moment, Yodha is extremely busy because he was given the responsibilities to organize the tournaments to select the candidates. That is why Sam is confident that he can give him a position at the pool.

    "Why are you back here? Is our business going on smoothly? Why did youe here?"

    Yodha asked Sam as soon as he appeared. As for the stressing on the ¡¯our¡¯ Sam has rejected Yodha to join in the weapon and shipbuilding, butter he was afraid of the security. He was so used to opening businesses left and right on his home and he forgot to consider the risk here.

    So,ter he has to go and request Yodha to be a part of it by himself. Yodha didn¡¯t mind much, but he is taking some petty revenge like this.

    "I am here regarding the tournament." Sam ignored his antics and continued.

    "He is Arkiv, he is just like me. He also came for the Pce of Inheritance. But I don¡¯t know if I could really request the emperor regarding this."

    "Are you sure?" Yodha looked at both of them and asked. Sam nodded at Arkiv and he took out the token. Since the Pce appeared, the token is finally active, they can take it out now.

    When Yodha looked at the familiar token he nodded and said.

    "I don¡¯t know if he would agree or not, but I will try."

    "It is beneficial for him if he agrees. At least he will have extra people going in from his nation and he can recruit them to get more benefits, if he doesn¡¯t have entry, all he could do is participate in the tournament and he will get a ce by hook or crook. You guys will stand to lose."

    "I will mention this."

    "When will the final tournament begin?"

    "In two weeks. The tournaments in various cities are already in their final stages. So, it wouldn¡¯t be toote."

    "Okay then, I will go and wait for your reply."

    Sam left the ce along with Arkiv.

    He didn¡¯t expect that Arkiv woulde for him and he also didn¡¯t expect that he would have to listen to the crap about how difficult his life was in the past year.

    After some time, he couldn¡¯t take it anymore and handed the job over to Arman. He called him back from the camp and gave him all the responsibilities regarding Arkiv and was nning to go back to Mirage city, the business is in the final stages and the first batch of steamboats and ships will be released to public sales. So, there is a lot of work pending for him.

    But before he could leave, Emperor called for him.

    When he met the emperor he seemed to be in deep thought.

    "Just how many of you are here and what is this about? At first, I thought only you are here for this pce, but then you added Arman, I didn¡¯t think much of it, but now another one of your friends appeared here. Can I get more details?"

    Sam thought for a bit and said.

    "The Pce of inheritance is actually a test for us. It started in our ce and the next phase of the test was conducted here. As for how many. There are actually twelve candidates and out of twelve three of us are here.

    As for the tokens that came out from the pce itself, I will be honest and say that they are just there to increase our difficulty as well as apensation to you and your kingdom.

    The twelve of us are deployed to different ces on the and the pce of inheritance also appeared in different ces, we can enter the Pce from any of these ces.

    At first, I thought only I and Arman are sent to your Empire, but my friend also appeared here and I don¡¯t know if anyone else wille."

    "Since anyone can enter the ce as long as they have the token, what if someone grabs a token from the twelve of you?"

    "Our tokens are special, they are bound to us by body and soul. There is no way anyone can steal them. We have to enter the Pce multiple times."

    "What can we expect in the Pce?"

    "It is dangerous. There is little chance that people would actually die, but they would suffer severe trauma from the damage they will take. The tests are tough and they vary from time to time. I don¡¯t know what they are going to be this time, but they will get great rewards that are out of the world."

    Emperor didn¡¯t question any further, he knew that it is not too great to push the privacy of others by too much.

    "So, what should I do with these friends of yours if more of them pop up? The public and the officials will think I am giving special treatment to you guys."

    "But it is for your own benefit. There are only two tokens that you could use and the candidates whoe here will definitely be stronger than most of the guys here. They will definitely want to enter the Pce by hook or crook and most of them wouldn¡¯t want to reveal themselves as special candidates of the Pce of inheritance. Because it is too dangerous.

    The only reason I am telling you this is that I trust your character. From what I know the candidates in other nations will participate in the tournament and gain positions, reducing the chances for the empires.

    I am saying this to give you a chance. After all, whatever they gain inside will be useful and superior to what you have hereby a lot. So, I am just giving you a chance to maintain that."

    "So, what you are saying is, I should let you guys go and keep the tokens for the candidates from the empire?"

    "Yes."

    The Emperor went into deep thought and said.

    "I will do that. If you find any other candidates of your twelve then just give me advance notice. I want the three tokens for my citizens only. But you cannot enter the sacred grounds with them, you have to enter secretly. So do tell me if new friends join you, I will have to make arrangements."

    After that everything went smoothly. Sam knew that he judged the emperor¡¯s character correctly. He is a great man and treated his citizens responsibly without any tyranny. During his travel around this ce, he also understood the people¡¯s affection towards the Emperor.

    It is hard to fool the public and it is almost impossible for a man who has such a ce in people¡¯s hearts to be an unreasonable and greedy man. That is why he was confident enough to reveal these details to him.

    Anyway, after this time, the Pce of inheritance wouldn¡¯t disappear, it would still stay in that ce at least that is what happened in the past, and so the Emperor might figure it out sooner orter.

    At least with this, he could develop a certain level of mutual trust towards the Emperor.

    After he was done here, he went back to Mirage city, he has to finish his initial preparations in the factories and start his business. The Weapon shop already took action. The Special weapons are doing great and they are not sitting on the shelf even because of their superior prices.

    After a few days, Sam was done with the preparations in the Mirage city. Both of the businesses are ready to be on the market.

    One of them is a beach resort.

    The resort is full of Cottages, there is not a single stone building in and each cottage has wide andrge windows giving the way to the sea breeze and the view.

    Even the restaurants, massage centers, and other recreational centers also have the same style of construction.

    The view is amazing. And the sea breeze is rxing. As for the cottages, they are made with a special Crystal bamboo.

    Most of them have blue-colored bamboo and they are translucent. The blue liquid inside the bamboo sections and when the sun rays fell on it made it an extremely beautiful scene.

    As for the night, the bamboos give out a dim glow giving a special and mysterious feeling to the people inside.

    This is one of the best holiday spots.

    Massage, spa, and the food side things are all dealt with Vasu, who has experience in this area. Yodha is responsible for the government side of things and Sam gave the ns and even food recipes.

    Even on the opening day, the resort already became extremely famous.

 Chapter 561: Fourth Player

    Along with the Resort, the ships also hit the market, the first customer is surprisingly the smuggler. When he came previous time, he saw the semi-finished ships and felt like they are good. So, after he finished his business in Mov Empire, he once again came back to take a look, right before the opening day.

    He stayed there for the demonstration of the ships and he bought five ships of different sizes.

    One of them is a decent Ocean-Liner and the others are all smaller ones that could fit inside a spatial ring.

    After that, there are some orders from the local fishers. They took a liking to the smaller speed boats that could be used for one or two people, and a bitrger fishing boats that could be used for five to ten people.

    At the moment, there is norge order, but the smaller orders are umting decently. After setting the business on the track, Sam went back to the Imperial Capital, where the final rounds of thepetition are happening.

    There are barely two weeks left before the Pce of inheritance.

    He went to spectate thepetition. Arkiv and Arman are also staying in the Capital.

    But when Sam came here, he was stunned to see one more person in thepetition. It is a woman. The woman disguised herself as a man in the Herb Garden. One of the twelve yers.

    She is still disguised as a man, but this time, she changed the disguise and her skin tone changed to the point that no one would suspect that she is not from this country. He recognized her mostly because of the familiar aura of the nts and the attacks he suffered in her hands. She used simr attacks in the tournament.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know how she managed to maintain her skin tone, she must have escaped a lot of trouble because of that. But at this moment, he was conflicted. He was thinking if he should say that she is also a yer or not to the emperor.

    After all, he did make a deal with the emperor and it is not appropriate for him to let the emperor suffer a loss like that.

    After contemting a bit, he decided to go with it but he also decided to give her a heads-up to her.

    He didn¡¯t disguise himself anymore. It would be nonsensical to hide his identity after the waves he caused in this nation. Even Arkiv was able to get to know his details ande here, it is safe to assume that the rest of the candidates also learned of this.

    So, he decided to meet that woman that very evening, and he did.

    He asked Yodha about her residence and went there.

    Thankfully, thedy is training in the yard.

    Sam walked to her calmly and watched as he manipted the grass in the yard. All of a sudden, he jumped from the spot with golden mes surrounding him, and the spot he was in and the new spot hended both be devoid of any vegetation burned to crisp.

    "It is not polite to attack a guest," Sam said calmly as he looked at her.

    "It is not polite toe uninvited either."

    "I must apologize, but I had toe."

    "Why are you here?"

    "Well, I am here to say that you don¡¯t need to participate in the tournament anymore."

    Thedy frowned and looked at him coldly.

    "Can we sit and talk?"

    Sam moved to a nearby table and sat on the chair. Thedy also sat opposite him and said.

    "Why should I listen to you and stop participating? Do you want to get all the treasures yourself? Is it your patron¡¯s turn next?"

    Sam chuckled at that. He didn¡¯t expect her to call the Gods her Patrons.

    "Nope, actually you don¡¯t have to participate to enter the Pce."

    "And who will grant the entrance?"

    "The Emperor himself. I made a deal with the Emperor regarding the Pce. He wants to gain as much advantage as possible with the Pce and wants to use the three spots for his own people, so he wanted me to inform the other yers who came here and he would grant entrance directly."

    "How can I believe him? How can I even believe you?"

    "Well, at least I don¡¯t have anything against you. I didn¡¯t reveal who you truly until now. Doesn¡¯t that ount for something?"

    When Sam said this, he looked at her up and down. The girl became angry and wanted to beat the crap out of him, but controlled herself and said.

    "Maybe or Maybe not. I think it is more probable that you are luring me out so that you can reduce yourpetition."

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but chuckle and said.

    "Do you think I have to resort to tricks to clear mypetition? All I would have to do is hunt every one of you down and be done with it.

    Anyway, I said what I wanted to say. I am going to give the Emperor the news about you being a yer. I cannot go back on my words. If you really doubt me, Arkiv is staying at the factory outside the city. You can go there and meet him. So you can get some assurance. After all, from what I know, you two can at least be considered acquaintances."

    Sam didn¡¯t continue sitting there and started walking away. All of a sudden, he covered himself with golden mes and shed back. He disappeared into a golden sh and reappeared right before the woman.

    He held her neck in the midst of all the vines that are extended towards him and are slowly burning down because of the golden mes.

    "I came to talk, so let me leave peacefully. If I wanted to deal with you, I wouldn¡¯t even need to waste so much time and could be done with it."

    There is a small searing sound as ayer of skin burned on the neck of that girl. Sam released her and walked away calmly.

    That night, she really did find Arkiv in the factory outside.

    "Noah, is that you? I really couldn¡¯t identify you? So you were also deployed to Mov empire?"

    Arkiv greeted her casually. But he doesn¡¯t know she is a woman and he just ced his hand around her neck as he spoke in an extremely friendly manner.

    She dodged his hand and said about meeting Sam.

    Arkiv said casually.

    "Yes, it is true. He has some good connections with the Emperor and also the most powerful young master in the Mov Empire. I even talked with the Emperor myself. There is no cheating here. You can rx."

    "How can you be so sure?"

    "Well, it is simple, that guy Sam is too good to even among us, the yers. In thest two pces, he is the biggest winner. It is almost like the rest of us arepeting for the second position. There is no way he would want to trap us. In fact, he is the only one who is treating this test for fun."

    "But what if the Emperor dupes us?"

    "It is not likely, I have been learning about the Emperor and even Sam made some serious fuss right in front of him. You must have heard that too, right."

    Noah nodded and thought for a moment before saying.

    "Okay then, tell him that I will withdraw from thepetition."

    "That¡¯s for the better. We have to stay in this ce for at least another two years, it is better if we get into the Emperor¡¯s good graces."

    The news reached Sam and he was already on his way to meet the Emperor regarding Noah.

    The Emperor asked for some more details before agreeing.

    Now, all they have to do is wait for thepetition to be over and enter the Pce of inheritance.

    The three finalists who got the chance to enter the Pce of inheritance are of different ces. One of them is the prince. Even though the Emperor wanted to take one token for him, the prince didn¡¯t agree and participated in thepetition. And he got the position with his own capabilities.

    As for the remaining two. One of them is a special division member of the Military. He is in fact someone Sam knew. He is one of the leaders of the special division fire element batch.

    As for thest person, he is actually a city guard in the Imperial city. He is young and promising and he is trying to be the Imperial guard.

    The most distinguished feature of him is that he is human. Barely any human was able to reach a high-level position in the city guard, much less enter the Imperial guard.

    The city guard is full of political influence and many nobles try to wrestle for control over some area. That is why it is hard for a human to climb the ranks. But this guy still survived.

    And he gained a spot for the imperial guard training. He might as well be considered the toughest of all three candidates, both physically and mentally.

 Chapter 562: First Round

    Soon the time for entering the Pce of Inheritance hase.

    The day before the entrance, Sam along with Arman, Arkiv, and Noah entered the Imperial Pce from there the Emperor sneaked them out of the city and took them to the Imperial hunting grounds.

    There is a residence within the grounds and it is just arge stone building without many facilities. They stayed there for the night and the next morning, the three candidates were escorted by an Imperial Prince, who is also the brother of the Emperor to the residence.

    After dropping them, he didn¡¯t stay there and left. The Emperor then introduced the four of them to the three, but the introductions are short and only names were told.

    The three candidates are all looking at him with a serious expression. Because they are thinking they came through the backdoor. But they didn¡¯t dare voice those thoughts out. At least they knew that since the Emperor has no intention of speaking up and kept mum, then the situation is not something they could draw conclusions on.

    The prince however was pissed because they are all humans.

    Maybe, he didn¡¯t inherit all of his father¡¯s qualities, but what he doesn¡¯t know is that all four of them could beat his ass like beating a child if he really tried anything funny. After a few minutes they entered the Pce of inheritance and the first thing they encountered is another Avatar.

    This time, it is not Sanchez. The hall looked the same though.

    And the basic introduction for the rules of the Pce of inheritance was next.

    He clearly mentioned one thing though, that is everyone is responsible for their own lives. In the previous Pce of inheritance, it was the challenge of The Monkey King and he was kind enough to create a ce that would save the lives of the people as long as they are breathing.

    The whole woods are enchanted and all the trees are providing wood elemental healing. But this time it is not guaranteed at all.

    "You can pick a room and go in."

    For some reason as if they knew how many people areing in, there are seven doors. But the yers knew better than that.

    Nothing in the Pce is something to be surprised about. They have seen too much in the past two visits.

    Sam entered a room and inside there is arge and wide-open field without anything present. There is only arge field without even a single de of grass. All he could see is the brown soil all over the ce.

    All of a sudden, a human silhouette appeared in front of him with a spear in his hand. His whole body is emitting a thickmanding aura. It will create a sense of obedience in any normal person that experienced it.

    Sam looked at him as he observed. He could faintly guess who this guy is, but he didn¡¯t speak.

    "I am Karthikeya, the Heavenly God of War. This time, a total of twenty-two members appeared. You will bepeting against each other until only three of you are left. That means all of you will be participating in three shes, except for one person, who will be the lucky guy to directly enter the top-6 after the first round.

    He will escape the second round and directly participate in the third round and that person will be selected by your performance in the first round.

    As for what you are going topete in, it is the art of war. You will be thrown into different scenarios with the role ofmanders of the two opposing parties and you have to use your troops to fight against your enemy¡¯s troops to achieve your objective.

    The scenarios and the objectives will be exined after your opponents are allocated. Every man who lost or won will definitely be able to get some reward, but that would only be given to you at the end of the Pce of inheritance.

    There is no fixed time limit for this Pce of Inheritance, so after the finals are done and the winner is decided you will be let go.

    I wish you luck."

    With that Kartikeya¡¯s silhouette disappeared into thin air.

    Sam felt a bright light cover his vision and envelope his hole before the whole space distorted around and before he knew it, Sam found himself inside a room. He was covered in thick fur clothing. They seemed to be made of bear hide. He sat at the head of a long table and on both sides, there are many people standing.

    There is arge leather map on the table showing the image of a castle and there are some wooden pegs in different shapes ced around the castle.

    There is a firece burning behind him all the people standing seemed to have paused in their actions like a video.

    New information appeared in Sam¡¯s head along with a voice.

    "You are a humanmander, who is in charge of the safety of the castle. The castle is under siege on all four sides. The main objective is to protect the queen who is in the castle along with the prince. The king has gone to war and some of the enemies, sent some forces to siege the castle here. All the citizens are hauled into the castle walls.

    You are outnumbered by four times and there are not many provisions in the castle that could sustain the people inside for many days. The maximum time all of them can survive is five days. You have finished the operation in the five days."

    Along with that, there is a lot of other information on the castle dimensions, positions, and climatic conditions. Apparently, this is winter and the cold outside is unbearable.

    There is a lot of snow piling up on the castle walls, corridors, and all over the ce.

    The main information Sam focused on is that he and his troops, no one has any form of spiritual energy. They all normal humans. After digesting all the information, the actions of the whole room resumed and the people who are standing slowly sat down after Sam greeted them.

    Sam once again heard all their reports regarding the enemy forces and their current conditions before saying.

    "Guard the walls for now and stop all the attempts of the people who are trying to climb them up. As for the streams, they are already frozen, there is no way they coulde in, so don¡¯t worry about it.

    For now, send guards to keep order inside the castle and distribute the food resources properly. There should be no unrest. If the people starve, they would find ways out of the situation, and surrendering to the enemy is the best one out of all.

    Make sure that the Queen and the Prince are in their chambers and send two maids to stay in that same room. They are not allowed toe out and go in. The food shall be sent directly by the soldiers. And only on my orders. No one should have any contact with the Queen or Prince.

    How is the temperature outside?"

    "Sir, the temperature is freezing cold. The soldiers don¡¯t even dare to drink water outside."

    Sam nodded and went into deep thought.

    "How close are the enemies to the walls?"

    "They are not very far sir, they trying their best to climb the walls since the archers are little use to them. Our defenses are strong, but from what saw they are clearly trying their best to deplete our provisions. We learned that thest spy we caught already sent the message before we could kill him."

    "Then let us give them a nice surprise."

    Sam doesn¡¯t know the time limit and doesn¡¯t care at all. As soon as he found out there is a lot of snow, he knew that he will win. Most people might not think dirty as he does, but winning is winning no matter what.

    One must not care too much about pride when the matter of life and death are decided. Anyway, they outnumbered them by too much, to begin with.

    Sam ordered to start a fire in many ces of the castle and all themoners who came in were given a task, that is shovel snow into the wooden barrel and ce it on the fire to create water.

    Sam surely shouldn¡¯t use any drinking water such an operation. In this winter, that is also an important provision. So, he can only make do with the snow.

    When the soldier heard thatmand, they were puzzled. But not for too long.

    When they collected barrels of hot water, they understood soon.

    The barrels are not too big, so a soldier can carry one directly, he quickly ran up to the castle walls and poured the boiling hot water directly on the soldier that are trying to climb the walls.

    If the water is at room temperature, then it will definitely freeze before reaching the enemies and it would be no more different than hitting them with ice.

    But now, the situation is different, as long as the water fell on them, that is enough.

    Then only Sam noticed that there are catapults on the castle wall and he couldn¡¯t help but smirk.

    He ordered the soldiers to use the catapults to throw the hot water-filled barrels through the catapults.

    And just like that the enemy soldiers who are close to the castle are all experiencing hot water rain.

    When the water fell on them, they didn¡¯t feel anything. The water is not boiling hot by the time it reached them, it is warm and they even felt good, but what followed next is something they didn¡¯t expect at all.

 Chapter 563: Water and Oil

    Sam¡¯s trick can be considered somewhat dirty. Particrly, when he saw the way these people carried themselves. They are too prideful and too focused on killing their enemies in one sweep.

    If they really shed, then one party will surely perishpletely.

    They wouldn¡¯t retreat, these people are close to barbarians. But he didn¡¯t care about feelings. Feelings don¡¯t win wars.

    He also knew that the castle walls wouldn¡¯t stop them for too long, the more free time they have on them, the more beneficial it is for the enemies. The provisions are not enough at all the other party would dly wait and n on how to deal with the castle slowly, while the castle turned chaotic.

    Sam didn¡¯t want that to happen. So, the first day went with him spraying hot rain on the enemies. It might not seem like much, but it is actually critical damage for the enemies. More than half of the enemies arepletely soaked in the hot water.

    Their skin scalded slightly, but that is not the main damage. The water on their bodies will start to freeze immediately and even their thick clothing will start freezing.

    When some freezes right on their skin, they wouldn¡¯t be able to endure it, they are did something wrong and rubbed it off, there would beyers of skin disappearing from the spot, even if they don¡¯t, they will suffer Ice burn on top of the scalded skin.

    The Ice burn is enough to make the enemies go chaotic. More than half of the people who caught up in the rain will feel their bodies burning on the fire even in that cold and will definitely catch a cold.

    A cold in the snowy mountains and in the middle of the war, they should see how chaotic they would be.

    The first thing he has to do is, that to reduce the calm of the enemies and he achieved that. Only when they are not calm will they take decisions on impulse and only on the impulse will they make mistakes. This is what he wanted them to do, make mistakes.

    And themander happened to be a Naga of some other nation, but currently, his appearance is that of a human. He has no idea about normal warfare without any spiritual energy. So, he is counting on the five days depletion of the provisions and the chaos, but now he knew that he has to defend against the enemy attacks too.

    The enemies retreated a bit and didn¡¯t stay within the range where the hot water could affect them. Even if they used catapults the water wouldn¡¯t stay in the barrel until it reached the area.

    Sam went on to look for the next trick he should use, even though some of his subordinates are not pleased with his method, they understood the severity of the situation. They couldn¡¯t just bitch and whine about the methods they used.

    That night, there was a surprise attack on the castle, a volley of arrows came from the enemy side, but there are no casualties, the castle walls were constructed in such a way. Even the people who are stationed on the wall will not be attacked by the arrows as they have a clear hiding spots.

    But the arrows that were shot are set on fire and they set hay and some wooden equipment on fire within the castle.

    Sam didn¡¯t worry too much, it is easy to put off the fire with this many people and the damage is not severe. But he is thinking of what to do next.

    How to cause more chaos in the enemy camp that they would feel like retreating and abandoning the post.

    He sat in his room and kept on thinking and didn¡¯t notice that the firece was not burning, he forgot to load the wood in and the room turned cold. But he didn¡¯t notice it, he only noticed until the oil in themp was frozen and the light reduced by a lot.

    He once again made a fire and heated themp a bit to get the light and went into deep thought.

    He immediately went to check all the provisions they have.

    The oil they are using in themps is made the mixture of the excess fat of some sea creatures. The city they are in actually a seashore city. This came as a surprise to him as he didn¡¯t expect that.

    The oil was actually made of seal fat and Pr bear fat. Even though they could use it to makerd the fat of all the sea creatures is not that tasty, and in this time, they have way too much of that, they could use it formps, other than cooking.

    The people who go hunting or fishing will collect animal fats and the delicious ones will be used for cooking but the no delicious ones will be made into fuel.

    Sam checked the provisions and realized that the only abundant thing is this fat oil. Except for this, everything else has to be rationed. The people mostly rely on hunting and they will exchange those goods for the grain from other areas.

    But since the nation is under war. The merchants are not so keen on entering and selling the grain.

    Currently, the whole city is getting by on the fish and meat they could obtain. Some animals that are in hibernation are also making it easy for them to hunt.

    So the oil is one of thergest resources they had at this moment and if they win the war and get the city back, then it is easy for them to recover the lost oil.

    So, Sam didn¡¯t hesitate anymore. He decided to trick them one more time.

    The next day, there is chaos all over the castle and that is because the people are starving. Their rations are cut off because the food that was supposed to be for five days has burned and half of it was gone because of thest night¡¯s fiery arrows.

    And by sheer coincidence, the news came out and went into the ears of the enemies.

    The enemies immediately took the opportunity and marched forward.

    There is a lot of empty space around the castle for a few hundred meters, separating it from the rest of the city, and the enemies are stationed there.

    Now they marched forward trying to use the chaos once again.

    But as soon as they came forward and reached the vicinities of the castle, they noticed something is not right.

    The soldiers on the castle walls made another rain, this time it is the oil rain and some archers are already in positions with fiery arrows.

    As soon as the oilnded they shot the arrows.

    The fur coats in the wild really do help them with the cold, but they easily catch fire.

    The soldiers of the enemies are all huddled together in the area as they are trying to burst through the castle door.

    This caused the fire to spread quickly, but the familiar barrels came down once again and this time they are full of oil.

    Generally, the people here only use boulders from this top and wouldn¡¯t use the means like setting people on fire and throwing hot water.

    But Sam didn¡¯t understand why. It is almost like these people only knew how to fight and strategize with weapons and all, there is no thinking of using the circumstances and such.

    Anyway, Sam didn¡¯t care, he almost finished the current task. Now that enemy camp is in chaos, the soldiers on the walls worked on full swing, the boulders, the oil barrels, the fire arrows and normal arrows, spears all went out of the castle walls like there is no end, even somemoners came and gave a hand in carrying the boulders and barrels up.

    The enemy camp is chaos and there is no way they could regroup. Themander fell for such a little trick and it is clear that he had no experience in fighting wars of normal people. He was way too easy to fool and way too easy to defeat.

    Sam almost felt like he is wasting his time. The war is over. Most of the enemies are injured or burned state, they cannot fight anymore and even the retreated forces cannot march forward. Now, even if the people from the castle opened the gates and met with a head-on collision, the enemies couldn¡¯t retaliate, they would definitely die.

    Sam felt the whole scene pause once again and a bright light enveloped him. He disappeared from the spot and reappeared on the emptynd.

    In this war, his casualties are nil, but he won. If this is not a great victory then he doesn¡¯t know what is. So, he is pretty confident that he would directly reach the third round. But before that happened, he has to wait.

    Wait until the rest of them finished their tasks and the winners are decided.

 Chapter 564: Tower defense

    Sam waited in the destend for some time, maybe thinking that the other battles would be over. But the wait went on and on. There is no day or night in that field, he sat there, he rolled over and he even slept for some time.

    He almost lost the sense of time after a while. After some time, he figured he might as well train and started the body refining. Even though he works every day with so many things, he always trained for some time in one way or another. Just that he wouldn¡¯t spend as much time as the rest of his peers.

    But now that he got a lot of time and an environment with the spiritual energy of higher density than his regr atmosphere, he might as well use it.

    He doesn¡¯t know how long he trained, but he kept on refining his body and practiced hisbat techniques.

    After who knows how long, he was finally woken up from his stupor. Karthikeya¡¯s silhouette appeared once again and Sam wore his clothes back and started restoring his energy.

    "You are exempt from the second round, but you have to wait for the remaining people toplete their second round. I wille back in five more days."

    With that, the silhouette disappeared once again. Sam felt like this has to be the most boring Pce of inheritance he will ever be in. The first test is way too easy and the second test is being skipped and the third one happens, who knows when. He felt like he wore his clothes unnecessarily.

    He once again took off his coat and the vest before going back to training.

    After five days, Sam didn¡¯t get any more notification, the bright light once again enveloped him when he is in the middle of training and he disappeared.

    He once again reappeared in a room, but this time, his appearance didn¡¯t change at all. He is still full of sweat and bare-chested.

    The room only one table and there is arge holographic map on it. He looked around and there are three windows to the room and one of them has a view towards arge forest and he could faintly see the hills far away. The second window has a view of the long beach and thest one has a view of the vast sea.

    He is inside the top floor of the tower. There is no door on the walls, but there is one on the floor which might probably have stairs leading downstairs.

    He tried to open it but to no avail.

    He wanted to see if he can jump out of the window, but that is also not possible as an unknown force is blocking him from jumping down. He could only sigh and sit back in his chair.

    All of a sudden some information popped up and the holographic map brightened.

    After digesting all the information in his head, Sam understood what the test is.

    This is more like the game of tower defense.

    His objective is to get the g on the opponent¡¯s tower while defending his own.

    He observed the map carefully, the game hasn¡¯t started yet. There is still an hour time for him to n and in this hour.

    The game¡¯s rules are simple. All he has to do is, use the hundred Nascent stage cultivators under hismand to defend his tower and at the same time capture the opponent¡¯s tower.

    Currently, Sam is looking at the three-dimensional holographic map in front of him. The map of the whole terrain of the ind they were in.

    He could see two towers clearly. One of them has the red g on top of it and the other tower which is on the other side of the ind has the blue colored g on top of it.

    His color is red and his troops are also marked as red dots with a colored hue indicating their elemental usage.

    All his troops are currently lined up in front of the tower and are waiting for his orders.

    As for the terrain, the whole ind has a stream that originated from the center of the valley surrounded by the hills on the other side of the ind. The blue tower is located right beside the origin of the stream.

    The map is divided into two halves.

    One half is red in color and the other half is blue in color. Sam could move his troops to anywhere in the red-colored region within the grace period of this one hour.

    He could see all the positions and any situation within his zone.

    But for the blue zone, all he could see is the terrain, he couldn¡¯t see the position of the soldiers of his enemy and the situations of the other half. However, it is not an absolute one, when his soldiers intervene, he can get the view of the situation near the vicinities of his soldiers.

    He could see everything within their sensory range and a bit more.

    If the enemy soldiers are in that range, he would be able to see that too.

    After checking through the terrain, Sam is looking for any special spots. There are some details regarding the beasts that reside on the ind.

    There are norge beast families with hundreds of them. Thergest beast family barely has fifteen members.

    Apart from the beast habitats, he is also looking for possible ambush points in the enemy area.

    As for his own terrain, Sam didn¡¯t think of creating many ambushes. But he did observe the terrains and possible ways the enemies could infiltrate in and march forward.

    He looked for all the clues that he might require. This one hour is the time that he can do whatever he wants. He cannot infiltrate the enemy¡¯s territory and the enemies cannot do the same for him. But everything else in this one hour is a fair game and there is even more special privilege that is that there would be no traveling time for the soldiers in this one hour. They will just appear, wherever he wants them to appear.

    Sam then took a look at the soldiers. All of them have serial numbers. There are five elemental users and all of them are Warrior-Mages. Fire, water, wind, earth, and Wood. Twenty soldiers of each element.

    He thought for a bit and started moving them within his territory as hemanded them to do some things.

    As for how hemanded, all he has to do is press the indicator of the soldier with spiritual energy and voice hismands to him.

    He can even do that to multiple people at the same time.

    Sam left thirty soldiers near the tower and they all doing their preparations as per Sam¡¯s orders.

    As for the remaining seventy soldiers, all of them are spread along.

    And particrly the twenty of them are teamed to various ambush points within his territory.

    Thest fifty members were divided into five squads with each squad having two users of every element and they are all deployed to various positions to move towards the enemy tower.

    After arranging all the things, Sam smiled and waited for the show to begin and he didn¡¯t have to wait for long.

    He took out a jar of wine and some roasted meat as he got ready to issue themands.

    As soon as the time for thepetition started, he could already spot a bunch of blue dots in his side of the map. At the edge of the border of the two territories. The blue dots are moving faster and deeper into his territory from some points.

    Sam looked at their traveling paths and spread his spiritual energy all the field to let all his soldiers hear.

    "Stick with the n until I say otherwise. Don¡¯t attack your own troops even by the mistake. As soon as you see the opponents you can activate the traps and escape to anywhere possible or try to get back to the tower."

    With that, he sat back and rxed.

    At this moment, within the forest, a team of blue soldiers is running with extreme speed. This is a team of five and they are extremely fast. Out of five two of them are wind element users and two wood element users and an earth element user.

    They seemed to be a team of scouts. But Sam doesn¡¯t know their abilities and only knew that five of them are running through the woods. They are following the path of the stream. They must be thinking of reaching the red tower from the side after reaching the end of the stream where it is joining the sea.

    This is not a bad n actually, considering that no one would think that someone would travel such a roundabout way.

    This is the longest path to the tower.

    After they reached a certain distance, however, they suddenly stopped and looked around. Theirmander sent orders that a red soldier is in the vicinity and they halted. Their sensory range is not thatrge and theirmander couldn¡¯t see that there are not one but two red soldiers.

    As the blue team is looking around vigntly, they heard a loud rumbling sound from the side.

    At that exact moment, arge log on fire was shot into deeper woods where a small fox tribe is residing. They are extremely agile and cruel beasts. The Pyro foxes. When therge red log on fire shot into their habitat, it destroyed the surroundings and immediately became angry.

    They looked in that direction and immediately started running.

    The red soldiers who activated their traps left the ce and both of them ran in different directions and they even appeared in front of the blue team.

    The blue team wanted to split up but they could hear the angry roars and the stamping of the beasts and before they knew it, the Pyro foxes are on their tail.

 Chapter 565: Tower Defense-II

    While the ten or so Pyro foxes pursued the five of them, the two red soldiers who split up once again changed the directions and ran after the pyro foxes. They only ran away to distract the blue team so that their reaction would be dyed and they wouldn¡¯t notice the Pyro foxes instantly.

    Now that their goal is achieved, it is better for them to go after the Pyro foxes and act as a backup just in case the blue team didn¡¯t die.

    There is no way the team could outrun the foxes as they are too slowpared to the beasts.

    After confirming there are only ten of them, the five-man team made a move suddenly and engaged with the foxes.

    These beasts are somewhat vengeful and wouldn¡¯t calm down easily.

    But the soldiers are coordinated and managed to overpower the foxes in exchange for receiving some critical damage.

    At this moment, the red soldiers are still beyond their sensory range and are watching the battle which was in its final stage.

    As soon as the battle was about to be finished, the two soldiers made their move and before the enemymander could see them on the map and react, the two of them already killed the exhausted soldiers.

    One of the traps Samid seeded.

    A simr scenario was happening in another ce of Sam¡¯s territory. But here the red soldiers didn¡¯t even have to kill themselves, a pride of lions tore apart every blue soldier that was in the way and they didn¡¯t stop right there, they ran after the two red soldiers who are a distance away.

    Sam looked at the scenario and chuckled before saying to the two of them.

    "Both of you split up. One of you go to the right and another go straight. Both of you will meet two more blue teams if you can hold on, but if you cannot hold on, turn left from your spot and run forward. A red team of ten is moving there and you can deal with lions."

    After he gave the instructions, he noticed that the red soldiers couldn¡¯t handle this and Sam immediately ordered the ten-man team that was slowly moving towards the blue team¡¯s territory and the ten of them intercepted the two soldiers and the Pride of lions.

    The battle was not as intense. The eight lions first attacked the five-man team of the blue team. Even though, they won they lost two lions and another two are injured, the remaining four lines only ran after the two because they can outnumber the two of them. Otherwise, they wouldn¡¯t have made a move at all.

    Which nascent stage beast would be dumb? But the ten members¡¯ addition now tilted the scales. They werepletely done with the lions and the two red soldiers also joined this ten-man team and walked forward.

    These people are also walking beside the stream, but they are walking on the other side and they are moving in a moderate manner.

    After reaching a certain distance, they hid in various spots and waited there on Sam¡¯s orders. At this moment, ten men from the Blue team were eliminated and they have an upper hand, here they are waiting for another team.

    But the trap is different, they didn¡¯t want to kill these men directly, instead, they have other ns.

    When the five men from the Blue team really came, the ten men ambushed them and forced them to enter the water.

    This has been the n all along. Themander of the blue team has been yelled at them as soon as he discovered the red team members, but he has been tooter, and then only he realized something else.

    The water is infested with some dangerous fish.

    These fish are asrge as a normal alligator and looked a lot like Piranhas. They started attacking the five men team. The number of fish is not exactlyrge and their defense is not too strong.

    They are somewhat vulnerable, normally they wouldn¡¯t prey on humans, but the haul is too big and they were greedy.

    So, they arrived and as soon as they started fighting with the five members, the twelve red soldiers came out of the hiding and started attacking from the shore.

    They didn¡¯t just attack the humans, after leaving the corpses of the soldiers there and attracting the remaining fish there, they killed all the fish from the shore.

    After some time, they simply created a small area that covered all the fish habitat and boiled all of it to make sure no fish survived. They made sure that the stream went back to normal and continued their journey once again.

    In this way, the blue team lost fifteen members, while the red team lost none. There is a reason for it, and it is not because Sam guessed the paths that the blue team would take, rather he marked every possible path they could take and three paths are within that scope.

    As for his own members that are assigned to invade the enemy territory, they actually didn¡¯t infiltrate at this moment. Sam didn¡¯t set their starting points right at the border of the two territories as his opponent did, instead, he put them at a moderate distance from the border and even asked them to move at a moderate speed.

    That is because he wanted them to help with the defense by dealing with some of the enemy soldiers that infiltrated. Since they will outnumber the enemies and also in their own turf with the help of traps, they wouldn¡¯t need so much energy.

    Meanwhile, the enemy troops are still infiltrating. After counting, Sam figured that a total of forty members infiltrated into his territory, and out of the fifteen members are already done for.

    Now only twenty-five members are still moving forward and most of them escaped the traps and some of them managed to deal with the two red soldiers that are dealing with the traps.

    Sam finally started seeing casualties, but there are no more than six of them at this moment.

    He doesn¡¯t know how many men, his opponent put up for defense near the tower and how many of them are in ambush.

    But he was not nervous in the least, because ten-men teams are not easy to take down and they are moving in a certain way that they will cover the maximum area with their sensory range that will give him more view of the territory.

    The twenty-five blue soldiers within his territory didn¡¯t fall for anything else and even stayed in ce after reaching a certain distance. It seems like they are trying their best to recuperate to their best state.

    At this moment, Sam¡¯s people are also infiltrating the enemy¡¯s territory.

    The Bluemander noticed that Sam¡¯s troops are mostly concentrated near the stream area.

    There are many people there and a cluster of red dots are there on either side of the river and most of them are even crossing the river time and time again to exchange information.

    Apart from this cluster of twenty dots, there are three more small clusters in different ces.

    Apparently, Sam chose the most difficult routes of all as their infiltration points, except for the stream.

    The stream is actually a better infiltration path for Sam than the blue team because the stream will directly lead them to the area near the tower. They don¡¯t even have to wait and hide.

    Seeing therge teams, the bluemander was really frustrated. But he is not entirely disappointed.

    For the first time, Sam was surprised because the traps set by the other party are almost the same. But they used more people to lure a family of tigers towards Sam¡¯s ten-man team, but there are only five blue soldiers and they hid and attacked the red soldiers along with the tigers without giving them any chance to be alive or escape. At the same time, they also finished off half of the tigers and once again lured them.

    They didn¡¯t lure them to another team, rather they lured them to another habitat.

    After some initial sh, the beasts joined and followed the team that already moved far away with a decent head start.

    But the beasts didn¡¯t leave them alone and went on following.

    Sam lost ten men and he doesn¡¯t know if he will lose more men. Last time, he wasn¡¯t able to give them orders on time, causing him to lose ten members.

    He became vignt again and scolded in his head because of his cockiness and underestimating the opponent.

    He estimated the next attack and started giving orders to the next ten-man team that is most probably going to be attacked. He must say that the other party is pretty ballsy to lure the beasts purely with his men.

    But he knew it wouldn¡¯t be easy. And his guess was right, the beasts caught up and the blue team lost another five soldiers, but the beasts moved on to the next red team, to whom Sam is already giving orders.

 Chapter 566: Tower Defense-III

    When the beasts caught up to the red team, they are already in a formation. Eight of them stood in a circle while the two of them stood in the center.

    The two in the center are the earth element users of the team and they already constructed a barricade of the earthen wall around them.

    The beasts surrounded and got ready to destroy the wall.

    When a beast ran forward and jumped, not only an earthen spike came from the wall and pierced it, but an intense me torched it all over until it almost turned into ashes.

    Only after the fire cleared could one see a hole in the wall which was rapidly closing once again.

    Sam really liked these soldiers, because they listen to themands perfectly and he doesn¡¯t have to exin anything twice to them. As long as he said it once, they will get it and do everything precisely. How good would it be if all his subordinates are like this?

    He can ck off a lot.

    The beasts couldn¡¯t understand what is happening, but they are not pleased with the death of one of theirpanions and the onught continued.

    But every time a beast jumped forward, there would be a spike halting its tracks and a barrage of lethal attacks hitting the beast until it is either dead or crippled.

    The situation was resolved by notpletely. The blue teammander has already made some preparations while these people are fighting off the beasts.

    But the earthen were still there. In fact, a roof also appeared on their heads as they waited for them. But the suspected attack didn¡¯te.

    Sam ordered the group to move in the same formation. The walls disappeared and they cautiously moved forward. No matter what came in their way, they didn¡¯t take any detours, no matter how many trees there are, all they did is cut them down all the rocks are taken care of the earth element users.

    They are extremely cautious and didn¡¯t make any rash movements.

    Sam gave the same order to the remaining two groups and enjoyed the show. He didn¡¯t like giving orders in real-time. Even though, that is what makes a goodmander, what is the point of having subordinates who have to be spoon-fed for everything they do?

    They have to resolve the problems themselves and all he would do is point and guide them in the most efficient way possible.

    ording to Sam, thepetence of a propermander will be shown when all his subordinates follow his orders, but thepetence of a greatmander will be shown when his orders are still followed even in his absence as their leader.

    That is why, he always trained the soldiers differently, even if he wasn¡¯t there to order around, they will still react in the same way as he was present and they will know what to do in what scenarios.

    He might not achieve that level with these tower defense soldiers, but he would get the best he could.

    The blue team could kiss goodbye to their traps, the thirty soldiers will definitely reach the tower.

    But they are extremely slow and will take some time.

    Meanwhile, the blue team infiltrators already reached the vicinities of the tower.

    The Bluemander is feeling the pressure and wanted to distract Sam and the best way to do that is to attack the tower and make him focus here so that he would focus less on his troops in the blue territory.

    Meanwhile, the bluemander sent the remaining five soldiers that set the traps and another ten soldiers from the defense line leaving only thirty of them to defend at the tower.

    These fifteen members all moved into the forest as they wanted to deal with the thirty troops of the red team.

    But Sam didn¡¯t worry about something like that even when he saw the fifteen members surrounding the ten-man team.

    As he said, these soldiers are efficient and could understand his orders easily. All they have to do is follow the regr defensive n he said.

    Even though the fifteen people are surrounding them, it would be hard for their spiritual sense to cross the earthen wall that was full of their enemy¡¯s spiritual energy and predict what is going on, but the earth element users could see outside because it is hard to block their sense from outside. If they have to do that, they had to seal the whole ten-man formation and to affective do that, they would need at least three earth element users.

    What Sam observed is that there are almost no earth element users in the blue team troops that were sent to infiltration, he only counted five of them and five of them are dead.

    Maybe he was using them as the mainline of defense at the tower. That is understandable though.

    The battle went on, Sam didn¡¯t focus much on it. Rather, he is focused on the defense of the tower.

    The twenty-blue soldiers within his territory are actually using the forest as the cover and are trying to do gueri warfare.

    But what they did not notice is that as soon as they made their move and are about to attack the tower, the forest has been blocked. The wood element users didn¡¯t wait for a second to entangle all the trees and made a serious blockade.

    And they came from the rear without giving a chance for these twenty-five people to escape.

    This is going to be the final battle on this side. He has been waiting for them toe and attack him and this is perfect.

    He is not going to let this slip away.

    Since the area is the beach, Sam decided to use the sand to his advantage.

    The twenty-five blue soldiers who covered arge area by spreading out are still surrounded and slowly the sand is raising. They couldn¡¯t just break out of here. The battle formation of the red soldiers is tight and the earth element users along with the wind element users are causing a sand storm and soon the whole blue team is surrounded.

    The wood element users also started taking action. At the eye of the storm where the chaos is minimum, arge vine started growing vertically with so many vines spreading from it. With the eye as the center and the solid foundation, the six wood element users worked together as they attacked the blue team soldiers that are trying their best to not get stuck in the sand tornado.

    But they couldn¡¯t hold on for long, because the wind element users are sharpening the wind currents into the wind des.

    This is the best team Sam has ever seen, they are practically like robots and their foundations are extremely strong to the point they could achieve Sam¡¯s weird formations like this without even practice.

    As the blue team soldiers finally got swept by the tornado, the fire element users and the water element users started working.

    The water element users are responsible for taking care of any strays that escape the storm, while fire element users utilized the wind currents to add fire into the tornado and work in tandem with the sandstorm. After an hour of futile resistance from the Blue soldiers who clearly fell into the biggest trap in this round, the battle is finally over.

    The bluemander has an ugly look on his face, he is someone from one of the nations who crossed the first round.

    He couldn¡¯t help but m the table in fury.

    He knew that whatever he nned will be futile now.

    Because he cannot hope to maintain the defense and offense with these meager forces.

    Particrly, when the fifteen soldiers he sent to deal with the ten are all dead.

    And surprisingly, only three members of the red team are dead.

    The seven stayed there to recuperate and slowly moved towards the remaining twenty soldiers who are moving on either side of the stream.

    The twenty-seven soldiers are soon joined by the red soldiers who are responsible for traps in the red territory. They are not part of the defense line.

    They are ordered to stay within the forest. Now that the offensive troops are having a shortage of numbers, they are going to join.

    Not just them, half of the defensive line also moved. The wind element users and the water element users moved. The water element users even used the stream to move faster and are about to join the offensive troops.

    As for the rest, they are still stationed for the defense. Even though he is confident that the blue team wouldn¡¯t send any troops to attack, it is better safe than sorry.

    Anyway, all they would need is one person to invade the tower. The term capturing the g is just symbolic and even the gs on top of the towers in holograph are also symbolic. They are not exactly capturing the gs.

    As long as they invaded the tower thepetition would be over.

    And Sam felt like thepetition is already over. The Blue troops¡¯ defense line waspletely outnumbered at this moment and it is hard for them to move forward.

    As soon as the red troops reached the tower and engaged Sam already sent an order to the remaining defense line members to march forward.

    There is no way the blue team can move forward and send someone to capture his tower. The best they could hope for was a tie. But Sam is not letting that happen. This time, the soldiers moved at full speed to reach their destination.

 Chapter 567: Target

    The tower defense ending is not magnificent at all. It is in fact boring. When the two forces engaged, the blue team who should have yed a defensive role with the excess number of earth element users they have, themander of the blue team couldn¡¯t stay calm and went on being offensive.

    His soldiers are aggressive and suicidal. Although he did do some significant damage to the red team, he still suffered more.

    After he calmed down, he finally realized the mistake and used all his brain and forces to create a deadlock.

    The deadlock worked quite well for a short period of time. But the problem arrived when the water element users who are using the stream move towards the tower. They could easily attack from the back of the tower, but taking advantage of their positions.

    The blue team couldn¡¯t afford to send the men back and deal with them when they came out of the water, because even if one person is moved away from the defensive position, the deadlock would copse like a sandcastle.

    But as the water element users neared, the wind element users who are moving differently already joined the red team and the bnce is close to titling.

    Sam must say the opponent really did put a great fight.

    As the water element users emerged from the back of the tower, the blue soldiers suddenly moved in a chaotic way and they started exploring their spiritual cores.

    Sam raised an eyebrow in an amusing way.

    All the blue team soldiers are getting ready to explode and since Sam¡¯s soldiers already covered the whole area, he could see what is happening. He couldn¡¯t help but chuckle, the bluemander whoever he is has lost patience and is doing ast-ditch effort.

    Sam didn¡¯t care at all and only ordered thest remaining troops at his tower, leaving only ten of them here to make a move.

    They ran fast and got ready to cross the border. Even if the blue soldiers blew themselves up and kill all the red soldiers, there is no way they would defeat the red team.

    And the blue soldiers really did blow up, but not all of them. Only those that are in the middle of the red soldiers and the ones that are near the water element users areing towards the tower.

    This stopped the invasion of the tower and the blue wind element user started running towards the red territory.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but smirk at this.

    The blue soldier just jumped into the stream and let is wash him to the sea without offering any resistance. The most he did is to make sure that he wouldn¡¯t get hurt by hitting the bed and stones in the stream.

    This is the truest struggle.

    But before that person could cross half the stream, one of Sam¡¯s soldiers who defended against the explosion crawled towards the tower in an extremely slow manner. He is the least wounded person in the explosions and even the blue soldiers were more wounded than him.

    Currently, Sam is ying a game with him. He wanted to see if the enemymander will notice or willpletely focus on the blue soldier who is the symbol of hisst futile effort and Sam couldn¡¯t help but disappointed, the other party is too mentally shaken and is not focusing on the red soldiers that are under his tower.

    These red soldiers are seriously injured, but they are not dead. Only four blue soldiers are strong enough to stand with some support, in this type of situation, he should have just finished the red soldiers even if it takes the remaining strength of thest four soldiers.

    But the soldiers are too distracted due to their injuries to see the slow as a snail, red soldier crawling to the tower and before they knew it, he already touched the tower door and abruptly used all his strength to push it to enter.

    Before the blue soldiers could react, everything was over and bright light enveloped the towers, Sam couldn¡¯t help but smirk. He has to say that this is the boring pce of inheritance of all. The first one is full of rounds maybe because there are too many people and the second one is exciting with full battle and the monkey soldiers.

    As for this, except for the strategy, there is nothing else. It is more of a test of leadership, logical thinking, wits, decisiveness, and quick thinking. There is nothing much in this test until now.

    He expected a little more from the God of war. But his god of war title is not just from his might, the most part is from the way he led his troops and his leadership so it should be understandable.

    But it cannot be helped. It is still boring no matter how justifiable Sam thought it would be.

    As he was lost in thoughts, Sam once again reappeared in the deste field and looked at the familiar brown soil and the blue sky.

    But this time, there are two more people in the field. One of them is Noah and the other one is the guy with the Spear of the Lightning Spear sect. He might be the chosen candidate of Karthikeya.

    He wasn¡¯tpletely surprised, but he is a bit impressed by Noah. She came to the finals in thest Pce too and when Noah looked at him, she couldn¡¯t help but curse him under her breath.

    She has some sort of hateful rtionship with this guy. But that is not to the point of getting revenge or plotting against him, but she felt like he is an eyesore.

    Sam didn¡¯t care and waved his hand. The third candidate who both of them don¡¯t have any rtion with came forward and spoke to me.

    "You must be Sam and you must be Noah. I heard a lot about both of you, particrly you Sam. I am Kumar."

    Sam looked at him and chuckled before saying.

    "Now that I showed my face, I don¡¯t have to say what superpower I belong to right?"

    When Sam said this, Kumar was puzzled for a bit, before eximing in surprise.

    "You are that guy in ck?"

    He clearly remembered the guy in ck from the previous Pce of inheritance. At that time, Sam made their whole stay a living hell by using them as bait for the Monkey Warriors and getting rid of them as soon as their purpose was over.

    Kumar also understood what Sam is saying. Because he remembered provoking Sam about revealing his face and identity so that he could bash him up after they came out. He felt a little embarrassed about that now.

    As the two of them are making small talk after Noah showing no interest in making any, a bright light was shone and Karthikeya¡¯s silhouette appeared once again.

    "The three rounds are over and this is the final round between the candidates. Only one of you will move to the next one which is also thest one. But for that, we have to choose one of you and what better way than a simple battle.

    No matter how good you are at leading, the subordinates should have enough respect and belief in your to be under yourmand, and without strength, it would be hard to prove that.

    So, battle it out between the three of you to prove your strength. Only one of you has a chance. Do the worst you can. Aim to kill, but don¡¯t worry no one dies here."

    As soon as he said those words, his silhouette floated upwards and hovered in the air.

    The three candidates are stunned. And All of a sudden, Sam made a move and caught a spear while his body was surrounded by golden mes.

    A faint purple smoke rose from them covering the three of them and when the smoke cleared, it could be seen that Sam has caught the hand of Noah with his right hand and the spear of Kumar with his left hand.

    Meanwhile, there is a pile of ashes around him.

    "Damn it, both of you targeted me directly? Both of you are not even on the speaking terms a few seconds ago and now what sort of tacit understanding is this."

    Sam said and when they noticed that the spiritual energy is bing chaotic around him, Noah threw seed on the ground and a vine grew rapidly before a red fruit ripened at a rapid pace and exploded.

    A hot and musky scent and smoke surrounded them and even Sam loosened her hand for a second.

    The red smoke is only some sort of numbing agent that reduces the senses and the field of smoke wouldn¡¯t allow any form of spiritual sense, he doesn¡¯t know what this is. But he was impressed.

    As for Kumar, he took a simpler approach, he just let go of the spear and took out another one. This spear is made of ck star gold and Sam easily recognized this.

    This is one of the spears from the previous Pce of inheritance.

    Sam also took a step back from the red smoke and looked at both of them.

    "Should I feel happy that you think so highly of me or should I feel sad because I am the first target?"

    Both of them didn¡¯t speak and are looking at Sam seriously. They noticed that Sam is still at leisure and didn¡¯t feel any nervousness at all. He is tooid back for a target.

 Chapter 568: Trapped

    Sam looked at the two of them, who are ready to make a move one more time. He knew why they are trying to attack him. He is the most high-profile person and his exploits are known to all of them.

    In thest Pce of inheritance, he kept his identity hidden for various reasons, and most important of all of them is to avoid the attention of the major powers. After all, they are all focusing on him at that moment, with him being in conflict with many of them.

    At the same time, he wanted to get as much advantage over the rest of the yers as he can. But this time, he didn¡¯t bother because his name was spread all over the nation. If he didn¡¯t want to make business running in this world and he was fond of this world¡¯s resources, he would have definitely kept a low profile. But he has too many things to worry about. That is why decided not to hide his identity.

    Now this made him the main target. These yers already had quite a hard time when Sam only used some of his abilities the previous time which means he is the one they are most worried about since he didn¡¯t have any restraints and naturally he became theirmon target and the first one at that.

    Sam didn¡¯t care though, he looked at them and smiled once again as he took out the staff.

    He stood in his ce and was in a defensive position. It has been a long time since he had a proper battle, so he would satisfy all his cravings today and he even had some improvement recently.

    As for why he is not being offensive, the reason is simple, both of these people have an edge in terms of cultivation.

    Sam is only a Level-6 Nascent stage cultivator at the moment, but these two people are Level-7. It would have been no different if he faced the regr people, but these two are the yers. If not for the rift between the middle stage and thete stage, he would have been more confident and proactive. But that was not shown on his face.

    All the opponents could see is his rxed expression and the smug smile on his face.

    Kumar is the first to make a move. He held his spear as he lunged at Sam as he exchanged a meaningful nce with Noah.

    He stabbed the spear straight at Sam¡¯s heart going for the skill. At the same time, Noah threw some seeds on the ground and small red sprouts could be seen on that spot, but all of a sudden some vines came from underneath the ground near Sam¡¯s feet.

    They coiled his feetpletely and Sam couldn¡¯t move, as he looked at his feet he could see that the red vines are going rampant and are still growing denser and denser as they tied his legs tighter and tighter.

    Sam¡¯s legs suddenly sted out some golden mes, but to his surprise, the vines didn¡¯t burn off. As he was distracted a bit, the spear almost made contact with his heart, but Sam bent his body backward at an unnatural angle as if he doesn¡¯t even have a spine.

    And to reduce the stress on his spine, he stabbed the staff into the ground and held it tightly as he ced all the burden on it.

    Kumar is no joke as he changed the direction of the spear and moved downwards after stabbing without calling it back.

    Sam used the staff as a support and spiritual energy burst into the vines as golden light enveloped them before they were abruptly cut into pieces by the light beams.

    After releasing himself, Sam used that staff as the support and kicked the spear off with his legs and pushing the man back.

    But as he was about tond, he noticed that another batch of vines appeared right at hisnding spot.

    Sam chuckled and with his incredible dexterity, changed his direction and somersaulted in the air beforending on the staff that was nted right into the ground. He stood there within an incredible bnce and he looked at the two of them.

    He was now ready to move, the only reason he waited this long is to check the disparity between them and him and he noticed that there is not much, his deficit in cultivation was covered by his physical strength and refinement. He can still beat them like before.

    Sam thought of this and jumped down, wind elemental energy surrounded him as he pulled out his staff from the ground and started spinning it in his hands.

    Kumar jumped at him and attacked with his spear and both of them started shing, but Sam¡¯s tailwind des technique which makes the tailwind of every attack into a wind de is an irritating one. Even though the attacks are not significantly damaging, the umtion of these small damages will make him suffer.

    He understood that soon, he will be worn out if he did that. Meanwhile, Noah is not cking, she is moving all over the battle-field as she threw seeds left and right, and various vines popped up as they tried to attack Sam.

    Some of them tried to restrain him, some of them bore fruits that caused various attacks and some of them are pure physical attacks. But none of themnded.

    The poisons that came from the exploding fruits have no effect on Sam and he didn¡¯t even bother to dodge them, but the rest of them are being dealt with in a peculiar way.

    This time, Sam is not attacking and moving in his usual manner, rather he is moving a lot more and he is almost dancing with spinning his body for 720 degrees and 840 degrees in various postures withrge strides.

    His moves looked shy, Sam who didn¡¯t usually like that is using them today because of the vines that Noah is using.

    Every time he jumped like that, the tips of his legs will bepletely concentrated with the wind element as wind des flew all over and they precisely hit the vines that areing, even if one de couldn¡¯t deal with them, the next one is doing the job.

    Sam almost looked like a wind god. His every move is causing the surrounding air to turn in the turbulent but sharp wind that is cutting down everything on its way.

    The two opponents suffocated all of a sudden. They felt like even the air they are breathing is not theirs and they are only breathing it because Sam allowed them to do so.

    Kumar took a step back and pped himself until his face was red and even the skin cracked on his lip before getting back into his fight.

    He knew that if he gets overwhelmed by Sam, this fight is as good as over.

    But the problem is the spear technique is not as versatile as Sam¡¯s staff technique. But he was still able to block and counterattack properly.

    Sam is enjoying himself. He is slowly getting the same feeling he got from the fight with Sanjay. He is bing engrossed in the battle, as for the vines that are being a nuisance, he almost got them out of his mind.

    Noah cursed under her breath, all of this is happening because the fight started too suddenly and there are no trees around.

    But she knew that there are only excuses and all she would need is some more time.

    As Sam is dancing with the wind for some time, Kumar suddenly changed the flow of his spiritual energy and stabbed forward. Sam deflected the strike with his staff, but as soon as they made contact spiritual energy at the point of contact started behaving weirdly and a shockwave sent Sam flying as he was already hovering mid-air.

    But he didn¡¯t crash to the ground, before he could fall on the ground, a lot of vines emerged rapidly and they formed a cocoon of thorny vines and enveloped Sam.

    Before he could make his move and escape, he felt the pricks of thorns on his acupoints. The thorns are trying to attack his meridianwork.

    But his flesh is too tough, tougher than Noah could ever imagine. Still, the n is not a total failure because, as Sam tried to use his energy he noticed that the thorns are not just purely physical attacks, rather the spiritual energy ripple caused by their stings made it hard for him to circte energy and his energywork within his body is not reacting fast enough to keep up with his thoughts.

    Noah didn¡¯t dy anymore as she made some hand-signs as a lot of fruits started ripening on the thorny vines. The ripening is a bit slow though. It is not as fast as the previous ones, maybe because a bunch of them are ripening at the same time.

    Kumar looked at her and pointed at his spear, and Noah created a small gap in her cocoon with a wave of her hand.

    Kumar lunged forward and spiritual energy became turbulent as his spear glowed. As he got into a throwing position, the spiritual energy surrounding the spear manifested into arge spear image surrounding the spear in his own hands as he threw it straight towards that hole.

    By this time, the fruits are also close to exploding and finishing off Sam. But at this moment, both of them frowned and Kartikeya who is watching the battle from the top also frowned as he looked at the situation. He thought that Sam is done for, but he understood that it is not that simple.

 Chapter 569: Secret Arts

    Sam could feel all his meridianwork going numb for a moment. He wouldn¡¯t be able to circte the energy normally like that.

    After closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, Sam noticed a huge threat that is looming over the cocoon and also a fierce attack that was going to hit him.

    But he didn¡¯t hurry. He still had his eyes closed and the spiritual energy started moving all over his body, he is not using the meridianwork, rather using the muscle fibers to circte the energy, he might not be able to use elemental attacks because it would be torturous to convert the spiritual energy into elemental energy without flowing through the meridianwork.

    But the elemental attacks are not the only cards up his sleeve. His arsenal is full of so many attacks that he didn¡¯t even have a chance to use them at all.

    As he concentrated, all the spiritual energy started concentrating on his vertebrae. It umted along the spine, of course over his skin.

    Sam wriggled a bit and bent his body into an arch as his belly moved forward. Finally, after one deep breath, he mmed his back into the back of the cocoon.

    The spiritual energy exploded on the vines and half of them are damaged, the rest are stuck in a small chaotic spiritual energy storm caused by the sudden void of spiritual energy. This is the Void style he learned from the Monkey king during the previous Pce of Inheritance.

    All of this happened in seconds as he kicked his legs forward and tore through the cocoon from the rear.

    By this time, not only the spear reached the cocoon, even the fruits exploded.

    Therge puff of red smoke was sted all over the cocoon and even the vines are corroding at a visible rate and the spear cleared a small region in the smoke as it sted towards Sam.

    But Sam who is already out of cocoon just fell back without trying to run.

    As soon as his back hit the ground, his meridianwork is also clear and he kicked both his legs forward and air cannons made him skid on the ground as he moved farther away from the red corrosive smoke.

    He could even see the spear moving over him and he could even observe even that spear was corroded.

    To corrode the ck star gold to that degree only when it traveled through the smoke just for an instant, one must estimate how good the smoke is.

    After the spear went away, Sam finally jumped up and the first thing he did was take a look at his coat. Then only he saw that some feathers are bent on various positions.

    The thorns of the vines are so strong that they could even damage his feather coat, it is really his luck that he tempered his body, otherwise he would be done for.

    As Sam is checking his feather coat with a cold look, his two opponents gulped hard. This was once chance they got and that too half of it is a surprise attack. They don¡¯t believe they will get this lucky every time. They surely lost the golden chance.

    Meanwhile, Karthikeya who is looked at the situation was feeling impressed.

    He knew Void style pretty well, that is the damn monkey¡¯s go-to move in every battle. There is only one reason for using that. Almost all kinds of armors and defenses crumble under that power and almost every fight ended in one punch.

    In fact, it was always a bit overkill, even with that one punch.

    But for the first time, he saw the void style used in such a way. Even though Sam didn¡¯t reach Moneky¡¯s skill yet, he is still not bad for his level, and his control over the skill is great to the point he dared to use it at his spine. If something happens, his spine will shatter along with the spiritual energy explosion.

    He couldn¡¯t help but look at him in a new light.

    After examining his coat, Sam slowly walked to his staff that was dropped there and stored it away. It is the normal staff without anything special about it, except that it was made by himself.

    He took out another staff and this is also made of ck star gold. He is the biggest profiteer of the ck star Gold and he has more weapons than anyone. He nned to use them as gifts for his subordinates and even ced them in the credit exchange system.

    But he has too many to use them all up.

    He swung the staff a bit and seemed like he was trying to make himself familiar with it. After that, he finally looked at his two opponents.

    "That was a good move. But too bad, it didn¡¯t seed. Let us see if you are lucky enough to get another chance like that."

    As he spoke, his body suddenly became golden and even the feather coat was activated. He recently got to know that the feather coat can be used even when he is maintaining the full elemental fusion. So, he is now using it. But he is not in full fusion, just partial fusion, but for the first time, Sam decided to use the light element directly in the battle.

    But this time, he is really pissed. Even though the energy usage is high, there is no way he would let them damaging his favorite coat slide just like that. He could even tolerate them ganging up and even tolerate sneak attacks, but not damaging the coat.

    Sam disappeared in a golden sh as he appeared right behind Kumar and swung his staff towards his head. The staff is also golden in color filled with elemental energy.

    Kumar sensed the attack and hurriedly ducked as he ced the spear to block the attack.

    But to his surprise, his ducking was the only option, because the spear he hastily took out turned out to be a normal Grade-5 weapon and it was cut into two. The cut was so clean that no one would believe it was cut in the middle of the battle.

    Sam is using the staff in the same style as before and dancing in the wind in the same way. But this time, the vines are being dealt with in a different way. Light des are being flung from the edge of his staff and his feet.

    The Golden light rays are even more lethal and faster than the wind des by arge margin. The damage is enormous and the vines are cut like crazy. Unlike wind des that are hard to see by easier to defend, these light des arepletely new to both of them.

    They couldn¡¯t handle it no matter how they tried.

    Soon, Kumar was forced to block one attack from the staff and he didn¡¯t have time to dodge at all.

    At this moment, he once again used the same technique he used to send Sam flying, but as soon as both of them made contact, his ck star gold spear was destroyed immediately with a spiritual energy explosion.

    And arge ball of light suddenly appeared in that spot exploding once again.

    This is the result of Void style. Kumar who was sent flying back and crashing into the ground coughed up some blood due to the energy bacsh.

    Sam felt his arm go numb. He has experimented on how the Void style would work with elemental energy and this is the result.

    Even though his skill in Void style is beneath the monkey king and by arge margin, within his range, he mastered all kinds of possibilities.

    After he sent him flying, Sam swung staff backward and arge light de was sent towards Noah. She couldn¡¯t help but shudder at the situation and hurriedly dropped some seeds and a cluster of bamboo trees grew rapidly.

    When the light de made contact, the bamboo trees started falling apart being cut by the des, but the bamboos really did reduce the damage of the light des and diminished the effect by the time it reached her, it only caused a moderate gash on her shoulder and that too after she dodged.

    Everything happened so fast. Sam just stood there and looked at them calmly.

    The light element is great and all and it could bypass most of the elements, but the energy drain is of another level. It is actually one of his trump cards and in fact one of his strongest forms. Even the full fire elemental fusion form couldn¡¯t rival this light element one when it is only partial fusion. And Sam is most familiar with the fire element, but still, this form beat it; much less the remaining elements.

    But the energy drain is something that made him worry. For this small sh half of his energy was drained.

    As he was thinking of minimizing the energy drain, he suddenly sensed arge energy fluctuation. Both Kumar and Noah already stood up and both of them are making hand-signs. Sam didn¡¯t worry at all. He just stood there waiting.

    At first, he observed Kumar, his blood is flowing out and a small ball is floating in front of him. As he made hand signs, the ball transformed into a spear and once again zoomed into his body.

    All of a sudden, a blood-red armor appeared on his body and there was even a helmet that covered his face. A blood-red spear manifested in his hand and still, he took out another ck Star Gold Spear and the blood-red spear and the ck spear merged together.

    Sam could feel the oppressive aura from Kumar, with this he can even fight a normal Level-1 Pre-transcendent level cultivator.

    He then looked at Noah who is also creating something big.

    Then he saw another scene that is somewhat simr. The blood flowed out and floated, but it morphed into arge seed and she mmed the seed into the ground.

    As soon as she did so a lot of seeds flew out of that spot and covered the whole area.

    The whole region started having blood-red sprouts and soon turned into a forest in an instant and within that forest, Noah disappeared.

 Chapter 570: Last one standing

    Sam looked around even tried to use his eye technique, but he couldn¡¯t find any trace of Noah and at the same time, his spiritual sense is telling a different story and that is Noah is everywhere around him.

    This is some high-level technique and looking at the simrities of her technique and Kumar¡¯s technique he was amused. He has some conjectures, but he didn¡¯t think much of it.

    As he was thinking, Kumar already neared him and started attacking. Every spear is extremely fast and leaving a lot of after images behind. The spiritual energy is taking a form of spear and zoomed towards Sam every time Kumar stabbed towards him.

    Sam used his staff to continuously block and his extreme dexterity and the speed of the light element, it is quite smooth for him to dodge and block. But he could see that the attacks from Kumar are far stronger than before and even when Sam struck back, his armor is defending most hits.

    There is no way he could damage the armor with normal attacks and he has to use void style with this staff if he has to do so.

    As he was contemting, he jumped to the side to dodge an attack and kicked a tree to jump higher andunch an attack, but all of a sudden, the tree trunk became soft and his foot was struck inside the trunk. Sam frowned, but before he could free himself, the branch extended and pulled him closer to the tree and a spear was about to stab him in the heart.

    Sam exploded with spiritual energy as he twisted his body forcefully and the whole trunk is mangled and the spear missed the heart, but it left a deep gash on his chest and torso because Sam twisted to the side.

    The only thing that is not covered by his coat is his chest and it was always attacked perfectly when he was stuck.

    Sam cursed himself when he saw that the bleeding is not stopping. This is almost like the bleed effect. His body¡¯s natural healing is being disrupted. But he is not worried, he started healing himself and at the same time mmed the staff at the tree and cut it in half.

    As hended back, but the roots of the nearby trees areunched at him.

    He knew what went wrong. As he was fighting he forgot that he is in the forest created by his opponent and let his guard down. He just fought like he was in a normal forest.

    Now that he already suffered, there is no way he would forget. When he saw that the roots areunching at him, his body transformed once again and partial fire element fusion activated. He held the staff straight and stabbed its end into the ground.

    A huge ming explosion urred in the ground and arge crater appeared. Kumar who was about to hit Sam with his spear was also blown away.

    The dust settled and the crater was revealed. It was deep andrge and the surface is covered with molten soil.

    The roots couldn¡¯t disturb Sam for a while as when they reached they disintegrated by the heat of the nearby soil.

    He swung the staff and arge golden crow made of mes flew over towards Kumar. The attack covers arge range and it contains a lot of power so Kumar couldn¡¯t dodge it and could only block it.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop there, he turned to the side and send another golden crow made of golden mes and a lot of trees started burning.

    Noah who is in the dark felt like her soul is burning and was quite surprised. Generally, normal mes do not have much effect on her forest at all, but the golden mes are burning rapidly..

    Sam already noticed the anomaly of this forest when he got caught, the trunk was extremely resistant to elemental energy and the best way to break out is to use brute force. And that is what he did, but he was still unwilling to believe that his golden sun crow mes couldn¡¯t damage these trees and was delighted to see that they are really burning.

    Although the wood element energy is trying its best to regenerate the trees, Sam is already satisfied with the oue.

    Now, he has many possibilities of dealing with the forest and Kumar.

    Sam¡¯s body once again transformed. He closed his eyes and is trying a new thing, the fire that caught on to Kumar is barely extinguished and that guy is still trying to catch his breath, as for Noah, she is busy recovering from the burned trees.

    In this time, Sam is trying something he never tried. All of a sudden, his body became normal and his left hand was enveloped with golden mes and the right hand was enveloped with a fierce wind.

    He is trying to fuse with two elements at the same time, but it was hard, so he is using the partial fusion on both hands with different elements. He held the staff in his hands and the staff was also enveloped with two elements.

    At this moment, Sam¡¯s legs are enveloped with the silver lightning, This is not partial fusion, just normal usage of a warrior-mage skill.

    As for why he chose the lightning skill this is the second-fastest. He looked at Kumar who is back to fighting condition and ran deeper into the forest.

    He leaped towards a tree andnded on a branch, but the tree was charred ck as lightning stuck it. Sam swung his staff and from one end the Golden me crow emerged and on the other end, a wind roc emerged. Both of them areunched towards Kumar. But this time, the two birds are notrge, rather they are smaller than the first attack.

    But they are flying together and when Kumar dodged it, he saw them crashing into a free and arge fire raged. The wind element is assisting the fire element like crazy and the fire is spreading faster than usual.

    Sam didn¡¯t care anymore andughed as he jumped forward. The trees couldn¡¯t catch him as he kicked every branch that came at him with the lightning that charred the trees and he threw attack after attack at Kumar who is dodging them by hair¡¯s breadth.

    The forest is burning and Kumar is notpletely devoid of damage. Even though Sam¡¯s energy is draining, there is no way he would stop.

    He decided to burn the whole forest down no matter what. He is not going to lose to these two people. Not in a million years.

    Sam could almost see the edge of the forest. He turned around and stood on the spot as he threw fire crows all over. The forest is burning too fast.

    All of a sudden, the forest disappeared with a sh and Noah appeared before him with a ragged look, Kumar caught and he is equally damaged as Noah. Even though he could dodge most of the time, there is no way he could dodge every single attack.

    He took the full brunt of the crow and rocbination making him feel sore all over. Even his armor was not able to do anything and slowly the armor started bing transparent.

    Sam could guess what is happening even if he doesn¡¯t know anything about that armor.

    Kumar¡¯s armor is going to be finished.

    Sam is also panting a bit by now. His energy is almost out. If he has to do some normal battle, he would be able to do it, but if he has to deal with another major attack, it would be difficult, he has to take out the energy cells.

    But judging from the appearance of the other two, there is no need.

    Sam is now standing normally as he held his staff. His fire, wind, and lightning are invisible at this moment, he deactivated all the transformations and stood there calmly as he gazed at both of them.

    "That was a good fight, but we have to put an end to this, don¡¯t you agree?"

    The two opponents immediately got tense and looked at Sam carefully.

    Sam started spinning staff. He hit the ground with the staff vertically and it bounced back, he spun it once and hit the ground once again.

    As he repeated to y with the staff, Noah and Kumar could see that silver sparks are flowing all over the staff. The more he yed with the staff, the more the concentration of the sparks is growing.

    When the intensity of the sparks grew to the point they could even feel it from a distance, they understood that they are done for if he hit them with that. But they couldn¡¯t flee or dodge. They are definitely struck here and could only count on luck as they used all kinds of defensive methods they have on their hands.

    Sam held the staff and his whole body was covered in silver lightning, he swung the staff in Noah¡¯s direction and didn¡¯t wait to turn around and swing it towards Kumar¡¯s direction.

    Wolves made of lightning appeared. One of them dashed towards Noah and the other towards Kumar. Both of them are standing on either side of Sam and both of them waited for the bull brunt of the attack.

    When they crashed with the opponents, it is as if lightning was striking from the sky and a loud rumble could be heard all over.

    When the dust cleared and the shes disappeared. Sam is the only one standing with the staff in his hands.

 Chapter 571: Talk with a God

    Sam looked at both of them and they are charred ck. They are barely holding their breath. It is too easy to kill them.

    But Sam looked weary. Even though he didn¡¯t suffer any form of serious injury, he was drained. His face was pale and his body is sore all over and every muscle is hurting.

    He stabbed the staff into the ground and tried his best to stand. He wanted to take a seat and rest or eveny down.

    There is no way he could easily take them down. Although he made it look easy with his mannerism and expressions, there is no way it is easy. This is the fight that is closest to the fight he had with Sanjay.

    But he was amused because there is no presence of a battle spirit this time. But he didn¡¯t think much, at this moment, he desperately wanted to hear the announcement of his win. And he heaved a sigh of relief in the very next second because Kartikeya announced his win.

    Sam immediately let the staff go and copsed to the ground. He took out the heavenly wine and started drinking in huge gulps.

    When Karthikeya saw him drinking the heavenly wine like that, his face twitched. Because the wine is quite famous in the highest realms, even the greatest of gods fight over it, even though the wine Sam is having is one to one million diluted version, he is still thinking it is a waste for someone to drink it like that.

    And he is sure that Sam didn¡¯t know the value of that wine at all.

    He snapped his fingers, Noah and Kumar disappeared and Sam was also transferred to a room.

    There is arge stone table and there are two chairs on either side of the table. As he was looking around, he saw karthikeya¡¯s silhouette appearing out of thin air in one of the stone chairs.

    He looked at Sam and said.

    "Take a seat."

    Sam walked towards the other stone chair and sat down before cing the wine gourd on the stone table.

    His energy didn¡¯t recoverpletely. He doesn¡¯t know exactly what test it this time, but he knew that he would need the full energy.

    Karthikeya nced at him and said.

    "You still need to recover, so let us put this on hold and talk for a bit until you recover."

    "Thank you so much," Sam said with a smile and took a swig from the gourd.

    "I must say I am really impressed. Do you know why?" Karthikeya asked.

    "No."

    "Not a single Idea?"

    "I am good at many things and in fact too many things. You could have been impressed by any of them, it is too hard to guess."

    Sam said with the same smile. Karthikeya suddenly wanted to beat him up. Who would speak to a God like that? One must say that Sam really has a way with his things; he can even piss off a god so much that he wanted to lose his temper.

    "You are the most disadvantaged candidate of all the twelve yers. The gambler has taken off every advantage we have decided to give the yers and chose his own options, which everyone in the gameughed at.

    Three Pce of Inheritances happened, but our own yers whom we thought that are so advantageous all lost to you. That too by arge margin. In all the three inheritances, you are the biggest winner."

    "I don¡¯t think I am in a disadvantageous position at all. I think I am a bit overpowered actually." Sam replied.

    "All the other yers, have the dimensional crosser and you had to find your own Dimensional Transported that was left behind by someone else ages ago.

    You have seen the battle techniques they used right? Those are the techniques specifically made by the gods in the game to give their yers. And they only unlocked after they became Nascent stage cultivators and they couldn¡¯t even use it in the first few stages. And even now, the technique is only partial, with their cultivations it will also evolve.

    Other than that, all of their other battle technique was given by us.

    Apart from that, every other yer was born in a super-power of the, but you were sent to a rural ce.

    They also have other benefits waiting for theter stages of the game.

    Compared to that, all you were given is a birth in a rural ce and you had to cultivate his special cultivation technique which would need too many resources that would force you to earn and grow. The divine dimension is a great thing, but what can you do with it in your stage, all the yers are destined to be reaching a level where they can conquer or even create their own divine dimensions.

    And it can at most used as a residence for your beasts.

    As for the tower, you cannot cultivate there. All you have are a bunch of cultivation techniques and a lot of low-level battle techniques, moderate-level recipes of pills and potions, and many other things. Simply put, there is loads of information covering many topics and elements.

    Even the simtion and the third floor with the battle monitor and maniptor. They are not useful for your direct strength. After all, what can you do by focusing on all the different things? It will add more burden. With your talent, if you focus on cultivation you could reach greater heights.

    I still think you have a disadvantage because these blood arts will evolve higher and higher and make you suffer more."

    Sam thought for a bit and smiled once again.

    "If you don¡¯t mind, can I tell you something?"

    "Sure."

    "I hope you wouldn¡¯t be angry at this and forgive me for any offense I might cause."

    "Don¡¯t worry and speak your mind."

    "I think the Gambler or whoever he is has yed you big time."

    "What do you mean?"

    "He fooled all of you, not just you. All the gods in the game."

    Karthikeya looked at him with a bit of anger in his eyes. He would like to p Sam to death for calling him a fool, but he restrained himself and asked.

    "Exin."

    "The things you said, yes they are advantages. But for all the yers. Not me. It makes it too easy for me. In fact, it will make me dumb. Gambler understood what kind of person I am. To a man like me, the most valuable thing is always the information.

    As you said, all I got is the information and a lot of it. And with that information, I became an artisan, I earned money, I made everything about who I am. I earned money; so much that even after feeding all the beasts that should be cultivated along with me, I still have money to do much more.

    And do you know what I do with that money? I make more of it.

    I enjoy making, creating, fighting, killing, business. Gambler wanted me to do something, so he gave me a chance by exchanging all the knowledge to me so that I could what I liked along with what he wants. We had a transaction.

    Now, all your yers had a dimensional crosser that can only allow them to move once every three years and they cannot choose the location. But I don¡¯t have to.

    Your yers who were born in major powers have to follow rules and restrictions and had to fight for someone else and work for someone else. I don¡¯t have to.

    They have to practice the battle techniques you designed whether they liked it or not, but I don¡¯t have to.

    I don¡¯t know what the objective of this game is at the moment, but you should know it very clearly. I think that what Gambler did is most beneficial to him. After all, to be a god and be called Gambler, he must have won bets like breathing air. So, do you really believe that he would put his yer in such a bad position with so many ridiculous disadvantages as you put?"

    Sam took a swig as he paused and continued.

    "That is why I said that he fooled all of you. Gambler seemed to have looked into me for a long time to understand my character and abilities that I am more proficient in and figured out a way to use me in the most efficient way before selecting what he should give me.

    And here you are thinking he put me in the most disadvantageous position. If that is not making you a fool, I don¡¯t know what is."

    When Sam finished, Karthikeya was in deep thought. He didn¡¯t think in this perspective. After all, he is too busy and too big to care about some trivial game they set up in the mortal realm.

    This is a game many gods are ying for many centuries. This is some sort of fun in their boring lives. This is their form of entertainment in more than a single way.

    But as he thought about it, he felt like he was really yed by the Gambler. He looked at Sam and said.

    "I think you recovered enough, time for thest game. This will decide the reward you will get."

 Chapter 572: Chess

    As soon as Kartikeya spoke Sam felt like he recovered all his strength, then only he understood that this guy just wanted to talk to him and the recovery time is just an excuse.

    "Since you are from Earth, you must be familiar with this game," Kartikeya spoke and snapped his fingers and the stone table transformed itself.

    Arge square groove appeared and the groove transformed into a chessboard. The grid is ck and grey. The chess pieces are also ck and grey and made of stone. Sam picked up a pawn and looked at it carefully. It is an extremely beautiful sculpture.

    He hadn¡¯t seen such a sculpture in a long time. He was amazed and attracted to it and went on to check the rest of the sculptures.

    Saying he was impressed was an understatement.

    "Although the game we are ying is chess, it is not exactly the same. There are some new rules which I would like to add so that the game bes more interesting." Kartikeya let Sam examine the pieces and continued to exin the rules.

    "The basic movements of the pieces are the same as the one you know. The pawn, the rook, the knight, the bishop, the queen, and finally the king. The names are the same, but their purpose and power ispletely different in this game.

    I will simplify the exnation so that you could get a hang of it easily.

    Since you are a Nascent stage cultivator at Level-6, your king will have that cultivation level and your queen will be having the cultivation level of Level-5 Nascent stage.

    As for the bishop, they will have Level-2, the Knights Level-3, and finally the Rooks Level-4.

    The pawns are all Level-1 Nascent stage cultivators.

    You will move the pieces in the exact same way as you would in a normal game, but when you want to kill my piece, that means, if you want to remove my pawn with yours, there will be a battle between the two.

    And you will be battling in the ce of that pawn and a soldier from my army would be battling in ce of my pawn, your cultivation will be suppressed to Nascent stage Level-1.

    After the battle is over, whoever wins upies the ce and the loser¡¯s piece will disappear. But the damage to the winner piece wouldn¡¯t disappear.

    Every pawn has five health points and when two pawns fought and yours won but only has two points left, the next battle, you will feel weary and will only have forty percent of your original strength at that level for the next battle.

    As for the real you, who is sitting here, you don¡¯t have to worry about any form of physical injury.

    In simr ways, the Bishop has ten health points, the knights have fifteen and the Rooks have twenty, the queen twenty-five and finally the king thirty.

    There are no checks and checkmates, everything will be decided by the battle. As for the battle rules, you would understand once you start the game.

    Any doubts?"

    Sam looked at the game with a curious look.

    "What is the name of the game?"

    Sam asked he looked at Kartikeya and thetter looked at him and said.

    "The Cultivator Chess."

    Sam felt like he was looking at his long-lost alter ego. How can someone be as bad as him at naming? He felt like the person who named the ck star Gold is dumb enough in the naming sense, but even the god himself?

    This is something he didn¡¯t expect.

    "If you don¡¯t mind me asking, what are the rewards of this Pce of Inheritance? I didn¡¯t see a single reward since the start."

    "Well, everyone will get a reward based on their performance. Don¡¯t worry, since you are the winner you have a different reward system altogether and you have more variety to choose from. Only after you are done with them, the rest will get to choose. Currently, the rest of the people all are going through enlightenment and cultivating since this is a superior environment."

    Sam nodded his head and looked at the game.

    "Who goes first?"

    Sam asked as he eyed his pieces. His pieces are ck and their positions are also the same as modern chess.

    "Of course, I will be going first. I am the one testing and I am the one going to invade."

    With that Kartikeya made his first move. He moved the pawn in front of the knight that was on the queen¡¯s side first and made two steps. Sam didn¡¯t think much and just moved the pawn in front of his bishop on the queen¡¯s side for two steps. He let the piece go because he wanted to see how the battle goes first.

    And Kartikeya made his move and ced his grey pawn in the same grid as the ck pawn by moving it diagonally.

    The grid hasrge squares and each square has big enough space to ce three pieces at least.

    As soon as Kartikeya ced the piece, Sam felt like he was being sucked into the board and when he opened his eyes he could see himself in arge Grey stage.

    Therge stone square is floating in the void and he couldn¡¯t see anything but darkness beyond the stage. On the stage apart from him, there is another person standing. His body is covered with armor and he even wore a Corinthian helmet protecting his head with a Spear in his hand.

    Both of them exchanged a nce as a piece of Information entered Sam¡¯s mind.

    He got the gist of it. The battle will go on until one of them is defeated and the defeat would be either being killed by the opponent directly or being thrown off the stage.

    Sam looked at the soldier with the spear in his hands and made his move. Since it is a battle to the death, there is little point in waiting.

    The whole stage is in square shape and it would around 100 square feet and it is neither toorge nor too short.

    Samunched a head kick right from the start, which was blocked by the spear. But Sam didn¡¯t stop there, he took advantage of the recoil and used the wind element to spin and gave a spinning back kick to the left temple.

    The soldiers are not fast enough and the kick connected.

    The helmet distorted from the kicks and there is arge crack on it.

    The eardrum seemed to have burst open and blood started seeping out from that crack in the helmet.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop there and leaped lightly before giving a crane kick straight to the chin of the opponent who is already wobbling on his feet. The man knelt down and Sam took a step back.

    As he looked at his opponent intently, he saw five green bars appearing over the head of the opponent and four green bars disappeared one after another. These seemed to be health points.

    Sam felt like this is some sort of video.

    He didn¡¯t wait and finished his opponent with another kick to the head.

    He disappeared from the spot and reappeared back in the chair. All of this felt so surreal, but he clearly felt nothing to his body.

    When he looked at the table once again, the grey pawn was moving out of the board on its own and went out of the chess grid.

    "Your Move."

    Sam was about to make it when Kartikeya said.

    "You can move the pieces without touching them. You just have to ce your hand on the table and use your spiritual sense."

    Sam did as he was told and moved the same pawn forward. Since the game is not regr chess where every piece can be killed by any other piece, this would demand the yer to y differently than usual. After all, even if he was able to bring his pawn to the king, so what? He would die all the same.

    So, he wanted to probe further and see what he can do and how he should proceed with the single pawn until the point that it can go.

    Kartikeya moved the pawn in front of the rook, two steps forward. Sam didn¡¯t change his move and once again ced his pawn forward.

    This time Karthikeya let the pawn in front of the queen kill this pawn.

    Sam once again entered the stage which is Grey in color.

    There is another soldier standing in front of him with a sword and shield in his hands.

    Sam focused on him and the health bar appeared and when Sam focused on his own hands, he also saw his own health bars. But the fifth bar is notplete, it looked like it was chipped a bit.

    Although it is minute, it was still reduced. Maybe that was because of the effort he made in the fight earlier.

    Sam once again lunged forward and used the same attack, but this time, it didn¡¯t work, this soldier blocked the kick that was about tond with the shield and Sam felt his leg go numb a little bit. But he still used the same trick and gave a spinning kick to the head on the other side, but he was blocked once again.

    It is almost like the soldier knew Sam¡¯s tricks already. Sam frowned at this. He wished that his conjecture was wrong and took the reaper sword to attack.

    After a series of shes, Sam finally managed to get rid of the shield and finally made a critical hit. But in this process, he suffered some minor scratches. He could see that the skill level of this soldier is not much different than the first person, but this time, the other party is a lot more cautious to avoid any surprise attacks that caused the first person to lose.

 Chapter 573: Chess II

    Before Sam could disappear from the stage, he checked the health and noticed that one of the five bars was empty. The soldiers are not bad. They can even be called geniuses even in the Naga Loka.

    Sam didn¡¯t feel much surprised and exited the battlespace and reappeared in the chair. He once again moved the pawn forward and this time, the pawn in the diagonal direction of the queen.

    He was ready to get taken out by the Queen, but to his surprise, Kartikeya didn¡¯t make that move and used another pawn to move forward.

    It is notpletely unexpected though. After all, the queen is bound to win, so there is little point in making that move. But Sam was ecstatic because his pawn can either challenge the queen or the Knight.

    The queen is a Level-5 Nascent, so there is no way he could deal with that, but the Knight is a Level-3. This is not the first time, Sam fought a person who is two levels higher than him. In fact, when he entered the Nascent stage, he was constantly challenging the higher levels and in his Level-6, he can even fight with the Peak Nascent stage cultivators.

    So, there is a chance that he could take out the knight, but since these are troops of the Kartikeya himself, he might not be able to kill the knight, but he would definitely make some serious damage.

    Sam moved the pawn diagonally towards the Knight.

    He once again reappeared on the battlefield with the ck stage.

    In front of him was a person holding a broad sword and is sitting on a horse-type beast.

    Sam looked at the health bars and noticed that the fifteen is not from the person alone, it is from both mount and the personbined.

    The person has ten health bars and the mount has five. The battle is between thebo and Sam.

    Sam didn¡¯t care much though. He noticed that the knight sculpture did have a horse and just thought it was symbolic because even his knights have the same.

    He made his move without any wait as he took out a staff. The only thing limiting is the cultivation, the rest of them are fair game.

    He used the light element fusion and started running towards the knight who is on the horse as he threw the light des.

    The knight also rode the horse towards him with his broadsword. The sword was glowing with sharp light as he blocked the light des, but Sam didn¡¯t worry, when he was close enough, the staff and the sword shed and Sam was mmed into the ground because of the force. One of his health bars dropped immediately, but he didn¡¯t feel disappointed, he leveraged this force and swung the staff horizontally.

    The edge of the staff glowed with sharp golden light and it slicked the underbelly of the horse.

    The internal organs spilled out with a lot of blood and the horse crashed to the ground throwing the knight forward.

    The horse has only one health bar left and it is also being slowly chipped away.

    The Knight¡¯s power is definitely beyond Sam, but that doesn¡¯t mean Sam has no fight left against him.

    Taking the opportunity of the Knight¡¯s imbnce, Sam didn¡¯t wait for a single second to throw the staff filled with a light element like a Javelin and ran after it like a golden sh.

    The Knight saw the staffing towards him and steadied himself before blocking it with his sword, arge sword image formed as he shed towards the staff, he didn¡¯t sh it on the tip, rather on the side surface of the staff, deflecting the staff, but the light surrounding the staff is not for show, it left a deep gash on the hand of the Knight.

    The arm guard was torn apart and the hand started bleeding.

    But his health didn¡¯t decrease by much. Only one-fifth of one health bar was reduced. The arm guard took most of the damage and the skin gash was superficial.

    The knight who just evaded the attack saw a golden sh right in front of him, as he was ready to wield the sword, Sam kicked the ground and jumped up as he stomped on the face of that guy before leaping forward, the corinthian helmet also covered the nose of this guy, but it didn¡¯t stop him from breaking the nose and there is also a gash on the face.

    Sam caught the staff that was still flying forward and was almost on the edge of the stage and turned around as he swung the staff once again to attack. The knight didn¡¯t have any shield on his hand and could only block the attack with the sword or his hand. But Sam is too fast not giving him a chance to use the sword.

    So, he blocked it with the injured hand and the wound opened up even more and the bleeding increased.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop, he took the chance to hit the Knight as much as he can, his super speed is his only advantage here, but his energy is being drained and when he saw his health bar, he noticed another health bar was gone due to exhaustion.

    Only two health bars were left.

    After a few moves, Knight gained his bnce and stability back and Sam¡¯s advantage was gone, the next time he went close to the knight, the broadsword was impaled straight into his chest. Sam felt cold sweat all over as his health decreased rapidly.

    Before he could get out of the sword, the knight¡¯s aura raged and sharp spiritual energy sword rays spread tearing his body apart.

    "ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH."

    Sam screamed at the top of his lungs as his body was ripped apart from this single move. His vision turned ck and when he came back to himself again, he was drenched in a cold sweat as he sat in the chair. His breathing was erratic. Gasping for air greedily, Sam looked at Kartikeya with a horrified look.

    Thetter exchanged the nce and looked at him with a faint smile.

    "That is the true challenge of the game."

    Sam understood what he meant, the true challenge of the game is not just winning, rather the true challenge is winning as he experienced his own death multiple times.

    Experiencing one¡¯s own death would make one mentally die. He would slowly lose his emotions and he would feel like everything is so trivial in this world.

    This is a result of the research Sam saw in his previous life. A rival organization of his tried to create some soldiers through this method. They are all killers. They don¡¯t even have thirst for blood. They don¡¯t even have any basic emotions like anger, sadness, happiness and so. Even the pain is not something they would care about.

    When the virtual reality and neural technology that can connect the human brain to virtual reality came about, they repeatedly experimented and created a batch of killers. They killed them so many times in the virtual reality and also made sure that their original bodies will feel the circumstances of the death, the pain resulting from the death but will still forcefully keep their bodies alive. Such a cruel method to make perfect soldiers. Once they are ready, they would even cut their own balls and give it you if you are theirmander and asked for them.

    Sam suddenly felt all this information run through his mind, because he felt like it would be dangerous to die so many times in a battle like this.

    His mental state became unstable.

    Kartikeya made his next move quietly and gestured for Sam to make his move. Due to Sam¡¯s mental condition, the next few moves are not so good in particr, but he recovered just after the next three moves and once again started ying.

    For some time nobody is trying to take the pieces of each other and a strange deadlock appeared.

    If one started the killing the spree would continue, but before that, Sam has to verify another conjecture and sent a pawn to fight with the Knight who was already half-beaten by him.

    There are only eight health bars left on this guy¡¯s health and Sam¡¯s pawn is fully fresh.

    When they entered the arena, Sam didn¡¯t opt for the same tactic and didn¡¯t use the light element.

    He actually started using the lightning element and covered the whole stage with a bright sparkling sh, the Knight couldn¡¯t help but frown in annoyance and look at Sam coldly.

    Sam jumped forward with his staff, but just before the Knight was about to sh, Sam who is as bright as a star a moment, ago suddenly disappeared from the ce.

    The Knight was stunned for a second and hurried to turn around, but before he could do so, Sam stabbed a dagger from the rear. Due to the Knight¡¯s sudden movement, Sam missed the heart by a hair¡¯s breadth but was not disappointed.

    He took a step back and spat out some blood as he deactivated the shadow mode.

    The abrupt change of elemental forms is tiring and harmful to his body, at least until he gets a hang of it and improve his control more.

    He left the dagger right there in the back of the Knight.

    He took the staff once again and started his battle.

    The full-fledged stab reduced the Knight¡¯s health by two bars and his health is still reducing due to the knife being there and not allowing the wound to scab or heal.

    The knight noticed that his movements are getting slow and his body is feeling numb, but that is not because of the bleeding. He used a lot of brute force and threw Sam off, before checking his own body, only to find a rapidly spreading poison.

 Chapter 574: Chess III

    Sam¡¯s health also decreased and he only has three bars left, even in this condition, the Knight is doing significant damage to him.

    But the dagger in the ce is really helping Sam a lot. Now the Knight not only has to make sure that he is not bleeding to deathpletely, but he also has to suppress the poison and fight with Sam. If he removed the dagger from the ce, he would have an advantage. Soon, the Knight¡¯s health dropped to three, but Sam¡¯s health also dropped to one and he is a bit exhausted.

    As he was thinking about how to make most of the situation, the Knight risked it all and attacked Sam.

    He dashed forward and shed Sam as he moved past him.

    Sam knew he was out, but even in hisst breath, he risked it all and swung his staff on the back of the Knight and hit it hard on the dagger as if he is hammering the nail.

    Blood spurted out and before Sam bled to death, he ran to the edge of the stage and jumped off. He wanted to confirm something and before he jumped off, he could see the Knight health dropping to one bar and he removed the dagger and threw it down the stage.

    Sam once again gasped for breath as he sat in his chair, but this time the torment is not that much, jumping off the stage is giving an instant and painless death.

    Sam felt relieved when he experienced that. He wouldn¡¯t want to die a painful death that many times, that is why he wanted to check if jumping off is also as painful, but apart from the greedy feeling of clinging to life and gasping for air, there is nothing he has to worry about.

    The mental torment and going through a death is a lot less.

    He calmed himself and waited for Kartikeya¡¯s move. Now that Knight is of no use to him. Even if he made his move with it, he could barely do anything with that Knight and the most he could do was use it as a decoy to halt Sam¡¯s steps.

    But in hands of amander like Kartikeya, it is still a great weapon. He moved the exact same Knight went for Sam¡¯s Knight.

    Sam once again reappeared on the battlefield and a new piece of information entered his mind. As a Knight, he can use a mount of his own to fight and he can summon it anytime he wants within in the battle. He looked at his health bar that has ten points and waited for the opponent to attack.

    He has too many beasts that he could use as a mount, but that would depend on the opponent. Sam is no stupid and wouldn¡¯t take this Knight on hisst breath lightly. He sacrificed two pawns to deal with this knight and he wouldn¡¯t dare make any mistake.

    The Knight whose back is still bleeding and skin already started turning purple looked at Sam and started running towards him.

    Sam didn¡¯t notice any energy fluctuations at start and felt weird, so he used his eye technique and when he noticed the anomaly, he couldn¡¯t help but feel Kartikeya is too sly.

    He stood there solemnly as the Knight was a few feet away, Sam waved his hand and Sky appeared before him.

    He jumped on his back and dashed to the sky.

    And right after he did that, the Knight exploded. The Knight used the spiritual core self-destruction method to deal some damage to Sam. That is why he thought Kartikeya is too sly.

    This battle ended so casually without Sam even making any move. But before leaving he got another message and that is, for this Knight piece he cannot use another beast as his mount.

    But he didn¡¯t care. He went back and looked at Kartikeya with an intense expression. He didn¡¯t expect that a great god like Kartikeya would actually stoop to this.

    But he did say anything and sent the Knight to attack a Bishop.

    The chain reaction has started and soon, the pieces will be dealt with one by one. There will be a continuous streak of elimination.

    But most of them are pawns. From Sam¡¯s side, only the knights and bishops are out from the big yers, but from Kartikeya¡¯s side, the rook is also out.

    For some reason, Sam had a feeling that Kartikeya is not ying seriously. He doesn¡¯t know why, but he is sure of it. But still, he is feeling the pressure. That might be the difference between them.

    When he entered the battlefield, he saw the Bishop of the opponent has a long robe and he has a staff that has an icy blue crystal on the end. It is definitely not a staff for closebat.

    He is definitely a mage.

    Sam is on top of Sky and looked at the Mage whose aura is extremely frosty.

    The bishop pointed the staff at Sam and the crystal emitted a dazzling light and a frost beam rushed towards Sam at an incredible speed.

    Sam dodged it and looked at the bishop in a surprised expression. This is a pure elemental energy beam. Not a normal spell that would have various effects, rather pure elemental energy beam.

    He wanted to try this, but his energy beam is not as good and even the beams he equipped on the Naval fleet are nothing but toys in front of this energy beam. The energy is so pure and concentrated that Sam felt like it would be a waste if he didn¡¯t use this.

    Sam didn¡¯t make a move for a few seconds, he just dodged continuously as he waited for the Mage to show more cards. But that guy is only using the frost beam.

    After some time, Sam got bored and Sky pped his wings. The wind started moving and a storm started in the whole stage.

    The Mage still stood there and tapped the floor with the tail end of the staff. And a thin ice shelter appeared and surrounded the Mage. It is just an Icebox whose walls are extremely thin to the point if not for the frost air and the blue hue it has, there is no way one could identify there is wall there.

    But Sam merely smiled.

    He made Sky go up as much as he could and stood there for a while.

    Sky started pping its wings hard and the wings are even brightened with the wind elemental energy as gales started appearing all over the stage.

    The frost beam was stilling, and Sam is dodging. The frost beam barely hit the vacuum around them.

    The Mage finally lost patience and tapped the tail end of the staff a few time continuously and every time he tapped, a glowing blue dot appeared on the different ce of the stage and with another wave of the staff the dots joined together and a weird shape appeared.

    The Bishop moved to the middle of the shape and an Ice fort appeared. Sam was amused. But the show is not over yet. From various entrances of the fort some moving ice sculptures came out. But Sam¡¯s gaze is not on them.

    It was on the health bars of his opponent which are depleted by three bars. Only seven bars left. Sam was ecstatic. This move cost a lot from the opponent and then only he looked at the ice sculptures.

    They seemed to be Ice puppets. Sam furrowed his brows and used the eye technique, he could feel the faint Dark element energy from the puppets.

    He understood this mage¡¯s secondary element.

    As for why Sam called them puppets instead of Golems, they are not made of a single entity. Although, every part is made of Ice, each part is made individually and linked together. Then only he understood the Ice fort¡¯s application.

    As he was thinking what he should do, he saw the Ice puppets flying towards him. There are two types one looked like a bird and the other looked like a human. The human jumped on the bird and came to him flying.

    Sam threw a wind de to test them. The puppets didn¡¯t stop, there is a huge gash on their bodies with which they continued their journey.

    He smirked and threw arge golden fire crow at them. The mes danced towards the Puppets and they evaporated in an instant. They are not that strong, but they are too many.

    As he was thinking of a method to destroy them all, Sky hurriedly dodged and three frost beams passed through the point he was there before.

    One of them was from the Bishop himself and the other two are from the fort.

    The Bishop is looking at Sam with a mocking gaze.

    Sam returned that gaze with a smirk and Sky moved. He started circling around the whole stage at an incredible speed and the puppets couldn¡¯t keep up.

    The wind roared and a storm hit the fort and some puppets are being destroyed from every p of Sky¡¯s wings. Sam¡¯s eyes never left the Bishop and he extended his left hand outwards as Golden mes spewed out.

    Soon there is a change in Bishop¡¯s expression. The whole stage became an inferno. And the Bishop is trying his best to increase the temperature but to no avail. He started panicking, because his health is reducing even though, Sam is not attacking.

    Because, the puppets and Fort are connected to him, for every puppet Sam killed there is a small damage to those health bars, then why would Sam leave such an opportunity?

    He took it and the result was obvious.

    No frost beam could hit Sam and Sky and no puppet could catch them.

    The fort started evaporating and soon the Bishop is the only guy who stood in the middle.

    Sam took out his staff and jumped down from that ce and wind elemental energy was surrounding that staff.

    As he reached near the floor, he mmed the staff on that person¡¯s abdomen and the body burst open.

 Chapter 575: King Remains

    Sam checked his health bar onest time before he left the ce. His health reduced by two bars and Sky¡¯s health reduced by one bar. This is not because they are injured.

    It is just the exhaustion of energy.

    Sam reappeared in the chair and once again entered the battle zone for his next move. This time, it is a pawn against another Knight of Kartikeya.

    This Knight was a female and is mounted on an eagle-like beast.

    Sam couldn¡¯t fly on a beast by himself, because he is a pawn, but he has a hoverboard and when the knight was feelingcent and was trying to toy with Sam, who has already dodged quite a few attacks, he suddenly took out the harbinger and zoomed to the top. He didn¡¯t attack her, instead, he took reaper and sliced the bird on its belly.

    His sudden move made the bird screech as it crashed into the ground.

    The Knight this time is an archer and she is quite good from the top, but now that she crashed into the ground before she could recover Sam already sent a barrage of sharp wind des from his sword that she has no other way but to dodge it.

    But this made the beast which was behind her and already lost, most of the health takes the full brunt of attacks.

    Sam fought for a while, but was still taken down by that woman and before he dies, he was able to reduce the health to seven.

    Since the beast is also gone, the woman¡¯s health was reduced to half.

    Sam came back and game continued.

    One after another the chess pieces are being removed. But the problem is for every pawn on Sam¡¯s one of the bigger pieces of Kartikeya was being removed.

    But not before one of Sam¡¯s knights, a bishop and rook were gone.

    After several moves, Sam was left with three pawns one rook, one bishop, one knight, the queen, and the King.

    As for Kartikeya, he was only left with a single pawn, a rook, the king, the queen, and an almost dead Bishop with half a health bar.

    Sam is clearly in favor of winning, but he is not least bit happy.

    From start to finish, Kartikeya is ying in an extremely leisurely manner. It is almost as if he is a spectator.

    This made Sam quite nervous. After all, he is ying with amander of gods. Many lesser gods and even some higher gods have to follow his orders and what kind ofmander should he be if he can lead such forces? Clearly, Sam is not cocky enough to think he is on the same level.

    He never thought, he was best atmanding. He might be good, but that is not one of his excelled arts.

    That is why he trained the soldier differently. To every possible scenario so that he doesn¡¯t have to try andmand for every obstacle they encountered.

    But now the greatestmander of all is losing to him in a chess match; at least that is what spectators would think.

    Sam, however, thought otherwise. He is not keen on thinking that he really has that much ability.

    Kartikeya finally moved his queen.

    The queen has twenty health points and is a fifth-level Nascent. So, Sam is quite nervous to his dismay, he moved the queen to the same line as his pawn. Definitely trying to take this out. Sam didn¡¯t like it. This pawn is the closest to the other party¡¯s ce.

    Once he advanced, he could have another queen. So, he didn¡¯t want it to be destroyed.

    He quickly thought of something and looked at his other pieces.

    He also moved his queen and ced it on the same line as his own pawn.

    He is quite confident that he can take down the queen with his own queen with ease. And he is quite sure that even Kartikeya knows that, so he is willing to see if he would take the risk.

    And as he thought, the other party didn¡¯t, but he has a peculiar light in his eyes and started moving his rook to the remaining pawns.

    This time, Sam didn¡¯t care and move his pawn one step forward.

    Kartikeya has locked the pawn in a horizontal line and Sam in a vertical one, so there is no need for him to move.

    Now Kartikeya didn¡¯t focus on the pawn and started dealing with the remaining two. The first pawn that encountered the Rook was dead just like that and could barely reduce the Rook¡¯s health by three points.

    Sam moved the Pawn once again and after this only one step remained for him to advance and his pawn would be promoted.

    He felt like something is fishy. No matter how he looked Kartikeya¡¯s game was almost over. There are not many ways to turn the game around.

    At this moment, the rook dealt with another pawn.

    But this time, Sam with paranoia didn¡¯t let the rook stomp. When the rook neared him, he just self-destructed himself and almost all of the health bars of the Rook were gone. There is only one health bar left and even a pawn would kill it easily.

    But Sam only has one pawn and it is his move. He moved it and got a promotion.

    The queen.

    Sam thought that he would have to face an incredible hurdle, but there is nothing here.

    As he thought and yed the game, all of the remaining pieces of Kartikeya are gone and the only the king remained.

    Sam didn¡¯t go anywhere near the king all this time. King can only move one step, but except for a queen and the king himself, all the other pieces are useless.

    At this moment, Kartikeya said.

    "I forgot to mention a rule. If only two kings remain. They would directly go to battle."

    Sam was surprised as he didn¡¯t know what to say. At this moment, he felt like something isn¡¯t right.

    He moved the Queen directly to the King and started a battle.

    And as soon as he entered the battle stage, Sam was shocked. Because the person in front of him is Kartikeya himself.

    He has a spear in his hand and he is ying with it.

    Sam felt vignt and took out his staff and ran towards him. But Kartikeya was extremelyid back as if he didn¡¯t see himing, but when Sam swung the staff, he urately blocked the attack.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop and continued attacking, after some time, he went to his light elemental fusion form. With ny percent partial fusion, he started attacking his opponent as if his life was dependent on this one battle.

    But Sam didn¡¯t manage to deal any proper damage to Kartikeya, it as if he is ying house. He is extremely rxed.

    Sam tried his best to ignore that expression of his and kept on attacking.

    After some time, just when he was about to change the form of attack, kartikeya made another move and Sam felt like he was being attacked by a dozen spears. There are more than a dozen spear images in front of Sam and he could barely see Kartikeya¡¯s silhouette behind the images.

    He jumped back hard to evade the attacks, but as soon as he lunged back, one of the dozen moved and pierced Sam directly in the abdomen.

    Sam felt shocked and all the spear images disappeared.

    Kartikeya was visible in in sight as he stood in a stance.

    Sam activated his eye technique immediately and felt the energy ripples, the next instant he would be torn apart once again. The small reduction in the health bar of Kartikeya and energy ripples are sufficient for him to assume that.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother waiting andpleted his hundred people light elemental fusion as he separated from the spear. But he was too slow. Just before the spear was out of his body, the energy ripple came even his fusion body was not spared.

    But he still gritted his teeth and looked at Kartikeya coldly as soon as he came out. He didn¡¯t die by that energy ripple but was severely damaged.

    He suddenly expanded the fusion body as much as he could and converted everything intosers and burned all his energy left, he would die by the end of this attack, but he is not willing to go down with a fight.

    Kartikeya spun his spear as he blocked theser beams, but as he danced with a spear, twoser beams managed to breach at the end of Sam¡¯s breath. One of them hit him in the armpit and the other one hit him in the inner thigh creating two scalding marks and one health barpletely.

    But there are still twenty-nine more left.

    Sam felt a sense of Deja Vu.

    It is the same as the previous pce of inheritance where he was against Monkey King, who beat his ass just as easily.

    At least that fight is not to die like this one.

    Sam looked at the board and his remaining pieces.

    In the process of eliminating Kartikeya¡¯s pieces, he lost his Bishop. Now only his rook, the second queen, the king, and the knight was left with half health were left.

    He is notpletely confident that he could finish Kartikeya even if they are on equal levels. So, he has to find a way to use this chess game in his favor. After some thought, he finally had an idea which is rather risky. But the risk is not him losing the game, rather something else.

 Chapter 576: Self-Harming

    Sam felt conflicted about using this Idea. He was sure that he is no match even if the King vs King battle happened.

    He would have to suffer a lot. Is it worth it? That is what gnawing his mind.

    After some thought, he gritted his teeth and hardened his heart. If that is what it takes to get a victory of the greatestmander, then so be it.

    He moved his rook to battle with the king. He stood at the edge of the stage andpleted the light element fusion. The golden looked extremely majestic. But Kartikeya still didn¡¯t make his move. He is keen to see what Sam could do.

    Sam suddenly made a move, his body slowly started turning green. At least there is an extremely faint hue within the golden glow. Any ordinary person would have missed it.

    Sam directly turned into a beam of light as he dashed into Kartikeya. For a second even he couldn¡¯t clearly see what is happening and dodged. But the light beam didn¡¯t cross the stage andunch to the void.

    It halted at the edge and once again shot back at an incredible speed.

    But this time, the green hue is brighter.

    The scene repeated itself and the golden light is turning into a green one and the light beam turned faster and faster.

    Just when Kartikeya thought he got the rhythm of the movement and speed, both will change making him miss the target.

    As he watched the golden light almostpletely turned green and there is barely any golden hue and now Sam¡¯s body didn¡¯t even touch the ground.

    He is almost floating in the air.

    This is hisser form. Sam never used this before, because it is not yetpleted and the second reason, it brought him more harm than good. He can kill his opponent in many ways, even though this way the rate of sess is high, he would be destroying his own body. He looked at his own health bars and Sam couldn¡¯t help but sigh at the rate of decrease it is suffering.

    He concentrated all the remaining energy within himself and drained himself dry.

    It is about time for one final attack.

    Sam disappeared from his spot leaving a green line behind as he zoomed to the heart of Kartikeya.

    Kartikeya frowned and became vignt. He felt like he would die the moment he became careless.

    He wanted to use some defensive technique but the time was not enough. He could only use his arms to block.

    The arm guards on the arms had a hole in them and the two arms are cut bone-deep. Kartikeya used his all to defend the arms with his spiritual energy but still took this much damage.

    He fell back and endured the pain as he looked at Sam¡¯s body was deactivated of the elemental fusion and justid on the floor. Sam spat out blood like crazy and looked at his opponent who stood up carefully.

    He reduced Kartikeya¡¯s health by four bars. This is better than he expected and this time, the damage is a lot more than just health bars, he would like to see how Kartikeya would use his spear.

    With a smirk on his face, he lost his breath. He died.

    Sam reappeared on his seat. His body shivered and palpitated. He is covered in a cold sweat and has a huge thirst for oxygen as he gasped for breath.

    The whole room was filled with his gasps. Sam felt the most pain he ever endured in his life. This is the reason he thought, this is a bad idea. Kartikeya pitied Sam as he looked at his struggle. He has half a mind to stop the game right here.

    But Sam didn¡¯t give up. He took a huge gulp of wine and tried his best toe back to his senses.

    After fifteen minutes, Sam was finally back in the game. Kartikeya¡¯s move was done, one step from the king, but he made it sure that Sam¡¯s Knight can attempt to take the king¡¯s life.

    But this time, Kartikeya is extremely vignt and didn¡¯t let Sam made the first move. His hands are already but, at least the veins are not severed so that he didn¡¯t bleed to death.

    He tore a cloth from his robes and quickly tied up the wounded spots.

    As soon as Sam arrived and stabilized on his Raiju, he threw his spear.

    But he was a tad bit toote.

    The spear which should have been fast enough to impale itself into the Raiju¡¯s head missed as the Raiju skipped and left the spot.

    This time, Sam didn¡¯t use the same Laser mode, he didn¡¯t want to go through the same torment again, even if he has to be hurt at the same level, he would choose a different method to hurt himself and he did exactly that.

    Kartikeya took out another spear and got ready to defend. He was still not being too offensive, he just didn¡¯t want to give Sam an addition such a beast mount as he watched the ruthless methods that almost ruined himself.

    But he failed and now the beast and the young man are on either side of Kartikeya.

    Both of them started to use the Lightning element andpleted the fusion. Sam¡¯s fusion is not a hundred percent one, only a partial one. But the Raiju is different, he learned that Raijus can gain partial fusion of fifty percent from their birth and talented ones with great bloodline purity can attain a hundred percent easily. And his Raiju happened to be one of them as soon as Sam refined his bloodline.

    Kartikeya looked at both of them and looked vignt. He knew Sam is using the loopholes of the game to his advantage and is using suicidal moves again and again. He doesn¡¯t want to fall prey to that.

    As he thought, his energy started surging and he decided to attack Raiju first. Since it is weaker, he can take care of it faster. But as soon as he turned around, Sam came from the rear, he expected it though.

    He didn¡¯t stop moving to Raiju and as he was about to stab it, he turned around and impaled the spear in Sam who is behind him. For some reason, the energy ripples caused by Kartikeya can even impale the fully fused bodies, much less a partial one.

    Sam didn¡¯t show any expression of pain however, rather he smirked.

    Then only Kartikeya noticed that Sam¡¯s energy is different and in form of waves.

    He frowned and was about to retreat, but Raiju came from the rear used all its energy tounch to attacks.

    Lightning struck as two deep gashes appeared on his rear. He thought that Sam¡¯s energy wave is a distraction and he was fooled.

    He became a bit angry and was about to use the energy ripples that could tear Sam apart. But before he could do so, he realized he has been fooled once again. Raiju who was near them and lost almost all of its health in thest attack went back and jumped off.

    Sam¡¯s elemental body fluctuated as the void style was used and all he did is move his body forcefully and the whole body exploded.

    The explosion of lightning caused a lightning storm, it should have made at least half of Kartikeya¡¯s body explode with it, but he is smarter than that and as soon as Raiju jumped off, he threw the spear away along with Sam.

    But he is notpletely out of the explosion range and storm zone, which made him paralyzed.

    Heid there on the floor even after the storm disappeared as he reflected on himself.

    A young man has toyed with him. His left hand is now bleeding even more and his whole body is shocked with all his muscles sore. He didn¡¯t feel like this in a long while.

    He didn¡¯t expect Sam to be a suicidal maniac. He came out and looked at Sam, who is experiencing another bout of torture. After Sam calmed down, he didn¡¯t make a move.

    There are two more battles for Sam. One with a queen and thest one with a king. Kartikeya is still superior, but still a total of seven health points are gone, but Sam is still not confident.

    "Should I scold you or praise you? I cannot decide."

    Sam only smiled as he wiped his sweat.

    "Your bout of surprise attacks is really great. I didn¡¯t expect that you would put yourself through the same torment twice. If not for that I wouldn¡¯t have been injured. However, there is no point in making excuses.

    But you do know that there is no way that this would work again right? None of your other elemental fusions are of this much power to cause any proper damage as they are not fast enough. And even if you use it, the situation wouldn¡¯t be the same. I just hope that you wouldn¡¯t put yourself through that torment again. I am not saying this because I want to avoid that, but just saying with genuine concern. Torturing yourself like this will affect your mentality. So, be careful."

 Chapter 577: Against the King as the Queen

    Sam merely smiled at Kartikeya¡¯s reminder and let him make move and Sam¡¯s next move is for him to attack the king with his queen.

    This time, Sam didn¡¯t behave like a madman or a maniac, instead, he behaved calmly and went back to his ny percent light element fusion form. But this time, he didn¡¯t take out the staff, instead, he took out the Executioner sword.

    There is a reason why wouldn¡¯t use this de normally. Because it was nurtured with hydra¡¯s blood and it has an extensive bleed effect on the wounds along with some wicked corrosive effect. In a normal fight, even before he could enjoy the bout, he was already kicking the ass of his opponents. So, with this de, it will be all too easy.

    So, he wouldn¡¯t use it. But since he is going against one of the best, he has to be at his best. He has to use all his tricks up his sleeve and that is why he made sure to damage Kartikeya dearly even at the cost of sacrificing himself.

    But now, there is no longer a need for that. His aim in thest two rounds is to create as many wounds on Kartikeya as possible and preferably all of them on the hands and he did attack the hands and they are still bleeding.

    As for the left hand, it has even severe wounds because of Sam¡¯s repeated attack.

    This is the best chance Sam could have. Kartikeya has around twenty-two and a little more of the health bars and Sam¡¯s queen health is twenty-five and it has full health since he didn¡¯t use it in a battle.

    He held the sword tightly as he looked at Kartikeya who is extremely vignt and held his spear in a battle stance.

    The first thing Sam did is activate the eye technique to its limit. He already felt the energy ripple attacks of Kartikeya before and there is something wrong with them.

    It is a style on par with the Void style, but theypletely work in different principles.

    He is a bit afraid of that and has to vary that. He started circting void style all over his body. He has to use every single means he has on him to get a victory.

    Samunched himself forward and even before he reached the opponent, he already shed the sword once.

    A light de escaped from the edge of the de and went straight to his opponent¡¯s throat.

    But before itnded, Kartikeya wielded his spear to destroy the light de in the middle, but that didn¡¯te without a cost, the void style creates a void that causes the explosion and as soon as the spear and the light de came into contact the opponent was pushed back by a few inches.

    Kartikeya smiled and moved forward as Sam is already there.

    Sam didn¡¯t use light des anymore and directly engaged in closebat.

    His moves are all tricky as he aimed for one part and as Kartikeya was about to block the strike, he diverted it.

    And he is hitting every part that he can get a hold of. And after an exchange of more than a hundred moves, Sam finally made a sh on Kartikeya¡¯s left arm. The cloth tied to reduce the bleeding was torn and only a small gash was left on top of the already existing wound.

    The corrosive effect kicked in and the skin surrounding the wound and even the wound itself started turned purple, albeit slowly.

    Kartikeya didn¡¯t seem to care too much though, he only took a nce due to the pain, other than that he didn¡¯t do anything but circte the energy to aid the natural healing of the wound. Because he didn¡¯t have time to care as Sam is not willing to let him rx.

    Sam attacked as if he is a rabid dog not giving him a chance, but the attacks are not done in madness. They just looked like that.

    After another hundred moves in which Sam got some wounds, he managed to injure Kartikeya one more time, and this time, it was on the leg. Sam shed through the calf muscle.

    Kartikeya frowned and the energy started changing. Sam didn¡¯t deactivate the eye technique and he could see the energy ripples. He immediately activated Void style.

    The energy wave passed through his body and entered the sword as it shed with the spear, but at the point of contact, there is an energy ripple trying to push him back as if it is trying to throw him as far as it could.

    But the explosion of the energy neutralized the energy and both attacks nullified each other.

    Sam didn¡¯t waste his time though, he went on using void style by depleting his energy and in turn depleting his health.

    But Kartikeya¡¯s health drop is not that huge. In fact, it is considered small. Even with the Hydra poison and the energy ripple, He was barely depleted by one health bar all this while and Sam was already down by two.

    After this constant nullifying effect thatsted for some time, all of a sudden, Sam felt the energy ripples act upon him. The void-style sh was not sufficient enough to nullify it and his hands bled.

    But he is using the light elemental fusion, the wounds healed, but the health is notpletely restored. After all, even healing himself will make him exhaust his own energy.

    The fight went on and Sam couldn¡¯t get past that wicked energy ripple.

    That ripple is also different Kartikeya kept on wielding in different ways that once it would throw Sam away like a rag doll and destroy his bnce and another time it would deal him a blow that could fluctuate his energy cirction and the most torturing of all is that it would tear apart Sam¡¯s flesh as if it was cotton candy.

    The skin tore at ease and even Sam¡¯s feather coat couldn¡¯t take repeated blows at the same spot and his health is also reducing. He is ying an extremely safe game. Although his attacks are rapid and continuous, he is not being reckless. Only his motion seemed like that.

    Kartikeya¡¯s speed is good, but he is not as fast as him. But his precision and timing beat Sam¡¯s speed.

    Sam couldn¡¯t find a good opportunity at all and he was being slowly worn down. All he could do was leave some small gashes here and there. But he is not exactly disappointed.

    He knew this is not the real battle, the real battle will begin after he was done here as a Queen piece. The real battle is when hees back as the King. And all of this, since the first queen, the rook, the Knight, and the second queen piece he is fighting as, all of this is just a foundation.

    After a few more moves, Sam took a huge hit to his stomach, the ripples started churning his guts. He wanted to throw up, but he fought his urge to do so because he knew that something is not right with the ripples this time. They are not as chaotic, they are too orderly and they are too controlled.

    His instinct is telling him that If he puked he would lose. His stomach has arge gash and blood is not stopping at all. Due to the energy ripple, he couldn¡¯t heal.

    He forcefully threw a pair of light des and went back as much as he could. He stood at the edge of the stage. He has only one and a half health bar left and it is decreasing. Sam grit his teeth and forcefully stabilized his energy.

    He deactivated his elemental fusion. Kartikeya walked near him slowly and he also has substantial damage.

    His armor is gonepletely. His situation is not too great, but his back is still straight and he is not gasping for breath. He walked straight and confident. He is as sharp as his spear, just that he is bleeding from several wounds and they are corroded with purple color and it is slowly expanding.

    Sam looked at his health bar and couldn¡¯t help but feel satisfied. He still has around thirteen health bars left.

    "You did a lot better than I expected."

    "Don¡¯te to any conclusions yet, there is a lot more from where it came from."

    As soon as he said those words, Kartikeya already took his stance to attack, but Sam is fast. He used all his energy to lunge forward. As Kartikeya was about to take a step back and attack, he felt like his legs were hurt and when he looked down, he saw the shadows are holding his legs and are spreading up at the same time trying to tearing into his skin.

    He created ripples of energy and the shadows disappeared. But this distraction for the fraction of a second is enough for Sam to make his move.

    Sam¡¯s skin became purple. This is the fusion he never used. The poison fusion. He didn¡¯t even think a second before exploding himself.

    Kartikeya looked at him and said.

    "I told you not to do this." He waved his spear and the spiritual energy became visible and it rippled all over.

    Sam disappeared with an explosion of purple smoke.

    The energy ripples and the smoke explosion met and Kartikeya was thrown to the other end of the stage.

 Chapter 578: King Vs King

    Kartikeya examined the injuries on his body and couldn¡¯t help but frown. The damage is more than he could think of. If Sam has directly used a poison attack with his element, he might have thought of something else. But Sam is too clever and used a weapon with that attribute and the poison is not acting fast.

    It is acting too slow in fact for him to think of any countermeasure in between the battle. After all, in the battle, his main concern was always the most immediate threat and Sam happened to be that. No matter how injured Sam was he maintained that threat and didn¡¯t give Kartikeya any chance to think of any other thing.

    And from the final attack, he might have been able to use arge ripple to avoid the explosion, but he still inhaled some smoke and now he could feel his body going numb. His odds in the next battle reduced by a lot. Sam woulde at him in the form of a king with a full health bar.

    When he came back to the chair, he saw Sam twitching and sweating once again. But this time, he seemed to have already got a hang of the pain that is torturing him and is enduring it quite well.

    Any ordinary person would have broken under that pain. That is what Kartikeya thought when he saw Sam.

    After some time, they didn¡¯t speak anything and once again entered the battle zone.

    Sam looked at Kartikeya who is finally feeling the effects of the poison. Initially, the Executioner only has a corrosive effect and the faint anesthesia effect. The remaining effects of the variant hydra are nowhere to be seen.

    But still, it has the two major effects, but a man of Kartikeya¡¯s caliber, wouldn¡¯t go down that easily. The effects are slow, to begin with, and on him, they are slower.

    However, one thing is sure, they have the effect. Added to the fact that he inhaled some purple smoke, it elerated the effect a bit.

    That is what Sam wanted. But still, he is not extremely confident in fighting Kartikeya.

    Sam didn¡¯t take any weapon this time, rather he took out the flute, this made Kartikeya confused only to hear Sam saying.

    "I have been practicing a new trick recently but didn¡¯t get a chance to try it a real battle. I would try it today."

    With that, Sam started ying the flute and spiritual energy started rumbling.

    The energy is visible to the naked eye as it condensed around Sam in the form of an orb. Kartikeya frowned and lunged forward as he swung his spear, the spearhead shed over the orb and the energy ripples following it started disturbing the orb, but an energy wave emerged from with the orb and the Void style nullified the energy ripples.

    Kartikeya didn¡¯t hold back anymore. In the previous battles, he has to worry about the final battle and couldn¡¯t use too much energy, but now he can do that.

    His movements becamerge, but the energy ripples that are happening are also too big, if this continued the orb wouldn¡¯t sustain long. But Kartikeya would definitely expend a lot of energy.

    Before the actual confrontation with Sam, he wouldn¡¯t like that.

    He started circling around the orb to find any sort of weak point as he attacked with normal strikes.

    As he did so, he kept on observing how Sam is doing inside and noticed that he now only possessed twenty-nine health bars and one of them is decreasing a tad bit faster.

    He frowned because even when he is not attacking the orb, the health reduced. That could only mean one thing, Sam is creating an attack that consumed a lot from him.

    As he observed and tried to find a weak point from the orb, he could see another orb appeared in front of Sam, but it is not a shield and it is actually a very small orb made of golden mes.

    The energy is being gathered as he yed the flute with his eyes closed and the condensed ball of mes burned with increasing intensity.

    Kartikeya frowned, by the time it condensedpletely, Sam¡¯s second health bar is gone. From the looks of it, he used one bar of health¡¯s worth of energy to create the shield orb and the second to the fire orb.

    Kartikeya felt like something is definitely wrong but he couldn¡¯t find the source. He has a feeling that he would be able to break the shield if hended a proper hit on its weakest point, but he couldn¡¯t identify it.

    But if he has to break it forcefully, he would also be devoid of another health bar.

    He has already less, to begin with and he contemting. As he was thinking, Sam¡¯s flute tune changed. At first, he noticed that the tune only has single energy and then the tune changed when the fireball condensed and now the turn changed once again and water elemental energy activated along with the neutral energy and fire energy.

    A dense but gentle flow of water started condensing and it is merging with the golden fireball, but the water is not evaporating, rather both of them are co-existing like that with a delicate bnce. Another health bar is gone.

    Kartikeya resolved himself and waved his staff, his body glowed and the whole area trembled.

    He lunged forward and stabbed with the spear. The spear prated the Orb shield and a lot of energy ripples that are formed of the condensed energy rippled through the orb and the energy channeling through it was destroyed. But at the cost of one of his health bars.

    But before he could move forward and engage with Sam, another orb shield appeared and another health bar disappeared from Sam.

    He frowned when he noticed how recklessly Sam is wasting his energy. But after some more observation, his eyes widened, because, within that one health bar, Sam just didn¡¯t create a shield back, but he also merged some wind energy into the orb of the fire and water and now three elements are co-existing.

    And Sam didn¡¯t stop there and continued. Kartikeya reached a conjecture and he didn¡¯t want it to be true. But he could only verify it in a different way.

    Once again his energy surged, but this time, the wounds on his body finally started reducing his movements. Although they restricted him quite a bit all this while, now they can hinder his battle. He could feel the corrosion is reaching his bones and his health is dropping considerably.

    But he still attacked.

    By this time, Sam already has another health bar reduced by half and the wind element also condensed in an equal amount within the small orb, but the orb size didn¡¯t increase at all.

    Kartikeya destroyed the shield at this exact moment and he noticed that the shield formed again. He carefully observed Sam¡¯s health and only around one-third of the next health bar was reduced. He frowned at this and once again destroyed the shield and this time, the health bar only reduced one-fourth of its health.

    He was shocked by the revtion. Every time, he attacked the energy consumption was reduced to make the shield again. Then he would be losing out as attacked four times, four health bars are gone.

    And now he only has a little more health than ten health bars.

    He would be in deep trouble as the poison is acting up. He took a step back and went into deep thought as he looked at Sam, who is injecting new elements into the small orb, after the wind the lightning element, and the dark element, and even the poison also entered. Except for the light element, all of Sam¡¯s elements entered the orb.

    Only for this, he finished six health bars and the seventh one was for creating the first barrier and the eighth one was for creating the barriers after Kartikeya destroyed them.

    After the repetitive attacks, Sam forced him to inject the energies faster.

    Kartikeya is still conflicted, he does have skills that are good enough to deal with Sam, but he cannot use them because they will kill Sam instantly and he has to pay a price.

    The main goal of the Pce of Inheritance itself is teaching these prospects and increasing their experiences that would aid their growth, not showing off their strength and power.

    But he is having second thoughts when he looked at Sam¡¯s actions. He doesn¡¯t know what he is doing and if he should let him do that. After some thought, he still allowed Sam toplete the attack and took a step back.

    He took advantage of the time, to deal with his own poison-festered wounds.

    He tried his best to create small energy blockades so that the corrosion wouldn¡¯t spread even more.

    But he didn¡¯t have much time, because he felt something from Sam.

    All of a sudden, the Orb shield spread to all the stage and enveloped Kartikeya within and the smaller orb within it was floating in the center of the stage without its size changing.

    But Kartikeya¡¯s attention went to Sam, who is now avable for him to attack without any barriers.

 Chapter 579: Game Over

    As soon as Kartikeya jumped forward he waved his spear and created energy ripples to avoid the energy waves that areing from the smaller orb containing all of Sam¡¯s elemental energies. But when he was halfway through the stage, he felt a huge energy explosion and was thrown away.

    In mid-air, he stabbed the spearhead straight into the floor and a burst of energy ripples negated the force that was pushing.

    When he looked up he noticed that the explosion came from the small orb. It is now growing big, but as it grew the elemental energies are forcefully fusing together and it is causing the energy ripples.

    Kartikeya looked at it with his eyes wide open. For the first time, he sensed some threat from Sam.

    The threat is bigger than Sam¡¯s self-destruction. He has a feeling that is Sam really exploded all these energies together, there is a good chance he would be crippled for the remaining battle. But there is a small problem with this and Sam wouldn¡¯t be able to escape the explosion himself. Even his shield wouldn¡¯t be able to save him and it would be more like a suicidal attack.

    That is why he was sure that Sam wouldn¡¯t explode it.

    As Kartikeya tried to move forward, he couldn¡¯t help but shake his head. The resistance is too much. As he faced Sam¡¯s monstrosity of these attacks he more and more thought that he should just use his big attacks.

    It would be futile wanting to hold back.

    As he thought so, he finally got used to the resistance and was able to walk faster and moved towards Sam. But he is still ying the flute without bothering with anything and his health bars are depleting, but now there are only eighteen of them left.

    He is expending a lot of energy.

    But once again, there is a drastic drop of another health bar and along with it, the elemental energies that are concentrated in the orb all collided once again before an explosion urred and the energies spread all over the stage.

    Kartikeya didn¡¯t fly back this time as he was prepared.

    He was shocked by the sight that was in front of him.

    There are ck clouds above and the floor has started heating up at a rapid pace and started melting, but there is a patch of darkness in the middle of the floor from which five Naga shadows came out.

    After the shadows arrived, the patch disappeared and that part of the floor also started melting slowly. It didn¡¯t be liquid though, it just became soft.

    Silver lightning crackled from the clouds and soon it started raining.

    Kartikeya was lost in disbelief and awe for a second.

    In front of him was a domain where thend is full of golden mes and clouds are raining and thundering at the same time.

    He is surprised, but not because he has seen this for the first time. He has seen far too much and far too greater things in fact, but he was surprised because of Sam¡¯s seamless harmony in using all his elements.

    As he was thinking, he observed the remaining details, the wind is guiding the raindrops and the tongues of mes from the ground.

    When he breathed he could feel the air being heavy and all eight types of hydra poisons are in there making him feel some sort of itchy feeling in his internal organs. Now even the energy locks that are trying their best to stop the spread of the poison became useless.

    He didn¡¯t waste a single second as he ran towards Sam and was about to stab the spear, the surroundings rippled with energy, but before he could finish the stabs. The five Naga shadows lunged at him.

    He didn¡¯t want to stop and stab through the shadow, but as soon as he made the contact, the wind shrieked and the raindrops concentrated on him like crazy and the mes emerged from below his feet.

    Silver lightning struck him from above and the raindrops are now like razor des as they left small scars all over his body. And poison seeped into him.

    His spear did destroy one shadow as soon he struck, but he was unable to make another move. The four shadows all bombarded him.

    He felt frustrated and his hand started glowing along with the spear as he threw it towards Sam. But before it could reach half-way, surprisingly an ice wall fell from the clouds and mmed into the ground to stop the spear.

    But the spear destroyed the wall and proceeded further. But didn¡¯t seem to mind as there is not a single frown on his face and just continued ying, but the tune changed and the wind howled faster.

    The wind circled around the spear and the water drops turned into ice as they started spreading all over the spear making the energy ripples emitting from it reduce and the motion was slowed down. But all of the ice is being sted off of it, but still, the ice didn¡¯t stop at all and slowed it down considerably.

    But it still almost reached Sam, but before it could touch him, Sam¡¯s own shadow expanded and turned into a shape of the arm as he held the spear in ce.

    It didn¡¯t stop there, the ice disappeared and dark elemental energy flowed through the arm and enveloped the spear. It spun the spear and void style was activated.

    Not just in the shadow arm, the whole domain¡¯s different elements had void style activated including the four shadows that are inbat with Kartikeya.

    And all the elements struck him at the same time and the shadow arm threw the spear using the void style.

    Kartikeya thought rapidly and grits his teeth in frustration. He closed his eyes and his whole body seemed to have changed as he glowed with energy. An energy armor manifested on him that has a stark resemnce to the armor Kumar¡¯s blood armor. An energy spear manifested in his hands and he stood tall as he swung his spear once.

    An invisible fabric seemed to have rippled in the air as he spun the spear once around his body and energy ripples traveled far and wide as they destroyed everything surrounding him. But the range of the attack is not toorge and kept on shing with the spear and arge number of ripples started spreading and finally, he stabbed the spear in the air at the intersection of the ripples.

    The ripples turnedrge and spread all over. The stage was destroyed and Sam¡¯s elemental domain disappeared. That included the attacks that came for him.

    Sam couldn¡¯t keep up with his ying and he opened his eyes. He put away the flute as he turned his elemental fusion on and changed. He turned into a beam of golden light as he jumped upwards with all he got.

    The light beam shot upwards and Sam escaped the range of the explosion. He took out the harbinger and deactivated his elemental fusion.

    The effects of the explosion still reached him but no to a great extent but he still dodged them and bnced on the Harbinger before looking down again.

    Kartikeya is still standing there on the stage and Sam slowlynded after the dust settled.

    "You really are something else. You forced me to use this."

    Kartikeya said with a wry smile as he deactivated the armor and the spear. He took out another spear and looked at Sam.

    Kartikeya only has seven health bars left and Sam has twelves. This is the best chance Sam has if he really wants to defeat Kartikeya and he took out reaper and executioner. He has used too many staff moves in the chess game and Kartikeya is too familiar with them, he should try to change his style.

    He activated the light element partial fusion and lunged at Kartikeya and the other party has done the same.

    This time though, Sam is like a mindless fiend, he didn¡¯t care about getting injured. He left the spear stab through the part between his neck and shoulder and before the ripples could finish him off, forcefully pushed the spear out tearing his own flesh.

    Kartikeya was bewildered for a second and Sam used this to jump into him and closed the distance by very much.

    He stabbed reaper straight into his chest, but Kartikeya dodged and the stab turned into a sh that tore the flesh on his chest apart. Making him bleed.

    Sam still took the closed distance to his advantage and used the Executioner sword as he held it in a backhanded way and stabbed it to the side.

    Kartikeya once again dodged his vital parts, but the sword stabbed into the edge of his abdomen and Sam twisted the de and dragged it to the side tearing a small part off of the body, but he didn¡¯t step back after finishing the attack.

    In fact, he moved even closer as if he was trying to embrace Kartikeya.

    At this distance, the executioner couldn¡¯t even be useful.

    As he forcefully walked into him, Kartikeya tried his best to make some distance, but Sam is not giving him any chance and thus, he cannot use his spear.

    In fact, in his distance, it is hard to even punch, they are almost hugging each other after all. Sam pushed Kartikeya back and they are nearing the edge of the stage.

    Kartikeya was done with him and dropped the spear, he held Sam¡¯s left hand that was holding the executioner, and using he used his both hands to lock it and used as he tried to break the arm.

    But he held the arm tightly in the lock without breaking it and the energy ripples started ravaging the arm and they are soon to spread to Sam¡¯s whole body.

    But Sam didn¡¯t show a single trace of pain, even the sleeve of the feather coat waspletely ravaged, and right before the ripples could reach the shoulder joint, Sam moved to the side with his arm still in ce and used the reaper in his right hand to cut off his left hand.

    Kartikeya was shocked for a brief second, at Sam¡¯s ruthlessness and he was hit with the bacsh of the skill.

    At least he wanted to gain better distance, but Sam still persisted.

    He once again started pushing Kartikeya back.

    Kartikeya was now standing on the edge of the stage in a weakened state and he clinched into Sam and started using energy ripples, but all of a sudden, Sam¡¯s right hand dropped the sword and ws appeared.

    Energy waves appeared and he mmed his w straight into Kartikeya¡¯s back and held him by the flesh as the void style exploded.

    Kartikeya¡¯s flesh exploded, but Sam also took the brunt of the explosion as they were clinching.

    But he didn¡¯t stop. He forcefully pulled Kartikeya by his flesh and kneed him in the abdomen at the same time and made him stumble backward.

    Kartikeya lost his bnce and was about to fall off the ce. But he held Sam¡¯s arm and hung from there as his w was still imbued in the flesh, he was confident that Sam could pull him.

    But he saw Sam¡¯s smirk and felt something was wrong.

    Sam¡¯s right arm exploded into meat paste all of a sudden and Kartikeya fell.

    At this moment, Sam¡¯s health bar only as a minute spark of health left and he lost consciousness of losing a lot of blood. Before he could take a step back, he fell forward into the void following his opponent.

 Chapter 580: Rewards

    Sam came back to his senses and looked at Kartikeya with an embarrassed expression. The fight he fought is nowhere near a real fight. He has fought Kartikeyapletely taking advantage of the rules of the game.

    From damaging Kartikeya bit by bit and hisst onught like a mad fiend, all of them are his tricks to take advantage of the rule and he did this knowing full well that the other party is going easy on him. Just like the Monkey King did.

    "Don¡¯t feel bad, I also broke some rules I set for myself, but your performance is better than I expected, at least you can y the game and mold the rules to yourself."

    Kartikeya spoke and waved his hand, Sam felt all his mental fatigue recover and sighed in relief. There was too much pressure from this game and he had died sixteen times in total. At least, he avoided the pain and torment andmitted suicide most of the time by jumping off the stage.

    So, at least he was spared of the torment, but still, he feared that he would suffer some mental damages. He has very few emotions that he could feel heartily. They might even be pain and anger, but he didn¡¯t want to lose them.

    So, Kartikeya¡¯s healing is something he was grateful for.

    "Gambler really did pick some good candidate and no wonder that Dumb Monkey likes you so much, it is eptable. Even I was regretting a bit by not picking you as a candidate."

    With that Kartikeya took out a ck crystallized metallic ball and threw it to Sam.

    Sam caught it and examined it.

    "That is the thing Monkey King promised you. It will give a great upgrade for the dimensional traveler you are using."

    Sam was ecstatic and immediately ced it in divine dimension. He was not in a hurry to examine it through. After all, there are still rewards that are awaiting him for this Pce of Inheritance. He has suffered too much to not think about them.

    "I wanted to give the winner, something that would help them inmanding the battle well. But from what I heard, it was already there with you, even though yours is of the lowest level, the best property of that it can be developed along with you.

    Normally, a being at your level, couldn¡¯t do much with it as looking after yourself will be hard enough already.

    But from the looks of it, you got that covered.

    I was so sure that my candidate will win, I mostly prepared the rewards that would be suitable for him."

    He paused for a bit and said.

    "I don¡¯t want to cheat you, how about we make a deal?"

    "I am open for it."

    "Actually, the ultimate winner will be getting three rewards in total, but the rest of the candidates will only get one reward based on the level they reached and the performance they had shown.

    At first, I wanted to give you a spear, themander¡¯s table, and some life-saving trinkets, but I want to request you to forfeit the spear so that I can give it to my candidate. In ce of that, I will give you my Ripple style technique.

    And since you won the game technically which I didn¡¯t expect from any candidate, I will give you a superior reward that the final prize dictated."

    "What kind of rewards are we talking about?"

    "How about the Chessboard?" Kartikeya asked with a smile. Sam was stunned, he didn¡¯t expect that Kartikeya would give him a cultivator chessboard.

    Sam pointed at the table in front of them and asked still in disbelief.

    "This board?"

    "Not this one exactly. Another board which will suit you more. Trust me its value is on par with the thunder prison you already have."

    "What about the trinkets you spoke of?"

    "I will give you five items, one of them will be aiding your breakthrough after you reach the Consummate realm. I heard that you already got the peaches the Monkey King awarded and this treasure will go well with those peaches."

    As he spoke he took out a small ss vial which has a drop of transparent liquid. Even though it looked like water, Sam could feel its divinity.

    "This is a diluted drop from the Divine river of Akashaganga. Even though, it is diluted, if can help you a lot in the break-through. Drink it with the Heavenly wine you have after eating the peaches, right before the breakthrough.

    And the breakthrough should be done only after you feel like your body couldn¡¯t bear the extent of the power it is sheltering in.

    The second one is a battle puppet. It has the strength of a Consummate level cultivator and it can be used three times. Anyone within the limit of Consummate realm will die no matter how strong they are."

    Kartikeya took out another small humanoid metallic doll and ce it. It almost looked like a transformers toy.

    "The third reward is the transference scrolls. Five of them. You can never have enough of them. But their range is different from the previous time, you can now reach the range of five thousand kilometers."

    Kartikeya then ces five scrolls on the table.

    Sam was ecstatic. But he still waited, there is another present waiting for him, these three items are all one reward. The skill is thest reward.

    "The Ripple style and Void style have been rivals for many years. The disciples of the two schools of thought are fighting for centuries to prove which one is better. But I couldn¡¯t have imagined, there would be a day, a single person will be learning two of them."

    Kartikeya said and a stream of light came out of his forehead and shot into Sam¡¯s forehead.

    Sam felt like he lost control of his body and tried to resist it at first.

    "Don¡¯t resist, observe."

    A voice was heard in his head and Sam started observing his own body. He could see the energy cirction. For the ripple style. It was different from the void style. The void style mostly used a volume of spiritual energy in a ce to create a small space of vacuum that would create an explosion and chaos of spiritual energy.

    But ripple styles, consider the energy to be in the form of fabrics and all the energy in the atmosphere isprised of theyers of connected fabrics.

    The ripple styles create ripples in the fabric create the necessary damage.

    Sam observed as the ripple style circted all over his body and Kartikeya demonstrated it several times. Unlike most battle techniques and cultivation techniques, there are no stages of practice or levels in the technique just like the Void style.

    Both of them arepletely auxiliary and anyone can use them in any form of technique if they are smart enough to figure out a way to do that.

    After the demonstration, Kartikeya even left some images in his mind so that he could practice some forms using this style.

    Sam was delighted by the time the demo has ended and thanked Kartikeya repeatedly.

    "Now, let us get back to the chessboard, shall we? As I said, this thing would be on par with the thunder prison."

    With that Kartikeya took out a chessboard and ced it on the table. The board is a lot smaller than the first one and there are no pieces on it.

    The board is made of some crystalline substance as it is almost transparent to look at.

    "This is called Prison Chess. A variant of the original Cultivator Chess and that is because the game is yed with the prisoners you catch with it.

    Since you have thunder prison, this would be a great addition to your arsenal when you are dealing with too powerful enemies.

    At your cultivation level, you can catch Level-1 Consummate stage cultivators when they are in an injured or exhausted stage. As for transcendent stage cultivators, you can easily capture them as long as you caught them off guard and if you employ thunder prison and could restrain them for fifteen minutes, you can imprison them in there perfectly.

    As for Pre-transcendent stage cultivators, it would be easy for you and the Peak stage Pre-transcendent cultivators will make you exert some extra mental strain.

    Once you have captured them. You can assign them to different pieces on the board on both sides.

    They will be stuck in that block and after all the pieces are filled, you and an opponent can take the ces of the king and y with them.

    Their cultivation levels would be limited to the rules we have set. If you are the King, at Nascent stage peak level, the pawns would have Level-3 Nascent stage strength and if you have Consummate stage level-1 strength, the pawns will have Level-5 Transcendent stage.

    But the only drawback is they should not be ced in a piece that would be higher than their actual cultivation. A piece position can reduce their cultivation, but not increase it.

    You also don¡¯t have to be the king necessarily, you can capture the thirty-two pieces and you can assign the kings as you please and let them battle. They can never defy you and will be stuck there unless you will them toe out.

    And you don¡¯t have to y with them every time. Just like how you and I yed, two friends can y will all the pieces being themselves even with the prisoners still present.

    It can be used to capture your strong enemies and slowly destroy their wills to make them your own soldiers.

    Thest function is an attack function. If the opponent is too strong for you and you didn¡¯t get a chance to capture him using the Thunder Prison and the board itself, you can use this function.

    You can activate this function with a gigantic amount of spiritual energy and forcefully drag the opponent or opponents into a chess game and you fight them in a chess game ording to the rules, if you won, they will be captured. But if you lose, you will be captured and the chessboard will change the ownership. So, you have to exercise caution when you use it.

    But pulling them into the game is no easy task because the energy that would be needed is massive at the same time, it takes some time based on the level of opponent."

    Sam was overwhelmed by the new knowledge that flooded his brain.

 Chapter 581: Jealous Prince

    After getting a detailed exnation of all the rewards and iming them, Sam was sent off to the hall of the Pce and by the time he came all the remaining candidates also just appeared out of thin air.

    Everyone has a different range of expressions. Some are ecstatic and some are just normally happy but some of them are disappointed and expectant.

    The Avatar made some regr announcements of the next Pce of Inheritance for the yers and the subsequent entries that Naga Loka could have.

    After that, they reappeared once again at the entrance, where the Emperor is still waiting. At this moment, the three selected candidates are all looking at the four yers with some sense of hostility.

    Particrly, the Prince.

    Sam didn¡¯t know, who he encountered as his opponents in the test, but since none of the Naga Loka candidates didn¡¯t make it to the finals, they must have been eliminated in the early rounds and they are not willing to swallow it.

    And the prince is one of the candidates who were disappointed and expectant.

    The Emperor asked the three candidates some simple questions and came to the yers to ask the same questions and all of them are invited to the Imperial Pce that evening for a personal dinner and discussions.

    But before that, they are invited to rest.

    The Emperor led them out of the sacred grounds and led them back to the Imperial capital.

    Sam went to his residence along with the rest of the yers. Currently, he is staying in one of the VVIP rooms in Paradise.

    This is a permanent reservation given to him by Vasu after the business transaction and it is a suite. There are three rooms for them to temporarily rest.

    Noah didn¡¯t talk much and went to a room and closed the door. Sam and the rest didn¡¯t disturb her privacy.

    Arman, Sam, and Arkiv all ordered a sumptuous feast, and only then did they give her some food and didn¡¯t interact anymore.

    After eating to their full, Sam called for a massage and rxed. He even took a nap. It has been a long time since he slept. But it is a good thing to sleep once in a while.

    Only in the evening did he wake up and got ready to go to the Pce. It turned out that an attendant came here and gave them a time regarding their visit to the Pce while Sam is asleep.

    They went to the pce and without any questions the guards let them win. After walking for a few minutes one of the attendants came running and led them towards a room within the Imperial Pce.

    There, the three candidates of the Mov empire are already there. The yers didn¡¯t think much, they just greeted them normally and sat down opposite to them at a long table.

    It seemed to be a private dining room that can house ten people at most apart from the host.

    There are five chairs on each side and the yers took one side, as for the other side, there is a gap of one chair between the three people and the prince sat closer to the host¡¯s chair.

    As they sat down and waited, the Imperial Prince looked at Sam and the rest of the yers and asked.

    "Where are you guys from? What did you get in the Pce of Inheritance?"

    He asked with his tone oozing the sense of superiority.

    The whole group was silent and from Sam¡¯s nce, Arman got the message and replied.

    "The ce we are from is not known to you. It is useless even if we tell you. As for what we got, it is a little personal to disclose it to you." He replied with a polite tone and calm smile.

    Prince didn¡¯t seem to like this answer and asked one more time and a tad bit colder.

    "You will answer whatever I want. Tell me or you will face consequences." This time all the yers frowned. They didn¡¯t like the prince¡¯s tone from the start and his gaze made it sure that he doesn¡¯t like them either. But they are fine with it, but this is too bad.

    If they don¡¯t know anything about the pce or the Imperial family, they might not have been disappointed at all. But since they already came into contact with the Emperor and had interacted with him and seen how humble he actually was even in his position, they had some expectations from this Prince.

    But it seems like they expected too much. It is good that he is not the crown prince. Or the respect earned by the father would have gone down the sewers.

    Arman was about to reply, but Sam just gestured him to stay put and all four of them stayed silent.

    Seeing this further infuriated the Prince and he was about to start talking, but before he could do so, the emperor came in and the Prince took back all his hostility and just gave out a calm expression. But the emperor is no idiot, he could clearly see that there is some sort of tension in the air.

    But he didn¡¯t broach the subject and soon the attendants started serving. Sam took out few wine gourds and gave them to the Emperor. They are the recent products of the Ape inside Divine dimension, made with the local delicacies.

    He gave them out of gratitude. Due to the Emperor, they were at least able to get into the Pce without much trouble. If the Emperor is as cranky as the prince in front of them, they would have had some serious trouble.

    The dinner went normally and there are no serious questions regarding the Pce while eating. After the meal is done, they all sat there and drank wine.

    Then came the question.

    "Since what you came here was is over, what do you n to do from now on?"

    The Emperor asked the four of them.

    "We will be staying here for quite a while. I already have some business ventures, so I would manage them along with my friends. But they might enlist in the army if they like to." Sam answered this question calmly.

    "I would like to know more about this Pce of Inheritance, can you borate? If it is not too private, that is."

    The four yers exchanged nces and nodded.

    "Please do ask what you want to know, we will try to answer to the best of our abilities. If they are to be kept secret and cannot be divulged, please forgive us for the offense." Arman replied.

    And the questions went on and on. But The Emperor didn¡¯t ask anything too deep.

    It is just what kind of people are handling the Pce and what those old men with white hair and long beard are etc.

    He didn¡¯t go deep regarding who the master of Pce is. The one question he asked was who Kartikeya was and for that, they didn¡¯t answerpletely. All they told him, he is an extremely powerful person who could destroy a realm with a mere thought.

    Thest question was regarding their home. Seeing the expectant Emperor and his hospitality, Sam decided to say something.

    "We are not from Naga Loka."

    That is the only answer he gave him though. The Emperor took a deep breath and the atmosphere was quiet for a while before saying.

    "I think it is alreadyte, you can leave now. You can stay here as much as you like. If you really want to join the army, I think you wouldn¡¯t have any problem with the enlistment with Sam and Yodha here. I hope you have a good time here."

    With that, The yers all came and went back to Paradise.

    But the three candidates are still there and Emperor asked for their prizes to be shown. The Special squad candidate got a spear technique that has many levels. It has twelve sets of moves whenbined will create a single greater move.

    The Imperial guard candidate got an even better reward, a cultivation technique and it seemed to be an extremely high grade one and his other reward is a chance for him to re-cultivate using this method. He was given a method to do so but was told that it was only good for him and no one else as everybody has a different body and a different situation.

    But when the Emperor read through the Cultivation technique, he couldn¡¯t help but feel a little jealous. As for the Prince, he got some battle formation ns to lead the soldiers. Even though, the formation ns are profound his reward is the lowest of them all.

    Apart from that, they also got some weapons. And even in this, the Imperial guard candidate beat them. As he got a full set of armor, gauntlets and that even included a helmet and a weapon of his choice.

    But he cannot wield it because it was way out of his strength at this moment and he cannot give it away because it was a life-bound treasure. It would live with him, and die with him. He can only pass it to his descendants.

    He didn¡¯t take the two soldiers¡¯ treasures away, but he didn¡¯t ask them for a copy of the techniques after confirming that there is no use of distributing them.

    As for the Prince, he stayed there and the Emperor¡¯s eyes became stern as he said to him.

    "I was already disappointed with one of my children, so don¡¯t be the second one. There are many things you wouldn¡¯t understand even if I tell you unless you experience yourself. Those people are from the Naga Loka.

    Since they were able toe here all by themselves, their backgrounds are not something to be trifled with. Whoever it is behind the Pce of Inheritance, he made it exclusively just to merely test them and you were all just some add-ons for their trial, but even you people got such great presents. So, it is better if you be content with what you have and don¡¯t piss them off. I don¡¯t know why you are so hostile towards them, but I wish you would think properly with a calm mind. An unreasonable hostility will never end on a good note.

    But if you still don¡¯t listen to me and still butt heads with them. I wouldn¡¯t mind. But unless ites to your life, I wouldn¡¯t interfere in this matter."

 Chapter 582: Dimensional Drifter

    After staying in the Capital for a few days, Sam went back to the Mirage city and Arkiv followed while Arman went to the Military camp.

    This time, the Emperor did Sam a favor and transferred him to the Navy of the Mirage city temporarily as a trainer. So, that he can manage his business properly.

    At the same time, he received arge order from the Navy and they signed a contract.

    Everything is going well and after arranging everything, Sam decided to check on his new reward. But not the ones Kartikeya gave himself, rather the one Monkey King sent.

    The upgrade for the Dimensional Traveler.

    He was now in his own personal cottage of the beach resort and it is in the restricted area for the visitors. He already told everyone that coulde for him to not to disturb him for the next few days.

    He took out the ck cube and activated the device and took out the new ck sphere he got from the Monkey King.

    He didn¡¯t even have to do anything as the ck sphere shot itself into the device and Sam was stunned by the scene.

    The device ispletely reconstructing itself at a visible pace. It is as if he was watching a sci-fi film.

    He couldn¡¯t understand or make sense of what is happening at all. But something is telling him that the upgrade is going to be an amazing one.

    For the next one hour, the cottage is full of shes and mechanical sounds of metals cranking and shing.

    Sam just sat on the bed as he witnessed the scene and after one hour, it was finally done. There is a ck cube that looked the same as before. There is not much difference at all. And the only difference is that it is shining like crazy.

    Sam got a hold of the device and activated it.

    When the device opened up, there are many changes from the previous one.

    The ce where the people stand normally has berger and now around twenty people can stand at the same time. The tform is arge square and on one of the corners, there is small think metallic stick upon which a crystalline ck sphere is mounted.

    Sam walked into the tform and touched the sphere. A light ray shot out of the sphere and two light screens that are perpendicr to each other and aligned to the two sides of the square tform appeared from the light ray.

    Apart from that, there are two palm prints glowing on the crystal ball.

    Sam ced both his palms on it. Something seemed to have activated as words and letters activated on both the screens.

    On the left screen, there is a string of letters forming, ¡¯World Coordinate guide.¡¯ On the right screen though, his current world coordinates appeared with a string of letter beneath it.

    ¡¯Naga Loka, Fifteenth¡¯ That is the only thing specifying his location. The coordinates are glowing for some reason and Sam moved his right palm on the crystal ball. The coordinates that highlighted his position within the are highlighted and when Sam applied pressure on the hand, a map appeared on the screen with the coordinates and the letters moving to a corner of the screen.

    The map is not detailed with all the routes and stuff, but it is a rough image of the and there is a blinking red dot which is specifying his location. He moved his palm once again and it zoomed in. Sam zoomed to his maximum and he could make out the shape of the Mirage city on the Map and his own position within the city.

    This is good enough though.

    He moved his hand once again and it went back to the string of numbers and letters. But this time, the image appeared in another corner. He willed to change the coordinates and he only changed the coordinates within the and he could see the image changing.

    He then tried to change the coordinates, then a different image appeared.

    As for changing the nodal points and the coordinates of the realm, even if they changed, the images are not that easy to differentiate as they looked like star-fields. After he turned the coordinates back to normal, he looked at the second screen.

    The world coordinate guide.

    When he tried to open it, a tab named Naga Loka was already opened as it was ced on top of the date that is revealed as a heading with a suffix of ¡¯Node-1¡¯ beside it.

    Beneath the title, there are a series of names with-1,-2, and so on until it reached-18.

    Among them, the-15 was the one highlighted indicating his location.

    When he tried to ess the name, it didn¡¯t show anything else, rather a pop-up appeared asking him to change the name.

    He was stunned for a second, but he didn¡¯t know the name of this either, so he went back and tried to ess the Node-1.

    Then a list of nodes appeared and there are around fifteen of them.

    He once again went back and this time, he essed the Naga Loka, the realm name. A long list of realms appeared and it seemed never-ending, but apart from Naga Loka, all the other names have a lock symbol on them. When he tried to ess them, a pop-up appeared with a string of words.

    "Cultivation Level is not up to the threshold."

    As he browsed through the list that supposed to be having thousands of names, he was about to give up, but he grit his teeth and searched, because he has to find his home at this moment. And after a long search, he was able to see another name that was not locked.

    It was named Deste realm. When Sam opened it, there is only one node listed under it and within that one node, there is only one.

    Sam essed the with extreme caution and when he clicked it, the image on the screen changed and the appeared. When he clicked on the¡¯s image, the screen on the right side changed and the coordinates changed. Sam zoomed into the as he kept on changing the coordinates.

    And after ten or so changes, he was finally relieved.

    He has seen the map of the and remembered every uniquendscape as he wanted to use them in his war with the major powers.

    So, he was able to identify the location.

    He altered the coordinates until they are locked on the Western continent. Anywhere in the western continent is his own territory. He can go there ande back as he wished.

    He locked the coordinates and now it is time to load the spirit stones. And as soon as he locked the coordinates, an energy indicator appeared and it is showing that only twenty-five percent is full and at the same time, a small hole appeared on the control sphere.

    He ced his hand on it so that the spatial ring could align with it and started dropping the spirit stones, he loaded a lot of spirit stones it and the amount almost reached a billion before the charge was done. The hole automatically closed and he once again looked at the image of the and took a deep breath before activating.

    Sam disappeared from the spot along with the device and when he reappeared he was in the middle of the forest with the ck cube in his hands.

    He looked around, and he heaved a sigh of relief. At this moment, he is standing in the middle of the forest. This forest is also the one Sam is extremely familiar with actually.

    This is the forest that connected two of the dukedoms of the empire and this is the route Sam used when he was at war with the Orion Empire. He used this very route to destroy the mines.

    He was overjoyed and opened the device once again. The first thing he did is to look at the Energy Indicator and he was stunned to see that only one-third of it was gone.

    He heaved a sigh of relief and this time, it was because of the money he could save. For every roundtrip, he has to spend a lot of money on the previous device, but now it reduced by half. This is great news for him and he changed the coordinates and moved back to Naga Loka.

    Even though the most important task has been finished off, Sam has some other matters. He has spent too much on this Naga Loka and he has to make most of it.

    The next thing he has to do is, find the resources unique to this realm. He decided to find any means to get his hands on any form of resources he could get his hands on in bulk and transport it with them.

    Not only would new materials enter his market, but the material researchers will also have some new branches they would research on they can create some new alloys.

    Apart from that, there are beasts and nts he wants to take away, for that he would need some more time to gather the resources from all the corners of the.

    After exploring the new device, he was extremely satisfied after checking the energy indicator and another function that could lock all the previous coordinates he has used and let him name those spots. After that, he tried to turn it off.

    Before the screen could disappear, two words appeared on two screens.

    ¡¯Dimensional Drifter.¡¯

 Chapter 583: Gambling of Gods

    Sam is done with checking the device. Now, he sat cross-legged and closed his eyes, and started meditating. It is not for cultivation. There is not even a single strand of energy. In fact, he sealed his own cultivation at this point and started thinking.

    Now it is time for him to process all the new information he received. With the talk he had with the god and also the battle he had with the two candidates, he gained a lot of information.

    For starters, he came to know about the blood arts they are using and why they are simr. He even stayed his hand to see what that technique exactly is and let them finish the technique. Since he wanted to flex his own body for a bit, then it turned out well. Otherwise, he would have already made a move and stopped them using any form of a secret art, by any cost if it was a real battle.

    Apart from that, he also came to know that every other yer except for him have these blood arts and are all tailor-made by the gods.

    The selection of candidates has something more depth than he thought.

    At first, he thought he was picked out at random and so were the rest of the candidates and it seemed to be true with the rest of the Gods except the Gambler.

    Sam drew this conjecture from what Kartikeya said about the so-called disadvantages of Sam. At that moment, what he said might have been what he thought on his feet, but it really does seem true.

    The Gambler must have actively sought out for him and already made all kinds of preparations including sending Yanwu, the divine dimension, the collection of the cultivation techniques, knowledge, and pill recipes.

    As Kartikeya said, they already have enough pressure withpeting with each other as they need to get to the Pce of Inheritance every three years. And not only do they have topete against themselves, they would also have to transverse the dimensions andpete with the locals of their respective areas.

    This is already hard enough. That is why the gods made a decision to give these special techniques and the Dimensional Crosser to these guys.

    But The Gambler seemed to have risked everything rted to this game. After all, if the selected party is not capable of utilizing the current situation properly and doesn¡¯t know how to take advantage of what he was given, The Gambler would have lost.

    And one more thing, he got is that this thing really is a game. But instead of the game pieces, the yers, are used and they will work independently not even knowing that their steps are being manipted by the gods that sent them here.

    Now after thinking about all of this, there is one question, what is the objective of the game?

    What are the gods expecting from these twelve yers? From the three pces of inheritances, the first one mostly tested the overall talent in many aspects, the second one that belonged to the Monkey King tested thebat prowess and the third one tested themanding skills and battle acumen.

    And in each Pce, and every test have corresponded with the gods that are good at these things. They are giving the rewards away that are far too valuable for the world they are currently in.

    Even though, Kartikeya said that this was merely entertainment, what sort of person would use those out-of-the-world arts, the resources, and the hassle of sending avatars to different dimensions all by themselves just for the sake of entertainment?

    Sam had a really bad feeling about this.

    He stopped his train of thoughts and opened his eyes. It is stupid to think too much about the things you cannot change.

    He has to think about what to do in present.

    At this moment, he has already sent orders to all the mines within the Nation and the nearby friendly nations. But it would take some time, for him to get the required materials.

    Apart from that, he also has to ce orders for the herbs and other crops that are special here along with a way to get the resources from the nations that are not friendly to Mov Empire.

    Actually, he can use the Dimensional Drifter, but it wouldn¡¯t be economical at all. The cost is too big for just buying some metal, no matter howrge the quantity is. In fact, he could get a decent load of these things with just the travel expenses if he used the Dimensional Drifter.

    He wanted to ask Yodha if he can do anything about it and came out of his cottage.

    Meanwhile, in the realms that are too far from any other being in the universe, there are twelve people sitting around a table as they discussed.

    Indra is the first one to speak.

    "Three Pces arepleted, it is about time we activate another part of the test. But we haven¡¯t even decided on what kind of test we are going to use. So, today I called all of you here to make decisions regarding this.

    Currently, there are two proposals, I propose voting."

    After he finished, the votingmenced and it was quite a disappointing result because the vote is equal.

    And two people are neutral to any of the two proposals. They are Gambler and Kartikeya.

    For some reason, Kartikeya is intently observing Gambler since the start of the meeting. After his talk with Sam, he felt like there is something wrong with the game this time.

    As the decision is once again conflicted, Gambler spoke.

    "I don¡¯t know why we are even fighting regarding this. I would say use both methods, one for now and the other one after the fourth pce, in fact, go on and make more proposals. We can use a different one every time.

    What is all this unnecessary fuss about?"

    He said so in an impatient voice. Everyone was stunned. It is not like they didn¡¯t think of it, but they are too bored to think intricately and create challenges. They don¡¯t want to that time and again and decided to keep only one format, and since the format is going to be there, they wanted it to be something they selected themselves so that they can feel better about themselves.

    Who said gods are beyond regr vanity, here they are trying to fight over glory that as minute as this.

    As if he could read their mind, Gambler said.

    "It¡¯s not like you can only feel better with having only your format. Using different formats proposed by different people can allow you topare and you can feel smug as much as you want if you can create a better test.

    Anyway, we can add an extra gamble in this so that we can also get super goodies from each other."

    Everyone rolled their eyes, this is so like The Gambler, he can include gambling in everything, but the person in question didn¡¯t even care and said.

    "We will use proposal number one this time and we have to select a single candidate to be on one side and the rest of the eleven on the other side, so I think it is better to start voting regarding this."

    "Let us call the single candidate the ck Horse. Now, let us started voting for ck horse candidate."

    Kartikeya proposed and at this moment, almost half of them followed by Indra gave the same name.

    "Sam."

    "Sam."

    "Sam."

    .

    .

    Gambler and the remaining six were dumbfounded. These are the people who supported proposal one. They didn¡¯t know why they tried so hard to push the proposal given by Indra so strongly. After all, everyone on the team knows that no one can get along with Indra. Among the gods of the same level, Indra has the least friends, but he was still able to get this much support, this really made them think.

    But now they understood. This is all a petty trick to get back at Sam. After all, everyone knew what happened in the first Pce. Indra felt his fragile ego got hurt because Sam rejected his enlightenment and tried to teach him a lesson and pressured him.

    Sam didn¡¯t take it lying down, after enduring the pressure, not only he didn¡¯t kneel, he took a sword and used all his strength to cut down the statue of Indra into two. From that day on, Indra was a butt of jokes in this circle.

    And this guy even employed a trick of setting his thunder prison in the second-ranked treasure of the pce so that his candidate could have lesspetition.

    But his candidate is stupid enough to realize it and Sam got a hold of it. From then on, this guy must have plotted against Sam and used something to persuade these guys. The gambler didn¡¯t care though. He looked even more excited and said.

    "Okay, since you guys are making him the ck horse, it is me against the remaining eleven. Come one take out what you want to bet. I am waiting for it."

 Chapter 584: Black Horse

    Sam was trying his best to meet with Yodha for the past few days, but he was not able to get in touch with him. Every time, he tried, he was told that Yodha is in a special meeting with the emperor regarding a special discussion.

    But he didn¡¯t want to dy this too much, even though there is not much for him to do back in his home, he didn¡¯t want to stay away from that. The Major powers would have already recognized that their top geniuses are all disappeared for a year.

    From what Sam learned from Arkiv, they are all on the expedition in the Central Continent. That is what they gave to their respective sect elders so that they can create a perfect ruse. But that is not going to be easy.

    Since it involves the prodigies of all the major powers, it would be difficult to keep the matter on the down-low and they would start searching.

    If they find out Sam also disappeared with them, then they might think of ways to get back at his organization. Even though they would still worry about their own geniuses, they would still focus on getting a piece of the fat and juicy meat which is his own organization.

    Philip, Watt, and Jack will not be able to handle the situation alone. They could maintain it to some extent, but they wouldn¡¯t be able to maintain it for so long.

    He should move and make an appearance in three months and also introduce his new ships and the engines to the market.

    That way, he can also use that as a way to fool them to think, that he was busy with the research and that is the reason he didn¡¯t appear for this year. He can avoid any rtion to the mysterious disappearance of the prodigies.

    One night, Sam is practicing his mental cultivation in his cottage and all of a sudden, his divine dimension reacted a message appeared in his mind telling him to enter the dimension.

    Sam looked a little surprised and looked at the crystal. He immediately entered the crystal and he didn¡¯t appear at the tower door like he does every time, rather he appeared in another floor which he never opened.

    This is the fourth floor of the tower. Sam was stunned by this as he didn¡¯t expect that this would open this quickly.

    The fourth floor is not as big as the first three, it is actually very small and there are only one screen and a podium inside this room.

    On the screen, LingTian appeared once again.

    This time, Sam is not surprised anymore. He asked even before that guy can talk.

    "When am I going to meet that Gambler?"

    He asked as if he was tired of seeing Ling Tian every time.

    "Hello, Sam.

    It is good to see you again.

    Now I am here to tell you something. A new mode of the game is now introduced to test the yers. This is called Point mode.

    From now on, after every Pce of Inheritance was over, this Point mode will be activated with different games between the yers.

    The first game is going to be One Vs Eleven others. The game¡¯s name is the ck Horse.

    In this game, one yer was selected as a ck horse and he has a task to finish and the rest of the yers has to use any means necessary to stop the ck horse.

    Everyone will get points based on their performance and those points would be useful in the final Pce of Inheritance you will encounter.

    Now, you can see the details of the ck Horse Game."

    With that, Ling Tian¡¯s image disappeared and the screen showed some text regarding the task.

    The game is concise and simple. There are six herbs Sam has to obtain and they all belong to Naga Loka, but they will be on differents and what surprised him is that he is the ck horse. He has to gather these six herbs and when he looked at their names, he frowned. Because these herbs are not exactly suitable for farming them in bulk.

    They can either grow them individually without any other herbs and in a single unit at that or they can only find it wild.

    He has to assemble these six herbs and the remaining eleven candidates will have to find ways to stop Sam at any cost.

    They can fight him, they can steal from him and they can even kill him.

    The game duration is six months and everyone¡¯s performance will be evaluated individually. They will get the points.

    At this moment, a small metallic disc with a crystallized surface appeared on the podium and every yer has to take this.

    Sam walked towards it and when he touched it, it immediately moved and seemed to have entered the palm on his hand.

    It looked like it was embedded into the left palm and only the crystal surface was visible outside. Sam frowned at this. He didn¡¯t want something unknown in his body, as he thought of removing it, the crystal surface disappeared.

    After that, with another thought, it reappeared again and when he thought of what its use is, it showed the number 180 on it showing the time limit of six months.

    With another thought, it disappeared. He moved his hand and tried some spiritual energy circtions, there is no change, it didn¡¯t change anything at all.

    After that, he once again looked at the list of the herbs on the screen and also the details regarding their location.

    The game¡¯s difficulty didn¡¯t lie in finding their location, because they already gave the details about the in which it can grow.

    Sam went down to the first floor and started searching up for the details regarding the six herbs, their living conditions, qualities of the herbs, their uses and many more.

    When he looked through them, he didn¡¯t know if he shouldugh or cry. The herbs here are of high-grade. They are mostly used for the Transcendent cultivators. He didn¡¯t read the exact uses, but he has to find out.

    But the thing is, he has to find out a way to get them.

    And there is one restriction in this game to Sam and that is he cannot leave the Naga Loka within the duration of the game or until the game is overpletely.

    Sam is having a headache with this. He would very much want to smack that gambler until he couldn¡¯t recognize his face from his ass. He doesn¡¯t know how he ended up as the ck Horse, but his gut feeling is telling him that this is not just a lottery.

    As Sam is thinking, he came out only to meet with Arkiv.

    "What do you want?"

    Sam asked with a frown; he knew that the whole game this time around revolved around him and he is the target of all of them. He has to be wary. But for some weird reason, he didn¡¯t feel any hostility from this guy.

    "You do know you are the target of this, right? I will be magnanimous because of the help you have done and will not mess with you for the first two months, if you were able to finish the game before that, I am fine with that.

    But if you didn¡¯t, then I will definitely try my best to stop you."

    "Thanks." Sam heaved a sigh of relief. Arkiv turned around and left the ce.

    As for Arman, Sam didn¡¯t worry too much. Even if that guy managed to find an ounce of mental strength by any chance, when met in the battle, Sam is sure that he would face the trauma, he himself inflicted on him.

    There is no way he would get past that. It is like the fear of snakes inflicted in the genes of the whole human race. Even though some people have extremely less fear or none at all, most of them fear it. It was ingrained by the generations of humans being attacked by the snakes and dying in their hands.

    Now, Sam¡¯s treatment made Arman develop that kind of fear.

    The only immediate problem is Noah.

    She didn¡¯t stay with Sam and others and left for Army after the Pce is over.

    She didn¡¯t want to associate with them.

    As for the remaining candidates, they can try and find him first.

    Sam went to the Navy base and conducted a session of training and sent a raven to Yodha. He has to ask some questions before he could go to others, but before that, he also has to find the herb that is within this.

    It is not exactly an herb. It is actually a flower.

    The conditions are also severe. It is a fire-type flower called the Magma lotus.

    The lotus can only be grown when some Magma streams are merging into a single magma pool. Theva shouldn¡¯t move from the pool to the outside, rather the pool should be the collection point of theva.

 Chapter 585: Deal with the Smuggler

    Sam didn¡¯t know where to start, so he looked through the files of his new students in the Naval Base. After finding some capable and well-connected people, he used the connections to get some basic information about some other nations.

    He even used his military rank to get some more information. The military information is mostly rted to the borders and armies, not much of the internal workings and the terrains. At least, he got one thing right though. Mov empire didn¡¯t have that much a volcanic region.

    So, he definitely has to move to another to see.

    After some futile efforts to get the required detailed terrain and contacting Yodha, Sam was stuck in the starting point.

    Now, he felt like he might as well directly travel to other nations one by one. But he only had six months, he cannote and travel through all of them.

    As he was thinking, he went back to his ship-building factory. He has been encouraging the artisans there to create new ship designs with the engines as the core of the design. He even said to use multiple, engines, multiple transmission systems, anything that is necessary to create any kind of ship.

    They are also trying, but few had made some significant changes regarding this. But there is still an improvement.

    As he walked to the office of the factory, he saw someone and had a new Idea. Someone is talking to the Orphan two, who is now in charge of Sales. They seemed to be in a heated argument.

    When he entered the office, he could hear something.

    "I need them earlier than that, I cannot wait that long. How about you give someone else¡¯s ship and you can dy their order if there is no urgency?" The smuggler requested. But Orphan two didn¡¯t reply as he stood up to greet Sam.

    "Hello, Boss."

    Sam gestured him to take a seat, but he didn¡¯t sit in the same chair, he moved to the side and sat on the assistant¡¯s chair before offering the main seat to Sam.

    Sam took the seat and asked.

    "What is the matter?"

    "This man wants a new ship. A decentlyrge one. And that too a custom order. It is more like a fusion of a cargo and passenger ship. But we cannot meet his timeline. So, now he is trying to get a ready-made ship. But we don¡¯t have suchrge ships ready-made."

    Sam understood the matter and asked the Smuggler.

    "What are specifications?"

    The smuggler handed a scroll to him. Inside there are requirements of the ship. He frowned for a minute.

    "Come with me, let us talk in private."

    Sam stood up and took the man for a walk along the dock of his factory.

    "I will be honest with you. That ship would take a month to manufacture with our current manpower. Wepletely abandon all the other orders we will take around ten days. That too because you are lucky enough that there is a pre-made engine that is suitable for this ship.

    And currently, we are working on the Navy¡¯s order. So, we cannot dy that easily."

    "Is there no other way?" The smuggler asked.

    "Why do you need this ship so badly?"

    The smuggler thought for some time and said.

    "You know what my profession is. But what I exactly do is find a way of escape to the people in different ces and send them to a different nation or city and such.

    This time, something big is going to happen in a month in vos empire. There would be a lot of new fugitives that want to leave the country."

    "vos? The Empress¡¯ home country?"

    "Yes. This is a special time of the year and there are so many peopleing there. A treasure trove is going to be opened and people from different nations will go there for that. There will be many fights and deaths and a lot of people will want to escape the ce intact and avoid the wrath of the local factions.

    That is why I need a ship. In fact, I could have gone on my old ship. But it is damaged and it would take more time to repair than your new ship.

    I cannot miss this chance after all. All those rich pricks will be practically giving me the money."

    "What kind of ce is opening up?"

    "vos has one of the most active volcanic regions. And the magma concentration and the fire elemental energy are so high that there are many naturally formed Golems there and it is hard to go there is any time of the year.

    Even the Consummate realm cultivators cannot withstand the heat. The Lava is also not red in color. Most of it is in Golden Yellow and is hotter than any Lava you could have even seen in Mov or any other empire.

    Some people also go there in normal times, to sit on the edges of the regions so that they can enhance their fire element or increase the resistance to the fire element.

    At this time of the year, it would be open only for a month. And only Nascent stage cultivators and Pre-transcendent stage cultivators can go there. Everyone who can find any sort of treasures there can keep them.

    But that is only a rule with so many loopholes. Inside that region, everything is allowed, people kill, ughter and rob as they like.

    That is why this is one of the best options for me. I will get so many customers to move to various nations. This is something I cannot miss."

    Sam thought for a while with a calm face. But his mind is a mess. He didn¡¯t expect there would be such a coincidence. In fact, he didn¡¯t believe in too many coincidences. The ck horse task and the Magma Lotus being the first thing on the list that too in the he was present. This is too good to be a mere coincidence.

    But after he thought of the gods that are ying with him and their means along with their twisted ways of testing the yers, there is not much a surprise if they really made it happen like this.

    He is feeling a headache. He was trying to find a suitable volcanic region from this smuggler and go there, pick the herb ande back and try to get to others.

    That is what he thought. But now, he realized that all he had are pipe dreams. He would already have a handful with the rest of the yers targeting him. Now he also has to deal with the remainingpetition from all the nations.

    This is too much of a hassle.

    He looked at the smuggler and thought of something.

    "How many nations have you traveled?"

    "All of them. Small and big, there are a total of fifteen empires and thirty-seven kingdoms on the. Except for the ces that are least developed and a deficit of resources, I have visited all of them. I might be a smuggler. But I smuggle people mostly and I sent man people to, many different ces."

    "Then I have a business proposal. Are you interested?"

    "Tell me."

    "I will give you a ship temporarily and you can keep it for six months. It is quite spacious and it can actually five times faster than a normal ship you guys use on this.

    After six months, I will give you some ships in the form of payment. They will include two small speed boats. One small passenger ship with six cabins, a bigger passenger ship with twelve cabins, a fishing boat with six cabins andrge fish tanks that could even store sharks of this sea, a small ocean-liner that can be both cargo and passenger ship.

    But for that, I need you to do something for me. If you are down for that, we can continue talking business.

    The smuggler was stunned. He didn¡¯t expect that Sam would give such arge payment. Their market price goes to almost three hundred to four hundred million.

    But Sam didn¡¯t think it is too much. He will need something that could be spending billions. So, he can give amission like this and the cost price of these ships is nowhere near three hundred or four hundred million.

    The profit margin is quiterge actually and Sam wouldn¡¯t even feel a thing even if he gave them all for free.

    This deal intrigued the smuggler, so they went into a private office and discussed everything there.

    But there is one step that made it hard for the smuggler to agree. There is a pill on the table that Sam needed him to take.

    He is hesitating, but after some thought, he gritted his teeth and took it.

    Sam felt a sensation in his mind and smiled before he shook his hands and saying.

    "It is great doing business with you. Now, our first stop will be the vos empire and for this first phase of the deal, I will being with you. I want to take a look at the volcanic region. If you can get this done, you can proceed with the next remaining deals directly."

    Then Sam took him to a ship that was already on the dock. This is one of the ships that was built during the training period of the employees in the factory. It ispletely supervised by Sam and The smuggler is quite satisfied with this.

    After arranging a time for their departure, the smuggler went to the resort upon Sam¡¯s invitation. As Sam was thinking of contacting Yodha again, the man himself came to Mirage city which made Sam rx a bit.

 Chapter 586: To Flavos

    Sam was relieved when he saw Yodha. The deal he made with the smuggler is something that has many loose ends on. Even though he gave him the Pill of servitude, he has to make sure that there would be no possible loss of betrayal because of this.

    That is why he wanted to find Yodha once again.

    Since Yodha himself came now, it is much easier. And the thing is Yodha came for a ship too.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but chuckle.

    "There is a small problem here. The ships for the Navy cannot be built individually. Since you gave me the chance to build this small fleet, you have to wait for it. If we build the ships individually, there is a high chance that it would go to waste." Sam said upon Yodha¡¯s request.

    "Then, is there any other ship for travel?"

    "Where do you want to go?"

    "vos."

    "For the Volcanic region?"

    "How do you know that?" Yodha asked with a little surprise. After all, he knew that Sam only came recently and the Volcanic region is not amon news for the locality in Mov empire.

    "How many people are going? I can arrange a ship if there are few people. I built a few ships already during the training period of the employees and we built one for each model. The small-sized semi-cargo is already reserved. So, you can ask for another ship and I can get you one. They are all travel ready."

    Yodha looked through a booklet on the table that has the specifications and said.

    "The eight cabin passenger ship will do. Are you going to visit vos as well?"

    "I am. How can I miss such a great opportunity?"

    Yodha¡¯s face becameplicated and said.

    "Actually, our empire decided to send a team of five Nascent stage cultivators and three Pre-transcendent stage cultivators, but I am not the leader of the team and all the ces are reserved previously. And everyone is a Naga.

    This was all agreed by the nobles and the emperor previously, so we cannot get you in."

    "No problem. I will go on my own. I am not even traveling on the same ship as you. I have my own transportation."

    "Then that is fine. But if you are not a part of the team, you have to finish a test at the entrance of this volcanic region.

    Although it is the natural reduction of heat that allows the people to enter, the ancestors of the Nagas had created a special entrance. The entrance will test the candidates who want to enter and as long as they can make it through the entrance, they can enter the region.

    It is better to be prepared as the test would be strong. It mostly based on the fire elemental energy and pressure." Yodha said a few more things that he had to remember and after he was done, Sam said.

    "I have a business deal. You want to take it?"

    "What is that?"

    "A weapon deal."

    "A new weapon?"

    "Yes, new to you people. It is specially made for Naval soldiers. Are you interested?"

    "What is the deal?"

    "Before I exin, I would like to say that there is a condition that you must fulfill. And it involves an extremely huge amount of money. Of course, it is my money, but I wouldn¡¯t be there to manage it. So, I need the Navy or army anyone else that could guarantee it. I don¡¯t want my money to be lost and if something really happens. I will not only stop this weapon deal, but there will also be no further cooperation between us regarding any other weapons."

    "Sure, but first tell me the condition, then we can discuss the weapon."

    Sam agreed and exined what he needed. After some deep thought and a long discussion finally, Yodha agreed.

    Sam then took out the breathing device and the t-fish puppets.

    He took Yodha to the docks and dove into the water and gave him a demonstration.

    Yodha liked this thing very much. He immediately agreed and asked Sam if he has any more conditions he wanted them to fulfill.

    Then, they started discussing the factory and the production.

    The t-fish puppets are not products of mass production and they are only suitable for elites. Sam¡¯s deal with them is that he would sell them the design, the production n, machinery and even train the artisans to make them along with training the enchanters on how to give the necessarymands to the spirit in the puppet.

    But, Sam would get a royalty for every puppet that was made.

    This is more to Sam¡¯s taste than a full-fledged factory because Sam wouldn¡¯t stay in this ce forever.

    On his home, he has a solid foundation and sufficient power, so that he can ensure that no one will cheat him off. Here the situation is different. The only person he can trust is Yodha and that too not unconditional.

    He can only trust him because Sam has more weapons in hand and Yodha who likes making money needs a person like Sam who is good at doing that.

    At least, he knew that this type of trust exists, unlike the one that is full of flowery words.

    After making the deal and talking about the rest, Sam set a date that he would teach them after a month.

    Meanwhile, he gave them the blueprints of the different parts of the puppet so that they could make them.

    "Actually, I wanted to talk to you about something else, but since you are also going to the volcanic region, we can talk about it after this one month," Yodha said these words before he left to take a look at the ship.

    Sam also went on to deal with the tasks and then went to the resort. After two days, two ships left the docks of the Mirage city Industrial zone. One of them is an eight cabin passenger Ship. Another one is a Semi-cargo ship. Which is the same size as a mini-version of the small-scale ocean liner.

    There is a special crew on both ships. The passenger ship has a crew from the Navy and only two people of Sam¡¯s employees are there as for the Semi-cargo; apart from him and the smuggler and there is a full cabin crew that is trained and are current employees of Sam¡¯s shipbuildingpany.

    They are responsible for testing of the ship for sails and they are hired. Even though there are not manyrge orders and the Navy orders which arerge are still not ready at the moment, the crew is only tasked to test the fishing ships and the speed boats.

    Now they are extremely excited. They can now use the semi cargo as much as they want in the ship.

    From the engine crew to the navigation crew everyone is excited to see the metal beast go on a voyage. But they were disappointed to know that they have are only going to vos. Because it is one of the nearest ces. But still, it is better than nothing.

    After five days on the sea, the two ships reached vos side by side.

    The smuggler, whose name is Buck, has a license to bring ships and enter the docks and the other ship is on official notice.

    So, they have no problem docking in.

    The whole docks though, are stunned and attracted by the two ships that seemed to have outssed every other ship on the docks.

    Sam and the smuggler left the docks and entered the city. The volcanic region is a bit far away and the smuggler said he is not going to use the official route to go there from the port city.

    Since Sam also didn¡¯t want to associate with the rest of the group from the Mov empire, he also wanted to go with the smuggler.

    This route is simr to the route the smuggler took when he smuggled Arkiv.

    They first went to a small vige that has an estuary and they sneaked into the forest following the water upstream.

    After they arrived deep into the forest near the waterfall, where the stream originated, they went to the deeper region of the forest and traveled for three days before they arrived at another vige. From that vige, they took a mountain route to stop at a final vige.

    This is called Hot spring vige and this is nearest to the Volcanic region.

    There is another town on the other side from where the official people wille.

    The smuggler went to a house on the outskirts of the vige and entered with familiarity as he led Sam inside.

    The vigers greeted him casually as they came across him.

    "You seem quite familiar with this ce."

    "Of course, I am. I stay here quite often. After I was done with a job I wille here. I wouldn¡¯t stay for more than forty-five days on the sea continuously and if something like that happens then I would stay at other ces.

    After all, vos is a great ce to live."

    There are still three days till the volcanic region entrance opened and Sam is waiting in the Hot spring vige.

 Chapter 587: Into the Volcanic Region

    These two days, Sam spent in the house as he continuously circted energy in his body with ripple style. The Hot spring vige¡¯s specialty is that almost every house has a hot spring and it was a spring that gets the heat from the nearby volcanic region.

    And due to the presence of many minerals, they are extremely helpful for relieving body fatigue.

    For these two days, Sam sat in the spring and practiced the technique and the water rippled.

    Sam wanted to test the control of his skill on an obvious entity that he can ess easily. He tried this on the hot spring and he used it on both the pool of water and the steam that is arousing from it.

    The ripple style is as tough as the void style. At least, he got a detailed view of the practical application of the void style and he even saw the energy cirction in action fighting against it.

    Now even though, the methods and techniques are imprinted in his mind, he was still missing something.

    So, he is trying to use his control to create the ripples in the pool as he wanted.

    After two days of practice, there is little progress, but he didn¡¯t give up. He moved along with Buck and both of them walked to the entrance of the Volcanic region.

    Soon, they are walking on the volcanic rocks and Sam could even feel the flowing magma underneath.

    He didn¡¯t know if the Magma lotus will be present in this area, but he felt like this is the only ce that could make it possible for the herb to grow.

    When they reached the entrance, there are already many people standing there.

    They went through the crowd and looked at the entrance.

    In front of them is arge steep hill and there is a cave at the bottom.

    Six Nagas are sitting in six different ces. All six of them are Nagas from six different empires. Recently, from the smuggler, Sam has learned a lot about the empires of this. There are six major Empires that stand above the rest of the empires.

    And Mov is one of them along with the Rubrum. Both of them are tied at fourth ce. While the vos is in fifth ce. There are three empires above them

    This is a joint event from the six nations, even though the primary host is the vos empire.

    At this moment, the teams of the six empires are entering the cave one by one and after a few minutes, after they left, two sentries stood at the entrance and started collecting the toll for entry. Each Nascent stage cultivator should pay two million spirit stones and each Pre-transcendent stage cultivator should pay five million.

    There are around a thousand nascent stage cultivators and three to four hundred Pre-transcendent stage cultivators going. This is a massive ie for even the six empires. They are going make a fortune.

    Sam paid his toll and left the ce. Buck is not going in, he walked away from the ce after Sam entered.

    Sam started walking through the tunnel and after walking a few meters, the entrance is glowing red.

    The cultivators seemed to have slowed down a bit.

    They are all sweating. Even the fire elemental users are having a hard time moving, but not as bad as the others though.

    As Sam stood there and watched, he felt like someone is watching him and turned around. A young man walked through the entrance with a smile.

    He is someone Sam recognized. He is none other than Akhil. The yer from the Beast faction.

    "Fancy seeing the ck horse here. Is it really okay for you to juste out and openly finish the task? Especially when eleven elites are after your tail."

    "Seems like you forgot the first Pce of inheritance already."

    When Sam said this, Akhil almost choked and replied with faint embarrassment.

    "We are not the same. Do you think it would be as easy as that time? All we have to do is stop you from doing tasks. Even if we have to fight, I don¡¯t think you can certainly win. After all, I am improving."

    "And what do you think I am doing? From the first pce of inheritance till the second one, I started a business, became a refugee, waged a war, and even butt heads with a Major power and still I kicked your ass in the second pce of inheritance when you have three people supporting you and all four of you surrounding me.

    And still, you think you have a chance now?"

    With that Sam left with a smile. Akhil was stunned at the spot for a second before his face turned red and became embarrassed as he yelled at Sam.]

    "This time, I will definitely defeat you."

    As he said he also started walking beside Sam. And both of them entered the red zone.

    They could feel the extreme heat that is being created by the extreme fire elemental energy.

    At the start of the walk, there is not much effect on both of them as they walked pretty simply. But after some time, the heat increased too much and Akhil started sweating. After all, he is a warrior and he is not of the fire element. He took out a pill and swallowed it and his skin started emitting icy fog.

    But even then, at halfway point, he started sweating. Sam is still walking normally. All he is feeling is the pressure. Not the heat. The heat effect on him is almost negated by the Golden Crow bloodline. After all, there are few types of mes that could contend against the golden crow¡¯s mes.

    As they walked, all Sam did is look at others who are falling one after another.

    By the time, they reached the end, only half of the original group made it. Half of the people spent their money in vain.

    As soon as they exited most people are feeling tired and took a rest.

    Sam barely broke any sweat, which surprised him. From what he observed in the path, the resistance offered by the path is not for the strength of the person, rather the quality of their cultivation.

    The fire element is of an extremely higher grade, but its grade is not higher than that of Golden crow that is why Sam not only felt any heat, but almost all the pressure was negated. As for the pressure he faced, it is mostly due to cultivation.

    These are the main advantages of his cultivation technique. Even though he has to spend more resources than any other cultivation, it is worth it.

    He looked at Akhil who is a lot better than any other person and said.

    "I advise you to not mess with me in this ce. But if you are still so confident in stopping me, you cane and find me."

    With that, Sam lunged and rank into the ck rocky terrain.

    The whole expanse ofnd they could see is full of volcanic rocks and there is nothing else.

    They could see small cracks in the rocks and a light golden glow could be seen emitting smoke.

    The ce might be a rocky terrain, but there are many treasures in this area. A variety of metals, herbs, beasts are all avable.

    Thend looks like blocks of rocks are thrown over. There is not much tnd at least not within the vicinity.

    He could see many people walking in different directions and soon, he reached a small patch of tnd. It is so small that it could barely be used to y badminton. But it is still a better ce to rest than the thorny rocks.

    There he saw Yodha and the rest of the team.

    One of them is holding a scroll and it seemed to be some kind of map and discussing something.

    He felt lucky to encounter them this early. He wanted to find ava stream. No matter how small it is. Thisrge area of volcanic region definitely had to have some streams and he came here for that. As for other treasures, he would try to take them if they are on his way, or he wouldn¡¯t care about them.

    So, he wanted to ask Yodha if he can point out a direction to find a stream, but before he could take a step back, one of the team members looked at him and yelled.

    "Stay there, this is Mov empire¡¯s team and currently this area is ours, get lost."

    He said with some unbridled arrogance. Sam didn¡¯t show any expression though, he just looked at Yodha and called for him.

    "I need to talk to you."

    Yodha looked at the rest and said.

    "He is a friend of mine. He didn¡¯te for you guys." But when he was about to take a step forward, the one who is holding the map stopped Yodha and said to Sam.

    "What do you need to talk to him?"

    Sam frowned and said.

    "Why do you need to know?"

    "If you are not going to say anything, then I am not going to allow you guys to talk privately. You can talk here or you can get lost."

    "And why should he do that?"

    This time, it is Yodha who asked the question and his voice is a tad bit colder even in that heated environment, the leader who stopped him didn¡¯t dare to meet his cold eyes, but after a second he recovered his bearing and said.

    "I heard that he is your business partner, what if you share our team¡¯s ns with him? Then wouldn¡¯t our whole trip be leaked? What if the prince or the other people get attacked?"

    "You better mind your tongue. Or there is a great chance that it could be cut off. He is a war hero and you should treat him with the respect he deserves."

    Yodha became enraged and the leader shuddered. Everyone knows how unreasonable Yodha could be, but for some reason, the leader who wouldn¡¯t dare to meet an eye with him is openly going against him. This is a surprise for everyone on the team.

    But they still felt like it is not their leader¡¯s fault and they couldn¡¯t me him. As for Yodha, they wouldn¡¯t dare, so they directed their ire at Sam.

 Chapter 588: Berries

    Sam noticed the hostile stares from everyone else and the prince is gloating. This is the same prince that entered the Pce of Inheritance but ended up with the least valuable prize of all.

    Sam didn¡¯t want to bother with them. He cannot stoop to a level where the grown men are squabbling like children.

    "Yodha, where is the nearest stream?"

    "Stream? Do you think this is a forest? This is the volcanic region." One of the candidates couldn¡¯t keep his mouth shut and spoke.

    Sam looked at him coldly and once again looked at Yodha in askance.

    "Twenty kilometers in that direction," Yodha said and pointed towards a direction. Sam thanked him and got ready to leave.

    "Don¡¯t you dare associate with us, if you get into trouble? You are not a part of this team." The team leader said this once again.

    Sam looked at him and didn¡¯t reply. He just stepped on the nearest rock and disappeared with a golden sh. He didn¡¯t take the harbinger at the moment, just on a whim. He enjoyed jumping from one rock to another on this terrain.

    This almost felt like a pinball machine as he hit one rock after another and after some time, he finally saw traces of the stream.

    There are smallva puddles in the rocks and when he moved forward, he could see the Lava stream.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel impressed at the golden liquid flowing in a stream with vapors emitting from it; now and then there would be some asional gas bubbles spraying the Lava out.

    As Sam observed, he could see small tongues of mes near the bank of the stream. But not extremely near the stream, a few feet away.

    When he walked closer, he noticed that they are not mes, it is red-colored grass.

    He felt weird as there shouldn¡¯t be soil in thatrge rocky terrain. He touched the ground and felt that even the soil is sizzling hot.

    He plucked a few des of grass and threw them in divine dimension to see if they are useful. When they appeared near the cattle farm inside the dimension, there the fire elemental cattle, that included the zing earth bull are all excited to eat this.

    Sam observed this and decided to collect more. The grass is not too tall, thergest de of grass reached his calf at most.

    He took a dagger and swung it. A de ray cut into a distance and the grass that is present in a few meters was all uprooted. Then he started collecting them.

    But when he started collecting them, he finally noticed something. The grass is growing on a small slope that titled towards the stream.

    And he took a step back and observed it from different angles and finally understood.

    The grass that grew didn¡¯t grow on the bank, rather it is the bed of the stream. And why the bed of the stream is out in the open that is because the width of the stream reduced.

    Sam felt like this must have been due to this special one-month period.

    He followed the stream and walked as he collected the grass as he went on. He felt like a farmer cutting grass for his life-stock. But it was not a bad feeling though.

    As he hummed a tune and cut the grass, he walked slowly along with the stream. If not for the fact that the stream is of goldenva and the grass is extremely hot like it was taken out of oil right after it was deep-fried, it would have been perfect.

    After walking for a distance there is no more grass and Sam didn¡¯t use it anymore. He took out the harbinger and started moving faster. After a while, he spotted two people fighting. One of them is Akhil.

    He didn¡¯t expect he would move that fast though. Sam hovered over and looked at the fight with interest.

    There is a small shrub on the river bed and it has fruits that are the size of a quail egg.

    They looked like berries.

    Sam immediately understood what the fight is for. These berries must be some sort of spiritual fruit.

    He zoomed past the fight and directly plucked one and ate it. Anyway, even if it is poisonous, it can do little to him Even if it cannot be negated, he has a variant hydra bloodline. He can just make it his own.

    But his thoughts are unfounded as soon as he ate the fruit. He could feel the fire elemental energy spreading to his bones and muscles, even his blood.

    He could immediately guess the effects. The fire element users get better affinity and the non-fire elemental users will feel their body tempered and they can gain some resistance to the fire element. But he is not focused on it too much. He is focused on the feeling it caused when it went down.

    It was marvelous. These berries are great and it seemed like they would make great wine. He looked around and noticed that although the same kind of shrubs is there, they seemed to be a bit different. He tasted one from each bush and he noticed that it might their growth level.

    The nts like these also seemed to have evolution levels. Some berries didn¡¯t have any effect on him and some have too poor an effect. Only the first two bushes gave him that sensation.

    As Sam is taste-testing the shrubs, the two people noticed what Sam is doing and they immediately focused on him.

    When Akhil saw it was Sam, he was delighted, but before he knew it he frowned once again. He remembered their current status. Sam is the ck horse.

    It would be great if Sam didn¡¯t beat the crap out of him, but expecting him to help would be a bit difficult.

    His opponent is a peak stage Nascent while he himself is only Level-6. He is having a hard time.

    "Sam."

    Akhil called for him and Sam looked at him as he ate a berry.

    He smiled and said.

    "This is good stuff man, I will be taking all of them. Don¡¯t worry. After we are out of here, meet me. I will give you some."

    With that, he went to work on the shrubs. He started plucking the fruits without heed for the two others.

    Akhil¡¯s opponent who is a Naga immediately moved towards Sam with his sword.

    "How dare you steal something that is mine? I will kill you." He yelled as he ran. But Sam is on the harbinger and he didn¡¯t even bother to fight. He danced in the air as he plucked the berries faster than ever. He noticed that there are seeds in the berries, so he can try to grow them.

    As he dodged and jumped, he almost finished plucking all of them. Only two main bushes are left and they are the ones that have evolved greatly.

    But the opponent is standing guard there.

    Akhil is not making his move as he tried to recover.

    "Move aside and I will give you a couple of them, otherwise don¡¯t me me if you regret itter." Sam said in a calm voice.

    But thetter only snorted.

    Sam didn¡¯t care anymore and made his move and soon in a few minutes, the Naga is lying unconscious on the ground while Sam plucked the berries happily. He then threw a few towards Akhil and said.

    "That¡¯s your share. Bye."

    With that, Sam resumed his journey. He thought this journey would be boring. But it seemed like it was going to be okay.

    He moved along the stream on Harbinger and encountered many such sights. There are many types of herbs, grasses, and flowers growing near this ce.

    But he didn¡¯t stop for everything. But he did stop for the berries though. He has collected all of them and walked forward.

    Soon, he noticed that the stream took a turn into a cave of a small hill. As he was deciding to check up on what is inside before going, he heard some activity and could detect some presence not too far away.

    He looked around with the eye technique and found that a team of people is discussing something. They are the vos team and there are also some individuals who came in.

    He also walked towards them to see what they are discussing and since they are not keeping anything secret. He got the gist of what is happening.

    The small hill is actually a beast¡¯s habitat and he heard that they are mutated Lava Smanders. They have thick hide and their scales and leather make great armor that has extreme fire element properties.

    The fire elemental users will die for those armors. He wanted to venture in too. But before he could do so, the vos team noticed and halted. Sam felt like his luck is shitty. Because, the Mov team and the vos team, both of them didn¡¯t seem friendly at all.

    "You cannot go in there. If you want to you can join the team and receive payment. Otherwise, you have to wait for us toplete our expedition into the cave."

    Sam understood that since he learned the information from them, they would use that as a point and hinder him a lot.

    "If I want to go in now?" Sam asked.

    "You have to pay the toll."

    "How much?"

    "Twenty million."

    Sam threw out a spatial ring and started walking to the cave. From what he heard there is a single pre-transcendent stage beast and around ten to twelve Nascent stage beasts. Sam doesn¡¯t have anything to worry about. It would be pretty easy.

    Anyway, his main thought is just to take a look and follow the flow of the Lava stream. He didn¡¯t have much interest in the beasts. But after the raid, he would have to face these guys who might take this ce as their base of operations at least that is what they told. At least, facing these beasts is better than facing these guys.

 Chapter 589: Deal with the Beasts

    "Bro, is it really okay to let him go like that?" One of the vos candidates asked the leader.

    "Let him go, he can be our bait. If he is skilled enough, he might be able to run to the cave before he died and he can lure a smander or two separately.

    Even if he didn¡¯t, as long as he is a bit skilled, he would be able to hit a Smander and cause some damage. Even though, it didn¡¯t matter much. It is still beneficial for us.

    Even if he didn¡¯t do any of those. We can at least estimate the power of the Smanders and on top of that he also paid twenty million to us."

    When the leader and the others are speaking. Sam walked into the cave leisurely.

    The cave entrance isrge and most of it is upied by the Lava stream.

    If anyone wants to enter, they have to enter from either side of the stream, not through the middle of the entrance.

    The cave is dark and nothing is visible outside, even though it is such arge cave.

    Sam is feeling a little bit excited. This is only the first day. Not only did he get a new type of fruit, but he is also going to enter a Smander¡¯s nest. Even though, he is not interested in Smanders that much and the main focus is the stream itself since the vos took his money.

    He might as well make his money¡¯s worth in this cave. As soon as he entered, he could see the blood-thirsty presence of many creatures.

    When he reached a wider area of the cave, there is a lot more space and it is as big as a football stadium.

    In the middle of it is a Lava pool and around the Lava pool, there are many nts that are growing the same berries Sam picked on his way. The berries are bigger and they are definitely a better version than the ones he picked.

    But he is nowhere near excited because the Lava stream is ending here. This would prove that his efforts for the day are wasted. Even though he has a month, he wanted to finish this as soon as possible and get out of this ce.

    *ROAR*

    *ROAR*

    *ROAR*

    As he was already feeling frustrated, there are many roars echoing in the cave and he could feel the hot air blowing from the beasts.

    He is surrounded by the beasts. The Smanders are really mutated and they don¡¯t have the regr red skin scales that their race would usually have. But they have golden scales, just like the Goldenva.

    He looked at them and he could even understand their roars. All the roars have only one meaning. ¡¯KILL¡¯.

    They are eager to kill and are squabbling among themselves as they are undecided on who should kill Sam. It seems like it has been a long time since they saw someone and they are extremely eager.

    When he saw the number of beasts in the area, he was surprised and shook his head.

    Because the number of beasts here is far more than the group anticipated. Just the Nascent stage beasts are twenty-six and as for the Pre transcendent stage beasts, he could feel four presences.

    The team outside could barely do anything to them.

    As the beasts roared at each other, he smiled and said.

    "You guys can squabbleter. I am not here to fight, I am here to discuss something. So, it is better if someone who can make decisionse over."

    As he said this all the Smanders shut up and they roared once again, but this time, there is a roar from another cave passage that is within this cave. He is waiting for that presence toe over.

    Arger Smander came out and looked at Sam.

    [How can you understand beast tongue?]

    Sam merely chuckled and circted his bloodline powers all over and released the beast aura.

    "I am a partial beast myself. So, you want to talk?"

    The Smander is a Pre-transcendent stage beast and it looked at Sam curiously. It could feel the beast bloodlines and they are fairy superior to his. If not for the cultivation level, it would have been suppressed by now.

    Even now, all the Nascent stage beasts are having a hard time as they took a step back and this is Sam holding back.

    [What is the deal you want to talk about?]

    "There is a team of humans that are waiting outside. There are so many people and even though, your strength is far greater than they could expect, you will still lose half of your popce if they reallye back and after that damage, they wille back with more force and kill you guys for revenge and of course for your leather and scales.

    I have a n for you guys to suffer less."

    [Why should we believe that you are not going to help them? How can we believe that this is not a setup?]

    "Me and them? Do you really think that lowly of me? I didn¡¯t think my first impression is that bad? After we make a deal, I will sit right beside you. I will not even make a single move. You can even keep one of your ws on my neck, and kill me if you find something wrong."

    [Why are you helping us?]

    "Number one, I want to trade some of the berries for my help. And number two, I came in here following that stream and I was in a hurry, so I didn¡¯t bother talking with them and paid twenty million. It is a toorge sum of a money. Even though I paid I nned on taking it back before I leave, but since I have to embark on apletely new journey.

    It is better to settle this score right now."

    [What is the n?]

    Sam smiled and started exining. He then moved to various corners of the cave and started cing some formation gs and some formation discs all over the ce.

    He showed a demonstration and deactivated the formation.

    He then nailed the formation discs into the cave walls and formation gs into the cave floor so that they could stay there permanently.

    He came back to the Smander and said.

    "If you attack as I said, you can easily defeat them and remember to collect all their spatial rings from them," Sam said these words, and all of a sudden, he started screaming at the top of his lungs as he threw fireballs at the walls and floor giving various golden glows.

    "Arghhhhh.."

    "Arrgggggg..."

    His voice is extremely painful and after putting up an act, the Smanders are ordered to give a painful cry and some angry roars.

    Meanwhile, the team outside, which slowly grew suspicious are about to investigate what happened inside the cave, but just before they did that, they heard the painful screams of a human and a beast along with the sounds of battle.

    They were extremely delighted and from this. Particrly when they heard the painful screams. They immediately wanted to take advantage of this battle to catch them off guard and even the leader felt like Sam is really strong to get such a death cry from a beast and create such chaos.

    But as soon as the party entered the cave, what they experiencedpletely subverted their expectations.

    As soon as they entered, their senses are disturbed and they could fully observe the presence of the Smanders, and even their vision and spiritual sense are restricted and they walked along the stream.

    But only after a few minutes did theye to their senses and when they did, they are shocked. They realized that they were in an illusion because at this moment, they were already surrounded by the beasts.

    When they counted the numbers, they are even more shocked.

    The beasts are more than they expected. They tried to look in the surroundings to run for escape for some weird reason, they couldn¡¯t see the cave entrance they came in. All they could see is that they are in the cave.

    The leader looked at the stream and cried.

    "Follow the stream."

    One of the candidates followed the stream. They have to go in the opposite direction of the streamflow. But when they noticed this, they felt weird because if the streamflow is correct, the person who should be nearest is the farthest to the entrance.

    But they attributed it to the illusion and felt like they might have turned around when they are struck. And when the candidate moved though, they heard a plop sound and he disappeared.

    "Help me. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH........"

    They could hear the screams but they don¡¯t know what happened. They are extremely afraid and they shivered in fright even in that hot weather. The Smanders seemed to be enjoying this, but after a few minutes of panic right before the people can calm down, golden mes sted on them apanied by the roars of the Smanders and the illusion finally disappeared.

    They didn¡¯t move in the wrong direction actually, all they did is move diagonally a bit and when the man walked backward, he directly went into the stream.

    After the Smanders attacked, the illusion disappeared and it was all controlled by the Smander king of this ce. Even though they are not extremely intelligent, they can at least inject energy into a spot and remove it at the perfect timing. After all, they don¡¯t have to observe some great working principles.

 Chapter 590: Lake and Slime

    After another hour Sam is sitting at a corner of the cave as he looked through the spatial rings of the team that came in.

    The candidates who came in didn¡¯t die though. They were forced to leave the cave without their rings and armors stripped off of them.

    Sam checked everything inside was delighted. He earned ten times more and he pocketed everything. As for why he didn¡¯t want them dead. He didn¡¯t have a grudge and he didn¡¯t want some extra forcesing in and bombarding these Smanders. They wouldn¡¯t be able to stay peaceful if the imperial family¡¯s scions.

    Anyway, he sold the formation for just those berries and some beast friends here.

    After dealing with the new gains and giving all kinds of herbs and fruits in the rings to the Smanders, he was preparing to leave.

    He has to find another stream and get on with it.

    [Why are you looking for a stream?] The Smander King asked Sam when he was munching the higher-grade berries.

    "I came to find something in this area. I don¡¯t know if that thing is avable, but I have to see. For that, I need to follow the stream and find argeva pool."

    [Large Lava pool?]

    "Yes. Do you know something of that sort?"

    [We Smanders are not allowed to leave this area. It is a pact between all the creatures in this region. I don¡¯t know where the area is, but I do know that all the Lava streams only stop there.

    The pool in the cave is not the end of the stream.

    There is another opening under the pool that leads the stream underground and from there it flows.]

    Sam had a thoughtful expression as he looked at the pool. Even he knew that something is not right with the pool, after all even though the stream of the Lava is slow, it is still moving and the pool should be full and theva should flow out of it. But it is not happening.

    But Sam didn¡¯t feel anything when he used his spiritual sense of the pool. The Lava inside the pool is extremely stagnant at least that is what it is looking like.

    "Is there any stream nearby?"

    [There is one a few kilometers away. You can go there in the morning. But I doubt you will be able to find the Lava pool you are looking for if you just follow the stream. The streams of Lava are not as direct as they look. Every stream will only lead you to an obstacle such as this.]

    "Then what do you suggest?"

    [The Lava pool is too deep into the region and hardly any of the humans and Nagas thate in would go there, as the heat increases the more you go inside because the Lava streams converge as you go inside and even some of the beasts couldn¡¯t handle it. We arranged our habitats that way.

    But if you really want to go there, even though the stream is the most direct method, if you couldn¡¯t follow the stream just like now, it is better if you go in the direction the heat is high.

    The hotter the area, the more dangerous it is. Very few Pre-transcendent stage cultivators go there for treasures because the moreva there is the more treasures you can gain and some special people have some special means to ovee the heat and go in and they all have different maps.

    So, for a Nascent like you, it would be difficult. I would advise you to not go there. But if you really want to be careful.]

    Sam went into deep thought and took the rest of the night off. The next day, he went on the harbinger to the next stream the smander king pointed out and started following that.

    Even though, the Smander King said that he should go in a direction the heat is higher, he felt like finding it would beplicated. After all, every ce is hot here and if there is Lava deposited in a ce, that ce would definitely be hotter.

    This time, the stream is long and it didn¡¯t disappear into any cave or ground for a few days. He traveled leisurely for a week as he harvested any kinds of herbs and fruits that came in his way. Mostly there are only those berries and that grass he found on the bank of the first stream.

    But as he went deeper and deeper into the region, Sam noticed that the terrain is not as rocky anymore.

    And after that one week, the stream disappeared. This time, he knew that stream is going to continue because theva flew through a cave but the other end of the cave is underground and Lava is flowing like a waterfall creating an inferno. He is not confident that he would even be able to go there with his elemental fusion.

    He came out of that ce and tried to find the hotter ce and traveled. He has used many methods like feeling the temperature of rocks, using water elemental energy and the ce that is giving him more resistance is the ce of higher temperature and after continuous experimentation, his observation ability came in handy.

    He can feel the density of the fire elemental energy and determine where the temperature is higher and it seemed to be working.

    After another ten days of continuous journey, Sam has to use his spiritual energy to shield away from the heat continuously.

    But looking at the energy consumption, he stopped that and started circting the Golden crow bloodline. Only then didn¡¯t he feel a bit better.

    At least, the Harbinger didn¡¯t have any problem at the moment, so he traveled.

    On the fourteenth day of his travel, he finally saw what he wanted to see. The traces of therge pool.

    But it is still far away and it would take another two days to cross the area and move there.

    Two dayster, he could finally see the pool. But when he saw it, he felt like calling it a pool is undermining the vastness of it.

    The heat here is higher than any other ce and apart from the Golden crow bloodline, the rest of the bloodlines of Sam are all suppressed. Even though he can use the elements, he would have to expend more energy than usual and as for the water element, he can just forget about it.

    But what surprised Sam more is that there are other people in the vicinities. They seemed to be waiting for something to happen. And only after watching them for a while did he understand that they are waiting for someone to make a move.

    Sam went near theke to examine if he could find the lotus there. Theke is situated down a long slope. And the slope has some nts growing.

    But Sam knew better than anyone that the slope is not just a normal slope. It is part of theke and it only appeared out because of the lower level of theke. This is the effect that would only be for a month.

    The only problem is that theke surface is not exactly visible. There is a golden glow from the Lava and the glow is a lot brighter than the Lava on the stream. It seemed like the Lava umtion is not the only reason for it glow like that, but he doesn¡¯t know what is, as for the people that came here, they wouldn¡¯t tell him anyway.

    So, he wanted to go near to see what is the deal with theke.

    For some weird reason, no one stopped when Sam is moving to theke. He was just allowed to go and no one bothered to stop him.

    But as soon as he stepped foot on the slope and walked down a bit, arge figure jumped out of theva andunched itself towards Sam.

    Sam jumped back and avoided the attack.

    But a lump of slimly Lava was shot at him and hurriedly dodged as he walked back.

    After taking himself to a safe distance, he finally got a chance to see what is in front of him.

    It looked like a think golden glowing hot slime was lumped in front of him. But within that slime, he could see a row of teeth. The golden glow is a lot higher than the Lava and Sam immediately understood what causing the glow over theke.

    These are Lava Slime. They are types of beasts that are simr to a normal amoeba. But they have a mouth, which the only tangible part of their body apart from their core.

    Even if you sucked the whole slimy part off of the core, as long as it exists in sufficient heat, they can once again secrete their bodies.

    All the information ran through Sam¡¯s mind as he looked at the Beast. The beast is only Nascent stage one and he is confident that he can do something, but the wholeke is glowing with the same glow that can blind every person that is present here. That means the fullke is infested with them.

    He understood why these people didn¡¯t stop him. Because they are confident in him not going there.

    He took a step back and came up from the slope and the beast finally went back into the Lake.

    As he stood there and started thinking about how to proceed, he saw someone familiaring to the area. They are none other than the Mov empire team. When Yodha saw him, he waved his hand and walked to him with obvious signs of relief on his face.

 Chapter 591: Fighting for the Lotus

    "What are you doing here?" Yodha asked as soon as he neared Sam.

    "This is the reason I came here?" Sam said as he pointed at the Lake.

    "For theke?"

    "No, for the Magma Lotus." When Yodha heard that he was stunned for a second before asking.

    "How do you know that?"

    "I didn¡¯t know until now," Sam said with a shrug.

    Yodha also chuckled and said.

    "It would be difficult. Theke is infested with a lot of Lava Slime and only Pre-transcendent stage cultivatorse here.

    The information about the nts inside the Lake and even about theke ispletely confidential, I didn¡¯t even know how you find out. But I would be hard for you to get into theke much less get the lotus. After all, all the other nts have multiple units inside theke but there would only be one lotus."

    "Why do you guys so much information? It is almost like youe here often or if it is your backyard. How do you know that there is only one lotus?"

    "We have maps and info from the previous expeditions and this ismon information. In fact, the teams of six nationse only for this. It is almost like farmers iming the harvest. Every time, only a handful of peoplee here individually and they too wouldn¡¯t gain much. That is why they didn¡¯t bother with you."

    "What are you guys after?"

    Sam asked casually.

    "Actually all the six teams are after the same thing, the main goal is the lotus. And only one from each team will go after it, the rest of us will go for the slimes. They are actually a great fertilizer for the fire elemental herbs and every year the imperial garden uses them.

    The herb expert of the imperial court even found a great method to refine them properly.

    So, we have to collect the slime off of the beasts after killing them."

    "As far as I know it is hard to preserve them. If you don¡¯t collect the slime in a fraction of seconds as soon as you hit the core, the slime will die out with the core. Good luck with that." Sam said with a smile.

    He is not that interested in the slimes, they do have some uses, but not to the point he wanted to fight for them. If he wants he can grow them and have a constant harvest of these slimes, he doesn¡¯t even have to kill.

    But after thinking like that, he suddenly felt that it is not that bad to catch a couple of them alive and grow them.

    He put a stop to his train of thoughts, he looked at Yodha and asked.

    "What are you guys waiting for?"

    "They waited for the Mov empire and the vos empire teams. The vos got into some trouble and we helped them there and we camete. And the real extraction will only take ce on the twentieth day.

    It will take only ten days to go back to the entrance, after all, so we will wait for some of the individual cultivators toe and the teams recruit them to harvest the slimes and the other flowers. While the leaders go for the Lotus.

    You want to join?"

    "No need, I don¡¯t want any association with the Mov empire, just like your leader said. But do tell him to stay away from me, when I extract the lotus. I cannot guarantee anyone¡¯s safety."

    "Are you that confident?"

    "You haven¡¯t seen half of me. You will understand why I said that soon enough."

    With that, Sam smiled and started using his eye technique along with the light element to zoom and look at theke. The thermal vision wouldn¡¯t work and in fact, it would blind his eyes. But his light element could.

    He tried to change the frequency of the light to see if he can get a glimpse of theke all the while talking to Yodha.

    He did get a blurry sight at one point and he tried the frequency near it and after some tries, he was able to get a barelyprehensible image. And that too because of the eye technique¡¯s uracy in differentiating the energy waves.

    He decided to call this method energy vision. This is a lot like thermal vision but the only difference is it shows the spiritual energy density instead of the temperature.

    And in this energy vision, he could faintly outline the energies of the nts on the surface of theke and the slimes under the surface of theke, but what surprised him is that there are three energies that are showing some seriously high readings and there is a forth energy which is faint and that is only because it is too far from the range.

    He looked at the teams and stopped responding to Yodha¡¯s words.

    Yodha asked.

    "What happened?"

    "You guys better prepare. If you really only send a single Pre-transcendent to that ce, you will have some serious trouble."

    "What do you mean? What trouble?" I don¡¯t know exactly what it is, but I think it is better to be cautious."

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything more. Because two out of those four energies don¡¯t belong to the Slimes. Even though he is not familiar with the slimes and the energy vision, there are too many slimes around topare and he is pretty sure that those two are not slimes.

    "Do you know if there are any other creatures apart from the Slimes?" Sam asked to confirm.

    "No. the slimes are the only things that live in here. Why?"

    "Nothing. But I think you should really be careful. If something happens, don¡¯t go to the lotus immediately. Wait for two to three minutes and then move."

    Sam only left these words and didn¡¯t say anything more. He decided to make his move after the teams did.

    He just sat on a rock nearby and meditated as he tried the ripple style.

    Days passed and the influx of the individual cultivators stopped only on the eighteenth day. No one came on the neenth and the teams already started recruiting.

    But Sam saw some familiar faces here.

    They are Akhil and another guy from the Usaine sect. He is also a yer. Apart from Arkiv, there are two yers in the Usaine sect because of their diverse nature of experts and the vast amount of influence they wielded. He heard from Arkiv that they escaped to other major powers before the attack.

    That too because of Sam¡¯s warning to Arkiv who passed it on to them.

    This person is a strong fire element user and he is the only one who doesn¡¯t have to use external means and pills to stay here even though he is a Nascent stage cultivator.

    He and Akhil seemed to havee together and the rest of the candidates are nowhere to be seen. After all not everyone has the same freedom as Sam in this ce. Some of the yers are even waiting for the three-year time period to be over to escape their current situation.

    They did get a chance at the Pce of Inheritance and they got some benefits from the Imperial families, but they lost their freedom and cannot go to events like these.

    Both the yers arepletely focused on Sam.

    Sam only smiled at them once.

    Finally, the time hase for raiding theke and every team got ready with the new recruits that joined them in the past few days.

    When all of them are walking towards theke, the Lava slimes are also slowly rising in the pools. The glow dimmed a bit. They can only use that glowing effect to a full extent when they arepletely inside theva. If not, the effect would reduce.

    The beasts didn¡¯te to directly attack though, they are still inside theke and only a small part of them showed up on the surface. If someone saw them for the first time like this, they will think the Lava level rose in thiske.

    Sam also walked after all the teams went forward and the two yers followed him.

    They are not too interested in the treasures of theke, at least one of them. But stopping Sam is more important for them.

    The teams took out some metal rafts and ced on the Lake. They seemed to have been made from a special alloy. Sam still didn¡¯t move and the slimes too didn¡¯t move.

    Only after they entered a few meters into theke, theva slimes finally had a reaction. They sprung up and started shooting Lava out of their mouths.

    The people also started dodging and the leaders of the six teams only have one thing on their minds, they didn¡¯t even bother dodging and let their subordinates block them. After all, there is not much space on the rafts, so all they can do is blocking mostly and only a few people can dodge.

    But the situation soon changed, the team members started throwing raft after raft into the pool.

    And jumped on to them, so that they could have more fighting space.

    As for why they are not using some fire-type beasts, they tried but it didn¡¯t work. Of course, they were able to avoid the attacks on the beasts, but the slimes couldn¡¯t be killed with the spells and long-range attacks easily. They have to do meleebat to be efficient, if they are focused on flying-type beasts, they will be shot down and they wouldn¡¯t be able to react due to the natural cover of the Lava to the slimes.

    As for normal beasts, they would die as soon as they entered the Lava.

 Chapter 592: Getting the Lotus

    Sam just waited as he watched the battles, the six leaders split up from themon rafts and jumped to the newly thrown rafts as they rode on them further into theke. They started attacking the slimes that are on their way as they made their way.

    Due to the constant battle, the blinding light has reduced to a mere faint glow and they can see the things on theke.

    There is a region of theke on which there are a lot of flowers all bloomed and ready to be plucked.

    In the middle of all these flowers, there is arge lotus as big as arge bucket glowing with red and golden patterns all over.

    Around it, there are many small flowers that could grow in theva along with some vines that could be seen here and there.

    Sam stood at the edge of theke as he looked at the scene and the team leaders slowly reached the region where the vegetation is growing.

    The remaining pre-transcendent stage cultivators of every team are in charge of collecting the Lava slime bodies and the other flowers that are in different areas of theke.

    They are all snatching the resources and it didn¡¯t take long before some fights broke out between different teams. They are not the main members though, it is the extra members they hired at theke.

    Sam watched all of this casually. Except for the Pre-transcendent stage cultivators, there are barely any Nascent stage cultivators on theke.

    The few Nascent stage cultivators that are here are the extra members recruited. As for the Nascent stage members who originally belongs to the team didn¡¯te near theke. They are afraid that they would be killed here and since all of them are from prominent families, they love their lives too much to take any risk.

    And Lava slime is also a tricky beast to handle though. Their powers are not strong, their attacks can almost be considered weak among the Pre-transcendent stage beasts.

    Their attacks are at the Nascent stage only and as for the defense that is the trickiest one, particrly in this Lava.

    They can blend in and the attack thatnded on any part of the body other than the mouth and the core are useless as they wouldn¡¯t even hurt the beast.

    If they cannd some clean hits, even a Late-stage Nascent can kill an Initial stage Pre-transcendent stage beast. If they cannot, even Pre-transcendent stage cultivators cannot kill a Nascent stage beast.

    At this moment, Sam is watching the effects of this. The Lava slimes are all attacking, but they are not looking to directly hurt them. They are just trying to make sure that they don¡¯t have anywhere to dodge and lose bnce so that they would fall in the Lava.

    Once they are inside, it is their territory. They will get some good nutrition.

    Many Pre-transcendent stage cultivators are falling and they are trying their best of emerging back on the rafts.

    Some who managed to do that lost their legs or hands in the process. It would be hard for them to recover too and that is if they have any chance of recovering.

    Since they became burdens and there is not muchradery, they are being thrown back into theke as bait so that the rest of them could have some time.

    In the whole harvesting team, only a few people have safety and they are the archers that are on the bank of theke.

    Since the people on theke are distracting the beasts, the archers are trying their luck to hurt the beasts. And kill them by shooting their cores down.

    But it is not that easy. They could at most create some breathing space for theirpanions on theke.

    As things are like this, the six-team leaders are close to reaching the region of theke with the most vegetation.

    But just when they were about to do it, their rafts suddenly got stuck in the ce, the Lava around the rafts seemed to have a jelly-like substance as it enveloped the rafts and fixed them in the ce.

    The six leaders are trying their best to move, but they couldn¡¯t. At this moment, two mouths appeared before them.

    They are the two Lava slime leaders and they are the two of the four that Sam is wary about. But when they appeared though, he was shocked and so did everyone else.

    The aura of this beast is at the very peak of the Pre-transcendent stage and is close to breaking through the transcendent stage. But that is not the most shocking though. The two mouths are actually connected to a single body and there are two cores floating extremely near to each other.

    The two Lava slimes have a single body and their power is not as simple as two powers added together.

    The team leaders felt extremely strange. The mouths started throwingva at them at an incredible rate and they have no ce to dodge. When they tried to throw another raft to the side andnd on it, as soon as the raft appeared the Lava Slime already used its body to grab a hold of it.

    They are in quite some trouble. They are close to the cores, but they couldn¡¯t hit. The body of this creature is so thick and dense than a normal Lava slime and it is more transparent too. That is why they could see see cores hovering around the body as they kept on missing their target.

    Seeing this, Sam smiled and turn around to face the two of his fellow yers.

    "Want to do it now or want to do it after I got the lotus?"

    "You are speaking as if you can get the lotus." The fire element yer scoffed.

    "You are Agun right?"

    "Yes."

    "If you are so confident, then let us wait until Ie back from theke, if I don¡¯te back, your mission will be easy and if I doe back with the lotus, you can fight me and take it and if I came back with anything, I will lose the game anyway.

    Don¡¯t you think so?"

    "Don¡¯t let him. I think it is better to hold him up here." Akhil said from the side.

    "Why?" Agun asked with a frown.

    "He is a tricky guy."

    "If you cannot give a proper reason, then don¡¯t bother saying anything," Agun said to Akhil and then turned to Sam before saying. "I am okay with it."

    Then Sam once again turned around to look at theke with a smile.

    "Are you not going in?"

    "It is not time yet."

    As the six leaders fought with the weird slime and finally gained some foothold and tried to beat it, one of them suddenly felt like a raft being dragged down and fell into theva.

    "Ahhhh... AHHHHH." He started screaming as he tried to get back, but before all the leaders¡¯ eyes, they could see some sort of vine coiling his legs and pulling him back into theva, and soon there is no movement left.

    The six leaders felt chilled and they noticed that some other vines areing and they took another raft to fall back.

    Only aftering back did they heave a sigh of relief as the range of vine is not toorge.

    Sam who is on the bank used his energy vision to see what is going on he could identify the four presences he felt the other day are all out in the open.

    The six leaders stood on the safety and started fighting from a long-range. For some reason, even Lava slime with two cores is also noting too far away from the Lotus. So they are trying their luck from the long-range. But to their dismay, they could do minimum damage.

    Watching this Sam smiled and took out a breathing device and wore it. It is not a device that could cover his eyes, only the mouthpiece is there.

    His body started circting energy as he glowed with gold light. He swiftly entered the full light elemental fusion. As he entered that state, he slowly walked back a few meters, before dashing forward, and just when he was on the edge of theke his whole body transformed into a beam of light as he kicked off the edge andunched himself.

    When he reached a certain distance from the jump, he turned himself into a light beam as he shot himself to the ce where therge Lava slime is present and just before the beast could react and attack the beam of light, Sam halted in mid-air and floated for a fraction of second andnded on the harbinger he took out.

    The Slime and the wine were caught off guard and so were the leaders at the present. Sam didn¡¯t stop though, he took an energy cell of the water element and threw it straight into Large Lava slime. The energy fluctuations distracted the Lava slime and it didn¡¯t focus on Sam and he used his window to zoom past the beast and arrived right above the lotus.

    But the vines didn¡¯t leave him though, they startedunching towards him and all he can do is try to dodge them on the hoverboard. He didn¡¯t go for the lotus immediately because he knew that it wouldn¡¯t end well the vine is still here.

    As he was ying like this, the energy cell in the Lava slime exploded causing it the necessary damage.

    Even though it only attacked the slime body and the cores are moved as far as the slime could, the main damage happened to the mouths of the body through which the slime wanted to extract the energy cell outside.

    The explosion of water element energy deep within the only tangible part of its body made it go on a mini rampage and st the Lava everywhere and this affected the vines that are extremely close to it.

    Sam didn¡¯t know where the vines are from, but he didn¡¯t care. He used this opportunity to take out a smoke grenade full of hydra poison vapors and sted it on the vines near him.

    At this moment, unless he decided to use arge energy cell st he has no hope of ending these creatures as they are deep within theke. Theva is a great obstruction. But he didn¡¯t need to kill them, that is why as he used the poison bomb on the remaining meager amount of vines, he dove deep and tried to pluck the lotus.

    But it is quite tough and didn¡¯te easily.

    He used his eye technique to see if there is any obstruction and when found the stem of the lotus connected to the root, he gritted his teeth and transformed the light fusion to the fire fusion, and dove into theke before he started breaking the thick stem. After some futile attempts and the increasing pressure of Lava, he ced his arm on the stem and disintegrated it bit by bit and he pulled the lotus to the divine dimension as he emerged to the surface.

    But he didn¡¯t have time to be delighted as he was surrounded by the angry vines and alling for him. They didn¡¯t even care about the damage the rampaging Lava slime is doing to them, they just wanted to deal with him to get the lotus back.

 Chapter 593: Surrounded by dumb things

    Sam didn¡¯t worry too much about the vines, though. His main worry is thevake itself. Even though he is using the fire elemental fusion and his golden mes are far stronger, this goldenva¡¯s heat far greater and it is trying to devour his body whole. He is trying his best to control and stay intact.

    When the vines are moving and trying to catch him, he was able to move freely. As he looked at the vines, he could see the traces of the hydra¡¯s poison. He didn¡¯t expect too much from it and he is not counting on the poisoning, rather he wanted to test the limits of the physical corrosion and it seems like it has little effect.

    He dove deeper into the pool and took out another energy cell. This one is cylindrical in shape and also water elemental in nature. But it is not too big. He destabilized it and rammed it straight into the bed of theke.

    After that, he came out directly and leaped up. He tried his best to move away from the vine ce. The vine also noticed that there is something wrong because of the energy waves under theke and felt distracted.

    Sam took this situation to his advantage and directly came out and took out his harbinger before the explosion could happen and deactivated his fusion.

    He is extremely exhausted and even his feather coat is damaged a lot, even though the feathers are unaffected the metal threads binding it are almostpletely destroyed. It is nearly falling apart. Sam quickly put the feather coat in the storage and started riding the board almost butt naked.

    Then the energy cell sted and the water element explosion affected the roots of the wine and the Lava riled up.

    The slimes and the vines are going berserk.

    Everything happened in a sh and the cultivators on the rafts are all looking at the scene stunned.

    Sam did everything in less than two minutes. There is no break. As he exited the zone of these Slime kings and the vines, Sam finally slowed down a bit and took some clothes out to cover himself.

    Before the Pre-transcendent leaders and the rest of the cultivators could realize, he is already half-way towards the bank of theke.

    The cultivators soon reacted and started throwing attacks at Sam. But as soon as he covered himself with a cloak, Sam didn¡¯t even dy for a single second. He took out the wine gourd and drank the heavenly wine greedily as he zoomed past all of them at an extreme speed.

    The Harbinger is moving at its top speed and the opponents could try all they can to catch him.

    The two yers Akhil and Agun who are standing on the bank looked at Sam with their mouths wide open. The battle on theke has been going on for almost an hour, but Sam just went in and two minutester he is already out and he is escaping.

    Before leaving, Sam made eye-contact with Agun and smirked as he sped up.

    The people started abandoning theke and tried toe back to the bank. They wanted to chase Sam. But it is not that easy. The yers also started running after him. The fastest of all is Akhil because he has a fire-type mount that could run in this heat.

    This is a perk of him being an elite of the beast faction. They prepared mounts for the elites for different situations and a fire-type mount is amon thing.

    He started chasing after Sam, but no matter how fast he went, he wasn¡¯t able to catch up.

    The cultivators inside theke areing one after the other and trying their best toe out of theke and started running.

    But after chasing for half-a-day, there is no trace. Even the mounts are of no use. They couldn¡¯t do anything.

    Without any results, they all regrouped and started discussing how to deal with this situation. Since the lotus is all theirmon target, they decided to work together.

    "Does he have a map to go to the entrance directly?" The rubrum empire team¡¯s leader asked.

    "How would we know that?" Someone replied.

    "Of course, we don¡¯t know, but the Mov empire team should have known about that. After all, that guy is their soldier."

    Everyone focused on them and the leader of the Mov empire felt a bit frustrated. He doesn¡¯t know how to react immediately and at this moment, he grit his teeth and said.

    "He has nothing to do with Mov empire."

    "What do you mean, he has nothing to do with the Mov empire? He is a war hero, he got his des directly from the Mov emperor. At this moment, he is an Instructor in the Mirage city Navy. You don¡¯t tell me that he is not one of yours. If you guys really don¡¯t treat him like one of yours with all his contributions, then who is going to be considered yours.

    God, I thought that the Mov empire has some standards."

    This one is another Pre-transcendent stage cultivator from the rubrum empire.

    Everyone once again looked towards Mov empire.

    "He is one of us, yes. But he came to this expedition independently and caught the lotus independently. As for the question you asked, no he didn¡¯t have any map on him. He explored his way all over to theke and he went on his own way." This time no one tried to argue anymore, because the one who talked is Yodha.

    Everyone knows, he has a temper and he doesn¡¯t care who the other person is. So, they just sucked it up with some cocky expressions as if they have won making them admit Sam is one of theirs.

    "Then let us, use the map and go back to the entrance where we would be able to capture him." One of them suggested.

    "But he is too fast. Whatever he used, it is not just there for a show and it is not a normal thing. We don¡¯t know anything about that board he used and he just zoomed past everyone. What if he reached the entrance before everyone else?"

    Everyone went into deep thought at these words and at this moment, someone from the vos empire spoke.

    "I have a suggestion." Everyone focused on him as he took out a map andid it out on a table in this temporary camp.

    "From theke, he has three obvious routes that surely indicate that they can lead to the entrance and all three of them are long routes. But judging from his speed, he could definitely make it within the ten days.

    But we can take a shortcut and try to intercept him in this route."

    "What is so special about intercepting from this route you indicated? It is all the same."

    "No, it is not." The person replied and started exining the n and soon the rest of the members realized that this n might work.

    After the n was exined and few adjustments were made everyone spilt up and started moving in different directions. All the peoplebined and formed three teams and moved in three different directions.

    They are taking all the shortcuts they can and reached their destined locations and used the herbs they collected to make some preparations.

    While they are doing that, Sam is moving on the harbinger after he travelled till the night in a straight line, he stopped at a spot to get dressed. He can¡¯t wear his coat and his metal pants are also gone. He picked a new dress and wore his regr ck vest. Had dinner with wine and recovered as much as he can before restarting his journey.

    He traveled for four days straight, and his journey is smooth sailing. Except for the hot and searing breeze on his face.

    He didn¡¯t bother about any other herbs or any other creatures that he encountered. Some people stopped him to get their hands on the Harbinger, but he finished the fights in an instant as long as it is Nascent stage cultivators who did that.

    As for the Pre-transcendent stage cultivators, they could wish for better luck to catch up with his speed.

    On the fifth day, while Sam is going through a canyon; all of a sudden something directly lunged at him from a small rock cliff from the side and he came to a halt as he tried to dodge.

    He stopped there and saw a ck and gold thing that is standing up clumsily with chaotic energy wavesing out of it.

    The whole body is made of the Golden Lava except for some small portion that is visible which is made of ck rock in random ces.

    This is a Lava Golem. He frowned at this appearance all of a sudden. He heard that there are these golems present, but he didn¡¯t encounter one all this while.

    He was examining it as he hadn¡¯t seen a naturally formed golem before, but he clearly didn¡¯t have time because, a lot of golems are jumping down one after the other from either side of the cliffs.

 Chapter 594: Payback

    Sam still hovered on the harbinger as he dodged the falling golems with a peculiar look. Even though he didn¡¯t see a lot of golems and particrly not the naturally formed one, to the best of his knowledge, he knew they wouldn¡¯t fall mindlessly like that.

    He wanted to just go straight away from the canyon, but he was stunned by what he saw. Because a giant golem came rolling down. It is ten timesrger than the rest of the golems and it blocked the canyon¡¯s entrance.

    He wanted to go back, but another golem came there which is of the same size and blocked that way too. He didn¡¯t expect something like this to happen and wanted to increase the altitude and getaway. But then there came some beasts on top of the canyon. They are bird-type fire elemental beasts.

    Sam frowned at this. As he tried to increase the altitude, the birds areunching at him as if they are catching a chick. He felt extremely annoyed because the number of them is toorge and they are both Pre-transcendent and Nascent stage ones.

    He was being attacked by the golems and the birds at the same time. This is something he didn¡¯t expect.

    He didn¡¯t think this thing is coincidental though.

    As he was thinking that and was hovering at the maximum altitude he can and trying to dodge the birds and find his way out, he saw some familiar faces behind therge golem that is throwingva at him.

    They are two teams of people. One of them is the rubrum empire and the other is of another nation that he doesn¡¯t know, but their scales ck.

    He frowned at this. He didn¡¯t expect these people would beat him to this spot and even set such a trap on top of that.

    The team members looked at him and smirked. Particrly the team leader of the rubrum empire.

    "There is no way out for you. These things wouldn¡¯t get out of the valley anytime soon and they wouldn¡¯t let you get away easily. Particrly, when they are sure that is in that canyon but it is not present and you are the only foreign presence that is there which will automatically make their dumb brains think that you are the one that stole it.

    Good luck getting out of that. Even with your extremely practical and fast toy, I highly doubt you would be able to do that."

    Sam raised an eyebrow when he looked at their cocky expressions as if they have one. He doesn¡¯t know what they used to lure these creatures into this canyon at the exact same time, he entered it, but they sure did a great job.

    He is sure that if it is anyone normal they would have definitely had a hard time getting out of here. But they don¡¯t realize, that Sam is not anyone.

    Sam looked at them for a second and once again reduced his altitude. The birds are the most pestering at this moment. They are called me owls. Their talons are extremely sharp and they can secrete fire poison through them.

    Even though Sam has experience with that and fire poison has the word ¡¯poison¡¯ in it, it is not a normal poison and the hydra bloodline wouldn¡¯t do anything to it. Golden crow¡¯s bloodline will help him absorb it, but the process will want to make him cut the part where it is infected rather than absorb. It would be that painful.

    As for the golems, they are just mindless brutes and if not for their numbers and the size of their leaders, he wouldn¡¯t have any problem getting away at this moment.

    He decreased his altitude and dove deep into the valley. He took out the two handguns and started shooting at the golems. Every golem, whether it is a natural one or an artificial one will have a core and once it is hit, it would be done for.

    And unlike the Lava slime, it cannot move the core as it wished.

    Sam barraged to golems with bullets with his two handguns as he tried to identify the core¡¯s location and soon both the golems fell. Sam noticed the location and the first thing he wanted to do was to reduce the numbers.

    He changed the bullets and used the energy cell bullets and started shooting. A Grade-5 Golems that are equivalent to the Nascent stage are down for one hit. They don¡¯t have enough intelligence to even dodge. As for the Grade-6 ones, he was able to do it for a few more hits. As for two bosses, he would need an energy cell the size of an RPG to get through that and he doesn¡¯t have one.

    And they don¡¯t even have any rage for the loss of their kin.

    After reducing their numbers by a bit, Sam aimed his guns at the owls. He didn¡¯t aim for their heads though, he aimed for their wings. They might be fast and they might be fierce, but they are birds and they need wings to fly.

    And when they got hit, they started falling down.

    As he was doing this, Sam also started taking hits from the golems and the long-range attacks of the Lava and fire from both the golems and birds.

    But he cared little about that. He tried his best to dodge and he let the rest hit him and he tried his best to defend.

    When the birds fell, the golems got distracted and started getting to them. For the golems, the birds are not allies, but just another source of energy they could absorb to survive and since such a thick piece of meaty resource fell in the middle of them, they started tearing them apart and absorbing the energy and lifeforce from them.

    These are the only two things these golems need and they are taking it.

    Sam smirked at this because the leaders of these owls are not as dumb as the golems. They might be dumb enough to be manipted by some Nagas, but they have enough sentience and instincts to attack the one who is hurting their kin the most.

    In their eyes, Sam¡¯s attacks that only damaged their wings are not the worst, the golems that are tearing them apart and absorbing them are the worst of the two, and most of their aggression was diverted at them.

    Sam got the breathing space he needed and he went down the valley and entered the divine dimension for a second, beforeing back. He didn¡¯t do that as soon as he was surrounded because he was afraid that the divine dimension would end up in the belly of a bird or get stuck in the body of a golem if he did that. But now that both parties are engaged, he was fine with it.

    When the two teams beyond therge golem saw this, they were stunned, they didn¡¯t expect that something like this would happen.

    They couldn¡¯t see what Sam is using and they couldn¡¯t see, but what they could see is that some birds started falling off and now the golems and the birds started fighting.

    Even the bosses of both sides are engaged and at this moment, they saw Sam once again. He is battered and ragged with some blood escaping his mouth and his clothes burned off as they became a little more than rags just now.

    But he is smiling at the six cultivators with a lot of mischief in his eyes and he zoomed past therge golem which is currently fighting with the bird king and took out two ss bottles before throwing them onto the teams all of a sudden.

    A golden-green liquid was spilled on them and they were stunned for a second before they could react to what it is, they noticed that it has a lot of fire elemental energy in it and the energy is extremely dense and easy to absorb.

    All of them recognized the effects because they knew what it was, it was the juice made out of the stem of the lotus.

    The lotus is born from the absorption of a lot of fire elemental energy, in fact, the fire elemental energy of the whole volcanic region. It is even beneficial for transcendent stage cultivators and generally, it would go for those cultivators when the teams harvest it.

    But they do get the leftover, like this stem. When they saw Sam throwing such a precious resource at them, they became furious, but before they could express their anger, they realized what is happening. This type of resource is too precious and tempting for the creatures in the region and if not for the slime and the intensity of the Lava that makes these beasts cower in fear, they would have gone for the Lotus themselves.

    But now that such a lotus fragrance wasing from these people, they would surely not give up the chance and then they saw the golem king and the bird king, both halting and making their way towards the six members.

    The six of them didn¡¯t be extremely panicky though, they are fine for a moment, but they suddenly sensed something and turned around and what greeted them is Sam aiming his guns at them.

    He shot twelve bullets in total before they could react and all the twelve bullets are energy cells and every one of them was targeted on the limbs and joints.

    The six members were injured and they lost a pretty good chunk of their flesh from their bodies as one arm and one leg for each has been injured.

    Their eyes turned wide in horror.

    "Since you guys wanted to set me up, you must have been prepared for this."

    Sam left these words and left and the six Pre-transcendent elite Nagas are left with a horde of golems and owls to deal with in their injured states.

 Chapter 595: Smuggled out

    Sam moved slowly on the harbinger as he watched the desperate fight they are putting against the golem kings and the Owl Kings.

    With all the trump cards they will have, they would surely get out of there, and about that, Sam is sure. But getting out in one piece and without any traumatic damage, would be hard to achieve.

    He didn¡¯t have any other obstructions and just rode on the board as he reached the entrance in the next three days.

    There are many peopleing out of the ce. After all the one-month time is about to be up. Apart from that, there would be a ten-day grace period. Even though this one month is the only permissible time for others to enter the region, it doesn¡¯t mean the rest of the time the entry is barred and the region wouldn¡¯t turn into an Inferno hell in just a single day. The ten days before and ten days after, are the time periods the people can barely survive in the region.

    They cannot fight, they cannot explore and the beasts would be more active than normal, they could barely use all they got and try toe out of it. But even aftering out, they will have to suffer some serious injuries caused just by the environment.

    As for why this became relevant, the six representatives of the six empires are not letting the people that already came out to go on their own ways.

    And they even used an excuse of counting the survivors and also organizing an exchange event after the end to trade the gains. Most of them are happy to oblige, but not all of them. Because the real gains came to the people that fought for them, and the people who didn¡¯t want to stay here mostly got into a fight with some big-wigs.

    If they stayed here until the end and the scions they fought withe out, then they will have some serious trouble.

    They were all forced to stay in a special inn and even the transcendent stage cultivators are guarding there. But since they are so subtle and indirect about it, no one can even find words to argue. Sam also didn¡¯t want to make a scene. The people who are after him will definitely make it out within the next two days and he has to get out of this.

    He cannot get any support from the Mov empire team, except for Yodha and no matter how privileged his identity is, he is only one man and his father is definitely not going toe and back Sam up at this moment.

    The lotus will make his situation worse

    He isying on the bed in his room of the Inn and all of a sudden someone came and knocked on his door.

    He opened it and saw an unfamiliar man in front of him, but there is some kind of familiarity about him.

    "Buck?" Sam asked with a frown and an extremely confused expression. Even though he felt that the man in front of him is Buck, the face is not the same and he couldn¡¯t see any form of physical disguise techniques.

    The face looked as real as it could get.

    "You are good, you recognized me. How did you do that?"

    "Smell," Sam replied.

    "Smell?"

    "My senses are different from others. My sense of smell is five-time better than others. I might not be able to trace you but I can catch the smell if you are near me. What are you doing here?"

    "Taking you out of course. Do you think that everyone who agreed easily joined this like to stay here after all this? This is not the first time they did this and this ce is my business point for more than seven years.

    All the cultivators who don¡¯t want to stay but are still staying here are all my clients. Get ready by midnight. We are leaving. I wille and pick you."

    "What if they find out? Since they are doing this every year and you are doing this every year and also it seems like you are quite sessful. Don¡¯t tell me, they didn¡¯t take precautions against this."

    "Of course, they did. But taking measures and those measures having an effect on my work are two different things. Until they find out the way I am taking you out there, then there is nothing they could about it."

    "If you are that confident, then okay. I will wait to see your performance."

    Sam went back to bed and waited. When it was time, he got ready to leave and there is a knock on the door at the exact moment.

    Buck is standing there and along with him, three more people are standing there. They are also people who want to get out of here.

    "One four?" Sam asked in confusion.

    "No, I am taking twelve people in total and the rest of them already moved."

    "What are we waiting for then? Let us go."

    "There is something I need to do before that." With that Buck went into the room and he seemed to have beenying down a formation and took out a weird-looking nt.

    He came out and closed the door, when Sam scanned the room with the spiritual sense he couldn¡¯t see much difference. He could feel a presence of a person that is at the nascent level.

    "Disguise technique. I am good at it."

    With that, he led the four of them down the stairs and led them to another room. He led all four of them inside that room and removed a floor tile before shoving them inside.

    Then reappeared on the door next door and at this moment, there is another person waiting on the other side of the tunnel. After five of them are out, that person went back into the tunnel.

    "Where is he going?" One of the three asked him in confusion.

    "To take care of the tunnel."

    "How did the tunnel go unnoticed all this while? Surely, they would have noticed such arge movement if something is going on like that when they put so many people in this inn." This time it is Sam who asked the question.

    But he didn¡¯t get an answer except for the gesture that he would exinter.

    Buck gestured them and they walked into the building which seemed like a warehouse. There the five of them changed into a different set of clothes before Buck taking out a few amulets and giving them.

    "They are hard to make and they are only good for a few minutes, so hold it in your hands and don¡¯t activate them before l tell you. Be careful."

    With that he led them outside and then they walked out of thepound and walked to the road directly and they are walking towards the end of the street.

    When they were a few feet before the turn, Buck slowly said under his breath.

    "Activate the amulets now."

    When the four of them entered the spiritual energy inside, they felt like a weird aura was enveloping them.

    When the guards at the end of the street stopped them, Buck took out a badge and exined something. The guards scanned them with their spiritual sense and let them go.

    They walked out and went through some streets before going to a neighborhood that could lead them directly into the nearby forest. They are making their way out of the city and are going to take a hidden route to the Hot spring city and from there, they are going to the seashore.

    The journey is smooth sailing as, by the next afternoon, they were out and when they reached the port city they docked on, they were shoved into some fish boxes and boarded on to the ship and were only let out after they left the waters.

    "So, are you going to exin how you did this?" Sam asked. Now they are both alone and no one else is there to eavesdrop.

    "It is my business secret, but judging from what I see you are not interested in this business. But since you are my treasured partner, I will reveal you a little bit of info.

    "The tunnel was not dug during the expedition. But it was dug way before this whole situation. The man who went back into the tunnel was the one who did it and before the inspection happened, the tunnel was already there. But they wouldn¡¯t inspect that room so intently because that man is there for more than a month before the expedition and he is the seafood supplier of the inn.

    So, they wouldn¡¯t let the six representatives bully him too much and cut some ck. And the warehouse we entered is also his. And both he and his possessions are mine.

    He is my subordinate and he runs a seafood business in this area. And since for every year at this time, the business is high, hispany has to send some expensive live fish to the inn and so he would stay there to supervise everything regarding them.

    And I used my tricks to disguise the tunnel to escape from the mediocre inspection. That is how you guys got out.

    Now the news will get out that you guys escaped and the guards will spread out and the leash on the inn will be reduced a bit. Because, every time their immediate response is to not check the escape method, rather finding the escapees.

    So, before that happens, he will close the tunnel and erase every trace of it as he is thest suspect due to the guarantee of the inn¡¯s owner. That is the gist of it. Even though it sounds impossible and non-usible and there might be a lot of loose ends in the story. My main expertise is in tying those loose ends and if I reveal those tricks to you, I will have an extrapetitor."

 Chapter 596: Hard stand

    Sam came back to Mov without a single hup and when they were about to reach Mirage city, Buck once again came to talk to Sam. This time, he came with a spatial ring.

    "Here are the items you wanted. Everything, the vos empire can offer in terms of metal are inside this thing."

    Sam took the ring and checked it before saying.

    "Why did you only give it to me now?"

    "I didn¡¯t carry it on me all this while, some people were tasked to carry it and they gave it to me in thest stop."

    "Why?"

    "Do you really think these things are easy to get? The mining of metals is done in an entirely different way than you could ever imagine. They wouldn¡¯t dare to exchange the metal for money directly anywhere near the vos¡¯ waters.

    That is why we had to take a detour. Otherwise, I would have dropped those people in Mirage city and let them go on their way. Even my close associates don¡¯t know about this deal and I used dropping those guys as a cover-up."

    Sam smiled and said.

    "You really are capable. How did you get your hands on these things?"

    "You really think I would say it out loud?"

    Sam shook his head slightly and stared into the horizon as he looked at the Mirage city they are approaching. It is beautiful to look at.

    Buck also enjoyed the view as the sun is setting and said.

    "You know, it has been a long time since I made a deal of this scale. I stopped smuggling the metals and herbs a long time ago. Particrly the military-grade things. I almost got caught once and then I lost my fleet and almost lost my life when I was doing the biggest deal of my life."

    Sam looked at him and took two wine jars and offered him one before asking.

    "What happened?"

    "I used to have a rule that I wouldn¡¯t deal with the imperials and royals. But one of my subordinates who I took a liking to and wanted to make him my sessor got drunk with the authority I gave him and made a deal with an imperial prince. And he only told me after the deal is made. If we back away from that now, the prince would deal with us directly.

    The prince had a mole in the ranks of another empire¡¯s imperial farnd and got some special herbs from them, my task is to transport them without any problem. The empire we took from had a rather good emperor that he noticed something was off and caught the mole and sent a fleet on our trial. I had a ratherrge fleet and tried my best to divert them and finallypleted the objective.

    But when we handed over, we got fucked. The imperial prince my subordinate made a deal with and another imperial prince of the empire where the herbs are from, the one who is chasing us on the sea are together and they wanted to throw the me on a third party while they take the goods.

    So, we got caught and while escaping almost all my crew has died. Only a few people survived and they left the trade."

    "Then why did you agree to such a deal with me? You are even being the intermediary to buy the objects."

    "I don¡¯t know actually. After that deal, no one came to me with a deal of your scale and the ones that came to me with military or nobility-rted deal are all simple they didn¡¯t interest me. But the deal you gave me, made me want to test my expertise of this whole life.

    At the same time, I had a dream. I wanted to have my own shippingpany with the best ships and retire peacefully as I roam all over the world on those ships in rxation without any anxiety of getting caught.

    But every time, I take a step towards that goal, my old smuggler habits are kicking in. I couldn¡¯t save enough money to reach the goal. But since you are giving me a fleet directly, I might be able to pull it off and retire."

    "Are you sure it is just your smuggling habits that stopped you from owning a fleet? You can still save money and all it needs is having arge enough to store all those spirit stones."

    "Well, there are many other things, but I would like to keep it for myself."

    They arrived at the city before it waspletely dark. And Sam went to his resort. While Buck followed.

    The next day, he reported to the Navy base and went for a training session. The first batch of the puppets is out and they only need to be assembled properly. So, Sam went on to show them how to assemble and train them properly.

    He even organized a small tournament to select the first batch of tfish puppet troops.

    One week passed and Yodha finally made his appearance with the rest of the team. And to his surprise, they directly stormed into Sam¡¯s cottage.

    Sam who is cooking something for himself looked at the team members who came and said coldly.

    "You better have a proper exnation regarding this, otherwise you would wish you were dead."

    "How dare you threaten a prince?" The prince in the group directly tried to pull one over Sam.

    Sam looked at him and it is a gaze full of disdain and disregard. He looked at Yodha and said.

    "You are the only reason, they are still standing here. Tell them to get the fuck out if they don¡¯t have anything to say."

    "Handover the lotus." The leader of the team barked.

    "Then you can just fuck off directly without wasting my time."

    "I demand you hand over the lotus, or else you will be punished for insubordination." The leader of the team tried to pull his rank.

    "And who said I would give a fuck about that. Go and file aint and see if anyone tries to take action. First, they will curse you till yours bleed and then they will tell you that your rank can be shoved up your ass for all they care because I don¡¯t take orders from you dipshit." Sam grew more and more impatient.

    He turned to Yodha and said.

    "Tell them to get the fuck out of this ce right now. They are cklisted from using any of the services thate from me, my resort or any other product thates from the Dusk organization that includes the current and any future partnerships we have. And this will extend to all their personal and military subordinates."

    Yodha was stunned and asked.

    "What do you mean direct subordinates?"

    "Since this hotshot wants to throwmands at me, every soldier that is under hismand can forget about getting the grenades, puppets and any other weapon that I am going to sell to the military and that extends to the remaining people that are standing right in front of me except you. And as I mentioned services, they also include the training. The special division and his battalion are done for any future training programs."

    There is a nascent who is the special divisionmander and the leader of the team who is a battalionmander in front of him at the moment. So, when Sam said this their faces paled. Particrly the special division.

    They are nning for specialbat training on seas and applied for Sam¡¯s time, now it is gone.

    "Instructor Sam, it has nothing to do with me. I am under orders."

    "And I am about to have my dinner," Sam said with an unreasonable tone.

    "I, as an imperial prince order you to handover the lotus this instant, otherwise you will be arrested for insubordination and investigated. And when you are under investigation all your businesses will be taken over by the Imperial authority until you are proven innocent."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply to him once again and just stopped the stove and took the dishes as he set his table and was about to eat it.

    The prince got enraged by this and came forward to flip the table, just before did so, Yodha yelled.

    "Stop it."

    But the prince didn¡¯t listen. When Sam is about to start eating, he looked at Yodha because of the sudden shout and turned around, only for the table to be flipped. The dishes fell and the food Sam spent one hour cooking was all spilled over the floor.

    Sam finally looked at the Prince with an expression other than disdain. It is a cold and emotionless expression. He stood up from his chair and stood up. He walked to another table on which the scrolls and papers are ced and wrote something, before taking out themunication device and called the Orphan One who is managing the resort.

    After he came, he directly gave the paper to him and said.

    "Take this to the Navy base and give it to the General who is in charge there. Tell them I am resigning. Call the rest of your three brothers. Shut down the ship manufacturing and the engine business to any military and government. Send a message to the grenade factory that we are halting the production to the military indefinitely.

    All the soldiers and government officials are banned from the resort from this day on. I want these executed from tomorrow morning."

    Orphan One heard everything and didn¡¯t even take a single look at the prince and the rest and went on to execute the orders.

    Yodha came out of his senses and said.

    "Sam, don¡¯t do something foolish."

    "Foolish? You will realize that the most foolish thing you have ever seen is this prince here spilling my food."

 Chapter 597: Meeting in the Imperial Capital

    Sam took out themunication token and called Buck, he even let the others listen to the conversation.

    "Do you have military contacts of other empires?"

    "Which empire do you want?"

    "All of the other five top empires."

    "Of course, I can get in touch with them."

    "It would be better if they are from the Navy."

    "It would be even easier if all you want is contacts in Navy."

    "Okay, then. I will contact you when needed."

    He hung up and looked at the prince and said.

    "I know what is wrong with you. You are just another arrogant prick who thinks you are so good because all the others sing praises because you are what you are because of your father. You are jealous of a mere human who was a part of a ve race in your eyes.

    You got so used to getting away with everything that, you cannot stand if someone outperforms, and rather than trying to improve yourselves, you try to put down others.

    But I can understand, you are lucky to be that privileged. Otherwise, I would have skinned you alive and fed you to my mount right here and now for spilling my food."

    He then turned to Yodha and said.

    "I respect you as a soldier and a friend and as a person. But in this case, my stand is firm. Don¡¯t try toe and discuss something from me."

    "What makes you think you can survive after doing this? You are practicallymitting treason. The Emperor will kill you." The team leader said in fright. He didn¡¯t expect that this small episode would end up like this.

    The prince, whose face lost all the color once again lit up. But Sam looked at him directly in the eyes and said.

    "What the fuck are you so happy about? Do you think you are so great in your eyes of your father and he will treat you like an apple of an eye just like all the others treat you after this? Do you think he will directly send someone to kill me after you report my ¡¯treason¡¯?

    Think again dumbass.

    Apart from the fact that you are his son and can spread his bloodline, what use do you have to him? You are not even the crown prince.

    I won the war for him, you just pissed off a war hero which he rewarded personally.

    I gave him a new weapon that could make him lose fewer soldiers on the battle-field and because of you, he cannot get that weapon anymore.

    I gave him new ships that outss every other ship in this world and you just made him lose those ships and deprived his navy.

    I trained the best soldiers ever for his army who can destroy their enemies with negligible casualties. You have made that trainer resign.

    Now, the army, Navy, and every soldier hate you and this dipshit team leader to their guts for all the loss you caused to them and even if they don¡¯t know now, I will make it so they do by tomorrow.

    From amon foot soldier to a general, everyone will hate you and if your father the Emperor who is a great man in the hearts of every citizen and every soldier who cares about them, just sends an assassin to kill me because of your stupid, ungrounded arrogance, do you think they will still believe him as the great man?

    Do you think, your father will make that sacrifice for a prince like you?

    A prince who is not particrly good at a single thing except for using his father¡¯s name and his prince¡¯s title to get what he wants and oppress others if he was denied what he wants? Use your brain, you piece of shit. For the food you wasted, you will regret it so much that you will never ever let food go to waste.

    You have to remember that all that took to make your life miserable is a te of poached lobster, grilled prawns, a sharkfin soup, and fried fish."

    With that, he gave a nce to everyone else and said.

    "Get the fuck out of my property, you guys are trespassing." Yodha also sighed with a frustrated expression as he ran out and sent ravens and pigeons to the imperial capital.

    Sam also sent ravens to different ces discreetly. In fact, no one knows he was the one that sent them. But the news of his actions all spread over in various military bases and Navy bases. They also got the news that their orders for the new battleships were canceled and the reason was explicitly stated that the imperial prince was trying to be hostile with him and take over his businesses forcefully.

    The rumors also spread that Sam is nning to move to a different nation in ¡¯fear¡¯ of this abuse of power. Once the soldiers knew this, the news was sent to themoners, and the more it spread, the more exaggerated it became.

    After Yodha sent the news to the Imperial capital, the emperor felt drained.

    He didn¡¯t expect that another one of his children would provoke Sam again. He is already having a hard time dealing with Sam as he was too cunning and always seemed to have a backup n.

    Everything he did, he is making it public so that the emperor couldn¡¯t directly meddle and the people who provoked him whose importance was based on the public opinions are unable to do anything.

    He immediately summoned his son and the rest of the team back and organized a meeting with some officials.

    "The situation in the Union dimension is bing more and moreplicated and we wanted Sam¡¯s help. I even nned to have Yodha discuss it with him and the rest of the six nations also agreed to this. But now, this happened and there is no way he would have any discussion.

    The rest of the nations will get the news and they will definitely eye for him now that he even stated that he wants to get out of this ce.

    We made a lot of diplomatic deals with the other nations based on Sam¡¯s performance in the Union dimension regarding this situation. If he was poached. Not only will we lose all the diplomatic deals we made, but we will also lose the number of weapons and the new innovations he would bring in to prosper our nation.

    Just his training methods are enough for even the rubrum empire to put aside all their enmity to bring him into their ranks.

    I need a solution."

    There are only four people in the meeting room and they are the emperor, the imperial advisor, the Marshall and the Minister of foreign affairs.

    "I would say, you can arrest him for treason and start to investigate him and try to intimidate him a bit and he himself wille to his senses, your majesty."

    The minister replied and the Emperor looked at him before saying.

    "And the public will think that we are really abusing our power and they will definitely note to us if they have any ideas like Sam does. And once the public developed distaste, they will start to look for better options. That rule applies to their daily needs to their ruler.

    I don¡¯t want more informers and spies popping up in my nation.

    And we don¡¯t know what his backing truly is. He said he is from a different ce than Naga Loka.

    From what I know, he didn¡¯te from the Interdimensional Wormhole of our and he didn¡¯te from Union Dimension to assume that he came from a different. He just appeared out of thin air and how powerful do you think that someone that can make that happen is? We cannot take risks." The emperor replied.

    "But no matter what, he shouldn¡¯t fight and threaten the imperial authority, your majesty. Otherwise, the people wouldn¡¯t respect you anymore."

    "Now offering a different opinion just like you did is also a different opinion Minister. But you still get to do this? Why do you think so? Because the capable are given leeway and they should be given that leeway if you want to use their capabilities." Marshall opened his mouth in a reply to the minister¡¯s statement.

    The Minister shut up and didn¡¯t say anything, then Marshall continued speaking to the Emperor.

    "Why is he so drastic in his actions? What happened that made him so mad?"

    "This is not the first time he was troubled by the imperial family and the first time it was not honoring his achievements and now it is trying to take back the treasure he got himself with force." He then exined what happened the first time because of his daughter.

    "He seems to have some problems regarding authority and he is extremely prideful. There is no use in trying to be forceful with that kind of person, particrly when he is as talented and skilled as he is. He has too many options other than our own empire. He doesn¡¯t have to face the music from your sons and daughters when he is doing his duty without anyints.

    It is best to not provoke a guy like that when he is giving you enough respect and not undermining your authority without any rhyme or reason.

    Find out why the team members are forceful and get them back to him, ask them to apologize. As for whatever your son did, ask for what he wants inpensation and settle. You shouldn¡¯t go there, but you should send someone so that you show him that he is important and this situation matters to us.

    Then we can discuss when to ask him about the Union dimension and the other stuff. Call your sons, daughters, and their mothers and give them a stern warning not to piss off that guy. He is an important person whether they like it or not. We finally started seeing some difference in the status quo of the six empires and we can increase our influence in the Union dimension.

    If you let him slip by, you will be remembered as the biggest idiot of the whole world for theing generations."

 Chapter 598: Crown Prince

    Sam didn¡¯t know what is happening in the imperial capital, but what he does know is that he was being deliberately targeted by these imperial scions and the team that went to vos.

    He can take it when they just separate him from their team in the Volcanic region because it is a fact that he is not from the team and he went there individually. He can even take it that they nned to attack him along with the other teams as that is for the treasure and they are still within the volcanic region.

    As for the current situation, he wouldn¡¯t take it lying down. Barging in and spoiling his dinner might sound small, and his reaction might be exaggerated but he has another hunch and he wants to confirm if it was true.

    He wants to see if there is anyone behind this or this is really the action of the stupid prince. He doesn¡¯t have any concrete clues or signs to show anyone¡¯s involvement, but if there is really one he has to send them a message and that is why he took a hardstand.

    This message will also be good enough to make the Emperor realize that Sam is not that easy to deal with. Sam knew his own importance at the moment and the more he gives and the more he makes the deals and the more he got involved with the military, the more they will think that he is hard to dispense.

    The first time, he gave in when the princess tried to humiliate him for some favors because he wanted to get on the good side of the emperor and also because of the respect people had for him, but he cannot let the Emperor have an impression that he is easy to coax to.

    After all, if all his children have the same superiorityplex, Sam is not ready to bear it, just to get along with the emperor. He has to show him that he has other options and bearing with his children will only be a choice on his part which he doesn¡¯t have to take.

    But what Sam doesn¡¯t know is that his message was loud and clear and clearer than he expected it to be. Because the emperor has already made so many ns that require Sam¡¯s help. So, even if Sam didn¡¯t take that hardstand, they might have thought to make things straight with him.

    Two days after the incident, a transcendent beastnded in the Mirage city and some important people came into the city. The city lord, the General of Navy, and many people came to greet them.

    But they didn¡¯t take any invitations. They directly arrived at Sam¡¯s office.

    Sam is currently checking the designs of the artisans. He wanted to finish this work as soon as possible so that he could get some free time and go back to repair his coat. It was extremely damaged after all.

    When he saw the peopleing in he raised an eyebrow.

    There is a young Naga in the front with an Older one in the back along with Yodha and the stupid prince that wasted Sam¡¯s food.

    Sam stood up and looked at them before asking.

    "What can I do for you?"

    "I am the crown prince, Lokesh. It is nice to meet you." The young Naga extended his hand with a smile. Sam shook his hand before saying.

    "I am sorry to say. We are not doing any business with the people rted to the Imperial family or authority or any government official. I don¡¯t know how I can be of any service to you."

    The crown prince didn¡¯t seem to mind the cold reply and smiled as he said.

    "I am here to talk Mr. Sam. I don¡¯t know what exactly transpired between you and my idiot brother, but I would like to resolve any further misunderstandings."

    "There are no misunderstandings, your highness. I feel like I am being targeted by the imperial family for reasons unknown. First, a princess and a minister colludes to humiliate me and even threaten me that they would steal everything and then a princees right after that to force me into giving my treasure away, and even threaten me with the imperial authority.

    If that is as simple as the misunderstanding, then I don¡¯t know what some serious targeting will be in the eyes of you."

    "Don¡¯t take things too serious Mr. Sam. I am the reason the team came after you. I specifically asked for the Magma Lotus and that was their task. Since they failed they didn¡¯t want to bear the consequences and came to you as a desperate measure."

    "And how is that my problem?"

    "Mr. Sam. I hope we don¡¯t drag this on anymore. Your services are of utmost importance to the empire and we wouldn¡¯t mistreat you. I promise you that if you face any more issues from the Imperial family or any nobility, I will be the one responsible for it. I am swearing this on my honor. As for the disrespect my brother showed you, he will be responsible for it. Please ask what you want, to undo your measures."

    "The Emperor owes me something before and I am going to use it soon. I hope your favor will be added to that then. As for your brother, it is simple. He has to apologize and I will not be participating in anything when he is involved in this.

    If he is a part of the army, then my weapons and training will not go to that battalion, if he the part of the city guard, then the city guard will be deprived of my future ventures. I will not participate in any expeditions that he was part of and the same applies to the rest of the team members.

    Even in any business. I am not conducting business with any of them including and especially your brother. He should not be a part of any of my future ventures and deals I have with any branch of the government, that might be a business, military equipment, training, missions, expeditions, etc. And he is banned from meeting me and using any of my services that include the Resort and the shipping services. He will not be permitted into boarding any of the ships I sold. No matter who bought and once they broke this condition, they will be cklisted.

    He should not be permitted to use any grenade, puppet, or any future weapon I use, if the condition is broken, then the person who broke it will be cklisted and that includes the imperial family, any nobility.

    If you are okay with the conditions, then I will undo the measures I have taken. But I will not join the military again. You can hire me for the training."

    The crown prince went into deep thought and the face of his stupid brother was bing twisted with anger and he couldn¡¯t control himself and said.

    "All I did is knock some food out, do you really think all these unreasonable conditions are eptable? That means, if I use one of your puppets that you sent to the Navy, you will cklist the Navy? If you enter a business I am already doing, you would cklist me from that too? Are you mad?"

    "Whatever you said, is correct except for two things. I am not mad and the second one, it is not just some food. It is the food cooked by me. The food cooked by Sam.

    If you want topete with me in self-centeredness, then I could only say you picked the wrong target. I am more self-centered than you can ever be and my narcissism knows no bounds."

    "We have a deal." The Crown Prince said without even bothering about his brother.

    Sam smiled and said.

    "Now let us talk about thepensation that the emperor and you promised. I have a new business idea and I would need a lot ofnd regarding that. I would like you guys to get me one with some big discount."

    "Where would that be?"

    "The Butterfly city," Sam said as he looked at the stupid prince whose expression changedpletely.

    "What business that would be?" The crown prince asked. Because Butterfly city is one of the high-scale economic zones and it is also used for training the new members under the ministry of finance.

    "It is aplicated one. It will take forever to exin. You will know it soon anyway. So, it would be better if we talk about why you are here other than smoothing out the misunderstandings."

    "Did you hear about the Union Dimension?"

    "No."

    "It is amon dimension that was gifted to us by one of our ancestors. And the gift is not to the Mov empire or the nations on our. It is a gift to all thes in Naga Loka.

    It is a dimension that was connected to the sixs of Naga Loka. And it was divided into differentyers based on the cultivation level.

    That ce is a world of itself and currently, the people of our in there are having some trouble. And we need you to go there to see if you can settle this. You have to go along with the people who are selected from the other five empires and you, six people are tasked with settling the problem we are facing.

    Even though the six people are going there to settle this, it is also apetition. I want you toe to the Imperial capital in the next three days." With those words, the crown prince stood up and left the room.

 Chapter 599: Deal

    Sam went back to his cottage in the resort so that he can finish his tailoring thing. He has a lot to do in that aspect. He started fixing his coat.

    After it was done, he took out the Naga scales he got from the Blood mutants. There are the thing and flexible and have a crystallized structure and appearance.

    He took out some Heavenly Silk and fire meteorite sand. He started working on something new. As for why he wanted it, it was not because it is helpful for him. But it is just because, he liked how it looked and it could be an extrayer of protection for the chest part that was not being protected by the coat. He was being constantly targeted there and he has been looking for proper material to cover it.

    And after checking the scales of these blood mutants, he finally got what he needed. The scales turned out to be a variant of blood essence and it has more properties than the blood Iron, but it is simr.

    From the research records, the more mutation they undergo and the more blood they consume, therger the scales they have and the scales are there not because they are a part of mutation, they are the output of the extra blood essence that shouldn¡¯t be consumed by the body. It will be deposited along with the blood iron on their scales and they growrger andrger as they continue their evolution through the blood.

    Sam was thinking about what to do with them for a long time. But after the ambush of the golems and the Owls, he finally got an idea. He needs an independent shield that could act properly. If it was normal cultivators, he might have been able to use the intimidation and other factors to deal with them and have taken less damage.

    But the Golems and the Owls are dumb as rocks and he couldn¡¯t use them. He realized that if he get swarmed by a bunch of puppets, he would be having serious trouble. Particrly, when he thinks on his feet and tried to use those dumb things against his opponents and couldn¡¯t st everything around him.

    A new gadget could help him to things like that.

    But for that, he couldn¡¯t do it in a single day, he has to do slowly y with this thing. Because, he is trying to use a method he never tried and has little to do with modern technology. It has too many elements that he never used before and has to practice a lot.

    But he didn¡¯t go to the divine dimension this time. He just sat in the breezeing from the beach and tried to think of the ideas.

    After finishing the coat and a basic design he went to capital to meet with the emperor.

    When he arrived at the meeting, he saw more people than he imagined.

    Apart from the emperor and the crown prince, Yodha is also there along with two other men and one of them looked almost Sam as Yodha.

    Sam greeted the Emperor and took a seat, before the attendants left and the emperor spoke.

    "I think, Lokesh must have exined to you about the Union dimension. I will go straight to the point.

    In Naga Loka, there are sixs that has ess to this Union dimension and in every there would be two entrances to the dimension.

    One of them was currently under the jointmand of the Six empires and the another one ismand of another organization which you would know about it in a few minutes.

    The thing is, the Union is as big as an empire and it is hard to explore. And it is divided intoyers ording to cultivation stages and there are threeyers in total.

    Nascent, Pre-transcendent and Transcendent.

    Theyout of the threeyers is more or less the same, the only difference being the resources avable.

    The Union is given to us so that we can improve ourselves and the ancestor who ascended to the higher realms sends some things into the Union so that we can explore, acquire and use them to get better.

    Generally, the sixs¡¯ cultivators fight for the resources themselves. Did you get a general idea on how this works?"

    Sam nodded his head.

    "Okay, now I will exin what our problem is.

    Theyout of the dimension is in such a way that there are some pre-made castles inside that dimension. And every castle was full of various resources. Most of the castles are explored and upied and of course there are some ce which are unexplored.

    Currently, of all the explored castles the sixs didn¡¯t have much difference in the territory they hold.

    At random times, some space cracks appear in the dimension and new resources will enter in one way or another. They might be a tower and trials or a direct treasure for which everyone would fight to death for.

    But there are some castles that are upied by another organization which is also the one that is holding the other gate of this.

    The organization is called Union sect and it consists of fugitives from all the sixs. This organization houses, the most talented assassins, thieves, frauds and any kidnappers or any other type of criminal you can think of.

    And this sect has branches in all threeyers and they keep their position in the Union as the base. Not just that, we came to know that they hold the second gate in every other and their selection standards are also high.

    They offer a great deal of services in all sixs and they also hold some of the most resourceful points within the dimension.

    Now, this Union organization is going on a war with the base of our and we need you help regarding that."

    "What kind of war is it?"

    "They are attacking our members as long as they can catch them. Many people died in the past few months, they also upied some resource points and even ruined our chances in some trials.

    The situation is same in all threeyers and we have people to make things straight in the Pre-transcendent and transcendentyers, but the Nascentyer which also has the most chaotic mess doesn¡¯t have anyone to take care of.

    So, I want your help to take care of it."

    "Why did it start?"

    "Because the sect has ns regarding this from a long time ago and they want to rule the Union dimension from a long time ago.

    And they are going after us, because there was a conflict between us due to our territories being close. As for why the rest of thes don¡¯t want to cooperate, they are so sure that they can win this by themselves and they are taking advantage of the situation not just by eliminating us as one of thepetitors, they could also gain a measure of the strength the Union sect has.

    That is why we are in this perilous situation."

    "If I get you out of this, what am I gaining?"

    "You can name your terms."

    "Okay then, what are you gaining?"

    "We are preserving our territory in the Union." The Emperor replied directly.

    "And?"

    "What do you mean?"

    "Your Highness, I am not a three year old. Do you really want me to believe that if I, as a representative of your nation get the Nagas out of this situation, you are not getting anything from the rest of the five nations?"

    Everyone in the room is dumbfounded.

    "You don¡¯t have to know anything rted to that. It is your responsibility as a soldier to go in there if you are asked to. The Emperor is being generous by offering you to name your terms. Don¡¯t be greedy."

    Sam looked at the man who replied and said.

    "My dear Minister of Foreign affairs, for your information, I quit being the soldier as of three days ago and even if I didn¡¯t, your talk would work on normal soldiers not on me. I would like to what I am helping you getting so that I can demand a suitable price. If you really want to use me for granted and make me a bargaining chip without knowing it, then I am sorry."

    "The terms are still under talks and you can name the price after the task is over depending on what we get. But you prepare to leave as soon as possible."

    The Emperor replied and Sam shook his hand in agreement and left the room after asking them topile and provide him any form of information they have regarding the Union dimension and the sect.

    For the next three days he stayed in the capital and worked on his new project and waited for the call to go in.

    And he is also happy that he doesn¡¯t have to think too much about getting what he wants from the others.

    Two days ago, he was thinking of going to others blindly and trying his luck, but now he got himself an opportunity to go there without much problem. He is extremely excited and relieved at the same time.

    After three days, the Crown prince and Yodha apanied him along the journey to the supposed gate that leads him to the Union.

 Chapter 600: Chatur

    There is amon ind that is under the rule of the Six nations within the and Sam along with Yodha and the Crown Prince Lokesh, went together with a Consummate level Guardian.

    When they arrived at the ce, they could see more than twenty Consummate realm cultivators and there are some stone houses where some more people are staying.

    There is arge stone cave they are guarding. Apart from them, a team of three came from every other nation as well all eighteen members gathered.

    "You will arrive at the stone Pce and there would be a team of people waiting for you there to take you to the castle which we are using as the main base. Inside the stone Pce, there are portals leading to the differents.

    You cannot get to fight in the stone pce or you will be cklisted for three months continuously and the same rule applied for the three hundred yards radius from that Pce.

    Since you got the required information, take care of it as soon as possible."

    Sam nodded and entered the stone cave and when he came out of the cave, he is waking out of a door into arge hall of a stone pce. He turned around to see some more peopleing out of the different doors and walk out of the hall through the main entrance.

    Outside the hall, there is arge front yard full of peopleing in and going out.

    He went out and saw a team of people and met them. Soon, the remaining five people from the five other nations all came out and joined them and all of them walked out of the pce yard and climbed on the mounts.

    What surprised Sam is that this ce doesn¡¯t have the miasma of the Naga Loka. It is as if he was back in his normal world again.

    He sat on therge bear-like beasts running as he asked the person who is riding the mount.

    "What is thetest attack of Union on us?"

    "The Volcano cannon. They wanted to capture that ce. It is an important resource point as many beasts and resources came out of that."

    Sam nodded and went over the details he has on the Union. Even though this ce is a world of its own and has resources, the way the resources exist in this ce is quite unique.

    Because here there are no real mines. Even though, they call them mines, they are not exactly normal mines, where people go and dig out the ore.

    In fact, any resource they get here is not exactly a normal resource of a normal world. At least most of them.

    Because the resource points in this world are literal resource points. For example, the volcano cannon they talked about is a resource point that shoots out a treasure every month along with a bunch of Lava and some beasts or golems or simr threats.

    The which Sam is representing which is also called the Nagin has upied the resource point and the various factions that belong to Nagin will have their candidates participate and fight for the treasures.

    Sometimes, they cut a deal with some other¡¯s people and let some of them participate in an exchange for something of the same value.

    The Volcano cannon is a resource point that sends herbs, beasts, metals, and so on. That is why it is aplex resource point as for resource points they call mines, they only give the metals and for the resource points they call the farm, they give out only herbs. As for the resource point that only gives out beasts, they call it Incubator. Even though there are many other uses of a resource point, they are all secondary.

    The resource points give out resources in a particr pattern. One of them might give out daily and one of them would give one every week some of them only give out annually.

    As of now, there are five resource points that give out weekly resources that actually belonged to the Nagin but were upied by the sect in the past three months.

    Even though, the weekly resource points are the lowest level resource points of the main base of the Nagin. Because the daily resource points wouldn¡¯t give some great quality resources and they are held by individual factions themselves within the Nagin base and the Union doesn¡¯t care about them.

    Now, the first task Sam has is that he needs to get back the five resource points and also save the Volcanic cannon which is currently under the radar of the Union sect.

    He reached the Nagin Castle uneventfully. The castle is extremelyrge. It isrger than the Imperial Pce, but it doesn¡¯t have the magnificent stature of the Imperial Pce.

    Inside the castle, the rooms are used as dormitories and within the castlepound, there are many stone houses that are easily recognizable as the houses made by the earth element users without putting much thought through it.

    Sam was led to one of the houses just to show his ce of rest and then was led to a meeting room in the castle.

    There some important members are waiting. All Nagas from the different nations are standing together and even the humans are inside.

    Sam and the five other members who came along with him are standing.

    A Naga stood up and he is from the vos empire.

    "You six are going to be the six specialmanders in the castle until the whole situation with the Union sect is settled and you can ess the resources and the members of all squads and the individual members of the Nagin Castle without any trouble.

    If there is any form of conflict between you guys regarding the people you need or the resources or theworks you get, you have toe and meet the sixmanders of the castle and have us vote in which you have split those resources or who they should go to.

    After some details, Sam left the conference room with the badge he has with him and the list of the members of the Nagin castle and the hierarchy here.

    There are thirty-six squads at this moment and the squad with the least members has fifty members in it. Apart from that, there are hundreds of individual members.

    All these people came from the nations of Nagin for different reasons, some of them are military personal and some of them are idental criminals who seek redemption.

    Sam looked at the bundle of papers in his hands and smirked.

    At this moment, he going to a squad leader¡¯s ce. This squad ispletely made up of Mov empire¡¯s members.

    After all, no matter how united they want to be, they have their differences and there are some squads that truly belong to different nations.

    When he went to that room in the castle and there the squad leader is already waiting for him.

    His name Ranga and after discussing some things with him, Sam picked up a squad member that was already arranged for him and started walking out of the castle.

    This guy is the tour guide to Sam, but he also noticed that he is not exactly popr on that team. His name is chatur and he came here six months ago and he is not particrly great at anything. He is an extremely bnced candidate, at least which is what the details regarding him said.

    They went back to Sam¡¯s stone house and sat down before Sam asked.

    "Okay, Chatur what is the deal with this Union sect. I got the info from the emperor and he said that this war started because we are nearest to the Union sect. Is it true?"

    "What makes you think it is not true?"

    "It might be true, but I think there is more to it. Because, if the Union sect really picked us as the target because we are nearest. It cannot be the only reason. There should be a trigger. What is the trigger?"

    "A new resource point appeared. There is a conflict. Let us just put it in a way that ourmanders made a stupid move by trying to y dirty with all the other five castles. They wanted to y a smart game by thinking that they are so much better than the rest of the leaders and it backfired.

    The remaining five castles were cut a deal to not go to war with us, but they also said that they wouldn¡¯t help us at all. The Union sect though, wouldn¡¯t take the deal, because they have the most resources and our bottom line which we are giving away is nothing but coin change for them.

    They are provoked and they are flexing their strength on us."

    Sam went into deep thought, before asking.

    "Let us put it aside for now. What do you know about the Merchant union?"

    "Merchant Union? They are actually a joint organization that was made by the Six Castles. Why you want to buy something from others?"

    "I want to buy some big things, I want you to get me in touch with the merchant union member of our castle. The deal is actually quite big. Meanwhile, do you have any maps of the resource points that were upied by the Union sect?"

    "I have all of them. Which one do you want?"

    Sam was surprised. He didn¡¯t think he would receive such an answer.

    "What do you mean, all of them?"

    "I have map andyout of every single known resource point in thisyer of the Union dimension."

 Chapter 601: Attacking

    At this moment, Sam is looking at the maps that areid out on the table. He was quite shocked as he looked at one after another. Because each Map and Layout is painted extremely well, that they are almost realistic.

    Not just that, they are extremely detailed and mapped in such a way that they can be used for hatching battle ns. Every weak point of the location was given out clearly and it is extremely easy to understand.

    The most impressive work of all is the map of the whole Union. Even though it didn¡¯t include every single detail and he cannot be sure that it indicates every location there is, but he can bet that there might not be a more detailed map than this in the whole Union.

    He observed all of them before asking Chatur.

    "Chatur, what is wrong with your squad? Why did they give you away like that? You are an excellent addition to the team. You are even a Naga. I don¡¯t think race is the problem."

    "Well, ording to them my mapping ability no matter how good it is cannot be used in a direct battle. I can scout a location, I can identify the weaknesses of the locations easily and I can think of a thousand ways to destroy the location, but all of that was being buried and I was not given a chance to say that I can be useful this way, because mybat ability is subpar."

    Sam was even more surprised.

    "Are you saying that you never got a chance to show this ability of yours and get your required respect with that? Trust me Chatur, I would pay a bomb to hire a guy as skilled as you. You might not be good atbat, but your military acumen and mapping ability can make up for that subpar battle skills easily. It is unfair that you never got a chance."

    "No, I got a chance fairly, but what is unfair is some guy wanted to try to get his name out there in front of the big dogs and improvised the n I drew up and that also involved with a route I said highly dangerous in a n of his own and it backfired.

    He threw the me on me and I cannot defend myself because of myck of battle skills."

    Sam thought for a moment and looked at him with deep thought. He hasn¡¯t seen a talent like this in a long while.

    Even though Chatur¡¯s talents don¡¯t include in open wars and such, he is good at pointing weaknesses inyouts and he is a great addition to make fool-proof important constructions at the same time, he is also good for besieging and such.

    He is also a great painter artisan.

    "How did you scout all these areas? If you are not strong enough, how can you enter the enemy¡¯s territory?"

    "Who said I have to be strong to enter the enemy territory, all I need to have is the talent to be discreet." He took out a paintbrush and turned himself into his human form. He started painting something on his face and he changedpletely.

    Even his aura changed.

    Then with another wave of his brush, his face changed into Sam¡¯s and another wave, even his aura was disguised.

    He turned himself back and said.

    "This is just the tip of the iceberg. I entered the ces deep enough to get the blueprint of one of the sect¡¯s bases. But I never got a chance to present myself."

    Sam looked at him in the eyes and said. He cannot trust him clearly, because his abilities are too good to be ignored by the castle. That too when they are in such a situation.

    "You are my assistant until the task is over. Report to the squad that I am taking you over and even send an application to themanders. You are not going back anytime soon and that is if you ever go back.

    After that, pull whatever strings you have to get me a meeting with the Merchant Union representative of Nagin castle and after that meeting, we are going to the base of the Union sect near our Volcanic Cannon."

    Sam went on to look at theyouts regarding this location, while Chatur went to do what he was told.

    Theyouts are made in such a way that they could n ahead if they want to do something to that base just by looking at it. There is no need for pre-fight scouting at all.

    He marked some points and waited for Chatur toe. After an hour, he came back and said.

    "The meeting with the merchant union representative should wait for a while. He is not here. He is off to a meeting with the remaining members from different castles. It is regarding the ongoing mess."

    "Then, when can we meet him."

    "Tomorrow, if hees back and the day after tomorrow by thetest. But I have other options if you don¡¯t mind."

    "What are they?"

    "I have some connections with the merchant union members. I can get in touch with some of them. Which members are you going to make a deal with?"

    Sam thought for a bit and said.

    "How about the Merman for the starters? Get in touch with someone who can make a deal of a product worth a few hundred million spirit stones. We can meet them tomorrow. If the deal is set, you can get two percent as a fee."

    "I don¡¯t need a fee."

    "I don¡¯t take anything for free Chatur. If you really want to do this, just to be friends, yes sure. You can do that. But that doesn¡¯te into conflict with the business and I would pay for your efforts. And it is not easy to be my friend and it wouldn¡¯t depend on the favors you do to me. It would depend on your in character. So, don¡¯t worry.

    Now, why don¡¯t we make a move and secure the Volcanic Cannon and the nearest base of the Union sect now?

    Do you have a flying beast?"

    "Yes, I do. "

    "Then let¡¯s go."

    The Volcanic cannon is three hours away on this beast and when they arrived, the guards stationed here from the Nagin Castle are having a hard time.

    There are fifty of them and there are signs of battle. Half the group is injured and there are some corpses around them.

    The volcanic cannon looked like a volcano but it is too steep and straight and it is an active volcano. From what he heard, it shoots the resources out of it every month and the quota for this month would be in a week. This is the best time for the Union sect to trap this as they would get an immediate benefit right after and even if it was taken awayter, that would be worth it.

    Hended at the base and the squad leader came running to him and asked.

    "Who are you guys?" He is a human and most of the squad members are human too and the rest of the non-human is all half-Naga.

    Sam shed his badge and asked.

    "Which squad are you guys?"

    "Squad 30."

    "Okay now, what happened here?"

    "They are chipping us down. Our squad used to have seventy members. But now, there are only fifty members. They are just attacking and retreating on the flying beasts and long-range attacks. They are more people, more resources, more beasts, more strength, and more support.

    They are fucking my ass here."

    His voice sounded frustrating.

    "Why are they not sending the reinforcements?" Sam asked.

    Chatur is the one who replied though.

    "The political conflicts within. The Union sect is set on getting this no matter what and nomander wants to send his own squad to get them. And they don¡¯t want to weaken the remaining resource points and that led to the six specialmanders."

    Sam looked at the squad leader and said.

    "I will need you guys to get ready, in a few hours their base is going to go down. I don¡¯t know what you guys do, but find more people to hold it down before their reinforcementse again."

    With that Sam and Chatur started walking away.

    The squad leader was dumbfounded.

    He didn¡¯t know what happened, all he knows is some youngsteres here and shes a specialmander badge on his face and then says, the base of the opponents that they are facing for days and lost twenty men.

    After some thinking, he just considered this as a cocky man trying to show off.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is Sam is walking straight towards a ce that could give a proper view of the base.

    They walked towards a cliff nearby and entered a cave that was covered with a load of soil and rocks a few feet below the surface.

    After climbing into that opening and moving high enough, Sam used his back and legs to stay there and Chatur is right below him.

    Not many people pay attention because the crack is tapered inside and from outside of the cliff, it wouldn¡¯t look like it could fit a person like that.

    "I must say chatur, you could pick some great positions.

    I can look at the whole castle from here and this is exactly what I need to finish off this base."

    "What can you do from here? It is too small to use archery. It can be used to keep an eye on their movements. Nothing more."

    "In normal cases, Yes. But it is me here and all I would need is this ce to do what needs to be done. Now, let us finish this thing and have a great meal with whatever local specialties we can get in this area."

 Chapter 602: Creating Chaos

    Sam checked the location for a bit and kicked the walls for a bit to make suitable grooves for himself.

    "Chatur, are you sure everyone in the base is an enemy?"

    "Yes, No one will join the Union sect by force. At this moment, the base is upied by a special squad of the Union sect. The Dark Sky squad.

    Made of Yaksha and their mounts Dark wind Owls. They are good at aerial battles and also airstrikes. The squad is tightknit."

    "How many people do you think they have?"

    "Around one hundred and twenty. That is only an average squad in the Union sect when we consider the squads by their numbers."

    "Now tell me. Does your disguising powers only apply to yourself or can they be used to cover up something else?"

    "I can do that."

    "Okay, then go down and try to cover up the hole with your tricks and stay inside the hole, if anyonees near the hole, take these out and press the button on top and throw it at them with all you got.

    If you can use disguise techniques on them, make them look like rocks and mix them up with real rocks and throw those things at them. It will work wonders if theynded squarely on their heads."

    With that, Sam gave a space jade ring full of grenades and Chatur took them before climbing down.

    Sam activated his eye technique and the thermal vision together to see if he can get all the heat signatures. But the thermal signatures of Yaksha are clearly messed up, it is almost like they are as cold as corpses.

    He then switched to the energy vision and got a good enough view of them. He counted the visions he got. The castle is not made of special material. But there is a formation inscribed on it.

    The defense could be used to defend for quite a while.

    Sam took out his sniper and aimed. He first shot a few energy cell bullets at various ces of the castle. It is small and he can get a full isometric view of it along with all the stone houses around it. He could miss two to three houses covered from his view by the castle, but the rest is visible clearly.

    He shot the nodes of the formation and the formation started fluctuating. But this also alerted the Yaksha in the castle and the stone houses.

    The formation only defends the castle building and ites with the castle itself which was the part of this dimension, to begin with as for the stone houses, are built by themselves and the main feature of this formation is that it can repair itself. Unless the core is destroyed within the castle¡¯s foundation it wouldn¡¯t be of any use. They can at most destroy it temporarily.

    And Sam bought himself around an hour.

    Seeing the chaos in the castle and all of theming out to take their positions to defend themselves, Sam started his harvest.

    The first targets are the people running out of the castlepounds. They are the people going out to scout. As for why they are not using their owls, they don¡¯t want to catch too much attention if the attack is in order.

    Yaksha also has humanoid bodies, except they have a body structure that is a bit different.

    They are taller than average humans and shorter than Naga. And they have pale skin. They are one of the most beautiful creatures. But the only difference is that they don¡¯t have mage and warrior differences and all of them are Warrior mages.

    Unlike the humans and Nagas, their affinity and the usage of their powers will be happening since birth. But their growth rate is quite slow and there is not much advantage apart from the superior experience in their own powers.

    The Yaksha will have patterns on their bodies on their corbone area, the navel and on the back. The colors of the patterns indicate their elemental affinity and the area the pattern upies when birth indicates their talent.

    But the patterns expand all over their bodies with the growth in their cultivation and their strength can be estimated with the density of the patterns.

    At this moment, Sam is aiming at the Yaksha who just got out of the castlepound and are vigntly looking around.

    He shot one of them straight in the head and the head exploded because he used an elemental cell bullet.

    This will create more fear and the difficulty will increase for them to pinpoint the location because there will be no traces of the bullets and wounds left on the body.

    After the first one was down, the remaining became afraid and looked around. Sam shot another person and then the rest of them didn¡¯t even bother to stay there, they decided to leave and return to the castle.

    But they couldn¡¯t, because out of eight members that came out one after another was going down, and thest two finally figured which direction the attack ising, but they cannot expand their spiritual sense that far and they don¡¯t have the balls to go near.

    They ran towards a stone house and just before they could enter the house, one of them died right in front of the door. This time, though the remaining person has seen the type of attack that was made.

    Someone opened the door due to the explosive sound and when he looked at the body, he didn¡¯t let the remaining candidatee in, he called for someone else.

    He seemed to be a figure of authority and he looked at the headless corpse and when he heard the ount, he immediately wanted them to enter the house. But right before he couldmand, his head exploded and everyone looked towards the cliff.

    They are sure that someone was attacking from that direction.

    But they didn¡¯t randomly run after it, they entered the stone house and warned everyone to get inside a covered space.

    Before the warning could reach another five people died.

    Soon the whole castle fell into chaos and everyone went under the cover either into the stone houses or the castle itself to discuss what is happening. Sam activated the energy vision and locked onto one of the stone houses.

    Since it is just some high-quality stone, he doesn¡¯t have to worry too much.

    He checked the positions of the targets and shot at the door of the house and a hole appeared and the second shot went through him and hit another guy in the heart and created arge hole in his body.

    He moved a bit forward within the crack and he has barely enough gap to hold the rifle in the ce as he continued shooting.

    After another ten kills, the energy cell bullets are not exactly useful for the remaining stone houses, from his position they will explode before they reached the remaining stone houses, if he wants to attack with them, he could only go straight to the castle.

    But he doesn¡¯t want to yet. And one of the reasons is, he didn¡¯t want to damage the castle too much so that themanders will nitpick at him.

    He changed the bullets and started using the pration bullets and windows he could possibly get under his aim and shot ten more people. Now, everyone became vignt and hid behind the stone walls. They didn¡¯t even dare to look past the windows and doors.

    At the same time, currently from the blind spot in which Sam couldn¡¯t shoot behind the castle a team of thirty people left the ce and started taking another route to reach the cliff from the rear.

    Exactly towards the cave entrance Sam and Chatur took.

    Chatur who hid under his painting illusion could see theming and couldn¡¯t help but feel tense.

    He is really not good at battle. He can be calm when he escaped in front of a stronger enemy, but now that he was tasked to take on them, h was extremely frightened. He held a grenade in his hand and a paintbrush in another.

    He painted it like a rock and ced it among a pile of rocks he collected, not all of them are rocks though, he looked at them and started throwing the rocks will all he got, even when they were not that close.

    When the iing Yaksha looked at the iing rocks, they smiled and sent some long-range attacks to destroy the rocks and some of them even let them be as they are confident they wouldn¡¯t hit and they realized what kind of mistake they did.

    They are pin grenades and when they exploded right under their footsteps and in the middle of the groups, they are extremely horrified because five of them are riddled with the pins and more than ten of them are wounded.

    When Chatur saw this from afar, even though he couldn¡¯t see how much damage they took, he got some confidence.

 Chapter 603: Capturing the Castle

    Sam kept on shooting at the stone houses. The range of the energy cell bullets might be over and no one was left within except for the castle, and the people might have been hiding behind the thick stone walls, but that doesn¡¯t mean much to him.

    He started shooting the walls with the pration bullets.

    After three continuous shots at a single spot, the fourth bullet entered the hole and shot someone in the heart.

    He didn¡¯t stop. With the energy vision, he can shoot the four shots instantly particrly, when his sniper doesn¡¯t even have any reloading time required.

    As he was harvesting lives as if they are ripe mangoes in the grove, the captain on the squad and some leaders inside the castle are having a hard time. They are waiting for the news from the thirty members that went to the cliff from the blindspot.

    And the news they waited for came back. Ten people came running after they had enough of the grenades and reported about the rocks that sent them back.

    This made the captain frown and when he started thinking about the situation and asked.

    "The projectilesing at us, at first they exploded and easily destroyed anything including the walls and the people, but now they are not using such attacks. Why do you guys think?"

    "Maybe they are out of them?" One of his subordinates replied. The rest also agreed.

    "Are you sure about that? If he is not out of them, we would be in trouble."

    "But we couldn¡¯t think of any other reason. Except for if he is baiting us."

    After discussing any possible scenarios, the teams started moving, they took advantage of the blind spot, they started moving out and took out the owls from their beast pouch. By this time, there are almost fifty deaths and only seventy people left.

    Half of them led by the vice-captain of the squad are going to move towards the rear of the cliff on the owls and the remaining members will follow the captain from the front.

    It is almost dusk and the sun is setting which means, the owls that have both dark elements and the wind element will have the time of their lives.

    They also came out of the blind spot and moved outward in a different direction to test the range of Sam¡¯s attacks.

    Sam didn¡¯t shoot them at all; even if one of them is within the range, he didn¡¯t do so.

    Instead, he yelled for Chatur.

    "Leave the cliff area and escape to another hiding location. Be discreet and be fast. But stay within the range of a few hundred meters from the Pce and keep thismunication token on you. When I call you,e to the Pce discreetly and move as fast as you can."

    After Chatur ran away, Sam looked at the captain and his followersing towards the cliff slowly. He could also guess the remaining peopleing from the rear. He only has a shot amount of time left for him to go on a final killing spree with the sniper. b

    Because, once the captain or other elites got a hold of the speed and the precision of the sniper and since they already know the direction, they can dodge. Even if it is at a cost of their lives, he would lose the sniper¡¯s advantage. Along with that, there is no much range he can cover in peripheral directions because they areing from a different direction instead of the castle direction because the crack is small.

    So, he waited until they arrived a little nearer and started shooting continuously.

    He didn¡¯t shoot the beasts, he only shot the riders on them and he shot as fast as he can. He got seven kills and for the eighth one, the captain got the hang of it and blocked it with a wind de.

    Sam shot two more times, one for a beast and another for a man, and one of them is dodged and another one was blocked.

    They are still away from the energy cell bullet range, if he waits for them, the people from the rear will catch up.

    Sam looked around. The troops from the front are waiting for the troops for the rear to make the first move.

    He took out things and started sticking them onto the walls of the crack he was standing in.

    These are the same bombs he used in the process of wrecking the Naval fleet of the Adrian Empire.

    He slowly climbed down as he stuck the bombs to both the walls.

    When he saw the rear troops in his sight. He ced a Naga shadow in that ce and climbed down.

    From both sides, the troops are moving slowly and are afraid that Sam would attack suddenly. But when they saw no movement after so much time, they felt like something is wrong and started throwing long-range attacks towards the cliff.

    When they saw no reaction, they finally rxed a bit and moved faster towards the cliff and when they saw a shadow from afar, they frowned, both troops sent five people from each side to check and when they are in range, the shadow did the task that it was supposed to do.

    It pressed a button on one of the grenades and...

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    A series of explosions urred in a single area and the ten men along with the ten owls are all dead.

    Taking this explosion as a distraction, Sam came out of the cliff entrance and moved along the shadows as he used the shadow transfer technique.

    When the smoke and dust cleared, there is arge hole in the cliff with the stones thrown all the way around.

    The two groups moved towards it and saw therge that also expanded all the way downwards. One of them jumped off from his owls and climbed down as they investigated.

    Meanwhile, Sam used this chance to escape. But he didn¡¯t go away, instead, he went to the castle that was abandoned at the moment.

    There are few people around inside the castle and Sam finished them off quickly.

    He took out themunication device and tried to get in contact with Chatur. He hid inside the Pce as he waited for Chatur toe and before he wanted to contact for the second time, Chatur was already in front of him.

    "Collect every beast pouch off of their bodies. Since they are dead, the beasts would have suffered a blow, but after they recover, they will try their best to recover. Recover all of them, but don¡¯t get noticed by the troops.

    They mighte at any moment, so I will be taking a look around the castle and find a suitable spot for taking them down.

    At the same time, Sam let Yanwu and Sky out. They are inside the hall of the Castle and since this world has no miasma he is not alone anymore.

    He can use his own beasts to gain an advantage.

    He went to the best sniping spot and waited for the troops to return as Chatur collected the beast pouches and came to him within half-an-hour.

    He threw them all inside the divine dimension to deal with themter.

    The owls are from Yaksha¡¯s home called Fysi. They are not like the dumb fire owls he met in the Volcanic region. They are actually quite smart in terms of intelligence and they are of moderate size and have great attack power. Particrly attacking the ground when flying.

    As Sam waited, the troops areing back to the Pce. Half of them are moving towards the Castle, while the other half split up and moved in different directions.

    Chatur is inside the castle checking the conference rooms and such to gather the information he needed as there are many scrolls left there in the middle due to the sudden attack.

    As the troops neared the castle, Yanwu and Sky roared with all their might as they released their aura.

    The surroundings are all covered by their aura and the owls that are bringing the troops back are all frightened and started moving down.

    They don¡¯t dare to fly when two predators are roaring in such amanding fashion. Their instinct is not to let them stay in the air.

    The riders are trying their best to control the owls, the speed they are descending will make them crash into the ground. Sam and his two beastpanions now went on to take advantage of this opportunity.

    Sam unleashed another killing spree as he started shooting at every Yaksha he could get his scope on while Yanwu and Sky exited the castle and took flight as they attacked their own.

    The whole situation turned into mayhem all of a sudden.

    Only half of the Yaksha managed toe back to their senses and jumped off to reduce the damage, but they couldn¡¯t get away that easily though.

    Sam shot everyone as fast as he could. Soon, only three people remained there and those three are able to dodge the bullets.

    But Sam didn¡¯t worry though, because the owls thatnded on the ground and now lost their contracts all turned their heads towards these three in a hostile fashion. Because the two predatory beasts are ordering them to do so.

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to shoot anymore, because his twopanions and their newckeys all tore those three apart.

    He called them back and caught the beasts in the divine dimension, before calling for Chatur and five new Yaksha shadows and let them clean up the battle-field.

 Chapter 604: Sandra

    Sam waited for the remaining troops toe, but this time his n didn¡¯t go through as he wanted it to be, because the remaining half of them came once and another half came a bitter than them.

    If the second half were any sooner or anyter, then it would have been great, but they came right when he was dealing with the first half which led to a chaotic mess of some of them escaping.

    Sam wanted to chase them, but seeing that they split up in different directions, all he can do is shoot four out of six of them while the remaining two escaped into twopletely different directions.

    He didn¡¯t follow any of them. Since one of them would definitely escape, he might as well let them get both of them away.

    He looked at chatur who got the remaining beast pouches and spatial rings and asked.

    "Do you think the squad at the Volcanic cannon called for the base?"

    "Absolutely not."

    "Then, you call them and make them call the base. I am pretty sure you guys have a method ofmunication. I am not going to waste my time holding down this ce like this on my own. I have many things to do."

    "What if I call the squad in that ce toe and hold this down?"

    "And the Union sect will soon move out and take the Volcanic Cannon and the sixmanders will start uprooting the authority of the specialmanders starting with me.

    I don¡¯t want to y stupid politics with these guys. After contacting them, just go and do your own thing with this base and get a new blueprint. I would like to see how good you are. Your talent is quite unique. You have abination of skills in art, construction, and architecture along with scouting, battle strategy and defensive fortification, infiltration.

    Combine all of that and show me what you got. Show me some design that shows all your expertise in one ce, if you impress me, not only will I hire you for something great, you will also get twenty million spirit stones.

    But before that, don¡¯t forget to set a meeting with the person from the Merman tomorrow. It iste and I would like to take a rest. Call me if anyonees here before the troops from our base."

    Chatur went on to do the tasks and a little after midnight, the soldiers from the base came. There are a hundred of them and Sam finally felt relieved as he didn¡¯t even bother to deal with the squad captain and left with his new assistant.

    This time they soared on Sky. He is faster after all.

    "So, when is the meeting?"

    "If you want to, we can go there directly."

    "Just show the way then."

    As Chatur led them, they traveled for two hours which should have been four hours in any other beast of the same level and arrived at another castle.

    There are a lot of merman and fishmen walking in and out of the castle and just every other castle, there are stone houses around it. This one is a lot smaller than both the castles Sam has been to.

    But the specialty of this one is, the front yard of the castle is full of stalls with all the races.

    There are many types of beasts and herbs that could be found in this dimension and many people will want to sell them and apart from that, they will also sell their own local specialties of their.

    This ce is a market for people of all races.

    Sam and Chatur walked into the castlepound and thetter called someone and some came as they escorted them inside.

    In an office room within the castle, A beautiful woman is sitting behind a table.

    She has white skin with a light pinkplexion and emerald eyes and hair that matched their color. She has a voluptuous body and a tall build with long legs that can be seen under the table.

    She is wearing something simr to the tank top and a long slit skirt below from which one could get a glimpse of those long and beautiful legs.

    The only difference between her and a normal human is that her elbows have fins with some pink marks on her neck that are her gills. Even though, they have closed at the moment and not pleasant things to look at individually, within her beautiful body they just enhanced her beauty.

    She looked at Chatur and Sam and stood up as she stopped writing whatever she has on hand and greeted them warmly.

    "Hello Chatur, this must be the person who told me about it. The Specialmander of the Nagin castle. Sam. Nice to meet you." She shook his hand without standing up from her chair. And gestured them to take a seat.

    Sam took a seat and said.

    "I am sorry to say this. But I don¡¯t know much about you. May I know your name?" She looked at Chatur with a piercing expression and said.

    "Its Sandra." Her voice was melodious as if it was nice music. But that didn¡¯t impress Sam, rather he felt wary. He knew little about the Merman race. Because all he learned is about Nagas as they are present in every of the Naga Loka and that includes the Merman and they have a poption that easily matches if not surpass the Merman¡¯s themselves. But what he knew is that there is something wrong with her voice. He remembered some myths of mermaids in his previous life and hoped that it is not true.

    "Nice to meet you too. I only came yesterday, so I didn¡¯t have enough to learn much about you. I hope you forgive me." Sam maintained his polite tone.

    "There is nothing to forgive. But chatur said that you have a business to discuss and it is a big one. What do you want to buy exactly?"

    "I want to buy something from your home. But I don¡¯t know if you would be able to sell it."

    "There are very few things I cannot sell from my, Mr. Sam. You can tell me what you want. You can trust in my capability."

    "Then I would like to get the Rainbow Kelp."

    Sandra was stunned for a second before saying. "Did I hear you wrong Mr. Sam? Did you say, Rainbow Kelp?"

    Only Chatur doesn¡¯t know what is wrong with these two words.

    "Yes, I said Rainbow Kelp. Don¡¯t tell me, that is one of the things you couldn¡¯t sell from your."

    Sandra became a bit angry and said in a low voice.

    "I doubt that you could afford it Mr. Sam."

    "Money is not an issue."

    "You do know that the value of that thing will go beyond money right?"

    "Yes, of course. Then, what do you want?"

    "What is willing to pay? Since you know what it is, you must have something in your mind. If the price is right, I can think about it. After all, there are only five units of this and they only grow every five years. So, please don¡¯t try to bluff me into this."

    "If you ask me, I would mostly say money. Around two hundred million spirit stones. I don¡¯t have a problem if you want to renegotiate the price. As for anything else, you have to tell me what you want."

    "Two hundred million? In spirit stones? You can pay such arge amount directly?"

    "Of course. I can. Will you take it?"

    "No. even though, the value is about the same, the Kelp gives a person to gain a chance to Breakthrough the levels in the transcendent stage. Even if that person is on the death bed, he can still breakthrough, as long as he is of water element.

    So, it is beyond money."

    When Sam heard this and looked at her expressions, his instinct told him something and he asked.

    "It seems like you already have something on your mind. What is it that you want?" He asked as he looked straight into her eyes.

    She took a deep breath and said. "I heard that you have deals with Yodha and are quite good with making new weapons. I want a new weapon design."

    "Miss Sandra. You must be mistaken, my weapon designs are far more valuable than two hundred million. You are asking for apletely unequal trade."

    "We will pay you the difference back."

    "It is not about the difference. If you knew that I do weapon business, you must also know that I don¡¯t give the design awaypletely. I don¡¯t sell the design that easily."

    "I am pretty sure, we can find a way to make a deal." She said with a brilliant smile and the bell-like voice once again made some waves in his consciousness. He frowned and looked at her coldly. The atmosphere in the room changed and his spiritual sense turned sharp and rebuffed whatever that is that came into mind.

    Sandra jerked a little in her seat and started sweating.

    She looked at Sam with a smile and the confidence that was before in her eyes was gone.

 Chapter 605: Discussing Business

    Sandra looked at Sam with keen eyes. The sh of mental attacks just now is something only she and Sam knew, Chatur could only see that something went wrong, but he couldn¡¯t understand what is going on.

    She took a deep breath and said.

    "Okay then. I need a weapon for a specific purpose. To hold something in ce and create damage at the same time. I don¡¯t want the victim to be dead immediately and it would be better if they wouldn¡¯t die at all.

    Can you make one like that?"

    "What kind of creature are we talking about, humanoid? Fish? Naga? A four-legged beast? It depends and what kind of restriction do you want? In what kind of terrain they should be restricted? How much of a restriction do you want? Unconscious? Devoid of motion? Slow down? How big the creature would be?

    I need more detail, Miss Sandra. I need you to be more specific."

    Sandra was stunned for a second. After all, Sam is just denying everything as long as he has to part with the designpletely, but now he is asking for specifications. Seeing her confusion, he smiled and said.

    "It is not that I am agreeing to give you the design. I am a businessman. I am not against talking terms. So, since you want to talk about the specifications, we will see what you want, and then I will decide whether I will sell you a design."

    She then started exining what kind of specifications she wanted and Sam took a mental note of that as he imagined what kind of machine he should make for that.

    The main problem is that the weapon should work underwater and they are most needed to catch some water-type beasts.

    Merman is mostlyprised of water and there is only around fifteen percent ofnd and the rest of it is the ocean.

    Even the Naga that stays there is mostly a sub-race of normal Nagas the Water Serpent Nagas. They can survive in water. But they are still Nagas and their appearance and the final form of their bodies doesn¡¯t look much different from the normal Nagas in the Nagin, except that their skin and flesh are a bit different and Nagas never discriminated against them.

    Most of the Nagas and the Mermen on that stay in underwater cities. As for thend, it is mostly upied by the normal beasts and some Normal Nagas that are present there and somend is used by the Water Serpent Nagas and the Mermen as their bases to get the resources from thend.

    But still, the ocean is ten times more dangerous thannd. And both the Nagas and the Mermen are not the true species that is on top of the food chain.

    The sea creatures are. There are many species that outnumber these two races and outdo them in strength.

    As for fishermen, they are an even lesser race than humans in the eyes of Nagas and the mermen have a little better opinion of the fishmen than the Nagas.

    All these three humanoid races lose a lot of people every year and due to their production rate being higher than even humans, they are still able to survive.

    Now Sandra is asking for a weapon that could help them survive against a shark species and other species of simr size and strength.

    He has some ideas and said.

    "It is not that difficult. And I can sell the design. What can you offer me for that? Because a rainbow Kelp cannot be sufficient for that design."

    Sam decided to sell that because the design will only be properly effective in the water. Even though he can make a variant that could work on thend with very small adjustments, he is not against selling the design.

    If it is the design of the puppets or grenades, then that would have thought otherwise. They are his opening business offers, when he wants to enter the market in a new ce. But he is not that interested in the Merman. As long as he could get a source to get their natural resources, he can part with a design that was born due to their custom ideas.

    "How are you so sure that a rainbow Kelp is not sufficient?" She asked.

    Sam thought for a bit and said.

    "I will have a prototype along with the weapon with me in a few days and I will show you a demonstration, in fact, I can even demonstrate on your own if you want me to. Then we will decide how much it is truly worth.

    How about that?"

    "Sounds great to me." She shook his hands once again and both of them had smiles on their faces, there is not a trace of their sh that happened a few minutes ago.

    They came out and used Sky and started their journey back to the Nagin castle.

    "Where can we get some beasts, that are good to eat? Like rabbits, pigeons like that? Do you know any ce like that?"

    "There is a small forest over there and there is all kinds of small creatures there. There is a herd of deer, but they are fast and dangerous. Not many people would venture there to catch them. If you get caught you will die.

    But I heard they taste extremely good."

    "Show me the way. It has been a while since I had a venison steak."

    When they arrived at the ce, Sam noticed the beasts, they are called Gale deer. They are extremely fast and only moved in a herd. But they are not as fast as Sky.

    With a mere thought, Sky dove down like a sh and made chatur let out a shrill cry. Sky dove down and caught a deer and rose high. It is all in one swift move and the deer couldn¡¯t even react. Sam is d that he at least has his beastpanions by his side and he can use them now.

    They went back to the Nagin Pce and when they are inside the stone house, Sam felt like the ce is not big enough.

    "Is there an open ce nearby? Without any trees and a big enough clearing."

    Chatur nodded and led him there. Everyone in the castle is looking at them in surprise. They didn¡¯t expect someone would catch a Gale deer and when they heard that he is the new specialmander, they are even more surprised.

    The news about his base capture along with the assistance of only one person is something that turned their surprise into shock.

    Since yesterday the sixmanders are trying to get in touch with him. The remaining fivemanders are still trying to get familiar with the situation. But he already took a base from the Union sect.

    The sixmanders were threatened by Sam¡¯s actions, so they wanted to put him down a little with some of their authority. But he is nowhere to be seen since the squad arrived to take over the union sect¡¯s base he took down.

    At this moment, Sam is looking at thend he was on with satisfaction. He gave a tent and tools and asked Chatur to make one as he took out a grill and fired it up with charcoal. He made the charcoal himself before for situations like this.

    While he skinned the beast. The beast isrge and it isrger than a normal elephant. But at this moment, Sky grew extremelyrge and even thisrge deer is barely half its size.

    He skinned the deer and kept the pelt before cutting down threerge steaks and butchering the rest intorge pieces.

    He took out some herbs he would use as spices and started grilling the meat. After he was done, he kept the steaks and left the rest with Sky as he sent him and the meat into the divine dimension, so that the rest of the beasts could enjoy it.

    Samid a table and asked Chatur to join him. He himself had two steaks and gave one to Chatur. But it is an extremelyrge one and he even doubted that the other party will finish it and said.

    "Don¡¯t think about saving it up or something just because it is valuable and good to eat. My cooking is not something you could get often and mind you, I even shed with the Imperial family because they wasted my food."

    Sam said jokingly and took out some wine as he started enjoying the juicy red meat.

    But his peace didn¡¯t stay long as one of the sixmanders, the one that belonged to Mov empire is running towards him along with his subordinates.

    "Sam, why did you not report when you took down a base like that? The Union sect will retaliate harder and they will be more offensive."

    Sam didn¡¯t like this interruption as he said.

    "Are you in a war or ying house? Do you want the enemy to walk all over you? If you really want to win the war, just leave me alone and try to put more work into the defense and attacks. A base like that is chipping the forces of the Volcanic Cannon and you are doing nothing, only letting a squad of fifty defend it.

    What do you think will happen in the next few days? In six days, the monthly quota will be shot out and they will definitely take that ce before that.

    And why do I even have to report this? My designation is the same as yours. Now, don¡¯t disturb me when I am having the meal. This is the first andst time I am saying this."

 Chapter 606: Lake and Pearl

    Sam finished his meal after brushing off themander. He really missed his friends now. Ever since he came to this Naga Loka, he missed those three as he couldn¡¯t rely on anyone when needed. If they are here, he is sure that four of them are enough to hold down that castle.

    After eating, Sam said to Chatur.

    "Let us go back to the Volcanic Cannon. I am taking the next thing that ising out of that cannon. We are going to camp there and give me theyout of the nearest resource point or the base that is taken over by the Union sect. We are taking it back.

    Call for two of the idlest squads that want to shine but have no opportunity to do so when I ask you to. I need them to hold down the next point I takedown. Along with that, find another thirty individual members. Use my authority to tell them to be on standby. They should move with those two squads."

    Chatur nodded and did as he was told.

    He is fast and efficient and the more he showed these qualities, the more Sam thought that it is a bit suspicious that he was being suppressed like this. It is hard to leave a talented guy like that to rot away. From what he saw, the Mov empire values their talents too much as he himself is the prime example.

    He only has two thoughts regarding this. The first one is that Chatur has to be lying and is spying on him and the second one is Chatur is being really suppressed but not for the reason he was told.

    But Sam didn¡¯t think much. As long as he didn¡¯t sense any threat, he was fine. He might be leaving all the orders to Chatur, but he is in his own precautions.

    After chatur finished his tasks, they once again made their move and went back to the Volcanic cannon. Sam checked up on the squad and after confirming that there are no more attacks, for the time being, both of them moved in another direction from there.

    They traveled for an hour and reached a Lake.

    This is the resource point. Even though there is a Volcano nearby, a normalke existed here. That is the nature of the Union dimension.

    Sam and Chatur got down from the Sky and walked through the woods as they neared theke.

    Theke was surrounded by a vast expanse of trees and many soldiers are waiting there.

    When Sam got an estimate, he couldn¡¯t help but feel surprised and asked.

    "Just how many members are there in the Union sect?"

    "Thousands. The rough estimate is three to four thousand."

    "Then how many are there in the Nagin Castle?"

    "Around thousand five hundred."

    "That¡¯s it? We are outnumbered and outdone in unity and strength. This is tough."

    Sam looked at theke from afar. Theke is a weekly resource point, one of the five that sect took over.

    There are fishmen all over along with a bunch of humans. They covered the whole area with a hundred people. The majority being the fishmen and the rest of the humans.

    He took out the rifle and started his harvest once again. In this forest, it is too easy for him to deal with them. He didn¡¯t even have to bother about his spot being caught. It is not like he was stuck in a cliff crack.

    He can move around and with his Harbinger he is unstoppable. He can finish this off pretty easily. At least, half of them will be done. Unless there is a super-elite on par with the yers, he wouldn¡¯t have much problem.

    He shot every person down one by one as he moved through the forest around theke. But he is not lucky to clean it up. Because out of thest twenty people ten of them are great at blocking the bullets. They couldn¡¯t escape thempletely, but he really wished that he had an assault rifle instead of the sniper.

    These guys are a pain in the ass and they are working together. As for the remaining ten, they are great at escaping.

    But this time, he didn¡¯t want them to go away. He let out the ape, Raiju, Yanwu, Sky and he let some of the owls go after them along. The ten people that are capable of defending the bullets are staying at theke and out of ten, three of them are fishmen and the seven are humans. He waspletely surprised by this.

    He didn¡¯t think that he would get some friction here.

    He stored the sniper away and took the handguns and directly went to confront them. He must say, he is enjoying the shooting. It really is addicting to shoot. As for the hundreds of bodies, he is taking down, he didn¡¯t care much. Since it is war, then they are deaths.

    He jumped right into the middle of the ten and started shooting once again. All he did is try to dodge and shoot. He is not even using any other attacks. Even though his energy is draining just like a normal attack with every bullet, the damage is far greater and he is confident that he can deal with them fast enough.

    By the end of the fight, Sam is panting and the Lake dyed red.

    Chatur, who is hiding the woods as he looked at him was gulping down nervously. Meanwhile, the beasts came back with the ten bodies of the people that escaped.

    Sam told Chatur to collect the spatial rings while he checked theke out.

    He took out the bodies and looked at theke that is looked like diluted blood.

    He noticed that the blood is being absorbed from a point on theke bed.

    "What kind of resource point is this?"

    "A weekly resource point. The pearlke.

    There is an oyster at the bottom of theke and it absorbs the energy from theke as it creates a pearl. The pearl is not an ornament though. It is a pill.

    It is mostly beneficial for water element users and the spiritual energy it absorbed all over the week will be absorbed by the body one hundred percent.

    The amount is not high though. But this is the first time, we are seeing it absorbing the blood. After all, no killed anyone inside theke." Chatur appeared as he finished his task and said.

    "When is the next pearling out?"

    "From the looks of it, maybe tomorrow."

    Sam nodded and replied.

    "Call the squads and the extra members I asked for and station them at the Volcanic Cannon for now. We will stay at theke for the time being. Build the tent nearby."

    Chatur went on to finish the task and Sam started observing theke. He activated his eye technique to the limit and is looking at the energy flow within theke.

    The oyster is indeed absorbing the energy of the water and the water is receiving the energy from surroundings.

    It is mostly filled with the water elemental energy due to theke water and the rest is the neutral energy.

    Chatur finish setting up the tents and Sam let out Ape to stay guard at the entrance and went inside before entering the divine dimension. He has to finish the promised design and the prototype so that he could get the Rainbow kelp. That is the second herb on the list.

    He spent his time inside the tower to deal with the new design. This is actually not muchplicated. Just the restraining part is a bitplicated. And ording to Sandra, he can make animals bleed and it would be better if the beast weakened as much as possible.

    So, Sam decided to make a suitable design ording to that and started working in it. The night passed outside and he only came out the next morning.

    He went to see chatur who is working in his tent on a table with arge scroll as he painted.

    "Did you send the news that we took theke and I am taking the gains of theke for the next few weeks?"

    Sam asked casually.

    "Yes and I already got a reply. The sixmanders don¡¯t seem too happy. They are saying that you are breaking the war strategy with your reckless actions and they want you to go back."

    "What if I don¡¯t go back?"

    "Well, there is nothing they can do. All they said is that they will make themander for Mov toin to the emperor."

    "Then, it is okay. Let himin to the emperor, at least he would get some sense drilled into his head."

    "Any other news?"

    "The troops from the Union sect arrived at the Volcanic cannon and are stationed nearby. There are two hundred of them in total. They didn¡¯t seem to have gotten the news about theke or they seemed to have left it forter.

    But they didn¡¯t attack the castle or the Cannon as they seemed to have been waiting for further orders due to the new arrival of the two squads."

    Sam heard all the news and went to theke as the time for the pearl to arrive hase.

 Chapter 607: Another Resource Point

    Sam already went through the spatial rings of the people here and he already has seen few pearls that came from theke.

    The weekly resource points don¡¯t seem to interest the Union sect by much, because the subordinates here have six pearls, which means from the past six weeks he didn¡¯t give away this share and it has only been six weeks since they captured this ce.

    Sam looked at theke as the oyster shined and opened. He dove and took the pearl beforeing out. The oyster closed and theke was back to normal.

    He looked at the pearl carefully and noticed that there is a faint red hue around the quail egg-sized watery-blue pearl.

    He used his observation skill and noticed that it is full of water elemental energy, but there is faint energy that resembled the energy from blood-essence.

    He became curious and ced the pearl he got from the spatial rings. Both of them are almost the same except for the red hue, which he ounted for the blood that was absorbed.

    He became curious and threw both of them into the divine dimension as he closed his eyes and observed Mia who is taking the two pearls in.

    She first ate the normal pearl and the reaction is that she got a bit of spiritual energy and most of it is water elemental energy. When she took the second one, she could feel minute improvement in the blood and body as she was eating some nourishing food. But the effect is so faint that it didn¡¯t matter whether the change happened or not.

    Sam started using the eye technique and the observation ability at the same time as he could see the energy slowly gathering inside, the oyster. It is mostly observing theke¡¯s energy for now and it is slow.

    He squatted down and ced his hand inside theke. Every living creature will emit some energy out and Sam also does. That energy was also being absorbed and the energy absorption from the water reduced a bit while the energy out of his hand is being absorbed at a more normal pace.

    He took out a ss container to see what the water and tried to examine it as much as possible. Then only he noticed that even though it is water, it not normal water.

    Normal water would have some vitality present. Even if it was not as apparent as the trees and light, there would be some vitality present in water, but in thiske there is none.

    The water almost seemed to be dead, even the spiritual energy that was being absorbed by the oyster is noting from theke, rather the water is absorbing the spiritual energy from the surroundings, and due to the nature of this weird water and the spiritual energy that it absorbed not being directly consumable, it turned into water elemental energy by the time it reached the oyster, at least that is what he can figure out from the observation in the energy flow and changes of the energy.

    He took out a spirit stone and threw it in theke as he kept on observing.

    Theke water stopped absorbing the surrounding spiritual energy andpletely focused on the spiritual stone.

    They started channeling the energy to the oyster and when observed, he didn¡¯t notice any change in the nature of energy. It is still neutral spiritual energy unlike before.

    He felt weird because, the energy absorbed from the ground and nts and surrounding environment is being converted into faint water elemental energy, but the spirit stone¡¯s energy was not being converted.

    He felt like this is something worth observing as he threw a lot of spirit stones in theke. There are more than a hundred thousand, but still, there is no increase in the water level. It is just like normal.

    He left theke alone for the time being and went back to Chatur who wrapped his work up.

    "So, what are we doing now?" Chatur asked.

    "What is the location of the next resource point?"

    "It is far from here. We would have to cross the army and travel for four hours on Sky to go to the next resource point. From there, the remaining three would be near enough. But from what I heard, the situation is not as easy. After these two attacks, they tightened the defense in other resource points.

    I don¡¯t why they are not aggressive in attack though. After all, a base and the resource point are big enough provocation."

    "They are being wary."

    "Of what?"

    "The troops of the sect are well trained and tightknit. They are well-versed in battle. That is the reason no one attacks them lightly. But two of those squads are gone, disappeared right from their troops in two days.

    They are wary and want to see exactly what they are dealing with."

    Chatur had a look of realization on their face and he thought of something.

    "What are the weapons you used to attack them?"

    Sam smiled and replied.

    "They are called guns, the smaller ones are handguns and therge one is a sniper rifle. Why?"

    "They are powerful." He said in a low voice.

    "Of course, they are. They are made such a way to reduce my effort during these kinds of situations."

    "These kinds?"

    "Yes, I often find myself in a spot where I have to kill a lot of people. It would be exhausting to fight them head-on. With these things, I can use almost the same amount of energy but is not as exhausting and dangerous. But there will always be exceptions, just like the ten people yesterday."

    "Oh." Chatur wanted to say something but hesitated and stayed silent.

    "How far is the next resource point from Sandra¡¯s ce?"

    "There is a direct way connecting two ces, it wouldn¡¯t take much time."

    "Then let us go. Since, the next pearl wille after a week, even if it is left alone, we don¡¯t have to worry about anything. But still call for a squad and ask them to guard here. Tell them to not touch anything in theke, otherwise, I will break their legs."

    Chatur nodded and went on to do his tasks. Sam doesn¡¯t know how he was able to contact the castle from every ce. But he didn¡¯t care for now, as long as the task is done.

    A squad from the Volcanic cannon came to thiske for now meanwhile, the squad they called for from the castle will follow the Volcanic cannon.

    There are no signs of attack from the enemy troops at this moment, so they didn¡¯t worry. Sam and Chatur went on their journey to the next resource point.

    Sam decided to clear the next one and stay there for the night and go to Sandra¡¯s ce and finish the demonstration.

    At the same time, this will also send the message to the Union sect. They will know that increasing their defense will not be changing anything and they are still as vulnerable and then the elites will finallye out.

    Even though, Chatur said they are elite squads, from what he could see, they are barely foot soldiers. They are elite, but onlypared to the squads of the Nagin and other castles, but within the sect, they are a little more than normal foot soldiers. He is pretty sure there is not much of a difference.

    The next resource point is a bamboo forest. Inside the forest, there is a single bamboo that grows individually and gives out special water within their sections.

    Water is useful for cleansing the toxins and improving body conditions. It was said that it can be used to enhance medicines and potions by using a small amount.

    Every week a new individual bamboo will start growing from the bamboo shoots of the previous bamboo. But only shoot among all of them will grow and be a bamboo tree and only one section of the tree will be giving this water.

    Around a liter of water will be given every week.

    Sam is looking forward to having a taste of this water. From what Chatur said, it will two days for the next harvest and it is a great time.

    They arrived at the ce by afternoon and there are two hundred members here. Sam was really impressed by the fortification. All the soldiers are in a formation and they have beastpanions. He didn¡¯t expect that he would meet so many cultivators that use beasts.

    Fifty of the two hundred have beasts and they are felines. Tigers, lions, and Panthers. All kinds of feline beasts are present. He almost drooled over them when he saw them. He didn¡¯t expect that he would get such a great harvest this time. He got around a hundred Dark wind owls and now these good felines, he is looking forward to what this ce is going to offer.

    Sam sprang into action and by night, he was done. Some felines are dead, but he managed to capture most of them. After checking his loot, he once again made a tent and waited there for the squads from the Nagin castle to arrive.

 Chapter 608: Sagar

    Sam got three liters of water that was inside the spatial rings of his victims. After calling for another two squads, he stayed there for the time being to see if there is any abnormality in the bamboo forest like theke.

    But there is nothing like that. He spent the night inside the divine dimension once again finishing the design for Sandra.

    After the squads arrived and once again telling Chatur to ignore the messages from the sixmanders and other specialmanders who are also pissed by Sam¡¯s actions as he is stealing their limelight, they once again started their journey.

    He didn¡¯t really care about themanders, they will talk and talk about all the glory and credits and all the honor they will get. But all he cares about is finishing the task and deal with the task and go back to his home.

    He has to bring his friends out of that ce and show them the world. It is boring for him in the Naga Loka, they could have clearly made it a lot easier and a lot more entertaining.

    After another two hours, he finally arrived back at Sandra¡¯s castle. They once again visited her and then all three of them set out on Sky.

    "What kind of bird is it? It is so fast." Sandra asked as she felt the shining feathers on Sky.

    But Sam didn¡¯t reply, he could feel that Sky is so proud of his mental connection and instead started speaking to him so that he wouldn¡¯t get cocky.

    At this moment, they are going to the Origin Castle, the castle that has portals to differents.

    Sandra led them to the room that has the portal that leads to the Merman, but before they entered she said.

    "The entrance is an underwater cave. Even though there is an air gap inside the cave and you can stay there, we have some preparations made just for you. But you would have to wait here for some time, I will go in ande back after making sure everything is ready."

    "You don¡¯t have to worry about that," Sam replied and took out two breathing devices and gave one of them to Chatur before saying.

    "Turn to your human form. It would be hard for you to wear this in this form. And don¡¯t try to talk, it is mostly useless."

    Chatur nodded and turned himself. When Sam saw his human form, he was stunned. Because he looked like a dorky nerd that everyone wants to push around in the ssroom.

    He didn¡¯t expect someone like this would evene to the Union dimension. He didn¡¯t think much and started wearing the device.

    This is a newly modified device. He made the modifications in the divine dimension the previous time after the second resource point was captured. He made sure so that he canmunicate underwater. He just removed the small pipe that connects his mouth to another space jade that collects his exhaled air and created a small cavity.

    This has a one-way outlet that would let the air out. And as for talking with this, a normal voice wouldn¡¯t be loud enough to transmit his words in the deep sea. But with his spiritual energy and his elemental affinity with the water can make him reach the message.

    Sandra is looking at them with confusion, even chatur doesn¡¯t know what this is, but he still wore it and all three of them entered that door and reappeared in an underwater cave.

    There really is an air gap in that cave, but the water is still knee-deep.

    The three of them swimming. Sandra has changed into her original form. The legs joined together to form a mermaid¡¯s tail and the fins on her elbows expanded a bit. The gills on her neck open.

    As for Sam, he is using the water elemental energy to move. He looked at Chatur, who seemed to be having no trouble. He used his eye technique and noticed that guy is also using water elements. He raised an eyebrow as he didn¡¯t ask for what kind of abilities the other party has.

    He scolded himself in his mind for being toox and swam after the mermaid.

    There are some Mermen and Water Serpent Nagas staying guard. They crossed them over as Sandra said something to them as she brought them over.

    "We will go to my home first, it is not far and we will be there in a few hours. We will go to the demonstration after that."

    Sandra¡¯s voice could be heard in their ears and Sam is stunned because he could see her lips are not moving at all. It is definitely not a technique that directly sends messages to his mind. He is sure about that at least.

    "Sure."

    Sam used his own technique to voice his answer as they swam together and after some time, Sandra gestured them to halt and arge seahorse appeared from the depths of the ocean. On the sea horse, there is a man standing. He is a Merman. But his hair is in light yellow color while he didn¡¯t activate his merman form.

    Only his gills are open. His tail is not. He is standing in his human form.

    "Lady Sandra, are these guests you talked about?" The man¡¯s voice rung in their ears and the tone of the words is extremely polite.

    "Uncle Khaal. You are here." Sandra spoke in a cheerful tone and said to Sam and Chatur.

    "He is my uncle and he is also my guardian. Let¡¯s go, we can move faster on the Emerald Sea Horse."

    As she spoke she swam towards the Sea horse and changed into her human form as he stood on its head.

    Sam and Chatur followed and greeted the man.

    "Hold tight. We are going at full speed."

    With that, all they could see is the sh of blue all around them and some colors in between. They couldn¡¯t picture anything that was around them.

    Within an hour and a half, they actually reached the destination.

    Sam had an urge to throw up. But he tried his best to suppress it. And Chatur is trying his best to hold back.

    His face is hidden behind the breathing device, so no one could see his expression.

    Sam looked at the magnificent underwater city in front of him. There is arge dome devoid of water and there are a lot of tall buildings. The buildings are mostly designed after the shapes of the seashells. They looked different and artistic.

    The sea horse and Khaal remained outside and three of them swam towards the seabed beside the dome.

    There is a small underwater stream that is leading them under the dome. There are some mermen staying guard and when they saw Sandra they saluted her and let them in.

    They followed the stream and let it carry them inside. After some turns, they reached a surface.

    It is like a subway station, but instead of a track, there is a stream.

    They used the steps to climb the bank, took off the breathing devices, and started walking.

    Nobody seemed to care about their wet bodies.

    The city really is magnificent and Sam is really impressed by the artistic way they built it.

    Everyone greeted Sandra respectfully.

    The city has a lot of Mermen and Fishmen. The Fishmen are mostly in small positions like attendants or shopkeepers. They walked for a while before reaching the Pce which is the core of the city.

    Sandra introduced every ce rted to this and before they could go to the Pce, she took them to another street.

    "We build the city near an undersea Volcano. We use the heat to for many purposes and some masters worked well enough to use that Lava for the fire element usage.

    Mermen will be born with the innate water ability and they do have tougher bodies than humans. But some of them will be born with an extra element and fire element is also not an exception. But improving in it is not easy, so we build the cities near the undersea volcanoes."

    Sam nodded in understanding. The street has some metallic works and some weapons shops. Most of the stores are owned by Mermen because Fishmen doesn¡¯t have any other affinities other than water. But they also have strong bodies even though they don¡¯t have any warrior constitutions.

    After checking the street out and admiring the craft of the mermen, they finally arrived at the pce.

    Sandra led them to meet someone who has an uncanny resemnce to her and is Pre-transcendent stage cultivation.

    "He is my brother Sagar." Sandra introduced him before saying.

    "Sagar, he is Sam and his assistant Chatur."

    They shook hands.

    "I heard a lot about you. I and Yodha are acquainted. He brags a lot about how great the wine you give them is and how much he is earning from your partnership and how good you are at everything you do."

    Sam smiled and said.

    "I don¡¯t know he can brag. I only know he can drink."

    "He can brag alright. It is not that far away from his drinking capacity. Now, Shall we talk about the design you worked on? I would really like to see what you came up with."

 Chapter 609: Great Black Shark

    Sam along with Chatur, Sandra, and Sagar are all in the sea. Behind them, a group of mermen ising along with a ck Shark-type beast. It is a Nascent level beasts, but it still took a Pre-transcendent stage Merman to hold it in a chain that waspletely wrapped around its body.

    They dragged it forcefully and Sagar waved his hand and the Merman left chain. The Shark shed into a ck streak as it moved to get away, but before it could escape, with another wave of Sagar¡¯s hand, the water in the surroundings started moving and created a specific region that made the Shark stay within it.

    It red at the four of them who are just outside that barrier zone. Even though Sagar is a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator, the shark showed no fear. There are teeth protruding out of its mouth. The fangs of the shark are too big topletely fit in and almost looked like a Grin giving it a creepy look.

    Sam was amused when he looked at the beast. He didn¡¯t expect to see this beast in a ce alike this.

    The Great ck Shark.

    Yes, the name itself is the Great ck Shark and one must agree that the name is deserving of it.

    It is one of the dangerous predators of the sea. They are fast, strong, ruthless and their biting power is as strong as an Initial stage Pre-transcendent stage beast when it is in Late-stage Nascent level Beast.

    If a real pre-transcendent stage beast couldn¡¯t handle it and died in its hands, there is still no need to be surprised.

    The beast is fearless and it is one of the few that has some resistance to the innate instincts that cause a beast to fear a superior being. Of course, if the difference is too big, then it wouldn¡¯t escape those instincts.

    The best part is that the size of the beasts is not much different from a normal shark. The most it could grow is to the size of a Whale-Shark. Thergest shark in normal earth. Around eighteen to twenty meters. Even if it bes a deity and a god, it will still stay that size.

    That size along with the speed and strength it could pack, it is a threat to any other beast in the sea at the same level.

    "Are you sure you guys are having trouble with these sharks?"

    "Yes, why?" Sagar asked in return.

    "I can understand why you are so adamant about getting a weapon like this. But are you sure you guys want to capture them? They are strong and efficient, but they are not exactly a pet material."

    "We know, but these beasts are too precious to let them die like that. We will try our best to form a contract." Sandra replied.

    "You seem to know a lot about these beasts," Sagar said from the side.

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and said.

    "No offense, but if you really want to catch these, even with my weapon, the user will have to be extremely skilled. I don¡¯t think even a normal Elite would have a way to shoot that. The only time they would have a chance to shoot it is when they are in the middle of its jaws in the process of being bitten in half."

    Sagar¡¯s mouth twitched and said.

    "No problem. Just show us what you have. We will think of the solution for other problems."

    "Then your wish."

    Sam swam around the barrier and reached the other end grabbing the attention of the Shark. When he reached the spot he desired to, he signaled Sagar to deactivate the trap.

    Sagar hesitated a bit before cing himself in front of Sandra and Chatur and deactivated the trap. The Shark immediately shot towards Sam.

    It opened its maw as wide as it can and tried to bite him off.

    Sam barely dodged as he looked at the ck Shark changing the direction anding off.

    His body changed and he activated the Partial Fusion with the water element.

    He moved in the sea as if he is a part of it. He is just trying to get a hang of the ocean battle and this shark is the best opponent he could ask for.

    He didn¡¯t even attack, all he focused on is the defense.

    When Sagar saw Sam having fun, he frowned and was about to sound his impatience. But Sam already understood and he thrust himself forward as his speed increased with a jet of water under his feet.

    He took out arge metallic object.

    It is a Harpoon Gun. But it is not like a normal one.

    It mostly looked like a normal one, but the butt of the gun is made differently. There is a few square inches of the rectangr gap in it. He took out a small metallic cylinder from his storage and ced it in the gap. It fit perfectly.

    Apart from that, the Harpoon is also a bit different. The spear tip is a bit different, it looked like it was made by joining several smaller metallic pieces.

    It is like a Lego Spear.

    As he moved around almost as fast as the shark, he dodged its bite once again and aimed at its back, and pulled the trigger.

    The cylinder in the butt of the gun almost shook and a jet of air shot out from a hole behind the butt. But the Spear that shot out has an air jet at its tail end and the cable that should be on the tail end was also there but in a different way. It was a metallic cable and it wrapped and welded around the hollow spear shaft and coiled up almost half of it.

    The Spear is too fast for a normal Nascent to even see. The Shark sensed a threat and wanted to move but it was alreadyte and the spear lodged itself into its back.

    The Shark was surrounded by its own blood that was quickly diffusing into the surrounding water.

    The Spectators felt excited when the Shark was caught. But Sandra and Sagar only have their excitement as they saw the shark is still moving, but Sam didn¡¯t show any change in expression.

    When the Shark wanted forcefully tug away from the Spear, Sam just stood there with the gun in his hands and when everyone thought he would be pulled over, he didn¡¯t budge, not because he is too heavy or too strong.

    After some struggle, the Shark didn¡¯t move an inch. It became extremely still as it was a rock. They didn¡¯t know what happened, because all they say is that there is some extra blood that puffed out of it.

    Sam called for Chatur, who swam to him nervously.

    "Hold the gun like this and don¡¯t even move. Just stay there."

    Sam moved gave him the gun and swam to the Shark. That was roaring in the water. Even though it is not a normal roar that woulde from other beasts, anyone can see its anger.

    Sam just stood there a foot away from it. He is looking straight into the eyes of the beast. He even ced his hand on it. But the shark didn¡¯t move a bit. Sandra and Sagar are shocked.

    They didn¡¯t expect the crazy and ferocious beast a second ago trying to kill him, is not even moving when he ced his hands.

    "I am sorry."

    Sam said in a low voice and moved. He ced his hand on the spear. At the neck of the spear, there is a small metal protrusion and a guideway in which it sat. He pulled the protrusion back and the Shark gave out a low roar.

    After pulling the metallic protrusion back, the spear seemed to have loosened and it came out with just a normal pull.

    When the shark was about to move and attack Sam, he held it with both hands tightly and started healing it. At the same time, he threw out the remaining two pearls in its mouth to supplement the remaining energy, but there is a mark left of the shark¡¯s body. There is arge scar.

    He didn¡¯t know what to say. He never felt bad about killing a beast for its meat, or for any other purpose for that matter, he didn¡¯t want to torture a creature for his own purpose when it has done no wrong to him. He didn¡¯t like the feeling of that and always felt somewhat repulsive.

    Even if it is a human it will not change. He might even feel better if he directly killed them with a single hit, this torture is something he is just against.

    After healing and the pearls are absorbed, the Shark is back to full health except for the loss of blood and energy. The beast looked at Sam ferociously and left. It didn¡¯t attack him, but it is still angry. After all, he did attack him.

    Sam looked at the leaving beast and when he saw the Pre-transcendent stage Merman that brought it here was about to go after it, he blocked his way and said.

    "If you go after it, the next spear will be in your back. He turned to Sandra and said. If you want to have a deal with me, then I want to include the life of that beast in the contract. He lives our partnership lives. If we can agree on that, then we can discuss it further.

    I left a scar that could be seen from the range of this gun. And every time Ie here I will find it. The moment I couldn¡¯t find that guy, you will understand how I can break the contract."

 Chapter 610: Business Deal with Mermen

    Sam and Chatur are sitting across a table with Sagar and Sandra on the other side.

    "Why are you asking for us to guarantee the life of a shark? It is a beast?"

    Sagar asked.

    "I used it to achieve something and I am just returning the favor. I don¡¯t like debts."

    "But that beast wouldn¡¯te to collect it. No one else is going to do that for him."

    "I don¡¯t want my debts paid only when they were asked. That is what I expect from my debtors. So, I cannot preach what I can¡¯t follow. It is more of a personal standard. Are we in or not?"

    "How would you even know if we killed it or not? How would you even know if it is alive or not?"

    "I made my preparations. Every heard of Spiritual Imprints?"

    "The ones that are used on puppets?"

    "Yes, I have been experimenting and increased my expertise recently. Now, I might not know the exact location, but I sure as hell know if it is alive and I do know which direction it is and I will also know when its vitality is reducing. Unless and of course, someone kills it and flees the scene within thirty seconds of its death, you sure as hell can count on me to catch them."

    "It would take more than thirty seconds toe here from Nagin," Sagar said with a smile. For some reason, he is so interested in getting to the bottom of this. Sam looked at him and said.

    "Since you knew about me through Yodha, did he tell you where I am from?"

    "Aren¡¯t you from Nagin?"

    "Not really. I am representing Nagin in the Union dimension that is it. Next time you see Yodha, you ask him how I appeared in Nagin and whatever his answer is, you can be sure that I will appear in the same way on this whenever I want.

    Now, if you want to talk business we can talk further and if you don¡¯t want to, there is nothing we can talk about."

    Then the talks finally went towards the business and the price.

    "A rainbow kelp is not going to be enough for the design and the prototype."

    "Then how can we be sure it is as valuable as you made it out to be, before exining about the core design."

    "Of course, I can exin it to you. But what if you reject the offer and copy the mechanism afterward?"

    Sagar chuckled and said. "I heard you are apetent businessman, but you shouldn¡¯t badmouth the people you want to do a business with."

    "Badmouth? You might not know this, before bing a businessman, I am actually a creator. I make things and due to me being extremely good at that, I got another ability up my sleeve and that is, I can spot a copy when I see it."

    "What do you mean?" Sandra asked with a frown.

    "First shop on the right, third shop on the left. The artisan shops in the volcano street you have taken me. The two artisans in the shop are experts at creating copies, in fact apart from their skill in forging, they only know how to replicate.

    They don¡¯t have a shred of creativity and they work directly under you."

    "Now you are using of us and our artisans."

    Sagar as adamant and his voice turned a little forceful.

    "If you really want to do business with me, you better get a good understanding of me. And don¡¯t ever question my words when I talk about artisans and their craft. My credentials would disagree with that big time.

    And the sooner we agree to that, the sooner we can talk further."

    "What do you want exactly?"

    "I think you are some sort of nobility here, so then use your spiritual signature and your noble seal and write a contract that you wouldn¡¯t copy my design if our deal doesn¡¯t go through after I exin the design."

    Sagar looked at Sam coldly and looked like he is too adamant, but right after that he sighed and agreed.

    Sam smirked and said.

    "If not for the fact I have no ns on developing further in your, we wouldn¡¯t have had to do this."

    "Why?"

    "Because wherever I am, people would be too afraid to copy my things and it doesn¡¯t matter what it is. So, now let me exin you the design.

    The harpoon gun has two main working mechanisms, one of them is the shooting mechanism for which the small metallic cylinder and another machine that I made myself would be required. The small cylinder containspressed air, at extremely high pressure.

    When the trigger is pulled, the air is injected through another nozzle to the shaft of the harpoon and it goes on until the pressure lock is triggered which will make the harpoonunch and pierce into whatever the target is.

    And now, the second mechanism, the harpoon spear tip. It acts like a normal spear tip when it was impaled, but once it stuck and the beast wanted to make the spear get out of its body, the spear tip¡¯s mechanism will be triggered.

    It is a small trap with some strings and small metallic des, both are sharp enough to slice through the flesh of a Level-6 beast or a Nascent stage cultivator and even the pre-transcendent stage cultivators.

    The trap captures something inside the beast as it envelopes either a piece of flesh, an internal organ or bothbined and the second the beast moves, not only would the entrapped part of its body will be sliced meat, the motion of the beast will definitely be impeded and if your soldiers couldn¡¯t catch a beast in such stage, they better not try to catch.

    But that is only the worst case scenario. Because, if the beast has its normal instincts, it wouldn¡¯t move considering the pain that would ur due to a millimeter of its movement."

    Sam exined as he activated each mechanism in ten percent of their strength. Even though, they couldn¡¯t be operated that way in the middle of the battle, it would be done with Sam in the demonstration.

    After exining everything, he said.

    "This is what you are buying. This might not be the best thing I can offer, but I can say that this is the best thing you can get no matter where you go."

    "You are that confident in yourself that nobody can beat your design." Sandra said.

    "If I am not confident in my own skills, I would be too embarrassed to let others see them and I am not just confident, I can bet that no one can beat my design. It is a fact and my design speaks for itself.

    By the way, we are dragging this way too long. This is one of the smallest deals I did and you are taking way too much time. What do you want offer?"

    "Rainbow Kelp and extra two hundred million spirit stones."

    "Rainbow Kelp and five hundred million worth of resources. I don¡¯t need spirit stones, I have too many of them."

    "Whatever resources you could get, but the five hundred million is too big of a number to give you that. I can go upto two hundred and fifty."

    "Four hundred and fifty."

    "Three hundred."

    "Four hundred."

    "Three hundred and fifty."

    "Four hundred and fifty."

    "Four hundred it is." Sagar extended his hand and they agreed on a deal.

    "Now let us talk about the resources you are going to give me."

    "What do you want?"

    Sam went on with a list of materials he wants to get from this. And after he gave them discussed the deal, he stayed the night in the city.

    The next morning, he got ready to leave with Sandra back to the Union dimension.

    Before they separated at the Origin Pce, they shook their hands once again.

    "It is nice making a deal with you. I hope we can work together in the future."

    "I would like that too. I wille to you, if I get a good business n and you cane to me again if you want to make another deal. I can do a lot more than designing a weapon."

    "I will hold you for that."

    After that brief farewell, they went in their own ways. In the one day, they were absent, a lot has changed in the Union dimension and they knew about it as soon as they arrived at the Nagin Castle.

    The vos¡¯ specialmander has made his first move and that is against a resource point, he lost a lot of individual members. Around sixty of them for that victory and this caused another political friction between themanders as the specialmanders of other nations tried use theirmanders to beat him down by a notch.

    The worst part is that the resource point is not in their handspletely. Even though it is there, the Union sect has already sent troops to that ce and they are now attacking.

 Chapter 611: Mess

    Sam didn¡¯t want to bother with this vos guy at all, but it turned out that he has to. Because no one is daring to take care of this situation and the movement of the Union sect became heated.

    They are moving their troops on arge scale and the attack on the Nagin Castle¡¯s resource points and bases intensified. In the main castle, there are only three squads and around three hundred individual members left.

    The four remaining specialmanders are moving to different locations or already there as he spoke to the Mov Empire¡¯s normalmander who is in charge of the defense at the main base.

    "What made them go on to this situation?" Sam asked calmly.

    "It is good that you asked. You are half of the reason."

    "Me? I am not even here yesterday."

    "Who is talking about Yesterday? It is your continuous attacks. You killed four hundred of the enemy troops and did that so fast and one-sided that they got so pissed and they are now taking out on all of us."

    Sam chuckled at the response.

    "Do you think this is funny? You put the whole castle in jeopardy because you are too focused on your personal gain and glory."

    "Glory? For what? ying house with you guys. You can keep it all to yourself. Do you think I am like the rest of you? Don¡¯t just judge me with your personal standards. Because mine are way out of your league."

    "If not for glory then what are you here for?"

    "That is way above your pay-grade."

    Sam left the room after saying those words. Chatur followed him and asked with worry.

    "What are we going to do? They will put all the me on us."

    "Us?" Sam asked with a smile.

    "Even though my contribution is minimal, I am already in the same boat as you. So, it is ¡¯us¡¯ and both of us can¡¯t change it."

    "Well, you are right about that. But they can¡¯t do anything to us. I am the one who made sure that there wouldn¡¯t be any more attacks immediately. The sect did send the troops, but they didn¡¯t attack. Because they are confused. The person in charge didn¡¯t dare to make rash moves.

    Because, even if they really did get the information about me doing all I did, they would more cautious than enraged. A single variable being that big of trouble. A smart person wouldn¡¯t want to do anything rash until they figured out a way to eliminate or iste that variable.

    Something else triggered all this mess. Something happened when we are away and the mess is way too big than we want it to be.

    How about trying to get some information. There is still three days to the Volcanic Cannon. We will wait here until now, you try to gather as much info as you can and we decide how to proceed. Until then there is no need to make a move in this war. Let them sh all they want.

    Chaturplied and left. Sam doesn¡¯t know how he gets his things done, but he does get his things done and that too in an efficient way.

    Sam stayed two days in the Castle, but all he did is try to create his new gadget cum garment he is making with the Blood mutant scales. Even though its quality wouldn¡¯t be anywhere near as the feather-coat or the harbinger, this takes a lot of time, due to the features he is going to ce on that thing.

    He worked in the divine dimension and roamed around as he tasted some beasts nearby to see if he can get any new additions to his farm or even new additions to his army.

    And he did find some options, like the rabbit-type beasts nearby, except each rabbit is of the same size as a normal deer and there is a chance that it could grow even more. He caught some and threw it into the form and let Ape take care of them.

    He spent his time like that for the next two days and Chatur came back with the information. But it is notplete. Because they couldn¡¯t find the exact trigger that leads to this situation in a single day.

    But they do know how big the mess is. Every ce is a deadlock. Every resource point, weekly or monthly, and even the random resource points. Everything was marked and targeted including the bases. Some of the bases are already taken out.

    This is too much damage and the situation is worse than he thought.

    While he is thinking about where to start to make his move, another person from Mov empire came running to him.

    "I am here bearing the message from the Emperor." He didn¡¯t even bother to introduce himself as he showed a scroll. The same one he got every time he got a message from the pce.

    He took the scroll and read it right there and when he saw the contents he couldn¡¯t help but feel frustrated.

    Chatur who is standing beside him was extremely curious and tried his best to take a peek through his peripheral vision.

    "Don¡¯t try so hard. You can read it directly." Sam said and passed it to him before looking at the messenger.

    "Tell them, I will take it. But make sure you mention one thing. He owes me for this separately."

    "Are you sure you want me to deliver such an impudent message to the Emperor?" The messenger asked coldly.

    "Why? You got a problem doing your duty? I am already pissed by that message, you better not provoke me now and I am pretty sure that the emperor wouldn¡¯t mind some coteral damage in exchange for the part of his debt he will owe me."

    With that, he didn¡¯t even bother and said to Chatur.

    "Is the information you gave me is the only information you have on that spot? Did you leave any minor details?"

    "No. But are you sure you want to do this? I know you can make a great amount of damage with the guns, but this squad ispletely different.

    This is the Elite Canine squad we are talking about and their top fifteen are something to be wary of. They wouldn¡¯t certainly be easy victims of the guns. They are elites of the elites."

    "But what can I do? That vos specialmander happened to be an imperial family member. The Emperor of vos is his uncle and do you know what that makes him?"

    "He is also a nephew of the Mov Empress, who is the sister of the vos emperor."

    "And you have seen the message, we have to save him right away. If he dies, the consequences are something Mov cannot handle and that would disrupt my expansion ns.

    Why don¡¯t you take out everything you have about that resource point?"

    This is the third weekly resource point Sam wanted to take back from the sect and this vos guy beat him to it, but the sect pulled one over this guy and surrounded the resource point with their troops. If not for the fact, they came after Nagin Castle sent the reinforcement to secure the castle, the troops would have dealt with them easily.

    Now, they are using the terrain that was at least giving them the advantage to keep themselves alive.

    And Sam doesn¡¯t know how these guys held up for three days against the elite squad when they lost around sixty to seventy people against the squad that stood defense.

    If the squad is really as elite as he heard them be, then there shouldn¡¯t be any form of a problem to wipe the floor with them.

    He felt like he is missing something. But he couldn¡¯t pinpoint it. But he doesn¡¯t have time to think of it and started his journey.

    The next resource point is a small hill and has a t peak with a tree on it.

    The tree gives a fruit every week and it is kind of weird because every time, the fruit differs. Sometimes, it is water, sometimes it is fire and sometimes it is lightning. The element changes and it doesn¡¯t aid in cultivation. It increases the energy control and efficiency of the techniques.

    For all its worth, the fruit is useful for everyone and anyone who uses spiritual energy.

    But the hill is full of trees and caves and holes all over it and they can hide properly and easily. The only problem is that now the hill ispletely surrounded.

    From all the sides.

    They traveled for four hours and reached there by thete afternoon. But he didn¡¯t reach the ce directly, they took a high vantage point and looked over.

    From the side he could see, there are tents all over, and at that exact moment, a few groups are returning from the hill. They have various beast mounts. All of them are canines and they are foxes, wolves, bears, hyenas, etc.

    But what surprised him is the things that these mounts are dragging down with them.

    They are corpses. Corpses of the Nagin castle members.

 Chapter 612: Canine Squad

    Sam instantly understood what is happening. They are ying with the people on the hill. The Canine squad with around one hundred and fifty members and one hundred and fifty beasts is truly as elite as they said and they might be even better as they are rxed enough to y around like this.

    He couldn¡¯t hear what they are saying from that far, but what he can understand is that they are counting the number of corpses each of them brought and they are giving spirit stones to the one who has the most corpses.

    He didn¡¯t expect that he would see something like this. The situation is a lot more serious and fishy than he had thought.

    "What are we going to do?" Chatur asked from the side.

    "First, do you like any of those beasts there?"

    "What?"

    "I did say that I would pay yourmission to you for the deal. Two percent is around fourteen million spirit stones. I can give you in spirit stones if you want to, but I can substitute that with any of those beasts. They might be pricey, but trust me I am okay with that."

    "Are you sure you want to talk a deal with me at a time like this?"

    "If you think that something like this cannot make me stop making deals, then you are mistaken. This is just a gang of guys with a bunch of canines."

    "Damn it, you are really underestimating the Canine squad. They are called the Alpha Canine squad and every beast is trained along with the squad members since their birth. They eat, drink and shit together for years."

    "Where did they get so many beasts?"

    "They collect them from all thes."

    "So, have you decided on what kind of beast you want?"

    Chatur didn¡¯t even say anything anymore. Sam looked at him and said.

    "Don¡¯t get worked up. What you said is right, the canines are great beasts, they are loyal than any other type of beasts and they are as good as theye. But their instincts are too urate."

    "How can that help us? If their instincts are too urate, then isn¡¯t that another disadvantage for us?"

    "You will know soon enough, how that is going to help us. You watch all of this from a safe distance, we will leave this ce after I am done with them. Tomorrow is the day, the Volcanic cannon activates and I am not missing it."

    With that, Sam jumped off of the tree and took out the harbinger in the middle of the fall, and zoomed towards the hill.

    The hill is more like arge mound than a hill. It is not too tall and they can even see the peak from the ground. And one hundred and fifty members are more than enough to block all the routes at the foot of the hill.

    When they saw Sam is approaching, they already started moving. This side of the hill has around thirty members at this point and all of them stood there and all their beasts lined up in front of them.

    A guy who is standing in the center howled augh out and said.

    "Herees the hunter who is going to be the prey. Sam from Nagin Castle."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply, he has a faint hunch because of that statement, that this whole thing is a setup.

    "Are you going to hurry up or not? That flower boy from the vos wouldn¡¯t make it if you don¡¯t." That man once again bellowed with a sneer.

    Sam raised an eyebrow because, from the report they received, they didn¡¯t capture him by now. But the situation seems a bit different here.

    "You know, our top fifteen guys are ying inside. They want to see who can catch that flower body first on the hill and whoever catches wins. We are waiting for the game to be over while helping them cleaning the remaining squad members up. If you go in there, the game would be more interesting."

    "So, you started a game like this just to y with me?"

    "You catch on pretty fast."

    "Just make the way then, I will go in and see what your top fifteen has got."

    "How is it going to be that easy? We heard you are a badass. Four hundred members from the sect. You did some serious damage.

    What do you think will happen, if they are dealt with you so easily? and there would be no reason for us to wait here.

    We are here to lend them a hand."

    They immediately surrounded. Sam could escape easily with the Harbinger. But he didn¡¯t do that.

    He already nned to bag all the beasts for himself and he is going to do it. With a wave of his hand, the Owls he captured came out along with Sky.

    They might not be under his direct control, but Sky can control them. At least, the forty of them came out without any problem.

    At the same time, Raiju came out and Sam released his beast aura and the killing intent on a full scale.

    The canines that are walking towards him all stopped in their tracks.

    The enemies all looked tense for a second. They couldn¡¯t guess why they stopped and they tried to urge them on.

    But they didn¡¯t do. All they did is look at Sam, Raiju, and the owls while growling. There are hesitation and fear in their eyes. But they don¡¯t want to take a step forward either. The only thing that is keeping them in the ce because they are loyal to theirpanions.

    Sam looked at the group and said.

    "I love Canines, they are greatpanions and honorable beasts. But do you want me to tell you something else you might not know about them?

    They are so loyal that they would do anything to save theirpanions and that is even if they have to face a bigger and more dangerous threat they can handle and even if they have to drag you away to run away from the threat, that they are sure will bring you the death."

    As soon as he said those words, Raiju howled and lightning crackled all over. All the canine beasts immediately ran to their masters and tried to bite into their clothes and drag them away.

    When the cultivators saw this, they became furious and tried to force the beasts with their mental contracts. Some of them surrendered and wanted to go against Sam and turned around and some of them didn¡¯t but suffered the bacsh of the contract.

    Sam looked at the beasts that have watery eyes as he took the reaper sword. He couldn¡¯t help butment a bit. After all, for these beasts that grew up with these people from infancy, their masters are everything, but for them, they are just meat shields, a prized possession.

    He looked at the beasts and said.

    "Is this all your loyalty worth?"

    With a singlemand, the owls went on to attack. They didn¡¯t go after the beasts and went against the cultivators directly. Even then, the beasts didn¡¯t let them, they tried their best to defend, but Sam and Raiju are not there for nothing.

    They pinned the beasts as much as they can without attacking them and finished off the people directly.

    The battle didn¡¯t take long, because the odds are clearly against the squad. After finishing his off, all the beasts are weakened due to the contract bacsh. But they are standing and growling at Sam.

    Sam shook his head and thought. I never thought I had to exin myself to beasts.

    "I get it you are angry. But the first thing they did when they fell into danger is to use you as their meat shield. I don¡¯t say I am a saint, but that loyalty felt unrewarded even for a cold-blooded guy like me.

    I won¡¯t force you guys toe and join me, but don¡¯te at me just to lose your lives, it is not worth it. Before you decide, let me heal you first."

    By this time, Chatur also came here to see the situation and Sam gave him potions and even some diluted heavenly wine.

    Even though it is not a great thing for the beasts to drink alcohol, this is the only thing he has on his hands that could heal the body and soul at the same time.

    After treating them all, some of the beasts left but most of them chose to stay. Sam let them all in the Divine dimension to join themunity there and went forward.

    He didn¡¯t go on to the hill but repeated the same thing he did here around the hill and cleaned all the people guarding the entrance for the top fifteen who prepared the yground for Sam toe and y.

    Now that he is done with them, he started moving on to the hill and at the same time thinking of who to capture to get some answers. Because from what he saw, this is clearly a setup for Sam and he would like to get to the bottom of this.

 Chapter 613: Dealing with Canine squad

    On the hill inside a cave, fifteen people gathered together with the vos empire¡¯s specialmander tied up.

    Out of these fifteen, five of them are Nagas, five Yakshas and the other five are human. They all gathered here to discuss what their n is.

    They believed that their squad would handle Sam and deal with him. Even though they don¡¯t know if they can kill him, they are sure they could wear him out. That is the n from the start. The squad members only have this job to do.

    They have to grind Sam a bit and escape if he is really as strong as the information they got said. But what they didn¡¯t know is that their squad disappeared and they even did Sam a favor by separating into smaller groups all over the hill.

    Even though the fifteen of them heard the cries and howls of the beasts, they didn¡¯t think they are all dead. Other squads might have been wiped out, but they didn¡¯t believe the canine squad is the same. They have the utmost confidence that they can win this and Sam would definitely be worn down.

    But what they don¡¯t know is, Sam and Raiju areing inside the hill and are trying to search for the cave they are in.

    He doesn¡¯t have a way to find out the exact location immediately though. All he could do is use his energy vision and try to search all over the ce. Chatur is following him after he concealed himself. He might be nervous, but he didn¡¯t dare to stay too far away from Sam.

    Because he is afraid that a canine might smell him out of his concealment and if he is alone he would die. If he is with Sam, at least he is guaranteed that he would be safe and have a greater odds to fight back.

    At this moment, he is walking with the grenade in his hands.

    And he is extremely nervous.

    After some time, Sam looked at Raiju and suddenly remembered something. He let the shadow mice out.

    Since there is no miasma here, he can just let the shadow mice handle the scouting and searching. He doesn¡¯t have to worry about this too much.

    After an hour, the results came.

    Sam followed the shadow mice and arrived at an area. There are fifteen beasts lined up near the cave and he could see another sixteen energy signatures inside the cave.

    He knew he came to the right ce. He also noticed there is a formation arranged around the cave.

    He doesn¡¯t know which formation it is and from the looks of it, it seems like an illusion formation. But he didn¡¯t worry. His eye technique might not be the best in the universe and might not be able to see through everything and anything.

    But this level of formation is quite easy to ovee.

    "Stay here, there is an illusion formation there. You wouldn¡¯t be able to survive in that with the beasts around.

    The canines have too good of a sense of smell and they would easily catch you within the illusions. Just stay here and wait for my signal.

    When I give you a signal, just throw the grenades at these ces."

    As he said that, he pointed at different spots within the area.

    With that, he and Raiju walked towards the cave without any hesitation, and the beasts outside already started growling as they looked at them.

    There are two wolves, two bears, three foxes, two hyenas, four hounds, and two Jackals. Although, they have different elements those are the species that are there.

    When Raiju and Sam entered the formation they growled and howled making the fifteen memberse out.

    They looked at Sam and smirked. Because, at this moment, Sam¡¯s face is showing an expression of fatigue and he looked ragged.

    "You seemed to have met the weing parade we arranged for you."

    "Of course, I did."

    "Then that means, you are now here to serve yourself on a silver tter and your beast looks good. Maybe it will be a good addition to our team."

    Raiju seemed to have been infuriated and growled with all its fangs showing out. Sam patted its back as he said.

    "Don¡¯t say things like that, if he goes out of control you will wish for an easy death."

    "Well, we can say the same to you and our statement will be much more valuable. Because, if anyone is dying that would be you."

    With that one of them activated the formation and all Sam could see is endless darkness around him.

    Apart from Raiju, he couldn¡¯t see anything.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "Do what you want, just don¡¯t go to the areas I pointed out and you are okay. As for the beasts, just let them stay if you don¡¯t mind. If you cannot then so be it. But don¡¯t suppress them with your aura yet. I want to see what this formation could do."

    Sam said and patted him again. He jumped into action after nodding to Sam¡¯s words. Sam didn¡¯t activate his eye technique immediately to see what this formation is all about. Everything is a learning opportunity and he didn¡¯t see a formation like this before.

    All of a sudden he felt a sense of threat and ducked forward. He could feel something brushing past his hair and it felt like the w of a beast.

    He raised an eyebrow and once again dodged to the side. He felt another sensation on the feather coat.

    He concentrated on his senses and continued dodging. He could see Raiju is holding something in his mouth and smashing another thing with his legs. He didn¡¯t seem to be in trouble as blood spilled on his silver fur and for sure he knew that the blood is not his.

    Sam understood immediately. The formation is made for the beasts. Particrly these canines that pride themselves in their sense of smell. They are using that sense to attack while all victim¡¯s senses are dulled.

    As for the cultivators, they still didn¡¯t make a move. If Sam¡¯s guess is right, then he must not have been in the formation at all. Because from what he could see the formation doesn¡¯t have exception making arrangements for someone to enter and leave it without affecting them.

    So, they would be standing outside and will only make their move after their beasts couldn¡¯t anymore.

    Sam didn¡¯t care much, because he is not as exhausted as he looked. He just made himself look like that to trick those guys, since he knew for certain that this is a n.

    He yed for a while and after checking everything he can about the formation with and without the eye technique, he whistled loudly and Raiju howled loudly along with him.

    While the fifteen members out felt like something is wrong, they saw the fifteen beasts inside the formation suddenly prostrate themselves on the ground. They didn¡¯t dare to make any further move. At the same time, a series of explosions urred around the cave.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    With the explosions, the formation immediately disappeared and Sam took out his staff as lightning energy surged through him. He didn¡¯t go after the beasts, that is Raiju¡¯s domain and he went after the cultivators.

    When they saw the two of them bing active and their beasts bing passive, they immediately called their beasts back, but not for saving them. Instead, they fed some pills to the beasts, even though they are clearly unwilling to do so.

    Their eyes turned blood red and their fur stood straight as they looked at Sam and Raiju with lots of bloodlust.

    Sam frowned and looked at the cultivators who also took another type of pills and their auras skyrocketed.

    He looked at them quickly surrounding him. Sam turned on partial fusion with a lightning element and moved like a silver sh as he mmed his staff in the opponent right in front of him.

    Lightning passed through the opponent¡¯s body as he copsed to the ground immediately with a tear on his shoulder along with the flesh being charred ck.

    He didn¡¯t n to entertain them with too much time and effort as he attacked at full strength. Half of them died within two hits and the rest survived albeit barely. Even though, he is outnumbered he is dominating the fight easily.

    He didn¡¯t hesitate to kill all of them, but left the leader alone, while Raiju also finished suppressed the beasts. They have missing limbs and deep bites all over along with the lightning char all over their fur.

    Raiju got some scars on his body with bloodpletely coating his fur from silver to red.

    He called him back and sent him into the divine dimension, while he examined the beasts, four of them died as they couldn¡¯t take the attacks, as for the rest, their bodies arepletely rattled inside and the internal organs seemed to have been in deep trouble.

    The pill made work on them. He tried his best to give them initial aid and sent them inside the divine dimension while instructing ape to take care of them give medicine and herbs timely to heal them back to normal condition.

 Chapter 614: Bigger plot

    Sam is sitting inside the cave as he looked at the leader of the canine squad. The battlefield is cleaned up and Chatur is sorting out the items from the Spatial rings to see if he can find any items inside that would give some information.

    But there is nothing inside and now he is looking at the leader to see if he could cough up. He still didn¡¯t start the interrogation as he just asked him casually.

    "I am not saying shit. Kill me if you can."

    The leader said with a cold tone, because Sam actually restrained his cultivation to prevent him frommitting suicide.

    "I will give you some time to think things through. If you don¡¯t make the correct decision, then you will regret it."

    He then walked to the vos empire¡¯s specialmander who is eating some meat Sam gave him.

    His cultivation was restrained for two days and he didn¡¯t get a chance to cultivate and replenish his energy. The fastest and easiest way to do that is to consume food with spiritual energy.

    "Thank you once again for saving me. When can we go back?"

    "Not at the moment. I need to know some things. First, tell me who gave you the idea toe here or what made you to attack this resource point."

    That guy seemed to be offended and said.

    "What do you mean by who gave me this idea? I thought it all myself and why are you asking that? Is it because only you can attack and take back the resource point?"

    Sam became incensed and there is no change of expression. He looked at the guy dead in the eyes and said coldly.

    "I am not ready to deal with your ungrateful crap at this moment. Remember one thing, I saved you ass and I can take that sorry life of yours if I want to. All I have to say is that you are already dead before I came here and I will make that leader confess that one way or the other. Do you believe that I can do that?"

    "How dare you threaten me? I will..." Before he could finish his words, Sam immediately pped him straight on his face and mmed his head into the cave walls.

    "One more word and that too about your imperial family crap, I will skin you alive. Just answer the question."

    With that he let go of him and asked one more time.

    "Why did you attack this ce?"

    "I got a tip from Sectum¡¯s team. He got intelligence that defense of this ce is weakened because of some issue that happened in the sect. He is nning to make a move on this ce. But I decided to make a move to beat him to it."

    Sam looked at Chatur and asked.

    "Who is sectum?"

    "The Specialmander from Rubrum empire."

    Sam frowned.

    "Any survivors from the squad?" He asked once again and Chatur only shook his head.

    "Then how did the information get to the Nagin castle that he is holding up continuously. It is one thing for the information toe and every time it came it is wrong information. Who gave the information to Castle these three days?"

    Sam muttered o himself and Chatur also realized something is really fishy at the moment.

    "I want to know who brought the news to the castle." Sam said seriously.

    "It will take time, I need to go to the castle ande back."

    "How much?"

    "Eight hours."

    Sam thought for a moment and waved his hand.

    Raiju came out and Sam said to him.

    "Activate lightning fusion and move as fast as you can."

    He then threw the gourd of wine to Chatur and said.

    "Feed him some whenever he got tired and directly go the Volcanic cannon. Tomorrow morning it is giving out something and I am going to miss it. Tell them this guy is safe, but I am not sending him back immediately."

    Sam then sat down before the Canine team leader. He is a Naga and he is in his battle form. He took out a dagger and held his tail in his hand as he coldly said.

    "I am only asking you onest time, how did you guys set this trap up and what is your exact n. Someone from inside is with you and I want an honest answer."

    "Or what?"

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and shed on his tail, the scales left the skin and showed the flesh of his tail.

    "AHHHHHHHHHH.."

    Sam didn¡¯t stop even when the cave resounded with the screams, he started peeling the scales off of the tail as if he is peeling the vegetables.

    There is not even change of expression on his face.

    The cave resounded with screams for over an hour before that person broke and said.

    "Its sectum. He is the guy who made a deal with our Boss. He sold you out."

    "And?"

    "He gave the information that you are the one who attacked the two resource points and the base and he also gave all your personal information regarding your rtion with the Mov empire and Yodha.

    His n is that he would lure this guy here and make sure that news reaches the castle and the outside world. In this ce, you are the only one capable of freeing him and ensure his life.

    But he also gave us the news that you are going to the Mermen.

    So, we picked that day to hatch out the n. He will send this guy to this ce by feeding him some bullshit and then we lock him up and blow up the war to create a deadlock situation so that no one would pay attention to this ce.

    You wille here and we kill you, then Sectum will make the Nagin castle lose this war and leave half of its resource points and will also support Union sect when a new resource point appears in the dimension.

    He will gain most merit and also use you two and me you both for triggering the war and causing to lose half the area and will make your empires pay the price while you two will die in the hands of the sect."

    "What else?"

    Sam asked as soon as he stopped.

    "There is nothing more."

    Sam peeled another scale making him scream.

    "Do you think I am an idiot? If both of us are going to die here, you wouldn¡¯t make let him live all this while. Particrly, when you guys are manipting the information that came to the castle anyway, there is no need for you to keep him alive until I came.

    You could have killed him and went on bullshitting the information and when I get back, you can kill me. Now, are you going to tell me the information or not?"

    Sam was about to move his dagger once more, but he already gave in.

    "The Union sect wants to start a civil war in the Nagin castle. When the fight broke out with you, we are going to kill you but not here, we will be killing you after taking you far away from this cave and at that time, ¡¯coincidentally¡¯ his restrictions would be going off and he would ¡¯find¡¯ his spatial ring that we already took at the entrance of the cave.

    Inside that there is a recording crystal of Sectum and our boss¡¯ conversation, then the management would be split and they will fight amongst themselves and we will proceed with defeating them and take all the resource points in a single sweep."

    Sam threw the dagger straight into his throat and killed him after he got his information. He checked the cave and found the spatial ring they nted and looked for the recording crystal.

    He took the guy from vos and asked.

    "What¡¯s your name?"

    "Yogesh." He is still afraid of Sam and said it in a calm voice.

    "Look, I am going to send you back to the Origin castle and you are going back. Don¡¯te back anymore until Ie out of this goddamn ce. Because the shit is about to go crazy and the situation is going to turn extremely wild and chaotic.

    If you do the same stupid shit you do and they try to attack me once again using you, I would kill you first before I do them. So, if I see you back here again before I leave."

    After that he took out another recording crystal that could copy stuff and gave it to him before saying.

    "Give one to vos emperor and give one to Mov emperor. Don¡¯t forget. This is a matter of national importance and if you don¡¯t do that, you will bear the responsibility for whatever that falls on us."

    All this while, he kept nodding his head.

    Sam then brought him to the origin castle and sent him away. Before leaving to Volcanic cannon as he thought about the scheme the union sect yed.

    At a nce it looked like something that aimed at Nagin castle, but he has a hunch that it is mostly aimed at the empires themselves and he hoped his hunch was wrong, because he is not really much interested in another which he has to train newbie soldiers and had to defend his business at the same time.

    He has his hands full at this moment.

 Chapter 615: Recruiting Chatur

    Sam doesn¡¯t know if he is being paranoid or not. But he felt that there is more to the story than what meets the eye.

    Even if the sect really only wanted to cause the civil war within the dimension, there is no way the perpetrator who is smart enough to orchestrate all this doesn¡¯t know that it would cause a war between the nations themselves.

    The thing that is bothering him most is that he is being used without even his knowledge and they almost seeded.

    He would collect his debts no matter what.

    But before that, he should receive some rewards for all the effort he put in the past week.

    When he reached the Volcanic cannon, there are many people already there. This is the only ce where the war deadlock didn¡¯t reach the resource point itself.

    Due to Sam¡¯s arrangement through which he called for squad earlier and maintain the defense the war here is not as intense as in other ces.

    The same goes for Pearlke and as for the Bamboo forest, Sam is not too interested in that ce. Even though the water tasted good, it is not extremely useful for him. At most, it would be some expensive water for him to drink.

    At the Volcanic cannon, Chatur is already waiting for him along with Raiju.

    It is nearly midnight. They immediately went to a tent Chatur already set up and started discussing the information.

    "The rubrum emperor¡¯smander is in charge of the intelligence. He only took charge for a week and his subordinates are the ones who brought the news from the hill."

    "Subordinates? You mean it is not a single person who carried the news?"

    "No, for the three days the updates of the battle are brought by three different people. All three of them are supposedly stationed at three different ces near the hill and all three people gave reports of three different supposedly happened battles which didn¡¯t happen at all."

    "Where are they now?"

    "They were rewarded for their ¡¯merit¡¯ and because you took over the rescue into your hands, they were assigned to another ce and all three ces are farthest from the Nagin castle."

    "What do you know about the factions of the Rubrum empire within the Nagin Castle?"

    "They are tightknit. Everyone from the Rubrum empire, might be human, Naga, or half-Naga. But they will only join a squad that is fully under the control of the Rubrum empire.

    They wouldn¡¯t take in outsiders. There are some exceptions and the main requirement is that the person shouldn¡¯t have any affiliation with the other nations¡¯ forces. He should be a lone wolf, without any form of link with any other faction.

    But the individual members of the rubrum empire will try to get in touch with other squads and factions to get information and sell it to the top dogs of their faction to get into squads.

    Even though, the rest of the castle members knew that they can do little about that. They are not selling the information on the families and such, at most they will be able to get the information on the resource points or other ces where some gains could be obtained.

    This happens all the time and all the factions try to pull this, but these people do it more. Apart from that, there is nothing abnormal about them.

    I don¡¯t know much about Sectum, but the normalmander from the Rubrum empire is his brother and his name Salvan. He is scheming. I don¡¯t know how he got his hands on the head of intelligence position, but he did.

    He is the one who got more gains than all the fivemanders. He has a pretty goodwork in the dimension and has contacts with other races and other castles."

    Sam thought for a moment and looked at chatur before saying.

    "I have an important matter for you to do. But before that, I want to know the exact truth of who you are what your situation is."

    "Didn¡¯t I tell you all that before?" Chatur sounded a bit nervous.

    "I know you are hiding something and I didn¡¯t bother to call that off, because I couldn¡¯t bother to mind your business. But now, someone is trying to dig a grave for me, I cannot afford that.

    You either tell me what is it or you can go away."

    Chatur stayed silent for a moment and said.

    "I didn¡¯t like. I was really cast aside because of myck ofbat prowess and I have a rtively useless ability only painting can bring out.

    My spiritual core is a little different. I have an affinity with the water elements, but I cannot use it much for an attack because the amount of water I conjure with spiritual energy is extremely small and not dense enough.

    But that is not even the main problem. My body ispletely against the cirction of energy in the form of those attacks and if that is not enough, I have a weird ability I discovered when I started learning painting to let go of the stress.

    If I use my ability and energy to draw something, it gains sentience for a short amount of time."

    He paused and took out his brush as he drew in the air with his brush, his spiritual energy started conjuring into the water and the water changed color before forming a bird in the air.

    The bird started flying around Sam.

    "I could control it, but I cannot make it attack. Even if I ask it to crash into the wall, the attack power is not being enough. The only good thing is, it doesn¡¯t need too much energy and as long as it stays sentient, it absorbs the energy from the surroundings and stays in shape. My energy consumption will be reduced.

    All I can do is scout a bit and gather information. As forbat, there is nothing I could do.

    Added with the fact that I am the bastard son of my family and that too a family full of soldiers, my father is just a bit away from kicking me out. I couldn¡¯t do anything. Even the entry to this ce was because of the noble blood in my body.

    My brother who is the current Mov Empiremander made sure that I couldn¡¯t get the recognition for my skills and I am being suppressed and he has no intention of letting you take all the glory. But I heard about you, a lot actually and I wanted to use this opportunity to put my skills to us.

    As you have seen, I might be useless inbat. But I am good at many other things. I can make connections, draw maps, and create architectural designs. I wanted to use you to get some recognition and fall in the eye of someone who can put my skills to use. That is it. Apart from that, I don¡¯t have any other intention."

    Sam once again went into deep thought.

    "I believe you. At least, most of it. Then I can offer you something.

    Help me for the next few months. You will use all your means to finish the tasks. I might not be able to rmend to you someone who can use your abilities. But, if you want you can work with me. Not only will I teach you how to use your ability properly, but I will also teach you how to attack and defend with it.

    You really don¡¯t understand what your ability can do. You are no defective, in fact, you have a gift many people can only dream about. But there is a catch."

    "What is it?" He sounded extremely hopeful.

    "I need you to take this pill." Sam took out the Pill of servitude.

    Chatur looked at him with a puzzled expression.

    "It is not that I don¡¯t trust you Chatur. But I cannot take a chance. You will know exactly what is it stake for me. I cannot let someone who I cannot trust with my life stay around me. There are a lot of lives depending on me and I cannot gamble them all away.

    I built everything I have on my own, if one day you were in a rock and hard ce and decided to give up on me, it wouldn¡¯t be just me who will be in jeopardy. In fact, I am confident I can save myself, but all that I built will be lostpletely. I don¡¯t think I can afford that gamble with just your word.

    You can think it over and answer me. If you don¡¯t want to do that, I can just contact someone within the military, but you will be stuck on this. I can take you out of Naga Loka.

    You can see the other world. Think it over."

    Before he could finish his words, he already took the pill and threw it in his mouth. Sam smiled and said.

    "From today onwards, you don¡¯t have to worry about going unnoticed. You will leave a mark of yours in this world, that the generations will never dare to forget."

 Chapter 616: Union Sects Plan

    The next day, Sam is waiting for the volcanic cannon to shoot the resource out and so did everybody else from Nagin castle and there are also some mermen here who want to give it a try.

    This is a part of a deal with the Mermen. Sam already sent a message to Nagin castle that he would be iming the next resource, but they didn¡¯t seem to listen, but he didn¡¯t care much.

    All he has to do is catch whateveres without giving others a chance.

    Everyone who wants to participate is on the flying beasts and got ready to move as soon as the volcano spits out the item.

    They could feel the energy surging from the volcano and Sam also got ready. But he didn¡¯t take Sky or Yanwu. He just stood there waiting for it tounch.

    In a few minutes, a red glowing orb was spat out of the Volcano high in the sky and Sam made his move, he took out the harbinger and moved like a sh as he increased his altitude along with the steep volcano. The rest of the participants also followed, but the beasts are nowhere near as fast as a harbinger and they couldn¡¯t keep up.

    Samunched himself to the top and raised his altitude as much as he can with the volcano as his base and caught the falling red orb.

    As soon as the orb touched his hands, it popped like a balloon, and a red-colored transparent crystal bottle with a crystal cork and full of a liquid that seemed to have contained a lot of fire elemental energy was in his hands.

    Along with that, there is a string of data in his head.

    The name made him surprised.

    "Firebird Blood essence."

    Firebird is one of the beasts that have a good enough bloodline. Even though it is not as great as the top rate beasts, it is still much better considering the Naga Loka.

    But the only disappointing thing is the next string of data. The firebird the blood essence extracted from is just a Pre-transcendent one. At least, it will still be helpful for Yanwu.

    He stored it away and started slowly reduced his altitude. Some of the participants are catching up and ady didn¡¯t even bother to halt as she directly attacked. Sam just dodged and passed through the gaps like water passing through aplex ridge and already went out of the encirclement before they could understand what is happening.

    He looked at them and waved goodbye as stored the Harbinger and let Sky out and picked up Chatur before flying towards Pearl Lake.

    The next day, it is going to give out the pearl and Sam is not missing that. Not after the number of spirit stones, he invested in it.

    But when he reached he saw many people already waiting there for the pearl.

    The squad members clearly saw loads of spirit stones and they also felt that something is up with theke and they reported back to the castle after Sam left. Some top dogs within the castle made time out of this war situation and came here to see what they can get.

    But when Sam came, they are having conflicting thoughts. He looked at everyone and said with a cold smile.

    "I already said, I will break the legs of everyone who tries to get a piece of it. Thiske is mine for as long as I stay within the Union dimension. You know what? I am iming thiske to myself. Get lost everyone."

    "You can¡¯t do that. This is the property of Nagin Castle and everyone here is as entitled as you with an equal right to share this resource point." One of the Nagas from the Rubrum empire yelled.

    "The ce was the property of the Union sect when they took it over and I and I alone took it back from them. At first, I only wanted to have it for a few weeks. But what can I do, you ungrateful assholes got greedy and now you want to get a share of it, I am taking it all. Get the fuck out before I make you go away.

    But don¡¯t expect me to pull punches. I may not stop at the legs,"

    He made his point and went to the bank of theke and Chatur started making the tent and started the barbeque.

    Sam sat on the bank of theke and ced his legs into the water to rx a bit. The peal would be ready by the next day.

    He stayed there like that and the remaining people who wanted to try their hand left the ce after considering the war situation and Sam¡¯s ruthlessness. He killed too many people and if he killed them here and med it on the Union sect, there is no one who could trace it back to them.

    The next day, the Oyster opened and Sam took out the pearl. Compared to the previous one, this pearl has a lot more spiritual energy and this can actually be used for the cultivation of a Nascent stage cultivator.

    Chatur who is standing not so far away could also feel the spiritual energy emitting from the pearl. It has the spiritual energy of a hundred thousand spirit stones.

    Even though, that much spiritual energy could only be used for some partial development of a person¡¯s cultivation within the Nascent stage and could provide assistance in breaking through the sub-stages. This pearl is different.

    It has a hundred percent absorption rate and it can easily be used to break through a level, at least within the middle-stage.

    But Sam doesn¡¯t have that much of a luxury, because the energy would be shared by all of his beasts and himself. He can devour four to five of them in session and he still might not have a breakthrough and he is not even looking for one.

    He could like to stay at this same level for another few months.

    He threw the pearl to Chatur and said.

    "Take this as your first sry for the past week. I don¡¯t need it."

    Chatur held the pearl-like it was a hot potato and was about to reject it, but Sam didn¡¯t seem to care at all and waved his hand gesturing him to keep his mouth shut.

    Sam wanted to experiment a little more and this time, he threw water elemental stones inside theke and looked at Chatur.

    "Find out which ce has a most chaotic situation. The news of that flower boy from vos leaving safely and me rescuing would have already reached the Union sect top dogs and the war will take some turn in the next two to three days.

    We will be present in the most chaotic ce and reap the most out of the situation."

    Chatur nodded and left the ce.

    Meanwhile, within the Union sect headquarters.

    There are three people sitting in a private room around a small round table. A Naga, A Yaksha, and a Merman. There is no human here.

    "We got the news that the guy from vos was rescued and Sam went away scot-free. We don¡¯t know where the video is or if the video was seen by anyone. From Sam¡¯s style until now, he didn¡¯t interrogate anyone and just killed from long-range. Direct battles and interrogation doesn¡¯t seem to be his style." The merman spoke and the other two understood what he was implying.

    "You might be right. But we cannot be sure that he didn¡¯t see the video. After all, he also collects the spatial rings and he might have seen the video."

    "Even that is okay. The worst-case scenario is the video reaching the emperors. The sixmanders are young and they will be impulsive to make the decision to start the fight between themselves. But once the video reaches any of the emperors, they will immediately understand what is happening and the n will not go as it should be."

    The Yaksha said.

    "What other way do we have? We should do something about the current deadlock. We cannot maintain it for a long time. We have to either create a conflict within the Nagin castle or directly finish off the war.

    If the situation is still as calm as it is now, then the emperors will send other elites. We heard that some new humans came to the Nagin and are all extremely proficient inbat. They are elite of the elite and this Sam also appeared at the same time.

    So, it would be better if we do what we have to do before they came. Otherwise, we would be in trouble." The Naga man said.

    "We should first see if the news of us trying this was revealed or not. So, we have to observe the situation first. If there is no unrest within the enemies, then we would just go ahead with the war and crippled the troops.

    Sectum will definitely try to get in touch with us because of our sudden change of ns of not leaving the other half of the resource points for him and we can use that situation to leak the information to the troops.

    Even if the emperors came to know about our n, if we could finish all this before they react, the war between the nations is bound to escte."

 Chapter 617: Necromancy

    For the next two days, Sam only stayed at theke as he experimented with it. For starters, he collected someke water and created a small puddle near theke, and dropped a fish in to see if there would be any change to it.

    And he soon noticed, the fish didn¡¯t survive for long. There is no vitality in the water at all.

    Just like that, he performed many experiments.

    On the second day¡¯s night, Chatur came back. He has taken a wolf from the Canine squad and has been using it. With his disguise techniques and its speed. He can easily escape any threat in the union dimension.

    He got the required information and Sam was extremely excited to see this. Because the most chaotic of the battle-fields are three and all three of them have someone from the Rubrum empire as the lead.

    One of them has sectum, the other Salvan, and the third one was led by some other rubrum guy. All of the rubrum emperor squads are on three battlefields only.

    When Sam thought about this, he couldn¡¯t help but feel ecstatic.

    He already decided to make the rubrum empire people have a taste of his revenge for plotting against him and with how the current situation is, he can not only make them pay a price, he can also make the Union sect suffer some losses.

    Sam wanted to brush off his necromancy skills. Even though he is not interested in the normal undead necromancy, he still studied some basics of that category and one of them is just making the undead. Generally, a necromancer who wants to have his own undead army wouldn¡¯t be able to keep all of them no matter how many corpses he has. Because the mental energy keeps a limit.

    But they can still make the undead, but just couldn¡¯t control them. But it wouldn¡¯t stay for long as the energy the necromancer injected will soon disappear due to the connection and the corpse would return to his actual state.

    He felt like he could use this as he didn¡¯t want to make his involvement known. His foundation in the Naga Loka is too shaky and he couldn¡¯t just cause a war between rubrum and Mov to satisfy his own revenge.

    But there is no way he would not kill them.

    Sam and Chatur started making their move, but this time a little discreetly. Everyone knew they left theke but no one knew where they went.

    Their first target is the third person-in-charge of the rubrum squads other than Sectum and Salvan.

    Currently, the sh is going on intensely and both sides are having skirmishes in a direct head-on battlefield.

    Due to some long intervals, both sides created their temporary bases and fortified them with the formations and defensive battle formations.

    They would meet on the battlefield now and then.

    And they had a tacit agreement not to fight at night. This stemmed from their original agreement between the rubrum and the sect.

    He stayed at a rtively hidden ce as there is a resource point nearby and Chatur hasyout ready for Sam to find a hiding point and sent the shadow mice out. Now he doesn¡¯t just have ten shadow mice. Currently, he has fourteen and there is six more newborns which would make them twenty.

    He could cover more ground now and get the information easily.

    After some time, they came back to help with the detailed report as he plotted thend and the marks they noted to him.

    The terrain is in and there are rocks and boulders everywhere. This is what Sam actually wanted. Then he started plotting something else and gave spatial rings contained huge dark element energy cells, that too in arge quantity along with the grenades of decaying gas, that would cause the green decaying me.

    The mice went away once again. But Sam and Chatur didn¡¯t stay, they also went with their own techniques as they disguised themselves in the night.

    They worked through the whole night for hours until a few minutes before dawn. They escaped right before the battle began.

    They took the nearest vantage point that could give a clear look and waited for things to unfold. He was trying out a special formation he came up across when he was brushing off his necromancy.

    This is a dangerous formation and as long as the dark elemental energy is directly supplied to it, it will go on making the results dangerous.

    This is a great trap and is a go-to defensive measure for any necromancer. This could be used in a war perfectly. But the coteral damage and resources it took are extreme and that is the only reason most people wouldn¡¯t create one.

    But Sam wanted to see if the trial would work out properly.

    The two sides started moving against each other and met in the middle. But Sam could see that the situation is more intense than he thought and all the other battle-fields are equally intense at the moment.

    That is because the union sect decided to make their move and speed the battle to cause more losses to the Nagin castle so that they can implement their secondary n of using sectum to start the civil war.

    Currently, the union sect¡¯s troops in this battle-field are mostly Nagas and Yakshas. These Naga scale colors are something Sam has never seen in Nagin¡¯s or base. So they are definitely from others.

    As they ran into the middle of the battle-field, Sam is waiting for the presents he left for them to show themselves and they didn¡¯t disappoint.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    A series of explosions happened as the green and blue mes erupted all over the battle-field. Everyone is stunned for a second because more than forty people were hit directly and half of them are on verge of dying as the decaying mes incinerated their bodies and started rotting their flesh.

    As for the rest of the forty, they are mostly in the aftershock of the explosion and have severe damage.

    The grenades are not powerful enough to st their limbs off and turn their bodies into mush and most of their bodies are intact.

    The first step of the n was a sess. The two parties are stunned for a second but that didn¡¯t stop the battle. In fact, it intensified because the explosions are not of an extremelyrge scale and everyone was ming the other party, even though both parties clearly suffered losses.

    They went on with fighting it off with the intensity.

    But what they don¡¯t know is after the few dead bodies sprawled on the ground, a ck patch started spreading across the soil. It is not truly ck, more like ck spiritual energy, and will only be noticed if someone concentrates their spiritual senses.

    As the fight became intense, all of a sudden one of the soldiers in the corner felt a bite on his leg.

    When he saw the dead body with all his guts sted out biting him, he couldn¡¯t help but kick the head off of that. He just felt like the other party has hisst breath and is trying to help hisrades even in death, but before he could recover his true opponent already stabbed him in the heart with a spear.

    Before the opponent could relish in his victory, he felt a bite on his neck and someone sucking his life force and energy from behind.

    The undead has only one desire and that is to kill all the dead by sucking their life force. They will try to sustain that life force and energy to maintain stay undead. But without the mental connection, it wouldn¡¯t be able to do that and no matter how much energy it has, it will soon run dry and the undead will go back to being dead.

    The battlefield suddenly turned extremely chaotic, because both parties noticed that several incidents are happening all around and they tried to mitigate it by killing the undead.

    But before they could do so, the newly dead are also turning into undead and they have better bodies which made them more dangerous.

    It is almost like a zombie virus spreading all over within a group of people.

    One of the undead left the formation area without attacking anyone. But after a few steps after the formation, it fell off and became a dead body again due to the loss of power supply.

    Many people noticed this, but they don¡¯t know that a formation boundary existed in the first ce and started running in different directions. But Sam already took out his sniper and started shooting.

    Everyone who was about to cross the boundary was shot. He didn¡¯t even use energy cell bullets or vital shots, all he did is immobilize them and they became an addition to the undead and soon the whole battle-field turned undead zone.

    There are hundreds of undead inside the formation. But Sam didn¡¯t do anything, he just stayed there and waited. The undead soon realized with their instincts that if they go out a certain boundary they will be gone like the rest of theirpanions. But the energy cells powering the formation soon ran dry and the bodies started to fall back to the ground.

    The whole area is emitting death energy. Sam released his new shadows. He felt like it is about time, he grew his own shadows and selected them carefully. Two of them are beasts, from the canine squad that went berserk due to the pills as for the rest, they are one Yaksha, one Naga and one Merman.

    The shadow ran towards the battle-field as they absorbed the death energy to feed on themselves and at the same time, Sam tried to see if he can raise any shadows from the dead bodies.

    Since they are already turned into undead, it is not possible to summon their shadows, as they would have already disappeared. But there are still a couple of them and he let his own shadows absorb them to increase their energy.

    Sam looked at the ce satisfied and beckoned Chatur who was stuck with fright move as they made their journey to the next location.

 Chapter 618: Interrogation

    Sam and Chatur left as silently as they came. But the news about the death of everyone in the battle-field being dead was heard and both sides suffered the losses. But no one knew what happened. Even though the news traveled fast, they couldn¡¯t figure it out and no one is free enough to care about this ce.

    Even Sectum and Salvan couldn¡¯t do anything about their troops as they felt they had a much bigger problem on their hands.

    The Union sect is not honoring their agreement as per which they would definitely put on a show along with the rubrum squads and leave half of the resource points, no matter what happens regarding Sam. They already knew that Sam is dangerous and they didn¡¯t want to leave the deal to his death.

    So, they made a use that even if Sam didn¡¯t die, their end of the deal is finished since they lured him to the hill, so they demanded that they should get what they asked for. The sect agreed at that time, but now they are clearly breaking the deal as they are not ready to face the losses of around six hundred people for nothing.

    They might be bosses of the sect in thisyer, but the real boss is out there somewhere within the Naga Loka and everything they are doing is based on his words and ns. They don¡¯t have any real say. And they are not nning to honor their words from the beginning anyway.

    All they did is make some changes.

    Sam reached second ce, the ce where Salvan is trying his best to get a victory.

    They are battling over a mountain range and the terrain is good for gueri war far and both sides are doing just that.

    Both sides are only trying to wear each other out as they sent small groups across the mountain to the enemy¡¯s camps and trying to chip each other down.

    Sam wanted to take advantage of this and wanted to create chaos. Even though he cannot use the undead formation here as the results would be too disappointing with that, he had other ns.

    He could just use this to improve his shadows.

    Sam let out all his shadows and started dealing with small groups of five to ten within the mountains and he didn¡¯t just stop there, first, he made your shadows devour the shadow energy of the dead bodies and stored them inside the divine dimension, before turning them into the undead.

    Sam couldn¡¯t control this undead normally if there are no mental connections, but things are different once he made them within his divine dimension, they cannot do anything there.

    He collected undead like that and after collecting a decent amount, he went near the camp of the rubrum empire and released them all.

    They wouldn¡¯tst long as there is no energy supply, but Sam doesn¡¯t need themst long as his shadows, he and his beasts also joined the fray.

    He let go of all his beasts, including Mia as they hunted the camp like crazy.

    Sam didn¡¯t just fight, he made every dead body into an undead after making a nearby shadow of his absorb the shadow energy.

    Soon, the whole camp is full of corpses emitting death energy which was also absorbed by the shadows.

    He once again collected the corpses and threw them in this divine dimension before moving to another camp.

    He repeated the process and due to the higher numbers, he let the owls out and made them help him with the cleaning.

    The continuous sess almost convinced Sam to continue improving his necromancy, almost because Sam was never in his top condition throughout the battle as every undead he created drained his energy for the creation itself.

    Even though, there is no mental connection and continuous energy supply the sheer number of creations made him feel exhausted. But this is the best way to increase his shadow energy and also clear the battlefield fast enough.

    Just like that he cleared two battle-fields and hisst target from the Rubrum empire, Sectum is also feeling that something off about the whole situation as two of his armies disappeared just like that.

    He is not ready to take risks and wanted to talk with the Union sect boss as he nned to retreat after sorting out the deal. He has too much at stake in the current situation and didn¡¯t want to back out without any benefits.

    He has been trying to meet with the boss of the union sect for the past two days, but he couldn¡¯t just get a hold of them as they deliberately ignored him.

    But at this moment, even the Union sect¡¯s bosses are feeling that something was off as the two battle-fields they concentrated the most disappeared just like that.

    They couldn¡¯t help but feel targeted but they still have no choice but to go through with their n. They know better than anyone how muchpetition they had to endure. Their orders were to make sure this civil war happened no matter the cost and they are going to do so. If they backed out because of the losses and reported back to ask for advice, there is no way they would escape scot-free.

    Their positions that they earned with all that effort were not something they are willing to let go of easily.

    So, they epted the request from Sectum and arranged a meeting ce and time, but Sam who doesn¡¯t know anything about was already proceeding with his n.

    Due to their meeting n, the two troops are in a temporary truce of retreat.

    And Sam who doesn¡¯t know why this calm is just didn¡¯t bother rejecting such an opportunity and a bunch of undead assaulted the tents of Sectum¡¯s camp on that night along with the shadows as they assassinated many soldiers adding a few more undead.

    The camp soon turned chaotic and it soon reached Sectum¡¯s tent which is the middle of it all.

    He was surrounded by undead all around, but there are not too many by this time as many have lost the energy and became cold corpses again.

    As Sectum started fighting with the undead, Sam slowly walked towards him kicking a few undead that wanted to do make a move on him.

    When Sectum saw Sam, his eyes widened and he felt like he understood what is happening.

    He almost forgot that he was in the middle of the battle and even the sounds of his troops slowly dying didn¡¯t wake him up out of his stupor. He just pointed a finger at Sam and tried to say something. But no words came out of his mouth.

    Sam let the undead have their way with him as they slowly bit him off, but he didn¡¯t just let him die. Just before he couldn¡¯t take it anymore, he healed him.

    This made Sectum to scream in anguish as he cried, wept, cursed, and begged Sam to kill him.

    "If you answer a few questions, then I would let you go."

    "Y... Yes."

    "Whose n is it trap me? Yours or the Union sect¡¯s?"

    "It¡¯s mine." Even though he knew that he might receive another round of torture, he didn¡¯t have enough mind to lie at this point.

    "Where did you contact the boss? How can I meet them?"

    "They contacted me directly, I don¡¯t know how to directly get in touch with him, all I can do is try through their right-hand men. But there is a way for you to meet them."

    Sam just stood there waiting for him to finish.

    "We arranged a meeting tomorrow morning and it is within a cave three kilometers to Northwest. That is why we have a temporary truce."

    Sam nodded and finished him off as he promised as he let the undead slowly disappeared, before collecting some more corpses.

    He went back to the hiding spot as he thought of what to do. He was deciding whether he should contact the boss and deal with him or go to the base and destroy it. After some time, he thought of an idea and went back to the said cave first.

    He took out Murali¡¯s inscription paintbrush as he started etching all of the cave walls and he spent four hours like that. It is almost dawn when he was done and he immediately sneaked out and reached the camp once again.

    He sat in a hiding spot waiting for one of the two things to happen. One thing is the soldiers in the base finding out their opponents are already dead and another one is a signal from the cave he visited.

    The first doesn¡¯t seem likely to happen as the truce is still present. But after an hour, Sam smiled as the second this happened.

    He immediately went on with his usual n as he unleashed a wave of undead over this ce. For the next two and a half hours, all he could hear was howling and screaming as they cried theirst words.

    Sam sent the corpses to the second floor of the divine dimension. Generally, the corpses wouldn¡¯t be suitable to make them undead after a day and he might not need undead for the next day. But he is not willing to let them go and he used this cheat to keep them fresh.

 Chapter 619: Catching a Boss

    After cleaning the battle-field Sam and Chatur started moving to the cave. The previous night, Sam has made some critical modifications to the cave walls and now it has be a cave of one-way ess.

    Once someone stepped in they cannot go out. At least someone in thisyer.

    He also enchanted the inscribed formation and a spiritual imprint to get a message when someone stepped in. He could also feel someone else trying to destroy the formation and the seal.

    Sam didn¡¯t care though. He is not worried someone would destroy it before he came.

    After a short while, they are already near the cave. He saw a merman and a Naga trying their best to destroy the barrier of the cave. But as they are damaging the barrier bit by bit, the barrier is reflecting the attacks back at them and they are trying their best to dodge.

    It is the same case inside the cave. No matter what the Yaksha inside is trying to do, every attack is being reflected back at him.

    They don¡¯t have balls to attack with full power because, they are afraid that they would die due the reflection even if the barrier is destroyed.

    When they saw Skynding and Sam jumping off of him, they were stunned for a second. They saw Sam¡¯s picture. Their informationwork is too wide.

    They instantly understood what happened.

    "I heard the boss ising here. Who is the boss of the three?"

    "Why don¡¯t you find out?" The Naga said and got ready to attack and even the Merman diverted their attention to Sam.

    "Are you sure you want to do this? I mean you would have a better chance tost more than three minutes if you have that friend of yours toe out. I would wait until you get him out. It might take some time, but I can wait."

    "Well, we are trying to get him out and easiest way is kicking your ass and make you to take him out."

    "You are more delusional that I thought."

    As he said that Sam took out his staff and made his move. He jumped up into the sky and his body was covered with silver lightning as he shot himself down towards the two of them.

    When they felt Sam¡¯s aura they are already having second thoughts. Sam might not have the best cultivation level of the Nascent stage cultivators, but his strength already reached the peak a Nascent could have. At least within this realm.

    Even when the two of them moved to the side, Sam didn¡¯t care andnded on the spot as he stabbed the staff to the ground.

    The shockwave was in the form of ripples as the lightning hit the surroundings in the form of consecutive waves making them stunned for a brief instant.

    That was all he needed and Sam immediately made his move as he kicked the ground andunched himself to the Naga.

    The staff hit the Naga like a lightning strike and made him paralyzed for an instant and Sam used this chance to give another good hit to his head.

    The Naga who is in original form was sprawled on the ground as he has spasms all over his muscles and twitched as sparks crackled.

    Sam diverted his attention to the Merman on the side who is stepping back in fright. He immediately took out what looked like a jade token, but it waspletely covered in dark elemental energy, to be precise, it is shadow energy.

    Sam frowned at this, but before he could make a move, that guy immediately broke the token and disappeared into his own shadow.

    Meanwhile, the Yaksha inside the barrier also did the same. Sam instantly changed his focus back to the Naga he battered.

    He is also trying to take out his token, but Sam stomped on his hand breaking his bones and holding his tail as he dragged him inside the cave.

    When Sam walked, the barrier automatically removed itself as if it has life. The spirit is working properly.

    Sam threw the guy inside and called Chatur over and gave him some pills to heal the Naga.

    The Naga has ck scales. He is definitely from the Nagin.

    After he healed a bit, Sam took out the dagger and said.

    "Listen to me. I will only ask a question once and if you don¡¯t answer it to me immediately, I wouldn¡¯t ask the second time, I will make you answer.

    Now, out of three who is the boss of thisyer of the Union sect?"

    The Naga stayed silent and Sam looked at him with a smirk before stabbing the dagger into the tail.

    "ARRRRGGGGG"

    He groaned loudly and Sam didn¡¯t stop there, he slowly started cutting through the tail as he slit the end of the tail into two.

    "AAAAAHHHHHHHH."

    Sam didn¡¯t stop though, he took out some fire elemental wine and started pouring on the split tail.

    The screams increased and when he saw he is still adamant in not answering, Sam just threw a spark of mes on the spot and the tail started burning.

    The blood that is seeping out of the tail was also burning giving off a metallic scent.

    He started to roll over the ground, but Sam didn¡¯t let him. He held the tail and made him stay in a single ce as he made sure that the fire wouldn¡¯t spread to his body.

    He still held the fire elemental wine and looked at the Naga dead in the eyes as he started pouring on the mes as it slowly but surely started spreading upwards.

    "I WILL TALK. I WILL TALK."

    Sam put the fire out and looked him.

    "We three are of equal status. I am from Nagin. My name Ishkar. The merman is Martya, the Yakha is Reye. We are appointed at the three people in-charge of thisyer of the Union sect.

    One of manages intelligence, one the troops and the other resource points."

    "Now tell me, what your n is regarding this civil war."

    "We are only following the orders. We don¡¯t know details. All we are asked is to eliminate the Nagin castle¡¯s influence and at the same time try to find a way to start a dispute strong enough that the sixmanders will kill each other."

    "So, you chose me as a catalyst for all of this because?"

    "Sectum came to us and offered you up. We don¡¯t know exactly who you are and what your goal is when you went on rampage and took out so many of our people. While we are trying to find out, Sectum came to us and gave the information about you and wanted to make a deal.

    He wanted to undermine the Mov empire and eliminate the influence they have in the Union dimension.

    So, we cut a deal and started nning this."

    The interrogation went on and on continuously as Sam got every information he needed. This Naga happened to be the person who in charge of the troops assignment and Sam now knew which squad went where.

    After that he put restrictions on him and decided to escort him to the Origin Castle.

    He would let Chatur take him there out of this ce and give him away to the officials of the country he was part of. The Mavros country. The Nagas with ck scales are the rules of this empire.

    Apparently, every Union member is a convicted felon of a nation or the offspring of the senior Union officials.

    And from the interrogation he learned that this guy is a convicted felon and actually murdered the son of a minister of the Mavros. He is worth a lot of bounty. But Sam is not after that. He after the favor of this minister and he would let Chatur deliver the message on who the minister clearly owes.

    So, Sam drafted a letter up and gave it to Chatur before taking both of them to the Origin Castle and he personally made sure to see them both out.

    He is not worried that someone would steal his credit, after all he is an expert at taking it back and Chatur can be trusted because of the Pill.

    After handing that over, Sam made his move as he started his journey of dealing with the Union sect all by himself.

    He is really d that he had learned necromancy. Because he was not interested in making these people submit and train the soldiers and process the situations and he is also d that he is not facing them head on.

    All the while, he is going to ambush them and that too while they are in middle of intense battles.

    Although draining, all he has to do is drink the heavenly wine. The only problem is that he is afraid he would turn into an alcoholic.

    While flying on Sky, Sam started looking at the details that were given to him by Chatur. These are details of all the resource points under or supposedly under the Nagin castle.

    Every ce is a warzone now and he now has all theyouts and maps he needed. Now he also has the details regarding their resource output.

    He is nning his target in an order, in which he would get some benefits from the resource points immediately after he cleared the battle-field.

 Chapter 620: Special Pill

    Sam went to his first target army.

    This is the point where most of Mov empire¡¯s troops are present and they are facing the heat of some elite squads of the Union sect.

    Sam first decided to target this ce as his main responsibility is towards the Mov empire¡¯s troops. He would put the Emperor in a difficult spot if he deliberately chose to ignore them and he might be able win some favors as many of the top dogs from the empire has sent their offspring to get chances here.

    So, Sam decided to first spread his ws in this area.

    But this time, he didn¡¯t work alone. He let all his beasts out as they are stuck inside the divine dimension for a long time as the Naga Loka is not a ce they coulde out openly. Except for Mia, everyone would have a hard time.

    But since they cane out now, he decided to let them loose.

    His first target was on arge grasnd and he decided to make use of the chaos of the battle and enter the temporary base of the Union sect.

    Half of the troops are currently on the battle-field and the other half are waiting to shuffle with them.

    In this ce, the Nagin castle still held the base as they used the castle to fight defensively. The Union sect is trying their best to wear them down and are shuffling. So, the first half always attacks until they are exhausted and will retreat slowly as the second half joins the front line.

    Sam is waiting for the exhausted half toe to this ce as that would be easier for him to deal with.

    He prepared the undead around a fifty of them.

    Currently, there are three hundred soldiers in the camp and another three hundred on the battle-field.

    Sam waited until all these soldiers moved and entered the base camp as the other half are slowly making their way.

    When they went to tents to take the necessary medical help and rest, Sam decided to make his move. His beasts all started their attacks from different directions. They rushed in with the attacks as Sam started running through the camp as he dropped the undead here and there meanwhile, his shadows that hid within some tents of themanding personnel started their assassinations.

    The camp turned into chaos and Sam started collecting the dead bodies as he has other uses for that.

    It was continuous massacre. You couldn¡¯t help but smile when the Ape ran rampage straight through the tents when usually he would he handling all kinds of delicate works during wine brewing and such.

    The owls surrounded the camp as they only had one task at hand and that is to not let anyone escape.

    After an hour, Sam collected all the bodies and started moving towards the base where the fight is happening.

    When he reached a certain point, he went into the divine dimension along with others and started making undead of all the three hundred corpses he collected. He was extremely exhausted and strained to the point that his skin went dry and he had nose bleeds.

    He gulped the wine hard as he threw one undead after another as soon as he made them.

    The beasts are also in the divine dimension for now and sensing the energy fluctuations from the castle, the undead started walking towards that direction.

    When the Union sect forces saw the weak and injured bodies of theirrades, they felt like something is wrong and grew alert but they are not alert regarding their rades¡¯ rather they thought an army ising from the back. Only after they got close and bit one of theirrades did they understand what is happening.

    After that, Sam already came out and he sat on Sky¡¯s back as he tried his best to recover his energy. He looked like a depraved otaku who hasn¡¯t eat and slept for days and spent all his time in front of aputer without even proper hydration.

    It would take some time for him to recover. But there is not much he has to do. His beasts lined up beside him to defend him if he anyone attacks him and the Nagin Castle¡¯s troops from the castle too advantage and went full-scale.

    There are some losses on their side but they still managed to win the war.

    Sam once again collected the new corpses at least as many as he can and threw them inside the second floor of the tower.

    Then walked into the castle casually.

    This castle is a special one as this is also a resource point and a monthly resource point at that. Thepetition for this is extremely high because every month it will give a pill and the pill is not a medicine it is a memory pill much like the divine wills in the library of the divine dimension.

    The pills contain memories regarding battle-techniques or cultivation of some high-level cultivators. They are extremely useful and when a fist user devours a pill contained fist techniques, he will improve faster with new insights.

    Tomorrow is the time for the next pill to be out.

    Sam just sat there before the room in which the pill appears without talking to anyone. He knew it would be futile to reason with these guys. He worked and killed for them and he knew they are the ones who will benefit with his actions in long run.

    Particrly when he is sure that he would taking the most heat from the Union sect and would definitely fall into the eyes of some high-level character of the Union sect.

    There is no way he would let go of any opportunity that couldpensate for the suffering he would have to go through.

    The next day morning, the door opened and inside the room there is a tform on which there is a small orb glowing.

    Sam walked in and caught hold of it. No one talked even though many of them wanted to voice their objections.

    Sam got a message in his mind.

    This pill contains the insights of light element healing. He was surprised by this and stored it away before leaving the ce.

    "What pill is it?" The leader of the troops asked in a low voice.

    Sam didn¡¯t reply though. He didn¡¯t want to say anything because he wanted to keep this to himself. The light element healing is a big thing in Naga Loka. Because most of them follow the wood element healing and for some reason, Nagas are not born with light element and are extremely rare and even them are not that talented. But light element healing has most immediate effects and everyone wanted it.

    He would be pestered a lot.

    That guy wanted to stop Sam but his deputy standing on the side stopped him.

    Sam didn¡¯t care much as he came out and went away on Sky. He didn¡¯t want to use his energy to travel as he would need the energy for the necromancy and would need as much as he can have.

    After reaching the next battle-field he almost followed the same tactics as he previously did for the next few days he killed hundreds of people clearing the battle-fields until finally he stopped killing and went to the Pearl Lake.

    This time nobody dare to say a thing to Sam when he came and took the Pearl.

    This time, the pearl has extremely concentrated water elemental energy and he threw it to Mia who absorbed and seemed to be pretty happy.

    Sam took out a fire element stone and threw it inside theke.

    He observed as he saw the fire elemental energy getting into the oyster and the rest of the energy absorption from the atmosphere stopped.

    Sam smiled at this and threw a load of fire elemental stones inside to see what would happen in the next week.

    That day he went and joined another battlefield and took care of another squad. And after this, the Union sect suddenly retreated as they ran to their main base. They even abandoned their secondary bases and resource points as they were afraid of the sudden death named Sam.

    By this time, Sam¡¯s name has already reached the upperyers of the Union dimension and the upper echelons of the Union sect.

    Chatur came back the day after as Sam got his own castle. He came back with messages from the Minister of Marvos and the Mov Emperor.

    The Minister said that he would owe Sam one and would pay it back when the time arises and the Emperor thanked him for the good job and also for saving the Flower boy from the vos.

    Sam was also promised a special reward from vos, but what surprised him most is that there would be a new batch of candidatesing to the Union dimension and when he saw the list he was surprised because most of the names are familiar as they are his fellow yers.

    Even Arman ising. He knew his leisurely time is about to be over and he has to speed up on the process of getting the herbs.

 Chapter 621: Elite ten

    Sam immediately called Chatur and gave instructions to contact the people from another. This is one of thes under full control of Yaksha.

    The Fysi. The Naga poption is extremely low and only upies one nation. But there is no adamant discrimination against them. As for humans, there are some but their poption is not even the same as the Nagas.

    The herb that Sam has to get from here, is the Abyss grass.

    It is grown in a deep dark valley where the sun wouldn¡¯t shine. It is darkness all over and even cultivators couldn¡¯t see anything with their normal vision.

    Chatur really did have connections everywhere. He managed to contact someone from the Fysi castle and when he heard the introduction of the person, he felt like his job would easy.

    His name is Dharkan and he is the prince of the Andhera Nation. This ce has year-long snow and darkness due to its geographical location.

    For six months of the year, at least they will have some light. That could be considered summer. As for the rest of the year, there is no light at all. It is almost like they are living in a ce where there is only night. If not for the changes of the moons they have, they wouldn¡¯t be able to find out the difference between night and day at all.

    Currently, it is the winter in that ce and the long night of six months is in its final phases.

    He felt like this ce is most suitable for the growth of the abyss grass. Even though there is a lot of ice elements and such, there must exist a ce with a lot of darkness within this ce.

    He met with prince Dharkan the next day.

    After exchanging some normal pleasantries, Dharkan said.

    "Sandra has been badmouthing you for some time. Now I can see why? You must be one of those people that are beyond her Voice Charm."

    "Maybe I am a person like that. Since you already know I met here, you might have also heard what kind of business Imitted with them. So, I will go straight to the point.

    I would like to buy a de of Abyss grass from you."

    "Abyss grass?" Dharkan¡¯s face became serious. His aura fluctuated as if he was ready to attack anytime.

    Sam looked at him without a change of expression. He is as nonchnt as he can be sipping his drink as if nothing happened.

    Dharkan calmed himself down and said.

    "Where did you hear about the Abyss grass?"

    "Hear? No, I read about it."

    "We have nothing to talk about. There is no business to make. You can leave."

    Sam was surprised a bit and he let Chatur walked out of the door, but he just stayed there and looked at Dharkand and said.

    "I don¡¯t know why you are behaving like this. But I am sure that you have Abyss grass. I will buy it no matter the cost. Just say what you want. It is important to me."

    His voice is calm and there is no sense of emotions. He looked straight into Dharkand¡¯s eyes.

    "It is not a matter of price. We cannot sell the grass."

    "Then how about a trade?"

    "You wouldn¡¯t be able to afford it."

    "There are not many things in this world that I cannot afford to buy. Please tell me. The matter is of extreme importance. I will not leave you alone until I buy one."

    Dharkan took a deep breath and said.

    "The abyss grass can only be plucked by themselves. The risk of obtaining that grass is extremely high and nobody would want to sell that grass out when they got it. The dark element users are abundant in the Andhera and every time, there would be a lot of them participating in the harvest of the grass.

    Everyone who participates is a Pre-transcendent and there are very few nascent stage cultivators that would go in. It is a tradition of our nation and not many people know about it.

    The path is dangerous and many people lose lives every year. So, I am not participating and everyone who participates in this wouldn¡¯t be keen on selling the grass they risked their lives to get."

    "Is there a way for me to participate in this harvest?"

    "No, very few outsiders of our family can participate and they are also citizens of the nation facing many tests and obstacles to gain the chance. How can I let someone like that just to participate?"

    "Don¡¯t you have a spot then?"

    "I have. But I am not participating."

    "I wouldn¡¯t ask why you wouldn¡¯t participate. But just tell me something. Is there anything in this world that would make you participate in this? I will try my best to do whatever it is. I need it."

    Dharkan wanted to erupt but he tried his best to control his temper because he knew that he might not be a match for Sam.

    He did hear Sam¡¯s exploits.

    "There is one thing that can make me go back. Find a Yaksha named Night charm in the Union sect and bring him to me. I will agree to participate in the Abyss grass harvest. In fact, I guarantee that I would be able to get you a de of grass."

    "Night Charm?"

    "Yes, a female Yaksha. She is an elite and works alone. She is a master in assassinations. If you can get her to me. I promise you a de of grass."

    "That¡¯s it? All you need is bringing a girl to you?"

    "What do you know? Bringing a girl? If you are careless for a second she will take your head and ce it in your hands. She is an assassin that is well known on the Fysi. Not many people have seen her face and she is extremely skilled that she managed to kill a few Pre-transcendent stage cultivators.

    She is not extremely good abat. She is only specialized in single strike assassinations or escaping from even the hardest of the ces. I am pretty sure that she is still nascent. So, she should be in the Union sect."

    "If there is really such a powerful assassin, wouldn¡¯t she already be after my head after what I did to the Union sect? She might have broken through."

    "No, she didn¡¯t. I am pretty sure of that. As for why she is not after you. Why do you think the forces of the Union sect retreated? Do you really think the real elites of the sect are all clear? They didn¡¯t even appear yet. The real war will be upon you soon. There is still a month for the Abyss grass harvest.

    If you can get her to me in a month, I will get the Abyss grass to you."

    Sam thought for a bit and said.

    "Sure. We have a deal."

    He shook hands and left the room.

    He knew that finding an assassin is a difficult task and catching her alive is even more so. But he is not unconfident. But he is not willing to go on a goose chase to catch her and bring her to him. All he has to do is wait.

    Because, he knew if there is someone like that in the Union sect even if they are not currently in the Union dimension once they came back, their first target would be to go after Sam himself.

    After all, he killed almost a thousand people, cutting their troops by one-third. It is a huge loss for them. There is no way they would be able to let go of him that easily.

    He came out and on the way back with Chatur he asked.

    "Are there any other elites in the Union sect?"

    "Elites? There are many of them."

    "Do you know Night Charm?"

    "Yes, but she wouldn¡¯t be in the dimension for now."

    "She is the part of Elite ten of the Union sect. Their authority is on par with the Boss. But they wouldn¡¯t bother with the troops. The only reason that they didn¡¯te and attack us is that there are three months in the year that they wouldn¡¯t stay in the Union dimension. It is part of their training.

    There are still two months for that time to be up."

    Sam frowned at this. If it is true, then why would the union sectunch a war when their elites are not here? It would clearly spell trouble to them. After all, Sam himself was a bane for them now.

    As if reading Sam¡¯s thoughts, Chatur continued.

    "Actually, it might have been a chance for the three bosses. Even though, they are bosses they are mostly the people who bear the brunt of management responsibilities of the sect. The Elite ten get special treatment because of their prowess in battles.

    Before you came, the situation in Nagin castle is extremely unstable and in the past few months it was almost chaotic, so the Union sect chose this time to make a move even if they don¡¯t have their elites because it is easy to crush the castle. Until you came they are just ying with us.

    But you just came and changed the tide. And from the message, other elites are alsoing in few weeks. I think they might recall the Elite ten back."

    "Is there any precedence of calling them back?"

    "There is. when threes¡¯ castle united and tried to upy one of the core resource points of the Union sect. They nned it so well and did it all when the elite ten is not present. But three of the ten are called back.

    They entered the battle-field and tore through the forces of the three castles. No matter how many enemies they came, they killed them slowly and chipped the forces down until all of them retreated."

 Chapter 622: Wind Fiend

    After listening to Chatur about the elite ten, Sam started thinking about what the current situation might lead to.

    Using the undead, Sam really did leave quite some wounds on the Union sect. But the Elite ten still hasn¡¯te back. But he is sure that they woulde as the war will continue. Currently, the Union sect only abandoned some secondary bases and castles. As for resource points, they tightened the forces.

    All they left are the resource points they upied from the Nagin castle.

    So, it can be said that the war is not over yet.

    When Chatur saw Sam thinking, he hesitated before saying.

    "Actually, there is one thing I wanted to tell you for some time, but I couldn¡¯t find the time as we are busy."

    "What is it?"

    "The reason the rest of the top-dogs of the Nagin castle are not bothering with you is that they are sure the Elite ten will kill you. That is why they let you do whatever you want with theke and Volcanic cannon. Otherwise, they would certainly bring their families in to make trouble for you."

    "Really?"

    "Yes, when Yodha first entered this ce, he didn¡¯t reveal his identity and came in with his human form. He is just like you, but your methods are different. He alone upied a weekly resource point and he wanted to take the resources.

    But the rest of themanders and others wouldn¡¯t let him. They created all kinds of troubles. But Yodha became furious and beat the crap out of them without pulling their punches.

    The next thing we knew, there is arge-scale search on his identity and there are many threats. If not for the fact, that Yodha revealed his Naga form in one of the battles, they would have still tried to pester him and threaten him. After he revealed it though, they almost pissed their pants.

    There is also another situation, where an orphan entered this ce and run rampant because of his fighting abilities, but at that time, some of the people created a conflict between him and Union sect, causing one of the Elite ten to hunt him down and kill him.

    These incidents are all toomon and not just in the Nagin castle. Every other ce, including the Fysi and the Merman castles, are the same.

    No ce has a single person who holds all authorities and they all use Union sect as a borrowed knife to get rid of their rivals."

    "Why didn¡¯t you mention this to me earlier?"

    "I thought that since Elite ten is not here, it is not that relevant but you did so much damage to them. From what I know of them, the retreat is rted to the elite ten. They would be already on their way back to the dimension.

    That is why I wanted to give you a reminder before they attack you."

    "Thanks for the reminder. But I am mostly worried about them noting at me. If they don¡¯t, how can I get my hands on Night Charm?"

    As he said this, Sam suddenly looked into the horizons. Currently, Sam and Chatur are flying on Sky¡¯s back.

    They reached high enough to look at the clouds and they even passed through some. They flew this high to avoid others. But he could feel someone ising, even Sky became alert and suddenly came to a halt as he pped his wings.

    "Hold on tight."

    Sam warned Chatur who sprawled on Sky¡¯s back and held tightly before Sky zoomed into the clouds and swung his talons at the something that seemed to being their way.

    Two beasts locked in as they threw their talons at each other.

    Sam looked at the beast and was surprised. The Fiend Vulture. This is a beast that is beyond the naturalws of the beasts. They are cruel, cunning, and crafty. They don¡¯t care about the superiority of bloodline and cultivation levels. If they can hit, they will, if they can¡¯t they will run.

    Holding the neck of the vulture there is a guy sitting on its back as he looked at Sam with a devilish grin.

    The two birds are moving up and down as they tried to bit each other and tear each other apart with the talons.

    But Sam is not worried. He just looked at the young man who is also a human sitting on the vulture¡¯s back.

    Sky is not an ordinary Great Roc. If it was, then he would have already lost. But he is the Sky sovereign Roc. The name is not just for show. Within the Sam level, when ites to Aerial battle, Sky is the best of the best. Even Yanwu couldn¡¯t deal with him, Unless Yanwu went all out and made some seriousrge-scale attacks, they would only be tied.

    But for this fiend Vulture to beat Sky, it can dream on.

    And soon, the Young man on the Vulture¡¯s back also seemed to have noticed something. As both the beasts are descending, Sky suddenly stopped and hovered as a de of wind stuck the vulture on the stomach creating a deep gash.

    *SCREECH*

    The vulture screamed as it took some time to control ande up. The young man took out a saber as he swung it towards Sam.

    Sam took out his reaper and blocked the attack. Chatur who is on Sky¡¯s back was terrified and almost peed his pants. He couldn¡¯t help gulp and close his eyes shut. He didn¡¯t even dare to look at the two people and beasts fighting.

    Soon, the young man noticed that there is not much advantage he could gain no matter what he tried. Sam is mostly on the defensive, but there is not a single attack that could pierce his defense. Sky is so nimble that the vulture could barely ruffle his feathers.

    But the Vulture itself has some significant wounds making it bleed.

    All of a sudden, the young man, who was attacking Sam all this while, diverted his attack and aimed at Sky¡¯s neck. The intensity of the attack also increased as the de of the saber for fully covered with wind energy.

    He would do considerable damage.

    As the young man was about to seed he has a grin. But Sam only coldly snorted and said.

    "Don¡¯t hold back."

    Sky who is ying tango with the Vulture suddenly glowed with wind element energy and wind des started appearing all around him.

    Even the p of his wings that should only have a purpose of flying is releasing wind de.

    *SCREEECCCCHHHHHH*

    The Vulture was cut in several ces. Its screeches shook the clouds and the young man lost his bnce and suffered the bacsh of the saber attack cutting his hand open and bleeding all over.

    He looked at Sam with resentment and there are several thoughts in his mind. But he made the Vulture descend. He is descending faster and he doesn¡¯t seem to be trying to escape through the flight. He must be thinking to escape through the stream that was nearby.

    But Sam has no intention of letting him go.

    Sky closed his wings and dove down. Chatur is screaming as they fell freely down and decreased their altitude.

    But the Vulture seemed to have a special trick for falling. It is too fast when descending like this.

    Sam tapped Sky on the head and jumped off of him. His body started changing and he finished partial wind elemental fusion as he increased his speed and held the reaper in his hand.

    He closed the distance faster and as he fell downwards, the wind energy on the reaper de increased like crazy. The energy is so dense and sharp that the young man who is escaping could feel the chill behind his back.

    He instantly took out something and Sam frowned. He recognized this thing. This is the thing the so-called bosses used to escape.

    His body changed and a golden glow surrounded him as he finished the Partial light element fusion. The speed increased and he shot like a light beam. Right before the young man could crush the token, she swung the de.

    The Wind debined with the sword aura created a dense and sharp wind curtain as it sliced through the back and cut the arm off from the shoulder de and it even cut the wind of the Vulture.

    They saved their lives by hair¡¯s breadth before they crushed the token and escaped.

    The wind curtain didn¡¯t stop there. It shed past and created arge and deep crater on the ground.

    Before Sam could fall down and crash. He deactivated the fusion and the harbinger appeared under his feet as he negated the fall extremely closely.

    Sam looked in the direction the shadow moved. He didn¡¯t like this feeling at all.

    If not for the fact, this is an aerial battle and that guy is quite skilled he would have been killed. Even though he is elite, at most he can be considered above average in Sam¡¯s books. Any yer can take him on.

    But what Sam doesn¡¯t know is that guy who escaped is also thinking the same thing. He is also thinking that he could have won if they met in a low-altitude battle or even the ground battle. He felt like he lost because of the difference in the capability of the beasts.

 Chapter 623: Too Lucky?

    Sam looked at the wing and the arm on the ground. Most of the bones in those limbs broke when they hit the ground. The wing is below the arm and both of them are inside the crater.

    Sam threw a fireball at the wing and the feathers supported the golden mes to burn and both of them burned.

    A gush of wind hit him in the back as Skynded with Chatur on his back. Chatur sprawled onto the ground as he panted heavily. Sam went to him and crouched as he checked for injuries. After confirming he is alright, he gave him some water to calm him down.

    After some time, they once again started their journey and this time, they went on the wolves they caught from the Canine squad. Chatur will be traumatized by the flight journey for some time.

    As they slowly made their way towards the Pearl Lake, Sam asked.

    "Who is that guy? Do you know?"

    "One of the Elite ten, the Wind Fiend. Nobody knows his real name. His specialty is using that vulture to attack from the air. But even in the ground battle, he cannot be underestimated. His wind attacks are extremely precise and his saber y is extremely unique.

    He is an expert in ambushing like this. He is a wanted person in threes. He was one of the best hit-men of the Union sect.

    While Sam is listening to the details regarding this guy, the person himself is sprawling on the ground as four other people surrounded him as theyughed, meanwhile another guy is healing him slowly as his arm started regenerating.

    The Vulture is groaning in pain as itid on the floor beside them.

    "Wind Fiend. Do you have any face left in front of the juniors of the sect? You came here in such a pathetic shape. Not only did you lose an arm and the wing, you even lost them after you took out the token? Are you that slow?" A guy who isughing said from the side.

    "He is the one who is fast." The Wind fiend answered through the gritted teeth.

    "Pfft. You really are a joke Wind fiend. We just came yesterday and there is only very basic information regarding him and you couldn¡¯t even control yourself? Are you so hungry for the glory? Now you even came back like this. Are you embarrassed enough?"

    A beautiful Yaksha girl with a ck Combat suit said as she giggled.

    Wind Fiend didn¡¯t say anything and only snorted. The person healing finished healing his hand and threw a pill to him before moving to the vulture.

    "I only lost because his beast is better than mine. It is faster than my vulture. If we met on a normal battle-field, I would have killed him easily."

    "You are even dumber in giving out excuses. Isn¡¯t aerial battle your specialty? If you can¡¯t even kill him in the air with a surprise attack, you expect him to sit still and let you cut his head off? Stop dreaming and train properly."

    A guy who is alsoughing earlier said.

    "Stop making fun of me, and try your own luck. You will see when you meet him yourself."

    "You don¡¯t have to say it. I will meet him tonight and see what he has got. Anyway, the rest of you wouldn¡¯t get a chance after me. So if you want to try your luck. Do it before dusk. Afterward, it is my turn and I will anyone thatpetes with me."

    The girl in ck left these words before leaving the room.

    Meanwhile, Sam and Chatur reached theke.

    Sam threw every guy out of this ce as he prepared his own tent this time. Chatur didn¡¯t even understand what that little thing that grew this big is, but he was also asked to stay inside this tent and he did.

    Sam cooked once again and they started eating as night fell. Sam didn¡¯t do much that night, he has been working on the Mutant scales and he continued that work, but he didn¡¯t do that inside the divine dimension. He did so in his tent.

    He worked until midnight and Sam put away all the things and looked at Chatur who is working on his own things as he painted on arge scroll.

    "Chature here for a second."

    Sam asked and Chatur obliged as he came near.

    Sam stood up and asked Chatur to sit on his chair, he bumped into the table and there are things that fell down.

    All of a sudden, a dark shadow moved and Sam who bent down to pick things suddenly moved as his hand was covered with shadow energy and caught the shadow in mid-air.

    A woman¡¯s silhouette appeared in front of him. But there is no visible flesh there. All the flesh was also covered in dark shadow light. She turned into a puff of dark smoke and disappeared into her own shadow before appearing behind Sam¡¯s back.

    Sam dodged the dagger strike and held her hand as he swiftly turned around.

    She once again turned into a puff of smoke and moved around.

    Sam frowned at this.

    He didn¡¯t like this at all. This shadow technique is quite unique and it is not easy to catch it even with his body¡¯s partial shadow fusion.

    He activated his eye technique as he looked at the shadow moving and his body also started dark element fusion and turning the dark energy to shadow energy. Soon, he is also moving just like the shadow as they shed with daggers.

    The sh is intense and the whole tent is filled with dark smokes and fumes. Even though they can¡¯t be felt and they only appear in an instant. They are still there and disappeared.

    Sam¡¯s technique is not as unique and fast as the other party but it is efficient enough and with his skills, there is no need for him to worry.

    He managed to leave some nicks on her skin. Even though a fusion body is not easy to damage, it is notpletely invincible. Sam has several ways to damage it and Void style and ripple style are quite good.

    As he was gaining upper hand, the shadow of the girl moved like it was growing and split into three as all three moved towards the entrance of the tent as if they wanted to escape.

    But with a snap of his fingers. Five shadows appeared and locked the three of them in ce. The Shadow necromancy is quite good in this aspect after all.

    Two shadows out of three disappeared and the five shadows attacked thest remaining one.

    The girl immediately exited the shadow form and a Yaksha woman appeared in front of Sam.

    Sam canceled his fusion as he looked at the girl and smiled before taking a seat on another chair.

    Chatur was stunned as he saw this scene. He was sweating profusely. Many times, he was hair¡¯s breadth away from the dagger of thisdy. But Sam did his best to save him. He felt like his life is on itsst days. Encountering two near-death experiences like this in a single day.

    The woman is a Yaksha and Sam immediately knew who she was. There is no way he would let this opportunity go.

    He looked at her and said.

    "You are Night Charm? I must say your name is not suitable at all. Shadows can exist in days too. Why would you have a name as night charm?"

    The woman only snorted and took out the token as her hands were behind her back.

    Sam nonchntly smiled as she spoke.

    "Your days are over. No one can live after messing with the Union sect." She coldly said and with loads of killing intent still being on full disy, she crushed the token.

    She disappeared into a shadow and moved towards the entrance of the tent. This time, his five shadows weren¡¯t able to lock them down. But right before the shadow could pass the entrance, a lightning screen appeared and blocked her. The tent cloth charred into ashes as lighting surrounded them and the metallic frame stood there in the shape of the tent as the lightning filled the gaps.

    The woman fell backward and spat a mouthful of blood as she looked horrified.

    "I have experienced the token three times, do you think I will not prepare myself. Night Charm, there is nowhere you can go. With that, Sam disappeared into a golden light beam and shot towards her. He ced a restriction on her body and held her down as he activated it.

    She fell forward and couldn¡¯t move her spiritual energy. Even her limbs are paralyzed.

    Sam deactivated the thunder prison and stored it away before saying to Chatur.

    "Let¡¯s go. We are going through the night. I didn¡¯t expect us to be so lucky. Before we could do anything, our target already came running to us."

 Chapter 624: Betrayal

    Sam and Chatur both once again traveled to the Fysi castle to deliver Night Charm. Sam did expect that she woulde after him. But he didn¡¯t expect that she woulde the very day he was given the task to find her.

    He must say he is lucky.

    As for why the thunder prison was already prepared. It is because, he was sick of these people using that weird shadow token to escape every time, Sam was ready to finish them off.

    He couldn¡¯t think of any methods instantly and decided to try his luck with the thunder prison and when he saw the results he was ecstatic.

    But he didn¡¯t make this trip for her. He just thought that since the first attack failed, the second and third attacks wouldn¡¯t be far away. So, he just wanted to be prepared. He is just damn too lucky to have caught her.

    He immediately decided to take her to Fysi Pce to finish the mission.

    But when they were in the middle of their journey, Sky suddenly attacked into the clouds and two wind des shot through the clouds dealing with two fireballs that areing at Sam.

    Sam didn¡¯t care though, he also noticed the attacks, but they are not strong enough for him to worry over them.

    Sky didn¡¯t stop, he took arge hard turn and two wind des shot to the front and the rear. Arge me and the frostnce are deflected.

    The clouds disappeared and two men are flying on the beasts. The beasts are nothing special like the Fiend vulture. They are at most on the level of the Dark wind owls. Their sole purpose might as well be traveling.

    A man and woman are standing on these beasts. The man has fire elemental energy on his palm as if he was ready to attack. The woman is also the same, but then in ce of the fire element, she has ice.

    Sam looked at them again and again as if he was trying to see through them.

    "Leave Night Charm now and you can live for a day more. We promise we wouldn¡¯t make an attempt on your light tonight." The man said coldly.

    Sam didn¡¯t seem to care at all. He just told Sky to make sure that both Night Charm and Chatur are safe, as he stood up.

    "What are you waiting for? If you are looking to stall time, there is no use. If you don¡¯t leave Night charm now, we wouldn¡¯t guarantee your life."

    Sam almost wanted to curse their stupidity. If even the Wind Fiend is unable to take him on in the aerial battle, then what gave these guys enough confidence to take him on? As he thought like this, he suddenly realized something.

    The reason they are bluffing is that they cannot take him on in the air, otherwise they could attack him and take her away.

    He started contemting whether he should take them down or not. He shook his head after some thinking and felt like it is not worth it.

    He sat down once again and tapped Sky on his back. The sky looked at the two beasts and gave a loud screech.

    *SCREEEEEEECH*

    The aura of the beast was released and the scream is almost like it ismanding the lowly beasts to leave his territory. The territory of the Sky sovereign.

    The two beasts became unstable and almost stopped flying altogether. When the riders on them wanted to maintain the bnce, Sam raised his hands and aimed at them. One of them was covered with golden mes and the other is covered with water energy.

    He shot arge jet of both and hit the two people making them unable to control. The beasts also took some brunt and they became even more unstable.

    Sam watched as they fell rapidly. He didn¡¯t care if they would live or die, but he felt like them living has greater odds and he just resumed his journey.

    There is no way he would try to fight now. If something happened and Night charm died from falling, then he would have lost a deal. Abyss grass is too valuable for him to do that.

    Sky didn¡¯t go at in leisurely pace as before. He moved at full speed to not let other people ambush. But his mind was thinking something else. How could someone know his position all the time?

    Night charm attacking him could be easily understood because Sam staying at theke is not exactly a great surprise. There are many people who saw him. But the appearance of the Wind fiend and these two people is not exactly called for.

    He would have to think this situation through and find a suitable solution to avoid this. But before that he has to find the core of the problem, when he asked Chatur, he thought long and hard and said.

    "I will check this out tomorrow morning."

    "How?"

    "I think it is something rted to the Nagin castle. After we reach the Fysi castle, I will travel to the Nagin castle, even though I am weak I can save myself with my techniques and travel without worry. I will reach the Pearl Lake by tomorrow evening."

    Sam nodded and just waited for their journey to be over.

    After an hour, they reached the fysi castle and Sam let Chatur carry Night Charm over Prince Dharkan¡¯s personal room.

    When Dharkan saw Night Charm, his face became extremelyplicated as a range of emotions could be seen on his face.

    Anger, sadness, happiness, and frustration all at the same time. The range of emotions on Night Charm didn¡¯t vary that much.

    He knew that there must be some important history between both of them. But he didn¡¯t care, he just looked at them as he waited to talk to Dharkan.

    Chatur whispered something to Sam and after receiving a nod of agreement, he immediately ran out of the room and left the castle.

    Sam just stood there as he saw the two people in question still stood there without a word.

    He gave a dry cough as if it was a trigger, both of them lunged at each other and started kissing wildly. Sam didn¡¯t know if he shouldugh or cry. They don¡¯t have any sense of propriety at all. With an outsider standing here, how can theymit such shameless acts?

    Sam raised his aura and gave another cold cough, but this time it stuck their minds as he used his mental energy to make theme back to his senses.

    "You can do what you want after I left," Sam said and all three of them sat down. Night charm is still under restriction but it was tweaked a bit only to restrict her cultivation.

    "Dharkan why are so persistent? What would happen, if someone saw me here? Now you either have to kill me or you have to bear a lot of pressure. You might even lose your title. Is it worth it?"

    Night charm spoke in a flustered tone.

    On the way, Sam hasn¡¯t mentioned they are going to Fysi castle, even when she was at the castle, she thought Sam is selling her to some other Yaksha, she didn¡¯t expect the one who is waiting for her is Dharkan, if she had known this, she would have rathermitted suicide just by rolling over Sky¡¯s back during the intrusion of her sect members.

    Dharkan didn¡¯t reply to her and looked at Sam.

    "How many people know of hering here?"

    "Me and Chatur and the people of her sect. There is a possibility that some people of the Nagin castle might have known."

    "That means everyone in the dimension will know about this in a few days."

    Dharkan muttered and Sam just stayed silent.

    "Can you remove her restrictions?" Sam looked at him and said.

    "Are you sure?"

    When he nodded his head, Sam just shrugged and removed her restriction. She cannot escape anyway, her spatial ring was already taken away and there are two more shadow tokens inside.

    As soon as he removed her restrictions though, he immediately covered himself in shadows and disappeared from the spot. Arge dark icence passed through the floor from where Sam stood. Night charm disappeared and reappeared near Sam¡¯s spot as Dharkan used his dark element and ice element in tandem to attack Sam.

    Sam grew angry and his gaze turned colder.

    He kicked his leg and a lump of dark elemental energy escaped from it before a shadow appeared behind Dharkan. This is his shadow undead. The remaining shadows also came and captured Dharkan, before Sam caught Night Charm by her neck with one hand and used his another hand and chopped on her shoulder with his palm.

    The dark elemental energy waves moved all over his hand as he shed on her shoulder and there was a miniature explosion tearing open the shoulder of the shadow body and deactivating the fusion. His hand went through the shoulder like a hot knife through butter.

    Everything happened silently the only noise that was made was the attacks of Dharkan even they are sharper than a brute.

    When he saw Sam slicing the arm off of Night Charm and the woman couldn¡¯t even scream as Sam choked her throat, Dharkan stopped struggling and stayed in ce.

    Sam looked at the woman dead in the eyes as he said.

    "Do you think I am ipetent just because I didn¡¯t kill you earlier? If not for the fact I made a deal with this sorry excuse of a man who couldn¡¯t even keep his word, I wouldn¡¯t have bothered to keep you alive. I would have killed you the second I caught."

    He looked at the prince and spat on the floor.

    "Ungrateful piece of shit."

 Chapter 625: Helping them

    Dharkan slowly dropped to his knees. If not for the fact that the room is small and Sam didn¡¯t want to cause any ruckus, he would have mmed their heads to the ground the minute they made their move.

    He looked at Dharkan coldly as he ced the restriction back on Night Charm.

    He didn¡¯t even stop her bleeding much less heal her. But if he kept it like that and restricted the cultivation, then she would bleed to death.

    "Sam, at least heal her."

    Dharkan said slowly, but Sam kicked him in the face, before saying.

    "You better think about how you are going to stay alive, before thinking about her. Do you think it is that easy breaking your word with me?"

    Sam said as he sat on the chair and looked at both of them coldly.

    "I don¡¯t have any other choice. If you don¡¯t die, people will know I didn¡¯t kill her. Then I would have myriad of troubles."

    Sam became angrier and wanted to smash his head into pulp. But he controlled the urge and said coldly.

    "I don¡¯t give a fuck about what choice you have. I want the Abyss grass by month. Until then, don¡¯t even think about getting to meet her. If the grass is not in my hands by the end of the month, you and she both would wish she is dead.

    Generally, I don¡¯t like threatening others using someone as a hostage, much less using the fact that the hostage is a woman. You should know what kind of possibilities await her if you don¡¯t keep your word."

    "YOU DARE?"

    Sam snorted and said.

    "Don¡¯t even think I would touch someone else¡¯s woman, I am not that filthy. But I can pay for someone else to do that dirty work. Anyway, judging from your reactions, I could just handover her to another noble from the Andhera Nation and they would definitely give the grass to me. Even though it might not be possible to be a fair exchange, I think me paying them with something extra apart from her is easy.

    She must havemitted a lot of crimes in your nation to be like this. So, you better be prepared."

    Sam stood up and was about to leave with her, But Dharkand jumped and held his legs as he looked at Sam with watery eyes.

    "Sam, please don¡¯t do this. I promise I will keep my word. I will get the Abyss grass for you. I will get you as much as you want. Just leave her alone. Just let her go back to the sect."

    "Do you think I am soft persimmon you could squeeze as you like?"

    Sam really wanted to kill both of these people. He really wished that Chatur was nearby and he could contact some other Yaksha right this instant and cut a deal with them. He has half-a-mind to yell in the castle and call out some people that mighte out and meet him.

    As if reading his thoughts, Dharkan said.

    "Just give me a chance to exin, after that you can do as you wish. Please, just give me a chance to exin myself and redeem myself."

    "And why would I do that?"

    "I don¡¯t have anything on me that could convince you, even my word might worth less than dirt for you because of what I did. Please, but just give me a chance."

    He started doing kowtows as he pleased Sam.

    Sam looked at Night Charm who is weeping as she looked at Dharkan, he sighed and made her sit on the floor before saying.

    "You have ten minutes."

    He sat on the chair and listened to them as he spoke.

    It is actually a simple love story that becameplicated because of the difference in statuses and the proud Night Charm who has enough of the oppression couldn¡¯t take it anymore and retaliated.

    The thing is Night Charm is a daughter of some low-level noble within the capital. Generally, there is no way both of them would have enough contact due to this difference and the only reason they had a chance was due to Night Charm¡¯s talent.

    She was enrolled into the Royal academy that only specializes in teaching high-ss nobles and Royal scions, but she was enrolled due to her Shadow body constitution. An elder of the academy who is the most fearsome assassin of the entire kingdom took her in as a disciple.

    There was no problem for them to be together as the elder has enough status, but due to some special circumstances the elder has to go somewhere and didn¡¯t return. Everyone thought he died and will never return and Night Charm became that lowly person once again.

    But they already crossed limits with each other and she was pregnant. The royal family has too high morals and they started having talks regarding their marriage, but the rest of the nobility didn¡¯t agree. After all, they all have daughters and they would never miss a chance to get into bed with royalty. So, some people forcefully made her pregnancy disappear that too in the middle of the Abyss harvest within the valley.

    The price went crazy and demanded an exnation from his father. But the King felt like it is too troublesome due to the number of nobles involved as there is a chance for them to rebel the worst part is she cannot give birth anymore as there was some kind of poison residue inside of her uterus.

    Thus the queen managed to convince the king that it isn¡¯t worth it anymore.

    But they really wanted to give the girl somepensation which they thought was generous. But how can a mother evaluate her child loss with just a mary gain? She asked permission to enter the Abyss harvest the very next year and next thing they knew, that Abyss harvest turned into the darkest incident of the whole nation that lives in darkness.

    She killed every person rted to the nobility that were involved in her incident. Except for the royal scions almost every person was dead.

    Then she managed to escape from the valley into a dark forest that is hard for even superior cultivators to tread. But onlyter did they realize that Night Charm already made contact with the Union sect and they are the ones who helped her escape.

    This time, the nobles demanded an exnation from the King and he once again felt troublesome as the nobles are too many and might rebel.

    And this time, the Queen reassured him that she would keep their son in check.

    Dharkan then vowed himself to not return to the Abyss harvest again and any other even rted to the Royal family.

    He even made such a demand to Sam as he felt like maybe he is the only one who has skills to capture her. After all, no one from the Fysi were able to do anything within the sect and she never returned to the Fysi. At least, not that they knew of.

    After hearing their story, Sam heaved a sigh. He doesn¡¯t know how to react, he only sympathized with one person, the unborn baby that died without any cause.

    He didn¡¯t sympathize with Dharkan or Night Charm individually, he felt for their love a little bit and also for the symbol of their love which is the baby.

    He felt like they are not lying that much. But Sam is also feeling conflicted a bit. Half of his mind is screaming and demanded he should help them a bit if necessary other half is saying to let them die their own death.

    He looked at them and said.

    "I promise you, that I would get the Abyss grass, just help me keep this matter down. Just promise me you will keep it a secret and if anyone asks just tell them both of us killed her."

    "Do you think the whole world is stupid and they would believe you?"

    Dharkan couldn¡¯t reply.

    Sam shook his head as he thought and finally came to a decision.

    "I have a deal. But this time, ites with a price. Do you want to ept it?"

    "What kind of deal?" Night charm asked. She left the in spite and as soon as she saw Dharkan again, she didn¡¯t want to leave him once again. She just wanted to die while being with him, but she doesn¡¯t want to go back to the sect anymore after meeting with him. That is why, she attacked Sam in tandem with Dharkan.

    "The kind that will keep you both alive and also separate from your, in fact all of the Naga Loka. Are you interested?"

    Both of the exchanged ad nce and once again looked at Sam before resolutelying to a decision.

    "What should we do?"

    Sam smiled faintly and started exining the n and details. After giving all the details, all three of them sneaked out of the Fysi castle and moved to theke.

    They removed their normal clothes and tried to dress like humans, they tried to hide their Yaksha features as much as possible.

    After arriving at the Lake, Sam resolutely dug arge area and created a small cave before covering it uppletely and creating a small entrance on top. He ced his thunder prison and tent on top as he gave an oxygen cylinder and other things within that hole to keep them alive.

    Luckily they were discreet and fast enough and from what Night Charm said, they are not tracking her anyway, they are tracking Sam himself.

    She said that someone is giving information to the Union sect from the Nagin castle and his doubts were confirmed when the next day afternoon, Chatur came to theke and reported the situation.

 Chapter 626: Show of force

    When Sam heard the report from Chatur, he immediately became furious. Because from what he said, the location of Sam is being traced in the Nagin castle.

    Inside the Nagin castle, there is a special room which Chatur didn¡¯t enter all this time, but this day, he entered it. There are six of these special rooms and each room belongs to the different nations¡¯manders.

    But the main thing is, this is like a tracker and only four people from each nation could ess this. The tracking devices are nothing but the badges that are given to them.

    They use special arrays of inscriptions that lets them be traceable even when they are inside the spatial storages.

    When he heard this, the first thing he did is ask how he knew and the answer surprised him.

    Chatur has risked it all and entered the floor where these six rooms are, got into the room, and got the info. He doesn¡¯t know how the thing works, but he is sure that the information about Sam was given to the other people by one of the closest confidants of the Mov empire¡¯smander.

    Sam first dug open the hole and let Chatur inside, before covering it back with the thunder prison and disguising it as the tent.

    He left the thunder prison right there and took out harbinger as he started his journey to the Nagin castle at his top speed.

    He didn¡¯t care if the enemies tracked him, but just from the fact his supposed allies that are supposed to be supporting him are not just supporting and waiting for his death, they are even giving the information to the enemies.

    There is no way he would let them off the hook easily.

    Sam decided it is about time, he presented a show of force to the Nagin castle members, even though they are not interfering with his work, they are really beingcent thinking that Sam wouldn¡¯t attack them.

    He has to prove them wrong, otherwise, they will walk all over Sam.

    And the first step to do that is to collect heads for leaking his location and whereabouts.

    Meanwhile, inside the said room, when the deputymander saw Sam¡¯s location changing swiftly he frowned, and when he saw that he is moving towards the Nagin castle, he rxed a bit. He went back and did what he wanted to do.

    But after a while, the whole Nagin Castle waspletely under chaos. Because a few hundred meters away from the castle, everyone could see Sam hovering on a board and held a blood-red de in his hands.

    Sam looked at the castle coldly and activated wind element fusion and started circting the void style. The red de glowed with wind elemental energy and sharp sword aura and if one looked closely it almost looked like it is tearing the wind itself.

    Sam bent forward a bit as he extended his hand holding the sword and increased the harbinger¡¯s speed to the maximum limit as he concentrated on collecting the wind elemental energy in surroundings to his de.

    When Sam is at a clear visible distance, every cultivator in the castle immediately notified their superiors causing a stir.

    They immediately activated their formations, but Sam didn¡¯t stop, he came to a sudden and instant halt right before the entrance of the castle and used the momentum to swing the de.

    Arge wind debined with a sword aura shed through the formation and hit the castle as if it is cutting a piece of paper.

    The attack didn¡¯t enter the depths of the castle, rather it shed the outer surface and the void style exploded as the formation crashedpletely and the center of the castle copsed into rubble.

    Only the rooms on both sides are left, the line of attack was focused on the hallways and the attack revealed the lowest hall of the castle on the ground floor. Thankfully, except for some rooms and walls, there is no serious damage.

    But they are not thankful for the castle¡¯s defense they are thankful for Sam¡¯s control.

    Normal soldiers couldn¡¯t see by themanders and other elites could see from Sam¡¯s raging aura that this attack isn¡¯t even half of his strength. If he really put it all in, more than half of the people currently inside the castle would have died.

    Themanders and deputies and even the normal soldiers all became furious after they came to their senses. They don¡¯t know why Sam is attacking their own, they really wanted to demand an exnation, but looking at the rubble they swallowed the words.

    But themanders and deputies have some backbone due to their backgrounds.

    Sam looked at them as they stood on their flying beasts and came towards Sam before asking.

    "What is the meaning of this? Are you trying to rebel?" The Mov empiremander asked coldly.

    Sam looked at him with a death stare as he deactivated the wind elemental fusion.

    "Someone is leaking the information about my location to the Union sect from this castle. If that person doesn¡¯te out now, I will find that person in my own way, but trust me there would be a lot of blood if I find my own way."

    One of themanders snorted before saying.

    "Who do you think you are to tantly throw such usations? We will report it to your emperor."

    Sam looked at him and the grip on his sword tightened as his aura turned sharp. That guy immediately took a step back on his beast. They knew from the show of might, they are no match for Sam. They would die for one wrong step.

    "How are you so sure about this?"

    The vos emperor¡¯smander was the calmest one of all and asked.

    "Night Charm told me."

    "Night Charm?" Everyone looked at Sam with a stunned expression.

    "Yesterday night, Night charm came to kill me, but I caught her and held hostage. I even took her to Fysi castle to see if she is one of the Yakshas, only when she regained senses and after my thorough interrogation did I learn who she is.

    After all, themanders here didn¡¯t give me any information regarding the Elite ten of the Union sect. Of course, I can understand. After all, all of you are waiting for me to die, why would you do me a favor?"

    The Mov empire¡¯smander and the deputy avoided eye contact immediately and looked away.

    "What if she lied?"

    The vosmander still asked.

    "My interrogation is a bit different. She cannot like."

    "How can you be so sure? Don¡¯t be so full of yourself?"

    Sam looked at the deputy who said this and asked.

    "How about a game then? I will interrogate you. I will ask some questions before and after I use my methods on you. All you have to do is just lie. If you can lie for one single question, I will give you a hundred million. How about that?" Sam said coldly as he looked at that guy with a creepy smile. He immediately shuddered a bit and didn¡¯t speak anymore.

    Sam looked at themanders and said.

    "I wouldn¡¯t beat around the bush. I know you guys are tracking me. If you don¡¯t reveal the truth, I will kill every person that has ess to my location. I don¡¯t care about allies who don¡¯t support me. But once that dig holes for me, if I don¡¯t make a thousand maggots dig into their rotten dead bodies in some valley, I would change my name."

    Everyone listened to his words and shuddered.

    As soon as he finished, the vosmander said.

    "Tracking people is really something the castle members do. But the authority and ess to track you are only avable to Mov empire¡¯smander, two deputies, and the squad captain of the Mov. The rest of the five doesn¡¯t have anything to do with this issue."

    With that, he just left the ce followed by the rest of the hesitantmanders. As for an exnation for the destroyed castle, they didn¡¯t dare to voice it out.

    Sam looked at the Movmander and said.

    "Since it is only four people, it wouldn¡¯t take much time, if I go through all of you."

    Sam looked at them and said.

    "I have two choices, take these pills. They are truth pills from my home, they can make you say only the truth for the next few minutes. If you don¡¯t speak the truth, you will feel your meridians shattered.

    The second way is for me to get hands-on with you. Which way do you choose?"

    "Sam you are being excessive by doing this." One of the deputies said. And Sam swung his sword. The sword ray shed past his head and a few strands of hair fell from right above his forehead.

    "The next one would be a few inches lower. I only want to know pills or me. Trust I would only ask about my tracking nothing else."

    The four of them meekly took the pills, they are afraid that Sam would take matters into his own hands. After all, he has too much authority within the Mov and particrly, themander who is a rtive of the imperial family more than others.

    Crown prince himself said Sam could do as he sees fits when another imperial scion tries to mess with him. Other than killing he has all rights and this message was given to them by the crown prince himself. So, he didn¡¯t hesitate to believe that Sam is a maniac that would deal with him.

    As for others, they are nobles and they knew what Sam did to Gnyan. They are not willing to see through this with force and took the pills before swallowing them.

    Sam asked a few questions and they answered.

    He finished with three of them and the results are negative. He focused on the fourth person who is the deputy who raised his objection earlier.

    He looked at Sam¡¯s cold smile and his knees shook as he said.

    "I am the one who did it."

    He said with a dry voice.

 Chapter 627: Players Arrived

    The sudden admittance was not something because of his guilty conscience, of course, it yed a small part. But the most important thing regarding this feeling is actually Sam¡¯s killing intent.

    It is his enormous killing intent and bloodlust that made them ept Sam¡¯s actions and take the pill.

    The three of them are okay because they didn¡¯t really do anything they didn¡¯t care if they suffered some humiliation. It is better than Sam taking matters into his own hands. After all, they had seen the reports. Sam has killed so many people, that they didn¡¯t even dare imagine.

    It is true that they waited for Sam¡¯s death under the Elite ten, but they didn¡¯t want to meddle and make an enemy out of him. After all, if he decided to flex his prowess a bit before dying, they would die too.

    But the fourth guy tried to y it cool. Half of his mind said that Sam is bullshitting and there is no such thing as that pill. In fact, his mind was right.

    There is no such pill in Sam¡¯s hands. He is bluffing and the bluff worked.

    The only reason was that his show of force and his aggressive yet confident stand made him nervous and when he looked at him like a crazed maniac, he was extremely baffled and immediately buckled under the pressure.

    Sam held him by his throat and said.

    "After sometime, you will start to spew who your father is anyway. So, you just have to tell me now so that we can save time when we have our personal ¡¯chat¡¯."

    "He is a marquis. But it has nothing to with him. I did all on my own vition."

    "Your own? Why don¡¯t you tell me the reason?"

    "I want themander position that is the only reason. My father inherited my grandfather¡¯s position, but he didn¡¯t raise at all. What can a Marquise do? I want my title to raise and this is the only way I can find it. I am sorry for selling you out."

    Samughed coldly as he threw a recording crystal to the Movmander and said.

    "This is the recording crystal with his confession, take this to the emperor and I want his reaction by the end of the week. If he asks the life of this guy is still intact and asks why I directly killed him without waiting, tell him one thing.

    ¡¯I am sick and tired of ying with the scion of this realm.¡¯ Leave the exact statement."

    With that, he once again focused on this guy and continuously asked the question to find the way they contacted him. There is a specialmunication token in his spatial ring.

    This one is identical to one Night charm has in her own ring.

    After getting all the answers, Sam suddenly used the same killing method he used when killing a beast faction member in a resourcepetition.

    He increased the blood cirction. Right in front of all the Nagas¡¯ eyes. The deputy turned into his original form, his scales peeled off of his body and he was there with bare flesh. The flesh started drying up as the temperature of the blood increased and skin cracked before he started bleeding as the meridians and veins are allpletely burst apart, and slowly, the muscle fibers were torn into shreds.

    Soon, all they could see the flesh falling off of the bones.

    Sam threw the carcass aside and looked at the Nagas before saying.

    "I don¡¯t give a fuck if you guys help me or not. I didn¡¯t ask for it anyway. But if you disrupt me and try to dig traps under me, you will follow the same fate."

    With that, Sam went back to theke.

    The thunder prison is still like that. He didn¡¯t worry about it all. Because thunder prison is not something a nascent can move. As for them taking control of it? It is even impossible. Lately, Sam noticed something with the thunder prison. The weapon seemed to have a spirit but it is an extremely passive one and directly has control over Sam. But to change hands, the battle would be nightmarish as even with this limited power, it is too strong.

    If any nascent in this dimension could control it, he would give up all his fortune for him.

    Sam destroyed his specialmander token after he killed that guy. He didn¡¯t like being tracked. But the uses of the token are self-exnatory as he can visit the other castles with a status, so before he broke it he made a replica.

    After that, there is not much disturbance regarding this.

    Now, all he has to do is follow through with his n.

    The next day, Dharkan and Sam came to Fysi castle with a dead body.

    They even made an announcement showing that this is the dead body of Night charm. There is an uproar, particrly from Andhera kingdom¡¯s side.

    Many people instantly came to check the dead body no matter they could recognize her or not.

    Sam and Chatur even followed the Andhera through the portal and they disyed the body to the nobles and the King.

    After confirming it was her, they performed a funeral, and Sam was given a bountiful reward or hundred million. Which with Prince Dharkan¡¯s influence he converted into resources.

    He bought several metals that react well with dark elemental energy and ice elemental energy.

    After buying, Sam returned with the goods, but Dharkan stayed there.

    He was nning on opening a new business as he had a new product in mind. He announced to his father and mother that he got the design from Sam for a good price and decided to open this special weapon business.

    They instantly agreed as they could feel the burden of his heart due to Night Charm¡¯s death and the prince used all the funds he could and more he got from Sam to ce an order ofrge amounts of metal.

    He decided he woulde back to the dimension after the abyss harvest is over.

    Sam who returned was met with some familiar faces. The rest of the yers arrived. Arman and Arkiv along with Akhil came to the Lake.

    He felt a headache creeping on to him as he looked at the timer that was on his hand. It is close to two months since this game started. And he already got two herbs. For the third one, he would have to wait another twenty-five days. But he cannot sit idly to wait for that toe to his hand. He had to find a way to get the remaining herbs.

    But these guys are here now and they would add to the trouble he is already having.

    "Why are you guys here?"

    "I came here because since the time I gave you is over, I would like to give you a reminder on what you would have to face. And these guys just wanted to tag along." Arkiv said as he sat in a chair within the tent.

    "Okay, I heard you. Then get out of this ce. Thiske is my territory for now. Even if you want to n something don¡¯t do this right in my ce."

    "What is thatke, why did you drop so many fire elemental stones in there?" Akhil asked.

    "It¡¯s a resource point. Don¡¯t tell me that you also didn¡¯t get any information."

    "Of course we did, do you think everyone will also treat us like a giant pain in the ass like they treat you?" Arkiv once again replied.

    Arman just stayed silent as he stood there.

    "What are you doing here?" Sam asked him with a smile.

    "I am just here to see if you would need any help. There are too many people here after you."

    He said with his head lowered and muffled voice. Sam smirked and patted his shoulder.

    Sam nodded and just focused on Akhil and Arkiv. You guys better leave now before I decide to restrain you. It would be for my benefit after all.

    "Do you think we are that weak? We might not be weaker if we both cooperate."

    "Yeah, Kumar and Noah thought the same. You can ask them how that turned out."

    After some more banter, the two of them left.

    Sam confirmed that no one else here and moved the thunder prison to let Chatur out. He is not willing to let Chatur stay alone that easily. It would be extremely dangerous. That is why he hid him.

    He introduced both of them before saying.

    "Elite ten are on to us. For now, only one of them is truly taken down and there are still nine. We have to be careful if I have to let my ns go unhindered and I do have some ideas on how to deal with that situation. But before that, Chatur, contact someone from the Vronti empire and his status shouldn¡¯t be less than Sandra and Dharkan.

    How long would you need?"

    "No need to wait at all. We can go now if you want to. I am a bit close to this guy. He might not be the strongest person in Vronti Castle, but he is the most capable merchant. He will sell his own body if he can get enough money."

    Sam nodded and said.

    "Okay then, let us go."

    Now, instead of two, three of them started their journey.

 Chapter 628: Praneeth

    Their journey to the Vronti castle is actually quite uneventful and there is actually a shortcut from theke which made their journey faster.

    Chatur changed his appearance when they are nearby and he did so after changing into a human form. He changed into a human with a face that could easily get lost in a crowd. He even made Sam and Arman change clothes and created disguises.

    But when they entered the Vronti castle, they didn¡¯t have to wait for anyone or inform an attendant. They directly strolled into a room with no one stopping them.

    As for the reason, the Vronti castle doesn¡¯t wee the people from Nagin castle. They are extremely aversive to them and the main reason stemmed from the rivalry of the Nagas.

    The Vronti is also controlled by both Yaksha and Nagas. There are few humans. But the Nagas of this don¡¯t like the Nagas of the Nagin because of their bloodline variation.

    Now it is like the racism of the modern earth. Racism based on skin tone, but where the skin is reced by scales.

    The is also a bit different as they have extreme lightning energy and metal energy all over the ce. There are many mines to the point there is no normal vegetation. Even the trees and forests here are of metal and they look great for the view, not so for the food and such.

    The conflict between the two unbnced natural elements, the metal and lightning sh regrly making it hard for them to live there.

    But that also gave them some advantages that are not easily obtained in any other ce. For starters, the gravity of this ce is higher and this made these people stronger than normal. They have a greater tendency to activate warrior bodies and there are many people with warrior constitutions.

    And due to the active metal essence and the lightning essence all over, it is a great ce for cultivating both elements and most of them awaken as Warrior mages of either one of those elements or even both of those elements.

    Even though they don¡¯t have as many resources as the rest of thes when considering other elements, they have too many in their own elements that made them extremely powerful.

    As for the reason the Nagas of the Vronti do not like the Nagas of the Nagin, it is very simple.

    It was said that the Nagas of Vronti are once part of the Nagin empire, but were chased away from that and thrown into the Vronti as prisoners.

    It was done so because ancestors of both races ascended to greater heights and fought for superiority. Their side lost but didn¡¯t seem to honor a bet, so this ancestor got pissed and tore open a space tunnel and threw them all into that.

    Even though it is a little more than a myth in the Nagin, the Vronti believe this as an exaggerated fact.

    As for Yaksha, they have nothing against others.

    Currently, they are meeting a Yaksha of the Vronti.

    He didn¡¯t wear anything on his upper half as he showed off his physique with all the blue electric tattoos along with blue metallic tattoos.

    He was blessed with both of them and the tattoos are extremely dense for a nascent.

    "Hey, Chatur. It has been a long time since we met."

    He greeted chatur casually and gestured all three of them to take a seat.

    "I have been busy. I brought someone to meet you. He wants to talk a business deal."

    Chatur replied and went on to introduce Sam and Arman. Apparently, the disguise is only for the others to ignore them. This guy already knows Chatur¡¯s real identity and they seemed to be pretty close. Sam could see how casual this guy is. His name is praneeth and he is already talking to them as if they are friends for the past seven lives.

    "So, what kind of business do you want to discuss? I am open to talk about any business except for a few."

    "I want to buy something special from your. But I don¡¯t know if you have authority to sell it."

    "Don¡¯t worry about that. There are not many things I couldn¡¯t sell. You can name what you want. I can sell metals, elemental stones, special herbs, fruits, even fruit trees. Apart from that I even have a business of some special beasts and even exotic water creatures of the Vronti."

    "They all sounds great, but first I want to buy a mushroom."

    Sam said with a smile.

    Praneeth¡¯s smile stiffened a bit and then his grin became bigger.

    "If you are saying what I think you are saying, maybe you came to the right person. Only I have authority to give ess to that thing."

    "If you think I am talking about Thousand lightning mushroom, then yes, you might be the right person."

    "But you do know that it is extremely valuable right? It cannot be bought with money easily."

    "Of course, I am not just paying with money. What do you want?"

    "The thousand lightning mushroom is difficult to obtain. But only for others, for me it is easy and in fact, I already have one. It is to improve my cultivation and foundation. Even the transcendent stage cultivators can take it. As for me, if I take it in small parts and slowly digest it, I can easily be a pre-transcendent stage cultivator and even reach the second stage directly. So, it is hard to put a price tag on it.

    But there is a way for you to exchange it with something of equivalent value."

    "So, what would that be?"

    "I heard you are quite fast, I want you to obtain a fruit for me, but that fruit is not of the same value as the mushroom. It is quite cheaper. So, I want three of them plus, I want your help in capturing a beast. I want you to help me tame it. If you can do that, I will give you the mushroom.

    If you can obtain anything from the expedition, you can keep it."

    Sam looked at him and thought for a moment before saying.

    "Any other alternatives?"

    "I can¡¯t say I don¡¯t have any. But only if there no hope at all."

    "Then I would agree. When do we leave?"

    "In two days, we will meet at the Origin castle at dawn."

    Sam nodded and left along with Arman and Chatur.

    They didn¡¯t go back to theke immediately. Due to the appearance of Elite ten in the dimension, the Union sect once again started the war.

    But this time, they are not as aggressive and even their arrangements are quite meticulous and that is due to one of the elite ten¡¯s arrangements. He is called the Battle Erudite. Even though, Sam felt that the title is not so deserving it is not too far off.

    He is good at nning battle formations and such.

    He has astute nning and a delicate understanding of the situation and he is not even attacking the Nagin castle directly.

    He is attacking it bit by bit.

    The Nagin castle has a veryrge disadvantage in terms of its bases and resource points. They are spread too thin and too wide. They couldn¡¯t send the reinforcements immediately.

    Currently, they are attacking a castle of Nagin from a different direction and attacked another resource point a bit far away from that castle.

    There is another base of Nagin castle in the middle, they are now stuck between two choices, but when they send reinforcement to either one of them, that very base would be vulnerable and the Union sect has stationed some troops nearby.

    So, currently, the union sect battling on two fronts and waiting out on one.

    On top of that six of the elite ten are ced in pairs at these three ces. They are waiting for Sam or other elites that appeared that could tilt the scales of the battle, they are not going to directly participate in the battle.

    But what they don¡¯t know is neither Sam¡¯s nor the elites that came has the war as their first priority. They all have their own tasks toplete.

    After observing the situation for a bit, Sam decided to meddle in one of the battle-fields.

    If he fought with these elites, he is pretty sure that they would use those shadow tokens. But Sam has a chance now as Arman is with him. He could figure out a way to hold off at least one of them if they wanted to escape by using their teamwork.

    So, after scouting a bit, they finally found the ce where the wind fiend is and decided to make their move there.

    He already has some personal business with that guy as he escaped after ambushing. So, Sam figured that it is also a chance for him to repay the favor.

    He could also understand the mindset of these guys as he didn¡¯t expect them to be this passive after Night Charm¡¯s disappearance.

 Chapter 629: Boring Battle

    Sam let Chatur hide in the Vronti castle for the time being and he woulde to the Origin castle along with him.

    He decided to y around the battle for these two days and that too in direct battle. He didn¡¯t want to battle with undead and other tricks.

    In fact, he wanted to go for an old-fashioned fist fight for a change, so he and Arman immediately covered their faces with ck cloth as they wore full ck. They don¡¯t even have any special inscriptions and enchantments. They are just some high-quality normal clothes.

    As for why they are wearing this, it is just because Sam just wanted to have some fun.

    They reached the base that was under attack as discreetly as possible and joined the army directly. Sam shed his specialmander badge to the actingmander in secret and Arman who also has a special badge showed it and only the actingmander at that base knew of their real identities.

    The actingmander was ecstatic. He didn¡¯t expect that a specialmander and an elite would being here. Currently, the rest of the specialmanders are in a deep discussion as the addition of the new elites and the previous losses, made them rethink their situation, and with Sam¡¯s prowess and the yers¡¯ goading, they reached an agreement.

    They wanted to get the most out of this by cooperating together isting Sam. The normalmander of Mov is also not there as he was sent back to the empire by Sam.

    So, there is no opposition and to their surprise, Noah and Arkiv who are supposed to be on the Mov side are also supporting them.

    They are currently nning some big moves and didn¡¯t care about the skirmishes that are happening at the two ces, they are nning arge-scale attack on the sect. But since Sam is not involved in this, he didn¡¯t know anything and decided to just mess around in the current battles.

    They entered the two separate squads at two ends of the battle-field. Both of them only used lightning elements and they only used their fists. They didn¡¯t even care about strategy or orders, they just jumped into the enemies and started punching with lightning fists.

    The silver sparks and blue sparks are glowing all over as they attacked barbarically.

    Sam didn¡¯t even follow his usual style of attacking vitals, he is just punching wherever he can and started prating the enemy formation.

    The same thing could be seen happening from the other side.

    And this led to themander of the enemy troops to fall into panic. After all, the ns the battle erudite gave him are only rted to battling against the army. It didn¡¯t specify the battle against single experts creating mass murder.

    The reason Battle Erudite didn¡¯t do so; was not that he didn¡¯t want to, rather he thought, he didn¡¯t need to because he thought, Sam or other elites wouldn¡¯t use such an approach and they would get the information from their spies if they are moving and the Elite ten members would be prepared.

    But Sam and Arman joining the battle arepletely decided on a whim and there is no other n behind it. They even sneaked inpletely beyond their thoughts.

    By the time, they realized who they are it was toote because they only managed to find out after their clothes are torn and their faces are revealed and people from the Elite ten saw them. But, Sam and Arman are already in the middle of the battle formations, this caused chaos and the elite ten members ran forwardmanding the troops to disperse directly.

    They didn¡¯t want Sam to create another massacre. They suffered enough losses already.

    Even though this many people surrounded Sam, due to him being surrounded like that, at most six people could attack him and Sam is fast enough to kill or injure these six people before they could attack and they are being reced by another six.

    They couldn¡¯t do anything but take the damage.

    But after the call from the elites, they immediately dispersed and the Nagin castle troops didn¡¯t let go of this chance.

    They took the initiative to take advantage. The formations have been continuously making them feel stressed as they are not being able to break them.

    Even when someone strong was able to break them for a bit, just like how Sam was stuck between the group with six people surrounding him, they are going to be dead and the formation is in such a way that they couldn¡¯t break through with a chain of people.

    They are separating the group of people that tried to break and surrounded them separately. But Sam and Arman are anomalies and added to the fact they are acting like normal soldiers made it hard for them.

    But now, the two elites came forward, the normal soldiers of the Union sect are actually relieved even though they met with the attacks of the Nagin soldiers.

    Sam smiled as the person who came to him was none of than the Wind Fiend who came on his bird. But he didn¡¯t fly on it. He jumped off and took out his saber as heunched himself towards Sam while the Vulture started supporting him.

    Sam smiled and didn¡¯t take out his sword, the silver lightning crackled all over his scar-filled body and he lunged towards Wind fiend. He didn¡¯t even use partial fusion and only attacked with his fists.

    As for the Vulture, it could wish it can catch Sam alone without harming Wind Fiend directly.

    Sam was sticking to Wind Fiend¡¯s body like a young maiden in love as if he couldn¡¯t live without that guy. He was so close and the vulture would definitely cause severe damage to Wind fiend if it attacked.

    Sam continuously punched forward as he even blocked several saber strikes and stabs with his fists and sent jolts of the shock of silver lightning through that contact.

    The amount of lightning is extremely small, but he is repeatedly making contact. Sam must say he was impressed by Wind fiend¡¯s defense as he still stood and fought back after taking multiple hits.

    Even though Sam didn¡¯t use full power, this is really impressive.

    As he was battling, Sam slowly lost his advantage, after all, he is only using his fists and fighting at a moderate pace with minimal lightning. It could be said that he is even toying and observing the other battle between Arman and another elite of the Usaine sect.

    They are having a somewhat tight battle as Arman held a considerable advantage. The reason being both of them using the lightning elements and Arman being more proficient with his skills.

    He already took out his saber as he countered his opponent who is using a staff.

    They are having a battle with high tension. Looking at them he felt a bit jealous, he didn¡¯t have such a tense battle in a long time.

    That is why he is suppressing his abilities like this now. As for enemies escaping, he has his ideas for that. But for now, he changed his stance a bit and increased the lightning energy in his arms and legs. His speed and strength increased and all of a sudden hended a clean upper-cut straight to the chin of the Wind Fiend which made him fly off a bit and crash into the distance.

    But Sam didn¡¯t follow up, rather he immediately leaped backward and dodged two wind des that missed him with hair¡¯s breadth andunched himself at the Vulture behind him.

    The vulture reacted fast enough and escaped, but his fist still grazed at the lower abdomen causing the vulture to scream in pain.

    Sam jumped backward and looked at the man and the beast before shaking his head. This is getting really boring.

    He looked at Wind Fiend with a bit of disdain. Even though this guy is good, he can only be considered a bit above average. The yers could also wipe the floor with him. He is more like Night Charm.

    She is good at assassination, not open battles and this guy is also not good at direct shes, he is good at aerialbat and ambushes.

    But he is not great at melee. At least, not one of the top dogs in that area whenpared to Sam and the rest of the yers.

    Maybe, other people will be having a problem when dealing with him as he is mostly focused on the mid-ranged attacks with wind des and saberbination, but Sam has yet to give him a chance at that as he directly stuck to him.

    He had his fun, albeit very short, but he is bored. His body suddenly got surrounded by silver lightning and he took out staff as he looked at Wind Fiend.

    Wind fiend also gritted his teeth and got ready tounch a final attack. He now has enough distance to build his attack too, even the vulture got into position.

    Sam even noticed that Wind fiend is holding the shadow token and the same hand has a thumb on the beast pouch that was on his waist. He was ready to escape too.

    His saber was condensing the spiritual energy and wind howled around it as he ran forward.

    The wings of the vulture also glowed and shone like sharp des of wind as both man and the beast lunged towards him.

    Sam mmed his foot to the ground and flipped in the air as he swung his staff towards the beast. Wind fiend frowned at this as the target is far off, the staff wouldn¡¯t react to the vulture as the swing is small.

    But as the staff came to halt, a bolt of silver lightning came out of the edge and stuck the head of the vulture, make it numb and stunned and the Vulture stopped flying and crashed.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop though, he used the falling momentum and swung the staff downwards as itnded on the left hand that was holding the shadow tokenpletely breaking the limb.

    Due to his single second of daze, Wind Fiend¡¯s attack missed Sam and grazed on the vulture¡¯s back.

    But the vulture couldn¡¯t even scream as it ispletely numb and paralyzed.

    Samnded on the ground as he looked at both of them. He made a swift move and broke another hand of Wind Fiend and smiled. The boring battle was over instantly.

 Chapter 630: Another tempest Valley

    Even thest attacks Samnded with the staff are not that great. They are quite simple actually. The only problem is them being lightning attacks and Wind Fiend is too stupid to prepare any defense.

    He is the epitome of the saying ¡¯People judge others by their own standards.¡¯ He doesn¡¯t have the ability to move like Sam and hit like Sam, so he just decided that Sam wouldn¡¯t be able to do that too.

    Sam was clearly too disappointed. When the lightning user looked at the situation, he decisively halted the battle and yelled amand to the troops before crushing the shadow token.

    The troops started to retreat and the Nagin castle troops started their pursuit as they didn¡¯t want to lose this chance.

    Sam and Arman didn¡¯t care about them. They already did what they had to do and with this Sam¡¯s contribution would definitely surpass all the specialmandersbined. So, he doesn¡¯t have to worry about the situation too much. He would receive the rewards he was due. After all, he alone killed a thousand soldiers and even reimed bases and finally took out two of the Elite ten. There is no way the other empires can protest.

    This is the part of the reason that the rest of the specialmanders decided to work together so that they can sweep the rest of the battlefield and diminish Sam¡¯s achievements. They would even agree to take equal credit and since they would be one entity in this, the Mov empire can forget about that deal between six empires. At least, that is what their n.

    But with this battle, the bnce has already tipped.

    Sam himself cleaned more than thirty percent of enemies, which means the rest of the five have to fight for the remaining sixty-five to sixty-eight percent. Even if they distributed evenly they would only get thirteen to fourteen percent.

    That is if Sam stops. After all, with the damage, Sam caused, if the Elite ten left him alone like that, their reputation would be worth bullshit.

    As for the rest of the time, Sam didn¡¯t go and y with the rest of the armies, instead, he and Arman went around to gather food and new beasts to the farm.

    Along with that, Sam is also looking for new vegetation so that it could keep up with the livestock he is growing.

    He has to maintain the output of the feed and luckily most of the beasts he had as livestock are herbivores and the current output is enough.

    After these two days, he directly went to the Origin castle with Arman. Since it is a with high lightning elemental energy, Arman might have some encounters. This short training period could be helpful.

    Anyway, since even with the enticement of the rewards from the ck horsepetition, he still didn¡¯t dare to do anything against Sam, it is okay to give him some rewards.

    When they reached the Origin castle, Chatur is still in his disguise, but Sam and Arman are not, they didn¡¯t bother much as there is no one who knows their faces on that.

    They went to Vronti and there are already people ready to escort them to their destination.

    They didn¡¯t beat around the bush and go to Praneeth¡¯s home. Since the deal is discussed directly, there is no need to wait.

    Anyway, Sam has a lot of things to do back in the Union dimension.

    So, they just went on with the journey and they used the beasts of the locality. They are traveling on the ground. The sky here is full of maic storms and lightning storms. It is not good for them to fly at all. The beasts that could fly high are not low in cultivation.

    For that reason, Raiju also came out and he is jumping around as if he is in a yground. The environment is extremely conducive to electricity as even the soil was like powdered metal. There are many minerals even in normal soil. But due to an excessive mixture of multiple metals it is hard to separate them.

    One thing, that surprised Sam is the gravitational effect. It is higher than what he anticipated and for a few minutes, it was hard for him to even move.

    Even after he adapted, it would be hard for him to battle at his full strength with his normal body. Of course, it is different if we talk about elemental fusion. After seeing this effect, his mind is full of thoughts. This ce is a perfect training zone for warriors, lightning users, and metal users.

    He has many ideas flooding his brain and he could see himself being in long-term cooperation with Praneeth.

    They traveled for three days straight and finally, reached the vicinities of their first stop.

    It is the fruit tree.

    When Sam looked at the area, he could help but remember the Tempest Valley in the Central continent of the Deste where Old beast is resting.

    It is almost the same, the only problem is that within the valley apart from the tempest, the gravity is many times stronger than outside the valley.

    And in the middle of it all, there are five fruit trees.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but shudder as he looked at this. Even though the lightning quality is not as strong as the tempest valley, this is not something easy to survive.

    Even some Pre-transcendent stage cultivators would die. But the problem is that other than Nascent and Pre-transcendent stage cultivators, no one is allowed to enter. It is because, the clouds causing the lightning seemed to have sentience, and when they feel the presence of someone stronger than the middle-stage Pre-transcendent the lightning will go on a rampage trying its best to kill you.

    Legend states that no one was able to escape the lightning storm after they entered if their cultivation level is that high.

    Sam was nervous when he looked at the situation. He didn¡¯t think it would be this dangerous.

    But apart from the nervousness, he is actually quite excited too.

    "The fruit here could work wonders. Even though the mushroom is good, its real effect is for the beasts or the Transcendent stage cultivators. But the effect is not too significant for them to die for it. So, mostly Nascent stage cultivators use it.

    But these fruits are different. They are mostly suitable for cultivators. But if they didn¡¯t take three, they might as well not take any of it.

    One fruit wouldn¡¯t change anything and if they took two it could even cause imbnce. That is why I asked you.

    Are you confident?"

    Sam nodded and said.

    "I need to examine the environment first."

    "One more thing, when you reach the tree and pluck the fruit, you would have to ept a small punishment from the valley. So, be prepared. If you take three, then you would have to take arger punishment. I wonder if you could take it."

    Sam nodded and just stood there at the entrance of the valley.

    The lightning is in pale blue color. It is crackling like crazy and unlike the tempest valley that has a continuous rhythm, this doesn¡¯t have a pattern at all.

    The only pattern that could be visible is that the intensity of lightning is increasing to the deeper portion of the valley.

    In every portion, the lightning is striking normally without any rhythm or pattern.

    Sam sat there at the entrance for a whole day, but he still couldn¡¯t find any pattern. They are extremely random and this would make it hard for him to escape easily.

    That evening, there are some people who wanted to try their hand at the fruits and entered the valley.

    Out of those three, two people had partial lightning fusion and thest one has full fusion. Their lightning is also of different colors and the quality and intensity is nowhere near Arman¡¯s lightning much lesspare to his silver lightning.

    But they are good, they seemed to have experienced this before.

    They are mostly trying to dodge the lightning strikes, but it is not easy to do so. So, they dodged as much as they can and let the lightning strike their bodies.

    Initially, the two with the partial fusion are having a harder time in the portion of the valley nearest to the entrance.

    The one with theplete fusion has no problem moving easily. But this changed when they reached half-way.

    The gravity which Sam initially thought was normal gravity is actually extreme maic force.

    It is making their lightning bodies react a bit and clearly, they are having a tough time controlling their fusion. But if they didn¡¯t do so, they would die from the continuous lightning strikes.

    One guy with the least amount of fusion couldn¡¯t take it anymore and give up early, the second person also gave up after his fusion body fluctuated and he retreated to avoid bacsh.

    Thest person was just a few steps away from the tree and he wanted to extend his hand, but the lightning strikes are something he couldn¡¯t handle.

    Even his fusion body is injured and he immediately ran backward without care.

    He fell to his knees at the entrance and coughed up blood. His friends took care of him and they left the ce together.

 Chapter 631: Getting the fruits

    Sam observed simr incidents for the next few days, there are some groups that worked together. They shielded a few people for the first half and returned from there, the remaining small group shielded an even smaller group for a certain distance before returning and thest group shielded one person until he is a few steps away from the tree.

    Thest guy took the final punishment and plucked a fruit, before trying his best to escape

    But this method is not extremely suitable. All the people who participated in the group have to elite and they also have to be good at fusion.

    They took significant damage as they not only have to protect themselves, they have to shield others.

    So, a group could at most take one fruit away and they would have to recover for a good ten days before they can even think of stepping foot in the valley again.

    And god must know if the fruit will stay with them for these ten days, so they would sell it. Even though, it is not that valuable individually, the cost is significant.

    After three days, Sam finally decided to give it a try.

    The first thing he did is activate the lightning elemental fusion. His control over this is not as good as his fire elemental body or the light elemental body. But at least, he has the hundred percent fusion and he can try his best to deal with the current situation.

    Sam has some ideas on how to proceed with this and for the first few meters it is actually quite easy, neither the gravity nor the lightning strikes made him fear. But after covering one-third, he finally started feeling resistance.

    He proceeded to use this first method. As for Arman, he is also interested in fruits, but he could barely pluck one and he couldn¡¯t guarantee to get the remaining two. But Sam said he doesn¡¯t have to worry about that, so he focused on cultivating and his methods made every visitor of the valley sweat bullets.

    He directly entered the valley and sat inside. Even though he is somewhat close to the entrance, sitting there for hours is not something anyone can do.

    Arman is also trying to obtain the full fusion of his lightning element, but currently, he is around sixty to seventy percent. So, he decided to take this chance.

    Coming back to Sam who is inside the one-third of the valley, he stood there for a second and closed his eyes as he slowly took his step.

    His steps caused energy ripples from his body to all sides and some lightning strikes that are not strong enough are deflected.

    The damage on him is reduced by half.

    Sam didn¡¯t dodge and started moving with simple and small steps. He didn¡¯t even takerge strides and even kept his eyes closed.

    Due to the superiority of his lightning andplete fusion, Sam could even try to absorb a bit, but his body couldn¡¯t take too much of it, so he is using ripple style to his advantage and make the lightning divert and even the lightning that struck him.

    He channeled that energy and let the ripples expel it from his body.

    Even though his body could take the stress, the main strain is on his mental strength.

    He has to concentrate to the extreme and the precision and timing should be impable.

    At least, he is not using the ripple style too much at the moment, but the more distance he covered, the more energy and more ripples he has to create, and more strain would be ced on his mental strength.

    He confidently moved forward and soon he reached the halfway point, but he didn¡¯t stop and just moved.

    The ripples grew stronger and Sam didn¡¯t even change direction once. But after covering three-fourths his speed reduced. The lightning strikes are too dense and his mastery over the ripple style is not exactly sufficient to repel them like that.

    He is suffering a bit and many spectators thought Sam is done for. But the man himself didn¡¯t think so.

    Until now, other than the few initial steps, he didn¡¯t take much damage at all. In fact, he is almost in his top condition except for exhaustion of energy his body is well and good. He brute-forced for a while and when he is a few steps away from the tree, he used void style all of a sudden. He used it to channel a lightning strike and kicked the ground as he lunged forward and he directly came into contact with the tree.

    Right beside the tree, there is not much lightning, in fact, it is almost like each tree is surrounded by a cage of lightning. The only lightning that will strike when they are in contact with the tree is the punishment for plucking a tree.

    While Sam is walking around the tree closely and seemed to be inspecting, everyone was stunned by hisst jump.

    Even Praneeth who has a leisurely attitude all long was surprised. Because, when Sam used void style, not only a decent-sized crater appear, due to the lightning void st and the surrounding lightning was all focused towards that point, giving Sam a small window of the gap to escape.

    Even the lightning blocking the trees also fluctuated because of this and Sam used his fusion body taking minimum damage and touching the tree.

    While many people are thinking that Sam is showing off by staying that much time near the tree, Sam has another thoughtpletely.

    He is using his observation technique with his feet and hands as he checked the tree¡¯s condition and the roots that are spread all over. There are five fruit trees here and they are growing quite well. Apart from that, Sam also noticed that there are small saplings nearby and they are also absorbing the lightning and growing.

    Even though the growth rate is slow, the five trees upied the most important spot of the valleys, so it is to be expected.

    After carefully observing for some time, Sam started using his maniption ability to loosen the soil. The lightning clouds started roaring as if they are warning Sam.

    But Sam didn¡¯t stop, he made a few circles and by this time, the lightning punishment started to strike him.

    He didn¡¯t stop or defend, he tried his best to expel most of it with the ripple style and started kicking the ground using the rest of the energy with Void style, only leaving third of the energy wreaking havoc in his body, but his lightning fusion body is reducing the damage as much as possible.

    Meanwhile, the spectators are stunned. They didn¡¯t know why Sam is kicking the ground like that. If they could see what is happening, they would see the roots of the tree being exposed as the loosed soil dispersed to the side.

    His kicks are extremely controlled even with the Void style and he didn¡¯t harm the roots.

    The lightning punishment kept on striking and this caused the people to be confused. They didn¡¯t expect the lightning would strike Sam like that just because only when the fruit was stolen would the lightning react.

    Soon, they came to an understanding, Sam is not just stealing the fruit; he is stealing the tree.

    Once they thought of this, they couldn¡¯t calm down at all.

    The tree Sam is stealing has twenty-one fruits and they are glowing with blue color lightning sparks, but in fact, they are transparent and the sparks are due to the lightning energy. They looked at those fruits with longing and many people started preparing their own schemes.

    If Sam returned and with his weakened state, wouldn¡¯t the tree be all alone in the hands of an injured person? They became greedy.

    Praneeth is looking at the rest of them and couldn¡¯t help but smile.

    Because, Sam has asked him for something before they came here and that is, his safety. And now Praneeth who already agreed now understood clearly.

    Sam¡¯s ambitions are too wild after all.

    He immediately took out a special token and crushed it a faint blue light appeared from it and zoomed in a direction.

    By this time, Sam finished clearing the soil and the roots are exposed.

    The tree is not too thick and the roots didn¡¯t spread too much. He hugged the tree and grit his teeth as he pulled the tree out while gritting his teeth as he endured the barrage of lightning that targeted him like crazy.

    He threw the tree into the divine dimension and immediately started running towards the entrance of the cave, but before that with a wave of his hand a fruit appeared and fell into therge hole Sam created to take the tree away and he ran to the entrance.

    But unlike the people before the lightning punishment continuously rained on him as Sam used void style to kick the ground and appear at the entrance.

    Only after he came out of the valley did the lightning stopped. He immediately deactivated the fusion and puked a mouthful of blood. He sprawled in the ground with exhaustion.

    The shape of the valley has changed because of Sam.

    There are manyrge craters and even the lightning strikes density was altered a bit.

    As Sam was sighing in relief, he didn¡¯t seem to care about the people surrounding him at all and just smiled as he looked at them.

 Chapter 632: Thunder Bird

    Sam just waved his hand and tworge figures appeared on either side of him.

    *ROAR*

    *HOWL*

    The Golden Ape and Raiju as they roared and howled to the sky. They looked at the rest of the cultivators that are surrounding with hostility. Arman also came forward from the valley and took out his saber as he looked at them.

    Praneeth was stunned for a second. He was clearly nervous before as he crushed his token toote.

    He was worried that the person he needed to be here wouldn¡¯t be able to reach this ce in time. He is thinking of ways to stall for time. But before he could react two beasts and a man are standing out.

    Chatur hesitated for a bit and even he came to stand beside Sam.

    The cultivators halted in their tracks. They could clearly see from the auras of the beasts and the killing intent oozing out of them, that they could do some critical damage. There would definitely be some lives lost. But no one was willing to lose their own life first.

    Ape took this chance and made Sam drink the heavenly wine so that he could recover.

    Praneeth also came forward and joined the team before saying.

    "These are my people, you better back off."

    He said with confidence, but only he knew that he is not confident at all. Because, he knew that once they got enough fruits if the party who stole from them escaped and gifted them to another noble family, they would definitely offer them enough protection to escape.

    The other noble families might not start a war, but they could easily make a few people disappear from their sight and things would be troublesome. If they really made a move, with around forty people around, there is definitely a threat to his life.

    He is actually nervous. He looked at Sam and was surprised to see that he was recovering at a visible rate.

    He understood that if Sam only took the fruits, with his endurance he could have harvested four to five easily.

    He just had to take down the whole tree. On top of that, now he is easily recovering. There is a chance for them to escape even if they couldn¡¯t fight. But the next moment, he was stunned.

    A person wanted to sneak attack on Sam, but Raiju and Ape got furious and jumped at him.

    Sam sat up and casually drunk wine as the conflict broke out and the two beasts fought ruthlessly. He only decided to use the two of them, because the other beasts have the natural disadvantage in this environment.

    That is not because of the Miasma.

    There is no Miasma here and then he understood that the nature of this itself ispletely different from the rest of the Naga Loka for some unknown reason.

    The disadvantage is actually due to the think metal and lightning essence. In this area particrly the lightning essence is too much.

    The rest of the beasts might be able to survive, but it is not a good idea to let them fight.

    As for these two beasts, Raiju is good, and the Ape is of neutral element. So, he has the least suppression other than Raiju.

    The two beasts didn¡¯t hesitate at all and attacked in full power as they tore through their enemies. Arman also joined in the action and even Chatur started throwing the grenades. Sam gave him a lot of grenades.

    There are too many left with him.

    He didn¡¯t have muchbat strength, so all he can do is throw them. But these grenades are quite a surprise and created some serious damage.

    The battle is one-sided. But not in the way praneeth expected. After a few moments, he came out the daze and he also joined in his attack.

    His methods are quite different as he is attacking with lightning and metalbined. His body is generating metal spikes that are being shot. Generally, it is hard to create projectile attacks with metal element users, but this guy can do because of his lightning element.

    It is almost like they are being hit by taser bolts. But these bolts too powerful that they could kill if they are hit in proper ces.

    The battle reached the final stages soon. But at this moment, man could be seening towards them on arge tiger like beast.

    When Sam was this, he was surprised, because this is the only tiger that was closest to the normal tiger from modern earth. At least in terms of looks.

    It has golden yellow fur with ck stripes, but golden-yellow electric sparks are crackling around it.

    A man is standing on top of the tiger and his aura is extremely powerful. When they looked at the person, all the attackers ran away.

    Sam also recovered quite a bit and stood up before stretching a bit. He let Ape go in first and fed some wine to Raiju to let him heal the injuries he got. He became energetic instantly as the damage is not that bad.

    He waved a hand and three fruits are thrown towards Praneeth.

    "I think our deal isplete. Don¡¯t forget that not only did you agree for me to keep the rest of the harvest. You also agreed to provide safety."

    Sam¡¯s words wereced with hidden meaning. He is clearly telling him to not forget the deal and try to get the tree for himself. All the fruits inside belongs to Sam now.

    Sam looked at Arman and said.

    "Tell me when you are about to breakthrough, I will give the fruits to you."

    Arman just nodded in agreement.

    The man on the tiger already reached the area and greeted praneeth before looking at Sam and others.

    "Bro, these are my guests, I want you to stay with me until I return to the Union dimension again. Keep us safe."

    Praneeth said casually and the man nodded. He didn¡¯t seem like a person who talks much.

    But Sam is not interested in him, he is looking at the tiger. He couldn¡¯t recognize the tiger at all. It seemed to be a cross-breed between two different types of tigers and it is not registered in the Beastiary in Sam¡¯s hands.

    This is something unexpected and surprising as the Beastiary was created by a God level person. Then that means, this beast has to be quite recent or this has to be quite remote that the person who created the Beastiary ignored this cepletely.

    They started their journey once again and Sam focused on his recovery. He didn¡¯t want to stay in this ce much longer. Everything is metallic here and even Sam who is crazy over metal resources, couldn¡¯t bring himself to like this ce.

    This ce might not just be useful for warriors and lightning users¡¯ training, this might even give them some mental training. It is too hard to live in this ce. Even the breeze is sharp and oozing metallic scent. Sam has an urge to even wear a breathing device.

    After traveling for another day, they arrived a mountain.

    It is a metal mountain and there is a constant lightning strikes on the peak.

    There are several bird type beasts flying around over various regions of the mountain.

    The Birds are electric blue in color and even their feathers are shaped differently. From afar they looked like lump of lightning clouds flying.

    But Sam recognized these beasts and he a bit surprised.

    Because, they are Thunder Birds. Just like how a fire bird is a lesser version of the Phoenix, the wyvern is a lesser version of the dragon, these Thunder Birds are lesser version of the Thunder Phoenix.

    These are extremely proud creatures and due to their higher grade of bloodline, they shouldn¡¯t be beasts that truly belonged to Naga loka.

    When he came to this thought, he highly suspected if this is even part of the Naga Loka. After all, there is only the connection between the sixs through the Union Dimension and no one can guarantee theses belong to the same Sr system.

    At least, he is confident that the Fysi, Nagin and Merman are of the Naga Loka, but he is not sure if they are really neighborings. Even the dimensional drifter doesn¡¯t have much information as he couldn¡¯t gauge the distance between them with just coordinates alone as he is not sure the how long a unit coordinate in that system is.

    He shook his head to let go of his confusing thoughts and looked at Praneeth.

    "I want one of those beasts, if you could capture one and help me tame it, I will give you the mushroom. Even if you can¡¯t I will ask for something else, but the price could be quite high."

    "Why do you want them so much?"

    "They are the only beasts that could be indifferent to all the lightning storms in the sky. Our doesn¡¯t allow us to fly unless the beasts are of Transcendent level or higher. But these beasts make it possible.

    No matter what cultivation level they have, they can at least reach a certain altitude.

    Many people tried to capture, but they are too aloof. They wouldn¡¯t even do anything if you go on to the mountain and try to entice it, even if you battle one beast, unless it is on verge of death, other beasts wouldn¡¯t interfere.

    But once the beast didn¡¯t like you and gave the message, the beasts would let theirpanion go no matter how strong you are.

    Even consummate level cultivators, tried to capture a low-level beasts, but no one know where they came from, but a bunch of Consummate realm beasts attacked and killed him. Legend says that the lightning on the peak is actually caused by a beast beyond Consummate level. So, no one dared to be cocky in this area.

    Are you confident?" Praneeth looked at Sam as he asked.

 Chapter 633: Surprise

    Sam looked at the beasts and couldn¡¯t help but smile a bit. He felt like these beasts are also here due to some kind of ban from the upper realms or this might actually be a part of the upper-realms. But he didn¡¯t think too much.

    He was just fascinated by the prospects of meeting these beasts. Firebird is an equivalent bird to this whenpared in terms of bloodline and might. But that firebird blood essence is being distributed as a monthly resource. And no one knows if it wille again.

    But on this, they can harvest an equivalent resource whenever they can. Comparisons are hideous.

    Sam looked at Praneeth and asked.

    "Did anyone seed?"

    "Of course, there are five people who seeded and those five people are the kings of our nation. Out of five, four of them are former kings and they disappeared. Either dead or gone to travel to a higher ce. Thest one is the current king. Even though he broke through beyond the Consummate realm, he couldn¡¯t make his beast aplish the same.

    The next generation, the prince is now trying his best to im one of these beasts, but he wasn¡¯t able to even after four tries. The talk of town though, is that he didn¡¯t like these beasts.

    But look at them. Those fascinating creatures. How good having apanion like that would be? That prince, talk about covering up."

    "So, all you need is for me to tame one of them. Is that it?"

    "Yes."

    "But before that, tell me this. Do you want them as apanion or as a pet or as a mount?"

    "Is there a difference?"

    "There is plenty of difference."

    After thinking deeply, he looked at the beasts and said with a smile.

    "Of course, they have to be mypanions, what would I need a pet for? To ying? As for mount? If it is only a mount, it wouldn¡¯t be the same. I think thepanion is the best way to have a beast. At least, that is what I felt when I see your wolf."

    Sam nodded for a bit and said.

    "Come with me, then."

    When others are about to follow, he immediately rejected it.

    "Only two of us."

    With that, both of them slowly started climbing. The thunderbirds saw them climbing, but they didn¡¯t seem to care at all as they went on with their own business.

    There are many nests of the beasts and the whole mountain is full of caves.

    Even though they saw many beasts on the way, they didn¡¯t stop. Sam just led them upward and only stopped at a few caves but eventually didn¡¯t step into the cave.

    "How powerful is your family?"

    Sam asked as they moved.

    "Why?"

    "Does the royal family has enough strength to attack you on a whim?"

    "Of course not. If we really fought, no one knows who the real winner will be."

    "So, they would wage war for trivial matters right?"

    "No."

    After reaching the cave that Sam wanted, he finally entered it. There are two thunderbirds in the cave and they are both Level-5 equivalent to the Grand realm stage of the humans.

    They could be considered the young adults of the Thunder Birds.

    Sam led Praneeth into the cave and after two hours, both of them came out. Praneeth¡¯s face is full of disbelief as he couldn¡¯t believe what exactly happened.

    But after another three hours, he was even more shocked.

    They came down and with the same daze, Praneeth handed over the mushroom.

    "Remember what I told you. Take care of them for now. We will talk the remaining business deals in a few days within the divine dimension."

    Praneeth finally came back to his senses and he hurriedly said.

    "What do you mean, few days? You areing with me now. You are not going anywhere until I treat you to my hospitality. Trust me. All this while you only saw the ugly side of the. I will show what the real is."

    He didn¡¯t even give them a chance and dragged them off. Sam also didn¡¯t care much. After all, he was forced to stay for six months in the Naga Loka and has to take care of the Union dimension. He beat the Union sect so bad that they have no choice but to hide and even now they areing out bit by bit.

    Now that the Elite ten and the yers are also here, it wouldn¡¯t hurt for him to take a step back and let them fight it over.

    They could wear each other down. Anyway, the yers didn¡¯t make any progress from the timer that was imprinted on their left hands, the rest of the yers could even see the number of herbs Sam collected. He already collected three of them and he even did them in an easy and boring way. He is not having much resistance at all.

    He decided to let them have time to catch up and at the same time, have them exhausted after they fought with the elite ten and he would have an even more unfair advantage.

    He would let this go. And with all these travels there are some new thoughts entering his head and he can use this time to think those thoroughly.

    He decided to take this chance.

    So, for the next three days, he was in the territory of Praneeth¡¯s family.

    Sam must say, that he really didn¡¯t see the beauty of thisnd earlier.

    The way the people built the buildings in this ce is quite different. They are unique and even the artisan ways arepletely different.

    The normal residences are basically built by manipting the soil which is basically a crude mixture of powdered metals.

    But now they molded into beautiful igloos of metal. They are a bit shiny and that unique metallic ze and the sh of the lightning that asionally urred gave them a unique beauty.

    Apart from that, there are several houses made with the shapes of the houses from the Merman, the Nagin, and even fysi.

    They seemed to have picked the beauty from many ces and mixed it with this unique metallic touch.

    He really liked this ce.

    The most beautiful thing is the pces.

    They are a bit more skillfully made with properly melting and joining the metal.

    He couldn¡¯t get enough of it.

    The only problem for him is the food. Most of the beasts that have pure lightning elements are extremely rare, so most of the meat avable has both metal and lightning elements.

    But if Sam consumed this, he would have trouble it would be hard to expel the metal element. So, he has to take out the meat and wine for the meal.

    Except for that, everything went smoothly.

    But Sam did get his hands on the local delicacies so that Philip could try. It is a rare chance of after all.

    In these two days, Sam also got a bit of understanding of this and its resources. He examined all he can and bought all of those that could be used on his home. After this buying spree, he felt like he would be running out of funds soon.

    He really did get arge amount of money when he came, and he also knew with his consumption, the funds would be in deficit. That is why he created a cooperation n in the Naga Loka and he is pretty sure the ie would be great.

    It is to replenish some of the funds. He didn¡¯t take the dividends from the business and it is about time he took them so that he can spend in thest twos.

    After roaming all over the ce, Praneeth finally decided to return with them and they started on their journey.

    But as soon as they left their territory and are on the way to the Portal, there was a sudden attack on Sam.

    When Sam saw the attackers, he was actually surprised. There are three familiar faces in front of him.

    They are Arkiv, Akhil and thest one is the lightning spear sect¡¯s yer Dyaus.

    Akhil and Dyaus ambushed them with Arkiv shooting their arrows at them.

    "If you guys are here to stop the transaction, then you shouldn¡¯t waste your time. I already got the mushroom. This makes it three out of six."

    "Who said we are here to stop the transaction? We are here to create some advantage for us."

    Akhil replied and all three of them targeted their attacks at him.

    When Praneeth was about to react, Sam gestured to him to stop as he dodged the attacks.

    He looked at the three attackers in a taunting gaze.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know why there are here, there are many spections regarding this. But he can understand why they are the ones here, out of three, two of them are warriors and the other one is the lightning user. In this environment, they are the ones who have an advantage over Sam in properbat.

    After all, if Sam has to fight multiple yers, he would have to use the advantage in his elements andbos to attack them, but now he is mostly permitted to lightning element and the normal neutral energy. He would have a pretty hard time if he fights.

 Chapter 634: Small changes in Personality

    Sam looked around and since he already knew that the fighting would be hard, he immediately used another method. He gave a taunting smirk and ignored the both of them as he ran towards Arkiv.

    Clearly, he is quite faster than the two of them and even if they are fast, it is not easy to catch up.

    Before leaving Sam screamed to Praneeth.

    "Keep both of them safe, I will meet you at Vronti castle after I am done with this."

    With those words, he ran faster, and while he did that, he continuously throws lightning strikes to the rear and the front,

    Arkiv is also moving so that he could keep his distance from Sam. He is the only one who has escaped Sam¡¯s guns and he knew that if he is within the range of the guns, he might as wellmit suicide.

    So, he maintained the same distance. The distance he remembers when they had the guns vs bows fight in the second Pce of inheritance.

    To his relief, Sam didn¡¯t take out the guns and after some consideration, he gave that credit to his twopanions.

    As they ran and ran, Sam chased and lured them into an unknown ce and the terrain is slowly starting to change. There are many metallic trees in the area and they seemed to have entered a part of the woods.

    Arkiv felt like he could take a breather as he could use archery better in the woods. But, when they are in the middle of the forest, Sam suddenly climbed a tree and used all his power to strike into the clouds.

    All of a sudden, the clouds roared as if they are provoked and started crackling. Sam jumped off of the tree and called for Raiju.

    He even let Raiju activate elemental fusion and made him attack the clouds once again before dashing away.

    He didn¡¯t go the way he came nor did he go in the direction he was chasing. He moved in ateral direction and simply escaped.

    When the three yers wanted to catch him, they suddenly noticed that the clouds started creating a miniature thunderstorm. Except for the water, there are only lightning sparks and lightning strikes. Except for Dyaus, the remaining two will take some damage, if they stayed, and even if they don¡¯t get injured severely, they would definitely be slower.

    And Sam is confident that he could get away before they catch up with this headstart.

    As for how he knew about that ce, it is a training ground of Praneeth¡¯s family. As long as they hit the clouds with lightning strikes, they will strike back in a barrage.

    Sam is on his way to the Portal. He clearly thought of this. Since the fights are getting boring, Sam decided to use escape tactics. He will make them frustrated like the pigs ready for ughter. He could finally have a good enough fight at the end of thispetition.

    As for why Sam is searching for so much funtely, he doesn¡¯t know it. He is also exploring his own mind and evaluating himself as he thought why he would need that much fun all of a sudden.

    He stayed on this more than necessary. Him, disguising and entering the battle like normal troops. Even attacking Wind fiend with such disadvantage. All of a sudden Sam felt quite boring and felt like his life has been too saturated.

    He has to think of the problem and solution as soon as possible.

    It is almost like he lost interest and mojopletely. Even this ck horse game is just a little fun game for him as he had a lead because of the coincidence from the emperor and got two herbs before these even came to the dimension.

    Of course, they don¡¯t have enough connections like Sam to enquire about the way to ess others which yed a big role, but it is still okay.

    After exploring theses, Sam is feeling something else in his heart, he is finding a long-lost excitement and some sort of fun.

    Every ce he went, all he could think of was how he can develop in that ce from the scratch. Even though he got sick of the Vronti before he visited the city after he did that he has half a mind to build a city like that and another half is screaming to smelt the whole soil down and separate the metals.

    There is an inkling inside his heart that is saying what the problem is but he wasn¡¯t able to catch it.

    After returning to the Vronti castle, he met with Chatur and Arman, before bidding goodbye to Praneeth, but not before reminding him to gather all his required resources.

    When the trio returned to theke, the fire elemental stones disappeared. Because pearl day was already over within their field trip. But they didn¡¯t panic.

    Because they knew where the pearl went. Theke is even reced by the Dark element stones.

    Chatur made himself scarce as soon as they arrived at thete and came back a dayter with the required information.

    Sam smiled at the information he gave.

    The first batch is rted to the homes of the elite ten. Since Sam is making deals with scions of the others, Chatur hoped that it would help. After all, the Elite ten is extremely juicy targets and wanted people on their owns. So, if Sam captured them and gave them to Noble scions, he could get credit which Sam doesn¡¯t have any use to and he will give resources Sam wants, which are actually pretty useful.

    When Sam looked at this he couldn¡¯t help but smile.

    But the second batch of information made his smile turn into a grin. It is the position of the current elite ten.

    For all the days, Sam has disappeared, the Elite wanted to take advantage to study all his previous battles without his disturbance and the mighty Battle erudite seemed to have prepared some battle strategy the attacks are once again in full swing.

    But the location of the Elite ten is a bit moreplicated.

    They are ced in a small circle such that they canmunicate with each other easily but the circle isrge enough for them to move to their designated location as fast as they can and if necessary they can even pull the Elite ten.

    After yers joined, the Specialmanders created a jointmand. Finally, there are signs of organized war and the yers are shing with the elite ten. Or to be precise Elite Eight.

    But the yers are nine members as Sam and Arman are clearly not on the yers¡¯ side in this ploy.

    Speaking of Arman, Sam was extremely surprised by his actions in this ck horse game. He thought, that Arman would definitely rat him out and use this situation to get some revenge, but it seemed that their private time spent together was well worth it.

    Even with the enticement of the points that coulde with this situation, he didn¡¯t do anything to betray Sam.

    After studying the information, Sam didn¡¯t immediately move, he waited for the three yers that came to Vronti toe and join.

    He decided to get involved when the situation is most chaotic.

    But he didn¡¯t have to wait for a long time. They joined the very next day and Sam also got ready to join the fray.

    This time, Chatur also wanted to join, as he could get the information from the enemies easily and hide at the special spots only he would know.

    He didn¡¯t stop and took him.

    His first targets are the young men who attacked Sam when he captured Night Charm.

    These young men are ice and fire users and they turned out to be brothers. That too they are born on same days. The only thing that is not making them twins is that their father is the same but their mothers are different and those mothers are also sisters.

    As for why them, they have some juicy bounty on their heads in the next ce Sam wanted to visit.

    The fifth-ce Castle or the representative of the fifth from which Sam has a need.

    The is closest to the normal in this Naga Loka. It is almost like Nagin, but not asrge. Sam even felt Nagin is smallerpared to the home. Much less this.

    This is extremely small. Small to the point, there are only three nations in this and they don¡¯t have many disputes as they created a deadlock for each other. No matter which country provokes another one, the remaining one will join the second country and suppress the provoker.

    This is a tacit understanding and except for some small skirmishes, there is nothing else between them. Even the resources are not that rich. They are just average. The only thing this ce can offer is highly fertilends for the herbs.

    And these two Ice and fire brothers actually managed to provoke all three nations and any representative would want them alive.

    After confirming all the required information and contacting the necessary people, Sam got ready to take action.

 Chapter 635: Trap

    [A/N Announcement in author¡¯s thought.]

    Currently, these two Ice and Fire brothers from the Union are on a battlefield where Noah and Kumar are cooperating.

    Since, their battle with Sam, they seemed to have a better cooperative rtionship and since the yers all managed to convince the specialmanders to work together, these two immediately became partners for this.

    Even though their main target is hindering Sam, they do have some obligations regarding the Nagin castle. So, they decided to clear the war first and from their judgment, Sam would never stay back in such a battlefield full of achievements written over it.

    And their estimations didn¡¯t fool them as Sam really did appear, but he appeared at a time they didn¡¯t expect. Sam arrived at the battle-field right when the brothers started their fight against Kumar and Noah.

    When he saw the fight, he couldn¡¯t help but marvel at the brothers¡¯ cooperation. They are extremely coordinated and it is almost like the two bodies belonged to the same mind and controlled as such.

    They don¡¯t even need tomunicate as they attacked and defended together, the trickiest of all were theirbinations.

    Ice veiled in the fire, fire veiled in ice, one veiled in two, two veiled in one. They are extremely hard to dodge and hard to block as they couldn¡¯t decide what kind of attack that wasing to them.

    The two brothers are giving a hard time. But the only w is that they don¡¯t have the required lethality in their attacks. Their coordination and partnership are great, but due to this constant movement and concentration required on maintaining this bnce, they could get enough lethality from a single attack.

    They are dragging and trying to let their opponents exhaust their energy with the confusion of their attacks.

    Clearly, these guys are good at closebat and it is a waste to send them to save night charm on that day.

    Maybe they are the nearest to them. But now, Sam really enjoyed watching this battle. Happy times wouldn¡¯tst long though. He learned the lesson because both parties soon noticed his presence.

    Unlike his usual style, he didn¡¯t hide at all. He is spectating from a closer distance.

    It is almost like, he wanted them to notice him.

    But Sam just waved his hand with a smile and said.

    "Please carry on. I wouldn¡¯t interfere until one of you wins."

    They looked at Sam extremely doubtfully. But Sam just sat on a nearbyrge rock as if he is really spectating.

    And to his surprise, Noah and Kumar didn¡¯t attack him. After all, he is the bigger target for them, he thought they would use the two brothers to finish him before fighting it out with them. But both sides ignored his presence and started battling again.

    The battle once again proceeded like before, but the situation turned sour for the two brothers after some time. Noah is not a normal fighter, she is actually a bit sly and she dropped seeds all over the ce. Since the brothers wouldn¡¯t leave a certain area to have perfect sync, they are surrounded by the vines.

    This is what Sam is actually waiting for. He knew she wouldn¡¯t drag the fight for no reason.

    The brothers didn¡¯t expect this and got stuck, what they didn¡¯t expect is the strength of the spear strike from Kumar.

    They have been blocking many strikes from Kumar, but they didn¡¯t expect he hid his strength well.

    With just two stabs, their guards broke their shoulders were torn open. They couldn¡¯t even move their arms. Kumar was about to swing the spear to give the final blow, but at this moment, Sam suddenly moved.

    With a dagger, he cut all the vines and he carried both the brothers on his shoulder before saying.

    "Thanks for the effort."

    Sam gave a cocky grin and flew away on the Harbinger. As soon as he took the Harbinger out, both of them gave up on their pursuit.

    "Why is he behaving like this? It is not his style right?" Kumar asked from the side with a frown.

    "Maybe, he just wanted to be willful once. I feel this might be better. Whenever look at that guy, all I could see is a killing machine and a cold businessman. Maybe, he remembered he is also just an ordinary young man."

    Noah replied. If Sam was here, he would definitely be stunned. After all, this is the most Noah ever spoke in a single breath.

    But too bad Sam didn¡¯t hear, but if he did he might have agreed with her view.

    Sam didn¡¯t have any reservations for now. He just wanted to have some willful days for himself before he went back to his ¡¯normal¡¯ life.

    He wanted to try behaving like a normal youth for once. He never experienced the youth in both lives anyway. All he did was kill, kill and kill.

    Since he decided to live his life to the fullest in this life even though he was forced into this, he didn¡¯t enjoy being alive at all. So, he wanted to experiment a bit and with all the people he met, he was trying new ways.

    He would only know once he stopped being willful if he really liked being a normal Youth or Not.

    Sam directly took these two the meeting spot from the battle-field.

    He expected some resistance. After all, the yers should have known exactly what he wanted to do with them, so it doesn¡¯t make sense if they don¡¯t try to stop him.

    This meeting event went extremely smoothly and the other guys are ready to exchange the required thing for some extra money. The worst part is they don¡¯t even know what use the herb has.

    Sam just bought it and started his journey, but then only Sam¡¯s hard time started. The remaining of the elite ten are on his tail.

    On his way, back to the Lake, Sam was ambushed by five of the Elite ten.

    He didn¡¯t join the fight immediately but tried to find thest of his targets. The battle erudite. From the information Sam received, the battle erudite is the person who belongs to thest.

    Sam just avoided the fights for a while and searched for the Battle Erudite.

    But no matter what he did, he couldn¡¯t find him. He circled almost every Union sect base. If the situation goes on like this, he would have to storm into the headquarters.

    After some thought, he kidnapped one of the Elite ten and started interrogation. Then only he got the news and that is, the Battle Erudite is already gone and Sam was the one who was supposed to have taken him down.

    Sam was stunned because of this news.

    After all, he didn¡¯t go anywhere near Battle Erudite. He immediately went back to theke and asked Chatur to enquire about the situation.

    Sam was clear about one thing in his life. He wouldn¡¯t take credit either good or bad for something he didn¡¯tmit. He wouldn¡¯t lose credit either good or bad for something he didmit.

    So, there is no way, he would take this lying down like this.

    Something seriously wrong happened.

    After another day of investigation, Chatur finally got some news.

    Just like how Sam exchanged the lives of the other Elite ten to their homes, Battle Erudite was also offered just like that and a valuable nt root was bought with his life in their¡¯s castle.

    Sam was stunned for a second and started analyzing the situation. Even though rumors are saying that he should be the one who did that, he certainly didn¡¯t do that.

    That is why the Union sect people are ambushing him, for the past two days, even the normal soldiers are also trying their luck.

    There seemed to be arge bounty on Sam¡¯s head and because of Battle erudite¡¯s disappearance, the battle came to a halt as the Union sect once again retreated. One can only say that the Union sect is being haunted by bad fortune, they are on retreat continuously.

    Sam started thinking about what could have happened and started investigating this matter. He didn¡¯t even have to do much as Chatur with his casual outings was able to get the required Info.

    The disappearance of battle erudite is the same day as hisst deal. Sam sold out the Ice and fire brothers.

    He certainly was busy that day and not in extreme limelight even the brothers were stolen by him from the battle, he was not even eye-catching in the battle-field at that time as there are no soldiers in the vicinity.

    He thought hard and suddenly an idea popped up in his head.

    He immediately called Chatur and asked him to get some info on the yers. He has spection and there is a high probability that it would be true.

    And when Chatur came back, he was already fifty percent sure. The yers currently are staying separately and are scouting different regions under the Union sect and spread all over the territory,

    Sam felt that the disappearance of the Battle erudite is certainly a trap for him. He is sure that the whole situation was orchestrated by the yers and they left the two brothers for him and they went for the proper and bigger fish.

 Chapter 636: Vs Agun

    Sam didn¡¯t just sit there and specte, rather he immediately left the ce and went to the Nagin castle. Not all yers left the castle with some excuse.

    One of them is still there and that is Agun.

    When Sam went into his stone house, he didn¡¯t beat around the bush and directly asked.

    "Thest herb, is it already with you guys?"

    Agun just smiled and looked at him.

    Sam is now almost sure his spections are right. He didn¡¯t speak further and took out his staff.

    "Will you give the required information or should I make you give it?"

    "You sure are confident about that."

    With that, he directly made his move. Azure mes filled the entire room and it almost melted the stone wallspletely.

    Sam didn¡¯t dodge, but just let his golden mes cover him. But he still felt the heat from the Azure mes, which surprised him quite a bit.

    This is the first time, he felt the mes of the same level cultivators. Every me he felt was dull and coldpared to the Golden sun me. But these Azure mes canpare to his own golden mes, which is extremely surprising and new for him.

    But he didn¡¯t care. He lunged forward andnded a strong hit with the staff on Agun sending him flying through the half molten walls and he crashed into the next room.

    He didn¡¯t use any element, just the physical raw strength. He followed him and ran through the broken wall and both of them started fighting. Even though Agun is a warrior mage, his forte is not strength, rather his agility and his attacks are mostly mage skills. He didn¡¯tnd many close hits. He is more focused on fire attacks.

    But Sam is not like that. He used his golden mes and the physical strength in a perfect fusion as he spun his staff like it was his extension.

    He might miss a hit with his staff, but Agun couldn¡¯t rx at all, because the edge of the staff will release a golden me bird that attacked him.

    The fight went on and on. Sam is not using his hundred percent strength but he is using his skills to their limit as he tried his best to beat him with just me element. Without using others.

    Since their mes are of almost equal intensity, then the tiebreaker lied in his physical skills.

    Every hit Sam gave him, he was sending him flying through the walls. At least that is what it looked like to the spectators as they saw a figure surrounded by blue mes and a figure surrounded by golden mes are fighting all over thepo9und of the castle.

    Sam already made some significant damage a few days ago and the repair is going on slowly, but here he is again he is creating chaos.

    Sam didn¡¯t care about their thoughts, he felt that something is wrong with the way fight is going on. Because every hit he is giving was not meant to send him flying but it was clearly happening and only after some time did he realize what is wrong.

    Agun is trying to keep a distance so that he can attack Sam.

    But once Sam figured it out, he didn¡¯t let this happen. He stored the staff away and switched to fists. Now, Agun can dream of flying back.

    Now, the spectators are even more awed. Because the scene in front of them is too beautiful.

    Sam and Agun are slowly activating the fusion and soon they turned into their fusion bodies.

    Agun seemed to not want to lose and he is not trying to use his blood art which confused Sam. But he didn¡¯t care about that now. He is getting a bit excited by this fight and the Agun is also going all out without dodging.

    But he was sent flying backward for that.

    He stood there in the distance and looked at Sam, Sam also looked back.

    Agun extended his hands forward and blue mes started gathering and Sam understood his intentions, he didn¡¯t move forward and extended his hands. Golden mes gathered and both of them sent arge jet of me forward.

    Two mes one golden and another blue shed in the middle and battled. The spectators watched with their mouths wide open.

    This is their final sh for this battle and the deciding factor will be who has more energy and as they activated their fusion forms now, the energy consumption is already high, but they didn¡¯t care. They just shed without any reservation and the first to fall will lose.

    The point at which both mes contacted has the most heat. The ground below it already started melting and a red patch appeared. The red patch didn¡¯t stay still, it kept on expanding and the surrounding spectators took a step back and maintained a certain distance as the heat got to them.

    The grass in thepound started drying and the water in any form was being taken away. Every cultivator watching this couldn¡¯t help but sweat.

    Sam was surprised with Agun¡¯s power reserves. Even he is feeling the pinch but Agun is still pushing with all he got.

    The shsted for half-an-hour as no one could outpower another for that time, but after that time passed, a fluctuation started on Agun¡¯s side. He is clearly struggling a bit. Sam is also already feeling the pinch.

    He always kept some energy for reserve and wouldn¡¯t use it all in normal battles. But that energy is now being used. If someone attacked him after this battle, it would put him in a dangerous situation.

    He hardened his resolve and increased the intensity, he should finish this quickly. And soon the golden me started pushing the Azure me back and Agun couldn¡¯t stand his ground, he started screaming to the sky as his body lost the fusion and he returned to his normal form.

    He tried his best to give onest push, but he couldn¡¯t do it and soon the golden me reached him and he could feel the heat striking his face.

    The sh was over and when the smoke cleared, all they saw is Sam standing there with his deactivated fusion and Agun sprawling on the ground with his bare and burnt upper body.

    Sam looked at him and carried him to the nearest house and started healing him while he himself recovered.

    After the burns are gone and Agun recovered a bit of his strength Sam asked his questions. Agun didn¡¯t show any resistance and answered all of his questions except one.

    Sam has finally confirmed his spections.

    The yers did set a trap for him. Nine of them joined together. For the Union sect is really secondary and they are not worried about them at all, not even about the Elite ten, Sam could see why they are not afraid anyway. If they really used their blood arts, these Elite ten are no different from some toddlers to them.

    They can even beat them without any arts too. Except for the guy with staff who used lightning element, Sam didn¡¯t see anyone particrly powerful that could pose a threat individually.

    After the yers confirmed that, they wanted to nt a trap for Sam but most of it depended on luck.

    When Sam went to Vronti they sent three of them to make sure that he thinks their attention is on himpletely. But the rest of them are all trying their best to get in contact with the people of others.

    Not all of them have a Chatur beside them.

    After gaining the contact, the other party asked them for the same thing Dharkan asked Sam. They want Battle erudite.

    So, they focused on war and they waited for Sam to make a move. All this while, Sam took the herbs in the list in the same order. He tried to, as the Abyss grass is still not in his hands, but still, he went for things in order.

    So, they targeted thest herb on the list and sessfully made a deal with the battle erudite as an exchange. They also had to pay a good amount.

    Meanwhile, they decided to let Sam catch his next target without any problems. So, that he would be busy making a deal. They also understood Sam¡¯s nature and his desire for natural resources, so they made sure that he gets the brothers and they thought he would spend some time getting the resources he needed.

    In the meantime, they executed their n and made the deal for that herb.

    After they got it, they gave it to the person that could use it, but that person cannot use it now. They nned to use it when he broke through. Now the herb is with that person. But as for who that person is, that is the question he denied to answer.

    So, all Sam can do is find out himself.

    Sam got suspicious and checked his spatial ring too, in fact, he himself showed the spatial ring willingly.

    He gave one crucial piece of information though. They don¡¯t want to break all the rtion with Sam just like how Sam didn¡¯t want to do so and helped Agun heal after the fight and not killing him, so they decided to give him a fair shot and if he could find them and beat them, the person who has the herb would willingly give it to him.

    Sam is already having enough on his te, but he also has to face the changes in his own mind. Now, he got another job to do. He thought he would finish the ck horse game before the time, but they put a halt to his actions.

    He would have to hunt all of them down. Even though the current Union sect is on the passive end, the war is not over. So, they cannot leave for a few months and in this time, he has to find all of them one by one and get his hands on that herb.

 Chapter 637: Another Emergency

    Battle with Agun is only the start.

    Sam started the most time consuming hunt ever and in the middle of it all, he has to deal with the ambushes and the attacks lead by the remaining Elite ten of the Union sect.

    For obvious reasons, he became their major target. It almost seemed like they changed their goal from the taking over Nagin to just killing Sam. At least, he became their priority over Nagin castle.

    But Sam didn¡¯t have time to care for their reasons, he used all the moves in his arsenal to deal with them. Wherever he went, there are numerous people turning into corpses. For some reason, the Union sect¡¯s soldiers increased. They seemed to have arge scale recruitment. No one knows where they came from and how did they manage that.

    Even the emperors couldn¡¯t find a reason, but there are addition three thousand troops in the Union sect and theyprised of many races.

    Along with that there are flocks of beasts apanying them.

    Since, they are tasting bacsh in this war from the start, they decided to step up their game, they are trying to drown the Nagin castle¡¯s troops with numbers.

    But the main brunt is being taken by Sam and the rest of the yers.

    A month passed and it is approximately three months since the ck Horse game began.

    With the war going on and his hunt, Sam is a bit mentally strained. He killed too many people and with the fluctuations in his character and slight dissatisfaction he is facing and the actions he is taking to cover them, all of them intensified.

    He doesn¡¯t know what kind of changes his mind is going through. From the past year he was here, everything was normal for him. At first, he was a bit excited about developing in Naga Loka. Butter it felt boring. He was caught up in this Pce of inheritance and the ck horse game.

    Therge amounts of killing he has done, he has no challenge in this ce at all. But he tried to increase his own interest, but he could see he is losing it. As the ck horse is being close topletion as he collected the herbs, he knew he has to go back, he missed his friends by his side, he missed an environment where he could talk to his beastpanions.

    But the thought of going back to thatfortable like in the home, where he has too much of an influence and too much of the power is also eating him away.

    When he thought of going back, nothing came to his mind, except for his friends and beasts, not the city he developed, the riches he owned.

    His mind is divided into two and the first half doesn¡¯t want to stay here and wants to finish this game and go back as soon as possible, the second half doesn¡¯t want to go back to the life where he almost doesn¡¯t have to do anything.

    He doesn¡¯t know what he is missing to have these contradicting thoughts. The only thing he knew is that he is missing something and that is connected to him making a promise to himself for his own sake and Ste¡¯s sake and that is to live his life to the fullest.

    When he was developing in that home, with no support and total suppression on every step, he felt alive, he reached the top brass without even having that much individual strength. Now, it is not interesting him.

    Every day, when he is taking rest, he was thinking all of this, while hunting these yers. This month, he battled three more yers and killed a lot of soldiers from the Union sect, he didn¡¯t get the herb nor did he get the answer he was searching for. It felt boring.

    With these conflicting thoughts, Sam spent another month and battled three more yers, he still didn¡¯t get what he wanted. There are only two more yers left and both of them are familiar to him. One of them is Arkiv and the other is Akhil and all the investigation he had done is showing him that they are both at the same ce.

    Then only Sam realized that he fell into another trap, they didn¡¯tpletely hide themselves from him, they actually appeared in front of him in a timely manner and led him by the nose in a way so that Sam would just go after them in that particr order and waste time.

    They just wanted to drag it as much as they wanted. But Sam was faster than they expected and there is still two months, but he already came to thest two.

    But they didn¡¯t change ns. After all, they didn¡¯t want to piss off Sam too much. In their minds, he is a maniac who can achieve his revenge by hook or crook and he is most resourceful guy of all of them, which made them extremely careful not to piss him off too much.

    After all, from the looks of it, they still have ten Pces they should attend together and they would also interact more in the future. Even if they don¡¯t want to admit it, Sam is currently best of them all and they are all in the same boat with him and if that boat has any holes, he has the highest chance to survive.

    They didn¡¯t want to antagonize himpletely.

    That is why they gave him a fair shot at this by putting up the possible fight. There is an option of ganging up on him, but no one agreed because, Sam would not be the ck horse all the time. They don¡¯t want to experience the same situation.

    After some struggle Sam finally found the duo and another intense battle began. For some reason, these two have even better coordination than Noah and Kumar.

    They gave Sam an unbearable headache as they led him by the nose through half of the Union dimension.

    They fought in such a way that they are stubbornly running away andying ambushes to Sam as one of them is extremely good at long-range attacks and the other was good at close quarters, Sam fought them for half a month and finally was able to get a hold of them and get that root in his hands.

    It looked like ginger, That is the only impression Sam has on it and even the effects are body cleansing and it is not too good to take it all at the same time. All the qualities are extremely simr to the ginger.

    After this fight is over, hisst phase of n is the only thing left. He returned to theke and Chatur went on a long journey to differents as he collected the pre-ordered goods and his final stop is Fysi.

    He met Dharkan and only have him a confirmation without saying anything.

    Dharkan started making somerge moves in his kingdom as he collected vast amount of his resources and he made a secret trip to Union dimension after everything is over. Now that the game is over, Sam could leave this ce anytime he wants and he couldn¡¯t wait to leave this ce.

    The war is still going on, but the Union sect doesn¡¯t have any lead at the moment and now the Nagin castle is the one trying their best to destroy the foundations of the Union sect.

    Sam is not needed as the other yers took charge and with the game being over, they full foused on the war situation.

    He clearly stated that he wanted to go back to them and asked them for a favor to manage the war. He is really getting sick of staying in this ce. As for the trigger of why he is feeling like that all of a sudden, no one knows including himself.

    But just before he wanted to leave, something else happened.

    Chatur came to running to his ten and yelled.

    "Sam, the untamable beast forest, is glowing, there would be a beast tide soon. We have to go to the Nagin castle."

    He was extremely anxious as he spoke.

    Sam looked at him with a question expression and asked.

    "Untamable beast forest?" He searched his memory and he remembered that it is one of the forests of the Union dimension. It is to the left of Origin castle and closest to the centre of the dimension. He didn¡¯t study much as it is not rted to Nagin castle and Union sect.

    "Yes, Untamable beast forest, cam also be considered a resource point. But it is extremely random and it is actually a dangerous ce. No one castle can hold it for themselves, that is why the name.

    As for how dangerous it it, whenever it glowed, there would be arge beast tide and the beast tide will be divided into six parts attacking all six major castles. There will be one beast in charge of all of them within the forest. Unless that beast was killed or tamed, the beasts in the beast tide will be in a berserk stage and will try to destroy all the castles.

    But no one ever seeded in taming the beast as it would take a long time and the risk is too high, so every time, they will try their best to kill the beast after some futile attempts of forceful taming, they would just kill the beast.

    We need your help now. We need every hand we can get."

    "Why hasn¡¯t anyone given any information about this to me?" Sam asked

    "Because it is extremely random and in the past decade the tide didn¡¯t happen. But from the history records, therger the gap between two tides, therger the tide will be. Please do something. The war is also put on halt, the elites of all the six castles will have to go to the forest and you are selected as our castle representative."

 Chapter 638: A Mare from the Myths

    Two days after Chatur gave the news, Sam went to Untamable Beast forest.

    He went on harbinger and he went alone.

    But the journey took for around one week, which should have been three days at most.

    The reason is simple. The whole dimension ispletely infested with all types of beasts. Not just from the beast tide, but also all the beasts in the forest seemed to have been infected with some sort of courage due to the beast tide as they all ran rampant.

    Now all the wars and conflicts are gone. All the beasts are upying or attacking the resource points and the bases. Every castle is surrounded by these beasts.

    If not for the fact, Sam left Yanwu, Raiju and the Mia at theke, it would have been surrounded by the beasts too.

    He left Chatur, Arman, and even Dharkan there.

    Anyway, there is a small step left with the deal he made with him and the beast tide is the perfect cover for him.

    But before that, he has to finish this problem. There is no way, he would be able to enter the Nagin peacefully without the pestering of the emperor if he didn¡¯t help with that. Anyway, it would be great if he could get a few favors from the Emperor, then he can go ahead with the future ns easily.

    He is also interested in beast forest. Apparently, this beast forest has a space crack that opens and the beastse out of that. Not only would they create a beast tide, after some time, but new types of beasts will also create their habitats in this dimension.

    On his way to this forest, all the beasts tried to attack him non-stop. There are even a lot of bird-type beasts that attacked without rest. Even with the speed of the harbinger, there are just too many of them in all directions for him to escape.

    After arriving at the ce, he could see some other members from the other castles, they came in teams and they are extremely rugged.

    There is some area around the forest without many beasts, all the beasts that woulde out of the forest already came out. Now all they have to worry about is the beasts inside the forest, the rest of the beasts are the remaining forces¡¯ business.

    Sam observed all the teams that arrived. There is one member at least, who didn¡¯t seem tired or exhausted at all. The rest of the members are tired and battle-torn.

    The team is to safely get that elite here and they also took care of all the dangers for that one special person, so that person wouldn¡¯t have to exhaust himself in the battle and keep their energy to enter the forest.

    Sam could see many familiar faces. Sandra is here, Praneeth is here, someone else came from Fysi castle because Dharkan was out somewhere else, the people from fysi don¡¯t know where he went, for all they knew he was out to do some business on others. Since he started his new business, he waspletely immersed in the preparations for months.

    Now, he is out there to cut his first business deal.

    That is the only thing his family members and the other castle members knew.

    After greeting the familiar people casually, he observed the forest with the energy vision.

    He was baffled when he saw the situation inside the forest.

    He could feel the energy signatures all over the forest, the trees, the caves, the ground, and even underground.

    There are too many energy signatures that it made him feel baffled that they are fighting each other over territory. There are even bird-type beasts flying over the sky in the forest.

    He increased his concentration and tried to find thergest energy signature in the ce. Even though every beast is Level-6 equal to the Nascent stage, there is bound to be a difference, to be the key to stop this beast tide, if that beast is at least on the level of a frost dragon in terms of bloodline, then Sam would be disappointed.

    After searching for a few minutes, he did spot a ce where the energy signature is highest and he could see the outline of the body which looked like a horse. Sam started searching his memory to remember the horses of that level and thought of how to enter the forest at the same time.

    Even though it is called a forest, it is merely a patch of trees covering an area that is almost equal to the area a castle upied in this dimension.

    No one knows how the space crack appears and where it starts, there are very few people who managed to get a glimpse of the crack.

    Not many people are lucky enough to be able to live after seeing that crack as the beasts would be justing out of the forest and it is extremely dangerous to stay here.

    Sam finished circling around and finally noticed an opening point. This ce has mostly snake-type beasts around. Even though they are equally dangerous, with the Harbinger, this ce would be rtively safer than the rest.

    Even though he has his ways to handle these beasts if pushes to shove, it is always better to have a less dangerous way.

    Anyway, Sam wanted to curb his killings a bit. He has killed thousands in this dimension. He didn¡¯t even kill that many on the home. He might have killed over a thousand to thousand five hundred, but that is cumtive of the years, but here, he only stayed for one year and he is responsible for killing so many, if he added the kills of the soldiers under his lead, then that would be a huge number.

    He has to control it, so as not to influence his way of thinking subconsciously.

    Sam noticed that the other parties are also moving, they even seemed to be making a deal, when he was about to enter, Sandra and Praneeth neared him and asked for cooperation.

    Even though I don¡¯t want to cooperate with them, it would better if he has someone at the side. He already wanted to take that beast as hispanion, having some partners here would help influence the rest of the people to refrain from killing the beast and stay their hand.

    He agreed and said his chosen way. The rest of the teams are not so sure though. They really don¡¯t want to lose control of the situation to Sam.

    But Sam didn¡¯t have a single thought on convincing them, he just said to Sandra and Praneeth, that he could choose this route.

    So, now the teams were divided. At this exact moment though, another group came and they are thest few of the Elite ten.

    Only four members left. Sam killed one of them in their ambushes in a fit of rage.

    Most of the time, Sam just left the battlefield not giving them a chance for to catch up, but once he made a great meal for himself and this guy disturbed it. So, Sam killed him in a fit of rage.

    The four of them looked at Sam in an extremely hostile way, which he didn¡¯t even bother to react to.

    He took Sandra and Praneeth to enter the forest, their team members are alsoing. Sam didn¡¯t get down from the Harbinger, but the rest of them followed as they walked.

    The snakes in this ce are mostly hidden and coiled to the trees, they are not that dangerous in aparison of strength, but their hidden methods and sneak snake bites are extremely dangerous as they suck blood instead of injecting normal venom.

    They are more like mosquitos as they inject some kind of fluid in, which would stop the coagtion of the blood and make it easier for them to suck all the blood in.

    He carefully guided the teams. He didn¡¯t let all of them follow and made them only bring a few of their teammates.

    They agreed to and walked beside him.

    For a significant distance, they didn¡¯t have any form of hindrance from the beasts, but after that Sam could only give a heads-up before they started shing with the beasts.

    But he is a great help as most beasts with lower bloodlines wouldn¡¯te near him due to his bloodline aura.

    For some reason, half of the beasts with a decent bloodline are not stopping even though, they are clearly afraid. He could think of only one reason.

    Since their attacks on the castles were led by the single beast, they must have some contract and the beast is the cause for the rest of them to resist the aura.

    But Sam is not at all worried, in fact, he is a bit excited. After all, he doesn¡¯t have any beasts that could suit him to make a contract when he became a Pre-transcendent.

    He has to find a suitable beast that has multiple elements as he had limited contracts left.

    Even though the forest is notrge, the constant battling made them take a whole day to reach the center and when he saw the beast clearly, Sam is extremely ecstatic.

    It is a horse and it is not evenrge as other beasts, it is the same size as a horse, a tiny bit sturdier and taller than a normal horse, but it is of the same size more or less.

    Many people might be disappointed if they saw it like that, but since Sam knew what kind of beast it is, he is only happy.

    The beast is actually a descendant of one of the mythical creatures. The mares of Diomedes. Many people knew about this myth, but all they knew is these horses eat flesh, but Sam only learned aftering to this world that there is more to this myth.

 Chapter 639: Sneak attack

    The mares of Diomedes.

    The four mares eat flesh and are crazy for killing. That was the story in the human world.

    Sam doesn¡¯t if there is a change in the story or not, but there are a lot more details that were missed off and one of them is that the four horses do not just eat flesh and drink blood and they are most certainly not crazy.

    It is just that they are possessive of their territory and they are extremely strong. Stronger to the point that it would seem unfair that an animal that was always only fit for a steed could possibly have the strength topete with the apex predators.

    The other thing is that the four horses are of different elements and have different abilities.

    One of them has abilities of Water and Firebined, the second one with the wind and lightning, the third one with the Darkness and Light, thest one with the metal and earth.

    These are just basic elements, but their constitutions gave them further gifts.

    The one in front of Sam is definitely a descendant of the third mare of Diomedes.

    It is a ck mare with a healthy mane. But there is a metallic tint to the color of both the mane and the skin and at the same type, one could feel the sturdiness of solid rock just by looking at the beast.

    The special ability it has is not just a fusion of earth and metal, but also another thing that was hard to control for even many experts. Gravity and Maism.

    Most of the people who control gravity do so with the Earth element and it is actually quite artificial to be called pure control of the Gravitational force.

    But this horse is the real deal and the things it can do when it fully matured can be the worst nightmares for any expert. It can influence gravity and tackle all forms of spatial attacks, even the surrounded space can fracture due to its influence over these two forces, and it or rather she can directly defend herself even in the face of a ck hole.

    But her pros are not without any cons. The main drawback in this race is that the bloodline and the genes could only be passed down to mares. There are no studs with the same bloodline, at least theplete bloodline, and the mare would always try to birth a mare so that their legacy could continue. This also led them to the situation where the bloodline started thinning. There are some beasts that have the thickest and purest bloodlines, but most have them have onemon problem.

    The mares will also inherit some of the genes of the stud horse of another species that they mated with and this makes their bloodline impure and thin.

    Sam looked at the mare in front of him with an excited and anticipatory gaze.

    She has ck ink-like eyes as she looked at the intruders with an angry expression.

    Sam looked at the eyes directly and kept on thinking about the mare.

    She has the thin bloodline of the mares, and the only advantage is that she doesn¡¯t have any influence on the other horse species that her mother mated with.

    Sam was quite satisfied though. Anything that can be rted to bloodline can be solved. That Ling Tian or rather The Gambler did give him great knowledge regarding that. Increasing the thickness of the Bloodline is a rather easy task if the beast is of the same level.

    Sam turned to his temporary partners and said.

    "I don¡¯t want any spoils from this trip. But that horse is mine. Don¡¯t attack it."

    With those words, Sam took a step forward.

    The horse looked at him menacingly as the surrounding gravity increased. Sam felt a brunt of force trying to push him down. But he used the sheer force of his body and muscles to stand straight and still walked forward, in fact, his speed increased a lot.

    The gravity didn¡¯t increase, these mares wouldn¡¯t just try to kill the enemies with gravity. It is just a way for them to hinder the enemies within a certain range so that they can kill them directly and more easily.

    The Horse ran towards Sam and opened its maw as it wanted to bite him down.

    Sam dodged to the side with difficulty as he was notpletely used to his gravity. Even though he stayed in the Vronti for a while, the gravity here is more forceful and dangerous.

    So, he wasn¡¯t able to take initiative immediately and just dodged for a second.

    He activated wind elemental fusion and jumped up, his body felt lighter and he was not as hindered as before. He made a move and managed to make a small nick on the body of the horse. It is too sturdy.

    Sam mostly floated in the air. Even though his main goal is to create a contract, he didn¡¯t start with peacefully talking. Because these horses are extremely prideful. They would never have a peaceful talk with someone who came into their territory.

    The intruder has to prove themselves first, before any topic of conversation could be raised. But not many people can do that. That is the reason they were portrayed as crazy and bloodthirsty horses.

    The fight was going on intensely. The horse and man shed many times, but there was not a particr advantage to anyone.

    Sam frowned. He has used wind element, lightning element, and water element, he even tried to use darkness and shadow element. He also used swords and staff, the only things left are fire elements, the light element, and the ws.

    He wouldn¡¯t use ws, those are for when he is angry. As for the light element, he felt like it might cause some serious damage and there would be no chance of peaceful talk.

    He still hasbos he has yet to use, but most of them wouldn¡¯t work as the horse is extremely good at earth defense.

    The worst part is the horse can walk in the air. It is not exactly walking in the air, rather she is using gravity to run in the air like that and made it even worse for Sam.

    As he was thinking to use the more dangerous attacks, the mare stopped and looked at Sam as she neighed.

    [Who are you?]

    Sam doesn¡¯t know if the mare felt like Sam could understand her, but she still tried and called for him.

    "I am Sam. Nice to meet you."

    Sam said and the horse was clearly surprised a bit, before neighing continuously.

    [You can understand me? That is good. Then why are you here? What are your intentions?] This horse is more intelligent than many beasts Sam has met and seen.

    "I am here to make a deal and also stop this beast tide."

    [Deal? I don¡¯t easily trust humans.]

    "But I am not aplete human," Sam replied as he released his aura.

    [Why do you think, I am talking to you right now?]

    The next few minutes, there is an intense argument between both of them as Sam exined what he expected from the mare and what the mare could expect in return. He even let the shadow mouse and Sky out. He really felt like he should have brought Yanwu and the rest with him.

    But these two managed to make the Beast think.

    [Bloodline refinement first and if you seed, then I would think about making the contract.]

    Sam was about to agree when he felt some aura and instincts screaming at him.

    Before he could react, some roots shot out from the surroundings and started tangling him in a rapid pace.

    The same thing happened to the horse and both of them are struggling constantly.

    But the more they struggled the weaker they became as they could feel the roots and vines sucking their spiritual energy.

    Sam activated his eye technique as he looked around and found a group of people. The five members from the Elite ten.

    Four of them ced their hands on the back of thest one who has closed his eyes and is clearly emitting the wood elemental energy waves.

    He understood their ploy. They are slowly making their way forward and soon they are also in the battle-field.

    Sam looked at him and regretted not killing them earlier. He closed his calmed down and said coldly.

    "If you don¡¯t release both of us now, you would be wishing for instant death. I will give you one chance to correct yourselves."

    Sam started thinking rapidly while he gave out a threat. The five of them looked at him mockingly as they turned their attention to the mare.

    "If something happens to her, then death would be a salvation no matter how painful it is."

    They only sneered and one of them raised his hand to attack the horse.

    Sam looked at them coldly and his body surged with energy. The vines are absorbing all elemental energies in their purest form, even light element and dark element are not an exception, what if they are altered a bit.

    That is what he did, he converted all the energy into a dark element and turned it into death energy he used to raise undead. He started injected the death energy rapidly as he could slowly feel the withering vines, but the process is too slow and the attack was already in progress.

    "Stop it." Sam yelled as he freed his hand.

    The person who trapped them noticed Sam¡¯s reign going free and immediately increased the vines, but he is also feeling the bacsh of the death energy being injected.

    "Finish them off both quickly. I will hold on for some time."

    The four of them removed their hands and walked in pairs towards Sam and the mare.

    Sam became angry, he is beyond enraged as his whole body suddenly turned golden and he transformed into a golden light beam. He spat out of a mouthful of blood as he forcefully severed himself away from the vines.

    His body shot light beams all over andsers started cutting the vines.

    The two people near his terrified and were about to step back. But Sam is not looking at them, he looked at the mare which just suffered a severe sword strike right through its belly where the skin is weakest.

    "ARRGGGG."

    *NEEEEIIIIIIIIIGGGGGHHHH*

    Sam¡¯s angry roar and the painful scream of the mare came at the same time, Sam shot like aser beam towards them, but the pair already got ready to escape. One of them is even lucky enough, but the other was not.

    Sam chopped his hand like a de straight to his neck and his palm just moved smoothly to another side.

    Sam didn¡¯t even stop at that guy as he knelt near the mare and started treating her as the head of that guy separated from the body and fell.

 Chapter 640: Exchange

    Everything went on too fast and the temporary partners weren¡¯t able to react. They did want to make a move on the Elite ten when they came, but theirpanions stopped them. After all, no one wants to provoke a sect full of assassins without a valid reason.

    For Sandra and Praneeth, there are enough reasons to help, but for the rest of their teams, they had enough reasons to stop them.

    By the time, they managed to get past their own members and wanted to make a move, this already happened.

    The four remaining members from the sect wanted to escape, and when they were about to follow, Sam said coldly.

    "Don¡¯t follow them. Let them go. I will settle this myself."

    Sam looked at the horse that is lying on the ground with some vines still entangled to it. He swiftly cut them all and looked at the wound as he observed the damage.

    The stab sliced the internal organs into two and there is a lot of blood loss. Sam carefully healed as he set the broken bones and repaired the internal organs after arranging them properly in the ce.

    He used his own energy and the heavenly wine to clean the wounds of the internal organs and slowly healed. The whole operation took three hours and no one dared to move from that spot except for the four members of the Union sect.

    After healing, the horse finally woke up and looked at Sam as she liked his face.

    Sam smiled faintly and just like that the beast tide stopped.

    Now, it is easy to clean up and defend as the beasts wouldn¡¯t have anyone directing them and most of them would be keen on finding a new residence than attacking the castles. In fact, they would be fighting among themselves too.

    Now, the whole Union dimension is a wheat field with a ripe yield. All they have to do is go in and harvest to the best of the ability and they would gain a lot.

    But Sam is not exactly in a mood to take advantage and gather his own beast army.

    Rather, he suddenly has an urge to kill someone. Even though he healed the beast, he barely managed to do so. The beast still needs a lot of rest nutrients to get back to its original shape.

    He looked towards the direction the four of them ran and Sam took a huge swig from the Heavenly wine and started gulping down hard as he forcefully recovered his energy, before boarding the harbinger. He looked at the Mare and said.

    "Keep up with me."

    The Mare cannot fight in its full capacity, but Sam doesn¡¯t want it for the battle.

    The horse nodded and started running and soon she is stepping into the air as they dashed out of the forest.

    Sam is not using his full speed, but he is still quite fast among the Nascent stage cultivators and not many could keep up, but the horse did even in her injured state.

    Sam activated his energy vision. At this moment, flight is actually an extremely dangerous mode of transportation as the whole sky is infested with a lot of beasts.

    Everyone who flies would take full brunt.

    Sam is also maintaining a low altitude as they ran. Sam is using his eye technique and sense of smell from Raiju to find the traces of them.

    They reached the end of traces after a while, but he is not disappointed, as far as he knew there is a base of Union sect nearby.

    Sam and the horse just rushed towards that ce and they directly entered the ce as they owned it. Sam held the reaper and executioner as he just sliced through anyone that came into his way. The battle is one-sided pretty much as the people who were sliced by the executioner would get busy worrying about the corrosion and wouldn¡¯t have time to battle.

    And Sam released the five shadows to help him along with some undead that could create some chaos.

    Finally, the person in charge of the base arrived and asked for a truce.

    "Thest four of the Elite ten, where are they?"

    "They didn¡¯te here." The leader said with an anxious expression.

    Sam looked at him and pointed his sword at him. Looking at this scene the leader immediately broke and said.

    "They dide here, but they are not here now, they already escaped. They only came here to get a guide who knows the hiding spots and familiar with the area. But even I don¡¯t know where they are gone."

    "What is the most usible route?"

    "They might go for the next base."

    Sam didn¡¯t bother with him anymore. The horse just followed and drank some blood of the beasts while she was at him.

    They reached the next base after a while and the same scene repeated, they came here, but they left after getting a guide.

    Sam did understand why they are doing this, generally, they would take flight and travel, but now the situation is a bit different. They couldn¡¯t take flight as the beasts are everywhere and they evennd route is not safe, so they had to find the people who are most familiar with the terrain so that they can avoid the beasts and battles so that Sam wouldn¡¯t catch up.

    They moved from one base to another and Sam followed their path. He felt a path of blood behind.

    The killing intent is extreme and the beasts are not even bothering with them and let them go and some foolish beasts on that interrupted being sliced into two also helped.

    The news traveled faster than them. There is no way this could be hidden. Everyone was shaken by Sam¡¯s tyranny.

    The four Elites are also feeling regret and fear. They thought that was their only chance to deal with Sam and they also didn¡¯t want him to get another beast to be hispanion.

    The beast is too strong, that is why they took the chance.

    Their only goal now was to get to the main base of the Union sect. There the defensive fortifications are better and they have a better chance at surviving.

    Sam moved through the dimension for a week. At any possible time, if he had sped up he might have already caught up. But he didn¡¯t do so. He made sure that the four of them would definitely feel the fear and anxiousness of losing their lives.

    By the time, Sam reached the location of their final base, the news traveled outside. The Nagin emperors are really looking forward to what will happen.

    But before they could do so, some situations happened.

    A public inn of the imperial capital of the Mov was destroyed and there was only one thing left in that ce. It is a scroll.

    "Let us end this peacefully." There is a symbol of the Union sect in ce of the signature and there is even a location that was supposed to be a ce for their negotiations.

    As for the destruction of the inn, there are no lives lost, but it is clearly a warning.

    The Emperor along with the Marshall went to the location and there a man with a face covered appeared. They spent the whole day discussing and the two of them returned to the capital without doing anything.

    Meanwhile, back in the Union dimension. Sam took a break for the day as he waited at the foot of the mountain on which the sect is located. He gave them an ultimatum that if they don¡¯t hand over the four of them, he will storm down the whole sect.

    But there was no answer.

    After the day was over and Sam was about to do well on his words. A group of twenty appeared before him and they are holding the four Elites as they brought them.

    They threw the four of them towards Sam and left without taking anything.

    Sam looked at the four of them. They are clearly battered and weary. They don¡¯t have any confidence or exhaustion in their bodies.

    He looked at the horse and she understood what he meant without him saying anything. She lunged on to the first guy and bit him in the neck as she sucked the bloodpletely.

    The other three are clearly afraid of this, but they didn¡¯t dare to move.

    After sucking all the blood out, the first guy is already out cold. But she didn¡¯t stop, she went on munching onto his body until only the bones left.

    Sam looked at the rest of them with a smile. The horse requires a lot of nutrients to recover to its top condition and consuming this much blood will also increase the ease of his bloodline refinement.

    The mare continued as she munched and stuffed herself with the flesh of a Naga, a human, a Yaksha, and a Merman.

    The people who threw the four of them out because of the orders are looking at this with trepidation from afar.

    They gulped hard.

    They got the orders that the Union sect would be entering a truce with the Nagin castle and wouldn¡¯t fight for the next twenty years and also the sect wouldn¡¯t take any missions in the Nagin for that period of time.

    All of this and their four lives in exchange for Sam¡¯s restraint towards the Union sect members.

    The sect in the Nascentyer of the dimension is their foundation. They couldn¡¯t lose it no matter what.

    Sam took the mare back and finished the bloodline refinement at theke.

    Her name is Dia and she would be staying with him from now on. Now that all of this is over, it is time for him to tie the loose ends in the Nagin and leave the ce and go back to his home.

    His conflicting thoughts will only be answered once he went there.

 Chapter 641: I AM BACK

    Sam went to the Nagin, along with Arman, Chatur and two more humans beside him. No one knew who they are. But they are now wearing the badges of some individual members of the Nagin castle, so no one cared.

    The thunder prison tent was taken away. And even theke was not filled with spirit stones.

    Aftering back to the Nagin, Sam went to meet with the Emperor while sending the rest of the members who followed him to Mirage city. He met with the emperor and got the rewards he asked for.

    He would be gaining ten percent of the whole imperial family¡¯s herb harvest every year and this is only one of the ten benefits.

    He got somend, a title and some more privileges along with arge amount of spirit stones. He really did get a great deal and Emperor still owed him a favor after that.

    After that, he asked the Emperor to help him contact Yodha who was still in the Union dimension. The war was not just halted in the firstyer, it applied to the rest of theyers and Sam doesn¡¯t know how they are so sure that the other party would keep their word, but he didn¡¯t care much.

    He went back to Mirage city and made sure that everything is going well, before he started his discussion with Chatur.

    It is about the assignment he gave him. Not only Chatur gave him a wonderful design blueprint of a Pce, he also gave some extra versions of it.

    Sam immediately gave him some tasks with arge pile of materials. He has to learn everything he can regarding the water element, the formations, the attacks and even the inscriptions. He took the materials and decided to study.

    But after that, Sam took out a blueprint which he worked on before he went to the Union dimension. This is the blueprint for the project in the Butterfly city. Before he left this ce, he would start this project and leave the preparations to Yodha and let him finish it before he visited the ce next time.

    Sam wanted Chatur to give the artistic and aesthetic touch. Sam¡¯s sense of art is a bit different from what is more suitable for Naga Loka, so he gave him this job.

    For the next few days, Chatur worked on it and finished it. Sam approved of the blueprint and there are no problems in the formations.

    Yodha finally came and Sam started his journey with him to the Butterfly city. Before that, he asked for a favor though. That is to call Buck back to the nation. But he was surprised to hear that Buck would be back at beginning of every month and this time, he was still not back yet, so that means he will be here in a few days.

    He gave clear instructions to make Buck stay and went to Butterfly city with his blueprints.

    He exining the whole n in detail to Yodha and exined every step to be taken. After repeatedly warning him to not make any modifications, he met with the best architect in the nation whom they are going to hire to be in charge of basic construction and exined everything to him again.

    After two weeks of constant instructions and supervision, he entrusted everything to Yodha beforeing back to the Mirage city.

    He met with Buck and collected all the resources. He was almost out of spirit stones and he collected the profits from the grenade factory, the ship building factory and the resort. He gave the promised fleet to Buck and ended their deal for now.

    After replenishing everything, he got ready to go back to his home with high anticipation. But it was damped because of something else.

    Arkiv came to him and after learning that he was going back, he exined the situations of all the yers here and asked him if he could help a bit.

    Half of the yers are stuck in a tough situation as they are now either subordinates of the Imperial families or some other nobility.

    But Sam couldn¡¯t do much. Emperor does owe him a favor but it would be useless as it is clearly taking away some elite subordinates from those nobility. When Sam exined the situation, Arkiv was a bit disappointed and asked for any other way.

    Sam thought long and hard and suggested one, but it is a bit risky and costly.

    When Arkiv heard this, he asked Sam toe to the Union dimension with him once again and Sam couldn¡¯t reject as this would make the yers owe him a favor and if he was stuck like the ck horse again, he could get some help.

    He once again went into the dimension with same entourage and met with the rest of the yers.

    After confirming the price they have to pay and the situation they would be in, four of them finally agreed and out of four three of them are people Sam was familiar with.

    Noah, and another who is the ¡¯only¡¯ girl in the yers until now as not all of them knew Noah is actually a woman. Both of them are from herb garden.

    The third one is Akhil and the fourth one is someone Sam didn¡¯t have much contact with. He is the third lightning user in the yers making them the most. He is called Halkan. He is from the thunder bolt sect.

    After confirming with them and taking the price, he finally gathered with them at the cave which he interrogated one of the bosses of the sect and took out the dimension drifter.

    Thanks to these people he doesn¡¯t have to pay a dime for this journey. He kind of ripped them off.

    Luckily the Union dimension is allowing him to travel with this. Their n is to disappear from the Union dimension and they can just leave for now. Even though, there is someone else Sam wants to meet, it would have to wait, as he nned to return in a few more months.

    They reappeared in the woods of the Western continent of the home.

    Sam let Sky out and all of them boarded it. Currently Chatur is in his human form and he looked around the cities curiously. The rest of the yers also took their beasts and followed Sam and soon they saw the familiarity of the ce and sighed in relief.

    As they flew off, Sam saw the cities still bustling and his parks still doing well.

    He looked at the two humans that are sitting together as they held their hands. One man and a woman.

    They are none other than Dharkan and Night Charm.

    This is the part of the deal Sam made.

    After the deal was made, he just found a body of the Yaksha woman and made Chatur use his skills to extreme to create a corpse identical to Night Charm. The only problem was that he had to see Night Charm naked for a few minutes as Sam didn¡¯t want to leave any clues. Even though, he was met with strong opposition from both Chatur and Dharkan, he insisted and even Night Charm herself agreed even though she didn¡¯t want to.

    Chatur perfectly created a replica of her, including the birthmarks and the patterns along with small scars and such.

    Only when he took the body back and people examined it did Dharkan felt relieved on how Sam insisted this. They really did check for body for all the marks and just didn¡¯t confirm with face.

    After the cremation, Dharkan stayed there and used all his influence as a Royal prince to collect the resources of the kingdom. He is already holding the resentment towards it because of their lost child, now he took revenge like this.

    He got every resource he could and emptied every mine he could and brought them all back to Sam.

    Sam used the confusion of the beast tide to lead him to go to the Lake and chatur is responsible for painting both of them as humans. He collected all the resources and here they could have a new life.

    Both of them will be teachers of Sam¡¯s school and teach the assassination and defense against the assassinations along with the dark element usage, ice usage, shadow usage and such.

    At this moment, they are smiling as they held hands.

    Sam diverted his attention to the rest of the yers who are also delighted, they really did have hard time in the Naga Loka and this air of freedom is really refreshing them.

    Before even entering the city, Sam led them to the Space gate leading to the Thunder god temple and let Arman take the rest of the yers away, they could leave to their respective ces by themselves.

    Arman woulde back after his tasks arepleted.

    After that Sam took a deep breath as he rode Sky along with remaining three andnded on the top of tower as he looked at the majestic city.

    The three of them also looked at the city and were stunned. They didn¡¯t expect that Sam would be the leader of such arge faction. They expected him to be a young master.

    Sam looked at the city and let it all sink in before shouting at the top of his lungs with excitement.

    "I AM BACK."

 Chapter 642: Some Answers

    Sam is currently being beaten up by his three friends, even though nothing is lethal, they are still beating him up.

    He looked at them as they attacked from all three sides and couldn¡¯t help shaking his head.

    Even the obedient and good Watt is also retaliating big time.

    To be honest, he did expect that some form of scolding or beating would be waiting for him, but he didn¡¯t expect it to be this intense.

    As soon as he yelled at the top of the tower, the whole city was resounded with his voice, and his three friends who became busy all ran towards the tower. They also heard the reports from the guards that they saw Sky flying into the city.

    Sam expected some sort of warm wee first or even a group hug. But the next thing he knew he was dragged into a training room inside the tower and they are attacking him with the pretext of testing themselves after a long time.

    Sam also didn¡¯t resist much as he let them hit him as they liked.

    After an hour of the constant onught, everyone is panting and they called for a truce, and then came the group hug. Even though Sam is not extremely fond of these things, he felt like they deserved this.

    Then they went to Mackey¡¯s restaurant and started drinking and eating. Even Mackey felt a bit emotional after seeing Sam and just shut the restaurant for the rest of the day and started whipping out all his new dishes.

    Everyone in the restaurant also didn¡¯t make a fuss as most of them are locals and they only greeted Sam with smiles as they left.

    The two Yakshas and one Naga are trying their best to blend in, but they couldn¡¯t. They didn¡¯t expect they woulde to a ce where only humans exist.

    But the thing that surprised them most is the respect of people for Sam.

    From amon citizen to a guard of the city to high-level cultivators are all respectful towards him.

    Sam just let them follow for now as he had a lot of catching up to do with his friends.

    They ate and drank with no care at all.

    After that fun time, they went back and they started exining official matters, he was actually surprised to find out that there are so many breakthroughs in the past year and a half.

    There are more than two thousand Nascent stage cultivators now and thousands of Grand realm cultivators, followed by even more Great realm cultivators. They recruited a lot more Novice stage cultivators.

    As for Pre-transcendent stage cultivators, they are in hundreds and even the transcendent stage cultivators are around thirty. This surprised him quite a lot and the most crucial part is there is another consummate realm cultivator and that guy is Adrian.

    This is an unexpected surprise.

    The most delightful thing though was the list of patents and new inventions in the school.

    The students and lecturers all got some significant new inventions and patents were registered in all kinds of categories. Equipment, inscriptions, formations, weapons, construction techniques, forging techniques, tailoring, embroidery, cooking, and even massage techniques.

    Sam must say he was extremely impressed by the progress of the school.

    The revenue also increased as they have the ie from the rest of the parks in the other continents.

    There are more than a hundred billion spirit stones left for him and it didn¡¯t even include the revenue from the other continents.

    For the next few days, Sam got busy as he gave out half of the resources he got from Naga Loka to the School and the research departments.

    There is one thing, he made a priority in researching and that is a pill recipe he got from Vronti. Vronti is actually a ce with no Miasma. So, the Yaksha born there are not born with poison immunity, so they developed a pill from the resources of Union dimension to visiting the remainings, Sam wanted to create an injectable serum with this pill as the base.

    After arranging everything, he led his three new employees to the school.

    He introduced Chatur to the department of marinebat and formations. He didn¡¯t give any explicit instructions on what he should learn, he just had to focus on learning more about water element energy.

    As for the two Yaksha, they are new instructors of thebat division and assassination subdivision.

    After sending them all, Sam was surprised to see someone running over to him.

    Sirona, that beautiful yet innocent maiden ran towards him as if she wanted to jump into his arms with clear delight in her eyes.

    But she seemed to have thought of something and halted right before him and spoke in an excited tone.

    Before he knew it, she grabbed his hand and dragged him to a training room.

    She took out a few puppets and started excitingly exining everything to him. She looked like a teenage girl talking about her idols. But she is talking about her work.

    "Can you not leave so suddenly and stay away for so long?" She asked in a soft tone.

    "Why?"

    "Everyone here is dumb, they don¡¯t understand what I make even if I exin to them. So, there is no improvement as there is no one who could point out my mistakes."

    Sam smiled. He looked at the puppets that are now implemented with many mechanisms that are created by the knowledge he added in the library, there are many modern elements in this. Sam exined a lot of ces where she could improve and promised that even if he left, he wouldn¡¯t stay away for so long.

    Sirona smiled and this is the first time Sam saw her like that, he also smiled and left the ce.

    He took the space gate and went to the tempest valley. It¡¯s about time he got some answers and he is going to talk to the Old Beast about this.

    When Raiju came to this valley along with Sam, he jumped excitedly and ran, Sam followed him with a smile and met with the Old Beast.

    "How are you doing? Is your trip to Naga Loka good?" The Old beast asked.

    "Nah, it is boring. There is no challenge and there is not even a bit of fun. I killed so many people but there is no sense of achievement in winning that war. It is extremely burdening."

    "Boring?" That is something I didn¡¯t expect.

    "What can I do? I don¡¯t know what happened to me when I was there as the time passed and the day of my return journey got closer and closer, I had this conflicting feeling. I don¡¯t know to react. I couldn¡¯t even identify the trigger of these emotions. Help me sort this out will you?"

    Sam asked as he looked at the Old beast in the eyes.

    "Just tell what you did since you left for Naga Loka." When the Old beast asked this, Sam immediately started recounting every situation.

    After hearing everything, the Old beast asked.

    "What was your biggest attraction toe back, the biggest factor that made you desire your return?"

    Sam thought for a bit and said.

    "My friends."

    "The biggest thought that made you not want toe here and return to your normal life as the head of your organization?"

    Sam fell into confusion, these are the contradictions he had in his mind and he thought deeply, but he didn¡¯te to the conclusion all these days, because he looked at the question the wrong way.

    Now that the Old beast talked to him, he came to an answer.

    "Because it is too boring?"

    Sam was not sure himself.

    "Is this boring from the start?"

    "No, I enjoyed my journey to reach this position quite a bit. I received a lot of suppression and faced a lot of obstacles that is why I was so satisfied when I established the City and the School. It feels like it became boring recently."

    Old beast chuckled a bit and said.

    "There is nothing wrong with you My boy. You are just getting bored because of theck of challenge. There nothing left for you on the, you have power, authority, and respect. You have everything this can offer and can get anything you want as long as you desire.

    But it seems like that feeling is not as satisfying to you as reaching that position that could grant you that feeling.

    All you want is the adventure, the fun of exploring and growing.

    As for the trigger, there is no single or particr trigger for this, you were gradually dragged into those thoughts.

    You visited all theses in Naga Loka, with different terrains, with differentnds, different people, different creatures, different rulers and every ce you went you experienced and thought of onemon thing and that is question yourself with ¡¯what would I do if I need to develop here?¡¯

    This question might havee to your mind in other ways, but you definitely thought like and this gradually made you realize that youck all those in your current Normal life.

    You want that kick off the journey and you want that journey to be with your friends, if you ask me, this is easy to solve. After all, you have dimensional drifter."

    That evening Sam left the valley after he did a lot of thinking and made a decision. He came back to the city and gave an order to his friends.

    "You have one year. In this time breakthrough to Pre-transcendent stage and find your sessors for your current positions in the city. Train them however you want, but they have to fill your ce in this city."

 Chapter 643: One Year

    After Sam made that decision, days passed rapidly as he ran around every day.

    The first thing he did is update the school library with the new knowledge and experiences he gained from the trip and that included the geography of the Nagin and the environmental conditions of others and even the Union dimension.

    After that, he went to the shipyard of the organization where the shipbuilding is going in full swing, he gave the research from Mirage city and engine designs.

    Now, he focused on the loot he got. The main loot is from the Pce of inheritance, but that is not what he is focusing on. He focused on the secondary loot, the herbs he got from the ck horsepetition. The evaluation he received got him 1200 points in the game.

    Even though he doesn¡¯t know what these points signify and if they are even useful in any way, he still made a mental note of the conditions he could gain more points in these kinds of games.

    As for the herbs, after he collected them he noticed one thing, every herb he got is somehow helpful to his beasts. The lotus for Yanwu, the mushroom for Raiju, the grass of Shadow mouse, the kelp for Mia, and thest two herbs he got are one for Sky with wind element and thest one, the one that looked like ginger is useful for all of them including himself.

    He could consider this as a happy coincidence and be done with it, but is there really such a happy coincidence in this world?

    For the first time in a while, he mostly focused on his training and his new gadget.

    His three friends are extremely stacked with work that Sam gave them. The task of finding a sessor is no small matter for them as they are in charge of variousrge departments in the organization.

    But they also have to concentrate on their training every day.

    A few monthster, Sam made his first trip back to Naga Loka. He has to honor some deals there.

    Sam went to Butterfly city first and checked the construction. After that, he went back to the Grenade factory.

    He went to meet the Shop Keeper. The Expert at the Peak stage of Consummate realm.

    When he saw Sam, he smiled faintly. Sam didn¡¯t make any time for small talk as he directly took him to a secluded ce and operated the Dimensional Drifter.

    When they reappeared, they are right in front of the Tempest Valley.

    Sam is not stupid enough to let an expert of such caliber into his home without any protection. So, he figured he would bring him here first and show him some force from his side.

    They walked into the Tempest valley and they soon arrived right in front of the Old Beast.

    The ShopKeeper felt extremely cold when he saw the beasts. Because the aura made him feel like he was in front of an almighty existence that could erase him in an instant and even disdained to even bother with him.

    "He is a rtive of mine. He would be in charge of you. You can slowly work on your seal on this, but in return work for a few years for me.

    You will be the guardian of my organization and take care of the internal politics when they cross the line and stop the outsiders who will try to invade my organization.

    I know it might not sound nice. But I cannot trust you with everything I built that easily, that is why I brought you here to create insurance for myself."

    As soon as he finished, a lightning streak escaped Old beast and entered Shopkeeper¡¯s mind.

    "If you ever betray me, even if you manage to seed you will also die with it. Except for that, I swear that there is nothing else rted to that lightning."

    Shop Keeper looked at Sam. He had some conflicting thoughts in his mind, but he still nodded in agreement. Even though he didn¡¯t like being treated like this, there is nothing much he can do.

    At least, Sam has shown enough respect by telling this upfront and the reason is also not inexcusable. Above all, he doesn¡¯t have to worry about someoneing and dragging him away or even killing him. The Beast is a powerful entity and since that type of entity is willing to save him, he is relieved.

    "You wouldn¡¯t have to work for a long time, after a few years, you will be able to leave this ce," Sam reassured him as he led him to the Space gate.

    The shopkeeper changed into his human form as they arrived at the city.

    He introduced him to the friends and some of the higher officials. He is a Peak-stage consummate and his seal would be broken in the next month or two. After all, it should have been broken by now, but he hindered it because, in Nagin, he will be caught if the seal broke, now he doesn¡¯t have any reservations.

    After the seal broke, all the other major powers wouldn¡¯t be able to do a thing to him. The organization will be safe with him here.

    This is the final arrangement Sam had done for the organization and went back to focusing on his training.

    The time passed and soon the One year was over.

    Sam has broken through the Pre-transcendent stage. Even though he has a mind to suppress it a bit, he didn¡¯t want to since he had other ns.

    As for the beast that made the contract with him, it is none other than Dia. After refining her bloodline, the purity increased and she became more skillful at her usage of earth, metal, and gravity. Sam also received two new elements and both of them are variants.

    Earth and Metal and the variance is the ability to manipte gravity. Even though his ability is minuscule at this point, at least he can defend himself from the artificially induced gravitational conditions.

    Even his friends also broke through and they are ready for the next step.

    Sam met with Sirona and gave the new research results of histest gadget he made before reassuring her that he would be back in a few months.

    But before they could really go away, Sam has some more things to do and one of them is giving his two friends some gifts.

    Philip and Jack.

    They are with him since Starwood city and they have gone through a lot. Even though they felt like they owed Sam a lot, Sam felt otherwise. He felt like there is no human part left in him because of the.

    So, he made something for them.

    The long coats. Philip was given a metallic red one and Jack was given Metallic Gray one.

    When they looked at them, they were ecstatic. If there is anything they were jealous of Watt, then it would be his coat and the Silver Wind.

    They always wanted that, but they couldn¡¯t bring themselves to ask Sam.

    But today Sam has given them without asking and he didn¡¯t just give them a coat, rather he fulfilled their second wish too.

    The Hoverboards.

    It is not that Sam didn¡¯t want to give it to them before, rather he felt extremely trouble on how to create them.

    He can give them something simr to Silver wind, but it would be hard for them to maintain something that was not their own element.

    That is why, he was working on them in the background, but since he didn¡¯t give a proper shot at the problems, he wasn¡¯t able to create them. Now, he did.

    For Philip¡¯s, it is made of Fire meteorite sand and ck meteorite sandbined.

    Its design is simr to Silver wind, except there are many nozzles at the bottom of the board and the energy cells are not directly linked to the motion like Harbinger or silver wind.

    The board works in a simr way a jet engine works. Inject air from surroundings burns in thebustion chamber, releases the exhaust gas through the nozzles to create the thrust.

    He is also doing the same, inside Philip¡¯s board, there is a newly developed methane and when burning in a small chamber, the exhaust is used to thrust the board forward and upward. As for how Philip would control it, thebustion will be controlled with his fire element and the direction of the exhaust could be controlled by his metal control as the nozzle diameters are adjustable.

    Generally, this principle wouldn¡¯t work on modern earth, but here it is possible.

    As for Jack¡¯s it is easier, because, he only used a drone principle.

    He just made a square board with four propellers on the four corners, just like a drone. Even though the design looked simple, there is a lot in it.

    The main source of motion is Jack¡¯s sword energy.

    He would use the spiritual energy of the energy cells within the board to use his swordsmanship to control the propellers.

    Each propeller like a wheel made of four swords and all he has to do is control these sixteen swords at the same time to get his desire motion.

    But he has to maintain a certain speed to do so.

    The formations Sam inscribed will assist him a bit taking some mental strain away.

    After giving these things to them and exining them everything, he left them to get used to those boards and went to the tempest valley.

    He is meeting the Old beast for the first time after he broke through. He decided to travel from this ce and Explore and the destination would be decided with the help of the Old beast.

 Chapter 644: Choice

    Sam went into the tempest valley and stood in front of the Old Beast.

    "I have broken through. Now tell me, where should I go?"

    Sam asked.

    "Open the Dimensional Drifter and let me see."

    With that, Sam did as he asked and opened the dimensional drifter. To his surprise, the lock on some of the realms ands was unlocked when he broke through and it is exactly what Old Beast. Sam doesn¡¯t know how he knew so much about the Dimensional Drifter, but it is helpful to him and that is what concerned him the most.

    He looked through the various realms. But most of them are locked. There are only three ces that are unlocked at this moment apart from the deste realm which Sam is in right now.

    The first one is Naga Loka obviously and the second one is called the Banished realm.

    The third one is the realm called The realm of the undead.

    When Sam looked at the names he was extremely surprised. The most surprising was when he looked at the world the realm of Undead.

    He didn¡¯t expect that he could gain ess to that world, but he had his apprehensions as he doesn¡¯t know exactly what that realm is and how it would be and that is where the Old Beast helps him.

    "The two realms you got ess to, as humans, but they don¡¯t have any significant position in the order of society or the food chain.

    They are the bottom of both.

    In these two realms, humans are reared like livestock so that they can either work or be used as food.

    The realm of undead is actually a ce where some of the undead creatures are banished to. Half of the realm is a graveyard to the demonic realm, they will just throw away the carcasses of their hunt or their ves into this ce. Half of thes in this realm are upied by that. They turned into natural undead creatures without any contractual support.

    They live off on the death energy that waspletely upying the realm. The other half of the realm is housed by some other creatures like Vampires, the Ghouls. The Lich, the Wight, The Specter, the Banshee.

    There are so many more races that rule the rest of thes, even though the death energy is lesspared to the graveyards which only has normal corpse undead with less sentience and intelligence, the rest of thes that are ruled by other races have their own civilizations. This ce is also like Naga Loka, but instead of Miasma, you will be surrounded by death energy.

    Since you are also a necromancer, you can manage, but it would be hard for your friends to adapt.

    That is not even the worst part though.

    In all the races that I mentioned, humans are their livestock. Even though they use humans for their abilities, they only do so for a select few and the major part is still livestock.

    The vampires breed them for their blood, the ghouls for their flesh, the specters and the banshee for their souls, the lich and the wight for their subordinates and reproduction, they all look for humans to fulfill these things as the humans have high fertility.

    Some of the races even use them for the sensual pleasures."

    Old Beast paused as he looked at Sam and observing his reaction. After not receiving anything, he said.

    "I don¡¯t advise you to go to the Undead realm unless it is absolutely necessary. Thes in there are connected with portals. Since they were thrown into that unfair ce that is thepensation for them.

    So, if you really go there, you wouldn¡¯t be able to miss an encounter with any of the races, and with the quality of your body and soul, they would go crazy over you.

    Anyway, let us talk about the Banished realm.

    This realm also only has one habitable. The rest of thes does have resources but they are not exactly suitable for development. The situation and the environment of thoses need some of the certain cultivation to develop and a person of that caliber wouldn¡¯t bother looking at the resources theses offer.

    The one that habitable is actually a prison. They forcefully made it habitable for some races to survive. But still, there are some ces on this that are not essible to any race.

    Here humans are a little better than Livestock, but not by much. At least not all the races that are present here would try to eat you.

    There are three races in this ce. Minotaurs, the Dwarves, and the Orcs.

    Out of three, the Minotaurs don¡¯t eat meat, but they use it as a fertilizer for their crops. Dwarves do eat meat, but they wouldn¡¯t eat human meat, the Orcs, only eat meat.

    Apart from these three races, the humans also stay in this ce.

    Even though not all humans are ves, most of them are. They use ves for farming, mining, eating and all other chores a servant would do.

    There might be some humans who gained enough strength and escaped the ce. But they don¡¯t fight back, they just stay in the wilderness.

    The friendliest race in these three are dwarves as most of them would treat humans with somepassion and normal workers.

    They are good at living along with humans. But even there few humans have any form of status.

    They wee the ves that ran away from the orcs and Minotaurs.

    As for the main upation of this world, it is agriculture. The three races have one thing inmon and that is they are all banished in here by their respective original races.

    The dwarves in here are of certain tribes rejected and thrown away by the remaining dwarves from their own realm, the orcs are the tribes that are rejected by the higher orcs in their own realm.

    The Minotaurs are also rejected race by the beast-men and many other races.

    They are all banished and there is a curse ced on the. The spiritual energy absorption rate is lesser than the spiritual energy of the Deste we are in.

    The energy is dense, but they couldn¡¯t easily absorb as nature rejects them a bit.

    But they can increase the spiritual energy by another method, eating. They will warm various types of crops and gain spiritual energy through consuming them and they eat the meat of the beasts to gain energy.

    As they gather energy like that, they will breakthrough and for every breakthrough, the seal will loosen a bit.

    After they reached a certain cultivation level, they will have a chance at going back to their own realms where they can cultivate freely.

    This is the general gist of that."

    Old Beast exined and Sam carefully digested all the knowledge he gained about the news.

    "Which realm do you want me to go?"

    "If I were you, I would go to the Banished realm. The undead realm is too early for you. It would be suitable for you, if you are inter stages of Pre-transcendent and you can even improve your necromancy. But now, you are just a juicy meal for most races.

    As for why it was also essible for you even with your strength not sufficient, there is a connection between both the realms.

    Since both of them are realms used for banishment they are nearby and also the guardian for both the realms is same.

    That is the only reason I could think of."

    After that Sam asked many doubts regarding this realm. Even though, he craved for something and not sure what exactly it was, he at least wanted to give the thoughts of Old beast some merit and test it out.

    If all he is missing is his friends, then it is better for him to go with his friends on an adventure so that he can confirm if the things were as the Old Beast said.

    He got all the information he can and asked all the questions he could think of. After getting everything ready, he went back to the city where his friends are waiting. Apart from his friends there are two more people. Arman and Chatur.

    Chatur is going to be helpful as he can create perfect disguises and could be helpful in an unfamiliar ce. As for Arman, he is there to not let him miss the Pce of inheritance location. Since Sam doesn¡¯t have dimensional crosser, he wouldn¡¯t get any default message of the coordinates, but Arman would.

    Anyway, Arman is notining and he is also extremely willing to go.

    When he saw their excited looks, he felt that this decision might be a correct one as they could see the new world.

    No matter how many years they are stuck here, they couldn¡¯t expand their horizons. Even though, the Naga loka is mostly simr to human world, Sam did expand his horizons and he learned many new things from this ce.

    So, when he thought of another adventure, he also felt a little excited.

    At least, he wanted it to be a little more exciting than the previous one as the Naga Loka is really too boring.

    He opened the dimensional drifter on the top of the tower as four of them entered it before changing the coordinates. He decided to go to the Banished realm first and see what it has to offer.

    As he changed the coordinates, all four of them became excited as he activated the machine and disappeared from the spot along with his friends.

 Chapter 645: Banished Realm

    The Banished Realm. The only habitable in this realm is the target of Sam¡¯s and his group¡¯s destination.

    The only has a singlergendmass that upied more than sixty percent of the and the sea is actually very small.

    The whole continent houses the three races that have some authority and one race that doesn¡¯t have any authority along with the vegetation, beasts, and mountains.

    Within this continent, a peaceful vige in the Dwarves¡¯ territory.

    This vige is not too far from the border between the Dwarves and the Mintaours¡¯ territory. But there are still some other viges and towns between the border and this vige.

    The vige is full of wooden houses and there are barely any brick houses.

    There are many humans that are walking down the streets with wooden or metal plows and other agricultural tools.

    They are talking happily with smiles on their faces and one could asionally see some dwarfsing to talk with the vigers.

    There is only one proper stone residence in this ce and that is a small mansion at the center of the vige. The mansion of the vige head, who is a dwarf.

    Dwarves are also humanoid creatures and they have strong bodies. Their only drawback is the tallest dwarf could at most grow up to four and a half to five feet. That is if he is of an extremely higher ss of the dwarves and has the most superior of bloodlines.

    The average dwarf could grow up to a little more than four feet and even if they are shorter, there is nothing to be surprised about.

    The dwarves are skilled at some things inherently and they are forging, mining and brewing. They like drinking the wine most. As for their battle prowess, even though it was great, the first three take precedence for that.

    Most dwarves are talented in the first three and even the least talented dwarf would have known about something regarding these three trades.

    The dwarves mostly awaken the fire element and everyone who did that would learn forging. If they did awaken the other elements, they would focus on battle and mining aspects.

    But even they have skillful hands that could work in other crafts rted to producing something. They have high endurance and the best of all is that they have a certain level of resistance for other elemental attacks.

    They have a bit of stout body and even their arms and legs are a bit thicker than humans and their skull structure is a bit different as they have bigger eyes and their nose is a bit rounder.

    At this moment, a dwarf came out of that mansion and strolled all over the vige in a proud manner.

    He has a long beard which he stroked gently from time to time as he talked with the human vigers with a smile which they replied with the smile of their own.

    The vige is surrounded by fields and all the fields seemed to have just gone through a harvest. They need to be plowed and prepared for the next ntation and some of the vigers are already working in their fields.

    It looked extremely peaceful. But all of a sudden...

    *BOOM*

    *CRASH*

    Arge explosion and a crashing sound could be heard from a distance and the dwarf vige head looked at with a frown.

    He and the rest of the dwarf guards all followed him as they ran towards that spot.

    They could see the vigers are all terrified. Most of them are Great realm cultivators and Novice stage cultivators, but they are all running for their lives. The Dwarves felt that something horrible might have happened and they all felt a bad premonition.

    When they reached the area where the chaos started, they were stunned to seerge Bulky humanoid creatures with their bare chests running and trampling the houses with their maces andrge axes.

    But those axes and hammers and the power behind their hits failed to create as much fear as their OX heads did.

    They are minotaurs and they are now invading the vige.

    The Vige head immediately came back to his senses and ordered for a guard to go back and activate a signal in the Vige head mansion.

    Most of the guards in the vige are stationed at the borders of the vige to guard, but they didn¡¯t expect that the danger came from inside.

    Even though, the signal was given it was toote. There are not many dwarves in this ce and the minotaurs are already running towards the Mansion to take over it. The defenses are already breached and the dwarves don¡¯t have any advantage left, in fact, they are in a perilous situation.

    The whole vige was full of ughter as every dwarf and the vigers that resisted were killedpletely.

    Before they knew it, the vige changed hands and the humans are all led to a specific ce.

    All the humans are huddled together in a field as they feared for their lives and shivered as they held their kin close to their hearts.

    The Minotaurs are all going through the vige to loot and pige and capture any more humans that stayed in.

    At this moment.

    Within a corner of the vige where the humans are still trying their best to gather their valuables before they were led to the field, around twenty feet above a house, six people appeared out of nowhere.

    They seemed to have horrified expressions as they seemed to have realized something extremely dangerous.

    But before they could do anything, they crashed into the house under them and turned it into rubble.

    Even though they crashed into that empty house, nobody seemed to have noticed them as the humans are all running towards the field and some of them are trying their best to escape.

    Sam stood up a bit groggily as he looked at his group. All of them crashed into this ce out of nowhere.

    But that is no what bothered them. Even though they fell from twenty feet, all they felt is some pain which would go away easily. The main problem right now is that they couldn¡¯t ess their spiritual energy.

    They felt some extreme resistance as if someone had caught their spiritual cores and not letting the energy out.

    Not just that, even their spiritual sense was not working and they failed to call out the hoverboards and even their beasts.

    Even Sam lost hisposure and the rest of his friends began to panic. Even though the Old beast said that there would be some resistance in the beginning and it will gradually loosen up, he didn¡¯t mention it would be this much.

    Sam stood up and looked around. All he could see is that everyone is running away. He didn¡¯t understand what is happening.

    They just sat there and closed their eyes as they tried their best to get their spiritual sense and energy back.

    After fifteen minutes are so, they finally felt something and the first thing Sam did is ask them to store their coats in their spatial rings.

    They stand out too much when they are with the rest of the humans and they didn¡¯t recover most of the energy. Even their spiritual sense is minute and they can at most activate their storages.

    Their energy is also minuscule and it can be at most considered the same as an Initiation Cultivator.

    If not for the body strength they have which couldn¡¯t be sealed, they would probably die easily.

    As they circted their energy, they noticed that the resistance and the seal over their spiritual cores are wearing down and they could feel it increasing.

    At this rate, they would have to wait for another week or ten days to recover their energy.

    They picked up some clothes that are inside this house and wore them.

    As they walked outside to look around, they noticed somerge muscr creatures with Ox head running over with clubs in their hands as theymanded all the humans to follow a human who is wearing different clothes from the rest of the humans in the vige.

    Sam frowned at this. He picked this location because Old beast showed the border between the Dwarven territory and Minatours¡¯ territory, but here the first thing he encountered is a Minotaur.

    He couldn¡¯t sense their energy because of his current state, but from the force of their clubs, he could fairly guess that they are at most in the grand realm. One minotaur looked at the group and screamed.

    "Move to the fields. Do you want to die here?"

    They felt weird when they looked at the talking Ox heads, but they didn¡¯t resist as they followed their instructions and walked towards the fields.

    All this while, they didn¡¯t speak and only focused on intently listening to the ramblings of these two oxheads.

    "This time, the vige was easily sacked. We would receive great rewards."

    "Of course, we would, we upied the city in two hours and our boss even killed thirty dwarves in total. How can we not get rewarded?"

    "Yeah, we even rounded up most of the humans, do you know, the vige that was sacked three days ago by other squad didn¡¯t have good results, not only half of the dwarves escaped, but even half of the humans escaped. We did a lot betterpared to them.

    But what a pity, so many humans are wasted?"

    "Haha, that is why you are called a mud-head. There is no way they could escape. All the surrounding viges of the Dhaka vige will be sacked by the next two days, where could they even go? They will end up working for us anyway."

 Chapter 646: Race War

    It took an hour for them to walk to the fields. It is not that far, but on their way, they stopped many times and the minotaurs carried on with their piging and capturing the people. They also inspected every house to make sure that it really is empty without anyone.

    After all the humans gathered at the field, there is one minatour standing before everyone.

    He is a bit different from the rest of his kind as he has red skin and he is a bit bulkier. He seems to be the leader of this bunch of minotaurs.

    As for why it is simple. Generally, normal Minotaurs will have Pale green skin and they have a constitution that is good for brute-forcing and smashing everything. But that doesn¡¯t mean, they don¡¯t awaken any elements, but it is extremely rare and that would be dependent right from birth.

    Even the element can be identified easily as their skin would change colors.

    The minotaur standing in front of them is one of them and he awakened fire element.

    Minotaurs are a bunch of muscleheads and whoever strong can speak up.

    "Humans, now you are all property of our Minotaurs and you shall work for us.

    You are weak and you have to earn your keep your lives safe. Since you guys didn¡¯t cause extra trouble, I will give you a chance. You can choose between farming and mining but you have to give your answer in an hour.

    Think carefully, if anyone tries to escape, you will be killed and made into fertilizer."

    The Red minotaur gave his imposing speech and left. The rest of the minotaurs are looking at the people greedily. Actually, they are looking at the remaining women. Sam could only shake his head.

    Humans really do seem like some good sexual objects. Even in Naga Loka, they are crazy over the humans both male and female.

    He doesn¡¯t know how the views of sexual intercourse of these minotaurs are, but if it is as liberal as the Nagas and if they are also as open as them to sex, then soon the female minotaurs will alsoe and try to take a pick.

    After an hour, the Red Minotaur also came and asked to pick the profession. To the surprise of the group, half of them chose mines.

    But Sam and his group decisively took farming. From what Sam learned they farm a type of wheat in this area. Even though he doesn¡¯t know too much information, he figured it couldn¡¯t be more different than the wheat that was grown on modern earth. The most difference it could have might be the size and growth rate.

    As for why many chose to be miners, he doesn¡¯t know, they have to learn itter.

    After picking the upation, then started another tussle in the group, the minotaurs started picking the women and the men they are married to or born to are all trying their best to beg the minotaurs to let go of their woman.

    "Every family that wants to keep their woman to themselves must cultivate an extra acre of the field for every woman. If you fail to deliver the required quota of wheat by harvest, then not only will we kill you, your women will be turned into whores."

    The red minotaur once again spoke, but the people are at least relieved a bit as they at least have a chance.

    After this farce is over, thend is divided. Each person, man or woman as long as they are older than fifteen, they have to cultivate an acre ofnd by themselves.

    They don¡¯t have any leeway. Now ording to the new rule, the family that has kept their women has to cultivate extra acres ofnd.

    As everyone is being assigned theirnd, Sam looked around and noticed something. Not many people are wearing spatial rings in this ce.

    Even though there are some humans wearing them, one look anyone could tell, the space is notrge.

    The minotaurs finally left the fields after they assigned the fields. They should start their work right now and they would be assigned a residenceter that night after their work was done.

    After they left, Sam and their group finally started spreading out to talk with the rest of the farmers.

    When they introduced themselves, they just told their original names, but they didn¡¯t say there are not from here, they just said they are the vigers from the Dhaka vige that was sacked a few days ago and escaped this way, but to their bad luck they are stuck here.

    They exined that they don¡¯t have any farming tools left and no seeds and fertilizer to cultivate thend.

    The vigers are weing to them. After all, they are all in the same boat of suffering, so they didn¡¯t shun them off.

    They arranged a set of farming tools since half of the vigers went to be miners, their tools are all left here, so Sam and his group didn¡¯t have ack of tools, as for seeds every group gave little of their own and afterbining them all, they all got a share.

    Sam offered to buy them, but the farmers rejected and acted friendly.

    He just offered them a favor and said that he would help them out if they want to and left.

    There is one thing left to obtain and that is fertilizer. When they asked about it, they only shook their head and said that it woulde when it should.

    They made some small talk to reveal as much information as they can.

    After regrouping they shared the information they got andpiled it.

    Currently, they are in a vige named Prana. It was formerly a vige under dwarves but now sacked by minotaurs.

    The dwarves have four tribes in total and four of them have divided the entire dwarven territory into four parts. In the middle of these fournds, there is arge city. The City of the council.

    This the ce where the Dwarven elders stay. There is an elder council that acts as a parliament and rules the dwarves.

    They don¡¯t have a single king.

    The minotaurs are different though. They have a king and they only have a single territory under a single rule.

    As for the orcs, they didn¡¯t know anything.

    What they did know is that minotaurs and dwarves are on a verge of breaking out into war and these attacks on the viges are part of it.

    Sam had a headache. He didn¡¯t think that he would arrive at a situation like this. They were directly dropped in the middle of a race war.

    Even though they knew that there are asional skirmishes, it has been centuries since one race managed to invade another race this deep into their territory.

    As they were thinking, the rest of the farmers already started working. The fields that are already leveled and ready to be plowed are being plowed and the fields that are not leveled yet are being leveled.

    But one thing that surprised the group of six is that there is no livestock to plow the field. The farmers are plowing it with their own hands and some of them even haverge wooden plows and started dragging them over their fields to till thend like livestock themselves.

    The six of them exchanged a look of helplessness. They can¡¯t do anything for now. The Red minotaur has a cultivation level of a Nascent and in the current situation, their strength is nowhere near that. They can deal with some great realm cultivators. But they cannot deal with Nascent stage cultivators without and spiritual energy.

    They have to wait at least three days before they could escape.

    They examined thend and noticed that it is extremely hard. It would be hard to till thend with brute force alone and after observing the farmers, they noticed that they are using their spiritual energy to till thend.

    Now only they understood why they needed cultivators to just farm thend. They also learned earlier that thend is extremely fertile and the crop could be harvested two months after nting and even if it is not as fertile the crop would still mature in two and a half months.

    Even though the rest of the team members didn¡¯t feel anything, Sam was clearly surprised. Because, aftering to this world, this is the first time he came into direct contact with the farming and he didn¡¯t expect the regr crops could be this magical here.

    Just two and a half months means they can at least have five harvests a year. This is simply great.

    All six of them looking into the horizon and sighed as they went on to start working. They knew their current situation. All they can do is work for now and don¡¯t gather too much attention and wait for another three to four days.

    After all, they didn¡¯t have any expectationsing here. All they wanted was a new experience and being a powerless person after gaining so much power can also be considered a new experience.

 Chapter 647: Being farmer slaves

    Sam and his group just went on with the first day as they leveled their fields and got them ready to be plowed the next day. They took their daily rations and went to their arranged residence. A wooden shack.

    A wooden shack has to be shared by three people and they got two shacks side by side. Even though most of them are destroyed, farmers couldn¡¯t do anything but fix them and use it by themselves.

    Sam and the group came into contact with the bread for the first time which was made from the local wheat. Only after eating it did they understand the effects of the wheat.

    The wheat is full of spiritual energy. Even though the density is not high and at their level, it is not that beneficial, for low-level cultivators it can work wonders. Particrly, the Acolytes and Novice cultivators. Great realm cultivators can enjoy little benefits, the Grand realm cultivators can at most use this replenish themselves, but it would be hard for them to cultivate.

    And from what Sam heard from the discussions, this is the lowest grade of wheat. They also learned that the wheat grown in the surrounding areas is of this grade only and most of it will be shipped to the council and them distributed among the cities.

    In exchange for thatrge quantity, the vigers will get a smaller quantity of higher grade wheat which will help them in cultivation.

    Most of the cultivators in the vige are Great realm and since they are all farming by themselves without any aid, they can at most work one acre all by themselves without over exhausting.

    For the people that have to cultivate extrand due to them keeping their women, work together with their friends and cultivate that extrand.

    The group felt quite bad for these farmers. They had recently sold their harvest to the council and since the harvest is good enough, they got a decent amount of higher grade wheat. They didn¡¯t even revel in their celebrations before this happened. Now all the high-grade wheat was taken away by the minotaurs and they are stuck with these rations.

    But the group themselves are satisfied for now because eating this bread is speeding up their recovery.

    But it will still take three days before they could confidently leave this ce without any mishaps.

    Thinking like that, theyid down closed their eyes in exhaustion.

    Meanwhile.

    Somewhere deep in the Minotaur¡¯s territory. A person is sitting inside a room with the Minotaur king.

    The Minotaur King is a person who activated two elements, which is extremely rare in the Minotaurs and he activated earth and fire at that. He has a great defense and powerful offense. He is ahead above all his peers. He even got a chance to leave this ce and get rid of his banishment, but he wanted to be the king here and rejected the offer.

    Right after he broke through past the Consummate realm, the previous king left the ce and finished his banishment, and gave up the throne to the current king.

    At this moment, this current Minotaur king with his gigantic body of 8 feet is sitting in front of a Pale-looking man.

    The man has extremely pale skin and red eyes. He is extremely attractive and any woman that made eye contact with him is bound to blush. He has such weird charm and the ink-ck hair has a faintly red hue.

    He has a faint smile and looked at Minotaur king as if he is sitting in front of a pleasant scene.

    "How many viges did you upy until now?" The young man asked in a melodious voice. There is a faint chill in that voice as if he is made of ice.

    "We upied twenty and by now the Dwarven troops would be moving. Currently, we are targeting only one territory. We share borders with another one too. Do you want us to make a move there?"

    "No, don¡¯t spread your forces too thin. Just start a war and gradually increase your force.

    upy this territory first, the other territory will be taken care of through other means.

    Just do as I said, then you will get the most fertilends of the Dwarven territory and you would be the first king who solved the food problem of the Minotaurs in the Banished realm and more of your race will be qualified to get rid of their banishment."

    "Why are you doing this for us? Just who are you? What are you?"

    Minotaur king asked the questions that are bugging him since the start of all this.

    "You don¡¯t have to know. I am only here because there is something in the Dwarven territory that I need and they wouldn¡¯t give it to me anyway. So, I need your help taking it.

    In this way, you would get what you want."

    "You are just a Pre-transcendent that is why it is bothering me so much. How can you promise all of this?"

    "I might be weak, but everything I said and made you do, did you lose anything from that?"

    "No."

    "Then just keep on doing what I told you to do."

    At the same time, on the other side of the continent, within the territory of Orcs.

    A person in a dark cloak is sitting in front of the Orc queen.

    "Have you decided on my proposal?" The person in cloak asked in a dreary voice.

    "I don¡¯t believe that you are so generous to us. What do you get from this?"

    "I have something that Dwarves wouldn¡¯t be willing to give away. Anyway, the dwarves have the most fertilends and they even have enough vegetation and wildlife. If you get that, you can improve your life, you will get more meat and have better ces to stay."

    "I will give my decision tomorrow." The Orc queen said with some hesitation.

    "Okay then, I hope you would make a correct decision otherwise only Minotaurs will benefit from this."

    The ck figure left.

    While the night was full of discussion on the other two ends of the continent. Sam who slept for the first time in a long while, woke up and got ready to live his life as a former for the next two days.

    The group has their spiritual energy increase a bit and they can use their elements and the spiritual energy to a certain extent. Even though the situation wouldn¡¯t change, for now, they can at least increase the speed of their work.

    They went to the fields and Sam used his newly gained earth element through therge plow and dragged it. With that, the soil loosened easily and it was tilled. Like this, he wouldn¡¯t have to plow thend two or three times, one single plow is enough.

    Jack is using his sword energy and used his delicate control to till thend, he is slower than Sam, but at least he is going faster than most farmers.

    The rest of them are also doing their best. Watt is using wind energy to till. Even Philip has no problem as he is using a smaller metal plow. But the remaining two are having the most problem as their elements are not suited for him.

    At least, they are still able to plow normally.

    The work is going on smoothly. But the Minotaurs are a big distraction as they came to the fields in the name of inspection and kept on bugging the farmers who have women with them.

    Since they have an extra field to work on, they didn¡¯t want to let them easily do that, so that they can get the woman.

    Sam looked at the situation and couldn¡¯t help but shake his head. This is worse than Naga Loka, at least there people will ask for consent. Here things are worse. The boss clearly gave them a chance, but he is also benefitting as these people will do anything to keep their women and they will increase the harvest.

    From the value of wheat in this world, Sam could clearly guess what kind of merit they will get for extra harvest.

    The boss must be clearly aiming for that. From the vigers, he heard rumors that Minotaurs generally don¡¯t leave women like that and never gave a chance. They are even thinking that this guy is an odd one.

    This is clearly because he wants extra harvest to increase his position within his tribe.

    But these guys are clearly nning to ruin this.

    Particrly one guy is extremely irritating as he was bugging the person right next to his field. The girl is still young, but this minotaur is lusting after her too much.

    He is constantly whipping the father of the girl so that he wouldn¡¯t finish his own fieldwork much less extra.

    The worst part is, this guy happened to be the brother of that fire-type minotaur.

    The group clearly felt irritated. Particrly, Watt. If not for the fact that they didn¡¯t recover yet. They would have already beaten the crap out of this musclehead.

 Chapter 648: Whipping

    By the end of that day, Sam and his group actually finished tilling theirnd. It is ready for ntation and fertilization.

    They are thest ones to start, but they finished it first and they even went on to help other farmers. The surrounding farmers are all kind to them since the start, so they have to repay the favor one way or the other.

    At least helping them till the extrand will make them suffer less. So, after dusk they didn¡¯t start nting the seeds as the fertilizer is yet toe. So, they worked on the fields of those families with women to give them a hand.

    The farmers are very thankful and even offered some of their bread, which the group rejected directly.

    They are just repaying after all. But they didn¡¯t realize that their help would only cause more trouble. At least this time, the major part of the trouble is not for farmers.

    "Which piece of shit helped this guy to till the field?"

    The brother of the leader, the guy who whipped the farmer for half a day so that he could get his hands on a little girl is yelling at the top of his lungs as he whipped the back of the farmer until there is blood seeping out.

    Sam and the group just came to the field and saw this scene.

    They felt like kicking this guy in the ass right there and then, but they have to endure. They only have to let that day and the tomorrow pass and they can do whatever they want.

    Seeing that no one is answering him, the muscle head got angrier and kept on whipping the man.

    *PAK* *PAK*

    *PAK* *PAK*

    The blood sprayed out and he still kept on hitting and said through the gritted teeth.

    "They helped you once, so let me see if they wille out to end your suffering."

    When Watt was about to explode, Sam tapped him on the shoulders to stop him and stepped forward.

    "I did."

    The whipping stopped and the Minatour looked at Sam coldly as he walked towards him inrge strides.

    "You like poking your nose into other people¡¯s business? What gave you the balls to help him?"

    "The fact that I finished my work yesterday?" Sam said as he pointed at his own field.

    The minatour looked at the tilled field and understood. The fertilizer was asked to be brought early because six acres were tilled faster than normal. He remembered that and now that he saw this, he understood who Sam is.

    His brother even asked him to observe the people who worked on these fields and if they can farm better than the rest, they might even get some special treatment.

    But he didn¡¯t want to give up, so he said to the gritted teeth.

    "Since you have so much time for helping others, not only will you finish your own work, you will also do the extra work. There is extrand that was too rocky and couldn¡¯t be tilled. You will level thatnd clear the rocks and till it.

    You only have this afternoon to nt the wheat. After that you have to work in thatnd. I will personally inspect your work."

    Sam didn¡¯t even say anything and just went to work. He already brought the seeds and a minatour brought the fertilizer.

    Sam took out the bag of seeds and carried the fertilizer basket. The fertilizer looked like mud, but it has a blood smell to it and Sam could even smell the fresh blood and flesh. He has some guesses on what was used to make this, but he doesn¡¯t know if it will work or doesn¡¯t even want to know if it will work.

    He just started nting. But even his nting speed amazed the spectators. Sam might not know much about agriculture, but since he knew the task he can think of the fastest way to finish it.

    He didn¡¯t even touch the soil once. He used the earth elemental energy and his feet to manipte the ground to sow the seed, with one hand and throw the fertilizer with other hand. He is fast within a few minutes he finished a row. When he moved to the second, the Minatour with the whip felt humiliated for some reason. Because Sam¡¯s speed is clear proof that he would be able to finish the whole acre by afternoon.

    He couldn¡¯t take it anymore and ran after Sam and whipped.

    *PAK*

    The whip hit him in the back and Sam felt a stinging pain as he halted in his tracks.

    "Who said you can stop your work? Move. Continue."

    And there began Sam¡¯s irritation.

    *PAK*

    *PAK*

    *PAK*

    He was constantly whipped as he sowed the seeds.

    After some time, the robe Sam is wearing, got torn and an opening could be seen. His skin was swollen red and small hints of blood seeping out could be seen.

    Minatour looked at this but seeing that Sam didn¡¯t even show a single hint of pain either through his voice or expression, he just went on hitting on the same spot.

    Sam¡¯s body is still strong even though, he couldn¡¯t use the spiritual energy to his desired level. If this guy is not a Grand realm cultivator and using his spiritual energy to attack and if not for the fact Sam doesn¡¯t want to cause any suspicions and defending with his miniscule spiritual energy, the situation would have beenpletely different.

    Particrly, thest night the vigers noticed some more Nascent stage Minatours entering the vige.

    They don¡¯t know why they are here, but it is definitely not to side with the humans.

    Even Sam saw these minatours roaming around the street this morning, He didn¡¯t want to be noticed too much and wanted to be extra careful. But here he is, taking a beating by a Pedophile minatour.

    By the end of ntation, it is already afternoon and Sam lost some blood. His muscle fibers are too tight to bepletely torn apart, so even for this blood, the minatour had a hard time damaging him.

    But he is so blinded by the ego that he only wanted to cause pain to Sam. But didn¡¯t notice the difference between Sam and other humans.

    He just vented.

    Sam didn¡¯t show any form of expression of his pain. He just finished the ntation and took a plough and pickaxe and moved to the rocky field.

    The Minatour took a break and followed after Sam.

    Sam started destroying the stones one by one as he dug them out and threw them out of the field. He didn¡¯t use his earth element to not to make it too obvious.

    But he worked fast.

    The minatour joined in whipping right after that, but by dusk, he got even angrier and called all the other minatours to join in with the whips.

    By night, Sam was being beaten by the six minatours and his robe was tattered.

    At night, he was given his rations and was sent to his shack.

    Sam ate his bread without speaking anything. His group didn¡¯t disturb him. They also knew why Sam is still taking the beating, there are two things if he didn¡¯t do that, the farmer that helped them will die and their cover will be exposed without them prepared enough.

    They have at least possess a strength of Nascent to escape this area without any mishaps and they are waiting. Instead of saying some sweet words, everyone is trying their best to recover. Sam poured some heavenly wine on his wounds and they started scabbing.

    At this moment, he couldn¡¯t eat any of the food and wine he brought, they have way too much energy and his spiritual core was still in a sealed state.

    He would receive some damage if he took that food in.

    He has to wait. One more day and this would be over.

    The next day, he went to the field, he didn¡¯t go to his own field and left the watering to Chatur. The minatour pedophile didn¡¯t care though, all he cared was breaking Sam¡¯s body once again.

    Sam already cleared half of the field the day before now he is clearing the other half of the field.

    He just took the whippings. But today, the whips are changed, there are spikes added to the whip which made his skin tear up even more.

    While Sam is experiencing the torture, the farmers and the group saw something weird. There is arge number of Minatours moving through the vige. They didn¡¯t stay in the vige like the Nascent stage Minatours, that are in the vige, rather most of the Nascent stage Minatours joined this group and passed by the vige. It seems like the invasion of Minatours is not over yet. They are trying their best to take advantage of the situation and moving their troops deeper into the dwarven territory.

    By afternoon, Sam¡¯s robe already fell off and his back ispletely bleeding. But he still continued with the work.

    He leveled one acre of thend and started plowing with therge wooden plow. This plow would only usually be used with livestock. He dragged the plow as he tilled thend and time passed.

    By Dusk he is halfway through the tilling and he suddenly halted in his tracks and closed his eyes. A faint smirk appeared on his face. Not just him, the rest of his friends also halted their actions as they closed their eyes.

    The Minotaur Pedophile felt that something is wrong as he sensed something from Sam. But he couldn¡¯t put a finger on it. But he knew that something is gravely wrong and is about to happen to him.

 Chapter 649: Farming the Minotaur

    Sam looked at the sky as he felt the rays of dusk and took a deep breath.

    The Minotaur Pedophile already felt something is extremely wrong, but he couldn¡¯t put a finger on it. The rest of the minotaurs also felt the same as they looked at Sam.

    He stretched his back a little bit and soon with a light golden glow his wounds started healing. His skin was back to normal but with some extra scars.

    This the first time, the minotaurs got a clear view of Sam¡¯s skin as every time they saw it was covered with blood.

    Now that they saw it, they realized one thing. Not all scars are given to him by them. This made them gulp and take a step back subconsciously.

    Sam stepped on the frame of the wooden plow and separated the plow part with a single pull. The two-meter-long wooden plow was now on his shoulders as he held it like a battle-ax.

    He turned around and looked at the Minotaurs with a cold look and took a step forward.

    Before the Oxheaded creatures coulde to their senses, Sam already made his move, he held the plow with both hands and swung it vertically downwards.

    The pointy end was stuck into the muscr chest of the Minotaur and before he could react, the plow pierced deep into his body, broke the rib cage, and punctured the lungs. Along with that, the Minotaur couldn¡¯t take the force and his knees buckled and crashed into the ground.

    The whole surroundings turned into silence. Nobody dares to speak and the farmers didn¡¯t even dare to breathe loudly. They are afraid that they would gather unwanted attention just by breathing.

    All minotaur spread around the fields looked at this and were stunned for a second.

    Sam didn¡¯t seem to see the reactions at all and just picked the Plow back up and moved forward. Only then did the stunned Minatours react and all of them ran towards Sam while yelling him to stop in his tracks.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care, he just went forward and lifted the plow to attack the next target. This guy recovered his senses faster and raised his club to attack, but all of a sudden, the surrounding gravity increased and he felt like he was carrying tons. Even the club he raised became so heavy that he couldn¡¯t raise it fully to make the swing.

    Sam left the gravity effect like that and mmed the plow with extra force.

    The plow hit the minotaur on the nape and the pointy end came out of his throat. Sam pushed it a bit more instead of pulling it, and the head was crudely separated from the body.

    Sam just kicked their head off of the plow and continued forward.

    Even though the rest of the minotaurs are running to the field, the minotaurs in the field with Sam are backing down.

    They clearly understood one thing, Sam is powerful than them, and with the energy and killing intenting out of him, they don¡¯t have any confidence. That is why they decided to back down until theirrades came.

    "Bring my brother here. Run." The Pedophile gave the order to the subordinate and thetter ran as fast as he can.

    The Pedophile looked at Sam and said.

    "You are powerful, I will give you that. If you stop this now, there is still room for reconciliation. I will talk to my brother and make him give you a ce in his squad, you can have a great life. The war ising and you can have great achievements."

    He said all of this in a shaky voice to buy some time, but Sam¡¯s answer came in another form.

    The plow was diagonally swung downwards and it made contact with the body of the minotaur at the corbone and the body was cut into two.

    And just like that Sam¡¯s onught began. He didn¡¯t use any elemental energy except for the earth element to simte gravity. Apart from that, he only uses the spiritual energy to cover the Plow and just mmed it straight into their bodies to kill them in a single hit.

    But even when he got the chance to he didn¡¯t kill the pedophile.

    As the bodies of the minotaurs kept on increasing, the rest of the minotaurs learned their lesson and stopped advancing.

    But Sam didn¡¯t. He just moved forward and whoever is in his way was cut down.

    In five minutes, the whole field turned into a Minotaur graveyard.

    By this time, the remaining Nascent stage Minatours along with the fire type minotaur came to the field.

    Now only the Pedophile is left standing.

    Sam dragged the plow towards him as he was backed up against the tree. The Pedophile couldn¡¯t bring himself to run to the sides as his legs are going weak.

    Then only the pedo looked at his brother and rest of his squading and he felt like he saw hisst ray of hope.

    He wanted to run away.

    But Sam mmed the plow to his side make him pee on spot. Sam looked at him in disdain and his cold eyes meant only one thing.

    ¡¯Move an Inch, and you are dead.¡¯

    The squad leader, the fire-type minotaur looked at Sam and coldly roared.

    "How dare you puny human do this to our fellow Minotaurs? Today you shall be erased from this world."

    With that, he picked up his battle-ax and ran forward. Behind him, there are ten more Nascent stage Minotaurs, out of all of them, except for the fire type minotaur only one more guy had skin color other than pale green.

    He has a grey metallic skin color and he clearly activated metal element. Both of them are in the lead and Sam didn¡¯t seem to care at all. He held the plow firmly and hit the back end of the plow on the knees of the pedophile so that he wouldn¡¯t move.

    Then he held it firmly and ran towards the crowd.

    But this time, he is not alone. His group ispletely itching for the battle. Even Chatur has an exciting look as he took out his brush and stroked it in the air. A blue line of water elemental energy appeared creating a pattern in the air and when he sent another wave of water elemental energy through the pattern, a medium-sized water dragon came out of it and mmed into the fire-type minotaur at the front who was about to throw a me attack.

    In the past year, Chatur has finally learned how to attack with his constitution and he found that he had endless possibilities in front of him and now fighting like this is only one of the possibilities.

    As everyone joined the battle, the minotaurs lost the confidence in outnumbering them.

    Even though the group is struggling a bit, they are able to hold on. The only bad thing is that they couldn¡¯t perform one-hit kills.

    Sam came right in front of the Fire minotaur and mmed the plow straight to his chest. But the minotaur who just recovered from the water attack, held the ax and blocked the attack, and countered it.

    Now the ax and the plow collided and the red mes spread all over as they both shed continuously. Currently, Sam¡¯s strength is around a middle-stage Nascent and it is slowly unlocking. He would reach his top condition in another two-three days.

    But he was still surprised that the Minotaurs are still able to block his attacks. Something like this is almost impossible in Naga Loka and his home. Even though, Sam is not using full power taking any damage is out of the question.

    But Minotaurs are able to take it.

    They really race with a good physique.

    Soon, the plow was charred to a crisp and fell off of Sam¡¯s hands.

    But Sam didn¡¯t feel worried, he stepped back and picked up a pickaxe he used to break the rocks.

    His hand turned into metal and even the wooden handle was covered by ayer of metal and the pickaxe metallic point became sharper and the length and size increased.

    Sam moved forward once again and this time, mmed the Pickaxe straight to the head. When the Battle ax came to block, the edge of the pickaxe suddenly changed as a small t surface appeared on the side.

    The side mmed to the ax head and slid as the point of the pickaxe mmed into the shoulder of the Minotaur.

    "AAAAAARGGGG"

    The Minotaur roared and the surroundings were filled with dark mes, he is trying to cover Sam with mes.

    But Sam didn¡¯t say anything and there is not even a change in expression. He just left the fire cover him and let the clothes burn.

    He tore the shoulder apart and swung the pickaxe again and this time, he stabbed the minotaur in the rips and kept the pickaxe.

    The pickaxe ahead started changing shape within the minotaur¡¯s body as it tore the internal organs apart.

    The MInatour buckled down and dropped his ax as he tried his best to make Sam remove the pickaxe.

    But Sam didn¡¯t do it, he just stayed there and let the metal inside change and deform into weird shapes that is caused the flesh to turn to mush.

    As this is happening, he looked around to see the other battles.

    Philip is fighting with the Metal Minotaur. The Minotaur¡¯s fighting style is clearly simr to Philip¡¯s but. But Philip has fire elementbined with the metal element and he gained an upper hand.

    Even the rest of the minotaurs without any element have some good defense and offense. Chatur is supporting them with water elemental attacks from the side.

    The fight went on for another ten minutes. When Philip was about finish off the metal minotaur, Sam said.

    "Don¡¯t kill him. I want that guy."

    He also removed the pickaxe from the fire minotaur and a meat past came out of that hole.

    He sprawled on the ground and is between life and death.

    Sam waved his hand and the chessboard appeared. He pointed at the fire-type minotaur and his body disappeared from the spot as he reappeared in the ce of a pawn.

    He did the same to the Metal minotaur.

    He wanted to fill pieces but he felt like Nagas don¡¯t even make qualified pawns. But these minotaurs will do. Not all of them though, only the element users.

    After collecting them inside, he sent some pills for them to take and they healed slowly.

    After looking at the piles of dead bodies, Sam collected all the intact ones and threw them inside the second floor before saying to the vigers.

    "Escape now. This is the only chance you will have. The surrounding viges are under Minatours¡¯ control, so try to split into small groups and escape to ces that are in dwarven control. The war is around the corner, so move fast."

    After leaving the message, he walked towards the Pedophile with the Pickaxe. The screams of the person made the farmers hearts shudder as they ran away from the ce. The empty vige devoid of life was filled with the screams that are begging for death than life.

 Chapter 650: Town under siege

    Sam and his friends went through the things of the Minotaurs. There are spatial storages around Minatours¡¯ hands.

    And most of them consisted of some high-grade wheat bread. Sam and his friends started eating the bread as they felt the seal on them loosening. Their strength would be returned faster if they could eat arge amount of this bread which is not exactly easy to obtain.

    They waited for the vigers to run away bit by bit. But they stayed for the night and nned on what to do.

    They got some details from an experienced viger and found the directions for the nearest town of the Dwarven territory where nascent stage cultivators of the dwarves will be guarding and that ce might be the nearest battlefield of the Minotaurs and the Dwarves.

    They also learned that the twenty or so viges are all under that town and that town¡¯s ntation is thergest agriculturalnd in the surroundings and they can even get some Medium grade wheat bread and even some corn and other foods of Medium grade as thend is more fertile than here.

    They decided to move to that town.

    But they would have to bypass the Minatours¡¯ camp and enter that ce and once they did that, they would be able to get more food of high-quality and would be able to eat.

    Even though they have spiritual stones, they are not exactly that useful in this ce as the natural suppression of the cultivation also applies to the spirit stones which are natural treasures of spiritual energy.

    They checked with their own spirit stones. Normally, they would absorb at least eighty percent of the energy that is flowing outside and twenty percent would be a natural waste as it would be dissolved into the environment, but now they could barely absorb ten to twenty percent.

    Except for foods, they wouldn¡¯t be able to recover any energy normally much less improve in cultivation.

    Sam and his friends decided to stay in this ce for six months at least. After they got the next location for the Pce of inheritance, they would move to that ce and develop there.

    But before that, they have to endure this and adapt to this ce. Anyway, Sam and his friends all liked to have at least one meal a day. Even though it was their vanity that led them to do that, they can still get used to a ce like this.

    After searching through the vige and the vige head mansion, they got some more things. There is a lot of medium-grade wheat and flour in the pantry of the vige head mansion.

    From what they observed until now, there are not too many spatial storages in this world. Even though half of the Minotaurs have them, their storage is extremely small and the space is not exactlyrge. They can barely keep some important rations and due to the consumption rate of these fellows, the rations would be at most sufficient for a week to ten days.

    They might have wanted to use this vige as one of the supply points to them and that is also why they arranged for vigers to start farming the very next moment after they sacked the vige.

    Sam his friends stole everything before leaving.

    They exited the vige and entered the forest. Sam is really impressed by this thick vegetation. There are many types of fruit trees in the forest. Although most of them are grades weaker than what Sam has in his personal grove within the divine dimension, there are still many.

    Thend is really too fertile and he can clearly understand why the Minotaurs wanted to invade this ce. The amount of vegetarian food they consume is extremely high and they would need a ce like this to develop properly. The minotaurnd is not this fertile.

    And the dwarven territory is theplete opposite, the deeper they go into their territory, the more fertile it is.

    As for the orcs, they mostly live in forests and they don¡¯t perform any agriculture and such.

    They will hunt and eat the meat, they wille to other territories once in a while and sneak into the hunt and leave when they had their fill. They never cared about the proper method of living.

    Sam and his friends didn¡¯t go on a proper route and traveled in the forests as they moved towards the town.

    Once they are there, they would be able to get their hands on the higher-grade wheat and bread as they have many things to sell.

    One of them is wine. Sam has so much wine on him. The ape¡¯s best hobby is to experiment with fruits and herbs to create more wines of different wines and intensities.

    He made many hard liquors, mellow wines and he is also close to brewing something that is close to ssic vodka. He is almost out of ideas due to the severeck of ingredients.

    When Sam threw that fruit tree from the Vronti in, he became extreme ecstatic and after giving three fruits to Arman for his breakthrough, the rest of it was made into a special wine, and the tree was transnted.

    Sam decided to exchange the wine for the goods he needed.

    After two days of constant travel, they finally arrived at the ce.

    They are in the vicinities of the town area and the whole town is surrounded by arge wall-mounted by many dwarves.

    The dwarves are using different weapons and there are many archers on the walls along with some humans as theyunched attacks on the Minotaurs.

    The Minotaurs also made some tents in the vicinity as they tried their best to attack the dwarves and the town wall.

    Even though it is called a town, it isrge and wide. It is more like an average-sized city.

    They looked at the situation from afar.

    There could see hundreds of Minotaurs trying to get into the city. Minotaurs don¡¯t know anything other than fighting. They are good at urately executing anything that required brute force.

    Even the weapons they have are crudely made and they are not made by them. They used the human artisans and got these items.

    But there are too few human artisans in this world as they have minimal growth in other areas other than farming.

    But the dwarves arepletely different. These short and stout guys are good at making things and their hands have extreme dexterity. Their strength is also good.

    They make decent archers too. They are easily fending off the Minotaurs below the wall.

    The Minotaurs are trying their best to get past the wall, but they couldn¡¯t. From the looks of it, this might go on for the next few days. But after these few days, the people who are going to be suffering would be dwarves.

    Because they don¡¯t have any supply points. All the surrounding viges of this town are sacked and behind the vige is the forest.

    Their supplies of the low-grade wheat and food were all from the surrounding viges and even the weapons and other supplies that came from the council should pass through some of these viges. Now that they are upied by the minotaurs, there is no way they coulde. That is why the Nascent stage Minatours came and upied the viges decisively.

    They wanted to drag the war and deal with the dwarves in this town and upy it.

    Once they upied this ce, they will have ess torger fields and Sam also heard they have a decent-sized pasture with some types of pigs and cows.

    But currently, they have to find a way to get inside the town.

    They stayed in the forest for the night, trying to find any possible openings they can.

    After searching through the night, they couldn¡¯t find any opening. Even the stream connecting the town and the forest is actually barred with arge metallic frame. It didn¡¯t hinder the stream of water to go in rather it hindered any foreign body to go through the stream.

    There are only three ways to enter right now. One of them is forcing their way in, which the dwarves certainly wouldn¡¯t like.

    The second one is trying to gain the dwarves¡¯ favor and help them fend off these minotaurs.

    Thest one is to circle through the forest and find another route through another vige where the attack is not so intense.

    The first one is out of the question.

    The second one is usible but they have to use some means tomunicate with them.

    Thest one will take several days.

    After discussing between themselves, they finally decided to go for the second option and they already started their nning.

    The first step in the n is to contact the dwarves in the town.

    For that, they first made a video with the recording crystal and let a Silver pigeon out. They don¡¯t know if the resistance also applied to the beasts, but after taking out the pigeon their worries came true.

    If the silver pigeon was able to fly, it can escape the arrows and attacks of the dwarves and enter the city with the recording crystal. But it clearly cannot at this moment. If they used the local beasts, they are too big and too easily identified.

    After thinking long and hard, they finally have an idea.

    But for this, they have to use Chatur and his ability and also the stream that is connected to the town.

 Chapter 651: Message

    Sam and Chatur went to the stream and thetter looked at the color of the water and the river bed.

    The stream has to go through the forest and cross the Minatour¡¯s base camp and enter the town and it flows across the town to the rear and enters the forest once again.

    Chatur took out his brush and changed his appearance and entered the water with the recording crystal. But when someone looks normally, they wouldn¡¯t be able to find out anything different. They will not think that a person is swimming in the water.

    The flow of the stream is not that turbulent and it is flowing towards the town, which made it easier for them.

    Chatur swam past the Minotaur base camp and soon reached the barred entrance under the city wall of the town.

    There is something wrong with the metal rods as they are extremely strong and even a normal Pre-transcendent couldn¡¯t damage them.

    But there is a small opening between the bars and Chatur ced his brush inside and created a fish that ispletely made out of water. He changed the color of the fish with some added paint and turned it into bright glowing red and ced the recording crystal inside.

    The fish then swam into the town.

    Chatur came back to their hiding location in the forest.

    At the same time, the fish swam deep into the town and entered the fields of the town. The ntation of the town was made around this stream and they even made some small streams for the fields to provide necessary irrigation.

    Due to this, they not only grow wheat and corn, they even have some paddy fields within the town which require more water than normal.

    As the redfish entered the stream and the ntation, it slowly started losing its speed as the spiritual energy chatur injected could only support it for so long. But right before it disappeared, a human who is walking by towards his field looked at the red glowing and moving object and picked it up to take a look.

    Even though it looked like fish, it was only made like that, so it can swim easily.

    When the farmer picked it up, the fish turned into a liquid and slipped past his finger leaving a recording crystal in his hands.

    He looked at the peculiar crystal in his hands. He has never seen a recording crystal before. At first, he tried to probe with the spiritual sense.

    After sensing that there is no danger, he immediately injected some spiritual energy.

    A holographic image appeared and he saw five-six humans standing together with a lot of minotaur¡¯s corpsesying around them along with the Fire-type minotaur kneeling beside the young man in ck.

    "I am Sam. I am trying to use this recording crystal to send a message to dwarves.

    We are traveling humans and we wanted to be integrated with the dwarvenmunity and escaped from the forests we lived in. We reached Prana vige a few days ago and on that very day, the Minotaur sacked the vige by killing the dwarves and enving the humans.

    Currently, the surrounding twenty viges were allpletely sacked and your town was cut off from all the routes and blocked off from any external aid as each vige is being guarded by Nascent stage Minotaurs.

    Currently, we are in the forest behind the Minotaur camp outside your city wall.

    They are nning to drag out the battle so that you would exhaust the resources.

    We are six Late-stage Nascent cultivators and we would like to work together and be of service to you in any way to fend off the minotaur troops.

    If you want to contact us, just leave the message at the metal bar blockade of the stream and the city wall and we would be able to find a way to reach it.

    I hope you make a decision quickly."

    After that, he even gave instructions on how to erase the existing video and record a new one.

    In the whole video, Sam is the only one who spoke.

    The farmer was stunned for a second and immediately ran towards the field supervisor. Generally, there are very few humans who have their ownnds, most of the fields belong to the dwarven authorities and they will rent thends to the farmers.

    The farmers cultivate it and give part of the wheat as rent and keep the rest or exchange it for something else.

    Most of the trading system in this world is based on barter.

    Anyway, the farmer immediately ran to the dwarf who is in charge of the fields and when he saw the video, he ran to the superiors and soon the video reached the upper echelons of the town.

    The town lord looked at the video and asked themander of the troops.

    "What should we do? Can we trust them?"

    "I couldn¡¯t decide. The dead bodies are real and I know that red minotaur. He is a prodigy of the lower ss in the Minotaurs. He leads a squad of Nascent stage Minotaurs. He is good at the battle and our dwarven brothers collided with him many times, but he was still able to survive.

    Since even he was kneeling on the ground, the group must be capable. But I don¡¯t know if we can trust them. After all, they didn¡¯t know what they want in exchange."

    Themander replied.

    "Then how about we reply to him first and ask what exactly he wants?"

    "We could do that then."

    Chatur is going through the stream for every hour to check if the message was replied and only on his third attempt did he find the recording crystal.

    He immediately caught hold of it and brought it back. But when he was returning, he saw that some Minotaurs are looking at the stream and talking something. They couldn¡¯t see him, so he decided to stop in their vicinity and listen to what they have to say.

    And when he listened to the news, he was dumbfounded and couldn¡¯t wait for these two ox heads to go away so that he could rush back in full speed. He even had to bear with their urine.

    After leaving the ce, he immediately informed Sam.

    Sam also felt extremely surprised and recorded another video. Chatur used the same way to send the video back, but this time, as soon as the redfish appeared in the stream on the other side of the wall, a dwarf picked it up and took the recording crystal back to themander.

    It is once again Sam in the recording.

    "We received your message and what we really want is to try to make a living in afortable ce. We have our skills in cooking and farming and forging. But with our current state, we couldn¡¯t find a ce to stay and live.

    We just want to have a peaceful life and residence under the protection of your dwarvenws.

    But there is a much more important thing I have to tell you and that is the Minotaurs are trying to mix some chemical in the stream. We don¡¯t know where they got it, and what exactly that liquid is, but the constant mixture will lead your crops to die.

    So, please make your decision as soon as possible. Otherwise, it would be toote."

    Themander frowned when he heard the second message. He has his suspicions. After all, this might Sam trying to make them desperate, but he cannot take this lightly.

    Normally, even if they couldn¡¯t fend off these Minotaurs, as long as they could maintain the status quo they would be able to survive for a while as the fields will still give medium-level crops. They might not improve and their weapon supplies might run dry a bit.

    But they will definitely be able to survive for some time. If the crops are gone, they would be done for. He went to the town lord and discussed the issue and made a decision.

    Chatur once again got the message back and this time, there is a request.

    They want the group to distract the Minotaurs.

    And if possible, they wanted the group to make the Minatour¡¯s lose all concentration on the wall for a few minutes and make the troops move back as much as possible.

    If it was done, then they will try to send some troops to meet the minotaurs for a direct sh.

    Sam understood their intention.

    The main problem currently is, even if the dwarven warriors are strong, they don¡¯t have a way to meet these minotaurs to meet directly in the field.

    There is only one entrance and if they tried toe out from it when the Minotaurs are fully concentrating on them, then there is a high chance that the Minotaurs could use the narrow entrance to their advantage and cause serious damage and at the same time enter the town.

    So, to go against that, they have to reduce the concentration of Minotaurs in the front, then the dwarven warriors wille out and the archers from the top will be able to provide cover.

    With hisbination, they would be able to gain an advantage.

    Sam and the group immediately started the discussion and wanted to execute their n by the evening.

 Chapter 652: Tables turned

    After discussing their whole n, Sam and his group started executing their own tasks.

    Chatur once again went to the stream, meanwhile, Philip, Jack, and Watt took off on their boards to leave the ce and went in a route to another vige.

    That is the route, the weird liquid is being transported in. They don¡¯t know how they are transporting it, but since it was due toe here in two days, the shipment should on its way and if they tackled the team that was sending it, they can get their hands on the liquid.

    Even with Sam¡¯s n, they are not confident to take down all the Minotaurs. They might be dumb, but they are certainly stronger than most Nagas and they are not easy to deal with as Nagas in terms of physical strength.

    Maybe from within the Naga Loka, only Yaksha might have some gic advantage and the Merman race are of almost the same level.

    Sam could kill hundreds of them at the same time when his opponents are of the same level, but the same couldn¡¯t be said about these Minotaurs. These guys are specialized in taking a beating. Even the grenades of bullets that are normally used on Nascent stage cultivators wouldn¡¯t have life-threatening effects on them.

    But Sam could still find some use to his toys in this ce.

    He took out the corpses and started performing some surgeries on them and ced some toys inside, before turning them into undead.

    He must say that these Minotaurs are hard to differentiate when they are undead.

    He sent chatur and Arman to their posts as he got ready to execute his n.

    Since it is only distracting and not shing, they can easily execute it.

    First, it is Chatur¡¯s turn.

    After entering the stream and merging with it, he carefully started drawing somerge patterns on the riverbed as his spiritual energy made them stay even with the stream.

    Currently, his position in the stream is right beside the Minatour¡¯s camp.

    Exactly on Chatur¡¯s opposite side, Arman is hiding in the trees as he prepared to execute the attack as soon as he got the signal.

    They all havemunication tokens on hand and they are within the range.

    After Sam was done with the preparations, he instantly, gave the signal.

    At that exact moment, there is a loud explosive sound in the stream as water started flooding out and turning into water dragons as they mmed into the tents.

    Looking at the tens of water dragons rushing into them all of a sudden, the minotaurs were stunned for a second and immediately tried their best to defend their camp.

    The attack is not exactly to damage anyone but to create more chaos. The area beside the stream is no longer suitable to be a basecamp as the water dragons constantly mmed into the ground.

    The minotaurs all came running to the spot to check who it exactly and got ready to attack. But no matter how much they defended and proceeded further nearer to the stream, they couldn¡¯t find anything.

    At this moment, Arman also made his move and lightning struck the base camp on the other side a few times.

    The Minotaurs are baffled because both attacks arerge-scale and shy and looked extremely powerful, they are worried that they are being surrounded by the troops from both sides as they fought with the dwarves in the town.

    The water and lightning attacks came one after another and injured a few, But if the Minotaurs are not so paranoid and a little scheming they would have understood that there is not much real damage done to them with the attacks at all.

    But themander really is worried and immediately gave the wrong order to check the areas.

    The troops that are all resting on the gap ran to either side and started searching the forest.

    But there are not any desired results to look at.

    As the troops are slowly retreating back to their camp, they didn¡¯t notice that their numbers increased by ten.

    And Sam did not n to let them realize that and another round of shy distraction went on.

    The troops became pissed this time as they thought the other side was ying, they didn¡¯t take a step back or defend and immediately ran forward. Minotaurs are hotheaded. How can they take such a provocation?

    But they are notpletely dumb, the first line of offense against the town wall is still in ce and they are in their asional rest.

    They didn¡¯t move in all thismotion.

    But that is not a problem, Sam already nned for it. In fact, even though the troops moved, they didn¡¯t move enough to be considered a proper distraction the dwarves wanted.

    Currently, the dwarves are already looking at the scene from the top and even themander of the troops is there.

    He is waiting for the proper timing so that they couldunch the attacks.

    At this moment, themander noticed something. Ten Minotaurs are running towards the mainline of offense with a lot of scars on their bodies.

    Themander of Minotaurs and the rest of minotaurs are all confused.

    Meanwhile, Sam who closed his eyes and currently controlling these ten Minotaurs had a smirk on his face as he manipted everything.

    Since they are considered normal undead, he was able to control more of them, unlike the shadow undead. But these guys will be done for after their bodies got destroyed which is the reason he preferred shadows over the normal undead.

    The Minotaurs that are running forward to the mainline used all their strength to leap forward after they reached a certain distance that caused them to crash into the middle of the troops in various ces.

    "What the hell are you doing? Which squad are you from?"

    The minotaurs didn¡¯t reply, instead, they stood up and just stabbed their palms into their chests and seemed to have pressed something.

    A formation was activated surrounding the few minotaurs around them. This scene stunned and before the muscle heads could get back to their senses, the undead started burning with green decaying mes as they started touching the remaining minotaurs all over.

    They are trying to set the minotaurs with the decaying me.

    The minotaurs did catch the me and they could feel the searing and rotting of flesh and blood, they immediately rushed to destroy the formation.

    But the mes are intensifying and spread among them and soon the undead sprawled on the ground with his body burning brightly.

    The same scene happening in all ten formations and soon the formations started breaking under the Minotaur¡¯s brute force.

    But they are already being burned with fire. They tried to defend themselves with their spiritual energy, but it was extremely hard.

    The front line is absolute chaos.

    When the dwarvenmander saw this, he was extremely stunned and soon came back to the senses and ordered his troops.

    "This is a perfect time, all the troops are in chaos. We have to send our troops now. Hurry."

    He also climbed down the wall and led his troops out. Even though the narrow entrance opened up, the Minotaurs couldn¡¯t react in time to deal with them.

    The dwarves managed toe out of the town and started assembling in the front and started attacking.

    Even though the dwarves are good at fighting, they are mostly good atnd warfare. As for the defense from the walls, they are extremely limited by the circumstance and couldn¡¯t do much even though, they can be skilled archers, they are mostly dwarves nheless. They cannot change their nature. They can only fight directly with full contact like the Minotaurs.

    Sam and his team kept on creating some distractions as they created chaos in the camp with asional minatour undead or lightning attacks and water attacks.

    They didn¡¯t focus on damage. They only focused on creating chaos and they seeded.

    Dwarves managed to make the Minotaur take a step back and created a line of defense in front of the walls and the gate.

    The Minotaurs suffered huge losses and are now worried about their future ns.

    But they couldn¡¯t retreat easily. This town is an important part of their war. If they don¡¯t seize this town soon enough, they wouldn¡¯t be able to supply themselves with enough food and resources when they invade deeper into the dwarven territory.

    The thing that Minotaurscked is always food.

    Food is the most important resource that provides spiritual energy to them. There is no way they could normally wage a war of this scale. That is the reason they are so set on getting their hands on the fields.

    There is no way they would be able to maintain it if there is no food.

    They only have three to four days to deal with this ce.

    They even wanted to catch the dwarves off guard so that they couldn¡¯t get the upper-hand. But now the situation changed back, the advantage was gone. If the news goes back, they would be in deep shit.

    And the worse, if they retreat to a vige and the situation turns around, the dwarves will sweep the floor with their troops as the routes would open up.

    They can only face off and push back.

 Chapter 653: Entering the town

    The ploy was sessful. Minotaurs are good at an open field and direct shes, but they are not good at hunting hidden prey. They can kill a wild boar running at them. But they are not good at tracking a rabbit hidden in its hole.

    Finding Sam and his two teammates turned out to be thetter case.

    They would have to nail down the whole forest in the surroundings.

    But if they did that, the Dwarves will crush them.

    Anyway, now the battlefield changedpletely there is only a few tens of meters of distance between two troops and the Dwarves have a way to retreat and Minotaurs have no choice of retreat.

    They can only sh ignoring and Sam and his group for now.

    They also realized that except for the weird behavior of the Minotaurs the water and lightning attacks are not really attacking them severely with any considerable damage.

    But their concession caused them to pay a price.

    For the day, the Dwarves and Minotaur continuously shed and the dwarven and some human archers stood on the wall as they provided cover.

    The best help still came from Sam¡¯s team, they are continuously hindering the Minotaur troops with their attacks.

    Sam¡¯s undead attack ispletely ruthless. He collected around thirty corpses in the Prana Vige and he used them well.

    The decaying me turned out to be more useful than they originally thought. In this way, without even directly participating in the battle, they are creating chaos in the Minotaur troops.

    The battle went on like that for two days.

    Sam and his team are just sitting ducks in the forest as they witnessed. After their initial interference on the first, they didn¡¯t need to interfere on the second day. They left the battle to the dwarven troops.

    They are easily taken care of and by the end of the second day, Philip, Jack, and Watt returned with what they wanted.

    Now the crisis for the crops is also over. From what he heard currently the harvest in this town is still going on as the Medium grade corps take a little more time to mature than lower-grade ones. The time is not exactly a lot. Just a few days.

    But that dys the process of harvest by a few days too and they also had to focus on the war. So, the harvest was slower than usual. The Minotaur¡¯s n is to mix whatever solution this is into the water and spoil the soil to temporarily spoil thend and make the yet to be harvested crops useless.

    Then they will wait for a few more days, to clean thend as the water is flowing stream and the influence of the liquid will be gone soon. They would once again start farming. Anyway, the war is destined to be dragged on for months and even a couple of years. Their true benefits lie in long-term ns. Losing some crops to get to the fields is eptable to them.

    But since, their n is revealed, Sam and his group decided to take advantage. They want to enter the dwarven society and they can enter is more easily if they can do some favors to them and this was the perfect chance.

    So, the trio went to intercept and gained whatever liquid they wanted to use and also reduced some forces for Minotaur.

    Now that they helped all they can to turn the tables, that would do for now. If they are even more capable, the dwarves wouldn¡¯t be weing and be suspicious. So it is better for them to tone down their involvement.

    They waited for the dwarves to deal with the rest of their enemies.

    To their surprise, the dwarves actually subdued some of the minotaurs. They brought some shackles that are bound to the necks and limbs of the minotaur and connected a chain as they dragged them like they dragged cattle.

    This is something they didn¡¯t expect.

    After everything was over and they are cleaning up the battlefield and Sam came out with his teammates.

    The dwarvenmander looked at the team and greeted them.

    "Thank you for your help. We really needed that."

    "It¡¯s okay. We couldn¡¯t take them onpletely anyway. We can only be of some small help. And here this is the liquid they are going to mix up. We ambushed the team that is bringing it here. They are actually not that guarding over this as they thought this is a tight secret."

    Sam said and took out therge Barrel from the storage.

    The barrel has a lot of death energy. It is a ck liquid and it is devouring the surrounding vitality.

    But one look and anyone with experience or contact with death energy will know that it is extremely diluted to the extreme.

    Generally, the death energy can be negated with life energy and vitality. If there is enough vitality in a ce, the death energy will try to absorb it, and soon it would turn neutral.

    With this liquid mixed in the flowing stream, the current harvest would suffer and after that, thend would soon return to normal.

    The dwarves took the liquid away to investigate further. Sam already kept a barrel for himself, so he didn¡¯t object.

    "Please follow me. I will take you to the Town head and we can talk there."

    Sam nodded and followed them.

    He was extremely refreshed by the atmosphere in the city. The residents of the town are all celebrating the town¡¯s sess in defending. He could also see the Minotaurs that were captured and they seemed to be led to the fields.

    Sam and the team are curious about what they are going to do and themander seemed to have seen him and said.

    "The capture Minotaurs will be used for agricultural purposes. They are good at carrying heavy stuff and their brute force can be used to do the hard things like plowing, digging, and so on. After some time, we will sell them away for ransom from their tribe or sell them to some orcs in exchange for some beast pelts, metals, and so on.

    It is harvest time, we could use some extra help from them."

    "But currently, the war is going on. Is it really possible for you guys to exchange them for ransom?"

    "Not really, but the orcs are still considered a possibility. They like eating Minotaurs, but hunting them is not possible.

    There are some mines and resources in the Orc¡¯s territory, so we exchange them for those resources if the ransom is really not possible. But from what I know this time exchanging for ransom is impossible. Minotaur tribe has too much fertility rate for the past few years and they have too many members.

    They can barely feed themselves. They couldn¡¯t possibly exchange them for resources. They might even feel relieved."

    Sam nodded in understanding. He is more interested in the shackles on the Minotaur than the creature itself. But it is not good to ask too much at the moment. He can learn slowly.

    Soon, they reached the Town head¡¯s mansion and met with the person.

    "Nice to meet you. Thank you for your help."

    "Nice to meet you too. As for the help. You don¡¯t have to thank us. It is just small favor."

    The town head looked at the group and asked.

    "You are strong for your age. From what you said you must be from one of the human tribes. I didn¡¯t expect the human tribe increased this much."

    "No, they haven¡¯t. Our strength was due to the circumstances. Humans are not good at staying still and maintaining peace, there are too many conflicts between us. We are forced to grow strong to survive and we couldn¡¯t take it anymore and escaped." Sam replied with a wry smile.

    "You must have suffered. So, what do you want to do? You said that you would like to integrate into themunity, then what exactly do you want to do now."

    "We would like to open a tavern for now if possible and we will see how it goes. My friends will also try to find another job if you give us permission."

    "Giving you permission is not a problem. The main problem is the price. The business capital and such."

    "No problem at all. We have some resources we obtained in our journeys. We have some rare metals. I think we can manage."

    Sam took out some metal samples and ced them on the table. They are some metals from his home and Naga Loka. The Dwarves wouldn¡¯t be in contact with these things, so they can sell them for a decent price. At least trade them for the ce to stay and for the shop.

    The town head looked at the metals for a second and said.

    "It seems like you are prepared enough. Then, my attendant will lead you to the possible ces where you could rent or buy a ce. You can make your preparations and if you have any problem ask him. We could help you get a discount, but the war is a bit more problematic so we have to tighten our resources and the prices might be more than normal. Please adjust a bit."

    "No problem, thank you for your help."

    With that, an attendant led the six of them away to look at the possible ces.

 Chapter 654: Exposed

    Sam and the team are first taken to a residential area. This area mostly has humans and since the group is also humans, they decided to first show the houses there.

    Not all humans are poor in Dwarven territory. There are some wealthy people. At least wealthy enough to not be a normal farmer and do some small business and focusing on his own normal cultivation at the same time without worrying over the resources.

    In the town, there are only two restaurants and they mostly sell fresh dishes of vegetables and meat along with some rice-based dishes and tbreads.

    There is another ce that has the most business and that is the bakery. They bake bread with wheat and corn and bread of various kinds with the fruits and other products they obtain from the fields and the forests.

    Apart from them, the only ce that is rted to food is a bar that was run by a dwarf. He works there along with a human maid and they only sell booze and some side dishes.

    And for some reason, the dwarf is closing down the business and is leaving the town.

    The attendant is very respectful to the Middle-aged dwarf as he introduced them.

    "Hello, Sir Veer. This person is Sam and these five are hispanions. They want to open a tavern in this ce and the town head heard that you are closing down the business and would be leaving the town. So, he wanted me to ask if you will be willing to sell this ce to them."

    The Middle-aged dwarf is in the middle of packing everything with his maid.

    He looked at Sam and asked.

    "You want to open a tavern?"

    "Yes."

    He looked at Sam intently for a while and then said to the attendant.

    "I need to talk business, you leave this ce." The attendant nodded and left the ce with a bow.

    "What can you offer?"

    "I have some metals if you would like it. Apart from that, I do have some local specialties such as herbs and fruits, would you like to take a look?"

    Sam once again took some samples and ced them on the table.

    Veer looked at the things carefully and even examined some herbs and fruits Sam offered.

    While Veer is examining the items, Sam is examining Veer.

    One looked and Sam could say what this person is. He is a killer. He might be a soldier, executioner or any other thing, but one thing ismon in his profession and that is his killing.

    Even the human main, who seemed to be in her early thirties, is also a killer. They have an extremely refined aura of killing and blood on them.

    They must have seen a lot of blood in their lives.

    "Where are you guys from?" Veer asked.

    "We came from forests in the southeast," Sam answered without a hint of hesitation.

    "I am asking, where are you truly from, you don¡¯t belong to this ce."

    Sam was stumped for a second and before he knew it, he was enveloped by a sense of pressure, the other party is clearly more powerful. He seemed to be a person at ate stage Transcendent or even consummate realm.

    Feeling the pressure, Sam immediately activated his eye technique and checked the energy waves, and confirmed that this man is clearly a consummate realm cultivator, he gestured his friends to take a step back and took all the pressure for himself and took off a strand of hair.

    It is one of the five strands of hair from Great sage. He already used two and he is ready to use the third one. But he didn¡¯t rashly move, he just looked at him and answered calmly.

    "I cannot reveal that. But we came here for a trial."

    Veer reduced the pressure and said.

    "What kind of trial?"

    "We have to survive for at least six months in this ce and we would be informed of another location and we have to go there."

    "By another location, you mean another realm?"

    Sam didn¡¯t answer, but he is silently admitting it. Veer thought for a second and said.

    "I believe you. I will rent this ce to you for six months, not just this, I will rent all my fields to you. You can use them for six months or any time period you want to stay here. But in return, I don¡¯t need any money or resources, I want you to do something for me."

    "What would that be?"

    "Protect this town, no matter the cost."

    "This town?" Sam answered with a frown. This is not an easy task. The town is not directly connected to the rest of the dwarven territory directly, it was surrounded by the twenty viges under its control and all the viges are already sacked. There are no supply lines and resources for low-grade wheat at all, this will make it hard for themon folk to survive.

    Sam could find a hundred other problems that coulde out of this and out of all of them the main thing is if the Minotaur tribe would send super powerful expert.

    Sam expressed his worries and Veer said.

    "Don¡¯t worry, we might be of the banished realm, but we have our rules, the town head is a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator and they wouldn¡¯t send any person higher than that cultivation to fight for this town."

    "What if I can¡¯t save it? I couldn¡¯t possibly ce the interests of this town over my own personal safety when the timees."

    "I don¡¯t expect you to."

    Sam went silent for a second and asked a few questions.

    "How do you know we are not from here? Since you know that why are you believing us so much? You are leaving the fate of the whole town in our hands. What are you expecting?"

    "I know it from your energy. The energy of the people from this world and other worlds will be different. You must have known about the curse since you came here from outside, this is the curse that is easily recognizable once you reach my level.

    And you don¡¯t have that curse.

    As for why I believe you, dwarves are in a great threat. And I know the people who are the cause of that threat. And those people wouldn¡¯t work with humans even if they have died like sheep.

    It is not entirely believing in you, it is my belief in the people we are facing. You don¡¯t have anything to gain from screwing us over. But you do this for me, I would give you something that you couldn¡¯t find anywhere else.

    In fact, I wanted to find you myself if you didn¡¯te here. After I saw the video, I know that you are not from this ce. Do you know why?"

    Sam just shook his head.

    "Because there is no human tribe in the southwest forests. Not just southwest forests, there is no human tribe in this ce.

    The tribe that was said to be existing in the forest is not exactly human, they were made to be human by dwarves. So, you can cheat anyone, but not me or other upper echelons."

    With that, he took out a token and gave it to Sam.

    "If you encounter anything rted to the upper echelons of dwarves just show this. I am leaving this ce in an outsider¡¯s hands because of two reasons. One is the hunch and the second is that the Dwarves are not exactly in a proper state. The towns like this might disappear because of some stubborn fools. I will just take a gamble.

    Anyway, since you are here for a trial, this will be more than enough for you to experience. This town is one of thergest producers of Medium grade grains and if you can cultivate the uncultivated field, you can even get an even greater harvest. This ce cannot be lost."

    With that, he tapped Sam on his shoulder and walked out with his maid.

    "I will talk with the town head. You can proceed and do your business. All the procedures will bepleted and necessary documents and such will be sent to you."

    Sam didn¡¯t even have a chance to reply when the elder left. He looked at the rest of his teammates and said with a sigh.

    "Seems like we found a ce to get the new experience we wanted. We are going to participate in the war with Minotaurs, our aim is to preserve the town and its people. Now dust yourself off and think of what you want to do in this town.

    But before that, let us clean up this ce."

    They went on to clean up the ce, rearrange the tables and clear the kitchen, and such.

    By evening, when they were almost done the town head came and gave the documents.

    "It is alreadyte and currently, the fields of Veer are going through the harvesting procedures. The workers are still working. The attendant will take you there tomorrow and show you around. But I don¡¯t know if you would be able to handle it properly"

    "Thank you so much."

    Sam just nodded in reply.

 Chapter 655: Tavern

    The next morning.

    The new tavern is not open yet. They have yet to make themselves familiar with the ce and surroundings and Sam is also making some modifications to the ce.

    The whole tavern is made of a special stone, that has a glossy ck look. He decided to modify it a bit and since he also had the earth element, he can use it for practice.

    But he might need some extra stone. So, he sent his team out to familiarize himself with the ce and buy the required things.

    That day, an attendant came to the tavern and took Sam to show the fields and other properties to him.

    Sam was really surprised by this. Turns out, thergest field in the whole town belongs to Veer. It is almost one-third of the total agriculturalnd.

    But what surprised him, even more, is that there is not enough manpower to cultivate the fieldpletely.

    In fact, half of the minotaurs yesterday are working in Veer¡¯s field as they worked to finish the harvest. Sam was surprised a bit, he can think of many ways to work with minimal manpower, since they have spiritual energy and elemental control, they can easily cultivate thend.

    But then only Sam realized one thing, the problem is not initial tilling or watering, the problem is maintaining the field, controlling pests, and harvesting properly without causing damage.

    The attendant went on exining the troubles they are facing due to the excessive and direct use of spiritual energy.

    The pests.

    Just like how every other creature and nt are evolved with spiritual energy and so are the pests.

    The fields generally do attract the pests and if the people involved used too much spiritual energy and the crops have too much direct contact with the external spiritual energy other than the spiritual energy from the earth, then they have a higher chance of infesting with pests.

    The maintenance time and manpower to control pests are too much, so they wouldn¡¯t cultivate the excessivend. Rather they just made sure that they have enough.

    This is the irony of the two races, Minotaur doesn¡¯t have enoughnd and is dying for more while dwarves have excessivend and couldn¡¯t find the time and people to cultivate them. This is something new.

    Sam thought of this a bit and felt like he could make some business opportunities in here.

    He checked all the properties of Veer. Apart from the fields, there is a small grove of fruit trees, a small pasture for some normal-sized livestock that is breeding some pigs, and a small pen with some chicken-type beasts.

    Sam looked at all this and sighed.

    He went back to the tavern to see his team is not there yet and reviewed the required documents. Since thend owned by Veer is private, he doesn¡¯t have to give away half of the wheat without any cost. He only has to pay tax with one-fourth of the harvest and of the remaining, he has to sell half to the Dwarven council.

    The rest can be sold, or stored, or used for barter, that is all on him. Currently, there is a harvest going on and Sam has to take care of this.

    After a while, his friends came and brought the required things, the stone was easily avable, it only took some meat to get arge block of it.

    They went to talk with the regr meat suppliers and fruit suppliers of Veer. They are not exactly willing to conduct business with Sam. Anyway, Veer only did business with them to support local products, so there is no need for him to worry. He has his own groves and livestock inside his dimension.

    After getting ready, he first talked to Philip. Philip has been learning production techniques and mechanical engineering techniques along with inscription and formation techniques that could be fused with the production and forging. The time Sam left and the past year, he focused solely on mechanical engineering and production. His metal control and fire control made it easier for him and he caught up pretty fast.

    Sam is going to give him a task.

    "Create a harvesting machine. Use wind energy to your advantage and most of the working principles would be based on basic wind elemental technique. They don¡¯t even need to be attacking techniques and use the mechanisms to your advantage.

    The machine should be in such a way that, the hay and grain must be separated anding out after the machine is passed."

    Sam exined and gave out some sketches of small harvesters from the modern world. Philip has some talent in mechanisms, so he knew he would be able to figure it out if he was guided in a proper direction.

    After that, Watt was sent to harvest the fields with others. He was tasked to use his card techniques toplete the harvest faster but not a single grain should be destroyed which is actually the reason no one dares to use wind elemental energy to harvest as the slightest disturbance would cause the grains to be destroyed.

    Chatur was tasked to create a pond with water circting from the stream. He wouldn¡¯t have any tools, even the digging has to be done using his water control to make the stream move fast enough to remove the soil off the ground. They are using an uncultivated field from veer¡¯snd and use it to rear fish.

    Arman and Jack are tasked to go to the grove for harvest. They have to harvest the fruit without touching them at all and not a single scar should be left on branches.

    After that, they are going to go into the forest to explore.

    After giving tasks to everyone, Sam went on to deal with his own tasks.

    First, he cut the stone into the pieces he wanted and started cing them in various spots on the shop floor.

    Then he ced his hand on the block as he used earth elemental energy to merge the block with the floor and also manipte the shape so it would turn into a circr table standing with a single stem connecting the middle of the table to the floor.

    All the merged into a single entity.

    Even the stools around the table are made in the same way. This glossy stone is extremely good looking and it is hard enough to carry some weights, so it would be a pity to not use it to increase the looks of the store.

    He changed the countertop and now he went back to the room and installed something. A liquor pipeline.

    He installed variousrge barrels with pipelines going through the wall and taps on the front side. Now he can get whatever wine is from the counter and give it away.

    He started arranging an open kitchen right beside the bar counter. Since the pipelinees from the backroom, apart from the space for sses and jugs there is no need for much room, so he can use an open kitchen to make the dishes for the customers.

    Sam wants to try a new method of training in this ce and this is one of those things.

    But in his mind, he is also thinking that once this trip is over, he will bring one of Mackey¡¯s teams to this ce and also create a proper brewery with the ape personally creating the recipes. This ce depends solely on food. If he can capture the market, he will be able to get a good source of ie.

    The next day, the tavern was made a grand opening. There is onerge signboard hanging on the door with words Sam¡¯s Pub.

    And there are two more wooden nks hung on the pir outside. One of them stating two things. Spirit stones are epted and Self-service.

    The second nk is something different.

    Free service for today due to opening.

    The second nk attracted the attention of the dwarves more than the first two.

    Since it is free and it is a pub, they can only think of one thing, free wine.

    Some of the dwarves and even humans came in.

    Sam weed the first group and asked something.

    "What element do you use?"

    This is the first question, Sam asked and this stumped them. But one of the dwarves answered anyway.

    "Fire."

    Sam nodded and went to the taps. There are numerous taps. In fact, the whole wall was full of them. He opened one of the taps and filled the crystal bamboo jug.

    He ced it on the counter and passed it to him, before saying.

    "Please take a seat, your side dish will be up in a few seconds."

    With that, he waved his hands and two shadows appeared. One of them is a yaksha and another one is a Naga.

    The customers were startled for a bit, but Sam calmed them down.

    "Don¡¯t worry, they are my shadows. Please give your elemental usage and cultivation level, they will give the appropriate wine to you and the side dishes will be up in no time."

    With that, Sam went to the open kitchen on the side and started the stove before cooking. He took some beast meat, that has fire element and started stir-frying it with some herbal powder.

    While doing so, he is controlling the energy in such a way that the energy of the meat will not disperse. He is practicing energy control in such a way.

    He learned from Mackey how difficult it is to maintain the energy of the meat and food within in, particrly when they are of a different elements. But Sam has almost all the basic elements, except for the wood element. So, he figured he could use this method to increase the control so that his fusion attacks and ripple and void styles will be fine-tuned.

    And this he decided to opt for cooking. Even though he couldn¡¯t cook for the whole day, he decided to cook for four hours a day. Two hours in the morning and two in the evening.

    But he didn¡¯t know that the impact of his side dishes and winebination will spread so much.

    The dwarves who are having the wine are astounded. Because the wine is helping them as much as the high-grade wheat.

    Even though they could get a little tipsy and couldn¡¯t handle it if they took it inrge quantities, they are definitely shocked.

    Sam who didn¡¯t predict this effect on the dwarves, didn¡¯t know that the word spread like crazy all over the town. He closed the service on the first day and he felt the business would be better the next day. But he just didn¡¯t expect how better it would be.

 Chapter 656: Siege once again

    The next morning when Sam came back to the tavern, he was stunned.

    He didn¡¯t expect that there would be such a long line waiting for him. There are more than fifty dwarves and even some humans waiting outside the tavern.

    He opened the door in a daze and went back to arrange the barrels.

    He came forward and ced arge wooden board on the wall with all the rules.

    "Each wine will have only one barrel for the day. Otherwise, my stock will be over easily and one person can only have one serving for the day. As for side dishes, I will only be cooking for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening.

    You can bring your own side dishes. Those are the rules that you need to follow. If you break the rules, there is no wine. And the price is non-negotiable. I will also take the spirit stones.

    As for why these rules are here, that is for your sake. If one person buys too much, the other people will miss out on this wine.

    Last but not least, you cannot buy a wine that is beyond your cultivation level."

    Sam already prepared these rules, but he didn¡¯t expect that the reaction would be this strong and the dwarves would queue up like this.

    The dwarves are after all famous for their own brewing techniques, Sam also tried some wines and they can be considered not bad after all, the ape¡¯s techniques are superior by a great level. That is why the wine tasted so different.

    Currently, the ape is working on two things, the first one is the wine with local specialties and the second one is making of beer.

    The wheat in this ce is of great quality and it would be a pity to not make a bear out of it.

    Sam sold out the wine by afternoon and he was free for the rest of the day.

    He must say that there is arge harvest on the first day. The ie is more than he thought. He got around a hundred thousand spirit stones for a barrel. Each jar of wine costs hundreds of spirit stones and they don¡¯t even care.

    After all, the dwarves have little to no use for their spirit stones, but for the wine, not only will they get more energy than those spirit stones, it is also a hundred percent absorption rate along with the taste.

    He can rest assured that he could earn big bucks. On the first day total ie reached a couple of million and he is confident that he would be able to get his travel charges back with just his tavern alone by six months.

    But he didn¡¯t aim for that.

    Anyway currently Sam is free and he decided to find a way to improve the defense of the town.

    He made rounds till night and came to some conclusions. The number of fighters in the town is small. The first victory is the only thing they could be sure of. But that was only a skirmish from Minotaur.

    Currently, there are no problems with the food supplies and all, as the low-grade wheat harvest was recently done and they have supplies for the next month. But with the war ahead, the consumption will increase. The soil here cannot be used to grow low-grade wheat as it has too much vitality for low-grade and too much of anything is not a good thing.

    He met with themander and asked if the town is going to take back the viges, but the answer he received disappointed him.

    The head-quarters only ordered for them to defend the town for now, but not to take the viges back.

    Sam shook his head and went to the forging street. This ce is the weapon forge for the town¡¯s supplies and even the weapons from the surrounding viges wille from here.

    But now that the viges are gone, there is not much work here.

    After examining everything, Sam went back. For the next few days, he ran the business till afternoon and went to check the situation of the town and a week passed just like that.

    The harvest is finally over and people are preparing thends for the next ntation.

    Sam also decided to prepare Veer¡¯s field for that. He decided to use his own livestock for the purpose. He has too many cattle-type beasts and many of them can work in these fields.

    Sam gave a dozen pairs to the workers so that they can till thend. He even modified the plows and inscribed some earth elemental inscriptions so that the tilling would go up.

    He decided to open up all the fieldspletely as he decided to solve the food problem when it arises. That is also the reason, he ordered chatur to rear fish in theke.

    In the week he stayed in the town, Sam noticed several problems.

    The pests are too many.

    The food crisis will hit the town the very next month.

    The defense of the town is weak.

    Scarcity of the soldiers.

    Theck of all resources due to the supply lines is an added bonus to them.

    When he thought of the deal with Veer, he felt like he got the short end of the stick.

    This ce doesn¡¯t have any metal mines. There are at most two-spirit stone mines nearby, which couldn¡¯t be much use for now.

    Him opening the new fields would help solve the food problem a bit, and he also took out some grasses that he got from Nagin and made them nt these grasses around the fields.

    These grasses are somewhat poisonous, but the poison content is extremely small and their spiritual energy content is much more active than the wheat itself, this could help them with pest problems as the pests wouldn¡¯t survive this.

    Apart from that, Sam also transnted some of the fruit saplings of his own grove in the divine dimension to this ce. These tries might not produce in the near future, but they would be better in the long term as they grow.

    Sam tried to discuss the solution to the problems with the town head, but he is being constantly shooed off with some lousy excuses.

    He couldn¡¯t even get the proper information from the town head and others. Themander is the only one who is giving him some genuine info. But that guy is clearly not fully trusting Sam, so he is not giving everything.

    Sam felt a headache. Veer did ask him to preserve the town and Sam felt that it wouldn¡¯t be a difficult task as the dwarves are known for their hardworking nature, but they do have a drawback, they only follow orders. They will always be content with their position and wouldn¡¯t think past their bounds which leads to a soldier always thinking of only obeying not improvising.

    On the first day of his tavern business, Sam felt like he would be having the easiest time of all, but the situation showed otherwise. His teammates are having better days. They are training and due to the environmental issues and their recovery rate of their energy being low as a factor, they are learning how to preserve the energy and they focused on efficiency, their control over their energy also improved.

    That is one of the good news they had in the past.

    Currently, their cultivation levels unlocked and they are back to their peak and everyone is busy with their own tasks.

    But Sam is the only one pulling his hair on thinking how toplete his own task.

    Another three days passed with him brooding over and the next attack of the Minotaurs happened.

    And this time, there are not just Nascent stage MInotaurs, there are many pre-transcendent stage cultivators too and they just didn¡¯te from the front.

    They are attacking from three directions. They infiltrated through the forest. Since they have all the viges as their bases, they can pick the sides now.

    They are not just focusing on the front gate, they are trying their best to knock down the walls around and destroy them. But their main purpose might as well be a distraction.

    One thing that surprised Sam is that the Minotaurs areing in battle formations.

    This shook him to the core. Because, apart from all the disadvantages that are caused by the superiors and the situations, there is one more disadvantage that is inherent.

    That is the dwarves¡¯ck of aptitude regarding the formations and the inscriptions.

    Dwarves cannot do them at all. At least for the formations, they can ce the formation gs. But for the inscriptions, they can¡¯t do anything. The minimal inscription presence on this is caused by humans. As for battle formations, they can forget about it.

    If dwarves are like that, one must not even bother with the Minotaur. But the current situation is different than what he expected.

    Not only did the Minotaurs attacked with battle formations, but they are also well equipped and Sam could even the inscriptions that are inscribed on them.

    There are many inscriptions that areplicated and clearly not from this. Along with the well-forged equipment, Sam could clearly see the disadvantage of dwarves in the uing siege.

 Chapter 657: Trying on his own

    It has been two days since the Minotaur troops surrounded the town from three directions. There is only one direction left for them and it is covered with dense forest. It would lead to an area where there is no civilization and no one knows what kind of creatures live there.

    Sam is extremely frustrated as he stayed in the tavern.

    Currently, his task is not going anywhere. There is no progress. Since the troops of Minotaurs came here, there is nothing much the troops of dwarves can do.

    This morning, Sam once again took a look at the situation outside from the top of the wall. From the past two days, there are not many offensive moves from the Minotaurs. But there are some attacks that are just made to frustrate and drain the forces on the top of the wall.

    But within the two days, there are many changes within the troops of the Minotaur.

    The human troops joined Minotaurs and they are not few. Not just that, the Minotaurs even have something else in their arsenal apart from the inscribed ssy equipment and the battle-formations.

    They even have catapults.

    Generally, the catapults are considered at most primitive in Sam¡¯s eye. But the current situation is different. The Catapult has some inscriptions and Sam doesn¡¯t know what they are as he couldn¡¯t see them up close.

    But the inscriptions are dense andplicated enough for him to feel weary.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but panic and he thought of Veer¡¯s words. The people behind the minotaurs, whoever they are shouldn¡¯t be normal at all.

    He wanted to talk about some strategy with themander and town head to help them understand the situation. But both of them refused to meet him.

    They are initial stage Pre-transcendent cultivators. Level 2 and Level-3. Sam is only Level-1. But he is not exactly afraid to sh. What he is afraid of is that the situation would turn out of hand and the town would easily copse.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know exactly what is happening and why the Minotaurs are focusing so much on a single town.

    After all, if it is about food, they upied so many viges, even though the food there wouldn¡¯t be able to promote their cultivation levels, they could recover their troops¡¯ energy while they are at war. If they left this town that was already isted and proceeded forward with the war, they would eventually take over this town too.

    Their persistence is showing him that this town is special.

    But at this moment, he is not concerned with verifying the spections.

    He finally understood why dwarves are looked down upon. Since he came here, he liked these dwarves quite a bit, they are united, they are easy to talk to and they work hard and on top of that, they are great artisans.

    He felt like they are theption of the good qualities of humans. But now he understood the drawback of the race. When they are within theirmunity, they are not easy to manipte at all. They wouldn¡¯t listen to any outsiders. Sam heard that dwarves are often taken advantage of, maybe they must have realized their shorings and didn¡¯t consider outsiders¡¯ opinions anymore.

    So, currently, Sam who is an outsider is having trouble getting through their skulls. At one point in time, he didn¡¯t want to try anymore. But he couldn¡¯t bring himself to. He had a deal with another person. He couldn¡¯t just back out. Giving up is not his style.

    That is why on this day, he let out all his beasts. Shadow mice are left in the house and almost all of his beasts have one shapeshifting ability, except for shadow mice and Dia. As for his petpanions like ape and others, he even let them out and made them stay in the field for a while.

    He would let them adjust to the resistance and unseal the cultivation. He is sick of ying nice with them. He would just make his own ns from now on.

    Once shadow mice are unsealed, they would be able to gather all the information Sam wants.

    All he has to do is wait for four days and since they have medium grade wheat at hand, he can even speed up the process. But at this moment, one of the bad news came and that is the fish in the pond are dying.

    Chatur was extremely terrified as he came running to Sam about this.

    Sam ran towards the pond. Currently, all his friends are upied in different corners of the town as they stayed close to the troops to see if they can gain any information.

    Only chatur is watering the crops and maintaining the pond.

    When Sam arrived at the pond, he could see that the fish are writhing as if they are on drynd. Sam dipped his hand and used observation ability and immediately thought what the problem is. This is the same weird liquid they used before to kill the crops.

    Sam was surprised a bit for a second and didn¡¯t react. Because Veer said that this ce is a tactical point that supplies food for further invasion in long run, Sam thought that they wouldn¡¯t hurt the fields severely. But now, he only has one thing to say.

    Bullshit.

    This ce being tactical point is a bunch of bullshit.

    The concentration of that weird liquid with death energy is actually high now and the soil will start being affected. They seemed to have mixed the liquid in the stream far away, so there are not many immediate reactions and the water diluted it a lot, but if this continued and the soil kept on absorbing this, it would soon die and be barrennd for a few months if not years.

    Sam immediately went into action. He took out some energy cells and ran to the entry point of the stream.

    The ce where the stream enters the town, there is a small pool formed from which various small canals are directed towards the crops. This is to let the water of the stream lose momentum. Except for the fish pond Sam made, every field is connected in some way.

    Sam started digging small holes in the ground around that pond and buried the light elemental energy cells and used them as formation nodes toy down a formation.

    The formation started producing vitality. This is actually a healing formation. It can be used inrge-scale wars where the soldiers with minor wounds wouldn¡¯t need to bother the healers and just sit in the formation to heal with sheer vitality, it can also be used for first aid.

    This is one of the recent formations Sam studied.

    After cing the formation, Sam ced his hand in one of the canals exiting it, and used observation, the death energy reduced and as he observed the flowing water, soon the death energy ispletely gone, in fact, the vitality in the water is increasing.

    This would be a good thing for crops as it would help speed up the growth. Since the problem of pests is solved by the poisoned grass, they can just let the crops grow.

    Sam looked at the surrounding soldiers who are in charge of watching the wall nearby and knew clearly why they areing. They are here to question what Sam is doing with that formation.

    "The Minotaurs already mixed that weird liquid, half the fish in my pond already died. That is why Iid a formation to purify the water."

    Sam left that statement and left. He already said what he could, he didn¡¯t want to exin himself anymore.

    He knew what kind of crisis they are facing, so there is no use in bickering. He could only create a suitable solution and try to convince them in the process. If he just stayed still without any action waiting for these numbskulls to understand the situation, then too much time would be wasted.

    He went into the town and entered Veer¡¯s house for the first time. This ce was also included in his deal, but he didn¡¯t bother with this at first, but he needs some space to set up a temporary workshop.

    He set a table and started creating a new design. It is full body armor for the dwarves. He called for Philip toe and gave him some metal and asked him to make the full body armor exactly ording to the designs.

    He also didn¡¯t stay still and made another armor.

    He is a bit faster than Philip, but Philip is not that slow. He really did catch up quickly as he utilized in advantage in manipting metal.

    They worked for a whole day to create the full body armor. The one Philip made is made of metal that is conductive with the fire element and the one that Sam made has water element.

    He gave both the armors to Philip and said.

    "Tomorrow, talk to the guards whoe for wine regrly and ask them to try these two armors in the battle. Just tell them that it is free and there are no strings attached, even if you tell them that we wanted them to test these armors it is fine. But make them wear it.

    From what I see, the attacks will be intense soon. The dwarves would surely die and the town would be lost within no time if they didn¡¯t take the necessary precautions. There is something going on and it is bigger than just the tactical point of battle and food supply.

    If we pull this off, an expert who is at least at a consummate level would owe us a favor and we can even find out some secrets of this banishment realm.

    For now, let us just focus on forging these armors. I will see if we can modify the production equipment to make them faster."

    With that, both of them fell into work.

 Chapter 658: Catapult Crisis

    Sam was trying his best to make things right, but he is already a bitte, maybe he should have just be more determined and earlier too.

    Because that night, while he and Philip are working on some armors, the Minotaurs made a first significant attack.

    For the first battle at the town gate, the Minotaur¡¯s mainly damaged the town hall than the soldiers, that is because of theirck of long-range attacking methods and theirck of aptitude in taming beasts.

    But now the situation changed. They have those catapults of various sizes. From small size that could through a medium-sized rock to target the soldiers on the wall and therger size that could cross past the walls andnd directly in the town destroying the residents. There are all sizes.

    Not just that, the Minotaurs were joined with another batch of troops that are riding some flying beasts.

    Dwarves are also not that great when taming, but that is not because of their in aptitude, rather they don¡¯t really care much for the support of beasts and always believed in doing everything themselves, but they know better than not having anything that could defend the airborne attacks.

    They also have a flying squad. Their only advantage is numbers.

    But the Minotaur¡¯s attack surprised them as they didn¡¯t expect the flying troops to not even stop at their base, rather they directly attacked.

    As the two air forces are shing, the thing that has the potential to break the bnce turned out to be the catapults.

    When they ced the rocks in and injected the spiritual energy into the catapult, the rocks are suddenly lit up with dark grey mes and even the force of the rock was increased as they shot the catapults.

    The dwarven archers and the wall defenders all tried their best to shoot down the rocks that are shot towards them.

    Some of the rocks only hit the wall and crushed. But the me caught on the wall and it is burning continuously.

    Even the ground that was filled with those rock fragments is still burning.

    When Sam heard the explosive sound, he came running out of the house only to see a boulder burning with grey mes flying into the town and crashing into the wooden shacks.

    Sam ran to that ce as fast as he can and when he saw the scene, he couldn¡¯t help but suck in a cold breath.

    The whole shack was in shambles and burning with grey me. Even the people that are inside are burning as they writhed and rolled on the ground in pain.

    Sam threw a jet of water at them, but to his surprise that didn¡¯t stop the me. He used his eye technique to see what is happening and then only he noticed that the flesh is not burning off of them. But the vitality is running out. Sam has seen this before, but he didn¡¯t want to believe it.

    If this is really true, then they are in deeper shit than he thought.

    There are three people burning with mes and Sam ran to one person and started using light elemental energy to control the vitality.

    He me is sucking the vitality away as it burned brightly, so Sam tried his best to restrict the vitality from moving. After seeing some reaction, he extended his hands and did the same to the second one. He looked at the dwarves and humans surrounding them and yelled.

    "Don¡¯t stay in groups, disperse, and don¡¯t touch the mes. If any of you are healers, try healing the third person, no matter what reaction they have just keep on pouring vitality quick."

    Sam continued to restrict the vitality and he could see the me burning less and less and finally, a person stopped writhing in pain and mes disappeared. He was about to move and focus on the third person too. But it was already toote.

    The grey me already disappeared leaving the person with pale skin. That guy stood up clumsily and jumped into Sam who is still focusing on the second person.

    Sam dodged the attack and looked at the person. He is no longer living, he turned into an undead.

    Sam clenched his fist as he looked at the second guy he was in the middle of saving, due to this small distraction, he was already burning more rapidly and the process only became faster. Sam could see him turning into the undead.

    He aimed his hands at both of them as golden mes shot through. He just threw the me in the form of a jet as he burned them until even their bone melted.

    The surrounding people are looking at him in shock, but before they could say anything, the next wave of attacks already aimed at the town. Luckily even with the people behind them, Minotaurs are a little dumb and they don¡¯t seem to know about the true effects of the boulders and the mes, they are mostly attacking the walls and the doors to copse them and the only a couple of boulders are flying into the sky.

    He called out harbinger and zoomed into the air as he threw two energy cells towards the two boulders and aimed his golden mes at the third one.

    He burned the stone until the grey me disappeared and pped the remaining into small pebbles.

    The remaining two boulders were sted by the energy st and didn¡¯t cause much damage to the town.

    By this time, all his teammates are running towards Sam¡¯s location. If not for the fact, that the beasts are not unsealed they would havee too. But now they are gobbling the middle-grade bread like crazy and burning the energy to digest it as fast as they can.

    When he saw his teammates, Sam started issuingmands.

    "Don¡¯t let a single bouldere past the walls and don¡¯t even touch them. No matter what the dwarves say don¡¯t stop."

    By this time, some of the guards already came towards the scene, Sam looked at them and asked.

    "Where is yourmander?"

    He asked in a rather domineering voice. They couldn¡¯t even answer with their mouth and just pointed the direction.

    Sam looked at Chatur and Arman. "Try your best to control the chaos. If any boulderes past, predict the trajectory and try to clear the people there and destroy the boulder."

    Sam disappeared from the spot and in a few minutes, he met with themander, who is guiding the archers to shoot down the boulders.

    If it is in a normal world, it would have been impossible. But what shocked Sam, even more, is that some of the archers and guards are caught with some of the grey mes.

    They didn¡¯t take the full brunt of the boulder and only some scraps and they are not fully caught and the me is only burning on the armor.

    He didn¡¯t even stop and ran to them and used his sword to cut through the armors.

    But right after he did so for three people, themander came running and halted his tracks.

    "Commander, that grey me is dangerous, it will turn people into undead. Half of the soldiers have grey me burning on their armors, they shouldn¡¯t touch it with their hands, tell them to take those armors off, they are not useful anymore."

    Sam said as he continued with this, the dwarves are startled by his movements and thought that Sam might be a spy from another side.

    But only after listening to his words that they came back to their senses and started feeling panic.

    Themander is still doubtful and when he was about to say something, Sam¡¯s voice was heard.

    "Commander, I am still showing respect to you as hosts, but if you say one skeptical word about me, I am done with that. I am telling you that there is something wrong since day one, but you wouldn¡¯t listen, if you don¡¯t take action now, don¡¯t me me for the consequences. I took an assignment from Veer and I will finish it no matter what and whatever the cost is. Even if it means killing you and the numbskull of a town head.

    So, you either listen to me and do something about the situation or get ready to die."

    Sam left those words and looked at the situation beyond the wall. He couldn¡¯t help but suck a breath of cold air.

    There are more catapults than he thought and they are not active yet, but once they are all active, they wouldn¡¯t have anything else to do.

    Sam took out two Javelins from his storage and started injecting his fire elemental energy into it. The two javelins are filled with fire elemental energy and he threw one of them at the Catapults.

    As Javelin cut through the air and went to the Catapult a Minotaur with Pre-transcendent stage cultivation used his battle hammer to strike the Javelin. After a fierce explosion, the minotaur was pushed a few steps back and even the formation on the Catapult was activated. There is a defensive formation, that could take some Pre-transcendent level hits.

    Sam coldly looked at Minotaur and started circting energy. The energy waves passed through his body and entered the spear. He mmed his foot into the wall surface and a small crack appeared as he threw the Javelin at full force.

    The Javelin disappeared into a golden sh and the Minotaur panicked. He didn¡¯t hold back at all and used all his energy to strike the Javelin as if his life depended on it.

    But this time, the situation is different. The javelin passed through the hammer and sent the Minotaur flying towards the Catapult at the same time it pierced through the formation and exploded. When the dust settled, half of the catapult was destroyed and it is clearly not suitable for shooting anymore.

    But Sam is not at all happy, because he is panting on the wall. The energy it took destroy the catapult is colossal.

 Chapter 659: Crossbows and Armors

    The Catapults are inscribed too well. The attack Sam made took a lot of energy. There are tens of Catapults surrounding the city and only a few of them are activated for now. The me is the buff provided by the catapult itself.

    No matter what was ced in it, it would definitely have the same effect.

    If Sam has to destroy each catapult, like this, he would be exhausted and he already drew attention from the enemies and the more he focused on the Catapults, the more he would be targeted. The troops are too many.

    Only on this side of the town, there are around dozen Pre-transcendent stage cultivators.

    In the whole town, there are no more than five dwarves who hit that level, and Sam and his friendsprised of six more. So, only one side of the troops is stronger than the town in terms of numbers.

    Them along with the Catapults, if the dwarves really act like they are doing now, they would be in even deeper trouble.

    At least, for now, not all the Catapults are active. There must be a reason for them not doing that. But it is currently for the best.

    Sam went back to themander and said.

    "Don¡¯t let a single boulder cross that. In fact, concentrate all the attacks on the Catapults and the people working on it. Their armors and equipment are all superior. I need some artisans who are best at forging. Send them to Veer¡¯s house.

    If soldiers catch the Grey me, try to use the healers and ask them to either trap the vitality within the body and not let the me burn it out. If they are not capable, either try to keep them alive until Ie or just kill them yourselves."

    Sam gave the instructions and went back to the house. Philip is not here, he also went to deal with the boulders.

    He waited for the Dwarves toe and meanwhile worked on a design. It is not actually thatplicated. In fact, it is extremely easy and direct design and he was finished within half an hour. By this time the Dwarves already came.

    Sam gave the designs to them and said.

    "Make these as fast as you can. But be precise. Make them as much as you can even use as many artisans as you can. Work throughout the night. I will be in the next room. Come on knock three times after you finish the first set. I wille and show you how to assemble them."

    With that. Sam went to the next room and entered the divine dimension. He used his production unit inside to modify the production equipment. He has to finish the production equipment for the armors as soon as possible. If he didn¡¯t the dwarves wouldn¡¯t stand a chance.

    He has a hunch on who the hidden enemies behind the Minotaurs are.

    The liquid to kill the crops with death energy, the mes that turn living into undead. They don¡¯t belong in this ce. But he remembered Old Beast¡¯s words, this realm is connected to another realm. The realm of the undead.

    He wished that his hunch is wrong and went to work.

    He didn¡¯te out for three hours, which means he spent thirty hours inside and modified some of his production equipment.

    Even though the full-body armor wouldn¡¯t be of the desired quality if he made them with these things, at least he would be able to make do with these things as they are at least produced fast fast.

    He came out of the divine dimension and used earth element energy to change the structure of the house by eliminating some walls. He started installing some production equipment and said.

    "Call for some humans and dwarves. They can be of low-level. But I need them toe immediately."

    He ordered and went to work. He took some metal and heated it up and created a sizeable block before putting it in a pressing machine. The die has been changed, the metal block turned into a breastte and there are some grooves that are in the six of quail egg at various spots.

    Sam was satisfied with this.

    While he was testing the machines for onest time, the Dwarves are finished with the first set.

    This is actually a crossbow. But arge one. A normal crossbow will shoot a bolt that is a few inches long, but this one shoots a spear of seven feet long. That is the main difference.

    The string is actually a metal wire and the loading and aiming would be done with the help of the gear mechanisms.

    The most important thing is that there are many grooves on the body of the crossbow in the same way there are on the breastte and other armor parts.

    Sam showed them how to assemble and took out some spirit stones as he ced them in the grooves.

    He even showed the armor to them and same way ced the spirit stones in. The crossbow glowed a bit.

    Sam already recorded everything in a recording crystal and showed them.

    "Start making them as fast as possible. There will be helping in a few days. Install these stones in the armors too. After the other artisanse, let some of them make the spears." Sam said and took out a spear for the reference. He waved his hand and the assembled crossbow which isrger than a man disappeared and he took it to the city wall where themander is.

    The Catapults are still attacking and they are slowly unlocking other catapults. Now only Sam noticed that the Minotaurs are only defending the catapults they are not operating them. The humans are the ones doing the operations.

    Sam didn¡¯t even talk to themander and just ced the giant crossbow on the wall. It has been around four hours since hest came here and there are many craters on the wall. Even some ces of the town are attacked and from the looks of it, they are unable to make all the boulders disappear before entering the town.

    He even saw some guards attacking the Undead. Now only half of the Catapults are active. If the rest of them are also working, they would be done for.

    Sam took out a spear and loaded it in the crossbow and turned a wheel to load and lock it, there is a swiveling joint making it easy to aim. He ced his hand and infused the spiritual energy inside to activate the formation.

    A pattern appeared on the machine as the spirit stones glowed and energy flowed to the Spear.

    This is the only way, Sam could think of increasing the energy of the attacks in a short amount of time. Since the dwarves cannot inscribe and their sense of formations is nil, he decided to make the design in such a way that he left the grooves in the positions of the formation nodes and the spirit stones ced there would be the nodes of the formation.

    They will use their energy as a catalyst to absorb the energy of the atmosphere and the person infusing the spiritual energy and enhance the spear.

    The spiritual energy will be in a turbulent flow all over the spear and no matter what elemental energy was infused, it would be a turbulent and forceful spear attack.

    Sam infused the fire elemental energy and pulled level. The Spear shot out towards a smaller Catapult and created an explosion of mes at the point of contact.

    The humans loading the catapult are also blown away by the explosion even though the formation was activated.

    One could easily see that the formation was weakened a bit. Sam loaded another spear and shot at the same catapult.

    This time, he used wind element.

    The spear impaled itself into the formation and stuck there for a moment creating cracks in the formation.

    The next shot was lighthing element and this time, the formation cracked. The fourth shot was made with the water element, it is like a jet of water cutting through the tree, the catapult¡¯s body broke in some ces. The fifth shot was neutral spiritual energy and it broke the catapult in half.

    Sam looked at themander and said.

    "Five shots for a small one. Maybe ten to twelve for a big one. It can also be used against some Pre-transcendent stage cultivators and the flying troops. I need all the artisans that know forging at Veer¡¯s hours, they have to make as many as possible.

    You see those spirit stones, you have to load a new batch for every ten shots. I already shot five. So, be careful. I will be sending the machines one by one as soon as they finished and the sooner you send the artisans the sooner they will be ready.

    I will go and help with that."

 Chapter 660: Taking Action

    Sam returned to the house and he once again went back into the divine dimension. His production unit can work faster and he also has more time in this ce. While the dwarves need around two hours to three hours for one.

    Sam could do one in an hour and he can even assemble them in a few minutes.

    He could ship them faster than them. But he couldn¡¯t stay inside for long.

    He has to be on the battle-field to control the flow.

    So, he only stayed for another one and half hours and made around fourteen crossbows.

    He went to the walls. There are three sides that are being attacked and he just dropped five crossbows on each side of the wall.

    He already ced one crossbow on the first with the four added to that ce, all three sides have five.

    After giving the spears and the crossbows, Sam went to the wall with the most number of catapults active. The front gate of the town.

    Here, Philip and Watt are working together to stop the boulders and attacking the catapults. But they also have to deal with the two Pre-transcendent opponents on the flying beasts. If not for the fact they have hoverboards, this would have been a much tougher challenge.

    He doesn¡¯t have too many owls with him as he left most of them back on the home for the troops and students.

    If not for that, he would have some good defense against the flying troops of the enemies, but now they can only defend and with the Catapults, it is also horrible.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother waiting for the dwarves to tilt the bnce. He knew for the fact, that he has to find a way to destroy as many enemy troops as possible.

    Whatever that is stopping them from activating all the catapults at the same time, that is acting to his advantage at least for now.

    Sam took out the reaper and sent a sword ray as he cut a boulder and zoomed towards the enemies on the Harbinger. The Nascent stage cultivators didn¡¯t dare attack him. They can feel the energy waves and they knew they are not his match.

    One of the Pre-transcendent stage cultivators came forward and this guy even has an elemental affinity with the wind element.

    Now only Sam could focus on their beasts and when they saw the beast he was on, he was stunned for a second and he now knew for sure these people have some connection with the Undead realm.

    Because this beast will only be able to survive in a ce with a lot of death energy.

    This is called Undying vulture. This name is quite deserving because, unless the corpse ispletely destroyed, the beast has a chance of turning into undead due to all the death energy it normally circtes when it is alive.

    Sam held the sword in his hand and started his battle. The Minotaur clearly couldn¡¯t control the beast to the full extent, the beast is moving ording to his instructions and sometimes it is moving on its own instincts.

    Sam felt like this is the opportunity and started focusing attacks on the beast instead of the person.

    Generally, it wouldn¡¯t matter who he attacked as both of them are Pre-transcendent and if they are linked and fought together properly, they could dodge it. But now they are not in sync.

    The beast would always try to save its own skin before the person that it is carrying.

    And it did just that.

    Sam moved swiftly on his board as he cut the beast¡¯s wings. He didn¡¯t care about the Minotaur at all and the Minotaur slowly started losing control of the beast as it became angry.

    Sam started using light element attacks on the beasts. The light element full of vitality is the bane of this beast that craves death energy.

    When the beast is injured enough, Sam took advantage and made a big sh towards the Minotaur with a light de escaping the reaper and bearing down on him.

    Minotaur felt like he couldn¡¯t block it, so he tried to control the beast to dodge, but it didn¡¯t listen as it is still angry at Sam, and Minotaur couldn¡¯t help but dodge to the side a bit still standing on the beast.

    The light de shed his hand and cut the wing of the vulture at the same time, causing them to crash to the ground.

    And coincidentally they are crashing into the catapult.

    *THUD* *CRASH*

    The beast and the Minotaur are extremely heavy and for some reason, the formation didn¡¯t block the creatures from falling it as it might not have considered it an attack.

    But as they crashed, even though the catapult was notpletely destroyed, its mechanism broke a bit and fell to the side.

    The best part is that the vulture and the Minotaur caught that grey me and started going crazy as they smashed everything with their full power.

    The troops surrounding the Catapult and the machine itself took the full brunt of the damage. The Catapult was destroyed by both of them and some men caught the grey me from them.

    Sam started attacking the people who tried to kill the two before they turned undead and checked the process with his eye technique to estimate the time that they would take to turn.

    But all of a sudden, he noticed something.

    The people that are operating the catapult don¡¯t have any vitality at all. Sam doubted his eyes and looked around to check the people from other catapults. He noticed that there is a team of few people with no vitality but walking with consciousness.

    They are undead, but they have their own consciousness. There are only a few creatures like that and they don¡¯t belong in this realm.

    His breath turned cold and he started looking around. But he couldn¡¯t fully concentrate on investigating that as the rest of the Pre-transcendent stage cultivators noticed that two of them are bing undead and came there to kill them off.

    But focused on defending them and even controlled the vitality of the two creatures to burn quickly in the middle.

    When they are finally done changing, he just escaped the ce and looked around at the Catapults.

    All of a sudden he noticed an anomaly.

    There is a human-looking creature without any vitality, walking from one Catapult to another in the most inconspicuous way and he is sitting behind the frame of the catapult as he ced his hand and seemed to be doing something.

    He took advantage of the gap the two undead and two Pre-transcendent Minotaurs fighting together and started observing.

    He pushed his eye technique to the limit and observed the Catapult and that person and found out that there is a ce within the Catapult where a fist-sized lump of energy is present. The energy is a mix of death energy and some other force and it seems to be in a sealed state. The energy the person is sending is slowly attacking that seal and cracking it bit by bit.

    He went back to the fight zone towards the broken Catapult and looked around.

    There he saw a fist-sized grey stone oozing with grey smoke.

    He waved his hand and threw it into the second floor of the divine dimension to a far corner where there is no equipment.

    This thing seems to be responsible for the grey me and Sam could also guess the reason why the catapults are not used at the same time.

    But as soon as Sam bagged that stone, the person who is activating the catapults one by one looked at him and charged towards him.

    Sam dodged him and stood on Harbinger as he looked at him coldly with a sense of provocation. This guy is clearly not a human and Sam has few guesses on who he is.

    But what better way than fighting him directly to find out.

    "Give that stone back. Or you wouldn¡¯t be able to live. Even if you take it away, that would be the death of you." He said as he scanned Sam¡¯s body and frowned.

    "Where is the stone? Its energy is too unstable, it couldn¡¯t be stored in spatial storage. Where is it?"

    Sam didn¡¯t answer and looked at him with a smirk.

    That person didn¡¯t pursue Sam further and said to the people around.

    "Kill him. As fast as you can."

    As soon as he said that a Minotaur ran towards themander of this side.

    Sam wanted to attack this guy, but the two Minotaurs fighting with the two undead creatures switched ces with him and came at Sam, while the other person went to deal with two undead creatures.

    His attacks are quite effective against the undead as he fought two on one quite effortlessly.

    Sam looked around and noticed that all the Pre-transcendent stage Minotaurs are running towards him.

    But he is not worried. Only three Pre-transcendent stage minotaurs on each side have the beast mounts to fly. Out of three, one of them is dealt with and two of them areing towards Sam.

    Sam avoided the two people who are fighting from the ground and maintained some distance on the harbinger as he lured the two on the beasts away.

    Sam can maintain an altitude from which he can ignore almost all the ground attacks. So all he has to do is deal with these two for now.

 Chapter 661: Grey Stone

    Sam lured the two Pre-transcendent stage Minotaurs on their Minotaur stage Beast mounts away.

    He has an edge on speed over them and they could only catch up to him when he allowed him to. Sam took out the Executioner too and focused on the fight with Light des flying over.

    Just like before, he didn¡¯t focus on the riders, he focused on the beasts. Since he already knew this weakness, it would be a pity to not use this against them.

    Sam sliced through the beasts and before the riders could realize, they understood that they are already done for.

    So, the first reaction they had is to not sh, rathernd safely. But the beasts are already pissed and they wouldn¡¯t let Sam go. They didn¡¯t care what their temporarypanions said and focused on Sam as they chased like crazy.

    Sam used the same methods as he did before and made the beast crash directly into a Catapult. But this time, the situation is a bit different as the Catapult is working and was just about to throw a boulder. But the beast directly crashed against theing force obstructing the swing in the middle.

    Not only did the boulder directly fell off in the middle of the troops after grazing against the beasts, the Catapult¡¯s arm also snapped into two and crashed down.

    The Minotaur wasn¡¯t spared as well. Initially, he fell on the ground nearby, but the vulture caught the grey me it raged against the Catapult and everything nearby which included the minotaur. It tore into his chest and ripped a huge chunk of flesh off.

    The only disappointing thing about that is that he didn¡¯t catch the grey me.

    Sam did the same to the second beast, but he missed the Catapult. This time he targeted arge one and the Catapult¡¯s shooting power is so high that it crashed into the beast and sent it flying along with the boulder to the front line of the Minotaur troops.

    Even though this is not the result he wanted or expected, the results are still satisfactory because there tens of troops in the front that caught the grey me, and now the two undead creatures are flying through the battlefield and attacking as Sam didn¡¯tpletely cut its wing off.

    The first beast¡¯s wing waspletely cut off, so not so much damage was done, but the second and third are a different story. He clearly saw what they can do as they rampaged amongst their ranks.

    Sam just looked at the scene and then turned their gaze to that pale man who is activating the catapults,

    He smirked and left the ce like he has nothing to do with any of the chaos happening.

    Hended on the wall and said.

    "If you guys can¡¯t even take advantage of this situation and do enough damage, you might as well let them take the town."

    Sam left those words and moved to the next attacking point. Commander looked at Sam with aplicated gaze. He really wants to trust Sam, but somehow he couldn¡¯t bring himself to as the orders of the superior are not letting him do so. But Sam is the reason they are able to tilt the bnce.

    They don¡¯t know what happened to the reinforcements that are supposed to arrive a few days ago, but they have to assume the worst and take care of the current situation.

    Currently, Sam doesn¡¯t know that there are even supposed reinforcements that have to arrive in this ce but nowhere to be seen.

    When he looked at the second wall, he noticed that the damage is here is severe than the first. The first wall definitely has more catapults. But this ce has more active catapults and the boulders are shooting in.

    Here even some guards and even a crossbow were destroyed.

    Jack is the one taking care of the situation here alone. He is trying to fend off the boulders. Then only they realized they made a big mistake. If only they knew that someone is activating the catapults, they would have thought about who activates faster too, they just assumed that the first wall has more trouble due to numbers, but here the situation is clearly worse.

    He let Jack go to the battlefield and he stayed within to deal with the boulders on this side.

    Jack has limited ranged attacks. There is not much he can do with the situation being like this. But he still tried his best to destroy the boulders.

    "Just target the three Pre-transcendents who are on the beasts. Attack the beasts enough to piss them off, they are notpletely in sync, and try to make them crash on the catapults. Don¡¯t go near the destroyed Catapults.

    And there would be a young human-looking creature near the Catapults moving from one catapult to another. You should be careful with them. If possible don¡¯t try to attack them yet. All the forces would concentrate on you will you attack them.

    Be careful."

    With that, Sam let Jack go out and took out his flute.

    He stood on the Harbinger a little bit inside the wall and started ying.

    Soon, there are some clouds forming parallel to the wall¡¯s length and they started giving out the silver lightning strikes.

    Every boulder that flew past the wall was being struck repeatedly by the lightning.

    sted into smithereens. Even though the fragments have some grey me, they are only falling within the range of clouds, which is not far from the wall and no residents are being harmed.

    Even though it worked great, there is no way he could maintain it for a long time in his current state. He just battles three Pre-transcendent stage cultivators along with three beasts of the same level.

    Now he is trying to stop the assault all by himself.

    At least, they are only boulders and not some high-grade rocks with special properties. They have nothing special to them except for the grey mes which will disappear eventually once there is nothing alive that it could burn.

    While Sam is controlling, the third side waspletely within control. This side didn¡¯t even need any of Sam¡¯s friends to take care of the situation and crash the boulders. So, Sam rxed a bit.

    He noticed that the production speed on the Crossbows increased. When Jack returned after two hours after dealing with three of them, he is a bit exhausted. Sam gave some wine to him and left the ce to take a look at the production house.

    The whole situation started at night, now it is dawn and the sun is rising.

    The dwarves are working around through the night and many teams of them are working on crossbows almost creating an assembly line. Each team decided to take one mainponent and they just kept on producing it.

    The humans are responsible for assembly and each part has no error at all. Sam must say that he was impressed.

    There are around ten teams and they created twelve crossbows throughout the night.

    They are working great.

    Sam went to check the production of armors. Unlike the crossbows, he didn¡¯t send the armors away immediately. He waited for some peace. He knew that once the assault went on like this and dwarves gained an advantage, the enemies had to retreat for some time. He would use this chance to let the troops wear armor and meet the others on the battlefield.

    They once again have to do the same thing as they did the first time. They have to send the minotaurs back far enough so that they can meet them in the field. But this time, it is a little hard.

    There are just too many and it would be stupid to meet them in the field directly until they reduced the numbers by at least two-thirds.

    But it seems like it would take a long time.

    As he was thinking, he finally noticed that the assault has stopped and the Minotaurs retreated a little bit. The catapults are not being used. Sam felt like something is wrong.

    He went to the wall and check the situation, he mainly focused on the non-human who is unsealing these weird stones.

    He finally spotted him, but he is not unsealing the stones. He just sat cross-legged and seemed to be cultivating normally.

    They even moved the catapults back to the range where Crossbows couldn¡¯t reach.

    Sam went back to the house and gave instructions to distribute the armors. His friends came and went to rest. Even Arman and Chatur are exhausted. They are dealing with the undead that is created within the city.

    Sam went into the divine dimension to see what this is stone is all about.

    The stone is in a corner of the second floor of the tower.

    It is still emitting grey smoke.

    Sam wanted to see what exactly these properties are, so he just threw some grass over it first, to see if it would catch the grey me and it did.

    The grass withered slowly.

    He then ced a rock over it.

    The rock also caught the grey me and started corroding. But the speed is definitely slower than the first one.

    He then ced a herb, metal pieces of different grades.

    The only thing he didn¡¯t do is a living thing. Because he could guess what would happen. Sam brought a Minotaur corpse out and threw it on it.

    The corpse did catch the grey me, but it didn¡¯t turn into undead, rather it slowly rotted away and even the bones withered.

    The me seemed to be a bit sentient and it is working weirdly. Clearly, any living is bing undead and it stopped burning after that, but a dead body is just rotting away. He really couldn¡¯t understand.

 Chapter 662: Experiments

    Sam tried all kinds of experiments with that stone. But no matter what he didn¡¯t touch it at all.

    After some experiments, he realized that this me has a decaying effect. But it is not like the one his decaying green me he had. It is more like it is elerating the lifetime of the object to make it decay.

    After trying its effect on many objects, he started emitting light elemental energy and used the healing techniques against it.

    All of a sudden, the grey stone which was surrounded by the eerie smokepletely disappeared as if it was never there.

    It turned into an ordinary stone. Sam was surprised a bit and once again threw some grass. Nothing happened.

    He was extremely surprised.

    He has a feeling on why they didn¡¯t attack at night now.

    He came out of the divine dimension and went to the backyard of the house. He waved his hand and the grey stone flew out and fell in the grass. But it is just like any other ordinary stone. There is nothing wrong with it.

    Sam once again threw it inside the divine dimension and ced it in the corner. The grey stone once again started showing the grey smoke.

    Sam activated partial fusion and tried to experiment a bit. His hand turned into a golden mass of light particles as he held the stone. But his other hand was ready to chop this hand off if it was really infected with the grey me.

    But his worries are unfounded. His hand was able to hold the stone, and it didn¡¯t turn into normal stonepletely when he held the fingertips. It is notpletely invulnerable against the vitality.

    While Sam is being fascinated by this weird stone, someone else is also talking about it.

    The three non-humans that are activating these weird stones gathered sometimeter after the sunrise within a forest.

    "Why is the sun so bright in this stupid ce?"

    One of them who is the only woman of the three-spoke in a grumbling tone.

    "We are here for something important. Stop your nonsense."

    The man whom Sam shed with spoke harshly and continued.

    "One of the Undying volcanic stones disappeared?"

    "What do you mean disappeared?" The remaining two spoke in unison and they had horrified expressions on their faces.

    "A guy who is flying around on a board took it. It is clearly not on his body and his spatial ring should have already exploded if it was in and he also didn¡¯t catch the grey me on. I don¡¯t know where it went, but it disappeared."

    "Are you kidding me? Even though it is of a low-grade stone, it is extremely valuable. Those people are celebrating because they thought they destroyed the catapults, but only we know what the true threat is. We could just ce the stone in another catapult or simr machine. But without those stones, there is nothing much we can do."

    The woman said with a bit of anxiety.

    "I don¡¯t know how he kept it, but it should definitely be with him. But he is strong. His body alone is strong enough to trade blows directly with a Minotaur of the same level and he might even be the winner of that exchange.

    His muscles and blood are full of vitality to the point he is like a delicious meal waiting for me to take.

    But you know our first lesson. The more delicious the meal and the more it felt like it is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, the more we have to be wary of it. That is why I didn¡¯t make a move. But the minotaurs are too dumb to stop him. He came out and went in as if he owned the ce."

    "So, what should we do? If he can escape that easily, it would be extremely easy for him to escape even after we take down the town."

    "That is why we have to catch him off guard."

    "Off guard? You better be not talking about attacking. You do know what will happen right. Even the catapults and the few half-servants we brought are simply merged with the troops is use treading on a thin line.

    If we attack him in the town, there is a high chance that our identities would be released and the dwarves will just send a Consummate realm cultivator and worse an even higher stage cultivator to kill us all. They can even use this chance to massacre all our members left in the southwest.

    The foundations we have built all these years would be gone."

    Thedy said calmly. But she is extremely panicky at the moment.

    "But the same thing might happen if they found out about the rack in his hands,. Even though it can only be used against the Pre-transcendent stage cultivators and a lower grade one, it can easily be identified as an object from the undead realm once they see it.

    If not for the cooperation between us and orcs, we would have already got suspicious and more people would havee to investigate. We would have been unable to hide it anyway. The only thing we can do is take this on as fast as we can.

    Luckily all four towns are being attacked and even the dwarves city of the council is also going to face the war. If we don¡¯t hurry up now and take advantage of this situation, the news of that stone will eventually spread. If that guy really managed to figure out something we will be done for."

    The three of them stayed silent for a while. They are stuck in a rock and a hard ce.

    The man who shed with Sam broke the silence first.

    "I will go there alone."

    "What? No, you said he is strong. What is if the strength difference is a lot? You can¡¯t do that. Why don¡¯t we wait for a while and n a trap for him? He wouldn¡¯t be able to use the stone for now anyway, since he couldn¡¯t touch it."

    "No, I noticed that he has many elements and I also heard that there is a necromancer who used the undead to disrupt the first attack on the town. If that necromancer is rted to him much worse if he is him, we would be in trouble. We cannot lose it."

    "Then let us go together." The third man who was silent for a while spoke. When he saw their silence, he continued.

    "It would be a problem if he stayed alive, all we have to do is kill him while the rest of the town is busy. We would just finish unlocking the rest of the catapults today and attack tomorrow night."

    They agreed to this and left the ce.

    Meanwhile, inside the divine dimension, Sam is still experimenting with the stone. Currently, there are few handsying on the floor as Sam held the reaper in his left hand.

    He has been experimenting with various fusion methods and except for the light element beingpletely okay and the lightning element being slightly resistant, all the elements are catching on to the grey me. Now, only thest element remained and that is his dark element or more precisely shadow element.

    He started fusion into the shadow element and held it.

    To his surprise the whole stone remaining just like that, emitting grey smokes. Even the ce Sam held didn¡¯t have any change.

    Sam ced the sword away and used light element on the stone and it returned to being a normal dull stone, but the spot where his shadow hand was still in contact was still emitting faint smoke.

    Sam thought for a while and wanted to see what would happen if he used death energy. He kept the shadow fusion and activated death energy through that.

    The stone emitted smoke with much more vigor and even the light element couldn¡¯t affect it.

    But when he increased the intensity of light far more than the death, it started having some effect.

    Sam was delighted. He came out still holding the stone in his hand as he used the death energy right under the bright sun.

    The stone is functioning normally. The grass, rocks, metals, everything is working the same. But he didn¡¯t dare to try a living thing. Even though he has many beasts that are mere livestock, he couldn¡¯t bring himself to do that.

    After some thought, he decided to use one of the enemies as a test subject.

    He went to the wall and jumped into the enemy lines and kidnapped a Minotaur whose level is lower than him.

    Even though it is a bit despicable, everything is fair in war. All he is doing is using an enemy weaker than him as a test subject.

    He brought the mInotaur before the enemies could react. Due to the overnight battle, both sides are exhausted and they are rxing, so they didn¡¯t notice the disappearance of a soldier.

    Sam brought him back to the backyard and extended his hand holding the stone.

    He created death energy to release the energy and used the same technique as creating a spiritual energy beam.

    A grey energy beam shot towards the Minotaur and he started burning. Sam watched intently as he turned into undead and couldn¡¯t help but smile.

    This weird stone gave the results he wanted faster than he thought. But he couldn¡¯t just use it like this. He has to figure out a way to use it without making it obvious.

 Chapter 663: Passive side

    Sam immediately went back to testing. This time, he started experimenting with the metals he got from Andhera.

    He noticed that the stone has an affinity to all kinds of dark elements and their variations and its greatest affinity is with the death energy.

    Even though there are no metals with him that arepatible with death energy, he can still use the metals that have an affinity with dark elements and use his knowledge on formations and inscriptions to see if he can create something that could help him use this stone properly.

    But before that, he has to reduce the size of the stone without affecting its properties and performance. So, Sam started using the observation technique as he started analyzing the structure of the stone.

    Meanwhile, the newly made armors are distributed among the dwarves. Sam used the same principle he used with the giant crossbows and created several grooves on the armor so that it would create a basic formation and the spirit stones inside those grooves will act as nodes.

    The dwarves are not good with inscriptions. They might be able to operate them, but if damaged they couldn¡¯t repair them, in this way, they would be able to repair them even after Sam was gone.

    After experimenting with the stone a bit, Sam suddenly remembered something as he went to check the walls.

    He clearly remembered that the wall was hit with several of those grey me boulders and even though, they didn¡¯t prate through and the grey me burned only for a short period of time on the walls, he remembered the effects of the grey me on the rocks.

    He ced his hand on the wall and started using his observation ability, he might not be able to cover the entire wall, but he only wanted to check it out partially.

    The region he covered made his heart shudder though. From the other side of the wall it only looked like some cracks appeared on it, but when he checked the structure itself, he noticed that the insides of the wall are not looking good.

    There are several small cracks and there is a lot of stone that turned loose sand in between. If this continued, this night will be thest night the wall stood.

    He immediately ran towards themander and asked,

    "How many earth element users do we have in here?"

    "Why?"

    Sam exined the situation of the wall and themander shuddered.

    "We do have some, but we wouldn¡¯t be able to cover the whole wall. And even then, we would have to go outside, which is clearly disadvantageous for us."

    "But we need to find a way to repair the wall now."

    Sam said once again. Even though the enemies retreated, they only retreated the catapults to the extreme so that they wouldn¡¯t be in the range of the Crossbows, but the rest of the soldiers are there.

    The catapults are difficult to move, but now the people. They can escape the crossbow attacks if they tried.

    Even if they did a surprise attack, they wouldn¡¯t have much effect as they would be alert after the initial chaos.

    If they really want to overwhelm the other party, then they have to man the walls with at least a hundred crossbows, currently, they have barely around thirty and it would take another two days to make the crossbows, but they don¡¯t even have that many materials.

    Sam couldn¡¯t just give away all his materials, he has to keep some for his own purposes.

    He only took out themon metals until now and he is reaching the end of his reserves, there are no reinforcements from the headquarters, no resources left at all.

    All of a sudden, Sam remembered something and thought of the pile of broken armor and weapons in the forging street. When he asked themander about them, he simply said.

    "They are all the armors and weapons that are damaged severely. Most of the damage was caused by elemental energies which changed the properties of metals, they are not worth repairing, so we just dump them there.

    When any artisan wants some scrap metal or shortage of metal, they will go there and try to find it."

    "Just bring all the scrap metal to the walls, call for all the earth element users, metal and fire element users too. I don¡¯t care what level they are, everyone will be useful.

    Ask them toe fast."

    Commander immediately assembled the people, and Sam went on to check various spots on the wall. He didn¡¯t expect the n to be like this, if not for the fact that he tested the stone, he would have ignored this problempletely.

    When the users areing one by one, Sam swiftly gave orders.

    He showed various spots of the wall, where they should use their earth elemental energy and fuse the stone back and he only did that for the smaller cracks, as for therger cracks, it would be difficult to deal with them.

    Sam ced his two hands on a spot where arge crack is present and extended the crack a bit so that it would be visible to this side of the wall. After that, he picked up a broken armor piece and used his metal elemental maniption and fire element to melt and soften the metal before making it flow inside the crack with perfect control.

    He used several pieces of metal and just sent it in until the crack waspletely fused.

    He turned to the cultivators and said.

    "I will markrger cracks with a circle and smaller ones with a cross. All smaller cracks can be dealt with by fusing the stone in the region.

    But therger cracks should be dealt with with three elemental users. Earth, metal, and fire. Just like how I did it.

    Do it fast and do it cleanly. By night, I want the whole wall to be filled. But make sure that the metal wouldn¡¯t flow out to the other side of the crack and also don¡¯t increase the crack too much. Once the wall copses or the other side has an inkling of what you are doing, we would be done for."

    Sam gave these instructions and went to the other sides of the wall to do the same.

    But he felt like this wouldn¡¯t be enough, this is a temporary measure and he knew that the rest of the catapults would also be in process of unsealing tonight and the damage will increase.

    He definitely needs to find a way out of this. The crossbow production has reached its limit and it would be hard for him to speed it up.

    If he really wants to speed it up, all he could do was manufacture them inside the divine dimension. But he couldn¡¯t do so, because he wouldn¡¯t be able to be in time if a battle urs and he needs to be on the spot for every twist that might happen.

    He went to the fields and even the entrance of the stream in the town to see the formation and noticed that the formation is working on its limit and the death energy is so high that it is umting in the formation like dark smoke.

    Sam shook his head andid down another formation around it and another one around that.

    Now the strain on the first formation is reduced.

    While he is checking the field, Watt came to him and said.

    "The work on walls is the extremely slow pace. They are trying their best, but they couldn¡¯t finish it. Most of the people there are humans and they don¡¯t have much experience, I think you would be needed there."

    Sam held his forehead in frustration. He couldn¡¯t believe that he is working so hard to save someone else¡¯s home all because of the deal he made with a person he just met once.

    "Just ask Philip toe over. We will try our best."

    Then he went to the wall to assist and Philip also joined in.

    Only half of the wall is done before the night.

    "We couldn¡¯t do anything, try to block the boulders from hitting the wall. We have to work hard."

    Sam said and after some thought, he continued.

    "Ask the earth element users to create an earthen wall made of the soil on the outer side.

    It is the basic thing. Just as them to keep theyers active as soon as they copsed.

    From the repairs we had done, it wouldst this night if we are careful."

    Sam was exhausted from all the work he had done. After the sunset, the enemies are already moving.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but sigh. If only they had greater numbers, he would have made an attack the whole morning. They are currently weak and didn¡¯t have any proper advantage.

    Even the crossbows with increased amount would only be useful as a defensive measure as the catapults will also increase.

    It really is new for Sam to be on the passive side. All he would need is one good opening and he would make the whole situation turn and the war would be over before they knew it.

 Chapter 664: Ambush

    Sam helped with the defense of the town whole night. By next morning, he couldn¡¯t help but feel exhausted and want to sleep.

    When Philip saw his exhausted state, he just let him go to sleep as he took over the repair of the wall.

    He woke up after three hours of sleep.

    When he came out, Watt came to him and asked.

    "How about we just attack directly? Tomorrow, Yanwu and the rest will have their cultivation unsealed. I have Falck too. We can just attack one side with overwhelming advantage and get this over with. We would be sitting ducks like this."

    "My main concern is not the Minotaurs. If it was only Minotaurs I would have done the same, we wouldn¡¯t even need to wait for Yanwu and the rest to unseal.

    I don¡¯t want an overwhelming victory at this moment. I need the war to go step-by-step. That is why, I am waiting for an opening. Not a victory with force."

    "Why?"

    "By this point I am extremely clear that this war is not rted to this town having good crops and not for agricultural yield.

    The three people I mentioned before, the ones that are activating the Catapults, they are most likely from realm of undead and even the people operating the catapults are some sort of undead creatures. They don¡¯t any vitality.

    This whole war is being directed by undead realm residents and they want something from this town.

    We don¡¯t know too many details. I am waiting for the shadow mice to unseal, then we might learn something.

    But one thing I am sure is that if we overwhelm the victory out of this and we, the people will get noticed by the upper echelons of the people behind this war and we would be bringing more harm than good to this town.

    If not for the fact, that themander and the town head are ignoring us, I wouldn¡¯t have been this forceful and let us get noticed even this much.

    Before we take any drastic action, we have to clearly know what goals the opponents have.

    Anyway, we couldn¡¯t be too confident about this. Once the other two sides learn that we attacked one side with overwhelming strength, they would definitely take advantage.

    There are just too many dangerous factors.

    First, let them manufacture enough crossbows. They would be helpful and then we would take action. We can directly go and take down one side while the other two sides defend themselves. No matter what, I would like to end this within the next week.

    Even if the new troops join them, I wouldn¡¯t let these troops stay here."

    But the next moment, a soldier came running to Sam and reported something, which made him feel stunned.

    He and Watt took off on their hover boards and went to take a look beyond the walls.

    Like the past night, the troops really retreated back, but now there is arge scale movement outside the wall and when they saw what is happening, they are dumbfounded.

    There are so many beasts running towards the wall.

    The beasts are running straight without any attacks and smashed into the wall.

    The soldiers on the Crossbows are shooting desperately. But no beast is dodging. They are all weing the spears to shoot and impale them.

    They seemed to be in an extreme mood.

    One of the beasts was even impaled into the ground by the spear, but it struggled so much that a chunk of flesh was torn apart from the body and still ran forward.

    Sam used his eye technique to see what is wrong with them. No matter what, no beast would behave like that in a normal situation. But when he saw the energy waves that areing, he was dumbfounded. Because, he is extremely familiar with those energy waves, they belong to undead.

    But these beasts are not regr undead. They do have death energy and their elemental powers disappeared. But they still have their sentience which is only possible for some high-grade undead. Normal necromancer can¡¯t even imagine doing that.

    He now knew what is happening, the person or people controlling these things only gave them one task. To smash the wall.

    Sam looked at them and sighed. He really didn¡¯t want to use the grenades this time as they are too eye-catching. Even the cross-bows that are extremelyrge are still within the scope where dwarves can make them. But grenades are out of reach to any race within this continent.

    But the current situation is leaving him with not much choice.

    He waved his hand and six shadows appeared. Two beasts, a merman, a naga, a Yaksha and a Minotaur. Sam is already considering changing them. But he couldn¡¯t find a good enough shadow.

    As soon as they are summoned they jumped over andnded on some beasts. Their job is not kill them, rather it is to absorb all the death energy in the beasts so that they could feed on it and grow stronger.

    As for stopping them, there is not much he can change by interfering too much. He could through a few grenades, but the beasts that too damage would definitelye again.

    "Ask the earth element users to grow spikes on the wall."

    That is only thing Sam said and he gave a space jade with grenades to Watt.

    "Throw them to shadows one by one. They might make some damage."

    With that he went back to Veer¡¯s house and entered the divine dimension.

    He took half of the remaining ordinary metals used for crossbows and started making them in his production unit.

    He is really getting sick of dragging this. He would rather take risk of themunching a fullscale in the morning that sitting ducks and he stayed inside till night.

    By the time he came out, he has around hundred crossbows.

    Sam sent them to the walls. By this time, the armor production was done and the crossbow production was also almost finished. Even if they want to do anything else, they wouldn¡¯t be able to at this movement.

    He went to fields and started checking. With the sheer number of crossbows, if the people here still failed to defend for another night, he would be wasting his efforts here.

    In fact, they can even turn the tide over.

    He waited to hear the sounds of explosions and attacks. But there is actually nothing. The enemies are silent and even the dwarven troops didn¡¯t do anything.

    The beasts are the only ones still crashing and raging as new beasts are continuously adding to their troops.

    The crossbows are all busy shooting the beasts and shadows are still having their feast.

    Sam returned to the house and saw the dwarves are all leaving. They are going to join the battlefield since the production is done.

    He decided to find a way to use that grey stone for now.

    But as soon as he sat down in the room, he felt something is wrong and felt like someone is watching him.

    Sam jumped from the spot and somersaulted in the air andnded. There is a pale young man standing with his arm extended towards the spot where Sam sat on two seconds ago.

    Sam took out a staff and attacked, but the young man dodged.

    He is none other than the young man who activated the catapults.

    Sam chased after the young man continuously as they fought in the house. The man is using all the dark element spells, like corrosion, curses and many other.

    But Sam dodged them with ease. But he couldn¡¯t find an opening to close the distance.

    The whole house is suffering the brunt of the attack. After finding no sess in physical attacks, Sam resorted to the fire element. He didn¡¯t want to cause too much damage but only now did he notice that there is no one else residing beside this house.

    The whole street is empty.

    Sam left all his inhibitions and attacked in full force. The staff threwrge amount of golden mes with every swing and the golden mes took the form of a golden crow as they flew towards that young man.

    The young man who seems to be unusually agile couldn¡¯t dodge the continuous attacks and blocked it with his arms.

    There are slight burn marks in his arms as he looked at Sam and spoke.

    "You are good. Better than I thought, it is a good thing that I didn¡¯te here alone."

    Sam widened his eyes and sensed the threat, a burst of frost was being shot at him from the side and Sam shot a jet of mes to defend against it.

    The attacks are neutralized and there is a woman standing there. She is the second person who is activating the catapults on the second side and Sam also sensed the third presence. Another young man came out of his hiding.

 Chapter 665: Exhaustion

    Sam looked at all three of them and asked.

    "Just who are you guys exactly?"

    "Why? Want to know who killed you before you die?" The girl asked, but Sam snorted and said.

    "No, I want to know who is being such a pain in the ass."

    Sam said and he is surrounded with a golden glow. He activated partial light element fusion. He doesn¡¯t know who they are exactly, but they are really fast. So, fast that Sam feeling a bit slow when he is using fire element and even Phantom step.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel marveled.

    But he doesn¡¯t have too much time to y. Anyway, his friends would being here in a few minutes after they saw themotion, they will start vying for the battle.

    "Let¡¯s just finish it quickly. My friends would be on their way back and trust me they are really fast."

    With that, Sam disappeared and mmed his staff at the girl as he reappeared at her back.

    All three of them widened their eyes in disbelief as he stared at theirpanion whose body was cut open.

    She rolled on the ground as she squirmed in pain.

    Sam also halted in tracks for a second. There is a scar on her body caused by the sharp light elemental strike with the staff. But that is not what surprised him. There seems to be a corrosive effect.

    All this while, when he attacked the first man, he was able to heal himself easily.

    But now, there is no healing effect and there seemed to an intense corrosive effect applied on their backs.

    When Sam was in a daze, the two othersunched an attack and when Sam dodged, they didn¡¯t followup and just dragged theirpanion.

    One of them took out a dagger and cut the flesh around the scar and then only the skin started regenerating.

    "What are you guys?" Sam asked as he looked at them and started guessing.

    "You are Vampires aren¡¯t you."

    All three of them looked at him at the same time with stunning expression.

    "No wonder. I already guessed as much but didn¡¯t confirm it. Not attacking in the mornings, your powers must have been severely suppressed, the sentient undead creatures that are loading the catapults and even the undead beasts, I did expect as much. I only thought I would meet you guys when I came to the undead realm, but here you are getting here to get your faces pped."

    As soon as Sam finished, all three of them stood up and looked at him with hateful gazes.

    "You learned too much. You shouldn¡¯t have been so smart, now it is bringing you to your death."

    As soon as they spoke, their bodies started changing a bit, their canines turned sharpers and their pupils turned red. Their skin turned paler and finally, their nails also extended.

    They are oozing blood and death energy.

    "Since you already knew who we are, we can fight you without reservations. Be proud that you are dying in hands of the vampire nobility. Not many could get this chance. In fact, I might take you to be my servant."

    The girl spoke and all three of them made their move.

    Sam was dumbfounded by their speed. They are almost as fast as him. They are like blurry shadows as they tore through the air andunched attacks on him.

    The first man isunching darkness curses, but the curses are all in blood-red color. The second man isunching blood-red mes, and the woman is attacking with blood-red ice.

    All their attacks are amplified with blood energy.

    Sam even observed that blood is seeping out of their body and merging with the elemental attacks. Sam is only focused on dodging as he couldn¡¯t find an opening. The three of them are fast and coordinated excellently.

    If not for the fact, he is faster he would have died.

    Sam defended and dodged like crazy, he is feeling overwhelmed. He looked outside as he waited for his friends to arrive.

    He felt that something wrong as they should have arrived by now due to the amount of chaos he created, but they didn¡¯t, he activated his eye technique and looked around. He was stumped for a second and almost got hit.

    There is a formation around his house and it seems to be a high-level concealing formation.

    It is at least made by a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator. And even for Sam, it would take around an hour to destroy. He started searching for the formation disc. He is certain that is made that way because there are no transcendent stage cultivators in the enemy ranks.

    But he couldn¡¯t find it. He now realized that he wouldn¡¯t be getting help from the friends and he halted in his tracks and blocked an attack before taking a deep breath.

    The only girl in the group is the one who is most angry as she suffered so much with that one sessful attack and she lunged at him with her palm extended. The nails are like the ws of a beast and could easily rip his flesh apart.

    But didn¡¯t dodge this time, right before she couldnd an attack small red crystalline pieces flew out and formed a thing wall taking the brunt of the attack.

    The wall copsed by the attack is also negated. That didn¡¯t stop there and those crystalline piecesunched themselves at her and tried to cut her into pieces.

    They are all moving independently. When the girl jumped back and dodged as Sam once again made his move, the red crystalline scales are all revolving around him.

    These are the scales of blood mutants all of those scalesbined to be Sam¡¯s new gadget.

    It is both a defensive and offensive tool he made with a lot of research.

    They are all individual things, but they can also connect ording to his will and form different shapes. Just like how Sam managed to block the attack with a curtain.

    Sam let out all the scales and just ignored the other two as hepletely focused on the girl.

    The two men are trying to attack from the sides. But the scales extremely slippery. They are not fast, but they stuck close to Sam and every attack that came at him was being blocked as the scales moved and formed different shapes. Once in a while, a couple of scales shot towards the two attackers when they got close and managed to make a few cuts here and there.

    Whenever they punched the shields formed with scales, the scales just copsed and cut through their skin and arms and reassembled for the next attack.

    The attack was not significant at the start, but it sure as hell annoying.

    While the scales kept the two of them busy, Sam just dealt with the girl. Now that she is alone even with her speed, Sam made her feel like a little girl hunted by a beast.

    Sam attacked ruthlessly, every attack was aimed at a vital part. Even when she dodged, she couldn¡¯t avoid itpletely.

    There are several scars on her body corroding her skin.

    The light element seems to be the bane of her existence.

    And soon, she reached herst legs.

    Sam increased the strength and stabbed the staff straight through her chest as he let the light element grow rampant.

    The two vampires went crazy as they lunged at Sam. But Sam didn¡¯t care. The scales really did their work properly.

    They are extremely useful.

    The girl couldn¡¯t take it anymore and sprawled on the ground as dark corrosive lines appeared all over her body and skin.

    Sam didn¡¯t care much and just lunged backward as he focused on one of the two men.

    The scalespletely focused on the third person.

    Now, they are not just defending anymore. They circled around him at an incredible speed as they started cutting through. The scars kept on increasing and even the armor that man is wearing ispletely gone.

    When they noticed that the situation is going sour, they couldn¡¯t take it anymore and they took out some tokens and crushed it.

    They turned into a ck puff of smoke as one of them held the girl and disappeared from the spot.

    The formation also disappeared as Sam looked at the ck puffs of smoke disappearing into the night.

    He immediately copsed to the ground and his nose started bleeding. His fusion mode was deactivated and the scales that came to him disappeared into the storage.

    This new gadget Sam made is actually of higher grade and it stressed him out whenever he used it, that is why he didn¡¯t let it stay in open.

    This is actually due to some silly mistake he made when making it.

    He wanted to achieve this desired effect, this copsibility and assembling ability and at the same time, give them the ability to float around and attack, defend all at the same time.

    This all came at a cost. But only after making it did he realize that he overdid it. He enchanted spirits in each and every scale and constructed spiritual imprints for each of them and even established abined link for the spirits so that they could feel like a single entity.

    He etched hundreds of inscriptions in a miniature level on all the scales and fed countless spirits full of soul energy to these spirits. He used many techniques of soul necromancy and all of these spirits are connected to his mind.

    There around a hundred and twenty scales he used and he is controlling one hundred and twenty spirits. If they are low-grade spirits, the required effects wouldn¡¯t have been achieved, but the stress would have been less.

    He should have let the lowgrade spirits grow slowly, but he didn¡¯t do that. He just had to increase the strength of the spirits and now every time he used it, he would be consumingrge amounts of mental strength cing immense stress on his brain.

    He slowly closed his eyes and went to sleep, but now before shooting a fireball into the air with thest of his strength.

    His friends who are on various ends of the town saw the signal and came running towards him.

    When they saw him still breathing and making sure that they are no significant injuries. They shifted him to a new house and let him sleep.

 Chapter 666: Two Months

    Sam didn¡¯t wake up for the whole night.

    He just slept like that and only woke up the noon next day.

    As soon as he woke up, he could hear the loud thuds and crashes. The war is still going on. The attacks became relentless. Sam stretched his body. He is still feeling a slight headache as he walked out slowly. He didn¡¯t take harbinger and just walked to the nearby wall.

    Just after he crossed the street, all the surrounding people scrammed away. Sam looked around to see all his beastsing towards him.

    He was worried about them. He thought they might have gone on a rampage because of his condition, but they didn¡¯t which is to his relief.

    They wouldn¡¯t care about the rules of the war and will attack everyone that is on their way to take revenge.

    Sam sat on Dia as they moved. Rest of the beasts shapeshifted into smaller forms. After that, they met with Watt and the rest of the teammates to make sense of the situation.

    From what they are saying, the attacks didn¡¯t stop. Last night after Sam fainted, the catapults once again started their action.

    The attacks are relentless and in the morning, after the sun rose the beasts increased, even the Grand realm and Great realm beasts are hitting the walls. The earth element users are trying their best to defend the wall and repair it continuously.

    Sam gave them instructions and currently their main priority is watching the fields. There is no way they couldst long enough if the food supply didn¡¯tst.

    Ape is still working on the beer. But this time, the target was changed.

    The beer aimed to be diluted of the spiritual energy, diluted enough for the low-level cultivators to consume it.

    The low-grade wheat reserves are currently running out and even though the Medium grade wheat was still avable, as they didn¡¯t send the harvest out. But normal people couldn¡¯t consume it.

    Generally, the harvest from the nearby towns would have made it easy for them to sustain, but not all the harvested wheat didn¡¯t reach this ce before the Minotaur¡¯s attacks.

    Sam pondered on how to get through this crisis and reached the town heads mansion.

    He didn¡¯t stop when the guards blocked him. He just went directly to the office room of the town head and sat down.

    "Last night I was attacked by three vampires. I was told it was a war for territory, but it didn¡¯t seem like it. You told me that the reinforcements will arrive, but they didn¡¯t. I would like to know some information.

    What kind of war is going on right now? How long should west? What is the situation in the rest of the dwarven territory? I want the information. Otherwise, I will leave with my friends and all the things I made."

    Sam said calmly to the town head.

    As soon as he said that, the room door opened and themander ran in as he looked at Sam. Seeing that there is nothing wrong and they are just talking, he heaved a sigh of relief and looked at the Townhead.

    "What is the problem?"

    "He wants the information from the headquarters."

    Commander shook his head in exhaustion.

    "Juste with me, I will tell you everything you need."

    Sam walked out and gave the silent town head onest look before leaving.

    He felt like this town head is more like a puppet, he is extremely unresponsive and he didn¡¯t even give any orders regarding the war. He just hid in this mansion and thest time he saw him was when he took care of the documents regarding Veer¡¯s property.

    Other than that, he was not seen in any other situation in this war.

    "What do you want to know?"

    Sam repeated his questions and themander sighed.

    "We just got the news a few days ago, that someone from the undead realm is involved in this, but we don¡¯t know exactly how.

    We don¡¯t even know the existence of the undead realm a few days ago.

    But currently, we cannot expect any reinforcements.

    All the viges are currently under attack and most of them are under enemy control. Not just minotaurs, even the orcs are acting against us.

    We lost almost all routes and only a few viges are under our control.

    The attacks from both sides are extremely aggressive.

    After we found out that the people are turning undead, we sent the news back, but there is not much response, they are just trying their best to deal with the situation. They said we just have to hold on until they are done.

    After that, there is not even any response for all the messages we sent, we don¡¯t even know if the messages we sent reached them or not.

    But thest message they sent is that we should not let the town go no matter what and they also mentioned that the troops will be never-ending for the next few months, the whole Minotaur race and Orc race are moving. This is just the start."

    Sam nodded and went to the wall. He estimated as much.

    He knew that there is something wrong with the situation, but he doesn¡¯t know how long the wall wouldst. But from the looks of it, the dwarves and the humans got better at repairing it and they are even making it stronger.

    They are even using the undead beasts to their advantage as their corpses are also acting as barricades for the wall after they are turned into pieces due to constant damage.

    If the opposite troops tried to clear the corpses, they are bing easier targets for the crossbows.

    The vampires didn¡¯t act again because Sam is sure that she would take a long time to recover from the current damage.

    Anyway, the current situation is not extremely bad. Due to the extra crossbows and the improvement in their activity, both sides are extremely bnced.

    From what he saw yesterday and the prowess of the vampires he changed his mind and created a new n.

    He decided to take advantage of the current bnce and prepare for therger tide. He called for his friends and immediately started making preparations.

    Every morning, they fought against the undead beasts and even the undead created by the dead bodies of the Minotaurs and the other humans in the enemy troops.

    And every night, the catapults are also added to the beasts.

    The only problem here is that the spears are diminishing due to the war. Now they are making spears out of the junk metal and even recovering them.

    Every flying type beast and even the beasts that are hitting the walls also became a resource as they made spears with their bones.

    Every day, they have a small interval of time when the catapults have retreated and the undead start their attack and in that short interval, the dwarves will go to recover the spears and some of the dead bodies. After collecting the bones, they just dumped the beast carcass directly at the wall.

    The vampires must have not thought things through when they decided to attack with this method, but this is the most cost-effective method they have to attack on such arge scale.

    If not for the fact, Sam made sure to identify the problem and started repairing the wall, the wall would have already been broken and they would have been open to the attacks easily.

    Sam called for all the artisans and his friends and started the n.

    For the next two months, the war went along at the same pace. In these two months, they maintained the bnce and didn¡¯t attack rashly.

    There are some skirmishes between the pre-transcendent stage cultivators. But there are norge-scale attacks.

    The troops of enemies and the dwarves both reduced a bit, but the enemies¡¯ troops are far more affected and the new troops areing constantly.

    Ape produced something equivalent to beer and most of themoners had to change to the liquid diet.

    After some trials and experiments, Sam did figure out a solution for the food problem and that is his divine dimension, he started growing wheat inside. And with the usage of formations, the low-grade wheat could be grown.

    Due to the reduction of the maturing time, the food problem is solved as soon as the farming technique was seeded.

    His friends had gotten great training within this ce and the town is in a rtively stable condition whenpared to the initial stages of the war.

    The only problem is that he couldn¡¯t give a possible exnation of where the wheat ising from.

    Apart from that, there is no other problem. Even the town head came in and thanked Sam. It turned out that this guy is just a puppet and one of the council elders is using him. He has no experience and is just a youngster with a timid personality.

    He waspletely shocked and devastated. He knew that he is here due to connections, except for the strong front he kept on when Sam entered the town, he didn¡¯t know how to manage the current war situation. He was ecstatic when the first attack was solved with Sam¡¯s help, but the attack from three sides is something beyond his reach and capabilities. That is why he is not involved and he hid as he couldn¡¯t bear the guilt of destroying the lives of all these people.

    He hid this all from Sam, as he feared Sam might take over the town if he became greedy and knew the town head was weak, there are instances simr to this in the past, but Sam didn¡¯t care much about this, he just continued with this n.

    And with these two months¡¯ worth of preparation, he is confident to face any kind of situation. He created a defense n that could easily fend off the enemies unless the enemy is of transcendent stage cultivation or higher, or if the whole army of orcs and MInotaurs didn¡¯te and attack, they could manage the situation.

 Chapter 667: Fall of the Wall

    Currently, Sam is checking the structure of the wall.

    Even though they constantly repaired it, he knew that it is only a temporary measure. Sam didn¡¯t even expect it tost two months, most of it is due to their counter-attack with the Crossbows, which made it easy for the wall tost.

    In these three months, there are many surprise attacks and unconventional attacks from the opponents, the troops increased several times. They are in an extremely delicate bnce. Once the wall is destroyed, they will be done for.

    Sam even saw the increase in the number of vampires on the other side. So, the most defensive they could get, the more beneficial it is to them.

    Sam created many defensive measures in these three months. He took every advantage this terrain has to offer and that includes the presence of thisrge stream.

    In fact, most of the ns made revolve around the water present here.

    Even though it doesn¡¯t sound right, Sam is currently waiting for the wall to be taken down.

    Currently, it is already three months since they came to this ce. Half of the time, they wanted to spend here was already over.

    Sam and his friends really want to finish this war swiftly and be done with it.

    And that day really dide.

    A few dayster, the dwarven troops withdrew from the walls and they started taking the crossbows back.

    Seeing this, the enemy troops rejoiced a bit.

    Particrly the Vampires.

    At this moment while the dwarven troops are withdrawing, there is a meeting going on within the Minotaur camp.

    Six pale people sat in a circle.

    And three of them are extremely familiar to Sam.

    "How long are we going to wait, before we took this town down? If we don¡¯t do it within the next two weeks, there are only two ways. First is the Wights will take over and the second is we should shed all cordiality and send a Transcendent stage Minotaur and kill them all."

    The second woman who is part of theter three said.

    "Like hell, you can do that. From what we got, Veer is still in his peak condition and even his maid is dealing with the Minotaurs as if they are little kids.

    He has moved throughout the dwarven territory in just a few days along with his maid and she dealt with Many senior Minotaurs who wanted to break the rules of the war.

    If by any chance he catches a whiff of it, he would definitely go out of his way to kill every present here and that includes us."

    The woman who was severely damaged by Sam said. She still appeared a bit weak. From the looks of it both women are at odds with each other.

    "Unless Veer is held locked in a ce, we couldn¡¯t be rest assured to use the second n, but the second n is ast resort. Wights will definitely take over before we could even think about the second n.

    What does it look like on the ghouls¡¯ side? Did the Orcspletely take over the town near their territory?"

    "They are halfway there. They took over the town, but the people are still maintaining the siege from the town hall."

    "At least they are better than us."

    "Don¡¯t worry, what weck is an opportunity to breach, once we do we will easily take over the town."

    While they are discussing, an undead servant came running and reported about the withdrawal of the dwarven troops from the wall.

    The six of them became ecstatic.

    "They must be nning for retreat. The wall couldn¡¯t withstand this onught any longer, we should just increase the intensity of the attacks."

    "What if it is a trap?"

    "They don¡¯t have resources for that. Dwarves are not good with formations and inscriptions and if they did be good, where could they find so many resources to ce all the traps. We blocked all the supply routes, this town only has two spirit stone mines, no other. I think this is the perfect opportunity.

    We should destroy the wall on all three sides in one fell swoop."

    All six of them discussed something and left the ce. Only two are left on that side of the wall.

    That day, they relentlessly attacked the walls. Their attacks went extremely smoothly as there is no resistance. There is no spear being shot by the crossbows.

    Sam looked at the situation and then went to meet his teammates, he talked to them onest time, before leaving the ce. He went to the town head¡¯s mansion and sat in the main hall.

    There is no one else inside. He just sat there on the chair and with a wave of the hand, arge crystal table appeared in front of him.

    This is the crystal table from the third floor of the divine dimension. He activated the table and the whole town and even some area beyond the walls came to his view.

    He looked at the image of walls constantly changing as they got hit continuously.

    Sam is really surprised by this stone wall. This wall is made of special material. It is easy to repair but difficult to destroy. This must be one of the special resources of this world.

    But even that special material cannotst too long.

    And soon, the wall crumbled into thousands of small pieces of stone and an opening appeared.

    The rest of the wall, soon followed suit and the troops barged in behind the undead beasts that are leading the attack.

    But only after taking a few steps, they heard a loud sound.

    *SPLASH*

    They saw water in front of them. The distance between the wall and the residences of the town waspletely filled with water and to their surprise, after the beasts fell inside, they didn¡¯t even hear any more struggle after the initial ssh. There are not even waves and ripples much less sshes.

    The same thing happened on all three sides.

    The undead beasts leading the attacks all disappeared into the water without any signs of struggle.

    Sam just looked at the situation coldly from the town head¡¯s mansion.

    This is the work of the Blue Algae he got from the Murali¡¯s Inheritance.

    He wanted to use these algae so many times, but couldn¡¯t find a proper ce, but now he did it. The beasts disappeared one by one as they ran blindly and this situation only stopped when the minotaurs saw the scene. The vampires didn¡¯t take action. The morning time is not exactly a great time for them as they couldn¡¯t attack their full power. From what they saw from the strength of Sam and if his friends are as strong as him, they are really going to die.

    Minotaurs took a step back and decided to jump over the water.

    It is not that wide, they could really jump over with their superior physique.

    But as soon as they jumped forward, Sam made a move in the town head¡¯s mansion. He used his spiritual energy to draw something on the holographic image and all of a sudden something changed.

    Minotaurs jumped and they are in mid-air at the same time extremely close to the bank on this site, but at that exact moment, several jets of water shot out to the sky from the bank and the water jets are extremely thin and forceful. The jets not only blocked their entry by forming a curtain, it is also made a hole through the people who are a bit forward in their fall.

    Blood sprayed and all the Minotaurs fell back into the water directly. And the minotaurs are also the same. They disappeared without a struggle, there is not even a single drop of blood visible on the water surface.

    The vampires at the back couldn¡¯t get a clear image of the situation. They didn¡¯t dare toe too close to the town, but now the situation is extremely different, if they don¡¯te forward, they wouldn¡¯t be able to see the situation and make sense of it.

    They exchanged a nce and all six vampires who are in pairs in different ces made the same decision without even consulting each other.

    They just took hold of two new humans in the Minotaur troops and bit into their necks.

    All of a sudden, the humans¡¯ eyes turned blood red and their skin turned pale.

    After the process isplete, the humans who are now the vampire servants walked out and startedmanding the troops.

    They came to the front line and ordered the water element users to move forward.

    But Minotaurs don¡¯t have many, they only have a few and they couldn¡¯t lose them as they are their important assets, so only humans can move like and even they couldn¡¯t cross it.

    After some losses, they finally managed to send a couple of them to the other side, but as soon as they crossed the water jets something else happened.

    Tworge water jets stuck them from the sides. They came from the top of the houses and they targeted them abruptly.

    But the worst part is, as soon as the water jets hit them, they could feel the water is different and their skin started corroding.

    They couldn¡¯t think of what is happening, but they could feel that their skin is burning and their flesh felt like it is ripping off.

    The water jets didn¡¯t stop there. They focused on the other people on the other side of the water and started shooting at them.

    The same scenarios happened on all three sides of the city and the troops that are extremely excited over the fall of the wall couldn¡¯t maintain that excitement any longer.

 Chapter 668: Situation changed

    Sam looked at the whole scene coldly. He even looked a little bored looking at the people who are clearly stumped at the first obstacle he ced.

    He has prepared many other things for them.

    In the past two months, Sam mostly made use of the stream and dug so many underground lines for water to flow through the whole town, and installed several new toys all over.

    Most of them don¡¯t use the inscriptions and formations, rather they are dangerous because of the mechanism itself within them.

    The mechanism is operated by the spirits and they are all connected to the crystal table.

    Sam used the water stream to the extreme. He and Chatur both came up with this design. Sam is responsible for activating anything that is connected to the spiritual energy and Chatur is mostly in charge of moving throughout the city and attacking them after they breached the first barrier.

    Sam did make some formations that are suitable for his teammates to fight with, but they are not integrated with the surroundings, they are something that Sam wouldn¡¯t leave in this ce nor sell to the dwarves.

    They are personally crafted for his teammates so that they could use it when they are facing multiple enemies.

    He used some of the tricks he learned while making his scale gadget in these formations. They are extremely helpful when fighting multiple enemies and got surrounded by them.

    But from the looks of it, his preparations might have been overkill.

    These people couldn¡¯t even cross the first obstacle, much less test the rest of the town defenses.

    But soon, the deadlock was cracked as they used some undead humans to cross the line.

    They used the flying beasts and sent some people to the other side trying their best to avoid the water jets at the same time, the undead jumped over to the thinner water jets and shielded with their bodies, creating a small interval. The Minotaurs jumped over them in this interval and crossed the water.

    They just used other undead as meat shields as they defended against the water jets shot from houses on either side.

    The water jets that are being shot from the houses are loaded with Hydra poison.

    Sam ced a vial of poison in the guns that are creating these jets mixing the poison with it.

    Minotaurs who are wearing full body armor of decent quality are also unable topletely escape the brunt of the corrosiveness of the water.

    The attacks continued. And every house has at least one water jet based on its size and some have two.

    But that is not all. When they tried to void the jets by going into some blind spots of those jets, something came up from the side andtched on their backs.

    That is one of the shadows of Sam.

    They took posts in different ces along with the rest of Sam¡¯s beasts.

    Even shadow mice are doing their jobs here. Sam felt like he is really working too hard for the dwarves¡¯ sake and only wished that he would be able to get something worthwhile in return.

    The shadow just didn¡¯t attack the Minotaur. It used a syringe to directly stab into the nape of the Minotaur making him take in the poison and then ced a disc thattched on the body of the Minotaur.

    A ck glow appeared on the Minotaur while he writhed in pain.

    Soon, the Minotaur fell. But as soon as it did, the body once again moved. It turned into undead and the Minotaur undead attacked its ownpanions.

    The shadow that disappeared earlier once again returned. It took advantage of the Minotaur that is under attack and injected another shot to him and ced another disc on his body.

    Another undead.

    Another disruption.

    The enemy troops soon fell into chaos.

    They are painfully paying a price to cross the first obstacle but they are unable to escape the chaospletely.

    The only thing they have is numbers. But the problem with those numbers is that they are not intelligent. They are dumb and ferocious. They wouldn¡¯t be able to take it lying down when they are being attacked.

    They did just that.

    At this moment, white-colored insects came out from hiding.

    They flew towards the fighting Minotaurs and started biting them off sucking their life force and spiritual energy.

    The three routes are already being blocked.

    The situation went on for hours but the Minotaurs couldn¡¯t figure out a way. They wanted to destroy the houses that have water jets with brute force, but they couldn¡¯t reach them.

    This left so much work for the flying beasts and the undead servants of the vampires on them along with some humans a lot to do.

    They started attacking the houses from the top.

    But at this moment, the spears flew out through the air and impaled into the flying beasts. The Crossbows are back into business again.

    Sam has divided the town into three rings. The first one is after they cross the water. They would have to deal with the water jets, undead, and the Zoi termites.

    The second ring is for the troops of the dwarven territory to handle.

    They will use the terrain advantage and some of the tricks Sam left them in that area to deal with the people there and there are some formations Samid down that could help them heal and fight back at the same time.

    As for thest one, that is the ring for Pre-transcendent stage cultivators.

    There Sam¡¯s friendsy down waiting for the Pre-transcendent stage Minotaurs and Vampires to make their way. Along with them, the Pre-transcendent stage cultivators of the dwarves spread all over the three rings to make sure the Pre-transcendent stage Minotaurs are not meddling with Nascent stage battles.

    They would fight to their heart¡¯s content in the third ring.

    The third ring is the ce surrounding the Town head¡¯s mansion. Thest obstacle is Sam himself inside the town head mansion.

    As for the residents, they are all moved to the new bunker Sam constructed beneath the Town head Mansion.

    Now the whole town is just a yground.

    Sam also discovered something when he dug under the town head mansion.

    The vitality of the earth there is extremely high.

    It is high to the point if that ce was used to cultivate crops, they would have their maturing time reduced by half.

    He felt like this ce has something rted to the secret that the dwarves are hiding and this ce might as well be the reason for the battle against the town.

    Sam couldn¡¯t get the required information from the dwarves, he could find an only one way. And that is capturing the Vampires.

    While Sam is waiting for the Vampires to attack, the battle went on.

    The troops of Minotaurs are being reduced drastically. But the Vampires showed no remorse. They are just sending them forward. The Vampire servants that are responsible formanding, started moving to the corpses and created undead once again.

    They are trying their best to dodge the water jets and enter the second ring.

    Inside the second ring, the crossbow shooters are mainly responsible for air defense and also to stop the people from climbing up the houses and move faster.

    They didn¡¯t attack the people on the ground that much.

    Sam just waved his hand one more time and the true power of the second ring activated.

    The water jets once again hit them. There are small water canals on either side of every road and Chatur is using the water to hit every single person. But his main target is the undead. There are not many living targets in the area and they are dealt with by the Dwarven troops. But the undead is the targets of the water jets and Chatur¡¯s attacks.

    And the reason is simple. As soon as the undead experienced the water attack, they started malfunctioning. They are unable to move forward and their skin started burning a bit. The death energy responsible to keep them intact started being dissipated.

    The water is full of excessive vitality and this is caused by the healing formation Samid.

    If the water left the healing formation, it wouldn¡¯t carry the same amount of vitality for a long time. But to shoot instantly, it is good enough.

    This ring¡¯s main aim is to eradicate the undead soldiers while the first ring¡¯s main goal is to increase the casualties and reduce the live troops.

    The Minotaurs started bing afraid.

    They managed to enter through three ways and they drastically outnumber their enemies, but they couldn¡¯t help but wince at the sight of the casualties.

    But they couldn¡¯t back down. There is no going back now. Even if they retreated, with these casualties dwarves would start their invasion and Minotaurs would be extinct.

    They are in a point of no return as from what they heard, even the Minotaur king is engaged in the battle with the Council elders of the Dwarves.

    This is an all-out war. That is the only reason, they still pushed forward.

 Chapter 669: Trapped

    The battle went on.

    It is extremely intense. The Minotaurs, the undead, the vampire servants, the humans, the beasts. Every creature involved was battling crazily. The whole town was colored with blood all over.

    Even the water canals are filled with blood and the blue algae are having the time of their lives. They are feasting on the blood, flesh, and bones.

    The whole situation turned chaotic. The Dwarves are using the terrain and tricks to their advantage. The Vampires and Minotaurs felt the danger of water for the first time. They didn¡¯t expect that a town having a stream flowing through it could be made this deadly with just few tricks.

    They are having the worst days of their lives.

    The Vampires, couldn¡¯t take it anymore, they are just waiting desperately for the night. All they could think is that this would be over as soon as the night arrived because they would be able to kill Sam and his friends, crumbling the chain ofmand.

    But what they don¡¯t know is, even Sam and his friends are waiting for the night. They are waiting for the Vampires and their servants to takeplete action so that they could flex their muscles a bit.

    By evening, the Pre-transcendent stage Minotaurs managed to reach the third ring all the while battling the Pre-transcendent stage cultivators of the dwarves.

    They didn¡¯t want fight in the first of second ring as they are suffering from casualties of the aftershocks.

    They are already suffering immense losses and dwarves are deliberately luring them to kill their own kind.

    That is why they tried their best to drag the battle deeper into the town as they thought, they could do the same to the residents of the town. After all, they are ignorant about the whereabouts of the residents and though they are within the houses inside the town.

    But they didn¡¯t meet them.

    The Pre-transcendent stage Minotaurs are higher in numberpared to the dwarves in the town. But they still managed to hold their own against them until they reached a clearing they made.

    Inside that clearing, Philip is sitting while arge Golden bird is standing beside him.

    That is none other than Yanwu.

    Even though the Minotaurs felt like they lured the dwarves to the inner ring, it is actually a ploy. The dwarves made it look like that with Sam¡¯s instructions. This is another ability of the crystal table.

    Sam noticed that he could use his energy and spiritual sense to send the information directly to the mind of someone within the range and tagged as an ally to him within the table.

    He managed to guide them to fight in a way to lure them inside the town and send them to special areas that are specifically made for fighting these Pre-transcendent stage cultivators.

    The three Minotaurs are a bit surprised but they didn¡¯t care much and went directly to attack Philip and Yanwu, who retaliated in kind.

    Sam¡¯s situations are happening in various other ces. Watt was apanied by Sky and Falck as they are in charge of air defense from Pre-transcendent stage beasts.

    Arman was paired with Raiju, Mia is in charge of the stream, Dia is assigned with Jack. Shadow mice are there to help with some grenades and such, Zoi termites are in the first ring along with locusts.

    The battles intensified particrly where Sam¡¯s teammates are stationed.

    Each spot is being attacked by at least three Minotaurs and they are fighting them vigorously. Luckily there are still rules in ce. Or more like the Minotaurs couldn¡¯t afford to employ the higher level cultivators other than the early stage Pre-transcendent stage experts in this ce.

    But they should have done that as abination of a Mythical beast and Sam¡¯s friends are not to be taken lightly. The battle waspletely one-sided and the Minotaurs are already suffering.

    But the Vampires are still stubborn, they are satisfied with the current situation.

    Even though the minotaurs are having a disadvantage, they are satisfied that they are upying the hands of Sam¡¯s friends. All they want to do currently is make Sam isted and this time, they nned to attack as a group of six.

    So, right now the arrival of the night is the only thing that is stopping them.

    And soon the time arrived.

    As soon as the sunset, the six vampires turned into puffs of smoke and moved towards the town.

    They crossed the first ring efficiently as for the second ring, even they didn¡¯t dare to enter that water with vitality, so they used some flying beasts that looked like Bats to cross over swiftly and soon, they arrived at the town head¡¯s mansion as they avoided Sam¡¯s friends and directly entered the mansion.

    Soon, they are right in front of Sam within therge hall.

    They are all focused on him with enormous killing intent.

    Sam just stood on his chair while still looking at the battle. He didn¡¯t even bother with the six vampires.

    He just casually operated the formations and the tricks he ced in various ces of the town.

    The Vampires, particrly the ones that attacked him previously are looking at him with a hateful gaze while the remaining three are focused enough to notice what Sam is doing, their eyes fell on the crystal table.

    They didn¡¯t expect something like this would be in Sam¡¯s hands, their eyes are filled with greed.

    Sam looked at them at this moment and said.

    "This thing looks great right? It also works great. It can show you what couldn¡¯t be seen normally. Like this."

    Sam said as he zoomed into a spot and there a bat is hanging on a tree right beside Philip¡¯s area of battle. The Vampires were stumped.

    This is one of their beasts, sent there to ambush Philip. Sam just continued without caring.

    "And it also allows doing something that normally can¡¯t be done, like this."

    With that, he zoomed to the town head mansion in the holographic image and showed the view of the hall they are in. He first ced his finger on the main door, which immediately closed. And they noticed that there is a mirror attached to the door.

    Sam didn¡¯t just stop there and started touching the pirs within the holographic image and the mirror started appearing. The seats, the pictures, and even the ceiling, the walls. All turned out to be mirrors under the illusion. Now their mirror forms are revealed.

    Sam once again looked into their eyes and spoke.

    "Do you guys really think, that your journey would be so easy? Do you really think that you entered this ce because of your superiority? You are here because I let you in.

    And I let you in because I prepared something for you."

    As soon as he spoke, his body glowed with golden light, as he activated the partial light fusion.

    He leisurely took out a small metal stand that is almost the size of a normal candle stand and took out a crystal that has many faces on that stand.

    He ced his right index finger on top of that crystal and let out a faint light. The transparent crystal turned golden giving out a faint hue.

    Sam looked at the six vampires who don¡¯t know what is happening yfully.

    After his previous encounter with Vampires, Sam thought long and hard about how to deal with them. He doesn¡¯t want to tangle with them directly, they are strong and Sam would have to exert so much energy to deal with them even if they are two on one and if they are three on one, he would have to resort to dangerous alternatives or the chessboard.

    But he doesn¡¯t want to collect everyone and anyone. He has to use that chessboard as a trump card and only if he wanted to collect someone truly interesting.

    Then he remembered the light element attacks that have immense effect on them. It is like a virus for them.

    Light element attacks are notmon, in fact, they are too rare to the point most of the people in the universe don¡¯t know it is even possible. But for Sam it is possible. In fact, it is one of his most used and most dangerous modes of attack.

    So, why would he tangle with them when he can prepare for their attack when he is particrly bane to their existence?

    That is how heid this trap and he made it so deliberately that they wouldn¡¯t be able to escape.

    Sam shot aser beam through that index finger. Theser beam diverged into several beams and came out of the crystal as it hit various mirrors and with just a single tilt of his finger, six beams shot towards the six vampires before they could make sense of what is happening around them.

    And just like that, they suffered their first strike.

    The only problem is, even though it is painful the six vampires are still standing, The intensity of the attacks was reduced quite a bit due to this much divergence. But Sam was not worried instead, he grinned with mischief, while the vampires who are clearly safe for now couldn¡¯t help but feel terror gripping their throats.

    "Let¡¯s begin our game shall we? We are going to have so much fun."

 Chapter 670: Plot

    Sam didn¡¯t even move from his chair as he just threw theser beams into the crystal on the table.

    The mirrors did the rest of the trick.

    Every time a Vampire moved, Sam shot them with a beam of light. Since he is the one who installed the mirrors, he knew exactly how they worked and how he has to shoot in the crystal to hit him.

    Their bodies slowly started taking the brunt of the attack.

    Sam activated his energy vision and looked at them carefully, as long as he could detect any form of energy, he would attack that Vampire.

    He didn¡¯t give them a single chance to leeway. He didn¡¯t give them the time to defend or to attack Sam. They don¡¯t even have the chance to turn into their forms.

    Sam felt like this is extremely easy. All he needed was to lure them into a trap and they are done.

    He looked at them and spoke.

    "I have a game for you. I will ask questions and the one who answers will be spared from the attacks for one minute, if no one answers, the intensity of the attacks will be increased by ten percent for every minute you dy.

    Let¡¯s get started with the first question.

    Are the Vampires only races involved in this war or are there other races from the Undead realm involved?"

    Sam said as he shot a continuous light beam. The six of them are being hit in six different ces and slowly their skin is burning.

    They couldn¡¯t take it anymore and everyone wanted to speak, but one person beat the rest of them to it.

    "Vampires, Ghouls, and Wights are involved. But only Vampires and Ghouls are currently here, the wights didn¡¯te."

    Sam smiled and made small finger movements which made that one person exempt from this torture. The rest of the five are shot with light beams of the same intensity.

    After a minute is over, Sam once again included that sixth person in this and asked his second question.

    "What is your purpose ofing here? What is the true purpose of this war?"

    This time it didn¡¯t take long before one of them opened his mouth.

    "We don¡¯t know the exact details, all we know is lead the Minotaurs and the Orcs to capture four major towns and the City of the Council in the dwarven territory, and our the task will be done. We will only get further details after we finish it."

    Sam modified the crystal position once again and let this guy go.

    After another minute, Sam once again asked.

    "What are those grey stones that you got?"

    "They are the stones from the undead realm. A volcanic stone formed by the Volcano called the Undying Volcano.

    They are hard to find and they have grades. Ours is one of the lowest grades, it turns every living creatures into undead by burning their vitality and soul away."

    "What is the progress of this war in other towns and the City?"

    "Dwarves were really caught off guard with the attacks of both Minotaurs and the Orcs. They couldn¡¯t react in time and almost all the viges were sacked.

    One of the towns that were being attacked by Orcs was destroyed and people retreated to the Town head mansion. They are still working on it.

    Another town has its wall destroyed and they are still at war.

    The third town was being upied by us.

    Thest town is this.

    As for the City. The war is still bnced. The Dwarves are stronger than we thought and they are holding their own against the top dogs of both races.

    There is not much we can do in that battle-field."

    "Why are only Initial stage Pre-transcendent stage Vampires in this ce?"

    "We can¡¯t send the people of superior cultivation. This is our limit."

    "So, when are the wightsing here?"

    "Two weeks."

    Sam asked a few more questions and asked for their storage devices before throwing the chessboard towards them.

    All six of them disappeared and Sam finally stopped his light onught.

    He went through their belongings and checked all the scrolls to see if the information they gave matched and it did.

    After finishing it up, all that is left for him to do is to deal with the Minotaur soldiers.

    He once again focused on the situation through the Crystal table while he took out the wine and took a huge swig.

    The table usually consumes a lot of energy and now he even used his light element, the energy consumed is extremely high. There is no way he could take it without any other energy intake.

    After recovering a bit, he observed the war. The Minotaurs are okay for a bit as they tried to survive, but Sam sent a series of messages to his friends and they became aggressive. All this while, even though they had the upper hand the scene looked like there is still a chance for Minotaurs for their superior members, but they are done immediately after this.

    Two Minotaurs died in every location almost instantly. This made the rest of them afraid as they started retreating. They tried to wait for themands from the Vampires, but they didn¡¯t give anymands for the past half an hour.

    So they didn¡¯t care anymore and went back.

    The enemies slowly retreated and felt the loss.

    Sam just ordered for the cleanup and didn¡¯t chase them.

    The Minotaurs are just pawns, there is no need for him to exert too much energy and suffer losses to deal with pawns. He has to wait for other pieces of the game toe out.

    He did order one thing though. The Minotaurs with elemental affinity. Particrly the Nascent stage ones. He has to create his own chess teams. The first one would be the Minotaur team. All the pawns will be the Nascent stage Minotaurs with elemental affinity and he would collect them.

    Even if he didn¡¯t manage to collect the rest of the pieces, he would leave them be for now. The second team is the undead team.

    He is going to collect these Vampires, Ghouls, and Wights that areing here.

    Currently, he has six vampires and from what he heard, this town is being most troublesome and they already sent the call for the other vampires that took the other town.

    They will being here soon enough and Sam also took out some tokens that would send the signal to the Vampires that are within the Minotaur territory gathering the troops.

    The wights will still take two weeks toe. If Sam managed to gather the remaining sixteen Vampires, then that would be great, if not he would gather the vampires, ghouls and wightsbined and make a chess team.

    After training them properly within this chessboard, he would drill the obedience and subservience into their very souls and make them part of his army and troops.

    They could be elites and would work solely for him and his organization.

    As for why Sam is collecting these troops, it is simple. He doesn¡¯t know where he is going with these tasks from those gods. But he wants to be prepared for all kinds of scenarios. If there came a time where he would need an army behind him, he wouldn¡¯t be in a position where he would be a sitting duck, trying to gather an army on such short notice.

    Sam shook those thoughts off of his head and started making preparations for the next attacks. Since the element of surprise is gone along with the wall, it is better for him to add another line of defense to rece the wall and he once again felt like using the water.

    While Sam is nning for the immediate future in a distant ce, someone is plotting to end his future.

    Indra is currently in a meeting with some of the gods.

    He just finished speaking his mind on what he is nning and the rest of the gods couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit ashamed of him.

    "Indra, you are the king of all the Lesser gods within the Hindu realm. Don¡¯t you feel it is beneath you to be this petty to plot this much against a yer? You have been getting more and more brazen. You might not have experienced the same tribtions like everyone else to be the god you are now, but you should at least think of your position and honor before you do something like this."

    Kartikeya pointed his finger at him angrily and stood up.

    "Hmph, do you really think you can talk to me like that? You are also a god belonging to the Hindu realm, don¡¯t forget that I am a king to you too."

    Kartikeya suddenly release his aura and looked at Indra coldly. The whole room was filled with the stench of blood.

    "Do you believe me, I can destroy you right now and go beg for forgiveness from Brahma who put you in this position.

    I bet that he wouldn¡¯t do much to me, except for some small punishment as long as I don¡¯t cripple you. After all, my father is the destroyer of the realms, no one wants to get on his bad side and that includes the creator.

    Do you want to give it a try?"

    He said as a spear appeared in his hand and he stabbed it into the table in front of him.

    Indra gulped nervously.

    Kartikeya looked at him and smirked before saying.

    "I didn¡¯t think so. So, you better watch your tongue. The only reason you are the king is the rest of the gods disdain that position that includes me. I could dethrone you in my sleep if I want to."

    With that, he withdrew his spear and left the ce.

    But Indra didn¡¯t stop his n. He looked at the rest of the gods and said.

    "My n is still on the table."

    He looked at another person and said.

    "You are the one who is sending the next Pce of inheritance. I am not asking you to make it unfair to him, all you have to do is change the next Pce of Inheritance. I would give you all that I promised if you support this proposal."

    The rest of them thought for a bit and they nodded after negotiating for a better price. They felt like their yers can suffer a bit for this.

    "We will see you in the meeting." With those words, everyone left.

 Chapter 671: Information on Wights

    The next day, the Gods that are involved in the game were in a meeting.

    "The next Pce of Inheritance spot is changing. I am opening the Pce in the Undead Realm."

    Hou Yi spoke in a calm tone.

    "Why the sudden change?" One of the gods asked.

    "Nothing, I just felt like it."

    "You felt like it? More like you felt the price is good enough." Kartikeya said with a cold snort. Hou Yi looked at him with a cold gaze.

    "What you want to have a go? Face the truth if you are man enough. No wonder your wife left you. You sick greedy piece of shit."

    The whole area was suddenly full of battle aura and killing intent. shing each other as the whole realm trembled.

    The gambler who is silent all the while tapped the table with a finger and both of them stopped. He then looked at them with ack of interest and said.

    "Just vote and decide on what to do. Don¡¯t make a fuss. But do remember Hou Yi. I might be a gambler, but every action you take under influence of others will turn into a gamble. Consider the odds before you do so."

    He spoke and just stayed silent for the rest of the time.

    "I think it is a bit premature to send them to Undead realm. They wouldn¡¯t be able to survive for that long. There are no rules and no social orders like reputation and honor to let them old dogs attack the youngsters. As long as they are delicious enough, they will be devoured and I believe the yers are all tasty for them."

    Hou Yi looked at the person that spoke and said.

    "I thought about it. We would be giving the location of the Pce of Inheritance directly. And we are also only opening one Pce of inheritance.

    In the Pce of inheritance, I will give them the charm to save themselves. The charm works three times and they can survive...."

    Hou Yi went on to exin and even after he was done, not all of them are satisfied.

    "What kind of game would be interesting if we keep on sheltering the yers? Anyway, I agree to this proposal. Let us just vote." Indra said halting the discussion and the voting began."

    There are only two votes left out of which one of them voted neutral. So, only one vote left and it happened to be Gambler.

    "I need to add a condition."

    "What is it?"

    "Let our yers bring some helpers to this Pce of inheritance. Each yer can bring three extra people."

    "What is the point of this?" Indra asked coldly.

    "The point is I want it to happen."

    Gambler said unreasonably clearly pointing it out that he doesn¡¯t give a shit about their opinion and his condition passed without much resistance.

    The next Pce of Inheritance was decided to be held within the realm of Undead.

    Indra is smiling sinisterly as he left the ce.

    Hou Yi stopped him and asked.

    "Why are you so against a yer?"

    "Why do you care?" He replied clearly annoyed. Hou Yi frowned and said.

    "Indra, I am not your subordinate, what you asked of me, put arger target on my back than you told me, so I better know the reason."

    Indra exined and Hou Yi clearly understood what his problem is.

    It is not that Sam acted against him in the first Pce of inheritance. That is only one of the reasons. The main reason is Arman¡¯s current situation. They are gods and they have some ways to keep track of the yers and everyone used their own methods.

    Arman is now currently Sam¡¯sckey. Every time Sam was contacted by Ling Tian, Indra also contacted Arman, and every time he did that, Arman acted as if nothing happened and he behaved like he is his own man. But after that conversation, he will go back to Sam and be his obedientckey.

    If not for the fact that there is a rule that Gods shouldn¡¯t interfere and manipte the yers, he would have killed Sam a long time ago, or at least he would have helped Arman solidify his mind. These yers are their symbols of pride, they wouldn¡¯t be able to contact other yers or keep an eye on them, but they can do so for their own yers and Arman is always beside Sam like a dog.

    This made him feel frustrated.

    But the worst part of it is that he couldn¡¯t do anything about it.

    If he did something to Sam directly, Hou Yi believed the Gambler would directly go bash him upright in his mansion and the life in Indra¡¯s realm might even be gone to extinction.

    It is too much of a risk to just get his pride back.

    So, all he can do is manipte thepetition as much as he can and kill Sam within the rules so that Arman could escape the influence.

    Meanwhile, Sam doesn¡¯t know that a God is trying to mess with him and he is even pulling other gods into his ns. He is currently in the middle of creating extra defenses for the town.

    Right after the attack, the very night Sam made the dwarves start the construction. He started building arge water ring around the town. The building is difficult but digging up is easy.

    The water ring gets the water from the stream. Sam thought that the flow of the stream might be affected and it turned out that it didn¡¯t.

    The flow of the stream is the same as before no matter how much water he drew into the town.

    For the next week, the construction went on and the next batch of vampires finally came.

    Sam didn¡¯t wait for them to attack this time. He led the attack and captured another six vampires easily.

    He overwhelmed them with his friends and beasts. They didn¡¯t expect that as soon as they entered the vicinities of the town, they would be attacked.

    Half of the Vampires that they caught are from the Minotaur territory and the other half of them came from the town that was already sacked.

    Sam interrogated thetter half about what they are doing with the town. But the answer didn¡¯t satisfy curiosity but only answered a few of his spections.

    The only orders they got from the team in the Minotaur territory who are the actingmanders of the whole operation is that they should hold the town head mansion and let the Minotaurs farm and take the rest of the town and the fields. Only the mansion is in their hands.

    Sam has no ns on going to the Minotaur territory or the other town to look for the Vampires. From what they said, the Vampires couldn¡¯t wait and if they don¡¯t get any answer from this second batch, the third batch woulde in the next two days by any means necessary.

    Because in another week, the Wights will being and Vampires don¡¯t have the most amicable rtions with the wights.

    Sam decided to ask about the Wights and he got some interesting information.

    Wights are simr to Vampires in many ways, they can create undead servants just like Vampires. But there is a difference in their servants.

    Vampires can make their servants have their sentience. Even though those servants will lose their abilities they had when they are alive, they could still learn the suitable abilities of the vampire servants and think to their own a certain extent.

    As for Wights, they have a different result in making the undead. They can preserve the abilities of the person they are turning into their servant but they will lose the sentience and couldn¡¯t think and acts mostly out of instinct.

    The onlymon thing in both of these cases is them creating servants, apart from that they can create normal undead from dead bodies.

    They are natural necromancers.

    There are other differences and simrities. The simrities include the two species consuming vitality.

    Vampires are weird species because they drink blood from live creaturess and take away their vitality. But if they are hit with a light or even the water filled with vitality directly, they couldn¡¯t take it.

    Just like that, the Wights are also weird species.

    The Wights consume vitality in a different way and that is from flora. All types of nts are their food.

    But they also couldn¡¯t take the external vitality directly hitting them. The only difference they have from vampires, in this case, is that they aren¡¯t affected by light elements as much as the vampires, rather they are more sensitive to the wood element vitality.

    When Sam learned all the details, he fell into deep thought. The Water filled with vitality using the healing formations acts good enough against the undead creatures and servants, but the mirror room is not a good thing against the Wights.

    He doesn¡¯t have the wood element, otherwise, that would have made things easier for him.

    After some thought, Sam just decided to deal with them head-on. Relying on their weakness is only one way to do it. He has many ways as long as they are within the Pre-transcendent realm initial stages.

    At this moment, he is just waiting for the rest of the Vampires toe. He already has twelve people and he only needs another four toplete his first set.

    Compared to it, the minotaur set is only half-filled. Sam is eager to fill his sets. Once he does that, he could use them whenever a situation arises where the numbers matter.

 Chapter 672: Provocation

    Another week passed.

    In this week, the next batch of vampires really came. They seemed to have paid an extra price toe here that fast. But they dide and Sam finished his Vampire set with sixteen members.

    As for the rest, he just killed them off.

    They are all elites of the Vampire race and they seemed to have high positions.

    And Sam¡¯s current haul is not just the Vampires, he also got something else. The bats these people are riding are one of the high-grade beasts and he got around ten of them.

    As for the other thing, they are the Undying Volcanic stones. The stones from the Catapults. He got a great deal of them. Every vampire has a Volcanic stone with them and he collected around twenty of them.

    He still didn¡¯t figure out a way to put them to good enough use. But they will definitelye in handy as soon as he finished it.

    Now, all he is waiting for is the Wights toe.

    Once they came, he would finish this up. From what he knew the Wights are the ones on top of the pyramid regarding this operation.

    They are the ones leading this and the Vampires and Ghouls are only co-lead.

    Along with this, due to the victory, the current situation changed and they finally started getting some information from the City of the Council.

    All this while, the reason for the information obstruction was due to the troops of the Minotaur. The Vampires tried their best to limit the information.

    And the information transfer happens through the bird-type beasts. They are simr to Silver Pigeons and the Four Eyed Ravens, but a lot slower.

    Now that the Vampires are gone, the Minotaur troops outside are sitting ducks. Sam¡¯s friend asionally went into their troops to get some sparring done with the Pre-transcendent Minotaurs in these two weeks.

    Now that these two weeks are passed, Sam is currently discussing his next n with his friends. The Vampires didn¡¯t feel any remorse when they spilled information about Wights. They got so much info on a personal level, Sam has thought of so many ways to deal with them.

    But what took ce is one of the least expected scenarios. The wights didn¡¯te to the town, Sam was in. From what they got through the info, the first ce they went is to the town that was already sacked and they seemed to be doing something there.

    After two days, there is another piece of information stating that the MInotaurs in that town are alling out along with the Vampires and they are marching towards Sam¡¯s current position. The whole town became devoid of Minotaur and Vampires. Only some humans remained along with the wights.

    The Wights just didn¡¯t stop there. For the next ten days, the news came about what Wights are doing non-stop. They sacked the remaining two towns like they are nothing. They killed every dwarf they could get their hands on and the dwarves that escaped sent the message to the City of the Council from which Sam got the news.

    They are not stopping the information cirction now. The Wights doesn¡¯t seem to care.

    From all the info Sam gathered, there are around twenty wights that came into the field and they divided into small teams to do things.

    By the time it was two weeks since they entered the field, they made a lot of changes.

    They sacked the remaining three towns and sent all the vampires and Minotaurs from that town towards Sam¡¯s position.

    They started rallying the remaining troops from the Minotaur territory. All this while, most of the Minotaurs that participated in the war are male, but now even the female minotaurs are being rallied and they are all marching to Sam¡¯s position.

    The troops outside of the town which Sam is protecting kept on increasing day by day.

    The dwarves that just got a little upper hand and felt relieved when they defeated and pushed the forces back are panicking.

    Except for the situation at the City of the Council and Sam¡¯s town, the rest of the ces are all under the control of Minotaurs and orcs.

    These changes didn¡¯t stop there.

    The orcs and ghouls are also moving towards Sam¡¯s town. From what Sam knew of the current war situation, the City of the Council is not a ce where the Initial stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivators can join the battle.

    The middle-stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivators are nothing but normal soldiers. And the battle there is not about quantity. So, the wights are concentrating on Sam¡¯s town as they cannot change the situation at the City of the Council by much even if they participated.

    So, they are targeting the next tough nut and trying to fight with Sam by rallying as many troops as they came.

    When Sam got the news. He estimated that the Wights will be done by another two weeks topletely get the troops. The Orcs and the Ghouls will take a longer time to get here.

    It has already been four months and it would four and a half months before the final battle starts.

    Sam does have some time to make extra preparations.

    He started scouting the forest to find some high-grade trees. The Vegetation of this area is extremely good and Sam could spend all the time he has on chopping wood and he would still take at least a year to destroy the forests of the dwarven territory.

    Sam decided to make another defensive machine since the number of troops increased by a lot and he is using some high-grade wood for the job.

    He came up with a new design and gave it to the artisans and the wood element users to create the new machine.

    The design is not exactlyplicated, but it has too manyponents. So, the dwarves had to work day and night to finish it.

    Their target is to make twenty of them and while they are doing that, Sam startedying some inscriptions all over the town.

    He even took out some of the leftover Indigo water to deal with this situation. At first, he didn¡¯t want to use the inscriptions or the personal resources.

    Because dwarves are not good with the first one, he is not okay with using the second.

    But now it is more than that. This might be the biggest war he participated in, in a while. The only war that coulde close is the war with Usaine sect.

    The war with rubrum and even the Union sect didn¡¯t interest him this much. He would like to see what these Wights can do that these Vampires cannot. He decided on one thing, that he wouldn¡¯t let this town go no matter what.

    So, he took out his resources and started using the Inscriptions.

    The preparations were going on in full scale.

    Sam and his friends are extremely busy.

    After two weeks, the situation finally came.

    Sam stood on a pir that was constructed in the middle of the water ring. He saw the wight for the first time.

    They are all white. Their skin is white and it has a crystalline hue with their frosty blue eyes.

    They looked like they are made of ice.

    When they saw Sam from far away, they also halted in their tracks and looked at him.

    Sam could even see the smirk on the face of the person who seemed to be the leader.

    They walked into their gigantic tent.

    Sam took off on harbinger and went back to the town head mansion. He looked at Watt who is preparing the troops and sent all the residents back to the bunker and gave an order.

    "Prepare the new machines. Put them in their position. Wait for them to attack first."

    Sam sat in his chair once again and looked at the crystal table. The area covered by the crystal table increased and currently it also covered the enemy troops.

    He looked at the troops that are changing into battle formations. He looked at the Orcs, the Ghouls, the Vampires, and finally, Wights sitting in the tent discussing something. He couldn¡¯t hear what they are saying, but they would hear what he wants.

    He ced his finger on their images and transmitted a message.

    "How long should I wait? Come forward and I can put an end to this.

    I am sick of your corpses disturbing my vacation."

    Everyone in the tent shivered at these words. Not because of the content of the words, but rather the calm and boring voice that directly transmitted the message to them. This made them feel afraid.

    Sam who is in the town not only gave a message to them and did so in a rxed manner and here they are trying their best and bashing their heads to think of ways to deal with him.

    By now, they understood from the Minotaur¡¯s ount of the situation that Sam is the one behind all their troubles.

    This made them have a seed of second thoughts in their heads. They don¡¯t know much about Sam and that is why they are taking an approach that would allow them to bombard with superior numbers.

    But even now, that person is so rxed that he could provoke them. This is made them rethink what they are going against.

 Chapter 673: Defense

    Sam looked at the image of those people in the tent and could guess how tense they are now. He just smirked and moved his vision to the remaining ces. He looked at the battle formations and the number of people that areing.

    Currently, they are outnumbered by around thirty times. There are too many enemy soldiers.

    But Sam is so rxed that he started looking for the Minotaurs with elemental affinity to finish his chess set.

    He is also searching for the ghouls and other Pre-transcendent stage cultivators¡¯ positions so that he can consider adding them to his collection.

    The Wights started moving along with the rest of the people in the tent as they spread among their troops.

    Sam is currently surrounded from all three sides and they are making their way towards thatrge water ring. That is actually the first line of defense into the town. The walls arepletely gone and the town looked bare and open, but he is confident in defending the town.

    While the troops are led by the water element users and ice element users so that they can provide a way for them over the water ring, they didn¡¯t realize that the water ring is not the first thing they have to worry about.

    Sam ced his finger on the table and traced it along with the image of a road and led it to one of the new war machines.

    The machine is arge rectangr wooden box. There are a lot of circr holes on its surface. There is arge metal rectangr te attached to it at the bottom, perpendicr to it and also to its rear.

    The rectangr te has small protrusions with holes in it. The dwarves standing there loaded the small holes with wooden bolts that looked like crossbow bolts with metal tips and took a step back. They loaded more than a hundred of them in one frame and took a step back.

    By the time, Sam stopped his tracing in the mansion over the holographic image, the inscriptions that are leading to it activated and there is a faint glow over the wooden frame of the machine.

    At the same time, the rectangr te moved upwards and shed to the rear of the wooden box.

    The wooden bolts moved into the wooden box and passed through the holes of the wooden box as they shot towards the enemy troops.

    But the dwarves noticed that when the bolts were shot out, they are burning with a grey me.

    The bolts moved towards the enemy troops and before they could defend they impaled into the frontliners. The water and ice element users.

    The twenty war machines did the same.

    The bolts engulfed in the grey mes impaled themselves into the enemies particrly the front liners and the enemies caught the grey me and started burning.

    The troops that are moving orderly and confidently are in utter chaos within a matter of seconds.

    Sam made another adjustment and once again shot another round and this time, the trajectory changed and the targets are the people behind the frontliners.

    Arge number of enemy troops are suddenly being carpeted by the grey mes.

    They are in tight-knit formations which made it easier for the grey me to spread.

    The leader of wights, who is also themander of the troops was dumbfounded. Not just him, every person from undead who knew about this undying me couldn¡¯t help but feel panic.

    They knew the consequences of this, their troops will be crippled in no time.

    Before they could react and take action, the troops are already turning undead and started attacking their formerrades.

    The worst damage was done by the flying beasts. There are many bat-type beasts and the vulture-type beasts and when they caught the grey me, they ran rampant. The riders on their backs suffered and then both of them just crashed into the troops before spreading the me even more.

    The troops that are charging forward suddenly came to a halt because of this and they are trying their best to control the situation.

    "Kill everyone who caught the grey me. Hurry up."

    Themander gave out the order coldly. At least thirty percent of his troops are gone at this moment and the number is increasing rapidly.

    "Change the formation. Formation three." He continued with the orders and the troops started going defensive, but it is not easy. No matter how hard they tried to defend the wooden bolts it is hard for them to do so.

    All it takes is a small whiff of the me and the people started burning and turning into the undead.

    They retreated a bit and changed into a new formation. They stayed put for now out of their range.

    Themander of the wights is feeling pressured. He lost a lot of troops and now he has to figure out way to enter the town. He sent his orders to the remaining sides and told them to stay put for now.

    He started drawing theyout of the town and tried to find the blind spot of those war machines. If they could find that spot, they would be able to get into the town. In his opinion, the water rings and other traps can be ovee with numbers, but not these wooden bolts. The numbers would only prove more troublesome.

    For the next few days, he sent smaller teams in various spots to avoid these bolts, but the machines are able to target them. After thinking long and hard, they finally found a way. But this time, they didn¡¯t try to avoid them, the n is about dodging.

    The bolts themselves are not so much of a threat to begin with, the grey me is the only threat to them and the Wightmander thought about the drawbacks of the grey me and his own abilities that could counter the grey me.

    Then he sent his troops for a hunt to capture some beasts from the wild. He has only a few requirements for the beasts. They have to be bird type and they have to berge. He didn¡¯t care about their level of cultivation. All he needed was size.

    After capturing the birds, the wights turned them into their servants. The grey me is dangerous, but it only works its magic on the living beings, the undead are an exemption, the most it would do is make the corpse a rotten mess.

    But all he needs is a certain time gap and the corpses tost a good enough time.

    The next day, the beasts started forming a curtain over the heads of the troops as they moved forward. Even the front line is guarded by the undead servants too. They took the brunt of the bolts and grey me as they led the troops forward.

    When they reached the water ring, the wightmander finally heaved a sigh of relief.

    The undead soldiers switched with the ice element users as they started creating a path of ice over the water.

    They were about to cross the water ring, but at this exact moment, the wightmander heard another voice from Sam.

    "You really are as good as the Vampires said, but dp you really think that it would be that easy. You might want to make your people stand on better grounds."

    As soon as the words ended, the soldiers in the front all felt the earth quaking, and before they could think what happened, a few tens of meters of earth copsed around the water ring. The troops standing in that range all fell into the water.

    The actual size of the water ring was revealed and the wightmander faced another huge loss of troops.

    He almost went crazy when he looked at the scene.

    To his relief, some soldiers managed to react in time and came back. He decided to proceed forward once again since this is a one-time surprise attack.

    They froze the water ring and managed to cross it. But their plight didn¡¯t stop there and it only just began.

    The thin water jets at the bank of the water ring. The enemies knew about this from the Minotaur troops. But what they don¡¯t know is Sam increased the water jets not only on the ground but also in the surrounding houses.

    This time, the water jets are not just mixed with toxins, but also the indigo water.

    The Wightmander just grits his teeth and let them move forward. No matter the price, he needs the town. When the Vampires failed, the situation fell into the hands of Wights and they are in no ce to lose it.

    They are the leaders of the operation for a reason and if they lose this town, that might change, it would affect the things beyond his own imagination.

    So, he made his troops march forward as he saw the recap of what happened to the troops led by the Vampires.

    The only difference is the wightmander led more troops and suffered more lossespared to the Vampires.

 Chapter 674: Ambushes

    The Wightmander let the troops bombard the town and after some time, he asked them to retreat.

    He decided to use gueri warfare and destroy the town bit by bit.

    After everything calmed down and all the soldiers came back escaping the wooden bolt shooting range, he once again met with the rest of the Wights, Vampires, and Ghouls.

    There is one question in everyone¡¯s mind.

    "How can he use Undying Volcanic stones in the morning?"

    This question is eating on their minds. It is already a big feat for a human or a dwarf to use the undying Volcanic stone, but using it in the morning is even impossible for them, much less a human or a dwarf. But to be able to use it and think of a better way to use it, they are feeling vexed.

    They thought of many possibilities, and Wights obviously tried to shift the me to vampires, but they didn¡¯t let this go. They insisted that it has nothing to do with them, after all, they cannot even use their own power much in the morning. Much less using it when betraying their own faction.

    They knew for the fact that the wights are just trying to find a way out and pinned it on them on paranoia.

    So, they didn¡¯t care much about this. They are also desperately trying their best to find a way out.

    After some time, they decided on an attack pattern. The soldiers and the servants will attack in the morning and try to destroy the town bit by bit.

    The Vampires, Wights, and Ghouls will attack in the night. Since their powers are mostly enhanced in darkness, they would attack at that time.

    Currently, the sun is just setting and all of them started preparing.

    At this moment, the Vampires, ghouls, and the Wights allbined, they are around fifty members. The Vampires are the shortest with only ten while the remaining two groups have twenty each.

    First, they decided to send a group of five with two wights, two ghouls, and a Vampire into the town and target one of Sam¡¯s friends.

    For that, the Wightmander used a small dark butterfly and let it fly into the town.

    Nobody cared when a small butterfly appeared out of nowhere, they just let it be as this sight somon for them as numerous butterfliese to the town through the forest.

    The butterfly made a trip through the town and went back to the Wightmander.

    Themander came out of his tent and sent the team out. Out of the five people, the Vampires are most good at sneaking in.

    But the darkness is their home ground, so they did find a way to break in and their first target happened to be one of Sam¡¯spanions.

    It is actually Chatur who is currently checking the water lines of the town.

    That is also the reason the Wightmander picked him as the target. He was seen the least when fighting even at the previous time and since he is checking the water lines, they thought he might be a crucial member in creating and controlling these water-based attacks.

    They decided to take the risk.

    At this moment, Chatur is currently near the stream entrance. He is checking the concentration of death energy within the formation.

    While he is busying himself with the tasks to do, he waved his hand all of a sudden a small water bird dashed forward hitting a dark mass of energy.

    He turned around and looked at the five people standing in front of him.

    But his face didn¡¯t show any surprise or panic, he is as calm as he could be. This made the enemies surprised a bit.

    This ambush is a bit important to them. This is like a trial run for their future operations.

    But their opponent didn¡¯t show any fear of panic, he is actually extremely calm.

    Chatur calmly looked at them and took out his brush.

    He held the brush behind his back and looked at them coldly. The five of them exchanged nces and made their move.

    Chatur didn¡¯t blink and just waved his brush, a row of weird patterns formed in the air, and a water dragon was created from those patterns as the dragon flew towards the iing attackers.

    It didn¡¯t stop with a single dragon. Chatur kept on swinging his brush as patterns kept on emerging in the air, creating water bullets, water spears, water dragons, all kinds of water attacks, and tried his best to attack them.

    But he was still overwhelmed by the five of them and soon received a decent hit on his ribs as he coughed up blood.

    He tried his best to resist and after some time, he couldn¡¯t take it anymore.

    Chatur looked at them with rage bubbling inside his heart, but couldn¡¯t do anything. The five of them also felt like they seeded in their ambush and were about to finish him off, when Chatur just lunged into the stream and activated his illusion techniques to escape.

    All the while throwing the water attacks from the stream non-stop.

    He zoomed through the stream as he escaped.

    The five of them didn¡¯t follow through. They knew that it would be hard to not attract attention like this, but they are already happy because they are so sure that they would be able to finish off Chatur if there is no stream nearby.

    They went back and reported everything.

    Meanwhile, Chatur also went to the Town-head mansion to report.

    "Your act is good enough, just hide for a few days within the mansion."

    Even before Chatur spoke, Sam already said.

    It would beughable if he couldn¡¯t find out that these five people areing into the town with his crystal table. He kept the table activated for the whole day now, with the help of energy cells and his heavenly wine.

    There is no way he couldn¡¯t find them. It is all his n.

    But he has his reasons for doing what he did.

    For the next few days, the war went on like this.

    In the morning, the Minotaurs, orcs, and humans all attacked together and tried their best to destroy everything there. But they couldn¡¯t progress too much.

    Other than that, every night there are ambushes on Sam¡¯s friends and the Pre-transcendent stage Dwarves.

    But there are no lives lost, every time the people who are ambushed tried their best to escape using their advantage in the knowledge of the battle-field since the town is their home ground.

    The wightmander didn¡¯t feel anything wrong though. Even though he couldn¡¯t kill them, they are still being injured severely and escaped. They wouldn¡¯t be able to stay at their hundred percent in the final battles.

    But Sam doesn¡¯t seem worried as the ambushes kept on increasing.

    At first, there is only one team of enemies ambushing at night. After three days, it turned into two teams in the same time, after another two days, it turned into three teams, and the very next day it turned into four.

    By ten days, except for the Wightmander and some top dogs, every team is getting ready for an ambush as they found out that Sam¡¯s friends and Dwarves are in an extremely important operation.

    Sam is looking at it all through the crystal table as he looked at the movements of these people. For some reason, the Wightmander also joined the ambush this time along with the rest of the top dogs and got ready to attack.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but smirk and mutter slowly.

    "Idiots."

    With that, he waited for them to enter the town ¡¯sneakily¡¯ without being noticed by anyone and each team went to their own destinations, where Sam¡¯s friends are ¡¯working¡¯.

    But what they are actually doing is, they are preparing for the attacks. They are waiting for their attacks tomence so that they can have fun.

    They are currently drilling six metal rods into the ground in their surroundings, these are special tools given to them by Sam based on their elemental usage to give them some advantage.

    While they finished their preparations and stayed there, soon the teams of five reached those spots.

    They didn¡¯t see the metal rods and directly surrounded their targets.

    Watt couldn¡¯t help but shake his head when he saw them. He was quite skeptical of this n and asked Sam much time whether it would work.

    But these corpses easily fell for it. They didn¡¯t even think about how Sam was able to talk to them in the middle of the battle.

    They didn¡¯t even think how Sam was able to activate so many things without moving out of the Town head¡¯s mansion.

    They didn¡¯t even think, why they were able to sessfully ambush their targets in the middle of the town even after their intentions are revealed.

    He doesn¡¯t know if he should call themander of these forces, Na?ve or stupid. But he has to say that he is impressed by how Sam managed to think about their reactions perfectly.

    His predictions are once again urate and this would be giving the desired victory to them.

 Chapter 675: Difference

    Sam witnessed the scene and chuckled. Nobody attacked the Town head mansion at this moment. Their main targets are Sam¡¯s friends and the Dwarven Pre-transcendent stage cultivators.

    The dwarves already took their own measures as Sam provided them some safe ces where they could defend themselves long enough.

    Sam also set some traps which he could activate through the crystal table to hinder the enemies.

    As for why he only wanted to staff for the time, his friends are there to deal with themter.

    He is not worried and took out some fried chicken as he ate while watching the show.

    As soon as Sam¡¯spanions are surrounded, Sam¡¯s beasts that are apanying each of them came out from the hiding and joined them before the formation is activated.

    Philip is joined by Yanwu. The formation activated and the whole region was filled with fire.

    The ground turned red and even the air was full of heat. The atmosphere turned into a fiery zone. Philip activated his elemental fusion as he breathed in the air full of fire spiritual energy.

    The same thing repeated in many other ces. This time, Sky didn¡¯t join with Watt. He is still inside the mansion waiting to assist anyone who has trouble in this situation along with Ape.

    Watt is with Falck.

    Mia is with Chatur. The ce Chatur standing was actually a ce with no water. At least that is what they thought, but as soon as they surrounded them. The earth crumbled revealing arge pond.

    Raiju is with Arman the formation is a lightning type and the five people felt their scalps turning numb.

    Dia is with Jack.

    Shadow mice are in charge of helping out just like Sky and Ape. But they wouldn¡¯t participate directly. Their goal is to use the grenades and other things to help them.

    The battle went on. Currently, the Wightmander and his team are facing Watt.

    They observed from their scouting that he is the closest to Sam and their n is to capture him alive to threaten him.

    His formation covered a prettyrge area and even the trees are included. He took out the silver cards as he threw them at the enemies. Themander is a swordsman with dark elemental energy. His energy is also a variant and seems to be something that has an extremely corrosive and decaying effect.

    But he couldn¡¯t attack properly with the wind des cutting him up.

    The cards are also extremely tricky.

    And it turned out he is not even the main target. Watt is mainly focusing on the remaining four people.

    As for themander he just dodged and ignored them.

    Even when fighting with the rest of the four, he is mainly damaging the Vampire only, the ghouls and the wight are not being critically attacked.

    The same scenario is happening everywhere.

    Sky and Ape also came out and went onto different ces to help dwarves.

    This night might as well turn out to be thest night of this battle.

    The enemies thought, they are the hunters and they are the ones ambushing, they fell into such a gigantic trap. Sam even let them run rampant for ten days straight.

    The environmental effect is too much for them to bear. They are undying creatures, they do have their drawbacks and an environmental effect is too much for them even with their abilities to regenerate.

    Soon one after another the enemies started falling. Sam¡¯s friends arepletely overwhelming them with the help of the formations.

    The formation not only gives them a familiar environment, it also supplies spiritual energy to let them recover their strength.

    Philip and the rest finished their job faster and they left the ce to help the dwarven cultivators.

    The only person who is having trouble is Watt.

    By this moment, except for the vampire who died and the Wightmander who is too strong, the remaining three people are tied down with sharp cards impaled into their faces and various other body parts acting as the tying locks of the sharp wire binding them in ce.

    The Wightmander almost lost it.

    "ARRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH."

    He looked to the sky and screamed in agony. The agony is not of the physical pain, rather it is from the mental torture he is going through. It is the pain of being yed as the fool.

    It is the pain of his whole troops being destroyed. It is the pain from the fact he turned out to be the person who led the troops and the mission towards destruction.

    He thought of all the boasts he spoke about beforeing here. All the ns, all the plots, thecent feeling he felt when he thought his n is working perfectly.

    At this moment, something broke in his mind and heart. He clearly lost it.

    Arge wave of cold death energy came out of his body and his crystal white skin turned dark with weird patterns and grey death energy huesing out of his body.

    The formation standing around waspletely destroyed and the wind energy flew away.

    Falck who is trying his best to assist Watt blew away and crashed into the forest. His body has several lines clearly showing how much he was infested with the death energy.

    Watt who was continuously battling was actually trying his best to recover through the formation.

    He felt the full brunt of this death energy wave and copsed to the ground as he grit his teeth to resist the pressure.

    Sam who is watching this felt something is extremely wrong.

    Wightmander looked at Watt and said in an eerie voice.

    "I must say that you guys are one of the best I have ever seen. I am the best in the whole undead realm. Every scion of other race had to bow before me, but they never made me use this form. But you forced me to do this.

    That hateful human is lucky to have you all as your subordinates.

    I will propose a deal for you. How about youe and work for me? I wouldn¡¯t turn you into my servants and leave you be."

    Watt who stood up with the support of the tree spat coldly on the ground in response.

    He looked at the trees and the surroundings, the death energy is decaying the trees and all the energy is flowing towards themander.

    Sam also observed this phenomenon and gave outmands before leaving the mansion. He took off on the harbinger at full speed.

    The Wightmander didn¡¯t seem angry at Watt¡¯s response and he instead said.

    "Do you know why I am here? This world is going to end soon, the undead realm will be independent again and gain their freedom back. And I will be the absolute king of the undead realm and rule it.

    The undead races will flourish under my reign and they will expand further getting their ce as the supreme races.

    Every being will bow before my might and I will bath in that honor.

    I am giving you a chance to share that honor. Think before you reject me.

    What is the use of being a subordinate of a puny human when you can feel the honor of standing behind me when the whole world kneels in front of me?"

    Watt looked into the horizon and his furrowed brows rxed. He just sat down leaning against the tree and spoke.

    His voice was weak, but his eyes are bright and confident.

    "You are right, there is a lot of difference between him and you.

    But the difference is not like you think.

    You will feel the honor is the world bowing in front of you. You feel pride when the world kneels in front of you.

    But to him, the world shall take honor in bowing before him, the world will take pride in kneeling for him."

    As soon as he spoke, the Wightmander stood dazed hearing those words.

    Before he could react, he felt danger and dodged to the side, but it is already toote, a sharp de cut through his arm and it fell off directly.

    Samnded with a loud thud and stood in front of Watt. He took out the heavenly wine and gave it to him, before turning back.

    He held the reaper and the executioner des in his hands as he looked at the Wightmander and said.

    "You got some nerve. If not for the fact that I am too bored and wanted to y with you, you would have been dead the day you came here. I let you live for a few days and here you are trying to poach my guy. You must be too tired of living."

    Sam paused for a second and said.

    "Oh, I forgot. You are already a fucking corpse."

    With that, he activated partial light elemental fusion and zoomed towards themander, and shed.

    But to his surprise, themander himself took out another sword and even his cut hand was recovered as he held two swords and blocked Sam¡¯s attacks.

    "I will show you what it¡¯s like to live like a corpse."

 Chapter 676: Escaped

    Sam activated his energy vision while their swords are still locked. When he saw the energy waves, he couldn¡¯t help but frown.

    The Wightmander seemed to be engulfed with arge amount of death energy. And a lot of energy is still being injected into his body by the surroundings.

    He looked around with the energy vision only to noticed all the energy is being sapped out of the nearby vegetation.

    His body is devouring everything from the nts in the surroundings..

    Sam took a step back and once again attacked. Currently, the Wightmander¡¯s strength has amplified a bit, but the main danger lies in his endurance. With this constant supply he can take the battle no matter how long he wants and not only would he seed in destroying the forest and crops, he would also be able to recover no matter how many times he wants and also sap his opponents dry before killing them.

    This is actually not good even for Sam with his overly resourceful energy reserves and his affinity with the spiritual energy in his surroundings.

    Sam¡¯s body started circting the energy waves. He decided to go with the Void style right from the start.

    He couldn¡¯t waste time feeling the opponent¡¯s strength and take his sweet time finding his weakness. He has to punch through his very being to make him feel despair. Since the Wightmander¡¯s main asset is recovery, he decided to injure him faster than his recovery rate, and thus one golden beam and a white and grey beam both holding two swords shed as every sh produced an energy explosion.

    The surroundings couldn¡¯t handle this as the decayed trees are being swept away by the aftershocks.

    The aftershocks are shredding the trees away. Sam is feeling a little conflicted because of this. If he didn¡¯t attack with full force like this, it would be hard to deal with this guy.

    But if he attacked like that, he has to tread carefully in order to not to damage Watt who is sitting nearby. Even the heavenly wine couldn¡¯t make him recover instantly.

    Sam and the Wightmander shed with each other constantly as Sam thought of a solution for this. He tried his best to control the flow of the battle.

    But he also noticed that the Wightmander is also trying his best to move the battle away from here.

    Sam once again activated his energy vision and noticed that he is trying to take the battle deeper into the forest and that is because the surrounding vegetation ispletely decayed and he is trying to get a new source of energy.

    Even though he is devouring the energy from the forest, it is extremely slow. Now Sam finally understood one weakness of his opponent.

    His range of absorption is not as far as he thought.

    As Sam is thinking about how to exploit his weakness, his rhythm got disturbed by the a sudden wave of death energy that hit him in the chest and he lost control of his limbs for a second making him drop the two swords.

    A lump of death energy impaled into his chest of his partial fusion form. He concentrated all his energy into the chest and tried his best to expel the death energy.

    The Wightmander didn¡¯t let this opportunity and started attacking. The swords left too many scars on Sam injecting the death energy into his body.

    He started taking severe damage and his fusion form was being corroded. When Sam is too damaged to resist, the Wightmander kicked him to the ground and stabbed his hands with the swords pinning him to the ground.

    Sam didn¡¯t even groan in pain as the death energy tried to seep into his hands.

    The Wightmander squatted down and looked at Sam right in the eyes.

    "I thought, I would need more time to finish you off. But it seems like you slipped off a little bit."

    Sam moved his head to looked at Watt who is already a safe distance and he looked at the Wightmander¡¯s eyes once again. He didn¡¯t lose his rhythm of the fight nor did he carelessly got injured. He noticed earlier that Watt is trying to leave the area. If the Wightmander saw him and Sam made his move, he might try to take Watt hostage.

    That is why he let himself be attacked by him. With that, the Wightmander not only stopped thinking about moving to the forest to get extra energy, he also ignored watt and spent the energy he has already absorbed.

    Now it is time for him to act.

    His partial fusion form disappeared and a weird smile appeared on his face.

    The Wightmander felt something is not right, but before he could react, Sam opened his mouth an intense golden me came out of it aiming straight at the Wightmander¡¯s eyes.

    "ARGGGGGGGH."

    The Wightmander felt extremely vexed as he held his face and rolled on the ground.

    Sam looked at the swords in this gap and noticed the death energy still injecting itself into his arms.

    He closed his eyes and the palms in which the swords are stabbed exploded into a blood mush, before his body turned earthen brown and he disappeared from the spot.

    The Wightmander tried his best to recover his eyes and looked around. When he couldn¡¯t find Sam, he frantically used his spiritual sense to scan the surroundings.

    But at this exact moment, he felt like his weight increased ten times over and his knees started buckling.

    At this moment, the ground behind him shook and Sam came out of it with his body turned metallic Navy blue and his arm turned into a metallic de as he tore the back of themander vertically upwards.

    The Commander started healing himself rapidly, but before the wound closed, some mutant scales appeared and shot themselves into his body. Sam only used four scales and made them enter his body.

    He didn¡¯t control them after that, he just let them stay inside.

    While the Wightmander was feeling the agony, Sam walked towards his two swords and took them.

    He once again shifted to his Partial light fusion form and started his attack.

    This time, the situations of both of them reversed.

    While the Wightmander is trying to defend, his whole body would feel the pain as the scales would make a move within his body.

    Every time he tried to attack, he would be attacked from inside and outside at the same time.

    Sam left the scars full of light elemental energy and vitality on his body. Even though the wights are most vulnerable to wood elemental attacks filled with vitality and they are not as vulnerable as vampires to the light element, if they are attacked enough, even the light element is dangerous.

    The attacks from inside and outside are destroying his body slowly along with the extra gravitational effect that is killing him.

    Sam just barely left an inch of life in him. The Wightmander knelt on the ground as he looked at Sam coldly.

    He is filled with rage and anger and the more it hurt him, the more he felt like killing Sam.

    He looked at him with all the hate and said in a weak voice.

    "One day, I wille for you. No matter where you hide in this world, I wille looking for you. I will make you wish that you are dead. I will make you wish that you are never born."

    Sam looked at him as he took the chessboard out. But before he could act on it, the Wightmander turned into grey mist and disappeared.

    Sam was stunned for a second and looked in the direction.

    "Maybe I should stop acting cool and battle everyone. I missed a good chess piece."

    He heaved a sigh and looked around to capture the rest of them.

    He got a full set of Wights and a full set of Ghouls.

    After capturing, the dwarves went on with the rest of the war.

    Even though the people from the undead realm disappeared, there are still some people left in the sacked towns.

    They led the remaining war. They knew that the situation is out of hand, but most people left here are subordinates and all they can do is follow through.

    The Minotaurs and Orcs are the ones who are in the biggest dilemma. They started this war because of the promises from the undead people and in fact, it is instigated by them.

    Now they are at a point of no return.

    They could only continue with this.

    Sam just stayed within the town and focused on his collection of resources for the next month.

    His friends are getting good sparring from the MInotaurs and the orcs, so they didn¡¯t want to leave yet.

    So, he just decided to stay here further. Anyway, it is about time, he started collecting what he spent.

    He took over the spirit stone mines and started hauling the spirit stones. There is around a month for the six months to be over, he would be focusing on his gains for this one month before returning.

 Chapter 677: Reason for the war

    Sam stayed there for the time being and helped the dwarves rebuild the town in a better way.

    Not only did he help them have a betteryout, he even added the defensive system using the stream into their new designs.

    His friends went onto assist them in taking the sacking viges back and even the captured towns are taken back.

    By the end of six months, Arman still didn¡¯t get the coordinates for the next location of the Pce of inheritance.

    Sam is currently waiting for Veer toe and pay the debts.

    There is no way he could just leave without any proper payment after doing so much for the people here.

    He sent a message to the City of the council.

    The war has also ended there. The Minotaur and Orc tribes are pushed back into their territories.

    While Sam is waiting for the answer from Veer. He broke through to the Level-2 of Pre-transcendent stage.

    He noticed that although the time for breakthroughs is increasing with his increase in cultivation, the more his cultivation increased, the harder it is bing for him to suppress the cultivation stage without breaking through.

    He was able to suppress the breakthrough for a couple of months when he is still a Nascent stage cultivator. But his bloodlines are bing harder to be kept in a suppressed state, the more he broke through further.

    He is feeling like his n to improve and have a more solid foundation has gone to shit, but at least his foundation is more solid than most of his peers.

    While he is contemting on what his third puppet should be like, Veer has finally arrived.

    Veer directly came to his residence where Sam is staying.

    Sam looked at him and smiled.

    "I am sorry your house was changed, but you know I don¡¯t have time to find another ce at that time. At least your town is safe and not many people died."

    "I wouldn¡¯t have minded even if you have raged every single house in the town to the ground if it meant to save the town."

    Veer said with a chuckle as he bowed his short body to Sam and said in a solemn tone.

    "Thank you so much for your help, if not for you we would have been in big trouble."

    Sam didn¡¯t dare to ept that bow. He could ept gratitude, but this much is too much even for him.

    He hurried stood up and asked him to stand before saying.

    "It is just a transaction. Please don¡¯t be so formal."

    Veer looked at him and said.

    "It is not actually a transaction for me. Do you know what that war signifies to us dwarves? If all four towns are taken down at the same time, it would have cost the survival of the whole dwarven race and the whole banished realm.

    Even the Minotaurs and Orcs wouldn¡¯t be spared. They would have died and be part of the corpse army of the undead races.

    But they are too stupid to realize and tried to attack us for them."

    Sam was surprised a bit. He didn¡¯t expect that there is such a story behind this.

    Veer continued.

    "I heard you made a bunker under the mansion. Have you noticed anything?"

    "Excess vitality and life force."

    "If you have dug another two hundred meters, you would have noticed something else.

    Do you know that the Undead realm and the Banished realm are actually used to be one realm?"

    "Yes. I heard about it before I came here."

    "The realm is actually an extremely unstable realm without any form of natural support for any life. When they decided to banish us and the Undead races to this realm, they didn¡¯t want the race to suffer extinction which would damage the bnce of the universe. That is why a god divided the realm into two and ced some objects within these two newly formed realms.

    We don¡¯t know exactly what they are, but they managed to create and sustain life in this banished realm and create an environment with death energy to let the undead races barely survive.

    But the undead races that tried to make theireback couldn¡¯t be satisfied with their survival. Do you know what they arecking?

    The life force.

    The undead races are somewhat weird, their bane of existence is the life force and their medium for development is also the life force.

    The objects they ced in this realm are under the four towns and the city of the council, if they could catch all five of these things and join them with their counterparts in the undead realm, they will have a life force and will sustain the growth of forests and living creatures.

    They would have more resources, the humans they consume couldn¡¯t get stronger than a certain extent due to the undead environment, if they could get these things, they would have an abundant life force and they would be able to grow.

    The human tribe in the southwest is actually a story created by dwarves. But the situation is that there is a crack between the two realms that loosens and tightens from time to time. The undead soldiers and servantse through that crack when it loosens and enters this world to scout and gather resources from here.

    Now, they seemed to have encountered a tough situation, they couldn¡¯t wait any longer and sent their prodigies here to lead the war.

    If they either take the four objects in four towns at the same time or capture the main object from the city, it will be gone.

    This realm will lose its ability to sustain and maintain life.

    That is why I asked you to hold down the town while I went back to the city."

    Sam listened to it seriously and asked.

    "So, where is my reward? Apart from the reward, I would be happy if you pay for the resources I have used to maintain the town. You know I would lose out a lot."

    Veer chuckled at Sam¡¯s words.

    He understood one thing, Sam doesn¡¯t care if there is a story behind all this. He is just looking at it as a transaction.

    He looked around and noticed Watt and Philip are sitting nearby and hesitated to say something.

    "No problem, there is no need for me to maintain secrecy with them. You can say whatever you want."

    Veer nodded and took out a glowing white object.

    It has a tremendous amount of life force and vitality.

    "This is a by-product created by that main object. You cannot find this anywhere in the universe other than here."

    Veer exined and stored it back in the spatial ring before giving the ring to Sam.

    "There are ten of them here inside. Bury it in a field or water source or create a room with them in a healing formation. It would bring qualitative changes for everything. People outside this world who consume the effects of these things will be able to improve their constitutions if they take it from childhood.

    Even though we have an abundance of it here, we couldn¡¯t use it ourselves due to the curse and we couldn¡¯t even take it out of this ce through the normal route.

    Since you cane here ignoring the restrictions in this ce, you can take it back with you. I think it would be sufficient reimbursement for your resources too."

    "Of course."

    Sam replied with a smile.

    He could feel the energy from it. It is extremely familiar to him as he felt it a few days before when he created the bunker.

    He stored the ring away and made some small talk regarding the resources he needs and what he is willing to exchange.

    When it came to this, Veer asked something Sam didn¡¯t expect.

    "Can you take some people out of this ce? I would like to send some youngsters who haven¡¯t awakened out of this ce."

    Sam was surprised as he looked at him in askance.

    "I don¡¯t want my race to stay here and face the danger of extinction. The Undead realm creatures wouldn¡¯t stay put after all the losses they suffered. This attack is only a start. I don¡¯t want my tribe to die in this ce. Even though it would take a few years for the next attack to happen, I would like to send a few of them back with you so that they would know and grow better."

    "But the ce I am from is filled with humans. Will they be okay with all the discrimination they have to face?"

    "They cannot have it all right?"

    Sam thought for a minute and said.

    "I have an idea if you want to listen to."

    Sam started exining a proposal and this went on for the whole evening. He exined about his school his situation and what kind of support he could provide for the tribe and what he wants in return.

    Sam showed the recording crystals full of videos of his organization and exined everything.

    At the end of the day, they both agreed on a deal and shook hands for it.

    Sam was ecstatic when hended this deal, but this ecstasy disappeared soon enough.

 Chapter 678: News

    Sam¡¯s ecstasy was lost because he felt a message from the fourth floor of the divine dimension¡¯s tower.

    He sent Veer off with the deal and entered the divine dimension.

    In the fourth floor, Ling Tian¡¯s holographic image was standing in the same position as before.

    "Hello, Sam.

    I am here to inform you about the next Pce of Inheritance. Due to the special circumstances, the next Pce of inheritance will be held in the realm of Undead."

    He paused as if waiting to see Sam¡¯s response. But Sam didn¡¯t show any expression on his face. But Ling Tian could faintly see his fists and jaw clenching.

    Sam was really shocked and frustrated regarding this. The current situation is obviously not advantageous for him. He pissed off three races of the undead realm and they would be waiting to deal with him.

    He doesn¡¯t believe that this is a coincidence.

    Ling Tian just showed a kind smile and continued after seeing his reaction.

    "I know what you are thinking and it is indeed not a coincidence. It was plotted by Indra and the next Pce of inheritance belongs to God of Archery Hou Yi. He agreed to this after taking some benefits from Indra.

    This is purely done to deal with you after they found out about your current situation and war with the scions of the undead realm.

    Since there is enough support for the vote to pass, there is not much we can do, so we got you some extra benefits. The first one is the time and location of the Pce of inheritance.

    This time, the location that everyone gets in their dimensional crosser is the same and all you have to do ise to that location on the day of the Pce of inheritance to participate. You don¡¯t have to go through all the trials and tribtions like before.

    As for the second one, apart from the prize they give for winning, you can demand whatever prize you want from them.

    We are confident that you would win, so we arranged for the second condition especially for you.

    So, it is all in your hands on what kind of prize you would demand, as long as it wouldn¡¯t challenge the heavenlyws of the realms it wouldn¡¯t be a problem.

    The third one is every candidate can bring three morepanions with them. So, your friends also allowed into thispetition. If they can get it right and try their best they could get the prize too.

    Apart from this, there is one more thing you have to know.

    The second Mini-game will be starting right after the Pce of inheritance.

    As soon as the Pce of inheritance session was finished, you already have one thousand two hundred points for now.

    You might not be able to use them now, but they wille in handy in the future. That is why they wanted to target your point gain and this is also suggested by Indra.

    The game this time is killing the creatures in the Undead Realm. No matter what creature it is, it might be a beast in that world, it might be a vampire, the wight, the ghoul, a specter, a naturally formed undead corpse, an undead servant, as long as it is the creature of that world, you would be able to get points.

    There is even a point allotment system.

    It is based on your cultivation levels.

    You wouldn¡¯t get any points from killing Nascent stage creatures or lower.

    The points will only be allotted for the Pre-transcendent stage creatures and above.

    Even then, the points will be based on your then cultivation level.

    If you are a Pre-transcendent stage Level-3 by then, a Level-1 Pre-transcendent stage creature will only give you 1 point, the Level-2 creature will be given 5 points, a Level-3 creature ten points, a level 4 creature 15 points, Level-5 creature 20, Level-6 creature 25 and so on until Level-9 creature with 40 points."

    Ling Tian paused a bit and said.

    "Actually, this game is not apulsory one like the previous one. You can just leave the realm right after the Pce of Inheritance. But the game will go on for three months straight and the number of creatures you kill in this time, the more your points will get.

    I know you must feel a bit down, the gods bullying a youngster like you. It really is a bit..."

    Before he could finish, Sam asked something.

    "What if I kill a transcendent stage creature?"

    Sam asked the question half-rhetorically, but to his surprise, Ling Tian actually replied.

    "You can multiply the current table with a fifty."

    Sam was surprised now, thest time Ling Tian¡¯s image came it acted like a recording, even now it is mostly like that.

    "You can talk to me?"

    "Of course, I am doing that."

    Sam is too tired to ask much and just listened to what he has to say.

    After listening to it all he came out and felt a headache.

    He would be lying if he is not a little afraid. Old Beast particrly warned him about going to that realm at this moment. He told Sam to only go thereafter he reached Middle-stage or even the Late stage.

    But now he has to go there in a year and he would be at most Level-3 or Level-4 barely entering Middle-stage. Normally, he might be able to survive but with the enmity he has with them and the escaped Wightmander, he could almost forget about having a moment of peace.

    Even though the situation is like this, not a single cell in Sam¡¯s body is letting him have thought of escaping this.

    All he has to do is just let this Pce of inheritance go and stay put back in his home or even participate in this and forget about that game after that. He would lose nothing.

    And no one would dare say a single thing about him. After all, the ones who are trying so hard to screw with him are the gods that can destroy realms with a snap and create chaos with a yawn.

    But his egoplex which is stupidly huge is not letting him think straight. It doesn¡¯t even have anything to do with the changes he has been experiencing recently.

    Even Old Sam doesn¡¯t like his decisions being influenced by others. They might be gods, but he is Sam.

    He cooled his mind off and came back with his same confident posture.

    Like hell, these gods can go fuck themselves.

    He is Sam.

    He went back to meet Veer and started making preparations.

    There is still a year left for the Pce of inheritance.

    A year was enough for him to kill Consummate realm cultivators when they came to his home and half a year was enough for him to destroy a faction that has centuries of history and that is years ago.

    Now things changed, he has an organization behind him. Full of people working in different fields.

    He would show the gods what happens after pissing him off. He cannot do anything to them now, but that is not the same in the future. The Pce of inheritance is something they send here to provide resources and trump cards to their yers.

    They can hinder his growth, so he can hinder their ns.

    He decided to leave the dwarven realm for now. He has things to prepare.

    After making the required preparations in the Banished realm, he finally left along with his friends. But this time, there are four dwarven members with him.

    They are youngsters who are about to awaken.

    He would be starting an exchange with the dwarven tribe. He would make them integrate with humans and exchange knowledge. The dwarves might be many things like na?ve, foolish and sometimes idiotic.

    But they are excellent artisans, he would teach them his own knowledge to improve their own techniques in exchange for their own knowledge.

    After returning to his city, he didn¡¯t even rest for a single day. He met with the dark element research department in his school along with a special department that research armors and started a new research project.

    He is taking his friends with him to the Undead Realm. So, he has to make preparations. He has to train them to endure the death energy that would be running rampant in that realm.

    He first started the research project and now he went to do his own things.

    After a long time, he started researching gics. Even though he has thought of doing this a long time ago, the engineering projects are more fun after all and he was stuck in them.

    But now it is actually time for him to focus and this time, he is dabbling in nt gics and also meeting an old friend he didn¡¯t meet since he tore the beast faction a new one.

    Sam once again locked himself within the divine dimension as he performed non-stop experiments.

    He forgot day and night.

    He fully involved himself in gics and started seeing some interesting flowers and vines and got even more interesting results after a few months inside the dimension.

 Chapter 679: Preparations

    Six Months.

    Sam took Six months to work on the project and he only made some minor developments. The gics of this world is much moreplicated than he thought.

    If only he had the wood elemental, it would have been more supportive. But this one gic development helped him in many fields like inscriptions and formations. He made significant development in both fields.

    Anyway, the current gic project is actually rted to the old friend he didn¡¯t meet since the beast faction.

    It is nothing but the soul-devouring vines.

    He met with this old friend and did all kinds of gic experiments on it for days and months. He tried to use several other nts to graft, to add extra charges that would be sufficient for his own operation.

    After hundreds of tries, he finally managed to find a match for this.

    The match is also an insignificant nt without many abilities, it is neither a medicinal herb nor is a powerful vine or nt like the soul-devouring vines. It is a normal nt that reacts to the excess of spiritual energy in a ce. It is in fact a flower that would grow faster as long as there is sufficient spiritual energy and spread faster than a virus.

    He managed to create a cross between these two nts and achieved his desired results.

    He finally came out of the divine dimension.

    He has stayed in for almost five years which is six months outside. If not for the fact that he came out once in a while to have a meal made by Mackey asionally. And in these six months Sam almost lost his sense of time as this is the first time, he spent so much time inside the tower.

    But he slowly adjusted to it. Currently, he is inside the vast garden of the divine dimension, where the time flow is normal. He is in the dark element zone, where a formation was ced in which arge greyish-ck vine is growing. Sam noted down some details and went to the other side where the vine was fully grown and there are some fully mature flowers with a lot of pollen in the middle.

    Sam gently blew on the pollen and it spread through the air andnded on the floor nearby.

    As the time of growth is elerated, Sam could already see small sprouts forming on the ground. He smiled at this and came out of the divine dimension with a rxed expression.

    His main goal has reached.

    Now he has to check on his friends at the moment.

    Inside a specially constructed room near the school, there are several researchers working together. They are from different fields. They are looking at arge screen that is disying the image inside.

    Inside the room, the walls are full of runes and inscriptions and there are five humanoid silhouettes standing in the middle.

    They are metallic humanoid structures with their backs attached with some chains whose other end is connected to the middle of the ceiling.

    At this moment, Sam came and asked.

    "How are the results?"

    "They are currently showing good enough results, sir. Even though, the facility is newly built it is still working better than we thought. If it was used on Nascent stage cultivators, they will be a hundred percent sessful.

    Since we are working with Pre-transcendent stage cultivators it is dependent on their bodies a lot.

    The effects are also decently permanent, but they have regr practice the resistance against the very element they had treatment with.

    From what we can see, it does not only work for the death energy, we can also use other elements, we can even use fire, poison, lightning, and so on. This research is extremely valuable for the future development of the troops.

    This will not only increase their resistance towards the said element if they are diligent enough they can have permanent resistance to a great extent."

    The researcher went on rambling in excitement as he repeated the same things again and again.

    Sam just let him speak as he observed the research result.

    After an hour, the five humanoid structures moved his fivepanions came out of it.

    Their skin has a bit of greyish hue as they came out of the room and greeted Sam upon seeing him.

    Sam used his observation skill and tried to detect any harmful changes in their bodies and since there are not many significant harmful effects, he heaved a sigh of relief.

    This is the new research project he started with these people. It is to create a method to make the people adapt to different environments.

    Particrly to the environment of the death energy.

    He started this project because of his friends. Last time, they couldn¡¯te to the Naga Loka for the same reason. And this time the risk is higher as at least they could try to resist the Miasma on their own, but the death energy is whole another ball game.

    So, he created this project so that their body can adapt to the death energy and stay resistant to it and it seems like his ideas and thought process was correct as the project was sessful.

    He left them to do their own tasks. There are still six months till the next Pce of inheritance and he has many things to do.

    He took Chatur with him to ask about his own project. This guy was tasked with another project rted to disguise techniques.

    If they looked like normal humans they would be too attractive for the undead creatures, so he needs a proper disguise technique that masks their soul, their flesh, their scent, and their aura.

    Even though Chatur¡¯s cultivation is low to fool too many high-ss undead creatures, it is good enough to manage some Transcendent and even Consummate level cultivators.

    After seeing that the research is going well, Sam left some more instructions and left the ce.

    He went to check the new Patent listings and if the rewards are going well. And finally, he went to meet the four dwarves.

    At this moment, the four of them are in Mackey¡¯s restaurant along with some humans drinking and eating.

    They seemed to have integrated with humans very well.

    Even though, there is some discrimination from the students at the beginning. Most of the students of the school are orphans at least since these people are yet to awaken, theye into contact with the orphans andmoners the most.

    Themoner children in the school are mostly children of the workers of the organization, so the initial discrimination disappeared soon.

    The dwarves particrly impressed the people with their knowledge. Anything regarding the materials, mining, and forging along with wine, they have a lot of knowledge they would learn since they are two to three years old.

    This is so much morepared to their peers and even some rank-4 artisans wouldn¡¯t be able to beat them in the contest of pure knowledge.

    When the dwarves saw Sam, they stood up hurriedly and started serving food for him.

    The rest of the students had simr reactions but not as intense as these people.

    Most orphans and students adore Sam rather than fear him. They have a lot of respect along with adoration. Because in their hearts he is apletely good guy. He is more saintly than an actual saint.

    They don¡¯t know the cold-blooded killer that massacred thousands of people. In fact, even somebody told them, they would only look at him in awe.

    But dwarves are different, they looked at Sam in the war. That is how he was introduced to them, so it is a bit hard for them to stay cool in front of him.

    Sam didn¡¯t put pressure on them by staying too long and just asked about how they are doing and how the school is treating them.

    They are feeling extremely good and after confirming they are okay, Sam left the ce and went to the new fields.

    There are new fields near the city. They are created to grow the wheat Sam brought and the Ape finally has its own beer brewery.

    He also went to the material research where they are working on new alloys and materialbinations with the new material added from the Banished realm.

    He even went to the shipbuilding area to see the current situation. The research is going well there too and there are many orders from both minor powers and the major powers.

    They are extremely busy.

    He finally checked with Sirona and this time, the situation is a bit different from the previous time. She directly attacked a gang of puppets.

    Only after he destroyed a few after taking a significant beating did his plight stop.

    When he asked what is wrong, she became extremely gloomy and said that it is for not toe here tp check on her results regrly. Sam felt a bit weird. He really felt like he should scout some really smart people from other realms. He cannot take it any time.

    Anyway, after this, he left the ce and went back to his building before making the final preparations and taking out the dimensional drifter.

    He called for a few students who are studying metals and materials and took them to the Banished realm for the first step in the exchange program and he proceeded with the rest of his preparations to go to the Undead Realm.

    He has to visit several ces in the Naga Loka and the Banished realm to collect some things before going back to his home and taking his friends back.

 Chapter 680: Undead Realm

    For the next three months, Sam was in Naga Loka as he tried to find every single grass or herb that supports the decay of flesh and bones.

    Since the Naga Loka is the home of many toxins he figured he could find what he wants here.

    After using Buck and all hisworks along with Yodha¡¯s help to get his hands as many things as he can.

    His own poison along with Mia¡¯s wouldn¡¯t be of sufficient quantity and he wants them in the form of herbs.

    After finding enough, he once again came back to his home and this time, he came with some Nagas along with him. He enrolled them in the school. But unlike Chatur who stayed in his human form most of the time, these people assumed their Naga form.

    These Nagas are bastard orphans of many people who don¡¯t know who their parents are. So, they don¡¯t have that unreasonable superiorityplex of the normal Nagas as their lives are bitter than humans who can at least sell their bodies.

    So, Sam came here with them as a part of an exchange program with Nagas.

    He will send the humans from his organizationter after the new adaptation technology is sessful in all the attempts.

    But there is one problem. That vixen Vasuki also tagged along. Sam doesn¡¯t want to bring her, but she pulled all kinds of strings and even made the Emperor request Sam so that she would be acting an envoy.

    He told them that he would be taking them to his personal ce, not to his backer¡¯s ce as they might be interested in Sam¡¯s backer than him.

    But to his surprise, she was even more ecstatic.

    On the way, he also heard a one more interesting thing, Vasuki who is known for her horny nature, wasn¡¯t as horny as before, at least she is not using any of her boy toys and she seemed to be smitten by Sam.

    Sam couldn¡¯t only shake his head in frustration and thought of dumping her in his city and let her do what she likes.

    He wouldn¡¯t be staying there for long anyway.

    Aftering back from Naga Loka, Sam once again started his work. Even though, he got the results he wanted from his gic experimentations, the process before implementing these results to his advantage is extremely long andplex.

    He started adding the poisonous herbs he got from Naga Loka into the process and make the required modifications for the new vines he created.

    This process took the remaining three months and there are only a few days left before the Pce of inheritance.

    The location of the Pce of inheritance is also finally revealed and Arman came running to him to show the coordinates.

    Sam took the coordinates in his hands and called for his friends to finish their final preparations before leaving.

    He also went to make his final preparations and that included making a new bow.

    He got information that the next Pce of inheritance is Hou Yi. The God of Archery. His yer is Arkiv. Even though he doesn¡¯t have anything against Arkiv, this Hou Yi really pissed him off by plotting against him or at least assisting in Indra¡¯s plot. This is uneptable.

    So, he decided to get back at him a little as a little lesson so that he would stay the hell away from Sam.

    For that, he decided to go with a bow of his own. He would challenge the whole thing with his archery. He would snatch the treasures he prepared for his yer right under his nose using the same skill he is best at.

    So, for the next three days before the journey which is also the thirty days in the tower, Sam just stayed in and created a special bow.

    This bow is also mainly dependent on the inscriptions and formations. He also made the bow with various meteorite sands.

    After finishing the bow, he finally met with his friends on top of his building for the departure.

    Arman also joined them.

    Sam opened the dimensional drifter and entered the coordinates to their destination.

    They disappeared from the spot and when they reappeared they couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit suffocated with all the death energy around. Sam put his dimensional drifter away and their group of six stood there to look around

    In a distance, Sam spotted Arkiv who also came. But he doesn¡¯t have anypanions.

    He came running towards Sam and asked.

    "Lucky you, Sam. You can bring your ownpanions, I should have visited you before leaving. But I was busy."

    "You think you can afford the payments if I bring them for you? It is extremely expensive."

    Sam replied casually.

    "Well, this rule is kind of suspicious, it is almost like it was set to give you an advantage. None of the people can bringpanions other than you."

    He asked a bit probingly. Sam just smiled and replied.

    "There is a lot of it going on. But first, don¡¯t stay near me, if you want to have at least a moment of peace in this realm. People here don¡¯t have a good rtionship with me."

    With that, Sam and his group started walking away.

    He finally got a chance to peacefully observe the surroundings.

    The forest they are in is full of dead trees and bones everywhere. The soil is ck and grey everywhere and there is a faint rotten stenching over.

    There are many beast skeletons in this area. But most of the skeletons are also rotten.

    They couldn¡¯t help but feel nauseous.

    There is a mountain far away. Sam and Arman felt their badges that grant the entry to the Pce react to it.

    So, they started moving in that direction. This time, Sam couldn¡¯t use his beasts once again. He also didn¡¯t dare try this adaptation method he used for his friends.

    The beasts tend to have mutations if they are kept in different environments as a way of adapting to that ce. If that happens, their bloodlines will be polluted.

    Anyway, he wouldn¡¯t be staying too long in this realm. It is only three months.

    As they started their journey, they soon started encountering the troubles of this ce.

    This ce looked like a graveyard and there are a lot of skeletons and in the middle of all these skeletons, some are still moving.

    They are some fresh corpses and some semi-rotten corpses in there moving and trying to find any living creature to feast on their vitality.

    There are even some stray spirits that reached semi corporal state as they roamed and attacked their group.

    Their group is attracting the major part of the creatures present in this area as they are walking a group and they are considered a big mealpared to the individual yers.

    They traveled till evening and the ce that is already grey and gloomy turned darker. They finally reached the mountain and he could see some of the yers he was familiar with.

    They are more exhausted than his friends and him. They are clearly being affected by the death energy.

    Their cultivation techniques are far too superior to his friends. But the amount of money he invested in the research and the project of adaptation is not there just for show.

    Apart from slight Nausea, Sam and his friends are not much different from the normal times, but these people are clearly more exhausted than normal.

    They looked at each other before looking around the mountain to find the cave and soon someone found the cave a bit over the mountain and they all walked into it.

    Out of all of them, only Sam haspanions with him. The rest of them didn¡¯t have the means to bring theirpanions with them and even if they could get them, there is no way they could trust many people enough to bring them to the Pce of inheritance. That is almost impossible.

    So, they didn¡¯t bother, to think much. But they are surprised by Sam bringing so many of his friends.

    They kind of know about the trio of Philip, Watt, and Jack. Chatur is a new one in the group.

    Currently, Sam is using his quota to bring the trio in while Arman is responsible for bringing Chatur in with his quota.

    They entered into the familiar hall where another Avatar stood at the podium.

    He looked at them and spoke.

    "This time due to special circumstances the Pce of inheritance is a bit different. We are not letting the local prodigies in.

    And along with that, the mini-game will start as soon as the Pce of inheritance ends.

    This time the candidates have a special offer to leave this undead realm as it is not so safe here. So, the Pce will bestow three trinkets that could protect you three times.

    If you use up all those three trinkets, your dimensional crosser will unlock and let you return to thest realm you are in.

    So, the people who came from the Naga Loka will return to Naga Loka and the people who came from the Deste realm will go back to the deste realm.

    I hope you are ready as this Pce of inheritance is a bit more straightforward. All the best."

 Chapter 681: Path in clouds

    Sam and the rest entered the single door that was in the hall.

    They walked in a dark path and when they could see once again, all they could see is that the whole group are separated and they are standing on a circr tform individually.

    Sam looked around and all he could see are clouds.

    There is not much he can see even with his eye technique.

    All he could see are white clouds floating around him.

    Not just Sam, everyone is in the same position. They are all standing on their individualrge tforms and could only see clouds all around.

    At this moment, a male voice was suddenly heard from nothing.

    "Wee yers.

    This time, the Pce of inheritance is a bit different. I don¡¯t want to go through a tournament procedure and think of various ways to test you guys.

    Instead, all of you will be going through the same test.

    You will have to go through six tests and the final test will be held between the people who managed to get past the six tests.

    The rest of you will be eliminated.

    If only one of you managed to pass, the second and third ces will be deduced by your progress in the first few tests.

    Now the simultaneous tests you have to go through are quite simple. In a few moments, a path will appear before you in these clouds. You have to go through these paths and face the challenges that were thrown at you.

    The path will have six checkpoints which are circr tforms that will lead you to the required test area and some of the tests will take ce on the tform itself. Each test will be exined on the respective tforms and the rewards will be given finally.

    So, I hope you all perform well and do your best to win."

    As soon as the voice is gone, the clouds cleared on one side and Sam could see a wide path forward.

    He cannot see far and even his eye technique proved to be useless in the scenario. He took a deep breath and took out the harbinger to clear this path.

    Since speed is also a factor, there is no reason for him to hold back at all. In general cases, he would have held back in using his special gadgets that could make him pretty overpowered among his peers. But today, he came here to teach Hou Yi a lesson. He cannot take any chances.

    As he zoomed past the route a few secondster, Sam suddenly turned hard to the right as he felt a sense of danger.

    He looked at the path and noticed that four arrows lodged themselves into the road and they are slowly disappearing.

    Sam frowned at this. He thought that the only danger lies in the checkpoints, but it seems like the path itself is also dangerous.

    But Sam didn¡¯t feel worried, in fact, he didn¡¯t even slow down a bit, he increased the speed to its maximum limit as the wind turned sharp around him. The tailwind became extremelypact and created a shield around him as he activated the energy vision.

    He looked ahead without a care in the world.

    He clearly observed the surroundings for the arrow movements, even though his eye technique is clearly being obstructed by the surrounding clouds, he is confident that he would be able to react to arrows as soon as he saw them within a range of five feet.

    And his n worked.

    He could feel the faint energy waves from the arrows as soon as the arrows left the clouds and that is enough for him.

    For the first few waves, he didn¡¯t even bother to dodge as his speed is enough to avoid thempletely or his wind curtain is enough to block without any damage.

    In his full speed he reached the first checkpoint within fifteen to twenty minutes.

    Sam could see a tform ahead of him once again and stopped over the tform and put the harbinger away.

    Meanwhile, within that dimension, a man who looked young and dynamic with hawk-like eyes and long hair is sitting on arge ind floating in the clouds. The ind has nothing on it. It is just a piece of floating t rock.

    There are several screens floating around him and he couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit down when he saw the four screens that upied most of his attention.

    Not just Sam, even his three friends are using the hoverboard.

    Actually, the path for meant to halt them for a few hours to mentally test them before reaching the checkpoint. But because of these hoverboards, the path became pointless.

    He heard that even though, Sam has the harbinger for a long time, he didn¡¯t use it in the previous pce of inheritances. But now he is using it without any reservation which is a bit surprising to him.

    He felt like something is wrong.

    Sam didn¡¯t know that the god¡¯s image is looking at him instead of his own yer andmenting over something deeply.

    Hended on the tform and took the heavenly wine to recover instantly.

    As he waited for a few minutes, he is wondering when the test will begin and he disappeared from that ce.

    He appeared in a dark room.

    Sam couldn¡¯t see for a second and even his other senses are not working. His vision returned along with his other senses gradually after a few seconds and Sam found himself looking at his own image.

    In fact, it is not a single image.

    He could see a myriad of images.

    He looked around couldn¡¯t help but shake his head.

    His spiritual sense and energy vision are not going past the mirrors.

    As he was thinking of what would happen, the same male voice entered his ears.

    "I thought it would take some time for the first checkpoint to be activated. But it guess there are always exceptions.

    Your first test will be to defeat the archer. An archer was hidden beyond the mirror walls or from his point of view, you are the one trapped inside the mirror wall.

    He would be aiming to kill you. If you manage to kill that person back, then you win.

    Good luck."

    With that, the voice once again disappeared.

    Sam just stood there as he looked around. And all of a sudden, he could see an arrowing towards him through the mirror. He turned around ready to defend, but to his surprise as soon as he turned around, all he could see is also the same mirror image of the arrow.

    Before he knew it, he was hit from the rear.

    Sam groaned in pain. Even though his feather coat managed to stop it from prating, it still couldn¡¯t manage to nullify the force.

    Soon another arrow shot towards him. Sam tried his best to avoid them. But he couldn¡¯t do anything. He barely dodged three to four shots but took ten to twelve.

    Another arrow image appeared but no matter which direction he looked, it seemed like it wasing from that direction.

    He looked at the four sides and the same image is on disy from different angles.

    He couldn¡¯t find the way the arrow ising towards him. Sam activated his energy vision as he looked at the mirrors, but to his surprise, even the energy vision was fooled. Maybe his level is not high enough.

    Sam could feel the energy of the arrow from all sides.

    He decided to defend from all sides. He summoned four of his shadows and made them stand on his four sides as he stood in the middle. He couldn¡¯t take more physical damage, it would make it hard for him to endure for a long time and hinder his thinking.

    He left the arrows to the shadows and he started attacking the mirror walls. But there is no reaction. He attacked with all the elements, but there is nothing he could do.

    He moved along with the shadows in the same position and tried to touch the wall. But he couldn¡¯t feel anything for a second before energy stuck him directly and before he noticed that, his palm was bleeding with an arrow stuck to it.

    Sam is getting annoyed.

    He stood in the middle of the area and looked around as the shadows did their job. His face is extremely cold.

    The shadows really dide in handy, due to their little intelligence they can block the tricky attacks on their own without Sam doing anything.

    Sam closed his eyes as he spread his spiritual energy all over and it even reached the mirror walls and spread among them as he used observation ability.

    At least, he is d that the mirror and the floor are connected so that he could use his ability. But due to the distance, he has to put in more effort than usual.

    But he noticed something.

    And as soon as he did that, he found two ways he can destroy this.

    One of them is easy for any one of the yers and even his friends, they would be able to figure it out after taking some hits and exhausting more than half of their energy.

    The second thing is something only he can do and it will align perfectly with his n of pissing Hou Yi off.

 Chapter 682: Displeased Hou Yi

    Sam felt like the most straightforward method is brute force.

    When he used the observation ability on the mirrors, he noticed the effects of his attacks.

    From the image, the mirror didn¡¯t seem like it is damaged, but the structure inside the mirror is clearly damaged.

    Sam just kept the observation ability activated and threw another attack, he could still see new cracks appearing inside the structure, they are small and insignificant, but the damage would definitely umte.

    From what he knew, that might as well be the method of cracking.

    But Sam observed something else.

    That is the mirror is not exactly a solid thing. In fact, it is not even a proper mirror. It is some sort of illusion device. The arrow image is actually a projection of the arrow that ising from outside, one side will be projecting the image, and the rest of the reflections.

    But now with his observation ability, Sam noticed that this solid mirror wall is actually changing a bit and letting the arrow go through it.

    With this change, Sam can easily find out which direction the arrow ising from.

    He couldn¡¯t help but smile a bit and took out a bow.

    It is a longbow with a ck body. The handle of the bow is a circr rod. Sam held that and inserted his fingers into the holes on the handle. He injected the spiritual energy through the fingers and the bow glowed a bit.

    He didn¡¯t open his eyes all this time as he just stood there and drew the string of the bow without the arrow. He pulled the string all the way and released it.

    *BING*

    The air in the surroundings exploded with a loud sound as waves of wind hit theing arrows and made them fall on the ground.

    Sam smiled and let the shadows disappear all while his eyes are closed.

    He took out an arrow and nocked it on the bow as he just stood there.

    After three seconds, he drew the bow and shot the arrow and within a sh, he took another arrow and shot in the same direction.

    The first arrow shot towards the mirror wall and shed with an arrow that was justing through it.

    The two arrows destroyed together and there came a small window in which the wall remained in the state in which the arrow can pass through. The second arrow, Sam shot entered the ce and it passed through the wall.

    Sam couldn¡¯t find where the other guy is nor does he know if the arrow hit sessfully.

    But he once again nocked his bow and started shooting.

    Sam¡¯s hand moved so fast that one could only see after images as continuously shot the arrows.

    Meanwhile, outside the mirror wall. A human silhouette is trying its best to shoot arrows and dodge the iing arrows at the same time.

    Now, the situation reversed. The person shooting from the arrows from outside, only has one duty, to attack the person inside and try to kill them no matter what happens. He cannot stop shooting arrows no matter what.

    But now that became secondary to him as every time he shot arrows, he has to try his best to dodge and be safe.

    Even before he could move and save himself, he was already being targeted by much faster arrows.

    At first, it is only one arrow, but Sam is actually getting better at finding the timing and started attacking more and more. Now he can even shoot two arrows in that small window and the opponent has to dodge twice.

    The only silver lining for the opponent is that the mirror wall is still there.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know or to be more precise what he couldn¡¯t find out due to him trying so hard to dodge and save his own ass is that the walls are about to crash.

    The structure of the wall is extremely damaged and the reason for that is the wind wave that ising out of the bow every time Sam shot and the second reason is, everything Sam attacked the arrows that areing out of the wall and exploded the enemy¡¯s arrow along with it, destroying the structure directly.

    The wall bes weaker and weaker with every single attack.

    Within ten minutes, their situation changed and it is still changing. After another three minutes, Sam halted his attacks, he once again called the shadows to block the shadow as he aimed his bow at the wall straight.

    The opponent who is outside taking the opportunity of the sudden interval and tried his best to attack Sam from the same position.

    But Sam just started injecting his spiritual energy into his arrow as he aimed at the wall.

    He stayed like that for a whole minute, which made the opponent feel weird. He finally managed to think with his dumb skull to check the wall and the results are not exactly what he wanted to see.

    Before he could react, Sam released his arrow. The pure spiritual energy-filled arrow loaded with the void-style waves created an explosion on the contact with the wall and created arge hole.

    Sam once again loaded another arrow and shot through the hole before shifting his inserted fingers a bit and the longbow turned into recurve bow.

    The bow went through some clicking sounds as a glowing pattern appeared on it.

    Sam once again loaded the arrow and shot in a different direction.

    All three shots are made within a second.

    The first arrow exploded with the wall, the second one went through and the third arrow hit the second arrow and changed its direction as it shot in another direction.

    *ARGH*

    The opponent couldn¡¯t even react in time to think what is happening exactly and the arrow directly lodged itself into his throat.

    Sam stored his arrow away and took a swig of his wine as he reappeared on the tform.

    Even though it felt like a long time has gone by, it is a little over fifteen minutes in the first checkpoint.

    Sam once again took off with his harbinger as he zoomed past.

    Meanwhile, Hou Yi really wanted to curse someone at this moment. He didn¡¯t expect that the first checkpoint would be over this fast. It is actually made so that it would take at least an hour or two to crosses this point since the start of their journey in the path.

    But it was over in half an hour for Sam and from the looks of it, the rest of his friends are also going to finish it in a few more minutes.

    He doesn¡¯t feel right. Because the Pce of inheritance is also about their name and face within the group.

    After all, being immortals they don¡¯t have anything else to do other than squabble and bicker and they also gossip a lot. Their game with these yers has spread all over the realms and if they came to knew that yer of another god cleared his Pce of inheritance in a few hours, he would lose his face.

    Hou Yi himself is a person who cared too much about superficial things. He is cruel, ruthless but all of that is a way for him to enhance the pompous side of his so that he could feel d and satisfied with himself when others respect him due to the fear of his cruelty.

    Even his wife Changge left him because of this.

    Now, Sam is just trying to get back at Hou Yi, but what he doesn¡¯t know is, he is ruffling the feathers of a stupidly irritating bird.

    He just proceeded with the journey as he dealt with the arrows that areing at him without much effort and in another fifteen minutes, hended on the second tform.

    He once again disappeared and felt like he lost his footing.

    He could feel a faint breeze hitting his face and a wooden smell.

    He is currently standing on top of a bamboo pole on a single foot.

    There is nothing in his surroundings except for the bamboo poles and at a distance, another guy in ck is standing on the bamboo pole with a bow in his hands.

    Sam looked around and as far as he can see all of this filled with bamboo poles. They are everywhere but not two poles are close enough to each other such that he can stand with two legs.

    He has to bnce while fighting.

    He looked down only to see that there is an abyss down below.

    At this moment, the familiar voice entered his ears.

    "In this checkpoint, you have to fight the opponent on those bamboo poles. Here you cannot use any form of external device or instrument to fly and that includes the stupid board you are using to cover the distance easily.

    Even your beasts are not allowed toe out of that divine dimension.

    If you fall down, I might be able to save you, but still, idents happen, so I request you to try your best to defeat your opponent without killing yourself."

    Sam obviously noticed the displeasure in the voice, but he doesn¡¯t give a shit, he once again took out his bow and got ready to fight.

 Chapter 683: Bamboo Poles

    Sam held his bow tightly as he looked at his opponent.

    As soon as he heard the displeasure in the voice, he knew his goal has reached, he sessfully pissed off Hou Yi. But that is not the end. He wants to take this to a next level.

    He would make him so angry and put him in a position that he wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything. Sam decided to act as shameless as he can and as devious as he wants to achieve his job.

    He closed his eyes as he used his observation to check the bamboo pole he is standing on.

    He wants to see how strong this material is and his skill gave the required information. It is as strong as a grade-6 metal.

    He stood on the bamboo pole with one foot as he looked at his opponent aiming his arrow straight at him. But Sam didn¡¯t worry he is looking at the surroundings and observing everything. Even though he is new to this, he is sure that his cultivation and his body¡¯s condition itself will allow him a decent bnce.

    He is sure that he can bnce himself on the pole. But since he came here he is feeling a bit out of bnce almost like he couldn¡¯t find his center of gravity. He is trying to find the4 factor that is influencing his sense of bnce.

    At this moment, an arrow was shot at him which he dodged by leaping off onto another bamboo stick.

    Since his sense of bnce was affected, he didn¡¯t manage tond smoothly. He wobbled all over and he tried his best to stay straight. Finally, he used the wind element to manipte the surrounding wind to make himself straight.

    But he could do so. The wind is so difficult to manipte and close to impossible, it is as if it has a mind of its own.

    Sam continuously dodged the arrows as he tried to figure the situation out. But it is too hard and the arrows are bing faster and faster.

    But the wind is not manipting as he liked. The more he tried the harder it became. It felt like he was stuck in a pool of mercury.

    Then only he understood the current situation.

    His sense of bnce is being affected by the wind. Even though it is just a slight breeze, he felt like it is creating some sort of illusory feeling making him feel lost in the bnce.

    Once he understood that, he only has to think about countering it.

    But by this time, when he jumped off to dodge the arrow, another arrow struck him in mid-air.

    He blocked it with his bow but was still pushed back a bit changing his trajectory and he almost fell into the abyss below.

    Sam desperately extended his hand as he caught the nearest pole. But the pole is so slippery that he just slid down like that.

    As he fell down, he could sense a peculiar coldness enveloping him.

    Sam¡¯s hand turned to dark blue metal and spikes came out of his palm impaling into the bamboo pole and the spikes changed shape and morphed into a metal lump that held the pole. Sam¡¯s descent halted as he held on to it tightly.

    He stored his bow away and started climbing with both his hands. This might be the first time for him to use¡¯ climbing spikes¡¯ to trek on a bamboo pole.

    When he reached a decent height he saw the opponent who has already closed the distance and aimed his arrow right at Sam.

    Sam just smirked as he looked at him and when the arrow came, Sam¡¯s arm turned metallic once again and morphed into a shield.

    Even though he took the attack directly, he still managed to endure it and he made it to the top.

    After he stood on the bamboo pole. He looked at the archer whose face is covered.

    He activated his energy vision to see how his opponent managed to stay bnced and then he found out what he should have guessed in the first ce. His opponent is the one who is actually manipting the wind around.

    He really wanted to curse himself and Sam held his bow once again as his body turned golden.

    The feathers are also turning golden and the coat has been activated. He activated partial fusion with the light element.

    The light might have mass but it is lighter than the wind.

    So, there is no way his bnce will be off in this mode and it turned out his call is correct.

    He took out the arrows and started his counterattack.

    Everything is loaded with light element and he doesn¡¯t have to worry about it.

    The roles were reversed instantly and the opponent who was so busy attacking Sam and making him lose bnce was now busy finding a ce tond.

    Because Sam is just not attacking him. When the opponent jumped off one pole and tried tond on another, Sam is attacking the nearby bamboo poles.

    From the moment he figured out the method to counter the bnce, he didn¡¯t even have to change the poles once.

    He just stood there and attacked. The golden shes moved all around as they destroyed each and every bamboo pole.

    Sam is having the easiest time. In fact, it is easier than the first checkpoint.

    He didn¡¯t even attack the opponent seriously.

    All he did is destroy all the bamboo poles within the area making the opponent stand on the single pole with nothing nearby to shift.

    He couldn¡¯t help but gulp hard and wanted to raise his bow, but Sam shot another arrow which grazed the edge of the bamboo pole giving it a slight tremor.

    The opponent dropped the bow and looked at Sam nervously.

    Sam shot more arrows just like this and had some fun with him before shooting down the bamboo pole.

    "AAAAAAAARRRRGhhhh...."

    All that was left is the scream as he fell into the abyss.

    Sam once again disappeared from this ce and reappeared on the path. He took off on the harbinger once again.

    Soon, he reached the third checkpoint.

    He once again disappeared and this time he reappeared in a forest.

    As soon as he reappeared an arrow was shot towards him which he dodged.

    He looked ahead and noticed that an archer is standing on the tree nearby as he aimed at Sam.

    Sam frowned. This is really a low blow. He didn¡¯t even know what the test is.

    At this moment, the same voice appeared in his mind.

    "Kill all your opponents. Here you don¡¯t have any flight restrictions, you can even take out a beast. But you have to kill all your opponents."

    With that, the voice was gone.

    Sam activated his energy vision to check the forest. He couldn¡¯t notice everything, but he could see that there are so many energy signatures.

    Within the next three hundred meters radius, there are at least fifty people most of them riding beasts of bird type and normal type while some of them hidden between the trees.

    All of them seemed to be archers.

    If not for the fact that the forest is too dense and the trees are unbelievably thick and tall, it would have been a direct confrontation.

    Sam thought for a moment and a faint smile appeared on his face.

    With a wave of his hand, Yanwu appeared in front of him.

    He boarded Yanwu and both of them soared.

    He also activated partial fusion with the fire element and took out his bow.

    He aimed at the archer who shot at him in the start and shot an arrow.

    The archer dodged and the arrow lodged itself into the tree, but before he could heave a sigh of relief, the whole tree caught fire and he also caught the golden mes.

    He screamed as he caught the me and tried to resist it, but Yanwu didn¡¯t let that happen. He just threw a jet of golden mes from his mouth and burned the guy to crisp.

    Then both Sam and Yanwu carried their onught. Sam has an advantage over the rest of them with his eye technique and his bow is a bit different than theirs. His shooting range is so long that he could shoot to the other side of the forest if he willed to do so.

    So, he and Yanwu just went on spreading the fire.

    Yanwu is also extremely excited to do this because he knew this is Hou Yi¡¯s Pce of inheritance.

    The Golden Sun crows, hate Hou Yi more than anyone in this universe. It was taught to them since their birth and by this point, it almost became a family heirloom that was being passed on to generation after generation.

    Hou Yi who is looking at the current scene, couldn¡¯t help but m his feet on the ground in anger and roared to the sky.

    He really wanted to kill Sam at the moment.

    But he didn¡¯t dare to do anything funny. He remembered the Gambler¡¯s words at the meeting.

    He took a gamble and he is facing the consequences. Sam might not have done any direct damage to him, but he made him so angry and feel so helpless at the same time. This is better than any form of superficial physical damage.

 Chapter 684: Intent to Kill

    Sam is having the easiest fight of the three checkpoints.

    The whole forest became his target as he shot arrow after arrow filled with golden mes and Yanwu is burning down the whole thing.

    Meanwhile, Hou Yi is having the second-worst time of his life. His wife leaving will always take the first ce.

    This Hou Yi has a weird enmity with the golden sun crows. He destroyed their tribe¡¯s ancestors leaving the only one which is a one-way ticket to the irreceable hate to the Golden sun crows.

    They hate him like no other and Hou Yi who liked to brag and act pompous always showed an intense amount of disdain to the golden sun crows and their tribe. That is because they didn¡¯t take revenge against him.

    But from what Yanwu said, it is an order or more like the agreement between the tenth ancestor and King Yao who ordered Hou Yi to deal with the problem of the ten suns.

    The story is simr to what Modern earth¡¯s Chinese mythology portrays, but there are many differences and the first one is, Hou Yi is not as exaggeratedly strong as that story. It only happened because of the special arrows King Yao gave him and when the ten arrows are gone, the tenth ancestor or the tenth golden sun crow, who is the strongest of them all is still alive and kicking

    As for the actual conflict, the ten golden sun crows gathered together as a protest about something and wanted to make King Yaoe out and talk to them, but King Yao who is toozy sent Hou Yi to see what the problem is, and he also gave the ten arrows to him just in case of emergency.

    But this Hou Yi who is already known to y many beasts that are running rampant in the heavenly realms, got too full of himself and provoked them too much, and attacked directly.

    When the tenth ancestor tried to kill Hou Yi, King Yao has toe in and mediate.

    It is a contract between King Yao and Hou Yi, that the former would protect thetter from any repercussions of the tasks he handed over and Hou Yi used this as a loophole to escape the immediate predicament as the tenth ancestor is not exactly confident in defeating King Yao.

    That contract between both of them is only valid for a few more centuries, so the Golden sun crow tribe is waiting for the contract to be over and once it is over, then Hou Yi can count his blessings if the tenth ancestor just gives him a quick death.

    Even Yanwu doesn¡¯t know the minor details, but this is the gist of the story. Then only Sam decided to use Yanwu as a medium to piss off Hou Yi.

    But he didn¡¯t feelfortable sending Yanwu alone as one of hispanions.

    He couldn¡¯t let Hou Yi take advantage of the situation and kill Yanwu. After all, it is specifically said that there is a chance for losing lives in the Pce of inheritances.

    But now that he got a chance, there is no way he would let this go.

    Sam had the most intense and direct archery battle he ever had as he shot one arrow after another and Yanwu destroyed every arrow that came towards him.

    They just burned the whole forest and the beasts along with the archers that are inside and the task that was meant to test the abilities of the yer in a forest turned into a task that tests the calorific value of the forest trees and the beasts.

    The only difference is instead of a sample, Sam is burning everything off and he doesn¡¯t care about the exact calorific value.

    The third test was done and Sam went out once again and started his journey.

    The fourth test is also some kind of direct confrontation with the archers, it is just that the archers are in a tower and Sam has to defeat the tower full of archers.

    But Sam just changed it a bit and shot arrows directly at the tower, the tower is strong and most of the arrows impaled themselves in it without creating much damage. Even though it looked like a problem, Sam took advantage of this with his knowledge of formations, and his arrows are shot in such a pattern that formations are created on the walls.

    The explosions started crumbling the tower and the archers came out to save their own lives, which didn¡¯t work that great as Sam killed them one by one as they came.

    For the fourth test, the situation is almost the same. Sam just went on destroying the opponents and finally, the sixth round arrived.

    Thest round before he meets the Hou Yi.

    But this time, the checkpoint didn¡¯t activate immediately. Sam just stood there.

    Meanwhile, Hou Yi is banging his head as he thought of ways to deal with Sam. Actually, he manipted thest two tests to make Sam pay for his arrogance, but the n didn¡¯t work.

    He increased the number crazily, but since they are of the same level and with the advantage of the terrain, Sam doesn¡¯t have much of a problem deal with them.

    But now Sam already arrived at the sixth test but he didn¡¯t think of anything. As for the original test, he didn¡¯t think of using it, Sam would just break it easily.

    That is why he thought of it so much but couldn¡¯t find a way.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know that he did more than enough to not just piss him off, in fact, he almost brought the crazy insecure side of this guy out.

    After some time, he couldn¡¯t take it anymore and did something no other god or someone close to that position would do.

    At this moment, every other yer and Sam¡¯s friends all disappeared in the middle of their tests. Even Sam disappeared from the spot and all of them reappeared in an open field.

    "I am tired of this slow process. One final test for all of you. In a group fight, thest person standing will win and reach the final test. No external gadgets are considered beyond weapons. Only normal weapons are allowed. No beastpanions and no necromancy allowed."

    While they are surprised by the sudden announcement and the weird extra rules, the remaining yers other than Sam and his friend got an extra message.

    "The one who kills Sam gets an extra reward."

    The rest of the yers were dumbfounded.

    They looked at Sam and exchanged nces. They didn¡¯t expect something like this from a god. The one who had the weirdest reaction is actually Arkiv. He is kind of on a friendly basis with Sam. With all the help he got from Naga Loka and everything else, he couldn¡¯t bring himself to hate him to kill.

    But the one who is trying to do that is his own mentor or patron or whatever these gods are for them.

    This made it extremely weird for him.

    Sam didn¡¯t know and he might not even care if he really did listen to it. Giving an order to kill him Is easy, but killing is different.

    Sam looked at them and said.

    "So, how do we start? One on one or a group fight?"

    As he spoke, his friends also took positions.

    Even Arman is on his side.

    Even though the yers might have an edge over Chatur, it would be hard to deal with Arman. As for the trio, they are deadly in their own rights, they don¡¯t have much experience in fighting them, but they don¡¯t dare underestimate them.

    They broke through under the pressure of cultivating under Sam, which is enough to give them enough respect.

    As for Sam the main target, they could just forget about it, they already heard of what happened when Kumar and Noah.

    If all of them cooperated, then things would get nasty.

    They don¡¯t want to turn this into enmity too.

    So, finally, they decided on one thing.

    "How about a tournament? Whoever wins will go for the final round."

    Arkiv is the one who suggested this and they all agreed.

    Hou Yi who looked at this felt even more frustrated. The fact that Arkiv gave this idea burned him even more.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know that he made a god behave like a little pathetic young master who feels like the world should revolve around them.

    He couldn¡¯t take it, by this time, he wants to kill Sam so desperately.

    He watched the tournament so intently that he wanted to just jump into their shoes and kill Sam directly.

    When this thought came to his mind, he suddenly halted all his stupid spoiled actions.

    He looked at their tournament as he thought of the tournament order and looked at the situation on how it goes.

    He estimated their positions and found out when Sam would meet Arkiv.

    And when the time came, there is a creepy and evil grin on his face.

 Chapter 685: Fight with Arkiv

    Sam met with Arkiv without much difficulty. After all, the situation is not extremely tense for the rest of the yers since it is not the Pce of inheritance of their own.

    They don¡¯t have to try super hard for the rewards. It is kind of a tacit agreement within them that they wouldn¡¯t risk too much into other¡¯s Pce of inheritance.

    Except for Sam.

    But they didn¡¯t hold it against him. He is kind of a whetstone for all of them.

    Now, Sam stood with the bow in his hands as he stood in front of Arkiv.

    "I didn¡¯t expect that we would be battling in archery. I heard from the people of the western continent, that you have some sick archery skills, but by the time we met you switched to the guns. How about we bet on this?"

    "What do you want to bet?"

    Sam asked with a smile.

    "If I win I want a couple of handguns."

    "No. I am not betting with them."

    "Why?"

    "They are the weapons of Mass destruction. They are not for others, ask something else."

    "Then why is it okay for you to have them?" He asked with a sulky look.

    "There is no amount of destruction I can¡¯t create without the guns that the guns can do. So, stop with this stupid talk and ask something else."

    "Okay, then. Only Archery the one who lost will owe other a favor."

    "Sure."

    With that, both of them took their arrows and shot at each other.

    The arrows shed mid-air and there is a faint explosion due to the sh of the spiritual energy.

    The arrows started flying from either side as they continuously shot and moved around. Straight shots, trick shots, multiple arrows, everything turned into chaos as they moved around and dodged each other¡¯s attack. The exchange was pretty intense.

    To be honest, Arkiv¡¯s archery is better than Sam¡¯s but there is a w as Sam has a superior body, more elements and on top of all of that, his bow is superior.

    So, he managed to stand on an equal footing with Arkiv.

    The rest of the yers are watching this intently.

    Most of the time, Sam is shooting fewer arrows than Arkiv, but the Arkiv¡¯s arrows have a problem as they wouldn¡¯t connect. Sam is using his earth element to his extreme advantage as he started building a defensive structure.

    It is not even a simple wall, with just a stomp, he is disappearing into the ground, creating a trench, creating obstacles for Arkiv, and making him lose his bnce.

    Arkiv was extremely frustrated. Sam is not using his methods to attack, so it doesn¡¯t count as him cheating and in the battle of archers it is extremely normal to do these things.

    But he is really frustrated with all this and Sam is being a pain in the ass.

    They are doing more damage to his mental fortitude than the body itself.

    The whole area turned into a chaotic mess.

    Sam is having some fun and there is a wide grin on his face. Even though this limited his abilities, he really is feeling the adrenaline rushing through as he got more and more excited by the contest.

    But soon he was on a back foot as Arkiv¡¯s techniques became more and more refined. Now, for every arrow, Arkiv shot there are extra arrows that are manifested with pure spiritual energy.

    At first, the number is small, but soon each arrow is creating five, ten, dozen, and two dozen arrows, and every arrow made of spiritual energy is exploding.

    Sam couldn¡¯t find a proper way to deactivate this, as every elemental arrow he is throwing is not effective and even the main arrow which the origin of the manifestation is hard to eliminate for some reason.

    He couldn¡¯t find another way out of it, so he once again changed his bow to recurve mode for faster shots and activated partial elemental fusion and void style at the same time.

    Sam¡¯s golden body made the spectators excited as this means, things got serious, Arkiv is also having the time of his life as he was never tested this much. If Sam fought at full strength and full arsenal he is sure that he would lose. But now that it is only a test of archery, he has some breathing space and can think of counter-attacking.

    It is now a tightpetition and when he saw Sam¡¯s change, he is even more ecstatic. But he is also pressured as Sam¡¯s attacks increased in not just intensity but also of quantity.

    He is attacking like crazy.

    In the part where Arkiv is winning with technique, he ispensating with speed and every arrow has void style which gave him the upper hand. The arrow doesn¡¯t even need to hit Arkiv to cause damage, all he has to do is to make sure that the arrow reaches near enough for him to get affected by the explosion.

    The situation reversed.

    While the battle was going extremely intense, something happened.

    An arrow hit Arkiv and he fell down. Sam was about to finish him off, but at this moment Arkiv dropped his bow and held his head with both his arms and rolled on the ground as he screamed on top of his lungs.

    Sam halted his actions and activated his energy vision to see if something is wrong with his energy cirction.

    But there is nothing wrong with his energy cirction.

    Sam ran towards him and so did the other yers, but they couldn¡¯t figure out what is happening.

    Sam tried to hold him in ce and check what is wrong, but all of a sudden Arkiv opened his eyes. His eyes turned a bit different. There is a weird ck glow in it and he caught hold of Sam¡¯s arm.

    Sam has already deactivated his elemental fusion and he couldn¡¯t react in time. Sharp energy entered his arm and the bone, the flesh everything broke. Even his feather coat was damaged as he bled profusely.

    Everyone took a step back.

    They didn¡¯t expect this turn of events, Sam also felt like something is not right. This energy is not exactly simr to Arkiv¡¯s energy.

    The flow is extremely different.

    Sam forcefully took a step back and looked at him coldly, he knew something is not right.

    A golden glow surrounding the hand and started healing it.

    He looked at Arkiv who stood up and picked up his bow and started examining it as if he saw it for the first time and looked at Sam with an extremely creepy and twisted grin.

    Sam examined him closely and said to the rest of the yers.

    "Take a step back, don¡¯t interfere."

    Everyone did as they were told and Sam activated his partial fusion as he also took out the bow. Once again the battle of archery began.

    This time though, Sam was suppressed. It is a one-sided domination and Arkiv is cackling like a crazy idiot.

    But Sam is constantly thinking about what happened.

    Arkiv¡¯s moves are extremely familiar to him but the current moves are nothing like his own. There are some simrities, but the fighting style is extremely different.

    But Sam could still sense some faint familiarity from the fighting style, he saw it somewhere. And he observed it closely before.

    But he couldn¡¯t figure it out.

    Only after taking some hits and destroying his coat in several ces, did Sam understand, his eyes widened in disbelief.

    He stored the bow away and changed his fighting style. His partial fusion turned intoplete fusion as he changed into hisser form and zoomed towards Arkiv.

    The sudden change took Arkiv by surprise and before he realized it, there is arge hole in his shoulder and a chunk of flesh was removed off of that shoulder.

    Sam threw the chunk of flesh away and took out staff as he started his attacks. The arrows that areing at him were not exactly a problem anymore as he started hitting Arkiv continuously and this time he is like a leech sticking close to his skin.

    Everyone is a bit shocked. Sam is not someone who goes back on his word so easily just to win a fight. They knew that much, but they didn¡¯t voice any opinions on the sudden change as they noticed something is definitely wrong with Arkiv.

    And the fight is not going well for Arkiv, first reason is that Arkiv is already exhausted before this weird change and now he is recklessly using his energy and overexerting himself.

    Now the surprise attack from Sam that missing chunk of flesh is also extremely taxing,

    Sam who has superior endurance and multiple fighting styles is bound to have an advantage and it showed easily.

    Soon, Sam pinned Arkiv to the ground and held the staff to his throat as he pressed his legs on it, he just took the mount position on Arkiv and held his head with as he closed his eyes.

    He used his spiritual sense to initiate a mental attack as both of their energies run rampant.

 Chapter 686: Hou Yis beating

    Sam tried his best to start a metal attack as both of them struggled. But he was being rejected as the opponent¡¯s mentality is too strong. He looked at him in the eyes and whispered something in his ears.

    "I heard your wife escaped before you could consummate your marriage, should I help her when I visit there?"

    He said this in such a way that no one would hear it, but suddenly Arkiv became so angry that his body started tearing apart with the spiritual energy running rampant.

    But Sam managed to beat that mental wall and he managed to start a mental connection.

    He could feel two mentalities battling inside Arkiv¡¯s spiritual consciousness. Even though it is a fight it looked like Arkiv¡¯s soul is being trapped under the first one.

    Sam just got a glimpse before his spirit was kicked out. He was also hit by another wave of spiritual energy and was kicked off. His coat ispletely ruined. The feathers are fine, but the threads are destroyed.

    He removed the coat and once again went to suppress this mentality, he didn¡¯t dare to provoke that guy anymore.

    As he knew that Arkiv might die if this goes on.

    He once again tried to create another metal intrusion but he couldn¡¯t the other side is too strong.

    After all, it is the god.

    That¡¯s right. Currently, it is Hou Yi possessed Arkiv and Sam found out because when he first came to this world and learned archery in the divine dimension, the divine will that he saw regarding the archery techniques was named Hou¡¯s Archery.

    At that time he really didn¡¯t rte to the name.

    He just went on to learn it. But the staff techniques he learned in the same way and named as Monkey¡¯s staff techniques turned out to be moves of Sun Wukong.

    So, when he saw those familiar moves from Arkiv, he finally managed to rte. But Hou Yi was extremely reckless, he didn¡¯t care about Arkiv¡¯s physical condition like a madman and kept on attacking Sam with the intent to kill.

    Now Arkiv¡¯s body is almostpletely destroyed and just a few seconds away from irreversible damage.

    If it is damaged too much, it would be impossible to restore it with direct healing.

    And Sam is caring so much because this is between Hou Yi and him, other people should have been kept out and particrly when Arkiv is Hou Yi¡¯s yer, he should have at least considered his well-being.,

    Sam is trying to get past the metal defense once again, but it is not happening. He thought for a second and his fingers turned metallic as two needles appeared on the index and middle fingers as he stabbed the needles into Arkiv¡¯s arm and the Paralytic poison that secretes from Mia¡¯s bloodline was injected into his body.

    And finally, the reckless movement was stopped and Sam took out an energy sealing device which he uses to keep the prisoners in check and seal their cultivations and ced it on Arkiv.

    He didn¡¯t even dare to heal directly as Hou Yi has vast experience and might find a way to use that energy he injected into harm Arkiv even more.

    He took out the heavenly wine and started spraying it on the cracks that appeared on the body. He tried to stop the bleeding and check the body condition.

    When he saw the condition he couldn¡¯t help but feel angry.

    He took the shadow sword for the first time in a while. From what he learned from the shadow sword, it is an extremely high-level weapon and it has its way around mental attacks.

    It can sever the connection between a weaker spirit weapon and its user forcefully. He couldn¡¯t help but turn to the sword.

    The shadow sword floated around and said to Sam.

    "This guy is quite powerful, it is not his full soul, it is just a wisp. Whom did you piss off?"

    Even though, he said that a faint sword ray shot out of the sword and entered Arkiv¡¯s head.

    "This guy is quite resistant. Make his mentality a bit unstable."

    Sam thought for a second and once again whispered something in the ear and the shadow sword used this chance to make a move.

    Finally, Arkiv¡¯s condition showed stability as he came back to his senses slowly.

    "He will be busy for a while, I couldn¡¯t kill him. Even if I did forcefully, the main body will be affected. So, try to bring the main body back to his consciousness.

    By the way, what did you tell him that he became so angry?"

    "He has the most beautiful wife in the world, but he hadn¡¯t done the deed before she escaped. You can imagine the rest."

    "Useless fellow."

    Shadow sword remarked about Hou Yi and Sam could almost picture the sword spirit being a handsome man rolling his eyes in disdain.

    He shook his head to get rid of these useless thoughts as he put the shadow sword back in and looked for the solution to the current situation.

    What shadow sword did is temporary.

    Seeing that the situation has stabilized a bit, the rest of the yers asked Sam what the exact problem is and Sam said everything without hiding.

    From thest message they got about the bounty on Sam and this situation, they got a gist of the situation. But they didn¡¯t feel relieved. They felt extremely fearful as they thought about what these gods will do them.

    Meanwhile, back in the higher realms far away from the undead realm, King Yao¡¯s special realm. Hou Yi has his personal estate here as he has a contract with King Yao.

    He is currently sitting cross-legged with his long hair let loose. If one saw him in this setting, they would think that he is a young sage untainted by any form of negativity.

    At this moment, space cracked outside the estate, and two hands tore the space like a piece of fabric and came out of this.

    He has a dark aura emanating from him with his face all blurry. The space crack didn¡¯t close behind him as he walked into the castle.

    Hou Yi suddenly opened his eyes in his room and disappeared from the spot. He reappeared outside his estate as he floated over and looked down at Gambler who is walking inside.

    "Gambler, what are..."

    Even before he could finish his sentence, Gambler disappeared from the spot and reappeared in the air right before Hou Yi.

    He held him by the cor and threw him over his shoulder towards the ground.

    But before he let go of his cor and throw him down, with a single thought, the gravity of the area increased by tens of thousands of times which made Hou Yi lose control, he crashed onto the ground. But the Gambler didn¡¯t stop there.

    He increased the gravity even more than space around became a bit unstable as just canceled his levitation.

    He directly crashed into Hou Yi who couldn¡¯t make sense of the situation and the next moment, the pounding of the millennium began as the Gambler took the mount position and started hitting him in the face.

    He knocked the teeth, made the jaw break, and soon the skull is also cracking.

    With every one of his hits, the tremors hit the whole realm and the castle of Hou Yi was already destroyed into mere rubble and the surrounding space is bing unstable and the spatial cracks are spread all over.

    The realm is trembling as it feared the Gambler¡¯s anger.

    But the Gambler didn¡¯t seem to care about anything else as he beat the crap out of his fellow immortal.

    At this moment another spatial fluctuation appeared as a middle-aged man appeared out of thin air,

    He looked at the Gambler and said.

    "Gambler, it is enough. If you have a problem, we can discuss it. The whole realm is trembling and it will be damaged severely if you don¡¯t stop now and I would be forced to move."

    Gambler halted his actions and looked at King Yao who appeared out of thin air.

    A few momentster.

    King Yao, the Gambler, and Hou Yi, all three of them are sitting inside a room around a table.

    The gambler looked at Hou Yi with disdain in his eyes and said.

    "You broke too many rules and even possessed your own yer to kill another yer. This ispletely uneptable. But right now, I don¡¯t have time to deal with you. You will now stop your stupid actions and give all three rewards to Sam, along with the promised reward which he could ask.

    You will triple the reward and give something equivalent to the runner-up prize to the rest of the yers and the other participants in the Pce of inheritance along with the protection charms you promised to deliver.

    We will be holding a meeting for two more days and see whether you will continue on with the game. If you so much as think about breaking the rules again, I don¡¯t care if the bnce between various realms will break, but I will kill you directly even at the cost of destruction of a whole realm."

    "You shouldn¡¯t be saying such reckless things." King Yao said from the side.

    The Gambler looked at him and said.

    "I will say what I want to say and I will do what I want to do. There is nothing you can do to stop the former and there is nothing you are capable of doing to stop thetter. Take care of your subordinate while you still can. After all, he might even die in a few decades.

    He provoked the wrong person."

    "Don¡¯t you think it is too much for you to threaten to kill me right in front of King Yao? That too twice." Hou Yi spoke.

    "You seemed to be a mistake. The first one is not a threat, it is a warning, the second one is not even considering my actions, it is the actions of the person you just tried to kill. Trust me, from what I know of that guy, your gamble was already against the odds from the start, and from what you did now, you don¡¯t have any chance."

    With that, he left the ce by tearing open a portal.

 Chapter 687: Vs Hou Yi

    Sam felt relieved when he noticed that Arkiv¡¯s mental storm has stopped. He once again started sensing Arkiv¡¯s mental state. He carefully healed his body and removed the poison he injected into his body.

    He slowly started healing him. He really felt a little guilty about this. Even though he doesn¡¯t like to admit it, he really does have some friendship with Arkiv, just because of his own ego and Hou Yi¡¯s ego has messed Arkiv up. Almost causing him irreversible damage.

    He really wanted to kill someone right this moment.

    After healing Arkiv and bringing him back to a certain stable state, he started looking around to find a way out of this ce. His blood is boiling right now and he wants to beat the crap out of that Hou Yi guy.

    This is the only thing that he could think of at this moment.

    The rest of the yers didn¡¯t daree and talk to him and only his friends are staying out of his way. He could only vent his anger at this moment. It is not suitable to make him suppress it.

    At this moment, Sam disappeared from the spot. He reappeared in a room where a young man with long hair is sitting on the other side of the table.

    Sam could instantly who he was, but even with all the anger he had, he didn¡¯t act impulsive, He walked towards that table and sat on the empty chair.

    His body is still freshly sore with all the fighting he did. His bare chest glistened with sweat as a faint smell of blood emanated from that scar-filled body. Even with that handsome face, at that moment, he gave out an aura of savage.

    "Due to the small mistakes I made, I have decided to triple your prize. You will not only be awarded the first ce and get the prize three times valuable than what was supposed to be given initially, you can also ask for three things instead of one."

    "What is the prize?"

    "It¡¯s a special bow. I wanted to give a rtively normal one, but since I decided to increase a prize, I will give you a rtively special bow along with three retractable special arrows."

    "So, can I ask whatever I want?"

    "Of course."

    "Okay, then. First thing is, I need the designs of the space gate formations that work between different realms."

    "What do you need them for?"

    "How is it any of your business? All you need to know is, it should at least be able to transport Consummate realm cultivators."

    "You should watch your tone."

    Sampletely ignored thisment and continued.

    "Second thing is, I need a list of names. The list of the gods who are in this plot together with you. nning to move the pce of inheritance to the undead realm inst moment. I want every god that Indra conspired with."

    Hou Yi looked at Sam intently. He didn¡¯t expect him to ask such a thing. Nor does he knew what he really wants to do with that list.

    "Are you giving it or not?"

    "I will."

    "Don¡¯t think about lying to me and adding other names that are not involved in this. I don¡¯t need everyone that voted in agreement, rather I want the names of people whom Indra might have arranged a meeting and the people he convinced with all the effort."

    "Do you really think, a puny human like you worthy of me lying? You dream really big."

    "You are a piece of shit that doesn¡¯t care about his own yer and even use his body to kill another yer whose age is probably younger than you by at least ten to twenty thousand times. If you can go this lower, there is no reason for me to believe you wouldn¡¯t go further."

    Hou Yi became angry instantly and his aura red up as he clenched his fist.

    "Thest one, I want you to make a bet with me."

    "What bet?"

    "You would be putting all the rewards you would be giving to the next participants and multiply them by ten times over and stake it against a fight with me.

    You and I will be battling with the same cultivation level. If I win I will get the rewards and if you win you wouldn¡¯t lose them."

    "What is the point of this, there is no benefit for me."

    "Of course, there is none you asshole. Did I ask you to screw up a fairpetition? You must suffer the consequences and what I am asking is not against the rules."

    "What if you ¡¯identally¡¯ got killed?"

    Sam ced his legs on the table to the side as he spoke.

    "Do you really think that I am soft persimmon? You must have thought since I couldn¡¯t beat Sun Wukong and Kartitekya, you would be able to beat me too. There is one difference that you didn¡¯t consider.

    The rest of the Pce of inheritances, I go there to test myself, to improve myself. So, I need to hold back some things. But this time, I just want to kick your ass. There is nothing to hold back."

    With that, Hou Yi snapped his fingers, the table and chairs disappeared.

    "You might not even have a chance to regret after I am done with you."

    Hou Yi said as he took out his bow.

    "You would be regretting this for the rest of your life. Because, every time you look at your ass from now on, I am the one thates to your mind."

    Sam said and took out the two swords.

    He changed to partial fusion instantly without wasting any time.

    He didn¡¯t wait for Hou Yi to make the first move.

    Even at his speed, the Hou Yi who is known as the god of archery actually managed to predict is his motion and shot an arrow.

    The arrow directly shot towards Sam full of sharp tyrannical energy. But he didn¡¯t dodge it. He used the swords to cut the arrow down along its length. The same thing happened for the next few arrows and Hou Yi couldn¡¯t help but frown.

    He has used a simr technique in the previous battle, but then he overexerted the strength and Sam is also using archery.

    But now things are different, on the same level his movement speed is certainly not a match for Sam.

    All this while he is using his right hand to hold the bow and all of a sudden he shifted it to his left and the number of arrows increased rapidly.

    Now Sam is the one being tested, he not only has to block the arrows with the swords, but some arrows are honing missiles locked onto him as if they have a mind of their own.

    Hou Yi is using trick shots like the back of his hand. The skill of his archery was on full disy and Sam who has a superior speed wasn¡¯t able to take advantage of it to the full extent.

    He thought of something and changed his approach. He turned off the light elemental fusion and activated the shadow fusion.

    His body disappeared into the shadow and he tried to near the distance. Hou Yi seemed to have predicted his reappearing spot as he dodged and already shot an arrow.

    The situation is not much different from before as once again Sam is working with Hou Yi¡¯s arrows after around fifteen to twenty exchanges, Hou Yi managed to finally connect the arrow, but he didn¡¯t feel happy instead, he felt like something is wrong and when the shadow fully manifested he noticed that it is not Sam. It is one of the shadow servants.

    Then only he noticed the energy fluctuations behind his back and Sam appeared there as swung the executioner¡¯s sword straight to his neck. Hou Yi tried to dodge but the de stuck his back and sliced through.

    The wound was surrounded with a corroding purple color indicating the special effect of the de.

    Hou Yi turned around and shot an arrow. But Sam disappeared once again as he shot another arrow to a different ce. Once again it is a shadow servant. In fact, it is the same shadow servant as the first.

    Even though the shadow was destroyed, it can be restored as long as Sam has enough energy.

    That is also one of the advantages of shadow necromancy.

    For the next moves, the situation didn¡¯t change. Hou Yi is being fooled by the shadow servants and Sam managed tond a few proper strikes tearing open Hou Yi¡¯s back with several wounds.

    And one of themnded on the special target. The ass. When Hou Yi felt the pain there, the mental pain and humiliation are much worse than the physical pain.

    He gritted his teeth as he looked at Sam with intense resentment and tried to attack him, but at this moment, he felt his body going a bit numb and his sense of touch got messed up.

    Sam looked at him and said with a smile.

    "Didn¡¯t I tell you? I don¡¯t have to hold back and poison is something that I don¡¯t use in normal battles. But I must say you held it for far longer than I thought."

 Chapter 688: Dumb Immortal

    Sam looked at Hou Yi who is currently feeling the effects of poison.

    He is wondering how long he would take to realize.

    When someone thinks of fighting Sam, the poison wouldn¡¯t be the first thought. They often forget about it, because of the rest of his dominant abilities.

    And Hou Yi did the same. Even when he is suffering the corroding effect of his wounds. He just attributed it with the property of the sword itself which is true.

    But since the corroding poison is the dominant one of all, and his anger clouding his stupid mind, he couldn¡¯t focus on the changes.

    Sam smirked at the thought that even an immortal is this easy to fool when he is this conceited.

    Hou Yi¡¯s energy ran rampant as if he didn¡¯t care anymore. But Sam noticed that he is expelling so much energy and burning his blood in process so that he could get rid of the poison.

    This is one of the crudest method of eliminating the poison from the body.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care, he just made his move and was about to use the same method once again. But this time, after the shadow blocked the attack, Sam didn¡¯t make the follow up move. He halted in his tracks and puked a mouthful of blood.

    The shadow was destroyedpletely. It is a permanent destruction making it impossible to recover.

    Sam looked at Hou Yi coldly.

    "Do you think that you are the only one who used necromancy against me?"

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and was about to make his move. Once again another arrow came and he tried to block it with the sword. But the arrow seemed to have disappeared into thin air before he felt the piercing pain on his left shoulder as the energy ran rampant.

    He once again halted in his tracks and bit on the handle of the sword in his right hand as he used the now free hand to remove the arrow.

    "You are also not the first one who used a sword to cut my arrows." Hou Yi continued with disdain almost materializing around him.

    Sam increased his speed to the limit as he tried to dodge the arrows now that he couldn¡¯t block it.

    But it turned out to be futile, the best he can do is get a graze on his skin. As forpletely dodging it is almost impossible.

    Sam thought for a bit and this time, when he swung the sword, the spiritual energy rippled in the air and the direction of the arrow changed.

    Sam used the ripple style and when the arrow didn¡¯t connect, Hou Yi couldn¡¯t help but feel stunned. So, one of Sam¡¯s light sword ray hit him in the chest.

    Sam followed with the attacks, but Hou Yi is smart enough to not stand there like an idiot.

    Sam who now noticed that the ripple style is working, didn¡¯t hold back anymore.

    He decided to use it and used to full extent and now not even a single arrow can make him budge. He just ran straight towards Hou Yi to reduce the distance. But it is hard as that guy is not so weak in terms of physique and the speed.

    The speed is not as fast as Sam, but this guy can integrate his movements well with his archery.

    No matter how much of a shit he is, damn is he good at battle?

    The exchange was intense, Sam started shifting to his elements as he battled so that he could mess up the rhythm of Hou Yi.

    The battle became intense. Sam is having a hard time. In fact this is the hardest battle he ever fought in a while. The pressure is increasing. Even though, the fights with Sun Wukong and Kartikeya are hard, they are meant for learninig.

    They taught Sam through a fight. But now it is pure enmity. Sam¡¯s experience of all these days is not enough to even the field with an immortal even if thetter reduced the cultivation.

    All of a sudden, Sam halted his attacks.

    He could see two ways from this point. One is to use the method with his flute and all his elements and the second one is to use his gadgets.

    Both of them had his pros and cons.

    The first method will definitely work, but Sam is not exactly sure as he would be dead tired after the attack was over and since this is just a duplicate body of Hou Yi, he might be able to find some loophole over the situation and kill him in his weakened state.

    Sam should be in a condition that any trick Hou Yi employed must take a certain amount of time which would give him a chance to escape or someone to intervene.

    As for why he is confident someone would intervene that thought is supported by the fact that Hou Yi suddenly changed his mind out of nowhere from trying to kill him to giving generous rewards.

    He knew that something must have changed in such a short period of time. So, he gave up on the first method and opted to the second.

    Sam¡¯s body turned to a brown rocky texture as he used his earth element. His arms expanded as arge rock appeared in it out of thin air.

    Hou Yi looked at it with a disdainful smile. He didn¡¯t expect that Sam would resort to this method. The only thought in his mind was how to torture Sam as he sensed Sam¡¯s despair from this method.

    Sam threw the rock straight at Hou Yi and another rock appeared in his second hand. He started throwing rocks one after another as if he wanted to kill Hou Yi with these rocks.

    Hou Yi smiled as he made some shy moves and shot the arrows at the rocks.

    Sam smiled at his action and his body turned transparent as he used the water element. All of this happened within a second.

    When Hou Yi saw Sam¡¯s smile, he felt that something wrong.

    The arrows hit the rocks and...

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*.

    The rocks exploded with arge amount of purple powdering out of it. The whole area was filled with it.

    This is one of Sam¡¯s new toys, these rocks are not formed from his earth element, rather he took them out from the storage. He already used earth element to make all these rocks hollow and filled it up with the poison powder.

    Even though this method seems dumb, it is actually quite practical. Not many people will check the iing attacks with their spiritual sense and scan it to see if it is real or not.

    And not for these obvious looking attacks. The lingering earth elemental energy Sam ced on it before throwing them wouldn¡¯t help.

    Sam used his transparency to his advantage as he moved within the purple powder area.

    Hou Yi who inhaled the powder and the powder that deposited on him profusely is not making his parts burn, it is also making him feeling like his blood is burning.

    He is in so much pain all of a sudden. As he tried to make himself calm and sensed the surroundings to check for Sam, he realized that he has been toote.

    Sam already cleared the distance.

    He held his bow, drew the string and released it. The spiritual energy wave sent the poison powder flying all around and created a space without any poison.

    But Sam already neared him. He didn¡¯t attack. No stabs, no punches, no kicks. But Hou Yi felt like he would have been better off if Sam did all of that as he was ready for those attacks. But Sam did something unique.

    He just hugged from the rear as his body turned metallic blue. He held him in a bear hug and the metal expanded to hold Hou Yi down for a brief second. He didn¡¯t give him any chance to resist and directly heated his own body with his fire element making the expansion easy as well as burning Hou YI¡¯s skin off.

    "Arghhh."

    Hou Yi groaned in pain.

    "AAAARRGGGGGHHHH."

    But the next moment, the groans turned into screams.

    Sam¡¯s metallic body suddenly has the sharp spikes protruded as he stabbed him in several spots at the same time. The skin is too thick and the muscles are too tough for him to just stab through him from one side to other.

    But he didn¡¯t need that.

    The fire element was deactivated and he even used the water element to cool down a bit and them all of a sudden, the lightning element kicked in.

    The electricity crackled as it was directly injected into Hou Yi¡¯s body as he shook wildly.

    Sam held him in ce and didn¡¯t let go. Soon, Hou Yi started losing his senses. Even his hair became crisp and smoke starteding off of his head.

    Sam finally let him go and he fell forward helpless. But Sam didn¡¯t rx with this. He took out the staff and gave a few hits with void style on the spine and even used the observation ability to see the cracks.

    He finally smiled as he spoke.

    "Hou Yi, the god of archery. And this is all you could amount to. Falling for such a cheap trick. Anyway fun is not over yet."

    Sam moved his staff which made a hole at the rear of Hou Yi¡¯s pants and he stabbed the staff straight in his Anus.

    "ARRRRRGGGGGGHHHH." He found the voice he lost due to the lightning.

    Sam just smirked and performed a three sixty degree kick straight on the other end of the staff.

    "AAAAAAAAAARRRRHHHHHHHHHHHH"

    The screams increased even more and blood could be seen flowing down.

    Sam took the staff and threw it away before taking out a small needle cum methane grenade before cing it in that hole of the pants right in between the ass cheeks.

    He squatted down and said to Hou Yi in his ears in a cold and venomous voice.

    "The day I meet you in real, will be the start of your worst time. I will make you wish that I was never born. Mere word about me will want you to tear the whole world apart and after all that suffering there wille a day where we would face each other.

    That day, the situation will end in the same way it is doing now. Remember this."

    With that, he pressed on the trigger of the grenade and jumped back.

    *BOOM*

    *AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH."

    The explosion was followed by a scream as the upper half of the body slowly disappeared.

 Chapter 689: The Game Begins

    After the body disappeared in the Pce of inheritance, back in King Yao¡¯s realm Hou Yi opened the eyes of his original body and he couldn¡¯t help but feel frustrated. His aura ran rampant and the whole pce shook.

    He really wanted to kill Sam right now. His killing intent made all the maids and servants feel extremely suffocated.

    But he didn¡¯t dare do anything, he didn¡¯t even dare to break the deal with Sam and just escape during the fight when he humiliated by exploding the grenade in his ass.

    He is afraid that The Gambler would lose all cordiality with him. He already made enough enemies, there is no need to speed up his own death.

    He could only curse his luck before closing his eyes once again. Even after all this happened, he has to give the rewards he promised.

    But he didn¡¯t have face to do that himself so he handed over everything to the avatar and stayed put.

    Sam took the rewards he was promised along with the list of the names.

    Actually, the reason he took the list is not solely for pissing them off, but to get the names of the gods participating in this game.

    From what he knew the gods didn¡¯t want to reveal the information about themselves before their turn in the Pce of inheritance.

    Now that Sam has the names of some people, he can not only expect their tests, he can also prepare for them all while estimating their character traits and for starters, the people in the list are easily swayed by benefits.

    These people are also someone he has to be careful about in the future Pce of inheritances and their yers might be his future enemies.

    When they came out, every yer and the candidate has three protective charms on them so that they could save themselves in this Undead realm.

    After all, as soon as they came out of the cave, the next game would begin and until their three charms are used up they wouldn¡¯t be able to return.

    They all had a pretty heavy day as they couldn¡¯t ept the fact that Arkiv was almost killed by his own patron.

    Sam¡¯s friends took off on their boards and foot as they searched for a ce to stay meanwhile Sam took Arkiv with him to a rtively deste ce along with his friends and took out a bow and three arrows.

    "This is the reward Hou Yi prepared. Generally, every Pce of Inheritance is just a tform for the gods to give these treasures to their yers and the rest of the yers are justpeting to snatch them away.

    This is prepared by him for you.

    Even though I don¡¯t feel guilty taking these rewards after winning thepetition, I do feel guilty for all the torment you have been through. So, please take this as my way of apologizing."

    Arkiv hesitated a bit before taking the bow and the three arrows.

    "Thank you."

    "Even though you are out of danger, it will take a while for you to be ready for fighting. I can get you back home if you want. You can just rest in my city and you will be safe."

    "No don¡¯t worry. I am okay. All I would need is fifteen days of rest and I would be as good as new. I can manage."

    "Okay then, stay these fifteen days with me. I have some medicine and pills, you can recover properly. After that, you can go wherever you want."

    "Sure."

    Watt who went around to scout the ce to find a ce to live came back and said.

    "There is a cave nearby. But it is upied by some Bats. It would need some time to clean up, but it is rtively hidden and wide enough for us to befortable. There is not much of activity in that area."

    Meanwhile, Philip and Jack also returned and reported the situation.

    "There is some activity there, we saw some wights and some ghouls hunting some undead creatures of thisnd. They seemed to be looking for some experience. There are really too many traces of battle.

    Arman and Chatur also came with simr reports.

    Now, only that bat cave seems to be their only option.

    They went to the bat cave.

    The beasts are mostly Nascent stage ones and a few Pre-transcendent stage beasts, the final one is a middle-stage Pre-transcendent stage.

    Since these beastse under the category of beasts that don¡¯t have sublevels individually so a Pre-transcendent middle-stage beast gives twenty points.

    He let them deal with the beasts. He wanted to capture the beasts at first, but when he saw the skeletons inside, he lost interest. They are too bloodthirsty and too hungry for blood.

    Even if he tamed them and let his subordinates take them in, they wouldn¡¯t be able to control their nature.

    After confirming this, he just went on with a ughter. He has locusts and termites to feed.

    Anyway, most of the beasts are not valid for evaluation, but for the beasts valid for evaluation, he decided to experiment.

    For the first Pre-transcendent stage beasts, the termite queen killed her and Sam received the points. The same wrist screen that was avable for their first game is still working.

    He could see his points there.

    The second was killed by him throwing arge boulder on it and this also worked.

    The third one was trapped in apletely physical trap and Jack killed it. This didn¡¯t count.

    The fourth one was aplete physical trap which worked, the fifth one is a kill through his puppet which also worked.

    The final test was done with something he prepared. He took out a vine from the divine dimension and nted it in the soil and dropped the beast on it.

    The vine entangled the beast and started sucking the energy dry and soon enough the beast died. Sam looked at his screen all this while and when he saw the difference in points, he couldn¡¯t help but feel ecstatic.

    He immediately burned the whole corpse with the vine which is undergoing some changes after the kill and turned both of them into ashes.

    He used his golden mes topletely burn it and only stopped after the ashes are scattered.

    Now he left the remaining beasts to Arman and Arkiv to make some points.

    After that, the four shadows were left to clean the ce. Then he burned everything in the cave for good five minutes until the walls turned red and almost melted.

    Bats are creatures that are so dangerous that even breathing the smell of their excretion will cause some viral infection. This realm is dangerous enough, he doesn¡¯t want any extra trouble.

    After arranging everything, Sam finally left the area with Watt to see around.

    He has to find the habitats of the Pre-transcendent creatures in this area as that would be the perfect ce to start his n.

    And soon they got some ces and Sam marked a single ce which has more traffic of the Pre-transcendent creatures.

    He went there with Watt and he took some flowers out of the divine dimension. He held the flower in his hands and blew on the pollen gently.

    He roamed around in this empty area to do the same with some more flowers and finally, he took out a small vine and nted it in that area before leaving with Watt and reaching the cave.

    He drew a simple map of the territory and showed the marked territory to the rest of the teammates which they should avoid.

    Apart from that, they can do whatever they want. After all, they are here for the experience.

    But since it is their first day in the cave, they decided to celebrate by cooking something. Sam took out a high-level boar from the divine dimension and started cooking a pork curry and made some roti tbread with the wheat flour.

    He tried his best to imitate the Coorg pork curry but it didn¡¯t work out as there are not enough spices, but it is still a satisfying meal to have after such a shitty experience in the Pce of inheritance.

    Meanwhile, the ce where he nted the small vine, a corpse of small rate type beast which turned into undead passed by, but the vine extended and caught hold of the rat which made it wriggle to get out.

    But it turned out to be futile as the flesh of the rat was decayed and only the carcass was left behind, the vine retracted back and there are some new leaves that appeared on it.

    The smaller beasts areing like that for the rest of the day and the vine caught them before finally a bud appeared on the vine and it soon bloomed with the appearance of more beasts.

    The flower that bloomed is extremely simr to the flower Sam blew the pollen off of.

    But it has a green hue. In fact, the flowers that he blew off are also different. One has a red hue and another one has a yellow hue.

    When a gentle wind blew, the green-hued pollen was carried away and the flower wilted.

 Chapter 690: Sprouts

    Within the dead forest, Sam and his friends are staying currently.

    The next day the group divided into smaller groups of two and they split themselves to do some hunting.

    Meanwhile, within the area Sam marked, arge Pre-transcendent stage creature that looked like a Rhinoceros is walking slowly.

    This is not a beast though, it is an undead creature formed from the beast carcass and it can be seen from the way there is arge chunk of flesh missing from its body.

    But the creature¡¯s energy doesn¡¯t seem to be proportionate to its size as it is walking a bit clumsily.

    Because that morning, it discovered that its energy is being drained out of its body from a point on its back and it couldn¡¯t reach any matter where it went.

    It walked for a long while and soon it stopped in its tracks and sat down on the ground leaning to a rock.

    What the creature doesn¡¯t know is that there is a small sprout on the back of its body with ck leaves and the number of leaves is increasing.

    The creature just stayed there till afternoon and soon it never moved.

    But after some time, a ck vine was growing out of the body of the creature, and flesh on the carcass ispletely gone with only a bit of skin and bones left. By the end of it, there are two flowers that bloomed and another bud on the vine.

    The flowers looked extremely simr to flowers Sam blew the pollen off of and with a small breeze this pollen also disappeared while the flowers on the vine wilted away after the pollen fell off.

    Soon a group of vampires came to that area following the tracks of that Rhino and were stupefied to find out that the creature is already gone, it cannot be considered dead as it is already undead, but it is gone.

    This made them feel a bit frustrated.

    "Why are the tracks so fresh if this is gone a long time ago? There are even vines all over it."

    One of the vampires said in an indignant voice.

    The vampires didn¡¯t bother with it but what they didn¡¯t notice is that a small white grain stuck to the skin of one of the vampires at the back of his neck.

    While Sam¡¯s little n is expanding wildly and bing arge n, he noticed the change in the number of his wrist screen.

    There is an excess of thirty-five points.

    Sam didn¡¯t expect that he would be able to get results this early. He could guess what happened. Generally, even for the vine he nted, he estimated that it would take another three days to show any form of results, but the very next day he managed to enter this area, the situation changed.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is, his n has spread faster than he thought and he didn¡¯t know that a Vampire was currently carrying one of the pollen grains on his nape.

    If he knew he would be even more eager to see the results.

    Meanwhile, he went along with Jack to see visit a ce.

    From the chess pieces he collected, he learned of some good ces in this area.

    The forest they are in is the forest of dying. As he already knew this ce is also a graveyard for some beasts and creatures from another realm. They don¡¯t know which realm it is.

    This forest is the house for few of such beasts but of lower cultivation.

    Apart from that, there is a ce near this area where a high-level swordsman died.

    He died in the valley near the forest.

    No one knows what level of cultivation that person is, but the valley is surrounded by the sword storm and in the middle of it, everyone can see the silhouette of a person sitting in the middle of that storm.

    It is the dead body of the cultivator that died in there and the rumors are that he has a sword in his hands while dying and that sword contains all his legacy.

    This ce is used as a training ground by many swordsmen of this realm.

    Currently, Sam and Jack are standing on the edge of the valley. There are a lot of undead creatures nearby. Vampires, Wights, Ghouls and there is even a specter with a faintly transparent silhouette.

    They all have different cultivation levels, but nobody bothered with these two humans, that is because they are currently under the disguise created by Chatur.

    As far as the rest of them knew, both of them are nothing but some vampires that do not belong to any Vampire household.

    Sam has lectured his friends on the basic knowledge of this realm after he learned from his chess pieces.

    Just like how any ce would have it, the different races have different territories they rule, but there are no strict regtions for people to live in one territory. At least for undead creatures, humans are treated as one of the valuable resources, so they are strictly regted.

    As for the rest, they move as they want and due to that, every race has seeds left in other races¡¯ territory. And for some reason, they don¡¯t have many conflicts. They are extremely friendly with each other. Except for Vampires and WIghts who have some differences and minor conflicts, there are no other differences between them.

    Sam has found such ces from the chess pieces so that he could help his friends get some experience and some legacies that are in this ce and this day it is Jack¡¯s time.

    They could feel the strong sword energy and sharp winds that could kill even a consummate creature.

    The whole valley is surrounded by this.

    There is a method to go in and that is their sword essence. Their sword essence will give them ess into the valley and the deeper they go the more refined their sword essence should be.

    Inside the valley, there are many people sitting and standing with their swords as they practiced and refined their sword essence. It was also said that every sword ray that is present in this valley is rted to a technique of the expert that died in here, so they have a chance of learning this.

    The only way to improve their sword essence is to practice more andprehend the sword more.

    Jack has a decent sword essence and he activated before walking in and Sam followed suit. Sam doesn¡¯t know how refined his sword essence and he is not keen on finding it out. He is not much interested in the legacies of others. The only reason he even attempted to take the legacy of Murali is to get the tools that legendary person used.

    And he epted the shadow sword as it is a magnificent weapon that was untamed for so long.

    As for this legacy, he is not interested. He has his own two great swords that would one day reach the greatest of the heights along with him and the shadow sword is an addition.

    He doesn¡¯t need the extra swords. He is not a collector.

    He is only here just to be safe if Jack gets into trouble.

    He spent the whole day until evening within the valley as Jack practiced in the valley.

    He couldn¡¯t go deep into the valley, but it is not bad for the first day. That evening, Jack stopped his practice and spoke to Sam.

    "You can go back, I will be okay. I wouldn¡¯t be attracting much attention for the next three days. You cane back then."

    "Sure."

    Sam didn¡¯t insist and went back to the cave. The rest of the group didn¡¯te back they are all staying out and only came at midnight.

    The next day, he took Philip and Watt to their respective ces. It is a bit far away from this forest, but their hoverboards really did help them in traveling fast.

    As for Arman, the lightning element is not something this ce could offer. The death energy is extremely repulsive to lightning. As for Chatur, normal legacies wouldn¡¯t help him that much.

    For the next few days, Sam spent his time battling the undead creatures and helping out his friends with theirprehension and practice.

    He is waiting for something big to happen and the first month would be boring just like this.

    So, he is not extremely worried.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is, his n moved a bit faster than he thought.

    With the forest dying, there is a small base of Vampires and within the woods near that base, there is a vampire leaning towards the tree as he tried his best to control the flow of his energy, there is a human corpse nearby with all the blood sucked out dry.

    But the Vampire is neither showing the satisfaction of the meal nor the energy that he should have gotten from all that blood. At this moment, all he could think of is the small sprout on his nape that is growing bigger by every moment.

    He noticed the small sprout two days ago and he tried his best to pull it out. But he failed miserably as he noticed that the roots are directly linked to his spine, he would be doing some serious damage to himself if he pulled it out.

    The sprout is sucking his energy dry and even his resistance is extremely futile. All he could do ispletely restrict his own energy flow but if he did that, the sprout is draining his body dry.

    He is battling with this for the past three days as he allowed the sprout to take some energy which would calm it down for some time and restrict the flow for that grace period as he dyed his imminent demise.

    He is sure that he wouldn¡¯t be able to hold it for long.

 Chapter 691: Spread of the Vines and the news

    The vampire is currently trying so hard to stay conscious as even his mental strength is getting exhausted.

    He doesn¡¯t know where this thing came from but it is sucking him dry. After another hour of struggle, he couldn¡¯t take it anymore and gave up.

    The vine started growing rapidly and the body of the vampire was being slowly consumed soon all that was left of him was some skin and bones.

    Sam¡¯s wrist screen once again changed with an additional ten points.

    But this is not the end, at this moment, a young Vampire is bringing a female human with lustful and hungry eyes.

    There are very few ways for a human to live peacefully without the fear of being eaten alive. And one of them is being sexy enough for these cold corpses to feel the arousal.

    This woman is one of those lucky few that is even treated nicely because of her bed-chamber arts.

    But when the young vampire who is hungrily kissing this woman saw the body of one of his kind being sucked dry and the vines are growing rapidly and even a flower blooming on it, he ran forward and the woman followed him.

    As soon as he was within the range of the vines, he was entangled and pulled in along with the human woman. Both of them struggled a lot but before long, the human woman who is screaming a lot until now just stopped as she realized nothing is happening to her.

    As soon as she released the spiritual energy, the vine is not even absorbing it and just let her go.

    She just physically struggled and freed herself from the vines and escaped, but the vampire was still stuck in the vines.

    She ran towards the camp and yelled at the top of her lungs to call for the people.

    At this moment, the flower already bloomed and the pollen already spread before the flower disappeared and the new flower is on verge of blooming.

    The woman who ran to the camp came back with a bunch of Vampires following her.

    They didn¡¯t dare touch the vine, but the vine has a certain range within which it would attack directly.

    Two more vampires got caught and they were being sucked dry and the vine spread even more. Now it is even sucking death energy out of the trees that could survive in this environment making the trees to be destroyed.

    The Vampires that are within the area looked panicked as they maintained a distance. They decided to go back and call for their seniors and also marked the area they are in so that they could maintain this safe distance.

    But the little white pollen is something they couldn¡¯t see and it also spread within their supposedly safe area.

    The next day, a Transcendent stage Vampire along with some high-level Pre-transcendent stage vampires came to this ce and watched from the supposedly safe distance, but as soon as they stepped there, they saw the carcasses of some undead creatures and small beasts.

    Before they could examine what happened, the vines entangled them and started sucking them dry. The new vines came out of nowhere and the Pre-transcendent stage Vampires couldn¡¯t put up much fight. The transcendent stage cultivator managed to get out with brute force, but half of his energy was sucked dry.

    He couldn¡¯t help but sneeze loudly as he felt something tingling in his nose, but he was relieved that he managed to escape and left the ce with that itchy feeling of the mouth and lungs.

    He immediately went back to the Vampire base camp to move and gave the ount of the current situation with this new nt they discovered.

    The human woman who saw the whole scene couldn¡¯t help but take another look at the vines before she left.

    As soon as she reached the camp, another Vampire scion who has his eyes on her for a long time took her away to the bedroom and once again she looked at the forest where the vines are still moving with a helpless look.

    Sam only checked the number increased in his wrist screen, he didn¡¯t know who was the victim of his crooked invention.

    After all, from the war, he and the whole Undead realm are enemies anyway. Even if he only thought of it is as a transaction, it is not possible for the undead creatures to think so.

    The wightmander that escaped has already informed the remaining two factions regarding Sam¡¯s actions. His action of collecting them for his chess is something they could ept no matter what.

    They are already nning for their next attack and every one of them has Sam¡¯s picture with them so that they wouldn¡¯t forget to take revenge on him.

    It is better to strike first thanter since he also has the need for points and has to piss Indra off once more.

    He actually worked really hard to create these vines. If he has wood element it would have been easy, but he doesn¡¯t have that, so he had to work extra hard.

    He made such adjustments that the vines which would have fed on the soul energy and spiritual energy of any creature are nowpletely fixed on the death energy. It is also a form of dark elemental energy which is also spiritual energy, to put it simply, Sam just made it pickier about its food.

    Apart from that, he grafted it with some other nts and the flowers are the results of that. These nts are not the strongest and they are not even favorite food for any creature, they don¡¯t even have any medicinal properties, the only advantage for them is that they will spread faster.

    The pollen of this nt grows easily as long as there is energy.

    Due to the forceful grafting andbined mutation of these two nts, this new vine was born. If he nted this new vine in a normal world, it wouldn¡¯t be useful at all. Even in Naga Loka and Banished realm, it would at most capture a target and leave them after realizing that they don¡¯t have any death energy.

    But here except for most of the humans, every creature is dependent on the death energy to live or to be precise dependent on this energy to continue its existence.

    And every being with that energy is food for the vine, generally, this vine wouldn¡¯t go after the vegetation but in this realm, it is going after everything that could hold the death energy and the more it eats, the more it grows, the more it grows the more flowers bloom and the more flowers, the more the pollen, more pollen then it is more vines and more victims.

    Sam estimated that it would grow to arge scale at which the higher-level people of the different races would notice it and take it seriously after a month and he would personally make a move them.

    The vines would have already spread so much by then and some of them would have grown enough to devour thete-stage Transcendent stage cultivators. This makes his points grow easier and he can provoke the races as he liked with these vines behind him.

    Not only would he be able to get what he wanted he might even capture that wightmander back.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is that his estimations are wrong by a long shot. While he is helping his friends in a rxed manner, the news about vines already spread to the higher-level authorities of the Vampires.

    Almost ten Vampires died and all of them have a certain importance for their race, so the Transcendent stage cultivator who inspected the ce and escaped from the vines came back and reported everything to his family head.

    But the family-head is pretty rxed.

    "This is the realm of undead and what you are saying happened in the forest of dying. Some rotten fool would have brought a different nt from the higher realms before dying and it must have fallen there.

    Just don¡¯t go near it andpletely ignore it for now. If one more incident happens, just destroy it. Why are you reporting these silly incidents to me?

    Is this the first time you encountered something inexplicable that could kill our kind?

    Don¡¯t forget most of the races beyond our realm don¡¯t like us and they have so many protection methods against us, this must be a new kind.

    Currently, what we have to think is how to rally the attack on the Banished realm when they are at their weakest.

    They just went through a war and all the races have weakened. Our fortune is good since that Wight kid also failed in his invasion and even escaped like a coward, this has evened our field with the Wights and Ghouls.

    Now we have to think of a way to rally another attack and invade into theirnds and we can easily take over.

    So, do your assigned tasks properly and don¡¯t think of these useless things."

 Chapter 692: Spread of Vines and News II

    Sam just went on with his newly acquired daily routine he looked for the beasts he could battle with and visited the legacy sights of his friends so that he could make sure they are safe.

    Apart from that, all he did is note down the points he has been acquiring.

    The first week went on like this and he has already gotten around three hundred points which is quite a lot.

    He noted down every increment so that he could estimate how many creatures of what level are dead.

    The situation is progressing faster than he thought and this is something pleasant even though it is beyond his expectations.

    If the situation goes on smoothly, his n would fall into ce and the steps would be finished earlier than he thought which means he can leave this god-forsaken ce faster than he originally nned.

    Meanwhile, the races of this realm also noticed the differences. There are four main races and the Specters are least involved in the territorial matters as they don¡¯t really need many people. They don¡¯t reproduce they just form from the dead creatures.

    They don¡¯t need much ce and there is not much development and such in that ce.

    The remaining three races, the Vampires, Wights, and the Ghouls, care about the situation the territory, and the number of creatures a lot.

    At this moment, the Transcendent stage cultivator who escapes from the vine is currently in front of their family head.

    They are one of the top three Vampire nobility and they deal with so many affairs and one of them is managing the Forest of Dying. Almost all the dead bodies of the Nascent stage creatures and Pre-transcendent stage creatures¡¯ dead bodies from the other realms are dumped into this area.

    This ce is an extremely valuable resource as these dead bodies have a high chance of turning into undead creatures and even if they didn¡¯t, they serve as food for many beasts that could live in the environment.

    There are many creatures and even the Bats Sam and his friends cleared are one of such species.

    But from the past week, the decrease in the Pre-transcendent stage beasts has reduced.

    Within the forest, there are three base camps for the three races. From the Vampire¡¯s side, this guy who escaped from the vine acts as the representative and takes care of the matters and the training of their young vampires who have good potential.

    Apart from that, he is also responsible for marking the Pre-transcendent stage creatures which are the possible hunting targets, and make a list so that they could monitor the hunting of their youngsters. After all, even though there are many corpses arriving at this ce, it is still a resource depending on many external factors so they could only use them carefully.

    But this guy noticed the rapid reduction of these creatures. Many beasts and undead creatures are being killed continuously the poption is being reduced. They could find several battle traces, but they couldn¡¯t find the people responsible for it.

    They don¡¯t know who is hunting these and what they are doing it for. The only traces they found are some human blood that was spilled during the blood.

    One must say that Vampires are truly linked with Blood. As soon as this guy found the traces of blood he noticed that there are multiple people. Being a Vampire helped him identify the blood easily and the nature of the blood which is constantly being affected by their spiritual and elemental energies along with the traces of the battle gave him information on their elemental usage.

    He is currently reporting these things to the head of their family. Apart from that, he also reported the increase in the vines that are appearing in different ces, the spread is too much and too fast.

    He did so all while holding his chest as if he is afraid of something.

    The head felt like the situation is a bit more troublesome than he expected it to be.

    "Go back and meet with the supervisors of the other races. See if areas under their influence also showed any of such signs and if they did, discuss the issue with them and find a solution."

    The head said with a solemn gaze.

    "Is there any possibility that there is a human settlement without us knowing? For now I could only think of something. This is an easy way for them to deal with us. By eliminating our resources when many of our elites are dead at the same time."

    "Even though it is too far-fetched, it might be true, just keep this possibility in your mind when you investigate this."

    The very day this guy left their pce and went to the Forest of dying to meet with the representatives of the other two races.

    He exined everything that has happened and asked.

    "Have you seen any traces of these happenings in your areas?"

    The Ghoul and the Wight exchanged nces and the Wight said.

    "We noticed the traces of human battles with the creatures, the poption of creatures indeed decreased, we are also looking into it, but I didn¡¯t know anything about these vines, I have to check once again.

    How dangerous are they?"

    "They caught ten Pre-transcendent stage cultivators all at the same time in the same ce and killed every one of them. I barely managed to escape." *Cough* *Cough*

    The Vampire spoke as he coughed, the two of them frowned. The Vampires don¡¯t actually need air to survive, they have different biology and everything they need would be obtained by blood, even their reproduction a bit different.

    The only reason they inhale air is so that they can speak. The vocal cords of the vampires only activate in the presence of the inhaled air.

    That is the only reason they have to breathe in the air, so it is really unfathomable for someone to see a vampire cough.

    The coughing didn¡¯t stop though, the Vampire bent his body as he coughed violently. He couldn¡¯t even stand straight.

    The Wight and the Ghoul neared him as they tried their best to make him stable.

    "What happened? Just show us where the problem is?" The Wight asked nervously. It is not a good thing for a Vampire to die in the presence of the Ghoul and the Wight. Even though they might be able to convince others about their innocence it will still make the situation tense between the races.

    A transcendent stage cultivator is an important asset.

    As they tried to make the situation better what they don¡¯t know is that they are actually making the situation worse.

    The Vampire is actually trying his best to resist something that is trying toe out of his chest.

    But when they interfered with their energy it actually undermined his resistance that something just came out of it.

    Before he could think of saying something, a vine came out of the chest and started growing rapidly while consuming everything in his body. The growth is so rapid that it turnedrger than any vine that was inside the Undead realm.

    Since the Wight and the Ghoul are there, the vine just spread through towards them and started consuming their energy and flesh.

    The process was so fast and the flowers are constantly blooming the wines, spreading the pollen and wilting, and due to the excess death energy that was being leaked out of these three people, some pollen is even sprouting immediately as it fell near.

    "AAAGGGGH" "HELP"

    They started yelling for help and the call for people nearby. But every person around them is only a Pre-transcendent and they learned that they made a mistake calling them the minute they entered the room.

    As soon as the Vampires, the Ghouls, and the Wights entered the room, they are already pulled by the vines and became the victim for its suction.

    There is no way they could escape.

    The vines even spread out of the wooden shack breaking through the walls.

    The person that caused all this is just looking at his wrist screen as he noticed the rapid increase of the number, he could guess from the score which is in hundreds three times in a row, that the transcendent stage cultivators have fallen victims for his vine.

    Now only he understood how much faster the n is unfolding. He didn¡¯t expect that he would be seeing this big of the numbers just after a week after he came here.

    When Arkiv who is near him looked at the number, couldn¡¯t help but shake his head in envy.

    "Just what did you do? You don¡¯t even make a move and you still get points. It is unfair."

    "Nothing is fair in this world, the faster you figure that out and admit it, the more you would feel relieved, and the more you would be able to solve your problems in a better way.

    As for the score, you haven¡¯t seen anything yet, just see it after one month and you will know what the real score is and if I were you, I would just leave after recovering. The situation would be nasty."

 Chapter 693: Trigger

    Sam¡¯s words really came true.

    Right after the incident with the sudden surge of his points, Sam saw the continuous growth of the points and knew that the vine is spreading beyond any of his expectations.

    After the three Transcendent stage cultivators of the three races along with tens of the Pre-transcendent stage cultivators disappearing in thin air after the meeting, the higher-ups of the three races decided to investigate the situation with high importance.

    The signs of battles between humans and the creatures are also increasing.

    But what Sam doesn¡¯t know is that the three races linked the vines and the humans together and though it is their n. Even though in a way it is the truth, the humans that are fighting with the creatures that openly with so many traces are naturally the rest of the yers.

    They don¡¯t have a cheating hack like Sam, so they could onlypete with each other and they first decided to sweep the whole forest of dying before leaving and spreading further.

    If they only killed the creatures and Sam didn¡¯t mess with the races with his vines they would have had an easier time, but due to this ovep of incidents they are getting the extra heat from the three races and one week after the incident, they could already feel the people of three races on their tails.

    At first, the Pre-transcendent stage cultivators that came after them regret their decision as the yers are not that easy to mess with.

    Now, most of the yers are Level-3 Pre-transcendent and they could deal with some Middle-stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivators.

    If they work in teams, then things would be even nastier for their opponents and they did make it nasty.

    They got some extra points. But after a few battles, the three races couldn¡¯t take the loss and the vines are increasing the losses.

    At least the first vines the vampires saw in the forests and the vines in the wooden shack are known vines. They know the locations, but they don¡¯t know the rest of them as the people are not returning and they couldn¡¯t estimate the location they disappeared at.

    Soon, the heads didn¡¯t dare to send the Pre-transcendent stage cultivators, they are only using the transcendent stage cultivators and even the Consummate stage cultivators are also making their move.

    They searched for the location and they even managed to destroy some vines that have not matured yet.

    At least they thought so.

    The yers are the ones who suffered the second most in this chain of people that are fighting a war that Sam has started without them even knowing.

    The chain consists of three batches of people. The first one is Sam and his friends, the second one consists of the yers, the third one consists of the three races.

    Sam who is the one that let the vines loose in thisnd was not known to be present by the three races and no one knows that vines are his own doing.

    The three races think that the yers are the ones who are damaging them and the vines are also their work and both parties are now shing.

    Because of the presence of the yers, the third batch of this chain the three races are thinking that as long as they defeated the second batch they would get rid of the vines and wasting time as Sam let the vines propagate and made his n thrive all the while his friends targeted the legacies that are left behind by the dead people.

    He is one person in this chain that is most low-key, but he is the biggest variable that is changing and manipting this war in an extremely rxed manner.

    Meanwhile, the yers are the ones who have the least amount of information in this situation and they don¡¯t know why they are being targeted so much, there is no room for them to sit and talk about what is happening within three weeks after the Pce of inheritance is over the Consummate level cultivators are on their tail and they had to use their protective measures.

    Some tried with their own trinkets before using the ones given by Hou Yi and a couple of yers had to escape back to where they came from while some managed to escape the forest of dying and join the rest of the undead realm.

    But the vines are also spreading past this ce. Because all the pollen that makes the vines move away from this ce is just some wind that could carry the pollen out.

    By the end of the first month, the forest of dying is already upied by the forest of dying.

    It is about time, Sam made his own move.

    And he decided the trigger to be one of his friends.

    The one closest to that is actually Jack.

    In the past month, he has shown one of the greatest results the undead realm has ever seen.

    He made the whole valley with thergest sword storm that existed for centuries his home.

    Everybody tens of swordsmen looked at him in awe as he spat blood and his body full of cuts. He didn¡¯t wear his special coat for this and let the sword storm rip him apart if his sword essence didn¡¯t manage to alleviate the sword storm.

    He took the hits, he took the swords, but he didn¡¯te back. Not even once.

    They don¡¯t know what kept him going.

    But on this day, he has gone the farthest in the valley. He was the nearest person to the sitting corpse inside and he is the only guy that could at least get a faint glimpse of that majestic silhouette that is right in front of him.

    There is only ayer of the storm that is between both of them.

    At this moment, Jack held his ck meteorite sword tightly as he stood straight. His right foot was in the middle of making a step as he could feel the pressure that is opposing him. His sword essence has surrounding him making him look like a living sword.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel his marvel as he looked at the massive improvement Jack has gone through. To be honest out of his three friends, Philip is most talented and Watt is kind of versatile with his growth while Jack is most rigid as he only practices sword and he is a bit one dimensional in his growth.

    But he is also the person that works the hardest.

    Sinceing to this ce, he is the one with massive improvements.

    Even though Philip and Watt gained something they don¡¯t have that great of an improvement.

    Now Jack is only a step away from what many of the people couldn¡¯t do for years.

    At this moment, Sam is standing at the entrance of the valley as he looked at the surrounding people look at him with greedy eyes.

    They don¡¯t have any reservations to hide their intentions. Their thoughts are quite simple, they would kidnap Sam and take him hostage then buy enough time to steal the sword from Jack.

    Even if Jack is greedy and lets Sam go, all they need is some time to steal the sword.

    But how can Sam not understand those greedy stares, but he is not at all offended. In fact, he is extremely excited.

    There are many Pre-transcendent stage cultivators and few Transcendent stage cultivators. There are four transcendent cultivators and they lock each other out and they knew it, so the key lied in the Pre-transcendent stage cultivators that followed these four.

    They will sh and they all locked eyes with each other.

    Sam just cracked his fingers and waited and as soon as they made the move he did too.

    He activated the partial fusion of light element and jumped at the two nearest guys and caught them by their throats.

    He held them tightly and dashed into the sword storm which made everyone halt their footsteps.

    Sam held both of those guys in his hands and turned around to look at them, he didn¡¯t stop his fusion and just increased his sword aura. He looked at the group of people that are standing at the entrance of the valley.

    He gave a cocky smirk as they understood that he is not a vampire, he is a human after all.

    He stepped back deeper into the valley in a rxed manner as he tried his best to increase his sword essence.

    He was surprised to find out that he has such a refined sword essence. But the two people he is holding are not exactly delighted about this.

    They don¡¯t have enough sword essence to keep on going in with Sam.

    Their bodies couldn¡¯t handle it.

    Due to the intensity of the storm, they couldn¡¯t even shout or yell to express their pain.

    They are bleeding their cold blood which doesn¡¯t have any form of warmth.

    Their flesh is being shredded by the sword storm as Sam neared deeper into the valley.

    Jack is currently taking thatst step and as soon as hended the foot, thest curtain was destroyed and he could see the silhouette clearly.

    There is indeed a Middle-aged man sitting crosslegged and a sword in his hands standing as it leaned on his shoulders.

    Sam started feeling the pressure and since the two people are dead in his hands, he threw their bodies away and concentrated on the walk, he couldn¡¯t enter thest region, he tried his best to close the distance with Jack and said.

    "Just take thest step, I will deal with everything thates. This is what you deserve."

 Chapter 694: Announcment

    Sam stood there as he looked at the group with a provocative smile, he even hooked his finger towards them to provoke.

    They are all extremely angry, but Sam didn¡¯t care. There are no Consummate realm cultivators and even the transcendent stage cultivators are not ofter stages, he can easily escape. All he needs to do is grasp the perfect timing.

    And not just that, he will also give them a parting gift.

    Nobody dared to enter the sword storm, they are not that dumb. But they are not worried that is the only entrance of the valley. In their opinion, they just had to wait.

    Jack held his ck meteorite sword tightly as he took the final step towards the body of that expert.

    At this exact moment, the chaotic sword storm which has no restraint until now, halted as all the sword rays floated like twinkling lights in the air.

    The rest of the cultivators at the entrance all looked at it in awe as the majestic sight synced into their minds. But Sam can see this differently as he is already inside the valley and his perspective is different.

    Even though the chaos looked like it ended and this turned calm that spection couldn¡¯t be farther from the truth.

    The sword rays in the valley that are currently floating are actually establishing a connection within themselves and they are bing one creating a stagnant curtain of the sword essence.

    This is far more dangerous and lethal than the sword storm, even though it looked safer.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but gulp in nervousness.

    He is a foreign person within this valley.

    Currently, Jack seemed to have established a link with the valley as he could feel the sword curtain linked to him in a form of protection.

    As he was thinking, the ck meteorite sword in Jack¡¯s hands shook a little and started vibrating as the sword turned bright with the spiritual energy turning into sword aura.

    At the same time, the old sword that was in the hands of the dead body is also vibrating as both swords obtained a certain level of resonance.

    Soon the whole sword curtain is vibrating along with the two swords. Sam could feel the pressure as he stood straight in the middle of all these links.

    After a while, he couldn¡¯t take it anymore and took out his two swords and concentrated his sword essence to maintain some resistance and alleviate the strain that was put on his body.

    At this moment, a white light shot from all the hovering sword rays and all these beams of lights converged together towards the dead body and merged in that sword.

    Then another refined sword light flew out of that sword and shot towards the ck meteorite sword and then surrounded Jack.

    Jack stood there calmly as he closed his eyes and absorbed the essence of this sword as heprehended the sword art.

    Sam could barely resist the pressure anymore and his skin started tearing in several ces. He felt like he is being tested by the sharpest of the des that ever existed.

    He couldn¡¯t help it anymore and took out the gourd of heavenly wine as he continuously drank it and healed himself.

    The process continued.

    Some of the idiotic people that are standing at the entrance of the valley misinterpreted the situation and thought that the valley was safe, but a sword ray shot out of the curtain and cut them in two. The remaining people got the message and stayed put.

    The process went on for a whole night.

    The next morning, Sam has finally managed to get rid of the pressure, that is not because of his strength or theprehension, it is because the process is over. But Jack is still not out of his dazed state.

    There is a lot of excess energy flowing out of his body which could destroy him any time, but he is keeping it in with a delicate bnce and trying to suppress it which is almost impossible with his level.

    Sam turned around to take a look and was stunned to see what is in front of him. Apart from Jack¡¯s state, the most surprising thing is actually the sword and the dead body turning into dust.

    He could see both of these things slowly disintegrating into the air and disappearing from this world.

    The sword curtain is also slowly disappearing.

    Sam didn¡¯t dare make any rash moves when the curtain is still present.

    As soon as it disappeared he looked at the valley entrance where all the people are rushing in madly.

    Sam extended his hand that has turned into a rock arm and held Jack tightly, before taking the harbinger out.

    At first, he didn¡¯t increase the altitude rapidly, he waited for the group to near him and held something in his remaining free hand.

    All of them have only thought, to take what was given to Jack.

    Sam endured the sword aura slicing his rock arm and took out arge grenade from his storage, this grenade is a bit different. He made it just for the undead realm.

    After every one of them reached a certain distance, Sam increased his altitude and threw the grenade at them.

    Therge grenade didn¡¯t even explode, it is like a smoke bomb releasing a lot of green smoke.

    The people stopped in their tracks and didn¡¯t move for a second, the whole group was covered within the smoke range.

    Sam used this chance to move further and took out a couple of flowers and blew the pollen towards them.

    Even these transcendent stage cultivators wouldn¡¯t be able to follow him if he moves in full speed on his harbinger, so he is not worried at all.

    He looked at all of them coldly and said in a loud voice.

    "If anyone of you lives past this moment, go back and tell your people that Sam has arrived."

    With that, he took Jack and left the ce.

    He turned into a streak as he moved towards the bat cave at full speed and as soon as he reached the cave, he put Jack aside and went to a corner to take care of himself.

    His arm waspletely torn apart from the sword aura.

    He just held him purely by his sheer will.

    While he ran away, the group in the valley is having the hardest time of their lives.

    The green smoke seemed harmless at first, but as soon as it dissolved into their skin and internal organs, the situation turned dangerous.

    There is one thing that is so important to the undead creatures. They might vampires, the wights or the ghouls all three of them have one thing that they have inmon, they have bodies that don¡¯t grow.

    Generally, there are two ways to reproduce or increase their poption, first one is to create a servant through the gift of bit or other bloodline arts, but the person wouldn¡¯t be pureblooded, this uses the humans as the targets.

    As for the second one, it is reproduction. The men will copte with the human women, and make them pregnant, the baby will be born with two bloodlines, the undead creature bloodline which will be initially passive, and the human bloodline.

    When they reach the awakening stage, the creature¡¯s bloodline activates and starts dominating the human bloodline and after they reach adulthood, they undergo a certain ceremony simr to the bloodline refinement in which they willpletely let go of their human identity both physically and psychologically.

    After that happened, their bodies wouldn¡¯t undergo any biological changes and will remain in some kind of frozen or dormant state.

    At least, their flesh would. It is stronger and has a high regeneration ability, but that is as long as it is healthy enough.

    Their flesh doesn¡¯t follow the regr cycle of the humans or any other creatures, with the new cells taking the ce of the old ones.

    Now the green smoke he created is actually made by the extract of all kinds of decaying poisons he found in Naga Loka.

    After this dissolved into their skin, their flesh started the decay and they rapidly used their death energy which is the basic form of their spiritual energy to resist the decay. This would have been normally okay.

    After the decaying poison and the death energy battled it out, everything would be okay.

    But Sam dropped the pollen over them at this moment for this exact reason.

    The pollen if by any chance entered their flesh directly due to the decay in the skin the death energy that was channeled to resist the decay will all be absorbed by the pollen promoting their growth.

    Even though Sam just blew the pollen off on them, it is not exactly sufficient to tag every one of them.

    Some of them are not suffering the decay, but some of them clearly felt their situation getting worse and the small spouts that came from their skin are the direct indication of that.

    All of them remembered his words and left the valley to find their superiors and family members in fear of death.

 Chapter 695: Kings Meet

    Sam¡¯s message spread faster than he thought.

    The people left the valley and immediately contacted their superiors. Particrly the people who have the vines growing out of their bodies.

    Since all three races are quite sensitive about these vines, they got ess to their higher-ups easily.

    When they gave the message Sam left, all three heads had a simr reaction. They stood up from their seating positions in extreme surprise. The one who has the most intense reaction is the person from the Wight race.

    The Wight race has four families in it and one family reigns over all the remaining three. Coincidentally, the one who came to the valley is the person that belongs to the main family and he is talking to the family head or to be precise the head of the Wights in this realm. Simply called the Wight King

    And the Wightmander who escaped from Sam with the tail between his legs is none other than the son of this head.

    So he has most information regarding Sam than anyone else.

    He asked for the full description of Sam and when he listened, he couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit conflicted.

    All three races have been yed by this Sam.

    He is the one who caused the catastrophe of these vines. That much is apparent because of the vines that are growing through the guy standing right in front of the Wight head.

    The second thing is that Sam can disguise himself extremely well to the point he stayed within the undead realm roaming freely without getting caught at all.

    The final thing is that the rest of the humans who he doesn¡¯t know as yers are also Sam¡¯s people trying to create the diversion and the chaos required for Sam to hatch his ns.

    Even though it is not entirely the truth it is not too far off either.

    He looked at the person in front of me. That guy is resisting with the best of his ability and strength so that the vine wouldn¡¯t consume him.

    "Stay in an isted room for now and try to absorb the energy from the vine. We are the ones that consume the nts, not the other way around.

    Take the remaining four people with you and let them stay with you. Which direction did Sam leave?"

    "Towards the forest of dying."

    "I will deal with him. You go and rest."

    With that, the five people left the mansion and were escorted to a special stone house at the edge of the city.

    There are a few people sitting cross-legged out of the stone house and closed their eyes. A holographic image appeared from the top of their heads as they projected the image of the interior of the stone house.

    The image is not a normal video though, they could see the energy flow details within the room and even the people that are staying in.

    This was all arranged by the Wight King. He has no hopes of these people pulling this off, but he wanted them to try their best and observe the process of the vines¡¯ growth so that he could find a way to deal with it.

    Even the transcendent that was escorted here knew of this. He is also infested with the vines and he could understand their threat.

    The vine started growing from his arm and he tried to cut it off, but before he knew it, the vine¡¯s roots already grew towards his spiritual core and made a link with it. If he really forcefully removed it, he would die along with it.

    His doom is inevitable, so he chose a painless death which is to let the vine consume him. As long as he didn¡¯t resist, it would just like drifting into sleep.

    It is just that the vine is taking a bit longer as he is a bit stronger.

    He just sat on a chair as he looked at the vast Wight territory and sigh. He really wanted to see Sam once again.

    Just what kind of person the undead realm is shing with.

    He is just a Pre-transcendent, he should be insignificant, but here is making the strongest powers in the realm. He just wants to know what the situation is, why is all this happening.

    He looked at the ce that he called home for decades and slowly lost consciousness as the vine consumed him.

    Simr scenarios took ce in all three territories.

    But they don¡¯t know that just isting the people who are infested with these vines is not a solution. After all, the pollen doesn¡¯t need much to spread.

    The situation turned worse by the day.

    The three kings decided to meet with their most capable elites from Pre-transcendent stage cultivators, transcendent and even the Consummate realm cultivators all gathered along with the Kings.

    "What are we going to do? He is in the Forest of dying and from what we know, that ce has the most number of vines in all of the realm. That ce is extremely disadvantageous to us. We don¡¯t know if the Consummate realm cultivators are going to be in trouble because of these vines.

    But from all we know, therger they be the easier it is for them to deal with the people of higher cultivation.

    The longer we wait the more problems we face."

    The vampire king said in a casual tone as if he couldn¡¯t be bothered with it. He looked at the Wight king with a bit of provocation in his eyes.

    The Wight King¡¯s son is the one who is considered the biggest loser and he is the one who ran away from Sam. Now that Sam is the current problem, their old wounds would be ripped apart andid bare for the world to see.

    "I don¡¯t care if they are living under the undying volcano, we shall send the troops together and destroy him.

    I believe that if the attack is powerful enough, the vines would be destroyed too."

    The Wight King said in frustration.

    "Yeah? Why don¡¯t you go and fight him directly then? You are the one who wanted to make a move on the banished realm, you are the one who created a war that made us lose so many resources, and now you are the one who provoked this guy who knows where he came from. Now you are asking for us to get into a head-on sh.

    Tell me one good reason why I should listen to you?"

    The Ghoul King said coldly. He was the most passive one when the war was started. He only went with the flow because both Wight King and Vampire king persuaded him.

    In fact, it is Wight king who gave the idea and as a long-time rival, the Vampire King just went on board with the n to not get behind and both of them forcefully pulled him in. Anyway, it is already generous of him that he didn¡¯t go to them to settle scores.

    But now a problem that they poked ising to haunt them. He stayed in their realm for a month under their noses.

    Creating chaos as he liked and hatching plots that could create devastating losses for them.

    The discussion escted and they couldn¡¯t go anywhere.

    The Ghoul king wants to send a smaller team and investigate the matter, the Vampire king wants to hunt down the yers and Sam directly.

    The Wight King wants to destroy everything altogether.

    While they are discussing this, the vampire king¡¯s servant came running in and said.

    "There is another incident of vines but this time, it is not in the forest of dying.

    It is near the Magma zone."

    Everyone was stunned.

    "What? Magma Zone? Isn¡¯t it near the Undying Volcanic region? The Vine is growing there? Is that ce not supposed to be the no-grow zone for any form of vegetation.

    The Lava is just the rotten matter of undead creatures and the chaotic mess of death energy.

    What kind of vegetation can grow there? What kind of perverted idiot made this vine?"

    "The problem is, it is growing too fast actually. It is faster than the growth in the forest of dying. One-fifth of the magma zone is already covered and it is spreading towards the Undying volcano.

    All the undead slimes and all kinds of undead creatures that live in this area are all being consumed by it. There are a lot of teams nearby in search of the undying volcanic stones, we have to inform them to return."

    The three kings went into a deep thought. The vine is already a pain in the ass, they don¡¯t want to make it worse. They wouldn¡¯t be able to sustain like this. Even if they managed to survive by themselves if their own kind suffers in this plight and their poption got reduced.

    They gave their orders continuously and directly went to take action.

    Since they couldn¡¯t reachmon ground in this matter, they decided to take care of it in their own way.

 Chapter 696: Trap

    One month and fifteen days since the game has started.

    Sam is currently inside the Bat cave looking at the numbers that are rapidly changing in the wrist screen. He currently has around three-thousand five hundred points.

    It is almost like a pandemic for the undead creatures and their higher-ups only let the select fewe out along with their trustworthy human soldiers and investigate ways to defeat these vines.

    The people have limited ess now as they couldn¡¯t go to many of their training zones, just like the forest of dying, the sword valley is also full of vines and so is the region around the undying volcano. There is no space that is free from the threat of vines.

    There are even some areas within the main territories of the three races that are infested with vines, they isted the areas without having no other choice.

    No matter what experiment they conducted, they couldn¡¯t get much information, all they have is one thing and that is humans are free from the threat of these vines.

    As for their own attacks, at first, there was some use when they attacked the vines with other elements. The three races do have ess to other elements, but that didn¡¯tst long. The problem turned out, that since the secondary elements of these undead races are also influenced and mixed with death energy, the vines that are picky about death energy and usually rejected other elemental energies and harmed themselves, unknowingly evolved in resisting these elements.

    So even if these attacks are a temporary measure, they will create more permanent damage in long term.

    Sam could guess what is happening outside and their group is also moving past the forest of dying recently.

    But there is one problem. Jack is still not out of his dazed state which made it hard for them to leave him alone if he were to be caught alone in this ce with no people to look after and someone came in to attack, the situation would be extremely tragic.

    In the past fifteen days, Sam and his friends took turns roam around outside and set some traps Sam specifically designed for the undead creatures that are roaming around in the forest of dying to search for their whereabouts.

    They encountered some people, but they didn¡¯t return and only ended up contributing to Sam¡¯s score and his friends¡¯ battle experience.

    Their hideout is still not exposed but they did notice that the search parties are increasing and the three races are actively searching for them.

    Meanwhile, the yers that escaped the forest of dying and currently roaming around in other territories understood the situation and they got the news from the captured targets.

    They couldn¡¯t help but curse Sam a bit. They clearly understood that they took the heat for Sam at the beginning of the game as the vines are med on them. They felt relieved that at least now that Sam¡¯s name is out they would be rtively safer.

    But what they couldn¡¯t understand is the reason for the resentment between the Sam and the undead races. But soon they understood that they are messing their priorities up and realized that their stress doesn¡¯t only decrease, but in fact increased a lot.

    They are still taking the heat for Sam, as they couldn¡¯t clear their name and sever ties between them and Sam which apparently exist in the eyes of Undead races.

    In this way, not only is Sam scoring an awful lot of points, but he is also hindering the rest of the yers from getting many.

    While the situation is like this, Sam finally decided to be more active. He and his friends already created all the traps within the forest of dying and this is the final step of creating the yground.

    Now it is about time, he started his own y.

    The first thing he did is create a formation near the cave and left his friends to defend Jack who is still in that meditative state.

    He is living off of spiritual energy.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know if anything bad is happening to him, but he couldn¡¯t do much, the sword aura is still defending him.

    At least he is safe for now and he has to be satisfied with the situation for now.

    Sam took off on Harbinger and went in a random direction without much thought.

    After traveling for a while, he came across a team of vampires. The one leading the team is a Transcendent stage cultivator and there are some humans as well.

    Sam took out his handgun and shot at a vampire from the rear. The vampire held his arm and turned around in pain and the rest of the team followed suit only to see Sam hovering in the air while ying with his handgun.

    "Are you looking for me?" Sam asked with the voiceced in the provocation. The team exchanged nces as they gestured something to each other and they didn¡¯t look like they wanted to make a move immediately.

    They are obviously plotting something. But Sam didn¡¯t let them do that, he shot another vampire and this time he used a light elemental energy cell bullet.

    "Argghhh.."

    He felt extremely hurt. The light element and its vitality are almost like an infection to him.

    The Vampires still didn¡¯t make a move, they just spread apart a little bit.

    Sam felt this is weird and activated his energy vision and soon he noticed what they are doing. The Vampire in the rear is actually making some hand-signs rapidly and soon a wisp of ck energy escaped the ce.

    The wisp is actually not visible for the naked eye and only visible in the energy vision. Sam realized that they might be sending a message for some other toe after him.

    He couldn¡¯t help but smirk and closed his eyes as he sent his consciousness to the third floor and activated the crystal table.

    He just kept an eye on these people through that and from the looks of it, they are more interested in creating a formation that could hold Sam than killing him directly.

    He doesn¡¯t know why they are so tense and why they are not underestimating him like everybody else, but he is willing to y along. And soon he noticed that three more simr teams are approaching their location and the team in front of him are also feeling a bit relieved.

    Sam opened his eyes and gave a mischievous smile.

    He took out another handgun and aimed at the team as he continuously shot before taking out a flower and blowing the pollen and escaping.

    The Transcendent stage cultivator who is also the team leader finally made his move, he waited for a long time without attacking just so he could make sure that Sam will not escape, but now he is escaping right when the n is about to unfold.

    He immediately ran after him and the rest of the team followed suit.

    Sam didn¡¯t care why they are so tense and cautious but he realized one thing in all his journeys and that is even though there are some differences, all the races have the same mentality. Just like how all humans are the same irrespective of their color and face, all the races are the same irrespective of their body and biological differences.

    The provocation and losing the opportunity is bound to rile them up and Sam escaping has the effect on them and they ran after him.

    Sam deliberately led the chase towards a specific direction in which another teaming is heading towards them and the chasers rxed a bit.

    Soon, the second team came into their view and the first team became ecstatic. There is a small cliff blocking Sam¡¯s way to the right and the first team blocked the way to the right and the rear while the second team is arriving from the front.

    But Sam didn¡¯t panic, in fact, he looked rxed, as soon as the second team reached the ce, he aimed his gun at the cliff wall and shot on it.

    A hole appeared on the surface of the cliff wall and a jet of green smoke popped out of it.

    The Vampire teams were caught off guard, but before they could react, Sam shot once again and the surface of the cliff wall crumbled, revealing arge hole in it, Sam moved towards the hole, before turning around and shooting at a spot on the ground and all of a sudden arge pit was revealed.

    The ce turned out to be a trap door but it is to not make these people fall in it, but to let the thing insidee out and that is therge vine with some flowers that are yet to bloom.

    This pit was used to trap the vine that has already matured a lot and the trap door has a formation inscribed on it that would not let the vine spread out of it. Even the walls of the pit are metal and now that the door is open and the vine can spread and the convenient right beside it, there is no way it would refuse the offer.

    Sam just escaped through the hole and reappeared on the other end which is on top of the cliff. This is all a premade trap and he must say the first one is extremely sessful.

 Chapter 697: Attack on the cave

    Sam left the first two teams behind and escaped.

    He then went into another random direction to see if he would meet another team and he did.

    The situation turned extremely easy for him as he dealt with at least thirty vampires, twenty-five ghouls, and thirty-two Wights.

    He is on a spree.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is that he is notpletely trouble-free.

    Someone is actually watching his activity closely.

    After all, the Undead realm doesn¡¯t just belong to these three races.

    At this moment, a Wight and a human are standing with a ck translucent figure floating in the air right beside them.

    The wight is someone Sam is extremely familiar with, he is none other than the wightmander who ran with the tail between his legs.

    The translucent figure is a specter.

    The Wights know that it is extremely difficult to deal with the Vines themselves and they couldn¡¯t think of a way to physically ovee their threat, so they went to find someone that couldn¡¯t be defeated physically and employed his abilities.

    The Specters are not exactly friendly with the rest of the races but they are not unfriendly either, it is just that they are aloof, only the Wightmander who is hungry for power managed to get some contacts with the aloof race by giving them what they want.

    He wanted to use these favors in the power struggle of the Wight race and boost his position to be a king, but now he is using some of them to just deal with Sam. One must wonder how much he hates Sam to sacrifice such valuable contacts.

    At this moment, the Specter that looked like a human is floating in the air as he closed his eyes and seemed to be thinking something.

    "He dealt with so many people. The whole forest of death seemed to have his traps, even I cannot identify them, at most I can just confirm the traps when I am near them. He is really skilled and he really nned everything perfectly.

    You really pissed off the wrong guy."

    "I don¡¯t need that evaluation, I want you to find a way to get rid of him." The Wightmander said coldly. But when he felt the cold gaze of the specter on him, he immediately understood his position and calmed down.

    "I am really sorry."

    "I can never understand where this superiorityes for you, undead creatures. Being a human is a thousand times better." He muttered in a low voice and then continued.

    "I can see the tracks of his soul and find his hideout. But that wouldn¡¯t be easy to afford."

    "Don¡¯t worry about the cost, as long as you find the hide-out, we can defeat them easily."

    "Don¡¯t get your hopes up. All you are is one pre-transcendent stage wight and a Transcendent stage human, do you really think you guys are enough to cause trouble to them? He is literally ying with you guys and you want to attack them directly?"

    "In the Banished realm, there is no powerful being behind him, in fact, he had a hard time controlling the dwarves as he went through so much resistance. If not for the fact that we cornered the dwarves, they wouldn¡¯t even bother to follow his lead.

    This is something I am sure of. If he really has someone powerful behind his back, he wouldn¡¯t be hiding like this."

    The specter just led the way with a shrug, he is not the one that is going to be in trouble if something really happens.

    As they are moving towards the Bat cave, Sam suddenly felt something is wrong. He didn¡¯t just set the traps to attack, he also made sure to set some that could notify if a powerful enemy appears near the hideout.

    He just created a simple formation that would just copse if a person with a certain energy level appears near the vicinity. He just enchanted the formation with a spirit and made a contract with it, when the formation copses, the spirit will disappear and he will be notified.

    He looked towards the Bat cave and frowned. Because the traps that went off are not supposed to be going off.

    There is a series of formations that were ced together, there is a certain order that would go off, but the first few didn¡¯t go off, but the ones in the middle went off.

    It is extremely hard to fathom that someone who can avoid the first set of traps would appear, this made him feel worried and started moving towards the cave.

    But he is alreadyte.

    The trio already reached the entrance of the cave and they even avoided the vines because the human transcendent stage cultivator is carrying the Wightmander and the vines are not reacting to the specter.

    Philip and the Gang already noticed them and got ready to fight or flight. By now, Sam has so many Transference scrolls that he gave one to each of his team members. If pushes to shove they can escape, but he highly doubts that they would escape leaving Jack in his situation.

    Right when the three enemies are at the entrance of the cave, Philip could estimate the powers of the people that came here. He is the stand-in lead when Sam is away.

    He could also guess that the strongest of the three is the human, this made things trickier for them. The human increased the pressure as he attacked the formation that is defending the entrance of the cave.

    The team is worried too much about the situation and they decided to attack instead of defending.

    There are some inscriptions on the cave walls and they all stood in their respective positions.

    This is the final line of defense and since the rest of the lines are not useful, this could be considered as the only line of defense.

    As all of them took positions, the formation activated and even the spirit manifested. If one noticed, they could understand that there is no death energy inside the cave, it is just normal spiritual energy and this happened because of some modifications they made.

    The whole cave glowed with spiritual energy as the Zoi termite queen and the rest of the locust queens came out of their hiding along with some Bee puppets.

    As soon as the three people came inside the cave, they understood that their situation is not as optimistic

    The formation spirit is actually a humanoid silhouette with all the elemental energiesbined.

    There is wind, water, lightning, fire, metal.

    The spirit shed with the human cultivator directly. Actually, this formation was designed to be used by five people including Jack, but since he is not in his conscious, they couldn¡¯t do anything about it and only use the formation as it is.

    There is also another drawback and that is this formation is not a permanent one. It is actually a temporary one and wouldn¡¯t be able to hold on for too long.

    The battle started and everyone is fully tense. The transcendent human took the brunt of the attacks and it is an equal challenge. They shed continuously and the whole cave trembled. At this moment, the bee puppets moved.

    The puppets shot the stingers from their tails and it is full of poison mixtures.

    They work for both humans and undead anyway, so there is nothing to worry.

    After that came the insect queens the battle is so tense that the wightmander is not even qualified to join the battle.

    He couldn¡¯t even go to the individual positions of the formations, and then he looked at Jack who is standing in the corner as he held his sword, he suddenly had a thought as he heard about the news. The swordsman in Sam¡¯s group actually managed to take the legacy from the valley.

    He became greedy at the moment and decided to do something.

    As soon as he neared him though, the situation turned south, a sword ray destroyed his arm and threw him into the middle of the battle.

    The human became distracted instantly and the formation spirit managed to take a good clean hit.

    Right at this moment, the human finally lost it and he threw the Wightmander to the cave entrance before going berserk.

    The situation turned extremely tense and the cave walls are crumbling because the inscriptions couldn¡¯t take the bacsh of the battle the time for this is ending.

    Philip and the rest of the team are losing due to the sudden berserk human attacks and soon the formation was destroyed.

    All the teammates are spitting blood and decided to take out the protection trinkets that Hou Yi gave them. Even all they could do is endure the attacks for a while, that is all they need to do. The transcendent human is also heavily injured and is almost on his long legs.

    All they need is some time for Sam to return.

    Wightmander is ecstatic as he was only a step away from achieving his goal.

    But before they could activate the protection trinkets, something else happened.

    Jack who is standing still for more than fifteen days suddenly moved.

    With a swing of his sword, the sword energy that was surrounding him since his time in the valley was expelled out of his body tearing his skin apart, and the sword ray that came out of it cut the head off of the transcendent stage human.

 Chapter 698: Catching a Specter

    Sam just came in time to watch the head fall on the ground. He looked at the Wightmander, but didn¡¯t stop there. He just went in to see What position his friends are in.

    There are no serious injuries and everyone managed to stand up. Jack is the only one who fainted due to blood loss.

    Sam fed some wine to him and left his care to the rest of his friends after he confirmed there is no critical damage.

    He is really relieved they managed to survive for a while. He didn¡¯t think that someone would find this ce this fast, he thought he was prepared. But from the looks of it the preparation was not enough.

    He finally has time to think about the people that entered this ce. As for the sudden attack Jack used, he would think about itter.

    Sam clearly saw the Wightmander who is currently standing at the entrance with nervous expression but he didn¡¯t make a move against him instead he looked at the corner of the cave where it is darkest and said.

    "Are youing out or should I make you do it?"

    He clearly felt this extra presence as soon as he came in. He used the energy vision to check the situation with the formations and identally found this extra presence which is not visible for the naked eye.

    The specter came out and looked at Sam in a bit of surprise.

    "I didn¡¯t want to bother with the specters since we don¡¯t have any particr enmity, can I take this as a provocation?"

    "No , no. I don¡¯t want to get involved. This is just business for me."

    He said as he waved his hands, but Sam didn¡¯t bother with his answer and looked at the Wightmander.

    "How are you doing? It¡¯s been a while and it seems like you still haven¡¯t changed at all."

    Sam looked at him condescendingly as he walked forward.

    The Wightmander remembered the nightmare he has gone through back in the Banished realm and couldn¡¯t help but take a step back. He tripped on a rock and fell backwards and still tried to crawl away as Sam neared him.

    Sam just extended his hand and three blood mutant scales came out of his storage and revolved around his hand.

    This made the Wightmander remember the past trauma and wanted to escape.

    But this time, Sam is prepared, with a wave of his hand three scales shot forward and two of them directly stabbed into the two arms and started spinning rapidly as they cut through the flesh not giving any chance for the arms to move while the third one circled his body and started slicing everywhere it could reach.

    Sam lunged forward, took out the reaper and stabbed it into his throat, but he didn¡¯t go too deep and only pierced into the firstyer of the skin.

    He used his leg to crush the arms and poured some green liquid over them and then recalled the scales back.

    "Try to heal this and escape."

    Sam just left him in the ce and let him groan and whine in pain before turning back to the Specter.

    "So, now tell me why you are here?"

    "I am just here with him because of a deal. I didn¡¯t even want to be here. I was forced." The specter immediately defended himself.

    Sam¡¯s arm turned golden as he shot a light beam towards a direction and a ck semi-transparent figure fell down while the image of the specter in front of him disappeared.

    Sam walked towards the real specter and asked.

    "Now tell me, why you are here?"

    "I just came to tag along. That is it. I don¡¯t have anything to do with the attack."

    "So you are saying that you don¡¯t have any involvement in finding this ce?"

    "No."

    "No involvement in defusing my traps?"

    "No."

    "No involvement in attacking this ce?"

    "No."

    "I am really getting cocky and dumb along with the time. I am forgetting to calcte the variables that I didn¡¯te into contact with. I should have also spent more time on this formation. I just got too sure since I started believing in others."

    Sam muttered to himself as he looked at the specter and said.

    "I never thought, I would be using these techniques this fast."

    As he spoke a ck light covered his arm and he extended it towards the specter. The dark elemental energy enveloped the specter and made him twitch in some kind of pain. The energy circted through the body of the specter and made him feel the soul searing pain.

    Soon a small mark appeared on the forehead of the specter and then only Sam retracted his arm.

    "I didn¡¯t want to mess with the specters at first, that is why I didn¡¯t add anything to the vines that could harm you. But here you are messing with my ns, so it can¡¯t be avoided. You are now mine. I read that Specters make good formation spirits and they can even be used for temporary use.

    I would definitely make good use of you."

    With that he waved his hand and the specter disappeared from the sight.

    Sam went back to the Wightmander who is still struggling and took out the chess board.

    "You would be a good chess piece with yourmanding, I really regretted when I let you gost time, now you are back so I am not going to miss this chance."

    With that he captured him and rxed for the moment.

    He started repairing the cave and inscriptions on the wall. Even though this is a temporary measure, it still works, just like it did now.

    While he was repairing the cave, Jack finally woke up.

    "What happened to you? What is the sword energy?" Philip asked as soon as Jack came to his senses.

    Jack looked around and heaved a sigh of relief and said.

    "I was conscious the whole time, but I guess the sword energy I took might have been too much for me to digest and increase my cultivation immediately, so I decided to slowly increase my cultivation as Iprehend the sword art that was bestowed to me by that man.

    But onlyter did I realize that the art only works after I reach the Consummate realm. It wouldn¡¯t be useful as much and my body wouldn¡¯t be able to take it.

    So, I stayed in a meditative state to bnce that energy and store it within my body butter I realized it is impossible as the energy is too tyrannical and would have destroyed my body if I just forcefully stored it, so I decided to figure out a way and if not I wanted to expel the excess energy.

    Since everyone even decided to use their protection trinkets, I thought I have wasted enough time and used that sword energy to kill him. The protection items are too precious even if they are only useful in this undead realm. That is why I gave this unstable energy which is putting me on a passive side away.

    But manipting the energy forcefully made me feel the bacsh and my skin was torn apart.

    That is gist of what happened."

    Sam who heard from the side heaved a sigh of relief and said.

    "Rest for today, tomorrow we will be making the move. We would first use the traps in the forest of dying and them move out towards the Undying volcano which is closest to the Vampire territory. If things go ording to the n we can move further and spread the vine there and if it didn¡¯t go we can lure the enemies towards the forest of dying which by them would be thergest vine host.

    Since Jack has recovered we will celebrate tonight and if anyone has any trouble use the transference scroll in this direction and return to the cave.

    If everything goes well, the whole forest of dying will be our best cover and the undead races wouldn¡¯t be able to enter this unless the specterse. I would think of something that could handle the specters by the time we move out."

    While Sam is exining this, what he doesn¡¯t know is that his n has already took a different turn than what he has anticipated.

    Within the undying volcanic region. The volcano has a lot of vines around it as they are growing rapidly. Here there was not even need for the creatures to feed themselves to the vines.

    The whole magma is actually doing a good job supplying the required nutrients and every minutes there are at least three flowers are blooming increasing the pollen and then increasing the vines rapidly.

    But that is not even the problem, the vines actually spread into the volcano. Now inside the stomach of the volcano there are some flowers blooming and the dark smoke that ising out of the volcano managed to carry the pollen out and created a cloud in the sky.

    The ck cloud moved towards the vampire territory along with the wind and disappeared there dropping the pollen grains within the city.

 Chapter 699: Last resorts

    For the next two days after the incident, the three races have seen their worst nightmare.

    They don¡¯t know what is happening or why the vines are spreading this rapidly, but all they know is that the vines are appearing right in the middle of the cities, the residences, the estates of noble families even in the pces of the kings.

    They are spread so far and wide and became helpless in the face of the situation.

    Except for the humans, no one is happy with the situation. Humans are treated as objects and livestock, so of course, they are happy about the demise of their owners and oppressors, but the owners themselves couldn¡¯t take this anymore.

    Just these two days pissed them off more than the whole month and a half.

    They decided to increase the search for Sam, for the first time in centuries, they offered rewards for the humans who are the only ones that are not vulnerable against the vines.

    Sam and his team also noticed the increase of patrol within the forest of dying and started using the preset traps to their fullest.

    But soon Sam felt that the number of cultivators attacking has be too many and even the vines are spreading too fast.

    Another five days passed and there is only a week away from the end of the second month.

    Sam and his friends got ready to leave the cave and came out, but he stopped in his tracks as he looked at the path.

    Everyone else was surprised a bit by his sudden behavior and looked ahead only to see a small vine in the pathway. They are even more surprised and the group walked towards the vine after exchanging nces.

    Sam held the vine and after confirming that it is their own vine he looked at his team for confirmation.

    "We didn¡¯t nt it." All of them said in unison.

    Sam used his observation ability to see any traces that might have been left around or any other vines, but there is none. He destroyed the vines and told his team.

    "Search around and see if there are any more vines around. Anything that has no other traces nearby should be marked."

    All of them moved around and they really did find some vines, they destroyed them. Even though the vines are harmless for them, if there are too many in the area around them, they would have trouble and might attract attention.

    They have to maintain a bnced amount of vines around them and the excess amount of these vines might even trigger their traps and formations around their cave.

    They can trigger the traps in the forest anywhere else, not just in their cave.

    Sam couldn¡¯t find a reason for that. He just decided to get more information from the new prey he would get in that day¡¯s hunt.

    And he did just that. That day they destroyed tens of people and made them food for the vines except for one human who Sam kidnapped and brought to an isted ce.

    "What is the current situation around the territory you are from? Why did the traffic of the people increase?"

    Sam asked directly without any beating around the bush.

    The human is still perplexed and worried. He didn¡¯t know what happened. Sam just came at them, they chased, he threw them into a vine and he was grabbed by something. Before he knew it, he was already here.

    Sam repeated his question once again and this time he came out of his daze and stuttered.

    "P.. Pl.. Please leave me alone. I was fo.. forced."

    "Just give me the answer I want and I will leave you alone. Why did the number of people increase in the search?"

    "The vines increased, they are spreading all around the three territories, the vines are appearing in every random ce out of nowhere. There are even pces and mansions that are not spared. They don¡¯t know what you have done, but they are panicking."

    This surprised Sam. He didn¡¯t expect that this could happen. He asked a few more questions before breaking his arms and vocal cords and threw him deep in the forest.

    Even though he said that he was forced, it is not an excuse good enough for Sam to leave him alone. It is a war and the soldiers that involved themselves would definitely suffer. It might not be their fault and unfair, but when was the world even fair?

    Sam left the ce and went back to the cave. His team also returned with some information.

    They started sharing the information and one of them have first-hand information on what is happening. Chatur looked at Sam and said.

    "For some reason, the pollen is falling from the sky."

    Everyone in the spot was stunned, they expected many scenarios, but this ispletely uncalled for.

    "What do you mean?"

    He extended his hand and showed a spot to Sam. There is a little frozen dot on it, but Sam could see past the ice and saw the familiar pollen grain.

    "This fell from the sky. I can be sure of that because I was on top of a small hill when I saw it falling on my arm while I was painting.

    The only thing that is weird at that moment is therge ck clouds that pass through the sky now and then."

    "So, are you saying that those ck clouds are carrying the pollen, but how did the pollen even reach that high, it shouldn¡¯t be normally possible."

    Sam spoke as he looked at the sky. He doesn¡¯t know what these ck clouds are, but what he knew is that they are a part of this Undead realm and he just thought it is one of this ce¡¯s unique features.

    But now he understood that situation might be different. He is also observing the sudden surge in points, but he didn¡¯t think that something like this would happen.

    He didn¡¯t think that he would enter the cities and the towns this early. He only nned it to happen in thest two weeks before he left this realm. This ispletely uncalled for and unexpected.

    He really wanted to check the situation out, but tracing the origin of the clouds is a stupid thing while he could enjoy the surge in points and the imminent victory thates with it.

    While he thought so, the rest of the races didn¡¯t. They can almost foresee their extinction. Even though this is their realm, it can be considered as the breeding base of strong fighters and soldiers for the upper realm that has connections with this realm.

    If they don¡¯t have enough poptions, the soldiers wouldn¡¯t be produced and if the soldiers are not produced, there would be no more support from the upper realms and then they would be doomed for the resources.

    They are already tight on resources, if something like this happens, they would lose the corpses and other things that are dropped down from the upper realms.

    This is the key to their survival. They didn¡¯t expect that their attempt at taking down the Banished realm would not only lead to a failure but also make such a troublesome enemy for them.

    At this moment, the three kings joined together to once again discuss.

    "The situation has turned worse, I can¡¯t hold on anymore, every day dozens of vampires are dying right before my eyes and I couldn¡¯t do anything.

    I am nning on making a move myself."

    The Vampire king said.

    "Do you really think that he doesn¡¯t have anything on him? From what we know the Consummates who went after the rest of the humans that are causing trouble in other areas all have something on them and they could save themselves multiple times and can even escape the ce like drinking water.

    If by any chance you fail to deal with him and he escapes to your territory when you are not present there and have his way with that ce what would you do? The worse, if you couldn¡¯t even reach him and he already foresaw your arrival, the scenario is more likely to happen than you killing him."

    The Ghoul King is clearly more rational.

    "Then what do you say we do?" The Vampire King is clearly frustrated.

    "I have a n and even if it fails I have a follow-up n. So, listen carefully...

    He went on exining his n and the steps for a couple of hours before finally stopping.

    "Are you guys ready with the n? If this works, we can easily get rid of him. Even if the first n fails, the second n has a hundred percent sess rate."

    Ghoul King said as he looked at both of them.

    "I am okay with it, but the second n is dangerous, not just for him, for us too. What do you think would happen if the thing in the pit gets angry? Even though they are notplete existences and are not as powerful as they are in their prime, it is still not easy for us to bear the consequences."

    "It is still better than facing extinction."

 Chapter 700: Laughing like a Maniac

    Two months have passed since the game started and there is only one month left before the game is considered an end.

    In the past few days, Sam felt that situation turned a bit weird.

    He couldn¡¯t find the smaller teams like before and every team that he could find are extremelyrge in numbers.

    Even though he can escape it is not a good idea to lure such arge team with so many transcendent stage cultivators. In fact, he could manage if it was just one team, but he would be in trouble if he encountered a second-team while luring the first one.

    That is why he is using some long-distance hit and run tactics to lure some of the yers out of the group by pissing them off. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn¡¯t.

    But his surge of points didn¡¯t reduce, in fact, it increased rapidly and he could have sworn that he even saw the point increase of 2000 which indicates the death of a Peak stage Transcendent creatures.

    He is extremely ecstatic with the growth of the points.

    So, he is not worried about the reducing points within the forest and he is even second-guessing whether he should move towards the undying volcanic region since what he wanted to do has already been happening.

    After some discussion with his friends, they still decided to go. They felt like if they moved to the undying volcano the traffic of the people will surely increase as the volcano should have rtively lesser vinespared to the Forest of dying.

    So before they started their journey, Sam decided to act as a scout to look at the path they would be taking. He didn¡¯t want any surprises and it turned out to be the best that he did that.

    There is arge ambush waiting for him in the way.

    The ambush is designed in a way that it could be fatal to the group and they could take hostage of them. But it is not as dangerous for the single person as the surprise element ispletely gone when the first batch of attacks came out.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother to fight it out with them, he doesn¡¯t care if they really predicted or somehow got the news that he ising this way, but for now, escaping was his priority.

    From the energy signatures, he could feel at least twenty of them, but as soon as he saw the people that are ambushing, he couldn¡¯t help but frown. This is a bit fishy than he thought. There are only Pre-transcendent stage cultivators in the ambush.

    No transcendent stage cultivator, nor the Consummate realm cultivators. This made Sam hesitate a bit. Pre-transcendent stage cultivators are easy to take care of, even if they are more and their cultivation is a bit higher, he can still deal with it.

    But he has a faint hunch that something is wrong. And his hunch was right because in the time he hesitated a bit, he is already bound in a formation along with these twenty people.

    Sam scanned the formation with the energy vision and noticed that even if it is not soplicated, it is a bit time-consuming if he normally opened it.

    He just hovered at the maximum height the formation allowed him to and held two handguns in his hands and aimed one at the formation while the second one aimed at the cultivators that are jumping on him.

    He continuously shot as he kept all of them busy with a single hand, the cultivators in ambush noticed that the formation is being shot by something that can create the energy explosions and got anxious.

    They paid a price to set an ambush like this, they don¡¯t want to waste this.

    So, they risked everything and attacked Sam with suicidal attacks.

    Sam is a bit surprised by this kamikaze attitude. He couldn¡¯t take it anymore and dropped an energy cell from the hoverboard.

    The group that is nearest to him was sted away and Sam started shooting them rapidly without even bothering about the formation.

    His hunch might be right and they might even be trying to lure someone else to deal with him, but if he is fast enough there is nothing the batch can do.

    He shot rapidly and soon all the cultivators are sprawling on the ground in either pain or without any movement indicating their demise. Sam caught hold of the leader who is rolling in pain and asked what the n is all about while injecting the light elemental energy into him.

    The leader already lost hope of the ambush, but now that Sam is questioning him, he just answered directly.

    "We don¡¯t know you areing this way, we set ambushes in all the routes leading out of the forest of dying."

    Sam was bewildered by this answer, but at this exact moment, the leader made a sudden move that caught him by surprise. But he still managed to escape with just a small scar on his wrist and some blood dripping on the soil.

    He just killed the leader and went back into the forest. He just roamed over the forest to make sure that he got rid of any possible tails and went to the cave before exining the situation.

    They decided to wait while scouting the situation around the forest and figure out the ns of their enemies.

    While he is discussing what he should do with his friends, something else is happening on the battlefield from which he just came from.

    A transcendent stage Vampire came on a flying beast andnded in the middle of the battlefield. He didn¡¯t care about the corpses of the vampires and the humans that are lying around him, he just looked around with his eyes glowing red as he searched around.

    And soon he stopped at a spot before making some hand-signs. A faint wisp of soul that belonged to the leader of the ambush resurfaced and the soul didn¡¯t even speak anything and just pointed at a spot near his corpse before disappearing.

    The vampire walked towards it and looked at the blood that fell on the ground, even though it was mixed with soil, he squatted down and took a sniff. He closed his eyes as if he was sniffing at the greatest delicacy.

    He was surprised by his own actions. He just collected the blood-stained soil and left the ce. He didn¡¯t even bother to clean up the corpses of his fellow members and went back to the Vampire King¡¯s mansion.

    By night he returned and reported to the Vampire king as he handed the container with the bloody soil.

    "Your Highness, I think something is different about this man, I almost lost control and consumed the blood from that soil on my way. The blood is too tasty."

    The Vampire king was surprised a bit and said.

    "No problem, you finished the job, I will look into it and find out what is so special about him."

    After the transcendent stage cultivator left, the vampire king finally opened the container and took a sniff. He closed his eyes as he felt the sensation this smell caused him.

    It is almost like the smell of the most addictive drug.

    He could feel that the blood is far purer and too high of a quality for a normal human to have. Since the first n which is the ambush and holding Sam down is gone, they can only proceed with the second n. He was still having second thoughts, but now he has some hope.

    He went to the deepest part of the mansion and entered an underground room.

    There is arge well in the middle of the room.

    He walked to the edge of the pit and gulped in anxiousness as he took out an extremely small sample of the soil and dropped it in.

    There is arge grumbling sound from the pit and soon a blood-red light was shone.

    This made the Vampire-King¡¯s eyes lit up with excitement.

    He couldn¡¯t help but smile and the smile turned into a grin and soon he isughing like a madman.

    "Hahahahahahahaa.."

    The whole mansion was startled by the suddenughter from their king and the fact that they knew what kind of crisis they are in and this suddenughter is something they couldn¡¯t fathom considering their plight.

    Some of the close aides of the king even ran to the underground room but stopped at the door as they don¡¯t have ess inside.

    But soon they are relieved as theughter has stopped and the King came back.

    "Inform the two Kings, we are proceeding to the second step of the n. I want the resources as soon as possible."

    The news of the Vampire kingughing like a madman spread all over the Vampire territory and even the Wight king and the Ghoul King learned about this.

    They couldn¡¯t help but call for the second meeting after hearing the news about his ecstatic invitation for the resources to start the second step of the n.

    After all, the main problem from the second step of the n is not even Sam escaping and living after that, there is something else altogether and the vampire king should be pissing his pants off right now. But he isughing and feeling happy which didn¡¯t sit well with them.

 Chapter 701: Captured

    The three kings met once again.

    "So, when are you guys sending the resources required for the ritual?" The Vampire King said as he tried his best to conceal the excitement in his voice.

    "Why are you so excited all of a sudden? For all I know, you are not as excited when we exined the n to you?"

    The Ghoul King asked a bit solemnly. He knew that there might be a reason for the Vampire King to be this happy, this excitement shouldn¡¯t havee out of thin air. For him to be this excited even this crisis, he either had to be an idiot or he must have gonepletely crazy due to the stress.

    "Excited? Of course, I am excited to kill that Sam. He destroyed so many things for me, he destroyed so many vampires, out of all the three territories, my territory suffered the most. Now that all the other ways are gone, even if I had to pay the price all I want to do is kill him.

    If I don¡¯t kill him, I can¡¯t even eat peacefully, that is why I am excited. Fuck the consequences all I want is his death."

    His voice sounded crazier as he went on. The two remaining kings exchanged a nce and had bewildered expressions in each other¡¯s eyes.

    It seems like the Vampire king has really gone crazy and in fact, it didn¡¯t seem too far-fetched to them. The Vampires suffered the most in the current situation and they took the most damage in terms of numbers, resources, and territories.

    They don¡¯t have enough confidence in themselves that they could stay calm in that situation.

    After some more crazy talk from the Vampire King, they appeared to be convinced and have two spatial rings to him.

    They discussed some more and all three of them went on their own ways.

    The vampire king revealed an exciting smile as he went back to his Mansion. He didn¡¯t even bother to exin anything to the rest of the people and directly went to the same underground room and started working around the well.

    He took out all the resources and started drawing some runes. He called for some humans and took blood from them to mix with the rest of the things that are being used to make the ink for the runes.

    For the next week, he ispletely busy as created runes and covered the whole room.

    After the week, he was finally done and looked at the inscribed formation and called for all the consummate level Vampires in the mansion toe to the room.

    After they came in, he ordered them to sit in different ces within the runes and exined the procedure on what they have to do, and finally took his seat nearest to the well.

    All of them sat cross-legged and closed their eyes and channeled their energy through the runes. The energy channeled through the runes and a wave of explosion urred sending the ceiling away.

    The whole underground room is not actually right under the mansion, even if it is underground it is beside the mansion structure.

    Therge explosion got the attention of every vampire in the city as therge cloud of dirt was shot into the sky.

    Some powerful Vampires directly went to the spot of the explosion only to see therge pit in which the strongest of the Vampires are sitting cross-legged in the middle of the blood-red runes that are glowing with an eerie light.

    They could see the death energy being sucked out of the surroundings and being sent to the pit that was within.

    They just sat there with their eyes closed until the well started glowing with the blood-red light.

    *GROWL*

    There is an intense growlinge out of the pit as if some hungry beast is asking for food.

    The Vampire King opened his eyes and took out the rest of the soil that has Sam¡¯s blood and dropped It into the well.

    The blood-red light from the well intensified and the red light beam shot into the sky creating a red misty cloud.

    The cloud started moving towards the forest of dying in a rapid rate that a red line could be seen in the sky from miles away.

    Meanwhile, in the forest of dying Sam and his friends are discussing their next step.

    All of a sudden the troops in the forest of dying has disappeared and they decided to move out of this ce even if they couldn¡¯t figure out the n of the three races.

    While they are making preparations, all of a sudden arge red cloud zoomed into the cave without them even noticing and it circled around the walls before enveloping Sampletely and taking him back.

    Sam and his friends are all panicked and they immediately ran after him. Philip, Jack, and Watt exchanged a nce and Philip gave an order to Arman and Chatur.

    "This might be a trap, stay here and make preparations for the emergency n, we will chase them. It is too fast for you guys to catch up."

    Both of them didn¡¯t say much and only nodded.

    The trio took to their hoverboards as they chased after the red cloud.

    They could barely keep up with the cloud and keep it within their visible range as they chased.

    Sam who is in the middle of the cloud is trying his best to deal with the cloud. But he couldn¡¯t find any way to get out of it.

    The first problem is that he couldn¡¯t use any of his energies, the elemental, neutral, physical. No matter what strength it is, he couldn¡¯t ess it.

    Nothing ising out of the normal spatial rings. Luckily the divine dimension is still essible.

    He took out the transference scroll from his divine dimension and activated it, he was ecstatic when he felt the energy waves that enveloped him, but before he could feel the relief, the red smoke acted weirdly and destroyed the spatial waves around him and kept him in ce.

    He took out the protection trinket Hou Yi gave him, but even that is not working. He felt extremely helpless. He exploded grenades, used formation discs nothing is working.

    He started using the observation ability to look at the red smoke and from what he discovered, he felt cold sweat dripping through his back. The red mist has the same properties as blood. This made him feel a bit anxious.

    The only silver lining is that he couldn¡¯t feel any sense of threat from the red cloud. He looked at his friends following him and wanted to say that they shouldn¡¯te. But his voice is noting out.

    He noticed that Yanwu and the rest inside the divine dimension are also bing restless.

    Sam tried all his ways to resist and tried to use any elemental energy he could manifest and soon found out, the energy is not sealed it is just that it is noting out of his body.

    He gritted his teeth and started using fusion. His first pick is the earth element and then the metal element to increase his weight and density. But that didn¡¯t work then he tried water, the wind which didn¡¯t work either.

    The shadow gave him some edge, but it was soon ovee by the cloud. The fire element also has some resistance but it didn¡¯t work, then finally only light element is there.

    When he used that, he was surprised because for a second the red cloud just left him and went past him. He became ecstatic even when he was falling down. He is not worried about the height.

    But soon his ecstasy turned into frustration as the red cloud came back and tried to enter his body to suppress the light element fusion and started dragging him away. The speed obviously reduced.

    Sam finally lost it, all this while he tried his best to stay calm but now he is getting angry. When he saw the vampire capital right before his eyes, his expression turned cold, and wanted to find a way. His main problem currently is that the red cloud is clearly not an attack and he couldn¡¯t find the properties of this except for the fact the blood is the base of this cloud.

    Soon, he neared the pit and when he saw the ritual that is happening, he looked at his friends and struggled to gesture them to stop.

    The cloud started dragging him towards the well. The whole vampire populous are watching Sam being dragged away and they couldn¡¯t help but heave a sigh of relief. The king and the rest of the strongest Consummate level cultivators are all sitting there without a single movement.

    Sam struggled as he was dragged into the well from which he could feel a dangerous sense of crisis his gut is screaming.

    He cursed under his breath and used all his energy to yell.

    "GO BACK AND ACTIVATE THE FINAL PLAN. I WILL BE BACK BEFORE THE DAY OF OUR DEPARTURE. DON¡¯T HOLD BACK ANYMORE, DESTROY THIS PLACE."

    Sam¡¯s voice is so loud and cold that the vampires that are listening to him all felt a shiver down their spine. He is still resisting as the red beam of light pulled him into the pit. Sam looked at the Vampires and said coldly as he felt their relieved gazes.

    "Don¡¯t be happy so soon. One month. I will look at all your faces in one month and see what happens and that is if you are alive by then."

    The red beam of light dragged him in and Sam didn¡¯t make another sound while he disappeared.

 Chapter 702: New Vines

    Sam felt like his soul is being sucked out of his body as he felt the red smoke pulling him inside. The situation is extremely dire. He understood that as soon as his legs reached the mouth of the well.

    He also felt something foreign trying to make a connection with his brain and he immediately understood that the situation is not going to be solved within a few days, that is why he set a deadline for himself.

    He is all open for trickery in a battle, but this is something he didn¡¯t expect. Tens of Consummates and a cultivator even stronger than a Consummate are all together trying to force him into this pit. Even his escape tactics are not working.

    He could only face the problem head-on. As for not being able to solve it at all? If he would have thought like that before he solved all the problems he solved today, he wouldn¡¯t have solved any of them.

    This is the mentality he had towards his problems. This might seem narcissistic, but he always thought that every problem is solvable for him, it is either a matter of time or a matter of need.

    Sam felt another consciousness invading his body even before he could reach the bottom of the well.

    The density of the red fog increased a lot.

    Soon Sam hit the liquid surface and it almost felt like he hit the concrete.

    There is a metallic taste in his mouth and he could smell blood all around.

    By the time he gained his vision, he already knew what he fell into, a pool of blood.

    Finally, Sam couldn¡¯t move a bit, the red fog still enveloped him, but it didn¡¯t pull him anywhere. Sam floated on the surface and he could finally use his energy freely.

    He stood up and used his water elemental energy to take a footing on the surface of the blood and used his eye technique to look around. He is on arge pool of blood and he is not alone in there. A dead body is floating on the surface of the blood near him.

    The body was sitting crosslegged and one look it easily gave away that this is the dead body of a vampire.

    Sam wanted to near the body, but the red fog once again moved and the struggle of this foreign entity to establish a connection with a brain began and soon a small forceful link was made through which a voice sounded in his head.

    "You are quite a specimen alright. Not only is your body so delicious and has such a fragrant smell, your soul is also quite unique, this is the first time I took this long to establish a connection with a brain. I wonder how much time it would take to consume youpletely."

    "Consume? Do you think, I would just let you do that?" Sam¡¯s voice was cold and indifferent as if the consciousness that is drilling into his brain doesn¡¯t even exist.

    "What else can you do? Do you even know who I am? Do you even know what I am going to do to you? Since we have to spend a lot of time together before we leave this ce, let me tell you."

    At this moment, the dead body that is sitting crosslegged in front of him opened his eyes and started talking.

    "I am the Vampire King hundreds of years ago. I was one of the reasons for the vampires to be imprisoned in this sick realm.

    The corpse in front of you was my original body, Vampire¡¯s body is one of the most outstanding physiques of all the species, but I was never satisfied with it, so I experimented. Not just me, the then Ghoul King, the Wight King, everyone experimented desiring different results.

    That is why all three races and the rest of the undead creatures that are associated with them are kicked into this realm.

    But we didn¡¯t stop. All the blood you are seeing around is the result of those experimental failures.

    I wanted to make a perfect body and create a new species altogether. In that body, not only would I be able to find a bnce between the human blood and the Vampire blood, I also wanted to fuse them perfectlybining the perks of both worlds.

    Then I would have the regeneration and vitality along with the lifespan of the vampire body and the versatility and the potential of humans, but I never seeded. In a final trial, I created this well in which my soul is preserved and lost my powers, but every time they are sending the human bodies to find the mostpatible vessel for me.

    All this while I survived because of those vessels but they slowly disintegrated into this blood, but now you came.

    Your bloodline is so pure and so superior to any human I have met. Your body is perfectly bnced with all the physical attributes and has the resistance for almost all basic elements along with intense affinity. If I managed to fuse with you, I can add the Vampire¡¯s flesh characteristics like regeneration, long life span, and high physical resistance and also ovee the defect of the vampires which is the light element and the morning sun.

    I will be invincible.

    Hahahahahaha..."

    Sam just looked on as the corpseughed and waited for him to continue.

    "Your soul is too strong and unstable. Normally, I would have consumed your consciousness and made your body mine, before merging, but if I do that with you, there is a chance you might turn the body into a corpse by killing yourself, so I would first imprison your soul within your body and let the mergingpletely.

    Once the body isplete and strong enough, I will savor your soul and achieve invincibility."

    Sam could already feel the blood seeping into his body, but that is all he can do, feel.

    His body is out of his control and he couldn¡¯t even use his own spiritual consciousness.

    Currently, his sea of consciousness is a battlefield in which the spiritual consciousness of the Vampire King is attacking his own.

    But Sam¡¯s spiritual consciousness is different. His is like a metal block unlike most people¡¯s which is an easily spreading vapor.

    He held on tightly as he waited for the opening and soon he already stopped feeling his body and even started drowning in it.

    He gritted his teeth in frustration and helplessness and struggled like a mad dog on a leash, but he couldn¡¯t even connect with his own body.

    At this moment, all he can see or feel is the foreign consciousness that is trying to take over him. Even his instincts are screaming that the foreign consciousness is a bigger threat than the body.

    Sam is confident that as long as his body and soul exist, no matter what state it is, he can at least live and find a way out, from this procedure his body will surely exist even with some stages, but he has to make sure that his soul exists.

    After thinking this through, he just let his body be and tried to battle it over with the consciousness.

    Anyway, the process is a long one, so Sam calmed himself down and started a war of his own.

    Meanwhile, back in the forest of dying.

    The team once again met up in the bat cave and everyone started making preparations.

    All the members of the team took out some small metal rockets from their storage.

    Sam has already made preparations for the true worst-case scenario and that is if his friends got separated from him.

    Even though Philip makes a good leader steer them clear of the trouble, there could be a scenario like right now and they would have to make big enough moves to save Sam. Therefore, he arranged something extremely dangerous with them that should only be used in case of emergencies.

    Currently, the forest of dying is empty. Sam¡¯s friends are not even major targets. There was no news from the Vampire King about Sam¡¯s demise or the information on how to eradicate the vines, so until then they decided to put the rest of the team on hold.

    So, for now, the team is free to act without any troubles and the vines that are still spreading are already causing enough trouble for the three races anyway, so it is no problem.

    The team spread to all the corners of the forest of death and started activating these little rockets.

    All they have to do is inject some spiritual energy and activate a small formation inside. The rockets flew until the fuel is exhausted and exploded there.

    But there no ming explosion nor is there any form of a shy scene. It is at most like failed firecracker leaving some small grains of different colors.

    These are the pollen grains that Sam stored separately and they are the next level to the normal vines. Sam didn¡¯t want to use them in the n unless it is extremely necessary. And since even his life is at stake this can be considered necessary enough.

 Chapter 703: Chaos

    The forest of dying seemed to have been festive mode as the rockets are beingunched into the air.

    The pollen was spread all over the ce and this time the vines are a bit different. They are not the usual ck, there is a faint hue on them with different colors.

    These vines are not just different in color but they are also inherently different, they are growing faster and when they came near the vines that already existed they are trying to merge together.

    When the pollen fell on already existed vines, they are also merging in and a new branch of vines growing out of it and soon the original vines are also changing a bit.

    Even the flowers growing out of it didn¡¯t just give out pollen. The flower wouldn¡¯t wilt away like before when the pollen left it and it will stay there on the vines.

    From time to time, the flowers started releasing various vapors of different colors based on the hues of the vines.

    The vapors have different effects on the surroundings.

    For example, the green vapor started decaying everything was in its way, be it the trees or the undead creatures, it has a particr reaction towards the death energy.

    The red vapor is creating a charring effect on the skin and surface of everything thates in contact with it and this is also only working on the things with death energy. But this time it is not just limited to the moving objects and creatures, the flora and even the soil are affected.

    The yellow vapor is a lot acidic and it is corroding the structure of everything that came into contact with it.

    The worst part is when multiple vines merged together or one type of pollen fell on another type of vine. They are merging their properties and if the red and green merged it is merging both the effects.

    Even though currently there are no people in the forest dying except for the team, the effects of this action will be soon seen.

    After finishing up with the forest of dying, the team went to the Undying Volcanic region. In the past week, Sam has already investigated the issue of the vines spreading into different ces randomly and came to some spections.

    One of them is the someone is trying to help with the propagation and the second one is the undying volcano being the reason. He captured his prey and inquired about the situation with the ck clouds and came to the conclusion that the undying volcano might be the reason the vines are spreading so much.

    That reason is also more believable while the rest are farfetched.

    The team went to the undying volcano and when they looked at therge expanse ofndpletely covered in vines, they couldn¡¯t help but stare at it in awe,

    Who would have expected that they can see an active volcano and vines growing in the same ce?

    They took out some ss bottles that have the special pollen and started sprinkling all over the area and finally they emptied a few bottles into the volcano through its mouth and let it do the rest of the magic.

    They just went back to the cave and started making the final preparations which would need some time. They took out several formation discs and activated them within the cave as they ced some pollen contained within a ss jar.

    Then they just waited for the show.

    Meanwhile, Sam is also waiting for something to happen as he just thought of escaping this plight. Sometimes, he managed to slip by the consciousness of the opponent and tried to control his body, but the corpse that is sitting crosslegged moved and would hold him in ce.

    The strength of this corpse is far superior to his own and he couldn¡¯t fully control his body so there is no way he could take him down. So, he got a lot of time to think of ways to escape his predicament and there is one usible way he could think of as the rest of them are extremely farfetched.

    But for that, the emergency n his friends are executing should progress to a certain extent.

    As he waited like that, the blood is seeping into his body and soon he was covered with a blood-colored cocoon. He went through agonizing pain, but he didn¡¯t even groan, he just held his mentality to not break before he could break out of this ce.

    Meanwhile, the vampires, wights, and ghouls are all waiting for the good news. The vines arepletely hindering their growth and daily routine, they are already sick of living in fear every day in istion.

    But they couldn¡¯t think of ways to do anything to make the situation better. All they could do is stay inside so that they could stop helping the vines to spread more.

    But what they don¡¯t know or expect is that them helping the vines propagation is the least of their concerns at this moment. Currently, a more dangerous threat ising knocking at their doors.

    In the outskirts of the Vampire city within a house, a vampire man and a woman are having sex with a human woman. They arepletely relieved since the problem is out of their minds and lost in their carnal desires, they are also confident that nothing would happen in the house.

    But at this moment, the tile on the roof of the house fell in startling them and getting them out of their passionate mood.

    Before they could make sense of what happened, they could see cracks happening all over the walls and the tiles falling off and before they knew it a green vapor entered the cracks of the walls and they started feeling their skin decay easily and within few minutes, the two vampires are enveloped with vines and the human woman barely managed to escape.

    She came out of her house only to see the same situation is repeating itself in many other houses, the houses are all burning, corroding, and simply falling off while the humans ran out of it.

    Within two weeks after Sam¡¯s imprisonment, the whole undead realm turned into a new phase of chaos. The Vampire King and the strongest don¡¯t have any idea what they had done, they are pretty concentrated on the ritual and even if they wanted to they couldn¡¯te out of it now.

    But the Ghoul King and Wight King are cursing Sam and his eighteen generations¡¯ ancestors in rage every day. They left all their works as they tried to control the vine growth, the new vines are going on a killing spree as they just grew all over the ce.

    Within these two weeks, they even reached the edges of the capitals and they already had to activate the defensive formations of the highest level to barely keep the pollen out of the city.

    Even the Vampire Capital is the same, but they are a bit toote and a bit too weak. The transcendent stage cultivators don¡¯t have enough ess or power to activate the strongest formation of the city and the pollen is spreading faster in their capital than in other ces, so they really couldn¡¯t do anything and the Capital is like a free pantry to these vines as there are tons of vampires just waiting to be devoured.

    This time San¡¯s kill count can only be called colossal. This is the reason why he didn¡¯t use the special vines since the start. Even though he needed points he didn¡¯t want to go as far as to send these people to extinction.

    From what he knew there are only a few members of these three species out of this realm and they might have even died, but now that situation became so dire as to the point that he had to think of his and his friends¡¯ safety, even if the rest of the whole realm copsed and became lifeless or in this case creature-less, he will still go on with it and effects are showing now.

    Another week passed by and Sam¡¯s body is on brink ofpleting formation, but he managed to still keep his mind strong. From what he predicted the final step for his exit shoulde anytime now and he just calmly waited.

    While he is waiting the Vampire capital is already in chaos, the vines already spread all over the mansion of the king and they are now sorge and thick that one should wonder if a Consummate realm Vampire can escape this and they didn¡¯t have to wait long for the answer because the three colored vapors reached the pit and formed clouds over it and the vines are spreading downwards as the death energy is at its highest in that ce.

    The vines are spreading rapidly towards the blood-red runes and the consummate cultivators that are in the middle of the ritual. But there is nothing much they can about it even if they are awake.

    Soon the vines reached the first person in the formation and started wrapping around him. The person started feeling the searing pain and feeling of decay as he forcefully opened his eyes spat a mouthful of blood and at this exact moment, Sam whose body just came out of the blood cocoon showed a faint smile.

 Chapter 704: Escape

    Sam finally felt the crack he wanted to feel.

    He knew something will happen as soon as the emergency n was activated. Even though the smile is not physical the old vampire king clearly felt the change is the state of mind of Sam and also the faint reduction in the energy that was being supplied to him.

    But he didn¡¯t think it was a big deal. This ritual has taken ce many times and sometimes the Consummate realm cultivators became exhausted so much that they fainted or even died, then the energy fluctuations are bound to happen.

    "What are you feeling so happy about? Your body transformation is finished and it is indeed extremely bnced and perfect, so I would be taking it over now and release you out of your misery."

    Sam just smirked and said.

    "You will definitely know why I am happy in a few minutes as for the rest of your nonsense, that is just your pipe dream."

    "Have you be delusional after spending this long resisting me?"

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to reply as he just let the process finish and slowly he could feel the resistance on his body is being reduced.

    Meanwhile, on the surface, the Consummate realm cultivator that is trying to get rid of the vines is having the nightmare of his life. No matter what he tried he couldn¡¯t get rid of the vine and his energy is being sucked dry.

    He felt the despair for the first time in a while. After all these years he reached the Consummate realm cultivation and he is not willing to give his life away just because he tried to kill a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator.

    He felt that it is so unfair. He cannot do this at all. He just wanted to live.

    If not for the fact that he is a consummate realm cultivator, he wouldn¡¯t be able tost this long even now it seemed like it would take hours to fully absorb from him but still there are already tens of flowers blooming out of the vines, the same thing happened in all the directions of the pit as one cultivator after other are being trapped by the vines and then growing rapidly before reaching another target.

    The situation is extremely tense and soon, the formation stopped working when the vines finally reached the Vampire King.

    Everyone spat out some blood and felt like their souls are being sucked away from their bodies.

    The energy in the surroundings became a chaotic mess. Except for the Vampire King, no one else was able to resist the effects of the vine, but he couldn¡¯t do much at least he couldn¡¯t escape the vinepletely all he can do is use the special energy that could ess since his cultivation is past the Consummate realm.

    While the fate of the Vampires is in a pickle, Sam finally rxed and the former Vampire King¡¯s soul suddenly trembled as he lost the extra strength that helped him to maintain the ritual.

    "What did you do?" He asked Sam in a tense voice.

    "Does it really matter? You are going to disappear anyway. It would just be a waste of my time to exin."

    "WHAT DID YOU DO?" The voice became freaky as he felt the connection being lost with the other cultivators on the surface. After that outburst, he calmed himself down and said.

    "It doesn¡¯t matter if you did something to them. Their involvement will be minimal in the next step anyway, I can manage it myself."

    As soon as he said that the corpse moved and pin Sam to the wall and the soul tried to devour Sam¡¯s soul.

    But when he took that step, there is a faint interval for Sam to ess his own body and spiritual consciousness was free for a fraction of a second. He didn¡¯t dare let that opportunity slip past him and took two things out of the divine dimension.

    The first one is the strand of hair from SunWukong and the second one is the pir he obtained in his quest to find the meteorite sand.

    He threw the strand of hair at the corpse and the Sun Wukong Clone appeared with staff while Sam yelled.

    "Guardian, you bettere out and destroy this soul now."

    The Old man¡¯s wisp of the soul came out of the pir and shot into Sam¡¯s mind to battle with the soul of the Vampire King.

    "This soul is stronger than a Consummate, just what kind of people are you pissing off? Anyway, why are you even in contact with the Vampires? Just how much of a trouble maker are you?" The guardian asked as arge mental battle took ce in his mind.

    The corpse is not extremely powerful and within the Consummate realm level, so there is no need for Sam to worry. The Monkey King¡¯s clone is more than capable enough to destroy that corpse.

    He kept all the concentration on the mental battle. Since the battle is taking ce in his own mind and due to the specialty of his own soul that came from other world and the superior strength of it that is past the Pre-transcendent realm and almost strong enough to be a Transcendent realm is a plus that he could even survive that mental storm in his brain.

    He could almost imagine the guardian and the Vampire battling it out on the open field.

    There is immense pressure on Sam¡¯s mind and he even started bleeding from his nose from time to time.

    The chaotic aftershocks of the SunWukong beating the crap out of that corpse started rocking the whole well and even on the surface the vampire can feel the aftershocks and wondered what is happening. Even in their state of despair, they could think of this, because there are hundreds of people who are sent under the well and they died without any signs.

    Those people are stronger, older, and powerful than Sam, but they still died. So, it came as shock that Sam managed to create thismotion that too after a month.

    Soon the physical battle under that is over and the Vampire King¡¯s soul also took so much damage and since the support from the rest of the Vampires has disappeared.

    "I can¡¯t go down like this. I CANT GO DOWN LIKE THIS. I am the greatest of all the Vampire Kings, I will not let this happen."

    Guardian¡¯s soul wisp is also extremely weak from all the damage and said to the Vampire King.

    "So, you are the guy that caused the whole Vampire race to be stuck in that hellhole. I didn¡¯t know you turned this weak. I wouldn¡¯t have even looked at you from a mile if you were still alive, but you are already brought to this stage, what a shame."

    As he spoke he finished off the Vampire King.

    "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooo...." The soul of the Vampire King disappeared along with his voice.

    Sam could see the soul wisp of the Guardian that is so damaged that he would take at least two years to recover. He is at his weakest.

    The wisp of soul came out of Sam¡¯s head and said to him.

    "Don¡¯t call me out in the near future. The damage is too much I need to preserve my energy to lead you to my ce when you reach that realm. He wanted to return to the pir, but Sam didn¡¯t let him. He held the pir and blocked him.

    "Sorry, I wouldn¡¯t be needing your services anymore. Goodbye."

    Sam said as he waved his hand to call out the specter that he captured in the Bat Cave along with the Wightmander.

    "What do you mean?" The Guardian asked with a frown.

    "Do you really think I am so na?ve? A valuable treasure such as this pir fell into a deste realm and you want me to take it back? You should have thought a better idea, do you know why? There is someone knowledgeable about the realms I can get in touch with and they said one thing.

    That only the ones that should be kept in that realm will be kept there. Nothing everes to the deste realm by mistake."

    As soon as he said that, the Guardian has gone angry and was about to attack Sam. But the specter stopped him with the assistance of Sam¡¯s mental strength.

    "Well, arrows in the dark surely hit well," Sam said with a sigh.

    The guardian widened his eyes and said in disbelief.

    "You bluffed."

    "Of course I did. And since you are at your weakest you became nervous that I might get rid of you if I find anything suspicious in your answer so you attacked in panic.

    I don¡¯t know what is so good about you guys, you are just like any other human I came into contact with me, easy to bluff and easy to fool. And fortunately for me, you fell for it and I can erase you without any guilt."

    As he spoke he used all his mental energy and injected it into the specter to help him consume the rest of the soul of the Guardian.

    "NOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooo...."

    The same situation repeated. Sam let the specter back in and looked around. Almost all the blood in the pool disappeared. He looked towards the mouth and decided to go out first before he checked what happened to his body.

 Chapter 705: Aftermath

    Sam felt like his body has strength that was never there before. He could climb the well easily and for a few minutes, he couldn¡¯t even maintain bnce and control his strength properly. He even fell back a couple of times.

    When he came up, he saw all the Consummate cultivators and even the Vampire King id rolling on the ground.

    The whole area is full of red, green, and yellow vapors. Except for the Vampire King, no one else has a fully intact proper body, they are just an hour away from disappearing from their existence.

    Sam walked out of the well and looked at them with a cold gaze.

    "There is still a week for a month. You are done in faster than before." He spoke and walked towards the Vampire King and looked at him in the eyes.

    "How does it feel to be helpless in front of something that was controlled and executed by someone else? Particrly someone you looked down on so much that you didn¡¯t even put them in your eyes. A person belonging to a race that was only a form of food for you.

    I really wonder how you feel."

    Sam¡¯s words made the Vampire King so frustrated that he wanted to kill him with a single strike, but as soon as he channeled his energy the vines¡¯ grasp tightened and absorbed everything.

    "I never thought my vines could work on a person whose cultivation is beyond Consummate stage. You are my first subject thank you."

    "Do you know how many people you have killed? It is a war, so fight with soldiers and the kings, what did the citizens do to you?" The Vampire King said as he spat coldly.

    Sam looked at him up and down and asked.

    "How many humans have you killed? How many humans have you consumed from your childhood? You might have even killed your mother with your birth as the probability of the human woman giving birth to the vampire, dying is extremely high.

    How many dwarves have you killed in the war?

    How many Minotaurs and Orcs have you used and made them lose their lives? What do they anything to do with you and your realm?"

    The Vampire King¡¯s face changed.

    "There is nothing fair in this world and everyone¡¯s hands are stained with the blood of innocents. You told me to kill the soldiers, but are all the soldiers guilty? More than half of them are innocent and in fact noble because they are only doing their job in the most righteous way possible.

    Then what are you for sending them to death for your stupid decisions?

    Stop being Hypocritical.

    When ites to my own survival and the survival of my friends, i won¡¯t care if a hundred or a thousand individuals die in the middle of all of it, I will ensure their survival.

    It is always which choice you want to make, I will always choose mine over all the creatures in this realm.

    As for the guilt trap you areying, why don¡¯t you try thinking why this happened? Why did I even be your enemy, why did I even bring these vines here? Why did I attack you? Why did I take these emergency measures which I didn¡¯t even use from the start?"

    The Vampire King really started thinking and Sam continued.

    "It¡¯s all on you. You brought this upon yourselves. You took a gamble in invading the banished realm and you lost the soldiers then went there, you took a gamble by sending troops after me in the forest of dying, you lost the troops, you took a gamble to destroy my life with this little well, but now you lost everything.

    Don¡¯t me me for your own mistakes."

    Sam said and walked away. After listening to Sam, The Vampire King just stopped resisting. He lost all the hope and he really felt guilty about all of this.

    This is all happened because of their greed, their pride, and their ambitions. The three kings are the ones responsible as all of this is a consequence of their decision.

    Sam took out the Harbinger and went away. He is not wearing his feather coat as it was damaged by Hou Yi and he had yet to repair it.

    He is fully covered in blood as he zoomed past the towns and cities of the Vampire territory. There is not a ce that was devoid of vines, all the vampires are fighting for their survival.

    There is very little they can do and very few ces can hide them from these vines.

    In just three months, the Vampires who are at the top of the food chain in this world became strays.

    The situation for the remaining two races is not too different. They at least have their top dogs alive but most of the underdogs are already dead.

    Sam didn¡¯t even dare to look at the wrist screen at the moment, he knew the points will be too many. He didn¡¯t ask about the scoring of the Consummate realm cultivators when had the chance, but he knew it would be a lot, so he just let it be. He would look at it after he figured out what happened to his body.

    At least for now, he is not feeling anything with it except for the superior abilities and instincts.

    He entered the forest of dying and reached the Bat cave.

    His friends are in a meeting to discuss something as they gathered together and they felt Sam¡¯s presence they were dumbfounded for a second before cheering out loud.

    "You are earlier than expected, we almost wanted to use the final destructive step to deal with all the creatures."

    "Well, it is good that I came early, if you did that nothing will be left in this undead realm except for the death energy."

    "Yeah, it is good that you came. Otherwise, we would have had a hard time finding a way to hide somewhere after activating that. We couldn¡¯t find any at the moment."

    They made some small talk as if nothing happened at all and Sam finally said.

    "We will stay for this week and leave this ce after that. But before that, I have to take a look at my own condition and examine my body, so tomorrowunch the golden rocket. This realm has suffered enough damage and we already achieved our own objective. It is unnecessary to kill so many people since I escaped."

    After that, he took a seat nearby and started examining his own body.

    The first thing he did is to look at his spiritual core.

    And he was relieved to find out that the spiritual core is okay. There are no significant changes except that he felt that the spiritual core can now directly absorb the energy from his blood. Generally, the energy has to be directed to it and even if it isn¡¯t directed even the spiritual core itself will absorb them through the nearest meridianwork.

    Absorbing it directly from the blood is something he didn¡¯t know. After that, he started checking his body.

    The muscle fibers are denser than ever and they are extremelypact. The blood is more energetic and his skin tone changed.

    He is already a bit fair for a man and now he can only be called pale.

    His hair has a faint blood-red hue.

    He could see that he didn¡¯t need as much oxygen as before. He definitely changed and he is no longer a human at all. His aura has also changed if not for the fact that his beast auras still suppress this vampire aura he would have been easily considered as an undead creature.

    The only thing he is thankful for is that there is no change in his meridianwork.

    His cultivation level and cultivation method are all safe.

    While he is trying to figure out a way to adjust to his new body in the next week, the rest of the group decided to deal with the task they were given.

    They took the special pollen they ced in the formations within the cave and left it in different directions as they fired different rockets filled with this special pollen.

    This time the growth of vines is extremely high, but they didn¡¯t go after the death energy and the creatures, instead, these vines went after the original vines and the different vapors that are in the air.

    But they are notpletely restricting them neither are they staying alive and consuming everything. They are attracted to these vines and both of them seemed to have neutralized as they merged.

    Soon, the density of the colored vapors decreased rapidly and even the density of the vines reduced.

    Philip even dropped more pollen of this kind in the Volcano and reduced the traffic of the spreading vines.

    But from the looks of it, there is nothing much they can do to the volcanic region. It is no go zone for all the undead creatures.

    The Wights and Ghouls are relieved when they saw the reducing dangers and these changes also happened rapidly.

    While they are like that a new message spread as the team members yelled over the cities and towns.

    "For the Kings and nobles of the Undead Realm. We hope that this would be a lesson to you and stay put in your own realm. No matter how powerful you are, you will be vulnerable for something, and these vines which you are vulnerable to are easy to control in hands of Sam.

    He can make theme and make them go whenever he wants, it would be good if you call quits now, but if you want to try you can try, but you better be prepared that there would be no mercy next time."

    Anuthor¡¯s note.

    *SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT* in author¡¯s thought.

 Chapter 706: Points

    Sam just stayed in his cave and took care of himself. There really are some changes and one of them is that when he saw his friends a part of him wants to take a bite and suck their blood. But the instinct is extremely faint so he could control the urge.

    In fact it that urge is dominated by the rest of his bloodlines so much that the feeling is extremely faint and negligible.

    He could feel that something bad would have happened if the beast bloodlines are not present in his body.

    He even conducted several experiments like taking some blood of his friends to keep in front of him, smelling it, and even applying it on his body, even though the urging increased it is within his rational limit.

    Only then did he feel relieved.

    Apart from that urge the rest of them are only advantageous to him. For starters, his body has the obvious physical advantage nowpared to his peers. His body is so strong and heals itself faster. He doesn¡¯t even need to use the light element to heal himself.

    The second advantage is that he became good at necromancy and dark elemental techniques. Now it is almost like second nature for him to use the necromancy and dark elemental techniques.

    There is one thought that bothered him so much and he felt extremely relieved to the point that he felt lucky for the first time and that is his fear of gaining the biggest weakness the Vampires have.

    The weakness of the light element. He would rather give back all the advantages this body brought him than attain that weakness of the light element along with them.

    The first test is simple, he just stayed under the sunlight and tested his techniques, and then he noticed that his body didn¡¯t change in any way nor did he feel any form of suppression. The rest of his body and the beast bloodlines seem to be acting as shields for his vampire half.

    He used light elemental attacks and nothing happened, it is just like normal. He felt extremely grateful for the luck for the first time in his life.

    He was never the one to believe in luck but now he is feeling it for the first time. Staying helpless for almost a month could have broken anyone, even his friends as they would feel the changes in their body which they might lose any second.

    Luckily he managed to stay strong and get out of that hellhole.

    The day before their journey, Sam finally checked his wrist screen but there is nothing on it that surprised him. For all the damage he did, he was expecting a six-digit number on his screen but he didn¡¯t expect that there is no number at all.

    If only this game has GM he can contact whenever he wants.

    He just left the thought forter and started making preparations for leaving. As for why they have to prepare, the remaining two races sent envoys to talk to him and they sent some presents.

    Some of them sent the human ves, some sent some beasts that can only be found in this realm, and some sent resources the undead creatures can use to grow.

    All the nobles from the two races and even some from the specter race and some lesser undead races came to find him.

    But he didn¡¯t meet with all of them. In the past week, he only focused on himself and his friends had to take up this duty too.

    Most of them just left after learning that Sam wouldn¡¯t be able to meet them. But the envoys of the two kings didn¡¯t leave and just set up a camp nearby.

    When they searched for a camping spot the team couldn¡¯t help butugh. They are staying far away from anything that looked like a vine.

    Sam made them all suffer from PTSD. They would never dare to hold a nt vine with their hands for the rest of their lives.

    When Sam came out and finally met them he was surprised by the resources they sent. One of them sent spirit stones. They are so many that he was surprised these many stones exist. Seeing his surprise the envoy exined what the situation is.

    The Undead realm is also a prison so these undead creatures also cannot use the spirit stones just like dwarves.

    These are all wasted here. But the Wight King always experimented with them to find a way out and mined them regrly.

    He somehow learned that Sam can use spirit stones, maybe his spies in the Banished realm are still working, so he sent many elemental stones that Sam felt that this alone is worth the trip. And he was even more satisfied when he saw the special metals of this world. The Wight king really did put thought into the present.

    As for the second present this is even more unique. This present is from Ghoul King.

    This is actually a jar of blood and from the letter he explicitly stated that the blood didn¡¯t contain any human blood and is collected from the blood of some exotic beasts that are not avable in the undead realm.

    Ghoul King is the person that has most contact with the people from the higher realm that is connected to them.

    So, he has his ways to get what he wanted. He must have arranged this so that he can exchange something from the Vampire King.

    But since he felt the extra threat from Sam he decided to use it here. Vampire King is a thing of the past anyway.

    There is no need to keep it with himself.

    Sam really felt the urge to drink it up. But the energy within the blood would make his body explode. This is also another resource he can only use when he broke through further.

    After dealing with this and making sure that he would be leaving the Undead realm after this, the envoys left the forest with a sigh of relief.

    While Sam is preparing to go back, there is a huge discussion in the area where the gods that are participating in this game usually meet.

    "There is no way we can award him with that many points, he used a cheap trick to achieve this. This is not fair for the rest of the points."

    Indra yelled at the rest of the gods.

    Sam¡¯s number is extremely high this time.

    The gambler just rxed in his chair and asked casually.

    "What did I say before the game started? For every stage of cultivation, the score will be multiplied by fifty.

    He killed hundreds of Transcendent stage cultivation and he killed tens of consummate realm cultivators.

    He even killed an Astral ne level cultivator. You must have forgotten that you yourself added a rule saying that they can use any means necessary.

    All he did is use the environment to his advantage and killed them by creating a simple weapon.

    If you can multiply the score by fifty times just because of a cultivation stage, how many times do you have to multiply for killing an Astral ne cultivator? I am being generous here and only offering a fraction of what should be awarded and you are still making a fuss.

    Don¡¯t take me for a soft persimmon alright. You might regret it. Ask Hou Yi if you don¡¯t believe me."

    The Gambler said as he looked at Hou Yi whose face is burning with shame.

    Hou Yi didn¡¯t dare to speak at this moment. He is in a pinch and everything he said that could oppose Gambler is a minus for him. For a person that cares so much about his face, if he opposed Gambler, it would be easily misunderstood as him being petty and his face would be lost.

    He is so concerned about these superficial things even though he is a god.

    The rest of the gods are also troubled. Particrly, those people who insisted on arranging the Pce of Inheritance and the game in the undead realm.

    It is just as the Gambler said to Hou Yi before it began.

    Every decision they make due to others¡¯ influence is a gamble and they have to face the consequences no matter what the oue is.

    They took a gamble and Sam pped them in their faces. They couldn¡¯t help but wonder what kind of little pest this Gambler has brought into this game.

    "But one million is too much." Indra still didn¡¯t give up.

    "Too much? I am not even calcting the score for the Pre-transcendent stage cultivators he killed so that the rest of the yers wouldn¡¯t die of embarrassment. So, don¡¯t you dare say it is too much?"

    "But..."

    "Indra, stop it. You have embarrassed yourself so many times why are you still so stubborn?" Kartikeya intervened from the side.

    Indra couldn¡¯t answer him. He sat back in his chair and just stayed silent. But that stubborn look is still on his face.

    "Since there is no more objection, I will award the points to my yer. So, the next time you meet your yers tell them to up their game. It is no fun if there is nopetition."

    The Gambler said as he left the table.

 Chapter 707: Demon

    Sam and his team left the Undead realm and came back to his city.

    They went on to different duties and perform a general inspection after they came back.

    It has been a great training trip for everyone and all of them had certain gains.

    Sam went to the department of healers and gave his blood sample and the body tissue to conduct other experiments.

    While he gave the resources he obtained from that realm to the material section. They decided to stay for another three months and go on their next journey.

    After hepleted these actions, he went to meet with the Old Beast. No matter how safe this body seemed to be, he couldn¡¯t getfortable with these changes, he needs the opinion and judgment of someone experienced.

    So, he went to the tempest valley as soon as he got free time.

    As soon as the Old beast looked at him, he couldn¡¯t help but say.

    "What the hell happened to you? The human part of your body is almost gone. Why did you be like this?"

    "What can I do? I was too weak and I am making enemies out of too many strong people. This time I even managed to piss off three races altogether and a whole realm."

    Sam said as he sat down on the ground and recounted the whole story.

    "I faintly remember something about that Vampire King. I didn¡¯t expect that he would be able to survive until now. You did a great job and also getting rid of that guardian is a good decision. I don¡¯t know who he is, but I do know one thing.

    Nothing thates to the deste realmes by chance and nothing that was imprisoned here is for some ordinary reason.

    The hydra, me, and that guardian, everyone is here because of someone more powerful making them stay here.

    As for your body, it is okay for now. From what I can see it is not unstable. There might be some changes in your instincts and urges and you might like the raw food more than cooked food and there would be some cravings for the blood of the creatures. With your ability, you can suppress them easily. The beast bloodline in your body is not there for show.

    In front of those creatures a human bloodline and Vampire bloodline are not that different, so don¡¯t worry and just enjoy the perks that came with it."

    "Thank you," Sam said as he heaved a sigh.

    "What is up with your friends¡¯ training?"

    "It is good. Jack got the most gains out of all. He got a legacy of a swordsman. His technique andprehension have improved."

    "Do you want me to give you a suggestion?"

    "Yes."

    "You are being too possessive of your friends, no matter how much you are increasing their difficulty, they are already getting used to being under your shadow. This might have some benefits as chasing after you and keeping up will give them a target and goal to increase their strength.

    But they will soon forget to depend on themselves when there is a bigger problem and turn to you for every difficulty.

    This would limit their potential. After all, the true potential of a person lies only within the boundaries of their mind, so if you don¡¯t let their mind grow past you they wouldn¡¯t grow."

    Sam thought for a moment and felt that there is merit to what Old Beast said. This is the first time he had this many friends.

    All he knew about friendship is helping out each other and staying loyal. Except for that he doesn¡¯t know to truly take care of someone and how to help them grow.

    Even though their current age is simr, Sam¡¯s mental age is far more than them and he is supposed to be mature than them, but except for war, business, and stuff he is dumber than Watt when ites to rtionships and if he trained them like normal soldiers, he might be able to get in some work but they would lose their personality around him.

    Hismander or trainer side will outdo every other side he had. That is why he let them train in their own way.

    "What should I do?"

    "Just let them go. Your step to take them to different ces and train them there is good, but this time take them to different ces and let them train there alone, let them travel alone, let them make their own enemies and let them fight, escape, hide, fight back, let them do everything together."

    "But that would increase the risk."

    "Yes, it would also increase their growth. The way you are going now, they will first grow too reliant on you and soon will be a burden, even if you don¡¯t mind that therees a day where they realize that and they wouldn¡¯t be able to forgive themselves.

    The rtionship would be strained.

    Just listen to me and think about it.

    After you broke through Level-5 of the Pre-transcendent stage, you will get ess to many new realms and some ces that are suitable for them.

    Go on a journey together and then leave them alone in different worlds.

    From now on, the realms are connected together with a way to move from one realm to another, so let them grow, set a target, and meeting time, you are going to the top of these realms, the highest of them all, and fight with the strongest of them all, so they have to learn and explore themselves to be on par with you.

    Otherwise, they would be left far behind. The decision is yours."

    Sam fell into deep thought and felt a lot conflicted.

    He doesn¡¯t know where he would end up finally so he couldn¡¯t decide if he wants to get separated by them.

    As if reading Sam¡¯s thoughts, the old beast continued.

    "Come back to me after you broke through, I will look at the realms you have ess to and pick the best realm for them to train. I will even give the path they have to follow to reach the top, so don¡¯t worry."

    Sam nodded and thanked him before saying that he would consider it and left the valley.

    He went back to the city and focused on his next research project now. This time, he is going to work on another puppet.

    A puppet in the form of another animal and for starters he is using the panthers as the model.

    He is not just using the shape and size, but he is also using the cultivation research he has done since he came to this world.

    Since the first two puppets are sessful and he has the basic work done, he can finish this project within the next three months, it might not be ready to hit the markets but it would be enough time for him to create a couple of them and let his research departments analyze them.

    He let his friends do what they want for the next three months.

    He didn¡¯t put any restrictions and before he closed himself in research he went to Sirona and spent some time going through her research results. He is surprised that she could find so much inspiration cooped up in this ce.

    She has great breakthroughs in puppet making and her new puppets are really amazing. But she is not interested in business, all she did was patent some mechanisms she created and let them be used for the research and new products.

    After that, he went to the rest of the departments and looked through the research projects. He taught some sses to the students and went through the new students that joined. Only after managing everything did he leave to research.

    Meanwhile, somewhere in the Undead realm, a space crack opened up and a middle-aged man with arge beard came out of it. He has a bulky humanoid body. His muscles are huge and he is almost seven feet tall.

    He is not that handsome but there is an evil aura surrounding him.

    He walked out and with a single sh, he reappeared on top of the Vampire territory. He looked at the remaining stray houses and very few vampires that are still living there.

    The ghoul king and Wight King didn¡¯t swallow up this territory directly they just let the Vampires live by themselves without much trouble.

    The man frowned and the aura around him looked cold before he shed again and a few minutester he reappeared near the Ghoul Territory and directly entered Ghoul Pce.

    The Ghoul King felt the aura of the intruder and came running towards him and knelt before him.

    "Greetings from the Ghoul King."

    "What happened to the Vampires and the rest of the realm? Your poption decreased so much, there are not even many creatures left in the wild. What is this?"

    "As I mentioned in the report, a young man came here with a group of humans due to some past rivalries caused by the war between the Undead realm and the Banished realm. He seemed to havee for revenge and brought a weird vine with him. The vine has flowers that spread the pollen faster and the vines grew so much..."

    He exined everything and the person that came released an aura that even suppressed the Ghoul King, but he calmed himself down before saying.

    "Do you have his picture?"

    Ghoul King nodded and took out a portrait of Sam.

    "A human trying to mess with demon¡¯s underlings. I will find out where he is and kill him myself."

 Chapter 708: Medium-Level Realms

    Sam is working around the clock on his new project and he spent most of the time, in and out of the divine dimension, trying his best to find a way to materialize his ideas.

    He used the simtion aspect to the best of his ability, but no matter what he tried, he wasn¡¯t able to create his desired effect.

    The whole organization is in extreme chaos as they tried their best to find a way to help Sam¡¯s project. There is a lot of rewards ced on it.

    And since the problem is the material, any person has a possibility to find the material.

    But after these three months, there is not much progress. Many new materials, alloys, and even some new weird materials are created. But there is no desirable result. Sam felt exhausted and defeated, but he didn¡¯t continue the research immediately even though his target is not, he just went to the Tempest valley so that he could talk to the Old Beast.

    It is already the time to go on their next journey. He is not going to stop his ns. Anyway, this is not the first time he failed to reach the research deadlines he set for himself.

    Since he decided to go on this journey and he couldn¡¯t find the required material on this, he might as well use this trip to go to a ce where he could find this new material and Old Beast is the only one knowledgeable enough to give him the required information.

    He has already unlocked new ces in the dimensional drifter. He not only broke through Level-4 of the Pretranscendent stage, but he is also right on his way to Level-5.

    For some reason, his body is absorbing more energy and the cultivation speed has increased so much that it almost scared him.

    At this moment, he is currently sitting in front of the Old Beast with the dimensional drifter opened and the screen was disyed in front of him as he looked through the list of the names of the realms that are currently open for him to enter.

    There is another small change he noticed. There are some realms that are notpletely locked or notpletely unlocked.

    Their names which were not disyed when the realm is locked and not essible to Sam, are now being shown but they are still not essible directly with the dimensional drifter which puzzled him.

    The Old beast had valid spection though.

    "It happened because these realms are connected to each other and formed a chain. This chain is connected with the links of wormholes or natural portals that are connecting each realm. And you have ess to one of the realms part of this chain now.

    So, with your current level, you are not allowed to go there through this dimensional drifter, but you do have ess to the portals connecting these realms."

    But Sam was not entirely convinced with this.

    "From what I learned, there is a wormhole connecting the Naga Loka and another realm. I didn¡¯t see any of this at that time."

    "Of course you wouldn¡¯t. That is because that realm ispletely off-limits even through the wormhole. Even though you might be able to go in there through the portal, you would still feel extremely insignificant in that ce that you might get killed there just because of the aftershocks of the battle.

    The lock on those ces in the dimensional drifter is kind of a precaution to you not go there.

    Naga Loka is a lesser realm, but the upper realm that connected to the Naga Loka is one to the top realms there is. If you don¡¯t break through the Consummate realm don¡¯t even think of going there.

    Even now, the chains that are revealed to you are not exactlyplete. There are some realms at the other end of the chain that arepletely not suitable for you to go. In the names that are disyed, there is at least a way for you to survive, but some ces are not disced that are on the other end of the chain.

    These realms that are disyed to you can be considered medium-level realms, while the realms you already traveled are all considered lesser realms.

    From now on the races you encounter are all vassals of either the same race with a superior bloodline or different races that are in a realm of upper level than theirs. And the races in that upper realm would also most probably be the vassals of another superior race and this chain finally ends in either a top-ranked medium grade realm or a real high-grade realm.

    From what I could guess until you broke through past the Consummate realm and entered the next ne of cultivation, you wouldn¡¯t be able to get ess to the next chains."

    Sam went into deep thought as he tried to digest the information.

    He looked at a lot of the realms under which even more numerouss which he has ess to move. He didn¡¯t expect that just a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator has ess to so many realms ands in different ces.

    He can survive in any of these ces and now came the difficult part. He has to figure out the proper ce for this journey and also the correct ces in which he could possibly leave his friends.

    He gave the requirements for the material he needed and asked for advice.

    Old Beast thought for a moment and said.

    "You are from earth, so this journey might be a bit nostalgic for you and the world might feel familiar."

    Old Beast said as he started pointing out the ces he can go and also other ces that are possibly good for his friends¡¯ training and also the route his friends should take for them to meet once again.

    They discussed for hours before Sam finally went back to the city.

    He met with his friends and started exining the situation.

    "We are going on a journey once again. But that is not what I want to talk about.

    I think it is good for you to separate from me a little bit."

    The group exchanged nces in confusion.

    But Sam continued.

    "Philip, Jack, and Watt you have been with me in this journey since the start, but unknowingly you are gettingfortable with being under my shadow.

    For now, it is not that big of a deal, but if you continue to do so there might be some longsting drawbacks that could be developed within you.

    So, it is better if we separate a bit and you guys explore your own views and perspectives. Go through your own trials and tribtions so that you can realize your full potential."

    He passed a folded paper to each of them and said.

    "This is the route you would be taking for the next few years.

    You would be starting in those realms and moving from one realm to another and we will finally meet in a single realm after a few years.

    I have written everything there and you can go through them. You can decide yourself by the end of our next journey."

    Before they could reject, Sam gestured them to stop and said.

    "I don¡¯t want you guys to be in a hurry to reject me. Just let it be now and think of what I said. Think of the journey we have been through and the difficulties we faced.

    Every trial and tribtion you have been until now are all mine. All you did was have my back and work for me to help me in my troubles. What do you have that is truly yours?

    Just think for yourself on the next journey. This time there is no time limit for our journey this time, we will stay there for as long as it takes.

    So, now go out and prepare your things in next week so we can leave."

    The trio left with a sulky expression and Sam is left with Chatur and Arman.

    He turned to Arman and said.

    "I know our rtionship cannot be described as friendship. At most I am your employer.

    You are also a yer in this stupid game that we were pulled into for who knows what. So, if you want to go on a journey like this I can arrange for you. Or if you want to stay here you can do that too. Even for the next journey. You can tell me your decision if you want toe on this journey in this week

    And if you really want to travel like them, you can tell me by the end of this journey."

    After that, he sent Arman out of this ce and looked at Chatur as he took a deep breath.

    "I don¡¯t know what to do with you. I have a few choices, you can travel alone or if you want to stay here, you can do that and research your ability more or you can travel with me. It¡¯s your choice."

    After saying everything he has to say he sent everyone away and started preparing for the next journey.

 Chapter 709: Charbhum Realm

    Sam and his friends didn¡¯t talk for the next week. The trio is particrly cold towards him as if he is their arch-enemy.

    But he didn¡¯t really care much. He knows how they feel and he might not have enough emotional experiences to understand them but he is sure that this is for their good and he can also understand how much impact he would have on them if he kept on sheltering them.

    Being separate and being alone will give them their own experiences.

    Since he is convinced that it is for their good, there is no need for him to feel guilty or try to please them. It is better for them toe to terms on their own.

    In the past week, he just focused on stacking the resources he might need for the next journey.

    This time, they are going to a realm where three races are prominent. One of them is obviously humans. For some reason, Sam felt that humans in this world are simr to the Indians in his previous world.

    They are spread far and wide, whether it is the fields of study and research or jobs, they are in every industry and they also reside in almost every country with decent development.

    Here also the humans seem to be a prettymon race and except for the Deste realm, the humans are a passive and lesser race in every other realm he visited.

    And here also in the next realm, the humans are not exactly a superior race and in fact, their numbers are also lesspared to the other realms.

    They don¡¯t constitute a major part of this realm¡¯s poption.

    Anyway, the second race is Elves. Sam didn¡¯t expect that he would meet some creatures from the western myths in this world. But from what he saw all these years in this world it is not the most surprising thing. In fact, he is half expecting it.

    And the final race is Centaurs.

    These three races make up the major poption of the world and there is another minor race that upies the aquatic part of thes and even though the poption is not more, that is mostly due to their own biological problem.

    But they still have significant power.

    They are Sirens. Even though they are simr to Mermen, there is a fundamental difference between them and that is Mermen are normal creatures and the Sirens are different fundamentally in their food consumption, abilities and the way generally do things.

    The Mermen race has the special enchanting ability and has strong soul attacking abilities, but it is more of a well-rounded ability that used the body, voice, eyes altogether. But the Sirens are different, they don¡¯t need eyes, body, actions, or anything, their voice alone is enough to create the enchanting effect that could make their prey go crazy.

    Except for that, there are few biological differences that Sam didn¡¯t think are major ones. He is more inclined to believe that Sirens were once part of the mermen race but it is just a smallmunity that evolved further in their abilities and created their own race.

    They are like Mia and her mother who are Variant Hydras which couldn¡¯t blend in with the rest of the Hydras.

    These four races are the ones that have any significant power.

    But this time, Sam¡¯s focus is not on a single. There are manys in this realm and most of them have their own ecosystems without any connection with the rest of the realm, but there are fours in this realm that are under one sr system and each has its own moons.

    They are the majors of this realm and all four of them are under one rule.

    The Elves are the rulers of this realm. And no houses only a single race. All four prominent races are present on all fours.

    But the fours have different environments which prompted them to develop them in different directions.

    The main which is called 1 is the most luxurious of all. This houses the headquarters of all the businesses and families and this is also the where the ruler stays along with the rest of the governing and administrative body of the fours will also stay here.

    Apart from that, the best schools, the sects, the best businessmen, the tourist spots and so many other luxurious ces are all present on this along with the Elite forces and their families.

    As for the remaining threes, one of them is the agricultural hub as most of them grow the crops and herbs that are exclusive to this realm. Even though there are remaining industries, businesses, schools, and the wholemunity, agriculture is still the main upation here. This is called 2.

    3 is a more bnced ce with all kinds of industries and upations while 4 is mostly an Industrial zone. Mostly filled with factories, mines, and other simr things.

    This realm is called the Charbhum realm. Most of the products of this realm are not sold within. Even though they do have a healthy market and a thriving business environment, their major ie still lies in their exports to other realms of simr strength and even lower strength.

    The Charbhum realm has wormholes connecting to five realms in total out of which four of them are lesser or equal in strength and level while the fifth one is the superior realm. This portal is rarely usedpared to the remaining four.

    Sam is surprised that Old beast knew of this many details regarding this realm. After all, he is an immortal level Raiju. Even though his powers are shackled and he was imprisoned that wouldn¡¯t make his status any lower.

    There is no need for him to learn so much about all these realms that are clearly far beneath his stature, but it turned out that Old Beast learned all of this through his own experiences.

    Even though he and the God Raijin who are considered as the manifestation of the lightning itself are needed to have life experiences for which they created avatars that could roam the worlds and Raiju gathered all this data from those experiences.

    Even though he didn¡¯t roam each and every, he still covered the major part of them.

    This is great news for Sam. He got a guide, so it would aid him in his journey.

    Afterpiling all the information he got from the Old Beast, he gave the copies to the rest of his team so they would study.

    After the week has passed, Sam and his friends gathered together for their journey. But to his surprise, only the trio came. Arman and Chatur decided to not go this time.

    Chatur wanted to participate in some kind of research for a while and Arman is in the Thunder god temple dealing with some things.

    He didn¡¯t think much about it. They could what they want to do.

    The trio looked at Sam with the same resentful look. Even now they are angry at him.

    He just shook his head with a wry smile and activated the dimensional drifter.

    All four of them disappeared from the spot and when they appeared, they are in the middle of a forest.

    "We don¡¯t know the exact location, we are on-2 currently so most people here would be humans and Centaurs and there would be few elves.

    This ce is good enough, let us go and scout and meet here in half an hour.

    All four of them went in four different directions.

    Sam roamed around for half an hour. Except for the asional traces of battle and some activity he didn¡¯t find anything. He is just going deeper and deeper into the forest. He didn¡¯t even encounter any beasts and just went back.

    The trio also came back and only Watt has desired results. He found a road in the direction he went.

    They traveled to that road and changed their clothes to the less eye-catching ones and started walking.

    The road is smooth even though it is made of mud.

    Currently, Sam¡¯s organization has a team researching the construction of the roads with the new cement. Even though cement is working great for the construction of buildings, it is not entirely suitable for making roads.

    Even though most people travel on beasts on the trains, the roads will be useful for shorter journeys and not every city and vige has train stations.

    When he felt the road which clearly looked like it was made of mud, it was extremely great and smooth. He couldn¡¯t help but activate the observation ability and see how it was made and the structure made him even more surprised.

    The structure of this road is extremelypact and the grains of mud are bonded with a special substance.

    Even though he couldn¡¯t understand the nature of the substance and how it was made, it is still a great thing.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel excited at what new things he would see.

 Chapter 710: A different democracy

    Sam and the group just walked on the road in one direction and on their way, they were passed by some carriages dragged by various beasts and most of them are horse-type beasts.

    The carriages arepletely closed and they couldn¡¯t see who is inside. But most of the drivers are humans. But there is one carriage that is too eye-catching. Because it is being dragged by a centaur.

    The male centaur wore armor that covered his chest and there is even a barding that covered his body as he held a spear in his hands. There are leather straps connected to his armor and the barding that are connected to the carriage on the other end.

    The carriage has an entourage of centaurs, humans. The person seemed to be a VIP.

    Sam is really fascinated with the Centaurs, they are simr creatures to Minotaurs in some aspects, for example, they are natural warriors and they make great archers. Just like how Minotaurs have the normal skin tone of pale green, the Centaurs have a pale brown skin tone and they also have different skin tones if they have an affinity with elements.

    But Centaurs have more affinity with different elements than the Minotaurs.

    The carriage is actually being dragged by a centaur that has a dark brown color which is an indication that he can control the earth element.

    No matter how many carriages that are going through the route, nobody bothered with the group. They just asked them to stay to the side with gestures until they left. Except for that, there is no interruption, inspection, or any action taken by the people in the carriage or their servants.

    They just walked for another half-an-hour and they finally saw a town nearby. There are many carriages and people entering and exiting the town, the town is rtively busy.

    The town is surrounded by many fields and Sam could see some familiar crops. Most of them are paddy fields, but they are nothing like the fields on modern earth. These fields are farrger and bigger than the ones on the earth. Even though the grain size is only a few millimeters longer and thicker, the crop itself grew extremelyrge and the yield is unbelievably good.

    There are many humans working in the fields actively and there are guards standing on different spots as they oversaw the whole process. They are harvesting the fields.

    Sam felt that there is a market for the agricultural machines, but from the looks of it, there is no problem of manpower here like there was in the Banished realm.

    They walked to the entrance of the town and there is a toll station there. The toll is not much though, it is just a few dozen spirit stones, they paid the toll and entered the town. The first thing they encountered after entering the town was the market.

    There are many shops and hawkers selling things at expense of the spirit stones. There are all kinds of products here, but most of them are agricultural products or the by-products of agricultural products.

    Sam is most shocked when he saw cotton and Jute. These are something he didn¡¯t find anywhere in this world, in fact, nt-based products are very few. These cotton and Jute are also special spirit crops that have different levels of strength and resistance to attacks.

    The clothes made by them are clearly going to be some sort of armor to the body.

    From the looks of it, most of these people are clearly not from this area, the fields for paddy are not suitable for the growth of cotton.

    Apart from these, there are shops for food. There are many types of food items, cooked, raw, fruits, vegetables so many of them.

    Then came the medicine and herbs.

    They looked at the sky and could say it is noon by now.

    Many people are going to restaurants to eat.

    Sam couldn¡¯t understand this aspect. Most of the time the cultivators wouldn¡¯t worry about the food. They can survive with spiritual energy and they would spend most of the time cultivating and gaining experience.

    At least the Banished realm¡¯s residents have a curse ced on them and they couldn¡¯t take the spiritual energy from the spirit stones and the food is the only way for them.

    But the CharBhum realm doesn¡¯t have any restrictions.

    So the aspect of these people spending so much time on food is something confusing. To clear that confusion, they directly went into a restaurant and ordered something to eat.

    There are many dishes, but the group is not familiar with them. There is only one item they clearly understood what it is from the name and they ordered it.

    It is just steamed rice with some fried meat and vegetables.

    Only after they ate it did they understand. The dish cost a few hundred spirit stones which isn¡¯t much to them and after they ate they understood why they are focused on the food.

    The food they ate has enough spiritual energy topensate for the spirit stones they paid. And just like any food that has spiritual energy, this can also be easily digested.

    Cultivation is a boring thing no matter how power-hungry a person is. Particrly cultivating with the spirit stones is somethingpletely boring and time taking. If they exchanged it with food like this, it is indeed timesaving and pleasurable as the taste is also good.

    And if someone managed to maintain a routine like this, they would also have a standard growth pattern as long as they managed to keep theirprehension up with the energy consumption.

    At Sam¡¯s level, they would have to consume millions of spirit stones worth of spiritual energy to break through a single level and one could guess how boring it would be.

    But the current meal is not of much help as it is more suitable for Nascent stage cultivators and most of them are the ones eating in this ce.

    They roamed around the town for a while and checked in the inn while Sam sent the shadow mice to gather information on what are the happenings of the town and how the world works.

    Old Beast did say that Sam would feel nostalgic, but he didn¡¯t exin how. Sam is already feeling nostalgic with the market and the crops, but he is sure that this world has more than that to offer, so he is waiting for the news.

    They stayed for the night and waited for the shadow mice to get the required news and the mice only came back the next morning with a lot of information.

    They seemed to have infiltrated some special ces as they brought some really great information to them. One of the shadow mice even stole a book on thew of this world. This surprised Sam a lot. If there is a book forws specifically then the society must be extremely civilized since there are so manyws and this book is amonmodity for all the officials.

    Sam went through the information brought by the mice and the information from the book and learned a good deal of the situation here and he also understood why he would feel nostalgic.

    Because the government here is no formed by the nobility or the royalty, rather it is created by democracy.

    That is right, the whole world runs of democracy, and the people can elect their leaders.

    There are also bureaucrats called the Elders that oversee the election and the departments and under the ministers and the local governments. Except for the major core leader who has the highest power in any ce, the rest of the employees under the government has to study in the school of bureaucracy to gain employment in any governing body.

    Except for some normal jobs like attendants, gatekeepers, guards, and physicalbor, the remaining governing and administrative jobs will all be taken by the examinations conducted to the school of bureaucracy.

    This is something Sam didn¡¯t seeing at all. He thought this realm will also be something simr to the rest of the realms he visited, with the royalty and imperials ruling all over themon public and such. Things like very and forced prostitution would bemon here too.

    But things are different in the book ofws, there is a strictw against very and even though there is prostitution, a prostitute must be registered with the government before she or he could earn money in such a way.

    The registration process will only be approved once they verified that the person in question is not being forced by any external parties.

    Due to this process, Prostitution is actually a kind of high-end profession in the world.

    This is even more enlightening.

    But it is not some kind of saintly. The elections might help the people choose their leader, but not every species has the same treatment.

    There are two types of residents in this realm. One of them is a citizen and the other is a civilian. These two words mean extremely different in this world.

    The Citizens aremon people who generally live in this world under the protection of normalws with no special privileges. They can be humans and centaurs, but they don¡¯t have the right to vote. But Civilians are the residents that have the right to vote.

    Elves who are the superior and ruling race here are all civilians since birth and the only requirement for their voting right is that they should reach their awakening age.

    As for the remaining two races, the Centaurs and humans, they are born citizens, and to be civilians there are specific requirements like their work experiences, agriculturalnd, their soldier duties, or paying a certain amount of tax, there are many alternative routes where citizens can be civilians and currently this is a time where most people change their statuses because the elections are going.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but smile at the timing they arrived.

 Chapter 711: Stubborn Locals

    Sam went through thew book to see if he can find the requirements for the inteary travel within the realm and the information he obtained troubled him a little bit.

    The primary requirement for a person to even think of inteary travel is that they have to be a Civilian first.

    If they don¡¯t have that qualification there is no need to even think about it.

    But currently, Sam and his friends who just arrived in this ce are not even suitable to be a civilian as they don¡¯t have any registered identity under their names and they don¡¯t have any history of paying taxes.

    Even though they had money and they could clear the tax payment easily in a single shot, this would make them get some unnecessary attention and since it is the time of elections in the town for the town head¡¯s position it would be extremely problematic for them.

    They only have few options now and all four of them couldn¡¯t just get the civilian ship with one option. They have to think of different ways to not arouse any suspicion.

    As for just traveling in between with the dimensional drifter, even though it is the easiest and essible option for Sam, it is not suitable for him in a long-term n. He wants to establish a certain level of rtionship with this realm where he can freely conduct his business and develop properly moving forward.

    What he wants from this ce is their resources and talents, not the enmity and just the joy of exploration. For that, he needs a proper identity here just like how he had a proper identity in the Naga Loka to maintain his long-term rtionship with the Nagas.

    For that, it is better for them to get a proper identity and move with that.

    On top of that the dimensional drifter is extremely expensive and also the elections are happening in all four realms, it would be a sensitive time and someone is bound to notice their presence with their ns they have in mind.

    So, after some discussion, they decided to get the identities in a proper but fast method.

    They would open different businesses which is the fastest way out of all. No matter what business you open once it bes popr enough and gets you enough money you can use the identity as a merchant would not only be able to get the required identity, they can also pay off the tax at a single shot with the explosive business as an excuse.

    But they couldn¡¯t just bring the things he had out of nowhere.

    They decided to explore the town and its customs a bit more and think of what businesses they should take.

    `So for the next three days, they decided to travel around and investigate at the same time while trying to get a new shop and residence.

    They did get the information and Sam is actually quite surprised by the information he got.

    First thing is, there are not forges in this town and there is only one forge which is also a factory of weapons and agricultural implements on this and that is on the capital city of this from which the portal for the-1 is essible.

    It turned out that the weapon business and other forging business ispletely under the elven control.

    Theypletely monopolized it. Even though some normal humans can forge the weapons and equipment they have to get the approval of the weapon department which monopolized the business. The process is a bitplicated, but in simple words, the weapon business is simply a business under government control and it ispletely regted.

    Now even if Sam wanted to introduce it, he has to get through a series ofplicated procedures that might even take several days to months.

    And this election is oveplicating everything.

    As for the food and beverage business, it is a little bit leisurelypared to the weapon business, but they need a shop for lease or own shop under their name. Otherwise, they couldn¡¯t get any permission and the procedure wouldn¡¯t even get started.

    But that became a major problem. They visited every single street and every possible agent they could, but they couldn¡¯t get any shop for either lease or buying.

    They even tried to jack up the price, but the situation is still the same.

    After thinking for long and hard, they wanted to at least find a residence. But they couldn¡¯t do that either.

    They couldn¡¯t find any form of opening for a discussion or a deal. Sam never felt this stuck before. Everyone is so careful and sensitive about selling their assets, as the election is near. Everyone wanted to be a voting Civilian.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know the exact reason why they are so stubborn some people even started threatening him. Most of the people in this town even the normal citizens are Grand realm cultivators and Nascent stage cultivators.

    Any decent-sized business or home or agriculturalnd and the guards of the city are all Pre-transcendent stage cultivators. Even the government officials and the town head are all Pre-transcendent stage cultivators.

    The strength of the town is decent and he already attracted enough attention since many people have seen them roaming around trying to buy. He is worried that trouble will soone knocking.

    But by the end of the third day, he understood what is happening. The town head elections are extremely important to this ce and it will happen as soon as the Vige head elections in all the viges of the arepleted.

    The current town head who only has a decent reputation is facing stiffpetition this time.

    Every town resident wants to be a part of this election so that they could choose their own leader. They are worried that something might happen and they would lose their civilian identity. They don¡¯t want to fall for any conspiracy or any other trick that might have been part of the efforts and ploys of the two candidates.

    This made it hard for him.

    The group is currently sitting in their room in the inn. They are a bit exhausted. Sam never felt this helpless. He has met the most stubborn people in his life.

    But there is something more annoying that he has to go through and that is...

    "Come on, guys are you going to stop this or not. Talk something. Give me some ideas, I am feeling frustrated." Sam said as he looked at his three friends.

    "Howe the great and talented, all-knowing Sam doesn¡¯t know what to do now? You are even asking us for our puny opinion? You should know what to do. All we can do is obey and follow you." This is the reply he got and this is what he has to go through all the while. And this even came from Watt.

    One must wonder what Philip the chatterbox who always has a lot to say is saying now.

    At this moment, they heard the sounds of battles from outside.

    "Not again. These assholes are not letting me have a peaceful night." Philip said as he went to look out of the window.

    Outside the window, there are some people fighting. These things are happening every day. Due to the elections, there are many fights between the supporters of both of the parties that are participating.

    And this is the seventh fight they have seen in three days.

    Luckily this time the city guards came faster along with an official who is in charge of supervising the election. Sam suddenly thought of an idea.

    "We will go to the Administrator¡¯s office tomorrow. But before that, we need to prepare a story. Try and get the information about the farthest vige but still under the administration of this town and all the information about that vige."

    Sam said as he thought of what to do and how to convince the officials to help him with this.

    "We can not find it by morning. All the merchants already retired for the day and they are the only source of information about the viges, if we ask them directly we might let our covers broken if by any chance the news of us using that vige¡¯s name spread.

    So, we have to do it secretly."

    Jack answered from the side. Out of the three, he is giving the least frustration to Sam. Sam doesn¡¯t know what he thought of the idea he proposed but from what he knew, he must be thinking about it.

    "Okay then, you go on that job and I will try to find a way to buy some fields tomorrow. Even though there might be no luck we can even use that time to investigate more about this city."

    After discussing further details and who does what the next day, everyone returned to their own room.

    Sam is looking at the city through the window as he sipped some wine. He is really feeling a headache about this situation. These people are stubborn than dwarves. He doesn¡¯t know what is so great about being a civilian.

    There are some advantages mentioned in thew book. But if those are the only benefits there is no need for them to get so paranoid that they would lose their civilian ship just by selling one of their residences or one of their shops when they have multiple properties under their name.

 Chapter 712: Raunak

    The group went on their separate ways once again and tried to look for properties once again. Even though it is called a town, it is a decent-sized city.

    They really do have many options, but none of them are willing to sell anything to them. Particrly, when they knew that they are outsiders and just came here, they are even more reluctant and even a bit hostile to them.

    By noon, they came to the market street and went to another restaurant where there is a dish simr to the fried rice and ate to their fill and discussed their results. Three of them didn¡¯t get any positive results on their end, but Jack who went on a different mission did.

    "I went out of the town and met with a merchant carriage that camped a few kilometers away. They are traveling from this town. I managed to fish some interesting information out. Not just the information on the vige.

    There are two factions within the political circle of this realm and that spreads to the towns and even viges.

    One faction strongly supports the Elven supremacy and doesn¡¯t approve of the humans and centaurs that grow in some administrative position unless they are servants or subordinates of some noble family. They are also extremely biased towards the noble-blooded elves.

    The second faction is more liberal. They think that their birth doesn¡¯t matter as long as they are useful for the elven development.

    Ironically, even some humans and centaurs support the first faction as they think that noble elves are supreme and the nobility within the elves are the only ones suitable for the rule.

    As for how this is connected to our plight, it is because of the elections.

    There is a tacit understanding from a few centuries here that in every vige, town, and city, whenever an election is conducted, only two peoplepete for it and each one of them will be from each faction.

    These factions are not official andw bounded so there is obviously no rule, but this is happening for centuries.

    For every ten years a new leader would be elected and this time, the past leader who is kind of decent and had a love-hate rtionship with the town residents is retiring as he broke through past the Pre-transcendent realm.

    Now his brother is trying to take his ce. Both of them are part of the second faction while the first faction also has a strong candidate.

    The residents are torn in between the two factions and thepetition is extremely high. Even the fights that we are seeing every night are between the people are these two factions, each side trying their best to reduce the other side¡¯s votes.

    But killing is a serious offense so they chose the next best one, reducing the assets and the riches of a person that could make them lose their civilian ship.

    There is another news, the candidate from the first faction is arriving at the town today and this day we will not get any sess with the residents. They will try topare the two candidates today."

    "But if that person is onlying now, wouldn¡¯t it be unfair as the other candidate has his brother who is the resident of this town for the past decade?"

    Philip asked.

    "Well, there are still two months for the election timing and the other candidate didn¡¯t actually stay here for long. He only visited his brother a few times. I didn¡¯t get any information on how candidates are selected, but it is what it is."

    "What about the vige location?"

    "I got that too, there is a vige called Virnel which is also under the administration of this town and that is the farthest ce.

    That ce is a bit isted due to the location and there is not much in that vige that interests anyone. Thend is small and people there only grow banana trees of different kinds. So except for the merchants who are interested in these bananas, no one goes there. It is the farthest and also the less known ce.

    But there is a catch, there the vige head is only a Middle-stage Pre transcendent stage cultivator. We are already on par with him, this would make them suspicious."

    "Then how about we say that we traveled a lot since we were little and left the vige after we awakened?" Watt suggested from the side.

    "For that, we have to have some decent knowledge about the rest of the."

    They are in a pickle once again.

    "Let us get some information from the merchants once again. Just ask where they are from and what they do for living. Try to fish any form of information. For the next two days, we will just be doing that. From now on we are orphans that mostly lived in forests.

    You never managed to integrate into society much and didn¡¯t make many friends. Get all the information you can about the beasts near every vige and town and we can concoct something out of it."

    Sam instructed and all of them separated once again.

    For the next two days, they just made small talk with the merchants by treating them to the best meals and drinks. All that took was some small talk and banter which made them speak all they wanted.

    After all, the group has the best wine in the town which almost made the Ape cocky.

    This monkey really made the wine that could beast every other ce. He almost lost his cruel and beastly side his and became an extremely refined winemaker.

    The situation went on smoothly for them and the merchants didn¡¯t even think that they are lying, They even made some friends. They shared their information and concocted a story.

    These two days the chaos in the town increased so much that they couldn¡¯t have a moment of peace at night.

    There is nothing they can do more than this for now.

    The four people finally went to the administrator¡¯s office.

    There is arge board at the entrance of the office.

    ¡¯CANE TOWN ADMINISTRATION¡¯

    The town is named after the most popr agricultural product and it is not paddy even though there is arge field out of the town, the most popr product is still the sugar cane.

    And it is used for many purposes and the sugar cane juice or even the crystallized sugar that is being made out of that cane is mostly a supporting nutrient. It is mostly used for recovery rather than cultivation and it also increases the digestion of spiritual energy from other sources.

    It is a good addition to absorb the spiritual energy from the food, meat, and even the spirit stones and the elixirs.

    They entered the office and decided to meet with the official in charge of the business administrator.

    The town seemed to be under an expansion recently and Sam has found many empty newly built shops in the town, but no one is willing to sell them to him.

    Sam and his friends entered the personal office of the official who is an elf.

    One must admit that Elves are beautiful creatures. They really look like manifestations of beauty.

    They have tall figures, white skin, sea-green eyes, and the most noticeable of all the pointy ears and their silky hair which can even be seen from miles away.

    Such an elf is sitting in front of them and asked with a smile.

    "What can I do for you?"

    "We are some traveling humans. We are orphans from birth and managed to get by while traveling from one ce to another. We mostly lived in woods and collected resources from the forests to sell them in the nearest towns and viges.

    Finally, we want to settle down a bit and develop out of our current situation and we decided to stay in this town.

    But due to the sensitivity of the election, we couldn¡¯t manage to buy any property or even rent. We have some business ideas which I believe would be very popr. We would like to get some assistance or guidance so that we can buy some shops and a residence."

    The Elf looked at them and said with a smile.

    "I do encourage new peopleing to our town and developing it. But the time is indeed too sensitive. Particrly, four Pre-transcendent stage cultivators that survive the world all by themselves trying to buy the residences and shop so desperately.

    They are too sensitive about it being a ploy of some faction and it is not the first time it happened. So, I hope you understand. But I don¡¯t really care if you belong to some faction. As an official, the most I care is about the well-being of the town and its prosperous development.

    I don¡¯t care which factions bring it or which leader makes it happen. But currently, helping you is risky. But I will do that for a few reasons.

    The first one is that no one ever dares to ask an official for help. Not a single human would do that. But you dared to that. So I will take a chance with you and help you if you can satisfy two conditions.

    One of them is that your business being worthy of this help and the second one is you wouldn¡¯t side with any faction until the election is over. You can be enemies of both sides, but you cannot be friends with one of them.

    Are you down?"

    Sam just extended his hand to seal the deal without a second thought.

 Chapter 713: Fallen into a Trap

    Sam looked at the elf in front of him as they shook their hands. The young Elf who is also a middle-stage pre-transcendent is a bit different from the rest of the elves he saw in the past few days.

    They are all too noble and an air of superiority was around them. He didn¡¯t speak to anyone nor did he hear of someone special, but he saw them and their behavior around the town. They don¡¯t normally speak to humans, even if they want something it is their subordinates who do everything.

    Actually, even Sam looking for a Business administration official for this very reason.

    From what Sam observed except for this guy, everyone else doesn¡¯t even wee humans directly. This is what they observed even without trying. And they behave like they owned the ce. They had encounters with some elves in their search in the past few days and every time, not a single elf that hase for the inspections of the shops or some other things didn¡¯t even open their mouth once.

    So, he felt like they wouldn¡¯t even bother to listen to him and his friends. Even though this business administration official is in charge of the business approvals, taxes of the merchants that are from the town itself and the merchants thate from other ces and stay here temporarily along with the illegal business practices.

    This elf doesn¡¯t manage the infrastructure and the real estate of the town and he doesn¡¯t involve with agriculture and only has jurisdiction regarding the taxes.

    But he has connections with other officials which makes the process easier for Sam and the rest.

    Sam¡¯s confidence on meeting this guy came from two aspects. One of them is that due to their interaction with the merchants that came from out of the town. Everyone praised this officer so much and everyone seemed to be admiring him so much and it turned out that this guy is extremely flexible with the businessmen.

    The second aspect is that as long as the business proved to be beneficial to the town and adds merits to his personal record, he would be willing to bend the rules a bit and help out the businessmen a lot.

    Since they heard so much about him, they decided to try their luck with him. That is also the reason Sam easily epted his terms.

    He is confident in his business anyway.

    "Call me Raunak by the way. What business do you want to open and what kind of support would you need?"

    The Elven officer asked Sam.

    "I have several ideas, but the most direct one is a food Idea. If you would like to taste the food, I can give you some samples. It can be made with the local produce here. You can taste the samples and see if it is worth it or not. After the first deal is over, we can discuss the cooperation further."

    "Further Cooperation? Just how many businesses do you want to dip your hands into?"

    "We will see sir. We are pretty ambitious and we have stayed on this for long enough. It is about time, we spread our wings a bit and we cannot wait anymore."

    "Okay then, my attendant will take you to my spare house in the town. You stay there for now and you can cook there. I wille for lunch tomorrow. You sort out your things for today."

    This time all four of them had a puzzled look on their face, but Sam quickly hid it and agreed as if nothing happened.

    They left the office and walked to the inn to finish the checkout process and wait for the attendant.

    "Sam, don¡¯t you think this guy is helping us too much? He is too friendly. Even offering a residence to us? Isn¡¯t this too much? I have a bad feeling about this." Philip asked as they walked back.

    "Don¡¯t worry. I also think there is something fishy about this guy, but all we have to do is wait."

    As soon as they stepped out of the administration building, a human entered the office and asked Raunak.

    "Sir, why are you offering them such generous help? They are practically strangers that just entered the town."

    Raunak still has that smart smile and said.

    "Do you think I don¡¯t know that? I have been observing them since they came into the town. They are certainly not from any faction I can assure you of that, do you know why? Because before a few days they don¡¯t even know of any factions, they literally learned that from one of our merchants.

    They are extremely cautious, if it was not for me and anyone else in this ce they would have easily made them believe their story."

    "Then it is all more reason to be suspicious."

    "Yes it is, but why do you think what I did is just help them? If they really have ill intentions bying to me, then they would make a move, what better way is there for us to guard against them than keeping them right next to us.

    Let us see what they are really up to.

    Just take them to that residence in the farmer¡¯s street and help them if they want something."

    "Okay, Sir."

    Ten minutes after the conversation is over, Sam is sitting in the inn¡¯s room along with his friends as they looked at the video ying in a crystal tablet. The video is of the conversation between the human attendant and Raunak. A shadow mouse is sitting on Sam¡¯s shoulder.

    Sam has a smile on his face as he looked at his friends.

    "Seems like we have underestimated the city a lot. This guy has clearly made us fall into his trap. But too bad he is so desperate and tried to lock us down this quickly. If he has been a little bit patient we could have been led by the string by him for some more time."

    "Do you think he is working for some faction?" Jack asked.

    "I don¡¯t think so. Just remember this, wherever there is ¡¯n¡¯ number of factions you should always consider a n for ¡¯n+1¡¯ number of groups because there is always another invisible group that doesn¡¯t get involved with any of the factions subconsciously forming a group of their own.

    And all they care about is themselves without any form of idealistic and hypocritical bullshit and I believe this guy belongs to that category."

    "Why are so sure?"

    "It¡¯s simple. In both the factions, one group wants to use the other races to promote their own growth and another group wants to put the rest of the races in their ce and promote their own growth.

    In both cases what the people wouldn¡¯t bother with impressing the merchants or creating rtionships with them. Even if they did, they would do so with the merchants of noble families not with the merchants of such low grade and status.

    There is only one reason for a business administration official to have a good rtionship with local merchants and that is to promote the business which would help his own growth as he would get credit due to the revenue he created. And all the growth would only happen individually not for a faction of amunity.

    It is purely selfish and personal which would only matter when he doesn¡¯t belong in both the factions."

    "So what are we going to do?"

    "Just wait and move ording to our initial n. If I think of this Raunak correctly, then we wouldn¡¯t need to worry."

    That night the attendant came and led them to the residence. When the attendant offered help, Sam asked him to bring some ingredients which he would need for tomorrow.

    His first business is going to be a restaurant. He is going to bring a dish from his world back. He hasn¡¯t seen a single grain of rice until he came here and once he tasted this rice and understood the properties along with the properties of the other local ingredients he has the perfect dishes that could easily be sold in this ce.

    So the attendant bought some rice, crystal sugar, and some other spices that are mostly avable in this ce.

    When Sam looked at the sugar, he couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit disappointed. The sugar is not while it is brown and yellow. The juice that came from the cane didn¡¯t undergo the proper refinement and became like this.

    This also confirmed another thing he is looking forward to within this ce. The sugar cane is still not ready for harvest yet. It seems like it would take some more time before that. So, if he goes with the n properly, he could get to the point where he could take advantage of the local produce and get permission to get out of this within three months.

    The next day he started cooking to find out the proper bnce to create a dish from the earth. The Kheer.

    Kheer is actually a pretty simple dish if we use normal ingredients that is, but if you use these ingredients with spiritual energy there needs to be a certain bnce so that it could achieve Sam¡¯s desired effects.

    After a few attempts, it seeded. He reced the chi powder with some dried herbs that gave the perfect smell and blend for the dish while the milk is from his own pasture in the divine dimension. He got neutral elemental milk and used it with the rice and sugar to make the kheer.

    Sam decided to create the blend of recovery and cultivation energy with this dish and it worked. Since it is also good to taste and most importantly new, the elves and humans would like it.

    This ce is full of people who don¡¯t like the boring routine of the cultivation so this would be a decent gimmick to take the money from them.

    Kheer is not actually the money maker of the restaurant as it could be copied easily by others, but this would help him sell the dishes that make the real money out easily.

 Chapter 714: Biriyani

    The next day, Sam finished the dishes mostly made of rice and meat. His major dishes are mostly Biriyanis made in different styles.

    There are some things he observed in this world. No matter how strict the social statuses in this ce are, every social ss likes eating food. There are suitable foods for every social ss.

    He would open a biriyani restaurant while serving the Kheer as a dessert.

    Biriyani is one of the tastiest dishes that could be made with rice and meat and this ce such high-quality rice and it is also suitable for growing birds like the spirit fowl which grows on everything. That would be the mostmon biriyani that could even be eaten by the Grand realm cultivators.

    As for the rest of the biriyanis, he decided to keep one biriyani with neutral energy and fish out some dishes that could carry different energiester.

    Every energy except water and ice. Both of them became impossible for him to create with the biriyani experiments.

    Even though he didn¡¯t experiment much and cooked on intuition it worked well actually and he made the perfect dishes that could easily sell in this world.

    By noon, Raunak came to him along with his attendant and Watt served all the dishes one by one so that both of them would eat to their fill and they served Kheer atst.

    Both of them looked incredibly satisfied and the attendant widened his eyes in disbelief at the end of the meal. He moved out of the dining table and sat cross-legged on the floor and started sweating so much. After a while, he opened his eyes and looked at Sam before saying.

    "Thank you so much. Your food helped with a stubborn injury that was too sensitive to be treated by normal healing procedures and the normal elixirs couldn¡¯t help much. But just the sheer energy simted by your food helped me recover fully."

    Sam just smiled. He knew these kinds of effects are mostly because of the rice, this happened only because the dish he ate is of wood elemental energy and the attendant is also proficient in wood element.

    Sam looked at Raunak who is also looking at him. He made this wood element biriyani as a special item on the menu and it wouldn¡¯t be on there for the whole week.

    But it has another special purpose and it would be immensely popr in this world and the reason the elves are naturals at wood element. Just like how mermen have natural water elemental affinity, the elves have the affinity with the wood element and this wood element dish works best on the elves.

    "This dish is amazing. When are you going to open the restaurant?"

    "In three days. We have something to do in these three days and after that, we will open the restaurant."

    "Okay then, I will arrange a shop for you in the market street you can open your restaurant there. I can even arrange a discount on the price of the shop if you want to buy it and if you want to lease it, you can get a pretty good deal.

    You can buy the raw ingredients directly from the town mansion which would reduce your costs a bit. But there is something I will make clear for you. Due to the help, I am providing, you will have to pay a little more tax than the rest after you get the revenue. Are you okay with that?"

    "May I know how much more it is?"

    "Generally it is ten percent of the profits, but you will need to pay fifteen percent of the profits. Are you okay with that?"

    "Yes."

    "The profits just doesn¡¯t include the profits from selling food, if by any chance you sell your recipes you will also have to pay additional tax for that."

    "Sure, I am okay with that," Sam said with a smirk on his face as if he understood what Raunak said. Thetter also gave out the same smirk before saying.

    "I think you and me are going to get along just fine."

    "I am sure we would."

    They shook hands and the two guests left.

    "What is this all about? Why did you agree to more tax?" Watt asked with a puzzled face. Sam is not the one to suffer any loss. It was pretty clear with all examplesid out in bare.

    "You will see it in a few days. If I am not wrong within a month we would be getting our civilian identity, so we can go on to explore more and if this goes right, I think I found our potential partner right here."

    "Raunak? Isn¡¯t he a bit greedy? Why would you make him our partner?" This time it is Jack who asked this question. But before Sam could answer, Philip beat him to it.

    "He is not greedy, he is only ambitious. You guys might have forgotten what his upation is, it is business administration, but to be blunt it is just his duty to increase the taxes. Now with this five percent extra tax which would be ounted for his contribution will help his career.

    With how we do business, it is always arge amount that is involved and the tax would be huge too. So, this guy would gain huge merit which might help him get promoted. That is why he is saying that they would get along fine.¡¯

    But one thing I am not sure about is his talk about the recipe."

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "You will figure out with time. Now stop the discussion and help me out a bit. You have to stay in the four busiest streets and distribute the Kheer for free. Just serve however much they want, but only for eating. Don¡¯t let them take away from that ce and while you are at it promote our restaurant."

    "For free?"

    "Why? It is one of the tastiest dishes I ever had, why would you give it away for free?"

    "It is tasty, but with little practice, they can replicate it, so rather thanunching it in the menu and got replicatedter, we will use that as a stepping stone.

    After three days of free distribution, the customers will surely be curious about our restaurant. On the fourth day, we will be having free service for the first hundred customers be sure to promote that too and after we are done with that, we would have already attracted enough customer base.

    So, off you go."

    Even Sam himself went with a barrel of kheer while he sent his friends off and started distributing the Kheer.

    It has be so popr quickly and within few hours it was already gone.

    The next day Sam didn¡¯t go early in the morning, instead, he went to the administration office to finish the procedures and once the procedures are finished he went back to distributing Kheer.

    Sam who is worth billions is doing free service just so that he could get into the system of this realm.

    The kheer became extremely popr by the second day. And the food business took a hit as Sam and his friends made an evenrger portion of kheer that day.

    But before the restaurant owners could cause trouble the group announced that the third day will be thest day for the free kheer distribution.

    On the third day, they went on with distributing the kheer and by the end of it, they announced the opening of the restaurant and also the free service for the first hundred customers.

    This worked like a charm and the whole town soon came to know about the new restaurant that is going to open.

    The delicious kheer is free publicity and also a bar raised high with certain expectations regarding the taste of the rest of the dishes.

    The restaurant owners ground their teeth in anger at the despicable scheme and they immediately called for their chefs.

    "I want you to replicate that Kheer. They managed to gain the attention of these customers and the Kheer might be the only addition they have to the general menu. After this initial boost has ended, we can use the Kheer as our source of publicity and gain our customers back."

    A restaurant owner said to his chef.

    "But boss, what would you do if they have new dishes? The kheer itself is a new dish and all the ingredients are of local produce, if they can create that one, there is no reason for us to not suspect that they couldn¡¯t have made others.

    I think it is better for us to first taste what they have and think of a solution after that."

    "Okay, sure."

    Simr conversations went on in different restaurants. Even the officials decided to take a look at the new restaurant because of the special invitation from Raunak.

    He even asked Sam if he could treat the officials and asked for a reservation on the first day.

    Sam first decided to open the restaurant for lunch in, afternoon, but since he asked, he just asked Raunak to invite the officials an hour before noon and have a special lunch before the restaurant even opens.

    Raunak was even more satisfied with this arrangement and thanked Sam once again with deeper meaning.

 Chapter 715: Envoys

    Sam¡¯s opening day went extremely well. First, officials had the meal of their life and particrly the Elven special was the bomb that day. They just couldn¡¯t get enough of it. But most of them are only Pre-transcendent stage cultivators and they cannot eat much without digesting the energy that was already thrown inside their body.

    When the officials areing out of the restaurant, there are many people already lining up to be the first hundred free customers.

    Some of the restaurant staff that is set on causing the problem in the restaurant immediately abandoned their thoughts. The officialsing here really is a big thing and from their satisfied and smiling looks, they could guess how much they liked the food.

    After the officials left, Sam and his friends went on with the rest of the customers. The food is obviously pricey. It is almost the same as the most luxurious restaurant in the whole town. The customers that came in really enjoyed the food and the restaurant became an instant sess.

    After seeing the response Sam was relieved and just stayed in the food business for the next few days.

    One weekter, the whole town is a bit more chaotic than usual and that is because the final registration of the candidates for the election is going to happen and the two candidates can start their campaigns now.

    Sam looked at the two young Elves who are being escorted to the administration office toplete the process.

    He must say that he is really feeling nostalgic. The election is so much like the ones on the earth. He didn¡¯t know how the campaign goes, but from the looks of it, that would also not be much different.

    He went to meet Raunak who is in his office. Due to the election chaos, Raunak was busy and couldn¡¯te and meet Sam, so he called for him instead.

    "How is your business doing?" He asked as soon as he came in.

    "It¡¯s great. It seems like there are so many new people have entered the town. The business is extremely good."

    "That is good. The more your business developed the more beneficial it is to the town."

    Sam just chuckled in response and asked.

    "What did you call me here for?"

    "I want to reserve two tables in your restaurant for this noon. The tables should be served with the best of your delicacies and you should visit the two guests."

    "Sure, but who are the guests?"

    "They are the two envoys that areing here to supervise the election and make sure there are not any malpractices."

    Raunak particrly emphasized the word two, clearly indicating something else. Sam didn¡¯t miss the hint and said.

    "It¡¯s okay. If it is only two tables, I can still manage."

    "I know you can do that. Remember that you are a neutral party and don¡¯t have anything to do with any faction. You must keep that in mind."

    "Of course, I don¡¯t want to get involved in this election chaos."

    "Not being on a faction doesn¡¯t mean you are not going to be involved in the election chaos. If I am not wrong, you would be extremely busy in a few days."

    "I know what is going to happen. And I meant what I said, I don¡¯t want to involve, but that doesn¡¯t mean I am not ready to get involved in this. But I don¡¯t if it would be a good thing for the people that drag me in."

    Sam went back to the restaurant so that he could talk with his friends about the reservation and also prepare Philip to do something.

    From the hints Raunak dropping it is hard for Sam to miss the message. Anyway, he is also looking forward to an opportunity like this.

    At noon, the two envoys came to the restaurant with the officials escorting them.

    Both of them were sent to the two private rooms that are already arranged.

    Sam and Philip each took care of one customer, acting as the two owners of the restaurant. As Raunak said, Sam doesn¡¯t want to get involved in the chaos soon and from the hints he could guess that both of them are from different factions.

    So there is bound to be some friction. If by any chance they wanted topete in even the hospitality they received, Sam would be in trouble as one side is bound to be offended if he attended the other one.

    That is why he came up with this.

    The two Envoys are Transcendent stage cultivators who hold the positions in the Central administration departments, in 1. When they tasted the food, they are extremely impressed and after the constant praise, both of them left with a bunch of thoughts in their heads.

    They went back to the residences and met with the candidates they are supporting secretly.

    The Envoy from faction 1 looked at the candidates who are standing before him and said.

    "I was sent here by the elders as a supervisor, so I couldn¡¯t get involved directly. So you have to do everything on your own. In the morning, roam the streets and meet with the residents, don¡¯t care if they are citizens or civilians, all you have to do is get more exposure and meet with everymunity.

    Have a meal every day with amunity. One day has a meal with merchants, one day with the farmers, one day with hawkers, one day with factory workers, and one day with the normal citizens, one day with town school¡¯s kids. Don¡¯t leave a single one out of it. Do you understand?"

    "Yes."

    "And treat them in that new restaurant. Ask them if they can deliver that food in bulk to you so that you can have meals with different people within theirmunities."

    "Okay, sir. I will do it."

    "The candidate from the second faction has an edge over you as he has the support of his brother who is already familiar with the people here. So, you have to move fast.

    Visit the owner of the restaurant secretly and cut a deal with him. In fact, try to pay him so that he wouldn¡¯t do a sale with the other party. The food is truly exceptional, and try to get close to the owner, I have some ns with him."

    The candidate nodded obediently and left the ce. He stealthily went to the residence the team is staying, but he was stunned when he was there.

    The candidate from faction 2 is already there and he is already negotiating with Sam. Candidate 2 also looked at candidate 1 and was surprised. He then turned to look at Sam and said.

    "I will agree with your price. Let¡¯s sign the deal."

    "No, don¡¯t. I am also here to discuss a deal, I will give you a better price." Candidate 1 yelled.

    "I am here first." Candidate 2 yelled back.

    "It is not a voting booth, do you really thinking first matters in a situation like this? This is business."

    The banter went on and Sam looked at it with a smirk on his face. He knew that something like this would happen. It is not that he is so confident in his food that they would fight for it. It is just that his food is still in the initial excitement as the restaurant is new and everyone wants to taste it.

    But not everyone could afford it. This is just a trick to attract attention from the voters as to why they are trying to gain approval from the rest of themunities, they should always portray themselves as benevolent leaders no matter what their real intentions are.

    Sam looked at both of them and soon got tired of their banter and said.

    "There are two options, one of them is that both of you bid for my services the other one is to share my services. I am okay with both of the choices. But I cannot take your fight anymore."

    Both of them looked at Sam, but they couldn¡¯t make a decision. The sharing is absolutely impossible, so they have to think of something else.

    Sam shook his head and said.

    "I am not going to take this anymore. For the next week, I will supply for one party and for the second week I will supply for the second party.

    I don¡¯t want any trouble from either of you. Just give me a silent bid and the one who has the higher rate gets the first week and the remaining gets the second week."

    They hesitated once again. But they didn¡¯t want to lose this opportunity. They also understood where Sam ising from as they know that if he really favored one, the other would definitely find fault with him.

    If it is any other person, they wouldn¡¯t have given a rat¡¯s ass, but their envoys said they should maintain a good rtionship with him. So, they agreed to his idea.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but smile at their stupidity.

 Chapter 716: Stumping Raunak

    Even though the two candidates were easily manipted by Sam into agreeing on this, the envoys were not happy.

    They are not satisfied with the arrangement. Even though, one week¡¯s service is not so bad, if the service is on both sides it wouldn¡¯t give that much of an advantage.

    At least the Envoy 1 is better off as candidate 1 managed to get the first week. The people will think the second candidate is copying the idea.

    Anyway, Sam is out of trouble from this.

    Currently, Sam is thinking about how to deal with the Envoys and the candidates that would eventually bring some troubles for him.

    The main trouble is for the Elven special dish. Even though the dish is special and tastes better than the rest while it also helps the elves, the most it could do for Sam at the instant moment is bring more customers, but that is not the original purpose.

    The elves in this town who are satisfied with their lives would only see the benefits thate from eating it, but there is something else in it that only people like Raunak, envoys, and some other elves.

    The dish itself is not extremely special in the town, but once it transcends this ce and reaches the ce like 1 and the military bases, the significance is extremely different.

    If a nascent stage elf eats it, almost all of their injuries will be cured and it will benefit their cultivation by a lot and if Pre-transcendent stage elves eat that on daily basis, along with their natural talent in wood element and the assistance of this food, their breakthroughs would be easier.

    There is no way the elves would just let Sam have it in his hands and hold it for long. They would definitely want the recipe of the dish. Even though it is not too much of a big deal, there is another significance behind obtaining this.

    This could be beneficial for the factions. After these town elections are over, the city elections and finally the election for king or queen would be held. And simr to the town elections, there will be candidates from both the factionspeting, and giving this recipe away to the military and such will be a great contribution on their part.

    At least they can sway some civilians¡¯ votes to their side.

    If not for the fact currently the election is happening and both parties didn¡¯t want to give any advantage to the other party, they would have already made a show of force to Sam to buy it off, but as both of them are keeping each other in check, Sam is safe in that middle-ground for now.

    But there wille a time where they will use more and more desperate methods to buy the recipe off.

    And today them trying to get the supply for the next week is a trial run for the main game. Not just for them, for Sam also.

    He already knew that both of them are trying toe and visit him, his shadow mice are not for show, they could fool transcendent stage cultivators when they are Nascent level, now they are already Pre-transcendent, there is no way they would miss the opportunity get the news.

    So, Sam got the news and decided to test the intelligence of the candidates and he is disappointed to know that these guys who are so green can be elected as the town heads, but he understood what is happening.

    These guys are the easiest to manipte.

    Sam just kept an eye out for the envoys and made preparations for the next two weeks.

    He just went on with the supply of the two parties along with the regr operations of the restaurant.

    Meanwhile, the chaos in the town is growing. Every day people are getting into fights and the people that are suffering the most are the neutral people who are notpletely tied with any faction.

    They are being threatened, used as pawns for conspiracy from both sides, and also go through torture of being forced by two different parties.

    This is the reason they didn¡¯t want to sell anything to Sam or any other person for that matter.

    Every night the people from two factions fight secretly and sometimes the underlings of one candidate attacks the underlings of the other candidate hoping that the other candidate will lose control, sometimes one faction will create damage for a neutral party and paint it as if the other candidate has done it.

    These conspiracies are being gone on and on.

    While these things are happening after the first week ispleted, Sam went to meet with Raunak again. He was received even more warmly than before and was even served some drink, Sam just received the hospitality and asked.

    "I want to develop into the next business."

    "A second business? How can you do that though? You already have your hands full with your current business."

    "You and I both know what is going to happen by the end of these town elections, whoever wins the election will strong-arm me into giving the recipes to them while the loser would is an even lesser cordial method.

    So, let us not pretend we don¡¯t know anything."

    Sam¡¯s voice is so casual that it is scary. Raunak furrowed his brows for a second and said once again.

    "What will happen in a month? I don¡¯t know what you are talking about. Your food is great and it will be a long and prosperous business."

    "I already said don¡¯t pretend. I am here because I know you are a smart guy and we can help each other. But don¡¯t behave like a dumb person who would think everyone is dumber than him. If you really think that your n couldn¡¯t be seen through then you are sorely mistaken.

    All this while, everything is going ording to your wishes is because I wanted it to happen in the same way as well. Otherwise, no one in this world can manipte me to do anything that I don¡¯t want to.

    So, you better drop that fa?ade and talk normally, otherwise, I would look for another town where the business administrator is not as overly smart as you."

    Raunak looked at Sam coldly.

    "Do you think you can threaten me with this? You are not even a Civilian, I can do whatever I want to do with you and make you whatever I want you to do. You don¡¯t know what I am capable of."

    "Oh, I know it well actually. You are capable of using all the merchantsing here from other areas as your informers.

    You are capable enough to notice us from the day we came here.

    You are capable enough to manipte us intoing to your office and request your help.

    You are also capable enough to manipte the rest of the officials intoing to my restaurant so that it can have steady growth and wouldn¡¯t obstruct your target tax amount.

    You are capable enough to manipte the officials to bring the envoys to my restaurant and you know just how this political game works so you tried to put me in the hot water to see my reaction before the real game works.

    Since I managed to escape scot-free, you are sure that your tax target will be achieved by the end of the elections and even capable of think about manipting the envoys into a bidding war so that the price of my recipes will skyrocket increasing your tax cut.

    Which will finally lead to your promotion."

    Sam finished everything in a single breath and he said so in an extremely casual voice.

    Raunak was stumped. Sam looked at his face and said.

    "You are such a typical elf, always thinking that other creatures are dumb just because you have a slightly superior bloodline. Now shall we talk about my next business?"

    Raunak tried to calm himself down and said.

    "How do you know all of this?"

    "You have eyes all over the town and I have eyes on you. As simple as that. And I don¡¯t want to waste my time. So, can we get to the main point?"

    "This is the main point. I want to know exactly who you are. Why did you y along when you know everything?"

    Sam shook his head and stood up. "You are clearly not going to listen to what I want to say. We can talkter. Just sit down and think about what happened with your brain, you can get most of the answers you want. You cane and talk to me after that."

    With those words, Sam left the ce. Just like that Sam has changed the situation between them in seconds. At least in Raunak¡¯s mind, everything is going ording to his n.

    He is nning on dumping Sam down after his target has reached and let him die in the hands of the two factions while he gets the promotion.

    But Sam knew this all along. Now Raunak has toe and clear the situation with Sam.

    Now Sam can use him for his further deals and create a reliable and obedient partner out of him.

 Chapter 717: Bagasse

    The next day.

    Raunak came to the residence Sam was given after his daily business was over. Both of them sat in a private room and this time, Raunak doesn¡¯t have that air of superiority and even the attendant was not present.

    "Have you thought about what I said yesterday?" Sam asked casually.

    "Who are you and where did youe from?" Sam could see the anxiousness in his eyes. This is clearly a show of how green Raunak truly is. He is not that much older than Sam. He might be scheming but he definitelycks experience required to y in the same league as Sam.

    "Does it matter where I am from?"

    "How can I trust you, if you are not willing to give out any information?"

    "Its simple, you don¡¯t have a choice. From what I observed, there is something weighing on you and you need to be promoted as fast as you can. You are looking to achieve something and actually you are actually doing quite well for someone of your age.

    All the officials are old menpared to you. But you are still desperate.

    You just don¡¯t want this promotion because of your ambition, you need it because of something else."

    Sam said as he took a sip of wine. His voice is casual as if he is talking about the taste of the wine.

    Raunak shuddered for a second before he looked at Sam only to see him smiling as if he knew everything.

    Sam is not really surprised. Once again he shot an arrow in the dark and it hit perfectly on the bullseye.

    "It seems like my assumptions are true. I have a way to help you out of this and all I need is your support. Not only will you get promoted, you will also gain a boat load of money if you follow my lead."

    "You know too much for your own good." Raunak said in a low voice almost as if he is whispering and abruptly stood up with a crystal bottle in his hands and tried to pour the substance on Sam.

    But before he could do anything and even before a single drop of the substance left from the bottle, he felt like arge brutal force hit him and he wooden table in between him and Sam was broken into two and Sam held the hand that was holding the crystal bottle in ce tightly.

    The spiritual energy storm held him in ce and Sam¡¯s killing intent oozed out as he looked directly into his eyes.

    "Why are you so feisty? We are still talking."

    His hand turned metallic and he used fire elemental energy to heat it. He started crushing the bone before Raunak coulde out of his daze and defend. He held the crystal bottle while he kicked Raunak into the ground and held him there.

    Sam sniffed the bottle that is clearly emitting some vapors showing the intensity of the poison.

    "There is such a woody smell in it. Is it some tree extract or something?" He looked at Raunak who is currently under Sam¡¯s foot still trying to make sense of situation, but after he came to his senses and was about to fight back, Sam¡¯s foot also turned into metal and pierced the skin on his chest as a sharp spike cut through his flesh and just a few inches away from the heart.

    "Don¡¯t move too much, you might die. By the way you still didn¡¯t answer my question. I haven¡¯t smelled a poison like this till now."

    He said as he nudged his foot even more.

    "Widow Tree extract."

    "Widow Tree. What a name, lets see how potent it truly is."

    Sam said and he immediately poured all the poison into his own mouth. He drank all the poison as if he is drinking water or even some sort of delicious beverage.

    Raunak looked at Sam as if he is looking at a ghost. His eyes widened in disbelief and almost slipped out of the sockets.

    Sam finished the poisonpletely and looked at Raunak as he licked his lips.

    "Not bad. The name seemed to be extremely well deserved."

    He threw the crystal bottle away and continued.

    "I can kill you in my sleep if I want to. I don¡¯t even need to waste a single second to kill a man of your caliber. The league I y in ispletely different. The only reason I y along is because I like your ambition. I decided to give you a chance.

    But the most usible reason would be myziness so that I could rx without wasting my time to find another partner.

    So now are you ready to talk business or do you want to pull another stunt."

    "Let¡¯s talk."

    Sam removed his foot and took a seat. Raunak nervously sat down and Sam said.

    "I want to take a tour in the sugar factory and other surrounding factories."

    "It can be arranged, but may I ask why do you want to do that?"

    "I have a better way of creating sugar and there are some by-products I would like to have so that I could experiment some more."

    "I will have it arranged by tomorrow morning."

    "Just behave normally and don¡¯t do anything suspicious. Just let the n flow and what is the target tax amount that you need for the next promotion?"

    They went on discussing the ns and right before Raunak left, Sam gave him onest advice.

    "If you pull another stunt like this, trust me to pull your spine off of your body. And I would make sure that you feel every second of the process without missing a single step."

    Raunak shuddered a bit before leaving the ce in a hurry.

    He didn¡¯t even have any intention of sending the guards or other people here to take revenge, because he is still not sure how Sam managed to guess or probably see every move of his. He might be under some form of surveince. So, he is not willing to take any risks.

    He went back and carefully arranged for what Sam asked for.

    The next day, Sam¡¯s friends managed the business while Sam went to tour the factories. His guess was right, the crystallized sugar is not being made properly. The msses is not being separated from the cane juice and when he looked at the scrap of the cane, he was delighted.

    "The cane was clearly not ripened, it would take another week for the harvest, where did you get this cane from?" Sam asked after looking at the sugar cane that was being processed.

    "The sugar cane crop is one of the widely grown crop here. There are some viges nearby where the maturation the cane happens a bit faster than normal. That load came yesterday and along with that, all the stocked cane crop which is stored in spatial devices for some emergencies is also being processed now."

    "Okay then, send me a batch of canes and also send me the leftover scrap from the juiced out sugar cane."

    "Sure."

    Sam also went to the rice processing nt. There are using some pounding machines that works on the pedal power to pound the rice out of the grain. They are using such an old school technique, if not for the fact that they have to infuse the spiritual energy into the pounding to truly crack the shells, he would have felt like he is back in good old days of earth where technology is still in its infancy.

    After touring, he went back to his ce and decided to start the experimentation immediately. Particrly with the sugar cane scrap.

    He has extremely high expectations for it. Everything that Sam has in this world with spiritual energy and also can be rted to the things on modern earth are extraordinary. The counter parts of the normal things of the earth in this world are so much more better andpletely abnormal in this world. And he is expecting the simr effect from the sugar cane¡¯s by products.

    The msses and the scrap which is also called the bagasse.

    Bagasse has many uses, it can be used to make bio-fuel, paper and a type of plywood.

    Sam is currently thinking on which method to use. Obviously the paper is not his choice. No matter how extraordinary a paper is and how interested he is to see the effects, he cannot spend his time on it at this moment. He has to dy it a bit and look for the two other options.

    One of them is the bio-fuel and the other making the Plywood.

    He is looking forward to what results it would give him as he proceeded in both ways.

    The process cannot be replicated as it is and he can only explore slowly. By the time he has any significant results it is already the end of the second week which also concludes his deal with the two candidates.

    He is really fascinated by the results he achieved. Even though the bio-fuel is a bitcklusterpared to the methane gas, it still has its uses when he used some other ingredients that could help him process the bio fuel.

    But the wood is extremely useful and versatile. He knew that this wood is going to be the next best thing on this which also made sure that he couldn¡¯t reveal it this early.

 Chapter 718: Bratty Elf

    Sam is a little bit disappointed that he couldn¡¯t make use of the research results of the wood made with the bagasse to his advantage. But that disappointment vanished when he looked at the results of the msses.

    For this research, he has an assistant and it is none other than his refined brewer of liquor. The Ape.

    Ape has been involved in the liquor research so much that he didn¡¯t even care about his urges to battle anymore. But if anyone thinks that he is a weak guy, then they would be sorely mistaken and it was clearly proved by the remaining beasts.

    Once Yanwu got a little cheeky and tried to mess up one of the Ape¡¯s experiments and both of them went into a fight. Even though Yanwu has the upper hand it is extremely slight and both of them bled so much with so many broken bones and ape with burned flesh that if the rest of the beasts didn¡¯t interfere and inform Sam who was busy, they would have suffered irreparable damage.

    `Now they are working on another liquor with Msses as the base and that is rum. Sam is really getting full of himself. He really did enjoy a drink in his previous life but he couldn¡¯t drink as he liked as it would mess up his system.

    So, all he could do is have a good swig after achieving something, doing something significant enough to make him feel the excitement that made him break his routine.

    He drank all kinds of liquors. From the cheapest to strongest and he savored every moment of their consumption. But he is not a regr drinker so that he could maintain his body properly.

    Now that all kinds of restrictions are gone, he is enjoying and he almost became an alcoholic.

    At this moment they researching the rum, even though Msses the primary ingredient is present, he doesn¡¯t have exact copies of the remaining ingredients.

    He has to make do and the results are looking good. At least, he would be able to get the desired results before the elections arepleted and he can start this business after the elections are over.

    He contacted Raunak to speak about this. He passed over a spatial ring with the recording crystals and blueprints of the new processing nt of the sugar canes.

    "I would like to sell this. This is a new processing method for sugar canes."

    "It is not that easy, I have to convince the owners of the nt and they are not easy to get along."

    "Why?"

    "They belong to the first faction. They are so full of themselves that they can even ignore the normal elves with no noble background." Raunak exined with a scoff, he clearly despised these people.

    "Okay then, make an appointment with a manager of the nt. I will convince him of this. If I can convince him, he will think of ways to convince his higher-ups. Particrly, when I offer him a decentmission and another great sales n. Can you do that?"

    "Of course, a mere nt manager wouldn¡¯t be from the nobility. You can easily meet him."

    "Arrange it tomorrow. I am sure he wouldn¡¯t reject us."

    The next day, Sam went to meet Raunak once again and both of them went to the sugar nt where the manager arranged the appointment.

    Sam there demonstrated the new refinement process where the msses is filtered out from the raw sugar and the refined sugar is obtained.

    Not only is refined sugar more appealing to the eyes, but it is also easily dissolved and absorbedpared to raw sugar.

    The process was also sped up a lot due to the usage of the instruments, inscriptions, and formations.

    When the manager saw the new sugar yield and effects of the refined sugar which can be easily digested and there are no impurities, he is really happy and ecstatic. He is pretty sure that the elves who prided themselves for their aesthetic qualities and fickle things, would definitely love this new sugar refining process and the new sugar. He immediately took the materials that Sam gave him to their superiors.

    Sam was told that he would be contacted in a few days.

    Sam is not worried that this guy would bounce with this method because he only demonstrated the full method, but didn¡¯t give everything away nor did he reveal the details behind every procedure or the full blueprints of the refining tools.

    He still held the upper hand in this negotiation.

    This meeting might have been held in secret so that he wouldn¡¯t anger the second faction, but he recorded everything that happened here.

    And since this ce is governed with democracy and a far more systematic governing body, there is no way Sam wouldn¡¯t use it to his own advantage if they did something stupid.

    In the next few days, the manager secretly contacted him and asked him for a meeting at the factory.

    Sam snuck out of the farmer¡¯s street and went to the factory. There Raunak is also waiting for him along with the manager and another young man.

    This young man has arrogance oozing out of his pores with every action. Sam can almost feel the spoiled rotten stench from the entrance of the factory.

    When he stood in front of them, the young man looked at Sam with a gaze of disdain and said.

    "Are you the one who came up with this sugar refining method?"

    Sam just nodded without saying anything. He really didn¡¯t want to deal with these brats, but he has to if he wants to achieve his goals.

    "How much do you want for it?"

    "How much are you willing to pay?" Sam asked without answering directly.

    But this seemed to have offended the young man as he said coldly.

    "Answer when I ask you to, do you think you are qualified to question my intents?"

    "I am sorry, I thought it is a business negotiation. If it is not there is no point of me being here."

    Sam replied and took a step back to leave.

    "Did I ask you to leave?" The young man yelled and extended his hand, a vine came out of his sleeve and held Sam wound around Sam. And a green-colored lightning came out of it as it shocked Sam.

    Sam fell on to the floor as he rolled around in pain. The young man looked at him and said.

    "A puny human like you is not even qualified to breath same air as me and here I am being generous and trying to give you a chance at earning money since I took interest in your idea. Do you really think we are on equal terms that you can negotiate with me?"

    As he spoke, Sam just rolled around the ground and he stopped in his tracks all of a sudden and looked at the young man with a smile.

    At this moment, Jack came into the nt from hiding and gestured Sam with a thumbs up. Sam¡¯s body was covered in silver lighting and he sent the wave of electricity right back at the elf.

    The elf shook violently and crashed on the ground while Sam disappeared into the earth as if he became one with it and reappeared right under the elf and he hit him on the spine directly sending him flying upwards.

    But the attack didn¡¯t stop there, he activated the wind element fusion and shot himself into the air to catch the guy in midair and crash into the ground with him.

    He finally left him to roll in pain before taking a step back and stretching his body.

    "Do you think you can walk over me just because you think you are superior? Damn, elven brains are made of shit."

    "How dare you?" The manager yelled from the side.

    *Swoosh* A sword de went past his haircutting a few strands off and the manager fell silent. Jack looked at him in a warning.

    The young elf stood up and looked at Sam with an intent to kill.

    "I will kill you. I will definitely kill you."

    "I don¡¯t think so. Not only will you not kill me, but you will also talk to me normally and do business with me."

    He gestured to Jack who yed a video from the recording crystal. He then changed the crystal and another video was yed.

    The first one is the video of the elf talking down to Sam and torturing him when he didn¡¯t want to do business. The second video is Sam kicking his ass.

    "If you try anything funny, I will distribute the first video to the second faction and I am sure they can find a proper use to it.

    Then I will send the second video to your peers within your faction and I am sure they will find it extremely useful. After all, I believe there ispetition within the faction. If you do business with me, not only these videos will stay safe, I can even let you earn a boatload of money from the side. What do you say?"

    Sam said as he extended his hand. The elf looked at him coldly, but he eventually opened his mouth.

    "Let us talk about the sugar factory."

 Chapter 719: Plot of the faction-2

    The deal went on smoothly. It is easy to deal with spoiled brats sometimes. Particrly, those who have that much of a superiorityplex.

    Now that Sam has these two videos in his hands, this guy will have to stay calm for a few days. At least until the elections are over he has to stay put.

    One reason is that the town elections would be disturbed and faction 1 who already has a disadvantage in this town, would take another hit to their reputation, and the votes will be gone.

    So, he would have to make sure that the video wouldn¡¯t go out. As for the second video, these people with superiorityplex certainly wouldn¡¯t want their superiors and peers to know their dirtyundry.

    They would try all means to make sure their image is not ruined.

    And Sam also doesn¡¯t need a long-term rtionship with this guy, so he doesn¡¯t have to bear with him as he did with Raunak who he is going to take as a partner.

    He didn¡¯t need to bear with any other spoiled brats particrly when they are only needed for the temporary partnership.

    Anyway, he also has to send a message to the elven people living here so that they wouldn¡¯t mess with him and his ns, this is a perfect opening point.

    Many people might think he is reckless and has no political acumen and that is true to some extent and most of it is due to his disinterest in ying political games. He would rather y a game of strength and force which is straightforward.

    So, he is making the ying field even and getting ready while converting the political game into a game of strength.

    Meanwhile, the person who is on the receiving end is not feeling the same.

    "Sir Ragad, how do you want us to proceed regarding this matter? Shall I cancel the deal with him?" The manager asked as he looked at the young elf who has that gloomy face since morning.

    "No, the deal must go on as we agreed. Also, don¡¯t change any price or don¡¯t make it hard for him. We cannot afford those videos to leak to other people. We have to make sure that those two videos wouldn¡¯t see any daylight.

    I will deal with himter after the elections are over. Make the arrangements for my stay here and also call for my personal guards."

    "It will be done, sir."

    Ragad walked out and went into the yard as he looked at the night sky. He is burning with intent to kill. In fact, he wants to kill Sam right at the very moment. But he couldn¡¯t do anything. Even if the town elections are not as important, if the position of the town head was influenced by his own actions and their faction missed the spot, he would definitely face some consequences.

    But he is sure that Sam¡¯s death will happen in his hands.

    As for making it difficult for the deal, his superiors clearly informed him that the deal should go on. The refinement process is also clear and easy, if faction 2 gets their hands on the procedure, they will just take the sugar industry away from faction 1.

    He must make sure that there is no disturbance in his ns.

    He walked out of the estate and went to meet with the Envoy from his faction.

    Meanwhile, something else is happening in the faction 2 Envoy¡¯s residence.

    The envoy, the candidate, and the candidate¡¯s elder brother who is the current town-head. All three of them are sitting together and are discussing something.

    "Are you certainly sure that some deal has happened in the sugar factory?" The envoy asked the town head.

    "Yes, they got a new refinement method. We don¡¯t know the source, but the refinement method is extremely useful in producing more refined sugar and it also helps in the recovery of physical fatigue instantly. While it also increases the absorption rate of the spiritual energy taken in the form of food.

    It is also aesthetically pleasing and that alone is enough to redefine the sugar industry. Their ie will increase by a lot and sugar is one of the major ie sources for that faction.

    From what I knew they are still in trial phases and didn¡¯t expand to other factories, we must destroy it before that happened." The town head said in an anxious tone.

    "Why are you panicking so much?" The Envoy asked.

    "This would affect the election results. Most of the neutral voters are the cane crop owners and from what I heard, since they are sure to get more revenue this time, faction 1 is going to increase the cost price of the sugar cane.

    Apart from that, they also found a buyer who is willing to buy the waste of the sugar cane and the waste of the refinement process. This also increases the cost of the sugar cane now that is valuable than before.

    They are not hiding this from the public and now the voters will surely take their side if this happens."

    "Did the news reach the voters yet?"

    "No, the votes are still oblivious to this. Only I got the news at the moment."

    "Then how about we reduce the chances of votes before the newses out," Envoy said with a cold expression.

    "What do you mean?"

    "What if the sugar cane farmers don¡¯t have the crops anymore? They wouldn¡¯t be able to get the benefits and the faction 1 wouldn¡¯t get the required votes, will they?"

    The candidate who was silent all the time has his mouth wide open in shock while the current town head is in even more of a surprise.

    The cane crops are the highest taxpayers in the town and since their ie is going to increase, the taxes they pay will also increase.

    The tax is paid for every three months and this would be an addition to the next town head and it is surely merit.

    But now that there is a little chance that they would gain this merit, the envoy decided to destroy everything altogether.

    "But if there is any evidence that we actually did it, we would be having a lot of trouble." The candidate is a bit nervous.

    "Of course, do I look stupid? I will be making the arrangements. All you have to do is find some details regarding the guards of that candidate. I will borate on the nter."

    Sam just went on to finish his research in the divine dimension while his three friends are dealing with the business and also managing the information that was brought by the shadow mice.

    They are looking forward to any potential dangers they might have to face.

    When they got the news regarding the n to deal with the crops, they became alert and didn¡¯t wait to alert Sam of this.

    Sam thought for a bit and said.

    "Just keep an eye on the cane fields for now and mark the important guys in the faction 2. Nothing must happen to the cane fields. If the activity is too much or you cannot get a hold of the n, then inform me immediately. I will take care of it.

    The canes are extremely important to us. So, don¡¯t let them go to waste."

    For the next three days, faction 2 is full of activity. They sent their secret guards to tail the guards and someckeys of candidate 1 to check their daily activity and brought all the details back to the Envoy of the second faction.

    But there is no n that was discussed.

    By the end of the third day, the Envoy just gave a spatial ring to candidate 2.

    This made it hard for them.

    They know that something is happening, but they couldn¡¯t do anything to stop it or hinder it.

    They could only inform Sam about it.

    Sam came out of the divine dimension and talked with the shadow mice once again to see what he can find out.

    The only thing that is too suspicious is that after getting the spatial ring from the envoy, candidate 2 just took some things out of it and broke them some lights flew out of those things and left the town at a rapid pace.

    This is an extremely vague thing. They don¡¯t know what is going to happen after these lights went out of the town.

    And from the looks of it, even the candidate and the town head didn¡¯t know anything about the n.

    There are some spections but everything seemed farfetched.

    So four of them decided to just keep watch on the cane fields.

    They could only stay more alert and Sam employed all five of his shadows to hide in the fields as they cannot be seen near the fields and make the envoy suspicious.

    Sam decided to take some more precautions and asked the faction 1 people to release the news to the farmers as soon as possible. But the response is a bit cold. They don¡¯t even want to listen to what Sam has to say.

    He understood that this the repercussion for the ass-kicking he gave to Ragad. But Sam didn¡¯t fuss over it and went to Raunak to exin the situation and ask for a hand in stopping the ns.

 Chapter 720: Mob fight

    Sam did everything he can. If he had more time, he would have made more preparations that are not as superficial and can give him actual help.

    After all, even now only Raunak is trying to help out a bit by increasing the guards near the cane fields which is the most he can do for now.

    As for anything more than that, it is hard for even him as his main field of work is within the business sector and he cannot involve himself too much in the town safety.

    While the group is worried about what is happening, some people entered the town one by one. Most of them are elves and there are some centaurs. The Centaurs have separate restaurants where they can sit and eat as horses do.

    They don¡¯t get to transform into human forms like Nagas until they broke through the consummate realm.

    Currently, a centaur is eating in one of those restaurants with two spears strapped on his back. There is a dark aura around him as if he just came out of arge pit of dead bodies. Nobody bothered with him as he just ate casually.

    At this moment another centaur is getting drunk at the next table and he looked at the behavior of the rest and looked at this Centaur.

    "Hello, Pal. You look like a great warrior. May I know your name?" The drunk centaur tried to make small talk.

    But this centaur just focused on his food which made the former annoyed. But he didn¡¯t make a fuss and just drank and tried to broach the topic a little more.

    But the more he drank and the more he got rejected, the more annoyed he became. Nobody even knows why he tried to make the small talk and got annoyed just because the other party didn¡¯t y along.

    Soon he is on verge of exploding and said.

    "Do you know who I am? I am part of the centaur guards of candidate 1."

    The dark centaur finally looked at him and started paying attention.

    The drunkard finally had his ego satisfied and said.

    "You don¡¯t look half bad. I have a decent swing in my troops. Do you want me to rmend you there?"

    "Fuck Off." This is the only reply he got.

    The centaur guard was extremely baffled and dumbfounded.

    "What did you say to me?"

    He asked aftering out of his daze.

    "I said fuck off."

    "How dare you?" The drunk guard directly attacked and the centaur guard just decided to pay back in kind.

    The battle began.

    The Centaur guard is actually quite strong and he became sober in an instant as soon as the battle began.

    Both of them started attacking and they thrashed everything that came in their way. The drunk guard was on the losing end and decided to move around a bit to find some of his co-workers.

    And he did. In another restaurant for humans, there is another guard of the candidate one who is eating. He moved the battle towards it and grabbed the attention of his coworker.

    That guy immediately made a move without waiting to help out the drunk guard, but his attack missed andnded on another table making the human on that spot who is eating.

    He looked back at the person who attacked and his aura raged. He didn¡¯t even bother to talk as he joined the battle.

    Simr scenarios repeated as the guards are increasing in number and at the same time, they are offending more and more people and the small fight between two people has already turned into a gang fight.

    When they saw the town guards gathering to interfere, the people involved in the fight didn¡¯t want to stop now, so they tacitly decided to move in a different direction where there are not many people.

    And it turned out to be the way towards the Cane fields.

    The faction 1 guards are not exactly in the right state of mind. They are already pissed off in this town as they are getting a hard time due to the town head being a person from faction 2. While they are having a bad time, they are being attacked by some people who they don¡¯t even know.

    They don¡¯t even want to stop until they get some blood on their hands.

    Sam and his friends are currently in the residence. But since the cane fields are not so far from Farmer¡¯s street, they are keeping an eye.

    When they saw therge group of people moving towards the cane fields, Sam felt his heart turn cold and moved with his team.

    They followed the group that is fighting and are sure that the group is heading to the cane fields. Sam didn¡¯t wait for a second before deciding to attack.

    There are twenty people and out of them, Sam recognized ten of them. They are all the guards of faction 1. He is neither stupid nor was he in a heat of the moment. He knew that something fishy is going on as soon as he saw them.

    He took out his staff and attacked with the lightning element. He didn¡¯t want to kill, thews are too much of a hassle for him to bypass them and kill people just because they are interfering in his ns.

    At least not now.

    He has to wait for a while before he did anything too extreme.

    But knocking them unconscious and even severely injuring them can be done as long as he did that for the right reason.

    The cane farmers are not exactly strong and most of them are only Nascent stage cultivators. Even if they are pre-transcendent stage cultivators, they wouldn¡¯t be able to deal with twenty raging pre-transcendent stage cultivators.

    They wouldn¡¯t even dare to think when they knew that half of them are the underlings of a candidate for town head.

    But Sam didn¡¯t have any of those fears. He can whatever he wants. If pushes to shove, he can just escape for that moment ande back to take revenge.

    The group of four just jumped into the group fight and started beating the shit out of everyone around them.

    They didn¡¯t care if the person is from the faction or the individuals who are surprisingly working together.

    They just fought and the group started moving.

    This caused the fight to halt for a moment. All twenty of them took a step back and formed a circle as they looked at four of them who are standing in the middle.

    Sam looked at them and said coldly.

    "I don¡¯t care if you guys want to kill each other. But one more step, and I will make you wish you are dead."

    The faction 1 guards took the chance toe back to their senses and looked at the group that is fighting them and they understood that they seemed to have fallen into some plot. They became angry and wanted to start a fight once again. But as soon as the drunk centaur who is the starting point of all this chaos, moved.

    Sam made a move, he spun his staff and blocked his spear, and said.

    "I said don¡¯t move. If you guys want to fight, get the fuck out of this area first."

    "Get the fuck out of my way." The centaur is clearly pissed off at Sam. One must wonder how he became a guard with such temper.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother to talk, he manipted the gravity and made the centaur feel the pressure. His front legs almost buckled, but Sam didn¡¯t give him a chance to get out the pinch before he spun his staff and hit him right in the jaw.

    A few teeth fell out, but Sam didn¡¯t stop. His body was covered with silver lightning as he started beating the crap out of the guy. He broke the left hand that held the spear. He snapped the right shoulder, the front leg, five ribs and finally gave a crack at the spine.

    The centaur fell onto the ground and fought for his breath. Sam looked at the rest of them coldly.

    The faction 1 guards are also staring back. They are all impulsive and one could easily get that from the way they fought. They are only a small part of the guards and they don¡¯t make up the major force, otherwise the faction 1 candidate would have been already dead.

    They all made Sam their target now and almost ignored the rest of the group that started this fight. Sam didn¡¯t mind.

    As long as they stayed here.

    But the second group which Sam assumed to be the people that faction 2 arranged, took this chance to move towards the cane fields and finish their task.

    Sam just broke the fight with the current group and went after them.

    His target once again was the centaur who fought with the first centaur.

    This guy is not as easy as the first centaur, but that made little difference. Sam shed with him for a few strikes and once again the gravity increased. That guy felt the pressure, but at this moment, Sam stabbed the staff straight into the ground and arge lump of dirt formed an arm as it held the legs of the centaur and pulled him downwards even more.

    Sam then swung his staff upwards and followed with light element arge vertical scar was created on the torso of the centaur while the staff hit him in the chin.

    The chin was broken instantly and the staff lodged itself into the lower half of his mouth and even the upper teeth fell off.

 Chapter 721: Another Plot

    The fight went on and as it progressed. Sam is disabling one person after another and soon his three friends didn¡¯t have anything to do.

    Before they could do anything, Sam is fighting above and beyond as he dealt with them.

    Even when the people took advantage of their numbers and escaped from his attack and ran to the fields, his shadows got their hands on them first before Sam¡¯s friends could do anything.

    Soon, the town guards came and surrounded Sam stopping him in his ce as he kept on thrashing the twenty guys on the ground.

    He didn¡¯t make a move on them. Since the cane fields are doing fine, he calmed down. He looked at his friends but didn¡¯t say anything. But his one look made them feel a bit provoked.

    They really did wanted to help at first, they really do have some people in their hands, but as the fight progressed, Sam just took over as he just beat the crap out of everyone.

    They could only clench their fists as they looked back at Sam and grit their teeth in anger.

    The town guards are followed by the farmers and soon some officials also came forward.

    The guardmander who came fastest almost lost it as he pointed at Sam and yelled.

    "What the hell are you doing? Are you trying to kill them?"

    Sam didn¡¯t speak and looked around at the unconscious and painfully whining twenty or so people on the ground and looked at themander with a questioning gaze.

    Themander himself felt embarrassed when he looked at Sam¡¯s face. The rest of the spectators also understood what Sam¡¯s expression went.

    If he wanted to kill them, they would have been dead already and here they are all alive, but just not kicking.

    Seeing themander who is looking for the right words to speak so that he wouldn¡¯t embarrass himself more, Sam continued.

    "Twenty people are fighting and they battled from the market street to the farmer street and from here they are going towards the cane field. You are nowhere to be seen all this while and now here you are asking if I wanted to kill them.

    I am saving the cane fields so that they wouldn¡¯t be destroyed by some dumb guards and even dumber people that are fighting with them.

    If you want to punish me for that, I would happily oblige, but you better answer me why you arete before you do that."

    "Why would I need to answer you? I am not answerable to you about anything."

    "Of course, you are not answerable to me, but more than half of the sugarcane farmers are voting civilians and they contribute most amount of tax to this town, what about them? Are you not answerable to them at least?"

    At these words, the farmers all looked at Sam in admiration. They didn¡¯t believe Sam when he said that he only made a move because they are about to destroy the fields, but they are didn¡¯tpletely dismiss the possibility.

    After all, Sam is a new guy in town and even if his food is great, the eptance was only for the food, not the person who made it.

    But now Sam really did fight for them. At least, ording to them, there is no motivation for Sam to save the cane fields. Maybe he might have taken the opportunity to be epted by the town folk and if it is true, then it is working.

    The farmers started speaking up in support of his statement.

    "Yes, guardmander, there is not a single guard who came to stop these people fighting and you are using someone who stopped this madness."

    "I have been following this ground from the market street. You better have a proper exnation."

    "Yes, if there is not even minimum safety for our fields and us, then what are we paying all these taxes for."

    "There is no use in talking with themander. It is best for us to go to the town head¡¯s mansion. We just went along with the flow and just let it be, when the elves wronged, but they are now going after our farms and fields, this is not a good thing. We need to question the town head."

    With one person speaking, the voices rose and soon the people are all riled up and before the guards could realize what is happening and themander coulde out of his daze, everything changed. All the farmers are walking towards the administration office along with Sam. The guards followed while carrying the fallen twenty people.

    And soon they are before the town head¡¯s office.

    The current town head came out of the office when he heard themotion and felt extremely conflicted. This n was their doing and the people would just swallow the bitter pill as they couldn¡¯t do much on their own.

    But the situation will be different when the election is happening. At least during the election, they will have to do whatever the people say and most of the cane crop owners are civilians with voting rights.

    And all of this happened because Sam just had to be the good Samaritan.

    It took a lot of effort for the town head to control the urge to kill him in a single strike. He had to arrest all twenty trouble makers and leave Sam alone and he also has to promise that they would not make any concessions to anyone if they were to be found guilty in the investigation.

    Sam and his team went back to the residence as if nothing happened. But there is tension in the air that made it hard for them to even talk.

    But Sam behaved as if everything is normal. He didn¡¯t even bother to talk to them and went back into the divine dimension as he yed with the beasts for some time while clearing his head of the unnecessary thoughts so that he can think properly.

    With this incident, he made an enemy out of the two factions at the same time. Faction 1 will not think about how he saves the cane fields which would bring the votes and the revenue for them, even if they remembered, in their minds, it is beneath Sam to hit their guards. So, all they would do is think of lightening the punishment but the punishment ispulsory.

    As for faction 2, Sam clearly disrupted the n they concocted. So it is obvious that he will be their target.

    But currently, both the parties wouldn¡¯t do anything to him. Because in the incident Sam and his friends are not the only ones that got involved, the farmers are involved too much and there is clearly the participation of the ten guards from faction 1.

    And then there is the negligence of the guards which also makes faction 2 involved as the guards are clearly under their control.

    So, Sam is not exactly worried.

    At least that is what Sam and his friends thought, but the envoy of faction 2 has different thoughts about it.

    "We cannot make a move now. If anyone knows anything regarding this, we will be in a pickle."

    The town head said to the Envoy so that he would stop taking any actions. This n is envoy¡¯s, to begin with and that backfired big time.

    At least they are notpletely found out. But if this goes on any clues were left out this election goes to shit.

    But the Envoy is thinking differently and the reason might be his fragile ego that got shattered because of Sam¡¯s actions and the failure of the n or it might be because he is really smart and thought that he could make use of the situation.

    So, he decided to make another move, and this time he wanted to use Sam directly.

    "You don¡¯t have to worry about anything. Our involvement in the incident is not going to reveal that easily and it is hard to prove. But faction 1 has clear involvement in it and the ten guards will act as proof.

    So, if we make use of this situation and make a move on Sam, it will fall on the heads of the faction one."

    "But what if we failed and we lose some clues or even solid evidence behind. We will be done for."

    "What can a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator do? He might be strong among his peers and deal with them easily, but there is only so much he can do if the difference in strength is absolute. Just don¡¯t interfere in this and try to salvage the situation that has already happened.

    I will take care of the future ns and steps we have to take."

    Candidate 2 and the town head left the ce.

    If only the shadow mice that followed them out were not present then the n would have been wless.

 Chapter 722: The intruder Vs Trio

    The shadow mice went to the trio and gave the information out. This time also the n was a bit vague. There is no time, ce or the method that was mentioned in their n.

    Just like the previous n, the envoy did everything silently. There are no important details. There is nothing that could give away any sort of clue regarding the implementation.

    The three of them exchanged a nce contemting whether they should tell Sam or not. There is a good part of them saying to inform him so that he would take necessary precautions. But there is a voice screaming to take a leap of faith in themselves and deal with the iing threat by themselves.

    They don¡¯t want to take Sam¡¯s help and try to prove themselves.

    Since the time Sam mentioned their lone journey, there is a thought eating their hearts away that is telling them that Sam is getting rid of them because they are a burden.

    But they knew that Sam is not that someone that would need such a round a bout way to do these things. He would just say things straight to their faces.

    Even then, they couldn¡¯t think of other reasons for it. Maybe that is because they are subconsciously feeling the same thing in their heads.

    Now they all have same thought in their head and that is to prove that they can be really helpful.

    After some conflicting thoughts, they decided to take this matter upon themselves and took out the things from the spatial ring that they can use.

    Whenever Sam made some useful things and even the research results of the organizationes out and new product is made, they will all be given a piece so that they could try their luck.

    From the message, they came to know that the Envoy will be sending someone who is extremely powerful for them. So, there is a huge possibility that a transcendent stage cultivator could be moved.

    But if a powerful cultivator like thates to the town, it would be hard to go unnoticed by the Envoy of the first faction.

    So there is a high possibility that the cultivator that would be sent will be an Initial stage transcendent stage cultivator.

    If their spection is true, they can actually make some serious preparations with the gadgets in their hands and it is not like they cannot fight a Transcendent stage cultivator together. Even though the power gap is fight, if an initial stage transcendent stage cultivator really takes full-scale hits from all three of them at the same time, he would surely face some damage.

    They are middle-stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivators and they can challenge higher-stage cultivators, so with all the tricks in their hands, they can really try their luck.

    They started their n.

    First they gathered everything they have and started scouting the area surrounding their residence. They are currently living in thergest residence of the farmer¡¯s street.

    There is a front yard, back yard and even some space on the right and left of the house. It is like a medium sized estate with nothing but a single house in it.

    They currently have a wide range of poison grenades, methane grenades, and some bee puppets with a lot of potent poisons applied to their stingers and the Zoi termite queen along with the rest of the insect queens which are let out for safety.

    Along with that there, they have their hover boards, some tricks that are attached to the hover boards along with some formations that Sam recently made that could help them change the environment in a certain region and also a special formation that is still in testing phase.

    This is mostly for training, but it will also help them in a battle.

    It is a formation disc with a lots of souls injected in it and these souls will attack the people within the formation. This is mostly made to test the soldiers of the organization so that they could get used to the soul attacks and train their instincts.

    The trio happened to be the first batch who are going to try the prototype. They even decided to use this for their victory.

    They immediately went to work and didn¡¯t waste any time. They made sure that not a single shadow mouse would reach Sam and worked fast enough that Sam wouldn¡¯t suddenlye out of the divine dimension.

    In fact, Watt even went into the divine dimension to check on Sam and found out that he is too busy in the research, he is doing something with the nt fibers he obtained in this ce along with the experiments on that new plywood he made with the bagasse.

    He came out and informed his friends about the situation and they are relieved to know that Sam wouldn¡¯t being out any time soon.

    So, they just waited in silence to make sure that they wouldn¡¯t miss the attacker that would being in.

    That night nothing happened and soon the next day also passed. They even decided to stop their business for a day and waited there and only at that night they saw some signs.

    The guards in the farmer street were called away and even the people were ordered to stay in their houses.

    They could sense that something is really happening and it really did.

    They saw a young elf who seemed to be in his thirties walking on the street towards Sam¡¯s residence.

    The three of them went to their positions and got ready to activate the formations. They are extremely nervous and even started sweating.

    A voice is screaming in their heads, that it is not toote to withdraw from this crazy n. But they really didn¡¯t want to back down.

    Soon the man came to the entrance of the estate and knocked on therge gate as if he is just visiting. But no one opened it.

    "It is rude of you guys to not receive your visitors."

    He knocked on the gate once again and this time it broke as he walked in.

    At this moment, the trio activated the formations.

    The first formation is the gravity formation. This is something that Sam decided to make which would help them in defense. He wants to make it inrge scale and make a saleable product. In fact, this is just a prototype version.

    But it really did work. Anyone who is sensitive of the energy could feel that the energy is being sucked straight from the soil under them and the transcendent cultivator also felt that. He almost had his knees buckled due to the surprise in the element.

    But he adjusted himself and used his own energy to walk forward with some effort.

    "You guys are prepared, seems like you already know I aming."

    He is walking to the middle of the yard slowly. Now only did the trio get a chance at clearly observing the person.

    Even though at a single nce he was like an elf, in actuality he didn¡¯t look like a normal elf. His ears are different and even his body features are a bit different.

    But they don¡¯t have time to care for these minor details. They decided to make a move and first move was made by Watt.

    It is not a direct attack.

    He took a pile of metal cards and started throwing them from his hiding spot. The intruder could see the cardsing and even the spot they areing for, but as he walked forward, the gravity on him is increasing constantly which hindered his moment. As he thought that the card which looked like a streak of metallic light wille for him, it didn¡¯t.

    From the trajectory, he could guess that it will fall beside him and wouldn¡¯t even hit him. But as soon as the card dug itself into the ground, there is an explosion right beside his feet.

    Some metal pricks pierced his skin and dug themselves without any reservation. He couldn¡¯t help but hiss in pain as he looked at his foot.

    He hurriedly took a step back and look at the small pit that appeared.

    But another card flew out andnded behind him. Another explosion hit the same foot.

    The intruder couldn¡¯t stand still and jumped as he looked at the injured foot.

    The explosion is not exactlyrge because the methane is not too much. Most of the explosive effect was achieved by some wind element inscriptions so that there would be enough force for the metal pieces to dig themselves into the flesh of the victim.

    Watt slowly increased the speed at which he threw the cards and the intruder is fighting the gravity and the grenades at the same time. At this moment, the bee puppets came out to assist Watt.

    Philip and Jack are controlling the puppets as they shot the stingers at the intruders.

    The first five to six shots hit urately due to the element of surprise, but soon the intruder got used to the movement and speed of the bee puppets and he even destroyed a couple of them.

    The battle is growing intense.

 Chapter 723: Saving in time

    The transcendent cultivator that is running around the front yard didn¡¯t have much choice and from the looks of it, he seems to be unable to use the wood element or any other long-range attack.

    He has decent physical force and movement though.

    After some time, he finally got a little used to the gravity and started throwing punches in the air.

    The spiritual energy manifested in the form of fists and blew the cards that are triggering the grenades along with the puppets, that barely managed to escape the fists.

    The field was once again even with this and the trio didn¡¯t hold any advantage, but the three of them didn¡¯t panic at all. Because the explosions that injured the legs and the back of the transcendent cultivator along with the five stingers that either stabbed themselves into his body or scratched his skin are not just for the show.

    The poison might be of the lower level, but it is the poison of the hydra and many other poisons that are even rare in the Naga Loka.

    A peak stage Transcendent would even feel the pinch from escaping it, much less an initial stage one.

    They decided to take advantage of the situation and decided to move on to the next step as they threw some poison smoke grenades into the field.

    And even threw some decaying me grenades. The cultivator tried his best to throw fists continuously to make them explode within the air, but it is not much of a loss for the trio. The poison gas will still stay within the air.

    And Watt happened to be a decent wind maniptor. The intruder was soonpletely surrounded with the poison gas inhaling it forcefully and even the poison from his feet started acting up.

    He almost knelt on the ground due to the pain and his muscles are not responding properly.

    Taking the advantage of the situation fiverge bugs came from the rear and bit him on the back. Led by the Zoi termite queen, all five of them took a chunk of flesh each and createdrge holes on his back.

    The intruder not wearing any armor is a plus and the five bugs didn¡¯t stay there, they just escape as soon as their task waspleted.

    "ARRGGHHH." The intruder yelled in a painful voice and he looked around particrly at the three hidden spots of the trio and said.

    "I was told to finish this off silently, and if you provoke me anymore, I don¡¯t think I can hold back."

    As he spoke, he mmed his fist into the ground, and cracks appeared around him while a wave of spiritual energy cleared the poisonous smoke around him.

    There is a quake around and by this time all the surrounding farmers already understood that something is happening, but nobody dared toe out of their houses. Not just the farmers¡¯ street, even the people in the market street already knew that something is wrong. But no one came forward, because the guards are strictly patrolling the remaining areas, while they ignored the farmer¡¯s street.

    This made them understand that something is happening and they are not qualified to get involved in this.

    By this moment, the trio came out of their hiding spots with the hoverboards. The n is going on smoothly.

    They hovered over the boards and started their attack.

    First thing is that the decaying mmable gas ising out of Watt¡¯s board while Philip¡¯s board is giving out the mes and finally Jack is doing the damage of cutting the flesh and letting the decaying mes directly entering the system and burning them down.

    The intruder was throwing the fists left and right without any reservation and soon the whole estate is crashing down. The trio is fast enough on their boards and the gravity is not bothering them because of a special addition to the formation.

    They are flying and pestering the intruder until he lost his cool. The intruder¡¯s punches and kicks became extremely violent to the point that the farmers in the nearby houses got afraid and ran away to their neighbors and some even ran out of the streetpletely.

    But the battle didn¡¯t stop.

    Seeing the frenzied mental state, the trio is relieved and decided to proceed with the next step. The soul formation.

    This formation was actually created after their trip to the undead realm. When Sam saw the battle between the guardian and the old Vampire King, he got this idea and gave some thoughts to the formation department and the necromancy department.

    So, they managed to create this with some framework that was provided by Sam.

    Currently, it is a standby project for Sam and the testing prototype for the trio which they would work on when they are free.

    Now the formation discs are activated and dropped in three ces.

    The intruder is currently stuck in the point where all three formations ovep each other and all the spirits that came out of the formation are attacking the intruder¡¯s mind as the trio already escaped out of the formation range and attacking from there.

    "ARrggggghh."

    "Nooooooo.."

    "HMPPHHHH....."

    The intruder is going through hell as he felt the damage slowly umte his mind and body.

    The trio got a bit relieved and decided to do finish this off and was about to make the final move, but at this exact moment, the aura around the intruder changed.

    "Puny Pests, how dare you do this to me? Just because, I held back, do you think I will take it all lying down, I will fucking kill you all."

    With that, the man¡¯s aura started rampaging the surroundings and the soul formations are the first ones to be deactivated.

    He then stomped the ground so hard that the formationwork for the gravity formation was also deformed. Now he focused on the poison gas.

    His body is already mangled and there are several open wounds where the decaying me is still burning and it seemed to be intent on eating him away.

    Due to the constant moves he made to get rid of the two annoying formations, he already spat quite a lot of blood and he is extremely weak, but that was all enough for him to deal with the trio.

    No matter how fast they are and no matter how nned they are, they are still weaker in terms of cultivation and this is the first time, they are against someone powerful when Sam is not involved in the n.

    So, once the nning failed, they are shaken to their cores and one punch directlynded on Philip¡¯s board activating the formation that could only activate when it is an extreme crisis and rider on the board must be protected at all costs.

    Philip crashed on the ground and felt torn both physically and mentally.

    With one of the trio gone, the remaining two are also in great danger.

    Even though they really damaged the intruder, they didn¡¯t break his spirit rather they fueled his anger and provoked him to the extreme. Now he is going on a rampage. Half of the building has copsed and the shadow mice that are watching the situation couldn¡¯t take it anymore and went to the divine dimension to call for Sam.

    Sam came out and looked at the situation and his blood boiled with fury.

    He is not furious at the intruder but at the trio.

    With just a mere thought, he could guess what happened and what led to this kind of situation. And he felt like this behavior is utter bullshit.

    But he controlled his urge and anger and move to their rescue. First, he took out the harbinger and started attacking the intruder.

    He threw a small energy cell on his back which exploded the flesh and he angrily turned around to look at Sam.

    "You are here for me, soe and get me if you can."

    The angry intruder, who is already provoked, couldn¡¯t take the provocation anymore and went to sh with him.

    Sam used the superior speed of the harbinger to his advantage and started throwing the spirit stones after destabilizing them.

    He didn¡¯t use energy cells, because he is sure that he cannot kill the man in a single cell and if the intruder realized how dangerous the cell is after he took one attack, then it would be hard for Sam to drop the second cell.

    So, he decided to reduce the already exhausted body into even more exhaustion and make him drain his energy and physical damage his body and make it umte the strain and he is nning on doing all that while the enemy is still in his frenzied state.

    Soon, Sam achieved the desired state and he is sure that he can take this guy down, so he decided to use the recent invention he made with the bagasse.

    The bio-fuel that was made from it. It is liquid in state and he threw arge bottle of it on him and set him on the fire.

    Even though the bagasse has nothing rted to fire in it and it is purely wooden in nature, it propagated the fire element greatly.

    Sam could only attribute this to the nature of wood which is extremely mmable.

 Chapter 724: Town Heads outburst

    Biofuel is actually a transparent liquid. This thing has an extreme affinity with anything that has a wood element in it and this man that came to kill him actually has an elf bloodline in him.

    The trio might have difficulty identifying them, but Sam could do so with just a sniff.

    This is one of the perks he got from the vampire body he obtained.

    The blood spilled from the intruder was everywhere and with a sniff, Sam could guess what he is.

    He is the offspring of an elf and a human. But the human bloodline dominated the elf bloodline which made him unable to ess the wood element with his body.

    But there is a faint trace of the wood element in his blood which is due to the elf¡¯s bloodline.

    He wanted to test this bio-fuel on a live subject and since the intruder is here, he is doing Sam a favor by testing his new potential weapon in his arsenal.

    Sam looked at the bright red me that was created from this fuel and examined it with his energy vision.

    The intruder is already heavily damaged, but now the me is not leaving him, after the small amount of the fuel was burned and the mes were about to go off, Sam only threw another bottle at him.

    Soon, the man was dead. He couldn¡¯t stop his internal organs burning and the decaying me along with the poison already did a number on him. It didn¡¯t take much for him to die.

    By the end of the torturous burning of the man, there is arge pile of ashes along with rotten bones left on the ground.

    At this moment, Sam extended his hand, and the death energy riled up in his body while his eyes turned red.

    The energy shot into the skeleton and a light shot out of that skeleton straight up before the soul of the intruder manifested.

    Sam felt the pressure on his brain increase and blood trickled from his nose, but he didn¡¯t care about that and pulled out the specter from the divine dimension out and let him feast on the soul fragment.

    The specter simply swallowed the soul in a joyful manner. He is still digesting the guardian¡¯s soul fragment he absorbed a few months ago and now he got another superior soul.

    The specter closed his eyes for a moment and a small light beam shot out of his forehead and entered Sam¡¯s forehead.

    These are the memories of the soul fragment of the intruder. There are not many memories left because Sam is not exactly proficient with soul necromancy and also the intruder has a higher level of cultivation than Sam.

    The specter disappeared after his task ispleted and Sam fell down while spitting a mouthful of blood.

    He took a deep breath and tried to control his blood cirction and the heart that is beating so fast. When Jack and Watt who already helped Philip recover a bit saw this, they ran to him to help, but unexpectedly, Sam just pped their hands that extended to help and stood up all by himself.

    He waved his hand, and Dia came out. Sam climbed on top of her and let her take him to one of the intact rooms, after he reached there, he waved his hand one more time and Ape came out, who arranged a bed for him to sleep.

    The two beasts sat there beside him and when the trio came to check on them, they almost beat the crap out of them. And that is because of the instructions Sam gave.

    He ordered them not to let the trio near him no matter what.

    Sam woke up after three hours of sleep and finally took his time to look through the memories of the intruder.

    In those memories, all he saw is a glowing light orbing out of nowhere andnding in the hands of the intruder.

    And the glow disappeared while a small flower was left behind.

    The intruder just swallowed the flower and another mystical memory yed within the memory. The faction 2 envoy appeared there and he is giving the required instructions to the man.

    Sam looked at the rest of the memories that are collected, He observed the surroundings where the man lived and even some streets, restaurants and so many more things to the best of his ability. And in two hours the memories ended and it is already dawn.

    He looked at the sunrise in the distance. The ripened sugar cane fields are adding a certain beauty to it.

    He couldn¡¯t help but sigh.

    There is not a single peaceful journey since he came to this world. Where he goes, he is creating new enemies and making more troubles for himself. It is like repeating his first life all over again and at least this time, there are some people he can trust beside him.

    But now these people who he can trust needs to be separated from him for the time being, but they are reluctant and they even made a stupid decision that could have, cost their lives.

    He doesn¡¯t have enough emotional maturity to deal with this situation. Sometimes, he wished that Ste was still alive. He didn¡¯t ask Ling Tian or any other gods about her for no apparent reason. He just didn¡¯t want to show his one mistake to the rest of the world particrly when he in the middle of an unknown battleground.

    She was there for him whenever he needed help in these kinds of situations.

    If not for her, he wouldn¡¯t have had a proper employee working in his empire. Everyone would be a lifeless ve. If Sam had to say, one person who understood people more than him, then it would be her. Sam only studies people¡¯s mentalities, reading them like books, but she can empathize and sympathize with them all the while reading their emotions.

    This is something he was unable to achieve.

    He sighed at his own troubles while he looked at the trio that is still standing in the front yard, they are talking amongst themselves about what they have to do.

    Sam didn¡¯t want to deal with them now.

    He went to the restaurant alone and went on with the daily routine, even when the trio followed him and participated in their own work, he didn¡¯t speak a single word. He just stayed silent no matter what kind of attempt they made.

    Soon the shop was closed for the day and he went back to the farmer¡¯s street. The farmers are allpletely busy. They are in the process of harvesting the sugar cane.

    The process they are going through is simr to the harvesting back in the banished realm. They didn¡¯t dare to use their spiritual energy too much. They used it at the bare minimum and harvested the canes.

    He went back to his residence and locked the room door before keeping two of his beasts as guards. He doesn¡¯t want to be disturbed.

    Even when Raunak and the town guards that are put in charge of the investigating the night¡¯s incident came to meet him, all they got is a howl from Raiju and a wild gust of wind from Sky along with some frustratingly unreasonable excuses from the trio.

    Sam sent the shadow mice out and asked them to inform as soon as the Envoy 2es back to the

    Even at night, Sam didn¡¯te out. But a few shadow mice returned.

    Sam entered his divine dimension and let the shadow mouse take him to the residence of the Envoy 2. At this moment the envoy is talking with the candidate and the town head who are extremely anxious.

    "What should we do? Not only has the attack failed, the guy you sent actually died. He was burned alive. Nobody knows who did that, but all they know is that there are battle sounds and most of them are a single person screaming in pain.

    What if there is someone behind that guy?"

    The town head asked in panic.

    "Why are you always in such a panic? At this rate, the ten-year reign as the town head seemed to have not toughened you up. I highly doubt your ability to move to the next step." The envoy said in a cold tone.

    But the town head didn¡¯t take it lying down and fired back.

    "Don¡¯t be so full of yourself. You are the one that started this and you are the one that has to take the responsibility for this.

    If you don¡¯t clear this shit up, get ready to face the higher-ups.

    Since you like to give me lectures so much, finish cleaning up and I will be all ears. Since you came here, you didn¡¯t do anything that is beneficial to our victory in the election and created a lot of trouble. I will be reporting this to the higher-ups tomorrow morning and you better clean up before that."

    With that, he took his brother and left. The envoy didn¡¯t react when they are here and only mmed the chair he was sitting in after they left.

 Chapter 725: Payback

    The Envoy is having a frustrating day.

    Last night, he wanted to finish off Sam and also med faction 1 for it. But not only did the n fail, his man who is one of his trusted subordinates has died. Due to the arrangements he deliberately made, there are no guards, no farmers and not a single soul has seen what happened there.

    All they knew is that his subordinate was burned alive.

    He wanted to force Sam into confessing what happened after he got his hands on him in the name of the investigation.

    But Sam didn¡¯t even respond to any of their calls. Even some cocky guards that wanted to use force were sent back.

    He almost went there by himself, but he controlled the urge and focused on his real task so that candidate 2 can win the election.

    He took a wine jar and chugged it to alleviate some of his frustrations. But what he doesn¡¯t know is that a small blue crystal is being moved all over the house he is staying in and the wooden floorboards of the house are absorbing a transparent liquid.

    The crystal did not just circle the rooms and the floorboards, anything wooden is being covered and there are no traces of the liquid that was poured onto them. It was absorbed before it could even go to the surface.

    While the Envoy is chugging wine jar after wine jar, the crystal-covered every wooden part of the house, except the table in front of the envoy.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care, he let the shadow mouse take the divine dimension to the secret corner from where they entered and he came out of the divine dimension.

    The Envoy immediately felt the foreign presence in his house, but before he could react, Sam already threw a small spark of me onto the floorboard nearby and once again entered the divine dimension and disappeared from the house.

    The me which started slowly soon propagated all over and the whole house was burning with bright red mes and the Envoy was lost in a daze for a second.

    When he looked around, everything in the residence is being burned. He tried to subjugate the mes with his energy, but it didn¡¯t help. It has a weird resistance to the wood elemental energy and he doesn¡¯t have any ess to another element.

    So, all he could do is defend himself ande out of the house. But while he was trying to walk through the mes, he felt that something is wrong and before he could realize it, a ss container full of transparent liquid fell from the top and he was covered with the Biofuel.

    Before he knew it, he was enveloped in the mes and he could feel the heat directly reaching the muscle fibers and even internal organs.

    He ran out of the house and tried his best to put out the fire.

    "ARGGGGHHHHH..."

    "AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGHH...."

    He rolled on the ground as he yelled at the top of his lungs trying to put the fire out. Soon, his yells and therge fire reached the neighbors and some people came running.

    Some of the people within the group has water elements and helped him extinguish the fire which actually took a lot of time.

    The fire is extremely resistant and it really did a number on the Envoy.

    Even after the fire was extinguished, he is not happy. His whole body was burned and there is no sign of that superior elf¡¯s beauty.

    He is like a lump of charred flesh and many wounds appeared on his body while blood is oozing out.

    He is trying his best to catch his breath.

    Sam who is watching all of this from a faraway building smirked and left the ce without anyone knowing.

    He doesn¡¯t know if there are some methods that elves can use to know the intruder, but he didn¡¯t care. He has been holding back since he came here, if they want to y with business, he is down, if they want to use force, he is down for that too. But someone using him as a pawn to increase their chances of winning and framing someone with his death, it is impossible for him to stay put.

    He hoped that this would send a message and actually it did.

    After the incident, nobody dared to touch the envoy who is lying on the ground. They are worried that his flesh would fall off of his skeleton if they touched him.

    Soon, the guards followed by the officials that are nearby and the town head, all came along with some people that are specialized in healing. The healers slowly shifted him to the stretcher after administrating the first aid and brought him back to the hospital.

    There is a surgery that went through the whole night and finally the envoy was saved. He almost died. But still, his good looks couldn¡¯t be preserved. His face was half burnt and his whole body was filled with burned marks.

    They put him to rest and the healers informed him of this situation the town head and candidate 2.

    Now both of them are gulping hard of the situation.

    They didn¡¯t know what happened and don¡¯t know who did this. They are reluctant to believe that this the doing of faction 1. Because it is strictly forbidden for them to fight until the envoys are involvedpletely.

    Apart from them, there are no direct hostile parties involved though. All of a sudden, both of them of thought of something and ran towards the Envoys¡¯ residence and started examining the ce where the envoy rolled around while burning.

    He looked at the traces of the burned soil, grass after examining it carefully, he once again ran out and went towards Sam¡¯s residence.

    He has seen the burned area in Sam¡¯s house from afar when he went to the farmer¡¯s street to make the farmers calm down.

    When he looked at the Envoy, he felt like the traces are a bit familiar, but he couldn¡¯t put the finger on it, now that he calmed down, he found the familiarity and he wanted to confirm it, but as soon as he entered Sam¡¯s yard, there are no traces of the battle or the burned corpse.

    Everything disappeared. Sam is currently rebuilding the house all by himself. Since half of the house is still intact, he can repair most of it and stay there for the time being.

    Raunak is beside him talking. When both of them saw the town-head, Sam didn¡¯t even bother to greet him and just went on with his work, while Raunak stopped asking whatever that was on his mind.

    The town head calmed himself down and walked towards Sam before asking.

    "What happened to the crime scene?"

    "Your guards said that they already got all the information they can from this ce, so I cleaned it up. You don¡¯t want me to stay with a skeleton in the house, do you?"

    "No, no. Not at all. I was just asking because I wanted to confirm something."

    "Confirm something? It seems like the town head knew something about the person that came here."

    Sam asked with a raised eyebrow.

    "He came here to assassinate you. But what I would like to know is how he died?"

    "I would like to know more about the assassination thing. Who wants to assassinate me and why? I hope you have investigated."

    "It is more important to learn how he was killed than why he wants to kill you. The same person who killed this assassin is suspected to attack the Envoy from the Capital.

    So, I need you to help me with the investigation."

    "Actually, I don¡¯t know. Even though he attacked us, all we did was defend him for a few seconds and hid in the house. I had to use a life-saving elixir just to recover.

    Then someone interfered and killed that person. Before he disappeared I really did ask for him name and he said he is called Robin Hood. That is all I can say."

    "How did he look like? How did he fight?"

    "He is an archer. He shot an arrow that is materialized by pure fire and burned everything and he also poured some kind of liquid over the intruder after he caught the fire and burned him alive until he died."

    "Liquid? What liquid?"

    "I don¡¯t know, you are asking the wrong guy. Maybe if you find out if there is any rtionship between the envoy and the assassin you might be able to find out who tried to kill them. Maybe he is amon enemy."

    When he heard those words, the town head felt anxious and was quick to defend the envoy.

    "What do you mean by the rtion between them? How could there be any rtion between an envoy from 1 and an assassin? You better watch your words."

    "I am sorry. I am just making spection. There is no need to be so defensive. Anyway, who can say for sure that a person of high status cannot have any rtionship with an assassin? Just like how a person who looked to be of lower status, can have rtions at a higher level. Everything is possible."

    Sam said so casually, but the town head inhaled a cold breath and looked at Sam intently before leaving the ce.

 Chapter 726: Oath

    After the town head left, Sam looked at Raunak and said.

    "What is your problem? You are pestering me since morning. What do you want exactly?"

    "I want to know what happened. Why did the assassin target you and who killed him?"

    Sam shook his head in mental exhaustion and said.

    "Yes, I killed him. An offspring of an elf and a human walked in here and tried to kill me and my friends and I burned him alive. He is an initial stage transcendent stage cultivator and his elf bloodline is extremely dormant.

    He couldn¡¯t even ess his wood element and he mostly used fists.

    What else do you want to know?"

    "Are you behind the attack on Envoy?"

    Sam stopped his actions and looked at Raunak before asking.

    "Are you sure you want an answer to that question? Be careful what you wish for?"

    Raunak shuddered and gulped nervously.

    "Do you know what the consequences would be?"

    "There is something you seemed to have forgotten. Is there any proof that I did it? Is there any way that they can prove me, a pre-transcendent stage cultivator at middle stage capable of burning a Transcendent stage cultivator almost to his death?

    Does that sound usible to you?

    And above all, we are living in a society governed byw, unless they can prove to thew that I did it, they cannot do anything."

    "But they can do so in secret."

    "Like yesterday?" Raunak was stumped. He calmed down a bit and asked.

    "You are saying everything to me, are you not afraid that I would sell you out?"

    "Really? Why don¡¯t you try? That envoy managed to stay alive because he is a Transcendent stage cultivator, what do you think would happen if you are caught with the same me? Would you be able to survive?

    I am also kind of curious to find out.

    Are you curious too?"

    Sam asked with a faint smile which made Raunak take a step back.

    "No, need."

    "So, is that all you wanted to talk about?"

    Raunak finally remembered what he is really for and said.

    "I am here to carry a message from Ragad. They are announcing the new price for the sugar cane and the refinement of sugar with the new method will also start today. The bagasse and msses will be sent on a daily basis to you.

    I am here to ask what kind of delivery method you would like."

    "Delivery method?"

    "Yes. We can get it delivered in many ways. A direct method would involve dumping everything in a destined location. Handing over to someone discreetly and so on."

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "What happens after youplete the tax target?"

    Raunak became a bit suspicious and didn¡¯t want to answer, but Sam just smiled and said.

    "Do you really think I am still plotting against you? Trust me, I need a partner in this world and I am thinking of you as that potential partner. You don¡¯t have to worry about me stabbing your back, because I can just finish you off from the front whenever I want to."

    Raunak heaved a sigh and said.

    "As soon as my target isplete, I will be promoted and transferred to another ce and from what I know, my next transfer would be the city headquarters of the-2.

    I will still be transferred to the business administration or finance. But then I would have to manage the taxes of the certain area within the. Maybe a couple of towns and all the viges that are under those towns¡¯ jurisdiction.

    Why do you need to know?"

    "How much more do you need to finish the task?"

    "Around another twenty million spirit stones."

    "That¡¯s it?"

    "Yes."

    "Okay then, I think you are going to finish this target soon enough. I would like to make it faster. Announce that I will sell the recipes. All of them in an auction. I am selling each recipe separately. The auction will start in three days."

    Raunak was surprised.

    "Are you not going to wait for the election to be over?"

    "No. I am not going to wait. I want to get out of this town as soon as possible. I will sell the recipes and from what I could guess, the tax would be enough to reach your target. Both of us will leave this ce after the auction and you finish your promotion procedures.

    I want us to be out of here before the election even starts."

    "Then what would you do after getting out of here?"

    "I will help you with another target and make you get a promotion in a record time all the while entering a new business."

    "Why would you help me?"

    "I don¡¯t know how an ambitious guy like you can be so dumb at times. I am giving you a chance so that you can climb thedder of authority in this ce and I could use your help to develop my own business in this ce.

    Is that reason enough?"

    "But without that restaurant business, it is hard to break through into different areas. That is a surefire method."

    "Any method I use is a surefire method. You haven¡¯t seen any of what I am capable of. You will see it soon enough and you will feel that partnering with me is the greatest decision you made in your entire life."

    Raunak became silent and decided to walk away for now.

    But after some walking and clear hesitation, he came back to Sam and said.

    "Sam, I have something to say regarding this.

    I want to get promoted faster, but I don¡¯t want to risk my career. There is a lot of stake for me on this and I don¡¯t want to lose my career and life because of your actions."

    "I have my own life and three friends at stake, do you really think I would risk it, just to screw you over?"

    "I don¡¯t know. But please can you tell me where you are from? I just want some reassurance."

    "I have enough reason to suspect you, just like how you are suspecting me. Why don¡¯t you tell me your secrets before asking mine?"

    Raunak stayed silent.

    "See, you want to know my secrets without revealing your own. How can I trust you with my secrets like that?"

    Raunak took a deep breath and said.

    "We will exchange our secrets, but not here. Let¡¯s go to the forest and take the tree spirit oath."

    Sam is a bit surprised. But he agreed.

    "As you wish."

    He knows a bit about the tree spirit oath. He had heard about it a few times. The tree spirit oath is an oath that was protected by the tree gods which are worshipped by the elves.

    Under this oath, no one can speak lies and break the promises they made under this oath.

    If anyone breaks the promise made under this oath, they will be the enemy of the forests all over the charbhum realm.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know the exact principle behind this. But he knew this works.

    As for how he knew, he learned it from the memories of the intruder. This guy is bound by a tree spirit oath to work under the envoy.

    Both of them went to the forest and Raunak made some runes over the trees and created a formation.

    Both of them sat in the middle of the formation and soon the runes glowed with wood element energy as they held hands a golden green light enveloped both of their hands.

    The oath waspleted and Raunak started his questions.

    Sam answered everything. It is simply about Sam not being a person of this realm,ing from outside, his abilities, and his goals in this ce.

    There is not much of secrecy in those questions and Sam¡¯s turn came.

    "I won¡¯t ask you any questions. Tell me your story. However much you want, but make sure that every word you say is true."

    Raunak was surprised. He didn¡¯t expect Sam to be soid back.

    "Are you not afraid that I would hide my true intentions?"

    "There is not much you can do even if you hide. I am Sam."

    "It is just your name."

    "Yes, it is just my name. But you will know what it truly meanster. Just give me you story."

    Raunak went on to exin his story himself and Sam couldn¡¯t help but sigh at the end.

    It is a simple story of a love-struck fool. He has loved a girl from a noble household that belongs to faction 1.

    And she loved him back.

    But when they loved each other, he doesn¡¯t know her status nor her true identity. So, after her father learned of it, he interfered and he was only safe due to him being a student of the bureaucrat school.

    He persisted and managed to strike a deal with the father of the girl. If he managed to be a powerful central government official within a certain amount of time and he would let him marry her daughter.

    The story is nothing special. This was used so much in the movie plots on earth.

 Chapter 727: Auction

    Sam felt like this oath thing is a bit over the top.

    But after hearing this guy¡¯s story, he understood what exactly is happening. This guy is so in love that he is so afraid that he would be losing the opportunity to reach her sooner all the while fearing that the opportunity that came to him is a hoax.

    Sam didn¡¯t have enough patience to convince him normally and since the tree spirit oath is active he doesn¡¯t have to bother too much about the future situation.

    After the whole narration ispleted, they both pledged that the contents they spoke here wouldn¡¯t be revealed to another person and that is exactly what happened.

    While walking back to the town, Sam is currently thinking about what kind of luck he had. He is attracting lovebirds once again. Previously in Naga Loka, he encountered the two Yaksha who are so in love that they tried to kill him to keep the secret.

    Now he is entangled with another pair. It is almost as if he is their messiah or something solving the problems of the lovers and granting new life to them.

    After thinking so, he just chuckled the thought away and went back to his residence.

    Currently, his actions bought him some time. They don¡¯t want to take action against Sam directly without any evidence as for secretly taking action, they don¡¯t want to lose more transcendent stage cultivators and the consummate realm cultivators are not exactly a resource they can move at their will.

    So, Sam just continued with the research. For the next three days, the business was closed and Raunak put out the word that Sam is selling recipes in an auction.

    The word spread rapidly and the traveling merchants who are also supposed to leave this ce are staying to join in the fun.

    Sam didn¡¯t care much. He knew that the true customers are the two factions.

    They would fight it over and they will give him enough ie so that he can free Raunak of his target all at the same time.

    Anyway, he is already giving him enough money through the bagasse and msses. So this would be easily clearing his target.

    Sam also got some extra sugar canes freshly from the farmers even before they sold the harvest to the factory.

    After all, Sam did help them by stopping the mob that almost destroyed their fields. They can¡¯t do much for him, so all they can do is show some respect through their harvest.

    The elves worship the gods of forest and trees, which Sam doesn¡¯t know if they even exist.

    They offer their first batch of the harvest to those gods and the second batch was actually brought to Sam which actually made him feel the honor.

    Even though he stopped the mob for purely personal reason and he tried to exin this to them, they still insisted that he should take the harvest.

    For the first time in a while, Sam felt emotionally touched. He knew better than anyone else what the harvest means to a farmer. It is just like the final product of a research a researcher worked for months or a finished piece of art on which an artist worked for months.

    Sam looked at the sugar cane that was given to him and shook his head to not get affected by this too much.

    He used a few of them in the divine dimension so that he can create a sugar cane farm for himself and he kept the rest of them for his own consumption. It has been a while since he happily chewed on a sugar cane.

    But that still has to wait, he has to find a way to finish the auction.

    On the day of the auction, Sam went to the only auction hall that is present in the city. He didn¡¯t even inform his friends about the auction.

    They had to find out about the news from the talk around the market.

    They silently followed Sam without speaking anything. Whenever they tried to talk to Sam, all he did is give one stare and stop them from speaking more.

    They went to the auction house in extreme silence.

    By the time he went in, there are many guests already waiting for the auction to begin. All the major restaurant owners in the town and some other merchants are all there.

    There are some people in the private rooms and it wouldn¡¯t take a genius to guess they are some nobility and the people from the factions.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother announcing everything. He is not that interested in the current situation of selling this.

    These recipes are not that important to him. The recipes that he gave away to Mackey are far more valuable and far more useful, the specialty of these recipes is only based on the fact that rice is a major crop that is being produced in this ce.

    The auction started with Kheer¡¯s recipe. It is not exactly a big secret. Most of the restaurants tried to replicate and some of them managed to get a close copy made with their efforts, but there is still some decentpetition and a couple of million spirit stones are bid for this.

    After that the biryani recipes are being auctioned one after another.

    At first, the normal guests are all bidding for the recipe at the start until the nobility and the factions fought over it like rabid dogs, the auction is fiery than Sam thought.

    Each recipe is going on for around ten million to twenty million spirit stones and Sam has to pay the tax of fifteen percent overall over them and the auction house will take a two percent charge due to therge amount.

    Sam is sure that the target will be reached easily and he can make some pocket change that couldpensate the travel charges to this realm.

    Thest piece for auction is actually the elven special and even before that Sam has already achieved the target for the tax amount. But if he stopped thisst piece from the auction, he is sure that he wouldn¡¯t have a day of peace for the rest of his stay in this realm.

    Thest auction is extremely intense. The price is going up and up with time and there is no end.

    Finally the people that are left are the two factions and they are going at each other¡¯s throats and the cost almost reached a hundred million at which they finally stopped.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but chuckle at their stupidity. But he knew what is happening. This is an election trick, they are more concerned about the power and elections than the money they are over spending.

    The same thing happened back in the earth. Particrly a country like India. The candidates spend an ungodly amount of money just to please the popce.

    Sam just took the money and left. Hepletely avoided having any conversation with the extremely enthusiastic merchants that wanted to talk to him.

    He went to the administration office directly and paid the tax.

    Raunak didn¡¯t even waste a single second and already started making his application to the superiors about his promotion.

    From what he knew he would be promoted within a week and he has pulled all the strings he can to finish the process as quickly as possible.

    After dealing with the situation, he went back to do his research.

    His friends arepletely blinded about the future ns and they couldn¡¯t take it anymore. The trio went to confront Raunak about that so that they would get some context.

    "Aren¡¯t you guys his friends? Why are you asking me?" Raunak asked in a confused and defensive tone.

    He didn¡¯t want to make an enemy out of Sam, particrly after the oath and the way Sam made his promotion as fast as possible, he wouldn¡¯t want to lose such an important person who can make his dreamse true.

    His mind is going out of control as he thought of many scenarios about the current situation and those thoughts included the three friends either being imposters or them being in cahoots with one of the factions.

    But their exnation did alleviate some of his doubts.

    "Don¡¯t think too much. We did something stupid and he is being petty. He is not talking to us."

    "Why don¡¯t you apologize to him?"

    "The thing we did is too stupid to even get a chance to apologize."

    Raunak looked at them suspiciously and said.

    "I am about to get the promotion and I would be going to the capital city of this, he said that he would follow me and then start a new business there so that he can help me achieve the next target."

    "What kind of business is he opening?"

    "I don¡¯t know."

    "How long does it take for the promotion to go through?"

    "A week and at most ten days."

    "The elections would just be a week away from then, why are we leaving this early before the elections?" Philip thought out loud.

    "You can go ask him." Raunak has be extremely defensive by this point.

 Chapter 728: To the city

    The next week went without much activity.

    Sam spent most of the time in research and didn¡¯t bother with his friends, they are getting more and more nervous about the situation and didn¡¯t know how to break the ice.

    They would have been more at ease if Sam yelled at them or even beat the crap out of them. But here he is making their lives a living hell without even doing anything.

    This ispletely new for them.

    After the week, the promotion really dide. There is still a week before the elections start and now Sam decided to leave before the election is over.

    He knew that both the factions are currently not keen on him and once they are done with elections they would try to make his life unpleasant.

    But these people of both factions in the town don¡¯t have that much authority in arger scale.

    If Sam moved to the capital before the elections are over and they decided to still find him and mess with him, they would have to get the help of their superiors in that capital city.

    Which is not exactly a pleasant thing to do. Unless they give out a solid reason, they don¡¯t have the authority or ability to move their own superiors.

    Sam would by then have new cards just like this restaurant and recipes which would make it easy for Sam to evade. Particrly when he knew that the next elections would be held in the city. The same scenario would be happening in that ce. The factions cannot move directly and Sam can be prepared for the hidden elements.

    They didn¡¯t waste any time leaving the town after the news of the promotion came. Raunak already finished his handing over procedure and is ready to leave which made it easier for them to leave this ce.

    They are going to leave in a centaur carriage. This centaur is not only responsible for riding the carriage, but he is also a guard of Raunak. This is new for Sam.

    Both of them seemed friendly and the centaur is not even feeling bad that he has to drag a cart.

    He is even happy to see Raunak.

    "We grew up together on this since childhood. We are both alone and orphans so we are kind of friendly. I am allowed to hire a guard when I was working in the town, so I decided to pull him in. He will also get the Civilian rights because of that."

    Sam just nodded at the exnation and boarded the carriage and closed the door before the trio could board it.

    "Let¡¯s leave."

    This is the only thing he told without even looking at the trio.

    The trio has to follow them on the beasts.

    The Centaur is actually quite fast. The main thing is his endurance. A normal cultivator at the same level as the centaur can also achieve this speed, but they wouldn¡¯t be able to maintain it at such intensity.

    The journey took three days.

    They passed through many viges and another town on their way and Sam is in awe at the uncanny resemnce of this ce with the earth. The resemnce is mostly with the rural areas.

    If he took the cultivation out of the equation, then everything is extremely simr.

    There are tree farms, animal pastures, fisheries, and a lot of crops.

    One thing that gave him an even more surprising is the coconut farms near the city.

    The city is called the Capital-2. There is no specific name and even this city has a lot of fields surrounding it.

    Sam is already down to his next research project. He has to find a way to buy a coconut farm so that he can research the coconut fibers.

    Coconut trees are one of the most useful trees back on the earth. Every fiber of the tree, from the roots to the leaves is useful if they are used properly.

    The usage of the coconut itself doesn¡¯t need to be exined, it is one of the most filtered and purest forms of water with a lot of minerals in it. The water is so pure that it can rece a saline IV drip.

    The fibers of the coconut can be used to weave one of the best ropes that ever existed and in some ces it was used to create makeshift clothes, apart from that, there are many other uses for them that even the spines of the dried leaves are used to make brooms. And these brooms are favorites of Indian housewives for generations.

    Apart from them, the oils, soaps there are many sectors that use the coconut or any other part of the tree to their advantage.

    Sam is really excited to see if the coconut trees here are just as useful.

    Anyway, he is in this world looking for a nt fiber and he would research every nt fiber he could get his hands on.

    After they entered the city, they rode directly to Raunak¡¯s house.

    Sam cannot stay there, due to some rules as the bureaucrat¡¯s identity is a bit sensitive and as the newly promoted official, there will be a lot of eyes on him.

    Particrly the faction 1 who are certainly aware of the rtionship between him and the daughter of that noble.

    Nobody knows about Sam. But he would surely get some attention. It is okay that both of them have some rtionship, but it would be better if they are not too close.

    After visiting his house, the two of them went to the administration office since there is still a lot of time left in the day.

    They are doing two things now. One of them is to get the joining order of Raunak and the other thing is to get the civilian identities of Sam and his friends.

    The restaurant was registered and four of their names and even the recipe auction was done under the name of the restaurant.

    Their tax amount after the auction is actually a lot, it is sufficient to at least get civilian identities for at least fifteen members.

    Raunak already helped them create the identities in the town and now he is going to help them transfer the identities to this city, and also their civilian identity.

    Since he was in a bureaucratic school, he made a lot of connections. As Sam said, he is an ambitious and resourceful guy and he managed to help many of them with their problems. That included his seniors, his peers, and his juniors.

    He helped them in school after they graduated and many other tasks that helped them graduate. And every person he helped is a guy who has a decent background. Elves might be condescending to the people other than themselves, but they knew how to make use of the people that are capable.

    Raunak knew that he could be useful and in return, all he needed are small favors he didn¡¯t need them to help him his career. All he needs is them to not mess his ns.

    So, he can pull those minor strings to help with these minor things. There are tens of thousands of civilian identities registered every year, all he is doing is speeding up the process with all the legitimate documents.

    After the process ispleted, Raunak handed the identity tokens to the trio and told them which inn Sam is going to stay in.

    Sam left on his own. He didn¡¯t go to the inn straight away. He went roaming. There is a market area which is vast and ten timesrger and diverse than the one in the town.

    Just like the town, there are many restaurants and he saw some loaves of bread that are being sold. This ce has wheat too.

    There are poultry shops that are selling birds like the spirit fowls and some others. Most of them will be useful for the lower-level cultivators so that they don¡¯t have to hunt for every time they want to eat meat.

    Society is well-rounded and civilized enough.

    Sam looked at different things, ate all kinds of food, and met with many merchants and workers of restaurants, vendors, and even some residents.

    The situation of the whole city is festive. After the election in the town is over, the election procedures in this ce will begin.

    They will be given another two months for the campaign. Sam really felt like he was lucky that he came at this time.

    These elections are so easy to take advantage of. In a democratic society where the leader¡¯s positionpletely depends on the opinion and tastes of the people, there are too many things they had to care for and there are too many things they had to consider.

    Their abilities get limited.

    Limitations ced on them by themselves. In this kind of ce, the one who can manipte and control their enemy¡¯s actions will easily win.

    Sam is confident that he can easily survive this ce. In fact, he can create an organization that rivals the organization in the deste realm.

    He couldn¡¯t help but smile at what an interesting game it is going to be.

 Chapter 729: Wine business

    Sam went to the inn and took a separate room.

    He would discuss the ns with Raunak tomorrow after confirming which area he was assigned to.

    If he was assigned to the same area where the sugar cane fields are great in number, there will be little room for development. If there are no new products in a certain area, it would be hard for Sam to create something new out of it and increase the tax.

    Sam is certain that Raunak is definitely not going to be assigned to the city administration. He is a junior in this ce. And he has to get another promotion to be assigned to this city business administration and that too for only partial administration of the city. After the second promotion would he be able to manage the whole business administration of the city.

    The next day, Sam went to Raunak¡¯s office.

    Nobody really cared much about him and just let him be. There are many people who have good rtions with administrative officials and many people visit them on daily basis.

    As long as they don¡¯t seem too close, it would be alright.

    "I am assigned to the southeast region. The area with most orchards. There are many towns and cities that grow various fruits. Most of them are exported to this city. There is a special winery that belongs to faction 2.

    Just like the sugar industry of faction 1, this industry ispletely upied by faction 2. Most wines that are exported to 1 and others are made here." Raunak exined casually.

    "Alcohol industry? Not bad. I was thinking that you might be assigned to the area with sugar cane fields."

    "Like hell, I would. That area¡¯s tax has definitely increased because of the new method of sugar refinement. They are not going to let go of that opportunity that easily.

    In fact, I was supposed to be assigned to that ce. But there is another bureaucrat of the same rank as mine in this city and he belongs to faction 1 which made it easier for him to be transferred due to the inside information within the faction. Now he is going to reap all the benefits we worked hard for."

    Raunak said with a sulky expression. Sam just chuckled and replied.

    "It is for our own good. If you really are assigned to that ce, I would have had some trouble. The tax amount is more or less fixed in that area and it would take too long for your promotion."

    "But this south east area is also same. The tax amount is almost fixed and stagnant from many decade. The amount of fruit they can grow is the same and the amount the winery pays for that fruit is also same.

    The tax amount is certainly a bit higher than the former sugar cane field area due to the lower maturation period of the fruit and the cost of the fruit, but now the sugar cane field area is going to have more taxes.

    It would not be beneficial for me."

    "Don¡¯t worry about that. I am already nning to enter the alcohol business anyway. This way, you will be promoted faster. But for this, we need a much more extensive n."

    "Promote faster?"

    "Yes, this is what I wanted from the start."

    "I will give you more details tonight, but I would need some details and samples. I want a batch of different fruits thate from that area as soon as possible.

    Do you have any trustworthy people?"

    "Trustworthy people?"

    "Yes, people that you are sure wouldn¡¯t betray you. The transactions happen in millions of spirit stones. If they be greedy, then we would have trouble. If they are really trustworthy, you can even promise them about the civilian identity."

    "How many do you need?"

    "Two for each town under your administration."

    "There are five towns, are ten people really sufficient."

    "Of course, there is no need for too many people. Meet me at dinner time in the restaurant opposite the inn I am staying. Bring them there."

    "Sure."

    After that Sam left and continued his exploration of the city. While he is at it, he focused on the wines that are sold in this ce.

    Some wines are extremely expensive, but Sam didn¡¯t really care and just tasted any wine that he could get his hands on. As long as it can be bought with money, he tasted it. In fact, he even attracted the attention of some not-so-pleasant people and had to waste some time dealing with them.

    At night, he once again met with Raunak. Since it is the first day of his duty, he was somewhat busy. He had toplete the takeover procedures from where his predecessor left.

    He came with five more people. four humans, three elves, one half-elf, and two centaurs.

    They went to a private room. The restaurant isrge and could amodate the centaurs, in fact, the owner of the restaurant himself is a centaur.

    Raunak took out some fruit samples from the storage for Sam to see and even took some wines that are made with those fruits respectively.

    Sam has already tasted the wines, so he focused on the fruits. Most of the fruits are new to him and some of them have an uncanny resemnce to the fruits on earth.

    He tasted them and felt surprised that there are such good fruits in this ce.

    Inparison, the wines are clearly not doing any justice to the fruits that are used to make them.

    Even the wines are not extremely good. Most of the Ape¡¯s wines are quite superior to the wines in this ce.

    He took out his own fruits and wines from this storage and let them taste it.

    All eleven of them are surprised.

    "These are some of the wines that are made by a friend of mine. I like the fruits here and I am sure he can make even better wine with them than this brewery could ever do."

    "Are you down for our next business?"

    "What are they here for?" Raunak asked as he pointed at the ten.

    "Well, they would be buying fields in the towns. I hope you can do that. Even if the fields are small, all I need is a field that is enough for a small orchard in each town. And they will be growing some of my fruits and some of the local produce.

    On top of that, they will be opening a bar in each town. Selling wine in all five of these ces.

    They will pay the taxes for the fruits and the bars directly."

    "There are a few problems here. One of them is that we can¡¯t buy fields easily."

    "What if you increase the price?"

    "How much can we pay?"

    "Is the price of agriculturalnd regted by the government?"

    "No, it is all between the buyer and seller as long as the tax is paid."

    "Okay, try to pull your strings and increase the price five times the normal and also tell them that we would pay the tax on their behalf. They can put the tax money in their own pockets. Will they agree?"

    "Five times is too big of a price."

    "Of course, it is the maximum price. Increase it bit by bit. I am pretty sure that someone would be interested. After all, who would want to stay in this ce forever? From what I observed, everyone wants civilian identity and everyone wants to stay on 1. I think with this deal I can offer them both."

    "There is a chance."

    "Apart from that, help them rent the shop and residence in the town. I also need a ce in the nearest town from here so that I can open my small brewery.

    In this way, you will get the taxes from fields that are bought, the wines, the fruit orchards, and the brewery.

    All ten of those people will also be able to pay enough taxes to gain their civilian identity. I want you to get promoted in the next four months and after that I want you to get promoted once again in thetter six months.

    Anyway, if my estimation is right, since faction 2 has too much at stake in the elections and also the wine industry they had a firm hold on would be in a crisis if my wine sells fast enough.

    If that happens, they woulde for the recipes and brewing processes as soon as they can and all I have to do is resist them for a while and I would be able to bleed them dry.

    On top of that, faction 1 will also take this chance at prating the industry and try to get their hands on the brewing methods.

    The prices will jack up and it would be a great business. Anyway, I have a hidden card that could make up for the remaining taxes, and everything would be sessful as long the execution is handled perfectly."

 Chapter 730: Wine hits the market

    For the next week, Sam is extremely busy. But no matter how busy he was, he didn¡¯t assign any tasks to the trio.

    He traveled to the nearest town and dealt with the procedures of the new brewery. Even though the sugar industry and wine industry are under the two faction¡¯s control, it is not like the weapon industry which ispletely regted by the government.

    They just used the business practices to suppress the rest.

    They really do have the best wine in their possession and they used that wine to just suppress the rest of the business that tried to breakthrough.

    In fact, there are some small wine brands that are stationed on others and they do have some business, but they couldn¡¯t even get ten percent of the market even on thoses.

    Sam entering this industry is not exactly opposed by the government officials, but the faction 2 members get notified by their members in the administration.

    At least the officials didn¡¯t trouble him too much as he had the rmendation of Raunak who is the senior officer.

    But the main reason is that many officials didn¡¯t take him seriously. They know many people who started businesses and got stumped because of the pressure and their inability to catch the attention of people.

    It can only be said that they underestimated Sam too much.

    After this week, the procedures are alreadyplete.

    The orchards are also bought. The orchards recently came to harvest and now they are waiting for the next harvest. So, the ten people took the opportunity to buy the orchards at a sky-high price. One orchard is even one of thergest in the towns. That guy always wanted to settle down in 1. So, now that there is someone who can give three times the original price, he immediately got tempted and sold it.

    One must wonder how he would have felt that if he came to know that he could have sold it at five times the price.

    After the purchases and the leases arepleted, the next thing they have to do is remove the previously nted fruit trees. They removed half of the trees from the orchards and started nting the new tree saplings Sam gave them.

    All the new merchants and even the fruit buyers from the winery all learned about the new fruit orchards that appeared in different ces along with the owners of the orchards that opened the new bars in the town.

    Most of the bars on the only sell the brews from the winery of faction 2. The system is extremely simr to the modern earth¡¯s system. Where the liquor is made in the factory and packed there, to be shipped to different selling points.

    Sam is doing the same thing.

    His first target is the fruits wines and he would stay at that for the time being.

    The taxes thate from these towns in the next four months is around fifty to sixty million. Raunak¡¯s job is to increase the taxes.

    So, in the target amount all that was calcted is the excess taxes he brought, and this time, he has to bring around four hundred million spirit stones to get the promotion.

    Actually, it shouldn¡¯t be that much but from the discussion he had with Raunak Sam learned that someone pulled somerger strings and increased the target as he promoted faster than he should have and he would becking in experience.

    In the words of the superior officer, this is all for his own good.

    Sam didn¡¯t care much. He already increased cleared a few dozen million in this target with thend purchase deal.

    And now, he has to wait for another month to clear more of the target.

    The wine brand is called Dusk and it is packed in ss bottles of different colors based on the fruit vors.

    On the tenth day of the n, the bars opened with the new wines. They used the same tactic as before, supplying the wine for free in the first few days to attract the consumers.

    The wine is actually expensive than the wine from faction 2. But they are still buying.

    After three days of the free supply. The bars are still packed. They are many people who are buying the wine. There are even some rich scion elves that just stayed in the bar with some of theirpanions burning their fathers¡¯ money.

    The word soon reached faction 2 and their superiors. But nobody dared to take any drastic measures. They just went on to buy the wines and conduct some tests.

    Due to Raunak¡¯s supports, they are stumped in bureaucratic ways. They didn¡¯t dare to make false usations.

    Faction 1 is happy about this though. They are already sick of faction 2 hoarding the wine industry. They are thinking of contacting the owners behind the brand. When faction 2 got wind of the news, they also tried to track Sam back and the next week passed like that.

    On the fifteenth day of Sam¡¯s arrival to the city, Ragad who took a beating from Sam entered the city to get into contact with Sam.

    He got the information from the administrative office and learned that Sam is currently staying in the town brewing.

    When he saw the name, he is a bit hesitant and when he reached the town which is only a few hours away and met with Sam. His blood ran cold. He wanted to kill Sam right away, but when he thought of what is going to happen if he risked anything, he controlled his urge and had a talk with him as if they met for the first time.

    But the talks are not extremely sessful. Sam clearly didn¡¯t show any interest in selling the whole brand, he rejected him and sent him back.

    "I hope you will contact us before anyone else when you decide to sell it. Or you might not be able to sell anything at all"

    Ragad left a veiled threat.

    "You are so sure, that I would sell it?"

    "You would have to sell it one day."

    "If that day reallyes, I will conduct another auction, and don¡¯t worry since the deal between us regarding the msses and the bagasse is on, I would give you a five percent discount if you really outbid thepetitors."

    "It seems like you are really nning to sell it in the auction. You are really good at taking advantage of the situation."

    Sam chuckled without any reply and Ragad also left to inform the superiors.

    The same thing happened with Faction 2 but they didn¡¯t get any form of reassurances or discounts. Now the superiors in the city are also interested in Sam and the way he did things was investigated.

    His sudden rise in the Cane¡¯s town was investigated and all they could find out is that he followed Raunak out of the town along with his promotion.

    Apart from that, everyone also learned about the assassin sent to kill him but mysteriously dying with his whole body burned, along with the envoy burning in the same way almost dying.

    This made them feel a bit more cautious and didn¡¯t let them make any rash moves.

    For all they know, there might be someone supporting him from behind the scenes.

    But the faction 2 is not willing to take this lying down. In the winery of the city, there is a special meeting held between the faction members that call the shots in this. The city head is only a Transcendent realm and he is also in charge of the whole which is a bit surprising, but that things worked.

    From what Raunak said, all the working people and leaders are Transcendent stage cultivators in all threes.

    Except for 1 where the initial stage Consummate realm cultivators take the jobs. The higher level cultivators take some more serious talks that are rted to the business and settlements in the neighboring realms while the elders are allte-stage Consummate realm cultivators and beyond and that includes the King or Queen that is going to be elected.

    Anyway, back to the meeting in the Winery, the person in charge of the Winery is yelling at the top of his lungs for the past week. The stock for the bars is sent on a weekly basis and since elves like living in vanity, they drink a lot.

    But in the past week, their orders are dropped by a lot and their ie reduced drastically.

    So the current meeting atmosphere is extremely sullen.

    "We were informed that we shouldn¡¯t take any direct action that can be punishable byw against him. Neither should we target him by using underhanded methods. The superiors ordered us to battle his business in purely business methods, so I would like you guys to tell your views and ideas."

    The person in charge of the factor, who happened to be a maturedy asked all the subordinates that are in managerial positions sitting in front of her.

    Seeing their silence, her gloomy mood only worsened and she said.

    "I don¡¯t care whether you want to say it or not. But if the sales don¡¯t get back to what it was in the next week, you can forget about your sry for the month." She gave a cold warning before leaving the room.

 Chapter 731: Trio making the move

    Things are going at a rapid pace. The campaigns are also going at a chaotic pace.

    But there are three people that are feeling like they are stuck in the still waters of the deep ocean.

    They are none other than the trio.

    Philip, Jack, and Watt.

    After that stupid decision, they made it by themselves without talking to Sam and just thinking that they are good enough to deal with that transcendent intruder and almost got themselves killed, Sam didn¡¯t talk to them.

    He didn¡¯t scold them, hit them, or even warn them. He just stayed silent.

    Even in the Capital city, they couldn¡¯t eat together, drink together and Sam didn¡¯t involve them in any ns.

    He just went on with Raunak and the ten people Raunak brought into the game and made all the ns together.

    One month passed since their arrival at the city and they are not even allowed to follow Sam to the town where he set up the brewery and meet with him.

    When they went there, they are blocked by the same beasts they yed with and spent time together with. The most violent reaction came from the ape and they couldn¡¯t even understand why.

    What they don¡¯t know is Sam left the Ape in charge and made a use that if the trio entered the brewery and disturbed him, he would take him off as in charge and ce Yanwu in that position, which managed to trigger him enough, that he is ready to bash the trio in their faces.

    Now, the trio is stuck in a dead-end for a long time. They couldn¡¯t meet him and even if they managed to achieve that, he would just give them the ultimate move, the cold shoulder.

    They didn¡¯t expect Sam to be this cold. Whenever Sam did this to others and even threatening the people who disturbed him with a single look, they felt so proud, because the single man who makes thousands tremble with a nce is their close friend and they can even joke around with him normally.

    They make fun of him, they y with his beastpanions, and they were involved in all his projects without even asking.

    To be frank, in the deste, Sam is the most powerful man and it would be an exaggeration to say that. But they can do all those things with him without a second thought.

    But now that they are being treated in the same way as those young scions that tried to befriend Sam so much, they couldn¡¯t help but feel lost and helpless.

    There are many instances where they started a brawl between themselves as they pushed me on each other.

    But they calmed as quickly as they can before anyone is fatally injured.

    At this moment, the trio nned something today.

    Early morning, before dawn, they just barged into the factory and stole arge amount of wine.

    The ape went crazy and chased them around and thismotion is enough to let the rest of the beasts alert and start chasing them.

    The hoverboards allowed them to flee and the beasts are also not ready to attack them seriously. If they did, they would have been done for. They actually counted on such a reaction before they executed the n.

    Sam came out of his room and looked at them coldly.

    He gestured the beasts to calm down and went after them himself. They escaped the brewery from the back entrance and entered the forest. Sam followed them on harbinger at a rxed pace. He can catch up to them any time he wants. His board is the fastest of all. On top of that, Philip and Jack¡¯s boards are not exactly focused on speed.

    But Sam allowed them to show their tricks and yed along.

    After moving a bit deeper into the forest, they finally halted and Sam spoke.

    "Give the barrel back."

    Philip took out the barrel and ced it on the ground before stepping back.

    Sam took the barrel and put it back in the storage.

    He prepared to leave after that and turned around. But Jack already blocked his way on that side. All three of them are surrounding him on the boards.

    "Are you sure you guys want to do this?"

    Sam asked as he looked at all three of them.

    "We couldn¡¯t find any other way."

    "Your wish. But don¡¯t regret itter."

    As soon as he spoke, Harbinger zoomed forward towards Jack, and Sam¡¯s body turned metallic and his arms which he ced in front turned intorge metal spikes.

    He didn¡¯t even put any more energy into the attack. Just pure brute force.

    Jack was unprepared for this and blocked the attack with his sword, but he couldn¡¯t take the impact. He used the board under his feet to glide backward and negate the force that pushed him.

    Sam didn¡¯t pursue him and moved to the side where Philip is standing.

    Philip is already preparing an attack after Sam moved, his body turned metallic and it is turned into red hot condition. He almost looked like a lump of molten metal.

    He threw a punch towards Sam and Sam did the same. Both fists are about to collide, and Sam suddenly felt a movement behind him. It is Watt. He is on his alert and he threw a bunch of cards with the strings attached to it towards Sam.

    Sam couldn¡¯t dodge it in time due to his sh with Philip and both the fists collided at the same time as the cards impaled into Sam¡¯s hands.

    Sam didn¡¯t even flinch and was about to remove the cards and move backward with the harbinger, but he was once again surprised. Philip¡¯s hand turned into molten metal and enveloped Sam¡¯s hand holding him in ce and Watt is throwing card after card to tie him up.

    Jack who recovered prepared his sword and is ready to make his move. The trio couldn¡¯t help but smiling as this is the first time they managed to subdue Sam using their tricks.

    Sam exhaled a breath and smirked. He opened his mouth and cold water sshed out of it pouring all over Philip¡¯s body covering the surroundings in hot steam.

    The water is as cold as eyes. Sam used this opportunity to pull the cards out of his arms and decrease the altitude by reducing the thrust. Jack¡¯s sword which was supposed to be taking Sam down was now aimed at Philip.

    Jack also realized that something is wrong and managed to stop the attack, but the bacsh made his palm bleed.

    The trio was stumped for a second and the steam that is around them is obstructing their vision. They had to rely on the spiritual sense. But Sam didn¡¯t have to. He actually moved the steam to his advantage and all of a sudden the trio lost their breathing for a second.

    Watt who is the wind element user in the trio tried his best to contend with Sam to clear the steam. But Sam also has a water element and his control is obviously better, so he can easily resist Watt¡¯s efforts.

    But it wouldn¡¯tst long, the water would precipitate easily.

    Sam also didn¡¯t count on it. He tried his best to make them feel lost of breath and feel helpless.

    After the thickness of the steam reduced, Sam let go and all three of them tried their best to take the breath in.

    Sam made his move without waiting for them.

    The trio tried to move away, they felt embarrassed and stupid at the same time. They could have escaped and moved out of the steam, but they didn¡¯t get that idea when their breath is lost. Their instincts are acting dumbly and their first instinct is to fight for the breath, not clear themselves from the problem.

    Now that they are breathing again, but still, their reaction time is a bit slower as their body is troubled with theck of oxygen, their instincts are still being numb and their first reaction to move away.

    Sam took out his reaper sword and attacked. But this time, he didn¡¯t attack them directly. His target was the hoverboards. He separated the board from their legs by knocking them out.

    All three of them fell face-first into the ground and felt helpless.

    Sam hovered over them and spoke.

    "One small trick and you guys are done. I could have killed at least three times in this interval. When you are fighting with a familiar you have to think differently than you usually do.

    But how would you learn that; all you did is fight for me and train with me, that you are so confident that you could dance with me for a few minutes?

    That is why the experience is so important."

    The three of them sat on the ground with gloomy expressions. They didn¡¯t even dare to look at Sam.

    Sam shook his head and said.

    "One more chance. I will give you one more chance. If you manage to defeat me in the next fight, I would let you do what you want. But if you cannot you have to go on your own journey."

    All three of them exchanged nces and nodded at each other.

    This is theirst chance.

 Chapter 732: Thinking Differently

    Sam put harbinger away and stood on the ground. He let them get up and recover. They are not using the hoverboards anymore. They are going to battle straight without any external measures.

    Sam also decided to keep all of his toys away from this battle. He only decided to use weapons.

    They exchanged a nce and the trio decided to jump at Sam at the same time. Philip with the fists, Jack with his sword, and finally Watt with a couple of cards in his hands.

    Sam used his sword and his body turned rocky. He blocked Philip¡¯s fist and blocked Jack¡¯s sword with his own. He used the two collisions to his advantage and moved out of the trajectory of the cards that almost hit him.

    The cards hit the nearest tree and impaled themselves into it.

    Sam stomped his feet on the ground and the surrounding gravity increased. The trio is not exactly bothered with it. They trained in the gravity field. Sam felt the disadvantage a person would have in a high gravity zone when they are fighting for the first time when he fought Dia.

    So, he made sure that they wouldn¡¯t kill themselves if they fell into such a situation.

    The trio continued with the attacks as if nothing happened as soon as they adjusted their energy flows to sustain the gravity. But Sam once again smirked and deactivated the gravity field right before they wanted to lunge forward.

    They kicked the ground harder than they required to due to the absence of excess gravity and they rose too high in the sky.

    Sam took this chance swung his sword. Abined wind de and sword ray sliced through the air and hit the three.

    The after effect made the surrounding trees got cut.

    The three of them fell on the ground, but they didn¡¯t take time to recover and stood up taking a defensive stance.

    But Sam didn¡¯t follow through. He ced the sword back in the storage and took out the staff.

    The trio looked at him as if they wanted to say something, but they suppressed the urge to do so.

    "What? Do you guys think I would fight just like did every day? You know me too much, but that doesn¡¯t mean you know mepletely. I already told you, think differently while you are fighting with a familiar opponent."

    With that, he lunged forward once again and the gravity increased. The trio cursed under their breaths and tried to control their strength to the utmost and started fighting, this time they are prepared for the sudden disappearance of gravity, but that didn¡¯t happen, their attacks are on brink ofnding, but right before that, gravity increased even more and their movements were forcefully halted due to that.

    They were hit by the solid strikes of the staff on their shoulders, backs, and even heads.

    If not for theirst-second defense maneuvers they would have been already critically injured.

    Sam didn¡¯t wait this time. He didn¡¯t let them digest the surprise at all. He swung the staff as if he is fighting his mortal enemy. If not for the absence of the killing intent, the trio would have been sure of that.

    They felt like this is the test for their endurance on how much beating they can take.

    Sam is shifting between elemental fusions as hended one hit after another. Just when the group thought that he is using earth element, he mmed them with a lightning strike. When they thought that he is using fireball, it turned into a water ball.

    The fighting style is extremely bizarre.

    They are feeling the pinch on how their unfamiliarity with his method of fighting is affecting them. Sam is being extremely random and chaotic. Generally, he focused on efficiency so much, but now he is using the energy as if he has too much of it and he couldn¡¯t exhaust it all.

    The whole forest is hurting because of their battle.

    In the middle of this chaotic beating, the trio managed tond a few decent hits, but they are not enough to stop Sam and his onught.

    They all gathered at one point and went on defensive and created a distance between Sam and themselves.

    They are managing to gain the rhythm of Sam slowly.

    Sam halted in his attacks and help the staff in his hands and spoke.

    "Already done? I thought you would have learned a thing or two from me, but it seems like someone needs experience."

    The three of them almost cursed on top of their lungs, but controlled the urge and whispered something.

    Sam just smiled and let them do as they pleased. If it was a real battle, he would have already killed at least one of them. It is just too easy for him since he is familiar with every single move they can use.

    And in the same way, they are being stumped because, Sam is just ying around in an unusual style, which made all the advantage they have over his familiarity to be of no use.

    After the discussion, the trio got ready and the three aura surged to the skies. Jack shifted his sword from the right hand to the left hand.

    His aura changed and this is not the first time Sam is feeling this aura. This is the aura of the swordsman who died in the undead realm. In fact, it is the exact same aura as the sword rays in the valley.

    Watt also took out a bunch of cards in each hand. He is like a magician who likes doing card tricks. He held the cards like a fan and stood there.

    Philip also changed his style. Arge volcano seemed to have opened in him and became active all of a sudden.

    Sam also recognized this aura. This is one of Philip¡¯s hidden cards which was good for surprising enemies in a pickled situation. This is one of the techniques he got from the Murali¡¯s inheritance ind.

    This is a type of technique in which the user stores a part of energy he absorbed daily around the spiritual core. This needs impable control and bnce in the energy. This forms a cocoon within his body which he can ess whenever he is a dangerous situation.

    This technique is mostly used when fighting powerful opponents or too many opponents at the same time.

    Sam didn¡¯t expect him to use that now. But he is quite looking forward to it. He spun the staff around him as he ran forward. Once again he started ying with the gravity, which is actually irritating. But this time, the trio is prepared.

    The issue with the gravity is that it will mess up their footing and the strength they use will always be not right enough tounch their attack. It will either be more or less. But now they decided to not move at all.

    They all decided on ranged attacks that are devoid of gravitational influence.

    Jack threw a chaotic sword ray, Philip threw a jet fire and Watt threw a wind de without any card.

    All three attacks are targeted at Sam and he didn¡¯t have time to keep the gravity in a variable change. It stayed like that for a fraction of seconds.

    Sam used water element and a huge circle of spinning water was created in mid-air. He is using the same tactic as earlier. Use the steam that is formed out of the collision of the water and fire to make their vision blurry and the water disc also defended against the sword ray and the wind de.

    But since the gravity is not changing constantly and remained the same for a few seconds, the trio took advantage of the interval andunched themselves on Sam.

    There is one thing about gravity while manipting it, it is hard to use other elements when doing it and it would be hard for Sam when all three of them are at his throat to get that interval to manipte.

    So, he abandoned that idea and started fighting. Even Watt is near him and he is throwing those cards almost at a point-nk range which makes it hard to miss.

    He has several cuts on the face and neck but everything is small.

    Soon, Sam had to use the ripple style just to cope with the trio.

    He is constantly spinning the staff to defend the sword and the semi-solid metallic attacks from Philip which are extremely annoying and finally Watt¡¯s stupid cards.

    Particrly the cards that have threads attached to them.

    Themotion has sent every beast that is in the vicinity to escape and there are many trees that copsed due to the after-shocks.

    Sam is shifting between elements to deal with the attack. He is on the defensive. But he is not feeling anxious, because he knew that he can manage this. In fact, he is a bit surprised and excited that they are finally getting what he is trying to tell them.

    They are finally thinking differently.

 Chapter 733: Lost In Emotions

    Sam looked at them with that never fading smirk which kind of triggered them even more. They felt like they had an upper hand at Sam since he has been defensive for quite a while.

    But they didn¡¯t think that smirk would still be there.

    The same smirk that stayed there when he was facing hundreds of enemies until this point is still there. He is not feeling any pressure that within their set rules in this battle, the trio would be any threat to Sam.

    This is something they wanted to breach.

    They wanted to get past that smirk and make him understand that they can follow him, stay with him and still grow.

    To put it bluntly, the four of them don¡¯t have any other people in the world. The Evergreen family in the Star wood city is just a family of people that sheltered Philip for the sake of a transaction. He was never a part of that family, they are at most his benefactors.

    Jack lost his father at a very young age and his mother died when he has barely awakened hi spiritual core.

    Watt didn¡¯t even know his parents.

    Everyone knows about Sam¡¯s situation. The four of them stuck together not just because there is no one else to look for or not just because there is nowhere else to go. It is because they couldn¡¯t go anywhere. Every major power would have taken them with open arms and focused on them so much.

    They didn¡¯t even know an outside world exists, so they would have easily satisfied with the amount of sess they would get at a major power back on the deste.

    They stayed together because they find each other as support. They developed a bond over days and years that made them stick together. With Sam¡¯s cold behavior he wouldn¡¯t be able to make friends in most normal circumstances.

    In fact, he wouldn¡¯t even try to make friends in general. The most human rtionship he would be in is a business rtionship.

    They became friends in an unnatural manner. The most normal friend Sam had would be Jack. In Philip¡¯s case, he pestered Sam because he was curious about a person who can have such a cold exterior. It is like he is living his whole life fighting a war without any peace.

    He didn¡¯t even have a single positive approach towards people and their characters.

    The only thing he views positively about people is that he can use their character, emotions, and behavior against them or to his advantage in conducting business, killing them or destroying them, or something way bigger than all three that are above.

    He was curious just how such a human being was made, just what he had to go through.

    And when he understood that Sam has no problem making friends, he just didn¡¯t find a need to. He has too high standards on an emotional level and also his secrets and abilities are not supposed to be shared with any guy that can be called friends that just met him with a smile.

    There was a lot of effort from both sides.

    As for Watt, he started as a subordinate if it was said in a respectable way, or a ve if it was said bluntly.

    He did what Sam said, at some point in the journey if Sam had said to Watt to kill himself, he would have done that. He didn¡¯t have any other life other than obeying Sam and killing people.

    But because of his change and evolution within himself and developing a bit of individuality along with the loyalty, Sam has opened his ice-cold exterior to be friends with him and Watt who is disappointed at the world also let Sam be his friend and at the same time guide showed what he is truly worth.

    When Sam suggested their separation they are afraid, that they will be lonely once again. They are afraid that they would drift apart from each other. But Sam is adamant about that decision.

    In short, all three of them are insecure guys that are afraid that they would lose the stability they achieved. After all, Philip and Jack are done with their life goals. They lived for revenge and they kind of joined Sam in this journey to take that revenge which in itself is a selfish reason.

    They could have had an easier time if they left him after that.

    But now they are just afraid and insecure.

    While the three of them are having all kinds of thoughts and insecurities screaming in their heads, Sam just kept that smirk and defended.

    All three of them lost their sanity a bit and forgot the whole physical and mental training they went through all these years. They are just focused on causing more damage and making Sam submit.

    For once they desired more power, more strength and for once they felt bad about the gap between them and Sam.

    But as it went on, they are not exactly helping themselves. The more they lost their sanity, the easier it is for Sam to defend, after some time hepletely gave up on attacking. All he did was defend stably without even moving from his spot.

    The damage is increasing in the surroundings and soon the forest area was on fire or cut down. Many citizens that came for hunting are all attracted to them and there are spectators around them. But nobody dared to interfere.

    Some of them recognized the four of them, these are the new guys that entered the town and some powerful guys areing to meet them. They didn¡¯t want to interfere.

    The fight went on and on and soon the trio lost its strength.

    Sam had several wounds on his body. His coat was a bit messed up here and there. The moment they lost the systematic attack patterns Sam lost any chance of getting critically injured. He is just too familiar with their instincts.

    After they all fell down on their knees with no strength to move, Sam who is also extremely exhausted sat down with them.

    He looked around and said.

    "Leave us alone. It is just a friendly spar."

    The group looked at them with weird expressions and didn¡¯t say anything. They did have some opinions and thought to themselves though.

    After everyone left, Sam took out the heavenly wine and took a huge swig before throwing the gourd to Watt who is nearest to him.

    Watt also took a swig and passed it to Jack and he did the same before passing it to Philip.

    For the next half an hour, they just drank the wine calmly.

    Their emotions are a bit more stable and their wounds are healing.

    Sam looked at them and said.

    "I know what you are afraid of. You are thinking that we might drift away. We are simply four orphans who formed a weird bond of friendship and I know it would be hard for you guys to just leave the stability and security that you have even though every journey you have with me is life-threatening.

    It is a conflicting decision.

    Trust me, I might be a cold person and might even have a rock for a heart, but I really did think this through. I am not sending you away because you are burden to me.

    I would rather have you guys beside me than all the power this world could ever offer. But I genuinely think that you guys deserve a life better than being second fiddle to me.

    Move out of my shadow, walk your own path, fight your own battles, talk to women and find your soul mate. Just explore the world and the opportunities.

    If we are still on the deste, you wouldn¡¯t be able to get these opportunities, the whole world and the universe have so many things to offer other than just being a friend of mine.

    I would love to have you guys be a part of my legacy, but I would love it even more if I am also part of yours.

    I will never forgive myself in the future if all your legacy and journey is influenced and probably filled with me in it.

    Don¡¯t waste this chance.

    Have faith in me, have faith in our friendship. One day we will meet again and start our journey together.

    Who knows what you might encounter in this journey? You might get the greatest of legacies that are suitable for you, you might meet a woman that is worth you destroying the world over, you might meet an adventure that could change the way you think.

    Why are you giving up all of it just to be with a cold man who lost faith in everything? Don¡¯t fall into the hell hole I am staying in."

    The three of them just looked down without saying anything.

    Sam sighed and said.

    "I hope you go on this journey."

    With those words, he just left them alone to contemte themselves.

 Chapter 734: Meetings

    Sam went back to the brewery and handed the barrel over to the Ape.

    This is actually a newly made wine with the local fruit. Thest produce was all in the hands of the faction 2 brewery.

    Sam only got his hands on this fruit through raunak and buying the fruit off the market.

    So the quantity of wine is little. This is going on shelves of his bars this week and faction 2 will finally be anxious enough to stoping after Sam and try to reduce the damage that happened to their factory by reducing the cost of giving out different offers and discounts on their wines.

    This is what Sam is trying to achieve.

    Because in the past few days, the number of people who are trying to cause trouble in the bar is increasing and if not for the local people who liked the wine so much and that included the guards of the city reacted violently.

    Every time they came to create any sort of trouble, the guards are leaving them half-dead and throwing them in the prison afterward.

    The situation is being controlled by the customers, not by Sam, or the employees that are given to him by Raunak. The situation is extremely smooth for Sam.

    And by the end of the first month, since he started the business, Sam already got orders from other bars. They reached out to him to buy his wine.

    Sam did agree, but he didn¡¯t give the new wines to them. He gave out the old wines which are already in the five stores prior to this.

    And at the same time, he sent the new bars this old stock, he started sending the new stock which is made of the local produce. But this wine is a limited edition as most fruit harvest has already gone to faction 2.

    So, this became a hot product and expensive.

    While Sam is raking in the money. And he is raking this money without much capital. Most fruit ising from therge orchards in his divine dimension and in fact, most of the wine he sold off is the excess wine that was made by the Ape due to the excess fruit he is getting every month or in fact every day.

    He has loads of wine. He can literally drink one bottle, use one to wash his feet, one to wash his hands, and the other to wash his face, and finally pour one down while doing all three tasks.

    He didn¡¯t want to introduce all this excess wine in his organization because many of his subordinates are making wine and alcohol is a stable industry. He doesn¡¯t want to disturb that stability.

    As for this realm, the more chaotic it is, the more he can gain from here.

    While Sam is enjoying his new money and also the possibility of his friends changing their minds, there are some big-shots in the town, the city, and the outskirts of the capital city having various meetings rted to them.

    In the town administration office. The business administration officer, who is of equal position as Raunak¡¯s before his promotion is gathering all the officials and attendants under him along with the official in charge of the town guard to a meeting.

    "Today, we are here to talk about the brewery. I don¡¯t know why they opened the brewery here. It has been almost a month since they did that and we are having a load of taxes.

    The rest of the towns that had bars opened also have a raise in their taxes, but that is still less than the tax the factory has paid this month. In fact, it is far less. Both of them are not reallyparable. The tax that came in is almost half of the town¡¯s tax as a whole.

    So, we have to make sure that we provide him with enough resources and facilities so that he wouldn¡¯t leave our town.

    If we amodate him well enough, not only will our town develop, we will also have promotions rolling in with the tax targets we fulfill.

    The main problem they are facing is the people causing trouble. So, I am asking the town guard to provide some special service. In exchange to which I am going to divert some of the tax amounts to your department and petition to increase your sries and privileges."

    While the town is trying their best to make Sam stay, the exact opposite thing is happening in the administration office of the Capital.

    The main business administration office who is in charge of the city finance is talking with his subordinates. He is also the supervisor of joint town administrators like Raunak. But Raunak and others of simr positions are not this person¡¯s direct subordinates and he will not be getting any credit for the taxes Raunak and his peers make.

    He is extremely gloomy as he looked at the subordinates who deal with most work in the city.

    "Why did I not know anything about this Sam? He opened such a brewery and that town¡¯s tax almost reached half the city¡¯s tax. Do you know how much improvement it is? Do you know how much of our target we can decrease?

    Now that Raunak who just entered the city has already cleared one-fifth of his target just from this one brewery and the excess business the wine selling is making is an added bonus.

    And that is still when the brewery is not exporting to the towns other than those five towns. But this next month, there will be people from different towns asking for it and the brewery¡¯s profits will increase, which in turn increases the tax.

    At this rate, Raunak will reach his target in five more months. Why did such an opportunity slip right past us?"

    He is growing incredibly agitated as he spoke.

    One person raised his hand and answered.

    "Sir, the two factions are inquiring about them a lot and from what we know, Raunak and him are already acquaintances in the cane town. In fact, Raunak is the one that brought him here and made arrangements to the business establishment in exchange to an excess five percent tax payment.

    Which makes it easier for Raunak to get more tax. It seems like he had found a real business genius and invested time in him to get what he is. There is a rumor in the faction circle that he is nning something by the end of the city elections.

    The faction members are really tight-lipped."

    "I don¡¯t what you guys do. I want to learn what that big move is, and think of a way to make use of it to finish our own targets."

    An even gloomier meeting is happening in the brewery.

    The manager of the brewery. The Elvendy is standing with her hands crossed as she looked down on the employees that sat down at the conference table.

    "Who thought that it is a good idea to send men to harass the bars and the brewery? And you even sent the men under our faction. Now the families they belonged to are grinding their teeth at us. For not only losing business in the five towns that have fruit orchards but also losing men to the prisons.

    Do you know how much it would cost us to bail us out? That too we have to find a way to make the other party give up the charges.

    There are rumors flying around that we are doing this shit and there is also another rumor that the local fruit farmers are rethinking about the next harvest.

    From what I heard in the message I received this morning. That brewery released a batch of new wine. There are many different varieties and they are made of local produce. They are currently limited edition and extremely expensive. But they are still favorites of the people in those five towns.

    People are already requesting farmers to get in touch with this new brewery and inquiring about the cost of the fruit produce. They are trying to switch the sides.

    Why do you think we had to refrain from doing anything shady? He agreed to auction the brewery and the recipes off by the end of the elections in the city. If we pressure him, he will sell it off to faction 1 and our whole faction will lose the edge of this liquor business.

    So, make sure that you guys don¡¯t do anything shady."

    "Madam then doesn¡¯t that mean we can rx about the situation and let him have his business. We can just outbid him."

    "Like hell, you can do that." She almost cursed him out loud. She controlled the urge and spoke to him normally.

    "You cannot do that. If he grew too much, he would have more leverage. He will increase the price by too much and we wouldn¡¯t be able to reduce the price if he is too big. So, we have to try all the ways we can to undermine the worth of thatpany all the while keeping those methods clean."

 Chapter 735: Auctioning Again

    Sam didn¡¯t even see his friends for the next few days. But ording to the shadow mice, they are not far. They are not together and they are taking some alone time and seemed to be reflecting on what Sam said.

    He didn¡¯t meet them either. Since they are taking their time to really think without blindly and stubbornly rejecting the idea, he is good with it.

    Sam is currently watching the everyday progress of the wine business in this second month.

    The sales are increasing and after the first week in this second month, the other towns started approaching Sam for the wine supply and obviously, Sam didn¡¯t reject them. The other bars might not be increasing the taxes to Raunak but the tax Sam paid would be increased due to him earning more by selling to these bars.

    Faction 2 is going more and more restless and by the end of the second week, they sent messages through people asking when he would be conducting the auction.

    But to their surprise, Sam has actually been quite vague about it and in fact, he even postponed the date of the auction.

    At first, he said that he would be auctioning the recipe before the elections, but now he said that he would be auctioning it off a month after the election is over.

    This made them question him in anger only to receive another shock.

    His brewery has created two new products which are going to be released next week and this would increase his value in the market if he waited a month more.

    He would gain more money.

    When they inquired about the new product all they got is that they would announce the new product in the next few days.

    The news somehow managed to reach the faction 1 members who are a bit excited. Since Sam is not situated in the city and cannot influence the elections much. But he can take advantage of the fact that elections are ongoing and y around a bit.

    But this brewery can change the phase of the economic control of the Charbhum realm as a whole.

    So, he can y around even a bit more.

    Faction 1 immediately contacted Sam about the new products too, but they were also sent back. But their expression ispletely opposite to that of faction 2.

    They are happy that there are new products and those products are of a different kind. They are not the same as the wines.

    So, on the third week, the announcement came. The five bars got the new products. Beer and the Rum.

    Rum is new to these people and this liquor is extremely hard. It is not like a wine that is a bit mild and can be drunk like water.

    These cultivators can really do that. But rum is a bit stronger. Sam didn¡¯t expect this result but it really is making people high.

    The taste is also great. As for the beer, there is no need to exin too much regarding it. It is everyone¡¯s favorite. With perfect sides, nothing can beat a good old beer.

    They became a huge hit and the two factions once again focused on Sam with a newfound greed.

    Particrly when they found out that Sam would auction the recipes of the wines, rum, and the beer separately.

    This is going to make it a toughpetition for the factions. The price will also jack up.

    By the fourth week, there is not a single cultivator who is Nascent or above that didn¡¯t know about Sam¡¯s brewery.

    Particrly the rum that could make them high in a few minutes. These elves are really vain creatures and the humans who are in theirpany for so many years and the constant contempt they face which made them desire the lives of the elves also made them equally vain.

    They got drunk easily. But the cultivation which they are practicing for years has not been done in vain and they knew how to keep a sane mind and how to not get addicted to these drinks.

    On thest day of the second month when the voting is being conducted Sam went to the city and ced his vote.

    He just voted for the random candidate. Anyway, no one is going to care who he voted to.

    He went back and focused on the business.

    Sam made sure that the liquors reached far and wide. He didn¡¯t reject any bar to purchase and some restaurants also started serving the liquors and the business is going well.

    At the end of the second month, the taxes doubled. Raunak is extremely ecstatic.

    Time passed and by the end of the third month, Sam had two major things, the first thing is the minor breakthrough and the second thing is the auction.

    Only by this time did the trio return, but they are still unable to talk to Sam. They are going on hunting, taking mercenary missions, and doing all kinds of crazy fighting within the.

    The is extremely small, in fact, it is only as big as one-fourth of the deste.

    They almost explored every ce.

    When the auction was announced in the town hall. Raunak also attended it just for the fun.

    This auction is going to clear his tax amount and he can get promoted once again.

    But there is another news he had to report to Sam.

    "Recently, my mentor came into contact with me and gave me an olive branch. Generally, I have to wait out two more promotions after the next one to go to the.

    But since the recent growth of mine, he decided to make a special petition for me to go to 1 after another promotion. But the target amount is high and the time period is low.

    After I clear the current target, I will be promoted as a special officer in the2 and I would have to clear a target of eight hundred million spirit stones in tax in the next six months. But none of the current businesses in the city or any other business in the for that matter can be ounted as my own.

    I either have to create new businesses and change an already happening business significantly to count the taxes as mine.

    I don¡¯t have to care about the regr tax or any other form of tax. As long as the new business¡¯ approvals and permission go through me and the new additions to the businesses are made by the businessmen I helped out, then the taxes will be under my ount.

    He asked me if I want to take this deal. If not I can also go through normal procedure." Raunak exined everything to Sam.

    "What would be the next normal target if we go through the normal procedure?"

    "The next target would only be six hundred million, but there is no deadline attached and it was meant to make them stay there for a few years. Almost half a decade at least.

    In fact, even I was supposed to stay in this position for around three to four years. That is the fastest estimate actually."

    "We might as well take it. Why not? But there are some things I need for me to finish this quickly."

    "What is that?"

    "I want to know what kind of resources this has to offer. I actually figured out a few products from the coconut farms, but there are not actually enough for such a big target. I was thinking that I would have to think of something else or even use my hidden card to finish this.

    But we can use that in 1 now that the terms have changed."

    "I will give you the information in a few days."

    "Sure. Let¡¯s get this auction over with and finish it off first."

    Sam went to the auction house and this time there are only two parties. One of them is Ragad and another person is someone he unfamiliar with.

    It is the elven woman who is in charge of the brewery of faction 2.

    She came forward with a smile.

    "Hello, I am Ananya. The person in charge of the brewery. It is really nice to meet you. I have heard a lot of your genius business endeavors and I am a big fan of the products of your brewery."

    "Nice to meet you too. Please have the seat. Since there are only two candidates the auction might not take that long. If you want to talk, we can talkter." Sam replied casually.

    She smiled and nodded in response before going back to the seat.

    Ragad then came forward and asked.

    "Is the deal from earlier, still valid?"

    "Deal?"

    "The discount." He asked in a whisper.

    Sam smiled and replied.

    "Of course, but the discount has to be kept private. Don¡¯t report it openly and the deal should be signed with the actual price on the documents. I don¡¯t need any trouble with the tax."

    "But what is the point of the discount? Wouldn¡¯t you be losing the money?"

    Sam didn¡¯t even reply and looked at Ragad with a meaningful nce and went backstage to start the auction.

 Chapter 736: Grand Elders

    The auction is a real bloodbath.

    Both sides are raising the price like crazy. It is as if they have so much money and they are afraid that they would die if they don¡¯t spend it all.

    They are raising the bids by at least a hundred million.

    Sam has divided the auction into four different items.

    The first one, the brewing methods of the wine made by the fruits that Sam brought to this realm. The second, the brewing method of the wine made by the fruits that are produced locally, the third one is the rum and the fourth one is the beer.

    Except for the beer which was auctioned off to a rtively low amount, the remaining three bids are extremely high each almost hitting one billion spirit stones.

    This not just cleared the target, it even made an excess.

    As for who got what. Faction 1 got their hands on the beer recipe. Except for the remaining three are all bought by faction 2. They are adamant about keeping their hold on the alcohol industry. They are not nning to lose it anytime soon.

    Sam signed the deals with both of them and there is a use in the contract that the first five shops would be the lifetime customers of both the breweries. They shouldn¡¯t just cut them off.

    And they happily agreed.

    The five shops in the towns are almost like the gship stores of the new alcohols, they would be idiots to disturb the already established market.

    They are the five favorite bars in the five towns, so they are their target areas to establish more business. They are not exactly keen on destroying it.

    Arge amount of spirit stones are moved to make a payment. Faction 1 is still okay, but faction 2 has to pay billions of spirit stones which is not exactly a pleasant thing. And they did all this to keep the industry that was already supposed to be in their control.

    That is the reason, faction 1 is not so adamant on getting it. They just want to make faction 2 go to lengths to keep what is already theirs in which they lost billions of spirit stones.

    Sam paid the tax and went back to the city with Raunak.

    Raunak cleared his target and applied for promotion while Sam went to an inn and rxed a bit.

    He broke through recently and felt like he should digest the new gains a bit.

    He decided to wait while Raunak¡¯s promotion was being processed.

    By this time, the trio also came to the city, and even though they are not talking much, they are still trying to make the conversation and they are trying hard to not mention the separation.

    At least, their rtionship doesn¡¯t have that much tension as before.

    While Sam is rxing a bit, someone in 1 is talking about him in a heated discussion.

    There is a special estate in the Capital city of 1 which is the Elder¡¯s estate. The elders stay there and this is also the ce where they have meetings and the ce where the future of so many people in this realm is decided.

    But what people don¡¯t know is, it is not the dozens of elders that are truly ruling them.

    There is another group of people on top of the food chain. Even on top of the King or Queen, they are going to elect, even on top of all the elders.

    They are called the Grand Elders.

    In a secret room within the estate, there are four elves.

    They are sitting around a table and one of them spoke.

    "The faction 2 has spent almost three billion spirit stones today. They started moving funds from the past week. What is happening?"

    The elf to his right answered immediately.

    "It is a desperate attempt to keep their hold on the liquor business. They are afraid that faction 1 would just swallow them."

    "Why did that happen?"

    "A young man named Sam. A human made some new wines and different types of alcohols that taste better than the wine faction 2 makes. My agents said that it is ten times better and his business just grew in two months.

    Within a certain area, faction 2 lost all their customers. He hit them like a storm. Completely unexpected and unprepared. And he made it clear that he would be auctioning the recipes and techniques off and he did exactly that.

    Faction 1 took this opportunity to make faction 2 bleed a bit.

    They just jacked the price up like crazy and these three billion spirit stones are the result of that."

    The first elf who seemed to be the leader of the team thought carefully and said.

    "Where did this Same from? What area is he based on?"

    "His first identity was created in the Cane town. He and his friends formed a group of four. It was told that they struggled a lot to save the required capital to open their first business all the while improving the cultivation and surviving.

    They are orphans. After getting the capital, they started their first business. But then the elections are happening in the town and his food recipes have a good influence on the people. In fact, one recipe is extremely useful for the elves of lower-level cultivation which attracted the attention of the two factions.

    He seemed to have understood that it would be hard to keep them with him, so he decided to auction it off, before they are strong-armed him and earned some big money.

    He came to the city with that money and started this alcohol business."

    He paused a bit before and continued.

    "But there are some anomalies with him. At first, faction 2 wanted to deal with him immediately due to some personal issues, but the assassin sent was burned alive and even the envoy who nned the assassin was set on fire.

    It took a lot from the healers to save his life.

    It was suspected that he has someone supporting him and protecting him. That hidden figure was named Robin Hood.

    But we still don¡¯t know if it is true. Because the name was given by Sam himself."

    "Is there anything else?"

    "Yes, he seemed to be having some friends with a person named Raunak. A bureaucrat from a normal background. He got promoted twice in two days and all the tax target was cleared by Sam himself.

    It is almost like the businesses are created just to clear Raunak¡¯s target." Then he went on exining about Raunak¡¯s special petition for arger promotion.

    "Keep an eye on both of them and report to me, if there are any big moves they are going to make. If the data until now is wrong, he would be certainly creating some more new businesses. Ask some of our agents to study the businesses and try to guess his mindset and approach towards this business.

    His actions already tilted the bnce between the two factions a bit. If he makes too big of moves, it would be more chaotic. The finances of the two factions are important for the uing king/Queen elections.

    There shouldn¡¯t be too much of a difference.

    But don¡¯t dispose of him. His ideas are good and everything is for the improvement of the realm. So, let him make what he wants but make sure that both factions lose an equal amount of money or gain an equal amount of money.

    We can take this as a test for him and see if he can get promoted further to our headquarters. Nowadays, the candidates are not that useful, it is almost a waste to send them up. This Raunak is also not bad. If he gets promoted this time and makes use of this Sam properly then we can add him to the shortlist for the final tests.

    After all, the most important elves would know how to use the inferior races properly and he did that greatly until now."

    They went on discussing things on variouss and making decisions.

    Meanwhile on another ce of 1. In a beautiful small estate, there is a smaller mansion in which a female elf who was dressed gracefully is looking at the back garden where two firebirds are standing on the branches of therge tree as they lovingly cuddled together.

    She is holding a wooden token in her hands which is usually used to sendrge amounts of information.

    She had a longing smile on her face as if she envied the romance of the two firebirds.

    The scene is like it came out of a painting.

    At this moment, a person walked into the room and yelled.

    "Ramya."

    She came out of her daze and looked at the man who came into her room. She sighed and stood up and bowed her head reluctantly before greeting him.

    "Greetings Father."

    "I said, you shouldn¡¯t contact Raunak until the bet is over. So where did that wooden tokene from?"

    "It is not a message father. It is the new report sent from the faction regarding the new liquor auction that happened in 2. They said that the n has seeded and also the details of the people behind the auction. It just happened that Raunak is also behind this.

    He managed to clear his second tax target and got another promotion. In fact, he managed to gain special permission from the Elder¡¯s council.

    I am happy for him, but I didn¡¯t deliberately contact him, neither did he."

    The man snorted and left the room with a gloomy expression. He didn¡¯t have anything to refuse his daughter and he knew that is the truth. But he just couldn¡¯t help but feel grumpy at the fact that his daughter is thinking about that low-life.

    He has a simr token in his hands and muttered to himself.

    "This Sam is messing up my future ns, I would see how Raunak will get promoted from now on."

 Chapter 737: Deal With Ananya

    Sam doesn¡¯t know that he is in the eyes of someone at the top. An existence he didn¡¯t even know of.

    He knew that he would attract some attention from the higher-ups since he made them take so much money out of them. But he didn¡¯t expect that there would be attention from Raunak¡¯s side and he didn¡¯t even know that he already grabbed that attention.

    Currently, he is sitting with his friends and all four of them have crystal sses filled with rum in front of them.

    They are silent and asionally taking a sip and savoring the alcohol.

    Sam soon broke the silence.

    "Let¡¯s put your journey on hold until the next Pce of inheritance.

    There is around two years for the next Pce of inheritance and from the looks of things we might find ourselves staying in this ce for a significant part of time.

    We can think of it after that."

    All three of them looked at him for a second and exchanged nces in confusion.

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "I am not changing my mind. I am still extremely adamant on you going on a trip. But I know what you are afraid of. The world is too vast. There is a significant chance that we might drift apart. So, I would think of a way for us to find each other easily in the future and then we can discuss it.

    For now, let us focus on what you want to do for the next few days. You seemed to have had a significant experiences travelling all over the."

    "I noticed a lot of interesting things. The whole area I travelled is full of fields. Particrly this one area full of cotton fields. There is also cotton ginning factory and yarn making factory. Many men and women work there and even some children work for it.

    The cotton is being made to yarn, then fabric and then clothes that could be used normally instead a normal armor. The cotton is also extremely flexible and with the right influence during its growth, it can develop the attributes of different elements.

    They are mostly using for the attachments of the armors though. After all the hides are not always aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Particrly these elves and they use this cotton fabric to pad the insides of the metal armor which makes itfortable for the wearers."

    Watt started exining about his journey. Jack and Philip are surprised a bit. They didn¡¯t know how to break the ice with Sam, but Watt helped them do it.

    So, they also started talking about all their experiences. Sam just sipped his rum and listened to them talking.

    He learned about so many things about this.

    These guys just went to every corner and met all kinds of people. They noticed all kinds of agriculture that is going all over the.

    Sam thought that they are mostly focused on normal crops that are mostly rted to food. But there aremercial crops as well.

    There is an equivalent to turmeric here that is extremely useful in making inscription ink that are useful for wooden elemental inscriptions and also in form of a spice that could add some value to the cooked food and finally it can also be used as an ingredient in medicine.

    In some ces there is another thing simr to potato, sweet potato and some more bulb and starchy vegetables.

    This is extremely surprising to him. This uncanny resemnce is making him feel a bit curious about the origin of this world.

    The resemnce is extremely uncanny to the point that it is almost scary.

    While he is talking to them, Raunak sent the resource list of the whole and it is almost unnecessary at this point.

    When he went through the list he couldn¡¯t help but sigh.

    "I think we are not going to part from the liquor business anytime soon. But this might be a bit troublesome."

    "Why? Last time it worked well. We also raked in more than we expected."

    "And that is the problem. There must be several eyes on us by now and some people might even be plotting against us to get our money. I am sure that if we are alone in the forest now, we would be done for. If I am not right, there are at least ten people trying to kill us and take everything that we have on us."

    "Then what are we going to do?"

    "Let¡¯s put on a show and find out. I would try to mess with the alcohol business once again and see to what lengths they would go to maintain their bnce.

    Our next project will be rted to the rice again."

    This time, Sam didn¡¯t want to start another brewery though. He would just inform the other parties about the product in his hands.

    He went to meet with the ape to make the rice wine after giving enough instructions while he started preparing vodka from the potatoes that are avable in this ce.

    This time, the resources extended a bit and he managed to get everything he wanted easily and with the help of the extra time the divine dimension provided, the products are ready within a week.

    Sam informed Ragad and Ananya.

    But to his surprise Ragad didn¡¯t agree to the auction. He didn¡¯t want to bid for the alcohol recipes and this gave Ananya to have a bit more leverage to ask for a lower price.

    "Your good days are over Mr.Sam. It seems like someone felt like you are overreaching a bit and decided to put a stop to your advances. You cannot be as rampant as before." Ananya said with a smile as she sat on the chair with her arms crossed."

    Sam opened the bottle of Vodka and poured some for her before pouring some for him and said.

    "Stopping my advances?"

    "We can talk about thatter. We can discuss the business first."

    "Sure thing. Please have a taste and tell me what you want to offer."

    She nodded and was about to take a sip, but Sam gestured her to stop and said.

    "I think you would feel the real taste of it, if you drank it in one gulp."

    "Sure."

    She did as he told and her eyes widened in disbelief. The Vodka is one of the hardest liquors on normal earth, one must wonder what kind of experience it is giving when it was made with potatoes full of spiritual energy.

    She immediately shook her head and covered her surprise as that would be a disadvantageous thing to do in a business negotiation.

    She then went to the rice wine which is far milderpared to Vodka and the familiar and enriching after taste of the rice along with the feeling of the alcohol is fascinating to her.

    "Five hundred million for both of thembined." She spoke immediately as she tried to control her emotions.

    "One billion for each of them." Sam gave a counter.

    As he did that, he took out a jar of fruit juice that has simr taste to that of a ripe mango and poured it into a ss and mixed it with Vodka before creating a small ice cube in his hand and cing it in the ss.

    He them pushed the ss to her.

    Ananya reluctantly took the ss over and drank it. Her eyes widened once again and she pursed her lips in contemtion.

    "One billion for both of them. The deal is off if I have to go more than that."

    "Really? Don¡¯t threaten men with that Ms. Ananya."

    "I am not threatening. You are being a bit too greedy. Don¡¯t you think it is weird that no one from the faction 1 came here for such a good alcohol? Why do you think that? You have no idea what kind of position you are in and what kind of people are involved in this."

    "Oh really? Then why did you not think why I didn¡¯t proceed with another brewery and take the same strategy as before. Do you think anything is stopping me from doing that? As far as I know, if I take Raunak¡¯s special permit, I don¡¯t even need to go through the regr administrative procedures and here I am talking a deal with you.

    If I did that, you guys will be knocking on my door for the recipe all by yourselves. At least that is what you and the rest of your peers would do, if you don¡¯t know the people involved in this and if you don¡¯t know what kind of people are interrupting your advances.

    But I didn¡¯t do any of that, do you not wonder why?"

    When he said those words, suddenly Ananya thought of some possibilities which made her open her mouth wide open.

    "No, I don¡¯t know who they are. I am not that resourceful. But I am not stupid either. This is what I don¡¯t understand. Just how narcissist are the elves to assume that everyone is dumber than them?

    Anyway, just leave that forter. I would like you to offer another number. If not, in two days, every paddy farmer will get a copy of the rice wine and every potato farmer will get a copy of the recipe of the vodka. All with no cost. What do you think will happen by then?"

    And these words almost choked Ananya of her breath.

 Chapter 738: Attack

    Ananya was too dazed to talk to Sam.

    She didn¡¯t expect such a calm but aggressive stance from him. This ispletely out of her expectations. Now that Sam mentioned it, she is finally thinking in that direction. Why did Sam use this method when he can follow the same method?

    She just felt that it is normal because she knew that some people are keeping an eye on her.

    But Sam is not supposed to know that, but why did he still take such a step? If he opened another liquor business this time, the situation would be a bit extreme. Particrly, when all the elections on the are over by now and only the final appointment of the person in charge is left to do.

    That too if it is a normal person they would do it since they raked money the first time, they would do so the second time.

    There are so many reasons for Sam to take the first approach and very little reason for him to not to do it.

    This is unexpected.

    She wanted to ask some questions regarding this, but Sam didn¡¯t want to do that and gave the ultimatum.

    This made her even more surprised.

    "If you really do that, wouldn¡¯t all your work be lost?"

    "Let us be honest, will all the money we earned, even if it is divided between me and my friends equally, it is around 750 million spirit stones each. Arguably, we are probably the richest Pre-transcendent stage cultivators in the Charbhum realm.

    Even if we are not, we will still be in the top ten. We wouldn¡¯t need extra money to improve our statuses. As for the usage, those resources would be enough for a while.

    We wouldn¡¯t be needing the extra money anytime soon.

    And I made this on a whim. So, I can afford to lose it. But what about you? Your whole faction is trying to survive andpete with another faction of equal size and you have to help the elves as a whole to suppress and deal with the remaining races like centaurs and sirens all the while keeping your enemies from other realms in check.

    Even if you don¡¯t care about the profits from these things, what about the losses that you would suffer from losing the business to this free alcohol they make themselves.

    What would happen if the recipe spreads? After all, it only takes some energy control and few ingredients that are used for daily consumption. What do you think would happen?

    Unless and of course, if the government forcefully stops the production, you wouldn¡¯t be able to stop them, and what would be the cost of the forceful implementation in a democratic society? I would really like to test that. Would you like to do the same?"

    Sam said leisurely as he swirled the ss in his hands.

    Ananya gulped and started negotiating a bit more passively and soon both of them agreed on 1.3 billion spirit stones.

    Just the recipes without any brewery and the market value, this is already a big amount. After the deal was signed, Ananya looked at him before saying.

    "You are a bit different from all the humans I have seen. You are smart, in fact too smart for your own good. I like your courage, but I would advise you to watch your step. At the end of the day, you are just a human."

    She turned around and started walking out.

    "I am not just any human Ananya. I am Sam."

    "That¡¯s just your name. It doesn¡¯t make much difference."

    "You might change your mind soon. See you around."

    Ananya left the ce hurriedly with a lot of conflicting thoughts. She reported every single word to her superiors and the words traveled all over to the Elder¡¯s estate in a single day.

    Meanwhile, Sam went to meet Raunak and decided to pay the tax. For 1.3 billion and the fifteen percent of the special tax it is one hundred and ny-five million spirit stones.

    That is a huge cut in the eight hundred million and they only have to create six hundred and five million.

    It has only been a week.

    Raunak has a newfound hope and excitement while Sam is extremely rxed. He decided to take some time off, to focus on his skills a bit. He has some new ideas of maism and gravity he can manipte.

    Along with that, he got his hands on some new materials that are brought back by the trio. They are the cotton fabric, some roots, some stems, and so many other nt materials.

    While thinking like that, he went back to the new residence he got in the city. Since he is staying a significant time, a residence not only guarantees privacy it is morefortable too.

    But after he entered the residence, he noticed that his friends didn¡¯te back. He decided to rx a bit and was about to move into his room. But before he could do that, he sensed some crisis and looked up.

    The roof is covering the normal vision. But Sam could see it with his energy vision. It is like a meteoring towards him at an extreme speed. From the size, the whole residence and yards will be under the explosion region.

    He wouldn¡¯t be able to escape based on the speed.

    He could only find another way, so he immediately entered the divine dimension.

    *BOOM*

    Therge meteor struck his house with the mes surrounding it. The wave of the explosion shook the surrounding members and many people who already saw that something is falling are running towards the ce are shook.

    The whole area is surrounded by people and the ce where the residence previously was burning like hell. The rocks and metal parts of the house are melting.

    When they are wondering what happened. Sam came out of the mes with a gloomy look on his face. He looked at the nearest city guard and said.

    "I would like to file aint."

    The city guard came out of his daze when he looked at Sam. There is only gloom all over Sam, but other than that, there is no other feeling. The one he is looking for is fear.

    The fear that should have been present in any normal person when his house was sted.

    Sam walked to the city administrative office and filed theint. By this time, his friends heard the news and came to the office to meet him.

    "Let¡¯s go to the inn, before we talk."

    Sam didn¡¯t want to answer any questions now.

    But when they reached the nearest inn, they are denied entry and the same thing happened to them in the rest of the inns.

    They are not being given entrance. Raunak came running to Sam who is standing in the middle of the streets with his friends. He looked towards the sky as if he was thinking something.

    "I was in a conference where the election counting is happening so I didn¡¯t know what happened. I heard you were attacked after I came out. What happened?"

    Philip exined everything he knew and Raunak¡¯s face drained of color.

    "Not everyone can attack someone in the middle of the city. I think someone huge is targeting you."

    Sam stayed silent for a while and started walking. He didn¡¯t speak and walked into the forest. He went to an area that seemed to have been newly cleared of the trees.

    He looked at the trio and said.

    "Make a tent here. We are staying here from now on."

    With that, he walked to a thick tree stump that was nearby and sat on it.

    He looked around the forest as if he is searching for something. The aura he is emitting is like a predator that was thirsty for some blood. As if he is waiting for his prey toe to find him.

    Soon there is some movement around and Raunak got nervous as the time went on. He felt something is about to go on.

    And then it came. His worst fear came. There is a group of Late-stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivators surrounding them.

    Sam just sat there.

    He sat there with his hands on his knees as he leaned his upper body forward and looked at the Centaur that is running at the full speed while swinging arge halberd.

    Raunak was about to say something but Watt stopped him.

    "Just stay quiet for a while."

    "But they are well-known criminals. It would be hard for him to battle."

    "Just watch."

    By this moment, the halberd was about tond on Sam¡¯s neck from the side. At this instance, Sam raised his left hand which turned metallic, and held the halberd¡¯s de and energy has flown through the shaft and metallic spikes protruded at the hand of the halberd piercing the Centaur¡¯s hands.

    Sam then held the halberd in his hand and looked at the centaur who raised his front hooves to hit him. But Sam jumped up and used the halberd to cut straight from the head.

    The halberd hit the centaur on the corbone and it went straight through his body, slicing it into two vertical halves.

    The ribs are broken along with all the bones that are present in the way, The blood spilled everywhere and Sam was bathed in that blood.

    Raunak was stumped and looked at Sam in horror. At this moment Watt¡¯s voice woke him out of the daze.

    "You didn¡¯t think he is just a chef who can cook and make wine, did you? Remember what you said about how not anyone can attack someone in the middle of the city."

    Raunak looked at him expecting him to finish.

    "Not anyone can walk away after they made a move on him."

 Chapter 739: Robin Strikes Again

    Sam looked at the two pieces of the centaur¡¯s corpse in front of him and threw the halberd away.

    Initially, there are ten people who were running towards Sam, but now that one of them is gone in an instant, the remaining nine people halted in their tracks.

    Sam walked towards the next opponent without waiting for their advance. The next one is a Half-Elf.

    He is fast, but not fast enough to escape. Even his agility didn¡¯t help him dodge when Sam kicked straight in his face.

    He fell on his back and Sam just stood on him with one foot on his chest and the other on his face.

    He constantly stomped his face and soon the head was buried into the loose soil and cracked after hitting a solid rock.

    The ten of them are clearly not a team, they just came together on someone else¡¯s instructions, but when they saw Sam¡¯s savage nature and the leisure expressions of the trio without any sign of anxiousness, they are starting to get worried.

    They are actually the criminals that are supposed to be in the prison and some official in charge of the prison or an official that has influence big enough to let ten criminals out made them have a go at him after making sure that he didn¡¯t have a house or a residence in the city.

    Sam kind of guessed this from the meteor strike. The strike would have made a serious damage to him. The energy is too much in that one attack and even if Sam managed to destroy it, the rocks would be easily destroyed, but the remains will destroy the surroundings which would be med on Sam.

    It is just a trap that has a few oues that are beneficial to the hidden party that is nning something against Sam.

    But that didn¡¯t stop Sam from getting angry. The house is his after all. Not anyone can destroy it at their whim and not pay a price for that.

    So, Sam wanted to send a message.

    And he is doing so. For the next five minutes, it is a heartless ughter and the whole area was dyed in blood. He held arge battle hammer in his hands as he stood in front of thest tenth candidate who is a human.

    He knelt before Sam and looked at him with pleading eyes.

    "Please, let me go. I will tell you who sent me. I will give you all the details."

    He asked for mercy again and again and Sam only replied with one sentence.

    "You don¡¯t have to."

    With that, he smashed the battle hammer on his head. The head exploded as a watermelon and brain matter spilled all over the ce.

    The corpse fell backward. Sam extended his hand and once again used the soul necromancy and called the Specter out.

    The Specter absorbed the soul and shot a light towards Sam¡¯s forehead giving the required memories.

    Sam went through them and saw an elf along with the remaining nine criminals altogether. The elf is an official from the city prison.

    Sam waved his hand and the zoi termites came out along with the locusts to clean the battlefield and therger insects even collected the bones and took them back to the divine dimension.

    They don¡¯t know if someone was attracted by themotion or it is a sheer coincidence but the city guards came ten minutester and inspected the battle traces all the while questioning the group.

    "Ten criminals escaped from the prison and some people reported that they came this way. Have you seen them?"

    Philip took it up on himself to answer their questions as Raunak is still a bit nervous about the things that are happening all of a sudden.

    He was ecstatic by the fact that a good portion of the tax target was cleared and on the same day, there was an attack on a person who is responsible for the tax clearance.

    The worst part is they don¡¯t even know who they pissed off.

    "We didn¡¯t see any of them," Philip answered the city guards.

    "Then what are the signs of the battle."

    "We are just sparring."

    "Sparring?"

    "Yes. We are a bit tense about the attack on our house, so we are here to relieve some of the tension by sparring. Why? Is it illegal too?"

    The city guards were dumbfounded.

    Their presence here is not a coincidence at all. They were told to go to this ce and identify the bodies of either these four guys or the dead bodies of the escaped criminals and arrest these four guys.

    But here the situation is entirely different. There is not a single sign of a corpse nearby. There is some blood, but they are insisting that came from the sparring.

    They are at a loss for words.

    They couldn¡¯t do anything and just go back to the city administration office.

    Sam went to ake nearby and jumped to clean himself up while calming himself down. Even though he was angry, he wouldn¡¯t have lost his cool so much if not for the fact that the other party dered war without even showing up in front of his face.

    The enemy is showing hiscence and superiority through their actions and he wanted to make a chink on that mask.

    After the swim and a good rinse off of his body, he met with Raunak and said.

    "You have to be safe no matter what. We still don¡¯t know who is behind this. If you are not sure about your safety in the city, you can stay here. I am sure you will be safer here."

    As he spoke, he went back to camp and started cing the formation discs in various ces to make a defensive formation.

    The meteorite strike is a real pain in the ass.

    Soon the night fell and a small shadow entered the city without anyone noticing.

    It went to the area where all the higher grade officials usually reside and entered arge house.

    There is a middle-aged-looking Male-Elf is having sex with three humandies at the same time in a bedroom.

    He is so lost in passion that he didn¡¯t notice the small shadowing in and going out of the room.

    The rest of the house was empty. Nobody else was here and there are very few surveince formations that could be easily ovee in the shadow mode.

    As for the defensive formations they have to be activated after detecting any foreign presence or attacks.

    Sam came out of the divine dimension. He is wearing his cloaked outfit with his face covered. He masked his presence as much as possible as he held a ss bottle in his hands and poured the transparent liquid everywhere.

    He didn¡¯t make much sound and was as silent as he can. But he didn¡¯t deliberately hide his presence either. He just walked around and threw the biofuel all around. He must say that this thing is more reliable than methane gas, which would give itself away easily.

    He could still hear the sounds from upstairs that is extremely irritating. That guy is so involved that he didn¡¯t even bother to scan the surroundings.

    This is something Sam has noticed before. The elves are feeling too safe. They are not at all cautious. It might be because of theirws and the fact that they are extremely dominant within the Charbhum realm without any rivals, but this level of fearlessness is actually new to Sam.

    And along with that, he didn¡¯t see any form of high-level criminal activity. This ce is weirdly peaceful.

    After fifteen minutes, Sam once again went upstairs, but this time he didn¡¯t opt to the shadow mice or even his shadow form. He walked upstairs without any stealth.

    This time, the guy was alerted. He stopped his activity and became cautious when Sam is at the door.

    He opened it and walked in without any reservations. The threedies screamed and tried to hide their bodies.

    "The three of you better leave now. You don¡¯t want to lose your life here."

    The three of them didn¡¯t know what to do and tried to wear their clothes first.

    "Who are you?" The official is calmer than Sam expected. He looked at Sam without any nefarious intent radiating on his face or in his eyes. He is creepily calm.

    "Robin Hood."

    And these two words managed to crack that emotionless face.

    "You seemed to have heard of my name." Seeing that guy is silent, Sam just continued.

    "You came to the wrong ce. Attacking an official is an offense punishable by death and even if I kill you, I wouldn¡¯t be charged with murder."

    "Well, threatening as soon you opened your mouth. What a brave thing to do? Now let us not make any wild assumptions that you can kill me before we do anything send those three women out. I don¡¯t kill the people that didn¡¯t offend me."

    "They must be kept here. They can act as my witnesses."

    "Your choice." With that, Sam made his move.

 Chapter 740: No Sea

    Sam was surrounded by the ck smoke as he used the shadow mode and bypassed the threedies. The target is in the middle of all three of them and he definitely didn¡¯t think that Sam would just jump at him like that.

    He is just a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator and he knew about the name Robin Hood who is the person that burned a Transcendent stage cultivator alive.

    He wanted more people to present in the room so that he can use them as meat shields if he has to.

    He knew that since this Robin hood, can enter his bedroom without anyone in the street full of guards noticing, he has to be careful. As for being a witness, he is just bluffing to buy some time to make sense of the situation.

    This trick would have worked on normal people. A guy with confidence and calm will seem like a difficult target.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care. No matter how confident a deer is it is still a deer at the end of the day. It might bluff a fox, but it can¡¯t bluff a lion. It can only be supper and the more it bluff the faster it will meet its fate.

    The same thing happened now.

    Sam held the man by his face and mmed him into the bed. The shadow mode was deactivated and he increased the gravity as he mmed him again and again.

    The first hit destroyed the bed easily and they already hit the floor. Sam just mmed him without giving a chance and soon there is a hole in which they dropped down to the bottom floor.

    The target finally managed to gather his senses and wines started popping up and threw Sam away.

    Sam in turn and then threw a ss bottle straight at him.

    It didn¡¯t do anything and the transparent liquid that fell on him didn¡¯t even do anything. But this guy is smart and he is not that savagely insane to ignore this.

    Particrly, when the liquid is reacting to his wood elemental energy. The first thought that came to his mind is to run to the door and his anxiousness grew even more because Sam is not even worrying that he would escape.

    Sam just followed him leisurely, when the target went out the room and was about to reach the main door of the hall.

    At this moment, a small me bird was created in his palm and slowlynded on the door which in turn started a bright orange fire.

    The target ignored the immediate appearance of the fire and was about to open the door, but as soon he extended his hand towards the me, his hand was caught on fire and he immediately took a step back and tried to put it out. It is spreading rapidly over his body and he can clearly see the part the transparent liquid was ying in it.

    He abandoned the front entrance and ran through the hall towards the rear entrance of the mansion in another room.

    But the small sparks that are falling on the floor along with some pieces of the burned flesh and the me at the entrance are spreading all over the house.

    Sam who is standing threw another ss bottle at him when he entered the rear room which made the fire from the arm of the target spread all over the rear room.

    The target once again ran into a different room and this time, he left a small trail of fire behind him which propagated the mes and soon the whole house is on fire and Sam is not letting the fire die down by dropping the ss bottles.

    After some futile attempts, the target who is more resilient than Sam imagined came running to him and begged in a painful voice.

    "Please save me. I will do anything for you."

    "I don¡¯t need you to do anything."

    "Why are you doing this? It is about Sam, right? I can give you details, I will act as your double agent. I can get you more information."

    "You don¡¯t have to say anything. I will get what I want."

    By this time, the fire already alerted all the guards and the residents and they all came running towards the house. Sam leisurely raised his hand and performed another soul necromancy.

    He must say, the vampire part of him is loving the necromancy. He is also having the urge to drink blood now and then, but he can curb that easily but this necromancy is also kind of bing addictive because it ising so easily to him.

    After he got what he came for, he just left the burning house the same way he entered.

    While going back, he is looking at another set of memories in which the target that was just burned is taking orders from someone else.

    The current target is only in charge of a small portion of prison guards who are also part of the city guards, he is not that powerful. But the guy who gave orders to him to release the ten criminals is actually an initial stage transcendent level cultivator and also in charge of the whole security of the city.

    This guy is someone who is extremely powerful within the city and his position is next only to the city lord and he is only answerable to the city lord himself.

    Sam didn¡¯t go after him immediately, rather he wanted to wait for a good time.

    He returned to the camp and rested for the night.

    But right before dawn, everyone in the camp was at high alert as they came out of the tent and looked at the sky. Another meteor is striking down from the sky.

    This time, Sam is not nning on going down. He ced a surveince formation precisely to get a warning so that he wouldn¡¯t be caught off guard, just to fight back.

    His whole body turned rocky and he crouched down a bit. A stance to jump up.

    The energy is being pumped into the leg muscles crazily while the gravity in the spot he stood is being manipted. He reduced the gravity so that he can have more output and jumped upwards.

    His body shot up and met with the meteor that wasing down in midair.

    Therge meteor exploded and turned into a bunch of ming rocks. It set the surrounding forest on fire while raining down on the camp.

    The trio activated a defensive formation and the debris didn¡¯t harm the camp.

    Sam who shed with the meteor fell back down with the same force, but he turned his body into wind elemental fusion and reduced the impact of the fall.

    As soon as hended, he turned back normal and spat out a mouthful of blood.

    The attack is more than what he thought. When he shed with that meteor, his insides shook and he felt the full force of the strike.

    This is not just using the size of the rock and the mes to their usage, they are even using the gravity to their usage.

    From the force, it came and the mass it has, it didn¡¯te out of thin air. It definitely fell from arge height, but for some reason, they managed to hide that.

    Sam really wanted to know who is behind these attacks and he is trying to find that person by slowly going back through the chain ofmand.

    The target he dealt withst night is also part of thatmand. As for the gruesome death, it is to provoke the opponent, but it is just in the beginning phase and didn¡¯t achieve the desired result yet.

    But he doesn¡¯t want to hurry. He will surely run through the process, but he decided to make some tweaks. He took a swig of wine and spoke to his friends.

    "I want you guys to do something for me..."

    He started giving the instructions and the trio kept on nodding and asking their doubts. Soon they learned everything they have to and disappeared into the forest.

    Sam tidied himself up made some tweaks to the formations waiting for Raunak toe.

    Last night, that guy left this ce and didn¡¯te back yet. So, he is waiting for him toe back.

    "How are you guys? I saw the explosion in the sky. Many people from the city saw it, but from the looks of it is different from before."

    Raunak asked as soon as he came.

    "We are fine. The Meteorite was destroyed before it hit the ground, that is why it looked different. By the way, why didn¡¯t any city guardse here?"

    Raunak just pursed his lips and didn¡¯t answer.

    Seeing his silence, Sam didn¡¯t push it and asked.

    "I have something to sell to the Sirens. Is there a way to contact them?"

    "Sirens? What do you want to contact them for?" Raunak was surprised and it is apparent in his tone which surprised Sam a bit.

    Then only he met with a thought. He didn¡¯t meet a single siren since he came to this and he didn¡¯t see a single city with a seashore. Even the trio didn¡¯t mention anything about a sea. This is indeed a bit weird.

 Chapter 741: Hidden Observer

    "There are no sirens on this," Raunak said in a surprised tone.

    "No Sirens?"

    "Yes. Because there is no sea on this."

    "No Sea? That is impossible."

    "Why is it impossible? There is really no sea. Not a single person has seen this."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and went on deep thought. From what he learned, there is a decent water cycle happening on this. There are even monsoons happening now and then. That wouldn¡¯t happen without a decent-sized ocean on the.

    Otherwise, with the consumption rate they have in the form of fruits, crops, and other things, there is no way the groundwater source can sustain. The¡¯s core is not a water elemental cultivator that can easily covert the active spiritual energy into the water.

    Something is wrong with this.

    He took out a map of the and saw theyout. There is really no sea mapped in and he didn¡¯t observe that at first because he was so fixated on the business and promotion. After some thought, he didn¡¯t proceed on the topic too much and said.

    "Okay, I have a different product, but I don¡¯t know which department to consult."

    "What product is it?"

    "A food product. Made of coconut and wheat."

    Sam spoke and took out a coconut biscuit.

    The biscuit is not that specialpared to the wine and everything else, but this thing can be really useful in battle. The coconuts here have high healing factors along with a calming effect on the brain. But what theyck is enough spiritual energy. Most of the spiritual energy is present in coconut water, which itself is a great supplement. The white flesh of the coconut has some healing and calming effects just like the water, but there is no water.

    It is mostly used as an eating product just for its taste, there is not much use to it without the water.

    But Sam found a way. He made a coconut biscuit. Just some normal recipes from the earth are extremely useful here and can make the spirit stones rain over his head.

    Raunak ate the biscuit and was surprised by the effect. He could feel the taste of the rich coconut flesh but also the wheat vor and the blend of both of them.

    Sam made a small cut on Raunak¡¯s hand and the energy that entered his body because of the biscuit is mostly channeled to the wound, while removing his pain, calming his brain all the while increasing his natural speed of recovery.

    This is a great thing that can be used between battles. Sam decided to take this back to his organization.

    This really is a great addition to them.

    "How many do you have like this? How difficult is the procedure?"

    "It is not that difficult, but I am surprised that you guys didn¡¯t think of this a long time ago. After all you have both of these main ingredients for hundreds of years and it is easy to make. I couldn¡¯t find a usible reason for not making this except for the sheer stupidity and ignorance."

    Raunak ignored all thements and said.

    "Give me dozen, for now, I will meet a few people that might want to buy it. But this time the deal might be a bit hard to make. Faction 1 is avoiding you a bit and faction 2 just moved too many funds to buy things from you.

    I never expected that they would have to use almost five billion to just get the wine recipes. I don¡¯t even know if that is worth it."

    "Of course, you wouldn¡¯t. Do you really think they are okay with losing a stable market that was in the same state for centuries to a guy that just came out of nowhere? Much less there is a possibility that they would have lost it to faction 1 that is their rival since who knows when.

    They couldn¡¯t only buy with overwhelming money. In fact, they are not really that valuable, but the necessity made them that valuable."

    "Anyway, you are the one who made the money. But please do be careful. We learned that there are different people entering the city nowadays and most of them are mercenaries.

    They are a bit dangerous and operate in the grey areas.

    There is enough reason to suspect that they came to rob you out. You are just too enticing."

    "I will be careful."

    "Where are your friends?"

    "They left to do something for me."

    "I don¡¯t think this is a good time for that."

    "They can save themselves."

    Raunak just shrugged his shoulders and left the ce along with a few boxes of coconut biscuits.

    He first contacted Ragad and sent him a couple of biscuits but there is no response from him and the same thing happened with Ananya.

    There is no response. He can understand this with Ananya because theck of response is due to theck of funds.

    But Ragad has no excuse to do so. Raunak is a bit anxious when he noticed the change in the attitude of Ragad.

    He couldn¡¯t help but think about that one person that could have possibly influenced faction 1 to go against him. Even though there is a possibility he didn¡¯t want to think worse of him and decided to ask someone that can verify it.

    He hired a courier guy to send a box of biscuits and a wooden token with the information back to his mentor and waited for a reply. He really didn¡¯t want to ask his mentor for any help, but he is the only one who has enough connections to change anything in this deadlock.

    Soon the night came and Sam is still in the camp. He is grilling the fish on the fire. The smell is spreading all over and some beasts in the forest are disturbed by it, but he didn¡¯t seem to care.

    He just behaved as if he is in his own backyard.

    After cooking the fish, he sat down and ate as he enjoyed the wine and the cold breeze. He is really enjoying the atmosphere of this ce.

    If only the people watching him from the dark that is standing not too far away, things would have been better and Sam would have let the beasts out to have an even pleasant time. Particrly the panthers. They didn¡¯te out in a long while.

    While Sam is eating, a group of people that didn¡¯t know that Sam already noticed their presence is trying to close the distance as stealthily as possible.

    They are all Half-elves and all of them have a spear in their hands. Their movements, actions, and even the way they took breath are all same.

    They all wore ck clothes that are emitting a dark veil-like aura masking their presence. If it was anyone else they would have really gotten off unnoticed.

    But the current situation is a bit different. Sam had energy vision for quite a while and this stealth is not good enough to fool that.

    So, what the group doesn¡¯t know is that they are moving forward for their inevitable doom.

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to make a move directly and just activated the traps with a mere thought. He made some traps that could be masked by any form of scanning and detection. A person has to be at least Transcendentte-stage and also skilled in detection to find anything.

    So, when the traps are activated, half of the group was already soaked in the biofuel.

    Sam stood up from his makeshift dining table and took out his bow.

    This action and the traps made the mercenary team anxious and they immediately made their move.

    They are just too confident in their stealth that they believed that they are not the easy targets they are.

    Sam shot one arrow after another that just brushed past the targets. Which increased their confidence in their abilities.

    But if they saw the smirk on Sam¡¯s face, they would have thought otherwise. Sam deliberately made the arrows miss so that he can let their guards down.

    He nocked another arrow and this time it was surrounded by ayer of mes and the arrow also caught extremely high temperature.

    So when the arrow grazed past the half-elf, the result is not the same as before. The target started burning in orange mes in the middle of the forest.

    The whole group finally noticed their trouble, but it was already toote. They are too near to Sam and too clear as targets, the next thing that happened in the arrows burning the team that was soaked in the biofuel.

    As for the remaining, they wanted to escape in the fear of the fate of being burned alive. Sam wanted to make them experience this. But he is not going to let them get away.

    And the reason for this is not his satanic pleasures, rather another message to someone else that is watching him from another corner.

 Chapter 742: Testing

    The shadow mice are doing their job extremely well. The first group of half-elves is easily noticed by Sam due to their movement. But there is a bigger threat hiding far away from the ce that is watching him with a piece of special equipment.

    He is too far away from Sam¡¯s spiritual sense, energy vision, and even with the zooming abilitybined with his eye technique is not enough to get a clear image of that person. They are deep inside the forest kilometers away.

    In fact, they were only noticed because shadow mice made a long trip around the forest on Sam¡¯s order so that he could use the whole forest as his operating base and set traps to defend himself.

    They noticed this person who ispletely covered in ck clothes, almost simr to Sam¡¯s dark-cloaked attire and from the descriptions of the mice that saw him, he is using a device simr to a small telescope to look at Sam.

    Sam only learned this now, but he didn¡¯t make any move against him. He wants to see what his goal is.

    That is why he is creating such a gruesome and painful picture to his eyes so that he could see what Sam could do.

    Anyway, it would be hard to observe all the minor details with just the naked vision. He wouldn¡¯t even be able to observe the traps from that far. Unless he is as resourceful as Sam.

    Sam wanted to see to what extent that guy would stay there and how long he is willing to observe him and also send a small message to the people that sent this guy here.

    After his goal was achieved, he went back to rest in his tent.

    The next morning. The City guards once again came and asked about the mercenary team that moved to the forestst night after taking an assignment from the city guards and didn¡¯t report back and they are only met with a bunch of burned trees and Sam¡¯s lie of not seeing them.

    The dead bodies disappeared after all.

    And with Sam¡¯s necromancy, he found out that these mercenaries are only after him for the money. No one sent them here. So, this is just a minor case for him.

    But Sam¡¯s ns slowed down a bit because of them. ording to his own n, he has to meet with that senior official who is in charge of the city guard who ordered the subordinate to send those ten criminals to Sam.

    Then he would burn that house and that guy too and get his memories along with that. That was his original n. But now because of this intervention, he has to change his n.

    The next day, Sam just went on with his rxation. He ate fish, went hunting, cooked, and ate happily.

    And at night, since no one came, he left one of the chess pieces in the tent and left to the city.

    He didn¡¯t use the same approach as the day before though. The target is peacefully cultivating in the middle of the house and since he is a transcendent Sam decided to be a bit more cautious and first activated the soul formation to attack his mentality.

    His caution was correct because, as soon as the formation disc appeared in the house, this guy became alerted and came moved towards the formation disc. But the activating didn¡¯t take as much time and the souls attacked his soul.

    "ARRRRRRGGGGGGGGhhhh...."

    The target held his head and screamed on top of his lungs.

    Sam used this chance to throw the bottle at him which actually missed, but he is not disappointed. The other party has high senses and reaction time, but that doesn¡¯t mean they are invincible. The formation just started.

    Sam threw a barrage of the bottles and soon the target and the rest of the house is soaked in the Biofuel.

    Today Sam is not just looking to kill this guy, he also wants to test something, because this guy is a water element user along with the wood element.

    He would like to see how the Bio-Fuel would work on him.

    Sam set the house on fire and looked at the guy as he rolled on the ground. He is using the water element to put the fire off. Even though it is indeed resisting the fire a lot, it is notpletely extinguishing it.

    He mostly seeded in stopping the spread of the mes than stopping the me itself. The biofuel is continuously burning until it ispletely burned out until the energy in it ispletely consumed.

    Sam just stood there and observed as he threw one bottle after bottle at the struggling person and soon that guy gave up. The bio-fuel is just too much. The quantity itself overwhelmed him.

    But before he couldpletely burn out, the people are already surrounding the house that is burning.

    Sampleted the necromancy and left the house.

    After he returned, he reced his chess piece and started contemting the effects of the biofuel.

    The main drawback is that the level of the sugar cane. The fuel can certainly destroy someone who is within a transcendent realm. But from the intensity, Sam could guess that it wouldn¡¯t do much to a consummate realm cultivator.

    It can at most hurt them a little bit, but killing would be a problem.

    It is just like Methane, but methane can be created by different beasts of different levels. All they have to be is pure fire elemental beasts.

    But the sugar cane is different, it is the gic property of the cane to be at that level, it doesn¡¯t have any natural upgrade directly to the next level where the biofuel made of that could seriously hurt the elves at Consummate realm.

    After noting down the observations, he went through the obtained memories.

    This time the memories revealed a familiar person. Sam saw this person many times and met with him.

    He is none other than Ragad. He is the one that gave out the order. He ced a hit on Sam.

    Sam is really a bit surprised.

    The first thought that came to his mind is the beating Sam gave to him. But he dismissed that idea.

    Because the five percent ¡¯discount¡¯ is actually to make him stop having those thoughts. At least a normal person who is driven by the benefits will think twice before doing anything to Sam. It is a bribe so that they can put that behind them and continue with their business.

    That is what it meant and he is sure that Ragad got the message. From what he knew through Raunak there is no report to the faction 1 members whatsoever that there is a five percent discount. It is aplete secret between Sam and Ragad.

    There must be some reason behind this.

    While he is thinking, Raunak came running to the camp and asked.

    "What have you done? Why are you continuously killing people?"

    "Why are you asking now? You didn¡¯t ask me before when that small-time official was burned down."

    "Because I knew my ce to not ask too much and I am sure that he is the guy that sent the criminals. But the person you killed tonight is the second inmand of the city. In fact, if there is a crisis, he would be the real person in charge.

    Do you even know the depth of these actions?

    Do you know how big of an issue it is?"

    Sam cut a coconut open and gave him to drink the water.

    "Just because he is a guy with status, do you think I would just let them be? You are sorely mistaken. No one would be safe once they try something on me or my friends. It is just a natural consequence.

    Just like how natural it is for fire to be hot and the ice to be cold."

    "Those are naturalws, are you reallyparing your revenge to naturalw? Law is never a choice. But your revenge is an action made by your own choice."

    "My choice is the Law."

    "You are being too arrogant Sam. Not only will you implicate yourself, but you will also implicate your friends and me too."

    Sam smiled at this and said.

    "From how adamant you are sounding it seems like there is more to it than just your concern of your own implication.

    You didn¡¯t react this strongly when I almost killed the Envoy from faction 2. You were pretty okay with that. Why are you so worried now? Are you hiding something from me?"

    Raunak was stumped.

    "I... I..."

    He wanted to say something, but no words came out. Sam just shook his head and went back to enjoying his coconut.

    Raunak took a breath to calm himself down and spoke.

    "I suspect that someone I know might be involved in this."

    "Someone you know means, the father of your lover?"

    Raunak didn¡¯t say anything and just stayed silent.

    "I am sorry if that is supposed to stop me from paying back, it wouldn¡¯t. The sh is inevitable if he is really involved. I can guarantee that your love wouldn¡¯t be involved in this any manner. Unless and of course, shees and messes with me, I wouldn¡¯t do anything to her.

    And that is because of our partnership.

    But that immunity wouldn¡¯t apply to her father. If he is really involved you better think of a way to find out soon and make up your mind."

 Chapter 743: Buying the land

    Days passed.

    It has been a week since the biscuit samples were sent to Raunak¡¯s mentor.

    Sam is silent for this week. There are some mercenaries here and there trying to attack him. But the one he cared most about is still the person that is watching him from a long distance. By now, Sam already installed his surveince devices near that person¡¯s position with the help of shadow mice and is watching the whole scene.

    And it turned out, it is not a single person that is watching him. They are taking turns. And once this became clear, Sam sent a mouse to follow one of the people that are leaving and it led to a cave in distance.

    There is a tunnel inside that cave that led to an underground cave. The shadow mice didn¡¯t manage to infiltrate that ce, because in their own words. They sensed an aura of a natural predator inside.

    They didn¡¯t want to go inside. Sam also didn¡¯t push them. For now, he has an idea of their exact location. So, he can prepare for something.

    As for his next target on this side, Ragad, Sam didn¡¯t want to make a move immediately. For now, it is easy for him if faction 1 makes a deal with him if Ragad was present here.

    He doesn¡¯t want to make the new substitute understand what exactly is happening.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is, Ragad is currently quaking in his boots as he sat on his bed within the City.

    It has been a while since he even dared toe out. All his personal guards are outside his room and he even called for some extra help with the local faction 1 members.

    But the problem is even faction 1 and faction 2 are alerted with the continuous deaths and disappearances.

    Everyone in the official positions knew that the mercenaries that are going into the forest are all going there for Sam. But all of them are disappearing by the time city guards get there.

    As for the deaths of two officials and one of them being the person in charge of the whole city, security is causing a serious bacsh.

    Particrly, to the newly elected city lord. Faction 1 won this time and with a significant margin. They are managed to push faction 2 back. Sam didn¡¯t influence these elections much, so he didn¡¯t care. But it has something to do with most towns getting faction 1 as their leader.

    Now as soon as faction 1 took over two officials died and everyone knows that both of them belonged to faction 1.

    This not only caused unrest in the people, even faction 2 is trying to take advantage of the situation. They are questioning the credibility andpetence of the new city lord tantly and the faction 1 officials are trying their best to defend.

    But both parties knew who is responsible for the deaths. Even though they didn¡¯t believe that Sam killed them directly and there is no proof of significant evidence supporting their suspicions, they are sure that ¡¯people behind him¡¯ are responsible for the deaths.

    Only one person in the city has benefitted and that is Raunak. Even though he is tense and anxious because of the possibility of a conflict between Sam and his future inw, he is really relieved with all kinds of tensions.

    No one has found trouble with him in the past few days. He was as free as bird.

    On this day, he finally got a reply from his mentor.

    There are two separate documents. The first one is the document regarding the coconut biscuits. There is a high-grade military official that wants to send someone to discuss the deal. But they don¡¯t just want the recipe. They want an already established factory.

    The best part of this is that the military officer is not from any faction. He is a person just like Raunak, he was an orphan who grew up with his own achievements without any support. Now he is supporting some of these neutral members within the military.

    They are an elite force and they have quite a bit of sway within the military.

    But the second document is something that is making him feel a bit conflicted.

    It was mentioned that it is indeed the father of his lover that ced a hit on Sam¡¯s head.

    This made him more angry than anxious.

    He is angry because there is a pact between them. He was promised that he wouldn¡¯t be disturbed in his growth. He even wanted to ask for an oath. But he didn¡¯t want to hurt the feelings of his lover and now it seems like he made a mistake.

    He didn¡¯t want to think the worst of the people. Even when he was an orphan and struggling, he didn¡¯t think the worst of the world because someone helped him get out of that situation. But as time passed and the more he experienced, the more wrong he felt.

    He slowly walked out of his residence and made his way to Sam¡¯s camp.

    Currently, Sam is cooking some wish. He is trying to make a curry and the smell is spreading far and wide.

    For the past few days, he is trying to recreate the dishes of earth. He might be in grave danger, but he is not that worried. As far as he was concerned, the situation is still underplete control.

    When Raunak came with that gloomy face, Sam asked.

    "Is there any news? It has already been a week."

    "There is some news, a military official is a willing to purchase that. But they just don¡¯t want the recipe, they also want a factory in which they can easily make the biscuits."

    "That¡¯s not a problem, but they should be willing to pay for that too."

    "Of course, there is no problem regarding the budget. As long as it is not overpriced that is. They are a special unit in the military and they have enough funds."

    "Then that wouldn¡¯t be a problem, just look for a property..."

    But Sam wasn¡¯t even able to give the requirements before he was interrupted.

    "No, you wouldn¡¯t be able to buy anything in the city. Nobody would be selling you anything."

    "Really? Since the people are unwilling, what about the government?"

    "The government?"

    "Yes, I would like to buy this area."

    Sam said as he extended his hands and pointed to the expanse they are in.

    "You want to buy this area."

    "Yes, from what I know this forest doesn¡¯te under the city limits, but it would still be under the city¡¯s authority. Since you are a special office, try to use that to strong-arm them into selling this area to me. They have no reason to reject this since it is extra revenue for the city.

    This would also help you clear some targets in your tax. After all, tax is essentially revenue, so you can make the case and add this to your required target. If there is any opposition, just tell them that you would meet with the Elder¡¯smittee."

    Raunak thought for a bit and nodded his head.

    "Then what about your future father-inw. Have you gotten any information on that end?"

    Sam asked and this made the atmosphere tense.

    Raunak¡¯s reaction of clenching his fists and the gloomy face clearly showed what is happening.

    "Why is he targeting me? Is it just because he wanted to mess your ns or is there any other reason?"

    "No, there is nothing else. He just wants to stop my promotion."

    "You are smart and cautious enough to ask me to give you that forest spirit oath. Why didn¡¯t you do the same to that guy? Don¡¯t tell me, you thought that he would keep his word just for his daughter."

    Raunak¡¯s face turned even uglier which made Sam understand that his guess was spot on.

    "What a na?ve kid you are.

    Anyway, don¡¯t worry too much. He wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything to me. All you have to do is make sure that you keep the procedures in the administration wouldn¡¯t encounter any problems. I will take care of everything on this site.

    By the way, how much do you think thisnd costs."

    "Around thirty million."

    "That much? Why is and so pricey here?"

    "It is because of the elven culture, they just value thend a lot. Since we worship the forest and agriculture, every piece ofnd is valuable to us."

    "With your elves, everything has be expensive here. I never thought I would be earning money this easily but also spending that easily.

    Just finish with the procedures. Money is not a problem anyway.

    Is there a way to hire any artisans that are specialized in construction?"

    "I think that would also be a problem. There is not a single person in the city that wants a business deal with you."

    "Well, that¡¯s okay. At least they cannot vite the existing agreements. I will take care of the construction. But speed up the procedures, I want to start it early and I don¡¯t want to get in trouble with the government as soon as I start the construction."

    "Sure."

    Raunak was about to leave and turned around to ask Sam.

    "Are there more targets in your mind?"

    "Yes."

    "Who is the next one?"

    "Some stalkers and then our old business partner."

 Chapter 744: Therapy

    Raunak finished the procedures on the same day. He is especially fast and he is clearly seemed disturbed.

    He brought the documents to Sam by evening.

    Sam already paid for this.

    It really is expensive for such a small piece ofnd. Even though the area is considered huge for even a mansion, it is still too much to pay thirty million for such and.

    "Do you have any bacsh to add this to your target amount?"

    "No, they agreed immediately. There is no problem with normal officials. Only the officials that arepletely involved with factions are giving me trouble.

    For some reason, my situation seemed to have spread through the upper administration of the city. Faction 1 is trying to suppress me with that infamous disdain and faction 2 is distancing themselves from me so that they wouldn¡¯t end up helping me in case I join faction 1 in the future."

    Raunak exined.

    Sam gave out a beer and asked him to take a seat before speaking.

    "But this doesn¡¯t seem to be the problem that is bugging you. Do you want to talk about it?"

    "It¡¯s just...." Raunak wanted to say something, but it is as if he couldn¡¯t find any words.

    "The world is so fucking unfair?"

    Raunak nodded.

    "I thought you were an orphan."

    "I am."

    "Then why didn¡¯t learn this earlier?"

    "Learn what?"

    "That the world is unfair. You should be one of the people that should know that the world is not supposed to be fair."

    "But why?" Raunak asked him in a weak voice.

    Sam just smiled and let him continue.

    "Why is it so unfair? Is it really too much to ask that I get what I work hard for? Is it too much to ask that?"

    "Of course, it is too much. Why should you get what you want just because you worked hard? Everyone works hard. Every single creature works hard. It is the easiest thing one can do.

    If you want something, you have to prove that you want it, you have to show that you need it, you have to need it as much as you need air to breathe as if you would die if you don¡¯t have it. But there would be people trying to steal that too.

    Because, because of your desire, they are losing something they desire, you have to fight for it. But they are strong, the world has only one goal, to bring you to your knees, but you have to resist, refuse, deny and grit your teeth to stand up.

    Not whine and cry.

    You seemed to have gotten help at a very young age.

    But you were just lucky.

    And luck runs out soon and you woulde to a point where you have to make your own luck and this is one of those points.

    You just have to face it."

    Raunak really wanted to say something, but he couldn¡¯t. His throat is feeling heavy and he is feeling extremely conflicted. He is really feeling that everything is unfair. He wants to scream to the sky and question everything and anything about why it is happening to him.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but chuckle. He was like that. But when he was in that state, he is a lot younger. Way too young to contemte the fairness and unfairness. He doesn¡¯t even know what that actually meant.

    Maybe that helped him adjust easier. Since he knew little he was able to satisfy himself with that.

    But Raunak is different, he seemed to have been rescued from the honest reality with some help and now he is facing real pressure.

    Maybe this incident is the breaking point, but Sam is sure that there are a lot of umted incidents that must have lead to this point.

    He could have already experienced most of it in the school he went for his bureaucracy. But the love of his life made him reach this point.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "If you want to cry, then cry. But make sure no one sees it. A person¡¯s tears are extremely valuable. You cannot let the world see you shedding them for its cruelty. It would take that weak point and tear you apart.

    You can only cry in the embrace of the person you love the most or you in thepany of the person you trust the most.

    So, hold those tears until you meet your lover. Trust me on one thing. If I see a man crying in front of me, the first thing thates to my mind is not to help him wipe them off. It is to think of a way to use it against him so that he would be useful to me.

    So, you better not cry in front of me."

    "What should I do to escape this madness? What should I do? I feel so lost and powerless."

    "Then find a way to get that power."

    "How?"

    "How did they get it?"

    Sam asked in return.

    Raunak looked a bit confused.

    "How did the people in power get their power? They have to gain it themselves. It is not going to fall in your hands, if it does you will have to struggle to keep it there.

    You have to struggle for the power you need. Struggle every day to be more powerful than yesterday. Your every step and every breath should be focused on that one goal to gain what you want.

    If you are not that desperate, then the world will eat you alive."

    Raunak took a deep breath and he asked Sam.

    "Tell me what to do. I will do anything to get out of my plight."

    "Don¡¯t make promises you can¡¯t keep. For now, let us get out of this situation. The more these people try to stop you, the faster you have to finish your task. You are right under their eyes,pletely giving away your every step.

    The first step you have to take is to blind them to their knowledge.

    Stop ying by the rules they set in the game. If you want to change the game don¡¯t be so passive. There are many other active ways, beating them in their own game, changing the rules to your own advantage, or destroying the whole fucking game.

    Now go home and think of a way to change the way you y. I can give you instructions, but if I did, you would be needing them for your whole life.

    So, you better think of it on your own and get out of their grip then you can think of making your own power."

    With that he sent Raunak back.

    Looking at that leaving elf, Sam couldn¡¯t help but shake his head.

    "What is wrong with me? Giving these therapy sessions. It almost felt like I am life coach or something."

    He muttered to himself and went back to work.

    The first thing he did is to remove the tent and cleared the area. He uprooted the trees, grass, bushes, nts, everything that is notnd was taken away and the earth element really did help him do that easily within the night.

    Soon there is arge expanse of normalnd ready for construction.

    But there are not many suitable materials nearby that could support the structural integrity he needed. But Raunak is sure that he wouldn¡¯t be able to buy any of these things as they are monopolized by the constructionpanies themselves.

    So, Sam has to take everything out of his divine dimension, which would lead to another problem. The administration would grill him about the origin of the material.

    Sam is thinking of a proper alternative and soon he got one. He cannot use the resources that are not from here, but he can manipte and modify the avable resources a bit and think of a way out.

    So, the first thing he did it, take out the ingredients for the cement that was created by one of the students.

    After the cement was invented with the residues and extracts of nts and animals, Sam kept those nts and animals in divine dimension, breeding them.

    This cement mighte in handy someday and that someday is right here.

    He went looking through the expanse and gathered all the rocks irrespective of size and gathered the sand from the bed of theke.

    Heid down a formation to dry it so that he can eliminate all the foreign materials like the stone fragments, carcasses, and all the other waste that was deposited under thatke.

    After separating them with the earth elemental energy and mixing the cement in various proportions he started making concrete with the stones and rocks he gathered to create a decently solid structure without any elemental usage or modification is done on it.

    If the structure is solid enough without any of Sam¡¯s extra modifications, he decided to fuse the whole structure to a granr level to provide extra strength.

    For the next two days, he went on with the experiments and finally got what he wanted. Now, it is about time he started the construction.

 Chapter 745: Visiting the Stalker

    Sam is not alone in his construction. He did the first step which is making the concrete bs on his own and he would need to continue doing so. But the rest of the work could be left to someone else.

    For example, his shadows. Even though he can take his beasts out too, he is not exactlyfortable with that hidden observer breathing down his neck.

    As for why he is not going and dealing with them directly, he was waiting for the word from Raunak about the involvement of his future father-inw. He wanted to know this information to decide on his approach.

    If he was not involved, he would have just dealt with them and be done with it. But now that his involvement is there, he would have to think of a different way. He has to make sure that his message goes through.

    Even if this group of people particrly didn¡¯te from that guy, he would make use of them to give that message.

    As for why this future father inw has special treatment, it is simple. If it is a political bacsh, Sam would only need power but doesn¡¯t have to show it all to the opponent and leave them in mystery so that they can hold them back.

    After all, fighting for power will still make them have some reservations, they have to be treated in such a way that there is an unexplored terrain in front of them. They shouldn¡¯t know what they are stepping into. Their only knowledge should be that the terrain is dangerous.

    But when they are fighting for their pride, ego, and any other emotions, they have to be given a mad scare. It will either provoke them to the point they can no longer keep their sanity or they would be scared enough to keep mum for a significant amount of time.

    So, before he did something to them, he is keen on finishing this construction. This would also send a different kind of message.

    That he wouldn¡¯t be stopped just because of the restrictions he ced on him.

    Sam worked fast. Most of the lifting and cing was done by the shadows. He deliberated on taking the MInotaurs out, but after some thought, he didn¡¯t think it was a good idea.

    As for cing the bs on top of each other, those things are done by Sky.

    The most difficult and time taking thing is creating the bs themselves. Not the stacking them or even fusing them.

    For the next four days, he was working on it continuously. After getting a hang of mixing this concrete, he left that work for the Ape and mostly focused on fusing them.

    He evenid down a formation to reduce the hardening time by a lot.

    Except for the asional meteorite attacks, the construction went on smoothly.

    Within ten days it was done.

    He was satisfied with the work he had done. Even though it is not aesthetically pleasing to the eye and the color is not exactly what someone wants to look at, it is a structure that would hold up.

    After finishing the construction, Sam went to visit Raunak.

    In the past few days, all the city people are curious about Sam. Many of them knew that he pissed of some officials. But they don¡¯t know exactly what he did. They werepletely denied to sell anything to him.

    They are wondering how he would survive as they knew that he is a businessman. A businessman with no other businessmen in touch, which would be a hard thing to ovee.

    But they came to know that he is building something in the forest without anyone¡¯s help. Everything was done on his own.

    This is enough to raise their interest.

    Particrly, some men in the construction business are extremely interested in this, so when they saw Saming into the city, they have some expressions of greed and there are some people moving into the forest.

    Sam went to meet with Raunak. He had to wait a while because Raunak is busy with something. Only after a few minutes, did Raunak came out of the office of the City lord. His expression is cold and unfeeling. Completely unlike his usual self.

    "Factory is finished."

    Sam didn¡¯t beat around the bush and make any small talk.

    "Let¡¯s go then. All I have to do is record some images of the factory and send them back. Then they would send their representative here."

    Both of them started walking to the camp.

    "Was all thend you bought used up?" Raunak asked as they walked.

    "Not really. There is a lot of space left. The factory for biscuits is not that big. It at most used up half thend."

    "Then can I rent a ce from you? I need a new office."

    "New office?"

    "Yes, didn¡¯t you say that I need to get out of their grip? In the city lord¡¯s office, everyone from faction 1 holds certain high ces. They are all keeping an eye on me and they only have one agenda to make life difficult for me. Even though they are not interrupting my administrative matters for some reason, they are sending all the news to that guy.

    It would be hard to know what might happen if I was there. At least for now, the deal involved the military and this unit is too special for them to make any move. So, they wouldn¡¯t do anything for now. But the same couldn¡¯t be said to other deals.

    Since I don¡¯t need too many approvals from the city lord¡¯s office, I decided to distance myself from them. Except for thend dealings and the involvement inside the city, I wouldn¡¯te into contact with them."

    "Sure, you can stay there. I don¡¯t have any problem."

    As they reached the camp, there are sounds of agonying from there.

    Raunak was surprised a bit and asked.

    "What happened?"

    "Some people might have entered the factory."

    They entered the camp only to see some people on the ground crying in pain. They have cut limbs, broken bones and there is even a person that died.

    Sam walked into seeing that Ape and Sky are still doing their work. They are currently ordering the shadows around and making the biscuits.

    Raunak was a bit surprised to see the five shadows, but he remembered the ount of some farmers in cane town about these shadows that helped them in guarding the fields.

    He started recording some images of the factory and some images of the production line before going back to the city to hire a courier to send them back.

    The couriers are special upations, to be a qualified courier, one has to meet certain criteria and normal people cannot be couriers. Only civilians can. Because the courier should have permission to travel between differents.

    If a human or centaur can be a civilian, they wouldn¡¯t be couriers as they would have a significant status already.

    So, couriers are all elves.

    They also have to take a forest spirit oath, that they wouldn¡¯tpromise the information or any item that was on their hands no matter how valuable it is. They would be dead before they betrayed the information.

    They are the category of the people that could be blindly trusted by most of them. Anyway, the information was addressed to that special military unit. The factions wouldn¡¯t even have the balls to steal it.

    After sending the courier. He worked with Sam to make an office for himself. He shifted most of the documents that should be ced in the office here.

    With Sam¡¯s help, they have enough defensive measures.

    The city lord sent some more documents to fill in the remaining administrative procedures for the shifting of the office.

    Now they are two things to do. The first one is to wait for the envoy that would be sent by the military unit and the second one is getting rid of the observers.

    Sam is thinking of various ways to deal with them. Burning alive is certainly an option. But he has to think of a different way, only one message is never enough.

    He has to make it traumatic enough.

    Not just for the people that experienced it, but also for the people that hear about it.

    After some thought, he decided to be a mad scientist once again. He started taking various poisons and other nt extracts and made a simple modification to his ws.

    In his previous life, ws are Sam¡¯s favorite of all weapons, with all the tweaks he made to them, he used them as a go-to in any closebat situation. But when he came here, he has so many other options and there was no longer that burning desire to wear those ws.

    That special bond or savagery that was hidden inside him prompted him to wear ws every time has disappeared and he would only use them when he is extremely angry and has a desire to tear some lives apart.

    In fact, he is a bit happy that this happened. Now they are nothing but normal weapons to them.

    And he is going to use them in special situations where they are needed to do something not normal.

 Chapter 746: Entering the Cave

    That night, Sam left the camp with the help of the shadow mice. He left the shadows in the camp as they worked to make an illusion that he is still ordering them around.

    Soon, Sam reached the spot where the observer is located.

    There is arge rock on which the observer sprawled on the ground and looked through that small telescope without any movement. He is extremely stable and there are not too many energy waves around him.

    A normal cultivator can easily ignore him if he hid like this.

    Sam came out of the divine dimension. He is currently wearing his cloaked ck clothes and is in his shadow mode.

    The observer flinched a bit and turned around to look in the direction where he felt an extra presence looking at him.

    But he didn¡¯t find anything. He just looked around for a bit and after finding out there is nothing, he went back to his observation. But as soon as he turned, his body jerked.

    He turned his head around as much as possible to look at what is on top of him only to see a dark shadowy figure leaning onto him with a metallic w impaled into his back.

    Sam held the observed in his ce and ced his second w on his neck and pressed it so that he would stay quiet while the first w is working.

    Sam made a very simple but detailed modification to the ws. It is around the small hole left there to make poison flow through the ws, this time, he created an extremely small hollowpartment in which he can either secrete poison directly into or ce some external liquid.

    When he impaled the ws, he would be able to inject the contents into other¡¯s bodies more effectively than just scratching. But this would take a little more time. At least three seconds which is actually a short but also long time within the battle.

    He even made a special modification where he can ce a small cartridge on the rear of the ws which is directly connected to these hollowpartments. The liquid in the cartridge will be constantly moved to the hollowpartments which in turn can be used for injection.

    Currently, Sam is using three different liquids in the body. The first one is the paralytic poison, the second one is actually a medicine that is a blood essence of a fire-type beast and the third one is the blood essence of an ice-type beast.

    And he is injecting thest two liquids inrge quantities.

    From the side, there is a bee puppet recording everything that is happening.

    After injecting everything, Sam could feel the energy fluctuations inside the observer¡¯s body. He then took out medicine that can alleviate the effects of the paralytic poison and force-fed that guy before getting up and setting him free.

    The observer wanted to attack Sam, but he felt like his body is copsing. His whole body is feeling like burning and freezing all at the same time. He couldn¡¯t even speak.

    He wanted to yell and scream but no voice ising out.

    After noticing that Sam is not making a move, he decided to try hisst chance at survival that is to meet the rest of hispanions. He forcefully stood up and tried to run, but he couldn¡¯t. His legs are also acting in a weird way.

    He walked down stumbling here and there for every step to reach his team before something happens. He has a feeling that as long as he got rid of his hot and cold energy, he can live.

    Sam didn¡¯t follow him. He just let the bee puppet follow that guy and record everything while he picked up the telescope that was left behind.

    It is not that long. It is at most as long as the forearm.

    Sam looked through it and he was surprised to see the range. He can not only see the camp but even the city wall and the city.

    There are many inscriptions ced on it and there are many options. He was clearly not expecting such a piece of work to be here.

    There are many things he can learn and refer to this and he can see himself getting new ideas. He could really use a meeting with a person that made this.

    He stored the telescope away and followed the route the observer did.

    Soon he caught up. He didn¡¯t do much too observed. The paralytic poison is not just to keep him stationary, but also to make his bodily functions halt a little bit which would let the two blood essences that are being injected mix with the blood easily.

    Now that they are mixed and they are injected in such arge quantity and also since they are also two different elements that are extremely conflicting, they are trying to take over the bloodstream andbating each other. And on top of that, the elemental energy of the person himself is also in question which would try to battle the two foreign entities that are taking their own home ground as their battlefield.

    If only fire blood essence or the ice blood essence were injected, the effect wouldn¡¯t have been this great.

    Three elements shing is causing him to have a seizure. If he wasn¡¯t injected with the paralytic poison, then he would have had a minute chance to stop the foreign elements from wreaking havoc.

    But now it was gone.

    Sam leisurely followed him as he timed the speed of that guy.

    He injected the quantity with a certain estimation of the time. But it didn¡¯t reach the desired effect. He wanted the person to struggle until he reached the underground cave entrance and see hispanions before he died, but it didn¡¯t seem to be the cave.

    Because as soon as he reached the outer cave entrance he fell. He is weaker than Sam thought.

    Sam just went towards him and extracted the soul and made the specter get the memories.

    He wants to see if there is anything useful and soon some useful info dide out. When he saw the images, he couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit surprised and excited.

    The memories confirmed many of Sam¡¯s suspicions. One of them is that this group is responsible for meteorite attacks. But it is not an attack of a single person. It is a group attack.

    The second thing, they indeed belong to faction 1 and they are indeed sent by the Raunak¡¯s future iw.

    He knew this because he asked for the images of that guy and his daughter before doing this.

    And it turned out that guy just didn¡¯t send any other force. This force is something directly under his control and he gave the orders to them directly without any intermediary like how the attacks on him through the criminals took ce.

    In fact, that criminal attack is just to gauge his strength. It was to make these observers understand just how strong he is.

    Sam was surprised that he got so much information just from one scout.

    He looked at the body that is still under the influence of the two opposite elements shing. The hair is burning on one side while it is frozen on the other. One arm has be an ice while the other was cooked.

    He cut open the chest and ced something in his body before kicking him down the slope that leads to the underground cave.

    The Bee puppet followed the body recording everything while Sam followed the puppet down the way.

    After the body hit the ground, some limbs that are frozen copsed. There are several cloaked figures inside the underground cave all waiting.

    There are a total of twenty-nine people all cultivating or practicing their battle skills when the body hit the ground.

    The nearest to the entrance looked at theirrade¡¯s dead body that too in such a weird state, couldn¡¯t help but feel angry and run towards it.

    When they saw that there is something in the chest of the body, they are even more infuriated.

    There is no way they could tolerate it.

    They tried to pull the metallic thing out and it is actually a grenade. But it is not a grenade with a trigger switch, rather is a grenade with a pin all it takes is a small modification after all.

    Sam locked the pin with a bone in the rib cage, so when they pulled it forcefully, the pin was removed and before they knew what is happening, the grenade exploded within the hand of the holder.

    The group moved back, while that one person has his hands mangled.

    Sam who is slowly descending the slope and staying in the ce with his earth elemental energy, looked at the explosion and couldn¡¯t help but smile.

    Whenever he pulled out these grenades in a new ce, he managed to fool them easily.

    They don¡¯t really think twice about what that thing could have been before pressing or triggering it leading to their foolish loss.

    He jumped down the slope tond down along with the bee puppet that slowly descended beside him.

 Chapter 747: Great Team

    Sam looked at the twenty-nine people who are all wearing cloaked clothes. In fact, Sam could nicely blend in.

    But he is not supposed to ask that because of the killing intent that the twenty-nine members emitting. It is not an appropriate thing to ask or even think about.

    He looked at the person whose hand was mangled and blood is seeping out.

    That man is an elf and Sam could only guess that from the scent of the blood. These guys are that covered up. Except for the Centaurs though. Only their faces and the torso are covered. Their body is too big and huge to hide.

    A person who is simrly cloaked walked forward and looked at Sam before asking.

    "Who are you?"

    "Someone you might be looking for."

    The person who seemed to be the leader of the group narrowed his eyes and looked at Sam carefully. It is as if he is trying to pick on anything that could give Sam¡¯s identity away.

    "Why would we look for you?"

    "Then why would you be cing this guy there? To look at bathingdies in the city?" Sam asked as he pointed at the first observer.

    The group was offended and was about to make a move. For some reason, the rest of the group is not talking. Sam couldn¡¯t only think of two reasons. One is the team being a great team with proper hierarchy in ce and everyone epting it and being in their ce.

    Or the second reason which could be probable brainwashing of the team that they wouldn¡¯t talk when their leader is talking.

    Both cases make the team multiple times dangerous than it would normally is when they are separated and have their own thoughts.

    But Sam is not worried. He observed the bodynguage of everyone. They are all in a battle stance ready to attack him anytime waiting for their leader¡¯s order.

    "We are observing Sam. If you are here on his behalf, we would like to know what your rtionship with him is. In fact, we can talk this out and settle without a need for battle and bloodshed."

    "Really, how do you think that would work?"

    "It is really simple. Our main problem is not with the way you are operating or the businesses that you are starting. It is the fact that you are helping the business official Raunak.

    We don¡¯t like that. So we are here asking you to stop it. If you do that, not only will you be able to avoid the problems that areing to Sam at the moment, we can even help you buy whatever businesses you have and give you a reasonable price for that.

    Apart from that, you can also join the faction. With your battle ability and the battle ability of Sam which we observed in the past few days, you will be highly valued.

    This is a great deal if you ask me. If I was in your position I would take it."

    "You were never my position. So don¡¯t give me that advice. Anyway, I am not taking it. So what is the other option you might suggest?"

    "Then we have to use forceful measures to make you stop."

    "Like those meteors, you guys have been throwing down from the sky?"

    Everyone was stumped for a second.

    "Do you really think that you are so hidden and so stealthy? You are all over the ce if you ask me."

    This time the leader didn¡¯t reply. He took a deep breath and said.

    "Battle formation 8. Engage."

    As soon as he spoke, the twenty-nine members moved. All of them spread all over the cave with their energies riling up.

    The cave is not too big. Even these thirty members don¡¯t have any privacy here.

    They are all staying in a small space. It would actually be disadvantageous to the group itself. If an attack misses, Sam would be able to escape and even use another team member as a meat shield. Every time, he dodges, the attack would hurt some other person.

    Sam activated energy vision to give a quick scan over the area to see if there are any traps of inscriptions and formations.

    That is what he would do to have a better defense. But these guys seemed to have too much faith in their stealth that they didn¡¯t make any of such preparations.

    But Sam learned that he was sorely mistaken and underestimated his foes.

    They are not just a proper team, but they also know how a team fight if they want to lose. They didn¡¯t do any of themon mistakes which Sam could easily take advantage of. They didn¡¯t underestimate him. They didn¡¯t hold back and they worked as a team.

    There are many earth element users in the team and they are all channeling their energy to the ground surface through which they started the first attack.

    Their first target move is to create a sudden pit under Sam¡¯s feet with an element of surprise.

    But Sam didn¡¯t fall for that, he was using energy vision at that point and if he wasn¡¯t this would have worked. He escaped it at ast-minute and jumped from the spot. But at this moment, arge rocky protrusion came from the side of the cave wall to m into Sam.

    Sam who is in the middle of the air used his incredible dexterity to its limit and managed to change the position of his body and kicked the protrusion to move to a different side.

    But there is another protrusion already waiting for him in that direction.

    Sam once again used the same method, but this time as soon as he kicked the protrusion, the surface changed and instead of a solid protrusion it turned into a trap that could hold his leg in the ce.

    Sam had to use the water and wind element to create a pressurized explosion to escape the trap and he used the wind energy to reduce the fall.

    But when he was falling down another protrusion came from the floor.

    Sam didn¡¯t like ying this game anymore and his body underwent earth elemental fusion. Even though it is partial he is sure that it is sufficient for the current fight.

    He mmed the foot into theing protrusion with a maximum force which made the protrusion turn into a bunch of rocky rubble.

    Samnded on the ground and he stomped on the surface while injected the earth elemental energy into it as his own energy overtook the position of the opponent¡¯s energy with the ripple style.

    When that happened, he quickly made sure that the surrounding earth is under his control and slowly started spreading the energy so that enemies wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything.

    All this while only the earth elemental users attacked. Which are half of them. The rest of them didn¡¯t attack at all.

    Sam looked at them coldly.

    This is one tough team and there is even a faint trace of admiration in his heart towards them. But that is probably not a good thing. Because whenever Sam felt admiration towards his friends, he would grow closer with them. But when it was for enemies, he thought of ways to kill them faster.

    And now he is doing exactly the same.

    He looked at the protrusions that areing from all directions. Currently, he is wearing ws, which will not give much ess to the punching ability, but he can use chops, elbows, and even some palm strikes.

    So he decided to go with it and started destroying every protrusion that came near him. He didn¡¯t use any of his elements.

    The leader who is watching the situation closely frowned. He clearly noticed that Sam used the water element and wind element along with the earth element. Even though three elemental users are rare in the deste realm and the Naga Loka. It is actuallymon in this realm.

    It is rare but not to the point of making people feel extreme shock. Because, the elves are gifted with wood elements by nature and due to their innately superior body and talent, they easily awaken another element and some talented ones even awaken two elements.

    So, three is not much of a big deal. But there is no wood element in Sam¡¯s attacks which made it hard for the leader to digest this.

    All this time, he has a feeling that Sam might be an elf.

    As there is spection about the person behind Sam and it was always imagined and discussed as an elf living in recluse.

    But now he has other thoughts.

    And he is also thinking about why Sam is not using the water element and wind element when he is being barraged by the attacks.

    He made some gestures with his hands and the cultivators are all moving. The remaining half joined the first half and only the team leader stood in the center.

    Soon, the protrusions and the rocky throws are enveloped with fire attacking Sam with a fused attack from all sides.

    This made it a little difficult for Sam, but what they don¡¯t understand is subconsciously they are feeling a little heavier than useful as if their weight has been increased.

    Even though they didn¡¯t seem to have noticed this, it could be clearly seen in their actions, they are all using excess energy to move at a normal speed.

 Chapter 748: Stone Pythons

    The battle went on and on, but Sam only used earth element and smashed the attack as if he was a brute.

    The leader didn¡¯t feel happy about it though, because it would be crazy and extremely idiotic of him to expect a person who could go past his realm of cultivation and burn a transcendent person alive just by acting like a brute.

    It would be extremely stupid of him if he really did think so.

    He started thinking and observing the surroundings. Soon, he did realize one thing. The team is struggling a bit. They had to make more effort to move and also more effort to create the protrusions or the rocks that are flying towards Sam.

    There is a faint resistance that they are unable to notice in the heat of the battle. In fact, he felt that he wouldn¡¯t be able to notice it if he is the middle of the battle.

    After observing the situation, he looked at his own feet and body and tried to walk a bit without using any spiritual energy and it confirmed his guess.

    There is indeed a significant resistance but it seems to have gradually grown which made it seem insignificant.

    He looked at Sam in shock.

    Sam looked back at him and couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit surprised himself. The opponent realized his trick faster than he thought.

    He felt like he would be able to trick them a bit more.

    Since it is not going to happen, Sam decided to make a move. Before the team leader could issue anymands, Sam¡¯s energy riled up and the gravity in the whole cave skyrocketed immediately.

    Everyone¡¯s knees buckled due to the sudden force of attraction that is pulling them down.

    Sam took advantage of the situation and made his move. He lunged at the two nearest targets and impaled the ws into their throats and started injecting the blood essences.

    There are two main reasons for using the blood essences. One of them is that he wanted to inflict the pain that couldn¡¯t be alleviated normally by any medicine of normal treatment. A pain that makes them feel helpless.

    The second reason is to see what kind of reactions a body would have when it was forcefully injected by the blood essences.

    The Intake of blood essences is actually amon thing. Many people do that, but the blood essence had to go through a series of refinements that would make it possible for a cultivator to digest them easily.

    There are some cultivators that can take the blood essence in its raw form. For example, the beast cultivators, the beast-men, and cultivators of extremely superior bloodline can dominate any form of a beast bloodline that was injected into their body.

    Even though elves are portrayed as the most superior race in modern earth¡¯s myths, they are not that great actually. They are right above the Yakshas, who are slightly superior to Nagas and the humans.

    The blood essences are causing the required effect.

    Sam injected into their throats and they couldn¡¯t do anything about it.

    They held their throats due to the pain that was caused by the ws, but they don¡¯t know that the worst is yet toe.

    Both of them are earth element users and they are humans. They don¡¯t have a second element, so Sam injected fire and ice once again.

    The body started reacting to the blood essence and the sh began. His skin color is shifting from red and icy blue.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop there, he has to take advantage and finish as many people as possible in one sweep.

    He went on and injected two more people. By this time, the rest of the team forcefully overcame the gravity and tried to make a move on Sam.

    But as soon as they stood up, Sam made the gravity revert to normal, but due to the excess force they used when running, they flew into the air and mmed into cave walls.

    Three people directly came flying towards Sam.

    Out of which he dealt with two and injected the blood essences, all the while keeping the third man under him.

    The third person is the fire elemental user.

    So, Sam used different elements this time. The Ice and lightning elements.

    Lightning doesn¡¯t have much conflict with the fire element, but it also doesn¡¯t have a propagating effect on the fire element.

    He injected the ice element to make it conflict with the fire element and he used the lightning element which is extremely tyrannical and damaging to wreak havoc while the two are shing.

    The leader who was in a daze for a second was surprised to see the sudden development.

    He immediately reacted and ran towards Sam. But before he could do anything, Sam already jumped away from the spot and reached the nearest centaur.

    He didn¡¯t attack the centaur directly. He held the forelegs of the centaur and his body moved like a snake as he made his way to the back of the centaur all the while dangling from his body.

    He is like a slippery loach that made the centaur feel frustrated and angry as he couldn¡¯t reach Sam who is stuck on his back and the rest of the body.

    Sam started carving the body up with the ws and made him bleed crazily. Centaurs have better bodies than humans and if not for the high regenerative ability of the elves, then they would have better bodies than the elves. Their endurance is too high since the team is extremely stuck together and fighting in unison, Sam decided to slowly chip their strength away.

    After making the centaur bleed from significant cuts, the creature realized that he couldn¡¯t move his body and there is something wrong with his bloodstream.

    This is the work of Sam¡¯s poison. Now Sam took advantage of the situation and injected two blood essences and jumped away.

    Everything happened in a sh. The whole process didn¡¯t even take six seconds in which three seconds are just for injecting process.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop and moved to the next step. The leader is feeling the most helpless. After he joined the battle, he couldn¡¯t get a hold of Sam. Even though the ce is small, Sam is using it to his advantage. Every time he moved, he is making another member of the team be under the attacking range and even using them as meat shields.

    And at every candidate, all it is taking is a couple of shes from the ws and a three-second injection to make them useless.

    Within a few minutes, Sam is done with half of the team. This is not even a battle. Sam is not even contending. He is like a monkey ying with a bunch of small animals by stealing their food. They couldn¡¯t catch him and every time they had a chance they escaped.

    The leader gritted his teeth and mmed his first into the ground with a lump of energy.

    Cracks appeared all over the ground and started spreading to the walls.

    The whole team halted in their tracks and didn¡¯t dare move. They are moving away from the cracks that are spreading on the wall.

    Sam also halted in his tracks and looked at the cracks. He activated his energy vision. There is nothing he could see.

    All of a sudden from the cracks of the wall Sam noticed a pattern.

    There are two ces the cracks are concentrated and it is clear that they are breaking ayer of the rocky surface.

    As he observed and tried to use his eye techniques to see what is happening, he finally saw something, but it was toote.

    Tworge snakes one from each side jumped out and coiled around Sam.

    Sam was stunned for a second as he sawrge snakes that are two times asrge as python and coiling around him.

    One snake is coiling his legs, while the second is coiling around his upper body. He is too small to be in between them. He is not even visible after a few seconds and even his face was covered.

    Sam is extremely surprised. He didn¡¯t expect that there would be a creature that could escape his energy vision.

    That too, both of them are beasts. But aftering out of the initial shock, he startedparing the image of the snakes to the knowledge in his mind and soon found a match.

    The Stone Pythons.

    These creatures have a weird ability. To merge with any stone surface and be one with it. In that state, they are extremely dormant and wouldn¡¯t show a single energy fluctuation. But that doesn¡¯t mean there is no fluctuation at all. It is just that the fluctuation is too small and Sam¡¯s technique is not mature enough to capture it.

    But that is not his current problem. His major problem is now escaping the grip of these stone snakes before they turn him into a meat paste.

 Chapter 749: Sending a Message

    Sam felt his body being crushed in the middle of all the coiling.

    At this exact moment, he felt stabbing pain at various ces in his body, including several ces where his meridians are at. Stopping his energy cirction.

    He wanted to scream in pain, but held back and took deep breathes to calm himself down.

    After looking at the current situation, he knew that he is in a pinch. The energy in his body is not exactly working as he wanted it to. He is cursing himself for falling into such a trap.

    After calming down, he looked at the body of the stone python that is right in front of his mouth. He bit into the cloth that is covering his mouth and tore it slowly before spitting it out so that his mouth has ess. He took a deep breath and opened his mouth wide and bit the python.

    *HISSSSSSSSS*

    The python gave out a hissing sound in pain.

    Sam¡¯s teeth can no longer be treated as normal teeth, they are almost fangs due to his vampire part of the body. He can munch into any flesh easily.

    When Sam bit into the flesh of the python, there is something in his body that felt excited as the blood seeped into his mouth. Without him even knowing, he started sucking the blood in slowly and subconsciously, he is relishing in the taste of the blood.

    His eyes started turning blood red from ck and every cell of his body is feeling the excitement of the blood being sucked in.

    The python tried to struggle and wiggle, but soon it gave up on its own life as Sam just consumed every single drop of its blood and only the flesh was left.

    Only after the blood ispletely sucked did Same out of his trance-like state and he shook his head vigorously.

    He felt like he lost his soul in the middle of the process and he couldn¡¯t believe that it is him who has such a lust for blood.

    But he doesn¡¯t have that much time to think about it. He noticed that his energy is back to full again and he is burning with vigor.

    Now that the python that is coiling his upper body is dead, Sam used his hands to take it off of him.

    *HHHHHIIIIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSS*

    The remaining python is giving out angry hisses at the death of itspanion and started coiling up even faster and tighter.

    But by now, Sam¡¯s hands are already free. He adjusted the ws a bit and mmed the ws into the thick body of the stone python, the string trap of the ws activated and the sharp string tore through theyers of flesh on the python and held the beast in ce.

    *HIIISSSS* *HISSSS* The python continuously hissed in pain. The string traps are holding the most delicate flesh in ce and with a single pull, it would be torn down and the python would take hisst hiss before it died.

    And Sam did just that. He pushed his hands wide open as if he is weing someone for a hug and the flesh was shaved off of the python¡¯s spine.

    The stone spikes that are stopping his energy flow were gone again and Sam broke through the spine and stood standing.

    But before he could properly stand up, he was already being attacked and this time, the leader himself took direct action.

    Sam reacted fast enough and blocked the attack and left a deep w cut on the arm of the opponent.

    The paralytic poison started seeping in.

    Sam is on the full offensive for the next three minutes, he was in his shadow mode as he took advantage of the darkness in the cave to move faster than everyone else in the cave and attacking each and every person.

    The situation is extremely one-sided. If it was a normal open battlefield, Sam would have had some resistance as the teamwork is impable. But now that they are trapped in such a small space along with the fact that many team members already died, they are at an inherent disadvantage.

    In the middle of it, Sam halted right next to the dead bodies of the two pythons and looked at the rest of the team that is already feeling the effects of the poison.

    He extended his hand at the python and the death energy riled up. Soon, the python that has an intact body started moving again. But as an undead creature.

    The team became terrified. There is a reason that they didn¡¯t mess with the pythons when they areing out of the crack.

    They are not their pets, they are equal team members just like any of them and they would only listen to the leader¡¯smands.

    But still, they are beasts and predators.

    They are not to be messed with. If everything went well, Sam would have been their meal, but one of them became Sam¡¯s meal and now became Sam¡¯spanion.

    Now, Sam started going after them one at a time and started injecting the blood essences.

    The leader who is thest person to be picked looked at his team members and said to Sam with a gritted teeth.

    "You don¡¯t belong in a normal world. You belong in hell."

    "Really?"

    "Yes. What kind of a twisted psycho are you to make them feel this much torment. End their life if you want to. But you don¡¯t have to torment them like that."

    "You can only me your own luck for that. Don¡¯t worry, you wouldn¡¯t die right away. I have something for you to do."

    "Do you really think, I would do something for you?"

    "I am giving you a chance to go back to your boss to talk to him. Maybe you can get your revenge if you are good enough at persuading people."

    "Wh..." Before the leader could say anything, Sam knocked him out with an anesthesia shot and started performing surgery.

    He ced a small metallic object right next to his heart and sealed him back up. The man woke up after three hours and he was there alone with the rest of the corpses lying around.

    There is a note left for him.

    "You better leave this ce and reach to your boss within two days and take this with you and show it to your boss. Tell him, that the next team will suffer even more and no one would be able to send the new back to him at that point."

    The leader saw that there is a recording crystal near that note. He took it and left the ce. As he was walking, he noticed that there is a faint pain in his chest, but when he scanned his own body, there is nothing he could find.

    He traveled to the city and used the wormholes that are connected to 1 and directly traveled to the estate of his boss.

    All this while, he couldn¡¯t help but feel tormented by the image of Sam¡¯s actions in that cave.

    He saw the struggle his team members went through to just die. Those blood essences created chaos within their bodies. With one organ after another failing and dying.

    This is the most gruesome death he has seen and there is no blood spilled to kill that person or any other torturous action done to them.

    All it took was two stabs and the blood came out because those stabs are also not that high.

    Many times, he just wanted to scream and cry. But he couldn¡¯t stop in his tracks at all and soon reached the estate of his boss.

    When the attendants saw him, they are surprised. They knew that this team was sent on a mission. For the leader toe back in the middle of a mission and that too in a sorry state, there is no way they could stay calm.

    They informed their boss immediately and soon the team leader is in a private audience with Raunak¡¯s future father-inw.

    "What are you doing here? Are you not supposed to be in the middle of the task I gave you?"

    The leader couldn¡¯t stand anymore and knelt on the floor as he took out the recording crystal with his two hands shaking and shivering.

    The boss took the crystal with a confused look on his face and infused his spiritual energy into it.

    Soon he saw the video ying in and he was shocked to see the rest of the events.

    The battle was recorded from start to finish. But the most focus was on the torment the members went through.

    Their bodies copsing and their face writhing in soul-searing pain. Even the man who didn¡¯t care much about his subordinates and the man who is a member of faction 1 which only sees the people at the value they can provide, couldn¡¯t help but flinch at the torment.

    The leader who saw it all over again couldn¡¯t take it and, fainted on the spot.

    The boss stood up and called for the attendants.

    "Take him to rest and call me when he woke up."

 Chapter 750: Demonstration

    Rajan. The father of Ramya, the girl Raunak fell in love with.

    Rajan is currently sitting in his private office where he is trying to go through the video once again. Sam is moving like he owned the cave and treated the whole group like they are little kids, he could see the ws doing the work.

    The situation is extremely one-sided. At least until there are thirty members in the team, they had a chance to do something to him.

    But once Sam got hang of it, he kicked everyone¡¯s ass.

    After looking at it many times, he couldn¡¯t help but feel angry. This is a tant provocation. A provocation right to his face. Sam is directly asking him what he would do and what he could about this.

    He recently heard about the continuous deaths of the officials. But when he learned that Ragad ispletely alright, he rxed a bit and thought that Sam doesn¡¯t have the balls to do anything to a direct member of faction 1.

    But it seems like the other party just focused on a different target.

    Soon, he got the news that the team leader has woken up. So he went there to ask about the details.

    "I don¡¯t know anything about him. He is in that cloaked dress from start to finish. He ispletely unfazed. It is as if killing us is just like breathing air to him. Even the soldiers in military units that are seasoned in the killing wouldn¡¯t be this unfeeling.

    He is like a cold-blooded person. And those eyes. There is not a single fluctuation of emotions in those eyes even when he is tormenting the team members. He just watched them scream, groan, writhe in pain as if he is watching nothing."

    As he spoke, his voice was shaking and it got worse. One has to wonder how much he feared Sam¡¯s actions.

    The more he thought about it, the more the thought is eating his brain away.

    He couldn¡¯t keep hisposure.

    As Rajan looked at the team leader who used to be one of the mostpetent soldiers, he couldn¡¯t help but shake his head in disappointment. But he is also a bit conflicted about his next move. He has many people watching him.

    If he moved the transcendent stage cultivators casually, he would be noted down and get unwanted attention from the unwanted people.

    That is the reason he sent the Pre-transcendent team. The best team in fact. There are some cases, where they managed to take down initial stage Transcendent stage cultivators with proper ambush and nning.

    But Sam just came in ughtered them all.

    It seems like he kicked a really solid te this time.

    As he was thinking about what to do with this team leader, he felt an energy fluctuation.

    He looked at the team leader, who is holding his chest tightly as he tried hard to breathe.

    "Call a healer. Quick."

    Rajan ordered the attendant, but soon he couldn¡¯t feel any signs of life from Raunak.

    *Boom*

    Then came a small explosion that created a hole in the team leader¡¯s chest. The rib cage was destroyed and inside, the lungs and the heart are sliced neatly into pieces and there is a lump of metallic thread inside rolled around a bone,pletely knotted.

    He pulled that lump of string out only to see a small metal te inside. He looked at the metal te with words written on it.

    ¡¯FUCK YOU¡¯

    Those are the words written on it.

    As soon as he read those words, the atmosphere in the room changed a lot. The spiritual energy riled up and the attendants couldn¡¯t help but feel the pressure and spit out the blood.

    It took a while for him to calm down.

    He left his room.

    At this moment, he got a glimpse of his daughter who is making herself busy with something. He got angrier in an instant and wanted to do something.

    He walked to his room and asked his attendant to call for someone else.

    By evening someone came and that person also has cloaked clothes, but this time he has blood red-cloaked clothes.

    Rajan threw a wooden token onto the table and the guy that came just took the token and left.

    Ramya who came at this moment looked at the blood red-cloaked guy who is leaving and clenched her fists.

    She looked at Rajan and said.

    "If you break the agreement, I wouldn¡¯t care if you are my father. I would just go to the King or Queen¡¯s court to make you pay."

    With that, she stormed out.

    This made the already angry old lose it and m the desk into smithereens before he muttered.

    "I will see what you are going to do when I am done with him."

    With that, he went out of the estate and went near the elder¡¯s estate.

    There he met with the elders and made some preparations.

    No one knew what he has done. He even asked the administrators to keep the thing on the down low.

    While Rajan is plotting on what to do to kill Sam and that supposed person in the background all the while breaking Raunak¡¯s spirit, Sam is currently in a meeting with a human and an elf.

    They are in a military uniform sitting in Sam¡¯s makeshift office beside Raunak¡¯s office.

    "We are from the Star One Military unit. We are here to discuss the deal of the coconut biscuits."

    The one who spoke is the human, not the elf. Even when Sam asked them to take a seat, only the human took the seat, the elf didn¡¯t take the seat at all and stood straight clearly showing their rankings.

    It is new for Sam.

    "I was told you areing. Do you want to take the tour around the factory first? We can talk about the priceter."

    "Sure."

    Sam took them to the factory where the shadows are working to produce the biscuits. One ce is for drying the coconut, the second one is for grating the dried coconut, then the flour preparation, and finally thest ce where the cookies are baked in arge stone oven.

    After the small tour was over, Sam said.

    "I couldn¡¯t hire the workers from the city, so I have to make do with these shadows."

    "Shadow necromancy and using it for making food is really a pity." The human said

    "Well, it wouldn¡¯t be long. Since you guys are going to take over, I can put the shadows back to their proper use."

    "So, shall we discuss the price?"

    "How much do you want to offer?"

    "A half-a-billion seems like a fair price."

    "Lets go a bit higher, Shall we?"

    "Six hundred?"

    "Eight hundred."

    "But that is just a recipe. Do you really think it is worth it?"

    "It is not about the recipe. Thend itself is a bit expensive and the construction took a lot out of me. You must have heard, but I couldn¡¯t hire any workers or any other constructionpany to do the construction. I had to finish the construction all by myself from the scratch.

    It is not exactly a pleasant feeling, but I still held my end of the deal. Apart from that, the recipe itself has too many effects that could help the elves. I might be human, but I have an elf helping with the tasting.

    A liquor recipe can go for a billion, don¡¯t tell me that this is not worth it. If it is not for the effects, don¡¯t tell me you are here just for its taste."

    "Seven fifty. That¡¯s as high as we can get."

    "Deal."

    They shook the hands.

    "I noticed that you said you built the whole factory yourself. How is that possible? Even the stones seem like they are a bit different."

    "It¡¯s because of creation from a subordinate of mine. It helps in construction. In fact, it is faster than any of the traditional construction methods."

    "Can we see?"

    "Why not?"

    Sam led them out and he started mixing some cement and showed the process. After joining two rocks and pouring a concrete b. He spoke.

    "If you would stay for the night, you can see the results."

    "We would wait."

    "Then let us eat something. I don¡¯t cook for others very often, it might be your lucky day."

    Sam then led them and started grilling steaks and made some mashed potato.

    He even took some liquors for their taste and they had a pleasant dinner in which even Raunak joined.

    They talked about a lot of things.

    "I would like to ask something if you don¡¯t mind," Sam said as they enjoyed the meal.

    "Please do."

    "Do you buy weapons?"

    "Weapons? Don¡¯t you know that it is illegal for others to sell weapons? We can only buy weapons from the military armory."

    "Then what about special weapons? Things that are not avable in the armory."

    "Depends on how special the weapon is. But even then, it would be hard for you to get the approval to sell the weapons, you can sell designs though."

    "Oh, thanks for the information."

    Then the whole table fell silent and they went back to enjoying the food as if nothing happened.

 Chapter 751: Old Partner

    The next morning they saw the results of the cement.

    Sam then ced his hand on the concrete b and exined.

    "You can use this directly and if you really doubt the structure¡¯s integrity, then you can fuse it further so that the grains can be packed further."

    The two soldiers examined the joints and the concrete bs in every way they could think of. Even estimating the time taken to destroy it.

    "How did you make this?"

    "If you are asking about the invention, it was done by one of my subordinates who is not here. As for the recipe, you don¡¯t expect me to reveal it do you?"

    The Soldier just nodded his head and asked.

    "Don¡¯t give me the specifics, what are the type of ingredients?"

    "Some from a beast that I rear and some from nts, it is not really thatplicated. They can be reproduced easily."

    They talked for some more and the soldiers decided to leave. The human shook hands with Sam and said.

    "There is a possibility that we might meet again. See you then."

    "See you."

    Sam knew what he is talking about. Their next business deal might be rted to the cement. Even though the military doesn¡¯t belong to either of the factions, from the looks of it Sam could see another silent faction.

    Even though this third faction is not involved in politics, from the looks of it they do have a significant influence and if Sam¡¯s guess is right, they are deeper and dangerous than the normal factions.

    Anyway, even if it is not for the cement, he already dropped a pretty direct hint about a possible weapon design he had in his hands. So there is no way they would just ignore that.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but shake his head and smile. He liked selling things in this realm. He can sell everything for an expensive price and there are still people that want to buy these things.

    Its either the ignorance of the elves or they are too rich that they don¡¯t have any idea to estimate the actual value of a spirit stone.

    The biscuit recipe wouldn¡¯t go for more than two to three hundred million in the deste realm, but in the banished realm, it might go for a billion or so as the value of the spirit stone is less due to the native curse.

    But the elves don¡¯t have any curses and it still went for seven-fifty. This is a great thing,

    And now, he could sell this cement recipe and the nts and beasts that are needed for it to a high price and a good amount of the target will be finished by then.

    But before all of that, he has to make a visit to the city at night to meet his old business partner.

    That night Sam changed into his cloaked clothes and sneaked into the city.

    He entered Ragad¡¯s residence which is nothing short a mansion and moved around his house. For this chain of targets, Sam only has a way to kill, burning them alive. This will not only make the people rte to a pattern, but they can also rte these deaths to what they might have done.

    Sam wants to bring faction 1¡¯s reputation to tatters and make their lives miserable.

    But as soon as his shadow mouse which is carrying the divine dimension moved from one ce to another to search the room Ragad is in, he found something else.

    A man with a blood-red cloak is sitting along with Ragad in a room which looked like an office.

    The cloaked man is the same person that met Rajan.

    As soon as he got the wooden token, he looked through the details and came to this through the worm hold immediately, and since both the capitals are connected it is not that difficult toe.

    Sam is listening in on their conversation through the divine dimension.

    "Currently, the town elections are going on in 1 and this time, our faction is desperate to win. So, they want to make sure there is no more chaos. Two officials under our faction are dead and a team of thirty was wiped out.

    We already seemed to have made an enemy out of this guy, so Rajan decided to eliminate him as soon as possible. But there are no transcendent level cultivators we can move due to the election situation and we came to do that.

    I want the information on Sam as soon as possible. Everyst bit of it and every small detail."

    The man in the Blood-red cloak spoke while Ragad listened with concentration and replied.

    "We don¡¯t have much intel on him. Except for the fact that he is an orphan along with his friends and they traveled together all over the and tried to learn as much as they can.

    That is the story that is popr in Cane¡¯s town.

    After thest team attacked him with the meteor, he didn¡¯t make much fuss, he just gave theint to the city guard office and left the city when all the inns refused him.

    From then on, he rarely came into the city. There is little for us to suspect his direct action in the killing of the two officials."

    "Well, we also suspect that he is the one that killed them. Our main target is the person behind him. We had some intel that thest team was swept by that person in the background and even the officials might be his actions.

    So, our main target is that guy, but we cannot wait for him to eventuallye to us. We decided to use Sam to get him out.

    The factory that he built is something mysterious. It was bought by the One-star Military unit. So, we only have until they took over.

    Our people in 1 will halt them froming over for a week and this is the interval in which we could deal with him.

    So, get me the info of that area and how it is built."

    "I will give it to you by tomorrow afternoon. Where is your team stationed? I will send the details over there."

    "There is no need. Someone woulde here and get the details from you."

    The man stood up and proceeded to leave, when Ragad also stood up to send him off, he gestured him to stop and left alone.

    As he looked at the leaving person, Ragad clenched his fists and spoke to himself.

    "When will I be able to join the cloaked forces? I am just a step away every time I tried. Maybe I should use this opportunity to build some connections and try to get in."

    He then looked at the picture on the desk.

    It is a picture of Sam.

    "My dear business partner. Not only did you give me enough merits with your businesses, you even gave some money for me, and even when you are dying you are going to help me get into my dream force. You seem to be my lucky charm."

    "I wouldn¡¯t be so sure about that."

    A low voice and a cold breath hit Ragad¡¯s nape which made his blood run cold.

    After a momentary daze, he jumped forward and fell on the ground while sweating profusely. He looked at Sam who is in a cloaked dress.

    He suddenly had a premonition and was about to take something out of his spatial ring.

    A metallic card suddenly hit him on the shoulder and made him stop his actions.

    "I wouldn¡¯t do such a stupid thing if I were you."

    Ragad tried to calm himself down and asked in a shivering voice.

    "Who are you?"

    "The one you guys wanted to pull out desperately."

    "What are you talking about?" Ragad wanted to y dumb.

    "Please, do you really think I am here to gather evidence against you? I don¡¯t give a shit about thews here. If I want someone dead, I will kill them myself."

    "Why are you here? If this is about the conversation before. I have nothing personal against you. It is just me following orders. So, it is useless even if you kill me."

    "Really? Then it would be immoral of me to kill you for what you did under forced circumstances right?" Sam said in a genuinely confused and hesitant voice. When Ragad heard this, he didn¡¯t want to believe that Sam is this dumb, but his fear for life made him think of an unrealistic possibility that this killer might be that na?ve.

    Seeing the constantly changing expressions on Ragad¡¯s face made Sam almostugh out loud.

    He removed the cloak on his face and Ragad¡¯s face lost all the color.

    "You really thought that someone is that na?ve? I don¡¯t care if you are forced to follow some instructions or something else. Since you are involved in this, you have to pay for that. After all, when kings battle, soldiers are the ones that suffer the most. You can only me your luck for it.

    And by the way, I am not really your lucky charm, after all, which lucky charm makes you feel the sensation of burned alive."

    And soon there are screams of agony and a burning house all over.

    The red-cloaked man who just reached the gate of this small estate, could already hear the screams and the raging mes that are burning the whole ce down along with Ragad.

 Chapter 752: Easy Money

    The Blood red-cloaked guy looked at the burning house and the screams. He instantly ran towards the mansion.

    There are many thoughts running through his mind. He just had a conversation about this arsonist burning their people down with Ragad.

    Since Ragad is a rtively important guy in the faction and he is alive till now, they thought that Sam and his backers have some reservations against attacking someone who has some significant influence.

    But it turned out, he doesn¡¯t care.

    Right after they had a discussion about making a move on them, they attacked. He didn¡¯t even get the time to get out of the ce before the attack happened.

    There is a great possibility that their n was heard and this is the answer to that.

    When he ran to the entrance of the building and kicked the door down. He saw that the servants who are living in the quarters nearby are also running towards the house. And there is one water element user who is already trying to put the fire down.

    The cloaked person looked at them and said.

    "Block the entrances and make sure that no person gets out." The servants obliged immediately. The main reason they are in their own quarters instead of the mansion is the arrival of this cloaked guy. Due to privacy issues, all the servants are sent away and this is the perfect chance for Sam to burn the whole mansion alive.

    When the cloaked guy entered the mansion and looked at the office room he was in with Ragad, all he saw is the ck-cloaked man standing like the fire means nothing and looking down on the burning person that is rolling on the ground.

    Sam already covered his face back. He just wanted to see how this guy would react.

    And as he guessed, this guy came along. He didn¡¯te with the rest of the servants, even the transcendent stage cultivator who is a guard for Ragad also stayed down.

    This must have stemmed from the fact that this red-cloaked guy felt like he can deal with Sam and make him escape. One scan with energy vision and he can already see everyone surrounding the area.

    "You seem to be the person I am looking for. The Arsonist that killed our people." The red-cloaked man spoke.

    "Arsonist? Is that a new title? That is not so bad. But Arson is only one of the many things I am good at and it is not even my best element."

    "Maybe I can find out after I catch you and take that cloak off of you."

    "I don¡¯t think that you would be able to find that out in this life."

    "Why is that?"

    "Because your days are numbered, you wouldn¡¯t be able to live long."

    With that Sam¡¯s body was covered in golden mes. The fire elemental fusion and his clothes burned while his body merged with the raging orange mes around.

    The red-cloaked man took out a sword and got ready to make a move, but before he could do anything, Sam is already behind him as he moved through the me and a jet of golden mes hit the red-cloaked man in the back.

    "We will meet again. Until then, keep that as a parting gift. Next time we meet, I will take that head off and give it to the rest of your team or that person that sent you here. Until then, keep your life. That is mine to take."

    With that, Sam escaped as if he was never there. He used the mes and reached the entrance and the shadow mouse that is waiting there carried the crystal in which he entered and escaped.

    Even though some people saw the small shadow moving away, they couldn¡¯t care less as they don¡¯t know what it is and they didn¡¯t even suspect it.

    Meanwhile, on the top floor, Ragad is dead while the red-cloaked guy had all his back burned and there is Sam¡¯s symbol burned on his skin.

    The double S symbol. The skin ispletely burned in that shape leaving asting mark on that skin.

    Then man scanned his own back with his spiritual sense and he mmed his hands on the floor which made it crack and made him fall into the lower room.

    He stood up from the rubble and came out of the burning down which is copsing slowly.

    The people that surrounded the house came to him and started asking questions. He took out another cloak and covered the back before anyone could see and left this ce. But what he doesn¡¯t know is that there is a small shadow following him.

    There has never been a single person that broke this tailing method. It is still working great.

    The shadow mouse followed that guy out of the city and in a route to a nearby town. In the middle of the route, there are a few hills in the forest beside the road.

    These hills created a natural crevice and in that crevice, there are the remaining twenty-nine people. Thirty seemed to be amon number in these cloaked teams.

    The shadow mouse marked the location and left the ce to return by the next morning.

    Currently, Sam is sending a courier to the military unit regarding the n of faction 1 about halting their arrival by a week. But he didn¡¯t say theplete truth, he just made it seem like faction 1¡¯s main aim is the military unit and not Sam.

    He didn¡¯t provide any evidence or didn¡¯t give any statements to convince them. He only sent the message.

    As for how they will be convinced enough toe here faster, he doesn¡¯t have to worry about that for now. They will learn the truth as soon as they saw the signs of faction 1¡¯s activities to block them.

    They are going to learn it anyway, but Sam decided to take advantage of the situation and sell a favor.

    But to his surprise, after the courier was sent, a person came to meet him. It is a sheer coincidence that this person came.

    The person that came to meet Sam is actually a merchant from the. He is an elf and he is one of the best builders on 1.

    There is only one otherpany that is considered better than his own and thatpany belongs to faction1.

    Sam was surprised, but there are many of his spections answered after that initial surprise.

    There is definitely a third faction and they are tighter than the first two factions. Their end goals are definitely not clear, but from what he saw until now, they just want a certain level of independence from the two factions.

    They are trying to gather as much power as possible and all the means that could gain them wealth and power.

    They might not have ideals to take over this world, or they might have them. But from what Sam can see they are trying to increase the influence in different ways.

    They bought the coconut biscuits at such premium prices because of that so that they can increase the influence within the army and also gain some wealth.

    Now they gave out the information about the new cement to that respective person who is in the relevant business and that person came the very next day.

    Which shows that they are in a state of little desperation. They don¡¯t want to lose any of the opportunities that can be useful.

    The person who came is even ate-stage Transcendent stage cultivator who is a person of significant power in this realm as the threes out of the four are ruled by transcendent stage cultivators and he heard that the situation is a little different in 1 where the town heads arete-stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivators and the cities that they have are ruled by transcendent and the king or the queen is ate-stage consummate realm cultivator which made Sam feel a bit surprised and confused.

    The realm is supposed to be a superior realm to that of the banished realm and the Undead realm, but he didn¡¯t hear about any cultivators that are stronger than the consummate realm.

    Anyway, that is not the main point.

    He met with the builder that came and he took him on a tour over the factory as he checked the structure and construction method. The cement mixture the nt and animal extracts and Sam let him check the ingredients when they signed a contract saying that the man would buy the cement after checking that.

    After checking every ingredient, he is extremely happy, almost to the point of Ecstasy and they started discussing the price.

    This time Sam is extremely happy with the price negotiation. Because there is a lot of business he can do here.

    The deal includes Sam, selling cement recipe, a factory being built here, a farm that is specially made for cultivating the nts that are needed for the recipe, and finally a pasture to rear these animals and he managed to cut the deal for around 1.5Billion.

    Sam really liked this realm. He can make money easily. He never earned money this fast.

 Chapter 753: Hidden Sea

    Sam started his work instantly.

    He made Raunak process another few acres ofnd under his name and bought it and started clearing it.

    He felt like the owner of this whole forest.

    This time though, he doesn¡¯t have to worry too much about the construction materials. He just bought them from the new customers. He didn¡¯t buy the huge blocks of the stone though. He mostly bought the scrap that would help him make the concrete blocks.

    Within the factory, Sam is cing some machines that are used for crushingrge rocks into small stones, machines for extracting the ingredient from the nts, and also a machine for extracting from the animals.

    This factory is not just for making cement ingredients, this also for making the concrete blocks and sell them as construction materials instead of normal stone.

    So, Sam made some steam engine-driven machines that would run the factory. Like therge concrete mixer, the pulverizing machine, and such.

    That is not just for the sake of selling the factory. There is another motivation behind this.

    Since the other party wants to get power and influence using their current power and influence as the base, Sam just found his new group of customers. He can sell anything and everything to them and all he has to do is sell the designs and methods which is easier for him and since they don¡¯t value the spirit stones much and he would get more value for cheaper products.

    And his next target is engine-driven machines. He would just reach the target of Raunak¡¯s promotion by next month.

    Another week passed in the construction and the factory is basically ready. There is not much detail for Sam to do, he just has to finish the basic structure and the builders from the buyer wille and take over.

    Dia is in charge of tilling the fields and the ape in charge of nting them while Sky and Yanwu managed the pasture while the shadows performed the menial work.

    After this week, the buyer came back with his team to take over and he was surprised by the new machines.

    "Where did you get them?"

    "I made them."

    This surprised him even more and the man started examining them carefully.

    "These are great."

    "I know. But I would refrain from opening them and examining them if I were you. Once you pry it open, the machine will be destroyed and you would have to pay a good amount of money to buy another and that too if I was there and I am willing to sell it at that time."

    "Then I must be careful."

    After that theypleted the rest of the procedures and Sam moved his camp to a different ce.

    This deal added another two hundred twenty-five million spirit stones to the tax target, along with another forty millionnds Sam bought, the tax for the biscuit factory which is around one hundred and twelve, and the initial taxes from the liquor recipes already crossed the half-way point.

    Currently, Raunak only has around three hundred and seventy million spirit stones that he has to finish in.

    Sam is tempted to just buy morend, but without any proper reason like building a factory-like before, the authorities are strictly against this.

    Raunak has be colder in general after that breakdown he had. He is making all the decisions by himself without consulting Sam for everything and getting paranoid.

    The first thing he did after separating his office ispletely prohibited any normal official to have any ess to his office and that included the supposed guards that were sent by them.

    Apart from that, he dismissed all the subordinates he was given which are essentiallyckeys of other factions, and recruited the smaller level people in the administration office as his employees.

    The employees have only one weakness which is their desire to be real employees. They are the people that don¡¯t have any background and made out of the school of bureaucracy with sheer luck or grit without making any connections.

    Raunak showed some hope to them and recruited them under him and even here they are mostly responsible for performing the menial tasks like following the applications through the actual administration due to thend sale, or handing over the immediate tax Sam is paying them and such.

    But he is also helping them showing the ropes of real bureaucracy involving them in the discussions with the rest of the bureaucrats.

    He is giving them tips and experience along with the information which they would obtain about the rest of the bureaucrats and their characters along with some inner workings.

    They are ecstatic. These are the people that don¡¯t want to join any faction and sell themselves but still want to rise in the ranks.

    Everything is stable for now. Sam is currently waiting for another approach from this invisible third faction regarding the machines.

    Currently, there is no visible movement from them, because even with Sam¡¯s warning they are going to be a bit curious and with the belief in their abilities, they will not give up the opportunity of trying their luck in examining the machines.

    In fact, Sam actually wants that. He wants them to examine and tear the machines apart and he would use that as leverage to make a new business for himself. He would get that forging license which is impossible to get through Raunak from them and he would then start his weapon business here.

    He wouldn¡¯t sell products themselves, he would sell the designs and factories.

    He would open something like Patent Company use that as a base of his development in this realm. But he is not keen on opening it on this.

    This is made for agriculture. Not manufacturing.

    While he is contemting his future development ns in this realm, the trio returned from the trip and brought some interesting news.

    And that is, the viges and towns which are at the edge of the map are not actually the end of this. In the map, the towns are shown as the end and the rest of the is covered with forest which is restrictive to enter because of the presence of the high-level beasts.

    At least that is what they were told. But the trio went to different ces to verify these ims and it turns out it is not exactly true.

    There are indeed some forests that are being upied by some high-level beasts, but there are some ces that are a bit suspicious and the trio¡¯s investigation revealed something that was being hidden for a long time.

    There is a sea on this.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know how the elves managed to hide it for so many years and from so many people. But there is indeed a sea on this and it is actually arge one.

    One of the reasons that they managed to hide is because the travel is not by some spaceship. It is done by the wormholes which act as portals.

    This made things easier for the elves to hide. And from what the people observed the towns and cities that are on the edge of the map are not actually thest towns and viges on the edge, in fact there are other towns beyond them.

    But those towns are actually blocked by the thick forests which the trio suspects are artificially grown. Anyone who wants to travel past that has to go through the thick forests and they did encounter some beasts, but they are not actually wild beasts, they are tamed and some people are even riding them.

    They are mostly elves and when they sneaked past them, they finally noticed something.

    There are other towns past this forest, but the towns are not normal. They are bases for the soldiers. They didn¡¯t dare go deeper than that, but they are sure that they saw the sea and felt the salty sea breeze.

    So there is some reason that the factions are trying to cover this up and particrly when they are teamed up together and setting aside their differences.

    There are some spections Sam has.

    One of them is that they wanted to make the peoplepletely oblivious of what is happening because there might be some serious danger in the sea.

    Or there is a war going on with some enemy which they didn¡¯t want to show to their citizens and civilians.

    In both cases, the danger is too big and the people will be in a panicked state. In the worst-case scenario, if that dangeres into the town, then their main target would be the people that are ruling, so there would be no bureaucrats who would be willing to work here.

    So, this would hinder them from staying on this and running it and even the normal people that are responsible for the development of the wouldn¡¯t be willing to stay here when they knew that there is an enemy breathing under their neck.

    Sam is smelling an opportunity here based on the threat that is on the sea. But for that, he has to find what it is exactly.

 Chapter 754: Clash with Braman

    Sam didn¡¯t put too much attention into this hidden seashore. If he really wants to know what is happening there, he has to go there himself. The trio can make some chaos with their hoverboards but they wouldn¡¯t be able to get past them and stay safe much lessing back safely.

    The only way they can infiltrate this area is with the use of shadow mice or his own shadow mode.

    Any direct way would be too hard.

    For now, he has to focus on reducing the tax target and improve his business.

    And soon there is a chance. Because as soon as the builders took over the cement factory, they indeed messed with the engines to check the structure and operating mechanisms and Sam is very quirky about protecting the mechanisms.

    And for the steam engines, he made very different arrangements.

    First thing is that an array of inscriptions on the surface of the engine head and the bolts that are holding it up.

    The elves are not going to understand this simple bolt and nut mechanism and the best way to take it apart without really damaging it is slowly heating it up and melting the bolts away.

    But that is not at all easy. The array will absorb all the heat and divert it to the sensitive parts in the engine which will get distorted easily because of this excess heat and damage the mechanismpletely.

    This will not only let the bolts go away, it will also ruin the mechanism which willpletely make the engine unusable.

    If they start the engine once again, the parts that are clearly distorted will break and fail to make the engine unusable.

    There are many more traps like this including the ssic trap he has been using since the start. The destruction trap will activate as soon as they use force to pry it open.

    With all these traps in ce, there is no way they could just open it up. Not everyone has the observation ability to check it.

    And the builder that disappeared to 1 after the deal waspleted was back once again at Sam¡¯s camp.

    "Mr. Braman. I was surprised you were back so soon. I thought you will not start the production until your renovations areplete. Why are you here? Do you want to join me for a meal? I was in the mood for some cooking."

    "Mr. Sam. I am here to talk business. Not for a meal."

    "I am not nning any ventures soon. My friends just came after their journey. We are nning on having a rxed holiday for the time being."

    "It is not a new business. I am here to talk about some old business. You know the machines you have sold us, will I be able to buy a new set?"

    "Why? I think with the current size of the pasture and the current growth of the fields, the current factory is already too big and the machines are also enough for the current production capacity.

    In fact, since you are the only producer, for now, it is already enough for you to have enough profit. You would be able to make the money easily. The profit would cover your investment easily."

    "Well, there is an ident in the factory that damaged the machines. We cannot operate them anymore."

    "Really, an ident? Are you sure it is just an ident? What kind of ident managed to destroy a machine that could even withstand a Peak stage Pre-transcendent attack? Don¡¯t tell me, that your workers are fighting in presence of the machines.

    It is not far from here, so I am sure that I didn¡¯t hear any of such noises."

    "No, it is a bitplicated."

    "Indeed the machine is a bit tooplicated for you guys to open, so you destroyed the machine in the process. Am I right?"

    Braman just bowed his head in shame.

    Particrly when he was reminded of the fact that Sam already mentioned not to try anything funny with the machines and he did it anyway.

    "I can understand why it happened. No one wants someone else to hold the knowledge of something that could change the face of many industries. Particrly, someone as ambitious as you, who wants to prevail in your industry.

    You must have seen many more uses that are beyond the concrete mixer. It is indeed tempting."

    Braman is in a difficult position. So Sam continued.

    "I am also put in a difficult spot by you. That is thest piece I made and that too in secret. I couldn¡¯t possibly get a license for forging because of that. I would be having trouble if I did another in secret. After all, a forging license is hard to obtain due to the regtion on the weapon-making."

    "If you can make one in secrete, then it wouldn¡¯t be too hard to make another one. I can easily obtain any metals and materials you want."

    "It is not about the materials. I am actually trying my best to stay in legal ways. My friend Raunak is currently on a special test for his next promotion. So I have to make sure that everything is clean and perfect. I don¡¯t have the liberty to go astray at this point."

    "Is there no other way out of this?"

    "Of course there is a way out."

    "You can get me a forging license."

    "Forging license is not something that can be easily obtained. It is an extremely stringent process that would make it hard for any possible string-pulling."

    "Then you have to find your own method. I am pretty sure the machines are fully destroyed. They were made that way after all."

    "How about the designs? I am sure you can sell those."

    "I am sure too. But there is one problem. The designs are not just enough to make the machine. I am sure after the machines are destroyed you saw manyplicated parts inside, they are not possible to make with the normal process.

    Different tools are needed and to make those tools some more tools are needed.

    It is hard to give every design and teach you. I highly doubt you could afford my teachings that easily. It is not something that could be bought with just money."

    "Are you not undermining the forging methods of the elves so much?"

    "I am not exactly undermining the methods. I am undermining thepetence of the people who use it."

    "What do you mean? Do you think that the elves are that ipetentpared to you?"

    Sam looked at Braman and said.

    "I thought you were different from the rest of the elves, and it seems like this unwarranted superiority is just amon gic quality of the elven race.

    And since you are like this, I will be straightforward.

    I am not selling any machinery or equipment to you guys until I get the forging license. I want a weapon license.

    Do you want money in exchange? Sure. I will pay. If you want exclusivity to the products, I am open to discussion. I can even give you a condition and even a contract that I will only sell weapons to a specific military unit if you want to. I will not sell a single weapon to any other military unit, the city guard, or even a single individual.

    The military unit can manage all the sales.

    Now go back and tell the people that need to be told and finish this task then we can talk real business."

    "I don¡¯t think that it is an economical method for us. I am sure there are many other easier ways to take that from you."

    "And? What else do you think? If you can really think more than that, why don¡¯t you think if faction 1 and faction 2 didn¡¯t have the same thoughts as you? And after thinking that, why don¡¯t you think they didn¡¯t manage to take anything from me if they did get that thought?"

    Sam stood up from his chair and continued.

    "You are a merchant and a builder. They are your primary identities and I am also both of them, but they are terinary identities, not even secondary much less primary. If you want to be someone you are not, particrly when you are facing someone who knows what they are and who is many things that you don¡¯t know, you are bound to fail.

    I hope you make the decision after consulting the true decision-maker."

    With that, Sam stood up and walked to Raunak¡¯s office.

    Raunak is going through some administrative tasks. One of them is registering Sam¡¯s business. It is called the Dusk organization. A tradingpany. That is the most versatilepany that can be registered under their name and all of Sam¡¯s deals in the past few days are under this organization.

    He will be paying the taxes through thispany too.

    When he saw Sam, he stopped his work and asked.

    "Why are you here? Is there anything you want?"

    "You really want to keep your rtion with your lover pure and unaffected by the factions and politics?"

    "Why are you asking this?"

    "I thought maybe I didn¡¯t need to, but the circumstances are a bit different. If you have an answer to this question, then tell meter in person. You might want to change some things regarding your connections and rtions."

 Chapter 755: Dealing with the Red Cloaks

    Sam didn¡¯t discuss much with Raunak. Even though Raunak has an answer for this, he felt like he should think and understand what is going on properly before he answered.

    Anyway, it seemed like Sam doesn¡¯t need an answer right away so he can discuss this with himter.

    Sam left the office and went back to meet his friends.

    Tonight he will be having another meeting with the targets who are nearing him.

    He doesn¡¯t know why they didn¡¯t make a move and why they are stalling, but the shadow mice that are giving the updates told him that they are moving slowly through the forests without taking the main route and on the way they through the forests, they are capturing the beasts with force.

    This made Sam curious and there are many reasons for it. First one is that the one week stalling time they said they would have by halting the military unit from taking over the biscuit factory is over and the military unit is still nowhere to be seen.

    The second reason is the way this team is moving. It is as if they have all the time in the world. This made him want to know what exactly happened with the military unit that they halted for this much time even with the headsup Sam gave them.

    The final reason is also rted to the route they are taking. No matter how long the distance between the city and their hiding location is, it only takes a few hours through the main route and even though the route they are taking is a roundabout one and that is to the point that it is too long, it would only take around one and half a day.

    But it is taking too long for that. They didn¡¯t move right after Sam marked one of those guys, they halted for three days and made their move, but it is still too long, it is already sixth day since their day of travel and they are only visiting now.

    Currently, except for a few builders in the nearby factory, everyone else is gone.

    So, now that they areing here, there is no reason for Sam to not prepare a wee present for them.

    He started messing with the trees to make some traps with the Biofuel and the Grenades. This time, the beasts are out and his friends even took out the hover boards.

    From what the shadow mice said, they captured a lot of beasts and most of the time it is by force. He doesn¡¯t know what they are going to do with them, but there is a reason for him to believe that they are going to use them to create a stampede.

    So, it is better for him to prepare.

    While he let his friendsy down the special traps, he went to the cement factory and said.

    "You guys go back to the city tonight, there are some unwanted visitors and I am sure you don¡¯t want to get caught up in a mess that might take your lives."

    He didn¡¯t exin anything else and left and there is no surprise on what the builders did, they just left the ce and went to the city.

    Sam asked Raunak about the same thing, but didn¡¯t leave, he decided to stay there and help.

    "Just don¡¯t get in the way."

    That is only what Sam has to say to him.

    And at midnight, there is finally sight of the visitors and they are not alone.

    Sam¡¯s thoughts are urate, they are indeed creating a stampede. But the beasts are unbelievably obedient and they are extremely aggressive at the same time which is not a regr thing to see.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know what method they used to make them so tame yet aggressive at the same time, but he knew that is not something normal.

    As he waited with his friends near the camp, the beasts started running. There are at least fifty beasts all of them being Pre-transcendent stage beasts. The ground started quaking around them and even the guards stationed at the city gate can feel that.

    Sam knew that they wouldn¡¯t help so he didn¡¯t bother thinking about them at all.

    But he kept on looking at the beasts that areing towards them keenly, they are so aggressive to the point that they are crazy, they hit so many trees on their way and made them copse, but the beasts are moving without a single feel.

    And they areing from all sides. Soon they entered the perimeter they set and all of a sudden the ground copsed creating arge circr ring hole around the camp.

    That is what happens in a stampede, particrly when the beasts are crazy, they will only have the targets in their vision and mind and wouldn¡¯t take note of the minor details.

    As soon as this new crevice appeared, many beasts fell into the trap and some beasts are big enough to get stuffed in the crack. But that was good enough to set off the traps they set.

    The first thing that reacted were naturally the grenades and then the fuel bottles that cracked from the explosion and made the beasts burn continuously creating a pit of fire for the beasts.

    The sudden change made the beasts halt behind for a moment and this is enough for the team. They set off the remaining traps which are mostly about throwing the biofuel on the bodies of the beasts. There is not much they needed to do after all and the more the fuel stayed on their bodies, the more it would be absorbed into the body and the more it would burn.

    And soon it became reality, the beasts only halted for a few seconds due to the sudden emergence of the mes and now that they got over that surprise they jumped over the mes, but a small tongue of mes are enough to make them set on fire.

    The beasts thatnded on the other side of the ring started roaring in agony, the beasts that fell into the crevice are not exactly yelling or screaming as they don¡¯t even have enough space, but the rest can clearly show the suffering.

    But that didn¡¯t stop there.

    Sam and his friends made their move as they killed the beasts one after another even though they will eventually die. But they didn¡¯t let that happen, they finished them before they could die from the me and when most of the body hasn¡¯t been burned.

    While the killing being done, Sam is doing something else. He started performing necromancy. He made one burning corpse of a beast an undead and made it run towards the visitors before cutting off his contract with the undead. Now that the only living target nearest to it would be one of the visitors, it directly went for them.

    The same thing happened around thirty of so beasts that are not stuck in the crevice.

    Sam took out his bow and some special arrows which he made for this asion. Instead of the arrow head made of metal, there is a hollow ss arrow head filled with liquid.

    The ss is also extremely thin to the point that some heat and pressure would clearly distort and destroy it.

    The visitors are clearly shocked by the sudden situation change, but they didn¡¯t panic too much. They are a team specialized in directbat.

    The ck cloaked team is more keen on taking down opponents with ambushes and team work and team attacks, the red cloaked team is mostly focused on directbat with support from each other rather than thebined attacks like the meteor strikes.

    They didn¡¯t care about the thirty beasts that areing towards them, they are sure that they can easily handle them. But what they didn¡¯t know is that the beasts are not the direct threat they have to deal with. Sam hovered on the harbinger as he held his bow and aimed at them. As soon as the first burning undead reached the first visitor who is so confident about dealing with it, An arrow shot through the air and hit him on the shoulder followed by a second arrow with only a dy for a second.

    The second arrow passed through the mes on the undead and hit him near the wound causing him to catch a me around his already hurting wound.

    The same thing kept on repeating as Sam shot the arrows at a speed that made it impossible for one to see his hand stationary for a single second.

    As the battle field turned into an orderly chaos created by Sam, the trio made their move, they went on their hoverboards to deal with the chaotic visitors.

    The situation turned one sided but not in the way the visitors wanted it to be.

    It is a one sided ughter. But the trio left one person alive.

    The one person who Sam marked as his.

    He is currently kneeling on the ground and felt extremely weak.

    Sam zoomed on the harbinger and arrived in front of him.

    When that guy looked at Sam, all he saw is a face hidden because of the raging mes that are burning the forest overshadowing it, but he could faintly make out the evil smile on those lips, and then came the voice that sent shivers through his spine.

    "Didn¡¯t I tell you, you don¡¯t have a long life in front of you? And here you are waiting for your imminent demise."

    The visitor¡¯s eyes visibly shook as he shivered. This is the first time he felt despair.

 Chapter 756: Annoying trial

    The next day.

    Sam is currently in front of the city lord.

    This is the hearing for the yesterday¡¯s forest fire he caused. The city lord looked at him and asked.

    "Who are you fighting with in the forestst night? From what we heard there are many people in the forest and I am sure you knew that it is illegal to kill someone ording to thew. On top of that the forest is sacred in the elven culture. I know you are a human, but that is not eptable."

    "I didn¡¯t kill anyone."

    "What do you mean by that?"

    "I mean exactly what I said. I didn¡¯t kill anyone."

    "Then what about the people that are spotted in red cloaks by the city guards."

    "Then may I ask why the city guards didn¡¯t pursue the people that looked suspicious?"

    "I am the one asking questions here." The City lord got flustered and spoke in a defending tone.

    Sam shook his head and spoke.

    "I don¡¯t know on what grounds you are holding a trail for me. First, I didn¡¯t kill anyone and if you have any proof that I did, you can provide it. As for the forest destruction, I don¡¯t know exactly what you are talking about. You might have either ignored some documents or you might have deliberately not seen in.

    The forest you said I damaged is my private property and the paper work is processedst night. I am building an office for my ownpany which was recently registered so I bought the forestnd. And it is even directly processed by the special officer Raunak, if you want you can take a look."

    As soon as he said that, the city lord asked someone beside him who brought the documents.

    But Sam is not done yet.

    "I am the highest tax payer in thest few months and if you don¡¯t mind me asking, if there are really suspicious people that came to my property, I would at least expect that minimum security that a normal civilian should get.

    But here I am being put through a trial because someone suspects me of killing people that are supposedly sneaked into my private property.

    I just don¡¯t understand how you maintain this government."

    The City lord was stumped. But Sam still has something else to say.

    "Anyway, if you really want to find and grill someone, find that guy that ismitting arson right in the middle of the city. He killed two officers and a noble offspring that came here from 1. I don¡¯t think there is any progress in that case. I don¡¯t like being treated like this."

    With that, he didn¡¯t even bother to wait for any response and left. But the city lord is currently feeling a bit stressed.

    He is from a faction and he knows for a fact that something is wrong with Sam and he is currently hunting the members of their faction.

    The faction 2 is also silent for the same exact reason, they might have lost some money to Sam, but money is something they could earn easily and with the fact that everyone that messed with Sam was burned alive is something they couldn¡¯t get over easily.

    That is why the faction 2 let them fight over and they are happy that Sam is selling his new products to the new members from 1 than the faction 1 as they lost too many funds and that even cost them the election in 2.

    The city lord is only giving Sam a hard time because he was ordered to, but now that he was reminded of what happens, when Sam was targeted he is sweating bullets, he didn¡¯t even bother to stop him and let him go.

    After Sam came out, he met with Raunak and spoke personally.

    "These factions are really idiotic and so full of themselves. Do you have answer for my question?"

    "Yes, I would like a rtively peaceful life with her. I don¡¯t want our rtionship to be the part of this chaos."

    "Then there are only two options, one is get out of this ce after you married her. You have to leave everything behind within this realm and go to another realm if you want to, but you have to stay far enough for the factions to not mess with you.

    That professor of yours who helped with the coconut biscuits; he is bad news. There is another secret faction growing slowly but steadily in the dark and unknowingly you are actually a part of that faction."

    "I am a part of a faction? Are you kidding me? I am pretty sure, I would know if I was really a part of some faction."

    "Well, that is what makes this faction special. You don¡¯t know but you are slowly falling into this pit. Why do you think the professor is helping you and many others like you? Do you think that is for fun? Why do you think he is supporting your love with that girl when she is an important member of a faction? Because he cares too much about your well-being?

    If you really think that, then you are nothing but delusional.

    The one-star military unit, that builder that came to buy the cement factory, they are all part of a faction.

    They might have also started just like you or someone must have really been a part of that but if you ask them enough favors, you would have to return them one day and they would use your rtion with that girl to do something that you don¡¯t want to do.

    Even if they didn¡¯t do that, you would be forced to join the faction 1 by your father inw since you and your lover will be stuck with that.

    And that is not even the worst part. That would be when you and your lover are being torn apart from both this mysterious faction and the faction 1.

    If you don¡¯t want to get into this mess, there are two methods. One is as I said before, get the promotion, marry her and leave this ce. Get far away. You would have to leave your home town, and keep on running away.

    There is another way and I don¡¯t know if you are strong enough to follow that."

    "What is it?"

    "In that method you will be able to stay in this ce, not leave, but it would be a little harsh, at least you wouldn¡¯t be too torn between both the factions. You have to manipte them in getting what you want out of any kind of situation you will be put in.

    So make your decision, because the more I stay here, the more I am feeling that this ce is not worth it.

    But no matter what decision it is, first cut the contact with the professor and any other contacts he gave you. If that builder or any other person tries to contact you, about anything. The forging license or any other shit, just ask them to contact me directly no matter what it is.

    If they ask you for something else, like some favors or something, don¡¯t do it for free. If you can handle it and brush it off, do it, if you can¡¯t then tell me and I will help you handle it.

    If you are going to escape, just tell me before, so that I won¡¯t waste too much time making ns. I will make the promotion as soon as possible and let you have your moment.

    So, be sure to think this through before you do anything.

    By the way, after you are done with the promotion, if your father inw tries something funny, the remaining two factions will definitely look for you to make use of you. Currently you are a great talent in their eyes, but you are inevitably linked to the faction 1 and they couldn¡¯t separate you from that easily.

    But if you don¡¯t want to die with all of your uses extracted from you, you better not take it.

    That is all I have to say for now. Think properly."

    With that, Sam left the ce and went back to the camp. He and his friends are currently in the middle of building a new base for his office.

    This would be a secondary base for his future subordinates that are going toe to this elven realm.

    From what Sam could see, the elven government is not as strong as he thought and there is not much power in the hands of elected officials, it is just a symbol of authority.

    The main power is still in the hands of the bureaucrats and the merchants along with the military and finally the elders who are essentially the bureaucrats while the hidden powers amount to the nobility.

    And the government is also pretty torn here. So, Sam decided on the development route of his organization in Charbum realm, and it starts in the 2 for now. And it would continue after he entered the remainings too. With the 1 having the primary base.

 Chapter 757: Forging License exam

    After the small altercation in the form of trial and the veiled threat Sam gave him along with the free advice he gave to Raunak, Sam got himself busy with the construction.

    This is the first detailed and proper construction he is doing after he got the earth element and he is using a special new technique. The special reinforced concrete.

    Normal concrete is actually quite good, but he wants to see how the reinforced concrete structure works in this world with all the special metals with special properties and their special affinities with the different elements, he wants to see how he can make use of it.

    Anyway, while he is researching in this direction, his friends are working on the foundation of the building.

    It has been around five months since they came here and there is only a month away before thepletion of a year since thest pce of inheritance.

    Sam must finishying the path for his development in this realm within a year as he has to go and find the next Pce of inheritance location from Arkiv or Arman who are still in the Deste realm.

    While Sam is nning the development, someone familiar came back. He is none other than Braman the builder-merchant.

    "I can help you with the forging license, but all the weapons or weapon designs you make have to go through the One-Star military unit."

    "Of course, I already agreed to that."

    "Then let¡¯s put it in a paper and sign it."

    "I am not really okay with that. I will only sign an agreement after the licensees to me."

    "That is not what we previously agreed on."

    "We didn¡¯t agree to sign the document early either. Its your word against mine. What do you say we do?"

    "What if you leave after the license and hang me out to dry?"

    "What if you hang me out to dry without the license after I signed it, you are going to strong arm me into giving my designs away since we cannot put your help for the license in the agreement. Do you think I was born yesterday?"

    "This is absolutely ridiculous. We shouldn¡¯t have just agreed with you. Now you are showing your true colors."

    "I never hide my true colors Mr. Braman. Its just that the people are too dumb to recognize that. Do you really think you are so smart and the decision maker who might have convinced and more likely forced you to ept my terms is dumber than you?

    Just how good do you think you are?

    You might think that you and I are making this deal, but that is not true in any sense. The deal is between me and the ones behind you.

    And you better what you are told, as I am sure there are enough people that could rece you if anything happens.

    As for taking me on by force, I already told you, do you think that the two factions and your superiors are so dumb that they didn¡¯t think of that idea? Or are you for some reason ignoring the burned forest around you and the rumors that are surrounding it.

    Don¡¯t talk to me in that tone one more time. All this while I am ying defense just for the fun of it, if I go on offense, your superiors will serve you on the silver tter like an offering to a deity.

    I will finish the deal after the license is approved. Do whatever you want. Otherwise, I am sure that the faction 2 would be kind enough to get me a license in exchange for the same deal."

    With that Sam left the spot and went back to do his research. Sam is currently feeling a bit frustrated with these stupid political driven ce.

    It is easy to take advantage, but there are just too many dumb people here. Politicians are happy to run this ce because of this blind superiorityplex these elves have and the blind inferiorityplex these elves drilled into the humans and the centaurs, which made it easy for the maniptors to take advantage.

    But the factions are toorge and too detailed for Sam to tolerate this.

    Due to the nature of these factions, the leaders are noting out to talk for themselves as everything they do is being magnified and the public opinions matter too much.

    This happened back on earth too. But on earth there is no use of physical strengthpared to a strong political power. A person¡¯s strength wouldn¡¯t matter much individually in an open ce full of public eyes which made the footing of the politicians more solid, but here the physical strength or more precisely the raw strength of a person easily makes a big difference.

    In fact that strength matters more than the political power and this creates a conflict between the political image and the image based on strength. Here the bnce is delicate because a person who is part of the public and also possess immense strength will retaliate when the politicians get out of their fa?ade and do what they want.

    The same thing cannot happen in earth. Even if the politicians are known for their opinions and evil deeds, normal people cannot do much.

    This difference caused the politicians here to hide deeply and they wouldn¡¯t interact with anyone who is troublesome directly.

    This made things troublesome for Sam.

    If only he could meet a proper leader who has enough decision making power, he is sure that he would be able to fix this ongoing headache.

    He has to kill people secretly when they areing at him and he has to make sure that there is no implicating evidence at whatever he does.

    He is getting bored of this.

    Braman is clenching his fists hard and tried to control his urge to smack Sam once and be done with it.

    Meanwhile, Sam processed the paperwork through Raunak.

    Even though he is a special officer, he is actually like assistant to Sam who is making all the arrangements regarding the government issues.

    Sam¡¯s application process is clearly faster, but there would be a test about his forging skills.

    Only after Raunak exined did he understand just howplicated this procedure is.

    The easiest way to get past this is join the college in the capital of the 1. There is a college for all these vocational disciplines besides the school of bureaucracy. After they finished the course and passed the required tests they are good to go.

    But the courses are extremely pricey.

    Of course, there is also a way for the people who didn¡¯t want to go to the college and that is the direct examination which Sam has to take.

    These direct examinations are a lot stricter and harder and the basic requirement to even apply is to be a civilian and the second requirement is actually the financial status. A person has to pay arge amount of fee for the test.

    Both of them are not a big deal for Sam, so there is no need for him to worry. As for the skill test that is going to be thest part, he is confident that even the faction members who wants to create trouble for Sam wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything to him. He is confident to the point that it is border line arrogance and narcissismbined.

    The only problem is the long processing time. But when he asked about this, Raunak¡¯s answer surprised him.

    He was told that this is the fastest processing of an application that ever happened, the faction candidates will not go through this process and they will go through the college so their applications don¡¯t count.

    Apart from them, Sam is the onlymoner who managed to get his application processed this fast.

    Soon, Sam¡¯s exam date arrived, it is thest day of the month on which he is settling all the taxes.

    He left the taxation troubles to his friends and went for the exam. The panel of judges really surprised Sam.

    One of the judges is actually the city lord who is looking at Sam with those meaningful eyes. Sam just didn¡¯t care at all.

    From what Sam knew all the town heads and the city lords in this are just some puppets that are used by their respective faction¡¯s bureaucrats. If the city lord is really smart or skilled enough to find a mistake in Sam¡¯s forging, then he wouldn¡¯t be a puppet pushed around by others.

    There are not many tests, it is just the direct forging tests. He has to forge three different things based on the images and the blue prints given to him and each level bes tougher and tougher.

    The final test is actually a full body armor.

    It is in the style of a footbat armor of the medieval periods mostly used in the tournaments.

    The armor is mostly focused on the intricate and delicate details within the surface design.

    Even the first two tests are not easy, he has to forge some tricky weapons. One of them is arge nged head Mace and the other one is a Buckhorn Parrying stick.

    These are prettyplicated weapons that need excellent control of strength and force used to forge the metal. The shapes are a bitplicated and it is just a lot of trouble.

    He knew that these guys wants to make trouble for him, but Sam is not really that flustered. It is unexpected, but not impossible.

 Chapter 758: The Scroll

    Five hourster.

    Sam is standing with the three products in front of him.

    The Buckhorn Parrying Stick is actually the mostplicated for him to do. The remaining two are considerably easy.

    The nged mace is the easiest.

    Even though the materials are not something that he has worked on before, Sam caught up easily and his working speed only grew faster and faster as he moved.

    He forged the five products in Five hours. The armor is not thatplicated as it is time taking.

    Five hours is actually very little time for these things, but he did it.

    The test was supposed to be a test for a full day.

    Sam finished it in such a short time and the examiners are stunned beyond belief. They repeatedly tested the products and were amazed by the precision Sam showed. Many of the techniques Sam used are new to them.

    The three artisan examiners who are in charge of the quality check wanted to discuss these things with him, but looking at the cold look on his face, it is apparent that he is not very keen on that.

    The City lord tried every way to create trouble for Sam, but it didn¡¯t work.

    Before he left, he stopped by the city lord and whispered.

    "Be careful my dear city lord. I heard that an arsonist is sneaking into the city without being spotted by anyone. And he is burning without even his targets knowing. I heard that the previous person is a bit closer to you. We don¡¯t want anything happening to you, do we?"

    The city lord shivered in the spot and looked at Sam in horror.

    He doesn¡¯t know why, but Sam¡¯s tone almost made him pass out. Sam looked at the terrified expression, a clear sign of mental weakness. A great puppet indeed. He shook his head and left without doing anything.

    He doesn¡¯t have any reason for killing this city lord and there are no benefits for doing that. He just wanted to get off his back. Since he is a weak-willed person, then it is easy to induce fear into his head.

    Fear can make a person do stupid things and at the same time can make someone stop doing anything if it is induced at a certain level.

    Sam went back to the camp and waited for his license to be processed.

    And it wasn¡¯t dyed by too much, the license came in two days. On that day Raunak gave the license to Sam and said.

    "Someone from the professor contacted me and asked me to hold the license away from you for a while before the contract is signed. I didn¡¯t answer him anything and just brought the license."

    "Just stay silent for now. I will deal with this."

    With that, Sam waited for Braman or any other person that woulde to meet him for the contract and it was not toote before they came.

    They even came on that same day.

    But the people that came are the two military people that came from that military unit. The human and the elf.

    "I thought you woulde. Didn¡¯t expect this early."

    "These deals are better done earlier thanter. Shall we sign the contract?"

    "Of course, we can. But the license is not here yet."

    "It already left the administration, you will get it right after you sign the deal."

    "What do you mean? That is not the part of the deal." Sam asked in a surprising tone.

    "Now that is the deal." The human seemed to be a bit smug as if they pulled one over him

    "Really?" Sam¡¯s voice lost the surprise and that smirk that makes anyone want to punch that face came back as he took out the license from his storage.

    The license is a metallic card with all the details of Sam on it.

    When the two soldiers saw the license their smug looks are gone and the color drained away from his face.

    "How did you get it?"

    "It doesn¡¯t matter how I got it. Since you wanted to pull a stunt over me like that, I have another use to add."

    "What is that?"

    "Leave Raunak alone."

    Both of them frowned. This is clearly something that surprised them.

    "I don¡¯t know who that so-called professor is and in fact, I am not too keen on knowing who he is, but I am pretty sure he is a part or might even be a leader of something big and something that shouldn¡¯t be known to the world.

    I don¡¯t really care though. But you better leave Raunak alone. Every favor that he owed you is not going to be repaid because of your stupid decision of holding that license back.

    Go back and talk with your professor. I don¡¯t know what method he will use to prove me, but any person from your team shouldn¡¯t contact him again and you have to prove it to me."

    "Do you really think that you can do whatever you want just because you are given some importance? Remember your ce before making any demands."

    The human said in a cold voice as his aura raged around.

    Sam looked at him and said with a cold smile.

    "It seems to me like you are the one that is not self-aware. Do you really think you can force me to sign the deal? Then that means you haven¡¯t done your homework.

    No problem, all you have to do is make a move and you will understand why you shouldn¡¯t have done that.

    Go on."

    The one who made a move is not the human though. The Elf who is standing behind the human-made his move. He took out a saber and there is a lot of vitality-filled wood elemental energy surrounding the saber.

    He shed towards Sam from the other side of the table.

    The table was shed into two and the ray of the saber directly came at Sam.

    But right before it made contact, Sam extended his leg and kicked it through the falling table as arge wind explosion happened to cause the elf to take full force and got blown away which caused the saber to go away.

    Sam stood up from his chair and took out of his bow as he shot one arrow after another and when the dust settled, the elf is pinned to the tree nearby with arrows stabbed through his robe and nailed into therge tree behind him.

    Sam nocked another arrow and aimed at the elf before saying to the human.

    "Want to continue? I might stop holding back."

    The human just shook his head and let the elf down before they went back to the city. They sent a courier to 1 and waited for a reply.

    The next day they got the reply along with a special contract.

    When they saw the contract in the form of a blood-red scroll they couldn¡¯t help but gulp in nervousness.

    The scroll is a special one. It is made from a tree that is forbidden to grow in open, but some elves do it anyway.

    The tree is grown with the blood and souls of creatures. Any creature will suffice but the tree will absorb the energy from the souls and the blood that was given to it and the wood will be a bit different with some form of moderate sentience.

    The wood is used to make this special thick paper scroll, which is used to perform some ritual contracts. A person would have to ce his blood and a pit of spiritual imprint and a very small part of the soul into it.

    If they break the contract, all the souls that are absorbed by the tree that would be trapped in this scroll along with all the blood energy will haunt the person that broke the contract.

    Even though people of certain power can escape that contract, from what they knew there is not a single person including the Elders that can escape the effect.

    They didn¡¯t expect that the professor would use that contract to make Sam believe in them.

    They gave the scroll to Sam and when Sam asked what it was, they got a little pissed off and said.

    "Raunak will know it, ask him. But you better sign the deal now."

    "Sure, take the contract out."

    Sam looked through the contract and made sure that everything is on line and signed the deal.

    "Don¡¯t try anything funny alright. I am losing my patience in thisnd and I might do something crazy and trust me you don¡¯t want to experience that."

    With that, Sam finished the deal and went to meet Raunak.

    He doesn¡¯t know anything about this scroll. He has to find out if it really is trustworthy. He is sure that the professor wouldn¡¯t want a single Raunak and lose the weapons and deals Sam could bring to the table, but he figured that it would be better if he knew the details.

    After Raunak saw the scroll and the words that are written in it, he was extremely shocked and slowly exined everything.

    When Sam heard that, he couldn¡¯t help but say.

    "It would be great if I could get a couple of those saplings, these thingse in handy."

 Chapter 759: The Professor

    While Sam is wondering how he can get his hands on these trees to make the scrolls, someone who sent the scroll back to Sam is also wondering about Sam.

    In the College of Bureaucracy. Inside an office of the main building, someone is sitting on his chair and looked out of the window as he thought deeply.

    He is none other than the professor. He is a tall Elf with extremely lean but fit stature. Even among a bunch of elves, it would be hard to not notice his presence.

    There are a bunch of scrolls in front of him and one of them is open. There are details of Raunak written in it, if Raunak himself saw this, he would be stunned because there is everything about his life in them. Something which he knew and something which doesn¡¯t even know, like the identity of the parents.

    But the scroll was currently crossed out with red ink.

    *knock* *knock*

    While he is thinking, someone knocked on the door which brought him back to his senses.

    Another Elf came in, but this time it is a woman.

    "Ratna why are you here? I said I want some alone time."

    "I don¡¯t have a choice professor, you have been dying your administrative duties in the past week and the Dean is currently grilling me. I don¡¯t want to be around that pervert anymore. The Old Bastard gives me creeps."

    "I am sorry. I was just too busy with ¡¯those¡¯ affairs."

    She took a seat opposite to him and saw the scroll that was open on the table.

    "You really gave up Raunak? I think he is a great addition to your team. He can make connections, he thinks out of the box and he is modest enough to recognize his faults and grow. Why would you leave such a candidate?"

    "I already gave him up."

    "Why?"

    "To make a deal with that new resource of ours. He just has too many tricks up his sleeve. Because of him the faction 2 indirectly lost power in the 2. And they didn¡¯t do anything to him because of the 1 faction.

    And the faction 1 that is trying to get him back for that, lost two Transcendent stage cultivators, severely injured one transcendent stage cultivator, an extra officer, killed two teams of the cloaked forces and one of them is ck and the other is blood red.

    Apart from that, some mercenaries who got greedy about his massive wealth tried their luck, but they are also dead.

    He killed so many people and there is no evidence to directly convict him. They didn¡¯t want to make a move because of the election drama.

    He is the right person in the right ce, but his presence is going to mess with the elections a lot. With his new ventures one after another the two factions had to spend a lot of money to acquire them and this will impact their participation in the elections.

    So, they are now in a tacit understanding to not buy anything from him for now and get them by force after the elections are over.

    This is the only time we will get a chance to buy something and pull him to our direction, otherwise he might either disappear or he would be in the middle of a giant storm that we cannot meddle.

    This is the only time where we can take advantage of him as much as we can."

    "Then why don¡¯t you use force to get the required information out of him."

    "We can¡¯t. Because I am not clear of his origins. He mysteriously appeared in Cane¡¯s town and started making these waves, it is as if he came out of nowhere.

    Even though I said that he killed them all, it is not sure whether he did so himself or if he made some other people kill them. We don¡¯t even know if he is the one really incharge of all this or if he is just a puppet.

    Raunak¡¯s only special quality for us is his rtionship with Rajan. We can use him as our double agent if he is inside the faction 1¡¯s core member¡¯s circle, but that is still not sure. From what I know, Rajan is breaking the agreement.

    He is in constant contact with the elders and doing something, if I am not wrong, he might have already nned to send her daughter to that ce. The only way to stop that is for Raunak to finish his target as soon as possible and even with that it would be hard for him to get past Rajan¡¯s influence and make him follow the agreement.

    There are just too many variables.

    But I want everything he has on him and everything he can make. This will progress my ns for at least a decade. I would be able to gather both wealth, the influence and on top of both of them, I can create the chaos between the two factions and force them into fighting.

    I want his inventions and this is the only time I can gain them with minimum price. Once the two factions became free, the things wouldn¡¯t be as easy. One Raunak is just a small price to pay."

    "You know it better anyway, I will not interfere. But Braman is furious and you know how sensitive he is. He might make some stupid mistakes."

    "Of course, he would do it. Let him do it, but make sure that he didn¡¯t do it openly and leave any clues that are going to implicate him and make sure that he would send a person that is extremely trustworthy and smart enough to escape when things go south."

    "Sure, I will tell him that. But are you not afraid, that something might happen to that guy. You do have some hopes."

    "Do you really think someone would meddle in such a shitty political situation without having a life saving measure against some transcendent attackers? I bet that he can even escape from a Consummate realm cultivator.

    It is just that he killed a few transcendent stage cultivators and all of them have been nned properly except for the first one in which case the person was weak, I want to see how they will deal with a surprise attack from a proper person. That¡¯s it."

    "I will inform him then. Is there anything else? Otherwise, please do finish that administrative work, I cannot take it from that dean."

    "Sure. I will finish it right now. You don¡¯t have to worry about him. Anyway, the college elections will start as soon as the King/Queen elections are over, you wouldn¡¯t have to deal with him by then."

    "I really do hope that old bastard gets out of this college."

    "He will."

    While these people are discussing here, Sam is busy in some experiments and he saw some interesting development.

    He is currently working on with the cement and wants to see if he can improve it and also try and experiment with the reinforced concrete methods.

    The main drawback of the cement is actually it strength due to the natural mixture.

    The animal extract and the nt extract are both limited by their natural growth limit which capped the strength of the cement obtained.

    So, Sam wanted to create some other methods to ovee it.

    One of them is the simple reinforced concrete structure with metal rods being ced inside concrete, this is making the concrete stronger. Sam even tried to forcefully fuse both of them using his metal and earth elements, even though the results are not exactly suitable for him he did find some properties that could help.

    The second method is using energy cell rods to rece the regr metal rods and use inscriptions to use the energy to constantly strengthen the structure.

    But the energy cells are bound to lose the energy.

    There is no way he can sustain it for a long time.

    Sam is trying to fuse the metal and cement in a different way, by mixing the cement with the molten metal. This could even be considered stupid on modern earth, but he doesn¡¯t even care. He just tried to find all kinds of methods and finally, there is a special way he can do with a special metal and this metal is avable even in this realm.

    This metal has an extremely high affinity with earth element to the point that it can be considered as both rock and the metal at the same time. It has high heat resistant and the conductivity of the lightning or electricity is almost negligible along with its reaction to maic force.

    This is extremely useful for making battle hammers, bunkers and other defensive structures.

    He decided to powder this metal and mix it with the cement in various proportions and in various phases.

    And one phase showed the desired results.

    He has to make the powder extremely fine to the point that it felt like powdered silk and mix it with cement and he has to forcefully harden it through the heating like it was done with bricks and y pots.

    This made the structure more reliable, durable and also it has high conduction rate of spiritual energy. So if he made inscriptions on it regarding the earth element, it can easily absorb the energy from the surround earth and make the inscriptions work.

    Now he started the construction with a new found excitement.

 Chapter 760: Bringing a Crew

    Sam¡¯s construction was going extremely well. He and his friends started working with the help of the rest of the beasts.

    They worked together and their speed is not less than a well-rounded construction team full of artisans.

    As he was busy with that, there are some interruptions and disturbances from people. One of them is the surprise attack made by the transcendent stage cultivator sent by Braman.

    But that transcendent stage cultivator didn¡¯t go back, he even came when Sam is staying in the new camp which is actually the thunder prison in disguise.

    He was easily handled and when Sam learned that it was the n of Braman and it is only to teach him a lesson, he also nned to teach a certain lesson to this guy. But not for now.

    He scheduled it to the time he would visit 1.

    For now, his sole focus is on the building and soon time passed.

    It has been finally six months since he came to this ce and most of the base¡¯s framework isplete. This is also a year since thest pce of inheritance is over and there are still two years for the next pce of inheritance.

    There is still a lot of time for Raunak¡¯s targetpletion.

    Even though Sam wanted to end it by the end of this month, he changed his mind aftering into contact with this professor¡¯s men.

    At first, he wanted to sell many things he already has to these men and finish the target easily, but the more he interacted with them, the more he understood that there is a lot more to them than that meets the eyes.

    They are not just that extra faction that is formed due to their views and perspectives not matching with the first two factions, this third faction is actually quite ambitious with people spanning from military, politics, business, and even education, they are maintaining their own world within thisrger world.

    This is more trouble than he thought but that is also the safest out of the two factions, unlike the first two factions who have deep-rooted enmity for each other, the third faction is just ambitious. They just want to have more and will focus on obtaining whatever they want than trying to stop others from getting it.

    But before he delved any deeper, he has to establish his own groundwork and this base is both symbolic and literal form of that.

    After another two weeks, he finally finished with the construction. While he is doing that, Raunak started doing another task Sam gave him, to recruit people.

    Raunak really did have connections with the orphans in this capital, even though his rtionship with them is not exactly friendly, it is not exactly hostile either.

    While hiring them as orphans who have no civilian identities in this ce, Sam slipped in a few more application forms in and he secretly left the Charbhum realm.

    He earned more than enough spirit stones to make some round trips, so he decided to use that vast amount of money to go back to the deste realm of his city and bring back some people.

    This is not exactly economical in the long run, but for now, it is okay. Anyway, he already gave the blueprints for the inter-dimensional space gates to the Space gate association which is an important partner or even part of Sam¡¯s organization to research.

    Once they are familiar with that and have enough practice to be proficient enough to make them, he would be able to move people from his organization anywhere to anywhere as long as he ced the formation.

    He moved a bunch of people from the weapon factory to 2 so that he could use them as the workers in the factory.

    They are proficient in making grenades, the bee puppets, and some of them even made the air-powered harpoon guns that he sold to the Merman and the t-fish puppets, and some of them are involved with the steam engine assemblies.

    All of them are proficient in operating manufacturing machines.

    When the group arrived at the realm, they are extremely surprised and couldn¡¯t adjust for a few days. Particrly when they saw the elves and centaurs, they couldn¡¯t evenfortable in their own skin.

    Sam let Philip handle them as he is most capable of managing people.

    Philip endured the torturing process of calming them down.

    This is the second time Sam took the people from the organization to a different realm. He did so in the Banished realm as a form of an exchange program which is mutually agreed upon. But now it is no longer an exchange program, it is more like Sam smuggling them in.

    Raunak who is a special officer is personally involved in forging their identities which is actually pretty risky, considering the fact that it would put all their work and their lives in jeopardy if the truth was out.

    But Sam did that only because they took the Pill of Servitude.

    They are amongst the first batch of workers that joined Sam and some of them are from the Dragon Hawk tribe who are currently one of the most prosperousmunities in the Western Continent.

    There is no reason for him to worry about getting betrayed, but there is one thing that is bugging Sam a bit.

    That is about the soul searching for the memories. He has been doing this for quite some time and he is not narcissist enough to think that he is the only one who is capable of thought of it that way. He is pretty sure that someone within the Charbhum realm is capable of that.

    In fact, someone in the Naga Loka would have also been capable of that, but Sam didn¡¯t really think much of developing there so he didn¡¯t bother. But now he has to find a considerable way to really defend against this.

    But to get something that can hide something from a soul search, that would be extremely high level and there are no recipes for pills or potions in the divine dimension.

    As he grew in power the things in the divine dimension areing less and less handy. So, there is only one ce to try his luck and that is the divine dimension.

    That is the only ce that can give him ess to something that is unattainable in normal cases.

    But he shouldn¡¯t be sure about getting what he wanted in the very next Pce of inheritance, this might get dyed and he has to take care that nothing goes wrong.

    Now, these people are responsible for not only training the new recruits Raunak brought in. They are also going to be fed with the Pill of servitude and trained in the first assembly process mostly.

    After some time, he would make them work in manufacturing too. But not for now.

    Sam is currently in the process of getting the first batch of products out of this ce and they are the good old grenades. They are the ones that are easy to sell and easy to make, so there is no need for him to worry about making money.

    Meanwhile, something else is happening in 1 and it is an indirect result of Sam¡¯s activity in this realm.

    Rajan is currently in a meeting room with a bunch of other elves who are of the same level and the same age as him.

    "Two units of cloaked forces? Really Rajan, do you really think we can afford that much damage right now? Faction 2 is most aggressive in this time¡¯s election campaign and now we need all the strength we can get.

    The assassinations of some of our key workers are barely stopped. They are taking full-on active and dominant approach. On top of that, their forces are already trying to sway the opinion with their merits in the city guards and the military exploits.

    The loss of 2 is fuelling them even more. They are always dominant in that ce, but we managed to snag it because of that one fellow who you are trying to kill so desperately.

    The Elders also took notice of it and gave out an order that no other force should send anyone to attack Sam and if they found any evidence, they would take action themselves.

    You put us in such a hot spot just because of your petty revenge and what did we get in return? Nothing. And if this is not enough you are even trying to get that one rmendation to that position to your daughter.

    You must be out of your mind."

    Rajan just looked as his colleague ranted on and on and after the rant was stopped, he finally opened his mouth.

    "Just tell me what you want. What the hell is up with this roundabout way of doing things, be straightforward."

    "That fellow you are trying to kill seems to have a lot up his sleeve, for some reason the elders are against attacking him, so try and get something out of him. I heard that a bureaucrat who is in love with your daughter is with him for now.

    So try and make him get something out of him, a recipe, a blueprint anything will do."

    "And this is going to be thepensation for the two units of cloaked forces?"

    "Yes."

    "I will try, but I am not giving any guarantee that it will seed. That guy hates my guts."

 Chapter 761: An Old Friend

    Sam let the first batch of products out from his new base.

    The first batch of grenades of various grades, ones that could hurt a Grand realm cultivator to the ones that could hurt a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator.

    So, he went to the person in charge of the biscuit factory and told him to send the message to the military unit.

    Currently, the factory is run by the reserve members of the military and since this one-star military unit is a special unit, they created a smaller base here where they would train their new recruits while operating the factory.

    They have special permissions for all of that. Anyway, this is beneficial for Sam as he doesn¡¯t have to worry about not able to contact these people.

    After two days, the same human who made deals with Sam came back and this time the elf who stood behind didn¡¯t even dare to make eye contact with Sam.

    Sam didn¡¯t even look at him, he just went on with the deal as if nothing happened, he gave a demonstration of the grenades in a confined formation in which the effects will not be spread out and that includes the visuals, sounds, and the damage.

    After seeing the demonstration, the military guy was eager to buy the design and manufacturing method, but Sam just smiled and replied.

    "I can¡¯t sell you that immediately, anyway, you wouldn¡¯t be able to make them. If you really forge it normally, you would only be able to make three to four of them in a day.

    You need a lot of ingredients and machines that only I can make. I can show you some assembly processes. If you really can make that happen without the use of the machines, I can sell the design to you."

    After that, he took them on a factory tour. He already created a small methane generating tank in the rear of the base as he is not exactly focused onrge-scale production, he showed them that, and a small pasture was created at the rear of the base beside the methane tank which held the fire type beasts that supply the dung.

    But he didn¡¯t exin what the process of methane collection is, they just got a small glimpse of it.

    After that, he gave a faint introduction to the assembly zone.

    Currently, there are only around a hundred grenades per day and he is mainly focused on training.

    The human who is called Rogan, apanymander of the One-star military unit was surprised and thoughtful at the same time.

    The machines are making the assembly easy and the people that need to make them don¡¯t even have to be of high level and even their elemental affinities don¡¯t matter.

    Since Sam is not focusing on high productivity they are not using the assembly line to the full potential.

    "Is it possible to buy the machines, design, just everything that is needed to make these things?"

    "It is actually, but you should know the price of that wouldn¡¯t be small. You would have to be willing to pay a lot. In fact, this might even be the priciest purchase you ever made."

    "Give me a price estimate."

    "One assembly line, one production line, you can hire the trained professionals from here and make them train your own workers, or you can temporarily make them train your own workers and they wille back to me, the whole set up required for making the ingredients. All of itbined will go for three billion."

    "Three Billion? Are you insane? That¡¯s a lot of money."

    "Of course it is, but there is a price to pay for the exclusivity. If I had to sell the same setup for a few people I might do it for 1.5 or 2. But since you want it all for yourself I have to increase the price. Anyway, you even bought the biscuits for such a high price, I would say I am even giving it to you cheaply."

    "I need some time."

    "Please do. Do you still want the grenades now?"

    "Sure, how much?"

    "Just take it as aplimentary gift for our deal."

    With that, Sam sent a few hundred grenades off with Rogan and let him make a decision.

    Then he went to meet Raunak.

    But he couldn¡¯t find him in the office and he was told by one of his employees that he went to the city early morning and didn¡¯te back.

    Sam didn¡¯t think much of it and left.

    Meanwhile, Raunak is also having a meeting.

    But he is not as confident or happy as Sam in this meeting.

    He is currently sitting in front of another elf within a restaurant. He is extremely ufortable as if he wanted to get out of this ce.

    "Why are you here?" He asked the elf who is sipping the rice wine with a rxed expression as if he is there on a vacation.

    "This rice wine is extremely good. Faction 2 did one thing right by holding down the liquor business. Our faction is really not suitable for this."

    "If you are here for the wine, you shouldn¡¯t have called for me. I am a busy person. I don¡¯t have a rich and powerful father holding my ass up to make me sit in a position. I have to earn it by myself."

    The Elf didn¡¯t seem to be offended by hostile words and the tone of resentment and instead widened the smile.

    "What do you mean by that? You don¡¯t have time for an old friend?"

    "Old Friend? I am pretty sure that friendship died when someone tried to kill me in the roads of the Charbhum Capital city."

    "Well, you can¡¯t me that someone when you hooked up with his sister, Can you?"

    "But you should know that certain someone didn¡¯t be my friend before I loved his sister, he became my friend after my love with her and he came to me after learning about that.

    And he did so for the sole reason to drag me to the roads and kill me which was unsessful because he didn¡¯t expect such resistance from someone who he looked down on so much."

    "Well, I didn¡¯t know that you know about that. My sister is still such a snitch."

    "I would be careful, if were you. This not your father¡¯s backyard. Things are not looking good for faction 1 here. In fact, there are extremely bad."

    "You seemed to have forgotten, this ce is still under faction 1¡¯s control, so this is as good as my father¡¯s backyard."

    "Just cut the crap and tell me what you are here for. I wasted enough time on you."

    "Well, do you want to marry my sister?"

    "Isn¡¯t that a given? Where are you going with this?"

    "Well, my father is so adamant about not letting you marry and he is trying to get by your contract so much that it is almost impossible for him to not seed."

    Raunak clenched his fists and said.

    "I should have expected that from your father."

    "Well, you should have. Anyway, even though your growth speed is higher, you still have half of your current target to get by, so it would still take around a month of two for you to seed. But before that, my father will seed."

    "We will see about that. But that didn¡¯t answer why you are here."

    "Well, I heard that you have found a new treasure trove in the form of a human and using him to climb the ranks. What¡¯s his name again?"

    "Sam?"

    "Yeah, Sam. That guy. I heard he has some really good things in his hands and you two seem pretty close."

    "Where are you going with this?"

    "I will stop my father and buy you some time if you get me something from him."

    "Something what?"

    "A design? A recipe? A thing that could make a shit load of money for me. If you can get that, I will help you and stop my father for a couple of months. And in that time you can surely get promoted."

    "If you really want some business opportunity, you could ask him directly. I don¡¯t meddle in his business deals."

    "Well, I am also not asking you to meddle in the deal. In fact, it is not a deal at all. I want something for free without paying anything. You know like a gift from you to me."

    *SLAM* *CRASH*

    Raunak stood and mmed his hand on the desk, destroying it into smithereens.

    "How dare you? Do you really think that I am your servant that does everything you say?"

    But the elf didn¡¯t show a single change in his expression.

    "You are still as fiery as you were before. You might not be as weak as I think but that doesn¡¯t mean you are good enough. As for the servant thing? You are not that much different to me, at least for now until you really married my sister.

    Until then, you are just a small-time official, who is trying to get together with my sister. So, if you really want to get together with my sister, you don¡¯t have a choice. You have to give me what I want. After all, you do know how capable my father is. He is extremely efficient and I am sure he will send her away easily without my intervention.

    You have to make a decision."

 Chapter 762: The Test

    Sam is rxing for the time being as he thought of what to do next. He has a bunch of ideas which he wants to do.

    With this grenade deal, Sam is going to get out of this ce for sure. The tax target will be met and their next phase of activities will shift to 1 where the current campaign for elections is going on.

    This will be another way long influx of spirit stones for him.

    But he also wants to stay here for a while and look into the problem with the sea on this.

    Hiding a sea is aughable matter to someone. In fact, even Sam felt that the whole poption is dumb along with the elves who are trying to hide this from the rest of the poption.

    But because of the size of the and also the water to thend ratio which seemed to be quite small made it possible.

    If the water content of the is really asrge as three times ofnd just like on the earth, then it would be really hard and impossible to even think of doing that.

    But if the ratios are reversed and the water content is only one-fourth of the total, then there is a possibility particrly when the itself is small and if the ways to the sea arepletely closed off from the rest of thend region before the current poption even appeared.

    These are some prettymon conclusions as there are only a handful of cases that could be applied to make the current situations possible.

    While he is thinking, Raunak entered the room and he looked extremely gloomy.

    Sam looked at him and asked.

    "I wanted to meet you earlier, but they told me you went to the city? Are you okay? Is there is a problem with the officials? You spent a lot of time there?"

    "Nothing. It is just I met some people that I didn¡¯t want to meet."

    "Okay, then go and take your time. We can talkter."

    Sam went back to having the food.

    Then he went back to just think of what to do while cooking a meal.

    The trio went to the city as they wanted to challenge some people and get some battle experience. He doesn¡¯t know why, for some reason, they are extremely excited to fight the elves, the centaurs, and even the half-elves without the help of traps and the biofuel that is making it easy with them.

    They are just want to get some direct action. He just let them. Anyway, they are just going to get out of this soon. As long as they don¡¯te to do something stupid and get too much attention, then it is okay.

    As he was about to start his meal, a shadow mouse came out of nowhere and jumped on his shoulder.

    He looked at the mouse curiously and he listened to everything it has to say.

    This is the mouse that follows Raunak around. It is not actually to spy around them. Even though that is also an important advantage, it is mostly regarding something that could happen to him when someone targeted him so that Sam could get the news and the location as soon as he can.

    And it can also get him the news regarding the possible threats.

    It now came in handy.

    The current situation is not exactly a dangerous situation. It is not that easy to get something from Sam and stealing the designs is almost impossible, they can try to copy and all that would be left is that some scrap metal and broken parts which are not even useful to recycle.

    But Sam didn¡¯t do anything immediately, he just wanted to test Raunak. This would be a good one.

    Raunak could have achieved everything he currently had with his own work, but that wouldn¡¯t have happened in half a year.

    He wants to see just how much resolve and loyalty Raunak has. Would he just give up all that Sam gave and betray him over the fear of losing his lover? Or would he betray Sam and try to cover it up while still taking advantage of what Sam is giving him? Or would he just trust Sam and confess and ask him for help? Or would he just forget about the whole thing and leave it to fate?

    Sam wanted to see what he would choose and he would have a reaction to each possible scenario.

    He just waited without taking any action and let the shadow mouse do its job.

    Raunak is sitting in the office looking at a ring with a weird red stone on it. He is like a lost person with a lot of hesitation and confusion in his eyes and started remembering everything that has happened to his life since the day he met Ramya.

    It has so many twists are turns, he doesn¡¯t know who Ramya is when they fell in love, but he didn¡¯t want to leave her when he did find out. It mattered little to him.

    In fact, he only knew of that after her brother befriended him lured him into the streets, then dragged him to the ground and attacked with a clear intent to kill.

    Raunak is not the best fighter among his peers, but he grew up as an orphan, taking a beating was amon thing to him.

    He endured the beating continuously and managed to gather enough attention in the streets of the capital and that guy was unable to kill him off.

    But it is not a one-sided fight, he did take the most damage, but he is sure that he would be the one that would fall in the end.

    In fact, at that time Raunak doesn¡¯t know what to make of it, he just thought the story that guy used was true which is actually that Raunak befriending him to get to his sister and try to climb the socialdder.

    At least that is what the story that guy made up after that and Raunak felt lost. After all, what can he do? Fight that brother for having too much love for his sister and can¡¯t see anyone taking advantage of her?

    Then he was even more lost when Ramya broke the truth to him and he got yed twice by the same guy and was fed bullshit the whole time.

    For someone who is an orphan and saw the shit that goes on the streets, he became extremely na?ve and stupid after he fell in love.

    He thought about the whole mess that was created by that guy and then the rest of the attempts to ruin his career and making it hard for him to survive.

    The final meeting with that arrogant and condescending elf who is so narcissistic just because he was born in that position and then all the burden he has to endure and the torture he has to go through to just get a proper meeting with him and making sure that the message was sent that he is not leaving his daughter no matter what happens.

    Then finally getting a deal that could help him to be together with the love of his life and finallying to his home.

    Once again trying to climb one step at a time and soon his thoughts ran to meeting Sam.

    The only guy whose arrogance and narcissism that was beyond Rajan¡¯s. But the condescension of Sam is a bit different. It is as if he didn¡¯t even want to notice everything. It is not even thinking that everyone is beneath him. It is as if they didn¡¯t exist. The existence of the rest of the world, the species that are all surrounding him and making the world around him what it is, is nothing to him.

    That is what he felt.

    Sam looked at everything like tools unless he is directly involved with them, he wouldn¡¯t think of that person as a real living object.

    But he also felt like he shouldn¡¯tpare Sam with Rajan, both of them arepletely different and then he went down the small yetrge rabbit hole that he was thrown into after Sam came into his life.

    Everything sped up. He is sure that he would achieve his dream by hook or crook, but he is now so sure that he couldn¡¯t help but having thoughts of what he should do after he achieved this dream and when he thought of this he made a decision.

    He walked out of the office and ran to Sam¡¯s camp who just finished his meal and was about to clean up and said.

    "I have something to say. I met Ramana. Ramya¡¯s brother today. He offered me something."

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but smile at him and sat back down.

    "Go on."

    Raunak confessed everything without leaving a single detail.

    "So what do you want to do?" Sam asked with a smile. He guessed what the answer would be, he just wanted to hear it from here.

    "Is there a way for us to get him off my back and still spoil the n of Rajan?" Raunak asked a little hesitantly.

    "There is actually a way."

    "What is it?"

    "Simple, all we have to do is make you promoted in the next week."

    "What? How is that possible?"

    "It is possible, just get your paperwork ready and stall the time for a few days with this brother-inw of yours and y around. Make sure everything stays under wraps under thest second. And finally, enjoy the look on that guy¡¯s face."

 Chapter 763: Target reached

    Raunak couldn¡¯t understand the meaning behind Sam¡¯s smile, but he was freed of a lot of burden on his heart and he felt tons lighter.

    He went back and decided on starting his paperwork slowly. He didn¡¯t give the task to any of the subordinates. He worked on it himself even if he had to file a lot of documents exining all the businesses that he was involved in their revenue and the tax he collected from them.

    Meanwhile, Sam got busy, he knew that the grenade sale was gone he started drafting the contract, preparing the workers who are going to go with Military Unit.

    He didn¡¯t want to send his original crew directly, if there is really someone who can do the soul-search, then there would be trouble for him. So he decided to send one of the new crews.

    He made the old crew in charge of training them around the clock so that they would be proficient enough to work on the assembly of the grenades using the machines he is going to sell.

    Anyway, the military unit will take some time to prepare a factory and they would surely try to create a new one with a simr toyout to the smaller assembly line at Sam¡¯s base. So, Sam has enough time for them to train.

    And the crew are also excited. They have new jobs that are paying good money, without them having to put their lives on the line and from the special training they are going through and the reason they heard why they are going through, they are even more excited.

    If things go right, the One star military unit will hire them and from the way these grenades worked, there is a high possibility that the factory wouldn¡¯t be established in this, it will established in the control region of the military unit.

    Which implies that they have a chance to get out of this ce and reach 1 which is a dreame true for all of them.

    While they are lost in their fantasies and working like mules without taking any rest, the person who can finalize the deal came back.

    Sam is sure that the deal would be done. Even though this is almost eight to ten times the price of the grenade design in Sam¡¯s mind, he never sold it along with the assembly lines, the trained workers, and such, so he decided to increase the price a little bit and then when thought about the cheap evaluation of spirit stone here, he decided to just increase the price even more and it was sold.

    If by any chance these elves knew that everything Sam sold to them could have been bought for less than a billion and he would have even profited from that greatly, one must wonder what their expressions would be like.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care much, currently, he is the only pathway to the ces that have any ess to the grenades and their value, so there is no need for him to worry too much. Anyway, from what he observed the value of spirit stone is declining as he went to the higher realms, so from his guess if he really sold the same design in an, even more, higher ce, he would be able to sell it for a higher price than this.

    Rogan quickly signed the deal and gave the spatial ring with money while Sam gave the spatial ring with the machinery and the called the crew that is going through the assembly training.

    "They are the crew, they are good enough to work on the assembly of the grenades for now and in a few days, they would be more efficient. It would take some time for you to finish your factory, they will be trained here until then and you can take them away after that.

    I just called them so that you could take a look."

    Rogan took a brief nce at them and said.

    "Sure. But the factory will be set on 1 at the main base of the One-star military unit. Since you guys don¡¯t have a civilian identity, your only way is to go through military recruitment. I will send someone who will finish the procedures for you. Be prepared. You will be taken away in two weeks."

    With that he left.

    There is still two weeks¡¯ time, so Sam let them train for that.

    He sent the documents of the deal to Raunak so that he can finish the procedures.

    With this one deal, the tax target was reached.

    For three Billion, Sam has to pay a tax of four hundred and fifty million spirit stones, which is more than the amount they needed to clear the target, so the situation is quite simple, in fact, the threat Ramana gave ispletely invalid from the start.

    Faction 1 must have thought that Sam is currently cooking up new ideas and he would take some time and even then they thought that he would need multiple ideas to reach the target since he did the same for the first half of the targets.

    But Sam just dropped the huge bomb that would thrash all their ns. He is really looking forward to how Raunak will react to the look on Ramana¡¯s face while he is, even more, looking forward to what Rajan¡¯s face would be like.

    Both father and son are really maniptive and scheming.

    After dealing with that, Sam started nning for the next step in this trip.

    They are going to 1. They don¡¯t know where exactly Raunak would be posted but it is not going to be much different.

    He thought of what he would do after going there as Raunak would need some time to adjust to the area.

    He created a step-by-step n on what he has to do and what his friends should do.

    Meanwhile, Raunak is having a very interesting meeting with Ramana.

    Ramana is currently rxing as he enjoyed a feast in the private room of a restaurant and Raunak walked in with a gloomy face.

    Ramana gave a smile and spoke.

    "Come on Join me. The food is great. Damn the 2 residents really know how to enjoy their pathetic lives. Eating all this food. Maybe we should ce a luxury tax on all themoners."

    "Why wouldn¡¯t you do that? You are your father¡¯s son after all. If you get the chance you will even tax the air they are breathing."

    "hahaha, Maybe I would do that in the future. Anyway, did you bring what I asked for? I don¡¯t really mind waiting a few more days, but the more this thing is dyed, the more chances that my sister is going to be shipped away.

    You might not even get a chance to get near her."

    Raunak took out a bunch of documents from his spatial ring and dropped them on the table.

    Ramana picked the documents and looked at them, it is like arge binder, so when he opened the first document his excitement died down.

    Because it doesn¡¯t have any designs or blueprints. All it has are the details of Raunak and his official position.

    "What is the meaning of this?"

    "Just look through them and you will understand."

    Raunak said with a rxed tone, the gloomy look is gone. Ramana felt a bit conflicted and started looking through the documents, the first few are the tax documents of Sam which cleared the first half of the target which are not exactly surprising or unnerving to Ramana, but as he went through, he felt an ufortable feeling in his gut and soon that feeling almost turned into churning as he looked at thest document.

    The grenade sale document which cleared all the target.

    His hands shook visibly and his face was drained of all the color. He looked at Raunak with shaking hands and then looked at thest document it is Raunak¡¯s promotion document. Since Raunak has been already doing the paperwork which is the most time taking of all, he managed to get the promotion letter easily.

    "You have been ying me from the start?" Ramana asked Raunak with a shaking tone. He didn¡¯t expect that he was beaten at his own game.

    He didn¡¯t really think that Raunak will be able to pull one over him. But the documents are the direct proof of that.

    Raunak has a smug smirk on his face as he looked at the embarrassed and helpless expression on Ramana¡¯s face.

    "You can keep them, they are just a copy anyway. Take it as a gift. Even though it is not what you asked for, I am pretty sure it is memorable enough. And if possible show them to your father too and ask him to get ready for the betrothal.

    My dear Brother inw."

    With that Raunak left the room and heaved arge sigh before revealing a faint smile as he looked at the sunny sky and let the warm light bath him.

    This is one of the best days of his life.

 Chapter 764: To The Planet 1

    Ramana didn¡¯t want to stay in 2 and ran out of the restaurant and went to the Wormhole zone.

    He crossed the portal and took a flying beast at its top speed to meet with his father. He doesn¡¯t want to wait for a minute longer.

    When hended in their family estate, he threw all the etiquette and the formalities out of the window and barged into the mansion where his father is having the meeting with some of his subordinates.

    He looked at the subordinates and who are looking at him with a surprised look and yelled.

    "Get out."

    Rajan frowned but he didn¡¯t reprimand his son and told the group.

    "We will talkter, leave."

    He then looked at his son and said.

    "Take a seat and calm down before speaking."

    Ramana did as he was told and sat down in the chair nearby and started chugging the alcohol that was ced on the table.

    After a good minute, Rajan spoke.

    "What happened? The n failed?"

    "Failed, it is the epitome of the failure. He was already prepared for this."

    "What do you mean?"

    "Not only did we get what we wanted, but we also lost all the advantage we have over him. The time. He not only panicked but he yed me around and fed bullshit for days. His tax target is finished and even the paperwork for the promotion was done. He would be promoted to 1 within a week and his position would be most likely in the Capital.

    He has been hiding it from everyone while he prepared the paperwork beforehand and only filled in the numbers at thest minute. He ising to the capital and your daughter is gone. They would demand you to uphold your end of the deal."

    Ramana is too frustrated and angry. It is almost iprehensible.

    But Rajan is still extremely calm. He looked at his son and said.

    "Why are you overreacting? Your emotions are all over the ce."

    "What do you mean overreacting? She is supposed to be sent to that ce and she is supposed to be my support to enter that ce. I don¡¯t want to meddle in politics, but to enter the military of that ce, I need some support. She is the only one with enough political acumen and gets the position of a bureaucrat there. I can¡¯t let this little shit take her away.

    All my future will be ruined."

    "First get that thought out of your head and start thinking about how to fix it. Now tell me, what the possible ways to deal with him are."

    Ramana took a deep breath and started thinking. This is like one of the training sessions he had with his father. He is dumb in terms of schemes and maniptions. In fact, he is not even as smart as Sam thought he was and all the schemes he came up with are drilled into his head from his father so that he would never forget.

    He has zero political acumen that is why he didn¡¯t join the bureaucracy. All he has is the battle attainments he gained through the rigorous training. He would rather fight a hundred battles than sit in a room with the politicians, all he ever wanted is to be a part of the elites and there is only one ce he has in his mind.

    He wants to get into the military unit of that ce and train with the best of the best. But that ce is even more chaotic than the Charbhum realm and the politics ispletely ingrained into every field and that includes the military.

    If he went there directly as amoner, it would have been okay. He would just base his achievements on his own efforts, but now the situation is different. His identity wouldn¡¯t allow him to stay neutral in the political influence.

    That is why he wants his sister who is good with politics to enter there and have his back. That was the n from the start, but Raunak came in and made her fall in love with him and he is now sure that the situation wouldn¡¯t go as he wanted.

    No matter how much she tried to convince him that with Raunak both of them could help him, he is not convinced. He is so stuck up on Raunak¡¯s identity.

    He thought for a few minutes and said.

    "The easiest way to make this problem disappear is to kill him."

    *PAK*

    A p wasnded on the back of his head and rung his ears, this is the old method that used to show his father¡¯s, tough love.

    "We are in the middle of elections and Raunak is known for our deal and his tremendous growth is currently under the supervision of the elders. Do you really think I didn¡¯t want to kill him? Why do you think I even sent the forces to kill the person that is helping him and not him directly? Think again."

    "Transfer him to a distant ce instead of the Capital and buy enough time to make our n work."

    *PAK*

    "The promotion was under the direct order of the elder¡¯smittee. Do you think we can influence the elders too much? We would already be using all the favors they owe us just to get you and your sister into the quota and you want to ask another favor to suppress the prodigy they are counting on? Think again."

    Ramana thought deeply and said.

    "I cannot think of what to do. Please tell me."

    For the first time, Rajan didn¡¯t hit him and said.

    "Now you finally remembered what I taught. Ask someone when who knows how to do things when you are not capable of doing that.

    And to this point, we will make him transfer to the capital and we will keep him right under our vision. This is our domain, we will make him stay here and not let him grow. He just achieved what was agreed upon. We will use the elections as an excuse to make him halt the agreement and then we will send you both to that ce after the elections are over.

    Then we can slowly clean him up."

    Ramana thought for a moment and they went on discussing their n and started executing it for the next few days.

    On the 2

    For the next week, the situation is extremely smooth sailing, Raunak¡¯s promotion was confirmed but it took a week for the exact posting to be known and to their relief, he was posted in the Capital.

    In fact, he might even be the youngest officer in the business administration in the 1 Capital.

    They decided to travel immediately.

    The base is still working normally. But they are not exactly producing. The old crew is just training the new employees so that they could be useful for the next deals.

    They hired the best mercenary group from the 2 to guard the ce. Anyway, there is nothing valuable here.

    The machines may be useful for them to create a single assembly line and that¡¯s it. The machine would be destroyed if they tried to replicate it.

    Sam and the group decided to go to one.

    They went to the Portal station where the identities of the people are verified.

    They checked in and walked into arge stone room with a metallic door full of inscriptions and formations.

    Sam couldn¡¯t even see any energy fluctuations even with the energy vision. It might be his power level and the inscriptions that are drawn to mask the energy are just too good. But it is working great either way.

    The metal door was opened by a guard who is actually an Initial stage Transcendent cultivator.

    They couldn¡¯t see what is inside the door. This is the first time Saming in contact with a wormhole and he wants to see just how this works. But he couldn¡¯t because as soon as he walked in he felt like he lost his breath and was sucked in.

    He felt like he was thrown into a vacuum. His body parts felt like they want toe out body tearing through the skin and flesh.

    But at this moment, weird energy enveloped him and the best guess the people had is that the spatial energy creating a small enveloped moving space which also trapped some air and the feeling returned to normal and before long they finally saw some light as they saw the simr doorway with a different guard waiting for them toe out and close the door.

    Sam and the trio are looking at each other in amazement. This is simr to a space gate, but the effect is different. It is simr to the dimensional drifter but it was more natural.

    Except for the small shake in their innards, the travel is normal.

    After that, they went out and entered the capital city.

    Sam is surprised by the beauty of the city. The streets are bustling and there are just too many people. Most of them are elves and the second most are Centaurs, while humans are very few.

    They went to an area where they could find the inn while Raunak looked for a more stable residence where they don¡¯t have to pay daily after he finished his joining process.

 Chapter 765: Back to Planet 2

    Raunak finished his procedures fast enough and there are no actual problems, but when the final post was revealed, he was stunned.

    He looked at one of the Deputy heads of the city administrative officer in front of him and asked.

    "Sir, it seems like there is a mistake in the paperwork. I am experienced in Business administration, but I was posted in the education and the employment section."

    The Deputy who is an Old Elf looked at him with a faint smile and replied in a calm town.

    "It is not a mistake, you are assigned to the Education and the Employment section. You had remarkable achievements in Business administration and you brought in a lot of taxes. You are such a young man and even though you were not exactly experienced in business administration you did it greatly.

    I feel like Education and the Employment is a field that could use a youngster like you."

    "But.." Raunak wanted to say something but he was interrupted.

    "No need to worry about the progress, you are young and have a lot of time to learn. I am sure that you would be able to learn fast enough to get the desired result.

    And you are also going to be appointed as the special officer and every other direct government official except for the supervisors and higher are all under you.

    This is also the special privilege you are getting in the transfer of the department. If you were to be appointed in the business administration you would have been dumped into the lowest position. This will be a little hard but we all believe that you would be able to work a way out of this."

    Raunak couldn¡¯t even find the words to refute him and he came out in a daze. After thinking for a while he shook his head. It doesn¡¯t matter which department he is in now. He gained what he wanted to most. All he has to do is im his reward and think of his future steadily.

    He came out and collected his promotion bonus and also the address of his new quarters arranged to him by the government beforeing out and going to a real estate agent that could arrange a residence to Sam and his friends.

    He has some friends here too. The years he spent in this ce are not exactly wasted after all.

    He pulled some strings and found a decent house after which he informed Sam and his friends toe and seal the deal.

    After the deal was done Sam shifted to the house along with the trio and Raunak also stayed for the dinner as he exined everything about his new position in the new department.

    "When are you going to meet your lover?" Philip asked.

    "I am not allowed into their estate, from the guards to the head of the family everyone hates my guts, but since I am here, the new will soon go out and she will find me."

    "Well, it is still better if you go and meet her, since her father is against you there is a great chance that he would try to stop the news from reaching her."

    "There is a chance, I will see for the next three days and if she didn¡¯te, I will go and look for her."

    As they chatted, Watt seemed to have remembered something and asked.

    "Is there anything interesting going on for the next few days? We would like to pass some time. He is going to be immersed in some research."

    Raunak thought for a bit and said.

    "There is actually something going on in the city. The Campaign for the elections started and the town elections are already over, the city elections would start, but before that, there would be a battle tournament.

    All kinds of people wille and join. Fighters from military units, mercenary groups, city guards, special units, Noble n forces, personal guards of merchant families, bureaucrats, students, everyonees in and participates and there are divisions for different power levels.

    I think it would start in a week and the winners will get some great prizes.

    If you are interested you can join in. Until then, you can go sightseeing and experiencing some local luxuries. There is a special message center that uses different medicinal vines to massage your body promoting a better energy flow and vitality. This helps in curing fatigue and stress on the muscles.

    If you are interested in women, you can go to the Courtesan house. It is famous for the noble patronage..."

    Raunak went on and on as he exined every single thing he could think of about capital that could be enjoyed.

    After the meal, Raunak left and Sam looked at the trio.

    "I will a Vampire here. Don¡¯t try to grab too much attention on yourselves and certainly don¡¯t lose the attentionpletely and let them suspect that something is going on.

    They just have to ignore me. I will try to get back before the tournament starts by the earliest and even if I amte, I will be here by the end of the tournament."

    Sam gave some more instructions before entering the house and setting up a bunch of formations and opening the dimension drifter. He is being more generous in his usage as he got arge haul in this ce and since the destination a lot near and doesn¡¯t even need to cross a dimension, Sam had it easy.

    He disappeared from the spot and arrived near the base in 2. He took out the special telescope that he got from the ck-cloaked forces and took a look at the base. This thing really did work and with Sam¡¯s additional eye technique, it worked wonders. He looked around the base to see any stalkers or anyone causing any trouble.

    There are some people but since the mercenary team that they hired is there, they are not making any move. The mercenaries in this realm have a special requirement to even register themselves and that is that every member should take a tree spirit oath that they wouldn¡¯t betray their employer. That is one of the main reasons Sam opted for the mercenaries.

    After he became sure that everything is alright on this end, he took off on the harbinger as zoomed past the trees and went deeper into the forest.

    He traveled for the whole night and the next day, he finally reached his destination the next night.

    All this while, he didn¡¯t take a single regr route and only stayed within the forests.

    The destination he arrived at is one of the border viges that was closed off from the forest route and the seas.

    Sam went through the forest and slowed down a bit as he traveled carefully through the forest.

    From what the trio said, this ce has some high-level guardians clearly guarding the path to the town, but they are not so active at night. The trio managed to sneak in, so it is not much of a trouble for Sam.

    As for not using the shadow mice, he didn¡¯t do so because he wanted to take a look at the environment and habitats closely along with the beasts to see if there is anything useful here.

    He has to find the new resources anyway.

    But he didn¡¯t find anything and he also realized a certain pattern in the trees. The trees are a bit too orderly and they are of the same kind. There is a great chance that they are grown by someone and not naturally grown.

    Soon Sam reached the area where there are traces of the predators moving around.

    These four beasts and all four of them are tigers. Except their colors are a bit different. They have green and ck stripes.

    They are massive and they are being ridden by some elves.

    When Sam is barely moving he felt an energy fluctuation from the trees and the four tigers looked in his direction.

    He activated his shadow form and disappeared into the night and reached a fair distance where he is sure that the hoverboard sound wouldn¡¯t attract the tigers, he took out the harbinger and hovered around.

    He stayed in the air as he looked at the tigers that are sniffing and looking around and the trees are definitely reacting to it.

    The energy waves that areing out of the trees are acting as radars.

    Sam easily narrowed down the name of the beasts. They are Forest Tigers. Even though it is a bitmon and not so special, that is the aptest name.

    The forest tigers have a great sense of surroundings within the forest as they get can use the trees to their advantage. But it only works when the target is in contact with the trees directly or at least standing on the ground where the roots had direct contact.

    Even though Sam hovering could help as he is a small target and could stay out of touch, it is just a temporary measure. He had to find a way to escape.

 Chapter 766: War at the Seashore

    The tigers are not leaving Sam alone. Even though Sam never stayed in the sights of the tiger and the cultivators also didn¡¯t manage to catch him in their sight, he is still being sensed faintly even without any contact with the trees and the ground.

    Sam thought of how to escape and soon found a way, he came to the area where Sam found some traces of ws and smell of urine.

    He entered into another beast¡¯s territory and from the looks of it, the beast has the same habits as a canine.

    Sam activated his Raiju aura showing his weak strength as he drifted into the territory. After he went deeper, but not deep enough to piss the beast off, he saw that the tigers halted in their tracks and didn¡¯t want toe in.

    Even the riders on their backs are looking at the scene curiously. They didn¡¯t speak all this while for some reason and even now they are not making a single sound.

    They seemed to be wary of the people that entered and recognizing they are humans. As Sam thought like this, he also noticed something else, the four people are actually wearing clothes and armor that has the same pattern as the tiger¡¯s back.

    Sam only managed to see them with his eye technique.

    Even though in closebat this technique is almost useless, from a long-range, they can still deceive the cultivators when they are outside the range of the spiritual sense.

    After looking there for a while, Sam thought for a moment, before he let a shadow out. The shadow of a beast. He didn¡¯t let the shadow go near them and instead let it move within the thickness of the trees so they could only get a faint image of it all the while hiding behind arge tree.

    The tigers already stopped their detection through trees, if they did try to use that on the trees of another beast¡¯s territory that would be seen as the provocation.

    So, they are careful and after seeing an incredible speed the shadow is moving without even giving a proper glimpse, they decided that it was a beast and left the ce.

    Meanwhile, Sam is still tense because he could see anotherrge mass of energy slowly walking towards his direction with the energy vision. The beast has a simr outline as a fox. But it is quiterge.

    Sam didn¡¯t wait for it toe. He left the shadow as a distraction and started moving towards the town on Harbinger.

    After he moved to a significant distance, he recalled the shadow and continued his journey.

    He felt lucky that he managed to get rid of the beasts without causing many scenes and without leaving any traces of his presence.

    After reaching far enough, he turned back and used the telescope to once again observe the tigers and the fox and they are clearly not trying to pursue him anymore. He heaved a sigh of relief.

    It is not that he is afraid of the beasts, it is just that he wants a calm and silent way out of the current situation.

    He shouldn¡¯t be causing too much of a scene at this moment.

    Soon, Sam saw traces of some activity and stored the harbinger as he walked. From this point, he could even see the town and some of the elves and centaurs that are constantly moving around.

    There are very few humans.

    Sam climbed onto a tall tree and used the telescope to take a look at the horizon and he can see the seashore.

    But what he saw surprised him. He could only get a faint image because of the town that was in the middle, but from what he saw he made out a group of soldiers standing on their posts and a barricade on the beach as if they are defending against some enemies.

    He moved to the other side and looked over from another tree and there he saw some traces of cleaning up by the soldiers.

    They are recreating and reconstructing the barricades.

    It seems like a battle is just over.

    Sam let the shadow mice take reign now. He sent them into the town to scout around a bit.

    He looked at the sky. It is already almost dawn. He just stayed on top of the tree and only came down after the sunrise. Soon the shadow mice came back with the information.

    As the trio said, the whole area is indeed filled with soldiers.

    There are at least three to four thousand soldiers in this one town alone And there are two transcendent stage cultivators.

    Sam is a bit surprised by this. There are four transcendent stage cultivators in the forest and four beasts along with them which equals eight, but there are only two of them in the town, he didn¡¯t get what is happening.

    The shadow mice scouted all the ces as much as they can.

    Currently, most of the soldiers that are still staying in the town are focusing on recovering as they took medicine, pills and getting healed by the healers.

    It seems like Sam hase toote, they couldn¡¯t find a single dead body of their enemies.

    There is not even a meeting being held.

    Sam scouted around the edges of the forests and the shadow mice made some regr rounds.

    By afternoon, Sam finally understood why there are four transcendent stage cultivators in the forest and only two in the town.

    Because the two from the town came to the edge of the forest where the two from the forest came out and exchanged their ces.

    It seems like the two transcendent stage cultivators are rotating after a battle to recover while the other acts a backup.

    The area seems to be a constant war zone. Sam is really looking forward to seeing what is making them have so much trouble.

    By evening every single soldier that is not healing and recovering is all on the beach with the barricades.

    As the sunset, the whole town is like a haunted area. All the soldiers that are too injured to fight are all in the houses and the people didn¡¯te out.

    Sam took this to his advantage and made a move. He sneaked into the town and found a hiding spot on a rooftop with great difficulty from where he could see the beach more clearly.

    The soldiers are tense and everyone is extremely focused as they held their weapons.

    Soon there is a trace of movement on the seawater as the calm sea started riling up. Sam saw as humanoid figures came out of the water.

    Their body also looked like water, except it is not really transparent, it is just giving an illusion.

    With blue skin and they seem to have an ability to blend with the water as they stood up and started walking forward and even the weapons they are holding are made by the water from the sea.

    Along with them, there are some creatures that could stay in the water and on thend. Some crabs, turtles and some sea snakes, some lobster-type beasts alling on onto thend and some of those blue humanoids jumped off of the water andnded on the backs of these beasts as they rode them.

    Now their skins are looking more normal. The mystifying water look was gone. Their skin texture is more simr to the mermen but the mermen are far more beautiful and smooth.

    They started attacking the human barricades. But the major attack is still from the sea. Many sea creatures areunching water-based attacks along with those blue humanoids and the soldiers are all defending the attack carefully and countering them.

    They engaged in the battle extremely fiercely.

    It is an all-out war and due to the situation being night the water humanoids have more advantages.

    Sam looked and saw something that is even more surprising. Behind the water humanoids, a simr humanoid came out of the water and a mass of water is supporting him as a tform as he ascended into the air and he was being taken towards the shore.

    The transcendent stage cultivators who are still at the rear of the battlefield looked at this and got ready as they zoomed forward.

    As soon as the blue creature stepped its foot on the ground, the battle began.

    Only one transcendent stage cultivator engaged as the other was still in a lookout over the sea and as if it was on a cue, arge shark came out of nowhere and shot a beam of water elemental energy at the transcendent engaged inbat.

    The backup transcendent immediately blocked the attack and save his teammate as he engaged the shark in long-rangebat.

    The whole situation is a chaotic mess.

    The blue humanoids didn¡¯t hold many advantages over the soldiers, but they are mostly there to distract the soldiers and make them a good and easy target to the long-range attacks that areing from the water.

    Sam looked at the war and was intrigued by it.

    There is nothing intriguing for an arms dealer than a war that has to be hidden from the public but should be definitely won.

 Chapter 767: Collecting Info

    Sam looked at the battle for hours and middle of that battle, he sensed that people in the houses areing out and getting ready for the battle.

    He hid himself carefully and looked at the situation. These people joined the battlefield while some of the injured soldiers came back and started their recovery.

    The transcendent stage cultivators are constantly engaging themselves.

    The battle is mostly defensive and soldiers are mostly trying to consistentlyst long. The creatures from the sea are continuously focused on killing without a single care for their lives. Even those blue humanoids are reckless.

    There are some of those blue humanoids that are dead and there is a lot of navy blue colored blooding out of their bodies.

    After understanding the situation, Sam backed off and went back into the forest and started another journey. He travelled through the night and went to next base near the sea shore. Even though the ce between also has a shore, the shore is not exactly good for travelling and most of it is covered withrge cliffs at the edge of the sea or the forests with dangerous beasts upying it.

    These bases are the only pration points for these sea creatures.

    Sam reached the next base by dawn and checked the shore from a far.

    The battle is in itsst stages as the sea creatures are retreating slowly. But on their way back, they are collecting all the dead bodies on the ground. They are dragging the dead bodies as if their life depended on it and disappeared into the sea by the time sun rose on the horizon.

    Sam didn¡¯t want to stay at this second base. It is rtively smaller than the first one and has limited advantages for him to scout and there would be limited information as only one Transcendent cultivator is here and another is staying in the forest as a backup.

    These transcendent stage cultivators are extremely vignt that Sam had to use some extra beasts he has to divert them and escape.

    He was almost caught even with the help of the shadow mice as the beasts that are left there to keep guard has a certain level of natural expertise in detection abilities and their cultivation levels are higher than that of the shadow mice. A beast with such clear instincts is not easy to fool even with the shadow forms.

    Shadow mice can escape for certain, but it couldn¡¯t hide and if it is only beasts that would be okay, but since there people on the beasts that could possibly have contracts with the beasts, the whole situation would be a mess if they diverted their attention.

    Sam carefully slipped past them and travelled to the next shore and for the next two days, he repeated the process to see what is happening in different bases and finally he decided on one base as the infiltration point.

    For some reason, the creatures are not attacking in the morning, they are leaving by the sun rise and staying under the sea.

    That is the time when base is most vignt. The whole day time, there would be more people within the base with few people standing defense at the post.

    In normal cases that would be hard to cross. But after the sun sets, the sea is in chaos while the base is a bitx. Even if he could cross the base, he wouldn¡¯t be able to reach the sea.

    Sam has two objectives now. One is to get as much information as possible from the bases and also enter the sea.

    The information in bases is not at all documented and even if there are some documents like maps, formations and such, everything is within the hands of themanding officers or in other words the transcendent stage cultivators.

    He thought of all the obstacles and how to ovee them, the easiest way is to kidnap a guy from the base and interrogate him but there is a great chance that he would be caught.

    The second way is to kill a person and do the soul search which would obviously give him more details but would be easily exposed.

    The third way is to investigate slowly and put piece and piece together until he gets the answers he needs, which will take a long time.

    Another night passed as Sam witnessed the battle at the current base he was in.

    This is the most dangerous and most popted base here. There are a total eight Transcendent stage cultivators and around ten thousand soldiers and the attacks are also highest as the sea shore is also the widest.

    This is the ce that should have most information and there is also another advantage, there is a cliff near the base that leads to the sea shore.

    Even though Sam could cover most of the distance to the sea through this, the cliff edge cuts of at the beach instead of water which willy him bare by the time he reached the end.

    Sam did have one usible solution with small variable that has to rectified, let the shadow mouse take him to water from the edge of cliff which is a short distance and as soon as it entered the water, Sam should just exchange the position with the mouse, but that would easily be spotted. He is looking of a way around it.

    Currently, Sam is using this ce as a tform to watch the battle sneakily.

    That night the battle is more intense than ever and when Sam saw the bodies that are piling up, he had another idea.

    In the middle of the chaotic battle, Sam let the specter out. Specters are simply put souls that became ghosts, they have an innate ability to be invisible and the Specter Sam had is of a higher grade with all the soul energy he fed.

    He sent the specter in the battle field stealthily, if the specter used its energy inrge scale and maderge movements, some soldiers too much of urate senses and instincts can feel something is off.

    The Specter went to the nearest elven corpse of the Centaur that was killed just now and entered the dead body.

    The specters have a way to possess the bodies, but the dead bodies are not that useful, it can only possess it for a small while until thest remaining bit of vitality waspletely gone.

    But that is enough for the specter.

    It performed the soul necromancy on the dead body from within to perform the soul search all by itself.

    But the energy fluctuations couldn¡¯t escape the surrounding soldiers.

    Within the surrounding ten feet every creature stopped and looked at the centaur body.

    Both the parties halted their attacks within the ten-foot radius and stared at the corpse that was surrounded with the death energy. They didn¡¯t know what is happening and they don¡¯t know how to react.

    Both parties exchanged nces and understood they are as surprised as others. The death energy is riling up and at this moment, they two parties wanted to poke the corpse.

    Sam is watching it through the telescope and with added energy vision and his experience with the soul necromancy he could guess the time.

    At this moment, Sam made another move, he took out a four-eyed raven and attached a small grenade to its feet.

    The raven flew to the sea like a jet of ck streak which is invisible in the night and dropped the grenade in the sea. It made its return as fast as it can.

    *BOOM*

    *SPLASH*

    The explosion happened with a jet of water sshing all over and the sea creatures looked surprised.

    The distraction worked as the people who surrounded the centaur corpse also left the corpse alone and looked at the sea.

    The specter took advantage of the situation and escaped.

    For some reason due to the sudden explosion the sea creatures gave signals and started retreating earlier.

    The soldiers didn¡¯t follow up with the attack and instead looked at the centaur that is dead and tried to examine the differences that happened. They are also curious about what happened in the sea, but they didn¡¯t care as much as they cared about the centaur¡¯s body.

    But after constant examination they couldn¡¯t find anything. It is just a normal dead body.

    There is nothing they could see and they just buried them normally thanking whatever anomaly that happened in the sea has saved them the deaths that could have happened through the night.

    They had an extremely rare and almost impossible-to-have free night and all they did was have bonfires by the beach and enjoy the moon and wine as they heaved a sigh of exhaustion and fatigue.

    Meanwhile, Sam who is on top of the cliffying down and looking at the same moon is going through the memories the specter has brought with him.

    There is a lot of information that Sam is stunned for minutes without any reaction.

    The war is more intriguing and exciting than he thought and he could find great many opportunities just from the information he had in his hands, but he also has to find a way to get the information from the other side, the sea before deciding.

 Chapter 768: Into the Sea

    Sam digested the information as he stared at the moon.

    From what the Old beast casually said, there are four races in the Charbhum realm and they are humans, centaurs, sirens, and the Elves who ruled the territory.

    But the information that the centaur¡¯s body gave him clearly made him realize that there is the fifth race.

    The Blue Sea-Folk.

    They are a special race and there is very little information about them in the centaur¡¯s head. But they rule the sea on this and they have absolute control over it. The deeper they go into the sea the more powerful beings they could encounter.

    The Centaur seems to be a person of higher rank as there is some more information in his head.

    The Sea-Folk don¡¯t reproduce like any other race. They don¡¯t have sex, gender, and intercourse. There are no men or women in their race. As for how they reproduce, it is still a mystery for normal soldiers

    The Sea-Folk do notmunicate with elves or humans. They don¡¯t talk the samenguage and they never tried to be friendly.

    They are not active in the morning for some reason, but they are only passive when ites to invasion and war on thend.

    The soldiers have tried to go into the city many times in the daytime and even though the journey is smooth for a certain extent, they started their worst nightmare that came in the day.

    The sea-folk acted like they are part of the water itself.

    They easily destroyed the troops that came into the sea either by swimming or by the ships. Particrly swimming.

    If the normal soldiers, whether they are humans or elves encountered the sea folk within the water, they couldn¡¯t handle them at all. It is not even apetition even with the water elemental powers, because the main problem is that they couldn¡¯t get a hold of the sea folk within the water and they have unlimited endurance.

    The Sea folk will not attack to kill, they will use the water to make the person the opponent tired and suffocated. It would be hard for the people to get in the water ande up to take a second breath.

    And when they reached that state, the seafolk would start to engage in closebat in which case they can easily win.

    This is an extremely tough opponent. They have bodies, but they have high water elemental fusion rate and it is extremely fast which makes them invulnerable in water.

    The long-range water attacks are useless and even other water-based attacks like ice and mist are easily deflected. As for the other elemental attacks, lightning has some effect, the fire has the obvious effect and the wind is the only thing that couldn¡¯t be died down by the water element in the sea, but that also doesn¡¯t damage them.

    Even though the physical attacks are not extremely efficient and couldn¡¯t bended easily, they are also the most effective once theynded.

    These are some tough opponents. Sam is really interested in these creatures and how they operate. From the looks of it, they also have an extremely high affinity to form a contract with the underwater beasts so they are even more dangerous than they already are.

    Their vulnerability of physical attacks can only be exploited when they are on thend. Sam could understand why the army could only stay defensive.

    There is also another interesting thing Sam noticed. There is a time when some high-level people attacked the sea and some high-level sea folk attacked thend which only resulted in mutual losses and then there is another exploration team in the past that used some newly bred flowers that could be used as air storage.

    It is a flower simr to an insect-eating flower, but they are gically modified to act as air pockets that store arge amount of air which the diver used to cover the mouth and nose. They can breathe normally.

    But even that only helped them for an hour or so in the deep sea and the flowers are not at all mass-producible and the price they had to pay is also extremely high.

    They even sent some Consummates into the sea with those but nobody came back.

    Sam is really intrigued by this. This is something he wants to explore. Anyway, the main confidence is that he is sure that he can escape in most of the situations.

    He looked at the soldiers that are still on the beach, there is a small festive atmosphere amongst them.

    But this is understandable. For years, the soldiers are fighting with these people every night. These are the most resilient and defensive fighters in the realm within the Pre-transcendent stage.

    The centaur also has another memory in his mind which is a lot less significant.

    There are four battlefields where elites of each cultivation realm from the Nascent stage cultivators to the Consummate level cultivators are assigned to.

    They are trained to fight together and the best bunch, even if they are not the best individually, their collective efforts are very much useful in arge-scale battle of numbers.

    The centaur was in the Nascent stage division which is a forest border within 4. The beasts are mutants because of a special material in the surroundings which made them unable to control and the realm is fighting with it for a while.

    The Pre-transcendent armies are sent here. The Seashore. He doesn¡¯t know the remaining two, but he is very interested in knowing them.

    Sam disappeared from the spot and entered the divine dimension while the shadow mouse started carrying the crystal and moved towards the water.

    It is very dangerous for the shadow mice to be near the seawater. But that is the only way for him to get in without anyone noticing.

    The mouse stood on the beach and let the waves drag it into the sea.

    As soon as the shadow mouse entered the shallow waters deep enough for Sam topletely submerge, he called the shadow mouse back into the divine dimension and let the divine dimension fall down and hit the bottom.

    Sam carefully examined the shadow mouse and fed some medicine to it. This short interval of time already made the mouse swallow the seawater in, it wouldn¡¯t definitely survive in the sea for more than a few minutes.

    After making sure the mouse ispletely okay, Sam wore a breathing device. He didn¡¯t wear any of the diving equipment as he felt that the water elemental fusion is more useful to him than the gadgets in long run. The breathing device is more suitable for now.

    He started swimming slowly and exited the shallow waters and entered the deep sea.

    He tried to be close to the sea bed as much as possible afraid that he might alert the troops stationed at the beach while keeping an eye on the Sea Folk that could probably appear any second.

    But the first thing he encountered is actually not the sea folk, rather the Crab beasts.

    Sam recognized some of them and some of them seemed to be the mutated crabs that are not known throughout the world.

    The crabs are of various colors, there are some white-colored, some blue and some with two colors together and finally the orange and red-colored.

    The first reaction of the crabs is not to attack him, they started creating as much mess as they can and started attracting the surrounding creatures, the mud is being raised and the transparent water was gone.

    At this moment, Sam could feel the creatures storming to this side.

    By now, the crabs started attacking.

    He started swimming around while he dodged and his body started secreting the poison. The hydra¡¯s poison. He doesn¡¯t want to get into arge fight with too muchmotion and disturbance.

    The poison is the most discreet method he could use.

    Sam activated his water elemental fusion and since the hydra¡¯s poison ispatible with the water element, it is easy for him to merge the two and move around.

    The surrounding water becamepletely poisoned. The poison he secreted is also not exactly single corrosive poison. He secreted all the poisons that can be secreted by him and the crabs soon stopped their incessant noise and even their attacks are starting to slow down.

    Sam used this chance to deal with the iing beasts. Most of them are shark type beasts along with some lobsters.

    The battle went as silently as possible as the beasts themselves are not creating muchmotion and when they entered the zone of poison they are slowing down even more. The water element has a special affinity to the poison and the water elemental beasts are reacting to it strongly.

    Everything went smoothly as Sam collected most of the intact corpses and threw them into the divine dimension.

    He is sure that at least some of the sea folk would have been attracted by themotion, so he couldn¡¯t stay there any longer.

    After cleaning up, he disappeared deeper into the water in a different direction.

 Chapter 769: A trap to divert

    Sam is currently swimming or almost crawling on the sea bed with his water elemental transformation. He was extremely fast until he left the zone where he excreted all the poison, but after he left the zone, he merged with the sea bed and started moving slowly.

    While he is moving, two Sea folks came near the poison zone in a hurry to look at themotion. The beasts are not exactly powerful. All of them are initial stage Pre-transcendent stage beasts and even some Nascent stage beasts.

    They are extremely weak. Their main aim is to halt the enemies that might have infiltrated in and keep them busy while sending the message to the Sea folk so that they cane and deal with the enemy.

    And in many years, there was never a single elf or human that came into the water, so they became a bitx. But still, they followed the orders to the point and came to check.

    When they saw that the color of the whole area changed and was filled with the diluted blood along with the purple poison in the water, they frowned and swam faster, but they didn¡¯t enter the zone immediately.

    The whole poison is slowly diluting into the water and with given time it would dilute to the point it is ineffective.

    The effects would be downed to negligible state, but the sea folk doesn¡¯t know that. One of them tried to check it and extended his hand into the poison zone.

    He felt a prickling sensation as he took the hand back and his forearm turnedpletely purple and it is spreading into his skin and flesh slowly.

    The two sea folks swam back in rm and decided to meet with their team and report the situation. They couldn¡¯t see a single trace of the beasts around, so they are rather concerned about what happened anyway.

    All this while, the two sea folks didn¡¯t even talk. There is no voice or any motion of mouth. They only looked at each other and there seemed to be telepathy between them.

    The group went back to their team and came back with a bunch of sea folk. The team leader looked at the situation and examined it. He looked into the horizon and a fish swam towards him from that direction and it swam into the poison zone.

    As soon as the fish entered the zone, the poison seeped in and the skin started corroding. The fish is extremely weak since the start and now it is in the presence of hydra poison, it is not supposed to survive and it didn¡¯t.

    The team leader gestured for the rest of them after he saw effects and all of them surrounded the poison zone and started injecting their energy.

    They are in a formation and the water elemental energy started pushing the poison back into the center.

    From the looks of it, the poison and the water seemed to have been separated from each other and soon it was concentrated into a small sphere of poison and blood surrounded by the water. Not a single drop was diluted in the water.

    The team leader gave some more instructions through gestures and a small bubble was created around the poison ball and with a wave of everyone¡¯s hand, it flew towards the team leader.

    The team leader held the water bubble with his hand and once again instructed the team as they started swimming away.

    Meanwhile, Sam soon encountered another barricade. There are a bunch of stingray fishes that are ten times the size of normal stingray fish.

    One sting would be like arge spear impaling straight into the body.

    There are no other creatures around and it seems like the fish are the only watchers here.

    Sam decided to collect a few of these and store them in the divine dimension. But for that, he has also had to create anotherrgeke and fill it with saline water. Only Mia who is of a superior bloodline can survive in both normal water and the seawater.

    Not every beast can do that. But before he did that, Sam has to find a way to cut the contract between the fish and the folks.

    Luckily Sam is not currently in their perception range and he is interested in these beasts, unlike the crabs. So, he maintained his secrecy and let Specter out.

    The specter can really be useful in these cases.

    The specter is in his ghost form and started attacking each Sting ray and to Sam¡¯s surprised there are no contracts made. There are no spiritual imprints in their seas of consciousness.

    This is a great deal for Sam. He doesn¡¯t want them as pets anyway, so he didn¡¯t even bother making contracts, he let Mia out and both of them subdued them with the anesthetic poison and threw them into the divine dimension.

    With a mere thought of Sam and a solid fifteen minutes of concentration, there is already a decent pool area formed in the divine dimension and Sam collected the seawater while he swam as he slowly turned the pool into argeke.

    If he suckedrge amounts of water from the same ce in a single shot, there would be some disturbance in the water that would gather unnecessary attention.

    Sam proceeded with the same activities all over the night.

    He moved to one spot from another within the outskirts of the deep waters and encountered one group after another of the sea creatures.

    If he didn¡¯t like the beasts he killed them and if he liked them, he stored them.

    Everything went smoothly for him.

    But not so for the Sea Folk.

    They started noticing the anomalies in different ces.

    They are already pissed and worried about the sudden explosion in the water. They thought that the elves might have thrown some long-range weapons that act like traps within the water and they retreated just to check them out and be cautious.

    But as soon as they disappeared, the shallow waters became a mess. All their watchers the sea creatures are disappearing.

    They are disappearing only leaving arge area full of diluted poison. Several teams of people came there and checked the situation and collected the poison just like the first team and went back to report their superiors.

    When the superiors learned about the situation and the way all the watchers they had are disappearing, they felt like humans are nning something and became vignt. They started preparing for an imminent attack.

    But the whole night passed and the morning came, but still, that attack never came.

    Sam swam in the area between the shallow and deep waters where most of these watchers are ced and collected quite a haul. He can have some really good seafood meal which he didn¡¯t have in a while.

    But that was not the time to think of a meal. He is currently searching for a proper spot. He knew that the vignce of the sea folk would be tighter and by morning the search parties would definitely turn the shallow region upside down. It would be hard for him to hide.

    Even though he is notpletely dead set on hiding, it is still better than getting caught so soon.

    His current goal is to find a proper ce to break into the deeper waters where the sea folk would definitely stay.

    He also wants to test some of his weapons on them. So, before a search party was sent, he decided to leave some traps in the current region he was swimming in.

    But until dawn, he didn¡¯t find any good spot.

    By dawn, he is already on the other side of this ring, the ce where the seashore with the town ends andrge cliffs started blocking thend from the sea.

    There is arge reef that Sam could easily make use of and there is another smaller reef nearby which can actually act as a great diversion.

    Sam took out his poison grenades and swam to the small reef and started setting the traps up. He didn¡¯t use extremely technical traps or some formations, he used extremely old-school tricks.

    He kept the grenades in such a way that they can be triggered as soon as there was an impact nearby.

    Meanwhile, he also created traces of himself on the seabed.

    Even though it is hard to leave things like footprints and such under the seabed, there is another way.

    He took out some of the corpses of crabs and other shellfish-type creatures and threw some small pieces of shell around the reef while cing some parts nearby.

    Apart from that, he just cracked open a couple of vials of poison within the reef as it spread all over along with that he broke open a vial of a beast¡¯s blood and went into therger reef to hide.

    Even though the two reeves are within visible distance from each other and considered nearby, therge reef created a blind spot because of its shape and it covered arge area from the cliff wall.

    But the small reef only covered a small area and that too close to the cliff wall.

    All he needs is this diversion to work and soon enough the time came.

 Chapter 770: Bubbles and Pods

    Sam hid inside the reef for quite a while and soon he saw the Sea Folk search partiesing towards the reeves. He is finally relieved.

    When the search parties looked at the poison cloud that was formed around the reef and also the parts of their watcher beasts, they thought that is guy is there.

    They seem to have recognized the scent of blood too and Sam who is watching them with his eye technique at maximum saw some excitement in their eyes.

    The team that came first surrounded the reef and they startedmunicating on what to do.

    They are not speaking and there are barely any gestures or signs in theirmunication method, so Sam couldn¡¯t understand fully.

    But they are about to take action, he understood that much.

    Sam waited for this chance.

    One of the team members of the Sea folk extended his hand and arge water spear was conjured from the surrounding water and shot towards the reef.

    The surrounding water didn¡¯t offer any resistance to the spear and in fact, it aided its speed.

    *CRASH*

    *BOOM*

    The crash and the explosion happened one after another and the explosion created some waves in the water that made the sea folks move a few feet back.

    But that is not the main problem, the poison that was already in the surroundings and the poison that newly came out of the grenades was also blown away by the explosion and it moved towards the sea folk.

    Some of them are already experiencing the effects as soon as they came into contact with it.

    The poison is seeping into their skin and it started hurting. Even Sam who ced the poison was surprised, even when the poison that was being blown away came into slight contact with them, it is still effective.

    They are extremely vulnerable to it. But it would be harder and harder to attack them with poison as time passed. At the end of the day, the poison has to either go through the water or Sam had to inject it directly into their bodies.

    The first case can be easily ovee as long as the other party concentrated on the water properly.

    As for the second case, he still hasn¡¯t engaged in closebat with them. It is difficult to estimate the difficulty of this action.

    But the current goal was achieved because soon the surrounding sea folk that is searching in different areas are alling due to the explosion. They are sensitive to water and they could guess the scale of the explosion that caused enough waves.

    As soon as the surrounding people all diverted their attention to the small reef, Sam came out and reached the blind spot that was given by therge reef and started swimming rapidly in the direction where the sea folk team came from.

    After he swam for a few minutes, he encountered two Sea folk in front of him. But this time he didn¡¯t hide, he decided to test the waters with them, at least one of them.

    He took out a vial of poison and activated the water elemental fusion as he moved towards the duo.

    The duo also reacted fast enough and their speed is not any less than Sam.

    They are fast and their instincts are very sharp as they made a move at Sam.

    When both of them are near Sam, he broke the ss vial and took out a ss of dagger. He decided to test their resistance against the physical attacks.

    The sudden appearance of poison made a bit of trouble for them and particrly one of them took the brunt of it. Sam focused on the second sea folk and stabbed him where the poison didn¡¯t affect him.

    It felt like the dagger was stabbed into a thick jelly and there is a lot of resistance, but there is a clear expression of pain in the sea folk¡¯s eyes and Sam could faintly discern a telepathic scream that even reached his mind directly.

    It seems like the Sea folk identally slipped the scream into his mind too.

    Sam hurried up and attacked with different stabs covered in different elements. The water element has the least resistance and poison has a good effect.

    The lightning element provided a good paralyzing effect and also this Gel-like state which made it hard for him to stab, was also halted for a second because of that.

    The fire element has the highest resistance, the ice element has a different effect, the metal element enhanced the stabbing with its force and the earth element is the same but less effective.

    There are no other special effects on their bodies, it is an only lightning elemental energy that has some effect.

    Sam finished off the two as the navy blue blood seeped into the water. He threw the dead bodies in the divine dimension to take them with him. He also tried to clear as much blood as possible as he collected the surrounding water and throwing it into theke.

    He then started swimming as he went deeper and deeper.

    Even after a few hundred meters, he didn¡¯te into contact with any other creature. It seems like he finally crossed the initial defense line and entered the sea.

    The water is not as clear as it is in the shallow area and he couldn¡¯t see too deep. All he can do is use the eye techniques and the light element to see a significant distance and most of the time he is focused on the seafloor to see if he could find anything.

    He did encounter some beasts. But most of the time Sampletely ignored them.

    Soon he reached a certain distance where he found something significant. He swam to the seafloor and found some debris from the ship to hide from what he saw in a distance.

    He also changed his breathing device after taking one deep breath from the first one. He activated his eye technique to the limit and looked.

    There is arge hemispherical bubble on the seafloor far away and there is some Sea folk riding on the sea horses and other fish-type beasts as they scouted the surroundings and stood guard.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know if he is overreading into the situation, but they are prettyx.

    He focused even more on the bubble.

    The bubble is not devoid of water. In fact, it is filled with even more water and there is a faint glow that is giving a better vision of what is inside the bubble.

    Inside the bubble, there arerge egg-shaped pods that are glowing even more.

    There is arge pile of corpses of centaurs, elves, humans along with an even more number of sea creatures ced inside another smaller bubble.

    Some sea folks are moving from this bubble while carrying a corpse in an even smaller bubble not letting the blood leak out as they entered therge bubble, they went to the egg pods and started digging on the seafloor and ced the corpse inside and covered the hole up.

    The egg pod started glowing even more.

    Soon, almost all the corpses are gone. Only four to five corpses remained.

    Sam now understood why they are taking all the corpses from the seashore.

    He just stayed low under the ship debris.

    There is not a single skeleton present in the ship. Every single part is corroded and weak with a lot of algae covering the surface of the parts.

    It has been here for quite a few years.

    But this is not an optimum ce for staying. Soon the search parties in the front will definitely suspect that Sam went past the first line and will start searching the obvious hiding ces. Before that, he has to find a way to check what is inside those pods and get past the area to check even deeper.

    He waited for a while and he can see the growing unrest. These hundreds of Sea folk are being deployed and as the time passed by he could estimate that the search party would soon reach his area and he wouldn¡¯t able to hide.

    But the search party didn¡¯te. Instead, he noticed that there is unrest at the corpse bubble where the corpses are ced.

    The Sea folk seemed to be gesturing something and almost all of them started moving. There are only a dozen sea folks left near the bubble to guard while the rest of them left.

    It is already way past noon and it should be soon the evening. Another night of war would be happening on the shore, but now it seemed to have started earlier for some reason.

    But Sam is not worried, in fact, he is even a bit happy because of this.

    After the troops left, Sam came out of his hiding and started swimming to therge bubble. But this time, he held the harpoon gun in his hands.

 Chapter 771: Clashing with the Sea Folk

    Sam reached near enough to be in the visible range of the Sea folk that are guarding the bubble.

    The Sea folks looked at Sam and they became a bit restless. It has been decades since aby human or elf came this deep into the sea.

    The guards here are actually prettyx because of that.

    But now they already learned of someone causing trouble to them in shallow waters and their watchers are all gone. There is an anomaly the previous night and now there is a humaning towards them.

    Three Sea folks swam towards Sam with water spears forming their hands. They are extremely fast. Sam aimed his harpoon gun and pulled the trigger.

    The harpoon left the gun with therge wind jet sting it forward and it impaled itself into the sea folk that is in the front.

    The sea folks are obviously not as thick as a beast and their bodies are more or less the same sizes as a normal human.

    But the harpoon didn¡¯t just go through him. The gel-like thick, viscous flesh that has extreme resistance for stabs and impaling was pierced and the spear tip of the harpoon gun was stuck in the flesh. The body and the harpoon flew backward until the cable obtained the required tension and the wind jet is over.

    After the required tension was attained the spear was open and the trap held the flesh, but some of the tips came out of the skin as the harpoon is obviously too big for this guy.

    A path of blue blood was created in the water. The remaining two sea folks halted in their tracks and looked at Sam with furious expression. The remaining sea folks at the bubble were also stunned. They all went to quickly save theirrade.

    But the sea folk that was impaled is struggling too much and had a chunk of flesh removed out of his body.

    The flesh is also blue in color the harpoon trap waspletely activated and the spear returned to its original shape as Sam retraced the cable.

    This is the second generation of the Harpoon gun. It is superior to the first one in every way. Thepressed air cylinders are actually upgraded and their effect is enhanced with an inscription array that could increase the thrust of the air jet.

    All the metallic parts are upgraded with better materials. The spear traps that hold the chunk of flesh in the target are also upgraded. It became more sensitive to motion and force and finally, it can deal with Pre-transcendent stage cultivators.

    Sam is really satisfied with this.

    He stored this harpoon gun away and took another one. Another Harpoon gun is of first-generation. The one he used in the merman.

    He locked it and loaded as he waited for sea folk toe.

    The first target was clearly injured and couldn¡¯t be recovered any time soon.

    Two sea folks held that person and took him inside therge bubble with these weird pods.

    Sam couldn¡¯t see every singleponent of the hemisphere as it is as big as a vige. But there seemed to be a healing means for them in that hemisphere.

    The rest of the sea folks started sizing up Sam carefully as they moved forward in a formation.

    Sam aimed the harpoon gun at a person. But they didn¡¯t panic. They are extremely positive that it wouldn¡¯t work again.

    But Sam didn¡¯t attack. He just waited for them toe a little closer and soon he is already dodging the water spears that are being shot towards him.

    After they reached a certain distance, the wind energy riled up as an air jet was shot through the water in a direction. The sea folk in that direction dodged the wind jet and the rest of the group moved towards Sam in one swift motion as they thought the harpoon was fired.

    But Sam only fooled them with a normal air-jet and as the rest of them let go of their defensive stance, he fired the harpoon.

    The harpoon impaled into the flesh of the sea folk, but it didn¡¯t go through it, in fact, the rear end of the spear tip is still visible. Even though the wind force is not enough to go past that stuck up gel-like viscous flesh, it still took the body far enough as the tension in the cable grew and the trap opened, but it didn¡¯t hold the person in ce, it just removed a smaller chunk of flesh.

    Sam retracted the cable and checked the tip. The trap waspletely destroyed. It is not reusable.

    The Sea folk are stunned once again. They fell for a single and direct bluff.

    Sam used this small moment of shock to his advantage and swam upwards to dodge the attacks that areing towards him and took out his sword.

    The sword was covered with the sword aura and the water elemental energy at the same time. Just like how he used the wind des and sword inbination, he decided to use the sword and water as abination and it is working great.

    Just like how the sea folk managed to throw the spears made of water the water des he is using are also cutting through the water and attacked the opponents.

    The Sea folk surrounded Sampletely and the two sea folks who took their firstpanion inside came back but this time, they came back on sea horses.

    The Sea horses are faster than Sam in his water elemental fusion.

    They are easily catching up. If not for the fact that every water deing out of Sam¡¯s sword is lethal, they would have easily overpowered him.

    Even the sea folk are gaining in on the speed aspect as the time passed through the battle.

    They are moving in certain patterns that are hard to predict and there is nomunication between them like voicemands or gestures which Sam could study and take advantage of.

    They are moving as if they can read each other¡¯s thoughts and it might be even true. And the worst part is they are not extremely offensive. They are not wasting too much energy onrge-scale attacks.

    Now Sam understood how they managed to deal with the elves and the humans that attacked them. They are trying to make him feel tired and try to let him take a breath on the surface in which the attacker has to focus more on the breath than the enemies as they would hinder him.

    Then that would be the time for them to attack him and kill him in a single strike.

    But Sam is not going up. He can stay with that breathing device for a whole day and a half. He could easilyst longer than them in terms of energy usage. In this battle of endurance, he would be the ultimate winner.

    But he is worried that more sea folks woulde if he dyed too much. So, he has to finish them off faster and he proceeded to do so.

    While Sam is having a rtively easier time here as he dealt with the Sea Folk. The situation on the seashore ispletely different.

    The beach is currently dyed in blood as the Sea folk and the soldiers are shing aggressively. Today, the Sea folk are much more aggressive and they are not holding anything back and they also didn¡¯te on any other beasts.

    Even the transcendent stage Sea folks areing off and started attacking the two transcendent cultivators that are on duty.

    They are clearly a dead set of killing every person and the soldiers are having a hard time adjusting to it.

    The situation became perilous and they don¡¯t know why that happened.

    Themander of the unit looked at therge-scale killing and cursed under his breath before yelling themands.

    "Retreat and activate the defensive formation. Let the backup troops get ready."

    He ordered as he retreated and some soldier sent some shy fireworks into the sky.

    The troops that are resting and recovering inside the base all heard the explosions from the fancy fireworks and saw the shy lights in the sky.

    They hurried out of their residences and got ready for the battle as they prepared to activate the defensive formation of the base.

    The Sea Folk are still extremely adamant about not letting anyone go and followed desperately.

    A couple of them even slipped into the formation, but they were killed soon anyway.

    But the attacks didn¡¯t stop. The sea folk has great coordination andbination attacks. They are attacking the formation and the people inside through long-range attacks while the soldiers desperately defended.

    "Why the fuck are they so aggressive today? They are not even caring about their own casualties now. What is wrong with them?"

    Themander muttered to himself as he defended the base.

    Meanwhile, Sam who is responsible for this didn¡¯t know what is happening because of him and is currently dealing moving towards the bubble full of these Egg pods.

    It is about time he explored and got some answers.

 Chapter 772: Weird Pods

    Sam entered the bubble and looked at the pods.

    There are pods of different sizes and all of them are egg shaped.

    Thergest are the ones that are eight feet tall and most of them are not giving any energy waves or reactions when Sam watched them with the energy vision. These pods also have don¡¯t have any patterns on it. In this category there are only few pods that are showing some signs of energy.

    The smaller pods varied from one feet tall to the seven feet tall and all of these have patterns. Therger they became, the fainter the patterns became.

    There are some pods of this category which are almost eight feet and the patterns are barely visible. There are very close to the pods that have no patterns at all.

    Sam ced his hands on a pod and used the observation ability. He first did so on the empty pod. The pod seemed hollow. The pod itself has extremelyplicated structure. The grains are too small. It clearly reminded him of the structures made by nano materials. They are small,pact and the bondage of each grain isplicated.

    They will make good defensive tools.

    As he continued with the observation ability he was surprised to see that the bottom of the pod is not exactly closed. There is a small bed that looked like insides of an oyster.

    Sam moved to anotherrge pod with no patterns but still has energy waves.

    As soon as he ced his hand on the pod, Sam heard something within his head.

    He was surprised and retracted his hand immediately and looked around. After confirming that no one is here, Sam once again ced his hand slowly and started listening to the voice once again.

    [Pain, Pain, Pain...]

    Those not exactly words it is as if the creature inside is sending all the feelings directly to his brain.

    Sam proceeded with the observation ability. Now he can see what goes into the hollow structure and he could faintly guess what the function of this pod is.

    There is a Sea Folk currently sitting inside the pod. The bed that looked like the insides of the oyster is glowing faintly and the pod is full of waterpletely submerging the sea folk.

    The Sea folk is none other than the one Sam injured with the first attack. There is arge hole inside the torso that is slowly healing as flesh is slowly regrown bit by bit.

    Sam was stunned a bit. He removed his hand and looked around to look at the other pods.

    These pods seem like they are made for recovery of these people. But the smaller pods confused him even more.

    He walked to the smaller one and ced his hand.

    This time he was even more stunned. This is a bigger surprise for sure.

    Inside the pod there is a sea folk, but not the sea folk he fought. The sea folk in the pod is rtively shorter, smaller and the insides are not filled with just water. The water is a bit viscous and the inner walls looked like the insides of a womb.

    There is a faint membrane on the body of the sea folk and it is clearly not developed fully.

    Sam removed his hand and went to observe another smaller pod. This is the smallest of all and his spections were right.

    In this small pod, there is a small baby sized sea folk. It is just like fetus turning into a baby with the face and hands not fully formed.

    He couldn¡¯t help but marvel by this.

    The first thought that came to Sam¡¯s mind is that they might be artificially created.

    But if that is true, then the questiones on who created it which he couldn¡¯t find an answer. But the setup is really like that something that could have been created artificially.

    Sam looked into the horizon of the deep seas and was surprised to see what would be there. He doesn¡¯t have much time, so he left the bubble and swam into another direction.

    He didn¡¯t go deeper, but he wanted to see if he could find the same type of bubbles in the same sea level and his guess was right. He could find them, in fact they are not scarce or rare.

    After finding out, he didn¡¯t engage with them, instead he started recording everything and went deeper into the sea.

    By now, it is already dawn outside and the Sea folk are already getting back along with arge number of corpses.

    The haul today is two timesrger than normal. As they didn¡¯t do anything the previous night and they seemed to have taken revenge.

    After entering the water they divided their loot which are the corpses of the people and they went to their own bubbles.

    When the sea folk that belongs to the bubble that Sam just ¡¯visited¡¯, they were shocked and immediately a team left the ce to look for themander, the transcendent stage Sea folk who is part of another bubble.

    That bubble is not only bigger, it also has double the pods than the bubble Sam visited.

    The sea folk gave the message and themander was surprised. After some moremunication he learned that not a single pod was harmed, so he sent a search party of the strongest of the bunch from each bubble to search till the night while he himself went into the deep sea to do something himself.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know that hundreds of sea folk are searching for him within the range of the bubbles. If he knew he would be d that he left earlier.

    He travelled at full speed for more than an hour and he is now far from the range of bubbles. In fact, he met with many sea creatures and had to fight them and flee some of them because of the sheer numbers.

    Soon he found his way to another area with the presence of the sea folk. And to his surprise there is not just bubble now.

    There is onerge bubble that is two to three times the first bubble Sam saw and there are six smaller bubbles surrounding it.

    Sam could only see them all together from far away and due to the glow that is brighter because of their presence in the same ce.

    He was surprised to so many sea folk there.

    There are just too many.

    They are all training and guarding all the same with so many pods inside.

    One of the Sea folk is training the rest of them. Helping them conjure the water into spears, throwing them and controlling their motion within the water, elemental fusion and so on.

    They are currently training like normal soldiers. Sam is a bit conflicted, he couldn¡¯t move any more than this. There are no hiding ce past this location and if he really goes anywhere close he would have to fight hundreds of them underwater alone.

    Even though he might be able to escape, the price to be paid is just too much.

    He decided to take a detour and go past thisrge bubble and swam to the side.

    After he left, within an hour there is another Sea folk that arrived at this location. If Sam was here, he would have recognized him. He is the one who led the sea folk to attack thend.

    But he didn¡¯te alone, he brought arge haul of dead bodies along with him in a bubble.

    He went to therge bubble in the center to meet with the person who is training the troops and gave the corpses.

    Some of the soldiers that are training came and took the corpses and buried them under the pods.

    Themander and the trainermunicated for some time and the former left, but this time, along with him, some more sea folk are moving. But they are not going normally. There went to the pods and ced their arm on it as they injected the energy inside and after some time, the pod shook slightly and slowly floated upwards.

    Under the pod there are tentacles that are covered with blood and soil of the sea floor and it almost seemed like it has its own life.

    Now both the sea folk and the pod swam and followed themander and reached they travelled towards the bubble which is under the directmand on themander.

    There some of the sea folk ced their pods into the bubble and it nted itself into the sea floor, before sending the rest of to the different smaller bubbles in the shallow waters and one of them being the one Sam visited and reduced some numbers earlier.

    And within a day of their loss, the army of sea folk is back to normal again.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know anything about this, but he was found by something else.

    Currently, he is floating in front of arge number of corpses of elves, humans, and centaurs that are collectively floating within a bubble and the sea folk that is floating in front of that bubble.

 Chapter 773: Hiding

    After taking a detour from the firstrge cluster of bubbles, Sam encountered many more living creatures in the area and he even saw some sea folks asionally.

    Most of the time he just hid from them without causing much trouble.

    But soon he saw this transcendent level sea folk swimming in the water along with these corpses in the bubble and he is not alone.

    There is arge octopus along with him that is following around and this octopus seemed to have arger sensory field. No matter how much Sam tried to avoid and hide, this octopus led the sea folk to his direction and just when he thought he got them off his back and tried to escape in a different direction, he was greeted with them out of nowhere.

    It turned out that the octopus is not just good at sensing others, it is also good at disguising.

    This is a beast that Sam couldn¡¯t recognize which means, it might be a mutant of this realm that was rtively new.

    It covered the whole pile of corpses, the sea folk and itself and disguised itself as a rock.

    And that is not the only thing.

    It actually spread ink in all the different directions faintly which is also the reason Sam took this one particr direction.

    And now here he is, fooled easily. If only he knew something about this beast, he would have been more careful. Everything happened too suddenly.

    In fact it is actually very surprising that Sam managed to stay hidden this long in enemy territory. That is only because he took advantage of the vastness of the sea to his advantage. Now he has to face the enemy who is stronger than himself and another beast that is at least as strong as him.

    This is not exactly a favorable situation to him.

    He doesn¡¯t know anything about what these sea folk are made of and how they are born.

    From what he saw, the deeper he went the density of these people is not only increasing and he might find another cluster of these sea folk.

    He wants to see their hierarchy, their living conditions and ways.

    One thing he is sure is that the pods are not only responsible for their birth, they are also responsible for healing when they are injured critically and the flesh and corpses are major source of the nutrition.

    He is going deeper to see if he can find arge base of the sea folk and arge city or something like that.

    He would like to see someone who is behind the scenes and doing this. But it seems like it is harder than he thought.

    After he dealt with the current problem, Sam has to find a way to move discreetly even if it means to slow down a bit.

    While Sam is rapidly thinking to all the things that led to here and what he would do after this, a voice was heard in his head that stunned him for a second.

    [Who are you? What are you doing here?]

    Sam looked at him with a confused expression. He fought a dozen of these guys and no one talked to him or tried tomunicate him.

    Most of Sam¡¯s face is covered with the breathing equipment. Only his eyes are visible through the ss.

    [You must be the human that is causing trouble to us. I thought you would have already been taken care of, but it seems like those guys are getting rusty and I have to take care of their problems.]

    As the voice yed out, the octopus started excreting the ink into the surroundings and Sam didn¡¯t just stay around. He came out of his daze and started sorting out the poison vials in his storage.

    The first one he has to take is clearly the hydra poison he collected over days and the rest are the poison cocktails he created from the Naga Loka.

    The sea folk raised his hand and the ink started condensing into a spear. Sam could guess what would happen if that spear impaled into him.

    He would die in seconds. He wouldn¡¯t even survive a single shot.

    So, he could only do one thing. His body started glowing with golden light and he activated light elemental fusion.

    That is the only thing that has more speed than the water element in the water.

    He didn¡¯t even do the partial fusion. He did theplete fusion and the sea folk is pretty rxed. He didn¡¯t worry about Sam at all, which is worrying to Sam.

    Sam looked at the spear that is still swirling but noting towards him. He took a deep breath from the breathing device before storing it away and did something else. His golden body started glowing with green light.

    Since the other party is dumb enough give time to Sam, he is more than happy to take it.

    Sam finally made his move and this move made the Sea folk stunned.

    Because, he didn¡¯t run away instead he moved towards this guy. Even though Sam is fast and faster than any pre-transcendent stage cultivator, the sea folk still managed to dodge.

    Sam went past the sea folk and collided with therge bubble carrying the corpses. The bubble burst open and the corpses all fell and there is arge glow of light that could be seen from hundreds of meters.

    The Sea folk couldn¡¯t look at that though, he is currently having trouble because while Sam is moving past him, he left a bunch of open poison vials there and that is half of the hydra poison he umted over days.

    His right side ispletely corroded with the poison.

    He came out of that poison cloud and looked at the corpses. The octopus is also searching for Sam, but to their surprise, they couldn¡¯t find him.

    He disappeared into thin air with that light.

    They looked the corpses for a while but they couldn¡¯t see anything.

    The sea folk made some angry noises before leaving with the octopus.

    He soon arrived at a cluster of these hemispherical bubbles. Another gathering of these sea folk and there are a lot of them training.

    He went to the trainer there and reported the situation. The trainer looked at the poisoned body and examined him for a while and used his energy to try and clear the poison.

    But the effort is fruitless as only a small amount of poison came out of the body.

    The corpses were thrown into the bubble that was filled with the rest of the other corpses.

    That guy that brought the corpses and half of his body poisoned left with his octopus and the trainer went back to the training.

    The people who are burying the corpses under the pods are also doing their job.

    But what they don¡¯t know is that there is a human corpse among the corpses that is moving whenever they are not there.

    There is a blue round crystal inside the stomach of the fish and it is escaping to the far corner as much as possible to not get picked earlier.

    And it worked. The corpses are picked one by one and there are a lot of them stored inside, so he was not picked and the new corpses are piling up on it as the time passed which threw it back into the queue.

    Sam is currently in the divine dimension as he enjoyed the sensation of not being in the water.

    He didn¡¯t use any space gate or transference scroll or something else to escape, he just used the oldest trick in the book. Hide in in sight.

    Well it wouldn¡¯t exactly satisfy the requirements for the criterion to be hiding in in sight, he just bluffed them with the bright glow and made the divine dimension enter one of the human corpses and after they dumped it here, he let the specter out and cast necromancy on it.

    For some reason, the water bubble they are using has a very good effect of preserving the body and it is still suitable for normal necromancy even though the shadow necromancy and the soul necromancy.

    The specter is making it move so that he can hide.

    He wanted to see where the corpses are being taken and he is not disappointed he is at another cluster of theserge bubbles full of pods.

    Now all he has to do is wait for a chance to explore more.

    But he was disappointed now, because as he waited the trainer who is training the sea folk for a while came to the bubble and hauled more than half of the corpses and created another bubble as he took them to some ce else.

    Sam was surprised. He didn¡¯t expect that the corpses would be hauled to some other ce.

    He waited for another two hours. He struggled to maintain the necromancy state, well technically it is the specter that is having the most trouble.

    He couldn¡¯t see much outside and he can at most look at the crystal table. But he is in no hurry to do that. He decided to wait until this motion has stopped and looked at it.

 Chapter 774: Large Pod with eggs

    Sam finally felt that the body stopped moving and he heaved a sigh as he looked at the crystal table.

    The image of the surroundings slowly manifested as he looked at the table.

    The first thing that came in the image is the image of arge bubble that is full of corpses in which he is currently. He thought that would be the only corpse bubble, but to this surprise, there are several of those corpse bubbles around this bubble and they are all filled with corpses of thend beasts, elves, humans, centaurs, half-elves, sea creatures, and so on.

    He was surprised to see some birds too. This ispletely unexpected.

    He expanded the range and soon other areas came. By the time the whole image was created, he widened his eyes in disbelief.

    It is not the sheer number of pods and the bubbles that made him this shocked neither was the number of sea folk that is simultaneously moving around and training here. Rather, he was surprised by a single object that was in the middle of the bubbles and in fact created and supported a muchrger bubble that was covering over all the rtively smaller andpact bubbles.

    It is arge pod. The pod is so huge that it is around 100 feet tall and there is a single sea folk standing on top of it without any movement.

    As he watched at the sheer magnificence of this pod, the egg-shaped pod opened up like a flower.

    In the middle of the pod, there is a tall andrge central pir upon which the sea folk stood without moving as the pod opened.

    The pod now became arge and hard flower, each petal being the part of the shell and in each petal, there are around a dozen glowing things.

    The Sea folk that are standing nearby swam over and started picking these glowing things out.

    Each of those glowing objects is one foot tall and they are embedded into the petals.

    When the Sea folk removed these objects from the petals, they lost their glow, and Sam was surprised once again and zoomed in to see if what he saw was real.

    The objects that lost their glow turned out to be the same egg-shaped pods he saw in the first bubble he visited.

    These are the very pods that he saw fetuses inside.

    But he didn¡¯t check the roots of the pods at that time and now he can see them directly. There are tentacles that looked simr to that of an octopus.

    The Sea folk that collected the pods or eggs took them in a water bubble and brought them towards an open ground..

    They dug the ground and nted some of the eggs and then went to meet some more sea folk and handed the rest over.

    These Sea folk took the eggs and moved in different directions.

    The process went on for hours and soon the Sea Folk on top of that transparent cylinder looked around for a second and seemed to have sent some message as all the sea folk looked towards him.

    Sam couldn¡¯t understand what they aremunicating.

    The sea folk on top of the pod tapped his leg and he dropped into that transparent cylinder as he floated in some weird liquid inside.

    Therge pod started closing as each petal rose up slowly.

    The Sea folk all bowed down to thatrge pod as a sign of respect and started moving towards the corpse bubbles, they started taking all the corpses and carried them towards therge egg pod and some of them carved out some pieces of flesh from the corpses and buried them near the newly nted egg pods.

    Sam¡¯s concentration was interrupted for the first time, as the corpse he was hiding in was moving.

    He remembered that he was also in a corpse and realized that he has to escape.

    But first, he has toe out of the corpse.

    Sam made all the preparations and wore a new breathing device and prepared for everything before taking a deep breath.

    Meanwhile, the Sea folk that are carrying the corpses towards therge egg are doing so in a fast pace and didn¡¯t stop for anything.

    They are burying the corpse in different ces around the egg pod and they are burying one corpse at one spot.

    One of the Sea folks who is about to bury a corpse suddenly felt something was wrong and before he knew it, the corpse in his hands was exploded and a human figure along with some blood diffusing into the water came out.

    Sam looked around and watched the Sea folk that is right in front of him.

    This sea folk is extremely weak and his energy levels are only around the Nascent stage.

    Sam finished him off with a single punch.

    By this time, the rest of the sea folk already noticed Sam and even therge egg pod had a reaction to it.

    Sam could hear the vibrations and soon his mind was once again greeted by a voice.

    [How did you manage to get this far? How dare you kill my child right in front of me? I will kill you.]

    The voice is not showing any emotions, it is extremely monotonic and emotionless. But Sam didn¡¯t want to test the emotions of whatever powerful creature that was inside and as the tentacle from the ground below thatrge egg pod was about to move, Sam already took out the dimensional drifter which was already set with some coordinates and loaded with spirit stones and disappeared from the spot.

    The tentacle came out of the ground and smashed into the spot where Sam was and created arge hole and an earthquake creating chaos in the seas.

    Even the soldiers that are guarding the beach could feel the effects of this attack as arge wave hit them. Even though it is not as huge as a tsunami, it really did carry a lot of sea creatures and flooded the base for an hour.

    At least there was no serious damage.

    But along with that, there is a sound wave that moved from that onerge egg pod which hit the remaining bubbles and pod ntations that are being controlled by various sea folk and all the sea folk looked in the direction of the main ntation and bowed before they started making preparations.

    The soldiers on the seashore have no idea what ising for them.

    All they knew is that there was an anomaly two days ago and now there is anotherrger anomaly that made them worry even more.

    They don¡¯t know that a human who doesn¡¯t even belong to this world has pissed off an existence that they don¡¯t even know and couldn¡¯t fathom.

    From what Sam saw that one thing standing on top of therge pod is at least on the consummate level and from the structural integrity of the pod¡¯s shell he knew how strong it is defensively.

    There might be some reason for the war to not escte and the Sea folk not directly attacking the forces on thend, but at the rate, the poption is developing and the advantages of the sea folk, they are not going to get extinguished any time soon.

    As long as they maintained their defensive upper hand they have within the sea and not let the forces from thend gain any advantage over them, they would be able to one day reproduce to the point they can deal with thend forces in one fell swoop.

    It is just a matter of time.

    And from what he saw under the sea, he can deduce some spections that the reason the war is happening.

    Every race has one instinct that ismon to them. To reproduce and ensure the survival of their race.

    No matter if it is a mouse, cat, dog, human, elves, and even the superior of all the races the golden sun crow, Sky sovereign roc, and Raiju.

    All these beasts also have that one instinct to survive and reproduce to ensure the propagation of the race.

    Of course, there are exceptions to the case like some immortals who live too long to think about their seeds for the future. After all, they are sure that they are part of the long future.

    Anyway, the reason this is rted to the current problem is, there are a lot of needs for their reproduction as it was not done in a normal way.

    There seemed to be no male or female within this race. All they have is this onerge pod in which they are creating eggs from huge consumption of flesh and bones.

    The sea is smaller here and the food the sea produces is not enough for them, so they have to depend on thend.

    If they took over thend, they can farm the animals in one way or the other or even farm humans like animals and find a way to get the required food for their consumption and growth.

    This is a direct problem without anyplications.

 Chapter 775: Intense war

    Sam is currently in the forest of 2. He is a few kilometers away from the base and is thinking of what to do next.

    It has been around a week since he came back from 1 without anyone noticing.

    He is currently thinking about what he should do. The war at the Seashore is simply direct and there are not too many variables involved. But from what he saw, there is no way that the war could be hidden longer from the residents.

    They wille to know about it sooner orter and Sam has a feeling that his visit to thatrge breeding base, the process will only be escted.

    He is sure that the Sea folk would be pissed beyond belief and would definitely take it out on the troops.

    Sam is thinking about whether he should help them directly or indirectly. Even though he doesn¡¯t have to care too much and has no obligations towards the people of this realm and even the rage of these sea folk is inevitable with time, he did escte the situation faster. He is responsible for their loss of time to prepare.

    So, he has to make it up some way and he also has to think of a way to sell them to the military without anyone suspecting that he visited the sea.

    This is a bit problematic.

    No matter how he hinted it to them, he would have trouble selling them without raising any suspicions.

    He shook his head and decided to think about itter. Currently, the breathing device will be a great device for them and even the tfish puppets would work, but the harpoon guns will be a bit troublesome.

    As they are made to attack beasts and they are not even made for killing, they can only severely damage them.

    But with the coordination of these Sea folk and their care for each other, not only would they rescue then injured one, they will even deal with the attacker with a newfound anger.

    They have to have more trouble than that.

    Sam thought for a minute and went into the research mode.

    But he couldn¡¯t do that in the middle of the forest, even if it is in the divine dimension. He went to the underground cave where he killed those ck-cloaked people and decided to stay there for now.

    He doesn¡¯t want to go back to 1 as he wants to test the effectiveness of the research results right here on this and he can also use his crew in the base to help with some assemblies whenever he wanted.

    He decided to upgrade all three items he wants to sell.

    Particrly, the tfish puppets and the harpoon guns.

    He wants to change the harpoon mechanism of the tfish puppets which will make the attacks more effective. He decided to use the air-powered harpoon gun mechanism. Even though the harpoons are shorter and smaller, it would still be a significantly lethal attack if used correctly and he also decided to add the metal cable and trapped spear tip.

    That would make the tfish puppet more useful and versatile as they can even lock their opponents down in ce.

    The normal harpoon gun is not that useful against the sea folk, the second generation worked well, but the spear is toorge that is not staying within and creating enough damage.

    He has to find a way to create more damage, so he has to change the way the spear tip trap works.

    He started researching without any rest.

    The changes are not exactly tooplicated. He doesn¡¯t even have to create any new mechanisms, he has all the research in his hands and all he has to do is change the size and shape a bit to fit his requirements.

    It only took fifteen days within the divine dimension which is around one and a half-day outside.

    He went in in the afternoon of the previous day.

    Now it is already night.

    He took a brief rest and went back into the divine dimension to research something else.

    The corpses of the sea folk.

    He noticed that the sea folks arepletely different in biological aspects. First, they don¡¯t have any genitals or other sexual organs that could indicate their gender. It is as if they are gender-neutral and they can reproduce as long as they reached a certain level without any intercourse.

    But that is not even the point that made Sam curious. What made him curious is the flesh and the rest of the body structure.

    It is as if they don¡¯t have any bones at all. Their body¡¯s defense is also handled differently. They are not defending the attacks with the hardness of the skin or some defensive spells and shy tricks, their flesh is bing a gel-like viscous substance that is stopping the flow of the attacks into the body.

    The blood that ising out of their body is even more interesting.

    Sam looked at the corpses in front of him. Most of them have minimum blood and they didn¡¯t even rot even after staying there for such a long time.

    There is little blood though.

    The blood seemed to have seeped into the flesh of the body and hardened it.

    Sam took out the remaining blood and the gel-like flesh and started experimenting.

    The first thing he did is to feed them to some water-type beasts. There are some fish in his new salt-wateredke and the stingrays are too many anyway.

    Sam fed the blood and flesh to the stingrays and to his surprise they are eating it extremely well. In fact, they are devouring it and became extremely active as if they had taken a steroid shot.

    Sam wanted to conduct more experiments, but he couldn¡¯t do much as the flesh is minimal and the hardened flesh is not suitable for anything other than being a rock.

    Even when he threw it into theke, the fish are ignoring it. Maybe this is the form of rotting for these species.

    Sam didn¡¯t even manage to stay for a long time, he stayed for an hour or two in the divine dimension, which is barely a few minutes outside.

    After he came out, he decided to start his travel once again.

    He has to go back to the sea and check what the consequences he brought were and how his new toys work.

    And this time he didn¡¯t use the dimensional drifter. He wants to travel on a different route. After all, one of the reasons he came to this is to find some nts that could help him with the problem he is having with his puppet making.

    Until now he is a bit busy, but he and his friends searched for it as much as possible even in their chaotically busy schedule.

    The trio even searched for it when they went on that trip of self-pity.

    But there are no results.

    Sam used this chance to finish some more exploration.

    He took off on the harbinger and went through the forests. He took a long detour. If he had taken the original route, he would have seen a lot of new soldiers are traveling through the forest routes towards the seashore bases.

    Sam traveled for three days and collected some samples, he did find some vines that could satisfy some of his requirements even if they cannot satisfy all of them.

    After reaching the forests separating the bases from the rest of the, Sam was surprised a bit, because he didn¡¯t see a single guardian standing guard there.

    Even the four green tigers are not present and seemed to have disappeared from their original guarding position.

    Even therge fox that lives by itself is not there.

    If the viges on the other side tried to cross the forest now, they would be able to do so with ease.

    But they have to sneak past the soldiers that are also entering the forests sneakily.

    Sam traveled through the forest edge and noticed that dozens of soldiers areing every hour and they seemed to have taken the same route, but justing here in batches.

    In fact, even if he got caught, if he managed to bluff them into thinking that he is part of them, it would easy for him to escape.

    He took vantage on arge tree once again and looked at the situation at the sea and Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel sorry for the soldiers there.

    The Sea folkpletely lost it. They are like crazy madmen rampaging without any care for the world.

    Even the four tigers and the six transcendent stage cultivators are on the field as they are fighting against their counterparts from the sea.

    The war ispletely chaotic and this time, the sea folk didn¡¯t just bring the sea creatures with them, they even brought a bit of sea.

    Currently, the sea waves are high and the water is reaching the edge of the barricades made by the soldiers.

    The new soldiers that just joined the base are changing into their battle attire and joined the battle immediately.

    The casualties on both sides are high but to Sam¡¯s surprise, the one losing most is sea folk instead.

    They haverger numbers, but due to their made state, they are behaving crazily and are trying to kill as many as possible instead of killing as efficiently as possible.

    Which made them lose a small edge, but he knew that it is just temporary.

    It is the anger caused by Sam when he killed that one Sea folk right in front of thatrge egg.

    Maybe they have too much affection towards their younger generations or something, but they are pissed off big time.

    The war is so intense that the soldiers might not even care if Sam entered the base directly.

 Chapter 776: Testing

    By dawn, the sea folks are retreating as usual. But they are not going normally.

    The water level that rose up is being retracted and they are using that very water to carry all the corpses back into the sea along with them.

    Sam decided to take advantage of that.

    All he has to do is go onto the cliff and jump into that water while the soldiers are distracted with their own cleaning up and he did exactly that. He used full speed on the harbinger to get on the cliff and jumped straight into the water.

    But before jumping not only did he put the harbinger away, he also activated earth element fusion and turned into a rock while he rolled up by a boulder.

    Even when the soldiers who are in extreme distress saw this ¡¯boulder¡¯ falling from the cliff, they are in no mood to care about what it truly was and investigate it.

    They are too busy sulking and recovering and went back into the base.

    But the Sea folk are different. Even though they are in hurry to return to the sea for some reason, once they returned to the sea, they saw Sam who already wore the breathing device, and took out the new harpoon gun in his hands.

    The length and mechanism are all same. Only the trapping mechanism of the spear was changed into a different mechanism.

    The Sea folk are already informed of a human that made a fuss in the sea folk area and he is the prime target and since they couldn¡¯t find him as they don¡¯t know his face, they are taking it out on the soldiers.

    Now that they saw him again, they let go of all the exhaustion they had and tried their best to move towards him so that they finish him off.

    They are currently in the middle of the shallow waters and the deep waters.

    Sam aimed his harpoon gun at one of theing targets and the harpoon impaled itself into the target.

    But after the cable acquired the required tension, the trap opened and this time the trap didn¡¯t just grip the flesh normally instead the small des are zooming into different corners of the body and creating fewrge tears on the body and when the trap was done, the body was cut into six pieces and the spear trap went back to its original position.

    There is no need for him to even retract the trap, he just has to call the spear back to him.

    The sea folk didn¡¯t stop, they didn¡¯t even care about theirrade that Sam just killed.

    They are justing at him with full rage.

    Sam took out the tfish puppet and wore it rapidly as he moved in the water. His own speed is actually faster than when he used puppet, but this is just a project testing and now he has to test the harpoon shooting.

    The harpoons on this are much smaller than that of the gun and in this one, Sam used a different trap.

    Sam shot the harpoon to one of the sea folks and it hit. The trap opened and this time, the strings are not as sharp as the previous ones. They held this gel like flesh in their grip as if it merged with it and when the harpoon is being retracted through the cable, the sea folk came along with it.

    And due to the constant blood loss that is happening, he couldn¡¯t even escape.

    And the air-powered mechanism is good for shooting at a higher force and speed. This test was also a sess and Sam wants to test thest modification. The breathing device.

    He is going with the helmet-type device for them and not just that, he is also going to create a small emergency utility for them.

    The tfish puppet¡¯s harpoon has pulled the sea folk closer and Sam let ite close enough to see it dead in the eyes through that helmet screen.

    He injected spiritual energy into the helmet and a hollow metallic shot was fired from the side of the helmet straight into the eye.

    The contents in the shot are the poisons that are normal poisons that could even be found in this world. It even came from nts.

    He wants to see what kind of reaction the sea folk has and he was not disappointed. He used sea folk as a meat shield for the attacks all the while moving around and observing the reactions the poison has on its body.

    For some reason, Sam felt that the body of the sea folk is too pure and easily affected by something else. Particrly the poisons. Even though some of the effects are not deadly, it is still good at slowing them down and the poison stays in their body longer than that of humans.

    While observing, Sam started killing a good few sea folks around him and took the bodies away, before using escaping from them.

    He stored everything away and moved with his light elemental fusion as he escaped into the horizon. The whole sea would be affected because of Sam¡¯s presence as the sea folk would go wild. But Sam didn¡¯t care.

    He is not going to stay in this ce anyway.

    Even though he is eye-catching no sea folk could catch up to his speed and he is certainly not in a pickle situation like thatrge breeding base.

    He went to the sea area which met the sore near arge cliff where the sea folk activity is less after traveling for half a day.

    He came out from there and let Sky out to escape into the air.

    He is extremely exhausted and he even had to replenish his energy many times in this escape.

    After that, he escaped into the forest, found a cave, and took residence there to take a look at the bodies before they are spoiled.

    He has around half a dozen of them with him.

    He went to the saltke and separated a stingray from the rest and kept it in a smaller pond before giving it a whole body of the sea folk.

    The stingray first went for the blood that is seeping out of the body and then started eating the flesh. After it ate half of the body, it went into a slight slumber.

    He left the body like that and put the remaining in another salt pool just to preserve them.

    He picked one and went into the tower to do some experiments on it while it is still fresh.

    He started injecting the blood essences, elemental energies, and many more.

    The body reacted differently for every single thing. He really felt like catching a live one.

    That would have been better, but he knew that they would chase him to the end of the world if he really caught one alive.

    They have this weird bond that is hard to find in any other species.

    They are okay with Sam killing a dozen sea folk in battle in the shallow waters, but they are not okay with him killing a weaker one at their home. This is weird for him.

    For the next few days, he did some experiments, but there is not much he found out. Everything is the same for him.

    Except for the poison, there is nothing Sam could use against them. The body is full of water elemental energy and it is almost like the water elemental energy took shape in these creatures and it reacts to the poison that has water element to it extremely highly and corrodes easily.

    Apart from that, there is nothing else he could do.

    Sam decided to go back to his base secretly and give the new design to his original crew and make them familiar with creating the new mechanisms while he hatched ns to sell it to the one-star military unit and make a big haul of money.

    He would make at least twenty billion out of these three designs if not more.

    He took off on the harbinger and went back to the base and waited in the cave.

    Once the night hit, Sam went to the base secretly with the help of the shadow mouse and contacted his own crew member.

    His presence shouldn¡¯t be known to anyone as his travel was not recorded at the wormhole station, he would be having the trouble of his life if he was spotted here.

    After contacting them, the crew changed their daily routine as they shifted into a new for their work, where Sam stayed temporarily withouting out and exined the new mechanism and the new manufacturing process while training them and creating a proper assembly line.

    After a few days of training, Sam decided to return to 1.

    It has been around two weeks since he came here. It is about time he returned and met with his friends.

    He also has to meet with his business partners to sell these designs without raising any suspicions.

 Chapter 777: Tournament

    Sam used the dimensional drifter to go back to 1.

    He appeared in his residence.

    He didn¡¯te out immediately. He freshened him up. Picked his feather coat and went out of the home.

    The trio is not in. Sam figured that would happen. They don¡¯t have much to do anyway. But when he came out of the home, he was surprised to see that there are very few people on the street.

    They are extremely scarce. He started walking around to see if he would understand anything and he noticed that everyone is walking in the same direction and some people are even running in that direction with excitement.

    Sam caught hold of a teen young man running and asked.

    "What is happening? Why are all people running in that direction?"

    The one Sam caught is actually a half-elf. When he looked at Sam asking these questions, he looked at him as if he was an idiot.

    "What do you mean what is happening? Don¡¯t you know? It is the big fight that is going on for the past seven days."

    "Big fight?" Sam got even more confused.

    "You don¡¯t know anything? Then don¡¯t waste my time. I will miss the fight."

    Sam didn¡¯t stop him and just followed him in that direction.

    Soon, he reached the edge of the city and there is arge arch leading everyone into a forest which is surrounded by a wall.

    Sam frowned at this. This is the forest that is developed in a certain way. It is only for high-levelpetitions and challenges. The election tournament that is supposed to have taken ce in the past week would also take ce here.

    But from what learned the tournament should have been already ended. But it seems like it is still going on.

    When Sam entered, he saw everyone waking towards therge auditorium that usually holds the hand-to-handbat.

    But now it is showing arge holographic three-dimensional video of the forest.

    Sam is a bit confused about all the hype. From what he knew the tournament is just a normal battle tournament that tests the skills in one on onebat.

    He sat in the topmost row of seats as he watched the video carefully. There are a lot of people in the forest. The elves, half-elves, centaurs, and humans, and there are many people fighting around.

    But soon Sam noticed that everyone¡¯s attention is on one particr ce within the tournament that seems to be the main focus of the tournament. To his surprise, Sam saw his friends in that focused area.

    Watt, Philip, and Jack are currently running within the forest as they escaped the pursuit of a dozen or so people chasing them.

    Sam frowned at this. No matter what, this is a bit absurd as dozens of people are pursuing a single person.

    This ispletely nuts.

    He needs some answers.

    He looked at a group of teenagers nearby who are looking at it with much excitement. Among them is the half-elf that Sam met on the way.

    He walked towards them and asked.

    "What is happening in this tournament?"

    The kid looked at Sam and his face changed a bit and said scornfully.

    "Why are you here, if you don¡¯t even know what is happening in the tournament? Don¡¯t waste our time."

    Sam didn¡¯t get angry and just took out a spatial ring and tossed it at him.

    The kid caught it and checked the contents and his eyes widened in disbelief.

    "That¡¯s yours if you exin the situation to me."

    The kid walked out of the group and dragged Sam to the side before asking with a smile.

    "What do you want to know? I will tell you everything." Sam shook his head at how fickle this guy is and said.

    "Tell me from the beginning of the tournament. Isn¡¯t it supposed to be a normal battle tournament? Why did it turn into this?"

    The kid didn¡¯t pass any snide remarks now and spoke.

    "The tournament format was changedst minute. It is not a restricted tournament anymore. It is free for all tournaments and anyone can participate at any time.

    But it only changed for the Pre-transcendent stage cultivators. Not the rest.

    For some reason, the officials changed the format for that one cultivation level and the reason they gave us that they felt like the pre-transcendent cultivators of this era is just too great and too powerful. It is some kind of golden age or something. With that, they threw a new tournament which started two days ago.

    Everyone will be given a badge when they enter the forest and out of all of them, three people will have a special ruby badge. For ten days, they have to hold on to those badges. Anyone can try and fight for them. By the end of ten days, the three people that have those three badges will be considered the top three and they will fight between themselves to decide who gets what rank.

    And for some reason, those three people who recently be famous in the city got those ruby badges and now they are being chased by everyone in the tournament. Apart from the badges, there are various other treasures and threats hidden in the forest which could help with their survival.

    There are fights breaking for those treasures as well.

    But that is not the end, there is another absurd rule.

    Out of the ten days, anyone can enter the tournament in the first five days and fight for it. After five days, the doors will be closed and only the people already in can fight for it.

    This is the third day and the trio already beat the crap out of many people. But we heard that today, the city guard is also joining in and some elites from the army units areing.

    The situation is extremely tense and the fights are great. That trio is making these elites look like some little kids. That is why everyone is interested."

    Sam thought for a second and second.

    "You can go now. I will ask you if I need anything."

    "Sure, sure. You can find me in the fruit street. I live there."

    Sam didn¡¯t care much and looked around. He felt like the whole thing is a bit suspicious. There is nothing wrong with the tournament. In fact, it is more challenging. But all three ruby badgesing to his friends, this is a bit suspicious.

    He is looking for Raunak. If the whole city is here, then there is no way he wouldn¡¯t be here.

    After some time, he couldn¡¯t take it anymore and sat in his seat and looked into the divine dimension to take a peek at the crystal table.

    It is easy to find someone in it and he can also send the message directly.

    And it worked. Raunak is sitting in the front row and he seemed to be frowning.

    He is in an extremely bad mood and at this moment, he heard a familiar voice in his head and all of a sudden he stood up and started running towards the entrance of the forest.

    Sam also stood up and went to the entrance where Raunak is already waiting.

    As soon as he saw Sam he came running to him and spoke.

    "Thank god. You finally came. Where did you go all this while? They said you are in research."

    His voice sounded hopeful as if he found an oasis in the middle of the desert.

    "What happened?"

    "Your friends, they are in trouble."

    "Trouble?"

    "This is Rajan¡¯s n. He put a bounty on their heads, everyone is so focused on them because of that."

    "Bounty? How much is that?"

    "I don¡¯t know. The ruby badgesnding in their hands is also his n. The tournament is also changed because of that. If I am not wrong, he might even have messed up the escape tokens of the trio. I already told them to not do this, but they didn¡¯t listen."

    "Why? Is there any special reward?"

    "There are rewards, but what reward is more important than their lives. there are dozens of people going after them."

    "How did they do in the past two days? Is the fight too difficult?"

    "No, they are still doing okay. They didn¡¯t have any challenges. They are good with the forest and cutting down each one of them."

    "Then it is okay for now. I will deal with it if there is any other problem. Let them stay for now. What about Ramya? Did you meet her yet?"

    Raunak lost all the light in his eyes and stayed silent.

    Sam frowned and said.

    "Don¡¯t tell me she is not on this and left somewhere else."

    "No, she is in a house arrest. They are using all kinds of twisted logic to keep her away from me. I was being given all kinds of diplomatic and bureaucratic work to deal with all kinds of educational institutions since I am the only one ¡¯free¡¯ in the department. In the fourteen days I wasn¡¯t able to meet her in the morning and every night I was denied entry into the estate.

    The situation is not looking good."

    "Then, why didn¡¯t you meet her in secret."

    "There are Consummate level cultivators in their estate. How can I do that?"

    "Why don¡¯t you put him on trial or something? He did make a contract didn¡¯t he?"

    "He did, but all the trial procedures are postponed to be done after the tournament."

    "Your father-inw is a fucking pest. Irritating, damaging, and difficult to get rid of. I gave you my word, I will help you with this, so I will stay till the end. Anyway, I have a lot of things that I want you to do for me.

    Try in a normal way if you can deal with this. But if you can¡¯t then I will help you in my own way.

    Let us go and see the battle for now."

 Chapter 778: Huge Bet

    Sam and Raunak went back to the arena and this time he went to sit beside Raunak in the first row.

    He was really fascinated by this type of broadcasting set up and he has even seen this before in the Starwood academy on the deste. But there it was done by the illusion expert in the thunder god temple.

    He just modified some illusion formations to create that.

    But here the formation is definitely not as simple. With the quality and the span, it covered it certainly is not something one can easilye up with.

    While Sam is observing the whole formation while many more are observing him. Many elves of his age group and cultivation level are looking at him curiously and some people from faction 1 who has already seen his face are giving out some evil smiles.

    Among them, Ramana is looking at Sam as if he wants to eat him up.

    Apart from them, some people from this invisible third faction and Rajan from faction 1 are also looking at him, but these people are rtively calm.

    Sam didn¡¯t care much about all these stares, he just focused on the formation first and then the battle.

    Currently, from what is visible in the video, there are not many challenges for the trio. Particrly when they are working together.

    They are setting quick traps, separating the pursuers and dealing with them, and catching them off-guard.

    Sneaking up on them, luring them to some of the beasts that are left here as threats for the participants, and so on.

    They didn¡¯t even have to use the hoverboards for now.

    They are dealing with it with the proper approach.

    Sam is looking forward to how they will fare against the true elites that are going to join in on thispetition and he doesn¡¯t have to wait for long.

    At first, the city guard wanted to join the stage by the afternoon, but after Sam came someone passed the message to them to join earlier and they didn¡¯t disagree.

    The city guard is still wearing their uniform and they entered the arena together.

    But it would still take some time for the city guard to engage with the trio directly. After all, there are two dozen people that are in the active pursuit of the trio and if the city guard just wants to take over from there, they wouldn¡¯t agree. At least, not without some ¡¯persuasion¡¯.

    Sam watched as the battle went on and on until evening and finally the city guard came near them from another direction. Right before they engaged though, the sunset, and the battle was halted.

    Sam was confused and looked at Raunak.

    "They are not allowed to battle at night or even move from that ce. Even if they want to recover, they have to recover there.

    This is a rule to increase the anticipation in the viewers and increase the bet money through it."

    Sam was intrigued, as he was about to ask something, Raunak spoke again.

    "There is no question of them moving from that ce. There are some Consummate level cultivators guarding or watching them.

    Usually, they are kept for watching the barracks of the contestants in a normal battle tournament so that they wouldn¡¯t fight at night, but now they are guarding them like this.

    They are directly under elders and nobody knows what they are looked like.

    From what I heard from the stories, they don¡¯t even speak. There is no need to worry."

    Sam nodded his head and started walking out along with Raunak.

    They went to a meal. It has been a while since Sam ate something delicious.

    "You mentioned betting. Is there a limit to the amount of money one can bet?"

    "You want to bet? As far as I know, there is no limit. The betting system hasn¡¯t changed from the previous time as this was an impromptu modification. How much do you want to bet?"

    "What are the odds against them staying in the top three by the end of the tournament?"

    "If they can really reach that, you can win five times the money over."

    "Two billion."

    *PFffftttt*

    Raunak spat out the liquor he is having and looked at Sam in surprise or rather a shock.

    "Two billion?"

    "Yes, two billion. Each."

    "Are you out of your mind? There are just too many variables out there in the battle. That money didn¡¯te to you for free. What if you lost it?"

    "It is just money. I have plenty of it. Anyway, they will be buying something else in the future. You just don¡¯t have to worry too much.

    Tomorrow helps me with the betting. Same bet on the three of them. They will stay in top three. Two billion each."

    "That is arge amount."

    "The amount will berger after I won."

    "But..."

    "Don¡¯t worry about it. I have a new business idea waiting for me. So, don¡¯t worry too much. It would be alright."

    They went on their own ways after the meal. Sam wanted to take a nap after a long time. Even though there might be a plot going on against him. It is not something that is worrying him too much.

    But as soon as heid on his bed and closed his eyes, he abruptly opened them and looked at the window.

    A small scroll was thrown into the room through the open window.

    Sam picked the scroll and looked through the contents. It is from some unknown person. The gist of the matter is simple.

    It is a threat that his friends would die tomorrow in the arena and to stop that, Sam has to meet them outside now and discuss a deal to leave his friends alone.

    Sam burned the scroll and went back to nap.

    The next day, he went to the arena where he met with Raunak and gave the spirit stones.

    Raunak sent his assistant to ce the bet and they went to watch the battle.

    It is just a little after sunrise and the arena was already packed. Almost everyone in the arena ced a bet, smaller orrger and most of the bets that are ced are rted to the trio.

    Some people bet that the trio would be eliminated today, some people bet they would be killed today, some people bet that they would be defeated by a certain person, there are even bets on the approximate time frame of elimination.

    Even though the audience is getting riled up after the trio¡¯s performance that impressed them at first, they are not exactly on their side at this moment. They are sure that the trio would lose soon.

    The battle started soon and the trio that is in the middle of a dozen pursuers and the city guard started the day aggressively.

    They didn¡¯t even bother to consider too much as they made their way towards the city guard and tore through them like a hot knife through the butter.

    They didn¡¯t engage them too much and added them to the group of their pursuers.

    They are still sticking to the kiting measure they took from the start.

    They don¡¯t care if they are city guards or individual pursuers.

    By the end of the day, they once again cut their pursuers in half and are in high spirits. But right before that day¡¯s battle ended a group of soldiers entered the forest. They are all cloaked with green color and Sam felt that they are familiar.

    They are definitely rted to the cloaked forces of faction 1.

    Sam looked at Ramana who is sitting beside his father. That guy had a crooked smile and he is looking at Raunak as if he is a cat looking at the mouse. The sadistic expression is reflecting his desire to toy and torture Raunak before killing him.

    Sam went back to the residence without caring much. He is still confident that they deal with them in a chase. If it is a cornered battle with all these people surrounding them, he would be a little pressure on their performance.

    But as long as they are not surrounded and not cornered without any recovery time, they will be fine.

    As Sam entered his residence there is someone waiting for him.

    It is none other than the arrogant builder, Braman.

    "It has been a long while since west met. How are you doing?"

    Sam greeted casually as he entered the house.

    "Maybe I should be asking that question. As you are not doing so well."

    "I am perfectly fine actually. There is no problem whatsoever."

    "Really, your friends are about to die and you are not worried?"

    "That¡¯s a strong and conclusion. Not to mention baseless."

    "Baseless? I don¡¯t know if your officer friend told you. The escape tokens that are given to your friends are rigged, they wouldn¡¯t activate the space gate inside the formation and they wouldn¡¯t be able to escape. This was all pre-nned to take revenge on you.

    Green cloaks are too good in forests. They are made for this, your friends might have managed to keep their upper hand until now. But tomorrow, they would be true prey."

    "So?"

    "Tomorrow, one-star unit is also entering. So if you want to save your friends, they are the only way out for you."

    "Then?"

    "I heard that there is a new product from your research base."

    "Oh, now you want that for a cheaper price." Braman didn¡¯t say anything in response and just smiled.

    Sam shook his head with a smile and said.

    "Get out of here."

    With that, he mmed the door shut and went in.

    Braman is just standing there like an idiot as he didn¡¯t expect this kind of response at all.

 Chapter 779: Green Cloaks

    Braman was stunned.

    He didn¡¯t expect this reaction at all. Everything he imagined would happen didn¡¯t happen.

    Actually, it was not even his task to give this news to Sam, he just paid a price to get this task so that he can look at Sam¡¯s panicky expression and struggle to let go of his design to save his friends and such.

    But all that was left to him was a mmed door on his face.

    This is frustrating to the point that he wanted to kick open the door and hold Sam by his cor and ask what is wrong with him.

    But he controlled the urge and went back to report the matter.

    Meanwhile, Sam is looking at the guy from his window and couldn¡¯t help but give a cold sneer.

    "I didn¡¯t even find you to settle scores and here you are trying to get under my skin."

    He spoke coldly and he changed his outfit. He wore the ck cloak and got ready to deal with this guy. Braman already sent a transcendent stage cultivator to teach Sam a lesson. But since it is not an attempt to kill and just someone trying to satisfy their ego, Sam only killed the guy who attacked him and left Braman alone.

    He wanted to teach Braman a lesson, but he forgot about it as he was in a hurry to go to the sea and all.

    But now that he is back, it is better to give this guy a reality check.

    Sam used shadow mouse to follow this guy.

    Braman first went to the school zone where the colleges and other schools are established along with arge residential area within to amodate the lecturers and some rich students who can afford the home rental.

    There Braman went to meet with someone and the shadow mouse followed, but not too far. Just to be sure Sam used the crystal table to take a look at the house and he was surprised at how tight the guard and security is.

    Sam wanted to proceed in, but a formation is blocking the entrance of the shadow mouse.

    This surprised Sam. This is the first time a formation managed to counter the shadow mouse¡¯s shadow form. He activated the crystal table to look at the whole residence and was surprised to find out the tight-knit guard.

    The surprise is not just the sheer number of people that are guarding, the surprise is also because of the guards themselves.

    The guards are shadows. Sam was surprised once again.

    There is another person who can use shadow necromancy in this ce. All this while, he didn¡¯t manage to meet a single person that can use shadow necromancy, even in the realm of the undead, even if there are any present there, Sam didn¡¯t meet anyone. This is the first time.

    Aftering out of the initial shock, Sam realized his situation and immediately made the shadow mouse get out of this ce.

    The shadows can perceive other shadows and Sam wouldn¡¯t be able to escape easily based on their strength.

    The current situation is not extremely favorable.

    He let the shadow mouse hide in the corner of the street and waited until Braman came out of the house. Now the following continued once again.

    Soon they reached Braman¡¯s residence where he started drinking as soon as he entered and started cursing wildly.

    This guy indeed had a huge ego. Sam just let the shadow mice do their job once they are here. Since the owner of the house is so involved in drinking and cursing, it is easy for the shadow mice to do their job.

    They poured the biofuel everywhere and Sam set it on fire.

    The whole building was on fire in a few seconds and Braman finally came out of his daze. All this while he is letting the alcohol take over to let go of his frustrations and didn¡¯t let the spiritual energy clear his body off of it.

    But now that he saw the mes that are clearly famous for their presence in the deaths of many faction 1 members he became panicky and started moving out of the house.

    Sam who is still inside the divine dimension finally came out behind Braman who is escaping and threw a ss bottle of fuel on his right hand.

    Braman was so panicked that he is not even using his sense properly.

    He looked behind only to see a ck-cloaked figure disappear in front of his eyes and he started running out even faster. But in that process, his right hand caught fire. Even though it didn¡¯t spread past his right hand, he knew that is not something to be happy about.

    Sam left the ce along with the shadow mice.

    He only did this to give a warning, not to burn the bridges.

    This should teach Braman and this third faction a lesson.

    They shouldn¡¯t be reaching their hands too much. Anyway, these elves are too cunning and greedy for their own good.

    Actually, the rumor of the new research in the base was deliberately given out of by Sam himself. His crew leaked the news on his orders to the biscuit factory that was nearby.

    Since it would be hard to push this sale forward by himself without raising any suspicions regarding his journey into the sea, particrly when the war became intense right after that.

    He would just concoct a story about why they are researching after they identally found out that a new research project ising.

    But these guys took apletely different approach than normal. They want to take advantage of him.

    After doing what he wanted to do, Sam left the ce and went back to his own residence.

    At first, he wanted to solve this war problem as soon as possible, but now this tournament thing is going to dy it, and anyway, they will clearly see the threat from the sea is far more dangerous than they thought and then he would release some hints on what products he is making and then make them bend over and give him a great price.

    The next day, the situation in the forest is not that different. The trio is still managing to shake off the pursuer and also taking them down most of the time.

    The green cloaked team is not acting the like the rest, instead, they are spreading all over the forest and getting a hang of it.

    They are scouting high and low as they moved from one ce to another as if they are mapping it all.

    There are no centaurs in this team, everyone is a humanoid creature. Either an elf or a human.

    They are moving like they own the forest and if the trees are helping them move.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know what they are exactly doing, but for half a day, they didn¡¯t fight at all. They just visited all the trees.

    But soon in the afternoon, the situation changed. The green cloaked team whichprised of thirty members divided themselves into groups of three and started moving towards the trio from different directions.

    Any other contestants that are in their way are being eliminated as each team fought together and the trees are surprisingly supporting them.

    The trees almost seemed to have gotten their own mind as the branches, roots and some vines started moving along with the movements of the teams as they supported their attacks from the side.

    The audience was amazed by this sudden disy of expertise. Even Sam was surprised. It is simr to what Noah used, the blood forest technique in which every time Sam ced his foot on a tree, the branch or the tree itself will move and try to capture Sam in ce.

    This is a simr technique, but here instead of the manifestation of spiritual energy made forest was reced by the real forest and instead of one person there are multiple people controlling it.

    Even though their primary target is the trio, the green cloaks are not leaving the rest of the contestants alone. They must have thought that they would only be a hindrance to their moves.

    So they are cleaning them up casually.

    Soon they are near therge group pursuit against the trio.

    The thirty members circled the whole group including the trio and started their cleaning process.

    The trio managed to escape some of their attacks and with theirbined attack, they just pushed through the encirclement and moved to the other side.

    The green cloaks were surprised by such a suddenbination attack and didn¡¯t expect their encirclement would be prated so easily, but they didn¡¯t worry.

    They decided to clean up the extras before dealing with the trio. Forest is their territory anyway.

    Meanwhile, the trio gathered together and started discussing their n while recovering rapidly.

    "What should we do, they seemed to have a great hold of the forest?" Watt asked and Jack also looked at Philip.

    "They do have great coordination with forest, with all the treesbined, their team is huge. You guys know what that means right?" He asked them in return and Jack and Watt nodded.

    "That means they are the bigger target."

    "These people are using all kinds of methods to deal with us. It is about time, we reveal some of our cards as well."

    All three of them agreed on what to do and dispersed into different directions.

 Chapter 780: Meeting the professor

    The Green Cloaks didn¡¯t have an easy time when they are fighting the rest of the group. They really underestimated thepetition they have in this ce.

    But since they already provoked them, the rest of the contestants are not going to let them go easily. The fight went on and on for the rest of the day and it is almost evening.

    The trio is in an extremely rxed state now. There are some straypetitors that came to fight them and there are some newpetitors that joined in, but they are still low in numbers and they are okay with handling them.

    Anyway, by evening not only did they finish making their own preparations in the forest, but they are also had enough time to rest and recover for a while and discussed their ns.

    They should really thank Green Cloaks for taking the heat off of them.

    By dusk, the rest of the contestants are either defeated or escaped to fight for another day, either way, the green cloaks became less busy and to the surprise of the audience, they started recovering immediately.

    They are absorbing the wood elemental energy from the trees and grass surrounding them. To be precise it is almost like the trees and grass are giving their energy up to them.

    Their recovery rate is also extremely high.

    Sam who is sitting in the audience was intrigued. He is really looking forward to how the trio would fight off these green cloaks.

    The whole afternoon, the trio set their own traps in the forest along with some more preparations, the rest of the arena didn¡¯t understand what they are doing, but Sam did.

    These are the new results of their training. After they got their ass kicked by Sam, they came up with some techniques.

    Even though they didn¡¯t fight again, Sam could still guess their effects.

    But his thoughts are interrupted by something else.

    At this exact moment, anotherrge group in another type of uniform is joining in on the fun. He frowned because he is familiar with the uniform. These people are from the one-star military unit.

    There are thirty members of them entering and Sam even saw a familiar person within the group. Rogan. Even though he is not at the forefront of the group, he is only standing right behind the leader, he clearly has a higher rank in the unit.

    They entered the forest and unlike the green cloaks, they are pretty aggressive in their moves. They all stuck together and started moving towards the green cloaks and the trio who are now in the same spot.

    This is a new addition to the already excited crowd.

    Currently, there are thirty green cloaks, thirty One-star soldiers, and around twenty to thirty individual contestants, in midst of all these people the trio who are the targets are standing together.

    The green cloaks are pretty fast and they made their presence known to the rest of the forest in an aggressive way.

    By the time the green cloaks healed themselves and got ready to deal with the trio, the first one-star soldier already entered the scene and the rest slowly followed.

    Rogan who came a littleter looked at the two parties and said.

    "Why don¡¯t we wait for tomorrow? There are only a few minutes until the sunset, I am pretty sure it wouldn¡¯t be enough to finish this and it would be a pity to stop it in the middle."

    The trio doesn¡¯t have any problem with that, they just sat there and started eating their food.

    The green cloaks looked at the One-star military unit and cursed them for being nosy, but they still didn¡¯t attack and held their hand.

    The day is over just like that.

    Sam is really looking forward to seeing what the trio has newly picked up, but it seems like he doesn¡¯t have enough luck to watch it today, but he is still excited.

    He came out of the forest along with Raunak as both of them walked towards another restaurant. Raunak seems to be a bit troubled. It seems like the situation with his girlfriend is not going anywhere.

    "You are in the Arena the whole day. Why didn¡¯t you go meet her in that time? Her father and brother are here. You can work something out, can¡¯t you?"

    "It is protocol, every government official should be at the tournament."

    "You really have no luck in this love. Everything is against you."

    Raunak didn¡¯t even know what to say about that. At this moment an elf came running towards them and whispered something to Raunak which created a frown on thetter¡¯s forehead.

    Sam looked at him in askance and he replied.

    "Professor, he wants to meet you."

    "Meet me?"

    "Yes, it seems like he is intrigued by you too much. He wouldn¡¯t meet people that easily."

    Sam shook his head and gestured for the elf to lead the way. Raunak also followed them as he had nothing to do anyway.

    Soon Sam arrived at the familiar street.

    The very street that he visitedst night.

    He has a feeling that he already visited the ce he is going to visit now and it turned out to be true.

    Soon enough he is right in front of the house which blocked the shadow mouse to enter. He took a deep breath and entered the house.

    Both of them were led into an office room where an elf is waiting for them.

    Sam and Raunak took their seats and looked at the smiling elf.

    "Good to see you Raunak. How is life treating you?"

    Raunak didn¡¯t answer and just looked at him. For some reason, he felt the question was a bit sarcastic. But he doesn¡¯t know if he was just being a bit sensitive.

    Then the professor looked at Sam and spoke.

    "You must be the infamous Sam. I wanted to meet you for a long time, but I never got a chance."

    Sam shook his hand with a faint smile and replied.

    "Nice to meet you too."

    "I heard Braman visited youst night. Did you think about what he said?"

    "Said? More like threatened. I think I am pretty clear with the answer."

    Professor chuckled at the reply and spoke.

    "I am really sorry if Braman has spoken anything out of line and I am sure he is regretting it now clearly. The One-star unit just wanted to make a deal."

    "And why are you discussing this, instead of them?"

    "The person in charge is my student and he is a bit busy with something. So, I can only take it upon myself to aid him."

    "What would the deal be?"

    "Well, from what I heard from them. Your research base has a new product and they are willing to buy it. But they just want some discount in exchange for your friends¡¯ safety tomorrow.

    They survived four days, it would be a pity to get seriously harmed in thest day and it is an open secret that their escape tokens are not working even if they want to give up."

    "So, your deal is that I sell whatever product I have in my hands to the military unit at a cheap price and the unit will save my friends."

    "That¡¯s right."

    "What if I don¡¯t ept that deal?"

    "Well, the one-star unit will be just normal contestants in the battle."

    Sam chuckled as he looked at the professor right in the eyes,

    "Do you even know what my product is?"

    "No, but from your record, I am pretty sure that it would be another revolutionary product."

    "My dear Professor, I heard you are a great teacher. But today give me a chance to teach you something about making business deals.

    The first thing you have to do before starting the negotiation is to verify whether what you can offer is credible or not, worth it or not, and if the other party needs it or not.

    You can bluff with it if you are not sure and if you think that the other party is also not sure.

    But you can¡¯t bet on it too much when the stakes are high. Otherwise, you will lose everything for being greedy."

    "Does that mean, you still don¡¯t want that deal?"

    "Of course not. Anyway, the next project in the base is actually a personal interest of mine and I don¡¯t n on selling it anytime soon. As for this deal, we can continue the discussion tomorrow afternoon. I will meet you in the arena then and you can once again offer different conditions."

    "Afternoon? Do you think your friends will survive until then?"

    "Do you want to make a bet?"

    "Bet? What bet?"

    "If my friends don¡¯t survive until tomorrow noon, I will give you the next three products for free. Not only the design, but I will also let my staff train yours, a n for the factoryyout. Machines needed for the factory. Everything you need.

    But if they survive and if youe to me by noon with a different deal, then you guys will have to pay double the price for the next three products

    Are you down?"

    The professor chuckled and shook Sam¡¯s hand.

    "Deal."

    "I hope you keep your word. If you don¡¯t, I will shut mypany down and will just join faction 2 as a normal artisan."

    "You don¡¯t have to do that, I am a man of my word."

    "That better be the case. While you are at, call that shadow of yours back and keep it safely with you. It is an insult to do that to a fellow necromancer."

    The professor froze in his actions and looked at Sam with narrow eyes. Under the table, a shadow just moved from Sam¡¯s shadow and merged with the professor¡¯s shadow.

    Sam stood up from his seat and said.

    "Lesson two. Stop underestimating the other party in a negotiation. So, you can recall the shadow that was with Raunak too."

    Raunak who sat on his chair was already sweating at the exchange and when heard this, he sprung up from his chair and looked down. He could see the shadow leaving from his and merging with the professor¡¯s shadow.

    "Goodbye professor."

    With that Sam and Raunak left the ce.

    The professor looked at Sam¡¯s back with a deep gaze.

 Chapter 781: Clash with the Green Cloaks

    Next day.

    Everyone was excited to see what would happen today as this is the fifth day. By the end of this day, nobody can enter the battle anymore.

    From that day onwards the battle is solely for the people that are already inside. But that is not the only thing that is exciting them.

    The most exciting thing is the uing battle between two elite units and the trio that are the center of attraction for the two teams.

    They are looking forward to seeing if the trio would survive this.

    Sam and Raunak also came together and sat in their usual seats.

    Today, the professor who didn¡¯te to the battle in the past four days also came.

    Raunak looked at the image of the two teams on either side of the trio and asked Sam.

    "Are you really not worried about them? Those two units are as good as they can get. If they really target them, it will be hard to survive."

    "Not really, they can escape if things go really bad, there are many ways they can escape from that ce and I am sure they are aware of that too. For them, this is more of a way of testing themselves. They made some special and substantial improvements this time, so they just want to test that."

    "But isn¡¯t that too risky? They have to stay there for five more days."

    "I don¡¯t think so. What happens if all the other contestants are done and there are no more contestants that are getting in to join?"

    "Isn¡¯t that too farfetched? It is almost impossible to do that."

    "You said it yourself, almost impossible. Not impossible. Just wait and see for yourself."

    As he finished his words, the battle started.

    The one-star unit didn¡¯t attack immediately, for some reason they backed off and waited there.

    But the green cloaks didn¡¯t bother, their primary target is the trio. They are a bit vary of the one-star unit but that didn¡¯t stop them from going after their target.

    Rajan and Ramana are looking at Sam with cold eyes as they wanted to see his expression when his friends are dying.

    Even though thepetition doesn¡¯t support intentional killing, ¡¯idents¡¯ can always happen. Particrly when the weaker party didn¡¯t use their escape token in time.

    So, they are looking forward to that incident.

    The Green cloaks surrounded the trio. They are standing in ten positions and in each position there are three people.

    They created aplete circle in a formation and with the aid of the trees, they are far more than just thirty people in the formation.

    Philip, Jack, and Watt stood together with their backs against each other and looked at them. Their auras are raging as they looked at their opponents with excitement.

    The green cloaks activated their battle formation and the wood element started raging and the energy from the surrounding trees and the trees within the encirclement is also being added as the first person of every three-man group took a step forward with their weapons.

    A green-colored transparent shield dome was created around them with the twenty green cloaks as the nodes while the ten people were about to attack.

    At this moment, Watt took out a stack of cards and started flourishing with them. He performed cardistry as if he was a magician trying to trick others to perform a card trick.

    The cards flew from one hand to another and as he made several moves the wind elemental energy is also moving along with the cards and the cards started glowing with the sharp wind around them.

    There are more than fifty cards in Watt¡¯s hands as he waited for the ten green cloaks toe near enough.

    Meanwhile, Philip and Jack are not staying idle. Jack is currently holding the sword within the scabbard as his energy riled up and even his breath turned sharp like des. Philip on the other hand is doing something else. A lump of powdered metal is moving in his hands like a snake as it slowly turned its color and he divided into two snakes and then three as it thinned constantly.

    The ten green cloaks didn¡¯t stop their advance from what these people are doing.

    All the ten green cloaks are currently holding weapons of closebat and right before they swung the weapons, Watt threw the pack of cards straight into the air. The cards opened like arge snake as they created a circle in the air and Philip who is holding a lot of red hot metal snakes in his hand also threw it up and these snakes zoomed towards thisrge metal card snake.

    And when they collided with the card snake it is like fireworks happened and the cards caught fire for some reason and the sharp winds that were created because of the cards were being added with the fire creating a small firestorm in the air.

    At this exact moment, Jack pumped the spiritual energy into his legs as he jumped upwards and twisted in the air as he executed arge sword strike creating arge sword ray in the shape of an arc.

    The arc shed the fiery cards into two the pieces moved in different directions.

    Jacknded on the ground and by this time, the card pieces already reached their targets.

    The major target of the card pieces are actually the ten people that are near them and when the fiery metallic card pieces rained on them like swords along with the fiery storm, they could only abandon the thought of attacking and start defending.

    Everything happened within three seconds and the green cloaks who have an upper hand went into a passive mode, when the twenty that are standing in the rear wanted to help theirrades, a wall of fire was created out of nowhere and they had to halt in their tracks.

    When they looked around to see what is happening, they noticed that a formation was created on the ground and it was created by some cards. They are not pieces, they are just the fiery cards that have some inscriptions on them.

    Even though the energy that could be held by those cards is minimal, it is still good enough to create a firewall for a few minutes.

    The trio went to engage with these ten soldiers and their aim not to kill them and it is not even trying to incapacitate them. Their goal is only to create enough damage to make them not fight at their fullest. That is the only time frame that could be provided by the firewall.

    And by the time the green cloaks outside managed to break past the formation, the trio is already done with their task and started moving out.

    The three of them moved in three different directions. Watt moved straight while the remaining two went diagonally.

    The green cloaks looked at their injured partners who can still at least move and heaved a sigh before chasing the trio in separate groups.

    The people that are in forefront of the chase are actually the ten people that got injured badly.

    All the wounds that they got are not exactly critical, but they hurt a lot and every wound is nasty. It is more of an irritating distraction than clear damage.

    As Philip started running his body slowly started glowing red and the metal coat he is wearing started reacting well enough. He activated partial fire elemental fusion and started leaving a path of fire on his way.

    He ispressing his energy too much that every step he took and tried to move, his body is trying to expel some of the energy instinctually creating a pool of fire.

    The green cloaks started worrying as they saw this path of the fire, the trees are catching fire and these trees are the ones that are helpful to them and even the basis of their confidence.

    But they are sure that Philip wouldn¡¯t be able to keep this up for long as they shot attacks from behind. The spears, arrows, and even the trees that Philip is passing by. He is avoiding all the attacks with speed and dexterity.

    The remaining two pursuits are not exactly different.

    Watt is simrlypressing his wind elemental energy with partial fusion as he destroyed and ravaged everything in his way.

    The trees are being uprooted as a whole and debris resulted from that didn¡¯t even have a chance tond on the ground as it got stuck in the wind storm and got carried away by the tailwind of the storm.

    On Jack¡¯s side, the situation is simr to that of Watt¡¯s but he is not uprooting neither was he creating a storm. He is cutting through everything.

    Even the path he took forward is like arge single sword cut.

    The chase is going on intensely.

    They couldn¡¯t even understand where this much energy ising from for three Pre-transcendent stage cultivators. They can guess that they are squeezing every bit of it.

    But they couldn¡¯t understand the point of this chase even though it is indeed exciting.

    After a few minutes of this fruitless chase, Philip and Jack took sharp turns and the troops followed.

    The green cloaks are so into the chase that they didn¡¯t even notice why they turned.

    Only the trio and the audience that is watching the whole scene from outside knew what is going to happen.

    The atmosphere is very tense in the whole arena as everyone watched curiously thinking about what is about to unfold.

    But only Sam had a smirk on his face as if he had seen thising long ago and one person who is observing Sam, the professor had a bad feeling when he looked at that smirk.

 Chapter 782: Finishing off the Green Cloaks

    The trio is running at their top speed leaving their mark on the path they traveled making the green cloaks that are not only following them and attacking them too immersed to see what is going on.

    The trio is so fast that the green cloaks had a subconscious thought that they would lose them if they just blinked.

    And there is another factor that made them put all their focus on the trio and that is the behavior of tant provocation.

    The trio didn¡¯t even flinch when the green cloaks surrounded them and even when they have the ability and chance to just escape they stayed there without flinching and performed a shy trick before leaving that too separately and in a forest and right after beating the crap out of these ten guys who wanted to attack them.

    Even though they had a chance to kill with proper attacks, they just left them there beaten and bruised as if it didn¡¯t matter if they are finished or not.

    This is just pure looking down on. Creating simple insecurity even if it is temporary. This trick works most of the time if the opponents have a certain level of reputation and the pride to hold on to and it works best on people with fragile egos.

    They just followed the trio as their life depended on it.

    But soon, they noticed something else.

    All three batches of the green cloaks can see the shy and chaotic energies of the other two people that areing.

    They finally understood that the trio is gathering together.

    But they couldn¡¯t understand the n before they could stop and think of what is happening, the trio didn¡¯t want to let them have that chance and started throwing some attacks at them and the provocation worked once again.

    Soon, they could see the ce they are going to meet. It is a clearing with no trees. Arge circr clear area with no trees, grass, or any other nts.

    It is pure soil.

    The trio was running to a single point and the trial of thepressed energies followed. The audience is watching the scene carefully and thought they would collide.

    The green cloaks who saw what is happening halted in their tracks as soon as they entered this clearing and stood at the edge as they tried to recover with the help of the trees nearby from that edge.

    The trio suddenly mmed their legs to the ground and skid as they tried to alter their direction a bit. But their speed is too much and the energy theypressed isrge and chaotic. But before they could lose control, the three of them locked each other¡¯s hands and used the force of energiesing from each other to skid in a full circle, and in that skidding process, they just released all the energy out.

    At this exact movement when most of their speed died down, a formation was activated around.

    This is the formation ced by the trio when the green cloaks are still dealing with extra contestants and this formation is made by the special formation gs that Sam gave them and they used in the banished realm when they are fighting the undead creatures.

    But this time it is not a single formation, it is abination formation with three elements.

    The wind energy that is carrying the debris and following Watt, the sword ray that was beingpressed by Jack, and thepressed firestorm that was being suppressed by Philip while they ran are released.

    Now they all merged together as they rotated within the formation which not only provided a closed space and also channeled this fiery-wind sword storm even more and added to its force and in the eye of the storm, the trio stood closely as they took out the wine and started gulping it down.

    The green cloaks that are within the zone are all carried away and the storm started tearing their clothes, creating cuts, and then burning the skin all at the same time.

    More than half of thempletely lost control and even the other half who managed to stay down are only resisting the storm from carrying them away, the debris is still hitting them like crazy, tore their clothes apart, cut their skin, and burning the flesh.

    The trio just stood in the middle of this tornado storm like they are on a pic as they drank wine non-stop.

    The audience burst into cheers in the arena and everyone was burning with excitement. Of course, except for the people who ced a bet against the trio surviving this day.

    There are some people that are particrly upset about this and almost wanted to beat the crap out of the green cloaks themselves for being so stupid.

    And one of them is Ramana and Rajan is not even looking at the image anymore. He is looking at Sam who sat back and rxed in his seat with a smirk on his face.

    There is another person who is looking at Sam, the professor. He is much more level-headed than the rest and is not exactly offended or feeling frustrated by the performance of the trio.

    He is just waiting for the time upon which he would get the idea of proposing a deal with Sam.

    He didn¡¯t even consider the possibility of Sam bluffing, but he knew that the current situation is not enough for him to go and ask Sam for that deal.

    Because this trick doesn¡¯t work consecutively.

    He once again focused on the match.

    The wine the trio used is the heavenly wine. Sam gave a bottle each so that they could use it in emergency situations. Now they are using it because they already learned that there is a bounty on their head, if they didn¡¯t deal with this situation properly they would be inviting a ton of trouble onto themselves.

    They couldn¡¯t kill them and they couldn¡¯t go easy on them at the same time. This is a pain in the ass.

    The trio got into action after the storm stopped.

    The green cloaks are already mauled and are panting for breath. The blood and the burnt flesh is giving off a weird smell all over the ce.

    And soon, the situations reversed. Most of the green cloaks are injured beyond recovery for now and they used the escape tokens to escape.

    The members that can at least stand up and take some blows are helping their friends escape first but in this process, they are being beaten to the pulp by the trio.

    They are not even using any weapons or elemental techniques anymore, they are just beating the crap out of them with the fists and soon the green cloaks are gone.

    The battle didn¡¯t evenst a half-an-hour.

    The green cloaks are gone just like that. The longest thing that has gone in this fight is the chase and that is only for fifteen minutes.

    The trio is already back in shape and is ready to go after the One Star force. But when they are moving towards this unit, they halted in their tracks all of a sudden and looked towards the sky in a daze. The daze onlysted for a few seconds before they exchanged a nce and a smirk before they went back to their activity.

    They didn¡¯t go to the one-star unit but rather went into the forests separately to hunt the rest of the strays down.

    No one noticed this small change in them, but the professor did, and that too because of the bet he had with Sam not for any other reason.

    He noticed, in that brief moment before the trio went into a daze, Sam has closed his eyes and had a deep frown on his face and his face turned red with all the blood pressure due to the stress on the brain.

    This is not a normal thing that happens randomly. Sam did something and the trio reacted to that.

    He wouldn¡¯t believe that to be just a coincidence. He assumed that just like how he canmunicate with the One star military unit in the forest, Sam might have also had a way to do that and he might have done that.

    As for how he himselfmunicated with the unit, it is with the shadows of course.

    His shadow necromancy is really too good and of a higher level. He can use them to talk with someone else and he can send them anywhere as long as they are his peers in strength.

    This is really a great level of skill.

    And just like how themunication between Sam and the trio didn¡¯t escape the professor, themunication between the professor and the military unit didn¡¯t escape Sam.

    He watched the shadow move into the forest when he looked into the crystal table tomunicate with the trio.

    As for all the mental stress, it is because of therge range he covered due to the distance between the arena and their position in the forest itself.

 Chapter 783: Vs One-Star

    The Professor is trying to guess what Sam said to the trio.

    He is extremely curious. At first, he didn¡¯t think much about the trio as he didn¡¯t think much of the people they defeated.

    But these shy tricks and teamwork made him think otherwise. Of course, the biggest contribution to that thought is still the fact they dealt with the Green Cloaks.

    Now he is thinking about whether his bet has been the right choice.

    That is why he wants to know just what exactly Sam said. He even wanted to send a shadow to the forest and take a look at the situation.

    But while he was doing so, an attendant came running to him and gave a slip.

    ¡¯Don¡¯t even think about it.¡¯

    That is the content of the slip. He frowned and looked at the attendant who pointed his finger towards Sam.

    Sam gave out a smile as he looked at the professor which made thetter feel like he got caught red-handed. He recalled the shadow immediately and cursed under his breath.

    But his frustration didn¡¯tst long. Because he could guess what Sam said from the trio¡¯s actions.

    Currently, the trio got separated once again and started hunting down the stray cultivators and they brought hell upon them.

    Maybe it is the payback for all the chasing and pestering they had to suffer in the past few days or they wanted to make an example out of them, but the stray cultivators are being treated extremely roughly.

    They are beating the crap out of them. Breaking bones, tearing flesh, burning the limbs off, the trio is behaving like savages.

    The One Star unit didn¡¯t stay still, they already started the pursuit of the trio. Unlike green cloaks, they didn¡¯t focus too much on eliminating fast. They just went on to sneak within the forest and tried to attack them from the side without directly confronting them.

    But the trio is slick enough and they didn¡¯t stay in any spot for more than three seconds, they are on the constant move as they hunted.

    The whole forest is suffering from this constant hunt, the trees are being cut down, and several pits are formed due to the extreme battle.

    The vegetation is getting destroyed.

    Soon some people noticed that not only are the trio trying to hunt the strays down, they are also destroying the forest on their way.

    They are not leaving anything in their way to stay.

    The battle continued for another three hours and it is not too far away from noon.

    Sam who is in the audience looked at the ravaged forest and smiled. There are not many hiding ces or traps left.

    The one-star unit can either run or hit them directly but there is no way they can make an ambush.

    Sam once again closed his eyes and activated the crystal table to send a message.

    The trio halted in their tracks once again and changed the direction they are moving. They are moving towards a single point to gather again and the One start unit also realized now there are not too many trees to even confuse them as they did with green cloaks.

    So, they are sure what is going to happen and they decided to meet anyway.

    They are sure they are stronger than the green cloaks and they are also sure that they can handle the trio without much effort if they surrounded them, so they are confident about this.

    And they are not as impulsive as the green cloaks and when they reached a certain range, they halted and let the trio run.

    They just wanted to be sure to not fall into a trap.

    But to their surprise, the trio neither stopped nor did they activate another trap, instead as soon as the three of them were only a few feet away all three of them changed direction. Philip just turned around and started running towards the unit behind him, while Watt and Jack also moved towards that batch.

    The rest of the soldiers were stunned and started running, but before they knew it, the trio broke through the formation by brute force and caught hold of a single guy on the rear, and started running once again.

    As Jack carried that guy on his back, Watt took out a stack of cards, but this time they have sharp strings attached to them and he threw them all into that guy¡¯s body making him bleed continuously. Watt didn¡¯t even attack him in vitals he just made sure the cards stuck in.

    After that, he held the strings tightly and pulled the body over, and threw it towards the pursuers. While it is midair, Jack threw a sword ray and cuts the strings. The body flew through the air and fell right into the pursuers that areing.

    The pursuit stopped for a second, as they looked at theirrade who is suffering from all the cards impaled into his body. But as they are taking the cards out one by one, one of the cards that were impaled in an arm exploded.

    A small chunk of the arm turned into meat paste and was thrown all over and the rest of the arm fell over.

    The victim became unconscious.

    The one-star unit looked at the trio who stopped a few meters with rage in their eyes. They just wanted to go there and kill them and half of the remaining people started running while the other half tried to give the emergency treatment to the victim and crush his escape token so that he could escape.

    This time trio didn¡¯t y any tricks immediately and engaged with the people that areing at them.

    But five soldiers from an elite team each is not an easy deal. They are powerful and angry at the same time, but they only focused on defense and not on attacks

    The five soldiers that are going after them pressed forward aggressively and tried to separate the three of them and also separate them.

    But right before they achieved that, the trio looked at the remaining unit that was about to join in the fray and stopped the engagement.

    Watt and Philip activated elemental fusion and slipped out while Jack used his sword energy to reach a simr state where his whole body and even breath released sword aura.

    He is like a sword himself and they didn¡¯t just slip out normally.

    Watt and Jack moved towards Philip¡¯s encirclement and hit them from the rear while Philip caught hold of someone and the trio started running once again.

    This time, it is Jack¡¯s turn to attack while Watt covered the rear defense with some explosive cards.

    Philip¡¯s body turned metallic and red hot at the same time and his arms morphed and spread over the arms of the soldier they captured to hold him in the ce as he ran backward.

    Jack ran towards them as he used his sword to continuously stab that person.

    He is carving him like fruit and he deliberately didn¡¯t target any of the vitals and just let him bleed.

    The chaotic sword energy ravaged that guy¡¯s body and Philip who is holding him started increasing the temperature making the cuts even more painful.

    After enough damage, Jack moved to the side while Philip threw the body over to the pursuers.

    This time Watt threw an explosive card to the body¡¯s leg and the trio is once again on the run.

    The card exploded and the legs is mangled.

    The One-star military unit is currently on fire. They are burning with rage.

    They couldn¡¯t guess what the trio is thinking as they are not fighting directly, it is as if they are ying a game.

    At this moment, they clearly understood what having extreme speed can do to them. The trio has superior speed and Watt is the fastest among them with his wind element.

    If they really met in a direct sh, then the trio might have trouble dealing with these thirty guys at the same time, but in a battle like this, in which the One-star unit has no experience on, they are extremely advantageous and the more the battle went on like this the more frustrated their opponents will be and it will be even easier for the trio to deal with them.

    The military unit started running once again and this time, they are trying a different method, they divided into two teams and one team decided to chase the trio down into a specific ce while the second team will meet them from the opposite direction.

    But the trio who are already waiting for the pursuit had other ns.

    They are currently in the middle of a bunch of fallen trees and they are messing with them a bit. Watt who is in the middle started creating a tornado that made the fallen trees get carried away and Philip started adding fire to this tornado.

    As they saw the military unit nearing them and halting in their tracks because of this sudden disy.

    Jack started sending sword rays towards the trees as he sliced them into sharp shards. But what is even more amazing is that each shard is carrying some sword aura.

    This is something he learned from the swordsman in the undead realm. It is to make the sword aura and sword ray exist even when there is no direct contact between him and the aura itself.

    It is hard to achieve, but Jack got into the first step which is to use a physical entity as a carried and in this case, it is the wooden shard.

    As the unit arrived, Watt directed the storm towards them and the wooden shards started drilling into them.

    Taking this chance, Jack ran towards the crowd and once again abducted another soldier and the trio started running once again.

 Chapter 784: Premature End

    Currently, the audience didn¡¯t have any reaction except gulping down and looking at the situation nervously.

    The trio suddenly turned wild. They are not fighting as they did for the past four days. In the past four days, even though they are on constant chase they still fought without too much trickery and they didn¡¯t fight dirty.

    Now, they are just ravaging this One-star military unit with every possible trick. Some of their tricks can even be considered less honorable and dirty, but they didn¡¯t care anymore.

    Men fight with and for honor if it is a fair fight, to begin with. One it is unfair, it can be unfair on any level and it can be unfair from both sides.

    There is no reason for them to risk their lives just for some intangible honor that could get them killed. Yes, dying with honor makes their names remain in history, but that will still be within the history, living can make them see the future.

    They could have thought of honor if they are really in a fairpetition, but since it is already unfair with their escape tokens and the bounty they might as well change their ways, and particrly Sam gave them an agenda.

    Currently, within the audience, Sam is still watching the situation leisurely, while the audience are sweating because of the brutality and the change in atmosphere in the battle. The people from the faction members are all looking at it with intrigue and tension at the same time and the professor who is looking through the fight is having chaotic thoughts.

    He knew what is happening as he knew the one-star military unit personally. What the trio is doing is not just ying dirty or using trickery, they are going to create arge psychological shadow that wouldn¡¯t leave them for the rest of their lives.

    One star military unit is used to beating the crap out of other people. They are good at setting ambushes, facing ambushes, direct shes, chases, and many other things, but fighting dirty and slowly wearing them down it is new to them. They are the ones who tore others down.

    And the way the trio dealt with them is copsing their belief in their abilities. The trio is leading them on, making them chase like madmen, stealing one of them like they are some children while throwing the tricks and cheap shots and mauling and torturing the abducted person in mere seconds and minutes before throwing them back.

    The confidence and the solid wall they built to themselves, it now being chipped away bit by bit. Slowly creating chink after chink and slowly making holes all over that wall.

    If this continued, by the end of this, the core force of the One-star military unit will be crippled.

    This will break their mental states.

    Now the professor understood what Sam meant by the bet. He is so sure of what his friends can do and he has to way to make them do it.

    It was them who became too happy with so much belief in their own strength of numbers and their elites. At the end of the day, all they thought is that they are only three humans.

    He could only think about trying to mitigate the situation and his first thought is to get through the shadow. But he remembered the slip Sam sent to him and stayed his hand. He cannot interfere in the fight directly.

    While he is thinking the current situation in the forest is getting worse. The one-star military unit is being constantly ripped apart as one after other soldiers are being caught, tortured, and thrown back at them.

    They are too emotionally invested and couldn¡¯t get their heads straight.

    And the trio are doing this slowly while taking their time without a care for the world.

    In the next two hours, they only took ten people and there is only an hour till noon.

    The professor is already having second thoughts.

    Some of the soldiers are already thinking about escaping and giving up. But they are still hesitating.

    And the judges couldn¡¯t interfere because the trio is not killing anyone.

    By noon, another four people suffered the same fate and finally, the professor couldn¡¯t take it. He stood up from his seat and started walking towards Sam¡¯s seat.

    Sam looked at Raunak and said.

    "Get away from here for a while. It is better if you are not involved in this conversation."

    Raunak nodded and left the ce. The Professor took that empty seat and spoke.

    "Your friends are really good."

    "Of course, they are my friends."

    "I wonder how good you are. There was never a talk about your battle prowess. Are you as good as them?"

    "Maybe I am, maybe I am not. I am pretty sure you are here to discuss more important issues."

    "Of course, I lost the bet. Tell them to leave them alone."

    "I will do that, as soon as you leave from this seat. Is there anything else you would like to talk about?"

    "How did you do that?"

    "Do what exactly?"

    "Communicating with your friends."

    Sam looked at him and spoke.

    "If you really are as smart as I think you are, you know that I am not going to give an answer for that."

    "Of course, I know that. But it never hurts to ask. Anyway, you are a lot more interesting than I thought and you have a lot more hidden within you than what you show outside. I am really impressed."

    "It is ttering. Gettingpliments from someone like you. It is a great feeling."

    "You are bullshitting. You don¡¯t care at all."

    Sam just chuckled. And the professor continued.

    "I don¡¯t know what your goal is, but it is better to not interfere in other¡¯s business. I will give you free advice. That guy, Raunak. He might get you more troubles than you can handle. You have a lot of future left for you if you work with the right people."

    "That¡¯s really kind of you. And I really don¡¯t like crossing paths with others. But sometimes it is inevitable to do so. Just like how our paths crossed. At least we are business partners. But in Raunak¡¯s case, it is impossible for me to back down. I can¡¯t take back my words and I need a person like that to do my bidding."

    "I hope you can handle what you are messing with. I would like to see what kind of influence you can bring to this realm. If you disappear early that would be a real pity."

    "Don¡¯t worry, it wouldn¡¯t be long before you knew what I can bring to this realm. In fact, it would be sooner than you think. And please tell your students to not bug me about the new products. It is more of my personal project. I wouldn¡¯t be selling them until I test it personally."

    "Sure."

    With that, the professor left the ce.

    Sam once again closed his eyes and looked told something to his friends.

    The trio stopped their actions and looked at the remaining soldiers.

    Philip took a step forward and said.

    "If you want to leave you can leave now. If you don¡¯t, the same thing continues. If you don¡¯t leave that ispletely on you and we wouldn¡¯t be held ountable."

    The team leader was about to say something, but a small shadow merged with his own shadow and he went into a daze for a while before saying.

    "We will give up."

    His face is full of unwillingness and frustration. The rest of the team could only agree without much resistance as the leader agreed.

    After that, they took out their escape tokens and crushed them. The space gate activated and threw them out.

    Now only the trio and some stray cultivators that came here are left. But they are notpeting for the top three ces.

    They are just here for the extra treasures that are left within the forest. When the trio looked at them, they just lifted their hands and gave up without much thought clearly making sure that the trio knew that they are not here for them.

    The trio rxed a bit and sat down. Even though they performed well enough and they recovered with the wine, they are still a little exhausted mentally.

    ying such a long game.

    They sat there and had some food and wine while recovering slowly. Until the end of this fifth day, the entries to the forest are not banned, and only after that can thepetition be confirmed. After the disy of the trio, the rest of the people didn¡¯t want to join in and stayed put.

    They knew that once they go in they wouldn¡¯t even fare as better as the One-star military unit. They would be having a harder time than them. And they wouldn¡¯t even be able to resist as much as them.

    The time slowly passed. Even though the whole event turned boring without much activity, nobodyined and all looked at the situation as they wanted to see if anyone would step up.

    But to no avail. By sunset, the rest of the strays didn¡¯t even dare to stay in there and gave up and by night only the trio was left in the ce making them the remaining three winners and ending this trial or tournament prematurely.

 Chapter 785: Delayed Meeting

    After the trio were dered the winners, they were able to go back to the residence. The battle for top 3 is the next day. Many people are excited to watch this. But to their surprise, beforeing back to the house, the trio threw a bombshell at them.

    They are not going to participate in the next fight. They just distributed the top 3 ces among them.

    This time Jack had to do the most work inside and he was given the first ce, followed Philip and Watt.

    When the audience heard this, they went on an uproar. But the judges just couldn¡¯t force the match, they agreed with the trio and let them go for now. The rewards would be collected next day.

    Sam didn¡¯t go back with them. Instead, he went to administration office of the arena where a long queue was already present.

    Even though it was long, it was only in a rtive sense. Compared to the actual number of people in the arena, these people are not even one percent of them.

    They are all here to collect their bet money.

    Sam was not surprised by the number of people. There are more people who believed in trio than he expected.

    He just stood in the line normally. His face is a bit well-known within the 2, particrly in that capital. But here he is not that big of a deal, nobody recognized and nobody wondered just how big of a bet he ced.

    But as soon as his turn came and he gave the token which is the proof of the bet, the hand of the employee who is clearing the bets halted as he looked at Sam with a nervous gaze.

    He took the token with shaking hands and checked the information. From the looks of it, he already knew that arge bet ising and he recognized the bet as soon as he looked at the token.

    He whispered something to his colleague who looked at Sam and asked him.

    "Sir, Our manager wants to meet you. Will you pleasee?"

    "Sure, after I collect my money."

    "Sir, it is about that money. We need to discuss something."

    "Discuss? Did I ce the bet properly?"

    "Yes." The employee is getting nervous, he didn¡¯t know why Sam is so stubborn. He could have just followed him and this guy would be the manager¡¯s problem. His pay is not enough for him to go through all this.

    "Did I win the bet?" Sam continued asking and this gaining too much attention.

    "Yes."

    "Then give me my money. We can discuss anythingter."

    The Employee looked at the people that are observing the situation. If this goes on the situation will be out of hand. The news will spread all over and they would be in some serious trouble.

    The trouble which they cannot afford at the time of elections.

    Currently, the arena is under the administration of the faction 1 as the current king is also of that faction. There are many types of matches and tournaments that will be held throughout the year, and the bet money is some decent revenue.

    But now Sam¡¯s bet is taking the revenue of the past two to three years. That is why the manager wants to work something out. But Sam is just making it worse.

    If the manager knew who Sam exactly is and what kind of rtionship he has with the faction and the trio, then he wouldn¡¯t have even bothered asking Sam. After all, it will be fruitless.

    "I ced the bet properly, I won the bet, but you are not paying and asking me to meet the manager, I think there is something fishy going on here. Don¡¯t tell me that you are nning on reneging the debt you owe."

    The employee became nervous and said.

    "No sir. It is just that the funds are a bit short on hand. We would like you to wait for a while."

    "No problem, I will wait here."

    The employee couldn¡¯t do anything and went back into the office to report the situation to the manager. The manager felt something is wrong and sent some people to get information on Sam and when he learned about that, he couldn¡¯t help but curse Rajan and his ancestors for the loss. He figured out that there is no use discussing. So, he can only send people to get the funds.

    After two hours of waiting, Sam just stood there without doing much. There are some people who had free time on their hands waiting there.

    Two hourster the same employee came with a bunch of spatial rings in his hands. there are around ten of them.

    Sam grabbed the bunch of them verified each one of them before saying.

    "Thanks."

    When Sam was about to leave, the same teenage who he paidst time to give details came running to him and asked.

    "Big Bro, do you remember me?"

    Sam looked at him and raised an eyebrow before nodding.

    "May I know how much did you bet?"

    Sam smiled and asked.

    "Why?"

    "Just curious."

    "Six billion. I gained five times."

    With that Sam left the surprised teen and a bunch of adults who are equally surprised.

    The word spread like wildfire by next morning. But there is an even intense me burning within a meeting room the next morning.

    The meeting room for the faction 1. Everyone is looking at Rajan with eyes full of coldness and malice.

    Rajan is also not as calm as before. He is also feeling rage burning inside.

    "Rajan, in the past few months you caused repeated harm to our faction. Because of you, we lost two cloaked force units, officers in the 2 and now thirty billion spirit stones.

    Thirty billion. Do you know how huge that amount is even for the whole faction. We lost so much all because of your fragile ego and a bet that you are not even a man enough to honor. You have to give us a proper exnation."

    "What do you want me to do?" Rajan growled as he controlled the urge to kill them right there and then. He already suffered enough humiliation. This is not something he can endure.

    His position within the faction is weakening and all because of a puny human.

    "That is up for you to decide. If you cannot show any substantial gains to the faction through your or your family¡¯s contribution, you can just forget about the two positions you asked. Until then don¡¯t even think about dealing with Raunak and those friends of his."

    Rajan gritted his teeth and agreed.

    But before he left, he made sure to ask for something.

    "Stop them from meeting the king for their rewards. I don¡¯t want them to ask something that shouldn¡¯t be asked before I did what I have to do."

    He left those words and left the room.

    The rest of the exchanged looks and were surprised.

    Meanwhile, Sam is with trio and Raunak as they enjoyed a feast in the residence.

    "So, what reward are you guys getting?"

    This is the only time Sam actually thought about what reward it is, he knew it must be something exciting for the trio to take such a risk.

    "We will get a meeting with the current king and we can ask for anything. Not something too outrageous though. Those are the only requirements. And if the King feels it is appropriate for our position, he will agree."

    Philip replied as he dug into the meat like a savage.

    "But isn¡¯t it too vague and can be rejected because of king¡¯s willful behavior."

    "That is not going to happen. The elders will be monitoring and they will evaluate the requests. If the king really wants to reject it, he would have to find a proper exnation. It is not that easy to reject."

    Raunak exined from the side.

    Sam nodded and asked the trio.

    "What are you guys asking?"

    "We didn¡¯t think much, even third price is enough for what we want. We don¡¯t need anything specifically.

    Do you have anything you need?"

    "Not really."

    Sam shrugged and all four of them looked at Raunak.

    Raunak who is silently eating looked at them and asked.

    "What?"

    "Do you need something?"

    Philip is the one who broke the silence.

    Raunak widened his eyes and said.

    "Are you guys out of your mind? You can ask for anything, don¡¯t waste it on me."

    "Don¡¯t be too quick to reject. Just think about it. We don¡¯t have any use for them anyway. You have until tomorrow." Watt said and went back to his eating.

    At this moment, someone knocked on the door which surprised them.

    Sam opened the door and there stood a man in golden armor. An elf holding a golden spear as he looked at Sam with emotionless eyes.

    "Are the three winners of the tournament here?"

    "Yes."

    Sam gestured for the trio toe and when they arrived, the man in golden armor spoke.

    "Your meeting with King has been dyed because of an emergency. We would inform the meeting timeter."

    With that, he didn¡¯t even wait for the reply and left.

    All five of them frowned in confusion.

 Chapter 786: Taking action

    The five of them didn¡¯t understand why the dy urred or if something else is happening behind the scenes.

    But for the next four days, there is no response at all. The Arena managementpletely washed this matter off their hands and every time the trio tried to ask the city administration about the issue, they brushed it off.

    They are losing patience and by this point, they knew that something is fishy.

    When they are feeling a bit lost, they finally had some clues.

    There is arge movement as all the young masters in the city joined together and started roaming all the luxurious ces in the city.

    If this is the only thing, it is extremely normal for the city, but there are a few extra people along with that batch of young masters and these people are notpletely unfamiliar for the locals.

    Once the news spread and Raunak learned of it, he gave the details.

    "They are the young masters of the upper realm. Charbhum realm is a subordinate realm to another entity.

    They are other elves apart from us in a superior realm and we work under them. Every few years, they wille and select some of the valuable young prospects to take back with them. These young masters are not exactly the selection judges, but these people do have some pull in their realm and theye here to pick a few people who are good within the selected criterion and try to gain a few personal subordinates.

    But I don¡¯t think they are rted to your current situation. Because they don¡¯t have any sway in thews and rules of this ce. Once they are found to vite a singlew or rule and go against the norm of here, they will face some serious consequences when they return.

    There are some cases where these people even died because of their impudence here."

    After hearing this exnation, even Sam and the trio didn¡¯t think there is much to do. While they are thinking this, the situation in 2 is worsening and Sam¡¯s shadow mice that are currently spread all over the city already gave him the information about some elite military units secretly entering the city.

    This city is the only way to go to 2 and then they have to reach the sea. But they cannot do it openly because of the secrets they have to preserve.

    Even the higher authorities of the two factions are diverting their attention to this problem from the elections because of the seriousness.

    But no matter how much they tried to suppress it, it would be hard to do so unless they enter the sea and manage to fight there.

    If they can¡¯t do it, the sea folk can just attack them on earth and return to the sea as they like. They are just wearing them down. But the soldiers cannot follow the sea folks into the sea and hit them. So the sea folks just attack, return, recover ande back once again.

    The whole situation is disadvantageous to begin with.

    But Sam didn¡¯t take a step forward to selling this. At first, he has to find some information regarding what is happening. He had a faint feeling that Ramana might know of this as faction 1 has the highest animosity towards them.

    He sent a shadow mouse after him, but even before the shadow mouse, someone else came to him with information.

    The same teen who Sam paid once again came into contact with him.

    "Big Bro, do you remember me?"

    "Why are you asking the same question again and again? Just say what do you want?"

    "Hehe, I actually some information on hand. I wonder if you want to buy it."

    "Information? About what?"

    "About the reason your friends not meeting the King."

    Sam was surprised. He just learned about the people that came from other realms and Ramana who is with them came to his mind and he sent a shadow mouse after him, but before that this kid came to him.

    "Tell me, what do you want?"

    "I.. I.." The kid is a bit hesitant about giving the number he had in mind.

    "Okay, just give me the information. I will give the money based on its worth."

    "That.."

    "You either tell me what you want or take what I give. Just figure this out."

    The kid took a deep breath and decided to go with it.

    "One hundred million."

    Sam looked at him and just nodded without batting an eye.

    Seeing that the kid heaved a sigh of relief and said.

    "The reason your friends couldn¡¯t meet the king is because of someone called Ramana¡¯s father. That guy¡¯s father is nning to send someone called Ramya away to the other realm and he paid arge price to invite some high-level houses from the upper realm.

    He said that Ramya is somehow rted to you guys and you are trying to stop her from leaving. They are afraid that you will use the reward from the king to keep her from leaving.

    That is why they made you stop from meeting the king. That is all I know."

    Sam widened his eyes in disbelief.

    "How did you get this info?"

    "I work at a restaurant. I heard this from a group that is drinking there."

    He took out a spatial ring and tossed it to the kid and said.

    "If you have any information in the future you cane to me. I don¡¯t care what kind of information it is, as long as it is about the faction 1 I am okay with that."

    With that, he hurriedly turned around and went to meet Raunak.

    The kid looked inside the spatial ring and was stumped to see so many spirit stones inside. There are around two hundred million. He didn¡¯t expect that he would get double the amount.

    He carefully hid that grin on his face and left the ce.

    Sam met with Raunak and exined the situation.

    Raunak slumped into the chair and said.

    "I knew that piece of shit would do something like this. There are only a few days until the selection what should I do?" He pulled his hair and spoke in despair.

    Sam calmed him down and asked.

    "How many days till the test exactly?"

    "Five days."

    "That would be enough. Don¡¯t worry about that. I said she will stay here and she will stay here. Help me send a message to the professor. Tell him, that I am testing my new projects and see if he wants to send someone to the demonstration. Tell him to send a person proficient in water elemental usage."

    "Where do they need toe?"

    "Just ask them toe here. But tell him to prepare for some journey and three days. It would be better if he sends them by evening we can move."

    "Do you want me toe with you?"

    "No, I want you to do something else for me. Something you are proficient in, the administrative work."

    With that Sam discussed a lot of things with him before leaving for his own residence. He asked the trio to prepare for the journey and waited for the professor to send someone and to his relief professor is more efficient than he thought.

    He sent a person within an hour and that person is actually part of the One-star military unit. He is the leader that led the charge in the arena against the trio.

    They didn¡¯t bother with any false courtesies and started their journey.

    "Where are we going?"

    "To the sea."

    The unit leader was surprised.

    "Why?"

    "We need water to demonstrate this and I heard there is a sea hunting area for others which is not held by the sirens and the Emerald tortoise are avable there.

    I want to taste it."

    "Emerald tortoise? Do you know how difficult it is to catch them? They are not like any other tortoise. They are fast, faster than fish and their defense is unfairly high. It is a pipe dream to catch it. Without a proper n."

    "Yeah, yeah. Just shut it already. You are only here for demonstration. Juste with us silently."

    Philip said from the side and his tone is annoyingly sarcastic.

    When that guy looked at him, Philip just gave him a side-eye and said.

    "It is basic manners to say your name when youe to some other¡¯s ce. But you don¡¯t even have that."

    "I am Galvin. And you better watch your tongue."

    "Or what? Are you going to watch it for me?"

    "You.."

    As Galvin was about to continue, Sam spoke.

    "I don¡¯t have any patience for your bickering. Shall we continue our journey?"

    Both of them finally stayed silent and the journey finally became silent and fast.

    They traveled through the evening and they reached their destination by midnight.

    They arrived at a town that is next to the sea. This seashore was evacuated by the Sirens. They don¡¯t have any say in this area and left this ce as a gift for the elves when they had a deal about their cooperation.

    They rested for the night until the dawn before going into the sea.

 Chapter 787: Hunt

    As soon as the sun rose, Sam and the rest went into the sea.

    They didn¡¯t waste any time. Sam just has too many things to do and he has to stop Ramya from leaving this realm.

    Raunak is apetent subordinate in this realm and he doesn¡¯t want to lose that guy because of his stupid love.

    They stood on the seashore and Sam took out the breathing devices for the group.

    He gave each one of them to the trio and they wore it with practiced ease. Sam has to put that on Galvin himself to demonstrate how this thing works.

    Sam then wore one and all four of them jumped into the water.

    Galvin was surprised to see the breathing device. This ispletely unbelievable for him to breathe this easy. Even that flower that enabled them to stay for some time underwater, the breathing is a bit difficult and they have to make sure that they didn¡¯t splurge the air within.

    Now he doesn¡¯t have to. Except for that weird enclosed feeling that wasing from the helmet, this thing is perfect for diving.

    After they entered deep enough Sam took out the harpoon guns and gave one each to the trio. He didn¡¯t give one to Galvin and only made him just spectate.

    Sam also took one harpoon gun in his hands and they started searching for the Emerald Tortoise.

    Actually, it is not that hard to find. One of the reasons for that is its size. It is three timesrger than an average beast of the same cultivation level and it is extremely active within the water.

    It is a dangerous beast and it is extremely fast and it has an extreme instinct to hunt and eat. If only the same features applied to it when it was onnd, then it would have been an apex predator in many ways. But unfortunately, it only has its invincible defense on thend and it beszy with the sunlight.

    In water, they go berserk. And they have many uses. Their shell is a natural material for a shield. It is crystalline in nature and has an extremelyplex structure.

    Apart from that shell which is hard to be made into some usable shield or armor, they have some umted crystal that can be collected and forged. Even though it is not as strong as the shell itself, it can still be used for some strong armors.

    But the one thing that Sam wanted to hunt it is the taste of the meat.

    The meat of this tortoise is said to be too delicious and it is an extremely luxurious food. But it is not easy to hunt and wasn¡¯t eaten that much. Except for the upper-echelons on top of this realm, no one can eat this often.

    After searching for a while, they finally saw a tortoise at a distance and Sam got ready. The five of them swam towards the tortoise slowly without making much noise and Sam made the first move.

    He aimed the harpoon gun and was about to shoot. But right at this moment, the tortoise moved like a sh and turned around.

    It leaped towards the group with its mouth wide open as if it wanted to swallow them whole.

    The five of them looked extremely small in front of it and they would definitely fit in its mouth together.

    The five broke out and separated as they swam in different directions and got ready to attack.

    Sam is gesturing to the trio and guiding them towards the direction he wanted them to be in.

    Philip is the first one at work as he activated his metal and fire elements at the same time. He is like an attractive beacon creating a lot of steam and light within the sea.

    The tortoise looked at him and made him the first target and at this exact second, Sam pulled the trigger from the side.

    The harpoon lodged itself into the neck of the tortoise and it started bleeding. Since the harpoon doesn¡¯t have enough force to move thisrge gigantic tortoise around, Sam moved backward and soon the tension reached before the trap opened.

    The des of the spear tip cut open arge piece of flesh on that thick neck and came out.

    The tortoise changed its direction and looked at Sam angrily while the blood dyed the sea.

    As soon as it turned his head, Philip took the shot and made a simr hole on the other side and soon Jack and Watt followed.

    They created holes on the neck as they slowly chipped the flesh away.

    Soon the tortoise stopped focusing on attacking and went defensive. It nestled back into the shellpletely and no flesh was out and this is the difficult part of the hunting.

    Because these tortoises are made differently, the shell is also a bit different. There are retractable shields that can cover the holes of the limbs and head.

    The shields are not actually theplete shield, rather it is a naturally created mesh with very fine holes that it would only allow air or water to go in.

    Most attacks were blocked within that shell.

    And that is not even the worst part of this defensive method.

    A water current suddenly came out of that tortoise¡¯s shell. The current is so sharp that even after the group dodged it, the current went through the water and it cut through arge rock that was far away.

    The team got a bit nervous as they knew what is going to happen. The tortoise suddenly became a submarine as it moved like that. The water jets from the limb holes made it hover while the water jet from the tail hole is making it move forward.

    The water jet from the head hole is for attacking.

    The tortoise started attacking, but it didn¡¯t do so for long, because the blood is still seeping out and it is on the neck of the tortoise. It cannot keep up this for long. So escaping became its main priority.

    Sam then gestured the trio to follow the tortoise while he and Galvin swam to the surface.

    "What are we doing here?"

    "Nothing, it is time for me to demonstrate the next product. That is why I brought you to the surface."

    Sam took out a tfish puppet and climbed on it.

    "Do you know how to use elemental fusion?"

    Sam asked Galvin for which he nodded.

    "Then try to keep up."

    With that, Sam activated the transformation of the tfish puppet and dove into the water. Galvin became a bit flustered and move after him.

    He was surprised to see Sam going that fast and he can feel the energy waves which are extremely minute.

    Soon, Sam caught up with the trio and gestured them to follow while he overtook them and neared the tortoise.

    The tortoise is not at its top speed. The blood that is seeping out is too much.

    Sam increased the speed with the puppet and soon reached his optimum distance as he observed the shell of the tortoise.

    The tortoise might have a hard shell and the attack might not prate that hard shell and hit the body, and the holes of mesh might be fine and small. But so are the new harpoons of this puppet and with the trap activated, it would definitely hook onto the mesh.

    But the main problem now is with the water jets. They are just too strong and the pressure is high.

    Sam started attacking the tortoise with the water-type attacks.

    He also started shooting water jets at it and he is not even looking to create damage, he is trying to throw the tortoise off bnce.

    Since the creature is huge, he can use that size against it.

    And it worked. He unleashed arge water jet on the right side of the shell which made the water jetsing out of the limb holes to be unbnced and the tortoise tried to keep the bnce.

    And for that, it has to manage the jets slowly regting their speeds.

    Sam took this chance to his advantage and shot the small harpoon into one of the limb holes on the left side as soon as the creature stopped those jets.

    The harpoon didn¡¯t hook the first time. The mesh at the point of contact must be too fine. But Sam tried the same method again and again and on the fourth attempt, he finally found a ce that could hook and he halted all his motions.

    He used the puppet¡¯s jets to move in the opposite direction so that he can stop the tortoise from moving. Now it is just hovering in middle trying to move as it made sounds of agony.

    Sam used all his energy to stop and control this tortoise as it tried to drag him away.

    Galvin is the nearest person and he saw everything closely, while the trio tried their best to keep up and when the three of them arrived, the tortoise which sensed the uing threat decided to go all out.

    The head, the limbs, and the tail all came out, but one limb was stuck.

    Since the harpoon was stuck into the mesh when it was being retracted, it halting its motion and the mesh couldn¡¯t be opened anymore.

    The leg was stuck like that and this created an imbnce from the tortoise. The trio took the chance andunched harpoon guns to the remaining legs while Sam used the second harpoon on the puppet to shoot through the same limb hole through the half-opened mesh into the leg.

    The tortoise screamed caused a huge uproar but it couldn¡¯t move.

    Sam gestured to Watt who is nearest to the head to finish this off.

    Watt went to the eyes and shot the harpoon through it and finished the beast off.

    Galvin who saw the whole hunt couldn¡¯t help but gulp at the new gadgets that are in Sam¡¯s hands.

 Chapter 788: Uninvited Professor

    The hunt ispleted. The tortoise is dead. Sam waved his hand and the whole tortoise fell into the divine dimension.

    The surrounding water is full of blood. This will attract the other beasts soon if they don¡¯t move fast enough.

    The group started swimming to the shore.

    Aftering up, Sam took all the equipment back and looked at Galvin who is still in a state of shock.

    "What do you think? How is it?"

    Galvin finally came out of his daze and asked.

    "How much are they?" He couldn¡¯t even hide the anxiousness in his eyes as he asked. Sam knew why though. The current situation at the sea is an extremely high-level threat and within a month or two it would be hard to hide it from the rest of the world.

    That is why they are secretly sending all the military units to 2. A one-star unit will also go there in a while. It is just not their time yet.

    When the situation is like this, how could the ambitious and scheming professor not take advantage of it? He would try to get credit to the military unit under him or other people who woulde up with an idea that could help with the defense and im credit himself.

    In times like this, the credit directlyes from the Elders, the true managers of this realm, so he wouldn¡¯t want to leave this chance.

    But he couldn¡¯t find anything yet. That is why Sam¡¯s products are currently the best option and there is nothing Galvin could imagine that could beat them.

    And luckily, there is a contract between Sam and their military unit. This is the perfect opportunity. Or at least, he thought so.

    "I am not selling them now. They are for my personal use. It is just that you guys bugged me too much and I wanted to show you what I am working with."

    Sam gave the answer and gestured for the trio to follow him as they walked.

    Galvin stood there in a daze for a few seconds before hurriedly following them.

    "Wait, Sam. What do you mean you are not selling? We have a contract. You have obligation to sell it to us."

    Sam just smiled and said.

    "You seem to have no experience in the business world and the contracts. The contract states that if I have to sell any products then I must sell them to the One-star military. Don¡¯t tell me, I have to exin the meaning of the statement and the significance of ¡¯if¡¯ in it."

    Galvin wanted to say something but he couldn¡¯t for a second. He once again stood in a daze. After three more seconds, he recovered again and ran after them before asking.

    "Come on, just name the price. I am sure we can pay a pretty decent prize."

    "Decent? I already won thirty billion a few days ago. I am not in need of money anymore. At least not anytime soon. I just have too much wealth on my hands."

    Seeing Sam¡¯s smiling expression, Galvin almost wanted to knock those teeth in. This low-key flexing is killing him inside.

    On the return journey to the city which they reached a littleter than that afternoon, Galvin kept on asking about selling the products, but Sam didn¡¯t say a single thing.

    Galvin can only be disappointed and go back to the professor hurriedly to ask him to think of a solution.

    Meanwhile, Sam went to meet Raunak to see if the situation improved. And he wasn¡¯t surprised when he found out that there is no contact from the administration regarding the trio.

    It has only been a day and there are still four days until something happened. He already threw bait and the fish is ready to get hooked. It would be easy from now on.

    That night, Sam stayed in the divine dimension as he worked on the tortoise. He separated the shell and the rest of the body, before deboning the flesh.

    Even the bones of this tortoise are different. The shell of this tortoise is simr to that of an emerald in terms of looks and even the bones are of simr texture to the shell, but they are a bit different. These things really make good weapons.

    Sam got an idea as soon as he saw them. But it is not for him or his friends. The weapons made of this are only useful for the Pre-transcendent stage cultivators and they can at most take some transcendent level blows.

    It was for the people in his school and organization.

    Sam had a different chain of thoughts as he worked on the tortoise meat.

    Even the four of them with theirrge appetites can eat this thing for a while.

    Sam cut some of the meat and started making a stew so that they can eat it with some rice.

    He didn¡¯t cook the food in the divine dimension, because there is a great chance that uninvited guests woulde to this ce.

    And his guess is not wrong. By the time the stew was done, someone knocked on the door.

    Sam opened the door with a smile and he saw the professor standing there with a faint smile.

    "Oh, Professor. I didn¡¯t expect you toe now. Come in. Come in. I just cooked some Emerald tortoise. You came just right in time."

    Sam said in a casual tone, but his expression seemed to indicate his displeasure about his meal being disturbed.

    But the professor acted as if he didn¡¯t see it.

    "Don¡¯t mind if I do. The smell is too alluring."

    Both of them made their way to the dining table where the trio is already digging into the bowl.

    They didn¡¯t even wait for Sam toe.

    Sam rolled his eyes at them and gestured for the professor to take a seat before serving a bowl of rice while filling one for himself.

    They savored the tasty stew as they slowly enjoyed it. Sam is lost in the taste of the tortoise. It is really as they said a great beast for food.

    "So, Professor. Why are you here? Don¡¯t tell me, you just came here for the tortoise. I am pretty sure that is not the only thing Galvin told you."

    "You are smart Sam. I like working with people like you. Just saves me a lot of effort in exnation."

    "I am ttered."

    "No, you are not. Anyway, your new products. What do you need?"

    "What do you mean? I am not selling them anytime soon. I already told you, they are for my personal use. Particrly to catch this tortoise. I just wanted to show it to you guys since you kept on bugging me for a while."

    "Sam, I admitted you are smart, just don¡¯t treat me like a fool alright. I don¡¯t know what you want. But I do know that you want something. Don¡¯t beat around the bush and tell me what you want. It can save some time for both of us."

    Sam stopped eating and looked at the professor and thetter did the same.

    "It seems like you are in a hurry professor. Why is that?"

    "There are some things that are not suitable for people to know. They are better-kept secret."

    "Then I am right in thinking that you are in a hurry. So it might be a big problem and something that is even a secret for me. Then it must be of something of high importance. But since you are not telling me what it is, I am not really that willing to cooperate with you.

    If I knew just how important it is, I would ask the favor of the same level, wouldn¡¯t I lose out otherwise?"

    Professor took a deep breath and said.

    "The things in your hands can change the dynamic of the whole government. You are holding something that can be your doom. Of course, due to the elections, you would be able to be safe for a while. But that is also uncertain now.

    Just ask me any favor you want. I will use anything in my power to make it happen."

    "Then, I won¡¯t hold back.

    I want my friends¡¯ meeting with the king to happen. And within next two days."

    Professor looked at them and frowned.

    Sam continued.

    "Don¡¯t tell me you don¡¯t know what is happening regarding this incident. Faction 1 is trying to hold us back. So, I want that meeting to happen as soon as possible. As soon as the meeting is over, the products would be open for sale. I will even give you a ten percent discount.

    But our bet still holds. You would have to pay a lot of money. So, prepare your funds."

    The Professor went into deep thought for a few seconds and said.

    "It will be arranged. Don¡¯t go back on your words."

    "Don¡¯t worry, professor. I will never go back on my word."

    With that, both of them shook their hands and the professor left the ce after the meal.

 Chapter 789: Roar of Agony

    The Professor acted faster than Sam thought. The meeting was arranged the very next day and this was not even informed by the professor himself.

    The same guy in his golden armor came to their residence and asked them to follow him. Of course, Sam does not need it there.

    After half an hour, the trio went to meet the king and they are in the audience of the entire court. But along with them, Raunak is also standing there.

    Even though Sam didn¡¯te, the trio asked if they can be apanied by Raunak and for some reason, the golden armor agreed.

    So, they took him with them.

    Currently, the king has a faint frown on his head as he looked at the trio with resentment. That is not because of any direct resentment or feud or even something the trio did that made him like this, it because of all the political pressure he has to endure for the past few days that he felt like this.

    Faction 1 tried to grind him so that he wouldn¡¯t grant those three wishes to the trio, he didn¡¯t like it in the first ce and yesterday, the elders grilled him for not granting those three wishes earlier and once the elders involved, everything is finalized.

    There is no way, Rajan can interfere in this.

    So, here they are.

    After exchanging all the insincere courtesies and all the etiquette the trio has to perform, it was finally time for the three wishes.

    First would be Watt, since he has the least position of the three in rankings. This will also help them set the base for the next two wishes.

    Watt took out a scroll and said.

    "Your majesty, as you know we have apany that focuses on the research of new things, and for one of our researches, we are missing an ingredient. I hope you can help us find it."

    As soon as he spoke, the royal attendant took the scroll and passed it to the king. After the king looked at the details of the scroll, his frown deepened and rxed for quite a while before nodding in agreement.

    Next came Philip.

    "Your Majesty, we want to open a special school in the Capital city and it would be a bit unique. So, I want you to grant us permission."

    Everyone was a bit surprised. There are several schools and colleges in the capital. But none of them are under the control of a bunch of pre-transcendent stage cultivators.

    This ispletely unprecedented.

    "Opening a school is not a small thing. It needs a lot of financial support and administration itself is not that easy. And there are a lot of requirements that need to be fulfilled to give you permission." The King replied with a hint of disdain.

    "We don¡¯t have any problem regarding the financial requirements and we already prepared a n with all the requirements needed. You can check the n and give your answer."

    With that, Philip took out a bunch of scrolls. The Royal attendants took them and brought them to the people who are in charge of the educational department. It is a basic administrative n of the school along with some structural n.

    They looked through it for half an hour and didn¡¯t find any mistakes orck of requirements, so the permission was granted easily.

    After that came thest wish, Jack took a step forward and took a deep breath before saying.

    "Your Majesty. A friend of mine was being cheated by a high-level noble and I want you to grant him justice."

    Everyone in the court was stunned. Rajan who is also in the court held his armchair tightly and if not for him restraining himself, he would have already broken it.

    The King looked at Jack and then at Raunak and could understand what is happening. The very reason he as a king was ground to stop the trio froming to him is happening right in front of him. But he couldn¡¯t directly reject it. He would have to find a way to reject it.

    "Exin properly."

    Jack smiled and exined.

    "Our friend Raunak is an orphan and fell in love with a nobledy Ramya. Her father who is also a noble of a certain high position objected because of his birth and status and for their love to seed he ced some conditions on them to be together.

    One of them is for him to be an administrative bureaucrat in the Capital within a certain time and my friend beat that time limit by a year.

    The second one is for both my friend and Ramya to not have any contact while he worked to get that position and he fulfilled that too.

    My friend has been in the capital for almost a month, but he wasn¡¯t even able to meet Ramya as her father is stopping him from entering the estate.

    And he is also trying to send her away to some unknown ce. We don¡¯t see any other way than this."

    Everyone in the court was stunned. They didn¡¯t expect that Jack would bring such a request. And that too for the first ce.

    Every year, the person who ranked first will use that to get a position in some prestigious military unit or guard unit, or even some bureaucratic position. And for Jack to use it to help someone else¡¯s love almost made them feel like he is a fool.

    This ispletely unprecedented and unheard of.

    Rajan is almost losing his control. The King looked at him and then at Jack and finally at Raunak before sighing.

    "I cannot take your words at the face value. We will conduct a trial for this. We will put both your friend and Ramya on trial tomorrow and we can decide after that." The King spoke in a casual tone.

    "Your Majesty, my friend wouldn¡¯t mind taking a tree spirit oath."

    Jack said once again and everyone looked at him in surprise. No matter what, the king already told them that he would give them justice. Even though many of them knew that it is most likely impossible, they wouldn¡¯t dare suggest another method to the king openly.

    The King himself was a bit pissed off, but after some thought, he didn¡¯t do anything and just shooed them away.

    The trio and Raunak could only move helplessly. Rajan stood up and there is arge indentation on his arm on the armrest of his chair as he heavily left to his estate.

    Raunak is still in shock. He knew very well what a first ce wish can do. This is not something that could be wasted easily. He looked at the trio who are still chatting and smiling wryly about the judgment.

    He came out of his daze and said.

    "Are you guys out of your mind? Why would you waste your wish like that? We could have thought of another method."

    Philip looked at him and said.

    "What do you mean another method? You are asking as if we used that for our selfish reasons. You are already helpless with this issue and we don¡¯t need that wish anyway so we used it on you. Do you really think that a man of power like Rajan cannot handle a bet like yours? Sam even said that you wouldn¡¯t even know what happened to her and she would be gone.

    Just don¡¯t cause a scene and let¡¯s go. It is not like we did some crime.

    And hope that Rajan didn¡¯te up with some twisted n to not let her speak.

    If possible try and find a way to keep your eye on her. Otherwise, we would have to do that too."

    "I do have a way. But it is only used for emergencies and I wouldn¡¯t even need to contact them directly. If something really happens, the news wille to me.

    That is the only reason I am still a bit relieved and felt like I had a chance."

    "Are you sure that method works? I mean, Rajan is trying to send her away but there was no news from that."

    "The news would onlye if the situation is in final stages."

    "If you trust it that much we wouldn¡¯t say anything more. But you better be sure. Because this one day is the most important day of your life."

    With that four of them went back to the residence.

    Raunak repeatedly thanked them after the initial outburst and they had a meal.

    But he has a bad feeling enveloping his mind, telling him that something is not right and something serious is going to happen.

    This tugging feeling didn¡¯t go away no matter what he did and he could alleviate it with the strong liquor on the table.

    He drank so much and didn¡¯t let his spiritual energy block it. He let the feeling cloud his mind. Only then was he able to rx a bit.

    But that didst long. When he looked outside the window, he looked at a ck silhouette jumping from one roof to another and his face turned pale. He stood up and stumbled as he ran out of the house.

    Sam and the trio looked at this reaction and quickly followed out and when they came out, they saw an elven woman donning all ck and a broad sword strapped to her hip. She is tall and beautiful just like any other elf, but that is not what attracted their attention.

    It is the presence of another elven woman who is currently unconscious and resting thedy¡¯s arms with her skin turning all green.

    That made them feel a bit cold.

    Raunak who is standing could feel the strength in his legs going down and his knees buckled.

    His knees hit the floor and he looked at the sky with tears in his eyes as he roared on top of his lungs.

    "RAMYAAAAA..."

    The roar full of agony and pain was heard all over the city that day.

 Chapter 790: Midday Green

    After the meeting in the court was ended.

    Rajan who is extremely angry returned to the estate so that he can persuade his stupid daughter to not speak in the next day¡¯s trial.

    But he didn¡¯t open the topic immediately because his son brought the scions from the upper realm to his estate and he didn¡¯t want to lose face in front of them.

    So, he stayed put and decided to wait until they leave.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is that his impulsive son somehow got the news and he did something stupid.

    At that moment, Ramana and the rest of the scions are sitting at the bank of one of the estates and enjoying the alcohol. Due to Sam¡¯s recipes, the alcohol business is at its peak and everyone started appreciating the good liquor more and more.

    Particrly these scions who came from the upper realms and are used to indulge themselves in a morevish life than the scions of this realm like the liquors and they drank it continuously.

    An attendant just came in and whispered this news in Ramana¡¯s ears.

    He became silent and his mood turned sour. At first he became angry at his father for not resolving this issue and then his thoughts went to Raunak and he wanted to kill him and finally his thoughts went to his sister who is the cause of all this.

    He became angry as he downed one bottle after another.

    The scions from the upper realm are a bit surprised, but they didn¡¯t care much. They just indulged in the liquor and the good food.

    Ramana looked at the four young masters that are sitting in front of them and his gaze finally rested on the most handsome one of all.

    From the day he came, this young master only focused on different women that he beds. He suddenly thought of an idea and waited for the gathering to be over.

    After all the four young masters got ready to leave, he slipped a paper into the hand of this one particr guy secretly and waited.

    The young masters are not clearly staying in the same ce, so after the four of them went their own way, this one guy returned discreetly after looking at the paper slip.

    "What is this Ramana? Why did you ask me to meet personally? Is it about the test? If you really got selected, I would have no problems taking you under our force, but I couldn¡¯t do much after that."

    "Thank you. Young master Rasman. But I have something else to talk to you about.

    I think you already know that I have a sister who is also taking the examination with me. But she is specialized in bureaucracy and she would be taking in that category.

    But nowadays, she is being a bit muddled and confused because a guy is trying to y with her feelings. No matter how my father and I convinced her, she is still so confused. So, I would like young master¡¯s help."

    Rasman smirked and said.

    "What do you want me to do?"

    "My sister is a smart woman, but she is a bit confused and muddled because she is a girl at the end of the day. She is being smitten by that guy¡¯s looks and I am pretty sure it is aplete infatuation. Once Young master spends some time with her, I am pretty sure that she would be able to lose the thoughts of him."

    "Spend some time?"

    "Spend some alone time, young master. But trust me, she is great beauty and would certainly of young master¡¯s taste."

    "Let me see her first."

    With that, both of them started walking into the estate.

    But currently, Rajan is in Ramya¡¯s residence as both of them stared daggers at each other.

    Rajan just exined what happened in the court and is persuading Ramya to not speak up the next day.

    "Are you not ashamed of yourself father? From ying dirty to breaking promises and now you are here asking your daughter to be like you. Lie and y dirty and cheat the one person that loved me for who I am? Why did you stoop so low?"

    Ramya asked her father without backing down.

    "Ramya, you better watch your words and you better listen to me and do what I say while I am still being pleasant with you. You are not supposed to be here with him. All you would do is rot your talent in this stupid realm. Go to the superior realm and find someone that is suitable for you.

    Why did you have to do this to yourself?"

    "Go to the superior realm and find someone more suitable for me? More like someone suitable to grow your son¡¯s career and prospects. Don¡¯t glorify selling your daughter out like that."

    Rajan¡¯s face became red with anger and he mmed his fist into the wall creating a hole and left the ce.

    But before he crossed the entrance, he spoke.

    "You better listen to what I say. I don¡¯t want to resort to extreme measures."

    With that, he left.

    As soon as he left the ce Ramya copsed onto her chair as her eyes started tearing up.

    But within five minutes someone else came.

    Ramana and Rasman came to her residence and he came with some guards.

    This alerted someone who is hiding a bit away from Ramya¡¯s residence.

    When that ck silhouette moved and started moving towards Ramya¡¯s residence.

    But at this moment some of Ramana¡¯s guards who are hiding their faces until now came forward and blocked her.

    The woman in the ck looked at them and eximed.

    "Why the fuck are family elders involving in this? Get out of my way."

    But they didn¡¯t say anything and just started attacking her. All three of them are consummate realm cultivators and shed.

    Ramana looked at thedy in ck and said.

    "I know you are going to be here. I can¡¯t let you ruin my moment now, can I?"

    After that, Ramana led Rasman into the chamber while the rest of his guards dealt with guards of Ramya.

    When Rasman and Ramana entered the residence, Ramya is already alerted by the sounds of battle and was surprised to look at them.

    "What do you think young master, is she of your taste?" Ramana asked Rasman who is already ogling on Ramya with a lustful smile.

    "Your sister is indeed beautiful. I can even make her my concubine."

    "Haha, that would be her honor. Young master. Please enjoy your time."

    Before Ramya could react, he already finished the conversation and left the ce.

    Rasman is ate-stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivator while Ramya is an early-stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivator.

    There is no way she can control or fight what is about to happen. She tried to run away, but Rasman caught hold of her and tried to force himself upon her.

    Her clothes were torn in many ces and there are many nail marks on her flesh. She started crying and screaming for help.

    "Heellllp."

    "Father... Father..."

    "Aruna..."

    "Leave me alone."

    As she was struggling to get out of this, she realized that this is going to be her fate and she couldn¡¯t escape it.

    No matter how she attacked and how she tried to use her weapons and elemental energy, that guy is unstoppable. Fighting is not her forte, to begin with.

    With all that is going on, she soon lost her strength and took out a green pill from her storage and swallowed it.

    The pill dissolved into a green liquid instantly and when he tried to kiss her forcefully, she made some of the liquid enter his mouth and then only that guy calmed down and backed down.

    He could clearly detect what kind of smell that is and he was terrified.

    "How dare you poison me? You bitch?"

    With that, he punched her in the gut and ran back. His guards immediately came back and asked him what is wrong.

    "Give me an antidote. I am poisoned with the midday green."

    The guards became terrified and they went on to give him the antidote. He already fainted by the time the antidote was given and Ramana who is standing aside was terrified.

    He didn¡¯t understand what happened and ran into the room..

    When he looked at his sister who is frothing from her mouth and her skin slowly turning green, he couldn¡¯t help but feel cold all over. He didn¡¯t expect that things would turn out this way.

    All of a sudden the battle sounds stopped outside and he ran back.

    Rajan has arrived and when he looked at the elders fighting the ck-dressed woman, he became angry and yelled.

    "What happened here?"

    The ck-dressed woman looked at him resentfully and ran in to take a look at Ramya.

    "NOOOOO.."

    And a soul-searing scream cut through the wind.

    Rajan who heard this ran inside and looked at the ck woman who is feeding antidotes to Ramya.

    His feet turned cold but he hardened his heart and ran forward. When he saw the skin tone and the darkness of the green, he was stumped.

    "Midday Green. How long has it been?"

    He was terrified, Midday green has one effect which makes it extremely lethal, the only antidote that was made for it wouldn¡¯t work after two minutes.

    And the time can be evaluated from the tone of the skin and from the looks of it, the time has already passed.

    Rajan¡¯s eyes started tearing and when he was about touch his daughter, Aruna who is the ck-dressed woman pped his hand away and said.

    "You are the reason she is dead. Remember that and live with it, you bastard."

    With that, she carried her away. Ramya is still alive but she is not responding anymore. At least she would lose her life in the arms of her loved one.

 Chapter 791: Treatment-1

    Rajan just stood there stunned as he looked at Aruna who is taking Ramya away. He really wanted to stop her, but he couldn¡¯t bring himself to. There is an enormous amount of guilt eating his heart away.

    He couldn¡¯t even speak out a few words.

    As he watched Aruna leave, his attention was diverted towards the two elders, the guards and finally Ramana.

    All of them didn¡¯t even dare to move. Ramana who was clouded by anger and greed finally cleared his head and understood how dire the situation is for him.

    He just bowed his head down and stood there.

    Rajan walked to the two elders first and before they could speak, he mmed his two fists into their bodies and held them like that as the spiritual energy around them started riling up. The two elders looked at Rajan in disbelief, pain, and despair.

    Soon some leaves started sprouting from various parts of their bodies and slowly their flesh and blood were being absorbed by those leaves which turned into small nts and finally some shrubs.

    The corpses fell and the nts nested themselves into the ground and one couldn¡¯t even see the skeletons that are in midst of them.

    Rajan then turned towards the guards and their fates are also the same. Particrly, when they looked at how emotionless Rajan¡¯s face is, they almost peed their pants. Soon, the only ones left standing there are Rajan, Ramana, and some guards who came after the cries of despair and some elders that learned of this through the guards.

    Ramana was also nervous. He knew that he fucked up big time. But at this moment an elder came and stopped Rajan¡¯s hand before saying.

    "I can understand your pain. But you shouldn¡¯t kill him. He is the only one left from your family line as your heir. You are reaching a certain age where you will be deployed to the higher realm sooner orter. Someone must take the spot to increase your lineage. Your daughter is also gone. He is the only heir. You have to bear with it."

    As soon as those words were spoken, Ramana suddenly felt like he grabbed a life-saving straw and was pulled back from despair. Rajan also looked at him with a bit of hesitation, but that hesitation onlysted for a second. As soon as he saw the relieved expression on Ramana, he didn¡¯t want to leave him alone.

    "If my family has to propagate from the likes of him, it is better dead. Who knows if he would sell his daughter to some other guys for a promotion? I will take this chance to get rid of this tumor. I should have done this a long time ago."

    With that, he threw a punch and this time it didn¡¯t take long. Ramana is after all a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator. His body turned into a bloody meat past with that single punch, not even his skeleton remained in the ce.

    After finishing the deed, Rajan felt a bit empty and fell to his knees.

    Meanwhile.

    At Sam¡¯s residence.

    Currently, the trio and Sam are feeling a bit lost as they looked at Raunak who is weeping like a baby as he held Ramya in his hands.

    Sam looked at Ramya and noticed that she is still alive. He couldn¡¯t help but frown and walk towards Aruna before asking.

    "She is still alive, right? Is there no antidote for this poison?"

    Aruna looked at him for a second and answered with a sigh.

    "It¡¯s Midday Green. The lethality of this poison is not its potency, it is apletely different poison. After taking it in, if one couldn¡¯t take the antidote within two minutes, it would be toote.

    The poison mixes with bloodstream and it makes the meridians so dull that it would be impossible for spiritual energy to be absorbed. Nothing that entered the stomach wouldn¡¯t be digested and nothing that was injected into the body, even spiritual energy wouldn¡¯t be absorbed. She would be alive for another two hours and she would be able to hear what we are saying, but she just couldn¡¯t respond."

    Sam was stunned. He didn¡¯t expect that there would be a poison like this in the world. This ispletely new to him. And with those conditions, even the heavenly wine would have some problems.

    But when he looked at Raunak¡¯s face, he took a deep breath and decided to try.

    He walked towards him and patted on his shoulder before saying.

    "What are you crying for? She is still alive. Bring her in."

    Raunak looked at Sam with surprise.

    "Do... Do you have a way to save her?" Suddenly Raunak saw a bit of hope, he remembered all the things that Sam pulled off and felt like if it was him then there might be a chance.

    "I don¡¯t know yet, let¡¯s see."

    With that, he walked in. Raunak and Aruna exchanged eye contact before walking inside. The trio also followed.

    Raunakid her on the bed. Sam ced his fingers on her forehead and started using his observation ability.

    He started observing the flesh, blood, and the poison that is moving within that blood. He can see the meridians that are slowly closing down and clearly affected by the poison.

    With a deep sigh, he took some heavenly wine and poured it in her mouth before slowly guiding it into her stomach.

    The stomach which came into direct contact with the poison was slowly healing because of the wine, but other than that there is not much use, after the stomach healed, Sam poured some more and this slowed down the poison a bit, but it couldn¡¯t be absorbedpletely and the wine just stayed there.

    Even the energy emitted from that wine ispletely useless at this point. Sam was really stumped by this.

    The heavenly wine can even have alleviating effects even on hydra poison, but this Midday green which is nowhere near as potent as the hydra poison made it hard.

    If only he was injected with that poison, then it wouldn¡¯t have been this hard to get rid of it, with the half-ass potency it wouldn¡¯t have even affected him.

    As his thoughts of this, another thought came to his mind.

    But he hesitated a bit.

    Raunak observed Sam¡¯s actions carefully and when he saw that look of hesitation, he asked.

    "What happened? Is there no way?"

    "There is one way, but it is a bitplicated. One mistake and she will die immediately. You wouldn¡¯t even have these two hours with her."

    Everyone stayed silent for a bit. Even Aruna didn¡¯t say anything and just stayed quiet as she looked at Raunak. It is his decision. But it didn¡¯t take long.

    "Do it. At least this way there is a chance."

    Sam looked at Aruna and said.

    "I need a healer. A consummate level one. As soon as possible."

    "A consummate level healer?" She was surprised a bit.

    Sam nodded and once again observed the bloodstream. He really does have a n, but it is dangerous. Extremely dangerous. He should be ying with the naturalws of the body and its functions. But that would be extremely dangerous. When he looked at the heart which is slowly being affected by the poison, he couldn¡¯t help look at Aruna who is still thinking.

    When he saw his look of urgency, she ran out of the house and ran towards the estate. She is a hidden guard, she doesn¡¯t have contacts. There is only one healer she knew in this world that could help her.

    And that also happened to be one person she is hating the most right now.

    He is none other than Rajan.

    When she reached the estate once again. Rajan is still standing on the same spot as he looked his daughter¡¯s residence. Aruna noticed the bushes that are formed over the skeletons of the people he killed.

    She knew all too well what they are.

    Rajan noticed her presence and asked.

    "What happened? Did you give her to him?"

    "I need your help." She didn¡¯t answer his question and directly came to the point.

    "What do you need me for?"

    "To save your daughter."

    "It is impossible."

    "There is a young man saying that there is a chance. You better make your quick, you are the only consummate level healer I know. I don¡¯t have time."

    Rajan stood up and was surprised, but he didn¡¯t waste any questions and followed her. Soon they reached the residence and came inside.

    Raunak was stunned and was about to explode when he looked at Rajan, but Sam gestured the trio who stopped him from doing so. They pinned him to the chair and closed his mouth as Philip slowly whispered something into his ear.

    Rajan stood there and looked at Sam in askance.

    "I want you to concentrate on her heart. No matter what happens, you have to heal it and make sure it works even without blood. Can you do that?"

    "Only heart?"

    "Yes, I will take care of the rest of the body, but make sure that you do not let the heart stop. It is really dangerous."

    "I will do it."

    "You can start now. Don¡¯t try to force the poison out, I will take care of it myself, if the heart is injured heal it immediately, no matter what happens it shouldn¡¯t fail."

    With that Sam and Rajan, the two enemies who just wanted to kill each other a day before are trying to save the girl.

 Chapter 792: Treatment-2

    Rajan ced his arm on his daughter¡¯s chest and the wood elemental energy slowly enveloped her heart.

    "The heart is already infected a bit." He spoke as he looked at Sam.

    Sam is surprised a bit, because there are few healers who can actually inspect the infection level of internal organs without using some diagnosis techniques, maybe Rajan also used one, but this one is pretty advanced.

    Sam nodded to show that he understood and started preparing for surgery. He cut open the cloth covering her stomach and directly touched her skin as he knelt beside the bed.

    He closed his eyes and his body slowly started activating the water elemental energy. The heavenly wine which was stuck in the stomach was currently moving towards the intestine forcefully because of his water elemental control and the intestine which is the most infected part in the body at the moment, started healing.

    But from the severity of that poison, it is hard for it to absorb directly and Sam has to force it which is causing damage to the insides of the intestine, Sam ced his second hand on the belly and used the light elemental healing.

    The damaged intestine is being healed instantly while he forcefully threw the heavenly wine into the intestines.

    The small intestines are okay for now, but they still didn¡¯t reach the level of their regr function.

    Now starts the real problem. The rest of the body which is already infected by the poison also has to be treated, but for that he has to make sure that the blood is free of this persistent poison. But it is hard to separate the poison from the blood as it is mixed well on a cellr level.

    Sam only has one way to do it.

    He looked at Raunak and asked.

    "Do you trust me?"

    Raunak looked into his eyes and nodded his head.

    "Then don¡¯t panic about what you see next?" Sam said and he ced removed the cloth covering Ramya¡¯s neck. He closed his eyes took a deep breath and a bloodline which he didn¡¯t like using activated. The Vampire bloodline.

    His teeth slowly started turning into fangs and his skin turned pale. The elves in the room are stumped. They didn¡¯t expect this. The trio is a bit fearful. They didn¡¯t expect that Sam would have to resort to such means. They are also afraid that the elves would get panicked and do something to Sam.

    Sam took another deep breath and bit into her neck as he started sucking the blood.

    As he sucked the blood, his both hands are ced on her forehead and her stomach as light elemental energypletely surrounded her body and this energy went through his left hand which is ced on her stomach while the right hand had faint blue light which is the water element.

    He used the water element to take the wine from the gourd and made it go through her lips and controlled the flow of the wine within her body.

    While sucking the blood.

    As Sam sucked the blood, the poison which is also part of that blood was also being sucked in. For the first time after he became a vampire he is drinking the blood of sentient creatures, he did drink the blood of the stone python, but that was still a beast.

    This time he is drinking the blood of a creature that is close to a human. Even though his brain is screaming against it, he couldn¡¯t help but do this. He didn¡¯t see any other way.

    As the blood is slowly being sucked in, Sam controlled the wine and forcefully sent it to the bone marrow which caused harm to the insides, which he started healing with his light element, he let the wine treat the bone marrows which are also infected with the poison.

    He forcefully let the wine enter the bloodstream and used his elemental energy to separate both of them while he sent the wine to the bones and started treating them. As long as the poison was not in contact the already infected part could be treated properly.

    After treating that, his light elemental energy surrounded the bone marrow and started increasing the vitality to make it function rapidly increasing the blood production.

    As he sucked the poisoned blood the heart is currently devoid of any blood and Rajan also noticed this. In fact, he is the only one who can see the whole surgical process.

    His diagnosing technique is almost simr to Sam¡¯s observation technique, but it is not as detailed, but he can still see what Sam is doing.

    Surprise and shock can hardly define his reactions.

    This ispletely new to him. Sam¡¯s control over his energies is already hard for him to fathom and to control the energy delicately enough to treat the organs? It is impossible for him.

    He focused all his energy on the heart.

    Meanwhile, Sam is focusing on multiple things at the same time. As he sucked the poisoned blood, he is also observing the new blooding out of the bone marrow.

    Making the bone marrow generate the blood continuously and rapidly is a dangerous process. Normally it is not even possible. But Sam is using vitality control to make the bone marrow function rapidly. And since the marrow is already infected by poison and is still being treated, the blooding out is also a bit poisonous.

    He kept on sucking it in while creating new blood.

    This is ridiculously going against the naturalws of the body.

    And to create the new blood a lot of nutrition is required for Ramya¡¯s body and Sam¡¯s only one way to create that, the wine, but the digestive system is only partially healed and in the middle of healingpletely. Until then he has to do everything himself.

    Sam slowly but surely started dealing with everything. After the bone marrows are cleansed of the poison, he only made sure that blood is being generated and the digestive system was also cleansed of the poison which made it possible for him to stop the forceful application of the heavenly wine, all he has to do is make it flow into the stomach.

    Sam finally opening his mouth and deactivated the vampire bloodline. His body has suffered a bit as he used the vampire abilities and light element at the same time. It is a bit problematic to use two conflicting things. At least if it is elemental, he could manage. One is physical and the other is elemental which made it easy for them to sh. At least, he is free now.

    Now the body is digesting the heavenly wine and it is slowly sending the effects of the wine to the rest of the organs and now Sam has to do a lot less. The wine would do most of the work. But Ramya¡¯s body has be dormant for a while, so he still enhanced the healing process with the healing and soon they are done.

    Rajan is the only one observing Ramya closely apart from Sam. The trio didn¡¯t understand the process, but they know Sam is having some trouble.

    Raunak and Aruna are looking at Sam in surprise. Because he drank all the blood, at least it can be summarized as his taking some extreme measure, but even more surprising thing is that the blood is filled with midday green. But Sam is still working properly.

    After the treatment is done, Rajan also looked at Sam and realized what he had done. The Midday green is not ordinary poison, but Sam is still alright after drinking the blood infested with it.

    Sam didn¡¯t care what they thought. He finished the treatment. Ramya¡¯s skin also returned to normal, there is just a faint hue of green on her white skin which will go away with time.

    But she is still unconscious because she is extremely weak not physically but mentally. She is sleeping for now.

    Sam didn¡¯t even talk to them and just nodded at Raunak before leaving the room.

    He went to his personal room and closed the door, not even letting the trioe in.

    As soon as he entered the room, he knelt on the floor and felt his breath grow erratic. He tried his best to control this reaction.

    His body is currently feeling a bit different and he is feeling a myriad of emotions from drinking the blood. He felt like puking it and he is trying so hard to do so, but it is not happening. At first, he wanted to suck the blood and create an outlet normally. But as soon as his lips touched the skin and started sucking the blood, his brain was a bit clouded and didn¡¯t have time to conflict the thought.

    He can only clear it so the rest of the process wouldn¡¯t be interrupted.

    But after a while, he was even more conflicted, particrly when the poisonous blood is gone, he has to put in a lot of effort to stop the constant craving for the blood he just consumed.

    Even after finishing the treatment and walking out of the room, that is the only thought that is killing his mind. His eyes are currently blood red and want to create a rampage and drink all the blood.

    Even his friends are looking like a juicy dinner. That is why he came out of that room and tried to calm himself down.

    If not for the concealing formation, the rest of the people in the residence would have heard the agony he is going through.

 Chapter 793: Big Money

    It took around a half-an-hour for Sam toe to himself.

    He tried his best to suppress the urges and instincts along with that feeling of him being a bloodthirsty monster that is bugging his mind constantly.

    After trying his best to control, Sam became silent and sat in that same position as he closed his eyes and meditated.

    He wants some peace at the moment and that moment continued for the rest of the day. He just sat there are meditated as if that is the only thing he wants to do in the world and only came out the next morning.

    He finally lost that bugging feeling that is trying to take over his mind. He doesn¡¯t want toe to terms with that feeling, a feeling of being a monster. He has a feeling that once he epted it, the rest of his life would be miserable and uncontroble. His cold and emotionless mind which he uses to do business and create things wouldn¡¯t work like that anymore.

    He might gain more power, but that didn¡¯t outweigh the damage he has to suffer and the things he has to lose.

    No one outside knew what Sam was going through. They just thought that he needed some rest after such a delicate procedure.

    They just let him be. Rajan is still there waiting in the courtyard. Aruna is standing guard outside Ramya¡¯s room, while Raunak stayed with Ramya.

    Ramya woke up at dawn and managed to speak a few words with Raunak, but she is still a bit weak and exhausted.

    When Sam came out, the trio is busy cooking in the kitchen. The three of them are not expert cooks, they barely know how to skin the meat and roast it on fire, so when Sam saw them trying their best to make something in the kitchen, he didn¡¯t know whether he has tough or cry.

    "What the hell are you guys doing?"

    He asked them which made them stop in their tracks.

    Philip heaved a sigh and spoke.

    "Thank god, you woke up. The atmosphere in the house is weird sincest night. Rajan doesn¡¯t want to leave and stayed in the front yard which is already enough to get attention. While Aruna is wary of him and stood guard at the door and finally Raunak refused to even move a bit until he confirmed that she is alright.

    And the awkwardness increased only after she woke up in the morning. Now Rajan is adamant about seeing her while Aruna is even more adamant on stopping him. Raunak who is the cause of all this is not even thinking of leaving the room.

    At first, it was entertaining to see, but soon we realized we would be stuck in this if we don¡¯t excuse ourselves and here we are."

    "You could have gone out. Why are you destroying the kitchen? Why are you cooking anyway?"

    "Ramya is exhausted. As much as we are not against her staying here. We can¡¯t take it anymore. If she recovered, she would leave and all this awkwardness will be gone."

    Sam shook his head with a smile and said.

    "Get out, all three of you. I will cook."

    The three of them left the kitchen helplessly and Sam went on to cook. After he finished a simple meal, he took it to Ramya¡¯s room. Aruna saw it was him and made way while looked at Rajan who is waiting in the front yard with a hostile gaze.

    *Knock* *Knock*

    Sam knocked on the door and after a minute, Raunak answered.

    "Come in."

    He went in and ced the food on the side table of the bed and asked Ramya.

    "How are you feeling?"

    Ramya is indeed a bit weak, but she is in a much better condition thanst night. The green hue on her skin was gone and her aura is a bit stronger and stable. She gave a faint smile and said.

    "I am feeling great. Thank you for saving me."

    Sam also smiled involuntarily and said.

    "Don¡¯t mention it. If you are any other person, I might not have gone through that trouble. I saved you because of Raunak. I apologize if I am being blunt, but that is indeed the truth."

    "That doesn¡¯t make me feel any grateful."

    Sam shook his head and said.

    "Eat the food while it is still hot. After that, meet your father if you can. He is a major help in saving you. I don¡¯t have enough confidence to do that without his help."

    With that, he patted Raunak¡¯s shoulder and left.

    Sam went to meet Rajan.

    "Why are you so adamant about meeting her now? Isn¡¯t it toote to make amends?" Sam asked casually.

    Rajan didn¡¯t speak for a second and said.

    "I apologize for all the things I did to you."

    Sam just stayed silent.

    "I am not here to make amends, I just want to say goodbye."

    "Good luck then."

    Sam went back to do his own thing.

    After an hour, Ramya indeed met with Rajan and at that time, even Raunak was out of the room. Nobody knows what they talked about. But after they came out, Rajan didn¡¯t speak to anyone. He just thanked Sam and left the ce.

    That day¡¯s trial was canceled and a golden armored guy came and informed that Rajan will be fulfilling his agreement.

    By evening, Sam is in a meeting with Professor and Galvin. They came for the products. But even they are baffled by the amount that was given out by Sam.

    "Thirty Billion. The original price. With the discount I promised, it will be twenty-seven billion. And with a bet between the professor and me, it would be fifty-four billion. I would be okay with fifty billion."

    When Sam gave these numbers, both of them felt their throats dry.

    "Do you know how much fifty billion is? Even Rajan¡¯s family assets on the wholebined would only be around three hundred billion and there might only be two to three families that are richer than him."

    Sam thought for a second and said.

    "Elves are richer than I thought. I wonder how they managed to earn so much."

    "Not as easily as you," Galvin said through the gritted teeth and took a deep breath before he continued.

    "We can only offer a thirty-five billion to you."

    "That¡¯s way too low. I am already losing ten billion out of courtesy. And you are even reducing another fifteen billion. That wouldn¡¯t happen."

    "Thirty-seven"

    "No."

    "Forty."

    "No way."

    "Forty-two and that¡¯s final." We can¡¯t do any more than that.

    Sam went into deep thought and after some time, he nodded his head.

    "Sure, I will agree."

    With that, the deal was signed. Sam is ecstatic inside, even though he is showing a sad expression.

    But he won big in this deal. In fact this one of the biggest deals he ever made. In Deste realm, he earns a lot and even a lot more than this, but thates from the work of thousands of people. Now he just sold some ns and designs along with his workers training some other people, this is the easiest money he can ever make.

    He is growing to like this ce more and more.

    After that, he went back to rx a bit.

    Ramya stayed at their residence for the next three days. After that, she moved out and went to Raunak¡¯s residence.

    All that was left is a wedding ceremony which they decided to arrange soon enough.

    She didn¡¯t go to the higher realm selections anymore. On that day, they received the news of Ramana¡¯s death, this surprised them a lot. They didn¡¯t expect that Rajan can be so ruthless. Killing his own son, for his daughter, even made them think twice and reevaluate his love for Ramya.

    After they settled in, Raunak decided to go back to his work. They couldn¡¯t decide on when to have their wedding, so he decided to wait for a while and finish the work.

    It¡¯s about Sam¡¯s school.

    He procured somend in the outskirts from the government and Sam bought it.

    This is going to be thergest campus in the capital and it is going to be asrge as a noble estate. In fact, more than half of the noble estates are not even asrge as this.

    Now Sam needs a constructionpany for this and ironically, Braman¡¯s is the best option he has.

    He really wondered if Braman will take the deal, but to his surprise, he did take the deal and this time he is a lot of meek and tolerable.

    The Biofuel treatment can treat stupidity to some extent.

    This is great for Sam. Except for that stupid arrogance of that guy, there is nothing that Sam can fault him for.

    He is good in all the other aspects.

    The construction project was the biggest in the city and with this, theirpany will surpass theirpetitors by miles, so Braman called for every builder he has on his hands and decided to put all his manpower on this.

    The ns are given by Sam which reduced his workload.

    Sam is building the same campus he has on the deste. He is building a school of exact replica.

 Chapter 794: Confusion

    The construction process is faster than what it took on the deste. The manpower here is multiple times more than there and they are of even higher level. Sam saw some Pre-transcendent stage cultivators working like construction workers. Not doing anything but creating the concrete bs.

    This ispletely new to him.

    But this situation was only for a week. After that, some of the builders had to move to some emergency construction. Sam could easily guess what is.

    The factory for the new products.

    The One-star military unit is opening the factory right next to the grenade factory and half of the team from Braman¡¯s constructionpany has to go there.

    Braman doesn¡¯t know why they are in such a hurry. He is much more interested in Sam¡¯s school project as this is thergest project he has seen and it will also increase his market value after it was done both financially and also a brand image.

    Sam¡¯s designs are unique and they are going to be one of a kind in this majestic city which would attract a lot of people.

    If only he knew what kind of this school this is going to be and how popr it can get, he would have never even let his construction team go.

    But half of his construction workers have to go away. Because the professor insisted that the factory has to bepleted as fast as possible and Braman fought tooth and nail to only send half of the team.

    The war on-2 is going insane and the troops are dying like flies. If this continues, no one can guarantee that the secret they had kept hidden for centuries would be kept secret anymore.

    On this one matter, both the factions joined and this hidden faction led by the professor also supported fully.

    They clearly know the depth of the situation and they are not petty in the face of it.

    While the situation is like this, Sam got some news from the shadow mice. Rajan is going to 2 and he seems to be joining the war.

    The suicide attempt by Ramya must have impacted him too much.

    He is looking for a way to let the steam out and this is the perfect chance for him.

    And the war even required the consummate level cultivators to move, this made Sam remember therge pod he has seen and that creature that almost killed him.

    He could only wish the troops good luck and hope that his products can give him a break.

    The hidden faction was the happiest in this tense situation, because Sam also gave a batch of harpoon guns and some breathing devices along with a bunch of puppets when they made the business deal and he got news that they were already sold to the military. Even though there are only ten of each piece, the government made a test run and they made a small fortune just with this sample products.

    And since the owner of the designs turned out to be the one-star military, ording to this world¡¯sws, the government cannot forcefully take it away from them.

    This made the business even more possible.

    Sam got all this news from Galvin and his team through a shadow mouse.

    Out of all the members of the hidden faction, Sam knew of, only Braman is kept in the dark.

    After the second week since the incident the foundations are alreadyid in Sam¡¯s school and one building already finished the next phase of construction the work is progressing greatly.

    The same thing was happening on the side of factory construction.

    The first thing they built is arge warehouse type room and they kept the equipment for making the breathing devices. This time, they managed to hire some already trained guys in the aspect of making breathing devices and started manufacturing.

    They are the ones that are on top priority from the government and they started manufacturing them.

    Soon, the One-star military unit was fully deployed to the sea shore to join the battle and these people went with the set of breathing devices and harpoon guns and the water element users even got the t-fish puppets.

    While the war side is heating up, the election is nearing and the campaigns are growing wild.

    There are some illegal malpractices in the election like giving bribes to certain people to get votes.

    There is an entire ss of people who doesn¡¯t care what government thates on top of them. And they include people in different sectors, like the workers in factories, the teachers in some educational institutions, some military units that are too dangerous and not controlled by any factions and least caring of them all are themon public that live the lowest of the lives in the financial pyramid of this society.

    No matter what factiones into power, these people wouldn¡¯t have too much of an impact and every government that makes different policies will only effect the general popce that already have a decent life to begin with.

    But the majority of the people belong to the sses that are not effective, so they can only show them something more tangible, not some promises which they are sure not going to be fulfilled.

    So, the faction 2 went for a more indirect way, by distributing the liquor here and then. They managed to develop some cheaper version on the drinks that Sam sold them and are distributing them freely, while the faction 1 went through a direct method by giving some tangible benefits like spirit stones, weapons and medicines.

    Thepetition is high, on both the surface and in the shady grey area.

    This also led to another thing, the fights and battles are starting to break out, the mercenaries are finding new jobs, the couriers are busy with carrying messages and goods.

    The capital lost any state of calm.

    Sam is taking it all in.

    By the end of fourth week, which concluded a month since the incident, the factory waspleted and the production has been going on full swing and the election campaign reached the new heights.

    And the school is also on its finishing stages. Now Sam has to arrange the staff. He is not opening the school immediately, he has to bring the staff from the school in the deste realm.

    But for that, he would be needing some help and for the first time, Sam is going to use the services and some underhanded help of Raunak who is a high level official now.

    His rank far outranks the City lord of the 2¡¯s capital and due to Rajan¡¯s insistence on cing him within the educational department, they had to pay a certain price for that which gave him a higher rank.

    And since he is a special officer he has some special privilege.

    Giving the teacher¡¯s license.

    The teacher¡¯s license is a special identity. Every person cannot be a teacher. They have to go through certain tests and the standards would be maintained by a special license officer. But Raunak has a special power regarding this.

    So, Sam would be bringing his own staff from the deste realm, where there is a new batch of excess teachers and researchers and bring them to his base in 2.

    Raunak will be conducting a mass scale teacher¡¯s license test in the 2 capital and his staff will participate in it.

    Sam¡¯s school has different requirements for teachers in different fields, but the government can only give permission for certain mainstream fields, so Sam¡¯s mode of operation is a bit limited for now, but he can still manage for the time being.

    After the teachers are selected, they will get the license which has an added bonus of a civilian identity.

    They will join Sam¡¯s school and enter the staff properly.

    After that, Sam would open the school and the first target popce are obviously orphans.

    Sam really wanted to see if he can continue the same thing he did in the deste, create an overall manpower that excels in different ways by inducting orphans into his school and from the information he got from the teenager in the fruit street who also happened to be an orphan, and Raunak who was also an orphan, the number of orphans is actually quite high and there are many government funded orphanages in this ce.

    Anyone can donate or even constantly finance them, so Sam is currently concocted a new n to gain a regr source of the orphans into the school the rest of it will be run by itself.

    But that has to wait for a bit, because there is another important thing going on and it happened to be a wedding.

    And this is the first wedding, Sam is attending since he came to this world more than thirteen years ago.

    And the wedding is of Raunak and Ramya¡¯s.

    The wedding was being arranged grandly and Sam was caught off guard with when he was told he was the chief guest. Raunak has helped him a lot, even though it was all a fair exchange between them, he liked that guy a bit. So, he helped him with that girl¡¯s problem.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know what to give him as a gift. All he has is a lot of wealth which wouldn¡¯t be that appropriate to give.

    And the trio is not helping either, they went on a search for their own gifts. There is only three days for the wedding and Sam was left confused.

 Chapter 795: A Special Gift

    Sam is a bit flustered. No matter how smart he is in the other aspects, in normal social conventions, he couldn¡¯t be smarter than a five year old.

    In his two lives this happened to be the first time someone invited him to the wedding out of pure gratitude. Even in the organization or thepany he had in his previous life, no one invited him normally, it is either out of fear or pure courtesy. There are some high level people that invited him, but it is to just suck up to him.

    He felt like he obligated to give a nice present now.

    Now that the trio is gone for their own gifts, he was left alone.

    Currently, he is inside his house in a deep thought.

    *Knock* *Knock*

    He came out of his daze due to a door knock.

    He went to open the door and was surprised to see Raunak and Ramya standing outside.

    "Come in."

    He walked back and gestured them toe in. It has been a while since he saw Ramya, she was a bit traumatized by the incident and didn¡¯t want toe out that much. He asionally saw her when he went to meet Raunak, but that¡¯s it.

    "Why are you guys here? Are you not busy with your wedding preparations?"

    Raunak had an awkward smile on his face.

    "We are indeed busy, but we want to ask you something?"

    "Yeah, tell me."

    Before Raunak could speak, Ramya cut him off and said.

    "I want to work as a teacher in your school. I heard from Raunak that you are not just teaching awakened ones and also teaching the children who are not awakened and I heard you are also teaching them basic knowledge of the realm,nguage and something else. I would like to teach those kids. I don¡¯t have particr knowledge in the fields called sciences which you are teaching, but I have enough knowledge about this realm and thenguage. I even have a teacher license years ago. Would you consider me for the job?"

    As she spoke, she took out her teacher¡¯s license and gave it to Sam.

    Sam took it and looked at it a bit before saying.

    "Are you sure you want to teach them? You would have to deal with a lot. Those children will be a handful."

    "No problem. I am really interested. In fact, this is what I wanted to do for a while. But I couldn¡¯t make my father agree to it and no school in the city will even let me take their tests to be a teacher in their school."

    "I indeed need someone who has knowledge in these categories, since you are eager let¡¯s try it out. We will see for one semester, even if you have ws in the beginning, you will have a chance to improve and even after that if you don¡¯t have any improvement, I cannot continue to employ you. If you are okay with those conditions, then I am okay with that."

    Ramya beamed with joy and said.

    "Thank you. Thank you so much."

    They chatted for a while and Sam couldn¡¯t help but notice his teeth marks on her neck.

    He felt a little guilty and said.

    "I am sorry for the scars. I should have healed it as soon as I finished the treatment. Now you have to bear it for the rest of your life."

    Ramya just smiled and said.

    "Please don¡¯t apologize. It might be a scar for the people who are looking at it, but for us it is a reminder and a symbol that you kept us safe when even my closest kin are looking to harm us. I cannot thank you enough, so please don¡¯t feel guilty about it."

    Sam just smiled and didn¡¯t continue the topic.

    After the couple left, Sam thought of Ramya¡¯s words and smiled a bit. He finally has an idea on what to give out as a gift.

    He went into the room and started making it.

    He took out the lump of crystal that he gathered from the tortoise¡¯s back and started melting and molding it as he worked for the rest of the day.

    He carefully made and sculpted a crystal token. It is the emerald token with Sam¡¯s symbol on it. In the middle of the process, Sam inscribed a formation within the token and ced a drop of his blood inside and then he started adding other materials and inscriptions.

    He worked through the whole night and only managed to create the token by the next morning.

    He was finally done with his gift.

    He ced it in a specially made box and wrote a letter along with it.

    He is sure that this gift would surelye in handy for them. They would be able to find a use for it in the future. Maybe not in the near future, but in this lifetime, they might be able to use it.

    On the wedding day, the trio returned, they also got their own gifts and they seemed to have a littlepetition regarding this, so they are hiding it pretty badly.

    The wedding was held at night and it was grand. Many big shots came. Since Rajan¡¯s threat waspletely gone, Raunak¡¯s status has grown in the capital. He is a high level official and the way he worked, he is bound reach greater heights no matter how they looked at it.

    Many are convinced that he would leave this ce soon enough and go to the higher realm. After all, he is only two promotions away from the ceiling of this ce and the only higher officials that have higher status than him would be the King and the Elders.

    He cannot be a king, but he can surely be an elder. But to be an elder, they have to work in the upper realm for a certain amount of time. Even those who went there, the cream of the crop would stay there and climb a differentdder and the some would return and sit on top of the whole Charbhum realm.

    Either way, his prospects are higher than what they can reach and fathom.

    Every senior official came and even a representative from the elders came to the wedding.

    After the wedding ceremony, the couple got too busy with greeting all the people that came. One good thing is that no one came from Ramya¡¯s family saving the awkwardness. Even her father didn¡¯te. Ramya seemed to have mixed feelings about this.

    Sam gave his gift and so did the trio.

    After the wedding was over, everyone left to their own way.

    Raunak has bought a new house and the couple went to that house directly.

    They are currently in the backyard of the house which has a small pond with some lotus flowers in it.

    They sat in the garden under the full moon as they chatted in each other¡¯s embrace.

    "Let¡¯s go through the presents shall we?" Ramya asked and Raunakplied.

    All the presents are in their spatial rings. They took one after another and made fun of the people who gave them.

    "All the presents are so diplomatic and clear signs of sucking up. I didn¡¯t expect that my situation in the bureaucrat circle will turn from being oppressed constantly to being sucked up to in a single night."

    "Well, how do you like the feeling of someone sucking up, my dear officer?" Ramya asked yfully.

    "Stop teasing alright, let¡¯s go through the remaining gifts. There are only four left. One is from Sam and the other three are from trio."

    They went for the trio¡¯s gifts first and they were amazed.

    "These fellows spent a fortune on these things. They really didn¡¯t hold back." Raunak said as he looked at the three gifts.

    One of them is arge jar of honey, the other one is a special fruit and thest one is special herb.

    These three are the specialties of the threes. And they are extremely rare to the point that each unit will only be avable for every decade. And they are auctioned off. The price would be in hundreds of millions.

    Ramya hit him gently and said.

    "Why are you calling them fellows? Aren¡¯t they Sam¡¯s friends? Give some respect."

    "My dear Ramya. Can you stop revering anything associated with Sam. He is your savior, but not his friends. Its enough you respect them normally, you don¡¯t have put them on pedestal. Anyway, it is not that I don¡¯t like them. But you should see how they behave when Sam is not around. They are living nightmares."

    "Okay, what is Sam¡¯s gift? What do you think he bought?"

    "Who knows?"

    They opened the gift and were surprised to find out the token and the letter. Ramya is looking at the token curiously while Raunak opened the letter.

    The letter has few words.

    "One day, I and my friends will disappear and you might have to leave this ce and go somewhere else. And in that situation if you are in trouble and you can find any organization that is named after ¡¯dusk¡¯ or you hear any information regarding me or my description, you can go to that ce with this token and they will help you ovee no matter what problem it is.

    This is a symbol that you are under my protection and it can be used for generations toe. But it can only be used once. So, please be careful and do not discuss it with me or anyone else after today.

    Happy married life."

 Chapter 796: Another deal

    Raunak was a bit stumped by the letter. He doesn¡¯t know how to react.

    He always felt that Sam is a bit mysterious but he didn¡¯t know that he is far more mysterious than he could fathom.

    This letter answered some of his questions, but created a lot more of them. Ramya is even more confused. But they didn¡¯t pursue the topic. It is their big day after all.

    After that day, Raunak wanted to ask Sam about the letter many times, but he couldn¡¯t bring himself to and since Sam is also not keen on this and it was made clear within the letter, both of them didn¡¯t bring up the topic and just went on with their preparations.

    First thing Sam did after the wedding is go to the 2 directly and then he took up residence in his base along with the trio so that he could travel back and forth from deste and bring his staff back.

    Since many people graduate from the school and join the organization, and also from the time Sam sent the first batch of people to the banished realm, everyone is waiting for such a chance. Sam didn¡¯t bring those people from the banished realm, but many people heard stories from the dwarves.

    Once they stayed in the deste realm for a long while, there is a limit to what they can do and learn here, so there are many eager candidates that wants to leave this ce and grow somewhere else, where the consummate realm cultivators are not the strongest anymore.

    They want to experience that new world.

    And along with that, many of these graduated and eager people are handpicked by the already established department heads, researchers and the professors of the school.

    They are all eager to join a ce like this.

    And Sam decided to take around forty people this time. Even though it is far more than what he took to the banished realm, but there is a difference. The banished realm is a mutual exchange program for learning. He doesn¡¯t need much development within the banished realm due to its limited resources, but the charbhum realm is different.

    He has apletely different set of ns for that realm.

    He made trips and slowly made all his candidates merge in this ce. Along with them, Sam also let out another group of people. The Vampires.

    Precisely speaking, the vampire chess pieces. Once they entered the chess board, they are bound to it. And since Sam has multiple chess teams, he has made them fight each other non-stop and he finally broke through their minds.

    They are bound to listen to Sam¡¯s orders and they are bound to work as a team. Now they are nothing more than brainwashed ves with some bloodsucking habits.

    But Sam didn¡¯t forget to feed them. Every day, he eats a lot and he collected the blood of the beasts he ate and gave it to the vampires, so they are slowly growing.

    He even experimented with the blood of the sea folks, but only water element vampires have any use for that, the rest of them are extremely receptive of this.

    The same thing happened to the ghouls, only water elemental ghouls can eat the flesh of the sea folks.

    As for why Sam is interested in feeding them, it is because of the sting ray fish. The fish that ate and drank the flesh and blood of the sea folks had mutated.

    The mutation is slight, but it can make a lot of difference whenpared to a normal sting ray fish.

    Most of the changes are physical, the stinger improved in size and shape along with the enhancement of the poison and even the body¡¯s physical characteristics are improved. The defense and the dexterity are amazing. These things really increase the strength of the sea creatures.

    Nowing back to the vampires, he is going to leave them here as the secret guards. The chess board makes it possible for him to make them obey all themands.

    So, he is making them the secret guard of the school and the base. As for why he is not leaving the ghouls, wights or the Minotaur, they cannot merge into the society here with their looks.

    It is that simple.

    After arranging everything and all his personnel are in ce, it is now time for Raunak to do his magic.

    He is going to conduct mass examinations for the teacher¡¯s license in all threes. Previously there are very rarely any teachers picked from the sides, except for some special schools that are established within thoses.

    But now, Raunak is changing the norm using his authority.

    While Sam is waiting for the tests to be over, he heard a news which he can take advantage of. The news about the sea.

    This shocked him a bit, because he knew that the situation improved since the products he gave started production and are being constantly produced and the government which is vastly wealthy is not holding back anything at all.

    They are clearly putting all their efforts in, but it seems like they pissed off the sea folks even more. The sea folks created arge sea wave which is almost a miniature tsunami and flooded the border viges. The sea waterunched itself through the woods and hit the towns and viges that are under right next to the forests separating the seas and the rest of the.

    And this happened to every border town or vige and the sea folks used this water as their advantage and are advancing into the viges and towns and ughtering the people and the beasts in the forest. They are staying there until the next wave of water and are using it to take the corpses back along with them and are escaping.

    Sam didn¡¯t get this news from the shadow mice or some other indirect way. He got this news from the people¡¯s gossip. The news was already all over the public and the people that are in those viges and towns are trying to reach the capital. The people are flooding over every day.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but shake his head. The soldiers didn¡¯t seem to get a hold of the weakness of the sea folks and are still fighting with them directly like fools. The first they should have done is send a team of elite to go deep into their territory and find as much information as they can. But they are just fighting them like brutes.

    For the first time, in a while, Sam is thinking of selling something else this time. But not in exchange for the money, but for some permissions.

    So, he left the 2 and went to meet professor in the 1.

    "Didn¡¯t expect that a day woulde for you toe and meet me. What do you want?"

    "I am not here exactly just because I want something. But I also have something that you need. Which actually trumps what I want."

    "What would that be?"

    "The way to defeat the Sea folks."

    Professor stayed silent for a while and looked at Sam right in the eyes.

    After that brief pause he spoke.

    "You knew about the sea folks before the war didn¡¯t you?"

    Sam just smiled and stayed silent.

    "So, what do you want and what do you have to offer?"

    "First, let us talk about what I have to offer. I have a detailed hierarchal structure of the sea folks, their breeding methods, their weakness, strength everything you need to know about it, I know it. How valuable do you think it is?"

    "Do you want more money? Just how much money do you need? You know that you are one of the wealthiest individuals in this realm right?"

    "No, I don¡¯t need money. I just have too much of it."

    Professor really wanted to smash his face.

    "Then what do you want?"

    "I want some approvals done."

    "Approvals?"

    "Yes, I need some government approvals. I would like to charge of the government funded orphanages."

    "Why would you do that?"

    "I am an orphan myself. It is just giving back to the society. I would take charge of the orphanages. All their needs will be taken care of."

    "Its hard to get those approvals, if there is any mishap in the orphanage, the public will grill the government and the government will have to grill you which would be a bit problematic as you are a major tax payer and the bureaucrats don¡¯t want to piss you off."

    "Don¡¯t worry, I have a way to convince you."

    "How?"

    "The new school is going to open its one research center and they have their own revenue system. Half of the revenue gained by that research center will go for the school and the other half is going to the orphanages.

    The research base in the 2 alsoes uses a simr scheme, but they will give one-third of their ie to the orphanages."

    "That¡¯s a lot of money."

    "Of course, it is. So, now can I get those approvals?"

    "Yeah, one of my students will contact you for the paperwork, it will take two days for the approval, and you can give me the data then."

    "Are you sure you don¡¯t want it now?"

    "I am not stupid enough to think that you would give it to me now."

 Chapter 797: Experts

    Sam stayed in 1 for the next two days. He waited for the procedures toplete. His tax documents were verified by some officers and after two days the procedures werepleted easily.

    Sam went to see the professor and told them everything rted to their weakness. He didn¡¯t say anything rted to the mutation of the sea creatures.

    He told them about the breeding bases, the training bases, the egg pods, their weakness to the poison and theirmunication methods, their digestive habits of the corpses. Some of these things are already known to professors but some are new.

    He didn¡¯t expect Sam to have this much information on hand. He instantly penned down everything and sent the details to the One-star military unit. This could be a military achievement.

    But the war is already going on arge scale. Sam is pretty sure that this would be a longsting war. It would go on for at least three to four months continuously even with all the weakness they knew.

    Because therge waves that are sweeping the viges could only be the result of the Consummate level sea folks trying to make a move and it could even be a collective move.

    The soldiers are going to have a hard time.

    "By the way, I want to make another business deal. Are you interested?" Sam asked after the exchange ispleted.

    "We are extremely low on funds. Do you know how many students I have squeeze dry to get the funds for the weapons?"

    "I don¡¯t know, but I am sure that the number might be huge. But this time, I am not selling, I would like to buy."

    "Buying? Wow, you are even willing to spend money? Tell me what do you want to buy?"

    "The leftovers of the battle. I want the shells of the pods. From the smaller ones to the one upied by the consummate level one."

    The Professor was surprised and started thinking deeply.

    "Don¡¯t think too much into it. I just want to do some research on it. Not everything I touch makes me money, you know? You guys might think I made the money easily, but I probably have worked harder than all of youbined to get what I want and I had to waste tons of spirit stones on things like this."

    "Really? How long did it take to develop that harpoon gun? I am really fascinated by that."

    "That would be too much information for you. Just tell me if you can sell them to them. I highly doubt any of your artisans could make anything out of it."

    "Aren¡¯t you looking down on the elves too much?"

    "A threat that was lurking around for centuries and an outsider like me had to create a usible solution that could even have a minuscule of a chance to create an advantage. Your credentials speak for themselves, my credentials back up my words. It is not me looking down on you guys, rather it is me stressing a fact."

    Professor smirked at those words and said.

    "You really are a proud person. Let¡¯s do it that way then. The One-star military unit will get to choose the reward other than the merit for your information, I will ask them to choose the shells, but you have to pay for them. They might not be cheap."

    "One billion for everything. You can take it or leave it."

    "Two billion."

    "One billion and two hundred million. You don¡¯t have any other buyer."

    "One billion and five hundred million. You don¡¯t another seller too."

    "Deal."

    "Deal."

    They shook their hands, but the professor couldn¡¯t help but ask.

    "You have too much money. Why bother bargaining for this small amount?"

    "It is money earned, not given. Every penny has its own worth. I don¡¯t want to splurge when I don¡¯t have to."

    "You are the same age of all those young masters, but why the hell are you so different? It would have been easier for me if you were like them."

    Sam just smiled and left the room.

    The Professor wrote another letter and sent it through a different courier.

    After the deal waspleted, Sam went back to 2 to oversee the situation of the tests. There is one problem in this scenario though. Currently, the people in 2 are panicking and everyone is looking for civilian identities and escape to others.

    Most of them went for soldier recruitment, but it was stopped because the government just deployed the new recruits back to the sea to fight the Sea Folks. So, they are stumped in that way and tried for other ways.

    And then came this mass teacher license exam. There are three times the applications that are expected.

    This dyed the process by a bit.

    The forty people Sam brought are not just ordinary staff. Not one of them has cultivation less than Late-stage pre-transcendent stage and the strongest of them is a peak stage Transcendent stage.

    Due to the constant potion sets that are being made to aid the breakthroughs of these people, the organization has a constant growth of powerhouses.

    There are even some Consummates and even the Space gate association has four consummates in their ranks at the moment.

    He wanted to bring some of them, but it would be a bit difficult to mask the powerhouses. There would be many doubts raising among them.

    So, Sam has different ns for them. There are some zones in 1 that are not really developed. They are deep forests or some dangerous mountain regions that arepletely under the control of the beasts. Not the centaurs, elves, or humans, no one goes deeper into those areas.

    So, Sam decided to use this to his advantage and he is sure those consummate stage cultivators would love it. Because, due to theck of spiritual energy within that, they had to use every minuscule of energy that is avable and absorbable to get where they are now.

    Once they enter a spiritual energy-rich environment like this, they would have another boost and it wouldn¡¯t be an exaggeration to say that Sam would have some people who broke past the consummate level.

    He is nning to bring the old shopkeeper too. As he has the most probability of breaking through.

    The seal would have already gone and the after-effects of that seal would have also disappeared.

    He might even be preparing for a breakthrough right at this moment.

    While Raunak is struggling to take care of this mass selection and the war is going on intensely, Sam made his own ns.

    He stayed there for the week and made sure that all forty of his candidates finished the tests and got their licenses.

    He then brought them back to 1 and arranged their quarters within the campus.

    After dealing with that, he went on with the orphanage procedures.

    The first thing he has to do is upgrade their living conditions, a proper food supply, and resources. Every orphan that is residing in these orphanages would be eligible for joining the school. For now, the school is not open to others.

    Only orphans.

    The little teenager informant from the fruit street got a message from Sam indicating the opening of the school.

    He and some of his friends that has any aspirations of making their lives better entered the school. The school became a hot topic. The only restriction in the school is that the people that already have certain family backgrounds cannot join.

    The orphans can join even if they are not awakened and the normal cultivators who are below Novice and don¡¯t have any family background that could help them grow has special ess through a tough interview.

    There is no disparity in fields of study. They can study any field of study and they can ever learn things that are not rted to their own field of study.

    As for the kids that haven¡¯t awakened, they are being taught about the basic sciences and other things just like the school of the deste.

    The students are given great food, proper amodation, and enough monthly resources that aid their development properly.

    After everything was settled in the next three weeks, Sam finally went on his journey to these special zones.

    The zones that are very sparsely popted by the citizens are visited by Sam one after the other. Even though it is expensive to make so many trips back and forth from the deste realm to this realm, it is still better as he would gain more security.

    He made a total of five trips and set five consummate level cultivators. Two of them are in the early stages, two of them are in the middle stages. Thest one is none other than the shopkeeper that is on verge of a breakthrough.

    In fact, as soon as he came to this world, he felt like he would be able to breakthrough within two days.

    It is about time anyway. He was already at the peak for years under the seal and even four to five years after the seal was removed. This is way too much suppression at least the suppression is because of theck of spiritual energy in the environment of the deste realm which didn¡¯t cause any harmful effects to his own body.

    After Sam finished the visits to these ces and came back to the school.

    One expert after another appeared out of nowhere to join the school as teachers. These five experts raised the poprity of the school to another level.

 Chapter 798: Great Massage

    The issue of the school was finally resolved and even the orphanages arepletely under control.

    Sam kept the trio the in-charge of all the orphanages¡¯ redevelopment.

    This went on for a few months. It even took longer than the construction of the whole school campus. And by now, it is election time.

    The election for the King or Queen.

    At first, Sam thought, only the people of 1 are eligible for the vote, but it turned out the voting will be done in each and every vige, town, and city. But the campaigns are only done on 1.

    Because the elves believed that the results of the rest of the viges, towns, and cities are already decided by what faction won there in their local elections.

    Sam shook his head at this notion. Even though it is somewhat rational to think like that, it is not exactly a fact. There is still a chance and particrly when there is a long time for campaigning. They can use this chance to point out the faults and holes in the freshly elected ces and try to get a win from there.

    But it is not Sam¡¯s ce to judge these guys, much less worry for them. He went there and threw a random vote over them and came back.

    In the next few days, Sam was in constant meditation mode. There was a new residence for him on the school campus and this location is concealed to its limit. He is currently sitting in the middle of argeplex andplicated formation.

    All the beasts that have a contract with him are sitting or standing around within arge circle and each of them is in the middle of a small formation that was fully charged with their respective elemental energies.

    Sam sat in the middle of all those formations with another formation that is not only connected with those different formations but was also filled with normal spiritual energy stones. He is practically sitting on piles of stones and every time they are finished, they are being reced with a mere wave of the hand.

    Due to his constant activities, Sam really didn¡¯t have time to have these proper cultivation sessions very often.

    Most of the time, the beasts cultivate and share their energy with him. But now that he is also in the picture, this cultivation session is going to be fruitful.

    It has been almost a year since he came here and it has been a year and a half since thest pce of inheritance. He managed to create this base and power six months earlier than he predicted and now he has another six months¡¯ time to explore the high and low of this realm before going back to the deste.

    As for Arman leaving before that, Sam is not exactly worried. Even if Arman managed to gain an urge to ditch him and escape to another realm, Arkiv who is still in the deste realm can help Sam with the location.

    After all, Arkiv liked being in the deste realm where not many people can touch him. Whereas every realm they went to, it has been a nightmare for him. Even in Naga Loka, he is the one that suffered the most.

    So, he would definitely need Sam¡¯s help with that and for that, he has to wait for Sam.

    Anyway, in these six months, Sam made some new ns. While the whole city is waiting for the election results, Sam was surprised by something.

    The reward the trio asked for finally arrived. Even though two of them are fulfilled, thest one and the most important one of them all, the one thing the four of them came to this realm for arrived.

    It is actually a special vine.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but marvel at the vine. This exactly what he wanted. This vine is extremely thin, long and finally, it is hollow. There is a liquid in that hollow vine structure that is slowly moving through it and it is full of wood elemental energy.

    But the energy couldn¡¯t be felt from outside at all. The vinepletely enveloped it. Along with the vine that was brought in a special storage device, there was also a small booklet along with that, which contained the details regarding the nt and its properties.

    He first nted it in divine dimension for it to grow.

    Now the major task waspleted and he has to wait for the vines to grow and he can make a leisurely n.

    One of them is to find a good beast with wood elemental energy.

    Sam¡¯s next major breakthrough is right around the corner, if he is not wrong about his body¡¯s condition, then he would be in peak stage Pre-transcendent stage ready to break through into the transcendent stage for the next pce of inheritance and he needs to find the beast.

    Currently, there are two types of beasts, Sam has his eye on. One with the wood element and the other with the spatial element.

    The charbhum realm is an elven realm, finding the wood elemental beast is more probable.

    Along with that, he also has onest invention he came up with.

    But he came up with it at the start of this journey. That is regarding the bagasse, scrap of sugarcane. The plywood made from that scrap would be an absolute treasure for the elves.

    Before he left, that would be a good way to squeeze some money dry from this realm and leave.

    And in the middle of that, there are two more things. One is to conduct research on the tortoiseshell and get it more if he can along with that he also has to research the egg pod shells.

    If he can find a proper use for them, there would be something he can gift to the researchers back at home and also some researchers here.

    Apart from that, there are some more misceneous things to do. Like collecting the raw materials and herbs of this ce and taking them to the deste realm.

    But before they did any of these. There is one more thing the four of them decided to do.

    That is some splurging and enjoying.

    It has been a while since Sam came to this realm, but he didn¡¯t enjoy that much. With all the things they had done, it is time for some reward.

    Sam is really eager to try the massage technique of this realm.

    The trio is even singing praises for it to be the best of the best. If possible he also nned to recruit the people of some niche trades like this masseuse or somebody else. Anyway, he never nned to restrict the courses of the school to a certain range.

    After discussing, they decided on their first stop. Thergest luxury center in the capital.

    It is almost a second home for all the spoiled brats of the city. Sam decided to go and rx there.

    When he saw the area, he waspletely surprised. The ce is actually better than he thought it would be. It is even on par with the resort he built in Mirage city of Naga Loka.

    It was built with wood and it covered arge expanse in the middle of the forest. There is a fresh waterfall which is giving a refreshing feel and the stream that ising from this waterfall went through the middle of this establishment.

    Most of the wooden cabins are constructed at the bank of this stream.

    There are many people roaming around. Most of the staff are female and to Sam¡¯s surprise, most of them are elves. They are dressed in moderately skimpy silk outfits and they did their tasks.

    Some of them are carrying fruits and beverages, some of them are in the arms of the young masters and some of them are in a different outfit which seemed to indicate that they are a masseuse.

    As soon as the four of them entered, the manager who is a male elf came forward and greeted them.

    "Hello, how may I help you?"

    Sam looked at him and spoke.

    "Do you have membership or package deals?"

    "Yes, we have various sses of membership." The manager smiled and took out a scroll. Sam looked through it and his eyes directly went to the costliest one of all.

    "Four Ruby memberships."

    After that, he was given a special service booklet. It is the menu of the ce and the first section happened to be the menu for bed chamber services, which he automatically ignored and looked for the best massage package.

    "Four of those please."

    With that, Sam passed a spatial ring with a boatload of spirit stones.

    The Manager was all smiles and they were taken to a special cottage right next to the waterfalls.

    Thergest room of all and everything that is needed for service was already inside.

    There are even special waitresses for this ce and they are dressed even skimpily. Sam could only shake his head.

    The elves really do know how to enjoy themselves. But he has no interest in having sex with them. He went on and removed their outer clothes and only stayed with a towel covering their lower halves andid on the tables.

    And then soon the masseuses came and Sam had the best massage he had in the two lifetimes.

 Chapter 799: Sirens arrived

    Sam came out with friends and it is already evening. He felt like his body is a thousand times lighter. Although the masseuse was scared a bit by the scars on his body, she slowly regained control and Sam fell asleep in the middle.

    Not aplete deep sleep though. He held on to his consciousness and he can still feel the hands and the person that is moving those hands, he just didn¡¯t care about the rest of the room.

    He decided toe here more often. He held the ruby card in his hands and went back to his residence.

    The trio is stunned by how Sam was so satisfied and liked it so much. This is the first time Sam showed this much interest in something like this.

    The reason Sam liked it is not because of just the pleasure it is giving him, the person who is doing the massage is actually using the wood elemental energy in such a precise way to cover a small portion of the body at a time and used the vitality to rejuvenate the cells in his body.

    He was really impressed by her technique. When he looked at the profile of the masseuse given by the manager, he was even more impressed. She is specialized in many more types of massages and is the best of the best within the whole establishment and possibly even in the whole.

    If not for the fact, that he was too lost in the massage, he would have even tried to recruit her.

    But he is not in a hurry. There are still many techniques that he has to try and there is a lot of time for him to recruit her.

    While Sam and his friends dedicated their time to enjoy themselves, something else is happening in the city. The day for the election result¡¯s announcement is going to be given out soon and the coronation of the new king or queen would be conducted.

    So, there are some special guests in the city.

    From the seashore of a town, a group of sirens emerged out of the water and started their journey to the Capital a few days ago and they reached the city on that very day.

    The first thing they did to go and meet the elders and then went to their own residence that they have.

    The whole city is in fervor upon their arrival.

    This is the tradition between the sirens and the elves. For every coronation, the sirens will send the envoys over to give their wishes and gifts for them to show their support and continue their coexisting cooperation.

    The sirens will take their time and enjoy themselves on the surface and experience the pleasures this world has to offer.

    Along with that, there will be a series of meetings between the sirens and the elven officials discussing some things which are not disclosed to the public.

    So, for the next few days, while Sam is enjoying himself with his friends. The remaining city is bustling, everyone is interested in impressing the sirens, all the business owners want to serve the sirens that are not from this ce.

    The trio is also discussing this as they found it interesting because the sirens don¡¯t pay normally with spirit stones, they give out some special rewards from the sea if they really like it, and turned out that the sirens are richer than the elves.

    And another shocking news is, they are evenrger in terms of poption.

    No wonder, the prideful elves wanted to coexist. Sam thought, but that is not the only thought Sam has when he remembered the three products he sold.

    Maybe, there is a chance for the shift in the bnce of power and this peaceful coexistence might notst long and if there is any chance that could happen, Sam might be able to take advantage of the current situation even more and get something else from someone else.

    While Sam is thinking of the sirens while getting a different massage which is done by some soft vines coiling around him, what he doesn¡¯t know is that the sirens are currently talking about him.

    Currently, there is a meeting happening between the envoys of the sirens and some elven officials.

    "I heard that the war between you and the sea folks intensified? And you guys are showing the chances of winning. I must congratte you. The Sea folks are pests that are hard to get rid of. If you manage to get rid of them, you would have a seapletely under your control."

    The Siren envoy asked as he tasted the wine in front of him. This is one of the wines Sam created and is a new delicacy to sirens which they seemed to enjoy a lot.

    "Thanks for the good wishes of Lord Varien. But it would still take some time before the sea folks are finished up. The consummate level creatures already on the move and they are creating big waves all over. It is a bit problematic."

    "Well, I heard that you have some new weapons which helped you enter the sea and even attack there properly, it seems like you people became good at making things."

    "haha, Lord Varien can truly jest. We are really not that great."

    "Don¡¯t be too modest. I would like to meet the maker of these weapons if possible."

    "That..."

    "Why? Are we not eligible?"

    "No, no, that is not what I meant. Currently, those weapons are produced by the One-star military unit and they are pretty discreet about the actual maker of the weapons. If you really want to, we will try and see what we can do."

    "Then please do. We would stay here until we get to meet that person."

    With that, the sirens left and went back to their arranged residence. The officials went to meet their superiors and the word began to pass.

    These officials clearly understand what the presence of these weapons means. The elves are prideful by nature and it would be a joke if one believed that they really don¡¯t have any aspirations to conquer the seas.

    These weapons are a clear show of that possibility and it has to be resolved as diplomatically as possible. The sirens don¡¯t have the disadvantages of the sea folks and they don¡¯t have to bid their time.

    They can attack anytime they want and it would still be a doubt whether the elven government can sustain that attack.

    So, they decided to arrange that meeting and soon the news reached the professor through the one-star military unit.

    Professor was a bit stumped. No one knows that Sam was the one who created these products. Very few people know about it and they are the one-star military unit, the professor himself, his trusted aides, and finally the tax officer who is also the subordinate of the professor who managed to conceal what kind of product that Sam has sold to gain this much money.

    Even Sam doesn¡¯t know that he waspletely concealed regarding this. He didn¡¯t want to hide it and neither did he think that it was possible.

    He already gave up the thought of hiding his actions as the tax regtions are quite strict here.

    There is even a department for riding some people if they are suspected of tax evasion.

    But they wouldn¡¯t go through the regr process of searching and digging, rather they would be asked to swear a tree spirit oath every now and then.

    He didn¡¯t want to get mixed up with this and do something stupid while he stayed in this world.

    What he doesn¡¯t know is, that the professor is not exactlyfortable with everyone knowing what Sam made.

    It would be a bit of trouble if others coveted it and there are too many loopholes in their contract.

    The main one is that the contract only states, that Sam can only sell the products or designs created in the research base of 2 to the one-star military. But that doesn¡¯t include or restrict Sam from opening the new base, or the products that are solely made by himself without the involvement of the research base.

    Elves are good at finding useful people and using them properly. If the remaining factions learned that Sam is making the waves in the weapon industry, then things wouldn¡¯t stay the same. The grenades are barely tolerable.

    But he couldn¡¯t reject the Siren¡¯s request.

    So, all he could do is send a request to Sam and also another request to the sirens that they would keep the creator of the weapons a secret.

    After writing both the letters he waited.

    When Sam got the letter, he was a bit surprised.

    But he agreed to the meeting. It wouldn¡¯t hurt to meet a person from the race that is ruling the sea. What could go wrong?

    But it seems like some were really bound to go wrong.

    Since he liked the massage sessions so much and particrly by that one person, he paid for the rest of the month andpletely booked her. He didn¡¯t even care if the service he took wouldn¡¯t be expensive enough to cover the cost. He just paid for the whole month with the most expensive package there is and made sure that she is avable every time hees here.

    After some research of the tortoiseshell, he went to try a new massage technique, but the manager is currently standing before him with a faint smile and telling him that she is not avable.

 Chapter 800: Encounter

    "Sir, you are our valuable customer. And we don¡¯t want to lose you. Please adjust for this one day."

    The manager looked at Sam and said with a faint smile.

    Sam looked at him coldly.

    He took a deep breath and asked.

    "Did I pay you for the whole month or not?"

    "Yes, you did."

    "Did I reserve her service in particr for the whole month or not?"

    "Yes, you did."

    "Then why am I not being provided by her service. The very reason I paid early is because, she might be stuck in somebody else¡¯s service when Ie here. Why do you think I paid for her earlier?"

    "I understand sir. But she is not avable."

    The manager just kept on that smiling face and looked at Sam. There is a sense of gloating in his eyes that could be clearly seen.

    No matter what Sam said, it is like punching cotton. He couldn¡¯tnd a proper blow with words.

    The trio didn¡¯te here today, so Sam is alone. But if they were here and saw his expression, they would have known that something is going to happen to this ce.

    "Give me one damn good reason, why I should wait?"

    "Because, I am asking nicely, Sir."

    Sam took another deep breath and asked.

    "I will just wait here for a while. Do you mind if I y my flute while I am waiting?"

    "By all means please do sir."

    Sam sat down and took out his flute. The manager turned around and walked in. A supervisor who is in charge of the waitresses followed him and asked.

    "Manager, what you are doing is wrong, if the boss finds out about this, we will be in big trouble. He is a valuable customer after all and he really did pay early just to avoid this scenario."

    "What is he going to do? I don¡¯t even know where he got that money. He must be some kind of mercenary. But at the end of the day, he is just a human. Since when did they have any say in what Elves do? Anyway, the customer I am mainly concerned about is the young master inside. He brought a special guest, so do take care of them properly."

    The supervisor shook her head and left.

    At this exact moment, Sam¡¯s aura raged and music started spreading all over the establishment. At first, the music is not big of a deal, because it is extremely smooth and melodious even if it is loud.

    But soon the situation changed bit by bit.

    The first thing that happened, is the water in the waterfall has turned cold. And this caused the few people that are rxing in the water-rted massages and swimming in the stream to get cold all of a sudden and their pleasantness disappeared.

    There are some cold winds around causing people to lose that warm and cozy,fortable feeling.

    When they are feeling the cold wind, then came the second problem. The wind currents turned hot. The hot and cold winds are hitting their bare bodies. They came here to rx, so they are not using their spiritual energy to block everything. Their bodies are currently closest to the normal body. Even though they are strengthened and wouldn¡¯t be hurt by these cold and hot winds, it is more of an irritation technique.

    The next thing is the people whose feet are being rxed in the mud. All of a sudden the mud turned dense and gripped their feet roughly causing them to streak in irritation.

    The manager was stunned. Theints are pouring in non-stop, but before he could reach another thing is happening. A wind current is carrying the fallen leaves, debris, and dirt all and rushed into the tent where the special baths are given to the customers. The special baths include the girls performing the special services.

    While they are in the middle of it, this small dirt storm, went right into their private parts.

    "ARGgggggghhh."

    One after another the customers are shrieking and calling the manager.

    At this moment, the music suddenly stopped and all these weird things also stopped happening.

    The manager looked at Sam in horror.

    "What are you doing? Are you trying to cause trouble?"

    He started yelling like crazy, but Sam didn¡¯t even care.

    "Now, can I see my masseuse?"

    The manager was stumped. This is some reaction he didn¡¯t expect.

    "Do you know where you are and who you are speaking to?"

    Before Sam could even answer, another young elf came out from the cottage and walked towards the manager.

    "What is with all the disturbances?

    "Nothing young master. Someone is trying to cause trouble." After that, he started whispering everything into his ear, and then the young master looked at Sam.

    "You are the one causing trouble. So, what if I have snatched your masseuse, I didn¡¯t snatch your wife, why are you so overreacting? Even if I did snatch your wife, you wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything. Do you know who I am and who I am apanying today? It is your honor.."

    Before he could finish his words, another person came out of the cottage and Sam understood why this young master popping so much. He is apanying a siren.

    Before the young master and siren could interact, Sam already held the young master by his hand and twisted so that he could make the young master face the ground and dropped an axe kick on the back of his head.

    "Snatching my wife? Try and snatch my shoes and see if I would make you wish you were dead?"

    "How dare you hit me? Do you know who my father is?"

    "Why are you asking me? Your mother doesn¡¯t know or is she too embarrassed to tell you?" Everyone in the room almost bit their tongues.

    While Sam is about to make another move, a fierce aura was focused on him making him halt.

    "What is happening here?"

    The manager was stunned. He looked around only to find a mature elven woman walking towards them and beside her, is the supervisor who is walking meekly.

    The woman seems to be the boss of the ce. She looked at the siren and then at the person that is lying under Sam¡¯s foot and said.

    "Please leave him alone and tell me what happened."

    "I am a ruby member and I paid for the highest service for the remaining of the month just so that I could reserve the masseuse and here I am to get the service and I was not allowed. May I know why?"

    The boss looked at the supervisor who whispered something.

    "I am sorry for the inconvenience. I will arrange for your service immediately."

    "No need." With that, Sam walked towards the masseuse who just came out and gave a card.

    "I am Sam. The person who established the new school. If you have an interest in teaching and also be the personal rejuvenator of the school, contact me. I am staying at this address. I would pay five times the money you get here annually and you don¡¯t want to wear the unwanted clothes and force yourself to do unwanted things.

    All you have to do is make sure the injured students are healed and get rid of their fatigue and teach your techniques to the interested children."

    With that, Sam turned around to leave.

    The boss frowned and didn¡¯t like this at all. But she didn¡¯t do anything. But the siren who is silent all the while stopped Sam and spoke.

    "Who are you?"

    "I am Sam."

    "Don¡¯t let me see you again. Otherwise, I will kill you."

    "Seems like the massage worked wonders. You are even daydreaming."

    Sam didn¡¯t stay any longer and left. He has to go for the meeting with the Siren envoys in the evening.

    After Sam left the boss looked at the masseuse withplicated eyes. The situation was seen by a lot of people, and five times the sry is a lot of money. If she forcefully stopped her, it couldn¡¯t be hidden from the public eye and the reputation would take a hit.

    But she is the top masseuse of the establishment. Even some transcendent and consummate stage cultivatorse back for her massages regrly. She looked at the young master who barely stood up and the manager who is panicking.

    She pped the manager to the ground and looked at the young master before saying.

    "You are really getting of hand aren¡¯t you? Tell your father to meet me this evening. I will have a good talk with him."

    She didn¡¯t even care about the presence of the siren and left.

    In the evening, Sam went to the meeting ce arranged by the professor to meet the siren envoys.

    As soon as Sam entered the room with his friends, he was stunned. Professor and Galvin are sitting along with some sirens while talking about something. Some sirens are standing behind the sirens who sat, clearly indicating their subordinate status.

    But one of the subordinates looked at Sam and his eyes widened. His aura raged and he almost made a move. But before he could do that, the professor spoke.

    "Herees our guest. He is Sam. The inventor of three of these devices."

    Varien stood up and shook Sam¡¯s hands.

    "Nice to meet you. Mr. Sam."

    "Nice to meet you too. Mr. Varien."

    Both of them took the seat across each other and exchanged some pleasantries. Sam gave a provocative look to the subordinate standing behind here and then and continued to talk.

 Chapter 801: Meeting with Sirens

    Sam and Varien are making small talk. They are not talking about anything serious though. The professor understood the cue and left the room.

    After that with a mere gesture, the subordinates standing behind the envoy also left the room.

    Varien looked at the trio.

    "No problem, let them stay here."

    "Sure. I would like to talk about the weapons you designed? May I know if you designed them on specific instructions or did you do it on your own?"

    "You are pretty straightforward. But don¡¯t worry. Those weapons are not made for you and no one ordered me to do it. I made them for hunting the emerald tortoise. They found a use for it because of the sea folks that suddenly became impatient and started the war."

    "That is good. The only thing we are worried about is that they can be used for more than just sea folks."

    "I am sure. They could be."

    "Sam, I would be straightforward and honest. Because of these weapons, there is a probability that there could be a war sparked between elves and sirens. You might have already known, the elves are extremely prideful and they don¡¯t take anyone as equals that easily. And I guess you can understand why they even gave sirens that chance."

    "Of course, but what can I do? I don¡¯t have that much political influence, even if the war started. I am just an inventor."

    "I know that too. And that is the area of expertise we are here for. Not the political influence. Since you are the one who made it, we would like to ask you to make something for defending against these things. We would be extremely grateful for that."

    Sam was surprised. He didn¡¯t expect something like this. When he learned that the meeting is about the creation of these things, he surely expected some reaction from the sirens. Like anger, discontent and hostility.

    But this is somethingpletely unexpected. They didn¡¯t show any anger, they are showing willingness to cooperate instead.

    This is new for him.

    "What kind of defense, do you want? If it is a defensive system for arge ce or something like that, I have very few limited things to do."

    "No, not something like that. We would like you to make something that is good for individual defense. Something particrly good against the harpoons."

    "Is selling weapons a viable option between us? What if there are any problems with the government?"

    "Don¡¯t worry, I will manage all of that. All I ask, is that you pay a visit to our ce and make something for us to defend ourselves. I have a convincible story made up just for this. If you can just sell us these things, we would be happy, if you can make it possible so that we can make them directly, then that would be even ideal."

    "But why do I have to pay you a visit?"

    "Because that is the only way, I can make the story convincing. In fact, there is indeed a problem there and we would like your assistance in that also. As for me betraying you, you don¡¯t have to worry about that."

    With that, he took out a blood red scroll from his storage. The very familiar scroll that was given to him by the professor to make him believe that he would stay away from Raunak.

    Sam was indeed convinced. Actually, since he got the dimensional drifter, he is not exactly worried about getting stuck. As long as they couldn¡¯t detect the divine dimension, he would be able to escape. And for all the days he spent here and no one saw it, which means there is no one here who can detect it. It is safe for him at the moment.

    But after seeing the scroll, he was even more convinced. He is really tempted to go to the sea. After all, no matter what world it is, the sea is thergest treasure trove and also thergest home for the danger.

    The greatest of the treasures might as well be in the lowest depths of the sea apanied by the craziest of the dangers.

    How can he not be interested in visiting such a ce? Particrly when a whole civilization and a race is living there for centuries. He still couldn¡¯t forget the experience in the Merman in Naga Loka.

    But he didn¡¯t agree immediately.

    "I will give you an answer by tomorrow. Can you tell me where you live? I can visit you directly."

    "Sure, thanks for the consideration."

    Sam left with the trio and on their way, he spoke to them.

    "Do you guys want toe along? Or do you have something else in mind?"

    "Nope, we are going to the 2. We heard that the sea folks are going all out. We don¡¯t want to miss out on the fun."

    "Really? Then try to collect some bodies of the sea folks will you?"

    "Sure."

    "When are you going to leave?"

    "Tomorrow, afternoon. We are signing up for the special recruitment as temporary soldiers."

    "Sure, don¡¯t forget to be careful. Particrly you Philip, you have greatest disadvantage inside the water."

    "Yeah, sure. Don¡¯t start nagging me."

    They went back with some small talk and funny banter.

    As soon as they left, the subordinates went inside and the one particr subordinate was in hurry to speak, but before he could speak, Varien raised his hand and pped him across the face.

    "Can¡¯t even hide your killing intent? What kind of soldier can you be? If you can¡¯t even do that, go back to your prodigal life and live the rest of it while bragging about your ancestors and noble blood. The army has no ce for you."

    The young man held his face with his palm and looked at Varien with anger and resentment.

    "Are we taking him with us?" The young man still asked the question he wanted to ask. Not minding the face numbing p he suffered.

    "Yes, if he agrees."

    "I don¡¯t him toe with us."

    "And why do you think that matters?"

    "Because, he is my enemy."

    "So, he is the one put you in your ce this morning. I heard of that matter. You not only stole his masseuse, your humanpanion even yapped his mouth at her. How did you expect it to go? Good thing he didn¡¯t kill you."

    "Him, killing me? In his dreams. I am telling you now. If hees with us, no matter what happens to him is not my responsibility."

    "Yes, it wouldn¡¯t be yours. Go do what you want to do. I dare you to do it."

    With that the argument was over.

    Sam came back to his residence, informed Raunak and made arrangements for his friends that are going the next day.

    The next morning, he sent off the trio and went to meet the Siren¡¯s in their residence.

    He agreed to go and they decided to start their journey the next day.

    He spent the rest of the day just with his research.

    The next day, the Sirens and Sam started their journey from the city.

    They went to another seashore city and entered the sea.

    Sam is wearing his breathing device and started swimming with the sirens. They are exactly like the mermen in the water. Their legs changed. Except for their auras and their skin tones, they are almost same.

    The only drawback in the journey is Sam has to swim for half a day, before they reached the deeper waters where they got a ride.

    They are sitting on the back of arge shark. This shark is out of proportion and is almost same size as a miniature whale.

    After travelling for a day, they finally arrived at the ce and when Sam saw the city, he couldn¡¯t help but feel nostalgic and a smile appeared on his face.

    The structure andyout of the city is almost same as the merman city. Most of them are made from therge shell-fish beasts¡¯ leftovers.

    The people are also the same. Except there are fishmen here. Only the sirens.

    "Your city is beautiful."

    "Thanks you."

    "So, you created the city near the undersea volcano?"

    "How do you know?"

    "Just a guess actually. The lighting into the city is getting the energy from heat and where can you get heat under water."

    "You seem to have good understanding of energy flow and energy natures."

    "Of course, that¡¯s one of my strong suits, so tell your subordinate to control that energy. He is clearly trying so hard to hold back. With that he wouldn¡¯t even be able to sneak up on a fish. Much less me."

    Varien looked at the same subordinate who he pped yesterday and red before they went to see the city.

    "So, when are you going to see that problem of yours?"

    "You don¡¯t want to rest first?"

    "First work, then enjoyment. That¡¯s how I operate."

    "Great then, Please follow me."

 Chapter 802: Sea Urchins

    Sam and Varien didn¡¯t waste too much time as they just started their journey once again.

    While they are in the middle of their journey, Sam asked.

    "If you don¡¯t mind me asking? Why didn¡¯t you stay until the coronation? I am pretty sure it would have been done in the next three days."

    "We don¡¯t need to stay actually. Not all of the Sirens returned. I am only there for the discussions and meetings with the elders and officials to think of ways to improve our rtionship. There is still a group of sirens left there to fulfill the superficial diplomatic duties.

    They have higher ranks, so they don¡¯t do much work."

    "Oh? That is good."

    The conversation halted once again and after some time Varien himself spoke.

    "We are near that location. I would just give you a brief estimation of the problem.

    This area is the shallow waters nearest to our location and there is an ind nearby which is used by us to train our young sirens for on-groundbat.

    This is thergest ind of the seas nearby and it is also thergest producer of the natural resources that are avable on thend to us.

    But currently, the shallow waters all around the ind are upied by special creatures. They are some kind of sea urchins."

    "Sea urchins?"

    "Yes, they are giant sea urchins, but they are not as passive as the sea urchins of regr types. These things started shooting spikes at anything that came into their ecosystem. But their spikes are weird and they are not using water as their attacking element."

    "Really? That¡¯s strange."

    "You will see what I am talking about. Those attacks are sneaky and not defendable easily and I have never seen a better advantageous situation for the sheer numbers in a species. Of course other than the sea folks."

    "Do sea folks inhabit this sea too?"

    "They are actually. But they are not the biggest enemy. The main problem with the sea folks is their breeding capacity. They don¡¯t have gender. Every sea folk can reproduce by themselves. In 2, the sea folks are hidden within an undersea valley that was protected by a strong creature.

    If that creature knew that sea folks are inside, it might have been the first one that killed them. But they managed to conceal themselves after our ancestors¡¯ attempt to clear them off. And that one mistake cost the elves dearly.

    The sea folks are bad at learning. They don¡¯t learn fast. But once they learned they wouldn¡¯t forget the lesson. That day they learned the value of being able to hide and they started breeding once again.

    The very creature that acted as cover for them became their dinner and they started growing rapidly and at the same time carefully.

    The sea was slowly upied and elves didn¡¯t even have a chance at them in the water. After that, you can guess what happened. They expanded too much that the creatures in sea will one wouldn¡¯t be sufficient for their development.

    So, they needed the creatures from thend."

    "Seems like a giant pain in the ass."

    "It is actually. BE CAREFUL."

    Varien yelled and Sam became alert, he suddenly felt something zooming towards him and he dodged to the side. A forearm-sized spike zoomed past him. But that is not the only thing that surprised Sam.

    The thing that surprised him the most is the propulsion boost of the spike. It is not only fast and sneaky but gas is propelling it. It is almost like a rocket in the water.

    Sam took a step back and looked at the rock in front of this. There is nothing he could see. At least with normal eyes.

    He activated the energy vision and he finally the same something. A circr piece of ¡¯rock¡¯ is moving on thatrger rock with extreme stealth. And Sam saw another spikeing out of this piece of ¡¯rock¡¯. There is no sound, there are no energy waves, If not for the small gas bubble that emerged in the water, no one would even care for that gas bubble normally and as for the water ripples they are not that big of an indication because of the speed. Before the ripple can propagate the spike is already reaching the target.

    Sam dodged the second spike. He wanted to catch it, but he couldn¡¯t. It is too fast. With his normal body in the water, it is impossible for him to catch it.

    Sam swam back and waited there for a second before he noticed the ¡¯rock¡¯ stopped moving.

    Varien looked at Sam ready to interfere anytime.

    "This really is a lot of work. It is undetectable in the normal case. But is it really that big of a deal? The spike can be taken care of with an armor right?"

    "No there is poison in them. If it really stuck, the area would be swollen out of proportion and after it was swollen, it would explode easily with a single touch. And no matter what armor was used. The youngsters couldn¡¯t stop it. It is prating.

    Only Transcendent or higher managed to even have any chance at blocking it."

    Sam looked at it carefully for a while. The water elemental energy concentrated in his hand and he created a water fish full of spiritual energy and made it move towards the rock just like a fish would.

    The spike came and prated through the fish easily and it didn¡¯t stop. Sam tried his best to halt the spike within that fish¡¯s body, but it didn¡¯t work.

    "Anything with the water element is not working on the spikes. It is working on the urchin itself, but for that, we have to find its location first. But for the spikes themselves, they have this water elemental energy negation which is the major trouble for us."

    "You said they move in numbers, why is there only one?"

    "How do you know there is only one?"

    "I can see it moving on the rock."

    "You can?" Varien was surprised. But he held back and answered.

    "This is the outskirts of the area and the rock is small, so it can only be upied by one. There is a cliff for this ind. You must see it there. It is an underwater hell."

    Sam thought for a moment and swam towards the seafloor before collecting the sand and started creating a fish with his earth element.

    And once again he sent it towards the rock. This time, the spike once again prated and went through, but it was not as brutal and damaging as it was but the spike still didn¡¯t hold. It floated away in the water.

    Sam increased the next target in size and this time, the spike stayed like that. He recalled this sand lump back and took the spike out carefully.

    His arm turned into a rock with partial fusion and he held it by the tail end as he examined.

    He used the observation ability to check the structure of the spike.

    There is only one thing Sam could describe the internal structure of this thing as,plex and precise.

    The spike is not at allpletely solid. In fact, it is mostly hollow and there is some small hall on the surface near the pointy end. This is to inject the poison, and the internal structure of the spike has many small and narrow channels that seem to have to channel some liquid. This liquid is the poison that is being injected. But that is not all, this liquid is also the propent for the spike.

    The intricate structure of this spike created a natural formation that converts this liquid into a gas at a low temperature.

    This gas is propelling this spike.

    Sam was more than surprised at this point. He never thought such a thing could exist. He knew of some sea-urchin type beasts from his database that could throw the spikes, but he is sure that there is nothing the bestiary that described a sea-urchin like this.

    This thing must be a mixed species or a mutant, or this never appeared anywhere out of this.

    "Interesting thing."

    "Really? Interesting? This has been a living night mare for us. Just imagine what happens if a Pre-transcendent or even lower person falls into the water full of these things? They are going to make him a sieve in a second."

    "I know, that is what makes this interesting. How did they manage to survive without you guys seeing it?"

    "Actually, they lived under arge enclosed cave under the ind. Some kids opened the cave identally."

    "Then why don¡¯t you guys move some high-level people and kill them all."

    "That is not possible. There are high-level creatures deep inside. The higher level sirens can take them on, but that would be a lot of damage, in fact, the main problem is their numbers. Even if they are low level, due to the water elemental negation, they are causing harm to even the elders. A sea urchin at the Pre-transcendent stage is not doing anything to a transcendent normally. But a fifty of them is hard for him to bear. Even if he wouldn¡¯t explode after swelling. The sting itself is unbearable.

    And if there are three hundred of them, a consummate level cultivator is also going to be in trouble and the worst part is, we couldn¡¯t even attack from a very long range. We are mostly specialized in mid-rangebat and these sea urchins¡¯ elders are also the same. A high-level cultivator will be sensed and be tackled by an equal and with the support of the extras, he would definitely die here."

 Chapter 803: Experimentation

    Sam was really intrigued by these creatures. They have a clear advantage over sirens. The water elemental energy is not affecting them that much. The attacks might cause them trouble but the problem is the element of surprise. The normal spiritual sense couldn¡¯t even scan its presence and the energy waves.

    They are merged with the rockspletely. If Sam didn¡¯t use the energy vision and the urchins are not using the energy and a weird method to conceal themselves, then it would have been different. They are notpletely concealing their energy, they are more like manipting it to be ¡¯invisible¡¯.

    But energy vision worked its wonders.

    Sam was really impressed by these things, they are extremely different and dangerous and that is not because of their massive size, or their intimidating aura with a lot of killing intent which is extremelymon in most beasts.

    Rather they are just dangerous for what they are.

    "Let me take a closer look."

    Sam asked and Varien nodded.

    Sam started swimming towards the rock. There is only one urchin on it, so he is confident of dodging one spike at a time. And he did it. With water elemental fusion it is actually easy and before long he is already right beside the rock.

    By now Sam could see the body of the urchin a bit clearer. The spikes bent t and he could one of them standing right up and being shot at him. He dodged it once again and extended his hand towards the rock. But he noticed that all the spikes just stood at the same time pointing towards him.

    Sam didn¡¯t wait a single second, he became alert and ducked down. But the sea urchin already shot all of them.

    One spike hit the breathing device and destroyed the mask. While one of them hit him in the shoulder.

    Varien became alert and was afraid Sam¡¯s arm would be lost, but Sam gestured him to stop right there.

    Sam ducked down and threw the mask away before taking a new one. While wearing the new device with one hand, he used another hand to remove the spike.

    The poison has a bit of burning sensation to it but that is because of something that Sam didn¡¯t expect.

    Its potency didn¡¯t affect Sam. The burning sensation is because of the fire element and he is currently in the middle of water and using the water elemental energy.

    This caused him a bit of surprise.

    A water creature that is clearly surviving under the water and couldn¡¯t survive after if it was taken out had a fire element to it. Now he understood how that weird intricate formation within the spike can actually evaporate the liquid to gas. The heat is definitely not enough normally because of all the water here.

    But the formation made it enough.

    Sam ducked, he kicked the rock directly, but as soon as his leg touched the rock, it didn¡¯t give the impact he expected, it crumbled easily and what surprised him, even more, is that the rock is hollow.

    The sea urchin that was stuck to one part of the rock is producing the spikes at a rapid pace and he could clearly see the rock that it was attached to being reduced in size.

    Sam touched the rock carefully and turned it into the powder which made the sea urchin stop the spike production.

    But the other end which was not visible to the outside until now still has spikes and he could sense that they were about to beunched.

    Sam used his water elemental energy and froze the water around the sea urchin. The spikes that were very close tounching themselves stopped. But the heat from the spikes thate from the formation is trying to melt the ice. But the momentum is definitely gone.

    Now the sea urchin ispletely out of spikes.

    He unfroze in and swam towards Varien.

    "I would like to bring this back and study it a bit if you don¡¯t mind that is."

    "Sure. We already arranged a residence. Let¡¯s go."

    Sam went back with the sea urchin in hand. He didn¡¯t ce it in the divine dimension forcefully, nor did he forcefully create a contract. He didn¡¯t want Varien to get too suspicious.

    "You seem to have a remarkable resistance to the poison."

    "I do actually. Most poisons unless they reached an extreme level of potency will not affect me. It is my body¡¯s natural gift."

    "It¡¯s indeed a gift."

    They returned to the city and Sam was indeed given a residence. He couldn¡¯t help but marvel at the dome created by them.

    Even though they lived underwater and liked to be in it, they made the city under thisrge bubble enclosing it from the water.

    All of it is just to do the work that is not really possible in the water.

    He went to the residence he was given and started examining the sea urchin. He ced it in a small pool of water and the first thing it did is to search for the rocks under it. Unlike the normal sea urchins, it is rolling fast and it is moving clearly.

    Once there are no individual rocks inside, it stuck itself to the wall of the pool and started absorbing it. The spike grew at a fast rate.

    At this moment, Sam ced his hand near the wall of theke from the surface and checked the rock carefully.

    The rock is being slowly consumed by the sea urchin.

    It is clearly using the method to absorb the rock. But Sam couldn¡¯t understand it. He pulled the sea urchin forcefully out of it, threw some lumps of metal inside the pool, and let it go once again. This time, the sea urchin searched for the rocks once again and when it came into contact with the metal, it seemed to be examining a bit more, before attaching to it.

    It didn¡¯t go for the rock walls. Sam looked at the spikes that are being made at a rapid pace. This time they are different, there is a metallic sheen to it and Sam knew for a face if they are shot, then the situation would be worse than it is for the targets.

    He used his water element to create fishes out of the water and surrounded the urchin, the urchin couldn¡¯t take it and threw all the spikes at them.

    The spikes lodged themselves into the walls of the pool.

    Sam took out one of the spikes and looked at it carefully. He couldn¡¯t help but marvel by the fact that the formation still stayed even in these metal ones. These sea urchins are really a gift for him. The spikes that are made are decent sized and once they are shot, they are not being damaged too much and they have an intricate formation carved inside along with a natural propentwork.

    It is almost like it is unfair for the rest of the sea creatures for one creature to have such a gift. The worst of all is that it can negate most water elemental attacks.

    Now, Sam took out the sea urchin and ced both rocks and metal pieces. This time, it went for the rocks directly. The problem might have been because the metal is taking a bit too much time.

    He thought of something and created another hole in the rocky ground. This time, he ced some scrap metal inside and melted it and they cooled it down.

    Now he filled it with water and forcefully took the sea urchin from the first pool and threw it into the second. There are no individual rocks or scrap metal, only the walls of theke that are made of metal. As expected it stuck to it.

    Now Sam ced his hand into the pool and turned the metal coating into the powder.

    The sea urchin became a bit shaky and it pushed the metal powder away and stuck to the rock wall.

    Sam did all kinds of experiments with this thing.

    He created some pools and added different items, like nts, herbs, different metals of different affinities, rocks of different affinities, spirit stones, the used-up spirit stones, everything he could think of.

    And there is one thing that came to his mind, by the time he was done with this.

    He has to catch some of these things and take them back with him.

    These things are natural weapon makers and those weapons also have great structural strength and they are all of equal size and shape without a minuscule difference.

    But for that, he has to find a way to get into the middle of them, defend against the spikes and catch them all together.

    And he can understand why the Sirens wanted him toe. Weapon making and other things are not these guys¡¯ specialty and even if they had ideas, they couldn¡¯t execute them. So, they want a person who can think out of the box and create something that can help them get by easily.

    As for why they didn¡¯t ask the elves for help, Sam has a feeling that if he is an elf they wouldn¡¯t have let hime here and show this problem and thought of a different way to deal with it. It is because he is a human that they even tried to trust him.

 Chapter 804: Volcano

    Sam learned about the behavior and characteristics of these sea urchins in every possible way he could think of.

    Now, he has to make something that could effectively defend against these things and repel them away if possible. And he shouldn¡¯t forget about the harpoon guns and the t-fish puppets.

    The harpoons they shoot are also going to be a problem.

    But he is a bit relieved by the fact that the harpoon and the sea urchin are a bit simr in their attacking method.

    The only main differences are size and shape and the spikes of the sea urchin cannot be defended with water elemental attacks and thest difference being the trap and cable mechanism of the harpoon gun.

    The propelling principle is almost the same. But instead of apressed air contained that is used in the harpoon gun, the sea urchins are creatingpressed gas propulsion by themselves.

    Sam could think of a few ways to counter these things. The main principle of these projectiles is the usage of gas and air underwater.

    So, Sam decided to use this as a counter too.

    He doesn¡¯t even have to stop the harpoons and spikes moving all he has to do is deflect them away.

    Make them not continue in the same path and because of thepressed air or gas propulsion there is one thing they could take advantage of and that is the fact that the trajectory of the harpoon or the spike cannot be changed by the shooter once it was shot.

    They cannot manipte it constantly.

    And this gave Sam an Idea.

    Using the samepressed air to change the trajectory of these things.

    But before he could make anything, he has to inspect the city first. Since the merman can activate multiple elements and that includes the fire element, they do have the ability to maintain decent craftsmen in their ranks, but sirens are different.

    They don¡¯t activate any other element. They only have the water element and that unbearably good mental strength and attacks. They might be good with their hands, but they are still unable to create proper weapons faster. If they have to go for the weapons, they had to go the old-fashioned way.

    cing the metal in a normal furnace and hammer it constantly with no control over the heat would take up too much time and also sirens wouldn¡¯t want to spend too much time near that fire. They would die if it is too long.

    But selling the weapons directly to the sirens from the above-ground is not exactly a good deal. In fact, it impossible. The Elves would kill him before they let him export weapons to the sirens.

    So, he has to see how he can manage to properly cut this deal.

    After four days of constant research, Sam came out and met with the attendant he was assigned to.

    "I would like to take a look at the city. Particrly the volcano."

    The attendant nodded and gestured Sam to follow him without saying anything. Sam didn¡¯t mind and just followed him.

    He walked through the streets as he looked at various things that are being sold, made, and worked.

    It is very little for sirens to do. Their staple food is obviously the fish in the sea, apart from that they train a lot, they rear some things like a special type of seaweed and another thing is the mining.

    They excavate under the sea and also mine the spirit stones from the spirit stone mines nearby.

    Other than thesemon things, there is only one umon and unique thing in this ce and that is making products for the elves on the surface.

    These people make some products of the things they get under the sea.

    They make potions of different kinds right in this city before selling them. And the main ingredients are obviously from the sea creatures and some scarce vegetation that is avable on the seafloor.

    Even with minimum work, everyone is active and they are all currently looking at Sam as if they are looking at an animal in the zoo.

    "How many Siren cities are there?"

    "There are forty cities that are of decent sized. And this is the Siren Capital.

    Apart from the cities there are some minor establishments within the sea with a smaller poption of sirens."

    The attendant spoke for the first time.

    "So, only Capital city has ess to meeting with the surface."

    "No, ording to the treaty between elves and sirens, the sirens belonging to all the forty cities can go to the surface to conduct any business. But the sirens who do that are rare and even they do it in a specific time period every year.

    The sea is mostly sufficient for our survival."

    Sam nodded and both of them continued.

    The attendant started leading him into an alley and spoke.

    "The route to the volcano is a bit remote and there would not be many people there."

    Sam was a bit confused but he still nodded. After all, it is not necessary to make himself clear, it is not like Sam is extremely suspicious of the attendant.

    When this thought came to his mind, he immediately halted in his tracks and looked at the attendant with a frown.

    The attendant who is walking in the lead noticed that Sam¡¯s footsteps are halted and stopped too.

    Sam closed his eyes for a second and a smirk appeared on his face.

    He started walking forward with that smirk and he started speaking with the attendant.

    "Have you seen these sea urchins? The ones that are attacking your kind near the ind."

    "No, by the time I was deployed to train there, it was already infested with the sea urchins and they are already attacking us."

    "Then let me show you something."

    Sam took out the spikes of the sea urchin from the storage.

    "These are the spikes of the sea urchin. You can imagine just how big they are. But they are still good at stealth."

    The attendant looked at Sam with confusion.

    "They are too good at stealth, they can blend into rocks as if they are part of it, they can bend their spikes and make it look like a t surface without even exposing themselves a bit.

    They shoot the spikes at an incredible speed and it would be toote before you even notice it."

    The attendant was even more confused. But he still nodded.

    "I still survived them without taking much damage, do you know why?"

    The attendant thought for a second and said.

    "You are strong?"

    "No, I am good at finding the hidden things. They might be objects, beasts, and creatures like these sea urchins or even the Sirens that are hiding in the alley."

    The attendant stopped in his tracks and gulped. He looked at Sam with his eyes wide open.

    "Come on, let¡¯s walk and talk."

    The attendant walked carefully, he is worried that Sam might do something. After all, Sam knew about the people hidden inside but still came.

    Sam tossed a spike and caught it and he yed like that for a few steps before throwing it in a direction. The spike pierced into a stone wall and almost prated to the other side, but halted right before stabbing into the siren.

    Sam took out another spike and threw it in a different direction. He repeated this process as he walked.

    "I could guess who made you do it. But the next time you do it, remember one thing. This time spikes stopped at thest second, the next time it wouldn¡¯t be the same. I have to respect the hosts as a guest, which is why I am leaving you guys alive. If you do it one more time, get ready to be killed."

    The attendant became nervous.

    "I am really sorry. But I was forced to do it. That person is a son of a powerful person and they are not here to kill you. They wanted to teach you a lesson..."

    "What is the point of the exining now? One has to bear the consequences to their own actions. No one canpletely force others to do something. It was all a choice. Maybe he threatened you with your family, but that is also your choice to go with it, after all I am sure you havews and rules, you could have gone through the legal way.

    But you didn¡¯t, because you are afraid or worried or even became greedy for the reward.

    Anyway, I already said, this time I am not doing anything to you. But that doesn¡¯t happen the next time. No matter what you are forced to do, that is not my business. Beingpassionate is not my cup of tea."

    The rest of the journey was silent. He was lead to the volcanic area.

    The area is simr to what Sam guessed. They opened up the soil within this bubble and let the Lava create a pool and there is arge formation covering it. The formation seemed to be a temperature controller as the heat is not as intense as Sam thought.

    They even created small currents from the pool and led theva to create even smaller pools which are covered by formations and these are also simr to the main formation but a bit different. These formations can hold the container in ce and some sirens are concocting something in this container.

 Chapter 805: Making new products

    Sam observed the whole setup. It is just abination of some formations that are good at toning down the temperature.

    He used the energy vision to see how dense the spiritual energy is and couldn¡¯t help but feel surprised.

    This Lava is the richest fire elemental energy source he has ever seen in this realm. He didn¡¯t see a single volcano on 1 or 2 so this is understandable. But thisva is actually hotter than theva he saw in the Naga Loka.

    It is hotter than the Lava in theke of the Volcanic region of Naga Loka.

    Sam took out a bar of metal and ced its tip in a smaller empty pool.

    The tip started melting as soon as it came into contact with it.

    This is a high-grade metal that could be used to make armors for a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator and it melted this easily.

    The heat is unbelievable. If a properly skilled cksmith is here, he can use it for forging purposes, but that person has to have a mind for the temperature and should know how to use the temperature to his advantage.

    But if it is a normal casting process. Just melting the metal and pouring it in a mold, then this ce is a great ce for them. All they had to do is know how to make use of the heat of theva without making the metal directlying in contact with the Lava.

    This ce is good for training the fire elemental users too.

    It is just that it is not really feasible in the near future.

    Sam couldn¡¯t possibly let his students train here for now. He can make some powerful artisanse here. But not the students.

    Currently, his thoughts are racing.

    This is a great resource, but he couldn¡¯t really take advantage of it in a long term. But he can at least use it to think of a solution for his short term goal.

    He is thinking of all the possible ways to make use of it and make the best deal with the sirens.

    He kept on thinking while he walked back to his temporary residence.

    When he reached the street of his residence, he met with Varien.

    "Hello, are you here for me?"

    Sam asked as he observed the gloomy mood of Varien.

    "Actually yes. I am here to apologize."

    "Oh? Is it about the thing in the street? I apologize for the property damage too. But I couldn¡¯t just let them go before sending the message."

    "No, don¡¯t apologize, please. In fact, I should thank you for sparing them. I will try my best to not let them trouble you again."

    "That would be good. It is hard to hold back and it will only get harder with time."

    Varien was a bit stumped but still nodded his head.

    "I heard you went to see the volcano. Do you have any ideas?"

    "I do actually. But there is one problem here. You definitely know how elves would react if I were to sell weapons to you from the surface. That industry is coined by the factions and they wouldn¡¯t let a person like me butting into this business and particrly not when what I would be selling you are some special weapons.

    I don¡¯t know if the elves would change their target ande for you after they dealt with the sea folks. Honestly, I don¡¯t care if another war happens, but I don¡¯t want to be in the middle of it. Supplying the two sides is a bit of a stretch.

    And the elves wouldn¡¯t leave, they would probably kill me if they had the slightest idea of what we are discussing right now. After all, the only advantage they have over you is that the weapons you use right now all came from them. You don¡¯t have skilled artisans in that area.

    If Ie into that picture, I would be stuck in the middle having the whole realm against him and unfortunately, I cannot live underwater forever."

    Varien went into deep thought. He could clearly understand what Sam is thinking and he knew for a fact that what he said is entirely possible. He would be lying if he said that Sam doesn¡¯t have any threat to his life.

    But they really need this.

    At this moment Sam continued.

    "I have a way out of this actually, but you cannot let this be known to anyone and I need to meet the people who are in charge of the Sirens, the upper echelon. Only they can make the decision and I need theirplete reassurance before I do anything.

    I would like you to go and meet them and say my requirements and please stress the fact that the price will be high. In fact, it would massive. We can decide if we can cooperate after the meeting.

    It wouldn¡¯t look too good on my part if I don¡¯t give anything for you to think. In three days, I will make a prototype and you can ask them toe for the demonstration and they can decide to have a meeting."

    Varien thought for a moment and said.

    "I will talk to them about it."

    He turned around and left.

    Sam went back into his residence and started working on his new product.

    This a bit simr to a harpoon gun. Except for the spear, the cable, and the trap will be gone.

    Instead, they are going to shoot something else.

    He didn¡¯t even make a new one from the scratch. He picked a harpoon gun apart and started making the adjustments.

    But after testing it a bit, he was a bit stumped. It would definitely work, he even checked it in the simtion of the second floor under various conditions. But if a person is surrounded by too many, then the problem would arise and this weapon is more of an attacking mode than focusing on defense.

    He started thinking about how to rectify that.

    The alternatives proved to be a bit difficult.

    The most direct and best option for defending against the spikes thate from all the directions is clearly armor with an inscribed formation.

    But that wouldn¡¯t work here. This is underwater and the sirens are only specialized in water elemental control. But the spikes are also great against the water elemental control. They are directly negating it.

    Sam even created a water elemental defensive formation around the pool and let the sea urchin release all the spikes at the same time, the spikes flew right through the formation no use.

    This might work against the harpoons, but not the urchins.

    He has to think of something else.

    After some thought, he still stuck with the armor, but this time he didn¡¯t create the formations.

    He added something else instead.

    It also worked with the canisters filled withpressed air.

    But it is a bit too sensitive and he has to pad it with a lot of formations so that wearer wouldn¡¯t be affected by it.

    For the first day, he worked in the divine dimension and for the next three days, he went into the sea to test the equipment practically.

    By the night of the third day, the equipment worked and reached its desired target.

    He was really worried that he wouldn¡¯t be able to make it.

    The next day, the demonstration was held and to Sam¡¯s surprise, there are not many people there for the demonstration.

    Most of the people that came are actually Transcendent level cultivators.

    They are not the true decision-makers.

    Only one Consummate level cultivator came and he is also a bit reserved. Varien didn¡¯t even introduce him.

    Varien is a bit embarrassed as he spoke to Sam.

    "I am really sorry, the upper echelons are not actually united and even the people that are supporting this are a bit under pressure and they couldn¡¯t make it here because of some reasons?"

    "Reasons? What would that be? I don¡¯t want to be disrespectful, but you are not being fair either. I don¡¯t know who you are working with and you guys are not even sure if you want to work with me and here I am risking my life just to be here. This is not exactly a fair exchange between us.

    Can I ask? Just how many people have decision-making power here?"

    Varien just stayed silent.

    "From your expression, it seems like no one is here.

    Even though I am a single person, we are working as equals in this partnership, show some sincerity.

    Anyway, I would just deal with the current situation for now.

    But don¡¯t think that this would go without any consequences."

    Sam didn¡¯t speak after this and all of them swam towards the area infested with the sea urchins.

    But while swimming there, Sam has a smirk on his face. Even though he spoke about not liking this attitude of the sirens, he actually didn¡¯t care much.

    At the end of the day, it is just a business deal. So, as long as the transaction was proper he could give two fucks about their attitude. But he has to get the most profit in every transaction and this attitude helps him even more.

    He would use this as a stepping stone to gain more from them.

 Chapter 806: Demo

    When they reached the Sea Urchin Area, everyone became careful.

    The transcendent stage cultivators are afraid of it the most because to kill them, there was not even a need for the transcendent stage beast toe. They would die if they are surrounded by sea urchins all of a sudden.

    Sam quickly changed his outfit. He changed into armor which looked extremely weird.

    It has so many small holes in the front and the rear. In the rear of the armor, it was attached with two big canisters ofpressed air on each side and it is connected to the armor on the shoulder through tubes.

    Apart from that, Sam has another weapon in his hands.

    It is a gun and it is extremely simr to that of a harpoon gun.

    But the front barrel waspletely changed and there was no spear and even the cable mechanism was removedpletely.

    There is a small knob on the body of the harpoon gun to the rear side.

    Sam checked the equipment once again and started swimming deeper into the area without his energy vision.

    There is no reason for him to use the energy vision which the sirens don¡¯t have in such a demonstration.

    It wouldn¡¯t really reflect well and also the demonstration wouldn¡¯t be effective if Sam didn¡¯t fight against that element of surprise which these Sea urchins have when they attack.

    But he is extremely alert and in fact, he has another n to detect the spikes that woulde. After a few feet of swimming, the armor was activated and there was a spherical formation that was activated. It is using water elemental energy and formation is not actually dense.

    It is extremely thin and there is barely any energy in it.

    Looking at this the Sirens are sneering.

    "Varien, is he really the guy who made weapons for the elves to defeat the sea folks? I highly doubt this. Look at his stupidity. We all know the water elemental formation don¡¯t work against him and look at how thin it is and why would he spread it so far, is he that much of a coward?"

    Varien frowned and looked at the person who is talking.

    "Arav, since when did you have guts to talk before me? You better keep that old attitude of yours whenever I am around. Otherwise, I will chop your tail into pieces and use it to feed the beasts."

    "Yeah, yeah. All you know is brute force. Why don¡¯t you brute force through these sea urchins? If you are so badass why did you go and ask a puny human for help."

    "Last time I checked, I am the person who killed the most sea urchins in the entire city. You should understand that the only reason I am looking for someone to help, is because you pieces of shit have no strength to beat these stupid animals directly.

    As for that very puny human, he almost killed your brother and his goons yesterday. The street to the Volcano is the biggest evidence for that, and the worst part is that your brother is the one that set the ambush."

    Arav couldn¡¯t speak anymore. The rest of the transcendent stage cultivators and even the only Consummate level cultivator is looking at it with amusement.

    Everybody knows between their bad blood and it is not their direct feud, it was a feud from the previous generation and Varien¡¯s side was always on the lead.

    This is one of the most fun things in the city.

    While they also have some opinions about Sam, they didn¡¯t want to get in bad books of Varien, he was sent to the surface as a part of the envoy group and it is not just for a show.

    Meanwhile, Sam doesn¡¯t know what is happening in the rear. He is too busy with searching and soon the results came.

    One Sea urchin that is hiding in the reef shot a spike towards him and the transcendent stage cultivators that are far away could see it clearly.

    But Sam couldn¡¯t see it in time, at least that is what they though. When the spike touched the formation, the formation disappeared, and Sam turned towards the direction the spike ising from and pulled the trigger.

    A decent-sized air cannon was unleashed towards the spike that wasing and because of the impact of the air and the disturbance in the water, the spike couldn¡¯t maintain the direction and the momentum. It changed the direction upwards and it halted after moving a few inches.

    And the thing formation was activated once again.

    The Sea urchin didn¡¯t stop. Even though the water is not exactly clear and filled with air bubbles because of it, Sam moved towards the sea urchin while shooting at the spikes and when he finally reached the rocks that it attached itself into, he pressed the knob on the rear of the gun and aimed it at the rock.

    He pulled the trigger and an extremely concentrated air cannon was shot which made the whole rock copse and luckily even the sea urchin itself was stuck in the air explosion which caused it to be torn into pieces.

    Sam smiled at the effectiveness and started moving deeper into the area after he changed the canister in the gun.

    At this moment, the sirens are looking at him with a dumb founded expression.

    They didn¡¯t expect Sam would use the formation like that.

    They didn¡¯t even expect the gun to work like that. It is not even using any other equipment but thepressed air. It looked so easy.

    If Sam knew their thoughts, he would say that it is definitely not easy at all.

    The number of tricks he had to use to make the air as lethal as it is just with a pull of the trigger is enormous. But the only good thing out of it is that this gun can also be used outside on a normal surface, instead of just the water.

    Sam proceeded forward and started taking down one sea urchin after another. There are still avable individually, but the deeper he went the more the quantity increased, and soon, he was surrounded by the sea urchins.

    When the transcendent stage cultivators are about to take a closer look, Varien reminded.

    "Don¡¯t go any further, have you forgotten what would happen if you go deeper than this? If you go any further, you would be in the detection range and transcendent sea urchin wille.

    There is a possibility that he would die."

    The sirens suddenly came out of their daze. That really is true. They are so involved in the demonstration that they forgot.

    When Sam is surrounded by the sea urchins that are even unwilling to hide their presence, he didn¡¯t feel worried at all. Instead he smiled a bit.

    All the sea urchins shot at more or less the same time and when the spikes prated this detecting formation, Sam ced his hand on the chest, precisely the armor covering his chest, and injected energy into it.

    All the holes in the armor, both front and the rear reacted and an array of constant explosions happened. The air cannons were shot from both front and rear at the same level of impact that Sam stayed in the same ce, but the spikesing from different sides are all cleared.

    He didn¡¯t even have to worry about the ones that areing from the side, due to the distance and the range of the air cannons which grows with the distance, every single spike was dead in its tracks.

    Now Sam took the chance in this small interval to take down some sea urchins and when another wave of spikes came, he once again activated the air cannons on the armor.

    After three to four attempts, he managed to clear the sea urchins.

    Now the demonstration isplete and Sam wanted to leave. But just as he was leaving the area. He heard a voice.

    "Very well done, very well done. Varien I really have to apologize for my statements this time."

    Sam looked at them and noticed Arav is entering the area. As soon as he did that, the rest of the transcendent stage cultivators felt weird.

    "Arave back."

    "What¡¯s wrong Varien? I am just appreciating that guy for his efforts."

    Everyone could hear the sarcasm from his words.

    And soon Sam who is swimming outside, felt a sense of danger, he activated the armor once again, but this time, he didn¡¯t activate the front one, only the rear one.

    It pushed him forward, but a spike brushed past his arm and took of a chunk of flesh off of it.

    Sam looked at the sea urchin that came. It looked simr to that of the other one and there is barely any difference in size, but its skin is slowly turning red and even the spikes that came out of it are turning red. Even though the rock it is absorbing it somewhere between ck and brown it is still producing red spikes.

    Sam used energy vision to check the difference and it turned out to be a transcendent level sea urchin and that too of a high level, it would be a consummate level soon.

    This sea urchin is too strong for Sam to not take out some of his cards, if he were to really fight it, he swam faster and faster. He threw the equipment back into the divine dimension and activated water elemental fusion as he swam out of the range.

    This surprised the group even more. They are sure that once the spike brushed past him, Sam¡¯s arm would be swollen out of proportion and his body wouldn¡¯t be reacting. Much less activate elemental fusion and swim that fast.

    When he finally came out, the sea urchin also stopped attacking him.

    Sam looked at Arav coldly. This piece of shit did it on purpose.

 Chapter 807: Variens sincerity

    Sam is radiating killing intent for the first time he came here.

    He looked at Arav as if he is looking at the lowest grade of the pests but the most annoying of them all as if he wouldn¡¯t be able to rest until he kills itpletely.

    The reason for such a huge reaction is the cowardly method that was used.

    If Arav came at him directly to kill him, he would have not cared much. He would have killed him, but that was just ying tit for tat.

    But he used such a method that waspletely uncalled for. And the worst part is, he doesn¡¯t even know who this guy is. He never met him, didn¡¯t have any contact or encounter.

    He could guess some things but those are just guesses at the end of the day.

    Sam looked at him as his body slowly regenerated. Even without the light element, the vampire body itself has a high regeneration. Even though it is not as fast as healing himself, it still works.

    Arav gave a mocking smile, even though his n has failed.

    "I am really sorry. I was so ecstatic that your equipment worked that I forgot about the boundary."

    He even had the gall to exin himself like that.

    Sam controlled his killing intent and looked at Varien. Nobody could see the expression on his face clearly, but everyone can guess from his bodynguage and the aura he is giving out that he is super pissed.

    "I am leaving."

    Varien replied nervously.

    "Let mee with you. We can go together."

    "I am noting back to the city. I am leaving the sea."

    "What? Sam this is too important to us. Please, we can talk this out."

    "And why the fuck does that mean anything to me. I am leaving this ce now. You can go tell your decision-makers what happened."

    Sam turned around and started swimming to the surface.

    At this moment, a whirlpool appeared around Sam and stopped him in his tracks.

    The only consummate level cultivator looked at him and said.

    "You are not going anywhere. Didn¡¯t he already apologize?" His voice was cold and absolute. With no room for discussion.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care.

    He just took out the blood-red scroll and showed it to him. The consummate level cultivator frowned and looked at Varien who nodded.

    "I signed the scroll on behalf of the siren race."

    "Are you mad? How can you sign that? That too to a puny human."

    Varien couldn¡¯t take it anymore and yell.

    "What do you know? Puny this and puny that? Have you ever stopped to think what your position is? What our position is? The only thing we have an edge over the elves is our poption and their inability to not survive in the water.

    Now the second problem is solved because of him and the first problem will soon be solved with time.

    If that is not enough, every day the dangers in the sea are increasing. The sea urchins are already bad enough and they are spreading rapidly reproducing every fucking day.

    You are in your mansion drinking the wine that came from the surface and eating all the delicacies every day, having servants do everything you want. An entitled piece of shit that is what you are. Not knowing what the future holds. Looking down on everyone and everything. What right do you have to call anyone puny? Your whole existence is puny and wasted. Look at yourself before you call out everything."

    Everyone was surprised by Varien¡¯s outburst.

    But he didn¡¯t care. He swam towards Sam who is stuck in the whirlpool and used his own body to break it before saying.

    "Sam, I know this is not fair for you. But I would like you to give me a chance. The Sirens as a whole are too huge than the actions of these two pathetic bastards, I will let you meet the decision-makers and let you discuss with them directly after this. Anything and everything that wronged you will bepensated duly. Please."

    "What canpensate an attempt on my life and that too twice? If only something serious could have happened to me, I would have loved to see what would have happened to the sirens. I would really love to hold evenst breath to see how the scroll would have reacted."

    Varien pursed his lips and said.

    "Sam, this time, I swear on my life. Once they knew about the scroll they wouldn¡¯t do anything. The product is a sess, even if these bastards don¡¯t know what is at stake, the people in the upper echelons surely do. I will talk to them. Then you will be able to talk to them. Please give me a chance."

    Sam looked at Varien for a second and finally nodded his head.

    They swam back to the city. But this time, the transcendent stage cultivators and the consummate stage cultivator stayed silent the whole time and didn¡¯t even dare to talk.

    They are afraid of Varien, even the consummate level cultivator is also being a bit restrained. Sam first time understood the influence of Varien.

    Since he came to the city, he was too busy working. He didn¡¯t really enjoy it much and take a look into the workings of the sirens.

    It seems like Varien has a bit of influence here and the scroll might even be the reason for that.

    After returning to the city, Sam went back to the residence, and Varien went to deal with the situation. The first thing he did is drag Arav and the rest of the enforcement officers and make sure that he gets punished.

    The word spread around the city and the attendant that led Sam to the ambush yesterday who is still working on Sam¡¯s insistence is the carrier of the news.

    He exined the whole situation of the city and its power dynamics and what might lead to what.

    The basicyout of the power dynamics is that there are three groups of people. One that supports them being superior to the elves and attacking them any time they wanted.

    The second one is against that and are cautious of the elves who could possibly find a way to enter the sea and deal with them, so they support the internal development in the sea and guarding their territory.

    The third group is the fence-sitters that go with whatever flow is smooth at that time.

    Varien is obviously from the second group and he turned out to be the strongest transcendent stage cultivator in the whole city and in fact it might even be true to be the strongest of all the sirens in the same cultivation realm and no one knows how strong he really is.

    That is why the consummate stage cultivator who recently broke through, just a few days ago and also the only consummate cultivator that came to the demonstration is wary of him.

    There are even stories of him blocking consummate level attacks with ease. That is why they didn¡¯t dare to piss him off too much.

    If by any chance he managed to defeat a consummate stage cultivator, then all his glory would go down in the drain.

    And Varien¡¯s father is also one of the important members of the sirens, but he had to go to somece where urgent assistance was needed. Otherwise, Sam wouldn¡¯t even face any form of resistance.

    This would have been easy.

    Varien tried to be civil and amodating with the rest of the group so there wouldn¡¯t be any conflict when his father is not here.

    But this time, it is already way out of the line. He couldn¡¯t take it anymore.

    He dragged Arav to the enforcement hall and put him through a special trial.

    An enforcement hall is a ce where all the trials will be conducted for every crime.

    Sirens are generally born with the great mental strength, to begin with, they can even do some mind control and stuff. But there are specially gifted people even among the sirens in this area and they can actually put a man through a mental test where they would only tell the truth and any effort to lie would be detected easily.

    The trial is simple.

    Whether Arav has intentionally tried to cross the boundary and if that intention is to kill Sam using the help of the Sea urchins.

    And there is no suspense there. It was intentional and the reason is also told. Because Sam has a scuffle with a siren on the surface and that Siren happened to be Arav¡¯s brother.

    Now it was the punishment. For this enforcement, the hall is a bit hesitant.

    Arav and Varien have simr status regarding their birth and such. But Varien is far more valuable to the Siren race as a whole.

    But still, they don¡¯t want to offend the fathers of the duo and decided to throw Arav into prison before Varien¡¯s father and other people who went along with him toe back.

    Sam is really willing to see what these people would do. He is extremely intrigued on how far Varien would go to prove his sincerity and then Varien came to his residence to say something.

    "Currently, the decision-makers that are here are all old fools that are stuck up. They like your idea, but they don¡¯t want to have a fair discussion and all they have in mind is to oppress you. So, if you don¡¯t mind I would like to ask you to wait for three days until my fatheres back. Then we can have that meeting."

    Sam didn¡¯t really have much to say and agreed.

 Chapter 808: Making the deal

    Three dayster.

    Sam is currently walking towards the majestic building that is in the center of the city along with Varien.

    Today is the day, he is going to have a meeting with the true decision-makers of the Sirens.

    He is really looking forward to it.

    From all the incidents that happened till now, Sam has an advantage if it is a fair deal. There are two attempts on his life and there is mistrust from the decision-makers which are all detrimental to any sort of cooperation.

    Sam also clearly mentioned his desire to leave this ce earlier clearly showing that he doesn¡¯t care much about the deal. So, if Varien¡¯s father and the rest of the people on Varien¡¯s side are really desperate to clear this problem and can influence the opposition to yield, then Sam would have some decent gains over the top of the actual price of what he is going to give them.

    Soon, Sam is in a meeting room sitting on a chair across the table there are six sirens and every one of them has an aura that is trying to suffocate Sam. The intimidation is so obvious.

    Sam just stayed there and smiled at them. Not speaking first.

    After five minutes of the ufortable silence and Varien¡¯s nervous looks, the Siren in the middle spoke.

    "Hello, I am Valian. Varien¡¯s father. Nice to meet you. I am the one who asked him to bring you here."

    "Thank you. Your city is beautiful. I tried my best to enjoy my time here. But it was hard."

    Sam emphasized on the word tried hardly and this didn¡¯t go unnoticed by the sirens at the table.

    "Hahaha, I am really sorry if you had any problems here. It would be hard for a human to adjust in the underwater city anyway. Let us discuss the business deal."

    The siren next to Valian who is also in the center spoke.

    Sam looked at him with a questioning gaze and asked.

    "May I know who you are?"

    "Aranab. Nice to meet you."

    "So, are you Arav¡¯s father by any chance?"

    Arnab¡¯s smile froze a bit. But he still answered.

    "Yes. Why?"

    "Your two sons have tried to kill me twice in the few days I have spent in the city. Once they tried to ambush me when I was on my way to the volcano and then your son deliberately crossed the boundary of the sea urchin territory, knowing well that I am in and almost made me a victim of the transcendent stage sea urchin. "

    Everyone became silent. Before the meeting all of the sirens came to a tacit understanding to not bring up this matter directly, this is a disadvantage on their part, so they wanted to cover it up with smiles and sweet nothings.

    But Sam didn¡¯t let that go. He justid the whole situation bare in front of them.

    Sam looked at their expressions and continued.

    "I already risked my lifeing here. I am sure that as soon as I left this ce, the elves woulde and pester me until they truly found out what really happened. They might even send some people here to see the situation. And by any chance, they finds out about what I am selling you, I and my friends and my subordinates will all die.

    But even in that condition, I am still here. Do you know why?"

    "Don¡¯t make it sound so noble. It is just for money."

    One of the sirens on the right side beside Arnab said coldly.

    "Do you know what my worth is? You can ask Varien, I am sure he knows."

    The sirens looked at Varien and thetter spoke in a soft voice.

    "Hisst business deal was made for around fifty billion."

    All the sirens were dumbfounded.

    "I have so much money, that I highly doubt that I would be able to finish spending it before they became useless to me. Don¡¯t judge me if you know anything. I was here because, Varien asked me, requested me, and almost begged me. And he didn¡¯t do it for his personal gain. He did it for your race and city. That is why I stayed.

    So, before you talk business you guys must understand who you should be thankful for and what you are paying for, that is why I am bringing this up. Now, we can talk about business."

    Sam said with a smile.

    Now the situation reversed.

    Sam clearly knows what these guys are thinking how they wanted this negotiation to go. He experienced this in his previous world.

    Every time a rival boss either in business or in the mercenary world or even in the assassin world tried to mess with andter wanted a truce or a business deal, the first trick they would use is to downy their own actions.

    The attempt on life would be dubbed as an impulsive action due to misunderstanding.

    A gang war would be dubbed as a minor scuffle.

    A fight to the death will be dubbed as a quarrel of immature youngsters.

    And to destroy that fa?ade the best and the most direct method is toy everything on the table without hiding anything.

    Now, took the higher stand and the sirens had to take the lower stand and then the negotiations proceeded.

    Sam took out a scroll along with the two products that he is going to sell.

    He is not selling the products individually, his foundations in the charbhum realm were justid down, he is not strong enough to have an arms deal with a potential rival of the elves which would put him crosshairs.

    So, he is going to sell the manufacturing method.

    Even though these people don¡¯t know how to forge and manufacture things, they have a great heat source and methods to regte the temperature of the heat source. Sam created a n with this heat source as the center and he would create a manufacturing nt.

    Along with that, he would also create a defensive structure around the city using theva around the city which would be a cover-up for the arms factory they are going to create.

    If the deal was signed, Sam¡¯s men woulde and finish the construction ording to the designs and finish the process and they would also be in charge of providing necessary asional services and training the sirens to operate on the machines.

    He would let his team train until they reached a certain level of expertise in operating the machines without any problems and let them make their own weapons along with the training in assembly process and operation.

    The defensive structure would also be filled with different mechanisms and it would need some regr maintenance for which his people wille regrly and also check the weapon factory which would be keptpletely hidden from the elves.

    And there will be a use in the contract that they wouldn¡¯t reveal this airpower weaponry to the elves any time soon. In fact, they could only show them when the elves attack them with the harpoons. If not, everything will go to shit.

    Sam would be in trouble and the maintenance will not just stop, but Sam would be forced to create something that could counter these airpower weaponry.

    After discussing everything that Sam has to offer and that includes his special defensive structure that could be used against the sea creatures or any other invasion that could happen against the city and it mainly focuses on using the heat energy of the Lava and theva itself as a weapon of defense.

    As much as fire is considered weak against water, that depends of the intensity of the fire and there are many indirect methods they could use this.

    Then came the discussion about Sam¡¯spensation. The discussion was heated and Sam clearly said that he is not really interested too much in the spirit stones, even if they are elemental stones.

    After some futile attempts to convince him, they decided on a certain value of the spirit stones for thepensation and they would provide different options to Sam in a few days and each option would be equivalent to that said value and he can select what he wants from among those options.

    Sam agreed and he stressed the fact that thepensation should include the exnation they have for the two attempts on his life and the deal wouldn¡¯t go through.

    One must say he is treading on thin ice as he was very aggressive in the negotiation without backing down. There are veiled threats, warnings, and forceful demands, but he didn¡¯t back down but he still managed to walk away.

    After Sam finished the negotiation, Varien is tasked to take Sam back to the capital.

    Sam went on with selecting the artisans that will be working on this and many of the newly joined artisan students are also going underwater. The first construction would be the defensive structure which would also give a veil for the elves. After it waspleted, the main artisans that are part of Sam¡¯s original crew will make the internal construction of the weapon manufacturing nt.

 Chapter 809: Destined Person

    Sam¡¯s estimated construction time would be around three months. After this is over, it is time for him to go back.

    After these three months, there would be approximately one year and two months before the next pce of inheritance.

    And the one-year grace period is necessary for him to have a proper development phase in the realm the Pce of inheritance is going to be held.

    So, in these three months, Sam has to find a beast that is suitable for his next breakthrough. He is focused on the wood elements.

    But before that, he has to do something else and that is catching the sea urchins.

    If he didn¡¯t catch enough sea urchins, then that would be a waste. These things are going to be one of his new defense mechanisms and he would even send them to his different bases.

    His city, the western continent, the former Usain sect¡¯snd, and the minor power inds he had.

    As for Naga Loka, he wouldn¡¯t bother with it. His partners are there and they are trustworthy. There is also some serious stigma about Sam in that world and he wouldn¡¯t be easily betrayed. And another reason is that these sea urchins wouldn¡¯t survive in that poisonous world. The miasma would kill them.

    He went back to the sea along with his team and exined the construction n to them. The team is a bit ufortable about the situation. After all, most of them are artisans who are specialized in the fire element, but here they are going to sea to construct underwater. This ispletely baffling to them and almost impossible to be done.

    But Sam gave them enough ideas and resources to finish the project.

    After exining the n and setting them to work, Sam went to the sea urchin area to start his hunt.

    He used light elemental fusion most of the time and just caught the sea urchins forcefully.

    He didn¡¯t go and hunt the transcendent stage sea urchins, he just stayed in the outskirts and went after the low-level ones. Not only does that reduce his risks, it also finished his work easily.

    After catching a hundred of them, he was done with his task.

    Inside the divine dimension, there is another saltwaterke that was formed, but in this one instead of the fish, the sea urchins are floating around.

    Sam threw thest remaining part of the sea folks¡¯ bodies into it. The sea urchins are absorbing the blood, but not the flesh. So, he gave the flesh back to the stingrays.

    Now, Sam is throwing all kinds of waste rocks, the waste metal, and everything that is hard including the bones into the pool.

    And after they finished the absorption while growing, he made a puppet with special food and let it roam around the pool,

    The sea urchins shot at it and the ape would take it back and collect all the spikes and ce them neatly in order based on the material.

    The great thing about this is that most of the rocks that are really hard and have great structural integrity are not forgeable. They are resistant to heat and all they can be used is for construction.

    This is a real waste of them and Sam¡¯s time far too valuable to waste the time making small weapons, but that doesn¡¯t stop him from getting these small weapons from another way and these sea urchins are perfect.

    After he was done here, he went back to the surface. There was a surprise waiting for him. The masseuse from that luxury center is waiting for him.

    He was told that she is visiting the school every day.

    Actually, Sam gave the department heads the go-ahead to hire her if shees. But she wanted to meet him.

    When Sam met her, he felt like he is meeting apletely different person. He even activated his Raiju¡¯s bloodline to check her scent and even after that, he activated the vampire bloodline to check once again.

    But she turned out to be the same.

    The masseuse that he saw in the spa looked like ady who liked unting her beauty and a bit sensual with her actions and speech. But now she is tranquil and looked like a peaceful person. That was arge personality change.

    "I heard you rejected the professor¡¯s offer. Is there a problem?"

    Sam asked.

    She pursed her lips in hesitation and took a deep breath before she finally dared to speak.

    "I am willing to take the job and I don¡¯t even need the five times to pay, but I want to teach my true art."

    "Your true art?"

    "My true art is not a simple massage that is used for body pleasure. It is just a part of it. My true art is a method to improve body constitutions, healing the body of injuries that couldn¡¯t be done in normal ways. It is to increase the affinity between the body and spiritual energy of that person.

    But it also has the power to destroy a person in the battle.

    It is an ancient art created by the family. But I am the only one left of my bloodline to continue this art. Our rivals destroyed our family when I was a kid and destroyed every single person who is capable of art, only I survived. If you let me teach the art, I would even work for free. I just want to reestablish my legacy."

    She took out some scrolls and ced them on the table. Sam looked through them and was a bit surprised. The art really seemed too profound andplex. It has the properties of healing, enhancing, and destroying all at the same time.

    But what confused him is the fact that she came to him and telling the truth. He couldn¡¯t fathom trusting someone who just offered a job with such a secret and when he asked this question, the answer surprised him even more.

    "I was destined to meet you. I know you would being here and I know you are the only one that could help me."

    "Destiny? Do you believe such an intangible concept?" Sam asked casually.

    "I do. There was a person who came to our family estate when I turned five. He told our family that within a few years, there would be a downfall of our family if we don¡¯t put our pride aside and move away from our home.

    And if we didn¡¯t, we would be destroyed. Our legacy will disappear and only one person who could continue that will stay alive.

    My family kicked him out and told him to get lost.

    But when I was ying outside in the estate, he met me once again and told me the exact time it would happen and also the exact ce where I should be if I saw the signs.

    He also told me who I should trust, where I would end up, and what kind of person that could help me restore my family legacy.

    A man, who is a human and not a human at the same time. With a body that was riddled with the marks of his journey, the man who can wield the multiple elements in tandem like using his fingers, a man who has power that was not supposed to be there, with an influence that he is not supposed to wield, the wealth that he shouldn¡¯t able to carry, destroying all the societal norms while climbing the ranks and once he climbed up he would reveal a strength that would halt anyone that coveted his things. And all those qualities would be in a man who is less than thirty years of age and a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator.

    You are the only one that matched all of them.

    You might think I only knew you when we first met in the spa, but that is not true. I knew you before you came to 1. I was keeping tabs on the news about you through couriers. A businessman that sprung out of nowhere, making business after business, paying the highest of taxesing to one.

    Getting involved in education, military, and many others, you are quite hard to miss if one really cared about the affairs of the realm and I waited for you toe.

    You came to the spa and you appreciated my work. You showed appreciation and while you are doing that, I saw what your body holds.

    You can wield the number of elements that shouldn¡¯t even coexist in the same ce. But they are all staying stagnant in your body.

    You have human anatomy, but your cells are notpletely human. You have characteristics of a human, a beast in fact various types of beasts with different instincts and another creature that I couldn¡¯t even identify. But all these are iplete bnce and control as if they are subservient to one supreme instinct.

    You are something that shouldn¡¯t even exist in the first ce, but your existence itself changes norms. It is against the norms.

    I know you are that destined person the second Iid my hands on you.

    So, I am confident that you would help me."

 Chapter 810: To the Forest

    Sam doesn¡¯t know what to make of this situation.

    Destiny? Fate? Fortune telling? Does he believe them?

    He doesn¡¯t know. He couldn¡¯t bring himself to believe them. He couldn¡¯t bring himself to believe the fact that his life was just a book that could be pre-read even before he experienced it. Nor could he ept that what he would do with his life was already decided and the decision of the not his own rather some unknown force that he doesn¡¯t know.

    This ispletely uneptable.

    But there is an example right in front of him. In fact, he is an example. It is too difficult and almost moronic to believe this is a coincidence.

    Sam is pretty sure that a creature like him doesn¡¯t exist in this universe. After all, there is no such thing as a half-vampire and half-human, in fact, even the existence of those beast bloodlines is more feasible.

    But now he is at a loss for words and doesn¡¯t know what to do.

    "What else did he say?"

    "He told me to do whatever you say and trust him unconditionally."

    "Really, what would you do if I ask you to sleep with me?"

    Sam asked with a smirk.

    "Do you really want to?" She asked without a change in expression. The tranquility didn¡¯t go anywhere.

    "No need. I am just joking." Sam shook his head and replied. From the looks of it, she didn¡¯t even take her body as something precious when it concerned him. She might really do it, if he said yes.

    Sam took a deep breath and asked.

    "I can ept you. But before that, I have to test what you are really doing. I want know what kind of effects your art has. So, would it be okay to ask you to show it to me?"

    "No problem."

    Both of them went to the nearby room and Samid on his stomach on his bed after removing his top.

    She carefully ced her hands on his back and the wood elemental energy slowly flowed into his body and before Sam knew the muscles are hurting.

    It is as if his muscle fibers are twisted all over.

    He took a deep breath, but he didn¡¯t move.

    She is just demonstrating what kind of damage she can do. After that, she started smoothing over these knots of muscle fibers and she is doing it precisely.

    "May I ask you something?"

    "Sure."

    "Why do you have so many scars on your body?"

    "After all the things you knew about my body? Is this really the thing you want to ask? Not the elements, not the bloodlines?"

    "I am sure, they are something that I shouldn¡¯t be asking."

    "You are as smart as I thought. But before that, there is one thing I want to ask. Why should I believe you are telling the truth? You might be lying to enter my school to help the elves. After all, with our new staff, even the elders might be having some trouble. Why should I trust you? You might even be their pawn."

    "What should I do to make you trust me?"

    "I will tell you thatter. You asked about the scars; right? Why did you ask that?"

    "You seem to be good at healing. I heard it from the rumors about Ramya, but why did you leave all the scars there?"

    "As that fortune teller said, they are the marks of my journey. Every scar represents the battle I got it in and also the price I paid to win that battle. They are important life lessons so that I won¡¯t make the same mistake again."

    "Now that you mention it, there are barely any scars that intersect, but your body is only that big, you wouldn¡¯t be able to maintain that right?"

    "Then all the more reason to be stronger and more skilled so that I won¡¯t get injured."

    By this time, the muscle fibers are all repaired and Sam stood up. He felt a lot lighter. He could guess what kind of art this is.

    "You can join in and open your own sub-department under the healer department. You can have your own ss and the timings are also up to you. The pay also wouldn¡¯t change. I don¡¯t like going back on my word.

    Go and meet the teacher named Shork and tell him I sent you. He would take care of the rest."

    "Thank you so much."

    "For now, just focus on teaching your art. There is no need to care or worry too much about some family taking you down. They can try all they want. As long as you work for me. Unless someone that could destroy the whole charbhum realm with a single move appears, you don¡¯t have to worry about anything."

    With that he sent her away and now. The next day, he went out in search for the beast.

    He couldn¡¯t dy it anymore.

    From what he learned the war with the sea folks is going into a standstill as the elves, humans and centaurs retaliated severely.

    The sea folks are showing signs of retreat. But the elves are not really willing to let go of this chance and decided to go all out against them.

    It wouldn¡¯tst too long and after it was over, it would be time for them to go.

    He did his research and Shork has also taken it up on himself to look into it when he came out of the forest.

    The Shork is none other than the strongest person under Sam. The Shop Keeper from Naga loka.

    This is the alias the shop keeper created to himself for some reason when he was told that he would be taking him to Charbhum realm.

    This is a bit confusing for Sam, but not by too much.

    When he got these five people from the Deste realm to this ce, they stayed in those danger zones for a while and Sam asked them to take note of any beasts that are good at using wood elemental energy.

    And everyone gave their options out of which Shork gave the best option.

    It is actually a bear type beast that is good at wood elemental energy. Sam has a feeling that he would find something simr to that of the Golden Ape in terms of its bloodline.

    He skimmed through the bestiary once again and looked at the bear type beasts that have the wood elemental energy and there are some options.

    And there is even a great list of variants of them.

    He checked with Shork and it turned out that there are really some decent options. With bloodline refinement he can really get a beast that is not too low level.

    So, he prepared for his journey and left the capital.

    He traveled for a day and night and entered the danger zone.

    The forest is lush and green everywhere. The trees are so big that every single one of them is at least a few hundred feet tall. They are also too thick and wide that it would take at least three people topletely hug a single tree.

    There are few trees of smaller size.

    Very few people enter this forest and the ones that dared to enter and managed to return will always have a treasure in their hands.

    Everything in this forest is valuable and there are some legends stating that the deeper they go the dangerous the beasts would be and the fewer chances that they would return.

    But Sam is not exactly worried, because he is not nning to go too deep and even if he identally went, he can use the dimensional drifter to escape, he already locked the coordinates and filled it with spiritual energy.

    The only problem is that along with Sam there are some people that are following from far away.

    There are still some greedy people who want to mess with Sam and this forest is their best bet. What happens inside stays inside and this forest is one of the most dangerous ces on the, it is only expected that some idents might happen. They just want to because of that ident.

    Sam who already went a decent distance into the forest looked back and muttered to himself.

    "This is going to be a long search with these pesky obstacles."

    There are just too many people he has to kill.

    And thus Sam¡¯s little adventure in this dangerous forest began.

    For the next month, he didn¡¯te across a beast that he liked and even he liked something that is not really suitable for him. He just caught them and took them with him. They would contribute to the animal poption in the divine dimension and also to the ecosystem of the deste realm.

    While he is searching for the beast, all the mercenary teams and individuals that are after Sam are being killed. But not by Sam directly.

    He made use of the chessboard after a long time and let the Wights out.

    The Wight team is extremely surprised and delighted to be in a forest such as this. Everyrge tree here has a vitality that was umted for hundreds of years and even more. This is the best ce for them to be to get rapid growth.

    So, now they are not only helping him with clearing the followers, they can also grow stronger and also help with the search.

    After this one month, Sam finally saw the traces of the beast he liked.

 Chapter 811: Purple Orangutans

    *CRASH*

    *CRACK*

    Sam flew across the forest as he crashed into arge tree. The tree cracked in the middle and he fell on the ground with face first.

    He stood up and looked into a distance coldly. There are some purple figures jumping one tree to another clearly visible to him. One such figure swung with the help of a tree branch that is rtively lower andunched itself on to Sam.

    Sam activated metallic fusion and punched right at the purple figure which shot through the air and crashed into the trees nearby.

    But it didn¡¯t stay there, it jumped once again and stood on a branch as it looked at Sam baring its teeth.

    The purple figure is a primate. An Orangutan to be precise. It is also not too big. It is just a little bit bigger than a normal orangutan back on earth around 1.8 meters tall.

    Yesterday, Sam has finally found the traces of the bear type beasts. He is actually very surprised by the dy because from what Shork said, the bears are not exactly scarce and he noticed bears of all cultivation levels.

    Even the Consummate level ones.

    But now that Sam is here. There is not a single sign of a bear. In this one month, there are no results and the mercenaries and individuals that came after him became a nuisance.

    That is the reason he let the Wights out and let them deal with all these people. The Wights are on a spree. Each tree here has so much vitality that they would take months to absorb onepletely and digest it. And a single tree would help them with break through. Some trees are even so good and nutritious to them that they might elerate their breakthrough.

    So, they are doing all the mious things.

    After this constant futile search, he finally found the traces of bares. The feces, the w marks on the trees and territorial scent they leave with the urine. He saw all of them. But the bears are nowhere to be seen.

    When he followed the traces, he finally came across the beasts, but they are not the bears he wanted. Rather they are the primates in front of him.

    Not only the encounter was a surprise, it was actually a nned surprise.

    The apes ambushed him out of nowhere and he crashed into the tree like this.

    He is actually cautious, they are actually able to merge with the trees that he needed to use energy vision to distinguish their presence from the trees, but it was already toote by them and they already started pounding the crap out of him.

    If not for his defense the attacks would have torn the Pre-transcendent cultivator apart.

    Not only are they using the trees to their advantage they are even physically strong and active. It would be hard for an elite squad to escape the ambush.

    Luck was on Sam¡¯s side as the concentrated attacks threw him out of the ambush zone and his strong physique and endurance helped him survive.

    He is really angry at them.

    He didn¡¯t provoke them, neither did he try to hunt them. In fact, as soon as he spotted them, he was already retreating, but these monkeys didn¡¯t leave him.

    Generally, the Orangutans are peace-loving primates, except for this one.

    These things don¡¯t have any sense propriety and don¡¯t have any respect for bloodline superiority and such.

    Their sense are sharp in many ways except for recognizing superior beings. These are in a sense beasts simr to the Great ck Sharks.

    Both don¡¯t care about the bloodline hierarchy.

    But in some ways these things are worse than sharks. At least those sharks only hunt to eat and fight when provoked or to protect themselves, on the other hand these Purple Orangutans are a greedy bunch.

    They will keep on eating as long as there is food. They will invade other territories and try to conquer the other race. And these things are omnivores. They eat meat like they are eating fruit. They have the worst qualities of the humanbined with the worst qualities of the monkeys.

    These things are a night mare for anyone that encounters them. The most irritating thing is that they are wood elemental beasts and they are extremely advantageous in forests. Now that Sam saw them, he is sure that the Green Cloaks must have learned their forest fighting techniques through these beasts.

    Currently, the Wights are busy in some other area fighting with a batch of mercenaries and also cultivating.

    It would be annoying to fight these beasts alone in a ce like this.

    Sam took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He used the crystal table to check the surrounding area for any other creature¡¯s presence.

    Within the range there are only orangutans, no human, no elf, no centaur.

    He looked at the beasts that are hanging over the trees, or sitting on the rocks or even the ground trying to surround all the whilepeting amongst themselves who could finish him off as if he is a dead man is pissing Sam off a bit.

    These monkeys are not stupid after all. At least if they are stupid, he could have forgiven them easily. But they are intelligent and clearly a bit arrogant.

    Sam waved his hand and Ape came out of the divine dimension. He is currently eating his meal and he has a bunch of fruits in his hands, when he saw all the orangutans that are looking at him with confusion, he looked at Sam in askance.

    Sam gave him a look and the ape stuffed his face with the fruits and started munching on them and got ready to fight.

    Sam and the ape got ready and the Orangutans are still confused by their actions and just like that, the fight started.

    The ape is far bigger than the orangutans and its strength is clearly superior. It is also good with trees, jumping, climbing. Except for the wood elemental use, they have no advantage.

    The Orangutans that areing are receiving the most vicious punches they have ever experienced in their lives as they came at the Ape from all the sides.

    Sam didn¡¯t go on full aggressive and hand and to hand. First he activated the wind element and jumped on to the trees. As he ran around the wind des rolled around cutting down the branches and roots that are aiming for him along with disrupting the rhythm of the orangutans.

    Soon the Orangutans caught up to him a bit and are about to attack him. Sam is currently stand him on the tree and jumped down as if he gave up the fight, when orangutans followed him, he waved his hand and Yanwu came out of the divine dimension.

    The golden mes made the trees catch fire and the bunch of orangutans that jumped towards Sam are all the in mid-airpletely unable to escape.

    The screams of the monkeys resounded in the forest. Sam let Yanwu do his own thing. He started setting the Monkeys on fire along with the trees they are standing on. But the trees are too big to burnpletely and faster so it is taking a bit of time.

    But that is enough.

    Sam¡¯s actions enraged the rest of the monkeys and they became more aggressive, he even watched as more and more orangutans joined the first group.

    The monkeys are only growing numbers as the time went on.

    Sam picked the tallest tree in surroundings and started climbing it up.

    The trunk isrge enough to be considered a wall and he used the metal element to use his hands as climbing spikes and started climbing upwards.

    The Orangutans who are good at climbing swiftly followed as the height increased the trunk started to thin down and be less and less usible for more monkeys to fit.

    So after reaching a certain height, Sam looked at therge number of monkeys that are along the trunk climbing mindless and smirked before kicking and trunk and jumping outwards.

    With a wave of his hands, Sky appeared out of the divine dimension and his wings started glowing with wind elemental energy.

    Sam held on to Sky¡¯s back and both of them dove down with Sky¡¯s wing cutting the trunk vertically downwards and the Monkeys that are in the way of that started jumping down.

    But Sky is faster than them and Sam Jumped down from the sky and let Dia out who increased the gravity around the tree.

    Not only is the trunk falling down rapidly to the two sides, the monkeys are also falling down because of the gravity and right when they were about to hit the ground with the increased the force, earthen spikes came out of the grown crucifying them on the spot.

    Sky, dropped Sam off and started assisting Yanwu.

    The Monkeys that are chasing Sam reduced by half and they are looking at him angrily.

    They are really angry to the point Sam can even see their eyes turning red and hear their teeth grinding.

 Chapter 812: War in the forest

    Sam is using all his beasts except Mia and Shadow mice and the panthers. But the Orangutans seemed to be never-ending.

    He halted for a second and checked the area with the crystal table once again and was surprised to find out that the monkeys kept oning from different sides.

    They numbered in hundreds.

    If this goes on, there is only one method, he would have to use the harbinger and the guns to deal with them faster.

    But even then, there is no guarantee that this would be controlled. If he used any other methods, like energy cells, mass explosions of grenades or burning the whole forest with the bio-fuel, then he would gather some serious attention from the people who are roaming the forest and also even stronger beasts.

    After contemting for a while, he decided to counter the numbers with numbers for a while and only go for the drastic measures when necessary.

    He let out the Specter and asked him to perform soul necromancy on the corpses. Not the soul necromancy that is used to get the memories, rather really catching the souls of these monkeys and using them for attacks. Or precisely using them as ghosts to make mental attacks on the monkeys, at the same time, he let the Ghoul Chess team out and let them create the undead of the Orangutan corpses.

    These undead creatures have only one goal and that is to get a hold of the orangutans and hold them tightly, while Sam put a bullet through its head.

    The whole area turned into hell.

    And once the Orangutans even lost the advantage of numbers, the situation is finally in favor of Sam.

    But Sam heard something that made him feel tense.

    *ROAR*

    He can hear the roars of an orangutan from far away. But he is sure that it is not a normal orangutan. It is surely something that is at least transcendent level.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but get a look at the crystal table.

    There are three figuresing from three different directions and all three of them are Orangutans. They are bigger than the orangutans that are currently attacking Sam and looked stronger.

    They are clearly Transcendent stage Orangutans.

    All of a sudden the monkeys in this area didn¡¯t attack as aggressively, instead, they are encircling every beast and ghoul so that they can make them stay in this ce no matter what.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but curse the intelligence of these creatures. They can be dumb enough to get irritated and fall for the slightest of the provocations and they can also be smart enough to act like they are acting now.

    Those beasts that areing to apany them didn¡¯t even give out anymands in that roar, but these things still managed to do this.

    Sam sped up on the harbinger and started letting everyone enter the divine dimension and the ghouls into the chessboard.

    The Orangutans are trying every possible way to get a hold of him, but that is not going to happen. Sam is really sick of these monkeys. As much as he doesn¡¯t want to continue this conflict they are just too persistent.

    But they really do make a good squad to work in forests.

    He looked at the most injured by alive monkeys and started collecting them into the chess board, but not without doing anything else.

    He is taking out all the umted bio-fuel he had and made it rain over the whole area.

    The Monkeys are all getting soaked in the bio-fuel. But they didn¡¯t stop, they are just too excited that their superiors areing to help them.

    Sam is keeping track of those three superiors and soon they are within the range of his sight.

    They areing aggressively as they crushed some smaller trees on their way.

    Sam is currently hovering over harbinger while dodging the monkeys that are jumping from the trees onto him to catch him.

    By now all hispanions including the beasts, ghouls, and even the specter are all either in the divine dimension or in chessboard. Only he was there alone.

    As soon as he saw the threerger monkeys entering the fray and were about to near him, Sam made his move, he increased the altitude and moved upwards.

    There is only onerge tree near him that is tall enough for the three monkeys to follow him.

    They climbed rapidly and there is not much difference if they are running or climbing. They are that fast.

    After reaching a certain height, Sam ced his hand on the tree trunk and set it on fire.

    The tree trunk caught on fire rapidly and it reached downwards faster and faster.

    Because this is also the tree that was soaked on the biofuel the most.

    The whole tree is on orange mes and these orange mes didn¡¯t just stay there. They extended downwards to the surrounding trees.

    The three monkeys jumped downwards into the group of their subordinates and all the monkeys are moving backward to not catch thisrge fire.

    But there is an undead that emerged from within the group that jumped to one of the trees and caught fire before once again jumping into the group. The same thing happened in many ways.

    The monkeys whose affinity lies in wood elemental energy and the biofuel are not supposed to be a goodbination.

    The threerge monkeys are now stuck in the middle of therge group of their kin that was set on fire. They have not trees nearby that are intact to take advantage of.

    Sam looked at the situation and made a move.

    He created a formation around this area, so as to prevent forest fire and then proceeded to throw the biofuel over the threerge monkeys so that they would catch on fire faster.

    Even though they might be a good catch for the chessboard, he is more interested in catching the beasts that are of the same level as him which would be a good thing in the long run.

    He has enough powerhouses for now and the current underdogs are bound to be powerful in the near future.

    The situation is not too bad for now.

    But Sam is worried that there would be another sudden appearance of the Orangutans, but luckily that didn¡¯t happen.

    As the three monkeys are burning continuously and the actions of the undead whose only job is to pin them down and Sam¡¯s only job which is to throw more and more fuel on them, they are finally taken down.

    Sam let the specter out to collect all souls.

    He digested the three souls of those superiors while he used the soul formation to collect the rest of the Orangutan souls.

    Currently, it is already in the transcendent stage, if it wants to improve the lower level souls wouldn¡¯t do much anyway.

    And he also collected the memories of these threerge monkeys.

    Sam was surprised when he went through the memories. Because he is caught up in the middle of another war.

    The Orangutans waged a war on the Bear territory to upy thend, resources and such.

    The Bears are individually strong, but they are not strong in terms of numbers.

    Even if they can take on ten orangutans each, they are justing in groups of the twenties, so the bear king just led the whole bear tribe into the nearby mountains to create a defensive line.

    This is a bit surprising to Sam.

    These beasts are really too smart, they are now waging wars, setting up the defense, and even using war strategies.

    This is new to him.

    But Sam is a bit excited.

    This would be a perfect time for him to take advantage and catch a bear to be his next beast in breakthrough. All the while loosening up in the battle.

    He looked through the route he should take from the monkey¡¯s memories and started moving in that direction.

    The current area he was in happened to be the area that was previously under bear¡¯smand. It was recently upied and the hundreds of these monkeys are the soldiers of the Orangutan army that are holding this ce down. And that includes the threerge orangutans.

    He traveled for almost an hour to reach the destination.

    He stood on a tall tree to look at therge swarm of Orangutans stationed at the foot of a hill.

    This is very simr to an actual war. If there are some tents and some formations, then it would definitely be mistaken as a human or in this an elven war.

    Sam has to circle around the line of defense of these Orangutans to reach that hill which is the start of the mountain region the bears upied.

    He doesn¡¯t want to be mistaken as an ally for the Orangutans. So, he has to make sure that he went discreetly and as soon as possible.

    The war doesn¡¯t seem to be heated enough, so it would be better if he went as fast as he can before it does.

 Chapter 813: Little Help

    Even though there are just too many orangutans that are blocking the way. Sam didn¡¯t find it any difficult to go past them.

    They are concentrated in one ce and at the end of the day, they didn¡¯t really study some war strategy. They are beasts after all.

    So, Sam sneaked into the forest carefully and crossed therge area by circling around it through the forest.

    There are asional Orangutans that areing and scouting there, but it wasn¡¯t that difficult to escape with the help of energy vision. He didn¡¯t even need to use the crystal table.

    After climbing onto the hill which also has a decent density of vegetation, Sam carefully climbed it to see why these monkeys are not crossing the hill and swarming the mountain region with the sheer numbers.

    But he didn¡¯t have to wonder for too long. as he witnessed a scene.

    There is a team of Orangutans entering the hill to scout once again and when they crossed the area Sam was currently in, reached the peak of the hill, there came the ambush. The peak has a too many rocks and trees as hiding ces and a group of bearsunched themselves into the team of orangutans and started a killing spree.

    There are only four bears, but they really did a number of the orangutans that are a team of ten and only two of them escaped.

    This caused Sam to feel very intrigued. He activated the Crystal table and took a look at the surroundings.

    The hill is actually quite small. After reaching the peak and descending to the other side, they would enter a small valley that would be leading into the depths of the mountain region.

    But around the peak of this hill, there are many groups of bears standing in ambush and they are clearly trying to interrupt the scouting of the Orangutans and also thin down the numbers as much as they can.

    He couldn¡¯t see too much into the valley as the range is limited, but he can see the ambushes waiting from the bears.

    These bears have brown fur with a green hue and have simr size to a fully grown adult grizzly bear. It might grow further.

    As soon as Sam saw the bears, he already knew that these are the ones he came looking for.

    He couldn¡¯t get the urate number of the bears. But from the looks of it they are clearly outnumbered by arge margin.

    Maybe, they could use some help.

    Sam didn¡¯t go into the range of the bear ambushes. Instead, he stayed within the safe zone and managed to keep an eye on both of the scouts of the Orangutans and also the Bears that are at the peak of the hill.

    All the while making sure that he didn¡¯t fall into the radars of both parties.

    He could see the Orangutans that just escapedmunicating with the rest of theirpanions.

    They are discussing loudly and yelling at each other.

    But Sam is not currently focused on them. He is looking at thergest monkey there is in the bunch.

    In fact, not one. Four of them are sitting in the middle of the whole camp as if they don¡¯t care what the rest of them are doing. All four of them aremunicating since the start.

    They are notpletely too big. The average height of the Pre-transcendent stage Orangutan is around 1.8 meters and the Transcendent Orangutans he killed in the forest are around 2 to 2.1 meters and theserge Orangutans that are even bigger which seemed to consummate level creatures are around 2.4 meters.

    They are not really too big or too small. But for a consummate level beast, they are clearly small and even Dia who is closest to the size of a normal horse has a bigger presence than these beasts.

    They are just too small. But this is one of their advantages. They use thisck of presence and intimidating aura to hide within the forests and make sneak attacks easily.

    They are the best in that aspect.

    These four seemed to be the leaders of this invasion, but they are letting their subordinates do all the work for now.

    The front team of hundred or so Orangutans is the only actives one for now and they are dividing into teams of varying sizes and entering the hill to finish the scouting from the looks of it, their target seemed to get a gauge of the ambush that was set up in the valley after the hill.

    But the bears are not letting them cross.

    As for the advantage the Orangutans have over Sam and other creatures which is their affinity with the vegetation and the forest, it is not working anymore.

    The bears also have the same level of affinity and they can also take advantage of the trees, but not as much as Orangutans, but they can still supplement it with their superior physical strength.

    The battles are great.

    But the bears didn¡¯t ount for one thing though. The cunning of the Orangutans.

    Even though they are not exactly too clever when dealing with their prey and enemies they can be very smart. The Initial beating Sam took in their hands is proof of that.

    This time, when the scouts moved, few Orangutans, didn¡¯t enter too deep into the zone of ambush, rather they just hid and after a while, another batch of teams entered and they directly jumped into the ambush zones.

    The bears once again started tearing them apart.

    But this time, they are in for a surprise. The first batch that hid in the forest made their move and ganged up on the bears.

    After the initial advantage of surprise which bears had and helped them kill the scouts easily vanished now and they became victims of the same element of surprise.

    Sam who is watching it from a far, took out his bow and took out a bunch of arrows. He let Raiju out and made him adapt to a size that is simr to that of a Bear here. And used him for moving around. Along with that, he plucked a bit of fur from Raiju¡¯s body and tied to the arrows.

    Soon an arrow with lightning energy shed through the forest and lodged into the head of an orangutan that is about to finish off a bear.

    Before the group of beasts could realize what is happening, another arrow came and pierced through the ear of the ape from one side to another.

    The Bears became wary and so did the Orangutans they stopped fighting and formed their own groups as they looked around verily, but before they could really do anything, Sam already shot three more arrows and three Orangutans are done for.

    When the group once again returned to a state where the Bears are now superior, the Orangutans panicked and were about to flee, but the bears didn¡¯t let them. They just took the chance and attacked.

    After dealing with this group, Sam moved to another side and helped another bear group.

    After a few minutes, all the scouts are dead. This time, no Orangutan managed to escape and give information to theirpanions.

    The Bears which are now free from the threat of their enemies started examining the arrows that helped them.

    The first thing they did is take a sniff like any ordinary bear and the silver fur which has a strong scent of Raiju attracted them the most.

    Most of the arrows didn¡¯t get too bloodied and the fur was intact without any blood on it which preserved its original scent.

    And the Bears that got the scent have only one thought in their minds, it is the scent of another predator.

    But they are also familiar with the arrows which are not exactly a thing for a beast. They either belonged to the three known creatures for them and they are humans, elves, and centaurs. Of which they had no friendly rtionships with any of them.

    This caused them to be a bit warier, but they have a bigger problem now.

    The Orangutans awaited theirpanions toe back and when they saw no oneing back, they became angry.

    That is around eighty Orangutans dying at the same time.

    And the rest of the Orangutans are not exactly happy about it.

    The Bears that are part of the ambush are now feeling the effect of injuries. They have been constantly attacking and fighting with the Orangutans for hours and they are not only tired but they are also injured quite significantly.

    Sam took out some wine that has significant healing properties and made of fruits that are medicinal and sent the shadow mice to send them out.

    Even though Shadow mice don¡¯t act that great in forests and in the presence of some predators, Sam is nearby and they are okay.

    Shadow mice dropped the wine bottles from the space hade rings they have and returned.

    The bottles have a scent of Raiju has Sam deliberately rubbed each of them in Raiju¡¯s fur.

    Along with the scent of the delicious and healthy fruit wine, they couldn¡¯t control themselves and one who is closest to the death has volunteered to take a taste.

    And when the wine worked properly they are surprised.

    At this moment, there is another batch of bears that came out of the valley to take over the position from the bears here.

    The injured bears took the ss bottles and left some for the newly arrived bears andmunicated about the arrows with silver fur to them before leaving.

 Chapter 814: A little more help

    The bears exchanged their ambush locations.

    Sam didn¡¯t follow them. Instead, he stayed within this area and looked at the Orangutans and the bears take their positions and get ready for the fight.

    The Orangutans arepletely enraged by thest wave and they seemed to have decided to just swarm the whole area with the superior numbers they possess.

    If Sam was the leader of their tribe, he would have told them to do that long ago.

    There is no business for these Orangutans to act like normal soldiers. They are good at mindless fighting and they have to do what they are good at.

    It is just that they are too concerned about the strength of the bears and their tactics.

    The more Sam looked at it, the more he felt like this is closer to the human war or a war organized by fully sentient and intelligent people.

    The beasts are beasts and these are not that sentient but they are still too cunning to be operating such a war.

    Sam let the specter out and transferred his memories to him before sending him to the bears.

    He has to send the message of the Orangutans lining up to rampage the hill to them. But if he makes his way right before them at the moment, he would have to make them trust him and it would take time.

    This is the best way for him to do it.

    The Specter is also stronger than the bears and it is easier to imprint the memory in their minds along with the message.

    The specter is also fast too. So within a few minutes even before the Orangutans lined up one-third of their troops, the bears already reached the word and they startedmunicating.

    Soon, one bear from each group ran towards the valley and started exi9ning the situation to their superiors.

    Sam watched as the bears came out one by one. Therger bears that are definitely transcendent in cultivation level came out and three of them came into the hill forest and from the looks of it, they are searching for Sam with the scent from the Raiju¡¯s fur.

    Meanwhile, the rest of the bears are rearranging themselves within the valley to meet with the attack.

    Sam didn¡¯t want to waste the time of the bears, so he moved towards them himself on the back of Raiju and the bow in his hands,

    He looked at the bear in front of him and spoke.

    "I know why you are here. You want to see if I am a threat or a trustworthy person. But don¡¯t worry, I had a brief encounter with these monkeys and they tried to kill me in the forest. I am just here to return the favor."

    Sam¡¯s Raiju bloodline is on the rise as he spoke. To give the aura of a beast which is much more trustworthy than the aura of the human.

    Beasts have one quality no matter which realm Sam went. They don¡¯t trust humans easily.

    Sometimes they would rather die than trust a human. Humans are the most fickle creatures after all.

    After Raiju and the bearmunicating and some convincing and also making sure that Sam wouldn¡¯t cross the hill ande to the valley until he was permitted, they went back.

    By now, the Orangutans are already started their move.

    When the bears went back, Sam let the Ghouls out. The wights are still on the other side of the army within the forest, they followed Sam with a distance and now they are still there as he didn¡¯t ask them toe here.

    They are cultivating using the trees. By the time they are done with that, they would be leaving a dead patch where not even a single de of grass will grow for the next few months.

    The Ghouls spread all over the hill and started digging small holes to put the grenade traps, no matter how easy they are to avoid, they always work for the first time.

    After the grenades came the biofuel, Sam¡¯s new favorite fuel and particrly useful against these orangutans.

    He didn¡¯t let the beasts out at the moment, the war is mostly between the Orangutans and the Bears, he doesn¡¯t have to help out too much, it is fine as long as he helped enough to make it easy for them.

    The hill is soon swarmed by the purple orangutans and even the ground quaked a bit as they ran crazily.

    Sam got his bow ready and Raiju is currently standing beside him at the peak.

    This is thest line where can enter. They are not allowed into the valley behind them.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The grenades exploded and the time came.

    The first line is obviously the Pre-transcendent stage monkeys and then came the Transcendent stage Orangutans.

    They are not here to fight immediately, only the Pre-transcendents are going to sh first.

    There is a slight halt after the initial st of the grenades, they are waiting to see what would happen, but nothing happened.

    They once against started running and the ghouls started their attacks along with Sam and Raiju.

    Raiju made the whole sky above the hill fill up with lightning clouds as the silver lightning crackled and started striking them.

    It even enhanced the arrows that were being shot by Sam with the umted lightning that is supporting him. Every arrow was apanied by a series of lightning bolts that are killing the orangutans like they are little kids.

    They are only good at the direct battle, this made it easy for them to be killed in this way.

    Granted that Sam couldn¡¯t kill all of them with the arrows and the lightning, as he decided earlier, he only had to make it easier for the Bears.

    With the head-start Sam gave, everything went smoothly. After the initial chaos, the orangutans became more orderly and they are going strong.

    Raiju who is already extremely couldn¡¯t wait to let loose and Sam let him. But he followed him on the harbinger to make sure he is safe.

    Any of these beasts are not supposed to die at this early age. All the beasts he had in his possession are not even considered adults in their worlds.

    Even unlocking their potential starts after they broke through the Consummate level and getting past that.

    Apart from that, they are his dearestpanions, he cannot let them suffer too much.

    The war went on for a good while before the transcendent stage beasts started their sh and then after a few hours came to the Consummate stage beasts.

    They all crashed and shed like crazy, the vegetation on the hill all grew out of proportion which made good firewood for the biofuel to burn.

    As soon as Sam set the traps of biofuel set by the ghouls on fire, the whole hill is almost done for.

    But the only affected beasts are Orangutans because not many bears came onto the hill directly and the select few that even came here are not exactly weak enough to catch on the fire.

    They easily escaped and the fight went on.

    Some monkeys entered the valley where more bearsid in ambush.

    Everything went ording to the bears and they managed to push back the Orangutans by evening.

    The situation stabilized.

    Once the monkeys retreated, Sam got busy, the first thing he did is put out the fire and the next thing he did is help the bears heal with the fruit wine.

    After he did all that, he was finally allowed to go into the valley. But the first thing he has to do is to heal the injured bears.

    When Sam entered the valley and crossed it, he reached the real camp of the Bears.

    The camp is full of female bears that are pregnant and new mothers along with the injured bears and the kids.

    All of them need special attention and nutrition at the moment. But from the looks of it, they don¡¯t have any.

    There is no vegetation around that has rich fruit or anything.

    There is one consummate level bear that is extremely injured and seemed to be the head of the tribe. He is looking at Sam as he healed himself.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit down with the atmosphere. There is no happiness that the war is won. There is onlyplete sadness and dampness all around.

    Even his cold heartfelt rippled because of this.

    He took out the bulk of fruit and wine he has along with other herbs of lower quality which he doesn¡¯t need and gave them to the cubs and the new mothers along with the injured bears.

    He has a lot of them anyway, there is no need for him to hoard them.

    After all of this was done, Sam gave some heavenly wine to the tribe head so that he could heal faster and finally they had time to have a conversation.

 Chapter 815: Conversation

    Sam and the tribe head are sitting together. He let his beasts out for a while. Even Mia.

    There is ake nearby and Mia is having a great time in the open water after a long while.

    Dia, Raiju, Sky, Yanwu, Ape, and even the shadow mice are having a good time as they interacted with the baby cubs.

    The most fun is always for the panthers. They are now as big as their mother now and they barely reached the Nascent stage. They are interacting with their peers in the bear tribe and they all are interacting with the cubs innocently.

    It is quite ironic when we consider the number of people Sam and the people killed over time when they are still Nascent stage.

    "You want to talk?"

    Sam asked as he looked at the head bear.

    When the bear is looking for Raiju, Sam said once again.

    "I can understand the beast tongue. Don¡¯t worry."

    {You can understand?}

    "Yes, it is a gift I have. So, what is up with the war with these monkeys?"

    {First, I want you to answer why you are here? It has been years since we saw a human this deep}

    "Well, I am actually in search of your tribe. You see those beasts, the golden sunbird, the sky sovereign roc, the Raiju, that horse, they are all part of my family. I want to add another one here. So, I came to see if I can convince or befriend one of you. But I encountered a war here."

    {Befriend? More like enve.}

    "You can talk to my friends. Speak as much as you like and ask them if they are enved or captured. I share a part of them with me."

    Sam spoke and activated his bloodlines one by one.

    "We are bound by a special bond. All the power I have is given to me by them. They are the ones that made me who I am and they are the ones that stayed with me along the path. I am not saying I never enve beasts, I do, but not every beast, only some of them in special cases."

    {Why would you want another beast? Their bloodlines are all superior to ours, even that mouse has a superior bloodline than us. What do you need us for?}

    "They have what you don¡¯t and you have what they don¡¯t. I do care about the bloodline superiority but that is not all."

    {What would you do if I send one with you?}

    "That is too hard to exin. Anyway, I am the only one who is answering all the questions why don¡¯t you answer some of mine?"

    {What do you want to know?}

    "Why the war?"

    {Resources.}

    "What?"

    {I don¡¯t know if you know this, the Orangutans have a high reproduction rate and their poption increases easily. Their natural predators are nowhere near this area.

    The forest here is actually having a too high a level of spiritual energy and it is extremely useful for the growth of the trees.

    But that also brought another problem, the energy is too chaotic and not too refined and this caused the lower level fruits that are suitable for the diet of the cubs and young beasts are unable to grow here. They are dying of overnutrition.

    This caused the Orangutans to invade many territories, they already destroyed a few tribes and barely any beasts survive their attacks. There is a tribe that was even driven to extinction.

    They are pests, but their affinity with the forest is just too much. Only we could rival them. We tried unifying, but they are going against the newborn and others. We actually killed half of them by now because of ourbined efforts.

    Because of their reckless consumption, many of the fruit patches were destroyed and there were only a few patches left and those are in their territory.

    It has been hard to survive.}

    "Can you defend this area sessfully?"

    {We don¡¯t know. But we can try.}

    "How about I help you solve that problem and let me have a chance to convince one of you toe with me?"

    {If you can help us with that, you wouldn¡¯t even need to ask and try, they would willinglye with you.}

    "Then let us get down to the business then. The first problem would be a good ce for defense. This area seems nice. All you would need is proper adjustments for the defensive measures against them and the second thing is theck of food.

    I can give you the fruits that are actually more nutritious and more variety that grow faster than normal. The trees will be nted in this area.

    As long as you defend it, then it would be great. Everything would be in your control."

    {How can you do that?}

    "Don¡¯t worry. It will be done soon. Just let my friends work for now. And I hope you wouldn¡¯t mind if I take the corpses of the Orangutans will you?"

    {Not really. Their meat is not tasty anyway.}

    "That is great."

    Sam went to work immediately.

    He called for the ghouls and the specter and went to the battlefield. The Ghouls created undead and the Specter conducted soul necromancy.

    Sam is going to make a formation that was a standard from the books he read. It is a formation of a necromancer and as long as there is spiritual energy, it can be maintained with a proper supply of spirit stones or any other intake of energy.

    It is called a necromancer¡¯s ring.

    It is a ssic but versatile formation used by many necromancers that defend their territories.

    It can be made in any size and some shapes and many different necromancy techniques.

    Sam decided toy the ring down.

    Meanwhile, Ape and the rest of the beasts along with the other bears that are fit enough to work are all working together to clear the whole hill.

    The corpses are taken to the foot of the hill where Sam currently is, while they pulled out the tree stumps, dead trees, burned trees all the same.

    While Sam isying down the formation, Ape guided the rest of them to create the formation ording to Sam¡¯s instructions and this time, Sam is going to use the trees as formation nodes.

    His divine dimension has many orchards and it is no exaggeration to say that he has a forest in his possession.

    But first, they transnted some of the trees in the nearby forest and ced at the key nodes while nting some of Sam¡¯s own trees.

    After it was done. Then came the trees from the divine dimension.

    Most of the front side of the hill from where the invasion is possible, the trees areid in different formations with minimum fruit trees.

    After it was done, they went on to nt in the inner side of the hill, the peak and then the path leading to the valley and finally the valley.

    It took three weeks toplete everything.

    Ape is experienced in nting trees and the bears are good at growing them. With the help of formation discs, everything is easier. And most of them are transnted, they are not exactly growing them from the scratch. This was easier.

    Sam is mostly focused on the ring. It took the same time for him, the ghouls, and the specter to build it.

    It is actually arge formation in the shape of an iplete ring that enveloped most of the entry points. In that formation, the spiritual energy will be converted into death energy and fed to the undead creatures, the souls that turned into ghosts, and even the shadows if they want to.

    But currently, they only used the corpses of the orangutans and their ghosts.

    After three weeks of work, Sam said.

    "The fruit trees are also nted. I think they would be enough for the time being. As for the formation, as long as there is no serious damage it wouldn¡¯t be a problem.

    Most of the time they wouldn¡¯t evene past that and any possible breach will give you a big enough signal and I am sure you are not afraid of confrontation on a higher level.

    All the fruit trees grow faster and have arge yield and you can grow them continuously into the valley and make the whole mountain region your space with this hill as a base.

    Is that enough?"

    {This is more than enough actually. I am quite surprised by this new change. How did you pull that off?}

    "Well, it is not thatplicated and it is not my idea. It was studied and used anyway. So, now can I meet my new friend?"

    {Of course, you can take him with you. But you have to stay for a few days before you go. And also your new friend happened to be our best on his own level and wants to have a littlepetition with you and your beasts.}

    "That wouldn¡¯t be a problem at all."

 Chapter 816: Return

    Sam went to meet his soon-to-be new friend. The best of the best in Pre-transcendent level.

    When Sam met him he has a faint recollection of that bear. He is one of the bears that were at the forefront of the war and killed the most number of Orangutans and also the most injured bear.

    Now he waspletely recovered and wants to have a littlepetition. Thepetition went on for the next few days.

    It is actually not that big of a deal, the bear wants to fight with them one on one to see where it ranks amongst all of Sam¡¯s beasts.

    Even though Sam felt like this is a bad idea, the beasts are excited to give the newbie a good beating.

    Their bloodlines are superior and they have some distinct advantages over bear for now as their battle experience is different.

    They don¡¯t have as much battle experience but the little experience they had is extremely different and they have developed some new tricks with Sam. They almost think and act like human cultivators, the bear would face some serious trouble.

    Sam almost felt that the bear would take the worst beatings of his life, but he was surprised to see how the bear held on. It put up a decent fight against the beasts and took advantage of the forest properly. But most of the time, on verge of his loss, Sam stopped thepetition.

    And thest fight was between the bear and the Sam himself.

    Sam didn¡¯t even fight back. He just focused on his own defense so persistently that the bear gave up.

    After two days of these littlepetitions, Sam started his return journey, with the bear, he got everything he wanted from this realm and it is about time to start his return journey.

    He went back to the city along with it.

    The bear waspletely shocked when he entered the divine dimension. It thought it would be cooped up in some space inside the beast pouch, but it turned out to be different, the divine dimension is a world of its own and the bear liked it a lot.

    For some reason even after the beating, it took from the rest of the beasts, they still got along.

    Sam didn¡¯t finish the bloodline ritual immediately, because he has to study the bear a bit before he did that.

    From the actually looks of it the bear is called the Forest Bear. And they are also supposed to be green in color with some brown hue.

    But this bear tribe seemed to have undergone some mutation or either some crossing with a bear of another bloodline. He has to check which bloodline has possibilities and see how to refine it properly. If it is just a random bloodline, he can resolve it, but if it is also somewhat superior, he doesn¡¯t want to lose out on it.

    Anyway, he doesn¡¯t have any hurry in that. He would stay in the Pre-transcendent stage for a while, the next breakthrough would take enough time and he would even enter the Pce of inheritance in the Pre-transcendent stage.

    After returning to the Capital, Sam spent some time with Raunak and Ramya to hand over things properly and give the required instructions.

    He sent a courier to the trio toe back.

    He went to meet with Professor and asked for the reward.

    "Why are you asking for the reward immediately? The war is not over and for the price you paid, you would get a lot more than what you are going to get now." The professor asked as he looked at Sam keenly.

    "I don¡¯t have time. I am going out on an adventure with our friends. It would take some time before I came back, it might be a few months or a couple of years, so I would have to do my research."

    "Oh my, you are going away for such a long time, don¡¯t you worry about your establishments?"

    "No, professor. The people who ought to worry are the people that have their eyes on my establishments. Sometimes I pity the naivety of the elves. They only believe what they see, don¡¯t give too much thought, and specte about others, particrly towards humans and centaurs or other creatures. Everyone came to the conclusion that I managed to persuade the five powerhouses that came to my school. But has anyone thought about why they really came? How did I persuade? Or was there even a need to persuade? Have you ever thought about that Professor?"

    The Professor looked at Sam with interest.

    "What are you implying Sam?"

    "Nothing professor. I am implying nothing. I am saying directly that you should think properly before you act. There are a few things that you should know before you try and convince the professors of my school to join you in your so-called cause and trying to persuade the researchers that they would receive better treatment with you. Because they will have only one answer.

    And that wouldn¡¯t change no matter who the question came from. It might be from the students you set up to be their best students or the women you sent that are trying their best to find a way into their beds.

    The answer will not change and you might lose the people that you are using. Because these old men were not persuaded toe here.

    They were ordered toe here."

    With that Sam left the ce.

    By the evening of that day, there was a letter from the professor saying that the items wille along with Sam¡¯s friends.

    Now there is one final destination Sam has to visit. The Sea.

    He has to get his payment from the Sirens.

    When Sam went there asking for the payment, they provided him with quite a few methods and Sam liked one of them the most.

    This payment consisted of some medicinal vegetation that can only be found undersea, a decent amount of the Emerald Tortoiseshells, metals and materials they mined, and finally some spirit stones.

    It is hard for them to match the actual value with the materials alone. It would be too much of a strain on them.

    But Sam didn¡¯t worry too much. He didn¡¯t spend much money on this project anyway.

    After receiving thepensation, he left the spirit stone part of this payment to the artisans that are working on the project and left Siren city.

    After another two days, the trio came back with the shells and a lot of corpses of the Sea folks.

    Sam threw everything into the divine dimension and told them to get ready to leave.

    They had spent too much time in this ce. At least previously, his friends stayed at the city most of the time, but now all of them left for such a long time.

    Even though most of their roles are seeded by someone, they are still a bit worried.

    In fact, they are more worried than Sam.

    After tying up all the loose ends Sam and the trio left the capital in the name of the adventure and were seen going to a mountain area.

    Sam felt like he would miss this realm a bit. It really is a beautiful city and that elven masseuse will definitely be missed.

    "Someone shoulde once in a while to this ce. Otherwise, these people will try to swallow up our organization."

    Philip said as they are going to the mountain range.

    "I will just show my faceter. But I don¡¯t think it would be too much of a trouble. There are only a few weeks and it would only be a year for the next Pce of inheritance, so after we go back, you guys better prepare yourself for the journey."

    As soon as Sam brought it up, they became silent.

    They didn¡¯t know what to answer.

    After reaching far enough, Sam activated the dimensional drifter and all four of them returned to the familiar city.

    They looked from that familiar top of the building and looked at the bustling city that is as active as ever.

    Sam went to his room to rx, but the trio went to their old offices.

    It might be a bit funny to say, but the trio can be considered officially retired before their journey to the Charbhum realm.

    They already ced their sessors in the position before they left and now they are going to go and check how they are doing.

    After a few days, Sam went back to his office and there were a lot of messages left behind for him, most of them are about the special patent allocations which the department heads cannot decide on how to rank them and give the prize money and there are proposals for other things.

    When Sam saw these proposals he couldn¡¯t help but smile.

    The areas under his control areing more and more in order and as the power of the organization grew, the rest of the major powers are bing meeker and meeker.

    He looked through the reports of the major powers given by their spies and he was surprised by the reports. Everyone is minding their own business and everyone is trying to establish a business rtionship with Sam and the organization.

    Sam looked at the city through his office window and sighed in relief, there is a faint smile on his face and he recalled how far he hase.

 Chapter 817: Delayed News

    After dealing with urgent matters. Sam went on to look at the amusing proposals he got.

    Most of the proposals are forpetitions and tournaments.

    Currently, there are very few events for the students, teachers and other members of the organization to showcase their skills and the most popr one among them are the annual examinations. In fact, from thest year, several people from the major powers started visiting the examinations to spectate and try to recruit some of the better participants into their own organizations.

    For that reason, many people who are not part of the organization also want to join in the fun. But unfortunately, the annual examinations are only for the people inside the organization.

    Another drawback of that is theck of fields in thepetition.

    The annual examinations are mostly focused onbat, artisans, formations, inscriptions, and other mainstream fields.

    Now the proposals are there for creatingpetitions for the not-so-conventional fields.

    There is a proposal for sh fish puppet racing, tfish puppet waterbat, the bee puppet hunting, bee puppet operation, underwater t fish puppet treasure hunting, races, specialbats, there is even apetition proposal for the factory workers who are specialized in assembling. Competition for assembling faster.

    Sam knew where these areing from. They areing from the long peace they had. If a person is starving without food, he wouldn¡¯t care how the food tastes like, but if he is eating to his fill every day, then he would start worrying about the taste of the food, quality of the food, and even how the food looked.

    This is the same. If they are having a constant war, no one would care who is best at what. They would just think of ways to survive one ordeal after another.

    But now that there is peace, they are worried about all these things, but he didn¡¯t dampen their excitement.

    He approved thepetitions that have a rational setup and rejected the rest and even gave the proper reason for rejection.

    It is not like anyone would question it, but they shouldn¡¯t even have a chance to do that. As time passed, the people will forget the fear they have of Sam.

    As the new people developed, everyone would think that they deserve something more and they will feel that Sam is not as great as their predecessors said. Most of these thoughts are crushed by the use of the pill of servitude, but that is not a long-term solution. In fact, as the numbers grew, he cannot afford to waste too many resources on making these pills. All he has to do is to use the pills on the people that are in key positions.

    While he is thinking of the future scenarios, some uninvited but expected guests arrived.

    It is none other than Arman and Arkiv.

    Sam went to meet them.

    "How are you guys doing?"

    Sam greeted them casually.

    "Where did you go this time?"

    Arkiv asked even before Arman had the chance to speak.

    "Somewhere you don¡¯t know. Why are you interested?"

    "Nothing much. I was wondering if you brought something from there."

    "I am craving something, let¡¯s go to Mackey¡¯s ce and we can talk while eating," Sam said and started walking out of the campus.

    Arkiv and Arman followed.

    When Sam arrived at the restaurant, Mackey greeted him and said.

    "Boss, I was experimenting with the rice from yesterday, do you want to try something?"

    "Yeah sure, bring me some venison, will you? Make it spicy."

    "Sure boss."

    Arkiv and Arman also ordered and they finally settled down.

    "How is your health, did you properly recover from that guy¡¯s possession?" Sam asked.

    "I am okay, in fact, I got something out of it this time. My spiritual sense is more active than ever before and in fact, my perception range increased."

    "Well, good for you. Arman, what are you up to? Is Arthur still troubling you?" Sam shifted attention to Arman after he replied Arkiv.

    "Arthur doesn¡¯t have time to save his own ass. Much less find trouble for me. The power dynamic of the Thundergod temple is changing. One Grand elder recently had a minor breakthrough and now he is gunning for the position of the Temple¡¯s head.

    If that really happened, Arthur would lose all his privilege. Since, the first Pce of Inheritance and your departure from the thunder god temple, everything is going downhill for him. It is quite funny when I see him now and remember how he used to be."

    "Good for you then. When will you be named the next heir?"

    "I don¡¯t know. But I am not worrying too much. It would be mine as long as I want it anyway. All it would need is a single challenge with Arthur."

    All three of them made some small talk.

    "So, why are you guys together?" Sam asked as he took a swig of cold beer.

    Arkiv looked at Sam and spoke. His easy-going nature disappeared and he became a bit serious.

    "I have some news. There are three candidates teaming up for the next Pce of inheritance. I wanted to talk to you about that, but you are off on your journey. So, I was camping with this guy."

    "Three people? Who are they?"

    Sam is a bit surprised. He didn¡¯t expect that there would be teams in the Pce of inheritance too. After all, everything that came out of it is a life-saving or a life-changing treasure, who would be stupid enough to sacrifice it like that?

    "That lightning user from the lightning spear sect. That guy from the Thunderbolt sect and that other guy named Agun."

    "And why are they trying to team up?"

    "It is because of you. Every pce of inheritance you yed us like fools. You won all four of them until now. So, they are thinking that it is about time someone else other than you won it."

    "Good luck to them."

    "Yeah, yeah good luck to them. But just to be sure, do you want to team up?"

    "Why? Want some extra security or some extra reward?"

    "It is security actually, it would be hard to guard against three of them if I am alone. I am not as monstrous as you. If I really tried and used all my archery I would be able to manage two of them and that too in a really long battle. Three is too much for me and that guy Agun is a bit of trouble. He can go to the extreme sometimes. So, what do you think?"

    "If you want security, then I am game, but the rest of the game is for ourselves, anyway almost every Pce of inheritance is a game yed individually. If there is really any trouble, I would help you. But for the rest of it, you are on your own, you get what you can."

    "That is enough for me. Just help me when they gang up on me. Other than that, I can handle the rest. Anyway, do you have any idea what would the next Pce of inheritance will be?"

    "Who knows? Did you get the coordinates?"

    "Not yet, actually, that is why we are a bit curious. Do you think it will happen likest time with some special circumstance?"

    "Do you think every god is a psycho like Hou Yi?" Sam asked sarcastically.

    After that, they went on their own ways.

    After two days, both of them came back again and this time, they have the coordinates.

    Sam got the coordinates and was surprised to see that both locations are extremely close by. From the looks of it, they might even be nearby cities.

    This is new once again.

    But the coordinates are not the only thing they brought,

    "There is another news along with the coordinates."

    "There is another test for us before the Pce of inheritance."

    "Before?"

    "Yes, before. This time not everyone has entry into the Pce of inheritance. Only six people are allowed entry. And they also have a special requirement for that. The special requirement was not announced yet. The message said it woulde after we go there."

    "Why didn¡¯t I hear anything about this?" Sam was a bit surprised. He didn¡¯t expect that something like this would happen.

    "We don¡¯t know. Even my message was delivered by some attendant on that guy. Arman got his message delivered by god directly. I don¡¯t know why you are held up."

    Even they were confused and at this moment, Sam felt the fourth floor reacting and he excused himself a bit before going into his room and entering the divine dimension.

    Ling Tian appeared and he seemed to be in a tattered shape. His robes are tattered and his usual majesty could be seen covered with a faint aura of bloodthirst. His whole body is covered in blood and even his long hair¡¯s knot was removed.

    There is one ring scar on his chest that even made Sam feel a shiver. That is a gruesome wound and Ling Tian¡¯s eyes are still as sharp as ever.

    "I am sorry Sam. I hope I am not toote."

 Chapter 818: Nike

    Sam looked at Ling Tian who is releasing that dangerous aura. Even though it is just a holographic image, he can still feel it.

    Sam felt an unknown and subconscious fear grip his heart and he took two steps back without even knowing.

    Ling Tian looked at Sam who is sweating profusely and said.

    "Don¡¯t think too much. I was in the middle of something. While I was preparing to give you the message something uninvited came up and ruined everything.

    I hope I am notte."

    Sam calmed himself down. He now understood how much he is underestimating the gods. That aura cannot be faked, that is a real deal. After that initial fear, there is excitement boiling through his body.

    One day he is going to butt heads with the likes of Ling Tian and people even stronger than him. He would hold them by their throats and demand that they tell him why they forced him into this life. While he is lost in thought, Ling Tian spoke.

    "I don¡¯t know if you came into contact with other candidates, but the next pce of inheritance was already decided. This time, there was an extra game before the Pce of inheritance.

    Everyone is going to go to different cities in the same region.

    There are six cities in that region and each city lord and his family possess a piece of special lightning type weapon.

    One piece of this weapon will only allow one person to enter the pce of inheritance. So, for the next one, only six people will be entering and thepetition inside is still unknown.

    The ce you are going to is a bit dangerous and there will be no humans there. You have to be careful. Death is notpletely out of bounds.

    This time you cannot bring any extra people to the Pce of inheritance. In fact, it is better if you don¡¯t bring your friends to that ce at all."

    Sam looked at him with a bit of confusion. He doesn¡¯t know why this is happening all of a sudden and why is he the only person that got this informationter than everyone else. If not for the fact that he has ties with Arman and Arkiv, then he wouldn¡¯t have even known about this.

    "Are your injuries connected to this matter?"

    Sam asked, not really expecting an answer, but Ling Tian answered.

    "Actually, they are. Someone tried to stop the information from going to you sooner. They gave the informationter and when I was about to send the message to you, they came and attacked, I just dealt with them."

    "Who did that? The same person in charge of the Pce of inheritance this time?"

    "Yes. But don¡¯t think too much into it, because of this, we can take advantage of the situation a bit. Do you want anything?"

    "I get a say in what I want?"

    "Of course, just tell me, it would be possible to fleece them a bit. I have clear evidence of their activity."

    Sam thought for a moment and exined what he wanted. He was already thinking on how to get this item in this Pce of Inheritance.

    Now that Ling Tian himself asked this, there is a high probability.

    Ling Tian listened to Sam¡¯s requirements and said.

    "It would be hard to get this as a reward. It would be too wasteful, but we have a different way to get this to you. Just wait for this Pce of inheritance to be over and there would be an instance while presenting your rewards. You will understand how to get that item then.

    Be careful though, this time the whole thing is a bitplicated but also direct at the same time. The danger is multiplied by a lot."

    "Thank you."

    With that Ling Tian disappeared after he gave some coordinates.

    Sam was surprised once again because these coordinates are almost the same as Arkiv.

    Only thest two points changed a bit and both of them will still be a few kilometers away from each other. They are most likely to be dropped into the same city.

    Sam left the divine dimension and went back to the office where Arman and Arkiv are still waiting.

    "I got the message. Apparently, it is dyed by someone for some reason."

    Sam said and heaved a sigh.

    Arkiv and Arman exchanged a nce and thought of something.

    "Didn¡¯t you say that not all gods are psychos? Then why is this happening?"

    Arkiv asked sarcastically.

    Sam lost interest in arguing.

    "How would I know that their pettiness is only second to their immense power? When I get the chance, I will spank their asses so long that their skeletons would escape those skins because of the constant pain they had to feel. That is if they have skeletons and skin."

    "Yeah, yeah. You can daydreamter. Tell us what the n is? Are you bringing the trio?"

    "Most probably not. I have to get the information on that ce first and will decideter. But from what I already know it is going to be a bit dangerous."

    "Okay then. You take care of it and contact us. We should leave together. I think those three are leaving after three days."

    Arkiv said and stood up to leave.

    "How are you getting this info?"

    Sam asked with confusion.

    "After the Usaine sect was done for, I went to one of thosemon cities in the central continent, where people from all major powers can gather.

    I kind of started awork there and these idiots are doing every conversation and meeting there. It became a bit easy to get the information like this."

    "Good for you. What is thiswork for? Are you starting something?"

    "I want to open an exploration team for the Central continent. Even the major powers are too afraid to maintain their activity in the Central continent. It is free territory. I want to do some conquering. Want to partner up?"

    "We will see, first you start the project. If I like it, I might consider it."

    "What is the point of considering? You have so much money, where would you spend all that? I am thinking of asking you to make a base for me there. Strong enough to defend myself in the Central continent. If you partner up, you can do it for free and I will take care of the rest."

    "I have extra money, but why would I waste it on something I don¡¯t know if it will work? It might be extra, but it is still something I earned. So, now stop thinking of my riches and get lost." Sam said with a smug look.

    "Yeah, yeah, be that smug and one day I will watch you getting the crap beaten out of you by someone cockier than you, then I will have the same smug face as you do now."

    "Who is day dreaming now?"

    Arkiv left after being unable to continue the banter. Arman shook his head at their childish behavior and left along with Arman.

    Sam also left the room and went to the space gates.

    He took the space gate to go to the tempest valley.

    He met with the Old beast.

    "How have you been? When did you return?"

    The Old beast asked as soon as Sam sat down.

    "I am good. I had a great haul this time. I became a lot richer. The elves don¡¯t value the spirit stones as much. It is too cheap for them. They are more focused on the deliciousness of the food and meat."

    "Of course, elves are born vain creatures. They have very few rules for their personal actions. How are the things from the political side?"

    They talked about all the things, the elections, fields, Raunak¡¯s matter, sea folks, the sirens, they talked about everything.

    "I thought the war between sirens and elves would have been over by now. It seems like the elves are patient than I thought."

    "It is not far off if you ask me. I just started a spark and threw it on the dry grass, there would definitely be war. The elves are too cocky for their own good, they would definitely test their limits with those harpoon guns and if the sirens reacted kindly, the elves would be in trouble.

    After all, their main forces areprised of humans and centaurs out of which Centaurs are stronger on average, but they cannot do anything in the water."

    After some more discussion, Sam finally opened the dimensional drifter and asked.

    "Here this is my next Pce of inheritance location. I have to go there in a few days. There is apetition waiting for me there."

    "Old Beast looked at the name of the and was a bit surprised."

    Nike? There are no humans there."

    "I know. Ling Tian told me about that. There is some kind of weapon which was divided into six pieces and they are ced in six cities. The only one who can get a piece of that weapon can enter the next pce of inheritance."

    "Well good luck with that. You are going to have real trouble now."

    "Why would you say that?"

    "That is actually a lower level thing than the Naga Loka, but the only reason it was ranked higher because of its connection with the higher gods, it was named after the goddess the people on that pray for. Goddess Nike, the charioteer of Zeus."

    "Do you think, she is the one ying the game, I don¡¯t know much about her."

    "No, she is not on the same level as the rest of the gods who are ying. There is a probability that this round it would be Zeus. Take care, that Bastard is cockier than you."

 Chapter 819: Confrontation

    Sam left the valley after a long talk.

    There is not much that was told about the itself or the local power structure like before.

    It was more about the nature of the creatures that live there.

    He was surprised to learn that the creatures that live there do resemble humans for the most part but there is one aspect that is different from the humans which makes everything different.

    That one difference is that people have wings there and they are called the Feathered race.

    The race that has wings on their back and has a ringly obvious difference from the humans. They are said to be descendants of the goddess herself.

    They have tall physiques and the average person is around six and a half feet tall with extremely strong builds and wings.

    They really are good at what they do.

    Nike is considered the origin of this race and it is named after the goddess.

    The power dynamics of this are more down to earth and are even weaker than the Deste in a way.

    They only have six Consummate realms cultivator each in charge of a city which controls the one-sixth of the.

    And in the middle of all these six cities, there is onerge temple.

    This is the onlyyout that Old beast gave and most of the information is more about how devout they are towards their goddess and Zeus who their goddess is serving.

    As for why their power structure is weaker, it is not because of theck of resources or even theck of fertility and potential.

    Their potential and superiority is almost on par with the elves. The only reason they are like this is because of the restrictions that the goddess herself ced. Every person who broke through the consummate realm must leave this ce as they would be summoned to go to a higher realm which is controlled by Nike herself.

    The is under her protection and there are no invasions on it from any other or realm, it is mostly due to the fact that no one wants to mess with a direct confidant of Zeus himself.

    On top of that, this is the only ce where Nike herself gives insights and teachings to the people.

    After all the discussion Sam reached one conclusion, only Zeus has the power to release a Pce of inheritance here and Nike will be manipting it for him in any way he wants.

    Along with that, there would be some serious trouble especially for him because that could be the only reason why some gods wanted to mess with Ling Tian.

    There is no other way around it, he has to think of some necessary precautions that could help with the extra trouble he is going to attract.

    While Sam is thinking of making preparations, in the faraway realms Ling Tian is standing on a cliff as he held his sword. He is in the same state as when he talked to Sam.

    He looked down on a person who is currently kneeling in front of him.

    "So, you are from Olympus?"

    "Yes, I gave you all the information I had, please spare me"

    "And why would I do that now? You have livedfortably for hundreds of thousands of years, you probably even forgot the times of struggle you had in the past bathing in thefort of the peaceful and blissful life you had, why are you trying to mess with me? After all, the wounds of the struggle still didn¡¯t even heal properly. You can only me yourself for your foolishness."

    With that, he sliced the head off.

    He looked at the beautiful horizons before him and smiled.

    The one who died in his hands just now is an immortal. He wouldn¡¯t have died if he didn¡¯t fight with him. He would have lived for hundreds of thousands of years more and could have seen many generations start and finish with his own eyes. But he died because of a god¡¯s pettiness and willfulness.

    He turned around on looked at the ground, there are dozens of corpses with their heads separated. He killed more immortals who are just a step away from Godhood all by himself.

    He took a deep breath and levitated into the air before turning into a sword light and disappearing into the horizon.

    The sword light passed through the after, crossed realm after realm before tearing through the void and space, and entered a special realm that has a very high threshold for entering.

    The realm is under the direct rule of Olympus and could be said to be the part of the Olympus itself.

    This is the ce where those immortals came from.

    Ling Tian zoomed past thes and entered one which has some high-level Immortals guarding outside.

    But he didn¡¯t even flinch and just zoomed past them and the barrier they set up.

    The sword light shed through the city andnded in front of the castle in the middle of it.

    The impact of hisnding almost caused a sword storm around.

    A bunch of guards surrounded him as soon as he arrived and they are all looking at him coldly ready to fight, but their bodies are acting more to their instincts as every step forward they took, they are feeling a bit hesitant.

    The auraing from Ling Tian is not exactly friendly and meek.

    At this moment, a woman dressed in golden robes came out of the castle. There are golden wings on her back with those shiny golden feathers.

    "Nike, the charioteer of Zeus. It is nice to meet you."

    Ling Tian spoke as soon as he saw her.

    "If you know who I am and you are still here, you are either stupid or crazy." Thedy replied.

    "Neither."

    "Who are you?"

    "Ling Tian, it is funny that you don¡¯t know the person who you wanted to kill. That is some disregard."

    She raised her eyebrow and looked at him.

    "Oh, you are that guy? you survived? That is unexpected. Then why are you still here, you should be thanking your luck and stayed put. Or are you expecting to die and came here to fulfill that wish?"

    "Not really, I want to ask why you sent someone to kill me. To be precise on whose orders."

    "I have guts to say the name, do you have the guts to go and confront him?"

    "Well, I am too weak for that, but I think I can try my luck with you can¡¯t I?"

    "You? You didn¡¯t even cross the barrier to achieving god hood, what can you do to me? I can kill you in a single strike."

    "If you can, by all means, do it now. If you don¡¯t you are going to regret it until the end of your time."

    With that, the sword aura raged wildly and even the wind around turned sharper than a de.

    But Nike didn¡¯t even bat an eyelid.

    She raised her arm and the sh began.

    They fought wildly and as they exchanged strikes one after another, Nike felt like her whole understanding is subverted.

    After half an hour, Ling Tian is standing with his whole body covered in blood.

    There are several tears, wounds, bruises, and many more injuries.

    He is extremely weak and he is only supporting himself with the sword.

    Half of the castle is destroyed. Nike is still standing strong, but there is a scar on her abdomen tearing through her golden robes.

    She is extremely angry. The surroundings started shaking. After all, how dare a mere immortal who didn¡¯t even touch the boundaries of the godhood injure her? In her opinion, such existence should even be possible and if it existed she wanted to eradicate itself.

    Right before she was about to make a move, she felt a tremor around the whole realm.

    "Not so fast Nike."

    Space started tearing apart in the sky as the Gambler arrived.

    "Trying to kill my close subordinate? Did you have my permission?"

    "Permission, you guys are in my realm, my residence? How dare youe here and swing your weight?"

    "I don¡¯t have to swing my weight around. My presence is enough. Is it not right Zeus?"

    He looked into the horizon as a lighting streak flew through it and came forward, a man whose aura could suffocate the whole realm is hovering in the air right in front of Gambler.

    Both of their auras shed and the lesser level creatures felt suffocated and started puking blood.

    "Get out of here."

    Zeus said as purple lightning streaked around.

    "Is it any way to treat your guests?"

    "Guests? You are not invited here. I am telling you once again, get out of here." Zeus insisted.

    "Gambler waved his hand and the spatial energy enveloped Ling Tian carrying over."

    "I will leave, but before that, let¡¯s make an arrangement. I wille back in a few years along with Ling Tian, this time, he would finish what she started and do remember Zeus if you want to follow the path of Indra and Hou Yi. I don¡¯t mind. But I will say what I said to them. Be careful what you choose, as you have to pay for the consequences."

    With that, both of them disappeared, but the space crack that appeared created spatial turbulence which is the only sound that dared toe out from the whole.

    As soon as they left, Nike spat out a mouthful of blood and the wound of the abdomen opened up even more as she clutched it tightly. Someone levels beneath her left her in this state. Zeus couldn¡¯t help but contemte his actions once again.

 Chapter 820: Advice

    Sam doesn¡¯t know that there was almost a war in the realms far away from where he was currently.

    He was busy doing something in the divine dimension at this moment.

    He is currently operating the production unit and making something for the journey. This is a design he came up, on a whim and it uses the spikes of the Sea urchins he got from the Charbhum realm.

    By now, Sam has already given a major portion of the resources he got to the various research departments and that includes the stingrays and the Sea urchins. He only kept half of these with him in the divine dimension.

    He even gave away some emerald tortoise shells to see if any researchers cane up with something.

    Along with that, he gave the crops he brought from here, rice grains, sugar cane, fruits, and many others. The final thing he gave away is a research project that never got to finish in the Charbhum realm.

    It is about the plywood made from the bagasse. This is a special wood and it has some great properties that would make it a good armor and its performance will be enhanced when it was worn by a wood elemental user and if it is an elf who wore that, then it would be best fit.

    But he already earned enough and he didn¡¯t manage to take this out in time. But he is not worried. It wouldn¡¯t go to waste.

    Charbhum realm is not a single realm, it is a subordinate realm and there is a superior realm that controls it.

    His organization that is currently growing is going to enter that higher realm soon enough and then he would use this as an entry token. He gave this to researchers toe up with an efficient production method.

    After two days, the design and manufacturing areplete and Sam came out. He went to meet the trio and gave the instructions to them and also told them to prepare for the long journey.

    Even though they insisted that they woulde to Nike with him, he firmly rejected. He doesn¡¯t know what awaits him in that world. He cannot take them and make their group a bigger target.

    He already realized gods, don¡¯t necessarily y fair all the time, in fact they have highest tendency to y dirty as nobody other than their peers dares to question them.

    And that questioning wouldn¡¯t be enough to shake their arrogance and confidence in their own actions as they are too full of themselves and there is little possibility that their peers will attack them.

    If only Sam knew what Gambler did when he was targeted by Hou Yi and Indra.

    Sam finished his preparations and he contacted Arman and Arkiv.

    This is the first time Sam was given a proper coordinated location. Even though he felt that there might be something happening there, he didn¡¯t worry too much. He still decided to use the same location.

    He met with Arman and Arkiv and all three of them decided to move right away.

    Sam used the dimensional drifter and disappeared from his office while the remaining two used their dimensional crossers to move, all three of them disappeared in an instant.

    Nike.

    It is an afternoon at the moment.

    In a city carved out of rocks in the middle of lush vegetation, there is arge temple in the center which is also made of the same brown rocks as the city.

    Inside the temple, there is a middle-aged man standing around seven feet tall with ck wings on his back.

    In front of him is a statue of Goddess Nike

    He knelt down on the ground as he prayed for some time before leaving the temple. Outside the temple, there are a bunch of young men waiting for him. They are also people of feathered race and they have different colored wings.

    "Are all the preparations made for their arrival?" The middle-aged man asked.

    "Yes, sir. We have surrounded the forest areas you mentioned and we evenid the formation you gave us. As long as they enter that forest, it would be hard for them not to alert us and nigh impossible to escape from us."

    "Don¡¯t let your guard down. We were told not to use the superior cultivators, everyone should be a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator. Even early-stage transcendent stage cultivators are not allowed to make a move when he is outside the inner circle of the city. Only when hees into the inner circle are you allowed to make a move and even then you have to hold back from killing them.

    Also, try your best to not kill them, we were told that there would repercussions if we didn¡¯t do that. Alert all the Pre-transcendent stage cultivators, the people thate here are not at all ordinary, so be alert."

    "Yes Sir."

    The group dispersed. The Middle-aged man took onest bow towards the temple before leaving to do his duties.

    At this exact moment, in the forests of the city, Sam appeared out of nowhere.

    As soon as his feet touched the ground though, he felt a bit suffocated and he felt like his whole body froze in the spot.

    He was stunned and stumped at the same time.

    He tried to take something out of the divine dimension and the spatial rings, but it didn¡¯t work. They are not reacting. His energy is still flowing but it almost felt like mercury flowing through his body.

    He felt heavy and restricted at the same time, with great difficulty he activated energy vision and was not so surprised anymore as he detected the spatial lock formation around him.

    At this moment, several feathered beings came out of their not-so-good hiding spots.

    There is both male and female cultivators and they sized Sam up.

    One of the people who is on the younger side looked at Sam in contempt and spoke to the woman who seemed to be the leader of the team.

    "Captain, is he really as powerful as our Sire said? He fell for the trap easily."

    The woman looked at him coldly and said.

    "Shut up."

    Then she looked at Sam and spoke.

    "You must be Sam. We are ordered to stop you from pursuing your goal. We were also ordered to try not to kill you if it is unnecessary, but it is notpletely out of bounds.

    If you stay put here with us for a while, there would be no problem at all. If you try to get into the deeper parts of the city, then you would have to deal with the transcendent stage cultivators. Since we already knew of your arrival, then it is impossible for you to finish your task. Stay with us for the rest of the year calmly and we might even let you train for some time and you can return from where you came from."

    Sam looked at her calmly and smiled. Even though he is unable to move, he is not exactly worried. The spatial lock is only holding him in ce along with the ess to the spatial rings and treasures, but not for the elements and their usage. He still has a chance.

    "Are you new to this kind of stuff?" Sam asked as he looked at the woman up and down.

    She looked at Sam with a frown but still nodded.

    "I have some experience with capturing people and me actually quite good at this, let me give you advice.

    You never tell your whole n to the person you captured. If you do, then you are giving him a chance to formte his own n to escape.

    You never tell him that he has too many chances to live, you have to emphasize the ways he could get killed and constantly remind him so that he stays put in fear."

    He looked at them with a smile and was surprised to see they are all listening intently.

    But it might them being attentive to whatever he does.

    Sam raised his aura all of a sudden.

    "It is useless, the formation makes your energy flow dense. You would feel enormous pain. Just give up."

    Sam just smiled and his aura rose wildly.

    First golden mes came and tried to spread around. But they are restricted as soon as they spread around a radius of two feet.

    "I already told you, it is useless. You only damage yourself and the weaker you are the more pressure the spatial lock puts on you."

    The golden mes went back and different energy that ispletely unfamiliar to the group around them is being released from his body.

    "Why are you so concerned with me? Are you afraid that you would be punished if something happened to me?"

    Sam asked with a faint smile as energy riled up. They couldn¡¯t understand where all the energy is going and what is happening, but they looked at Sam carefully.

    "So, now tell me what would happen to you if Imit suicide? Would your superiors believe you didn¡¯t kill me?"

    As soon as he asked this question, the atmosphere became tense.

    [Author¡¯s note:- I started publishing my new book named Pest Control. Please do check it out and leave a review.]

 Chapter 821: Frustrating Battle

    Sam¡¯s words made the whole group of feathered men have a tense moment.

    "You are bluffing."

    The captain said as she looked dead into his eyes.

    "Am I really?"

    With that, there is a lump of energy bubbling up near his heart and it increased.

    All the attention is gathered on that one spot as they tensely looked at him.

    "I think you are still bluffing, you wouldn¡¯t lose your life for this." The captain once again said.

    "Let us wait and see then."

    The energy is still increasing and if it really explodes, Sam¡¯s heart would really be exploded into a few pieces leaving only his dead body behind with arge hole in the chest.

    The feathered men are very tense. They don¡¯t know what Sam is like but if he reallymitted suicide, then they would definitely be in trouble.

    The captain looked at him intently and had her spear ready. She would stop him if he is really going to do that even at the expense of critically injuring him.

    But what they didn¡¯t notice is that all their attention is focused on Sam¡¯s body that they failed to see the minute changes that are happening at the edge of the invisible boundary the formation has set up around Sam.

    There is extreme pressure on that boundary with very concentrated energy creating two forces.

    And as the whole group is focused on the high profile stunt of Sam, all of a sudden the boundary copsed and the space cracks appeared at that edge of the boundary, the lock disappeared and Sam who is bubbling that energy, shot that energy lump through his body and into his foot and hit the ground with void style.

    *BOOM*

    *CRASH*

    Everything happened too fast and by the time, the captain recovered and was about to make a move, Sam¡¯s hit to the ground caused her bnce to go off.

    Sam used this chance to leap into the air and took out harbinger before zooming past them to escape the range of the formation.

    The dust settled and the team looked dumbfounded at what happened. But at this moment a voice appeared deep in the captain¡¯s mind and she clearly recognized the voice.

    "The final advice, never ever give your captive a chance to say all the bullshit he cane up with. You would be in for a nasty surprise if he can manage to divert you."

    She became angry and gripped her spear hard and leaped into the air. She has white wings and she looked like a streak of white light as she followed Sam¡¯s route.

    But how is it that easy to catch up with Sam when he is on harbinger?

    Sam flew to a side and changed his direction before he halted in his tracks and took a look at his body.

    He really did y a big gamble there.

    One thing he noticed about the spatial lock is that they are not exactly designed topletely arrest a person, if that is true, then there is no need to ce a formation that can let him control his energy, even if it is painful, it is not exactly a great way to restrict someone.

    Sam is sure that any of the other yers would be able to destroy that spatial lock with brute force, but then they wouldn¡¯t be able to move properly for a while. They would take too much damage themselves to do that.

    And that condition in the middle of an entire group of enemies is not exactly a pleasant scenario.

    That is why Sam found an alternate method.

    He is sure that there is one thing that could clearly have some impact on the space around him and that is gravity.

    He created twoyers of opposite gravitational forces shing each other in the same space. This caused the space surrounding it to have some fluctuations and the formation became unstable.

    This instability is enough for a spatial formation to copse. Any formation can be stabilized a bit even if there are any fluctuations. But the spatial formation is not exactly that forgiving.

    It would go off with minor mistakes.

    Sam currently sat on the tree and looked at the area through the crystal table and was surprised to see that the whole area ispletely under the control of these feathered guys. It would be too difficult for Sam to escape, even if it is on the harbinger.

    No matter how fast he is, he is sure that someone could be precise. But he has to take the chance if he has to get out of this ce.

    He opened the dimensional drifter to check his coordinate location and also check the coordinate location of Arkiv.

    Arkiv and he are supposed to appear on the premises of the same city.

    At first, both of them wanted to meet in the city directly and get the weapon piece after moving to the next city to take another one.

    But now in the current situation, he has to go and meet that guy before he does something crazy and tried to break out of the formation, if he really did that and tried to fight off the group surrounding him, he might be able to hold on for a while, but there are just too many feathered in the surroundings and they will reach in a blink of an eye.

    The situation good from bad to worse and he would be captured.

    After checking the direction, Sam started moving, he went on full speed without any second thoughts.

    Some feathered that are looking through the forest encountered him but he didn¡¯t stop and just dodged everyone.

    He traveled for over half an hour before he reached the premises of the location. He looked at the crystal table once again and got a glimpse. He was relieved to see that Arkiv is still there in the formation, but from the looks of it, he is trying to force his way out.

    It would be hard if Sam dyed it anymore.

    But just as he was about to speed up and get there and help him out, he felt an energy sensation and his instincts screamed danger, he halted in his tracks and changed the direction of the harbinger, but he was too slow, the attack still hit him in the left shoulder.

    Even though it failed to prate through his coat, the impact still threw him off. Sam immediately tried his best to control the hoverboard and stay on it.

    He was surrounded by the flying feathered and the leader of it is none other than the Captain he ditched a while ago.

    "You are smart and capable, but that doesn¡¯t mean you can escape easily from us."

    The captain said coldly and held the spear in her hands once again.

    "Surrender or you would regret fighting us. You are outnumbered."

    "Sometimes numbers don¡¯t matter."

    Sam took out the reaper sword and looked at them coldly. The blood scales came out of the divine dimension and hovered around. It would be hard to fight normally while they are in the air. Feathered are best in aerialbat. And he is short on time.

    So, he let out Yanwu and Sky to help him out.

    When the two beasts appeared out of nowhere, the group was startled a bit.

    Sam made the first move without waiting for the enemies and the battle started. He was surprised to see the spear kill off the captain.

    The skill is of an extremely high level.

    She is a wind element user and this weird skill is making it hard for Sam to dodge her attacks. No matter where he is, the attack is being sent towards him.

    The attack was too easy to manipte midair. Even a casual wind de thrown out of the spear is being manipted until it reached his body. Sam doesn¡¯t know is she is doing that, but he doesn¡¯t have the time to do that.

    He looked at Arkiv and had an idea.

    He closed his eyes and the blood scales appeared in front of his body creating a small curtain as they defended the attacks of the captain and her helpers while Sam took a moment to activate the crystal table. He tried tomunicate with Arkiv, but to his surprise, he couldn¡¯t.

    He felt like cursing someone right now.

    After a moment of thought, he couldn¡¯t help but take an extremely deep breath and yell at the top of his lungs with the spiritual energy-enhancing his voice.

    "ARKIV DON¡¯T BREAK OUT OF THE FORMATION."

    Along with that loud yell, Sam used the lightning element to make the lightning strike continuously.

    This loudmotion got the attention of not just Arkiv and the feathered that are surrounding him, but also the feathered around in the area.

    There are more than a hundred feathered now gathered around Sam to deal with him.

    Sam felt a bit frustrated. Now that Arkiv stopped the violent action, he is free enough to deal with them.

    He stored the reaper sword away and took out the handguns.

    He looked at the Captain and said.

    "me the person who ordered you to do this."

 Chapter 822: Surprise attack

    Sam didn¡¯t want to get into a war with these feathered right away.

    He wanted to escape this area first, scout, and take actionter. But everything happening here made him lose patience.

    He would just use this chance to teach them a small lesson and also make them understand just why they should have stayed out of his way.

    Sam took the blood scales and ced them back in the storage, they are currently not needed.

    Yanwu and Sky are doing well. They are working as a team and already burned down a dozen feathered. But he still kept an eye over.

    The Captain guided the rest of the feathered and is nning to surround Sam and then subdue the beasts after he was caught.

    But Sam just smiled and aimed his guns.

    He is only using the normal metallic bullets that are used to fire different elemental attacks.

    His current choice is lightning.

    He started shooting and the first two shots didn¡¯t miss, the two bullets lodged themselves into the chest of the feathered that ising towards him and the lightning bullets paralyzed him. This made the feathered stop swinging his wings for a second and he became unstable.

    Sam used this chance to shoot another two bullets into the wings.

    He didn¡¯t aim for the head. He still has some reservations about starting the all-out war. He is in the middle of nowhere of the enemy territory, if he started a ughter now, the situation would be dire. He has to find out where he is and where he needs to go before he could do anything drastic.

    Even if he doesn¡¯t want to kill them, the damage is notughable at. The Feathered that crashed into the ground screamed so loud that the rest of the feathered could feel his pain.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop with that. He started shooting and he moved like a slippery eel in the water.

    The advantage of the harbinger is clearly showing now. It is faster and it is more versatile than its wings.

    The captain who was still confident a second was stunning.

    One feathered after another is falling down and crashing into the ground.

    Various elemental attacks are flying in the air rapidly and most of them are flying towards Sam, but not a single onended.

    She couldn¡¯t help but look down and feel pressured at the number of injured. The only silver lining of this is that none of them are killed. At least not yet.

    The fight continued. The only person Sam was unable to hit is the captain.

    She is faster and herbination of personal wings and the wind element are perfectly blending together and she is the only one who managed to dodge the bullets sent her way and even counter-attack.

    The team surrounding Arkiv is currently hovering in the sky as they watched the battle, but Arkiv cannot do that as he is still locked inside the formation.

    He really wanted to get out of the formation now, but he knew Sam wouldn¡¯t tell him to stop if there was not a good reason.

    So, he decided to wait for a while. The only problem he wished he saw the battle happening far away.

    The spot he was in doesn¡¯t have a good view. Most of it is covered byrge trees. He can asionally get a glimpse of Sky and Yanwu, but that is it.

    He is even a bit frustrated.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know that not the frustrating battle was making Arkiv frustrated just because he couldn¡¯t see. If he knew of this, he would have sent a bullet his way.

    Now, Sam is already having a bit of trouble.

    The feathered that are injured are moving down on orders of the captain. They are in no condition to fly, so they are walking.

    The enemies are dwindling and soon the feathered that supposed to guard Arkiv also joined in the fun.

    Now they are moving in a formation and Captain managed to save some feathered from the bullets. Even with the guns, it is bing a bit difficult to deal with them now.

    Soon he thought of a remedy.

    He let the blood-red scales out and they are flying around inrge circles.

    Sam smiled and started shooting once again when the bullet went past the feathered and just when he thought he dodged it, the bullet hit the blood scale behind him and ricocheted the bullet towards another feathered.

    The situation once again titled in Sam¡¯s favor.

    The captain is losing her calm by now.

    Sam has be a nightmare to her as he dealt with the feathered like they don¡¯t even matter. It is almost like a shooting practice to him.

    Except for her and some others, no one is fast enough to dodge the bullets even if it is just Ricochet without any guidance.

    So, she thought of something and gave the order for everyone to retreat.

    This surprised Sam.

    Now there are only four people left and the rest of the feathered are either under retreat or guarding Arkiv once again.

    Sam knew these four people would be able to dodge the bullets, so he didn¡¯t bother using them.

    He took out the sword once again and got ready to a fight.

    His body glowed with golden light as he swung the de.

    The Golden light de created a beautiful golden arc in the air as it moved towards the feathered.

    The zing light made them involuntarily close their eyes and they were momentarily distracted because of the sh.

    But within a fraction of a second, they understood how dangerous it is to do that and opened their eyes, only to realize howte they were.

    By the time they opened their eyes, Sam¡¯s sword is already in the chest of theirpanion.

    The captain got angry and she looked at him coldly before saying.

    "You can only me this on your impudence."

    As she spoke, she activated the wind elemental fusion andunched herself towards Sam.

    Sam just smiled, he took the sword back and shed the feathered in his wings before making him crash into the ground.

    Harbinger is nowpletely covered in wind elemental energy and he made his move.

    As the captain chased him, every sharp turn he made, the harbinger released arge wind de that was shot either at the captain or the four assistants she had.

    She now had a proper understanding of how dangerous the harbinger and Sam are. All this while it was not possible to use the harbinger as a proper attack weapon because there was minimal space and Sam couldn¡¯t take arge enough curve tounch a decent-sized wind de. But now everyone is on retreat, so he is doing it to his heart¡¯s content.

    If she brought the group back on, he would resort to guns and bullets and if she didn¡¯t, she would need to continue facing the troublesome harbinger.

    This is a nightmare for her.

    She couldn¡¯t take it anymore and looked at the feathered and ordered.

    "Full retreat."

    She joined the group as they started moving away from Arkiv.

    Sam heaved a sigh of relief.

    Atst, he didn¡¯t cause too many casualties, in fact, no one is dead and he also got peace.

    Now, he can go and rescue Arkiv out of the situation and get out of this ce to find a safe hideout and n the rest.

    He recalled Yanwu and Sky who are still craving for more battle and let them take a rest.

    Both beasts are ecstatic, their bloodlines are finally satisfied a bit and now they are going to brag to the rest of their peers.

    Sam heaved a sigh as he moved towards Arkiv calmly.

    "That took some time. If you had tried to break out of the formation and seeded, this would have been what you faced with injuries all over the body."

    "I understand. Just how tricky are these assholes to think of such a way to take us down. But what surprised me, even more, is the fact our coordinates are given this way."

    "Well, that was my surprise too."

    They made small talk as Sam observed the formation to break it open. But at this moment, he felt a sense of danger his instincts are screaming of it, even Arkiv felt it.

    A spear made of concentrated windunched itself down from above as the captain dove from the sky.

    The spear was not aimed at Sam or Arkiv it is actually aimed at the formation nodes.

    Sam was a bit surprised, he didn¡¯t see thising at all. He looked at Arkiv with aplicated gaze, if he wants to dodge, he could do it, but Arkiv would definitely be under attack.

    Arkiv looked at him and yelled.

    "What the hell are you looking at? Get lost from here."

    All this happened in a second and Sam doesn¡¯t have time to defend against such an attack, but just before he dodged from the ce with gritted teeth, the captain smirked and her attack which was already fast enough suddenly increased in speed and before Sam could leave the area of the formation, the attack neared him.

    Sam was shocked for a second, but since he couldn¡¯t dodge, he channeled his energy through his leg and mmed it right into the ground.

 Chapter 823: Counter

    The whole area is surrounded by dust clouds.

    There is not a single sound for the next minute as the dust settled down.

    *Cough* *Cough*

    Sam¡¯s cough broke the silence as he slowly shuffled the rubble around his leg. His leg is bleeding as there is a tear all over the muscle tissue because of the hit he made.

    His arm is also feeling numb and his chest has a deep scar.

    A few meters away Arkiv was unconscious. He is bleeding profusely and there are many wounds on his body.

    Beside Arkiv, the captain is also standing up slowly, out of three of them, she the least injured.

    Sam also stood up and when she looked at him, her eyes and mouth were opened wide.

    "How are you still conscious after the hit?"

    She was really surprised.

    What she hit is not the person after all, it is the formation and everyone within the formation zone will be damaged, but Sam is still rtively great shapepared to Arkiv.

    Then only she noticed the numb feeling on her arms was gone and she could feel the battered pain. She was puzzled and surprised at the same time, she couldn¡¯t understand why her arms are so painful, every muscle tissue felt like it took a beating, there is definitely internal bleeding.

    She doesn¡¯t know how it happened, but Sam knows because he is the one that made it happen.

    The hit hended on the ground is a hit with ripple style.

    Even though the spear strike is supposed tond on the formation, it is nearer to Sam than Arkiv, the damage Arkiv took is more from the formation¡¯s bacsh and less from the spear strike. In fact, there are space cracks near Arkiv even at this moment, slowly mending themselves.

    The ripple style kick has only one job to do, it is to reduce the effects of the spear strike and throw her off with even a bacsh.

    He doesn¡¯t know if the effects are reduced enough. He took some serious damage. He didn¡¯t take that much damage in a while.

    He looked at Arkiv and wanted to take him away, but still, the captain is less damaged than him and closer to Arkiv.

    She grabbed him first and at this moment a bunch of feathered appeared from the forest surrounding them.

    Sam looked at them coldly and said.

    "You are going to regret this so badly that you will never have a day of peace until I leave this ce."

    He waved his hand and the beasts came out. Sky, Yanwu, Raiju, Ape, the Bear, Dia, and even Mia were out.

    Dia instantly activated the gravity and some of the feathered closer to the ground mmed into the earth and got crucified by the earthen spikes that came out, they are not dead, but it is no use being alive either.

    The captain who was about to fly out was also affected by the gravity and couldn¡¯t do so.

    The feathered that are in the sky engaged with Sky and Yanwu as they retreated, one of them attack Dia which gave a small interval for the captain to fly off with Arkiv, they are retreating rapidly. They took a token out of their storage and crushed it.

    Golden light enveloped them and their speed increased rapidly.

    They became faster than the beasts, it would be hard for even Sky who is the fastest in the air to catch up to them.

    Sam cursed under his breath and limped towards Sky, whonded on the ground for a second, he climbed onto his back and both of them flew high.

    Sam can see them far away.

    He took out his bow and the heavenly wine gourd. He took a chug out of the bottle and took out an arrow.

    The arrow covered in lightning tore through the sky as it lodged itself into the head of one of the feathered.

    The sky started following their trajectory as he started firing arrow after arrow. Every arrow hit the target, they are unable to dodge. The energy in each arrow, caused Sam to weaken and take a swig from the wine gourd.

    The captain felt horror dawn on her.

    The golden light¡¯s time is about to stop, then Sam could surely catch up at this rate and she also noticed that Sam¡¯s attacks are only increasing in intensity and threat level as he slowly recovered from the injuries.

    The pursuit continued and Sam went on killing. He killed a dozen of these people and the captain has half a mind to stop the pursuit and engage with him in closebat.

    In this long-range, they could only live if they only focused on dodging in one ce, running away is not really a great choice in this situation.

    They did halt in their tracks and Sam sped up on Sky.

    He saw much Feathered moving through the forest, they are injured feathered in the earlier battle, they are moving by foot.

    Sam¡¯s arrows didn¡¯t stop instead, he started using different varieties. He took out a poison vial arrow. When he shot it from a certain distance, it reached the target and the arrow exploded leaving the smoking purple poison gas.

    There is a pin arrow that has a small pin grenade as its arrowhead.

    He shot every arrow precisely and dropped a person. Even if they dodged it, they are not going to be off the hook without any damage.

    The captain felt like the danger is increasing, particrly when she got a clearer look at Sam who is actually recovering faster than he thought.

    She gave the instructions to the group and they decreased their altitude they are now moving in the middle of the dense vegetation of the forest.

    Sam used energy vision to keep track of them and still sped up on Sky as he shot arrows from above.

    The captain is a bit shocked by this. Sam is not stopping and now he almost caught up to them, she would be in deep trouble if he really caught her now. She is injured after all. She is not even sure that she would win when she is in her top form, much less now.

    She grits her teeth and stopped in her tracks. She deflected the arrow that came at her with the spear. The group also halted in their tracks and stood around her trying to defend against the tricky arrows that are torturing them to no end.

    The captain looked at her deputy and said.

    "You guys disperse. Being together is making us a bigger target."

    "But captain, you cannot win against him at this rate. At least, earlier he held back now he is pissed off, we should have left them alone after that, but it is toote to regret anyway, just let us go in the group."

    "No, you guys disperse, I will use the golden feather and escape."

    The deputy became silent for a second and spoke up.

    "It is too valuable and you cannot carry this guy with you when you use the golden feather. You would take too much damage. How about you leave him here? We would be able to escape easily. He would stop and take care of him. This is our territory, we are going to win anyway."

    "No, you shouldn¡¯t do that. We were ordered to capture both of them. We have to take at least one of them back."

    "But.."

    "No more discussion, he ising. Let¡¯s leave. It is an order."

    The deputy grit his teeth and ordered his subordinates to disperse while the captain took out a golden feather. She gulped nervously and held Arkiv tightly.

    Sam who is almost near them stopped shooting the arrows he is only a few yards away from them.

    When he noticed the argument and the soldiers are ready to disperse, and also the actions of the Captain, he became a bit anxious, he stepped into the air and activated full light elemental fusion. He took out his two swords and shot like a golden light ray towards the group.

    When they saw this sudden change, the group dispersed into random directions, Samnded right in front of the captain, who is enveloped with a bright golden light and levitated along with Arkiv. She turned around and was about to escape, at this exact moment, Sam spun on his heel with the two swords createdrge light des curving through the forest.

    The light des cut through the feathered and even left a sh on the captain, but she still managed to disappear from the spot.

    Sam panted heavily as he stopped in frustration, but the light des didn¡¯t. They cut through the whole group and left them on the ground and they continued as they cut the trees down in their path like cutting through the butter.

    Sam frustratingly kicked the ground and is full of anger. She escaped with Arkiv.

    He looked into the horizon where she left and turned his attention to the group that is moving by foot.

    When he wanted to move, he saw something on the ground. It is half a white wing of the feathered.

    He shed his de covered in golden me and ran towards the group of injured feathered.

 Chapter 824: Special treatment

    Sam is really pissed right now, even though he prepared himself for something to happen, he didn¡¯t expect that they wouldnd directly in the middle of a space lock.

    If only he was a bit more cautious, he would have appeared in a different location altogether.

    It would be a lie if he said that he never expected a group of feathered waiting for him, but he didn¡¯t expect them to stay with a formation and everything set up right at the location.

    So, even his minor preparations are for naught in that situation.

    At this moment, he moved towards the walked feathered rapidly. When they saw himing on the harbinger, they are shocked. Even though they saw him following their captain, they felt that he wouldn¡¯t being any time soon, so they are moving leisurely.

    Now they don¡¯t even have time or strength to fly away as Sam did a number on those wings which is the reason for them to walk now.

    When Sam neared them, he took out arge metallic ball. It isrge enough to be considered a boulder and it is at least on the size of an elephant head.

    Sam lightly threw the ball into the air and ax kicked it into the ground straight with the golden mes enveloping his leg.

    The fire elemental energy was spread through the ball and it was activated while falling down.

    It hit the ground with severe impact. By now the feathered already started dispersing. But it was of no use, the ball was activated and purple smoke came out of it along with some orange mes as metallic spikesunched out of it.

    Those are the spikes of sea urchin. The orange me and purple smoke are thebinations of the bio-fuel and the poison. Which act as fuel and go through the intrinsic formation of the spikes that shot themselves out of the ball.

    The spikes tore through the air and lodged themselves into the bodies of the feathered. The poison was injected properly and after the impaling of the spikes, the feathered are stuck on the spot. Some of them are dead right there.

    While the rest are not. But they will soon not be, now the holes on the ball that previously housed the spikes are emitting gas at high pressure as it spun rapidly on its own axis and the gas spread all over.

    The Gas is methane, after the gas waspletely leaked, a clicking sound came from the metallic ball and the methane gas was set on aze.

    The feathered who are within the range of the gas was caught onto the fire as they rolled on the ground.

    All of this happened within a second after Sam kicked it into the ground. It is very rapid.

    Sam moved away while they are burning to see if there are any other left within a certain range.

    Noticing that no one was here, he took out the chessboard and let out the Wights and Ghouls.

    "Go and make undead of any corpse you can find intact."

    The Wights and Ghouls dispersed after taking the order, Sam went to his beasts. He camped right there and then waiting for the Wights and Ghouls toe.

    And it didn¡¯t take long at all.

    He looked at the Ghouls and said.

    "If the corpses are not intact eat them to your fill, no need to report to them. This ce is going to be your breeding ground soon."

    One of the ghouls brought the metallic ball he previously used and gave it to him.

    He stored it away in the divine dimension and got ready for what is about to happen. This Goddess Nike really did put her head it doesn¡¯t belong. Now he is going to make her regret it.

    Meanwhile deep within in the inner circle of the city.

    While the middle-aged feathered who has ck wings is sitting in a room that looked like an office. While he is looking out of the window, he saw a golden shing and he couldn¡¯t help but frown. He instantly ran out of the office and went to the temple, where that golden shnded.

    When the golden glow was gone, it revealed the female captain and Arkiv, both of them unconscious and the female captain barely breathing.

    His eyes widened in horror when he saw the half-cut wing on her back.

    He ran towards them and separated them both, he threw Arkiv to the side and carried her as he walked inside the temple.

    The other subordinates and attendants are also here by now, so when he was about to enter, he ordered others to bring him inside.

    Another feathered with grey wings carried Arkiv inside.

    They entered a room deep inside the temple in which there is a tranquil pool of water. They ced both of them in the water and activated a formation.

    "Leave them alone. From the looks of it, they will take a few weeks to recover."

    With that both of the left.

    The ck-winged man went into his office, but the grey-winged man also followed him in.

    "What happened, brother? Did the n fail?" The grey-winged man asked the ck-winged man.

    "I don¡¯t know. But from the looks of it, something severe really happened. The only reason I sent her is that the goddess Nike clearly said that he is the most troublesome of all. But I didn¡¯t see thising. He is more troublesome than we thought.

    He almost killed and pushed her to the point that she even used the golden feather while carrying that guy. She should have just dumped him there and escape. As stubborn as ever."

    "What do we do next? Should I send people to search for him and investigate?"

    "Yes, but not right away. Let him be, for the time being, there is a possibility that he woulde looking for us soon anyway So, we will send a batch when he is near the city¡¯s outer circle, we would be able to see the traces by then, so we don¡¯t have to waste any time or resources on him."

    "But is it really okay that we let him be? The Goddess said that he has a bag of tricks, what if he does something crazy? We would be in trouble. Why don¡¯t we send some transcendent stage cultivators after him?"

    "No, we cannot do that unless it is ourst resort. Our situation is extremely delicate, for the next year, various gods will be watching over us. Our Goddess is no match for them, and most of them are on par with Zeus himself. At least that is what she said, so we have to be careful, otherwise, we would be bringing trouble to our goddess.

    What we are doing is already unfair to those yers, we cannot add in more."

    "Okay brother, we will do as you say."

    Meanwhile, there is apletely different scenario unfolding in the next city.

    This city is also most simr to the first one. There is an exact same temple here and there is a woman standing at the entrance with Electric blue wings.

    She is waiting for someone and soon the wait is over as a bunch of feathered brought two humans along with them. One of them is Akhil and the other guy is someone from the Lightning spear sect. The second yer that came from the sect and is named Dayus.

    Both of them are escorted by a bunch of feathered men.

    But both of them are inpletely different states.

    Akhil is unconscious with many wounds on his body and Dayus is without a single scratch on him.

    Dayus looked at Akhil and felt a little nervous.

    He then looked at the silver-winged woman standing in front.

    "Wee to our city Dayus. I am Artika, your host for the next year."

    "Why did you bring me here?" Dayus asked nervously, even though he was already told that nothing would happen to him in Nike and even people there would help him, he is still a bit wary of these people.

    "You don¡¯t have to be nervous. That pce of inheritance or whatever it is called will open in a year and this year, I would give you some special training which would be useful for your growth."

    He nodded and looked at Akhil.

    "What about him? Are you going to kill him?"

    "No, we have strict orders not to kill any of your peers. We were only asked to capture them and even then we couldn¡¯t much to them."

    "But, he is injured badly?"

    "You don¡¯t have to worry about that. That is just because of a small trap weid for them to fall in. He would be healed in a week or so.

    You can make yourselffortable here. They will show you the residence and if you need anything, ask the attendants to arrange for you.

    The training will begin tomorrow. You can rx until then."

    "What about the rest of the yers?"

    "We have six cities in each city there are two yers. But the rest of them wouldn¡¯t get the same treatment as you, so there is a high chance that they are in the more or less the same shape as this guy."

 Chapter 825: Conversation

    Sam is currently in the middle of the forest.

    He is in a makeshift camp near a stream. He is currently fiddling with thatrge metallic ball. He is reinserting the spikes inside and filled the gas and bio-fuel along with the poison so that it can be used again.

    He actually made this because the feathered are flying creatures and the rapid work of this ball with which it throws the spikes and set them aze is good enough to target them when they are in the air.

    And all he has to do is kick with proper timing and position using fire element.

    But that is not the only thing it can do. He can think of other ways to use it.

    He started grilling a piece of meat as he prepared for lunch.

    While he is eating, the wights and the ghouls returned to him along with a bunch of undead creatures.

    "Keep them for now, they are for sending gifts to the city. But before that, we have to make it so that the feathered would be afraid ofing out of the city."

    The Wights and Ghouls stayed silent. "You can go and cultivate for a while, don¡¯t hold back with the trees and corpses."

    Sam said and the two groups left into the forest excitedly.

    After they left, the beasts came back.

    They all went to hunt on their own. Except for the Ape of course.

    This guy became even pickier than Sam after he started brewing alcohol. Sometimes Sam is tempted to make a suit for the ape when he thought of how elegant and graceful his way of doing things are. But every time he thought of that, Yanwu or Raiju would piss the ape off by drinking a vat of wine and all hell will break lose.

    The rest of the beasts would be munching on the food as they watched the fight.

    That is the most entertaining thing ever in the divine dimension.

    The ape is currently collecting the fruit trees and bringing them back. As for the rest of the beasts, they are having apetition. They wants to see who can find the better pray.

    Sam looked at all the corpses which are now essentially meat and couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit lost. That is too much food and he is the one who has to prepare them.

    With him around, the beasts are not eating as barbarically as they should. Sometimes they eat cooked food, if not at least, he has to skin the corpses and cut the meat into boneless pieces for them to eat. In this aspect, they are all acting like spoiled children.

    He called for the shadows and made them help with the work as the beasts munched on the meat they hunted.

    After the meal, he sent them all back into the divine dimension and called for the Ghouls are Wights who are also having the time of their lives and threw them back in the chess board as he started his journey towards the city on harbinger.

    He travelled for three hours before he can clearly see the city.

    There are many feathered in uniforms roaming around the forest guarding it carefully.

    He is currently standing on a tree branch with thick vegetation and used the telescope he got from the ck cloaked force in the Charbhum realm.

    He got a clear view of the city.

    Even though it is called a city, it is basically an establishment in the forest.

    The trees are notpletely cleared off, there are many of them but just widely spread.

    Even the paths are not too wide for walking as they are mostly flying around. Maybe that is the reason they didn¡¯t bother with clearing forest too much.

    Every house is made of some brown stone and the one structure that caught his eye the most is the temple in the middle.

    And there is arge engraving on the stone temple indicating a name.

    "Silva."

    Maybe this is the name of the city or something but that was the only thing indicating anything about the city.

    This ce is going to see hell soon anyway. He is not going to let them off the hook easily.

    But as he said to the Wights and the Ghouls before, he has to let these people not get out of the city for a while and make sure that they stay in the city for a while.

    He is near the main entrance which was also the only visible entrance.

    Even though it is made in the forest, there is arge city wall separating it from the beasts.

    Sam retreated a bit and didn¡¯t let the guards notice him, he reached a little patch with no trees, and took the chess board once again.

    The Orangutans appeared.

    But this time, they are a lot meeker and afraid when they saw Sam.

    All this while, they are being properly taken care of by the rest of the chess teams within the chessboard. Sam constantly put them under the stress of chess games one after another before they finally got some sense or to be precise lost all their sense of their blind arrogance and cheekiness.

    Now they are going to perfectly listen to what is going to say.

    The sixteen Orangutans stood in attention.

    "Stay within this region of the forest and capture every feathered you can. Break a few bones and make immobile, I will be camping here temporarily and bring them here.

    Do everything discreetly, norge movements, no attention gathering."

    The Orangutans nodded their heads and went into the forests. Even though the forests are not as dense and lush as their original home, they are dense enough for them to easily get mixed in. These Purple Orangutans can be living nightmares for the next few days.

    And they did exactly what Sam wanted, while he is taking his time to train in the forest, for the next week Sam was already given a bunch of Feathered by the Orangutans.

    These Orangutans might have lost their cheekiness, but they didn¡¯t lose their cunning battle tactics, they are only sixteen of them, but they still didn¡¯t target a group more than four feathered. They are that cautious.

    But that is also okay with Sam.

    When they were brought to him, he broke the wings and sealed their cultivations and even their mouths. The only moving parts in their bodies are the legs and their spiritual energy is also sealed.

    He created arge hole in the ground and lined it up with rocks creating a temporary dungeon with venttion enough to let them breath.

    There are over a dozen of them.

    He could have collected them in the chess board, but he is a person who values quality over quantity, he is extremely picky when choosing proper chess pieces for the game and he is not interested in selecting whatever piece that falls in to his hands.

    After this week, Sam made the Orangutans stay down a bit and only target the solo feathered that came near the camp.

    Sam is already using many concealing formations, so his camp is not visible for most people, at least not from far away, but there is a chance if theye and check it from close based on their expertise, so he didn¡¯t want to take chance.

    His prisoners soon built up.

    This didn¡¯t go unnoticed by the city and the authorities though.

    The ck winged leader already got the report of this the second day itself, but they still couldn¡¯t see any results.

    Meanwhile within the temple. In the pool.

    Arkiv felt like his body is light as a feather, but his head is heavy as lead.

    He opened his eyes, at first it was all blurry, but then it was greeted by something he didn¡¯t expect at all.

    "You are awake."

    The feathered captain who attacked Sam and Arkiv is sitting opposite to him in the same pool, the white wing grew back and she is using those wings to cover her naked body.

    He became alert and was about to make a move, but his whole body is feeling sore and painful.

    "Don¡¯t even bother trying, you are in no position to move now." The captain said once again.

    Arkiv looked around and realized that he is in the pool naked, he instinctually covered his private parts before asking.

    "Where am I? What happened to Sam? Why am I here?"

    "You are Silva city. My city. This is the temple of Goddess Nike. You are currently in the healing pool. You were injured heavily."

    "Yeah, I wonder whose doing that is?"

    He said in mock anger.

    "What is your name?" She asked with a sigh.

    "Arkiv. You didn¡¯t even know my name and you even attacked me?"

    "I don¡¯t remember your name, you were not my target. Your friend was my target."

    "Yeah, then why bother attacking me?"

    She didn¡¯t want to speak and just shook her head in silence.

    "From the looks of it, you are also injured pretty badly. Sam must have done a number on you."

    She looked at him and said.

    "Yeah, he did. But what can I say, it is a death match and this is price I had to pay for his death."

    She said as she looked at his eyes directly expecting a reaction. But the expected reaction never came.

    "Such a beautiful girl, poor thing. He must have hit you too hard on your head and now you are imagining things. I apologize on his behalf, that brute has no respect or consideration for the beauties like you. He was always that ruthless."

    The captain became angry and wanted to rage, but she is also in no condition to move and said.

    "Why are you so sure that he didn¡¯t die? It is not impossible for me to kill him. I did give him a fair fight."

    "Yeah, you could. In your dreams."

    "You..."

    Arkiv just kept on observing the architecture without caring for her annoyance.

 Chapter 826: Advice from Arkiv

    "You didn¡¯t answer my question?" She asked Arkiv again.

    "What?"

    "Why are you sure that I wouldn¡¯t be able to kill him?"

    "Of course, I have seen him fight so many times. Most of the time, it is not others giving him a fair fight, it was him trying to make it fair for them. He has too many tricks up his sleeve and too many hidden cards. If all he wants to do is kill directly, he wouldn¡¯t even bother fighting.

    It seems like he didn¡¯t want to go on an all-out war immediately, but you pushed him again and again."

    *Snort*

    She snorted and said.

    "He is one man? He will wage a war against the whole city?"

    Arkiv leaned back and rxed a little bit as he looked at the ceiling.

    "You will see. When are you going to release me?"

    "You are not going anywhere until the end of this. You would be staying here. If you want you can train, but you wouldn¡¯t be given any ess outside."

    "Sure, then what is your name?"

    "Grace."

    "Nice name. But I think it doesn¡¯t suit you."

    She just gave me a side-eye and didn¡¯t speak anymore.

    After a few seconds, Arkiv spoke again.

    "Did you speak to your elders after you woke up?"

    "No."

    "How long have we been here?"

    "A week."

    "Then, when your elderse, after you exin the situation. Ask them if something big is going on and if it is, tell them not to panic or think it is something else. It would be him and there is a chance that it would stop if you guys send me out."

    "You are not going anywhere. So shut up and stay put."

    "Well, I like your race actually, that is why I am giving you a piece of advice. It ispletely up to you whether you like it or not."

    "You like our race?"

    "Yes."

    "Why?"

    "Because you guys can fly."

    "Guessed as much."

    While they are having some not-so-friendly conversation, in the forest, Sam took a look at his prisoners once again and decided to take the next step.

    He sent the shadow mice out and let them enter the city.

    After they returned, the ghouls and Wights came out with their undead.

    There are around forty undead creatures and all of them are feathered, but at this moment, Sam is only using only ten of them. He made them clean the bodies of the undead to make the wounds and the bloodstains less obvious and made them enter the city one by one.

    They are flying slowly and close to the ground. They didn¡¯t move too fast and didn¡¯t catch too much attention.

    One feathered went into the city for every hour and for the next two days, all he did is send these people without raising any suspicion.

    After everyone is in their hidden position within the vegetation of the city, Sam looked at the Wights and Ghouls around him that are controlling the undead creatures with utmost concentration and gave the orders.

    The Wights and Ghouls executed the orders immediately.

    The Feathered started looking around, some looking into the tree trunk holes, some into the abandoned houses, and so on.

    There is a metallic box inside.

    They took the box and came out of their location and started walking. They didn¡¯t even fly. They walked for a while and ced the box on the floor after opening it.

    It has some grenades in it.

    At this moment, they are all near the city walls where the guards are stationed and some of them are near the buildings which Sam observed to be some sort of administrative building, some of them are just aiming at the wall directly.

    There is one person who is not anywhere near them, that one undead feathered is currently near the temple.

    As soon as all of them reached their position, Sam gave the orders, the wights and ghouls controlled and the undead creatures threw.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    A series of blue-colored explosions happened in various ces of the city.

    There are some ces where the city wall was damaged and some buildings copsed, the soldier stations were destroyed. Even though there doesn¡¯t seem to be any death, they are injured severely and a couple of soldiers were on verge of death.

    The whole city fell into panic with the shy and dangerous blue explosions rocking their hearts. Everyone ran out of their houses to see what is happening.

    At the temple, the situation is worse.

    At this moment, except for the temple cleaners and others, only Arkiv and Grace are there.

    They are on an upper floor and they have a faint glimpse of the entrance down below. When he saw the blue mes explosion, he couldn¡¯t help but smile. He is extremely familiar with those blue mes and has seen what they can do.

    Grace who is sitting opposite him also had an opposite reaction.

    She opened her wings and wanted to get out without even caring about her naked body.

    But she couldn¡¯t, she is almost as damaged as Arkiv. She needs almost the same amount of rest like him.

    "Don¡¯t move and waste your energy. There is nothing you can do even if you have managed to go out."

    "I have to see what is happening? What is that blue me and explosion? I have to see if the city is under attack and see if I can help it."

    "Well, you don¡¯t have to go and see to know that it is an explosion. You can feel it from here. Anyway, I already told you, there is nothing you can do that your whole city can¡¯t. Stop being so stubborn and sit down."

    She wanted to refute him, but she couldn¡¯t. She at least wanted to know what is happening.

    "Don¡¯t worry, your elders wille to meet us in a few minutes."

    While he is speaking, the ck-winged man and the Grey-winged man arrived at the temple entrance, where the feathered undead is still standing.

    "Who are you? What are you doing here?"

    They hovered around him and asked coldly. But the undead didn¡¯t speak anything and ced his fingers into the throat and took out a small scroll.

    By now, they guessed that he is an undead creature, they wanted to finish him off, but before they could do so, the undead pressed against his chest.

    *Boom*

    Another explosion happened right in front of the temple.

    At this moment, another round of explosions could be heard from all over the city.

    But the only difference is, the undead that is spread all over the city are being captured and they have pin grenades in their bodies instead of the normal grenades, which is more damaging.

    The Grey-winged elder looked at the scroll. His face is crunching up in fury.

    He opened and the contents are simple.

    "Release him now."

    That is it. There is no extra information, no exnation. But at this moment both the grey winged and the ck-winged understood who they are referring to and what they were asked to do.

    Both of them walked into the Temple.

    They reached the pool where Arkiv is still rxing and Grace is extremely tense.

    When they heard the footsteps, Grace¡¯s eyes lit up, but Arkiv just leaned back even more and spread his arms and legs to have a morefortable position.

    "I guess the message was received." He said casually.

    "So, you do know of this. There are ten explosions in the city. What are you guys thinking? Do you think we wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything to you, just because we had an order not to kill you guys?" The grey-winged elder yelled while releasing his aura.

    Arkiv looked at them calmly.

    "If you really want to kill me, be my guest. I am not afraid of it. But I would suggest that you kill that guy that just bombed your city.

    Even though we are not that close, I guess we can be considered friends with all the interactions we had and for this journey, we are even partners. So, if I die before he does, now he only threw ten explosions, you wouldn¡¯t even want to imagine what he can do.

    He is a crazy asshole. I am telling you."

    "I will send the transcendent stage cultivators to catch him now. I would like to see what he would do after he got captured and put through torture." The Grey-winged elder once again yelled and left the room.

    Arkiv just chuckled and said to the ck-winged man.

    "I hope you make a proper decision. If you send me now, he wouldn¡¯t demand you to hand over whatever that weapon piece is, but he wouldn¡¯t stop stealing it, at least you would have a fair fight without too much damage to your citizens.

    But if it is toote, you wouldn¡¯t be able to. He will stop the demands and go on a rampage. A lot of lives will be lost."

 Chapter 827: Hostage Exchange?

    The ck-winged elder looked at Arkiv for a while to see any change in the expression. But there is nothing. He is as rxed as ever.

    Then he diverted his attention to grace and asked about her well-being before reassuring her about the city and left.

    After they left, Grace looked at Arkiv and asked.

    "How did he manage to do that?"

    "Do what?" Arkiv came out of his daze and said.

    "Attack the city."

    "Oh, that? We all want to know that don¡¯t we? Unfortunately, we cannot figure that out unless hees here and exins it to you."

    "Do you mean what you said about the citizens being involved?"

    "Of course, do you think he made these explosions just for the fun of it? This is a warning for you guys."

    "How can you do that? Citizens are not involved. How is that fair? If you are men try and do something to us."

    "That is riching from you. Do you even dare to talk about fairness in front of me? You surrounded us, even before we appeared in this world and as soon as our feet touched the ground, there is already a space lock.

    You are judging us for being unfair."

    "We are just following orders. Anyway, we are soldiers, fighting each other. Why do you have to bring citizens into this?" She became more and more frustrated.

    Arkiv rolled his eyes and only one word.

    "Na?ve."

    "Who are you calling na?ve?" For some reason, she became a bit angrier.

    "Who else is here? You attacked us first, with or without the orders doesn¡¯t matter, before you attacked you should have thought about your citizens, children, and all the other people that you have with you. Because every action of yours is bound to influence their lives too.

    You cannot go and pull the tail of the vicious beast and demand that it only retaliate as you wished.

    Even if only one person in the group does that, the whole group suffers, it all depends on who has the higher power and that person¡¯s mood.

    There is nothing fair or unfair in this. This is how the world works. If you think it is otherwise, you are clearly na?ve and you are not suitable for killing and fighting."

    "How can you decide that? What right do you have?"

    She bowed her head down as she asked weakly.

    "I don¡¯t get to decide this. After all, what authority do I have to decide? But that is what the world taught me. That is the world where I live in."

    With that, the conversation was cut off.

    Arkiv looked at her dull eyes and various thoughts are running in his mind.

    At this moment, Sam is sitting on a tree with the telescope as he looked at the temple and the rest of the city.

    He has been doing that every day, to find out the routine.

    Actually, he wanted to infiltrate the city with shadow mice as the earlier nting bombs was sessful, but he has his reservations.

    There is a great chance that as soon as he came out of the divine dimension within the city, he would be spotted.

    If he got caught, it would be difficult to get out again.

    The fact that there is only One consummate level cultivator in this ce is tempting him to do this even more.

    The shadow mice grew and they can now escape their vision, but the initial spatial lock he was kept in is giving him second thoughts.

    A ce with spatial locks couldn¡¯t be so backward and they should have known about something like the shadow transverse.

    There is a possibility that the key areas might have something that could help them detect these things, that is why he is hesitating a bit.

    If not for that, he would have already entered the city and get Arkiv back before leaving again.

    The fact that he couldn¡¯t blend in with the rest of the feathered is not helping either.

    After some thought, Sam decided to try something else.

    He called for Yaksha¡¯s shadow and sent him to infiltrate the city.

    Even though the techniques of the shadow are not greater than the shadow mice and can even be considered worse, it would be a great test subject.

    Sam could sense the shadow moving from one spot to another.

    Now it is moving past the inner circle and is going farther and farther. His target is the temple in the middle.

    The shadow even managed to enter the temple, but as soon as it entered the temple Sam lost the connection with it.

    Thest thing Sam felt when it was disconnected is a massive pressure and he spat out a mouthful of blood.

    The shadow was destroyed. As soon as he entered the temple, the shadow was destroyed, his second thoughts are not in vain.

    Sam went away from the spot and drank some heavenly wine to heal the damage, even his soul was a bit damaged due to this, but it is not severe.

    He has to rest.

    When he reached the camp, there are new prisoners waiting for him.

    After the first gift, Sam sent to them he recalled all the Orangutans back as he noticed that the Transcendent stage cultivators are sent out.

    Even though they were refrained until now, it seems like the feathered are also a bit out of patience, so Sam let the specter out.

    Now even the transcendent stage feathered are bing prisoners.

    After another two days, Sam felt like he caught enough. So, he focused on hiding himself and only caught them when they reached near his camp.

    Meanwhile, he prepared a new gift.

    He took out a silver pigeon and sent a spatial ring along with it.

    This time also the target is the temple. He wants to see if the pigeon could enter the temple normally. Silver pigeon is fast, faster than the shadow, so if anything has a chance at escape, then it is this.

    The silver streak of light went past the city. Not many noticed it, and the few who noticed couldn¡¯t even follow the path with their eyes.

    The pigeon entered the temple yard and tried to enter the main building.

    But right after the pigeon shot in, Sam lost the contract connection he could feel with the pigeon, but the pigeon managed to escape.

    Sam who is watching through the telescope along with thebination of his eye technique to get a clear few, could see the pigeon bleeding.

    The pigeon dropped the spatial ring and came back.

    At this moment, someone came running from inside and looked at the pigeon and tried to follow it, but the speed of the pigeon shook that person off easily.

    He couldn¡¯t follow, so he went back inside.

    That guy has one notable difference from the rest of the feathered Sam saw.

    He doesn¡¯t have any hair on the head. He is bald. He picked the spatial ring and went into the temple.

    The ck-winged elder is standing in front of that goddess statue once again as the bald guy came with the ring and said.

    "Sir, there was a second infiltration attempt just now. First, it was an undead shadow and now it seems to be a living creature. Looked like a pigeon.

    But this time, the pigeon managed to escape with an injury and it dropped this."

    He gave the spatial ring to him.

    The elder took the ring and opened it only to see a recording crystal.

    He injected some spiritual energy and the image appeared.

    In the video, there are many feathered who sprawled on the ground in a dark ce.

    They are all feeling the pain that much is visible through the image.

    At the end of it, Sam¡¯s voice could be heard.

    "One person for all of them. You decide.

    Every day you dy, I will kill a person."

    With that, the video was stopped. The ck-winged elder became angry. He called for the grey-winged elder and showed the video.

    "That bastard. Brother, let me go. I will take care of it immediately. Not only will I capture him, I will also rescue all of them."

    "You have one day. It seems like he is nearby. He sent an undead shadow to infiltrate but failed. He would be at the borders of the city. Not too far."

    "I will check. Don¡¯t worry, I will definitely catch him."

    With that, he went to meet the guardmander who was in charge of the operation until now.

    All this while, they thought that they are all dead but now that they knew they were alive, they cannot just let them die.

    They decided to go and find them.

    He assembled his best team and flew out of the city.

    They searched from day to night and even till dawn and the Grey-winged elder finally saw some anomalies and found the concealing formation.

    He took out his spear and shot it directly at the area.

    The spear caused the formation to copse and the dust raised.

    When the dust settled, all that left in the area is a big pit that was used for the prisoners. There is nothing else. Sam or any of the feathered are nowhere to be seen.

 Chapter 828: Torture

    Sam is currently standing on a tree as he watched through the telescope. There is a faint smile on his face as he looked at the Grey-winged man hitting the concealed formation.

    Actually, after the shadow was gone and the pigeon was sent, he already moved the whole set up backward.

    As for the prisoners, Sam thought of something. He doesn¡¯t have any goals on this. He doesn¡¯t want to develop here or gain influence here. The ruling creatures of this are not exactly on friendly terms with him and it would be impossible to develop those friendly terms and these guys already knew most of the details about the yers and the game they are ying.

    So, he doesn¡¯t have to hide some of the cards he has in his hand.

    After this thought came, he took the most highly powerful sedative and gave it to the prisoners. He then threw them into the chessboard as a temporary prison. Even if the sedative wore off, the most they can do is feel trapped in an unknown thing.

    In fact, there is a high probability that they would even think that it was a side effect of the medicine.

    Even they if they managed to figure out that it is a weird ce that could be essed by Sam remotely and after Sam released them, they went to their superiors and said that, it wouldn¡¯t matter much.

    Even though these feathered have some connections with higher realms, it is only with Goddess Nike and after they left this ce, they are directly sent to the Zeus army. And Zeus himself would have already known the possessions Sam has in his hands.

    Anyway, now he shifted the camp and held the prisoners in the chessboard.

    And the first day went on like this.

    But he has fulfilled the promise he made to them.

    So, by the time the grey-winged man returned to the city, he and his team saw something horrible.

    Tworge wooden crosses were nailed into the ground on their way back to the entrance of the city within the forest and on the two crosses, two feathered were killed and nailed down. There is a small paper note ced on one of them.

    The grey-winged man went there and took a look at the paper note with shivering hands.

    "One as promised and the other a bonus for destroying my previous hideout. Wait for another one tomorrow. Only one if you don¡¯t give me any extra surprises."

    The team quickly took the bodies down and destroyed the cross. They carried the dead bodies back to the city and brought them near the temple, where the ck-winged man is standing.

    He read the note was bing angry. Only his expression is showing that anger, he is not screaming or yelling. But when he remembered what is there at stake and what he was ordered, he couldn¡¯t help but force himself to calm down.

    He walked into the temple.

    In the temple, Arkiv and Grace are still inside the pool.

    They became a lot morefortable with time and often had some conversations.

    "How long should I be here?"

    Arkiv asked with a boring expression.

    "Two more days in the pool. Eleven and half more months in the city."

    "Trust me, I am not staying that long. In fact, there is a possibility that I might get out of this ce by next week."

    "Really? Do you think it would be that easy?"

    "You won¡¯t understand. That guy outside doesn¡¯t have enough patience for things like this."

    *snort*

    "Stop hyping him so much. He is just a Pre-transcendent stage like me."

    As she said, both of them saw the ck-winged eldering.

    He walked towards Arkiv and held him by the throat and pulled him out.

    Arkiv is currently hanging by his throat like a rag doll without any clothes on, but there is a smile on his face.

    "It seems like he managed to piss you off. Why don¡¯t you send me? Half of your problems will be gone."

    "Do you think I am an idiot, kid? If I leave you, both of you will be one and became a massive pain in my ass. You are not going anywhere. But every time he kills someone from our side, then I will put you through the torture and throw you back into the pool.

    You will heal, I will torture you again and throw you back into the pool.

    I will do that until your spirit is broken if I have to. The orders are just not to kill you. Not to stay our handpletely."

    "Seems like you have finally lost it. Do what you want. At the end of the day, I am walking out of this temple and the city alive, but by the time I walked out of them, if you would remain intact or not, is a whole another matter."

    "Let us see who will break first. You and your friend or me and my citizens."

    "Let us see."

    "What the goddess said is right. You guys are cocky sons of bitches. How dare you not know your own worth? Just because you are chosen for some game?"

    "I don¡¯t have to exin that, you will understand it as the time passed. Now if you don¡¯t mind, put me down for a second. I don¡¯t want to stay naked in front of ady like that."

    The ck-winged man released the hand on the neck.

    Arkivnded on the floor and wore a new set of clothes as he stretched a bit.

    "It seems like you are already healed, why didn¡¯t you say so earlier?" Grace asked from the pool.

    "Say it and miss a chance to stay in the pool with a naked beauty? Am I a fool?"

    Suddenly he felt some pressure. It came from the elder.

    "Why so serious? Is she your daughter?" He looked at both their faces, one after another, and was surprised.

    "Oh shit, she is indeed your daughter, isn¡¯t she? Damn, your wife must be much more beautiful."

    The pressure intensified.

    The man dragged Arkiv by his arm and started dragging him out. Arkiv looked at Grace as he left and winked at her with a smirk.

    On the lower floor of the temple, the ck-winged elder dragged Arkiv into an inner.

    There is a woman who has brown wings sitting inside that room. Her wings are open, but she sat cross-legged on a small stone tform.

    "Priestess."

    The man greeted her politely.

    "King Silva."

    She greeted him back.

    "You should know who this guy is, deal with him. We are trying to catch his friend for now. We want you to record what you can do to him."

    "Record? You seem to have seen something disturbing."

    "His friend is crucifying the feathered outside the city. He has another thirty hostages."

    "A daring guy, isn¡¯t he?"

    "I would like to see how daring he is after I am done with him. Please throw this guy into the pool after you are done with him."

    With that King, Silva left the room.

    The priestess looked at Arkiv who is also sizing her up and said.

    "You can only me your bad luck for being on the bad side of our goddess."

    "Trust me, I am on the bad side of people your goddess couldn¡¯t touch. Actually, your goddess is the least of my concerns now."

    The priestess raised an eyebrow and said.

    "So, it is indeed true that you guys are some ythings for gods. How lucky do you have to be?"

    "Trust me, we don¡¯t feel lucky."

    "How could your puny minds fathom the blessing you have received. Being able to meet and interact with the gods of that calib.."

    "Is your n preaching me to death? If it is yes, it might actually work."

    "Seems like you are actually excited for this. Let us go."

    She took to him to the rear of the temple. There is arge stone tform under the open sky. There is a bunch of feathered on the edge of this tform surrounding it on the whole.

    The tform is so big, they have to yell at each other to speak.

    Thedy flew into the air and threw Arkiv into the middle of the tform.

    Arkiv maneuvered himself in mid-air and was about tond, but suddenly the gravity increased and he mmed himself into the ground.

    "For you, the gravity on this tform is ten times that of normal. If you get used to it, it will increase. If you get used to it then too, it will increase again. It will keep on going until your spirit is broken."

    Arkiv mmed his fists on the ground and tried to get up.

    At this moment, a fireball hit him squarely on his back and he fell back on the ground again.

    He looked at the bald feathered who threw it and cursed under his breath. He tried to stand up again and this time another attack came.

    The process repeated for hours, Arkiv¡¯s body was ravaged badly, at least this time, the wounds are external. But he is still trying to stand up and failed.

 Chapter 829: Cricifixion

    Sam is currently sitting in his camp, looking at the recording crystal he has in his hands.

    It is the video of Arkiv being bashed and hit for two days straight.

    It has been two weeks since they came here for today and in the past two days, Sam crucified another two feathered.

    And this day, in the ce of the crucifixion, the recording crystal was found. Even though there is a bunch of feathered lying in ambush, they are all early-stage transcendent stage cultivators and specter has no problem escaping them with a recording crystal.

    Now, this is the video, he got from that crystal.

    Sam clenched his fists as he looked at the constant bashing Arkiv received, without being able to put up a fight.

    The gravity is the direct obstacle that is not allowing him to stand up.

    Sometimes, he didn¡¯t even bother to stand up anymore and justid down trying to defend himself, but for some reason, the more contact he has with the stone, the more resistant his spiritual energy be.

    He is fully frustrated and clearly not feeling well.

    After the bashing, he was taken away by a bunch of people.

    Sam saw the priestess who is hovering over the air as she looked at the whole fiasco coldly.

    He decided to send the return gifts in kind.

    He started preparing for the next crucifixion, but along with that, there is another gift he nned.

    He took out a dead body of the feathered and started cutting it open.

    He removed some internal organs and filled them will energy cells. He sewed up the skin and cut the wings off of the dead body.

    He turned the body into undead and ordered him to close his eyes and try to act alive.

    He killed two more feathered and put them on the wooden cross again. But this time, inside their dead bodies, there are some gifts hidden.

    He crucified the dead bodies in a different spot and sent a signal with a golden me. The ambush team lying in wait looked at the golden me and went there.

    Sam took a detour on harbinger and arrived nearer to the city on a different side and let go of one of the feathered.

    He gave him the healing pills, that could barely allow him to fly.

    "Take this guy with you. If you can go fast enough, you can save yourselves both. Both of you are given same poison, if you don¡¯t act fast, you would also turn out like him."

    Sam said as he stabbed his hand into the chest of another feathered who is still lying on the ground barely breathing.

    The feathered looked at hisrade who is still barely breathing and immediately became anxious. He carried therade and started flying towards the city screaming.

    "HELP."

    "HELP."

    He couldn¡¯t fly longer andnded on the city wall. By now the guards saw him and came rapidly towards him to check their situation.

    "What happened?"

    "One of the leaders of the guards asked."

    But as soon as he did that...

    *BOOM*

    A loud energy explosion happened and more than ten guards along with arge chunk of the city wall disappeared. The explosion could be heard throughout the whole city. The rest of the city guards are all alerted.

    In fact, not to mention the city guards, the priestess inside the temple heard the explosion and came out running.

    While their focus was all on that side, in the ce of crucifixion.

    The group saw the crucifixion and this time, they felt their blood boiling even more. The amount of torture inflicted on them is beyond belief.

    They hurried to free them from the crosses and provide a proper burial, but as soon as they stepped forward...

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    A series of explosions happened.

    Purple smoke covered the whole area and even the trees are feeling the corrosion and started wilting rapidly.

    The feathered that are there had their legs injured and a lot of pins are stabbing into their skin, the purple poison is seeping in as it made them feel their blood burn with every breath.

    These rapid explosions once again caught the attention of the city guards and they started flying towards them.

    But as they are on air, they saw something surprising.

    Sam who is practically invisible to them for the past few days, appeared in a distance on harbinger as he floated on top of the trees looking at them.

    This halt caused the feathered group to up and looked at him coldly.

    As they were about to move towards him, Sam smirked and made a spin with the harbinger as his body and the board covered with golden mes.

    As he spun with a mere thought arge metallic ball appeared and he kicked it with golden mes into the group.

    He didn¡¯t stop there and kicked another one with a slight change in direction.

    The two balls shot in mid-air as they reached the groups soon. The feathered just ignored the balls and decided to dodge them, but when they reached the middle of the group, the spikes came out of the ball, impaling into their bodies and injecting the poison, before they could even feel the full extent of pain, the gas was already released and it was caught on fire.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    ]The feathered group has all their wings caught on fire and their bodies became weak as they fell down.

    Sam took out his bow and arrows and started shooting the falling feathered.

    His arrows impaled many of them to the trees and made them hang on the trees like scarecrows on a cross.

    After impaling them, he shot another poison vial arrow that could intensify the effects of the poison.

    He left the ce as fast as he came.

    The metal balls were left there and just went away as fast as came.

    The incident shook the city.

    There is no way this would go unnoticed. Everything Sam did until now is not too overboard or over the top. The only thing he did too shy is the initial st.

    But now he decided to do something that would make it known to everyone in the city.

    He would like to see if they would let the whole city go into a panic. He would make one of the six capitals of the city shake in fear and see if they would dare to keep him inside. And with all the torture they are putting Arkiv through, he would make sure that they hand over the weapon fragment or whatever that is that he has to take from here by themselves.

    Even if they didn¡¯t want to hand it over, by the time, he was finished, he would be able to do anything he wants to do with this city and take whatever he wants.

    He is giving them onest chance them and that expires this very night.

    If they didn¡¯t do what he wants, they would regret it for the rest of their lives. That is if they have any remaining life after he was done.

    He went to go through the preparations.

    At this moment, Arkiv is currently soaking in the pool as he healed the injuries.

    Grace is standing beside the pool as she looked at him.

    "Why are you provoking them so much? You are already in this state."

    "Provoking them? You might not notice this, but what is happening is, you guys are provoking me and another monster that is outside.

    The time I get used to that gravity and that guy outside had enough, you would beg me to leave this ce."

    "Why are you so cocky?"

    "Well, you haven¡¯t talked to Sam yet. He will make you feel like I am the most humble guy in the universe."

    She stayed silent for a second and said.

    "What is it like to talk with gods?"

    "Gods?"

    "Why do you ask?"

    She sat down at the edge of the pool and said.

    "Our is isted from the rest of the world, our only hope to get out of here, to break through to consummate level and join the training camp of the Zeus army. We do all this to meet our Goddess and serve under hermand.

    I want to know how those gods are, as I couldn¡¯t go there anytime soon."

    "Well, they are nothing special. Some of them are very petty. Pettier than a little girl. Some of them are easy to get along with. Like you could have a drink with him over some snacks andughs. Some are dignified and powerful, but noble and fair. Some of them are vicious cunts that have no manners whatsoever or no conscience.

    And from the looks of it, the next god might even be an arrogant piece of shit that has no respect for a fairpetition."

    Grace looked at him in shock.

    "You are talking about gods."

    "So? Gods are living beings as well."

    "But they are still gods. They are not normal. They are supposed to be different."

    "In my journey, I have seen young men make gods bleed when they are on the same level, if they can bleed, they can die and I am going to kill one myself. There is nothing to adore, nothing unreachable about them."

    "You are crazy."

 Chapter 830: Blocking routes

    That night, the whole was forest was in chaos.

    All the beasts arepletely feeling restless due to the sudden invasion of the feathered. They are turning the whole surrounding area upside down.

    But all Sam has to do is, observe the crystal table and he can escape to where there are no feathered at that moment.

    He just yed hide and seek for the whole night and the search still continued till morning.

    But Sam didn¡¯t want to y along anymore and did something to give him some space to execute his n.

    He just sent some special gifts into the city.

    Even though the shadows cannot enter the temple and have a chance of getting detected inside the inner region of the city, the outer region is still easy for them to do something.

    And Sam doesn¡¯t even want to go as far as the outer region.

    Right before the sunrise, Sam sent the shadows inside the city and they are within the premises of the city wall as they dug some earth at the bottom of the walls in their respective positions and set the bombs.

    These bombs are the ones that take some time to set. They are simr to the ones he used in the war with Adrian Empire.

    After setting the bombs, the shadows escape.

    And soon, the presence of the gifts was known.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    A series of explosions caused the wall to vibrate for a long and even cause some cracks.

    The guards and other teams searching outside, immediately ran back to the city. And the added fact that the explosions happened on the inner side of the wall only caused more panic.

    They all stood on the city walls just for safety.

    Sam took this opportunity to do his own thing and the first step for doing this is identifying all the routes to the city.

    Even though the main goal of this is just serving their goddess, they still have a financial system in ce and businesses are a thing.

    And the six capitals are naturally the economic hubs. They are also the ces with most traffic. Sam is going to delete that traffic.

    He would stop all the peopleing to the city and block all the routes which will eventually damage the financial system of the city.

    As for why he is saying routes in a where the creatures can fly, there are beasts that are territorial about the sky too and not anyone can fly anywhere.

    The main reason for a small walking path created below the flying path is to make sure that the feathered would stay within the safe region.

    They cannot just fly anywhere and everywhere.

    And Sam has noticed this in the past few days the feathered are strictly following these routes. Even though the routes are wide, there are many ways to block them.

    Sam went to the first route and let out all the soldiers who can work from the chessboard. The Orangutans, minotaurs, the ghouls, Wights, and even the shadow soldiers.

    He let Dia and other beasts out.

    Dia does the main job while the rest of them will assist.

    Sam entered the divine dimension once again and checked with the Sea urchins.

    He has arge need for the spikes now. Along with that Mia is busy secreting with the poison.

    While Dia is handling the construction along with the rest of the workers, Sam got busy in the second floor with the production unit as he made new toys.

    The feathered didn¡¯te out of the city for a while and Sam didn¡¯t let the featherede to this way. He just let the beasts create a disturbance and made them take a detour.

    By afternoon, everything is ready.

    Sam came out with special equipment and fixed it with the earthen structure they created.

    He then dumped a whole load of fire elemental stones in the structure. Called out the Specter to assist him in the soul necromancy.

    Sam is trying to do something that is looked down upon, frowned upon, and rejected in many parts of the world.

    This is soul necromancy that uses the soul of the recently killed person and forces that soul to be a spirit and enchant it into a weapon, formation disc, or any other object.

    This practice is more efficient and more preferable than normal Spirit enchantment because the soul has some consciousness left and the spirit has higher quality.

    The same advantage is also the reason for rejecting this process. The soul would retain the original consciousness to a major extent. So, if the necromancer is not skilled enough and couldn¡¯t erase all the memories, the soul will suffer too much and there is a chance that spirit might slip out of control and go on a rampage.

    If it is a passive weapon, then it is fine, but if it is an active attack formation, things would be beyond dangerous.

    Sam wanted to test this and see how it works, since he is inexperienced in this, he called for help from the Specter.

    If it is a normal time, he wouldn¡¯t be so cruel towards them, but these guys are soldiers and picked a fight with him before he did anything to them. They are the ones who deliberately started this war, so there was no need to hold back at all.

    Anyway, he already told them that he would kill them one by one, instead of releasing Arkiv, they are torturing him. They can only me themselves for it.

    Sam performed the ritual with the assistance of a specter andpleted the enchantment.

    The whole setup is actually aplex set up of earthen pirs of different shapes and sizes which have different metallic mountings on them.

    There is anotherrgeplex mechanism under it that connected all these structures.

    After making sure it wasplete with the spirit, he took the body and went to the earthen pir that was in the forefront.

    It is as tall as the flying height of the feathered and on top of that, there is a cross.

    He hung the body there, removed the feathers off of the wings, and nailed them to the cross by their flesh, spread them as wide as he can, before writing on them.

    "NO ENTRY"

    After setting the whole thing up, Sam went away from that spot. The feathered that came to that way looked at the sign and were shocked.

    They don¡¯t know what the current situation is and some people tested what would happen if they go there.

    As soon as the feathered entered the area, the spikes started shooting at him from the nearest structure.

    When they tried to destroy the spikes, some formations got activated in defense and spikes kept on shooting at them.

    There are many weapons apart from the spikes, there are small rockets that use the biofuel for propulsion and methane for the explosion.

    Rockets that use pins and so on.

    This is actually a massive attacking beast of a machine.

    Since Sam is already a peak stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivator, his formation-level also increased, so with fewer inscriptions. The transcendent stage cultivators can barely do any damage and by the time they could even make any significant damage, they are going to die.

    The worst part is that there is a final obstacle really defending the setup.

    It is soul formation.

    Sam integrated the soul formation into the equipment. Not a single feathered managed to activate that.

    Even when the feathered guards from the city came, they couldn¡¯t do much.

    Sam went away and targeted another route.

    For the next week, along with the crucifixions, he blocked all four major routes connecting the city and the viges.

    The main four routes were blocked. The rear side of the city is connected to only one route which leads to the main temple city of this which is not taken by anyone else.

    After the routes were blocked, the situation change was visible instantly.

    The city started suffering and the citizens started suffering.

    Whenever arge group of people came to attack the blockades, Sam just made an appearance and used energy cells and metal balls to deal with them.

    Every day, the news of dozens of feathered dying was sent back to the city and Silva the king of the area is grinding his teeth.

    Every day he spent a lot of time standing before the statue of Nike while he closed his eyes.

    But he didn¡¯t do anything else. The most he did is, let his brother get out and deal with Sam, but there are no results on that end either.

    Meanwhile, someone else is having a decent improvement in something.

    Arkiv is currently sprawling on the ground as he closed his eyes.

    His energy enveloped his whole body and created a visibleyer.

    The attacks that areing at him are still hitting him, but they are not disrupting his energy flow. Only the outeryer is being damaged and he is using too much energy to deflect them. But it is still great progress.

    No matter how much gravity is being increased, the energy flow is not getting disrupted it is only being expended more.

    All of a sudden, he opened his eyes and there is a smirk on his face."

 Chapter 831: Retaliation

    Arkiv looked towards the sky with a newfound appreciation.

    The smirk on his face is so refreshing from all the torture he has endured in the past few days.

    He took a look at the priestess, who justmanded to increase the gravitational pull more, but he is not fazed. He gave that smirk one more time and then rolled over on the floor with much difficulty.

    Soon, his face was nted into the stage, while his back is facing the sky.

    He used his arms to push the ground and tried to get on his knees with great difficulty.

    The attacks didn¡¯t stop, even when the attacks are crossing the energy film around him and hitting him, they are unable to destroy his energy flow and as long as the energy flow is uninterrupted, it is all just a matter of how much energy he has.

    With great difficulty, he took five minutes to get on his knees.

    After he did that, he looked at the sky and started chuckling a bit. This felt so new to him. With the pressure under his feet, every day he couldn¡¯t even sit properly, even sprawling on the ground was difficult, but now, he managed to kneel.

    Looking at his satisfying expression, the calm feathered who usually stayed calm even when torturing him started looking annoyed.

    Every day, Arkiv would throw new kinds of provocations, curses that they never heard before. In fact they suspected that the lone time Arkiv got in the pool every day after the session was being used by him toe up with new swearing methods.

    But now that they are seeing himughing and smiling, it somehow didn¡¯t sit well with them.

    While they are intensifying the attacks, Arkiv didn¡¯t care.

    He took out his bow. The bow he got from Sam, which was given to him by Hou Yi.

    The bow is normally heavy and with the added gravitational effect, it is even heavier.

    Arkiv¡¯s arm muscle looked like it wanted to tear apart. But he still held the bow enduring the pressure and pulled the string without an arrow.

    He then looked around to see if there is that familiar face and he soon saw it. Grace is sitting on the stone steps afar as she looked at the brutal torture, Arkiv gave a smile and released the string.

    Both of his arms shivered a bit, but a wave of energy hit the stage, and the surroundings that the attacks that came at him were easily deflected, but there three attacks that hit him.

    He just took the punishment and smiled.

    He took out an arrow from the spatial storage and aimed at one of the bald guys.

    He pulled the string to about eighty percent of its draw length and made a move.

    The arrow didn¡¯t reach the other person though. The gravity messed with it and it crashed right before it was about to hit the target.

    Arkiv is a bit disappointed and added to that disappointment are the injuries he got from the attacks that areing from different directions. He took them once again and this time, he spat out a mouthful of blood.

    But that confident look didn¡¯t go away.

    He aimed the bow, but this time, there is no arrow. When everyone thought, he is just defending like he did the first time, his spiritual energy started condensing and turned into the shape of an arrow.

    Arkiv released the arrow once again.

    The bald guy started fluctuating the gravity, but the arrow didn¡¯t budge, this caused them to have a frown on their faces as the arrow is fast enough to reach him in seconds. Before he could defend it, it already impaled itself into his chest and disappeared.

    All the bald guys were shocked. They couldn¡¯t even fathom someone doing this to them before, but it happened right now, in front of their eyes, so it is hard for them to just dismiss it as if nothing happened. But what they didn¡¯t realize is that they lost focus on the main person who did that.

    And Arkiv who is still kneeling wants just that.

    He aimed his bow and arrow at another person and took a shot, but this time, he went for the head.

    The arrow pierced straight through the ear as the guy is still looking at his injuredrade.

    He fell off of the stage.

    A series of energy arrows wereunched at them constantly and another two people were down.

    At this moment, the gravity finally weakened a bit, maybe it is because of the loss of members, but Arkiv is ecstatic, he stood up and started shooting rapidly.

    His arm couldn¡¯t even be seen as he shot in different directions.

    The situation reversed drastically. Now not a single attack managed to make its way past Arkiv¡¯s arrow. He didn¡¯t even bother to dodge or block, every attack was met with an arrow and was countered with another arrow as if it is normal.

    He didn¡¯t back down once and shot.

    Now it is time for the bald guys to block of course that is because they could dodge much.

    They can at most sway into different directions, but that¡¯s it. They cannot do much in form of physical movement.

    Soon another two fell down and this caused Arkiv to let loose, even more, the gravity became almost irrelevant by now and he finally took out a normal metallic arrow.

    The arrow¡¯s speed and damage increased to arge extent.

    After some time, the feathered couldn¡¯t keep their stand with pure blocking and they had to dodge. The gravity effect of the stagepletely disappeared.

    Arkiv who is in the middle of it all changed the course easily. The feathered are flying around as they tried to attack him by the air.

    But Arkiv only smirked.

    When he told Grace that he liked the feathered race, it is true.

    But he didn¡¯t say the full truth. He liked the feathered race, because of their ability to fly, which makes them rely on that more which also makes them the exciting targets for shooting arrows.

    That is the reason why he liked them, not because he was envious of them or because they are superior inabilities.

    He started using multiple arrows at the same time, shooting two different targets at the same time, and then the two became three.

    The arrows are shot restlessly while Arkiv is walking down from the stage. Soon, he is the only one standing and the stage is full of fall feathered who have arrows lodged into their wings, limbs, and stomach.

    The situation changed drastically in a few moments.

    Arkiv stored his bow away and stretched his body. It popped some joints as he enjoyed the feeling of relief.

    He took the robe he left before he went on to the stage, ced it on his shoulder, and slowly walked away without heed to the priestess who is looking at him coldly.

    From the looks of it, she is definitely holding back. Arkiv walked past Grace and whispered into her ear.

    "Told you so."

    Grace is looking at the stage full of feathered with tension and fear on her face.

    While Arkiv walked back to the healing pool to rx a bit, something else is happening within the city.

    Several feathered elders who arete-stage Transcendent stage cultivators are having a meeting now.

    Silva, the ck feathered elder is standing at the head of the table as the rest of them grilled him with questions.

    The whole city is facing trouble now. The traders are being blocked and early-stage transcendent stage cultivators and middle stage transcendent cultivators are not being able to help.

    They couldn¡¯t do much to the earthen constructions that blocked the routes.

    The traders are not daring toe to the city.

    But there is another problem that bugged them even more.

    The previous night within a researchb of the city, the researchers are trying to rip the metallic balls apart.

    These balls are the ones Sam didn¡¯t bother to pick up after he kicked them into a group of feathered in the air.

    But the feathered cared because the poison their people inhaled is giving them trouble and they have to think of a way to block it.

    But when they tried too hard, the balls broke and let out two clouds of purple smoke.

    The poison gas spread all over the area and every who inhaled it got paralyzed and fell asleep. Their bodies are failing. The two researchers who inhaled the most of it, are as good as dead by now.

    This caused the administrators in the city to feel the pressure and wanted the king, Silva to settle this as fast as possible.

    They don¡¯t want to face another series of catastrophes.

    But before they could even have a proper discussion, the attendant came running over and whispered something Silva¡¯s years.

    Silva became extremely angry and mmed his fist into the table with a controlled force, but it still made it crack, but then another attendant came and whispered some other news, which caused the table to break apart without even hitting again.

 Chapter 832: Idiot

    Sam is currently in the forest sitting on a tree branch as he chewed on sugarcane.

    Raiju, Dia, and the forest bear which Sam decided to call Barn. As it was already established that his naming sense was not good and taking advantage of the fact that the bear has no naming sense either, he just gave that name to it.

    There is a stream nearby.

    This stream flows through the city and the only entry point that ispletely restricted with formations and barricades.

    But Sam is not using this for entering this ce. He is more inclined to use it for something else, so he created a small mounting frame in the middle of the stream, and ced a metallic barrel. The barrel is none other than the undying liquid waste he got from the Banished realm.

    He didn¡¯t let it go all at once, as the stream is constantly flowing, he has to constantly replenish the inclusion of the waste.

    So, set up some small apparatus like this so that the barrel which was ced on it will slowly drop the liquid into the stream.

    Sam is currently looking through the telescope while munching of the sugar cane.

    He is looking at the view of the city which has a lot of trees, but there is a line of trees that are already withering within the city, this is the effect of the water pollution.

    While he is looking through the telescope he saw something interesting at the bank of the stream within the city.

    Currently, Silva flew towards the stream andnded on the bank as he looked at the surroundings, all the grass is dead and even some small trees nearby are gone, and therge trees are withering at a rapid rate.

    The elders followed him as they took a look and their expression grew uglier with every step they took.

    "King Silva, you have to do something about this. You say that this is the will of our goddess, but there should be a better method to fulfil that will than suffering like this."

    Another elder chimed in.

    "I agree, as long as we let go of that guy you captured, we will be able to stop this madness."

    Silva grew extremely frustrated and yelled at the top of his lungs.

    "Are you guys braindead?

    What do you mean the madness will stop? If you don¡¯t know the details, then just shut the fuck up. Whether we handover that guy or not will not stop this. Because we have something that he needs and he is not going to give it up. It woulde to this sooner orter.

    If you really want to help, then get the fuck out of the city and start searching for him.

    I already broke several rules by allowing the Transcendent stage cultivators out of the city to capture him, but I am not willing break the rule by going myself, but if you want to go, please do so. I will never object to you.

    If you have balls, go and capture him and stop this madness yourself. If you cannot do that, shut the fuck up and stay put."

    Hearing his outburst, everyone was shaken a bit.

    Except for one elder.

    "I think I can convince you to hand him over..."

    Silva looked at him deeply.

    Sam looked at all of this through the telescope. He is sure that they are talking and arguing, but he doesn¡¯t know what they are arguing for and what the exact details are.

    But Sam is satisfied with the current situation. This what he wanted to cause, the unrest and disturbance.

    Soon, Yanwu and sky came from afar with some prey.

    Sam started cooking and setup a temporary camp there.

    He has something to prepare for that night.

    After he finished the meal and was about to get into the work, he was surprised by something his shadows and shadow mice said.

    The other party is calling for truce.

    This caused Sam to feel the shock for two minutes straight.

    He just saw them argue over an hour ago and the results are already here.

    He almost suspected that this is a farce.

    He made a move and took a look at the truce from the far away. Their method of truce is simr to that of the truce back on earth.

    A g, a white g to be precise, but the only difference is that they are using a g with a wing embroidered on it, while the humans used the in white g. There is a scroll hanging to the g pole by a string.

    Sam didn¡¯t want to go there and took a four eyed raven to get the scroll back.

    This bird has more strength than the pigeon and can break the string. When the raven brought the scroll, there are no attacks or moves from the opposition.

    So, there is nothing to be afraid of, at least for now.

    Sam read through the scroll.

    There is a genuine truce letter in it.

    It simply stated how apologetic they were and how they are willing to give up his friend in exchange for the rest of the hostages Sam has in his hand.

    Sam was a bit surprised. They even asked him to give them a location.

    He is a bit surprised by all this. He thought of many possibilities that could lead to if it was true and if it was false.

    He went into a deep thought and decided on something, there is a cheeky grin on his face as he went on with his new n.

    It is not too different. He just modified the n a bit and went on with it.

    He entered the divine dimension and started making some new things. It is about time he used another thing that he obtained in the banished realm from the undead creatures. It was stagnated for too long.

    Sam worked through the whole night without rest and set up everything ording to his n.

    After finishing the n, he wrote down on a scroll and threw it near the gpole.

    There is an exact location on where they shoulde and who shoulde to the exchange.

    He asked for grace toe, even though he doesn¡¯t know her name, he is pretty sure they would guess with the description he provided. Along with her, they can send four Early stage Transcendent cultivators at most.

    The exchange was scheduled for the night.

    Sam waited for the night to arrive.

    Meanwhile, the feathered are also waiting for the night to arrive. Both parties don¡¯t know what other party is thinking. They had their own thoughts.

    After sunset Grace escorted Arkiv by tying him up with a special rope.

    When Arkiv looked at the other four, he asked.

    "Are you sure they are early stage? If not you would be in trouble."

    "They are early stage."

    "You might not know this, but Sam can guess the cultivation levels of the person easily, he has a special skill."

    "Yeah? Then he can confirm it himself."

    "That¡¯s good then. Let us go. I am sick of being trapped in that temple."

    "Don¡¯t get too happy soon, what will happen if you have toe back there once again after we sent you back. After all, from what I know you need something from us."

    "Who knows, the next time I walk into the temple, I might not even be a prisoner. What would happen then?"

    "You are too cocky. You guys would pay a price for that."

    "I am pretty sure we are not the ones that paid a price here. I heard the vegetation in the city is being ruined as we speak and the trade routes are blocked. As for those bald birdies, how are they doing, I tried to go easy on them, but it would be hard for me to do that to the people that took great pleasure in torturing me."

    Grace didn¡¯t speak and stayed put.

    Because they reached the location.

    Arkiv looked at Sam who is standing in the middle of arge clean patch without any trees.

    The trees at the edge of the patch are so tall and huge that they can only considered gigantic.

    When the group of five brought Arkiv to the center and Grace asked Sam.

    "Where are the feathered?"

    Sam pointed in the direction and a Transcendent cultivator went there to check, there are more than a dozen of them tied up together.

    But there is a formation there shielding them from entering it.

    The cultivator can break it, but it would take some time as it is ayered formation.

    "Open the formation."

    "Send him back to me first."

    The transcendent feathered wanted to argue, but Grace sent Arkiv.

    Arkiv walked away and gave a wink to Grace before he did.

    He still had handcuffs on and felt a bit uneasy.

    Sam threw a token to them, which will help them open the formation while Grace threw a key.

    Sam ced the key in the keyhole and started fiddling, the lock isplex and have many gears and levers working behind, but the formation is simple.

    As Sam is opening the lock all of a sudden, he felt a prickling sensation on his hands. The key and the cuffs showed some metallic protrusions that ran deep into the skin.

    Sam and Arkiv exchanged a nce and both of the shook their heads.

    Grance and the four Transcendent stage cultivators who already freed their people left one transcendent to give medicine to them and walked back to Sam and Arkiv with faint smiles.

    "That is the most potent paralysis agent we have known. It was gifted to us by Goddess Nike, It can even make a Consummate suffer with this.

    Don¡¯t worry, we will give you the antidote, once we get back."

    Grace said while Arkiv looked at her with disdain. For some reason, she became embarrassed and didn¡¯t make eye contact.

    "Idiot."

    Arkiv spat out that one word.

 Chapter 833: Escape

    Sam felt his whole body go numb. For some reason, this paralytic poison is acting against his body.

    Every time a poison entered the body, his Hydra bloodline always took over and assimted the poison, he would escape without any harm done to his body.

    But this time, for some reason, before the hydra bloodline could even do anything, his human bloodline, the human flesh of his body started absorbing it crazily and it is even opposing the hydra bloodline.

    Generally, all the beast bloodlines Sam has in his body arepletely superior to his human part and thebination of this many bloodlines should have already killed Sam by now. Every bloodline of that caliber will be trying their best to show that they are the superior ones.

    Which would lead to his body tearing itself apart. But because of this cultivation method, the body became proper junction that holds every bloodline separately and makes it coexist. The beast bloodlines wouldn¡¯t be opposing the human part because, once that junction is destroyed, he would die.

    Now taking this as an advantage, the human part of his body is greedily absorbing the paralytic poison, while the hydra part is trying to take over and absorb it.

    At least Sam is notpletely paralyzed at the moment.

    Sam looked at Grace coldly, even though he is suffering a soul searing pain. He looked at the handcuff and realized that at least the key and the lock were real.

    Arkiv released himself and held Sam who is struggling to stand up.

    Sam took Arkiv¡¯s support and looked at the feathered and said.

    "This will mark the beginning of the real war between you and us. Whatever happens after this, remember that you have only yourself to me. Onest reminder, if you can send this back to your city, I won¡¯t stop you.

    You better evacuate citizens from this ce or what awaits them is a fate worse than death.

    With that he whistled louds and gestured Arkiv toy down on the ground.

    At this moment, the earth shook and the feathered who are standing on it felt like it is about to copse as a flying species their first instinct is to jump upwards.

    But only then did they realize that they made a mistake. The earth is merely a distraction. A bunch of spikes flew from the top of therge trees. The spikes are a bit different though, they have grey mes all over it.

    The spikes impaled themselves into the bodies of the feathered and they were surprised that they didn¡¯t feel much pain.

    The spikes are not exactly damaging. They hovered over the sky for a second and one of them spotted a tree which also has grey me on it. It was also hit by a stray spike and they realized just how much shit they are going to face now.

    Their bodies slowly caught on the grey me and started burning.

    The feathered slowly copsed to the ground and started rolling around.

    By now, Sam sat down in a cross-legged position and started meditating. He has to get rid of the poison and all he has to do is make the human part of his dormant for a few seconds.

    He closed his eyes and struggled for a few minutes before getting an idea. He used the Vampire bloodline to suppress his human one.

    But in these few minutes, he will get that monstrous feel where he would want to eat everything.

    If only there was other way. Sam activated the vampire bloodline and his whole body screamed of extreme hunger. After that first dose of elven blood he took from Ramya, his cravings didn¡¯t stop.

    He has to keep the vampire bloodline dormant and suppressed to save himself from turning into a literal monster.

    The hydra bloodline finally started working, Sam even let Mia out to help him with physical extraction of the poison.

    It is too potent and the bloodline will take some time to absorb it alone.

    Mia bit into his arm and started sucking the blood and poison out as she consumed it directly.

    Even though it was just one shot, it took a few minutes to clean the poison.

    When Sam opened his eyes, he is feeling a bit weaker and stood up while stretching.

    Arkiv is standing nearby as he looked at the feathered that are struggling to fight back the effects of the grey me.

    The grey me is created by the undying volcanic rocks. The very stone, the vampire, wights and ghouls used to deal with the dwarven towns and cities.

    Sam has caught every volcanic rock in the possession of his chess pieces, but he didn¡¯t find a proper use for them. In the Charbhum realm, he didn¡¯t get into enough trouble to use these things.

    Now he is using them.

    "What is going to happen to them?"

    Arkiv asked after Sam walked towards him.

    "They will turn into undead creatures. I will capture them and throw them into the city."

    When they heard it, the feathered are shocked. Grace in particr is shocked beyond belief.

    "Can you save her?" Arkiv asked.

    "Why?"

    "She is the daughter of the boss of the city. He is pretty stubborn about not attacking you. If you kill her, then he woulde to us swinging in full. Even if we are not exactly afraid of them, it is not such a good idea to provoke him right?"

    "But she cannot leave. Hold her hostage. And she is your responsibility."

    Sam said and Arkiv shrugged.

    Sam crouched down beside Grace and started healing her. But when the process is half way through, Grace got some strength, she looked at the remaining four feathered who are slowly losing consciousness.

    At this moment, the ghouls and Wights came out of the hiding.

    "Capture them as soon as they lose their lives and throw them into the city."

    They nodded and got to work.

    Grace became anxious. Four transcendent stage undead creatures will be a nightmare to the whole city.

    In fact, it is more dangerous than anything Sam did to the city before.

    She closed her eyes and took a golden feather and used it.

    A golden light enveloped her and she turned into a golden light streak before leaving the ce.

    Sam was a bit surprised. He tried to hold the golden light streak but he couldn¡¯t.

    What surprised him is the fact that she could have used this chance to heal herself fully and escapeter, but she didn¡¯t.

    Then he looked at the four undead creatures that are captured by the Wights and Ghouls and understood what she was thinking.

    She was afraid that she would be toote, she wants to inform her father or others in the city.

    "Would we be okay?" Arkiv asked with concern. He knew that if Grace went back with the presence of grey me on her, if she dies and Silva finally losses it, the situation would be hard for them to deal with.

    "Let¡¯s wait and see. For all we know, that father might even catch that grey me and turn into an undead creature and this whole thing would be over before we knew it."

    "I wish it could be over like that."

    "It wouldn¡¯t be too different. Don¡¯t worry. Let¡¯s go. We have a lot to do."

    "What is our next n?"

    "What else? Take that weapon fragment or whatever that is inside that temple. But that stupid temple is hard to infiltrate."

    "Then how are we going to deal with it."

    "My first thought is to find a way to destroy it, the second thought is to make the feathered go into despair and make them give it to us. Which one is better?"

    Arkiv shrugged.

    Meanwhile, back in the temple.

    Silva flew in a rapid pace as he came to the entrance. Grace is currently sprawling on the ground with the grey me eating her away.

    "Father, ... Un... Undead attack. They are sending four.. transcendent stage undead to the city."

    The grey winged elder who also came heard this and after getting a nod from silva he disappeared.

    By now, the wights and ghouls already threw the undead towards the city.

    The undead has instincts and it is to go for the living beings, since wights and ghouls are not exactly living beings, the city is their obvious choice.

    Luckily for the feathered as soon as the undead came in, the grey winged elder came with his guards and started a fight with them.

    Silva is currently holding his daughter who is suffering in grey me and took her into the temple.

    He opened a secret room and there is a pool with golden water inside.

    He ced her into the pool while he also ced his own hands that caught the grey me inside.

    He doesn¡¯t know what these grey mes are, but when they caught his hand, he could feel his vitality seeping out of it, he couldn¡¯t even walk properly. But his daughter was his priority which made him walk anyway and enter this area.

    The pool of golden water. The ultimate healing pool of their city and even in the.

    But to his dismay, the grey mes are not going anywhere, but they are not spreading to her body either. Even for him it is the same situation. He hardened his heart and used his wings to cut his arms off and ced the stumps into the pool as he concentrated. The arms started regrowing rapidly.

    He even took some pills with the help of his wings and his arms will be back in few minutes, but he is still uneasy. He can cut his arms off, but for his daughter this treatment is not going to work.

 Chapter 834: Help from Goddess

    Silva was devastated as he looked at his daughter. He doesn¡¯t know what to do.

    After some time, he got his hands back and ran towards the statue of the Goddess Nike.

    He gave a sh on his palm and let the blood fall on the feet of the statue, then he used his finger to draw some runes on the feet.

    Soon, the statue was enveloped with a golden glow and a female voice could be heard.

    "Head of the Silva family? What do you want?"

    "Goddess Nike, your humble servant greets you. As we are trying to do what you ordered, my daughter was attacked by Sam with something that I cannot understand, she is on the verge of life and death at the moment as we speak.

    I beg you to save her."

    "Where is she?"

    "She is inside the Golden water pool."

    The Golden glow of the statue disappeared and Silva ran back into the secret room.

    Inside the room, apart from the golden pool, there are some statues and architectures and among them, there is a statue of Nike.

    The statue is now surrounded by the golden light and the same light fell on Grace who is still in the pool.

    "Undying mes? Did Sam do it?" Nike asked.

    "Yes."

    The goddess went silent for a moment.

    "Keep her in the pool for now. If I was there directly, it would have been easy for me to deal with this, but I cannot physically be there, so I have to think of other ways. I will see if there is any other method."

    "I thank you my goddess."

    "How are you dealing with them?"

    Silva was ashamed a bit and exined everything that has happened.

    "This human is just like the god he associated with. Both don¡¯t know what their ce is at. But stay put for now. If consummate stage cultivators got involved, there would be a lot of nonsense for us to deal with.

    You have already sent transcendent stage cultivators, if they couldn¡¯t even catch him, then it would be a waste of their cultivation. Tell them to work hard."

    With that the golden glow disappeared.

    Silva is looking at his daughter with concern. He just sat beside the pool not caring about what is happening outside.

    The grey winged elder who is also Silva¡¯s younger brother came back and reported.

    "Brother, the four undead creatures are dealt with, we managed to defend them before there were many casualties, but there is damage to the city wall."

    "Do any of you managed to reach anywhere near to catch Sam?"

    "No."

    "Try to catch them as soon as possible. We shouldn¡¯t have let them get together. Now they will only be pain in the ass. Tighten the city defense. Don¡¯t let him cause anymore chaos.

    Ask all the citizens to abandon their homes ande to outer shelter in the temple building. All the Pre-transcendent and transcendent stage cultivators are going to be drafted into the forces temporarily. Pass the orders under my name.

    We still don¡¯t know how this grey mes work, but from the looks of it, it takes the vitality away without stopping, if the people caught it, it would be difficult to cure. So, tell them to stay within the temple grounds."

    "Yes brother."

    "You have to handle all the affairs, I wouldn¡¯t be joining you guys."

    While the feathered are preparing for searching Sam and catching him at all costs, Sam is also executing ns that could make the task easier.

    He has a new weapon at the disposal.

    It is arge gun or cannon that has square cross section and shoots spikes.

    Sam has around ten of these undying volcanic stones at the moment and he made four of them into guns. These gun are carried by eight Wight and Ghoul pairs.

    They are incharge of attacking individuals.

    The gun is made in such a way that the spikes will be shot with the help of loaded biofuel and they will catch the grey me before they wereunched.

    Out of remaining six, he kept two of them within the divine dimension just in case and the remaining four are made into some weapons that are really useful mass destruction.

    They are actually based off of the impact cannons. But impact cannons needs to have a proper distance and angle settings to have the proper impact of the shell which fails them to achieve a rapid attack over the moving enemy.

    But now this doesn¡¯t have to. Sam modified the impact cannon into a normal boulder cannon which shoots the rocks covered in grey mes.

    The wights and ghouls are given the operation. Then he let out the Orangutans, the Minotaurs, the shadow soldiers. He called all of them out for the war including his beasts.

    It is about time, he moved to another city. There he would be having more trouble. He would have to find a way to get another weapon fragment.

    Sam stationed all his forces in different positions. The main equipment is the projectile weapons that are using the grey mes. Their target is not even the inner city, they are focusing mostly on the city walls.

    When the grey winged elder found this, he was shocked. He just took orders from his brother and wanted to send a search party at Sam. He didn¡¯t even finish announcing the order of his brother and here is Sam who already started the attack.

    This caused him to feel a bit frustrated. He ordered the soldiers to maintain the defense line properly and went to the get the elders to work.

    He passed all the orders and made two elders in charge of the recruitment of the temporary soldiers and took the rest of the elders to take a look at the city wall.

    Sam¡¯s forces are not exactly strong and they are severely outnumbered, but they have one advantage the trees in the forest are huge and his equipment can be moved easily. Sam hid along with Arkiv and kept his eye on the crystal table as he instructed his troops that are having the guns and cannons that could shoot the grey spikes.

    The only things or forces that came out in the open to attack them are the undead creatures that are created by Wights and Ghouls.

    While the Orangutans teamed up with some Wights to get a job done. They are the only creatures that could do this without dying, so he sent them.

    After the initial attacks by the undead to the walls, Sam gave orders.

    The wights and ghouls operating the guns and cannons started their attacks.

    Their first target is obviously the city wall and the people on the city wall.

    If they attack it long enough, Sam is sure that the wall will copse easily.

    They don¡¯t have another Sam on the other side to think that a me that is used to eat the vitality can corrode it, they are too busy caring about their own lives.

    As soon as the attacks started, the feathered also went into action.

    They followed the trajectory of the spikes and rocks and started looking for them. But Sam checked who ising from what direction and gave instructions to his members.

    It became a wild goose chase.

    Soon, the transcendent stage feathered areing out and Sam had some special gifts nned for them.

    He started finishing off the feathered that were supposed to go away in the exchange and turned them into undead. He didn¡¯t make them loose undead with no control, he controlled them properly and started cing the energy cells inside their bodies.

    Now, he went looking for the first transcendent that is closest to him in the map all the while making sure that everyone else is escaping.

    When he was within the visible range of the transcendent, he deliberately gave his location away after taking the undead out. He created a false image that the undead is attacking him and both of them are in a battle.

    This caused the Transcendent to make his move without a second thought.

    When he reached the spot, the feathered undead hugged him tightly after Sam ced his palm on it for a good few seconds.

    Sam used the top speed of harbinger to escape from the ce in the second.

    *BOOM*

    The sound of the explosion was heard all over the surroundings and the transcendent stage feathered came flying in that direction, but Sam is nowhere to be seen in that ce, all they saw is some flesh and mangled wings of two different color.

    Meanwhile, Sam is hiding far away as he looked out in the crystal table to choose the next target.

    While he is looking through it he saw feathered on the wall turning into undead creatures due to the golden me and an internal fight began.

    The situation is as chaotic as he wanted it to be and it continued to grow chaotic.

    He has to make sure that he chip away as many feathered as possible and make the enemy weaker.

 Chapter 835: Frenzy

    Sam is going on a rampage and he only calmed down after the sunset.

    He recalled all his troops threw them back into the chessboard and divine dimension. He and Arkiv are the only ones still outside apart from the Orangutans and Wights that went on a mission.

    They are sitting on arge tree far away from the city wallspletely out of the warzone they previously were active in and looked at the whole city through the telescope.

    The feathered are still searching and skimming through that area, but they couldn¡¯t see anything.

    It was all ck.

    "Is there any possibility that she is alive?" Arkiv asked all of a sudden.

    "Why do you ask?"

    "I feel like she is alive, otherwise her father wouldn¡¯t just sit there and note out. No matter how much he adores and worships this goddess, I don¡¯t think any father would give up his daughter just for the sake of it."

    "You would be dearly surprised if you would know what some fathers do just to get some benefits."

    "I met him. And I know that he has genuine concern and love towards his fathers. I bet she is still alive inside that is why he didn¡¯te."

    Sam didn¡¯t want to argue anymore, so he gave an answer that satisfied Arkiv.

    "There is a way for her to stay alive, even though the problem wouldn¡¯t be solved, it is indeed not impossible to make her stay alive like that for a while. If there are proper resources, one can stay alive for even a month or two."

    "Really? "

    "Yes. Now shut up and just rx for the rest of the night."

    "Sam took a wine jar and started sipping it casually as he enjoyed the night.

    But they didn¡¯t sleep orpletely take rest, they always had to keep an eye on the troops of the feathered.

    If not of the vast forest and theplex terrain, this wouldn¡¯t have been possible, but soon they will lose their advantages, before that something big has to happen.

    So, Sam is waiting for the Orangutans and the Wights.

    He didn¡¯t have to wait for long. Before dawn, both groups returned, but they are not rxed. They arepletely tired and seem like they are running away.

    Sam looked behind them.

    Four transcendent stage beasts are running after them as they tried to catch and kill them.

    Orangutans have a knack in the forest and they are faster than normal and Wights have only one job and that is to use necromancy to slow the beasts down.

    But no matter how slow is, how slow can the transcendent stage beasts be?

    That is why he chose the slowest of the beasts in the surrounding forests.

    Even though it looked it they are letting it chase it for a long, it is an actual right. Wight and Orangutans worked together to lure them to the nearest spot slowly for hours and from that spot they let them chase here.

    The chase only began a few minutes.

    Sam left the specter out and caused the beasts to slow down. Even though specter is bing powerful day by day, it is not actually strong enough to kill those beasts instantly.

    Anyway, their n is not even for killing the beasts.

    He called for Arkiv to proceed with the next n.

    This time, it ispletely in his hands of to do this.

    Specter is slowly leading the two beasts out of four to the war zone of the forest while he is trying his best to retain the remaining two in their ce.

    After it entered the war zone, Specter did something with the brains of the beasts to piss them off so much and left them there.

    *ROAR*

    *ROAR*

    Both of the beasts roared in anger. The feathered were stumped and got anxious.

    They didn¡¯t know what kind of beasts are here, but they knew this is trouble. When they saw themotion, they looked at the beasts and all the feathers that are flying and searching had to divert their attention towards these beasts for a moment.

    Sam knew they wouldn¡¯t hold up at the moment, that is why he has the extra 2 and Arkiv to do something.

    Arkiv took a proper position and took out his bow. He is far away from the city and the battle zone. Sam doesn¡¯t know if he himself could take a shot with a bow from this long, but he is sure that Arkiv can do it and he was not disappointed.

    Arkiv shot the arrows one after another and his targets are not feathered that are flying. Rather the city wall. There are some specific ces that are targeted from the start and are given some decent damage with the grey me and spikes.

    When the arrows collided with that area, the whole wall vibrated and created cracks.

    But the feathered on the wall are more concerned about the location of the arrow which they couldn¡¯t see.

    As the city wall was cracking slowly, Sam and Specter are guiding the remaining two beasts to those weak spots.

    By the time the feathered finally noticed the beasts, they are already here and Specter used some mental hypnosis to make them run in a specific direction.

    Arkiv shot his final arrows to break the wall and the beasts entered the city.

    The first reaction of the soldiers is not panic, because since they already sent all the people to the temple, they are not worried.

    But to their surprise, the beasts started running in a direction they didn¡¯t want it to.

    It is the barracks for the injured and their healers are also there.

    The grey-winged elder who is overseeing the battlefields was surprised by his sudden change.

    He flew rapidly towards the beasts to stop them, but it was already toote, they should have tried to move earlier.

    But what surprised him, even more, is the fact two shadows emerged out of nowhere.

    These two shadows also have something in their hands. Something burning with grey mes.

    They touched the beasts with those mes and followed them for a file to make sure it burns.

    But the beasts are still in hypnosis as they entered the two barracks on the two sides.

    But now their whole body caught on fire.

    The whole barracks were set on fire.

    The shadows returned as fast as they went there.

    The situation turned worse. The grey-winged elder who is fast enough to go and catch the shadows didn¡¯t even bother to do it, because he is already panicking about what to do with the barracks.

    The beast setting every injured guy who is healing on fire and making them burn.

    Soon, the beast lost its life and became an undead creature sensed the nearest life form to be the Grey-winged elder who justnded and ran after it.

    The beast battled without a care for life, while this guy battled while looking at the surroundings causing him to take some damage.

    The second barrack¡¯s situation is also the same, the beast was intercepted by another transcendent stage feathered. But there the beast had the extreme upper hand.

    The whole battlefield is in chaos.

    Sam used this chance to clean up more forces and sent some ghouls to shoot the spikes of grey me at the enemies once again.

    His major target is the people that are dealing with the two beasts in the forests and they didn¡¯t miss the target, they managed to do it properly.

    Meanwhile, another group of Orangutans and Wights appeared from the other side leading three more beasts.

    Sam once again went there with the specters and led them into the battlefield. But this time, he directly set them on the grey me and made them join the first two beasts in the forest.

    With that, the whole group couldn¡¯t escape and caught on fire as they flew towards the city which is beneficial to them.

    These beasts also followed them and crashed into everyone.

    Now the whole camp that is protecting the wall is in chaos as dozens of undead creatures are created like this.

    Sam finally decided to make a move personally. He appeared in the sky on the harbinger as he took out the metallic ball.

    He couldn¡¯t find a better opportunity for these things.

    He started kicking one ball after another into the group and watched as they caught fire in the middle of the battle. Even here the most damage was done because the undead doesn¡¯t feel pain and they caught the fire.

    Now they are using that fire to their benefit as they simply threw themselves to kill the feathered.

    For the first time in their lives, these people had their worst nightmares physically manifested.

    Sam is standing in the air as he looked down on the situation and asionally threw a metal ball into the frenzy just for the sake of it.

    Even with an army of flying beings down there, nobody is free enough toe and catch him.

 Chapter 836: Provoke

    After Sam caused the chaos, he retreated without wasting any time. He doesn¡¯t want a crazy feathereding at him tomit kamikaze.

    As soon as he retreated, a feathered came to this ce.

    It is none other than the priestess from the temple. She looked at the current situation and felt her heart grow heavy. She looked at the temple far away and then at the feathered that are killing and dying.

    They stooped to a point where they have to fight themselves.

    More than half of the transcendent stage cultivators of the city were killed just like that. But there is nothing they can do at the moment. She looked into the forest with anger bubbling in her heart. She has half a mind to go there and kill Sam.

    But she cannot do that. The goddess ordered as such and they should follow it. Even if it is not for devotion, in fear. They don¡¯t have any other way.

    They have to follow her words for the propagation of their race.

    She is their only point for growth and prosperity.

    "Retreat to the temple. Don¡¯t fight with the Undead."

    Her voice reverberated throughout the city and the soldiers who are waiting for a call like that couldn¡¯t feel more relieved.

    She started attacking the undead creatures to help them buy some time.

    The feathered started retreating while the undead creatures followed them.

    The undead creatures wouldn¡¯t stay undead for a long while, they might be like that for around an hour.

    As long as they can escape to the temple and then defend for a while, then they would have some breathing space and just let them go back to being dead.

    They went along with that n and rested there. The priestess arranged for healing them and took care of the citizens¡¯ unrest.

    After making the arrangements, she angrily walked into the inner side of the temple and reached the underground golden pool where Silva is still sitting there looking at his daughter.

    "Silva, you need to do something about it. We lost half of our forces. We either have to kill Sam or give him what he wanted."

    "Hundreds of soldiers and you can¡¯t even handle two kids? What are we even living for?" Silva replied with frustration.

    The priestess didn¡¯t take it seriously and exined.

    "We picked the fight, we are the ones who provoked him. It doesn¡¯t matter if it was goddess¡¯ orders are not. We have to take the responsibility for this. Have you told her what our situation is?"

    "No, I didn¡¯t?"

    "Why didn¡¯t you exin?"

    "I don¡¯t have time to exin. She is looking for a way to save Grace."

    "Looking for a way?" As she spoke the statue on the side once again got enveloped with golden light.

    Both of them stood straight and bowed to her.

    "Greetings Goddess."

    "Hmm. I thought of a way to save your daughter, but it would require a small ritual, I can take possession of your body temporarily and save your daughter. But you would lose some lifespan and the longer I stayed, the more lifespan you would lose.

    The worst part is that I cannot estimate how much time it would take for me to finish the process. You have to think about it."

    "There is nothing to think about goddess. Please tell me what kind of ritual it is and I will do it."

    Nike went on with the process of the ritual and Silva noted all the details down.

    He didn¡¯t want to make any mistake. It is his daughter¡¯s life after all.

    The priestess stayed silent the whole time and after they are done, she was about to say something.

    But Silva held her by her hand and stopped her from doing so.

    The goddess disappeared and Priestess asked.

    "Why did you stop me?"

    "I want my daughter to be saved before that."

    "Why is that?"

    "I don¡¯t want anyplications. I want my daughter to stay alive first and then only we will tell her the situation."

    "I cannot understand."

    "You don¡¯t understand a lot of things. Not just you. Everyone in the city doesn¡¯t understand a lot of things. What is the situation now?"

    "We retreated to the temple grounds."

    "Tell them to stay put. Do not provoke Sam and Arkiv now. Stay silent and let the days pass, I will tell you after the ritual is over."

    Silva went away and started preparing for the ritual. While he was getting the ingredients required to make the inscription for the ritual, he saw the state of the city and the soldiers. Sam clearly did a number on them.

    There was never a war of this scale or any scale within this. Silva couldn¡¯t help but shake his head.

    They utterly failed in the task given to them by the goddess.

    If it is known to her then the situation might turn even more unpleasant.

    While Silva is preparing for a ritual, Sam and Arkiv are also resting. Arkiv also had a busy night as he attacked the wall and the people on it from afar.

    Such a long shot clearly wouldn¡¯te without a price.

    While they are resting they just observed the city to see if they would do something next.

    But there is nothing.

    The next day, Sam had a new n. He let out the Zoi termites and made them enter the city.

    Therge forest is still a good coverup for them and the temple ground has a strong wall that blocks most of the vision.

    As per the orders, the feathered are trying to stay down low and even the guards couldn¡¯t be seen from outside.

    So, Sam wanted to think down the forests a little bit while he destroyed the city wall with the corrosive poison.

    The progress is not much as the trees have extremely high vitality, so he let the wights help them. A couple of Wights are also on verge of breaking through into the transcendent stage. This is the best phase for them to eat up the trees that have an abundance of life force.

    As for why he is doing this. Since he already had an upper hand now and pushed them back, it would be great to keep them there.

    He decided to make an open patch in the middle which would make them open targets for a while. The way Sam took advantage of the vegetation shouldn¡¯t be an advantage for them.

    While they are weaker, he would take this chance to make them even weaker.

    Even then no feathered did anything. By night the patch was created.

    Since there was no motion once again, Sam did something else, he started installing new equipment into that patch in arge scale with the help of Dia and the rest of the beasts.

    Now the feathered will be trapped inside.

    Sam collected the souls of every dead body he could find and is suitable for soul extraction and ced it into a lot of soul formations.

    Since there are hundreds of deaths it is not exactly a big task.

    The soul formations are also installed along with the new equipment.

    While he is doing this, Sam is getting new Ideas, he wanted to see if this setup could be used in pair with the necromancer¡¯s circle and if it works, then this would be the perfect patch that could stop the feathered from evering out.

    Unless the consummate makes a move of course.

    Sam is also prepared for that scenario in case that happened. He still has the hair strand of Monkey King.

    In fact, he doesn¡¯t even have to use that. He can use the thunder prison in conjunction with the shadow sword.

    Due to his growth his tolerance for that also increased and he would be able tond one clean shot that could kill the Consummate stage cultivator that is if he prepared well.

    If pushes to shove, he can just use the thunder prison to just save himself and use that strand of hair.

    A week passed like this and the feathered still didn¡¯t show. Sam is a bit curious about the peaceful stand taken by the feathered.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is that the feathered citizens and the feathered soldiers are in severe unrest.

    They couldn¡¯t bear to see Sam doing whatever he liked in their territory as if he owned it.

    He just destroyed the houses and made this stupid circle and he is not even stopping, he went on with installing therge necromancer circle in conjunction with the new setup.

    But Silva and the Priestess didn¡¯t give the orders, they just stayed quiet.

    Finally, after the week, the ritual arrangements areplete.

    It was already night by then and Silva startedmitting the ritual.

    It takes around an hour to finish it and summon Nike onto his own body.

    While he is performing the ritual, Sam and Arkiv got ready with something else. They want to provoke the temple a bit and see what happens. They are not really enjoying the peace. After all, after they took this city down, they have to travel for days before going to the next city and start a n to take the equipment from them.

 Chapter 837: Goddess comes

    Sam¡¯s and Arkiv¡¯s provocations are simple. Both of them came out of the forest, out in the open, and stood in the safe spaces of therge patch full of traps, and started throwing attacks at the temple.

    Arkiv used some of the special arrows of Sam.

    The corrosive poison vial arrow, the bio-fuel vial arrow, grenade arrows that don¡¯t need the fire elemental energy to activate, and so on.

    Sam also took out his bow and tried to see what he could do with this.

    He was really impressed by Arkiv¡¯s longshot. It would be really useful, if there is a proper power behind the arrow, it would be easy to take out the target miles away.

    Initially, Sam couldn¡¯t do that. Even though he could make it reach long just by pulling the bowstring, he couldn¡¯t reach the target at that distance.

    Even though he could calcte the trajectory and everything that is required for the arrow to go there, something is missing which is making the target miss.

    But he didn¡¯t care much, currently, the whole temple is his target and he can do whatever he wants with it. He started mixing ripple style and void style with the arrows and shot them at the temple.

    The results are actually good even in such a long-range.

    He started making some nicks on the temple walls, even though those nicks are not exactly considered serious damage, it is still damaged anyway.

    Sam then took out the next thing that could make some real damage to the temple. The Undying Volcanic stone.

    He held the stone in the palm of the hand that pulls the bowstring and started coating the arrows with that undying mes and shot them.

    The grey me streak which is small and inconsequential in the night hit the wall of the temple and set some area to fire.

    It burned for a while and disappeared soon, corroding the stone a bit.

    The quality of this stone is high and it has too many inscriptions on it and this is verified as soon as the formation was activated around the temple.

    But Ripple style and Void style are working wonders on the formation.

    The Ripple style is creating a disturbance in the energy flow and almost created a gap which would give ess inside, even though most of the time it failed, it still worked sometimes, the void style is more damaging to the formation, even though a bunch of arrows is being blocked, he is sure that the formation would be damaged beyond their belief and the arrows would enter it.

    Even now, some arrows are making their way towards the temple, causing a lot of disturbance and damage.

    Meanwhile, within the room with a golden pool inside, the ritual ispleted.

    Silva is currently sitting crosslegged as the golden glow from the statue slowly came over to him and enveloped him.

    After a few minutes, Silva opened his eyes and stood up. His bodynguage changed and he looked a lot different than usual.

    The priestess standing at the side looked at him with awe and was lost in a daze. Only when he took a step forward did she realize who the ¡¯he¡¯ was and spoke.

    "Greeting Goddess. And wee to Silva family temple."

    "I don¡¯t have a lot of time to waste. So, don¡¯t disturb me."

    Priestess nodded and backed off until she stood at the entrance.

    Nike who is now in Silva¡¯s body started examining the body of Grace and soon started separating the grey mes with a weird motion. But it is going a bit by bit in extremely small portions that are not even considered consequential. But the process is going fast and Priestess finally saw hope.

    But at this moment, an arrow of Sam¡¯s made his way through the formation and hit the temple squarely and due to the void style, the explosion caused created a bit of ruckus, with a small stone brick crackingpletely.

    This could be heard even in that room and Nike looked upwards all of a sudden with a frown.

    She stopped the process as if she cared more about the temple.

    Priestess knew that something was wrong.

    She has to cover this up.

    "I will take a look Goddess. Please wait."

    With that, the priestess left and ran towards the entrance before flying. She looked at Sam and Arkiv who are shooting arrows leisurely out in the open and wanted to kill both of them.

    She zoomed through the air and reached their spot soon and said.

    "Please stay put for a few minutes, we can continue this warter."

    She is just a few meters away from the patch and Sam is disappointed a bit, he looked at her once and started shooting again.

    She attacked the arrows that areing and called for a few transcendent stage cultivators.

    "Block the arrows with all your might. Not a single one of them should enter the formation and touch the temple.

    With that, she went back into the temple to meet the goddess once again.

    "Goddess, we nned to carve something on the temple to make it look more majestic since today was a free day, the architects and sculptors areying the foundation for the job, I told them toe backter and they left."

    Then only the frown eased on Silva¡¯s face.

    Nike once again started focusing on the matter at hand and while doing that, she casually asked.

    "How is the situation with Sam and Arkiv?"

    "We are still trying to capture them. They are slippery and escaping too much."

    "Of course, they would. They have too many perks and too many gifts from the gods, they will be hard to catch. But from what I heard, that Sam is not a type of guy who likes escaping. Then you are doing a good job."

    "You tters Goddess."

    Priestess¡¯s face became awkward as she didn¡¯t know what to say.

    If the goddess knew that the attack on the temple is made by them, Priestess felt like her soul would be drawn out of her body.

    Sam and Arkiv are still ying around. They are annoying the bunch of feathered who are trying to block their attacks.

    But soon, they managed to sneak in some attacks from the middle of them, but the transcendent stage cultivators chased the arrows and made sure that they didn¡¯t reach the temple.

    Sam and Arkiv are a bit curious on why they are reacting on this level, so they wanted to hit the temple even more.

    And soon, they managed to do that.

    The arrow slipped past them andnded on the temple walls, at least this is outside, but it is still significant because, they finally figured out a way to send the arrows to the temple.

    And when an arrow finallynded on the temple, Nike frowned once again and looked at the situation.

    "What is happening exactly?"

    "I.. I... will go and take a look."

    Priestess left the room and began to sweat as she flew away. Nike became more and more suspicious and wanted to see exactly what is happening, when she was about to walk outside though, the body showed a bit of resistance and didn¡¯t let her move, this caused her suspicions to grow even more and decided to take a look, but the closer she got to the door, the higher the resistance is.

    "You are hiding something from me. But it is not something I couldn¡¯t find out."

    Nike muttered and closed her eyes.

    He started diving into Silva¡¯s memories. She was resisted a lot and finally after some struggle and nose bleed because of the pressure on the brain, she finally managed to see some memories.

    Memories of the damaged city, crumbled city wall, Sam and Arkiv doing whatever they want as they used Sam¡¯s workers cum soldiers to build the special defensive ring.

    She opened her eyes and looked angry.

    "How dare you hid something like this? How dare you let my city get destroyed?"

    She forcefully walked outside even though his body is resisting and took a peek through the main entrance, the arrows are flying and making small nicks on the temple, the feathered are trying to stop.

    Nike became even more furious.

    "How dare you let him attack my temple? Can you not do anything about two pre-transcendent stage cultivators? Even if you had to die, you can die, but my temple shouldn¡¯t be mangled.

    I will send the troops to deal with them now on your name and even if they die, you will be the one to me, that is your punishment for letting my temple get damaged."

    She muttered under her breath as Silva can hear.

    She paused for a moment, as Silva¡¯s thoughts entered her mind.

    "I don¡¯t give a fuck about your daughter. I can do whatever I want after I cure her?"

    "I don¡¯t have to wait until I cure her to do whatever I want. The only reason I agreed, to begin with, is because you are the dog that guards my temple and you promised another mural on my name, but here you are making them damage it. Let her die and you will learn your lesson."

 Chapter 838: A deal with the Priestess

    Nike forcefully came out of the temple as the body resisted.

    "Everyone get out and block the arrows, not one rock could be damaged from the temple. Go now."

    She ordered in a loud bellowing voice, which surprised the people a little bit, but they still went on with it and started following the orders.

    The priestess in the air was shocked when she looked at her.

    "Goddess, why are you outside? Was Grace saved?"

    "My temple is in this state and you are talking about a stupid girl? Go and capture those two. I don¡¯t want anything to happen to my temple."

    Her voice is hysterical and she even sounded a bit mad.

    The priestess was dumbfounded.

    At this moment, she understood why Silva wanted to keep this hidden from Nike. She might be a god-level person, but she is an unbelievably self-centered woman.

    The man who served and worshipped her for his whole life begged her to save his daughter even at the expense of his lifespan and she is using that body to capture someone so that they wouldn¡¯t damage her temple.

    The stupid temple which people built for her out of reverence.

    This caused her to feel disgusted about herself for sacrificing everything to be a priestess in that temple.

    "Goddess, Please Save grace. I will do anything to protect your temple."

    "I don¡¯t care."

    "But..."

    "Get out and capture them. Otherwise, don¡¯t even think about leaving this anymore. I am the only way out for you guys from here. Otherwise, you will live and die here with the limitations ced on you."

    The priestess was dumbfounded. She didn¡¯t know what to do. But at this moment, the golden glow over Silva which indicated her presence dimmed a bit and Silva seemed to have taken over the body for a second.

    "I asked you to save my daughter, if you don¡¯t do it now, I will kill both of them."

    "How dare you say to threaten me? Your ce as a dog is to stay at my feet and lick them clean when I ask you to. I will make your daughter die and make you watch it."

    "I told you to save my daughter. Otherwise, I swear that I would kill them both at any cost. Even if I have to destroy my body and die in the process. I will kill them both and let you suffer from the consequences."

    Both of them argued as they tried their best to take control of the body for themselves.

    The priestess looked at Silva with aplicated gaze.

    Meanwhile, the troops already left the temple, while Sam and Arkiv left the spot.

    The Ghouls and Wights are standing within the circle as the death energy will only be a nutrient to them. There they can fight without the fear of getting exhausted.

    The feathered didn¡¯t enter the zone of the circle yet as they are afraid of what would happen. But the Wights and Ghouls that can shoot are not really worried about anything. They are shooting the spikes and cannons like they were ying a game.

    Sam and Arkiv who escaped into the forest took some good positions and started doing their own thing.

    Sam kicked the balls into the group while Arkiv is shooting them down.

    The feathered are falling like birds that are being shot.

    The feathered that fell into the circle is as good as dead and turned into undead bing an addition to the circle.

    The feathered now understood what kind of mistake they did by not dealing with Sam when they had a chance and letting him make this circle.

    They now only waited for the order to retreat at the moment, but that order never came.

    Priestess is busy by now as he started helping Silva to calm himself down.

    Because by now due to the struggle between the goddess and him, his body is being damaged constantly, he is bleeding from his nose, ears and eyes as he struggled with his own body and tried to get back in.

    Nike and him are struggling like crazy.

    "Save my daughter. Save my daughter. Save my daughter."

    This is the only thinging out of his mouth as if he is possessed.

    Priestess looked at the struggle and couldn¡¯t help but feel a sense of heartache.

    She ran back after him to look at Grace who is still being burned by the grey mes.

    "How dare you defy me? I will make you watch your daughter die and I will condemn your branch of the race to eternal damnation. I will ce the new rules on this world. I will make you die if you cultivate past Pre-transcendent and I will torture your soul if you don¡¯t cultivate at all.

    I will make all of you die miserable deaths."

    Nike yelled as she turned around and stabbed Priestess in the abdomen with her palm.

    "You will not give them orders to retreat and let them die in their hands. That is the price for your branch for not performing my task properly."

    "Get out of my head." At this moment, Silva¡¯s consciousness tried too much and the golden light suddenly started dimming rapidly and soon it disappeared as thest streak of golden light went back into the statue.

    Silva raised his hands a wind de stuck the statue and broke it down.

    With a wave of his hand a huge windstorm came and ravaged everything within the line of his sight and started destroying all the statues and carvings of the Goddess.

    Even the main statue of the temple is destroyed.

    He finally knelt down on the ground as he spat a mouthful of blood and looked at his daughter weakly.

    Nike did a number on his body and mind breaking everything.

    He started weeping as he looked at his daughter. Then the sorrow led to anger which was directed at the Goddess, Sam, himself and once again back to the goddess.

    He wants to save his daughter so badly, but he couldn¡¯t.

    He looked at Priestess and said, please save my daughter. That is the only thing he muttered as he lost into daze as he looked at his daughter once again.

    Priestess felt heartbroken as she looked at his lifeless sorrowful eyes and thought of ways to help.

    She crawled to the edge of the pool and sucked in a mouthful of water to heal her injury a bit and slowly pushed Silva into the pool so that he could be healed a bit.

    Then she walked out and looked at the whole scenario which ravaged the majestic city into a pile of rubble and corpses.

    She flew into the air and yelled.

    "All feathered, retreat. This is the end of the war. Retreat."

    All of the feathered felt like they have new life injected into them as they retreated back to the temple.

    Priestess whose wounds are still lethal, needs at least a week in the Golden pool to get fully healed.

    But she doesn¡¯t have that luxury of time at that moment. She looked towards the forest and yelled.

    "Sam and Arkiv, pleasee out. I have a deal to talk to you."

    Sam and Arkiv came out and stood in the safe spots of the formation once again.

    "I like making deals. Now does this deal include the weapon fragment that belongs to your city? Then I would like it even more and there is a great probability that this deal will go through."

    "Yes, I will give the weapon fragment, as long you do some things for me."

    "Please do tell."

    "Come with me to the temple first."

    "I am sorry. I am not going to enter the temple that has an extreme defensive measures."

    "There is no need for you to worry."

    "I am sorry. I don¡¯t have a reason to trust you."

    Priestess gritted her teeth, but she knew that it was to be expected from him given how they are at odds until now, she took out a sword and swung it at the temple.

    The sword ray streaked through the temple and the main entrance copse leaving a huge gaping hole.

    "The temple has copsed, the statue that was the core of the defensive measures, you don¡¯t have to worry."

    Sam was a bit surprised, but he still felt skeptical. He cannot trust them that easily.

    She became a bit frustrated and started swinging her sword and the temple copsed at some walls.

    "Pleasee with me. I don¡¯t have any motivation to hurt you."

    She is almost sobbing.

    Sam looked at her intently and then only noticed the wound.

    The wound is so severe and the bleeding barely stopped. Something serious happened.

    Sam decided to go in, but he got ready with the dimensional drifter.

    When they entered the temple, Sam really didn¡¯t feel any threat from the temple walls, all the walls and the statues are destroyed.

    She led him to the golden pool room and asked.

    "Save her life and I will give you the weapon fragment."

 Chapter 839: Explanation

    Sam was surprised, to say the least when he looked at the situation.

    This whole area was ruined as if a storm hit.

    Silva floating in the pool like a corpse. If not for the faint breathing, Sam would have thought he really is a corpse.

    And finally grace. He didn¡¯t expect they would manage to keep her alive until now. He activated energy vision and checked the situation and the pool really invoked his curiosity.

    The vitality that the pool is emitting is just too much.

    If it could be channeled properly, then it could heal even a Consummate easily. Then Sam changed his attention to Silva who is floating.

    He was stunned for a second. The damage that he took is actually is very severe. The energy wavesing out of his body are all messed uppletely.

    Sam ced his hand on his body and started checking. The observation ability showed him one of the worst states a person could be in.

    Every muscle fiber was torn apart, the wing joints are alsopletely broken off. So many veins were broken and bleeding internally. But the vitality from the pool is still trying to keep up with the damage and trying to heal him. Put him back into the shape.

    While he was lost in a daze, Priestess yelled from behind.

    "I want you to save her. I will give you the weapon fragment and you can get out of here."

    "Don¡¯t worry, it is not that difficult to save her. I will do it. But I have a different deal to make. Are you up for it?"

    "What is that?"

    "I will save his ass. What would you pay for that?"

    "He doesn¡¯t need any saving."

    "Not really. I don¡¯t know what exactly happened, but every muscle fiber of his body is torn apart and every organ is disced as if the whole body was shaken. Every system that ensures the survival of the person is damaged. The bones are broken in weird ces and there is a severe clot in the brain. If you let him heal like that, the bones and joints would form back in a different way and the whole body wouldn¡¯t function normally.

    He would live a fate worse than death. He couldn¡¯t even walk, sit, stand, fly, anything. Are you sure you want him to heal like that?"

    "Wha... What are you saying?"

    "I am not fooling you. You can check it out yourself. Even if you couldn¡¯t get a detailed view of what I said, you could at least get some basic understand if you examine him.

    I will cure her while you do it. But before that, Can I see the weapon fragment?"

    She went out to therge statue and started rotating thest remaining base of it. The sound of somerge cogs could be heard and soon arge square tile in front of the statue went down a bit and slid sideways.

    There is a purple metal rod that has one smooth edge and another broken edge.

    She took it out and ran back to Sam, but didn¡¯t give it to him.

    Sam shrugged and went to pull Grace out of the pool and started healing her. After rescuing her, Priestess threw the metal rod towards him.

    He caught it and examined it.

    The metal seems to be an alloy of different metals because he couldn¡¯t find a match within all the metals in his memory.

    He stored that away and asked.

    "What about the other deal? Are you interested in it?"

    By now the priestess has already checked the situation with him and started thinking on what to do. She felt that Sam¡¯s words have some merit in them. But she doesn¡¯t have anything to pay with.

    "What do you want? Spirit stones?"

    "No, I have too many of them."

    "Then I don¡¯t have anything else to pay with. In fact, there is nothing anyone can offer you here other than the spirit stones.

    We just lost our support from Nike. The statues copsing is the result of that. After a few days, I think the other ces will invade us and start a war. Taking over thisnd under their rule and making our branch of the race as ves."

    "Mind telling me what happened here?"

    Sam asked while he looked at Grace. Arkiv is currently taking care of her. He is feeding her pills that are good for healing the soul and cleaning the body.

    Sam raised an eyebrow at this.

    Priestess didn¡¯t seem to care about anything. She felt that she has seen too much today as she exined what happened.

    Sam listened to it intently and said.

    "The rules of the are being changed like that? Then what about now? What are the current rules?"

    "We cannot breakthrough past the Transcendent realm. Once we reach the peak, we have to apply to leave this ce and join the army of Zeus and have our breakthrough there.

    Even the six family heads go there ande back.

    I don¡¯t know what is it like there and what they usually saw there. But from the looks of it, after every king came back, he would behave like he lost a part of his soul there. They wouldn¡¯t show the same reverence they had towards Goddess Nike or Zeus.

    I thought it has something to do with his wife, but I don¡¯t know the exact details."

    "Well, another god with a mountain of narcissism and not even a grain ofpassion. Not really surprising if you ask me. I do have a proposal for you, but I don¡¯t know if you would agree to it."

    "What is that?"

    Sam smiled and started exining everything in detail. She received shock after shock by the time he finished. By the end of it, she has her mouth open wide.

    "You can think about it. I can save you from this whole fiasco and get you a new lease on your life. If you would like that, you can agree."

    "But it is not exactly my decision to make."

    "Of course it is not. You can ask him if he wants to think about it after he wakes up. I will treat him for now. You have until the year-end for you to agree."

    After that, Sam started the treatment, he dragged that guy out of the pool and started setting the bones back in his body, and started using the heavenly wine slowly and also trying his best to divert all the vitality from the heavenly wine to the parts that he wanted to heal first.

    Then came the internal organs.

    Sam is using his observation and the water elemental energy to move the body parts within the body. He is using the blood and other bodily fluids to do so.

    Even though it is dangerous, it is not as dangerous as leaving them be.

    The treatment took the rest of the night and until dawn, Sam is slowly working on each organ and healed every part separately, finally going for the brain.

    The blood clot there seemed to have been caused by the spiritual energy.

    He seemed to have used the spiritual energy to damage his own brain to get rid of that goddess and the sudden throwing into the pool caused him to clot the injury.

    Sam can only dissolve the clot bit by bit and it took three hourspletely.

    While he is treating him, the other party that is also responsible for this situation is not exactly having an easy time.

    Within the Olympus region, the Nike mansion.

    Nike is sitting in a room with her face all gloomy and angry. She wanted to go back to the Nike to deal with him after she was forcefully thrown away, but before she could do that, the statues which are the only means for them to contact her are all destroyed.

    If she wants to deal with them, she can only deal with them with the help of other Feathered in the remaining five cities.

    But before she could contact them, she got summoned by someone.

    And there is only one person that could summon her like that.

    She has to go there in the next few minutes, that is why she is being anxious.

    After five minutes or so sitting there, she walked out and flew into space. After a while, she arrived in a different realm.

    This is the realm Zeus uses to meet with outsiders.

    At this moment, within this realm, there is arge open circr table where Zeus is sitting along with Gambler, Karthikeya, and Sunwukong.

    When she arrived Zeus looked at her calmly and said.

    "She is the one who did it. She is just too loyal to me and doesn¡¯t want my yer to lose. That is why she did it. What do you want me to do now?"

    "You have to make her pay the price of course?" Gambler said from the side.

    "What kind of price would that be? What do you want her to do?"

    "She doesn¡¯t need to do anything we want, she is going to do something for candidates she hindered. But first, tell her to retract her orders."

    "She would give the yers apensation based on their ranks after this round ofpetition is ended, but the second thing wouldn¡¯t happen. She just attended some ritual and it bans her from going back to the statue possession at the moment. "

    The three of them looked at Zeus and Karthikeya spoke.

    "Okay then, let us call for a meeting tomorrow and you can exin it to the rest of the group. They didn¡¯t want toe to your ce."

    "Sure."

    "And take care of the rest of your subordinates, next time I wouldn¡¯te asking like this, I will just throw a spear right into their territory." Kartikeya left those words before the three of them left.

 Chapter 840: Taking Advantage

    After the three of them left, Zeus gestured for Nike to take a seat opposite to him.

    "You have one job, Nike. I told you. As long as your projection stays in the temple, everything would be fine. They couldn¡¯t see into the temple from here, because their yers cannot enter.

    As long as it stayed like that, no matter how fishy things we did are, they wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything.

    But now, look at the situation, they not only knew this, but we also have a pay a price for that and on top of that, we cannot interfere in this anymore.

    They would be closely monitoring you now, as they have enough reason to do so. You cannot go back there, even the temples are off-limits for your projection."

    "My Lord, I just want one more chance to go there. After that, I willpletely stop."

    "Why?"

    "That..." Nike didn¡¯t know how to answer this question. She herself knew how petty her behavior and actionse off as, but she never felt guilty or embarrassed about it when she did them, as for telling them to someone else, much less Zeus, it is impossible. That would be too much for her pride.

    "If you can¡¯t even say what it is for, they get lost from here. Don¡¯t do anything stupid. That Karthikeya is a man of his word. If he saw this happen one more time, he would really throw the spear and not just your residence, he would blow up your entire sr system."

    "Yes, My Lord."

    With that, she bowed in respect and left from that ce. After returning to her ce, she started smashing everything in her sight.

    Suddenly, she hated every god that is in this game. First, that gambleres here to show off with his subordinate, who managed to injure her cleanly, then Sam and Arkiv destroyed her temple and these three gods are now hindering her from the revenge she sought desperately.

    But she cannot do anything no matter how pissed she is. That is her position now and it seems like it could remain that way.

    Meanwhile, back in Nike.

    Sam and Arkiv are currently in the hovercar as they traveled over a bunch of trees.

    "This thing is quite good. Sam why wouldn¡¯t you sell the really good things you have. That harbinger now this thing, you wouldn¡¯t sell them to normal people, why?"

    "They are made for personal use. I will sell them when I no longer need them. Anyway, I have enough money. Even the urge to expand the business is not enough to make me sell these."

    "At least sell me one will you?"

    "You cannot ride this. Only a wind element user can ride this and anyway, I cannot make too many energy cells if I make these things onrge scale."

    While they are speaking, Sam suddenly turned the hovercar and almost flipped it in the process.

    A bird-type beast justunched themselves from the trees below, ambushing them.

    This is not the first time and they are sure this will not be thest time.

    Sam controlled the car and started shing with this bird-type beast.

    After a battle and cutting the wings off of the beast, they are free once again.

    They are currently on the way to therge temple which is in the center of the. After treating both Grace and Silva, they are done there and started their journey immediately. It is almost one month since they came here and there are still eleven months. But they cannot afford to wait too much.

    Because the journey turned out to be longer than they thought.

    They cannot go to the next city directly, they have to travel on a specific route and that is to go to the temple in the center of Silva city and then going to the next city from that temple.

    All six routes for the six cities are connected at that temple.

    And the worst part is that the journey will take around a month to forty days for a Pre-transcendent stage Feathered to go from Silva city to the temple and more or the less the same amount of time is required for them to go to any of the next cities from that temple.

    When Sam heard this, the first thought is that he has the hovercar and he could cut the journey in half, but his expectations are let down. The one-month to forty-day journey is only valid when they are unhindered, but the whole path ispletely infested with a lot of beasts that attack them constantly.

    So, Sam estimated that even in the hovercar the journey would still be more than a month with the beast attacks and as the time passed, they are extremely sure of that.

    This is just the first day and they already encountered around four waves of attacks.

    "This is going to be one annoying journey."

    "Yes it is."

    They exchanged and covered a decent distance before another beast came.

    The journey went on like this for more than a month before they could even get a glimpse of therge temple.

    When they saw it from afar, Sam and Arkiv felt like they saw an oasis in a desert.

    But thisst piece of journey took them four more days because of the number of the beasts they had to encounter.

    Even though the majority are still the Pre-transcendent, here the transcendent are the true bosses and it is hard for them to escape from them.

    They had to stop at a spot for hours before they could leave and sometimes they had to take arge detour which would waste half a day of the journey.

    After wasting most of their time, they finallynded on the premises of the temple.

    Even though it is called a temple, in reality, it is as big as a small town.

    There are so many structures, sculptures, small houses that seemed to be the temporary residences of the visitors, and some medium-sized residences which are filled with various sculptures of Nike.

    At this point, this is no longer a temple. It is almost like a ce to satisfy Nike¡¯s Ego and vanity.

    There are hundreds of her statues in here.

    "Damn, this woman focuses more on vanity than me. At least I only buy things and eat well. But look at her? The sculptures, murals those ques." Sam said as he observed the surroundings

    "I wonder how it feels to be worshipped like this. Is that a good feeling?" Arkiv asked from the side.

    "How would I know?"

    "You are also revered in your city and all of the western continent. They are grateful to you because you changed thousands of lives. I don¡¯t think there is much difference."

    "Being revered and being worshiped arepletely different things."

    "Whatever, they look the same to me and I am sure millions of people agree with me."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and just looked around the surroundings.

    "What are we doing here? Let us go. It is a long journey after all." Arkiv called out noticing that Sam is silent."

    "It is a long journey, but I think we should take advantage since we visited this ce first, don¡¯t you think so?"

    Arkiv¡¯s eyes lit up and said.

    "What are we going to do?"

    "Let¡¯s use the opportunity to ce some things here, so that he can have an advantage when wee here next time.

    The way I see it, thest battle will be here."

    Arkiv grew excited.

    He didn¡¯t think too much about this.

    But the battle would be really intense and bnced as the other yers are no pushovers. The battle would definitely be neck and neck as there are only six entries into the pce this time.

    They would fight tooth and nail to get their hands on those six weapon fragments.

    This is not going to be easy at all.

    It would really be wasteful of them to not take advantage of this chance.

    Sam has many toys that he could use in a ce where many things could be hidden.

    So, for the next few days, Sam and Arkiv worked together with the help of the Wights, Ghouls and the rest to set all kinds of different traps in the temple.

    They didn¡¯t let a single ce go. Every area is full of grenades, formations, spike shooters, cannons, and many more things.

    After spending two weeks doing so, there are only ten days left in the third month.

    Now, they have to decide on which route to take.

    Even though he got some information from the Silva city priestess, he has to consider many things before he goes to a city.

    It would have been better if it was a ce where Arman is not present. In that way, they don¡¯t have to go to another city.

    But they couldn¡¯t find out which person is in which city.

    After some time they decided on one city due to the distance it took was lesser than the others and started their journey.

    A/N: Mass release event is back

    For every two weeks. The next mass release is on 3rd July.

    400 power stones for one chapter.

 Chapter 841: Surprise attack

    Forty dayster.

    Sam and Arkiv are currently standing on the tree as they looked at the city in front of them.

    Yesterday night they reached the surrounding forests after a long journey.

    The journey was just as annoying as thest one. The most annoying part is them knowing why this journey is so long.

    It was all just for Nike to satisfy her ego. She created these routes and the forests and ced all the beasts there just for the sake of increasing their journey¡¯s difficulty. It is like a perilous pilgrimage.

    Even though they were being forced to do this, she still feels great about it.

    One could imagine how twisted her mind is and how vain her thinking is.

    When they reached this city, they are finally relieved.

    But they didn¡¯t directly enter it or just show themselves.

    They cannot go to the front entrance directly. If they want to go there instantly, they have to go through the city, but they have to take a detour which would take around half a day now and there is a great chance that they would be spotted by feathered.

    They have to get as many details on what exactly is happening in the city from here.

    They started observing them yesterday because of that reason and from the looks of it, there is indeed severe unrest going on.

    The feathered are moving in the forest like crazy and they seemed to be searching for someone and the temple is damaged severely in several ces.

    The people definitely escaped from this ce.

    There is no doubt about it. But Sam wants to find out who are the yers that are situated here. If it is someone else, he has to find a way to deal with them and get the weapon fragment directly from the temple.

    They have one advantage over the rest. After Silva was treated and came to consciousness, he gave Sam some important information and the first one is that all templeyouts are the same in the six cities as they are designed by someone Nike herself appointed.

    This is notmon knowledge and only the six city heads or kings would know about it.

    So, if he wants to find the weapon fragment in any other city, he just has to find a way to enter the main hall of the temple and turn the statue a bit and the secret door will be opened.

    As for infiltrating the temple, which turned out to be a difficult task as even the shadows and the silver pigeons were unable to do so, is actually not too risky. The main thing that is needed to enter the temple directly without receiving any damage is the presence of active Feathered blood.

    They can directly take a human, creature, or anything else inside directly if they want to and if Sam couldn¡¯t do that, all he has to do is draw some fresh blood from the feathered and hold it in a vial and as long as the vitality and the nature of blood didn¡¯t change, he could enter the temple.

    Sam really felt like he received his worth after treating them. This information is enough for Sam to get his hands on the weapon fragment.

    The only drawback is that the blood has to be carried by a living creature. The shadows and undead are not suitable. Otherwise, Sam would have sent his shadow soldiers to finish the task off.

    They observed for the whole day and after getting an estimation on the scale of the activity the feathered are causing, the situation doesn¡¯t seem too serious and the yers seemed to have escaped recently.

    They decided to take a detour now and first find out who the yers at this spot.

    But this time, they didn¡¯t take the hovercar or go on the beasts, they just used the forest as a cover and go slowly.

    After an hour or so after the journey, Sam and Arkiv are currently having a meal. This is one of the perks of the journey. Even though it is annoying, they got to sample a lot of beasts and Sam even collected a couple of them to rear in the divine dimension.

    As they are making the small talk, all of a sudden they detected some other presence nearby and got ready to fight.

    At this moment, Arkiv who is looking in the sky felt a cold feeling behind his back and jumped forward.

    A dagger just shed the air in his spot and missed him with hair¡¯s breadth. At this exact moment, Sam also rolled to the side, and earth elemental energy channeled into his legs and then onto the ground as a sharp earthen spike raised behind his heel and blocked another dagger.

    He slid to the side and looked at the seared meat which is crusted with various herbs that fell on the ground.

    "I don¡¯t like wasting my food you know. It is not polite either."

    Arkiv looked at a feathered standing there coldly as he took out his body and his aura raged.

    Two feathered are standing there with smoky ck wings.

    One look and anyone could guess they are dark element users and specialized in shadow element.

    "A flying shadow. Not a goodbination if you ask me." Sam said once again as they didn¡¯t speak.

    "Who are you? You are not the two humans that escaped. Where did youe from?"

    "Well, technically we are also humans who escaped the temple, but not this one," Arkiv replied as he took out the arrow as got ready to shoot.

    "Which city are you from? Which King is so ipetent to let you get away like this?"

    "Silva city."

    Sam said as he eyed the two feathered closely. Both of them are twins.

    They both have dark elemental energy running around them and the wings are still in shadow form. It is partial elemental fusion.

    "Grace is really slipping down. She couldn¡¯t even keep you guys there and you even managed to escape from the city. Silva city seems to be on a decline on all fronts."

    Arkiv chuckled at it and said.

    "You are the one to speak, I am pretty sure those two fuckers whoever they are already giving you a hard enough time. Are you sure you want to mess with us?"

    "Hard time? All they could do is run away." The one who is eyeing Sam spoke in disdain and made a move.

    He disappeared into bing a shadow and tried to stab him in the neck, Sam took out a dagger of his own and blocked the attack, but right before both daggers shed the feathered moved to the side and tried to stab Sam in the back.

    When he thought that the attacknded, he suddenly felt a huge impact on his chest and lost his senses for a while.

    Before he knew it, he felt another impact as he hit a tree nearby and fell down.

    He looked at Sam in surprise.

    This is the first time his trick has failed when he fought against a peer.

    "Your movements are fine and gliding with the wings is good as it caused almost no sound, but you not exactly stealthy with your moves, your energy is all over the ce. What a pity for someone to be gifted and not knowing how to use it." Sam looked at him and shook his head as if he is really disappointed and felt pity for that ability.

    "All you got is one lucky shot. Don¡¯t think that you are all that just because of that."

    The feathered spoke and made a move, the remaining feathered also didn¡¯t wait any longer and made his move on Arkiv.

    Arkiv kicked the ground and jumped onto a tree and kept on hopping as he nned to create enough distance between them.

    But the shadow is moving too fast. Arkiv started shooting arrows one by one and managed to keep him at bay so that he can move freely.

    Meanwhile, Sam started glowing in ck as dark elemental energy surrounded him. He held the dagger and said.

    "Let us see who can be the better shadow for now."

    With that the battle became intense.

    The feathered shadows have a bit of an edge as they used their wings mostly for gliding while being in the shadow form.

    Arkiv is having a bit hard time coping with that, but Sam is matching him with that same speed.

    He is not even attacking at all and even the elemental fusion is not hundred percent. It is around fifty to sixty percent and mostly focused on defending.

    He moved like a slippery eel as he blocked the movements and made him ufortable.

    As for why he is doing this instead of finishing off the fight, he just wants to have some fun and see what he has got.

    Thest few months have been a bit of a frustrating task after all.

    Meanwhile, Arkiv changed his game and is making moves that are not his usual style. He started shooting multiple arrows in different directions and he is using a different arrow style. This seemed to be one of his special techniques and this caused that shadow feathered to back down instantly.

 Chapter 842: Meeting Arman

    The battle continued, soon Sam got bored of this.

    These shadow guys are good, but they are too reliant on their shadow abilities and didn¡¯t focus on anything else. Their dagger skills are mediocre at best, their awareness is nowhere near elite. If not for the ambush, Arkiv could have already maintained distance.

    He is not particrly good at closebat but he is still gaining upper hand as time passed and eventually he is going to win.

    These guys are in fact worse than grace. At least she couldnd a decent hit or two on him. But there is nothing these guys could do unless Sam beszy and closes his eyes and senses offpletely, he wouldn¡¯t be able to do any critical damage.

    He couldn¡¯t take it anymore and decided to finish the whole thing off.

    Sam increased the fusion level and disappeared like dark smoke when the shadow feathered missed him, he was dazed for a second on how fast Sam has be, and that one moment of daze was enough, Sam reappeared on his back and broke the two wings directly.

    Everyone could hear the crack at the joint of the wings.

    The feathered fell down as he is relying too much on his wings, so after Sam broke it, they are down.

    The remaining feathered lost hisposure for a moment because of this and Arkiv managed to increase the distance, he aimed the bow andunched arrow after arrow.

    Soon the shadow feathered was pinned to the ground. His wings are riddled and couldn¡¯t be used anymore.

    Sam and Arkiv both exchanged a look and they understood that both of them are disappointed.

    "It seems like Silva city is still better than you guys. At least, they have proper nning and Grace put up a fight. You guys are too weak."

    Arkiv said as he crouched and started tapping the face of the feathered. When he looked at the annoyed and outraged expression of him, he was satisfied and said with a smile.

    "I want to ask since you know grace, does that mean you guys are of the same status?"

    The expression of the feathered changed a bit.

    "It seems like it is true, then you will make perfect hostages. I would like to see what the person in charge would think. To save their sons and give up the fragment or would they leave you for the sake of the goddess¡¯ orders?" Arkiv continued

    "How dare you?" The feathered spoke.

    *PAK*

    A good pnded straight on his face.

    "I didn¡¯t let you talk my boy. Your job is just to stay put." Arkiv pped and said this with a sweet and harmless smile.

    Sam threw handcuffs that negate the spiritual energy usage and Arkiv proceeded to tie that guy up, meanwhile, Sam did the same with the second guy.

    *Boom* *Boom*

    While they are doing this, several explosive sounds could be heard from a direction. They looked at each other as they are a bit familiar with these explosive sounds.

    These are sounds of grenades. They could easily guess who produced those sounds.

    It has to be Arman.

    Both of them shook their heads in disappointment. This means they have to take another one of those annoying journeys wasting their time.

    But that could change if they could save some time from that. Sam really wished that someone would be holding a weapon fragment with them and bring it back to the temple after they went back to the temple so that they could snatch it.

    Anyway, first they have to get to Arman and make sure that everything is okay.

    Sam threw the two guys into the chessboard and both of them ran towards the directions of the explosion.

    After five minutes, they could still hear the explosions and soon they saw the blue lightning crackling all over the ce.

    Arman seemed to have finally started fighting.

    When they reached the ce, they saw him being surrounded by ten or so feathered who are trying to fight him from the sky, but Arman is like an agile but powerful monkey who is jumping around the trees and made the lightning strike one after another.

    The feathered are the ones having a hard time.

    He even took out the lightning de saber and cleaved through the bunch. He seemed to be pretty pissed and soon they understood why, there is a burnt and ravaged patch of forest nearby which is still burning, and some of the trees charred in the middle of it, there are more than a dozen feathered lying dead.

    It seems like he is totally frustrated by their constant pestering.

    Even without them interfering the fight was over.

    Arman finally rxed a bit, but he still has the saber in his hands as he leaned against a tree and sat down panting.

    Sam and Arkiv came out and started walking towards him.

    "When did you guyse?" He asked without much surprise as if it is natural for them to be here.

    "Well a few days actually, we came from the rear route so we have to take a detour around the city. So, how long since you escape, from the looks of it, the damage on the temple and the city are still fresh."

    Arkiv asked in return.

    "Yesterday. I actually worked together with the other guy."

    "Who is it? Is it Akhil?" If it is that guy, it would be annoying. He is a piece of work in the forest."

    "No, it is the guy from the thunderbolt sect. Donner."

    "Okay, you guys worked together and escaped, so where is he now?"

    "I don¡¯t know, we escaped in different routes out of the city and got chased by arge group of feathered, even though they had wings like birds, they are as annoying as flies, I couldn¡¯t take it anymore and deal with them."

    While Arkiv and Arman are having a conversation, Sam is currently busy checking the surroundings. He is taking the corpses for the necromancy and such.

    "So, how are you guys here this fast?"

    "Well, we fell into the same city and I am the only one who got caught. This guy was still okay and managed to escape. So, it was easy. You know how resourceful he is, so I didn¡¯t even bother to escape and even managed to get some decent training." Arkiv exined.

    "At least, it is nothing like the training I did. There are two pesky little shits in that city. They always leave us in a handicap to beat us up. I would really like to meet them once again."

    "Are those two shadows?"

    "How do you know?"

    "Hehe."

    While they are talking and cleaning up the mess, some other feathered who also saw thergemotion from afar are making their way here.

    Sam took notice of them through the telescope and they made their escape.

    They took a long detour and moved towards the front of the city.

    There is not much they can do from the rear end or the side.

    After they escaped, that night they had a proper meal and started discussing their future n.

    "So, what are we going to do next?" Arman asked Sam.

    "Of course, we have to get the weapon fragment and leave this ce. We didn¡¯t know how long it would take for you guys to make your way to the temple, since we finished it fast, we decided to check another city and get another fragment.

    It is risky to not hold the fragment until thest minute.

    If we only need one before the Pce we can manage, but if it¡¯s two, then it would be troublesome, that is why we came here.

    Anyway, we will deal with this city just like we did with Silva city. But before that, we need to know about the details regarding the higher-ups.

    The king and the priestess? How are they?"

    "It is actually a queen and the priest here."

    "Queen? So, are the two shadows her sons or just students and subordinates?"

    "Of course they are sons. Those two fuckers are so important to her."

    "Then it might get easy. We will start our n from dawn tomorrow."

    The next day they started working. The three of them scouted the area around the city. The size of the city and theyout are simr to that of Silva city.

    The only difference is the distribution of trees in the forest.

    Here the forest is not as dense as the forest around Silva city. But it is still alright.

    Sam has a new n for this.

    For the next week, the three of them escaped the pursuit of the feathered and set up the traps so that they could finish this faster.

    After it was done, Sam let the zoi termites out and made them clear a patch of the forest right in front of the entrance of the city, and in that patch, he crucified some of the feathered bodies. He stuck two recording crystals on their chests. One for each and waited for the other party to make the move.

 Chapter 843: Plan

    Sam, Arkiv, and Arman are sitting on a tree.

    The crucifixion was already noticed by the feathered city.

    The open patch in the middle of the forest is not exactly hard to notice. But the feathered didn¡¯t touch the bodies, they just surrounded the area and looked around to see if they could find the three of them.

    But the three of them are sitting far away looking at it through the telescope. Soon, they saw a person who seemed to have a high statuse out of the entrance and enter this patch.

    He saw the two crucified bodies, but he didn¡¯t touch it. He only touched the two recording crystals which is almost part of the skin now.

    He looked at his subordinates and said.

    "Take them down first and examine their bodies, before you take them in and perform the burial. Take those recording crystals out and see what is inside."

    The soldiers started taking them down and pulled the crystals out.

    For the first body, the crystal pulled some flesh along with it as if it was attached to it by some glue, but it still came out. On the other side, the second crystal took something else out.

    There is some metallic piece attached to the recording crystal and as soon as they pulled it out...

    *BOOM*

    An explosion happened and the purple smoke spread all over along with the bright orange and blue mes.

    When the dust settled, the person who pulled the crystal was dead, the people that are near him are also dead. The rest of the group standing there are all infected by the poison.

    They could feel their blood burning and their bodies feeling weak and corroding.

    Even the person that came and gave orders was the same.

    Sam who is watching everything through the telescope spoke.

    "When will they ever be smart enough to not just pull down the corpses directly without examining them? One-touch and use of spiritual sense would be enough."

    "No one thinks that someone would use the dead bodies to set traps like this. What do you think of everyone? As retarded as you? They think normally, they assume that you have the decency to respect the dead bodies."

    Arkiv replied snidely.

    "Respecting dead bodies. I don¡¯t think there is a ce for morals and virtues on a battlefield, particrly when one side is overpowering the other with numbers, strength, and resources. The highest level of respect I can give them is to use any means possible for me to defeat them. Any more than that, it is impossible for now."

    "Just imagine your dead body being used like that? You wouldn¡¯t feel good right?" Arkiv asked as he looked at Sam.

    Sam chuckled at Arkiv¡¯s persistence on this matter. This is what he has been doing for a while. Even though he didn¡¯t object, he did make sure that he didn¡¯t like it.

    "Answer me, Sam. How would you feel if it was your body?"

    "If my body turns into a dead body one day, then I will make sure that no one else is alive around me to use like that, I will make sure that no one woulde anywhere near until my body bes one with earth."

    Arkiv didn¡¯t know what to speak of that. Sam continued with a smile.

    "I don¡¯t know why you are so aversive to this method. But since you are like that, I didn¡¯t force you to use them. But remember this, you cannot provoke an enemy and expect them to fight in a way you want, you cannot ask help from an ally and criticize them on how they help. Both of them are hypocritical and entitled."

    With that, they left to do the remaining tasks.

    Meanwhile, at the explosion zone, the people that are still hurting with the poison are squealing in pain and the feathered who are stationed on the city walls came looking for him.

    They shifted them to the barracks and collected all the dead bodies that could be collected before giving them proper rituals.

    After finishing that, one of the soldiers took the recording crystal which was ced on the first dead body with him.

    Since the person who pulled this out is not too close to the explosion, he managed to survive with some wounds and poison. But the survival is not for long. They were taken into heal, but the healer has no clue about the poison.

    While the feathered threw them in the temple pools to see if they could save them, the Queen and Priest are looking at the recording crystal which was safe.

    They saw the recording of the two shadows feathered.

    The Queen¡¯s aura raged like she was set on fire.

    "How dare they? How dare they capture my sons? I will kill them. I will kill them." The Queen yelled.

    "Queen Rata, you cannot do that. The Goddess ordered that their lives shouldn¡¯t be harmed. But you can do as you want as long as they stayed alive. But before you could do anything to them. We have to capture.

    I think it is about time we release all the city forces to search for them."

    "Send them then. I want my sons back alive and well. If they were harmed in any way, I will crucify them alive and torture them until they wish they are dead."

    The priest left to pass the orders.

    The queen who pped her dark ck wings simr to that of the twins and flew out of the temple and stood on top of the arch to look over the city as she observed the forces leaving.

    She really is angry.

    As soon as the forces came out of the city...

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    A series of explosions happened one by one within the city.

    Necromancy really doese in handy.

    The forces that flew to the skies were shocked and halted in their tracks, while the queen felt the horror for the first time.

    All this while she is angry and that is that, but now that she knew her opponents have the ability to cause explosions in the city like this, she felt like she should be more serious and consider her moves well.

    She went to the nearest explosion zone and there was only one dead body and the body parts.

    This caused her to be angrier and wary at the same time.

    She called for the priest and ordered him to send all the forces and search for him properly without any dy.

    And then she passed orders for a curfew.

    After sending the soldiers out and arranging a camp for them right next to the city gate, she passed new orders.

    A curfew was ced on the whole city.

    No one shoulde out of their houses until they were ordered again.

    Only a team of people will be moving to give the necessary rations of the cultivation resources and food they would be needing for the next few days until the situation changed.

    So, as soon as Sam sent an undead acting like a living feathered inside the city, he was taken down easily, even though as soon as they caught the undead, Sam made him explode the grenade causing some damage, the precautions taken were still impressive.

    After this incident, the rest of the infiltrators were attacked from afar without even touching to avoid unnecessary damage.

    Sam who is observing this all, felt really impressed and surprised.

    These measures are really decisive and proper.

    If only the Silva city king took such measures, they would havested long. The Queen here didn¡¯t care if the people wouldin or think that she is weak or they would panic imagining there is trouble, she decisively shoved them into their houses.

    "Not bad. Let¡¯s go prepare for the next step. Before we ask for the exchange of the hostages and the fragment, we have to show her our strength.

    Unfortunately, there is no stream passing through the city to show we can affect them differently, but we can do the same thing as before. Let us block the routes once again and strip them off the resources for now.

    Also, let¡¯s attack the city walls in different positions and show them their weakness and finally kill as many soldiers as you can let the wights and ghouls make them undead and bring them to me. I will send some new gifts to the base instead of the city like they expected.

    Let us see how they would manage to handle this. And Arman, you are in charge of the two shadows for an hour every day, pay them as you like, and record the video, we will send the daily updates to the Queen.

    If by any chance the transcendent stage cultivators and the queen herself decide to join the fray, focus on running and hiding. Let us not engage with them for the time being.

    I don¡¯t think we would as lucky as before for the Goddess to get angry at another ruler here.

    Arman, I want to know details about the Queen. Every small one of them."

 Chapter 844: Threat

    For the next week, everything went on fast-paced.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother to hide the Wights and Ghouls, he even let the Minotaurs and Orangutans out and let them fight, while he and the beasts blocked the routes one by one.

    Even though the forces of this city have more presence, they don¡¯t want to break the rules too. They are still trying to stay within their limits, but the Transcendent stage cultivators still came after the first blockage and it was left for Specter to deal with.

    The specter teamed up with the Ghouls and Wights to deal with the transcendent stage feathered one by one as they are not searching in groups, even though there is some damage on this side, a proper ambush is all it takes.

    Some wights got injured severely in the process and they had to be put back on the chessboard for recuperation. But still, the price was worth it for the transcendent stage feathered.

    While the situation is like this, some of the Wights finally broke through. With all the vitality they absorbed from the trees in the Charbhum realm and this, it was only a matter of time and it actually came at a perfect time.

    Now he has more edge over the others.

    The Queen inside the city is having the worst time though, every day their losses increased. And by the end of the week, there are almost ten transcendent stage cultivators down and Sam has blocked the two main routes directly with all the equipment in ce.

    The trade was haltedpletely. At least currently, the curfew is going on and it wouldn¡¯t impact much, but even the curfew is not a long-term solution, so they have to think of alternatives.

    After the sessful blockage of the first two, Sam is currently wrapping the presents for the kings and the soldiers.

    He is currently operating on the undead feathered as he ced all the gifts within them.

    After the wrapping ispleted, the undead that almost looked like they are injured and running away all ran towards their camp near the city wall.

    The leaders of the camp are already wary of these things, so one of them yelled at the top of his lungs.

    "Halt right there and tell us your names and which unit you belong to."

    But the undead didn¡¯t stop, they only listen to the Wights and Ghouls that made them. Not some random yelling feathered.

    Seeing that they are not stopping at all, the captains ordered their teams to attack without any care.

    The Undead have only one job to reach the camps and the soldiers made it their job to stop them.

    But they couldn¡¯t do that as the wights are ghouls are controlling the undead properly, they don¡¯t even have to fight back, all they have to do is a dodge, block, or even absorb some attacks and take damage. As long as they reached the camp, everything is fine.

    Even though some of the undead fell before they reached, most of them did and they pressed the triggers ced on their body.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The series of explosions could be heard all over near the city wall. The soldiers were thrown into chaos.

    At this moment, Sam appeared on harbinger in the sky and started kicking the metal balls into the already existing frenzy.

    After kicking that, he dropped a scroll right there before leaving.

    Nobody cared why Sam is looking different from the two humans that escaped the temple. In fact, they don¡¯t have any time to care. They had to take care of their own.

    The priest left the city and went to the explosion zone. He guided the soldiers and healers to save the people that could be saved and then finally picked up the scroll. After reading the contents, he brought it back to the Queen.

    Queen looked at the scroll with aplicated gaze.

    The contents of the scroll are simple and straightforward.

    "We are not as weak as you think and this is only the beginning. If you want to risk the lives of your soldiers and the people, along with your sons, then please continue what you are doing. If you don¡¯t want to do that, just for the sake of a self-centered goddess, give that weapon fragment and take your sons back.

    If you don¡¯t make a decision by the dawn, I can help you make a decision. Wait for my next present."

    With that, the message ended.

    Looking at the Queen¡¯s angry and conflicting gaze, the priest spoke.

    "Queen Rata, you cannot think of handing it over. Your sons are important but so is the word was given by the Goddess. I would like you to give me a chance. Even if we break the rules for a moment, she might forgive us, but if we give the fragment away, then we would be facing her full wrath."

    "You have until dawn. If something happens to my sons, I will kill you for convincing me."

    With that, the queen left.

    The priest had aplicated gaze and flew out of the temple.

    He wanted to take action himself because he knew that the Queen has an extremely soft spot for her sons. She would definitely let go of her queen position and live a normal life if it is for her sons, much less a meaningless weapon fragment that is just collecting dust under the temple.

    While the priest took off to the forest, Sampletely nullified his activity. He took everyone with him and went into hiding.

    He didn¡¯t attack, defend or make any other ns. He didn¡¯t want to go for a full war on this city like he did with the Silva city. The Queen here is more emotional than the King there and she spoiled her sons rotten. At least King Silva knew how to toughen his little girl up, but here these guys are nothing but pampered princes.

    So, there is no way she would let them feel the pain and the suffering.

    But Sam wondered about one thing though. The golden feathers.

    Grace had multiple golden feathers on her position, but these two guys didn¡¯t which didn¡¯t add up at all.

    So, Sam entered the chessboard and asked them.

    At first, they didn¡¯t want to speak, but after some ¡¯careful¡¯ and ¡¯gentle¡¯ pampering, they did open their mouths.

    It turned out the feathers are not just given, they are earned through thepetitions held for the younger generation. Thepetitions are held in the central temple where all royals of the six cities gather along with their best fighters and Grace turned out to be the best of all of them.

    And these golden feathers were the rewards from the goddess and only works for the feathered.

    Sam is a bit disappointed after the whole exnation.

    The functions of the golden feathers are not as good as he thought.

    The night passed with the team running around the forest stealthily without doing anything and right before dawn, Sam sent the team to do their new tasks, they are preparing for something big, and Sam to prepare something for that.

    After sending everyone, he entered the divine dimension and made a new toy. This is not actuallypletely new, this is just the modification of the sealing devices that restrict the cultivations by blocking the energy flow of the body.

    He is modifying the seal in such a way that instead of just blocking the energy, it will forcefully inject the energy. But thetter part is difficult without any entity there to manipte and direct the energy properly, which led to Sam using a spirit.

    The spirit¡¯s job is to use the elemental energy from the elemental stones ced in the device to forcefully seal the energy of the body and then forcefully inject this energy into that body.

    After making the arrangements, he ordered everyone to do their part.

    The first step is to send a video to the city and that too directly to the queen. From what Sam heard from Arkiv, the priest here is some kind of nut job and he is scarier than the queen the whole time even though she is more powerful.

    So, Sam made multiple videos and made them reach many soldiers along with a note telling them to deliver this to the queen.

    While that is happening, he sent some presents to the city walls with less defense.

    The forces mostly focused on guarding the front of the city as there are no side entrances and it would take a long time to take a detour.

    So, Sam decided to attack these ces on arge scale enough to scare the people who are still under curfew to be scared.

    Then the final step, they have to wait for the queen to make her move.

    When the queen saw the video Sam sent to her, she couldn¡¯t keep it to herself anymore.

    She started weeping as she felt the sorrow and the rage hit her at the same time. If possible she wanted to kill them both, but the Goddess clearly stated that the weapon fragments could be lost if pushes to shove, but the yers shouldn¡¯t be killed.

    So, she has to control herself and decide.

    When she was about to take the decision, the priest who got the wind of the news came to find her and see her state. When he saw the video, even he couldn¡¯t take it and felt suffocated. Even though he wanted to persuade her otherwise, he couldn¡¯t bring himself to when he saw their situation. But when he saw the statue of Nike, he hardened himself and thought of a different idea.

 Chapter 845: Exchange

    That day, there is no more activity from both of them. The search from the feathered was stoppedpletely and there is no one who came to search them.

    Everything is silent.

    After the next day has passed, Sam sent another video and a small scroll with the message to the queen with the silver pigeon.

    The pigeon just dropped the message at the entrance of the temple and returned.

    The message is simple.

    It is the ce and time for the exchange of the hostage for the weapon fragment. But before that, they have to do some preparations ording to his instructions and then only they will exchange.

    When the priest took a look at the requirements he rejected them immediately.

    "Queen Rata, this isplete nonsense, you cannot possibly think of agreeing to his demands at all. He is just using your love for your sons to do all this."

    "Then what do you want me to do? My sons are being tortured as we speak. Their bodies wouldn¡¯t be able to take it."

    "Then agree to my n. We would be able to take them down easily. They are only a couple of humans."

    "What couple of humans? When will you stop underestimating others and overestimating us? You don¡¯t know anything. You don¡¯t know what kind of world is outside this.

    You don¡¯t know what humans are actually capable of.

    The goddess you pray so much is not invincible against them. Do you think that she ordered us to not kill them because she is fair, just, and kind? Because she is afraid to do anything to them. She is afraid that someone woulde knocking on her door and that knock would be enough to destroy her whole mansion.

    If you don¡¯t know anything just shut up and stay put., Don¡¯t downy their abilities."

    Her sudden outburst made him feel a bit lost. The priest didn¡¯t expect that not only would Queen speak like this, but she is also even thrashing the goddess.

    At first, he thought she is just speaking out of her anger, but when he carefully ruminated on her words, he understood that she gave a lot of information unknowingly.

    He took a bit time for himself and thought of something.

    He flew back to the Queen and told her his n and now all they have to do is wait for the time toe.

    Sam and his group are all in their positions waiting for the feathered toe here.

    This time, the situation is a bit different. He didn¡¯t just call for representatives and some transcendent stage cultivators to pick up the hostages, rather he called for the Queen and the Priest.

    The next morning at dawn the forces of the city are all moving to the side of the city. They just left the front gate open and stayed in a formation. Meanwhile, the Priest and the Queen moved out of the city. Only two of them.

    The rest of the transcendent stage cultivators started following them after fifteen minutes.

    Sam is using the telescope and started following them from afar as he traced their path and after they crossed every major point Sam marked, he let the wights and ghouls out to take their positions.

    Arkiv and Arman are in their own positions already.

    After everything was set in ce, Arman finally appeared before the Priest and Queen along with the two feathered.

    The shadow feathered.

    Currently, they are in the worst state they could be and there is not a single thing they could do about it.

    Their shadow elemental fusion was activated, but there are golden lines all over their body. This is because of the modified seals Sam, ced on them.

    He forced them to use the shadow fusion and then ced the seals in the middle of the process. The seals contained the light elemental stones and the light elemental energy which contradicts the shadow a lot is being injected forcefully into their bodies. This caused their body to be a battlefield between the two contrasting elemental energies.

    Hindering their motion, breathing, thinking, and any other physical or mental activity.

    When Queen Rata saw her sons in such a state, she was angry and furious and her aura raged crazily and Arman felt the pressure.

    But he just ced his hands on the necks of the two guys and their screams made her calm down.

    "Brought what I want?" Arman asked coldly after the pressure was lifted.

    She threw something at him and Arman caught it. Sam who is standing from afar looked at the object that flew across through the telescope and frowned.

    He couldn¡¯t examine it properly but he felt like something was off. For them to throw the fragment without any resistance and insistence to send the hostages first, this is not normal.

    Arman is currently wearing amunication device that is like a Bluetooth headset, Sam was about to say something, but he saw something else in the background and got distracted by that for a second and Arman let the hostages go, he jumped back and threw a key towards the Queen and said.

    "The lock would be open if he uses his fire elemental energy for a half-an-hour with proper concentration and after that, you have to clean the body of the light elemental energy immediately and maintain the cleansing process for one hour. If not, they will have permanent damage." Arman said while he took a step back.

    At this moment, Sam spoke into themunication device.

    "Arman be careful. Something ising from your left."

    Arman turned around to see. There is a Azure lightning growing brightly.

    "Shit, why did this fuckere now of all times?" Arman cursed and took out his saber. The blue lightning covered his whole body as he ran backwards.

    Sam looked at the situation and informed Arkiv.

    "Arkiv, do your thing."

    Immediately, Arkiv who is hiding near the camp of the transcendent stage cultivators that are following the queen and the Priest from a distance and shot an arrow at the group.

    The wights and ghouls who are in their position started shooting the metal balls and other things full of poison. There are some fire elemental ghouls and Wights, so they could handle it.

    The poison grenades, the spikes full of poison smoke, the pin grenades and the undead bombs that are constantly sted over the group are all in full swing and the ghouls and Wights started retreating, but not before they activated a couple of soul formations on the already injured group.

    Sam didn¡¯t want to use the undying mes, that is why he put the exchange in the morning instead of night.

    Meanwhile, Sam took out the hover car and moved towards Arkiv. He picked him and collected the ghouls and wights into the chess board.

    Arman is still running the direction of the city as he threw the fragment in his spatial storage. Donner is after him with a battle hammer swing lightning strikes from a far. Arman is repelling them with his own saber lighting strikes.

    The forest is full of shes.

    After Sam Arkiv up, he moved towards Arman¡¯s location.

    While the Queen and the Priest are busy saving the two guys and the transcendent stage feathered are enduring the horrors of the poison and stuff.

    Sam finally arrived at the entrance of the city along with Arkiv.

    Arman and Donner are fighting like crazy as they created a destroyed path in the forest. Both of them are caught up in a fight within that route and just when Arman was finally about to create a distance and jump on the car, Donner caught up and held him tightly.

    He took the stab of the saber to his chest and hit the battle hammer on Arman¡¯s leg prompting both of them to drop their weapons and get exchanged in a fierce grapple.

    The lightning element flew around and destroyed the surroundings while both of them didn¡¯t let go.

    Arman wants to get out of the lock, but Donner is hell bent on taking him on.

    All themotion got the remaining forces to be alerted.

    "We have to help him." Sam said and came out of the car along with Arkiv.

    Donner was evenly matched with Arman and he has only one goal at the moment and that is not even to defeat Arman, he only needs the spatial ring that has the fragment.

    When Arman saw the both of theming out, he made an attack that damaged both of them and ran backwards. He took out the fragment from the storage and threw it towards Sam.

    Sam jumped upwards to catch it, but Donner threw the battle hammer towards Sam. The hammer flew with Azure lightning and with the amount of power it packed, Sam had to dodge it, but Arkiv who is behind shot an arrow at the fragment so that Donner wouldn¡¯t get a hold it.

    But Donner didn¡¯t seem to have cared, all of a sudden a blood drop appeared in his hand and Sam was shocked. This the blood art that was given to the rest of the yers.

    The hammer that Sam just dodged flew back to Donner and it has some new patterns.

    He didn¡¯t go for Arkiv or Arman who is already injured, rather he went straight for Sam without care and used his full power.

    He is as fast and forceful as a bolt of lightning.

 Chapter 846: Secrets of the Temples

    Sam didn¡¯t have time to dodge. Donner is that fast. So, he tried to block the attack with all his might as he activated the earth elemental fusion.

    But even before the fusion could bepleted, he felt the heavy impact on his chest throwing him off.

    Sam felt his bones crack and lungs shake as he spat a mouthful of blood.

    Donner didn¡¯t even bother to follow up with that and took the weapon fragment on the ground before running into the city.

    He ran towards the temple and all the three of them could see a streak of lightning. Arman who is already injured was also about to use the blood art, but Sam stopped him as the three of them took off in the car as they followed Donner.

    Sam was really impressed by Donner¡¯s speed because he is almost as fast as the Hover car, which should have been basically impossible normally, but with the blood art, it is possible.

    Donner¡¯s use of lightning is a bit different. While Arman has the chaos under control and used it precisely, donner let it have a free reign as it liked. It can even be seen in the way he is running with the help of lightning and it actually suits his battle style using the hammer.

    Soon they entered deep into the city and are moving towards the temple.

    Meanwhile, back at the hostage exchange point.

    "Why are there more humans here? Are they not supposed to be only two? Where did the other twoe from?"

    The Queen asked the priest.

    "I don¡¯t know. Nobody noticed anything odd at all. We didn¡¯t even suspect anything before much less know that they are here."

    "Are they from another city?" She asked while she channeled the dark elemental energy into her sons¡¯ bodies to ease their pain.

    "I don¡¯t know. But if they are really from other cities and they already got the weapon fragments, wouldn¡¯t that mean..."

    He trailed off at that and looked at the city where the lightning is rattling constantly.

    While they are contemting something, the chase in the city already entered the temple. Donner is aiming for the back entrance so that he could leave the city and be on his journey to the forest.

    When they are in the central hall, Sam involuntarily looked at the familiar ce and the majestic statue in the middle, and when his eyesnded on the base of the statue, he felt that something is odd. But he still continued the chase.

    But just when they were about to exit the temple through the rear exit, he stopped the hovercar and thought of something, he forgot because of all the frenzy.

    He turned the car around back to the temple to take a look and when he looked at the surroundings, he remembered many things he saw in the Silva temple and the Central temple. He couldn¡¯t help but smile.

    Arkiv and Arman are a bit frustrated and anxious that they would let Donner slip.

    "Don¡¯t worry, we would get the weapon fragment, sooner orter. But I think I found something crucial here."

    With that, they stayed there for over half an hour.

    When Sam was doing his thing, Arkiv and Arman were surprised by his actions and what he got.

    By the time they are finished, the forces of the feathered are alreadying to the temple. The three of them once again took off in the hovercar and zoomed into the forest.

    "Can we catch up to him?"

    Arkiv asked as he looked around. His eyes are glowing weirdly. This is his very own eye technique.

    He is an archer after all.

    "I think we will. You should know about blood art better than I do. He is bound to be exhausted sooner orter."

    "Yeah, he would. But he is really good at hiding.

    In the past two weeks, while we are working, he not only managed to avoid the transcendent stage feathered and other forces, he also managed to hide from us."

    Arman replied from the side.

    "Well, you don¡¯t have to worry about hiding in this route. The beasts wouldn¡¯t let you hide even if you want to. They are annoying.

    As they spoke, both of them got caught up with Donner who is fighting with a bunch of beasts.

    Arkiv opened the door of the hovering car and climbed to the top of the roof with his bow.

    He started shooting Donner while taking advantage of his perilous situation.

    But Donner is no soft persimmon, he just broke through the deadlock and diverted the beasts towards the car and Arkiv.

    They shed continuously and the rest of the journey continued in simr circumstances.

    Donner would go forward and sh with the beasts, Sam and the team tried to attack him and he would either attack them back or let the beasts hinder them while he escaped.

    This made the journey which is supposed to be over in forty days to take sixty days.

    Now, they are in the middle of the seventh month by the time they reached the central temple.

    Donner entered the temple hurriedly and took a battle stance as he looked at Sam, Arkiv, and Arman who came out of the car.

    "We are already at the temple, so leave me alone. The fragment is mine."

    Sam just smiled and said.

    "Sure."

    With that, he left the ce and went to one of the temple halls along with Arkiv and Arman.

    In Silva city¡¯s temple which ispletely covered with rubble and almost destroyed, Sam saw some intricate inner mechanisms that could lead to something. An entrance, a defensive system, or something. But he didn¡¯t think much as he couldn¡¯t understand it too much because of its destroyed state.

    At most he thought it was just normal secret storage or locker, just like the ce they stored the weapon fragment.

    After he came to the Central temple, he roamed around the temple for around fifteen days and set up many traps here by taking advantage of the architectural structures of the whole temple and in the process, he entered many small temple halls that are here.

    The temple halls have various sculptors and engravings depicting many things. Some showing Nike¡¯s might, some showing her stories with Zeus and her devotion to him, and some showing the process of the temple construction.

    But the one thing that made him interested the most is the exact replication of the temples.

    The small temples within the temple grounds here are the same as the temples that are in the six cities.

    The temple grounds are structured in such a way.

    That there is onerger temple and six smaller temples surrounding therge one and some temple halls and other structures surrounding these six smaller temples.

    At first, he didn¡¯t care much about the six smaller temples and the engravings on them. But now that he saw the temple in the Rata city, he understood the resemnce.

    That is why he halted in his tracks to check some things in the temples and revtions astounded him and his friends.

    Now that he learned these six smaller temples resemble the ones in the cities, he wants to see what he could find.

    So, he went to the temple that looked simr to the one in the Rata city and started moving the statues and other things.

    There are many secret levers and cogs that he moved and rearranged some.

    Arman is sitting on the steps at the entrance with a saber as he looked at Donner who is meditating far away.

    He is wary of him. Because the soundsing from the temple are extremely loud and it would be weird if Donner didn¡¯t be curious.

    After Sam worked for an hour or so, the whole setup moved and a secret door was opened which has stairs leading to an underground area.

    When Sam entered, the tunnel which waspletely dark was illuminated all of a sudden as the formation is activated.

    When he entered the cave, there are some engravings of words and images all over.

    He carefully read all of them and finally, he arrived at therge opening this ce led them to.

    Inside there is a book glowing brightly.

    Sam picked the book up and looked into it.

    RATA.

    The word was written on the cover page. When he opened the book, there are a few lines on the first page.

    "If you are not from the Rata branch of the feathered. This book has no use for you."

    After some examining through the book which described a cultivation technique that he couldn¡¯t practice, he looked around in the room and finally found something. An engraving.

    There are a few more words written there.

    "This book is the property of the Rata branch of the feathered race.

    This is the lost secret art of the race which was ced here by Nike. If you are here, then that means, you are not from the feathered race. Nike ced a curse on this world and this path can only be essible by people that are not from the feathered race.

    But this book has no use for you no matter who you are. It can only work in the hands of the Rata Feathered and the art can only be learned by them.

    So, if you don¡¯t mind. Please hand this book over to them."

    The que is destroyed and only pieces of it were left whichpiled this message.

    Sam was a bit confused. But he threw the book into his divine dimension and left.

    He wanted to see if he can find out what is inside the other temples. But thought was bugging him.

    If it was this easy to crack the code of the temple, why didn¡¯t the feathered race obtain this book earlier?

 Chapter 847: Players Gathered

    Sam walked to the Silva temple and wanted to crack the code of the temple too.

    But while he was doing so, several thoughts are eating his mind.

    It is easy to crack the code, once they identify the simrities between the two temples. And Sam is not narcissistic enough to think that he is the only guy who managed to guess the purpose of the simrities in tens of centuries.

    But that raises the question, why it was not opened until now?

    Sam doesn¡¯t know, but he wants to know that. As for how to know that, the only way he could think of for now is to try and open other temples and see if he could find any ques simr to the one that was in the Rata temple.

    It also stated that the path wouldn¡¯t open for feathered. Sam would like to know the reason and find the whole story so that he could think of ways to utilize it to his own benefit.

    So, he started working. For the Rata temple, he already had the required info and knowledge from the city. But for the rest he didn¡¯t.

    The closest he had is the Silva temple which he is trying to open next.

    He managed to finish half of the process within an hour and that is as far as his information could lead him.

    And the rest of the process is going to be a night mare.

    Sam started decoding the unlocking procedure with only the clues left here and for that just observing with eyes is not enough.

    He started looking at the mechanisms, walls, pirs, statues and every inch of them with the observation ability.

    He couldn¡¯t even afford to leave a single millimeter of the stone brick of a temple unexamined, if he really wants to open it.

    The process is long and testing his patience.

    He really wanted to just give it up in the middle. But he didn¡¯t because, before he took any decision, he wanted to see if it was all worth it. So, he took the book to the second floor of the divine dimension.

    He started simting the whole process of the art is a body that was described in the book to a very minute detail.

    When he was done with the whole process, he was stunned. Until now, he really underestimated the feathered and their potential. So much, that he didn¡¯t even bother to collect them in his chess board. But now that he saw this, he felt like he should do that.

    The art is actually suitable for the feathered with the shadow elemental affinity, which is the Rata family branch. But the family bloodline is so thin that barely three to four people are carrying the bloodline for the next generation and this time, it is still two and they are the twins and the previous generation is obviously the queen.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know what kind of elemental affinity that Silva family has. But from the looks of it there is a great possibility that they are of wind element.

    He really wants to see what could feathered do if they got their hands on this method. He might even reconsider collecting a few. In fact the heirs of each city and make them practice technique. He would have another powerful force with him that he could deploy in a different business branch of his.

    So, he went back to work.

    For the next ten days he worked his ass off to unlock the second temple.

    For some reason the normal spiritual sense is not actually going through the walls and the stones of temple.

    He couldn¡¯t even see the stone structure, much less the contents beyond the stone structure.

    After Sam got the book from Silva temple, he moved to the next one.

    Now that he has the experience with these mechanisms Sam started getting the hang of it a bit and sped up a bit, but he is sure that that it would take at least twenty days for the third one.

    But what he is not sure about or he didn¡¯t know about is that as soon as he took the book in the temple, something happened in Rata city.

    The temple¡¯s central hall started glowing and the statues of Nike shook wildly before shattering into pieces.

    In the ce of the statues, a pir came out with the name of RATA written on it along with an engraved sculptor of a feathered in shadow form.

    The same thing happened in Silva city with the only differences being the statues already being mostly destroyed and the names and engraved sculptors are different.

    The Queen and the King on both ces was astonished and they ordered their subordinates.

    "We are going to the Central temple, be prepared."

    But they couldn¡¯t go immediately, because they had to take care of the damage caused by Sam¡¯s visit on the two ces.

    In actual fact, their orders were to not care about the central temple or the yers after the yers get the weapon fragment.

    But now that is not going to happen. They want to go back to the central temple.

    Queen Rata is visiting the top floor of the temple every day after this phenomenon.

    There is arge silver te with a single pir of ck light floating over it. That is the only thing she could see every night.

    After the Silva temple is open though, she saw another pir of light.

    She immediately ran towards the te and cut her palm to drop some blood on it.

    The silver te glowed brightly and the pirs of light disappeared.

    "King Silva? King Silva?"

    She started called as she looked at the Silver te.

    Soon the glow disappeared and an image appeared on it.

    The image of King Silva.

    "King Silva, your temple opened as well?"

    "Yes, just now. I am guessing your temple opened earlier."

    "Yes."

    "It seems like the feathered are finally going to be freed from the shackles."

    "I think so too. We are nning to go to the Central temple. Maybe these yersing here is for our boon instead of a curse."

    "It is a boon for us. We are also nning to go there. But not this early. We are nning to be there in three and a half months.

    By then, all the yers would have gathered there and we wouldn¡¯t have trouble at all. If every temple opens, we all have to be there to activate the central temple. Even if they didn¡¯t make it by then, we can wait until their event ispleted and ask whoever opened this to open the rest.

    This is the closest we havee to freedom.

    For some reason Nike is not reacting now. So this is the only chance we would get."

    "We will be there then."

    With that themunication was cut off.

    Meanwhile, back in the central temple after Sam finished off the second temple and moved to third, the next batch of yers came.

    This time it was Noah who happened tond solo in a city and came here with the weapon fragment.

    After a few days, Agun came along with Kumar and both of them were fighting like crazy.

    Sam sped up the process of unlocking and in the next month he unlocked two temples.

    Every yer became curious over this. They knew that Sam wouldn¡¯t do anything unnecessary. For him to take so much time out of all this, they felt like there is something precious here.

    By the end of ten and a half months, every temple was unlocked. But when Sam was on the final stage of unlocking thest temple, he heard amotion outside. He finished the process quickly and went outside to take a look and he was surprised by what he saw.

    It is arrival of thest two yers. The only path that was left unchecked.

    Akhil and Dayus areing from there. But not in a normal way.

    A bunch of feathered are following them while holding Akhil like a prisoner.

    Every other yer was alerted.

    Sam felt amused and walked forward with the rest of them.

    As soon as Dayus arrived in the temple with the rest of them, Akhil who acted weak moved all of a sudden and kicked in the groin of the feathered that is holding him and escaped with his shackles.

    He ran towards Sam and asked.

    "Help me with these please."

    Sam ced his hands on the shackles and turned them into powder in a few seconds.

    The feathered wanted to follow, but Dayus waved his hand to stop them from moving forward.

    "No need. There is no use holding him down here anyway."

    Arkiv who has contacts with everyone spoke.

    "You have some pretty good following here Dayus."

    Dayus looked at him with a side eye and spoke.

    "Agun, Donner. Do you have your fragments?"

    Donner nodded and went away and Agun shook his head. Kumar held the fragment there.

    The three yers were united and they are all looking at the rest of the yers with a hint of pride. They really felt they already won because they are sure they would get another fragment.

    Dayus swept them with a look and said.

    "Let us show our hands. Who has the fragments and who doesn¡¯t?"

    Everyone didn¡¯t mind. Agun didn¡¯t have the fragment. Sam and Arkiv also raised their hands. He looked at the rest of the people who didn¡¯t have any fragments.

    "Well, I need one more fragment for my teammate Agun here. If one of you hands it over, then we will not fight it out with you. I think it is better if Arman hands it over. After all, you guys are a team of three and you don¡¯t have two, so it will be even."

 Chapter 848: Arrival

    Sam looked at Dayus with a raised eyebrow.

    There is a reason why he gave the fragment to Arkiv. Because Arkiv also has lightning elements and he is a perfectpetition for Dayus, he wanted to create some tension and make the three, Dayus, Agun, and Donner toe at him, Arkiv and Arman.

    It is better than going after them to hunt for weapon fragments.

    And it seems like his n worked.

    "You know it is not going to happen. Just get on with it already."

    Arkiv spoke and the tension started building up in the group. Nobody knows who is going to make the first move and in the end, it is Agun that made the first move.

    He is the most impatient of the group. He threw a giant ball of me towards Arman and ran after it to get closer.

    He expected a return attack or something like that, but to his surprise, nothing of that sort came.

    Sam started running away without any shame. In fact, there is a smirk on his face and the duo followed him.

    The rest of the group started shing as well and the frenzy of the feathered following Dayus is only an additional nuisance in all this.

    After running for a while, Sam jumped up and stood on arge stone pir, and closed his eyes.

    Arkiv and Arman also jumped to the nearest stone pir and got ready with their attacks.

    The sky was covered with blue lightning while started shooting like crazy.

    Before the rest of the followers could notice what is happening, explosions urred in the surroundings.

    The group of feathered werepletely caught in it while the three yers managed to defend themselves a bit.

    But that is only temporary.

    As soon as they were distracted by the explosions, Arkiv and Arman attacked.

    Arman¡¯s lightning strikesnded continuously without any break, but two of the three yers following them are actually the lightning users as well.

    So, it is not an ideal element to fight here. But it is a good thing that is mostly there for support, to distract the three of them as Arkiv attacked.

    The arrows pierced through the dusty smoke and reached their targets.

    By the time the dust cleared, Sam disappeared along with his two teammates.

    The same situation happened again and again.

    The numbers of the feathered are dwindling like crazy while the three yers are getting exhausted.

    And that exhaustion led to confusion and before they knew it, they are inside a pit, Sam has prepared before.

    The gravity of the pit is increased by many folds and they couldn¡¯t just jump up. Right when they thought they got the hold of the gravity, it would change and make them nt their faces into the ground.

    The feathered that are flying was also dragged to the ground because of the gravitational pull.

    "Sam, let us get out of here."

    Dayus screamed at the top of his lungs. But Sam didn¡¯t care.

    He sat at the edge of the pit with his teammates and said.

    "Give me your fragment and I will leave you guys alone. I won¡¯t participate in the rest of the fight."

    "You wish."

    Dayus said angrily.

    "I am only asking for one. But that has to be yours. You are a team of three, I am pretty sure you can handle the rest, if I leave you now."

    "Why should it be mine?" Dayus asked suspiciously.

    "Because, I didn¡¯t like the condescending way you talked to me earlier. It has to be you. Otherwise there is no deal. Even your survival is in your hands.

    After all, there is no rule against killing other yers."

    "Like hell, you would kill me. If you did that you would be isted by the rest of them."

    "Are you sure about that? Is it really me they are going to iste? Or someone who teamed up with locals to fight with the fellow yers."

    As he spoke, Dayus startedughing as he looked in a certain direction.

    Sam looked in that direction only to see some feathereding over. He looked at Dayus and said.

    "Do you think you are the only one who can amass numbers? I just didn¡¯t want to use them with the fellow yers."

    With a wave of his hands the ghoul team and Wight team, all came out of the chessboard.

    "This is only half of it. Do you want more?"

    With another wave of hand Yanwu and the rest of the beasts came out.

    "You seemed to have forgotten that I am the most resourceful guy here. Now be a goodd and give me that weapon fragment before things get out of hand. After all, I am sure that I won¡¯t be able to hold back anymore. My patience is running thin."

    Dayus felt conflicted but he couldn¡¯t do anything for now. Even though the gravity pit problem is temporary and they will eventually figure out a way, Sam seemed like he nicked every corner of the temple in traps.

    "You guys are three and you would only have two if I give you one. Why are not asking for two."

    This is the only suspicion that the three people in the pit have inmon.

    "It is none of your business. Give me one and I will stay out of your way for the rest of the game, even if I want to join in and get another one, it wouldn¡¯t be from you. Deal?"

    Dayus was conflicted a bit, but he still nodded.

    "Deal."

    Dayus took his weapon fragment and threw it towards Sam who caught it and left the area with the ghouls and Wights back in the chessboard.

    After Sam left, the gravity effect on the pit disappeared and the three of them came out.

    "Let us go. We have to make sure we get two fragments."

    Sam and his teammates just walked out of the battlefield and sat at the steps of thergest central temple, which is also the main temple.

    This temple has apound of itself inside the walls and it is highly likely that pce of inheritance might appear there.

    While Sam is waiting the rest of the candidates fought with tooth and nail to get a weapon fragment for themselves.

    Noah is still holding on to hers for now while Kumar and another person from the Herb garden are still trying their best to fight it out within themselves.

    But the battle continued intensely.

    The trio of Dayus, Agun, and Donner are met with some serious resistance as the rest of the candidates, whether they had a fragment are not extremely fond of their way of doing things.

    This is not exactly a great thing after all.

    The battle went on for days.

    Akhil is going after the trio fearlessly. He seemed to have really held a grudge against Dayus. He is relentless in his attacks and didn¡¯t hold back.

    Every attack seemed to have been aiming for a kill.

    While the situation is like this, time passed and the there were only fifteen days till the next Pce of inheritance.

    All the candidates came to a consensus that they wouldn¡¯t fight in thest week before the Pce of inheritance. Which means they only have a week for now.

    While the situation is already tense, something else happened. A group of feathered led by King Silva just came out of the route from the Silva city.

    Sam waspletely surprised and alerted at the same time. While he is contemting on what could the reason be, Queen Rata did the same and the rest of the routes soon followed.

    Within the same day, all six kings or queens came along with arge group of feathered with them.

    All the yers stopped their battle as they felt a bit nervous. Even though they are strong and they might be able to take some Transcendent stage cultivators on if they really tried, this kind of lineup is too much for them.

    They don¡¯t know what to do.

    Sam who has a rtively amicable rtionship with King Silva looked at him in askance. King Silva gestured for Grace to move forward and exin the situation to him.

    She flew towards Sam and whispered to him.

    "We are here because someone unlocked the secrets of the temples here. We need to talk to that person. Is that you?"

    "Secrets of the temples?"

    "Yes, one of you unlocked the temples and ording to my father, there should be a book under it. We need that book."

    "Why do you need that?"

    "Is it really you?" Her eyes brightened. At this moment, Arkiv came from the side and pulled her by her wing, and said.

    "Why are you whispering to him so closely? You can talk normally."

    "Is it a friendly exchange or a serious one?" Sam asked Grace.

    "This is a friendly exchange. We are not here to threaten anyone. But we don¡¯t want to be yed either. I hope you can make the decision."

    "I want to talk to your father privately. Only me and him." Sam replied after some thought.

    "I will ask him."

    She flew back and asked her father.

    Who nodded and both of them walked into the Silva temple.

 Chapter 849: Palace Appeared

    Sam and Silva stood in the Silva temple.

    Silva looked at the still open secret door and was pleased to see that. He went to the central statue and started rotating it back and the secret door slowly started closing.

    It took around a hundred or so turns to do that and after the secret door is closed, the statues started moving and slowly disappeared into the slots that are reced by pirs simr to that of the ones in the Silva city.

    Sam was surprised.

    "It seems like you did this identally, you didn¡¯t know that you should close the temple back."

    "Not exactly idental. I saw that there is a resemnce between the temple here and the temple in the city, so I wanted to see if there is anything hidden and it seems like it is real."

    "You really are our boon. I wille straight to the point. We want those books. What do you want in return?"

    "Before we discuss further ande to a decision, tell me something. Why didn¡¯t you guys open these earlier? From the information I gathered, you cannot enter the path, but you could send a beast, an undead creature, or something else. There are other options for you.

    Why did you wait all these years?"

    "It is not like we wanted to wait. We were forced to wait. First of all, every person that was born on this is bound to follow the rules of Goddess Nike, they are trained and bred in such a way. Only after we leave this would we learn the real truth.

    We are not actually the descendants of Nike. She is just like any other feathered. In fact, she didn¡¯t belong to any of the six main branches.

    We don¡¯t know how she managed to be what she became today. But after she attained those heights, she didn¡¯t want another feathered to attain the same heights, so she stole the secret arts of the six main branches, but the ancestors who are on the verge of death after the battle with her managed to use their bodies and souls as a sacrifice to seal those arts within the.

    To prevent Nike who can take over any feathered body with the possession just like she did with me, to get these books, they made sure that anyone from the feathered race wouldn¡¯t be able to take it.

    As for opening it. We were brainwashed since childhood and even though we knew that there is something hidden inside, we are not allowed to go there and in fact, for the children and youngsters, the secret rooms are actually the prisons for the spirits of the demons that tried to annihte the Feathered race.

    That was what we were taught.

    The people who left this after reaching the transcendent stage peak will learn what exactly is happening but it is already toote.

    Once we go there, we would be fed with Pill of servitude to not talk or do anything about this and only one from each generation will return to this ce as a Consummate and I will wait for the next Consummate level feathered to appear in my city and go back to that ce.

    This is what happens.

    Nike is not our goddess, she is just a petty self-centered woman who wants to feel revered and validated constantly.

    Once a consummate level person appeared from each of the six branches while cultivating this technique, they would be able to unseal the curse that is making Nike able to ess this ce.

    Even though the wormholes and portals connecting this to the other are destroyed, at least we won¡¯t die if we break through the Consummate level in this ce."

    Sam was surprised when he heard that.

    "You don¡¯t have any other transportation methods to other realms from here?"

    "No."

    "Well, it seems like we can really make a proper deal. But there is one condition to proceed."

    "What is it?"

    "You guys have to wait until our test is over. It will start fifteen dayster and it might take a few days to few weeks, I want you to wait until then and we can discuss it after that. I have all six books and the rest of the yers don¡¯t need to get involved in this mess.

    You can discuss with the rest ande to a conclusion."

    "There is no need to discuss. Since it is with you, we will wait for now. But we take our temples as the residence."

    "Sure, but for the next week, the battle would be intense. So, don¡¯t let your youngsters get in the way, those guys wouldn¡¯t hesitate to kill."

    "Okay."

    With that, the discussion is over and the battle went on and on.

    Thest week was pretty intense and the yers destroyed a good portion of the temple properties. Most of them are Nike¡¯s things so there is no problem for the feathered.

    Even though the youngsters wanted to stop that and retaliate, but the kings and queens stopped them from doing anything stupid.

    By the end of the week, everyone stopped.

    Now from the count, the six people that have the fragments are Arkiv, Arman, Donner, Dayus, Noah, and Akhil.

    Akhil actually went after the trio to get the fragment at first, but they came to a truce for a while where the trio took it from Kumar.

    As soon as they did that, Akhil went and got that one, then the trio had to move to another batch to get the second one.

    If possible they wanted three. But Agun has topromise as he doesn¡¯t have a lightning element and it is not as beneficial to him as it is for his teammates.

    For the next week, everyone is healing and recovering from the wholemotion.

    And finally, their entry badges which are in their spiritual sea started reacting on one day.

    The Pce of Inheritance appeared and the badges are guiding them towards the entrance of the central temple.

    Everyone who has a fragment walked towards it. But when they saw Sam walking towards it, they are a bit surprised.

    "Where are you going?" Agun asked from the rear.

    Sam took out a weapon fragment which is actually a piece of the shaft of the spear and said.

    "I have one so I am going."

    Everyone else was surprised, but the one that was most surprised is actually Donner. He took out his own fragment and took a look.

    It looked exactly simr to the one Sam has in his hands.

    "How is that possible?" Donner asked as there is a faint sense of dread in his heart.

    "It is possible because the fragment you have is fake," Sam answered nonchntly.

    "Fake?"

    Donner looked at Queen Rata who is standing in the back far away.

    She just shrugged which made Donner feel a bit helpless.

    "You guys were in on this?"

    "No, actually. It was their n to put a fake instead of a real one in the exchange, but too bad they didn¡¯t know we two are there until thest minute and they also don¡¯t know we already got the fragment from Silva city and we know where it is hidden.

    So, when we are escaping, I noticed that the mechanisms in the temple are not active, so I went on check while I was checking something else.

    Too bad, you fell for the act."

    The act Sam is talking about him trying to attack Donner all the way back to the temple.

    They battled constantly as if they are really trying their best to get the weapon fragment from him.

    Donner became angry and threw the piece of metal at Sam.

    It was surrounded by the blue-colored lightning. Sam¡¯s hands were covered with silver lightning as he caught the metal piece.

    "Better luck next time."

    With that he walked forward with the fragment in his hands along with the rest of the yers.

    When they entered the temple¡¯s main door, they went through that familiar feeling and reached the main hall of the Pce of inheritance.

    But as soon as they did that, the weapon fragments disappeared from their hands.

    The Avatar stood there and said.

    "You don¡¯t have to worry about too much in this Pce of inheritance.

    The tests are direct and easy to understand and they are directly relevant to your strength.

    Pick a room and go in.

    You have to stay in there for two days to get over the first round. Then four for the second round, eight for the third round, and ten for the fourth round.

    If more than one person finishes the fourth round, then you will have a final battle.

    Until then you wouldn¡¯t have contact with anyone.

    You can use any form of medicine and standard weapons. You cannot use special weapons, consumable weapons, and even the formation gs and inscription ink are banned inside.

    You can only battle directly. Even your beast pets andpanions are not allowed.

    All you have to do is fight and endure the circumstances.

    All the best."

 Chapter 850: Test

    Sam opened the door and walked into the room.

    The whole room ispletely empty. There is nothing else except for a circle in the middle.

    A circle big enough for a person to stand properly. He walked towards the circle and stood there.

    Suddenly the whole room started glowing with a purple electric glow and in holographic hourss with white sand could be seen dropping slowly.

    A screen appeared with Round 1 written on it.

    At this moment, the whole room seemed to have changed. Lightning started raining down on Sam from the top of the room.

    He dodged it hurriedly, but it didn¡¯t stop. Several lightning strikes started falling one after another. Each strike is extremely strong and chaotic. Full if deadly lightning energy.

    Sam doesn¡¯t even know if he could take it without flinching. He looked at the ceiling to see if he could get any visual on that. But as soon as he did that. The lightning suddenly came from the sides and hit him.

    He fell forward and felt like his muscles were all swollen up for a second.

    "It is better if you don¡¯t look up."

    The Avatar¡¯s voice could be heard in his mind.

    Sam stood up slowly and looked around. The lightning strikes are still falling, but it was not too difficult to dodge. If he used the lightning element, he is confident that he can take them all directly without too much of a problem.

    It is not that big of a test. At least until the moment, he thought like that.

    Because at that moment a few silhouettes started forming from thin air and six feathered appeared.

    But they are a bit different from normal feathered. These guys are actually wearing a full body armor. Only their wings and eyes are exposed outside. Even the hands are covered by metal gloves.

    Every one of them is holding a spear.

    Sam just stood there as he waited for them to move.

    The six feathered are currently surrounding Sam and all their spears are held towards him and they stabbed simultaneously, all at the same moment. Sam ducked the stab as he crouched on the ground and slid to the side.

    He held the legs of the feathered and forcefully took him down and rolled over making sure that he is not exposed to the rest of the five feathered.

    His arms turned metallic and fingers turned sharp as he stabbed into the armor with his palm and hit directly at the heart.

    When the lightning was about to strike Sam he threw the body upwards to block it and moved forward to take on another feathered.

    When a spear came flying towards him, he dodged that and jumped towards the feathered in front of him like a cat and took his down once again. This time, his metallic hands are targeted at their wings.

    The wings were cut down and he stabbed the heart through that hole.

    The rest of the group are showing no emotions, not even a bit of rage, anger or even a flinch when he killed them like they are nothing.

    They seemed extremely robotic and they are not using their wings.

    There is no one flying around. The wings are more of a hindrance.

    There is no challenge except for the lightning dodging.

    He made quick work of the rest of the group and was done with it.

    At this moment another bunch of silhouettes started forming in the air and another bunch of feathered came out of nowhere.

    Then came another six feathered with the same type of armor. But this time, they are flying, and unlike before they also have elements.

    And the battle began once again.

    Sam didn¡¯t even get a second to rest. Not that he needed it at the moment, he just felt that he would be needing itter if the battle got too intense as the change in the nature of the feathered is a clear indication of the increase in difficulty for each level.

    Sam took out two daggers this time and activated the shadow element.

    The room is still pretty dark and the feathered is not flying too far. They are just gliding a bit higher than the floor.

    He moved like a ghost as he dodged the lightning and the attacks from the feathered as he left nicks and shes all over their bodies.

    They slowly started falling and soon the second wave was also done in.

    But he didn¡¯t feel happy, because after the second wave came the third, and this time their strength seemed to have increased. Until now, the six of them are barely at Late-stage, but this time, they seemed to be of Peak stage and all of them had different elements while they flew higher.

    The difficulty kept on increasing.

    Sam started fighting like crazy. He stored the daggers away and took out the staff as he jumped constantly to smash the feathered flying around him.

    But the situation just went on and on.

    By the end of the first day, he dealt with feathered that came with various perks and difficulties, and then he got a breathing space in which he took a giant swig of the heavenly wine.

    After finishing that off, the feathered appeared and this time, they increased in number.

    Apart from the original six, there are another six but they didn¡¯t fly. They attacked from the bottom while the first six attacked from the wind.

    Whenever Sam tried to look up, the lightning is striking from random sides and the more he looked at it, the more intense it is bing. That is the only lightning strike he couldn¡¯t dodge since he entered the room.

    He couldn¡¯t use harbinger. It came under the ssification of special weapons.

    It was really annoying.

    After some time, Sam thought of something and activated his partial light elemental fusion. He started running around as he dodged the attacks and the lightning strikes and suddenly looked upwards just for a moment.

    The lightning struck the spot he was in but it didn¡¯t manage to hit him, instead, the feathered who didn¡¯t have any elemental affinity and chasing him to get clean close-quarteredbat was stuck by that and halted in his tracks.

    Sam turned around, deactivated the elemental fusion, and swung his staff to hit him straight at the neck with the full force of the wind at the end.

    Upon contact, the highly concentrated wind cannon wasunched at the point-nk range at the windpipe of the feathered which made the throat burst open and the feathered fell to his knees.

    Sam used the same trick again and started tricking other feathered to fall under the rage of the lightning strikes.

    But the feathered are not stupid. After the third target, the rest of the nine already guessed what could happen and immediately stopped following him.

    They are focused on the long-range attacks and in fact, tried to avoid getting close to him. After multiple tries, Sam managed to get near one feathered but that guy waited as he has fallen for the trick, but stopped Sam right in the track with a kamikaze attack to make him get stuck with the lightning.

    Sam copsed on the floor.

    And the feathered tried to take advantage of this and tried to hit him.

    "I didn¡¯t want to use this early, but fuck it."

    Sam¡¯s body was deactivated from the light elemental fusion and he activated lightning elemental fusion. He looked like a silver ball of lightning as he started punching the feathered that came near him.

    He didn¡¯t care about the lightning strikes that areing from the top.

    He manipted most of it to attack the feathered constantly and the rest of it waspletely absorbed to recharge the spent energy.

    Soon, this wave was finished and the next wave came.

    This time, the number of feathered increased by Six again.

    Space is now a little cramped and the worst part is, the new addition is all lightning type and they are immune to the lightning strikes that arending from the top.

    They are just attacking Sam without care and even if Sam wanted to use the same trick, he couldn¡¯t do it and the lightning strikes seemed to be taking some toll on his physical body even with the fusion as the merging and manipting process is taking some effort from the spiritual core.

    He has to take some heavenly wine in between which is leaving openings for the rest of the feathered.

    Even though he is capable of fighting them off, this is really annoying as it is time taking.

    The worst part is, he couldn¡¯t even use the shadow soldiers who could have bought him some time and even these bodies are disappearing as soon as he killed them.

    He can only grit his teeth and endure this whole long annoying process.

    After this wave is over, twelve out of eighteen turned out to be immune to lightning and the next one all of them are immune to lightning which forced him to change to the earth elements and use gravity to deal with them.

    After that, twelve are immune to lightning and the six are of lightning elemental fusion. This went on and on.

 Chapter 851: Round 2

    After the second day is over, Sam finally had the breathing space to rest a bit.

    The wave after wave of different types of feathered is actually quite annoying and disturbing. In fact, the mental toll is greater than the physical toll for some reason.

    After the first round is over, he sat down on the ground and started gulping the wine down.

    While he is waiting and recovering for the next round, the room suddenly shook and on the opposite wall, a door suddenly appeared.

    Sam waited for a minute and recovered as much as he could before walking towards the door.

    When he walked through that door, he appeared in a room simr to the first one. But this is a lotrger and there are many entrances on the other side of the room.

    Each room looked like a tunnel. Sam couldn¡¯t see the light through it. They arepletely dark

    But there is one thing Sam could see within this room and that is the same circle that was present in the first room. The circle which prompted the start of the test.

    Sam took another gulp of the wine and stored it away before taking out the reaper sword and walked towards that circle.

    Now the survival time is four hours and from the looks of it, the numbers might increase a lot, he has to fight cautiously.

    But as soon as he stood on the circr ring, Sam was surprised. The tunnel entrances across the room started throwing water out.

    The water started gushing out like crazy and soon the room was filled with water.

    Sam swam upwards rapidly as there is an air pocket which helped him take a breath.

    He wanted to take out the breathing device, but that also came under the ssification of the special weapons.

    He could only sigh helplessly, take a deep breath and swim down to take a looked at the situation.

    He activated partial water elemental fusion for the start and waited for the things toe and to his surprise, there is no single creature for the next few seconds.

    While he is contemting what kind of test this would be, he felt a sense of threat and turned around. A water spear is moving through and almost pierced if not for his abrupt dodging.

    After dodging the first attack, Sam didn¡¯t get a chance to think before a second attack came from a different direction and this attack is faster than before, which prompted Sam to block it.

    He was pushed back because of the impact on the de and then came another attack.

    The constant barrage of attacks made him feel suffocated and soon he ran out of air. He started swimming upwards once again to take a deep breath which is the weakest moment and the attacks didn¡¯t stop.

    He had to eat a couple of them and block the rest with the sword. He finished taking a deep breath and once again dove under the water.

    This time, he activated energy vision to take a look inside the water and he finally saw some silhouettes.

    He started attacking them one by one.

    They are not exactly strong, but they are fast and since they can merge with water this easily, it is a bit difficult to attack or to defend against them.

    Their main forte is their stealth in the water and since it is gone, everything became easier.

    Sam felt extremely confident now and dealt with these creatures instantly with the sword, but right when he was about to feel a bit happy about his aplishment, the water started flowing back into the tunnels.

    Sam who was caught up in the flow was not allowed to go into the tunnels, so he was moving around casually as the water left.

    Almost all the water left, except for a knee-deep puddle.

    Even though there is still some water, Sam felt great touching the floor, but that feeling disappeared as soon as it came.

    There is a lighting strike nearby and Sam felt it conducting through the water and giving a shock.

    Before he could make sense of the situation, the feathered appeared once again.

    And this time, they are twenty-four of them and they all have lightning elemental fusion. Sam felt annoyed once again.

    He really is getting pissed at this god for sending these annoying creatures again and again. It is pure torture and for some reason, they are not even bothered to fight Sam directly this time, their main goal was the water puddle on the ground.

    Sam felt vexed as he activated lightning elemental fusion once again and started attacking the feathered.

    Even though the lightning elements could neutralize each other a bit, Sam is still confident that he could deal with them, it just takes some more time.

    And he did exactly that.

    But before he could make sense of the situation, water started gushing out of the tunnels once again and the bodies of the feathered disappeared.

    Sam is once again overwhelmed with the water and this time it is even worse as he didn¡¯t even get the chance to take a breather from the air pocket before the attacks came in.

    The process constantly repeated for the next four days.

    After the water flooding, some feathered starteding out. After the second wave, it became thirty.

    In the third wave, the creatures that could merge within the water now can use Ice elemental attacks and before the water left, they left Sam in his cepletely frozen which helped the next lightning to strike him properly and make him suffer.

    The third wave of normal creatures is even bothersome. Along with the thirty feathered, different creatures came. They arend creatures and they looked simr to that orcs.

    The only difference is that they have a certain level of negation abilities against the elemental attacks which is a disadvantage for Sam. He has to focus on the physical aspect which would lead him a bit vulnerable to the lightning strikes and the feathered.

    After that, the water came once again and this time along with the invisible water creatures, there is another type of creature.

    A jellyfish.

    The jellyfish which has both water and lightning element.

    This caused Sam to panic a bit because the Jellyfish is almost transparent and this time, the invisible water creatures only want to support the jellyfish and their sole purpose this time to make him stay in one ce.

    When the jellyfishpletely enveloped Sam whose body is under partial water elemental fusion, the body returned to normal abruptly as the lightning shock went through his body.

    His lungs got emptied out because of the pain and he is out of breath. He is trying his best to get out of the grip, but he couldn¡¯t.

    He didn¡¯t have any other way and dragged the jellyfish along with him while it is still shocking him so that he could take a deep breath.

    He didn¡¯t even bother blocking or dodging other attacks.

    Only after taking a breath, he finally managed to think clearly and used the observation and the maniption ability.

    The tentacles of the jellyfish became meat paste and released him.

    Sam took out a spear and used ice element as he stabbed it into the jelly fish and froze it on the spot.

    He then used the frozen thing as a shield and started attacking the invisible enemies.

    In the process, the frozen jellyfish waspletely broken into pieces.

    The broken pieces got washed away with the water but right after the water was gone and only a knee-deep puddle was left, the puddle was suddenly frozen.

    Then came the next opponents, some snow white-furred creatures that resembled orcs, then the orcs that have elemental immunity, and then the good old feathered.

    Wave after wave, attack after attack.

    Different creatures attacked, which he had to block, defend and attack again to save himself.

    For the first time ever in a Pce of inheritance contest, Sam felt like he might get killed if he was careless and it is notpletely out of the realm of possibility.

    After all, it was clearly mentioned in the first Pce of inheritances and even this one, that the yers are responsible for their lives.

    And from Sam¡¯s guesses, if the god is who he thought he was, then there is a high possibility that someone could die.

    Every god has some mutual respect and some sort of fear towards others. But this one doesn¡¯t have any. He is the manifestation of pride and arrogance. So, it would be weird for him to think normally and care for other yers.

    But Sam doesn¡¯t want to think about it too much. All he could do is try his best to survive.

    These thoughts carried him to the third round which is another room with an evenrger space.

    In fact, it is as big as a stadium.

    And there is a circle not in the center of the room. Rather near the entrance of the room.

    Sam looked at the size of the area and felt a bit nervous.

    This is just the third round and he couldn¡¯t even fathom what the fourth round awaits him.

 Chapter 852: Annoying

    Sam moved to the circle vigntly. He held both of his swords and entered the circle.

    The whole area shook for a second and the ceiling of this room which Sam couldn¡¯t see is covered with clouds with lightning crackling around them.

    As soon as he looked upwards, the clouds roared loudly and a series of lightning strikes followed him.

    While he is trying his best to dodge and block them, the first wave of creatures came.

    This time, the feathered, orcs, and those furry orcs all of came with double the number as thest wave in round two.

    Along with that, a few other creatures added up and these creatures surprised Sam a lot. They are thunderbirds.

    They are moving along the clouds like fish swimming in the water and Sam felt tense.

    The numbers themselves are a bit problematic and now the variety of the creatures that are attacking him is not exactly small. He has to be careful since he couldn¡¯t use any other extra gadgets and could only use normal weapons.

    He really wished he could use the help of his beasts at the moment.

    For a long time, Sam didn¡¯t feel this overwhelming. It is not because of their numbers or even strength, it is more of their annoying way of fighting. They arepletely robotic, with no pain, rage, sorrow, or any other emotions which Sam could take advantage of.

    It is like he is fighting a bunch of undead but these things can use their power in full.

    This is taking a toll on his brain.

    Sam activated his lightning element and started fighting like crazy. He stopped holding back and started shing them down like they are some hung meat.

    He didn¡¯t care about handling it like normally anymore.

    He is like a thunderstorm himself as he hit every single creature that came near him.

    The first wave was over soon enough and Sam immediately took out the wine to heal himself. He now understood how surviving this would be like.

    The rest of the candidates would be having a harder time because they couldn¡¯t heal as fast as Sam. Not like they don¡¯t have any other options. They are all rich and there are many pills and potions they carry, just not as effective and efficient as Sam.

    After recovering, Sam started making a move even before the next wave came.

    His lightning disappeared and his body turned purple. He started releasing the poison into the air. He threwrge water globes full of poison and threw a fireball to vaporize it.

    As his poison grenades also came into the category of stupid special weapons which are not allowed.

    But he can use the normal poison collection.

    He didn¡¯t care about leaving them for rainy days. He just wants to get rid of these annoying pests.

    The whole ce is covered with a poison cloud.

    All this while, Sam only used poison as a secondary weapon. In grenades, in some tough battles with sneak attacks and when he has to defeat people stronger than him.

    But now he decided that is it is about time he used the poison as the main weapon.

    When the creatures appeared, the first thing they did is inhale a bunch of poison into their bodies.

    Sam held his swords as he went after one person after the other like he is a crazy maniac.

    One proper wound in a vital spot is all he needed to deal with them. The poison will take care of the rest without any trouble.

    The third round went on like this, Sam started using every technique he has in his arsenal and soon the new creatures areing over and over again with new abilities which his lightning element or poison could do little about.

    For example, there is an armadillo-type beast that is practically immune to lightning and has a shell that didn¡¯t let him get affected by the poison.

    Even the corrosive effect of the purple poison does little about it.

    As more and more creatures appeared, he had to shift between all his elements one after another and this caused him to take a few more lightning shots to his body.

    At one point he even tried to find a loophole in this whole system.

    He didn¡¯t outright kill some of the creatures that came to attack him and made them survive. After all, the whole goal is to survive and he wants to see how the waves areing and whether the waves would stop if the previous wave was cleared and it turned out that is a stupid strategy.

    As soon as he tried to use that method when the time came for the next wave, the previous creatures that are left alive on verge of death recovered instantly adding more enemies to himself.

    Sam is now fighting hundreds of creatures without any of his usual gadgets or tools. He is switching weapons to his ws, staff, daggers, metal cards with no inscriptions, and the swords as he fought relentlessly without any rest.

    The only good thing about this is that no creature was beyond the Pre-transcendent stage.

    Until now they are only increasing the difficulty in numbers.

    But eight days of this hell is really going to be something he would remember for the rest of his life.

    Byst wave, even therge coliseum-sized space was clogged with the creatures all trying to get a piece of him.

    Thest wave itself went on for a whole single day to clear. By the time he was done with them, he is panting hard, lying on the floor with his whole body and hair soaked in blood. The smell of this much blood is provoking his vampire instincts.

    He controlled the urge to bite into the nearest beast¡¯s corpse and suck the blood out of it and started drinking the wine from the gourd.

    He is not even in the mood to clean himself up as he walked towards the next door.

    At least he had this time for taking a breather.

    When he crossed the door and arrived on the other side, he was shocked by what he saw.

    It is not a room anymore. It is an open space. It almost looked like a desert. He could see nothing but open ground with some grass here and there as far as his eyes could see.

    He had a bad feeling about this though.

    Therge room is already bad enough. Now he has to deal with an open field. He doesn¡¯t even know what is there in store for him.

    And it didn¡¯t take long for him to figure out.

    Soon earth shook as Sam looked into the horizon on all three sides and he could see many creatures running towards him. This first wave is as big as thest wave in the previous round. But the thing that attracted him the most is the new addition of creatures.

    There are some extremely gigantic humanoids running with armors and full battle equipment.

    And there are two kinds of them. One that looked bloated and extremelyrge. At least ten times that of a normal human and the second type are somewhat leanpared to the first one. But they are still seven timesrger than a normal human.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know who they are or what race they belong to. He only knew about the beast races/

    But one thing he understood from the way they areing is that they have one hell of strength in closebat.

    He took his staff and got ready, he needs to have a space around him that could be controlled solely by him.

    The sky started roaring and the clouds gathered. Along with the thunderbirds, some other lightning-type flying creatures appeared along with the clouds.

    Sam started channeling his void style and lightning energy at the same time.

    He used as much energy as he could handle in the void style and kept it active.

    The surrounding earth started cracking a bit because of the energy he held.

    When the troops are nearing him, he jumped to the sky and smashed the staff straight at the head of the giant humanoid that ising towards him.

    The staff smashed his head into pieces and didn¡¯t stop there. It just went through the body before the void style actually exploded and the surrounding creatures blew back as a chaotic mini thunderstorm appeared in that ce.

    Sam looked at the rest of the creatures coldly which are not stopping even for a second.

    "At this rate, each wave would take at least a day. For fuck¡¯s sake. I really wish I would get a chance to fight with the god whoever it is after this."

    He muttered to himself as he started his onught.

    The bodies started flying, exploding and blood started spilling everywhere. But what Sam doesn¡¯t know is that his perils are only halfway there. He doesn¡¯t know that what he would have to take on next is something even more annoying.

 Chapter 853: Last Wave

    Sam is currently killing a giant humanoid with his sword as he lodged it inside that guy¡¯s neck.

    This is thest creature of this wave and this is the end of the night day. As usual, Sam got some breathing space. He is still soaked and reeking of blood and is currently trying his best to recover.

    Soon, the next wave started toe.

    This time, Sam directly activated energy vision.

    In the past few days, Sam came into contact with many creatures he never heard or saw of and these creaturese in different forms and shapes. In the previous wave, a creature simr to that invisible water creature attacked him, but this time it is merged in the wind and poison is not working on it.

    So, Sam had to use the energy vision.

    This time Sam didn¡¯t want to take any risks as it is thest wave, the difficulty and intensity will be at another level.

    So, he decided to be careful and vignt.

    But when he saw the energy waves that areing from the creatures that appeared, he was shocked. Because, this time the difficulty didn¡¯te in numbers or the variety of the creatures, rather the main difficulty is the strength.

    Currently, there are around eight creatures in front of Sam slowlying towards him and all of them are transcendent stage creatures, provided that they are clearly of the initial stage, it is really hard for Sam to deal with them.

    As their cultivation level increased, it would be hard to cross the boundaries of one level and fight the higher cultivator. Sam didn¡¯t even bother trying in the Peak stage of the Pre-transcendent stage, even though he is confident that he might be able to win with all the tricks he had, but that is for one on one. Not against a group.

    But in front of Sam, there is one feathered, one thunderbird, two giant humanoids, the orc, the snow-white orc, the invisible wind creature, and now not so invisible water creature. All of these are walking towards him slowly.

    He couldn¡¯t help but gulp nervously. This is going to take more than stamina and strength. He needs a bit of luck as well. Even though Sam always didn¡¯t believe that he was lucky, he really wished if such a thing ever existed, it would stay with him.

    Because, unlike the rest of the yers, Sam had a disadvantage in this fight and that is he cannot breakthrough, even if he wants to.

    If the rest of the yers got overwhelmed, they could at least break through and fight them off. He is pretty sure that their strength would be far better than normal.

    But now Sam couldn¡¯t even ess his beasts to finish the breakthrough, he has to fight at his current stage.

    He took a deep breath and took out the flute.

    This is thest resort and it is specially made for these kinds of situations.

    He didn¡¯t wait for them to get close. For some reason they are not justing at him with full speed, they seemed to be leisurely waiting to deal with Sam as they walked.

    So, at least Sam has enough time to set up the foundation with the flute.

    He started ying as the elemental energies started pouring out.

    Now the first part is the barrier around him and the second part is the elemental energy bubble that isprised of all his elemental energies jammed up together.

    The elemental energies started shing within that bubble and the waves that areing out of these shes themselves are extremely dangerous.

    And by now the creatures finally managed toe near Sam and they are slowly surrounding him.

    By now, Sam alreadyid out the field of his control.

    The area ispletely simr to the time when he fought Kartikeya. But now there are two extra additions, the earth element, and the metal element.

    He is using the gravity of the earth element mainly and as for the metal element, he let out some mixture of metallic powder and pieces which are running around the field together like a swarm of bees.

    Thest addition to this whole set is the blood scales.

    All the creatures attacked Sam at the same time. Sam who is inside the barrier is a bit nervous at this moment as the sh began.

    His first target is that invisible wind elemental creature.

    As soon as that creature entered the field, Sam controlled the wind and filled it with metallic sand and metal debris.

    The metal debris wouldn¡¯t have any effect on the creatures in a normal scenario, but currently, as the metallic pieces are being stabbed into that creature are all being used with the void style.

    The creature is a wind elemental being, so when the void style that is being used was used along with the wind elemental energy, the creature started having trouble.

    And the field is full of different elements which are in sync with each other, so this creature has to resist the effects of the rest of the elements.

    So, after a few minutes, Sam did manage to immobilize itpletely and killed it.

    He wanted to heave a sigh of relief, but neither does he have time or leisure to do that.

    Because currently the rest of the creatures are already ravaging the barrier he was in. Every attack theynded on the barrier, a ripple is being formed because even though Sam is fighting with the invisible creature he is also responsible for defending himself and every impact caused on the barrier is being repelled with the ripple style.

    The ripple style made the defensive barrierst a bit longer than normal and the gravity along with other elemental attacks is already throwing them off bnce.

    Even in that condition, it is already the third barrier Sam made.

    Even though the energy usage would be reduced with every barrier, it is still too much pressure.

    His veins are bulging dangerously as if they are ready to pop any moment even with the slightest of touches.

    Sam checked the barrier once again and focused on another target.

    The second target, the not-so-invisible water creature. This one creature is the weakest of the rest as it is not present in water.

    The only reason Sam didn¡¯t target this and went for the wind creature is that the wind creature is more dangerous, otherwise, this would have been already dealt with.

    The blood scales that are annoying the rest of the creatures left them alone and moved towards the water creature.

    The scales used the ripple style as they attacked from multiple fronts. The creature is being divided into small parts and the scales are slowly being enveloped by the golden mes as they caused the water creature to evaporate.

    He used fire elemental energy to kill a water creature and now finally moved to the rest.

    His next target is the thunderbird.

    Even though the ones that are attacking him the most at the moment are the giant humanoids and they are the ones cracking the barrier, Sam is least worried about them.

    Because these guys don¡¯t have any elemental affinities and the only strength they have is brute force and a lot of stamina.

    The blood scales and the metal debris along with the mes and wind are all surrounding the thunderbird. But one thing that is not near the bird but affecting the most is the gravity. Generally, Sam wouldn¡¯t be able to use other elements when he is messing with the gravity, but this is the only state he could do so.

    The gravitational focus waspletely based on the thunderbird and Sam almost controlled its flight path with it.

    Because of the constant fluctuations and attacks, Sam not only managed to avoid being attacked by it, he also started controlled the trajectory and altitude a bit.

    After he got a hold of that, instead of killing it, he got another idea. He made the thunderbird crash directly onto the snow-white Orc who is an ice elemental user.

    The lightning energy works great on them.

    Even though they didn¡¯t attack each other rapidly like what would have normally happened, he still managed tond a proper attack on both of them.

    But the one that got killed is not the orc, but the thunderbird.

    Sam continued the attacks, but by now he is already bleeding through his nose and the veins on his body arepletely still.

    He doesn¡¯t know who long he could hold up and all he can do is endure and fight back for now.

    He changed his target now and it is time for the Snowwhite orc.

    Sam just didn¡¯t go for physical attacks this time, he also started using mental attacks.

    It is no use hiding his tricks at the moment, so he used the mental attacks to make the orc distracted and attacked it physically.

    Even though the situation is on his side and he managed to deal with the orc, he is pretty sure that he took some severe damage.

 Chapter 854: Zeus

    Sam is done with almost all the creatures. Only one giant humanoid is left who is still pounding on the barrier.

    He didn¡¯t stop no matter what.

    Sam who is standing in the middle of the barrier is actually feeling a little dried up. He didn¡¯t have much energy left and his brain is killing him. His whole body which is already soaked in blood ispletely sore and all he wants to do at the moment is to sleep peacefully for a whole day.

    But he has to deal with this remaining creature no matter what. He came too far to just give up now.

    But he couldn¡¯t keep this state of his for long. He almost exhausted all of his energy.

    He is thinking of alternative methods to get out of this situation and right when he thought of something the barrier broke and the whole field was destroyed.

    Sam was blown back a bit and the giant who got used to pounding the barrier nonstop fell forward. He was lost for a second. Sam took advantage of this opportunity and jumped on to the giant.

    The giant started shaking around as he tried his best to get Sam off and kill him. But Sam didn¡¯t dare loosen his grip, he held the armor tightly and made sure that he wouldn¡¯t get caught in those giant hands and die.

    After some time, Sam finally managed to get a grip. His hands are covered with ws as he tried his best to dig them into the giant¡¯s flesh which almost seemed impossible with his current strength.

    And this was a mistake as the giant managed to loosen Sam of his grip and fall backward. But there is a gap in the armor of the giant where a wound was present and Sam used the ws to dig into that wound.

    The giant hissed in pain.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care. He held on to that desperately and tried his best to expand the wound as much as possible.

    The wound slowly expanded but it was not much, only irritation for the giant in a normal situation, and in this case, there are no emotions whatsoever, so there is no use except for him clinging on to it.

    Sam used the observation skill to take a look at the body of the giant to see if he has any other wounds and finally managed to find one near the chest.

    He climbed upwards with all his strength and reached the wound from the back. But this time, there is a high chance that he would be caught, but Sam didn¡¯t worry, because he is using another ability which he is not very fond of.

    His eyes turned red and his teeth turned into fangs as he dug into that wound tightly and started sucking the blood.

    The giant held Sam and started pulling him, but Sam didn¡¯t let go of the armor. His muscles are bulging with pressure as he held the armor tightly and even his neck muscles are tense because of the grip of his mouth.

    He started sucking blood and for better or worse the giant has a lot of it.

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother spitting it out and just drank like crazy. He didn¡¯t care whether he would have to worry about turning into a monsterter or whatever changes might happen to his body. He just wants to be the best he could be at this moment.

    He didn¡¯t want to give up. He didn¡¯t want to surrender to the gods that are ying with his lives, even if that leads him to the path of no return. Even if he has to turn himself into a monster that lives off of sucking blood.

    Sam just endured the pulling, punching, hitting, and everything that is the part of the retaliation of the giant as he sucked the blood out of his body and soon enough, the giant copsed due to the loss of blood and barely hand any breath left.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop just yet, he moved towards the throat and started biting into it. The ws are not working on that tough skin. Even his fangs are slowly shattering, but they did manage to tear the skin apart.

    Sam tore the flesh and spit it out to the side. He repeated the process again and again until the giant stopped breathing or moving.

    Sam slowly rolled to the side andy down on the floor as he breathed heavily. The giant¡¯s body slowly started disappeared and Sam started drinking the wine immediately.

    He couldn¡¯t think of what would happen after this, so he needs to be ready.

    As he drank the wine and recovered, Sam is feeling the effects of the giant¡¯s blood.

    It is different from any blood he has evere in contact with. It is heavier and denser. It also has too much energy and his muscles are all reacting to it for some reason.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel that he is bing stronger than normal. Nothing from the energy gained from the blood went to the spiritual core. All of it is going to the muscles and the wine is making it easier to digest.

    While he is recovering slowly, he thought of the situation of the rest of the yers.

    He doesn¡¯t know how they are doing. The situation wouldn¡¯t be easy. The only reason Sam managed to pull this off is because of the various elements. He doesn¡¯t know if others would be able to do it.

    As he thought of this, the room slowly disappeared.

    He weakly stood up to see he is in a hall with a man sitting on a throne.

    He has silver hair and purple eyes with a robust figure.

    Sam looked around to find other yers. But he could see only one of them.

    Noah is sprawling on the ground in pain as she tried her best to stand up.

    Sam checked her energy waves to find out that she really broke through. What he feared really happened. At least she didn¡¯t have any bacsh from breaking through. He wondered how the rest of the candidates are doing.

    But before that, he walked towards her to help her up and feed the wine to her.

    "It is you again. Just how many wins do you want?"

    She said as she looked at Sam.

    Sam didn¡¯t know what to say and just shook his head. He is also asking himself. Just how many wins does he need? He is just trying too hard.

    Zeus looked at him and said.

    "If one of you gives up, that person will be the winner. If not, fight it out. Thest one standing wins."

    Noah looked at Sam for a second and saw that he didn¡¯t break through, she hesitated for a moment, before saying.

    "Forget it, I Quit."

    As soon as she spoke with a snap of Zeus¡¯ fingers, she disappeared from the spot.

    "So what now? Are we fighting?" Sam asked Zeus.

    But thetter looked at Sam in disdain and said.

    "You are not worthy to even stand before me. So, don¡¯t go around speaking about fighting me. You are still a pathetic human who is polluted with all kinds of beast bloodlines."

    "Well, that is one way to put it."

    Sam shrugged and looked around. After a brief paused, he spoke once again.

    "If you give me what you owe me, I would be leaving."

    "There is no hurry, you would be leaving when I tell you to. I heard you are originally from the earth. How is that doing? It has been a while since I took a look at it."

    "Well, it is alright I guess."

    "I never thought someone woulde out of that godforsaken realm. And now that I see it I understand why it was godforsaken."

    "Why?"

    "The humans from there, have too much intelligence. They understand too much."

    "Is that apliment?"

    "No, they understand too much and they don¡¯t know their ce. They try so hard to conquer nature and fight against it. They destroy it in the process and think of ways to get out of those perils and all of this without any powers. I wonder what they would be like with powers and true gifts of nature and here you are.

    A living example of that. I now remember why we left that ce alone without any contact with the rest of the universe."

    "Why?"

    "That is not something you should know. But I am intrigued by you. You amuse me. So, I will answer any other question if it is appropriate."

    "Was your goal to kill the candidates in this Pce of inheritance?"

    Sam asked without much hesitation. The tests this time are a bit dangerous.

    "yes."

    "Why?"

    "That was the way it was supposed to be. It is the way it was nned. The grace period of invisible protection you have in the Pce of inheritances is over after thest one. From now on, get ready to face the challenges like this in every Pce of inheritance. Since you know you are a part of the game, then you should also know that some of you are destined to lose, and losing your life is one way of losing the game.

    If you think the Pce of inheritances that areing in the future are the treasure troves, then start thinking again. They are going to turn into nightmares and I am sure in the next one, at least one of you will die and by the end of all pces, at least four of you would have been dead and then starts the real game.

    Now, that is all I want to talk about. So, get lost."

    With that, Sam disappeared from that spot and appeared in the main hall once again.

 Chapter 855: See how she is doing

    Sam looked at the state of the rest of the yers. Thankfully nobody died at this moment and it is still looking okay for now.

    But none of them had an expression of relief, they realized that they are on verge of death many times and this is getting more and more dangerous.

    Even though they are in life and death situations many times, it is actually a bit more overwhelming here. Every creature that came to attack them is a higher-level creature and by human standards, that level would be considered a monstrous genius.

    It really is a tough battle fighting with them like this constantly.

    While he is thinking about the situation, everyone got their reward.

    Sam looked at the spear in front of him. It looked familiar. But only after touching it, he realized, this is the spear formed from the weapon fragments.

    When he closed his eyes and checked the weapon, he could feel that it is powerful. But he was not excited. He is not really concerned too much about weapons. He has too many of them in fact and all of them are of certain power.

    He looked at Arman who is also standing nearby and had a book in his hands. Both exchanged a nce and Arman gave out a tired smile.

    Sam wanted to say something, but at this moment, the Avatar spoke.

    "There is something else that you have to attend and it is rted to the points you gained for the extra games you yed. So, please enter that room one by one."

    As he spoke, the Avatar gestured and another door appeared on the hall walls. One by one each yer went in and Sam¡¯s turn isst.

    When he entered the room, he was surprised to see the setup.

    There is a table and on the other side of the table, Ling Tian sat with a bunch of books.

    "What are you doing here?"

    "Well, since Zeus tried to interrupt your business, you are bound to get some benefits, so you can make a wish now and if it is reasonable, it will be fulfilled."

    "First let us talk about the points. Thest time I checked, I have a million points. What can I spend that on?"

    "You can spend that on many things. You can buy techniques, resources, blueprints, and many more. You can take a look at these books for some products."

    Sam took a look at those. It is like a sales catalog with a lot of products and prices beside them.

    When Sam looked at the prices, he felt like this is a joke. They are too cheap.

    The most expensive thing he could see is around ten thousand. He has a million points with him. He wouldn¡¯t even be able to spend it even if he bought every product in the catalog.

    "Is this really it? There are no more I can buy?"

    "You can actually, but you have to pay the price for special conditions."

    "How much for a?"

    ? What are you talking about?"

    Nike. You should know about the situation. The has no worm-hole connections and no other rtions with any other in the universe. Once in a while Nike opens the portal and gets soldiers for her army.

    I want that out of her control. I want the ownership of that. I would be conquering it."

    "It is not actually impossible. But there is no such thing asplete ownership of the. All you have to do is conquer it and keep it in your control."

    "Okay then. How much for removing her control and restrictions?"

    "Her control over that can be relinquished for two hundred thousand points. But the restrictions would have to be broken by the people inside. There is a special method for that. You cannot buy it."

    "The secret arts?"

    "Since you know that, this would be easy. They can slowly take down the restrictions on their own."

    "Okay then, I would take that for that price. I want something else, I think I already exined what it is in ourst meeting. "

    "Of course, I already prepared that. It would be three hundred thousand points."

    "I would be taking it. Now that this is over, I would like to see someone."

    "See who?" Ling Tian asked with a smile.

    "Someone who died before me on earth. I don¡¯t know if there a heaven and hell where they would go after death or they would be born again. I would like to see that person."

    "Well, there is a heaven and hell and after experiencing them, they will be born again. Anyway, it is possible to see them. But it is costlier than getting your hands on the."

    "Why?"

    "Earth is not a that is essible to us. It is an isted from the rest of the universe. You should know that."

    "And she was born on that again?"

    "Yes, no soul from the earth can escape the chain of their reincarnation. They will go back to the same again and again. You are an exception."

    "How much?"

    "Three hundred thousand."

    "I will take it."

    "Okay then, before we go there and take a look, you better use that favor that you are owed. What would you like that for?"

    "I want to arrange the timing for my Pce of Inheritance."

    "Timing? I didn¡¯t expect that."

    "I want the Pce of inheritance to be the ninth one on the list and by then I need to be at the end of Transcendent stage and getting ready to break through to the Consummate stage and if possible I would like to choose the final prize."

    "Please go ahead."

    "A beast. A beast at peak of Transcendent level. This beast in particr."

    Sam gave a small paper note to Ling Tian.

    "You are already prepared for this."

    "You told me that there would be something like this. So it is only natural I prepare for this."

    "I will see what I can do."

    "Please make sure it happens and inform me so that I can prepare myself."

    "But May I ask why you want to change the time of the Pce of inheritance?"

    "There is no particr reason. I just want that beast at that time and I am pretty sure with my cultivation level at that time, I wouldn¡¯t be able to get to the realm that has that beast."

    "Okay, then. Let us go see that person."

    "Do you have ess to earth?"

    "How do you think I managed to steal your soul? I am a special case though. People at my level don¡¯t usually have ess to earth. Now it is better if you sit down. It is not possible to take your body, I will be taking your soul to see."

    Sam nodded and sat down on the floor and closed his eyes. He could feel a power, sucking his soul out of his body, it is a weird feeling.

    Then the rest is just a sh.

    He didn¡¯t see anything and soon he found himself floating over the very familiar ce.

    The earth.

    He looked around to find out Ling Tian is also floating with him.

    "Let us go. I think you would be happy to see her present state."

    With that, both of them disappeared and reappeared in a rural area.

    When Sam looked around, he was surprised.

    "Is this India?"

    "Yes."

    "Why is she born in this country?"

    "Well, that is what all the good deeds she umted managed to get her."

    Sam looked around and he could only see fields all over. There is just one brick house in the surroundings and arge space around it with a garden.

    A little girl ran out of the house and Sam felt a sense of familiarity from her.

    "She is the one. Your Ste, now Lakshmi. A girl born into a farmer family. All the fields you can see are under their name.

    They have been farmers for generations and they are quite well off. But they didn¡¯t leave the farming and just stayed here.

    Three generations of the family staying in the same house. Fascinating isn¡¯t it."

    Sam didn¡¯t answer. He just looked at the family.

    The mother is running after her daughter who is chasing the chickens in the garden. She is trying to feed her something.

    There are other kids and other family members. A grandfather and a grandmother. An elder brother and a younger brother. The only daughter of this generation.

    "They don¡¯t have ambition. All they want to do is to work in their fields and produce food. They are a hardworking family and like living simply. What do you think about her situation now?"

    Ling Tian asked once again.

    "This is what she deserved. Let¡¯s go."

    "You don¡¯t want to stay any longer?"

    "No. All I wanted to do is take a look at how she is doing. She is doing well. That is all I need to know. She suffered too much in the past life. Let her enjoy this one."

    "You don¡¯t want to stay with her. You don¡¯t want to be a part of her life once again." Ling Tian asked curiously.

    Sam just gave him a smile without replying and both of them disappeared.

 Chapter 856: First Death

    Ling Tian took Sam back to his body and the Pce of inheritance finally came to an end.

    All six candidates came out of the Pce of inheritance and all of them arepletely exhausted and feeling down.

    Even Arman broke through to the Transcendent stage, but he ispletely exhausted and he definitely gave up. Only Noah managed to persist but she was on the verge of copse when she cleared the final stage.

    When the remaining six candidates saw them, they are all a bit surprised by the bad state they are in.

    Sam took a look at them and noticed that Agun and Donner already broke through and the rest of the candidates are also on their way.

    Sam, Arman, and Arkiv moved to a residence to take some rest.

    Grace arrived to meet them.

    Arkiv talked with her and then came to Sam to inform about the meeting with the Kings and Queens.

    They arranged the meeting for that night.

    "Did you guys get ess to the dimensional crosser? Is there a way for you guys to leave?"

    Sam asked Arkiv and Arman.

    "Not yet. It is not even activated yet. It might take some time."

    "Okay then, be careful until the rest of the yers left. Agun and Donner seemed to be doing something fishy."

    "Okay sure."

    After that, Sam went to take a shower. He just made a small set up in one of the empty residences to take one.

    His body is reeking of blood and sweat of many beasts and his own. He doesn¡¯t want to look like that when he went to meet the Kings and Queens of this ce.

    After he was done with the shower and a proper meal, he meditated for a while and went to meet with the Kings and Queens.

    There are four kings and two queens in this.

    When they saw Sam, they are all showing off their aura and tried to be as intimidating as possible. Except for Silva of course.

    Sam gave them a smile and took a seat and started the meeting.

    And slowly their auras started fading with every step of the meeting and the atmosphere in the room shiftedpletely to Sam¡¯s side.

    By the end of the three-hour-long meeting, Sam had a satisfied smile on his face, while the monarchs felt like they are ashamed of themselves, but they are still grateful for the advantages they got in this deal.

    "Since we came to an agreement, we can work on this immediately. Make arrangements for your younger generation and prepare them to leave this ce.

    I will take them to my ce and bring back a few teams of my people who will be in charge of development in this ce.

    Since Nike is going to lose ownership of the ce and you are responsible for making sure that the seal is lifted slowly. You don¡¯t have any connections with the rest of the world for now.

    But you would soon get in contact with the rest of the universe.

    I already have some influence in various realms, I will connect your to the rest of those realms. Even you are located in an isted corner at the moment, I will make you a connection hub between various realms.

    I will be back in a few days with my teams, so show me the area for my city construction first."

    Grace was in charge of showing everything around to them. The yers still didn¡¯t have the dimensional crossers activated so they are staying for a few days.

    In the next three days, Sam was led to all the ces nearby the central temple, that has resources, he would be given a temporary base here.

    The long routes between the Capitals and the Central temples are all undeveloped with all the resources left alone, because of Nike¡¯s rules. But since he is going to take over, the first order of business will be to develop these ces.

    He learned that the residents under the six cities are not exactly living off well. Their areas are not exactly resourceful. In fact, they are living in the outer circle of the whole with barely any resources, all because of Nike¡¯s vanity.

    Now, Sam is going to work with the six cities and develop this whole.

    After marking everything on the map and the immediate development zones which are near the central temple, Sam was ready to leave this area.

    He didn¡¯t want to do it that night though. The six monarchs arranged a banquet as the symbol of their cooperation and he decided to attend and it is also a farewell to their younger generations. Even though it is called an exchange, it is more like handing over a hostage to Sam in their opinion, but Sam thought otherwise.

    These youngsters will be another team of elites under him and would help him in taking over some other ce.

    After the banquet is over, Sam is walking alone in the Central temple back to his residence, and all of a sudden, he felt a sense of threat and dodged.

    A hammer strike missed his head by an inch.

    Sam rolled on the ground and escaped a bit as he looked at Donner who is standing there looking at him with cold eyes.

    "Hello, Donner."

    Sam wished him with a smile.

    Donner didn¡¯t reply and made a move on Sam. He already broke through the Transcendent stage and Sam is still only a Peak Pre-transcendent stage cultivator. If it is a normal human, he would have easily handled him, but Donner is also happened to be a yer.

    While Sam tried his best to dodge with light elemental fusion, he felt some other presence.

    Agun threw a fireball at him.

    "Whoa? Isn¡¯t it a bit of overkill? Two people fighting me at the same time and that too you guys are Transcendent stage cultivators. Have some dignity."

    Sam said as he threw arge beam of light into the sky.

    Everyone residing in the temple campus saw it and came to look for him.

    "Everyone will be here soon. Are you sure you guys want to continue?"

    "Today, we have to take you down, Sam. You are hindering our growth constantly. You are too much of a big deal to be with us and at the end of this whole game, we wouldn¡¯t have a chance to survive with you present. So, please die."

    Agun spoke bitterly.

    Sam chuckled and continuously dodged with the golden light glowing brighter and brighter.

    "How long are you going to dodge like that? You are going to die today. The feathered are not going toe here. Some priests didn¡¯t like the fact that you insulted their Goddess Nike by change of the ownership of the and decided to help us.

    As for the rest of the yers, I highly doubt they will be involved. Arman is still recovering and Arkiv didn¡¯t breakthrough yet. Just surrender and we will end this quickly."

    "After all these years and all the things you heard of me, is that all you know?"

    "Of course, we wouldn¡¯t have even attacked you if this is our home. But we are far from home and you don¡¯t have all your forces with you. This is the best opportunity we can get. Donner also told me that Wights and Ghouls are sent on a mission today. That is why we waited this long."

    "There is one thing you forgot. I always butt heads with people who are stronger than me. Why do you think that is?"

    Sam asked as he stood on a stone pir.

    The Duo didn¡¯t reply.

    But Sam answered.

    "Because, when fighting with others that are stronger than you. You don¡¯t have to fight fair."

    As he spoke a sudden series of explosions urred all over.

    Sam jumped off of the pir. The grenades wouldn¡¯t do much to them now. These are part of the traps he set up.

    The grenades are not damaging king, rather they are made of a special chemicals that numbs their senses. It is more like a smoke grenade of the cultivators.

    Sam took advantage of this and he took an energy cell out of the divine dimension.

    He reached Agun who is running aimlessly and ced the energy cell on his body right before it exploded and entered the divine dimension.

    *BOOM*

    Arge explosion urred which made Agun lose his right shoulder and Arm. The divine dimension crystal fell far away because of the explosion and Sam who is checking the surroundings came out mid-air after he ispletely out of the explosion zone and took off on harbinger as he went after Agun and Donner.

    By now the smoke cleared and they are trying to escape. When they saw Sam¡¯s speed, Donner dropped Agun there and then and escaped.

    Sam halted near Agun and said.

    "Seems like you chose the wrong teammate."

    "No, this is the prior agreement. We are not obligated to save each other and in this kind of situation, I would have dropped him to escape if we swapped our positions."

    "Then great. Anyst words?"

    "Make it fast. Please."

    Sam nodded and finished him off directly and there was no resistance. By now, the rest of the yers arrived at the scene and saw Donner who is running away after he dropped Agun.

    They could make sense of what is happening.

    "I thought one of us would die because of the Gods¡¯ requirements. But the first one died of his own foolishness. At least, he found peace." Arkiv said calmly.

    The rest of the yers nodded.

    "Let¡¯s give him a proper burial shall we?" Sam asked Arkiv and Arman and both of them nodded.

 Chapter 857: Rapid Expansion

    Sam proceeded with the funeral of Agun. The rest of the yers are all present. Except for Donner. He knew he wouldn¡¯t be able to talk with the rest of the yers normally again. Everyone will look at him with scorn and wouldn¡¯t want to team up again.

    Even Dayus is despising him now.

    But he hid far away and looked at the whole funeral silently.

    All of them are feeling a bit heavy in the heart. But nobody med Sam for this, maybe some of them did, but they didn¡¯t say it out loud. After all, it is hard to ask someone to hold back, particrly when the other party is the one who struck first and that too with an intention to kill.

    After the funeral is over, everyone went on their own ways to stay alone for the night.

    The next day, Sam went to meet the Monarchs of the six cities and said.

    "I don¡¯t know what is happening between you and the priests. But if this causes disturbances in my development ns, then I might have to reconsider working here. So, before Ie back next time, get your people in order."

    With those words, he took the youngsters and left the ce. He returned to his residence and activated the dimensional drifter.

    Arman and Arkiv followed him. The dimensional crossers for the yers are still not activated.

    After returning to the city, the first thing Sam did is take the six youngsters to the trio so that they would help him manage them.

    When the feathered youngsters entered the city, every person is looking at them with fascination. It is not every day that they could see people with wings.

    But no one was too concerned. It is already a given that different races areing from somewhere in the name of the exchange programs and most of them are already a part of the society. Some dwarves even have jobs in the city.

    Sam immediately went to the school after he dealt with the youngsters.

    He asked for the school records of all the graduates.

    There are many people who felt like they reached their normal learning limit and decided to work. But the problem is there are just too many graduates in many fields.

    The school is producing so many of them and everyone is an elite on some level.

    He has an excess of workers, artisans, fighters and any other person who can work in any other field.

    But he never cared nor did he stop admissions for any of them.

    He made sure that every one of them had a job even if he has to lose some money to pay their sry. It is because so that he could use them in times like this.

    After this Pce of inheritance trip or the soul trip back to earth or the death of Agun. Something changed in Sam.

    He started working on something grand.

    After getting the list of all the graduates and all the employees under him. He marked several names and called them back to the city.

    He gave that responsibility to someone and went to deal with his own thing.

    He holed up in his room as he started drawing and writing on arge scroll.

    A scroll that isrge enough to cover the whole wall.

    While he is doing that, the representative from the Space gate association came knocking on his door.

    "Coming."

    "Mr. Sam. You asked me to meet you?"

    "Are the inter-dimensional Space gates ready?"

    "Yes, we managed to work them out. But their working costs are a bit on the expensive side. So, we are trying to find alternative formations."

    "Don¡¯t worry. We are not short of money. Start training your people on this formation. I want at least five teams of people who cany down this formation.

    I want one formationid down within the city first though. A formation connecting to a I want. Can you do that?"

    "Yes, but we would need the coordinates."

    "Do you need them right now?"

    "No, at the final phase."

    "I will give them by then. I need a formation that could transfer Consummate level cultivators too. Do it as fast as you can."

    After giving out orders, Sam went on with his work. While working the dimensional drifter ispletely activated. He is looking at the long list of realms that he could ess with his current power.

    He noted everything down on the scroll and made sure to take note of the realms that are connected to each other and even the topmost realm that could be essible with these connecting realms.

    After he was done with that list, Sam went on with a breakthrough.

    The forest bear¡¯s bloodline was refined and Sam made a breakthrough. After reaching the transcendent stage, he once again worked with the dimensional drifter. To take a look at the new list.

    After working for more than three days, the whole scroll ispleted.

    He took the scroll to the school and opened a new room which was not opened until today. It was created with the sole purpose of this.

    The room for checking the progress of expansion ns.

    The major expansion would dwarf even constructing his own city and the railway project that connected the whole continent.

    This is the expansion n that would cross realms and open new gates for the humans on this connecting them with various races.

    He then contacted a team of people along with the trio.

    This is a certain group of people Sam wanted to be in charge of the expansion ns and oversee the progress.

    After calling them, he started exining everything to them.

    He has information on some of thes that they are going for. But that is not enough. He has to go to the Tempest valley to get the info on the remaining ces.

    But before he goes back, he gave the information to them so that they could start working.

    "Not you three." When Sam saw the trio getting involved, he immediately stopped.

    "What do you mean?" Philip asked.

    "Don¡¯t think I forgot about the n. You only have a week or two, so enjoy thest remaining days here. You wouldn¡¯t be back for many years toe."

    With that, he left to the tempest valley to meet with the Old Beast. After exining his n, the old beast looked at him and asked.

    "Why do you want to expand all of a sudden?"

    "I want to be a god."

    "But that doesn¡¯t need this much effort, does it? You only need to cultivate."

    "No, I want to be a different type of god."

    The old beast looked at him and grinned.

    "Seems like you have a n to do something. But don¡¯t do anything stupid. Information is not a problem, but there is one thing you should be worrying about. If you connect different realms with Space gates, they can be essible to your enemies too. So, make the Space gates connecting to that ce in the tempest valley.

    I am not leaving this ce anytime soon. So, I will be the first line of defense. I am pretty sure ny-nine percent of the beings in the universe wouldn¡¯t be able to cross past me."

    "Thank you."

    Sam went back with the info and informed the Space gate association about the change of location. They felt a bit disappointed and frustrated, but nothing a few bonuses couldn¡¯t cure.

    After they went with the Space gate construction, Sam got busy with the rest of the people in the city.

    Slowly, all the candidates he called for areing to the city.

    And in the next one week, they are busy assigning everyone to different ces.

    They are sending all kinds of people. Artisans who are good at construction, chefs who are good with new and old recipes, weapon artisans and healers alongbat divisions are allmon to every ce.

    The rest of them are sent there based on the terrain of the.

    For example, a marinebat team with tfish puppets and people trained in shipbuilding and marine weaponry are sent to a that is inhabited by fishmen, and more than ny percent of the is covered with water.

    There is a full of active volcanos and many creatures and have too small of a human poption and is mostly upied by beasts, there went the fire elemental users.

    A with a lot of metals and materials was going to be visited by experts in metallurgy and artisans of forging.

    They are given the conditions of thes and the tasks they should be doing first.

    But before they do any of that, Sam first has to create a hub. A hub for his transportation and also a base of production of all the resources and materials he would gather from all these variouss.

    And that is where the Nikees in.

    Or the Feathered, as it is called now.

    Sam briefed all the teams with the tasks they must take and decided to visit the Feathered. The formation at the tempest valley isplete and he is going to take the Space gate association members there to construct the second formation.

 Chapter 858: To the Central Continent

    Sam took the Space gate association members to the Feathered with the Dimensional Drifter.

    Their first job is to create a formation here which connects the formation in the tempest valley. Along with them, he also brought some Architects, miners, and farmers who are going to work on the newnds of the Feathered. But the most active of them are now going to be thebat teams.

    They are the ones going to work with the feathered here and clear some of the beast-infested habitats so that they can work on that.

    First targets a spirit stone mine near the central temple and a special metal mine.

    After this isplete, they will be working on fertilend nearby. While thebat teams are working, the architects are constructing a special space for the Space gates.

    Sam left them there to deal with the things. The six monarchs already started work before Sam came. Because of Nike, they were never allowed to deal with this route. It is even dangerous for Transcendent stage cultivators. But now it can be dealt with.

    Particrly, the Wights are so happy. They are having a feast of these trees that are present here for hundreds of years. They would probably reach to Consummate level by the end of the whole operation.

    That is the advantage of the undead creatures, they don¡¯t have bottlenecks or cultivation hurdles, the only problem is the time taken for digestion of the resources and find those resources to begin with. That is the reason they were locked in such a realm so that they wouldn¡¯t find resources easily.

    At least, they have ring weaknesses so that they wouldn¡¯t turn too dangerous.

    After settling the tasks here, Sam went back to Deste.

    He heard that the Dimensional Crossers are activated, he wanted to see if Donner came back to this ce. He is in no hurry to kill that guy, but he doesn¡¯t want him to use the Thunderbolt sect¡¯s power to create problems here.

    He informed the people he had in the thunderbolt sect¡¯s territory. It turned out that he didn¡¯te back after that.

    Every other yer returned to deste. For some reason, the gods seemed to have pitied them as they granted ess to them to the deste again. This is like a home to all of them after all.

    Sam then went to meet the trio. It is about time, they are gone.

    They met together in a room to have onest meal.

    "At first, I wanted you guys to meet me when we are at the Consummate stage, but now I changed my mind.

    I want you guys to develop. I am leaving you in realms that I am not interested in developing. The realms I am going to target for now are all the realms that have no contact with the god-level figures. Most of them are just aware of their existence but they don¡¯t have blind faith and religion.

    After finishing the when the development grows and spreads I will reach the areas under the control of gods where the faith and religions already exist.

    But the three realms I am sending to are connected to the higher realms which have a religion that I don¡¯t want to butt heads with. I don¡¯t want to have too many dealings with the races in those realms too. They make good soldiers, but they don¡¯t have other skills that are I am really fond of for developing the organization.

    So, we are not going there anytime soon and those are the ces you three are going to start your journey in.

    You don¡¯t have to develop businesses, mercenaries, soldiers, or anything. You don¡¯t have to develop anything for me. All you have to do is find ways to develop yourself.

    Get strong, fight battles, make enemies, make new friends, fall in love a few times, break some hearts, break your own heart, do whatever you want.

    But all these three realms are connected to one particr realm which Old beast told about me. This realm is not even visible in the Dimensional drifter.

    Your final goal is to go to that realm. No matter how many years it would take, even if it takes decades, you are going toe there and if you are early and came before me, wait there. If you arete, you would be hearing my name there, so you cane and find me.

    But before all that. I have something for you."

    Sam took out three circr crystal tokens and gave one for each of them. The crystals are grey in color and they have some weird energy all over them.

    "This is something I got from the gods above. This is an additional essory for the dimensional drifter. You make a blood contract with them and keep them on you, I will be able to get some rough location of yours. Even if not exact coordinates, I would be able to trace your location within the range of hundred kilometers no matter where you are.

    But that is not the only function for that.

    You can also use it for something else. But you can only use it for that three times.

    You can send a message to me in case of emergencies. You can only record a message for three minutes and I would get the message within an hour you sent that. If you are in an extreme situation where you couldn¡¯t do anything but choose to die, then send me this message and try to buy as much time as you can.

    I wille and find you."

    Sam exined many things to them and also gave many treasures he had on him. He even gave them some transference scrolls he got from the recent Pce of inheritance and the previous one.

    Formation discs, grenades, medical supplies, everything was stocked.

    After giving everything to them, four of them went back to the tower from which Sam started taking them to their respective locations.

    After dropping in the three realms that were decided on before, Sam came back and felt a little lost.

    But he didn¡¯t stop his actions. Instead, he sped up. He met with Arkiv and spoke with him.

    "When are you going to the central continent?"

    "A few months from now, why?"

    "Come to me before you go there."

    With that, he went to meet Sirona.

    "I have a project in mind. I want your cooperation though."

    "What is it?"

    Sam started exining the project. It is the new puppet project. But it is not just about making puppets. If this works, Sam would have a robot army at his disposal.

    This is his next big project apart from the expansion.

    This would dwarf all kinds of puppetry he has known and it canpete with high level puppetry.

    Sirona looked shocked. This is the first genuine and proper emotion she has shown to him in a while.

    "How did you even get this thought?" She asked him in shock as she looked at the blueprints in Sam¡¯s hands.

    "It doesn¡¯t matter, does it? I will be exploring the central continent for the beasts in a few days. Before that, I would like to figure out a general framework. I want you to help me. Nobody is smart enough to understand and keep up with my thought process in research here."

    "I am in."

    With that, the two of them started the research. Even though they are researching together, both of them have their own tasks toplete. Sam only met with her when he needed a different perspective on his tasks.

    Most of the time, he stayed within the divine dimension. It would be too much of a waste of time to stay outside in this long research. But he also took ten times the work of Sirona.

    After constant workings, they finally had the breakthrough. The rest of the work is secondary and now they had to do the tests.

    This framework Sam designed works with the help of the vines he got from the Charbhum realm.

    Combining this with the puppets and using a decently high-grade metal suitable for the weapons of Pre-transcendent stage cultivators, the puppets would be as good as Pre-transcendent stage cultivators. It would be an army of them. An army that can be produced as long as they have metal.

    And this is only temporary because the next step after the metal is produced is the gic improvement of the vines so that they could suitable for higher-level puppets.

    But that has to be on hold for now.

    After the framework is achieved, Sam met with Arkiv and entered the Central Continent. The continent is richest in resources but ruled by the beasts. It is about time he got his hands on the things this continent has to offer.

    "Where are we going first?"

    Arkiv asked Sam.

    "Sky has some old debts to repay. So, let us go there first."

 Chapter 859: Bi fangs

    Sam¡¯s target is the Bifang tribe.

    From the description it is not the true Bi fang tribe, but a descendant of it. Just like Great Rocs which are the descendants of the sky soverign rocs.

    He also saw the Wyverns and Flood dragons in the Beast faction.

    He doesn¡¯t know why there are so many high level beasts in this deste.

    It ispletely inexplicable.

    But he could use this to collect some beasts not just for research, but also as an addition to his troops.

    He is going to expand rapidly for the next decade or so and he would be reaching far and wide without any limitations. For that, he has to have a proper army with him and a proper army doesn¡¯t necessarily have to be humans.

    Now, the first target will be Bi fangs and to reach them, Sam doesn¡¯t have to worry too much since Sky already knew of their location.

    Sky escaped from this very central continent and the memories of that nightmare are still fresh in his mind.

    They didn¡¯t have to travel for long too. They only had to travel three days before they reached the spot.

    The Bifangs are inhabiting an active volcano within the central continent. They are fire type beasts after all. But the fire element they activate is not normal. They don¡¯t just spew fire and create mes like Yanwu. Bi fangs fire will be more on magma side. The me is like a thick jelly and it is also called me poison.

    It acts like a hot acid that could melt metal and when it touches any mmable objects like wood, cloths and feathers, it does make fire. But when it contacts the flesh, it seeps in with a burning sensation and makes the whole body infected by that ming poison slowly making the person¡¯s blood boil and bones molten.

    This is the extreme torturous method to kill someone.

    But that is not the only special thing about these cranes though. They are extremely cunning and greedy. They want morend and more food and want to upy everything. Which is also the reason they attacked the Rocs when they had the chance.

    Sam is sure that they must have enjoyed the high grade meat and the new habitat that came along with it.

    But this greed and cunning also makes it hard for the Bi fangs to survive. After all the rest of the beasts wouldn¡¯t just stay still and let them do their thing, that is why their poption wouldn¡¯t grow too much.

    Sam factored in all so that he could estimate their strength.

    From what he learned from Sky, Bi fangs attacked them when they are still allies and are in war with some other beast tribe. After that war, both sides suffered severe losses and the Bi fangs wanted took advantage and betrayed them.

    As proud as rocs are they wouldn¡¯t have expected this.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but shake his head as he thought of this. At least back on earth, only humans are capable of betrayal, beasts are loyal and wouldn¡¯t be able to think too much. But here, that also changed.

    After reaching the spot. Sam and Arkiv stayed within the outskirts so that they could scout the area properly and also n to make the attack.

    From their estimation there is a possibility that there are one or two consummate stage beasts. It is hard to grow to consummate level in the outskirts of the central continent, so that should be their limit.

    Sam has nned something special for them.

    The volcanic mountain that is in this area is active, but not active enough to go off anytime soon and createva-streams.

    So the effect of heat is notpletely unbearable and there is even a normal water stream nearby.

    He decided to use the stream and some things he got from the Northern tribesman of the Western continent.

    It is called the frost essence. After the western continent is developed, the northern tribe didn¡¯t want to be left out. While Sam is out there exploring the world, some higher level executives of organization managed to create a healthy business rtions with them which led to thisplimentary gift.

    It is actually core of an extreme cier which greatly increases the cultivation of the ice element users even if they are in transcendent level.

    Sam created some formations in this area and used the frost essence to reduce the temperature of the water stream and the created a temporary cold environment.

    This wouldn¡¯tst long in the face of the volcano, but it is strong enough make the Bi Fangs to make them ufortable.

    Then they used this chance to catch Bi Fangs one after another and forcefully subdued them.

    Sam just threw them one by one in to the divine dimension. Sky doesn¡¯t want the whole tribe massacred. He just wants the head of the tribe to be destroyed.

    Now that the small fries are almost done, Sam cancelled the formation heid down to change the atmosphere back. All Bi fangs from Nascent stage and below are done.

    The Pre-transcendent stage and above wouldn¡¯t be bothered with this minor atmospheric changes. This cold wouldn¡¯t bother him, they will stay in their habitat for the most of the time.

    But they can lure them with something else.

    Samid down another formation. It is actually a blood essence of a transcendent stage fire elemental beast and he has a lot of it.

    He got this from Agun¡¯s spatial ring on the night of the banquet.

    He ced the fire elemental essence in the middle of the forest patch he created. This is extremely valuable for those beasts and they could sense it from a mile away.

    And Sam even sacrificed some of the essence to throw it in the forest to lure them out.

    When the Bi fangs were out, Sam just made the essence disappeared after spilling some here and there making the birds search like crazy.

    He gave it to Yanwu to consume. Even though it would have been more beneficial when he is a pretranscendent, it is still useful.

    Now that the birds are out, Sam started catching on by one.

    Finally, the transcendent stage birds and Consummate level birds have taken notice of the anomaly.

    They normally wouldn¡¯t care if the birds of lower level went missing for a few days, but this time, they went missing on arge scale.

    So, the situation turned serious.

    Sam is waiting for them toe out. He set some special traps just for the Transcendent stage birds.

    It is time for the Specter to shine once again and he is using the chessboard this time. A team of Bi fangs at transcendent stage didn¡¯t sound that bad.

    After that was done, it was finally the Consummate level birds.

    The two birds came out at the same time. There are barely any Bi fangs left in the territory. Except for the ones that went to hunt and the ones that didn¡¯te out of the mountain, every other bird is already caught.

    Now there are barely a dozen left.

    The Consummate level birds prohibited the rest of the birds froming out and took searching for themselves and Sam started his shameless method of dealing with it. But for that, he has to leave Arkiv in a hidden ce which the Bi fangs wouldn¡¯t reach.

    First step is to wait for the two birds to separate so that they would have a decent distance. After that, he appeared in front of one of the birds on his harbinger.

    The Bi fang waspletely arrogant towards Sam and didn¡¯t even bother spewing the me poison, it just wanted to swallow him whole in an instant.

    Sam didn¡¯t resist. Instead, he disappeared into the divine dimension and let it swallow him.

    After he entered the belly, he just let one tenth of the frost essence he had in his hand and threw it into the stomach.

    The frost essence is weaker than Bi fang for sure, but that is just when they are used against each other openly. Once it was thrown directly into the stomach, the situation will be different.

    Particrly in the stomach. The digestion process couldn¡¯t be stopped at will and the frost essence is not a good thing to be digested.

    The bi fang pped its wings like crazy and felt cold all over before crashing into the ground.

    Sam started throwing all kinds of stuff inside. Poison, grenades everything that could harm it and soon, he crawled out of itsrge mouth after it died.

    The other bi fang seemed to have sensed the death of itspanion. It started going berserk. But the berserk nature is the best time to take advantage of it after all.

    Sam used the same trick.

    He used the harbinger to dodge the attacks at his full speed and if he couldn¡¯t, he just entered the divine dimension and fell down and started all over again. Finally, he managed to enter the mouth once again and damaged the beast by too much. But this time he didn¡¯t finish it.

    He just made sure that Bi fang wouldn¡¯t be able to fight anymore.

    He let Sky do the rest of the job after the bird crashed.

    He let out Sky far away along with Arkiv who is observing the situation with the telescope Sam gave him.

    After the second bird crashed, it was finally time for him and Sky to arrive and kill the beast.

    Sky took revenge and Yanwu got a lot of fire elemental meat that could boost his strength.

    Now they went on with the rest of the journey.

 Chapter 860: Puppets

    The Bi Fangs are dealt with soon enough. Now it is time for them to move to their next target. Now they are notpletely focused on killing or capturing the beasts. Their major target is to conquer the areas with resources, whether they have beasts or not.

    They already have a ce in mind.

    A nearby fire elemental spirit stone mine.

    He really wished that tempest valley is nearby. But it is actually on the opposite side of this area.

    It would take some time for their people toe here and clear the area so that they could take over.

    For the next week, they are focused on searching for the mine¡¯s exact location and relocating the smaller beast tribes that are living nearby. Most of them went to the mountain that was previously upied by Bi fangs.

    That is the most resourceful ce after all.

    Sam caught a pair of beasts from each tribe to add to his collection and for the research.

    Within two weeks they are done with the mine. They only have to wait for the miners from the organization toe here and take over.

    "What¡¯s next?" Arkiv asked Sam.

    "What else? We are going deeper inside."

    When the miners finally came, Sam and Arkiv went deeper into the forest.

    Days became weeks, weeks became months.

    They just went on with the exploration. Even if they couldn¡¯t find some high-level resources at every spot, Arkiv is getting a map which would be great for his exploration team.

    The Central continent is bigger. In fact as big as the Western continent, eastern continent, and Northern continentbined.

    They would take years topletely explore this area and with all the beasts that are guarding various ces, it would only be harder and longer.

    Soon, years passed and it is time for the Next Pce of inheritance.

    In between, Sam only came out of this ce a few times. Mostly to go back to the city and take a look at the research situation and talk to Sirona about the new leads in the research.

    Within this time frame. They created many models and conducted tests so that they could modify and improve the framework they established before Sam¡¯s journey and in this process, some new types of puppets came into existence within the city.

    The most eye-catching one of them is a bird-type puppet. It is a lightning elemental puppet and it looked exactly like an eagle.

    The most important aspect of this puppet is actually that it can do at least ten different lightning-type attacks.

    Like spewing lightning from its mouth, lightning wings, crashing with lightning covered all over its body, throw lightning des, and so on.

    All of these attacks are taken from the natural attacks of the lightning eagle.

    The vines which they got from the Charbhum realm and modified after months of experimentation are used to create an artificial meridianwork within the puppet. And the puppet core which they designed has twelve rooms for programming these attacks. Out of which one is there for flying, one for spare and the rest of the ten are for programming these attacks.

    Now after injecting a spirit into with and that too with some memory imntation of the spirit which is also kind of like programming but with soul necromancy, they managed to create it.

    The only problem is that it is not powerful enough to attack the Pre-transcendent stage cultivators. It is only suitable for Nascent stage cultivators and the power source is not enough for too many attacks.

    But it was the first product after the new research, so it is bound to be like that.

    Even though it is taking a long time for the results, Sam is still satisfied. But that is not the only result in these almost three years.

    They made some new stationary puppets which are good for guarding the walls as they have many long-range attacks.

    This is a fire type and it can even manage some closebat skills when someone manages to climb the wall.

    This is based on a fire-type gori beast.

    But the whole body is not built that way. The base is stationary and attached to the wall on the base, there is a swiveling mechanism that supports the swiveling motion of the upper body to cover the three sixty degrees.

    The upper body has a gori chest, long gori arms, but a somewhat robotic humanoid head. The head can also swivel in different directions.

    The head also acts a surveince device which the chest is the house for the powersource and half of the meridianwork. The remaining half of thework is extended to the arms.

    The arms can create up to eight long-range fire-type attacks and they can establish a closebat punching and grappling routine only with the hands without moving all based on the different attacks. But these fire-type attacks are based both on the gori and the human fire elemental attacks.

    And when ced in a proper position altogether the puppets can createbination attacks and even some formation attacks.

    These are not actually directed to the market. They are not for sale yet. Currently, before Sam has to go for the Pce of inheritance, the third test product is on the way.

    As for the business expansions of the organization, the space gate formations are built on the Feathered.

    One space gate connects the Tempest valley and the Feathered and the rest of the Space gates are constructed to connect various realms under the expansion n.

    In the middle of his central continent expansion, he already sent twelve groups of his employees to different realms along with the Space gate staff to construct the Space gates on the other side too.

    Now the business ns are going at a rapid pace.

    As for the Pce of inheritance this time, Sam didn¡¯t even bother to worry too much, because it is happening in a familiar realm this time.

    The Charbhum realm.

    The ce Sam is extremely familiar with and in fact has a lot of influence.

    Sam was a bit surprised to find out that the next Pce of inheritance was there. Because the king and the Elders are only of Consummate level.

    But in between the exploration he went there once to check on the situation and also ask Raunak who is now a high-level officer to keep an eye out for the Pce of inheritance thing and how the situation is proceeding, then only he learned that about the existence of the Grand elders.

    They are people whose strength is beyond Consummate level.

    The Astral ne of cultivation.

    This is something Sam didn¡¯t expect, but still, he came to terms with it and returned.

    The rest of the yers left the Deste a year early to take a look at the realm and get to the pce of inheritance. But Sam doesn¡¯t have to.

    He just has to go a month before.

    And he did exactly that. Arkiv and Arman just tagged along.

    When they entered the Pce of inheritance, it didn¡¯t have too many tests. It is a singlerge survival test that would select the top three participants to fight it out in the finals.

    They are all thrown into the forest. They have to survive there for a month.

    And most of the enemies this time are vegetation. There are some beasts and the yers can attack each other, but the worst enemies are still the flora.

    At first, the vines that are present everywhere are after the yers along with the beasts of the forest and after a week, one third of the trees also became hostile, then came a new species out of nowhere. The flowers that give out the poisonous pollen.

    Sam is immune to that though.

    The threats kept on increasing until even breathing in the forest became difficult.

    And this doesn¡¯t have any safetys like people getting healed right before they died or something.

    Most of the yers managed to give up before things got dangerous, but not all of them. One of the yers died.

    He is from the Usaine sect.

    The Usaine sect has the most yers at the beginning with three of them being there. But now two of them died.

    As for the mysterious twelfth candidate who they never saw, they don¡¯t know where they are from or who they are.

    Now there are only nine of them left. At least until the twelfth candidate finally decides to show themselves out in the open.

    When they reached the final stage. Sam, Noah, and Akhil are the only ones left. Noah looked at Sam and sighed in exasperation.

    This is getting on her nerves so much. She walked to him directly and said.

    "Just give up this one Pce of inheritance. This is from my god. I need this."

    Sam didn¡¯t even know what to say. But after thinking about Agun and the yer that died today, he agreed.

    "But I need the second ce."

    When he said this, both Noah and Sam looked at Akhil who became angry at both of them.

    "Come on guys, how is that fair?"

    "You are getting the third ce and I will give you an ape-type beast with a decent bloodline. How about that?" Sam offered. And just like that all three of them came to a consensus without fighting.

    Then came the god or to be precise the goddess of forests. Aranyani.

    This is the third Hindu god Sam saw.

    When he saw her he couldn¡¯t help but ask.

    "You are not that famous back on earth. I didn¡¯t know you were this powerful."

    "Well, sometimes there is more to the game than the power of the gods. I may not be as strong as Kartikeya and Indra, but I have my own perks. I am even surprised you knew me. Most humans don¡¯t pray for me as much as they prey on the forests I created."

    "You can say I am a reader and Rig Veda is a good read in which you were credited a lot."

    "Of course it did. I didn¡¯t expect that someone still read Vedas. Not so bad. Anyway, are you going to fight?"

    "No, your prot¨¦g¨¦ has a deal for us and we obliged. You can talk to her."

    Aranya directed her attention to Noah who is looking at her and their conversation led to the end of the Pce of inheritance.

 Chapter 861: Hidden Player

    Sam returned to the Deste. Even though he gave the prize up for Noah. It is not for nothing. Apart from the second ce, he could also ask a huge favor from her.

    As for the mini-game or whatever the gods call it which is yed for the points, Sam is not really going to focus on that. Because it would be done by his subordinates there and he would get more points than the rest of the yers allbined.

    It is just hunting down the sea folks. Sam doesn¡¯t know why the gods have given this kind of task. The war is going on between the elves and the sea folks for years now and it is still going on. Even with all the equipment Sam has presented them with, Sea folks have too many trump cards and they are upying the sea far more than Sam and even the elves thought.

    But still, Sam has enough influence in Charbhum to get things done no matter what.

    He has an Astral ne cultivator here working for him.

    He can do whatever he wants here. The sea folks hunting is as easy as eating and drinking for him. Particrly, when the conditions clearly stated that the metric for the points is who has most bodies by the end of the game.

    So, Sam left the collection of bodies to his subordinates and returned back.

    After returning back to this ce, he continued with his exploration, research, and collection of different samples.

    But in between, he has something else to do and that is to visit his new businesses across the realms. Currently, he is expanding to the realms with Astral cultivators as in charge. Not that it mattered too much at this point as he is mostly concerned about the business expansion.

    But the presence of the Astral cultivators means that the average cultivation level is quite high which would make it a bit harder to deal with the average problems.

    That is where Sames in. The first order for his subordinates after entering the business sector is that they have to go and piss off some gangs and take over one of the weakest in the city while establishing connections with a character like Raunak in the Charbhum realm or Yodha in Naga Loka.

    Then with the connections and the fuss, the problems will automatically raise up which Sam would go and solve if the people there cannot solve and as they expand, they will establish a school in the area which recruits the orphans and train them in different methods.

    The process might not be smooth sailing, but he is sure that he could handle this. Anyway, the expansion would take some time and in that duration, he can develop the Feathered into the junction of the transportation as well as the production hub.

    And the next time he gets the chance to use the points, he nned on getting an interdimensionalmunication system so that he could establish a basicmunication channel between the whole organization.

    The process is going on well ording to n.

    Every month there is a new project starting in the feathered. A metal processing nt, grenade factories, puppet factories, wheat fields, paddy fields, cane fields, orchards. Apart from the mostmon products, the feathered is mostly focused on opening the raw materials and the processed materials which are then transported to the others to be converted into the finished product.

    There are many projects going and people are moving at a rapid pace. For the first time ever, Sam almost got a problem with the manpower. But there are too many people in the universe and every realm he enters, that realm is going to be a new source of manpower.

    There are many desperate people in every world and all they have to do is extend an olive branch. Make them take a pill and they are good for go.

    He is even making the beasts work.

    The organization contacted many races in this growth period. There are others with Yakshas, the beastmen which in itself has many subraces. Demi-humans, the giant race which is simr to the giant humanoids that are in Zeus¡¯ pce of inheritance.

    Then came the Hobgoblins which are simr to humans in many ways, except for the skin color, a bit of bone structure, and facial features. Dryads who are more like trees spirits and are a bit simr to elves as they have wood element inherent to them.

    Gnomes, the short creatures but skilled in inscriptions. Sam was surprised when he saw them. Their inscription skill ispletely inherent and they have this weird affinity with runes. They even battle with the inscriptions, drawing them in the mid-battle out of nowhere.

    Then in a realm, they managed to get in contact with nature spirits.

    They look simr to humans, but they are one with nature in many ways. There are fire elemental spirits, water, wood, lightning, and all the rest of themon elements.

    Mothmen who have insect wings and some other moth-like creatures.

    Ogres, simr to orcs but more intelligent.

    The most surprising of all and the most suitable for battle are the Were-people.

    This realm doesn¡¯t even have humans, but Sam still managed to get into their business forcefully, so that he could hire them as mercenaries.

    Were-people has many subraces. Like werecats, werewolves, weredogs, werehyena, weretigers.

    These are also the races that are thrown away by the beastmen tribes like the Minotaurs and the Centaurs.

    Sam was really impressed and amused as he explored one after another and one realm after another.

    After the Aranya¡¯s Pce of inheritance, it could be said that he spread too thin. With the training cum exploration in the Central continent and the exploration of the realms ands, he really spread too thin both his time and efforts as well as his forces and the subordinates.

    So, the recruitment process was boosted for the second time.

    And in this chaotic situation what Sam noticed is that he almost entered one-tenth of all the realms disyed in the Dimensional drifter.

    Even though it feels small, it isrge. He just expanded his influence from tens to around a hundreds in mere six years.

    That is his situation by the time the next Pce of inheritance drew near.

    And luckily, this time the Pce of inheritance is also within one of the areas he recently developed some influence in, he used the space gates and went there to keep an eye on them and went on with his training.

    He is already in the middle stage of Transcendent by now and he is absorbing resources like crazy. He is getting all kinds of resources from all the realms he visited and he is consuming them like crazy all the while battling his way into the central continent to improve both battle experience and the cultivation level and he is back to being having superior cultivation level than the rest of the yers.

    The next Pce of inheritance happened to be an open one letting the locals to participate, but only after they entered did they learn about what is truly happening.

    The the Pce of inheritance currently being held has some nature spirits and Beast men as the main poption and their task is to kill the yers that entered the Pce.

    As for the yers, their task is to survive.

    Even though the beast-men and the nature spirits are not considered the cream of the crop, they are still better than humans in terms of natural talent and they have better skills and physiques and the entry-level is up to the peak stage of transcendent level, with all that, another yer died.

    The yers are feeling cold all over. This time Noah in particr, this yer is also from the Herb Garden.

    They couldn¡¯t help but imagine themselves being in the same situation. But they couldn¡¯t stop. They had to move on.

    After this Pce of inheritance, once again the point shop opened up. Sam took the chance to get an interdimensionalmunication system that could be used with the Space gates, so that thework could be established.

    It cost every single point he has on him. It is even costlier than the and the visit to the earth.

    But he still bought it.

    There was an announcement after the shop and that is since the three yers who died didn¡¯t have their Pce of inheritances yet, they are not going to happen at all. So, there are only two Pce of inheritances left.

    After this was over, Sam returned to get busy with his expansion n, but his puppet project has some extraordinary breakthroughs, so he has to focus on that too.

    Even in that chaos, a thought sat in his mind.

    It is about the next Pce of inheritance. ording to the deal with Ling Tian, his Pce of inheritance would be thest one and they might even postpone a bit.

    So, there is only one possibility for the next Pce of inheritance and it would be the Pce for thest hidden but mysterious candidate.

    That yer, whoever it is didn¡¯t show their face except for the first Pce of inheritance, where Sam checked the twelve tattoos.

    But at that time, the identities are hidden and no one knows who that person is.

    After that, they didn¡¯te to any other Pces, so this time they will have to reveal themselves, no matter what. Sam is really looking forward to it.

 Chapter 862: Research results

    Sam¡¯s expansion ns became steady. As the forces are running too thin, there is only so far they can go. So, they stopped expanding far and started thinking of expanding wide.

    They started concentrating on the influence within the realm or the they are in and then decided to climb the realms upwards from it.

    All thes Sam sent his subordinates to are connected to a superior realm and then they are connected to an even superior realm.

    From this point, everything is going to be steady as the foundations areid.

    Meanwhile, there is only two years¡¯ time for the next Pce of inheritance. The eighth Pce of inheritance.

    Sam decided to wrap his things up within the Central continent temporarily as half of the continent is already conquered and is now safe for people to visit. He took a hold of the mines and fertilends already and now the rest of the major powers at least want a chance to send their exploration teams to pick up some crumbs.

    Arkiv started his explorationpany. Now, the Major powers can only rely on him for the map, but no one dared to force him to hand it over. Because it is a venture of the Dusk Organization.

    By now, even if they are idiots they would have realized who the head of the dusk organization is, so they didn¡¯t dare to piss them off.

    Sam became an uncrowned king of the whole.

    After wrapping it up, Sam went on full-time research mode.

    He and Sirona already established the major foundations for this puppet project, so it is about time they made something big with it.

    They even had apetition just for the fun of it to see who would make a better puppet in the next three months.

    Sam has an extremely new approach for his new design. It is almost impossible for Sirona to know a better meridianwork than he does. He just has a trove of cultivation techniques and battle techniques giving him ess to a bunch of meridianworks.

    He even offered some techniques to Sirona just to make it fair. It is her desire to have thispetition, he doesn¡¯t want to crush her by much.

    He is that confident.

    And he actually took a cultivation technique and a battle technique as his references and he is creating two meridianworks.

    Then hebined both of them and then started working on the body.

    Sam didn¡¯t stay in the divine dimension to make it fair and also didn¡¯t use the production unit.

    He designed, made every part with his own hands and it took a lot of time. The puppet is the mostplicated thing he made in past few years.

    When both of them revealed the puppets finally, they were shocked. Sam¡¯s puppet is almost simr to a human. It is just as tall as him and as lean as him. Except for therge metallic crossbars that are on the puppets¡¯ back.

    Sirona made arge mechanical gori. It is the same size as the original beast. Five to six times her size.

    But that is not what surprised him the most. It is the fact that different energies areing out of the gori.

    "Just how many elements did you use?" He asked as he took a closer look at the machine.

    "Why? You scared?"

    "You wish. It is not about the numbers in this case and as for the size, I think you would regret making it that big."

    "How do we decide who made it better?"

    "How else? Just by making them fight of course. I hope you used the necromancers well with the spirit enchantment."

    "Of course."

    "Then let them loose."

    As soon as he said that the puppet he made had its eyes brightened with a red glow and fire elemental energy raged all over.

    The gori has multiple elemental energy surrounding it as it walked forward.

    The legs of the gori are covered with the lightning element, while the arms seemed to been covered with the metal element and the chest is with the fire element.

    Sirona took the best of all the gori-type beasts of different elements and picked their best part. The metal ape has great fists, the Volcano gori has me attacks that are great whening from the mouth and the lightning gori has great legs which makes it fast.

    She used three different meridianworks and three different power sources.

    As for Sam¡¯s puppet, he used the meridianwork from the cultivation technique which has fire elements and great movements and agility. After all, some cultivation techniques have inherent battle techniques and then fused this meridianwork with that of another meridianwork that belongs to a winged race.

    Sam¡¯s puppet was surrounded with fire elemental energy as the crossbars on its back opened up created bat-like wings which are extremely thin butced with the fire elemental energy.

    The puppet kicked the ground and moved forward with a jet of fire as it used the wings to glide smoothly.

    The gori started throwing punches, but Sam¡¯s puppet is too dexterous to get hit. He used the wings to glide here and then and started throwing attacks at the gori¡¯s back most of the time.

    The attacks are mostly physical and sometimes they are ranged.

    But the Gori had a defense as stable as a mountain and the movement with those lightning legs is actually fast and it managed to catch Sam¡¯s puppet a few times.

    The battle is intense.

    It is like a battle between a Pre-transcendent stage cultivator and a beast and soon there is some audience.

    The people who are working in the factory nearby are having a break and they surrounded the scene.

    The battle is going on like crazy and everything seemed so shy because of the predetermined attacks and movements.

    Some of them are cheering for the gori and others for the humanoid puppet.

    The atmosphere is so exciting. But some of the higher-ups and the department heads who are in charge of research and staff are looking at them in awe.

    In their eyes, both pieces are masterpieces. They are practically a work of art.

    This is the pinnacle of the technology the organization has reached.

    As the witnessed the battle, Sam¡¯s puppet soon started getting the advantage, because his design for the limbs and the mechanisms is superior and his puppet took lesser damage because of the dexterity. It is a battle of endurance.

    But right before the puppet was about to finish the gori off, Sam stopped it.

    "Why did you stop?"

    Sirona asked with a displeased expression.

    "It is apetition, not a fight."

    With that, the factory workers left talking about these new things in excitement.

    The department heads and researchers surrounded Sam to ask about the details, because they knew Sirona wouldn¡¯t give them. The already experienced Sirona¡¯s cold shoulder many times.

    But Sam rejected them. There is only one reason, they need to cover the engineering basics first before they could think of doing anything remotely simr to this.

    After sending them off, Sam and Sirona started talking again.

    They are thinking of the ws in these puppets. There are two main problems at the moment, one of them is the power source. Currently they are using the space jade with a bunch of elemental stones and then second part is the durability of the meridianwork.

    The meridianwork is made with a vine. No matter how superior it was, it wouldn¡¯t be able to take the constant transmission of elemental energy through it.

    It would definitely wear down.

    For now, they can work on creating different prototypes like this while researching the meridianwork problem.

    Sam is sure that the energy source wouldn¡¯t be a short term problem. It would definitely take a long time.

    Even if it is a bit expensive, they have to use it like this.

    After discussing everything, Sam went back to his training and research.

    For the next two years, until the Pce of inheritance neared them, he is constantly making new prototypes along with Sirona andpeted with her. There are times, he lost. But most of the time he won and there are times he won by andslide.

    The workers and staff got used to this new routine.

    The revenue of the organization increased by too much and it is almost twenty-four years since Sam came here and his age must be around thirty-nine or forty years old.

    But he still looked like a man who is in his mid-twenties. The perks thate with cultivation.

    The most confusing part is not even the looks, he didn¡¯t feel like he aged at all. He was so busy with everything and too active on all fronts, that he didn¡¯t even know how the time is going so fast. There might be some changes in his mindset, but he is still essentially the same man who came to this world.

    He took a deep breath and went to attend the next Pce of inheritance.

 Chapter 863: Black Flames

    The current Pce of inheritance is being held in a realm that is powerful than the Charbhum realm and might even be powerful than the realm that was superior to the Charbhum realm.

    Because the noble family heads here are all in the Astral ne of cultivation.

    A ne of cultivation is a set of cultivation stages. The cultivation stages from Initiation to the Consummate make the Mortal ne and the Astral ne is the next set.

    The astral ne is not as divided as the Mortal ne though.

    It only has four different stages, each having four different sub-stages.

    The current person in charge is in the second main stage of the Astral ne and the noble family heads and big shots are in the first stage of the Astral ne.

    This realm is also where the expansion ns are going the slowest as they have to be careful. As of this moment, Sam only has one Astral ne cultivator, three if he counted the Raiju beasts that recently broke through.

    There is a suppression ced on Raijus within the Deste, so Sam is the one who moved them out and now they cannot go back to the Tempest valley. They are currently residing in the Feathered so that they can reach any realm easily and help out if needed.

    Anyway, back to the topic, the expansion in this is actually slow and steady and Sam had minimum influence here.

    But he still made some contacts, thest time he visited here.

    The ruling race in this realm is the Winged race. The very race Sam used as a reference for the first puppet he made inpetition with Sirona.

    The Winged race has wings that are simr to that of a Bat.

    They are strong, have a superior bloodline and physique to humans and they don¡¯t have problems like elves in terms of fertility rate.

    They have numbers too.

    Sam is currently in the capital of this realm and he is meeting with a Noble kid who is of simr cultivation as him.

    They already gained ess to the Pce of inheritance, there are around two weeks for it to open. So, meanwhile, Sam just wanted to discuss some possible business deals.

    But while they are discussing, someone ran into the room and spoke to Sam in a hurried tone.

    "Boss, Arkiv was attacked. He is not feeling well."

    Sam frowned and ran out of the room.

    They are currently in the residence prepared for him by the employees and Arkiv wanted to take a look at the city.

    Sam followed his subordinate and soon found Arkiv in the middle of the street sitting while holding his chest tightly with his right hand. His bow is ced on the side and he is swallowing pills like crazy with his other hand.

    Sam ran towards him and finally Arkiv rxed and fainted.

    Sam examined the wounds.

    There are many flesh wounds that looked like a piece of it was cut off from his body. Sam frowned and looked around. The battlefield is full of traces of fire elemental energy, but the wounds turned out to be flesh cuts, this is a bit confusing.

    He first, gave him some heavenly wine and set the broken bones back, before letting his subordinates take care of him while he inspected the battlefield.

    There are some traces of ck mes still burning around. It is the first time he saw ck mes and the fire elemental energy is extremely concentrated in there.

    He looked at the ck me that is burning the surrounding rock off and was surprised. Even with the energy vision, he couldn¡¯t understand how the me is burning for so long. There is no vegetation, flesh or even any other mmableponent, it is just rock.

    He used his earth element to make the rock protrude out with that burning me and it is right before his eyes now.

    He let it burn slowly and stood there for minutes without doing anything, except holding that extended protrusion, at least that is what it looked like.

    But he is using observation ability to take a look at the me and what is happening to the rock and he soon got the answer.

    For some reason, the ck me can burn the rock and it is not melting it, instead, it is evaporating it. But it didn¡¯t stay there for long, it started dwindling as the spiritual energy within the me was being consumed slowly.

    He injected some spiritual energy through the rock and as long as the active spiritual energy stayed, it is burning andter with his maniption he sucked the energy dry which made the me go off instantly.

    He now understood why Arkiv has flesh wounds on his body, he cut the flesh off when the mes are burning so that he could stop it from spreading.

    He went to meet Arkiv who is resting. By now Arman also returned.

    "How are you doing?" Sam asked Arkiv after checking the condition.

    "I am alright."

    "Who attacked you? Those mes are weird."

    "I don¡¯t know, she looked like a woman. Her whole body is covered in the ck cloak."

    "Why did she attack you? Is there a conflict?"

    "Conflict my ass. She just ambushed me out of nowhere. She seems to be proficient in hiding her own presence, she is almost as skilled as your shadow mice.

    Damn it, I want to kill her so bad. Those mes are torturous."

    Sam went and meet with the young master with who he was in contact.

    "I want some details regarding this incident, can you put a word out?"

    "Sure."

    Sam carefully checked Arkiv¡¯s condition again and again for the rest of the day. He felt like the flesh that came into contact with the ck me ispletely different from any burnt flesh he saw before.

    It almost sucked the vitality and spiritual energy along with the normal burning process.

    By evening the young master came back anxiously and said.

    "Sam, the guards at the city gate found something in the nearby forest. You might want to take a look at it."

    Sam took off on harbinger hurriedly and within a few minutes, he is already at the city gate. On the way, he could see some ck smokeing out of the forest as he neared it got clearer and clearer.

    There is a patch of forest burning in these ck mes. Sam activated energy vision and tried to concentrate to the maximum.

    He could see the vitality of the forest leaving as the me spread.

    If this goes on, by the end of it the patch left wouldn¡¯t be good enough to even grow grass for the next few years.

    Sam circled on the harbinger as he created a fire in an opposite direction with his golden me around the patch with the ck

    He didn¡¯t let the golden me spread and instead just let the contacted trees burn and this created a ring and now the ck mes will be cut there, not spreading directly.

    If it is a normal me, this would have been good enough, but this ck me is even contacting the soil and rocks, so this would be a bit troublesome.

    But he remembered the spiritual energy requirement of the me and was a bit relieved. The soil doesn¡¯t contain as much active spiritual energy as the trees, so it wouldn¡¯t be a problem for a bit, but it would take a long time for the whole patch to go off.

    So, he took this chance to experiment a bit with this.

    He threw some water at the mes, but it also got caught and burned. He then threw some wine, biofuel, a methane gas container, and such.

    The reaction with wine is not much as for the Bio-fuel and Methane, they didn¡¯t give off the expected reaction. The me is burning them down instead of using them to propagate more.

    After some thought, Sam took off his feather coat and went near the mes. He activated partial fusion and ced his hands into the ck me.

    He felt like something foreign is trying to invade him when the ck me tried to swallow the golden me. Both of them are shing together.

    Sam retracted the fusion and let his arm burn.

    He felt a hissing pain as he took his arm back.

    He now understood why Arkiv said it is torturous. The me is not just burning, the spiritual energy that is responsible for easing the pain and heloing him with endurance was being sucked out along with vitality.

    Which makes him both weak and vulnerable.

    He didn¡¯t who anything on his face as he observed the whole process carefully.

    While burning in the mes, his arm is slowly withering, but the me didn¡¯t spread up his arm, because he tried his best to cut off the connection between the spiritual energy in the arm and the rest of his body.

    Arman was anxious when he saw the arm being burned like this, even the young master who followed is feeling a bit afraid at Sam¡¯s nonchnce.

    At this moment, all of a sudden the ck me on Sam¡¯s arm was reced by the golden me and his withered arm slowly started getting back to normal.

 Chapter 864: Hidden Player attacks

    "Do you know what is inside?"

    Sam asked the noble kid who followed him. But thetter only shook his head. Sam thought for a second and activated fire elemental fusion to aplete state and walked into the mes.

    The mes toned down a bitpared to the first time they are here.

    But still, they are extremely intense and it is still trying to devour Sam. He felt like some foreign body like a parasite is trying to infect him and eat him up from inside and there is a prickling sensation in his body.

    He walked to the center of the ming inferno to see what the person who is responsible for this is burning.

    He found out that there are two corpses inside and he brought them out.

    By now the corpses arepletely unrecognizable. It is impossible to recognize who it is just from looking. The bodies are that damaged and there is barely any flesh left on those withered bones.

    But they managed to find out something that could give them some clues. The spatial rings.

    Even though it is damaged a lot and space inside was almost copsed because of the damage, it is still essible.

    When they took the belongings of both the victims from inside, Sam was surprised. There are two very familiar tokens inside the spatial rings.

    The ess tokens for the Pce of inheritance.

    The Pce of inheritance this time also turned out to be an open one and in fact, there are a lot more people entering than the previous open ones.

    At first, Sam just suspected the motives of the attacker when she attacked Arkiv, but now that he saw these two people, he is sure that whoever it is that made the attack is trying to thin the numbers that enter the Pce of inheritance.

    If Sam didn¡¯t retrieve the corpses, the tokens would have been destroyed along with the spatial rings and the number of tokens is limited. It would have been perfect.

    He looked at the corpses and the forest fire intently, before he took a deep breath and said to the noble kid.

    "Tell, the king about this news one way or the other. The people who are going to enter the Pce of inheritance are being attacked by someone. Tell him to do as he sees fit."

    He doesn¡¯t know who the other party is nor the clear motives on why that person is killing the candidates for Pce of inheritance.

    Maybe that person is also someone who managed to qualify for the Pce of inheritance and wanted to reduce herpetition, but as far as Sam knew there is no one with ck mes in the candidates selected by the winged race.

    He was there for the tournament and he is sure of it. This reminded him of another possibility, the mysterious hidden yer.

    The hidden yer that didn¡¯t show their face until now.

    Maybe that yer is responsible for this. After all, this Pce of inheritance is that yer¡¯s and it would be advantageous for that person to thin down the numbers properly.

    But still, he cannot be sure until he confirmed it by himself.

    After the forest patchpletely burned down and making sure it didn¡¯t spread everywhere randomly, Sam returned to the city with the rest of the people following him.

    While they are moving in the city all of a sudden, they heard an explosion nearby and a faint trace of the ck mes could be seen.

    Sam immediately made his move, the area is where most inns are present and that is also where some yers are living. When he reached the ce, he could see Donner fighting with a woman who is coveredpletely in ck.

    If not for her chest, it would have been impossible to find out her gender.

    Donner is clearly on losing side and she is dancing around daggers as he dealt with him easily.

    There are already several scars on his body with the ck me burning on them.

    Sam quickly made his way towards her to get a look at her. He couldn¡¯t care less about the life and death of Donner, after all, if the situation arises, he might kill that guy himself, but he has to see who she is so that he could be prepared. Two of the yers are his friends orpanions after all. He couldn¡¯t let them be killed by someone like this.

    But as soon as he neared the area, she looked at him and left the ce in a pull of ck smoke as she turned into a shadow and merged into the darkness.

    Sam activated his energy vision to take a look at the surroundings and tried to find her, but to his surprise, he couldn¡¯t see a single trace of her energy. She really disappeared into thin air. Even the ghosts are visible under the energy vision as long as they have a trace of spiritual energy on them.

    But she managed to disappear into thin air.

    Sam felt really frustrated for a second. For the first time in a while, he felt that situation ispletely out of his control.

    He returned to his residence and Arkiv is still resting, the whole residence is guarded by his subordinates. She would have to create argemotion if she really attacked this area and they are extremely close to the noble households.

    For the next few days, the cases of the ck medy¡¯s appearance increased rapidly, many people that are selected for the Pce of inheritance died and the king didn¡¯t take any action. In fact, he even ordered the city guards to not meddle if the battle is between the candidates of the Pce of inheritance.

    Sam is notpletely surprised by this attitude.

    The attitude for the first and second Pce of inheritances is simr, the thunder god temple and other major powers are not allowed to attack the candidates with the Pce of inheritance token on them as long as they are within their grounds.

    Only if the fight is fair, they would be exempted, but if it is not, then they would face the wrath of the Avatar from the Pce of inheritance.

    He just wanted to see if the person who attacked is also considered the candidate by asking the king to take action and it is confirmed now.

    Sam tried his best to track and follow this woman, but he couldn¡¯t.

    Every time the people that are attacked are random and no one could guess who the next target is.

    All the yers except for Sam and Arman were attacked at least once in the first week and there is only a week left for the day of the Pce opening.

    And the attacks increased. By now almost all the candidates with the tokens other than the yers are all gone.

    The situation ispletely chaotic. Even though some tokens are saved, nobody dared to hold them. They are all sent back to the king. Only one candidate was left and he is a prince and he didn¡¯t dare leave the side of his father.

    When the day of the opening is nearing, Sam was called to the Pce by the king.

    "Do you know who is doing this?"

    "Not really, she didn¡¯t show her face once"

    "Is it okay for my son to go inside with you guys?"

    "Actually, the returns will be great, if he manages to survive, but it would be difficult. The survival rate inside the Pce is high, but not for the outsiders. There is a ny percent chance that your son would die, even if he didn¡¯t die because of that woman, there is a chance he would die just from the tests inside.

    If you ask me, I would tell you to not send him in."

    The brief meeting really changed the King¡¯s mind. He really didn¡¯t send his son, rather he decided to give this chance to his son¡¯s study attendant. Even though it could be seen as cruel, the study attendant volunteered himself to do so, so that they wouldn¡¯t miss what is truly happening inside.

    As the days passed, the day finally came.

    All the yers and the study attendant of the prince came towards the imperial pce of grounds.

    When they arrived, they finally saw the woman in ck.

    All the yers are looking at her with resentment. yers didn¡¯t die in her hands, but they sure as hell are injured. Except for Arman and Sam whom she didn¡¯t attack, Noah and Akhil are the only onespletely unscathed even after she attacked them.

    They managed to defend themselves and even push her back.

    But the rest of the yers are severely injured, at least Arkiv was ambushed, so it is reasonable to say he is not that weak, but Donner, Kumar, and Dayus are all attacked straightforwardly without any hesitation, but they are still injured.

    But none of them are ready to admit that they are weaker, everyone is trying to get the chance to fight her once again inside the Pce of inheritance.

 Chapter 865: Survival game

    When they entered the Pce of inheritance, the Avatar spoke directly.

    "This time, the test is simple. It is a battle of survival. All you have to do is to stay as long as possible. You can fight each other, or kill each other. As long as you say you give up, then you would be safe.

    If you are killed by the environment or by your fellow candidates, it is solely your responsibility.

    You cannot use any special weapons and even spirit weapons.

    Get inside that room one by one."

    One after another all of them stepped inside the door.

    When Sam entered it, he felt like he was sucked inside some sort of portal.

    When he finally got his senses back, he waspletely surrounded by ck and bright red mes. The whole area is like an inferno. Even he felt suffocated by the heat until he circted the Yanwu bloodline.

    He managed to tackle the heat.

    Sam didn¡¯t move too much even then, he just looked around in the immediate surroundings to confirm that no one is there and there is no immediate threat.

    Finally, he started observing the mes and the environment.

    There are two types ofva streams in the surroundings. One is bright red almost in the color of blood and the other is ck. Along with the small and thinva streams, there are also mes surrounding him. Except for the basic topsoil in the ground, the rest of the objects in the surroundings are covered in mes.

    The rocks, some withered trees everything is covered in the ck and red mes.

    After watching this, Sam just became surer that the woman in ck is the yer. Every Pce of inheritance, the environment inside is favorable to the yer that the Pce belongs to.

    Sam started moving in a direction he picked, but as soon he moved a few feet, he felt some other presence, which he couldn¡¯t see. He tried to take a look at it with the energy vision, but all he could see pure fire elemental energy around him.

    He frowned at this and got ready to battle.

    As he stayed vignt, he finally saw a fireballing at him.

    A humanoid figure came out of the nearestva puddle.

    It ispletely covered with ck and red mes.

    Sam couldn¡¯t feel any vitality or death energy from him, so he came to a conclusion, this is elemental.

    It has been a while since hest saw one. These creatures are not exactlymon after all.

    The elemental ran towards Sam and started throwing fireballs, firebirds, and all kinds of me attacks.

    Sam wanted to use the water element which is the fastest method to deal with these fire elementals.

    But he was wrong. The water that came into contact with the fire elemental also caught on the ck me and started burning.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel frustrated. What kind of nature does the fire have to be to even put water on the fire?

    He has only one choice now. To directly attack the elemental until its core is destroyed.

    Sam was covered in golden mes as he activated partial fusion and made a move at the elementals. He threw rapid punches at the elemental in that close range. It is nothing but a moving puddle of Lava, at least that is who he felt when he hit it. But he is not just hitting it.

    Every hit, he is getting closer to the core and soon, he managed to break the core easily. The elemental was gone.

    Sam really felt a bit exhausted right after the fight. Even though he could dozens of them together, he felt like the environment is making him use more energy than he was supposed to use.

    The consumption is toorge.

    Sam took out a wine which is full of ice elemental energy. It is arge jar and he poured a small amount of heavenly wine inside and started chugging it.

    He felt refreshed.

    The heavenly wine is to make him feel energized and the ice elemental wine tobat the heat effects that are on him because of this.

    After he chugged it, he felt a little bit cooler. But he looked at the heavenly wine with a sad look. Because he has only a little more of it left.

    As much as he liked the wine, he only drank it asionally. When he wanted to feel drunk because of his mood or if he was critically injured.

    And sometimes Old beast asked for a taste now and then.

    But even then, it has been almost two decades since he got this, so it is bound to be finished. But still, even though he is feeling sad, it is not because it would end in just a few days, it mighte in handy for the next two to three years, but with all the time he spent here, he felt like two to three years is an extremely small span of time.

    As he thought about the wine for a while, he took another jar of ice wine and chugged it before walking again.

    He has to focus on the Pce of inheritance and it would be hard to not to do so as the elementals around him started growing.

    He tried to use other elemental energies, but everything is catching on those ck mes in one way or the other.

    Only after a dozen or so trials did he manage to get past the mes and hit the elemental with a different element other than the fire element.

    He could really imagine how the rest of the yers are feeling.

    The battle went for days. He doesn¡¯t know who vast this area is, but he walked for three days straight and still didn¡¯t see any trace of a yer.

    He met with a lot of elementals and on the third day, he met with a beast for the first time.

    The Devil Wyvern.

    When Sam saw this beast, his first reaction is to catch it. The Devil Wyverns are very high-level beasts. They are on par with the Ape he has with him.

    This is the only beast he knew to possess a ck me. And another specialty is it is only called a wyvern because it looks like one in terms of its body and bone structure not because it is also a lesser dragon.

    In fact, there is no such thing as a devil dragon.

    But it is hard to catch it in such an environment as it wouldn¡¯t submit to any of the superiority of the bloodlines.

    He can only fight it out. He killed a dozen or so of these devil wyverns after he failed to make them submit.

    He walked for another three days before he finally saw traces of another yer.

    He saw several arrows that are half-burned and molten in the sand. It must have belonged to Arkiv.

    He followed the trail left behind by the arrows and after another three days, he finally saw Arkiv.

    He is currently fighting with a bunch of Devil Wyverns and the Elementals.

    Sam jumped in to help him and both of them continued their journey.

    The Wyverns are getting crazier the more they traveled and elementals are bingrger and stronger.

    Days passed slowly.

    Sam is chugging ice wine along with Arkiv every day as they walked.

    Even though Sam can endure it, he doesn¡¯t like it.

    As for Arkiv, if not for the Ice wine he would have given up by now.

    It is that irritating.

    Three weeks passed like this, without them meeting another yer.

    And at the end of the third week, Sam finally saw someone else.

    It is the body of the study attendant.

    His wings are burned down and half of his flesh was molten with the skeleton visible to outside.

    He died the most gruesome of deaths.

    Sam burned the whole body down and collected the ashes to give back to the king.

    After another two weeks, they finally something else.

    The yers are fighting.

    It is Noah and Donner.

    Even though both of them had elements that are not exactly great in this kind of environment, they are fighting it out to the best of their abilities.

    Particrly Noah, she seemed to have vine seeds suitable for every environment.

    Soon, the fight is over and Noah won while Donner gave up, she looked at the duo and became vignt.

    But after some time both parties went on separate ways.

    They are on rtively friendly termspared to normal and two dayster, Sam and Arkiv met with Dayus and Kumar, and this time the fight broke out.

    Kumar and Dayus had to give up in the end and with that, the whole environment suddenly shook and a wall of fire could be seen far away.

    Sam took a high vantage point on a burning rock and took out the telescope to take a look.

    He saw that the wall of fire which is miles away, slowly moving inward in a snail¡¯s pace, and the elementals and the Wyverns are all gathering together and moving towards them along with it.

    He took a look in a different direction and felt like rather than a wall, it should be called arge ring.

    Even though he couldn¡¯t see all of it, he could guess what is happening.

    The god is trying to bring them all closer so that they would have more probability of fighting.

 Chapter 866: Gathered at the Centre

    The wall of fire ising closer and closer every day. Sam and Arkiv started moving in the different direction.

    The elementals and the Devil wyverns are all acting crazily as the wall neared them and all of them are showing their frustrations on the yers they came across.

    Sam and Arkiv are on the move at a full speed so that they could maintain the distance, but for some reason as the wall got closer, it looked like it ising faster.

    After a week of running, they started seeing the rest of the yers. The wyverns and the elementals also increased in number. There are hundreds of them all gathered together like an army running after the yers with the wall of fire behind them.

    Woman in the ck, thest yer is also here.

    Soon everyone could see the whole ring of fire and the rest of the yers other than themselves.

    Out of nine yers, only five of them are remaining.

    Sam, Arkiv, Akhil, Noah and the woman in the ck. Arman didn¡¯t seem to make it. Arkiv and Noah are the only ones who made it despite not possessing the fire element.

    Arkiv wouldn¡¯t have made if he didn¡¯t meet Sam with the amount of damage his body took. As for Noah, she is just being Noah, she never failed to reach finals in Pce of inheritance except the first one.

    Akhil made it because he was not injured from the attack of the ckdy in the past few days and managed to endure this heat.

    As they neared the center, everybody got nervous. Because it is inevitable that they sh, but with the wall of fireing from behind, it would be hard for them to not feel fear and the presence of hundreds of elementals and the devil wyverns is not a joke either.

    After some time, the wall of fire suddenly stopped and so did the yers. Even the elementals and the Devil Wyverns stopped in their tracks for a moment before slowly moving away from the wall.

    The yers all looked at each other and they understood that this might be the final stage.

    The stage where they had to fight it all out. When they looked at the areapletely surrounded by the mes, they noticed that there is nova puddle, an openva stream, not even a single rock. It is just a normal patch ofnd with ck sand covering itpletely and it is full of hundreds of elementals and wyverns and only five people.

    "Let us deal with themon enemies first and we can settle at among ourselvester." Akhil yelled at the top of his lungs so that everyone could hear his words.

    Even though they could see each other, it is not easy to talk normally. They are that far away.

    A ce that could fit hundreds of creatures is not small after all.

    Nobody wanted to yell back, but Sam threw a ball of a golden me which turned into four letters "Deal".

    Noah did the same with her vines and even the woman in the ck did the same with her ck mes.

    All of them started moving towards the center where the creatures are lying.

    Sam really wished he could use his guns at the moment. That would be of great use when there are so many targets.

    But he has to be satisfied with his bow in his hands.

    Sam started shooting them down along with Arkiv.

    Everyone is attacking the creatures and even the woman in the ck who everyone is wary of didn¡¯t disappoint them as she killed them.

    They fought like that for a whole day.

    Sam used void style with his arrows to finish them off faster than normal and with most kills being his followed by the woman in the ck, they finished it by the end of the day.

    By now everyone is exhausted.

    They had to preserve their energy while fighting these things and taking medicine in between to recover the energy levels, so that they could continue the fight.

    After everything is over, they are tense. Because, they knew something bad might happen. Everyone is weak and they had to recover their energy and whoever recovers the energy first is going to in an advantage.

    Sam took the heavenly wine out and started drinking it as he looked at the woman in the ck carefully.

    The rest of the yers don¡¯t have energy vision, so they don¡¯t know, but he could see the energy levels of hers raising rapidly.

    She is able to recover quickly because of the surrounding ck mes.

    The wall of fire itself is giving energy to her. In fact, throughout the whole fight, he was observing her constantly, she took the least medicine in the whole group. The environment is tailor made for her.

    He recovered quickly in fear she would do something.

    She looked at Sam at this moment and their eyes met. She has a weird flicker in her eyes that is simr to that of those ck mes and it almost looked like those eyes are smiling at him.

    He immediately yelled at Noah who is nearest to her.

    "NOAH, watch out."

    At his words, Noah suddenly made a move a few seeds fell on the side and a bunch of vines surrounded her and built a cocoon around her.

    The woman in the ck threw a ball of ck mes at Noah right at this moment.

    For some reason the vines managed to put up some kind of protection for a few seconds, which allowed Noah to escape from the cocoon.

    She looked at the woman coldly as if she wanted to kill her.

    The rest of the yers also looked at her in the same way.

    After all, everyone here except Sam was attacked by her. It would be weird if they didn¡¯t hate her to the guts.

    But she is confident for some reason.

    Sam felt like something is fishy and he started looking around with the energy vision.

    But before he could examine the surroundings, some of the devil wyverns that are supposed to be dead moved all of a sudden and stood around the woman.

    Sam took out his bow and started shooting immediately. But the wyverns are magically avoiding all the vital parts, but are still taking the shots. Even when he used the void style, they are trying their best to use their whole bodies and are blocking the arrows even though every arrow is taking a chunk of flesh from their bodies.

    No matter who many he shot, he still couldn¡¯t reach her.

    The rest of the yers also started reacting, but to their surprise, the remaining wyverns near the woman which are supposed to be dead are all moving.

    Sam is a bit surprised. He tried to so hard to subdue a devil wyvern, but he couldn¡¯t. But this woman managed to fool all of them into thinking that she killed them, but in fact she actually subdued them and is now controlling them to use them as meat shields.

    While the yers are unable to get near her as they are weak and at the same time Wyverns are fighting with suicidal methods, the woman in ck ran towards Noah and started fighting with her.

    The battle became intense instantly, right when they are all focusing on the wyverns and the woman, one wyvern which was battling with Akhil, got too close to him just when he was about to deal the finishing blow and just held on to him with its limbs, before dragging him towards the fire wall abruptly.

    Akhil is trying his best to get rid of that grip, but he failed to do so as the wyvern is using all it can to hold him down and another wyvern followed that to make sure that he didn¡¯t escape.

    Everyone was dumbfounded for a second. Sam shot an arrow with void style at the wyvern that was holding him, but the one following the first one took the shot to its head and died. Before he could load the second one, the woman in the ck surprisingly directed his attention towards Sam and Akhil who is dangerous close to the fire wall, just gave up instantly.

    He disappeared from the grip of the wyvern just like that and the wyvern fell into the wall of fire and burned to ashes.

    The woman seemed a bit disappointed at the oue as she looked at the wyvern.

    Taking this opportunity, the rest of the yers started taking down the wyverns while Sam engaged with the woman directly.

    "Nice to finally meet you."

    The woman greeted in a casual voice while she dodged Sam¡¯s attacks.

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and tried his best to get a hold of her. She is agile, like a cat, and nimble on her limbs.

    He is having a hard time getting a hold of her when she only focused on dodging.

    "It is rude to ignore ady when she greets you, you know that right?"

    Sam didn¡¯t care about her words and just focused on attacking.

    While they are busy the rest of the yers didn¡¯t know whether to intervene in the battle or not.

    When Arkiv is about to shoot the arrow, Sam gestured him against it and told him to stay put.

    Sam himself doesn¡¯t know what kind of threat she is possessing, but one thing is for sure. Whatever it is, if by any chance the other yers got into this fray, they would definitely get into trouble. His instincts are screaming that.

 Chapter 867: Death

    Sam felt pretty frustrated.

    The surrounding environment is not allowing him to use different elements, but the fire element alone is a bit limiting to his abilities, he almost felt like he didn¡¯t put enough effort in developing his elements.

    The woman in the ck is like a slippery loach. He couldn¡¯t catch her no matter how much he tried. She is managing to dodge the attacks by a hair¡¯s breadth.

    But still, after he got used to her rhythm, he managed to get some hits in and the fight actually started at the moment.

    Thedy is surprised. She certainly didn¡¯t expect Sam to catch on to her rhythm so quickly, much less managing to attack her.

    Both of them almost abandoned their fire elements as they started fighting. For some reason Sam¡¯s golden mes are on par with her ck mes, both of them couldn¡¯tpletely take out the other with that, so they tacitly went for normal hand-to-handbat.

    Sam finally understood how she can move like that. She is using some kind of technique that could repel something.

    Her unnatural moments with which she managed to dodge almost all of his ranged attacks are because she is using this technique on the ground so that she would be repelled from it.

    This is simr to that of ripple style a bit. But ripple style doesn¡¯t predict the direction of the repulsion, and only repels or diverts things, but it is a lot more versatile and could be used in many ways even in ranged attacks, but her style can only be used on contact.

    Sam wanted to test some of his spections in the battle and gestured Arkiv to shoot an arrow.

    When the arrow came near her, she made some hand motions near the arrow contact point and its direction waspletely changed.

    The arrow directly moved towards Sam.

    Sam caught the arrow and a smirk appeared on his face.

    This is the reason, why his instincts are screaming not to let anyone else interfere.

    She is using her repel style to make Sam suffer the damage. As for why she is not doing the opposite, he doesn¡¯t know, but since he already got the conclusion, he doesn¡¯t have to be wary of her too much, he started attacking her, but this time he used void style.

    Her dodging is impable.

    But with Sam¡¯s speed, she is only dodging it by a hair¡¯s breadth.

    So, when the punch hit the empty air, the void style would still be active and she would receive some damage if she is not careful.

    While seeing the fight progress intensely, Noah and Arkiv are looking at each other with the same expression.

    "Why don¡¯t we figure out, who stays and who leaves between us, before they are done?" Noah asked Arkiv calmly.

    "And the winner gets to fight Sam?"

    "Yes, he might even be too exhausted to deal with us, when he would be done with her, so it is not a bad thing. Even if he surprises us once again without any exhaustion, it would still be great to have a second ce."

    "Sure, a normal duel?"

    "No Blood arts."

    "Deal."

    "Deal."

    With that, they shook hands and stepped away from each other as they got ready to fight. Sam almost wanted to roll his eyes.

    If not for the high energy consumption and resistance from the environment he would have used the different elements and finished the fight by now, but here they are having a blind trust that he would finish the fight and they are exhausting their energy without caring about the resistance from the environment.

    The two battles went on and on. Noah had the upper hand over Arkiv and right when she was about to solidify that upper hand by handing a critical blow, the woman in ck who is fighting Sam changed tracks and ran towards her.

    Sam didn¡¯t let her go though, he moved after her and even used partial light fusion. Light element is one of the most energy consuming elements, but it does increase speed.

    The woman in ck attacked both Noah and Arkiv with ck mes. The mes took the shape of a ck phoenix and moved in two directions catching thempletely off guard.

    Both of them tried their best to defend but still had to take the hits directly.

    Their bodies caught the ck me.

    At this exact moment, Sam¡¯s punchnded on her back, the ck robe was torn apart and his fist almost lodged itself into her body, but she is too sturdy and the flesh is too thick to finish the process.

    But the impact wasn¡¯t negated. She felt her whole internal organs shake and started spitting blood. Because of her face cover, the blood didn¡¯te out directly, but it started seeping out of the cloth.

    Sam wanted to follow up, but Noah and Arkiv are injured, he moved to them and used the golden mes to devour those ck mes.

    "I think, it is better if you quit."

    Sam said after he looked at their state, their bodies are damaged badly and if not for him, half of their bodies would have been molten.

    Just one attack in their weakened state and they are going to die.

    Sam looked at the woman and felt she is dangerous beyond belief.

    There are not many people in this world, that would show their back to him in a battle like this.

    But she did and almost killed two other yers.

    At that instant, her speed is far beyond his imagination.

    She used the repel style to the maximum and reached the same speed as his wind elemental fusion.

    Noah and Arkiv looked at her with resentment and gave up which made them disappear into thin air.

    Finally, only Sam and her left in this ce. She is clearly injured and Sam is also a bit fatigued, but he has the upper hand in this exchange.

    At this moment, she spoke calmly.

    "I brought a gift for you actually."

    As she spoke, she took out something from her spatial ring and Sam widened his eyes in shock.

    She is holding the lightning de. She threw the de towards Sam who caught hold of it, the spirit instantly reacted to his touch.

    "Where did you get it? He couldn¡¯t possibly be using this. Spirit weapons are not allowed."

    "Well, they are not allowed to be used, but they can be taken from the spatial ring of a dead person and given to another."

    Sam closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

    "I know you wouldn¡¯t believe me. That is why I brought something else."

    She waved her hand and Arman¡¯s body fell out of her spatial ring.

    Sam looked at him with a dead gaze. He didn¡¯t expect that Arman would die, he thought he might have given up, but dead? That is not even something he thought.

    "He fought bravely and in fact, he gave me a tough fight. But he is not as smart as you. He didn¡¯t realize the energy consumption he has is too much in this environment and he didn¡¯t factor that I can recover almost three times faster than he does.

    And some snide remarks here and there, he is dead."

    Sam slowly walked towards his body. He didn¡¯t have a good start with Arman, to be precise, they had a good start, but after that start, Arman got too greedy for the thunder prison.

    He didn¡¯t stop at all costs and kept on pushing it, Sam couldn¡¯t take it and made him break. He broke the will, soul, and body and reconstructed them back to normal. Like he is some kind of a toy or a machine.

    But after that, they had developed a healthy boss and employee rtionship andter they could even be considered friends, Sam suddenly felt a bit heavy in his heart.

    He has seen too much death to feel like this.

    Just when Sam was about to squat and take a look at Arman¡¯s body, The woman made her move and stabbed her palm near his corbone as she released the ck mes out her hands.

    She wanted to burn him.

    Sam held her arm tightly and started emitting golden mes.

    He bent down with her arm still in his body and gently pushed Arman¡¯s body to side and stood up again.

    She looked at his dead eyes which showed no emotion and felt a bit anxious.

    The golden mes and the ck mes shed.

    "You seemed to have known too much about me to use Arman¡¯s death as an emotional bait, but you didn¡¯t know enough, if you have known you wouldn¡¯t havee this close to me."

    As he spoke, his eyes turned red and skin turned paler as his teeth turned into fangs.

    Her eyes started shaking at his transformation and she tried her best to move away. But Sam didn¡¯t let her go. He pulled her towards him and bit into her neck forcefully as he sucked her blood out while burning her with the golden mes.

    The sh between the golden mes and ck mes became weaker as the ck mes are dwindling crazily.

 Chapter 868: Interference

    Sam didn¡¯t care if he would turn into a monster or something else for drinking human blood, but he is sure that this is the best way to deal with her at the moment and this is also the most painful way to deal with her.

    After all, she is good at sucking the vitality of the people with her mes.

    She kills them with the most torturous of the methods, so he wanted to see how she would act in such a situation. He wants to see her expression.

    He used his other hand to remove her veil.

    She is neither beautiful nor ugly. Her facial features are average. She would easily blend in with the crowd.

    As Sam is enjoying her agony and was about to finish her off, he felt a weird pull over his body, and both of them separated.

    At this moment, his instincts are too dangerous and he is inplete vampire mode. If any other yers are beside him he would either feast on their blood or kill them directly.

    But he is sure that the yers are not the ones that pulled him over. He looked at the woman who is on herst legs.

    If he made a proper move, she will die.

    Sam got ready to do that and took out the reaper sword.

    But at this moment, he felt some resistance from that invisible force again which held him in ce.

    "Not so fast youngster. I can¡¯t let you kill her."

    A voice was heard throughout the area and the wall of fire disappeared suddenly.

    A womanpletely dressed in ck slowly descended from the air. ck mes surrounded her and her long ck hair moved along with those ck mes giving a dangerous but beautiful picture.

    "A goddess interfering in a pce of inheritance. I don¡¯t think the rest of the gods would look kindly upon this."

    "Well, shouldn¡¯t they be grateful that I didn¡¯t let my yer out since the start rather than feeling angry about my interference, she would have killed them from the beginning if she participated earlier so that gratefulness is enough for them to offset this slight mistake."

    "But I am not leaving her alone. I would kill her one way or the other."

    "For that, you need to move first."

    Sam knew that he couldn¡¯t move at the moment, but he still looked stubbornly at her. In fact, he started using more force which led to his body receiving damage.

    "Why bother trying so hard? You will only be harming yourself."

    "Am I really just harming myself?"

    Sam asked in return and moved fiercely.

    His arm muscles started tearing apart and blood seeped out.

    She finally seemed to havee to a realization and let go of the resistance.

    Sam activated light elemental fusion immediately and arrived near thest yer instantly.

    Right when he was about to slice her throat with a sword, that woman was pulled away from that position.

    Sam missed the throat and she was saved.

    "You are quite smart aren¡¯t you? It is the iron rule that gods shouldn¡¯t hurt other yers. You are really nning to screw me over didn¡¯t you?"

    Sam didn¡¯t reply, he wanted to make a move again, but he knew he wouldn¡¯t be able to do so.

    "Even if you can save her now, I wouldn¡¯t let her goter. You should know, she only managed to survive this long because of the environment, the outside is not like that. The next time I meet her, I will definitely kill her."

    "That is not going to be easy anyway. She managed to stay away from you for two decades, do you think she wouldn¡¯t be able to do that after she escaped."

    "You can wait and see."

    "Let us leave it at that for now. Since I interfered, it is her loss, so I would give you the prizes."

    "I don¡¯t need them."

    "Well, it is not really up for you to decide that, is it?"

    Sam felt a little jolt as soon as she said that and lost consciousness. When he came to himself, he is inside a room sitting on a chair.

    In front of him, the Avatar who conducted this pce of inheritance sitting behind a table.

    There are a few objects on the table.

    Arge ck whip, transference scrolls, and a book.

    "These are your rewards."

    Sam took a look at them and waved his hand as he let them go into his divine dimension and looked at the avatar.

    "What is the name of the goddess that is in charge of this Pce of inheritance?"

    "Hel. Goddess of Death."

    "Daughter of Loki?"

    "Yes, Indeed."

    "I want to ask some personal questions if you don¡¯t mind."

    "Please do."

    "Which are you from?."

    "Star bird, the Azure path realm."

    Sam nodded and was about to leave the room when he suddenly recalled something and asked.

    "Where is Arman¡¯s body?"

    "It is waiting for you outside. You can take him before you leave."

    "Thank you."

    With that, he left the room and he was back in the hall.

    There Arkiv is sitting on the floor gloomily as he looked at Arman¡¯s body lying on some kind of bed.

    The rest of the yers are also solemn. This fourth death. They all have some sort of friendship in one way or the other, even if they are not friends, they have mutualpassion as everyone was forced to live this life.

    They also have mutual respect for each other. So, whenever a yer fell all of them are sad. Even when Agun died in hands of Sam, even though it ispletely deserving since he tried to kill Sam first, they still felt bad for him.

    All of them paid their respects.

    Only the woman in the ck who is thest yer is standing far away weakly.

    Sam wanted to kill her right there and then, but the hall of the pce didn¡¯t give them that freedom. There are rules he has to follow.

    Sam wanted to ask something before the Avatar appeared again and spoke.

    "There is another game this time and the game is to collect the Blood crystals of the Blood Wyvern in this realm.

    This game goes on until the next Pce of inheritance.

    The one with most crystals is going to win. You can go back to other realms if you can, but only the crystals from this realm will count and the dimensional crossers will not be activated until the next Pce of inheritance.

    Sam felt like this announcement was music to his ears.

    He carried Arkiv¡¯s body and walked out of the Pce of inheritance.

    The woman in the ck didn¡¯t want to exit the Pce. She was really afraid to leave.

    She took a hold of the transference scrolls that she just got and as soon as she walked out of the entrance after the rest of them, she used one.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop her, he just let her go.

    But she didn¡¯t feel safe enough, she used another scroll right after that and by now, she is far away from the capital.

    Sam looked at Arkiv and said.

    "I am going back to deste first. Do you want toe along?"

    "Yes."

    Sam nodded and walked towards the king, he handed Arman¡¯s body over to Arkiv and took the ashes he collected.

    "He met with a disaster and lost his life. By the time I met him his body is half burned, I didn¡¯t want to keep him like that."

    The king took the container with ashes and gave it to his son.

    "Thank you for bringing him back."

    "I will be leaving this ce for a while. I have something to talk to you after I came back."

    "Sure."

    With that Sam left the ce along with Arkiv and Arman¡¯s body and after entering his residence, he returned to deste using the dimensional drifter.

    He took Arman¡¯s body to an empty space within the Sam¡¯s city and buried him there after constructing a small tomb for him all by himself.

    Then, he took out a tree sapling and buried it at the foot of the grave.

    "We didn¡¯t have a smooth journey until now. But I do feel that you are my friend. I apologize for not being to avenge your death. But one day, I will kill her and bring her ashes to this very grave and use it as a fertilizer for this tree.

    Goodbye my friend. I hope you find peace in your next life."

    Arkiv also attended the funeral.

    Sam has half a mind to get the trio back, but he didn¡¯t.

    After finishing the cremation. Sam stayed in the city for the next day just doing nothing and returned back to that realm.

    He met with the king of the Winged race.

    "I want your men to keep an eye on her." Sam gave a sketch to him and said.

    "I need proper information on her and in exchange, I will train an elite force for you. A force that your rival race cannot rival anymore."

 Chapter 869: Training Soldiers

    Sam¡¯s deal caused the king to be flustered. Yes, they do have a rival race with which they are fighting to take over a, but they couldn¡¯t find any opening with them.

    Their strength is almost equal in all aspects, from the foot soldiers to the top dogs who rule thes, everything is equal.

    And the war for this is going for quite a while.

    "How can you guarantee that?"

    "Give a hundred soldiers and two hundred Blood Wyverns. I will give you a force that would make all the rest of your army look like trash.

    A force at the transcendent level. Which is the cultivation level of the foot soldiers in your war. The only thing that iscking in your side or even their side is this one elite force that could put a stop to the foot soldiers of the other side.

    One side needs to gain morale and the other side needs to lose it. I will make it happen. They wouldy waste of the soldiers thate at them and even a few Consummates tried to attack them, I will make sure they would win. Do we have a deal?"

    The King hesitated a bit, but after some thought, he nodded.

    "The Consequence would be severe if you don¡¯t hold your end of the bargain. But why a hundred soldiers and two hundred wyverns?"

    "Hundred Wyverns are for my use, I have a mission toplete for some other person."

    "But.." The king hesitated once again. A force of hundred wyverns under someone else¡¯s control within the city is not a great circumstance.

    "Don¡¯t worry, you can give them to me after you are satisfied with my work, but I want them to be within my range of vision, I need the blood crystals."

    "Deal."

    After they shook on it, Sam made the requirements for the training ground and after thend was arranged, he startedying the formations down along with the staff.

    The Blood Wyverns are of neutral element and these are really lesser dragons, unlike the devil wyvern.

    He wanted to catch these things even before the mission was announced because they would be a good fit in his personal forces. But now, he captured many beasts of a simr level, including Bi fangs, Thunder Sparrows, Flood dragons, some Wyverns, and many other beasts in the Central continent. With the Central continent¡¯s level of power, they shouldn¡¯t even be present there.

    And from the looks of it, they are suffering the same fate as the Raijus their cultivation seemed to be suppressed along with their bloodline dilution.

    So, even though they hated Sam to their guts when he attacked their habitats and upied them and turned them into their breeding grounds, they areter happy that their cultivation suppression was removed once they are out of this realm.

    Sam¡¯s forces from the Nascent stage to Transcendent stage, all of them now had a supporting force which could be run by these beasts.

    He wants the Blood Wyverns to be part of that.

    After the deal was agreed upon. The king immediately sent the people to get the Blood wyverns, they are hard to catch, but not impossible.

    The king managed to finish the quota in a few days.

    But even before that, Sam already started the training.

    The Winged-Race is not at good at flying as the feathered race. They have bat-like wings, even though they could fly, they are still good on the ground and even on the ground, they use wings to maneuver themselves in the battle.

    This is also the inspiration for Sam¡¯s first puppet with the new framework.

    The training is new and unique the soldiers are quite skeptical about it when they started, but as the intensity grew and Sam eliminated the candidates like he is throwing the bone after eating the meat, they became wary.

    Some of them quit halfway because of the intensity of the training. All of them are Warrior-Mages, so the physical aspect is also extremely cared for.

    Samid down a gravity formation that has a gravitational force double than normal at the start and as the time passed, it increased slowly and the winged race candidates who now eat, drink, and shit here within the formation didn¡¯t even notice.

    All they could feel is the constant suppression of their bodies and no ease.

    Sam personally made medicines for them so that their joints and bones wouldn¡¯t be damagedpletely, he even brought some masseuses from his organization to take care of their bodies.

    The Elven masseuse really trained people well, they can make wonders on the body that is suffering from constant muscle pain.

    Apart from that, they are also trained for the ranged attacks, joint attacks,bos and finally training on the back of Wyvern.

    The whole trainingsted for six months straight. This is the longest personal training Sam has ever given, so he slipped in some of his soldiers within this realm so that they could train here.

    The King didn¡¯t bother showing any resistance to that anyway.

    After six months, he gave the soldiers to the king while the king gave the remaining Wyverns and the blood crystals they produced to Sam.

    Blood crystals are nothing but the excrement of the Blood Wyverns.

    They have weird blood energy suitable for the nourishing physique. It really is ironic that one creature¡¯s excrement can be medicine for other creatures.

    But it is true and he nned to give them to the vampires and Ghouls and since he has a stable source of blood crystals, he doesn¡¯t have to worry about anything.

    The King already put a personal word out for catching thest yer and there were some sightings of her. She was forced to the corner many times, but she managed to escape. It really is hard to find her, but she is also going through a torturous phase as she encountered the bounty hunters searching for her every day.

    She suddenly regretted pissing Sam off. If she just left Arman¡¯s corpse after killing him, it would have been fine. His anger would have been directed at the god. But she just has to try and get inside his head in their battle, so that she could take advantage of the situation, but it backfired big time and caused her to feel his wrath. If not for Hel, she would have already died in his hands.

    She knew all about Sam, even though she stayed low and didn¡¯t make a high profile, she heard about Sam and all his exploits. They are nothing short of legendary.

    That is also the reason she didn¡¯t attack him before the Pce of inheritance.

    But there was no use.

    While thest yer was trying her best to escape and stay alive, the king of the Winged race already started the war with the new force.

    In this realm, there are two races. The other race is also a flying race, but they are a bit different. They are considered to be part of the Beastmen and they are specifically called the Birdmen.

    Because, they have wings and humanoid bodies, but their heads are simr to bird heads. They have beaks and their eyes are also simr to that of a bird.

    These two races are fighting each other for millennia as they conquered one after another within the realm.

    And now thest has a war going on for decades.

    This has a great habitat and there are many types of beasts and resources they could take advantage of.

    The Blood Wyvern force arrived on this and started the war.

    They are apletely mobile force. They didn¡¯t stop at a single ce and stationed there for a long time, they attacked an enemy force and troops, destroyed the camp, took their supplies and let their soldiers take a hold of that camp, and left to another ce.

    They are almost like wandering farmers. Just like how they would go to an area, create a field, make food and leave to find another area, they are doing just that.

    The tide of the battle changed easily.

    As they won every battle they fought, the king gave the orders to increase the search parties to find that woman.

    She is bound to get caught sooner ofter.

    With the increase in search parties, that woman couldn¡¯t take it anymore. At least, in the start she managed to retaliate a bit, but now every person that is after her has ate stage or even peak-stage transcendent stage cultivators in their teams if not a Consummate level cultivator.

    She became a rat in a hole.

    She couldn¡¯t move around peacefully, she is in constant fear of getting caught. Every person walking past her is making her feel afraid.

    But she barely managed to stay safe, without getting caught.

    When the King was about to increase the intensity of the search again, Sam rejected.

    When the King asked why he just replied calmly.

    "Let her suffer more. I want her to go to a point where getting caught will be a relief and I wouldn¡¯t give her that easily. Let her feel the pressure. Don¡¯t worry about the finances though, if you have a problem I can manage."

    "No need. Your training is enough. If you really can, train another force for me please."

    "Sure, but I would like to bring my soldiers too and we would train on your new, it is a bit raw and unrefined and many ces are really good for training."

    "Deal."

 Chapter 870: Unconquered Realm

    Days passed.

    Sam didn¡¯t go in a hurry at this time. He focused on stability more than anything.

    By now, the results of establishing various schools are already showing out. With the tailor-made directions and paths for all the orphan students, everybody that graduated could be considered as an elite in one area or the other.

    Even though Sam gave priority to every and any profession,bat is still where most people shined. This is the era of cultivation after all and at the end of the day, strength reigns supreme.

    Now he has thousands of Transcendent stage cultivators and more than ten thousand Pre-transcendent stages cultivators when hebined all the workers in the organization across the realmsbined.

    The numbers are insanepared with the fact that a dozen transcendent stage cultivators led by a Consummate or two can be considered as a Major power in deste and decent power in many realms he put his foot in.

    By now, he started freeing one Raiju after another.

    All the Consummate stage Raijus are taken out of the Tempest valley so that they would grow and many new Consummate level Raijus areing up as they grew.

    Even the transcendent stage cultivators he had under him since the start already became Consummate level cultivators. And Sam managed to recruit some Consummate stage cultivators across various realms with the help of his forces and giving them a hand.

    He can be considered a major force among all the realms and at this point he might be able to rival the Charbhum realm as a whole.

    The resources he amassed are enormous. He has men, money, materials and everything that one could need to roam around the world. He can now walk around any lower level realm or even a medium level realms in the universe without any problem.

    The only drawback is that his forces are a bit thin as they are spread too far and wide.

    But still they are recruiting new people and they are gaining new forces everyday.

    Infact, the feathered which is the transportation hub and also the preprocessing hub for the organization has a Pill factory, where more than three dozen pills makers work and every three months they would stop all the production processes for a week and only focus on the pill of servitude. Sam would also go there so that the pill of servitude will have his imprint when used.

    That is the level of recruitment happening now. In fact, if they counted all the Nascent stage cultivators, they would be in tens of thousands and not much could be said about the Grand realm cultivators to Novice stage cultivators. Only the Deste has more than ten thousand of each.

    All Sam would need is time now that he has stable businesses and resources and he would have an army of elites with all the training methods and techniques he implemented.

    All the kings and people in charge he is meeting every day, doesn¡¯t know what kind of force he is amassing behind him. But if they did know about it, they would have been warier and respected him more or they would have outright killed him to swallow it on a whole.

    Currently, it only a few months for the next Pce of inheritance and the dimensional crossers just gave the new locations.

    Sam also reached the Peak of Transcendent stage as hepletely focused on training and he almost managed to create a few elite forces for the Winged race king and his own troops with various beasts.

    The game for points has ended and Sam as usual won and had the highest score with around eight hundred thousand points. He has that much blood crystals with him and now thatpetition is over, he dumped them all to the Ghouls and Vampires only keeping a few for some warriors who are suitable to consume it.

    Thest yer who was tortured with the chase constantly finally managed to escape this realm as soon as the dimensional crosser was released.

    As for why he knew that, Sam has already got a hold of her tracks and locations and one day, his spy said that she disappeared into thin air, which is only possible for the dimensional crosser.

    She must have had a really hard time as she couldn¡¯t even find time to get a single blood crystal.

    Sam let her be.

    The next Pce of inheritance which is also thest Pce of inheritance is his.

    She might have an advantage in environment the previous time, but this time, there is nothing that could stop him from getting to her, except for himself or the guy named Gambler who is behind Ling Tian.

    The rest of the yers who stayed in this realm all left. And Donner in particr didn¡¯t dare to stop for even a second after the dimensional crosser was activated. All this while he is living in fear. He couldn¡¯t help but feel suffocated by the fact that he is involved in the murder attempt of Sam and thetter could change his mind anytime and kill him.

    This ispletely new to him and when he roamed the to meet more blood wyverns and collect blood crystals, he couldn¡¯t help but notice the high-profile search for the woman and feel chills running down his spine.

    He also felt small at the same time as he thought how little Sam should have considered him, since he didn¡¯t make any attempts whatsoever to try and find him.

    But this is also first time he felt happy about someone¡¯s disdain. So, the first chance he got escaped.

    Sam only took simple notice of the rest of yers.

    He also wants to go to the next Pce of inheritance, but it doesn¡¯t matter whether he went there early orter, because this time the Pce of inheritance is in unconquered realm and from the coordinates he got from Arkiv and Noah, the location is pretty close to the Pce of inheritance.

    The Unconquered realm is actually realm separating the lower medium realms and upper medium realms, to be precise it would be better to say it is connecting them.

    It is one of the realms which has connections to multiple lower medium realms and upper medium realms.

    But this realm was never conquered by any of the races living in the realms connected to them, because the amount of resources and manpower they would lose in the conquest would be astronomic.

    This realm is being upied by all kinds of beasts.

    Sam heard from the Old beast that, this realm used to have many races from all these connecting realms, but they were all thrown out of it by the sudden surge of the beasts which retaliated in unison.

    After that weird incident, no matter how many people or races entered this ce they would always be repelled back with abined effort of the beasts.

    Even the beasts that are natural enemies will work together to kill any foreign creature that invades it.

    Actually, Sam wanted this to be his next adventure. He has the bloodline refinement and there are many beasts mixed with bloodlines and lesser bloodlines with high potential in this realm.

    He wanted to go there and amass beasts to his heart¡¯s content.

    He would create a beast army itself.

    But the realm is dangerous, there are many astral ne level beasts here and if they considered pure power without any consideration for the order and tactics, this realm is stronger than some of upper medium realms.

    So, he has to be careful and he is also bringing a Raiju that broke into Astral ne and two more Raijus that are Consummate level.

    They would be quite helpful with his endeavor and even Yanwu and the rest might like the environment there.

    After taking care of everything and wrapping it up, Sam took Arkiv and both of them left to the Unconquered realm.

    As soon as they entered the area, they are already attacked by some monkeys.

    These monkeys looked likepletely normal monkeys and even their size is only a little bitrger than normal.

    Sam surprised as soon as he saw them.

    These things are closest in terms of gics to the normal monkey he could see back in earth and these are mischievous to boot.

    But to their relief, the bunch of monkeys are only Pre-transcendent and they couldn¡¯t hurt them.

    "Let¡¯s not attack them. They live inrge families. We would be in for it if a senior member is here and I have no intention of raising these crazy freaks. Let¡¯s get out of here silently."

    He warned Arkiv to not to attack and left the ce.

    The monkeys didn¡¯t follow them for long, they couldn¡¯t maintain the same speed as them so they could only fall behind.

    But soon the duo realized that is not the only reason for them to not follow them. They entered another habitat and this time, Sam saw a twin-tailed Ocelot looking at him weirdly, but that is not the thing that surprised them the most, it is therger ocelot that is sleeping behind this smaller one.

    Sam was both surprised and excited when they saw the small babies that are sleeping beside the big ocelot.

 Chapter 871: Another Survival

    Sam felt excited because the twin-tailed Ocelots although small in size are great beasts and are good at fighting and also have great intelligence.

    Therge Ocelot is only a Transcendent stage one, so it is not a big deal for them.

    Sam instantly captured the beast and its litter and threw them all in the divine dimension.

    Then they continued their journey.

    They walked most of the time as they tried their best to catch the beasts and to avoid entering the territory of some strong animal, Sam was using the crystal table carefully from time to time.

    Days passed soon he almost felt like the divine dimension might even get cramped if he continued on like this. Of course, that is just his feeling and far from the truth.

    But still, he didn¡¯t catch every beast that he came into contact with, he caught them if they have a certain specialty to them and if two beasts have too many simr characteristics, he just chose one.

    They are following the pull of the Pce of inheritance tokens to walk in the correct direction and soon they reached the Pce of inheritance.

    They are extremely surprised and impressed by the Pce of inheritance this time because every time the Pce is only from the interior and the entrance is always some kind of cave or a passage.

    But now for the first time, a real Pce was in front of them. There is arge real Pce which is extremely majestic and luxurious at the same time.

    They really wanted to enter it, but it is not time yet. Sam noticed some of the other yers here and there, but the woman in the ck still didn¡¯te yet.

    She must be waiting for thest minute to show up so that Sam wouldn¡¯t have a chance to deal with her.

    There is another problem though. There are hundreds of beasts surrounding the Pce. There are too many of them and all those beasts are trying to enter the Pce from different ways.

    They are trying to knock therge door down, knock some walls down, the windows, from the top, they are trying their best to enter no matter what that they even ignored the presence of humans near them.

    But they are unable to even leave a nick on it much less breach it.

    The yers camped for a few days and asionally had to fight with the beasts that are wanted a piece of them.

    Soon, they managed to notice some things about the beasts near the Pce.

    None of them are below or above the transcendent stage.

    All the beasts that came and surrounded the pce are transcendent stage, there are no consummate stage beasts and there are lower-level beasts of Pre-transcendent stage, this surprised them a bit and they wondered about something.

    Everyone had simr thoughts and when the Pce of inheritance opened up, the thoughts turned out to be true.

    All these beasts are permitted to stay here because they have ess inside. As soon as the doors opened, the beasts flooded in without any resistance which is a clear indication that this time the Pce is open for the locals, and beasts are taking part in it.

    The yers also entered the Pce, Sam enteredst as he looked for the woman in the ck, but he couldn¡¯t notice her even with the crystal table which is extremely weird. So, he went in.

    What he didn¡¯t know is that as soon as he went away on a tree nearby, arge human-sized monkey-type beast¡¯s fur started burning in ck mes as the woman appeared out of it.

    She is so meticulous as to use the carcass of a beast to cover herself up and stayed put to not attract his attention.

    Sam also didn¡¯t doubt anything when he looked at the beast. Because he already knows that the beast itself has a timid nature and it doesn¡¯t like fighting with others, so its separate existence didn¡¯t surprise him and he didn¡¯t bother to check itpletely in detail even with the crystal table.

    So she managed to escape. One must say she is smart and ... scared shitless.

    She entered the Pce of inheritance along with the rest of the beasts that are slowly entering.

    When all the yers reached the hall, they noticed that even though the beasts entered through the same entrance they didn¡¯te to the hall. They seemed to have gone to a different ce.

    They looked around and waited for the Avatar to appear, but to his surprise, Sam finds a familiar person appear in ce of the Avatar.

    It is Ling Tian.

    "Hello, yers. I hope you are doing well.

    This is thest Pce of inheritance and I wanted to make it special, so I came here myself. My name is Ling Tian by the way and I am some kind of personal guide for Sam substituting the god that chose him.

    So, now let us go to the main topic.

    This time, the Pce of inheritance works simr to that of the previous one, this is a survival game and you would have to fight all the beasts that came inside along with you and also the beasts that I brought from higher realms.

    Mind you, I brought a lot of them and a lot of kinds.

    But there is a twist, the terrain would be changing randomly along with the beasts in it and you wouldn¡¯t know when you would disappear and reappear in a different ce and an ape you are passionately fighting might suddenly disappear and an eagle might on your back the next time.

    Sam, you cannot use your gadgets. It might sound unfair, but the rest of the gods are crying like babies and particrly Hel, she seemed to be really pissed at you.

    You can use beasts and necromancy though.

    The goal is to endure it and stay for the longest time possible. If by any chance you appear near each other, you can fight and even kill each other.

    Thest to stand will win, there are no final rounds and final battles. You will get your reward after the task is over.

    There is a twist here though. The points game this time was added to the Pce of inheritance.

    The more beasts you kill the more points you get. There are thousands of beasts that you would encounter and you would clearly spot the difference between the beasts from this ce and the beasts from higher realms.

    You can keep the remains of the beasts you killed and if you can capture them, that is even better, you can keep them with you.

    So, good luck with your endeavor and I will be waiting to see you at the end. I hope all of you stay alive by the end of it."

    With that a door opened, the first one to move is the woman in the ck, themon enemy. She must have really been cautious because of all the enmity she induced from the rest of the yers.

    The worst part is that they don¡¯t even know her name and they still hate her to their guts.

    The rest of the yers entered the door and when Sam reappeared after walking through, he is in the middle of nowhere.

    The surrounding seemed to be like a grass in as he looked around and didn¡¯t find anything except for the grass.

    After walked around to check the situation and soon he found out something, and Earthen Bison. This beast looked huge and its features are simr to that of the zing earth bull, but this bloodline is superior to most of the beasts from the lower realm and its strength is beyondparison to the zing earth bull.

    When it looked at Sam, the Bison that is peacefully grazing in the in suddenly turned angry and furious and charged at him.

    It is like arge brown streak as it ran towards Sam like a sh and tried to sh with him.

    Sam frowned and extended his hands as he held the horns and stopped the bison in its tracks.

    His legs turned rocky with earth elemental partial fusion and he used the strength to kick in and get support from the ground to stay stable.

    After the situation turned around and he held the bison in its ce without moving back too much, he tried to release his beast aura and subdue the beast, no matter what aura he used the beast is not getting subdued. It is too mad and too out of its mind. Its only instinct is to kill Sam.

    Sam lost interest soon and his arms turned rocky with partial fusion as he used his physical strength to rotate the beast to the side as they wrestled even more before breaking its neck.

    The Bison died in one swift motion.

    He threw the beast away in the divine dimension and let Dia out.

    "This ce seemed to be a good fit for you, the grass is also of the rich earthen element, so enjoy your time a bit."

    He didn¡¯t let the other beasts out. Since it was already told that the terrain would change randomly, he doesn¡¯t know what would happen and when it would happen. If there are too many of his beasts out and the surroundings are unfavorable to most of them, he wouldn¡¯t be able to take care of all of them in an instant. If it is only one beast, he can manage it though.

    Dia looked around and started eating the grass, she is really delighted. Sam threw some grass into the divine dimension to grow it, while they are busy with that, they saw a few more Bison that just looked at him and areing their way.

 Chapter 872: Aerial massacre

    Sam and Dia are currently dealing with the four Bison that are surrounding them.

    They are clearly angry just like the first one and they have full intent of killing as they used their earthen elements and theirrge and dangerous body to their advantage and started attacking both of them.

    Dia is faster than them as she dodged and yed with gravity so that she could mess with their movements. She didn¡¯t even bother to directly attack them. It is almost like she is ying with them as they crashed into the ground and the sudden earthen walls that appear out of nowhere in their path.

    Sam is wrestling with one bison after another as Dia kept them busy.

    The bison have extremely high resistance for external attacks, even if they are of different elements, their skin is too thick, in fact, Dia constantly made earthen spikes appear on her wall or just in their path in general, but not a single spike managed to leave any scar on their body.

    The most they could do is show that it scratched the surface, but even the outermostyer of the skin wasn¡¯t damaged a bit.

    That¡¯s how thick their hide is and that is also the reason why Sam broke the neck of the first one.

    The thickness and strength of the hide are not just raw strength rather its sticity and other properties. But the bones are always the same, they are rigid and they could be broken and he has to do the same for the remaining Bison.

    That is why he is letting Dia buy him some time so that he could kill them off one by one.

    They didn¡¯t take too much time with.

    After killing them and storing all the bodies except one, Sam started preparing it for Dia.

    She is not a normal horse that only eats grass and hay. She eats meat and in fact, sometimes she is pickier than Yanwu, Sky, and Raiju and after a long time she came across an earth elemental beast that has one of the tastiest meats, so it dove right in after Sam prepared the corpse.

    After it finished half of the beast and felt a bit full, the rest went into the storage and both of them started moving.

    While they are on their way, Sam and Dia suddenly felt alert, but before they could reach it, they are being coiled by threerge snakes.

    They looked like pythons with their size and muscle definition and they blended perfectly into the environment.

    But unlike regr pythons, they are beasts with vivid strengths and properties.

    Dia started struggling because of this. No matter how much she manipted gravity she couldn¡¯t get rid of the snake as it snuggled to it. Sam who is enveloped with two snakes felt it.

    But soon both parties are done with keeping a low profile as Dia started metal elemental fusion and her body suddenly protruded metal spikes and Sam is even shy with the fire elemental fusion. He started burning the pythons on his body alive.

    When they were about to release him, he held them by their throats and let them burn. But the time he was done, Dia is already feasting on the blood of the python.

    They continued their journey.

    As they moved around, they got attacked, by elephants, snakes, rabbits, and some Rhinos.

    After a few hours, they are fighting with an elephant that is shooting out a corrosive liquid through its trunk.

    Sam and Dia are dodging. The gravity is not much effective as the elephant is not moving and for some reason, it could still hold its gigantic body in ce.

    Dia managed to get in some good hits with the metal element, but thisrge beast didn¡¯t faze even when bleeding. It stayed in ce and just shot the corrosive liquid at them from different angles.

    When Sam finally managed to reach the top of the elephant and was about to hit the crown with his fist, he felt something warping him around and before he knew it, he is in another ce.

    He felt the wind hitting his face and when he realized where he is, he was shocked.

    He is falling from the sky and there are hundreds of Bird type beasts surrounding him like crazy.

    Sam¡¯s first reaction is to find Dia.

    Dia has gravity under her control and she can float a bit and even walk in the air a bit, but it is not powerful enough to fall and remain unscathed from this height as there would be not nearby surface which she could take advantage of and use her gravity on and levitate. The momentum she would pick up from the fall wouldn¡¯t be negated no matter what she tried when she reached thend.

    Sam waved his hand and called Sky out who dove towards Dia and caught her. Sam let Yanwu out too and both of them moved towards Sky.

    Sam sent Dia back to the Divine dimension and finally heaved a sigh of relief.

    They looked at the sea of bird-type beasts that are surrounding them.

    There are hundreds of beasts around.

    "Do you guys want to do it by yourself or do you need my help?"

    Sam asked the two birds and they decisively shook their heads and started moving.

    At first, they went straight towards the encirclement as they forced each and every beast that is in their way and cut a line through it.

    Sam is still sitting on Yanwu leisurely as he barely attacked any birds that came at them.

    Yanwu and sky went through the encirclement and reached the other ends. The beasts tried to encircle them once again.

    But before they could do that, both Sky and Yanwu moved at their full speed.

    Both with elemental fusions and at their full power. A circle of light and a circle of the condensed sharp wind both formed at the same time as they moved faster and faster.

    The wind and fire mixed forming a tornado in the sky. A ming tornado dressed with golden mes decorated the blue sky. For a second it is as if the sun hase closer and the bird beasts that are trying their best to attack now wanted to escape this circle. But the closer they get to the circle, the intense the heat is and the more resistance they felt move forward.

    The winds are too strong for them to move up are down as the wind des are striking on both ends. It is like a lid made of wind des as it sliced the beasts one by one.

    They all huddled together and got some peace for a fraction of the second, but soon they noticed that the ring is getting closer and closer.

    The feathers started burning and the sky is filled with the groans of the misery of the birds as fell one after another.

    Sam was a bit surprised as he looked at it.

    Yanwu and Sky are practicing these things in divine dimension daily, but he didn¡¯t get to see one up close as he was always focused on something else.

    But looking at it from this close, even being a part of he is really surprised by the effect. But he also noticed the drawback. The energy wouldn¡¯t be sufficient if they continuously attacked like this. This one attack may destroy a hundred but the hundred and first that will appear after that will have an easy time with both of them.

    While Sam is thinking of ways to rectify these drawbacks, the birds are falling down with burn corpses as they hit thend.

    Sam is not particrly interested in any of them.

    But at this moment, he spotted some figures moving towards their location.

    The attack is too shy, he figured that would attract some attention. But when he looked at the beings that areing, he is really surprised.

    Winged tigers are flying towards them from a direction.

    Sam suddenly felt greedy.

    These beasts are both good atnd and aerial battles and they have good tenacity and from the looks of it, they are all wind-type beasts.

    This is the perfect opportunity. He decided to capture them no matter what, even if he has to use soul attacks and subdue them.

    As soon as Yanwu and Sky are finished, they are weak, but they can still stay flying.

    He gave them some heavenly wine and some food so that they would recover.

    He doesn¡¯t want them to do any battle. They already did enough and he waved his hand to let out some of the beasts he captured in the unconquered realm.

    They are some birds he did capture and they woulde in handy now.

    He was told that he could use the beasts as he liked, so there is no need to worry at all.

    Sam excitedly waited for the winged tigers toe near him. But just before they were about to engage, he felt the warping sensation once again.

    But this time he was more alert and Sky and Yanwu are right beside him along with the rest of his beasts. He collected all of them into the divine dimension to be sure.

    And it turned out he did the right thing.

 Chapter 873: Savageness

    Sam felt suffocated all of a sudden.

    Because he is in the middle of the sea. From the pressure he is feeling, he is at least three to four hundred meters deep under the water.

    If he didn¡¯t pull Yanwu and the rest back in time, they would be having a real hard time here. In fact, even he is having a real hard time already. He didn¡¯t prepare for this sudden warping and breathing devices are not exactly allowed to be used.

    He started swimming upwards. But he realized that it wouldn¡¯t be that easy.

    He saw a familiar beast,ing towards him at the moment. Great ck Shark.

    This thing is not exactly a normal beast. It doesn¡¯t have any fears and it wouldn¡¯t back down with just a hit. It would be a nasty fight as for escaping it that would be even more of a hassle.

    Sam activated full water elemental fusion as he swam upwards crazily. The shark also followed him and soon, it is already near him.

    The fight was inevitable.

    The Great ck Shark at Nascent stage can already do some damage to the Pre-transcendent stage creatures, but now it is at Transcendent stage, its speed is faster than Sam who has full water elemental fusion, if not for the fact its cultivation level is a bit lower than Sam, the escaping wouldn¡¯t even be an option.

    Even now, Sam is not focused on fighting. He waved his hand to let Mia out and continued swimming upwards.

    Mia who came out didn¡¯t even wait for a second before shing with the shark.

    She didn¡¯t even use poison and just used three of her nine heads to bite into the shark that was swimming upwards and within a few seconds, the shark is dead.

    Sam finally managed to swing upwards and take a deep breath.

    Luckily he can use his beasts, if not things would be much more difficult.

    Mia also swam upwards to check on Sam and after confirming that he is safe, they started swimming around.

    This time, there is norge encirclement like the previous times.

    Thergest group they encountered only has four beasts and they fought with them easily.

    Mia is having a time of her life.

    It is not everyday that she would get to do whatever she wanted in an open sea.

    Deste is the only ce that she could do whatever she wanted and in every journey, Sam had to be cautious to let his beasts out and Mia couldn¡¯t even disguise like Yawnu, Sky and Raiju which is a problem.

    The most she could do is change her size and even then there is a chance that people might recognize her.

    There would be a time where even if people recognized her, they would still not bother too much, until then he had to be careful on letting her out.

    So, this time in this Pce of inheritance is extremely valuable to her.

    After an hour of so, once again there is a warping effect.

    Sam hurriedly pulled Mia into the divine dimension and soon he felt a heat wave hit him.

    He is standing on the edge of ava pool.

    One step and he would be inside. Theva¡¯s heat is almost as hot as his golden mes. He would be taking severe damage if he didn¡¯t take precautions.

    He let yanwu out and started flying. Theva streams and pools are dense. There is barely anynd left and the heat is too much. Sky wouldn¡¯t be able to endure it for long.

    This time, the beasts are both on thend and in the sky.

    They are just hunting them down.

    After an hour or so, they changed to another location.

    This time, Sam reappeared on the mountain top with lightning striking down continuously.

    It is time for Raiju to Shine.

    Then the desert, once again Dia.

    Then the forest, where the forest bear came and attacked him.

    As time passed, Sam didn¡¯t even remember how many hours or even days he has been in.

    He finally understood what the true test is, it is not hunting the beasts, nor is it inly surviving.

    It is to ovee the desperation.

    The constant change in environments is creating a sort of mental annoyance and theck of sense of time is creating and illusion that they are here for far too long.

    And worst of all, they are barely getting any time to recover.

    If not for the fact Sam had wine with him, he is sure that he wouldn¡¯tst too long.

    Gloom is slowly clouding their judgment.

    At first he thought the test is not that difficult. After all, even though the bison, bird type beasts, the sharks and all kinds of other beasts are dangerous they are not dangerous enough for him.

    Ling Tian definitely knew the beasts he had with him and what he can do with them.

    But as the time passed he understood the stress and the true goal of the test.

    And even though he understood the logic, he still couldn¡¯t escape from the effects.

    He lost interest in hunting the beasts for the points, hepletely focused on finding other yers.

    He wanted to find them and eliminate them as soon as possible, so that he could finish the task and get this over with.

    It almost felt like he stayed here for a month or so. But in reality it has only been a week.

    But no matter how much he travelled he couldn¡¯t find another yer.

    He almost went crazy.

    He became ruthless whenever beasts attacked him. He crazily attacked without thinking about his own safety.

    He fought like a savage.

    At this moment, Sam is inside a forest along with Forest Bear as they stood in the middle of Purple Orangutans.

    The very same annoying Orangutans.

    Sam and the Forest bear who has its bloodline refined before the breakthrough are looking at them crazily.

    One for being their natural enemy and the other for being irritated.

    Sam wore his ws and he jumped at the Orangutan nearest to him.

    He controlled the vines near the feet of the Orangutan and bound it closely and jumped on its shoulder to not let it move.

    He impaled the ws on the back of its neck and took removed the flesh off of its back like he was digging loose soil with his hands and when the ws reached the spine and cut it off, the Orangutan fell down.

    He then moved to the next one. But this time, the Orangutans already made their move and he was being held by vines in mid-air. He tried his best to overthrow their control over the vines so that he could free himself, but the control of over ten Orangutans is too hard to ovee.

    He could have called other beasts out, but he didn¡¯t. He understood that his state of mind is not exactly clear, so he didn¡¯t want to let out too many beasts lest he would do something he regrets.

    He used fire element to burn the wine down and when the Orangutans moved a bit away, he caught hold of one of them by its neck with the w and the golden mes entered its body through the nose and mouth. He didn¡¯t even burn it from outside, he forcefully burned it from inside.

    One part of his mind is telling him to calm down, but he couldn¡¯t control himself.

    The constant warping and no results of any yer is extremely irritating. Even the torturous training he went through in two lives and all the trials and tribtions are not useful at this moment.

    His mindset wavered to this point.

    Even Forest Bear is a bit concerned about him while fighting the Orangutans.

    Sam moved to another Orangutans, but by now they are so afraid and started running into the forest. Sam relentlessly followed them and he didn¡¯t even bother to be careful and fell into their ambush.

    An orangutan managed to catch him from behind and another from the front.

    The vines coiled around them as the rest of the Orangutans attacked.

    Sam¡¯s vampire fangs came out and he bit into the Orangutan that is hugging him and activated fire elemental fusion as he let the golden mese out of his body like crazy.

    It is expending a lot of his energy, but hepletely threw the caution out of his window.

    The Orangutans felt like they saw the devil, they were caught one by one and hunted in a savage way. The Forest bear ran close to him.

    After all of them are dead, Sam finally calmed down, and the bear came near him as it licked his face and snuggled with him so that Sam would calm his mind.

    Sam looked at his ws and sighed.

    This ispletely unlike him. He wouldn¡¯t lose his cool that easily after all, but this trial is making him this mad.

    He must find a way to stay calm.

 Chapter 874: Reason behind the Savageness

    Sam warped again. And this time, he is in a dark underground cave with a lot of tunnels. He left the forest bear back into the divine dimension.

    He didn¡¯t let any other beasts out and even he didn¡¯t move anywhere.

    He sat down crosslegged and took a swig of wine to recover a bit before trying his best to calm down as he meditated.

    He didn¡¯t think about anything. He tried to empty his mind and didn¡¯t even care about the pce of inheritance anymore.

    He focused on only one thing. His breathe.

    He carefully meditated as he tried to throw out all the thoughts regarding the warping, the change in environments, the continuous attacks from the beasts, their unnatural killing intent, the prize, the contest, the y of gods, the anger he felt towards them. He didn¡¯t think of anything.

    He emptied his mind to extreme and tried focus on his breath.

    Even if he didn¡¯t go over and try to find trouble with the beasts, that doesn¡¯t mean they don¡¯t find trouble with him.

    Soon, stone pythons starteding towards him and when they saw him sitting there doing nothing, they coiled aroundfortably.

    Sam still didn¡¯t move, but activated earth elemental fusion turning his body rock solid and focused only on defense.

    He didn¡¯t attack them for a single second. He just them try to bit him and try to attack him as much as they liked, but only when they were about to hit him critically did he do anything like create some earthen spikes on his body and throwing them down a bit.

    He only focused on recovering his body and state of mind no matter how disturbing it.

    Time passed by and soon he warped again.

    He appeared in the middle of a stream and some alligator type beasts are already waiting for him to take a bit of him.

    He didn¡¯t even have any time to react before a beast already impaled its teeth into his body.

    Even though he has earth elemental fusion which made his body rock solid, this beast¡¯s teeth are sp strong and the bite strength is so high that his body started cracking.

    Sam still tried his best to calm down and first caused the beast to release him with the earthen spikes and then release the elemental fusion before using water element and pushing the alligators away, he then once again used the earth element to create a barricade around him so that the water wouldn¡¯t enter and he can meditate calmly.

    The alligators started attacking the beasts crazily and tried their best to get inside the barricade.

    He kept on repairing the barricade no matter how much it cracked without opening his eyes.

    Soon, many more creatures came for him. More alligators, some piranha fish, and many other fish that would feast on him if they got the slightest chance.

    But Sam didn¡¯t let them have it.

    He warped just like that.

    And this time he is falling from a cliff.

    He still didn¡¯t open his eyes and waved his hand. Sky came out and hended on his back and both of them flew away.

    Sky only had one duty, to avoid all the beasts areing at them and escape.

    When the warping was about toe again, he let Sky back in the divine dimension and reappeared in a new ce.

    This time, he didn¡¯t stay with his eyes closed and opened his eyes.

    He finally calmed down and went for hunting.

    This is a desert, so he called Dia out and rode on her back as they moved in a certain direction.

    After calming his mind, Sam thought about something else.

    It is about his savage state. He couldn¡¯t understand why he couldn¡¯t stay calm at all and turned into such a savage.

    It is not like the warping and change in environments are not a part of it, but he still felt like he is beyond that. It is not enough to turn him into such a savage.

    Even in that Savage state, he has this unusual blood thirst to find and kill the rest of the yers if he has to, to end this whole thing.

    The more he fought with the beasts. The more intense the feeling got.

    That didn¡¯t make sense at all and he couldn¡¯t think about why it is happening before because his mind is not calm.

    So, he wanted to experiment a bit.

    So, he fought with the desert cougars, the scorpion type beasts and many other beasts that came for him and after two hours of constant killing and journey, he warped again.

    This time, he is falling from the sky again, but into the sea.

    He sent Dia back into the divine dimension and let Mia out as they freely fell into the water.

    But right when they are about ten feet away from the water surface, arge whale jumped out of it and swallowed both of them down before going back.

    Sam and Mia washed down its throat without any resistance.

    But once they reached the stomach of the whale, they could feel the digestive fluid being corrosive.

    But it is not corrosive enough. Even that is not the most surprising part.

    The fact that there are more than ten other beasts within that stomach surprised them even more.

    Sam and started the fight without any dy and soon after the beasts are done, Mia started eating the stomach of the Whale and quickly ate out a path out for them. But as soon as they reached the water after killing the whale, they warped.

    Sam threw Mia back in the divine dimension and reappeared on the back of a gigantic lizard which is in the middle of a having its meal.

    But as soon as he appeared, it stopped its meal and rolled on the ground to make him get down.

    Sam jumped off of his back and he noticed that urge to kill reappeared again.

    He could barely feel it.

    He wants to kill the lizard in the most gruesome way possible. But his mind is still clear to not to sumb to it and it is still more like a subconscious thought.

    As he killed the lizard, he realized that is in the middle of a lizard nest as more and more lizards starteding out of their holes.

    Sam didn¡¯t even hesitate as he took out reaper and executioner and started slicing through their scaly bodies.

    As he continued, his urge to kill increased again.

    This ispletely unlike him.

    He warped and he reappeared in the clouds, he let Sky and Yanwu out once again, but he didn¡¯t let them fight directly, he started slicing. The urge is going out of hand once again.

    He reached the same feeling and same irritation he had before the meditation. He couldn¡¯t understand how his state of mind which couldn¡¯t be influenced in far threatening situations could be changed this easily.

    So when he warped again, he once again went back to the meditation and tried to recover his mental state to think this through. To figure out what exactly is happening.

    And after another round of meditation, he finally realized something.

    It is not the warping that is making him that crazy. It has something to do with killing the beasts.

    To test the theory out he went on for a few more rounds.

    And when the mentality change happened he meditated once again. He repeated the process until he reached some desired conclusions and they are not exactly something he is looking forward to.

    The first thing is that Warping really had little to do with the blood lust.

    The most important thing in this is the beast killing.

    No matter which way he killed them, with ranged attacks, with close quarters or any other methods, the more he killed that more bloodlust he is umting and the more he wants to kill.

    And this is also leading to the irritation and disturbing his state of mind to search for the rest of the yers and not finding them is making even angrier leading to him taking it out on more beasts and the cycle is repeating.

    There is only one end goal for this and that is to make the yers crazy.

    Sam managed to get a hold of himself. His twisted state of mind helped him.

    But the same couldn¡¯t be said about the rest of the yers. Nobody knows how their state of mind is and if they would be able toe out of it.

    If they couldn¡¯t, then by the time they faced each other, things wouldn¡¯t be just some sparring to see who will stay and who will give up.

    They would go for each other¡¯s throats and try to kill each other even at the risk of harming themselves.

    They wouldn¡¯t hesitate to hold back and wouldn¡¯t second guess about using their trump cards. They would be like some crazy savages whose only goal is killing.

    Sam felt a chill run down his spine. Because he remembered the mini-game that was being yed within the Pce of inheritance. The beasts are the points that inevitably make the yers focus on the beasts.

    This might as well be the cruelest Pce of inheritance of all.

    Now he really didn¡¯t want to meet the other yers. But that is an inevitable situation.

 Chapter 875: Calming down

    Sam decided on what to do next.

    He let the beasts do the killing. As for why he didn¡¯t want to lose the points that are this easy to obtain and the beasts wouldn¡¯t be affected by the sudden violent urge. Even when they killed it, the violent urge was increased in himself.

    So, he just closed his eyes meditated after letting the beasts out in a populous area of every new ce he appeared and they stuck close together as they collected the points for him while he tried his best to close his eyes and concentrate on filtering these unwanted and unnatural emotions out of his system.

    In this way, he managed to stay calm for the longest time possible.

    But there is one thing still ultimately confusing to him. The time.

    As he warped to a different environment every time, he is losing this sense of time and he feels like he stayed a lot of time in the previous one and he would be staying a lot of time in the next one.

    He doesn¡¯t know how this feeling is being generated like this, but he understood how it affects the yers. Since he filtered these violent urges, it is still okay, but if not this loss of sense of time will definitely add fuel to the fire.

    As he thought about these things, he is really afraid and nervous to meet another yer at this moment. He sure as hell knew that everyone does hold back whenever they are fighting each other so as to not cause any permanent damage, but if their mental states are like this, it would be hard to hold back.

    He has to think of a way to restrain them and calm them down without harming them too much.

    Sam felt helpless after a long time.

    He couldn¡¯t do anything at the moment and just has to go with the flow.

    So, he experienced the long and tiring journey of these warping realities and after a long time which he didn¡¯t know how long, the one thing he wished didn¡¯t happen, happened.

    He appeared in front of another yer and that yer is someone he least wanted to appear in front of him at the moment.

    It is Arkiv.

    Arkiv is currently standing a few meters away from Sam is a in ground. His facial expression is showing an ultimate rage. His whole body is trembling with that rage. His veins popped on his forehead and he is clenching his teeth and fists so hard. He held his bow tightly as he looked at Sam menacingly and shot without even a second of consideration.

    Sam took out his reaper sword and sliced the arrow in two. He didn¡¯t let the beastse out. Arkiv is too dangerous a target. Even though he might appear weak sometimes in battles with other yers, the fact of the matter is that Sam would pick other yers to fight instead of Arkiv if he had to.

    Because Arkiv¡¯s archery is that skillful. In most of the battles between the yers they hold back and so does he, so he cannot use his dangerous skills which are more in his arsenalpared to others.

    Sam and Arman might be the only two that knew about this in the whole group.

    Sam started dodging as he used the partial light elemental fusion and the light des to slice the arrows into two before they managed to hit him.

    But constant dodging and blocking are only being difficult for him. He is trying his best to close the distance between them, but Arkiv is also moving backward even though slower, it is still reduced the distance he closed.

    After reaching a certain range, Arkiv started throwing trick shots.

    He is shooting multiple arrows at the same time. Particrly this one trick shot where one arrow condensed with pure spiritual energy turning into multiple arrows mid-air.

    It almost covered every dodging point of Sam, so he can only block, but the light des can only block so many and they still kepting. He used his hands to the utmost and managed to destroy all the arrows that areing at him, but while he is busy like this for a moment, Arkiv got ready with a big one.

    Aiming straight at him.

    Sam didn¡¯t have any choice but to block it head.

    The Reaper and the arrow shed and Sam widened his eyes in disbelief.

    The arrow exploded at the point.

    The explosion is different from the void style and normal spiritual energy explosion. It is more like the air in thepressed cylinder just broke the cylinder apart. It is that kind of explosion that solely focused on the physical effect on Sam¡¯s body.

    Luckily he is strong and escaped with an extremely numb arm and a possibly swollen wrist at that point along with his whole body vibrating losing some bnce.

    Sam tried his best not to waste any time so that he could escape the next attack and he barely did it with a hair¡¯s breadth.

    There is a reason why Sam is not attacking fiercely.

    He is afraid.

    Currently, Arkiv doesn¡¯t seem to recognize him at all and his battle is going on with basic instincts. But the instincts are only screaming ¡¯kill at any cost¡¯.

    So, even Sam proved to be strong, Arkiv¡¯s first reaction wouldn¡¯t be to run away, rather attack with the best possible attacks he could. The moment he senses a serious threat from Sam all the bets will be lost and even Sam if could defend, would definitelyy waste of Arkiv when the dust settled.

    And even if Sam didn¡¯t kill him, as long as warping happened at the moment, Arkiv would reappear in another ce where the beasts woulde and kill him easily in that weakened state.

    Sam might even be the calmest of all the yers in the current Pce of inheritance, but he is the one who is suffering the most.

    He has to hold back his strength and not raise an rm for Arkiv but still subdue him.

    So, he could only borrow some pages from other¡¯s books and try them.

    After a series of exchanges which resulted in both of them getting minor scratches, Arkiv once again upped the game.

    He once again shot those multiple arrows that are appearing in midair, but this time, they are different. Every one of them moved towards him no matter where he dodged and every arrow is exploding.

    He got hit by a couple of them. He crashed into the ground and fell.

    But surprisingly, he not only didn¡¯t attack back, he turned off his light elemental fusion and activated the wood elemental fusion which in terms of speed is not actually a good thing.

    The wood elemental fusion is also something he was least used to.

    But as he thought earlier, he is trying to take a page from another¡¯s book.

    He ran towards Arkiv with his eye technique used to the maximum and as the arrows came at him, he started blocking them with therge wooden shields.

    He took the full brunt of most attacks as he tried his best to reach Arkiv and once he is within the range of two meters and managed to maintain that for a second, the in started sprouting around. Arkiv didn¡¯t care about that though. He is so focused on Sam who is so close yet taking so much damage from him but still being so tenacious.

    He finally lost his cool and was aboutunch a final attack at Sam and he activated the blood art.

    Arkiv¡¯s blood art didn¡¯t give him any armor like Kumar, the only thing he got is actually an arrow and an enhancement to the bow is already holding. But Sam knew he would be done if he took the shot from that arrow. He would be sprawling on the ground with an arm and a leg lost.

    But he is not worried. He walked closer to Arkiv and Arkiv allowed him as he is sure that he would be able to make the hit that will kill Sam.

    His eyes are crazed and there is a crazy smile on his face that lookedpletely unlike him.

    Just when he was about to release the arrow, Sam¡¯s leg glowed with the wood elemental energy and mmed his foot into the ground and the small insignificant sprouts that came out suddenly grewrger and turned into dense and thick vinespletely enveloping Arkiv.

    They only have one job and that is forcefully binding Arkiv and Sam jumped on to him and held his head.

    There is the only way he could think of bringing rity to Arkiv and that is to forcefully shake his soul.

    He doesn¡¯t know when the soul would be calmest when people are living, but he knew that it would calmest when the person is about to die.

    He used the dark elemental energy to create a false feeling of death so that Arkiv could calm down a bit and after five minutes of constant trials, Sam finally managed to that, and Arkiv¡¯s eyes finally revealed some rity.

    "Sam...?"

    Sam finally heaved a sigh of relief when he heard his name spoken.

 Chapter 876: A heartless Revenge

    Sam and Arkiv finally managed to sit down for a second.

    Arkiv was really confused on what happened and as he recalled what he did a few seconds, he was horrified.

    When he was about to ask Sam what is this, Sam already spoke.

    "No time, for exnation. Recover first, we don¡¯t when we will warped again."

    He threw a bottle of wine mixed with some heavenly wine to him and both of them tried their best to recover.

    As they recovered slowly, Sam briefly told Arkiv what to do.

    "After killing the beasts, you will start to feel irritated slightly and whenever that feelinges, avoid the killing and start meditating. After you calmed down, you can hunt again." Arkiv remembered all his words, but he is still a bit confused.

    If only he tried to meditate a bit in the middle, he would have taken note of the anomaly and he would have already been saved from this torturous maniption of his own mind.

    Before Sam could exin anything though, he felt the warping effect and he yelled.

    "Remember to meditate and keep a calm mind."

    He reappeared in a different ce with a lot of beasts already surrounding him.

    Sam let Dia and Raiju out to deal with them.

    He is already feeling a little anxious about Arkiv. He really wished they could at least move together. He knew for sure that once Arkiv is encountered with other yers, he would have no way to hold back. There is at least one yer that is going to die and if the luck of the winning yer is bad, he would warp and appear in a ce with beasts in his weakened state.

    Escaping death would be almost impossible.

    He didn¡¯t have special rtionship with any of the yers other than Arkiv. They are a bit friendly at best and that is it.

    But there is one thing that held all the yers together in times of need and that is they are all in the same boat.

    They are all puppets being used for amusement of some gods who are so powerful beyond their belief and their imaginations.

    So, they empathized with each other and that is why they tried to keep each other alive by holding back at times and having friendly spars even when the cost of it is a treasure that could cause wars within the realms.

    Even if Sam got most of them, they didn¡¯t leak the news to any powerful people that could harm him. Nobody stabbed anyone in the back.

    Even Donner who almost killed Sam, and is on constant fear of losing his life in Sam¡¯s hands, he still didn¡¯t do anything that would involve third parties other than yers to kill Sam.

    It was all a tacit understanding. No matter what happens between them, it was their problem. They don¡¯t want others to involve and they have this kind of weird bond, where they don¡¯t have any affection, friendship or any other rtionship other than the faint mutual understanding about their situations in this world.

    That is the main reason why this many yers survived until now and in thest few Pce of inheritances, the difficulties increased so much, the only goal for the tests is to kill the yers. But still with their capabilities most of them survived.

    Now, this test is taking the rationality away and making them crazy so that they would put that mutual understanding aside and try to kill each other.

    The gods must have realized that killing the yers with just the test is not possible so they resorted to using the yers against each other forcefully.

    He must say that the gods have reached a new low once again.

    Even if that god is the gambler who is supporting him.

    He really wanted to pull their tongues out and demand them to exin why they are so twisted to torture someone who has already suffered so much and force them relive another torturous life.

    At least, Sam has many other avocations by side like his research, work, business and many other things.

    But he really felt pity for the rest of the yers.

    As he thought up to this point, he even felt surprised by his thoughts. This is the first time he is actively feeling somepassion to others instead of thinking it is their problem and they have to learn to deal with it or learn to endure it.

    That was the philosophy he lived by in the past life. Maybe too many hardships and rtable people can change a person as stone cold as him.

    Another few rounds of warpingter.

    Sam looked at the yer in front of him.

    It is the one yer he wanted to meet the most and she seemed to be injured too.

    The woman in the ck, thest yer and the one whose name no one knows.

    She is standing there staring at Sam coldly while her arms are burning with ck mes.

    Sam took a deep breath and took a ck whip.

    When the woman in ck saw that, she squinted her eyes and spoke to Sam.

    "How dare you take that out? Do you think you can humiliate me with that just like this, because you barely wonst time?"

    Sam looked at her with a raised eye brow. Even though she is crazy, she is not as crazy as it seemed. She can still recognize him and speak with him.

    Even Arkiv who is close to Sam couldn¡¯t recognize him and only focused on him as a target and it too so much effort and beating to make him recognize him.

    But she is much more clear-headed.

    "I don¡¯t know how, but it is good that you are clear-headed. I wouldn¡¯t want you dying in my hands without knowing how and what for."

    Sam spoke and the golden mes entered the whip.

    The Whip is a special fire elemental weapon.

    It can enhance fire elemental attacks by arge margin and it is extremely suitable for someone like this woman whose ck mes eat up others and even slightest of it can cause damage.

    With this whip she doesn¡¯t have to use a lot of effort to make the mes reach others and she also doesn¡¯t have to worry about getting close.

    Sam swung the whip in the air and fire serpents came out of it as they covered arge area surrounding the woman.

    She threw ck mes around and tried to suppress golden mes before running towards Sam.

    The whip snapped in the air creating arge burst of mes in her path making her move to the side and once again another whipnded right beside her leg making her barely escape the golden mes.

    She is not being as tricky as before. She is not taking advantage of her surroundings. She is not utilizing feints like she did before, She is not baiting Sam to attack and try to get one over him.

    All she is thinking is to try and get a hold of Sam and burn him to death.

    The mental state is really easy to take advantage of. Of course, it is only because she is already injured and she has yet to show what is her real strength and soon it was revealed.

    She used her blood art.

    It is not thatplicated.

    She got two whips made of condensed mes in her hands with a faint blood colored hue.

    Sam chuckled at this. All this struggle for her only to finally get into a battle of whipping.

    Sam activated fire elemental fusion as he went all over. A streak of golden me and a streak of ck me are throwing the ming whips which are creatingrge mes in the surroundings are shing like crazy.

    The whole surrounding area started burning. The rocks started melting, the trees turned into ashes, the soil went dry while the grass was deadpletely and burned with the gravel being charred and melting here and there.

    The sh is so open and bold.

    As the battle continued Sam got the upper hand. Clearly he has more experience in battles than her. For some reason she hid from the start of this game and she started revealing herself recently.

    She kept an incredibly low profile in the deste where it is a ce which has very few rivals for the power of yers to begin with.

    They are the best of the best within the realms across, much less deste. So, herck of battle experience started showing.

    And soon she was caught by the whip which was circled under her waist as Sam pulled her over and she fell in front of his feet like a ragdoll.

    Sam let the whip be around her as he increased the intensity of the mes and mader scream in agony.

    "I don¡¯t know why you are hidden for so long, but you told me, you knew me. But apparently not enough. Because, if you knew me enough, you would have known that I take revenge for slightest of grievances and what you did is kill a closepanion of mine.

    I will show you what eternal torture feels like."

    With that Sam took out a knife and cut his palm as he collected blood inside a container. He then tore her cloths on some ces and started marking some runes with his blood.

    This is one of the soul necromancy techniques which is forbidden in many realms and in fact, even the darkest of the necromancers don¡¯t like using this.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care if he is frowned up on or called a monster, but he is going to use it anyway.

    This is the technique of extracting a living soul and trapping it in an inanimate object and the day that object is fully destroyed beyond repair, she would die, but whatever that object goes through, she is feel it in her soul.

    If the soul is attached to a piece of iron, if it is forged, she would feel the heat, the hammer beatings and everything else and if a new piece of metal is added, she would feel her soul losing the freedom and purity and if the metal is turned into a powder and thrown away, her soul would also die along with it.

    And Sam has created a new piece of alloy recently which doesn¡¯t even melt with his golden mes at maximum. He really wants to see how she would survive that.

    He started making hand signs and the bloody runes started glowing.

 Chapter 877: Memory

    Sam is in the middle of the soul extraction process, but all of a sudden he felt like something hit him.

    It was not a physical hit. It is a hit to his soul. He could feel it. At this, he is using his soul to extract her soul out while restraining her mental strengthpletely.

    But suddenly, the restraints of the mental strength seemed to be loosed up for no apparent reason or to be more precise for the reasons he couldn¡¯t understand or imagine.

    The attack is light, but he halted in his tracks to make sure that nothing dangerous could happen to him in this process. Anything that is involving one¡¯s soul is too much danger. In fact, it is dangerous than ying with a spiritual core.

    Because there are a lot more ways to heal or even regrow a spiritual corepared to the healing methods for the soul.

    Last time, his soul barely got into the shadow realm for a few seconds and he was out cold for two months straight.

    Sam started re-examining the runes in the middle of the process. He didn¡¯t find any anomalies at the start, but as he examined it again and again, he started finding anomalies.

    There is some kind of power that is trying to alter the flow of the energy within the runes to make the part of it which is cing a ¡¯leash¡¯ on the soul to loosen up.

    Without this supposed ¡¯leash¡¯ there is nothing Sam could hold onto to pull the soul out of her body. As the leash was loosened Sam felt his soul shake a bit.

    He is getting mild hits continuously which might lead toe umted damage.

    He focused on retightening the leash and the sh started.

    Sam is really surprised and not so surprised at the same time with this sh.

    The surprise is that she has this much soul energy and she seemed to have abundant knowledge in the soul necromancy to even try to change the flow of energy. But the not-so-surprising part is about the fact that he expected some resistance from her as she managed to keep some sanity within this Pce of inheritance.

    The only confusing part about is, How?

    How does she have this much mental energy? Sam has dedicated one-fifth of this total training time to just training mental energy and even when he is on long research retreats, he still kept up with this mental strength training.

    Even from the yer¡¯s standards, his mental strength at least thrice if not four times higher than an average yer.

    But here another yer managing to put up the struggle with it.

    Sam decided to start a full-on war. He is not ready to give up the chance to torture this woman. She would definitely escape if he gave up now and it would be hard to find her again.

    And he wouldn¡¯t be able to find her in a weaker state than this. Currently, her cultivation level, physical strength, energy reserves, injuries. In all of these aspects, she is worse than him.

    He cannot let such a tempting chance go that easily. So he resorted to mental attacks.

    He ran the runic formation slighting differently and started extracting memories from the soul, trying to find the deepest darkest memories of her which she didn¡¯t want to share, and to avoid her from seeing his secrets, he actively let some of his memories for her to see.

    In fact, it is not a precaution, it is more like an attack and it could be said that this act of sending his memories worked better than trying to read hers.

    Because Sam sent worst of his memories. Things like the constant physical abuse or the training in the assassin camp to control nausea and increase the tolerance for the human organs, corpses, and even rotten corpses.

    He started showing these memories to her and she really was affected.

    Her grip over the soul loosened a bit and now not only Sam got more memories, he also got the soul easily.

    Right, when he was almost taking her out, he got a faint glimpse of memory which made him halt in his tracks in confusion and when he was to see it in full, suddenly his ¡¯vision¡¯ turned ck and all he could see is a pair of eyes burning ck mes flying around and looking at him with a voice saying.

    ¡¯Don¡¯t you dare.¡¯

    Sam lost control and the runic formation was destroyed. Before the bacsh could strike, Sam let her body go and the bacsh was all directed to her body and the soul which made her spit blood and hold her head tightly in pain.

    She instantly gave up and the woman disappeared leaving the ck whip behind.

    Sam took his whip back and started recovering.

    The fight might be rtively easierpared to Arkiv, but he still took some damage and the process of soul extraction is actually quite taxing.

    While he is recovering he constantly thought of the small glimpse of that little memory he saw. He couldn¡¯t make heads and tails of it.

    The rest of the memories he saw are her just trying to get by every day in a low-key way back in Deste and in fact, she is in thends of the beast faction.

    So, she heard about Sam more than the rest of the and her name is Beryl.

    He might be the first man in the universe who found out a woman¡¯s name in such a gruesome way.

    Sam thought of the rest of the memories and tried to link it with the glimpse. But it didn¡¯t just work.

    The glimpse is something about Beryl talking to her own and he barely heard a few words which didn¡¯t even make any sense.

    But his instinct is telling him because of that strong reaction that he got from her and the reaction which ispletely out of his league and understanding is making him feel more and more curious.

    It is too bad that he couldn¡¯t find it for now.

    He justid down on the ground and let the warping do its thing.

    He is falling to ava river that was blocked by Yawnu. He was carried on Yanwu¡¯s back as he scolding himself in his mind.

    He lost the chance to take revenge on one woman, who is so much weaker than him.

    And he let the chance slip two times in a row.

    He felt like shit right now and he also understood something else. He understood how the rest of the bigshots felt helpless when dealing with Sam.

    He was open right in front of their eyes, in the most high profile way possible, doing everything he wanted, earning money that was always there but the bigshots never knew it was there to take and leaving like he doesn¡¯t give two fucks about their hate towards him.

    And all they can do is think about their failed attempts and feel miserable about themselves thinking that they are entirely worthless, even though they ruled a million people for a greater part of their lives.

    Luckily he is only at two attempts and he decided he wouldn¡¯t go and feel to that extreme and to make sure of that, he has to time the next attempt properly.

    He would make a foolproof way that Hel herself would have toe down to save her yer.

    The warping continued and after he got his confidence back, he once again focused on the game.

    He doesn¡¯t know how long he stayed there. How many days, months, or even years it has been.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is he only spent forty-five days in total, before encountered the third yer.

    This time the things were easier. It is Donner and Sam is in no mood of killing this guy, and he is also too injured. His whole body is covered with too many stab wounds and he is bleeding from at least eighteen tears and he is still standing there with lightning roaring around.

    The first thought Sam came to was to kill this guy in a single p and be done with it.

    But all of a sudden he felt hesitant and left him alone.

    Four yers are dead already. There are only eight left. There is only one more yer that has to die in his hands.

    He just subdued him quickly and made hime to his senses before making him give up. It turned out he was in a battle with Kumar and he was also on verge of death.

    Sam felt gloomy at this thought.

    The chances of Kumar surviving are very few. No matter if it is the beasts or another yer, they would eat him alive in a minute.

    The only way he could survive is with thest breath half-eaten by the beast or beaten half to death by the yer, before calming down right before he died and giving up.

    Going out with a single breath in his lungs holding his life intact.

 Chapter 878: Talk with Gambler

    Sam endured the exhaustion and tried his best to survive through this and at the end of the second month which almost felt like a couple of years, he was finally out of this warping thing.

    He is standing in the middle of a room. A simr setup to the point shop. But instead of Ling Tian, a man wearingplete ck is sitting with his feet on the table.

    When Sam saw his face, he almost had a heart attack on the spot.

    Because the face of the man is an exact copy of his face. He shivered a bit before trying his best to calm himself down and sit across him.

    "Sam, nice to finally meet you. I wanted to meet you for a long time, but I couldn¡¯t you know. I am a busy man. Not as busy as you though. You are making waves before you even reached the Consummate stage.

    My choice is not bad."

    Sam expressionlessly looked at the same familiar face he saw over and over again for almost three decades.

    The expression, the voice everything is simr to himself. If only the aura was also copied. He could clearly tell the difference. As long as anyone who knew Sam both of them together, they wouldn¡¯t mistake them at all.

    "Is there a chance for us to fight?"

    This is the first thing Sam asked as soon as he opened his mouth.

    Gambler raised his eyebrow as he looked at Sam with a surprised yet amused expression.

    "I made a bet with Monkey king that you would demand answers from me as soon as we met and here you are asking for a fight. I am losing a lot because of my own yer. This is bad."

    "It is never a wise choice to gamble on someone else, particrly when you are not aware of that one¡¯s particr choices. If by any chance things go out of hands, you wouldn¡¯t even be able to bear the consequences."

    "First proper meeting and you are throwing veiled threats? Another bet is gone now and it is with Kartikeya. Both of those muscle heads would never let me hear the end of it."

    "Well, it is not much of a threat and more of a fact. The two bets you lost today are the proof. Anyway, you didn¡¯t answer my question, Are we going to have a fight?"

    "No, not really. We are not fighting today and certainly not anytime soon. And can you put that weird fetish of fighting me aside for a second and talk with me? I am really here in good faith you know? I want to maintain a proper rtionship with you.

    After all, you guys are halfway through the whole game and I only get to interact with you now.

    Let¡¯s talk about the face, why are you not surprised when I came here like this?"

    "What is the point of this fake face if identifying you is already a given. No one with the right mind and knowledge of me will believe you. I am pretty sure my friends would have already started attacking you if it was outside."

    "It seems like you have great friends. I would like to meet them."

    "Not possible. You might have to wait for me to get to your ce."

    "I am the only one asking questions why don¡¯t you ask some as well?"

    "Why are you guys so eager to kill us all?"

    "Wow, I would have lost another bet, It seems like I don¡¯t really understand you at all. I thought you would be asking some questions like why I picked you? What is this game? or something like that.

    It seems like Ste¡¯s wishes really dide true. You are asking something that is clearly rted to something bigger than yourself. It seems like you can empathize now Sam, you find yourself being a part of a group and you are thinking of a collective problem of your group, like the climate change groups or animal rights group back in your home.

    Do you feel that? I wanted to make a bet with Ste on this one, but she really doesn¡¯t have anything else other than her soul with her, If I had bet with that too and by any chance, I won...."

    Sam closed his eyes took a deep breath before calming himself down and asked.

    "Well, I am pretty sure you are not going to answer them, so why bother asking?"

    "Why did you get to that conclusion?"

    "There are many reasons and I can¡¯t exin them all, but I am pretty sure when the dayes for keeping my legs on the table, you would be answering every question of mine."

    "Why do you have so much resentment? Think of me as a father figure you never had."

    The discussion and went on like this and soon it reached from theugh to him being the only person.

    Sam still didn¡¯t show any expression and let the gambler talk as he wanted.

    "No wonder the gods are having a good time in the Pce of inheritance, no one really likes to lose this feeling. But all good things muste to an end.

    But before that, let me just give you, your special blessing exclusive to you."

    With that, there is a bright light falling on him which made him feel lighter and also made him go through the same process as Arman before. His body seemed to have been reconstructed from the core. He felt like a re-forged sword with all the nicks and rustpletely gone, a brand new de that could slice through anything like a knife through butter.

    After that, it came to Sam¡¯s prizes.

    The main prize of the Pce of inheritance, the beast Sam asked.

    It looked like it is a football-sized grasshopper and its skin is semitransparent.

    This is the beast he was waiting for. The beast is called the Void hopper. The very beast is supposed to have a great grasp on space without even its knowledge. But from the looks of it, the appearance of the current beast in his hands is not exactly the same as before.

    Along with that, there are many transference scrolls other small stuff along with it. The points are around a million once again. Sam once again gathered the most points with the most killings of the beasts.

    Apart from that, there is nothing much Sam wanted to speak to Gambler about. He is really satisfied with this.

    He really didn¡¯t like this Gambler a guy who is hiding his face from the very soul he abducted for fun. If he doesn¡¯t even have the guts to show his face off like this, then what kind of person is he, or what kind of god is he.

    "Come on, speak to me more. Are you sure you want to just leave like this? I mean, you might not be able to meet me for a century or two."

    Sam didn¡¯t answer instantly, he is clearly hesitating.

    "You are like my mentor in this whole game, right?"

    "Yes."

    "So, how should I proceed in the future?"

    The gambler was clearly surprised. From the start, he knew that Sam doesn¡¯t have any good impression of him and he didn¡¯t expect him to have and doesn¡¯t care what kind of impression he could have.

    All he needs is a capable yer to y the game for him and win.

    "I am really surprised. I am very sure that you won¡¯t rip my face offpletely and pull my tongue if you get a chance and you are still asking me how you should proceed? I didn¡¯t expect that. You are way beyond my expectations in all aspects.

    As for the question, keep going the same way you are going. There is something the other yers are ignoring now which couldn¡¯t be revealed at the moment, but you identally got a hold of it. That is also one of the reasons that the rest of the gods hate you. I am in no position to reveal exactly what it is. So, just proceed the way you are."

    Sam nodded and replied.

    "Then I am done, you can take me back to the rest of the yers."

    Both of them disappeared from the spot and reappeared in the main hall. Gambler is standing beside Ling Tian and his face changed back to obscurity without any face showing at all.

    Sam looked around to check the yers and he was surprised to find out Kumar is indeed injured.

    He ran to him quickly and checked his injuries. He isying on the ground extremely helpless with the yers trying to feed the potions and medicines to him.

    He seemed to be poisoned by an extremely potent one.

    Sam looked at Ling Tian and asked.

    "Why didn¡¯t you heal him?"

    "There are no more safetys Sam. You are responsible for your own life."

    Sam cursed them under his breath and took out the heavenly wine as well as got ready to suck the poison out. But Kumar stopped him and smiled.

    "I have waited for too long. If only you came a bit earlier. I am actually waiting for you. But that gave him time to think, what is the point of living like this? Being tied up with strings that are not even visible and felt.

    The past few minutes are the moments that I felt most alive in this second life.

    Just leave me be."

    Sam gritted his teeth at those words. It seems like the deaths are affecting him more than he thought.

 Chapter 879: New Plans I

    Sam felt conflicted.

    "I have ast wish Sam, I got two new sisters in the world who doesn¡¯t seem to want to ept me because of the reasons that the predecessor of my body created. Give everything I have on me to them and tell them I loved them. They didn¡¯t deserve a brother like me nor my predecessor.

    And make sure that my death never reached the lightning spear sect. They wouldn¡¯t be able to survive if I disappeared."

    The rest of the yers are all gloomy.

    It has been constant deaths of one of them for a few years. After some thought, Sam ced his hands on Kumar and said.

    "Do all of that yourself. I am a busy man. I don¡¯t have time."

    With that, his body turned wooden as the vines spread from his arms and they coiled around Kumar lifting him into the air.

    This is a new kind of trick he is trying to do for a while, but he didn¡¯t get a chance.

    The wood elemental feeling has the most efficient when they are working with poison. Even better than light elemental healing. Because the wood elemental healing has an absorption effect along with the vitality increase, but the situation is different with the light elemental healing, it is mostly for injuries and rotting.

    He started sucking the poison and all of a sudden the vine cocoon started emitting light.

    This is the perfect fusion of light element and wood elemental healing techniques and this is not the end of it.

    Some thorns starteding out of the vines and pierced into the skin at the meridians and Sam drank a bit of heavenly wine and some highly potent potions.

    Some thorns are sucking the blood out of Kumar¡¯s body while some others are injecting the medicinal properties from Sam¡¯s body into the body to excite the bone marrow and he used almost the same method of treatment he used with Ramya in the Charbhum realm.

    This is the alternative he searched to not turn into a monster.

    When the cocoon was cleared, Kumar¡¯s body is back in shape, but he is weak and there are a lot of scars over including the scars for the thorns piercing into it.

    "Those are the reminders for what happened today. Think that life has ended today and everything else was extra. So, utilize the extra time to find a way to do what you couldn¡¯t do while living."

    With that, Sam walked to the front and looked at Gambler and Ling Tian.

    "Is there anything you guys want to say or should we leave?"

    "Not so fast, Sam. This is the final pce of inheritance and from now onpetitions are a bit different and you will be having apletely different set of rules and methods to y.

    The next challenge is going to be a long challenge.

    In fact, it spans over a decade and the main goal of this is to break through past the Consummate realm.

    I know that you guys spent almost a decade in just the transcendent realm, but you have to focus on too many things and your motivation might not be great enough as you are already faster than all your peers. In fact, you are absolutely right to feel that way, even the Upper medium realms didn¡¯t have the same speed.

    The Avatar race has the same speed as you guys and they are living in much better environments. But we want you to be faster.

    In a decade you have to break through to the Astral ne of cultivation.

    You must reach the Astral ne Initiation level ande to a particr realm which you will be informed through those special wrist screens.

    And another twist is that you wouldn¡¯t be able to get to use the dimensional crossers and after a year you will be getting notifications within the wrist screen for you to travel to the realm and showing the directions.

    You will be crossing ten realms that are connected to each other and many other realms. In this ten realm path, in each realm for that year, you will be having different quests, like catching a special type of beast, harvest some kind of herb and such, and the more you catch of the asked thing, the more points you will collect.

    And every month you can ess the shop through the same wrist screen, but mind you, it will cost a lot of energy and you would have toy down arge formation. If you guys are in good books of each other, you would create onemon formation for the ess.

    Within the shop, you will be getting ess to first-ss resources that will help you with the speed of your cultivation.

    One year each realm, one year of constant training along with quest, ess the shops in the middle, amass resources to cultivate.

    And in this decade, you can kill each other if you want, you can be killed by another guy with superior cultivation, you can be a meal of a beast, whatever it is, you will be dead as we have said earlier, there are no more safetys. Your babysitting time is over and after you reach the Astral ne of cultivation, you would start with the rest of the game which would be much more interesting and entertaining.

    If any of you didn¡¯t make it, you will not just die. You soul will be trapped with your god for eternity as they will make you enter the dead bodies of many people in many realms and make you do their bidding until they get bored out of you.

    So, all the best, my dear yers. May the best yer survive till the end. And you can visit the shop for now and get the resources for your points."

    Next, the group went to the shop one by one. This time the avable products are a lot. There are too many actually and to their surprise, there are resources for the Transcendent stage and Consummate stage together. This is perfect.

    Sam had more than a million and a half points while the rest of the yers are almost a million short and most of them are not even at the peak stage.

    And to their surprise, Sampletely emptied his points out only leaving a hundred thousand points with him.

    After the shopping is over, the Pce disappeared from the spot with a huge energy ripple which didn¡¯t affect the yers at all and the beasts in the surroundings just blew away.

    "This is thest safety I am providing since I am so impressed by Sam and his changes. Goodbye."

    Gambler¡¯s voice was once again heard.

    The yers looked at each other and felt a bit helpless.

    Beryl looked at Sam and felt nervous as she held the transference scroll.

    "I am not killing you today. In fact, I wouldn¡¯t do that for the time being. But the next time I see you, you wouldn¡¯t be able to escape even if you have an interdimensional transference scroll with you."

    Sam said casually and turned to Kumar.

    "You owe me one for this. And if your sisters really have a problem, send them to my city. I am pretty sure they can find something of their interest there.

    The first quests would start next year. Until then, anyone wants to go to the deste? I will be making this shop formation there for now and I will offer the first ride for the first quest ce for free."

    All the yers except for Beryl raised their hands.

    And they immediately left the unconquered realm, but before they left, Sam took one good look at the whole realm. This ce is a perfect training ground.

    The whole realm is full of beasts that are trying to kill any other race that enters it. He could make good use of it as he already got a certain understanding of the threat level.

    He left with the rest of the yers and they took the space gates of the city and left to their respective ces.

    Sam constructed a shop formation immediately. The wrist screen already gave the formation n and it is actually not thatplicated, but it needs the space element users to transport the items from there to this shop and it also seems like most of the energy is being given from the other side.

    Sam called for a meeting as soon as he was done with assigning the formation work.

    Every executive of the various departments came for the meeting.

    "I will be going to breakthrough for the next few days and before Ie back, I need the list of all the Late-stage transcendent people below the age of sixty-five and list of all the consummate stage cultivators in all the realms."

    "May we ask why, Sir?"

    "We are going to start a special training program for the next decade. Everyone on the list must strictly adhere to the conditions I set and have to meet all the requirements and qualifications. There is a special resource haul that I gained ess to and I will be personally leading the training.

    In the next decade, all thete-stage Transcendent stage cultivators must at least reach the middle-stage Consummate or even more, and All the Consummate stage initial stage cultivators must reach thete-stage at least and medium stage cultivators must breakthrough past the Mortal ne and reach the Astral ne.

    This is going to happen and I am personally going to see to it. So, make a list properly and if by any chance there was any biased entry and if any entrant learned of this before I started training, I will crucify the person who leaked the info."

 Chapter 880: New Plans II

    Sam is currently inside his room along with the Void hopper.

    Although it is an insect, most of its characteristics are like a beast. Even though the beast itself is not powerful, it is almost impossible to kill in the same level of cultivation.

    Sam is currently examining it closely as it disyed the skills it already has. One of them is to create a fixed space within a radius of twenty meters making everything else stop moving, another one is blinking one ce to another within the twenty meters, and the space tearing attacks that could cause extra damage to the opponents.

    All of these attacks may sound minute and not too shy and grand, but that is one of the drawbacks of getting the spatial element and also the capacity of the Void hopper at the current stage.

    A void hopper always has limited abilities below the Astral ne, in fact, the current abilities are limited to its transcendent stage cultivation.

    If it reaches the Consummate level, the range will increase by at least three times the normal, and also the attacks of a beast are mostly determined by the gic memory it inherits from its parent.

    But these are not the things that are bothering Sam at all, he is currently looking at the one long silver-grey stripe on the dark grey body of the Void bug.

    ording to the description in the bestiary, the stripe shouldn¡¯t exist.

    So, he is currently using the bloodline refinement techniques to see if there is anything he could find and he did find something.

    The Void bug has an extra bloodline inside its body, but Sam couldn¡¯t identify it. Its nature doesn¡¯t match with any beast in the bestiary. That or, it is unrecognizable after merging with the bloodline of the Void hopper.

    He was a little hesitant to finish the contract, but he still decided to do it anyway.

    He is sure that Gambler needs him for now and any problem that coulde will be dealtter.

    So, he went out of the room and stood on top of the building as he started the process.

    When the whole process was done, he took a look at the spiritual core and a new orb is floating within it along with all the old ones.

    This one is a ball of two shades of grey. The dark and the silver-grey.

    Sam tried to use it and he managed to channel the spatial energy all over his body, but the orb turned dark grey, the silver-grey part of the bloodline ispletely unessible.

    And there is not much he could do and he couldn¡¯t even ask the Void hopper anything, because the beast is not capable ofmunication yet. It can listen and understand and that too, the beast tongue and barely any normalnguage, but it cannot speak back. It can give out some hints which the beasts could understand, but Sam is still having a hard time.

    That is because the age of the Void hopper which might be around ten to twenty years is actually considered a child.

    Only after it reached a certain cultivation level after a few years could it be considered an adult and until then, it wouldn¡¯t get any form of directmunication.

    He just has to wait for the Void hopper to grow or just let it show the abilities of the Silver Grey bloodline.

    While Sam is contemting all of this, he took his attention back to the spiritual core because he felt something.

    And he was shocked by what he saw.

    His spiritual core which looked like a transparent ss ball with different types of marbles inside started crystalizing.

    A faint crystalized line appeared on the core and stopped. The line which circled around the core divided the whole core into two halves.

    He noticed that the energy seemed to have increased and it is more than it should even for the Consummate level standards. His energy reserves are higher to begin with and it seems like the crystallization brought one more fold of energy to raise.

    After making sure that his body doesn¡¯t have any adverse effects, he went out to train for a bit to get used to the new strength.

    Two days of trainingter, he went to meet the executives whopleted the list.

    The eligible candidates are actually higher in number than Sam thought.

    There are around six hundred people in the transcendent stage middle-stage and higher and the consummate level cultivators are not many. Everyone that broke through is already at the end of their potential and there are barely any that could qualify for his requirements. Except for the Ark, Adrian, and some recently broken through people, not many are selected. They are around ten.

    This is devastating, to be honest. But that is alright.

    When he saw more than a hundred people who are at the Peak of the transcendent stage, he is hopeful once again.

    He gave out orders to send divide them into groups and he decided to visit each group separately.

    After that, he went to check how the administration is going on and what the profits are, and how much he could use.

    The next decade will lead to another fast expansion n. But this time it will be within the realms that Sam is going to enter. He wouldn¡¯t spread too thin and the ones who will be in the lead of the expansion n are the people in the earlier list.

    Because previously they took their sweet time with expansion even though it is considered rapid, they didn¡¯t hammer their presence directly and boldly.

    But this time, he is going to do exactly that.

    He would almost create an invasion in that realm and the main thing that he would be selling the people and the rulers there is going to be fear.

    He would establish himself there with brute force and open up his businesses rapidly without even giving the people any chance to retaliate.

    Even though he wanted to do that before, he couldn¡¯t because of theck of resources which led to the slow growth of the individual strength of people under him.

    Even though many people in the world would beg to disagree, he is sure that as long as he could increase the growth and created a strong force with him, he would have no problems fearlessly expanding the business.

    As long as he is strong enough he doesn¡¯t have to cozy up to the local bigshots and share too big of a pie with them.

    But for that, he needs another n. Because the faster the expansion the faster his manpower who runs things from bottom to the administrator level would thin down.

    His new academies are already established in all the realms and by the end of the decade he is sure that just the number of orphan students would be enough to maintain this manpower, but that is not enough. He needs more.

    So, he thought of something different and he went to the Feathered realm to talk to all kinds of administrators from various areas so that they would follow his instructions.

    The n was put to action.

    The whole organization once again got the busiest.

    People are always running around and doing multiple tasks, while Sam went to the Central continent to flex his muscles a bit.

    Most of their expansion was within outer regions of the central continent, but they still got a lot of resources, and Arkiv¡¯s explorationpany was alsounched.

    Now it is time they went deeper and see what this ce has to offer.

    While Sam is hunting the central continent, their ns of his are being implemented in various areas.

    The higher executives of every realm sent the lower-level executives to various corners of their respective realm, from the viges to the city with a bunch of patents and ideas and along with a small research team.

    It is about time the graduates that are specialized in research took a proper practical experience head-on.

    The executives and the teams met with the local big shots, the vige heads, town heads, the city heads and examined their respective locations and researchers before they proposed some kind of development ns which would not only increase the local economy but also some profits to the organization.

    The profit margin for the organization is very small, but the profit is not what they are after.

    Sam wanted to gain two things from this. One is that the research freshers would get practical experience and two is that he is taking the smaller portion of the profit in exchange for the death row inmates or people with long prison sentences.

    No matter which ce it is or what government is ruling, the death row inmates aremon. In fact, they are ced on death row without an instant execution because of one main reason, the big shot whoever imprisoned them will execute them in the bunch to create some show of strength which he didn¡¯t possess and create fear in people.

    And in chaotic times like this, the death row inmates are more. Sam decided to take them and use them as manpower.

    A desperate man who is counting his days to death, what would he be not willing to do to get a second chance.

 Chapter 881: Quests

    Three monthster.

    Sam spent it in the Central continent conquering a new zone with Arkiv and returned to the city.

    He took the first group of the selected candidates with him and returned to the Unconquered realm.

    He took out the resources be bought from the shop and distributed them.

    The first dose itself is so effective and the environment with a lot of spiritual energy is not something thates often.

    Along with them, Sam brought someone else too, an Astral ne Raiju just in case.

    They camped in a ce with the Consummate stage beasts are still acting as bosses to conquer the area while the base is being held by Raiju.

    And the training started.

    Sam trained them without any form of humanity. They felt like they are being put under torture.

    Every one of them has to wear a special belt which is created by Sam. This best increases the gravitational pull of the wearer by three fold and he would be modifying the formation whenever they got used to this.

    He put on restrictions that would reduce their energy usage. They have to try andpensate it with efficiency.

    They are thrown into dangerous situations one by one and they almost died a hundred times.

    After three months of constant training the daily regiment is drilled and ingrained into their every cell and ording to Sam¡¯s orders they would be training like this. He gave the resources that would be needed for the next year and sent them back to their own ces.

    Now they are continuing their daily lives along with the training and the first batch are the people with lowest cultivation level.

    As the batches went their cultivation level increased and their training time in the unconquered realm decreased and the final batch are the peak transcendent stage cultivators.

    All this while the ten consummate cultivators are present with Sam and their training is going on and on.

    He has to make sure their breakthrough speed kept up with his own and train them even giving them resources that are more than his own consumption.

    Soon, the first year ended in this training and from now on they will be gathering in the Feathered for every three months to take their batch of resources and show the results of training.

    Everyone who didn¡¯t pass the tests, they would be taken back to the unconquered realm for another torturous session.

    But these tests are led by the Consummate stage cultivators and it would only take around a week with no sleep and breaks to take care of them.

    The only problem is that they would be using a lot more spirit stones for the space gates then they actually do.

    But that is alright. Even after all the sries and all kinds of investments and the prices for the raw materials and everything else, he has billions of spirit stones lying around doing nothing.

    He used them from his personal stash and made them train like dogs.

    Soon, the year ended and the first quest came. The yers were surprised to see it is within the unconquered realm.

    They thought that they would be already given the quest in some realm connected to the unconquered realm not the realm itself.

    But still they are okay.

    The task is simple, they have to find the horns of the Demonic Rhino.

    This is one of the beasts that has the bloodline hierarchy within the race even though the superiority of the bloodline itself is not that high.

    The bloodline hierarchy is based on number of horns as the more horns a rhino has the superior its bloodline is and the more potential it has and the horns gorger as the rhino grows.

    Their task is to collect the horns. As many horns as they can within the next two months and every horn should be from a consummate level rhino.

    The initial stage rhinos will give them around thousand points for each horn, the middle stage will give around five thousand points andte stage ones will give around fifteen thousand points.

    Even though the points seem high, it is actually not that high. When they bought in the shop the resources for this one year cost most of their points and that is around four to five hundred thousand. These resources are just for breaking through into the Consummate realm and start toy the foundation for themselves.

    They are barely shot of breaking through the second level of Consummate stage, Sam has that many resources because what he bought for transcendent stage cultivators to have minor breakthroughs which cost him more than a million points.

    If this goes on, the resources for every stage will be high and they have to work for more points and Sam already has to work ten times more as he would need ten times more resources and now he is feeding therge army which would need him to work hundred times more.

    But he has his ways.

    After bringing the yers from the deste to the Unconquered realm, they parted ways.

    From now on it is apetition.

    Sam decided to be shameless this time. He didn¡¯t try to think of putting any fair fights.

    Within the past year, he already has a decent understanding on the locations of the beasts, so he knew where he could find the rhinos.

    At least for the relief of the yers that is not the only tribe of Demon horn Rhinos in this realm. Otherwise they would be in trouble.

    He took the Astral ne Raiju and the rest of the Consummate stage cultivators training with him to collect the horns of the Rhinos.

    The Rhino tribe¡¯s strongest Rhino is only an Initial stage Astral ne one and the Raiju is clearly stronger. Their bloodlines are miles apart.

    While the rest of the yers are scouting and waiting for the rhinos toe out of the tribe and go for a hunt to find the Rhino alone, but Sam just walked into their camp with the group and started collecting the horns like they are fruit.

    The rhino with weakest bloodline has three horns at least and the rhino with the strongest bloodline which is also the Astral ne rhino has nine horns.

    The sh went on for three weeks and he collected around three thousand horns.

    With a thousand and five hundred from the initial stage, an eight hundred or so from the middle stage, the rest of them arete stage while thest nine are from the Astral ne.

    He looked at the wrist screen for the points and he was very satisfied with the numbers he saw.

    He earned more than ten million points in total just from the first quest.

    Granted that he used his men to do the work and even used an Astral ne level beast, he didn¡¯t care how it looked for others.

    He has more than six hundred people who will breaking through into Consummate level soon to feed and develop along with him.

    He immediately went to shop to get the resources, he emptied everything and only kept a million with him.

    He stored the rest of the resources with him and started rationing them to the troops equally.

    After two months the quest was over. The rest of the yers got around five hundred thousand each and the one who got the least happened to be Beryl who was always subjected to the Kill steal, but for some reason her growth was not slow. She is growing as fast as the rest of the yers.

    There was a month of gap after the first quest and the yers went to train with the new resources and cultivate.

    After that the next quest was given and this time it is in a different realm.

    The realm is called the Tetra star realm. There are four stars or four suns in this realm with one of them being in the center and the other three revolving around it with each sun having threes each.

    Nine realms with same race but of different branches ruling each.

    This is the realm ruled by the Demi-Humans and Sam actually came into contact with them way before he even knew about the race.

    The Dragon Hawk tribe.

    The humans with characteristics and features of a different race.

    Just like how the Dragon Hawk race couldn¡¯t cultivate normally and the meridianwork of the Dragon Hawks, there are many more races with different meridianworks with just normal human features.

    There are no normal humans in this realm.

    But this is also the realm where they don¡¯t have to maintain any disguise.

    They don¡¯t have dissimrities in the appearances.

    Sam called for a batch of people that are training under him, this is a special batch with fifty of them being from Dragon Hawk tribe members.

    These tribe members are most loyal to Sam and they have held on until now with sheer grit. Out of the first hundred from the battalion, fifty of them not only made a name for themselves they also managed to get selected in the batch of candidates and they are also on the Peak stage of the Transcendent realm. This collective growth is really fascinating for Sam and it is time for him to put it to use.

    The next year, they would be spending in the Tetra-star realm where the Demi-humans will be ruling and a demi-human race establishing the foundation for the organization is more advantageous for them as they could blend in easily.

 Chapter 882: Breakthrough

    After entering the Tetra-star realm, the ns are going on at a rapid pace.

    The first thing Sam did, establish arge restaurant in a city with most business traffic and learned about the details of the quest.

    They have to collect a type of herb which is not exactlymon, but not exactly too rare. It is somewhere in the middle and the difficulty to find it is high because it looks like grass and there is a simr grass which grows a lot and disguises the herbpletely.

    Sam simply put a notice in the restaurant and also gave the notice to all the mercenarypanies within the city that he would buy the herb.

    The herb does not have too many advantages or it is not some coveted property, it is just too difficult and annoying to collect as the grass attracts beasts of many kinds which are going to be a hindrance for them.

    But if the reward is good enough, anything could happen.

    Sam¡¯s restaurant is already popr and the price money he put up is a lot of actually.

    And while the mercenaries went to find the herb, Sam bought a field nearby from the local government, arge one and he and Dia tilled the wholend.

    As soon as the herb came, Sam nted a bunch in the divine dimension and the rest in the field. He bought as many herbs as they came at a decent price and everyone is eager to get their hands on the herb now.

    Forest bear managed the field and made sure the rest of look alike grass didn¡¯t grow up as well and controlled the growth, speeding it up.

    By the end of the three months, he had a field full and more of the herb and once again he got ten times the returns of the rest of the yers.

    The yers started to get jealous a bit. From the start, Sam is more focused on business side and now he is reaping his benefits. He doesn¡¯t have to do too many things. He has a lot of money which is making people do things for him and he also has a lot of subordinates who can do the dirty work.

    Particrly in this case, the presence of Dragon Hawk tribe is a big advantage. They are the ones that managed to blend in easily and get the permission for restaurant, the field and the missions for mercenaries.

    They fit right in the environment and the rest of the year, they saw simr things happening as the quests kept oning for every three months.

    So, the remaining two quests are also done in a same way. Whatever that needs to be collected is being collected by the group of subordinates and the mercenaries for hire and Sam is amassing arge number of points right before spending them for resources for all the subordinates.

    The next year, the realm changed and it is connected to the Tetra- Star realm.

    Sam let the Dragon Hawk tribe members stay here. Their cultivation improve in this one year and everyone broke through the Consummate realm and he also broke through to the second level and is half through the third level.

    Now, Dragon Hawk tribe will be expanding the business and opportunities there and will be following Sam¡¯s orders to the teeth.

    After they entered the second realm and got the quest, he checked for the and the race¡¯s surroundings and felt like expanding here is a waste of time. The resources here are not exactly that great and there are not too many things that interested Sam.

    So, he decided to be a bit passive in the development. He started a smallpany and moved over a batch of research personnel and a batch of candidates in special training to assist them temporarily.

    He went and found a noble family met with their noble son and created a partnership offering a design of grenade.

    He would be doing the design selling just like how he did in the Charbhum realm.

    In this ce there is no need for a lot of muscle as they decided to be extremely low-key and onlye in contact with this one noble family kid and he did all the collection for them

    A yearter the next realm and then another.

    Years passed rapidly and Sam is training like crazy and his candidates are also struggling because of that.

    The rest of the yers are all increasing rapidly together.

    Before they knew it, it is already almost the end of the decade.

    There is barely a month left before the deadline and everyone is getting ready to prepare for a breakthrough into Astral ne.

    At this moment, Sam is in a which is not all inhabitable.

    This has arge orbit, but ites too close to the sun for half of the year and the remaining half it stays freezing cold.

    But before transitioning from state to another there would be a special period of a few weeks, where the reveals all the treasures it grew in the previous season.

    Currently Sam is on that as he prepared for a breakthrough. The exploration has already ended and most of the valuable treasures are already shipped. His quest which is rted to this ce is also over.

    At this moment, he is using the loneliness he could get in this to his advantage to breakthrough.

    He let all of his beasts out and they surrounded him in arge circle.

    Sam started taking out all kinds of treasures that he collected just for this moment.

    The peaches from the Monkey King, blood essences of Astral ne beasts of all elements, the blood given to him by the Ghoul King and the elixirs he got from the point shop and many other things which he stored exactly for this moment.

    He consumed one thing after another. The peaches that could give enough energy and focus on improvement of different things like soul, body and energy, the blood from the ghoul king which gives the necessary nutrition for the Vampire part of his body, the blood essences that could provide the nutrition for the beast bloodlines in his body.

    All of them are something that could help one breakthrough. But he has to take this many. The only regret is that he doesn¡¯t have a spatial essence lined up.

    Even though he knew Spatial elements are rare, Sam is really surprised. The number of space element users in the Deste turned out to be more whenpared to the numbers in different realms he visited.

    He didn¡¯t encounter a proper beast of high-rate of cultivation with Spatial element. They are all of a low-level bloodline.

    But there is one way topensate it by energy conversion in his body.

    He can share the energy that is also the reason why he is consuming the blood essence instead of beasts.

    He has to take convert a part of each essence into spatial energy and feed it to the Void Hopper carefully and he must make sure that all beasts got equal power.

    Sam consumed one treasure after another, even though he felt bloated and will explode any moment, he didn¡¯t stop for a second as he consumed on thing after another.

    As the energy reached his peak and his body almost copsed, he started distributing the energy to evenly to every other beast as they all cultivated together.

    The whole area is fully covered with all kinds of elemental energies and the surroundings turned chaotic.

    The valley they are currently in is being ravaged by the elemental energies as all of them pushed the final barrier to crack it and enter a new ne.

    Sam¡¯s spiritual core which already turned into a semi-transparent crystal from a transparent ss ball is reacting heavily as it expanded to the extreme and cracked before solidifying once again with the help of Yanwu¡¯s bloodline.

    The same process repeated until all the bloodlines are used and finally the core solidified again.

    All the beasts grew in size and there are some pretty visible changes. Even the Void hopper increased in size and all the beasts opened their eyes.

    Astral ne is a true ne where these beasts can show their prowess.

    Their auras changed and they looked like they could tear anything apart.

    But Sam didn¡¯t open his eyes yet.

    Something is still happening in his body.

    It seemed to be the change from the vampire part of the body as every muscle is being reconstructed.

    Sam felt like he is being stabbed by a millions of needles at the same time making him feel extremely painful.

    After the painful torture for an hour ended. He finally opened his eyes.

    He felt like he lost a ton of weight and became lighter on his feet. He could feel the surrounding elements so closely.

    His affinity increased by arge amount and his spiritual sensory range improved by at least threefold.

    He felt like a new person.

    He started checking what he can do and after gaining some understanding of his own strength, he finally decided to leave this.

    It is about time he served some revenge. That person lived far too longer than they needed to be.

 Chapter 883: A confirmed Speculation

    Sam left on Harbinger and left through the Wormhole connecting to the current the rest of the yers are present.

    After reaching the he directly went to a forest.

    He already knew where he has to go and find that person. In the decade, he didn¡¯t even let her wander off without knowing her location for a single day.

    She waspletely under his surveince.

    Sam liked his speed. He traveled cities and nations in a single day with this Astral ne cultivation. He just wished a spirit would be generated earlier so that he could add some inscriptions which would let the spirit do all the operating and he can rx and just stand on the board.

    He appeared near a forest and looked into it with a smirk on his face as he got ready to deal with her.

    He didn¡¯t even hide his presence at all, in fact, he made sure that every being in the forest can feel his presence.

    Beryl who is sitting in the forest with her legs crossed as she cultivated felt her heart shiver for a second.

    She looked at the horizon as Sam zoomed like a ck streak of light towards her. Her face went pale and she started running.

    She knew this day woulde sooner orter. That is why she worked so hard to cultivate faster and keep up the pace with Sam and in fact, she is the fastest of the rest of the yers. She is on verge of a breakthrough into the Astral ne.

    Just a few minutes and she would have been done.

    He took a bunch of transference scrolls and used them. She is the only one buying them from the point shop and umting them like a crazy person but this day they came in handy as she used one after the other in different directions.

    But Sam is not at all flustered.

    His eye glowed deeply as he used the eye technique in conjunction with his spatial energy and saw the traces of the transference scroll¡¯s direction and he used a scroll in the same direction from where he saw another trace left behind and use another scroll to follow her.

    She even had to buy them in the shop, but Sam has been umting them since the second Pce of inheritance and most of them are unused.

    By now, he didn¡¯t need them anymore.

    Beryl used five scrolls and every moment, she moved in a different direction and stopped in a volcanic region and jumped directly into the volcano as she submerged as she hurriedly absorbed the fire elemental energy to forcefully breakthrough.

    Sam arrived at the location and looked around surprised to not find out another trace.

    This means that she is nearby and he started searching.

    His spiritual sense covered arge area as he looked for her and leisurely searched her.

    And he couldn¡¯t find her location normally and the only thing left is the volcano and coincidentally he also felt the presence of a strong umtion of fire elemental energy from that volcano. He went nearby and ced his hand on the outer surface of the volcano and scanned the contents.

    He noticed that she is on verge of a breakthrough.

    He contemted between letting her breakthrough or trying to stop her.

    But a mischievous idea came to his mind and he gave out an evil grin.

    He didn¡¯t interrupt her, rather he made her know of his presence, but gave an illusion that he is standing afar and as if he didn¡¯t know her existence here.

    And she felt like Sam is nearing her slowly and felt anxious.

    She started absorbing the energy in bulk and didn¡¯t care about the consequences at all which led to an unstable breakthrough.

    As the energy rose and her breakthrough became apparent, she could feel Sam¡¯s presence reaching her at a high speed.

    And she hurriedly finished the breakthrough. The volcano exploded with an eruption and theva started raining down from above as she jumped out of it hurriedly covering herself in ck mes as she looked around carefully as she was about tond.

    But before she could touch the ground, she stopped mid-air and hovered in the air which made her brain run cold.

    "Hello, Beryl, isn¡¯t it rude to run away like this from me? As fellow yers we need to be friendly don¡¯t you think?"

    Sam sat on the rock and the Lava rain that is destroying the surroundingnd is avoiding himpletely.

    "What did you do to me?"

    She asked as she tried to break free and she managed it for a second because of the overflowing energy, but she felt restricted again.

    "You don¡¯t know? That is part of my new bag of tricks. It seems like you couldn¡¯t control your energy yet. Cultivation should be stable my dear."

    "You..."

    Beryl became angry and the ck mes enveloped the whole region. She still couldn¡¯t escape the shackles though. Sam just sat there nonchntly as he looked at her attempts.

    The ck me tried to cover him and burn him down, but it seems like a barrier is in ce as there appeared a spherical space that the mes couldn¡¯t enter.

    "Try harder. You know what, let me be generous. I wouldn¡¯t increase the force of my tackle and just let me be here and hold you like this, You can try and escape it if you can."

    Beryl got angrier and angrier as she looked at Sam¡¯s smug face.

    The ck mes rampaged and the spatial barrier that is holding her started tearing apart with spatial cracks and loosened the reach.

    But Sam didn¡¯t tighten it immediately, shended on the feet and moved towards him like crazy as a ck streak of fire.

    Sheunched a punch in the middle which caused arge st of ck mes to be shot at Sam, who is just looking at her calmly.

    The mes zoomed towards him but collided with an invisible barrier.

    Beryl was stumped for a moment, but she still ran towards the barrier and started punching it with ck mes.

    The spatial barrier couldn¡¯t take the pressure and cracked, but right when it was about to copse, Sam mmed his palm to it causing an explosion on the spot which made her fly in the air and crash into another invisible barrier.

    "I must really say, ever since I got the spatial element, everything is easy. Do you want to see something?"

    He asked as he threw a fireball at her. When she threw her own at it to defend, the golden fireball disappeared from the spot and appeared right in front of her face.

    "See? Within a specific range, my attacks don¡¯t even miss anymore."

    Beryl got up and threw another ming punch at Sam. But Sam blinked on the spot and reappeared a few feet away, exactly out of range by a hair¡¯s breadth. Beryl started getting annoyed.

    This is the most frustrated she has ever been in her life and at the same time as time passed, she felt more and more nervous and afraid of what her fate would be.

    This is like thest struggle as she used everything in her arsenal to attack Sam, but he defended easily. Soon, Beryl is facing the consequences of using too much energy in such unstable conditions as her attacking streak was halted in the middle as she spat a mouthful of blood.

    Beryl suddenly calmed down instantly. The raging ck mes are gone and she looked at Sam as if she was lost for a second and suddenly something in her seemed to have changed.

    Her eyes became brighter and then Sam recalled that soul extraction. The memory was halted by two eyes.

    Currently, her eyes resembled the very same eyes.

    Sam instantly made his move. His expression became serious as he ran towards her and blinked as he disappeared and reappeared behind her.

    Beryl turned towards him and blocked his attack whileunching her own.

    Sam used the repel style which is actually her forte and jumped upwards using her own force and before she knew it, he took out a small cage and mmed towards her.

    The thunder prison was activated after a long time as it captured Beryl and Samnded right beside it.

    Beryl crazily attacked the lightning walls of the prison, but there is no use.

    Sam can actually keep some stronger people inside the thunder prison and it unlocked a lot of its strength with his cultivation. There is no way a person with the same level of cultivation would escape.

    Sam watched as she crazily attacked the thunder prison, used the transference scroll, and many other attacks, she is even using her blood art.

    She behaved like a mental patient.

    Once she calmed down, Sam finally spoke.

    "It seems like you are exhausted. Aren¡¯t you goddess Hel?"

    Beryl looked at Sam coldly and then burst outughing.

    "Hahahaha... Since when did you figure out?"

    "Right now actually. It is just spection until you confirmed it."

    "Since you know this, then leave me alone, then I wouldn¡¯t bother to pursue this matter."

    Sam just smiled at her cocky request and his smile gave her chills.

 Chapter 884: Dinner

    "What are you looking at? Let me go." She yelled at him once again.

    "You are not going anywhere. In fact, after learning of your identity, I would be stupid if I let you go. You are an obvious vition of rules and I don¡¯t know how you managed to hide it from the rest of the gods, but I am going to burst your bubble."

    "Really? Is that all you got? I heard you are very good at fighting with gods when they are on the same level as you. Why don¡¯t you try and do that with me? Kill me if you can."

    Sam made arge rock appear with the earth element and sat on it before saying calmly.

    "Do you really think I would fall for such a cheap trick? Provocation to fight? I am way beyond that. But if you answer some of my questions, I might let you go. Why are you participating in this game like this? Is it really that important to win in this game? You went as far as cheating like this. I thought gods have some dignity when I came into this world, but it seems like you guys are all dying to prove me wrong."

    "What the hell do you know?" She only replied with that but didn¡¯t answer at all.

    "You know what, I wille straight to the point. I am going to kill you today. One way or the other. But I will give you a choice, if you give me some idea on what the hell this game is, you will die in a single second, otherwise, I will give you the worst of tortures."

    "Hahaha... You are a kid alright. Do you really think you can kill me? The most you could do is kill Beryl and destroy a fragment of my soul. This is not my original body and this is not myplete soul. The moment you kill me, you would be making me a permanent enemy of yours.

    I might not be able to take action directly, but I can make your life living hell until you reach a certain stage where I can meet you directly and I will kill you then."

    "Sounds like a n then. But I do have one question. Is it you or Beryl that killed my friend?"

    "Do you think I will stoop so low as killing the rest of the yers myself? She is the one who killed them, I was just here for guiding her and to save her in times like this."

    "Well that would be enough, so you can leave now."

    With that, Sam snapped his fingers and the runes drawn inside the thunder prison started glowing. They are all drawn with his own blood. This is a simr kind of soul extraction.

    He threw a block of metal inside and the runes started moving towards it and after all of the runes gathered block flew and touched Beryl on the forehead.

    By now, she is trying her best to destroy the thunder prison, she even tapped into the power that is beyond that and she even made a futile attempt of destroying the block of metal.

    But there is some kind of inscription on it that blocked the mes.

    Beryl looked at Sam and yelled.

    "Don¡¯t you dare, let me out of that metal box. Otherwise, I will go to hell and back to get revenge."

    And then it changed to Hel.

    "I will be waiting for you in the higher realms, I will not kill you directly. I will throw you into hell with your body intact as you suffer from your own guilt for all eternity."

    "Good luck with that."

    Sam replied nonchntly and Beryl¡¯s body stopped moving.

    Sam just burned it off.

    "AHHHHHHHHHHH."

    Beryl¡¯s voice could be heard from the Block of metal, she screamed in agony as she saw herself burning.

    "This is just the beginning, Beryl. You and I are going to have a lot of time together."

    He said as he let lightning energy enter the cube and she screamed once again.

    "You might be the biggest stress reliever in this world."

    Sam left the ce to return to the city. His troops are on verge of breakthroughs and in this month, he might be gaining more than Hundred Astral ne cultivators and he already gained ten of them through his own training and another five Raijus along with some Astral ne beasts he captured from the Unconquered realm.

    He is going to be one of the most powerful men in this world within the medium realms.

    For the next month, he supervised the breakthroughs.

    The rest of the yers are also preparing for the breakthrough.

    They are all tense and looking forward to seeing what they are going to do in the future at the same time.

    By the end of the month, everyone has broken through and they all agreed to meet in the city to have dinner together.

    They don¡¯t know exactly what would happen in the future. But they felt like it is a good thing to have a normal dinner forgetting about all the tensions they have and enjoy a moment of peace here.

    Mackey was called over to cook the special meal.

    He is already a Consummate stage cultivator and his restaurant was already inherited by his disciple. He is currently in food research and recipe making as he roamed around the Deste and other realms that the organization is working in.

    He came here to cook arge table and he kept on cooking as he knew their appetites will berge.

    "So, Sam. What are your ns? Are you going to start a new business?"

    Noah asked him.

    Sam was a bit surprised. Noah is the person who likes to talk the least.

    "Why do you ask? It is not like you to ask these things?"

    "Nothing, you invested in a business with Arkiv, I am looking for investing in one too. If it is your business, I can feel a bit assured."

    "I don¡¯t know actually. All the expansion ns are stabilized and businesses in all the realms are in a stable state.

    We have to see what our gods will throw at us to see where we are going and then decide what I would be doing."

    The small talk continued.

    Everyone is talking about how their journey felt and then came some serious topic. It is about their past lives.

    It turned out all these people are from different realms. And some of the realms are something they already visited.

    They all have the basic knowledge of cultivation. But their realms are of the lowest ranks and even if they were considered geniuses they will not have been able toe here.

    In fact, they are considered to be strays with a transcendent stage cultivator ruling it and dying there.

    "What about your families?"

    Sam asked them in confusion and all of them became gloomy.

    "We cannot remember them. We have retained all the memories we have except for the families. We don¡¯t know why that happened. But when I asked Hou Yi about it in the start, he said that families are a distraction for us and if I have to really get together with them, then I have to finish this game properly as he told me."

    Arkiv answered in a calm tone.

    "So, what is your story?" Noah asked him from the side. He didn¡¯t share it in the start and just brushed it off and no one wants to piss him off and ask. In fact, since the start of the dinner, they are all walking on eggshells.

    A ce in the middle of Sam¡¯s organization. It is not a great ce to piss him off and they just heard the news about the revenge on Beryl, so they stayed silent. But Noah is the only one asking questions calmly as if she couldn¡¯t care less.

    But her courage is not because of her own strength. She just trusted in Sam more than the rest as she interacted more with him.

    "Well, my life is not as exciting as yours. I was from a ce where there is no such thing as cultivation a person¡¯s strength has limits. So, the humans resorted to different methods to kill each other and I am one of the merchants who sold death.

    A good one if I may add."

    He stayed silent after that.

    "Do you remember your family?"

    "I didn¡¯t have any. An orphan. Grew up in the streets for a few years, sold by one asshole to another, learned killing at age eight, killed the first man of my own free will at twelve, killed a hundred by eighteen, and dead by twenty-eight.

    I don¡¯t know how many people I killed before I died though. Around a hundred thousand at least.

    Earned a lot of money and one person who is as close as a family for me died before me and I died all alone in front of a friend of mine."

    Everyone stayed silent as the atmosphere turned a little heavy. They could all hear a bit of mncholy from his voice and he is clearly feeling a bit sad about his past.

    Even though he didn¡¯t go into details, they still felt knew it should be worse than what he made out to be.

    While they turned silent their wrist screens all gave an alert. Thest day of the decade is over and it is time for their next phase of this game.

 Chapter 885: Next Phase of the Game

    While the yers just got a message informing them of the end of their decade-long mission, the gods who are ying the game with the yers are having a meeting.

    And in this meeting, all twelve gods are present even though five of the yers died.

    "Okay, we are here to get the details of your missions. Even though your yers died, it is not an excuse to take off your missions from the whole game."

    Zeus asked calmly as he looked at them with a sweeping nce.

    "Why should we give our share when we are no longer part of the bet? We already lost our wager, but you also want us to give the missions away, which might lose our fame and prestige over there. There is no way I am doing that."

    Indra refuted directly.

    "Don¡¯t go back on your bloody word Indra. Or I will make you bleed. You might think that you would lose fame or faith of your followers. But trust me when I say this. If you go back on this word. It doesn¡¯t matter how many followers you have you would still be walking limp for eternity."

    Thor who is the god supporting Donner spoke.

    "Really, I would like to see you try."

    Indra didn¡¯t back down.

    Gambler tapped on the table making everyone silent.

    "Stop acting up everyone. I am the most psychotic guy here and you all know what happens when I go crazy. And your stupid arguments are annoying me."

    Thor and Indra sat back down.

    Gambler diverted his attention to the five eliminated gods and said.

    "I don¡¯t care if you are okay with giving the missions are not. But you are giving them. You made a wager which this Gambler is also part of and you all know how far I could go for a wager. So, don¡¯t make me lose it.

    Or we can go to a realm war and decide the result based on that."

    Hel threw a token onto the table and stood up.

    "No need, this is the list. Just inform me when I am needed."

    With that, she was about to leave. But Indra extended his saber and said.

    "You are not going anywhere. I have been trying to get in touch with you. My yer died because of your little trick. You better give me an exnation."

    Hel looked at him coldly and spoke.

    "I don¡¯t know what is wrong with your brains. Seven out of eight people who has every right to ask for an exnation are staying silent. Did you ever ask your brain why?"

    Indra looked at the rest of the gods who seemed to be unbothered by it.

    "It is because they knew that they don¡¯t need to ask. I will provide an exnation properly. For my part of the missions, apart from the normal reward, they will get an extra reward if they clear it. As for your little yer who died, I didn¡¯t kill him. He died in a normal way by another yer. I don¡¯t need to dirty my hands to kill someone of your yer¡¯s level.

    Now take your saber off and let me go before I lose it and burn your ass."

    Indra begrudgingly let her go as he knew that a fight is not an option at this moment.

    So, he sat down there for the rest of the meeting.

    Gambler proceeded to exin the next phase of the game.

    "Here how this goes.

    All the gods here have certain realms under their rule and their many people follow you like religion and there are some organizations and families in every realm under you that follow you with the most devotion with which you make asional contact.

    Now every one of your lists has families or organizations of such strength with various powers.

    And we will be giving these lists to the yers.

    The yers will have to select one family or organization at a time from the list of others and after the selection, you would be going to inform that family about the yer and give his picture too.

    The goal is for the yers to get the family heirloom or some treasure in that organization that represents them.

    If it is a consumable one, then they would take it to use it for the benefit of the cultivation or if it is a weapon, they could decide to keep it or they could barter it with us.

    The family or the organization can kill the yers if they can and they can use any means which includes, employing assassins, the family heads directly taking part, cheap tricks, there is no cap to their methods.

    So, if we are clear with all the rules, we would be sending the lists and the rules to the yers tomorrow."

    The meeting was over soon and the rules are sent the next day through the wrist screen.

    The yers are already feeling nervous about what would hit them and when they saw this, they are stunned.

    The gods are just finding ways to kill them. Because some people go to the lengths that a normal person wouldn¡¯t just to make sure their heirloom stays there. To keep that intangible honor exist.

    And some people might sell it for the right price.

    But they don¡¯t know what family is what and what organization is what.

    It is just them knocking on the door of death and try to escape after stealing something from inside when it opened the door.

    Sam looked at the long list of all these families or organizations that are in this. The only details given about that family is their location and realm, the head of the family, and what kind of heirloom they had with them.

    The game has one rule that intrigued Sam. The gods didn¡¯t set a deadline for this, but this phase of the game will be over only after they are done with all the families and organizations.

    And since there are no requirements that he has to fight normally and work normally, he doesn¡¯t have to worry too much.

    It is just as well that he can test his own forces. If the families sell the heirlooms it is all and good, otherwise, he could just take over their businesses and influence so that he can develop in these realms.

    It will be a lot less effort for him.

    When he looked through the list to pick a ce, he saw Hel¡¯s list.

    The realms he saw surprised him a bit because he recently checked the locations of the trio and Watt is in one of those realms. So, he was a bit surprised by the coincidence.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is, he is not the only one who noticed this coincidence.

    Hel who is in one of Hell¡¯s realms is looking through all the information she has on Sam.

    When her soul fragment was part of Beryl she already has a lot of information regarding Sam and after the episode between them, she is really waiting to deal with him.

    Even though she told him that he would die when he came to the upper realms, she couldn¡¯t wait until then, so she looked for her friends who went on a journey on their own and noticed that Watt is also there within one of her realms and got an idea.

    If only Sam knew this, he would have selected that organization directly, but he doesn¡¯t know and selected a different realm.

    His first target is Zeus¡¯s list.

    The yers reached a consensus that at least while they are still here, they don¡¯t sh with the selection, because from what the rules they were told if they sh in their selection, they would have to go against each other to get an heirloom.

    And the winner will be someone who defeated most families or organizations. So, the shes is inevitable one way or the other. So, it would be better if they didn¡¯t start with sh itself since they have many options.

    As for why he chose Hou Yi, it is because Arkiv couldn¡¯t take it himself.

    If he could, he would be dealing with them by himself and as a friend, it wouldn¡¯t hurt to help him a bit in taking some revenge.

    The first target is a family and they are also in the Azure Path realm, the same realm where Avatars stay. But the he is going to go is on one end while the Starbird which is where Avatars live is in on the other end and their¡¯s strength difference is like the difference between night and day.

    While he decided to go there, he didn¡¯t go alone.

    He brought thirty Astral cultivators with him along with some beasts.

    Why bother fighting alone when you can just deal with them with numbers?

    Samnded in the Bird¡¯s eye along with his thirty confidants and the news about his arrival and his information was also given to the Starbow family.

 Chapter 886: Eventful Night

    Sam entered Starbow city, where the Starbow family has their main family estate directly.

    From the data given to them, the leader or the head of the family is actually a Middle stage Astral Pre-transcendent expert.

    The Astral ne is divided into four main cultivation stages and they are Astral Initiation, Astral Pre-transcendent, Astral Transcendent, Astral Consummation stage.

    Each divided into four sub-stages. With Initial, middle,te, and peak stages.

    And as the divide between even the substages is huge, they could have a family full of Astral Initiation stage juniors and head could only be Astral Pre-transcendent stage expert and this is the same case.

    Sam has one Astral Pre-transcendent stage Raiju with him at the moment and he is in the Initial stage.

    Only he is someone that could put up a fight against the Family head in a one on one situation and that too because of his superior bloodline. Otherwise it would be extremely one-sided.

    But Sam has his own bag of tricks to y with.

    So, the first thing he did after entering the city is to let his shadow mice go on a trip over.

    By now he has more than three dozen of them with the first ten being at Astral ne.

    They are responsible for gathering info on the whole family. He also sent one of his subordinates to gather some direct info at some of the business held by the family.

    The family obviously worships Hou Yi.

    And they are all humans which Sam didn¡¯t expect as it is rare for humans to hold such a high position in an upper realm like this.

    But he really underestimated the family¡¯swork. He is in a bar drinking with one of his subordinates and an arrow came at him through the entrance which he barely dodged, still he didn¡¯t move from the spot.

    He just sat there and kept on drinking. The rest of the customers left as soon as a young man came in with a bow and looked at Sam coldly.

    "Get out of this realm. Next time it wouldn¡¯t miss."

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything and just continued sipping the beer and he tore a big piece of meat as he chewed on it, enjoying the after taste.

    The young man who came in, aimed the arrow at him once again, but this time it stopped right before it reached Sam and stopped mid-air.

    The arrows came one after another and they are all floating in front of Sam. The spatial barrier not only stopped them it is also holding them in the ce.

    Sam finished his meal and stood up. He let his subordinate settle the bill and walked towards the young man. The arrows fell on the floor by now.

    The young man was a bit nervous at Sam¡¯s nonchnce and he aimed the arrow once again. Sam tood close to him with only two inches between the arrowhead and his face.

    "This close, It would be funny if you can miss at this distance."

    The young man gulped hard and looked at Sam nervously, his hand is trembling and Sam smirked.

    "What? Never seen a man not tremble in your presence? Your father must have done a shitty job."

    The young man couldn¡¯t take it and released the arrow.

    Sam opened his mouth and caught it with his teeth. The impact created a small air wave around, but he didn¡¯t budge.

    He dropped the arrow and spit on the ground. There is some blood as his tongue and cheeks got a bit roughed up, but within a minute it was all healed.

    "Now, how about my turn." He took out his hand gun and aimed at his face. The young man is still feeling a bit shocked by the sudden change in situation.

    Sam moved the muzzle a bit and shot his ear off.

    "Ahhhh..." The young man knelt on the floor and started groaning in pain.

    "Go back to your elders and tell them, I am not going anywhere. I am taking over this bar. We will be staying here.

    I want that Tri-metal arrow of yours. I am open for the discussion over price. But if you want to use force. I am all up for it."

    The bartender and the chefs all left the ce immediately as they helped the young man leave the ce.

    Sam and his subordinates stormed the ce and sat down on the tables.

    "Good start I guess. But will they react extremely?"

    "Like I care. If they sell it, we will open in this realm the normal way. If they don¡¯t, they will be gone anyway, so there is no need to worry and by the way, did you get any details on their rival family?"

    "Yes, there is one. But they don¡¯t have enough normal forces. They are a bit smaller family and the only reason they are rivals is because their head is of a simr strength to this head and they wouldn¡¯t easily recruit outsiders."

    "Okay then, send them something. This Starbow family has too many business. Tell them we not only would give them half of the businesses after we take them down and also give them a food recipe from the cooking section.

    The Fire-Pheasant is good we can make a proper roast with proper spice unlike these guys who are wasting their taste like this.

    Tell them, they have until evening before we go undercover."

    The subordinates nodded and started the work immediately.

    By evening there was another young man in the bar sitting in front of Sam.

    "The young master of Dewber family. Nice to meet you. I am Sam."

    "Nice to meet you too. Call me Dwon, by the way. We are really interested in your proposal. But there is some resistance in the home drive by skepticism of the elders. After all, from what we saw you have around thirty Astral ne cultivators and all of them at Initiation. That is an impressive force actually, but that is definitely not enough to deal with the whole Starbow family."

    "You don¡¯t have to worry about that. I have ways to make this happen. As long as you ept the deal, I can even give you a little demonstration and we can talk about the percentage then."

    "But what if you turn your back on us. You are the outsider after all."

    "You don¡¯t have to worry too much. It is not the power I am after. The most I would stretch my fingers is to the business level. Not more than that. I am not interested in political power and I am certainly not interested in ruling. That is a tiring and thankless job in my opinion."

    "But can we take your word for that?"

    "As you might have already known, I am not from your realm and if it helps you understand one thing, I would like to say this. If what I want is this, then trust me that I wouldn¡¯t be talking with you. I would have sacked it the moment I entered.

    The only reason I am here with these forces is I have no interest in this little and I am pretty sure the area my organization covers over the realms isrger than this by a dozen times.

    So, I hope you can put your paranoia aside and think."

    "We would like to decide after that demonstration you are talking about."

    "Oh, it would be done by tonight and I wille and meet you in your estate after that."

    "Sure thing."

    Dwon left the bar and went back to inform his family members.

    A shadow mouse came out of nowhere and sat on the table, Sam gave it a spatial ring and said.

    "You know what to do with the new toy, so don¡¯t screw it up."

    The shadow mouse disappeared.

    "Boss, are you sure you want to do this, this fast. It has only been two days since we came here."

    "Of course, but the shadow mice gave me info that the Starbow family is calling the troops. It seems like Hou Yi just have the order to kill.

    You guys go in a group and have some fun at their winery. You don¡¯t have to hold back, in fact do it as loud as you can, while our shadow mice will have some fun while they are distracted.

    And the rest, enter the woods immediately and find a hiding spot. Split up at the mouth of the forest, but unite secretly in groups of four. Don¡¯t forget the training. There would be some tailsing at us.

    The winery group wille and join us at the forests. And use these in case of emergency."

    Sam gave two transcendent scrolls and all of them made their move as they all wore ck clothes which have concealing inscriptions and split up as they went different ways.

    That night was bound to be an eventful night for the Starbow family.

 Chapter 887: Bombing

    That night, the winery of the Starbow family exploded in an extremely eye-catching way.

    Not a single warehouse was left. Everything exploded and when the news reached the Starbow family and heard that it was done by four Astral ne cultivators, they are understandably pissed.

    And they sent their forces to that area. But what they don¡¯t understand is that it is aplete distraction and the distraction as an advantage Shadow mice are acting up as they fixed some brick sized bombs in the residences of some of the Astral ne cultivators who are going to the Winery.

    The team that went to winery already disappeared by the time the forces arrived, but the family members are not done with them, they already got a tip that Sam¡¯s forces are on their way to the forest, so they decided to start the pursue them in the forest, but what they don¡¯t know is they are walking straight into the ambush.

    Sam is holding his sniper after a long time as he used his energy vision to the maximum.

    After reaching the Astral ne, he was astonished by the energy vision¡¯s limits.

    He can scan the whole patch of forest with a single nce and he can he even take a look at the spiritual energy within the leaf and if he concentrated hard enough, he can even the energy flowwork of a tree from its root to the leaves.

    It is a great upgrade and with the sniper and spatial element, he felt like he can easily kill the opponent, the dodging wouldn¡¯t be that effective and he proved just that.

    The moment the first person entered the forest, he pulled the trigger and it has spatial element and void stylebined.

    Which caused the contact point to have a small spatial crack with some turbulent vacuum trying to suck the atmosphere out and a man following the fallen target who ced his hand in that area by mistake, realized that it is a mistake hard way and too after losing a couple of fingers to the mending space crack.

    And then began the hunt of the archers from the Starbow family who wanted to be the hunters but ended up being the prey.

    Out of around thirty people only ten people were left and all of them retreated to save their own lives. Sam didn¡¯t continue the pursuit, he just let them be.

    When the forces from the family returned home and entered their own residences to take a rest after they gave their reports.

    They saw this weird metallic brick attacked to a pir or a wall.

    They scanned it with their spiritual sense, but there is a concealing formation, which they couldn¡¯t break with spiritual sense.

    So, they walked towards it carefully and were contemting whether to touch it or not, some of them called the servants and asked what it is and some of them just decided to examine it.

    But no matter what decision they made, as soon as they stood straight in front of the brick, it was activated.

    This is one of Sam¡¯s new toys he made. Something simr to motion sensor activation. As long as a living object appears within three of its sensory range the spirit enchanted to it will activate the bomb.

    The first thing that came out of it is the purple smoke. The astral ne level hydra paralytic and anesthetic poison.

    When the people that inhaled it knelt down in numbness and felt their bodies going to numb, then came the Methane gas.

    This methane gas is extremely rare but it is not exactly the most effective thing against the Astral ne cultivators even though it was made from an Astral ne level beast.

    It can injure them, but to kill them in mere seconds is not exactly its advantages as they can easily resist and that is why the anesthetic and the paralytic poisons.

    Now the methane filled the whole room and the brick finally exploded.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    A series of explosions happened and the people that are inside including the servants that are with their masters answering the questions about the poison started burning. Luckily for the family the fire and the explosion range was within the room, otherwise other people in the house would have also been burned down.

    But not all the bombs are activated and not all the people who are part of the explosions died.

    One of them who is also a poison cultivator managed to escape as he tried his best to resist the effects of the hydra poison.

    He managed to fight them back a little bit and tried his best to defend himself from the explosion.

    But still, he is paralytic and his wbole body burned.

    He is barely breathing and there is minimal chance that he would make it long.

    But he still managed to give out some information regarding the bricks he saw, but too bad, he wasn¡¯t able to say ¡¯not to go near them¡¯

    So, instead of helping them, it actually killed more people as they spotted more bricks.

    The explosions in the strongest family of the city are not something people can ignore. Everyone started bing nervous and at this moment, Sam who is in the forest and looking at all of it with his eye technique from far away took the dimensional drifter and pinned a location before going there.

    Within the Dewber family. The family elders are currently having a meeting regarding the explosions of the winery they heard and at this moment, they got the news about the explosions in the family.

    When everyone is still in shock, something even more shocking happened.

    They felt intense spatial fluctuations in the surroundings and before they could make sense of it, Sam appeared out of nowhere.

    "Hello, nice to meet you. It seems like you already got the news. So, if you are open for the cooperation, then we can talk right now."

    He said casually as ifing out of nowhere ispletely normal and sat on an empty chair.

    The only one who is calm is the family head who is looking at Sam with squinted eyes and the one most shocked is Dwon who felt terrified by Sam¡¯s appearance.

    The rest of the elders are going through so many thoughts.

    They don¡¯t know what Sam is trying to prove from this, but they do know that he proved that he can enter any ce he wants.

    This is a scary thing for them.

    "So, what do you want?"

    The family head asked without any expression.

    "I already told you, I don¡¯t need any political power in your. And as I told you before, if I want to sack the I would have done so as soon as I entered. It would be hard for your guys to resist me. The most that your interests me is in a business Sense and that too not too much.

    I could make some money off of it.

    So, I would take sixty percent of the family businesses of the Starbow family."

    "We think you said fifty this morning and we are thinking even that is too high."

    "Well, that offer is this morning. Now I showed my hand already and you are still undecided, so you can expect me to not to increase my share right?"

    "What kind of cooperation do you need? Do you want me to kill the family head?"

    "Not really, mostly keep his busy along apanion of mine and in fact you might even be able to kill him easily if you cooperated."

    "I would like to meet yourpanion before that."

    Sam chuckled and waved his hand.

    The raiju at Astral ne Pre-transcendence came out of thin air and stood in front of them calmly.

    But the family-head could feel the sense of threat. He could see that the beast is not easy for him to kill. He would at least lose an arm and a leg and there is no guarantee that even then they would be able to kill it.

    "He is kind of like my uncle in seniority, so you better be careful of your thoughts and actions. By any chance there was any signs of betrayal, results would be dire."

    Sam said calmly. Just went the elders wanted to rage, the family head stopped them and let Sam continue.

    "Even when I attacked the Star bow family, I only attacked the people of my cultivation level and maybe as coteral damage some Consummate level servants must have died.

    But if there is any betrayal, I will jump on your family, from infants to the old men, I wouldn¡¯t care f they are guilty or innocent of your crime, I wille and kill and bounce.

    That is it.

    So, you better make a decision fast."

    With that, he waved his hand once again and Raiju disappeared before he walked out of the meeting room casually.

    "Wait. We have a deal."

    The family head called for him from behind and offered his hand for a shake.

 Chapter 888: True Face

    The deal was made and they went into action the very night.

    The Starbow family already nned to attack that very night, they decided to bring the whole family who is Astral ne to the forest and just overwhelm Sam with numbers, what he wouldn¡¯t expect is, it is not just Sam who would be there.

    Sam used the dimension drifter to bring the family head and some other people along with him to the forest as they waited in ambush.

    The other party has more numbers, but Sam has more tricks up his sleeves.

    The subordinates are already setting up the whole forest with different types of motion-activated bombs and devices.

    There are many things other than just poison bombs that could harm an Astral ne cultivator and they are going to use them to a full extent.

    After arriving at the forest, the Dewber family members took positions and waited for the people to fall into traps.

    As soon as they entered the forest, they already experienced the poison attack, and this time the bombs are a bit different. It is thebination of the nine poisons from Hydra and some of the devices have a single bullet that is made in a special way and also injects the fire poison into the victim¡¯s body.

    The fire poison from one of the bi fangs.

    It is just a Consummate level fire poison and it shouldn¡¯t affect in normal cases, but after inhaling a load of poison, it would cause some disruptions in energy flow as well as the instinctual healing of spiritual energy that the body offers while fighting with poison will be focused on the fire poison temporarily.

    After all, its effects are short-term and immediatepared to normal poison and the instincts always go for immediate danger.

    Thenes Sam¡¯s sniper attacks. Some of them are dead just from the poison bombs, but even if they don¡¯t, he can kill them with the sniper from afar.

    But the other family is a family full of archers, they know how to deal with the ranged attack properly, even though it takes some time to get adjusted to a proper sniper rifle attack, they tried their best and sneaked deeper into the forest to stay out of range of the sniper.

    Unfortunately, their efforts have minimal results, the only reason they are not dying altogether is that Sam couldn¡¯t shoot rapidly with a sniper.

    Otherwise, they would be dead meat.

    Still, as some people made their way inside, the subordinates went into action. They are extensively trained to face these kinds of situations.

    The first thing they did is to leave tracks here and there, luring the other party away.

    And leave enough tracks to separate them and thin their numbers down to a group of two and sometimes even one.

    Then attack them with a group of two or three in an ambush and finish them off as fast as possible.

    The family head of the Starbow family is feeling vexed as one member after another died like this.

    He felt like something is wrong and soon he realized that he was lured into the trap. Sam didn¡¯t escape with his subordinates after that attack, he provoked them toe here and soon he saw some familiar figures.

    The members from the Dewber family.

    He understood what is going on and he also felt the two auras that are extremely dangerousing near him.

    "Everyone Retreat. Retreat immediately."

    The family head ordered a retreat, without a second thought, and moved towards the city.

    Sam didn¡¯t continue the pursuit, he just used the dimensional drifter and took the dewber family head, the Raiju, and ten more guys with him while the rest continued the pursuit.

    After fifteen minutes, the Starbow family forces returned and they are all holding a meeting within the front yard as the family head exined their current situation after activating the defensive formation which put the pursuers outside.

    At this moment, they felt somethinging towards them and before they knew it, a bunch of poison smoke grenades areing out of nowhere.

    Sam used a newly made grenadeuncher and used his spatial element to make the grenade skip the farthest ends of their sensory range and appear in it when it was toote for the opponents to realize.

    The dewber family head and Raiju went after the family head and the battle began.

    The whole area turned into chaos.

    Sam found some formation nodes and broke them down. He doesn¡¯t even have to worry too much and work on it too much, all that needed was a proper spatial explosion which turned the whole spiritual energy into chaos in that ce deactivating the formation.

    The battle became intense and Sam who is standing on the harbinger mainly provided support with sniper and with Yanwu and the rest also joining the fray, the battle is one-sided.

    A family ruling thends for centuries was turned to this state in one day.

    Sam was really surprised by this oue.

    He expected some sort of war and resistance, but the very first trap seeded.

    This didn¡¯t even make sense to him.

    Granted that he picked the weakest family out of the list and not just the weakest of Hou Yi¡¯s but of all the families, in fact, it would be hard to find a weaker family than this, this is still a bit too easy.

    Which further reinforced his belief in growing his own force along with him.

    The fight went on and on throughout the whole night.

    It became a nasty dog fight and the Starbow family has nowhere to retreat to. Because if they retreated, they would be taking the fight to their families, the kids and women who are not strong enough are not something both sides want to involve.

    Soon some of the family members surrendered on the ount that they would leave the. Only the family head was remained standing.

    "God Hou Yi. Where are you right now? Because of you my family on verge of extinction. Help me."

    He cried at the top of his lungs as thest resort.

    He did everything ording to his god¡¯s orders.

    Sent his son to warn the other party as he didn¡¯t want to kill anyone without enmity and after his son returned with an injury, he became hostile.

    He called for the forces and decided to go ording to his god¡¯s wishes, but what can he do when he was cornered like this other than calling for his god¡¯s help.

    But there is none. He stood up and ran into the deeper parts of the family with his whole body dripping blood.

    The Dewber family head didn¡¯t stop him. The Starbow family head cannot continue this fight no matter how much he tries.

    They just silently followed him.

    The Starbow family headed into a special room where a statue of Hou Yi was ced.

    Sam was surprised to see the statue, it is made of meteorite sand something he is extremely familiar with.

    But he couldn¡¯t help butment at the pure usage of it.

    The statue of Hou Yi, dynamically giving a pose with his bow and arrow. He couldn¡¯t help but feel disgusted when he remembered the shitty character he has.

    The family head dropped blood on the foot of the statue and started performing a ritual and the statue¡¯s eyes glowed.

    Sam smiled and said.

    "Hello Hou Yi, how are you doing? Is your back still hurting?"

    He asked without thinking. Hou Yi looked at Sam but couldn¡¯t do anything.

    He looked around and understood the situation.

    "He barely arrived at the and you are already in this state. Why do you I have trash like you under me?"

    When those words were uttered, everyone in the room including Sam were stunned.

    But Sam recovered quickly and burst outughing.

    "HAHAHAHAHAHAHaaa. You are indeed a piece of shit, even to your own devotees. What a waste of their devotion."

    The Starbow family head recovered from that and started begging Hou Yi.

    "God, please save us. I am sorry that we couldn¡¯t do what you asked of us, but please don¡¯t condemn us to this fate."

    "Condemn? Do you think you are worth that much time? Fools."

    "But this all happened because we followed your orders. We didn¡¯t want to make an enemy out of him. We didn¡¯t want to go on a war with him. You are the one who made me do this."

    "So? All these years, I heard your annoying please for strength and blessings and you received them in due, now that I ask one thing in return, not only do you miserably fail, you also demand me to help you back.

    Get lost, you pathetic vermin."

    With that, the glow from the statue disappeared.

    Sam took a look at the recording crystal in his hands and slowly stored it away before looking at the dewber family head.

    "My task here is done, you can deal with him however you want. It is your enmity. Anyway, I am taking any business rted to liquor and weapons, that too within my sixty percent limit, the rest is yours."

    With that he left with his forces, but not before taking the arrow from the Starbow family head who still has a defeated look. Not because he was defeated by Sam and his enemy, but because he was defeated by the god.

 Chapter 889: Call from Watt

    Sam made a trip to the Feathered to bring back a team of Space gate association experts so that they would create the space gates officially connecting the Birdseye and the Dusk organization.

    The rest will be taken care of by the executives.

    Sam is currently drinking wine and looking through the options for the next target.

    He wants to deal with an easier one again and get a head start from the rest of the yers, he already has one with a bunch of forces at hand that he could move at will, the rest of the yers are already cursing as they saw their wrist screens which showed Sam cleared the first family.

    They knew they were at a disadvantage, but what can they do? Who asked them to not start a force just because they felt it would be too troublesome to take care of them.

    Anyway, they already made their bed and they have to sleep in it, it wouldn¡¯t matter if they get jealous of the silkier bed the other party is sleeping.

    While Sam is rxing and enjoying the wine and meat, his dimensional drifter started giving an alert. His breath turned cold and his whole body became tense.

    The dimensional drifter wouldn¡¯t give any alerts normally, except when they are messages from the trio.

    Sam hurriedly walked into his room and opened the dimensional drifter to take a look.

    There is indeed a message and it is from Watt, as he went closer and closer to open the message, Sam felt his whole body drenched in cold sweat as he opened the message.

    What he saw made him take a deep breath to calm down as his energy almost went out of control.

    Watt is sitting in a chair with some kind of chains with inscriptions all over them tying him up.

    He is bleeding from many wounds on his body including his face.

    "Hello Sam, I really didn¡¯t think that I would need to send my message to you and not in a position like this.

    There are so many things to say, but I have to keep it short.

    I fell in love, a barbarian girl. I will exin the rest of our storyter. But what my current situation is, her tribe is on the run because a rival tribe came and attacked them in full force and they seemed to be talking about some blessing from a Goddess.

    They are there for me, they want to kill me for some reason and when I asked they told your name, it was because of you.

    If it is in a normal condition, after I saw their family forces, I would have died in their hands without calling you. They are just too big. But this time I want to be selfish for a while, I don¡¯t want to die if I have an option to live and I want to live and see my life together with her.

    Currently, she bought me three months.

    And the whole race is in it, the normal citizens to the Head of the race, everyone is in this together.

    I didn¡¯t think I would ever say this to you. Please save me.

    I am in the hands of K Barbarians.

    And there is one more request. These K Barbarians pride themselves as sons of war and better than all their peers in battle. Shatter that pride for me please."

    Sam could feel the pain and grief that are engulfing Watt to say these things. He knew Watt would rather die than put him in the danger, but for the first time he was being selfish and Sam didn¡¯t feel bad about it.

    It is never a good thing to selflessly give their lives to another person no matter how deep their bond is or how close they are. It would always end up in pain for both sides.

    Sam is really d that Watt fell in love and when he heard the name of the race, the K Barbarians, he knew what his next target is.

    The K barbarians are a race under Hel and it seems like she couldn¡¯t keep her hands to herself.

    But there is one thing that is making him worry. The strength of K Barbarians is a bit high on the numbers side.

    Their head is a bit stronger than the Starbow family head, but the rest of the family is many times stronger. There might be another person who is as strong as the family head and there are hundreds of Astral cultivators who are in initiation.

    Sam is Intial stage of Initiation as he recently broke through.

    In normal cases, it would take a year or year and a half for him to breakthrough, but now they can exchange family heirlooms for the resources.

    There are some things he needs to see before he decides on that.

    He started calling for the Dragon Hawk tribe. This is about to get personal and the K Barbarian tribe are good in closebat. The whole tribe is full of warriors. No elemental usage.

    The Dragon Hawk tribe who are good at both things works perfectly here.

    But even before that, he has to make some contingency in case something happens and he is going to that with the rarest of the elemental stones.

    The Spatial elemental stones.

    He took the stones and started creating arge elemental energy cell.

    In fact, it is sorge that he spent five days on the second floor which is fifty days inside.

    But not all the time was spent on making it because of its size, it is mostly because of its shape and a mechanism he created to make proper use of it.

    After making all the preparations in five more days, he started his journey to the Barbarian Realm.

    There are around five to six subraces of barbarians in this realm residing in differents and K is the house for the K Barbarians.

    Different tribes worship different gods, the K Barbarians worship Hel, some worship Yama Dharma Raj, the Hindu god of death, and some worship the Devil the king of western hell.

    They are descendants of Demons and humans from ancient times.

    The legend has it that when different gods of death gave some free reign to the demons under their realm, they went on and impregnated all kinds of humanoid races and only humans apart from the demons managed to carry their offspring.

    But that offspring has clear problems, the constant sh of bloodlines made their survival almost impossible, and then maybe gods did it or the demons found a way, they managed to mellow the bloodlines andbine them creating the Barbarians.

    The average height of a barbarian is 6 feet and 4 inches.

    Their muscle density is five times that of a normal human and it increases with their cultivation. They have endurance and stamina on par with the Centaurs and in fact even more based on their training.

    They are truly a gifted race in some sense.

    Thankfully they look too much like humans, even though they have a much bulkier body. The only difference is the skin tone and the canines, at least to the visible eye.

    And Dragon Hawk tribe are perfect to masquerade as them. Sam is a bit shorter than the average height, but he has another n, he disguised as a teenage Barbarian who still didn¡¯t hit his growth spurt.

    The disguise went well, particrly after Chandra¡¯s touch on it.

    Before they proceed any further, they have to gain an understanding of the situation and find out where Watt exactly is.

    From the location on the Dimensional drifter that came with the message, he is in the K¡¯s capital, the headquarters of the K Barbarian tribe.

    But the location is not to the pinpoint.

    They could have changed him after the message.

    But when they entered the capital they are surprised by what they saw.

    Since the whole realm is upied by barbarians with no elemental affinity, they have to do things like construction on their own directly, but that would be a bit troublesome, so they outsource the construction and such to other races.

    And Sam saw that directly, currently most of the Capital is destroyed and some kind of winged race which Sam never came into contact with are working on somerge scale construction.

    A lot of residences and streets are destroyedpletely.

    Sam wanted to get some info, so he took a couple from the Dragon Hawk tribe and entered a bar, where they could get some info and they finally got some sense of the situation.

    The K Barbarian tribe has ced a target on Watt¡¯s back after their goddess ordered them to do so, a small tribe that is part of this was currently housing him and they are not devotees of the Hel, and they refused to give up the soon to be the husband of their daughter.

    The task was handed over to a rival tribe of that small tribe, who in an attempt to kidnap Watt not only failed but to remedy that failure they kidnaped the tribe¡¯s daughter and when the young man came here to save her, they destroyed that tribe and when Watt learned of all this, he left half of the city in shambles and killed a hundred people at Consummate stage, the only reason he was caught was that an Astral ne cultivator came in and helped.

    But in the process, the youngdy escaped and used a barbarianw to buy some time.

 Chapter 890: Kala Tribe

    Sam tried to fish some more information to find out the location of the woman Watt is involved with.

    But it is a bit difficult. They knew that woman is free, but nobody knows where she is.

    Sam doesn¡¯t exactly know what the barbarianws are and he cannot ask them which would blow their cover.

    But she managed to stay safe, out of confinement, and even buy some time for Watt, if she can do all this, thews must be very generous.

    For the first week, they blended into the area as Sam made a few trips and brought all the Dragon hawk tribe people here and merged them into the city.

    They got into different jobs trying to blend in and one must say that they did a really great job.

    This is too bad that the K tribe doesn¡¯t have any rivals and the tribe itself ispletely dominating the ce. Otherwise, Sam would have taken a more straightforward approach.

    And this time there is a special condition attached to the request Watt made. He has to make sure they lose their pride. Completely stripped and they should feel helpless like they are some kind of ythings that Sam could do whatever he wants.

    So, he needs to get the information on the city¡¯s circumstances and also happenings within the estate of the K Tribe, which he might be able to take advantage of. And the shadow mice focused on the inner workings of the tribe, while Sam and his subordinates are focused on the workings of the city.

    While the infiltration and information gathering is in progress, somewhere within the K tribe¡¯s main estate, Watt is bound to his chair with all his wounds scabbed a bit on a top floor of the tower. A young Barbarian man who is an Astral ne cultivator came in and took a look at him.

    "You are a human right? Where are you from?"

    The Barbarian asked Watt as he took a chair for himself and sat down.

    "Why do you care?"

    "It is not that I care, I am curious. Do you know what pride and honor mean to barbarians? I, as an astral ne cultivator, has toe by myself to catch a Consummate level cultivator. I mean, you are not even a peak stage cultivator. You are only level-8.

    How are you so strong? And what is that weird board of yours that you are flying around on? We couldn¡¯t use it."

    "Well, it is useless to know where I am from, as for that board, you would never be able to figure out what it is and how it works with your muscle brains. But I do have one piece of advice though, you better not let anyone move around the city with that."

    "Why?"

    "Because the one I sent a message to is actually the one who made it and he really doesn¡¯t have the best of the tempers."

    "You said it is your friend, is his name, Sam?"

    We got the news from Goddess Hel, the same Goddess who told us about you.

    Your friend is not onlying to take you back, but he is also trying to get his hands on our Tribe¡¯s heirloom.

    I am really curious what is the connection between the god who rules realms and your human friend?

    It doesn¡¯t make any sense."

    "I don¡¯t know what their rtionship is, in fact, I don¡¯t care. If I were in your ce, I would do one of these two things.

    One, I would prepare for a war and defend myself as much as I can, or two I would pack my things and get the fuck out of this realm as fast as I can."

    "That is funny, you are the one that is bound and you are threatening me that I would die here?"

    "We have one hundred and thirty-two Astral cultivators in the city. We can kill him in a heartbeat."

    "Yeah, sure you can."

    "From what you told us, you said it yourself. He is stronger than you, but only a bit. The most he would be is an Astral ne cultivator. It is one versus one thirty-two."

    "Yeah, yeah. Just wait for a month or two. You would be able to see what I mean."

    "Month or two. Shouldn¡¯t it be faster? Since you are his friend and you are trusting him so much."

    "Theter hees, the more assured I am."

    These kinds of talks happened over and over again for the next one month.

    Sam settled into the city nicely along with the rest of the subordinates.

    They bought a few houses in different areas of the city and there is one underground base under a house in the outskirts where Sam lived.

    There is a map of the city on arge board and Sam is inside the room with four of his subordinates who are the team leaders of the four teams he created with the subordinates in the city.

    He is exining their current status to them.

    "Just from looking at this data, I am already missing the Starbow Family.

    From the estimation of the shadow mice, there are around one hundred and thirty Astral ne cultivators, and most of them are at Initiation and around four to five of them at the Astral Pre-transcendent stage.

    And more than seventy of them live within therge estate and the rest of them live over the city.

    Apart from that, there are hundreds of Consummate stage cultivators, and the weakest person in the city is the Pre-Transcendent stage.

    Now, do you guys have any updates regarding Watt¡¯s lover?"

    "Yes, we do. We managed to get some information and some people are suspecting that she lives in the slums with her personal guard.

    There is an old man and a woman who is moving around within the slums, ording to the kids whoze around every day.

    From what we observed that guy seems to be guarding her. We don¡¯t know why she is hiding, but every guy that tried to behave funnily with her disappeared."

    "Then why is the K not reacting to this?"

    "We don¡¯t know about that, I think it would be better to send the shadow mice and confirm if they are who we think they are."

    Sam nodded and then continued with the rest of the n.

    "The first step in the n would be to make them know about their presence while not deliberately showing our presence. They should suspect our presence but shouldn¡¯t be able to confirm it.

    The second step would be to create a fear of the unknown.

    The third step would be to wait for the counterattack and show them that it is futile.

    The fourth step would be to go and rescue Watt after utter destruction.

    But before we proceed with any of these steps, I would like to talk to that woman, she is the only one that could give us the necessary information.

    I only have vague ideas of the barbarianws, from what I learned it is actually a pact between the tribes.

    The woman who is thest member of the direct bloodline of the tribe managed to get her hands on the thing that made the K tribe to hold back against her and let Watt live.

    So we have to find out and talk to her about how much the tribe can tolerate and how far we can push in the first three steps."

    The meeting is over and everyone went to do their tasks.

    For the first step they need to make the advance preparations and it doesn¡¯t change no matter what answers they got from that woman.

    That night, Sam wore his ck cloak and left to the slums.

    The shadow mice brought some information and it really seems like they found her.

    He entered a house which is on a corner of the deste street.

    When he entered the house, he saw a woman sitting on a bed while she looked at the horizon through the window.

    "It is not that good view. So much that you became mesmerized."

    Sam said casually as he took a seat on the chair.

    "Uncle ck."

    She called and an old man entered the house with a spear and when he looked at Sam he was stunned too.

    He couldn¡¯t sense Sam¡¯s cultivation and this made him feel even more cautious.

    "Who are you? What are you doing here?"

    "Well, I don¡¯t know if you guys heard of me, but I am Sam."

    The woman was even more shocked and almost shrieked.

    "You are Sam? Watt¡¯s friend?"

    "It seems like you do know of me."

    Uncle ck rxed a bit, but he still kept the spear aimed at Sam.

    "How can we trust you? We heard that the K tribe also knew about this friend. You must be someone trying to trick me."

    "I don¡¯t know what anyone would gain from tricking you, particrly when the K tribe is not even keeping a strict eye on you. But I might have a way or two to prove it, but I am sure he should have said that something that could help you identify me, so ask away."

 Chapter 891: Presence

    Sam had a long discussion with Wembley, the woman Watt fell in love with.

    Their love story is not that grand and she is not the most beautiful woman he saw. They met identally and fought, Watt won and didn¡¯t kill her for some reason and stayed within the forest. And their idental meetings increased and soon they fell in love.

    The issue was brought back to her tribe and they took it harshly, a conflict between the tribe and Watt started which waster solved by some kind of barbarian duel.

    Sam was really not that interested in the whole love story thing. They fell in love and if it is true, he will give them his blessing.

    But he couldn¡¯t stop her from saying everything, so he just listened.

    "Everything was alright, between us. After the duel, my family got along well with him, but all of a sudden the K tribe barged in and demanded that we hand him over and with the slightest of resistance they started attacking.

    Almost all of my tribe was destroyed and in the middle of it, Watt directly surrendered, but they didn¡¯t stop, then only we realized that they don¡¯t have just taking him away in their ns, they are nning to kill all of us from the start.

    And Watt got angry and killed a bunch of Consummates in an instant and they didn¡¯t manage to capture him as he moved on his board.

    WE were about to escape when the Astral ne cultivator attacked and captured me. Watt tried to get me back, but he couldn¡¯t at first, he is on verge of death. The soldiers who came at that time seems to have been told to bring him back, but it turned out they overdid it.

    So, they took me back, making up a story that Watt escaped after they left him to die like that. But a few dayster, he came back in full health and started going on a rampage.

    Which bought me a chance to escape properly, but he got caught by the Astral ne cultivators.

    As for why we are still alive, the remaining members of our tribe escaped and my grandfather who was the head of the tribe has left me something.

    It is the blood pact between my tribe and the K tribe, which he failed to use when they attacked directly.

    The blood pact is a very important thing for the barbarians and if the K tribe doesn¡¯t fulfill it, the rest of the barbarian tribes in the realm, will not tolerate it and wage a war at them.

    But it is not invincible, so I made some demands and bought three months time as Watt said and also managed to send you that message."

    "What I want to know is, how far I can push before they lose and kill Watt?"

    "What do you mean? Are you not sneaking in and freeing him?"

    "Why should I sneak in? I am going to war."

    "Are you out of your mind, I thought you guys are just bluffing, but are you really doing it? I thought Watt was only saying those things out of spite and you are also talking as crazily as him."

    "Miss Wembley. You don¡¯t have to overreact. I know exactly what I am doing. I just want an answer to my question."

    "What do you mean you know what you are doing? You definitely don¡¯t know. Do you know what K barbarians are? Savage warriors. They are such savages that they would kill a guy if they just look at their woman¡¯s feet."

    "That doesn¡¯t matter. My war is a different kind. I just want to know when they would get rid of the pact and kill Watt without any consideration to it if I proceed with my ns."

    "They wouldn¡¯t do it until they became scarce in numbers and they feel like their whole tribe is being threatened.

    In that case, nobody cares about the pact anymore and they would use him to threaten you. But if you can really reach that point, you can bargain with them and get him in exchange of their lives.

    But both of them are impossible scenarios. I don¡¯t even know why we are talking about that."

    "Okay then, I have one more question. Why are you hiding if the pact is still active and in such in sight."

    "I am not exactly hiding. The K tribe knows where I am. The only reason I am moving around is to avoid these pesky small fries who want to use me to get close to the K tribe.

    They are always the biggest annoyance and hindrances, when the timees for the pact is over and I try to escape so that the K tribe couldn¡¯t do anything to me, they will use therge numbers of these dumb guys who want their favor to wear us down.

    So, I am luring them here and finish them off while we have a chance. My ce of hiding was never a secret from the past two weeks."

    "It seems like my subordinates did a sloppy job. Anyway, I want you to sneak out of the city secretly and meet me in the forest outside. Things would get messy and I don¡¯t want you to get caught up in it. It is better if you do it tonight."

    "Is it really necessary for you to do this? You could just save him and we can escape from here."

    "That is exactly not my style. I don¡¯t do things that way."

    "It is better if you move as soon as possible after I left, tomorrow night, something big is going to happen."

    With that Sam left and he slowly moved his base to the forest outside. It wouldn¡¯t be wise to stay within the city after the first step ispleted.

    Wembley who is resistant to his thoughts, still met him along with that old man that very night.

    The next day, every subordinate who has a job in the city applied for leave and came out of the city and went around the city wall to their positions as Sam asked tp.

    And stayed there until the night as they installed something.

    These metallic beams with inscriptions on them are ced in their exact positions and they all injected their spiritual energy into it exactly after sunset.

    This is a formation Sam designed just for this city. Actually in the first month spent here, they spent a week just surveying this whole location and finding the proper locations.

    After the energy is injected the whole city started quaking mildly.

    But everyone can feel it, the buildings are vibrating continuously with a faint noise and slowly the gravity increased as the Barbarians are running out of the structures with the intention of escaping.

    This sudden gravity raise caused them to get stuck to the ground, making them stay in ce, and moving around became extremely difficult. Of course, not all of them arepletely affected. The Astral ne cultivators had minimum effect on them and they ran out immediately to check out the situation.

    The first thought that came to their mind is that a stampede is urring, but the gravity effect crossed off everything.

    All the citizens are feeling anxious and helpless as they stuck to the ground unable to move and started yelling prayers to their goddess.

    But as they prayed the gravity only increased causing them to feel a more crushing pressure on their bodies.

    The people who didn¡¯t awaken are feeling the most effects right now. Some of them even had an illusion of being crushed by a rock.

    After fifteen minutes of this effect and the Astral ne cultivators searching through the city to see if someone is doing from inside, Sam¡¯s subordinates, twisted the top of the small metallic beam and the inscription on it changed.

    The subordinates retreated back into the forest and went back to the camp while the beam started vibrating.

    There is one rapid increase in the gravity and this time even the Astral ne cultivators felt it.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    A bunch of simultaneous explosions happened at the same time five minutester which made the whole city wall have cracks on it.

    The explosion is not a normal one. It is more of a shockwave. This is something Sam has been working on in his spare time.

    He wanted to see if his understanding of void style, ripple style and repel style could be put to a different use.

    And this is the result of it.

    The whole city vibration is not just a normal attack. It causes the energy ripple in the atmosphere in a very subtle way and the beams that are around the city give off the vibrations that ovep with them and then the result of a collision caused this shockwave and destroyed the wall and also the bacsh destroyed the beams.

    If the beams are a bitrger and stronger then he could have sted the whole city down, it might not be a good weapon against enemies of a certain strength, but it sure can be used as a good diversion and disruption weapon.

    While Sam is thinking of how to improve it further in his head, the people inside the city are thinkingpletely differently.

 Chapter 892: Presence II

    The head of the K tribe is currently organizing a meeting while most of the tribe members are out there trying their best to calm the people down.

    The city wall is gone so they have to increase the patrol and guards around the city to make sure nobody sneaks in and also keep the possible beasts that might want to enter the city.

    But it is hard.

    This is not something they are prepared for and these kinds of attacks are not something they even dreamed of.

    This is not barbarian style, they juste and beat each other up until one party dies or goes to the verge of death.

    Tactics, trickery, strategy are not their thing.

    When the scouts that were sent out brought back the half-broken metal beams that are actually the cause of this, they arepletely surprised and baffled. They are not extremely good with formations, but they sure as hell, know about them.

    When the idea that this came from a formation stuck them, they don¡¯t even know how to react.

    "I want you to increase the search all over the city and the surrounding forests. I want you to find out who did this at any cost, we cannot let them go like this and we certainly cannot let them cause another incident."

    The citizens are already in a panic, if something like this happens once again, then we are going to be in extreme trouble.

    No matter how powerful we are, we need people to keep things going and if they decide to leave, we will have a lot to lose.

    And try to find out if this has any connection to that guy named Sam."

    The son of the tribe head, the same young man who is having conversations with Watt over time nodded and left to meet Watt.

    If there is any connection to Watt, the one who might give anything to him is Watt, even though they got information from Hel, it is not exactly a lot and it is definitely not enough.

    When the young head went to meet Watt, he is actually taking a napfortably in his seat.

    He woke him up gently and Watt looked at his gloomy expression with a cheeky smile.

    "Seems like you are having troubles."

    "Yes. The earlier earthquake and the wall copse, it is made by someone."

    "And?"

    "Is it Sam?"

    "Maybe."

    "Maybe? I want a definitive answer. Yes or No?"

    "I don¡¯t know, I haven¡¯t seen him in around a decade and a half. He might have a whole new bag of tricks."

    "A decade and a half? Even wives will be forgotten in that long span of time. How are you so sure that he woulde for you?"

    "Do you really want an answer for that? I am pretty sure you have more pressing matters at hand. I thought your tribe is some kind of ruling party here. But it seems like you do have enemies to have you this much confusion.

    Go and find out and if I were you I would really wish it was Sam."

    "Why?"

    "Because he is as good at making deals as he is good at killing. So, if you have an extra enemy that could cause you this much damage and confusion, then you will only more headaches. Now get out of here, I want to continue my nap. It has been a long time since I slept properly."

    The young head is having trouble controlling his urge to p the shit out of him.

    Watt is a prisoner and he is more peaceful than his captors.

    The K tribe increased their search and since they didn¡¯t get any proper information from Watt that could help them, they only hoped for their search to give some results. But no matter how much they tried to find the traces of Sam and his group, they couldn¡¯t.

    Because Sam and the group are hiding in a very unexpected ce.

    A mile away from the city there is argeke.

    Theke big enough for a small romantic cruise back on earth.

    It was infested with a lot of beasts and it is as still as ever.

    But deep under thatke, there is arge dome that is blocking the water and the beasts to enter an evenrger hole that is full of tents and people.

    This is also something that was prepared in the first month. A hiding spot where no one searches.

    Sam must say that he is really enjoying the Spatial element and all perks that got him only made him tend to the spatial element users more and train them more.

    And he also explored some other uses other than battle just like he did with everything else and now he managed to do this. The underwater hiding base.

    The Spatial element is great for concealing if it isbined with a proper concealingwork it could work wonders and using that they managed to not only keep the water and beasts out, they also created a close environment for them to stay.

    Sam is currently discussing what to do next with the subordinates when Wembley entered the tent.

    She was unable to speak since the first attack on the wall.

    She didn¡¯t know Sam could do that. After all she is also a barbarian, she couldn¡¯tprehend these deep tricks and stuff.

    And after they moved to this base, she has difficulty digesting this too.

    "May I know what your next n is?"

    "Why? Just wait and rx. One of my subordinates cooks well and I am sure he has some exotic ingredients. You can have him cook whatever you want."

    "I want to ask you something a bit more personal, is it fine?"

    "Sure go ahead. Where are you guys from? Why did you send Watt here? This is the first time someone caused this muchmotion in the barbarian realm and managed to escape scot-free.

    What are you?"

    She couldn¡¯t even find the words and asked it like that.

    Sam just smiled and said.

    "Where we are from, is not a ce you know of, but I think we might go there after this is over as for why I sent Watt there... That would be a bit tricky to answer. Just think that I sent him to meet you."

    "Meet me?" She was a bit perplexed.

    "I mean not particrly you. I thought he might be wasting his life standing beside me all the time, so I sent him out so that he could find someone who he wants to spend his life with and that happened to be you."

    "What is your rtionship exactly? You sound like his parent."

    "Does that really matter?"

    She just shook her head and left. Sam also shook his head and went back to work. He doesn¡¯t know the exact reason why she is so curious and confused, but he could faintl7y understand her concern.

    When she met Watt, all she could see is a lone traveler who has been traveling across the realms for more than a decade, a lone soul who experienced countless things.

    He must have been an interesting person to be around with and she must have been attracted to him, but Sam¡¯s involvement is making her look at a probably different side of Watt she never knew.

    Why does Watt have a friend who is waging a war for him? What have they gone through? What was he like before he came here? These are all the questions that a life partner always wants to know about them but afraid that they will be brushed off and pushed aside if they asked too much.

    But Sam is not against telling her, it is just he felt like it would be better if Watt told them himself.

    Two days went by while they stayed under theke.

    After two days at dawn, Sam sneaked out by himself out of theke and moved towards the city.

    The search has been stagnant for a bit now and they calmed down and mostly focused on defense instead ofpletely putting their resources into finding him.

    So, he needs to implement the second step, so that they wouldn¡¯t forget.

    A few hundred meters away from the city, Sam is currently underground. He created arge opening here inside the ground with his earth element and used a concealing formation to hide it.

    At this exact moment, he is making basketball-sized holes in the earth and took out a metallic puppet.

    The puppet which in the shape of arge bug and ced them in the holes and pressed a button.

    This is one of the products of the puppet-making technology, he and Sirona developed. In this decade or so, they managed to develop a suitable vine with a gic mutation that could make a puppet that is equal to an Initial stage Consummate.

    And this is one of them and is based on a beetle that stays underground. The puppet started digging into the ground and went deep enough to hide from the general spiritual sense of the scouts and moved towards the city.

    The rest of the puppets did the same in different directions.

    By morning, when all the activities are bustling, the puppets reached the city and slowly dug their way to the surface in popted areas. By now it doesn¡¯t whether they are being caught or not. Anyway, most people just ignored it as it looked like a piece of metal. If they only knew how mistaken they were.

 Chapter 893: Fear

    The bug puppets have holes in their rear and they started releasing some invisible gas into the air all over the city.

    The gas leak Ipletely simultaneous there is no gap between each other and the whole city is covered except for the estate of the K tribe and the whole city which just started its activity went silent again.

    All the people within the city fell silent. Not because they couldn¡¯t just talk. It is because they fell asleep. They fell asleep in middle of whatever they are doing.

    Walking on the street, making love in the bed, eating, drinking, fighting, and training.

    Anyone who is not a Astral ne cultivator fell asleep in the middle of their actions. The K tribe once again went nuts. They don¡¯t know what to do.

    They tried to find the anomalies that caused this but everyone who saw the metallic bugs are gone.

    But soon they found the holes created by the bugs and started tracing them by closely monitoring the tunnels they are travelling through.

    One barbarian forcefully opened up a small crevice in the ground and pulled the puppet out to check what it is and that is the mistake he made, the bug didn¡¯t struggle at all, after all it doesn¡¯t feel pain, so it enveloped its whole body and the energy cell that was ced inside exploded.

    This used the same method the cultivatorsmit suicides by self-destructions, as long as they perform a rapid injection of energy into the spiritual core try to forcefully suppress it and it reaches the poi9nt where their force makes the core unbearable, the energy bes unstable and the core copses.

    The same thing happened to the energy cell. But it is more stable than a spiritual core and the explosive effect is not as good aspletely destabilizing the energy cell or a spiritual stone, but it sure as hell created a big enough wound for the poison ced within the bug to enter the body directly.

    The poison Sam used is actually mixed with blood. Blood of the Ghouls and Vampires. This is a result of one of his perverse experiments.

    The undead blood injected into a living creature, in fact he experimented on his own body to see what would happen and suppressed the vampire part of his body to not react and all the other bloodlines. Only letting the weakest bloodline of his, the bloodline that is his own to take the shot of this blood and he learned some very interesting things from these kinds of experiments.

    And one thing is if undead blood has a constant supply of vitality and death energy at the same time, it will survive for months and the second thing is when it was injected into a living creature, it eats the vitality away from them without even knowing.

    The rest of the poison along with that blood is a very mild one and it doesn¡¯t have any adverse effects, the only effect it has is that it gives a vitality boost to the body.

    It is like a shot of adrenaline for a normal human being.

    If a normal healthy man takes that shot, he would feel stronger and healthier for some time, and if a weak man takes that he will feel like a normal man and now Sam is making them feel like a normal man as their vitality slowly dries up.

    They wouldn¡¯t no what happened.

    The first barbarian who picked it up, didn¡¯t think it was a big deal. So, he told the rest of them to remove them off or destroy them.

    Even though not all of them caught it, some of them did take some hits.

    There are around thirty puppets sent that way. Even though it is a significant loss for such well made puppets to be destroyed like that, it is worth it.

    This is vengeance after all.

    The barbarians also have healers from other races and they checked up on the citizens and confirmed that they are not poisoned, they are just going to take some long naps and their waking up time will depend on their cultivation levels.

    But the fastest one would not wake up until dawn next day.

    Sam went back to theke and started changing his base once again and this time he moved to a mountain nearby where they dug a hole within the mountain right in the middle.

    It is almost like a hollow void formed within the mountain.

    Sam created pin sized holes in the body of the mountain and used a special formation to make sure they are not filled with dirt and let the air flow in.

    The holes just looks like some kind of perforated pattern on the mountain and nobody even notices that. At least anyone with a sane mind and he actually used a small space gate formation which heid by himself to let everyone in and let the outside formation self-destruct without muchmotion.

    Now they have to let the people soak the shock in until the next night while they prepared for the next step.

    They have to wait for the counter attack and as a part of it, they will at least evacuate the city or put all the people in a temporary refugee area so that they could be safe and they will wait for his next move keenly and be alert all times.

    They might try to give him some signals that to try to fish him out.

    And as expected, the whole K tribe is on high alert, they are patrolling the whole city with all their members.

    At first they only had Astral ne cultivators, but now they also have their Consummates patrol the whole city.

    The family young masters who never had to do menial things are patrolling so themoners could be safe.

    But Sam didn¡¯t make a move, putting these people to sleep will only make the people afraid, not the main tribe, in fact they could be feeling very safe right now as Sam didn¡¯t attack the tribe with this sleeping gas.

    But he is sure that something else is going to happen that could make the K tribe afraid.

    That day nothing else happened and the citizens started waking up one after another and fell into panic. Sleeping for a whole day without even knowing is a terrifying thought to have after all.

    There is no way, they could just ept it and let go of the thought.

    After all the citizens woke up and a curfew was implemented to keep them inside the houses safely, the tribe head held another meeting.

    "What are the updates? Any traces found?"

    He asked in a frustrated tone. He is having a headache since the day before.

    "We found the tunnels tracing towards onerge hole half a mile away from the city. They all started from the same hole. These metal bugs dug the tunnels themselves and entered the city. But from there, the trial went cold. There are no traces at all."

    "This is going to be a problem. The citizens are going to be in a panic and if whoever that is doing this try to take advantage of that, then we would be having some more trouble. The rest of the tribes within the realm are looking at us like hawks.

    We cannot risk too much damage.

    Now, take those scraps of those bugs and take them to that captive. Try to see if he could recognize them.

    We didn¡¯t see puppets like this at all, they are certainly notmon and I suspect that Sam must be the one who used them. Confirm it with him first and we can think of what to doter."

    The young head took the bug scraps with him and left the room immediately.

    After he left, the rest of members started discussing what to do next and at this exact moment, an Old man who is an Astral ne cultivator, fainted onto the table all of a sudden and his face started turning pale.

    He started palpitating and his whole body is covered in cold sweat.

    "Call the healer, now."

    When the healer came and saw the body, the Old man is already dead. So, he couldn¡¯t find anything wrong with the body.

    The herbal mix that was injected into the body that increases the excitement and vitality is not something that could be traced easily and it is not exactly a poisonous thing for the healer to suspect.

    As for the undead blood inside the bodies, it would have grown in vitality by a lot, but since the person is dead, then the blood wouldn¡¯t be able to survive.

    It is simr to a virus in many ways and after the host dies, the virus also dies.

    And the healer thought that the vitality in the blood that is slowly dissipating is actually amon urrence.

    After a person died, the vitality slowly leaves away and since the person is an Astral ne cultivator it is even moremon. So, healer kept on checking again and again to see if he could find what happened to him.

    But he couldn¡¯t after a while, because another person also fainted at that moment.

    The second step; the fear of the unknown finally started gripping their hearts even without them knowing.

 Chapter 894: More Killing

    Five Astral ne cultivators fainted and died in that room within ten minutes and they could do nothing about it.

    They didn¡¯t even exhibit any symptoms other than fainting, sweating, and palpitations.

    All the top dogs gathered in one room and they are sweating bullets thinking what would have happened if they were in that position. While they are still trying hard to digest these deaths a young Astral ne cultivator ran inside and yelled.

    "They are dying. Th..they are dying."

    The people in the room were shocked and they immediately ran outside.

    Within the mansion, they saw some Astral ne cultivators copsing right where they stood, the tribe head is having the hardest time to process, he doesn¡¯t even know what is happening much less how to stop, it but he is sure that he wants to stop it as soon as possible.

    The whole K tribe went into chaos.

    Meanwhile, the young head came to meet Watt again.

    "Why are you here again? Can I have a moment of peace here?"

    "Peace? Everybody wants a piece of that, don¡¯t they? Anyway, currently, you might even be the most peaceful person on this."

    "Not really, your guards are having sex right outside the door. She is moaning as if someone might miss hearing her voice. Tell them to fuck somewhere else then I would have more peace."

    "There is no use, we are barbarians."

    "Yeah, fucking his brother¡¯s wife is a popr thing here?"

    The young head almost choked from his words.

    "Anyway, I am here to talk about something important."

    "What is it?"

    The young head took out the scraps of metallic bug and showed it to him before asking.

    "I want you to see if you can identify these things. They came out of nowhere digging a tunnel from half a mile away from the city and put the whole city to sleep. Some people didn¡¯t even wake up as we speak."

    "When did this happen?"

    "Yesterday."

    "My hands are currently tied, so if you show the parts clearly I might identify it."

    The young chief did as he was told and Watt started smiling as he looked at the parts.

    "There is a high chance it might be Sam."

    "How are you saying that?"

    "I recognize some of the parts inside, that broken puppet core and the small gear wheels, I saw Sam using them many times and I never saw another person that used that many inscriptions in a puppet that doesn¡¯t have that muchbat power."

    "Then why are you saying there is only a chance."

    "I am a bit confused by the choice of poison he used. Generally, he wouldn¡¯t use such a mild one."

    "Mild? He put a whole city to sleep."

    "Yeah, generally the scenario would have yed differently like whole city dying would have been right up his alley."

    "Are you crazy?"

    "Not really, Sam has a weird fascination with poisons and he can wield poison himself, he could create all kinds of twisted cocktails that serve different purposes. He created a poison for indigestion, some spiritual energy interruption, paralysis, a small shock, and many other things.

    Most of the time, the poison¡¯s goal wouldn¡¯t even be killing. He would just make them help him to kill the other person easier.

    While the young head is trying to process that, the guards outside came running and said.

    "Young head, The tribe head is calling you. There is a lot ofmotion outside."

    "Okay."

    He looked at Watt and wanted to ask something but Watt beat him to it.

    "This is a message."

    "A message."

    "Yes, A message. This is him directly announcing his presence and showing you what he got. He is showing you what he can do without even showing his face.

    Just imagine those bugs are filled with something else than that sleeping poison. Like slow poison that kills them slowly after sucking their vitality or a corrosive gas that could rot your flesh off of you bones.

    What do you think would have happened?"

    The young head went silent and as the guard knocked the door once again, he ran outside.

    When he went downstairs and back to the main building, he saw around thirty corpses ced side by side on the floor.

    These are all the Astral ne cultivators that died within the few minutes of his absence, all died because of the same reason which the healer couldn¡¯tprehend.

    When he heard the description, he felt his mouth grow dry.

    He remembered Watt¡¯s words. A message.

    If just the people are not enough, these thirty men are clearly a message that is loud and clear.

    The young head looked at all the Astral ne cultivators in the room, they are showing different expressions.

    Some disying anger, some grief and some are nonchnt, but there is one emotion mixed with all these other emotions. Fear. In fact, they are terrified.

    They cannot imagine themselves in the position of those thirty, but there is a high chance that they could be there. It might happen anytime soon.

    They don¡¯t want to be there, but for that, they have two options, either catching the perpetrator or leaving the war.

    Both of them are not immediate options they could choose and from the looks of it, both of these need a certain amount of sacrifices.

    It is just that they are afraid they might be one of those sacrifices.

    The young head also started feeling that fear.

    "We have to catch him as soon as possible. Did he say anything?"

    The head asked his son who came out of his daze because of the sudden call and responded.

    "There is a high chance it is Sam. The style of the puppet matches with his. At least that is what he said."

    "Anything else?"

    "Yes, he said that the whole city sleeping might be a message. It is like an announcement of his presence. Watt said that he is an expert in poisons and he is very creative with what he makes."

    "How good?"

    "From what he said, the sleeping poison is nothing. He can make all of them die a slow death or just let their flesh rot and fall off of their body.

    It is that simple, at least that is what he said."

    "We need a reply to that message. There is no turning back. Think of something quick."

    And then started another discussion and the results are shown the next day.

    The patrols from the K tribe started yelling threats out in the open.

    "Sam, you bettere out. We know you are here. If you don¡¯t your friend will die a slow and torturous death."

    "The second I find out where you are, I will catch you and rip your limbs off of your body."

    "Watt is going to suffer the more you dy. Half of the estate can hear his screams."

    When Sam and his subordinates heard this, they didn¡¯t even know whether they shouldugh or feel pity for them.

    They couldn¡¯t understand in what world is threatening a person who almost killed your city a good idea, when they don¡¯t even know his location.

    But Sam understood where their confidence came from.

    They actually shifted Watt from that secret tower to one of the residences in the city.

    In fact, even that was announced by the patrols and Sam had to confirm it with the shadow mouse. Even though it couldn¡¯t go inpletely, it managed to get a glimpse, but the security is too tight for even the Shadow mouse.

    It is confident that it could enter, but it would be too risky. The ce where that residence was located is a bit isted and there are no shadows that could be present in the surroundings.

    So shadow mouse has to wait till dark if he wants to know any information and they are even ying different tricks, but cing some kind of security in three to four isted ces like this within the city.

    Trying to give him an illusion that Watt might be present in any of these areas.

    This could have worked if the shadow mice are not present, but to their bad luck, he is present and even if he had to wait for the night to use them, it wouldn¡¯t hurt him at all.

    So, Sam started a new n for the night and this involved one of his most used things. The Specter.

    The specter and Shadow mice worked together.

    The specter and the shadow mice moved into the city that night.

    An Astral ne cultivation specter is too rare to see.

    It would have been already taken over some body and became some undead lord in normal cases, but here it is. Sam is slowly nurturing it along with it.

    After they entered.

    Within one of the false camps. The guards are a bitx with their duty. They are Astral ne cultivators and they enjoyed certain prestige on this, but now they are on guard duty, so they are clearly frustrated.

    One of them who is stretching and yawning in boredom suddenly held his dagger and stabbed another cultivator in the heart from the rear.

    Before the remaining could react, he already moved to another side and stabbed another guy in the throat without even caring about the opponent¡¯s sword that came for his chest.

    The whole tent became chaotic and a battle started.

    Three people died in total and two more are severely injured. Only one of them managed to escape scot-free, but he couldn¡¯t even speak he is so terrified by what he saw.

 Chapter 895: Challenge

    Midnight, there is another meeting held within the residence Watt was currently ced.

    There are a bunch of dead bodies and some injured people sitting beside them.

    They are the result of the Specter¡¯s actions, he just possessed a weaker guy in the group and sneak attacked someone before getting out of his body.

    And the hot blooded barbarians just took care of the rest without even thinking. They just couldn¡¯t control themselves when someone tried to kill them.

    But that is not the only thing they are worried about. Currently, Watt is holding a wine jar by his teeth as he slowly drank into it.

    His body is healing rapidly.

    He drank the whole wine jar and finally opened his mouth as he took some deep breaths.

    "Guys, can you be anymore inconsiderate of your guest. You could have helped me with the drink you know. My teeth are hurting a bit."

    He said that so casually as if he is really a guest there.

    That wine jar was delivered here by the shadow mouse when the Specter is causing all themotion in their camps.

    There is no way they would have expected to Sam not only somehow kill some of their guys, but also give a jar of wine which helped his friend heal the injuries.

    This is like a giant pulsating middle-finger standing right in their faces.

    All their bragging about their pride of being some kind of superior battle race, this is just stupid.

    The embarrassing turned into rage and everyone wanted to kill Sam right at that moment, but what can they do? They have to find the guy first, if they want to do anything about him.

    The young head brother who is holding his spear and looking at the whole scenario, felt extremely frustrated.

    He ran out of the residence and moved towards the entrance of the city.

    The young chief hurriedly followed him.

    "Stop, Druv, stop. Where are you going?"

    "I am going to kill that guy."

    "Are you an idiot? Get back to the camp now. We have to think before we act."

    "Think? You are wrong brother. We are barbarians, the K Tribe. We are Savages. Thinking was never our forte. We are born to fight and fight shall we."

    The young head followed him silently. He couldn¡¯t persuade, at least he should be with him and help him stop doing anything stupid.

    Both of them ran out of the city and outside the city gate, Druv took a deep breath and yelled at the top of his lungs. A scream that could travel for miles.

    "Sam, I know you are hiding somewhere out there like a rat. Killing my men like a coward. If you are mane and fight me right here, right now.

    Stop trying to fear monger our people and fight hand to hand like a man. Otherwise get the fuck out of my realm."

    Sam who is in the mountain cave nearby could actually hear this and he was genuinely surprised by the scream.

    But the surprise turned into chuckle.

    Generally he would have just let it go. He doesn¡¯t care about some juvenile provocation. But this time, the whole thing is a lot more personal than it should have been and he really wants to have so fun, so he decided to go and meet him.

    He went on harbinger and soon he is hovering over as he looked down on the two brothers standing there.

    "You have some guts after all."

    Druv said with gritted teeth as his aura raged. The young head looked at Sam carefully observed him. He wants to know what kind of person their enemy is. His methods are unconventional. Barbarians fought many wars with many races, but no race ever managed to create this sense of disturbance and fear in them like Sam did.

    Sam jumped down andnded a few meters away from the duo and took out his reaper sword.

    "I don¡¯t have too much time to waste. So let us just finish this. I have to go back and send you guys a few more presents."

    "Presents? That is just cowardly killing."

    "I don¡¯t care what you call it. You asked me toe here and here I am. If you want to kill me, this is the chance."

    By now the rest of the Astral ne cultivators already started moving to the city gate.

    But before they came the fight already started.

    Sam¡¯s didn¡¯t use any of his elements this time. He really wants to see how a barbarian at a same cultivation level as him would do against him in terms of physical strength and pure warrior skills.

    The sword started glowing the wind in the surroundings turned sharp.

    Even ever breath Sam is releasing is giving of a sound of sword cutting through air. He is in perfect condition to sh his sword.

    Druv held his spear and started running towards Sam.

    He started stabbing towards Sam who dodged easily leaving a sharp after image.

    The barbarian is fast, they are dexterous and they have a good battle sense. That is what Sam saw in two minutes of dodging.

    "Fight Back you fucking coward."

    "Really, I let you have a go and in two minutes you didn¡¯t even manage to make a scratch and you actually stooped to name calling. I thought this would be more interesting than that."

    "Hiding and running are these the only abilities you have?"

    "Okay okay, Stop. At least learn how to scold properly and remember you asked for it. And it seems like your folks are nearby, so it is also my time to leave."

    As he spoke, he lunged towards Druv as both of them directly exchanged the attacks.

    Sam¡¯s sword de brushed past the spear shaft and he used the repel style to shift his body and the de as it moved towards the head.

    Druv knew he was going to die, he felt the horror gripping his throat. Even before it touched him, he could feel the coldness.

    He saw Sam¡¯s eyes. The eyes that are so nonchnt.

    He is so calm as if taking the life was so insignificant, he almost seemed bored.

    Samnded on the ground with a crash and the dust rose up.

    He looked at his de which has a faint trace of blood on it as he turned around.

    The young head is currently holding Druv in his arms.

    There is arge sh on hisrge chest. He couldn¡¯t hold it in and saved his brother inst second.

    Sam looked at the group that almost reached the gate.

    Everything happened so fast. It was just three minutes from start to finish.

    "The Great K tribe. The Barbarian honor and pride as a great battle race." Sam said as he shook the blood off of his blood.

    The young head and Druv are looking at him with embarrassed expressions.

    "It is ironic isn¡¯t it? All that bragging, provocation and everything with me being a coward and all. It is easy to not be a coward when you have a whole tribe backing you. But it is hard not to be a coward when a sword is on your neck."

    "He is not a coward. I saved him." The young head came to his brother¡¯s defense.

    "Really? Why don¡¯t you ask him if he is one or not. Don¡¯t take my word for it. But remember, I was never a coward when a sword ising towards my neck, because I am always sure that I can make sure it doesn¡¯t reach me or my sword would reach the other party first.

    Unless you have that same confidence. Don¡¯t call out for me. Just sit tight and wait to experience whatever I do to you and your little tribe.

    And at this moment, I am still giving you guys a chance to defend yourselves, that might change depend on the way you treat my friends.

    So, if you want to do anything to him or want to threaten me with him, please do wait until dawn tomorrow, I have a special presentation or demonstration for you to what could happen if I be serious.

    Just multiply whatever happens at that time a hundred times and imagine it.

    Now goodbye."

    Sam left his words and used a spatial technique to blink a few meters and then left on the harbinger to disappear from the ce and the family members appeared at the spot right at the moment.

    The tribe head looked at the scene and could imagine what exactly transpired.

    Druv knelt on the ground as he wept continuously. He recalled Sam¡¯s words.

    When that sword was nearing his throat, he kind of lost his will to fight back or think of all the possibilities that could let him escape or defend himself.

    He felt dark and afraid.

    The power behind that sword strike was so overwhelming and when he realized that his brother saved him, it is not the relief that he didn¡¯t die, it is a relief that he didn¡¯t die for that sword.

    He was so afraid of it that he just wanted the death to not happen by it. He faintly felt like he would have been fine if he died in any other way, but dying by that sword is fearful than dying itself.

 Chapter 896: Demonstration

    Sam expected a pursuit from the Barbarians, but to his surprise, nobody was after him.

    Because back at the city gate, the young head didn¡¯t let anyone chase him. Everyoneined and he had to exin the situation about Druv.

    Everyone felt ashamed when they heard that. It could be said that the Barbarians have a very fragile ego. Just one of them has supposedly made a ¡¯mistake¡¯ of saving his brother from dying in a duel and they are all ashamed and embarrassed.

    If Sam was in their ce, not only would he catch the other person, he would have done so in the middle of the fight.

    Particrly, when that person is someone who is passionately provoking them. Day in and day out.

    That day passed with their moods getting gloomier.

    For some reason, the young head went to meet Watt and started talking to him.

    "I met your friend."

    "Oh, I have heard."

    "What did you hear?"

    "Enough to know that your brother¡¯s sweet little ass is saved by you in the middle of the fight."

    The young head smiled bitterly.

    "What is wrong with us? Why does a captive know about the incident that happened at the city gate? Is it really normal?"

    "Why are you asking me? Have you never had a captive before?"

    "Not for this long. We would kill instantly most of the time and if we need any info, we torture you and kill you in two to three days, whether you give us the info or not. That was our norm."

    "Well, I would give you some tips then. Tell your guards to shut the fuck up when they are near the captive, they are constantly talking about random things, you wouldn¡¯t even believe how much information they are giving away."

    "I will make sure that doesn¡¯t happen next time. For you. It doesn¡¯t matter anymore."

    "There will be no next time."

    "We will see. Anyway, your friend said something about a surprise. We want to stay prepared."

    "It is useless. Because even I don¡¯t know what kind of surprise he would be giving."

    "He said that this is a sample for what he can do and we have to multiply it by hundred times to see the full extent of his attacking power. I have a really bad feeling about it. So, I need your help."

    "Just because I am giving you asional tips, doesn¡¯t mean I would be helping you every time.

    I am sure that there is nothing you could do about it. Good luck."

    "Just what do you guys want?"

    "Well, you should be asking that to your goddess. She is the one that started this. You kidnapped me on her words that too to provoke Sam, even letting me send a message to him.

    You guys listened to her and wanted to kill my friend, so this is the payback. You live by the sword, then you die by the sword."

    The young head left the ce with a gloomy expression. There are many thoughts going through his head. Why does a goddess up in the highest of the realms want to do something to a young human who is barely an Astral ne cultivator?

    Why are they the ones doing the bidding?

    Why are they dying on her behalf?

    All these questions are killing him. If one has too much faith in something and all that faith did is lead them towards destruction, they are bound to question the faith.

    He couldn¡¯t rest that night, he didn¡¯t even bother to treat his wound properly and left in the middle of the treatment.

    As dawn neared, he had a gripping feeling in his chest, making him think of all kinds of scenarios.

    Scenarios that he never thought he would imagine are all going through his head.

    And a few minutes before dawn, Sam is currently high above in the sky.

    Above the clouds, from the ground, he and Sky are just a mere ck dot. He is standing on Sky as he looked down with the telescope. From that height, it is hard for even him to see the city with a naked eye even when he used the eye technique.

    He used the telescope and eye-technique to even see a faint outline of the city.

    After making sure that he could see that, he opened the dimensional drifter.

    He already marked the city¡¯s coordinates, so he is checking whether he is exactly collinear to the city with his current coordinates and he adjusted ording to those coordinates until he became really collinear.

    After he reached that spot, he put the dimensional drifter away and took a cylindrical object.

    The cylindrical object has many sections within it.

    The topmost section isyered energy cells, with different elements.

    The bottom-most section is the thrusting mechanism which works on bio-fuel and methane and thest thing is the middle section.

    It is alsoyered with several discs with runes on them.

    Sam started moving these several discs with runes and after some alignment, he pointed the cylindrical object vertically downwards and started destabilizing the energy cells and also injected the energy into the runes and dropped it.

    The object dropped downwards for a few meters before disappearing from the spot.

    He is using the same method as the transference scroll. Traveling in a linear direction for many kilometers in an instant.

    The object doesn¡¯t have a very long-range, but he is sure that it can reach a point just a few meters away from the city.

    Even when the barbarians find out about this, they wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything, It would be toote to do anything.

    As for why Sam used a vertical drop from that height, it is just a test. He wanted to create some chaos while testing his research.

    When the object reappeared above the city, the thrusters activated and their speed increased.

    When the first barbarian saw that, he immediately threw a spear at that, but there is no use. Just before the spear even touched the object, the force itself was enough to change the direction of the object and it stillnded in the city, particrly on the outer circle where the city wall is used to be.

    Currently, most of the city is evacuated as they moved closer to the estate so that the K tribe members would have an easy time saving them, but this also gave Sam a perfect stage for a demonstration.

    The object exploded in mid-air right before it could touch any solid substance. And that explosion included different elemental energy including spatial energy.

    And thergest part is also spatial energy, it created a small spatial rift in the atmosphere but the rest of the elemental explosions started causing changes in the rift making it expand a bit and the spatial turbulence that should have been too small normally increased to the extreme.

    If any person below Astral nees nowhere near this, they would be sucked in and even if they don¡¯t fit, their parts would be torn apart from the turbulence.

    When the group of soldiers saw this, they are shocked. The spatial tear and the chaotic turbulence are mending themselves slowly, but the turbulence is not going to let it happen easily.

    It would take at least half a day.

    And that is just the start. Many objects started falling from the sky one by one.

    As if they are raining.

    The Astral ne cultivators started throwing ranged attacks to divert them and make them fall far away from the city.

    But it is not possible.

    They are falling within the range of the city no matter how much they tried, but the only silver lining is that they don¡¯t have to worry too much about the citizens as they managed to divert them to an outer region.

    This went on for over an hour and finally stopped.

    The whole city is feeling a bit anxious.

    The aftermath is devastating.

    There is a circle around the city with a bunch of spatial tears causing chaos.

    They are tearing each other apart and the constant turbulence of chaotic mixture of different elemental energies is causing the near tears to appear while the old tears are mended.

    If one tear is alone, it would mend back in the day, but there are a bunch of these like these, it would take months to fully get rid of them.

    While the barbarians are feeling lost, a scroll fell into the city.

    A scroll with Sam¡¯s words.

    "These things are just samples.

    Imagine an object that is a few hundred timesrger than this and falls on you from the sky. I highly doubt your city will escape from this.

    So, I have a proposition and if you want to listen to it, send your young head and a bunch of others outside the city gate.

    I am pretty sure that you would be able to cross that circle of spatial rifts.

    Goodbye."

    The young head felt a bit frustrated. Sam might even be the only person that made the barbarians so passive.

    But the tribe head doesn¡¯t seem to care about this proposition.

    He seemed to have lost it and gave an order that surprised him so much.

 Chapter 897: Retaliation

    The barbarians didn¡¯t take the truce agreement from Sam lightly. And they took the attack on the city harder.

    They didn¡¯t know if Sam could really do it a hundred times more, but they know one thing, they have to deal with him as fast as they can, so they moved the whole city¡¯s poption to the estate, the estate is cramped and even though it upies one-fifth of the city, the whole poption is still a bit overwhelming.

    The weakest of them all are sent directly into their underground temple which is the safest space of all and then they started cing the people in increasing order and the Consummate level people are almost in open grounds of the estate.

    The Astral ne cultivators are having the lowest level of protection.

    The Tribe chief and the next strongest four stayed on the four regions of the estate leading half of the whole Astral ne cultivators to defend themselves from the sky attacks, while the remaining half of them started moving out fiercely.

    Many of the barbarians are spear users and they used their spears savagely.

    Sam who is watching the whole situation from afar was surprised by their actions and returned to the camp immediately.

    The barbarians are destroying everything and anything in the surroundings. They are not even caring whether the beasts, the trees, and their surrounding forest would be affected, they straight up started destroying each and everything foot by foot as they moved forward.

    Soon, they reached the mountain in which Sam and the camp previously hid, the barbarians didn¡¯t even bother to check whether there is anyone, they used their spears and threw them straight at the mountain as they slowly copsed it and even made sure that their spears went underground nearby.

    This is almost like a carpet bombing. But it is not exactly the same as the carpet bombing. It is a bit different. They couldn¡¯t move as fast as a carpet bombing. They have to move slowly because they have to be thorough, they knew that Sam is switching camps, a few dozen people wouldn¡¯t be able to move traceless. But they are disappearing somehow.

    So, they decided to go strong. They are the bigger party here and they are the ones that should be offensive, but they were forced to be so passive by Sam and his shenanigans.

    They decided to go full offensive now.

    Sam decided to use it to his advantage.

    From the start, even though the barbarians are on the losing side, they thought that Sam is nothing without his tricks.

    So, they felt that once they caught hold of him and didn¡¯t let him hide, it would be over for him.

    But Sam to show them that they are utterly wrong. He should make them understand that they are in too much trouble to waste time underestimating him.

    So, he decided to make a move. A direct and strong move.

    From what he saw, the stronger half of the Astral ne cultivators are inside the city. So, the rtively weaker half are the ones that are moving around and they spread a bit thinner.

    With the number of tribe members he has with him, it is even okay for him to strike directly. They can sh upfront without even a thought of losing.

    They are confident in that, but he didn¡¯t want to do that. He wants to give them a show of force a stronger force if you might add.

    So, he decided to let the subordinates be the backup while he dealt with them directly.

    He took the reaper sword and moved on the harbinger to the nearest Barbarian.

    When Sam appeared before him, the Barbarian was shocked a bit, but he recovered soon and called for his nearby friends.

    At least he is not stupid enough to directly confront him.

    But Sam doesn¡¯t have to wait or worry about the arrival of his friends. He can start early without any hesitation and he did just that.

    His body is covered with wind elements as the sword created arge wind de and Sam shed it right ahead.

    Creating an extremely shy andrge move that attracted a lot of attention from the surroundings.

    The barbarian defended it with his spear as he stabbed at the wind deing at him with full power, but he blew back because of the bacsh.

    Sam got off from the harbinger and stored it away.

    He jumped at the barbarian and as they shed in close quarters for a few moments.

    Sam is using a lot of his physical strength forcefully. He is fighting like a barbarian as he shed with him and finally when a few barbarians are reaching them, he activated wind element once again at thest second which the barbarian defended mindlessly and even the spear blocked the sword, the wind de shed into his chest and Sam used metal element and cut through the spear before tearing the chest open with his sword.

    The barbarian fell on his back with barely any of his breath left and Sam finished him off with a stab to his heart before he moved towards the next barbarian who is so close that he saw thest move.

    He was stunned as he saw how strong Sam is.

    Sam ran towards him with his sword as he started throwing the wind des with it.

    The barbarian is defending against them, but he also threw a couple of spears back at Sam.

    Their battle started with the long-range and the barbarian has decided on keeping it that way. He didn¡¯t let Sam attack reduce the distance between them at all and he moved in different directions.

    He seems to be good a moving technique and Sam without using any elemental fusions or abilities was unable to catch up with him.

    He also noticed that the barbarian really knew how to take advantage of the terrain even though most of it is newly created by destroying the old one and he is trying to lure Sam towards more of his team members.

    Sam didn¡¯t care though. After a few minutes of this chase, he switched reaper with his bow and started shooting arrows.

    The barbarian also stopped in his tracks as he looked at Sam from afar. He noticed that his friends areing and they would be here within two minutes, so he is not worried about dying easily and he also couldn¡¯t let Sam stop engaging and escape, so he stopped and attacked from there.

    He took out arge pile of spears and started throwing then one by one.

    Sam focused on dodging more than the shooting itself which the barbarian misunderstood as him not being able to shoot at that moment, which brought a smile on his face.

    But that changed the very next second. Because Sam is actually waiting. Waiting for the next barbarian to see what exactly is happening to his fellow tribe member.

    Sam¡¯s arrows came too sudden and the barbarian has already be toocent to notice it.

    After the first arrow with paralytic poison applied to it was lodging into his chest, the rest of the arrows were easy, one arrow after another riddled the guy in the chest and all over the front side of his body.

    Sam kept on shooting as he moved forward and the barbarian that is nearest stopped in his tracks from what he saw.

    When the barbarian with arrows fell forward, his body didn¡¯t even touch the ground.

    The arrows stopped it from happening.

    The arrows managed to support the body like it was nothing.

    It is almost like he isying down on a bed of arrows.

    Sam looked at the body as he observed the work he did and the barbarian who is standing nearby didn¡¯t want to be noticed he looked for anotherpanion of yours, who is actuallying towards them and not too far away, he would be nearby within thirty seconds.

    Sam smiled at them and waited for the second party to join in.

    It is lucky that he managed to get a hold of people at Astral ne Initiation and that too at the initial stage. He doesn¡¯t have to extend too much of his strength, so he has to show what he nned to them now.

    He wants to create a chain reaction of fear and see how far above can he fight even in the Astral ne cultivation by using the fear to his advantage.

    That is why, he is making a shy move at the start to attract the nearest members and when a member is near enough to see them clearly, he would deliver a terrible and coldst blow, which would not only make it brutal but also make it look easy.

    This would inevitably cause some kind of fear in the barbarian who saw that as it would be hard to not imagine himself being in the ce of his friend.

    And the fear would create a chip on the other party¡¯s shoulder which Sam would once again exploit.

    He reced the bow with staff and moved towards the next opponent at a rapid pace as lightning elements enveloped him. It is time for him to move to the next link of the chain.

 Chapter 898: Flashy Killing

    Sam went on with the killing in a shy way.

    As the two barbarians attacked him from both sides in perfect coordination and one with his spear and the other with his saber.

    Sam used his staff and lightning element to cause amotion, every block he did was like a lightning strike as he attracted a lot of attention, even the people far away could see the silver lightning crackling.

    As for the attacks he made, they are even shier. He didn¡¯t hold back at all. Naturally, his original style is to finish the battle as fast as possible and then kill the enemy as quickly as possible, whether it takes a discreet move or a shy move, he never really cared, but now that he decided to go high-profile, one must say he is seeding in it greatly.

    When the first barbarian neared him, he took a look at him and finished this duo instantly. Their heads exploded like watermelons and they fell down just like that as Sam moved towards the next target.

    This person is also an Astral ne Initiation stage expert, but he is actually a middle-stage expert which is a sub-stage higher than Sam.

    Sam is confident that he could take on a person of that level if he fought properly, but he is not confident enough to take on multiple opponents of that same level.

    His body changed from just have lightning enveloped him to aplete lightning fusion.

    He is sure that he has to be serious if he is to fight a man powerful than himself in Astral ne.

    He used the repel style to move dexterously as he swung his staff at the Barbarian, from the looks of it, there is only two minutes of time for the next opponent to join them, so he has to be fast.

    The barbarian didn¡¯t back down, he can clearly guess Sam¡¯s cultivation and he is not afraid. In fact, he is extremely confident that he could take him and sh with his broadsword.

    Sam managed to get a feel of this man¡¯s strength, he is not too strong. Not something he couldn¡¯t ovee with his multiple abilities.

    Along with the repel style, Sam started using the void style, even though his strikes were being blocked the lightning element and void stylebination are hard to ovee.

    The barbarian started getting a lot of push back and the energy explosions caused his arms to get weaken. Even though the lightning didn¡¯t have aplete crushing effect on him, his muscles are continuously being subjected to this electric shock, and started getting paralyzed.

    The barbarian also realized that he was losing and shifted to defensive, he didn¡¯t want to lose Sam, so he could only make him wait and stick around until the otherpanionse.

    All of this happened in one and a half minutes, the battle is that fast and quick, there is only thirty seconds for the barbarian to join the battle, in fact, theing one already took out his spear ready to throw it.

    Sam thought of something and smiled as he swung the staff at the man, but right before the staff and the sword made contact, the staff disappeared and the lightning de, which was found in Indra¡¯s Pce of inheritance that formerly belonged to Arman appeared in his hands.

    His spirit is unlocked a lot and it has enhanced lightning elemental affinity.

    The silver lightning covered the saber and it slid under the broad sword and he managed to stab him in the heart.

    Sam didn¡¯t wait a single moment after the void-style explosion that caused the heart to break literally and forcefully moved the body to block the flying spear that came towards him.

    The spear pierced through the barbarian¡¯s body and almost hit him, but he managed to avoid it by moving to the side.

    Sam looked at the barbarian that ising and thought for a moment, the next one is also a middle-stage initiation stage level cultivator and he has to recover before he engaged, so he decided to use something else to buy some time.

    He activated dark elemental energy and started using necromancy as well as let Specter out before finally releasing Yanwu.

    He knew that thest battle would attract a few more people than before. In fact, maybe all the barbarians that are involved in this ¡¯carpet bombing¡¯ might be moving towards him. So, there is no point in holding back and he has to use the chain for fear to his advantage.

    After the ranged spear attack, the next opponent didn¡¯t follow up with another attack instantly, he is wary of Sam and wanted to drag time.

    The unconscious fear that he would end up just like his friend who died a few moments ago, is really working its charm.

    But this time, he has more opponents than Sam himself.

    Not only did Sam let Yanwu out and created an undead, he also threw a small explosive out in the air.

    This is the signal for one of the subordinates to join him.

    It would be incredibly stupid of him to bear all the weight himself even for showing off that would be a bit too much.

    Sam focused on his recovery while looking out for the barbarians that might join them and soon picked up three people nearing them, they will be here in the minute, the undead barbarian is now clutching to his friend with all his strength and Yanwu used this chance to attack him from the sky.

    Sam took a few swigs of wine and some recovery pills. The heavenly wine is almost finished, it would be over by the end of this trip.

    He skimped and saved for the past few years, but it seems like it is time for him to finish it, anyway its potency decreased a lot after he reached the Astral ne and he could barely recover his energy, as for the recovery of physical injuries and such, it could at most be sped up a bit.

    He joined the fray after recovering and the barbarian is done. But the first undead is destroyed in process.

    Now Sam and Yanwu are moving towards the three barbarians that areing their way and one of his subordinates joined him.

    He is a dragon hawk tribe member and a wind element user.

    His hands already turned into ws as he moved along with Sam fiercely.

    Out of the next three opponents, two of them are just the Initial stage of Astral ne Initiation and one is at the Middle-stage of Astral ne Initiation.

    Yanwu and the subordinate shed with the two weaker ones while Sam focused on thest one along with the new undead he created from the new corpse of the barbarian.

    The battle became intense and shier.

    Sam used another signal to call for two more of his subordinates.

    He is sure that this is going to turn into a full-blown war.

    And he is going to win it no matter what.

    As the middle stage barbarian dealt with the undead and changed his focus to Sam, a shadow rose from his shadow and stabbed him in the heart from the rear.

    This is one of his shadow soldiers.

    Since he reached the transcendent stage, Sam didn¡¯t focus too much on increasing the shadow count. He has human, yaksha, merman, an elf, a Naga and the shadows of two more beasts.

    He finally settled on these seven shadows and focused more on grooming them. He is not a pure necromancer to focus too much on their numbers, so he focused more on grooming them and training them ording to his will.

    Now the Yaksha shadow is currently an inch away from destroying the heart of this middle-stage barbarian.

    Even though he couldn¡¯t kill him, Sam can easily take over from here.

    He used the wind element and a spear the barbarian threw at me to directly stab him from the front with ripple style.

    The barbarian was involuntarily pushed back and the heart was stabbed by the shadow who was holding him in the ce.

    Yanwu and the subordinate are also done with their enemies, the new batch of barbarians who saw the three gruesome deaths also saw this.

    Now there are four of them.

    Sam really liked this gradual increase as they moved inwards towards the barbarians and he almost wanted to thank them for spreading too thin over the territory.

    This is like dungeon farming in a videogame for him.

    He would have time for them to move towards him in which he could brutally kill their friends and make sure that image imprinted in their minds while they are fighting and then killing them in the same way before their next set of friends all the while increasing the usage of his subordinates little by little.

    He is kind of enjoying it as a smile crept on his face when he engaged with the next set of barbarians.

 Chapter 899: Kidnap

    As time passed, the battle became intense as the numbers increased on both sides.

    Whenever there was a suspicion that his side would be at a disadvantage, Sam directly let another beast out.

    He managed to just gradually chip down the barbarian forces until they lost at least fifteen people. There are around fifty of them outside the city in this carpet bombing and now the rest of the ones other than the ones they killed almost gathered up.

    Sam also brought out all his subordinates as he went on a full battle mode.

    The dragon hawk tribe members are one of the groups that are trained by him since the start. He put them through hell many times that it is nothing short of dying multiple times.

    That resulted in something good. They never met their match in a fight. All the suffering they went through before they met Sam and after he put them, they are really good at team fighting.

    They are the ones that maintained a cultivation speed simr to his, even though they don¡¯t have the same level as talent, they pushed through.

    And finally after all these years, they finally had their proper match. They are fighting with the barbarians to their heart¡¯s content.

    They are like beasts that sent chills to the savages of the barbarians.

    And as the difficulty increased, Sam started letting one beast after another out and then the shadows, It is aplete nasty dog fight between both sides.

    He used necromancy, poison, his ws, staff, swords, spears. His whole body is soaked in blood.

    As the fight got too much, around fifteen barbarians started retreating.

    Sam didn¡¯t pursue them instantly though, because ten of his men are injured severely and five of them are critically injured.

    He started treating them immediately.

    It took around fifteen minutes to get them back out of the critical state and the rest of the team members started giving them pills to get them back to recovery.

    Sam let them return to their new base camp which is also hidden and started the pursuit on his hover board.

    The barbarians that escaped are all injured and they escaped in different directions. Out of them only a three of them moved towards the city and even among them one got ate start.

    And he happened to be someone Sam has already seen before.

    He is Druv, that one cocky guy that challenged him and needed some saving from his big brother.

    At that time, he didn¡¯t think about kidnapping him, because the rest of the K tribe already closed the distance, but this time, he is not going to let him go that easily.

    He is an important member of the tribe, so he would be great for hostage exchange.

    Sam had a very new understanding of the K tribe, they are some crazy assholes that is what he understood from this carpet bombing incident.

    If there was any sane man in the ce of that tribe head, they would have already made a deal and Sam would have left the realm after taking some necessary lives and also his friend.

    They are just making it worse for themselves.

    As for why he immediately didn¡¯t start the pursuit, because saving his men came before taking a hostage. If the fifteen didn¡¯t retreat he would have used some trump card to finish the fight quicker and stop the fight.

    As Sam zoomed on full speed, he finally saw the traces of Druv escaping. He could smell the blood with his Raiju and Vampire bloodlines.

    And when the city gate came into clear view, he finally saw Druv limping over slowly in exhaustion, the rest of them seems to have already gone to the city.

    This guy is the only one that is still in vicinity.

    As Sam looked forward with his eye technique he saw that the young head is running from the city gates towards his brother.

    A smirk appeared on Sam¡¯s face as he zoomed towards Druv, his aura raging like crazy as he jumped off the board and storing it away beforending right behind the injured barbarian.

    Druv started dragging his feet as he ran towards his brother while screaming.

    "Dhar, help me. Save me. Please, save me. He ising."

    Sam didn¡¯t attack him or capture him. He just walked casually with a staff in his hand as if he is taking a stroll.

    Dhar was extremely worried, the soldiers that arrived are all being healed inside at the moment. He got gist of what happened.

    The battle is a total loss to the barbarians.

    They lost almost half of their forces, even though the strongest are all there for now, this is a devastating loss.

    Now that he saw Sam swaggering around with that bloodsoaked body as if he is taking a walk in his garden behind his brother, he is extremely scared.

    He is a middle stage Astral ne Initiation cultivator, his aura raged as he used all his power to reach his brother, but Sam is still closer.

    Sam held the staff at one end with a single hand as he swung it towards Dhruv.

    He is using repel style this time and as the staffnded on his back, he was thrown forward like a cannon ball and he rolled on the ground before crashing.

    Now Dhar and Sam are almost at a same distance from Dhruv and Sam finally increased his speed.

    His body started turned Dark Gray as he used Spatial elemental partial fusion. He looked like a graphite statue as he ran forward.

    His speed is unbelievably fast but that is not what confused Dhar who is trying to beat that speed to reach his brother.

    It is the perception that this spatial element giving him.

    It is almost like Sam is not moving at all which is messing with his instincts. But it didn¡¯t stay for long,

    Because he noticed that Sam is maintaining the same distance as him with Dhruv, instead of moving fast or slow, he is just making sure that their distance remained same. He is obviously provoking him.

    Dhar has a bad feeling about the situation and he threw something into the air. It seems to be the signal for the rest of hispanions in the city.

    Sam just smiled and still maintained the same distance, but right when they are around ten feet away from each other, Sam lunged forward with his staff as he swung it towards Dhruv with void style.

    Dhar also lunged and jumped in between the staff and his brother with one arm blocking him and the other arm supporting him from falling on his brother.

    The staffnded on the arm. The spatial element and the void style are such a strangebination and Sam doesn¡¯t use this lightly at all.

    Because just the partial elemental fusion requires him to expend as much energy as the light elementalplete fusion.

    But this is the special case.

    The staffnded on the arm of Dhar and at the point of contact a spatial crack appeared.

    The Void style is extremelypatible with the spatial element, the hit creates the spatial crack and the explosion that urs in the next instant creates a suction turbulence which started sucking the flesh off of Dhar¡¯s arm.

    Dhar who was notpletely prepared for the hit took the full brunt of it. He has to channel all his energy to shield his flesh and rolled away from the spatial crack to the side while holding his brother¡¯s hands.

    He looked at the flesh that was nastily ripped off on his body and groaned in pain.

    Sam continued with the attack and the staff was aimed at the head of Dhruv this time. Directly being hit on the head would kill him easily and not a single piece of that head including the brain juice wouldn¡¯t be left to salvage for the funeral. Everything will be lost in turbulent space.

    Dhar took out his spear and held it up against the staff.

    Both shed and the spear was destroyed, but Dhar took the brunt of the force. Sam didn¡¯t pursue the attack anymore.

    He stabbed the staff into the ground and looked at Dhar right in the eyes and said.

    "You kidnapped my friend, when there was no enmity between us. You kidnapped him when I was not here.

    I am standing right in front of you, taking your brother away right from your hands and you or your entire tribe cannot stop me.

    Tomorrow you will being with a bunch of your peers from the tribe to talk about the deal of course the conditions would change, otherwise, by tomorrow night I will be visiting Zhaka tribe, Bahu tribe and Anki tribe along with your brother.

    I would like to see if they are interested in your K tribe and your territory."

    "Leave my brother alone. I promise we would discuss tomorrow. He has nothing to do with this"

    Dhar said painfully groaning.

    "The moment you wanted to be soldiers of Hel, you must have been prepared for this. Because in the war between two major parties, the ones that suffer the most are always soldiers."

 Chapter 900: Conditions

    Sam looked at the iing barbarians and took out the harbinger before slowly taking off.

    This time, no one tried to stop him, even though Dhar didn¡¯t say anything.

    Because Dhruv who is hanging on Sam¡¯s shoulder is clearly visible.

    They stopped in their tracks feeling a bit anxious. Dhar gritted his teeth and stood up with his one arm broken and the other one bleeding like crazy, he walked into the city in a gloomy mood.

    Nobody knows what he is thinking, but everyone knows that Dhar and Dhruv are close. Someone kidnapping his brother right in front of him must have been devastating.

    Meanwhile, Dhar didn¡¯t even go for the healing, he went straight to Watt to talk to him. This came as a surprise to everyone, but some of them are paranoid, they thought he might do something to Watt out of spite since his younger brother is taken away now.

    Dhar casually removed Watt¡¯s shackles and sat in front of him. Watt didn¡¯t bother to escape or even try to escape, he just stretched his body really well and sat down in front of Dhar.

    "My brother was taken away by your friend."

    "It is expected. He does that sometimes."

    "I want to kill your friend now."

    "That is nothing new, you can try."

    "Are you not angry?"

    "Yes, but is there anything I can do? If it was the previous me, I would have raged and showed my dissatisfaction which increases my chances of getting killed, but now I want to live a long and happy life."

    "Do you know why I released your shackles?"

    "Not really, maybe you are confident that I won¡¯t be able to escape."

    "No, when he took Dhruv away, I thought. My heart would break if he were treated the same you were treated here. Now only I understood how frustrated and annoyed you must have felt when I imagined my brother in your ce."

    "Don¡¯t say these things to your captive, never. Because you would never know what kind of sick maniptive psychos they can be.

    If Sam was in my ce, then you just put your life in a box and gave him the key."

    "It doesn¡¯t matter. Today is thest day of your imprisonment. I will be taking you away at dawn tomorrow. You are going to be free."

    With that Dhar left and Wattid on the floor on his back as he let his sore back muscles rx a bit and slowly recovered his energy back.

    Meanwhile,the news about Watt¡¯s release spread all over the k tribe, but nobody among his peers dared toin about that. But that didn¡¯t apply to the elders. They couldn¡¯t even wait until he was healed and already started trying to persuade him otherwise and some even demanding exnations.

    Dhar didn¡¯t even speak for a single second. He just stayed there calmly and silently without even acknowledging their presence, after he was healed he left to his residence within the estate and there he met his father.

    "Are you sure you want to give him away? There is no way what he might do to our tribe if we don¡¯t have that hostage." His father asked him.

    Dhar stopped in his tracks and asked.

    "Why is that Warton barbarian tribe annihted? In fact, why did we even go after Watt? Why did we provoke his friend? What do we have to gain from this? We lost more than forty men and you yourself know what he might do to us.

    Dhruv wouldn¡¯t be able to endure half of the tortures we put Watt through. Even imagining it making me breath harder.

    Why are we doing this?"

    "Because Goddess asked us to?"

    "If we did as Goddess asked, then why are so many of our men died like that? Why did she not save them from the plights caused by the duty we did for her?"

    "You cannot question the Goddess like that?"

    "Of course, I cannot. I am mere soldier. I am only good for fighting and dying for her. Not for asking exnations. I don¡¯t care if you did it for goddess or the devil, tomorrow I am taking Watt and I will bring my brother back, no matter what conditions he ced.

    Otherwise, not only me our entire tribe will be annihted just like how we killed the Warton tribe."

    "What do you mean?"

    "Since we retaliated in front of his generous offer he is going to meet some other major barbarians tomorrow to offer alliance. So, if we failed tomorrow because of your schemes you can thank youself and your goddess for the destruction of our tribe."

    With that the discussion was over and Dhar went away.

    He called for some of his peers who are close to him and formed the team. Before dawn they all prepared to move out and they took Watt with him, even his father didn¡¯t stop him.

    Soon they reached the meeting spot and there Sam is waiting alone with Dhruv. Both of them sitting beside a campfire as Sam roasted something over it.

    Even when he saw them, he didn¡¯t stop his actions, he just lefte forward. After they got close, Dhar stopped the rest of his peers at the rear and walked towards the campfire with Watt and sat on a log opposite of Sam and Dhruv.

    Dhruv is feeling anxious as he looked at Sam¡¯s nonchnce.

    Sam looked at Watt and said.

    "You don¡¯t look so bad. They treated you well."

    "It¡¯s the wine and yesterday, I finally got the chance to properly recover. As per the treatment you can guess. It is not the worst, but it didn¡¯t tickle."

    Sam just chuckled in reply and looked at Dhar before saying.

    "Send him here and I will send him there. At the same time."

    Both of nodded and pushed their hostages forward at the same time.

    Sam ced his arm over Watt and used the observation skill to see any anomalies on his body or possessions.

    There is nothing fishy so he finally rxed.

    Watt suddenly remembered something and asked.

    "Where are my board and the coat?"

    Dhruv hurriedly took out things from his spatial ring and gave them to Watt.

    It seems like they ended up in the youngest son¡¯s hands.

    "Can we stop the war now?"

    Dhar asked after the exchange.

    "No, not really. You seemed to have forgotten the reasons for the start of this war are not just one. There is another reason, Warton tribe¡¯s annihtion.

    ording to the barbarianws, you cannot kill them directly. Why did your members kill them just for the slightest resistance? And why did they went so far as killing the infants too? I not only need answers, I also need the men who killed, the one who ordered and the extras who supported. If you can give them to me and I let my friend and his soon-to-be wife kill them, then I would leave you guys alone."

    "That is not possible."

    Before Dhar could even say something, one of his peers rejected, when everyone looked at him, he didn¡¯t dare to make eye contact. He is acting dodgy.

    Sam took out one of the cylindrical bombs he dropped on the city and said.

    "This is the thing I dropped on your city the other day. I dropped around a fifty of these."

    He stored that away and took something else. It ispletely simr to the one before, but the size differed.

    Sam aligned the discs and injected his energy before throwing it away.

    "And this is the one ten times bigger than that one."

    The bombnded a few hundred meters away and exploded.

    *BOOM*

    Arge explosion and when the dust settled, there is arge spatial tear that is sucking the dust, rocks and all the debris that was caused by the explosion as the crack slowly mended.

    "I have made a hundred of those."

    Sam said causally and took out an even bigger one. It is at least twenty-five times bigger than the first one.

    "I have a fifty of these."

    Then he walked to the nearby empty space and waved his hand.

    Arge bomb fell with a thud.

    "And a ten of these."

    He stored it away and walked back to the campfire and said casually.

    "Actually, I wanted to kill your whole tribe. That is why prepared them. Not even a single piece of flesh would be left after I use them properly. But Wembley didn¡¯t let me.

    She doesn¡¯t want the innocent children and ordinary citizens to suffer because of some of your tribe member¡¯s stupid actions.

    That is provided that the stupid actions are not ordered by your tribe head.

    So, find out what happened and bring them here by tomorrow, same time. Or else, I will meet the other tribes and show them my explosives and see if they would dig information regarding this and tell me why you guys killed her tribe.

    And I would like your family heirloom brought to me as well."

    With that the meeting is over, Sam and Watt took off on their hover boards and zoomed away.

 Chapter 901: Discussion

    Dhar went back to the estate and met with his father making sure that his brother is okay.

    He exined what is Sam going to do if they don¡¯t agree with the deal first and thenter exined the deal.

    The tribe head could only pull his hair in frustration.

    He couldn¡¯t disobey the goddess¡¯ will.

    He is not as detached to the goddess and their faith as his son and he knew that convincing the rest of the tribe to just ignore the goddess¡¯s instructions and go against them would be extremely hard.

    And even though he was not involved in the massacre of the Warton tribe, it is still one of their own that did that, so if they just gave them away, they would lose the trust of the tribe members.

    "Father, if he really uses all his weapons on us, not even an infant will live to see another day, don¡¯t you dare let your stupid faith and honor kill our tribe members. Every decision you will make would be catastrophically dangerous.

    If you don¡¯t do anything, then I would call for the tribe headpetition and I would fight you to death. I may not be as strong as you, but I would see if you will follow the rules and kill me if I didn¡¯t give up to follow the supposed rules and traditions created by your faith and people."

    The tribe felt lost. He didn¡¯t know how to reply to his son. He thought for a moment and said.

    "But the Goddess..."

    "I don¡¯t care what your Goddess said or did. She didn¡¯t save the forty-plus astral ne cultivators that died.

    As for the resources and other stuff she gave us, half of our Astral ne cultivators are being sent to her army and it is an exchange that is in fact unfair to us.

    I was never a big fan of her and I only believed in faith because I believed in you, father. But if the faith leads us to our doom, then, please. I don¡¯t want that.

    Tomorrow we are going ording to our n."

    "Give me one chance. I am sure the Goddess will help us with this."

    "I don¡¯t care what you do. Tell me what you decide before midnight and I will decide on how to proceed based on your decision. I am investigating who ordered and why the Warton tribe was destroyed."

    With that he left the room.

    But the only problem is that both of them didn¡¯t act as discreet as they wanted to be.

    At least not for the most part as they didn¡¯t notice the guard that stood at the entrance in the middle of their discussion waiting for their audience.

    So, when Dhar opened the door, he was a bit surprised.

    "Second Elder wants an audience with the tribe head."

    "Go in."

    Dhar then left.

    The guard went in and reported the same before leaving.

    After getting out of that residence the guard ran towards the second elder and gave an ount of what he overheard.

    To his dismay he didn¡¯t hear the whole conversation and missed the part what Sam is going to do exactly and only heard from the part of catastrophe and told him everything.

    The second elder has a nervous expression on his face as he thought of what might happen if Dhar¡¯s n goes through.

    He immediately went to meet the Tribe head and after discussing something with him, he went back to his own residence and called for some elders and discussed something else.

    Meanwhile, the tribe head is feeling more and moreplicated and he went to the inner temple.

    He performed a ritual to call the Goddess.

    The statue of Hel glowed brightly and she spoke.

    "What is it?"

    "Goddess Hel, we failed to keep Watt with us and in process we lost forty of our Astral ne cultivators, He seems to possess some kind of weapon and he is threatening us with it. The tribe¡¯s existence is at stake. I hope you can guide us and let us cross this peril."

    "I told you to kill him and you areing back to me crying. What the hell am I keeping you all for?"

    Her words made him feel shocked.

    "Try to find a way to kill him. Lie, cheat, use tricks, I don¡¯t care what you do kill him. If he calls for the truce, act as you want it to and kill him there. Do I have to teach you everything?"

    "But Goddess, that is not right. It is against our barbarian values."

    "What are your values for? Did they give you the resources I gave you? Can they be used for your breakthroughs? Do what I say and you can try and find another god for your blessings."

    With that she left.

    The tribe head doesn¡¯t know how to react. All this while they never asked the Goddess for anything. It was always her giving generously and them taking it.

    At least that is what she made them believe. They never knew what is happening to the flocks of soldiers they are giving her. He thought that they were loved by the goddess and cared for by her.

    This is news to them. They were never in a situation where the goddess asked them to do some impossible task. It was always just the soldiers which they send with love. This is the first time they were even ordered to do something and when that brought them problems the goddess behavedpletely differently.

    In fact, it couldn¡¯t be said that she is different. She was always aloof. It is just that when she was while giving them blessings and resources, they felt that she is generous, now that she was aloof when they were dying, he felt like she is cold and unfeeling towards them.

    He came out of the temple in a gloomy mood and he was called for another meeting by the elders. The second elder is the one leading the meeting. When he went there, there are severe protests from the rest of the elders about handing over the people that killed the Warton tribe.

    From what they said, Dhar is currently ¡¯handling¡¯ the people who massacred that tribe and is forcing them to give them a proper exnation.

    There is a threat of division. The tribe head who is already having a lot on his te couldn¡¯t take it anymore and called Dhar.

    They had a huge argument and finally, there was a truce.

    "Dhar, you will be challenging Sam to a duel tomorrow. If he wants the people who killed the Warton tribe, he has to defeat you, and then we will hand them over. Otherwise, he can just take the family heirloom and leave.

    This is the deal and we are not going to back off anymore."

    "But why should heprmise? He has the leverage not us."

    "We heard you are close with that Captive. You will be responsible for handling it."

    "I am not doing it."

    "You are doing it and there is no use in arguing about it anymore."

    With that the meeting was over. Dhar doesn¡¯t know what the elders used to convince his father, but he knew he has limited power. If he is really too stubborn they might really do what they threatened to do.

    So the next morning they moved.

    Their family heirloom is a blood iron spear.

    Dhar and four of his peers took the spear and went to the meeting spot.

    Sam is there along with Wat, Wembley, her subordinate old man and finally one of his own subordinates.

    Dhar didn¡¯t even wait for a second before giving the spear directly to Sam.

    "This is the family heirloom."

    Sam examined and admired the craftsmanship for a while before asking.

    "I don¡¯t see the second condition of the deal."

    "I am sorry. I cannot just give up my tribe members."

    "It would be better than giving up on your whole tribe don¡¯t you think?"

    "I know we are the ones who started this and we are the ones that were excessive, but it is not a barbarian way to give up on our tribe members. I would like to propose a condition.

    We can have a duel. The barbarian way. No one else interrupts.

    If you win, you would get them, if you lose you have to leave the realm and nevere back. This is a fair deal. I hope you would agree."

    "Are you sure you want to fight me? Yesterday you didn¡¯t do so well."

    "It wouldn¡¯t be like yesterday. In a duel, I don¡¯t have to hold back. Yesterday, I was so caught up in saving my brother."

    "I hope so, otherwise I would be disappointed. So, when do we start?"

    Sam asked as he stored the spear away and took out his staff.

    "Right now."

    As Sam and Dhar got ready for the duel, something else is happening in the city.

    The second elder is currently talking to his guard.

    "They wille a few minutester after you go there. They will be keeping a good distance, you are the one responsible for not only signaling them but also give arge signal that could let us know what happened there.

    We have to proceed ording to the result of that duel.

    And no matter what result it is, this would be the day, I will reign supreme."

 Chapter 902: Battle

    Sam and Dhar are staring at each other.

    Both of them are not ready to make a move first. The tension is building up the auras are shing as they released their bloodlust.

    It is almost like there are two hungry bloodthirsty beasts who are about to start binge eating in the forest. The rest of the people took a step backward involuntarily. They couldn¡¯t take the pressure from them.

    The barbarians are nervous beyond measure. They never saw Dhar being this tense. Not even once. As for Sam¡¯s side, they are rxed. Everyone except Wembley.

    She has a very different understanding of Sam. Everyone who got to know Sam first came to know about his strength. His strength as a fighter, then they knew of his intelligence. But this time, the order was reversed. She saw Sam¡¯s presence of mind, his intelligence in different fields. His calm state of my mind.

    But she never knew of his battle prowess but she knew of Dhar.

    Dhar is a warrior renowned for his battles and victories all over the. He is the strongest barbarian of the era and he would stay as such. That is the word amongst all the tribes.

    She is clearly nervous for him. Watt put his arm around her so that she could calm down.

    As the tensions grew, Dhar is the one who made the first move, with a single kick to the ground heunched himself like a missile and in the blink of an eye he crossed half the distance. This is the same technique he used against his brother.

    Sam stood there as he spun his staff with his fingers and waited for the attack and when the punch came straight to his face, he swung his staff towards the fist to block the attack.

    He didn¡¯t use his full strength, he wants an urate gauge of Dhar¡¯s strength and he was not disappointed. When the hit was connected, Sam skid back because of the force and staff is vibrating leaving a small numbing sensation in his hand.

    The strength that was special to the barbarians. Sam is seeing it for the first time.

    And this also confirmed another suspicion of his. He knew for a fact that yesterday if not for the presence of injured Dhruv, he wouldn¡¯t have had such an easy time.

    The situation would have beenpletely different.

    Sam could feel his blood boiling.

    He might encounter the same challenge he faced with Sanjay back in the days. This might be a bigger challenge than that.

    Sam stabbed the staff into the ground and left it standing right there as he jumped towards Dhar.

    They started exchanging punches with pure physical strength.

    Dhar has more raw strength, but Sam has precision.

    While Dhar¡¯s punches arending on Sam here and there, Sam¡¯s every punch isnding on the face, jaw or the chin.

    This is almost like a boxing match.

    Soon, Dhar realized his mistake. He mightnd punches, but they are not enough for him to stop Sam and his body can take that.

    But his chin wouldn¡¯t be able to take the total onught.

    So, he changed, he kicked the ground and moved backwards as he kicked Sam in torso with another leg.

    He took out his spear andunched himself at Sam again. Sam didn¡¯t take his own weapon. He caught the staff of the spear and pulled Dhar towards him and kicked him in the shoulder.

    Sam¡¯s arms turned metallic after that, as he defended against the spear attacks with your hands. He is trying to get near Dhar to hit him, but the spear pulling trick wouldn¡¯t work again.

    But he didn¡¯t stop trying, his metallic arms turned rocky and he manipted the gravity, he didn¡¯t increase it, he decreased it and Dhar who was advancing forward stepped too hard and the reaction made him jump too high.

    Sam jumped into the air and his rocky leg kicked Dhar right in the face, but this time he didn¡¯t escape scot-free.

    Dhar managed to leave a graze on Sam¡¯s abdomen, when the coat pped as he was jumping.

    The battle started gaining momentum. After a few more hits, Dhar managed to create a perfect defense and is not taking any more hits, Sam had to change from bare handed fighting to a dagger as he managed to leave a graze on his shoulder.

    His body was surrounded with ck smoke as he became shadow and started shing Dhar here and there.

    He didn¡¯t aim for the critical point and only cared about leaving as many scars as he can.

    He made sure that not a single hit missed and the wounds kept on bleeding.

    As for why he is not hitting any vitals, it is not because he didn¡¯t want to, but Dhar is guarding them closely.

    His battle instincts are surreal, he is clearly unable to catch Sam, but he is still able to sense his iing attacks and Sam couldn¡¯t keep this advantage for a long time.

    Dhar started taking Kamikaze attacks. Whenever Sam left a sh on his body, he is swing his arm of the spear to that position to get a hold of Sam.

    And finally Sam took a hit and the hit shook his liver as he crashed into the ground. He was surprised and when he saw Dhar his surprise turned into shock and shock turned into excitement.

    Dhar¡¯s muscles are currently tightening and faint vapors could be seen emitting from his body.

    "It is indeed my lucky day."

    Sam stood up and held the staff while he is still in the ground. His fire and earth elemental energy passed through it as he looked at Dhar who is adjusting with the new transformation as he heard Wembley exining the state to Watt.

    "The true heir of K tribe always has this. This is the Barbarian Berserker state. The true reminder and quality of the demonic nature within them. No enemy ever witnessed this lived to tell the tale."

    She tightly clutched Watt¡¯s arm in tension.

    Watt and Sam exchanged eye contact as both of them had a smirk on their faces.

    "I guess we are changing the history this time then." Watt said to her with a reassuring smile.

    Sam¡¯s arm bulged a bit as he pulled the staff out with one arm and along with the staff, arge piece of rock was stuck to it at the extreme end and Sam held the staff like it is a big hammer and smashed that rock on the head of Dhar who is about to move.

    The rock cracked and arge amount ofva which is created from molten rock fell all over Dhar.

    His hair burned and he became bald.

    But his body didn¡¯t suffer at all.

    His berserker mode gave him a perfect defense.

    Sam also didn¡¯t expect much from this attack. Thisva is not that hot, the main purpose is to serve as a disturbance for the other party, it seems like that is also not possible.

    His body started turning golden and he activated partial light elemental fusion.

    Both of them looked at dead in the eyes as they moved.

    The rest of the spectators couldn¡¯t even catch what is happening with their eyes. The spear and the staff collided and the spiritual energy waves caused the surrounding environment to take the brunt.

    The rocks are getting crushed, the earth is crashing in several ces, the trees are being put through torture as they are split from the top to the roots.

    Sam¡¯s subordinate guarded Watt and Wembley from feeling the shockwaves.

    The battle went on and on and soon the battle spirits are being formed.

    Dhar¡¯s was like arge muscr ape and Sam¡¯s was his own image from the previous life.

    They are faint but they could see them.

    Soon, both parties connected some deadly hits that even Sam¡¯s feather coat couldn¡¯t protect him properly.

    Both of them spat out blood as they were pushed back.

    Sam spat once again and looked at Dhar with an excitement that was never seen before.

    "This is the best fight I had in a decade. I respect you."

    "This is the best fight I had in this life. I admire you."

    "But this needs to end."

    Sam said as his body turned into dark grey. He started using partial Spatial element.

    Right now this form is his best battle state against a direct opponent.

    Sam spun the shaft and blinked from the spot as he used the void style.

    He cannot let this drag on anymore and this is the attack that would definitely hurt the other party even with that berserker state.

    Dhar started channeling his energy to his heart and the blood pumped faster. His body is emitting spiritual energy fumes.

    He held his spear tightly as he looked at Sam. Right now both of them forgot all about the pact and the deal, all they have in mind is to defeat the other party.

    Sam blinked and reappeared behind Dhar and swung his staff which the other party barely managed to defend with the spear.

    The spear was different from the previous one and it wasn¡¯t destroyed by the spatial crack.

    But Dhar is not happy. He noticed that the strength difference is a bit too much for him now with Sam in his forms, his defense wouldn¡¯t be enough, he wouldn¡¯t be able to take too many of these blows.

 Chapter 903: Betrayal

    Sam and Dhar are shing like crazy.

    With that partial Space elemental fusion, Sam is almost unstoppable. Dhar clearly understood that he underestimated Sam.

    If he was any stronger and has more energy, he might have been able to defend and even managed to counter some attacks, but he took so many hits and too much damage and it is piling up more and more.

    It wouldn¡¯t be easy for him to proceed any further than this.

    But he cannot give up now. So, he started preparing for onest solid hit.

    His muscles tightened even more and his body is emitting even more vapors as he held his spear tightly.

    Sam also prepared for a proper hit as he prepared to use both void style and ripple stylebined.

    It is a new type of attack, but something that definitely works wonders.

    Sam jumped high and was about tond the hit on Dhar¡¯s body, he felt his instincts screaming trouble.

    Sam stopped his attack forcefully and moved towards Watt and Wembley as he tackled them to the ground. A bunch of spears flew through the wind as they came for them.

    The subordinate managed to defend himself but a spear lodged itself into Sam¡¯s leg even though he managed to defend Watt and Wembley.

    The attacks are too sudden even for him. He didn¡¯t detect any presence nearby. Even the shadow mice that are hiding nearby didn¡¯t give any signal. This ispletely unexpected.

    Dhar who was also in middle of attack, stopped himself forcefully and looked at the whole situation in shock.

    He was about to help Sam up whentter looked at him coldly and he stopped in his tracks.

    He looked around for the sneak attacker and he could see a barbarian running away.

    "Sam, I have nothing to do with it, I swear. This was done by somebody to pit us against each other."

    Sam didn¡¯t listen to a single thing. He is feeling extremely painful as he removed the spear from his leg.

    He stood up and started healing himself. But his energy levels are too low, so he took some heavenly wine out of which barely a jar full of it was left.

    He took a huge swig so that his wound would recover. He then started using his eye technique to observe the surroundings and he looked at Dhar with intense disgust.

    He then raised his hand and arge golden orb flew into the air and exploded creating arge golden sh.

    The subordinates who are hiding a bit away from the camp all starteding as Sam prepared for the battle.

    Within a few seconds a bunch of barbarians already came out and started surrounding Sam and hispanions.

    Sam didn¡¯t expect something like this.to happen.

    He kept hearing about the stupid barbarian pride so much that he couldn¡¯t even rest. And here they are proving that they are nothing better than any other race in this world. Everyone is same. They are prideful and honorable until their lives depended on it.

    Dhar looked at the man who led these barbarians out.

    "Third Elder. What are you doing here? Who told you toe here?"

    Third Elder looked at Dhar calmly and said.

    "It is the order of our new tribe head."

    "New tribe head."

    "Our second elder won the battle of the tribe head and won. He is the new tribe head of the K tribe and it is his orders that we sneak attack Sam and kill him."

    "We made a pact."

    "I am only following orders."

    "Hahahahaha..."

    Sam startedughing out loud as if hepletely lost it.

    "What a show you are putting here."

    "Sam, it is no..." Dhar was about to speak, but he wasn¡¯t able to finish as Sam beat him to it.

    "I don¡¯t give a fuck if it is your decision or not. If you are involved in this or not. Do you think I would believe a word you say?

    If you don¡¯t know how to hold them up, don¡¯t use words like honor and pride so much.

    Sam waved his hand and all his beasts came out. Not just Yanwu and rest, he also called for all Astral ne beasts he caught and even the extra Raiju that fought with the head of the Starbow family.

    "If you want to a full out war. You could have said so."

    With that all beasts started attacking with Sam.

    Sam¡¯s shadows came out and surrounded Watt and Wembley. He managed to catch the spears mid-air without effecting them. But they are not near enough for him to go and throw them into the divine dimension and it would be impossible for him to divert his attention to them now.

    Because this third elder or whatever that guy¡¯s name is, is a peak stage Initiation of the Astral ne.

    If Sam diverts his attention for a single second, he might die.

    The battle started and Sam didn¡¯t have anything over them, but the Raiju at the Intial stage Pre-transcendent stage of Astral ne is enough to stop the third elder in tracks.

    There is no contest at all and this caused the barbarians to already meet a dead end.

    Sam is currently focused on the barbarians who are going after Watt and Wembley for some reason. They are so determined to kill them first.

    It seems like the rest of the force of the K tribe has alle.

    When the third elder is in pickle another man who is actually a Pre-transcendent Initial stage came out and started helping him.

    The barbarians are really good, even though Raiju has a massive advantage over them, they still managed to defend themselves and keep Raiju upied.

    Sam is waiting for his subordinates toe.

    They are a bit far away and this attack has been too sudden, it would take at least two minutes for them to join.

    Seeing that the rest of the barbarians are going after Watt and Wembley too much, Sam couldn¡¯t help it. As soon as he saw a glimpse of his subordinates, he informed Sky to take them both away.

    While Sky is moving away, Sam stood in the way on harbinger and held his own against them while his subordinates joined him one by one.

    The battle is on full swing and Sam is sure that he is going to win.

    Dhar who saw Sam ughtering all the barbarians that came his way even in that weakened state, couldn¡¯t help but join in.

    He knew that talking is useless at the moment. No matter how he put it, barbarians betrayed the deal.B But he cannot let his kin get ughtered.

    So, when Sam and Dhar got busy again, the third elder who noticed Watt and Wembley are escaping cursed under his breath and took out a spear.

    His cut his palm and let it bleed over the spear as he made handsigns and a fragment of his soul was attached to the spear before he threw it towards Sky.

    The spear is fast. It is so fast that it can almost match up Sam¡¯s harbinger at his current level which unfortunately Sky couldn¡¯t beat.

    But Sky is not only counting on the speed but also his movement, but that is also not working, the spear is homing on them.

    The Raiju elder managed to kill the extra elder that helped third elder in this gap and went after the third elder.

    Sam who noticed the spear, felt anxious.

    "Get the fuck out of my way."

    Sam kicked Dhar out and took off on harbinger at full speed and he even used Spatial blinks in the middle to catch up to them fast enough.

    But it seems like the spear has a mind on his own and it is speeding up.

    It soon caught up with them, Sam didn¡¯t have a choice as he grit his teeth and took out the shadow sword.

    He used shadow elemental fusion and swung the sword. It sent a dark sword ray out and hit the spear right when it was about to hit Watt.

    The force was enough to divert the spear, but it brushed past Watt and that caused him to receive enough damage to not only knock him out of Sky¡¯s back but also bleed crazily.

    "NOOO..... WAAAAATTT.."

    Wembley cried on the top of her lungs as she saw Watt falling off. Sky dove down and caught Watt before he hit the ground and by now, Sam also reached them.

    The Raiju elder smashed his paw with lightning on the third elder and caught him by the mouth in his weakened state as he dragged him towards Sam.

    "Stop it, every barbarian stop." Dhar yelled themand as he ran towards Sam and the rest.

    He knew that things turned from bad to worse. Ambushing Sam like this is really a stupid thing, but deliberately trying to kill his friend in front of him after breaking a pact, they are in for the trouble. If he didn¡¯t do something to save the tribe, the K tribe might be extinct.

 Chapter 904: Ultimatum

    Sam looked at Watt who is unconscious on the ground. He knelt on the ground and started healing him. He took out the heavenly wine gourd and started making him drink.

    He is panicking like crazy.

    The attack was lethal, it would have definitely killed him if Sam didn¡¯t divert it in thest second.

    He is trying his best to wake him up.

    Sam started tearing up while healing him as he muttered.

    "Watt, don¡¯t die on me now. You said you wanted to live. You said you were in love. You said you waned to live with her forever. Please don¡¯t die on me now. I will not let it go."

    He muttered like a little kid as he tried his best to heal. There is too much blood loss, so Sam first finished the wound up and elerated the blood generation.

    The heart is already pumping the blood slowly. He has to make sure that it doesn¡¯t stop.

    He didn¡¯t care about the energy or the heavenly wine. He only focused on Watt¡¯s health.

    And when the heart and the rest of the bodily functions reached a safe level, Sam finally heaved a sigh of relief.

    He felt like a mountain was lifted off of his shoulder.

    He looked at the beasts and the subordinates before sending Watt in to the divine dimension so that he could rest and recover there.

    He gave instructions. Except for Sky the rest of the beasts areing with him.

    "Sky, you are staying with the rest of the subordinates,. Defend her at all costs. She must stay alive."

    They nodded and followed their orders immediately. When Wembly was about to reject him, Sam cut her off with just a nce. His eyes are burning with fury even though he is calm, she knew that it is better for her to shut up, but she is too concerned about to Watt to do that.

    "Wembley, nothing is going to happen to Watt. Just stay with them for now. I will being back with Watt."

    "Where is Watt?"

    "He is in a dimensional space recovering. You don¡¯t have to worry about him for now. He ispletely alright. He would be out here in a few minutes. But meanwhile, I have to do something."

    Sam said as he gulped thest of the heavenly wine. He is in a long and tough battle and he ispletely battered.

    He has many wounds bleeding and energy is exhausted with the healing process. This is the first time that he is so d Watt¡¯s cultivation is not higher than his.

    If they were of same cultivation, it would have been extremely hard to heal him with the wounds.

    Sam kept the gourd away and took some pills and potions as he gulped them down like water and food.

    This is the first time he used any form of medicine this much.

    Dhar and the rest of the barbarians could sense that the atmosphere is changing into something weird.

    Dhar walked towards Sam nervously and wanted to speak, but Sam looked him dead in the eyes and said in a calm. Cold and low voice.

    "We had a deal. We had a fucking deal.

    Not only did you guys break it. You even want to kill my friend.

    Barbarian honor my ass.

    It seems like I have gone soft."

    Sam finished his words as he levitated. This is the same technique Dia uses to levitate temporarily but when it was used with the space element, he can levitate and move at a considerable speed for a long time.

    Sam held the shadow sword in his one hand and took out the thunder prison which is in the short cage form in to another.

    He injected his energy into the thunder prison and it started changing its form.

    The metallic structure enveloped his arm and by the time it was done it looked like a robot arm. He recently learned that there are other uses for thunder prison other than just using it as arge trap or a cage and this is one of them. It can also be worked in a smaller size and this is it.

    Dhar is running behind Sam with the rest of the barbarians as he yelled and pleaded him to stop and listen to him. But there was no reaction. It is clear that he is angry.

    Sam reached the city gate and yelled at the top of his lungs.

    "The citizens and the members of the K tribe. My name is Sam and I am the friend of Watt, the person whom your K tribe captured recently.

    From the past few days, I have been at war with your tribe because they captured my friend, after I freed him, we made a pact to end the war. But your tribe head not only broke the pact, he also tried to attack my friend in an attempt to kill him.

    So, I am retaliating now.

    I will give half-an-hour. Anyone who wants to live, if they are not involved in this matter, get out the city now and go into the forest and I assure you, your lives will be safe.

    If you don¡¯t do that now, I will not care if you are a child, an infant, an orphan, a woman, an old man, an innocent or a guilty person, I will ughter you all the same."

    As he spoke he moved towards one of the spatial rends that are still around the city from his previous attack and started mending it with his spatial element and then continued his announcement.

    "A spatial rend near the entrance of your city is repaired, you can use that path toe out. I am once again telling you. I wouldn¡¯t tolerate a single life that stays within the city after thirty minutes. I will kill everyone."

    With that Sam just stayed silent without doing anything.

    Dhar kept on asking for a conversation but nothing happened.

    Meamwhile, the Astral ne cultivators of the K tribe came outside.

    The second elder is in the lead and the rest are following him. The Astral ne cultivators that followed Dhar also moved to that side and there are currently around forty of them standing there.

    "Uncle, where is my father?"

    Dhar asked the second elder.

    "Oh, he is in the temple room healing. He is injured in the earlier battle."

    "What battle? What is all this mess. Are you out of your mind?"

    "Out of my mind? Who is out of their mind? You dare say that to me? What kind of race are we? What kind of tribe are we? And you not only give into some puny human¡¯s conditions and you even dare to handover some of our own to him? I would be out of my mind if I didn¡¯t do something about it."

    "Those people annihted the tribe of innocent for no reason. They deserve whates to them."

    "What innocence are you speaking of? Going against the K tribe¡¯smand is their crime and they should have been punished and they were punished."

    Dhar was shocked and suddenly something stuck him.

    "You are the one who ordered the annihtion, didn¡¯t you?"

    "So, what if I did?"

    "You sick bastard." Dhar yelled at the top of his lungs to everyone¡¯s shock and continued without caring.

    "You would be the death of our tribe."

    "No, I would bring the tribe to new heights."

    The second elder didn¡¯t pay any more attention to Dhar and walked towards Sam.

    Meanwhile, Dhar went into the city to see if he could find his father and evacuate the citizens at the same time.

    But he is one man. All alone. What can he do? He understood how vulnerable he can be at that moment.

    He tried telling the people to get out of the city, but not many replied to his wails kindly. The second elder somehow created an image that he and his father are the traitors of the tribe and it is working wonders.

    Only a few people actually listened to his pleading and moved out of their houses and ran out of the city.

    After some search, he finally found his father who is recovering in the temple. Dhruv is sitting next to him as he tried to ease his pain.

    He has many wounds on his body and from the looks of it the battle seemed to have happened here.

    Dhar carried his father on his back and ran out of the city along with his brother as both of them tried to evacuate the citizens as much as they can.

    Meanwhile, outside the city Sam¡¯s aura is raging.

    "So, you are the one who ordered hit on Watt."

    He asked coldly as he looked down on from the air.

    "Yes."

    "How dare you? How fucking dare you?"

    "I am the leader of the K Barbarian tribe. I can be as daring as I want."

    "Then what would happen, if the K Barbarian tribe doesn¡¯t exist."

    "The only one whose existence is going to be erased is you."

 Chapter 905: Inactive Second Elder

    Sam is surrounded by all the remaining Astral ne cultivators of the K tribe.

    But his attention is on the second elder.

    He is not ready to attack for some reason. Sam activated energy vision, but he could gain little because of that guy¡¯s superior cultivation, but there is a spection in his mind.

    He didn¡¯t wait anymore and made the first move. His body is covered in shadow energy as he channeled it through the shadow sword.

    [Finally, I get a chance to taste some blood. I think you should be this pissed off more often] The sword spirit sent a message to Sam which he ignored tantly and jumped at the nearest barbarian.

    The barbarian who could see Sam clearly became confused when he neared him. The shadow looked like a shadow as if it in intangible and fluid, he doesn¡¯t know where he has to block, but before he couldprehend, the shadow sword sliced on his body leaving arge scar.

    *BOOM*

    A small explosion of spiritual energy due to the void style made the cut bigger as the shadow energy crept into his body and internal organs.

    By the time the energy reactions stopped and the rest could see what happened, they saw the barbarian rolling on the floor twitching as his body slowly gained these ck patterns all over him.

    This is shadow corruption. The same thing happened to Sam years ago when he escaped from the Beast faction to shadow transverse. He only managed to ovee that because of the shadow element within his body.

    But the barbarians don¡¯t have any elements.

    They can only take it all in and submit to the corruption of their own bodies as they experienced the soul-searing pains andbors their body is subjected to.

    Sam finished the first target in one sh and he moved to the next one. He didn¡¯t levitate anymore. He just jumped around like a shadow and shed the barbarians one after the other.

    The numbers are dwindling and the second elder is still not doing anything about it. The Barbarians are dying like flies.

    Many people who escaped the city because of Dhar¡¯s reminder saw this and their mouths went dry. Their K tribe has always been strong and tyrannical.

    There is no such thing as rival for them in the barbarian realm. Even though there are some equallyrge tribe, the K tribe stood out among thempletely crushing the rest.

    This is the first time they are watching the barbarian tribe ground to dust by a single person.

    Sam is like shadow of death as he shed them one by one.

    While he is shing them down, his left arm is not ildle. The arm which was covered with the thunder prison and looked like a robotic arm is creating a shield made of condensed lightning as he defended the attacks of the rest of the barbarians.

    After the first initial ten deaths, the barbarians are afraid. Sam stood there with the cold breeze brushing past his blood-soaked body and the lightning shield on his hand crackling as it amplified his shadow form.

    For the first time ever, the whole race is afraid of one man this much. They didn¡¯t expect that Sam would be this strong.

    This also gave them a new understanding of Dhar¡¯s strength, because that guy shed with the monster right in front of him for a long time.

    While they are taking in the effect of Sam¡¯s work, Sam is thinking something else. His body is taking the toll of using the shadow sword.

    The sword was not something he could wield like he wielded the reaper sword or the executioner sword. He was fascinated to know this. He thought he would be able to wield it at the Consummate stage, but the power of the sword is beyond that.

    Even the Astral ne Initiation might not be enough and he is only at the initial state.

    He would have to take some rest after this or he could think of ideas to alleviate the physical toll.

    He is trying to stand to just do that.

    While he is looking at them with that intimidating death re the wood elemental energy which is not as eye-catching as the light elemental energy is healing the muscle tissues of the right hand.

    But the Barbarians who are struck by the fear didn¡¯t just stand there for long. They started attacking him as soon as they got out of their shock.

    Sam moved his left hand. The lightning shield expanded and itpletely surrounded his whole body like a cage and blocked one attack after another.

    Not a single attack went through and Sam went on another shing. Even though all the physical pain he is enduring, Sam has one advantage, the shadow sword only needs one perfect sh to end a man and if he couldn¡¯t defend the strike, he wouldn¡¯t be able to defend against the corruption of the shadow energy.

    While is Sam is killing them left and right, there is something else that is making him more concerned. It is the fact that the second elder is not exactly attacking him.

    By now he killed around fifteen members of the remaining Astral ne cultivators and he is pretty sure that he would be able to kill another ten or so without any resistance.

    And he knew this because he is targeting all the Initial stage Initiation and the Middle stage Initiation stage cultivation.

    Then he would have to fight a little more to kill the rest and he is sure that he would be able to kill the Second elder if he took some more power out of that sword.

    If he could put it directly, the barbarians have no hope, but the second elder shouldn¡¯t be knowing that, so he shouldn¡¯t be standing there passively while Sam destroyed his forces. Something else is going on here and he has to know what it is.

    So, he stopped his attacks on the small fries and moved to attack the Second elder directly.

    He kicked the ground and got ready to stab his sword right in his eyes.

    The second elder dodged to the side, but the thunder prison on Sam¡¯s hand suddenly extended and it acted like a metallic power hammer and hit him in the guts with arge amount of lightning energy.

    The second elder flew across the air and when Sam was about to follow up the right-hand man of this second elder came and attacked him.

    The thunder prison extended once again and acted like a pincer. Sam blocked the attack with his sword and used the lightning pincer to pin the guy to the ground before stabbing the sword into his neck, but he forcefully moved to the side and took the full brunt of the attack on the shoulder.

    He is a peak stage Astral ne Initiation cultivator and he is one of the five that could resist the corruption a bit.

    But Sam didn¡¯t want to give him the chance to do that and was about to stab him once again, but the other parties are not exactly willing to give him that chance.

    The remaining three out of the strongest five here came at Sam from three sides, so he has to let go of that guy and defend himself.

    But he is still focused on going after the Second elder.

    He didn¡¯t stop at all and only dealt with the remaining four when they got in the way. As for the rest of the candidates, they didn¡¯t try to interfere.

    These five are the only ones who can even defend against the sword and they are happy to not get it in the middle and get shed.

    The second elder mostly focused on dodging and defending than attacking Sam while the remaining four focused so much on stopping him which only made them get the shocks by the lightning and stabs from the Shadow sword which is increasing the corruption slowly.

    The second elder looked at Sam with a frustrated look as Sam just used the thunder prison like a pile bunker and mmed one of the four into the ground while continuously stabbing him in the chest.

    One of the four finally died, but at the cost of exposing Sam¡¯s own body for the attacks of the rest of the three and he spat out some blood in pain.

    After one of them dead, Sam used the thunder prison to take another recovery break.

    After recovering, he went after the second elder once again and he is once again dodging while the remaining three tried to stop him.

    The cycle repeated again and again and finally, Sam managed to sh him on the shoulder.

    The second elder looked at him coldly and attacked back with his spear. Sam took the brunt of the attack and crashed to the ground, which he rebounded from with the help of thunder prison to bounce back.

    He knew that something is wrong with the Second elder and he just confirmed this attack. The second elder is weak at the moment, it might be a result of something that happened to him, but he is not in his strongest state.

    That is why he is not attacking Sam actively because he is afraid of Sam¡¯s attacks. But if that is the only case, there is always a surrender that would help him from saving the lives of his tribesmen. But he ispletely ignoring their lives, no matter how many of them are dead.

    This is all a bit fishy.

 Chapter 906: Devouring

    Sam is going after the second elder after confirming this spection and thetter kept on dodging and dodging.

    He took a lot of hits from Sam felt extremely frustrated.

    The three remaining men are trying their best to impede Sam and they are seeding for the most part.

    Sam is losing energy every second and he cannot take extend it for too long.

    He decided to do something big and finish this off in a single strike.

    He used the thunder prison to cage himself and started concentrating his energy. He changed the full partial fusion of the shadow element to the partial fusion and the remaining part of the body is actually going through Space elemental fusion.

    He closed his eyes and controlled the energy carefully as he tried his best to make both ofpletely different energies merge together to form a very critical bnce between them.

    This merged energy channeled through the sword and Sam suddenly took the cage off and shed towards one of the three guys.

    The sword ray reached right in front of the target and opened a spatial rift and that rift is leading to the Shadow world.

    The suction force pulled the guy in and the shadow energy started corrupting him like crazy and at the same time Sam¡¯s shadows extended their hands and tried to pull him in.

    The shadow energy corruption started and the barbarian slowly began to move into the shadow realm.

    But the spatial is slowly closing at the same time. So, the barbarian finally found some hope and tried to pull himself out of the spatial tear. And he did have some improvement, but he couldn¡¯t do that in time and the spatial tear closed which cut his body in half while the rest waspletely corrupted.

    He is dead just like that.

    Everything happened in three seconds. And the whole area turned silent, while the remaining two and the second elder are looking at Sam in a bit of horror.

    Sam proceeded with his strikes and the second target was hooked while the third and fourth barely managed to dodge.

    Sam kept on trying to get a hold of them and the surrounding barbarians who didn¡¯t want to involve in the fight are getting involved as the spatial tearsnded near them and they are being sucked in.

    The barbarian tribe will really lose their core power at this rate and without that, the rest of the tribes would swallow the K tribe in.

    After a series of constant missed attempts, Sam finally got thest guy, and now only the second elder and a fewpletely injured and badly exhausted barbarians left in the field.

    And the second elder actually stopped running.

    Sam walked towards him as he prepared for the next strike.

    "I really admire you, Sam. I really do.

    A young man who is in his forties. By your age, I was still moping around as a Consummate stage cultivator. I have stayed at that stage for so long that it felt like most of my life.

    I was never the strongest one out of all, but I had the greatest ambitions of all.

    But you are here almost destroying my tribe single-handedly. I know what¡¯s the enmity between you and Hel, but I am really d that she made an enemy out of you and used our tribe to do something to you."

    All of a sudden the energy around the second elder started changing and he became instantly stronger. Sam frowned at this.

    This ispletely different from what he spected and this confusion made him stop in his tracks.

    The second elder continued though.

    "Because of you, I managed to get to the Warton tribe and used as an excuse to ughter them and got what I wanted.

    Because of you, the attention of the whole tribe including my brother, the tribe head all changed their attention towards you and because of that, I managed to do things that should be done to be what I currently am."

    Sam swung his sword and created thergest rift he could right in front of that man.

    But the second elder jumped back and escaped before saying.

    "You should have done that a few minutes ago. If not for all the members sacrificing themselves, it would have been indeed difficult, you might have even done it and I would have really died easily. But it is a bit toote."

    As soon as he spoke, his body started emitting the fumes just like it did with Dhar.

    Sam frowned in confusion and so did the remaining barbarians. The second elder was the second elder for a reason. He shouldn¡¯t be having this ability. If he had that, he would have been the tribe head easily.

    But he didn¡¯t inherit the berserker bloodline and Dhar¡¯s father did and took the spot away.

    While Sam is confused, the second elder spoke once again.

    "The Berserker bloodline is something I dreamed of for years, in fact, decades, but now it is mine, along with many other things."

    And his body changed once again, the skin tone turned red and his muscle buffed up.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know what it was, but the second elder seemed to be quite talkative and wanted to get it all out.

    "This is why I killed the Warton tribe, some of the elders came to know about a secret of mine and on top of that they didn¡¯t give me what I wanted, so it was two birds with one stone."

    Then his body kept on changing.

    He got fangs and ws and then, his skin became scaly.

    There are many changes happening to his body. Sam knew this smells trouble, but no matter how many times he attacked, they are not doing any good and all he is doing is opening up the spatial rifts to the shadow world and creating unstable spatial turbulences.

    But that guy blocked, dodged, and simply escaped.

    The battle is in a stalemate and with every transformation that is happening, the performance is increasing and Sam is already running out of energy.

    The battle is currently at a stalemate, but both of them couldn¡¯t back out now.

    Meanwhile, Dhar and his father along with Dhruv came out of the city by now and they are the tribe head recovered a bit.

    When they saw the whole scene, they were stunned.

    "He was holding back."

    Dhar muttered when he saw the battle.

    Dhar¡¯s father recovered a bit and said to Dhar.

    "I need to recover as fast as possible. We need to take the Second elder down."

    "What exactly happened father?"

    "The second elder got greedy. He found a specific demonic cultivation technique. It was created by one of the demon races that are above our realm.

    The technique is pure evil. It devours the bloodline of others who are different races or even of same race with different bloodlines. I don¡¯t know where he exactly got it, but he is working behind our backs and devoured many barbarian bloodlines until now.

    And earlier he got me with a sneak attack along with the rest of the elders who were bought into his n of extending his technique to their children.

    He is now a whole new different kind of barbarian with many bloodlines mixed within and his offspring would be born that way.

    He would be powerful but his mind would be lost in that power.

    He doesn¡¯t care about the lives of the tribe anymore. He doesn¡¯t care if the elders and all the other Astral ne cultivators die, as long as he nurtures that power, he would be able to hold the strongest in the barbarian realm¡¯s position and he would be able to create his own tribe with apletely new bloodline.

    And from the looks of it, he wants to devour Sam.

    He got the details of Sam from Hel and learned about the different elements and the beasts with him. You might not know this, but from what Hel said, Sam uses a simr technique but he doesn¡¯t devour, he shares a bloodline with the beasts."

    "What does that mean?"

    "That means, he is not a normal human. He has bloodlines of some more beasts coexisting within him which is the result of him having too many elements.

    If the second elder devours his bloodline now, he would be holding all those elements and no one would be able to stop him."

    "But then how can we stop him. From the looks of it, he is too strong."

    "He would be stronger than now if we don¡¯t stop him and that will be the doom of the barbarian realm not just our tribe.

    The gods don¡¯t look kindly on this and even the superior realms above us wouldn¡¯t just leave this be. They would juste and wipe the whole realm and the race and be done with it.

    This second elder doesn¡¯t know that and he is just so drunk on power that he believes he can take on the whole world.

    He couldn¡¯t be any more wrong.

    So, I want you to do something so that I could recover faster and we have to help Sam. He is our only hope now."

 Chapter 907: Torturous death

    Sam flew through the air and crashed into a tree. He went through that, crashed into the next one, and finally stopped at the next one.

    He slowly stood up as he felt the pain all over his body.

    He is pretty sure at least half of the bones cracked inside him. As he stood up, he could see the second elder in hispletely transformed state walking up to him slowly and leisurely.

    This is the state of the battle for the past few minutes.

    After the transformation wasplete, it becamepletely one-sided. The Second elder started beating the crap out of Sam and if he has to defeat him, there are very ways and very few cards Sam could implement.

    It wouldn¡¯t be easy.

    Apart from that, if he were to implement a n, he would only have one chance, because currently the second elder is still ying with me and bragging here and there as he showed off to the rest of the spectators.

    This might be the result of him having to keep it a secret for so long. But at least it is working to his favor for now, he can find the perfect timing and implement his n.

    But he needs a proper distraction. He is contemting whether he should let Raiju Elder out and let him do his thing, he is sure that he would be able to win, but he is worried that Second elder might do something extreme which would harm the beasts.

    Sam can atmost heal the beasts he had contract with. If the Raiju elder was injured, he wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything.

    So, he is thinking of finding or creating suchrge distraction so that he can implement his other n keeping his beasts and the subordinates safe.

    While he was thinking, the second elder already made his way towards him and punched Sam.

    Sam used repel style against the giant fisting towards him and moved backwards to avoid most of the punch.

    He is crashing here and there, but he is still searching for that distraction.

    "I had enough fun with you, Sam. It is time to finish this. I will make sure your name is part of my legend when it was told to others. You are the best opponent I came across and you will remain that way even when I defeat the gods and conquer their realms."

    The second startedughing like a maniac while saying this.

    Sam raised an eyebrow. It seems like he didn¡¯t have much time at the moment.

    He can only think of a method even if it hurts him.

    In normal cases, he would have gone for the flute and since the Space element, he did make plenty of modifications. But it is useless now. He doesn¡¯t have that much energy.

    He is very exhausted and his energy is very limited. But he is still thinking of doing that now since he couldn¡¯t find that distraction.

    He took the flute out and was about to y, but at this exact moment, his eyes lit up from what he saw.

    The tribe head came from the side and tackled the second elder to the ground and started pounding him in the face one fist after another.

    Everyone was stunned. The move was sneaky andpletely unexpected.

    Dhar came running towards Sam and said.

    "Recover as much as you can. You have to work together if you want to kill him."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and stood slowly. He removed the thunder prison attached to his hand and returned it to its normal state. He put the shadow sword away and he once again levitated so that his bones and muscles wouldn¡¯t hurt as much.

    He is observing this battle closely as he watched it with the energy vision.

    The second elder pushed the tribe head to the side and rolled to the opposite side to get out of that constant pounding and threw a punch in the air. The spiritual energy took the shape of his fist as it moved towards the tribe head who replied with one of his own.

    "My dear elder brother. I didn¡¯t think you still had it in you. Even that sneak attack didn¡¯t stop you from fighting back.

    I must say I am impressed."

    "Who needs your impression, you traitor scum."

    "I am not impressed by your strength, my brother. I am impressed by my own thinking. The thinking that led me to a decision to kill you.

    If not for this Sam, you would have already been a dead man. But still, it wouldn¡¯t change a thing. I would kill now and then kill Samter. It is all same."

    The battle became intense and for some reason, the second elder is not as advantageous as Sam and the rest of them thought. The tribe head is getting the upper hand easily.

    While the barbarians felt relieved, Dhar is screaming at Sam.

    "Sam, he cannot hold on for too long. You have to help him. He cannot defeat him alone."

    But Sam ispletely nonchnt.

    He didn¡¯t react at all.

    He observed the battle as the tribe head and the second elder shed like crazy and slowly the advantages tilted from one side to another.

    It is mostly fistfight and soon the second elder managed tond a perfectly clean hit in the ribs causing it to crack.

    He spat arge amount of blood and the second elder smiled.

    "It seems like you are not exactly yourself my brother. You burned your life force, didn¡¯t you? Anyway, it doesn¡¯t make any difference."

    As he spoke the tribe head looked at Sam but Sam is still as nonchnt.

    He just dropped his gaze and sighed in helplessness.

    There is nothing he could do if Sam really doesn¡¯t want to help. No matter how they look at it, it was the barbarians who started all of this for him, he doesn¡¯t have to care about the barbarians.

    As he thought, the second elder¡¯s ws are glowing with spiritual energy, and got ready to kill whileughing crazily.

    Just when he was about to finish it quickly, he felt something from the side.

    The thunder prison hit him and he fell to the ground. Sam who was away a few seconds ago, used the spatial elemental fusion to cross the distance instantly and used the thunder prison to throw the second elder away and before he could react, then he mmed the thunder prison and created a cage around that guy.

    Samnded on the floor panting.

    Thatrge blink with the spatial elemental fusion is not exactly an easy thing. It almost drained thest bit of his energypletely.

    He was panting crazily and it took a few seconds for him to even get back up.

    The second elder who was stuck in the lightning cage started beating it up trying to escape.

    "Don¡¯t bother, it is not going to happen."

    Sam said to him and walked near the cage.

    "I should have used this on you since the start. But damn, you are fast. You are too fast for me tond this on you perfectly.

    And I am d that you are a cocky piece of shit. That made it easy."

    Sam then took out one of the cylindrical explosives he used on the city and threw it towards the cage.

    A small opening appeared inside the lightning cage and the explosive made its way towards the second elder and exploded.

    *BOOM*

    The flesh on the second elder¡¯s body was torn a bit, but there was no critical damage. He became that strong.

    Sam just smiled and started throwing one explosive after another from different sides.

    The second elder tried his best to get out of the cage, but he couldn¡¯t. He started attacking the cage walls and then the ground as he pounded heavily.

    The earth cracked, but the cage didn¡¯t copse. There is nothing he can do.

    The insides of the cage are filled with spatial tears and his motion was soon cancelled.

    He is on his knees and looked at Sam.

    "I can¡¯t die like this. Someone help me. Barbarians, help me please. I will be the strongest barbarian of all. I will be able to create a ce for barbarians in the realms of gods in the future. I will lead our race to a new glory. I cannot die like this.

    I havee too far to die like this."

    Sam looked at the rest of the barbarians who are all feeling conflicted. They are indeed tempted by this. But when they were met with Sam¡¯s cold gaze, they didn¡¯t dare toe forward.

    Sam moved closer to the cage and looked at the Second elder and spoke slowly.

    "You are not that powerful, man. Stop deluding yourself. The only reason you were able to pound me as you did was that I let you do it.

    Look at how easily you are trapped and how easily you are going to die.

    You were only able to overpower me because of your cultivation level, if not for that, you wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything to me.

    In fact, I could have used this cage a long time ago. The only reason I didn¡¯t is that I wanted to test myself against you. I wanted to kill you by myself in my anger.

    If all I need is to kill you, I don¡¯t have to go through that. You might consider me as your greatest opponent. But I only considered you as just another opponent. So, ept the reality. You are not powerful, forget about the realm of gods, you wouldn¡¯t even be able to unite the barbarian realm."

    As Sam spoke calmly, his eyes are giving off some strange glow. This is one of the specter¡¯s tricks. It doesn¡¯t have much use normally. But currently, the second elder¡¯s mental state is not clear, so Sam used this trick to give him more mental pressure and nted a seed inside his head that would let him repeat Sam¡¯s words over and over.

    He would feel that they are true and feel helpless and frustrated. He wouldn¡¯t even be at peace even in thest second of his death.

 Chapter 908: Punishment

    The second elder was tortured to death.

    After creating enough spatial tears, Sam didn¡¯t bother to attack him any further and he died as his body was being sucked by the different spatial tears.

    His death was gruesome and all the while he was dying, he yelled different things.

    "I need to be more powerful."

    "I am weak."

    "I am Pathetic."

    "I want to be strong."

    He yelled these things like a crazy maniac. Sam¡¯s trick really did work wonders. No matter how torturous death is, the dying man would always have a moment of peace before death. As his body and mind would ept that it was death, they would just let it go in the final moment.

    But the second elder didn¡¯t have that chance as Sam used that trick on him. He wouldn¡¯t find peace even in death.

    Even the tribe head who wanted to kill the second elder desperately a few minutes felt a sense of pity for him at that moment.

    As he was dying the gruesome death, Sam looked at the rest of the barbarians and the city.

    He is a bit conflicted at the moment. His anger is still bubbling when he saw how Watt is doing. He doesn¡¯t understand why they are so hell-bent on killing Watt, but no matter what reason the second elder had he really tried to do that.

    Maybe most of it might be to use him to remove the elders who might oppose him in the future and reduce any future threats.

    And it could be said that even the barbarians are a victim in this whole y. But that doesn¡¯t excuse them from doing what they did.

    But killing the whole city is a big deal and he even gave them a warning earlier.

    As he was thinking whether he should proceed ording to the warning or do something else, Dhar, the tribe head, and Dhruv came in front of him and all of them knelt on the ground as they touched their foreheads to the ground.

    The tribe head spoke in the same position.

    "Sam, our tribe has wronged you repeatedly. We tried to kill your friend when there was no enmity. We kidnapped him and killed the whole family of the woman he loved. We understand your resentment and it is justified.

    But please show us some mercy as we were also victims in this organized n.

    We did our goddess¡¯ bidding. My brother go greedy and wanted to use you. But I really do hope you can find it in your heart to forgive our race.

    At least leave the citizens who are truly innocent alone. I know you gave them a warning. But they are ignorant. Please try to forgive them.

    If you really want to take lives, then you can take mine and my sons¡¯. We are the main perpetrators of this whole thing along with my brother.

    You also killed most of the Astral ne cultivators. We barely have any left. If we leave us now, we would at least survive.

    Please, I am begging you."

    The tribe head pleaded repeatedly.

    Sam looked at them and sighed.

    If it was before, he wouldn¡¯t care about the pleadings and the begging. In fact, it would serve as little more than an annoyance to him. But now he could find himself forgiving them. He is subconsciously thinking of all the reasons that could justify him leaving them alone.

    He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

    Wembley who is looking from afar noticed Sam¡¯s hesitation and came towards him.

    "If you want to kill them, I won¡¯t stop you. But if it was just because of me and Watt, you don¡¯t have to do that. We can forgive the tribe for the crimemitted by one of them."

    As she spoke, Sam felt something and he waved his hand. Watt came out of the divine dimension.

    "Its your decision Sam. You can do whatever you want."

    He just said that and stood there weakly. His skin is pale and his posture is feeble.

    Sam looked at the remaining barbarian Astral ne cultivators and they also knelt on the ground.

    He closed his eyes and sighed once again before saying.

    "I will let you live, but your actions wouldn¡¯t go unountable. You will be paying for these actions with your future actions.

    The K tribe would be subordinates of Watt and Wembley for the next decade.

    You will stop your worship for Hel and you wouldn¡¯t do any of her biddings. You will receive your resources from the dusk organization.

    You will do as Watt asked you to do. Your businesses will be taken over by the Dusk organization and you will be give forty percent of the share.

    Your children will study in the academy Dusk organization is going to open in this realm and in the next decade they will work in different sectors of the Dusk organization.

    And Watt and Wembley¡¯s order trumps all the orders of your superiors and that includes mine. If any of you defy any of these rules, you will be executed in the most gruesome way possible."

    The barbarians looked at each other as they whispered about the unreasonable conditions.

    Sam raised his hand and thergest explosive appeared on his hand as he used the spatial element to keep it there.

    The barbarians were stunned and the father and sons trio also looked at the massive explosive in Sam¡¯s hands and gulped.

    "You have other option. I will set this explosive on the city after you enter it and see if you can stay alive. As long as you live, you can live a free and happy life as you like."

    The whispers were gone.

    They understood that they cannot push him too much otherwise they might really die.

    The tribe head raised his head and said.

    "We ept."

    With that, Sam walked away from the spot.

    He walked towards Watt and Wembley and said.

    "Take it as a first-time meeting gift."

    With that, they left calmly.

    They have to take a rest. As for staying in the city, there is no way they would do that.

    They went towards the nearest stream and made their camp there. Sam took a bath in the stream andid down on the bed as he slowly drifted into sleep.

    His body is fatigued, his right hand wouldn¡¯t be in its peak state for a few days. There is no way he could get away with this without proper sleep.

    He slept for three days straight while the subordinates also recovered.

    After they came to themselves, Sam looked at the wrist screen to check the list of the families and organizations, he picked one with the lowest power level and called for the one in charge of the Dragon Hawk tribe.

    "Raiju Elder and the K tribe chief would apany you after they recover, there is a realm connecting to the Barbarian realm, there is a family of Hellian race.

    Take your team and get their heirloom.

    Compared to the K tribe, they are weak. If you want you can go and check them out before deciding to proceed. You have ten days, we will be waiting here until then."

    He nodded his head without saying anything and took a team of four to scout the information about the Hellian race.

    Meanwhile, Sam sent the rest of the subordinates to the K tribe to take a look at their business ounts and finish the takeover procedure.

    The city is once again being repaired, but this time Sam didn¡¯t let them go to other races, he brought the space gate team and a construction team from the nearest realm he has influence in and let them do the work.

    Since they are his subordinates and he will be taking their services, but not for free.

    Anyway, his construction team is better and the city is not too damaged. They fixed the city in the next week and then went on to deal with the city wall.

    The city wall is too easy to handle, so Sam decided to give it some enhancement.

    While he is focusing on finishing up all the procedures here and going back to the Deste, the k tribe are also adjusting to the new normal.

    After recovering the first thing Dhar did was to destroy hel¡¯s statues in the temples.

    The crisis was started by her. She is the reason why they were almost extinct.

    And they also destroyed the one-way portal which delivers their soldiers to her every year.

    "Are you sure that there would be no consequences from Hel?" Dhruv asked his brother and father as they cleaned up the temple.

    "We don¡¯t have to care anymore. We are under Sam and his friend now. And from what I see, no matter how powerful Hel is, she still cannot do anything to Sam, otherwise, there is no way she would have asked us for help.

    Maybe this is good for us. At least, we don¡¯t have to worry about sending our family members as soldiers for her only to never see them again."

    The tribe head replied.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is how spot-on he was with his assumption.

 Chapter 909: Plans

    In the upper realms.

    Particrly, in one of Hou Yi¡¯s immediate subordinate realms. This is one of the realms he can visit directly. But still, there are some restrictions ced on his body by the naturalws which suppress his strength by a lot.

    But he is not here to fight, so this is okay. He is here to meet somebody and he waited for them toe. Soon ady in the ck arrived and sat opposite to him calmly.

    "I didn¡¯t expect I would get an invitation from Hel, what do you want to meet me for?"

    "I want Sam dead."

    "I want him dead too. But don¡¯t you know that we cannot just interfere."

    "I know, but this time I cannot tolerate it anymore. That bastard not only destroyed one of bigger soldier supplies for me, he also merged them with his own force. I cannot even retaliate against them for the time being because now they are considered part of the yer¡¯s forces which ispletely against the rules."

    "So, what do you want to do?"

    "I am not doing anything directly, we will let the subordinate families deal with this and we have to y within the rules discreetly.

    Sam currently selected the Hellian tribe of mine in the ming Star realm. From what I know you have arge race superior to the Hellian tribe under your control."

    "The Sr fragment race?"

    "Yes, whatever that is. What I want is let a person of high position from the Sr fragment race to marry one of the people of high position in the Hellian tribe.

    The marriage had to be done secretely and public should never be aware of this."

    "What do you want to do with a marriage? Are you going to let them join in when the Hellian tribe is attacked?"

    "No, I have a much bigger n than that. But before I exin anything, look at this and tell me if you recognize this thing."

    She spread a scroll across the table and when Hou Yi saw the contents of the scroll, he was shocked.

    "Where did you get this?"

    "You seemed to forgotten who my father is. He is the god of mischief."

    "Then why didn¡¯t you get a full lock, we can only get open the portal temporarily and only a few of our subordinates might be able to go there."

    "This is all I can get, you do know why it was fully locked right? Don¡¯t think that we would be able to escape scot-free just for this. We have to give a proper exnation and a giantpensation just for this.

    If it was full unlock, then we would be in a full war.

    So, prepare your subordinates from the personal army and send them all to the Sr Fragment race. Everything should be properly done. Don¡¯t you dare give out any loose ends.

    I will be sending my subordinates to the Hellian tribe.

    And you should give some instructions to the tribe directly and make sure that they understand every word of them...."

    She went on and on for over an hour as she clearly exined the n and gave all the key details.

    "By the way, if by any chance any one of us gets caught, then we are on our own, there would be no ratting on others. Do you understand?"

    "Yes, I was about to propose the same thing, then I will take care of the instructions you gave me and prepare the Sr Fragment tribe. You deal with the things on your end."

    With that they shook their hands and just left.

    Meanwhile, back in the barbarian realm.

    Sam is currently looking at the report from the subordinate he assigned to deal with the Hellian tribe.

    The report is extremely detailed, they are regarding the detailed power structure and the businesses of the Hellian tribe.

    "You did great. I thought you would take a lot of time, but it has only been four days. You are fast."

    "Thank you sir."

    "So, what do you guys think? You can take care of that on your own? Or should I alsoe there?"

    "No, Sir. I think we can take care of them, but we need small help, we want to know how to breach the family through this side. That was the side where the least number of people are stationed, because the wall is strongest there.

    If we can breach from here, we would be able tounch a perfect surprise attack."

    "I can tell you that, but what about the business approach."

    "We would be going through the business approach first, but we are sure that the Hellian tribe wouldn¡¯t agree for the business deal and it will lead to the conflict easily. They are hot tempered. So, I figured it would be better to be prepared before the conflict so that we don¡¯t have to think too much."

    "Not a bad idea. This is not just a task, this is also a test for you guys. From now on we will be climbing upwards into the realms and soon reach some catastrophic opponents where I had to be involved directly. Then I wouldn¡¯t have enough time to deal with the smaller problems, so I need people who can do most of the things on their own without too much of my intereference.

    I am not telling you this just to increase the pressure, I need to inform you because I want you to be ready. I want you to prepare yourself properly for the future.

    You can fail in these tests and try to stay alive and escape. After all, as long as I am here you would be able to get back at them and for that you also need to stay alive.

    Get your team ready and ready to move."

    "Yes, Sir."

    After sending them off, Sam moved out of his tent to meet Watt and Wembley.

    They are sitting on the bank of the stream with their legs ced in the water.

    He walked towards them and asked.

    "What are your ns?"

    "We would stay here for a few days, we are only sure of that part."

    Watt replied with a faint smile.

    "When will you get married?"

    "Is there really need for such a formality? ISn¡¯t it enough as long as we are together normally?"

    Watt said with a helpless expression.

    "That is a day to remember. It is the day you proim your love in front of the whole world. A story that you could tell to your kids and yourself when you are old and senile. Why are you so against it?"

    "I don¡¯t know. I am not against it, but I am also not particrly interested either."

    "Anyway, you are having a wedding. But I would say you better have it in Deste. That is our home after all. That is if it is okay with Wembley."

    Wembley looked at both of us and said.

    "I don¡¯t have anything left in this ce. I don¡¯t mind."

    "What about Philip and Jack then? Do you want me to bring them to your wedding?" Sam asked as he sat down beside Watt.

    "No, let those assholes stay where they are. Who knows what kind of situations they are in? We would meet on the time we agreed on.

    Few days after wedding, we will also be leaving deste, I would resume my journey once again and meet you after a few years in the ce we previously agreed up on and now I am sure that I wouldn¡¯t be as bored as before."

    "But you have to take care. You only have two more calls left on your device to call me. So, be careful.

    Anyway, back to your wedding. My subordinates are dealing with a tribe in a nearby realm. I want to get a glimpse of their performance and review how far they can handle things. So, we would staying for a few more days.

    And after that we will go back to deste, by then even the Space gate will be finished.

    So we can go directly. There we can finish your wedding, you go your way and I will go my way."

    "Sure, whatever you say."

    For the next few days, Sam secretly went to the realm where Hellian tribe is to monitor the process of his subordinates, it is not that he doesn¡¯t trust his reports, he has this n since the start and he would also get a better understanding of their ws in such arge scale operation which he would be able to rectify.

    And as for why he didn¡¯t tell them directly, he was worried that they would be having performance anxiety with his presence.

    He observed all the process from start to finish, they managed to get out of the business proposal alive, then they managed to divert their attention properly while they attacked the tribe estate directly and enter it.

    They chipped down a lot of forces and destroyed all kinds of formation arrangements they have in the estate which would make it impossible for the tribe to have a decent base.

    Then they slowly irritated and frustrated them while finding ways to destroy the businesses of the family and defeated the stubborn tribe finally after a lot of work and took that family heirloom before returning.

    There is one subordinate dead and four of them critically injured.

    They are a bit down because of one death which led them to train more.

    Sam is really impressed by their performance.

    He let them take over the businesses after giving them a bonus and left the Barbarian realm with Watt and Wembley.

 Chapter 910: Wedding

    Sam came back to Deste with Watt and Wembley.

    Watt took Wembley to take a tour around the city.

    She was in awe by everything she saw. The school, the factories, the city which is in a constant rush, the hotels, the orphanage, the restaurants.

    She never saw anything like this before.

    "There are a lot of changes. It has been over a decade since I came here. But I could still feel the sense of familiarity."

    Watt said as he took her from one ce to another. When she saw the puppets created from new technology, he was even more surprised by that than Wembley.

    "This guy cannot rest at all. When I left, these puppets are nothing more than concepts, but look at them now, they can rece all the manpower in the city. From the guards to the factory workers. They can rece them all."

    "Then why is he not doing that? He would have a lot more profit."

    "I don¡¯t know. He always says that he doesn¡¯t care too much about others and such, but I think he is verypassionate. Do you know how many people he changed the lives of?

    There are thousands of orphans including me that could only live in the slums for the rest of our lives, but he gave us an opportunity to better our lives, but in his opinion, he is only doing that to get himself some manpower.

    The same goes with the Dragon Hawk tribe, they were constantly misused and abused by the people in charge at that time, he relieved them of that abuse, but he would say that he did so because he only wanted to get some loyal soldiers.

    No matter how much he improved their lives, he will always count that as a by-product to his own agenda.

    As for this situation where he can rece them with the puppets, he must have just thought of not recing the manpower that helped him build this ce, but he would say some other stupid reason."

    "How are you sure that the excuse is not the real reason?"

    "I have known him for a greater part of my life. Maybe when I met him he was like that, it must have been the real reason, but as we grew together, I am sure he changed. Now it is nothing more than an excuse.

    And I am sure that all the students that graduated and all the families that changed their lives would agree with me.

    Let us go. I heard my student is working nearby. Let us go and meet him."

    Watt and Wembley went on with the tour. He taught somebat lessons in the school when he was here and he was a favorite among all the orphan students.

    And he is also familiar with a lot of staff. He met a lot of people and introduced Wembley to them.

    Wembley was even more surprised than when she saw the city as she saw how many people are lovingly greeting Watt after such a long time.

    The whole city is like one big tribe weing its member who has been away for a long time.

    It is not so inurate.

    Meanwhile, Sam got busy with some administrative tasks and the wedding arrangements. The food section was left to Mackey.

    They are cooking beasts on par with Wyverns and flood dragons for the meal. They collected the best of the ingredients from different realms.

    Sam even got a hold of a bunch of Emerald turtles for the meal. Only the cooking preparations would take at least a week for all the ingredients.

    Then came the wedding dresses which Sam took it upon himself. It has been a long while since he did any tailoring.

    But he didn¡¯t get too rusty. He is creating robes from the best of the materials he could gather. Even though the wedding robes wouldn¡¯t be worn again and again, they would be great for remembering this day after a few decades in the future.

    Sam is sure that they will live for centuries toe and when the stories are passed down, he wants every single detail of this wedding to be passed on with them.

    And the highlight of the wedding would be the venue.

    This is not a simple venue it is going to be a construction project that would be reminded as one of the greatest constructions in history.

    Watt was given a few options and he chose the one closest to the city.

    There is a mountain region near the city which is being modified now. The valley in the middle of the mountains would be the stage and the mountain walls would be carved out to make the seats, stairs, path, and everything else for the venue.

    All the best construction teams were given a chance to tender their design and the best design was selected and that construction team was givenplete control over it.

    They can use all the technologies under their patentw and everything will be paid from Sam¡¯s personal pocket.

    The construction team was ecstatic.

    Everything was done at a rapid pace for the next fifteen days. This is one of the fastest constructions because every artisan is a Consummate level cultivator and used earth elements and there are three Astral ne earth element users helping them.

    In the middle of it, Sam even sent the Dragon Hawk tribe team that has taken over the Hellian race to take over another organization so that his progress on that side wouldn¡¯t be impeded.

    But this time there is also another reason, so he sent another team to support them as this organization is bigger and they control a small which is full of resources. The whole doesn¡¯t have any other citizens, it was infested with beasts and this organization just uses it for mining, farming, and other stuff.

    Sam decided to take over the so that he could give it as a wedding present. This is also the first time he didn¡¯t care about the business deal aspect within the list of the organizations he has to take care of and the organization happened to be under Zeus¡¯s control which didn¡¯t stop him at all from doing what he wanted to do.

    Everything was grand on the wedding day.

    Many people from differents were invited.

    Even Raunak and Ramya came along with their child who is already six years old.

    Watt looked at the Majestic setting all done just for his wedding and felt emotional.

    On the wedding day.

    Watt is currently standing at the center of the stage as he waited for the bride.

    Sam is standing beside him as they took the sight in.

    They could still remember their first meeting in the slums of Falcon Cliff city.

    Falck who might even be the first Whirlwind Falcon to reach Consummate level peak is standing behind both of them as he crowed in happiness.

    Yanwu and Sky are flying over as they watching it from the sky while the remaining beasts are behind the state as they witnessed the marriage.

    The Old man survived the Warton tribe massacre. Thest family member of Wembley walked her down from the aisle on either side of which many students and Orphans who were taught by Watt are standing as they witnessed the scene closely.

    Wembley was also emotional.

    She didn¡¯t expect that a person who she fell in love with is not just a simple man she thought he was. He was such a person that could summon wind and rain in arge organization.

    He saw many beautiful women who are interested in him. Women that are far more useful to him than her in many aspects.

    But he still chose to love her for what she is. epting her ws and mistakes. He swallowed insults and unreasonable tests and trials her family put him through.

    He almost lost his life in protecting her.

    When he doesn¡¯t have to do that. His organization is clearly bigger than her tribe by ten times over.

    He could have used his power and influence to just take her away. He could have just left her when her family insulted him.

    He could do any of those things, but he chose not to. And she is not deluded enough to think that is because of her beauty.

    Barbarians are never beautiful, to begin with and whenpared to the elves and mermaids, they are like night and day.

    She knew he loved her. More than she could imagine.

    As she walked to the stage and they gave their vows, the crowd erupted in cheers as the Wyverns flew across the sky decorated it with their mes

    The citizens who are watching the whole wedding through the live broadcast system in the city also raised their sses in a toast as they blessed the couple.

    Sam felt tears welling up in his eyes and this is the first time that happened out of happiness. He hasn¡¯t cried tears of happiness in both of his lifetimes.

    This is the first time he found such pure happiness in the joy of others.

    But that didn¡¯t stay for long as his assistant ran towards him and whispered something in his ear.

 Chapter 911: Attack on MInes

    For the rest of the ceremony and the toasts, Sam was extremely vignt. His assistant said that something happened at the mines in the central continent.

    It could be said the whole central continent is his at the moment and only a few ces around were upied by other major powers.

    Someone attacked the people at the mine and escaped.

    This ispletely new to Sam. Because currently there should be no one who has balls to attack the dusk organization. Even the major powers with centuries of history couldn¡¯t do anything.to him now. One swing of his sword could kill the whole major power.

    Someone attacking the mines out of blue is impossible which made Sam extra vignt.

    Watt and Wembley carried on with celebrations while Sam gave orders to his subordinates to get to the bottom of the incident.

    The celebrations went on until night and when the couple went to Watt¡¯s floor in the tower the celebrations finally ended.

    Sam is waiting in his office for the reports.

    The attack is a fire elemental and they didn¡¯t kill any miners. It was a single attack and all the defensive measures at the mine were activated because of that.

    And these measures managed to defend against this one attack.

    This person is definitely a consummate level cultivator at the least. If it was an Astral ne cultivator Sam would be having a bit of trouble.

    If an Astral ne cultivator decides to damage Sam, then it is almost impossible for him to defend. He can find and kill them, but it is hard topletely avoid damage as there are too many ventures and they are too split.

    Particrly, the Deste is currently his main base and core of the dusk organization he would be having more than just a bit of trouble if someone attacked him. But he couldn¡¯t think of the possibility of someone attacking him all of a sudden.

    That night he went to the central continent and inspected the mine while he is doing the inspections someone came to him once again and informed of another attack, and this time there are casualties.

    Twenty miners died with the mine copse.

    "Order every miner to return to the base. Stop all the other operations in the Central continent. Inform the administrators in the city to find the families of the deceased, give them the bodies and tell them someone attacked the mine and we would avenge them.

    Compensate them however they see fit. If they have any kids of an employable youngster offer them a job in some administrative circle and join the kids in the school as permanent students. They would be employees in the school after they graduate.

    Also don¡¯t forget about the spirit stonepensation.

    Do it fast and do it properly. Show them the respect and take any scolding they throw at you.

    I would be taking over this casepletely."

    Sam gave out the orders as he moved on harbinger to the next mine. The attack was fresh, so he could get more clues here and when he went there he could see the traces of the mes almost melting the rocks of the mine.

    But that is not what surprised him, it is the fact the way the me reacted with the rock and the metal. It is extremely familiar to Sam. The heat waves that wereing off due to the aftermath were also familiar to Sam.

    Because it is extremely simr to the golden sun mes of his Golden sun crow bloodline. His golden mes and Yanwu¡¯s golden mes have simr effects, but their mes have more intensity.

    From the inquiry of the witnesses, they are also sure that the mes are golden in color.

    This is another surprise. Golden mes, simr to Golden sun mes. He is pretty sure that no creature in the entire deste is capable of that and Yanwu has never left his sight.

    This ispletely mysterious.

    Luckily Sam is a bit prepared for this kind of scenario and gave out orders.

    Immediately a bunch of puppets is deployed in all the mines by the miners who are evacuating the mines.

    These puppets are one of the special cases. They don¡¯t do any work, they just roam around the space randomly.

    They are made by cheap metals and they don¡¯t use any expensive parts. But they are extremely useful at the moment.

    As soon as these puppets are activated they are connected with the nearestmunication node or tower.

    And they would use a special technique simr to that bats to send some spiritual energy waves to the surroundings.

    Any living creatures within this range or any strong energy signature will be registered and the puppets will immediately catch the picture of it and recording the source that caused it within the range.

    It would be stored in the nearestmunication hub which uses one of the new innovations from the school.

    It is like moving surveince. Just like how the recorded data of thetv footage is stored somewhere else, these images are also sent to the information hub with the help of the enchanted spirits.

    And it did work.

    At midnight, Sam got a message that another mine was attacked and a recorded message was sent back to the nearest hub.

    Sam immediately went there to take a look.

    He saw five peopleing to the mine and throwing golden fireballs.

    They have golden-colored hair and there is a weird glow around their skin with a faint golden hue.

    Sam took the recorded images to the tempest valley.

    Old Beast looked at them and was surprised.

    "They are Sr Fragments. They are a weird race. They are all fire elemental warrior mages. And they use golden mes simr to the golden sun crow.

    They are Hou Yi¡¯s subordinates."

    "How did they get in here?"

    "I don¡¯t know, they either have to use space gates that you made or find a way to use an already existing space gate. Because all other kinds of Space travel arepletely banned from the Deste realm to the other realms.

    And they live too far away from here."

    "So, do you think that Hou Yi sent them here somehow?"

    "I believe so."

    "That fucker. "

    "I will have to take care of this as fast as I can. I don¡¯t know how many people or what level cultivators coulde in. Currently, we only spotted these five, and I have to catch them.

    How far can your spiritual sense spread?"

    "My range is suppressed by arge margin, so only half the continent."

    "Check if they are in this half."

    The old beast did as he was asked and gave an answer.

    "They are not here. They must be in the other half."

    "Okay keep the surveince. I will leave a subordinate here, if you find them, tell him. He will inform me of the space gatemunication system.

    If by any chance, you find any anomalies I might have to know inform him."

    Sam left as soon as he asked for that and went to the other half. He has a decent space gatework within the central continent, so traveling is easy.

    He reached each space gate and let out some more puppets.

    Puppets that are as small as little birds. These are some of his new research projects and they are used for surveince and tracking.

    He still didn¡¯t ce them up for normal production as he didn¡¯t finish the meridianwork to have maximum energy efficiency.

    These bird puppets flew around in the area and covered arge range.

    They are simr to the mine robots that are left for surveince but these things are a bit more advanced and they only do the search operations.

    They have a different set of abilities regarding their eyes.

    They can zoom and act like some telescope which he stole from that telescope from the charbhum realm.

    Then they can have a modified version of energy vision which might not be as detailed as Sam¡¯s own, but they have a decent energy vision. Thenes the X-ray vision. It is notpletely see-through, but it can find living organisms hidden in between rocks and other stuff.

    He has to create some new inscriptionworks to get this. In fact, this is more expensive than thebat puppets he made.

    And when an image is given to the enchanted spirits of this bird they would search for the things on that image.

    Person, object, beast, anything.

    And there is a portablemunication hub which they would send the signal as soon as they find out the location.

    They can estimate the exact distance from the spot and if Sam is present he could even find approximate spatial coordinates.

    Between midnight and dawn, the team attacked another mine and Sam immediately went there and released another set of birds and soon he managed to get an approximate location.

    He took off on the harbinger in that direction swiftly.

 Chapter 912: Solar Fragments

    Sam didn¡¯t bother to hide his presence, he just went there on the harbinger at his top speed and the forest along his path is being torn apart just from his tailwinds.

    When the five sr fragments felt the overwhelming presence, they are shocked. Before they could react though, Sam is already in the middle of all five of them.

    "Five Consummate stage cultivators? Your balls must be made of Meteorite sand toe after me with your pathetic strength."

    The five of them exchanged nces and decided to run away, but too bad it didn¡¯t work out. As soon as they wanted to move, Sam¡¯s shadows emerged and held them in the ce.

    "You are not going anywhere until I get my answers."

    "You are not getting any answers. We took pills for selective memory loss. We don¡¯t know how we came here."

    Sam looked at him and let the specter out to check on them.

    Specter took a brief look at their memories and decided that they are not lying.

    The memories of the whole day are missing.

    They got orders the day before yesterday that they would be sent to the deste and their goal is to find the mines and create chaos so that Sam and his personnel will be busy managing the issues.

    Only after a certain time after they gave orders did they send them to deste and the procedure of that travel and their point of drop here in the deste disappeared.

    But there are other memories that Sam could take advantage of.

    First thing is that the people that came out will track down these five people. These five people not only have a job to create chaos, they are also responsible for gaining some information regarding Sam in the next few days.

    The first batch of the soldiers from the Sr fragments wille here and they will be deal with the first half of the central continent upying it while the war is going on, the second batch of the soldiers will arrive giving them a surprise.

    Of course, everything would have been perfect if by any chance these five are not captured. If the people who gave orders to them are any smarter, they wouldn¡¯t let them attack and only make them focus on finding info.

    If Sam was in their ce, he would make his subordinates disguise themselves and infiltrate into Sam¡¯s camp in five different ces and the next batch of soldiers would track these five men in five groups which will inevitably give them chance to attack five different ces from both inside and outside easily destroying them.

    This is a better n and Sam could think of this in seconds.

    Anyway, at this moment, he couldn¡¯t be bothered with how bad their n is or how stupid they are, since he caught them he has to make sure that their current n wouldn¡¯t seed.

    Sam shackled them all and negated their cultivation before taking them to a valley under the control of the dusk organization.

    He left the five people there and started making preparations.

    He called for any Astral ne cultivators that don¡¯t have any tasks at their hand and let them stay within the valley.

    The valley is nearest to the center of the central continent.

    All the mines that are attacked by these five people are located near the center of the continent. He felt like whatever method they used, there is a high chance that they would be sending people to somewhere near the center.

    But even if that is right, he cannot be careless in other areas.

    He sent orders to all the cities, parks, and bases. Every employee must move to a protective base where the high-level defensive formations could be activated and leave all the production to the puppets.

    Sam contact Sirona who is in charge of puppet research and puppet production and told her to send the puppets to all the necessary areas and also release some of the unreleased puppets that were set aside for now to their respective positions.

    The whole dusk organization turned into some kind of warzone.

    The citizens and employees are feeling anxious.

    Meanwhile, Sam went back to the Old beast to learn about the Sr fragments a bit more and there was nothing too remarkable about them.

    The sr fragments are in a way, mutated humans. When Hou Yi destroyed the Golden Sun crows with his bow and arrow the golden sun crows who were on the level of immortals fell into a and soaked it with their blood.

    The blood which is more potent than the life force of the wholebined started seeping into the¡¯s core, vegetation, and humans forcing them to mutate ordingly. But the original is merely a ve where all kinds of ves working under Hou Yi used to reside and it couldn¡¯t sustain the mutation.

    So, Hou Yi who was intrigued by the new race created a family or a tribe out of them and sent them to a lower realm that has a suitable environment for them.

    They are good with fire elements mostly and there is an asional dual element with light elements too. They are good at fighting and they contribute to the army of Hou Yi by upying arge number of positions within.

    As for why they are able to attack Sam and how they managed to get here without breaking any rules of the game ispletely iprehensible.

    Sam waited for them to arrive in the valley and he deployed several of his subordinates with the tracking birds over a few ces in the continent to see if they followed any certain routes.

    The central continent is too big, he cannot cover everything with a single set of tracking birds. The main problem is the time constraint which he couldn¡¯t possibly ovee at the moment.

    So, he can only see if he can capture their path or position at a specific time and trace a path to their origin.

    Three dayster, Sam indeed got a message from a subordinate that some of their tracking birds spotted some golden-haired people moving through the forest, but they are too fast for the birds to capture a proper image.

    They must be Astral ne cultivators and they are moving towards the valley. There must be some kind of special technique for them to track these five down.

    They managed to near the valley faster than he thought.

    There are ten people this time and these ten are all Astral ne cultivators.

    When they arrived in the valley they looked at the five Consummate cultivators in the center with a frown.

    The leader wanted to ask them some questions, but before they could do anything, Sam whistled and his subordinates came out. The ones that came are all Astral ne Initiation cultivators that, too Initial stage, he doesn¡¯t know how they managed toe here and why they only sent the Initial stage cultivators, but this is a chance.

    Even though Sam doesn¡¯t have too much of an overwhelming advantage on the opponents, it is easy for him to overpower them.

    He took out his reaper sword and activated light elemental fusion as he shed them right and left.

    The battle went on for a decent time as the subordinates and the sr fragments tied.

    Sam is the only anomaly and he managed to capture them down. Four of the ten Sr Fragments are dead and four on Sam¡¯s side are injured. Sam went to heal them properly and let them rest and then started the questioning.

    Sam was pretty frustrated with the info he got. These are not all the first batch of the soldiers. These are only half and the major force of the first batch, there a second half who is the minor force with Consummate level cultivation and they have a different task.

    They went somewhere else as soon as they came.

    And these people don¡¯t know what their tasks are and they also don¡¯t know where they arrived. They also took these so-called selective amnesia pills.

    This is another dead end.

    The only useful information Sam got from them is the fact that the second batch of soldiers would being only after a week.

    Apart from that, there is really no use keeping them alive.

    But Sam found another use for them.

    Yanwu can eat them.

    These people are mutants of the Golden sun crow blood and humans. If their flesh, blood, and organs are consumed, Yanwu would benefit from it, particrly since they are Astral ne, he would be able to break through to the Middle stage Initiation of the Astral ne as soon as Yanwu digested thempletely.

    So, he gave the four corpses to Yanwu instantly and waited for him to digest to give the rest and since they are doomed to die and they don¡¯t have any other use, Sam directly threw them into the divine dimension and let Yanwu eat them as much as he can.

 Chapter 913: Special Space Gate

    Sam desperately wanted to contact Ling Tian at the moment.

    He has to stop the Sr fragments froming here. There is too much at stake for him in this ce. If he cannot do that, he has to find where these people are arriving on this.

    There is too much at stake within this and the only reason he was able to feel safe is that the only ess to this from other realms is through his organization.

    In fact most people working in his organization don¡¯t even know this ce exists.

    He has too many people and too many resources at stake.

    But he cannot contact Ling Tian. There is no response from even the forth floor of the divine dimension.

    So, he can only think of other ways, he deployed the consummate stage cultivators to search for consummate sr fragments that came with the first batch. He ordered for immediate engagement when they found where they are.

    Meanwhile, he took the map of the central continent and tried to find a ce which is mostly likely to be the right ce for these people to arrive. But there are very limited options and most of these ces are upied by the dusk organization as they also make good hiding spots and ambush points.

    Meanwhile, Raiju is going a tracking trip along with another Raiju elder. They are trying to trace back the path of the Astral ne Sr Fragments through the smell and it is actually working.

    But it is a bit slower than what Sam would have wanted.

    The Central continent is full of beasts and it would be hard to get a hold of a single smell in the middle of such a forest when they are moving at such a speed. But still both of them are doing an impable job at tracing back.

    So, Sam gave up on the first idea of searching through the map directly and let Raiju and his uncle take care of the situation.

    But three days of constant tracking lead them to a mountain region at the center of the Central continent.

    This valley is arge circr field formed naturally with a series of mountains surrounding it.

    It is a great ce for conducting fights and tournaments.

    But from the looks of it, it seems like something is wrong with this ce.

    It is almost impossible to appear here out of thin air unless they used a one sided space gate which is not possible as they couldn¡¯t construct one without marking a spot on this side. Then they would have to use a dimensional drifter or device simr to this.

    But from what Ling Tian and Old beast said, the coordinates of this ce are erased from the rest of the world.

    They cannot calcte the coordinates of this ce unless they marked it from inside.

    That means, there is a connection between this ce and somewhere else which he doesn¡¯t know about.

    They thought that they searched this ce high and low, but the exploration has to begin once again now.

    Sam personally started searching the area.

    With a normal nce, there is nothing wrong, even the spiritual sense and the energy vision didn¡¯t show anything.

    No traces of spatial energy, no traces of trap doors, hidden mechanisms nothing. No matter how he looked at it, everything ispletely normal. It looked like a normal rocky mountain lump no matter how many times they saw it.

    San decided to go with the most time consuming but urate method.

    He started scanning every inch of the valley with the observation. It would take days even with the Astral ne cultivation and increased range.

    It is hard to scan each inch of the of the rock and particrly deeply until they reached the core of each mountain and then also to the core of the valley.

    This ce might even be the center point of this, if he has to go to the core of the whole to find out how they areing here, he would do so.

    And thankfully after three days of constant checking it wasn¡¯t required.

    Because Sam found something in the core of a mountain.

    He immediately started destroying the mountain and soon there is arge hole which led to a stone pir in the middle of the mountain core.

    He must say destroying the mountain is easier than observing it, so he proceeded to destroy mountains and out of tens of these mountains, he found the stone pirs in eight of them.

    They are inscribed with hundreds of runic structures. The designs areplicated beyond belief. But most of them are things Sam is familiar with.

    They are runes for concealing and the runes for spatial transfer.

    He examined them for another day to get an understanding on what this is and he came to some conclusions.

    This is a special space gate and it has very weird but specific functions. It is a oneway space gate when it was used to send someone outside. But the downside is that they cannot select the location they need to go. It was already locked. And even worst thing is that it is expensive. Even Sam had to think twice even thrice before taking that many spirit stones.

    When it is used as a receiver, any space gate in the world could ess it, but they had to drop the perfect coordinates. If they have the coordinates they can send anything or anyone inside.

    But in the current situation it shouldn¡¯t be possible to use this as the iing function was sealed.

    In fact, even the outgoing function was supposed to be sealed, but someone used the inscriptions to loosen that seal a long time ago and Sam could guess who it might be because of the style of inscriptions.

    It has to be Murali. The master of several trades of the Deste. His mysterious disappearance is now solved.

    He used his knowledge to alter the seal a bit and escaped from this, but even he didn¡¯t mess with the iing seal.

    Technically it should be impossible for anyone to use this formation toe to this.

    But there is no other way, other than this formation that could exin the sudden appearance of these sr fragments.

    Sam recorded everything and went to the tempest valley to show the formation to the Old beast.

    "This formation is of an old style. Extremely old. It is ancient. No one in these days would use this type of space gate as it is time consuming to set up and energy consuming to use.

    But trust me it creates a proper space gate channel and it is almost impossible to interfere in it unless someone knows the exact schematics of the formation and has a great grasp of the spatial element and knowledge of space gate.

    This would be a treasure for inscription researchers and only a few can actually replicate it. Can you recreate it?"

    The Old Beast asked Sam.

    "No, not at my current level. The setup is tooplicated my energy level or strength and even my mental strength wouldn¡¯t support it any time soon. But I can do some alterations on the inscriptions particrly on the seals and concealments."

    "I guessed as much.

    I think someone might be using the small altercation in the outgoing seal to send people back here."

    "But that is almost impossible."

    "You said it yourself, almost. It can be done when someone who knows how to make these things tries.

    And you are taking about a God here. Do you think he cannot get his hands on such a person? Hou Yi might be a piece of crap, but he is a high level god all the same. So, you have to be prepared and not rule out the possibility."

    "But why did he only send a few people and that too weakest ones?"

    Sam thought and the Old beast also became silent.

    "I have to check them once again. If my theory is correct then I might have an advantage here."

    With that Sam went back to the valley and examined them once again closely.

    Then he finally understood what the situation is and he was ecstatic for a second.

    The seal that Murali altered is notpletely undone. He made sure that people who are strong couldn¡¯t be sent out from here. Sam doesn¡¯t know whether murali did this intentionally or he was only capable of unsealing this much or he might have thought this much was enough.

    But if Old beast¡¯s theory about them sending people here is right, then this also adds up. Then cannot send too many people at the same time and they also cannot send people who are too powerful which gives him some window.

    Before he could think of ways to find the what stage cultivator can be sent here, he got a message and it was from the beast faction.

    Particrly it was from Sanjay, he arrived at the city with an important message and he mentioned that it was an extreme emergency. And there was mention of the Sr fragments.

 Chapter 914: Major powers

    Sam returned to the city immediately and went to his office where Sanjay is waiting.

    By the time Sam reached there, Sanjay is looking at the wall with paintings of some of the memorable days and achievements of the school.

    Sanjay became a bit flustered when Sam entered the room.

    They shook their hands and extended their wishes.

    "Long time no see."

    Sam said casually as he sat down.

    "Yes, it has been a really long time."

    Sanjay also took a seat.

    "What brings you here? They mentioned something rted to the sr fragments?"

    "Yes, yesterday, a person arrived at the beast faction. He has golden hair and golden eyes. He is a Peak stage Consummate level cultivator and he gave us a proposal. He wants our cooperation to deal with you and your organization.

    They want our support in waging a war on you with our soldiers and he also said they want something else. But he wouldn¡¯t reveal the details until I signed some kind of contract with them that will bind our souls. And in the ount, if one of the parties breaks the contract, their soul would be decimated.

    We immediately captured that guy and took him in our custody. But it is hard to transport him, so I think it would be better if youe by yourself."

    Sam¡¯s frown deepened as Sanjay finished the story. This is a bit troublesome. If the sr fragments really reached the beast faction, there is no reason for them to not reach other factions.

    And even their trial of smell was lost from that central valley. He couldn¡¯t even find where they are or which direction they went. But now that he found one of them, there is no way he could let it go. He has to gain any possible information from him and also find out if the other sr fragments went to different factions.

    Sam and Sanjay left the city and went to the beast faction. There he saw a lot of property destroyed. There was a reallyrge battle.

    "Who captured him?"

    "It is my father who did it. He is also a peak Consummate stage cultivator, he only stepped down because he couldn¡¯t find the next step to grow. So, he wanted more time to himself."

    "Tell him to visit the city after the situation with the Sr fragments is over."

    Sanjay¡¯s eyes brightened, but Sam didn¡¯t see or he didn¡¯t care and just continued.

    "I will send a construction team to repair the faction, feel free to suggest your own adjustments to them."

    "Thank you. But I think we can manage."

    "No, it is my problem actually, so the damage caused by that should be fixed by me. Anyway, where is that guy?"

    Sanjay led him to a secluded area. There the sr fragment was bound to arge rock with all kinds of cultivation shackles ced on him.

    When the sr fragment saw Sam¡¯s face, he started breathing rapidly.

    "Seems like you guys do identify me. Tell me why you are here?"

    "He must have already told you, why do you think we are here?" He said as he pointed at Sanjay with his chin.

    Sam looked at him coldly and took out his handgun. He forcefully stuffed one of the fingers of the sr fragment into the gun barrel and asked once again.

    "Why are you here?"

    When there was no immediate response, he just pulled the trigger.

    *AARRRGGGHHHHHHHHHH...."

    The bullet crushed the finger and went directly into the arm before tearing the flesh apart and escaping into the air.

    Sanjay hissed when he saw the aftermath of the hand.

    But Sam didn¡¯t even flinch as he casually looked at the young sr fragment and ced another finger in the barrel.

    "Why are you here?"

    "I will tell you. I will tell you. I am here to talk a deal with the beast faction, there are four more sr fragments who went to the four remaining major powers. We were ordered to make them sign a contract to get their help in exchange for the power and resources of the deste."

    "How did you arrive at this?"

    That guy once again became silent, but Sam didn¡¯t have any of it, he just simply shot him on another finger and moved onto the third one.

    *ARRRGGGGGGHHH..."

    "I don¡¯t know the exact process, we were sent through a space gate and we arrived in the middle of thatrge valley. From there the Consummate stage cultivators like me using a special transference scroll which transported us to the edge of the continent to arrive near the factions."

    "What is the exact n with the major powers?"

    "I don¡¯t know that, all I am responsible for is to ask them to sign the contract and install a device in of the space gates of the major powers. Then my task is done."

    There is only a day left before the second batch of peoplees here. Sam is already surprised that these guys didn¡¯t take the selective amnesia pills and remembered everything. There must have been a reason for that.

    But he couldn¡¯t waste his time thinking of that reason and has to focus on solving the situation at hand.

    He took all the contents from the Sr fragment¡¯s spatial ring and found the instation object to examine it.

    He even asked the seniors of the Space gate association for some advice. But they couldn¡¯t find what exactly its purpose is without installing it in the formation. But Sam didn¡¯t want to risk it.

    So, he didn¡¯t dwell on it too much and diverted his attention to the rest of the major powers.

    If the sr fragments went there, there should be some kind of news, but no one came to him yet, which could mean only one thing. They wanted to turn their back on him.

    The only reason Sam left them alone even after he became more powerful than all of thembined is that he respected the traditions and history of the ce and also he didn¡¯t want to bother with something so troublesome as ruling thends and the people.

    It is already hard enough for him to maintain the organization as it is and he is thankful that he has great executives that work for him, if he took ruling thends into his hands, then the only thing that awaits him is suffering and immense responsibility without a moment of peace. There is no way he would carry a burden like that.

    But from the looks of it, the major powers are taking his mercy for granted.

    But he still didn¡¯t want to take extreme measures, so he gave them a chance, he sent word for all the major powers to send the head of their organization to meet him if there is an uninvited guest from a different realm.

    Sam was direct and on point.

    When the message was received, the heads of these four organizations are confused.

    The fact that they didn¡¯t inform like the beast faction is already a clear indication that they drew the line and they were on the other side, but that is only based on the fact that Sam didn¡¯t know what is happening here.

    But now that Sam knew and he directly asked, they are confused.

    The four of them met together for a secret meeting to decide on it.

    "How did the news leak?" The temple head from the thunder god temple asked.

    "It is because of that guy from Beast faction. We forgot to take his immaturity into ount. He became a new head and he already seems so desperate to kiss Sam¡¯s ass."

    "But now that Sam knew of this, what should we do? Should we really give him the news about these people?" The thunderbolt sect¡¯s head asked.

    "Of course not." "Obviously."

    The thunder god temple head didn¡¯t agree while the herb garden¡¯s head agreed.

    "What do you mean by obviously? This is the only chance we have to get rid of Sam, he has been ruling us over for decades. We have to gain our freedom back." The thunder god temple head made his case.

    "First, he never really ruled us. He mostly focused on the business and his schools. As for the rest, he is stronger than us. What do you expect from him? To be meek and docile in front of you when he can kill you on a whim? Stop being unrealistic. It is a mistake for us to even think of the possibility of betraying him.

    You all seemed to have forgotten what he can do and could do when he was just a Nascent and Pre-transcendent. Now he is beyond the Consummate stage, at least that is what some of his students and subordinates said.

    If by any chance he came out of this unscathed, which is of a high possibility, we would be dead meat. Then he would really rule over the whole all by himself."

 Chapter 915: War

    The discussion was heated between the four heads of the major powers.

    The herb garden head is adamant about giving the information to Sam, while the remaining three are opposed to it. Of the three, the thunderbolt sect is sitting on the fence. He is saying that he wouldn¡¯t help the sr fragments and he wouldn¡¯t inform Sam either.

    The thunder god temple and the lightning spear sect arepletely against giving the information to Sam.

    "How many times do I have to tell you? The Sr fragments are stronger and more powerful than Sam. Did you even see the Consummate stage cultivators they sent? They are barely in theirte twenties or early thirties. What was Sam doing at that age? What was that you and me are doing at that age? They are certainly powerful."

    "Of course, they are powerful, but why do you think they need our help if they are that powerful, tell them to destroy Sam and we can talk. I wouldn¡¯t even hesitate to submit all mynds and people to them if they can aplish that."

    The thunder god temple head and the Herb Garden head are arguing for a long time.

    And finally, the herb garden head couldn¡¯t take it and said.

    "Okay, I will write up a soul contract that I wouldn¡¯t leak any information regarding you people and your ns, but I don¡¯t want to be involved in this war. I will give the Sr fragment away to Sam and stay put on the sidelines."

    With that, he stood up and walked away.

    Noone stopped him. They know that it is useless to stop him much less attack him. He can surely escape.

    And the herb garden head returned back to his ce, before sneaking out once again.

    He is not sure if he can capture the sr fragment, so he went to the city and informed Sam of his decision and Sam sent a couple of his subordinates to capture the Sr fragment and bring him here.

    From what he learned from their interrogation, they are not going to have any form of contact between themselves. They would just finish their tasks and stay passive for now until the next batches and gives them orders.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know what the exact n is, but he has some guesses, so to make sure, he locked all the space gates connecting between them and the major powers. He only kept the Beast faction and the Herb garden¡¯s gates open.

    He only left one Space gate open between the major power that didn¡¯te to him and these gates are not present within the city. One of them is the space gate between the thunder god temple and city which was constructed years ago. One of the first Space gates Sam had made.

    He kept them open to see what these factions and the Sr fragments are getting at. But not without any precautions.

    He started tinkering with the space gate formations by himself to make some adjustments just to be okay and he put one of the elite teams full of Consummate stage cultivators and a couple of Astral ne cultivators to stand guard near these space gates just in case.

    There is only a single day and Sam is focused on preparations.

    He is going to stay in the Central Continent, near the valley.

    Watt who happened to be in the city is going to control the whole defensive fortifications of the city while he was absent.

    All the puppet defensive mechanisms are deployed and installed overnight.

    Sirona is in charge of the puppets and recing the damaged ones and deploying the news ones ording to the situation.

    Across the, all the employees of the organization and their families were ordered to retreat into the parks which have defensive measures for emergencies. With those formations, they can hold off against some Pre-transcendent stage cultivators and easily win. But any more than that, they could barely afford some time.

    Sam already called for the forces from various ces and sent them to different ces. He prepared himself as much as he can.

    It was good thing that he never scrimped and saved on the defensive measures, even though he knew no one in this could harm him.

    While Sam is a bit tense, his subordinates are all excited. There are hundreds of consummate stage cultivators deployed today and they are all excited beyond belief as most of the time they could only train and not participate in actual battles.

    So, this is a moment they are waiting for. They are confident in their abilities as they trained until they are exhausted like a dead dog.

    Now they only awaited the Sr fragments to not back down, so that they could fight to heart¡¯s content.

    The next day.

    Sam who is near the valley along with his beasts and the Raiju elder, waiting for the sr fragments, noticed the stone pirs shining brightly and there is spatial rift that opened in between.

    The sr fragments dropped one after another and there are over two dozen Astral ne Initiation cultivators and forty Consummate stage cultivators, but that didn¡¯t stop.

    The Consummate stage cultivators immediately used some kind of transference scroll and most of them disappeared from the spot.

    After those Consummate stage cultivators left, another batch of Consummate stage cultivators also did the same. But when they reached the fourth batch and the fifth batch, they didn¡¯t disappear, they are all stayed right here in the valley in confusion as their scrolls didn¡¯t work.

    Everything happened within three minutes. The spatial rift closed down and the Astral ne cultivators who were supposed to take action are confused because of the presence of the Consummate stage cultivators.

    One Astral ne cultivator stepped forward and smoothened the scene before exining.

    "The first batch of people must have failed in some of their targets, but do not worry. We will go with n B. The Consummate stage cultivators will be going after the mines and other areas that are under the Dusk organization¡¯s control.

    Remember, this is a war. We can only fight with people of the same cultivation. We cannot kill the people of lesser cultivation randomly.

    And trust me, we should not break this rule at all costs and make sure that you yell out this rule before you invade the ce. Because once the rule doesn¡¯t exist, the other side can ughter you all and we can ughter the people of another side.

    It is a massive lose-lose situation.

    The major powers of this ce will be responsible for war below the Consummate level. Now Go."

    But as soon as he threw that order away. Sam and his beasts came out of the hiding and surrounding the valley.

    "You are not going anywhere."

    Sam said in a loud but cold voice and looked at them calmly. The leader is a bit tense. But he tried his best to calm himself down and said.

    "Sam, this is a war between you and us. We should abide by the rules."

    "Really? Then tell me, why are you waging this war, and then I might abide by these very rules."

    "You attacked and destroyed the Hellian tribe. We are a family by marriage, so we are here to take revenge."

    "So, Hel and Hou Yi cut a deal and sent to you be ughtered."

    Sam spat coldly and continued.

    "Okay, then let us abide by your rules, I would like to see how you will survive."

    With that San whistled loudly and a bunch of Consummate level beasts that reside in the Central continent all surrounded them.

    "Consummate for Consummate and Astral ne for Astral ne."

    The Consummate level beasts are not just some random beasts from the Central Continent, there are some beasts that Sam collected from the Unconquered realm. There are over a hundred of them and all of them mauled the consummate level Sr Fragments. There are some talented people within the Sr fragments that could take on multiple opponents, but there are talented people on Sam¡¯s side as well.

    So, before he could engage with the Astral ne cultivators, he sent a message back to call for a dozen dragon hawk tribe¡¯s consummate level cultivators and a dozen consummates from the K tribe which he brought for this asion.

    After sending the message, he looked at the list on the wrist screen. Currently, he is not engaged with any families or organizations. So, he selected Sr Fragments as his next target. In actual fact, he didn¡¯t want to engage them this early even though they are Hou Yi¡¯s subordinates. They are just too big. At least three times bigger than the K tribe and their head is also far stronger.

    He wanted to slowly build his power up and fight, but since they are so eager to die, he cannot do anything but oblige.

    And since there is a limit to how many people and how powerful the cultivators they can send to the deste, he would take that to his advantage and chip them down until they are all dead.

    He can also progress in cultivation because of Yanwu like this and might even reach thete stage Initiation by the end of it.

 Chapter 916: Information

    The valley is currently filled with sounds of battle, rage, and screams. The beasts and the Consummate stage cultivators shed and Sam, Yanwu, and the rest of his beasts are shing with the Astral ne cultivators.

    The Raiju elder didn¡¯t make the move immediately and waited on the side.

    Currently out of the two dozen Astral ne cultivators, around eighteen of them are in the Initial stage and the rest of them are in the middle stage of Astral ne Initiation.

    It could be said that this is a toughpetition for Sam. But not when he is using different tricks.

    He created new energy cell explosives. Particrly the water elemental ones. The Sr fragments all have fire elemental expertise. So, obviously, they are careful about the water elemental explosive.

    And Sam didn¡¯t even stand of ceremony with thoughts like having a fair fight when he did with the barbarian realm. He only has one thought in mind, killing ruthlessly and his beastsplied with him on that.

    While they kept the Astral ne cultivator busy, Sam held a mini rocketuncher on his shoulder as he aimed at the opponents from his harbinger.

    Even if the energy cellsnded directly they are not powerful enough to kill them, but they would surely be damaged severely and Sam is okay with that. And along with normal water elemental explosions, Sam used poison explosives.

    And the Astral ne level poison is no joke.

    Once he made sure that he hit every single one of them with this poison and water elemental explosive at least once, Sam stored the rocketuncher away and took out the reaper and executioner swords along with his shadows, and jumped in.

    The fight became nasty. In fact too nasty as he savagely cut one after another. It was extremely one-sided and even when Sam is the one being outnumbered.

    Sam left the leader alive to get the gist of the n while he threw the rest of the bodies to Yanwu so that he could munch on.

    This would be enough for him to break through to the Middle stage of Initiation.

    Meanwhile, the Dragon hawk tribe and the K tribe¡¯s people came and they took on the Consummate level sr fragments that are fighting with the beasts. Even though there are many rare beasts the sr fragments still had a slight upper hand. But now that these two teams came. They are already done for.

    After the battle which started abruptly was over as fast as it started, a small camp was arranged around the valley and Sam started questioning the team leader of the Astral ne cultivators that he captured.

    "What is your n? Or what are your duties?"

    Sam asked while he held the gun over one of the fingers of the team leader.

    "Our team is actually here to only set the base and to estimate your strength. We are not the main force of the Sr fragments. In fact, we are disposables and the bottom of the Astral ne cultivators of the tribe."

    "So, after estimating our strength, what are you going to do?"

    "I don¡¯t know exactly what it is. But the main force wille here only after a week and that too only half of the force wille.

    They didn¡¯t let me in on the full n and I only got a gist. After staying here for a week, we will perform small attacks on your ces using the Major powers and estimate the strength you hold in this and after that, I will be informing the leader of the first half of the main force.

    He would make a decision whether he should fight with and finish you off faster or if he should hold you in your ce with some defensive measures and wait for the second half of the main force."

    "So, why are you guys not sending main force directly?"

    "I don¡¯t know about that. They said it was a strategy. But I heard something along the lines that it is difficult to send all the people at the same time. I don¡¯t know the exact and urate reasons."

    "Where do you n to meet them?"

    "They will being for us. They can track us down."

    "How are they sending you guys here?"

    "There is arge set up there with a lot of Space gate formations and hundreds of millions of spirit stones with a lot of Space gate experts making something. I cannot understand what was happening exactly."

    "Then I don¡¯t have much use for you."

    With that, Sam sliced his throat. But he didn¡¯t give body to Yanwu. He has other things to do with it and he has to do it in the divine dimension as it takes a long time and a lot of energy.

    But before that, he left the Raiju elder in the valley along with his beasts and he went back to the city to get the reports of the situation in other ces.

    They have a vast informationwork with many spies within the major powers. They might not be able to give the information to Sam about major things that happen at the top of the faction, but they can give normal and regr information about the changes there and they sent the information regarding these sr fragments.

    The major powers will have half a dozen Consummate stage cultivators at most, but the sr fragments sent dozens of them here to wage a war on Sam.

    The sr fragments magically appeared through the space gates of the thunder god temple, lightning spear sect, and the Thunderbolt sect.

    Now Sam could understand the exact use of those devices that are installed in the space gates. These devices make it possible for the sr fragments to use the special transference scrolls and reach the major powers.

    From there the attacks began. Since Sam shut down most of the space gates connecting the organization and the city with the major powers, they had to use the sources that he deliberately left open which made them appear out of the city and a few other ces that are considered the outskirts for the organization and the war began.

    Most of the war was taken over by the puppets and the defense mechanisms. Grenades,rge crossbows, bio-fuel, methane gas, Impact cannons, methane shell cannons, poison gases,rge hunter traps.

    The war is over in a sh.

    If only the Sr Fragments tribe knew how resourceful and systematic the dusk organization is and how detailed Sam made his nning when building this whole thing, they wouldn¡¯t have had to suffer this many losses.

    After this first wave of war which was nipped in its buds, Sam sent people to the major powers.

    Since he already got the purpose of the major powers, there is no need for him to hold back on them. The current heads are dead and his major supporters are crippled with new heads appointed overnight.

    If not for the fact, Sam ispletely bothered by the ruling and stuff, he would have taken over.

    After the major powers are settled with their new heads who are still shaking in their boots, because they saw the execution of their predecessor, Sam went on with his tasks.

    The first one is nning a surprise with the body of the Sr Fragment he kept intact and other gifts alongside so that he could have an easy time when the main force arrives.

    The second thing is to prepare for the breakthrough. Within the next few days, Sam would be Middle stage Astral ne Initiation cultivator.

    But he is not that happy, even though this is fast by any standards.

    He is concerned. The leader of the Sr Fragment tribe is actually a Peak stage Astral ne Pre-transcendent.

    This is more troublesome than killing a Consummate as a Nascent stage cultivator.

    He has to do the utmost nning and make many considerations.

    If only he could get some information.

    As he thought of this, he immediately went to the formation that leads to the shop. Currently, he took down four powers under different gods and he has four heirlooms in his hands. But he didn¡¯t go for the exchange because he didn¡¯t need to immediately.

    But since he cannot contact the gods at this moment, he has to find the only possible way to get in touch with them.

    That is this shop. At first, he wanted to umte the heirlooms for something else, but now he has no choice.

    When Sam¡¯s consciousness entered the shop space, the Avatar asked what he wanted.

    Sam didn¡¯t even take a look at the list of resources and said.

    "I want to buy information."

    "What information exactly?"

    "The Sr Fragment tribe is currently attacking the deste through a special space gate. I want to know what the exact number of people or the most powerful person that could be sent through this space gate."

    "Sorry, that information is not possible to obtain. You can ask something that your god allowed you to ask."

    "May I know what they are?"

    "Exnations of the resources.

    Consultation on the resources¡¯ usefulness to you.

    Information on the location of certain resources.

    Ling Tian¡¯s opinions and guidance on certain aspects."

    Sam was dumbfounded. He doesn¡¯t know that there is a way like this to contact as he didn¡¯t care too much about the shop. But now it seems this is the best product they are offering here.

    "I want the fourth one."

    "Ling Tian will contact you shortly on his own. You have to wait. Do you want anything else?"

    Sam asked for something which needed some consultation for even the shopkeeper, so he paid with one heirloom, and his consciousness left.

 Chapter 917: Conversation with Ling Tian

    Sam is currently in the Central Continent as he meditated along with his beasts. They are on a verge of a breakthrough.

    Yanwu almost ate every single of the dead bodies of the Sr fragments that arrived on the deste. Except for one corpse; which Sam stored to create some surprise.

    Thisrge consumption ensured that Yanwu alone absorbs energy from those corpses which are sufficient enough for the breakthrough of all of them.

    And here they are. As soon as the energy requirement was met, they met together for the breakthrough.

    As they channeled the energy together and started breaking the limits, there is something Sam is feeling at the moment. The golden crow bloodline within his body is currentlypletely activated and is moving towards Sam¡¯s lungs.

    Sam frowned and almost stopped circting the energy, but his body instinctually reacted and allowed the bloodline and the energy to umte on his lungs and they went through a metamorphosis. He felt like his lungs are ripped away from his body and ced inside a furnace.

    As if they are being heated like a lump of metal before forging. The temperature increased, but by now his instincts are telling him not to let the energy cirction stop. In fact he couldn¡¯t stop.

    After the heat reached a certain limit, Sam¡¯s chest started burning. His body couldn¡¯t take it. As he trembled in the burning pain for over an hour, he finally felt a bitfortable as the pain slowly started receding.

    He could feel that his lungs have changed. But he couldn¡¯t concentrate on that at the moment and proceeded with the breakthrough and from now the process became easier.

    After the breakthrough, Sam finally had a chance to check up on his lungs. The beasts are looking at him with concern, but they couldn¡¯t do anything.

    Yanwu is the only one who is looking at him carefully expecting something.

    Sam observed his own lungs carefully and found something interesting in fact it is interesting to the point that he became extremely cautious.

    His lungs are glowing with golden hue at the moment. The color of the lungs changed from the normal color to that of a mix between golden color and the blood red color.

    He doesn¡¯t know exactly what is going on with the lungs, but even his breathing changed. He channeled a small amount of energy into his lungs to see what would happen and the air that he exhaled suddenly became a streak of golden me.

    Sam was stunned. He immediately stopped channeling energy and observed his lungs in horror.

    Yanwu who is standing beside him started crowing in happiness while the rest of the beasts are trying toprehend the situation.

    Sam is this shocked not because he can breath fire now. In fact he could have done it in normal circumstances too, if he wanted to throw a fire attack from his mouth or nose, all he has to do is channel his energy to that spot and use fire elemental energy to attack.

    But at this moment this is not just a premeditated attack. Breathing fire became his bodily function. The energy required is far less. In fact to create a decent fireball in normal cases, if we considered the energy required to be ten units, then now it became two minutes if he did it with his lungs and exhaled it through the mouth or nose.

    Then he remembered the special bloodline arts of these things and understood where this is alling from. Until now, the main reason that he cannot use the bloodline arts is that they would leave residual effects on his body for days if not for months. And sometimes he might be inatose state for months like it happened previously.

    But now that he saw the change in these lungs he thought of something. One of the two bloodline arts of the Golden Sun crow is actually rted to the lungs and breathing fire.

    Now he can perform the arm without effecting his body and the most adverse effect might even be an energy exhaustion.

    He felt excited. Now he has another attack in his arsenal that he doesn¡¯t have to worry about being put in an extremely weak state if he used it and use it in a direct battle. Particrly, the opponents of higher strength which is exactly what he needed at the moment.

    As he was getting excited on what this cultivation technique will bring him in the future, Sam got another good news. There is a signal from the fourth floor of the tower.

    Ling Tian finally contacted him.

    Sam immediately went to meet that guy.

    "Where the hell have you gone? I had to lose an heirloom just to talk to you."

    "Of course, you cannot talk to me without paying a price. Do you think it would be as easy as before? As thepetition changes the difficulty increases."

    Sam wanted to curse him to death, but he controlled his urge before exining the situation with the Sr fragments.

    "Of course, I figured as much. But don¡¯t worry a meeting is currently being held at the moment regarding this issue."

    "Currently? Just how much time did you guys take to even take care of this issue? Damn it, why am I not being treated same as the other yers, they get guidance, they were never plotted against and other gods don¡¯t hate them to the core."

    "Then doesn¡¯t that say something about you? Maybe you should be working on your manners."

    "You guys are really having fun because of my plights don¡¯t you?"

    "I am not answering that. Anyway, we had to beat some bigshots up to get the evidence about the plot against you and it is currently being reviewed in a meeting to question the gods.

    As for your situation and the questions you have. I will give you some information which might help you.

    The Sr fragments cannot see you and the deste at all. They just have an old man in their hands which was probably drawn by Hel when she was still here and she might have known about this Space gate before.

    And they are using the information she gave to them to work here.

    Currently they don¡¯t know what you have done to the sr fragments and how their mission status is. That is one of the reasons they are sending people in batches.

    It seems like they have a very outdated information on your technology which exins their stupid mistakes regardinig provoking your mines and such."

    "But if they really have old information, how did they know about the mines that I am exploring."

    "They searched like dogs for three days. Try being less discreet sometimes, you are way too high profile.

    Anyway, along with that, the space gate is not exactly stable and they have a limit of sending people. This space gate uses the spatial tunnel to directly open to send them there, instead of moving the people and objects directly into the tunnel, this opens up directly, so even someone not in the formation can jump inst second and it with some altercations it can be used two ways.

    But the spatial tunnel is sealed which made is somewhat... how should I put it?... Cramped. It has limitations on the power of the people and the number of people they could send at a time and they increasing the number of slowly as they loosened that cramped tunnel bit by bit.

    But the final limit would be an Middle Stage of Astral ne Pre-transcendence.

    And if they send a person of that caliber, they would have to wait for a while to ess the tunnel again.

    At the same time, they cannot send more than a few dozen people at a time with lower power.

    I think you can manage."

    "It is not that I am afraid I cannot manage, it is that I don¡¯t know for what kind of threat should I prepare. I don¡¯t want to waste my time on something new if I can manage the threat with what I already have."

    "You already have something."

    "Yeah, I made something to go against the K tribe if pushes to shove. It is a special gift for the Sr Fragments and it would be of great help for me if I manage to send this gift earlier than I arrived there.

    But there is another doubt I have.

    Since they are using the space tunnel which should be normally used for taking something out of deste, can I send something through it when the tunnel opens?"

    Sam asked casually. Ling Tian looked at him with surprise and then a smile appeared on his face. He suddenly felt a tinge of pity for the Sr fragments. Their god just damned them to the worst time of their lives since the inception of their race.

    "Is there anything else you want to know?" Ling Tian asked Sam.

    "I want heavenly wine. One that I could use is Astral ne. Try to ask Sun Wukong about this and see if he would be willing to give some in exchange for some heirlooms."

    "From what I see, you already asked for some resources and it seems like you can get them, so you only have one heirloom left with you. Can you afford the heavenly wine with that?

    Well, from the looks of it, an heirloom¡¯s value changes and the Sr fragment¡¯s heirloom is going to be very valuablepared to the rest of my current heirlooms, and meanwhile, I can collect one more. I think I can afford at least some of it."

    "I will ask him."

    With that, the meeting is finally over.

 Chapter 918: Arrival

    While Sam was having a discussion with Ling Tian, there was another meeting that was being held between the gods that are involved in the game.

    Even though some yers are eliminated, all twelve of them are gathered.

    The Gambler is currently sitting leisurely in his chair as he looked at Hel and Hou Yi calmly.

    "You guys better give me a proper exnation. Otherwise, don¡¯t me me for being nasty."

    "I don¡¯t have anything to exin. I have nothing to do with this issue."

    Hel replied stubbornly.

    "Hel, the special scroll that links to the Space gate in the deste. Only two people still have them and one of them is your father. If you are telling me that Hou Yi has enough brain to steal a scroll from God of Mischief Loki himself, then you are being delusional.

    There are very few people in the world that could steal from him and I personally know every one of them. And it just so happens you are one of them along with a motive."

    "Motive? I don¡¯t have any motive."

    "K tribe. One of the tribes that sent you some great soldier candidates. In your army, there are many K barbarians that survived your training for years. Now it was gone. You used the K tribe to attack Sam by kidnapping his friend and failed miserably to lose the tribe in the process.

    They destroyed your statues, they destroyed the wormhole you used to transport their soldier candidates. If anyone has a motive that is you. Don¡¯t even bother denying it like that. You and I both know it is useless."

    "I already told you. I don¡¯t have anything to do with it. Did you see any of my subordinates attacking your precious little toy? Is there anyone from my subordinates helping the sr fragments? They started this on their own. And even if someone prompted them to do it, it is not me."

    Gambler turned his gaze back to Hou Yi. He is more shocked and surprised than anyone else as she strongly denied any involvement in this matter.

    He felt like he was being yed. Because, no matter how they looked at it, his involvement couldn¡¯t be denied. There is no way a lesser race like Sr fragments can get their hands on the space tunnel ess scroll to the Deste.

    It is a high-level and highly secretive thing.

    And there is no way they would go there and attack the deste a sealed and abandoned realm that was in that state for who knows how long.

    That is why he didn¡¯t want to get involved in this from the start. But Hel convinced him by saying this could be taken as a family issue and revenge and him just helping his subordinates with the revenge.

    She also said that she would support him in that statement. But she is not mentioning anything about the marriage or rtionship between Hellian and the sr fragments much less support him.

    He felt like he was cheated and rightfully so.

    Because Hel is currently feeling intense contempt towards him at his shocked expression. That is also the reason she picked him instead of Indra. Indra might hate Sam, but he is not as stupid as Hou Yi to fall for such a trap just because of the hatred.

    Now the whole meeting is calling his argument bullshit. Nobody bought that story and only Hel¡¯s support could give him some credibility.

    But all she said was this.

    "He wanted to know if Sam is targeting any of my tribes and I said he was targeting Hellian tribe. I agree that I captured one of his friends but I didn¡¯t kill him, in fact, I made sure that they didn¡¯t kill him. I just wanted to attract his attention to the K tribe and make him die there.

    If you wantpensation for that, I would do so. But deliberately initiating an attack on his organization is none of my business.

    Sam was angry because of Watt and targeted the Hellian and that was that. Hou Yi is the one who took advantage of the situation and used the marriage as an excuse to attack Sam and his organization. If you have anything take it up with him."

    This was the reply that she gave and Gambler and her started arguing which led to the current scenario.

    Atst, Gambler dropped the argument, he knew it would be useless to drag her into this, but it is going to be easy to mess with Hou Yi.

    "From now on, Hou Yi¡¯s subordinate heirlooms will increase in value by a hundred percent. If anyone disagrees you can object."

    Gambler said coldly. No one objected. Hou Yi is feeling humiliated. In this game what the yers don¡¯t know is the one who pays the resources in exchange of an heirloom is the original owner of the heirlooms. That means H has to be the one who pays a price for the blood iron spear of the K tribe. Anything exchanged with that spear in the shopes out of her own pocket.

    Now that Hou Yi has to pay double the amount of the actual value.

    Even though it is not enough to make him feel a pinch, it is still his loss amongst all the gods that are in the game with him.

    This is not exactly a great feeling to have.

    But that is not all.

    "You will have to pay 150 percent more for Sam."

    "I don¡¯t agree." Hou Yi reacted immediately.

    But Gambler didn¡¯t give in. He calmly looked at him and said.

    "You sent a tribe full of Astral ne cultivators to kill my yer with a deliberate plot. I am letting you off easy without breaking your body like I saidst time. If you don¡¯t want topensate like that, let us go to war. Only one of us should remain at the end. Are you down?"

    Hou Yi gritted his teeth in frustration and could only agree to the condition.

    "Hel, your n to lure Sam to the K tribe will not go away withoutpensation. You have to pay 100 percent more for Sam and 50 percent for the rest of the yers."

    "Why would I be paying for the rest of the yers?"

    "Of course, because of your previous offense. Don¡¯t tell me you thought we would forget."

    "No, I was the one who forgot it. I agree with your conditions. Now can I go?"

    The meeting ended like this.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know what exactly is happening there and what kind of decisions they took. But currently, he is looking at the list as he marked the subordinate organizations of Hel and Hou Yi. There is no way he could let them go without taking any revenge.

    If only he knew the conditions Gambler got for him, he would be even happier.

    Currently, he is waiting for the first batch of the main forces to arrive while drawing up a proper n to proceed in taking down their subordinate organizations.

    He is not in a hurry though, he has a day for the force toe and he has another week before theter batches, so he can take his time.

    So, he just waited there for the space tunnel to open.

    And time passed faster with work.

    When he saw the first signs of spatial energy, he whistled loudly and the n started.

    He sent the undead he made with the corpse of the previous batch¡¯s leader a few meters from the center of the valley where he would be noticed.

    The undead ran there and knelt on the ground. It opened its mouth and some blood fell over.

    His body is full of injuries.

    The space tunnel opened and the sr fragments starteding over. The Consummate stage cultivators used the transference scrolls just like before and disappeared.

    But this time, there are more Astral ne cultivators. By the end of it Sam was surprised to see around sixty Astral ne Initiation cultivators out of which fifty of them are at the Initial stage and nine of them are of the middle stage with one being ate-stage cultivator.

    They are going big on this one.

    The spatial tunnel closed in an instant. By now, they saw the undead, but they couldn¡¯t recognize him as one and they ran over towards him to see what happened.

    They didn¡¯t touch him hurriedly though. They are cautious enough and looked around for some sort of trials and when they saw the bloody footsteps of the undead and the dripping blood that was already ced Sam, they lost some caution and the leader walked to the body.

    He wanted to check on him. But as soon as he turned the body around. The undead opened his mouth and bit the leader in the neck.

    The teeth are not normal. They are reced by some metallic injecting teeth Sam created to use in puppets that are based off of animals with biting specialties.

    The teeth are filled with blood of golems, vampires and hydra poison allbined together.

    The leader used his golden mes to burn the body to ashes. But he could feel his vitality seeping low and hydra poison corroding him faster and faster. There is an immediate drop in hisbat strength.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    As the corpse burned, there are some explosions that threw some needles from the body. They are all tainted with poison and they managed to prate into the skin of the Astral ne cultivator. They are made of high-grade metals. As Sam saw those needles, he is already feeling a pinch from the side.

    But this is the only way. At least ten people are shot by those needles and the leader was about to give some orders when they heard a loud whistle from Sam.

 Chapter 919: Clash

    Sam¡¯s whistle echoed through the whole area and even the Sr fragments heard it.

    At that exact moment, Sam¡¯s beasts came out of their hiding and he also ran out towards them, but before they reached, his shadows who are hiding at the outskirts of the valley appeared in different positions at the edge and they stabbed a medium sized metallic pole that was hidden between the rubble.

    The Sr fragments are distracted by the undead who looked like one of their own, that is the reason they didn¡¯t check the surroundings. Anyway the whole n started with a giant underestimation of Sam from the Sr fragments.

    They are so sure that Sam wouldn¡¯t be able to find the valley and the Space tunnel. They thought that he would panic from the start from the sudden attacks the news from the major powers, everything else. Even underestimation was a major understatement.

    At least for the scout batch, which came before the current batch, they didn¡¯t even bother giving the escape means, they are sure that Sam would be unaware of their entry point which led to the previous massacre.

    Anyway, these pirs are simr to the ones that he used in destroying the city walls of the K tribe. As soon as the shadow stabbed them in the ground, the spiritual energy in the surroundings started vibrating and after the initial vibration, the spatial energy vibrated.

    This is not to injure or attack the Sr fragments. It is to restrict them. They wouldn¡¯t work on the transference scroll.

    This is Sam operating on the assumption that at least this batch would have some escape means as they might have considered their entry point being revealed.

    And his guess is right, one of them used the transference scroll to escape, but as soon as he did that, the spatial energy vibrations that areing from all sides collided with the energy emitting from the transference scrolls and he suffered the bacsh of the collision.

    His body fell on the floor with a lot of muscle tears and wounds as he bled out slowly.

    Sam suddenly felt it was a pity that he revealed this function so early, if only he waited for them to use them together the impact would have been great.

    But it was only a fleeting thought.

    Sam and the beasts dove into the Central Valley with Raiju elder supervising the whole thing. If anything goes wrong, he will take over and sweep through the whole thing.

    His first target is the not the leader in his weak moment, rather the Middle stage candidates. He took out both reaper and executioner swords as he shed with them with partial light elemental fusion.

    While the beasts took care of the Initial stage Initiation cultivators. They are all in middle stage just like him, so this is a bit of overkill.

    The leader saw Sam¡¯s approach and ordered the Middle stage cultivators.

    "Nine of you work as a team. From the looks of it he broke through to the middle-stage. If he is done the beasts will automatically back down. Be careful and always stay in the formation."

    He spoke in a painful voice and sat down straight before closing his eyes and meditating. He started burning his blood. He knew that something entered his blood and it is failing his organs, he has his own thoughts on how to cure this situation and this is the most dangerous of them all.

    He is burning his blood and for the heat his own blood would react differently as his bloodline is of fire. But the foreign blood and poison wouldn¡¯t react the same way. He can identify the foreign bodies and get rid of that blood forcefully.

    He would be weakened after this, but at least he would stay alive.

    While he is going through that painful procedure. Sam already started shing with the nine Middle stage Initiation cultivators.

    When Sam reached them, they surrounded him from all the sides and no matter which direction Sam moved, they made sure that they moved along with him to keep him in the center as they attacked with ranged attacks from their positions.

    No matter how he moved, they are trying to keep their rtive positions same and he was being attacked from all nine sides.

    But that didn¡¯tst long, the golden mes are doing little damage to him and he is faster than them. He activated partial light element suddenly and zoomed towards the person in front of him.

    His target moved backwards and the rest of the maintained their rtive positions by moving at the same speed, but they are not fast enough.

    Sam¡¯s sword reached the target and left a sh on his chest and when he was about to continue with a sh to the throat, he felt arge ming inferno hit him in from all the sides.

    The remaining eight locked on to him as they attacked simultaneously which threw him off the track.

    He didn¡¯t receive too much damage but that doesn¡¯t mean he didn¡¯t receive any at all.

    The more surprising thing is they managed to catch him even in his partial fusion form.

    Before he coulde back to himself, the nine opponents are back to their original position.

    Sam did a slow rotation on the same spot to take a look at all of them, they are all keenly looking at him without batting their eyes and when Sam suddenly lunged towards an opponent, the opponent didn¡¯t dodge this time, he directlyunched a jet of golden mes at Sam which thetter blocked with a swing of his sword.

    But before he couldnd that sword de on the target, the remaining eight managed to lock him down and threw their attacks.

    This is a pretty annoying formation he must say. The nine opponents are good at aiming their ranged attacks and have perfect timing.

    Even at his speed they managed to predict and lock his position at a certain time and attacked at the same time. If they attacked individually he might even be able to take it without so much as flinch, thebined attack is making him feel the heat.

    The same thing happened for a few more times and Sam barely managed tond some shes on the torso¡¯s of the opponents.

    But he noticed that he is wasting his energy to defend against the constant attacks and knew that speed is not the answer for them, he might be able to win the fight eventually, but he would be in no condition to fight against the leader.

    So, he changed his strategy.

    When he lunged towards a target this time, he suddenly deactivated the partial light elemental fusion in the middle and the speed disappeared, he turned back into his normal speed which made the opponents to miss their target and before they managed to prepare for the next attack Sam disappeared into the shadow and reappeared right before the target in front of him. He is just an inch away from him as both of them looked into each other¡¯s eyes.

    Sam stabbed the two swords into the opponents bodies from the rear and he locked the body in ce before turning around along with it.

    The rest of the opponents threw an attack at him, but he stepped back as much as he can and let the dead body take the attacks for him.

    When the body started burning he made the undead out of it and let it loose in the middle of the formation.

    That is the beauty of the Sr fragment¡¯s body. Even the dead body can endure a bit of heat, if it was an ordinary dead body, then it would have already been turned to ashes and even the bones would have been gone.

    Once the formation broke, Sam let himself loose. He used partial shadow elemental fusion and disappeared in a puff of ck smoke before reappearing near the one guy who is dealing with the crazy undead that wasing at him.

    He shed his swords. One of them missed and the other shed the hand off of the target.

    Hended and disappeared from the spot once again, before reappearing out of the formation.

    The opponents became angry and they also activated their elemental fusions. Unlike Sam, they went with full fusion and all of them turned into mass of golden mes.

    The eight streaks of golden mes and ck shadow shed repeatedly in the spot and Sam was on the back foot once again.

    Even in his shadow form they are catching on to him and the golden mes are slowly umting damage on his body.

    Before he could decide to change his form and fight in a different way, he was caught by one of them with a direct attack and fell on the floor and before he could disappear, they surrounded him and used their full strength to incinerate him with golden mes.

    Sam bathed in golden mes as they washed him downpletely from all sides, he couldn¡¯t see anything except for those mes.

    The incineration went on for a few minutes straight and when it was gone, they thought they would see a corpse of Sam, but instead they saw a mass of golden mes, leisurelyying on the ground.

    "I wanted to save this form for thest. But you guys are good."

    Sam also activated full fire elemental fusion and he also turned into a streak of golden mes. Now the eight streaks are shing with one.

    This became like nasty meleebat and Sam started using void style and the first punchnded on the target already confirmed to the opponents that they are in trouble.

 Chapter 920: Grapple

    Sam had a myriad of thoughts going through his mind while he fought with them.

    He never had a problem with dealing nine to ten opponents of same level. There are times he defeated dozens of people who are powerful than him much less people of the same level. Except when he was attacked by the yers.

    He has a whole new understanding of the Sr fragments, the previous batch of soldiers who came are disposable at best whenpared to the current batch.

    These nine people, could really put on a fight and even when he used the light element and shadow element, the fastest right behind the space element which he cannot use because of the restrictions he himself put on.

    They have intense coordination between themselves that was even hard to achieve in one of Sam¡¯s own teams and they all attacked simultaneously with perfect sync without anymunication. It is almost impossible to predict his position when he is in light elemental fusion, but they did.

    The only reason he didn¡¯t use the fire element is because they would be having certain level of immunity due to their simrities and the fight would be decided on who wouldst longer.

    As for the rest of the elements, if he cannot get near them with the light and shadow element, it is almost impossible with rest of them. He would not only be slower, he would also be an easier target before he could make an proper attack or defensive move.

    This is the first time he was this helpless even with therge number of abilities he has. They are a perfect team and now he is thinking of some kind of ideas on how to train his own teams with their strategies.

    And all these thoughts while he was kicking their asses with void style and the fire elemental fusion. Now that they are all on purely equal terms it is just a good old fashioned fist fight, which Sam is winning.

    The opponents couldn¡¯t keep the fire elemental fusion for as long as Sam and his use of void style is making them suffer injuries that are otherwise impossible in their form and when the first one ran out of energy and his fusion turned into partial fusion, Sam¡¯s hand directly went into his heart and the void style exploded the heart.

    He moved to the next target instantly and his punchnded in the guts which was thest attack that made the fusion disappear.

    And the next punch thatnded on the face made him bleed though the orifices on his face and faint on the spot leading to a slow death.

    The next target was simpler as it was a jab of his palm to the neck causing his throat to break.

    The team is falling off one after another and soon there are only three members left.

    They looked around to see if there is another way out. But the beasts are almost already done with the rest of the Sr Fragments so they cannot escape easily.

    When Sam is about to proceed to kill the next one, they epted their fate, but at this exact moment, a palm came out of nowhere and stopped Sam¡¯s fist.

    Sam pulled his hand back and looked at the leader who just blocked the punch.

    "Not bad you recovered faster than I thought."

    Sam said and he looked at the guy carefully. He is examining his physical aspects to see if he can find anything wrong with him. Any sign of weakness would be helpful.

    The leader didn¡¯t speak though, he activated fire elemental fusion and started attacking Sam.

    Sam who is also in his fusion form is attacking him in the same way.

    The fight is bing intense and soon Sam suddenly stopped in his tracks and changed his fusion form. He deactivated his fire elemental fusion and changed it to the light elemental fusion.

    His speed increased and he took out the reaper sword once again, he started slicing the leader who is stronger than Sam.

    The main reason he changed out of the fire elemental fusion, that guy has a slight advantage over him. Extremely slight and Sam doesn¡¯t want any advantage to that guy.

    And this time it worked since no other Sr fragments are there to cover his back.

    He stabbed the guy in the back, but he didn¡¯t go deep enough to kill him or do some critical damage, because he almost caught Sam¡¯s hands.

    Sam moved away from that spot and came from another side, he left a sh on the left hand, but had to dodge a punch on hair¡¯s breadth.

    The next sh was made at his thigh and a kick was missed by another hair¡¯s breadth.

    The next sh was made to block a kick that almost hit him. Sam knew he should finish it off faster to get out of the situation. The opponent is getting used to his speed.

    So, he took out the second sword and started using void style and he managed to create more damage, but when Sam was about to make a finishing blow on the heart of the opponent with the executioner while the reaper is used to cover his dodging side, the opponent suddenly let the reaper stab into him, dodging the executioner sword a bit which made it enter his chest missing the heart by a small distance.

    But in exchange, he got hold of Sam¡¯s arms and he rolled over as he put Sam in a full body lock.

    Sam and him started grappling and in process he managed to take out the swords off of his body and middle of it, the fire elemental fusion was gone and his next move made Sam feel extremely shocked.

    His fire elemental fusion was gone, but the golden glow did not. Because he activated the light elemental fusion.

    The light elemental fusion which Sam hasn¡¯t seen in any other person. The element which he never saw anyone use to attack.

    He was shocked to the point he forgot to struggle to get out of the grappling lock, which made him more vulnerable and the lock tightened.

    Sam¡¯s whole body is currently under the other person¡¯s suppression.

    While he was struggling unknown foreign energy started entering his body. He closed his eyes trying to confirm what kind of energy that is, but the leader spoke.

    "Don¡¯t worry, you will not find what energy it is, because it would be simr to your light elemental energy. I am surprised you could the light element for physical attacks, there is only one person I knew who can do that.

    You also share a bloodline with a golden sun crow who is feasting on the corpses my subordinates. You are full of surprises."

    Sam didn¡¯t bother to pay attention to his words and tried to get out, but he couldn¡¯t. The lock is too tricky to escape. Just when he was about to change the elemental fusion into shadow elemental fusion, he felt the energy entering his body attack him.

    In fact it is more like the body is trying to reject the light elemental energy out of it, but it is being forcefully injected which would cause extreme resistance that could damage him.

    "You should listen to while I am being good. If you change your elemental fusion, your body will instinctively fight the injecting energy which would cause you some serious damage. So, you better stay in this light elemental fusion and answer my questions.

    Where did you get a Golden Sun crow. What realm are they on? How did you meet one?"

    Sam was surprised for a second and said.

    "You do know that Golden Sun crow is a high-level tribe right? You wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything even if you knew their position. A guard from that tribe would kill your tribe."

    "Yeah, that is what I know. But since you managed to get one, there is a way. I want to know how."

    "I don¡¯t know any other way and my way wouldn¡¯t work for you. But I can tell you something else. Which you might not want to hear."

    "You will die in a few minutes if you don¡¯t talk what I want you to talk. If you talk about what I don¡¯t want to listen to, your time would only reduce. So, do make sure that you use your words wisely."

    "Well, it is something rted to my death actually. Do you see why my beasts are not moving even though I appear to be in a deadly situation?"

    Sam paused and the opponent looked at the beasts, they are all looking at him casually, they looked rxed which puzzled him.

    "Because they know that I am still okay and I don¡¯t need any of their help. And do you know why they know that?"

    The opponent is still feeling a bitplicated and had a bad feeling about this.

    He tried to let Sam go, but it was alreadyte.

    "They know that because I talk to them and they also know that I can do this."

    With that Sam¡¯s body started glowing with a golden color and it is as bright as a star and an explosion urred on top of his body and when it was back to normal. All they saw is Samying down in arge pit and a bunch of half molten bones beside him.

    This is the effect of one of the bloodline arts of Yanwu, one that uses light elements. He wanted to try that after he got the change in his lungs to see what changes it brought and he had some results because of this fight.

 Chapter 921: Present

    Sam captured the remaining two Astral ne cultivators to get some information. He ced them in thunder prison and while Yanwu munched on the corpses and the rest of the beasts helped him by gathering those corpses.

    He then went to a quiet ce to meditate a bit as he went through his observations of the new changes in his body.

    The Golden lungs he has are a definite result of the Golden Sun crow bloodline. He knew that much and now he can breathe fire like a normal bodily function with minimal energy.

    Apart from that, he saw the real advantage of those lungs in the previous battle. The fire elemental fusion and light elemental fusion are consuming way less energy than normal. It reduced by almost fifty percent and even the bloodline technique is taking way lesser energy than normal.

    These are really great advantages. He can easily outperform his opponents. Now all that was left is the other remaining bloodline art of the Golden sun crow bloodline which uses the lungs directly and if he finished that, he would be getting a better and almostplete understanding of the function of these lungs.

    After making sure he made all the observations, he took his gun and went to meet the two hostages they got. Sam wanted to save the leader¡¯s soul at least so that they can get some memories, but there are barely any bones left and the brain is an importantponent in conducting the soul necromancy.

    There is no way they could perform it.

    So, he can only resort to these two people.

    Sam inserted one finger into the muzzle and shot them first to give them a demonstration on what would happen.

    A finger getting crushed, is not exactly a pain that could be tolerated easily.

    And they sing like little birds after that demonstration.

    They gave plenty of useful information and Sam kept them up the whole night as he listened to it carefully.

    The Sr Fragments¡¯ next n is to send a simr force, but this time there would be more middle-stage cultivators, morete-stage cultivators and it is possible for a few peak stage Astral ne Initiation cultivators toe and their leader might be Initial Stage cultivator of Astral ne Pre-transcendence.

    Sam is a bit surprised. Because the maximum limit is a middle-stage of Astral ne Pre-transcendence.

    So, he asked about why they are not sending a person of that stage and the answer is simple. They thought it would be an overkill and they don¡¯t have too many Middle-stage Pre-transcendence stage cultivators to spare.

    They cannot afford to send one to such a sure-win battle at least in their minds.

    Then Sam proceeded to ask the remaining questions about the strategy and such and he finally understood why they failed this miserably.

    This is all because of Hou Yi. That guy severely downyed Sam¡¯s prowess and means. All he did is give them a gist of how he had different bloodlines and beasts at his disposal. He didn¡¯t care about Sam¡¯s influence, he didn¡¯t care about his inventions and he didn¡¯t care about his meticulousness.

    In Hou Yi¡¯s opinion, Sam is a lucky brat and that is what he projected to these people which made them feel a bit rxed and opted for such a loose strategy.

    They sent the Consummate stage cultivators to create some chaos and since Sam¡¯s headquarters is in the western continent, they thought it would take some time for him to get a hold of this situation.

    And they are sure that they are best in the Consummate realmpared to all of Sam¡¯s subordinates and confident in their hiding skills.

    On top of that, they didn¡¯t think that Sam would search for them himself or send other Astral ne cultivators, all they had to do is stay there for a week.

    And thenes the scout batch. They are not only responsible for making deals with the major powers, but they are also responsible for scouting some of Sam¡¯s important locations and attacking them so that they would inform the first batch of the main force.

    If the scouts are in a good situation, the main force will split up and if they are in a bad situation they will y more of a defensive game and inform the same to second main force as soon as they came.

    If it was the first case, they would just finish this off in a week ande back to the space tunnel and when it opened they would go back to the other side.

    Sam was really surprised by how ignorant the Sr fragments are to attack him like that and how petty and brainless Hou Yi can be.

    Because of his personal evaluation of Sam, he lost a perfectly good tribe.

    Even Sam felt a pinch in his heart. Such perfect force and he just wasted them by cing them in a faraway ce with limited resources and also sent them to their deaths.

    After listening to the whole story, Sam left the ce and made some preparations.

    There is one big gift, that he wants to give the Sr fragments and since he knew that the space tunnel is two-way street, he is going to use that to send this gift to them.

    He made this thing as a precaution against the K tribe. If he was not able to take care of them normally, he would have used this and be done with it.

    Everything would have been over with one attack.

    But for that, Sam needs to create a proper setup and he also needs to maintain perfect timing.

    He started working on the valley himself, the first thing he did is dig arge vertical hole in the middle of the valley exactly on top of which the space tunnel appears

    And he started digging tunnels underground connecting to thatrge hole in the next two days.

    After he was done there, he ced arge rocket inside the vertical hole. This rocket is actually made of Space elemental stones and it is essentially arge elemental energy cell.

    As for the propulsion agent, he used abination of methane and bio-fuel. All he needs is for its weight to be carried with the propulsion.

    There is noplex structure and there are not manyplicated devices mounted on it. It is an energy cell shell with a lot ofpressed fuel ced in it which would send the rocket away.

    He dug an extra tunnel above the tunnels that dug under to act as exhaust outlets, this tunnel is for him to reside there and destabilize it.

    After he was done with that, he started setting a formation. Simr to the one he did in the battle with the first batch of the main force.

    A formation that could mess with the spatial energy and collisions.

    The next batch would have far more superior strength and it would be hard for him and the beasts and even the Raiju elder to take care of all of them.

    So, he has to make sure that he did some serious damage before they even stabilized their position.

    And after the whole setup is over he went into the divine dimension to create anotherrge rocket but with different elemental stonesyered together to create a different explosive.

    This would be of great use in dealing with the Sr fragment when he knocked on their doors.

    The days passed quickly with Sam being extremely busy.

    And the day for the arrival of the second batch of the main forces came.

    Sam is hidden inside the tunnel he arranged himself for destabilizing the rocket and as soon as he sensed the spatial fluctuations, he started destabilizing it.

    It is an extremelyrge energy cell. Larger than anything he ever made, so it would take some time.

    The Sr fragments appeared one after the other and they were surprised to see the half of the rocket which is exposed openly and they came near to check it.

    For them it is merely a pure mass of spatial energy.

    Sampletely focused on the energy cell and he destabilized it extremely fast to the point that the vein on his forehead is bulging due to the mental pressure.

    After three minutes, the rocket was in the final stages of destabilizing and Sam activated the fuel jet which started the propulsion, the sr fragments that are examining it suddenly felt a bit surprised and alerted, but before they could do anything, the rocket slowly started raising towards the spatial tunnel while creatingrge Spatial waves due to the destabilized energy.

    At this exact moment, the Void hopper activated the formation. Even though it has limited battle abilities and has limited maturity, it can do something as trivial as this and as soon as the formation around activated, the spatial energy wavesing from the rocket shed with the vibrationsing from the opposite side and since the range is toorge and the waves covered the whole valley, the explosions due to the collisions also covered the whole valley which included the positions of the Sr fragments too and the explosions didn¡¯t treat them lightly.

 Chapter 922: Gift delivered

    The elemental cell rocket managed to get into the space tunnel before it even started closing and the spatial waves caused the whole area to be a mess of series of explosions.

    None of the sr fragments are standing, including the leader who turned out to be the Initial stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivator couldn¡¯t stand there.

    But it was only temporary because the attack couldn¡¯tst long. Every sr fragment is bleeding at the moment and they did realize that they are in a trap.

    "It¡¯s a trap. Escape everyone. Use transference scroll to east."

    The leader yelled his order and then took out his own transference scroll. Sam who was about to make a move halted in his tracks along with the rest and they waited for the sr fragments to hurt themselves more.

    They did find out the trap because of the obvious signs but they didn¡¯t think too much and didn¡¯t know what kind of trap that is because of not so obvious signs which they cannot see.

    And as they used the transference scrolls all at the same time in same direction, the formation reacted in kind.

    *BOOM*

    This time it is not even like a series of explosions. The timing was almost perfect and the energy explosions managed to create enough damage for some people toy on the ground as they bled profusely and for some people to try and stand up with a groaning pain.

    Sam and his group finally made a move.

    And this time Raiju elder also came in. The leader of the opposition is an Initial Stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivator of the Astral ne.

    So, It is better to have the Raiju elder deal with him than fighting him on his own and he also has something else to test.

    He let the beasts deal with the people at the rear. People of lower cultivation level and are doing a great job. After all, even if they are in hundreds they are injured beyond belief.

    The leader who is obviously the least injured of them all is currently looking at Sam with utmost resentment as he saw the beasts killing his subordinates.

    If not for the presence of the Raiju elder he would have made a move and ughtered each beast.

    But too bad for him the Raiju elder is looking at him like he was some piece of steaming piece of shit. With disdain and disregard along with some provocation stating ¡¯do something if you dare¡¯.

    Sam didn¡¯t engage with the leader, he let the Raiju elder deal with it, he jumped in front of the medium stage Initiation cultivators.

    But he is not here for the fight.

    There are around fifteen of them.

    And they are not as coordinated as the nine from the first batch.

    These people might even be weaker than the first nine.

    Anyway, he didn¡¯t want a slugfest and a fistfight with all of them at this moment. He has something else to do.

    He looked at their injured selves and couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit sorry for them. Because it looked like a waste to kill them like this.

    Sam¡¯s body turned golden as he activated fire elemental fusion. The feather coat is also covered with a golden glow as he made some hand-signs. His lungs expanded to maximum and the energy started umting in them as they slowly expanded the lungs even more.

    The surroundings almost turned void of spiritual energy as he rapidly absorbed and the opponents who saw this, couldn¡¯t help but be nervous and started attacking him.

    But from within his ming body, a fire crow was created and hit the person who is leading the attack and the another bird went for another person. He is not letting anyone near more than five meters of him and the attacks that are being thrown it him from out of that range are being countered with fire attacks.

    They cannot attack him from anywhere and they are being attack from where he stood without even moving a bit.

    After two minutes of constant sucking of energy,and all of that being injected into his lungs forcefully, the energy started converting into pure golden mes.

    And when they saw the change, their first reaction is to scatter. But Sam looked at them in pity, it is already a bitte. They should have moved away a long time ago.

    Sam blew the mes from his mouth and the golden mes turned into arge ming storm that covered almost quarter of the whole valley,pletely covering the fifteen Middle-stage Initiation Astral ne cultivators.

    The golden mes zed over their bodies and they activated their fusions to defend against it as much as they can, but it was not enough. Their fusion disappeared after a few seconds and their energy waspletely suppressed.

    Their flesh started burning and bones melting. They could feel the whole flesh turning in to ash right before their eyes.

    "ARRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHH]"

    "NOOOOOOOO"

    "SAAAAAAVVEEEEE MEEEE."

    Screams of agony and pain echoed in the whole valley. When the fire was gone, there is arge pit with molten rocks, the men disappeared and instead of them there are bits and pieces of the bones and skeletons left in that pit.

    There is nothing left in that spot.

    Sam¡¯s fusion disappeared and he felt a bit weak. He looked at the aftermath he left behind and felt a bit surprised and excited.

    Fifteen people died just like that with a single move.

    And they are all strong and could have put up a decent fight against him.

    And he still has some energy left in his body.

    He felt stronger all of a sudden.

    He looked at the rear where the fight between the Raiju elder and that leader is being extremely one sided. But the Raiju elder has to hold back a lot.

    He doesn¡¯t want to kill that guy, because Sam has some use for him.

    Sam just sat there in the pit as he examined the skeletons and looked at the rest of battles now and then to make sure nothing is going wrong.

    After an hour the battle was over. There are a pile of bodies for Yanwu to munch on and Raiju elder has his paw on the unconscious team leader/

    They started cleaning up.

    Meanwhile, far far away and around an hour before.

    It is the time when the Sr Fragments are still operating a series of Space gates while maintaining the Space tunnel so that the journey wouldn¡¯t be interrupted and the people wouldn¡¯t die or get lost to somewhere else.

    The operator of the Space gate is not the Sr fragment, he looked like an elf but he is a bit taller and his skin tone is ck unlike normal white of the elves.

    He is a Dark Elf. A high level Elven race who are on par with the highest level of nobility of the normal elven race.

    It can be said they are a subrace just like how beastmen have different subraces within. But these guys are superior than the actual race.

    As the Dark elf is trying to close he space tunnel, he felt something and said.

    "I can detect some presence within the tunnel. Something seemed to be wrong."

    "What do you mean? Did one of our people get stuck?"

    One of the people near him asked.

    "How would I know? I am not the designer or builder of this tunnel, I am just an operator. I don¡¯t know what is wrong. But whatever it is, it ising towards us."

    "Us? Does that mean someone is using the tunnel toe here?"

    "I don¡¯t know what ising, but I don¡¯t think it is a person."

    The Dark elf became a bit nervous and thought for a moment, before saying.

    "I think it is better to close the tunnel."

    "Are you sure?" I think it might be one of us. Something must have gone wrong and they might be escaping."

    "If we are wrong, and it was someone or something else, it coulde here."

    "Let ite and we will see what it can do." This time it was not the same person who replied.

    Everyone looked at the direction the voice came from. There is another Sr fragment who has a long golden beard.

    The head of the Sr fragments.

    The leader of the tribe, he looked at the space tunnel with a bit of disdain.

    That was until a wave of energy sted through the space tunnel and a frown reced that disdain.

    "Close the gate." The head ordered and the Dark elf muttered something snide under his breath.

    But they are a bit toote because the rocket already reached the end of the tunnel and half of it was already to this site when the tunnel shrunk and slowed its exit down.

    Everyone became alert and anxious as they looked at therge mass of spatial elemental energypletely destabilized and on verge of an explosion and before it could make it out of the tunnel, it exploded.

    *BOOM*

 Chapter 923: Message

    The explosion made the leader of the sr tribe be blown away. He crashed into the surrounding walls and then into the buildings beforending almost a hundred meters away.

    Before he could recover from the shock his body has gone through, he was surprised again. A powerful suction force started sucking him back and in the middle of that, he managed to gain his footing and tried to resist.

    When he saw what was in front of him, he was stunned in silence for a second.

    There is arge or even a giant hole in space created in the spot of the spatial tunnel and everything in the surroundings is being sucked in.

    There are some dead bodies that are being sucked in first and then the alive ones who are blown away just like him.

    The dark elf who is clinging onto a tree started yelling like crazy and he saw the head of the tribe standing his ground against the suction force.

    "Tribe Chief, Save me. My father wouldn¡¯t let you get away with this. Please save me. If I die here, you would be in war in the Dark Elf n."

    He started yelling threats, but before the chief could react, the tree was uprooted by the suction force and the dark elf was gone along with it.

    The surrounding hundred meter radius ispletely going through a catastrophe. The chief was the one who could stand his ground and even he felt threatened.

    He noticed that the copse of the tunnel stopped, but the space is not mending itself.

    He used all his strength to defend himself and managed to slowly walk out of the range of the turbulence.

    By now, even the top soil on the earth was being pulled over and only therge tight soil and rock below the top soil is intact.

    He doesn¡¯t know how long it would take for the spatial hole to mend, but it wouldn¡¯t be anytime soon.

    Only after he managed topletely get out of the range did he manage to think of other things and the first thing that came to his mind is the tribe.

    Arge portion of his tribe¡¯s property and many people from his tribe are dead.

    He couldn¡¯t help but wonder what would have happened if the explosive managed toe this sidepletely.

    He felt shivers run down his spine.

    Then came another realization, the people he sent to the deste are noting back.

    It is impossible for theme and any spections that they might be alive and chances of their return are pure delusions.

    His tribe¡¯s power dropped to one-third.

    And then came other realizations. The after math of this will result in more enemies for him. First, Sam who they provoked so much that he sent such a thing towards them and second, the Dark Elf tribe who sent their young prodigy who is so adept in spatialws and ways.

    The first one was expected, but the second one is really an added bonus. He really couldn¡¯t understand, how he managed toe to this stage.

    The only silver lining is that the task itself was given by their god Hou Yi and the Dark Elf tribe is also a tribe under him. In fact, he is the one who gave orders to the Dark Elf tribe to help the Sr Fragments.

    So, there is still a chance to remedy the situation.

    But he knew that he had a lot more to lose.

    He immediately went to the main mansion of the tribe and summoned everyone of the tribe members. They didn¡¯t stay in any more residences of the tribe. He activated the defensive formations after calling them into the mansion.

    The tribe members are already anxious because of the situation they were in. Some of them even saw thatrge spatial hole that appeared out of nowhere. They became anxious after the explosion and now that their tribe chief is asking them to hide inside, they are even more surprised.

    Meanwhile, the one who caused this chaos, Sam is leisurely interrogating the leader they caught.

    He is asking for the information rted to the tribe¡¯syout, location, escape measures, defenses, anything he could think of.

    He knew the rocket would make some serious damage there, but he doesn¡¯t know how much damage it could make and how much of the tribe, he still has left to deal with.

    After one day of interrogation, he took the beasts, the raiju elder and left deste.

    Apart from that, he took five more Astral ne cultivators and arrived in the Sr Fragment realm.

    They named this realm after themselves since they are the rulers. But now that the other people in the tribe knew that they are in trouble, there are already whispers in one day.

    Sam arrived in the city with golden blonde hair. He came in with disguise and no one thought much of him. He can even mimic the aura of the Sr Fragments easily, so there is no need for him to worry and disguise too much.

    When he was walking through the city though, another golden fragment who is hurrying towards the family mansion looked at him and asked.

    "Why are you still here? What branch are you from?"

    Sam was a bit surprised.

    "Didn¡¯t the chief tell all the people below Consummate to get into the inner mansion?"

    "I just came from outside of the city. I was in the forest hunting."

    Sam said casually and examined the person who was questioning him.

    He is a consummate level cultivator and since Sam has toned down his aura and tried to mimic the sr fragments, he thought Sam must be some low-level cultivator.

    "Okay, get into the inner mansion. It is not safe here."

    "But where are you going?"

    "I am going out to check for people like you. We are in the middle of crisis and there are some people who are still in the forest just like you, so I have to call them.

    By any chance, do you know any location of our men in the forest?"

    "I don¡¯t know. I went alone and there was no one in the vicinities of my location. I am sorry I couldn¡¯t help."

    "No problem, at least I don¡¯t have to search in that area."

    With that the other guy left and Sam got a direct ess to where everyone else was.

    He entered the Sr Fragments¡¯ estate and the mansion like it was a walk in the park.

    There is nothing he has to do. He went in and saw the formationwork and talked to a few people without any suspicions. All he has to do is use the information he gained from thest leader without thinking much.

    And if there was any problem, all he did is close his eyes bring his consciousness into the divine dimension and then into the chess board within in which the leader was currently trapped to ask the questions.

    He had a good time and after he got enough of it, he vanished from the spot without a care if someone saw him or not with the dimensional drifter.

    And he reappeared in the forest along where his posse is staying.

    After giving them some instructions, he took off on the hoverboard.

    Meanwhile, a guy suddenly disappearing in middle, out in thin air caused some more chaos within the estate and the chief was informed which caused him to panic and he started overthinking.

    At this moment, he got another news.

    A subordinate came running towards him and said.

    "Chief, someone who imed to be a subordinate of Sam is waiting outside of the estate. He imed he has a message with him and is asking to meet you."

    "Sam¡¯s subordinate is here? Why did he send him here?"

    "We don¡¯t know. He said he would only talk to you."

    "Bring him in."

    A subordinate ran and came back with another man with him.

    "I am a subordinate of Sam and he gave me a message.

    First, you don¡¯t have to panic too much. The young man who disappeared from your estate is him. He came in here with a disguise and it didn¡¯t need much effort.

    He came in already got theyout of all your formations and they are now useless."

    As soon as he spoke, all of a sudden the formation disappeared. Everyone in the tribe panicked.

    "This is the doing of rest of our men outside your estate. Now, before I proceed, please take a look upwards through this."

    With that, he gave the telescope to him and the chief hesitated before looking up.

    In the sky Sam is standing on Sky and he is carrying therge rocket he made beforeing here on one hand over his head.

    "That is the same explosive you were attacked by through the space tunnel. So, you make a decision based on that.

    The first option is to surrender and give your family an heirloom. You would be a part of the organization. The second option is to refuse the surrender you will be bombed to death and thest option is that you can go to Hou Yi¡¯s statue, plead for his help and feel the despair before picking the options from one and two. But before you pick the third, you might want to watch this."

    With that, he took out a recording crystal and gave it to the chief.

    "Don¡¯t think of attacking me or escaping, any signs, he would drop that on your heads.

    I hope you make a proper decision."

 Chapter 924: Offer

    The chief ran back into the mansion to go to the inner temple. Hou Yi¡¯s statue was there. He took a deep breath as he looked at the recording crystal in his hands. On one hand, he wanted to see this, but on the other hand, he has a bad feeling.

    But after some thought, he decided to take a look at it anyway and when he saw the video, he was shocked.

    It is the video of the Starbow family begging Hou Yi and thetter sneering and chiding them at their uselessness to kill Sam.

    This is the video Sam took when the Starbow family head is begging and crying to his god after Sam retaliated in full scale.

    He figured it woulde in handy.

    The Sr Fragment chief looked at Hou Yi¡¯s statue after the video. He felt extremely conflicted and anxious at the same time.

    He didn¡¯t want to make the leap and ask Hou Yi for help. If he didn¡¯t ask, there is no chance for him to get any help and if he did ask and didn¡¯t get the answer he wants, he would be in deep trouble. If not for the fact that Sam didn¡¯t show the video, he would have directly asked.

    Now there is also another thought that Sam is just messing with his head.

    A lot of thoughts are killing his mind.

    He doesn¡¯t know what to do and who to ask for help.

    He just spent an hour in front of the statue thinking whether he should ask or not. He considered surrendering to Sam and then thought of the consequences of that surrender and then he thought of therge rocket and the damage it could cause.

    He stood up after this and thought of asking the elders for help. He wanted to ask their suggestions.

    But he didn¡¯t know that this is the mistake he made. He should have made the decision himself and as soon as he brought other voices in, it got all the more confused.

    "Brother, you need to think of another way. We cannot just surrender and there is a high chance that this is all a ploy from him. Let us try to ask the help from Hou Yi. He is our god and we did this because he asked this of us.

    There is no way he would leave us in the lurch."

    The onlydy in the meeting the younger sister of the head gave the advice.

    But there is another voice which is even stronger.

    "I think we need to validate all pros and cons. I suggest we call him for a meeting and discuss terms with him directly. I always told you, the gods are not trustworthy. In exchange for resources, we are sending half of our offspring to him. It is not a noble blessing. It is merely a trade.

    Even though I don¡¯t like to surrender, it is a way better option than sending all our kids to that god."

    This is another brother of the chief.

    The conversations were heated and the chief had to put a stop to it.

    "We don¡¯t have to make a decision. There is no deadline. We can wait for a while and think this through and even if God doesn¡¯t help us, we can always negotiate the terms with himter."

    Another man who has an uncanny resemnce to the woman who first spoke told and with that the meeting is adjourned.

    As they walked outside, the woman walked towards her twin brother who spoke thest and poked his hand before leaving.

    The brother followed her and both of them ended up in her residence.

    "I got something this morning."

    She said as he took out a scroll from her spatial ring and gave it to her brother.

    He took the scroll and read it which made him feel shocked.

    "When did you get this?"

    "When that news about a man disappearing out of thin air circted. To be precise a few minutes before that."

    "He personally gave this message? Are you going to follow through?"

    "We are going to follow through."

    "Agar, you are not out of your mind are you? I thought you wanted to be the head of the tribe. Not destroy it."

    "I don¡¯t want to be the chief of this tribe. I don¡¯t want to destroy this tribe either."

    "Then what do you want?"

    She didn¡¯t speak for a second and continued.

    "We are following this through and you are not going to make a move on him to help this tribe. Do you understand? Now get out of here. I want some alone time."

    The brother left in silence.

    That night, the twins came out of the estate discreetly and walked into the forest ording to the instructions Sam gave them in the scroll.

    Once they reached a certain spot, they saw a shadow appear from the ground in the darkness and spoke.

    "Hello, I am Sam. The one in front of you is the result of my shadow necromancy, so don¡¯t panic or think too much. It is just that the probability of you guys killing me is extremely high. So, I didn¡¯t want toe here."

    "I am Agar and this is my brother who is younger than me by three minutes. Argan."

    Agar spoke as she looked at the shadow.

    "I never saw this kind of body, which shadow is it."

    "Its called a Yaksha. There are simr to you guys in many ways, but instead of fire element, they can get any element by birth."

    "Okay now. What do you want us here for?"

    "I want to know if you want to be my partner. I heard from a little bird who sang that you want the destruction of the Sr Fragment tribe."

    "Well that bird didn¡¯t sing correctly, it is not just the destruction of the tribe that I want."

    "Oh, then is that bird correct about this. You both are inte-stage Pre-transcendence of Astral ne and you both hid your cultivation. You are about to apply for going to Hou Yi¡¯s army to kill your father."

    Agar and Argan both stopped in their tracks and they became vignt. Faint killing intent could be felt.

    "You can kill this shadow. All I would feel is a headache for a day, but I will be after you ande searching for you to kill you with my own hands."

    "How do you know of this?"

    "It turned out that thest batch of your main force sent to mess with my life has a leader and he is your nephew.

    I must say he has great talent. He is not that much older than me and he is already stronger than me and he also has a lot of secrets.

    And he also told me, that your brother already knew of this and he is nning on sending you somewhere else with the help of Dark Elf.

    And it happens to be the Dark Elf¡¯s territory where they would be doing experiments on you guys."

    "You are lying," Argan said coldly.

    "The Sr Fragments are great. But there is a gic problem. They are humans who are mutated into something else because of the bloodline of a superior being.

    You are like Demi-humans, but the only problem is your bodiesck the potential to hold the strength that bloodline brings. Once you breakthrough into the Astral stage Pre-transcendence, you will be done for. That¡¯s the limit of your human part and your beast bloodline wouldn¡¯t be satisfied and tries to make your body copse.

    The only way to get past that is to make a beast cultivation contract with a Golden Sun crow which you guys cannot do.

    So, you try different methods and your brother made a deal with the Dark elves, that they could experiment on you as much as they liked and they could take you Agar as their birthing machine to strengthen their bloodline.

    And this is the n your father and Nephew discussed because he was throwing a tantrum when he was ordered to mess with me.

    I know you wouldn¡¯t want to trust me that easily. After all, there is arge possibility that whatever I am telling you is bull shit."

    So, go back to your residences and tell your brother that you would leave tomorrow morning. If he sends you both some cors in the name of some bull shit excuse, thene here and meet me."

    With that, Sam disappeared.

    Agar and Argan exchanged a look and went back to their residences. Most of the things Sam said are right and if all of it was true, then they would be in some deep trouble. But before they make any decisions, they should confirm it.

    So, they went and did as they were told.

    "Why do you want to go suddenly?" The chief asked with a frown.

    "There is no reason, it felt like a good time. Even if that recording was right, it was because the Starbow family was not that useful. But we are. We would join the army as a gift to Hou Yi and he might think twice before rejecting his help." Agar just made something up and replied.

    "It is not a bad thought. Go back to your residences first, your levels are too high and the wormhole that connects to the army is a special one. So, you need to wear something. I will let the attendants bring them to you."

 Chapter 925: New Recruits

    The twins were surprised, but they didn¡¯t show it in front of their brother.

    They silently got out and went to her residence. Argan is a bit furious and was about to yell in anger.

    "Stay silent for a while. Calm down and let those thingse in."

    "You still want more confirmation?"

    "We are already here, we might as well wait for a while. Anyway, it wouldn¡¯t hurt to confirm one more time."

    As they waited, an attendant came with a spatial ring.

    "Lord Argan, you are also here? I have one ring sent for you as well. Do you want to take it now or should I bring it to your residenceter?"

    "I will take it now."

    Both of them checked into the spatial rings and they found out, there are indeed some cors inside.

    Agar who was always calm suddenly mmed the ring on the floor, the attendants who are waiting for her orders outside were about toe over, but she yelled at them even before they touched the handle of the door.

    "All of you get out of the residence. Do note until morning. If anyone steps here, you would be dead."

    The attendants silently retreated, they didn¡¯t even step loudly as they are afraid to earn her wrath.

    "Should we go meet him now? There is still a few hours left before dawn." Argan asked from the side.

    Agar sat on a chair and started thinking. She is extremely anxious, even though she is the one that calls the shots in their rtionship, that is not because she was stronger, it was mostly because she is cautious and meticulous in thinking.

    After some thought, she stood up and said.

    "Let¡¯s leave. If you have any subordinates that are loyal to you, bring them with you. The Sr Fragment tribe will be doomed from today."

    Argan didn¡¯t ask any questions and left quickly.

    Agar came out of her residence and looked out, there is one servant who is still standing at the edge of the courtyard attentively listening for amand from the house. When that attendant saw Agar, she became anxious and was in a hurry to apologize, but Agar stopped her and gestured her toe near.

    The attendant was nervous as she walked, she was expecting some punishment, but Agar surprised her with her words.

    "I am leaving the tribe. If you want toe with me, I will take you away. From then on you don¡¯t have to follow any tribe rules, you don¡¯t have to worry about loving someone. You can be free. Will youe?"

    She was surprised and baffled, but when she saw the serious look on Agar¡¯s face, she was surprised and nodded her head.

    "Go and pack any of your belongings."

    "I don¡¯t have any."

    "Family members, you want to say goodbye to?"

    "I am alone."

    "Good."

    Soon her brother came there alone and all three of them escaped.

    They entered the forest once again to meet Sam in the same spot. As soon as they reached the spot, the shadow popped out of nowhere.

    "Seems like you already made your decision."

    "We did, now is it possible for us to meet you directly."

    "I am sorry, I cannot trust you that easily. If this was my ce or if you had any love for your tribe, then I woulde out directly. But this is neither and you are a lot stronger than me and I cannot trust you."

    "You can¡¯t ask us to trust you and not trust us in return, right?"

    "I earned your trust Argan. I gave you the information to earn your trust. It is better if you earn mine too. It is only fair trade."

    "What do you want us to do?"

    "Let us discuss a deal then. What exactly are you expecting from me? Is it the destruction of the tribe? I bet two of you can do that yourself. Then what is it?"

    The twins stayed silent for a while and Agar spoke.

    "My wishes are a bit over the top. You would be scared out of this deal."

    "Trust me, no one has more lofty ambitions than me in this world."

    "I want to kill Hou Yi. But I only have a few decades and no growth left. Can you do that?"

    Sam was stunned for a while and then he startedughing.

    "Killing a god, what a lofty aspiration indeed. But it still falls short of mine by a lot. In fact, it falls too short. But I like that. It would be better to have someone like you working with me." But this time it is not the shadow that spoke, Sam arrived in front of them directly, but he still kept a decent distance, energy vision on and the divine dimension ready to escape as fast as he could."

    The twins sized him up with a cautious gaze.

    "I think I could use a way to deal with your problem. But you would need a lot of training and a lot of procedures. And a guarantee that you wouldn¡¯t kill me after you are satisfied with your result."

    "You don¡¯t have to worry about that. What procedure is that?"

    "We can talk about thatter, but before that why don¡¯t you guys deal with your tribe and the heirloom. All this while you held back because this is the only way to meet your father and kill him. But now that you have other ways, you don¡¯t have to worry about them. I have ways to go to the ces others cannot."

    "We want a guarantee that you have a method. Otherwise, we would be the ones at the losing end."

    "Fair enough."

    With that, Sam threw a scroll towards them. There are three yoga poses he used in body strengthening. One of the reasons the Sr fragments copse is that their body couldn¡¯t hold the potential of the golden crow and the bloodline is also too crude and unrefined.

    If he used the bloodline technique on them, it would work, it would make it easier for the human bloodline and the beast bloodline to merge and mutate further, but he has to do it gradually as they increase their physical strength.

    "If you find any progress after following the exact instructions, then you can meet me after you finish the task. We will meet here again. Bye."

    The twins looked at the yoga poses and tried practicing them as they circted the energy as per the instructions. The human cells thaty dormant in their bodies finally showed some reaction to this.

    They were surprised and they could feel a minute increase of strength. It is minute but they knew they are strong and they are also sure the strength came from some part of the body that they never bothered to use.

    This made them happy. They have hope.

    Agar looked at her attendant and said.

    "If you want to leave, you can do that. If you want to go to another realm or stay with us, go deeper into the forest and wait for us."

    "I will wait."

    "Sam, please take care of her while we are gone." She yelled into the forest, before running towards the tribe. There is a smirk on her face that was never present before. Argan looked at her and shook his head before following her.

    This is the day they will finally get revenge.

    The twins knocked down the gates of the estate and ran towards the mansion in the most high-profile way.

    There is no way their presence could be missed. They activated fire elemental fusion as they ran towards the mansion and knocked down the entrance directly.

    The tribe chief who is still a bit conflicted was a bit surprised. He didn¡¯t expect that the twins would retaliate like this at the moment. There is a bad feeling rising in his heart, but he didn¡¯t dare reveal it.

    "Argan, Agar. What is wrong with you? Are you out of your minds?"

    "No, brother. We are not out of our mind, we are out of our shackles. And you are out your time."

    Agar replied as she threw a punch straight to his gut, as he tried to block it with his hands, Argan kicked him on the temple from the rear.

    "Today will be the start of our revenge against the tribe. And this day will mark the doom of the Sr Fragments."

    "You are practically one of us. Where is all this angering from?"

    "One of you? My mother was one of you guys and when she was damned to that state because of your ignorance, you are all dead to me."

    And then began the massacre of the Sr Fragments, the twins are too strong for the Astral ne cultivators of the tribe, the chief, the elders and everyone who has a standing couldn¡¯t stand a chance against them. They killed everyone and grabbed the family heirloom before leaving the rest of the tribe alone.

    Without the Astral ne cultivators, it would be hard to survive, but they left one guy though. The one who handles the businesses of the tribe.

    They returned to the forest and dropped that guy before yelling.

    "This guy manages the business. We heard you are interested in that sector. It would be a lot easier to take over from here."

    Sam arrived along with that attendant and said.

    "That is a great job. You are faster than I thought."

 Chapter 926: Deal with Arkiv

    Sam is currently in the forest sitting in the camp with the rest of his team.

    Opposite to him, the twins are seated. They are all waiting for the meal to be served.

    "So, when is this process going to begin?"

    "Your body wouldn¡¯t be able to hold it if it was done in a single attempt and I am not strong enough to do that in a single attempt, your cultivation is way higher than me. So, if you want it to be finished fast, there is only one way, help me grow faster and it will be done.

    But I am sure it would take a decade or two before it happens. But trust me, it happens.

    Anyway, what is it about killing Hou Yi? You are the third and fourth people that I know who want to kill him and all of us are in Astral ne.

    Do you want to tell me about it?"

    "Before that, who are first and second?" Agar asked as she sipped the wine.

    "I am the first of course, a friend of mine who is running across the realms and you two are third and fourth and that too if your brother is in on this too."

    "Yeah, he was in. But I don¡¯t think it would be necessary to know my story. Just think of it as a revenge."

    "Maybe, if I liked your reason, I might let you kill him. But my friend has a legitimate reason too, so you have to beat that."

    "If you tell your story, I will tell mine."

    "Its simple. I want to kill him for my friend and trying to kill me. He possessed my friend and that almost made him die. That is why my friend wants to kill him. For using him as a pawn."

    "I think my story beats the both of yours. It could be said that we are Hou Yi¡¯s children in a weird way. He possessed our actual father and raped my mother and we are born. So, we are not his biological seeds, but we sure as hell are a consequence of his actions."

    "So, what happened to your mother?"

    "He raped her again after we were born, but this time, she is dead in the process," Agar said it so casually. There is not a flicker of emotion in her eyespared to her brother who is clenching his fists and the killing intent riling up like crazy.

    "I will let you kill him if my friend doesn¡¯t get his hands on him on his own."

    "You speak as if you can kill him whenever you want."

    "I cannot kill him whenever I want. But I can do it in the future I am sure of it. If you are going to be with me, you have to be sure of it too. Anyway, let us discuss our future ns.

    We would be visiting one of my rtives after I sort this ce out. After that, I want you guys to deal with one of Hou Yi¡¯s nests. Your main aim is to defeat them, try to make the leader surrender, steal the heirloom and the businesses.

    I will be traveling with you guys and after three months of constant practice of the physical strengthening technique I gave you, you will get your first refinement where you can find symptoms.

    But before you take the next case, you train in that physical technique for a month, from your energy waves, you are on verge of exploding. The physical strengthening will cause you to consume that extra energy.

    After that one month, you can start with the tasks.

    Meanwhile, you can train while I stabilize my new businesses and make some deals."

    "Stabilize your businesses here?"

    "Not just here, My expansion has been rapid for the past year even though I wanted to stabilize, but what can I do, I have arge organization with a bunch of subordinates to run, so it would be hard to not think of expanding every day.

    And I also have to start with some groundwork our next target."

    "Who will that be?"

    "The Hawk-King Tribe. You must have heard of them, they are also in the same realm but their activity is on a different."

    "You want to mess with Hawk King tribe? Are you insane?"

    "Not really, they worship Goddess Hel and they are also one of my targets. And they are extremely strong and even more stupid."

    "Stupid, they rule the whole which is the second-best resource on the realm all on their own. No subordinate realms, no rivals, nopetition, and no business. The whole is like one big organization, except there is no organizing and no boundaries. They kill everyone that doesn¡¯t listen to them and kill their own over a night¡¯s sex with a whore."

    "That is what makes them stupid. They are savages that live too close to their instincts, so they are easy to manipte. Except they are too big and too scattered, I don¡¯t know where the guy with those heirloom is staying and where is moving to."

    "What is it that you are after?"

    "The staff the king of this tribe holds."

    "You are out of your mind."

    "Just focus on your training and we will talk about thister."

    With that, the conversation ended.

    The next day, they went back to the deste, but he left the subordinates there to take care of the takeover.

    He introduced the two of them to the Old Beast, who gave them a proper warning which made them shut their mouths for a whole day, and then he left them to practice on their own near that valley.

    He went to look for Arkiv.

    And when they men, Arkiv just finished destroying his third organization. After the Star bow family, Sam didn¡¯t go after the small ones, he went to the K tribe, the Hellian, another organization for the, and then Sr Fragments.

    All of them are of medium level category in the whole list and the rest of the yers are dealing with the low-level ones.

    "What are you doing here?"

    "Just here with a proposal."

    "What would that be?"

    "Recently Hou Yi sent a medium-level organization to deste to destroy the Dusk organization, and I retaliated. He teamed up with Hel to screw me over. But it didn¡¯t work for him. So, that led me to have a proposal for you.

    You cannot go after Hou Yi¡¯s organizations, so I am giving you something else in exchange. You can go after Hel¡¯s organizations. We can share their rewards."

    "I need a lot of resources and you need ten times more than that, with your big ass organization that you need a shit load of those resources and you want to share them with me? I don¡¯t buy it."

    "I wille clean. It is actually not thatplicated. I want to finish off, the low-level organizations and the lowest of the medium-level organizations as fast as we can. I have men, but I need someone to lead them and I need to work simultaneously with them. I cannot select two organizations at the same time, so you would be doing that."

    "Why are you in a hurry?"

    "You all know that the lower level organization are just crumbs, even the lowest level of the medium level. The Sr fragments who are a little better on the medium level organization spectrum doesn¡¯t give much.

    I need more resources and I can only do that if I force them to go after the bigger fish. I need to finish this as soon as possible. These gods are going to piss me off and go against me as the time goes on and I cannot waste my time on the small fish for too long. I need to increase my growth speed and collect some subordinates.

    And to be a friend, I will give you an advice, get some subordinates too. Try to recruit them permanently, mercenaries or gather a hoard of resources that could even attract you just by the sheer amount.

    When we are after the big fish, you would have to get some serious help. Otherwise, you would be in trouble.

    I will stay here for a week, the sea is great here. So, if you want to ept it,e and find me in the beach."

    The conversation was over.

    And things went on. Since Arkiv just finished with an organization, Sam took over those businesses as well.

    He stabilized any opposition and let his subordinates introduce their own products within a week and went on with the business.

    After a week, Arkiv came to him and said.

    "I heard from your subordinates that Watt got married. You could havee here and invited me."

    "I didn¡¯t even get Philip and Jack and you think you will make the cut. If you want we can go swing by his new home."

    "I heard; a for a wedding gift. I wish I was that rich."

    "I wish I had enough time to fool around as much as you."

    Both of them smiled and went to do good on their new deal.

 Chapter 927: Hawk King Planet

    The reason Sam made a deal with Arkiv is simple. He wanted to go after the big fish faster so that they could grow faster.

    As for why the small fish has to bepletely eaten by then, it is very simple.

    The big fish are limited in numberpared to the small fish and they are way too strong. Except for Sam who has advantage of numbers in his favor, no one else would be able to directly sh with the organization on their own in a short span of time which would make thispetition, span over decades.

    So, the only other way is for yers to attack an organization simultaneously. The ovep is bound to happen as they progressed and once that happens it would be easy for them to deal with them.

    Sam wants that chaos to be created faster, so that he could learn and grow faster. He needs the experience and the resources more than anyone else.

    As for why Arkiv epted, it is even simpler. He would get to have some support to deal with these people and he would be getting resources.

    But that is a very long term n. It would take a decade or two topletely implement it.

    Currently, as he told the twins, he is focused on the stabilization of the organization once again and he also sent some people to the Hawk King to get some info.

    The Hawk King tribe is an extremely peculiar and a savage tribe. They don¡¯t care about things like politics and bureaucratic nonsense.

    They don¡¯t give a shit about the social contracts.

    They have a tanned skin and a build just like humans. In fact, they are just some overly powerful demi humans like the Sr fragments. But the beast gics that mutated them are not from a single beast. Theye from a bunch of Hawk type beasts.

    But ironically, they didn¡¯t inherit the wings. They inherited their vision and they also inherited the predator instincts of the bird.

    They kill for anything and everything that gives them pleasure. One of the would kill their brother to have sex with his wife and they don¡¯t have such thing as cheating on their spouse, if the male partner is not exactly stronger than the other guy, the other guy coulde and go as he pleases.

    And the two partners will just continue with their lives.

    They are so close to their instincts that they don¡¯t wear anything except for covering the groin.

    Sam sent some of the Dragon Hawk members with wind element. That is also one of the things the tribe inherited from the Hawks.

    They were sent to infiltrate some higher ranks, as for the rest of the information anyone would do.

    Sam got the information regarding the major cities or to be precise settlements of the tribe and sent people there to merge into the society and gather information.

    It is impossible for them to transmit information normally, so he thought of a new way. He sent a silver pigeon with each of these guys and he gave them quite high level ones.

    There would be one spot in the center of the forest where there is minimal activity, they built a small hiddenpartment and every week they will send the Silver Pigeons to drop the information inside thatpartment.

    When Sam arrived, he would directly go there and read it.

    As for why, he is nning this much, without attacking directly, the Hawk King tribe is peculiar and the chief of the tribe is the most peculiar of all.

    The current chief doesn¡¯t stay in the ce, there is no such thing as headquarters or main estate. He is travelling around with his posse all over the year and will only one to the only proper city at the end of the year.

    He goes to different ces in the all over the year to have sex with different women in different ces. Particrly the women who already have a partner. This constant moving is hard for Sam to contact him.

    And Sam needs that heirloom more than destroying these guys and there is no stable settlement for him to threaten that guy with arge explosive.

    The people he sent there will be sending him the information regarding their surroundings and he can decide where to go and how to proceed from then onwards.

    Meanwhile, he kept on doing his research on who to recruit as his subordinates from other ces he was going to attack while managing his business.

    One month passed swiftly and Sam arrived in the Hawk King along with the twins.

    They stayed within the forest where the messages are deposited and started reading them. Luckily there doesn¡¯t seem to be any form of disturbance from the beasts in the surroundings.

    After reading the messages for a whole day, the three of them got a decent understanding of what is happening.

    The leader of the tribe is currently travelling from north to south and is sampling the wives of all the people in charge of the settlements.

    At least that is what the pattern indicated as he started this sampling at the northern most part of the town and then went downwards in a straight line connecting the major settlements.

    If he continued down south just like that, he would dividing the whole in two halves. Screwing the in half.

    This might be a little farfetched but from thetest messages they have, they are at least which location he is going to arrive next.

    Sam decided to go into the city by himself and check out the situation. He needs to find out how the settlement reacts when this lustful king arrives.

    So, he started his journey. Most of the is underdeveloped at best. There are no particr paths they could use. They can only use some hidden forest paths and they moved there by foot instead of the Dimensional drifter.

    One reason for that is there is enough time and they could also investigate the smaller settlements on their way to learn the nature of these people.

    After a week of travel they reached the ce. The twins are staying in the forest while only Sam took of his dress and wore a garment that barely covered his crotch and changed his skin color with one of Chandra¡¯s tricks to enter the city.

    From what he overheard, the king ising the next day and the arrangements are being done.

    The King is a fan of Orgies. After enjoying the wife of the in charge of the ce, he would go after the rest of the beautiful maidens that he got sight of and they in charge of the ce is responsible for selecting them too.

    Sam must say that the women are indeed beautiful here and they are too open and too wild. Maybe it is the nature of their bloodline or gics, but this is the first time he felt overwhelmed by something like this.

    The people are having sex on the streets. There is no such thing as a right ce or right time. As long as the man is stronger than the woman and there is nopetition for her, there is no reason for them to not have it.

    He felt disgusted and intrigued at the same time.

    Nobody cared about an outsider like him in the settlement as he roamed around and looked everywhere.

    The whole city is bustling. All women are going to the area where the in-charge resides to register for the orgy with the king. The in-charge will check them out and approve them and even if someone doesn¡¯t register if he approves them they have to go.

    There is a very peculiar tax system of the city. They have to pay at the end of every week and they have to pay half of whatever they got on that week.

    There is only one group of people who are dressed more than covering the crotch who seemed to be the guards directly working under the person in charge of the settlement. He has some shoulder pads which they wore as an indication of their position.

    Sam roamed the whole settlement and he was approached by many women on his way. Apparently the scars on one¡¯s body are an indication of their strength here and it is hard to find a spot where Sam doesn¡¯t have any scars, except for his groin and his face.

    So, he was an eye candy to the women and an eyesore to the men.

    There are some attempts to kill him too, but he sessfully dodged them.

    As he learned about how things work here, he also found something else he was searching for. An anomaly.

    No matter how much a race is distinguished by its gic nature. There will always be a lone wolf in the pack.

    So, he wanted to find such an anomaly and he saw something. A woman in this sex-crazed species is not so crazed for the sex. Evidenced by theck of enthusiasm and a seating posture which is trying so hard to cover her bosom and a look of disgust on the face by forcefully making her part of the King¡¯s feast.

 Chapter 928: Kings Entry

    The women who were selected for the Orgy of the King are kept separately in one of the crude stone houses they made by piling some strong stones.

    There is only one proper construction in the whole settlement and that was the mansion of the person in charge. Everyone is calling him Kal.

    The Kal mansion is constructed decently with different kinds of stones and the structure is also properly designed. Sam even saw a formation inscribed on the walls.

    And the stone house the women were kept in is the nearest to this Kal mansion. Sam went to a makeshift bar which is made of some loosely fitted tent.

    The wines are made from the blood of the beasts and he didn¡¯t like it. But wine is not the reason he was there, he was here because, this is the crowded but also most discreet out of all the surroundings.

    Sam sat in a corner as he swapped the wine in the jar with one of his own. The whole tent is crowded and everybody is getting drunk. Not even bothering to use the spiritual energy to stay sober. The whole ce has a stink that he felt disgusted about for some reason and with his enhanced nose, it is even more a trouble.

    He let one of the shadow mice out and let it enter the stone house where the women were kept. He let him go to the woman he noticed to see what she is doing, The distance is not too far away, so he couldmunicate with the shadow mouse with the mental contract.

    And the thing mouse reported is that women are getting warmed up for their action the next day. They are having sex by themselves.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but shake his head and sigh. This whole race is in on this debauchery. These people are too lustful even more than Nagas. These guys¡¯ urge to copte is same as an urge to eating and the breathing.

    They are having sex any chance they got and the women seemed to swing both ways and just when he thought that the men are in control over that, he saw a man riding another one over a rock bed a few feet near him.

    He could stay in atrine pit for an hour without even thinking twice, but he couldn¡¯t stay here and as the men are also getting on with it, he could see that the stink is growing too much.

    Sam frowned and felt there is something wrong. The stink which he didn¡¯t like and which caused him to feel adverse is growing as the sex is increasing in the surroundings.

    So, he thought of something and activated his Raiju bloodline even though the sense of smell increases by more than a dozen times, he endured it and focused on the tent.

    There is a different scenting from there and as for why he thought it was a scent, because it was more pleasantpared to the smell the men are oozing.

    In fact, it is even a bit intoxicating. Sam wanted to smell it even more and more and he tried to increase the effectiveness of his smell as he focused his spiritual energy on his nose.

    At this moment, he felt someone touching him on the back which made him get back to his senses.

    He held the arm tightly and came out of his daze. This is the first time, he was so lost into a feeling and he checked his groin. His penis is erect at the moment and he felt extremely disappointed in himself.

    The scent is like an aphrodisiac and it even managed to fool him. He is not sure how his subordinates who he has yet to meet holding up.

    When he reached the settlement, he just gave a fleeting nce to his subordinate, they didn¡¯t meet up because Sam wanted to conduct his own investigation before getting his opinion. But it seems like has to take care of his subordinates otherwise they will get lost in this debauchery.

    But at least the reports are consistent until now. As many thoughts ran through his head, he finally focused on the hand that brought him back to senses and when he looked at that, he realized that he is not the only one who realized his own erection.

    That guy is already using another hand to feel his groin.

    Sam frowned and immediately kicked the guy in the gut before he could proceed further and the other party being only a Consummate level cultivator, was dead with that one kick, in fact half of his body almost disappeared in a puff of blood and flesh.

    Everyone became silent for a second, but they went on with it. But not one guy and his friend who are in the middle of their deed ran towards Sam.

    And Sam is not in a good mood and he doesn¡¯t care if they are weak. With a single kick two heads were crushed and the bodies fell on the spot. He called the shadow mouse back and left the bar to check on his subordinate and from what he saw in the morning, he is on the stone house at the outskirts.

    When he went there, he saw his subordinate having sex with two women.

    He made his presence knowing without any propriety and the subordinate came to his senses before sending both women to another room.

    Sam walked towards him and started smelling him before asking.

    "Do you smell anything from those women?"

    "Smell? Not particrly, Boss. There is only a normal scent of women on them and the scene changes a bit because of the sex."

    "Why are you having sex with them?"

    The subordinate felt a bit embarrassed, but Sam insisted on an answer.

    "I don¡¯t know, they are so open about it and they are good looking, attractive in many ways so it seemed like a waste to not take advantage of the situation."

    "Is that it? Or do you want to have more and more sex with everytime you do it."

    "It is exactly like that."

    Sam sighed at this. The race has a separate attraction towards Sex. Their scent itself is working an aphrodisiac.

    Sam felt conflicted on how to proceed on this. But before he could do it, someone knocked the wall down and came into the room with weapons in their hands.

    He frowned and looked at them like they are idiots, even his subordinate is feeling the same.

    All of them are Consummates, a full hit from Sam would be a waste.

    But Sam didn¡¯t want to cause amotion, so he threw a poison fume into the air and disappeared from the spot along with his subordinate. He has to find a way to talk with that anomaly to see what he can do.

    But people started running after him and when his subordinate asked him why, he gave the ount at the bar and a brief description of the person he killed.

    "That green garment he is wearing, is a symbol of a gang here. You seemed to have killed a big shot¡¯s son. I think it is better if we escape now. The King arrives tomorrow and Kal would be taking a special care of the whole settlement.

    "Do you know of any woman who is not so open about the ways here?"

    "Here? No boss. The women are more proactive than the men. In fact, they are the reason for half of the deaths that happen as they want to try other men."

    "Okay let us escape for now. Since you said something about a ceremony, let use to that. I want to know of this woman. If we can understand what is so different about her, we can have some advantage on how to deal with this King."

    "Boss, isn¡¯t it easy for you to kill the King while he is here?"

    "It would be easy, but I cannot let go of that staff. And for the threats to even work I need to make sure that he could be held in one ce. I need to get the details regarding him to know what kind of threat works.

    If he is as crazy as I heard, he would rather die before handing that staff over and I cannot kill him in closebat and every other way would result in mass destruction."

    They escaped into the forest and stayed for the night. Sam and him disguised some facial features with a fake beard and longer hair and entered the settlement in the morning.

    The people in the settlement arepletely different from the previous night. They are not wantonly having sex. They are all a bit disciplined and the bars are not open. Everyone is normal for a change, except for the nudity.

    A few hours after sunset, the King finally arrived with his Posse and it turned out to be mostly women. The king has golden shoulder pads along with the women around him who have ruby-colored pads.

    They all entered the city on the back of arge elephant-type beast and some smaller beasts following behind it.

    The whole entourage entered the mansion of the Kal where the stage is prepared with all the women selected the night before exhibited.

    The citizens followed the entourage and entered as the King picked his women.

 Chapter 929: Anomaly

    Sam and his subordinate are looking at the whole ceremony from within the crowd. All the settlement is within the estate of the Kal.

    It is almost like ritual or a performance by the King to do this all in front of them. Sam has his focus on only two things. The anomaly who is the only woman who is feeling shy on the stage. One could easily guess that she is fighting the urge to cover her breasts while the rest of the women are trying their best to show case their curves and assets as much as they can so that the King would choose them. The second one is the staff in the hands of the King.

    Among them, the wife of Kal who is wearing green shoulder pads is also standing in the center and Kal could only look at all of it from a far.

    The King walked to Kal¡¯s wife and kissed her deeply as he groped her ass and released her only after she was short of breath.

    Then he proceeded to check the rest of the women.

    Groping their ass, breasts, touching their lips all he did is do a forey with all the women there and he selected a few and unfortunately the shy woman who is most likely closest to normal in there is also on his list and all of them including the wife of Kal all went into the mansion escorted by some of the maids.

    While the unselected ones were set to auction to the guys in the crowd. They are unofficially the most beautiful women in the settlement so there are some people who can try their luck with them as long as they have money even if they don¡¯t have strength and there is a rule that no one could disturb them until the king is gone from the town.

    The crowd dispersed as the auction continued and they continued the day of debauchery.

    Sam and his subordinate left the ce and got into an empty house where another orgy is happening. This is one of the ces where there will be minimum disturbance. Even by the tribe¡¯s standards this ce is nasty.

    Sam threw out some gas to make them all fall asleep while he took a look at the tablet screen.

    While the ceremony is happening, the whole mansion is empty, everyone is out of that building and that was the perfect time to sneak in the shadow mice to install some surveince.

    It was hard, but the shadow mice¡¯s abilities increased greatly with time and they managed to it. In fact, the strongest shadow mouse is still inside as he provided the live surveince from different areas.

    The king is currently on Kal¡¯s bed with the Kal¡¯s wife as she pleasured him with his mouth.

    While the rest of the women in his posse are ying with the women he picked.

    Sam sat there and just watched the whole thing. The King really is a lust crazed monster. Even among this race he is the first one to start circled around the settlements getting it on to other¡¯s wives. At least, he didn¡¯t go after the children. That is the only good thing about this race.

    No matter how disgraceful they acted, their kids are not allowed to do any of these things until they are awakened. Fifteen years and they would already have a build of an adult. At least they are not including them in these acts like some pedophiles.

    Sam watched the whole thing only to observe the reactions of the King and the anomaly.

    He looked for what King liked in the women, what he did before and after the deed. What else he does other than the deed? He is looking for the answers of all these questions.

    His mental state is what is going for.

    But he made another interesting discovery. The anomaly happened to be a virgin until now. Which should be rare. Judging by her appearance and approximate cultivation level, she is at least thirty years old.

    This is an extremely different and unique scenario. A woman who is virgin until thirty years old in the world full of debauchery.

    The orgy went on for the full day and by evening, the King too a rest. Even as an Astral ne cultivator he can only fuck for so long in a day.

    He took a rest in the middle of thedies that are part of his posse.

    After a few hours, the night dawned to another orgy.

    Sam just looked at whole scenario. For the whole night and a few hours rest he took and another round of debauchery. He saw all the wild and nasty activities they did.

    This went for three days and Sam kept on making the people inside unconscious. He felt like crashing into the room and killing that guy right there and then. Maybe steal the staff at least. But the staff only stays within his spatial ring and if he really did attack him, the spatial ring will copse along with the staff.

    After a few days of constant sex, he finally went out to have some fun with the maids who were forced to watch all this. He wanted to add some new women to this and started checking then out.

    And this is also the time for the women to recover and they were taken to separate rooms to recuperate and heal.

    After taking a bath, the women rested in their rooms privately.

    The King¡¯s Orgy was over after another three days and then came the ending ceremony, the King selects a woman to add to his posse and there would be arge party held that night before they day they start their journey again.

    And to Sam¡¯s surprise, the woman that was selected is actually the Anomaly. The Anomaly that was intrigued by.

    While the party was going on, that woman was extremely stressed and sad and she couldn¡¯t handle all the attention that was given to her because of something she didn¡¯t want to do at all. Because of that reason, she left the party and entered the mansion.

    At this moment, Sam let another shadow mouse out and filled the space jade with some contents before sending it to her.

    When a mouse appeared right before her, she was stunned and almost shrieked. After all, she was just raped for a few days.

    But before she could yell, the shadow mouse dropped a small scroll.

    She picked it up curiously and read.

    "You don¡¯t know me and I am not one of the Hawk King tribe.

    I am someone with some motives towards your king. I have been following the whole scenario for the few days and I understood that you don¡¯t like this. You are different from all the debauchery that is going on around here.

    I can help you get out of your misery. I can transport you out of this, realm and send you to a ce of your choice with all the money and resources you can imagine. You wouldn¡¯t be recognized by anyone.

    You would be able to live your life with dignity.

    But for that, I need your cooperation a bit.

    There are some presents inside the spatial ring, do take them. I will give you some time, on your journey with your king, the mouse will be close to you. If you ever want to contact me, you can just find a lonely ce and make a star sign on the ground. The mouse will appear and you can send a message to me.

    I will contact you again tomorrow night.

    Thank you."

    With that the mouse took the scroll back and took some potions out. Thedy was hesitant a bit, but the shadow mouse threw out another scroll.

    "If you are worried about poison, you can choose a random bottle and feed it to the mouse. They are all healthy potions that could help you with your physical recovery and cultivation."

    She hesitated a bit and then took the potions as she downed them. The mouse collected the empty bottles and left the spot while thedy sat there and meditated as she observed the new changes her body is undergoing.

    She looked at the direction the mouse vanished into and went into a deep thought.

    The next morning, Sam and his subordinate left the settlement before the King¡¯s posse moved. They entered the forest and waited for the posse toe and soon it did.

    Then they started following them from afar.

    The posse is moving slowly and at this pace it would take ten days before they reached the next spot. The twins also joined Sam by the end of the first day and Sam used everything he has rted to concealment to conceal the twins from posse as they followed.

    At night, he sent the shadow mouse again when the woman was alone.

    And this time, the conversation is not one way. The woman wrote something and sent it through the shadow mouse.

    "I can cooperate with you and I will do whatever you want me to do. But the king has to die. If you agree with my condition, then we can talk."

    Sam sent another note.

    "I am okay with that. But can you give me your name?"

    "Arona."

 Chapter 930: Aina

    For the next few days, Arona started sending different information to Sam as they traveled. How does the camp function, what do they do besides having sex? King¡¯s pattern of choosing women every night. He tried to get any information he could.

    All the while trying his best to locate the herbs and beasts in the surroundings that he could use to kill the King.

    The King is also a Late-stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivator of the Astral ne, but he is not ordinary, even the twins have some problem dealing with him alone and they are adept in killing Peak stage Pre-transcendent cultivators fairly one-sidedly.

    This guy is a monster. He can fight ten of his peers even if those peers themselves are capable enough to fight ten on their own.

    And the presence of the staff is not helping either. The staff is made of special wood and it is an extremely high-level weapon, designed specifically for the people of the Hawk King tribe.

    Once that staffes into y, there is not even a chance for the twins to defeat him and his posse of women that are wearing the ruby pads are not exactly some weakling. There are two Late-stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivators of the Astral ne and two middle-stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivators of the Astral ne. The rest of the original posse are Astral ne cultivators from the Initial stage of Initiation to the Initial stage of Pre-transcendence.

    Even though he is going around the for orgies, he and his team are quite strong.

    He has half a mind to just dump a bunch of explosives on this guy, but if that guy managed to escape, it would be harder to find him.

    So, Sam is trying to make only one direct move when he was sure that he could kill that guy.

    After a week of travel, Sam finally got everything he could take advantage of from within the posse.

    The queen looks like she is open for anything, but she is jealous whenever the king sleeps around, even though that is the only thing he always does.

    As for the rest of the group they feel the same way.

    As much as they embraced these lustful animal instincts they still have some other emotions and the envy and jealousy that they cannot keep the strongest mate for themselves is something they couldn¡¯t deny.

    This gave Sam an Idea of how to deal with this guy. But there is only oneponent missing and he has to make it himself which would take some time.

    So, every night Sam separated from the twins and his subordinate before going to a secluded ce and started working on it in the divine dimension.

    He spent most of the time on the second floor as he performed various simtions.

    He is testing a few drugs that he is making on the spot that would work on the Hawk King race and he is making them by mixing the already existing drugs.

    This is the advantage of having research departments of his own, there are just too many drugs that he could make without even doing any research.

    He is alss spending his time in the library as he searched for an already existing recipe and he has to find one that has herbs that he could find even on this.

    There is some progress, but he didn¡¯t manage to do anything in the next three days, so they had to wait until the orgy in the next settlement is over.

    It took three more days as this is a much smaller settlement than before and this time the King directly took Kal¡¯s wife with him.

    The green shoulder pads actually turned Ruby and this caused the tension in the camp to grow. Because the ruby pads mean the permanent addition. One must wonder how she performed on the bed.

    Sam hurried his experiments in these three days, but he couldn¡¯t find a single drug that could fulfill all his requirements, but he did find some alternative approaches which he decided to take.

    And the first thing he did is wait for the second of their next journey.

    That day, Arona was instructed to be proactive. She has to make the King believe that she is changing and warming up to him, but still has to maintain that shy demeanor. Sam could guess why the King picked her and it is not because of the pure beauty or her performance in bed. But the shyness is new to him. The quality that could make him feel like he finished a conquest as long as he slept with her as there would be some resistance.

    In fact, he saw some simr anomalies in thetest settlement too. But they are a bit older and didn¡¯t have the same beauty as most women did. Even that only exins moderate sex, but these women didn¡¯t have any sex in the past three days.

    They are rare but notpletely umon. So, the King must have been intrigued by her. So, Arona started acting shy and proactive at the time. Giving signals to the King without making any move. This caused the King to change his schedule with other women and go to Arona.

    This made her look more annoying for the rest of the women, but she seeded. The next day, the new addition to the posse also took a simr approach in her own way and managed to getid and she is even more powerful than Arona which made him stay with her all night.

    This caused the atmosphere in the posse to changepletely, except for the King as he enjoyed each womanpeting to have sex with him.

    Even though that is the normal urrence this time, it was more and more obvious.

    After this was over, Sam moved to the next thing he has to take care of within the camp. The food.

    The king likes to eat. He doesn¡¯t have to eat every day. But no matter what happens, he will eat five times a day and one of the women he kept is solely because of her cooking skills.

    Arona observed how the cooking process goes. There are two guards who are the only male part of the posse other than the King who goes for a hunt and brings it back. They will prepare the meat and the cook will prepare a recipe after observing the meat.

    So, one day Sam caught the same type of beast as the guards and made Arona to take over the cooking section. Even though the cook was reluctant, acting shy and coy in bed made Arona to get what she needed.

    Sam cooked the meat on the side separately and sent the shadow mice so that Arona can just put an act with the meat and switch it.

    When king ate the meat, he was ecstatic that he even canceled his schedule on fucking his queen to stay with Arona.

    The n worked.

    For the next three days, Arona took over the cooking and more time from the King which increased the tensions even more.

    Then Arona went to meet thetest addition in the posse and tried to cozy up.

    "We are the new ones here. I think it would be better to stick together." Arona said to her calmly.

    "You are the one at advantage, why should you bother? You can just cook your way onto his dick."

    "What if the Queen kills me? I don¡¯t have the lofty ambition of bing a queen, but I want to have a morefortable life. I think you would make the perfect queen and I don¡¯t have any problem serving under someone like you.

    I have a special recipe that could help you with that.

    You cane and take over the cooking duty for the night and trust me he will not leave you alone for the whole night."

    "Why would you do that for me?"

    "Because I am ipetent as a queen or any high-level position, but it wouldn¡¯t hurt if someone like you who ispetent enough bes a queen and I have her support."

    The woman was a bit suspicious of Arona but she still agreed. She just has to pretend that she is cooking, so she didn¡¯t even bother to do anything and lets Arona do all of it while she rested.

    When the dinner was finished, she took a taste and was stunned in silence for a second and then gave Arona a tight kiss in joy.

    "You are a lifesaver. I will never forget this."

    She let the guards set the table outside and took all the credit for the meal.

    The posse of women and King were all mesmerized by the meal and felt a bit lost. But before they coulde back to their senses, the King is already tearing the garment off of this new addition and started making love on the same dinner table.

    The women became jealous even more so than normal and they are also aroused. But no matter what they tried, they were not weed in between the King and the woman as they made love in the wilderness. The table broke, they rolled on the ground, the rest of the women waited a lot but they didn¡¯t get a chance. So they retired to the tents. But the moans of pleasure prevented them from taking any rest.

 Chapter 931: Addiction

    Aina.

    The name of the woman who was the wife of the Kal of the previous settlement. The new addition which Arona used as per Sam¡¯s instructions.

    For the next few days, the journey actually stopped. The king spent most of the time with Aina. They made love like beasts on heat and he did it until the point of exhaustion. Even if he was not satisfied by then, he went to other women.

    The bnce in power has changedpletely. The King didn¡¯t care, but the women became insecure about their positions. Even the time he spent after having his way with Aina is bing less and less and with every meal, he is spending more time with Aina.

    And the frustration in the rest of the women grew more and more.

    They thought that King really fell in love with Aina.

    But what they don¡¯t know is this is Sam¡¯s doing. He is using a special Aphrodisiac on the King mixed with the food.

    He tinkered with the recipe of the drug to make it enhance the taste of the food as well as the libido.

    And the King directed all this increased libido towards Aina without a second thought and Aina who is probably the best performer in the bed managed to hold him in ce making sure that he got satisfied in every way. Both physically and mentally to the point that he didn¡¯t even bother thinking of other women.

    Even his queen was barely remembered by him.

    He stopped his journey temporarily for over a week to enjoy his time with Aina.

    He was that high of Aphrodasiac and the pleasure, but he attributed all of it to Aina and her possible expertise in the matter.

    And the next step started after three days of Aina and King¡¯s exploits.

    Sam started changing the recipe a bit and from this point onwards Arona has to stay away from the King for a while which is easier than ever.

    The debacuhry went on for the whole week and the rest of the women are extremely frustrated. By day six and seven, he didn¡¯t even go for one of them and also fucked Aina to death.

    Which prompted him to leave her alone for a while to recover. But his increased his libido didn¡¯t stop and finally the women started getting their much needed attention as they restarted their journey once again.

    But this time, the King is not feeling as satisfied as he did with Aina which made him feel frustrated.

    Another week went by when they reached the next settlement, he didn¡¯t have the same enthusiasm as before. He had high libido but no satisfaction. Not unless he did it with Aina. Otherwise, his libido is being wasted.

    He couldn¡¯t focus on his partner and his erection is notsting long.

    Arona who is the only one within the posse who understood his situation looked at him with a deeply satisfied glee.

    The suffering of the king made her feel good and she is more and more assured that Sam might achieve what he said he would.

    While the libido of the women is increasing with every meal, they are feeling frustrated by King¡¯sck of attention.

    Aina who was crazy about the attention iscking the energy to do it. And Arona once again did something ording to Sam¡¯s instructions.

    "Take these potions. They are good for keeping you energy and recovery."

    "Where did you get these?"

    "I made them myself. It is a secret. I didn¡¯t want the queen and others to know that I am taking things like these to please the King, they would kill me. But you are having a hard time because of yourck of energy. So, take these and you would be able to keep him with you for three days straight."

    Aina was ecstatic, but still a bit suspicious. Arona had to take a sip before Aina could drink them.

    The potions increased their activity once again.

    The frustration between the posse increased to a whole new level by the time they started their journey once again.

    The women felt their increasing libido extremely problematic to the point they put their disputes aside and started pleasing themselves.

    Sam got the real time news from Arona as he noted down every single reaction from the group.

    Since the start, every change that happened to the group is done by him. The Aphrodisiac, the drugs that increased the sexual frustration of the King when he is not doing with Aina, the drugs that increased the frustration of the women when they are not doing with them and finally the potions that Aina is drinking currently is almost thest phase of the ns.

    Now he just has to wait for the results.

    And soon he got them.

    Because two of thedies, the ones in middle stage of Astral ne Pre-transcendence couldn¡¯t take it anymore and took the male guards with them to have sex.

    As liberal as it may be in this world and men doesn¡¯t care that much about their sexual parnter¡¯s sexual partners, the King¡¯s Ego wouldn¡¯t allow him to share his women.

    Arona whispered this in the ears of Aina who took this as an advantage and took the King to the same spot while they are fooling around.

    The King looked at the guards and his women along with them.

    And for the first time, he thought something else other than fucking Aina¡¯s brains out. He looked at them with boiling anger and his aura raged.

    He took out the staff and Sam is looking through the telescope as he observed the reaction carefully.

    "How dare you?"

    He asked as he pressed his leg on the chest of the guard who is nearest to them.

    "Lord, it was not my fault, she was the one that dragged me here."

    He begged and pleaded as soon as he saw the rage of his King.

    Sometimes it is easy to forget why king is the king when all he does is fuck around like a horny dog.

    He smashed the staff on his head and killed him one strike before moving to the other guard.

    The guard wanted to run away in a desperate attempt to safe his life.

    But as the King swung the staff, a wind cannon smashed him on the back almost breaking the spine and making him crash into the ground.

    The King hit him on the back of his neck which killed him.

    He then finally turned to the two of his women. Unlike the guards, he didn¡¯t kill them with a single strike, instead he started beating the crap out of them.

    "How dare you bitches sleep with someone behind my back?

    You nasty whores.

    Once I said you are mine, then you are mine.

    Only I can fuck you. Filthy whores."

    He went on and on until they slowly bled to death.

    Aina looked at them with a smirk. All she could see is the death of two of herpetitors.

    But what she failed observe is the beastiality of the man she is lusting after.

    Meanwhile Arona looked at the situation and felt extremely satisfied with the way things are going.

    The twins who saw the live broadcast from Arona were shocked by this and asked Sam.

    "That tool killed his own women? How did you manage to do that?"

    "I didn¡¯t actually. Credit goes to one of my subordinates currently doing some research in my home."

    "Is it all from the drugs you put in the food?"

    "Not all of them. The drugs in the food is just aphrodisiac, this is from the potions Aina is consuming. During sex a cultivator exchange their spiritual energy along with the bodily fluids and the potion I gave her is one of the reseach projects of my subordinate.

    He is trying to create a medicine which would make the healing easier.

    When a patient is in subconscious state, advanced healing that required for organ regeneration is hard. Particrly when they just went into shock due to a deadly battle.

    The instinctual response of the body is to force the foreign energy out and the hardest part in the treatment is to dominate the energy and make it dormant for a while. Making the subconscious instincts to understand that it is useless to resist or that I was being done for their own good.

    But it is hard for average healers which causes many people to die.

    This potion works on the doctor and when it was taken, the doctor¡¯s energy will give out a mellow feeling which makes the subconscious instincts drop their guard and enjoy the soothing and mellow feeling of the spiritual energy.

    But there is only one drawback, it is addictive and it messes with one¡¯s brain.

    That is why he gave me the samples and recipe to see how we can fix that addictive factor, I research it in my spare time.

    But currently, the unfinished drug is being useful."

    "But how useful can a drug that is used for low-level users can be on an elite of Astral ne?"

    "Well as long as he keeps on taking it, it would be effective. After all, they are already sex-crazed and an addict, for one thing, could get addicted to another easily."

 Chapter 932: Plot

    The things went on just like how Sam nned for the next few days.

    Aina and the King are doing what they are doing and the rest of the women are being thankfully ignored only involved when Aina wanted some excitement in.

    But the King is not getting that feeling.

    They reached the next settlement and this time, the ceremony is almost non-existent. The King is fully focused on Aina, the Queen waspletely sidelined and was told to pick the women she liked while he went into the Mansion along with Aina.

    He was smitten with her and if not for the fact that she is sure that she wouldn¡¯t be able to defeat him, the Queen herself wanted to deal with him.

    The orgy in this city waspletely nd. He didn¡¯t make time for any new additions. He just kept on having sex with Aina for seven to eight hours a day. It is too much even for an Astral ne cultivator.

    But he got addicted to it.

    Aina who was feeling good about this was having second thoughts, but when he saw the lost look on Queen¡¯s face and how the King couldn¡¯t even get himself turned on when he is trying it with Queen alone. He has to keep physical contact with Aina continuously.

    He is getting more and more addicted to her and she is downing more and more potions into her body.

    Arona who was not raped for more than ten days is feeling grateful and happy after a long time. She looked at the deprived state of the King and felt a sense of victory over him.

    After the nd time they spent within the settlement once again, they went out to the next journey.

    On the first night after they left the settlement, Aina came to meet Arona secretely.

    "I just want to talk to you for some time. Can we do that?"

    Arona nodded and both of them took a seat by theke side. Aina looked exhausted and asked Arona.

    "Why is the King so crazy? He was not like that when I met him for the first time. I never thought I would say this. But I don¡¯t want to have sex for a while."

    "Maybe he fell in love with you."

    "No, this is not love. I have seen love. My husband loved me. This is more like a crazy lust."

    "Well, he is the king, he would do whatever he wants. Even if his lust is crazy nobody can do anything about it."

    "I wish he would tone down his libido a bit. He is so out of control for a person of that cultivation level."

    "Is it really that out of hand?"

    "Well, he is acting more and more like a beast. There is no mind and thought put into that sex. He is like a beast in heat."

    As they chatted, the Queen suddenly who is hiding in the rear heard these words and left to talk to her husband.

    The King cannot be insulted like this and even the slightest of suspicion he gets would be answered with death.

    And she has seen many of the concubines he keeps in the castle getting killed because of her snitching and she felt it would be the same.

    At least that is what she hoped and the initial reaction is indeed so.

    "AINA."

    The King yelled out as soon as he got theint.

    Aina and Arona went running towards him and he is indeed furious.

    "Queen has something to say about you. Do you have an answer for that?"

    The Queen repeated what she did and then pointed at Arona.

    "She is there too, ask her if I am telling the truth."

    She looked threateningly at Arona which is obviously an indication for her to not lie. But Arona behaved as if she never even saw that and spoke.

    "Lord, I am sorry to say this, but the Queen came to us when we are speaking and she started yelling at Aina about her being a vixen and hogging you all for herself and she said that this would be the end of Aina¡¯s wicked ns.

    She is just lying to make you angry so that you would punish Aina and she can have you all for herself."

    She bowed down and spoke in a pitiful voice as if she was afraid to speak up.

    Aina was dazed for a moment and it didn¡¯t take long before she took the hint.

    She averted her gaze with tearful eyes and when King saw that he thought of his own answer and he took out the staff immediately and swung it at the queen.

    The Queen was shocked. She was Queen not just because she is a goody, rather she is most trustworthy to the King.

    They practically grew up together. She is his political and business advisor and that is the reason he trusted her every time she reported something and it should have been the same at this moment.

    But the Kingpletely took the side of a woman who is nothing but a goody. She has nothing to offer other than her body.

    Even though, there are many thoughts running through her mind, protecting herself was the top priority and she did just that.

    The staff hit her on the torso and she flew back and crashed into the tree as she spat out blood.

    The King looked at her coldly and said.

    "I am forgiving you because of all the things you have done for me, but there is no way I will let you off if you do something like this again."

    The queen¡¯s face is filled with shock and pain.

    She really wanted to retaliate, but she knew that her power is not equal to the King. She has to endure this.

    She looked at Aina and Arona with a hateful stare which both of them ignored and went to finish their chat.

    "You are really gutsy. You should have given me a headsup."

    "You are going to be the next queen anyway, there is no problem. It is only a matter of days."

    "But still; this is too early. What if she just kills us and be done with it."

    Arona didn¡¯t say anything and stayed silent. At midnight she sent the report back to Sam and got a reply.

    That night the exchange of notes went for quite a long time.

    The next morning, she went to meet Aina again as soon as they got the chance,

    "I have a n for you. If you want to be a queen. Then you can be the queen and it would be announced in the next settlement. You can get rid of the Queen and herpanions easily."

    "Is there really such a good deal in this world? How can we get rid of them?"

    "We are nearing their of a beast. I have a herb that attracts that beast and I have a n. If you want to, tell me before we reach the settlement.

    We would out of range of that beastir after we reach the settlement."

    After that she didn¡¯t stay in touch with Aina that much, but she did change the cooking pattern. Which means she changed the food for the queen and the rest of the women. It is also another drug that was still in research.

    And this increased their aphrodisiac content and then came the effects of the new drug. It has the function of increasing the blood pressure.

    This is for surgical purposes. Not everyone has so many elements like Sam, they couldn¡¯t control the blood flow in the middle of healing someone.

    There is another drug that helps with slowing down the cirction too, bit it has no use now.

    As the queen and the rest got the new foods, they are bing more and more out of control. There are many instances where they wanted to kill Aina directly and the Queen even thought of ideas of killing the King while he is doing Aina.

    As she observed the changes in the behavior, Aina became more and more cautious and on second day she agreed to Arona¡¯s n.

    "Try to find a way to get all the women to a separate spot and make sure that King is a bit away but not too far. Try to talk him in to making this happen and the n with seeding easily. I will take care of the rest."

    "But what if the beast manages to kill me."

    "There is no chance. The beast would be more interested of the herb than us. And it cannot consume it directly, there is arge process it has to go through before eating it away and it would be very possessive of it.

    So don¡¯t worry. As long as it gets the herb it will go away.

    In fact, I will give the herb to you and you can throw it away whenever things go south. But one thing does make sure that the queen and the rest know that King is nearby, then only the n will work."

 Chapter 933: Loss of Satisfaction

    The next day, Arona proceeded along with the n Sam sent her which she advocated as her n to Aina.

    She took three simr herbs that gave out some transparent liquid when squeezed out and applied it on Aina¡¯s arms. She only left one herb intact and Aina held on to it.

    The women are all moving towards a spot which is supposed to have some special fruit which Aina believes extremely great addition to ¡¯her cooking¡¯.

    As the King is a sucker for her and her cooking, he agreed without a second thought and sent all thedies to collect the fruit. Since he killed his guards thedies are the only ones left to do his work.

    And somehow she even managed to make sure that he stays within a certain range.

    Sam nted some berry bushes nearby to create a proper scenario and thedies arrived there as they plucked the fruit.

    At this moment, they sensed a presenceing from the side and before they knew it, the Raiju Elder already appeared near Aina, ignoring the remaining women.

    The women who are already under the influence of the drug looked at the most hated person being attacked and didn¡¯t even bother to react.

    They cannot kill her, as the King would be dealing with them if they did, but that doesn¡¯t mean they cannot just let her die on her when an external party attacked.

    They are not her bodyguards after all.

    They genuinely wished that Raiju elder would kill her. The Raiju elder caused a lot of ruckus and made some big moves and Aina started running towards the Queen.

    Queen who is clearly stronger than Raiju elder in cultivation level didn¡¯t want to get involved in this. More than anyone else, she wished that Aina died on the spot.

    So, she dodged to the side and let the beast have his go.

    "Queen, you have to save me. Otherwise, the King wouldn¡¯t let you off."

    "The King has to know before he makes a decision. And I am sure, no one here will be giving him the news."

    As she spoke the rest of the women agreed and suddenly their eyesnded on Arona who is standing at the edge of the field.

    "There is indeed a snitch here. It is possible he might know."

    As she said she gestured for the women nearest to Arona to make a move. At this exact moment, the King came from his hiding.

    "You filthy Whore."

    He yelled at the Queen and looked at them coldly. Aina threw the herb into the air and the Raiju elder caught it before running away.

    The King wanted to follow him and make a move, but as Raiju elder dove into the forest, he disappeared all of a sudden which cut his trail off.

    After a futile search to look for the tracks and the cloud anger he has towards his wife and concubines, he walked out of the forest and went to the field where the women all gathered together, with the exception of Aina and Arona.

    Thetter is currently feeding some potions to the former.

    "King, listen to me for a moment. Please."

    The Queen asked as she tried to talk her way through this situation. But the King is already angry and his staff is already out.

    The surrounding wind elemental energy ispletely riled up. The Queen and the women tried to plead some more, but that all turned out to be futile. He didn¡¯t back down and slowly walk towards them as he channeled his energy into the staff.

    Queen looked at his cold eyes and spat on the ground coldly before saying.

    "I apanied you through thick and thin for decades. I helped you be the king and offered you all kinds of assistance. I was there beside you in war protecting your back. I was there beside your bed when you were injured.

    Now, because of a vixen you dare do this to me? How dare you? How dare you betray me like this?"

    She yelled and sobbed at the same time, there is a burning resentment in her eyes.

    The King looked at her with anger, disgust, and disdain in his eyes and without speaking anything lifted his staff.

    And then the battle began. Aina broadcasted it live and Sam saw this along with the twins and his subordinates.

    One must say that the Queen is quite strong. She is at least as strong as one of the twins and she has great battle instincts. She can think on her feet quickly and made some significant damage.

    But unfortunately the King who mostly relied on the brute force still managed to overpower.

    The battlested fifteen minutes and this gap he killed almost all of the women and only spared some as they begged and pleaded for mercy.

    No one knows if he didn¡¯t kill them because he really showed mercy or if it is because he couldn¡¯t care less about them.

    At thest sh between the King and the Queen, when the staff was about to make a contact, she used all her energy to thrust her sword into the arm that was holding the staff.

    The staffnded and half of the bones in her body broke. She fell to the ground with blooding from her orifices.

    She had a smile on her face as she looked at Aina and said.

    "She will be the end of you."

    She closed her eyes and died.

    He then looked at the women who are half dead and barely alive and said.

    "I am leaving you alone for now, because you are just bystanders. But this is the final warning. Aina will be your new queen from today and you all have to respect her as you did to me. Do you understand?"

    They nodded and knelt before Aina asking for forgiveness.

    Aina was stunned for a moment. This is what she was yearning for. This is her goal and she achieved it just like that.

    She can wear the golden shoulder pads and roam around the. She would be the dream woman of everyman but they cannot touch her and would even fear imagining something with her.

    She would be a symbol of the tribe.

    As she was reveling in her own fantasies, the King dragged her away to make love to distract himself and the rest of the women followed.

    Arona was thest one to move behind them.

    She got a new message.

    And she was surprised when she read it.

    But she did as she was told.

    For the next few days, the wound on the King¡¯s hand didn¡¯t heal. For some reason, no matter how many times he took the required pills, the bleeding didn¡¯t stop and the wind elemental energy is not really a healing element.

    He doesn¡¯t have any healers at hand. So, once again Arona came into y.

    She went to meet Aina and used her to deliver another recipe which stopped the bleeding and made the wound scab, but the arm became a bit numb and he needs to give the arm some rest.

    In the next two days, they reached the next settlement, where the King announced Aina as the new queen.

    Even though everyone has many doubts in their minds, they didn¡¯t dare ask them out loud. King does whatever he wants.

    This time he left the job to pick the new women in the city to some other women and directly took Aina inside to make some love on afortable bed.

    But for some reason, in the middle of the sex, he lost the weird soothing sensation he always gets while doing it with Aina.

    But he didn¡¯t stop, in fact, he increased his pace and started using all his strength.

    Aina started screaming in pain and almost broke some bones which prompted him to leave her alone.

    He went to the rest of the women and let Aina recover.

    But for the next two days, no woman managed to give him any pleasure.

    He felt like he lost a part of him. He felt iplete.

    The sex he liked so much felt like a tedious activity he was being forced to do to find that weird pleasure that made him smitten with Aina.

    He couldn¡¯t find it anywhere and then he directly went to Aina who was still recovering and started raping her even though she tried to resist.

    After knowing that he couldn¡¯t be controlled, she calmed down and went along with it while leading him on with her bedroom tricks.

    He calmed down for a while and tried to enjoy it, there are a few traces of the joy he was searching. But he couldn¡¯t get a hold it.

    It is almost like he is fishing with his hand and he could touch the fishtail and fins. But he couldn¡¯t get a grip on the fish no matter how hard he tried.

    But at least with Aina¡¯s efforts, he was satisfied for the moment.

 Chapter 934: Withdrawal

    Addiction withdrawal.

    Something that happens in humans quite often. No matter what kind of addiction it is, it might be an addiction to drugs, alcohol, some types of food, mobile devices, music, movies. People could be addicted to anything and when they are taken off of that and the supply for any of their addiction was cut off, you would see a whole new side of that particr person.

    We can see the behavior they never even exhibited. The bravest man will show fear. The strongest man will show weakness, the most loving person would show ruthlessness and the most restrained man will show recklessness.

    And currently, Sam figured out that even a strong cultivator is not exactly an exception for this case.

    On the third day in the newest settlement, the King has already killed four maids and a local woman who was selected for his orgy which didn¡¯t take ce.

    Aina tried her best to control his urge but he cannot, because the food is still beingced with Aphrodisiac. There is no way to tone down his erection. But there is no way to stop the food. Because that is the only thing that is keeping him in check for a few hours a day and Aina doesn¡¯t know it has the aphrodisiacs in them.

    If anyone in the sane mind has been in that situation, they would have looked for an anomaly. But only if they met this guy for the first time.

    But no one cared about any anomaly, because of the King¡¯s crazy quirks, nobody thought that something might have happened to him.

    Not until the fourth day, where his arms showed something else.

    The muscle that was cut off of his hand because of the sword attack of his wife, didn¡¯t healpletely. The healing pills and potions he was taking were not working and the muscle seemed to be overgrown overnight and it is still growing.

    At first, he thought that the muscle growth was normal but by that day, there is a lot more growth than it should have been, he could almost see the difference between the sizes of the two arms with his naked eye.

    And this muscle overgrowth started hurting him.

    He doesn¡¯t know why the overgrowth is not stopping, so he stopped taking the pills and potions. But the pain didn¡¯t go away.

    If only he knew that as long as he didn¡¯t eat the food that he gorges down for five to seven times a day, this might have stopped, then he would have been okay.

    But he didn¡¯t and nobody dared to do anything. Including asking for his well-being, checking up on him or taking care of him.

    For the first time, on the fifth day, he remembered the queen he killed and even left the dead body in the middle of the forest as if it was a rotten carcass.

    She used to care for him, she used to check upon him. Too bad, he was an asshole.

    And when he remembered why he killed her like that, his thoughts led him to Aina, and then his thoughts led him to the warm soothing feeling he gets after having sex with her. And he ran into the room and started roughly doing her without a second thought.

    "STOP. NOOO, STOP."

    Aina started screaming in pain as she reached several orgasms but the pain overwhelmed the minute pleasure he got.

    "Where is it?"

    The king muttered which made her stop her screaming as she tried to listen to what he was saying. He didn¡¯t care whether she is screaming or not as he just tried his best to get that feeling.

    "Where is it? Why could I not feel it?

    There is something wrong. There is something hidden.

    I couldn¡¯t feel it. I want that feeling.

    I want the sensation."

    He started muttering all kinds of things and he increased his thrusting and almost made her bleed.

    "MYYYY KKIIIIIINNG"

    She yelled at the top of her lungs and he came out of a daze. He saw the faint trace of blooding out of her vagina, he immediately left her and went outside.

    He ran into the forest to calm himself down and for that reason, he trained for the first time in a few months.

    Aina immediately ran to Arona and said.

    "He became crazy. I am a lot weaker than the Queen, I couldn¡¯t take this like she did. Help me please."

    Arona gave her a few more potions and told her to get a rest before she went to send the message to Sam.

    Sam who saw the symptoms smiled and sent a reply.

    "Wait until you guys enter the forest and for the next settlement or any return.

    Before that journey, use thest drug I gave you and I sent a scroll, use your blood and draw a line starting from the center of the scroll and towards the east while you are facing the east and inject your spiritual energy into the scroll.

    Use the scroll only after you saw the first symptom listed down on the rest of the note. Good luck and don¡¯t go anywhere near him.

    If hees looking for sex use the scroll right away. He would be a beast for quite some time.

    So, do be careful if you want to live."

    She then proceeded to read the rest of the symptoms and instructions and sent the scroll away with the shadow mouse. She only carried the transference scroll and thest set of drugs to make sure everything goes right.

    After two more days, they started their journey and this time the King brought a bunch of women with him from the settlement and he is having sex with them on that elephant-type beast continuously in search of that lost feeling.

    Aina still has to recover for a few days, her bones were dislocated because of the rough sex he had.

    And the first meal they stopped for after the start of the journey, Arona gave thest drug Sam wanted her to administer and soon after the meal when he was taking a rest something happened.

    He clutched his left arm which has muscle overgrowth in pain. This is painful beyond anything he ever experienced.

    He could see the overgrown twitching continuously. It is fighting off the original muscle fibers that are already present on the arm as if it was conscious. To be precise the rest of the body is rejecting that piece of muscle tissue.

    Even his clutching is more painful than normal. This is the result of another set of experiemental drugs. The ones that are created for torture. It is nowhere near finishing and it causes the pain receptors to be a hundred times more sensitive than normal.

    At this moment, a single pinch would feel like a stab wound for him and one can only guess what would happen if he was really stabbed and in a situation like this, he is feeling the pain of muscle tissue being forcefully separated from the rest.

    When Arona saw the change, she immediately took out the scroll and got ready to leave but at this moment, Aina came over and took a look at the King¡¯s situation and asked.

    "What is happening to him?"

    "He seems to be in pain. Residual effects to the stab in his arm. It must have injured a sensitive part of the arm.

    Go and tell him, he would be okay. Give him a massage."

    Aina nodded and left, Arona smirked and waited for the scene to y out. When Aina ced her hands on the muscle tissue and pressed it with her spiritual energy...

    "AHHHHHHH..." The king screamed at the top of his lungs and swung his fist at her. She is not as strong as the original queen, to begin with, so she couldn¡¯t take the hit and die on the spot.

    Aronaughed out loud and activated the scroll and when the King looked in her direction, all he saw is her disappearing in a streak and he got suspicious, before he could run, he felt the pain increased and knelt on the floor.

    Arona reappeared in a forest patch and she waited there and soon Sam appeared in that spot on Sky and the first thing he did is give her some robes to cover herself. Since he came out of the city and traveling through the forest, he already wore clothes, this naked roaming around is not his thing.

    She was d to see full clothes, in this tribe anyone who wore clothes is taking an odd one and picked on, even dead and nobody would care.

    She covered herself in the robes and felt secure after a long time.

    "My beasts would be here with you. There is no strong predator in the surroundings and if there is any problem I would be getting notified immediately. I wille as fast as I can. I have to go back and take care of the King."

    With that, he let Yanwu, ape, and Dia out before going back to the spot where the King is still screaming. The twins are also ready to deal with that guy now. They wouldn¡¯t be able to find him a weaker state.

 Chapter 935: Pain

    The twins are looking at the King from afar as they observed his symptoms. ording to Sam, the pain will only get worse for the next few worse.

    And they have to make a move only when the King tries to cut his hand off but fails, that is the best time for them to make their move as that would be the time the pain receptors reach the highest sensitivity.

    Before the symptoms reached that point, Sam already arrived and took a look.

    They had to wait for a good half-an-hour before they could make their move and this time, Sam didn¡¯t go himself into the field, he just flew upwards on the Sky as he looked down through the telescope.

    The twins arrived in front of the King as he was about to chop his arm off, but the very little contact made him unable to continue. The small sh he left on it created a lot of pain and faint bleeding and he could only grit his teeth and endure as he took deep breaths.

    The rest of the posse didn¡¯t even dare toe near him and disturb him and when the twins came and they felt their auras, they are even more stunned.

    "Sr Fragments? What are you doing here?"

    The King got vignt and for a moment, he even forgot all about the pain. He took out his staff and raised his aura.

    The twins didn¡¯t speak and the King continued.

    "I know you guys. You are the bastard twins from the Sr fragments. Why are you here? Answer me, or your tribe might need to answer thatter."

    "No need to answer with words when we can do that with actions," Agar spoke and made a move first.

    She directly went to full fire elemental fusion as she lunged towards the King who started spinning his staff with the wind element.

    Both of them exchanged blows and when the hit connected, the King felt like his whole world is copsing. In normal times, he wouldn¡¯t have even flinched when he was attacked like this, but now he felt like his whole body is burning in a furnace which made him close his eyes flinch as he lost focus.

    Agar has no mind to not take advantage of that and she ced her palm on his chest before sting arge golden fireball.

    The King flew back as he groaned in pain. He could feel each muscle fiber burning up. This is torturous than any torture he put through.

    If a seasoned warrior was in his ce, he would have retreated. But this guy is not thinking straight from the withdrawal symptoms and he became angry because of the pain, but before he could get up, Argannded from upwards and he cannonballed himself into the same spot of the chest with arge ball of fire under his legs.

    Arge crater appears on the ground with the King¡¯s body as the center and this time, the groaning became screaming for his life.

    The twins took this as an advantage and constantly rained fire on the guy, keeping him in the pit without letting hime out of it.

    The King felt his mind go numb. He stopped thinking clearly a long time ago, but he knew one thing, if things go wrong, he would be dying right there and then. He didn¡¯t want that to happen no matter what.

    As he felt his flesh slowly burning with the golden mes, he shook himself out of his painful daze and used his wind elemental energy to block the iing me and as soon as he found the opening, he ran out and turned to escape.

    He couldn¡¯t care less about the pride and face. As long as he was alive and as long as this painful phase is over, he can just go there and kill the whole Sr Fragment tribe if he wants to.

    The twins started running after him as well and on their chase, the King destroyed the vegetationpletely while the twins burned the same vegetation to ashes.

    The twins started throwing ranged attacks which sometimesnded and sometimes missed. But every time itnded, they grew closer to the king who is already panting and sweating like crazy.

    At this moment, as the King was running, he saw something in the front.

    The former Queen before Aina. The Queen he killed when he was lost in lust.

    He has seen that rear many times and he is seeing it now. If his mind was any clearer, he might have avoided it, but he is in desperation and he ran towards her. As soon asid his hand on her back, the Queen turned over and stabbed a knife in his guts before biting him in the neck.

    The king didn¡¯t even yell in pain this time. He couldn¡¯t even breathe properly. He almost went into a shock like that.

    He finally managed to take a look at the Queen and then only he noticed the anomaly. The wounds he inflicted are still there but since they are mostly internal, he subconsciously ignored them. The one in front of him is an undead.

    For some reason, he felt extremely angry. Angry at himself, angry at his lustful behavior and angry at the twins who are chasing him, and angry at the necromancer who used the Queen to be their tool.

    He pulled the knife out of his guts and threw the undead away before turning back with his staff. Hepletely gave up. Since there is a high chance he would die, he might as well go all out in the battle.

    As the twins ran towards him, he ran towards the twins with full speed while spinning his staff crazily.

    When he was few feet away from them, he swung his staff in the air which created a massive wind de that went towards the twins which they dodged easily. But in that brief moment, the King used wind elemental fusion and rode the wind as he appeared behind Argan and swung his staff.

    The staffnded right on his back and the air cannon at the end made his organs shake inside his body as he crashed into the ground creating a crater.

    But the cost of it is that Agar managed to sneak to his rear before pping her palm on the neck bit he got just a moment and dug her fingers into it before burning it with golden fires.

    "AAAAHHHHHHHH..."

    He yelled in pain and could feel each cell in his throat burning up and by the end of the attack, he lost his voice and couldn¡¯t speak or yell.

    But he still didn¡¯t give up, he swung his staff backward and the end of it grazed past her torso which caused aceration and she fell backward as he lost her bnce.

    The King jumped towards and tried to m the staff on her head and finish it with a single strike. The chaotic wind energy in the staff is an easy indication of that. But before he couldnd it, Argan came from the side and shoved his arm into the stab wound, and hugged him from the rear before firing it up.

    The King couldn¡¯t even yell in pain as he almost felt like dying and be done with it. Almost.

    Before he gave up, he suddenly changed his mind and gritted his teeth to throw an elbow and the head or Argan, which he tried to dodge, but the wind de that was a result of the elbow couldn¡¯t be dodged as it sliced his temple and the nose a bit which caught him off guard and made him leave the guy.

    By now the King became crazy, he used his full power without care for preservation or escape n and directly attacked the duo in closebat, but the staff and the wind elemental strikes are much deadlier than the wind attacks he threw from a certain range.

    Even on hisst legs, this guy is an absolute beast. He started inflicting the wounds and the twins continuously, even though they are small, they are umting and create some serious trouble for them.

    But almost couldn¡¯t avoid them. Every move turned into a Kamikaze. Every attack is being aimed at mutual destruction. It would be really hard to fight off a person like that. Particrly, when one is as strong as the King.

    After a few minutes, the twins stood on one side and the King stood on the other, both not making a move. Now the twins are also panting and bleeding crazily but King is a lot worse. Many parts of his flesh are burned and they can even see the ribs on his torso.

    He can only make onest move which is also the reason the twins became careful.

    But at this moment, there is arge colorful explosion in the sky which made the Twins smile and the King frown. He couldn¡¯t understand while an explosion like that would happen at a moment like this. But before he could make sense, he saw someone falling from the sky. He couldn¡¯t make the silhouette but all he could see is that person is iplete ck color.

    But he felt that person is stupid, not because of the height he wasing from, but because it is too eye-catching and extremely easy to spot which led him to a question. Why are the twins smiling?

 Chapter 936: Recruitment Drive

    The King looked at Sam who is falling. His fall is too high. It would take at least thirty seconds for him to reach the point.

    He decided to take care of the twins in these thirty seconds before he shifted his focus to Sam.

    But as soon as he decided and was about to make a move, the twins lunged towards him directly and they held his hands with their bodies. Agar held the hand that held the staff and started heating the whole arm directly and Argan who is holding the hand with excess muscle which is being rejected by the rest of the flesh did the same.

    The King was caught off guard. There is a reason why people don¡¯t usually make these kinds of moves. They might be easily executed once the opponent was caught off guard, but it was also dangerous for the ones who made the move and might backfire big time.

    Particrly when the opponent is too strong.

    And in this case that is how the situation should have turned out. But the pain receptors are at their most sensitive state which made the King almost pass out.

    At this moment Argan canceled his fire elemental fusion and activated the light elemental fusion and injected the light elemental energy into the arm.

    The muscle tissue that was being rejected finally found its backer it started absorbing the vitality from the light elemental energy and when the King tried to inject his own spiritual energy to numb the pain, he felt an even more soul-searing pain out of nowhere which almost wanted him to die. This is the most painful situation he has ever been in.

    He couldn¡¯t even move his arms much less attack the targets that are right under his arms. While he tried to calm himself down, he remembered something and looked upwards.

    Sam almost neared the ground and is only a few feet away.

    He is in the merged state of shadow fusion and Space fusion and held the shadow sword in his hands.

    As he moved towards the ground, he used the shadow sword to sh right behind the King and before he could touch the ground, he used the shadow and space elemental energies to turn into a puff of smoke and reappearing in front king.

    The spatial tear to the Shadow world opened up and Sam¡¯s shadows hugged the King from the rear and the corrosive shadow energy starteding out of the tear crazily.

    Sam used a spatial barrier shieldbined with the shadow elemental energy to cover himself and the twins as they slowly pushed the King into the portal.

    His pain didn¡¯t allow him to move the arm. His instincts arepletely taking over and didn¡¯t let him try to do anything that increased the pain.

    Agar held onto the staff tightly, but the King held on to it even tighter and didn¡¯t show any signs of losing it.

    The staff is his life. There is no way he would give it up that easily.

    But as he struggled the shadow¡¯s corrosive energy is seeping into his body which felt like a bug gnawing into his flesh. He felt exasperated as all his life revolved around and for the first time in the past few days, he has a moment of rity.

    When he remembered all the things that are happening to him. His obsession, his addiction, his debauchery, his arrogance, his Queen. All of the things that came to his mind. He understood that something is wrong. All of it cannot be a coincidence. If he was going to die, he at least needs some answer. He struggled with all the remaining energy.

    But the twins and Sam are not worried. The King is already halfway through the tear. Now they waited for the spatial tear to close down.

    Sam and King had eye contact and the King who knew that his demise is almost inevitable asked.

    "Who are you?"

    "I am your killer."

    "Why are you trying to kill me? I don¡¯t think we have any enmity."

    "Well, I would have told you to go and ask Hel. But it seems like it has been a long time since you guys contacted her. I don¡¯t know if you got the message or not, but I am Sam and I got a mission to get this staff."

    "Would you leave me if I give up the staff?"

    "I am sorry, I also made a deal that I would kill you if someone helped me set you up. And this is the end for you. It is not good to lose yourself in debauchery. Things wouldn¡¯t turn out properly when you indulge yourself too much. Now goodbye."

    With that, the three of them kicked the King who gave up all the hope.

    The space crack closed itself and the arm which held the staff was cut off there.

    Sam took the staff from it and burned the rest of the arm.

    The three of them then went back to the meeting spot where Arona is waiting.

    They made the camp there and decided to stay for the night and leave the next day.

    "If you are going to target powers like this, you need to increase your manpower. We wasted over a month for this guy, we cannot spend that long time."

    "I wanted to do that too. In fact I wanted to recruit some of the guys from this race, but from the looks of it, they are not suitable for me."

    "Why? Just because they are having sex openly?"

    "No, they are having too much of it. Even though most of it is gic and for the reasons unknown, it is still a problem for me. Did you see how easy we got that guy? All that took was time and for cultivators, time is not exactly a tight resource. We live for centuries and a month for killing a guy who is probably ten times stronger than me is not exactly a bad deal. Don¡¯t you agree?"

    "But the list of the powers you are going after is quite long. You would need more people to do it faster."

    "I know, all I am saying is the current situation is not as bad. But I would really like to recruit new members. In fact, you are going to do that from the rest of the powers you are about to raid. What I am going tock is someone powerful. I need someone at your power level. Do you have any rmendations?"

    The twins fell silent for a moment and after some thought Argan replied.

    "It is hard for people at our level to deliberately ept someone¡¯s dominance over us. Even though we are not exactly some big deal in higher realms we can still do well for ourselves in the current realms, it is nigh impossible to convince that when you cannot give them something."

    But Agar has different thoughts.

    "That is generally true, but there are always anomalies. I have heard of some legends. Some solo cultivators do not belong to any organization or a power. There are quite a few of them with a power level equal to us or even powerful than us. I made a list of them a year ago when we hit a roadblock in our cultivation."

    "Roadblock?"

    "We thought we couldn¡¯t break through into the Late-stage, we werepletely stuck. It is almost like we were caged. So, I wanted to find someone to take revenge. I was content with killing my brother and sending the news to our father."

    "So, you brokethrough and the list became obsolete. I will take it. How many are there?"

    "Ten, out of which three of them are in Late-stage Pre-transcendence. Four of them are in the peak stage of Pre-transcendence and thest three are in the Transcendent stage. One in Middle-stage and two in the Initial stage.

    The list you made as your n can be cleared by anyone of us. But these guys can go after the second phase of the n easily on their own and if you can get them together, you will have an ultimate team that could sweep through the third phase of your ns and they would be a great help to the fourth phase."

    She passed a scroll to Sam and he looked into it.

    There is a list of names along with some general details. The realm,, and their possible location.

    The ten members are indeed a great bunch. They will be extremely useful. And Sam went through their names before saying.

    "Argan, you will go with my team and Raiju Elder to start the first phase of the list. The approach has simple steps, you go there. Make a big announcement. Tell them you are offering a deal for their heirloom and an offer for the strongest person on the, buy both of them if you can. If not raid the home, kill a few and capture the strongest and torture him with the pain drug until they sign a soul contract or anything equivalent to that. But find an assurance that they would be faithful and only bring one from one ce.

    Then bring them back with the heirloom. Keep them close, take them to the next spot, use them to make the announcement, and repeat.

    I and Agar will go on a recruitment drive.

    Oh, by the way, destroy every Hou Yi statue, youe across."

 Chapter 937: Five-Elemental King

    Sam sent Argan with the rest of his team.

    They will start from the families and organizations that are on the same level as the Starbow family and proceed to deal with a series of organizations until they finished the families on the same level as the Sr Fragment tribe.

    All of these organizations are under Hou Yi¡¯s control. While Arkiv is dealing with the organizations under Hel¡¯s control.

    After Argan finished the organizations he will help with Arkiv¡¯s tasks and then they will both move to the rest of the organizations on the same level under different people.

    This first phase would take at least eight months and it might need a whole year. Even if they are easy and an organization would upy at most a week, the sheer number would take a lot of time and the travel time, the nning time, and all the other conditions they have to consider along with the possible conflicts with other yers would do some dys.

    But he is sure that the first phase would take longer than the second phase of the ns anyway.

    After sending him away with the details, Agar and him started going on a journey. But not before sending Arona to one of thes under him to take up a job to manage a bar.

    She doesn¡¯t want to get herself involved in fighting, sex and drugs. She wants to have a rtively peaceful life and she has an experience in a woman bar in the previous. If he can manage these crazy sex-driven maniacs in a bar, there is no need to worry about her management skills.

    So, he threw her in one of the bars and that was the end of their deal.

    After sending her away, Sam and Agar started their journey.

    Their first target of the ten people is actually a Sick man.

    "The Five-Elemental King. The man who can use five basic elements.

    Fire, water, earth, metal, and wood.

    He is a legend among all the Late-stage Astral ne Pre-transcendent cultivators because he is the guy who killed most of the Peak stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivators.

    He is too strong to be on the same cultivation as us. But he is.

    He is good at using formations and inscriptions. Some say he is a good artisan too, but no one knows if it is true.

    He walked through the realm like a crazy maniac and there was no one who could stop his growth and even his presence came out of nowhere. He appeared when he is a Mortal ne Transcendent stage cultivator and they began his legend.

    He roamed around defeating all kinds of geniuses that are considered on the same level as his and defeated them again and again as they broke through. He is the ruler of an era and he marked every single one of his victories by collecting treasures of various kinds in different levels of his cultivation. He has the best weapons, best medicines, best herbs, and the best materials that could be avable in his realm which goes to say he is filthy rich.

    He doesn¡¯t belong to any organization and there are only a few friends, but they are not some small fries.

    But the legend hase to a stop a few years ago when he built himself arge formation of five elements in a valley and meditated there and before he settled like that, he announced that he is sick of something and as long as one gave him a usible diagnosis and treated him he would work for them for the life.

    He solely survived on the spiritual energy and he never came out of the valley and he cannote out of it. That valley is the only thing that is keeping him stable.

    For years, many people, famous healers, pill masters, potion makers tried to give him a proper diagnosis, but they couldn¡¯t do anything. Some said he doesn¡¯t have any illness. Some made some desperate attempts to luck out in a diagnosis, but nothing worked and soon the doctor¡¯s flow reduced.

    The people slowly started forgetting him. But it changed a year ago when some greedy fellows who just broke through in the Peak stage of Astral ne Pre-transcendence wanted to get all the treasures he hoarded over the years and made arge borate ne.

    But not before one of those idiots went into his valley and demanded that he should be given all the treasures. Nobody knows how he died and the rest of the idiots tried to kill him with numbers as they just barged into the valley.

    He came out of his meditation and killed everyone within an hour as all of these guys are young masters the families and tribes they belonged to came looking for revenge. They thought the Five-Elemental King has turned soft and he let the wave of experts enter the valley and locked it in.

    The screams of all of these people were heard throughout the surrounding area for a whole day and when people finally got ess to the valley, they saw a valley full of blood and gore. Dead bodies are everywhere and in the center of the valley, the Five-Elemental King is sitting with his whole body soaked in blood as he meditated every so calmly.

    That is the time I heard of him and I added him to the list, but after I found out about the illness and everything else, I didn¡¯t bother to even try.

    But since you are good at drugs and stuff and this guy is the nearest to us, I figured you might want to try."

    "The Five elemental King. I haven¡¯t seen someone using that many elements except by myself. Let us go and try our luck. I am hardly a doctor or a healer. I would take a look and see how lucky we are."

    After that, both of them went to the realm where the Five elemental King is staying using the wormhole connecting the Hawking and that realm.

    The they entered is called the Star Prism and the family that holds the most power over there is called Cancid family and they belong to the Marhinad race.

    They are a winged race and their wings are thin and translucent. They are razor sharp. They are almost like attached weapons to them as they use them in battle frequently.

    As for why, it is relevant because the head of this family is a friend of the Five elemental kings and after that incident which happened a year ago, he decided to take control over the surroundings of the valley and had strict surveince as well as monitoring the entry of the valley so that no one would disturb the King and get killed.

    The image he left behind previously is still fresh in their minds.

    And the reason why it is relevant to Sam is that they stopped the self-proimed healers to go into the valley so that they would try to piss off Five- Elemental king.

    The popr opinion is that his friend the head of the Cancid family thinks to make his friend free from disturbance, the unpopr opinion is that the Five- elemental king warned him that he would tear the Cancid family a new one if something like this happens again.

    Anyway, in both cases, Sam has to go through the test the Cancid family conducts and has to pass it with flying colors before he is allowed to go into the valley.

    They even constructed a separate building within their family estate for these tests.

    Agar led him to the building and let her attendant who came from the Sr Fragment tribe to finish the registration procedure.

    Sam looked at the long line of applicants before him and asked.

    "Is this what you mean by reduced traffic? They are around a three dozen of these guys."

    "Of course, do you know how many guys are there on the first day the Five elemental kings announced that he would need this healing? Three hundred and twenty-five and on the second day the number climbed to eight hundred and fifty and by the end of the week, it is around one thousand nine hundred.

    You tell me, is flow less or not."

    "Yeah,pared to that it is non-existent. But that doesn¡¯t change the fact that this is going to take a lot of time. Is there any way to skip these guys?"

    "Not really. Bribes don¡¯t work, they are almost as strong as me. They are of decent backgrounds and threats don¡¯t work. In fact, a few people belong to the organizations that are on our list and most of them are in the third phase of it.

    So if you piss them off now by offering a bribe or a threat, you might have to work on them a little earlier than normal. So it is better for you to stay low-key and wait."

    "Do you know what the test is?"

    "I don¡¯t know. But I do know that it was created by the five elemental King himself. It was done on a beast.

    The applications would be closed by afternoon and the test would be conducted. They would check the diagnosis, document it, and select the few that got it correct and they will bring them to the valley tomorrow."

    "Guess, all we can do is wait."

 Chapter 938: Test

    Sam waited for twelve hours before he got his turn. As patient as he could be, it is really a bit frustrating.

    He entered the exam site after a long time. It is arge room with a bunch of people supervising him. There is a beast. A reptile.

    The Razor teeth Alligator. It is one of the beasts that live in water but doesn¡¯t have a water element to it. In fact, it is a neutral element. It is an extremely rare beast because the water elemental beasts like to eat this guy.

    The taste of the meat is great and it is almost addictive. Cooked properly, it is a delicacy that makes even Sam drool for a taste.

    But it has another function. Ab subject. It can be a great guinea pig for any sort of experiments rted to poisons, toxins, potions, parasites.

    It is actually a reptile spiritual beast version of a whiteb rate.

    The next thing Sam noticed is the behavior of the beast. Generally, these alligators are extremely active. As tasty as they can be, there are not many beasts at the same level within the water body that could eat them up.

    They are fast, aggressive, and extremely cunning. But currently, the beast in front of him ispletely tired. It has different skin tones in different ces and its expression is showing pain, pleasure, lethargy, and numbness at the same time.

    He became really curious about its condition. He went in there to take a look. He ced his hand on it and directly used the observation ability to check the whole body out at the same time.

    And then what he saw shocked him.

    The beast in front of him has different elemental energies nested up in its body. It is like a globe of an energy cocktail and each energy is flowing in a random direction, affecting various organs.

    It is hard to keep such an energy lump in a body of a living being without having any effects. There must be an extremely sensitive bnce maintained between them to have any form of stability. But once the bnce broke, the energies wouldn¡¯t be stable anymore and the result is what he is seeing in front of his eyes.

    The bnce between the five energies is not just broken they are currently fighting with each other to corrupt the body and out of all these five elements, only the water element is not harming the beast.

    Because it lives in the water even though it doesn¡¯t have any water elemental abilities, it does have a body that supports that elemental energy. At least it is immune to it.

    As he observed the energies rampaging through the body, he felt more and more intrigued.

    "Five elemental energy poison."

    He muttered out loud as he looked at the beast.

    The beast is not just suffering from theck of bnce or infiltration of the elemental energies, the elemental energies are in fact caused by the umtion of the energy poison which he noticed when he observed the tissues of the body.

    These poisons are simr to the Bi Fang fire poison. They have a simr texture and physical properties to that of a bodily fluid or a tissue and they merge in the body easily.

    Due to the nature of the beast, the energy from all the poisons was umted in the center and once again merging with the flow because of theck of the beast¡¯s ability to keep the bnce. If one looked at it normally, one would only notice the elemental energies and theck of bnce. But once they look at it deeply and examined the muscle tissues and skin fragments, they would be able to notice this aspect.

    But this all takes a lot of time to diagnose without the observation ability.

    Which caused the room full of supervisors of the test to be shocked by the quick analysis.

    "That was awfully quick. Seems like somebody from the supervisor team is snitching again."

    The chief supervisor looked at the remaining four of hispanions and said.

    Sam looked at him in confusion.

    "You don¡¯t need to putt an act. You are barely in the middle stage of the Astral ne Initiation. It is already a bit of a stretch to let you participate, but the Sr Fragment tribe¡¯s reputation still holds some weight, even though the tribe is on verge of destruction. That is why you got the chance.

    Now you just slipped the attack by diagnosing it too quickly. You must be one of those insane kids who want the Five elemental kings to teach you.

    Give me the name of the guy who gave you the answer and gets lost from here."

    Sam raised an eyebrow as he looked at the condescending man. He is known to be condescending himself, but this felt a bit extreme even for him.

    He just raised his hand and ced it on the beast again, before channeling his energy inside.

    The beast ispletely enveloped with glowing energy and Sam closed his eyes as he increased his focus, before the supervisor could do anything, the glow already receded and the beast is visible again.

    But this time, the skin tone and the other symptoms are gone. The beast has its eyes closed as if it slept and it slowly opened its eyes and looked at Sam.

    It licked him on the face twice before closing its eyes peacefully and drifting into sleep. Its body is too tired to be able to stay awake.

    "Is this also part of the snitching you guys offer?"

    Sam asked casually and walked out with Agar.

    The supervisor came to his senses and ran towards the beast and made his own tests. After half an hour of testing, he couldn¡¯t find anything. Anything except reaching a conclusion that the beast is okay and there are no traces of the elemental poison anywhere.

    It ispletely clean of the elemental energies.

    Sam and Agar went to their assigned tents to stay for the night and waited for the result.

    The next day. There are five people including Sam who were selected and they were brought to the valley.

    The valley isrger than what Sam actually thought. He just thought it would be a regr old valley, but it covers a few acres and the formation of that scale is extremelyplex. Particrly when they are keeping the five elements in bnce.

    Even he would take a significant time toy out a design for this kind of formation.

    There are many fields where they are growing herbs and fruits of different elements within the valley and the Cancid family workers are maintaining the fields and managing the harvest.

    Maybe the Five- elemental king is not the only reason they are keeping control over the valley.

    After they reached a certain distance, there is arge patch of forest and there are many people entering it.

    "This is the five elemental forest. This was actually a normal forest before he came in and ced his resting space in the middle of it, but after heid the formation the forest area mutated. Many weak beasts migrated into this forest with his agreement and they brought some great vegetation.

    This ce gives ess to some people who paid the entrance fee and they can search for the herbs or fruits that may have grown here. Hunting ispletely prohibited. When you walk in, if you find any herb or fruit you want, you can keep it. But stay away from the beasts.

    After we reach the center, you will be allowed to diagnose him in order."

    The supervisor who came with them exined and he took them through a path in the forest.

    After walking through, Sam felt like calling a forest is a bit of stretch, more like an overgrown garden full of trees.

    Soon they reached the center of the valley which is also the center of the forest and there a man with long hair and beard sat cross-legged on a stone tform.

    He is barechested only wearing the clothes that covered his lower off and anyone with decent energy sensory abilities could feel the five elemental energy being in the perfect bnce around him.

    Sam activated his energy vision to take a look at the surroundings and the man himself.

    At this moment, the supervisor took out a scroll and said.

    "Here is the order that you guys will have your turns.

    First is Sam, then Lonava, Mariad, Ora..

    But before the supervisor could finish one of the two girls in the five candidates raised her hand and interrupted.

    "Excuse me, I think there is a mistake. I should be the first person on the list."

    The supervisor frowned and looked at her in askance.

    "I am Lonava from the Golden Blood Dark elf n and also the disciple of Vardar. I am sure there is a mistake. There is no one here that could beat me in that littlepetition."

    Sam raised an eyebrow and was about to say something. But Agar caught his hand and whispered.

    "Don¡¯t butt heads with her. She is the disciple of someone whoes under your Phase four ns."

    Sam stopped and looked at her in surprise.

    Someone in Phase four means they are in Astral ne Consummate stages. It would take a long time for Sam to even provoke them ording to his current ns. So, it is indeed better not to mess with her.

    But there is another question in his mind. What is a person who is a disciple of such a powerful person doing in a ce like this?

 Chapter 939: Diagnosing

    Sam doesn¡¯t know why this Lonava was here. But he knew he had to be low-key. Still, it is pretty hard to digest the fact that he should give up his ce just like that. He hasn¡¯t done that in decades.

    So, he thought for a moment and asked the Supervisor.

    "May I know what the judging criterion is?"

    The Supervisor looked at him and said.

    "There are many variables, but the time is taken for the diagnosis and the details of the diagnosis are the main factors."

    Sam sighed when he heard that. Because he knew this is going to be hard if he tried to hold on to his ce. If he really revealed the results right now, thatdy would be humiliated beyond belief.

    Because, Sam¡¯s diagnosis barely took a minute for him toplete and in that minutes, half a minute was wasted as he observed the residual effects of the poisoning.

    If he brought that up and things blew up this prideful girl might weep ad he would be poking a ho nest.

    If it was any other day, he would have just did what he wanted to. But his forces are spread thinly and his organization is being run on a tight schedule. If something happens, things wouldn¡¯t go well and he has a lot to lose. Things were a lot simpler when he doesn¡¯t have anything significant to lose.

    "I give up my spot to her. Just let the test go."

    Sam said with another sigh. He is not worried that someone would treat the Five-Elemental King before him.

    All the candidates will get an hour to directly examine the body and note down any valuable information and they will try to use that information to diagnose for over a day. If they cane up with a treatment n which the Five-elemental King thinks would work, they would have a shot to really treat him and at that time the order is decided by himself.

    So, there is no need for Sam to worry about. He just walked around and observed the surroundings and the man from afar with the energy vision.

    Meanwhile, Lonava who took Sam¡¯s spot and saw him sigh was pretty prideful and walked towards the Five elemental King with her nose high in the air.

    But what bothered Sam the most is the look she gave me. It is almost saying ¡¯It¡¯s good that you know your ce.¡¯ He almost wanted to take his word back and put that girl in her ce. But he knew his pettiness is not something he could use here.

    The girl went on with all kinds of tests she could think of and used her one hour pretty efficiently and she is also not an ordinary healer.

    She is a wood and fire dual elemental user. Which is quite a rarebination. She used the wood elemental healing and fire element for making pills and potions. He must say she is skilled But not to the point it is impossible to catch up.

    She has an above-average talent in all three fields and the only specialty about her is the ability to link the three fields she specialized in.

    After making this observation he lost interest in her and as soon as she finished. Sam went towards the Five elemental King to take his turn. He ced his hand on that guy¡¯s back and spread his spiritual energy and closed his eyes as he used the observation ability.

    First he focused on the hole body to get a view at cellr level. He wanted to observe the nature of every cell in his body and the first thing he observed when he did that, all the cells contained five elemental energies.

    This should have been a normal scenario given that he is a five elemental user, but the five elements are not exactly in a bnce. They are extremely disproportionate. The disproportion is minute given the amount of energy a cell can umte.

    But when it was factored to the whole body which is basically a lump of cells, the disproportion is toorge.

    Another observation he made as he looked at the body of the whole is the energies from each cell are moving towards the center of the body and following the spine, it is moving out. Sam couldn¡¯t get a proper detail from it as the five energies are merged disproportionately. He needed a much more detailed observation.

    After confirming that he started checking each part of the body from the heart, lungs, blood, and skin and so on, separately to get the specific details of each body part.

    He checked each and every bone separately, the bone marrow was also tested. He even checked the eyes both from inside and from outside giving them a normal examination.

    When he was done he stood beside the man in a confused state. He has a lot of time left. Barely twenty minutes passed in his allotted time.

    He can brainstorm while checking the body more and more.

    At first nce, it looked like five elemental poisonings. But Sam ruled it out pretty quickly. Even if the elemental poisoning is present it is a little more than a side effect. It is definitely not the main cause of the illness.

    But a lot of other symptoms are aligned with the five elemental poisonings. Therge presence of different energies in different organs.

    For example, the liver is full of fire elemental energy. The heart is mixed with earth and metal elemental energy, the spleen and kidney are full of water elemental energy.

    This is a ssic sign of elemental poisoning. If Sam hadn¡¯t taken a look at the cells of the body, he would have alsoe to the same conclusion.

    But that is not the case now. He understood why Elemental poisoning urred as a symptom.

    It is all caused by the disproportionate bnce between the elements in the cells. The cells that made the liver all had more fire elemental energy than the rest of the energies which caused the liver to go through fire elemental poisoning.

    Same with the lungs, heart, some bones, and all the other body parts. The only part that has five elements distributed evenly is the blood inside the body. But that is not helping, because each body part which is run by the blood is taking whatever energy it needed without any bnce. The liver is taking more fire elemental energy, the heart is taking more earth and metal elemental energy, the spleen is taking more water elemental energy.

    But this should be impossible. This type of disturbed bnce at the cellr level should make the body copse a long time. But it didn¡¯t. It stayed in its ce.

    And the reason for that is the formation. The five-elemental formation is not there to just provide energy. It is there to circte energy. As the five elemental energies entered the body and the blood, they are being distributed to different body parts and the Five- elemental king is trying his best to consume the energy to live and move the rest of the energy to his center and back into the formation so that his body wouldn¡¯t copse.

    From the state of it, he would barely survive three to four hours in this state if the formation was turned off.

    But there is one thing Sam couldn¡¯t understand, the origin of the problem. Unless he learned the origin of the problem he couldn¡¯t treat it.

    Because since the defect is on a cellr level not on the level of a tissue or an organ as a whole, even if he treated him for the elemental poisoning and took the excess energy off of his body, the organs will only work normally temporarily, but once the effect wore off, the cells will revert back to the disproportionate nature which will make it absorb a lot more energy than normal to get back to the original state before the treatment.

    This might make the organ copse in failure.

    The Five- elemental king must have tried a lot to maintain this bnce. If he loses it by any chance, it would be hard to gain the new bnce without hurting himself too much.

    To cure this problem, he has to find the problem regarding the change in the cells and how to turn it back.

    "I need to take some samples of your blood and skin, if possible the bone."

    Sam asked and the Five elemental King nodded in consent. Sam took out a knife and cut some skin and drew some blood into a small blood collector and collected a small bone fragment from his toe.

    He then took some potions and gave them to him before saying.

    "You shouldn¡¯t be healed normally for these injuries. These are some potions with low efficacy and are made of the wood element. If you take them with a good enough gap between each dose, you would be able to maintain the bnce while healing.

    But I suggest you wait for the rest of the diagnosis to finish."

    When Sam was about to leave, the Five elemental King opened his eyes for the first time since they came to the valley. He looked at Sam with a look of intrigue in his eyes.

    "Thank You."

    He said those two words and closed his eyes back again.

 Chapter 940: Diagnosing-II

    Sam didn¡¯t stay within the formation. He went back to the residence he was given and ced all kinds of concealment formations. He didn¡¯t even let Agar in. After making sure that no one is looking at him, he entered the divine dimension.

    He directly went to the second floor and closed his eyes before creating a simted version of the whole body of the Five-Elemental King.

    He simted the whole body except for the skin, and then the simtion of the energy flow, but the model copsed as he didn¡¯t simte the formation.

    It would take a lot of time for him to do that, so simted the functions of the formation. Absorbing the energy that wasing out of the body and injecting the energy into the body.

    As he did that, the model finally stayed still.

    The first thing he did is treat the model for elemental energy poisoning. He knew that the body wouldn¡¯t be able to take the bacsh of the cells taking in the energy once again. But he has to know how much time he would have if he takes this route.

    But he was disappointed by the result. Once the organs are forcefully cleaned of the poisoning there is barely ten minutes time.

    Now all, he has to do is find the origin of the cellr change and see if he can think of a curing method that wouldn¡¯t involve the direct clearing of the elemental poisoning.

    So he started checking the blood sample, the skin sample, and the bone sample he got as he used the observation ability to the maximum. Now that he is focusing all his energy on a small sample, he has better ess to the cells and he can pick up things that he might have missed before.

    But it is indeed difficult to find the problem is just by looking at it. The cell seemed pretty stable the only unstable thing about is the energy content of different elements.

    After a long examination, he still couldn¡¯t find any anomalies.

    He couldn¡¯t think of the reason for that instability and no matter how much he examined it there are no results and no changes.

    He even tried the simtion techniques, introducing different medicines to see how it will really work, but an excess usage of any medicine even if it is perfectly bnced five elemental energy medicine it is still causing instability within the body which is killing him.

    After even more tests, he finally got a conclusion. Even in this bnced state, this guy wouldn¡¯t be able to stay alive for a long time.

    From the simted figure, he observed that this guy even though is sitting there on the stone casually, is actually still cultivating. In fact, that cultivation process is what makes him stable. It took some time to understand that and the cultivation no matter how slow is increasing his level which would push him to the breakthrough and his body wouldn¡¯t survive another breakthrough.

    He would definitely die.

    The breakthrough will prompt the body to take all five elemental energies with even distribution to all corners, but the organs that are attracting different elemental energies will cause inevitable chaos which results in the body failure due to thatrge amount of energy involved in the breakthrough.

    Which made it impossible for Sam to even put this matter to rest and take some time to think this through and do some proper research.

    He has to finish this as fast as possible.

    He came with a goal in his mind. To recruit this guy, but now he is obsessed with the problem. To solve this puzzle that stumped him like this.

    He sat beside ake as he skipped the stones over the water and made up of random thoughts inside his head that might rte him to the issue.

    "What if the spiritual core is damaged?

    What if the merge of the elemental energies is copsed?

    What if something in his body is making the five energiespete?

    What if there are different types of parasites present?"

    He kept on making up random assumptions and then rectified them himself. He is bouncing off of the ideas with the mirror image he could see in the water.

    As he saw the ripples that were caused by the stones he is throwing he made ackluster analogy. The stone is the problem that is causing the problem in the body while the water is the body and the ripples are the effects the body is going through.

    As he threw stones, again and again, he suddenly kicked arge boulder which made an arc in the air andnded in the center of theke.

    The wholeke rippled and the boulder drowned, but the ssh of water that raised into the airnded and caused even more ripples. Which is causing more chaos in the still water.

    He suddenly had an epiphany.

    ¡¯What if I am not looking at the ripples caused by the stone? What if I am looking at the ripples caused by the water itself?¡¯

    Suddenly his hand stopped and he thought more into this. All this while he was assuming that the instability of the energies is caused by some external problem. But what if it was caused by an internal problem. A problem that was triggered by something external but not relevant now since it is already gone.

    This might be just the aftereffect of that. Just like how the boulder drowned quietly after it caused the initial ssh and the ripple but after that, it became almost significantpared to the disturbance the water ssh caused.

    What if the problem is not with the five elements, but the five elements themselves are the problem?

    When this thought came to mind, he couldn¡¯t let go of it.

    Hepletely ignored the fact that the other party can use five elements and considered it as normal, because he himself can use multiple elements.

    But this is not exactly normal. At least for the Five-element King who is a human, this is not exactly a normal thing to ur.

    So why is he able to wield the five elements like that, he went back to his tent and started checking the samples once again.

    But this time, he also took samples from his own body to take a look.

    Topare the cells. His own body is the perfect specimen as he had almost ten elements in bnce.

    But the only problem is his body is not human anymore. His cells are all changed and every consists of the part-human cellr structure, part vampire structure and eight parts beast structures.

    He knew that theparison would not be ideal but still, it is better than nothing.

    But when he saw what both of side by side, he was stunned in silence.

    He immediately went out to meet Agar and asked.

    "Find a human and get me some samples. Skin, blood, and bone. Please, hurry up."

    Agar was surprised by Sam¡¯s agitated state. He was always calm, this is the first time she ever saw him show that many emotions on his face.

    "What cultivation level?"

    "Doesn¡¯t matter. Just needs to be pure human. No cross of another race."

    "Sure."

    She immediately went out and came back in fifteen minutes with the samples he asked her.

    Sam took them back in and started testing them. He saw theparison between the three cell structures.

    This made him confirm that his shock is not just his overreaction.

    Because whenpared with the cellr structure, the cells of Five elemental King are closer to his than a normal human cell in simrities.

    This ispletely unexpected and almost impossible.

    He saw the spiritual core of the five elemental king which has five different colors indicating the five different elements and it looked stable. This is also one of the reasons he overlooked the impossibility of five elements in the human body.

    He once again went through the book he had on the spiritual cores and constitutions to get the information.

    There is indeed a five elemental spiritual core, but it is not exactly the same as the one he saw in Five-Elemental King¡¯s body.

    Something is extremely wrong and he has a conclusion in mind, but he doesn¡¯t dare confirm it.

    He came out of the ten and asked Agar.

    "Do you know any information on Five elemental King before he was famous? Where was he born? Where did he awaken? Where did he train in lower-level cultivation stages? Anything abnormal?"

    "Not really, that information is not avable anywhere. It was said that some of the friends of the Five elemental king asked him about that, but he said he suffered severe memory loss due to a battle and all he can remember from the past is the battle and the damage. Not the opponent, not the days and life he lived before that."

    Sam took a deep breath.

    He went back inside and did some other tests. In fact, he activated his vampire bloodline and tasted a few drops of the remaining blood in the sample after smelling it with Raiju bloodline.

    And he finally reached the inevitable conclusion. The five elemental King is not a normal human.

    He was not born this way. He didn¡¯t awaken five elements. He was made into this.

    He is aboratory experiment with the objective is making a person who can wield five elements artificially.

    And if that is true which it has to be, then the current symptoms are all result of the failure of the experiment.

    All this while he was content when he saw the stable structure of the cell but only the instability of the energies which made him ignore this, but that artificially stabilized structure of the cell is what made the energy unstable.

    The problem is not affecting the body on the cellr level. The cell itself is the problem. Each and every one of them.

 Chapter 941: Treatment

    Sam immediately went back into the divine dimension after the confirmation as he looked at the simted body that was hovering in the space.

    He started checking all the organs, muscle tissues. Even if he cannot have a physical sensation, the body he simted is the body he observed, so it is pretty close. But none of these showed any difference than a normal human body. They act the same way, they work the same way.

    The only difference is the cellr structure.

    Just like his own body. Sam¡¯s body is also different on a cellr level but there is not much difference in the nature of the operation. Except for some specific functions, the eyes because of the Sky¡¯s bloodline, the nose because of Raiju¡¯s bloodline, and the stomach because of Mia¡¯s bloodline.

    They have small changes in their functions, but the lungs are the only ones whose change could be seen beyond a cellr level.

    But the bnce of energies in Sam¡¯s body is impable because of his cultivation system. The five- elemental king is also using a cultivation method that could keep this delicate bnce, but something external messed the flow up and he cannot go back to normal.

    The taste of the blood showed that it might be some kind of Beast¡¯s gics that were used to modify this guy¡¯s body.

    And they don¡¯t seem to be of a particrly high level and even the amount of gics that were used are also minimal.

    But that onerge stone that drowned after creating a ssh messed the bnce of his body and made the organs tilt towards these gics which made them adopt a certain elemental affinitypletely ruining the bnce.

    He couldn¡¯t understand the criterion on how the gics chose the organs or how the organs chose the gics, but they surely mutated because of this and the copse will happen because all five genes will try to take over his body.

    Five-Elemental King is currently using the formation in the valley to keep the bnce between them. If the genes in the organs didn¡¯t have a constant supply of the elemental energy they needed, they will look for another source within the body and the organs will copse.

    So, he is channeling the five elemental energies through the formation while trying to suppress his cultivation all the while feeding the organs and keeping them busy.

    Instead of absorbing the excess energy which might ruin the bnce, he is channeling all of it outside his body back into the formation.

    The process isplicated.

    The immediate solution that Sam has in mind is that he could use the bloodline refinement to check the genes of the beasts and refine them within his body.

    But he couldn¡¯t be sure if it could work. There are five different beast bloodlines or genes in his body and if he refined one, it would take over the rest of the genes. If he has to maintain the proper bnce once again, he has to refine them all simultaneously, which is almost impossible.

    If only if the genes were taken from the same animal with five elements in it, this would have been easy as there is a refinement technique for that, but that is not exactly possible now.

    As he thought up to this point, he got another idea and started simting something else again. He kept on doing various simtion tests and only came out of the divine dimension after midnight. It could be said it was an unfairpetitionpared to the rest of the healers, but they might not even get to know the real problem is and life is generally unfair. And this is just a fleeting thought as he looked at the rest of the healers that are prancing around thinking for ideas.

    The next day all five of the candidates were taken to the valley once again, to meet the Five elemental King.

    He currently had his eyes open and spoke.

    "Give me your diagnoses and treatment n. I will decide whether I would take it or not. No matter what the result is, I am grateful for your effort.

    You can go first."

    The Five- elemental king pointed at the candidate who got thest diagnosis yesterday.

    "I think you have a multiple organ failure due to some kind of infection which caused the deficiency of the elemental energies and impaired their ability to absorb other elemental energies.

    We can do a surgery to each organ in which we reboot them so that they would regain the ability to absorb other energies."

    Then the King moved to the second candidate from thest.

    "I think you are going through the Elemental energy deficiency. When a person has more than one element and they only absorb the same element constantly, it happens.

    I can make a special potion which should be taken in multiple doses so that you can fight the deficiency."

    The third candidate from thest.

    "I think your spiritual core must have been damaged and recovery didn¡¯t happen properly. I can give you a pill with five elemental energies that could help you with the recovery of the spiritual energy."

    Sam got ready to go with his own diagnosis, but the King moved directly to Lonava which confused everyone including the woman, but she still enthusiastically continued.

    "All the diagnoses until now are trash. You are suffering from Elemental poisoning of the five elements. The bnce between the energies must have been broken when you are injured and you must have made a mistake when you are cultivating that caused your organs to be poisoned by different elements.

    You will be fine as long as I detox your different organs with different elemental poisonings one by one.

    It would beplicated and take some time, but I can assure you that I am your best choice. With my surgical skills and healing skills, I can do it easily."

    Sam was surprised by the diagnosis and for the first time, he paid real attention to the girl. The Dark Elf race with ck skin and a faint golden hue around her skin and some faint golden marks on her pointy ears.

    Even with the dark skin, she looked beautiful. Except for that constant arrogance and disdain on her face, she is fairly skilled."

    "What about you?"

    The five elemental kings asked Sam. Before he could reply, Lonava interrupted him.

    "You don¡¯t need another diagnosis. I am sure I am right. I am the disciple of Vardar. Are you sure you want an opinion of some nobody on my diagnosis?"

    Sam was even more surprised. Nobody? It has been a while since someone associated that term with him.

    "Everyone gets an equal chance." The king replied and looked at Sam.

    Sam took a deep breath and said.

    "I disagree with all four of the diagnoses. Thest one made by Ms. Lonava is the only one that is anyway rtable.

    But the problem is not the elemental poisoning. It is a symptom. The problem is a lot deeper than on a cellr level. I think it would be better if I exin the rest to you in private. It wouldn¡¯t be pleasant to exin this in front of everyone."

    "Acting pretentious? Just agree if you are ipetent. Why try so hard?" The Lonava really had a big mouth.

    The King just smiled and said.

    "No problem. I am not ashamed of anything. No matter how shameful or degrading my problem is, I will be able to ept it."

    Sam thought for a moment and asked.

    "If you don¡¯t mind, can you tell me anything about your past? When you are in the Initiation stage? Novice? Even at Nascent stage is fine."

    "I don¡¯t remember. I lost my memory. All I remember is that I was in a battle before I woke up and was severely damaged. Apart from that, there is nothing that I could remember."

    "Then what I would say next mighte as offensive, I am sorry in advance."

    "Please continue."

    "I think you are not born with five elemental energies. You were made to have them. And the current condition is a painful side-effect that was triggered because of some serious disturbance within your body.

    It might have been caused by an external trauma or some internal trauma or even a mental trauma, but this ruined the artificial bnce that was given to you and the instable energy flow in your body is because of that.

    The elemental poison is also a result of that.

    The genes of yours are not purely human. There are genes of different beasts inside you which are trying to take over different organs which is the cause of your elemental poisoning in different organs.

    If you are detoxed of this elemental poisoning, you would ruin the bnce you tried so hard to maintain with this formation, and the energy that hit the organ will surely make it copse.

    Even if youe out of the formation, you will die.

    Even if you stay here, you will reach the next cultivation breakthrough soon enough and even then you will die.

    If you want to live, you have to start my surgical treatment as soon as you can."

 Chapter 942: Treatment-II

    There is an eerie silence when Sam was done with his words. He looked around the valley and sighed. He knew this is the reaction he would get. He knew that things might not turn out well. But this is the real diagnosis and his obligation to his patient is to tell what the real problem is.

    The five-elemental king is silent and there is no expression on his face. It is as calm as a sereneke.

    "Hahahahaha...."

    Theugh broke down the silence and everyone turned towards the person. Lonava isughing cockily as she looked at Sam. She walked towards him and got in his face before saying.

    "Where did you learn all of this? The school of Bullshitting?"

    Sam raised an eyebrow and sized her up. This young miss is getting on his nerves since the start. If not for the fact that he didn¡¯t want to disturb the already existing n, he wouldn¡¯t have given two fucks about her status and be done with it.

    As he thought of all the other possibilities except for the current scenario, she continued.

    "Do you know why you diagnosed him as a freak? I know. Because you are some kind of pompous jealous prick yourself. You envy the talent heavens bestowed upon him and you feel that intense jealousy burn you from inside.

    You came here with the sole purpose of humiliating the Five elemental King. Not for the Diagnosis, not for the surgical treatment. You just came here to find a reason to use him so that you could feel better about yourself."

    She looked at Sam with an intense disdain and spat these words.

    Sam sighed and looked at the Five-Elemental King without caring for her.

    "I don¡¯t care whatever she said. That is my diagnosis. If you want my treatment, you can say so. Otherwise, I would be leaving. I don¡¯t have time to waste."

    "Pretentious prick. Do you think you can juste here and say what you want and leave?" Another voice came from the rear.

    A young man from the Cancid family walked towards Sam with an angry expression.

    Sam frowned at this. This is slowly bing a circus show. One clown after another entering and giving their performance. All because they wanted to impress one audience.

    But this time, the clown is a little bit aggressive. Seeing that Sam ignored him, he threw a punch at him.

    Sam frowned and energy wasced along his palm as he stabbed it on the fist.

    The palm and the fist shed with the palm slicing through the muscle fibers.

    "Ahhhhhh..."

    Sam¡¯s problem with Lonava cannot be resolved, but that doesn¡¯t mean, the Cancid family can do whatever they want.

    They are still within his range even if they are not part of the game list, he could just take one more. It wouldn¡¯t be a problem.

    Sam looked at Agar and said.

    "Let¡¯s just leave. I have had enough." He couldn¡¯t possibly take anymore of this clowning. He might need more warriors, but that doesn¡¯t mean, he has to tolerate all of this. He can recruit others or he can find alternatives to warriors.

    "Wait." The Five elemental King finally spoke and Sam halted in his tracks.

    "I apologize for the disturbance. I want to get the surgical treatment. Right now."

    When the Five elemental King said this, the valley once again became silent. In fact it is even more silent as if all the people held their breath.

    Before Sam could reply, Lonava yelled at the Five elemental King.

    "Why would you agree to the treatment of that human? If what he said is true and you have beast genes inside you, it is impossible for him to remove. The Elemental poisoning is most likely. It must have been caused by some imbnce in your body.

    Whose diagnosis do you trust? I am a disciple of Varder and he is just some nobody serving the Sr Fragment tribe."

    Her voice sounded anxious and there is a sense of urgency in that.

    "I might have asked you for my diagnosis, but that doesn¡¯t mean I don¡¯t know what is wrong with him. I know what the problem with my body is. The only reason I asked you guys to diagnose me is, if you couldn¡¯t even identify the problem, how can you even possibly treat me?"

    This caused another bout of silence, but it was soon broken by the murmurs.

    "Everyone get out of the valley. It is now only open for me and my doctor."

    As soon as he said that the Cancid family members hurriedly sent the people away. Lonava looked at Sam hatefully as she was taken outside. It seems like her stakes are high and she couldn¡¯t lose this. But nobody can do anything when she doesn¡¯t even know what the ailment is.

    After everyone left, only Sam, the King and Agar are inside the valley.

    "Stay outside the forest. Don¡¯t let anybody near."

    Sam asked and Agar nodded before leaving.

    Sam walked towards the Five elemental King and started observing his body once again.

    "If you knew your ailment, you could have just said so It would have been easier and someone who has an interest in this field might have alreadye and treated you."

    "I know that too. But the chances are slim. Anyone who can treat me is someone I couldn¡¯t afford. It would take years just to get their appointment. Why bother to waste my time if there is a chance of dying like that.

    This valley is like my deathbed. I would rather peacefully die here than die in the pursuit of some impossible-to-please healer."

    "But still you want to live. That is why you put up this offer."

    "Yes, every living being wants to live and if anyone wants to die, that means they are already mentally and emotionally dead. I am still alive inside, so I hoped someone would cure my outside."

    Sam nodded and said.

    "The surgery is extremely dangerous and it can only be done once. I will put you in a Semi-death state. You would be partially dead and partially conscious. This will reduce your reaction time and instincts to almost zero and in this time, I will have my specter take over the empty consciousness partially so that he can control your energy flow.

    Something ruined the bnce between your genes and bloodlines and made them unstable. If I refine them and calm them down, and brought them back on to equal terms, you would be able to reach that bnce.

    But the organs that have already been mutated because of the different elemental energies wouldn¡¯t go back. But they wouldn¡¯t try to each other either."

    The Five-Elemental King nodded his head and agreed without any resistance.

    This surprised Sam.

    He took out a surgical table from the storage and ced him on it. He removed all his clothes and shaved the beard off before cleaning the whole body.

    Then he started drawing an inscription formation on the forehead of the King and sent him into the Semi-Death state.

    The Specter came out of the divine dimension and entered that formation on the forehead.

    Sam took over the valley formation and injected the elemental energy back into the body so that the organs wouldn¡¯t copse from theck of energy supply.

    The organs became dull and they are barely working.

    At this moment, Sam cut some openings in the torso, enough to let his fingers enter and touch the organ, and started sucking the elemental energy out of it. This is to remove the elemental energy poisoning out of it.

    First, he has to cure this before he could stabilize the cells. As he sucked the energy from the lungs, the lungs tried to absorb more and more energy from the circting energy, and the other parts of the body and the other parts of the body also tried to absorb more and more to fight back.

    At this moment, the Specter changed the energy flow a bit and restricted the lungs to gain any more energy, and didn¡¯t let the existing bnce with the organs ruin itself.

    After removing the poisoning, he directly absorbed it. He removed his coat and used his left hand to rapidly draw inscriptions on his right arm before cing the palm back inside the opening to his lungs.

    He touched his lungs carefully and activated the inscriptions on his hand.

    These are blood refinement formations and he is using a lower level formation and inscribed it on his arm to refine the organ itself separately.

    The genes of the beasts are fighting to take over the organ and the body, but the refinement technique not only calms it down, it also erases the conflict by properly merging them.

    And since the organs already changed and cannote back to the normal state, he decided to further promote the change and merge the animal and human genes together. This would be simr to Sam¡¯s own lungs and how they fused with the Golden Sun crow bloodline.

    After Sam does that with every organ and the blood, not only would the Five elemental King be out of danger, he would also be a bit stronger than normal.

 Chapter 943: Banquet

    The surgery went on for one and a half-day.

    Sam couldn¡¯t rest for even a second. Since he took over the formation, he kept on absorbing the energy out of it to sustain his consumption.

    He first cleared the lungs, then the liver, the pancreas, intestines, the bones, muscles, skin, and finally the heart.

    At least whoever messed with his body and made him this way, didn¡¯t mess with the brain that much. So, Sam is out of trouble.

    As soon as the refinement of the organs was finished, he pulled the specter out and healed the openings he made before removing the inscribed formation on his head.

    Then he slowly let the controls of the bodily functions go back to Five-Elemental King¡¯s control.

    He took a step back and wiped the sweat off of him. This is the mostplicated healing he has ever done in his life and that too to someone who is so much stronger than him. If not for the fact that the Five-elemental king willingly let him cut him, Sam wouldn¡¯t even be able to leave a mark on the skin.

    Even though he followed all the surgery steps carefully, he still couldn¡¯t be sure if it worked as he liked it to be.

    At least it worked in the simtion, but he cannot be hundred percent sure.

    And his anxiousness only grew as there was no movement for the next five minutes, just when he was about to check him once again, the Five- elemental king started showing signs of energy intake.

    He started absorbing everything in the surroundings and Sam almost felt a spiritual energy void around him. The five elemental King is sucking all kinds of elemental energies without restraint and this suction reached the range of the five elemental forests.

    The five elemental energies started circting around his body. Sam activated energy vision to see what exactly is happening and he was shocked by what he saw.

    The five elemental energies are concentrating at five different spots within the body and constantly absorbed the energy which made him feel nervous. If something happens to Five elemental King, the external problems might pile up, but what he felt more nervous about is the fact that his diagnosis failed and he killed a person with who he doesn¡¯t have anything to do with.

    He might have killed thousands of people, but that doesn¡¯t mean he is okay with killing someone who is not against him. Killing someone who entrusted his body and soul to Sam and believing that he could cure him. He would definitely feel the weight of that guilt.

    But his nervousness was all for naught because after a certain level of energy was gathered, all five energies moved to the spiritual core and started merging there and circted around the body.

    The King¡¯s energy level kept on raising and he is about to hit a breakthrough.

    Sam sighed in relief and sat on the ground wiping his sweat once again.

    By now many people already sensed the changes in the valley and knew that something is happening there.

    So a lot of people already rushed towards the valley and even Agar who is standing guard went back inside and took a look at the situation forgetting to guard.

    When they arrived in the valley, they saw Sam sitting on the ground while sighing in relief and then focused on the Five Element King¡¯s body who is still on the table breaking through.

    "What did you do to him?" The young guy whose arm was almost sliced into two by Sam spoke from the side.

    He is angry at Sam and the first chance he saw he wanted to pin some me on him. Sam is too exhausted to argue with an idiot and after seeing the energy reaction, heid down and fell asleep.

    At that exact moment, the Five elemental King opened his eyes and looked at the surroundings. He walked towards Sam and ced him on the surgical table to rest before saying.

    "Thank you so much."

    He then looked at the rest of the group and said.

    "Thank you for your concern. But the surgery was sessful. So, you guys can leave now. And the cancid family doesn¡¯t have to guard me anymore. I will take care of myself."

    Everyone congratted him and left. But there is one person who felt extremely hateful as she looked at Sam. Lonava.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know why she hates him so much nor does he care. But she left with her guard in an extremely conflicted and hateful state.

    Sam didn¡¯t wake up until night. This is one of the most satisfying sleeps he had in a while.

    When he woke up, he is still in the Five elemental valleys on the surgical table.

    The Five elemental King is sitting on the center stone while meditating and when Sam woke up he opened his eyes and smiled.

    "How are you? It seems like you exhausted too much of your energy."

    "It is more of a mental exhaustion than the physical exhaustion. I haven¡¯t done surgery asplicated as this one. I had to monitor, the energy flow, the blood flow, the organ functionality, and even your soul to make sure that it doesn¡¯t drift into real death. The fact that you are way stronger than me doesn¡¯t help it either.

    If I am also in the Pre-transcendent stage, it would have been a lot easier than now."

    Sam spoke as he dressed back and stretched. Agar is sitting on one sidepletely bored.

    "What do you want?" The Five elemental King asked Sam.

    Sam looked at him with a smile and said.

    "I don¡¯t know if you would like it, but I want you to work for me."

    "Work for you? It is not that surprising. But do you want me to work for you for my whole life?"

    "No need, I will bind you with such an outrageous deal. You just have to work for a decade."

    "After that?"

    "You can leave if you want to. But I am pretty sure you would stay."

    "Why are you so sure?"

    "No one ever quit working for me, once they started and in a decade, I would be surpassing your level and I would be having a bunch of subordinates who will be able to rival you. Even if they can¡¯t defeat you.

    You will be an addition at that time, but losing you wouldn¡¯t be a loss. So, if you decide to quit you can."

    "May I know what kind of work I have to do?"

    "Most of it involves killing people. I am on a special mission currently, so I could use the help of someone like you."

    The Five elemental King thought for a moment and said.

    "I will work for you. But can we leave a few dayster? Many of my friends helped me a lot when I was dying. I would at least like to hold a banquet as a farewell."

    "You can take your time."

    "Don¡¯t you want a contract or something like that?"

    "I think I can trust you. Someone who cany their lives in the hands-on another guy is not that easily doubted. But I do have my contingencies."

    "That is great."

    So, Sam stayed for another week within the valley.

    He must say that the atmosphere of the valley is extremely good. Theke which is brimming with water elemental energy is a pleasant ce to swim around.

    He rxed as if he was on a pic.

    For the first two days. The Five-Elemental King didn¡¯t stay in the valley. He went out to hunt some beasts and brought back a boatload of them.

    And then for the next three days, he spent his time preparing for the cooking. He wanted to cook all by himself and didn¡¯t take anyone¡¯s help.

    The procedure for these recipes is mind-numbingly long and exhausting. But he cooked every single dish he brought and set up the tables all by himself.

    On the day of the banquet many people attended. Some people even came uninvited.

    Like Lonava.

    She was not invited. Many thought she even left the realm after the treatment was over and it was confirmed that not only was the Five Elemental King was fine, he even had a breakthrough immediately.

    But she didn¡¯t leave. Even though she lost the diagnosis, she still has something else to do.

    And this has something actually to do with Sam.

    Sam sat in a corner of the banquet as he didn¡¯t want to interact with anyone. But it was impossible for him to do that. These people really didn¡¯t want to let him go.

    There are greetings, wishes, consultations, and finally even some marriage proposals for him. But he tacitly rejected and even used Agar as a shield.

    But Lonava has a different motive altogether.

    "I want your secret technique."

    "Pardon?" Sam was genuinely confused by her statement."

    "I want the secret technique you used to diagnose that guy. There is no way you would be able to diagnose a gic disease at your level. Which means you have a secret technique that could help you do so.

    I want that. Name your price."

    "Sorry, I don¡¯t have any secret technique. It is purely my ability and even if I have one, I am not selling. You cannot afford me. So, please leave and let me eat in peace. The five-elemental king really made a lot of effort on the food. It would be an insult to him if I don¡¯t eat it properly."

 Chapter 944: Next Target

    Lonava¡¯s face turned red in anger as she heard Sam¡¯s words and when he proceeded to ignore her presence and started eating, she became even more frustrated.

    "How dare you ignore me? Do you know who I am?"

    "Yeah, Disciple of some great healer Vardar.

    I am in a decently good mood today, So, I will take some of time to advice you.

    No matter how I look at it, the greatness in that sentence revolved around Vardar. Don¡¯t you have any sense of identity or being his disciple is the only thing you have worth mentioning about yourself.

    From the looks of it, you are around fifty years old. Which means, you are decently talented and all you can speak about yourself is being his disciple. You should seriously do something with your life. Something that could make feel secure enough to announce your name and demand respect for who you are than what you are to someone.

    If you have that kind of identity,e and find me and I will spare my time to talk to you.

    As for what you are asking me now, it is not some secret technique and even if it is what grounds do you have to ask me something that is useful for my healing abilities? Would your teacher Vardar just gives away his techniques for money?"

    Sam said as he munched on the food. Like he said, he was in a good mood and doesn¡¯t want to spoil it by fighting or arguing. He also decided to let a deluded help a deluded youngster with some advice.

    But only if he knew, it is more of an insult than an advice. Basically, he is saying that there is nothing to Lonava¡¯s identity than being a disciple of that Vardar guy or whatever his name is.

    Lonava couldn¡¯t even bring herself to say a few words in retort. Because whatever Sam said happened to be true. But she needs something to return.

    "I don¡¯t care what you think of me. But I need your secret technique. So, will you give it to me or not."

    By now, Sam got tired of her constant pestering. It is already out of norm for him to give advice to some passerby. In fact it is generous of him. If she doesn¡¯t take it, then it is her loss.

    For the rest of the banquet, he focused on enjoying the food with all his concentration and after the banquet was over, he finally got some peace.

    "So, what is your next n Sam? Where are we going next?"

    The Five-elemental King asked as he drank some wine.

    "I couldn¡¯t decide where to go. Do you have any rmendations?"

    With that Sam opened the scroll with the names of ten people Agar gave him and asked the Five elemental King.

    "You are nning to recruit all of these guys?"

    "Of course, why not?"

    Five elemental King was surprised, but he didn¡¯t say much and looked through the list.

    "I know some of these guys. I met them in some of my adventures in different realms. They are all hard nuts to crack and you would need to spend a lot of effort to recruit them.

    But if I have to suggest, the person that is most probably easily recruited is this guy."

    He said as he pointed at one of the names.

    "He is not living the same location as the one shown in this scroll. That was thest location that he was spotted.

    A year ago, right before I sealed myself here, he was sealed in a ce by someone from a higher realm."

    Sam looked at the name and was surprised.

    This guy is a Peak stage Astral ne Pre-transcendent stage cultivator and someone must be at least an Astral ne Transcendent cultivator at middle-stage.

    "Who managed to seal him? How did he piss such a person off?"

    "No, it is not an individual actually. It is a whole younger generation from a family of higher realms and they coborated with a bunch of organizations in his realm to seal him inside.

    He pissed off too many people as he is kind of a womanizer. He slept with wives of a bunch of powerful people and didn¡¯t hesitate to rub it in their faces and the one time he fell in love, it is from a youngdy of higher organization. But she was already engaged and her groom-to-be, came with a bunch of his friends and tried to kill him.

    But this guy is a real fiend when fighting. His body is a bit different from normal and regenerates quickly. He looks like a human, but I am sure he is not purely human. He is of a different race.

    But no one asked or cared. But this gave him an edge over normal soldiers. When his opponents realized that they cannot kill him, they decided to seal him instead.

    They created a perfect trap with the woman he loved and used some higherlevel formations to set up a maze. The maze is conscious and is a result of bunch of formations that are linked together. The spirit of the maze is to let one enter it but stop them from returning back.

    The nodes of the formation are actually spiritual energy mines. The veins of the mines that are responsible for generating the spirit stones are solely used to power this formation.

    There is not a single spirit stone that was produced for a month in any of those mines.

    The organizations that helped in the sealing were rewarded and they guard the maze from anyone who wants to unlock it. But they were obviously not strong enough to stop everyone and some tried to get in there to the unlock the maze and gain the favor of this Saber Monarch.

    But to his misfortune, he was stuck inside the maze along with the Saber Monarch and from what knew, hemitted suicide as he couldn¡¯t take the mental torture."

    "How did the newse out if the Maze is sealed?"

    "That is the Saber Monarch¡¯s doing. Every now and then he would make a small hole in the maze and he would send a message through a scroll from it to the families and organizations that sealed him in.

    Sometimes the scrolls would even have his sealed saber attacks.

    He didn¡¯t want his presence gone unknown and over the months, the holes he could make became bigger and bigger, but they heal too fast for him to leave and the formation obstructs him too much when a hole appears, but the scroll could be sent outside."

    "This guy must be holding some serious grudge if he is desperate enough to not let them forget his presence. He wants them to stay in fear of his return and once he does that, he would he would be giving some serious trouble to people."

    "That is for sure. Even though he is a difficult guy, as far as I know he is the only one desperate enough for you to help him and have more chances for you to recruit him. The rest will be tougher nuts to crack and takes more time than usual."

    Sam nodded in agreement and asked.

    "Can you give me the details of the organizations that are involved in this whole scenario? I might be able to create some distraction, even if it is the slightest one. I am pretty sure we could use on as they organizations are surely focused on the maze. Things would be a bit easier for us."

    "Of course."

    And then Sam started discussing all the organizations that are involved along with the Five elemental King.

    There are three main organizations involved out of which two are something he could find on the list of the organizations they had to mess with.

    One of them belongs to Zeus and the another one to Indra. Both lightning organizations. He then looked at the list to see which organizations rest of the yers are currently targeting and in particr he looked for Noah and Akhil.

    After confirming the organizations they are fighting with, and noting that one of them is even closer to his location, he decided to make a visit and his first choice is to visit Noah.

    She is currently targeting an organization under Kartikeya. Even though they don¡¯t have enmity, it is all part of the game.

    And when he arrived in front of her she is shocked and immediately checked the list.

    "You didn¡¯t target the same organization as me, then why are you here? Don¡¯t tell me, you are nning to do that now?"

    She didn¡¯t even ask anything. No pleasantries, no nothing, she directly used him of stealing her prey.

    "I am not here for the organization. Anyway, I already cast a wide open, you should have already realized by now."

    "Yeah, I am seeing it in the list. You are finishing them off at least four times faster than us. I should have started an organization too with some proper subordinates."

    "Arkiv said the same thing. Anyway, I have a deal do you want to take it?"

 Chapter 945: Deals

    Noah looked at Sam with squinted eyes. She is one of the yers who understood Sam well. He doesn¡¯t care too much about people that are not rted to him. It is a waste of time to expect things likepassion, empathy and other useless emotions from him.

    So, if he is offering a deal to her, then it would serve in his best interest. But that doesn¡¯t mean it wouldn¡¯t serve her best interest too, but the deal would definitely be in his favor.

    But when he exined the deal, she was a bit confused.

    "You want me to go after one of these two powers, this early in thepetition and you will help me deal with them. I will get to keep the heirloom and any other treasures that could be found there and you will even give half of the business of the power I chose to deal with.

    And even in the businesses, I won¡¯t have to do anything but I get fifty percent share in the profits. Is that right?" She asked as she looked at him even more carefully. She looked straight into his eyes trying to find any form of emotion that could deceive his act of dead pan face.

    "Yes, that is the gist of it."

    "Something is fishy." She said as she looked at the details of the family. Every deal Sam makes would be beneficial to him mostly. It might be a win-win for some people. But it is mostly going to be his advantage. But he is offering so many benefits her and she has to do the least of it.

    She couldn¡¯t believe that she is that lucky. Lucky enough for this cold guy to offer such a warm deal. Then she thought even more and said.

    "I don¡¯t believe that you would make a losing deal. You are bound to gain something else from this. Tell me what is it?"

    "Why does it matter? I am giving you more than what you want. If you take the deal, you will get a slightly higher level heirloom than what you can acquire at the moment and you can exchange for more resources. You will reach a breakthrough quicker. No matter how I see it, you are gaining an advantage here.

    I am the one on the losing end of the deal."

    "That is why goddamn problem. You are never on a losing end of the deal. There is something else going on."

    "Why are you so talkative all of a sudden? Just tell me if you want the deal or not."

    "You are also talkative today. Why are you saying so much nonsense all of a sudden?"

    Sam sighed. He also noticed that he became a bit talkative particrly since Watt¡¯s marriage. But that is because he is in a good mood.

    "I am doing a favor for someone else. It is a mary gain. It is for my organization. Now are you going to take the deal or not? If not, then I will go and find someone else. I bet Arkiv would be interested."

    "No, I am taking the deal."

    Noah didn¡¯t push it any further. At first she just wanted to know so that she could exploit some more benefits out of him. But now that he said it was a favor, there is not much she could ask for. And there is a good chance that he will indeed cancel the deal.

    So, she quickly shook on it.

    "Wrap things around here ande to the Crimson reed realm. There the Blood lightning family is kind of a big deal, but they have two more rivals. I will be within the vicinities of the Blood Lightning family. So,e and meet me there."

    With that he finished the deal and went to meet Akhil.

    This time things were much simpler.

    The conversation was much simpler with this crazy brute. He epted the terms easily without caring or reading too much into it.

    "I am going to be done with this as fast as I can, then I wille there. But I won¡¯te and find you directly. It is too troublesome. I will give you a signal that anyone cannot miss, so you can follow it and find me."

    "Alright, whatever you say."

    With that, Sam went back to get Five-Elemental King and Agar before leaving to the Crimson Reed realm.

    The realm that has red soil all over. There is no particr elemental significance, except for the color and for some reason, three organizations that worship the lightning gods based themselves here.

    One of them are a Yaksha organization which is also the one under called Crimson Lightning family. The second organization under Zeus, the Blood lightning family is a race of Demi-humans with a Crimson lightning Panther Bloodline and finally the third one which are under Lightning God Raijin. They are semi-elemental beings. They are created because of the Raijin¡¯s intercourse with a lesser human.

    The three families have an equal upation in the whole realm. Thes they control are also equal. In fact to maintain that equal control there is a joint ownership of a fews.

    They also have equal power. All three family heads being the Peak-stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivators of Astral ne.

    Even the family member count is almost same.

    And they never get along. They have a lot of subordinate realm under their respective controls and theypete in everything. Business, strength, prodigies, subordinates, women. Harems. Particrly the family heads.

    And in thispetitive life they all agreed on one thing. Imprisoning the Saber Monarch. Because this guy managed to bed all three of their wives and their favorite consorts within their harems.

    No matter which world it is, women can cause wars and destroy kingdoms just with their beauty alone and this guy is a sucker for the beauty.

    And that led him to this situation.

    As soon as Sam entered the Crimson Reed realm along with Agar and Five-Elemental King, they made their way to the Maze.

    The Maze although technically a prison, is actually quite a good attraction. This attracted a lot of people which turned the surroundings into the business zone. The three family heads are so sure that they can keep the Saber Monarch inside forever that they upied the surrounding areas.

    There is a hill nearby from the top of which they can get a clear view of the whole Maze and Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel marveled as he looked at the massive structure.

    All the maze walls are made of energy and they are a result of myriad of formationid together. It covered arge area. It is almost like a small vige.

    And they can even see therge Saber raysing out of different spots.

    They stayed there for the night and Sam kept his watch on the Maze every moment and he even saw the maze changing and at this moment, a saber ray attacked the formation which caused a hole and stopped the maze walls from reappearing in their new positions.

    In the middle of thisrge area there is a man who looked like a normal human being sat there. He has crimson red hair and he is indeed quite handsome. He is panting heavily as the formation put a lot of pressure on him to make sure that he doesn¡¯t move.

    There is a saber in his arms and on the de of the saber a scroll is resting. He swung the saber with a lot of struggle and the scroll came out of the crack that was almost healed.

    The scrollnded on the dome on top and rolled to a side before falling off of the maze.

    One of the shop keepers outside the maze took the scroll and passed it to the guards nearby.

    The guards are extremely cautious with the scrolls and took it to a nearby empty area and slightly opened it before throwing it away with all their might and it turned out to be a proper decision.

    The scroll fell in the middle of trees which were all cut down by the saber rays that came out of that scroll.

    This guy is indeed cranky.

    After that for the next few days, Sam strolled around the area with the other two.

    They observed the surroundings to find vantage points suitable for scouting attacking and also how to defeat the formation.

    If they destroy the formation without harming the Saber Monarch inside, they could get him out of it. But before thinking about it, they need to find a way to contact the guy inside.

    Otherwise, all of their efforts would be for naught. At least Sam is not ready to believe that this guy would just offer all his services life long as soon as he heard that Sam saved him. Heck, he might not even believe it.

    So, Sam¡¯s main agenda at the moment is to cut a deal before he did anything with the formation and once the deal is made and the Five elemental King acted as a witness, then he would do any kind of saving and anyway, it would take some time for Akhil and Noah toe here, so he can finish this as fast as he can.

 Chapter 946: Message

    For the first week of their stay in the Crimson reed realm, they didn¡¯t go near the maze directly and only roamned around the surroundings.

    Surprisingly nobody recognized the Five-Elemental King who is quite famous in this realm too. There are gossips about his curing and him leaving the valley for the first time in years. But even when he is right in front of them they didn¡¯t recognize him, because of his beard.

    After Sam shaved that beard off during the surgery, the Five elemental King cut his hair to a short length to match the beard and now all they can see is a man who is in his mid-thirties by earth¡¯s standards.

    And this is one of the best scenarios they ever encountered identally.

    The Five elemental King being recognized is one of the worries they had from the start and now that it was gone, they can move more freely.

    After the first week was over and introducing some people with their made-up names and disguises, they moved to a much deeper investigation, at least Sam did.

    He needs to find the main nodes that could still be essible to him so that he can formte a perfect n to make this guy escape.

    This part was fairly easy because the formation is too big and the nodes are equally bigger. So, he got the location of the three former spirit stone mines which are now being used solely for channeling energy into the formation.

    After finding the location, Sam managed to sneak to the center of the node with the mine tunnels that were dug previously.

    There is short stone pir in the middle of the mine connecting the formation to the spirit stone mine¡¯s vein. The energy is being sucked by the pir from the vein like a straw and is being channeled into the formation.

    After visiting the three nodes one after another, Sam came to another conclusion, the three nodes are essential to the formation because they act as the energy source, but they don¡¯t have any influence over the maze shuffling, the dome healing and the pressure application on the Saber Monarch. They are just like batteries in a toy. They run the toy, but changing them to another set of batteries which are a bit less efficient but could fit wouldn¡¯t the change the operation of the toy very much.

    And theoretically, if Sam did cut this energy supply off, there is a great chance that the formation might stop working, but he is afraid that something else might happen. Because, if he is the one that made a prison like this, he would have made a self-destructive n.

    As soon as the energy supply was cut off, the formation would absorb the rest of the energy and explode.

    Or, he would create a small backup power source and a notification system which would alert all the guards and everyone within the surrounding five to ten miles.

    If there was any such mechanism, he would be falling into some trouble if he messed with it right now.

    He has to wait for Noah and Akhil toe out. And even then it is better to study the formation more and get more data.

    So, he decided on another n.

    "We need to contact the Saber Monarch first. I need the formation structure to estimate its operation. Except for energy source, nothing important is outside the formation itself. The remaining nodes are all inside. Think of a n."

    He said as he closed his eyes thought hardly.

    The se3curity around the formation is too tight. The onlyx he saw was at the energy nodes which are hard to mess with and even then there is no guarantee the other party will safe. The fact that there is ack of security is bothering him even more.

    Except for that, the entry points are severely guarded. Most of the surroundings of the maze are upied by shops and businesses.

    And when the Maze is shifting the security increases. The only silver lining is that the security is not as vignt as it should be.

    As they thought and discussed, they finally came to a conclusion. They can only use the most obvious way to contact the Saber Monarch inside. The crack he makes during every shift. Infiltration is out of option no matter howx the security is.

    So, they decided on a n.

    Sam gave some formation gs and a n to them so that they would ce the gs on certain areas of the hill while Sam moved to a different vantage point.

    And from that point it is job for the Void Hopper. The little guy who never did anything. He is like a toddler who doesn¡¯t talk at all and all he does his y with Yanwu and the rest inside the divine dimension and rub on to Sam as soon as he came out.

    "Here, little buddy. You have to do one thing for me.

    You are the only one who is small and fast enough to not get recognized by the guards and do this. Other than you, no matter who goes, they will be spotted.

    So, what I want you to do is, as soon as I give you a signal, you make a move and appear right above the crack and drop this scroll before returning to me."

    Sam exined every single thing, step by step and in fact he demonstrated it to him again and again until the void hopper finally understood.

    "Be sure to dodge the saber strike and don¡¯t bring the scroll the back. Alright?"

    The Void hopper nodded and Sam finally heaved a sigh of relief.

    And they waited for the midnight.

    When the time came, the maze started shifting and as soon as the Five elemental King saw the start of the change, he activated the formation along with Agar.

    The hill exploded with bright light and a lot of fire works went into the sky with elemental energies. It looked like a celebration but a massive and dangerous one.

    The hill is extremely close to the Maze and as soon as they heard the explosion, the guards went to check up on the situation.

    But the daily saber strike didn¡¯t stop. As soon as the saber struck the dome a crack appeared. Void hopper disappeared from the spot he was in and reappeared already half way towards the crack.

    The void hopper once again blinked and neared the dome once again, all while carrying a spatial ring.

    After the third blink he finally managed to arrive at the crack and dropped the ring. But the second saber strike that carries the scroll almost came out and hit him which he luckily dodged with the blinking back.

    Sam heaved a huge sigh of relief. The Saber Monarch is at most a secondary addition to his group. But beast is almost an inherent part of him. He couldn¡¯t let him be injured. And the void hopper is a kid to begin with.

    So, Sam was extremely tense as he was worried if the Void hopper is going to be too scared. But his worries are in vain as the little guy danced around Sam with excitement and wanted to do it again and it took great efforts for Sam to stop it from going back to the formation again.

    After sending the little guy back into the divine dimension, Sam went back to their new hiding spot where the five elemental King and Agar are waiting and took out a special tablet waiting for it too glow.

    Meanwhile, within the maze.

    As soon as he made a crack in the maze, the saber monarch tried his best to throw the scroll under the pressure.

    But when he threw the scroll and let the pressure crush him for a bit without any resistance, he felt something drop on his head.

    The first reaction is that he was surprised by something suddenlying out of nowhere. And the second reaction is him realizing how he kept his guardpletely down. He didn¡¯t even notice the iing spatial ring that directly hit his head.

    The year or so he spent in the mage with no enemies or attack whatsoever made him thisx.

    But before he could think of a solution for this, he opened the spatial ring and took out a few things.

    And one of them happened to be a scroll.

    "Hello, Saber Monarch.

    This is your friend Five-Elemental King. I am here to inform you that I am free of my condition and in fact became stronger than ever.

    I am currently outside the maze with a friend of mine who helped me cure my condition and he is here to help you out.

    But you would need to pay a price for that.

    He would like to discuss the rest with you directly. Within the spatial ring, there would be a small metallic bug. Inject your spiritual energy into that and press the button under it to talk to him."

    He noticed the spiritual energy signature under the letter which he is extremely familiar with.

    All of a sudden, he got a smile on his face, which looked a little devilish with that crimson blood hair.

 Chapter 947: Annoyance

    Saber Monarch is looking at the flying metallic bug with a look of surprise. He is examining from different angles as it flew around him.

    "Hello, Saber Monarch. I am the friend the Five-elemental King spoke of. I am Sam."

    Sam¡¯s voice was heard through the bug. But the Saber Monarch didn¡¯t reply at all. He is still looking at the metallic bug like a kid who got a new toy. He was extremely curious and whenever he tried to catch it, it tried to dodge him. But the bug¡¯s speed is no match for his speed.

    He caught it pretty easily.

    "Don¡¯t do anything to it. It would be hard to create another distraction to send another device in. Just let if free and talk."

    Sam said once again. But this guy is too curious to put it down.

    "What kind ofmunication system is this? Howe I get to speak to you without using spiritual sense?"

    "Because, that is how I made that thing. Not only can I speak to you, I can see you picking your nose like a toddler."

    As soon as he said that, the Saber monarch embarrassedly took out his finger from him nose and looked around in shock.

    "You can really see me?"

    "Yes, I can. Now can we talk about something important?"

    Sam sounded exasperated. Back at the hiding spot, as Agar and Five-Elemental King looked into the crystal tablet, even they felt extremely frustrated by Saber Monarch¡¯s behavior. It has been almost thirty minutes since they sent the scroll in.

    But they only got the signal before five minutes. God knows what this guy did all this while. And even after activating the bug, he still didn¡¯t talk anything useful.

    Sam almost had second thoughts about recruiting this guy. Five elemental King is young for his cultivation, but he behaved wiselu, he even has an air of a schr around him. But the Saber Monarch ispletely behaving like a kid.

    When a message came for him to activate something that could help me get out of that prison he was in, his first reaction to y with the thing and when the thing is giving out voice of someone that is willing to help him, his reaction is to ask how they reached him.

    He got his prioritiespletely wrong and he ispletely focusing on the wrong thing.

    "Do you or do you not want to get out of this ce?" Sam almost yelled out loud.

    "Of course, I want to."

    "Then just speak already. If you want to, I will exin how I can speak through that bug when you came out of that. Until then, just tell me what I ask for and do what I told you to do."

    "Okay. What do you want me to do?" He finally asked this and Sam felt relieved to say the least.

    "First, I want to know where the formation nodes are. This formation is extremely high grade and I cannot deduce the wholework of it just looking at it from outside. I want you to find all the energy nodes and for that you have to move around the maze along with the bug."

    "Move around the maze? I don¡¯t want to do that."

    Sam took a deep breath and asked.

    "Why?"

    "Because it is confusing."

    "I don¡¯t want you to find a way out of the maze damn it. I just want you to move around in the maze with the bug. Just think of it as taking an aimless walk in the garden."

    "But this is not a garden. There would be no walls in the garden." The Saber monarch spoke as heid down on the ground and held the bug with his hands stretched out aiming at his own face and continued.

    "Anyway, what is the point of moving around the Maze if you don¡¯t want me to find the way? Is Five-Elemental King there?"

    Sam is almost losing it and asked the Five-elemental King to speak.

    "Bert, it is me." He spoke and then the Saber Monarch¡¯s voice suddenly became brighter and there is a wide smile on his face.

    "Hey Pent. It is nice talking to a friend after a long time. And who is this Sam guy? Is he even as smart as you made him to be? I mean what is the point of walking around in a maze if you don¡¯t want to find the way out."

    "Then why don¡¯t you try to find the way out?"

    "No, I don¡¯t want to. It is confusing."

    Even Five-Elemental King is feeling a bit exasperated and yelled.

    "Bert, I am going to tell you this one time and one time only. From what I learned, you will be stuck in that maze for forty years at the least before you could get out of there. That too if you have regr breakthroughs and resources as you used to have. But now, you are stuck there and no resources will be provided for you, so in a year or two, you would run out and have to cultivate purely based on the atmospheric spiritual energy.

    There is no way you could breakthrough in the Astral ne Transcendence without any resource.

    So, if you want toe out. And even have any chance to remotelying out. Shut the fuck up and do as you are told."

    "Come on Pent, why are you so cranky? Do you have blue balls or something? I told you long ago. When was thest time you gotid? A decade ago? Go to the Reed Inn a few miles away and meet with Janine. She has auburn hair and trust me my friend. She is okay for everyth..."

    "Bert, if you don¡¯t stop right now. I will leave you the fuck around here and get lost from here. You can stay here and life the rest of your life dying. And trust me your lovers will find someone to rece you and fill their satiety."

    "Come on Pent. Don¡¯t be such an ass."

    The three of them are losing patience and it took a lot of time before they managed to make him listen to them

    Even then he waszy as he walked around aimlessly and only covered half the maze.

    But still Sam didn¡¯t feel entirely disappointed as he saw everywhere the bug went and started drawing a map on arge scroll.

    After the whole thing was done, both of them went back to the center and Sam didn¡¯t talk to him anymore. This guy is apletely juvenile in a way.

    But soon Sam realized that it is not his decision whether he could talk to that Saber Monarch or not.

    Because the bug he sent has a function which ables that guy to contact Sam and the rest and if Sam knew that this guy is a nut job, he would have clearly made sure that the function was disabled.

    "Hey, Pent. Come on, talk to me." The tablet glowed and the voice came from the speaker.

    "What do you want Bert? You are being annoying."

    "Come on, don¡¯t say that man. It has been a year since I talked to anyone. Be a friend. Anyway, don¡¯t you guys think this is unfair?"

    "What is unfair? Us being annoyed by you when we are trying to get you out? Yes, it is unfair."

    "No, Pent. You became dumb. It is unfair because you guys can see me, but I cannot. Come on. How is that fair?"

    Sam just left the tablet with Five-Elemental King and left the spot to get some peace.

    Meanwhile, somewhere far away, within a with joint ownership of the three families, the three family heads met.

    "So, what do we have about the results of the sudden explosion? The whole hill exploded and there is no damage to anyone. There are no signs of activities, there are no signs of people nearby and we don¡¯t e4ven how it happened.

    What is it?" The crimson lightning family head asked the other two.

    "Just because you are out of realm doesn¡¯t mean we know more than you do. We just know what you know.

    But I think it is better if we don¡¯t do anything, this might be some kind of prank, or some battle between some youngsters?" Another head said from the side.

    "Yes, it could be except that is it is not. There are literally no signs.

    I for one think that this is a distraction."

    "Distraction for what? Entering the maze. If someone really wants to enter it, I might even let them go myself. If not for the fact that Saber Monarch is a nut case, he would have already been dead with all the confusion the maze brings."

    "Except that there are no signs of any activity near the maze. There is no sign of any person walking near it. That everyday saber strike and that everyday message from the monarch are also there. I think this is irrelevant."

 Chapter 948: Examining the Maze

    While the three family heads are discussing the situation with varying opinions, the attendants of the family heads of the blood lightning and crimson lightning family head ran in and informed something.

    Both of them got off from their chairs and left the room in the middle of the discussion even when the third family head asked about the situation.

    They went back to their respective family estates to check the situation.

    Meanwhile back in the with the maze, Sam is currently grilling a steak while he talked with Noah and Akhil.

    "You guys just arrived yesterday night and already caused a ruckus in your targets. You are getting bolder."

    Akhil cut a piece of his steak off and stuffed his mouth as he spoke in a muffled voice.

    "You are the one to talk. Your team and that guy named Argan or whatever his name is. He is going on a rampage. It is almost like he is knocking on the doors of every target he goes.

    He already finished four and is almost halfway with the fifth one and the best part is, you almost have zero casualties of your main force. As soon as they are injured they are being sent back and switched.

    You might be the only guy who waged this many wars and lost less than a hundred men. And every war is tense and cutthroat not just some bag of tricks and you are calling us on our boldness. The rest of the yers are grinding their teeth over your work.

    So, stop bullshitting us alright."

    "Can¡¯t you just take apliment when I give you? And what does winning wars and doing a quick job anything to do with the boldness of yours." Sam refuted as he brought his steak to the table and started eating along with them.

    "Okay, we are here as you asked. Now, what is the support you are talking about?" Noah asked from the side calmly.

    "Well, I need you guys to create as muchmotion as you can in their respective homes. I want them to be so disturbed that they should call all their forces back to their home field and I will give you things that could help you cut down the numbers." Sam replied.

    "You better keep your word and don¡¯t think of ying me. We didn¡¯t even select these families on the list as you asked us for, so you better be ready to face the consequences if you piss us off." She warned him with a smile.

    "I don¡¯t think he would do that. He knows what kind of crazy pain in the ass that I can be. You should ask Dayus." Akhil said from the side.

    "Alright, that¡¯s enough with the threats. Okay. I don¡¯t get anything from lying to you. You know what, I don¡¯t even care that much about these small fries. That is why I left a bunch of families for Arkiv to deal with along with one of my teams."

    "Yeah, we heard of that too. Why are you spreading so much? If you spread too thin, you will tear apart." Noah said.

    "But if you are strong enough you will also cover a lot. I don¡¯t want to waste too much time on the small fries."

    "Even with your team and their speed, just the low-level families would take you at least three more years. And why the hurry?" Akhil asked.

    "Why are you guys interrogating me all of a sudden? Just enjoy the steak and have some wine. It is a new vor the ape made. And take your gadgets before going there and causing ruckus. As long as you don¡¯t select those guy¡¯s names on the list there is no way the families will get any information regarding the yers and the game from their gods.

    So, we have an advantage here. Create as muchmotion as you can and when they are down by half. You can select their names and finish it off."

    "I heard something about a guy stuck in the maze. Are you doing this to get him out of there?"

    "Kind of."

    When she was about to continue questioning, Sam brushed everything off.

    "Enough with the questions, alright. I am getting frustrated by this."

    With that the rest of the meal went along with some small talk and strong wine. After the meal, he gave them some of the new toys he tinkered with and sent them away to thes of the families.

    And that nigh the families became busy. Because their bars became the first targets. As soon as the bars were closed, Akhil and Noah went to one of the biggest bars in the city and set up a cylindrical device in the middle of the bar, and pressed a button on top of it before leaving silently.

    The metal cylinder started spinning as it dug itself into the ground and then some protrusions came out of the surface of the cylinder from which some kind of gas started emitting out.

    The spinning didn¡¯t just release the gases but also created a tornado in the surroundings and a spark created a methane storm and the firestorm that came out started melting everything and in an hour the whole bar was gone.

    Everything within the site has disappeared and all the left it a burn and molten ground with a lot of smoke puffing out of it.

    Even the metal pir was molten in that and disappeared.

    By the time the whole incident was noticed and reported, there was nothing left in the spot. No traces of the metals, no traces of people, and no traces of any bar ever existed.

    And this is only the start.

    Meanwhile, back in the with Maze, Sam is once again busy at midnight, and this time as soon as the maze shifted, he and Five-Elemental King made some valiant efforts to make the Saber Monarch go through the route again with the little bug.

    Sam drew the map and since this time there is a whole day ahead of them, The Saber Monarch whined and bitched a lot beforepleting the whole round around the maze and Sam kept it away.

    For the next few days, Sam did the same thing. Kept on drawing the changing theyouts onrge scrolls with same scale and this went on for a week.

    In this week, Akhil and Noah also started dealing with the targets properly. Their first targets are obviously business that could be used as the meeting points of the family members, such as bars and restaurants.

    These business were destroyed.

    As for the businesses of weapons, inscriptions and formations, they were also attacked but not aplete destruction. But a disruption to their whole practice.

    Sam gave them a bunch of formation discs particrly the soul formations and made them infiltrate these businesses and use them discreetly.

    These soul formations are made to control and manipte people slowly and by the end of the week, the product quality has dropped to an all-time low.

    The customers started revolting and they stayed demandingpensations.

    In short, this is small-time chaos.

    After this week, Sam got a basic report of progress from Akhil and Noah before he went into the divine dimension to do something.

    He took out the maps he drew. There are seven maps in total and he started simting all seven mazes inside the second floor of the divine dimension.

    At first, he decided to go on a full scale. He could estimate the approximate area the maze upied and that is never changing no matter how much it changed, it doesn¡¯t change the area it actually upied.

    After marking the area properly, he started drawing the map on arger scale. And after finishing the whole maze sessfully, he made the solid energy walls appear within the simtion.

    The whole maze is now rendered into a single entity and hepressed it into a small scale and pushed it aside.

    He did the same with the rest of the six mazes and now he has seven model mazes hovering around him.

    After cing them side by side, he startedparing each model.

    It is all a bit confusing, when ced them together as they intersected, but once he gave each model different color it became easy.

    Sam looked at all the colored mazes as he aligned them together.

    He doesn¡¯t know whether this process works are not, but he is actually trying to find a way to identify the energy nodes.

    And he is using the possiblemon points of the maze.

    He believed that for a formation asplicated as this and the mazes that are formed which don¡¯t have any route outside but just give an illusion of it and all the major nodes within the formation, the maze walls might originate from the formation nodes that are hiding.

    In fact, they might be hiding as the maze walls.

    So, if he can find themon walls and mark them down, he might be able to get at least a few nodes marked down.

 Chapter 949: Finding Nodes

    Sam¡¯s n worked. When he aligned all the mazes together. He found a total of eighteenmon points in all of the mazes and all these eighteen points havemon walls. When he stacked all the mazes together. And eliminated all walls that are not in thesemon points, he got eighteen long pirs of energy standing there.

    Now, he marked all these points within the maze area and drafted all of this on anotherrge scroll.

    Then he started creating simted formations with these eighteen nodes, but he wasn¡¯t able to create a maze formation like this. Not even a single maze.

    He came to a possible conclusion that these are not the only nodes within. He must have missed somet nodes that are not exactly visible on the maze directly.

    So, he can only figure out how the maze works from what he has and also how to destroy the maze within the limitations it gave him.

    He kept on doing different experiments for a few days within the Divine dimension while Akhil and Noah proceeded with their ns.

    They are slowly taking down the Astral ne cultivators of lower level by themselves.

    They recently broke through to the Middle-stage of Astral ne Initiation a few months behind Sam who got a head-start from the Sr fragments bodies, so they could handle the Initial stage cultivators and the middle stage cultivators without much of problem.

    The situation is chaotic, but not chaotic enough for the guard to be called off from this spot.

    After hitting a road block within the divine dimension, Sam started roaming around the maze with his energy vision on to find out if he could see any loophole or get an epiphany that could help him crack the maze.

    Everyday, the Saber monarch is getting more and more annoying as heined about why it is taking so much time. Always questioning Sam¡¯s intelligence and expertise.

    For the first time ever, Sam didn¡¯t feel the pleasure in unlocking a puzzle. He almost wanted to shut this annoying guy inside for as long as he can.

    But he couldn¡¯t waste too much time.

    And after that week, he managed to find three more nodes within and that are not covered by the walls in all seven mazes.

    They are always free. But he cannot be sure if they are really the nodes, but from the experiments and the books he is once again going through from the library of the divine dimension, he concluded that there is a high probability that they are part of it.

    By third week, he managed to get one more node, but after that there is nothing more.

    This is the toughest formation he came across and since he cannote into contact with it, he is having a hard time.

    After one month of their arrival, Sam met with Akhil and Noah to give a lot of supplies at the same time to cause enough Chaos to let some of the security leave this ce and one of the things that he gave them is poison and the addiction drugs of high dosage and a lot of high quality wine.

    He need the security to be more diluted for what he was about to next.

    After sending them away, he spoke to the Saber Monarch once again.

    "Tonight, you have to make thergest crack you will ever make."

    "Why would I do that? I will be exhausted."

    "Do you want to get out or not?"

    "You are asking the same question again and again. Are you dumb or what?"

    Sam took a deep breath and said.

    "If you want to get out, do what I say. I will be entering the formation this night."

    "You are entering the maze? Are you out of your mind? You wouldn¡¯t be able to endure the torture here. The Constant shift of mazes and minor formations that are within the maze that gives you illusions when you walk, you would just die because of the sheer mental exhaustion."

    "You don¡¯t have to worry about that. I only know about the few nodes, I couldn¡¯t figure out the formation mechanism from outside. I will being in and within a week or two, we will both get out of here."

    "As you wish. But if you die, it is your fault."

    "Yeah, I don¡¯t expect an annoying piece of work to take responsibility anyway. Just make the goddam hole alright."

    With thatmunication was cut.

    "Are you sure this is a good Idea? As he said, there is a chance that you would kill yourself." The Five-Elemental King asked.

    "This is the only way."

    "Is there really no other way for you to just copse it? You seem to have things that could do damage. The things that you gave to your friends. The things you used to threaten the Sr fragments."

    This time it is Agar who asked.

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "let¡¯s go to one of the other vantage points. I will show you something about this formation."

    With that all three of them discreetly moved to a vantage point and Sam took out a mini-rocketuncher and shot a space elemental energy cell.

    *BOOM*

    The energy cell went near the formation and exploded.

    The energy waves and the mini explosion covered the view and alerted all the security guards. The three of them only stayed enough time for the view to return and what they saw surprised them a bit. Particrly, Agar who knew what a space elemental energy cell could do, even if it is an extremely small cell.

    The formation is scot free. There is not even a single mark there.

    Sam then shot a different elemental energy cell and the result is same.

    As soon as they saw that, they escaped from the ce and went into hiding.

    "The formation is not just some prison. It is almost impregnable from outside. Even if Iunch therge rocket I used on the Sr fragments, the most it will do is destroy everything along with the Saber Monarch. But just destroying the formation and saving Saber Monarch is impossible.

    As for minor damages, there is a small perimeter around the formation that negates all use of the spiritual energy.

    Even for the energy cells, the explosions I created couldn¡¯t reach the real formation, any form of explosion that happens within the zone is negatedpletely.

    The spatial transfer is also out of the question. If not for the fact that we know there is a guy in there, I would have thought it was made for defensive fortification not for some prison.

    I don¡¯t know where the guys that ced this formation got this, but the one who made it, is a real genius. The sheer experience and experimentation that was needed to make this formation is fascinating to say the least.

    The only way to get out of this is from inside. There is no way out from the outside. Of course, if an Astral ne Consummate stage cultivator wants to give a try, they might be able to do some damage and tear arge enough, but the rest of the formation mechanism will not let the people inside to get out.

    Anyway, it is necessary to go inside."

    Then he passed on a spatial ring to them and continued.

    "There are some devices and the instructions to activate them are inside, I will stay in contact with you through the bug, keep that tablet on all the times and if I need the devices to be activated in certain spots, use them.

    There are also some devices which I kept for the usage of Akhil and Noah, if theye here, give these to them, but before that let them talk to me."

    After giving a lot more instructions, Sam waited for the midnight. He let some shadow mice to stay outside just in case, he needed them to do something.

    At this moment, he really appreciated that the formation didn¡¯t manage to keep themunication away.

    It would have been a pain in the ass if there is no other way tomunicate, than send the scrolls through some cracks.

    By midnight, The Saber Monarch used all his strength to create a hole at the dome of the formation and Sam who already got ready on the harbinger, just dropped inside the crack.

    Many people saw him go in there and there is amotion because of that, some called Sam stupid, some called him a madman, some called him brave. But the most important thing is someone called the family elders about someone entering the maze through the crack.

    This resulted in somewhat of an opposite effect than Sam wanted.

    The security once again tightened around the maze. But that is the least of his worries now. In fact, even getting out and figuring out became secondary. Because he just learned that no amount of mental training could prepare him for enduring the Saber Monarch.

 Chapter 950: Losing It

    At this moment, Sam is currently roaming around the maze with his energy vision on as the Saber Monarch followed him along with his incessant chatter.

    "So, you seemed to be quite young? How old are you? Fifty? Sixty?"

    "I forgot."

    "You forgot your age? Then you are dumber than I thought. Then why are you bragging about taking me away from this maze? It is too bad now that you are stuck here. How about I kill you when you wish to die. Trust me, I am very powerful, So you would die in a second."

    "If I decide to die, then it must be because of your annoying mouth and at that time, I would surely wish of another way than to give you the satisfaction of giving me the service by killing me with your saber. Now shut up, your mouth is not exactly helping."

    Sam said as he arrived at a corner within the maze and checked the walls and the ground keenly. Now that he came in and observed the energy walls with the energy vision, he has a whole new understanding of the formation.

    His first targets for observation are obviously the previously discovered nodes.

    No matter how much he tried with those nodes, he couldn¡¯t replicate this maze formation, but there are a bunch of by products within his experiments and one of them is dome and the other one is the perimeter for spiritual energy negation.

    These findings are one of the reasons that he came into the maze to check out the formation.

    By the end of it, not only would he learn a lot more about the formations, he would also be able to add a few tricks into his own arsenal.

    And as he checked the first node, he already found why he failed.

    Because, what appeared like a single node from his perspective when he saw it with naked eye, is actually abination of a few multiple nodes.

    There are four nodes within this spot extremely closely to the point they would be mistaken as a single node when they were observed with normal spiritual sense. But as he observed with the energy vision, he managed to distinguish them and found something.

    These four nodes are not only acting as nodes for four different formations within the maze, they are also acting as abined node for the dome surrounding the maze.

    As he already have a basic understanding of what causing the dome he could figure this much out. So, he took out a scroll and marked the four nodes on the spot and took out another node to mark thebined to have a better idea on how this works.

    Then he moved to the second node and got the simr results, but instead of four nodes, there are five. And the next one has three. After checking out five of these nodes, Sam suddenly remembered something else.

    The energy concentration of each smaller individual node is different. This is like a gigantic puzzle with a lot ofyers ced on each other like an onion, the moreyers he took out, the more he felt like weeping because the more troublesome it got to deduce, but he is also sure that by the end the onion is the one that will be torn into pieces while the person who peeled it will eventually stop crying.

    So, he started peeling the onion without a second thought.

    As he moved all over the maze on harbinger conveniently, the saber monarch seemed to have been offended by the fact that he has to walk.

    "Where did you get this? I want one."

    "I made it myself."

    "Make one for me too then."

    "Impossible."

    "Why is that? You might not know I am filthy rich. My fortune ounts to a few billion spirit stones mind you."

    "Do you know my previous month¡¯s ie?" Sam asked as he looked at the man casually.

    "How much?"

    "One hundred and twenty billion spirit stones."

    The Saber monarch became stunned for a second and stuttered as he spoke.

    "How... How much?"

    "You heard it right. So, stop bragging and let me do my job."

    "You are lying."

    Sam turned around and said.

    "Do I look like I need to lie?" And this sentence suddenly silenced the Saber monarch as he thought of therge amount of spirit stones.

    Sam finally heaved a sigh of relief. For a braggart this is the best way to buy some breating space and time.

    So, he peacefully got all the marks from already discovered nodes.

    Now he has to discover the new nodes, which is not that difficult since he is already in the formation. But unfortunately once again, the chatter box opened.

    The Saber monarch looked at the markings on the scrolls and the drawings Sam is making and said.

    "What are these markings? Are these scribbles going to get us out of here?"

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and just went on drawing and experimenting as he used spirit stones as smaller scale nodes and kept on simting different formations. He cannot go into the divine dimension as he cannot trust this guy at the moment. So, he could only adjust with this.

    For two weeks Sam worked without a wink of rest as he endured the incessant chatter and annoyance.

    As he made formations up on formations, he began to understand many things. And the first conclusion is that the major nodes he found from outside are not even half.

    There are around fifty-six major nodes that are responsible for the dome, the perimeter with energy negation and finally the healing of the formation.

    And each of these major nodes are created by thebination of smaller nodes and the minimum number of smaller nodes is only three with the maximum being seven. And half of these smaller nodes change positions with every mid-night shift.

    They exchange positions within themselves without any new positions that means the only thing that changes is the energy concentration of the node not the location of the node, but still the dome and the perimeter remains the same but the internal formations change.

    The internal formations created by these small nodes are around three hundred and twenty four out of which half of them are responsible for theyout of the energy walls in the maze and the rest are there are creating the illusions, the torture, the pressure and other aspects of the maze.

    Even though he managed to figure this out, Sam wasn¡¯t able to find one missing link that could help him crack the formation. That one link. The core of the formation. He found the energy source, he found the nodes, the moving nodes, the rest of the operation, the energy cirction. He found everything except for the goddamn core which is holding him back from simting.

    Even with his current cultivation level, he could not see the energy lines or circtionwork directly with the energy vision. This became a nightmare.

    His obsession with solving the puzzle and his constant desire to crack this made him feel frustrated. The experience and endurance he umted with years of research, war, killing and training are not enough for him to stay calm.

    The mental strength he was always proud of suddenly appeared puny and futile.

    Even with all the frustration he is going through, Sam had to endure one thing which ispletely unrted to the formation. The bbering. At first it was still okay. But as the bbering went on and on, he couldn¡¯t take it anymore at one point and after these two weeks, the saber monarch threw ast straw to break the camel¡¯s back.

    As Sam is looking through the designs he made to identify the core, he entered another dead block in his experiment and tore the scroll. At this moment the saber monarch came and said sarcastically.

    "I knew it, you are just a braggart. Look at all the scrolls and the Ink. They are a waste. Who are you trying to impress by doing this? Even a genius like me cannot do anything to this formation, what can you do?"

    Sam felt extremely frustrated and took out the bug to contact the Five-Elemental King. He set the volume of the bug to the max and said.

    "This is Sam. Currently, I am extremely frustrated and I cannot stand this bbermouth.

    Divide all the explosives I left for you equally and drop each share into the spirit stone mines."

    "Why? What happened?" Five-Elemental King said in an anxious tone.

    "Nothing just do as I said and contact meter on."

    After three hours the Five elemental King contacted him once again.

    Sam then turned the volume of the bugpletely on and looked at the saber monarch before saying so that Agar and Five-Elemental King could also hear it.

    "I am working my ass off trying to figure out how to get the hell out of this. But as days passed, I am having second thoughts on whether it is worth it to make this much effort on this guy. If you so much as say a word until I figure this out. I will remotely detonate every explosive and the whole formation would explode. You will die on the spot."

    "Come on, Sam. You are not going tomit suicide along with me?"

    "Those are my explosives, I have ways to save myself. But you would definitely die. If you think I am bluffing then try it, but before that ask Agar why half of the Sr Fragment n is wiped out."

 Chapter 951: Epiphany

    Agar, The Five elemental King and the Saber Monarch were stunned in the spot. Particrly, the Saber Monarch. He looked at Sam¡¯s face.

    It is filled with irritation and frustration. He is extremely familiar with that expression, because he enjoyed the annoyance on people¡¯s faces. He enjoyed annoying them and watching them feel helpless at the same time, as they couldn¡¯t do anything about it.

    All this while, within the surrounding realms and on the same cultivation level, nobody could match him. The only person who could be stronger than him is the Five elemental King but his cultivation level was weaker than him in the past.

    So, he got away with everything he had done. The annoying chatter, the irritating condescension. This almost became a habit to him that he didn¡¯t save it even in front of a person who is desperately trying his best to save him from this prison.

    But now he realized he seemed to have pushed the buttons too far and too long.

    Sam stood there, even though there is frustration on his face, there is not a hint of lie. It is brutally honest. And his tone also suggested that he is not lying.

    So, either he is the greatest bluffer there is or he is telling the truth.

    And this is not something he could take a chance on.

    So, he decided to take Sam¡¯s advise and asked Agar.

    "What happened to your tribe Agar?"

    Agar took a deep breath and exined the situation about how the Sr Fragment tribe tried to deal with Sam, but instead they were dealt with by him. Particrly therge rocket that actually threw half of the tribe into a spatial chaos.

    "Are you telling the truth, Agar? You are not bluffing for him are you?" The Saber Monarch asked once again as he looked at Sam¡¯s determined eyes.

    "I don¡¯t have a need to." She replied calmly.

    The Saber Monarch still wanted to probe a little and said.

    "Even if you can do that, I don¡¯t believe you have ways to save yourself from such arge scale explosion that could kill me. You are bluffing. And it is too much, if you want some peace, you could have just said so. We are all friends here aren¡¯t we?"

    He wanted to dilute the tension a bit as he smiled and said.

    Sam didn¡¯t flinch and his frown didn¡¯t recede.

    "Listen, Saber Monarch. It seems like you have had a decent life until now and it must have been smooth sailing. It must have been good knowing that you don¡¯t have anypetitors within the same level and you can roam around a bunch of realms banging every woman you want.

    I know that feeling actually. In fact, I experienced an even stronger feeling. Imagine being a Nascent but can walk around Transcendent stage cultivators and Consummate stage cultivators like it was a backyard. Everyone wants to kill you, but they are afraid to even show those intentions.

    I have experienced that, I know how addicting that could be. But don¡¯t you dare satiate your addictions on me. Because, I might not be your match in strength, but I have a hundred ways to kill you and fifty of them are on top of my head that I could execute right this moment. If my nning is right, I could make you a fugitive that runs through the same realms you once roamed free.

    So, don¡¯t piss me off too much and stay put if you want to get out of here."

    The Saber Monarch looked at Sam in the eyes for a few seconds before saying.

    "You think you can scare me like that?"

    "I already did. Why do you think you didn¡¯t take your saber out and sh me already. You know deep inside that if I am right, you would die here as soon as you take that saber out. So, now that we established that, let us discuss something.

    I am not taking you out of here for free. You need to work for me for a decade. Just like how the Five-Elemental King is working for me.

    I will pay you the same as the Five elemental King and you have to work for me just like he does. So, after youe to terms with that, you cane and talk to me. Until then we are strangers. But don¡¯t you dare think you can lie your way through this, because the Five_elemental King might not have heart to kill you, but he would sure as hell break your bones and hold you back. Now that you guys are of same cultivation level, I don¡¯t think I need to say whether you are his match or not.

    And the finally, your way of speaking is not really as amusing as you think. In fact, it is downright annoying, so shut the fuck up and let me do my work."

    With that, Sam turned back and went to a rtively calmer ce in the maze and started his experiments again.

    He already has an epiphany on how this thing works, but the location of core is what stumped him. Once he got the location of the core, they can escape easily.

    But he couldn¡¯t find it anywhere within the formation.

    At least for the next few days, the disturbance from the Saber Monarch has reduced, in fact he couldn¡¯t even see that guy at all.

    But after the third day, Sam decided that it is time for some rxation and calm his mind, so he took out a deer from the divine dimension and started preparing it for some grilled meet.

    At this moment, the Saber Monarch came to him as he cooked the meat and said.

    "It has been a while since I ate something. Do you mind sharing?" Sam gestured him to sit down and as they ate, the Saber monarch said in a soft voice.

    "I am sorry for how I behaved earlier. It is just a force of habit. I like making people feel helpless and annoyed, it is just a personal problem. I am really sorry and thank you for your efforts."

    Sam looked at him with squinted eyes with a hint of suspicion.

    "It is hard to believe that you changed that quickly."

    "Well, I had a hard talk with Five-Eloemental King. I am okay with working for you for a decade, but I want your help with something."

    "What is it?"

    "My girlfriend. She is currently imprisoned in her own family, I have to go there and release her."

    "I heard she has a fianc¨¦. What if they are already married?"

    "So, what? She is still my girl and she doesn¡¯t like the marriage. So, I will just take her away from him."

    "I heard you are quite a yer. How did you manage to make a woman fall in love with you?"

    "That is the secret.Every woman I have been with has fallen in love with me. I don¡¯t do casual sex or sex in exchange for something. In fact the prostitutes don¡¯t even take my money and that is their profession and my girlfriend likes that.

    She likes me making all the people fall in love with me and she likes the fact how I fall in love with them in the process and on top of all that, she likes it that I love her the most no matter how many woman I love."

    "Is it even possible? Loving all those woman at the same time?"

    "Yes, it is. It is just you need to convince the women that you can love them equally, that they are special to you in some way and most of all, you need to make sure that they feel you are worth it. The women that love me all think that it is worth it even if they have to share me.

    If you can do that. You can be as many woman as you can."

    "Well, good for you. Anyway, deal epted. Now all we have to do is get out of here."

    "Are you sure the core is within the formation?"

    "Yes, it should be. Even though it is possible to keep the core out of the formation, it is extremely difficult to do that when the formation has this many nodes. It would be hard to connect all of them out of this formation, particrly when they are moving and just to be sure for the past few days I have been doing all the elimination I could get the location of the core and it is definitely not outside.

    Do you know how peaceful it is for me for the past few days It is almost like you didn¡¯t even exist in the maze? Thanks for that. I am now closer than ever."

    "Of course, it is easy. I just had to make sure that I am not in the ce you are at the moment and the possible ces you could go after, so I just stayed in the ces that you have already been."

    And that is the moment, that Sam had the epiphany he needed.

 Chapter 952: Message

    Sam dropped the deer leg he was eating and immediately made a move. He let out a batch of puppets that are still in the research phase.

    These puppets are modeled after a beast called Day Bat. A bat-type beast that feeds on sunlight and roams around in the day instead of the night like the rest of its other species. It has a special quality that as long as the sun exists it doesn¡¯t have to worry about theck of spiritual energy. Even the absorption rate of the spiritual energy from the surroundings is less and most of the energy it consumeses from the sunlight the skin converts.

    And the secret is not in the genes which is lucky for Sam as the secret lies in the acupoints, the energy cirction is what makes it possible for the bat to do this, which made it possible for him to make a prototype and the best part of this beast model is that the bat doesn¡¯t send sound waves to the surroundings to find the way.

    It actually sends some special waves that resonate back, that gives a special echo ording to the energy concentration of this ce.

    They are still in the research phase, he couldn¡¯t nail the energy source systempletely so they cannot just go on with the sr energy.

    But the energy wave detection is still on. So, Sam sent it in all the directions and checked the energy echo that wasing to different puppets as the puppet spirits sent the data to him.

    And within five minutes, as he moved around, he noticed the energy readings from the puppets are changing. He then took a seat as he made some calctions on a scroll and he is doing at a rapid speed. He moved to another location and the readings changed, he once again started calcting.

    This went on and on for a whole day and by midnight as the maze shifted Sam is finally done with the calction.

    He looked at the bunch of scrolls lined up in front of him and the bunch of calctions he made, he felt extremely satisfied. He never felt this proud in this world. Not when he made the puppet technology, the energy cells, the rockets, killing people far stronger than him, fighting gods on equal stage, tearing Hou Yi¡¯s asshole, nothing ever gave him more satisfaction than this one moment.

    He felt like he cracked something divine. He felt like he touched a new realm of knowledge. He felt like he crossed a million miles in a second.

    He looked at the whole formation once again with a newfound appreciation. All this while the formation is like an iplete art piece, he knew he is seeing something great, but he couldn¡¯t understand what it is.

    But as soon as this piece fell into ce after the calctions, he felt like he got the real meaning behind this art piece. This formation is like a masterpiece that could go down in the history as one of the greatest and to think that something like this is used to imprison an annoying brat, Sam felt like he met his match on vanity.

    At that one moment, he didn¡¯t care about the Saber Monarch, he didn¡¯t care about getting out, he didn¡¯t care about the game, the gods, the families, organizations, the goals, mess, he didn¡¯t care about anything at all.

    He was lost in this art piece of a formation.

    The person who created is a genius among geniuses. He made a moving core and a dormant formation spirit. It doesn¡¯tmunicate or maintain the formation operation, the formation runs on its own like a mechanism.

    The moving core is not exactly a node or a zone concentrated energy that could be moved, in fact it could be said that this formation is coreless.

    Because the moving nodes that group together in different ces all together form a temporary core and every time Sam enters an area, the spirit changes the location of the core.

    A core is basically a hub of energy that maintains the cirction of the energy within the formation so that it stays working, so these moving nodes not only act as main nodes and small nodes, they are also acting as a core based on the person¡¯s location within the formation.

    So the core is there and not there at the same time.

    Now Sam just has to find a way to trap that core in one ce and mess the energy cirction up so that they could properly escape.

    And since he cracked the mechanism up, he doesn¡¯t have to worry too much. He took out the paintbrush that he got from the Murali¡¯s inheritance and he started drawing inscriptions on the floor with an excited expression.

    The saber monarch looked at Sam¡¯s expression and his change of attitude. He became active, there is this invisible glow around him. He is happy.

    For some reason, he felt a bit jealous of Sam at the moment. That happiness wouldn¡¯te easy. One has to work tooth and nail to get that happiness. He is very familiar with it. He has simr happiness when he found the woman he loved most.

    Even though Sam¡¯s happiness is not to that degree, it is still the same.

    He felt confused. How can cracking a formation can give someone such pure happiness?

    If Sam heard these thoughts he would have answered them with a mere smile. He heard those thoughts quite a lot in his previous life. Among all the identities that he has the one he took most pride in, the identity of the inventor, a creator it is that part of him that is so happy at the moment. When he cracked the mechanism of the formation, he felt like he met another lonely soul that left the message in the ragged path he was traveling.

    He felt like he met a friend with who he could finally share his thoughts, his loneliness.

    For a whole day, Sam spent on writing the inscriptions in the maze, like crazy and he was done just a few minutes before midnight and he fell onto the ground and started panting.

    The Saber Monarch came to check on him immediately and after confirming that he is okay, he heaved a sigh of relief.

    "Why did you over exert yourself like that? What is wrong?"

    "Nothing is wrong. We are about to go outside, get ready."

    The Saber monarch¡¯s eyes lit up. "You are not joking are you?"

    "No, just wait a few minutes, the maze is not going to change anymore. Meanwhile, let me finish my meal."

    Sam took out another beast and started cooking for himself as they waited for midnight and by the time he served the meal on the te, midnight arrived, the saber monarch looked around in shock.

    "The maze didn¡¯t change." He muttered in awe.

    "It wouldn¡¯t anymore. Unless you want it to change." Sam said as started eating.

    "The MAZE IS NOT CHANGING ANYMORE. HAHAHAHAHAH..." The Saber monarch startedughing like crazy and joined Sam for the meal. His grin didn¡¯t leave his face.

    Sam took out the bug to contact the Five Elemental King.

    "Hello, Sam, the Maze didn¡¯t change. What happened?"

    "I cracked the maze. I cracked the mechanism. We can get out whenever we want."

    "Thene out now."

    "I cannote out now. We cannot now. I need to know the status of Akhil and Noah. How far did they go?"

    "Thetest report we got is from a week ago. They woulde tomorrow morning."

    "Then let theme, by that time, these family heads will also be here. So, stay in your hiding ce and contact me. After I got the details, I will decide on what to do next and keep the explosives of the formation where they are."

    "Why do you need the explosives there? You said you already cracked the formation."

    "Well, the creator of the formation has some special interests, He actually left a message hidden within the formation for whoever that cracks it, I need to prepare a reply for him.

    So, the explosives are a bit necessary."

    "Creator of the formation? Do you know who he is?"

    "No actually, but I will find him for sure."

    With that themunication was cut.

    Sam then had a peaceful dinner and wanted to take a nap.

    But at the moment, the Saber Monarch asked a question.

    "What is the message left by the Creator of the formation?"

    "Why do you want to know?"

    "I am a bit curious on what a guy this intelligent needs to leave a message to a stranger who cracks his formation."

    "Come and Find Me. I am feeling lonely at the top.

    That is the message he left."

    Sam said with a smile.

    "That is one arrogant message."

    "Arrogance is a rtive term actually. For him, that statement might just be a simple fact."

 Chapter 953: Power of Addiction

    A few weeks ago. The very next day after Sam entered the maze.

    Akhil and Noah got the addiction medicine, the alcohol and the poison along with the gist of a new n which they could employ at their own will.

    They were initially shocked by the fact that Sam directly entered the maze, but it was not something he wouldn¡¯t do. He has been doing this crazy stuff all along. So, after getting through that shock phase, both of them took a seat in a peaceful area to discuss what to do.

    After clearly studying the effects of the drugs and the poisons on the people and how to use them, they came up with a n.

    And the after two days, two bars opened. One in the area of the Blood lIghtning family and the other in the area of Crimson Lightning family.

    The bar has several specialty and most of them are medicinal that are useful for different ailments and even for cultivation.

    The addiction medicine works greatly through the medicinal ways. So, they got some medicinal alcohol before which they would be taking this special sensation medicine which was given to Aina before having sex with the King and the duo would pour their spiritual energy into the wine through a special formation Sam added into the goods they have now before serving it.

    When the wine was consumed, they will absorb the spiritual energy which causes this sensational feeling which they will mistake for the wine¡¯s effect as they don¡¯t even fight back against the dizziness caused by alcohol since they are using it as a medicine to heal or cultivate.

    This worked wonders.

    Exactly how they wanted to.

    Every customer is bing a repeat customer within the first week.

    But soon the suspicions came. How can a store which has same effect and same product open in twos that are homes for two rivals?"

    And they cooked up a story for that too.

    Akhil and Noah are now siblings who are continuing family tradition. They are drifters and they don¡¯t have any home. They roam around the realms. They visit a realm, open a shop there, do business for two to three months and then sell the business to some local bigshot along with the recipes and leave.

    Their aim is to earn some money, but the main goal is to make sure that their recipe and craft goes far and wide.

    They cooked up this story without Sam¡¯s help and this worked perfectly for them.

    They managed to make it convincing enough to avoid trouble temporarily.

    As for why they wanted to change the n like this, it has something to do with Sam entering the maze.

    After he entered the maze, even though the three families are not exactly worried, they didn¡¯t want to take chances and increased the security around the maze.

    Sam guessed that this would happen, that is why he changed to this n.

    If he was outside, there would have been no need for this and they could have simply killed some people to make the security dilute, but now there is no way that would work. The families might risk it if they have to make sure there are no anomalies in the maze.

    Because they knew that once the Saber Monarches out, they are going to be dead meat.

    So, Sam decided to dilute the forces of the family in another way. Instead of quantity, he went for quality.

    In fact, the employees of the families have a special discount in the bar.

    They are weed and they even have VIP rooms. When asked why the duo only has a simple reply.

    "They are probable buyers of our business. So, they get a little special treatment."

    For some reason they believed that and now the guards from the family whenever they don¡¯t have any duty wille here to get a jar.

    The young masters of the familye here with friends to showcase their specialty.

    The elders of the familye here to discuss business and politics with others.

    And all of this happened by the time Sam managed to crack the maze and waited for the report from the duo.

    The next day after Sam cracked the maze. The news of the Maze not shifting reached the whole realm overnight.

    The family heads all came along with their trusted subordinates. All of them are pretty high-level and the least affected by alcohol.

    And the duo also came giving this report to Sam through the bug as he thought of how to proceed from here. But first, he sent them back to do what they are already doing and waited for the family heads to leave the.

    "You should have just removed the formation then, I would have killed them all. With the help of Five elemental King on the side, we can make short work of them."

    "Yeah, you would do that. But I don¡¯t want to take any chances, I don¡¯t want them to be together when you fight them. I want the sure kills. And there is a lot more interesting approach with much less possible damages."

    "What is it?"

    "First, I want to know whether the family heads will go out to meet the person who gave the formation by themselves."

    "Why?"

    "To think of next step. If they go out, I can speed up a few things with the help of Five-Elemental King and Agar. If not, I might have to think of another way."

    But the second case didn¡¯t happen, because the family heads indeed went out of the realm on their own to deal with the formations.

    And since it is a joint decision and they didn¡¯t try to hide it, it was not exactly difficult to get the wind of the news.

    Now, Sam went on with his n and the first step is for the duo to load the wine with the addiction energy and all the poisons he gave him.

    They even closed the shop for a day and took out arge formation disc that helps them to load the energy and kept on charging the wine relentlessly.

    Even the one-day absence of the addicted wine caused some withdrawal symptoms in the people and most of it is actually just frustration.

    Now, Agar and Five-Elemental Kings made their way towards the two families respectively at night to pay them a proper visit.

    Since more than half of the forces at the family estates are frustrated beyond belief, it was a piece of cake for the two of them and their main goal is not to wipe them out anyway. All they have to do is create enough casualties to make the families feel the extreme pinch but also give them a faint hope that it can be recovered."

    After the attack happened and most people are injured, the very next day, the duo opened the bar once again.

    Even though some people are suspicious by their actions of closing on the day of the attack, nobody bothered to voice them. After all, in the eyes of public these bars tried their best to make a connection with the two families, so they are not going to do something like this, that could ruin their connection.

    So, the injured and frustrated people came running to the bar. In their mind, these wines are a perfect alternative for the bitter treatment they could get there.

    And as they drank their first pint of wine, they didn¡¯t know they are going to die that day. The first thing that kicked in is their addiction. They couldn¡¯t control their addiction and the special sensation it is giving them as they drink like fish.

    After they are on their third or fourth pint, the duo took out the new barrel which is mixed with the special poisons, and this time they are even generous.

    They just gave the next set of barrels for free and let the bar silently without anyone noticing them.

    The customers drank like fish. They got drunk on alcohol that it took some time for them to realize that they are getting drunk on poison and by the time they truly realized it and got out of their stupor, they arepletely hopeless. Some of them ran out of the bar in hopes to find a healer, but they couldn¡¯t make it.

    So, that night. Extending from the bar to many streets of the city, there are corpses of the two families fallen all over.

    Within two days, the three family heads came back and went back to their respective families directly and the Crimson Lightning and the Blood Lightning families got the biggest shocks of their lives and at this moment, Sam tinkered with the maze a bit as it gave of some glowing light.

    The guards don¡¯t know what is happening, but they are scared shitless as they knew they would be the first in line for ughter when the Saber Monarches out.

    But the guards that went to inform the family heads didn¡¯t even get an audience, because the family heads of the two families are furious while the third family head is anxious.

    As three of them are rivals and only two of them are attacked, the me clearly shifted to the third one.

    So, the first two joined forces and waged a war the very same day. They are especially furious when they heard that the reason their forces died is that they are addicted to the wine that was sold in those special shops. Because a few days ago, they are gloating by the fact that the third family didn¡¯t get to have this wine in his businesses, but they could, but now it bit them in the back so hard, they could feel the pain while breathing.

 Chapter 954: Chaos

    The sh between the three families went on a full scale within no time. The third family head is also a proud man and he knew that he didn¡¯t do it. But since the other families are hell bent on using him, he didn¡¯t bother to convince them and decided to take that usation to next level and started the battle.

    Now that half of the family forces of the two families are down to nothing this is also the perfect timing for him to deal with them.

    The only disadvantage is at the sh of the top. Two family heads versus one is going to be a bit troublesome. So, he decided to go into hiding and let the lower levels deal with the war. He has a great chance of winning.

    Soon, the sh extended to all themons and there are invasions to not somons, and finally it even extended towards the maze.

    By the time the family heads heard the news about the anomaly in the maze, they are already knee deep in the war.

    If they want to have any usible chance of facing the Saber Monarch, they would have to be together. But that is not possible at the moment as the first one to offerpromise might be swallowed.

    And when the war escted in just a few days, Sam finally made Akhil and Noah to select the families within the list and make itpletely official and an hour after they did that, the gods contacted the families through the temples.

    When the family heads heard about this and learned of the facial and physical description of the two people, they are stunned.

    They are the same people who opened the bar.

    Which also means, their war is meaningless. The two family heads ran to the main battlefield and immediately called for the third family head.

    Yelling that the war is over and they are retreating. They apologized and they have some exining to do.

    They even publicly talked about what the problem was and how it all happened.

    Meanwhile, after the announcement was made, Sam made a move once again within the maze.

    The dome slowly started thinning down. The guards who are fighting each other didn¡¯t even get the message from the family heads to stop yet and even if they got it, it would be hard for them to instantly stop, but the thinning of the dome made them stop and retreat a bit.

    The dome gradually thinned down and from the speed it is happening, the guards estimated that in three days the Saber Monarch would be out of that ce.

    And Sam did this because, he wanted the third family head to be forced out of his hiding.

    The three family heads wouldn¡¯te together for negotiation unless they have a clear and powerfulmon enemy and Sam decided to give them that.

    And when the news spread and the third family head got wind of it, he immediately arranged for a meeting with the other two with all his informationworks still open.

    The meeting was even held in an open ce in front of a lot of people. The two family heads started exining their situation with Akhil and Noah.

    And since Raijin the god that was worshiped by the third family head is not in the game it is obviously hard for him to believe them. But he gave them benefit of the doubt and opened discussions about the maze and dome.

    But while they are in middle of discussions, something else happened, the third family head got some news and that is their family guards are all found dead near the maze and only guard survived who saw that the maze is back to its original form. The dome is as thick as ever and even the maze shifted within.

    Now it was the third family head to make assumptions. The two family heads wanted to trap him and kill him here to end the war and they used the maze and the weird conspiracy about some game and the gods as the bait to lure him here.

    So, he immediately made a sneak attack and tried to escape the spot. The two family heads started chasing him. But it is all futile and since the meeting was held in an open ce, the news travelled pretty fast.

    As soon as Sam got the news, the dome and the maze disappeared into a puff of glittery glow.

    The whole was surprised by this disy. All the guards that are still alive, the people in the shops and the customers that came to visit, all looked at the maze in awe as two people sat there in the middle of the valley.

    Sam took off on the harbinger immediately and left to meet the Five elemental King and Agar.

    Akhil and Noah are also with them.

    "If the family heads don¡¯t realize that they are being yed like fools by now, they might be the dumbest family heads that we evere across."

    Noah said as all of them looked at the valley.

    The Saber Monarch is still sitting in the middle of the valley and the whole valley lookedpletely normal, except it is not. Sam¡¯s inscriptions are not visible to naked eyes. They are hidden for a purpose. The purpose of leaving a proper message for the creator of the formation.

    The news of Saber Monarch¡¯s release spread like a wildfire. It is even intense than the news of dome thinning down.

    But this time, the family heads didn¡¯t want toe out in the open first. They are continuously yed for the past few weeks, they lost many soldiers, businesses, trust and the bnce they kept for so long, so they decided to sneak into the to see this first.

    And this gave the news enough time to travel to the rest of Saber Monarch¡¯s enemies in the nearby realm.

    All of them arrived and the three family heads finally met after confirming the situation.

    "This is the only chance we got. We did hav some improvement in past year even if it was little, but the Saber Monarch is constantly tortured in the maze, we need to gather the support of the rest before we go there and attack him."

    "But if he is that week, how did he get out of the formation?"

    One of them raised the question.

    "Didn¡¯t you hear the reports? The formation didn¡¯t copse or break, it disappeared. It was cracked the normal way. Whatever it is, it is the work of that second person who entered the formation. I also got the report that he flew away on a metallic board as soon as the formation disappeared.

    He might be some kind of master in the art who just came for destroying the formation, Saber Monarch might not even be his intention."

    "Or, he is the one behind all of this mess and he is manipting us since the start."

    The argument went on for a while and they decided to meet with the rest of the Saber Monarch¡¯s movies.

    For the next few days, the meeting was held. There are around twenty people who are here just to confirm Saber Monarch¡¯s return. They are all afraid of him. Because they all yed a part in imprisoning him.

    After some tedious discussions, they decided on a few things.

    First thing is that no help would being from that youngmaster that helped them with this formation and the setup.

    The second thing is, the Saber Monarch must definitely be suffering from some weakness for him to not make a move instantly. This is not his style, he is extremely rash and straightforward and in fact that is the reason he was caught and from the way he threw the scrolls out every night, it could be said that his rash nature didn¡¯t change one bit.

    So, this is the perfect time to attack.

    The third thing is, if the Saber Monarch is stronger than they thought and they couldn¡¯t kill him, they would be retreating and will use all their forces to catch the guy who unlocked the formation.

    Since he can unlock it, he can lock it back. He would be the only way for them to do this. In fact, the three family heads already sent their forces to search for Sam along with Akhil and Noah as they thought that there might be some kind of connection between the three of them.

    And then they decided to attack.

    As the twenty of them surrounding the valley on their beasts flying in the air or just from the ground, Saber Monarch looked at them with a smile. It is time for him to put some work into his saber. He is thirsty.

    And when the confrontation began, the Five Elemental King and Agar left with Akhil and Noah to the family estates of the Crimson Lightning and the Blood Lightning family.

    The heads and some of their men are here, the second powerful people were left at the estate in fear that Akhil and Noah would try something, but since their power level was given to them by the gods, they are notpletely afraid. But if they knew the Five-Elemental King ising, they might have had a different point of view on the subject.

 Chapter 955: Revenge

    As soon as the people that surrounded the valley started entering it and moved towards the Saber Monarch, he got ready with the Saber.

    Sam watched the whole fiasco from far away with a telescope. Immediately after the opponents entered the valley, Sam activated the dome of the maze from afar.

    Once he got a hold of the formation and its core, it is easy for him to do all this, and he even used the Specter as the temporary formation spirit who uses the formation inscriptions heid down. Now all he has to do is use their mental connection and give the message and the specter will execute it.

    The dome of the maze appeared and thus started the panic among all the people.

    They were lured into the trap this easily and everyone turned back as they started smashing the dome with their weapons.

    Saber Monarch stood up and stretched as he held his saber and started walking towards them as his speed gradually increased before he started running. Therge saber in his hands started glowing and the opponents scattered around the valley.

    It is at least arge ce even if it was enclosed.

    They started running around to be thest of the batch and started attacking him from different directions.

    Sam looked at the whole mess and now understood how the Saber Monarch could get away with all the crap he throws at people.

    His annoying mouth is enough for him tond him some super strong enemies, much less his even more annoying crotch that plucked the flowers that are not his.

    But here is walking through the lightning storm that was thrown at him as if he is talking a walk in the park. His Saber strikes are powerful that if not for the fact the dome is activated, he was afraid that his own inscriptions would be gone.

    As per the formation¡¯s mechanism anything that is the part of a formation will be restored, so the inscriptions he gave to the formation are now also part of it.

    Lucky for him the battle wouldn¡¯t cause any adverse effect on his ns.

    He sat on edge of a cliff with some wine in his hands and looked at the whole issue calmly.

    The battle is interesting and exciting and there is still time for him for the next move. He has to wait for the Five Elemental King and Agar to send news back from the families.

    This time unlike before, Sam decided to take the family yard for himself. He decided to change the space gates they use and connect them directly to the ones at the feathered Ind.

    He will establish a direct link which helps with the business take over.

    But this time he decided on a different approach.

    The families that are going to lose their most powerful people are going to work for him directly. He would use the good old batch of Pills of servitudes on them and ce some of his high level subordinates on the top to take care of the situation.

    Even though, it would be difficult for them to survive without a Peak stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivator, Sam had other arrangements for that.

    He made all the ns properly and if everything goes well, they wouldn¡¯t have any problem at the moment.

    And for that, Saber Monarch ys a critical role.

    As Sam watched the battle, the Five elemental King and Agar are doing their job. Their first job is the Crimson Lightning family. They went there and the Five elemental King killed the second inmand directly with one strike and rounded up the rest of the group who are within Astral ne and put them under shackles.

    The next stop was obviously the Blood lightning family and the situation repeated itself.

    But they didn¡¯t go to the third family, Sam didn¡¯t want to go there. He wanted to keep it in ce just as it is. It has the least damages and most people.

    After finishing the task within a single day, the Five elemental King returned along with the remaining three.

    When they arrived, The Saber Monarch is ying with the remaining survivors within the dome. He is using themunication device Sam gave him before leaving the ce only to make him change theyout of the maze whenever he wanted.

    He is ying a game of cat and mouse with them. He is enjoying it way too much and the three family heads are still there running away as they panted, pleaded, begged for mercy.

    But nothing worked, he was determined to y with them to his heart¡¯s content.

    "What is he up to now? Will they chase them to death?" Agar asked as she sat beside him and took a jar to herself.

    "He is just taking out the frustration of the past year. He might go on for a week at this rate." Sam replied.

    "A week, do you have time?"

    "Of course, the n worked out faster than I thought, particrly those two families are finished within a day. That is something else, I must tell you."

    "They are weaker than we originally thought. Seems like you are doing well with this formation."

    "It is like a new toy in the hands of a curious kid. Once I finished the mechanism, it gave me ess to everything. This might be the biggest reward I got here."

    "Biggest reward? Not even the Saber monarch?" Agar asked in surprise.

    "It doesn¡¯t matter no matter how many men he has. They are mostly required for him to make things easier. The biggest reward for him will always be new knowledge and information." Noah answered as she grabbed a bottle of beer.

    "Knowledge and Information? What can you do with it?"

    "You don¡¯t know what he did. His exploits are legendary, they are now even told as stories for kids in our home."

    And just like that Agar and Noah started talking about Sam, then the home and then all the things he had done therepletely ignoring the remaining three men that are sitting right beside them, particrly when they are talking about Sam who is sitting beside them.

    He rolled his eyes and looked at the maze.

    Meanwhile, the realm fell into Chaos. The family heads are trapped in the same maze along with the Saber Monarch, the story rung in the ears of everyone in the realm. Everyone wanted to try something with the businesses of the families, but to their surprise, everything is up and running. There is no difference, no war like atmosphere, no problems, no anxiousness. The businesses that are opened regrly were opened that day too.

    The next week went away just like that and finally there are only three family heads left inside the maze along with the Saber Monarch.

    The rest of the people are all dead.

    At this moment, the Saber monarch is sitting on a maze wall as he looked at the three family heads that crouched like chickens.

    "Now, now. How was thest week inside the maze? Isn¡¯t it amazing?" He asked as he wiped the blood off of his saber de with his own clothes which are also blood soaked.

    But the three family heads didn¡¯t dare answer.

    "Why are you not answering? Come on, tell me. How is the week in the maze? Not so good right? At least for you, you guys hadpany. But for me, there is no such thing like apany. I waspletely left alone inside.

    Do you understand my torture now?"

    There is still no reply.

    "You bastards couldn¡¯t keep your wives satisfied. Tell me, which one of you have a wife that you loved and pursued with proper respect? All you did is force her to marry you guys. You, the crimson lightning family head. You abducted her from her lover¡¯s embrace when she was grieving for her father¡¯s death.

    You blood lightning family head, you forced her family to betroth her to you. Threatening their very existence.

    And finally our third head, you are worse than both of them. You just raped her directly. At least the other people are decent enough to marry her first and give her position. If not for the fact she was a strong and intelligent woman, she would have died in your hands.

    I might be a manwhore in your eyes, but every woman I spent my night and shared my bed did so willingly. They loved me for the whore I am. I loved them in return all the same.

    I made sure their feelings are valid.

    At least that makes me better than all of youbined.

    If I think about it, they are sleeping with me for who I am and what I am without any fear, pressure or need. But for you, they slept with you to stay alive, survive and satisfy your ire.

    Your position in their hearts is lower than mine. And you will die like that."

    With that, he shed the throats of the two family heads. He left the third family head whose subordinate family is of Raijin gods. It is per Sam¡¯s request. This guy is the key for controlling this realm.

 Chapter 956: Next Assignment

    The maze opened. The maze that trapped the strongest of this realm and some other realms nearby opened.

    When it was opened, only two people remained alive.

    The Saber Monarch and the third family head. But they didn¡¯te out of the valley. Instead, Sam went into the valley to do something.

    As soon as hended, he started collecting the dead bodies of people and brought them all towards the center of the valley, where The Saber Monarch is currently sitting along with the third family head.

    Sam called Specter out and both of them started performing arge ritual of soul necromancy.

    After Samid out an inscribed formation, he walked to the Saber monarch and the Third family head and gestured them to go inside the formation.

    And then the ritual started.

    Both Specter and Sam carefully carried out the ritual to link the soul of the third family head to the Saber Monarch. The Link they are establishing is one of the servants and the master. This is actually one of the Soul Necromancer tricks, where he marks and creates a forced link with one of the souls of people who are still alive.

    He might not be able to kill that person directly, but he can at least control them about some fundamental things and make them stay loyal and if by any chance the marked person is dead, the soul wouldn¡¯t vanish into nothingness.

    Instead, it uses the soul realm as a means to travel and reaches the master¡¯s location directly and bes a servant soul undead.

    The advantage of this is that the souls would be in their purest and strongest form.

    The disadvantage is the ritual itself. If not for the Presence of Specter, Sam wouldn¡¯t have dared to perform the ritual on himself or to even perform at all, much less performing it on another person which is ten times more difficult.

    Even with his vampire bloodline activated, Sam is not exactly sure that he would be able to do it. But with Specter it is a whole different story as he is aplete natural at the soul necromancy.

    And this natural talent was bound to be put to good use.

    After the ritual ispleted and forcefully linking the souls, the Saber Monarch stepped back and after going above and beyond to stop him from using his new power to y with this family head, Sam started drawing another circle and this time, it is muchrger and moreplicated.

    The Specter separated itself from the maze formation and entered this formation circle directly and within no time it started glowing. Sam threw the family head into this circle and then threw the dead bodies of all the Peak-stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivators into the circle one by one.

    After that, he started channeling his dark elemental energy and mental energy into the formation circle letting the specter do the rest.

    The dark energy casts a gloom all over the valley and it almost seemed like night has arrived earlier. It felt like they are walking through a haunted cemetery.

    As the spectators watched the spectacles, the souls slowly appeared out of the dead bodies. They areing so slowly that it made the whole scene much eerier.

    After the souls werepletely extracted, the soul from the third family head even though he is already alive was forcefully extracted outside as he screamed on top of his lungs.

    "AHHHHHHHHHHH..."

    Not caring about his pain, the specter continued with the ritual. One after another each soul extracted from the dead bodies was forcefully attached to the soul of the third family head.

    The ritual is so painful that this might be the first time that he ever wished to be passed out so that he wouldn¡¯t be feeling any pain.

    But some wishes are just that, wishes. They don¡¯t mean anything more and anything less.

    If it was pure physical pain, he would have surely passed out, but the pain is to his soul so he cannot pass out even if he wanted to.

    It took an hour to finish the ritual. Even five elemental King and the Saber Monarch felt extremely sorry for this guy. It was that torturous just to watch, one could only imagine the pain of the one who is inside.

    After the ritual was over, the family head passed out. But Sam didn¡¯t let him rest, he woke him up and said.

    "There are around fifteen strong souls that you could ess to any time. Try and see if you can get them out."

    The family head nodded and closed his eyes, he could indeed feel a few extra presences in his sea of consciousness.

    He tried to ess these presences and the souls came out. They are the souls of therades who he fought together for the past few days. He was stunned for a second.

    "They obey all yourmands and they will be helpful in the battle. They will grow along with you and be powerful. But you have to cultivate your soul, your mental energy. As long as you keep it up, these souls will get stronger and you would be able to fend off all your peers alone.

    From now on, you will take over the operation of the Crimson Lightning families and Blood lightning families.

    You will be taking thirty percent of both families¡¯ ie and give twenty percent to my subordinates that I would be leaving here, the remaining fifty will go to my friends.

    You better leave it aside and keep a proper ount for all the money so that they coulde and collect whenever they want.

    Do you understand?"

    Sam asked, but the third family head is still in a daze. To be honest this is the first time he even had a proper look at Sam. So, he is a bit lost. But as he was lost in that daze, a re fell on his eyes and he looked at the shining saber nearby held by the smiling saber monarch, he immediately agreed to all of it.

    After this was taken care of, Sam sent them back to thes of the two families to settle the issues there along with the Saber Monarch.

    He would settle the issues wherever the force was needed.

    After that, Sam erased the two ritual formations and activated the maze once again and added some extra inscriptions, and finally detonated it.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Large explosions happened continuously and the cliffs surrounding the valley are destroyed along with the valley itself.

    The spectators ran as far as they could.

    But when the dust settled a string of words could be seen.

    "This Maze is cracked by Sam. And he is going to look for the one who made it."

    These words are carved out of the cliff walls around the valley and Sam couldn¡¯t help but smirk as he looked at it.

    This is the result of thest set of inscriptions he drew inside the valley. They managed the explosion on the cliff walls so that they could create these words.

    Since the other party left a message. He felt that it would be rude to not leave a message after he cracked it open.

    After this, he waited for the things to settle down in the realm so that they can move to the next adventure.

    Sam took a look at the list to find his next target.

    At first, he wanted to finish thete-stage Pre-transcendent cultivators earlier. And he started with Five- elemental king for the same reason. Luckily he broke through to the Peak stage. Anyway, there are still two Peak Stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivators and one of them is going to be their next target.

    He looked at the details of the two people.

    Sam got some more information from the Five elemental King and Saber Monarch andpiled it with the already existing data given by Agar and got some decent information.

    First one is s thief.

    He wouldn¡¯t steal for himself as he didn¡¯t find any happiness in increasing his collection. Rather he enjoys the process.

    In fact, he even managed to steal something from Five elemental King.

    Everybody knows the way how he works.

    He always ns ahead for days, weeks, and sometimes months.

    Once he confirmed that the other party has the item he wanted, he would target that person and create circumstances and scenarios that would force the other party to use the said item. It might be a herb, a potion, pill, weapon, formation disc, defensive artifact. It doesn¡¯t matter what it is, he could think of a scenario to use it and once the other party uses it, he would appear out of nowhere and steal it before disappearing.

    And he does this for money and resources. He would take assignments from anyone, big or small. But they have to pay the money suitable for that assignment.

    There are some people who acted smart and tried to ditch the payment, but they realized that this master thief can be a master assassin if he wanted to.

 Chapter 957: Bartender

    The Master thief, Gran.

    Sam looked through some of the exploits and was really amused by this person.

    Not many people saw him or fought him. Or to put it other way, not many people fought with him and lived to tell the tale.

    His battle style is also different and he is the user of the shadow element. At least ording to what the five elemental King said.

    There are only few assignments that this person failed and one of them is the one with Five elemental King and the other one is the Saber Monarch and both of them are Sam¡¯s subordinates.

    The Five elemental King¡¯s assignment almost seeded, he managed to grab the item, but he couldn¡¯t take it away. The five elemental King locked him in the battle making it impossible for him to escape, even though he disappeared like a phantom.

    Five elemental King almost followed him to his hide out. There is nothing he could do and left the item away before escaping.

    As for the Saber Monarch, this maniac managed to stop that thief even before he could grab the item. Because the item he wanted to steal was a saber and Saber Monarch¡¯s grip is not exactly removed easily.

    And the worst part of it is, the assignment was given by the Saber Monarch himself. He just wanted to meet this thief and tried to meet him directly, but the channels didn¡¯t allow him to do that which caused him to ce this assignment on his own head and lured the Thief toe and find him directly.

    He said that he wanted to spar or something, but the thief escaped as soon as he learned that this is a hoax. At least, he got some advance down payment which could be considered a profit.

    But still, even among the few people who managed to fight with this guy or escape from this guy, nobody saw his face, and nobody ever made proper direct contact with him.

    Not even his highest-paid managed to see that person¡¯s face. They only knew that it was a man.

    After settling the matters down in the Crimson reed realm, the four of them left while Akhil and Noah went on their own journey.

    They are not exactly suitable for going against the families at this level yet.

    They are still only suitable for the first phase families which are still left a lot.

    So, all they can do is leave and continue their progress at their own pace.

    Sam now has an extra person in the entourage and he is also downright annoying, their next stop is the Nine Moon realm.

    The realm with the main having nine moons. And these nine moons are of different elemental significance with their soil and cores having high-level concentrations of different elemental energies.

    These nine moons also have lower gravitational force than an average and the air is very thin with almost no oxygen which makes it impossible to survive. But once in a while, these moons throw something on this when they interrupt each other¡¯s gravitational fields and create some chaos.

    This makes the Nine moon the main of this realm extremely dangerous ce to live as nobody knows when the hit woulde and how much damage it could create.

    But this also brings some advantages as whatever piecees from that moon, it will be resourceful and useful for the cultivation or making weapons.

    The moons influence the waves, a small tsunami is almost a daily urrence. There would be at least two earthquakes on the whole.

    This is a nightmare for all the construction artisans.

    Because of this chaotic situation, no family or organization made this as their headquarters.

    There are small bases of every organization and there are fewer businesses. The beasts that live on this are all apex on their own level. To live in such a chaotic ce is not exactly a pleasant task.

    As for the businesses, there are very few that could even manage to survive.

    There are very few cities that are built in the zones which are free of any strikes from the moons, they are somewhat of blind spots.

    But still, the people thate and go from this are extremely high in numbers even though the death rate is astronomical. The only reason being their greed for resources. As long something falls from the moon, there would be at least ten people or teams fighting for that along with a bunch of beasts within the surroundings.

    Every person on this is a scavenger which made a perfect ce for the Master thief to start his business. Most of his assignments are within this. A big shot would get something and he would steal it from that guy.

    At this moment, Sam and the trio are walking through a city. The Bandit City.

    This is the city named like that because of Gran and in this city, there is only one bar which could be considered a proper business.

    Because it has been there for years and no amount of chaos managed to disrupt its business.

    The main reason for that is the fact that this business is affiliated with Gran. In fact, this is the ce where people drop assignments for Gran and get the news whether they epted it or not.

    Sam entered the bar with a group.

    There are not servers or waiters even though there are a lot of tables. There is only onedy bar tender behind the counter who is polishing the crystal sses.

    She is the owner of this ce. Everyone who entered the bar went to the counter got their drink and sat down at a table of their liking.

    Sam looked around the bar and his gazended on the walls. There is arge metallic letterbox mounted on the wall and beside it there are a bunch of notes nailed to the wall.

    The letterbox is for dropping the assignment for Gran and the notes are the indication of whether gran epted the assignment or not.

    There is a small crystal screen beside the letterbox with a number disyed on it 2820.

    And when a person came in and dropped a letter in the box, the number changed to 2821. These numbers are the indicators of the assignments and on the notes, the assignments are indicated by these very numbers without any mention of names or the tasks.

    Sam took a seat at the counter which ispletely empty while the rest of the group took their drinks and sat at a table nearby.

    The bartender looked at them in surprise and then at Sam who sat at the counter and looked at the menu.

    She stopped polishing the crystal sses and waited for Sam to speak.

    "It has been a while since I had a cocktail. I would have your best cocktail please," Sam said with a smile.

    She nodded and started pouring the drinks for the cocktail. Sam observed the different alcohols. Just from the smell, he could sense that they are of great quality.

    She shook the drink with a certain rhythm but the energies are the ones at y and poured the drink in a crystal ss.

    The cocktail looked transparent even though the liquor that was poured in has different colors. Sam took a sip and closed his eyes to savor it properly.

    "Wow, that is really good. The blend of elemental energies is perfect. You are really good at this."

    Sam said as he savored the drink. He finished it and asked for one more before looking around.

    "For a bar with such a beautiful bartender and these amazing drinks, there are awfully few people at the counter."

    "Not many people have the guts to sit down anymore." She replied.

    "Why? Are you that dangerous?"

    "Not really, in fact, it is quite opposite. That is why they tried their hand and overstepped their boundaries but that guy who is using my wall is not so easygoing. So, the bar counter is almost a no-entry zone."

    Sam nodded in understanding as he took the next drink and this time observed the woman and her action as she mixed the third one.

    She is a talldy. She is beautiful, but not to the point of making everyone lust after her. It is a bit of sophisticated beauty. She wore normal clothes that covered her whole body, not revealing too much skin. Maybe the most beautiful features are the eyes and the long hair.

    A few drunks would have really tried their hands at her.

    "That look is not generally not a good sign." She said as she fixed the drink.

    "Don¡¯t worry, I won¡¯t try my hand. I am not interested in your body. As much as I am interested in your drinks."

    "That would be good for both of us."

    "By the way, it has been a while since I saw someone with their way around the liquor. I have a friend who is also good at this. How aboutparing some notes?"

    She looked at Sam keenly and said

    "Not many people would dare ask something like that." She paused and then looked at the table of hispanions.

    "I guess not many people woulde along with two of the most notorious guys in the surrounding realms."

    "I guess," Sam said with a smile.

    "Tomorrow morning, an hour before the opening time. Bring your friend here."

 Chapter 958: Assignment

    Sam and the trio left the bar after drinking for some time.

    "Boss, why did you ask for that exchanging notes or something? Don¡¯t tell me, you are hitting on her. If it is so, don¡¯t even try. That Gran guy is a crazy piece of shit. He might try to kill you."

    "Why would he try to kill me?" Sam asked casually.

    "Well, you are hitting on his girl, aren¡¯t you?"

    "Isn¡¯t it true that he made a point many times to the people who tried to get him through her? He doesn¡¯t have any rtionship with her. So, nobody should bother her for him. Now, I am bothering her for her."

    "I don¡¯t think that is true though, he might have just used that as a cover, so that nobody would bother her."

    "There is only one way to find out."

    The next day, Sam went to the bar again. But this time, he didn¡¯t bring the trio along with him, they are waiting nearby the bar, but they didn¡¯te inside.

    "I thought you were bringing a friend. Why are you here alone?" She asked him with a raised eyebrow.

    "Who said I didn¡¯t bring him?" Sam replied and waved his hand to let Ape out. Along with ape, he took out a bunch of alcohol samples. He took out every alcohol that they ever created, no matter how low level it is at this point.

    The bartender looked at the ape who is managing the liquor in surprise. She then looked at Sam who just took a seat and watched the show.

    "Are you serious?" She asked him with a hint of doubt and of course, the ape didn¡¯t like the question and he is not afraid to show his emotions outright and that led to him roaring at her face.

    "You are hurting my friend¡¯s feelings like that. Trust me, he is a great liquor maker."

    "Sure then, let us see what he¡¯s got." She replied and took out a bunch of her samples.

    And soon they tasted each other¡¯s samples and a discussion broke out. The bartender directly spoke her opinions out loud, Sam tranted Ape¡¯s thoughts, and soon the discussion broke into an argument on who is a better winemaker and how beer is a better beverage for rxation, and so on.

    After an hour and a half of some fierce argument, Sam finally broke it and sent the ape back to the divine dimension.

    "Looks like my friend won," Sam said with a smile as he took the seat at the counter once again.

    The bartender bit her lower lip as she reluctantly agreed to his evaluation.

    "Where did you get that ape?"

    "From my hometown."

    "How did he be so good at this? Isn¡¯t that kind of ape more suitable for battle? Liquor making is a delicate thing after all."

    "Of course, he battles. In fact, he is better at that than liquor making. But he enjoys liquor as much as he enjoys battle, so I let him be and it is also good for my business. It is a win-win for both of us."

    "You are in the liquor business."

    "Of course, I am. Who would be stupid enough to not make use of these kinds of recipes? At least, I am not."

    "Do you sell recipes?"

    "Of course, for the right price, yes."

    "How much for the beer recipe?"

    "Are you sure you want that one? Thend here is not suitable for agriculture. You cannot grow enough wheat for the beer."

    "I will take care of that. Just say the price and we can think about other issuester."

    Sam smiled and said.

    "A billion spirit stones."

    "Are you crazy or do you think I am stupid?"

    "I don¡¯t think either of those assumptions is true, but my price is."

    "That is way too expensive."

    "How could it be considered expensive, I have sold the recipe for even more money in many realms. There is even an auction where it went for three billion in one realm. I am actually giving you a discount because I am impressed by your skill in this liquor trade.

    Anyway, from your pricing range, you would be getting it back in a few months. After all, you are the only sessful bar in the surroundings and if you buy the beer recipe, there won¡¯t be another sessful bar around here."

    "You are here to sell liquor recipes to the bar owners?"

    "Not particrly, I am here to do some business, the liquor recipes are not the only ones I have in my hand."

    "Okay, let me have some time to think about it. But until then, don¡¯t sell any liquor recipe to anyone."

    "I can put the beer on hold, but why the rest?"

    "I might want to buy them too. Anyway, since I agreed to your exchange, this is the least you can do."

    "Okay then, if you put it that way, I agree. But make your decision quickly."

    With that, Sam walked towards the door, but before he left, he stopped at the wall and the letterbox as he ced his hands on it.

    "How does this guy get these letters and reply on the wall?" He asked her while she started polishing her sses.

    "Who knows? I never saw hime and take the letters when I am here. Sometimes, I stayed overnight just to see if he woulde, but he didn¡¯t, but somehow the letters still managed to reach him."

    "Must be some legendary thief. I would really like to meet him."

    "Why?"

    "Just like why we met today. To appreciate an expert."

    With that Sam left the bar and went back to their temporary residence.

    "Boss, are you really not hitting on her? I thought you are here to recruit people, but why are you doing business?"

    "I am not just doing business. I have some doubts?"

    "What?"

    "I think she is Gran."

    "Hahahaha" The Saber Monarch startedughing like crazy, when everyone looked at him, he controlled theughter and said.

    "I am sorry, but that is hrious because at first, I thought the same. But both of them are not the same. Her bar was always open when he robbed something. Even though both of them are not seen together in the same spot at the same time, they were seen in different spots at the same time."

    Sam went into deep thought and said.

    "Okay, Five Elemental King will go there and make an assignment in there ording to my instructions and we will test this theory."

    After that, Sam wrote down the details and made a letter which the five elemental King dropped in the letterbox.

    Sam then sent one of the chess pieces he had on hand to the cityke discreetly and let him practice with a sword there the whole evening.

    After that, the chess piece went to a nearby inn to stay the night.

    This repeated for the two days and every day, Sam and his team visited the bar, either together or in separate times. On these days, Sam noticed something. The cocktails are not offered every day.

    This made him feel suspicious, but the Saber Monarch ruled that out too, saying that it was also noticed by someone else, but it was mostly mere coincidence that the cocktails are not served on most of the thefts, but there are times they were served even on the days robberies happened.

    But Sam didn¡¯t exactly buy that exnation. There is a reason why Sam felt this suspicious about thisdy.

    First one is the cocktail. They were done with the help of space elemental energy. He didn¡¯t want to use the energy vision in front of her, but he is sensitive to spatial energy and when the cocktail was served, he could feel the traces.

    A spatial user who is a bartender is a bit of a stretch but not impossible, but he couldn¡¯t find her cultivation level, with normal measures, but when he looked at her from afar with energy vision, he could find traces of some heavy concealment.

    So, he moved to the wall next. When he touched the letterbox and the wall, he used the observation ability, albeit for a brief moment, he managed to notice something. Behind a boatload of concealments which he bypassed roughly, there is a spatial energy formation within the box.

    If his guess is correct, Gran might not even be taking the letters out, they might be delivered to somewhere else directly.

    He just needs one more link to directly connect both of them. Just one link.

    That is why he ced an assignment on one of his chess piece¡¯s head. So, when he found out that his assignment was epted, he was excited and looked forward to seeing what is going to happen.

    After they confirmed that the assignment was taken, the five elemental King got a separate message from Gran. Within the assignment, they have to mention afortable meeting point that would be explored by Gran before confirming the assignment.

    So, Gran left a message there and Five elemental King went there alone. There was a time mentioned on it at which the five elemental kings collect the merchandise and he also has to give the money.

    After getting that message, Sam sent a shadow mice along with the chess piece. His job is to not tail gran, rather just stay far away and watch the whole robbery while carefully recording it. If Gran is really a shadow user, he might find out shadow mice¡¯s movement while tailing which made Sam ignore that idea.

 Chapter 959: Setting the Field

    While, the Five elemental King, the chess piece are doing their job, Sam is sitting in the bar at the counter as he looked through the menu,

    "Why are you taking so long to decide today?" She asked him casually.

    "I didn¡¯t n oning today, but I just came in anyway. So, I forgot to decide what I should drink."

    "Do you want me to rmend something?"

    "Sure."

    "Taste this one, you never tried this. Even though it might not be as good as the past ones you drank, you never tasted this. This would be good for a long drinking night."

    "How do you know I want a long drinking night?"

    "I don¡¯t know, I just guessed."

    Sam smiled and replied.

    "Then get me one of those."

    Sam observed her actions closely as she prepared the cocktail. There is nothing wrong with her movements or the measurements. Everything is spot on. He couldn¡¯t find any mistake. But his instincts are not letting him rule out the possibility yet.

    He wants to take a look at the whole process with energy vision and until then he wouldn¡¯t be satisfied, but the energy vision is a bit too eye-catching. So, after some thought, he pulled out the oldest trick in the book.

    He took out a small formation disc and acted like he is tinkering with it and activated the energy vision.

    As his eyes glowed she instantly focused her attention on him.

    "What are you doing?" She asked in confusion, he then looked towards her with his eyes still glowing and said.

    "Nothing much, I have been trying to inscribe a special formation into this disc for a long time, but it was failing. In fact, it is the reason I am here tonight. Since I am having a long drinking night, I figured I might as well try something in a drunken stupor. It might have a chance of working."

    He said and he continued to check on the formation disc. He just worked on it with an inscription pen and scribbled like a kid and erased it again and again.

    The bartender kept on making drinks and Sam used this opportunity to just look at her while she is making the cocktails. But he didn¡¯t find what he hoped. There are still traces of spatial energy over the cocktail shakers.

    He spent a long time there and the bartender is even nice enough to open the bar overtime just for him.

    He kept on observing her while drinking, but he couldn¡¯t find anything.

    He went back with a lot of confusion and doubts still left in his mind.

    By then, the Five elemental King already returned. The chess piece also went into hiding.

    The Five elemental King got the sword from Gran¡¯s hands.

    "I think they are not the same people. I even talked with Gran a bit as we were past adversaries. He just wanted to squash that enmity and even gave me a discount."

    "I still feel like we are missing something that is right before our eyes." Sam said as he closed his eyes and thought of all the clues. But every clue he caught has a proper and viable alternate exnation.

    The spatial energy might be a coincidence, the concealment might be a choice, the cocktail-less days might also be a coincidence. All the connections he made are a bit farfetched. After some thought, he finally put this idea aside.

    "Let us just assume they are two separate people, which means we have to tail the gran separately."

    "Tail him? That is an impossible task, isn¡¯t it? No one managed to do that in years. How are we going to do that?"

    "We don¡¯t have to seed. We just need to tail him. And I still want to confirm something, so Agar go and ce an assignment and Saber Monarch, you go and meditate in the mountain north to the city for the next few days, keep yourmunication device on at all times, so that I could contact you."

    "But what kind of assignment do you want me to ce?"

    "A special assignment which will give some information and confirmation."

    Sam took out a paper and took out a formation disc.

    He then ughtered a bird for dinner and used the soul of the beast to create a soul imprint on the paper, before writing the assignment down.

    When the three of them saw the assignment, they were shocked.

    "Did you make a mistake or something?" The Saber Monarch asked him in confusion.

    "No, that is what we are doing and we are doing. So, go and do your job tomorrow."

    The next day, Sam went back to the bar after Agar dropped the assignment. Five elemental King and Agar stuck together and stayed in the residence after dropping the letter.

    Sam sat at the counter and said.

    "Do me a different cocktail today, I think I am getting closer to fixing this formation disc." He said as he looked at her.

    The bartender didn¡¯t react and just did as he told her.

    Sam closed his eyes for a second and searched for the soul imprint he left on the letter. It has only been a few minutes since Agar dropped it and it is still here and as he stayed there observing the letterbox and the bartender again and again.

    The letters kept on umting and the bartender went on with her usual break in the afternoon.

    "I wille back in the afternoon, then."

    Sam left with those words. But he sat nearby in a restaurant and waited.

    Right after the bartender left, he felt the letter changing position.

    It didn¡¯t move normally, nor did it have a path, it just disappeared from this spot and reappeared somewhere to the south of the city.

    Sam couldn¡¯t estimate the exact location from this far away, but he has a decent range in which the location would be.

    An hourter, the bar opened once again and Sam entered the bar.

    The bartender kept on doing more and more cocktails and Sam kept on observing her and kept track of the letter.

    While he was drinking, and inscribing formations on the discs, the bartender suddenly asked.

    "I am willing to buy the recipe for the beer. But I need some help with the wheatfield."

    "Do you have the propernd? If you have it, it wouldn¡¯t be much problem. But you need people to guard it, if anyone wants to sabotage the business, all they would have to do is spoil the field. You are going to pay a lot for this."

    "I will take you to the field this evening and you can decide whether it works or not. I can deal with my own safety."

    "Alright then. I will take a look."

    Sam waited till evening and he actually finished one formation disc that time. And even though he did it out of boredom, he did really do something with it. It is a small formation that does a holographic projection.

    He just wanted to do something to pass his time here and used his light elemental energy and his new grasp at the light frequency to make an art piece and he actually made his own image in it and as he changed the orientation of the formation, it changed to another position and a faster orientation made his image walk, run, throw some fire bars. It is like an art show.

    While he is ying with that, he waited for a long time. That evening she closed the bar early and both of them walked to the south of the city which made Sam feel amused.

    It seems like his earlier suspicions were notpletely groundless, particrly as he felt the imprint getting closer and closer.

    And soon, they walked into a hidden valley behind arge hill where there is a decently fertile field.

    "This is also part of the city¡¯s safe zone, but no onees here for some reason. Is it a good ce for growing wheat?"

    The bartender asked.

    Sam picked up some soil and started examining its contents, he did some tests and observations, but in actual fact, he is trying to take in the surroundings.

    The letter is certainly here somewhere. But he doesn¡¯t know where.

    "How do you know this ce?"

    Sam asked as he did some tests after wetting the soil.

    "Just one day I happened upon this area when I was taking a walk here."

    "This soil is not bad, just create some manure with these type beasts¡¯ feces and mix it with the soil after tilling it, then it shouldn¡¯t be a problem.

    In fact, regrly using that manure as a fertilizer might help the wheat a lot.

    If you want, I can give you a pair along with the deal. It isplementary."

    "That would be great. I would pay you more if you help me with setting the ntation. I don¡¯t know how to do that."

    "Sure, that is not a bad offer. But It would be better if we work on that in the morning."

 Chapter 960: Soul Scent

    Sam returned to their residence after checking out the field that night.

    "Did he ept the mission?"

    He asked Agar as soon as he arrived.

    "No, if the mission needs more details, he would ask for us to meet somewhere first before fully epting the mission, but there was no message whatsoever. It didn¡¯t take this long for the Five-Elemental King." She replied in confusion.

    "Maybe, he wouldn¡¯t do that at all. He must be thinking of this as a mission trap by Saber Monarch again, he already did that once, so there is no way of knowing if he would do it again. Particrly when we stayed in the bar for such a long time as a group. Assuming that the Gran saw us, there is no way he would take the mission. We just have to wait and see." Five-elemental king conveyed his thoughts from the side.

    "I know that might be the case, but I want to give some food for thought to this Gran," Sam replied and took a seat.

    "So, what is your progress with the bartender?"

    "She is buying the beer recipe and asked me to check out thend for the wheat field. I am going there again tomorrow."

    "Wheatfield? Boss, don¡¯t tell me that Saber Monarch is right. Are you really hitting on her?" Agar asked with a smile.

    "No, I think my suspicions are notpletely wrong. I have a lead but don¡¯t ask me what it is. I will tell you when I have some confirmation myself."

    "Boss, don¡¯t tell me that you are still hung up on the possibility that Gran and the Bartender are the same."

    "No, but I think I might have made a connection. Anyway, if there is no reply by Gran by tomorrow, leave another note and use the story we made up. See if he takes the bait then."

    "Okay, boss."

    With that, everyone retired to their own rest.

    The next morning Sam went back to the south of the city where the bartender is waiting. Sam waved his hand to let Ape and Dia out to take care of the field and he sat on the side along with the bartender.

    As she looked at Dia and Ape working efficiently, she spoke.

    "What kind of beasts are they? Their intelligence is awfully high."

    "Yes, it is." Sam didn¡¯t reply to the first question instead he asked one of his own.

    "So, are there any neighbors for you here?"

    "No, why?"

    "Nothing, I just asked casually."

    They made small talk, but every time Sam asked a question, he asked it with a hidden meaning, just to probe her a bit. Even she noticed it, but she couldn¡¯t understand whether he is really doing that intentionally or not.

    As Sam, made this small talk with her, he suddenly felt the soul imprint left on the letter disappear. He paused for a second and continued but he didn¡¯t show it on his face.

    After a few hours, they did some of thend and left for the day as she needs to open the bar.

    Sam returned to their residence and told Agar to drop the second assignment by evening and rested for the day.

    The next morning he went back to the field again to see if there is any reaction, but there was nothing initially.

    "So, why are you guys on this? You along with the Saber Monarch and the Five-Elemental King and that Sr Fragment?"

    "We came here to find an item. It was the only thing missing of a set and it makes a big difference for us."

    "Is it okay for you to share what it is?"

    "It¡¯s a de set and we all have one each, but we need thest one and it was said that it is present in this on some guy. But please don¡¯t say anything about it to anyone. You are the only one I told and you might even be the only person I suspect if it is stolen from me now."

    He said with a joking tone.

    She chuckled and replied. "Of course, don¡¯t worry. I am just a bartender and liquor maker."

    "Can I ask you something?"

    "Sure."

    "Why did he choose your bar as a ce for his assignment holding? I mean, he could have any ce he wanted and maybe even a more suitable ce, but he chose yours of all the options he had, why?"

    "Maybe I am just lucky." She just replied half-heartedly and they stayed silent like that for a while.

    They finished some work and left the ce.

    That afternoon Sam went to the bar once again and started drinking while he checked on the location of the second letter.

    It is still in the south of the city. Even though Sam couldn¡¯t find anything near the valley, he is sure he is missing something, the letter¡¯s location is definitely near that wheat field, but he couldn¡¯t find exactly where the location feeling from the letter is very faint and it might be because of some concealment arrangements.

    If not for the fact that he used a high-level soul necromancy, then he would have never been able to sense the location of a letter with a normal imprint.

    While sitting in the bar, Sam felt the letter moving as soon as the sunset and the closing time of the bar neared.

    The letter is currently moving towards the bar, he could sense that it is getting closer and closer.

    Sam took a small recording crystal made for secret surveince and attached it to the bar counter as he spoke with the bartender while she is arranging the sses back in the shelves.

    He left after that and even the bartender closed. Sam walked two blocks away from the spot and started running. He went back to his residence and opened a crystal table to take a look at the bar.

    He could sense the letter moving closer towards the bar and his guess was not wrong. Soon, he saw someone appear in the bar in a puff of smoke. Donning all ck and covering his face properly. He pinned some notes on the board before leaving in another puff of smoke.

    The person is definitely a shadow element user.

    The next day, Sam went on with this new routine, the field, prying information from the Bartender and returning to the bar in the afternoon and when he looked at the board this time, he was surprised, there is a note epting Agar¡¯s assignment. He couldn¡¯t help but smile.

    Sam looked forward for that night and went back to his residence before moving to the mountain area in concealed clothes to take a closer look at the situation.

    There Saber Monarch is messing with a de in hisp. There are a bunch of inscriptions on the de and it looked like something profound, but in actual fact, they are nothing but some scribbled mess of inscriptions that are made to make the Saber Monarch¡¯s life difficult. But to others, he is unlocking some great weapon that needed these many inscriptions for sealing.

    And at that midnight, the man is the ck, the same one who appeared in the bar the previous night appeared and moved towards the Saber Monarch.

    The Saber Monarch is vignt and woke up from his meditative state immediately. Before he could reactpletely, Gran disappeared from his spot and reappeared beside the saber monarch, and caught ahold of the saber with a bunch of inscriptions.

    The Saber Monarch was caught off guard, but soon he came to his senses and took out his regr saber and shed towards Gran.

    Gran managed to escape in the nick of the time and reappeared in a different spot and thus a pointless struggle continued.

    Sam particrly asked the Saber monarch to recreate his previous meeting with Gran.

    Even then, just like this, the saber monarch was caught off guard, but he didn¡¯t have any item in his hand as it is a trap and as soon as Gran came near him, he swung his saber. But Gran escaped the location after dodging a dozen swings from the saber and this time almost a simr scenario happened.

    But this time, Gran escaped with an item in his hands.

    Sam smiled at the whole fiasco because he left something on the de that would make it easy for him to track Gran. He doesn¡¯t have a face or any other clues that could help Sam find him, so he decided to create a clue himself.

    It is called Soul scent. The saber was inscribed with some special set of arrays that houses a spirit whose only job is to leave its scent on whoever touched it.

    But the scent is not physical, it ispletely rted to the soul and only soul necromancers and the specters could identify it.

    Every soul has a unique scent just like the body scent, but it is hard to detect for even the soul necromancers, but once it was attached with something like this, it would be much easier to find.

 Chapter 961: Sisters

    The next day after the sun rise Sam went to the wheat field with some anticipation. Even though, there are no clues until now that she is anyway rted to Gran, he still felt like there could be some sort of link between them and he felt like there is even a chance that she is Gran.

    But as soon as Sam arrived at the field, he couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit disappointed.

    There is no soul scent around her and she ispletely clean. But soon his disappointment was gone as both of them started working on the field.

    "Sorry, I forgot to ask before. What is your name?" Sam asked as they worked.

    "Sia."

    Sam looked at her and felt like she is a bit too excited and couldn¡¯t help but ask.

    "So, why are you so excited today? Is there a special reason for that?"

    "I am excited about the wheat field. This is getting me one step closer to my dream."

    "What is your dream?"

    "I want to be the greatest liquor maker in the world and this beer making is going to open new doors for me. It will teach me many new lessons and I would be able to make huge progress. It has been a bit stagnant for a while."

    "Of course, it would be stalled. If you hole up in a ce like this, it would be indeed difficult to progress. To be the greatest at an art, you have to explore, meet other people who are in that art, experiment at different ces, exchange points with other masters.

    In your case, you have to move a lot. Go to different realms, find new ingredients, try to make liquor in different climates, mix different ingredients, experiment, explore. If you stay in the realm, you wouldn¡¯t be able to progress at all.

    In fact, it would be no surprise if you regress."

    Sia just stayed silent for a while and asked Sam.

    "What is your dream?"

    "My dream? I just want to lead a simple life."

    "Simple life? Then that would be easy. All you have to do is go to one of the lower level realms and stay there. Some people will give you protection fees just to use your name and you will be able to live off of it. There is no need to worry at all."

    "That is not my definition of simple life."

    "Then what is your definition?"

    "My definition of a simple life is..."

    Sam was about to say something as he looked at the sun in the sky, but he stopped in the middle as he looked at Sia carefully.

    He suddenly noticed that his behavior has been weird. Generally, he wouldn¡¯t take to a stranger like this, much less a person of an opposite gender about his dream or advise them casually. This ispletely new of him.

    Maybe it is because she is dedicated to her craft and it is rare to find someone who is obssessed with an craft that has nothing to do with power,status and authority that he decided to open up an bit.

    He shook his head and said.

    "There is no use in exining my simple life. I cannot get it anyway. I need to many things before I get to that."

    With that he finished the work before the bar opening time and said.

    "We need to stop here today. The earth needs to soak the nutrients in before we start the next process. I have something else to do. So, I will see you in the bar this afternoon."

    With that Sam took off on harbinger.

    But what he didn¡¯t notice is the look that Sia has on her face as she looked at his receding back.

    There is a hint of tenderness in her eyes and Sam would have easily identified that if he saw it, but unfortunately he didn¡¯t.

    After going back to the city, Sam kept on roaming around the city to find Gran. He believed that no matter how secretive gran is, he must be living in the city. So, he decided to go about in an old fashioned time consuming way.

    By afternoon, he roamed over half of the city and looked around.

    But there are no results and by afternoon, he arrived at the bar.

    He decided to just to go in. But as soon as he stepped inside the bar, he felt the soul scent. He stopped in his tracks for a moment and looked around without any overreaction.

    He walked towards the counter and took his usual seat as he slowly concentrated on observing the scent of each and every person carefully. But all the people who are sitting at the tables are clear of any possible scent.

    Then there is only person left in the bar and his gaze turned to Sia who is standing at the far end of the counter as she arranged the wine jars carefully.

    He carefully checked for a few more times to see if he was mistaken. But after a few sniffs, he is sure that he got the right person.

    "Hahahahaha...."

    Sam startedughing out loud and Sia walked towards him confusion.

    "What happened? Why are you so happy?"

    "Nothing. Just give me this cocktail."

    Sia nodded and went to work on the cocktail and Sam spoke.

    "I have an offer to make. Tell me if you are interested."

    "Offer? I thought we already made a deal. Are you selling another recipe?"

    "Not really. I have a job offer for you."

    "Job offer?"

    "Let me reintroduce myself. I am Sam and I run an organization called the Dusk Organization. My business Spans across many realms. I want to officially recruit you into my organization. Think over it. We will talk about it tomorrow."

    With that Sam finished his cocktail and went back to his residence.

    "Stop all our ns. I found Gran." Sam gave instructions as soon as he returned.

    "You found him? Who is he?"

    "You will know for yourself soon enough."

    With that Sam waited for the next day in anticipation.

    The next morning, Sam went to the wheat field on harbinger and met with Sia.

    She didn¡¯t talk about the harbinger and just worked casually with some small talk. But Sam asked with a smile.

    "So, what do you think about my Job offer?"

    "Offer? Sam, I am working on the Wheat field. Why would I work on this if I have any intention to leave?"

    "Maybe, you don¡¯t. But what about your sister?"

    Sia halted in her tracks and she shivered for a second before she covered the anxious expression with a smile.

    "Wha...t are you talking about? I don¡¯t have a sister."

    "If you reacted fast enough it would have been convincing. But you gave it away.

    As I said this morning, I am Sam and I own an organization. I am currently on a journey to recruit some special candidates for a quest of my own. And Gran¡¯s name came up on the list. I came here to recruit gran.

    It was really hard to find out. I am here to extend an invitation to both of you. You can both join my organization as you are both highly skilled."

    Sia turned silent for a second and replied in a low voice.

    "What if I am just some normal bartender? What if I am just Sia and have nothing to do with the master thief, what if my sister is the Gran and I am just a normal bartender."

    "Well, if you it is indeed the case, I would still offer job for both of you. Your sister for her skills as a master thief and assassin, you for being a wine maker and a bartender. But your sister might have to stay with me in the journey, while you can work with the liquor department of my business.

    But my guess is that both of you are Sia the skilled liquor maker and Bartender and both of you are Gran, the skilled master thief and assassin.

    Since we have this healthy coincidence, I would be a fool to pass up on this.

    You can think about the offer, but do consider it properly. I am giving you and your sister an opportunity to enter the major league of the crafts you are in. You would enter a whole new world with a whole lot of skilled opponents and obstacles with a lot more possibilities and opportunities for progress.

    And it might not even be impossible for you to be the greatest liquor maker in the world.

    So, both of you take a seat, have a proper discussion before you decide."

    With that, Sam left the area on the harbinger without turning back. He is really excited to see what decision Sia would make.

    In actual fact, he really liked her and already wanted to offer her a job even if Gran didn¡¯te into the picture. But now this happy coincidence made things easier.

 Chapter 962: Test

    After Sam left, Sia just stood there with a lot of thoughts going on in her head. She doesn¡¯t know how to react to this situation or how to proceed. The rational thought would be to kill Sam and be done with it.

    Their secret would be safe and they can proceed with their lives as they are now. But the thought killing Sam didn¡¯t feel right in her head. She felt extremely ufortable. She looked at the wheat field they are working on and moved towards the hill nearby which had a creek that led to an underground room.

    Within the secret room, Gran is looking through some letters.

    Twin sisters. The resemnce is uncanny not just physically but also in terms of their temperment. They are extremely simr. At this moment the only difference is that Sia is in a gloomy mood.

    "What happened Sia? Why are you unhappy? Did Sam do anything?" Gran asked with concern.

    "He knows."

    "What?"

    "He knows about us.

    When she heard this, the first reaction of Gran is that Sia must have told him and wanted to get angry but when she saw her sister¡¯s mood, she knew that there is more to it.

    "How did he know?"

    "I don¡¯t know how. But he knows and he came here to talk to me about it. He gave us a job offer."

    With that, Sia went on to exin what Sam said.

    "So, what do you want to do?"

    "I don¡¯t know, Gran. You tell me. What should we do?"

    "Do you really want this?" Gran asked as she looked Sia in her eyes. But Sia averted eye contact.

    "You really fell for him didn¡¯t you?"

    Gran said with a helpess sigh. After some thought, she spoke.

    "Let us consider this. Think this through and tell me what you really want to do. If you really want to pursue this, I will support you wholeheartedly. In fact, I really think you should take it upon this offer. What he said is right. You cannot be the greatest bartender and wine maker when you hole up in a with no actual residents or resources to speak of.

    You need to explore more and see new ces."

    "What about your.." Sia wanted to say something, but Gran immediately cut her off and said.

    "Don¡¯t worry. All these years, you gave up your dream to realize man. Maybe it is about time I do the same for you. Anyway, this will also help my dream. I will be the master thief that is known across the realms and you will be known as the best wine maker of all realms.

    But only few shall now that we are sisters until the day we die.

    So, if you really want to pursue this offer, you can speak your mind."

    Sia nodded and both of them sat there as they talked for a while and finally Sia gave her opinion.

    "I would really like to take this offer. That is only if you are okay with it. If you have any form reluctance please reject it."

    "Well, my only reluctance is due to the fact that you want to pursue more than just a job after and explore more than just ingredients for liquor."

    Sia didn¡¯t know what to say and pretended like she didn¡¯t hear anything. But Gran continued.

    "We will decide on what to do with that offer. But before that, let me test him once."

    "Test?"

    "In a few days, our annual sister bonding day ising. I will use that to test him."

    "But Gran.."

    "Don¡¯t whine. I will be fair to him. Don¡¯t think I am some kind of devil."

    Sam is roaming around the city and went back to his residence at night and he was about to take a shower, but he halted in his tracks and said.

    "You know you could use the front door and visit properly. You don¡¯t have to sneak in."

    He turned around with a smile after he spoke. Gran is standing beside the windowpletely cloaked.

    "Why did you offer that job?"

    "I think I was pretty clear with your sister."

    "How did you find out?"

    "That is a secret. You wouldn¡¯t tell me your trade secrets would you?"

    Gran didn¡¯t reply but Sam continued.

    "If you are here just worried about how I found out your secret and whether if it will affect your hiding efficiency of your identity, you don¡¯t have to worry. My secret and your secret is safe with me.

    In fact, no matter what your answer is, I will be leaving this after I receive. I don¡¯t have time to horse around here too much and I certainly don¡¯t have time to mess with your life or secrets. So, Don¡¯t worry ande back when you have an answer."

    "My sister, really likes your offer." Gran replied calmly.

    "Oh? What about you?"

    "It is not bad. It is the most straightforward offer I got. But before I make a decision, I want to test you."

    "What kind of test?"

    "A race."

    "Race?"

    "There is a mountain to the north of the city. It will take around four to five hours for me to travel at full speed. Many people know about it. But what many people don¡¯t know is that it is also a safezone like this city. But the mountain is so steep that no one bothered to upy it.

    Two days from now. We are going to race there?"

    "That is it?"

    "No that is not it. Herees the main part. Two days from now, an event will happen on this. All the nine moons wille close to each other and closer to the and their gravity fields will cause meteor showers to happen. You can see all the moons in the morning and the meteors will strike every ce except the safezones.

    We are going to race in that situation.

    I will suppress my cultivation level to yours, so don¡¯t think too much about it being unfair. I will make my decision after the race is over and my decision is final."

    "Okay then."

    Sam agreed and she left as swiftly and as sneakily as she came. If not for Sam¡¯s presence, nobody would have ever thought that she was there.

    The next day, Sam started his inquiry about this special natural event and he got some details.

    This event is not just simple as a meteor shower and natural disaster. There is a lot more going on with this and what follows this event is also one of the most dangerous times to spend on this.

    The meteors that bring destruction on to the also bring a bunch of resources from the moons to this.

    And once the shower is over on that day, the whole unsafe zones are scavenger zones for all the people and they search for these resources.

    People kill each other for all the materials, spiritual energy resources that this brings and this week is also the busiest time for Gran.

    All kinds of assignments would be given to her by these people. They don¡¯t care whether she would take it or not, but everyone would give assignments. Someone even gives assignments which are asking for her to not to take any assignments against them.

    In fact, this week alone would bring a few months¡¯ worth of ie for her.

    In the next two days, Sam carefully prepared mentally for what is toe.

    He decided to not use the dimensional drifters, transference scrolls or even harbinger since the other party is kind enough to suppress her cultivation. Any of these three things areplete cheats and there would be no point in thispetition at all.

    On the third day, Sam moved out of the residence and went to the North gate of the city before dawn.

    There Sia and Gran are waiting. Gran still wore that cloaked attire.

    Sia had that usual tender smile and Gran is looking at him coldly.

    "We will start here and the first person to reach the top of the mountain wins." Gran said as soon as she opened her mouth. He just smiled at her and turned to Sia.

    "I heard you liked the offer. Thanks for considering it."

    She didn¡¯t reply and just smiled shyly.

    "Anyway, I heard a big deal about this natural event. I am kind of looking forward to it."

    "Don¡¯t say it until you see it." Gran said as she looked at the sky. Sam also looked upwards all the moons are getting closer and they became visible. The sky is looking beautiful and soon he started seeing some bright dots falling towards the earth and the whole earth quaking slightly.

    He turned around to take a look at the city which is currently deste. Everyone is holing up inside and from what he heard, even the tables at the inns are for rental today.

    He is nervous and excited at the same time.

    "Let¡¯s do this." He spoke and Gran and Sam started running towards North.

 Chapter 963: Different Meteors

    Sam and Gran started running with their normal forms. Just like a normal runners using physical runners and after they warmed up a bit, Gran activated her partial shadow elemental fusion for which Sam did the same.

    Gran was a surprised a bit. She knew little about Sam. Other than the fact that he is good at formations and good at liquor and wine with some extra high intelligent beasts that could do all kinds of work for him, she doesn¡¯t know much about him.

    Now seeing shadow element, she was even more surprised.

    Both of them started using shadow element and moved like two ck snakes in the ground jumping from one ce to another with a rtive ease.

    Sia looked at both of their receding backs and wished that they both would be safe.

    Soon as both racers ran for a few hundred meters the meteors started striking. They boulders are almost falling down like raining water.

    Gran who seemed to be experienced in this started dodging them easily, she is using the shadow of the meteors that are about to strike to move from one spot to another and swiftly moved forward creating a lead.

    Sam wanted to ovee that lead, but he is not as swift as Gran at the start, but soon he managed to catch up a bit.

    But as soon as he neared Gran, she made a somersault in the air and kicked two small meteors that areing down towards him.

    Sam dodged one that is sure to hit him and ignored the other that was a bit off trajectory, but the next second he dodged the first one, he understood the second one didn¡¯t miss. Because it was not aimed at him in the first ce.

    Its target is anotherrge meteor to begin with. This boulder crashed into arger one that is near Sam and the debris started falling off on him.

    Sam shifted to earth elemental fusion and defended against the debris, before chaging the fusion back to normal and moving forward.

    This time, he didn¡¯t try to catch up or overtake immediately. Instead he maintained a steady distance as he observed the meteors that are crashing down with energy vision. The main disadvantage of Sam over Gran is that she knew about this and familiar with this scenario.

    He has to make himself familiar and knowledgeable if he has any chance of beating her and soon he drew up some observations.

    First one is that the nine moons which have different elemental properties and presences are throwing out different elemental meteors. Even the rock that crashed into him burning with fire elemental one.

    Even the gravity and the extreme force these meteors are hitting the earth is not changing these elemental properties and second is that the meteors are of different sizes.

    There are small baseball sized torge mammoth sized. But they are not gigantic. If they are that big, then the might not even be able to survive. Sam doesn¡¯t know how the gravity of this holding itself against nine moons, but that is not his problem so he shook those thoughts away and started thinking of ways to help himself out of the situation.

    He came up with a small n to pick up the lead. He shifted his elemental fusion to earth elemental one and caught hold of a meteor without destroying it. It is a good ser ball sized and he used gravitational manipton to catch a hold of it.

    Then he shifted to fire elemental fusion and started creating a rockva egg. After that he turned back to the shadow elemental fusion and started picking up the speed again.

    Gran noticed that the distance between them is decreasing once again and started kicking the boulders. This time Sam is careful and he used this exact moment to throw the Rock-Lava Egg at Gran. She dodged it to the side.

    But the egg crashed into a nearestrge rock and theva sshed all over Gran. Even though it is not exactly damaging and all it could cause might not even be considered pain, the first instinct of the body when an unknown hot liquid suddenly sshed on them, particrly when they are not expecting it is to flinch and cover.

    Sam used this swift second to jump and kick arge ice elemental boulder that was about to fall towards it and it crashed right into Gran which made her stop for a second and Sam took this chance to not only eliminate the distance between them and picked up the lead.

    But instead of leaving arge gap between themselves, he maintained a steady distance so that he could be aware of her tricks.

    For some time, he managed to dodge or evenpletely avoid her attacks from the rear because of this constant awareness, but he also managed to maintain the lead perfectly while throwing a few of his own attacks.

    But after a while Gran stopped attacking him and let him move forward and then only he realized that something changed. Until now when a meteor crashes, all he had to do is dodge from the impact and debris and he did the same with this one.

    But instead of the stray and harmless debris that usually hit him, he was hit by arge wave of fire elemental spiritual energy that caused to feel a minor fire elemental energy forcefully entering into his body.

    He almost felt suffocated because of that and his body also started hurting severely.

    He immediately changed his shadow elemental fusion to fire elemental fusion and absorbed the stray fire elemental energy and stayed in ce feeling shocked.

    By now, Gran already caught up and just overtook him and by now, she is already using full shadow elemental fusion as she moved like a shadow snake and avoid every crash by almost a four meters.

    Sam looked at the surroundings for a few seconds. The meteors changed. There are normal boulders charged with elemental energies but now in addition to that, there is a new kind.

    Sam dodged a strike and moved forward slowly as he used earth elemental fusion and caught ahold of this new boulder. It looked like a ss crystal filled with some kind of colored smoke. He looked around to notice the effects of this crash and was stunned to see that such a thing even exists.

    This is just a giant mass of active elemental energy. It is stable enough to stay in shape and not create an elemental energy explosion, but also unstable enough to create an elemental energy wave that would could corrode the surroundings up on impact.

    These ss boulders are also of all elemental energies.

    Fire, water, ice, lightning, darkness, wood and many more. At one spot a fire elemental ss boulder created a small scale magma pond and a few meters away the ice elemental one created a miniature tundra.

    Now he understood why Gran didn¡¯t bother fight for the lead a while ago. She knew that something like this would happen.

    He also activated full shadow elemental fusion and started moving forward. He was sure that he could catch up with Gran, but soon he realized that he had overestimated himself. He cannot possibly catch up with her as the ss boulders are raining more densely and Gran is still managing to dodge them.

    This is the result of experience.

    He really wished he prepared well enough for this.

    As he was busy dodging and thinking of other ways, Gran turned around and gave him a smile before throwing two knives towards him. He dodged them, but they hit two ss boulders behind which caused him to take the blunt of the attack.

    Luckily one of them is a wind elemental one which blew him a few meters away and made it easier for him to recover.

    Sam pursed his lips and used started moving forward, but as Gran was about to take a few more throwing knives, he took out his two hand guns and aimed forward.

    He shot energy cell bullets at the ss boulders around Gran.

    He is faster than her throwing knives and when she threw those knives, he even shot them mid-air like they are easy targets.

    As the constant barrage of bullets hit the ss boulders that she almost dodged, Gran had to slow down and halt for a few seconds and Sam used this chance to catch up.

    As he crossed her, he had a sudden idea and changed his elemental fusion back to earth one to catch a boulder and used repel style to kick it towards Gran.

    Gran who barely recovered from the shock of this bunch didn¡¯t expect this kind of attack. After all, the ss boulders should be exploding up on hitting them.

    But to both of their shock, the repel style worked and he managed to kick the boulder properly. He caught a few more boulders and stored them in the divine dimension for research before changing back to shadow elemental fusion and taking the lead.

    Now not only Gran has to look out for meteors, he also has to look out for these weird and impossible attacks from Sam.

 Chapter 964: Golems

    For the next few hours, Sam maintained the same lead as he created after realizing the use of ss boulders.

    He kicked the boulders at Gran whenever she tried to throw the knives at him or whenever she tried to reduce the distance. He managed to keep that steady distance without any changes. But he knew that he couldn¡¯t go on like this. Because the ss boulders reduced in numbers and the rocky boulders took their original dominating spot and even they are not as dense as before.

    On this way, Sam noticed the effects of this meteor shower on thend and the environment. He noticed that there is even an undead ss boulder that turned some beasts into undead and in fact it is so potent that it managed to create some undead trees which are extremely rare.

    So rare that even in the realm of undead he only managed to see a few.

    All this while they ran through a partial forest route and partial open route, but Sam could see an open in in horizon. A few hundred meters away.

    He ran towards the in without a stop and he even didn¡¯t care about kicking the ss boulders at Gran.

    Gran who is following him closely made a flip and kicked a basket ball sized boulder towards him. But Sam already saw it and easily dodged. But the attack from Gran continued, but Sam didn¡¯t have any ss boulder left. So, he also decided to reply in kind.

    As soon as he stepped foot on the in field, he made a flip in the air and kicked on a rock. But instead the rock flying over like a ball, his leg got stuck in it.

    Sam couldn¡¯t see what help on to him, but it almost felt like something bit on his leg tightly.

    He started dropping down along with the rocky boulder.

    Sam became a bit vignt and tried to pull his leg, but it didn¡¯te out. He used the second leg and the void style to kick on the rock continously, and right before he crashed into the ground, he managed to get rid of that biting grip.

    When the dust settled, what he saw in front of him shocked him. He turned around and looked. From a bunch of boulders, rock golems are emerging with different elemental energies surrounding it.

    The one in front of Sam has lightning elemental energy inside it and when it punched Sam, he could feel the lightning striking him as he blocked.

    His whole arm felt numb.

    And the rest of the golems within the range also starteding towards Sam as they attacked.

    Sam felt a bit frustrated. He fell into her trap once again. She timed it perfectly.

    And the worst part is, when he saw Gran, she just smoothly crossed over and left. The golems didn¡¯t even bother with her as she dodged them perfectly.

    Sam realized how stupid he has been. If he was a bitter or even a bit calmer and didn¡¯t kick the boulder, there is a great chance that the golems wouldn¡¯t bother about him too and this belief only reinforced when the golems far away from started fighting each other when there is no other living thing within a certain range.

    They don¡¯t have any intelligence and they barely had any sentience. They have only desire to fight and when a crearture or moving objectes within a certain range of their senses, they fight. And once they are engaged if a second objectes, they ignore.

    If no objectes at all, they just roam aimlessly.

    This caused Sam to curse under his own breath and since all the golems already surrounded him, he saw no other way.

    He took out his staff and used abination of ripple style and Void style. This is something he came up with when he was reseaching the metal poles that uses three styles and crush the structures.

    In thisbined style of ripple style and void style, the spiritual energy will travel in ripples across the object he hit and when the ripples reached their maximum range, they are explode ording to void style.

    Sam smashed the staff on the leg of the goleming towards him and the energy worked ording to thebination which crumbled the whole limb joint.

    The golem crashed to the ground and Sam smashed another hand making it impossible to get up. He doesn¡¯t need topletely destroy them as long as they don¡¯te to fight him.

    He moved fast and swift as he hit each golem, but he realized that there is no end to this as many golems kept on surrounding him.

    He used a full strength and spun the staff tond as many hits as he can and finished a bunch of golems in a single strike before gather time for a breath. He looked at Gran who is moving forward and the lead is increasing. He couldn¡¯t bear it anymore and put the energy conservation at side before deciding to cross the field first.

    His body changed from shadow elemental fusion to the light elemental fusion. His whole body turned into a golden mass light and soon it turned into a green mass of light.

    He decided to use theser fusion which he didn¡¯t use for a while.

    His whole body turned into aser beam as he kicked the ground and shot forward.

    Theser beam made some holes in the bodies of golems and then swiftly passed through half the field in the blink of an eye. Samnded on the ground and rolled over as he panted before turned to shadow elemental fusion and dodging the uing golems.

    He is only a few dozen meters away from Gran and when she saw his feat, she almost tripped and fell.

    But that is not the end of it, they are still within the in field and there are no surroundings that could help them dodge that effectively, even Gran is struggling a bit. Of course not as much as Sam.

    So, Sam decided to even the field a little and a shadow soldier suddenly appeared under Gran and caught a hold of her foot which made her trip and fall literally.

    Sam took this advantage and changed to earth elemental fusion and when he was about to pass her, he used an earth elemental technique that made the ground move and trap her inside without almost half of her body stuck underground.

    Then he turned back to shadow elemental fusion and moved forward.

    Gran who was stuck was also detected by the golems nearby. She broke apart from the binding and tried her best to dodge the golems and escape. Luckily she was not surrounded by Sam otherwise, she would be having even more trouble.

    As Sam increased the lead between then, he saw a forest a few hundred meters away and when he saw Gran following him, he doesn¡¯t know if it is another trap or if it is okay for him to go inside.

    He halted for a sed and looked around in the sky to see if there are any new bouldersing down.

    When he noticed that there is no sight of new boulders, he took a deep breath and went inside the forest.

    What he didn¡¯t notice is the smile on Gran¡¯s face and if he saw he would have understood what it was as soon as he entered the forest.

    With all the meteor strikes and other things, Sam forgot factor something else inside the forest. The beasts.

    And even the normal beasts are not the main problem and in normal times it wouldn¡¯t even be an issue. But currently due to the meteor situation, the beasts seemed to have gathered together and formed a group to save themselves and they are currently fighting the golems.

    But before golems, the wave of ss boulders seemed to have did its job perfectly and it resulted in some of the undead beasts.

    While the beasts are fighting with most of the undead beasts and golems new beast dead bodies are being formed as they fell within the undead zones created by undead ss boulders.

    And these are the real problem. As soon as Sam entered the forest, they sensed his presence and undead are running towards him. If it is normal time, he wouldn¡¯t care and would have taken a detour or just dodged and left. But the whole forest is full of golems and beasts, if he caught their attention, he would be in trouble.

    The undead beasts like living creatures and some undead creatures that are figthing only the golems, turned their attention to him and are charging. He didn¡¯t expect their senses to be this strong and noticed that these undead are somehow strage.

    But he didn¡¯t dwell on it and thought of a n to escape.

    If he took a detour, Gran might cross him away.

    So, he did something else. He activated his vampire bloodline. Since it ispatible with dark elemental energy, it went along with the shadow fusion and all of a sudden the undead creatures that are charging towards him suddenly grew confused.

    The undead creatures don¡¯t have any feelings and thoughts, they live on instincts and these instincts strictly prohibit them from attacking one of their own and particrly an undead of superior nature like a vampire wouldn¡¯t even be touched.

    So, Sam got a free pass away from the undead creatures and even used them to escape easily.

    On his way out of the forest, he created undead creatures out of the deadbodies of the beasts and left them there for Gran as a gift.

 Chapter 965: Creatures

    Sam stayed over four hours inside the forest. It is such arge patch and when he made it out, it is already deep into the afternoon. In a few hours the sun would set and he can looked at the mountain directly from this point.

    He kept track of Gran who is actually quite skilled in sneaking around the forest. Even though, Sam left all these extra undead creatures, he was unable to feel that he is going to win. It is as if he was given the lead intentionally and he couldn¡¯t shake that feeling off at all.

    After a few dozen meters of the forest, Sam saw the next obstacle. It is arge valley. It is so wide and deep that he is sure that he wouldn¡¯t be able to leap to the other side in a single jump and even his tricks might not be able to cross it.

    In fact, even the spatial blink wouldn¡¯t be possible. It is almost two to three hundred meters wide. It is as if was seperated into two.

    As for diving into the valley and crossing it before climbing from otherside. Sam is even more reluctant as the valley is too deep that he couldn¡¯t see any trace of the end.

    And he could hear the loud roars of the beasts.

    But when he turned around, he could see Gran nearing him.

    After some thought, he took a deep breath and jumped into the valley.

    After a few seconds of Sam dropping down, Gran arrived and she had a smirk on her face.

    She stood at the edge of the valley and started swallowing various pills that are mostly used for energy recovery. But instead of recovering her energy, he is channeling all the energy that came out of the pill andpressed it.

    Her n is to use all this excess energy and use a spatial blink to cross the valley in a single step.

    There is a reason why Sam jumped into the valley. Even if he can use the spatial blink by borrowing extra energy, his body wouldn¡¯t be able to sustain it. But she doesn¡¯t have any problem with that. Because even though she suppressed her cultivation, her body has already experienced changed and evolved ording to her original cultivation level.

    She could easily bear all the energy.

    There is no true fairness after all. As she channeled the energy and took more and more pills, suddenly she sensed something from the valley.

    She looked down and noticed arge tree branch extending to the other side of the valley. The tree branch is so wide andrge that it is extending for three hundred meters directly. This is something unbelievable for Gran.

    The more shocking thing is Sam sitting on the branch.

    When Sam leapt into the valley, he came across thisrge branch that is growing on the side of the cliff. He caught a hold of it and tested it for its strength for a few minutes and decided to take his approach. He is also taking a lot of potions and pills, but instead ofpressing it, he directly channeled the energy to the tree branch and let it grow wildly.

    Gran really wanted to punch Sam in the face. This is already god knows what element he showed to her this day.

    She thought she was being unfair to him with this spatial blink technique. But she didn¡¯t feel like that anymore.

    She stopped channeling the energy and used the spatial blink andnded on middle of thatrge branch as she ran on it following Sam.

    Sam tried to create some obstacles to her on the branch, but she dodged them easily.

    After some time he gave up and focused on leaving the ce.

    And he did exactly that. He managed to cross the valley and he threw arge container of bio fuel and set the tree branch on fire as he ran away swiftly.

    This tree branch trick gave him time to recover his energy and heal some wounds and he managed to run with a new found vigor.

    Gran who is now running on a burning branch tried to cross it and when she noticed that it is burning too vigorously, she couldn¡¯t help but put her own energy conservation aside and use blink once again as she crossed the valley.

    As she followed Sam, he shifted from shadow elemental fusion to water elemental fusion as he jumped into a calm stream and swiftly appeard on the otherside.

    For some reason, there are no golems or meteor strikes in the area and there is a in field that is leading directly to the foot of the mountain.

    Sam turned around to look for Gran who is catching upto him swiftly.

    But as he moved forward, he saw that there are some new meteors that are falling down. These didn¡¯t look that different from the normal meteors. Rather they are quite simr to golems and others. But the only difference is that they are extremely orderly.

    All this while, when the meteors are crashing down, they also crashed each other because of the trajectories. But the current meteors arepletely orderly as if they already have a flight path designed.

    Sam halted in his tracks and looked at the meteors that fell on the open in field. He was surprised by what he saw next. Some weird creatures started popping up from within the meteor strikes.

    They looked like humanoid creatures with the skull that shaped like a giant praying mantis.

    They have pale skin with different hues.

    They have no lips and only circr holes for mouths and arge white tongue came out of it and shot itself into the ground as they sucked energy out of it and an energy barrier is being formed around them.

    When Sam looked at them, he felt the same vibe as he did when he faced the sea folks. But these creatures lookedpletely different.

    He trusted his instinct and took out the executioner sword as he moved forward. From his energy vision he could sense that they are not exactly strong. They are barely in intial stage of Initiation of Astral ne.

    He could take all of them on.

    As he moved forward, the nearest creature stopped its actions and ran towards Sam while screaming in anger.

    Sam dodged its attack and shed his sword at it. The sword barely left a sh on the side of its abdomen, but the poisonous corrosion immediately started spreading all over it.

    This is clearly something simr to seafolk.

    Samnded another sh and moved forward. These creatures upied the whole field and there is no other way. At least, they are weak and there are no meteor strikes that he has to worry about. So, he shed his way through the crowd.

    By now, Gran already caught up and started attacking these creatures, she seemed to be extremely familiar with this as she used throwing knives to deal with each of these things instantly.

    Both of them are almost back on an even ying field with Sam only having a lead of few dozen meters.

    The battle went on and on and these creatures kept oning forward.

    After two hours, both of them finally managed to move to the other side after killing all the creatures and by now both of them are back tos square one with no lead whatsoever as they panted and moved towards the foot of the mountain.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit disappointed. As Gran is familiar with these creatures, she managed to kill them in one shot without any waste of time, but he needed some time to get used to it and he was unable to keep the lead he created with so much struggle.

    Currently, they are standing at the foot of the mountain as the sun slowly began to set while they took medicines to recover their energies.

    It is almost as if they are starting a different race altogether.

    After a few minutes of recovery, Gran started channeling her energy. Sam sensed the energy and felt extremely familiar with it.

    He couldn¡¯t help but smile.

    Because, she is using a merge of spatial energy and shadow energy. But the feeling he is getting from it is a bit different.

    He couldn¡¯t put a finger on where. So, he used energy vision to take a look as she channeled her energy and prepared to move.

    After looking at her closely, he finally found a bit of difference.

    It is the method they tried to merge their energies.

    Sam channeled both elemental energies together to merge and create fusion. To be precise he is using two partial fusions at the same time at a perfect bnce and ration.

    But Gran took apletely different approach. When he saw this, he felt like he was an idiot to not to have tried that method before as it is more straightforward.

 Chapter 966: Finishing

    Gran is using a extremely straightforward method to merge two elements. And all that needs is an extreme control of energy. When Sam saw this, he felt like his level of control might even be less than her own.

    It is that critical and delicate.

    But it is simple to exin. Unlike Sam who channels both energies at the same time by taking advantage of his beast like meridians, Gran channels one energy after another. She channels, shadow energy and space energy one after another in extreme speeds that there would be an ovep between both energies which gave her the opening to use both energiesbined.

    If one has a greatmand and control over their own energy with a perfect timing, they can merge any two energies.

    Gran smiled at Sam as she reached a proper state to move, but just as she was about to make that move, Sam also returned her smile and used his own version of shadow and space elemental merge.

    The shock of Gran is more than what Sam felt when he saw her use that.

    Most of his surprise is due to the fact that he forgot that she has spatial element as she mostly used shadow element throughout the race. But her shock is due to the fact that she felt it is extremely unfair for Sam to possess spatial element too which she thought as an edge over him.

    This made her more determined to win this race and she blinked and disappeared into the nearest shadow and in the next moment, she remerged on another shadow on the surface of the mountain.

    Sam looked at hering through that shadow and felt surprised once again and he looked at the setting sun on the side.

    She is using the sun set to her advantage as it caused the rocky protrusions on the surface of the mountain, even the small protrusions to castrge shadows and she is using those shadows to her own advantage and created a technique simr to shadow transverse.

    Generally, spatial blink takes a lot of energy, because the spatial enery used for transporting a person or an object is a lot and in addition to locating the next point the person wants to move to is also an extra energy expense.

    Now she is eliminating all of this, she is reducing her body mass by directly entering the shadow nearby merging into it and then using the shadow energy to locate the shadows nearby and pinpointed the farthest shadow she could get ess to and then using the spatial energy to blink her low mass body to that point.

    That makes it easier for her move and use blink more often. Almost like a normal move.

    Sam never felt this stupid in his life.

    As he looked at her way of moving and felt like an idiot thinking on how he missed this kind of technique which uses the most basic principles of the respective energy usage.

    Sometimes, it is really hard to notice the simplest of the things.

    Sam decided to use the same technique and merged in the nearest shadow and reappeared in the farthest shadow he could ess to.

    When he did it for the first time, he is not as fast as Gran is nor did he cross the same distance as she did. But he didn¡¯t feel disappointed. Once he understood the principle it is only a matter of number of trails and he would be proficient in any thing. He is proud of his learning ability and there is not much to learn in this thing.

    So, he started moving forward without much hesitation.

    Gran, who is also moving upwards halted in her tracks as she hung with the support of a protrusion and looked at Sam who is using the same technique as her.

    It didn¡¯t take long for her to figure it out that he is using her own technique in a race against her. She really wanted to curse Sam and his eighteen generations of ancestors out loud in the open.

    But she controlled the urge and threw a knife downwards after observing a few moves of Sam.

    Her knife hit a protrusion as soon as Sam disappeared into a shadow.

    Sam who is in the middle of the motion, felt suffocated and stuck. He felt like he was being crushed by apact space and he channeled his energy rapidly which made him reappear in the middle of the path.

    As he was about to fall down, he mmed his palm into the mountain surface and held onto the small groove he made tightly.

    He looked around to notice that the shadow he marked to transfer to was gone and that is reason why he was stopped midway. If not for his control, he would have suffered some severe bacsh.

    He is sweating profusely while panting heavily as he looked at Gran who looked at him with a cold victorious smile.

    By now the cloak covering her face is long gone.

    She got hit so many times because of Sam that it was destroyed and Sam finally saw the clear difference between Sia and Gran. The natural instinct and nature of an apex predator. Gran is a hunter and predator through and through.

    She has the cunningness, patience and strength all that needed for that and she has that coldheartedness in face ofpetition and enmity. He never saw these qualities in Sia, but he is willing to bet that she doesn¡¯t have them. Even if she did, she is inferior to Gran in those qualities.

    Sam gritted his teeth and moved forward. He is not skilled enough to attack her from the below while using this technique, so he could only think of ways to dodge and not slow himself down even more.

    So, he stopped picking the farthest shadow he could ess and picked at random and soon he realized that he has an advantage over Gran even in this new technique and that is because of the bloodlines he has.

    Since his affinity with elements is high because of the beast bloodlines, he can use the technique faster and his energy consumption is lower than hers.

    Particrly, with the simrities between this technique and the shadow mouse¡¯s bloodline technique, it was even easier. So, except for theck of experience in using this technique, there is no disadvantage.

    But that was enough for Gran to take perfect advantage of and maintain that lead. The attacks became more and more precise as he tried all kinds of random things.

    Soon, he couldn¡¯t keep up the pace as he is feeling suffocated with the constant stuck feeling he is getting because of the interruptions from Gran in his motion.

    Because of this, Gran soon got a lead that couldn¡¯t be covered with this technique no matter how hard Sam tried.

    The chances of him winning are reducing every second.

    As he thought of the situation, he couldn¡¯t think of what would happen if he lost. Would he be able to recruit the sisters? That question didn¡¯t even pop up in his mind. The only thing is that his mind kept on repeating is that he doesn¡¯t like to lose.

    He thought of all the ways to reach the top in the fastest way possible. There are at least a few hundred meters to reach the peak and he has to cross them as fast as he can.

    He went through all the elemental energies that he could use and thoughts of ways to use them to get to the peak. But no scenario worked out in his mind and then he thought of any new ideas that he could use any new thing that he learned recently even in this very journey and by the time hee to this thought, his mind ran at a new speed.

    He immediately closed his eyes while handing on the mountain side and channeled different energies in his body.

    He removed the shadow enery and started channeling the light elemental energy in ce of it.

    He never really focused on merging different energies to create newbinations, the reason hebined the spatial energy and the shadow energy is because of the usage of the shadow sword and the attacking power of a spatial tear to the shadow realm.

    And there are a million other things for him to think about and he was never really on the weaker side of the battle among their peers. He even had too many tricks in his arsenal that he couldn¡¯t use them all in a normal battle.

    But now it seems like it is about time he explored something new.

    As he tried to merge the light and spatial energy, he felt a bit of resistance. This would be gone if he practiced it a bit, but he has no time to practice.

    He channeled the energy rapidly and directly used the technique.

    Gran who is almost at the peak with just a few meter away looked down at Sam and frowned. She immediately removed her shadow fusion and only used the full spatial fusion to blink directly with all her remaining energy.

    At this exact moment, Sam turned into a beam of light and moved upwards. As light was shot upwards, it disappeared in the middle and the beam reappeared as it cross the peak of the mountain.

    Just before Samnded, though the fusion ended and he felt the full bacsh of the energy and started coughing blood which made him lose his footing and fall backwards.

    Just before he felt like he would be tumbling down the peak, he felt someone grabbing him by his coat and when he looked up, he saw Gran who already reached the peak.

 Chapter 967: New Additions

    Sam and Gran are sitting on top of the mountain as they looked at the horizon. The top of the mountain is free of any meteor strikes for some reason, but the view from up there is great.

    The meteors that are striking the ground with different elemental energies created different colors with the dark sky in the background, which made it seem like a painting on a canvas, but the painting itself is constantly changing but every change is beautiful.

    Both of them are currently recovering and they didn¡¯t speak since the race was finished an hour ago.

    "I lost." Sam admitted and took out some wine as he offered her some.

    "You don¡¯t have to tell me that. I know it." She remarked while taking the wine jar.

    "You seemed to quite familiar with the route."

    "Yes, this is the annual racing route for Sia and me. This is the only day, both of us don¡¯t have to wear masks and we race to this mountain top from the city. And we will watch that beautiful scene together."

    "Not bad. It might not be my kind of fun. But it is still good."

    Gran was silent for a minute and said.

    "What kind of journey are you going on?"

    "It is a bitplicated. But simply put, it is a journey to spread my name in different realms and make enemies all over. I would be trying to take the heirlooms of organizations and the families that are spread across the realms and serve different gods."

    "What do you have against the people who serve gods?"

    "No, I don¡¯t have anything against them. But I do have something against the gods themselves and in fact they are the ones making me do this."

    "Yeah, like gods woulde to you and request you to destroy their devotees¡¯ ces."

    Even though she said sarcastically, she is actually pretty spot on.

    "Believe me or not, that is the truth. I am going to be stronger and climb the realms. I am sure that I would be quite famous in a few years that even if you stay in this corner, you would still be able to listen stories about my exploits."

    "I thought your goal was a simple life."

    "And everything I do is to attain that simple life."

    "It doesn¡¯t look like that."

    "Why are you asking me all of this?"

    "I need to know a few things about where me and my sister are going to work in the future."

    Sam was surprised for a second. But Gran continued without minding.

    "The race was a test, winning doesn¡¯t mean you passed or losing doesn¡¯t mean you failed. I am the judge anyway.

    But we need some time. There are some goodbyes we need to tell and somethings we need to do. Particrly, the next week. There is no way I am leaving that haul."

    "Sure. No problem. I can wait for a week."

    "By the way, take care of yourself. There are eight assignments on your head. To steal your weird flying metal board."

    Sam raised an eyebrow in amusement.

    "That is actually a bit expected."

    "And, there is one more thing I need to tell you. My sister wouldn¡¯t go to your organization and work there. She would be moving around with me. She would be travelling around with both of us.

    You don¡¯t have to worry about her safety. She is as capable as me in theft and murder, it is just that she doesn¡¯t enjoy the conquest of it as much as I do."

    With that both of them waited for the meteor shower to be over and got ready to return to the city.

    But as Gran got ready to move the same way she came here, Sam stopped her and took out his dimensional drifter.

    "I know a shortcut." He smiled and both of them disappeared from the spot before they reappeared at the city gate.

    When they arrived at the city, Sam was surprised to see what was in front of him. The city just seemed to have gone through a chaotic storm. Every property is damaged and a lot of people are injured.

    "I thought meteors didn¡¯t strike the city."

    "They didn¡¯t. But the moon folk did."

    "Moon folk?"

    "The weird creatures. They survive on a low gravity area with very thin air and they feed on the spiritual energy of thend. Every year at this time they want to give birth so theye here to absorb a lot of spiritual energy and give birth here, but most of the time the birthing pods they ce here will be destroyed by the meteors, so they decided on safe-zones, but the safe-zones are upied and they are dead as soon as they came.

    Even if by some miracle they managed to survive the meteor shower and people at safe-zone, they would die in the wilderness as they don¡¯t have enough power to return to the moon and the atmosphere here doesn¡¯t suit them that much.

    So, they are weaker here and the beasts would take them for a ride easily."

    "They are exactly like some creatures I know, except for differences."

    "Anyway, it is no longer our problem. Go to the bar. She must have opened it. I need to go to our home and see wait for the assignments."

    With that Sam went to the bar and Sia is waiting for him to anxiously.

    As soon as he took the seat, she looked at him closely and asked.

    "Are you okay? Are you injured?"

    "No, I am alright. By the way, I passed your test and a week from now, you guys areing along with me So, get ready."

    Sia¡¯s face beamed in joy instantly and she almost screamed in joy. This caught Sam off guard. He didn¡¯t expect that there would be such a reaction from her.

    He expected a sadder reaction or an excited reaction, but this much overexcitement is something he never expected.

    She went back to the wall of liquors and started making a cocktail.

    "Why are you so excited? Are you not least bit sad about leaving this ce?"

    "I am sad, but my excitement to what the world has to offer me is much more than the sorrow of leaving this ce."

    They made some small talk as Sia made all of her favorite cocktails one by one and Sam drank them. He almost got drunk a little bit tipsy when he went back to the residence.

    "We are done here. I managed to convince Gran. And we even got an extremely special deal."

    "So, when are we leaving boss?" Saber Monarch asked. He has been at this, since they came here. He doesn¡¯t like the ce because there are not many beauties. The only beautiful women they saw are Agar and Sia.

    Agar is off limits and she made it clear, Sia is also off limits, because he felt like something is going on between her and Sam, so he didn¡¯t dare. And most people apart from them are men. The only sce he found here are some prostitutes.

    "We are still going to be here for the week. Since this ce has a lot of people from different ces. Find someone who can give us information on the next target. Find as much information as you can.

    The winner gets a special cocktail from me."

    Sam said with a smile and went to cook for himself.

    Even though the reward is small, all of a sudden there is a hint of tension in the room. All three of them exchanged nces and left the ce immediately.

    And for the next few days, they didn¡¯t evene to the residence and stayed within the different inns of the city.

    Sam visited the bar everyday and talked to Sia or Gran who are working in different shifts.

    On third day of the week, Sia is on the duty and she spoke to him with the usual tender smile.

    "You know, it is bing easier to differentiate between you two. Your sister has that look every time I see her, but from her eyes I can see that she wants to swallow me whole if possible, you have that tender smile. It is bing more and more apparent." Sam said casually.

    Sia just chuckled and said.

    "I heard from Agar that you gave them a task. I am interested in the reward. Since, I am also your employee can I also participate?"

    "You know about this guy?"

    "Of course, we actually met quite a few times. There was a time I wondered, if there is any chance that could unravel our mystery it would be him. He was quite adamant about me being Gran for quite a long time and he tried all kinds of methods to find out."

    "Seems like an interesting character."

    "He is. But I think it would be hard to recruit him."

    "Why?"

    "Because, that guy fell in love all of a sudden. If not for that, he might even be the easiest hire you would have had."

    "Let us go there and find out for ourselves. Now, give me the details and you might get my special cocktail."

 Chapter 968: Sark

    Sam is currently shaking the cocktail shaker while looking at the information on the counter. Sia is looking at him with her hands supporting her chin.

    Soon, he was done and he poured it in the crystal ss. When the cocktail was poured there are three colors, in fact it is threeyers of drink one up on another that stayed like that without mixing.

    He didn¡¯t even take a look at it and studied all the information he had.

    The next guy they are going to meet is actually a mercenary. His name is Sark.

    He doesn¡¯t have a particr organization he was working for. In fact, he is more like a mercenary for mercenary organizations. They hire him for temporary missions.

    That is why, Sia said he might even be an easiest hire for him. But currently he is in trouble as he messed with a family and fell in love with that girl. It is actually a demon family and the woman could be said to be a demon princess.

    He is currently struggling to get her from their family while escaping the family pursuits. It was arge cat and mouse game and it has been happening for around three months. The family head is an Astral ne Transcendent stage cultivator and this guy is Astral ne Pre-transcendent stage cultivator atte stage. Otherwise, he would have stormed the whole family down.

    And the worst thing is one of the most despised kind in the eyes of demons. An offspring of a lesser demon and a normal human.

    He is just a result of one night¡¯s bestial pleasure and that resulted in his mother¡¯s death. From them on, he despises demons the only demon he ever loved is this woman.

    This all looked like some movie story for Sam and he doesn¡¯t know whether he is lucky, but every time he decided to recruit someone, he is finding them in a time of need. If this is just luck, it seems like he is not as unlucky as he thought he was.

    He got all the information he needed and said.

    "I will leave for now. I need to find those guys and make them stop it. You better get ready for some sheer annoyance, because you are not going to like their treatment for getting this. At least one of them will make it clear." Sam said as he pointed at the cocktail and left.

    He returned to the residence and used amunication device to call them back.

    "You guys all lost."

    "What? Why?" As expected, the Saber Monarch has thergest reaction.

    "Your new colleague beat you all to it. " The three of them were stunned. The calmest of them all, the five elemental King is also showing this expression of surprise which surprised Sam in reverse.

    "Anyway, get ready and do what you have to do in the next three days. We will be leaving by then."

    With that meeting ended and after three days, they all gathered together in the residence.

    "Meet the new addition to our team."

    Sam said as he opened the door. Sia and Gran both walked in, but they didn¡¯t wear any disguises. This made the rest of the team shocked. Sam couldn¡¯t help but chuckle at their reactions. But he didn¡¯t give them any time to get a rity just for the fun of it and rushed them into the dimensional drfiter, before all of them disappeared from the spot.

    They reappeared in the middle of the mountain range.

    "Well, one of our new teammates said that this ce is perfect for our camp. So, we are going to stay here. And by the way, wee to Azure mountain in Blood demonic realm.

    The beautiful azure mountain you can see far away is the home for the Azure Blood demon family which is the target of our target.

    He is in love with the princess of that family and is trying not to get caught by that family but also to create enough chaos to catch that girl and escape. So, for the next few days, your duty is to scout around the area and find a way to catch him. Move in teams of two.

    Sia and Gran, one of you wear a disguise and separate, join with some one other person and don¡¯t stay together. You can be a perfect trump card.

    And since you guys are in odd number, one of you can join me."

    "Boss, I would join you."

    The Saber monarch was the first one to raise his hand. There are two reasons for that. First one is Sam really knew how to enjoy himself. He will definitely go to get the best food and drinks in the surroundings. And the second one is, he doesn¡¯t have to pay for himself if he goes with Sam. Sam is filthy rich.

    So, disgustingly rich. He wouldn¡¯t even feel a pinch if he took care of all Saber Monarch¡¯s expressions. But gran who just finished her disguise dragged him and said.

    "You are with me."

    Agar and Five elemental King went together, leaving Sam and Sia together.

    "I guess you are stuck with me. Let¡¯s go. We will meet here at evening."

    With that Sam and Sia moved towards the Azure Mountain range. The mountain is full of Azure soil rich in lightning elemental energy. The Azure blood demons has literal Azure blood and they all have lightning elemental affinity and some of them even has more.

    The whole mountain range is one big city and the family took the residence on the very top of a mountain.

    The city looked more like a tourist spot than an actual city itself.

    Most of the residences are made from the Azure stones that are avable in the mountain range.

    The first thing Sam did is to go to the restaurant with most rush. The blood demons are not really that different from humans in terms of apperance. They have fangs and their skin is a bit different and they are not exactly unfriendly or despised by other races.

    They are just like humans or any other race, except they have this unnatural pride thates with no grounds whatsoever.

    Sam could clearly see this in the restaurant they were in. He saw a human waiter who is serving busily and called him before cing the order.

    "We are new visitors here, what is the situation of the city?"

    "Nothing much. The Azure blood demon family rules is and the rest are ruled by them within in." He said ndly.

    "Well, anything interesting happening with the Azure Blood demon family?"

    Sam asked once again as he ced a spatial ring on the table. The waiter looked around and slipped the ring and checked the contents before saying.

    "Sark is pissing them off more than they made it public. Yesterday, I overheard that, there is an attack on the south side at the foot of the mountain, where the family had a mine. Sark is causing trouble there at the moment."

    "Thanks, now bring the order as fast as you can and I might give you a decent tip."

    After the waiter left, Sia said.

    "You are quite good at this."

    "Of course, don¡¯t tell me you don¡¯t know this trick. You are a bartender yourself, I am pretty sure that you got a lot of information from the customers without them even telling it you directly. That is the main w of the people, they don¡¯t care much about the waiters and thus makes it easier for an information slip.

    But I am sure, as long as the basic information is concerned, a waiter would have more of it than a professional information seller.

    Now, finish the meal, we have to go to the mines and find traces."

    After finishing the meal and leaving a decent tip and amunication token with the waiter, Sam left along with Sia to the south of the city and used the south gate to move towards the foot of the mountain.

    The forest of the mountain is lush and rich and many people areing out to hunt but as they went downwards, there are less and less people and soon they understood why. Apart from the mine, the rest of the area is a bit of a wastnd.

    It is not exactly a great ce to hunt or explore as there are barely any trees and even the few people that went in that route are going to a specific vige that is situated far away.

    Sam and Sia secretely roamed in the surroundings of the mine. The security is tight, but there are some clear traces of battle and a lot of tunnels seemed to have copsed. A lot of earth elemental users are trying to restore the tunnels, Sark clearly came here and he did quite some damage. There would be no mining for quite some time and this will definitely impact the family.

    But apart from that, there are barely any traces. But there is one thing that Sia found which gave them some information which might help them.

    (A/N: As I said in the announcement yesterday. Myptop crashed and it wasn¡¯t fixed yet. All my mass release chapters were in it, so for today, I had to rewrite everything and hence the dy and the mistakes in grammar as I was in a rush. Bear with it for today and from tomorrow I will look for a proper alternative even if myptop is not fixed. Thank you. for understanding)

 Chapter 969: Scouting

    Sam and Sark are currently sitting inside a forest as they looked at a piece of rag. It was covered in mud and Sam is trying to uncover the rag without losing any possible blood or other marks that could be on it.

    When he was done, he gave it to Sia who looked at it. There seemed to be some kind of embroidery design on it, but since it was torn they couldn¡¯t see what is truly is. But Sia smiled and said.

    "It is hit. He really came to this side of the mine, he might have escaped that way." She pointed in the direction they found the rag.

    But Sam is not as optimistic about it, he thought for a moment and asked.

    "The rag is not that difficult to find, why do you think the soldiers from the Azure Blood Demon family didn¡¯t find it?"

    When he mentioned it, she also began thinking of other possibilities.

    "This mud cleared off all the bodily scent that we could have used. Let us go try to find some other information or we can wait for another event like this to happen."

    After that, they began walking away and Sam looked at the possible path in which this guy might have escaped one more time before he left.

    They came back to the city and went to a bar.

    "So, why are we here?" Sia asked as she looked around.

    "Of course, why would we be at a bar? To drink."

    "I thought we need to work."

    "We do and we did and we are going to do so. I would never let my work impede my time of vanity." Sam answered and took seat at the counter, gesturing Sia to take the one next to him.

    He looked at the menu and ordered one drink after another as he sampled them. There are not too many varieties here and they are also not exactly the best wines.

    Sam looked around. This is the best bar in the city and everyone is flocking inside drinking like pigs, but the wine here is one of the worst wines he had to the date.

    "Seems like I have some business opportunities here."

    Sam said as he came out of the bar and Sia hurriedly took out her own wine to wash away that disgusting vor she just tasted.

    "I thought demons would know how to enjoy life. But turns out I was wrong." Sia said as they walked.

    After some more roaming and scouting the city, Sam and Sia came back to the residence. Since this is in the mountain region, the terrain is notpletely even and there are many paths, Sam could take advantage of.

    In fact, the whole city seemed to have been built on along with the uneven mountain terrain without any leveling.

    After returning to the residence, soon the rest of the people also came with a bunch of information.

    Sam took out a map of the whole city which he bought that day itself and started marking.

    The map only included the city and the surroundings arepletely denoted a forests or mountains, there is no mention of the properties of the Azure demon family or any other person for that matter that might have been outside the city range.

    But Sam and his team managed to see a few properties of Azure Demon Family out of the city.

    Some mines, some fields across the mountain and some factories.

    Unlike Sam who went for thetest attack information, they went for the information about the properties instead.

    "There are still a bunch of properties we hadn¡¯t visited yet. Until now, including your visit, we went to five properties. And out of wife, three have already been attacked. From the looks of it, he is going to attack even more properties. By day after tomorrow, we will finish visited the rest of the properties and find out which are attacked and which are not.

    The information from the city has not been urate. It seems like the family hid all the attacks from outside. Their situation might even be worse than what rumors are saying."

    Five elemental King exined.

    After the meeting was over everyone went to rest and Sam threw a bunch of shadow mice out and sent them on a secret information hunt. Their targets this time are low-level soldiers. Many soldiers are stationed near the city gates, the family estate and so on. They seemed to be reserved soldiers that are being sent to different ces as soon as the attack happened and their camp is also for healing the injured soldiers from previous attacks.

    The information on these soldiers might not be detailed and confidential, but it is critical all the same. No matter whom the demon family tried to keep the information from, it would never escape the soldiers as they are the ones who are going to visit the battlefields.

    He left the shadow mice to stay in their camps for the next day while he and the team went to check on the properties.

    It just so happened that one of the properties was attacked when Saber Monarch and Gran are snooping around it.

    Gran who is also familiar with Sark easily identified it was him.

    He is attacking a orchard of the Demon family they use to grow the fruits for their winery. When she looked at thergend full of fruit and thought of the disgusting wine experience her sister had, she really wanted to p some sense into the demons. They don¡¯t know anything about wine except for drinking it.

    She snuck in the chaos and managed to get a hold of a few fruits before going back and no one ever noticed that she came.

    Sark kept them that upied.

    After destroying half of the trees in the orchard, Sark channeled arge amount of energy and created a massive lightning explosion that blinded not just the vision, but also any other senses and disappeared from the spot as if he wasn¡¯t there.

    Gran and the Saber monarch who are outside the range of this explosion, saw everything and was surprised, they could see Sark leaving in one direction, but for some reason, the soldiers are not going in that direction.

    It is as if they eliminated the possibility of going in that direction at all. But they didn¡¯t follow him. If they want to catch up to him, they would have to cross these soldiers which is not a good idea and if they tried to take a detour, there would lose him anyway.

    So, they went back and continued their secret visits to the properties.

    That day everyone came back by evening and they mapped the properties they visited so they might get a pattern.

    Gran described the whole situation of the attack properly Sam was surprised by that.

    "Nobody thought of checking that route?"

    "No, some soldiers looked in that direction and some moved a bit towards that route, but for some reason, nobody followed him. Even Sark didn¡¯t use too much energy to escape, he just ran normally after the initial burst until he disappeared into the forest."

    Sam thought of this and then thought of the rag they found simply by just just walking around.

    "Tomorrow if youe across a previously attacked property, try to get the escape route. Look for any traces that could have been left by him while escaping. See if we can find something. And if youe across another attack, don¡¯t interfere. Just observe his escape route."

    The next day they went on with the duties and by the end of that day, the managed to map all the properties.

    They managed to get three escape routes that day. One fresh because of the attack that happened that day and they witnessed directly. This also ensured that the escape route is hundred percent trustworthy.

    But they don¡¯t know about the rest. They are mere approximations.

    Still, Sam drew all of them on the map. They couldn¡¯t discover a general pattern among the attacks.

    "From the previous two attacks, he is neither striking the least expected ce nor the most expected ces, he might even be picking in random. So, the next order of business is finding where he is escaping to or hiding at.

    So, for the next two days, spread out and hide near these properties. Don¡¯t leave any traces or gather attention and if there is an attack find out his escape route.

    There must be a reason that the soldiers are avoiding certain routes and it wouldn¡¯t take long for the higher ups to figure out that they should be looking in those routes. Before they do that, we need to do that.

    If we find out before the family could, he might be saved and used. But if we do not, our efforts would be wasted. So, be vignt. There is not even good food or drinks here.

    And take these things. These are grenades, they might not create damage to people, but they sure as hell can create chaos in the surroundings. If by any chance Sark was spotted by others and his distraction is not enough, explode a bunch of these and things would be smooth sailing."

 Chapter 970: Forbidden Zone

    For the next three days, the team was split up. This time Sam also went alone, despite being the weakest of them all.

    They stayed near different properties that were not attacked and waited for them to be attacked.

    And the first attack coincidentally happened at the ce Sia is camping. She stayedpletely out of range and managed to get a glimpse of the route Sark took.

    After the dust settled and the initial search trials from the soldiers, the injured were being moved to the camps at the city gates to get the treatment.

    Sia waited for the chaos to settle down a bit and finally sneaked into the path.

    But as soon as she entered that path, she halted in her tracks and turned around.

    A man is standing on top of the tree looking at her.

    "Seems like someone else is after this Sark. Don¡¯t bother, the Azure Blood demon family already noticed this, you wouldn¡¯t get any reward even if you try to find him at the moment."

    She just stayed silent and looked at him calmly. He is an Azure blood demon. It seems like their team is not as quick as they want to be. Sam wanted to find out where this route is leading to and find the hiding spot of Sark.

    But from the looks of it, the Azure Blood demon family already thought of this possibility, they might be a bitter than they should have been.

    "If you found him, you wouldn¡¯t be standing here." Sia said after some thought.

    "Well, I just discovered this route he was taking and we all know where this leads from here, so technically I found it. Now, I am sorry that your reward dreams might have been crashed like this, but it is your fate, so ept.

    So, get out while I am still in a good mood, otherwise something untoward might happen to you."

    As soon as he finished his words, Sia made her move, she disappeared from the spot and within a second she is already climbing the tree like a coiling ck snake and before he could react, she stabbed a knife in his throat.

    "You should have stayed silent." With that she shed the throat and killed him in a second and threw him into the storage and ran towards the special rendezvous they prepared earlier.

    First she reached an open spot and lit up a stick Sam gave them. This is a re. As soon as she lit it up, it flew upwards and exploded like a fire cracker with arge eye-catching explosion that could be seen from all over the mountain. From every corner without any problem.

    But this also attracts the attention of the demon family.

    So, Sia ran back to their residence.

    This is merely a signal for everyone to return to the residence to discuss something important.

    After a few hours, everyone returned back to the residence where Sia is also waiting.

    "The Azure Blood demon family already suspected about these special routes, there is a guy who stayed out of the range of the attack and spotted Sark¡¯s escape.

    When I was about to follow Sark, I had an encounter with him and I killed him."

    She waved her hand and let the body out. Sam immediately activated a bunch of concealment formations.

    As he looked at the demon¡¯s body, two bloodlines in his body are riling up. First one is Raiju Bloodline which might be the result of the lightning element present inside its body.

    And the Vampire bloodline which might be the result of the blood of the demon.

    He suddenly felt like he found the next source for his cultivation. The Sr fragments he got from that encounter are still present. The only reason he still stopped is that Yanwu has to consolidate his body a bit and is now going slower than before in consuming them.

    At first he thought those bodies would be enough forte Stage Initiation breakthrough, but to his dismay, he came short of it and since the breakthrough wouldn¡¯t happen instantly they decided to slow down the consumption and let themselves grow steadily.

    Now it seems like Raiju might have a simr effect from these Azure Blood demons because of the lightning presence and he might increase his cultivation by absorbing the blood.

    But before he didn¡¯t anything drastic, he decided to test the corpse a bit. But before that he returned his focus back to the situation at hand.

    The Azure demon family is bound to confirm that Sark is using these avoided routes even if this demon that just died didn¡¯t inform. They would just rte his disappearance to Sark killing him when he was being tailed.

    If that demon lived and informed the family directly, they would have confirmed it directly, the death would be confirmed indirectly.

    "Did he spot you in your hiding?" Sam asked after some thought.

    "No, the only reason, he caught me is because I came out of the hiding to tail Sark. From the looks of it, he is already on the lookout in that path." Sia exined her observations.

    "Assuming that, this guy was already inside that path, then we know that the demon family knew about these paths and just wanted to be sure before they proceeded. And if you are right, then they must have ced someone like him in other properties too.

    If all of them are ced in these paths, then we are safe. We stayed out of range and far away and didn¡¯t tail after him immediately, so there is little chance that we are spotted.

    But by any chance we were spotted, there would be peopleing to look for us. Then we need to maintain a united front. We are some bounty hunters trying to get some reward. We are all a team. Luckily, the saber Monarch and the Five elemental King are not extremely popr here. So, it would be hard for them to identify you.

    Now, before we proceed, we need to know something about the paths and some more information and the cing of these people."

    Sam exined their current position and took a look at the corpse.

    "Let us hope this works."

    He muttered and let the Specter out to conduct the memory extraction from the soul. It has been a while since the person died, luckily the body was thrown into the spatial ring as soon as he died which made it possible for some extraction.

    The Specter absorbed the partial memories that came to him and sent them to Sam.

    Sam closed his eyes and looked through all kinds of scattered memories and put pieces together.

    "There is some good news and bad news." He said after digesting the memories.

    "Bad news is that this guy also doesn¡¯t know much about these paths. Except for the fact all of these paths lead to a forbidden zone. Even though it ismon knowledge, it is even forbidden for the people to talk about this forbidden zone.

    As for Good news, we are sure that Sark is near this forbidden zone, because as soon as he strays out of that path leading to forbidden zone to go into the woods, he would die. There are too many beasts. The path leading to the forbidden zone is the only safest ce that deep into the woods.

    But it leads to the most dangerous ce of all and the forbidden zone is the only connecting point for all these paths and properties.

    And another good news is that there was only person sent to be stationed in these paths at each property so that they wouldn¡¯t attract attention and cause Sark to not attack. So, there is minimal chance that we could have been spotted."

    They all understood their present situation now.

    "We need to find out about the forbidden zone."

    "Yes, we do. But it is not exactly possible at the moment. Even this guy who seemed to be of a decent level in the family doesn¡¯t know about it, so our only options are go after an elder level person directly or go into the forbidden zone directly."

    They started discussing different ideas bouncing off of each other and finally, they managed toe up with a n.

    But for that, they need to wait for the demon family to make their move and they also have to move nearby the property that Sia just came from.

    The investigation of the family will definitely begin from there and they will try to learn what happened to the person they sent. After confirming that person¡¯s death, they would straight up go to the forbidden zone for sure.

    Sam is counting on the fact that they would send an elder level person to confirm and even if they didn¡¯t, they would eventually do as every person they sent there to confirm start to disappear mysteriously and die after they came to check here.

    They would lure that elder no matter what and find out what they are dealing with.

 Chapter 971: Luring

    The team sneaked out of the city to go that property. Since Sia killed that demon, she dyed the news travelling back to the Azure Demon family. So, they are sure that they wouldn¡¯t take any action immediately.

    They will wait for at least a few hours or even for that night.

    At least that is what they thought, but as soon as they arrived at the scene and looked at the whole area from far away, they were surprised. There is a team of Azure demons who seemed to have just arrived.

    The leader of the team is seriously questioning the person-in charge and his team member are looking at the dead demon¡¯s hiding spot and a little deeper into that forbidden path to take a proper look and see if they could find any clues.

    But Sia did a clean job and there are no traces left. She didn¡¯t even leave a single drop of blood.

    Sam and his team observed the actions of the demon team. They didn¡¯t seem to have found any clues and they decided to stay within the camp for the night before they continued the investigation the next day.

    Sam sent out a shadow mouse to the tent this demon team is staying in to see what they are discussing and after an house, the shadow mouse returned.

    He got the information and kept his team members in the loop.

    "They got the news of this guy¡¯s death immediately, but it seems like they have been dyed because of some differences in opinions in the upper echelons and the team formation was dyed. They are cursing those higher-ups and ming them for theck of clues.

    Tomorrow morning, they are going into the forbidden path. Until they reach halfway towards the forbidden zone and look for any possible clues.

    Their job is to not find Sark directly, they only have one job and that is to find proof that Sark went to the forbidden zone."

    Saber Monarch was confused and asked.

    "The death of one demon is not proof enough? He was not stationed at the edge of the camp, he was inside the path and he was dead there, what more proof do they want?"

    Sam chuckled and answered.

    "A proof that wouldn¡¯t let any other person give an excuse. It seems like the forbidden zone something even the upperechelons don¡¯t want to visit. So, some of the weaker willed but high authoritative people will create excuses and rationalization and some time deliberately act dumb to stop any advances into the forbidden zone.

    They couldn¡¯t be convinced. The only proper way convince them is to show some irrefutable proof."

    "How do you know that?"

    "Every organization has them. They are the ones who doesn¡¯t want to get out of thefort zone that was being provided by their position. They would go against anything that could pose any risk to the current position of the organization and dream of the world staying as it is, so they can sleep peacefully knowing that he is still something. They are cowards who disguise themselves as rational thinkers."

    Sam exined as he thought calmly.

    "Seems like you have a grudge against them?"

    "Not a grudge, but I despise them quite a bit. I had to endure a fair share of these guys. Anyway, back to our current situation at hand. They are going to move tomorrow at dawn. So,e up with a n."

    And that set off a discussion as everyone tried toe up with a proper n while Sam only listened. The boon of having apetent team. He can finally rx and let them do some thinking too.

    After an hour of discussion they finally came up with a n and surprisingly, Sam doesn¡¯t even need to be present for that.

    They didn¡¯t even include him. When he asked why, the reply dumbfounded him.

    "Sorry boss, you are too weak and delicate."

    He didn¡¯t know what to say. He was stunned and shocked to say the least. Because this is the first time since he came to this world and had an organization or employees that worked for him, say he is weak. Of course, the only who didn¡¯t say he was weak is Agar as she knew better than the rest to not say a freak who can use all kinds of weird things to kill stronger people as weak.

    But Sam didn¡¯t feel offended, in fact he was quite alright with this arrangement.

    So, after they snuck towards the forbidden path one after the other, the team went into their hiding positions and Sam stayed in a hiding position at the edge of the forest nearby.

    As soon as the team left, Sam immediately entered the divine dimension while keeping an eye on the surroundings through the crystal table.

    But his main focus was the demon body.

    Even though he was not offended by the team when they said he was weak, he was reminded. He needs to speed up his cultivation, he let Yanwu consume all the remaining Sr Fragments and took a look at the demon corpse.

    He doesn¡¯t know if he could Raiju with this. If anything untoward happens to Raiju, he wouldn¡¯t be able to forgive himself, but he could clearly sense that the Raiju bloodline is riling up.

    He took a deep breath and collected some of the blood before taking a sip of it himself. He decided to test it on himself and if it is indeed poisonous he has Mia¡¯s bloodline.

    But as soon as he drank that sip, his vampire bloodline and raiju bloodline were extremely excited and started absorbing it, but since it is blood the Vampire bloodline got most of it.

    Sam could feel the spiritual energy being absorbed into his core. He then cut off a small piece of flesh. Eating a humanoid looking creature is not something he wants to do, but he didn¡¯t want Raiju taking any risks and grilled itpletely under the me until it is not recognizable and swallowed it directly.

    The overcharring clearly reduced some effects but he could see the Raiju bloodline absorbing energy rapidly.

    He took the corpse to Raiju and as soon as he smelled it, he jumped right in. It seems like these demons are a direct source of food for the Raijus.

    When the rest of the beasts saw Yanwu and Raiju having a feast, they became sulky. It took a few hours for him to try and convince them that he would find something.

    Raiju finished the corpse and only left a few bones on the side and licked Sam is face asking for more.

    For some weird reason, he felt a bit of sympathy for these demons. They are rulers of a realm and all they could considered for his beasts are as food.

    He spent the rest of the time researching the bones of the demons as he felt they are different. They are indeed a bit different, so he threw them into the sea urchin pond to make some spikes out of them.

    He was done with it and started observing the crystal table while he tinkered with the new holographic formation he made.

    And the next morning at dawn, as soon as the team arrived at their ambush point, the team worked perfectly well and dealt with the whole team within a few minutes. It was extremely swift and precise operation.

    They only left the leader alive.

    Sam finally came out and watched as the Saber Monarch showed his interrogation skills. It is in and simple instead of threatening the guy with pain or torture and asking questions, he sealed that guy¡¯s mouth and tortured him first, while asking questions.

    It was effective and they got the information pretty quickly. Because there is not much begin with.

    The team leader doesn¡¯t know much about the forbidden zone. He was only given orders to reach half the path and look for the proof.

    What he does know is that after he gave the concrete proof that Sark is here, an elder would directly go through this path to find Sark.

    "How strong are you elders?" Sam asked the demon.

    "They are strong. Most of them are at Initial stage of Astral ne Transcendence."

    "So, which elder wille if you give the proof?"

    "I don¡¯t know."

    "Do you have any methods to send an emergency message?"

    "Yes."

    Sam smiled and gave some instructions to Saber Monarch after checking the message sending message. Even though it is called an emergency message, it takes some time to set up. They didn¡¯t have time when Sam¡¯s team attacked them which made it impossible.

    Saber monarch used his convincing skills and made the leader send a fake message back to the demon family and went into hiding.

    But this time they didn¡¯t stay in the outskirts. They wanted to go in a bit. But as soon as they stepped a few meters deep, they sensed some strong presenceing towards them running at fullspeed.

 Chapter 972: Trap

    When ambushing the team stayed within the edge of the path and the forest, but now that they are waiting for a longer time they decided to stay a bit deeper. But it seems like the rumors about the surroundings of the forbidden path are notpletely false.

    Arge boar like beast is running towards the team. It is an Astral ne Initiation stage beast. So, there was no problem for them to kill it at all.

    They are quite surprised by the fact that a beast as weak as this wille at them directly. The beasts have better instincts that many creatures, this should have normally ran far way from them, but instead ran straight towards them.

    Sam started checking the corpse. The first clear and major difference is that the blood of the beast is blue. From the looks of the beast, he could guess that it is Metal-tusk boar. But that boar wouldn¡¯t have blue blood which is quite a surprise.

    He used the observation ability to take a look at the insides of the beast and the muscle density.

    All of them are different than what a normal Metal tusk boar should have.

    While he was wondering what is wrong with it, they could sense many presencesing towards them. The team knew they would be in trouble and ran back to the path, but before that Sam pocketed the dead body of the beast. And as soon as they arrived at the path directly the approach from the beasts suddenly stopped.

    They roared a few times and went back.

    "Seems like we need to stay in the outskirts, but let stay this side."

    Sam said and they moved to the other side of the path and even then, they didn¡¯t dare to go deep inside the beasts are too sensitive for some reason.

    After establishing a small camp. Sam started dissecting the body. If they were to travel here, it is better to have some understanding regarding these beasts without going there blindly.

    But after dissecting and observing each and every organ, he could only say one thing. The beast is mutated and its physical features improved and it has blue blood. Except for that, there is not much data he could gather from it.

    He couldn¡¯t find what caused the mutation.

    He doesn¡¯t know if the blue blood is the result of the mutation or the mutation is the result of the blueblood and finally he doesn¡¯t know if this has anything do with the forbidden zone.

    The only silver lining is the blood is a bit simr to the Azure blood demon blood. But apart from the color simrity and a bit of simr smell, there are not too many simrities. There was definitely no trace of the lightning elemental energy in them.

    The only conclusion they came to after studying it for a while is that they need to be careful in the forest and shouldn¡¯t go deeper.

    But to do that, they need to find a different way to ambush. The next opponent might be an elder and they have to be prepared for that elder toe. And since the elder has a stronger cultivation, they would need a proper hiding spot to ambush him.

    Now, it was once again, Sam¡¯s time to think. The elder is too strong for him. So, to fool him, he would need a proper distraction that would make him ignore many obvious things. Luckily for him, Sia and Gran are good concealment and formations regarding the concealment, they can still have some edge.

    Sam quickly cooked up a n. From the looks of it, it would take a few hours for the Elder toe. They set the emergency message so that, the Elders would wait for a bit before theye searching for their team.

    They yed it so that they would think the team has indeed found a trace of Sark, but they were also spotted. Sark was severely injured before they engaged and it only worsened which forced him to flee. But they also found some suspicious people nearby who seemed to be helping him after some pursuit and they are hiding currently to find what their goal is. The message also mentioned something about the cultivation level of the helper being the same as Sark.

    They even left some loose-ends so that the family elders would over think. They even made this guy say that he would report back in two hours.

    But there was no report. This could cause the family elders to specte a bit and think of possible people who could be helping Sark.

    And since there is really no one helping them, they would be over-thinking it and after some time, they would send people.

    Since the team leader made clear about the cultivation, there is a great chance that only one elder wille and on the off chance that there are multiple elders, they need to be prepared for that too.

    So, Sam made a n that could work for three elders.

    Sia and Gran started working on the concealment formations and Sam took out his new holographic technology.

    He started created a formation discs that would better suit his purpose.

    With Saber Monarch¡¯s strength he might be able to take on an Initial stage Transcendent stage cultivator and Five Elemental King might be able to do the same.

    If Gran and Sia worked together, they could also take one of that level. Even if they wouldn¡¯t be able to kill them, they could upy and exhaust them, giving some time for other¡¯s to help and along with Agar¡¯s help they might take down their opponent.

    But if the Elder that came was a middle-stage one and multiple elders at that, they would be in some trouble.

    Even though chances are not high, Sam didn¡¯t want to leave anything for the chance and put themselves in danger. So, he took out the metal poles that are responsible for destroying the walls of the K tribe city. The poles that are used for merging the Void, ripple and repel styles.

    He started modifying the inscriptions on it so that they would be able to use them in this situation.

    After some modification, the preparations were done in the two hours.

    Sam gave the modified metal poles to the rest of the team.

    In this battle, he wouldn¡¯t be able to help them no matter how much he wanted to. It is indeed a bit frustrating knowing that he couldn¡¯t take action by himself. He looked inside the divine dimension where the Raiju is eating the corpses of the previous demon team and pursed his lips.

    He felt that his cultivation is too slow and one should wonder what other yers or other cultivators would do to him if they heard him say it out loud.

    Anyway, after setting up all the formations properly, they hid once again and Sam directly entered the divine dimension.

    When the whole set up was activated a bunch of holograms were on the outskirts of the path and a few traces of Azure blood leading to the forest could be seen on the road.

    The holograms are of some people Sam met or even killed. Most of them are people he killed. They are all posing as the allies of Sark who are currently helping him.

    One hologram is of Sark himself. Even though Sam only saw him once, the twins have seen him quite some times and they are familiar with him. So, he made a rough hologram and anyway, there is a tolerance for uracy within.

    The holograms might seem like they were hidden, but they are ced that way to look like they are trying to hide but failed.

    This was all a bait for the elders. The team is hidden under the concealment formations. Even if Sia and Gran¡¯s concealment is not up to par, it would be hard for the elders to notice with such a tant disy of Sark and his ¡¯allies¡¯ right in front of them.

    At least Sam hoped so. This could also be considered as a test for his new technology and luckily, Sam didn¡¯t have to wait for quite a long time to get the results.

    Because within an hour, the elders came.

    There are two elders which is actually a relief, but one of them seemed to be the leader and from what Sam could see through the crystal table, he seemed to be a middle-stage cultivator of Astral ne Transcendence.

    And Sam informed the rest of his team through the crystal table.

    The team became a bit nervous but they are still prepared for this.

    When the elders noticed the traces left behind and Sark along with their allies, they are delighted. They fell into the trap easily as they moved with raging auras and without a care.

    But as soon as they stepped off the path and attacked a hologram, the twins appeared out of nowhere and stabbed the metal poles into both of them.

    The initial stage elder was stabbed, but the middle-stage elder dodged. But before he could react again, Saber Monarch came from behind and stabbed him in the back with the pole and went back into the hiding.

    The poles that were filled with their energy all channeled it in the three styles simultaneously and forcefully entered the body of the elders.

    And when a person who doesn¡¯t know void style and doesn¡¯t know how to control suddenly experiences an energy flow simr to that in their body, they would have some deep trouble. Much less there is an addition of ripple and repel styles too.

 Chapter 973: Meeting Sark

    The energy operates in an extremely different ways in Void style, Ripple style and the Repel style. The Void style creates a void that will not stay stable for even a fraction of second and create an explosion because of the impact of the energy particles trying to fill the void.

    The ripple style tries to spread every energy particle that is present in a certain range creating a curtain rippling continuously.

    The repel style tries to shift the energy particles in a bulk to a single direction.

    All three styles have some simrities and differences at the same time. But one thing they have inmon is that they move the energy particles. And when these three type of energy flows happen in the same body, at the same time starting from the same point. One must wonder what would happen if the energy from a single area is forced into different directions.

    The person who experienced it would be in extreme pain as the energy parties that are attached to his body will try tear themselves from that very body.

    And even if that person is a Middle-stage Transcendent stage cultivator of Astral ne, it would still be painful. Not as life threatening or excruciating, but painful enough for the Saber Monarch and the Five elemental King to make another move and this time, the Saber Monarch stabbed the pole at the heart of that elder.

    He knelt on the floor as he held his heart tightly and trying to pull that pole out of it. But it was not an easy task to do. Not when all the team mates came out.

    Since the weaker elder was also effected and more injured than the other elder, Five-Elemental King alone was sufficient to deal with him. The remaining whole team went after the strong elder. Two shadow assassins, one crazy saber butcher and a Sr Fragment. That was enough to take that guy down after the poles did their job.

    After making sure that he cannot attack them andid unconscious and the weaker guy already dead, Sam came out.

    He didn¡¯t ask the strong elder any questions, instead he used the chessboard to directly throw him in and go through the chess games so that he would mellow down.

    Later he used the soul necromancy with the help of Specter and extracted the information from the dead elder.

    As he did that, he felt extremely shocked for a moment trying to digest the information.

    When the team members are asking him what happened, he didn¡¯t even bother to reply and calm down as he ran towards the path and knelt on the ground to use the observation ability on the road.

    The firstyer is normalpact soil and bed rock and the secondyer is the mixture of normal soil and blue colored soil and the bedrock, the thirdyer is blue colored soil and fourthyer is what made him shocked.

    He moved to a different position and checked the soil there and repeated the whole process in three different ces.

    Sam suddenly had a horrified feeling in his heart.

    He is actually a quite cold person. He didn¡¯t think twice when he made swords out of the blood of three hundred members, he didn¡¯t even blink when he made a throne out of the bones of the people that annoyed him.

    But even he felt horrified at what he saw.

    The fourthyer is actually a mixture of blue colored soil and blue colored crystalline bones.

    He never saw any bone like it. They are definitely crystalline bones and from the looks of it all kinds of bones from a skeleton are used.

    And this went on through all of the forbidden paths leading to the forbidden zone.

    In fact, the reason why these beasts do not attack the people travelling on the forbidden path is because of these bones and the blue colored soil.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but think deeply for a moment and when his team mates are getting anxious, he finally got out of the daze and reassured them that he is fine. But when they insisted, he told them the information he gained from the elder.

    The forbidden zone and the forbidden paths didn¡¯t have a forbidden status from the start. In fact, the forbidden zone used to be the core headquarters of the Azure blood demons and the forbidden paths are the paths led the people from that headquarters to their different properties among the mountain that are full of resources.

    And this changed around two hundred years ago, when the Azure mountain region opened up for the rest of the world and a city was constructed.

    Before that, the Azure blood demons have two branches between them which is not amon knowledge among the other races. But as the time passed and generations went away, the difference is starting to be too apparent.

    The first branch of the family who have the crystal bones and marrow along with Azure blood are bing more and more powerful.

    The second branch were getting jealous. So, when someone came and offered some help. The help was originally to make the second branch as powerful as the first by using a method, but the helper failed to mention the exact way he was going to do that and by the time they asked it was already toote.

    The mysterious helper conducted a weird ritual in which he killed all of the first branch. The ritual was conducted in the core headquarters which is now a forbidden zone. Because the ritual was failed and something untoward happened, the area was forbidden to enter.

    The mutant beasts on the forest surrounding the forbidden path and the forbidden zone are a result of the failure of the ritual.

    So to protect themselves from extinction because of these beasts, they created an invisible barricade. The presence of the blue soil and bones, which are the soil soaked in the blood of the first branch members and the bones of the first branch, under the paths made the beasts not enter it which created a safe zone.

    The Elder doesn¡¯t have more information on what is present in the ritual site. All he has is that the ritual site still holds the darkest secret of the Azure blood demon family and only family head and three of his trusted aides have ess to that ce.

    Even though it is forbidden for the rest of the n, the four of them can go and use some hidden power there to save the family from emergencies.

    As he said all of this to the team, even the team felt horrified.

    Just how many people has to be killed toy the route with their bones and there are fifteen routes approximately.

    Sam hurriedly dug theyers of the soil and took out a crystalline bone from underground and closed the hole. He need to know how this works and why this works to do something.

    Then, they started their journey to the forbidden zone.

    The route is luckily not so long and by evening, they managed to reach an area with one stone house in the middle of it and apart from a circle around the house, the rest of it is covered with the trees which have Azure leaves.

    As they walked forward, they could hear the beast roarsing from the different sides of the forest and couldn¡¯t help but be nervous.

    "Don¡¯t worry, we can just escape with the dimensional drifter if pushes to cover."

    Only after that did they feel relieved knowing that they do have some escape means.

    They went into the stone house, but there was nothing inside the house. It is just a normal empty stone house.

    Just when Sam wanted to check every nook and cranny, they noticed some presence around them and when they came out of the house, they could see a bunch of beasts surrounding it. Except for a circr gap between them, the beasts surrounded them, even the return path was blocked.

    But it was notpletely safe, because the beasts can do some ranged attacks and Sam and his team went back in and got ready to leave.

    There are too many beasts and at the rear they could feel some extra strong presences that is making them nervous.

    They decided to visit the ce once again after they got some new information, but right after Sam took the dimension drifter, the beasts started retreating.

    When they came out once again and watched, they saw the beasts clearing a path for Sark toe forward and when he reached the stone house and looked around the beasts left.

    Sark looked at the group of people and grew vignt, but when he saw Gran who is in her cloaked outfit and Sia standing right beside her he let his guard down a bit.

    "Why are you guys here?"

    He asked weakly before he fell unconscious.

 Chapter 974: Hidden Heart

    Sark opened his eyes groggily. For some time he felt his whole body aching and tried to find a morefortable position on the bed to sleep some more.

    But as his thoughts went on to the bed, he realized that he didn¡¯t have one. He instantly opened his eyes and looked around with increased vignce.

    Only when he looked at Gran and Sia did he calm down.

    "Why are you guys here? Who are these people?" He asked them in a low voice as he eyed, the remaining four including Sam and in fact particrly Sam as his cultivation is lowest.

    "We are here looking for you."

    Gran replied.

    "When did a thief got interested in bounty? Particrly in a realm you have no idea about. And it seems like I am right, you both indeed have some rtionship."

    "Look at the state of you Sark. Where is that pompous brat I saw in my bar?" Sia said jokingly as she poked a wounded area on Sark which barely healed and was still sensitive.

    "It seems like you still didn¡¯t grow up." Sark said sourly as he rubbed the area and continued.

    "Why are you guys here?"

    "Didn¡¯t I already say, we are here for you. But not for the bounty of course. We are here to recruit you."

    "Recruit me? I am sorry. I am not taking any tasks right now."

    "This recruitment is not for a single job. It is for a ten to twelve year constant job." This time Sam replied himself.

    "Who are you?"

    "The person trying to recruit you."

    "You?"

    "Before you show your tant disdain, meet your possible colleagues. Five elemental King, the Saber Monarch, Sia & Gran and finally Agar."

    Sark looked at Saber Monarch and Five elemental King in a dumbfounded expression before saying.

    "How did you guys started working for him, and you Gran., When did you start taking jobs like this? I thought you are going to die in that hole of a you call your home and what does a bartender has to do anything with this? No offense. I like your cocktails but is this really a ce for you."

    Gran silently cook off her cloak and this made Sark look at the twins with a shocked expression. He opened his mouth wide as he looked at them alternatively.

    "It is getting creepy Sark. Do you want to hear his proposal?" Sia stopped his actions and asked.

    Sark just stayed silent without saying anything. So, Sam continued.

    "I will help you with your lover¡¯s escape and take you out of this ce. You can wear a disguise and follow me and if your wife is as strong as you, she can alsoe with you, but if you don¡¯t want to take her, you can ce her in one of thes I am in charge of.

    She would be in safe hands.

    I want you to work for me for a decade and if you feel like it, you can stay after that. I will give you the resources that you never dreamed of."

    "How can you take us away from this realm?"

    "I have my means."

    "I am sorry. I cannot trust you without seeing some proof myself. I cannot risk it with my wife."

    Sam thought for a moment and sighed before taking the dimensional drifter out. He asked Sark to stand inside and activated it. The next second they are in the property they just came from. Before the surrounding people could notice, Sam used the dimensional drifter once again and took them back to the house.

    "Now, can you trust me that I can take you away? As long as you can take use to your wife and all three of us are together, I can take you away."

    Sark went into a deep thought and after sometime, he smiled and agreed.

    "It is a deal."

    But at this moment, Gran moved and ced her knife on his neck surprising everyone. Sam was also stunned but he didn¡¯t say anything and just watched.

    "Don¡¯t y games Sark."

    "Gran, what happened? Don¡¯t tell me that you are suddenly greedy about bounty."

    "No, I am not greedy about bounty, I am vignt about your smile. That smile of yours is fake. Tell me what you are nning."

    Sark became silent and just as he was about to make a move, Sia came to his rear and twisted his arm. You seemed to have forgotten a lot of things you said after you are drunk Sark.

    "Whenever you fake a smile, it is because you are scheming something. You said it in your own words. You don¡¯t like faking a smile and whenever you do it would be apparent. And you only do that when you are nning something cruel and do that out of nervousness to hide the fact that you are scheming something.

    You are not a very good drunk."

    Sia said all of this and Sam frowned.

    He didn¡¯t expect that someone with these traits would be present. Faking a smile only when he is scheming is awfully easy to crack once they knew and letting out the secret while they are drunk, Sam felt like he wasted his time here.

    But Gran and Sia vouched for his abilities time and again, so he decided to give it a shot.

    "So, what are you scheming?"

    "I just wanted to steal that box you used just now and if not possible I would just make you take us separately from the group and once we escaped, I would kill you."

    "And why are you revealing that now?"

    "As I said, I cannot take chances, if by any chance I might have leaked my behavior when lying while I was drunk, Gran might notice and kill me. I have to stay alive."

    "Okay leave him guys. Let him talk." Sam said and took a seat. Soon, Sark started his story and they got the idea.

    Sark couldn¡¯t take the job at all. He didn¡¯t want to. Because his wife is pregnant and he wants to stay with her until delivery and also did not want to leave her and the kid alone in the early stages. That was a promise he made to his wife.

    And currently the Azure blood demons don¡¯t know their princess is pregnant. But once they knew the trouble would be apparent, so he decided to take Sam¡¯s help and escape before his wife¡¯s pregnant belly shows and then escape from Sam so that they can live peacefully.

    "Love makes people do stupid things. It just like how stupid the drunk people behave. They spill secrets and make idiotic decisions that will bring their doom."

    Sam said and looked at the guy before he continued.

    "Before this, you are a person that was actually a possible asset to my team who is worth certain risk and I am a rich guy with resources trying to hire you. We have some equal leverage.

    Now you are a guy with treacherous mindset and nned to scheme and also a person who does stupid things. Your leverage is gone and mine just got up.

    You tell me one thing. If you are in my position, would you recruit someone like you?"

    "No."

    "Then should I recruit you?"

    "No."

    "Do you want me to recruit you?"

    "I want you to save her."

    "Well, there is nothing in it for me, is there?"

    "Save her and give me five years, after my kid grew up a bit, I wille work for you. I will kill whom you want to kill and die if you want me to. But please help me now."

    "I have a better proposal." Sam said with a smile and after exining everything, Sark went into a deep thought.

    "It is your call. But I assure you. Your cultivation wouldn¡¯t stagnate, you, your wife and your child would be able to live in one of the most peaceful ces in the world. But before you can do any of that, you have to save her.

    While you make your decision which has to be quick because by now the Azure blood demons already confirmed you are staying in the forbidden zone somehow, I would like to inspect this house if you don¡¯t mind."

    With that Sam started using the observation ability on the house and when he did that on the ground, he could only go as deep as few feet. Because there is something that is obstructing even his observation ability.

    He started digging the soil using earth element and removed oneyer after another and then finally he saw something.

    A transparent barrier is housing a blue liquid under it.

    Sam expanded his digging and finally saw some traces. He is actually familiar with the formation that is creating the barrier. In fact, not the formation but rather the style of the formation and when he made his observation ability go past that barrier, he saw something else he was familiar with.

    A Heart.

 Chapter 975: Taking the deal back

    As soon as Sam saw what was inside this transparent barrier. A blue-colored heart which looked like a human heart beating under the transparent barrier, pumping a blue-colored liquid into the surrounding soil.

    This is extremely simr to the Sesh¡¯s heart he found when he went to find the meteorite sand ind and then it also reminded him of thatrge pirpetition ground and then the guardian.

    To this day, he doesn¡¯t know if Sesh¡¯s heart ced under the sea which created a poison zone in the sea was rted to the guardian. But he sure as hell knew that both hearts are rted.

    As soon as he saw this, he got the many answers he needed. The mutation might have been caused by the blue liquid that was circting and if his guess was right, it is demon blood and it affected the entire ecosystem and mutated every living being, and this guy whoever that made this possible might just be a person who is interested in experimenting with different species.

    The Azure blood demons and their internal conflict due to jealousy are just a means to an end for him.

    If Sam¡¯s guess is right, there is no such thing as the special weapon or special power that the demons get from here.

    That guy who nted this pumping heart just wants to see how long this whole setup would survive and how mutation it could cause and how much change would happen to the species. And Sam came to this conclusion by the decreasing energy in the blood cirction.

    Even though the energy difference is not exactly visible and it can even be considered negligible, Sam is using the observation ability and that ability works because it can even detect the things that are on a negligible level.

    The energy in the blood is of limited supply and as Sam extended the range of his observation ability, he got some new information.

    The whole setup didn¡¯t start with the current blood amount. The setup was started by at least fifty times the current amount of blood. Because there are some cavities made in the earth to contain the blood and most of them are empty right now.

    There are some containers with full blood which is being slowly emptied and joining the rest of the blood circting and being pumped by the heart.

    Sam must say he was impressed by this. The amount of work and thought process put behind this, the person who made this is nowhere stupid. He is a genius in formations and a niche science. Something regarding the blood and hearts of the beasts and other creatures. It is so niche that Sam doesn¡¯t even know what to call it and how to describe it. But it is somethingplicated and intelligent.

    But the one problem is that this is also horrific and terrible. At least a few thousand people were dead for research and it was covered up with the lie and a rationalization for the remaining half of the same family that produced that few thousand sacrifices, that these sacrifices created a life-saving weapon.

    But all that served was them being part of some kind of experiment that doesn¡¯t serve any purpose other than satisfying the curiosity of a perverse genius.

    After examining it, the rest of the team members who saw everything going under felt extremely shocked. Particrly after Sam exined it.

    Sark had a nk look on his face.

    "What is with that look?" Sam asked him in confusion. Why would an enemy to the Azure blood demons be so shocked when he found out their trump card is a farce.

    Sam would have been delighted.

    "That was my hostage."

    Sark said in a low voice. His mood which was already gloomy seemed to have hit an all-time low.

    "What did you say?" Saber Monarch asked in an even confused tone. And suddenly Sam and Gran had thought and exchanged a nce.

    "You were thinking of using this ¡¯invincible weapon¡¯ as a hostage to escape with your wife in the worst case scenario. And for that to happen you must have something or you believe you have something on you that could help you hold this thing hostage.

    Your wife seemed to have given you a gift before everything happened. What is it?"

    Sam asked as he dissected the situation.

    Sark became silent.

    Sam looked at him and said with a smile.

    "I am changing the deal. You have to give me that object for the deal to be active."

    Sark looked at him in frustration.

    "Can you keep your word for a second? You are changing deal just like that?"

    "Well, before you had leverage and now you don¡¯t. You are in a worse situation than before and you are the one that nned to scheme against me. And to think that even a clown-like you who spills everything when he was drunk and couldn¡¯t even fake a smile but still wants to scheme against me is already infuriating. Just be grateful that I am not cornering you with all I have.

    And the only reason I am even giving you a chance is the baby inside your wife. Because it is unfair for the children to suffer for the ipetence and irresponsibility of the stupid parents like you."

    "Watch what you say, Sam," Sark replied coldly.

    "What? You are offended because I called you irresponsible and ipetent? Do you know any person who has a mindset of a responsible parent does? Keep his genitals in control so that a baby wouldn¡¯t be brought into the middle of chaos. Particrly chaos you cannot control."

    Sam became incredibly frustrated and yelled thest sentence.

    The whole team was surprised by his outrage.

    This is not something Sam would do for any other issue. He looked at Sark after taking a deep breath and said.

    "I know you think you are somewhat admirable and have a moral high ground because you are fighting for your wife and the unborn child. But I call that bullshit. Love is not some stupid feeling you get out of nowhere.

    And a person of your ability, who doesn¡¯t have any backing any sure method that could save both of your assessments should have thought twice before going for amitment.

    Even if you did, you should have controlled your penis and shouldn¡¯t have made her pregnant. Because you didn¡¯t know how you will fucking figure a way out of this shitty situation.

    Now, I am even having second thoughts on offering you a job. And you know what. Fuck it. There is no job. Try to get out of the situation on your own and live the life of a refuge in the same you call home and make your child live a life with no connection to society or anything else. That if you don¡¯t get him killed after they find out your wife has that child in her stomach."

    He then turned towards therge pit he made and let Raiju out.

    When Raiju came out, he smelled the blue blood and felt extremely hungry. His eyes wereced with greed.

    "How much closer this would make us for the next breakthrough?"

    Sam asked and Raiju replied through the mental connection.

    From the looks of it, if Yanwu consumed all the sr fragments that are left and Raiju consumed all the blood and the heart that was left here along with a bunch of Azure Blood demons, they would be able to reach the Peak of the Initial stage directly.

    The only downside is the time take for the digestion of the energy.

    The body of the demon that Raiju ate is still being converted to energy.

    It is taking a long time.

    By the time Sam finally broke through to the Peak stage, the rest of the yers he had would be catching up to the middle stage and some evente stage.

    The lead would be maintained. But when he looked at his subordinates, he felt like the lead is not enough.

    He thought for a moment and decided to make a n for the consumption.

    "I will store the blood and the heart forter for faster consumption. If you take it as they were, they would be taking a long time to digest. If we catch a few more demons while we are here you can eat them.

    If you take the blood and heart now, you would be stuck for over a year before our breakthrough and you wouldn¡¯t be on top of your condition for fights.

    I want the breakthrough in three months thetest by which the first phase of the families should be over."

    While he is talking to himself and Raiju, Sark interrupted.

    "I will take your deal. Whatever you want. I will do it. Save my wife and daughter."

    Sam and the team changed their focus on him instantly.

    "I said I don¡¯t have a deal for you anymore. The only reason I am still standing is to take this shit away. And by the way, I forgot to mention, the Azure Blood demons already knew you are here. So, get ready to take their wrath."

 Chapter 976: Escape

    After Sam¡¯s outburst, Sark started begging Sam like his life depended on it. He didn¡¯t have any cards up his sleeves and he knelt down on the floor while crying. Sam finally heaved a sigh.

    Sam made a deal with Sark. Even though he didn¡¯t exactly like the man, he still had some battle prowess and even though he wanted to stay with his wife for a long time, Sam doesn¡¯t have too much problem as he had a position in mind for a long time.

    But the current problem is the demons that are going toe to look for them here. If they couldn¡¯t confirm and second guess even after two elders are dead, then these demons really are going to be in trouble soon.

    While thinking of a n for them, Sam decided to take the blood and heart away from the pit.

    He decided to store everything inside a pool in the divine dimension, but before that, he has to check the item that kept Sark thinking that he has something under control.

    And when Sark did take out an item, Sam was half expecting it, but was still surprised, because it is exactly not what he thought it would be.

    There is a solid blue-colored rock-like substance in his hand and it is the shape of the pointy nail.

    "So, what did she say this would do?"

    "She said that to activate the weapon, I have to dig through the soil and stab it inside the core and in this case the heart.

    My n was that if I use it now, the Azure blood demons will lose it forever."

    Sark exined what his wife told him.

    "Well, it is good that I came here and met you. Otherwise, you guy would have died along with a bunch of Azure blood demon elders."

    "What do you mean?"

    "The only reason the beasts didn¡¯t harm you, is because of this thing. This is either made by the blood essence of some second branch Azure blood demons or their bone marrows, I cannot identify it at the moment. But this is something the beasts wouldn¡¯t attack.

    But there is also a reason why they alle towards the stone house and only stay within the range of the forest, not going too far away.

    They are all attracted towards the Blood and heart underground.

    If there is a chance they wille and devour and for some reason, they have a weird connection with this heart, if you stab this in the heart, the blood pumping would be affected and the beasts would storm through this area.

    They might be afraid of the small barrier that was made of bones under the earth, but the formation will destroy the barrier once it was destroyed and it would make the beastspletely crazy-making them go through everyone that stayed within the vicinity."

    Everyone was stunned.

    "but does that mean, if you take these away, the same thing might happen?"

    "The same thing will happen."

    "So, why are you taking them away? Wouldn¡¯t it put us in danger?"

    "Not really. I would take them away as soon as the demonse here and we will use the dimensional drifter to go away. I will tell the next n we go depending on how many demons wille here."

    While Sam is thinking about how to proceed in different cases and scenarios, something else is happening in the estate of the Azure blood demons.

    Sark¡¯s wife is currently huddled up in her room as she cried.

    Her father entered the room and said.

    "It is confirmed that Sark is actually staying in the forbidden zone. I want to ask you. Did you give the nail to him?"

    "Yes."

    The father had a disappointed expression on his face. There was no trace of anger or frustration. Just pure disappointment.

    Looking at his disappointment, the daughter was the one who got angry.

    "This wouldn¡¯t have happened if you have just let me go. All because of your ego that this happened. You can only me yourself."

    "Yes, I can only me myself for being a responsible father. You grew up as a princess of the Azure blood demon family. Even if you didn¡¯t ask for it, you never tried to reject it. You enjoyed all the attention, you took pride in that position, you savored the envy of others, you looked down on the whole world from your privileged position.

    But for a position like that you need to make some sacrifices. I cannot let you sully the position and just run away. The very pride and fame you took advantage of from childhood will be gone. If you wanted that much free will and love, you could have lost in any one of the challenges for your position.

    But you didn¡¯t. Your peers who didn¡¯t have that position didn¡¯t have any restrictions, they can marry whoever they want.

    Now, you are envying that and rebelling calling the very same position you enjoyed as a cage.

    And in that rebellious nature, you even gave the life-saving measure of the family to someone who you thought loves you more than your father.

    I am just disappointed in myself for not being a good enough father to teach you when I had the chance."

    The father left and there was an elder waiting outside who asked as soon as he came out.

    "Do you think this would work?"

    "Who knows? I just gave try. This guilt-tripping worked with her mother. I don¡¯t see why it wouldn¡¯t work with her. There is bound to be some seeds of thoughts nted."

    With that, both of them left.

    And just like the father thought, she indeed started thinking. There is hesitation and second-guessing all her decisions, but that is only temporary because as she felt the small bump on her stomach, she understood that she went too far to back down. If only her father knew, he wouldn¡¯t have wasted time with words.

    After a few minutes, another Elder came and asked her.

    "Your father wants you toe to the forbidden zone with us to ask the nail back. He promised that he would let him go alive."

    The Elder was expecting her to agree, but to his surprise, even though there was hesitation, she gritted her teeth and said.

    "I am noting. Please say that to my father."

    Her father didn¡¯t expect the stubbornness which ording to his calctions should have been gone after the guilt-tripping.

    But it didn¡¯t.

    So, all the elders started their journey to the forbidden zone.

    When they finally arrived near the circle around the stone house, even before they could make their demand, Sam waved his hand and the heart and blood shifted into the divine dimension.

    As they moved, the beasts that are already walking towards the ring after identifying the presence of the demons, flew into a rage.

    The elders who saw the beastsing became anxious and the head said.

    "That bastard seemed to have activated the attack, we need to go into the stone house to stay safe. Let us go."

    And they ran inside. But when they entered, they didn¡¯t see anything except arge pit. They didn¡¯t know anything about this. The family head blindly trusted the guy who set the formation up because he was far stronger than these people and didn¡¯t have any need to set a trap like this to kill them.

    If only they understood that guy¡¯s perverseness.

    The formation was deactivated and the beasts ran straight to the stone house and immediately the whole scenario turned into chaos. The elders started fighting the beasts and tried to escape, but they couldn¡¯t.

    Their only way is to ughter a path through the horde of beasts or dying there.

    Meanwhile, Sam entered the city with the rest of the group and ran towards the estate.

    Within no time, the beasts wouldpletely go out of control and there is a possibility that they would run towards the city. And even if they didn¡¯t the news of them going crazy would definitely travel to the estate and even if that fails, the elders would definitely send an emergency message.

    The forces of the demons would definitely make a move and that would be the perfect time for Sam to make him move.

    An hourter, everything went on as Sam expected and the forces are moving out of the city.

    Sam took this to his advantage and took Sark with him in the dimensional drifter and entered the estate.

    Even though it is a bit expensive, Sam decided to cover the loss from the demons. After entering the estate, it was the task of shadow mice to find the location of the princess and within an hour, they are already inside the room where the princessid down.

    Sam cut the reunion drama short and took both of them away.

    The group traveled to the foot of the mountain and waited for the chaos to be over.

    After a few hours, Sam once again arrived at the forbidden zone and made a sweep there. He collected the corpses of both beasts and demons. Luckily the battle was notpletely over and only the battlefield was moved to a different location which gave him plenty of time to gain some corpses.

 Chapter 977: Grow faster

    After finishing all the collections he could get, Sam left along with this team. He directly took them all to the tempest valley where they were given an introduction to the Old Beast, which made all of them gulp in nervousness.

    The Old Beast looked at them with intense coldness and looked dead in their eyes.

    "I would like to leave a small soul fragment in your consciousness so that you would stay loyal to him and I could worry less. What do you say?"

    He asked all of them which made them nervous.

    Sam just stayed silent and when they looked for him for help, he said.

    "He wouldn¡¯t listen to me. If I hadn¡¯t brought you here now, he would have kicked my ass directly."

    "So, you figured it would be better to get our asses kicked instead of yours?"

    "Of course, is that even a question?"

    "You either create soul contracts with him or I forcefully use my soul fragment in your souls and as soon as you get a single thought about betraying him, your soul would explode. You decide."

    After some thought, they simply agreed to create a soul contract with Sam. This is simr to the soul contract Sam forcefully made between the Saber Monarch and the Third family head back in the crimson reed realm.

    He knew this woulde and all he has to do is to be careful while travelling around before he took them to any of his core areas. He cannot possibly roam around with people stronger than him and he doesn¡¯t want to be the bad guy ande out as one with no trust. Even if not having trust is most rational thing one could do. So, he just took them to the Old beast and let him be the bad guy.

    Now the contracts were created and after they left the tempest valley and arrived at the feathered, Sam exined.

    "I am sorry. He is old, powerful and stubborn and bit too protective, he will not let me roam around with someone who had no restrictions whatsoever and have a chance to betray me anytime. My father died just like that and he was devastated that he couldn¡¯t save him.

    So, he became a bit pain in the ass."

    "We understand." Sia is the first one to reply and the rest looked at her in surprise. If anything, she should be the one who is pissed than the rest. At least that is what Gran thought. After all, while the rest came to honor a contract, Sia came solely because of her interest in Sam, she should be most offended.

    But it seems like she is the most forgiving and as for Five elemental king, he is not mad at all. In fact, there was an instance that he offered a contract himself.

    "Anyway, let me to show you my base."

    Sam then gave them a tour and showed the whole area while exining everything and after he was done, he spoke.

    "Sark, you and your wife will be staying here. You are going to guard the whole with your life on line. After your kid grew up, you can take them to one of the schools in the. You can live the rest of your life here. Unless and of course if a war happens which is notpletely out of possibilities.

    You will also be enforcer here. I am hearingints about some youngsters getting out of hand, you take care of them. But if by any chance I hear something about you misusing the power, you would be in trouble.

    I might not be able to do anything, but I guess the rest of the team will be enough to nail you down. So, take care."

    With that, they left and went back to deste.

    "Take a vacation for a few days and roam around the. I will be sending you guys out to scout for the next few months. I want all the information on the next set of our targets. The ones in the Peak stage of Pre-transcendence of Astral ne.

    Get all the information on them. What they are doing? If they are in any trouble. What are the possible ways to recruit them? What can we offer? What do they need? Their needs and their wants. I want everything that could be useful to us in recruiting them to the team.

    Now, go and enjoy. If you want you can go to different ces connected to our organization and take a look. You guys will be the strongest there, so there wouldn¡¯t be any trouble for you.

    Sia, you can stay in the feathered. The liquor research department was moved there and I am going to send Ape there."

    After sending them away, he went into istion.

    He decided to take a week off and formte a n for a faster breakthrough.

    If he reached the Peak stage of Initiation, then he would have some standing. With his tricks and techniques along with the shadow sword, he would be able to hold himself against some of the opponents in worst case scenario.

    Even if the battle prowess might not be directly helpful, he would at least be able to gain some extra ess to his other abilities like observation, the energy vision and gain more ess into the formations and inscriptions which are essentially the major aspects within his arsenal.

    So, for one week he conducted all kinds of tests on raiju and the demon blood and heart to find the most suitable and the fastest way to digest it.

    And after some ns he formted inside the divine dimension, the most he could speed up is four months.

    He started setting up the n and for that he has to use the tempest valley and Raiju has to go through some struggle.

    He ordered his subordinates to start some construction in the tempest valley and Old Beast prevented lightning from striking the subordinates while they are working on the construction.

    After that, he sent the team to different realms and went on with the n.

    He finished the formation after the construction ispleted.

    The formation has only one function. It focuses the lightning that was striking in a single area and focuses it in a single point and mellows it down a little.

    Raiju will sit in the centre of the formation and consumes the potions of blood and heart slowly.

    And he channels the lightning energy to breakdown the whole blood and heart so that he could consume it faster.

    He is diluting the blood with lightning to absorb it faster and dissolve it in his own body.

    And Sam would sit with him in the middle of the formation taking the lightning strikes along with him and also channeling the energy so that Raiju wouldn¡¯t feel too burdened by it.

    The remaining beasts will be kept in a ring around the construction where the lightning wouldn¡¯t reach. But the energy from both of them could be channeled.

    This process will go on for four months until they reached the Peak stage of Initiation.

    The Old beast looked at Sam and then at the sky.

    He could understand Sam¡¯s desperation, particrly when he thought of the team members Sam brought here. They are strong and full of potential. If Sam wants to catch up with them, It would take more than just resources.

    He has to go through many more rituals like he is going through now.

    But what worried him even more are the circumstances the people are in. Except for Sia and Gran who followed him voluntarily, the remaining people had to join because of Sam¡¯s help in the desperate situations.

    As much as it looked like a mere coincidence, it would be hard for even him to digest that someone across the world is going through something that Sam could take care of at the exact time that Sam is looking for the strong subordinates.

    This way too fortunate.

    And unlike many people and even Sam, the Old Beast believes in fortune and fate.

    But it is not exactly an absolute. In fact, it is an ever changing stream that changes its direction and flow because of the spontaneous obstacles that mighte at any time.

    From the looks of it though, it seems like there are no obstacles for Sam in quite a while which is making him a bit anxious.

    But in his current situation, he cannot do anything even if he suspicious. He just has to wait. Wait until the time for him to get out of herees and once ites he would be able to see what the reason behind this actual game is.

    As he looked towards the sky in hopes of looking past the realms, the Gambler is also looking down in a screen which is disying the ritual Sam is going through with a smile on his face which couldn¡¯t be seen.

    "If only I can make you grow even faster. If only I can make the time run faster. Come up Sam. I am waiting for you."

 Chapter 978: Another Metamorphosis

    Four months passed.

    Sam is still inside the tempest valley along with the beasts inside the structure. By now Raiju already took thest of the contents from the blood and heart portions Sam made.

    The dilution of lightning was really a great method and it worked perfectly ording to his calctions. Now all of them are on verge of the breakthrough.

    Sam and the beasts are pushing the barrier together and Old beast kept a keen eye on them to make sure that nothing wrong happens.

    As they became closer and closer to reach the peak stage of Intiation, Sam suddenly felt a weird sensation in his ees and on his spine near the shoulder des.

    He was familiar with this sensation and the experience for this not exactly pleasant. In fact it was one of the most painful experiences of his life.

    It was when he broke through to the middle stage of Astral ne initiation, when the metamorphosis of the l lungs happened.

    The change in the lungs due to yanwu¡¯s bloodline. Now the same thing is happening but to a different organ. This time it is even happening for two organs instead of one.

    Eyes and the back.

    He could feel the blood dripping from his eyes and the energy in his body slowly turned into wind elemental energy.

    This made him frown in confusion.

    He thought since he took the energy from the lightning elemental demons the metamorphosis might have a link to the raiju bloodline. But from the looks of it, it is going on with the order of his contracts.

    Since Sky is his second contract the wind elemental energy is the one that is causing the metamorphosis.

    Sam gritted his teeth and tried his best to control the paining from his eyes and the pain slowly extended to the optic nerves.

    But his focus on the pain waspletely disrupted as his back also started hurting. He could feel the bones protruding from the spine portion between the shoulder des.

    His back also started bleeding and Sam couldn¡¯t even take the pain anymore and started roaring on top of his lungs.

    "Ahhhhhhhhhh..."

    His whole body felt weak and fell forward. His hands involuntarily reached to his back as he felt the bone protrusions growing more and more.

    The increasing pain made him punch the ground and cracks appeared in the structure surrounding them which shielded them from the lightning.

    Old Beast looked at his situation and hindered the lightning from striking them. He had an extremely serious expression on his face as he looked at Sam¡¯s condition.

    There is a sense of familiarity which he couldn¡¯t remember where he got this from as he looked at Sam who is growing a new bones out of his body.

    The beasts waited for Sam¡¯s breakthrough and everyone wanted tofort him when he saw. But they didn¡¯t dare touch him as his groans of pain became more and more intense.

    Soon, the bone grew into two wings and slowly flesh started forming over the bone frame and even feathers started growing over it.

    And the eyes also stopped bleeding and he could slowly feel his vision returned.

    Sam finally stopped feeling pain and his energy started flowing freely as it pushed the barrier of breaking through like it was pushing a paper door.

    But after the breakthrough, Sam didn¡¯t feel a single ounce of joy, instead there is only relief that the pain was over.

    Even that relief didn¡¯tst long as he looked at his wings.

    His wings are extremely simr to that of the wings of Sky and when Sky saw those wings he became increasingly proud and happy and even stood beside Sam topare the simrities.

    Except for the size, those wings are same in every other aspect.

    Even though, Sam is smiling when he looked at Sky¡¯s joy, it was particrly forced, because he doesn¡¯t know how to hide these. But before that, he decided to try and fly with them.

    He tried to feel them and move them and he managed to do that with a surprising ease as if he has been doing all his life.

    As he pped his wings continuously, he levitated a bit. And that is only because he didn¡¯t use any spiritual energy. As he channeled the spiritual energy, the wings pped faster and he slowly started flying.

    They worked best when he channeled pure wind elemental energy and when he activated wind elemental fusion, the energy consumption has been reduced by more than half.

    He became overjoyed with all the new things he could do. But after all the trials, he once again focused on the problem at hands.

    How to hide these wings? He couldn¡¯t just let them out in the open. Even though winged races aremon and no one would care too much, he couldn¡¯t just stay like this. It would be hard for him to adjust.

    He then remembered the Nagas and mermaids, their tail transforms itself into legs when they needed it to, maybe he thought there would be a simr situation.

    So, he went to meet Chandra who is within his newly createdb.

    When Chandra saw Sam¡¯s wings, he was dumbfounded.

    After Sam asked him about how they do it, Chandra exined.

    Sam went to his residence without anyone seeing and sat crosslegged.

    He circted energy ording to the cultivation method of Myriad beast bloodlines and slowly cirction the bloodline of Sky sovereign roc.

    As he did that and folded the wings as much as he can, they bones started retracting into his body as much as he can and the flesh over the wings waspressed too.

    After he was done, he checked himself and wore the clothes over it. Nothing is visible when he stood like that.

    He took his feather coat off and once again circted the energy in the same way he did whilepressing the wings. The wings expanded with a whoosh and tore through the clothes he was wearing. He pped the wings and it all worked normally.

    Then he proceeded to modify the feathered coat. The wings are a great addition to him in the battle and he cannot be needed to take the coat off every time he wanted to use them.

    But he couldn¡¯t think of any possible modifications that would let him use the coat spontaneously like he wanted without the presence of spirit.

    But he didn¡¯t want to enchant the coat with a spirit. He want a spirit to induce itself in it.

    After all, the feather coat is made of ck meteorite Sand and the feathers of the Golden Sun crow. If a spirit induces itself, it might even resemble the Golden Sun crow. It is a waste to enchant it and he is sure that the spirit induction is near.

    So, hepromised for the moment and didn¡¯t tinker with the coat. After settling the issue temporarily, Sam went to meet his subordinates who already returned frompleting their assignments.

    Sam sent them to collect the information regarding the Peak stage cultivators of Astral ne Pre-transcendence.

    There are three targets remaining in that cultivation stage and the team managed to get information on all three of them.

    Saber Monarch acted alone and he gathered information regarding a woman. She is a sole cultivator who recently opened a sect solely for women.

    She is a fire elemental user and she is famous for her fire elemental spells.

    No one knows where she was born or where she was from. But it was told that she lives within a volcano and even her sect is located in the premises of the volcano.

    The sect for women was created with the sole purpose of stopping some of the demon families who are indulging themselves in too much human very.

    Sam was surprised that they are encountering demons once again this early.

    It seems like the demons are increasing in amount as they moved forward and even more coincidental thing is these demons are also blood demons.

    But they are of different elements and different blood colors.

    Five elemental King went along with Agar and they got information on the second candidate who is also mysterious of them all.

    He is a challenger.

    He roams across the realms as he challenges the prodigies of each realms for duels. He would always challenge the peers and even some seniors with a bit of superior cultivation to get a proper challenge.

    He didn¡¯t kill any of his challengers in a duel. He always showed mercy, but if someone ambushes him, he kills them in the most brutal way.

    It was hard to find his exact whereabouts as not many people managed to see his face. In fact, he is also master of disguise and no one knows what his true face is.

    But one thing is for sure, he would reveal his name when throwing a challenge. His home realm is actually far from the Crimson reed realm and Nine moon realm and this is not even his operating area, but he only recently got closer as he couldn¡¯t find challenges within his realm.

    Even now Five elemental King didn¡¯t manage to find his exact whereabouts, instead he managed to get news of where he would be next.

 Chapter 979: Necromancer

    The team worked better than Sam thought and both Saber Monarch and Five elemental King brought decent information. The three targets are not as high profile as Five elemental king, Saber Monarch and Gran.

    So, it is a bit difficult to track them. But they still managed to bring most of the information.

    But Gran and Sia outdid these two. They managed to not just get information, they actually even started the negotiations with the other party regarding the recruitment and even managed to find out what the other party wanted.

    This caused Sam and the rest of the team to be shocked and Sia is so smug that Saber Monarch almost punched her in the face.

    "This is Sia¡¯s talent. She can actually be quite a good negotiator and skilled in politics. If we were part of a regr organization, she would already be an elder and no one would be herpetition." Gran praised her sister without any shame.

    "That is great. You might be a better asset to the team than your sister." Sam said jokingly only to earn a re from Gran. But he ignored it and went through the information.

    The third target is a necromancer.

    He goes to where the chaos is and where the wars happen, if the bodies are left uncollected, he would collect them, if somebody is willing to sell the dead bodies he would buy them.

    Doesn¡¯t matter if it is a body of beast, human, demon or any other creature, as long as he felt it was useful, he would buy them.

    Even though he is a bit famous the only problem with him is that no one knows where he stays. Every time he appears at a ce and gets the corpses of different races and creatures, he will once again disappear.

    They only knew that he stays in the Talon realm, but they don¡¯t know exactly where he stays or even which he resides in.

    But Sia and Gran not only managed to find out where he stays, they even managed to meet him, talk to him and exin their stand and found out what it takes to recruit this man.

    They were actually pretty nervous whether this information would be of any use after listening to his desires.

    Because, this man is actually pretty satisfied with his life. He doesn¡¯t have any love problems, no health problems or any other curses or traps he needs to be freed. And he doesn¡¯t even need any resources.

    The only focus in his life is his craft of necromancy. He is proficient in all kinds of necromancy. Whether physical, soul or shadow, he does them all. He is good at spirit enchantment and in fact for every three months he takes customers for any interesting enchantment.

    His only care in this life is the necromancy and his only desire is to meet someone who can defeat him in pure necromancy skill.

    If there is a person that could defeat him like that, he would do anything person says except for dying without asking a second question.

    While team is a bit baffled by the request, Sam is actually pretty excited. He never met a proper necromancer until now. Even though he saw a couple and he met a lot of vampire, ghouls and wights who are natural necromancers, he didn¡¯t meet someone who looks at it as a craft and tries to develop it without strength being their sole goal.

    And this caused him to make a decision. He decided to go and meet this person. Whether he would be able to recruit him or not, this would be a worthwhile trip as they might exchange some ideas.

    "Let¡¯s go to Talon realm. We are meeting this guy, Tamas."

    "But what about the necromancer boss?"

    "What about it? I am a necromancer too. Even though I am not particrly good at it. I am decent. Let¡¯s go and see if I can manage to convince this guy."

    "Boss, you are a necromancer too?"

    "Of course, I am a lot of things and why are you being surprised even now. You should have gotten used to it."

    With that the team moved to the Talon realm in the dimensional drifter.

    After reaching the First in the Talon realm, the twins took the lead and showed the way to them. They travelled through the forest and found a small stream. When they went upstream, they found a water falls falling into argeke which is the origin of the stream.

    They dove into theke and swam deeper and deeper until they reached the bottom and found a creek inside.

    They swam through the creek opposing a great force of water pushing against them and finally reappeared in anotherrgeke underground.

    When they came out, they saw a number of tunnel entrances in front of them.

    They seemed to be in an underground cave which has a glowing roof creating a dim light.

    Gran and Sia took lead once again and led them through a tunnel.

    Even the tunnels are glowing with the same dim light. After fifteen minutes of walk, they reached a dead end.

    But Gran and Sia knocked on the rock wall at the same time. The rock wall slid to the side giving way.

    When they walked through the entrance, everyone looked at it in awe.

    It is arge room and a young man is sitting on a rock in the middle of it.

    There seemed to a translucent curtain of death energy separating him from the surroundings.

    Around the rock there are a bunch of undead creatures walking around with a bunch of blunt weapons.

    Sam looked at the surroundings keenly as he tested the new changes to his eyes. He started his journey without any break after the breakthrough and he only mainly tested the wings and almost forgot about the eyes.

    His eyesight is great to begin with so he didn¡¯t notice the big different when he travelled. But after he came to the cave, he could see the difference. The dimness, didn¡¯t hinder his sight one bit, even when he was in water and in darkness, he could see normally just as if he was standing on a hill and looking at horizon.

    That is only the start of it. Now as he focused on the undead creatures, he could clearly see the minute movement of their hair on the body.

    The more he focused, the more he could see. When he channeled spiritual energy, he could even see the fibers of the robes the young man wore in the middle of the room.

    When he attached the energy vision to this existing ability, he can see the energy waves in apletely new way.

    This might open a lot of new doors for him.

    He decided to test the eye sightter under different circumstances, and shifted his focus back to the man sitting in the middle.

    Sia and Gran didn¡¯t move forward anymore and just waited there.

    After twenty minutes, the young man came out of his meditation and walked out.

    He greeted Sia with a smile and asked.

    "You came back faster than I thought."

    Sia also smiled and introduced everyone leaving Sam tost.

    "He is Sam. Our boss. He is the one that wants to recruit you."

    He shook Sam¡¯s hand and said.

    "You are young and promising. To be able to recruit these people at your age. You must me more capable than you look."

    While Tamas is studying Sam, Sam is doing the same.

    Tamas is like a young man in his thirties. His skin is pale and his hair is a few inches long covering his face a bit.

    But one thing that couldn¡¯t go unnoticed is that he reeks of death.

    Sam could almost see the death aura manifesting into a shape behind him.

    While Sam is taking a proper look at him, Tamas spoke.

    "There is a familiar feelinging from you Sam. Have I met you before by any chance?" He asked in a genuine confusion.

    Sam just chuckled and replied. "I am sure I wouldn¡¯t forget, if I met you before. I am good at noticing people. Particrly, a man of your talent."

    "Don¡¯t tter me. I actually told my conditions to Sia. If you can find a necromancer that could defeat me in terms of pure skill, then I would definitely obey hismand even if it is joining you."

    "If you can give me some details about the challenge, I want to give it a try."

    "You are a necromancer?"

    "I would like to think so. And since you said it ispetition of skill, I hope you don¡¯t mind the cultivation level and would suppress yours to my level."

    "Of course, I don¡¯t mind. But I would like to test you before thepetition. No offense, but I wouldn¡¯t want to waste my time if you are not worth it."

    "Not a problem. What is your test?"

    "Tell me how many undead are there in this room."

 Chapter 980: Necromancer Battle

    Everyone in the team were surprised when they heard Tamas¡¯ question.

    They involuntarily turned around to take a look. From what they could see there are over a hundred undead creatures roaming around in the room and this question didn¡¯t seem so hard.

    "There are a hundred and eight undead. What is so tough about it to be considered a test?" Saber Monarch blurted out.

    But Gran was the one that replied to his question.

    "No, there are around one hundred and forty undead creatures. There are shadow undeads hidden. I could sense them a bit."

    Five elemental King also looked at the whole room and then at Tamas who is smiling and Sam who is looking around casually.

    He didn¡¯t want to speak, because he knew that neither Tamas or Sam are stupid enough to ask such a simple question and take such a simple question seriously if the answer is that simple. As usual, he is most patient guy in the room.

    Sam used energy vision and took a look. He must say that the metamorphosised eyes are as good as that telescope he got from the Charbhum realm, maybe he could even see better than that.

    And for his own vision he could use the enhancem along with the energy vision which is not possible with the telescope.

    After he looked at the surroundings, he replied.

    "There are three hundred and twenty four undead creatures in the room. And if we count you, it would three hundred and twenty-five."

    When Sam said that, Gran and Saber Monarch were shocked. The number Sam gave and the numbers they gave are not even remotely close.

    And thest sentence about Tamas being an undead creature, that was another shock, they became vignt and got ready in case Tamas made a move.

    But the expected disy of rage didn¡¯te from Tamas. Instead he smiled and said.

    "Well, done. You are great. I didn¡¯t expect that you would notice me. I was really sure you are going to miss that."

    "It is actually impossible considering I am also kind of simr to you. But I couldn¡¯t pin point exactly what your part is. Ghoul?"

    "Yes, what are you? I couldn¡¯t even sense your part at all."

    "Vampire."

    As their conversation went on the rest of the team became confused. They are openly calling themselves as undead creatures, ghoul and vampire. They couldn¡¯t understand this at all.

    "Wait, you mean that he is right about the three hundred and twenty four undead creatures?" Saber Monrach focused on the number more than their undead creature exchange.

    "Yes, he is right."

    Tamas replied and pped his hand twice.

    The whole room suddenly dimmed a bit, but a lot of creatures came out. Some shadow undead rose from the shadows and the souls or specters made themselves visible in the air.

    Saber Monrach once again counter the undead creatures and was stunned.

    He didn¡¯t expect that he wasn¡¯t able to identify a soul roaming that close to him. Suddenly he felt unsafe.

    As if sensing his emotions, Tamas replied.

    "Don¡¯t panic. If they were attacking you, then you would have definitely sensed their presence. It was just that their nature is to be hidden and your instincts didn¡¯t warn you because they don¡¯t have any intention of hurting you."

    Even though, he reassured them, it is hard for them to just let it go.

    "I guess, I passed the test. So, what about thepetition?"

    "A battle of necromancy. We are not going to use our already piled up undead creatures.

    We are going to use fresh corpses, in the field. We wouldn¡¯t use any other elemental attacks, phyiscal attacks and such. You can only use spontaneously created undead creatures to attack each other. We can move all we want, but even then we are not allowed to use other elemental energies.

    I will suppress my cultivation to your level. Are you okay with that?"

    "That sounds fair. But the real question is where do we get the fresh corpses? It is not like they are lying around."

    "There is a reason why I chose this realm. They are just too many creatures killing each other. Stay in the Front beak city¡¯s Mavin Inn. The Inn owner will inform the location and time of the battle. And take this token. You will get some special treatment."

    Sam took the token and the team left in the same way they came in and they went to the Inn in the city.

    When they gave the token to the Inn¡¯s receptionist, he was stunned and went to get the owner. The owner came and behaved extremely docilely and brought them to a special section of the rooms.

    They were given finest food and liquor.

    Sam and the team stayed for the three days and in these three days, Sam focused mostly on testing the eyes.

    The few conclusions he reached is that now his range of normal eye sight increased by ten fold at least and even within that range, he could see every detail like he was looking at it throw a magnifying ss.

    His peripheral vision increased two fold. He could see what a person beside him is doing without even trying even when he is looking straight ahead.

    And the final enhancement is the focus. When he channeled spiritual energy into the eyes, he could zoom into a object or a person and in case he did it to a person, he could see the energy flow of his body a bit without the help of energy vision.

    When he used the energy vision and this focused vision together, he could directly see the energy flow in a person¡¯s body. Of course, it helps if the person¡¯s guard is down and when the other party is stronger than Sam and had a lot of energy, it is hard for the focused vision to get the clear picture, but because of the energy vision which could read the energy in normal, he could get a clearer picture even if the person is a bit stronger than him.

    If the person is too strong and the energy is being masked deliberately, the more he focused the more confused he would get.

    After three days, the message they are finally waiting for came.

    Sam and the team were escorted by the inn owner directly to the location where Tamas is already waiting.

    After greeting Tamas with utmost respect, the inn owner left.

    Tamas then gestured the group to follow him before they reached a certain location.

    It is arge open field in the middle of a forest and a bunch of beasts, humans, yakshas and even some barbarians and finally the birdmen which are highest in numberid dead.

    "The talon realm is like a migrant nation. Many other racese here to make a living because of the rich resources, but the talon realm doesn¡¯t like that and considers this as someone raiding their home.

    They are not against some other racesing here and developing an unexplorednd and getting rich, but they are against peope thate specifically after thend under the birdmen¡¯s control.

    So the disputes go on and on.

    I need a lot of corpses for my research and collection, so I made a deal with the rest of the city here.

    I explored a danegrous zone and created a bunch of resources for the city. And within a few miles radius around the city, every dead body that appears is mine.

    I was looking for a battle that might have happened here and here it is.

    So, shall we begin?"

    Sam and the group looked at therge patch. The battle seemed to be a bit brutal. They could still feel the energy residues left behind by these dead men.

    The battle must have happened a few minutes ago.

    This is a perfect ce for a nercromancer.

    Sam and Tamas walked to the either side of the battle field and they got ready to make their move. Tamas suppressed his cultivation and looked at Sam and both nodded at each other, indicating they are ready and the battle began.

    Unlike other times, the battle didn¡¯t begin with a shy first move, rather it began with creating undead.

    As both of them are Astral ne cultivators, the range with which they create undead increased a lot, although it doesn¡¯t even cover the half of the field, they can control the created undead throughout the whole field.

    Tamas turned the corpses near him into undead and he did so faster than Sam, who iste by more than ten seconds.

    Tamas was confused a bit by this dy, if Sam is this slow in creating undead, then things wouldn¡¯t be as easy.

    As the undead creatures from both sides of the field ran forward, they threw the corpses that are lying in the middle towards their masters so that they would fall within their range of undead creation.

    Sam has sent four undead creatures and while Tamas has five. The timing and the number both indicated that Sam is on the losing side. And what surprised them even more is that Sam¡¯s undead didn¡¯t stop Tamas¡¯ undead even though he is clearly on the offensive.

    In fact, they gave way to let them go and moved towards Tamas.

    Tamas¡¯ frown deepened as he thought his judgement might have been wrong, but it didn¡¯t take long before the frown turned into surprise.

 Chapter 981: Possession

    Sam¡¯s undead which dodged the undead creatures of Tamas and let them pass through, even though he looked like he was at a disadvantage, didn¡¯t go towards Tamas as expected.

    Because they focused on the dead bodies on Tamas¡¯side. They threw the smaller bodies towards Sam and therger bodies were being destroyed by them. Tamas was baffled for a second before he came out of that shock.

    Sam didn¡¯t go after the necromancer directly, instead, he focused on the one thing the necromancer cannot afford to lose no matter what. The source of the undead.

    Tamas immediately made a move, he created the shadow undead out of the bodies that are on verge of copse from Sam¡¯s undead to preserve something. And then made these shadow undead to kill Sam¡¯s undead.

    By now the original undead that he sent out almost reached Sam. Tamas didn¡¯t take the same approach as Sam to destroy the dead bodies since his undead already reached the main target. But before the undead could even attack Sam, four shadows came out of Sam¡¯s shadow and severed the legs of this undead.

    The first goal is to make them unable to move and then they focused on the hands which could also be used as support to move and then the head.

    The sudden appearance of the shadows surprised everyone as no one noticed when he performed that.

    Now Tamas realized why Sam dyed in the start.

    It is because he was extracting shadows from the four undead creatures he made before converting the dead bodies into normal undead.

    That is why he looked like he waste in creating undead and slow in his actions.

    But he was just being discreet.

    Now Sam already gained the upper hand. But that was just the initial move. Both of them knew that the real battle is just starting now and death energy started emerging from their body. Sam¡¯s vampire bloodline was not suppressed anymore and his skin became paler than ever.

    The blood-red hue on his hair, the increased length of his nails which turned to ws, and the canine teeth turning into fangs.

    The team was stunned to see this change, but Tamas was amused and the smile on his face is the biggest indication of how excited he was to see this change in Sam.

    His body also started changing and it is very simr to Sam¡¯s, but his hairpletely turned red, unlike Sam whose hair only turned slightly red with hue.

    Both of them covered all the corpses within their range with the death energy as started creating undead.

    On Tamas¡¯s side the first thing that rose from that curtain of death energy are the shadow undead and then the normal undead as for the soul undead, they turned into shes and disappeared into the air.

    He might have set them for the traps.

    But on Sam¡¯s side, things are a bit different. Sam¡¯s curtain is much denser than that tamas¡¯ and it is alsopletely blocking any vision or spiritual sense to prate it. And when the curtain cleared all they could see are the normal undead that started running towards Tamas and his undead.

    Tamas has the edge on number from the looks, but Sam has an advantage in tactics. His undead didn¡¯t charge randomly, they charged in a battle formation.

    Even though other elements are not allowed in the battle, arranging the undead in an efficient way to battle is not exactly out of bounds.

    He didn¡¯t go on the full offensive and focused more on blocking the undead creatures of Tamas.

    Tamas used this chance to let the shadow undead sh with the normal undead. The advantage of the shadow undead is that the shadow undead can survive and revive as long as the connection between the necromancer and the undead is not severed and the necromancer has enough energy.

    But normal undead would be useless once their physical bodies are destroyed to a certain extent.

    So in a sh between the normal undead and the shadow undead, thetter with be able to win.

    The physical undead moved past them and charged towards Sam.

    Tamas is half expecting the shadow undead to emerge from Sam¡¯s shadow once again and block the undead, but to his surprise, Sam started dodging. The undead is slowpared to him even if he didn¡¯t use any form of elemental energy or technique.

    He didn¡¯t attack them or defend them. But just dodged using the surroundings to his advantage.

    Tamas and Sam¡¯s team were surprised as they couldn¡¯t understand where the shadow undead is doing.

    As all the focus was ced on Sam and Tamas was trying hard to make sense of the situation, he suddenly felt a jolt in his soul.

    He looked at the shadow undead that is shing with Sam¡¯s normal undead, but one of the shadow undead is dissipating into nothingness.

    A soul is visible to the naked eye as it severed the connection between Tamas and his shadow undead and went to another shadow to sever that connection too.

    Tamas suddenly became anxious and let two souls appear. These are part of the bunch of souls he hid and he sent them to sh with the soul of Sam¡¯s undead.

    But he was a bitte as the second shadow was also gone and when the two souls came to sh against Sam¡¯s soul, Sam¡¯s undead suddenly glowed and souls came from them and destroyed the two souls immediately with numbers and went to severe the rest of the shadows.

    This caught Tamas off guard and he couldn¡¯t help but take out the rest of the souls. But once again his action was toote. Almost all the shadows were severed from his link which made him curse under his breath.

    Even though these shadows destroyed half of Sam¡¯s undead, it was still a great loss.

    At this moment, the normal undead of Sam became free as the soul crash was going on and they attacked Tamas¡¯s normal undead from the rear.

    But still, Tamas is not worried as he outnumbered them, but to his surprise, from within the shadows of Sam¡¯s undead, the shadow undead emerged and shed against the normal undead.

    Now the number doesn¡¯t matter anymore. Sam is dominating the sh.

    Tamas didn¡¯t expect such cunning from Sam. The attacks were pre-nned and executed properly. Tamas never thought that his moves were this predictable. He couldn¡¯t even disy his strength properly and tactics in a direct sh against Sam.

    He shook his head in helplessness for a second and made some hand signs.

    All of a sudden, the undead that is chasing after Sam and shing against Sam¡¯s undead returned back and the souls that are shing with Sam¡¯s souls also retreated.

    As they all aligned, the souls forcefully entered the undead bodies and their movements suddenly changed. Their strength increased by many folds, they are beyond the realms of normal undead.

    "I hope you don¡¯t mind. This is one of the oldest techniques I recreated after a lot of research. Forcefully merging of the undead with its own soul to give a temporary consciousness."

    The battle immediately turned tables. The shadow undead, normal undead, and soul undead. All of these arepletely helpless against this new undead.

    Sam waspletely surprised. He never explored necromancy more. He does consider it as an art, but his research is more towards the spirit enchantment and even the shadow undead, he cared more about the quality over his trained shadows than the quantity.

    But this is way beyond what he could even imagine.

    The numbers are bing less and less significant as they are reduced.

    And the first thing that merged undead did was actually go after the souls. Even when Sam tried to hide the souls as he did before, they are being spotted and taken care of. Soul necromancy is not really is his forte anyway.

    So, he shifted to the shadow necromancy.

    The shadows hid in the shadows of the undead and started doing sneak attacks while the normal undead tried to hold the merged undead down.

    The shadow undead also didn¡¯t focus onpletely destroying the undead, instead, they made them immobile.

    But in the process, Sam almost lost all of his undead and only a bunch of shadow undead remained.

    Now his shadow undead and Tamas¡¯ soul undead. Two slightly simr but vastly different undead creatures remained.

    Sam was at a disadvantage here. Since these shadows are just made out of whim and not something he trained, he couldn¡¯t keep that strong connection between them, and the soul undead could sever the connection between them.

    But Sam couldn¡¯t find a way to use the shadow undead to sever the connection between the souls and Tamas which made him feel a bit frustrated.

    After some failed attempts and losing a bunch of shadow undead with only three left remaining and Tamas having around eight souls remaining, Sam decided to use one particr advanced necromancy technique he is familiar with.

    He recalled two out of three undead towards his body and made them guard him before he sat down and closed his eyes.

    The third shadow undead which is a shadow of the barbarian suddenly had glowing eyes.

    The Shadow possession. One of the advanced shadow techniques and as soon as a soul tried to attack that shadow, the shadow¡¯s arm glowed with death energy and caught the soul in one hand before using the other to sever the connection and destroying the soul with tyrannical energy rush.

 Chapter 982: Loss

    The Shadow Sam possessed didn¡¯t stop at destroying one soul. The movement speed increased and now it fought like a conscious opponent and lunged towards the next soul.

    Before long, Sam destroyed three souls with just pure ravaging energy bursts and soon there are only five souls left on the other side.

    As the shadow ran after them, they retreated towards Tamas who is making handsigns and within in a few seconds the five souls moved toward each other in a rapid speed and collided with a bright light.

    When the bright light was gone and the vision returned, they saw only one soul in the air hovering around. But it has five heads distributed all over the body of the soul and the energy it contained is immense.

    Sam and his team didn¡¯t even know how to react. At least Sam knew what happened, the team werepletely oblivious to what is happening and they don¡¯t even know what to make of the situation.

    The technique Tamas used is actually called Soul Merge. Even though Tamas is known for all kinds of necromancy and he did have a well rounded expertise, it still seems like Soul necromancy is his cup of tea.

    The two advanced techniques he used are rted to souls. One in which souls merged with normal undead and the second one in which the souls merged together.

    In both cases, the results of merging are formidable. Even though, Sam couldn¡¯t show any expression on his face and on the face of the shadow he possessed, he is anxious inside.

    Shadow undead are already disadvantageous towards the soul undead. But now the other party has an advanced soul undead that has a power of fivebined in one.

    He could grit his teeth and fight and wish that his technique is enough to deal with the soul and thus the battle began.

    Sam began using all his physical fighting technique with the shadow undead with only exception being channeling the death energy in every punch and kick he threw.

    As for the soul, it is not budging. The movement speed of the soul increased three fold and the endurance seemed to have increased by five fold.

    The strength increase cannot even be questioned.

    If not for the fact that Sam possessed the shadow which resulted in a lot stronger connection, it would have already been severed.

    After a few exchanges, the soul halted in its tracks and its body started glowing brightly and soon all the glow was channeled to one arm of the soul which then turned into a glowing de.

    Sam had a trepidition in his heart and his instincts are screaming to return to his own body and thus he did. He instantly abandoned the shadow and his consciousness returned to his own body. As soon as he opened his eyes, he saw that glowing de strking the shadow which sliced the shadow and the connection between Sam and the shadow away.

    Sam knew that he already lost. Even the two shadows he has in his hands wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything if Tamas has tricks like that under his sleeve. If only he could use other elements that would have been great.

    While Sam is thinking like that, he suddenly thought of something and decided put ast ditch effort. He might lose, but he could at least lose while fighting.His two remaining shadows moved towards the charging soul that wasing towards them.

    Sam quickly possessed one shadow and used the void style with death energy in it. But the void style is not for a punch or a kick or even a movement technique, instead it was for the whole body crash and as soon as he finished the energy cirction and the jump, he let go of the possession and let the shadow do the rest.

    The shadow shed with the soul and exploded as it couldn¡¯t control the after effects of the void style.

    The five faces of the soul showed intense expressions of pain and two of them died.

    Sam lost one shadow and when he was about to possess the second onend the final blow, he saw the glowing de and immediately made the shadow dodge.

    The de didn¡¯t slice the connection away and instead it only managed to take a hand away and no matter how much Sam tried to recover it by pouring the energy, it was not possible.

    The hand was gone forever.

    The next moment another slice came and Sam couldn¡¯t think before the connection between him and the shadow was severed.

    The soul then charged towards Sam directly after finishing all his undead. Sam was pretty disappointed. It is his second loss in the row and he became a bit frustrated with himself. As the soul charged towards him directly, he couldn¡¯t control himself and threw a kick with void style with death energy.

    The kicknded squarely on the soul and the energy explosion happened which threw the soul to dissipate on the spot.

    Only after it was over did Sam realize what he did and immediately apologized with a sigh.

    "I am really sorry. I was just a bit out of control."

    But Tamas didn¡¯t speak, he looked at the dissipating soul and showed the surprised expression.

    "Tamas?"

    Sam called him once again and Tamas recovered this time.

    "Don¡¯t worry. The match was over anyway. I just wanted to mess with you a bit."

    "Okay then, we will get going. Thank you for your time. If by any chance you want to talk to me,e to crimson reed realm and go for the dusk organization and ask for me.

    They have ways to contact me. Even if I was out of reach, I would get the message and meet you as fast as I can."

    "That is useful, but are you not here to recruit me?"

    "Of course, but I didn¡¯t meet your conditions."

    "Well, they are my conditions, so I can change them as much as I want."

    Sam was surprised and asked.

    "So, are you saying you want to join my team?"

    "Yes. But there is a new condition."

    "Do tell."

    "I want both of us to sign a contract. There is a reason why I was working alone for quite sometime and I don¡¯t want to repeat same mistake."

    Sam just smiled and said.

    "Not a problem. I don¡¯t have any objections for that."

    With that both of them signed a soul contract which prohibits them from betraying each other and Tamas, a skillful necromancer became a part of the team.

    They returned to the inn where Tamas insisted on celebrating and that night Sam started focusing on the next target.

    He doesn¡¯t know which one to choose as both of them are equally difficult.

    But after some thought, he decided on trying with the woman inside the sect.

    The whereabouts of the challenger are still unknown and even though they are sure where he woulde, there is still a lot of time for his arrival.

    So, the only choice left is the obvious choice.

    They can only go after the woman from the sect.

    So, Sam and decided on the journey.

    Tamas asked for a few days to settle things here while Sam tried to get any possible information on the realm they are going as it is not too far away.

    Even though Saber Monarch got the information, it didn¡¯t have much on power structure.

    While Sam is focusing on that, Sia was interested in talking with Tamas.

    "Why did you ept his offer even when you lost?"

    Tamas smiled and asked.

    "Why are you interested in this?"

    "I am just looking out for him. If you are so set on your own rules for this long, I don¡¯t see a reason for you to change them now all of a sudden. You want something else."

    "There is something else I want, but you don¡¯t have to worry about that. As you know, I cannot betray him."

    "Even though you cannot betray him doesn¡¯t mean that you are not using him."

    "Well, that is the deal wasn¡¯t it? He is using me as well. So I don¡¯t see a problem here."

    "You have to tell me what you want now."

    "I already told you not to worry too much. It was just for improving my necromancy skill. Sam is one of the best necromancers I fought and he came this close to beating me. There are some people who managed to do more than that and there are a few victories I only got with hair¡¯s breadth difference. But none of them managed to do that with pure basics.

    Sam didn¡¯t have any advanced techniques in necromancy in terms of battle. His skill set ispletely basic and shadow possession can only be considered above average at best.

    No person with that skill set should be able to force me to use the soul merge technique, but he did. I want someone like that. Someone who cares and nails the basics down. Only a person like that can beat me and Sam is not even a necromancer by trade. It is more of a hobby for him.

    I just want to practice with him which would help me tune my basics and also open new possibilities for me.

    Are you satisfied now?"

 Chapter 983: Tri-Ashura Realm

    Tri-Ashura realm. The realm is being ruled by three Blood demon families.

    The Crimson Blood demon family. The family that rules one-third of thes and has a fire elemental bloodline.

    The Emerald Blood demon family. The family that rules one-third of thes and has a Wood elemental Bloodline.

    Finally, thest but the most powerful of all three. The ck blood demon family. They use dark elemental energy and they also have decent art of necromancy running within their family.

    But that is not the reason why they are the strongest. It is because out of all three, their backers are the strongest and they don¡¯t fail to remind the two families of the fact and push their buttons from time to time.

    Unlike the Crimson reed realm that divided thes between themselves, the Tri-Ashura realm is a bit different because, they couldn¡¯te to an agreement on how to divide and who would get whichs, so they settled with dividing every into three parts.

    That too not equally. The legend has it that they waged war on each other and tried to upy as muchnd as they want and that too thend of their choice on differents. And by the time the war is over the ces that they managed to keep a hold on belonged to them.

    There are still some underhanded methods going on even after all the decades to upy each othernds.

    But no one speaks about it.

    There is one main called the Capital in the realm that has headquarters of all three families and within this in an area where volcanoes are most active within the wilderness close to the main city where three families headquarters are located, the new sect was opened.

    Her name is Jw. Nobody knows where she came from. All they know is that she is a human and she is powerful.

    She came to that a few years ago and survived on her own as a sole cultivator. After some probes and troubles from the three demon families, she showed her hand which made them hold their horses and not push her too much.

    Because at that time, the three families had too much to lose and she doesn¡¯t have anything to lose. They couldn¡¯t afford to piss her off.

    But around three years ago, she opened a sect in the volcanic region solely for women. She bought every female ve she could get her hands on and gave residence to them within the sect.

    The women tried to use their skills to earn ie to sustain the whole sect.

    But this led them to have some troubles. Because the market ispletely under the control of the three demon families. Even the market leading to the others and realms ispletely under their control.

    Even though the sect has permission to sell products, they cannot possibly prate the market as their products are not really as good as the demon families¡¯ products and they have no experience or support whatsoever.

    This is all the information that Sam could gather from the Talon realm. He managed to find a merchant who has connections with the market in the Tri-Ashura realm and a few drinks made him spill everything.

    Along with that Sam managed to cut a deal with him with the innkeeper who is Tamas¡¯ friend acting as his proxy, he decided to open the liquor business and gave exclusive rights for Sam¡¯s liquor for Talon realm to that merchant.

    He earned some money in the two days that Tamas took to settle the issues. After that, the whole team went to the wormholes that led to the other realms.

    There is no direct hole connecting them to the Tri-Ashura realm. So, they have to take the connecting paths. Sam didn¡¯t bother to use the dimensional drifter for this as it is way too expensive. All he had to do is spend one day travel to save that expense.

    No matter how rich he could be, he also has that many mouths to feed. So, he cannot possibly waste money and save it whenever he can.

    After reaching the Tri-Ashura Realm¡¯s capital city, the team took residence in an inn and tried to gather thetest information regarding the sect.

    So, they separated and spread out all over the city.

    The city has arge market. There are many different races trying to sell their things and the market is pretty much divided into many sections based on the products.

    Weapon section, medicine section, herb section, restaurants and bars, and so on. And in every section, there are stores belonging to the three families and one store belonging to the sect.

    Sam first went to the weapon section and entered the shop of the sect.

    The shop was also run by two women. And since there are no customers they have nothing to do. So, as soon as they saw him entering the shop they were surprised and excited at the same time.

    Sam took a look at the swords and sabers that were hung on the wall.

    He touched them and checked the craftsmanship. Even though he couldn¡¯t say they are exceptional, they are not actually bad. What iscking in them is the soul of the craftsman. There are no ws in the weapon if it was looked at in a pure physical fashion, but as he touched it, he could feel that it iscking something.

    To put it simply, it looked like a printed text on paper. It is good to read and can be understood, the text would serve its purpose, but a weapon should be like a handwritten note.

    One should be able to understand what the writer is going through when writing this. That is what¡¯s missing in these weapons. The maker didn¡¯t find their own style in weapons and purely followed the principles as they are, which made the final product look empty giving the wielder the same feeling.

    But they would still serve their purpose and they have their own uses. For example for a puppet that is designed to wield des, this type of sword is perfect.

    Sam picked a rapier and examined it for a while, before nodding in satisfaction. Currently, a new model puppet is being made in the factories. This type of rapier might be a perfect fit for that.

    "How many of these rapiers do you have?"

    The two women were stunned and didn¡¯t manage toprehend the situation for a second and Sam repeated his question.

    "How many rapiers do you have?"

    The two women came back to their senses and said.

    "Currently, in the shop, we have around thirty."

    "I will take them all. I would take those short swords too. Give me as many as you have."

    Sam paid for them and looked around while they took the products.

    Even though he came to get information, this is an unexpected gain. Every artisan he has under him has a different style and most of the swords and weapons he used for the puppets are mostly machine-made and he doesn¡¯t need these things, but still, these weapons might open a door for him to reach out to the sect.

    As Sam is watching the weapons, another man came in. He is a demon and he has emerald eyes.

    "Hello, Sir. It seems like you are new to this realm. This shop doesn¡¯t have any quality products. Nobody buys here. Not even a single local. Our shop is next door. You cane and take a look."

    He spoke to Sam as soon as he entered and the two women immediately became flustered.

    Sam is the first customer in a long while, they couldn¡¯t afford to lose him. Sam understood their expressions and said with a reassuring smile.

    "Don¡¯t worry, I am looking for this exact type of sword. I know what I am doing."

    The demon tried to persuade him even more but Sam didn¡¯t respond and he couldn¡¯t help but leave.

    Sam took the swords into his storage and said.

    "I have an advice for your artisan. Tell her to not worry about the final product and the correctness of the process too much. There is no such thing as a proper and absolute procedure to do something. Tell her to enjoy the process of making it.

    Her weapon has no physical ws, but sometimes being wless might not make it the best.

    And give you Sect leader my regards. Tell her that a human named Sam wants to make a deal if she is interested.

    I would be staying in a fifteenth room of the ck blood Inn.

    Finally, you two should improve your salesman skills. Your etiquette is alright, but you should never let someone from outside approach your customer and you should be more confident in exining your products. You should take the initiative.

    You are not proactive at all."

    With that Sam left the shop and went back to the inn.

 Chapter 984: Greedy Women

    The team returned to the inn by the night.

    They didn¡¯t get too much extra information. The situation is a bit bitter for the sect than the merchant described.

    From what the team observed by the end of the day, there are no sales for the shops of the Sect. The pill shop has some pills sold and they are all recovery pills which didn¡¯t matter much as they are all the same in any shop.

    No shop is turning any profit. Everything is in a loss.

    While Sam and the team are discussing any possible additional details they noticed in the city, the saleswomen from all the shops gathered at the city gate and walked through the forest path towards their sect.

    They are sharing their sales. The herb shop seemed to have had a few sales, but that is it.

    The groupdies looked at the two women from the weapon shop and their lost and dazed expressions.

    "Don¡¯t worry. We will soon make enough to not to make a loss. We don¡¯t have many sales either anyway."

    When one of theirpanions was trying to better their moods, both of them came to their senses and said.

    "It is not that actually. We have sales today."

    When the group heard that, they were shocked.

    "What did you say just now?"

    "We have sales. We sold seventy swords. Thirty rapiers and forty shortswords."

    One of the two exined and showed the spatial ring full of spirit stones.

    "Oh my god. Oh my god. We have sales today. We have sales." As one of thedies from the group started cheering loudly, another one was perceptive enough to notice their nk expressions and asked what happened.

    "The person who bought the weapons actually wanted to me deliver a message and an advice to the Sect leader and the artisan who made the weapons. He said something about a deal." Then the two of them exined what happened with Sam and his exact words.

    The rest of thedies were surprised and they also became thoughtful.

    "I don¡¯t know whether I should say something about this to the Sect leader or not."

    "Of course, you have to tell her. What if it was a big deal?"

    "If it is a big deal, why would hee to someone of our status. No offence, but we know our current situation. We are not exactly the best producers in the realm."

    "Maybe, he thought that he could get a good discount. After all, we are in our starting stages and are struggling to get out of this situation. If he gives us a big deal, then he could ask for some discount and we would also get our break."

    Everyone started making spections.

    "We are not going to say anything to the Sect leader."

    One of the women who was silent all this while, spoke for the first time.

    Everyone was stunned, but the woman went of exining.

    "I have a n which can help us make some more sales and then the big deal. Do you guys want to hear?"

    Everyone answered with silence but the eargerness in their eyes said it all.

    Thedies went to the sect and rested for the night and no one ever mentioned the deal Sam talked to them about and the discussion they had about the deal. They are as silent as a stillke and the next day they went back to their work as usual.

    Sam didn¡¯t expect an immediate response from the other side, so he didn¡¯t disturb them for the next three days.

    And the women participated in their routine as normal without breathing a word out about Sam or his offer.

    On fourth day, he went back to the weapon shop and sent the rest of the team to other shops and asked them to buy some things and leave the same message while he discussed the situation with the two saleswomen in the weapon shop.

    "It seems like the advice didn¡¯t reach the artisan." Sam said as he looked at the new rapiers that are ced on the disy.

    The saleswomen were silent and Sam continued.

    "Of course, I take it that the message didn¡¯t reach your sect leader too."

    They shook their heads.

    "May I ask why?"

    "We are not granted audience to higher-ups until we achieve the targeted sales goal."

    Sam raised an eyebrow at their words, he doesn¡¯t know if the women are trying to fleece him or if she was telling the truth.

    "Okay then, I will see youter."

    That evening Sam talked with the team and asked them what they got from the remaining shops.

    "They said, it is impossible to meet the higher-ups without reaching the sales target and one of them even said that it is impossible to meet the sect leader if they don¡¯t make an exceptional number of sales that would impress the whole sect."

    Sam was surprised.

    "The saleswomen all seemed to be on the same page. There is a high possibility that they are all saying the truth. But a woman who opened a sect with no experience and only as a service for the other women is unlikely to set such a serious goals just for the audience.

    That is what¡¯s bugging me." Sam exined his concerns. After some more discussion he got an idea and they came to a decision.

    The next day, he went to the weapon shop and bought everything in it. He ced a spatial ring without asking for any change.

    He took all the weapons and emptied the shop and before leaving he only had one thing to say.

    "I want this deal to happen faster. So, go and talk to your higher-ups."

    The two women were ecstatic as they looked at the spirit stones in the spatial ring one after the other and they went to meet with their counterparts in other shops.

    "What did you just say? Did he empty the whole shop? Are you for real?"

    The woman who gave this idea, to begin with, asked in a shocked tone.

    "Yes. He also told us to talk with our higher-ups as soon as we can. He seemed desperate. I think we should talk to our supervisor today." One of the two saleswomen from the weapon shop said and while the rest of thedies agreed, the onedy with the n didn¡¯t.

    "No, we cannot. You guys got a great haul. But it is not the same for the rest of us. We need to make the most of this opportunity."

    "What do you have in mind?"

    "Tomorrow when hees to find you and asks about the situation, tells him that the sect leader only wants to meet the sales staff after all of us reached our targets. Since he is desperate, he would definitely buy everything from our shops. Even if he is not that desperate, he would at least buy something."

    The women hesitated. But thatdy tried her best to convince them and seeded.

    The small hesitation was gone and was reced with joy at the possible haul they would have the next day.

    If only they could see that one mouse hiding in the corner with a recorder on him and understood what that meant, they would have thoughtpletely differently.

    When the shadow mouse returned with the recording, the whole team looked at it and they became angry.

    "Boss, we are really fleeced. They took us for the fools. No, not really, they made you the fool." Saber Monarch said as he looked at Sam with pity.

    Sam really wanted to punch that handsome face, but knew his limits and didn¡¯t dare to.

    But there are some things he is allowed to do to get that sweet revenge and he did that.

    "One month Sry cut." And that one sentence with that cold gaze hurt Saber Monarch more than a stab to his gut.

    Without heeding his pleas, Sam looked at the recording with a cold smile.

    The next day he went to the weapon shop and didn¡¯t speak at all.

    He ced the crystal tablet on the table and yed the video.

    The two saleswomen who were ready to put up an ultimate performance lost all the color in their face and looked at Sam in trepidation and their next reaction is to smash the crystal tablet only for Sam to pull out two more from his storage.

    "I have a thousand copies of these and I would distribute all of these to the three demon families. I am sure they would be happy to do you some good publicity."

    He threw one crystal tablet on the table and said.

    "Take this with you and show it to your higher-ups if you have to. But I am expecting a call for me by tomorrow afternoon. Otherwise, I would show this to the three families and let¡¯s see if your sect will ever be able to sell anything.

    All the integrity would be lost when the word of the saleswomen from the sect is trying to fleece the only proper customer they got in months."

 Chapter 985: Jwala

    Sam waited in the inn for the call toe. He knew that this time, someone is bound toe, and just within two hours after the threat, someone came to meet him.

    It is a woman wearing a ck robe. She used a cloth simr to hijab and even covered her hair only her face is visible.

    Sam let her in as soon as she knocked on the door.

    Inside the room, Sam is sitting with the rest of his team.

    "What do you want to talk about?"

    The woman asked in a cold voice.

    "Are you the sect leader?" Sam asked with a smile.

    "No."

    "Then I have nothing to talk to you about."

    "You have no right to directly talk to her. You should tell me what the matter is and if it is something that needs her approval, then I will arrange a meeting."

    "Then who will decide if the matter is important enough to meet the sect leader?"

    "Me, of course."

    "When I heard your sect is running on losses and your leader has no experience, I was surprised. But now that I see you guys, it is no wonder you are losing money."

    As soon as those words left Sam¡¯s mouth, the aura of thedy changed indicating her extreme anger.

    "You better watch your tongue." As she spoke she tried to suppress Sam with her aura of Superior cultivation.

    But before she could do that, she felt suppressed from all four sides and before she realized, the Five elemental King, the Saber Monarch, Gran, Sia, and Agar all surrounded her and their auras are pressing on her. She couldn¡¯t bear the mental pressure and held her head in pain. Even though Tamas didn¡¯t move just the change in his presence is enough to make her feel the dread of death.

    Sam gestured them to back off a little and said.

    "I don¡¯t want any conflict with you. I just want a meeting with your sect leader. You might think I am not worthy because of my age and strength, but my subordinates in the room would disagree big time.

    So, you better go back to your sect leader and tell her that I want to meet her. This deal might make your sect not onlye out of your poor state, it will also help in keeping the sect running properly even without any of her involvement.

    And the threat remains. I will show the video out by tomorrow evening. That is just a grace period because someone of a higher level came here to talk to me. And also tell her that the content in the video is the indication of poor handling of the organization."

    With that, thedy in the ck left the inn with a ck face.

    She is angry and frustrated. The saleswoman didn¡¯t say anything about Sam having these strong subordinates and she thought she could shake him off a bit with that pressure.

    But the team almost made her faint with just a disy of the aura. This caused her to evaluate the situation and came to a decision to tell everything that happened to the sect leader.

    From the looks of it, the people in Sam¡¯s team are as strong as the sect leader, so she could only follow what Sam said so that the sect wouldn¡¯t add even more enemies.

    The Next day.

    After the sun rose, thedy in the ck came back. But this time, she is polite and not as overbearing as before. She came to lead Sam to the sect.

    "Sect leader ordered that only Sam coulde since he is your boss. He is the only one required for the business deal."

    When the team was about to raise their objections, Sam gestured them to stop and showed them some hand signs casually, and left the inn along with thedy.

    They went out of the city and walked through the forest path for half a half-an-hour before they reached the sect.

    Even though it is called a sect specifically, it doesn¡¯t have an atmosphere of the typical sect.

    It upied arge area with an active volcano in the center and the rest looked like a forest area. But most of it was cut down to build houses, but still, the atmosphere of the forest is not gone.

    There are no distinct buildings assigned for certain activities like teaching, sparring, or healing. There are no offices, quarters, dorms and from the looks of it, there are not even many rules.

    The only proper building is near the volcano and it seems to be the ce for the artisans and the medicine makers to work.

    At the foot of the volcano, A woman with golden blonde hair and red robes which has golden embroidery all over sat on a chair with a table in front of her. Sam was lead to a seat opposite to her.

    "So, you are the man that is threatening our sect," Jw spoke as soon as Sam sat down. Her tone was cold and showed her clear hatred towards him.

    "That is one way to put it, but the more appropriate way is that I am the man that was created by your sect and decided to threaten you for that."

    She became silent as she sized him up and Sam did the same. But unlike her, he didn¡¯t look at the other party, instead, he focused on his sense of smell. Because he could smell something here that is riling up his Golden Sun crow bloodline. It is not because that could be of help to him in cultivation, but whatever that is, it is something the bloodline seemed to be familiar with.

    It should be something the golden sun crows are so in contact with that it registered into gic memory. If only Yanwu could smell through the divine dimension, then he is sure that he would have found out what it is.

    "What is the deal that you want to talk about?" Jw asked as she looked at Sam¡¯s curious expression.

    "I am assembling a team of strong people for a quest I have to fulfill. I want you to be a part of it."

    "I cannot. I have a sect to run and I don¡¯t want to be part of a stupid team."

    "Stupid? Every one of my team members is smarter than you. Do you know why? They decided to make a decision after listening to what I have to saypletely. So, let me finish before you make a decision. After all, I still didn¡¯t say what I have to offer."

    By the time Sam finished speaking, her eyes turned red and she is ready to throw her temper. Her aura is raging and the rest of the staff standing nearby also got ready to make a move. But Sam just smiled and said.

    "Are you sure you want to do something? Didn¡¯t your subordinate tell you about my subordinates?"

    "You are far away from your subordinates now, aren¡¯t you?"

    "Well, it seems like you are more na?ve than I thought. No wonder your sect is having problems."

    "I don¡¯t want to hear another word out of your narcissistic mouth about my sect and me. No matter where I go, all men are the same. Thinking that they have right to lecture me." She muttered thest line and Sam almost burst outughing.

    "Oh, you are a man-hater. It has been a while since I met one."

    "What did you call me?"

    Red hot mes surrounded her as she looked at Sam in anger.

    "What else do you want me to call you? You passed a judgment on me within five minutes of meeting me. You are extremely hostile since the start of the meeting and you called my team stupid as soon as I proposed the offer even before listening to it fully."

    "You are the one to talk. What about the judgments you passed on me and the sect since the start?"

    "Your sect is in a dire state which is a fact. And when I visited your shop and bought something in the intention to make a bigger deal, your employees that means your subordinates tried to cheat me of my money just because they don¡¯t have sales.

    Whose fault is that if not for the bad management of yours forgetting to keep your employees in line?

    You have no experience in running a sect. The most you would have done is being a part of one and here you are with a sect as its leader. Doesn¡¯t know how to operate, but you expanded so much now you must be running out of funds to support all the women.

    Your subordinate, whatever her name is, the woman in the ck doesn¡¯t have a single skill in talking or negotiating. I have some evidence on your guys trying to cheat me and the worst she could do ise and threaten me again without even knowing my strength, but she did exactly the same and that too in the presence of a bunch of my subordinates, in which anyone could p her to death in a second.

    And your final judgment on every man is the same? I don¡¯t know how many pathetic men you have met, honestly, I don¡¯t care. I am a person who offered a genuine deal and any responsible sect leader would consider the deal more than their immature emotional reactions.

    And your judgment is so stupid, to begin with. If you have met a dozen men who are pathetic do all the men are bound to be like that? I met with a thousand whores who are willing to sell their bodies for afortable life. How stupid it would be if I judge every woman as a whore?

    So, don¡¯t y this game with me."

 Chapter 986: Offer

    Sam took a deep breath and calmed himself down. It is unlike him to argue with someone else like this, just because he didn¡¯t like their worldview and he thought if that worldview is stupid. Maybe the continuous losses are affecting more than he thought they would.

    He lost in Gran¡¯s hands in the race and he lost in the necromancer battle with Tamas. All the continuous victories over the years he spent in this very world seemed to have really gotten into his head. He is notpletely new to losses. But these losses hit him hard and even though nobody judged him until now, he is judging himself.

    Throughout his journey, he was invincible in every aspect among his peers. Battle, business, subordinates, status. He maintained his position ahead over the rest of his peers and he managed to defeat all of them in their own fields sometimes crushed their confidence.

    Sanjay is a great example of that as he is still recovering from all the damage he took to his mental state because of Sam.

    These two losses made him remember that there is a chance that he is not as exceptional and extraordinary as he thought himself or peoplebeled him to be.

    There is a great chance that in fact, he is just like any other person and not that great. And he also realized that subconsciously he is the greatest of all his peers and the sudden losses when the opponents are on the same level even though he is ying the other party¡¯s game hit him a bit too hard.

    He realized his character w and decided that he should work on it slowly and change his thinking.

    But the sudden judgment that indicated that he is just like any other man even though with a different context still made him feel a bit sour and he decided to unleash himself on this woman.

    He tried to calm himself down and decided to leave the ce.

    "I will stay in this city for another week. If you want to talk about this deal properly, you can do that. I apologize for being too rash with my words. But most of them are true. Your sect doesn¡¯t have a proper organizational structure or the resources to run like a proper self-sustainable organization.

    Yourck of experience is not helping either. As much as you believe that your strength can solve everything, that is not enough. In this world of strength, theck of wit and cunning made many people bite dirt and die in regret in hands of people less than them.

    If my estimation and judgment of these demons are right, you wouldn¡¯t be able to survive for long. The sale I made in the past few days, is bound to gather their attention and they will use any means necessary to close your sect down and nip the growth when it is still in bud.

    And If you want to prevent that, you can discuss the deal with me."

    With that, he left.

    But before he left, he looked at the volcano onest time. That familiar smell that is imprinted in the gic memory of the Golden Sun crow bloodline ising from that volcano and there is a faint scent on Jw¡¯s body.

    He is curious to know what that is, but he couldn¡¯t do that for now and left the ce to calm himself down.

    For the next few days, the teamid low. Many people noticed their big presence. It is hard to miss someone who is on the level of family heads of the three families that are ruling the realm roaming casually and the little episode with the woman in the ck didn¡¯t help.

    Some people started paying attention, but Sam didn¡¯t care too much, he just stayed put and roamed around in the city and in the forest.

    In the forest, he came across some demon bodies to see if any of his beasts are interested and get a quick growth as Yanwu and Raiju did.

    But the Forest bear is not exactly interested in Emerald Blood demons and Yanwupletely ignored the crimson blood demons.

    The shadow mice also didn¡¯t show any particr interest in ck Blood demons.

    So, after two days of roaming, he just stayed in the city and ate at different restaurants while drinking with Sia as they exchanged their opinions on liquors.

    Even though the team is peaceful. The rest of the city is not. The three families noticed the big sale that happened in the weapon shop and due to that big sale, some people showed interest in the shop.

    Most people ignored the shop due to the publicized prejudice of the demon families, but once one person buys things and that too on arge amount even though the families tried to portray it as a shill, it was still impossible to do that.

    Some people entered and the weapons are actually not bad. Within the same price range, they might even have the best weapons.

    Now that one shop is doing business, they have to help with the other shops, so they offered some minor discounts and made the people go to their other shops.

    Once these shops started getting noticed, it is hard for the three families to ignore that.

    So, their attacks started immediately.

    Their first target happened to be the medicine shop where most pills are sold.

    A group of three went in to buy some recovery pills and one of them took the pill right there and then. Instead of his energy being recovered, he started yelling on top of his lungs with his skin turning blue and foaming out of his mouth.

    The two of his friends made a ruckus and took them to the pill master in the shop next to them and the shop belonged to the ck blood demon family.

    The pill master diagnosed what happened and then gave a pill that cured the person immediately. And the public believed that it is definitely poison.

    Then the restaurant. A group went in there and when their food was served they could see that the meat is raw and it is not even cleaned properly.

    The weapon shop was visited by someone and when he swung the sword to check right after buying, it broke into two.

    The saleswomen and the sect higherups are all amateurs. At first, the three families didn¡¯t care because they are not going to have any sales.

    But once they do have sales, they can easily deal with them and send them back to a worse position than before they had any sales.

    At least to have sales in the first scenario, they just have to establish themselves in the market, but now not only do they have topensate for the lost integrity they need to establish stronger integrity than before.

    When Jw started getting the reports, Sam¡¯s words lingered in her mind. The whole scenario turned out exactly like Sam told it would go.

    She also remembered the words about him staying in the city.

    When she was hesitating, another report came. Someone attacked the herb shop when the goods turned out to be faulty. The saleswomen almost died.

    She became angry and wanted to storm over there and beat the crap out of those people, but she knew the sect¡¯s reputation would only turn worse if they did that.

    She could only grit her teeth and endure.

    The woman in ck looked at Jw¡¯s plight and couldn¡¯t help but say.

    "I think it is better to consider his offer. We don¡¯t have to worry about him betraying us, he would be able toe and storm the whole sect if he wants to with his subordinates. No matter how I see it, we are the weaker party in the deal.

    So, think about it."

    Jw just stayed silent but the reports kept oning to her. That night, she couldn¡¯t take it anymore and go to the Inn.

    When she knocked on Sam¡¯s door, he was surprised.

    "What do you want?"

    "I am here to talk about the deal. But I would like to tell my position on this first."

    "Please proceed."

    "I want the sect to run stably without worrying aboutck of resources. I don¡¯t want to leave those helpless women on the streets and subject them to very once again. If you can do that, I will work for three decades for you."

    "The solution is simple, all you have to do is change the location of the sect. Move to a lower realm and establish it there. The only reason you are being this targetted is that the three families are afraid that you areing after their stable positions.

    And to be fair, I would be too if I was in their position."

    "But I cannot move from here."

    "May I ask why? If it is a problem I could solve, then I would."

    Jw hesitated for a while and said.

    "Come to my sect tomorrow. But before I tell my problem, you must sign a soul contract that you wouldn¡¯t reveal the details to anyone."

    Sam was surprised, but he agreed.

 Chapter 987: Surgery

    Sam went to visit the sect the next day at sunrise.

    If he finishes this deal, he would have some free time before they could get their hands on thest member who is also a Peak stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivator of the Astral ne. That one challenger.

    He can finally reevaluate his recent changes both physically and mentally due to the cultivation and the losses he suffered.

    Having that much pride is a borderline character w and trying to defend it by being angry at criticism that he gets is even more of a problem. He cannot let something as trivial as that to get in his way and hinder his progress both physically and mentally.

    As he walked through the sect entrance, Jw directly came to receive him and led him towards the volcano.

    They climbed the volcano and stood at the mouth of it.

    The scent that attracted Yanwu¡¯s bloodline got stronger and stronger as he moved upwards and when he finally reached the mouth, he was shocked by what he saw.

    There is a giant bird in the middle of theva pool as it absorbed the fire elemental energy constantly. But what surprised him is not the process. It is the bird itself. A phoenix.

    He didn¡¯t wait a single second to let Yanwu out and when the majestic golden bird stood at the edge of the mouth of the volcano, the phoenix that turned into a ball at the bottom of the volcano started trembling and looked upwards.

    *CAAAWWW*

    Yanwu crowed from the top and just the sound itself made the whole sect poption tremble.

    The phoenix looked upwards and started crowing in reply.

    Sam now understood what that exciting feeling of the bloodline was.

    It is not exactly an excitement towards the prey or some food, it is an excitement that stemmed from the generations of rivalry that existed since the first of the golden sun crow and the phoenix crossed paths.

    As the crowing between them increased as a challenge the two birds soon startedmunicating and Sam could understand what is happening felt extremely shocked.

    "Did that Phoneix ask you to bring me here?" He asked Jw as he observed the volcano.

    Jw was a bit surprised at this moment and asked.

    "You can understand them?"

    "Yeah, I sure do. And answer to my question?"

    "Yes, Phoenix asked me to bring you here."

    "Seems like your little friend is in trouble and couldn¡¯t move from that spot. Is that the same trouble you have from moving your sect out of here?"

    "Yes, at least part of it."

    "Well, then let us take it one step at a time."

    Sam and Yanwu exchanged a nce and both of them jumped inside the volcano.

    The volcano is wide enough for them to house all of them anyway.

    Yanwu started discussing something with the Phoenix and asked all the details of any problem that he has and Sam heard everything.

    He opened his wings and hovered around the phoenix while he used the observation ability to check it.

    He could have used the harbinger, but since he has these unwanted wings anyway, he might as well try to integrate them as part of his daily routine so that he would be more familiar with them.

    So, he started checking the bird and after some time, Sam flew upwards and stood at the mouth of the volcano.

    "From what I could see, there is something that was forcefully inserted inside the phoenix that has arge Ice elemental energy that could almost freeze the meridians of the bird.

    The phoenix is using the heat from the volcano to suppress that thing from acting up. We need to remove that in order to let the Phoneix free."

    I exined the trouble to Jw. She beamed in expectation and asked.

    "How can we remove it?"

    "There are two ways. One is to perform surgery. But that thing whatever it is, already had a solid foundation within the body and froze half of the meridians and became one with it, so for me to remove that, I need to dissect various parts of the body and reconstruct those meridians one by one.

    In that process, I also need to not let the meridians turn back from their frozen state for which the phoenix should be awake while I am performing the surgery and circte the fire elemental energy ording to its own cirction method and the surgery should be performed within the volcano while we are all hovering in the air."

    Sam listed out all the difficulties that an amateur in medicine could understand. There are another hundred or so things that he needs to take care of which Jw couldn¡¯t even understand.

    As Sam was thinking, Jw abruptly grabbed his arms and pleaded.

    "Please, I will do whatever it takes for you to heal him. He needs to recover. Please."

    Sam currently thought for a moment and then looked at Yanwu to ask his opinion. After all, he should think about whether all this effort is worth it for a single cultivator. That too when he has an extra member because he managed to recruit both Sia and Gran.

    Yanwu gave his answer and then Sam looked at Jw.

    "What is the other part of your reason for not leaving this realm?"

    Jw was stumped for a bit and then answered slowly.

    "Why are you asking this now?"

    "I should weigh my pros and cons before doing this. If it is just this, it was okay. But if you have a ridiculously unreasonable thing to take care of after this just to recruit you, it would be unfair on my part.

    After all, I am not hiring you for free.

    I also have to make sure that I take care of your sect and its operations. It is too much effort from me and too many things that I need to do just to recruit one cultivator under me. You might be good, but I don¡¯t know if you are good enough for all this to be worth it.

    So, if youy out everything that needs to be done, then I will think about it. Either way, don¡¯t worry I will perform the surgery, since my friend here wants to be generous. But I want to make things clear before I start it."

    Jw started thinking for a bit and said.

    "There is one more thing I need to do. There are some people I need to free from the demon families. They are rtives of the people that are already in the sect. I promised them that I would free their family members. So, I need to do that before I leave.

    You have strong members by your side. If you help me with that, it would be easy."

    "Yes, it would be easy for you. All this effort for three decades of your work. You tell me, do you think it is worth it? From the looks of it, you don¡¯t have any other skills except fire elemental expertise in battle.

    I need to think about this before I make a decision. But before that, I will perform the surgery tomorrow. Ask your members to stop drawing heat from the volcano for forging and pill-making. I need the volcano to be at its best state to do this."

    With that he left the sect and went back to the inn to do some simtions within the second floor of divine dimension. But Yanwu just stayed with the beast at the volcano and started throwing golden mes at the phoenix to help it deal with that internal cold.

    The next day, Sam came back and he used his wings once again as he hovered around the phoenix. Yanwu spread his body wide open and stood on the pool ofva while he supported the phoenix on his back.

    Sam used his reaper sword to cut open the Phoneix and started performing the surgery.

    He has multitasked as he needs to keep the phoenix awake while also numbing his pain and working on each frozen meridian and muscle fiber that was affected.

    The surgery processed slowly for over seventeen hours and finally, Sam removed the thing that caused the freezing effect.

    It looked like a lump of slime. And he is pretty sure that it is a living thing. He didn¡¯te across anything like this in his books. But from the looks of it, it is a parasitic creature that slowly takes over the body of another creature while simultaneously drawing energy from it.

    Since it is an ice-type parasite this would most effective on the ice elemental creatures. But on the fire elemental creature, it would be a good torture device that could cause a slow and painful death.

    After performing the surgery Yanwu still stayed with the phoenix for quite some time. But before Sam went back to the inn, Yanwu said something that made him stop in his tracks.

    He looked at the phoenix and smiled quietly before getting out of the volcano.

    "I will help you with the problem, but you need to agree to some of my conditions."

    Sam said to Jw before leaving.

 Chapter 988: Tour

    The next day Sam met with Jw in the most popr bar of the city at the most eye-catching table.

    "Are you sure you want to do this here? You will gather a lot of attention in a ce like this."

    "There is no need to hide now. I already decided to help you. I don¡¯t need to do something like hiding now. They are going to know anyway."

    Jw sighed and said.

    "What are the conditions you want?"

    "You will work for me for at least seventy years. The Phoenix will also work for me along with you. The sect will be moved away from here and be merged with my organization."

    Jw was stumped when she heard the three conditions.

    "I can agree with the first one. The second condition is the decision of the Phoenix himself and the third condition is impossible. These women suffered a lot until now, I don¡¯t want to let them suffer even more."

    "What do you mean to suffer? They would wish for a lifetime to be a part of my organization if they knew a ce like that would exist. In fact, I wouldn¡¯t even bother to reach out if not for my friend Yanwu asked me on behalf of that Phoenix. It seems like Yanwu was a bit nostalgic after he met someone from his own realm.

    And the Phoenix already agreed to the condition. He will be working permanently under me. But he has his own conditions some rted to you and some not rted to you.

    Only if you agree to this, I will proceed with what you want.

    Offending three demon families and particrly when one of those families is connected to a higher order of the demon family is not exactly a good deal for me, no matter how I look at it when all I get in return is you only. In fact, the main gain for me through this deal is the Phoenix a person who has an understanding of the recent activities in the higher realms.

    Think carefully and make a decision."

    Jw looked down in exhaustion and thought for a long while. By now many people are looking at Sam and her and the news has spread almost half of the city.

    People are already moving to investigate Sam and his team members.

    After fifteen minutes of silence, Jw spoke.

    "Is it possible for me to go and see your organization?"

    "You want to see my organization before you decide?"

    "Yes."

    "And why would I do something that couldpromise the safety of my organization?"

    "I know what I am asking a bit over the top. But I just need to be sure that those women won¡¯t suffer anymore. Those women are defiled, vited, and tortured both physically and mentally and when that happened, they were a part of the organization by name.

    The very organization that allowed them to suffer like that."

    Sam sighed and almost wanted to give this whole thing up, but he remembered Yanwu¡¯s request. Yanwu never requested anything from him, but this time, he almost pleaded. So, he could only endure.

    "Okay, let¡¯s leave."

    Sam took her to the inn and picked Saber Monarch. The three of them went back to deste using the dimensional drifter.

    They appeared on the rooftop of the tower.

    "Take a good look and pick a house from here."

    Sam said as he showed the view of the city from up there.

    She was stunned when she took in the majestic view of the city. Sam¡¯s city might be the cleanest and proper city out of all the cities she has ever visited. Even the city from a higher realm where she used to live didn¡¯t have this much neatness.

    Seeing her nk expression, Sam couldn¡¯t help but speak again.

    "I said, pick a house. That is the residential area, where all my subordinates live."

    Sam said as he pointed at the residential area of most of the factory workers and the city guards.

    "Why do you want me to pick a house?"

    "Just do it already. Why do you have so many questions?"

    She looked at the neat row of houses and pointed at one.

    "Okay, let¡¯s go."

    The three of them went downstairs and exited the tower before they started walking through the streets towards the house she picked.

    As they walked through the public, Jw saw everyone bowing to Sam and greeting with a bright smile on their faces. Their smiles are not forced and even the bow was not burdensome. They are doing it with all their heart. It is the purest form of respect.

    Sam greeted them back with just a nod as they passed by.

    The word spread that Sam returned to the city and his walking path was spread and everyone in that path starteding out of their house to greet him joyfully as they invited him in.

    Soon, they arrived and stopped at the house that she picked. A woman and a kid are standing at the entrance of the house as they bowed to Sam.

    Sam smiled at them and gestured them to stand up before asking.

    "If you don¡¯t mind, can we have a meal in your house?"

    Thedy and the kid were shocked and immediately beamed in joy.

    "Please, pleasee in."

    They entered the house. It is not too big, but it is not small either.

    "So, your husband works in the city guard training center?"

    Sam asked as he looked at some medals that were hung on the wall.

    "Yes, he is one of the first generation guards of the city and then he became a trainer after we had our son."

    She offered seats to them and went into the kitchen to cook something.

    The son looked at Sam in awe and asked.

    "Are you really Sam?"

    Sam rubbed his head and spoke.

    "Do I not look like him?"

    "You look exactly like him. My teachers said a lot of stories about you. But they also said that the stories are from a decade ago. So, why didn¡¯t you grow old?"

    "Visa!"

    Thedy yelled from the kitchen and almost ran out.

    "Don¡¯t worry madam. It is fine."

    Sam just smiled and said.

    "When you cultivate and be stronger, you can stay young like that. So, for the past decade, I didn¡¯t age even a bit."

    "Really? My father said that you are stronger than him. Is that also true?"

    "Yes, I am. But your father is a stronger person than me in a different way."

    "How?"

    "He trains the city guards that keep the city safe. He is increasing the strength of the city to keep you, your mother, and many other people like you that are living here safe. So, in a way, he is stronger."

    "I want to be strong like my father."

    "I am sure you will be."

    Jw and Saber Monarch were stunned a bit as they looked at the peaceful smile Sam had on his face while speaking with a six-year-old.

    Soon, thedy of the house served the food and was quite nervous.

    "Please forgive me if the food is not to your liking. I am not that good at cooking."

    "No, it is one of the best food I had in a while. I like it. It has a taste of home."

    After finishing the meal, Sam looked at thedy and asked.

    "I need a favor from you if you don¡¯t mind."

    "Please, just ask whatever you need me to do."

    "Thisdy¡¯s name is Jw and she is someone who I want to make a deal with. She has some doubts regarding the organization, so I hope you would give her a tour around the city and the school. You can answer any of her questions honestly."

    He then turned towards Saber Monarch and said.

    "You also go with them."

    With that, he returned to the tower and rxed while Jw and Saber Monarch went on a tour of the city.

    Jw kept on asking questions about Sam and when thedy understood Jw¡¯s intentions, she gave one proper answer.

    "If you really want to know what kind of person he is, I really have no answer. His journey started in a small vige that waspletely far away from this ce. A small vige that barely has a novice stage cultivator.

    On his way to where is today, he was ruthless in his actions. Many people in this nation still fear him. For some people, he is a straight-up devil that they want dead.

    But most of the people that live in this nation always feel grateful to him. For them, he is like a deity.

    Long ago, this ce is a different empire and the prince of that emperor is a tyrant to say the very least.

    I was forced to be a prostitute because I refused to sleep with one of the royal guards. I saw Sam make his presence known in the city.

    He cut the arms of everyone that disturbed him or his friends and he actually cut both arms of the prince when he unted his position.

    Later, the emperor hunted him for months, he fought wars beyond his level one after another and he made the whole empire fall and be what it is today.

    I was here when the previous capital waspletely demolished and this new city was built.

    He gave new hope to many people. He opened the school to give the orphans a chance at life. He gave value to every form of education that could be used and made it possible for us to explore. His three friends were together with him all the way through it.

    If one has to judge his character, he wouldn¡¯t hesitate to show his cruel side but he would never show his kind side. He is sensitive to betrayal and kindness and repays both of them tenfold. In fact, be burned four men alive in the most painful way in front of the whole city because they conspired against him. But he equally rewarded the people that made real contributions.

    After he took over he made the peace in this crazy world a reality.

    I don¡¯t know what kind of deal you want to make with him. But from what I know, no one ever made a deal with him was on a losing end."

 Chapter 989: Hels statue

    Jw went through the whole tour with one surprise after another. She didn¡¯t expect that a person who is employing a few thousand people can be adored and loved by this many while simultaneously respecting them to no end.

    From a normal waiter in a restaurant to a researcher in the school. All of them are extremely respectful towards Sam. Particrly, the students of the school. There are members of all age groups, all kinds of races, and both genders.

    Everyone was given an equal opportunity at what they want to do.

    And the students almost treated Sam like a god. The onlyint they had is that Sam is not staying in the realm more often.

    He was always roaming around.

    After the tour was over, she and Saber Monarch were escorted by the Saber Monarch to the ce where Sam currently is. He is currently getting a massage from the elvendy he brought from the Charbhum realm.

    When Sam saw theming, he said.

    "Is the tour detailed enough? Or should I arrange another one?"

    "No need. It is great." Jw said as she looked around. This is not exactly a massage parlor. But it has all the things that are needed for a massage. This is actually the practice ce for the Elvendy and except for the test subjects which are her students, nobody is allowed. Of course, Sam is another exception.

    She stopped giving massages directly a long time ago. Now she is focused on studying the technique and improving it while imparting it to the new generations.

    She rotates around all the of schools under the organization and luckily she came to the deste¡¯s branch and Sam is also here.

    "Boss, Can I get one next?" Saber Monarch directly asked.

    "Sorry, she is not a masseuse by profession. She is currently a researcher.

    If you want a massage, I think the new massage parlor opened by her students is three blocks that way. You can go there and get it. I will pay for the massage, but you better tip them properly. Otherwise, I will cut your next month¡¯s sry for their tip."

    Saber Monarch had chill¡¯s down his spine when he thought of the Sry cut and immediately left.

    "So, Ms. Jw are your doubts rified? If you have any more you can ask thisdy here."

    Jw shook her head in a hurry.

    "Then that is good. You can make your decision leisurely and we will leave by evening. Your stay was arranged and a guard will escort you there."

    That evening, Sam went to meet with Jw along with the Saber Monarch in the hotel she was staying in and asked.

    "Did you make your decision? Or do you want more time?"

    "I made it. I will ept all your conditions."

    "Thank you. This spares me some money."

    After that, he called for a space gate team and took them along with them to the Tri-Ashura Realm.

    The Space gate team went to the sect and started building a space gate that connects with the feathered.

    This gate is also a temporary one.

    Its goal is only to sustain until all the people of the sect can move away.

    While they are slowly moving away Sam sent his team to different sects to offer something.

    Something in return for all of their current ves and their refrainment for the very for the rest of their lives.

    Of course, he knew there is a great chance that they wouldn¡¯t ept it, but two out of three families surprised him by asking what Sam can offer.

    Sam knew that this only happens in two cases, they just want to drag Sam along for a ride just for the sake of fun or they want to know what is so valuable in Sam¡¯s hands that is equivalent to the abolishment of verypletely so that they could rob him off of it.

    There is also a third case which is that they are really interested in the deal and that is the rarest of the cases and almost impossible.

    Sam didn¡¯t hesitate to show what he has. The good old grenade factory, the liquor, and t-fish puppet. He gave them all up just like that because he wanted to see Yanwu happy. A part of him also knows that they wouldn¡¯t take this deal.

    Even though the team is powerful, they have means and they have numbers. The elders of the family are inte stage of Astral ne Pre-transcendence and all three family heads are in peak stage.

    As soon as Sam made his offers to them, all three family heads had a meeting and came to an agreement. They decided to rob Sam blind of all his techniques and business secrets and decided to distribute among themselves.

    And they moved the very same night. The team members that went to meet these people gave the sect¡¯s location as a meeting point and asked them to send any message there.

    So, they sent their people directly there to take whatever they wanted.

    What they don¡¯t know is that this is exactly what Sam wanted.

    He just wanted to drag them all to this ce and get this over with and particrly, he is keen on them making the first move.

    He doesn¡¯t want the reputation that he runs around and destroys families like he has nothing else to do.

    In this case, they got greedy and they are the ones that are making the first move. No, whatever he does, he is only a victim here.

    And Sam gave a few tasks to the team. To capture an elder of the family head one each so that he could add them to the secondary team inside the chessboard.

    Then the battle that would be remembered as long as the Tri-Ashura realm exists, went on.

    While the team including Jw is busy fighting the family forces, Sam went into the city and entered the family to take a good look.

    The security is actually pretty tight in all three estates than normal because they are afraid that they might betray one another.

    Sam sneaked to the outskirts of the estate and got a good look through the crystal table to get theyouts.

    He did the same with all three of the families while the battle went on and on.

    By dawn, half of the forces on the three families¡¯ side were gone and they returned to their estates.

    It is now time for Sam¡¯s team to attack and the families started getting cold feet.

    The Emerald blood demon family is the first to give up as the family head was extremely afraid, so the team only managed to capture an elder who was actually captured the previous night.

    The next to break was the crimson blood family, the scenario is simr but at least they got two elders the other night and finally the ck Blood demon family.

    He didn¡¯t give up actually.

    "I am a subordinate of the Night Demon Family. You don¡¯t want to do something you will regret." And before he could finish that sentence, the team already captured him and Sam threw him into the chessboard.

    Sam already poked the next so whatever it is that happens, will happen whether he left these guys or not. It is better to take whatever he can now.

    After that, the team focused on looting the resources and releasing the ves while Sam was looking at something he didn¡¯t expect to see.

    The statue of Hel.

    He hurriedly opened the list to see if there is any family that he didn¡¯t notice. But there is none. As he looked through, though he noticed something else, the Night demon family.

    That name is under Hel¡¯s list which led him to make a spection. The ck demon family might not even be a separate entity that acts as a subordinate to the Night Demon family, it is just a part of the Night demon family that spread far and wide.

    And this Night demon family is something that is on Phase three of his ns.

    Luckily, he didn¡¯t have any business operations or connections in this realm or the surrounding realms.

    It would be too hard to make any connection with him as he stopped the expansion a long time ago and roamed so many realms. The Night demon family wouldn¡¯t be able to trace him that easily.

    And all he needs is for them to wait for a few years.

    Luckily the most they knew is his name and not many people had a clear impression of him as much as they had of his team.

    He could stay low for a while. But just in case, Sam decided to do something to help himself buy some more time.

    He looked for the realm that the Night Demon family belongs to marked it.

    There is still two months¡¯ time for Sam and the team to go and meet the challenger, so he decided to use this time and buy some more time from the Night Demon family.

    After all, if they have a problem at home, they would focus more on it and less on the destruction of their subordinates.

 Chapter 990: Troubling the Night Demons

    After dealing with the families, Sam stayed there for a week and there is nothing bad that happened in that one week. He guessed that the news didn¡¯t reach the Night Demon family or the night demon family really didn¡¯t care too much about a small subordinate family under their wing.

    But this time was enough for Sam to move the sect away to the feathered and he destroyed the formation at the volcano before he moved there. The headquarters of this sect will be held in the feathered as the average strength of the women is higher than that of the average strength of the people in Sam¡¯s city.

    Then the sect people are divided ording to their cultivation levels and sent to different branches of schools that are suitable for them and adults chose different ces to work at.

    After this was done, went to meet the Phoenix.

    The beast came from higher realms. The realms were far higher and the realms that still didn¡¯t unlock within the divine dimension.

    The name of the Phoenix is Fion. He came from the same realm as Yanwu.

    He just wanted to see if the bird has a story to tell.

    And after hearing it, Sam was not very surprised. He learned that the beasts and cultivators from higher realms would be sent to the lower realms for some training. The phoenix is actually of the next generation of the beasts to that of Yanwu.

    Yanwu had to stop his cultivation for fifteen years to stay aligned with Sam¡¯s cultivation, so he is currently on par with the next generation of the beasts in his realm.

    Unlike the Golden sun crow race, the Phoenix race is pretty diverse. There are different elemental phoenix races. Like the thunder phoenix, the Ice Phoenix, and the Dark Phoenix which are more prominent ones.

    And all these subraces have intense rivalry among them and the fire elemental phoenix race is hated by all as they are the most prominent race of all.

    So, every generation when the young beasts are sent to different realms for training, the other younger beasts would be after their tail trying to attack and finish their rivals.

    In an attempt to do that, Fion was attacked and that parasite was inserted into his body forcefully. He managed to escape and he snuck into his lower realm.

    As for the cultivation of Fion, it turned out to be the Initial stage of Astral ne Transcendence. But he needs to recover for a few months after the surgery so that he could strengthen the newly constructed meridians to sustain his energy levels.

    Then he went to Jw once again to get her story.

    "You are not aplete human are you?"

    Sam asked as he took a seat in her new residence.

    Jw who was about to offer him a drink stopped in her tracks and looked at him in surprise.

    "Well, I am actually not a human too, and the remaining part gave me pretty good senses particrly identifying the scent of the creatures. I am pretty familiar with human scent and I am sure you are not aplete human. What race and realm are you from?"

    Sam continued as he looked at her in silence.

    "Does it matter?"

    "Of course it matters. I need to know what I am going to face next. Since I already took you in, it is impossible for me to just brush it off. Otherwise, yanwu will be said even if he agreed with my decision. So, if you give me some information, I would be prepared. That is how I survived and grew into what I am today. Preparation."

    She slumped into a chair and sighed.

    "I am from the Gandharv race. Do you know about them?"

    "The subordinates of Hindu Deities and gods?"

    Jw was surprised.

    "You know about factions of gods?"

    "Well, I know about gods more than most people. Anyway, are you from a Gandharv family?"

    "Yes. Gandharvas are a race that is too diverse with too many branches. If we dig deeper there would be a hundred branches at least and I am from one of the lowest-ranked branches. An illegitimate child between a Gandarv and a human.

    I had to escape because of some circumstances."

    "What is that? Family pressure?"

    "Yeah, something like that. If you don¡¯t mind I would like to not speak about it. Don¡¯t worry. You wouldn¡¯t get into trouble easily. I changed my face, name, and identity. In their opinion, I am already dead."

    "That slows down some problems. Can you tell me the name of your family?"

    "Merene family."

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but chuckle.

    "It seems like we are bound to sh with your family. But it will be some time. Prepare yourself."

    "sh with my family?"

    "Yeah, they have something called a golden horn of illusion that I need."

    "You want the family heirloom?" Jw was stunned.

    "I don¡¯t want it. I need it."

    "Anyway, as I said it would take some time, so don¡¯t worry too much and by the way, I am not going to be in the realm for a while. I need to go somewhere.

    Our next journey is after two months and you cane there with the rest of the team. I would directlye to the destination. Take care."

    Sam stayed there for the next two days and left.

    He directly went to the Night Demon realm. The realm is named after the family and the whole realm is under their control.

    Sampletely changed his attire and went there as a member of the winged race which was convincing because of his new wings.

    He even used some disguise techniques to change his face.

    He started roaming around the realm for the first month and took a look at all the ces the Night Demon family has resources.

    After the month is over, he started creating trouble for them. From the information he gathered, the Night demon family is already investigating the case of the ck blood demons.

    But they have limited progress.

    There is also something else he observed. The presence of undead creatures. Vampires, Ghouls, and Wights are everywhere to be seen and in fact, he came across some familiar faces from the realm of the undead.

    This made him understand that the Night Demon realm is the realm that is connected to the realm of the undead and the Night demons are the organization that is recruiting the undead creatures that reached certain cultivation.

    After getting a proper idea of what is happening in this ce, Sam decided to use the local means to create chaos.

    He didn¡¯t want to mess with the family directly and make them alert, rather he decided on making them busy.

    Anyway since this ce is within his list and it is also under the control of Hel¡¯s subordinates, he doesn¡¯t have to care too much.

    His first target is to go after their herb production.

    The Night Demons are so into the herb production that a whole was dedicated to it.

    They produce all kinds of herbs with different elements as they had fields across all twelves they have in that realm.

    Sam created something with death energy and nted them near the forests where the fields are present.

    He didn¡¯t directly attack it. He took over a week to do all that and let the things he nted work on their own.

    And for the next week, after his preparations were done, one field after another started being affected by the death energy, and the herb production was halted. The herbs started getting corrupted by the death energy. Their efficacy and the medicinal properties are disappeared and even the forest surrounding the fields started withering.

    This something created by the undead waste from the undead realm, which he collected long ago and hebined it with the undying volcanic stone powder a bit and let it corrupt the soil of the whole area.

    The Undying volcanic stones he had in his hand are not very useful for him now, so he decided to use a couple of them like this and turned them into powder.

    After the herbs are taken care of, Sam decided to go after the mines.

    He once again used the stone powder, but this time in a different way.

    He created a formation disc with a special ink that contained the stone powder and nted the formation disc deep under the mine.

    The formation disc has only one job, to create a concealed formation that slowly sucks the vitality of whoever enters the mine.

    He made a bunch of those discs and nted them all in different ces in the mines.

    Soon miners started getting sick and fainted as they felt their vitality being sucked from their bodies.

    The night demons who were already surprised by the sudden herb production loss didn¡¯t expect another blow in the form of the mining hindrance.

    Even when the high-level cultivators entered the mine, their vitality is also being slowly sucked. They can survive a bit longer, but they couldn¡¯t identify the problem.

    And the first suspicion obviouslynded on the undead creatures. Even though they are recruited as subordinates, there are some undead creatures who have high ranks and they obtained them with a lot of effort, in fact, there are a bunch of elders who are vampires, ghouls, and wights.

    They are obviously the first suspects as the whole thing is a result of death energy and vitality loss. But they didn¡¯t dare make the assumption didn¡¯t start pushing me. At least they knew they are in a crisis and called all the night demons back from across the realms.

 Chapter 991: Kiran

    Sam created enough troubles for the Night demons and left their realm without a second thought. The next stop is Barmmin realm.

    This realm is of a bit higher level than the Tri-ashura realm and it is not exactly far away. It has powers that are on a thin line between phase two and phase three of his ns and there are families here that are on the list.

    This is thest realm he would have entered ording to the phase 2 ns right before entering the phase three.

    Even though, these powers are individual and independent, they still have connection with powers in higher realm and these families are responsible for helping these specific higher powers to recruit some prodigies from these realms.

    Since it doesn¡¯t make sense for them to travel from one realm to another to search for talent and they were afraid that they might lose their sense of superiority, they conduct a tournament every now and then.

    There is no pattern in conducting the tournament. They will conduct it as long as they all agreed to it at one point and give out the news.

    And this tournament is about to start in the realm and the information is that the candidate Sam and his team are after is also entering the tournament this time.

    In fact he left this message at thest person he challenged so that if anyone came looking for him will be informed ande and meet him here.

    Currently in his team, Sam has all kinds of people. The Saber Monarch who fools around a lot. Sia who is tender hearted, Gran who is cold, Five elemental King who is peaceful and Jw who has this righteous sense of justice. But if this guy joins the team, he would be the most crankiest of all.

    That is what Sam understood as soon as he entered the realm and came to the capital of Barmmin and roamed around to see if he could get any information regarding the tournament. But to his surprise, the candidate they have selected has be the main character here as everyone is constantly speakiing about him.

    His name is Kiran.

    And everywhere Sam went, no matter which bar, restaurant, inn or some other ce with more than a dozen people, it is inevitable that at least two of them would be talking about this guy.

    The registrations for the tournament opened that very day and there is arge board in front of the administrative office disying the names of the candidates who registered for the tournament.

    Kiran¡¯s name didn¡¯te up. As only a few people know this guy¡¯s true looks it is hard to know whether he registered with an alias or if he didn¡¯t register at all.

    But most people inclined to believe it was thetter as he was never afriad to reveal his name whereever he went and was quite high profile. He was that confident in his disguise technique that he would never get caught.

    Or he is just that crazy.

    So, Sam is also counting on him not registering yet. So, he waited there and meanwhile after a few days his team arrived and still he didn¡¯te to register.

    "The registrations are open for another week. He might wait untilst minute to do that. We need to be partient."

    Sam exined the situation to his team.

    "Do you guys want to register?" He asked his team members.

    The registration criterion is actually simr to the criterion Sam is looking for in his teammates. The cultivation level should be Late stage Pre-transcendence to Middle-stage Transcendence of Astral ne.

    Of course, the Pre-transcendence and Transcendence divisions will be held seperately, but for extra reward the Pre-transcendence winners can challenge the Transcendence winners at the end of the tournament.

    And the rewards are not just recruitment from the high level families and organizations. They have cultivation resources, weapons and medicines of different kinds.

    It is alsomon for people to participate just for the material rewards instead of joining the family. He wondered if his teammates are tempted.

    But to his surprise none of them are interested even though he is sure that there would be some great excitement if they did after all, they are famous in different realms one way or another and this tournament is essentially a gathering of fighters from different realms.

    "Saber Monarch, you have to register."

    "Me? Why?" Saber Monarch said in a whiny tone.

    "What do you mean why? Because I asked you nicely. And I need someone in the tournament that could get into direct contact with this guy and you are the safest guy I could think of as you wouldn¡¯t die that easily and as reslient as a cockroach."

    Days passed as they waited for the name they are looking for and on thest day of the registration and in thest hour, the name finally appeared.

    It turned out that they are not the only ones looking for that guy.

    There are many people who registered in the tournament that felt excited when they looked at him name and they also seemed to be waiting for a long time.

    Sam took at the surroundings near the registration area to see if he could find him, but he just disappeared into the crowd.

    At first he wanted to get a glimpse of him at the registration area and he was confident that he would be able to spot him as long as he was alert for the name to appear, but it seems like that guy is slicker than he thought.

    Anyway, he is not in any particr hurry.

    After the registrations are over, the tournament started the very next day.

    The tournm took ce in arge arena constructed specifically for this.

    For the initial stages, there are bunch of small stages all over simultaneously conducting twelve fights so that they could finish off the scrap in the early stages.

    For this, the audience are not that excited as the matches were over as soon as they started.

    There are so many contenders that even though the matches are simultaneous and they are held for eight hours straight, it still took around five days to finish the initial challenges and thirty contenders from each division were selected.

    These thirty-two contenders will fight in one on one battles until only one of them remains in a regr tournament order.

    And the fights for the two divisions would be conducted on alternative days.

    By now, everybody saw who Kiran is, but everyday he ising with a different face and he has pass a test that would prove that he was him to the tournament authorities before he stepped on the stage.

    But Sam didn¡¯t manage to find him even shadow mice couldn¡¯t tail him as he is disappearing as soon as he exited the stage and on the way to the backstage from where he could go home.

    Shadow mice cannot meet him at the stage and could only wait at the back stage. But he was never seen at the backstage with the same face he had on the stage. He is that slick and quick.

    There is a contingency anyway. If everything goes well and there are no surprises, Saber Monarch would meet this guy in semi-finals and they would finally be able to contact that guy. So, for now they could only wait.

    After another five days, the tournament finally reached the semi-finals and since there are no unexpected surprises, Saber Monarch finally managed to meet this guy. It would have been better if it is private, but it was actually on the stage.

    "It is great to finally meet you." Saber Monarch said as soon as he got on the stage.

    "It is great to meet you too. I heard a lot of stories about you. Including the one how you were trapped in the maze. Which surprises me, why would you enter this tournament? After all, the people who trapped you are the ones recruiting."

    Saber Monrach looked at him coldly and said.

    "You seemed to have more than heard stories about me. You researched quite a bit. Anyway, I am not in the tournament for recruitment, I came specifically for you."

    "For me? Oh, you wanted to fight me?"

    "Not really, challenging for this ¡¯let¡¯s see who is stronger¡¯ thing is beneath me, because I know I am stronger. I needed to discuss something else."

    Kiran got pissed as Saber Monarch mocked that him like that. After all, his whole he has been travelling around fighting to make sure everyone knows who is stronger. It is almost an addiction to him and Saber Monarch is essentially saying that his whole life is worthless in his opinion.

    "Seems like you don¡¯t have anything good to talk."

    "You would know once we talked. But it seems like you are in no mood for talking. So, let¡¯s get this over with."

    With that, Saber Monarch took out his saber while Kiran took out his sword and two people got ready to sh.

 Chapter 992: Finding Kiran

    Saber Monarch and Kiran both looked at each other as they took out their des. The whole atmosphere turned sharp around them as their auras raged.

    They channeled their energy into their des and they glowed brightly.

    Kiran was the first one to make a move and he swung his sword directly aiming at Saber Monarch¡¯s neck.

    But the Saber Monarch didn¡¯t even dodge, he swung his saber, standing in the same position, and cut the iing attack in half blocking Kiran¡¯s advance prematurely.

    He didn¡¯t follow up with a counterattack and just stayed on the spot letting Kiran take the offensive.

    The audience looked at the battle with excitement. Sam and his team are also observing the whole scenario carefully.

    Out of the whole team, Saber Monarch is currently powerful as he stayed in the peak stage for a long time and should be on verge of a breakthrough to the Transcendence stage of Astral ne.

    And Five elemental King would onlye second to him. Thenes Jw and the twins and finally Agar.

    Agar who knew that she ispletely weaker than the rest didn¡¯t feel any pressure as she already epted that fact even before the journey started. But the same couldn¡¯t be said to the rest and even the Five elemental kings who is the epitome of patience felt a little pressure from Saber Monarch.

    So, the whole team is currently interested in knowing what this new addition ranks at and how strong he would be.

    It could be said that he would rank above the twins as his cultivation stage is higher and since he is also a one in a thousand talent just like twins, it would be hard for them to kill him. But between Jw, Five elemental King, and Saber Monarch, where would Kiran rank? This question is on everyone¡¯s mind.

    But from the looks of it, it would be hard to find out as Saber Monarch who is the strongest of them all is not giving much to measure.

    He ispletely on the defensive and it is apparent that it is by choice.

    He is fending off every attack that came at him and he made all of Kiran¡¯s efforts useless.

    Kiran is also getting frustrated as he attacked more and more and he learned that it would be difficult to prate that defense at this rate.

    He became even more aggressive and directly let his guard down. He kept on shing down without caring for his defense and even used his legs to kick and force Saber Monarch into action.

    Saber Monarch clearly noticed the change and it became a bit difficult to keep the same stance anymore and he had to finally move and as soon as he moved, the audience felt like they saw apletely different battle.

    Kiran is still aggressive, but this time it didn¡¯t look like Saber Monarch had the upper hand, rather it felt like he is struggling to block and defend the attacks.

    This is all because of the unique technique Kiran uses. His swordsmanship is different than normal and it focuses more on the moving objects. When the opponent is moving, h would have more advantage. And if the opponent is not moving and rather stayed stable with a proper defense, they would have a better chance at fighting him.

    Saber Monarch observed this from the previous fights and noticed that defending is easier when he stayed still. But he couldn¡¯t get the grip of the whole technique topletely be invulnerable. That is why he lost his footing and moved.

    But still, Saber Monarch is very skilled in battle and his instincts are top-notch, He was in too many life and death situations for him to fall just because of a technique.

    After a few more exchanges, Saber Monarch was still on the defensive and all of a sudden, he took a step back after defending the strike and sighed.

    Kiran felt the change in Saber Monarch¡¯s disposition and made his move, but this time he couldn¡¯t reach Saber Monarch and before he knew it, he felt a sharp sensation on his gut.

    Before he knew it, Saber Monarch is standing behind him with the saber which has a faint trace of blood on its de.

    The wound is not too deep, but it is not too light either.

    Saber Monarch smiled and raised a hand before saying.

    "I forfeit."

    With those words, he left the stage.

    Kiran looked at him in shock.

    "Wait. WAIT. WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU ARE GOING? THE FIGHT IS NOT OVER YET."

    He yelled at the top of his lungs and ran after him. But the referee stopped him in the middle and announced him as a winner while Saber Monarch left the arena.

    Sam and his team also left the arena.

    After meeting back at the inn, all of them immediately left the city and sneaked into the forest, and stayed in a pre-arranged hideout.

    Sam took the blood off of the Saber Monarch¡¯s de and activated his vampire bloodline to take a deep sniff and a light lick.

    Vampires have a unique ability to remember the scent of the blood of a person and they can spot that person whenever they are within the sensory range of their smell.

    This scent is unique and could only be sensed by Vampires and other undead creatures as it is the scent of the life force.

    Kiran can mask his energy, face, and even his demeanor but it is nigh impossible to mask the scent of life from him.

    If he can even do that then he would really be the greatest at the technique of disguise, but for one to try and change that assuming that it is possible, one must know that it even existed.

    And even Sam only learned that because he is a part vampire.

    It is not some theoretical study or a result based on experiments, it is something the undead creatures inherently knew for themselves.

    After taking the scent in, Sam once again appeared in the city and went to the inn.

    It would be hard to catch the scent of Kiran if he only relied on the Vampire bloodline, but things would be different if he used the Raiju bloodline along with the Vampire bloodline.

    With Raiju¡¯s bloodline, he could pick any scent within a few meter range of the inn and his vampire bloodline would help him identify the scent.

    After a few hours of waiting, he finally managed to catch the scent and immediately left the room as he followed the scent.

    Kiran is actually pretty swift. He came here after trying hard to find out where Saber Monarch lives without revealing his own identity. Because everyone is sensitive about Saber Monarch and everyone who asks about his whereabouts would be taken for Kiran as he is the one who wanted to meet him more than anyone.

    So, it took some time and once he learned that Saber Monarch is not in the inn, he decisively left without thinking too much and wasting his time.

    But Sam managed to catch his scent and after a few minutes of chasing, he finally managed to identify the person. Then he observed that Kiran also seemed to have noticed him so, after he marked that person, he left a shadow mouse near his shadow while walking past that person and entering a bar.

    "Finally, it is hard to find where this bar is," Sam muttered and entered the bar.

    Kiran who heard the mutter heaved a sigh and left.

    He walked through the streets for another half-an-hour and changed a few disguises before finally arriving at his hideout.

    It is actually a normal residence and he entered it like an ordinary man.

    Shadow mouse stayed with him throughout the night. The next day, Kiran left to the forest first and came back into the city with a different disguise and walked through the streets as he searched for Saber Monarch.

    Shadow mouse stayed on trial and made sure that he wouldn¡¯t be lost.

    And after a day of futile search, the frustrated Kiran once again reached the same house at the end of the day, to take a rest.

    The next day it is the finals of the tournament and he went to the finals and finished his opponent off before roaming around the city once again in search of saber monarch and went back to the residence.

    The shadow mouse immediately went to the inn where Sam arrived that morning and informed him of the location.

    Sam neared the house and took a deep sniff and only after confirming the scent, did he go to the nearest which ispletely within the range of his shadow necromancy, and sent a small shadow towards him.

    This is a new shadow he created just for this moment and it is also made of a mouse just not a shadow mouse.

    The mouse shadow arrived in the residence and Sam used a shadow possession.

    Kiran immediately got alerted and took his sword out.

    "Woah, don¡¯t be in a hurry to attack me, buddy. It would be hard to keep your cover if you react like that. I am just here to talk."

    He got stunned when he heard the voiceing from a small voice.

    "So, how is your search for Saber monarch going?" Sam asked in a cheeky tone.

 Chapter 993: Brutal Defeat

    Kiran became alert and wanted to attack the shadow, but when he observed his surroundings, he noticed that there is nothing else except for this one shadow which is not really a threat no matter how he looked at it. It doesn¡¯t even have that energy in it and it is not really abat-style beast even if it directly came much less a shadow undead.

    "Who are you?" Kiran asked while still pointing his sword at Sam.

    "I am the one who knows your current location and a person with means to follow until your next location."

    "Well, it is good that you think so. After all, a man needs to have something to be confident about. But don¡¯t try. You might lose that confidence and drown in despair."

    "That is funny. Do you think this is a fluke?"

    "I know it is a fluke."

    "It is great that you think so. After all people like you who think they are invincible and believed it wholeheartedly, need to have this kind of thinking, rejecting everything that might challenge your belief even though it stares right at your face and associates everything to your bad luck and other¡¯s good luck.

    I have been there in that phase. Trust me, I was even more of a pain in the ass than you are. So, you are doing a great job."

    A sword ray barely missed the shadow and shed the surface behind it. But the shadow of the mouse didn¡¯t even flinch.

    "Don¡¯t make empty threats, If you want to finish off the shadow, you better do it properly. But before that, you better know that there is no way you would be able to meet Saber monarch if you do that."

    Kiran frowned and asked.

    "You know saber Monarch?"

    "He is my subordinate."

    "Bullshit. Saber Monarch is a sole cultivator. He didn¡¯t work for any organization."

    "Now he does. Why do you think he forfeited when he could sweep the stage with you in a few seconds. That defensive fight, that one strike that barely got some blood out of you. All of this was done based on my instructions."

    "Why should I believe you?"

    "You don¡¯t need to and neither do I want to force you to. But if you by any chance want to meet the Saber Monarch to clear this. Come to the mountain top on the eastside forest of the city.

    You would be able to meet him there at dusk tomorrow.

    Otherwise, you can go on your way and never get the chance of knowing whether you really won or lost the fight with Saber Monarch. The saber Monarch might even be the strongest opponent you ever faced.

    Goodbye."

    Sam let go of the shadow possession and let the shadow disappear into nothingness.

    Kiran got out of the house and ran around to see if he would find Sam, but there was no clue and he is not exactly an expert in necromancy to figure out ways to search for a necromancer through a shadow undead.

    It is even a difficult task for an experienced necromancer, much less for someone who doesn¡¯t know anything.

    After he failed repeatedly at finding someone, he went back and waited for the next day.

    At first he wanted to wait until dusk, but he couldn¡¯t and moved at afternoon and waited at the mountain top.

    After a long wait, Sam and his teammates all arrived together.

    Kiran looked at the group and asked.

    "Who is the boss here?"

    Sam just smiled and said.

    "That would be me. Nice face by the way."

    "How did you find me?"

    "And why would I give that answer away that simply? Would you tell me how you managed to change your face if I ask you?"

    "Then how about after I defeat the Saber Monarch?"

    "So, what if you lose?"

    "I will show you my real face."

    "You really think that every person other than you is an Idiot, don¡¯t you? There are a few things you got wrong. First, Saber Monarch is my subordinate, so his time is my time and if you want to fight him, you would need my permission and you would need to offer something for that. As for the winning of the fight, if you do win I would tell you how I caught you, but if you lose you would have to give something equally important."

    "I am not giving you my technique. Apart from that, everything is negotiable."

    "Not a problem. I am not going to ask for any technique from you. But I don¡¯t need negotiations. I want something that you would do for sure"

    "What is that?"

    "I need you to work for me. For a decade."

    "I am not doing that. At most I would do it for a year."

    "You are way in over your head. You think you are worth that much?"

    "I know I am worth that much."

    "Okay, then the deal is off. Nobody and particrly you will never know who the true winner of that fight is and everyone knows that one who might have lost is not the Saber Monarch. You can take that to your grave.

    Let¡¯s get out of here."

    Kiran took out his sword and before he could even raise his aura, the whole team already focused their auras on him.

    "Deal or no deal that¡¯s it. Don¡¯t think that you can force this upon yourself.

    Anyway, you don¡¯t even trust yourself that you can win. So, why bother trying to fight?"

    "I know I am going to win."

    "Really? Then agree to the deal. What is the difference between one year and ten years if you are not going to lose?

    It wouldn¡¯t matter even if it is a hundred years. Try and find me after you gain that confidence so that you can fight him."

    "Saber Monarch? Is that it? Don¡¯t you have any pride to leave an opponent hanging?"

    Saber Monarch halted in his tracks and took a dramatic turn, just when Kiran thought he would make a move, he replied.

    "There is only one thing I care about at the moment. The sry my boss gives me. As for pride, I only pride myself on one thing. Not making a woman wait. So, there is nothing you can do that could make me fight you."

    As they were about to leave, Kiran yelled.

    "I agree."

    The team stopped and took a step back while Saber Monarch stepped towards Kiran and the battle started.

    After twenty minutes.

    The whole mountain top was a mess and the whole area waspletely thrashed with a lot of damage to the environment.

    And in the middle of it all, Kiran was standing with the support of his sword and there are a lot of wounds all shes bleeding out.

    Saber Monarch stood in front of him with one proper sh on his chest. But there was no deep damage and he stood there with a serious look.

    "You are good, But not as good as you think."

    He left those words and turned back to stand behind Sam.

    Sam walked forward and sized Kiran up.

    "I think this is the first loss in a while. Digest it, take a rest for three days and thene and meet me in the inn.

    You bettere and meet me. I don¡¯t like someone who breaks a promise and I might kill you for that. And you better believe when I say it. I can find you even if you go to the ends of the earth."

    After that, they left and went back to the inn.

    "Boss, do you really think he woulde?"

    "I don¡¯t know."

    "You are sure that he woulde to the mountain top. So, why not now?"

    "Because at that time, I knew what is going through the mind. But I don¡¯t know what is going through now."

    "How is that possible?"

    "He is a man that lives on the validation of others. He wants his name to be spread, he wants to prove that he is the strongest.

    He wants to create a legend for himself by not revealing his face.

    Just imagine, if you hear a story about a man who traveled across the realms defeating all his peers at every stage of his cultivation but no one ever managed to make him show his face.

    No one knows what he truly looks like.

    That would make quite a story, wouldn¡¯t it?

    So, I made a n. Saber Monarch who is famous himself and had a reputation, gives a chance to fight but withdraws from the fight in the middle. Kiran, who had a chance to add the title, the person who defeated the saber monarch under his best, lost the chance. It was robbed off of him in front of a whole crowd.

    He became mad and frustrated, so he tried to get that back and came here in desperation. I yed into the desperation and made a deal with him.

    If he really leaves, it would be hard for me to hunt him down in this vast world, and if it was before defeat, he would have believed that too. But he also believed that he would never lose. So, now he wouldn¡¯t trust his own beliefs that much.

    So, there is a great chance that he would definitelye for us. There is also a chance that my judgment might havepsed and he might leave. That is why I am not sure."

 Chapter 994: Meeting with Players

    Sam felt that there is a great chance that Kiran wouldn¡¯te to meet him. But he is not extremely worried and was ready to ept either oues.

    Because Kiran might be a high profile person, but he is not really that strong. In fact, even Gran and Sia might be able to give them a tough fight. After all, they can hold their own against the Saber Monrach without getting caught for a good while. At least a lot more than a twenty or so minutes.

    Even though most of it is the result of their elemental usage, it is still a great achievement.

    But he would still take this guy in and most of it is due to the disguise technique and his desire for glory. If his desire is strong enough, Sam could use his ability in art of disguise to make infiltrate different ces.

    And kiran wouldply just for the glory or thrill of doing those things. After all, all the enemies and opponents Sam is going to face are going to be beyond what Kiran could currently imagine.

    But on the second day, when the whole team is having a feast, Kiran came and said to Sam.

    "I would work for you. Exactly for a decade. But I would like to continue challenging tougher opponents. If you cannot agree to that, I will leave right after I defeated the Saber Monrach."

    Sam smiled and replied.

    "I will take the second option."

    Kiran was surprised.

    "Are you not afriad that you wouldn¡¯t be able to keep me for a long time."

    "The distance between you and Saber monarch is something you don¡¯t understand. If my estimation is not wrong, you would be work with me for a long time. A lot more than a decade."

    "I will prove you wrong."

    "Don¡¯t worry, with the things I would make you do, you might not even want to prove me wrong. Anyway wee to the team. Join us for the meal."

    Kiran sat at their table and after the meal was over, everyone went to do whatever they wanted to do for the day, they are moving the next day.

    "Oh, by the way. Kiran, you forgot to show your real face the other day."

    Kiran halted in his tracks and began hesitating.

    "Never mind, but show us a face that you would only use with us and also that face should never cause any troubles and we must never have a chance to mistake someone else for you no matter which realm we go. Do keep that in mind before you decide what to show us. You have twenty four hours. Right before we depart tomorrow."

    After giving them the time off for the rest of the day, Sam also took an off day and went to the nearestke he could find in the forest to take a swim and rx.

    With Kiran¡¯s addition, seven out of ten members were recruited and there are three more that he needs to recruit.

    But these three members are all of transcendent stage of Astral ne. One at Middle stage and two and the Initial stage. There is no way recruiting them would be easier than recruiting the current team members.

    And it can actually only be harder.

    Saber Monrach could possibly manage topete with the Initial stage people with his battle prowess, but that would be hard for him to do when considering that all the people in the list are stronger than their peers.

    All the current team members met Sam with any problem or need on their part. He could be considered fortunate, lucky or this might just be a simple and direct coincidence, but things always yed to his advantage and he managed to recruit them as per his wishes.

    But the remaining three would be a massive pain in the ass.

    After some contemtion, he decided to halt the recruitment process a bit.

    Because, by now the first phase ns which are currently being led by Argan and Arkiv are in their final stages and soon the first phase powers will all be over.

    The yers will be moving to the second phase powers and Sam doesn¡¯t want to lose out. Even though he managed to finish off a few second phase powers, that is just a drop in a bucket.

    There are too many second phase powers and they might be higher in number than the first phase and some second phase powers are connected with the third phase powers.

    So, has to n properly.

    He decided to move back to the deste or feathered to take a break for a month and prepare for what they are going to face before deciding on whether he should focus on the organizations in second phase first or prioritize the recruitment.

    With that in mind, the next day, he met with the rest of the team and went back to the deste and told them to take off days and roam around the next month.

    He went back to the roots of his research just so that he could calm his mind while he waited for Argan and Arkiv to arrive with news and the heirlooms.

    He went back to school, sat in sses, participated in research with Sirona and her staff, taught students, not just some senior students who works in diffe fields, even the little kids. He just did whatever he wanted for a month and in the middle of it, Argan arrived with Arkiv and the troops that fought for a few months straight are all stationed in Feathered to take rest.

    There are a few dozen heirlooms and Sam is extremely satisfied with the results.

    "How are things on your end? Whatever that thing is?"

    Arkiv asked as both of them drank together.

    "Not too bad. I recruited a few people. Ther e are still a few left to recruit."

    "Don¡¯t tell me you are making a crew for the next batch of people too?"

    "Of course, what do you think? I would just charge in and out of the organizations and struggle with them for days and even months trying to find ways and methods to defeat guys that are a dozen times stronger than me? I will pass on that one. I would rather finish with everything in a few days and take rest while acquiring whatever I could from that realm."

    "Are you still expanding?"

    "Not really. I decided to stop expanding for a few years. It is going too big and I need to make sure that there is no threat from all the people I am going to provoke. If I can make sure of that, I would once again start expanding."

    "Then it would take some time."

    "Yeah, it would. I will once again start after I am done with the phase two. By then I would have a certain strength that would stop the powers from phase two to try and swallow me whole, so I could just expand then freely after making an example out of them."

    "Speaking of Phase two, I have some messages for you."

    "Messages? From who?"

    "The rest of the yers of course. They want to make a deal."

    "A deal? For what? I am not giving them any troops. Anyway, the second phase is mostly dependent on quality over quantity."

    "Its not about that. They want you to cut them some ck."

    "Just tell me what it is."

    "Well, it would be better to talk to them directly. Nobody is currently going after the second phase organization and some of them are cleaning up some of their messes. So, by the end of the month at thetest, they would visit the feathered and have a meeting with you. If that is alright of course."

    "Let theme. But what is it that they cannot just tell through a message?"

    "Well, this time they are asking something big of you, so they decided they at least need to be polite and visit you while asking it."

    "Whatever you say. What are your ns now?"

    "Currently there are none. Since there is no time limit, I can do it a bit leisurely. Anyway, I am with the rest of the yers on this one. I will wait for them toe and we will talk. Until then, let me enjoy some of your luxury, will you?"

    "As long as you can pay for it."

    "Is there any kind of fellow yer discount? I am not as rich as you, you know?"

    "you are not poor enough to ask for a discount either. I know you are rich enough. Just don¡¯t be a miser and spend something on yourself. Otherwise, you would go mad soon."

    After that, both of them left their own ways. Sam continued his research and teaching and Arkiv spent his time rxing.

    By the end of the month both of them arrived at the feathered and so did the rest of the yers.

    All the yers that are alive gathered.

    Sam could sense the changes in everyone of them. They are clearly stressed in the past few months.

 Chapter 995: Wait

    Sam arranged a special meeting for the yers.

    "So what do you guys want? Why is this meeting? Did you all get into any trouble by any chance? You seemed so stressed."

    "You are the reason for that stress, do you know that?"

    "Noah asked from the side."

    Sam was surprised.

    "I don¡¯t think I did anything to piss you off, did I?"

    "Dude, you set your team off on all the organizations that are within the range and because of that, we had to work faster and quicker takingrger risks. What is your hurry? If we hadgged behind most of the organizations would have been taken care of by you. Even now you at least got double the average of what we got. You are making us work harder."

    Akhil said in a whiny tone.

    "Don¡¯t me for that alright. I am ying within the rules. If you had wanted to do it fast, you should have worked harder and got an organization of your own. After all, having a bunch of capable subordinates is a good thing."

    "Of course, it is a good thing. And that is what pissing us off more. We were all born into organizations, but we are the ones that are running solo now. You on the other hand didn¡¯t have an organization from the start and were born in a lost vige somewhere, but you have the organization that is far more capable than what we destroyed in the past few months.

    If we had known things would be like this, I would have made some preparations at least. Anyway, just cut us some ck, man."

    "Can you guys cut the crap and just some to the point directly?" Sam said with a chuckle.

    "We need you to stay on a break."

    "What? That is not going to happen. Give you guys a headstart? Over my dead body. I am not that stupid."

    "Not a headstart dude. Just give us time to catch up. You are already at the peak stage of Initiation and god knows when you would break through to Pre-transcendence. Because of your hurry, we are not getting any time to cultivate and train peacefully. No matter how much we tried we are barely in the middle stage and Arkiv and Noah are the only ones who made it to thete stage.

    We are being held back a lot." Akhil went on without giving anyone any chance to speak.

    Sam sighed and Akhil continued.

    "The thing is, we don¡¯t exactly know what your n is, but you are in obvious haste for growth. If you get a great headstart like this then the rest, we would ck back and we all know that in the final stages, no matter how powerful we are, those organizations are hard to deal with and there are few of them.

    You wouldn¡¯t be able to do it alone and had to wait for us to catch up.

    So, why do it then, rather than do it now? Now it is easier to wait for catch up as the gap is small. If you keep on going like this the gap would only widen.

    And also don¡¯t drive us to the dust, man. It might sound unfair but we are all in the same boat, let us just have each other¡¯s back. Wait for a few months. We will convert all the heirlooms and focus on cultivation. We all had our own encounters around and we are sure we can catch up. As soon as we reach the peak stage, even if you break through to the Pre-transcendence by then, we wouldn¡¯t ask you to stop until the second phase ends."

    Sam thought for the moment and said.

    "So, what is in it for me?"

    "Two-phase two heirlooms from each of us. Deal?"

    "Deal. But I wouldn¡¯t wait for all of you to break through. Six months."

    "Make it eight."

    "Sure then. Deal. Is that all?"

    "There is something else."

    "What is it?"

    "It has been a while, let¡¯s go to Mackey¡¯s restaurant, please. I desperately want to eat something good."

    Sam just chuckled and took them away.

    After the meal at Mackey¡¯s, all the yers left on their own way. Eight months is not much of a time to break through and they don¡¯t have enough resources like Sam.

    They could only take the time and the opportunity they have at hand.

    While they are gone, Sam also focused on his cultivation himself while he let the rest of the team on their own training or whatever that is they wanted to do. But as much as they could enjoy themselves, they also need to bring information on the next and thest three people that Sam is about to recruit.

    After picking the person of their choice, the team dispersed and left.

    Sam focused on training and research once again. He didn¡¯tpete with anyone for a while and he didn¡¯t set any goals for himself. Even though he didn¡¯t n for this break to happen, he decided to take this chance to calm himself down.

    The things that happened with Gran and Tamas, he didn¡¯t want to repeat it again. Not the losses, if a person doesn¡¯t lose now and then, they will never learn some things. The reactions are what shouldn¡¯t be repeated again.

    He shouldn¡¯t react like that in any other situation.

    For that to happen, Sam just did everything on a whim in a peaceful manner. He didn¡¯t care about the numbers for a long while. Since he had no goals, there was no need to worry about achieving something.

    For the first time in a while, he just enjoyed and took in all the things that he built aftering to this world. He traveled through the trains he built. He visited some old friends. And this went on for over six months straight.

    Last two months, he focused on the breakthrough.

    The breakthrough to the Astral ne Pre-transcendence was smooth and there are no weird changes. The bloodline activation didn¡¯t happen and there was no metamorphosis. Except for the change in power and small change in his body.

    But this one small change that made him ecstatic in these six months and that is his trick to hide the wings he had on the back.

    After he broke through to the Pre-transcendence, as he circted his energy ording to the cultivation method something changed in his brain. It is as if the cultivation technique imprinted something into his memory directly.

    Memory is the method to hide the wings. Since he was not born with them and they are at most the result of a mutation that was caused by his unique cultivation technique. And after he broke through he came to know that the mutation of wings was iplete and itpleted itself after the breakthrough.

    Now, he can bring the wings whenever he wants them and hide them whenever he doesn¡¯t. And the ess point is through the wind elemental fusion.

    When he goes through theplete fusion, he can call the wings and they would appear on his body in the form of solid condensed wind just like the rest of the body.

    And if he changed into a normal body at that time and deactivated the fusion without folding the wings back, then the wings would take their normal form with feathers, but it takes a lot of spiritual energy and a bit of expendable life force to do that.

    Once again when he needs to hide them, all he has to do is go through the wind elemental fusion and just fold the wings directly ande back to his normal body.

    Even though he was happy, Sam had more questions than answers at the moment when this happened.

    Because, even though the cultivation technique was a prerecorded thing, the types of beasts he would take in for the contract was not.

    Except for Yanwu and the Void hopper, no other beast was pre-decided and every single one of them was his choice and a result of exploration with not too many pre-existing factors involved.

    But the change in the cultivation technique and the memory imprint along with the iplete andterplete mutation of wings, he didn¡¯t believe that it is also pre-recorded. After all, he could have made contract with any other beast and it is impossible that different reactions were programmed within the cultivation technique based on different bloodlines.

    After all, there are too many bloodlines and beasts and even bestiary is not a record that could give data on all of them.

    Even though he had questions, he has no one else to ask and certainly no one else to answer.

    He could only keep them in and wait until he met someone that could answer all these questions.

    After the breakthrough, Sam finally shifted his focus back to something rted to these families and organizations.

    The heirlooms.

    He had a few dozen heirlooms at hand now and he needs to exchange them for some value.

    He went through a bunch of these heirlooms to see if they would be useful to anyone in his subordinates and in fact he asked some of the team captains within the team that followed Arkiv and Argan to select one for themselves, but they rejected and preferred something Sam made. So, he could only exchange everything for resources and there is one particr resource that came into the menu that attracted him more than anything else and this resource is exclusive to him which made it ten times better.

 Chapter 996: Paras

    Sam looked at all the resources he could get ess to with the dozens of heirlooms in his hand and out of all of them, the one thing that is exclusive to him since he was the one asked for it, attracted him the most.

    It is the heavenly wine. The heavenly wine which Sam asked from Sun Wukong directly.

    But this one is a little different because it has higher potency and could be used on Astral ne cultivators.

    Even though Sun Wukong made an exception and gave this wine to him, he also ced an exorbitant price on it.

    At first, Sam thought that two to three second phase heirlooms and a bunch of first phase heirlooms would do it.

    But now, when he saw the price he was stunned.

    He would need to lose almost one-third of all his gains for this wine. But the one silver lining is that the quantity of wine is also huge and it was given in the same type of gourd he was given the first time.

    This could be stretched for a decade or even more if he controlled his drinking habits and didn¡¯t use it for normal drinking purposes and only used it for proper causes.

    After grudgingly buying that wine, he exchanged the rest for the resources for himself and his subordinates.

    The shopping was over and he is back to zero heirlooms. He went to different areas where his Astral ne subordinates are stationed and distributed the resources to them.

    Now that he has a bunch of Astral ne cultivators, he doesn¡¯t have to worry about the resources of lower-level cultivators. After the expansion, the resources for Consummate and lower level becamemon in the organization and as long as one has enough dedication and efforts, they would be able to breakthrough to Consummate realm easily, even if he is an old man.

    The organization has grown that big.

    After Sam finished with the distribution, he waited for his team to assemble once again.

    They came by the end of the seventh month. There is still one more month until the deal with the rest of the yers ends.

    In these seven months, the team not only took a proper vacation without worrying about anything, they also got the information Sam needed.

    This time though, everyone wanted to outdo the others and got some information by directly talking to the other party.

    The remaining three are all Transcendent stage cultivators of Astral ne and it is fair to say they are all far stronger than the members of the team.

    So, they were careful when speaking and didn¡¯t dare to cross the line. After all, being a subordinate of an Astral Pre-transcendent Initial stage cultivator is not something for an Astral ne transcendent Initial stage cultivator to be proud of.

    Some might feel, even a suggestion like that might bepletely over the line and take it as an insult. Particrly when they are roaming the world on their own without being dependent on anyone.

    Sam looked through the information he got and had a headache when he saw it. Out of three one is driven by revenge.

    A guy who uses a battle-ax as his weapon and is getting revenge for his deceased parents. This should have been an easy situation. After all, Sam would only need to prove that he could help him get that revenge, and then everything would be great.

    But Sam couldn¡¯t do that promise because he doesn¡¯t know what kind of revenge that guy is after.

    His original home is a lower realm which doesn¡¯t even qualify as a first phase organization. He is from a that could be considered the same level as deste. His parents died for some reason. They couldn¡¯t get the reason or the name of the person out of him.

    But his parents are dead and he going after the killer.

    He is currently staying in the realm with a bunch of second phase powers and throughout his journey, he destroyed many powers as he increased his cultivation level. But he still didn¡¯t stop and many people stopped believing that this is all for revenge and it is just some lunatic trying to get his name out there.

    But the person that talked to him was saber monarch and he is good at reading people as much as he acts like an idiot.

    He might not be good at analyzing their thought processes and behaviors like Sam does, but he could tell whether a person is a pure lunatic or if he is a normal guy driven by revenge.

    He is sure that this guy is definitely being driven by revenge. But why would someone who is in the lowest level ofs have an enemy that might be living this high or even higher?

    That doesn¡¯t make sense.

    There is another piece of information that might help Sam understand this guy¡¯s situation better. From what Saber Monarch observed, he is currently trying to deal with an elven branch.

    Until now, nobody figured out what kind of power destroyed this guy¡¯s parents, but the destruction he caused affected arge diverse group in terms of races, strengths, and authorities.

    And currently, he is going after an elven branch which has a bit of a higher level than normal elven branches and a lower level than the true elite. This branch could be said to be the bridge connecting the true elite and true subpar branches.

    Sam circled the name of the guy as he sighed.

    Paras. That is the name of the guy and his nickname is Axe grinding lunatic.

    He is their first target as he is the only guy that has an opening for Sam to exploit. If by any chance Sam manages to convince this guy and make him join his team, then he could use him to try and convince the remaining two.

    So, he passed the orders to the team to gather and get ready to leave to the Dark eye realm the realm where Paras is currently residing.

    Sam took a look at the list and smiled. Because the elven branch that was being targeted by Paras is actually on the list and it is even Hou Yi¡¯s organization.

    This is a great thing.

    While there is still time to do anything ording to his deal with the rest of the yers, he can at least gather the intel on the enemy for this one month and only make a move after the eight months period is over.

    This elven branch will also need quite some preparation anyway since it is actually on the top end of the list of second phase families.

    Even though he might not have finished the second phase operations with this family, he is sure as hell that he wouldn¡¯t start with this one.

    But now he has to.

    After reaching the Dark Eye realm, Sam and the team separated and lived separately in different inns. He separated the tasks for the team. The Elven branch is thergest entity they faced until now and they have a middle-stage Transcendent cultivator of Astral ne as head with a bunch of peaks andte-stage Pre-transcendent cultivators of Astral ne as their subordinates.

    They cannot do it on their own, but they can sure as hell finish this with the help of Paras.

    Since Paras is alone, he takes a longer time than the team to collect information on the family and it also happened that it is not his specialty.

    But with Kiran, Gran, Sia, and the bunch of shadow mice he has at his hand, Sam gathered much more informationpared to Paras in a much shorter time frame.

    After one month of information gathering, Sam went through with his team, it is finally time for him to meet Paras directly.

    All this while Saber Monarch kept regr contact with the guy and they regrly drank together in one of the inns.

    The very night which signifies the end of the eight months time period, Sam went to meet him directly when both Saber Monarch and he are drinking. Sam just slipped into their private room calmly and took a seat.

    Paras frowned and said.

    "I think you got the wrong room kid. Get out."

    "I am in the right room Paras. I came here to meet you."

    Saber Monarch sighed and said.

    "Meet Sam, my boss."

    Paras was surprised and spoke.

    "This is the boss you are talking about?"

    "Yes. He is the boss."

    "Are you kidding me? He is so weak."

    "Well, he is weaker when I first epted him as a boss. He is quite strongpared to that time. Anyway, that is not important at the moment. He is here to talk to you. I believe we can help each other."

    "I am sorry, Sam. I work alone. I don¡¯t work for organizations."

    "You don¡¯t have to. You just have to work for me."

    "Why would I do that?"

    "I don¡¯t want to waste my time exining how I could be of help to you on your long vendetta of vengeance.

    I have a deal. Let us cooperate in taking down this Elven Branch. I will help you take them down and I will get the heirloom. That is the deal. I will slowly exin why you should work for me or with me or whatever that makes you feelfortable. If you are still not convinced, let us just forget everything that happened and go our separate ways."

    Paras looked at Saber Monarch and thetter said.

    "Take it Paras, he can help you."

    Paras took a deep breath and said.

    "Deal."

 Chapter 997: Plan

    The next day, Sam arranged a meeting with the whole team and Paras in a hideout outside the city.

    Sam is currently writing on therge smooth wall of this secret room as he exined the n.

    The n was made after theypiled all the information they got in this past month and Paras was surprised at what kind of information they got and how they are using this information which he didn¡¯t think much of.

    He was also surprised by the fact that Sam who is the weakest of the whole group can actually make a n that is soplex.

    After exining the n, Sam smiled at Paras and said.

    "This is one of the perks of working with me. From what I see, your revenge doesn¡¯t end here. So, you are going to face tougher and difficult opponents and they will have argerwork and strength than this elven branch. If you really want to deal with them, you need to be stronger than all of thembined which takes a long time.

    But I and my team can do much more with the information we can gather and help you deal with the problem of numbers. Trust me, you will never be able to find a better team than this."

    Paras went into deep thought as he looked at therge and borate n on the wall.

    "Tomorrow we will proceed with the first step of the n. Our target, the third young master of the elven branch. Get ready ande to your positions tomorrow as per your time. Now disperse."

    The team got on their own separate ways while Sam and Paras went together to the most luxurious inn which gives the best view for monitoring the whole n.

    The next day, by noon Sam and Paras, are looking through the window as the third young master of the elven branch walked through the street sneakily. Nobody in the surroundings knows that he is the third young master because he is wearing the disguise. But his disguise technique is nowhere near as profound as Kiran¡¯s technique and he is barely hiding his physical appearance.

    He is walking towards a brothel. But before he could go inside, Five elemental King walked into the street along with another elf on his side as they discussed something. When the third young master looked at the elf, he immediately ran into an alley and hid there with utmost familiarity in his actions. He has done this many times actually.

    But right at the edge of the alley, there is a restaurant with a simple outdoor setting and Five elemental King sat on a table along with that elf continuing the discussion.

    The third young master cursed and hid deeper.

    At this moment, Kiran entered the brothel like a rich prick and asked for a particr woman.

    "I heard you have a woman named Aqua with blue hair. I want her."

    "Sir, Aqua is reserved already. She is waiting for her customer."

    "When is the reservation?"

    "Right now, actually."

    "Then is her customer here?"

    "No, sir. But he is our regr customer and I am sure that he is on his way."

    "I will pay double the price, I want her."

    Kiran asked casually. Aqua who is in her room came out and heard the discussion and frowned.

    "I am sorry sir. But I won¡¯t take any other customers at this hour."

    "I will pay three times."

    "No, sir Please leave."

    "Four times."

    "Please don¡¯t put us in a hard spot. We cannot. We will lose our regr customer."

    "Six times."

    "Sir, we have other options. There are many other girls and more beautiful too."

    "If you persuade her, I will pay for the whole brothel and everyone can take a break for a while."

    The rest of the women were stunned for a second and looked at Aqua."

    "I will pay ten times the price for Aqua and twice the price for the rest of the women for whatever the ie they get for the next two days."

    The manager was silent and didn¡¯t know what to do. But it is apparent that she is hesitating.

    Even Aqua was hesitating by now.

    "Fifteen times and five days."

    When Manager and Aqua are finally whispering, Kiran said something else.

    "I will pay fifteen times for Aqua for the next five days too."

    This is thest straw that broke the camel¡¯s back and Aqua ran into her room while managed shook his hands.

    Kiran smiled and made the payment.

    "Boss sure is rich." He muttered and walked into the room.

    Aqua shyly sat on the bed with a faint blush on her face as she wore a silk robe only slightly showing her skin.

    "I am a whore, why would you spend so much just to spend some time with me."

    She asked in a shy and seductive voice at the same time, that would invoke some protective instincts in an average man who knows he is pathetic but couldn¡¯t ept that fact.

    Kiran just smiled and took out some wine as he poured it into crystal sses and gave one to her.

    "Have some wine with me first and don¡¯t call yourself a whore. Let us talk for some time."

    And then began the sweet talk from Aqua¡¯s mouth. Kiran easily understood why she was this popr. Because she is good at making men feel that they are important. She could soothe their egos and make them feel that their opinions and their positions in the society along with their worthless lives matter and it almost feels like even if the whole world abandons those men, they will still matter to her.

    She makes them feel loved and she makes them feel like they are alive.

    Kiran who already got instructions from Sam, talked the way he was told. In fact, there is amunication device hidden behind his ear from which he is currently getting instructions and Kiran was stunned.

    The woman who wraps the men around her fingers is currently being wrapped around his finger.

    "What should I call you?"

    "Call me Fourth."

    "Fourth?"

    "Well, I am from a sect where we have to go to lower realms for some training and we cannot use our real names there. It is a vition. So we were given numbers. Mine is fourth."

    And soon both of them sprung into action.

    Kiran has no objection whatsoever to sleep with a prostitute, so he decided to take advantage of the n, and the real it is, the better it would be for the n.

    As they indulged themselves in the carnal pleasures so much, Kiran whispered something into her ears and she blushed.

    They stopped and he took two special blindfolds and tied one for her and pretended to tie one for himself and they went on with the carnal indulgence.

    At this moment, amotion happened outside the brothel in the street.

    Jw and Sia both started fighting out of nowhere and the fight was too shy. Everyone surrounded them and looked at the catfight as they made it seem like that.

    Even the manager of the brothel looked at the fight. At this moment, Five elemental King walked away with the Elf and the third young master came out of the alley and ran towards the brother. The manager sensed his approach and wanted to move, but she is in the middle of the crowd and Saber Monarch is standing behind her.

    When she pushed him, he coldly looked at her and raised his aura.

    "Who do you think you are pushing? You want a piece of me?"

    The manager became a bit panicky at the situation, but by the time she apologized to Saber Monarch and moved to the brothel, it was already toote.

    The third young master already opened the door to Aqua¡¯s room and what he saw shocked him.

    Kiran is currently in the disguise of an elf and he is taking Aqua from behind as she had blindfolds. Aqua moaned on top of her lungs. The rooms are actually soundproof, but as the third young master opened the room, the moans echoed throughout the brothel and even the streets on the outside.

    The manager looked at the third young master nervously.

    But she didn¡¯t dare say anything.

    "Young Master fourth. Don¡¯t stop. Ple.. Please."

    "I can¡¯t hear you," Kiran said and grabbed her by her hair and pulled her closer to him as he tried to fondle her breasts.

    "Please don¡¯t stop."

    "You don¡¯t want me to stop, then what do you want me to do?"

    "Go ha.. harder."

    "Why should I do that? You would share your body with another man after this. Why should I make you feel that satisfaction?"

    He asked in a cheeky tone.

    "No more.. No more... I will be your personal whore. Your personal bitch that you can fuck whenever you want. Please don¡¯t stop now."

    Kiran looked at Third young master and gave a smirk to his face and mouthed a few words.

    ¡¯Nice taste brother.¡¯

    The third young master felt like a sword was stabbed into his heart and he moved out of the room in a daze. He didn¡¯t even hear the apologies from the manager and walked aimlessly on the street."

    Sam and Paras are looking at the brother from the balcony and the former said.

    "The first step of the n is a sess. Now moving to the second step."

 Chapter 998: Plan II

    The third young master who was still in shock walked to his separate residence he prepared for himself in the outskirts of the city in the same daze.

    He locked himself inside and stayed there for quite a while.

    Meanwhile, Sam sent Gran on the next set of ns.

    To the fourth young master, whose disguise Kiran had when facing the third young master. He is currently alone on the other side of the city in his secret house with a bunch of scrolls and documents as he went through them.

    It is the information of his own family and his brothers who are also his peers.

    This fourth young master has the highest profile of all the young masters in the elven branch and he is good at talking trash, acting like a prick, and making fools out of others. He is a typical bully and a typical young master. At least in the eyes of the family and the city.

    But what Sam and his team of shadow mice found out in the past few days ispletely different.

    He is actually ambitious of all. He has informationworks all over the city and he knows information about all kinds of things in the city. From his family, his brothers, his elders to the young masters of other organizations, their elders, and so on.

    In fact, he runs an information selling point that is quite famous, but he doesn¡¯t use the information for money, rather he maniptes the information. He wants to control the political situation by manipting the information.

    It is possible, but one needs to be clear about what kind of information could be manipted and how much information they could manipte.

    But one clear advantage he has is, now that everyone made a habit ofing to his organization for information, whenever someone asked information about him, he managed to find out who it was and managed to manipte it fully, and stayed out of trouble.

    He is doing all this, but in front of all the other people, he is but a rich brat, that likes to fuck around and drink all day and in fact, he puts on quite a show.

    Gran arrived at the secret house and sneaked in. Before the young master could realize what is happening, he felt a pricking sensation on his neck and he fell unconscious.

    She took out arge jar of wine and made him chug it down. Soon Sam arrived and used dark elemental energy to ce a spell of illusion on this guy.

    In that illusion, he went out after getting bored, went to a brothel, chugged a lot of wine, and spent some great time with aqua, and finally came back to this ce to finish the work.

    A few hourster he woke up with a hangover.

    "I should drink more carefully next time. It is great that I managed to make it back here before passing out."

    He muttered to himself and went back to the estate of the family.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is something else waiting for him there.

    There is a reason why Sam picked the third young master for this n.

    There are five young masters in this elven branch and out of five, the fifth one is so young that is just in the Consummate stage and didn¡¯t even break through to the Astral ne.

    The remaining four are fighting for the spot to inherit the head of the branch title and out of these four openly, the first young master is winning, because he is good at both strength and politics. But in dark, the fourth young master is winning, because he had edge over all three and it is mostly because of the extra activities he is doing in the hiding.

    Just like how there are forerunners, there is one person who isst in the race. The third young master.

    He is a muscle head. A pure and dense musclehead. Who doesn¡¯t understand theplex thing like politics and he didn¡¯t care about the head of the family position.

    But when ites to battle prowess. He is the best of the best. He might be of same generation as the rest of the young masters, but in terms of cultivation he is almost on part with the elders and he could even beat the crap out of some of them.

    He openly withdrew from the race of the head.

    As Sam learned before, in the elven world, everything is mostly rted to politics even the individual strengthes second to the political standing, and not understanding this, the third young master withdrew which happened to be the biggest mistake hemitted in his life. His privileged status dropped and the rest of the young masters started making one of him.

    Of course, this was started by the fourth young master. But he only did it once so that he could make the rest of the young masters take over and make them fall in favor of the third young master.

    While he secretly made preparations to make amends with the third young master.

    What he doesn¡¯t know is that the third young master who felt depressed because of the constant bullying from the rest found sce in the arms of Aqua.

    He used arge part of his allowance to make her make him the exclusive customer.

    She made him feel loved for what he is and didn¡¯t force her to be what he wasn¡¯t and particrly, she didn¡¯t force him or make fun of him for being what he is.

    He made sure he was in disguise every time he went to aqua to make sure that he wouldn¡¯t reveal this one thing he had for himself.

    Sam decided to take advantage of this and created this whole scenario. Now all they have to do is wait for the aftermath to take ce.

    As soon as the fourth young master came to the estate though, he was actually greeted by the third young master near the gate itself.

    After the shock was gone, he turned embarrassed, and then the embarrassment turned into anger which then changed into a soul-searing rage.

    As soon as the fourth young master came to the entrance of the gate, the third young master directly took out his sword and charged at him.

    He shed on the chest and kicked him on it.

    He didn¡¯t want to kill him, he wanted to inflict maximum pain on him as much as he could.

    As he continued with the bashing, there was nothing the fourth young master could do except for taking it.

    Even the guard he kept around was dead within a single strike as soon as he involved himself in between. The beating went on and on and soon the whole estate was made known and the elders got involved.

    The fourth young master¡¯s father was the first one toe and he immediately intervened and pushed the third young master back. But he was shocked by the third young master¡¯s power.

    "Get the fuck out of my way." The third young master spoke coldly as he just wiped the blood that came out of his mouth due to the sh with the elder.

    The fourth elder who is the father of the fourth young master held his saber in his hands and braced himself. He didn¡¯t know that the third young master is this strong. It seems like he concealed his strength thoroughly.

    "We are all part of the elven branch. We can talk things out." The fourth elder spoke trying to ease the situation.

    "You all have been talking a lot for the past few years about me. Now I have had enough. I don¡¯t want to talk anymore. Let the actions take care of the issues and we will see who standsst."

    The third young master replied and he kept on attacking the fourth elder and the fourth young master.

    The fourth young master who got a breathing space felt his head go numb from the shock.

    "Third Bro. Just tell me what it is and I would do anything to remedy this situation. We can still talk things out."

    The third young master spat coldly and increased the intensity of the attacks, he didn¡¯t care if he is being injured in the process. All he did is just fight with all he got and soon the third elder came into y along with other elders and stopped the fight.

    "What the hell happened to you? You are not supposed to use that strength on your peers like that."

    The third elder scolded his son.

    The third young master stayed silent and let his father scold him.

    The third elder looked at the fourth young master and the fourth elder and said.

    "You guys bettere inside and let us settle this before it gets out of hand. I want your son to be honest with me. Otherwise, don¡¯t me me for not warning you. Your son might die right here and now."

    All four of them left the ce and went into a private room to have a chat.

    Sam who is looking at it from far away smiled and Paras who is looking at it through the telescope was surprised.

    They didn¡¯t do anything too difficult, everything was easy, but the final result is great. Thispromise between the two elders is also ounted for in Sam¡¯s n and they have to go and do the next phase of ns properly and the deescted situation would escte again.

 Chapter 999: Set up

    "You tried to kill me because I fucked a whore? Are you out of your fucking mind?"

    The fourth young master yelled at the top of his lungs as he looked at the third young master and his father.

    The third young master looked at him coldly and that gaze alone made him tone down his temper and sit back down.

    "Isn¡¯t it too much third elder? Killing a fellow member of the branch just because of a whore? Is he alright in his mind?"

    "You should mind your words, fourth elder. Otherwise, you can check yourself, whether his mind is alright in the field outside. I am sure at least half of the branch would be willing to be a witness for that and confirm whether he is alright in his mind or not."

    The fourth elder became silent and tried to say something, but the third elder cut him off.

    "Fourth young master, you and the rest of the young masters seemed to have forgotten something. As much as the elves care more about the democracy and the political aspects while ruling, this is the world of cultivation and the one with the stronger cultivation reigns supreme.

    My son might have quit the race for the head of the branch, it is not because he cannot evenpete or he doesn¡¯t know what kind of privilege it is. But he sees it as a responsibility and thought of the branch than thinking about his own well-being.

    That is the only reason, you guys are able topete carelessly now.

    Just because you are a bit cunning than my son, don¡¯t think you can look down on him and don¡¯t keep on pushing that line. There is only so much that he would tolerate and the next time, I am sure your father wouldn¡¯t be able to stop him when he decides to use his sword. Because I know I am not going to stop him.

    So, only the family head will be your option. That is if you can convince him with the fact that you pissed someone off by stepping on their dignity even though he is your peer and when retaliated you came crying to him for help.

    Good luck with that and your future."

    With that third elder walked away. But before leaving, the third young master looked at the fourth young master and said.

    "Stay away from Aqua. If I see you anywhere near her. I would cut your balls off."

    Fourth young master involuntarily held his groin as he trembled in fear.

    He went back to his room as he took pills and potions to recover from all the beating he took and felt frustrated by how he got into this mess.

    It is true that he started the trend ¡¯bullying the third young master is fun¡¯. But that is just to make the first and second to get distanced from the third and he even has the remedy maneuvers in ce. But before he could do that, he already became the victim of the third young master¡¯s wrath.

    If only he knew that the whore he fucked is someone the third young master liked, he would not just leave her alone, he would buy her off from the brothel and present her to the third young master.

    This bloody coincidence almost pushed his n four years backward.

    While he is trying to think of ways to remedy this situation, the word spread all over the city and the elven branch.

    Aqua¡¯s presence and third young master¡¯s long-term involvement with her werepletely made public andid bare in front of everyone¡¯s eyes.

    She couldn¡¯t believe that she fucked two of the five young masters and even became the reason for the sh. As much as she is ttered, she knew that she would be in trouble soon enough.

    Even if the young masters didn¡¯t get involved, the elders might.

    While she is feeling panicky about what to do, Kiran once again visited the brothel and directly entered her room.

    "I have a way for you to get away from all this. Do you want to take it?"

    "Who are you?"

    "Don¡¯t tell me you already forgot. It was just this afternoon that we met."

    Aqua was shocked and gasped.

    "You are fo.."

    Kiran stopped her from talking.

    "I am not who you think you are. But I can help you get away from this situation. Do you want to get out or not?"

    "Yes."

    "But I need some of your blood and your arm."

    "What?"

    "Don¡¯t worry, I have a way to heal you as soon as the arm was cut. Your arm will grow back again."

    With that, he threw a spatial ring towards her. When she saw therge amounts of spirit stones inside, she gasped once again.

    "Just take that aspensation for the whole trouble."

    With that, he shed the hand and collected some blood. Later he gave her a bunch of pills that managed to regrow her hand.

    Luckily her cultivation is low and currently, Sam has pills of a decently higher level. It is simple.

    She then changed the color of her hair and left the realm immediately. Now she has enough money to cross the realm by paying the fee. So, she took the chance to escape immediately.

    Meanwhile, Jw entered the room. Kiran finished decorating the whole room with blood and ced the arm in the center.

    Jw turned the arm into ashes and scattered them all over the room.

    Then Kiran exited and Jw set the whole room of fire.

    All the things werepletely burned it looked like a room that someone was burned alive.

    While Kiran and Jw are doing this, Gran and Sia did something else. They visited the first young master who is discussing a business deal with some people in a restaurant.

    They left the information regarding the fourth young master¡¯s secret house along with some recording crystals.

    And at the same time, Sam is adding some more information to the young master¡¯s already existing pile of information.

    He added the information of aqua and drafted a fake n which made it seem like all of the fourth young master¡¯s actions arepletely done with a proper plot in his mind and even the killing of Aqua was done by him. He did so with the fire element so that the me would go for the first young master who is a fire element user.

    As for why the first young master did it, it might be because of the orders that he got from the elders of the family.

    The orders were nted by Sam, but now it wouldn¡¯t be hard to believe that they were nted by the fourth young master.

    Now, after everything was set up, the team withdrew and waited for the things to progress and it wouldn¡¯t take a long time.

    The first young master went directly to the third young master and showed the information to him and dragged him to the secret house.

    There the fourth young master¡¯s subordinates who just became conscious were captured and the third young master had his way with interrogation technique, which worked properly.

    The information was given and it was confirmed that the fourth young master is the one that is leading this secret house which collects intelligence as for the ns in the fourth young master¡¯s room. They don¡¯t know about that, because they are not much worth in the whole organization.

    The third young master immediately ran out towards the brothel to only find out the smoke emitting room with ashes and the burnt blood marks on the wall.

    This made him feel rage and he ran towards the estate in fury.

    He directly broke through the fourth young master¡¯s residence and started hitting him with his bare hands and this time just the shock waves from the hits destroyed the house walls.

    The whole estate woke up and ran towards them.

    "How dare you kill her? How fucking dare you? I told you to stay away from her, didn¡¯t I. I told you to stay away from her. I told you.. I told you."

    Every punch made the fourth young master feel his bones broken.

    The fourth elder who came in time tackled the third young master and spoke in a nervous tone.

    "We just talked about this a few hours ago. Why are you stilling here for this?" He sounded frustrated and nervous at the same time.

    "She is dead. Aqua is dead. He killed her. I will kill him."

    He took out his sword and went after the fourth young master. The fourth elder tried to stop him and while he did so, he looked at the third elder for help.

    The third elder who stood in the crowd sighed and shook his head.

    He has no intention of getting involved. He knew when his son is angry. He wouldn¡¯t get angry normally, but once he is angry, there is nothing he could do to stop him. Even he might get injured and after the rage was gone his son would be the one feeling guilty. He would rather deal with the issue of the aftermath of whatever happenedter than make his son go through all this.

 Chapter 1000: Crazy Thirds

    The elven branch didn¡¯t see a minute of peace that night. The fourth elder and the third young master are fighting like crazy.

    While the third young master¡¯s cultivation is thete stage of Pre-transcendence it is still higher than the peers by two sub-stages as all of them are at a barely early stage.

    And the fourth elder is at the Peak of pre-transcendence, but he is being treated like the Third young master¡¯s grandson as he kicked his ass.

    Before the other elders coulde and intervene, the third young master already left eight deep shes on the fourth elder and made him immobile on the ground.

    He then started chasing the fourth young master who is trying to escape this nightmare, by literally fleeing the scene.

    But the third young master is not only persistent, he was already determined to kill the fourth young master that very day.

    Right before he managed to catch up and swung his sword, the second elder came and tackled the third young master from the side.

    The swing of the sword missed by a small mark and left a deep sh on the back of the fourth young master making him fall forward and bleed out.

    "Get the fuck out of my way."

    The third young master coldly looked at the second elder. The second elder was stunned for a second. This is the first time he is watching the third young master this angry. He is actually the most obedient and most docile of all the young masters, even though he is the strongest of them all. He might not be politically inclined, but he managed to solve many issues for the family that could just be solved with the strength and the cultivation world needs that.

    He worked his ass off for the family and eventually he was taken for granted. No one ced too much importance on him ever since he withdrew from the race for the head of the family. But now he is in full fury.

    He didn¡¯t care if the elders came for him or the family head wille looking for him. He decided to kill the fourth young master and he is going to do so no matter what happens.

    He once again ran after the fourth young master that is crawling and trying to get up. But before he reached him, the second elder once again tackled him and this time he held him tightly without letting him move.

    But the third young master managed to free one hand, even though it didn¡¯t have any sword in that hand, he took out a sword from the storage and threw it towards the fourth young master.

    The sword flew through the air cutting the wind currents surrounding it and stabbed itself into the back of the fourth young master and went straight to the heart.

    The second elder realized his mistake and turned around in horror as he tried to save the fourth young master, but it was already toote.

    The fourth elder who is watching the whole scene from far away lying in his own pool of blood, couldn¡¯t take it anymore and die of shock.

    The second elder who got angry over this looked at the third young master and said.

    "I wanted to give you a chance and a way out because of your talent, but now you are nothing more than an abomination who doesn¡¯t know what is good for you and the branch.

    I will execute you for your sins."

    He instantly charged towards the third young master. But thetter didn¡¯t back down and held the sword tightly as he wiped the blood off of his mouth from the back of his hand.

    His eyes looked like he is a beast looking at the prey with a lust for blood.

    He looked like he would go crazy if he didn¡¯t kill anyone soon.

    He lunged at the second elder who is at the Peak of Astral ne Pre-transcendence, he is the best there is in the peak of the Pre-transcendence, at least that is what he thought so.

    The third young master swung his sword and when the second elder blocked it, he used the force to turn around and a second sword appeared in his other.

    He spun like a top and stabbed the short sword that appeared in his second hand into the torso of the second elder from the side.

    A Second Elder winced in pain, the third young master threw a spinning kick on the handle of the short sword that was already stabbed cleanly into the body and made him feel excruciating pain.

    "Come and get me, elder. Execute me in front of the whole branch for my sins. Come on. Don¡¯t let a small stab to your lungs stop you from doing that."

    The third young master spoke and he swung his sword leaving a sh on the same spot. He just widened the flesh hole a bit and once again kicked the short sword, making it go deeper and deeper.

    The second elder is not only losing a lot of blood, he is also drowning in his own blood.

    At this moment, the first elder, the grand elders, and the branch head all came to the scene and everyone quietened down.

    The third young master took a look at them and a grin upied his face. A grin that made him apletely different person than what they knew he was supposed to be.

    He spun seven twenty degrees andnded the kick one again on the short sword and the second elder copsed on the spot.

    The branch head and the grand elders along with the first elder all frowned.

    The third young master picked the short sword out and wiped the blood off on his clothes as he walked towards the entourage.

    "What? Do any of you want to execute me too? If so,e and get a piece of me."

    The third young masterpletely lost it.

    The first elder took outraised his spiritual energy as fire elemental energy increased the temperature around.

    "Kid, you crossed way too many lines. You killed the members of the branch."

    "Yes, I killed the members of the branch. So, what are you going to do about it?

    Branch this, branch that. I am fucking sick of it all. I work my ass off for you worthless bastards and all I get in return is your scorn. I have had it enough. From today onwards, I have nothing to do with this branch.

    You can live and die as you like and fuck each other for some political bullshit. I and my father are leaving today.

    The next one that steps forward to stop me, will die the most brutal death of the night.

    "You little piece of s..."

    The first elder made his move and was in the middle of a spell while cursing the third young master, but a throwing knife appeared and stabbed itself into the arm, making him bleed.

    He looked at the third elder who stepped forward.

    "Didn¡¯t you hear what he said? Or are you retarded enough to not understand it?"

    The branch head frowned and said.

    "Third elder, are you rebelling?"

    "So, what if I am?"

    "You are breaking the rules and customs of the elves. Are you forgetting your vows?"

    "You can think so, but one thing that I don¡¯t forget is that to be on a high-level position, in our branch, you don¡¯t have to be the strongest, which means, you are all worthless pieces of scum who are just protected by the rules from the likes of me. Now, that my son doesn¡¯t want anything to do with you scum, it is all fair game."

    With that his aura raged and when his cultivation was revealed, everyone was stunned on the spot.

    He is an Early stage of Astral ne Transcendent cultivator.

    No one knew of this too. Because there are only four known transcendent stage cultivators of the Astral ne in the branch and they are the Branch head, the grand elders, and the first elder.

    Now, the third elder also revealed his cultivation, the whole branch is shocked by the father and son duo.

    They worked the most for the family, but they seemed to be the most detached people for the family too, at the same time.

    Sam and Paras are looking at this whole scenario from a vantage point not so far away.

    "It seems like we poked a bigger ho¡¯s nest than we thought. The third elder and his son are some crazy people."

    Saber Monarch muttered as he looked at the scene.

    This kind of esction is something that even Sam didn¡¯t predict.

    He didn¡¯t expect that the third young master who is insecure enough to find himself a prostitute to even feel loved, has such a side to him.

    "What do you think Paras, if that third elder is as talented as his son, he might even be able to deal with that branch head. Do you think you can take him?"

    "Of course, there is no one in the same realm that managed to defeat me. And there will be no one that would defeat me."

    "Well, that is good. Because as this esctes, after an hour or so, we might need to go down there and finish what was started. So, get ready to take your revenge."

 Chapter 1001: Talking with Hou Yi

    Sam and the rest of the team watched the scenario y out with Paras.

    They didn¡¯t expect the things to escte to this level. The tension between the elves is far too stronger than they thought and their power structure is messy to begin with. When there is an option of being physically strong with a power that could kill others and control their life, it is almost impossible for anyone to ept other people as their superior when all they have is a better cunning mind.

    At least not when the people with power to kill believes that there is nothing the people with mind can offer to them.

    Therefore elves will have a harsher rtions between themselves.

    But it turned out it is harsher than they thought.

    The third elder and the third young master who are powerful are not trying to get out of the estate while battling the rest of the elders that came to stop them.

    The whole situation is messy and the weaker elves are trying to find a ce to hide.

    That day, the elven branch is getting weaker and weaker without any more external influence. The third elder and his son are some real tough guys. They went on a killing spree without any discrimination. They killed everyone that opposed them, but they also sustained severe wounds while they are doing so.

    Sam just wanted to put some small fire in the middle of these elves so that he could use that as a breaking point, so he chose the third young master who is insecure about himself. But it seems like he has a lot more problems than mere insecurity.

    In fact, this is nowhere near as simple as being insecure, he seemed to have a past with the elven branch which he resented as much as he tried toe to peace with it, it seems like the resentment only grew. Sam felt more and more curious as the fight went on.

    By now the news about the fight already reached the other families in the city and the main members of those families already arrived.

    Sam took a look at the situation and took out the wrist screen to select the Elven branch in the list.

    This is the perfect time to do so. As soon as a yer choose someone from the list, the god will get the news and he will pass the information to his followers through the statue connection.

    This rule is obviously beneficial to the yer as they have a choice to attack first and then select the organization on a final step.

    Now this is even more advantageous because the god cannot possibly send the message at the moment, no matter what he does as the elven branch is busy and no one can receive the message in the middle of chaos.

    "Are you ready?"

    Sam turned to Paras and asked.

    Thetter nodded and all of them made a move.

    The third elder and the third young master are fighting tooth and nail with the three people. The family head and the two grand elders, the first elder is already dead and just like the third young master mentioned, he died a brutal death.

    Now both of them are having a hard time, particrly the third young master as he couldn¡¯t do much to help his father in this fight and he is fighting the elders.

    Sam¡¯s team directly entered the gates and joined the fight. Saber Monarch and Five Elemental King joined in helping the third elder and the remaining team members all went to fight alongside the third young master.

    The situation turned tides.

    The third young master and the third elder didn¡¯t know what exactly is happening at the moment, but they sure as hell knew that they are being helped and they took it.

    The fight that everyone presumed to take a long time changed courses and finished faster.

    Paras is an absolute beast with his axe as he teamed up with the Third elder to attack the already injured Branch head, who is actually a middle stage Transcendent cultivator of Astral ne.

    The Branch head lost soon and even the third elder got exhausted. The lower level elves realized that the branch is going to copse and left the ce to escape in their own way. Some decided to go to another elf branch, some decided to escape and live their own lives.

    The other families who are trying to get a piece of the elven branch suddenly stopped as they were afraid of the new characters that suddenly popped up.

    Saber Monarch who is fighting with an Early stage Transcendent is actually the one in dominating position and he kept on muttering something.

    "Just a little. Almost there."

    He kept on muttering these words, because he is on verge of breakthrough. He is so close to reaching Transcendent stage that he couldn¡¯t help but feel frustrated.

    All he iscking is someprehension of saber art and he would breakthrough. That kind of disy made the rest of the organizations back down and instead they went after the businesses outside.

    Meanwhile, Sam walked into the family estate deeper along with Sia. They soon reached the temple where the statue is glowing.

    Sam poured some blood over the feet of the statue and the statue¡¯s eyes got the glow.

    When Hou Yi saw Sam standing in front of him, he almost choked.

    "Nice to meet you again. Hou Yi. How is your ego doing? Is it still there, alive and kicking?"

    "What did you say?"

    "You heard me you piece of shit. I am asking since your ego is so big, you should be storing it somewhere else, you can¡¯t carry it everywhere. So, I wanted to know its well being."

    "You are talking to a god."

    "I am talking to a god, whose asshole I tore apart when we fought as equals, you are expecting more respect from me? That is in foolishness.

    Anyway, you are toote. The elven branch is finished. The head is on verge of death, the heirloom will be mine. So, go fuck yourself."

    "The day I see you, is that day I will kill you."

    "I am pretty sure you wouldn¡¯t be able to do it. You are shit scared of gambler. Now as I said before, go fuck yourself and if you see the moon goddess, tell her I said hello to her."

    Before the statue could react, Sam threw a kick and destroyed it.

    He came out to meet with Paras who is currently interrogating the head of the branch.

    "Sixty years ago. A bunch of higher powers sent people to lower strays using a special means for some training or whatever you fuckers call it.

    Out of all of them, some people came to Jaman from various races. The incident on Jaman tell me the names of whoever that is involved."

    As soon as the question was asked horror could be seen in the eyes of the branch head.

    "That is impossible. You cannot be alive."

    Paras swung his axe and chopped of a finger and asked once again.

    "I want names." No matter what Paras did, the other party is not willing to say anything. He is biting his tongue to endure the pain.

    Sam walked towards Paras and tapped on his shoulder before saying.

    "I have a better option. Just slit his throat and kill him."

    The Elven Branch head gasped in shock but as Paras hesitated.

    "Trust me."

    Paras swung his axe and even if it looked like a powerful strike, it just sliced the throat of the branch head.

    As he fell down and died slowly.

    Sam let Specter out and gestured Tamas toe over and let both of them carryout the soul necromancy.

    They imprinted the memories in both Sam¡¯s and then Paras¡¯ brain.

    All the memories went through Sam¡¯s mind and he was shocked as the scenes went to the sixty years ago, the time Paras mentioned and he looked through, he could understand why Paras is so angry and how deep his vengeance must have gotten.

    The suffering of Jaman is not something that even Sam could fathom or imagine and the people involved are far too many and they might reach far higher powers. In fact, this conflict between Paras and the unknown entity who was instigator of that situation, might even lead him to the realm of gods if he truly want why it happened.

    There are that many races and that many people involved.

    Sam sighed and said.

    "All this while, I just thought that I will just be of assistance to you in your revenge as long as you worked for me. But now I realized, I could do more than assistance for you. You wouldn¡¯t be able to reach that far with your cultivation, because the people you are involved with are actually a lot powerful and a lot more resourceful than you can imagine.

    Until now, you managed to gain information from the people you destroyed because they don¡¯t know much. Except for the names of the people involved. But from now on, you entered theyer of people who knew something that happened.

    They wouldn¡¯t open the mouth even if you tortured them for a century."

    "Do you know the person that gave the orders to this guy? You saw the memories to, since you are speaking like this, you must know."

    Sam hesitated for a minute and said.

    "Your rivalry is not with a person. That is the only thing I can tell you right now. Because I personally don¡¯t have any privacy, there are people watching me from far away. And once I reveal something, that would be the end of your journey.

    So, be patient and join me."

 Chapter 1002: Split

    Paras looked at the surroundings and went through all the things Sam did in just one day. The whole elven branch crumbled itself as if it was made of sand.

    Even though it escted because of some unknown information, it still yed in their favor.

    If he did this all by himself, he would have taken another month and would have been in a constant war trying to kill every single one of them before he reached the elven branch.

    As for thest words that Sam said, he felt conflicted.

    Jaman is his home. It didn¡¯t even have a wormhole connecting to any other sixty years ago. The energy level is so low that the Consummate stage is the limit for anyone there.

    But one day, a wormhole opened, the people of different races came there and gathered. They destroyed everything that he viewed as his home. Not a single person from the Jaman survived except him.

    He escaped using the same wormhole as his parents fought tooth and nail to let him escape.

    The only person that survived from a with millions of people.

    He didn¡¯t even know exactly what happened until now. Until he got the memory of the elven branch leader installed into his brain.

    He finally understood, what exactly happened, but he only got the information the results of what happened, even though he could see the face of some holographic person that gave the orders, he didn¡¯t know who it was.

    From the looks of it, Sam knew who it is, but couldn¡¯t tell him at the moment.

    After some thought and some hesitation and a conflicting conversation with himself in his head, Paras looked at Sam and said.

    "I want you to make a soul contract stating that you know who is behind this and you understand what I want. I want to make sure that you are not taking advantage of my revenge to make me join your team."

    "Sure."

    With that, Sam has another member in the team and even this guy joined because he has a necessity which he believed Sam help him with.

    The more members he recruited, the more conflicted Sam is feeling. It never believed in coincidences too much. Even though the whole life is nothing but a union of different coincidences, there is a certain degree to what could be coincidental. But now where he goes, and whoever he wanted to recruit, it was all bing coincidentally convenient to him.

    He is no conceited enough to think that he is indeed that resourceful that he has the capabilities to satisfy the needs of everyone he encounters.

    He believed he is just meeting everyone that has needs that he is able to satisfy and that is making him feel weird.

    He shook those thoughts away from his head and left the elven branch. They didn¡¯t stay in the city for long and went away. Many people saw them and even though elven branches are considered as separate entities within the elvenmunity they would still be affiliated with some main elven entity that is going to send someone to investigate.

    Their faces are all over the ce and any from the city could easily recognize them. They have to make sure that they are not here before they came here.

    Sam decided to go back to the deste and n further.

    Now that the first phase powers are over, there is not much need for the troops. He sent them to their original ces and let them train.

    From the second phase, things could be handled by the small team.

    Now, he decided to split the team into two smaller teams.

    In the first team Five-Elemental King, Gran, Tamas, Jw, and Argan will be going to move on their own and deal with the lowest level of the Phase two organizations.

    Their mode of operation would be the same as before. They would go after the families in a specific order just like Sam gave them and Sam would select the first family or organization on the list.

    They would move to that organization and first propose a business deal for the heirloom. If they didn¡¯t agree, then the team would proceed to use money and resources to convince the rival organizations to deal with them.

    Even if that is not possible, they could just storm the whole thing and capture the head and grab the heirloom.

    Sam would get the indication on the list that it was finished and he would select the next one.

    They would bring the captured head of the organization to the deste and ce him in tempest valley where they would be tamed and toned down by the Old beast until Sames back and throws them into the chessboard to make the mellower.

    While the first team moves like that, the second team would stay with Sam and their first goal is to make thest two candidates join the team, and then they would also join the first team in finishing off the second phase.

    Everyone from the second team except for Sam.

    In this months-long journey, Sam realized one thing. He is not exactly doing much ofbat while he is focused on recruiting.

    Even though he is sure that he would be in the top form, there is no improvement whatsoever. He got many new additions into his arsenal. He didn¡¯t even get to use the wings properly after he got them.

    He didn¡¯t get the chance to test his power once he broke through.

    He is too busy with the whole nning, roaming around, and recruitment.

    So, after the team was assembled, he decided to get away from the whole task and organizations thing and go on a journey on his own. He would take a page from Kiran¡¯s book and fight with some of the people across the realms who are on the same level as him.

    He would ce various restrictions on himself in different fights along with various expectations so that he could self-evaluate.

    But for now, he needs to concentrate on recruitment.

    The next person in the recruitment can either be too easy or too difficult as he is a bit cranky.

    He is a guy who doesn¡¯t do much in recent years. He stays in arge mountain pce and takes protection fee.

    Every year he would take in a bunch of cultivators at different levels and teach them something before letting them go.

    His expertise is in three things, Lightning element usage, Archery, and formations.

    The legend has it that he fought all kinds of people and even though he doesn¡¯t practice with different weapons, he can give advice on how to use and point out the weaknesses of people so that they could correct them.

    It has been over five years since he came out of that ce and people only knew that he is Early stage of Astral ne Transcendence from that time.

    Nobody knows if he improved the cultivation or not.

    The only contact he has with the rest of the world is the students and the monthly protection fee the organizations in the realms pay him so that the other organizations from foreign realms don¡¯t enter and do something to their realm.

    As for the students.

    Every year, he would take in a bunch of students based on a test and train them exactly for eleven months.

    In thest month, they would be sent to different ces to finish some tasks as a final exam.

    If they finish the task they would get a reward from him.

    The only condition for the student selection is that they need to be cultivators of Astral ne Initiation and they can go through the tests as they want.

    As for other ways to meet with the man directly without being a student or a person paying protection, there is one.

    There is a path on the mountain that leads to the top. But it is filled with various lightning obstacles which a person needs to cross.

    There are only a select few who barely managed to reach the top.

    To be precise only three members. One of them asked the man to help them take revenge and he did. Another one wanted to be a student and learn from him for a long time and he was given a chance.

    The third one is a woman and she asked him to marry her, he didn¡¯t do that and told her to move out of this realm and roam around for a few decades, he told her to enjoy her youth and if by the end of it, she didn¡¯t find someone she loves, he told her toe back and he would marry her.

    She agreed and left.

    Sam was pretty intrigued by all the information he saw on this guy¡¯s profile. This was created by five elemental King.

    This man is entric, to say the least.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know what it would take to recruit this man. But if his assumptions are correct, he would find a necessity that man has and would take advantage of it, just like he managed to do for the rest of the team.

 Chapter 1003: To the Mountain Top

    Vidyut. That is the name of the man they are currently after and Sam arrived along with team 2 in that realm.

    This realm is not actually overly powerful. The most powerful guy here is Vidyut. As much as the powers in the realm say that they are paying him to keep them safe from external powers, it isplete bullshit.

    The realms surrounding this realm and had connections with are the more or less the same level. With that level, starting a realm war is more like suicide as the side that initiated the war would be in an extremely disadvantageous position until they managed to take a foothold in the attacked realm. Until then, they would lose a lot of people.

    The only reason they are paying Vidyut is that he wouldn¡¯t go after them.

    This is just like how shopkeepers pay protection fees for thugs to not destroy their shops and disrupt their business.

    Sam and his team stood at the foot of the mountain as they looked at the path of lightning.

    The lightning is in Indigo color and it is continuously striking throughout the path. It kind of reminded Sam of tempest valley.

    The foot of the mountain is not exactly empty.

    There are many people who are trying to go through the mountain path and there are many people who are just here to pay respects and even more people just to watch the show.

    Sam looked at his teammates and asked.

    "Anybody wants to try?"

    Paras and Saber Monarch raised their hands.

    Sam nodded and waved his hand Raiju appeared beside him and as soon as he came, his attention directly went towards the mountain and the path of the lightning.

    Sam patted him on the back and said.

    "We are going up. Get ready."

    Raiju grinned excitedly and all four of them got ready.

    Sam took a deep breath and removed the feathered coat. As much defense as the coat could provide, the path is of lightning and it is of the fire element. He doesn¡¯t want to put that much stress on it and he also needs to test himself.

    There are no direct physical challenges for him in a while. This might help.

    Sam instantly activated the lightning elemental fusion without a second thought and so did Raiju.

    Saber Monarch and Paras both covered their body with spiritual energy as they wielded their weapons.

    All four of them started running upwards.

    Saber Monarch and Paras had apletely straightforward approach, they swung their weapons as the iing lightning strikes that they were sure that they couldn¡¯t take and the rays of saber and Axe shed with the iing lighting disrupting them.

    But they are feeling the recoil from the sh which made their arm feel a bit numb.

    Sam and Raiju obviously had a different approach. As the lightning fell, they just let it enter their bodies at first so that they could test the nature of lightning.

    When the Indigo lightning struck, it started battling the silver lightning of their bodies and they felt slight pain. And since the Indigo lightning is of inferior quality to the silver lightning, they didn¡¯t have to make much effort.

    But Sam clearly understood that wouldn¡¯t be the case as they moved forward. Because, sometimes quality can be easily ovee by quantity and as they moved forward, the density of the lightning strikes increases, and even the power contained with one lightning strike increases by multiple folds.

    If a conflict happens between the silver lightning of his body and that dense and energy-filled lightning, his body might not be able to take it.

    Sam and Raiju halted in their tracks as they thought of a way to do it while Paras and Saber Monarch took the lead and moved forward.

    Sam closed his eyes and ced his hand on Raiju as hemunicated with him through their mental connection as they formted a n.

    As they stood longer at the very start, many people are discussing and murmuring that they are some pushovers and stuff like that. The team is getting frustrated by this, but Sam didn¡¯t care.

    Soon, their chaotic lightning elemental fusion bodies seemed to have mellowed down and the lightning energy started flowing like a wave throughout their bodies and moved towards their feet.

    They used the lightning energy that gathered in the feet to lunge forward and move forward increasing their speed and theypletely disregarded the lightning strikes.

    As lightning struck them, the indigo lightning energy moved along with the flow of silver lightning in their bodies and escaped through the feet as they ran forward.

    Even though this caused a bit of pain, it is a lot better than the normal pain of two conflicting lightning energies in their bodies.

    As they moved forward things got a bit harder but they also go familiar with the process and moved faster.

    The audience was a bit surprised and teammates also didn¡¯t feel the unnecessary frustration anymore.

    Meanwhile, on the top of the mountain, inside the mansion, there is a man who looked like he was in his mid-thirties looking at the screens that are mounted on a wall. He could see all the people that areing through the mountain path and when he looked at Sam and Raijuing and overtaking others even though they startedte, they piqued his interest.

    And he is also the only one who clearly understood the technique they are using.

    "Energy flow in the fusion form, the delicate control they have is impable. It seems like they have experience in that type of energy flow. Particrly, that man."

    He muttered to himself as he took a scroll and wrote something.

    "Maybe, if he has knowledge about formations, he might be able to help me with this. I might be able to get out of here."

    As he muttered endlessly, he once again focused on the screen.

    Sam and Raiju are moving at full speed and the extra assistance of the indigo lightning energy which they are using to a boost on their feet is making them faster than usual.

    They are already halfway there by the time Saber Monarch and Paras reached halfway.

    They caught up to them and four of them once again moved together.

    As they moved higher, the amount of energy Sam and Raiju had to channel has been increasing and that is slowing them down, meanwhile, Paras and Saber Monarch are simrly shing with the lightning strikes and they are facing more bacsh as they went forward.

    By the time they could clearly see the exit of the path to the mansion, they are already feeling exhausted.

    The rest of the people who tried already dropped out in the middle and returned back.

    The four of them are the ones left, but thest obstacle is arge curtain of Indigo lightning. It is so dense that they couldn¡¯t see past it even with their spiritual sense and when Sam used energy vision, he felt a numbing sensation to his eyes with all the energy being channeled through that curtain.

    The fourth of them stopped there and thought for a moment as they dodged the lightning strikes.

    "Do you guys have a n?"

    "It almost looks like a waterfall? How do we cross it?"

    Saber Monarch and Paras are first to talk and Sam who was confused himself got an idea as soon as Paras mentioned that it is like a waterfall.

    He looked at the curtain and observed it closely.

    "Do you guys think, your strongest attacks can make you cross that?"

    "Of course." Both of them replied the same thing at the same time.

    "Then why are you not using them?"

    "The bacsh would make us fall unconscious as soon as we crossed it. Didn¡¯t you hear the stories, it was told that no one managed to finish the path while staying conscious in their final step. And I am not exactlyfortable in doing so at the moment. I need to stay conscious after cross it."

    Paras replied and Saber Monarch also nodded in agreement.

    Sam also felt the same.

    Vidyut might be kind enough to make sure that they recovered, but they would still be in a weak state when they woke up and if their talks didn¡¯t go well and Vidyut decides to do something, they need strength to escape.

    They are just that cautious. Staying in an area without consciousness for even a few minutes can make them feel like they are going on a suicide mission.

    Sam took a deep breath and said.

    "I have an Idea. We will make three attacks at the same time. One from Paras, one from Saber Monarch, and one from me and Raijubined.

    We will take the middle, you both take the two ends.

    All of the attacks should be collinear. From the energy flow, it indeed looks like a waterfall, if you break the flow on all areas at the same time, we might be able to get a proper gap to sneak in. As for the bacsh, don¡¯t worry about it. I will take care of it."

    "Let¡¯s give it a try."

    With that all four of them got ready. Sam sat on Raiju¡¯s back and took out a spear as he channeled both of their energies into the spear, while Paras and Saber Monarch also got ready.

    Sam started using the void style and channeled the energy and all three of them attacked at the same time.

    As soon as the three strikesnded, the energy was disrupted, but before the bacsh could hit them, Sam¡¯s void style already created that void, and all the lightning energy was sucked towards that point which caused the bacsh to halt and get back.

    In that short interval, the four of them sneaked into the gap created in the curtain and crossed it, but as soon as they crossed the lightning element exploded and they braced themselves for the impact.

    They were blown away for a few feet, but they still managed to stand up with minor injuries.

    *CLAP*

    *CLAP*

    As they stood up, they started hearing pping sounds from the entrance of the mansion.

 Chapter 1004: Three brothers

    The four of them looked back and immediately got cautious.

    "Don¡¯t worry. I am going to do anything for you. I am Vidyut. I believe I am the one you are here to meet."

    Vidyut looked at them and smiled as he stopped pping.

    Sam heaved a sigh and rxed a bit. He started observing the surroundings. The mountain mansion has arge front yard, which is also a great ce for training.

    Then he looked at Vidyut who is standing in front of them with energy vision. But he was shocked when he saw the result because he couldn¡¯t guess the cultivation level of Vidyut and the energy flow he observed is showing something that should not be possible normally.

    Sam¡¯s brain is running at an insane speed that he forgot about his surroundings for a few minutes, he kept on thinking about the possibilities of what he saw really happening.

    Another thing that shouldn¡¯t have been possible in normal circumstances, but still happened in front of him, he doesn¡¯t even know how to feel at this moment.

    As he was lost in a daze,

    "Boss, Boss. Are you sleeping with your eyes open?" Sam looked around and found himself in the middle of a room sitting in front of Vidyut.

    He shook himself out of the daze and looked at Saber Monarch.

    "What do you mean, sleeping with my eyes open? Do you want your sry gone?" Sam reprimanded the saber Monarch just for the sake of it and sighed. He didn¡¯t even realize that he was walking in and sat down. He was shocked by what he saw.

    He took a sip of the wine on the table and looked at Vidyut.

    "Your subordinates are saying that you have some business with me?" Vidyut asked Sam.

    "I actually wanted to recruit you into my team," Sam said as he took another sip.

    "Team? What kind of team are we talking about?"

    "A team of strong people. I have to do some things across the realms and I need some strong people to makes things easier for me. So, I am currently recruiting strong people. I came here to do the same with you."

    "Well..." Vidyut was about to say something, but Sam spoke once again.

    "I know, it is not exactly possible."

    All three of them in the room were shocked, although for different reasons.

    Looking at Vidyut¡¯s expression, he said.

    "I know it might not be possible for you to leave this mountain. Don¡¯t worry about exining the situation to me."

    "Why would youe to such a conclusion?"

    "You are somehow linked to this mountain. You cannot leave this ce"

    The atmosphere in the room turned awkward and suddenly...

    "Hahahahahaha..." Vidyut startedughing.

    "My guess is right. You are the only one that could help me out of here." Saber Monarch and Paras are getting surprised.

    "I am sorry. I never even saw a situation like this. I don¡¯t know how to get your out of this situation. I don¡¯t even know how this is possible."

    Sam replied with a sigh. He is extremely curious about how this guy is linked to the mountain. Because when he used energy vision, he saw the energy flow of the mountain is somehow connected to this guy. He is not even doing it voluntarily. It is just happening like that naturally.

    It is as if the whole mountain and Vidyut are one single entity and even when he is moving around it is still happening."

    Vidyut heaved a helpless sigh and said.

    "Saber Monarch. I heard you were trapped in a maze for a year. How did you get out?"

    "My boss got me out, of course."

    Vidyut then turned towards Sam and said.

    "Then you are the only one that could release me too."

    "Why are you so sure?"

    "Because the people who made the Saber Monarch get trapped in the Maze are the same ones that made me trapped like this?"

    Saber Monarch was shocked and said.

    "You have a rivalry with those families too?"

    "Not really, I am talking about the one that made the Maze formation."

    Sam finally had a look of interest. As much as he was curious when he saw the link between Vidyut and the mountain, he felt exhausted too.

    By now, he is sure that there is something fishy going on with his journey. Every person he wanted to recruit has something going on with him. They had a severe problem that can only be solved by Sam at that moment.

    It is as if they deliberately had a problem just for him to solve and then recruit them as repayment.

    As much as he would like to believe it is just a coincidence or even lucky. There is no way in the hell it is. He is suddenly feeling like he is a puppet on the string.

    Even though all of his actions are done on his own and even his mentality and character changed a lot over the years, he has a feeling that the whole path he took was designed by someone else. It is as if he is a rat running through a maze and clearing it, but the whole path he took wasced with bait so that I won¡¯t take any wrong turns.

    This is pretty frustrating. So, he decided to just let this guy go and think of other ways to do things.

    But this time the bait is a bit too strong for him to just leave it be.

    The person who made the maze is someone Sam is determined to meet and any link to that person is something worth knowing.

    "Do you know who did it?" Sam asked.

    "Yes, I don¡¯t exactly where they are from. But those three seemed to be fellow disciples of the same master. I pissed them off and one of them beat the crap out of me and locked me in this mountain with a formation.

    When he was imprisoning me, he was having a conversation with one of his fellow disciples. It is regarding the maze.

    The second brother amongst them is the one that made the maze and he said something about it being the final stages and he needs to find a proper location to ce it.

    After a few years, I heard that a person named Saber Monarch pissed off a bunch of families in a realm and they all used the formation called Maze to lock you up.

    I made some inquiries with the help of the people here and I managed to get more information which made him believe that the maze the Saber Monarch was imprisoned is definitely the same maze that those brothers were discussing.

    When I heard that someone managed to free Saber Monarch, I was expectant. But I don¡¯t know your details, so I could only stop. When I saw the Saber Monarch on the mountain path, I suspected you are the one, but only now can I confirm this. Please help me get out of this. I will do whatever you want me to do."

    Sam looked at the man in front of him who is currently bowing. He sighed.

    "Let me try. But I want to know all the details regarding the three brothers. Whatever you know, no matter how small, you must tell me everything."

    "I will."

    "And since you are present when the formation was set up, just tell me what they did throughout the process, then I will be able to find a way easily and my work will reduce."

    Then started the discussion. The whole mountain is a formation and that guy used some kind of cylindrical objects toy the formation down.

    Vidyut was only present for thetter half of the process so he could only exin that. And finally, there is something that Vidyut showed Sam that made him feel rather intrigued and excited.

    On Vidyut¡¯s chest, there is something stabbed in. It almost looked like the miniature arc reactor from the Iron man movies he watched.

    It has a lot of lightning energy in it and it is the one connecting the energy flow of the mountain to Vidyut.

    "Every time, I tried to remove it, I feel an excruciating pain that makes me feel like I am about to die."

    "If you did pull it out. Then you would have really died."

    Sam said and used observation ability as he observed how this thing works. When he closely looked at the structure of this object, he was actually shocked and then became excited.

    This time, the bait is not just something that he could ignore. And that too the bait is for something that would benefit him, even if the bait is for something that would screw him over, he would definitely take it.

    At first, he was determined to find the guy who created the Maze, but now if he was given a choice between the maze guy or this mountain guy, he would meet the guy that made this mountain formation without a second thought.

 Chapter 1005: Liquid Energy[Bonus Chapter]

    After checking the body of Vidyut, Sam got out of the room and immediately went out to take a look at the mountain. Leaving the path alone, he went to take a look at the rest of the mountain. But before he did that, he sent the Bat puppets which he used in taking down the maze formation all over the mountain, to find energy spots that might act as formations.

    Generally, formations are made on a t area whether it is horizontal or vertical.

    Even if it is in unevenrgend, the nodes would always be on the same ne when they are joined.

    This is the most basic and easiest way to creating formations and they don¡¯t have to worry about the energy instability due to the irregrity of the terrain and it will also free the formation creator to be free from extra worries and calctions.

    These kinds of people will rely on inscribing the formations if there is any particr w with the terrain which they cannot rule away.

    But there is another way of creating a formation even if there is no nar coincidence between the nodes and even when all the nodes are not exactly present on the same level.

    Sam had done some of those formations when killing the Nascent stage General Spark a long time ago and there are a bunch of formations like that within Sam¡¯s city and many other ces in the deste.

    But Sam never had any necessity to use that in arger and moreplicated scale like this.

    The person who imprisoned Vidyut actually used a simr technique and none of the nodes are in the same ne.

    If all the nodes are joined by a straight line, then they would surely create a three-dimensional figure.

    While constructing them is already difficult enough, deconstructing them is way more difficult and in fact downright irritating, and sometimes, it almost makes the people wonder if they are as intelligent as they believed they are.

    Currently, the whole mountain is used a single entity and there are many nodes created in different ces. When the bats managed to find out where the nodes are present on the mountain, Sam immediately became sure that they are not all. And since the number was quite limited, which could only mean one thing, the rest of the nodes are within the mountain.

    But before he explored more, he decided to check the nodes outside and see what he used as nodes.

    In normal cases, he wouldn¡¯t have wondered about something like this, but now, he should be otherwise, the thing that is making Vidyut stay, the one thing in his chest is made of some different method that Sam never saw and it is something among the lines of research he is currently doing.

    If the nodes are also made of the same thing, then he would be able to find some broader spectrum of materials to reverse engineer and grasp the method that he wants to make what he wants.

    He went to the nearest node and used the observation ability on it.

    With that, he sent his consciousness into the second floor of the divine dimension and created a model of the node there.

    He did the same with the rest of the nodes and finally, after dealing with that, he started thinking about the nodes that are buried within the mountain.

    As much as his cultivation improved, it is still not big enough to cover the whole mountain with observation ability.

    The best he could do would be around one-twentieth of the mountain. Which means he would have to do the same thing twenty times. And even then, he has to be careful and find a way to use the observation ability on the inner side of the mountain.

    First, he went on using the observation ability on the outer parts, and finally, there are two inner parts left.

    He couldn¡¯t directly dig through because if one mistake led to instability even at one node, the whole formation might create a copse that would explode the whole mountain.

    He went back into the mansion and asked Vidyut.

    "Before you were imprisoned here, what was this mountain exactly?"

    "It is the property of one of the families. It is just some training ground for low-level cultivators who just awakened.

    They will bring a bunch of initiation stage beasts and let the kids practice fighting here."

    "Is that so, then where did all this energye from?"

    "I don¡¯t really know."

    "So, you don¡¯t know the source of the energy and you just stayed here getting imprisoned by it?"

    "Well... I didn¡¯t really think much about it."

    "Okay then, ask the family head of the previous owners of this mountain toe. We need to know where the energy source is and I also need a way to ess the core of the mountain."

    With that Vidyut contacted the family head. There is a way for Vidyut tomunicate with them no matter where they are on the mountain. It is through the screens in the mansion.

    The principle is simr to that of the crystal table Sam has.

    After some discussion and threatening the family head, they finally got the news.

    Underneath the mountain, there is a mine. The lightning elemental spirit stone mine. And they kept it a secret from the rest of the organizations in the city so that they could avoid unnecessary rivalry with the other organizations. That is what the family head said. But in reality, he just wanted to make sure that he doesn¡¯t have to share the profits with other organizations. After all, the mountain is too close to the city and it will be hard to not create a conflict.

    After that, the guy was asked to send the map. A bird simr to a silver pigeon was used to transport the spatial rings and he sent the map like that.

    Sam took a look at the map to find out the whereabouts of the mining tunnels and see if he would be able to find a way to get in touch with the core.

    And luckily there is a way. Now that he also knew that there is a mine underneath, that must be the energy source too. He doesn¡¯t have to search anymore.

    He went to the bottom of the mountain through the mountain path again and with Vidyut¡¯s help, he managed to preserve a lot more energy as he can control the lightning curtain on the top of the mountain which takes most of his energy.

    After reaching the bottom of the mountain, he circled around it to identify the mining tunnels.

    Even though they are currently blocked, they were notpletely blocked, only on the surface. So, as soon as he removed the blockage which is around a meter thick, he managed to find the tunnel and started moving through it.

    The tunnels are diverse and confusing as they are split too much.

    Sam had to use the bug puppets to not waste time and find the correct path.

    After a three-hour-long search, he finally managed to reach the core of the mountain where the mine is also built.

    When he saw the center, there are two thoughts that came to his mind. The first one is that he felt d that he didn¡¯t drill through to find the core, otherwise, the mountain might have really copsed.

    The second thought is, whoever the person that made this formation, he is way too many levels above Sam in terms of his expertise in formations and for the first time ever Sam felt extremely inferior to another person in terms of ability.

    Even if he was inferior, he was never disheartened as he always believed he would catch up soon enough, but for the first time in life, he almost felt that disheartenment. Almost.

    He shook those useless feelings out of his head and a look of excitement came back to his face as he looked at the object in the middle of therge cave.

    The whole cave is scattered with the blocks of empty spirit stone.

    They are all exhausted as the object in the middle has sucked the energy out of it all.

    In the middle of it, there is a six feet pole standing straight. The pole is transparent and a bunch of inscriptions is covering it from top to bottom.

    Inside the transparent pole, there is an indigo-colored liquid full of lightning elemental energy.

    Just with the energy vision and even without touching, Sam could confirm what it is, it is the liquid form of lightning elemental energy.

    The liquid form of spiritual energy is actually one of the purest forms. But it is hard to find it anywhere as it would only be avable in the spirit stone mines, but by the time the mines are detectable, the liquid would have already turned into spirit stones.

    The liquid form of spiritual energy only exists for a small period of time. Between the spiritual energy turning from its particle form to solid stage, but this guy managed to reverse to preserve the liquid state in that transparent pole and use that pure energy for the formation and the liquid energy isn¡¯t being consumed as the pole and inscriptions which are responsible for conversion process are drawing energy from the vein of the mine.

    Sam excitedly walked towards the pole and touched it before using observation ability.

 Chapter 1006: Formation Cylinders

    At this moment, Sam is currently sitting on the ground of the second floor in the divine dimension with a bunch of models surrounding him.

    He observed and tinkered with each model as he tried to find a way to break the formation.

    Thergest model of them all is the model of the whole mountain and the second one is the model of the formation, but only the nodes which are essentially the cylindrical objects all arranged in the exact positions they were ced on the mountain. But in this model, the mountains and the rocks are eliminated.

    The remaining models are of cylindrical objects of various sizes and then models of some objects that are attached to these cylindrical objects.

    By now, Sam is more interested in the cylindrical object than the whole formation itself.

    The cylindrical object, let¡¯s call it the formation cylinder is the most high-level technical product that was used in this whole formation.

    The one in the middle, thergest cylinder which was ced in the center of the mine can be called as the Parent Cylinder and the rest of the cylinders that are spread all over the mountain are the child cylinders.

    There are fourponents in the parent cylinder. One of them is the inscriptions which are the easiest to understand and analyze of all four. The secondponent is on the bottom end of the cylinder which was inside thend. It is arge spike that is focused on taking the spiritual energy in from the mine.

    The thirdponent is the pole itself. Even though it looks like a normal pole, the insides of the pole are constructed in a certain way that there are several formations activated inside as soon as the energy sucked from the mine directly enters it. After the energy passed through all of that, it finally reaches the finalponent on the top.

    The topponent has two functions or to put it more precisely it has two subponents. One of them is responsible for distributing the pure energy sent across the pole to the rest of the nodes and the second suponent, is responsible for condensing the pure energy into the liquid form and drop it inside the pole.

    There is ayer inside the pole where this liquid deposits and some of the liquid energy once again goes back into the cirction system of the pole along with the energy being sucked from the mine.

    This time, the liquid energy will be converted into the normal purest energy and sent to other nodes while the energy sucked from the mine will rece that liquid energy.

    Now going to the other nodes, they are of different sizes. All of them have the sameponents, but thoseponents differ from theponents of the parent cylinder.

    In the child cylinders, the pole is almost the same and it simrly hasyers. The top and bottomponents along with the inscriptions are different.

    While the inscriptions on the parent cylinder support the cirction of energy through the pole structure and help to purify the raw energy obtained from the mine, the inscriptions in the child cylinder only try to assist to liquefy and make the energy active.

    The topponent receives the energy from the parent cylinder and also makes a contact with the rest of the child cylinders in the formation.

    The bottomponent is responsible for liquefying and storing liquefied energy.

    The cylinder which is fully charged with liquid energy acts as a formation node.

    This is the best formation node, Sam hase across in his whole life. It is even better than an energy cell actually. After all, at the end of the day, the energy cell is nothing but a structured spirit stone.

    As Sam felt fascinated with all the whole cylinder thing, he found out one thing that fascinated him more than anything. The transparent poles are made of very familiar material. The empty spirit stones.

    Even though he doesn¡¯t know how they managed to use that and change shape. He knew that it is not the same method as his.

    Because all Sam did is turn the whole stone into powder and reconstruct the powder in the way he wants using the same construction principle that a spirit stone follows.

    But the structure of this material is different. Sam felt excited. So much excitement that he looked like a kid in a toy shop.

    These things would be reverse-engineered by him in a few days. After taking care of the formation, he is going to study them and find out every single thing there is to know about these things. In the process, he would be able to save a decade¡¯s worth of time in research.

    He has had arge project in mind, for a long time. Now, with these things, that project would be finished at least a decade or two early.

    Now, all he has to do is find a way to cut the formation down.

    The person who made the formation is actually quite cautious, from the looks of if the parent cylinder or any child cylinder were moved, then the whole formation would copse and explode.

    As for the core of the formation, it is a divided core. It has two parts in different areas. One of them is the Parent cylinder and the other part is the thing that was ced in the body of Vidyut.

    Both of them act as a joint core and if one of them is removed from its ce or messed with somehow then it would explode and not just the formation, the whole mine would explode and it wouldn¡¯t be any different from an elemental energy st that happens when an energy cell explodes.

    But there, is another way to take care of this situation. As long as he managed to empty the whole Parent cylinder and take away the liquid energy directly, then the formation will go cold as it wouldn¡¯t be able to function. Then Sam can pull that thing out without any problem and Vidyut will also lose connection with the mountain and he can pull that thing out.

    And the formation will not activate again.

    But channeling the liquid form of energy is a dangerous task that is on a borderline impossible level.

    The liquid energy is extremely pure.

    If one tried to absorb it, they must be prepared to absorb itpletely, as pure as it is, it is also vtile.

    And this amount of energy is something that even an Astral ne Consummate stage cultivator couldn¡¯t absorb in a single attempt.

    That too assuming that person would be able to sessfully channel the energy out in the first ce with delicate control.

    But Sam happens to have a way.

    His innate ability of observation and maniption is really great and he used both of them to get out of many tricky situations. Now the maniption ability would be put to an ultimate test.

    Sam took out all the empty spirit stones he has in his hands and when he understood that he didn¡¯t have enough, he directly went to Vidyut and asked.

    "How big is your influence over the city?"

    "What do you mean?"

    "I want to know if the people in the city will do something nonsensical without expressing any doubts and questions if you ask them to do so."

    "Depends on the task actually. If it is something that mightpromise their interests they would hesitate."

    "Good, ask them to gather all the empty spirit stones that are being used in the city. I don¡¯t need other elemental stones. Only light elemental stones and normal spirit stones. That is it. Can you do that?"

    "Empty stones? You mean the transparent stone that was left after the energy is sucked dry?"

    "Yes."

    "Why do you need that?"

    "Do you want answers or do you want to get out?"

    "I want to get out."

    "Then do it as fast as you can. For the next three days, every stone that was depleted of energy should be delivered to you, and then it should be delivered to me in that room.

    You are not going toe in no matter what and only throw the rings through that door gap."

    With that, Sam walked in and started turning the empty spirit stones into powder.

    Vidyut immediately passed down the orders and although people are confused they sent all the stones as he asked and every stone was sent to Sam¡¯s room where he constantly turned them to powder.

    After three days, he finally felt like he had enough powder and took all of it to the core of the mountain. Because of its previous state as a mine, there is a lot of space.

    He dropped the powder which covered almost half of the room.

    After cing thatrge heap of the powder, he made sure not a single grain strayed away.

    He sat on one end of that heap which is close to the parent cylinder in the center.

    Then he activated his lightning elemental fusion and took a deep breath before gripping the parent cylinder directly.

 Chapter 1007: Final Candidate

    Sam¡¯s silver figure started absorbing the liquid energy from the cylinder forcefully.

    The energy output that is distributing the purified energy to the child cylinders was all being sucked towards Sam and the clear dark indigo energy is clearly visible in that silver body of his.

    Sam felt an excruciating pain in his body as if all his organs are being crushed, but he gritted his teeth and sucked the energy faster and then channeled that energy into therge heap of the spirit stone powder.

    Now that his level has be higher, he can channel lightning energy and bnce it within the normal spirit stone powder. If it was done even when he was in Astral ne Initiation that might not have been possible.

    But now it is possible. Whether it was a coincidence or it is really manipted by someone, he came to this ce at a perfect time.

    Sam closed his eyes as he focused with full concentration which divided into two tasks. The first one is obviously forcing the liquid energy out of the cylinder.

    Even though it sounds contradictory, he should be delicate and forceful at the same time. The second thing is the construction of therge energy cell by channeling the energy he forcefully pulled out. Both of these tasks are difficult and delicate, to begin with, even when they were done separately. But now he has to do both of them at the same time.

    The amount of stress he has to take both physically and mentally is something he never endured before. This is the greatest form of torture for him by far.

    As the process went on and one-fourth of the cylinder was empty, there was a rumbling sound all over the mountain.

    Vidyut and rest of the Sam¡¯s team, who are in the mountain mansion, can feel it.

    Vidyut in particr had a numb and slightly painful sensation around the thing in his chest. They all ran out of the mansion and saw that the lightning curtain at the edge of the mountain path dimmed a bit. The curtain which looked like a waterfall has its flow reduced and it became slightly less dense.

    They ran back in to take a look at the rest of the path through the screens and it could be seen that the lightning density all over the path has reduced by a bit.

    Vidyut was extremely excited.

    Sam didn¡¯t know what is happening. In fact, he didn¡¯t even notice the rumbling sound and the faint vibrations that are causing it. He waspletely immersed in the process.

    But after the Initial small portion was reduced, the rest of the energy became difficult to be dragged out. The farther away it is from the topponent which distributes the energy from the parent cylinder, the difficult it is to drag it out.

    Now he has to make the liquid energy delicately move to the top and let it out and try to grab it towards him instantly before it moves to different child cylinders.

    And as it is new for Sam, he failed a few times and the energy went to the child cylinders which sent the formation back to normal and Vidyut became anxious.

    But Sam didn¡¯t feel that anxiety and tried his best to increase his control. After a bunch of failed attempts, he managed to absorb most of the energy and only letting a small portion escape to the child cylinders.

    Now that there is no constant supply to the child cylinders and the formation is still slightly working, the liquid energy stored in the child cylinders is being consumed. Even though a small portion is being supplied, as long as the supply didn¡¯t exceed or match the consumption rate of the cylinder, it is going to be Sam¡¯s win in this situation, and the formation is bound to stop working.

    The process went on for the whole day and night. Sam didn¡¯t get a wink of rest and he just kept on sucking the energy and channeled it into therge heap of spirit stone powder and by the dawn the next day, half of the powder already turned into arge spirit stone and the rest is on its way.

    The process continued and by the dusk next day, Sam finally finished the process and the whole city witnessed as the lightning path that was revered and feared by many slowly dimmed down and disappeared.

    Sam finally had the chance, he immediately stood up and spoke through themunication token he already wore.

    "Vidyut, get ready to take that thing off your chest. We need to do it at the same time. On the count of three.

    One. Two. Three."

    As soon as Sam finished the count both of them pulled their objects at the same time.

    The whole mountain started shaking. As the parent cylinder was thrown into the divine dimension and the core ced in Vidyut¡¯s chest was also removed, the rest of the nodes doesn¡¯t have any other source to get the energy and the formation stopped.

    Sam turned around to take a look at therge energy cell he created in the process.

    This energy cell is thergest one he made. Even therge rocket is smaller than this.

    He couldn¡¯t help but smirk at the thought of the victim who would be getting treated with this energy cell. He threw that in divine dimension and took out the Heavenly wine to recover.

    He needs to collect the rest of the cylinders. There is no way, he would be leaving a single thing out of this formation.

    This is the first time, he became this greedy in a while.

    He didn¡¯t even go and see Vidyut and just started digging around to collect the cylinders.

    He took a whole day to do that and by that time, the family heads and other important people already made a visit to Vidyut.

    They were all shocked that the mountain path returned to normal and the disappearance of the lightning made them have a bad feeling.

    When they came, Vidyut wore a smile and said.

    "I have to go on a journey with my friends to improve my cultivation a bit. I will be temporarily leaving this realm. Rest assured that we will meet again no matter what."

    When the rest of the team saw this, they couldn¡¯t help but sneer in their hearts. This guy sessfully managed to con all these people and made them believe that he is some kind of expert. But he is a prisoner on the mountain. Just by taking advantage of the shy formation set up which caused the path to be riddled with lightning, he managed to make everyone believe that he is some kind of big shot and even kept the enemies of the realm in check.

    Sam returned after he collected all the cylinders.

    "Wrap up your act here. We are leaving as soon as we can. I have many things to do. This time, we are not going back to deste. We are directly going to ourst candidate on the list. I will take some rest. Saber Monarch, brief the team on the next candidate."

    With that Sam left to take some rest.

    The whole process went smoothly, but it left some serious stress on his body, he needs to recuperate properly.

    Meanwhile, Saber Monarch started briefing on thest candidate for recruitment.

    "The person we are trying to recruit next is named Night Ghost."

    "Wait. Night Ghost? You are kidding right?"

    Vidyut immediately interrupted as soon as Saber Monarch spoke.

    "No, I am not kidding. We are really going after the Night Ghost."

    "But the Night Ghost is just a rumor."

    "No, it is not. We investigated it ourselves and we even saw him with our own eyes. The person named Night Ghost exists and it is not just a myth."

    Sia replied from the side.

    Saber Monarch continued.

    The Night Ghost. He is a guy who stays in a demon realm within a mountain. He has an old rivalry with the Ash Demon family. They killed his wife and he swore that he would kill the Ash demon family as a whole.

    But currently, the Ash Demon family only knew that Night Ghost is their enemy, but they don¡¯t know why they became enemies and what his true intention is.

    And since they cannot have someone who can challenge their authority in their own territory, they simply made rumors and spread them wildly making people believe that Night Ghost is a myth and everything is being done by some kind of weird mutated beast in the forest.

    Night Ghost didn¡¯t care about anything. He just cultivates in that forest and kills every hostile intruder and every Ash Demon that enters that forest.

    He is actually a Ghost cultivator. Although Simr to soul necromancy it is slightly different.

    A soul necromancer is someone who uses the souls as his subordinates in a fight and the souls don¡¯t have anything to do with their cultivation, but a ghost cultivator uses his own body and mind as a house for the souls which turn into ghosts and use them to attack. As they consume energy from souls and living objects, he increases his cultivation.

    So, be on guard when we go there."

 Chapter 1008: Night Ghost

    The team along with your new addition moved immediately as soon as Sam recovered.

    Sam is getting sick of this recruitment. Even though this is beneficial for him, the thought of being a rat in a baitced race is not exactly a pleasant one.

    As for the Night Ghost, he is almost sure that as soon as he helps him take revenge against the Ash Demons, he would join his team.

    They went to the Ash Demon Realm which is the realm ruled by the Ash Demons. Just like the Night Demons, Ash Demons also upied and controlled the whole realm on their own the only difference is that Ash demons are a little bit weaker than the Night Demons when ites to both overall strengths as well as individual strength of the heads.

    The head of the family is a middle-stage Transcendent cultivator of the Astral ne for the Ash Demon family, while for the Night Demons it is a Late-stage Transcendent cultivator of Astral ne.

    Night Ghost is also in the Middle stage Transcendent level, but the only reason he is stopping from storming in and taking revenge on the Ash Demon family is that there are two more people in the Ash Demon family who are on the same level as the head. The two grand elders are not only brothers of the family head, in fact, but all three of them are also triplets.

    They all look alike and there is even rumor circting that, sometimes they exchange the positions of the Grand Elder and family head within themselves and they don¡¯t reveal it to anyone just for the sake of it. They are extremely close and they don¡¯t have any form of rivalry or conflicting ambitions between them.

    They are united and harmonious as they ruled over the realm together.

    After arriving in the realm, Sam sent the team to enquire about the situation in the capital, while he went to the forest upied by the Night Ghost which is not that far away from the capital. He took Paras as Vidyut with him.

    Paras held his ax in vignce while Vidyut also held his bow. They are extremely cautious as soon as they entered this eerie forest.

    Sam activated his energy vision, but it is not the regr energy vision, he modified it a bit while injecting death energy so that the vision would focus more on the death energy in the surroundings.

    Night ghost might be a ghost cultivator, but the energy emitted even by those ghosts is death energy and soon he found what he was looking for.

    He took a step back and whispered something in Vidyut¡¯s ears.

    Vidyut was a little bit confused, but he still raised his brow and aimed it in a direction, and shot an arrow purely made of lightning which hit a tree.

    The tree was charred immediately, Sam looked at the tree and said.

    "It didn¡¯t miss. We aimed at the tree."

    As soon as he said those words, a semi-transparent and semi-corporal body appeared near that tree.

    It is a ghost of a human.

    "Who are you? Why are you here?" The ghost spoke and Sam exined.

    "We came here to make a deal with you. Can we talk?"

    "I am not a merchant." The ghost replied.

    "But I am one. The deal is about the Ash Demon family. I would help you destroy it."

    "You?" There is a sense of condescension in that tone of voice. But Sam chuckled and said.

    "I heard you are quite a gambler. Let¡¯s make a bet if you don¡¯t trust me."

    "Gamble? Who told you that?"

    "A couple of my subordinates came to your forest a few days ago. They came out alive because of a gamble, didn¡¯t they? I think you would remember them. At least one of them."

    "You are Sia¡¯s boss?" This time the tone is of surprise.

    "It seems like she forgot to mention my cultivation level. I am that boss, so now are you ready to take the bet?"

    "First tell me what the gamble is."

    "Simple, I will help you take down Ash Demon family in ten days. If I win, you wille and work for me for a decade. If I lose, I will give thirty thousand souls.

    Even though the souls are not of high-level, I am sure the sheer number of it will be a good enough boost."

    "Thirty thousand souls? Have you ever seen that many?"

    "Don¡¯t worry, you are not the only one with weird habits of collecting souls. You collect them for your cultivation, I collect them for my subordinates¡¯ training. That is the only difference."

    With that, Sam took out a formation that is used for training the mentality of his subordinates. He got a bunch of them with him and they would really be around ten to twenty thousand souls. As for why he made the bet, he knew for sure that he would be able to win no matter what.

    Night Ghost fell into deep thought and replied.

    "Decade is too much."

    "Are you telling me, that the grudge you have with the Ash Demon family is not even worth a decade of your lifetime? I know the reason you are waiting is, you are not sure that you can defeat the triplets of the Ash demon family and you only want to make a move once you surpass them.

    How long do you think that would take? It is not like they would stagnate while you progress alone, right?

    All I am asking for is a decade. Trust me after staying with me for a decade, you wouldn¡¯t even want to leave me, even if I ask you to leave."

    "Sure, Deal."

    "Wait here, I wille back in a few days to meet you with some news on my progress."

    With that, all three of them left the forest and sneaked back into the city.

    That evening.

    Inside the city in the most luxurious in the team gathered.

    "So, what are the results? Anything that we can take advantage of?"

    The team started showing their investigation results and Kiran has the most intriguing one.

    "I found a brother of the triplets."

    Everyone was surprised.

    A brother of triplets, that is not exactly a popr person, at least not as popr as he should be.

    Because no one from that team that spent the whole day in the city heard about him.

    "He is not exactly popr and except for some high-level families and organizations, many in the lower levels of the city didn¡¯t even know him.

    That guy also does nothing of importance and it is not due to theck of trying.

    Since his three brothers took up the mantle of their father, he decided to progress their family in different directions. He became a merchant and in fact a good one at that.

    The rest of the peers of his generation including his brothers don¡¯t care much about him or his achievements. Then his insecurities got better of him and he spent all the profits on himself due to the constant goading of people.

    This caused him to get lost in gambling and whoring around and he is looking for that one lucky break in the family which could give him a respectable position. Hepletely lost the belief in working his way up slowly and gave up on business.

    Only after that did the family realize that their useless merchant brother is a great businessman and he brought many benefits even though he gobbled up most of the profits.

    But it was already toote and they pushed him beyond recovery. His situation is simr to that third young master in the elven branch. The only difference is that the third young master is too good on the physical side while this guy is too good on the mental side.

    But he is always high on alcohol and doesn¡¯t think straight. I think he is a perfect fit for being our target."

    Sam looked at all the information Kiran has gathered and asked.

    "How did you get it?"

    "The bar where this guy is a regr customer at has a waitress. I just hit on her a bit and she spilled the beans."

    "Bars and Waiters, they are the best, aren¡¯t they?

    If only all my doomed enemies knew that most of their death was due to the contribution from the waiters. They might die of embarrassment.

    Anyway, this guy is indeed a great fit. First, make friends with him in another disguise. You are now a merchant who came here to enter the market of this realm.

    Your product of choice is currently alcohol. Just make friends with him normally and don¡¯t even show a hint that you know his identity.

    I will tell you what to do next. You have three days to make him trust you. I will give you the required alcohol to fit the y perfectly.

    And if he asks what other fields you work in, make sure he believes you are ufortable talking about it and it is something that you cannot reveal to just anyone.

    I will n the rest and tell you."

 Chapter 1009: Mardhan

    Mardhan.

    The name of the low self-esteemed brother of the triplets.

    The next day after the meeting in the inn.

    Mardhan is walking towards the most luxurious bar in the city. He doesn¡¯t look anywhere near like a person of his status should. He looked ragged and his eyes are clearly screaming that he is a drunkard.

    He went to the bar and sat at his special reserved table as he drank one drink after another. Soon, a woman walked in and sat beside him. Mardhan ced his hand around her as both of them flirted with each other.

    "Who do you want to take today, Young Master?"

    She is the owner of thergest brothel in the city. The brothel has a specialty. None of the women that worked there are being forced to work there. They all took the job as a prostitute willingly.

    And it was known that the owner of the brothel never sleeps with anyone, except for Mardhan of course.

    While they are talking like that, a middle-aged-looking man with arge frame and a refined look walked into the bar. A waitress weed him and the middle-aged man asked.

    "Is there any regr customer of your bar present at the moment?"

    The Waitress felt confused for a bit on why he is asking but still showed Mardhan sitting in the corner.

    "Bring one of everything on your menu to that table. Including the Side dishes."

    With that, the middle-aged man walked to that table and asked the flirting couple politely.

    "Hello Sir, if you don¡¯t mind. May I sit with you?"

    Mardhan was surprised and confused which was apparent on his face.

    "I am a merchant and I need to know a few things about the alcohol in this bar. The waiter said that you are a regr customer here. If you don¡¯t mind, I would like to talk to you for a few minutes."

    Mardhan thought for a moment and gestured him to sit. From the looks of it, the other party clearly doesn¡¯t know who he is. If he does, he wouldn¡¯te and talk to him like this. Everyone who knows his identity wouldn¡¯t respect him that much.

    "Are you new to this city?"

    "I am new to this realm actually. I used to do business in another realm and I want to break into a new market. And I heard that the Ash Demon realm has arge chunk of consumers."

    "That depends on your product actually."

    "My product is alcohol. At least, the one that I want to use now. That is why I came to this bar. I heard this bar has the widest variety of liquors in the whole city. I want the opinion of a regr customer to break into the market with a proper liquor."

    "Alcohol? That is actually a tough market to break into in this realm. Ash Demons are really fond of liquor and they drink a lot. For that reason, many races already brought many varieties of liquor. If I must say, the market is stable than ever. You might get disappointed."

    "I hope you would say the same again after you drink my liquor."

    By now the waitress brought all the drinks and snacks.

    The middle-aged man looked through the drinks and took out different jars from his storage and matched one with every drink.

    "These are the drinks that are somewhat simr to the ones that are avable here. Taste both of them and give me your opinion."

    Mardhan was surprised, but he obliged. Anyway, all he does is drink and whore around. Since someone is paying for it, he is even more satisfied.

    But as he drunk one liquor after another, his facial expression kept on changing.

    "How is this possible?" He muttered as he looked at the middle-aged man.

    "Just who are you?"

    "I am sorry, I forgot to introduce myself. My name is Ranki. As I said, I am a merchant that deals with different businesses."

    "Your alcohol is the best that I tasted. How do you proceed with this business? Are you going to open bars?"

    "Not really. As I said, alcohol is only one of my many businesses and it is not even the main one. There are a lot more businesses I handle. I am just using this to break into the market of the Ash Demon realm. So, I would be selling recipes."

    "Oh? What is the price?" Mardhan¡¯s eyes lit up."

    "That depends on the size of the Ash Demon realm¡¯s market. As much as it would benefit the buyer if they have a fixed price, I didn¡¯t get these things for a cheap price. I need a considerable profit. But I am sure no matter who buys it they would make a dozen times of what they paid for me if they utilize them properly.

    Don¡¯t you think so?"

    "Yes, they definitely would."

    Mardhan looked at the alcohol greedily.

    "Okay, thanks for your opinion. I still have to go to other ces to do some survey."

    As Ranki was about to leave, Mardhan stopped him and said.

    "No, you don¡¯t have to."

    "Why is that?"

    "Can youe back here tomorrow? I think I have a proposal that you would be interested in."

    Ranki frowned for a minute in thought and said.

    "Sure."

    The next day, Ranki once again came to the bar but this time, he met with the sobered-up Mardhan and the brothel owner is not near him.

    He looked sophisticated as if he is back to his noble self.

    "Let me reintroduce myself. I am Mardhan, the brother of the family head of the Ash Demon family. Now, can we talk business?"

    Ranki was surprised, but he sat down.

    Mardhan took out a bunch of documents regarding the poption in many areas in the realm where the market would be flourished.

    And then proceeded to exin the business n. Ranki was surprised, in fact even Sam would have been surprised if he saw this. Because the current business n that was presented in front of Ranki is of a franchise.

    Mardhan wants to open a franchise based on Alcohol.

    Partnering with local bar owners they would create a brand all over the realm. His business acumen is brilliant.

    But hecks capital. He doesn¡¯t have enough capital to enter and since his brothers and peers along with his family counted him as useless and he acted in such a way, there is no way they would take out capital.

    He needs Ranki to ce the initial capital which he would use to show his brothers and take the money required for the franchise operation. Just when he thought, Ranki would refuse, he agreed immediately.

    "This would also help the rest of my businesses. I am in, but I need a share in franchise operations."

    "Of course."

    The preparations started immediately and the bar in the capital was nned to open in the next two days.

    Mardhan was feeling ecstatic as he found the ticket to gold. His family is in the liquor business as the Ash demons are great consumers are liquor, but with this new one, he would be able to get tons of money and increase his standing in the family in a single shot.

    As he thought of the ie he would get and the jealousy from his peers, he got reminded of Ranki.

    "What are the other businesses you were talking about?"

    "Well, Alcohol is at most my side business. I mainly operate in the special weapons business and physical enhancement drug business. There is an inventor I know who is proficient in many things and he sells these products and recipes instead of making a business of his own as his business already got too big.

    I got the alcohol recipes from him. Apart from that, I have food recipes, pills, drugs, and blueprints for some special weapons that are good for low-level cultivators in the mortal ne.

    They are all just tones of money waiting for us to take. Recently, he made some new types of drugs that would enhance the body in long term.

    For example, there is a fire elemental drug that could be consumed by the wood elemental beings and they would get fire elemental resistance.

    The fire elemental beings that consume a frost drug he made would be able to gain ice elemental resistance.

    I want to use that frost drug to enter this market. But it is hard to gain credibility for such a drug, so I want to inject myself with alcohol, then food, and then weapons before I go to the drugs.

    Since the Ash demons are a high-level fire elemental beings, I think it would be a profitable business."

    "Profitable? I think this is beyond profitable."

    Mardhan said and started pacing.

    He couldn¡¯t help but think of that kind of drug, the only weakness of the Ash demons is their inability to defend against ice. This would change the phase of Ash demons and it would be a new era if that drug could be mass-produced.

    He cannot let go of this chance.

    "I think I have an idea. Why don¡¯t we partner up now and sell that drug now?"

 Chapter 1010: Trap

    Mardhan and Ranki are currently sitting in a private room.

    There are a bunch of ss containers of different kinds set on the table.

    All of them are emitting some kind of frost energy. In one type of container, there is a liquid that is ice blue color and in the second type, there is some kind of pill in the same ice blue color.

    There is another container that looked like a lump of slime.

    "These are all different kinds of drugs and all of these are suitable for Astral ne Initiation cultivators. You can test them if you want. Even though there is a fixed dosage that needs to be taken for a considerable amount of time, you can still get the effects even after you take it once.

    You can try it if you want to test it."

    Mardhan hesitated a bit and Ranki chuckled.

    "If you don¡¯t even trust the medicine, how are you going to sell it? Even though it is mostly effective on fire elemental beings and I am only a warrior, I can still take one and show you."

    With that Ranki took a pill and swallowed it. His whole body is covered in frost energy, but soon the energy was concentrated to one single point and stayed there.

    "My cultivation is a bit higher. This pill doesn¡¯t work on me for long. But you fulfill both the conditions of the cultivation and elemental affinity, so you would have a better result than this. Do you want to try it now?"

    Mardhan took the pill awkwardly and swallowed it.

    He instantly felt a cold feeling enveloping his body, after the initial chill, he finally felt the cold feeling concentrating near the spiritual core.

    Ranki pulled out a scroll containing an inscription of a frost spell and threw it on Mardhan.

    As soon as the attacknded, he used the fire elemental energy to nullify most of the attack, but the freezing effect of the attack was what he anticipated, but to his surprise, it didn¡¯te.

    The freezing effect waspletely absorbed by the frost energy that was umted in the spiritual core. That frost energy expelled acted as some sort of glue and held the foreign ice elemental energy and expelled it. In the process, some of the frost energy was also expelled.

    Looking at the effects, Mardhan¡¯s eyes brightened.

    "This is the perfect product." He muttered to himself.

    "I know it is, but there is one bad news for you," Ranki told with a sigh.

    "What?"

    "I cannot do this business with just you. As you know when we started the liquor business, all I knew is of your identity which I trusted and ced my capital on. But soon I realized that your identity doesn¡¯t have any value even within the realm.

    But still, I didn¡¯t withdraw that capital in the Alcohol business, because that much amount is something I am willing to lose.

    That business is still in progress, so we can¡¯t see those results which might change my attitude towards you. If you are willing to wait for that long. I am okay with that. But If you don¡¯t want to wait, I want more assurance."

    "What kind of assurance do you want?"

    "An assurance from your brothers. Two of the grand elders or the family head himself. If you can get them to act as your surety then I am okay with that.

    I cannot just trust you and throw in money that I might not get back and this recipe is too precious and your social standing and worth are too low for me to entrust you with this. I hope you understand."

    Mardhan became silent and didn¡¯t even know what to say.

    He ground his teeth like a mad dog showing his anger and dissatisfaction with himself and then he looked at the pills and potions on the table.

    He cannot let this chance go. This is the biggest chance he would get in his life. With these things the fortune would change, they can fight against their greatest rivals without care about getting affected by the freezing energy.

    "To get their assurance, I need to convince them. I cannot just get them to okay with when they couldn¡¯t test the drug themselves."

    "These things wouldn¡¯t have much effect on them. If you want, I can give you the drugs created for Pre-transcendent stage cultivators, they might not have aplete effect on your brothers who are already transcendent stage cultivators and they are not up for sale yet. They are still in research as they couldn¡¯t find a way to mass-produce them.

    So, I can only give you two of them. A potion and a slime pill."

    "No problem. I will give you an answer by evening. Can I take these samples too?" Mardhan said as he pointed at the containers on the table.

    "Sure."

    With that Mardhan took everything and left.

    Ranki got out of the room and went to the inn he was living in. He didn¡¯t go into his room directly and went to Sam¡¯s room and changed his form.

    "Boss, the goods are sent. Are you sure this would work?" Kiran asked Sam.

    "If the information that we got about these brothers is true, then it would surely happen. They are already regretting that they didn¡¯t trust their brother once who would have brought a shit lot of money if given a chance.

    But now I showed them another chance. Let us see if they are dumb enough to trust this or if they would be even dumber to not trust this."

    "Not trusting this would be a dumber choice?"

    "Of course, they wouldpletely break the trust of this younger brother and we can use him to make something more extreme. Even if this attempt fails, we would y a longer game. A broken man can do things you wouldn¡¯t be able to imagine.

    So, it would be better if these brothers directly trust him, because if they don¡¯t a worst than this, would await them."

    While Sam and Kiran are discussing which would be a dumber choice for the brothers, the men in question are currently staying in the same room.

    Mardhan is currently looked at the triplets with a nervous expression.

    "Brother, I tested the drug myself. This is the perfect drug for us. Now we don¡¯t have to fear the frost giants anymore. That freezing effect that troubles us would be a thing of the past. The one weakness the Ash demons havepared to the rest of the demons would be gone."

    He said everything so passionately fearing that his brothers would reject him again.

    "Are you sure, this is legitimate?"

    The family head asked as he looked at Mardhan¡¯s ice.

    "If only I could take these things with my cultivation, I would have swallowed them all. But I cannot. So, I can only taste these.

    Just pick what you want me to eat."

    He said and took out all the drugs meant for initiation level cultivators.

    "You don¡¯t have to do that alright. We would trust you. But we need to test these drugs first." The Grand elder said and picked the pill.

    "I will take this first and then you guys follow if I don¡¯t have any effect."

    "Alright."

    The grand elder swallowed the pills. The intense frost energy enveloped his body and he almost felt frozen. But soon he felt the energy concentrating to one point. He didn¡¯t feel that cold. In fact, even the surroundings felt warm to him.

    "It is working."

    The grand elder said as he used another frost spell scroll that Mardhan got from Ranki on himself.

    The family head and the remaining grand elder immediately took the remaining, potion and the slime drug and swallowed them.

    They also felt the same sensation as the first grand elder and couldn¡¯t help but smile.

    "Bring him to us tomorrow. We will discuss the business." The family head said and sent Mardhan away.

    "It seems like we did right by him this time." The family head said calmly.

    "Not him. We did right by the family."

    "But to really do right by the family, I think it is inevitable for us to get that recipe of these drugs for ourselves. After all, it is not a good idea for these things toy in the hands of some external party."

    "Rightly said."

    As they are discussing plots to get the recipe of the drugs, the family head felt a weird sensation in his body. As he tried to channel his energy to get rid of that weird sensation, he felt that he couldn¡¯t move his energy from the spiritual core and the surrounding meridians are frozen.

    Another grand elder who took the potion also felt like his blood is turning cold and his skin turned ice blue slowly.

    "Brother. What happened to you? What is wrong?"

    Thest standing grand elder started yelling as he looked at his brother.

    His screams were heard all over the city as he rushed to the healer instantly and sent someone to grab his brother who caused all of this all the while panicking about his own safety.

 Chapter 1011: Recruitment Over

    Sam sent Sia down to the Forest to get the night ghost into the city. This is the perfect situation that they are looking for.

    At this moment, thest remaining grand elder without any adverse effects is currently holding his little brother Mardhan at the point of a dagger and is asking questions violently.

    "Who did this? Where is that guy? Is it a plot from Frost Giants? Are you assisting them now?"

    The barrage of questions hit Mardhan like a storm on his face. He couldn¡¯tprehend exactly what happened as his brother didn¡¯t think of exining why he is doing it and just directly went to questioning.

    Seeing that Mardhan is not answering anything, the grand elder made his hands do the work as he beat the crap out of the little brother.

    After that beating and some mild exnation, Mardhan finally understood and his face looked horrified and this also made the grand elder understand that his brother is nothing but a pawn in the whole game.

    He immediately called for the guards and the elders to conduct a search over the city. The wormholes for other realms ands are closed and people are looking for a man with certain features.

    Sia went to the forest and met with Night Ghost.

    "Our side is finished with the task. It is now your yground."

    "What did you guys do? How is it possible to do something like weakening the ash demon family in such a short time?"

    "For our boss, it is possible. At this moment, two of the three triplets are suffering from severe freezing effects. One of the guys has his meridians and energy circtionwork frozen, while the second guy has the muscle fibers frozen. They couldn¡¯t even move.

    The third triplet, a grand elder is the only one moving freely. But he is also worried about something.

    So, if you cannot take this opportunity, you wouldn¡¯t get a second chance like this. Hurry up."

    "I can¡¯t believe you guys did this."

    With that, he immediately moved along with Sia and soon they are inside the city right outside the estate of the Ash Demon family.

    A bunch of ghosts rose from Night Ghost¡¯s body as they spread all over the estate and soon they returned.

    "Are you guysing with me?"

    "Of course, who would take care of the low-level cultivators if we don¡¯te with you? Do you want to deal with all the nuisance they create for you?"

    "Thanks."

    With that, Sia contacted the rest of the team and they also arrived at the entrance. The whole group walked into the estate as they owned it.

    The guards and the elders that are already alert with something like this happening, couldn¡¯t help but notice such an eye-catching group and they decided to intercept immediately.

    The team spread out and dealt with all of them. Only Sam continued following Night Ghost on harbinger as they moved to the spot where triplets are.

    The grand elder is pacing around as he looked at his two brothers trying to fight for their lives.

    The two things Sam used are something he came across throughout his journey. The liquid is actually something he bought through the shop. A high-grade frost essence is actually quite cheap. The second thing which was passed on as the slime pill is actually the parasite that was inside the Phoenix¡¯s body.

    As for the pill that was given to the grand elder who is still running around and the pills that are given to Mardhan are actually the real experimental drugs of the organization. They are not made for some longsting immunity, but they are made of a temporary immunity against cold attacks and cold environments.

    He just used the experimental drugs as bait to lure these guys in. In fact, he was worried that they wouldn¡¯t take the potion and the slime in. He thought that they might be suspicious and test them on some lower-level people.

    But he bet on the fact that they owe something to their little brother and it seems that the gamble paid off.

    If it didn¡¯t, he would have had to make some more preparations and it would take a few more days.

    Luckily it was all over faster than he anticipated, so he could get out of this recruitment that he is sick of. He is now going to take a vacation while beating his peers just like Kiran did.

    But unlike Kiran, he is also going to challenge people of higher cultivation. Since he is in the Initial stage, he would be challenging people at the middle stage of Pre-transcendence too.

    He would ce himself under severe restrictions in different realms. The whole experience would be refreshing.

    While he is thinking of what he is going to do with the free time he decided to take, Night Ghost was already done with the three brothers. The only danger with the three brothers is that they would fight well together and evente-stage Transcendent cultivators and even some peak stage transcendent cultivators find trouble when they fight like that.

    Now that two of them are bedridden in an ice-cold stage, he could take them down easily.

    Sam walked to one of the bodies and cut open it to take the parasite.

    He still doesn¡¯t know many details regarding this parasite, he is not going to let go of it that easily.

    After the family was finished and Night Ghost ate all their souls, they left the ce and then the realm.

    Night Ghost made a contract with Sam and they all went back to deste so that they could join the first team and continue taking the organizations down.

    After that, he started charting out his own personal journey.

    This is going to be his personal vacation. That couldst from a few days to a few months and even over a year.

    He didn¡¯t think of nning the whole thing from the scratch. He just picked the realms that he would like to enter. Not even the order.

    He would leave this journey for his unpredictable mood at the instance of making a decision.

    After making all the arrangements, he finally made his move.

    His first target is the Emerald Forest realm.

    A realm that has a weird rtionship with the color emerald.

    This is caused by neutral spiritual energy that was mutated a bit. The emerald color that came from the mutated energy doesn¡¯t have additional properties except for a bit of focus on the physical bodies of the creatures, but the beasts and the meat that was avable here tastes great.

    Particrly, there is one beast that was famous not just in the realm but across the realms and there is one restaurant that made it possible.

    The Emerald Gold Chicken Stew.

    The Chicken, which has both emerald and golden feathers and body texture particrly suitable for making a stew. Now that he decided to have a vacation, he needs to satisfy his vanity a bit and decided to go there and taste the stew too.

    Sam used the dimensional drifter and disappeared.

    After reaching the realm, the first thing he did is, picking a target.

    As much as he likes enjoying that stew, if he took the annoying part out of the way, he can enjoy it freely.

    There are a bunch of families with the head of the family being a Middle stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivators in the realm and out of all those, one organization has the highest influence.

    The Mace sect.

    The sect that only focuses on the warriors and that too the ones who only use mace as their weapon.

    This is somewhat entric, but there is now stating that a mace sect couldn¡¯t be made. After all, swords and sabers have sects made after them.

    Sam¡¯s target was this organization and the restrictions he put himself on are also simple.

    He is going to use a blunt weapon on them and he is also only going to use his physical strength. No elemental abilities, no usage void style, ripple style and repel style.

    No usage of tricks and tactics. Only pure raw and brute force.

    As for the choice of a blunt weapon, he would leave it for thetter.

    Now, it is time for enjoying the stew.

    When he reached the restaurant, Sam was stunned. There are around a hundred people waiting in the line outside.

    There are a bunch of rules ced on the restaurant.

    ¡¯No reservations are epted.

    No rmendations would be taken.

    Limited servings of stew per day.

    No overnight waiting allowed and the line should only be made after the sunrise.¡¯

    Sam was stunned when he saw the rules, but he could only sigh, he is sure that there is no way he would be getting that stew that day. So, he could only enter the forest and try to hunt different beasts and try to taste them and if they are good, he would add them to the livestock in the divine dimension.

 Chapter 1012: Trouble

    For the whole day, Sam roamed around as he tried different food. The has one of the best sceneries he had ever seen.

    The faint emerald hue to the soil is giving him a refreshing feel as he walked around.

    He sampled all kinds of beasts he could get his hands on and roamed around aimlessly for the whole day and night.

    The next morning, he arrived at the restaurant, right after the sunrise.

    But he was shocked once again as there is arge line in front of the restaurant.

    "Fuck."

    He couldn¡¯t help but curse helplessly as he joined the line at the end.

    "It seems like you are new to the realm."

    The man standing in front of Sam asked.

    "Yes, how do you know that?"

    "Well, even though ording to the rules of the restaurant, the lines shouldn¡¯t start until the sun rises. But it is only lining up for the restaurant if it is outside the restaurant. So, in the next street, a gang here starts lining up long before sunrise. First-timers wouldn¡¯t know this and they will onlye here after the sunrise.

    By then, the gang already brings the line here and ces them here before the first-timers coulde and join.

    I also went there. This is my third time. But you are really fast. You came the very next moment. I think you will definitely get a portion, unless if it is one of those days."

    "One of what days?"

    "The portions of the stew are limited but one of those days, the portions would be lesser than normal and only a bunch would be able to get them. The gang I mentioned earlier will only make a line of people enough for those days. In such a way, they are guaranteed to have a portion and even they wouldn¡¯t cheat any off their money by giving them false hope. In this way, they avoid unnecessary conflict.

    I happened to be thest member of that line. So, if it is one of those days, then I will be the one to get thest portion."

    Sam immediately became nervous. As lucky as he felt these days, there is no way that fortune applies to satiating his food cravings. He just wished that it is one of those days.

    And as soon as he wished that, the restaurant door opened and a red cloth was hung on the door.

    "It seems like you are unlucky. That red cloth indicates that it is one of those days"

    The person in front of Sam said to him.

    Sam gave out a sharp sigh and then asked.

    "How much did you guys pay for the spot here?"

    "It is a five hundred thousand spirit stones? Why do you want to go to the gang there tomorrow?"

    "I will pay you a million, will you give up your spot for me?"

    "What?"

    The person was shocked. He looked around as if he was afraid that someone might listen to it and said in a whispering tone.

    "We shouldn¡¯t discuss selling the spots. The gang doesn¡¯t like that."

    "I don¡¯t care. I want a spot. How much will you sell it for?"

    The person didn¡¯t say anything and awkwardly looked around. After some time, he turned around and asked.

    "Why did youe here and what is your background?"

    "Why does it matter?"

    "If you give me an answer, I might consider, selling it."

    "I am here to get a sparring match with the head of the Mace Sect and this is also my vacation, so I decided to taste this famous stew before I go on about my business. I cannot waste my time for too long and there is no way, I am willing to wait for another day."

    The guy was stumped and said.

    "Are you sure you are alright? You don¡¯t have a screw loose in your brain do you?"

    "Do you want to sell it or not?"

    "Okay, how much would you buy it for?"

    "Just name the price."

    "Three, no four million."

    Sam shook his hand and a spatial ring appeared which he threw at that man and said.

    "Now get out of the queue."

    Sam took the spot and after a few hours, finally, his turn came. He walked to the counter of the restaurant and picked up the bowl of stew.

    The smell itself made his mouth water. He walked to the table and picked up the cutlery to slowly savor the wonderful chicken.

    At this moment someone barged into the restaurant and walked straight towards Sam.

    "Is he the one?" The leader of the group looked at Sam and asked the person next to him.

    "Yes, boss."

    The voice sounded familiar and Sam looked at him in surprise. The same guy who took money from Sam is standing next to the boss.

    He smiled at Sam and said.

    "Everything I said is true. But there is one thing I didn¡¯t tell you. I am also a part of the gang and sometimes we do this to fish out the people like you who have no respect to the system here."

    Sam looked at him for two seconds and once again shifted his attention to the stew.

    As he was about to scoop up some, the table suddenly rocked. He picked the bowl immediately but some of it already fell. That is not the end though, as Sam looked at the stew that was spilled, one of the guys spat in the bowl.

    "Now go on ahead and eat it you piece of shit. How dare you ignore the rules here? You better pay the fine or you will be in trouble."

    Sam sighed and looked at them. He dropped the bowl and slowly walked to the counter.

    "Is it possible to have another bowl?" He asked in a calm voice.

    The chef who looked like an old man looked at Sam and shook his head.

    "I am sorry we are out of ingredients."

    Sam took a deep breath and his aura raged as he changed his focus to the group. The group leader shivered a bit as he spoke.

    "What? Do you think you can intimidate us with your superior cultivation? You might not know. We are not some ordinary thugs, we are the special unit that is directly under the Lesser-head of the Mace sect¡¯s control. We are the ones that hold up the order and see to that the business is done properly.

    You are the one who broke the rules by trying to buy a ce in the queue. We are just doing our duty."

    Sam looked at them and walked forward calmly as he whispered something.

    "You seemed to have mistaken. Do I really look like a person that would give a flying fuck?"

    As soon as he spoke those words a metal baseball bat appeared in his hands and he swung it straight at the head of the guy who conned him.

    The guy fainted with one strike. Sam didn¡¯t use his full strength and kept it under control.

    He just wants these guys to experience pain. He doesn¡¯t want to kill anyone at least not yet.

    As for the baseball bat. This is the blunt weapon he chose for himself to fight with. A baseball bat is made of metal that is normally used to make weapons for people at Astral ne.

    He has money to waste and he wanted to just feel like he is in a street brawl once again, so he made a bat.

    After putting one guy to sleep, he kept on swinging the bat and made the rest faint. Except for the leader, everyone was there.

    All the customers in the restaurant were stunned. Half of them are regr customers and they knew exactly what this gang does and it is indeed under themand of the lesser head. Everyone knows he is doing this and no one dared to talk back even though the brats here are beneath their level.

    The leader started shivering and turned around to run away. Before he could reach the door, Sam hit a bowl with the bat which flew and hit him on the back of his knee and making him fall down.

    "Chef, the rest of the day is the end of your service. I am buying out the restaurant. The customers can leave. As for these brats, none of them are leaving until I eat my chicken stew.

    Now finish the meal and get the fuck out. After that, tell the people that need to know this.

    And tell them. There is a guy named Sam here and he wouldn¡¯t let this go until he eats his chicken stew."

    He then turned towards the chef and said.

    "Do you have wine?"

    "Ye... Yes."

    "Bring the best one. Why are you so nervous? Do you also belong to Mace Sect?"

    "I can be considered as their subordinate."

    "Then stay in the kitchen and don¡¯t get involved. I caught some game. Cook them for me now.

    This is going to be long and nasty."

 Chapter 1013: Beating

    Sam sat at the table as he ate the roasted rabbit and some grilled skewers.

    "You really are good at cooking. I have a subordinate who is also great at cooking. Your styles are a bit different, but you are more or less on the same level. I would like to see who will do better someday."

    Heplimented the chef as he drank the wine.

    The chef acted as if everything is normal. But that slight tremble of his hands whenever he is serving Sam or whenever Sam is talking to him, he is either afraid or excited about this whole thing.

    "So, why can¡¯t you cook the chicken stew?"

    "It is aplicated dish and it takes a lot of time. I cook it overnight every day. So, it is impossible to cook something like that on the spot and there are also limited ingredients.

    Even though we have plenty of chicken, the eggs are limited. I need the egg yolks for the stew and a lot of them. But every month we need to let some eggs go as we need them to be hatched, so a few days will be like this, with an extremely limited amount."

    "That¡¯s good. But as I said, I am not leaving this ce until I eat the chicken stew. You can go and prepare for tomorrow¡¯s stew directly. But I guess your restaurant wouldn¡¯t be able to escape the damage."

    Sam then took out a spatial ring and threw at him.

    "Take the money for the damages and there is a formation disc inside use it in your kitchen. That would be enough to save yourself and the kitchen from the residual damage."

    The chef did as he was told.

    Sam waited for a few minutes before a bunch of people came running to the restaurant.

    There is another leader for this group and he is carrying a mace. There is also another person carrying a mace along with him.

    The leader walked to the table straight and sat in front of Sam before saying.

    "What kind of superior cultivator treats juniors like this? I know you are upset because you were yed, but all we did is fish you out, a person who has no respect for rules. You broke the rules, you have to pay that is thew here. Just because you are upset and don¡¯t want to pay and on top of that you are a bit strong, doesn¡¯t mean you get to be unreasonable.

    Before the core members of the sect get involved, you better pay up and leave this ce."

    Sam just gave him a sweeping nce and yelled at the chef.

    "Chef, I am out of skewers. By the way, if possible roast an emerald chicken for me. I want to taste it."

    The guy who is holding the mace got irritated but he knew that Sam would kick his ass immediately, so he didn¡¯t dare do anything.

    As he was about to say something, Sam finally opened his mouth.

    "Listen to me, you little shit. I don¡¯t give a fuck about your rules, nor do I give a fuck about the money you conned. I don¡¯t like it when some disturb me while I was eating, and your subordinates spat in my food.

    This is not going to end the easy way. So, get lost and send someone who has strength and balls to fight or get me a bowl of chicken stew. If you cannot do either of them, then don¡¯t fuckinge here.

    Next time someone enters this ce but not for either reason I mentioned, I will crush their ball sack. Get the fuck out."

    "Do you know that you are not just disrespecting the rules, you are disrespecting the Mace sect who made those rules and also the rest of the city that follows them?"

    Sam pointed the baseball bat at the guy and said.

    "I said, get the fuck out. Do you want me to use a differentnguage?"

    The group left instantly, the people who were beaten by Sam are still unconscious.

    They don¡¯t want to be added to the pile.

    After the group left, their leader immediately ran to the Mace sect and went to the core area. He stood in front of a middle-aged man and exined everything.

    "Why did you make such a mess? Do you want my uncle to get a wind of it? Don¡¯t forget that we are using the fact that I am the lesser head and my uncle, the sect head is in seclusion in our favor. If things get too messy, he would learn of this incident and we wouldn¡¯t go scot-free.

    Just who the fuck is this guy, that is trying to shake up the status quo that I so carefully maintained?"

    He walked out and soon made his way towards the restaurant on a flying beast.

    He picked up a mace and looked at Sam and said.

    "Heard you are causing trouble here? You are something, aren¡¯t you? Showing your power on someone weak? Isn¡¯t it just sadism?"

    "Provoking someone stronger than you, that is Masochism."

    "I am the lesser head of the Mace sect. You better pay the fine and get out of here, or things wouldn¡¯t go well for you."

    Sam stood up and picked and held the baseball bat and said.

    "Let us get it over with."

    The lesser head immediately swung his mace. Sam, raised his bat and blocked the mace. The aftershock of the sh, caused the table to crash.

    But Sam is still standing there without even a flinch. The Lesser head raised the mace up once again and wanted to hit Sam on the head as he gathered a lot of energy on the head of the mace.

    Before he could swing the mace, Sam swung his bat and hit him straight on the temple.

    He didn¡¯t use his full power and held back. Otherwise, the fight would have been over.

    The lesser head stumbled to the side awkwardly as the energy he gathered dispersed instantly.

    He was bewildered by the hit that came. He couldn¡¯t see Sam moving, he didn¡¯t see the bating, but it met his temple and made him stumble, before he could react, the bat once again him, and this time it is on his knee.

    Sam tossed the bat and caught it and spoke.

    "It really feels good when you swing this thing at someone. No wonder it is such a popr choice for brawlers."

    He then started swinging the bat.

    The shoulder, elbow, knee, temple, chin, he kept on beating the crap out of the lesser head and slowly he started bleeding. His bones are broken, his teeth fell off and his face is swollen.

    It is a one-sided beating.

    "If you can be the lesser head, then I really kept my expectations too high. I am really wasting my time. I should just finish it."

    Sam gathered the energy in the bat and this is the first time it is glowing. The lesser head became flustered wanted to say something. But he couldn¡¯t speak because of the beating he took to his jaw and the mouth.

    Right before the hitnded, Sam looked at his expression and halted.

    "I will give you one chance. Call for backup as much as you can. If they fight better than you, I will let you go alive. How does that sound?"

    As he finished his words, he sensed something and looked towards the roof of the restaurant.

    *BOOM* *CRASH*

    The roof copsed as if it was hit by a meteor strike and even Sam was blown away. The whole restaurant copsed and the aftermath looked like it suffered a natural disaster. Except for the kitchen which was protected by Sam¡¯s formation.

    *cough* *Cough*

    Sam removed the debris around him and came out to take a look. An old-looking man with a massive build is standing with a Mace in his hands and looked at Sam who came out of debris and kept dusting his coat off.

    The lesserid there in the debris as he coughed some blood.

    "It seems like someone serious finally came."

    Sam said casually as he picked his bat again.

    "I am the elder of the Mace sect. I was told that you kept the lesser head of our family captive. You better release him now or you would die."

    "I am really bored about all your threats. The whole sect seems to be surviving based on their threats. I don¡¯t have time for such drama, let¡¯s just fight."

    Sam lunged forward and swung the bat.

    The old man used the mace to block it, but when both things collided, he felt the massive force and stumbled to the side.

    "Good, I don¡¯t have to hold back as much as before."

    With that, Sam kept on swinging. The elder couldn¡¯t help but dodge. He knew that one hit from that bat and he would be having trouble.

    As the dodging went on, Sam didn¡¯t slow down one bit, he became faster instead.

    The bat swept past the back of the elder who crouched down to dodge the attack, but the elder saw the ckness which is Sam¡¯s knee zooming towards his face and that is thest thing he saw before he fell unconscious.

    Sam turned back only to see the Lesser head calling someone using themunication token.

    He smiled and walked towards the debris and picked put a rtively intact table before he started drinking again.

 Chapter 1014: Fun

    Sam kept on drinking and whenever a fainted person woke up, they huddled together with the lesser head.

    The elder that woke up after some time, tried to attack Sam again and in the process lost eight of his teeth and his mace was broken. The spiked head was separated from the rest of the handle.

    The Lesser head who called for reinforcements hopefully and anxiously looked at the sky, but meanwhile, the people gathered and everyone watched it in anticipation.

    This made Sam feel a bit confused. So, he called one of the citizens and asked.

    "I thought you guys would be feeling angry at me, but it doesn¡¯t seem like it. All of you guys seemed to be enjoying the show. What is going on?"

    The citizen looked at the lesser head who is also staring back at him.

    "I am sorry Sir. You are an outsider, you wouldn¡¯t stay here for long, but I need to stay here for my whole life. I hope you understand."

    Sam looked at him closely and said.

    "You can go then."

    He got a fair idea of what is wrong, but he didn¡¯t care too much. He was just barely curious.

    As he was about to drop the idea, the assistant chef from the restaurant came out of the kitchen and walked towards Sam with a dish, and spoke slowly.

    "Sir, this is the dish I created recently, would you please taste it?"

    Sam took a bit and he was actually impressed.

    "It is nice. That spicy feeling is incredible. It is raising appetite."

    "Then, would hire me? I would be your traveling chef. I can cook all kinds of dishes and I can even maintain their elemental energies inside the food without affecting them too much."

    "It seems like your restaurant is doing great. Why would you want to leave like this? And the chef doesn¡¯t mind?"

    "No, he doesn¡¯t. As for leaving this ce, I believe any other ce will be better than this. Particrly this part of the city under the Mace sect¡¯s control, the other areas under different sects have a proper life we don¡¯t."

    "If your chef doesn¡¯t mind, then it is okay."

    As they were speaking massive beasts that are flying in the sky made their way towards the restaurant. The assistant chef looked at the beasts and felt a little nervous. Looking at his expression Sam asked.

    "Who are they?"

    "Some of them are elders from the Mace sect, the rest of them are the lesser heads from the other sects in the realm. They are all Astral ne Pre-transcendence cultivators, of course at the Initial stage."

    "Other sects? Why are they getting involved?"

    "I don¡¯t know, nobody knows, except for the Lesser head of Mace sect. Every other lesser head just follows his lead. It can be said that once they inherit their titles, the Mace sect will rule the whole realm."

    Sam looked up and yelled.

    "I have no enmity with other sects, it is best if you don¡¯t get involved."

    "We have no choice, we cannot let a outsiders insult our rules like this."

    "Have it your way then."

    With that, Sam kicked up the mace head that was near him and swung the baseball bat at it.

    The Spike mace head was hit like a ball cutting through the air and hit the eagle-like beast in the forefront of the entourage that came.

    *CRRARRGGHH*

    The beast crowed as it crashed into the ground along with its master and the rest of the peoplended hurriedly to check on theirpanion.

    Sam ran towards the group with his bat. A massive fireball was shot at him, which he hit with the bat as if he is really ying the game.

    Followed by that, he treated every ranged attack like a ball as the energy-filled bat was swung at them carelessly.

    Soon, Sam is already in the middle of the group and he hit them like a street thug. The metallic bat gave out the clinking sound as it hit the skulls and the bones of the opponents.

    Sam is getting more and more excited with each swing as he smashed one opponent after another. After a while hepletely stopped defending and let them attack him as he liked, there was little damage they could do as they felt the smashing force of the metal bat which is mostly making contact with their head and particrly their face.

    After fifteen minutes of bashing, everyoneid down on the ground either unconscious or immobile as they bled through their heads.

    Sam felt like he blew out a lot of steam and woke all the lesser heads up.

    "I am giving you guys the same opportunity as the first guy, call for someone who can take you out of here. Or someone who can bring me the chicken stew and I will let you go."

    The lesser heads immediately picked up theirmunication devices and called for help.

    An hour passed before Sam saw some more flying beastsing towards them. But by now, the whole city seemed to have arrived at the spot as they looked at the scene from the surrounding rooftops.

    The news already spread rapidly and the elders that came on the beasts didn¡¯t make a move, neither did they ask Sam what he is doing here and why he is doing it, they are waiting for someone.

    Soon, an old man with arge build and arge beard that reached his chest came on a falcon-type beast with a blunt mace on his shoulder.

    Hended down and walked towards the restaurant before he gave a sweeping nce to the lesser head and all the unconscious and conscious victims of Sam¡¯s bashing before saying.

    "I am the head of the Mace sect. Why are you doing all this?"

    "Whatever you heard, how unbelievable it might sound to you, is true. I am just here for a bowl of chicken stew and then a possible appointment with you. But some of yourpdogs spat in my food and that is thest bowl of the stew. So, I am telling you, neither me nor thesepdogs and their supposed masters wouldn¡¯t leave this ce until I have my bowl of stew."

    "Is it really necessary to make such amotion and damage for a bowl of stew?"

    "Yes, it is necessary for me."

    "I am sure that our side started this, but this is getting out of hand. We will apologize and give your money back, let them go."

    "I don¡¯t care about that money. I need the stew."

    "You are acting like a child."

    "It is not good to propose judgments on others, you looked like a conceited barbarian savage when you came down, you don¡¯t hear me passing judgments on you, do you?"

    The whole ce suddenly turned quiet and the old man ispletely surrounded by a raging aura.

    "You shouldn¡¯t let your tongue slip so much young man. You might die."

    Sam just chugged some wine and stood up as he met the old man face to face.

    "I don¡¯t think so."

    The old man moved his shoulder and the blunt mace was swung towards Sam which he blocked with the bat.

    Both of them took a step back and swung their weapons with full force.

    *DONG*

    It was like a bronze bell as both metallic objects shed with full force and the aftershock made the debris clear away from the surroundings.

    Both of them took a step back from the recoil and once again moved forward as they swung their weapons.

    A baseball bat and a blunt mace, the weapon which was a good choice for modern-day street thugs and another weapon that has some historical significance in some nations¡¯ history of modern earth. Both shed in apletely different world.

    As the fight got intense they managed tond some hits on each other.

    But soon realized that they couldn¡¯t win if they acted like this and both of them decided to change the way they fought almost at the same time and the first one to do that was actually the old man.

    As the bat and the mace shed he used the recoil and made a three hundred sixty degree spin and swung that mace at Sam.

    The Mace was about to hit Sam¡¯s arm, but he raised which made the old man smirk as now it would hit Sam¡¯s ribs.

    But as soon as the mace touched Sam, he felt stunned, because there was no recoil to him from the hit and before he knew it, Sam is moving along the same path as the mace freely as he if he was part of it. He negated most of the force of the hit by doing this and stayed there.

    Sam held the handle of the mace tightly as he pulled himself towards the old man and smashed the bat on his left ear.

    The old man fell down on one knee as he lost his bnce and groaned in pain. But he held the mace in his hands and wanted to stand up.

    Sam raised the bat to deal the blow, but he sensed something from the rear and swung the bat there, arge icence was destroyed by the bat and he saw the elders who were silent running towards him.

    Sam smiled and turned around swiftly as he swung the bat. It shed with the mace of the old man who already stood up and tried to take a shot at Sam from the rear.

    "This is going to be a lot of fun."

 Chapter 1015: All the sect heads

    Destruction is one of the things that can be addictive. At least it is more addictive than creation which is the opposite of this. And if a person gets addicted to destruction, it would lead them to seek thrills through it and finally find the best things to destroy to get the greatest of thrills and every person who enjoys destruction will finally end up doing one thing, destroying a fellow human.

    If a normal person kills a human, they might not be able to get out of that situation for a long time. But if a person who is addicted to destruction does that, he will be able to get over it in three days and will understand the thrill in it.

    As for why this came up, it is because Sam was in one of those phases where he enjoyed the destruction he brought upon the people at one point in his previous life.

    In his training phase, when he was eleven or twelve, when he finally came to terms that he wouldn¡¯t be able to get out of that hell hole and embraced that new life, he enjoyed it, he enjoyed disfiguring a man¡¯s face with his bare hands.

    He enjoyed crushing the skull of a man who is double his size.

    He enjoyed the screams as he yed the skin of his opponent to get the information out. What he can say, he didn¡¯t know that it would be this addictive and no one ever said not to enjoy it, as for what his conscience said? He was twelve what can it say?

    As for why it came up now, it is because currently Sam almost felt like he went back to those days as he mmed the baseball bat crudely at each and every elder that came at him. The head of the mace sect who is among the elders was spared as Sam let him take a look at what he is doing to the elders.

    The teeth flew aroundpletely covered in blood, people puked blood, every time hended a hit, he could feel the broken bones, the ruptured skulls, the shattered ribs, punctured organs, he could feel it and he couldn¡¯t help but be reminded of the time when he was training.

    It might be because of the weapon he used or because of the way he fought with no intent to kill but just to hurt or it might be because he deliberately made a mountain out of a molehill for a thing as insignificant as a chicken stew with the excuse of blowing his steam off, he felt like he became that twelve-year-old kid who just embraced the kill and hurting people as a mere activity to amuse himself.

    Within a half-an-hour, there are a bunch of people lying on the floor either unconscious or groaning in pain with half of the bones in their body broken.

    Sam halted as the mace sect head was the only man standing in midst of this bloodbath.

    He looked at the sky and thought to himself.

    He thought hepletely got rid of these emotions, but it seems like he just forcefully suppressed them.

    No these emotions, there are various feelings which he got ustomed to butter realized that they are not good things to be in his head and tried to erase, but it seems like he just suppressed them and the umtion of these things might be the reason for his insecurities.

    After all, insecurities stem from the thoughts that one cannot express to others.

    He sighed and thought to himself, he should eliminate these emotionspletely like excretion. He should get rid of those insecurities in one form or the other. He looked at the fallen guys and after confirming that no one is dead, he turned to the head of the sect and said.

    "I will give you the same chance. If you can call someone for the backup that could either take you out of here and bring me the chicken stew, I will let you go."

    These words resonated in the quiet neighborhood even though it is filled with a lot of people.

    The sect head immediately held themunication token and called for help.

    A few minutester, a bunch of elders and the sect heads of the other sects came andnded at the scene, they didn¡¯t take action thought.

    The four sect heads stood there and talked to the citizens as they looked at their lesser heads huddled together in fear.

    After getting the gist of it, the four of them fell into the discussion.

    They are three old men and one old woman.

    "So, what do you guys want to do?" The woman asked casually.

    "Of course, we cannot let someone walk over one of us like this."

    "I disagree, he seems powerful and the destruction he caused was controlled, he didn¡¯t kill anyone yet. He is a fearsome foe. It would be best if wepromise." Another old man said.

    "I agree withpromise."

    The old woman also said.

    Finally, except for one old man and the old woman, the remaining two wanted to fight and they rounded up their elders to go towards Sam.

    Sam picked the bat covered with blood and finished the ss of wine in his hands and moved towards them.

    "So, from the looks of it, you guys just want to take them out. I wish at least one of you will give me a bowl and chicken stew and be done with it."

    Sam said and suddenly he lunged forward with full speed and stuck one of the elders on his ear. When the elder was falling to the side, Sam halted in his tracks and hit him on the other side making him faint before holding him up with the bat.

    "You made the wrong decision." He spoke and continued with the bashing.

    The old man and the woman looked at Sam and gulped nervously.

    One of them looked at the chef in the restaurant and gestured him toe towards them. When Sam gave them a re though, they went there themselves and whispered.

    "How long would it take to make the stew?"

    "With the preparation timebined, approximately eight hours."

    "Eight hours?"

    "That is what it takes daily. But if it is just for one person, it would only be around four and a half hours as most of the preparation time would be reduced."

    "So, why don¡¯t you make one? We will pay you the price."

    "I cannot do that. I already ced all the eggs that were left for hatching in the hatching formation, the eggs are no longer suitable for making. We can only wait until tonight for the eggs to beid and make it."

    "Is there any way to get an egg at this time?"

    "My chickens cannot do it. Their biological clock was trained so that they wouldy eggs at night, if you want to get any, you can only go for the wild chickens in the forest, but it would be hard to find one."

    "Give us an approximate location, on where we can find one."

    "I don¡¯t want to."

    The two sect heads were stunned. All this while the chef gave all the answers calmly, but now he suddenly refused.

    "It is just how you guys ignored us. Because you don¡¯t want to get involved in the Mace sect¡¯s territory and antagonize them, you let the people suffer. The same reason you just helped the Mace sect hunt the people that escaped their territory and entered yours.

    For the same reason, I don¡¯t want to.

    I don¡¯t want to involve myself in a dispute caused by Mace sect members."

    The two heads didn¡¯t even know what to do.

    They were just lost in a daze as they remembered all the pleas they heard until now. The territory of the Mace sect ispletely run based on one simple thing. Tyranny. All the people here are ves and that is for theck of a better word to describe them.

    They don¡¯t have a free will of their own and they can only do what the sect tells them to. Disciples can rape women as they want, they can kill any person that angered them, this is amon urrence and one can say what the elders would do.

    But the rest of the sects ignored it, because, for them, the Mace sect is a necessary evil, they are the strongest realm in the surroundings, and the people of the Mace sect are an extra asset for them to keep that title in ce.

    It would be possible to fight without him, but with him, they don¡¯t have to fight at all, and now their attitude bit them in the back.

    No matter what they told and what they offered the chef didn¡¯t speak, he only has one thing to say.

    "I am used to the life of the ve and my son is going to get out of here with that guy, so there is nothing I have to lose. If you want to kill me, then you can kill me. I am not helping you. But do remember one thing. That guy wants to eat a bowl of stew and he is only leaving after he ate it. If I die, I wonder who will be making that stew to make him go from here."

 Chapter 1016: Departure

    The next day.

    The restaurant area is still covered with debris and the people didn¡¯t go anywhere. The injured people slowly became conscious, but they didn¡¯t dare make any rash moves.

    Sam didn¡¯t kill them for now, but that doesn¡¯t mean he wouldn¡¯t kill them at all. So, they just stayed put and remained silent.

    The two family heads who didn¡¯t participate in the whole fight stood there nervously as they waited for the stew to be prepared.

    Sam is sitting at the table in the middle of the broken restaurant. His hands are bloody and so is the baseball bat which is covered with blood as well.

    The whole area is silent and nobody dared to make a sound.

    Sam closed his eyes and rxed in the chair as he let the morning sun hit him.

    After waiting for a few hours, the chef finally came with a big bowl of stew. The bowl so big that it would hold at least five portions of chicken stew.

    Sam opened his eyes as soon as he smelled it, he cleaned his hands instantly as he dug in. The slurping sounds and the expressions of Sam reminded everyone of a little kid enjoying his food, but the bloody bat beside him reminded him of what he actually was.

    He swept the bowl clean and burped in ecstasy.

    He tapped his stomach in satisfaction as he stood up and picked up the bat before walking towards the street. He looked at the bat while he was walking thinking whether he should take it or not. After some thought, he just shot it at the ground making it stand in a hole that was created on the road.

    He looked at the assistant chef and said.

    "What are you standing there for? Let¡¯s get out of this shit hole."

    The assistant chef immediately ran into the kitchen to pick some things. Sam then turned towards the head chef and asked.

    "Are you sure you don¡¯t want toe out? I am a generous employer."

    The chef smiled and said.

    "I am sure you are. But I wish to die in this ce. I spent all the phases of my life in this realm and my wife also died here. I would like to finish myst phase here too. But if you can please take my crew away, they are good at what they do."

    Sam looked at the restaurant staff and thought for a moment and said.

    "If it is okay for them, but they wouldn¡¯t work with me directly. I have a restaurant business led by a great chef, I would these guys to him and he will take care of them. Is that alright?"

    "Anything is better than staying here." The chef said and looked at the crew who seemed reluctant.

    "All of you are fired this instant, even if you don¡¯t go with him you cannot stay here."

    The crew also started packing. Luckily for Sam, the crew is not actually big and can be taken away with the dimensional drifter.

    As the crew joined Sam, the Chef also walked towards and gave him a spatial ring and a beast pouch.

    "A small gift from me."

    Sam threw them in divine dimension and took out a crystal device.

    "Take this. If something happens to you, just record a message in this and it will reach me. I mighte a bitter, but I will definitelye here."

    He winked and left with the rest of the crew through the dimensional drifter.

    He dropped the whole crew in one of the realms he has a base on and left them with the restaurant staff. He kept the assistant chef with himself. His name is Nali.

    "So, the chef is your father, do you know the recipe for the chicken stew?"

    "No, that was actually a test for me. I need to figure it out on my own."

    "How would you be able to do it? You are now out of that realm."

    "Well, I don¡¯t know. But my father was adamant about me leaving there. So, I had no choice."

    "Good, then take a look at this."

    Sam passed the spatial ring that the chef gave him to Nali who looked through the contents, there are two scrolls. One of them is the recipe of the chicken stew and the other is the message from the chef.

    "This is the recipe of chicken stew. Please share it with my son. He was obsessed with this recipe. If I had shown him how to do it, he would have been addicted to the cooking process that he would be unable to leave this realm. The joy of cooking the stew itself will make him feel addicted. I know that because I am a victim of a simr scenario.

    That is why I just hid it from him. Now that he is out of here, share it with him and make him put an end to this obsession."

    "I don¡¯t know how addictive cooking a dish can be, but I can only assume it is too high, if he is that cautious, he also gave me a bunch of chickens and their eggs so that you can satisfy your craving for cooking."

    Nali didn¡¯t speak and just looked at the letter.

    Sam couldn¡¯t possibly understand what is going through the heads of father and son. And the very notion of cooking a dish being addictive is actuallypletely alien to him and taking this many measures to save someone from that kind of addiction is almost crazy. But he has no right to judge, so he is not going to.

    He just focused on picking the next realm and the restrictions he would need to ce on himself.

    This is getting a boring practice. Sam never thought that he would be this confused when choosing things, so he decided to make something.

    He made two pots. He created small notes with all the realms he wanted to enter and challenge the opponents and dropped in the first pot, in the second pot he dropped the notes of all the restrictions he wanted to ce on himself.

    There are a bunch of inscription marks on the pots. He ced his hands on both of them and injected some energy. Each pot let out one note.

    Now he got the realm and the restrictions that need to be ced on himself.

    When he saw them, he was stunned though.

    The restrictions on him are that he should only use fire element and that too only mage skills. He shouldn¡¯t use any warrior skills for attacking opponents and can only use them for dodging or traveling as for the realm, he has to go to the Tundra realm.

    The realm has a lot of inhabitables. All thes that are close to the stars are just some burning pieces of mass while thes that are habitable are all too far away from the stars and arepletely covered in ice.

    The winter on thests for a few years and summersts for a few months and the best summer they can have is that they can see the sun for six hours slightly.

    The stays in the dim light which makes it look like it was the time right before dawn.

    The cold is so bone-chilling in some ces that even some of the Astral ne cultivators would die.

    Such a ce is actually a test for fire elemental users. As much as fire elements can fight against the cold, when the cold is so overwhelming, the mes would diminish and seem insignificant.

    Sam needs to stay in a ce like that and fight the people who have simr cultivation as his. And he can only use fire elemental energy.

    This is going to be a bit problematic than he thought.

    But he can make preparations before he goes there.

    His feather coat will be enough for him to defend against the natural environment and even the attacks of frost from the fighters there.

    But his traveling chef would be in for some trouble if he just came like that.

    So, Sam took out of metal fabric in storage and started drawing inscriptions all over it after making it into a cloak.

    When he is drawing the final inscription, he took out the blood essences of some fire elemental beasts at the astral ne and mixed it with the ink, and drew it.

    The final inscription is a nodal inscription that joins the rest and it will make sure that every inscription is working.

    He gave the cloak to Nali.

    "Try it and see if it works."

    Nali did so and injected his spiritual energy. Before long he felt hot all over.

    "Boss, this is too warm. It would be good for a fire elemental user like me, but for others, they would be cooked."

    "Nah, the ce where you use it, this would be barely enough. Let¡¯s go we are going to the next location. Get ready to cook some cold meat."

 Chapter 1017: Ice Elves

    Sam and Nali appeared in the Tundra realm that very night.

    The ce is not actually the best of the ces to do business or any other development. Ifpared to the modern earth, this realm is the Antarctica of this whole world. Not in terms of location, but in terms of environment and atmosphere.

    People even surviving and living here is actually a surprise.

    But the main reason is that most people who live here are not humans, in fact, the human poption that is present doesn¡¯t even belong to this realm andes from the nearby realms which conduct some business here.

    For Sam, this realm is aplete wastnd that has no use for him. Except for the frost essences and some rare herbs that grow in this type of cold and some rare beasts, there was nothing much here. Even if it is present with many rare minerals, it is almost next to impossible to mine them out.

    Sam might be able to do it with his machines, but the investment and the long wait didn¡¯t feel like it is worth it, so he left this realm alone.

    But as soon as he entered, he believed that he can use this ce as the training ground for fire elemental mages.

    If he creates equipment that can keep them alive from the cold the surrounding resistance to the fire elemental energy will make them struggle and force them to control the energy more efficiently. But it is only for the Astral ne cultivators, even the consummate level cultivators of other species will die here.

    The only species that live here are Ice elves which is the banished elven n, they are also mutants of the elves just like the sirens from the mermen. They were banished. The other race is the ice elemental beings.

    They are purely made of ice and frost essence and they don¡¯t have any intelligence. They are more like beasts but more dangerous than them as their senses are keen and they can merge with the environment.

    The third race is a type of barbarian race called the Frost Barbarians.

    They have thicker skin than most barbarian races and they are the only barbarian race that has an elemental affinity with ice. But they cannot use any mage skills and can only use ice element to fight physically.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know which race is the strongest. All he has is the location of the nearest ce which has some civilization from the wormhole they took from the nearest realm.

    That is the headquarters of the ice elves.

    He decided to find a way to get in touch with the higher-ups of the ice elves and find his match there.

    But before he does that, he needs to find something to eat in the wild.

    He brought his chef with him, so it would be a waste to not find anything.

    His first target is the river that is near the city.

    The river is still flowing at such a cold temperature.

    The water is denser than normal as it is mixed withrge quantities of low-grade frost essence.

    Any fish or other creature that grew in here would be abundant with ice elements and would also taste nice.

    Sam looked at the river and asked Nali.

    "Would you be able to cook the creatures of this river? They are going to be very cold. Their blood might even freeze your fingers."

    "Don¡¯t worry boss. My cultivation technique itself focuses on cooking. And I am an Astral ne cultivator. I can handle all kinds of ingredients within Astral ne Initiation level."

    "That is great. Because there are many creatures in this river that I would like to taste and let¡¯s start with this."

    Sam lunged forward and jabbed his palm into the river and when he took it out, there is arge ice blue-colored fish in there.

    "This is the Frost Carp. It is not Astral ne and only Consummate level. But this would be a good estimation of what you can do with them. Cook something of your choice with it."

    "Boss, I can cook but are you sure you can digest. You are a fire element user aren¡¯t you?"

    Sam spread his fingers and all kinds of elemental energies he can use gathered up at the tips.

    "Did you see that? I can almost digest any elemental energy. Even if it is poisonous cook it up for me as long as it is delicious."

    Nali started cooking and he used some methane cylinders that could create a constant me to create a small area without snow and ice so that he could cook peacefully.

    While Sam waited for the food to be over, he kept a lookout on the river to find something else that might interest him to eat.

    But at this moment, someone arrived at the scene which made him alert.

    Sam jumped back and threw a fireball at Nali.

    Nali panicked, but the golden me didn¡¯t hit him, instead, it hit the flying ice arrow that was a few feet away from him.

    The ce where Sam stood also has an ice arrow.

    Sam frowned and looked around as golden mes enveloped his hands.

    He could feel the resistance from the cold environment, but his control over elemental energy is impable and he can ovee that resistance with minimum effort.

    He got ready to fight and even his feathered coat started turning golden and the surrounding ice and snow vaporized in an instant.

    As he was about to make a move, three people came out of the hiding,

    The Ice elves.

    They are all Astral ne Initiation cultivators and they all have their hands raised in the air.

    "Stop. We are the guards of Elven city. We have no ill intentions."

    "The arrows beg to differ," Sam replied with a smirk.

    "That was supposed to be a warning. It is illegal to fish in the river without permission and the arrows are part of the warning procedure. We do not know sir is that powerful, otherwise we would have revealed ourselves."

    Sam was surprised.

    "Stupid localws again."

    Sam muttered to himself and continued.

    "I don¡¯t know about the permission thing, what should we do now."

    "Generally, you should be paying a fee for fishing here and you need to pay a fine if you don¡¯t have permission."

    Sam threw a spatial ring and asked.

    "Is this enough?"

    The guard checked the contents and was stunned.

    He became speechless.

    "If there is extra, would it buy me some alone time here? I would like to fish with no one here to disturb me."

    "Of course."

    Sam didn¡¯t know why the guards are so flustered because he doesn¡¯t know the scarcity of spirit stones here.

    The most they could get are ice elemental spirit stones and even they are scarce as they cannot mine themfortably. There are too many obstacles and he mindlessly gave a few million normal spirit stones.

    The guards stayed a few feet away and guarded the river, while Sam just fished as he liked. He caught a bunch of carp and some krill that are growing there and ced them in an ice-coldke within the divine dimension made of the water from the same river.

    The elves are once again stunned by Sam¡¯s fishing. Sam has energy vision, so he can identify the flow of the fish within the river full of frost energy and wouldn¡¯t be limited to the normal senses, so he can catch them easily.

    Soon, the cooking was done.

    "Boss, the fish meat is too stiff, so I ground it and made them into fish balls after some treatment. The blood has some good frost essence and it is nowhere like normal fish blood. I made it into soup. Try it."

    Sam drank the soup and ced a fishball into his mouth.

    At first, it just tasted warm in his mouth, but soon the ice elemental energy exploded in his mouth and as he swallowed he felt the cold sensation expanding all over his body.

    It is a great dish.

    "That is great. You are indeed a good chef. "

    He then turned to the guards who are drooling and said.

    "We are actually travelers roaming realm after realm. I would like to know if there are any restrictions for hunting in the wild here."

    The guards who are so focused on the aroma of the fish soup were stunned for a second and said.

    "Sir, I am sorry to say that there are a lot of restrictions. The travelers are only allowed to fish on their own. As for other types of hunting, it is not permissible to do so within the city limits.

    Even the citizens cannot do that and only designated hunters for certain regions can go and hunt there.

    If any traveler or foreigners want to hunt in those regions, they must seek permission from the city management and be assigned to one of the hunter teams to go there.

    For your cultivation level, there is only one hunter team that you could join and there is only one ce where you can hunt.

    If you allow me, I will take you to the administration toplete the procedures."

 Chapter 1018: Wager

    Sam is currently in the city along with Nali and the Ice elf guards.

    They are walking through the streets as Sam looked at the stone houses which arepletely covered with snow and even a thinyer of ice.

    Even the street itself looked like it is a sculpture of ice.

    After roaming around for a while, Sam found a spot on the marketce and said.

    "I need this spot to set up a shop. What should I do?"

    "Shop? What would you be selling Sir?"

    "Food. My chef will sell his food here. I only need it for a day or two." Sam replied.

    "It is not too difficult sir. There are many travelers thate for business here. In fact, we have many beneficial policies for foreign businessmen."

    "Okay, please direct me to the relevant authorities, I would finish the procedures."

    He was then led to the authorities and Sam finished the procedure as fast as he could.

    "Now, I would like to get permission for fishing once again."

    "Fishing? I thought you wanted to go hunting."

    "Not anymore. I would like a fish a bit more."

    "Sure."

    He finished those procedures too and then finally made Nali work on setting up a simple stall and left to fish after a few hours, he can with a spatial ring full of fish and other creatures.

    "You have full freedom on what you want to cook with them. Save a portion of every recipe for me and then sell the food to the locals. But do not ept spirit stones as payment. Ask them to barter with some other local food or game from hunting. One portion for one portion."

    Nali was surprised and so were the guards.

    "But boss, wouldn¡¯t we make a loss?" Nali asked.

    "No need. I don¡¯t really care. After all, I am on a vacation, not a business trip. This trip is all about my pleasure. Not business. So just focus on getting as many ingredients as you can. If they can be used to cooking, just take it.

    If anyone asks for recipes, it is your wish to sell them. But I highly doubt any of the ice elves here can cook with their ice element."

    He then turned towards the guard and said.

    "I would like to meet someone with high status in the government administration. Would that be possible?"

    "ording to our customs, someone of your cultivation will greet you. You can meet with one of the elders here."

    "Just give me directions, you don¡¯t have to take me everywhere. You have the guard duty I suppose."

    "No need to worry sir. It is my duty to assist the foreigners that to people of your stature."

    "Your wish then."

    Sam was then escorted to an Elder¡¯s office where Sam met with a woman who has very distinctive features.

    Her hair is unbelievably long and thick and anyone could guess that by therge bun she has on her head.

    Since he came here for the past five minutes, she didn¡¯t do anything but sizing Sam up. She didn¡¯t speak, didn¡¯t ignore, just sized him up.

    After five minutes are up she finally spoke.

    "What can I do for you?"

    "I would like a sparring match with ice elves. A person with the same cultivation level as me would do."

    "You have that many elements, you are practically a multiple elemental creature, isn¡¯t one person going to be too easy for you?"

    Sam¡¯s expression immediately changed and a coldness appeared in his eyes along with faint killing intent.

    The elder flinched and said with a smile.

    "Don¡¯t get the wrong idea. It is just I am too sensitive to elements and I can feel all the elemental energies of your body from this close. It is too hard to ignore and it is indeed not fair."

    Sam was still suspicious, but he still said.

    "I am only using fire element in this spar. So, you don¡¯t have to worry about that."

    "Actually it is the courtesy of our ice elves to amodate our foreign friends. But a sparring match with you... Before we proceed can you say something about your background?"

    "Why?"

    "I mean, it would be best to have a conversation over a meal and build up our ties before we go into the sparring and what not?"

    "Don¡¯t beat around the bush and just cut to the chase"

    "Well, if you say so."

    The woman took a deep breath and continued.

    "We wouldn¡¯t do the sparring for free. You would need to pay for it."

    "You could have just said so. How much?"

    "Ten million Spirit stones?"

    "Sure. Please bring your strongest Initial stage cultivator of Astral ne Pre-transcendence. I don¡¯t want to waste my time on easy fights."

    "Of course. Would you be paying now?"

    She asked with an overexcited smile.

    Sam just gave her the money and left. By now, money is just a number to him anyways. The ie from the whole organization is booming and as an owner of that, his personal share and profit is enormous, to say the least.

    He doesn¡¯t have to think to spend a few billion on a whim.

    "You can wait in the Imperial Training hall. I will bring your opponent there."

    Sam was once again escorted by the guard.

    The elder immediately ran towards the Head of the Ice Elves. The Queen of Ice elves.

    The Queen and the elder have many simrities, including that unnaturally long hair.

    The elder immediately narrated the whole story and the queen replied.

    "Some paid to us in normal spirit stones? Is he stupid or does he really not know."

    The queen replied in surprise.

    "No, I think it is more like he doesn¡¯t care at all. He seems to be filthy rich. Our younger generation is currently in desperate need of these spirit stones, but all our channels are costing us enormous prices which we couldn¡¯t bear in our current situation.

    He is the only one who is ignorant enough to pay us like this at this moment."

    "Does he have interest in anything that is avable here? We can try to conduct some trade." The queen said.

    "No, I don¡¯t think so. He is even giving away the fish from the northern cier just for the exchange of food items. He doesn¡¯t care about the value and from what the guards heard, he is here on a vacation."

    "Which idiot spars in a vacation? And which idiotes to this godforsaken ce for vacation?"

    The queen muttered and after some time both of them looked at each other with the same weird smirk on their face.

    "Let¡¯s go. It seems like somemb is willing to be ughtered." The queen said calmly and walked out.

    "But what if the people behind him get angry?"

    "We will just give a bunch of our resources as a gift with approximately of an equal value at the end. So, they wouldn¡¯t have a reason to."

    As the elder went into deep thought, the queen.

    "My dear little sister, think of all the young geniuses we have now. All that iscking to use their talent is a proper source of spiritual energy. Don¡¯t you think this is the best chance? We might be cheating him, but we are not making him suffer a severe loss. We are exchanging something for it, right? Please harden yourself."

    Sam doesn¡¯t know that these people are trying to scam him, he just waited in the training hall as he observed the atmosphere.

    Soon, the queen, the elder, and some other ice elves came.

    The Queen is ate-stage Pre-transcendent cultivator of Astral ne and the elder he met earlier is a middle stage one. Even though he was told that he would meet someone of his own level, he has yet to do so, and finally, the candidates that are behind the queen and the elder are someone of that level.

    "Hello, I am the queen of the Ice elves, I heard you want to spar with one of our strongest opponents."

    "Not one the strongest, it would be better if it is the strongest of my level."

    "Well, the problem is, the four of them behind me think they are the strongest and they don¡¯t want to fight normally. They want to wager."

    "But I already paid the fee for a sparring match and there was no mention of this at that time."

    "Well, how about this. You can ept their wager and we will give your fees back."

    "Fine by me, but are you sure they are the strongest? No offense they don¡¯t seem like much."

    The four elves instantly became enraged.

    "Then if you want, you can fight multiple opponents." The elder chimed in.

    "That is not a bad idea. So, what is the wager if I want to fight all four?"

    As the four elves are about to explode in anger, the queen silenced them with a nce and said.

    "Hundred million each. Four hundred million in total. If the elves win, you have to pay that. All in neutral spirit stones. If we can¡¯t we will give something of equal worth. How about that?"

    Sam raised an eyebrow at the queen¡¯s eager smile and from the expressions of the elves and the awkward expression from the elder.

    He felt something is fishy.

    The queen is too eager for the bet and the elves in the rear are too irritated to be seen as interested in this and the elder is clearly feeling guilty about something.

    He caught on to the expressions since the start but decided to ignore them. But when the massive bet was ced, he understood. They are trying to fleece him.

    The same thing happened in the previous ce. But they wanted to con him in a different way. Sam felt like he was being treated like an idiot.

    The ten million fees is already suspicious enough on top of the guards¡¯ weird behavior around foreigners. Sam would really be an idiot if he didn¡¯t see these hints. But since he decided to ignore them to not spoil his own vacation mood, they are treating him like an extreme idiot. Since they want to y, he would y.

    "I don¡¯t do small wagers like that."

    "Two hundred and fifty million each. One billion. Are you down?"

    The room instantly turned eerily silent and serene all that remained of the emotions are the shock of six faces and the smirk on Sam¡¯s face.

 Chapter 1019: Fight

    Sam is currently standing in the center of the training hall with the four ice elves surrounding him. The queen and the elder are standing far away with nervous expressions.

    They agreed to Sam¡¯s bet. Because they got greedy.

    Due to the unfavorable conditions of the, they couldn¡¯t mine the stones as they want. Even the ice elves who have high ice elemental affinity amongst the ice elemental creatures couldn¡¯t sustain the atmosphere and the environmental changes in this realm.

    The basic resource which is the spirit stone cannot be found here easily. The very small quantity of the spirit stones they have circting in the market are ice elemental spirit stones and even they are not exactly sufficient for their own use much less giving them to others.

    As for the foreign trades, the realms that are connected to the Tundra realm are very few and the races that connected to this realm and managed to establish a trade decided to take full advantage of the realm.

    Nobody wants toe here voluntarily and the creatures here cannot find a more suitable ce than this, in the surroundings to move their race. If any of them came out as therge group, they might even be caught and used as ves. After all, they are all mutants. This realm is their only way topulsorily ensure their survival even if they cannot develop. It is hard for civilization to not think of development and not strive for it.

    They need spirit stones for that. As much as they can find the resources such as frost essence easily in this ce along with other things that could aid the cultivation, not having spirit stones is still a disadvantage. But the trade rtions they have only have one goal, exploit the creatures with exorbitant prices and get everything for cheap from them.

    And as soon as they saw someone as easygoing as Sam who didn¡¯t care about his money, they became a bit greedy and reached more than they should have. Now they are nervous that by any chance if Sam wins, they would be in trouble.

    Sam activated fire elemental fusion instantly. Since the environment is against him, it is better to go all out, if he just yed around for some time and got injured, since he decided not to use other elements, he would be paying some price.

    Seeing that Sam used the fusion from the ice elves also have no reason for holding back.

    They all stomped on the floor and ice walls appeared in front of them.

    Clear ice walls that looked like ss created a cage around Sam.

    He felt like he was locked inside a mirror cage as he could see the four elves but on sixteen walls. He was suddenly reminded of the anime back on the earth. Naruto. The protagonist was also surrounded by such a deceptive mirror cage, but the opponent was only one person.

    Sam became vignt and used energy vision to take a look. To his surprise, he couldn¡¯t find the real ice elves in the images, and in that moment, the ice arrows starteding towards him.

    Sam created a wall of fire around him which shed with the arrows and melted them down.

    He kept on increasing the heat and it is clearly visible that his immediate surroundings arepletely free of frost and ice.

    "You are good. Now let us get serious, shall we? We would like to finish this in a single attack."

    A voice resounded in the cage and Sam could feel the cold increasing within the boundary.

    The firewall he created around himself started dimming down and Sam kept on injecting the energy to burn fiercely, but it was to no avail.

    The insides of the cage turned into a blizzard and Sam could feel the small ice fragments that are hitting him.

    He stood his ground and tried to vaporize everything that came at him. But the blizzard kept on increasing in both the turbulence and density.

    Soon the small ice pieces started turning sharp as they moved along.

    Sam understood that it would be hard to resist something like this with sheer energy and gathered all of it to create a dense and smaller shield around him which gave him better protection, he abandoned the thoughts of attacking for a moment and decided to stay in a defensive position.

    The sharp and thin ice pieces suddenly halted in mid-air and all turned towards Sam.

    All the images in the mirror started aiming their arrows at Sam as the four-voice were heard simultaneously.

    "Myriad Arrow-Ice Coffin."

    As they all let go of the string, the arrows shot towards Sam from the mirror, and before Sam could react, all the arrows shot forward.

    They didn¡¯t necessarily aim at him, they even hit the ground surrounding him.

    But everywhere they hit, they dispersed into some ice particles and created a lump of ice in that spot.

    The ice is so transparent and full of ice elemental energy so dense that it almost resembled frozen frost essence.

    As the myriad of arrows and sharp ice spikesnded around and on Sam, they started creating ice all over him and within an instant, he waspletely covered in ice.

    The four elves undid the ice wall cage and stood around therge block of ice in which Sam is currently frozen in his fire elemental fusion form.

    "If he only he doesn¡¯t have that background, I would have just let him be like that for a few weeks and save themter. He would know not to underestimate ice elves."

    One of the four-spoke as he tapped therge block of ice which is in the shape of an octagonal prism with a golden wisp of me frozen inside.

    But as soon as they touched the prism, they felt that something is wrong with that and when he closed in to take a look, he could see the golden me in the middle spinning rapidly.

    The spinning is anti-clockwise and as it moved upwards and another stream of mes is spinning clockwise as it moved downwards.

    Before he knew it he could see the center turning into a pool of water and then vapor which tried to escape the cold ice prism.

    As the golden me spread, the four elves looked astonished and moved to their initial positions as they rebuilt the ice wall cage.

    But by then, the prism is already done for and Sam was released. The two streams of fire are moving more and more as they started attacking the ice wall cage which started melting slowly. The arrows of the four elves couldn¡¯t even go past those golden mes and the ice elves were pushed back.

    Sam appeared in the middle of the firestorm which soon enveloped the whole training hall and even the Queen and the elder was stunned.

    They had to use their energies to block themselves from the heatwaveing from the mes.

    Sam manipted the mes as it took the form of a bunch ofrge moving serpents and started attacking the four elves.

    The four elves whose defensive measures seemed futile and the energies not sufficient to create anotherrge-scale attack found some sce in group attacks and they moved towards each other and four of them stood together.

    But what they don¡¯t know is Sam made them feel like their group attacks are worthwhile and are working on him.

    In actual fact, he just wants them to be grouped together so that he can finish them off in one proper blow.

    The ming serpents suddenly stopped moving and the next instant rapidly moved backward. The whole training hall which is surrounded by the golden glow of the mes suddenly became empty. Except for the molten marks on the pirs and walls, there is no sign of the mes¡¯ presence there. Of course, Sam¡¯s presence should be considered too.

    Sam inhaled deeply and at this moment, his lungs expanded to maximum. The elves knew that shit hit the fan, so they immediately joined hands and created arge Ice bow as they poured all the energy which exhausted their tankspletely into one arrow. Two elves carried the bow horizontally as they knelt on the floor, one elf aligned the arrow and assisted the shooter. Thest one pulled the string to his maximum effort.

    The ice energy was concentrated at the tip of the arrow as they released it.

    It rampaged throughout the way, destroying the training floor, and shot towards Sam.

    Sam also released the mes from his lungs through his mouth. It took the form of the golden sun crow followed by arge streak of mes and met the arrow in the middle.

    But the sh turned out to be futile as the arrow became nothing but a vapor and the crow led the mes towards the elves.

    The elves felt like they were being sucked into despair as they saw the mese towards him.

    Just when they lost all hope of survival, the Queen and the Elder made a move and stood in front of them creating arge ice shield that diverted the direction of mes.

    The golden mes shot through the walls of the training hall and destroyed the whole front side of the building alerting all the residents of the estate and even the city.

    Sam withdrew his fusion and stood there as he sighed.

    "I am sorry, I guess I went overboard."

    Queen and the elder felt their hands tremble a bit. At least the Queen was just shocked by the power, but the Elder knew she wouldn¡¯t be able to take it.

    She could feel what would have happened if she defended the attack alone and Sam¡¯s nonchnt apology at the end as if it was normal made her want to get out of the scene right away and hole up in a dark room.

 Chapter 1020: Shadow Demons

    Sam is currently outside the city on a hunting ground. The hunting ground was reserved for the strongest people among the ice elves.

    After the wager is over, there is no way the ice elves are going to pay up.

    Sam would be surprised if they did actually pay up with that ridiculous bet. He might not have a keen understanding of the situation of the Ice Elves.

    But he knew they have a scarcity of resources. If a billion spirit stones worth resources are lost, particrly when the value of spirit stone in this realm is on a whole new level, they would be losing a lot.

    So, the Queen and the Elder instantly confessed everything and begged Sam while exining their situation in detail.

    After thinking about it, he cut a deal with them.

    He would bring his team here to create a space gate. Every year, they would conduct an exchange. Some fire elemental users from Sam¡¯s side woulde here to train and the Ice elves from this side will go there to train.

    Along with that, there would be a secret trade route in which the ice elves can sell their goods at reasonable prices to Sam in exchange for the spirit stones.

    Sam could also use this to improve the skills of the research department and decided to give them the task ofing up with a way to mine in these extreme conditions.

    So, he gained ess to the hunting ground and caught arge ice bear that was being cooked by Nali.

    Meanwhile, back at the Emerald Realm.

    The space in which the bat was mmed into the ground in the street was not touched by anyone. The bat is still standing on that spot.

    And one of the earth element users finally came forward and used his energy to raised the spot as a tform and repaired the surroundings a bit.

    The chef looked at the tform which the bat standing on it and smiled.

    Sam might not have intended to do this, but he saved their lives. He looked towards the sky and smiled.

    In the same way, back at the Ice Elven city. The leader of the four elves that fought with Sam, recovered a bit as he stood in therge destroyed training hall.

    Except for the part behind Sam, the rest of the training hall is pretty much destroyed.

    He stood there on the spot where Sam stood. The start of the destruction.

    He created arge ice block and started sculpting it with his arrow.

    The Elder came to him as she saw the sculpture.

    It is of Sam surrounded by the ming serpents.

    "Why are you doing this?"

    "Reminder. If a fire element user can standing in middle of this ice hell and defeat four ice elves. Then either the user is too strong or the four elves are too weak and there is a high possibility that both of them are true.

    If it is, we cannot make the user weak, so we have to make the elves stronger. Since we lost connection to the rest of the world and content with the achievements we have here, we might have be stagnant.

    This would serve as reminder.

    The one man who destroyed the elven pride that was not even scratched when the rest of the elves banished us. I never felt so ashamed and I never felt so refreshed either."

    ...

    Sam made a trip to the deste and brought the space gate team back. The team was back to focusing on research as their work reduced. So, they are avable.

    After arranging them here, he went on his own way as soon as he finished all the delicacies here.

    The next restrictions are simple. He has to use a scythe and no other weapons or elements. The next realm he is visiting belongs to some lower-level shadow demons.

    The shadow demons are born with shadow elemental energy, but their constitution is weak and impure as they result in so much crossbreeding between the demonic races.

    They are good at carrying assassinations, but their cultivation limit is at most Astral ne Pre-transcendence. None of the Shadow demons managed to cross the Middle-stage of Astral ne Pre-transcendence and after staying in that level for a while and ruling their world, most of them would go to work under another demon race until they died in exchange for resources.

    This is simr to how gods take the strongest bunch of races to their army and give them some resources in exchange.

    After reaching that realm, Sam roamed around for two days in the wild to find the food first.

    Nali felt like he was in heaven as he felt the sun walking behind Sam.

    Sammunicated with different beasts that exchanged information for their lives and finally managed to find his primary target.

    A Shadow eagle.

    The shadow demons are mostly active at night and there is another species that is also as active.

    The shadow eagle which has shadow elemental energy and rules the sky at night is Sam¡¯s next target for eating.

    But catching it was next to impossible. The first problem is the height.

    Sam cannot use the harbinger or the beasts while he is going on these journeys. That is one of the conditions he has to follow unless he faced life and death situations which is almost impossible considering the ces he is visiting.

    So, he nned something else.

    He went to the highest and steepest cliff in the region and waited there.

    The Shadow Eagle always stands there looking down at thend that was under its control.

    Sam hid there and that night the shadow eagle stood there just like every other day.

    He lunged out as he swung the scythe which created arge crescent in the night sky.

    But the shadow eagle was vignt and used its shadow form as it moved into the sky. The crescent sh missed the bird. Sam didn¡¯t stop though, as the shadow eagle looked at Sam with ring eyes while hovering, Sam leaped towards it and shed the neck with its scythe.

    The bird was caught off guard as it didn¡¯t think, Sam who cannot fly would be stupid enough toe to jump off the cliff just to kill the bird.

    Sam caught hold of the bird and fell down, but in the middle of the descent, he stabbed the lower end of the staff of the scythe into the cliff wall as he tried to slow down the fall.

    But normal stabbing didn¡¯t do anything, so he has to inject the spiritual energy and put in a lot more force.

    This caused the staff to go deep enough to create resistance as it destroyed the cliff wall as they moved downwards.

    But the downside is, the eye-catching crescent shes in the sky and the loud and jarring descent beside the cliff wall, attracted the shadow demons that are active in night times.

    All of them ran towards the cliff and by the time they reached there, Sam is standing on the ground with the scythe over his shoulders. Nali started removing the feathers off of the bird to start cooking. But more than that what made the shadow demons stand in a daze is the long clean vertical cleave that appeared on the cliff wall because of Sam¡¯s descent using the scythe.

    The shadow demons are the guards in charge of patrolling.

    They don¡¯t know how to proceed as they understood Sam¡¯s strength might be beyond them.

    Sam who noticed them said.

    "Are you the guards?"

    They nodded hesitantly.

    "Wait for a while, I wille with you after I finish my meal."

    And the guards did exactly that while they contacted their supervisor.

    Soon the supervisor of the guards came and he also had to wait.

    Sam finished the meal and both him and Nali entered the city along with guards.

    He was taken to one of the elders of the shadow demons directly and said.

    "So, who are you, and why are you here?"

    "My name is Sam and I am here to spar with your strongest fighter in the same realm as me. I don¡¯t mind someone in the Middle stage of Pre-transcendence too."

    The elder was surprised, but not shocked.

    "Then what is themotion at the cliff."

    "Oh, I was hunting the shadow eagle. As you know it is hard to catch, so I had to jump off the cliff and themotion is due to me trying to reduce the force of the fall."

    "Why should we spar with you? What is in it for us?"

    "What do you want?"

    "What can you offer?"

    "A wager? A two hundred million spirit stone wager. Is that enough of an attraction for your fighters?"

    "It is not a small number. But it is not toorge either."

    "Five hundred million, then."

    "What is your background? Which organization do you belong to?"

    "You might not have heard of it, it is called the dusk. Are you in for the wager?"

    "Yes."

    "Thanks, that saved a lot of trouble for me."

 Chapter 1021: Battle with Shadow

    Sam is standing in arge arena and a shadow demonpletely dressed in ck.

    He even had his face covered. As he is an assassin by nature and it is indeed a good choice.

    Sam held the scythe over his shoulder as he took a deep breath and waited for the other party to make the first move.

    The scythe is not exactly a conventional weapon as it has many limitations attached to it. It is not as versatile as other staff weapons as the de is too big to allow the rest of the staff to move as freely.

    Due to the weight of the de, it cannot be wielded as simply as the spear or even a halberd.

    It needs a lot more effort than other staff weapons and due to its requirement ofrge movements, it is easier to dodge than the other weapons.

    Particrly when the opponent is a shadow demon who can move along the shadows as he liked.

    The opponent didn¡¯t show any weapons and everything seemed to be hidden away. Sam was vignt and when having such an inflexible weapon in his hands, it is better for him to show some restraint and not just barge in on the opponent.

    The shadow demon waited patiently for a good while and made his first move.

    He threw a knife towards Sam and it ispletely covered in shadow energy.

    s

    Sam swung the scythe and hit the knife to the side.

    By now the opponent is already halfway through the stage and is still zooming towards Sam who is ready to defend, but to Sam¡¯s surprise, the demon turned into a ck puff of smoke and disappeared from that spot, and reappeared in the shadow of the knife that was hit by Sam.

    From that spot, the shadow demon threw two knives at Sam.

    Sam once again swung the scythe and made the knives fly away by instinct and got ready to defend against the demon who is running towards him.

    The demon once again used the shadow transverse to appear at the shadows of one of the knives and this time, he threw two knives and two throwing stars. The knives came straight towards him, but the throwing stars or simply shuriken took arge curve in the air as they moved towards him.

    While is Sam is busy dealing with the weapons flying towards him, the demon is closing the distance.

    This time Sam used the scythe to nail down the knives instead of hitting them away.

    Theynded right beside him, but as he struck down one of the shurikens which is taking a longer routeing towards him with a condensed energy sh of the scythe, the demon moved to the second shuriken which is still out of range of Sam¡¯s attacks.

    He caught the shuriken and threw it towards Sam along with two more knives and shuriken.

    The attacks kept on repeating and the demon moved more and more, the number of weapons he is throwing is also increasing by a lot.

    The position of the demon is also changing with every throw and as the weapons are increasing the options for the demon to move are also increasing and for every transfer, he is making, he is getting closer to Sam.

    The audience is gathering around the stage and is cheering the demon with extreme excitement. It seems like this guy is extremely popr within the city and this ce might be the one ce who straight out sent the strongest person without any problems.

    Even though the difficultly increased as time passed, Sam also started getting ustomed to the situation and he became morefortable in using the scythe as he spun it around to deflect the projectilesing at him.

    Soon the demon is moving within a seven and a half feet radius around Sam and if Sam moved from his spot, the demon is also moving rtively to maintain the seven and a half feet radius as he threw the weapons and also made sure that he is outside the range of the scythe.

    Soon the intensity of the battle increased as Sam has to be on constant guard with the weapons and couldn¡¯t find a chance to hit the opponent and thennded the first hit on him. The shuriken flew past his cheek leaving a small cut.

    The cut isced with shadow elemental energy trying to corrode the skin. Even if Sam couldn¡¯t use the shadow energy to neutralize it, due to the presence of elemental affinity, he can endure it better than the rest.

    But he understood that it is about time that he changed the style of fighting. The scythe has extremely long movements that are not fast enough to stop the projectiles when they are thrown from such a short-range.

    He took a deep breath and got an idea.

    He spun the staff and mmed the tail end of the staff into the floor making the floor tiles crack.

    He covered his body with spiritual energy as he dodged most of the weapons but let the rest cut him up as he attacked the demon.

    But the demon is moving faster, but every time he dodged, the hitnded on the stage creating craters and making the floor turn into rubble.

    Within a few seconds, the floor around Sam within the range of the scythe turned to rubble.

    As the demon reached his new position and threw a bunch of weapons at Sam, Sam didn¡¯t defend himself with the scythe, instead, he channeled the energy into the de of the scythe and used it to sweep the rubble off the floor.

    The glowing de swept the floor and the rubble flew upwards with extreme force hitting the projectile weaponsing at him.

    And the demon who was already in the middle of his shadow transfer didn¡¯t manage to lock the location of the shadows as they shifted because of the rubble and suffered a minor bacsh and came back to the original position.

    He was stunned for a second and Sam is ready with his scythe swinging at his torso.

    When he felt the de near him, he is sure that he would bepletely cleaved into two if he got hit. He endured the pain of bacsh and used all his strength to move back.

    The scythe made a keening sound as it cut through the wind and shed at his chest.

    The cut was smooth and deep.

    The opponent started panting as he tried to control the bleeding.

    Sam stood there on the spot while holding the scythe behind his back as he let the dust to settle a bit.

    The demon once again tried to use the same technique as before to see how ustomed Sam is to it and this time, Sam held the scythe by the extreme tail end of the staff and channeled his energy as he spun on the spot.

    The glowing crescent sh, not just swept the rubble, it is propagated further as it sliced the tiledyer off of the floor next to it.

    The demon had to once again dodge that crescent sh and before he could get the bnce, Sam is already near him with the scythe this time aimed at his throat.

    This time, he cannot dodge like the previous time as he is in mid-air, so he used his hand to block it with his arm guard.

    But the scythe cut through the arm like it was butter and the blood spilled all over the ce including Sam.

    The demon managed to find his foot and retreated a bit as he looked at the fist that was separated from his arm at the wrist.

    The cut was so smooth that it took a second for him to realize the pain.

    The elder who arranged the fight wanted to stop it, but the opponent gestured him not to move as he channeled all the shadow energy to the chest and arge dark energy orb surrounded him.

    Sam made his move as he decided to cut the orb in half and stop the process in middle, but unfortunately, as the scythended on the orb, it was deflected.

    He activated energy vision, but he couldn¡¯t see anything past the orb.

    He channeled his energy to the one point on the edge of the scythe and started attacking a single point on the orb.

    The orb slowly started showing some cracks, but all of a sudden multiple shadows shot out of the orb and surrounded Sam.

    They all looked identical to the opponent and the ce where the arm was cut off was covered with a dark ck cloth.

    The blood is not dripping at any of them.

    Sam¡¯s initial reaction was as usual use the energy vision, but there was no use this time. All the clones looked real in terms of energy.

    All the images of the opponent started throwing the shuriken and knives and Sam once again focused on dodging and blocking, the only good thing is the opponent kept a lot more distance than normal.

    Sam felt a bit frustrated. He decided to attack one image after another to finish them off, but as soon as he moved to one, the rest of the images that were on the opposite side and closing in to attack him in the back.

    He couldn¡¯t understand how the opponent has this much energy left in him, but he has to find a way, and while thinking he kept on deflecting all the attacks made on him.

    He couldn¡¯t see the blood drip to identify the real body, but as he thought of the blood his eyes brightened.

    Sam focused all his energy on his nose as he closed his eyes, he ced all his concentration on the nose as hepletely ignored the rest of the senses and even let the projectiles attack him a bit.

    After three seconds, he lunged forward towards one of the images.

    The three images opposite to the one he targeted moved towards him and started attacking from the rear.

    But this time, Sam didn¡¯t stop to defend and just moved forward as he deflected the attacks from the front.

    Right before he was about to cut the image off, he kicked the ground turned around and shed the middle image that wasing at him.

    The shadow demon was stunned and widened his eyes in disbelief.

    s

    Sam¡¯s rear is stabbed with a bunch of projectile weapons, but all of them didn¡¯t go past the feather coat by much, in fact, they are barely stuck in the fabric gaps. The scythe stopped right before it sliced the throat.

    The edge of the de slightly cut the skin on the throat without going too deep.

    The shadow demon gave out a heavy sigh as the rest of the images disappeared and a faint voice was heard on the stage.

    "I lost."

    The crowd became silent as their hero lost in the match which they are so sure that he would win.

 Chapter 1022: Spiritual Infancy [Bonus Chapter]

    The fight was over, Sam left Nali to settle the wager and left the city instantly. He didn¡¯t even bother to take out of the shuriken and knives on his back. Because, even though he could feel them on his back, they didn¡¯t go into his skin.

    They were blocked within the fabric mesh of the feather coat.

    Sam ran into the forest and after making sure that none is there, he took out a wooden mannequin, he usually made clothes on and put his feather coat on it.

    He looked at the back of the coat where the shuriken and knives are still stuck.

    He injected fire elemental energy into the coat and it started glowing with golden light. He noticed that even if he injected the energy normally, it is flowing differently within the coat, most of it is going towards des that were stuck in. The fabric mesh loosened there making the des fall down.

    All of this happened without Sam¡¯s help. He was surprised and closed his eyes to try and form a mental connection with the coat but he couldn¡¯t find any spirit in it, at least he couldn¡¯t contact it.

    After some thought, he took out the shadow sword and asked.

    "I think the coat developed a spirit, but I cannot connect with it? What should I do?"

    [How would I know you brat? But from the looks of it, there is indeed a spirit, you are just ipetent. Ever thought in that angle?]

    Sam doesn¡¯t know why the shadow sword is cranky but he didn¡¯t bother and threw it inside, before taking out the Lightning de. The saber which he got from Arman but rarely used.

    s

    "Do you understand what the current situation is? Since you are sent to help Arman, you might have an idea."

    The Saber Examined the coat and said.

    [The spirit has formed, but it is in the stage of infancy. This happens sometimes in the natural spirit formation. When the spirit is formed naturally in the early stages of its formation, it would understand a few things naturally and one of them which is also the main factor for the type of spirit formed is the nature of the job of the weapon it is staying in.

    Since the weapon is essentially the body of the spirit, it tries to understand its purpose properly to act that way.

    This problem wouldn¡¯t happen in the swords and other normal weapons as the purpose is easy to understand. In fact, if this is a normal armor, it wouldn¡¯t have a problem. But since it in this form, it is being confused a bit.]

    "So, what should I do to make it form properly?"

    [You just need to fight and find a way for the coat to absorb as much as external damage. Since it is based on fire elemental objects, fight a fire elemental creature and let the coat take heat. That would simte and it would cross this confusion state and slowly generate the spirit.

    If all goes well and there is enough simtion, you would be able to make a faint connection instantly and within a month the spirit would be formed.]

    "Thanks."

    He threw the de back in the divine dimension and thought of what to do next.

    If what Saber said is correct, then he doesn¡¯t have to stop fighting, but he shouldn¡¯t leave it to chance. He needs to find an opponent who is good with fire elements and need to take a lot of hits blocking with the coat instead of dodging them.

    He looked through the notes in the ces he wanted to visit for sparring matches and found the nearest one that could fit the requirements.

    A tribe of Demi-giants.

    Fire demi-giants to be precise.

    The descendants of giants but notplete giants, beings with massive staturepared to humans and the beings with higher elemental affinity and physical strength than average humans.

    That would be the next spot.

    After that, he went to the cliff where the guards found them. He said to Nali that he would meet him there.

    As he waited for them, Sam looked at therge vertical crater he created in the cliff and got an idea.

    He took out the scythe and channeled his energy as he swung it a few times on the cliff.

    After he was done a string of words appeared on the wall.

    ¡¯SAM WAS HERE¡¯

    The letters are massive and they would be visible from a few hundred meters even if no one focused here.

    He then stabbed the tail end of the scythe into the wall in the middle of those letters and left it there.

    All this while, everywhere he went there was a sign of presence. His organizational branch, or a disaster he brought up on the locals and so on.

    There is no reason, why there shouldn¡¯t be any sign here. He didn¡¯t get the thought in the first two ces, so he decided to start now.

    As Sam was satisfied with the words, Nali made his way there along with a bunch of guards.

    They looked at the words in awe as they exuded a faint aura of the scythe.

    "Thanks for escorting my friend here. We will take our leave."

    Then Sam and Nali walked deeper into the forests and once they went to a deste ce, he took the dimensional drifter and both of them disappeared.

    They reappeared at their next stop.

    A in a different realm, which is closest to the star and is burning throughout the year.

    The that was ruled over by the Fire-Demi Giants.

    The whole area surrounding them looked like the insides of the volcano.

    The rock is red hot andva streams flowed everywhere.

    The trees are sparse and even the ones that are there are of an extremely rare kind. There is no sign of any forest as such in the surroundings; the most they found is a patch of trees.

    Soon, they reached the nearest civilization. The city of the Fire Demi-Giants.

    This is also an extreme ce like the Tundra realm, but here there are others and they are connected to this with the wormholes, and this ce is also not as extreme as the Tundra realm. So, there is little others could do to swindle them and the Demi Giants are aggressive by nature, they would kick the asses of whoever tried to take advantage of them.

    The flow of people in and out of the city is decent.

    Everyone they saw is tall. The shortest person they saw is at least seven and a half feet and he is a teenager who might grow more.

    They all looked at Sam and Nali with smiles and invited them to their shops.

    Sam courteously rejected them with a smile while Nali became extremely nervous.

    Soon, they reached the administrative office from the direction of others and asked an officer.

    "I would like to meet one of the elders of the Demi-Giants."

    Sam revealed his cultivation level and asked directly.

    The first two ces threw him in some kind of sticky situation, the third one was slightly better, he doesn¡¯t want to create an unnecessary nuisance for himself so, he might as well take the direct approach.

    "May I ask your purpose?" The officer asked calmly.

    "I am a wanderer at the moment and I am traveling between different realms. I would like to have a sparring match with the strongest Demi-Giant in my cultivation level. And I would appreciate it if an elder was presiding it so that we can keep it all official."

    "Oh."

    The Demi giant was surprised a bit but still informed the elder.

    Soon, Sam got a meeting with the Elder and they quickly cut a deal for a wager, and Sam was led to the fighting stage.

    It is actually a cliff behind the city where many Demi-Giants are training.

    The process was smooth.

    Sam took out the reaper sword and got ready.

    Even though he selected the ce directly, he still picked the restriction himself.

    Only using reaper sword, no elemental energies, and no styles.

    But this is enough for him.

    The reaper sword is one of the weapons he used most frequently.

    Since the coat is generating the spirit, then the sword wouldn¡¯t be that far away.

    Luckily he gets to use it now.

    He got ready to fight and his opponent is also ready as well.

    The man he is facing is around nine feet tall with arge and muscr build.

    He held arge battle hammer in his hands and swung it twice in the air as he looked at Sam coldly.

    s

    Both of them got ready as the Elder himself acted as the referee.

    The giant ran towards Sam as he swung the hammer.

    The giant hammer covered in mes came towards Sam who crossed his arms and blocked it directly.

    The hammernded and a ming explosion covered him.

    Everyone thought Sam was stupid, but he is smiling under that veil of mes as he looked at the spot where the hammernded. The sleeves of the coat and he could see the changes of the energy he is injected into the coat because of the energy vision. It is working.

 Chapter 1023: Kimpurushas

    Sam forcefully pushed the hammer off of him and took a few steps back to get out of the range.

    He used the energy vision to quickly observe the energy flow within the coat and got ready to fight back.

    The quality of the fire element of the demi giant is actually quite high, even the soil below which is clearly used to the extreme heat was still charred a bit because of the me attack.

    As the giant pursued Sam, he also lunged forward and swung his de as he halted the attack mid-air by blocking the hammer at the handle.

    Even though, he was spared the impact, the mes still exploded after the contact and they surrounded Sam.

    Sam¡¯s own mes are of extremely high quality and they are one of the purest fire elements to ever exist, so even if he couldn¡¯t use the element directly at the moment, he can endure a rtively inferior quality fire attack on him for quite a while.

    And the energy the feather coat is also doing a great job defending him as it got hit by the mes.

    The battle went on.

    Sam didn¡¯t move out of the range of the hammer and stayed close to demi-giant.

    And whenever demi-giant took a step back to hit him with the giant hammer, Sam blocked the hammer swing in the middle with the sword, by blocking the handle and let the mes shower him.

    s

    The demi-giant slowly got frustrated because of Sam¡¯s movements.

    He is too dexterous and his timing is too on-point for the demi-giant to catch him in on the spot.

    The brute force is not helping as Sam is always managing to block the swing before it got any real momentum.

    Even though Sam is not attacking and only focused on defending against the demi-giant, he still had the upper hand in the whole battle.

    The thing that frustrated the Demi-Giant even more than not being able tond an attack itself is the fact that Sam is not attacking back.

    He got so many openings every time Sam blocked the attack, but there was no response from the other side.

    And this made the Aggressive demi-Giant take this as contempt from Sam and he started bing crazy.

    His attacks became fiercer and his body is slowly giving out a blood-red glow.

    Sam frowned at the change and as the attack happened, he put a bit more energy into the sword which cut the handle into two making the hammer unusable.

    But this didn¡¯t stop the demi Giant, the fire elemental energy started pouring out of him in a chaotic way and the metal handle in his arms started melting.

    His eyes turned blood red and the whole skin has a dark red hue all over it.

    He is covered with mes and his muscles seemed to have be leaner and denser. His state is simr to the partial elemental fusion and he mmed his fists at Sam.

    Sam looked at the ming fists and used his left hand to deflect them to the side.

    But the recoil is sorge that stumbled to the side which surprised him for a second, before he could get his bnce back, he felt a fist punching straight at his face from the side.

    Therge fist made him m on the ground and roll around. As he tried to slowly stand up, the giant appeared like a red sh and kicked him upwards making Samunch into the air with a trail of me following his ascent.

    The giant leaped into the air and mmed his elbows on Sam¡¯s back, making him crash into the ground creating arge crater.

    He thennded at the edge of the crater and started throwing mes into the pit with all he got as if he wanted to cook Sam alive.

    "Elder, should we stop him?" One of the Demi¡¯s Giants asked the elder.

    But the elder didn¡¯t reply, he looked at the crater with a frown as if he could see something the rest of them couldn¡¯t.

    The giant became more and more aggressive by the second and started using all his energy to throwing mes into the pit and the heat in the surroundings kept on increasing with it.

    The rest of the demi giants couldn¡¯t understand why he is doing so.

    Because they don¡¯t know that the demi giant fighting Sam could sense that Sam is currently sitting in there with the sword in his hand. The feather coat is giving out a faint golden hue.

    Only the opponent and the elder could faintly sense Sam sitting there. There are no movements of pain or suffering from him, it is almost as if he is taking the mes in as a delicacy.

    After some time, Sam suddenly opened his eyes and there is a smirk on his face.

    He stood up and held the sword tightly before shing the mes that areing at him.

    The sword ray cut through the mes as it is cutting through a solid tangible object and made the demi-giant step back just dodge.

    Now the crater was clearly visible to the rest.

    The whole pit ispletely covered with ayer of magma and Sam who is also covered with it just shook his body and the sword to get rid of it as he leaped upwards and walked towards the demi-giant.

    Sam¡¯s aura changed from before. His aura is sharper than ever and it is cold like steel. The opponent had a hunch that he shouldn¡¯t let Sam near him.

    So, he started throwing mes instantly.

    But Sam once again swung his de, the vertical crescent sword ray cut the mes and the two halves moved, either way, creating a path for Sam.

    The Demi Giant tried to block the sh with his body, but when it neared, he immediately jumped to the side out of fear.

    Sam became a whole new person and suddenly his slow walk changed into a sprint as he ran towards the Demi Giant and started attacking.

    The crescent sword rays ravaged the surroundings as the demi giant tried his best to dodge, but every time, he barely managed to avoid vital injuries, but at least his skin was severed from his body for every sh that came his way.

    The fight turned into a one-sided beating.

    The demi-giant soon knelt down and Sam held the tip of the sword at his neck.

    "This is our loss."

    The elder threw in the towel and Sam turned around. Nali who watched the whole scene from the side gulped nervously as he was shocked by the whole fight.

    Sam walked away from the demi giant and used the sword to carve out the same string of words near the crater.

    ¡¯SAM WAS HERE.¡¯

    He then turned towards the elder and said.

    "I think I lost myself a bit there. You don¡¯t have to worry about the wager. We will take our leave."

    "No problem. You won fair and square. You will get what you were promised."

    Sam just shrugged and didn¡¯t try to do persuade him.

    He walked away and let Nali settle the wager before both of them met outside the city.

    They searched for some prey and after catching something, he let Nali cook it, while he sat on the rock and closed his eyes in meditation.

    He tried to connect with the feather coat again and this time, he managed to do so.

    In the sea of consciousness, he could see a bridge appearing connecting him to another small consciousness.

    The consciousness took the form of a small three-legged golden crow.

    As it is just a bird that came out of the hatchling.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but smirk.

    He created the coat decades ago and there are many instances that it almost got destroyedpletely.

    Every major event of his second life, this coat was a part of it.

    He is really happy that he got the feather coat got a spirit.

    The meal was soon finished and Sam savored everyst bit of it.

    After the meal is over, he took out the two pots to pick the next destination.

    His journey is not going to stop anytime soon as he will explore this vast world.

    As a part of this journey, he is going to a realm ruled by a special tribe.

    s

    The Kimpurusha tribe. Also called the lion men.

    They are simr to the beastmen in some ways, but theypletely differentiated themselves from the rest of the beastmen as they prided themselves for not acting like beasts and solely relying on instincts.

    Their facial features are a little like a lion and their muscle fibers and meridians are simr to that of a lion, but their bone structure is simr to that of a human.

    That is they differentiate themselves from the beastmen who have too many simrities with the beasts except for their humanoid bodies.

    Kimpurushas are simr to humans in many ways as they can create formations inscriptions, there are healers of different elements. The only thing they are superior to humans is their strong physical constitution.

 Chapter 1024: Claws

    Sam looked at the restrictions for the kimpurusha tribe he is visiting.

    He needs to use ws. He doesn¡¯t know if it is just a coincidence or this is fate to use ws on lion men. The ws were his favorite weapons back on earth, particrly when he was angry and filled with rage.

    The ws were by no means the best weapons, but they are good to let the emotions our properly and it has very few limitations in terms of mobility. The defensive aspect is as good as gone, but for the offensive, they are one of a kind.

    But in this new world, he didn¡¯t use the ws that much. He created a set in the start and even made some modifications that could help him deal with the opponents in tricky situations even in situations where he might have to face multiple opponents. Even though they were nowhere inferior to any of the weapons he made, he couldn¡¯t find a reason to wear them.

    ws are something he wore when he was in the darkest phases of his life. They witnessed all the blood he shed when he was drunk in that darkness and when he was the epitome of the evil.

    When he started this new life, he decided to fulfill the promise he made. To not be his old self again. Maybe he truly changed, or he wanted to ignore everything that could remind him of those dark days, he subconsciously ignored the ws very much.

    Wearing them after a long time made him feel nostalgic.

    The Kimpurusha is a prideful race.

    They are more prideful than Elves for that matter.

    And there was no scheming or other fools who created nuisances when Sam asked for a duel right after he entered the door.

    s

    He was directly led to the tribe head and was arranged a meeting so that he could discuss it with him directly.

    "I would like to have a duel with the strongest Initial stage of the cultivator of the Astral ne Pre-transcendence."

    The tribe chief sized Sam up and said.

    "The Kimpurusha tribe always wees the challenges from others. But before we do that, answer me, what are you? You have too many scents on you. You are a human and not a human at the same time. Just what made you like this?"

    "I don¡¯t know. I might be the twisted joke of fate? Or the result of a twisted fate? I don¡¯t know myself. Does it matter for the challenge though?"

    "Not really. But we wouldn¡¯t fight in private, all the tribesmen will preside over the challenge and be the judges for the challenge. So, we have to wait for the evening for them to gather. We will do it ording to our traditions.

    Until then, please ept our hospitality and be our guest."

    Sam epted and they were taken to a special quarter. Nali could take a rest that day as they were served food by the tribe itself.

    By evening, everything was ready.

    They arrived at arge arena where a young Kimpurusha was standing waiting for Sam alight and as soon as Sam did that and wore his ws, the young man smiled and took out his ws as well.

    The only difference is for Sam the ws are something that he wore. For the Kimpurusha they are something he was born with.

    They are actually extractable.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know this detail about the kimpurusha.

    Both of them got into their stances and their auras raged.

    Sam cannot use any special tricks associated with the ws and he cannot use other elemental energies.

    The referee came forward and announced the rules.

    "There are torches lit up on both sides of the stage and they are in the hands of yourpanions if yourpanion thinks that your life is in danger or they feel like you should be giving up but in a position where you couldn¡¯t make the decision, they will just put out the torch and you will lose the match.

    If that happens, you cannot fight the result and start a ruckus.

    The match is only for sparring and no enmities shall birth or propagate after you leave this stage. Anything that is rted to this match shall stay within the arena.

    Participants shall not forget that this is a sparring match. Please do hold back from killing your opponents. If by any chance you were killed in this match and if it is proven that the other party did so intentionally, the winner will be punished ording to our tribe¡¯sws.

    Now, pay respects to your god and fight."

    The opponent bowed down to the arena and got back into the stance. Sam still stood there waiting for him to finish. When the referee looked at him in Sam just calmly said.

    "I don¡¯t pray to any god."

    The referee nodded as if he understood and the fight began.

    The kimpurushaunched himself towards Sam the very moment the fight began. Sam frowned as he looked at the movement technique and activated energy vision.

    He was stunned looking at the way the opponent moved.

    He is moving in a weird way and the energy particles in the surroundings are amodating him ording to his motion which making him faster than he should be.

    This is simr to the repel style, but instead of using the reaction of repelling the energy in the surroundings, the energy itself is acting as lubricant after calmly siding away and letting his motion happen freely.

    Sam moved forward with the energy vision still active as he met with the opponent.

    Both of them started with a jab at each other, but both of them managed to block the attacks with their other arms.

    Sam held the opponent¡¯s arm tightly and tried to throw him over his shoulder while he freed his other hand and got ready to aim for the eyes with his w.

    But the throw was not sessful as lifted the opponent over his shoulder and was about to m him into the stage, the party suddenly kicked his legs in the air. His legs moved like a sh butnded softly on the floor.

    He kicked the floor the very next movement and used the force to kick Sam in the forehead.

    Sam saw the footing towards his forehead and caught it with the other arm and used all his strength to pull the leg towards him.

    This made the opponent¡¯s head move downwards and Sam used his leg to stomp him in the face making the back of his head smash into the floor.

    But as the hitnded, the second leg of the opponent also made its way to Sam¡¯s face and kicked him on the nose, making him take a step back.

    He frowned as he felt the blood from his nose.

    There are two small stab wounds, one on the nose and the other right beside the nose bridge.

    Then only he noticed the ws that came out of the feet.

    Sam shook his head and rubbed the blood that was running down and lunged forward.

    He extended his arms backward and bent forward as he ran straight towards the opponent.

    There is not much distance between them and the opponent didn¡¯t move and got ready to defend and his focus was on Sam¡¯s arms.

    Just when Sam extended his arms with the ws aimed at the sides of the opponent and the opponent tried to defend himself by catching the arms and make a counter-attack, Sam changed the direction of the arms and rolled down, before pushing his body upwards aimed at the chin of the opponent.

    The opponent was surprised by the attack. But even then, he managed to guard his chin and get a hold of Sam¡¯s leg.

    But before he could make a move, Sam used ws to dig into the feet of the opponent. The opponent holding his legs benefited him.

    Just as he was about to tear the flesh, the opponent let go of Sam¡¯s feet. He knew that moving backward would only make it worse for him, so he let Samnd his feet which exposes his back, and wanted to attack.

    As his wsnded though, he felt like his ws were stuck in some kind of trap and couldn¡¯t move forward.

    Sam felt the brunt force of the attack, even if he didn¡¯t feel the stab of the ws. He groaned a bit and tore the flesh open on the feet which started bleeding.

    The opponent moved back as he groaned in pain. But even then, he swung his ws which condensed spiritual energy into the ws that came at Sam who barely dodged by receiving a small sh on his cheek.

    Both opponents stayed still for a while as they looked at each other intently.

    The match was pretty and the crowd is cheering their kin.

    But the tribe chief is frowning hard as he looked at the fight and said.

    s

    "Seems like my son lost the fight."

    The elders were stunned and one of them spoke.

    "What do you mean chief? There are only two wounds, I am sure young master can find a way to fight back. He has been in tougher fights than this."

    "I am sure what he can do. But I have a faint idea what the opponent can do as well and he is currently not doing all of it. He is holding back a lot.

    If he is giving it all, he could have killed my son a dozen times by now."

 Chapter 1025: Remembered

    Sam and the opponent are staring at each other. They are not making any moves, but the tension kept getting higher and higher between them.

    Kimpurushas have a decent recovery butpared to Sam¡¯s it is still far behind. After all, he is a part vampire, even if he surprised, the vampire cells in his body, wouldn¡¯t stop recovering.

    The more the fight got dyed, the more beneficial it would be for Sam and the opponent seemed to have noticed that, he wanted to be a bit passive at least until the bleeding from his feet stops. But after looking the wound on Sam¡¯s face he decided otherwise.

    The damage to the feet is not exactly a small one though.

    So, he leaned forward and ced his arms on the floor standing on all fours like a real beast.

    Sam smiled, but he didn¡¯t change his stance.

    Both of them moved towards each other, the opponent still being on all fours.

    As they reached within the fighting range, Sam tried to kick the guy in the face, but the opponent caught the feet and tried to dig his ws into it while putting Sam in a leglock.

    But before the leg lock was evenpleted, Sam used that hold as leverage and his other leg which is glowing with the spiritual energy made its way towards the other party¡¯s gut.

    The skin cracked on the torso of the opponent and blood slowly seeped out of it.

    s

    The impact made the other party move away, but the grip on Sam¡¯s leg made a tear appear and he started bleeding.

    But he didn¡¯t care about it unlike his opponent and ran towards the target before kicking him upwards and shing his back with the w.

    The opponent took the chance and used the impact to his advantage and rolled forward to keep a distance.

    "You are far better than I thought." He muttered to himself and suddenly his energy flow started changing.

    Sam could see that the energy particles around him are acting differently through the energy vision, he became vignt and took a defensive stance without attacking.

    The opponent lunged forward and threw a spinning kick towards Sam¡¯s head, which he tried to dodge, but just when the leg was about to go past Sam¡¯s face, the opponent swung his fist in the opposite direction and his foot made a contact with Sam¡¯s jaw.

    Sam was stunned by the sudden movement and he wasn¡¯t able to see the cause of it as he was too focused on the leg itself.

    The opponent threw a jab with the w towards Sam¡¯s chest, which he wanted to intercept, but all of a sudden, the position of the arm seemed to have changed instantly and his interception failed which made the jabnd on him.

    Luckily it handed on the shoulder as he managed to dodge it a bit.

    Sam frowned at this. It was his instinct to focus on the attack that wasing at him and both times the attack changed, but not because something happened to the attacking point directly rather some other change that happened somewhere affected it.

    He changed his focus to the body of the opponent as a whole, this time he is going to find out what is wrong with this situation even if he has to take some hits.

    And he moved forward with just those intentions and tried to block the w all the while looking at the whole hand.

    He missed the timing to intercept, but he managed to get a glimpse of what is happening.

    When the w wasing at him from the side like a hook, something happened at the elbow as soon as he tried to intercept it.

    The energy particles umted together and created a small explosion, which propelled the motion arm a bit and made the w gain momentum which should have been impossible from the start and make Sam miss the timing.

    This is a dangerous fighting method as it will make the user damaged a bit as well.

    It is hard to find out with normal methods but once it was detected, it is actually easy to counter.

    Sam took a step back and let the other party attack and this time he didn¡¯t intercept. He let the attack near him and just when the w is near his body with just a few centimeters gap between them, Sam was about to make a move which made the opponent nervous and he used the attack anyway.

    Sam smiled and just tilted his body a bit. The wnded on the feathered coat and the ws stuck in the mesh for a fraction of a second. Even then, Sam took the brunt of the attack and should have moved backward, by instinct, but he controlled the urge and used that fraction of second and used his ws on the arm that came.

    He used his full speed and he didn¡¯t spare any energy. Within that one second, he moved his arms eighteen times and all of themnded on the opponent¡¯s arm.

    The flesh was torn apart from the bone and it became visible.

    The arm is unusable now.

    The opponent kicked Sam in the gut and used the recoil to move away.

    Sam wiped his sweat away as he looked at the opponent, before slowly stepping forward.

    "Since it is a sparring match, I don¡¯t want to be too cruel, but forgive me your techniques are too good for me to hold back."

    Generally, in a fight, the fighters always aim for the vitals of their opponents to ensure that the fight is finished.

    It is not like they deliberately want to do it, it is how they trained themselves and Sam is no exception.

    They only focus on defending themselves and attacking the opponents on their vitals as they deem the rest of the minor injuries negligible.

    As for tearing apart the flesh like Sam did, unless someone lost rationality or in a deliberate attempt to torture their opponent, nothing of that sortes to mind, of course, desperate measures can also be a reason.

    But for Sam with all the restrictions he ced on himself, this is the only way.

    With this recoil method or whatever the opponent wants to call it, the opponent can escape and dodge easily. In normal cases, Sam would have used some other skills, or elemental energies or even the three styles would have made it easier.

    In fact it would have been a walk in the park, but with the ws, the fastest method he could think of is only this.

    Sam lunged forward to make a move but right before his w touched the opponent, he stopped in his tracks.

    The torch was put off.

    Sam ced his palm on the opponent and channeled the light elemental energy to heal him. The arm that looked like it was mangled by a shark was healedpletely.

    "As I said. I am really sorry."

    The fight was over and Sam stepped off of the stage.

    He looked around and found arge stone wall.

    "Can I use this for something?"

    The tribe chief just nodded casually and Sam used his ws to slowly scratch the words on the wall.

    ¡¯SAM WAS HERE¡¯

    Every time he did this in a different ce and with a different weapon, it is giving off a different aura.

    He smiled and said.

    "You can remove it if you want. But I would like it if you keep it that way."

    With that he and Nali left the tribe in search of a delicacy for this spot.

    After hunting down a deer and eating it, Sam and Nali decided on the next journey.

    He went to a different realm, fought a different opponent while maintaining different restrictions for the next few months while eating different foods, and everywhere he went, he left those three words along with some humiliation for his opponents and their families.

    Of course, not everything was smooth sailing.

    He has to fight the whole organization sometimes and sometimes he was caught up in the mess that he didn¡¯t want.

    Sometimes the organizations sent assassins after him and sometimes getting the opponent is a fight itself.

    Some people asked him to help them overthrow the tyrannical rulers they are under and some rulers wanted him to help them eradicate their rivals.

    Some wanted to give their daughters to marry and tie him up to one ce and some wanted to just make friends with him.

    But whatever happened in every realm he visited, one thing happened inmon. They couldn¡¯t forget the presence of Sam there.

    His fame slowly started to spread in the realms.

    He mostly operated in the realms that are not actually on the list of the organizations for the game.

    So, he roamed freely without any restrictions and fears.

    s

    He even earned many titles. Some called him fire yer, some called him dual sword devil, some called him the poison monarch, some called him the Shadow of the death, some called him the Lightning de.

    He got many titles based on how he operated in different ces.

    He became a hot topic in taverns and inns.

    Many people just dismissed them as mere rumors as they are too diverse and everyone who witnessed him in action believed their version is the only true version.

    But one thing is for sure, no matter how they remembered him, he was remembered.

 Chapter 1026: Breakthrough

    A year passed since Sam started this vacation in which he fought different people. On the journey, he saw a lot of people apart from the one he fought.

    He saw the life of normal people without any form of great responsibilities burdening them living their lives.

    He saw people who have too much burden on them to carry it alone smilingly carry it.

    In both his lives, Sam is not a ¡¯normal¡¯ person. He has very limited emotions and he was exposed to very few of them. In both of his lives, he was in a race to gain more power, more recognition, more safety. He never stopped to think about what it is doing to his mental state.

    He knew that in his current condition, he wouldn¡¯t lose that easily, but his mind doesn¡¯t change and it hinders his growth when he needed to grow the most? This is the question that came to his mind when he found out about his own inferiorityplex when he lost to Gran and tamas.

    He wanted to find an answer for that and that is why he took a vacation.

    He wanted to not only find out all the ws he has and also tried to eradicate them. He must say that he achieved great progress.

    He managed to identify, the inferiorityplex, the fear of being suppressed, his fear of being a puppet to someone else, his fear of being the weakest in the game, even his obsession with the research can only be considered as an escape for him to forget about these weaknesses and most dangerous of these mental weaknesses is his sensitivity to his birth status.

    Being a bastard an abandoned one at that never sat well with him. Because every person who tortured him in order to train or for other purposes never stopped to mention it.

    It was hammered into his very being and he believed that all the suffering he went through is because he was an abandoned bastard.

    s

    The rational part of his brain knew that it is not true. He suffered because he fell into the wrong side by ident. The birth might have some reason for it, but it is not the only reason.

    Ste tried her best to make him understand that. But that didn¡¯t happen. He wasn¡¯t able to break out of that shell and that shell followed him even in this life.

    In this journey, he wanted to get rid of that too, but it seems like the damage is too severe that it is almost impossible to change.

    Sam is currently sitting on the peak of the mountain meditating. He opened his eyes and sighed.

    Nali is standing beside him.

    "AAAhh."

    He shrieked in fright as soon as Sam moved.

    Sam sighed once again and said.

    "Don¡¯t worry. I won¡¯t do anything to you. Just stay calm. Here, this helps."

    Sam threw a bottle of wine to Nali who caught it clumsily and gulped it down.

    Sam turned around and looked at the rest of the mountain.

    It is currently covered in blood and corpses. There are many signs of his elemental usage.

    He walked down in the middle of all the corpses and reached arge que in the middle of it.

    ¡¯Myriad Illusion sect¡¯

    The que was carved with these words.

    Sam took out the reaper sword and swung it a few times.

    The same three words.

    ¡¯SAM WAS HERE.¡¯

    He took in the destruction he caused in the past two days once again.

    "Let¡¯s go. It seems like I am on verge of a breakthrough. You can also calm down."

    Sam led Nali along with him into the forest. They camped beside a stream.

    Nali kept on cooking every beast that came there as he tried to calm his mind, while Sam sat inside the stream to calm his mind too as he slowly approached the breakthrough.

    As he approached it, the hydra bloodline is getting a bit excited than normal. So, he knew that this time another metamorphosis might happen, so he felt like it is better to absorb water elemental energy for this breakthrough.

    After calming his mind down, he let all the beasts out.

    The beasts are also recovering from the battle two days ago.

    It is very rare for Sam to use the beasts in his battles, particrly all of his beasts in a single battle, but he used it in the battle thatsted two days.

    They looked at Sam¡¯s state and all of them started cultivating as they consumed the resources arranged to them.

    After two days of cultivation and energy sharing, Sam finally started achieving the breakthrough along with the beasts and as he predicted as soon as the beasts broke through, he felt his organs burning again.

    And once again, he has two organs burning up.

    The salivary nds and the liver.

    As Sam already experienced this burning sensation twice and he also stayed within a stream that has decent water elemental energy, he is barely able to hold on without yelling and screaming.

    The process went on for a long while. But when it was done, Sam recovered a lot faster than the previous two times.

    He rested for the next two days and finally started experimenting with the newfound powers.

    The first change is to the salivary nds.

    All this while the secretion of poisons happened mostly by converting the spiritual energy. But now, he can naturally secrete the poisons like an actual venomous creature.

    The modification to the liver is a bit different.

    It helps with the digestion of the different poisons that he could consume and collects them in the gall dder which would be delivered to the salivary nds through the blood cirction system.

    He felt like his body is bing less and less human.

    All these days, even if he has different bloodlines and muscle structures, the bone structures, the circtory system are all still that of humans.

    But with the appearance of the wings, one after the other is changing and he is moving far away from being a human.

    At least when it is considered physically.

    Sam then started checking the water elemental fusion. He cannot use the bloodline arts at the moment. Anyway, he still has to check the bloodline arts of the sky sovereign roc too.

    But he didn¡¯t face any opponent that is strong enough to make him use these bloodline arts.

    After checking all the changes and taking a look at his own power, he finally decided to get back to his original life.

    It is about time he did so.

    From the list he also found out that the team is almost done with the second phase ns.

    If his guess is right, the rest of the yers are all trying their best to finish off the rest of the organizations that Sam left off for them so that they wouldn¡¯t be left behind and keep the pace with him.

    Even though he didn¡¯t have a great bond with them, he decided that he should climb thepetition with them.

    Anyway, even if not in the long term, at least in the short term, he would be needing their help to go after the third and fourth phase organizations.

    So, the team would be going on another break at the moment.

    Sam and Nali went back to the deste, where the team is supposed to meet up after their assignment.

    He sent Nali to Mackey¡¯s kitchen.

    In this year, he picked up some progress in cooking and he might rival Mackey. The culinary circle is going to burn in chaos.

    Due to Sam¡¯s way of ruling even though he is not exactly ruling, the professions which are not considered much are also garnering enough attention.

    And being a chef is one of them.

    At least now, he can expect more in terms of food, whenever hees home.

    After that, Sam visited the research departments to check thetest advancements and finally after everything was done, the teammates appeared.

    When Sam saw them he was surprised.

    Gran and Sia broke through to the Peak stage,

    Saber Monarch broke through to the Transcendent realm of the Astral ne.

    Paras reached the border of breaking through to the next stage.

    The rest of them also had great progress.

    When looked at Sam¡¯s cultivation level, they are also equally surprised.

    He is picking up faster and this caused them to face some invisible pressure on them.

    Sam took the heirlooms and exchanged most of them for resources, leaving a dozen of them in case of emergencies.

    s

    He distributed most of them away and kept some as reserves.

    The team went to train after the reports were given.

    Sam looked at the list to take a look at the second phase organizations. It would take a few months for the rest of the yers to finish them off.

    So, Sam decided to go for the research.

    The formation cylinders he got are still waiting for him to deconstruct them and use it for his own research.

 Chapter 1027: Research

    Sam holed up in the research and as the first step, he tried to clearly understand the detailed working process of the cylinders.

    He understood the core principle on how they work and which part of it contributes to what aspect.

    But there is still a lot he has to learn, how to make each and everyponent and what makes thatponent possibly change the energy from particle form to liquid form.

    He has to understand that.

    And he started the research from the Parent formation cylinder.

    He created a simtion of the cylinder on the second floor of the divine dimension and started proceeding.

    The research started and Sam forgot about the time. He just spent studying and trying to obtain something from that research.

    The first objective is the transparent cylindrical body. He can actually reconstruct a spirit stone back to its original form.

    He can change shapes, but ultimately what he could do is just make it arger spirit stone. He couldn¡¯t find any other purpose to it.

    But this cylindrical body which is also made of the same material as the spirit stones is different.

    After creating the simted model, he started subjecting it to various simted tests. He used all kinds of elemental attacks on it, physical attacks, and much more.

    The elemental attacks are surprisingly ineffective. None of the elements, even the spatial elements directly used on it didn¡¯t work. Physical attacks have some effect. A constant physical abuse would make it crack and the void style is most effective of all.

    As for elemental explosions caused by destabilizing the spirit stones, that made the cylinders most vulnerable.

    If the cylinder is within the area of the explosion, the exposed part instantly vaporized as if it never happened.

    Sam couldn¡¯t understand how someone managed to make the empty spirit stones into something like something, but he is extremely excited to reverse engineer this.

    For more than a month he kept on doing all kinds of experiments on it to see how it would react.

    He tried to mold the material with the direct maniption ability he has, but that only resulted in making the structure copse.

    His maniption ability might not be delicate enough for the job.

    But soon, he managed to find out another feasible method.

    This also requires spiritual energy maniption, but in apletely different way.

    He instantly drew arge formation and ced a bunch of empty spirit stones in the middle of it. He started injecting the spiritual energy from the outer edge of the formation.

    The energy moved slowly and in a dense way at that.

    There were a lot of spirit stones on the outer edge of the formation along with Sam and he slowly channeled the energy from them into the formation.

    The energy that entered the formation from all sides is circting in many currents within the formation and as they moved inwards, the energy currents started merging with one another.

    By the time they reached the circle where the empty spirit stones are kept, only three dense energy currents are left.

    They all enveloped the empty spirit stones and Sam slowly but forcefully injected the dense spiritual energy into the spirit stones uniformly, making them temporarily active. Not on a cellr level but as the object as a whole.

    He used his observation ability and maniption ability to carefully manipte the shape of the stones as with the temporary force activation of the empty spirit stone as a whole, the solid stone itself became a lump of dense energy.

    The maniption is a bit difficult and it took up a lot of mental strength Sam and when the whole process was done, Sam fell on the ground as he panted heavily with the headache.

    He slowly stood up and made his way to the center of the formation to take a look at the final product. A t circr disc made of empty spirit stone material.

    He checked the structure of the object and the internal structure which should have been present waspletely gone. There are still faint traces of it, unlike the original cylinder.

    But he checked the properties of the material with different experiments, and they are extremely simr and it is not exactly a problem to use it instead of the cylinder.

    Now, his research took a different turn, how to produce it more effecticiently.

    This manufacturing method is not going to be feasible. The energy cells are already amodity only he can which made him limit the production a long time ago.

    But he cannot let the same thing happen to this product, he is going to make this product that could be mass-produced.

    He dove right into the research.

    Days became weeks, weeks became months.

    Not just in the divine dimension, even outside, it has been a few months Sam stayed in the divine dimension and he even lost the track of how long he stayed as he dismantled, analyzed, reverse-engineered, and even modified every singleponent to his purpose.

    The energy liquidation process.

    The liquefied energy storage process.

    The liquefied energy transmission process.

    He researched everything and got many different by-products in the process.

    After six months passed outside the divine dimension, Sam finally came back.

    When the people looked at his state, they were stunned by what they saw. Sam is very particr about his hair and how he looked.

    Even though people preferred long hair in this world, he always cut the hair short, but now it grew beyond his shoulders. He got a lot of facial hair.

    He looked like apletely different person as he muttered a lot of different things.

    Things that no one around could understand at all.

    Sam is still in a daze as he groomed himself back to normal and kept on thinking about what he had done.

    There are many results, but all of them are experimental products. He needs to find possible methods to mass-produce some of them as some of the products are not suitable for him to release in this world.

    As much as Sam wanted to stop creating easily essible weapons of mass destruction, it seems like he couldn¡¯t stop himself.

    His rtion with destruction seemed to be never-ending and their existence is always together.

    He calmed himself down after a long time and finally met with the team.

    "Boss, let¡¯s start the third phase operations, the rest of the yers already started it."

    "I know, I still remember them asking if they could go and me giving them a greenlight half-mindedly. How far behind are we?"

    "Not much actually, no matter how early the rest started, they are at most Pre-transcendent stage cultivators of Astral ne.

    yers are using some long shots. In the past six months, they are barely able to take one each and even and only some of them managed to finish the second target halfway." Five elemental King exined.

    "You broke through?" Sam asked in surprise as he sensed the energy while looking at the reports.

    "Yes, the changes in the body improve my cultivation speed by a lot."

    Now Sam has another Transcendent stage, Astral ne cultivator.

    Even Agar and Argan broke through to peak stage. Kiran is on his way to the transcendent stage and might have a breakthrough in the next few months. And even Paras and Vidyut might reach the middle stage in that time.

    The team is getting stronger. Sammented a little as hecked a lot of progress in thest few months.

    He went through the list and said.

    "We need to take down at least thirty-six phase organizations. We can leave the rest to the other yers.

    These thirty-six will be divided into three different phases.

    The first twelve are the organizations with a middle-stage Transcendent stage cultivator in charge.

    The second twelve are thete-stage and the final twelve are the peak stage.

    We are going to go after these particr organizations.

    Paras, fourteen out of these thirty-six are actually organizations you want to focus on. There is a possibility they are involved in your incident and they would have extra information.

    Night Ghost, you are going to collect the souls of every person that is killed and store them. I would need some of those souls. Particrly I want the souls of people specialized in formations, artisanship, inscriptions, and healing.

    I want you to nurture them in special containers I am going to give you.

    As for the rest of the souls, you can use the high-level ones as you like and all the souls that are useless to you will be used by me.

    The rest of the team can take any resources they acquired from the families themselves. Except for the mines and spirit stones and the family heirlooms.

    I want every one of you to focus on cultivation while this journey.

    All the current Transcendent stage cultivators should reach Consummation before the end of these thirty-six organizations.

    All Pre-transcendent stage cultivators should reach theter stage of the Transcendent stage.

    We are moving right away.

    Generally, we would have started with the First-Twelve of the list, but we are making an exception this one time."

    Sam proceeded to exin their next target.

 Chapter 1028: First Target

    "Night demon family.

    Our first target. When dealing with one of our opponents, we identally got the attention of the Night Demon family.

    Granted that I created some distraction and some infighting, it wouldn¡¯t help us stall them for long. By now, they would have already solved the problem and deemed it as a misunderstanding which it truly is, and focus on the ck Blood demon family incident once again.

    We were not exactly low-profile in dealing with the issue, so they might have already started the investigation.

    Luckily the Dusk organization has stopped the expansion for a while now, so they would take a few months to find out the tail and get to us.

    Before they get to any of the dusk organization branches, we have to go and deal with them first.

    The Night demon family is stronger than any organization we have faced.

    They upy a whole realm and they even have some subordinate realms. They are a big existence. But because of the tensions that are created because of my little stunt.

    Within the Night Demon family, there would be some undead creatures that are working for them. Some of them are at the elder level. But their authorities mostly lie in the external realms under their control.

    We are going to take advantage of that. We are leaving tomorrow. Do whatever you want today, we will leave at dawn."

    With that, the team dispersed.

    The next day at dawn, Sam and the rest of the team went to the Night Demon realm.

    They directly came to the headquarters. Sam is currently using a normal disguise technique and covered himself with arge dark cloak that concealed his face.

    The team took residence in one of thergest inns.

    As soon as they settled down, they instantly started the work. They dispersed and went to different bars and restaurants in the city to get any possible information.

    Everyone except for Sam.

    He stayed within the inn as he waited for the report. If the Night Demons really did research about him and started the investigation, there is a chance that they would definitely have his picture. After all, there are many people in the realm ruled by blood demons who saw him.

    He also wanted to bait the rest of the Night Demons to see if they have the information on their team too.

    If they really do have it, Sam would proceed differently, if they only had information on him, he would take the current approach.

    That evening, the team returned. The information was more or less to Sam¡¯s expectation.

    Not many people really do know about the information regarding the blood demons incident. But one thing they knew is that arge team of Night demons was deployed to a subordinate realm to perform an investigation.

    That is what the general public knew as there is too much attention on the Night Demon family because of Sam¡¯s little stunt.

    That is why therge movement of the demons caught everyone¡¯s attention.

    The information in the merchant circle is a little more detailed and they knew of what happened to the Blood demons and they knew of Sam too.

    ording to the merchants that move between the Blood demons and the Night Demon realm, the Night Demons have Sam¡¯s image who is the leader of the group and they have Jw¡¯s image who is the cause of the problem. The rest of the team was ignored as they were only present in direct action and eradication.

    The investigation started three months ago which is also the time the investigation for the Night Demon family¡¯s losses caused by Sam were alsopleted.

    From what the merchants knew, they are currently investigating Sam in the surrounding realms of the Tri-Ashura Realm.

    It would take a lot more time for them to get Sam¡¯s tail, but still, it is better to be cautious.

    One thing that surprised Sam the most is that the problems of the Night Demon familysted this long.

    He is pretty sure that what he caused is actually a decentlyrge conflict, but he is also sure that they would have solved it in six months.

    After all, all they would do is put pressure on the undead creatures and have them investigated all the while trying to think of a way to cleanse thends.

    But it became more than that.

    The information regarding that is quite fascinating. Because this incident caused some deaths within the undead faction.

    Even though it is purely coincidental, within the undead faction, there are some people who think differently than others and they are in constant conflict with the Night Demon family in the administration matters.

    So, the suspicion was focused on them and one thing led to another before everything went downhill.

    That group of undead escaped as things escted and wanted to live their lives. The Night Demon family head also became a bit suspicious of the remaining undead and made them take a tough decision.

    They were sent to kill the undead that ran off and the chasested for almost a year. The head didn¡¯t ept anything until their heads were brought to him.

    The rest of the procedure was dyed a bit and the Night demons didn¡¯t really try to repair thends seriously.

    At least the people that are assigned to the tasks cked off after some serious initial attempts and left it there thinking that the escaped undead group might have done it, so the solution would be with them as soon as they got their hands on them.

    But after the task ispleted and the undead creatures died, there is no sign of procedures in their memories and the night demons can only hire some experts from other powers to clear it.

    The news of who they hired is not exactly public, but they seemed to be from some high-level force.

    This is the information they got after just one day of investigation.

    "Our next step is to make them stop the investigation.

    Kiran, you need to make some high-level disguise. The head of the family is a Late-stage Astral ne Pre-transcendent, so make sure that you don¡¯t mess it up. Even if you meet him face to face, they shouldn¡¯t be able to identify you.

    If you want anything for that, tell me now."

    "Who am I disguising as?"

    "It would be a night demon, that is the only thing we are clear for now."

    "If possible I would need some time with the person to observe his aura. Four hours would suffice and I would need to know all his memories."

    "That is doable. Go and prepare for it. That is your next task, don¡¯t get involved in anything else. Even if I suddenly ask you to disguise, you should be able to do it."

    Kiran left the room.

    "Gran and Sia. Find some details about some important members of the Night demon family. The city guard chief, the investigative department chief, and something like that. You have one day."

    The twins also left.

    "The rest of you will go to the Tri-Ashura Realm. Try to find some merchants who deal with the surrounding realms of the Tri-Ashura Realm and see if you can get any information regarding the Night Demons investigation.

    Chances are low. They wouldn¡¯t leave such an open tail but see if there is anything that we can use.

    The night demons are actually quite a superior race, so they wouldn¡¯t personally investigate the destruction of subordinates. They would ask some local snakes to get the information. Try to see if you can get the information of those local snakes who recently got extreme confidence in their actions.

    If you do find anything, try to mess with those families a bit. Piss off some young masters or something to make the elders mess with you and try to see if some night demons wille out.

    If theye out, deal with them if them.

    We need some extra distraction.

    You have five days. Come back and gather at Tri Ashura realm. I woulde and meet you there."

    The whole team dispersed.

    The next day, Gran and Sia came back with the information he wanted.

    They got the information of the local city guard chief, enforcement team, and such, they have residences and their basic habits that they were told by some locals.

    Sam looked through all the information and picked a target.

    The Vice-captain of the Enforcement team.

    Quite a tyrant, but most of all he is a Night Demon and a descendant of an elder.

    But he is not as capable as his father, but still wanted some authority, to keep him in check they gave him this post.

    He is an idiot and a goof. He drinks a lot, whores around, and does all kinds of things that are not befitting to his status.

    He has a lot of mood swings and he doesn¡¯t have much real authority, but he is someone who can get together with a lot of core people.

    He would be the perfect target for the n.

 Chapter 1029: Infiltration

    Their first target, the prodigal son of the elder has one routine every day. He would go to a bar and gather along with some of theckeys of some moderately powerful and rich people and drink with them while all of them try to kiss his ass so that he could feel better about himself.

    That is the only thing that can be remotely considered as a routine. The rest of his day ispletely unpredictable.

    The Enforcement Department is a special department. The City guards are responsible for stopping the crimes and regr patrol while the Enforcement department handles all the matter regarding handling the criminals, bringing them to trials or even sometimes delivering immediate punishments.

    They are also responsible for investigating the internal affairs and workings of the administrative departments.

    They don¡¯t move in the public eye that much, except for this prodigal son.

    That night, after that guy finished his regr drinking session, Gran and Sia kidnapped him in an empty alley.

    He disappeared for the night and throughout, he was in presence of Kiran who studied him to create a perfect disguise.

    After the required four hours, he was disposed of instantly and Sam used the help of a specter to transfer all his memories to Kiran.

    Kiran spent the rest of the night studying those memories before going out as the prodigal son.

    He went to the residence directly. The next morning, an hour before noon, he went to the enforcement department office which is located very near to the premises of the Night Demon family estate.

    Since the enforcement department handles the affairs and investigations on the staff of various departments, he looked through some of the department records which he had ess to as a vice-captain, to get some information regarding the employees.

    These documents cannot be carried in spatial rings as they might have some trouble if any of the enemies get their hands on them.

    "Why do you want to go in there?" The special guard stationed at the room asked the Vice-captain. Since he is just a person of authority in name, they wanted to confirm that he is not doing anything stupid.

    "I need to get information on some women in the administrative department. I heard that new receptionists are sexy. I would like to woo them. You have a problem with that."

    Kiran got into the guard¡¯s face as he arrogantly said in a condescending tone.

    The special guard wanted to smack the shit out of him, but held his urge and let him in.

    There is a special formation that blocks the spatial storage ess so that the documents wouldn¡¯t be moved.

    Even though cultivators can remember everything with a single read, the Night demon family took some measures in the past so that no one would easily trust the information from the department through the mouth. There were some bad examples that led to this distrust. This is something they got from the target¡¯s memory.

    Now, Sam doesn¡¯t have to worry about those wrong information and such, Kiran read through the files.

    The enforcement department has records of who went where due to their assigned jobs.

    Kiran¡¯s focus was to see who are the investigators that went to investigate Sam and the Blood demon issue.

    After he got the information as fast as he can, he looked through the administration records and took out the sheet of a hot girl, and yelled at the guard.

    "Yo, can I take this with me? It is a pain in the ass to remember all of it."

    The guard who was about to check on this guy suddenly lost interest to do so and spoke sternly.

    "Nothing can be taken out of that room. If you are done get out."

    Kiran browsed some more and left the room.

    He went straight to the administrative office and flirted with the receptionist almost making her feel disgusted to the point that she would never forget this in her whole life.

    Later he continued his daily routine and exchanged the information he obtained with Sia who took it to Sam.

    He then kept on living as the target for the next few days.

    Sam looked through the information and made preparations.

    After getting the initial information from the Blood demon family, they came back and reported before getting assigned tasks on which direction they should go for further investigation.

    He then went to the Tri-Ashura realm information, but before that, he met with Kiran in the forest to give him something.

    "There are a bunch of new toys this. You have to be careful with them. I will give you a demo."

    With that, Sam took out a small cylinder. It is just the size of a normal battery.

    He ced it on arge rock and twisted the top of it which looked like a cap.

    Inside the cylinder, there is some brown-colored liquid.

    Sam came back and took out a small token which seemed to have been made out of some rock and there are some engravings and inscriptions on it.

    "If you twist it like that, it will be active. You need to be extremely careful. A moderate impact will make it explode."

    Kiran looked a bit skeptical. The small battery no matter how potent it can be, he didn¡¯t think it would cause that much damage.

    But Sam crushed the token in his hands and...

    *BOOM*

    an explosion urred.

    The earth¡¯s elemental energypletely shook the surroundings and even Kiran instinctually flinched even though they are a safe distance away.

    "It has been a while since I made something that is this good. Use your disguise techniques to hide them in some ces. It would be better if they are near the formation nodes of the Night Demon family. But make sure that no one suspects your current identity directly.

    If possible try to find the rival of your current identity¡¯s target or someone from the undead faction who is bitter about the recent developments. Try to frame someone of your age. Don¡¯t make it too obvious just make sure that someone notices and there is no possible alibi for them."

    Kiran nodded as he looked at thest ce of destruction. He left after taking the storage ring.

    Next, Sam went to the Tri-Ashura, realm waiting for the rest of the team to arrive.

    The team arrived on time.

    Only two of them seeded in drawing the Night Demons out and killed them sneakily. They even brought the corpses with them. It is none other than the Saber Monarch and Jw who apanied him.

    Sam took the corpses and then gave the information he got from Kiran.

    "Split into two teams. One with Night Ghost and the other with Tamas, both of them can get information from the souls. Try to disguise yourself as much as you can. The information regarding the investigators is here.

    Try to catch them or kill them as fast as you can. You have a week¡¯s time. If you cannot kill all of them or even cannot kill them at alleback. But do make sure that each team at least attacks one investigator. Keep your identity a secret and don¡¯t do this in open if possible."

    After giving the instructions, he went back and waited for the results.

    For the next week, he just let the shadow mice, Sia and Gran get as much information as they can, so that he can try and use it against the Night Demon family.

    After the week is over, the team returned.

    They managed to kill three investigators in total.

    Sam didn¡¯t mind the result.

    He just waited for the results to take effect.

    "Just rx for now. We will be getting busy in no time."

    These are his exact words.

    After two days, Kiran gave some information.

    "Night demon family got the news from other realms. Their investigators are missing. No one knows if they are dead or alive.

    But one family gave the information that two people killed the Night demon investigators who came to their family for assistance because of the dispute caused by one of their younger generations.

    At first, they thought it might be rted to us, but due to report of the two people killing due to that family dispute, they are more inclined towards the fact that they fell into a mess caused by that dispute and offended some high-level people.

    What is our next step?"

    "Well, since they are already a bit tense, let us intensify it. Use one of the explosives I gave you and destroy one of the Night demon family¡¯s guard stations.

    If possible try to make them suspect some other guy. Not too much, just a small link."

    "Who do you want me to choose? There are too many options."

    "This guy, the Vice-captain of the city guard. He is going on for regr rounds. Try to use some trick to make him disappear from the public eye while you do it and we will be fine."

 Chapter 1030: Young Master

    The next day, arge explosion happened within the city.

    At one of the city guard posts when the guards are on patrol, arge explosion urred which made the whole area crash.

    The explosion is of fire element type and everything within the explosion range burned, only a lump of magma and ashes were left behind.

    The Night Demon family who are already concerned about the dead investigators, don¡¯t know what happened. They don¡¯t have much information, they don¡¯t know his background, where he came from, and what are his goals in fact they don¡¯t even know his name.

    They don¡¯t know if he is capable of these feats of killing their investigators and causing an explosion within their home ground.

    If he suspected himpletely and didn¡¯t think in any other direction if Sam turns out to be not the person who did all this, things wouldn¡¯t go well for any of them.

    But they cannot let go of any suspicion either.

    The family head looked at all the reports and felt a slight headache. He looked at the attendant who is standing calmly beside him and said.

    "Call for the eldest young master. I want him here by evening."

    The attendant nodded calmly and left the area. He went out and used a wormhole to go to a different realm. He moved across three realms and finally in a rtively lower grade realm than the Night Demon realm, there is a construction project going on in one of thes and a young Night Demon is currently supervising it all."

    When he saw the attendant, he smiled and waved at him.

    "Why are you here at this time? If you were sent here, then it must be an emergency. Is it rted to that undead energy invading our fields and mines?"

    "That is what we want you to find out young master. The whole situation is confusing. At first, we were investigating a person who is responsible for the destruction of the Blood Demon tribe under our control.

    We dyed the investigation because of our undead energy problem, but after we sent the investigators, something else happened. A couple of them seemed to have pissed someone off and they are dead openly.

    After that, some of the investigators also went missing and this morning, there was an explosion in one of our city guard posts. We don¡¯t know if this is done by the one we are investigating or if it is the work of the people who caused the undead incident.

    We cannot be sure that the people our investigators pissed off might be the reason for it.

    The family head is having trouble, he would like you to deal with this situation."

    "You guys are lucky that I am nearby for my final sect examination. You managed to get rid of that undead incident and now you want me to clean up another mess of yours."

    He muttered and said.

    "Do you have any clue regarding the person rted to the Blood demon family destruction?"

    "We have a portrait of the leader. Since we dyed the investigation, not many people remember whoever that was involved, this guy was the only one that left a tad bit deeper impression on some stay survivors of the incident."

    With that, the attendant took out Sam¡¯s portrait.

    The young master took the portrait and was stunned for a second. He felt like he saw the portrait somewhere and started thinking and soon, he seemed to have remembered something and instantly took out a bunch of scrolls from the storage and checked one after the other.

    Finally, he managed to find the scroll, and inside there is a portrait of Sam and some details regarding him.

    When the attendant saw the portrait he was shocked.

    "Young master, do you know of him?"

    "Do you remember the incident regarding the realm of the undead? The guy who almost destroyed the whole undead realm and seeded in doing so for the vampire race is the same guy. Father went to the realm of Undead at that time to take a look and got this portrait.

    At that time, he wanted me to investigate it before going to sect, but he doesn¡¯t belong to any high-level organization and there was no trace of him, even in the subordinate realms that we have under our control.

    It is as if he vanished into thin air. And we still don¡¯t know how he entered the realm of the undead. Now it seems like we would find out if we catch him.

    I wille back to the family by tomorrow.

    Tell uncle not to worry about it and I would be getting some help from my friends."

    With that, the attendant left and the young master went to the nearest town.

    He entered the most luxurious inn in the town and met with four others who are sitting in the room leisurely.

    "Brothers, I need some help."

    "Help, is there any problem with construction? Or you just want to take advantage of something and skip your turn in supervision duty?"

    "No, the trouble is actually from my family."

    This time a guy who is munching on some food looked at him and said.

    "Again? Just what kind of a pain in the ass is your family? You need to clear their mess this many times?"

    "Well, this time, the mess is a bitplex. The enemy is unknown and there are three possible enemies. We don¡¯t know how to proceed with this. I am sure this would be interesting."

    "Oh really? What is so interesting about it? Your rival family must have done something shady to get on your nerves."

    "Except they are not in the list of suspicious targets."

    Then, the young master went on to exin the details.

    "Now are you interested?"

    "To suspect a young man who you came across more than a decade ago as your suspect, that too a human? What do you think his cultivation level is now?" One of the young men asked and he is a dark elf.

    "Who knows? How about we go and take a look. At least it is better than sitting in this boring shit hole looking at the construction all day with nothing better to do."

    "But one of us should stay here to make sure the construction goes on properly."

    "I will stay."

    A young man who is dressed in a cloak and also the person who didn¡¯t show any interest in the conversation spoke.

    "Well, if you are staying here, it wouldn¡¯t be a problem, junior brother. If you make sure there are no mistakes in the construction, then we would make sure to leave a good assessment score for you."

    "Thank you, senior brothers."

    The young man spoke calmly.

    The remaining four people including the Night Demon young master left the realm the next day at dawn.

    By the time they reached the Night Demon realm, the family head, and some elders are eagerly waiting for their arrival.

    When the group of four entered the hall, all the elders and even the family head bowed their heads a little and said.

    "Greetings for the disciples of five great sects."

    "Greetings to the Night Demon family head and the Elders." The youngsters didn¡¯t bow but only replied in a polite tone.

    The family head walked to the eldest young master and hugged him before saying.

    "Sorry, Davon. I knew that you are busy with your assignment, but I cannot help but ask for your assistance in this matter.

    This time the attacks reached our home ground, but we still don¡¯t know about our enemies."

    "Don¡¯t worry uncle. I will make sure we find the culprit. But before that, give me the information regarding the incidents. The undead energy contamination incident, the blood demon family incident, and the city guard post-explosion.

    I want to see if we can find any simrities. Make sure to add every single detail to it, no matter how minute.

    I also want the details of the investigators of the blood demon family incident.

    My friends will go and check the situation at the explosion area. So, let the guards know."

    The family head nodded constantly with every one of Davon¡¯s requests.

    After that Davon and his friends started their own investigation.

    Meanwhile, Kiran got a bit anxious and contacted Sam.

    "Someone named Davon came out of nowhere. He brought some friends from the five great sects."

    "Five great sects?"

    Sam frowned and immediately looked through the list of the organizations in the Wrist screen.

    The five great sects are the fourth phase organizations. All five of them form a joint organization, but they are still considered separate organizations.

    Sam felt like this would be tricky.

    At first, he wanted to directly reveal his identity when it came to deal with the final blow on the Night Demon family, but with the five great sects¡¯ disciples involved, things would be a bit problematic.

    There are two ways to ensure their safety. One is to find a way to make sure these five people wouldn¡¯t be stuck in the crossfires and the other way is to make that there are no traces of Sam and his team left here.

 Chapter 1031: Explosions

    Sam went into deep thought on how to deal with the current situation.

    From the looks of it, he needs to find a way to make sure these five people don¡¯t die at all, or even if they die, he shouldn¡¯t let anyone know that this is connected to him.

    "Leave them be for now. Just try and find out any information on what they are doing and who they are suspecting the most. We will proceed with the n ordingly."

    Kiran went back and he tried his best to get some information. For the next two days, there is not much activity from Sam¡¯s side.

    On the third day, Davon called for a meeting and all the young and old members of the family had to attend including the family head.

    "We made some initial investigation. We couldn¡¯t find the cause of the explosion at the city guard post. But it looked like it was made by a concentration explosion of fire elemental energy. Not the mes, the energy exploded in the raw form.

    As for our primary suspect, we don¡¯t believe it is some high-level power and the two people that killed the investigators and the missing investigators might also be rted to this case. We think they are using this as a distraction so that we wouldn¡¯t focus on them.

    The primary suspect itself is a guy named Sam.

    We don¡¯t know his exact cultivation level, but it should be around the Astral ne Initiation at the moment. He is also the one that came after our realm of the undead."

    "An Astral ne Initiation cultivator managed to do all of this?" The Family head couldn¡¯t believe it.

    "I know it is unbelievable, but you have to believe it. He is good at using the environment to his advantage. He would at most be a Pre-transcendent stage of Mortal ne cultivator when he dealt with the realm of the undead.

    But he managed to kill an astral ne vampire.

    He might be in Astral ne now, what do you think he can aplish now uncle?

    If possible, I would have recruited that guy into the sect under our wing, but it seems like there is some enmity with our family. I would like to meet with him while we can still reconcile.

    Anyway, the realm of the undead is actually inessible to anyone else other than us, but he managed to make his way there. We don¡¯t know the exact reason, but from the information my father gathered at that time, he helped the dwarves get through the war between the realm of the undead and the banished realm.

    So, send an envoy to the Dwarven realm that has connections with the Banished realm and talk with some dwarves that came from the banished realm after that. They would surely know something about him.

    He is the only one who has the ability to enter a no-ess area without anyone noticing. He might have been in our realm, our own city for all we know.

    He is our primary target.

    After we get the initial information from the Banished realm, we will discuss the rest of the n.

    Meanwhile, my friends will supervise different departments to ensure our defenses will not be breached again. The family must cooperate with them."

    With that the meeting ended.

    Kiran was stunned, he immediately went to a brothel after the meeting and drugged the woman he hired before contacting Sam with amunication token and said.

    "Boss, Davon has his eyes on you. He said something about the banished realm and dwarves. They are sending an envoy. I couldn¡¯t understand what it is."

    Sam was a bit surprised, he didn¡¯t know that someone investigated the undead realm. He had a hunch that might be the case, but he didn¡¯t expect them to connect the dots this fast. Going to a dwarven family is really the best thing to do at the moment.

    Sam thought of something and said.

    "Try to find out who the envoy is if you can. If you can¡¯t mark an elder who is quite high profile but doesn¡¯t have any actual substance.

    He needs to be someone who would be extremely known to all the subordinate realms, but he wouldn¡¯t have any core foundation and sway within the family."

    "I understand. But is this really okay? This Davon guy and his friends are quite something. They seem to be good at what they do.

    They even managed to find some clues in the explosion we caused at the city guard post."

    "Don¡¯t worry too much. Tell me if you find the envoy. We will proceed with our n. Oh by the way, try to find some scum of the family. The worst of the worst. I am sure there are other young masters who are rotten to the core."

    That evening Kiran came with some more information.

    The envoy¡¯s identity was not actually hidden. Along with that, he marked a few young masters.

    Sam then exined the next step of the n.

    The envoy was scheduled to start his journey two dayster as the family is preparing for some gift to the Dwarven tribe.

    Sam looked through the information of the young masters and kept on sending instructions to Kiran.

    The night before the departure of the envoy, the n was set in the motion.

    Kiran went to a bar that night alone and sat at the table drinking in a private room.

    He went out for a second to talk with someone on the street and came back. But this time there is a change in his movements which no one seemed to have noticed as everyone tried to ignore him.

    But the reason for the change is that the one that came back in is the undead created from the body of the true owner of the current identity.

    Generally, the body would have been useless for necromancy after this many days. But this is the result of one of the by-products of Sam¡¯s research this time.

    While researching the liquefying process, he managed to create some new things. He doesn¡¯t know if they existed, but he is sure they do now.

    One of them is an undead energy liquid.

    If used in a moderate amount, it can make the dead body in a preservative state. The body would possess all the properties of an undead except for that undead consciousness.

    This helps him preserve the body and he can make it undead after some time.

    He preserved the body of this guy and the spies they killed in that liquid to use themter and now is one of those times.

    After the undead entered the private room once again, it took out one of those battery-sized transparent liquid containers, twisted it slightly, and then mmed it hard on the table.

    *BOOM*

    The fire elemental explosion caused the wall to which the undead leaned on to crash and the explosion spread to the next room and ¡¯coincidentally¡¯ the envoy who should be going to the trip is also there.

    Even though the explosion didn¡¯t hit him directly, half of his body directly burned through and he died.

    The whole area turned into chaos.

    Everyone is running away and the city guards were alerted.

    But soon the chaos expanded to the other areas of the city.

    The explosions happened in different ces and different young masters died directly.

    Some of them died because Sia and Gran used these liquid containers.

    Some of them died by previously nted containers.

    But all of them died with fire elemental explosions.

    The news traveled to Davon fast and he deployed his friends to check the explosions, while he went to the site of the envoy¡¯s death.

    He felt like the envoy¡¯s death is a bit suspicious and if it was aimed at the envoy directly, then Sam would be their target and it would confirm their suspicions.

    But if it is a mere coincidence they would end up in a goose chase.

    It is almost as if the other party wanted to throw him into this difficult situation.

    He couldn¡¯t help but overthink all the other possibilities.

    It is making him feel a bit frustrated.

    But what caused him the epitome of frustration is the aftermath that came after the explosions.

    As soon as he and his friends returned to the family estate, the elders who lost their sons started making a fuss.

    Davon had the urge to break open their skulls instantly, but he controlled his anger with a lot of effort and tried to mitigate them as much as possible.

    In normal circumstances, they would have bowed down if Davon asked to due to his disciple status, but even these people have times that they wouldn¡¯t care about the etiquette and fear.

    Meanwhile, Kiran finally didn¡¯t have to y the character of some pain-in-the-ass young master and went back.

    But as soon as he entered the inn, Sam is ready with another dead body.

    "There is no time to waste, time for the next step of the n."

 Chapter 1032: Bluff

    Kiran painfully looked at the spy corpse in front of him.

    But he cannot do anything and this time, he doesn¡¯t even need to have any memories from the dead guy and he doesn¡¯t need to put up an act for a long time like before which is a silver lining.

    After he was done taking the disguise though, Sam gave a smile that looked creepy and evil to Kiran.

    "This time you have to suffer a bit Kiran. But don¡¯t worry, I will give you a bonus, I would give you a whole phase two heirloom worth of resources of your choice after this whole operation is over."

    Sam spoke and let Specter out, Tamas and Night Ghost also stepped forward as they started cing inscriptions on Kiran¡¯s forehead.

    Kiran started feeling some acute headaches as some pins are poking him on the brain.

    And he is feeling the death energy enveloping him which is kind of suffocating if he must say so.

    "Go there and act weak, imitate the aura of a night demon. When the time is right, you just need to follow instructions ande back here while switching it with the dead body of the spy. I am sure you can do that."

    Kiran wanted to weep for once even though he is a grown man. He couldn¡¯t think of any other reaction he should have. For the first time, he wanted to distribute his disguise technique to everyone so that he could be relieved.

    The next day, while Davon barely managed to get the elders in control and is having a meeting with the rest of his friends.

    "So, guys what should we do? Do you think this is a coincidence or this is just some kind of distraction nned by that guy?"

    "If it is indeed a distraction, then someone in the family must be helping him. The news about the envoy only stayed within the Night demon descendants, the undead faction doesn¡¯t know a thing.

    We can¡¯t suspect them either. The problem lies within the Night Demon faction."

    "There seems to be a rat demon lurking around."

    They started discussing who the possible rat could be and they don¡¯t have many leads and many suspicious people.

    After all, everyone stupid enough to leak the news to the outsiders is the ones that are killed in the explosion.

    "Maybe this is really a coincidence. After all, the envoy is not the only causality around the explosions, you lost some guards too, right. Their target could be the destruction of your family step by step while torturing you with this suspense. Do you know any of the guys your family might have offended with some level of backing?"

    "There could be thousands of them," Davon replied in exhaustion.

    Even though they are right to think that there might be a rat, what they had in mind is that the rat is a single person and they have to find, even though technically they are right, the rat cane in many forms and hisst form just died.

    And what they also don¡¯t know is, he just arrived in his new form at the gate of the family estate.

    Kiran walked lifelessly towards the gate of the family estate which is guarded with double the usual people and copsed even before the guards could ask him to show some identification.

    When they recognized him, the information was immediately sent to Davon who came along with his friends.

    The Dark elf checked upon him and said.

    "His vitals are not too good and he is enveloped with death energy. There is a seal on his body and mind, I cannot observe anything."

    "Can we kill him and use soul search?" Davon asked.

    Another one of his friends checked the inscriptions and said.

    "Not possible. The seal is beyond my level at the moment and it is closely linked to his soul. If we try to kill him, all the information would be lost. We need to improve his current condition."

    The Dark elf took out some pills and shoved them in Kiran¡¯s mouth, before letting guards pick him up and take him to an isted residence with a lot of security.

    After that they went back to the residence and talked.

    "How do you guys think he came back? Could this be a trap?"

    "We already took some measures. All the guards that are ced near his current residence are disposable.

    We can observe him. Try to crack his seal for a while and see if we can get some information. Even if we can kill him without losing information it would be good.

    But we cannot waste too much time on him, the opponent will take advantage of that and will try to cause some more chaos.

    Two days, that is all we can spare him."

    They took the decision instantly and started working.

    Kiran stayed put for the whole day and just let them think that he is really the night demon investigator and spilled some words in the middle as if the medicine they are using really working and he regained his ability to speak.

    But at the night of the second day, when the team had second thoughts on disposing of him after two days after looking at the words, Kiran made his move, when the attendant came in with the regr medicines, he killed the attendant, removed a spatial ring after puking it out from his stomach and took out the dead body of the investigator and ced it on the table.

    He threw the attendant in the spatial ring before disguising as the attendant and left the room.

    He sneaked out of the estate and dropped a small liquid container in the estate here and there while he was at it.

    After he escaped the estate and reached a safe distance, he crushed a bunch of tokens in his hands.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    A long series of explosions of different elements urred in the Night Demon family estate.

    None of the explosions happened in any important ces.

    They are empty residences and open fields, but this caused the head of the family and Davon and his friends to feel a shiver in their souls.

    They immediately alerted all of the Senior night demons to seal the gates and make sure that no one escapes, even the city gate was sealed and there was a curfew immediately announced.

    They decided to check everything and everyone in the next few days.

    All the decisions were made quickly, although not quick enough.

    By the time they reacted, Kiran is already out of the city and met with the rest of the team who already took residence in one of thekes.

    The next day, while Davon and his friends are looking at the current situation, a silver pigeon with Astral ne cultivation came and dropped some scrolls.

    "The Five Great sects have nothing to do with this conflict. So, if you are in name of that sect, get the fuck out of here. I don¡¯t think your masters will be after hearing that you are intruding in my ns and they also wouldn¡¯t be please if you are the cause of some other power invading your sects.

    You have one day. Last night is a warning, next time, you will not be let off easily.

    Tomorrow will be the start of my full-fledged attack. Think before you act."

    Davon and his friends were stunned by this. There was no announcement that was done to the public indicating their identities, but from their initial guess, this news was also leaked from the same person who fed information to the other party.

    But this time they are a bit nervous.

    It is not that easy to say the words five great sects and war in the same sentence.

    The five sects as a whole are an extremely high leveled organization.

    "I think this guy is bluffing."

    Davon said as he looked at the scroll.

    "Bluffing?"

    "If he is really that strong, he would have juste face to face and told us to fuck off. We would do that without hesitation. Even I might get out of here if it is an order from an existence that is at an elder level of an organization that can rival the sects.

    In fact, all he has to say is put the word out and the Night Demon family will be destroyed in three days. But he is attacking it secretly like this."

    "Even if it is, what about the attacks, we don¡¯t know how he is attacking at all. If he can really attack us this easily we would be sitting ducks waiting do die."

    The Dark elf said.

    Davon thought and said.

    "We will change the formations of the estate. We will modify it so no one other than us five and the direct descendants of the night demon family would be able to move in and out. The rest will stay locked inside.

    We will use the formations that jam the outsidemunication.

    All the personnel in the whole family would be gathered in the underground temple grounds.

    Let¡¯s cut the link between the rat and the opponent first."

 Chapter 1033: Futile

    The Night Demon family waspletely closed. Only a select few personnel were allowed to go in and out.

    Davon¡¯s friends modified the formation and added many new formations in ce.

    But in process they found something near the existing formation nodes.

    The small liquid containers that are hidden by Kiran in various ces. But they couldn¡¯t even find half of them, they just got around six of them.

    The team once again met up with these things in their hands. They were confused and surprised because of this.

    "What are these things? The energy is so pure and concentrated, Davon what does your family do exactly. Where did they get these things?

    Davon¡¯s friends assumed that this has something to do with the Night Demon family, but Davon knew nothing of it, he is just as clueless as them.

    "I don¡¯t know what these are. Let¡¯s ask the family head."

    They met with the family head and other elders asking what these are, but the answer is the same. They also don¡¯t know what these things are and how they made their way towards the formation nodes.

    The formation expert among the group took a keener look at it and tried to tinker with it a bit.

    And in the process, he turned the cap and made the things active.

    He is sensitive to the changes in the energy, so he couldn¡¯t help but notice the turmoil that happened in the liquid after he twisted the cap and felt that something is off.

    "Let¡¯s test these things."

    He spoke and all of them went to an open field. They ced the container far away and one of them threw an attack at it.

    *BOOM*

    The explosion urred and all of them widened their eyes in disbelief, except for the one who is interested in formations, his eyes are filled with shock, fear, and excitement at the same time.

    He looked at his friends and said.

    "I think we really need to get out of here."

    When Davon heard this he was stumped.

    "No, no. what do you mean get out of here? We just find out how the opponent is causing these explosions, we need to see if there are any more hidden in the estate, we need to investigate them. We can even make use of this..."

    While he was talking, he suddenly stopped as he saw his friend sweating profusely.

    "We are not doing any of that. Transparent and cylindrical liquid containers, there are only two people that I know that use these things, and even the weakest of them will get us killed with just a word.

    In fact, our masters will kill us ourselves if they just express that they don¡¯t like our presence.

    They don¡¯t have to warn us. They are just trying to give the face the name of our sects.

    We need to get the hell out of the situation right now, otherwise, our sect itself will just let us go and will present us in a silver tter."

    He then walked to Davon and ced his hands on his shoulder.

    "Davon, I know that this is your family and you need to take care of things here, if you ask for any other help I would do it in a heartbeat, but this time, I am not going to get involved in this. I will be leaving."

    He looked at the bunch of liquid containers and took one before leaving the ce.

    He immediately went back to the lower realm where their construction project is going on.

    Seeing that their friend is this decisive, the rest of them are also hesitating.

    "If they are really that powerful, what do they want with the Night Demon family, if they could just say it, we would have done it and they could just leave us," Davon said as he gritted his teeth.

    If only Sam heard this, then he really would have just sent a letter to get the family heirloom. But he couldn¡¯t.

    There was no activity for the rest of the day and the next day, every city guard post in the city exploded into smithereens, and Davon¡¯s friends are losing their will one after the other.

    They don¡¯t want to get involved in and they started leaving. Only Davon was left in the ce along with his family.

    He never thought that his friends would leave him like this.

    He wanted to find a way to contact the other party who is attacking them and negotiate a way out of the situation, but he doesn¡¯t know how to.

    Meanwhile, when the first guy who left the Night Demon family in the start saw the rest of them leaving too, he was a bit relieved, but seeing that Davon didn¡¯te, he became a bit depressed for his friend.

    "He should havee back the fight is futile, to begin with."

    He is twiddling with one container he brought back while speaking.

    "Senior brother, can I see that?"

    The young man who is dressed in a cloak and took over the construction site for the past few days asked.

    The senior brother threw that thing over and he caught it before taking a deep sniff.

    "You are right brother, the fight is futile to begin with. The Night Demon family is doomed."

    When he said that, everyone in the room was shocked.

    "Do you happen to know these people?" The guy who brought the container asked. After all, the rest of the group didn¡¯t even have the faintest idea of who they might be when they saw it.

    "I know and I am also sure that whoever you have in mind is not the person behind this incident."

    "Really? How do you know that for sure."

    "I don¡¯t really know who you have in mind, but I am sure that you wouldn¡¯t have met the person that is behind this. Anyway, it is good that you didn¡¯t get involved, because the person behind this is most likely a dozen times dangerous than the person you assumed him to be.

    If possible, get Davon toe back. There is nothing in the word that could save the Davon family from this predicament."

    With that, he stood up and walked towards the door.

    Just before he opened it, one of them asked.

    "Who is that person?"

    "It is better that you don¡¯t know. Don¡¯t get involved in this. I won¡¯t be here for the next few days, I will join you guys after the construction was over."

    "Hey wait."

    The dark elf stood up and grabbed the person¡¯s shoulder.

    "Tell us who that person is. What is with acting all mysterious?"

    The young man whose face is mostly covered with a cloak looked at him and said.

    "Let go."

    Just with the two words, the temperature of the room suddenly became colder.

    Another person came and pulled the Dark elf back and said to the young man.

    "You can go on your own business. We will wait here after the construction ispleted."

    After the young man left, the invisible tension was gone.

    "What just happened?" The dark elf asked as he wiped his sweat.

    "Don¡¯t even try to push him around or show any signs remotely close to that. He doesn¡¯t like it,st time a senior tried to use his authority over him was cut in half right in the middle of everyone.

    Single cut, he is not dead, but he is not alive either. His soul went dormantpletely and he is the son of an elder.

    When the elder demanded an exnation, this guy¡¯s master who doesn¡¯t hold a title in the sect and everyone thought of as a pushover came and almost cut down the elder in half.

    Don¡¯t piss him off, or we will not have pleasant days ahead of us. In all of the five great sects, he doesn¡¯t have to respect anyone, including the leaders of the sect.

    He can just do whatever he wanted and however, he wanted it."

    While they are talking, the young man came to the top of a cliff and held the container in his hands, his cloak blew off a bit with the wind and a sword could be seen hanging on his waist. A ck sword.

    "It seems like you are growing faster than I thought, we would be able to meet soon, but it is not now. I will give you a big surprise when we meet, this time I will beat you."

    With that, he walked away into the forest.

    Meanwhile, back at the Night Demon family, Davon is feeling helpless.

    "Davon, should we call your father."

    "Father is not present in the sect at the moment. And he doesn¡¯t have more influence than my friends. If they cannot do it, he cannot do it. We are going to have some big trouble. Just who did you guys offend this badly?"

    Sam who is keeping a watch over the family estate from afar noticed that Davon¡¯s friends left.

    "It seems like this as far as we can push them. Let¡¯s just proceed with the n, we cannot dy it any longer." And the team made their move.

 Chapter 1034: Fall of Night Demons

    Sam didn¡¯t care if Davon will go away or not.

    There is no way he could waste any more time. Anyway, it is easier for him to kill him and bury the evidencepletely. He can take care of the other matterster.

    He activated the wrist screen and selected the Night Demon family as the next target without any hesitation.

    They already created a lot ofmotion, so there is no need to worry about them knowing now.

    As soon as he selected the target, he immediately took out a bunch of tokens in his hands and started exploding them/

    Meanwhile, back in the Night Demon family.

    Since all the members were sent into the underground temple, they immediately saw the statues glowing a few seconds after Sam selected the Night Demon family on the list.

    But before they could react to that, they felt the trembling of the ground as the explosions hit the whole estate.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The energy sts hit the formation nodes. The whole ground quaked. Davon came out of the estate as he looked at the explosions in horror. The formation waspletely destroyed in an instant.

    As he looked at the whole scene in horror and was about toe out and check the situation, an attendant came running to him and exined the phenomenon with the statue.

    He ran in and the family head is already kneeling down before the statue.

    After they finished the small ritual, Hel¡¯s consciousness upied the statue and she spoke.

    "A man named Sam ising to your realm and would be messing with you, to get the family heirloom. From the recent activities, he must have already started his attacks. Are you suffering from something now?"

    The family head and Davon were surprised and he instantly started exining their current situation.

    "Those weird toys and attacking without even the opponent seeing is his forte, it is most probably him. He will be asking about your family heirloom and you are not allowed to give it to him no matter what.

    Kill him if it is possible.

    From what I know, he should be within the surrounding forests, but since he already revealed that he is going after your family, then he is going to attack you immediately, you don¡¯t have too much time to prepare so get ready. You better kill him, otherwise, you would have to pay with some consequences."

    With that she went away.

    Before the group could process the information, they already heard the sound of an explosion once again and Davon came out of the temple, along with the family head, the elders, and the other troops.

    Sam and his team are standing in front of the gate with the defensive formationspletely gone the whole ce is open for him.

    Sam stood on the harbinger as he looked at the whole family estate while the team members made their way in slowly.

    Sam waved his hand and something like a shotgun appeared in his hands.

    This is what he created for using the small liquid containers that are used for the explosions all this while and after some deliberation, he wanted to name them as liquid cells.

    The liquid cells that are the same size as the small battery is good for shooting at others. This gun is somewhere between the shotgun and the grenadeuncher.

    Even the loading of the cells inside the gun is being done by one of his new mechanisms using the space jade.

    Since he has the spatial element that he can use now, Sam has managed to find some new uses for the space jade. Now, he can make the mechanisms operate independently inside the space jade.

    In normal spatial rings, everything inside is a normal vacuum pocket of space. But the space jade turned out to be different. The space inside is actually a tangible closed pocket, even though it is isted and a living being cannot sustain inside, he managed to make the souls operate.

    He managed to make some inscriptions and create a gravitational field, a machine that operates independently with the spirits is can work inside and there is one fixed exit from the stone through which Sam can connect the machine to the outside world to another machine or a person.

    This mechanism is something that goes well with the rest of his new inventions. Now he can just make an automatic grenade maker inside a space jade with enough size and just let it operate inside, as long as there is enough material inside, he doesn¡¯t have to worry about the number of grenades he has.

    Anyway, he doesn¡¯t have any use for grenades at the moment, apart from selling.

    Currently, he is just using a space jade with a small space with a small mechanism that would load the gun with the small liquid cells.

    This is the test phase and if this works and the research that was still in the progress seeds, he can think of a lot of more inventions that would change the phase of the Dusk organization and even revolutionize the whole cultivation world for that matter.

    Anyway, he has to deal with the matter at hand for any of that to happen.

    Sam started shooting at different spots to make sure that the Night Demons cannot fight in a formation and proper sync.

    Davon looked at the whole scenario and felt the auras of the people that Sam had with and understood that they might need some help. The numbers wouldn¡¯t be an advantage to them and he wanted an attendant to call for his friends.

    Since it was confirmed that this person is not someone the friends assumed him to be, they can participate in it.

    But Sam who stayed at the gate, the only entrance doesn¡¯t n on letting anyone go.

    When the attendant tried to sneak out, he shot a cell at him without any hesitation, making his body explode into some bloody mist which was also obliterated with the energy st.

    It would be hard to even use soul necromancy on someone like that. Sam knew that it would be a waste of resources as the Night Demons have great souls and he saw first hand when they retrieved that young master¡¯s soul which was taken by Night Ghost.

    "What the fuck? Why are these guys doing this to us?" Davon muttered to himself as he took out a sword and jumped into the battle.

    The battle is decently one-sided leaning towards Sam.

    Within no time, there are only a bunch of elders and the family head standing along with Davon.

    They lost all the hope of moving forward and retreated, Sam made his way forward from the gate as he looked at them while the specter started the soul retrieval from the dead bodies that are spread all over the ce.

    "Why are you doing this?" Davon asked coldly as he looked at Sam who made his way forward.

    All this while, the rest of the team are obeying Sam¡¯s orders even in the battle. It is obvious that he is the leader of the whole thing.

    "Why? Didn¡¯t Hel tell you?" Sam asked casually in return.

    The family head and Davon yelled in reply.

    "How can you take the goddess¡¯ name that lightly with apleteck of respect?"

    "I don¡¯t really care. But I will tell you something that she didn¡¯t. You guys are all her pawns in arge game beyond you, your realm, and your family.

    She is a part of the group that tasked me with getting the heirloom of your family at any cost. We can kill you, exterminate you, and can even make you guys extinct.

    Generally, this is not my general way of dealing, I would have given you a business proposal first before trying to do something this extreme.

    But I already had some enmity with the undead faction and then the situation with the ck blood demons which ispletely idental. I know the enmity is night impossible to let go of, particrly the proud and noble Night Demons, so I decided to strike first instead of waiting for you attack."

    "I am a disciple of an Elder in the Five Great sects, my father is an outer deacon of the five great sects and he is already in the peak of Astral ne Transcendence if he breaks through to consummate he would be an elder in the sects.

    If I were you, I would just leave right now."

    "Well, you are not me. I would like to ask, how would your father know if I was the one who killed you? He is not here. Do your friends know that I am the one attacking you? For all they know, you guys are investigating me, but that doesn¡¯t mean they believe that I truly did this. Anyway, it is a waste of time for me to exin all of this to you.

    Why don¡¯t you just hand over the heirloom, I might give you a painless death."

 Chapter 1035: Talk with Hel

    Sam and the team finished off the Night Demon family. Except for the guy named Davon, the rest of the core members were killed. Davon was throw into the chessboard instead as an insurance n.

    Usually, Sam wouldn¡¯t have gone for this unnecessary bloodshed, this time he made the decision, because the Night Demons are formidable foes, for him to just let them be and stay with peace while they are still breathing under his neck.

    As for Davon, the outer Deacon of the Five Great sects being his father, he wanted to use him as a hostage if the situation arises where the father manages to catch up with them.

    After getting ahold of the family heirloom, Sam went into the underground temple where the whole of the Night Demon family was gathered. Most of them are weak and would take decades before they could be qualified to even think of making trouble for Sam. He let them live, but not without any other n.

    He left the Night Ghost, Tamas, and his specter to handle something which could be called as a ritual for the rest of the Night Demons, which reduces the chances of trouble even more. He walked towards the Hel statue and performed his own ritual with the blood of some Night Demons.

    The statue glowed and soon Hel¡¯s consciousness took over it, when she saw Sam in front of her, she was stunned, but she quickly recovered and spoke.

    "Guess, these people are also trash that couldn¡¯t even deal with you?"

    "If everyone that couldn¡¯t deal with me is trash, then doesn¡¯t that make you the biggest trash of all? After all, we met on equal terms face to face." Sam spoke sarcastically.

    Hel wanted to yell at him, but she knew it is exactly what Sam wanted and controlled her urge and decided adamantly to not lose herposure, at least in front of Sam. If she did lose it, it is definitely her loss.

    "I am not an Idiot like Hou Yi, to fall for your tricks, You cannot disturb me. Anyway, this is just one of the many forces that I have under me. Even if you destroyed all the forces under that list, I would still have forces numbering Dozen times more."

    "Of course, that is indeed true. Anyway, I wanted to ask you something. I heard something about the stray called Jaman and something happened a few decades ago. People are talking that a goddess is the main reason for it. By any chance are you involved? If you do, what the hell happened for them to talk about that, this many yearster."

    Hel paused for a moment, even though Sam couldn¡¯t see her expression through the statue, he could guess the surprised expression she might have had.

    "How do you even know that? Where did you hear about Jaman? It should be impossible for anyone to talk about it."

    "It seems like it is really rted to you. Anyway, I am not particrly interested in this situation, but when I saw the fear in the person that spoke to me, I couldn¡¯t help but be curious a bit. Okay then, I will take my leave."

    "No, wait. Who did you hear it from?"

    "I destroyed an Elven Branch around two years ago. The head of the elven branch who was on verge of death spoke about this in hisst moments. He wanted to make a confession before he died, he wanted someone to know the sins hemitted, so he asked me to listen to him. I was in a bit of a good mood.

    So, yeah, I listened to him and the first thought that came to my mind, when he thought of God and Goddess are Hou Yi and You. He didn¡¯t really go into details, he just said that whatever sins hemitted, he only shares the me for half of them and the other half goes to you two."

    Hel began to think nervously, but suddenly, she grew a faint suspicion and looked at Sam.

    "Why are you telling me this? Is this another one of your ns?"

    "Not really, I want you to stay alive by the time Ie there. I would kill your ass myself. Otherwise, there is no way my soul would have any piece if you died before that. From the looks of it, you protected the secret carefully, so do take care and wash your neck cleanly every day until I visit you. Goodbye."

    With that, Sam took a step back and threw a small liquid cell at the statue making it explode and copse. The night demon family task is finished. At least his part of it.

    Night Ghost, Tamas, and Specter are trying to erase the memory of the attack from their minds.

    Even though Sam wouldn¡¯t mind his identity being revealed, this time they dealt with a power that has some connections and rtions with even higher powers, if things go down that way, he would be in trouble. He needs at least a few years before he could deal with them.

    As for the citizens, he couldn¡¯t do anything about it, but at least they don¡¯t know that Sam is the primary suspect.

    As for why he didn¡¯t do the same with the core members, there is a high chance of their recovery of memory because of their current cultivation level. Which is not exactly a chance that Sam is willing to take at the moment.

    The issues were settled, it is time to distribute the loot. They stayed there for a few hours and collected all the loot that they can. Loot from the ces under the Night Demon family control.

    Sam needs spirit stones more than ever. The team went for the remaining resources.

    After the main loot was distributed, they moved to the other loot which needs to be distributed between Sam and Night Ghost.

    The loot of souls. Night Ghost, even took the help of Tamas and Specter to loot the souls from the dead and stored them in a special container Sam made. A container made of the empty spirit stone material.

    After the team finished their job there and left the estate, they went to a lower level realm that was a bit far away and rested there while Sam looked through the souls he collected, he didn¡¯t collect every soul, he looked through them specifically to collect the souls of the people who have any form of experience in the four major professions. As for identifying them, he just looked through the records of the family that he stole.

    Night Ghost took some souls that are useful for his growth and then left the choice to the specter who also devoured many souls that are not useful for any of them.

    As for Tamas who also contributed to this, he didn¡¯t want any souls at the moment, since he is a necromancer and is a bit picky at what souls he would use for his purpose

    They directly went into some special container that was inscribed with a bunch of formations.

    While Sam is busy examining his loot, the news about the Night Demon family spread far and wide like a wildfire.

    Even Davon¡¯s friends who are a few realms away from the Night Demon realm got the news.

    They already expected this but they still couldn¡¯t help but feel surprised by this. This happened faster than expected. They decided to take a look at the Night Demon family and see if they can find any clues to give them to Davon¡¯s father.

    This time the young man in the cloak who didn¡¯t go the first time also joined.

    They reached the estate and saw the remains of the Battle, the low-level members of the Night Demon family are cleaning up the battle area which was full of corpses.

    "This is worse than I imagined and way faster too. It is almost like the other party waited solely for us to leave this ce and attacked as soon as we moved."

    Dark elf muttered to himself and looked at the cloaked young man who is more focused on the wreckage of the battle.

    He wanted to ask about the person who did this, but held back and went to meet with the Night demon family member with the rest of his friends.

    They asked some questions, but Night Demons cannot remember any faces or names of anything rted to battle. They could only leave helplessly.

    "We need to finish the mission faster and report this to Davon¡¯s father." They decided and went back to do their work.

    While things are like this here, somewhere far away in the higher heavenly realms, some gods are meeting and it was called by Hel herself.

    The remaining two gods are actually Indra and Hou Yi.

    "Why did you call us so suddenly?" Hou wasn¡¯t really excited about the call and even Indra showed signs of annoyance."

    "The Jaman."

    She said these words and the remaining two widened their eyes in disbelief at what they heard.

 Chapter 1036: Meeting Gods

    "Why are we talking about this?"

    Indra asked as he regained hisposure.

    "Some asked me about this from the lower realms. They said that this topic is being talked about a lot in the lower realms."

    "Who is that someone?" Hou Yi asked as he looked at Hel¡¯s eyes. Hel thought for a moment clearly showing her hesitation, but she finally opened up.

    "It is Sam."

    The remaining two gods were shocked and this time, it is more than disbelief, they became anxious.

    "How the hell did he know?" Indra yelled at the top of his lungs.

    Hel looked at him coldly as her aura raged and said.

    "Shut the fuck up and sit down. Yelling doesn¡¯t solve anything and sends everything to shit." She really doesn¡¯t want to talk about this with these two. But these two are the only ones that are involved at the same level as her. So, she kind of doesn¡¯t have a choice.

    "It must be some kind of trick he is using. That little bastard is really good at this kind of thing. He must have gotten this information from Gambler. If anyone has any possibility of knowing this information, it must be the gambler."

    "It is not him. And I don¡¯t think this another one of Sam¡¯s tricks." Hel decisively rejected both ideas instantly.

    When the remaining two looked at her in askance, she proceeded to exin.

    "Gambler does know about the incident and he came to me. We signed a contract to keep the confidentiality. He wouldn¡¯t be revealing this to anyone. As for why Sam is not ying tricks, he said it himself. He wanted to kill me with his own hands and the rumors he heard seemed to be a bit troublesome.

    He wanted me to take care of the situation so that I wouldn¡¯t die before hees here and kills me."

    "And you believed that at his face value?" Hou Yi said from the side.

    Hel looked at him coldly and said.

    "He has much more face value than you two clowns that are gods. And I have many more reasons to believe him than believing you two. He never had to hold back his words in front us, just because we are gods, we cannot touch him directly no matter how much we hate him and he constantly provoked us time and again, without any form of restraint.

    I don¡¯t see any reason for him to lie to me."

    Hou Yi was about to say something, but Indra stopped him and asked.

    "I thought this situation was supposed to be sealedpletely. But it seems like the trouble arose. What else did he say?"

    "He said that he heard this from an Elven branch he destroyed two years ago. I inquired and found out that is under Hou Yi." Hel said and looked at him.

    Hou Yi nodded and agreed.

    "Yes, he indeed did that and the n was involved in this."

    "He said that the head of the family of someone that is on hisst breath wanted to confess his sins to lessen the guilt and he said that only half of the me was theirs and the half of it was ours, he even named Hou Yi and me."

    "If the elven branch was destroyed, then doesn¡¯t that mean that the problem is solved?"

    "No, there are other ces that are involved in the incident. Even if we have drafted most of them into our direct forces, there are some remnants that are still present in the forces. Let us contact those forces and ask them to report the incident as soon they even hear about this. We need to increase some surveince on them..."

    Hel went on to exin what they need to do.

    While the gods are worried about Sam¡¯s simple statement, the man himself is currently busy.

    Since he got the decent soul loot, he decided to try some research and experiments while his team investigates their next target which is actually a ce under Hou Yi.

    They moved far away from the Night Demon realm and their current targets are considered extremely low levelpared to the Night Demon family.

    While the team is investigating, Sam is currently tinkering with a machine that looked like a metallic rectangr block that is four feet long, three feet wide, and one and a half feet long.

    On the top of the block, the is a circle with a radius of one foot in the center.

    As for theteral surfaces, on the four feet side, there are three vertical grooves which are a foot long and two inches wide.

    The grooves are simr on the opposite side.

    On the three feet side, one side ispletely devoid of any grooves or protrusions making it apletely clean surface.

    On the remaining side, there are two grooves, on the center, there is a small circr groove that can house an average-sized space jade and beside it, there is a palm-shaped groove that houses the palm of the user.

    He took out six transparent cylinders.

    Out of which three of them have white liquid. It is the liquid energy created from the neutral spiritual energy and the remaining three cylinders have three white glowing orbs that are floating within.

    He inserted three of the energy cylinders on one side with three vertical grooves and the remaining three with orbs on the other side.

    He then took out a space jade and ced it in the small circr groove.

    He ced the palm on the palm-shaped groove as he injected some energy inside.

    There are some mechanical sounds that could be heard from the machine and the circr section on the top of the surface moved downwards and started rotating, the empty spirit stones started appearing on it. The spirit stones are a bit active as the energy drawn from the three cylinders on the side was used.

    Sam is controlling everything with his thoughts.

    After the initial activation, the three orbs from the cylinders moved upwards and disappeared as they entered the machine through the connection between the block and the cylinders.

    At the same time, the whole top surface of the machine is glowing.

    Soon three human silhouettes appeared on top of the circr surface and the glow on the surface changed a bit, it is not even now as it was concentrated on the three silhouettes on the surface.

    They looked like miniature creatures and they slowly grew in size as they rotated along with the surface and after they stopped growing, they channeled the energy to the empty spirit stones.

    The stones started bing active and when the activation ispleted, the three silhouettes started molding the active stones, they moved them together and started molding them by merging them first and channeling the energy into the lump.

    The three silhouettes worked like that and soon it turned into a cylinder. At this moment, Sam took out another space jade and reced the one that was already ced in.

    Soon the white liquid starteding out of the sides of the circr groove created when the circr surface moved downwards and entered the cylinder.

    Finally, a cap with a bunch of inscriptions and protrusions came to the top of the cylinder as the three silhouettes worked together.

    Sam removed the palm and three silhouettes turned back into orbs and entered the cylinders.

    The three cylinders with energy liquid have some change as some of the liquid disappeared, but it was only around two to three percent and not anyone could have noticed it.

    Sam picked the cylinder in the middle and the circr surface was back to its original state.

    This is the production unit for the cylinders.

    But this is still not enough for mass production, because it is too cruel and too evil even for Sam.

    Because the silhouettes are actually the souls of the three formation masters of the Night Demon family.

    At first, he tried to use some spirits from the enchantment technique, but with his current level, he couldn¡¯t find the skill spirits that would be able toplete the progress. So, since he is going to kill them anyway, he decided to use the souls for this.

    Even though, he is cold-hearted, for some reason he couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit reluctant to reveal this to others.

    If by any chance theter generations discover this method, he is sure that the people with talent would be harvested and used for the production of these liquid containers.

    Particrly when they get to know what the liquid energy and the inventions that he made that requires these liquid containers.

    He knew it is kind of hypocritical for him to kill his enemies and use his souls for his own gain, but thinking that it is evil for others to do the same.

    But the thing is he doesn¡¯t want to be the reason for others to be that evil and didn¡¯t want the responsibility of indirectly causing so many deaths when he has the means to stop it.

    If he is the same guy as he was in the past, he would have left it as it is, but now he doesn¡¯t want to.

    This invention although a great and efficient one is merely an experiment, there is no way it would see the light and be used by anyone other than himself.

 Chapter 1037: HobGoblin tribe

    Sam came out of the small research retreat to work on their next target. He was expecting to see the results of the initial investigation from their team, but when he heard and saw the report from the team, there was only one response that came almost instinctually.

    "Are you sure this report is urate?" Sam asked as he looked at the team members.

    "Yes, Boss. This is hundred percent urate." Saber Monarch said with a sigh.

    Their next actual target is a Hob Goblin tribe that worships Hou Yi and in fact, the tribe is named after Hou Yi himself with Hou tribe.

    The Hob Goblin race is evolved from the Goblins in ancient times and it outgrew its predecessor in strength, size, and intelligence.

    Hob-goblins have a much stronger affinity with elements and they are much more intelligent can control their own urges, which is the main difference from the normal Goblin tribe.

    That is also the reason that Sam felt the need to prepare beforehand when dealing with this tribe, even though the leader is only a person a Middle-stage transcendence of the Astral ne. Night Ghost alone should have been enough to take care of them.

    Hob Goblins are weak innately and prey on the weak a lot based on their instincts, but they are good at one thing, formations. Every one of the Hob Goblins is a born warrior like minotaur and centaur, but unlike them, the Hob Goblins have a higher elemental affinity. If one in twenty to thirty minotaurs gains elemental affinity, almost every second Hob Goblin has an elemental affinity and they are quite diverse in their awakening, they can even awaken spatial ability and it wouldn¡¯t be that surprising.

    Along with the diverse elemental users and their natural talent in the formations, the tribe is full of talents, and together, they could defend against almost all kinds of invasions. They are truly one of a kind among their peers.

    But their potential is extremely limited and they cannot grow past the Transcendent stages of the Astral ne.

    And they are also weak in invading others, which ces them on the lower end of the hierarchy among races.

    But that is not the only reason they are on such a low level, to the point that it is first on Sam¡¯s list.

    It is because, the Hob Goblins are a bit sentimental when ites to territory and they wouldn¡¯t move their core operational base that easily along with, this territorial protective instinct caused internal conflicts, and oncerge tribe divided into five different tribes and worshipped dive different gods.

    Hou tribe is one of those five tribes and they worship Hou Yi while they are skilled at archery.

    The main base of operations for all these tribes is the closest city to Sam¡¯s current location. The team went there to investigate that tribe as well, but the results smacked them in face.

    Because, currently the number of five tribes in the city is not five, but one and that is Hou Tribe. The rest of the tribes didn¡¯t disappear, rather they were conquered and merged together. The report is regarding the process of merging and the reasons for it.

    Approximately a year ago, the Hou Hob Goblin tribe decided to expand and waged war on the remaining four tribes at the same time, Not only did they manage to win making everyone shocked, the tribe chief made the remaining four tribes chiefs as elders without killing them.

    After they took over the city, the first thing they did is rebuild the city wall and install new defensive formations along with it. The whole city and its structures were used and made into formations, just like how Sam did with his own city.

    The security personnel of the city was also upgraded, the causal guards that go on regr patrol are reced by Astral ne Pre-transcendent stage cultivators.

    Even at the gate, there is an Initial stage Transcendent Astral ne cultivator taking charge along with a bunch of Pre-transcendent stage cultivators. Every creature that needs to enter the city must go through a special formation that uncovers any disguise technique.

    The shocking thing is that this is the only time, Kiran¡¯s disguise technique was beaten and he almost got caught.

    No creatures, souls or even lifeless objects can sneak into the city they all must go through the formation at the entrance.

    Apart from that, the whole city wall was mounted withrge crossbows with some high-level enhancements.

    The city is backed against a cliff so there is no rear side, the remaining sides are guarded by the wall which is arge circr arc and it is guarded strictly.

    There hired a necromancer to ce a necromancer ring which is mostly dormant and could only be activated upon invasion and they even made some small necromancer rings within the city.

    The beast tamers that are specialized in assisting people in taming the beasts were hired and they made Hob Goblins sign contracts with every beast that is at Astral ne Pre-transcendence and above within the surrounding forest and mountain region.

    The puppet masters were hired to create a puppet and Golem army even if they are weak, they were being used as formation nodes and some cannon fodder just in case.

    The whole city was fortified and it ispletely giving out a war-like feel.

    It is as if they are waiting for some foreign invader to strike at any moment. And the reason behind this made Sam stunned even more.

    It turned out that the Hob Goblins are preparing for a human that would bring them a disaster.

    The story is that the tribe chief of the Hou Tribe heard from a seer that a human along with his team and some other weird methods would strike their tribe and the only possible way to stand against them is to unite the five tribes and band together.

    Hou Yi, the god worshipped by the Hobgoblin tribe was generous in his help when that tribe chief requested him. Hou Yi gave the blueprints for high-level formations, weapons, and artifacts that could help them win the war against the remaining tribes and helped the Hou Tribe unite and the current situation is the final result of the whole scenario.

    When Sam heard the story, he has a faint suspicion that the whole incident might be some kind of ploy from Hou Yi. But at the moment, it is not the time for them to ponder about that.

    They need to make a decision on how to proceed further in the current situation.

    Sam looked through all the notes the teammates made while investigating and sighed.

    "It seems like we need to go for a head-on war. I can¡¯t see another quick way."

    From the looks of it all the humans are being suspected and they are a team that mostly consisted of humans. Even if they sneak in separately, they would be kept under a tight watch and they would have some trouble doing anything that would raise suspicion which would slow them down. Time is a valuablemodity for them to waste on this tribe.

    "So, do you guys have any objections regarding the direct war?"

    All of them shook their heads.

    So, Sam proceeded to exin the n.

    "Even if this is a head-on war there is no need to reveal ourselves this early. We can just wait for now and prepare for the next two days. I have a bunch of new toys that require some practical testing and this would be a good opportunity.

    And the first step in these preparations is that I need an aerial map of the immediate surroundings of the city. Don¡¯t stray too far, around a few hundred meters would be sufficient. But within this short-range, we need to be extremely detailed.

    Hob goblins might be good at fortification, but expertise happens to be destruction we will see whose expertise prevails this time.

    Tamas and Night Ghost are excluded from the aerial mapping, both of you are in charge of dealing with the necromancer ring so make your preparations, any gains you get from that are yours to keep. "

    After that, Sam left the both of them and soared on the harbinger to participate in the aerial mapping with the rest of the team.

    As he hovered on the harbinger, there was a faint smile on his face. The Harbinger is currently at Spiritual Infancy and so are the two swords, the reaper, and the executioner. Unlike the feather coat which had longer infancy, Sam is sure that these three wouldn¡¯t bother him as much.

    He is really looking forward to how they look.

    He almost felt like a father waiting for his child to be born.

    By the next day, they finished the mapping and Sam started calcting something.

    After that was done, he took out some poles and some one-foot-long liquid containers. The metal poles have gaps in their structure to hold the containers in ce.

    The containers all had brown earth elemental energy liquid.

    Sam twisted the cap a bit and pressed on different protrusions before cing it in the pole.

    "This is the active state of the pole. Take these and do this properly before stabbing them in the points marked on the map.

    There is a button on top of it, do not press it under any costs before getting my instructions."

 Chapter 1038: Direct attack

    The team carefully looked at the activation process and distributed the containers and poles.

    "Keep yourmunication devices active all the time and listen to my orders and execute everything within a moment. I don¡¯t want any mishap to mess up the timing."

    The teammates nodded and immediately left to their assigned spots.

    After they left, Sam hovered on the harbinger as he looked at the city and move towards the gate. He is hovering over a height of around twenty feet which is just a bit more than the current city fall.

    When Sam arrived at the clear visible range or to be precise the range of the crossbows the guards and the shooters noticed him and they became alert. But they didn¡¯t make a move.

    Sam waited in the same spot for a while with amunication device hung over his ear. After he got the confirmation that the poles are properly ced in their designated spots, Sam took a deep breath and amplified his voice using the spiritual energy, before yelling at the top of his lungs.

    "Hob Goblins of the city. I am Sam and I am the human that the seer told you about. The one who brings a disaster to you."

    Sam paused and let his words sink in. The Elders, the tribe chief, and all the members inside the residence came out. Some of the elders and tribe chiefs have some methods to look at what Sam is doing and was surprised a bit.

    Sam could see thergest building in the city with just his normal vision, he used the eye technique to see if all the core members from the main buildings came out and after confirming that, he continued.

    "I am actually here for the heirloom of the Hou Tribe, the elemental dismantling bow. If you want we can discuss a price for it and everything ends smoothly, but if you do not take the offer, things would be different and we would need to go through a hard way. So, do pick with caution.

    And the citizens, if your rulers pick the hard way, I am not responsible for any losses that you might suffer, so do take your time to evacuate while you still have a chance.

    Everyone who is outside the gate of the city would be excused.

    You have ten minutes to decide."

    Sam became silent for a while. He was pretty straightforward with his intentions and anything that might happen after this would be the fault of the Hob Goblins themselves.

    After the ten minutes are over, Sam smiled and once again spoke as he looked at the Hob Goblins on the city wall aiming the crossbows at him.

    "Your rulers picked the hard way. To the citizens, this is thest chance, you have five more minutes."

    Sam spoke as he looked at the wrist screen and selected the Hou tribe in the list.

    The tribe chief who is ready to give orders to the shooters to start attacking Sam, suddenly ran inside the mansion as soon as an attendant came and whispered something in his ear.

    He is going to the temple. Since Sam selected the tribe in the list, Hou Yi would definitely give the information now and he doesn¡¯t have to hold back.

    When the tribe chief went in and performed the ritual, Hou Yi appeared and spoke through the statue.

    "The man named Sam is the human who would bring your disaster. It is a good thing that you guys are prepared and from what I know he might already be there. It would be hard to deal with him, so don¡¯t hold back at all and kill him if possible."

    Hou Yi immediately jumped to the killing verdict without giving any chance for the tribe chief to pay respects or any other, he didn¡¯t let him speak and just talked and talked and sent him back.

    The tribe chief was a bit skeptical about the strong attitude Hou Yi has regarding Sam, but heplied and gave orders for the crossbow shooters to attack.

    The crossbows started glowing brightly.

    The crossbows are simr to the ones Sam used in the Banished realm to help the dwarves. The bolts that are being shot from it are nothing short of spears.

    The formation of the city wall activated and it channeled energy into the crossbows making the attack a lot more powerful than it is at the moment.

    A single attack would make an Astral ne Pre-transcendent cultivator immobile. If all the boltsnded on Sam, he would die without a doubt. That is if all of themnded on him.

    With a wave of his hand, the Void hopper appeared on his palm and it jumped onto Sam¡¯s shoulder and rubbed its head to his face.

    Sam smiled as he yed with the little guy.

    The shooters were dumbfounded and just shot the crossbows at the same moment.

    The spears are enveloped with all kinds of elemental energies. Sam didn¡¯t move even though all the spears came at him menacingly.

    He channeled spatial energy and the Void hopper that looked at the iing attacks also did the same as they yed together.

    The spears that are had a lot of momentum and looked like they could drill through the mountain to reach their target suddenly stopped a few centimeters away from lodging into Sam¡¯s body.

    Visible energy ripples appeared in the surroundings.

    The elemental energies that enveloped the spears slowly dissipated as they couldn¡¯t prate the barrier and they just stayed in ce until any traces of the elemental energy werepletely disappeared.

    Then the spears that became stagnant suddenly turned around with the tips pointing at the crossbows that shot them.

    Sam activated wind elemental energy fusion as the Void hopper held them in ce.

    The wind fusion wasplete and Sam let his wings out. A few feathers came out of the wings as they moved towards the spears and got attached to them.

    The glow from the feathers spread to all the spears as they started spinning rapidly with the sharp winds enveloping itpletely creating a majestic disy.

    The crossbow shooters were lost in a daze for a second, but when they saw the spears being aimed at them, they knew they are in a pickle and quickly loaded the crossbows for the next round.

    But they were toote, with a snap of Sam¡¯s fingers the spears shot like streaks of condensed wind as they reached their targets in no time.

    Some barriers were instantly activated to defend, but they might as well have not been activated, they broke like eggshells upon contact.

    The spears destroyed the crossbows and then they moved forward as passed through the shooters than the walls and then finally stuck the structures behind the wall.

    The whole scene turned into chaos in an instant and the destruction Sam caused made them feel a chill run down their spine.

    Half of the shooters died instantly and the remaining half are severely injured and would die in a few minutes, the structural damage to the wall, the city was also considerable.

    "Activate the barrier."

    The expression on the face of the tribe¡¯s chief didn¡¯t look good.

    Currently, he is in the greatest phase of his life. Due to him taking the action from the words of the seer and uniting the Hob Goblins, he was praised as a hero, and all the fortifications he did and everything he did to protect the tribe made the people revere him.

    There were a few moments, that he desperately wanted the human to strike with that disaster and he wanted to ovee it so that with this momentum he would be one of the few people remembered by the future generations as a great hero of the Hobgoblins. bUt now that the real deal is standing at his doorstep, he knew that he shouldn¡¯t have wished that much.

    The saying, ¡¯Be careful what you wish for¡¯ was not created for the sake of it.

    He could now see the expressions of the elders and other core members that are looking at the scenario, they are starting to doubt if he would be able to defend them from the disaster.

    He gritted his teeth and ordered.

    "Activate the Necromancer ring and the barrier."

    The subordinates immediately passed the orders and executed them.

    As Sam slowly moved forward while still smiling and ying with the Void hopper, the necromancer ring was activated.

    Sam is currently hovering over the necromancer ring as he didn¡¯t move forward and just waited there.

    The souls were the first toe out from the ring and they zoomed towards Sam rapidly.

    Sam didn¡¯t even flinch, in fact, he didn¡¯t even take a look at theing souls.

    Right before the soul was about to make contact with him, a dark grey-colored ghost appeared out of nowhere and bit the soul on its neck.

    Compared to the soul¡¯s translucent white body and the normal features, the dark grey ghost looked like an epitome of evil with hollow and dangerous features.

    The ghost used its arms to tear into the soul¡¯s semi tangible body and ripped it into pieces before sucking it all inside and gave out an expression as if it just had a delicious meal.

 Chapter 1039: Not much time

    Sam looked at his two subordinates dealing with the necromancer ring while he mused over the technique he used earlier.

    The wind technique is one of the bloodline arts of the Sky sovereign roc. The Myriad feather technique.

    This technique can use the feathers directly or the feathers could be attached to projectile weapons and the most important feature of this technique is that with sufficient cultivation level, the numbers of feathers could be altered ording to the user¡¯s will.

    Not just this, recently Sam realized the light elemental bloodline technique of the golden sun crow can also be altered.

    As he looked at the effects of the techniques while teasing the little guy in his hands, the battle happening right below him turned extremely intense.

    Tamas is currently sitting at a spot in the Necromancer ring as he closed his eyes. A bunch of shadows came from his shadow and a group of physical undead came out of his spatial ring as they swarmed throughout the necromancer ring.

    By now only the soul undead came out of the necromancer ring and the remaining undead creatures are still buried a few feet under the ground, they are slowly trying to get out of the soil and start fighting, there are pitifully few shadow undead and a lot of physical undead, but the physical undead is of arge variety even with the beasts included.

    Tamas started destroying each and every one of them as his undead absorbed the death energying from them.

    Meanwhile, Night Ghost just stood there with his arms closed a few feet behind Tamas.

    There are a bunch of Ghosts screaming anding out of his body and their tails were attached to his back.

    s

    They are ripping each soul and started feasting on them.

    This whole thing is carnage.

    The souls from the necromancer ring are nothing more than fodder as for the undead, they didn¡¯t even get the chance to go near Sam.

    When Night Ghost was done with the souls, Sam once again moved forward on the harbinger while Night Ghost kept up with him on the ground.

    Even though, but there is a barrier waiting for them that will block their entrance into the city. Sam looked at the barrier and spoke into themunication device on his ear.

    "Activate the poles."

    The teammates got the order and pressed the buttons instantly.

    They could see the brown earth elemental liquid energy suddenly being drained out of the container and entering the pole forcefully and then the energy entered the ground from which point a wave of an earth elemental energy moved towards the city wall which is just a few feet away.

    As soon as the wave of energy shed with the wall,

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Explosions urred. The wave of energy exploded as soon as it touched the wall and the formation barrier was instantly destroyed.

    Along with that, the wall started cracking.

    The cracks spread all over the wall as if it was made of fragile ss before crashing down as a whole.

    The city wall and any formations that are associated with it arepletely gone.

    "Enter the City."

    Sam ordered through themunication device and all the teammates entered the city instantly.

    The tribe chief who looked at the current situation already sent the orders. His main focus was on Sam and Night Ghost since the start as they are the ones out in the open. But now that wall crashed and he got reports and different people are entering from different sides and particrly, when he heard about their power levels, he became a bit anxious.

    He took a breath to calm himself down and looked at the whole city from the vantage point of the mansion he was in.

    Even though he made a lot of preparations, he didn¡¯t know exactly what he is preparing for.

    The thing he had in mind regarding the disaster is that the young man would bring an army. So, he prepared an army with soldiers of different levels.

    When he saw Night Ghost entering the city through the main entrance, he saw something unbelievable. Just from experiencing the aura of the Night Ghost, the low-level soldiers started fainting.

    Now the soldiers which he thought would help him were nothing but a hindrance.

    He turned around and looked at therge table which has the city¡¯syout and started arranging some models ording to the report.

    As much as Sam might be the disaster, his current focus was divided among the Night Ghost and the rest of the teammates.

    "Send two of the former tribe chiefs to fight against the man with Ghosts. As for the rest of the intruders, don¡¯t hold back. Since it is not the war with the army, send two Initial Stage Transcendent stage cultivators of the Astral ne for each person. Kill them without holding back.

    There is no point in holding back for pride and such."

    The chief ordered. Most of Sam¡¯s teammates were Peak of Pre-transcendence in Astral ne. So, sending two Transcendence stage cultivators is a bit of overkill, but the tribe chief didn¡¯t want to leave a chance to others.

    Sam and Night Ghost traveled openly, but the same is not true for the rest of the teammates. Except for Vidyut who immediately looked for a high vantage point and climbed a tower before taking his bow, the rest of the teammates decided to take advantage of the city¡¯syout.

    The people that were deployed by the tribe chief, though, didn¡¯t bother hiding and moved along the rooftops.

    They are trying to cover the maximum area to find the enemies since they have an advantage in numbers.

    While things are like that, Sam was also greeted with his own opponents.

    At least for the rest of the team, there are two cultivators, each, but from what he could see in the front over hundred opponents are swarming towards him from various spots of the city.

    Sam smiled at this and took out the swords.

    Since they are on the verge of attaining spirits, this is the perfect ce to speed up the process. He didn¡¯t get off the harbinger and neither did the little guy on his shoulder leave him, he let the opponents surround him as he dove into action.

    His first targets are the crossbow shooters stationed nearby.

    He used the full speed of Harbinger and started cutting their heads off with a single sh. In arge crowd battle, they would be a lot of nuisance.

    By the time he was done, the first wave already hit him, the Initial stage and Middle stage Pre-transcendent cultivators are all swarming towards him and most of them are on Aerial beasts.

    Since these guys are considered powerful within the tribe, they are distributed on arge area throughout the city to cover all points, but Sam¡¯s attack is straightforward and didn¡¯t bother using any tactics, so the initial arrangement should have been advantageous became disadvantageous instead.

    Sam looked at the people that areing on the flying beasts.

    If it is anyone, the beasts might have be a hindrance, but for him, they might as well be an advantage. He activated his beast bloodlines, all of them, and surrounded himself with the aura. Looking at this, the little guy on Sam¡¯s shoulders also got excited and he also channeled his beast aura towards the uing beasts.

    All the beasts that were rapidly flying towards Sam, stopped in their tracks and when their owners urged them to moved forward, they resisted with all they got and it took a herculean effort to just convince them otherwise and move a few feet forward, but that was enough for Sam to make a move of his own.

    Sam channeled Spatial energy into the reaper sword as he zoomed towards his opponents on harbinger.

    He didn¡¯t bother to aim for any critical parts and vital points, all he did was leave a sh on their bodies mostly on their torso and the chest.

    The spatial energy sh is a technique called spatial rend.

    It creates a small spatial rend which creates a small pocket vacuum that tries to chaotically suck the surroundings.

    Even when it misses and shes thin air, the resulting rend might will destroy the nearest object.

    Sam¡¯s precision and the clumsy reaction of the hobgoblins because of the beasts¡¯ misbehavior are a greatbination and as the shesnded on their bodies, they started sucking the flesh into it.

    s

    As for the executioner sword, it doesn¡¯t need any extra enhancements, the poison that enters the victim and the corrosive effect of it is enough to deal with them.

    The whole thing happened in a sh and the first wave was easily finished, the remaining soldiers are alling towards Sam in a frenzy as they jumped over the rooftops partially destroying the city.

    It could be said that all the troops of the Hob Goblins are jumping over the rooftops.

    Sam waited for their arrival and turned around to take a look at the situation, Night Ghost is currently holding the two former Chiefs by their throats and dragged them as he walked forward.

    Two ghosts are sucking the souls out of the Hobgoblins. Sam thought that this battle wouldst for a while, but from the looks of it, it wouldn¡¯t take much time.

 Chapter 1040: Extreme Measures

    Sam started battling the hobgoblins as they came.

    Not everyone is a prodigy and not everyone is as skilled as the opponents, Sam faced in his one-year journey. Maybe in all of the Hob Goblin tribe, including the new members that joined by the forceful merger, a dozen guys might put up some fight. As for the rest, they would at most be fodder, and particrly, when Sam only needs one sh and he has high mobility with his hoverboard, things are easy.

    Even the archers that are shooting at him from afar couldn¡¯t do anything.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but be disappointed at the quality of the opponents as the time went through.

    The tribe chief looked at the scene and gritted his teeth before giving out an order.

    "Send a Transcendent stage cultivator to kill that guy."

    "Sir, but.."

    "No buts, we need to get rid of this disaster at any cost. Who cares about honor and pride at a moment like this, look at that guy. He would destroy our whole younger generation at this rate."

    And just like that an Astral ne Transcendent stage cultivator was deployed.

    Sam didn¡¯t know any of this, he is just ying everyone that came towards him in a single sh. Even though he didn¡¯t execute them with the intention of being shy, his moves are indeed so as they were enhanced by the sight of blood and the falling hobgoblins.

    s

    This is the first proper battle he was in after the length restriction, even the battle with the Night Demon family was mostly handled by the rest and Sam only stayed there for support.

    Now that he has no restrictions, he went crazy.

    Sam just stabbed both of the swords into the hobgoblin that jumped at him. The body is hanging at Sam which he threw at another opponent, but he used void style on the body which made it explode as soon as it hit the opponent which created the bloody mist in the air.

    Sam turned around to fight another opponent, but all of a sudden he sensed a threat and was about to turn around.

    With the cover of the bloody mist, someone actually jumped towards Sam and tried to stab him.

    Sam moved the harbinger, he wouldn¡¯t hit his vitals no matter what. But he would definitely take some damage. As he cursed himself for being careless, he sensed something else and his nervous face turned to smirk.

    An arrow covered in Indigo lightning came from afar and hit the transcendent that wasing towards him.

    The arrow zapped the guy and he lost all his momentum, Sam used the chance to sh as many times as he can. He even followed the guy¡¯s descent with the harbinger as he shed him to make sure he died.

    When the hobgoblins saw Sam¡¯s descent, they were excited as this is the perfect time to get rid of Sam off of the harbinger and they made a group attack.

    But Sam kept an eye on them from the start and moved upwards and rapidly changed his direction.

    The Hob Goblins looked at the small liquid cylinder that is glowing on the body of the transcendent, but it was toote.

    *BOOM*

    An explosion and urred and this time, Sam used the spatial element, arge spatial crack appeared creating a vacuum. When the little guy saw this situation, Sam could sense his feelings. He is in awe at the destruction this is bringing.

    Sam shook his head and this time, he forcefully threw the little guy back into the divine dimension. Now Yanwu and the rest are going to have a handful. For some weird reason, this guy always tries to imitate Sam and this time, he is going to do those spatial shes all over the divine dimension.

    Sam looked at Vidyut who is jumping over the rooftops while he moved towards different teammates and supported them. Paras is also moving along with them.

    Sam called through themunication device and said.

    "Thank you."

    With that, Sam continued forward without dying much.

    The Hob Goblins might be elite at defending with their numbers, but that only applies for well-structured armies.

    Now all the measures that are taken to defend against an army are biting them in the back and this battle ispletely about the quantity rather than the quality, it only became easier as time passed.

    Night Ghost is directly walking towards the main mansion without any hindrances while the rest of the team are fighting against the Astral ne transcendent level cultivators.

    Even though some of them are at the peak stage of the Astral ne Pre-transcendence, they can still fight against one initial stage transcendent cultivator. Saber Monarch, Vidyuth, and Paras are having a rtively easier time with even the transcendent stage cultivators, so they are helping the teammates.

    All in all it is well bnced and the low-level soldiers at Astral ne initiation can only do one thing to help the Hob Goblins and that is to not get in the way.

    As for the formations which are the forte of the Hobgoblins, they were being dealt with the liquid cells.

    If the team members areing across some formations that they cannot handle, all they have to do is, throw a single liquid cell at them and be done with it.

    Even the small necromancer ring was being dealt with like that.

    The tribe chief looked at the city that has been turned into ruins and felt exasperated. Every decision he made and every order he gave was being backfired. The only proper decision he might have made until now is to hide the citizens in the fifteen minutes that Sam gave in the beginning.

    The citizens are in the bunkers of the main mansion.

    So, no matter what level of destruction they caused, they would at least be safe for now.

    The tribe chief looked at the whole scenario and started thinking. He wants to see if there is any way they could win, but everything is hitting a dead end. Even though the lower-level soldiers were spared, Sam is rooting out the next immediate generations and the only people that are left and have any chance of winning are the twelve elites that are about to join in on the battle. Apart from that, the transcendent stage cultivators they lost are also high in number.

    Particrly, that guy Vidyut ispletely insane. He took out the most people with his archery.

    He gritted his teeth and picked up his bow and started shooting.

    His main target is obviously Sam.

    Sam, who sensed the danger, immediately negated the thrust on the harbinger to descend as fast as he can.

    And even then, he barely managed to dodge the attack which killed one of the elites of the HobGoblins.

    Sam was stunned and he could feel his heart racing. He would have definitely died if the arrow hit him.

    He looked at the Tribe chief who is aiming another arrow at Sam.

    Sam activated wind elemental fusion as he moved and channeled the spatial energy along with it. The technique he used when he was racing gran. The dual fusion method.

    He moved on the harbinger as he first enveloped it with wind elemental energy and then with spatial elemental energy.

    He shed around with the board as he used the spatial blink to dodge the arrows and every time he blinked he appeared near the group of hobgoblins and used them as meat shields just in case and if an immediate arrow didn¡¯te, he just slit some throats as they tried to escape and dodged the next arrow that came towards him.

    "Guys, the big dog is chasing after me. Night Ghost, you need to speed up."

    "I want to boss, but I have two big dogs with me and they are better than the first two dogs. It would take at least four minutes for me to deal with them."

    "I don¡¯t know if I can hold for four minutes. It is hard to activate dual fusion and use it repeatedly, I barely learned to use the technique to not receive much bacsh.

    Vidyut, can you do anything?"

    "Boss, I can try to intercept the arrows, but our power difference might offer some trouble. He is shooting with quite a bit of his energy, if I match that, I wouldn¡¯t be able to hold for long. Night Ghost would still have to speed up."

    s

    "Then use the new arrows I gave you. And don¡¯t intercept the arrows, attack his position."

    "Boss, the chaos it would cause is too much."

    "Don¡¯t fret, just use it. If you don¡¯t use it now, I might need to take some extreme measures and half of the city would disappear without a trace. Chaos would be a better option."

    While they are discussing and dodging, Vidyut suddenly eximed.

    "Oh No. Boss, we are in trouble. It seems like the extreme measures are the only way to go."

 Chapter 1041: FIre Cracker

    "What happened?"

    Sam asked as he dodged the arrow once again. He also looked at the Tribe chief who is standing at the balcony. The attendants seemed to have brought some kind of arrows from inside.

    They carried them by hand and for every single arrow, two people were needed.

    "Boss, they are Soul-Destroying arrows. Once they were shot, they wouldn¡¯t stop pursuing the target until either they hit her or they run out of energy.

    It is almost impossible to get rid of them, blocking would be futile." Vidyut looked at the arrows as he gulped nervously and exined to Sam."

    "Are you sure they are the ones?"

    "Yes, Boss. As their range is long, their aura is detectable, particrly by people who cultivated a cultivation technique tailor made for archers. Just like sword essence, we have Arrow essence, we can sense something unique to us.

    The aura of the arrows is quite dangerous, we would definitely be hit by it if we don¡¯t do something now."

    Sam sighed and spoke once again.

    "Everyone, as long as you are within a few meters of the main mansion, try to defend yourself. Night Ghost, retreat a bit and defend yourself with those opponents are meat shields.

    s

    Vidyut, how long do we have before he could shoot them?"

    "One arrow will take around thirty seconds to activate and he still hasn¡¯t started it, so we still have time."

    "Then, you focus on him, use all kinds of arrows that could dy time. I would set up in the meantime."

    Sam swung his swords and sent everyone around him away before setting up a formation.

    He took out something and started assembling it rapidly.

    When it was done, it looked like an artilleryuncher, but with a longer barrel, big enough tounch a small rocket.

    Sam took out two cylinders which are around half a foot long.

    One of them is glowing a bit with different energies and another one has an internal structure simr to that of a beehive.

    He wanted to ce the glowing one inside, but he hesitated a bit before cing the hive one. There is a button at the foot of the stand.

    "Everyone retreat for a few meters. Shield yourself from the explosion."

    Sam¡¯s voice sounded serious than normal.

    Vidyut immediately stopped attacking with arrows as if he was exhausted, luring the tribe chief to attack him so that he could finish him off and get rid of the nuisance and it worked.

    Night Ghost retreated as he lured the two people along with him.

    Sam confirmed all of their locations and sighed, he took a deep breath before pressing the button at the foot of the stand.

    Theuncher started glowing and there is arge wind elemental energy formation that was activated.

    The methane is not enough to send these things far. Even though this looks like it doesn¡¯t weigh much, each shell is still heavierpared to evenrge energy cells.

    Sam used a wind elemental energy formation that couldunch this shell for a decent distance.

    As the shell left leaving the trial of energy, it started glowing.

    Sam¡¯s focus waspletely on the shell as his face looked heavy. The shell¡¯s hive structure started glowing and soon it copsed as each block separated itself.

    The hive splitpletely and it is so bright and glowing that it looked like a firecracker in the sky.

    The tribe chief who finally got a chance to be rid of Vidyut¡¯s annoyance and was about to activate the soul-destroying arrows looked at the magnificent disy with a frown.

    He didn¡¯t expect that Sam would do something like, he doesn¡¯t know what is happening with this firework, but as the fragments slowly descended down, he felt extremely nervous and the sense of danger became more and more intense.

    Before he could react the fragments already reached them and...

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The explosions happened everywhere a fragmentnded.

    Each explosion is of fire elemental energy it either melted, burned or incinerated everything that was within its range.

    The fragments covered arge area and it fell on space in front of the main mansion and covered a bit of the main mansion.

    The Hob Goblins who are fighting stopped in shock as they looked towards the explosions and the two former tribe chiefs who are fighting with Night Ghost are no exception in these actions and even they looked at it.

    Night Ghost didn¡¯t let this chance go and took their lives.

    Sam looked at the destruction his creation caused and sighed once again. Of all the identities he had, he was famous for two of them in his previous life, the creator and destroyer, he liked the first one but couldn¡¯t embrace the second one.

    But he didn¡¯t have a choice as the most memorable creations of his are the things that could cause destruction.

    He wanted to get out of this shell, but with every new invention or research he gained, he couldn¡¯t help but use it to create some destructive things. He wanted to control the urge many times, but his mind wouldn¡¯t let it go.

    He knew that thing would only cause chaos and ughter, but he still went away and made. The satisfaction of creating something always outweighed any possible sense of guilt which in itself is minute.

    And every time he was in a pickle these things are the ones that are helping him.

    He shook all these useless thoughts out of his head.

    It is no use thinking about him. Trying to change himself is a pain in the ass.

    He walked towards the Main mansion leisurely.

    The Hob Goblins lost the war. There is nothing else they can do.

    When the explosion cleared, the front part of the mansion turned into rubble and there are many dead bodies.

    The effect of the shell Sam shot is not to focus on taking lives, it mostly destroyed structures and covers a wide range.

    It would be most effective against some strong formation or fortified structure. But the fortifications of this structure is not on par to withstand the impact.

    The tribe chief slowly got out of the rubble.

    He could feel the broken ribs, the damaged internal organs and the burns all over his body.

    He lost the war. He looked at Sam and his team leisurely walking towards him.

    "Give me the heirloom."

    Sam asked calmly.

    "Please spare my tribe."

    "I don¡¯t have the intention to massacre everyone. As I said, I am only here for the heirloom."

    He took out a bow and gave it to Sam.

    "Please take whatever you want. But spare the tribe."

    Sam looked at him and observed his condition. Even though he is severely injured, it is only temporary, he would definitely recuperate if he takes care.

    Sam didn¡¯t want to destroy a tribepletely anyway. The situation with Night Demons is different. They have too many scores to settle and Sam couldn¡¯t take a chance, but the situation here is only business and nothing personal.

    Sam took out a pill and gave it to the tribe chief.

    "Don¡¯te looking for me in the future. If you do, the entirety of the HobGoblin race might go extinct because of your actions.

    At this moment it is strictly business and it is your god that threw you into this pickle. But the next time, it would be your choice and it would be a bad one at that."

    With that, he walked forward towards the temple.

    The tribe chief panicked thinking Sam wanted to harm the tribe members, but the Night Ghost stopped him and said.

    "Don¡¯t worry, he is not going after the tribe people. He going to talk with your god."

    "Talk with God?"

    "if you don¡¯t believe me, you can follow him. He did this before."

    Sam went into the temple, applied the blood of the tribe chief he got on his hand earlier, and started that statue ritual.

    Hou Yi and when he looked at Sam with the bow in his hands, he couldn¡¯t help but feel frustrated.

    "Another useless tribe. I don¡¯t know why I am wasting my with this trash."

    He cursed the tribe instantly even before Sam could speak.

    Sam just looked at him for a second and took out a recording crystal and yed it as he walked around the room looking at the sculptures.

    The video is of the discussion between him and Hel. The discussion they had in the Night Demon family.

    s

    Hou Yi looked at it for a while, but his interest is gone in the middle as he became furious.

    The statement of Hel saying she is not as dumb as Hou Yi rang in his mind.

    Hou Yi looked at Sam in anger, he knew Sam is ying him by showing this video, but what can be done about it? He really is as dumb as Hel said and this is the proof of that, before he could speak, Sam took out an arrow and aimed the bow he just got and shot the arrow.

    The arrow directly destroyed the head of the statue and the rest of the statue crumbled soon.

    Sam and his subordinates left.

 Chapter 1042: Jack

    "ARRGGGGGGGG"

    Hou Yi whose consciousness returned back to his realm looked at the sky and yelled angrily. At first he wanted tosh out at Sam in frustration, but Sam instantly destroyed the statue without letting him speak.

    As expected his anger didn¡¯t go away, immediately closed his eyes once again.

    Far away in Hel¡¯s realm.

    Hou Yio¡¯s image appeared in her front yard. It is a semi-translucent image.

    Hel sensed it instantly and asked.

    "Why are you here?"

    "Hel, you bitch. Who do you think you are to call me dumb? You think you are so smart just because you are Loki¡¯s daughter?"

    Hel frowned at this, she got angry at his words, but as she said, she is not as dumb as Hou Yi to react on impulse.

    "Mind your words. As you said, I am Loki¡¯s daughter, do you think you would have a peaceful life ahead if he listens to you. Even if I forgive you, he would not."

    s

    "Yeah, everyone knows how powerful he is. All he could do is hide and make others do his work."

    Hel frowned and ck mes appeared in her hands.

    "You little bastard. I told you to mind your words." She threw the ck mes and Hou Yi started burning. The image was gone and back at his home Hou Yi started destroying the things in his vicinity.

    Meanwhile, Hel is also frustrated and wanted burn Hou Yi¡¯s ass in an instant.

    If Sam saw those people¡¯s state, he would have beenpletely satisfied. He is pretty pissed about the game these gods are ying with them. If possible, he really wants to beat the crap out of them. But there is nothing he can do at the moment and all he can do is satisfy his urges by pissing the gods off.

    That is why he started provoking them one by one as he liked. Even though he couldn¡¯t see the direct reaction, he knew they were pissed and that satisfied his urges a bit.

    Currently, Sam is standing in the temple with his two swords.

    He swung them a few times carving the three words on the stone tform.

    SAM WAS HERE.

    He wanted to do this, in the Night Demon family too, but he couldn¡¯t.

    The Five great sects were involved, since he is bound to face them in the future, he decided that when he was ready to deal with them, he would go to the Night Demon territory and carve these words himself.

    The three words gave the sword aura which Sam didn¡¯t think much of and left.

    The Hob Goblin just stared at it and bowed his head before leaving. He and several other people heard Hou Yi cursing them for being trash. They fought to the death with a person like Sam and even knew how to show them some respect for their efforts, but Hou Yi who is the cause of all this didn¡¯t show it.

    How can anyone be still worshipping him?

    They also bowed to the three words.

    Sam and his team left to the next realm. They didn¡¯t exhaust themselves that much and this tribe is nearly as much trouble as they initially thought, so there is no need for them to think too much at the moment and decided to move since they already have the next target in their mind.

    While Sam is busying himself, somewhere far away.

    In the five great sect¡¯smon ground where the elders from the five sects hold the meetings regarding all of theirbined issues, two young men are standing in front of a bunch of elders.

    There is a night demon standing in front of him and he asked once again.

    "So, what young master is saying is that someone massacred the entirety of the core branch of the Night Demon family and you don¡¯t know who he is, even Davon was killed in that?"

    He is none other than the father of Davon the Night Demon who is also the outer deacon of the five great sects.

    "Deacon, Dang. What we said is true. We are not lying. But the enemy didn¡¯t reveal themselves and he didn¡¯t attack until all of us except Davon left. At first, we thought, that the enemy is someone our sect knew as they said they don¡¯t want a war to happen with our sect over that, and Mavy is also frightened by something familiar.

    But when we came back, we confirmed it is the not people who we initially assumed to be."

    "I understand what you are saying. But how can there be no clue at all."

    "Ther.." the young man wanted to say something, but he stopped, the elders looked at him and said.

    "You don¡¯t have to worry too much. Speak your mind."

    "Demon Soul swordsman¡¯s disciple is also with us and when he looked at that thing we mentioned, he took it and said that the enemy of night demon family is definitely not someone who we assumed them to be, but instead even more terrifying entity.

    We think that he knows, but he didn¡¯t want to tell and we didn¡¯t dare to force him."

    The elders and outer deacon frowned. They knew the Demon Soul Swordsman is an entric man. He is not even an elder and there is no official title for him in the sect for him to begin with, but he is daring enough to not give a crap about the five sect leadersbined.

    He would even curse them on their faces if they pissed him off and they only found out about this because of that disciple. Otherwise, they wouldn¡¯t have understood how powerful he is.

    After some discussion, someone still sent to the Demon Soul swordsman and his disciple. Both of them came. The disciple is in a ck cloak, but the demon soul swordsman is calm as he sipped from a wine gourd and a sword is hanging on his waist.

    "What do you old farts want from my disciple?"

    They exined the situation and the disciple looked at the two senior brothers.

    "Idiots. I told you to keep your mouths shut and stay out of trouble. But you don¡¯t listen do you?"

    He directly scolded them without a care for etiquette or the surroundings, when the elders were about to rage, a faint sword keen was heard from the Demon soul swordsman¡¯s sword which made them sit down.

    The disciple turned to look at his master and said.

    "Master, I don¡¯t have anything to say to these people. Let us go."

    The master nodded and both of them turned around to leave.

    The outer deacon became anxious and grabbed the disciple, cloak. The cloak covering the head dropped and the disciple¡¯s face was revealed.

    If Sam was here, his face would have beamed with a grin of happiness.

    After all, his friend who he didn¡¯t meet in many years is standing there.

    It is none other than Jack. During this time, his aura changed. There is some dark and ominous feeling along with that sharp sword aura.

    There is a scar on his face over his left eye.

    He looked at the Outer Deacon coldly but the deacon didn¡¯t let go of the cloak and said.

    "My brothers, son, and all my family members died. Please do tell me the identity of that person. Even if he is strong and I couldn¡¯t do anything to him, I will at least get closure. Please do it for my sake."

    "And why the fuck would I do that?"

    "I..." The deacon wanted to say something, but Jack continued.

    "I know the identity of the person, but I am not telling you. As for why you ask. It is just thew of jungle which you so essentially liked to preach whenever you killed families and organizations for your personal gain.

    The strong can do whatever they want, while the weak can either fight back or cower and perish if the strong, willed so.

    This is the same. Your family is weak, they tried to fight back against an enemy who would find it beneath him to disdain your family. They died, they perished. That is it. Now let go of my cloak."

    "You..." The Outer deacon became angry and was about to say something, but...

    *SLASH*

    A sword keen was heard and the arm that was holding the cloak was severed. Jack sidestepped to not let the blood fall on him, but his cloak still got some blood on.

    s

    "Master, you didn¡¯t control it properly. I got blood. You better get me a new cloak."

    He didn¡¯t even care as the deacon writhed in pain on the ground as he tried to stop the bleeding, while the Master is still standing there drinking, nobody even saw him move.

    The elders didn¡¯t even know what to say and just let the Master and disciple leave.

    "Brat, who is that guy that you are trying so hard to hide?"

    "Hard to hide? You don¡¯t know anything about him, master. I am not trying to hide, I am just making sure that you both don¡¯t need to sh. After all, the contract between you and the five sects will end in a few years. In this time if these idiots provoke, I am afraid, you would be pitted against him. Then I would be put in a hard spot."

 Chapter 1043: Poison Church

    "Just say you don¡¯t want your friend to die an untimely death in my hands. Don¡¯t worry I will go easy on him if ites to it." The Demon soul swordsman said as he took a sip.

    "You got it all wrong Master. I don¡¯t want to be put in a ce where I would need to plead my friend to go easy on you. And I am afraid, if he is really angered by you, I might not be able to bring myself to ask him such a favor even if you are my master and it would be my responsibility."

    The Demon soul swordsman finally stopped in his tracks.

    "Really? Is your friend that powerful? Why don¡¯t you tell me his name? I should have heard of him, what is his cultivation level?"

    "His cultivation level would be in Astral ne Pre-transcendence at most. As for his name, if you pay enough attention you will hear about him before your contract here ends.

    A person who you never heard of, a person who doesn¡¯t have any significant background that you could find will suddenly appear in your information circle. He is the person that you definitely would think that doesn¡¯t belong in that circle as you hear it."

    Demon soul swordsman nodded and just let it be, but he is thinking about Jack and his friend. He doesn¡¯t know Jack¡¯s background, they met coincidentally and Jack was not even that talented in terms of physique and constitution. No matter how he looked at it, he is just some normal human with an ordinary body, but his mind and soul are different.

    He is trained, he was honed, everything Jack got was from pure hard work, he liked him and took him in.

    As his disciple, there are definitely some perks and Jack obviously got them.

    His cultivation level is currently higher than that of Sam, but Jack is sure that it wouldn¡¯t stay like that for long.

    s

    Sam¡¯s cultivation might be faster, but Jack knew more than the rest, while everyone was cultivating for one person, Sam¡¯s cultivation requirements equal ten people.

    The beasts take up a lot of resources and Sam also had a habit of research and raising forces. Who knows how big of an army he is feeding on his own. He also got a faint understanding of the subordinates he had since there are several battle signs. If there are no distractions like these, who knows where Sam will be at the moment, he couldn¡¯t help but feel excited about meeting his friend.

    While Jack was thinking and walking, suddenly his sword vibrated.

    He gently caressed his handle.

    "Don¡¯t worry. You will meet him soon."

    He muttered to the sword and walked faster to his training grounds. When his master saw this he couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit nostalgic of his youth and wanted to meet Sam even more.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know that his friend managed to suppress the problem that would havee searching for him.

    He is currently busy with the information regarding the next organization they are going to attack.

    The Poison Church.

    The name itself is different and so is the organization and the title of the organization and the god they pray to don¡¯t match at all.

    Because these people are worshipping Indra.

    As far as he knew, Indra doesn¡¯t have any followers who are a race or a faction that practice poison arts. At least the mythology he read didn¡¯t have information regarding this.

    Sam never thought that a Hindu god will be served and worshipped in a church-like setting.

    The rituals and all kinds of sacrifices for Indra and other Hindu gods are different, so a church is definitely not suitable for them.

    But as soon as he got a look at the profile of the church, he understood immediately.

    This church is something that does dirty work for Indra and this might be one of the organizations that deal with people at the Middle stage of Astral ne Transcendence and below.

    He looked through the rest of the organizations under Indra and there is one such organization at every level which doesn¡¯t usually fit the profile of a Hindu God.

    He couldn¡¯t help but sneer inwardly.

    The team went to investigate and came back with the report.

    "Boss, I don¡¯t think we need to n too much, we can finish it off directly. The church officials are extremely stupid and recently they nned and killed their strongest cultivator and the new person that reced that position is only broke through to the middle stage of Astral ne Transcendence recently.

    I think night ghost can suck the soul out of that guy like pulp from a fruit. This is easy." Saber Monarch said as he gave the report.

    Sam looked through the report and felt the same. The new leader who just broke through got greedy and wanted to deal with the old leader instantly, they plotted and kill the other person, and the people that supported that guy also died as well.

    He really felt nning for them is too much.

    There is no strength, no structure, and no proper organizational hierarchy in ce. The whole church is nothing but arge gathering of maniacs who likes to torture others with poisons and experiments.

    Their main source of ie is actually doing dirty jobs for others. If Sam killed the whole sect, he is sure that the whole realm will be thankful for him for doing so.

    Sam opened the wrist screen and selected the organization directly.

    After doing that, he looked at the team and said.

    "I want to do something before we proceed. I need you guys to be protected from the poison."

    They were puzzled, but they could only proceed. Currently, they are renting a vi in a high ss in, in the backyard, they all sat around Sam.

    Sam sat down in the middle as he channeled water elemental energy. He is using Hydra¡¯s bloodline art.

    Soon, arge water blob which looked a little different than normal came out of his mouth, and with his consciousness, it separated into many parts, each part took the form of a snake and zoomed towards the teammates, and mmed into their skin.

    The water snakes were absorbed into their bodies.

    They all opened their eyes and checked their bodies, but they couldn¡¯t find anything.

    "This is a special technique. These things that stay within your body will help you absorb all kinds of toxins that might attack you.

    Almost all kinds of poisons in the world would be absorbed by them. Even if the poison quantity exceeds the limit, you wouldn¡¯t instantly die, so you would still be saved as soon as you find me.

    Be careful. The people who delve in poison arts don¡¯t care too much about means, all they care about is the end result."

    After that the rest of the team was about to leave, Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "Don¡¯t conceal your moments, let us just be open for now. I am getting tired of doing everything discreetly.

    Send a message to the sect openly and directly, in fact, nt a que in front of the sect gate in the middle of the night.

    Tell them where I am living. Let us end this as fast as we can.

    Paras, this sect yed some crucial role in the Jaman incident, so try not to kill the people of higher level, we need proper information from them as there is a great chance that these people know more than many of the organizations. If my guess is right, they would have already been notified by Indra to not let any words slip out and be onplete regarding the Jaman incident.

    So, don¡¯t let your tongue slip. The gods are not exactly some pushovers. There is a limit for how much I can push them and if you do something that pushed them too far, even the protection I have against them will not be able to save them from trouble.

    We would need to face a lot of heat."

    Paras nodded to show his understanding and left along with the rest of the team.

    That midnight arge stone que appeared out of nowhere in front of the sect gates.

    After guards informed the incident, the first to reach was not some elders or disciples.

    It was a woman. A woman who wore some loose robes, will her hair all messy, her body weak and her eyes swollen from crying.

    s

    There are several bruises on her visible skin.

    There are forceful bite marks near her neck and cor bone. She looked at therge que and memorized the address. Seeing that the guards were not there, she immediately ran out towards the slums.

    She went to an abandoned house and tried her best to clean herself up, but she couldn¡¯t even control her spiritual energy properly and there are no resources whatsoever around her.

    She didn¡¯t dare move out of the city or go to others.

    She stole some clothes from a traveling merchant and tried her best to look a little presentable.

 Chapter 1044: Maid

    Sam and his team members didn¡¯t sleep that night. They just took the restaurant over after the boss of the inn closed and waited there.

    They wanted to see if the other party wanted to try toe for them that night itself.

    Sam and is tasting some dishes as he read some data regarding the research.

    At this time, someone knocked on the door attracting their attention. Everyone looked at the entrance of the restaurant.

    A ragged young man is standing there, looking a bit exhausted. She has a charming face and beautiful skin, but her hair and bruises are clearly indicating her difficult situation.

    The group frowned, Night Ghost sent his ghosts to take a quick patrol around the surroundings and since they didn¡¯t find anything, Sam spoke.

    "Who are you? What are you doing at this hour?"

    "Ma.. May I know if Sam is here?" She asked timidly.

    Everyone was surprised for a moment, but they became vignt the next instant and were about to draw their weapons, they couldn¡¯t identify her cultivation, so they definitely thought of her as an equal, they didn¡¯t want to consider the possibility of her being a normal person and underestimate her.

    "Stop."

    s

    Sam spoke calmly as he looked at the woman. Everyone cannot sense her cultivation, but he has energy vision and he can see if there was any interaction between her body and the spiritual energy. But he couldn¡¯t see anything.

    "I am Sam, what do you want from me?"

    Thedy looked at Sam and slowly approached them as she spoke.

    "I came looking for you after I saw the stone que, currently the poison church wouldn¡¯t respond instantly, I want to see if you want a maid."

    When they saw her walking towards Sam, they became vignt once again, but Sam gestured them to calm down and asked.

    "I am here for the heirloom. I wouldn¡¯t just sit around for the attack. I wouldn¡¯t stay here for long enough to need a maid."

    Sam replied casually and turned his attention back to the research data.

    She knelt on the floor and touched held Sam¡¯s feet as she asked with pleading eyes.

    "Master, can we talk in private? I might not be skilled at anything else, but I am sure my service will satisfy you. Please agree to my request and take me in."

    Sam frowned as he looked at her, her words are definitelyced with different hidden meanings, but he is not focused on it, he is currently focusing on something else. He took a sniff in the air as he looked at thedy with a deep frown.

    After a few seconds, as he looked at her deep in the eyes, he said.

    "Okay, you are hired. Just for the time, I will be staying here."

    He waved his hand a bunch of liquors and a scroll appeared on the table.

    "Do you know how to read?"

    Thedy nodded in a daze.

    "Then use the scroll and the instructions in it to create a cocktail drink with this."

    She was stunned and didn¡¯t know how to react for a second.

    "I am talking to you, what are you looking at me for?"

    "Yes. Yes."

    She hurriedly stood up and started preparing liquor. The rest of the team looked at Sam weirdly, they knew better than to think that Sam did this for her body. But they don¡¯t know enough to understand why he would hire her.

    "You guys, leave us alone. Take your positions and be ready.

    Did you ce the restriction on the que properly?"

    Sam asked Sia.

    She nodded with a smile.

    "They shouldn¡¯t be able to store it away and it would be hard for them to destroy it. If they did, just ce one in the city center.

    When the customers and the innkeeper learn of this, buy off the inn in case we might have to stay here for a long time."

    He then turned towards the woman and asked her.

    "What is your opinion on this? Do you think the poison church will attack us immediately, or will they take their time?"

    Thedy looked at Sam in confusion. She doesn¡¯t know why he is asking her, it might just be a casual question for his amusement, but his faint smile and that meaningful nce, made her think twice before she answered.

    " I think that the church will not attack instantly. From the rumors in the city, they are in an extremely weaker state. After all, their recent pir died and there is already a threat at their doorstep.

    But since you are that detailed, not trying to hide, they will be more frightened and spy youi for the next two to three days.

    They will make sure that you are as vulnerable as you can be, before attacking."

    "So, what did you do prior to this?"

    "Nothing Sir."

    For the next few days, Sam and the group didn¡¯t care much about their own safety as they roamed around the city as they owned it.

    Everyone knew who they are and they are extremely afraid to sell them anything. They are afraid that the sect would deal with them. But the fear was only for the locals, the foreigners didn¡¯t hold back, particrly the spending power of Sam is something that they weed with delight.

    The team observed the spies who think that they are discreet enough but as bright and open as sunrise to them.

    Sam roamed alone, even though Gran or Sia followed him from the dark, most of the time he and his new maidservant are roaming around. Even though he could carry everything in the storage, he deliberately made her carry many things from time to time as if he is afraid that he wouldn¡¯t be able to show off that he has a servant.

    As he shopped everywhere, he always asked.

    "What do you want?"

    At first, she thought he asked normally and he is asking about what she wants from a shop. But soon, she could guess that he is insinuating something else.

    Every time, she thought of saying something, she held herself back and couldn¡¯t say it.

    She believed in her current stage, the other party wouldn¡¯t help her, she tried to make some advances in the past few days, but there was no response whatsoever from Sam.

    No matter how obvious she is, he always found a way to stop her.

    As they currently roamed around one restaurant to another, he is asking the same thing again and again, but there is no response as usual.

    He bought some street food and made her carry it while eating and roaming around.

    Sam stopped at a garment store where a tailor artisan is doing an excellent job and started taking a look.

    The maid is in deep thought as she tried to wrestle between her thoughts, there is a reason she escaped the church the first chance she got and there is also a reason why she came to meet Sam.

    But she is not confident that her words alone will convince the other party with their current servant and boss rtionship.

    At this moment, as Sam looked through the garments inside the shop and went to try some, someone appeared behind her and dragged her into an alley after covering her mouth.

    She struggled a lot, but to no avail.

    When she was finally released, she saw the person who is another woman and widened her eyes in horror. She panicked as she tried to think of a way to escape, but every idea that came to her mind needs her to have some strength of her own which she clearly doesn¡¯t possess.

    The other party is also a woman and when she saw the maid¡¯s struggle, she couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit happy.

    "You are indeed a slut aren¡¯t you? You already found another man only a few days after your husband¡¯s death? And to think that you acted all high mighty."

    She started pping the maid a few times and took out a jade container.

    "Do you know what this is?" The woman asked and judged by the horrific expression on the maid¡¯s face, she definitely knew what that is.

    "Since you are serving your new master like some slut every night with drinks, today add this to that and make him drink."

    "No, No I can¡¯t do that."

    "Of course, you will do that. You didn¡¯t forget what I have in my hands do you?"

    s

    With that, she crouched down and took out one of the wine jars in the contents that Sam is making the maid carry and reced half of the wine with the contents of the jar.

    She pped the maid again before she left the alley.

    After a few minutes, the maid gritted her teeth and walked towards Sam with the contents, he is still in the changing room.

    After he came out, both of them went along with the rest of the day normally.

    At night, when the team met up in the restaurant, she took out the alcohol and started mixing them, thest one is the bottle that was tampered with, she hesitated, but still mixed it before nervously taking it to Sam.

 Chapter 1045: Maids Background

    The maid looked at Sam with hesitation. She is very reluctant to give it to Sam, but the threat of the woman was very much real. She knows what that woman can do and what is at stake, which made her feel a bit determined.

    But when she saw Sam, she remembered that he not only gave her this job without much demands, when they first met, he clearly pitied her and showed some kindness. He was never excessive. He knew that she had a problem and asked her indirectly, prompting her to say it out loud.

    But she is afraid that Sam will back down. But that is not the only reason she did so. She knows her problem is excessive, but if Sam fails, she wouldn¡¯t be able to live with herself considering what is at stake here.

    She wanted to wait for two reasons, one of them is to give Sam enough motivation my seducing and make him intoxicated with her. Even though she knew her looks didn¡¯t mean much, she also knew that once they were in bed, she could make him fall head over heels for her.

    She is confident in doing so and the second thing is to see a test battle. She wanted to know how good Sam is.

    No matter how powerful he might be, the poison church is not some righteous ce with saints living around, it is a shit house with all scum living there.

    She wanted to see how he would fare with some of their tricks. If he managed to survive a few attempts of their attacks, she would feel confident.

    So, after she escaped, she disguised herself and tried to get in here and see everything clearly, but unluckily she was found out.

    She thought that the decoy he left in the church would buy her more time and the disguise will divert the attention of the church a bit, but it seems like she is too na?ve and optimistic.

    As a chain of thoughts flooded her brain, she kind of zone out on the spot and doesn¡¯t even know what she is doing at the moment.

    s

    Sam took the jar away from her, before she couldprehend her thoughts.

    He is currently working on some calctions with one hand while the other one held the jar.

    When the maid came to herself, Sam asked.

    "So, since how long are you living in this ce?"

    "A few.. few years sir." The maid came to herself and stuttered when he asked this question as she looked at the wine jar.

    "You seemed to have a problem. What is it?"

    "Sir?"

    "I asked what your problem is? Why don¡¯t you open up and tell me about it?"

    "I am... Okay, sir."

    "Then why do you want to poison me?"

    As soon as she heard the words, she was shocked, she looked at the rest of the teammates, they were all looking at her coldly.

    They don¡¯t know exactly what the circumstances are and Sam didn¡¯t let them observe the woman too closely.

    But they knew about the poison because Sia, who was hiding and looking after him, saw the threatening situation in the alley of the market and they became anxious.

    Sam just wanted to brush it off as he already have the situation under control, but the team is getting agitated and he couldn¡¯t help but create the current scenario.

    The maid is trembling and knelt on the floor.

    Sam snapped his fingers and Saber Monarch dragged the woman who threatened the maid out of the room. She looked weak and feeble as he was tied up and couldn¡¯t use her energy.

    As the maid is not replying, Sam spoke.

    "I knew you had a problem from the beginning. After all, why would a new mothers who still has the scent of breast milk on here and throw herself at the feet of an unknown young man?

    I don¡¯t know what exactly your problem is, and I don¡¯t have a habit of helping people when they are not even daring enough to acknowledge their problem and try to fight back by asking someone¡¯s help.

    In normal cases, I would have kicked you a hundred miles away from the area.

    But who told me to have a soft spot for mothers? If you tell me your problem, I will help you now."

    She looked at Sam with tears rolled down her eyes.

    At this moment, Vidyut asked

    "Boss, not to sound inhuman, what if all this is a ploy from the church. To threaten this woman into doing something like this to get to you. After all, as we established, they don¡¯t have a line they wouldn¡¯t cross."

    "Well, it could be."

    "Then..." Vidyut was about to reply, but Sam continued.

    "It is a mother¡¯s struggle for saving the life of her child, any sin is not a sin in that case and any crime is not a crime when she does that. At least, I wouldn¡¯t consider so.

    Now, stop trying to convince me and start prying the mouth of our guest open."

    As soon as the captive heard these words, she became anxious and said,

    "Sir, Sir. I will tell you everything."

    And she started narrating a story.

    The story is quite good. In it, the maid is actually an elder of the church and the mastermind behind the whole n. She orchestrated this whole thing including the threat to make them trust her more. She would never let Sam drink that.

    After gaining their trust, she would use them usurp the church and her faction will win the power struggle.

    The story is quite believable actually, except that it is not true.

    Gran took the task of interrogation as she pped the shit out of her face.

    "This is a waste of time, just use memory extraction from her soul, it would be a lot easier that way."

    Sam said as he yawned in boredom while he looked at the poisoned wine.

    "No no, what I said is the truth."

    Gran looked at her and said.

    "I would like to give it a one more try."

    Sam shrugged and the torture began.

    " I said everything I know."

    "I I I... Please let me go."

    "I will confess. I will confess."

    Her words changed in a few minutes and soon they got all the information needed. The maid is still looking lost as he wept for a long while, as she looked at the person that made her life a hell.

    The whole situation is simple.

    The maid is actually the wife of the deceased guy. Who was previously the most powerful priest of the church.

    They had a child and when they noticed some oddities in the body, they looked through some books and found that the boy had an amazing constitution.

    The already powerful man, birthed an excellent son.

    The Poison church are recently trying to get in touch with a high level power to be a subordinate and enter a bit of higher territory to expand their influence.

    They would definitely support the maid¡¯s husband when they learn such a future prodigy is born.

    So, the brother of Maid¡¯s husband got jealous. And it turned out, he has been that way for a long time because the maid herself is also someone he lost in courtship stages as she picked his brother.

    So, he managed to finish off his brother and took the baby with him, he separated his mother from him and raped the maid for over a month only letting the childe near her for the breast milk.

    One day, the new high priest of the church felt kinky and started raping her in the temple which is also the day Sam arrived and selected the organization, Indra appeared and informed about Sam, unlike Hou Yi, who only gave orders about killing Sam, he exined more and carefully told to be careful.

    Maid heard this, she implemented a n she has been concocting for a long time with her close confidant and escaped to ask Sam for help.

    She has nothing to offer except her skills in her bed which are otherworldly.

    And the captive even testified to that, because she lost the maid¡¯s husband to the maid in apetition regarding the bed chamber skills.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but shake his head.

    As the story ended, Sam yawned.

    "Quite boring and clich¨¦."

    As he spoke, he chugged the poison wine as if he was drinking a fruit juice.

    "SIR, NO."

    s

    The maid was about to stop him, but he had already finished everything and looked at the captive, the poison was really good. I need to get some recipes from you guys before I am done.

    So, now that you are done talking, let us finish this. I am tired of waiting for you guys to make a move."

    Gran finished her off instantly and Tamas took the body to another room and started operating on it.

    Sam looked at the maid and said.

    "I will help you this once, that is only because you are a new mother. Otherwise, you would have been dead for that poison stunt. After I give your kid, I will remove the seal ced on you, go to a lower realm and live there peacefully."

 Chapter 1046: Trap

    As Sam gave orders to the team on what to do the next day, a ck figure who saw everything that happened in the restaurant from far away, ran back to the church in a hurry to report the incident.

    He directly went to the main building in the estate where the leader of the church, the High Priest who recently took the spot from the previous high priest after betraying and killing him.

    He exined everything that happened in the restaurant and stayed silent.

    The High Priest got angry and yelled.

    "Those bastards, that bitch. Do they think that I am easy to mess with? They will wipe the Poison church tomorrow and rescue the baby, I would dare them to do so. What would they do if I killed them and this baby this very night? What would they do?"

    He ran his mouth like a crazy man and the guy who reported the incident didn¡¯t dare to speak at all. But at this moment an old man came out of nowhere and spoke.

    "You are not going to do anything to that baby."

    The crazy high priest stopped talking and looked at the old man.

    "Uncle, you are back."

    "You are not going to do anything to that baby. Kill that woman and the people that came here, but the baby is no longer ours. I already talked to a sect in a higher realm, they would take the baby away in two days and take us under their wing as a branch."

    s

    "Really?" The High priest widened his eyes with surprise and excitement.

    "Yes. And they are also followers of Indra, so we don¡¯t have to worry about other things like allegiance and stuff. But make sure that the baby ispletely unharmed."

    "I will do as you say uncle."

    The old man then looked at the person who reported the incident and said.

    "Call the elders immediately. We are going to make the first move." That guy left after taking the orders, then uncle turned towards the high priest and said.

    "Tell me about those people, don¡¯t miss out any minor details."

    The High Priest started exining the whole incident and the old man carefully listened.

    Elders came in the middle of it, but didn¡¯t dare disturb the old man and waited there. After the exnation was done, the old man looked at the Elders and picked some of them toe out of the group.

    He sent the rest of them back and started exining the n.

    One after the other the elders started going out to prepare for their tasks given by the old man and only one woman was left.

    "You are the main lead of the n. That guy named Sam who is the weakest is also the leader of the team. He might be weak and insignificant in terms of strength, but he is the key to all of this. The rest of the team will only fight the others for a while. From the data you gathered, they are some skilled people. I even heard about some of them and none of the elders will be able to do anything to them at the same level.

    In fact, they might directly die if they were confronted in a direct battle.

    So, you have to kill Sam no matter what.

    Use your trump card."

    "Trump card? Uncle, Sorry for being direct, but if I use my trump card, I would be nothing more than a normal human with no cultivation at that time, even a little kid can kill me. Do you really want me to use that to kill a person of this caliber?"

    "I am telling you to use it. So, use it. Even our god Indra said that he is dangerous and we should be careful when dealing with him.

    Why do you think the high priest waited all these days quietly tailing the group?"

    "Even.."

    She was about to say something, but the old man stopped her.

    "They are attacking tomorrow. If they took us by surprise and we couldn¡¯t do anything, we would be in deep trouble. So, you have to do this even if you don¡¯t like it. I will give you the thousand-snake poison if you finish this task.

    There is also another reason to do this. ording to the report, that guy seemed to have some impable poison immunity. He managed to drink the 9 venom cocktail without blinking his eyes. So, this is going to be a bit troublesome. If he is immune to that, he would be immune to a lot of other poisons at our hand. This is the perfect time to utilize your technique."

    The woman was surprised and there is a trace of determination in her eyes.

    "I will do it."

    With that she is also gone.

    That night, a group of ck figures moved discreetly towards the Inn.

    Sam and his team have already retired to their rooms to rest for a while as the next day they are going to fight with the Poison church.

    Everyone was meditating in their rooms, when the elders broke in. But there is not a single trace of surprise on the faces of the teammates.

    Because this is something, Sam already anticipated. In fact, they let the spy go deliberately to inform the poison church.

    Now that they are here, things would be a little easier the next day. The first thing the elders did after entering the rooms is to release a poison gas which would make the breathing difficult and cause irritation in lungs.

    Once that happens, they would have an upperhand. But no matter how much gas they released there was no reaction from the teammates.

    They could see that the gas was clearly poisoning their body, but as soon as the poison tried to react with the body, the small water snake was devouring it.

    They could clearly feel the devouring from the water snake.

    And the rest of the battle is easy. The HobGoblins only had that many transcendent stage cultivators because they merged five tribes together. The poison church clearly didn¡¯t have that many. They have around twelve at most in the Initial stage. And they cannot afford to send all of them and leave the church bare in case things went wrong.

    For Night Ghost, they sent three Initial Stage transcendent stage cultivators and their goal is not to kill him, it is just to hinder him in helping Sam and they activated some poison formations around his room trying to stop him.

    For the rest of the team, they sent four more transcendent stage cultivators and the rest are Peak stage. They didn¡¯t want to miss the chance this time, so they didn¡¯t even hold back in terms of numbers.

    But even then, they are at a disadvantage.

    The battle is not that intense, the elders started throwing all kinds of poisons but the teammates are immune so they are being subjected to the abuse of taking a beating.

    Meanwhile, Sam who is in another room alone was greeted by the woman who just barged in while throwing the simr poison gas.

    Sam sat on his bed leisurely and said.

    "Sending a Transcendent to kill me, is a wise choice, but too bad, you won¡¯t be able to kill me. Your teammates will die and I will soon be joined with my teammates."

    "You wouldn¡¯t be able to hold on until then."

    With that, she made some hand signs and blood started seeping out of her skin as it turned to snakes and zoomed towards Sam.

    Sam still didn¡¯t move, he activated a formation disc while still sitting on the bed and let the blood snakese at him.

    They shed with the formation which is almost like a transparent barrier around him. But they couldn¡¯t prate it immediately.

    The woman frowned deeply as she gritted her teeth and endured the pain and made the snakes attack fiercely.

    Meanwhile, Sam is carefully observing the blood snakes in front of him to see what kind of attack that is, the energy inside the attack probably took all her strength and the blood is definitely her own. The attack is too dangerous not just for the victim but for the user too. After a few seconds he just smiled as the formation broke and the snakes bit on him.

    The feather coat turned golden with the fire elemental energy and it reacted on itself as it started burning the snakes that bit on the coat even without Sam¡¯s guidance.

    The rest of the snakes that bit on Sam¡¯s neck and other exposed areas started disappearing as they entered his skin.

    But Sam didn¡¯t move, he just stayed there on the bed as if nothing was happening.

    The woman¡¯s face turned from pain to disbelief as she looked at Sam. As the blood snakespletely disappeared, Sam just stood up and stretched his body and said.

    "That is quite some poison. It is made of your blood and seems to have different snake venoms mixed in it, you must have gone through a lot to create it like that. Too bad, you met me. Coincidentally, my blood has some great affinity with poison too and it can digest all of it."

    The woman fell to her knees and looked at Sam in horror.

    The Next morning.

    A woman could be seen walking through the street towards the gate of the poison church.

    She is walking weakly as if her strength as sapped out.

    The guards looked at her and were about to shoo her away, but when they looked closely and identified her by her face and the blood that is dripping off of it, they were shocked and one of them ran to help her out, one of them ran to open the gate and another one went to report her arrival.

    s

    After reporting her, there were orders to take her to the healer of the church.

    The guards did as they were told.

    When the healer examined her on the bed, he was stunned.

    He was about to shout, but suddenly the woman exploded.

    *BOOM*

 Chapter 1047: End of Poison Church

    The explosion caused the whole church to be alerted.

    Thest few remaining elders and the high priest along with the old man who are alreadying towards the healer¡¯s ce to take a look at the woman and get any possible information they could get were shocked by the explosion.

    After the initial explosion that destroyed the whole ce, purple gas started spreading from the spot.

    Elders ran towards the spot and became vignt when they neared the purple gas everywhere.

    They breathed a small amount and stepped back. Since they are poison cultivators, they obviously have some immunity to the poison, but that doesn¡¯t mean they arepletely unaffected by it. So, they decided to take some in and observe.

    When they inhaled it, they were extremely shocked because their poison cultivation techniques that help them with digesting the poisons to strengthen themselves are reacting madly to it.

    Their bodies are absorbing the poison at a rapid rate.

    But soon their faces changed once again as they ran backwards far away from the purple smoke and sat down as they struggled to suppress the cultivation techniques.

    The poison smoke is of clearly a high level and it is extremely potent, it would be really beneficial, but only if the poison is from natural sources, not from another cultivator.

    This poison is the hydra poison which Sam created after drinking the poison wine the night before and absorbing the blood poison of the woman.

    s

    He absorbed all of them, processed itpletely and then secreted this poison to his surprise it came out in purple color, but he didn¡¯t care. He filled the poison and ced it in a container along with a liquid energy cell.

    After the woman finished her trump card which waspletely useless against Sam, the team came, finished her off, made an undead, ced the container on her and sent her back to the church.

    The guards are idiots to not check if anything is wrong and they reported her situation, then it turned out that the elders and High priest are also idiots as they didn¡¯t think why the woman who they sent is returning alone after such a long time and if she escaped, they didn¡¯t check if Sam¡¯s group is following them.

    They just sent to heal her.

    The explosion happened directly and killed their healer who is one of the remaining transcendent stage Astral ne cultivators here.

    Clearly their strength has weakened further.

    As for why they are feeling like this after inhaling some smoke, it is simple. The Hydra poison might be of high level and it would be best for the cultivation techniques for the poison cultivator, but they would have to be nuts to absorb it as it didn¡¯te from the hydra directly, rather he it came from another cultivator. It would make the body reject it and the sh between two poisons happens.

    Now they all need to support their own poison to throw the foreign one out. But the quality is a great factor here and to ovee it, the quantity must be enormous. Luckily for them Sam didn¡¯t think of using the corrosive poison.

    While they are struggling to save themselves, they forget about the spreading purple smoke and the people who are responsible for it.

    At this moment, Sam and his team came to the church gate and entered the estate.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother to fight here. He hovered on the harbinger as he roamed around the church estate while the teammates dealt with the rest of the people. The disciples obviously didn¡¯t interfere as they are not stupid enough to lose their lives.

    Sam directly went to where Indra¡¯s statue is after asking around for a bit and performed the ritual once again.

    "Hello, Indra. The king of Heaven."

    Sam spoke casually as he took a seat.

    "You survived. I should have expected as much."

    "Of course, you should have. It would be stupid of you to think otherwise. Don¡¯t you know that I am immune to poison?"

    Indra didn¡¯t say anything and was prepared to disappear, but Sam¡¯s words stopped him.

    "I heard you are also part of what happened in Jaman."

    "I don¡¯t know what you are talking about."

    "I don¡¯t know either. But someone certainly does and they are searching for the clues. I even got someone trying to contact me regarding this. If not for the fact that I am too active and I am moving all around, they would have seeded.

    They seemed like a pretty big organization. They are spread far and wide. I heard of them in twopletely unrted ces."

    Indra didn¡¯t speak for a second. He just looked at Sam and waited for him to speak.

    "Three gods who are absolute pieces of shit. A story about a destroyed. What is the link? A that could at most be considered a stray and many cultivators are trying to find what happened to it. They came and started asking about it. They are shaking the powers that normally wouldn¡¯t even bother to conquer a like Jaman even if someone begged them.

    And every power they areing after is a power under you. All powers that are controlled by your followers.

    At first it was only Hou Yi and Hel. Now even your name came up and these people are actually outside the Poison church trying to cut a deal with me.

    What do you want me to do? Do you want me to help them investigate this?"

    Indra doesn¡¯t know what to say, he immediately cut the connection and left.

    Sam destroyed the statue and carved the three words before leaving.

    Outside, Paras is currently interrogating the Old man who gave the orders to the elders to deal with Sam.

    Sam came there and asked.

    "Why waste your time? Just kill him to get the memories."

    None of the team members spoke and they only looked at Paras.

    Sam noticed that Paras is extremely angry.

    He thought of something and asked.

    "Do you recognize him by any chance?"

    Paras shook his head and said.

    "He recognizes me. He was there."

    Sam was surprised. The Old man had a twisted expression on his face as he looked at Paras and grinned like a madman.

    It seems like the Old man wants to get some mental satisfaction from torturing Paras.

    Sam sighed and took out something.

    A syringe.

    A in empty syringe. He took out two ss containers, one is a liquid energy cell and the other one is a herbal liquid. He extracted herbal liquid and filled half of the syringe and the remaining half was filled with the energy liquid.

    The energy liquid is of wood element.

    He injected it into the old man and said to Paras.

    "He is all yours. You can do whatever you want. Keep Tamas here and get the memories after you are done."

    With that the rest of the team left.

    After they left, the old man started feeling effect of the injection.

    At first he felt itchy all over and soon he could feel his skin cracking a bit and then thin grass des started growing out of the hand on which the injection was done.

    Paras plucked one grass de and....

    *AAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH."

    A cry indicating the soul searing pain. The old man immediately lost that twisted look and started sweating. He tried to hold the pain back and tried to agitate Paras, but he regretted it immediately as Paras plucked another de of grass.

    Half of the city heard the cries of the old man that morning.

    Meanwhile, Night Ghost handed the baby over to the Maid who knelt down and thanked Sam many many times. But Sam just brushed it off and told her to leave as fast as she can.

    Because, the baby was already coined by some higher level sect and they are going toe after her sooner orter.

    So, it is better for her to escape as soon as she can.

    After sending her away, Sam looked through the list.

    He felt a bitzy looking at the list. There is no challenge in the current targets. He doesn¡¯t want to n and scheme for these.

    "Let¡¯s just finish one every two days, shall we? Direct attacks, I don¡¯t care if they have nned tricks or specialities. Let us just barge in and finish this off.

    There are ten more targets in the first twelve. So, it should be done in one month at thetest."

    "Your wish boss. Whatever you want to do."

    While they were deciding on where to go next, Paras came and thanked Sam.

    s

    "So, what is the story?"

    "He knew my parents. I resemble my father a lot. He is the one who killed them."

    "So, any news about the incident?"

    "No, this guy is just a small fry. We need to go higher."

    "Sure thing. We are talking about the same thing. Join in."

 Chapter 1048: Merene family

    Sam and the team left the realm the very next day.

    Not before sending the maid to somewhere else. Sam removed the seal ced on her. The seal is quite perverted. Even though it seals off the energy, the body will not be affected. It would be as strong as the cultivator¡¯s body should be.

    This is made in such a way because the other party wanted her to endure the vitions. He wanted her to endure all the abuse and still recover so that he can continue.

    He really felt pity for the woman.

    After sending her off with the Dimensional drifter to the Naga Realm where his friend Yodha who just became an equal to his father, he came back and took his team to their next target.

    As for why he sent them to the Naga realm, it is quite simple. The Naga realm has the miasma and the poisonous properties, even if the poison is not high level, it is very beneficial for the poison cultivators that want to build a solid foundation.

    The baby has a constitution that gives him great affinity with poison cultivation. This ce is the best ce for them.

    This time, Sam didn¡¯t bother to make ns and got too involved. The teammates are quite skilled, he can trust them and leave them be to take care of the nning. Hepletely gave up the reins and stayed there as a normal teammate and decided to fight as he was ordered.

    The next power was defeated easily within three days and they moved on to the next.

    After dealing with three more powers, the two swords awakened the spirits.

    s

    The reaper sword has the look of a bloodthirsty monster.

    It didn¡¯t have any legs, like a genie it has a long tail from the waist down and the upper body is muscr as if it is chiseled from a stone.

    The head is also humanoid with his eyes glowing. Sam doesn¡¯t know what kind of creature is it, but when the Night Ghost saw the spirit, he was stunned.

    "That is called the Blood Ghost."

    "Blood Ghost?" Sam felt a faint familiarity with the name, but couldn¡¯t find what it was.

    "It is actually a spirit that is created by the ghost cultivators, but dumpingrge quantities of the blood from different creatures they ughtered, the more grievances the creatures have the more of the negative energy would be in their blood and the more the negative energy the faster the manifestation.

    They will create the blood ghosts which are the manifestation of all the anger, rage and other negative thoughts of hundreds or even thousands of creatures. If the ghost cultivator is not strong enough, they would be devoured by it and will lose their body to it.

    The blood ghost will go on a rampage to satiate its thirst for revenge and kill every creature in the surroundings and soon it will die along with the body.

    But your blood ghost seems different."

    "How?"

    "I never heard of a blood ghost forming as a natural weapon spirit and I never saw it being so controlled. It has the rage and anger, but the blood ghostpletely suppressed it, it is controlling it. Can I take a look at the de?"

    Sam nodded and gave the de, but as soon as the Night Ghost held the de, everyone was stunned, they could feel the sword vibrating as if it wanted to let loose. The sword is giving a faint keen which sounded like a roar of a beast.

    Night Ghost struggled a lot before giving the de back to Sam and said.

    "I don¡¯t know how you did it, but it seemspletely docile in your hands."

    Sam smiled as he caressed the de gently.

    He also has a faint idea how blood ghostse to be the spirit, because the de is made of blood iron and it continuously absorbs the blood of many creatures he killed with them to nourish itself and grow stronger.

    That much blood essence is no difference from dumping the blood together to create a ghost.

    After keeping that de away, he took the executioner sword out and closed his eyes, making the spirit manifest outside of the de.

    This made the whole room silent for a moment. The presence of the de is as strong as the Reaper, but the reaper gave out an evil aura because of the sorrows and rage of the people that died by it, but the executioner gave out a different aura. It is just as evil, but in a different way, the sorrows and rage are reced by some kind of cunning feeling that was fueled by the rage and anger.

    And the appearance of the spirit supported that, because it is almost the same as the reaper spirit, the lower body is reced by the genie tail, but the upper body is not human or humanoid in any sense. It is a Nine head snake.

    To be precise, there are nine hydra heads giving a faint purple and blood red aura.

    The aura is simr to that of blood ghost, indicating this might be the blood ghost, but of a different kind because it absorbs a lot of hydra blood.

    Sam could sense that the aura faintly resembled the aura of Mia¡¯s mother.

    Night Ghost wanted to touch the blood again and sense the spirit, but when he thought of how raging and savage the aura of the blood ghost is, he didn¡¯t want to risk it.

    At the same time, he noticed that this spirit might be more dangerous than the first one, so he stayed put.

    Sam put this de back in the divine dimension.

    Harbinger will get a spirit anytime soon, he doesn¡¯t know what it would be, but he is really looking forward to seeing it.

    Apart from that, there are still a few objects that he wants to see the spirits of. One of them is the production unit.

    The production unit that one could use their consciousness to manufacture everything.

    If that unit gets a spirit, he doesn¡¯t have to worry about processing any metallic objects, unless they are extremelyplicated.

    The spirit would be able to do everything.

    After he calmed himself down from the excitement, Sam focused on the next target.

    For the rest of the month, the team moved between different realms, in quite a high profile way as they finished off the remaining organizations within the first twelve.

    Out of these organizations, there are two more that are involved in the Jaman that gave some more information to Paras.

    After finishing them off, they shifted their focus to the list of the second twelve organizations out of which one of them was already done for in their hands.

    The Night demon family is finished, so there are only eleven of them,

    But these powers wouldn¡¯t be as easy as the Night Demon family, they could use a simr tactic like they did with the Night Demons, but it would take a longer time to investigate and make some proper nning before they could make a move.

    After all, not every organization would go through a power dispute when they made a move. When they fought with Night demons, not only was there a conflict between undead and the demons, they were also under the impression that someone powerful was targeting them.

    The Night Demons are also a bit lowkey because there are some severe losses in the resources and their subordinates are also massacred.

    All the problems added up which made it easier for Sam and others to deal with them.

    But it would be foolish to think that it would be the same for the rest of the organizations.

    And the first organization of the list is actually someone they need to deal with some caution. Because it is the family from which Jw came from.

    The Merene family.

    "Do you have any sentiments attached to this ce?"

    Sam asked Jw as they sat in a meeting in a cave inside the mountains.

    Jw didn¡¯t know what to say.

    If she said that there are no sentiments whatsoever then she would be lying, but those sentiments lie with the people. And she is sure that those people might not even be alive by now.

    Looking at her conflicting expressions, Sam said.

    "We will conduct an initial investigation, we will try to get as many names of the core people as possible, until then you don¡¯t get involved in this. After we got the results, you can look into it and tell me if you have any people that need to be kept alive, either for saving them or torturing them, I willply.

    s

    But you should do that, before we proceed any further from the initial investigation.

    It would be hard to stop once we proceed.

    So, be careful when you make decisions."

    With that he dispersed the team and he stayed with Jw. Both of them alone.

    "Meanwhile, why don¡¯t you tell me what Gandharvas are like?"

 Chapter 1049: Capture

    Gandharvas, the race which could be considered as the direct subordinates of the Hindu gods, are one of the most beautiful races, if not the most beautiful races ever created. They are even beautiful and look purer than elves.

    And they have arge spectrum of subraces within them because of the various blessings and curses they received from the Hindu Gods.

    Some of the Gandharva branches are lower than the Demon families with their bloodline extremely diluted and their powerspletely limited and some of the branches are extremely powerful.

    There are still some pure Gandharva branches with not a single drop of their bloodline diluted at all. They are extremely talented. Their battle prowess would be off the charts.

    They are skilled in many professions too and in fact, every Gandharva will always choose some profession.

    Some choose to be a weaponsmith, some choose to be a painter, a tailor, a potion maker, a pill master, a healer, a puppet maker, a dancer, a musician, a singer, and a sculptor. They choose different arts and professions.

    This is because of their natural creative mind is better than the rest and their mental strength is off the chartspared to any of their peers. Gandharvas are born with an innate mental strength which makes them perceive things while they are still an infant. They would be able to understand the words even if they were not able to speak they would be able to understand and respond. By one, they could learn reading and write along with speaking.

    Every Gandharva can be a schr by ten and their creative mind will go on a rampage if they didn¡¯t pick up art.

    They would pick up art by the time they are ten, they would grind on the basics and improve their skill in that art by fifteen and when they awakened they will choose a cultivation technique that is suitable for their elemental affinity and link it with their art to make a fight with it.

    It is just like Sam¡¯s flute techniques, but they will use their art for every attack. Their battle techniques are all artistic, except for a few who choose professions like pill making, forging, and such.

    s

    Merene family is one of the Gandharva branches that is on the low end of the spectrum and the family worships Indra.

    This branch is not divided by its elemental affinity of the arts and professions they take. In fact, it is one of the most diverse Gandharva families.

    The founder of this branch was cursed by Indra which made his bloodline diluted and the features unique to the Gandharva race, such as mental strength, creative ability, and superior body are weakened to a great degree.

    The dilution of the bloodline is more than sixty percent leaving around thirty-five to forty percent purity.

    In fact, the Gandharva with the most talent in the history of merene family barely managed to reach forty percent and the closest someone got to it is thirty-eight percent.

    The whole family has many elemental affinities with sub-branches. They are also into many businesses such as weapons, pills, and some pharmaceuticals.

    The arts that are mostly practiced are music and singing. There are no dancers, painters whatsoever in this ce.

    The family currently has a prodigy who should be at the same level of cultivation as Sam who is a musician. His name is Manvar.

    As for the core information, Jw barely knew a few names.

    "I don¡¯t think any of the information I give you would be useful. When I was forced to escape the family, it is going to through some serious restructuring because some people who were presumed to be dead came back with a lot of power in their hands.

    Nobody knows how they came back and nobody knows what they went through, but they are really powerful and brought some subordinates of another race.

    I was stuck in that chaotic situation and my mother who is merely a maid traded her life just to provide a way for me to escape.

    My father, who is supposed to be an elder might have died as he had some serious conflict with one of the people that came back."

    Sam nodded and didn¡¯t push her to say anything anymore.

    His team is efficient and he is sure that he would gain enough information that he needs from them.

    They didn¡¯t disappoint

    The Merene family is quite high profile and almost the whole hierarchy of the family wasid bare in front of the eyes of the public for them to see.

    The prodigy Manvar is still there and he is of the same level as Sam in cultivation.

    As for the elders, every single of them that Jw¡¯s father had any rtionship disappeared. And there are many news names she never heard before. The head of the family is still the same. The father of Manvar.

    Even the operations of the family are a bit open. Their weapons business is operated by Myun and elders.

    The pill business is operated by Ayun.

    The merene family runs an academy to train the kids of the realm and possibly recruit the ones that are really good and this academy is operated by an elder woman named Yona.

    There is another important elder who takes care of the arts that the kids take up. He is in charge of assigning them trainers, finding suitable art for them and such his name is Manjan.

    The people who are trained in the academy will be recruited to be the outer disciples of the family, this outer section is managed by one of the elders named Ramin.

    These are the core elders and the rest mostly manage the administration, distribution of resources, and other businesses under the family.

    Sam couldn¡¯t decide on how to proceed. The Merene family is not as powerful as the Night Demon family.

    The strongest is obviously ate-stage Transcendent and they have six Middle stage Transcendent stage cultivators and fifteen Initial stage Transcendent stage cultivators.

    As for the Peak stage and Late-stage Pre-transcendent stage cultivators are around a few dozen below them the middle stage which is Sam¡¯s current level numbered in hundreds.

    They could use some of Sam¡¯s new tricks to tone down the numbers by arge margin. But the team wouldn¡¯t be too excited as this is also a chance to train themselves.

    Along with that, the Gandharvas are a great resource as soldiers and fighters. Currently, there is almost a chess team formed by the demons he captures, from blood demons to the Night demons along with the undead creatures, there are only two more pieces needed in that team.

    If he managed to create that chess team, he would brainwash them and send them to the main base to help in the expansion of the organization.

    The organization has been stagnant for quite a while and it is stable than ever.

    So, he needs to find some time for the expansion. He decided to capture two Gandharvas in Pre-transcendent stage cultivation and send them into the chess team along with demons and undead. These two Gandharvas would be the ones who specialized in music that could provide support to the team.

    After all, there is a reason Gandharvas picked arts as their means of development. It is because the arts are something rted to the soul and with their mental strength, they could involuntarily attack the other party¡¯s soul if they are strong enough.

    The merene family might not be good enough topletely make someone crippled mentally. But they are good enough to create some mental distractions which would give enough of an advantage to the team.

    Since he wanted to capture them he called for Jw.

    "Tell me which young masters bullied you the most?"

    Jw was confused a bit. So Sam continued.

    "Since you are the child of a maid, then you would definitely be bullied by them. Tell me who went overboard."

    Jw didn¡¯t know why he is asking that, but she still pointed the two names that came to her mind.

    Sam nodded and gave the task.

    "Capture these two first. Only the Pre-transcendent batch should move. The rest go on and try to get more information from the city."

    He gave the orders and the team moved instantly.

    By that night the two targets were captured easily.

    Jw¡¯s was changed and her name is not the same as before so they didn¡¯t recognize her.

    "Manzi and Miradav. How are you doing?"

    She asked as she looked at them.

    "Who are you? If you know who we are you should also know what we can do. Let us go."

    One of them threatened instantly. Jw walked forward and pped him with a fire palm.

    s

    He looked at her sharply. The arrogance wasn¡¯t toned down one bit.

    Jw didn¡¯t take that look too well and kept on pping him until that look waspletely gone.

    "Now you look like someone who is captured."

    "Who are you? What do you want?"

    "Just some payback. As for who I am, don¡¯t tell me you forgot about me this easily? It hasn¡¯t been that long my dear brother."

 Chapter 1050: At any cost

    Out of the two people, Sam captured only one of them has musician skills and the other one is a pill master. Generally, in normal circumstances, the pill master would most likely be kept alive.

    But here with Sam, the situation is different, he only needs the musician alive. As for the pill master, he gave him up for Jw to deal with.

    Currently, the whole team surrounded the two young masters and Jw as they looked at them carefully.

    Miradav is the one who took all the ps to his face and when Jw called him brother, he was stunned. He remembered one person that called him and along with the voice, he immediately understood who she is.

    "Jyothi?" His eyes widened in disbelief. Before Jw could speak once again, he muttered.

    "How.. How is this possible? You shouldn¡¯t be alive."

    "Of course, I am sure you are d that I am alive. Aren¡¯t you, my brother?" She spoke as she threw another p at his face.

    Manzi looked at her with an equal amount of shock, but he is a lot calmerpared to Miradav and asked.

    "What do you want from us? If this is for revenge, we might have fooled around a bit and troubled you, but we are not responsible for your parents¡¯ death. Nothing wille out even if youe after us. Even the new elders that are responsible for your plight have nothing to do with us.

    Just let me go and I will help you get your revenge for old time¡¯s sake. I can bring one of the children of the new elders and you will be able to get the real payback."

    s

    Sam was really impressed by this guy and he is also a musician which would be beneficial for him. He is smart, but not smart enough to understand the depth of his plight.

    *PAK*

    Jw pped straight on his face and Manzi widened his eyes in disbelief. He knew Jw really well and he knew how vengeful she is. But she was easily manipted and her rage could have been shifted easily to those new young masters.

    But too bad Jw experienced too much. She could easily see through their ns.

    She started torturing them to vent their anger. After some time, Sam and the team got bored and gave them privacy while discussing the ns.

    "Okay guys, here is the deal. There are two options on how to deal with the family.

    The first one is to do what we did to the Night Demon family. We will infiltrate with the help of Kiran, nt some of these liquid energy cells, make them explode, and kill them without much of an effort.

    Of course, I would need to make some effort as I need to create more cells and waste my time.

    The second option is to directly fight them. We would announce our arrival and purpose. I will select the organization in my list and they will know why I am here and I am the one who is doing this too.

    Our moves will be more open and more people will be witnessing this. The liquid energy cells and any of my other weapons will be apletelyst resort.

    We will only use them when dealing with the head of the family, who is at ate stage of Astral ne transcendence or if things get out of hand.

    In this option, you will get more hands-on with the Merene family and this would also be great training for you guys. You take your time and decide on something unanimously before tomorrow morning."

    With that, he left them to make a decision.

    The next day.

    Jw was done with Miridav who died painfully. Manzi is petrified and is still looking at what is left of his fellow captive.

    Sam threw him into the chessboard and immediately put him through the chess games against some undead creatures.

    Night Ghost already got some information from the dead guy about the tensions of the family. Even though some old elders supported the merger with the new elders, it didn¡¯t mean that they are all getting along well and all of them are now a big happy family.

    There are many tensions, many conflicts of interests, and many problematic shes within them, which they could advantage of.

    After going through the information, Sam asked.

    "So, what do you guys want to do? First option or the second one?"

    "Of course, second one boss. Some of us or on the verge of a breakthrough, a good proper battle might get us there.

    When we finish two to three targets, none of us would be at Pre-transcendence anymore, except you of course."

    Kiran said from the side. His enthusiasm is a little over the top, because, he knew if they chose the first option, he would be the one doing all the rat-work. He wanted to use his disguise ability for his safety and for some mysterious legend he wanted to create for himself.

    But now, he is doing spy work, as good as it might be and as easy as it is, he couldn¡¯t bring himself to enjoy doing it. He tried hard to convince everyone to take the second option and even owed a few favors.

    Sam nodded and said.

    "Okay, then pick some targets for yourselves and make your move. Go to their usual working ce, don¡¯t even bother talking to them, and beat the living crap before capturing them anding into the woods.

    Don¡¯t kill them directly or leave them there alone if possible. We might need the information. You can take all the resources, but spirit stones are mine.

    I want you guys to have perfect timing. Exactly by noon, all of you will attack your targets and all of you will disappear from the city at the same time, stay in contact with each other all the time. I will send a bird puppet that holds a portablemunication hub into the city.

    Don¡¯t mess it up."

    Everyone nodded and went through all the information. Night Ghost didn¡¯t have apetition for the targets, he has all the middle stage transcendent cultivators for himself. But the initial transcendent stage cultivators have somepetition, everyone wanted the toughest target for themselves.

    Particrly, Saber Monarch and Vidyut are fighting like little kids. Paras looked through the targets and found a guy who is a demi giant. He is one of the outer section members of the merene family but he is very powerful and an Initial stage Transcendent cultivator. He is the subordinate of a middle stage Transcendent stage cultivator who is also a new elder in the family, he went to Night Ghost and said something, both of them agreed on it and Night Ghost picked that new elder.

    Both of them left to do some scouting.

    After much discussion and quarrel, Vidyut and Saber Monarch managed to agree on something. Both of them let go of their initial target and decided to go after the twins who can use spatial elements. These two guys are formation masters and they didn¡¯t pick any other art other than formations.

    They might not be the strongest in their bunch, but they are dangerous.

    They also left.

    The rest of the group didn¡¯t have much problem when picking their targets. Even Agar and Argan picked their targets even though they are the weakest, they improved a lot with peer pressure they have.

    The whole team dispersed into the city, with only Sam waiting in the mountain cave.

    He sent a bunch of bird-type puppets that could help the team have amunicationwork but could also provide him live feed.

    He took a seat and looked at the screens as he anticipated a great show.

    Soon it was noon. At this moment, Sam activated the wrist screen and selected the Merene family in the list.

    He looked at the current situation with a smile.

    At this moment, Indra who is thinking about the Jaman situation in his abode got the alert that someone selected his followers.

    He opened it and was stunned to see Sam¡¯s name again.

    "This cocky bastard, just how many of my powers will be destroyed by him. Out of all the yers that could do it, why this guy?"

    There is a reason for his frustration though because thest one that Sam destroyed also belongs to Indra and this made him feel a bit frustrated.

    He took a seat and sent his consciousness into the statue of the Merene family.

    When the Merene family head got the news from the temple attendants he immediately ran to the temples and performed the ritual.

    "For the past few days, did you see anomalies in your territory?"

    Indra asked.

    "No, Lord."

    The family head replied. Indra didn¡¯t say much and said.

    s

    "A guy named Sam is currently in your territory and he is here for your family heirloom. I want you to try all your means to kill him. At any cost, he must die.

    I know you want to ascend more. If you managed to kill him at any cost, I will rescind the curse ced on you and I will send a purer Gandharva to consummate some marriages so that you can have much pure-blooded offspring,"

    The family head looked at Indra in shock.

    "Even if my whole family dies, I will definitely finish this task."

    He knelt down and spoke those words. Indra has a smirk on his face. Every time, Sam¡¯s opponents gave up by the end and gave up the heirloom when the god didn¡¯t help them to counter Sam, but this time things would be different.

 Chapter 1051: Childish Duo

    A curse from a god is very effective. The cursing is particrly high in Hindu gods. Whenever they were insulted by their subordinates in a direct or an indirect way, they will throw a curse and that subordinate will be effected by it. Even if there is no direct effect from the words and there are no immediate results, depending on the gods rank, the fate would twist in order to make the curse a reality.

    Many followers who received the curse tried to get rid of them by going above and beyond, in fact some curses run for generations and all of those generations will only have one ultimate goal, to get rid of the curse and revive themselves.

    Same goes for the Merene family.

    But it is not that easy.

    Since it happened because of the twists of fate, there is no way they would be able to get rid of that easily. But now, the Merene family head has one way right in front of his eyes, there is no way he would be willing to let go of that.

    Even if he has to sacrifice every single one of the Merene family members, he would do it as long as one direct descendant survived.

    He immediately called for the whole family meeting within the temple grounds which is the only ce that could house that many people.

    He called for every descendant of the family and some core outer section members.

    It would take a while, to gather them all, but everyone did get the message.

    So, all of them are about to make a move to the family estate. Most of them reached within a few minutes. But some of them, particrly the ones that are targeted by the teammates of Sam are not able to go.

    Sam looked at the confrontations happening in different areas with some snacks and drinks in his hands.

    He anticipated for a good fight. But most of them are at mostckluster. They went there and are done with their opponents in merely few minutes and even brought them to the city gate waiting for others to finish.

    But there is one fight that is really entertaining.

    The fight between four people, a fight between Saber Monarch and Vidyut with the twins of Merene family.

    The twins are both space elemental users. They are warrior mages with spatial element along with a decent expertise in formations, and they are good at fighting as duo than a single person.

    Sam focused all his attention on this one fight.

    Saber Monarch and Vidyut are currently standing in front of the twins in the market square.

    Twins were just minding their own business and were about to return to their family estate when they received the message, but Saber Monarch and Vidyut appeared out of nowhere and stood there in front of them.

    When they tried to walk away, all of a sudden, the duo took out their weapons and the twins stopped in their tracks.

    "Brother, it seems like our friends from nowhere are too eager to spend some time before their departure."

    "Then, we shouldn¡¯t disappoint them as hosts can we?"

    With that, both of them took out their daggers and spatial energy surged around them.

    The bystander instantly understood that they are in the presence of some event that is way out of their league and ran away.

    The twins ran towards the duo with their daggers, but when the duo was also about to move, the twins disappeared from the spot and reappeared a few centimeters away from the duo with their daggers descending on their vitals.

    Saber Monarch swung is saber and blocked the dagger that was about toe down on his neck, while Vidyut used his bow to block daggers that were about to be thrust in his back.

    "Twins, which one of you guys is older?" Saber Monarch asked.

    The twins were bewildered and didn¡¯t know what to say.

    "It is you right? Tell me it is you." Vidyut asked the twin that is trying to push his daggers forward but was being continuously blocked by the bow.

    "Why would it be him? Of course, it is this guy." Saber Monarch said as he pointed at the twin that attacked him.

    The twins exchanged a nce and took a step back before going back to their original position.

    They looked at the Saber Monarch and Vidyut who are yelling at each other.

    "Why would the older one go for you? He is obviously going for me." Vidyut yelled as he looked at Saber Monarch.

    "Of course, he would go for me, didn¡¯t you hear anything in our investigation. The older is stronger and he will go after the stronger opponent. Why would he be going after a half-assed archer like you?"

    "Like hell, he will pick a saber brute over me."

    "Who are you calling a brute, you cowardly archer."

    They are arguing about who is being picked by the older twin, yesterday they argued about who is going to deal with the toughest guy. Sam knew that Saber Monarch is a childish guy, but he didn¡¯t expect the same from Vidyut, he really felt like bashing these two, but he couldn¡¯t because he is weak at the moment.

    The twins started attacking trying to take the advantage of the fact that the duo is distracted in their own argument and it almost looked like they are about to fight.

    But no matter how much they tried to mess up their timing and use the spatial abilities to their advantage, their attacks are being blocked right before they managed to hit.

    Even while arguing the duo are stronger than the twins individually.

    The twins tried a few more moves, but since it is not working, they retreated.

    "The older twin said."

    "It seems like we need to dive straight to the trump card. There is only one way to get rid of them."

    "But if we cannot, we would die."

    Both of them are solemn, unlike the duo.

    They activated spatial elemental fusion and one of them blinked to the opposite side.

    At this moment, the duo is in the middle of the twins who stood far away from each other and they stabbed the daggers with spatial energy into the ground at their feet.

    All of a sudden, the duo stopped their argument and looked around, even though nothing seems strange for his eyes, they felt like they are locked inside a room. The twins disappeared from their spot.

    "Oi, twins. Don¡¯t tell me you guys escaped?"

    Saber Monarch yelled, but all he could hear in response is his echo.

    At this moment, even Sam frowned as he looked at the live feed. From what he could see, the twins are standing in their spot with spatial elemental fusion and he couldn¡¯t hear Saber Monarch¡¯s words even though he could clearly see him yelling.

    The twins slowly stepped forward, but they disappeared at the spot. It is as if they are walking into an invisible door.

    Then only Sam faintly understood and he became interested in how the duo will react.

    As Saber Monarch and Vidyut tried to extend their spiritual sense, they could see that it is not exactly possible to do so. They couldn¡¯t see past a few meters and they couldn¡¯t hear anything outside.

    Saber Monarch lunged forward to walk away, but as soon as he took two steps, a dagger came towards his face.

    He barely managed to dodge it as he moved away, but still, a deep sh appeared on his shoulder.

    Vidyut was also alerted and got ready with his bow, he felt some cold sensation on his back, but when he tried to block it, it was already toote as he took a faint sh on it.

    But when the duo looked for the attackers, they couldn¡¯t see them, they appeared and disappeared in a single second.

    Saber Monarch and Vidyutpletely stopped their childish antics and instantly became vignt. As they looked around, suddenly both of them turned towards each other, in the middle of them the twins appeared and swung their daggers.

    Saber Monarch and Vidyut both had faint shes on their hand as they tried to block the attacks.

    The two shes appeared and disappeared as they came and attacked as they liked. Saber Monarch and Vidyut slowly moved away from each other due to constant dodging and soon there is almost a distance of a hundred meters between them before they hit the walls.

    They understood by now that they are inside a barrier, but they didn¡¯t expect that the barrier is thisrge.

    The twins are separating them to avoid getting a back-to-back fight against the two, they knew that they are useless in direct confrontation, so they resorted to this.

    As the Saber monarch and Vidyut are trying to think of a way out when they hit the wall, they felt a sharp sensation on their backs.

    The daggers pierced their flesh as they dug deeper and deeper. But before they could hit any vitals, the duo kicked the walls and moved along with the thrust to reduce the damage.

 Chapter 1052: Monarchs domain

    Saber Monarch and Vidyut looked at each other and their backs with a hateful gaze. The stabs are deep and powerful. If they were a bit inexperienced, they would have been dead. They are that close to the heart.

    Saber Monarch¡¯s face showed a new trace of anger. He was never this angry in front of his teammates. Of course, except the day when he was killing the people in the maze.

    At this moment, the Saber Monarch looked like he would slice up everything that came his way.

    With a mere thought, another saber appeared in his left hand as he felt another sh on his back. He didn¡¯t even try to block or dodge it this time and even Vidyut barely did it.

    Saber Monarch walked to the middle of the barrier and stabbed the saber into the ground as his aura changed. It became sharper than ever. He is surrounded by a bright glow and the spiritual energy surrounding him became very sharp. Vidyut felt his arrows vibrating in his quiver as the whole area in the barrier is enveloped with the saber aura.

    The twins knew that something is off, so they sped up their attacks. Vidyut once again tried to dodge and shot an arrow at the twin. But there was nothing as always.

    He was confined by this space and also became frustrated, he looked at Saber Monarch who is currently holding the handle of the saber that he stabbed on the ground and kept his eyes closed.

    He took out an arrow and activated partial lightning fusion, getting ready to break the barrier, but at this moment, the Saber Monarch¡¯s voice could be heard.

    "Don¡¯t waste your energy like that. You might want to use itter. Leave this barrier to me. Focus on dodging for another thirty seconds, after that, shoot at every spot I point you to."

    Vidyut nodded and shifted his focus to the dodging.

    In these thirty seconds, the Saber monarch barely moved to avoid his vitals and took all the stabs from the twin that was attacking him.

    After the thirty seconds are over, the Saber Monarch opened his eyes, and the area in the barrier is filled with his aura. Saber Monarch let go of the Saber that he stabbed and held the one in his hand tightly as he turned around and swung his saber.

    The Saber blocked the dagger that was about toe. While he did so, his freehand also created an arc in the air which flew over.

    Vidyut looked at that small saber arc and shot his arrow full of lightning energy at it.

    The arrow shed at the art and got repelled by it, before changing its direction, the remaining twin who was about to attack Vidyut was forced to block the arrow and felt a bit numb as he felt the lightning energy from it.

    The twin focusing on the Saber Monarch is trying to stab him, but all his moves were being seen through. Within this barrier, the twins haveplete control over the space. They can appear wherever they want and they can disappear whenever they want to. But currently, it didn¡¯t seem like this.

    At every instance, their presence is being identified and being marked by the Saber Monarch and his saber is reaching them no matter what.

    Even though he is just throwing a saber ray with his fingers to point out the second twin, it only meant that he is not going all out and didn¡¯t want to bother himself too much. So, he is using Vidyut¡¯s skill to their advantage.

    After he managed to do this the first time, there was a second, a third, and a fourth, and many toe.

    The twins failed innding a single strike.

    At this moment, the Saber Monarch swung his de directly at the twin.

    The saber not just blocked the saber, but moved forward without any hindrance at all and left a deep sh on the twin, all the while throwing small arcs around to hinder the other twin.

    The twin in front of Saber Monarch felt like he was cleaved into two even though he only suffered a sh on his chest.

    He immediately tried to disappear from the spot, but even though he became invisible, the saber monarch swung his saber once again and this time, he severed the calf muscle of the twin who appeared out of thin air at the spot he shed.

    The next few seconds are a sorry sight. The Saber Monarch shed at the empty air, but the Saber got stuck in the ribs of the twin who appeared out of thin air. He is using spatial ability to mask himself, but he was almost cleaved to death. The only reason the saber stopped there is because of the dagger he used to block at thest second.

    The second twin wanted to help his brother, but he was unable to do so.

    The arrows kept oning at him and he is barely able to dodge with minor injuries.

    Saber Monarch slowly walked towards the twin that fell with a lot of injuries.

    "What is your name, my friend?" He asked the Saber Monarch.

    "I am called Saber Monarch."

    The twin thought for a moment and smiled.

    "What a suitable name, in the domain of the Monarch, his authority is absolute and his dominance is thew. You indeed are a Monarch of the Saber. But too bad, when ites to domains, I and my brother have some experience and can be considered experts, we will meet again and we will have a proper fight at that time."

    As soon as he spoke, he stabbed the remaining dagger in his hands into the ground. Saber Monarch moved a tad bit slower and missed the twin and he didn¡¯t manage to throw the Saber ray towards the other twin. He turned around and yelled at Vidyut.

    "Shoot me."

    Vidyut frowned, but looked at Saber Monarch¡¯s determined gaze, he did as he was told. He channeled all his energy into the arrow and shot at Saber Monarch.

    By now, the Saber Monarch is the only one that is left at the spot and even the second twin disappeared after stabbing the ground.

    As the arrow came at him, the Saber monarch channeled all his energy into the Saber which made it glow like it was made of some illuminating material, and shed it down towards the arrow at a weird angle.

    The Arrow was shed into two and split into two parts.

    The two arrow pieces moved in two directions, the barrier broke and one arrow was stuck in the back of the injured twin, but the other arrow barely managed to scratch the leg of the second one who is rtively strong.

    Saber Monarch held the injured twin and said in a regretful tone.

    "It seems like we are about to miss this guy."

    Vidyut just smiled and took out an arrow and he aimed.

    "There are a lot of houses, here, people will die if you use the arrow recklessly."

    "Don¡¯t worry."

    Vidyut reassured him and shot the arrow high into the sky and closed his eyes.

    His consciousness shifted to the arrow in the sky.

    This is one of the archer¡¯s techniques that is used to stalk the prey that is hidden in too many structures.

    He took out another arrow and activated partial lightning fusion. The arrow was covered with indigo lightning as if it waspletely made of indigo lightning and this time, he pulled the string to its limit to the point the bow is giving some noise because it was pulled to the extreme.

    He shot the arrow into the sky.

    It shot like a lightning sh and hit the first arrow before mmed down. Both of them ran towards the direction and at that spot, they could see the second twin who is currentlyying down motionless on the ground with his whole body paralyzed with electric currents.

    Vidyut carried him over his shoulder and both of them walked to the city gate.

    When they reached the gate, their team is already standing there with a bunch of city guards hesitating whether they should surround them or not.

    "Come fast you slowpokes." Paras said impatiently and all of them quickly ran towards the woods.

    The city guards wanted to follow, but they didn¡¯t dare.

    They could only report to the merene family. But to their dismay, the merene family is currently holding an emergency meeting and is waiting for the rest of the core members toe to start and they stopped all kinds of matters including the reports from the city guards.

    But the city guards are the very people that are holding the report of the situation regarding the missing core members.

    After waiting for more than half an hour, the Family head got impatient and just exined the situation. When the members heard that they would be able to get rid of that curse, they were ecstatic, they are ready to do anything to get rid of that damn thing.

 Chapter 1053: Bold Move

    The Elders reacted the same way the Family head did when they heard that this is the chance that their curse could be broken.

    For generations, the Merene family only has one goal. It is not to survive, not to increase their influence, and not to be a superpower, their only goal is to get rid of the curse that has thrown them into such a state.

    Gandharvas are a pure race and they are the direct subordinates of the Hindu Gods, they are extremely devoted to the point that they would feel honored for dying in the hands of the gods or die for the gods they worship so dearly.

    And the worse punishment than death is being ignored and abandoned by their gods. So, as long as their curse lifted and one family member of the Merene family survived, they would be happy even if they have to sacrifice everything else.

    Even if they die, they are satisfied with the point that they would be regarded as the curse breakers of their family for the generations toe.

    So, the first thing they did as soon as the family head gave the information is note down the list of the younger generation who barely entered the Astral ne and some who didn¡¯t even enter the Astral ne and send them to a safe ce so that they could continue the lineage of the Merene family.

    Then the rest are ready to fight Sam to death.

    After the Initial arrangements and task assignments are done, everyone was sent to do their part.

    But as soon as the meeting room opened, the City guardmander immediately entered and reported the incident regarding the disappeared core members.

    The meeting that just ended once againmenced.

    "From what our God Indra said, this is the general way of operations of that guy named Sam. He will create chaos and attack on a small range at the beginning and slowly it would blow into a war. Since he already made a move and took our men, he would think he has an upper hand in this issue. Maybe if it is a normal family or organization, then it would. But we are the Merene family of the Gandharva race.

    I will lead the Elders into the Woods and we will meet him head-on. We don¡¯t need to preserve anything as long as our future generations could live without this curse and reach back to our former glory.

    Elders call every person of the family, both the outer section and the main family with the cultivation of Astral ne Pre-transcendence or higher. We will search through the woods and find out that guy before he could make another move.

    We shall kill him for our god and get rid of the curse today, no matter what."

    With those orders, the city has seen the biggest movements of the Merene family in years. Messengers moved through the wormholes as they went to their subordinate realms ands to call for all the people they can.

    The mercenaries and sellswords that are avable in the city with the cultivation of Astral ne Pre-transcendence and above were all hired with arge amount of money.

    The citizens were stunned by the whole show and the spies of different forces immediately ryed the message.

    At first, no one knew what the exact situation is, but soon they found out what this was all about and it is about a young man named Sam who is attacking the Merene family and the Merene family are currently repaying him in kind.

    Sam¡¯s bird puppets are still inside the city and when he observed therge-scale movement from that, he couldn¡¯t help but smile.

    "It seems like we don¡¯t need to n anything ahead. But we need to be careful. The family head will be a real pain in the ass.

    Night Ghost, how long can you keep up with the family head and what kind of help do you think you need to deal with him?" Sam asked.

    The Night Ghost thought for a moment and said.

    "The small liquid energy cells might be great against the Astral ne Transcendent cultivators at Initial stage, but they won¡¯t do much at Late stage. If you have arger one, then it would be good. Give me two of them.

    If I manage to get one clean hit with that, then the rest of it would be easy."

    Sam took out Medium sized liquid energy cells. Since he made them, he made them in all sizes.

    The small cells are in the size of an ordinary battery, the medium cells are the size of a small water bottle that could fit two hundred milliliters of water.

    As for therge size, it would be in the size of the bottle that could fit half a liter of water.

    Anything bigger than that would be too strong and too destructive to use in the current situation, they were too hard to make even with the machines Sam had and they are reserved for some special situation.

    Sam gave the two Medium cells to Night Ghost along with the tokens.

    "From the looks of it, the head of the family is a fire elemental user, So, both cells are of ice elemental energy, use them properly.

    All of you, spread through the woods. We will wee our guests, keep yourmunication devices on at all times.

    Vidyut, you will act as support for everyone and be sure to shoot wherever I tell you to. I don¡¯t want any mishaps. This is the first time, we are going against such arge family at a single shot.

    Get to your positions and wait for the orders."

    Sam then turned towards the captives who they brought here, and threw them all in the chessboard, and set them to y.

    After that, he took out the crystal table and took a seat before letting out a bunch of insect and bird-type puppets all over the woods.

    Even though he can use the table to take a look at the whole forest, these things will act as means ofmunication with the team and would help him have better control of the battlefield and since they are linked to the crystal table, he can have even better control over them and the situation.

    Sam looked as the team arrived at their locations and soon, the Merene family arrived along with their forces.

    They stopped at the edge of the woods where the family head divided the forces into different teams and sent them in different directions.

    From the reports of the attacks and the information that was given by Indra, he believed that Sam has only one Middle stage Transcendent cultivator of the Astral ne under him.

    He also judged that Sam would be having that person right next to him. So, he let the Initial stage Transcendent cultivators lead the teams, while the middle-stage cultivators moved alone.

    The family had stayed at the edge of the forest.

    Sam and the team didn¡¯t make a move, they just stayed in their hidden positions while the Merene family moved. When the Merene family teams moved for a certain time, they sent some silver pigeons back to the Family head with the messages.

    Sam tried to take a proper look at the message through the crystal table while they are writing and it seems like they are reporting their location, numbers, and the situation.

    The Family head stood near a stone table with arge map of the woods on it as he marked many ces with the teams and the transcendent middle stage cultivators. After analyzing for a bit, he sent the silver pigeons back with the new orders.

    That is their way of operation.

    Sam smiled and looked at the locations of the teams.

    "Vidyut, do you see the bird puppet on the tree beside you?"

    "Yes, boss."

    "Now, the puppet will be pointing a light towards a direction, you need to shoot an arrow in that direction that could hit a target at five hundred meters. Don¡¯t make it shy. Release the arrow as soon as I say."

    The bird puppet shot a smallser point light in a direction and Vidyut aimed his arrow, exactly after ten seconds...

    "Shoot."

    Sam¡¯s order came and Vidyut shot the arrow.

    The arrow whistled through the air as it hit the silver pigeon five hundred meters away,

    The pigeon fell along with the message it was supposed to carry. A bird puppet nearby picked the dead pigeon and brought it back to Sam.

    Generally, the silver pigeon is not visible to the naked eye and it is hard to attack them. But now that Sam can time its speed and location through the crystal table, he used Vidyut¡¯s skill to shoot it down.

    This pigeon is carrying the message to the group that was deepest in the forest and closest to Sam¡¯s location.

    Saber Monarch and Gran are closest to that team, so he decided to deal with it first. And the first order of business in doing that is to make them stay in that ce and cut theirmunication off with the Family head.

 Chapter 1054: Controlled Battle

    The bird puppet that carried the silver pigeon of the Merene family brought it towards a small cave nearby where a formation disc was activated. This is a small space gate formation.

    It dropped the pigeon on it which disappeared from the spot and reappeared near Sam.

    He opened the letter and picked a simr scroll as he imitated the handwriting in the letter and gave some new instructions. He tied it up to his own silver pigeon and sent it through the space gate which then moved towards the target team.

    When the first target team looked at the instructions, they immediately implemented everything. They split up and started scouting the area. The musicians and experts in the formations stayed in the spot as they made some preparations while the people with more individual strength split up.

    As soon as they split up, Sam gave his orders.

    "Vidyut, jump on to the third three to your left. The bird puppet will point in a direction. Distance one thousand meters. Even if you cannot kill the target, you should be able to paralyze him a bit. Target strength is Initial stage Transcendence."

    Vidyut jumped to the tree and aimed his arrow, he injected enough energy required for the range and the strength of the target.

    "Shoot."

    *SWOOSH*

    The arrow moved with faint indigo lightning crackles, but very few people even managed to get a glimpse of it as it moved too fast and hit the target.

    The outer section Transcendent stage cultivator who is a human was hit by the arrow on his chest as he stood on the tree while taking a look at the surroundings.

    The arrow didn¡¯t hit the vital because Vidyut couldn¡¯t see the target directly because of all kinds of trees and other obstructions.

    But the lightning energy is great for paralyzing people, he felt the shock and lost his bnce, and started falling down.

    "Saber Monarch, get to work there. The target is free-falling."

    Sam spoke and Saber Monarch was like a sh as he severed the head of the guy in a single strike.

    The head and the body separated and the head crashed into a tree and fell on the ground and Saber Monarch caught the body before it could crash into the groundpletely.

    He threw the body into the spatial ring and started running towards his spot.

    "Gran, use spatial blink and appear twenty-five meters to the left. Vidyut shoots an arrow one thousand meters from the same spot, but a few inches to the left in three seconds."

    Gran did as she was told, as soon as she appeared at that spot, she noticed that two Pre-transcendent stage cultivators are scouting on two different spots. But both of them could see her now. They immediately made their way towards her and in the middle met each other.

    At this exact moment, an arrow flew through the wind and went through both of them in a sh before hitting a tree behind.

    "Gran finish them off and get back to your hiding ce.

    Saber Monarch, run towards Gran¡¯s position.

    Vidyut eight hundred meters, paralyzing arrow, a transcendent stage cultivator."

    As Gran appeared at that spot, she felt a bit shocked as a transcendent stage cultivator is nearing her. He seemed to have sensed her a few seconds ago and already got ready to attack.

    She got ready to escape, but before she could do that, the arrow came, hit the guy and Saber Monarch sent the saber through the heart of the attacker.

    They threw the body into the storage and got ready for the next orders.

    "Gran and Saber Monarch go straight ahead. Vidyut shoots some shy arrows at thousand meters. They shouldn¡¯t be shy on the way, only on the point of impact. Attract as much attention as you can."

    Three arrows were shot and three of them were lodged into three trees, it almost seemed like they were struck by lightning and got charred instantly.

    Three people ran towards that spot.

    "Gran and Saber Monarch, run to your left, Gran is stealthy, don¡¯t let that back go."

    As they ran forward, they began to sense someone with their spiritual sense, but they didn¡¯t stop and just proceeded.

    As Gran was stealthy, as soon as they are both in range, that person attacked him with his back baring for Gran to stab a dagger towards his heart.

    Saber Monarch took the chance and instantly sliced the throat of the guy and also stabbed him from the front.

    "Now, both of you move towards the fire from that point and Vidyut shoots an arrow for eight hundred meters, a wide-range attack would be nice. And move a few meters left and change your angle by ten degrees before shooting another one.

    Gran and Saber Monarch go for the two spots, the first one for Gran and the remaining for Saber Monarch. Two easy targets. Finish them off and throw their bodies towards the burning trees. Then run to your right where our target group has currently camped."

    After doing that, Sam sent another silver pigeon, and this time it was for the Family head.

    When he the family head, read it and sent the reply with an anxious expression and also an extra pigeon to a different group, the first pigeon went through the space gate and reached Sam, while he made Vidyut shoot down the second one and got the message, before sending a different message to the second group.

    The second group who were closest to the first target group and wanted to go towards the fire stopped in their tracks and opted for a different strategy, as they created a formation.

    Meanwhile, the Saber Monarch and Gran reached the camp of the first group, but the first group is not there. They moved towards the fire when they looked at the fire and the dead bodies they were shocked.

    They wanted to get some instructions from the Family head, as soon as they reached the spot, they got the pigeon. This pigeon was sent by Sam, as soon as they opened the scroll, arge sh of light covered their eyes, catching them off guard.

    Before they could react, Gran and Saber Monarch came out.

    There are four opponents at the moment out of which two are musicians which Sam need at the moment and the remaining two are formation masters, which Sam had use for.

    They need to be captured, so both Saber Monarch and Gran focused on making their limbs immobile.

    They used some special poison Sam gave them which will paralyze their limbs.

    They then made them forcefully take some anesthetic and carried them over their shoulders as they moved towards the nearest space gate formation, Sam set up.

    While they are moving, Sam shifted his focus to the second group.

    "Vidyut change your location, move to three hundred meters, Northeast and stay on a tree.

    Paras, Sia and Jw it is your turn. The group is a bitrger this time than the first group. This is also in the center and can reach out to other groups easily. You need to deal with them carefully and not let anyone escape, they are dangerously close to the remaining groups.

    Jw, get on top of the tree on your left and start throwing projectile me attacks, they should fall five hundred meters away and your attacks should move left as you continue.

    Paras move forward a bit and ready your ax. I need arge attack that could cleave through three people and you shouldnd it as soon as I speak.

    Sia, stay with Paras in stealth, any leftovers should be dealt swiftly."

    All three of them moved. Jw threw the fireballs in a projectile fashion.

    Three people who got separated from the second group to scout ording to the family head¡¯s instructions saw the fireing towards them and moved to the side. As the more fireballs came, the more they moved.

    "Paras."

    Sam spoke and Paras instantly made a move. The ax which waspletely covered with spiritual energy made contact with the ground as he took a huge swing and arge and sharp one was shot from the ax as it cleaved through the forest and hit the three who moved to avoid the fire type attacks.

    The first guy was cleaved into two vertically and the remaining two were severely injured.

    Sia who hid in the trees threw projectile weapons with poison and finished them off.

    They started cleaning them up while Sam ordered.

    "Paras, to the northwest run. Attack the Gandharva thates into your sight in a few seconds.

    Vidyut, an arrow nine hundred meters around ten degrees to your left."

    Vidyut shot the arrow.

    At this moment, a Gandharva who is hiding far away looked at Paras and Sia¡¯s attack and was about to escape and inform others, but as soon as he jumped to another tree, he got hit by the arrow on his shoulder which made him fall on the ground and roll around and hit the tree.

    Paras who saw him, swung the ask as if he is cutting the tree making his head to be chopped off in a second.

 Chapter 1055: Controlled Battle II

    "Jw, go a thousand meters left and burn every other tree that youe across.

    Saber Monarch and Gran, both of you move six hundred meters south from your current spot. You will meet Jw there."

    Jw started running while burning the trees.

    "Vidyut, jump on to the tenth tree to your left. Start shooting arrows for targets that are currently at thousand two hundred meters and are moving to your right. Keep on changing the angle for every three shots by ten degrees.

    Paras and Sia, the rest of the second group are going after Jw¡¯s trial, now go straight for a hundred meters and follow those people. Vidyut will be assisting you. Finish the extras off and keep the two musicians who are currently carrying a flute and a zither in their hands."

    Paras and Sia moved and soon they spotted the group running after Jw¡¯s trial.

    Vidyut¡¯s arrows started going off.

    The group noticed Paras¡¯ presence while Sia went into a hiding as she got ready to sneak an attack.

    As one of them was about to confront Paras and block his axe attack, an arrow shot through the woods and hit him in the arm that was holding his sword which made his guardpletely down and the axended squarely on his chest.

    The second arrow was hit on another person¡¯s abdomen from the side and Sia took this chance to stab the dagger into that guy¡¯s throat from the other side.

    The third arrow missed.

    When the rest of the group saw the situation and understood that an archer from far away locked on them, they immediately moved.

    Paras and Sia went after them while Vidyut is still shooting the arrows. Soon the group waspletely done for.

    The two musicians lost consciousness and Paras brought them towards the space gate to give them away.

    Saber Monarch and Gran met with Jw and Sam instructed them to move in a different direction. After Paras was done with dumping the unconscious musicians, Sam guided him and Gran to meet with Agar who is a bit closer to them, to move in another direction.

    While they are travelling ording to Sam¡¯s instructions, Sam decided to focus on another target group with Five Elemental King, Kiran and Argan.

    They also focused on deal with the Transcendent stage cultivator led group. And since they are a bit weaker in terms of cultivation, they have to resort to trickery a bit.

    Sam activated a formation near the trio. These are some formation discs that are ced by the team when they are spreading out and these are there specially for Kiran to use.

    Sam activated it through the crystal table and a hologram was created. It is one of the holograms of the dead Gandharvas.

    Kiran looked at the Hologram keenly and slowly started disguising like that. He changed into simr robes and soon he was done. The hologram changed a bit showing the injuries, Kiran used some beast blood and such to disguise himself and then ran towards the group.

    He didn¡¯t even speak anything, when he was in the vicinity of the group, he just copsed and fainted. He regted his heart beat as if he is almost dying.

    A Gandharva shoved a pill into his mouth and made a small tent to let him rest.

    "You guys stay here. I will go there and scout."

    The transcendent stage leader wanted to go by himself, but the subordinates stopped him instantly.

    "No, brother. Let us send the report to family head and ask for instructions. For our brother to reach such a sorry state, the other party might have set arge ambush. In fact, even letting him go might be a ploy. We will do as family head says after we report this."

    They let the silver pigeon out, but as soon as the pigeon left the camp, it was shot down and Sam sent another pigeon in its ce to the family head, while he prepared a different pigeon to the camp after some time.

    "Family head sent the instructions. We will let the formation masters and musicians guard the injured while the rest of the group moves.

    Activate a strong barrier formation and immediately give out a signal as soon as you manage to spot anyoneing here.

    I will lead them and see if we can get rid of them, if not we will at least have some information."

    And the transcendent stage cultivator led most of the group.

    Meanwhile, the remaining people started working on the fortification of the camp.

    Sam sent the instructions to Kiran directly.

    He took out a breathing device and wore it before throwing out a smoke bomb.

    The smoke bomb made the people faint instantly and Kiran used his sword to maim their limbs before leaving them there immobile.

    He broke through the formation ording to Sam¡¯s instructions and moved towards the group.

    Meanwhile, five elemental King and Argan got ready to deal with them.

    "Vidyut one thousand two hundred meters, three targets. I want a rain of arrows on them. Even if the attack power is less. I want them to move left continuously."

    Vidyut agreed and used an archery technique. One arrow will create a bunch of arrows by condensing the spiritual energy. It is very useful inrge scale battles.

    As the group moved constantly, Sam gave orders to the Five elemental King and Argan.

    "Argan, move three feet to your right and use Sr Incineration. Five Elemental King, jump to the tree on your left and use ming meteor. It shouldnd hundred meters straight ahead."They proceeded with their attacks.

    Arge cluster of golden mes hit the group that is avoiding the arrowsing from far away and when they saw the situation, the transcendent stage cultivator took the brunt of the attack and let the rest move to a different direction, but they were hit by the ming meteor that crushed the grouppletely.

    Only two people managed to make it out.

    "Kiran, perform a lunge and leap for at least hundred meters in a stabbing position. It should be strong enough to kill your peer."

    "Leap for hundred meters? Are you kidding me?"

    "Stop your whining and do it Kiran. I am busy."

    Kiran took three steps backwards and did as he was told even though he doesn¡¯t know why he is doing.

    "Five elemental King, throw another meteor at the remaining two. It doesn¡¯t have to be as dangerous, but as shy."

    Five elemental King did and the transcendent stage cultivator who just recovered a bit from the shock saw the meteornding downwards, he immediately lunged forward and pushed the two guys away.

    He took the meteor hit on the head directly.

    The two subordinates flew through the air, but before they couldnd, Kiran who performed the leap with his sword stabbed through one guy¡¯s abdomen and the leg of the other guy.

    Kiran was shocked. He didn¡¯t expect that a leap he did would be used like this.

    Sam was so sure that these two wille in this way and managed nail it with perfect timing.

    He came out of the shock and managed to sh the throat of the remaining guy.

    The transcendent cultivator looked at Kiran in shock. Kiran is still in the disguise of the Gandharva. So, in the eyes of the group leader, it is one their own that killed them.

    He was about to rage, but Vidyut¡¯s arrow hit him in the chest and the earthern prison of the Five elemental King held him in the ce.

    Argan and Kiran joined in as they attacked him together. He already took the fire elemental attack,. The meteor and such, along with Vidyut¡¯s attacks he didn¡¯tst long.

    But this caused a lot ofmotion and Sam saw that the rest of the groups are sending messages to the Family head rapidly.

    Sam let the messages reach the family head, but he didn¡¯t let his replies return to every group.

    He made Vidyut shoot down as many as he can and sent different messages to them, making the ns mess up.

    The groups started spreading all over. Sam gave instructions to the Saber Monarch, Five elemental King and others to regroup while he shifted his focus to the Night Ghost.

    Since the other party spread the groups it would be easy for him since he can regroup his team and make them work together to deal with them one by one.

    Now it is about time, he reduced the number of the Middle stage Transcendent cultivators.

    "Night Ghost. Its about time we started.

    Move five hundred meters to the left. Vidyut turns around and shoot eight hundred meters away. Shoot continuously and change positions and shoot from different directions."

    As Night Ghost moved he could see the shy arrows hitting the opponent and his ghosts that are scouting ahead of him saw that a guy is running and trying to find the location of the archer.

    "Did you see that guy, he is your first target. Finish him off and take his soul."

 Chapter 1056: Confront

    The Ghost that was scouting for the Night Ghost zoomed past everything and entered the target¡¯s body.

    This is one of the ghost¡¯s tricks, forceful possession. If the other party is a bit weakwilled or distracted, then it would work perfectly. At this moment, the target is distracted more than ever.

    The Ghost possessed the body and controlled it. It used the two short swords in the targets body to make him stab himself in the chest piercing his lungspletely.

    Night Ghost undid the possession andnded a punch on the target¡¯s chest making the ribs broken and before the target could evene to himself and realize what exactly is happening, he is already dead.

    Night Ghost used a ritual to extract the soul and feed it to his ghosts.

    After digesting the soul, he could feel an abundant increase in cultivation. It is not every day that he would get middle stage transcendent souls. If this continued, he would breakthrough to thete stage soon enough.

    "Night Ghost keep on travelling in that direction in a moderate pace. Dont attract too much attention.

    Vidyut, move to a thousand meters south. Be stealthy, three groups of people spread all over. They are all open targets. Saber Monarch and the rest areing there. Start cleaning them up. I will once again ask you when Night Ghost meets his next opponent."

    With those orders, Vidyut started moving and on his way, he finished off the solo cultivators that are scouting and searching as they moved towards the cave location.

    From the messages Sam got, he learned that the family head managed to figure out that Sam¡¯s location might be in that cave as that is the only usible location for hiding.

    So, he ordered the troops to move in that direction while spreading out a bit. Since the other party didn¡¯t have numbers, he wanted to use his numbers to his advantage and sacrifice some of them. Even with that expense, he would still make a bunch of them reach the location.

    But too bad, that he doesn¡¯t know Sam has something like the crystal table.

    That is the reason, why the forces of the Merene family didn¡¯t encounter a single team member even though they are so active.

    Unless Sam ordered them to do so, none of them were caught by the merene family members.

    The whole situation turned into a massacre.

    For every twenty minutes, Sam made the team mates take a rest and recover with some potions and pills.

    They would recover their energy and will attack once again as they moved forward.

    He managed to cull every single of group of the Merene family only leaving a few strays here and there. In the process, he managed to capture thrity one musicians and sixteen formation masters.

    Gandharvas are talented in these arts and they are very creative, they would make great chess teams.

    Except for the few injured strays, there are only a few people that are left in the Merene family. Out of which two of them are Sam¡¯s current focus.

    One of them is the Head of the Merene family and the other one is the prodigious young master of Merene family. The talented musician who is also of same cultivation level as Sam.

    Sam converted the dead silver pigeons into undead and sent them through the space gate formation.

    They flew out and went to the Family head and fell at his feet.

    When the family head saw the bunch of dead pigeon bodies, he became anxious, he knew that things are going to be trouble some and the situation inside the forest is not as he presumed.

    He immediately made his move and ran into the forest.

    Meanwhile, Sam controlled his teammates and let the prodigious young master reach the cave. He is the only one who made it.

    The rest of the team engaged in dealing with the strays.

    When the young master looked at Sam, Sam stood up from his chair and came out of the cave with a smile.

    "Nice to meet you young master. I was looking forward to meeting you."

    "Why? You want to die that badly?"

    "Not really, I just wanted to witness your musical genius."

    "That is same as dying for you."

    "Don¡¯t be so sure of it. After all, you don¡¯t know me."

    "I know that if I kill you, the curse will be broken. You might even be considered a benefactor of the family, at least your dead body could be."

    "Foolish fanatics."

    Sam muttered and took out his flute. It has been a while since he used it. This is also one of his earliest creations, this might get a spirit too, but it seems like it would take some more time.

    He caressed the flute as he looked at the young man.

    "What instrument do you y?"

    "A Veena."

    As the young master said, he sat crosslegged and took out the instrument as he held it over hisp.

    Veena is one of the ssical Indian instrument back on earth. It dates back to the Indian Mythology and there are many types of Veena along with many variants emerging from them with the time.

    "Is that a Saraswati veena?"

    The young master was surprised but still replied.

    "Yes. I am surprised you know that."

    "It was quite popr from where I came from. And a person I deeply resented used to y that. I often thought, how the world is unfair that an instrument as great as this veena that could create such sublime music can be yed by a crook like that."

    "If that person could really y such sublime music on Veena, then he must not be a crook. No one with a tainted heart can y this instrument."

    "The heart is only tainted when the crook realizes he is a crook and still does what he does because of the circumstances. If a crook believes that everything he does is right, then his heart and soul would be pure as ever.

    It is all about the heart of the person."

    With that, Sam closed his eyes and brought the flute to his lips.

    The young master started ying the Veena as he plucked the strings, the spiritual energy riled up and he was surrounded with roaring mes.

    Sam also started ying the flute ording to the rhythm the young master took. The spiritual energy riled, but instead of elemental energies, the blood red scales came out of the divine dimension and circled around him.

    They didn¡¯t attack each other and only yed music. It is currently not a battle between two cultivators, rather aparison of notes between two musicians.

    The surroundings shook a bit and the whole forest resonated with the music. The beasts that are quaking in the fear due to the constant battles, suddenly felt rxed with the music and some of them moved towards the source.

    The family head also heard the music and he wanted to run in that direction, but he was suddenly stopped in his tracks as he some invisible force holding him from the three sides.

    Night ghost appeared from the darkness as he looked at the Family head who is struggling from the strangle of the ghosts he ced.

    The three ghosts are extremely powerful and they are currently using his technique, the ghost strangle.

    The attack focuses on the soul of the person instead of the body. After all, the soul is what controls the body and the effects of the attack will show up physically making the opponent feel immobile. They will struggle physically so much, but they wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything and by the time they realize that the problem is with their soul, it would already bete.

    At least, that is case with all his peers. Currently he is facing someone with a superior cultivation though.

    So, he knew that it wouldn¡¯tst long.

    So, he immediately made a move.

    Spiritual energy converged at his fist as he lunged forward and punched at the family-head¡¯s chest.

    The attack didn¡¯t cause any damage to the family head and even his dress wasn¡¯t wrinkled as he stepped back.

    By now, he also managed to get rid of the three ghosts that are strangling him. He doesn¡¯t know if he destroyed them, but they are not strangling him anymore.

    "Is that what you call a punch?"

    Family head taunted as he looked at Night Ghost.

    "I hope you will say the same after I am done with you."

    With that, Night Ghost once again attached.

    The Gandharva family head is a warrior mage with fire element. He activated partial fusion as he threw a punch towards Night Ghost.

    Both fists shed and Night Ghost used the recoil to throw himself backwards and tried his best to protect himself from the attack.

    "Do you want me to be done with just this?"

    The family head asked as he tried to throw another punch. But as he tried to move forward, he noticed that there is a faint dy between his thoughts and the reaction time of the arm.

 Chapter 1057: Night Ghost Vs Family Head

    Merene family head felt a bit dazed and lost as he looked at his hand. It is not reacting as fast as it should it is almost as if there is a timepse between themand from his brain to the actual motion.

    This made him miss the timing of the attack and Night Ghost easily managed to dodge.

    He leaped to the side and gave a kick to the right shoulder with all his strength, at least it looked like it, but there are no effects on the family head and the Night Ghost to the recoil and rolled to the side.

    The family head came back to his sense by now and he tried to move his hand around, but there is almost a second dy in the reaction time, he couldn¡¯t help but feel frustrated. He doesn¡¯t know what is happening, but he knew it has something to do with the attacks of the Night Ghost that don¡¯t seem to harm him at all.

    It seems like their purpose is not to harm them anyway.

    The family head used his left hand to throw a mage attack. Arge cluster of dark red mes joined together forming a ming horse that was ready to go after the Night Ghost.

    At this moment, the family head felt like his left hand is also acting weirdly and before he knew it, his aim was missed. It was only a small shake right before he could release the attack, but it missed.

    Night Ghost rolled forward on the ground dodging the attack and kicked the Family head upwards on his left hand¡¯s elbow.

    He could see that the reaction time of his left hand also slowed down. Not just the movement but even the reaction for circting spiritual energy has slowed down.

    "What did you do, you filthy vile creature?" The family cursed in a low cold tone as he looked at Night Ghost,

    The Night Ghost didn¡¯t reply, he maintained some distance and looked at the family ahead vigntly. As the cultivation level increases, it would be harder and harder to fight people of higher cultivation. If it is a normal run-off-a-millte-stage transcendent cultivator, Night ghost is sure that he could put up a great fight and even be able to beat him.

    But the current opponent is not just talented, but also has a great fighting style with abundant experience.

    And most of all he has a solid foundation within the mortal ne cultivation.

    Many people ignore this and focus too much on the cultivation levels, but the more they cultivate and fight with their peers, the more they realize the importance of the foundation in the cultivation journey.

    That is why Night Ghost is vignt. He knew that sooner orter his tricks would be seen through and he would be in trouble by then, he needs tond as much damage as he can before that happens.

    He used another ghost strangling technique on the family head when he is still shocked over his body reactions and started delivering blows on the legs.

    The limbs might not be vitals, but they y an essential role in the battle and sometimes leads to more disasters.

    The family head was extremely confused, but he still tried his best to calm down and closed his eyes before examining himself.

    By now, his four limbs arepletely out of tune and even his liver is not functioning properly. He doesn¡¯t know what is happening exactly.

    But once he calmed down and focused, he understood what the problem is. The hits of Night Ghost are not actually focused on the body, at least not solely on the body, he is hitting the nerves physically and the soul mentally with every blow is delivering.

    This is something the Marine family head never came across before.

    The attack is not damaging the nervous system directly, rather it is just dealing with the functions of the nervous system, and the soul attacks are done so that the mental strength wouldn¡¯t be able to repair the functions and get that reaction time back.

    Now the family head is on his way to do that. He just needs to stabilize his soul which will make his mental strength stable and the nerve function wille back.

    But in this small interval of time, he would be defenseless.

    Night Ghost lunged forward with a dagger in his hands.

    A bunch of ghosts manifested as they dove towards the knife. The knife slowly started turning darker as the spiritual energy condensed around it.

    He stabbed the Family¡¯s head in the chest cleanly. But he didn¡¯t manage to hit the heart as the family-head managed to move a bit, barely enough to dodge his heart by a hair¡¯s breadth.

    But the Night Ghost is not worried. The dark energy that was condensed around his de and his arm are all being channeled into the family head and he used all his energy to do so.

    He just wanted a few more seconds and the family head will be finished.

    But he is not that lucky.

    The family head opened his eyes and zed with fire elemental fusion before sting the Night Ghost who ispletely defenseless.

    Night Ghost was thrown away with arge trail of mes into the forest as everything burned on his way. Almost one-fifth of the forest burned smithereens.

    Within this ming hell, the family head slowly walked towards Night Ghost whose hair, robes, and skin were burned. There are several charred injuries on his body as he breathed heavily.

    That is the result of a full-blown Late-stage Transcendent stage cultivator¡¯s attack.

    If it is an ordinary middle-stage cultivator he would turn into ashes. Night Ghost is not ordinary and managed to live through it.

    He even slowly took the support of the burning tree beside him as he stood up slowly.

    He took out an ice blue cylinder in his hands and stood there vigntly.

    The liquid energy cell.

    If possible he doesn¡¯t want to use it at all.

    He is closer to the Late-stage than ever would breakthrough in a few days, if he gets ate-stage soul now and manages to devour it, he would not only breakthrough, he would also have enough energy to stabilize and also progress a bit into the breakthrough of the next stage.

    If he used the liquid energy cell, the energy explosion exterminates everything and that includes the soul of the person, particrly when they are in the middle of the explosion.

    But as he saw the family head slowly walking forward, Night Ghost¡¯s expression from vignce to surprise.

    Because in the middle of the chest of the family head, there is a portion that didn¡¯t fuse with the fire element. It is a normal piece of flesh which is not what he expected. The dagger he stabbed was still there and he could see the dark energy spreading all over that portion of flesh and it is even spreading throughout the fusion body.l

    He had a new hope, it seems like the family head attacked his prematurely fearing the dagger, but instead neglected his soul stabilization.

    This caused the dagger attack to have more effect.

    This dagger attacknds both physically and mentally to the body and soul. Currently, the family head is suffering it at the highest level.

    The family head¡¯s steps werepletely slowed down as he struggled to move forward.

    "What is your name, Young man?"

    The family head asked as he looked at Night Ghost.

    "Now my name is Night Ghost."

    "You are quite formidable. It feels like an honor dying by your hands."

    "You are the greatest opponent I faced until now." Night Ghost also replied in a painful tone.

    "It seems like I made a wrong decision and was way over in my head. I shouldn¡¯t have underestimated you. One small trick cost me my life. Your attitude right now is great. Don¡¯t leave that. Use every weapon and every advantage you could find and don¡¯t be ashamed to use them. I will be looking forward to seeing you in the afterlife. But don¡¯te too early."

    With that, the family head copsed.

    Night Ghost who is trying his best to stand didn¡¯t try anymore and copsed to the ground as well.

    He couldn¡¯t hold on anymore and the energy he is using to suppress the heat in his body was also gone almost making his blood evaporate.

    Saber Monarch and Paras arrived by now and looked at his situation.

    They immediately took out a formation disc and three medium-sized energy cells.

    The formation disc has three grooves for the three cells. One cell is of ; light elemental energy, the second one is wood elemental energy, and the third one is normal energy.

    When the formation disc was activated a small dome surrounded the Night Ghost and the blood burning was immediately stopped as his vital stabilized.

    His body is slowly being healed as heid there sleeping taking in thefortable sensation.

    At this moment, both of them looked at the body of the family head and the dagger stabbed in.

    "We need to seal the soul instantly, it would be such a waste if the Night ghost couldn¡¯t take it."

    "But he fainted. And we cannot do anything."

    As they thought. Both of them exchanged a nce. They could still hear the musicing from the forest, Sam cannot do anything for now as he is the middle of the battle. They can only disturb one more person who is currently exempted from the battle.

    Tamas.

 Chapter 1058: Musical Clash

    Tamas didn¡¯t participate in the battle, because he is currently in the middle of a research. In the cave where Sam was stationed, there was a tunnel leading to another cave in which Tamas is currently stationed and is actually looking through different dead bodies.

    There are some high level necromancers that realize as much quantity of undead give them advantages, the quality of utmost importance, so they change the bodies of the undead, they take different paths, based on their studies.

    There are some people who use poisons and toxins as enhancements, some people that attack special hidden weapons to the undead with some hidden mechanisms inside their body.

    Some people that rece the skeletalwork with different metals, some modifying the flesh using different experiments.

    Tamas style of study is very different he actually got an epiphany before they reached the Merene family, so he was excused from fighting in this battle.

    But now that the situation has changed that the greatest resource to their strongest teammates was about to be dissipated, they couldn¡¯t just let it go away.

    They immediately sent a message to Tamas who stopped his research midway and came to capture the soul.

    He observed the body and performed a ritual, the soul was then condensed into the dagger used by the Night Ghost.

    "Give it to him, he would know what to do. I will be taking this body away. It looks helpful for my research."

    With that he immediately left with the dead body.

    The rest of the team took care of the Night Ghost while they handled the clean up as well.

    Meanwhile, near the cave, Sam and the young master are still ying their instruments, both of them had their eyes closed.

    Currently, the mes surrounding the young master didn¡¯t change their position and remained same as they appeared at the start.

    The blood-red scales also stayed in the same ce floating around Sam.

    A few beasts are looking at Sam and the young master while they took in the music.

    The battle is still a fight between the musical prowess, the elemental energies, and attacks are not yet introduced in it and since it was the young master who started the battle, Sam is matching his tune and yed his flute.

    Currently, it is a battle of patience on concentration, the first person who couldn¡¯t keep up with the tune and maintain this bnce would start the attack and either of them doesn¡¯t want to be that.

    At this moment, it is like an argument between two intellectuals, the first person to resort to blows would be the one having the lower hand in terms of knowledge of the subject they are arguing.

    But as the time passed, Sam started frowning, he understood that he is really not as formidable as the other party in terms of music.

    He is clearly the inferior one and he is sure that if this stayed as a pure music battle, he will lose no matter what.

    After some thought, he decided to attack. He didn¡¯t like doing it and certainly didn¡¯t want to do it, but he needs to do it.

    The scales revolved around him for one more time as they glowed with condensed wind elemental energy and moved towards the opponent, they created streaks of wind des as they moved and they targeted man points on his body.

    But the young master didn¡¯t even frown as plucked the strings rapidly. The spiritual energy in the air created a wave around him and a wave of mes followed that wave of spiritual energy before taking the shape of a human warrior. What surprised Sam, even more, is that as soon as the warriornded on the ground, the earth started morphing and surrounding the ming warrior creating a ming earth golem.

    The scales were affected by the wave of spiritual energy and were stopped in their tracks and the ming earthen golem warrior ran towards Sam with the spear in his hands.

    A few more scales appeared from behind Sam as they revolved with wind elemental energy as started hitting the golem from all sides. Their first target was obviously the lower limbs, then the upper limbs and then the head, and finally the core.

    In a few seconds, the only that remained on the ground is a small puddle of some magma surrounded by charred rocks.

    But Sam didn¡¯t rx, this is only a probe from the young master. And on top of that, he is extremely vignt by the fact that the other party is using the earth element too. He doesn¡¯t know that the other party can use earth elements. This is quite hidden as even Jw didn¡¯t know anything about it. She never heard of it and there were never even any suspicions.

    As Sam became vignt, he let go of all the scales and made them float around him. He needs to be vignt and shouldn¡¯t hold back.

    He kept up with the pace as he looked at the mes that areing from the veena as the opponent plucked the strings.

    The cluster of mes fell on different positions within the battlefield as they turned into the ming earthen golems. A few changed into the warriors, a few turned into beasts and some turned into knights riding on the beasts.

    And the designs of the golems are different, it seems like the young master tried his best to analyze all his previous opponents and created based on them.

    Soon, more than two dozen golems are running towards Sam and he replied with the scales in kind.

    He only used the wind elemental energy until now and he didn¡¯t change that yet. The scales started chipping at the joints of all the golems one by one as they made them copse one after another.

    None of them managed to reach anywhere near Sam they are all done for even before they reached fifteen meters around Sam.

    As they copsed they created some puddle of magma and some charred rocks. The advance from the young master didn¡¯t stop though. He continued with the same approach and soon the whole battlefield ispletely filled with magma. It is like one big pool.

    All of a sudden, there is a change in the young master¡¯s tune and Sam couldn¡¯t help but frown once again.

    The mes started roaring as every single pluck of a string caused a cluster of mes to appear, they started circling around the pool of the magma and even circled behind Sam¡¯s back.

    The young master created arge ming barrier with roaring mes and then the tune changed once again, this time the me streaksnded in the middle of theva pool, and once again golems starteding out of it.

    This time they used the charred rocks and magma as the base as they slowly took form.

    Sam¡¯s tune changed as the scales attacked the puppets, but the scales were affected not only by the waves caused by the young master because of the music, but most of them passed through the magma portion of the other party without causing much damage at all.

    It is almost futile.

    Sam paused for a second after trying three more times, the small-scale wind elemental attacks done by the scales are not going through the golems and the golem bodies are resonating with the spiritual energy waves caused by the music which makes the attacks unstable. If it was used directly on the person who is physically attacking them, then he might even die because of the constant bacsh.

    As the golems formed, they are not fast, they are moving moderately towards Sam as they stepped forward in a formation.

    The formation enhanced the ming barrier surrounding the whole battlefield to make sure that he wouldn¡¯t get a chance to escape.

    Sam shook his head and his whole aura changed. He started ying the flute once again and the scales were enveloped with not just wind element but also water element as well and they started emitting steam because of the surrounding heat.

    Sam divided the scales into pairs as they moved together towards golems.

    One scale held water elemental energy at the beginning and Sam reduced the temperature of the water content with his control causing the elemental energy condensed to be the one between ice and water element. This first scale in every pair also used wind element, but not for attacking, just to stay afloat and move.

    As for the second scale in every pair, it has its original wind elemental control and it was also helping in carrying the first scale.

    This time, they are also not being affected by the energy waves, because every time the energy wave was about to strike, Sam made the pairs sh. The water elemental scale shed with the wind elemental scale and Sam used ripple style.

    The opponent¡¯s attack only used a single, but for Sam¡¯s ripple style it has multiple waves caused by the ripples and they moved in all the directions and the waves propagated the cold freezing winds, and just with the first sh, the temperature within the barrier dropped by a lot.

 Chapter 1059: Stopped

    For the first time in the whole battle there is a frown on the face of the young master of Merene family.

    All this while, he haspletely control of the battle and even a slight upperhand, since the battle was a pure music and even after it changed into a direct battle. He was perfectly in control.

    But currently, the situation seemed to have changed.

    Sam¡¯s tune and rhythmpletely changed, all this while, he kept the tune in sync with the young master and that is why the beasts around could at least see the battle that looked like a piece of art, the sight, and the noise are all pleasant to their senses.

    But at this moment, the beasts are showing a bit of pained expression as they could feel the sh between the music from two sides.

    Sam¡¯s waypletely changed and in fact, the sh of scales is also being added into the rhythm of the music-making the young master confused for a moment.

    This is the first time someone did it.

    Sam knew that he is no match for the young master in terms of music. In fact, he is far behind, but when ites to versatility and being resourceful, he beat the young master by miles.

    He can easily overpower him.

    As the scales shed more and more along with the flute rhythm, half of the whole magma zone has turned into a frost zone.

    The magma turned back into rock and the white misty winds could be seen blowing.

    The golems that are in that zone, slowly lost their magma portion of the bodies and the scales destroyed the rocky potion in a few hits, making them crumble into the ground.

    Now, the golems resorted to the ranged attacks as the ming spears and mes themselves were thrown at Sam at a rapid pace.

    But once again, the scales used the same technique and the frosty ripples of energy made the attacks almost useless they barely even reached Sam¡¯s feet and by that time, he didn¡¯t even need to dodge it.

    Suddenly, the young master felt a bit helpless. He didn¡¯t know what to do exactly and how to proceed, the energy ripples from Sam are so formidable that they are not only nullifying the attacks of his fire elemental energy, they are even shortening the domain he created.

    At this rate, all the normal attacks would be wasted.

    They wouldn¡¯t work and will be merely a waste of his own energy. At this moment, he suddenly stopped ying and stored his Veena away.

    The magma domain he created slowly started dissipating. The fire boundary is disappearing and the golems are slowly crumbling.

    Sam didn¡¯t rx though, he let the scales rapidly progress further and they shed with each other cooling down the magma zone as much as he can.

    It almost looked like Sam had won. But all of a sudden, the frown on the young master¡¯s face rxed and he took out another veena. This is apletely different one and Sam recognized this.

    This is Rudra veena. A type of veena that is very hard to y and it is yedpletely horizontally,

    The young master closed his eyes his whole body slowly started enveloping with the fire elemental energy and soon he activated fire elemental fusion.

    He plucked a string a wave of fire elemental energy hit the whole area, the golems that are almostpletely frozen suddenly revitalized as the magma turned back to its liquid state.

    The young master didn¡¯t stop though, now his body is currently enveloped with earth elemental energy on top of the fire elemental energy and slowly his body looked like that of a ming earthen golem.

    He plucked another string as the whole domain quaked and the frosty ground seemed to have turned upside down.

    At this moment, he plucked two strings with two hands at the same time and the whole area turned into some kind of volcanic zone.

    Sam could feel the scales that are covered with frost energypletely being suppressed. Even the normal scales with wind energy are being suppressed, This became an absolute domain for the me and earth elements and the monarch of this small domain is currently sitting in front of Sam.

    The young master opened his eyes for the first time since the battle. He didn¡¯t just look like a musician, he looked like an emperor of music.

    Sam, stopped ying his flute and looked at his opponent.

    The admiration couldn¡¯t be hidden in his eyes. It has been a long time since he admired someone like this.

    The other party¡¯s musical prowess was so high that Sam almost had the urge to ask him to teach him how to y that veena. These are his instincts. It was in his nature to learn as much as he can in his previous life. It was ingrained into his bones and the very soul.

    If they ever met on another asion, Sam would have done this. He would have taken a knee in front of this young man who is about the same age as him and ask him to teach music. He would make him a real teacher and pay respects as such and remember that debt for the rest of his life.

    But currently, it is not possible.

    Sam bowed deeply making the young master surprised. He didn¡¯t understand why Sam would bow to him, but he didn¡¯t dare rx and kept on ying. The rocks in the domain started joining along with Magma as new golems formed and this time, they are not humans or normal beasts, the golems are formed in the shape of dragons.

    It is almost as if they came to life.

    Sam sighed and once again started ying the flute and this time, he used all the elements he had at his disposal.

    His musical prowess is limited, but this is not just musical prowess, this battle is how much of their energy and attacks they can do with their music and even Sam is not as skilled with music, that is enough for him to manipte the whole surroundings.

    Golden mes erupted at first along with golden light all of them condensed onto a scale to form a golden sun crow made solely out of the mes and light.

    When it entered the domain a few meters around it turned into golden mes. Then wind element surged and it enveloped another scale to create a roc.

    When the roc appeared in the domain, a few meters around it waspletely under its control, the magma was immediately blown away by the air and normal ground could be seen.

    The water element formed hydra around a scale along with the poisons secreted by Sam, the flute them emitted the shadow element as a single mouse came in the domain, but it immediately merged into the shadow letting out his shadow soldiers.

    The silver lightning created a silver wolf that howled as soon as it came.

    Then the Earth and Metal elements, forming the horse and the wood element forming the Forrest bear, and finally the Space element forming the space element.

    But it didn¡¯t end there. Three swords shot out of the divine dimension.

    The reaper, the executioner, and the shadow sword.

    All three of them went into the hands of the shadow soldiers and Sam manipted the energies.

    The Wind and Fire elements entered into the first shadow soldier, creating a forceful merge, the water and poison elements entered the second shadow soldier making another forceful merger. That shadow soldier is holding the Executioner sword.

    After that, the space element alone entered the third shadow soldier that held the shadow sword.

    Sam¡¯s consciousness is currently divided into many parts. He is controlling many things and these three shadow soldiers are also part of those controlled things.

    This is one of the domain techniques he created. Since he has three powerful weapons, there is no point in not using them.

    But at this moment as he sense the three shadows, he couldn¡¯t help but smile. The sword spirits seemed to have merged with the shadows temporarily and this will lessen the burden on him.

    The shadow soldiers moved as they were led by these three and dove towards the ming golems followed by the beasts that are pure condensed of elemental energies.

    The massive figures shed as they reacted to the musical rhythms that aremanding them.

    The whole scene looked majestic. The dragons shed with the rest of the mythical beasts that are made with energies.

    And they slowly started moving back.

    The young master tried his best to get the upper hand back, but slowly his domain started disappearing and is being reced with apletely new domain.

    It turned into Sam¡¯s domain and as the dragons were slowly suppressed, a red scale flew through the domain aimed at the throat of the young master.

    Right, when the young master thought, he was going to die, the scale stopped right before his throat.

    He looked at Sam in surprise, who stopped ying and the scale dropped down.

    Sam¡¯s face has an expression of struggle and unwillingness before he sighed and opened his eyes.

 Chapter 1060: Oath

    As the young master stared at Sam who stopped ying the flute, he was dumbfounded. He could see the energy domains disappearing and the aftermath is clearly visible to see.

    The whole area is full of residual elemental energies moving in a special rhythm.

    The whole ce is infested with the aura of the music and the marks of their battle. He is sure that people that barely started their music practice will have great gains if theye here. But all of those thoughts disappeared as he looked at Sam who ising towards him.

    When they are only a few feet away, Sam spoke.

    "I really admire your musical prowess. I don¡¯t know if I should say that it is an honor to fight with you or it is a pity that you are on the other side. But I cannot bring myself to kill you just like that.

    You have two choices. One, swear an oath with your soul that you would continue practicing music and spread this path and if you want any revenge you can juste and find me. You wouldn¡¯t go after my subordinates of the branches of my organization.

    The second option is that you would die on the spot.

    I have norge enmity with you and your family except for the fact that you are subordinates of Indra.

    You choose."

    The young master was dumbfounded. He stood up and bowed to Sam before taking an oath.

    "I shall continue the line of Merene family and shall spread my art. I thank Sir Sam for the mercy. If I ever find myself in the maws of desire for vengeance, then I assure you that I wille searching for. This I swear on my honor as a Gandharva of the Merene family.

    This is a Gandharva Oath."

    When he spoke lightning crackled in the sky. Sam looked surprised and the young master exined.

    "Gandharvas have a special oath and vows that they could do. Since we are subordinates of the gods, our oaths would be recognized as the natural elements that are controlled and ruled by our gods. If I break my oath, the lightning of nature will not rest until I die.

    In fact, we can even oversee other people¡¯s oath as a witness on behalf of nature. If a Gandharva acts as a witness of the oath between two different parties, the party that broke the oath will be judged by the natural element of the Gods that are worshipped by the Gandharva."

    Sam nodded and was surprised as he never heard about it.

    The young master then took out something from his storage and gave it to Sam. It turned out that the heirloom is with the young master instead of the family head.

    He stored it away and once again bowed to the young master and left to meet his team.

    They finished the cleaning up.

    There are not many people left in the Merene family. Except for the few people they sent to their friend¡¯s ce so that their family branch would survive and the lineage wouldn¡¯t disappear, almost everyone else was dead.

    The city that was currently calm and curious about the Merene family¡¯s movements would surely burn in chaos in a few days.

    Sam and his team entered the city to take the rest of the night and moveter the next day.

    The whole war ended in only one day and the fate of the realm was turned upside down.

    While the team went to the inn and make other arrangements, Sam went to the family estate of the Merene family, there is no one there to stop him, so he went into the temple and meet with the Indra statue.

    He took out a small liquid energy cell and tied it to the statue before performing the ritual.

    "Really Indra? You can be angry at me for being a pain in your ass, you can at least be kind to your devotees, can¡¯t you. You should have at least not yed with their feelings by using words like curse breaking and such. They all died because of you. Can you understand that? You killed them all?"

    "Don¡¯t think you can escape the sin just because you try to push the responsibility to me. You are the killer, the blood is on your hands. You will soon reap what you sow."

    "Well, I guess, your words also apply to you too. Good luck with that."

    Sam broke the token and the statue was destroyed.

    He went back to the inn and rested for the night, thinking where they should go.

    ording to the list, their next target is actually another religious organization. They worship Zeus.

    Although, Sam¡¯s main focus was on the organizations under Hou Yi¡¯s and Hel¡¯s name and the next on the list was Indra, the other party he wanted o deal with was Zeus if he had to make a choice.

    Out of gods, Sun Wukong, Karthikeya, have a good rtionship with him, while he had bad blood with three gods, and he cannot do anything about his own god¡¯s organizations.

    So, in these neutral five, if he has to select, he would pick Zeus, and then he would pick Thor and Agni. It is not because he has bad blood with them, he doesn¡¯t like Zeus and the remaining two are the targets, he doesn¡¯t care too much about.

    Anyway, the rest of the yers understood Sam¡¯s enmity with Hou Yi and Hel and let go of those organizations, they barely messed with them and then some of Indra¡¯s organizations are taken down by Sam as well.

    Now he is going after Zeus¡¯ organization.

    This religious organization has many racesing to it. In fact, it is one of those organizations that collect people of decent talents from low-level organization and nurture them so that they can be sent to higher nes to join Zeus¡¯ army.

    The temple is currently run by the Stone Demi-Giants. These people are different from the demi giants Sam already dealt with. They are of the earth element and they have are fifty-five percent purity in their giant bloodline.

    Along with the stone giants, there are some earth elemental beings that belong to a winged race that ispletely devoted to the temple and the remaining people are all from different races and they even have different elemental affinities.

    The next morning Sam asked the team to collect some information from some merchants. Now everyone knew of Sam and his team, they clearly saw them dragging people off the Merene family through the city into the forest, the Merene family that went there didn¡¯te back but these people did.

    They could guess what could have happened.

    So, they are extremely respectful to the team and all the merchants immediately spilled the beans.

    The main business of the Temple is to make Golems and sell them. They make all kinds of golems. The base of the golems is the stone and they add elements of others with the help of the other members. Their energy would be used to create golems of different elemental affinities.

    Even if one was not a golem user they can easily make a contract with the golem.

    The Zeus¡¯stone temple. That is the name of the organization.

    They don¡¯t control the city, they don¡¯t control the realm. Nobody knows how many people are there in their ranks all they knew is that there is one Late-stage Transcendent cultivator of Astral ne, exactly six middle-stage Transcendent cultivators of Astral ne with three being demi giants and three being winged race.

    And there are around twelve Initial stage cultivators of the Astral ne.

    The number stayed the same for millennia and nobody knows why and where the people who made breakthroughs went.

    As for members of Astral ne Pre-transcendence and less, there are many people and no one bothered to count, but they are still not as many as the people that are ruling the realm.

    But the problem is nobody could be happy that their numbers are lesser, because the stone golems are a major problem. It could be said that Zeus¡¯ stone temple¡¯s main strength is the stone golems themselves.

    There are high-level golems that have contracts with the members, but even the low-strength golems are extremely troublesome.

    There was an incident where an Astral ne Initiation cultivator of the stone temple that killed three Astral ne Pre-transcendent cultivator and the main reason is because of the number of stone golems in his hand.

    He has dozens of Astral ne Stone golems at Initiation ne and there are hundreds of Mortal ne Consummation stage golems.

    Even though all of them are weak, they justpletely surrounded the three and jumped on them while exploding themselves without any care for their own safety which eventually killed them.

    These stone golems are as troublesome as the undead. But for the undead, at least if the necromancer dies, it would be alright, but these golems are already given spirits by the makers and the users barely make contracts, they don¡¯t need someone¡¯s control as long as they were already programmed to fight. So once the enemy was locked even after the user dies, they will only stop after they destroyed the enemy.

 Chapter 1061: Sculptor Gorilla

    Sam and the team moved that very afternoon after they got enough information from the merchants. They used the divine dimension to reach the next realm.

    But they didn¡¯t go for the temple immediately, as much as the merchants gave the information, it is clearly not sufficient to make a move, they must first enter the city to get some more detailed info before proceeding with their tasks.

    While the team entered the city with the temple, Sam and Sia are roaming in the forests as they looked around.

    There is one more piece of information that they got from the merchants and that is the other main business in the vicinity of the city and it turned out to be the fruits.

    The forests surrounding the city have some wild fruits that could only be grown in natural conditions, they are not suitable for making orchards.

    And these fruits are of quite a high level that they are mostly used for making medicine, no one ever dares to eat them directly.

    When Sam heard this he couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit hungry. If such fruit is grown in the divine dimension, the wine that could be made from it would on a whole different level. So, he immediately decided to try and find the trees from the forest, even if he cannot just uproot the trees because of their rarity, a twig is sufficient for him as long as it can be nted.

    And Sia the one with the ambition of bing a great liquor maker would never miss such an opportunity.

    Sam let the ape out to find the fruit trees. He is the best at this job.

    They stayed in the forest until evening and they were quite busy with their jobs. Just before they were about to go to the city and get to their main job, the ape suddenly became aggressive and started looking around sniffing for the scent. Its expression showed extreme anger.

    This is very for him to behave like that. After all, Ape¡¯s character mellowed a lot as he practiced making liquor. It is an art that he is practicing diligently, this made his mind to evolve further and made him more gentle and thoughtful.

    He even stopped most of his petty squabbles with Yanwu who steals his wine again and again.

    For him to react like this, Sam couldn¡¯t help but frown. He tried to calm him down and asked.

    "What happened?"

    Sam asked the ape and thetter replied as he pointed at a specific direction.

    Sam frowned and said.

    "Let us go and check then. Don¡¯t worry. No matter who it is, I will help them as long as you say so."

    The aggression of the ape mellowed down a bit as he started running. Sia and Sam followed behind them, Sia with her shadow technique and Sam on his hoverboard.

    Soon, they arrived at the location, they at the edge of a small cliff. It is not thatrge. They could clearly see what is happening beneath.

    There are two people one from the Winged race and another one from the Demi Giant race both of them seemed to be only Consummate stage cultivators. They are quite weak. But that is not what caught their attention.

    At this moment, there is an ape near them. It is only of Mortal ne Transcendent stage. It is currently weeping as there are many injuries on its body.

    It limped towards a tree within the valley and plucked a fruit before bringing it back to the two people. It bowed on the floor and offered the fruit to them as it begged in its ownnguage.

    It has grey stone-colored fur and it looked more like a gori.

    Sam was stunned when he saw this. This is one of the high-level races.

    They are called Sculptor goris. These are not supposed to be anywhere near this realm. Their blood superiority is right beside the Golden Ape.

    They are extremely good at stone sculpting. They stay in small families, mostly with few males and few female goris with their children. They only do a few things, cultivate fruit, roam around the forest and sculpt whatever they saw in the forest on the rocks and mountains. They would migrate to a different ce to sculpt where there is no stone structure in their vicinity or if there are fruits in their surroundings.

    They don¡¯t eat meat and only survive on fruit. They are better than Golden Ape in finding the fruits and such. They don¡¯t interact with other creatures that much and they don¡¯t have any enmity with others as well. Since they don¡¯t depend on meat and stay close to each other, the other beasts also don¡¯t hunt them for food.

    But there is one drawback in these creatures, they don¡¯t like to fight. They get hurt when they saw others killing each other. They even thank the trees that offer them fruits and that is not just figuratively, it is literally.

    Because of their abilities, they offer better fruits for other beast races in the forest in exchange for protection and they make wine that could heal other beasts when they are injured. They are one of the most peaceful creatures to ever exist.

    They cannot see anyone getting hurt.

    For that reason, the tribe is in one of the most secured locations in higher realms and the beasts of the forest protect this tribe properly.

    For such a creature to suffer like this, Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit angry. He didn¡¯t even know how the gori appeared here, but from the looks of it, it is not having a good time.

    "What do you want to leave?" The demi giant asked the gori with a smug expression.

    Gori nodded with tears in his eyes.

    "Okay then leave."

    The Gori felt surprised but it bowed once again and slowly walked away, time to time it turned back and looked at the duo as if it is afraid that they would go back on their words. Once it is at a fair distance away, it was about to start running, at this moment, the winged race guy threw a chain sickle at the gori.

    It stuck into the leg of the gori and Sam¡¯s party understood how the limp appeared.

    The muscles of the gori are strong and the sickle managed to get stuck there. The Demi-Giant help the chain and started dragging the gori.

    "GRRRAAAA... Grraaw."

    The gori started screaming in pain as it tried to move forward, it once again resorted to begging and pleading.

    Ape wanted to move out immediately, but he looked at Sam for approval. Sam nodded and the ape disappeared in a golden sh.

    With a chop from his arm the chain was cut and the ape walked towards the Gori.

    When the gori saw the ape, it was frightened at first, but when he noticed that they are of a simr kind, and also very strong, it became a bit courageous.

    Ape sat beside the gori and checked the wounds, before yelling at Sam.

    Sam and Sia slid down the cliff. Sam went to the Gori and Sia went to the two brats who wanted to run away. She made them faint instantly and looked after them so that they won¡¯t escape.

    Sam examined the injuries and couldn¡¯t help but frown once again. There is a special poison on the chain sickle de that would enhance the pain. He couldn¡¯t help but get angrier as he observed the condition of the gori.

    He instantly put him to sleep before carrying out the treatment.

    There are some ces that need some surgery. These guys are using different poisons on the goris which made the flesh change in many ces. These pieces of flesh need to be removed. Sam finished everything and took out some medicine to heal the goripletely.

    Only after the goripletely woke up did his frown rx.

    He let the ape coax the gori and let him rest before walking towards the two people who are currently tiedying down on the ground.

    Sam threw a ssh of water to wake them up.

    They woke up in shock and looked around. Then they realized where they were and what they were doing.

    They looked at Sam and Sia before pointing their fingers at them. The Demi giant yelled.

    "Who are you? Why are you interfering in our matters? Are you trying to steal our gori? You better give it back or..."

    Before he could speak, the demi giant and the winged race guy felt like they saw a sh before their eyes, and their arms which they extended to point their fingers at Sam were chopped off.

    They didn¡¯t even realize it immediately and it took some time for them to react.

    "AAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHH..."

    "NNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOO...."

    Two screams echoed in the valley they are in, the winged race guy desperately opened his wings and wanted to fly away. Sam just waved his hand and two wind des cut the wings down making him crash into the ground.

 Chapter 1062: Conning the temple

    Sam made both of them sit down as he prepared something.

    He first took out a ss vial with a potion and then he took out a small neutral liquid energy cell. He tinkered with it a bit and the lid came off. He poured half of it into the potion vial and then closed the lid on it.

    Then he started shaking it. The ordinary potion that looked like some normal red liquid now became glowing red liquid. Sam took out a syringe and pulled the liquid into it, before injected it into both of these guys with an equal share.

    He waited for the medicine to kick in, while he tried to warm with the sculptor gori. The little guy was hesitant a bit, but soon he warmed up with Sam, but when he looked at the demi giant and the winged race guy, he couldn¡¯t help but shiver.

    Sam thought of something and took out a formation disc. This is one of those three-dimensional hologram discs. He is still experimenting on them and this is one of the by-products.

    He ced the disc on the patch of grass and activated it. A bunch of butterflies appeared as they circled around the little gori.

    The little gori was in awe as he looked at the small beautiful butterflies and soon he started running after them.

    Whenever he tried to catch them, he wasn¡¯t able to, but he was not discouraged, in fact, he cheered up quite a bit and ran around like a little kid. In fact, the Sculptor gori might even be a little over twelve years old which is just being a kid in terms of their maturity.

    After distracting the little one, Sam took another formation and ced it around him, Sia, and the two captives.

    "Before we start, let me tell you something. I am pissed and the thing I injected into you is actually something I made. It is simr to the pain enhancer that you gave the gori, but just ten times more potent and the small white-colored liquid that was added to it has only one percent, make the potion more sensitive to the body.

    Now, p each other on faces."

    When Sam said this, they were dumbfounded. But they didn¡¯t react, Sam took out a knife and said.

    "p each other or your genitals would be cut off."

    They shivered in fright and immediately pped each other. Of course, they didn¡¯t use full strength.

    *PAK *PAK*

    The sound is also not that loud. But as soon as theynded.

    *AAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGG"

    Both of them cried in pain in unison.

    "That is the effectiveness of the medicine I gave you.

    Now, you will tell me each answer I want or you will skin you alive while keeping you high on that medicine all the time."

    They didn¡¯t dare and immediately agreed.

    Sam then closely asked about their identities, how a sculptor gori came to be in their hands. What is their purpose of torturing the creature? As he kept on receiving the answers, Sam became angrier and angrier. He started pulling the nails off of the fingers and toes slowly one by one. He behaved like an absolute savage.

    And as they went into details, he couldn¡¯t control his strength and identally killed the other party with a p.

    Both of them died with just a single p.

    He tried his best to calm down. Luckily, the little guy was busy with the butterfly formation and Sam used an istion formation for both of these guys, otherwise, he is sure that little guy wouldn¡¯t dare look at him again.

    Sia and Sam soon started their journey back. Ape is currently in hisrge form as he carried the little gori who is the size of an adult human on his shoulders while the little guy enjoyed the fruit juice.

    Soon, they returned to the camp and waited for the people toe back. By night, the team reassembled, but before they could even start the reports, Sam spoke.

    "I want the Stone temple absolutely destroyed. Not a single person who is at the Nascent stage and above can be left behind. We are going to kill everyone and in a single shot. We need to n perfectly for this."

    When they heard Sam¡¯s words they were stunned. Before they could ask any questions, Sam exined.

    He told them the situation of the sculptor gori and then continued with the information he got from the two kids.

    It turned out that the main reason for the excellent golems of the stone temples is these goris. Of course, they didn¡¯t sculpt the bodies of the golems, but they used a simr technique to Sam. The temple residents who are direct descendants of the demi giants and the winged race will all be given a stone gori when they are of the Nascent stage and from then on, they will torture these poor creatures.

    They only have one goal, they will torture all the goris to strengthen their souls and when they hit their potential, they will ughter them and harvest their souls. Just like how Sam used the souls to create the liquid energy cells, they also use the souls to sculpt the bodies of the golems.

    As for why they have to go through this tragic way, it is because the goris wouldn¡¯t be able to sculpt something they don¡¯t deem as artistic.

    They sculpt things that they are grateful for, they sculpt things that they think are beautiful, but they wouldn¡¯t act like machines and it is not their choice, they are incapable of it.

    And these people cannot do anything by making a contract with them, in fact, they cannot do so, as the soul will be damaged if they made a contract and tortured them. So, they keep all of them inside an inverted tower in the temple estate.

    Each gori will be assigned to the people of the temple and they are in charge of torturing them.

    Even the team felt sick hearing this. It might sound like they are all hypocrites considering the number of people they killed and tortured.

    Particrly Sam, who captured people and ced them on the chessboard to do his bidding, but every person is a hypocrite and one can afford to be so if they are strong. As long as they can make up a justifiable excuse. And Sam¡¯s excuse is that he never picked someone that didn¡¯t have any enmity with.

    They shed, they lost and they are now on the chessboard. But torturing a creature that doesn¡¯t want to harm you in any way, is something too disgusting and a new low for everyone.

    So, they started discussing the ns.

    Meanwhile, Ape made arge amount of fruit juice in a wooden barrel and ced a bamboo straw in it before giving it to a gori.

    And the little one got hooked on it soon. Because the goris are underfed and they would only be given nutrients for their cultivation. They wouldn¡¯t be given the food they want to eat, the fruits.

    After discussing the ns, they immediately sprung into action. The next morning two things happened.

    They looked for a high-level member of the temple who is not from the Demi giants or the Winged racemunity.

    They captured the guy and Kiran¡¯s job is to imitate him and infiltrate the temple.

    Meanwhile, Sam entered the city along with the Night Ghost like an arrogant young master.

    He reached the temple and when the stewards at the gate greeted him, he threw a spatial ring at him, without turning back, when the stewards saw the contents of the ring, they were stunned and the news immediately spread that a big fish has entered the temple.

    Sam was soon in a meeting with the elder of the temple.

    "may I know who the young master is?"

    "I am called Sam as for where I am from, you are not qualified to know. The only reason I am here is that I want the sculptors of your temple?"

    "Pardon, young master."

    "Don¡¯t worry, I am not poaching anyone, but rather I want all of you to work for me temporarily. I am cing a big order. I have some golem designs which are extremely special and they can only be made with special materials and I need them freshly made at specific times.

    The total deal is worth ten billion spirit stones.

    For the next month, cancel all your orders. I will send materials and the designs for them to your temple whenever I want and you would be responsible for sculpting it immediately and in the number that I want.

    And I don¡¯t want any distractions with all the petty projects you take regrly. So, cancel all of your orders now and you can get this deal."

    "Sir..." The Elder was stunned and hesitated.

    He doesn¡¯t know how to react.

    Sam threw another spatial ring on the table.

    "Inside is the first batch of the designs, I am still in process of procuring the material required for it, so you can study it in the meantime. Along with that are spirit stones. The advance payment of Five billion."

 Chapter 1063: Energy Lock

    The Elder was stunned and he immediately forgot about his position and status as he took a look at the spatial ring.

    The temple¡¯swork is quiterge, but even for them ten billion is a lot and five billion in advance.

    "On top of that, for every batch of products I receive, I will examine them and if they reach my expectations, I will give bonuses to the sculptors that made it.

    Do you want to take the order or not?"

    When the Elder heard this, he came out of the daze and said.

    "Young master Sam, this is something that I cannot make a decision about, I need to ask our leader. But Please don¡¯t worry i am sure he will agree and I will try my best to persuade him if he doesn¡¯t do so."

    "Be quick, I don¡¯t have much time."

    With that, the elder left the room to find the leaders, he organized an urgent meeting and told them all about it.

    But the leader of the temple is not as excited. He looked at the elder and said.

    "Don¡¯t you think this is fishy? If he is that rich and powerful, why would hee to our ce and give orders to us?"

    This question raised the doubts in the elders and after some discussion, the temple leader decided to meet Sam directly before making any decision.

    He indirectly slipped in the question and Sam said.

    "Well, it is a bet between me and my brothers, we arepeting onpleting different tasks. We cannot use our family resources and any of our business connections and we can only operate on lower realms."

    When they heard this, even though they thought it is a bit far fetched, they didn¡¯t dismiss the idea. Sam is currently acting like a proper spoiled brat and there is no saying what these spoiled brats would do for their own entertainment.

    This action is right up their alley.

    After some thought, they agreed.

    "Okay, I want all the sculptors on the standby and there should be no sculpting operations going on here. I want everyone to be fresh, not just their bodies, but their minds as well. Meanwhile, just analyze the designs and don¡¯t you dare try to use them on other rocks. If I am satisfied with your work, I will give them up to you."

    With that, Sam and the Night Ghost left the area.

    The elders went through the designs and they were stunned. They didn¡¯t expect that they woulde across such profound designs in the hands of a silkpants.

    Sam did this so that the other party would refrain their sculpting activity temporarily which will make the goris stay alive for a while.

    Meanwhile, Kiran¡¯s infiltration seeded. His job is almost the same as what he did in the Night Demon family. All he has to do is ce the liquid energy cells near the formation nodes, but in this case most of them are ced on the temples structure itself.

    As the temple is a detailed architectural manifestation, there are too many formation ingrained on it and when the timees, it cannot not only be used for defense, but attacks as well and they have to make sure that doesn¡¯t happen.

    That whole day, Kiran kept on moving all over the temple, he didn¡¯t care if they feel that he is suspicious, after all, they are crashing this ce at dawn, so there is no need for him to be too cautious.

    He finished the whole process by dawn and got ready with his next task. He went to the temple hall and started cing some cylinders in the corners of the hall. The cylinders didn¡¯t contain liquid energy. They are some of the chemical by products of Sam. Even though there is small content of liquid energy inside, it is extremely small.

    After Kiran was done with this task, there is only one thing left for him to do and he is waiting for Sam¡¯s signal.

    At this moment, Sam selected the temple in the list and the Zeus status in the temple started glowing after a few minutes.

    The temple is not like other organizations, the statue is not hidden, in fact it is out in the main hall. Large and majestic.

    Everyone gathered immediately in the temple hall. From young to old. Nobody dared to stay outside or insid their own rooms. Everyone except Kiran of course.

    As soon as they gathered, he slowly moved towards the entrance of the hall and pressed and crushed a token before swallowing a pill.

    While Zeus was exining what Sam is doing and what their situation is, the cylinders hidden in the hall started leaking colorless and odourless gas into the temple and it soon spread to all over the estate.

    Kiran ran towards the inverted tower in the rear and finished off the guards instantly before cing a formation disc there that would filter the gas.

    The whole temple estate is covered in gas, but no one realized that.

    Zeus looked at the leader who is exining features of the young master Sam he saw earlier.

    "He is the person I am talking about. He will ask for the heirloom, you better save it with your life. Otherwise, be prepared to face the consequences. Your race will never experience any raise in their status for all eternity."

    As the Zeus¡¯ possession of the statue was over and he returned back, the members of the temple bowed once again, but even before they could stand up, Sam arrived with the rest of his team and there are a bunch of bat type puppets surrounding the whole estate before they released energy waves from their mouth.

    All of a sudden, the people inside the temple, became stiff as they couldn¡¯t move their bodies, they felt like they turned into statues all of a sudden.

    This is all a result of the gas. The gas is actually nothing but energy treated oxygen. This is one of the byproducts of the research. And when it is breathed in, the energy would be easily absorbed into the blood.

    But there is a catch here. The energy is marked by the Energy bats which makes it resonate with the energy bat¡¯s energy waves.

    In the process they would turn still, because the energy would have already circted all around their body.

    But this is not too useful. They can at most hold them for one minute and for thete stage and Middle stage transcendent stage cultivators, it might even be less than a minute. Still, that is enough for Sam.

    He took off on Harbinger and sent Ape and little gori into the inverted tower. Kiran went back to the front join the battle from the front.

    Vidyut, Night ghost, and Tamas are currently attacking the people in the hall, this is the perfect timing for them to reduce some numbers, and seeing this, some of them tried to forcefully breakthrough that energy block which caused them to cough up a mouthful of blood.

    And they became the primary targets.

    While they are dealing with the others, at this moment Sam took out thunder prison to cover the entrance of the inverted tower.

    He knows that the fight will go out of hand because Sam is not exactly in a good mood. He could take them all into the divine dimension, but he needs to persuade them for that. But he didn¡¯t have any time and sculptor goris are too scarred by the torture for them to easily be convinced.

    So, he let the ape and the little gori calm them down and release them from their shackles.

    After arranging everything, he then took out one of his new toys. He is actually not something he felt good about when making. It is one of the weapons that he doesn¡¯t want to let this world experience.

    It looked like an assault rifle. Except for ce a magazine would have been present usually, there is a socket for a liquid energy cell.

    Sam ced a small liquid energy cell in it and loaded the gun like any ordinary assault rifle.

    The gun started glowing as patterns emerged on it.

    He hovered on the harbinger and a small ss box into the air. The ss box has a bunch of tokens that are usually used for exploding the liquid energy cells.

    He aimed the gun and shot them.

    An energy beam was shot and as it made contact, it exploded. It gave out the same effects as an energy st caused by an explosion of a spirit stone or a normal energy cell.

    As the tokens were destroyed...

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    A series of explosions urred all over the ce the temple started copsing.

    By now, the temple members already managed to escape the energy lock and angrily got ready to make a move at the team, but before they could do so the temple copsed. Now, instead of attacking, they focused on getting out of this ce.

 Chapter 1064: Energy beams

    The temple copsed and Sam made his way through the rubble with the gun in his hands. The team immediately lodged towards the temple members inside the rubble. Sam¡¯s shadow undead also came out as they went after the low-ranked people.

    The use of this liquid energy assault rifle is different than a normal rifle with normal energy cell bullets.

    When the energy beam hits the target, the explosion is clearly simr to that of a normal energy cell explosion, but in fact, it is extremely concentratedpared to it.

    The explosion that urred with this energy beam is extremely controlled and in a very small area. If such arge energy reaction was confined to a small area, then the damage could only be greater than normal.

    Sam shot down one Astral ne Pre-transcendent cultivator after another as he roamed around in harbinger. Every shot is a head shot and every head that was shot exploded and vaporized into nothing. All that was left is the headless corpse and a bunch of residual energy causing chaos because of the aftermath of the explosion.

    Sam didn¡¯t hold back at all. His cold expression and his shooting without even blinking an eye and nonchntly killing one guy after another made the team a bit ufortable. They didn¡¯t see Sam being this unfeeling. It is to the point it is scary.

    The team is currently shing with the elders and other experts of the temple in the front.

    Night Ghost managed to kill two middle-stage transcendent stage cultivators while they are still affected by the gas and the head of the temple who forcefully broke through is currently injured and is recovering a bit without making a move.

    More than half of them are stuck under the rubble when the building copsed and they areing out of it now.

    This is the only time, they have an upper hand and the team took extreme advantage of it as they attacked.

    But soon, the advantage is gone, everyone came out of the rubble and they started letting their golems out. Thousands of golems flooded the whole temple estate and even spread to the streets.

    Sam changed the liquid energy cell, the energy is almost over, he activated it and threw it towards the nearest temple member.

    A golem jumped into the air to block it, but it exploded in the middle making the golem crash back into that member.

    Sam then put a different energy cell and this time, it is a special one. The cell is divided vertically into twopartments even in that small size and one half has light energy liquid and the other half has the hydra poison energy.

    After loading the gun, he turned a small lever on the gun and changed a simple setting before aiming it at the temple head and pulling the trigger.

    Arge energy beam was shot. It looked like a goldenser with an Indigo hue but that is not the main difference from the previous one. The main difference is that this is a continuous beam. When the beam hit the target, the explosion was so concentrated and dense that the copse and destruction were immediate.

    When numerous golems tried to restrict the energy beam, they were just prated and hit the temple head who opened his eyes in the middle of recovery. He could feel the light elemental energy slowly ravaging his flesh and the stinging pain of the corrosive poisonous energy which spread along his flesh.

    The beam didn¡¯t stay in the same spot on his flesh, even though at the start it is more like a flesh wound, if he stayed on a single spot, he would definitely be able to make a hole through in a minute, but the rest of members didn¡¯t n to let Sam have that much freedom.

    But too bad for them, he is on the harbinger. Not a lot of flying objects, including their golems and beasts can do anything about controlling him.

    While Sam kept the temple head busy, Night Ghost hurried to deal with the rest of the candidates. In thest battle, he gained a lot of strength and he is on verge of a breakthrough, he is sure that he is going to experience a breakthrough after this. So, he is extremely powerful than his peers and it didn¡¯t take long for him to deal with the current opponents and then start his attack on the temple head.

    When he took over, they exchanged a nod and Sam shifted his focus back to the thousands of golems and the people that are controlling them.

    Meanwhile, when the temple members saw the state of the Temple head they were dumbfounded.

    The entirety of the back of the temple head waspletely burned and charred the flesh is exposed and it is being corroded at a rapid pace, there is no way he would survive through this if he didn¡¯t receive immediate treatment.

    Even if he won against Night ghost by any chance, he would definitely die after the corrosion spread enough in his body.

    Sam removed the dual elemental liquid energy cells and threw it into the bunch of golems blindly. Around four golems exploded, but within what looked like an endless swarm of golems they are minuscule.

    But there is not a hint of worry on Sam¡¯s face. He picked a fire elemental cells this time and loaded the gun before shooting another continuous beam. He just aimed at the nearest member of the temple and didn¡¯t bother to care if he tried to block it with the golems.

    When the golems came into the way and made contact with the continuous beam, one could see faint explosions happening on the surface, but in just two seconds, there is a burning hole or it can even be called a molten hole that appeared on the golem which spread cracks and eventually made it copse appeared and the beam went through that to hit another golem.

    Sam barely moved the gun and that too he did it only when the target member of the temple is changing his location.

    Whatever that came in the middle is not his concern and in this way, the member used a hundred golems to block Sam, but all hundred of them areying on the ground with half of their bodies molten and the other half-copsed, irrespective of their elemental abilities and the beam hit the member in the face after which that person¡¯s head, neck and half of the torso were gone and the rest waspletely burned.

    After that, Sam took out the almost emptied fire elemental liquid cell and threw it towards the golems that are ganging up on Paras.

    Paras got an opening he needed and dove towards his opponent before chopping him into two with a single strike.

    Sam looked at the number of the golems that are kept on increasing. They are not even focused on one particr person, they are just trying to exhaust Sam and his team while the members hid in the middle of them.

    Sam changed the mode of the gun once again and took out another special liquid energy cell. This one also has twopartments. One of them has dark ck colored liquid while the second one has dark purple colored liquid.

    Both of them are not pure elemental energy liquids. They are the results of some research and are simr to the undead liquid that preserves the dead bodies for a longer time.

    These two are corrosive liquids. The dark one is from the dark elemental energy and the purple one is from poison energy.

    Sam shook it a bit and inserted it in the gun before changing the mode once again and aiming at the empty spot above the ce with a high density of golems.

    A small energy globe with ck and purple colors mixed together formed and it slowly got bigger and bigger. When the temple member noticed this, they didn¡¯t care much initially as it is mostly near the golems.

    "Get out of there."

    Sam spoke to his teammates who are near the energy globe which is still expanding.

    The teammates left the spots and started abandoning their opponents and escaped.

    And within a few seconds.

    *BOOM*

    A massive explosion urred blinding everyone. The energy waves caused by it made everyone¡¯s heart skip a beat.

    Therge explosion created waves and when everything settled, all they saw isrge heaps of corroded rocky rubble in the ce of the golems and in the ce of the temple members, all that left is their remains which are rotten and corroded. Even the bones smelled like rotten feces.

    Not just the temple members, even the teammates were stunned by this. This is something Sam never disyed. They knew that he is resourceful. But they didn¡¯t know that he is this resourceful.

    One thought came to their minds after looking at it. Now, Sam doesn¡¯t need any of them. He can solely knock on the doors of these powers one by one and destroy them before they realize what is happening.

    When they looked at Sam, his face is as nonchnt as earlier. He took out the empty cell from the gun and threw it casually before loading it with other.

 Chapter 1065: Next Target

    Sam ispletely nonchnt of the destruction he caused. He just took out the corrosion liquid cell he used just now and threw it away and put another liquid energy cell as he continued shooting casually.

    This time, he used the wind elemental liquid energy cell and threw and changed the gun back to the initial single shot mode.

    He got a clean hit on one of the temple members and that guy turned into a finely shredded meat and bones.

    He kept on shooting one guy after another and the golems. Because of the corrosive poison used on the temple head, he is actually in a pretty vulnerable state and the Night Ghost didn¡¯t dare to bex in front him, even in that situation.

    After all, the other party is sure that he would lose his life, so there is no saying that he wouldn¡¯t use some crazy move that could cause some serious destruction.

    So, their battlested longer almost to the end. And for that reason, the family head had to see every temple member constantly dying in Sam and the rest of the team¡¯s hands.

    The whole scene looked tragic.

    By an hour before noon, finally everything is over. It took longer than they initially thought, but still everything was cleanly done. No one was spared and every golem was destroyed. All that left of them is the rubble, mushed meat and some bones.

    One more time, Sam only wanted money, he didn¡¯t want anything else the rest of the team divided the loot.

    Night Ghost used some of the containers made by the empty spirit stones and collected the souls of the family members one by one.

    He even stored the temple head¡¯s soul without consuming it. Because as soon as he swallowed a Middle stage transcendent stage soul, he knew that he is going to breakthrough.

    So, he hurriedly collected all the souls that he can and sat there down to breakthrough. Everyone looked at him with envious expression. Ever since they formed a team, they all have this invisible peer pressure that their cultivation is not fast enough and they are not strong enough.

    They wanted to breakthrough desperately. Everyone is cultivating harder than ever and they are pushing towards breakthrough stronger than ever. But still, they couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit of envy when their team mates were breaking through and this raised thepetitive spirit of others even more.

    Sam just gave the Night Ghost a nce before walking towards the inverted tower.

    There are some people who wanted to enter the tower to protect themselves, but they couldn¡¯t find an entry point with the thunder prison covering the entrance.

    Sam removed the thunder prison and jumped inside the inverted tower as he looked inside, he couldn¡¯t help but feel anger surge once again. There are cells that are barely enough to fit the goris around the tower and there are chains hanging to the wall. At this moment the goris are currently free and sitting there as they drunk some wine and fruit juice ape gave them, they are sighing as they felt the injuries heal on their hands and legs.

    At least, he could find some relief in the fact that they are healing.

    As he went down the level of the beasts kept on increasing and when hended there he saw a bunch of Astral ne cultivators surrounding Ape and the little gori as they looked at the screen.

    It is currently showing the current situation on the battlefield.

    When the goris sensed Sam¡¯s presence, they looked at him with a fearful expression.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but sigh, he is currently reeking of blood.

    There are many idiots who thought that they could kill Sam if they closed the distance. But they died nheless and their blood sttered on him. The goris don¡¯t like blood. They are tame creatures.

    Sam felt like a stupid for not thinking of this simple matter.

    He wanted to returnter after he cleaned himself up, so he turned around and got ready to get away, but the little gori suddenly yelled at him and ran towards Sam, trying pull him back.

    He looked at Sam¡¯s serious expression and offered the small barrel of fruit juice he is sipping through the bamboo straw.

    Sam was surprised. He smiled and sat down, before taking a sip of the fruit juice. The gori looked at him anxiously afraid that he would drink it all, which made him chuckle.

    Sam sat down on the ground and he took out a barrel giving it to the little one who smelled the fragrance and immediately hugged it.

    Soon, the rest of the goris came towards Sam as they hugged him before climbing the stairs that led upwards.

    Sam felt relieved and looked at the ape. They also slowly started walking out of the tower. He asked the ape to tell the goris that they wouldn¡¯t be safe in this ce even if they were to run away into the forest. Since no race here is familiar with them, the beasts in the forest wouldn¡¯t hesitate to hunt them down.

    So, he wanted to take them into the divine dimension, they would stay there for a while, until Sam found a way to their home realm and leave them there to join the rest of their kin.

    Ape talked to them and repeatedly reassured them that Sam is not cheating them. After a while, they agreed, but they wanted to spend one more day here in the area and bury the whole tower with their own hands.

    Sam nodded and left Ape and Yanwu there to escort them to their camp in the forest the next day. Night Ghost also stayed there as he is in the middle of the breakthrough.

    Sia, Gran and Kiran also wanted to return. But the remaining people stayed there with Night Ghost just in case.

    The next day, they came back to their camp in the forest along with the Goris. When they returned to the camp, they are looking at Sam weirdly.

    Sam didn¡¯t care much, he is still recovering from the shitty mood he had yesterday and is focusing on their next target. Their next target is a bit far away and the merchants here don¡¯t have any connections with that ce. They decided to leave.

    Sam put all the goris in the divine dimension, where they could recover their mental states with some idle sculpting he already ced a bunch ofrge stones suitable for them and even arranged a small orchard so that they can busy themselves.

    After he was done they left to their next ce in the dimensional drifter.

    But what Sam doesn¡¯t know is that the sculptor goris did something else other than just trying to bury the inverted tower with the rubble of the temple and golems.

    The temple is on the edge of the city which is backed by a small stony cliff.

    And at this moment, the people in the city are all looking at with awe. Because in just a single night the goris sculpted an image on the cliff and all of them did it together.

    That is the sculpture of Sam, holding his gun and hovering over harbinger as he shot everyone. The nonchnce that stemmed from immense anger can be seen on his face.

    The sculpture sorge that the Zeus statue which was left intact and left alone in that ce looked small and miniscule in front of it.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know they did it, the goris didn¡¯t say it. Because they didn¡¯t specifically do it for him. This is the first art they sculpted in months, they did it because that image what came to their mind whenever they looked at their free limbs and tasted the sweet fruits.

    As for why the team didn¡¯t say it, because, they can see that Sam is still angry for some reason, so they don¡¯t want to provoke him. Particrly when they remembered the damage the gun could cause. They became cautious because of it and even the Saber Monarch who is always suffering from verbal diarrhea didn¡¯t dare open his mouth carelessly.

    Even if he knew about it, Sam might have not cared.

    They reappeared in their next target location and as soon as they stepped foot there, they were hit by a cold sensation.

    All they could see are the white snow-coverednd with the white wind blowing on their face.

    The scenery is beautiful and they are currently on top of a small hill. Far away they could see a city that looked like it waspletely made of ice.

    They got off the hill and started their journey towards the city. But when they reached the city, they were surprised to learn that the family they are looking for is currently not staying in the city. They migrated away.

    They are looking for a Demi-Giant family which is part of Hou Yi¡¯s followers.

    This is one of the banished races that are suffering from the curse. They are sure that they would be present here, but they didn¡¯t expect that they would have migratedpletely.

    After getting the directions of their new location, the team started their journey once again.

 Chapter 1066: Demi Giants in Ice lands

    The family they are going after next is actually a Demi Giant family that was cursed by some other god who is a subordinate of Hou Yi.

    They were cursed and banished to this ce. These Demi-Giants have no elemental affinity, they are pure warriors withrge bodies. Their bloodline purity is around sixty three percent and currently they worship Hou Yi because, their god died.

    As for why they suddenly migrated, it is because, they heard about a prophecy that the key to their curse being lifted and them being able to get out of this realm will be present there.

    They created a small town in a valley where they settled. The town ispletely governed by them and the main source of attraction for the people are the merchants thate there for doing business with the Demi Giants.

    After all, the Demi Giants who didn¡¯t even have an elemental ability, might as well be one of the strongest exisitences in the realm, even though they don¡¯t have any particr territory in this ce. They are biggest suppliers of the treasures, beast products and other resources that are avable in the frozen fields of this.

    They don¡¯t rule the whole realm and they don¡¯t even rule the they are in, their only goals are to maintain an easy and proper way of survival and to find a way to break their curse.

    It was said that the naturalwspletely stop them from moving away from this, if they enter the worm holes, the spatial turbulence will kill them.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but suspect Hou Yi, after all it is not exactly a coincidence when it happens two times. The prophecy for the Hob Goblins and now these Demi Giants, both are powers of Hou Yi.

    But since the gods are not meddling, then he must be ying within the rules.

    Sam didn¡¯t care much anyway. Since they are inside the valley of this town, there is no need for him to worry too much, as long as their location is avable, it is all okay for him.

    But this time he decided to piss Hou Yi off even more than thest time for making him travel more than needed.

    Soon, they reached the vicinities of the valley.

    Sam looked at the valley from far away as he tried to analyze the structure and terrain to see if there is any advantage he could take.

    Meanwhile, he let the team enter the town and gather some intel.

    While Sam is busy doing this, the Demi-Giants that is currently in a meeting. The head of the Demi-Giants looked at the rest of the family and said.

    "How are the preparations for the defenses of the valley? Is the formation ready to be activated?"

    "Yes, lord. The formation was connected and it would surely awaken the hidden power in the valley at any moment, even the frontline defenses are made.

    We managed to construct everything ording to the blueprints. No matter who attacks the valley, we can definitely hold them back and send them back."

    "What I want is not sending them back. I want them o stay here. I am telling you, the person thates to attack us has the thing that could make us escape this realm. The only way for us to do is make sure that we kill every intruder and make them stay here for eternity.

    They will stay in this valley of death for the long time toe." The lord replied sternly and the elder sat back down silently.

    "How are the Ice cannons doing? Are they ready?"

    "Yes, lord. The Ice goblins are working day and night. They will deliver them by tonight and will help us in the operation. Their payment was also done."

    "The Ice cannons are important, the prophet said that the other party has many tricks up their sleeves, we need to be prepared. They can strike anytime now."

    As they are discussing, an attendant ran into the room without any etiquette or propriety and whispered something in the ears of the lord.

    When the lord heard it, his widened in surprise and immediately dismissed all the elders and only let a few elders stay.

    He sent the attendant away and gave some instructions of the Elders before sending them away too. He walked to the ice statue of Hou Yi in the room and bowed to it before sitting in meditation to calm himself down.

    Meanwhile, Night Ghost and the rest of the team are currently looking through the town as they talked with different merchants doing business.

    Even though the town is small, some exclusive merchants wille here to do business with the Demi Giants, since they are from the foreignnds, some people from the surrounding locality brought a bunch of their local produce to advertise if the foreign merchants like this, they will buy and along with that, the people from different localities in the surroundings can also buy each others products creating a small market and there is a lot of information they could gain from these people about the rest of the family.

    At this moment, Night Ghost is drinking some liquor and talking with the crew of a Foreign merchant who came to do business with the Demi Giant.

    But as he sat there, he sensed something and immediately ducked down, a hammer was swung past his earlier position as it hit the wall and half of the bar was destroyed with a single attack.

    Night ghost frowned and stepped away from him, before saying.

    "My friend, is this some misunderstanding. We don¡¯t have any enmity."

    He looked at the Demi Giant that swung the hammer and said.

    "What is your name?" The Demi Giant asked as she shook his hammer and walked forward.

    "Is this some sort of Demi-Giant Ettiquette I am unaware of?" Night Ghost as he dusted off some dirt on his robes.

    "I asked you what your name is." The Demi-Giant angrily mmed the hammer and the strike hit Night Ghost even though he is a fair distance away.

    He got pissed and unleashed his ghost directly making the third strike stop. He lunged forward as hended an upper cut on the Demi-Giant¡¯s Giant chin.

    The Demi-Giant¡¯s teeth were broken as he fell off of his feet. But that is not the end, blood came out of the orifices and he died on the spot.

    Because, Night Ghost is a Late stage Astral ne Transcendent while the other guy is only a middle stage Astral ne Transcendent.

    Night Ghost looked at the surroundings and immediately ran off to check up on his other teammates.

    Simr incidents repeated in other areas. Saber monarch, Sia and Gran, Five elemental King, everyone was attacked except Kiran and some of them gave out more information than the one that attacked the Night Ghost.

    Some of the team members killed their opponents and some of them didn¡¯t and escaped the city before leaving to the forest nearby.

    When they reported to Sam, he was surprised.

    "It seems like the prophecy didn¡¯t just state that we are going to attack them, it seems like they even left some clues on how we look and what our names are.

    This Hou Yi is bing more and more unruly. He is pushing his boundaries more than he should." Sam spected.

    But Tamas said with a smile.

    "I think we don¡¯t need spections boss. I brought one of them, why don¡¯t we get the direct information from the soul?"

    Sam nodded and Tamas finished the action quickly, the new information is really simr to what Sam guessed.

    Except that the clues regarding their descriptions not just stopped at their appearance, but also their powers, their elemental affinities and their cultivation strengths. That is why they managed to send people with exactly equal cultivation, it is just that they never calcted the Night Ghost¡¯s breakthrough.

    And from the looks of it the information is quite fresh and recent.

    Sam is sure that this is Hou Yi or one of his follower¡¯s doing.

    This is really getting out of hand.

    "Since they already knew we are here, why bother? Let us just meet them head-on."

    Sam selected the tribe¡¯s name in the list directly.

    Hou Yi appeared in the Demi-Giant¡¯s temple and exined the situation and as usual, he went on and on about killing Sam.

    As soon as he said that, the Demi Giantsplied.

    And their actions shocked not just the team, but also the people that are currently inside the town.

    The Demi Giant family announced theplete lockdown of the town and nobody is allowed toe in or go out for a while.

    They even issued an order that everyone who is an Astral ne Pre-transcendent cultivator of the middle stage of higher is being currently drafted into their forces temporarily and they should fight with the Demi-Giants.

    Along with that, they activated a bunch of formations.

    The whole valley is covered with a dome that looked like transparent ice and ice goblins came out of a hidden camp within the valley along with a bunch of cannons mounted on the wall.

    The whole city immediately went on being defensive in just an hour.

 Chapter 1067: Preparations

    Sam looked at therge dome formation and was stunned.

    He took off on the harbinger to reach a high enough altitude and activated energy vision to see what exactly is going on.

    When saw some details within the formation, he couldn¡¯t help but feel surprised. The whole formation is actually being power by the valley walls in the surroundings and it didn¡¯t stop there, the formation is actually hiding many things within which cannot be seen from this far away.

    He needs more information, but the small fry that Tamas caught didn¡¯t have much information, he only knew about the ice goblins, the cannons they created, the city migration due to the prophecy. As for why this exact location and what this formation is, he had no idea.

    They would need to get their hands on one of the decently high-level members in the Demi-Giants family.

    He turned to the Night Ghost and said.

    "Can you catch one of them? I need memories of an elder-level person."

    "I can, but before that, we actually need to sh with the formation once, otherwise it would be impossible to catch anyone. For some reason, I have a bad premonition about this formation. It is unlike all the formations we have seen thus far.

    It ispletely different. But I cannot say how."

    "Why do you think I wanted to get more information? The formation is different indeed and there is a connection with the valley walls. Since we definitely know that these people know about us, this might be a tailor-made trap just for us. I don¡¯t want to go in blindly, but if there is no other way, we can only do that."

    Sam spoke and went into deep thought before saying.

    "Attack with varying ranged attacks. Just try and probe what the formation and those cannons are all about. Meanwhile, I will go and get on to the top of the valley walls and see what is so special about them."

    "But boss, the walls are extremely high and the temperature in the surroundings is already cold, do you think you can handle it?"

    "It is not a problem. I have my means. Get ready."

    With that Sam immediately flew off on Sky¡¯s back. He created a thin barrier with fire element around them to defend against the cold winds, even with their power level they wouldn¡¯t be able to take the cold winds at high altitudes.

    The valley walls are extremely tall, they are around a thousand meters high, essentially the valley is only a small groove in arge mountain.

    Sam flew over and looked for a ce tond, after finding a protrusion from the wall, hended there and let Sky into the divine dimension instantly. He ced his arm on the wall and tried to use the observation energy.

    He was stunned to see the amount of ice elemental energy inside the ice walls. It is not just pure, but extremely dense too.

    If one chunk of the ice in the size of spirit stone was taken from this wall, the energy inside it would be at least ten times more than the actual ice elemental spirit stone.

    He tried to pry a piece out of it, but it is highly resistant to physical attacks. He can clearly understand why the demi giants chose this ce.

    The remaining three sides are inessible for the enemies and only one side is needed to be defended properly.

    He used a small energy cell and stuck it to the wall before going to the back of the sky and moving far away.

    *BOOM*

    Even though the explosion urred, there is minimal damage on the wall, but he managed to get some small pieces that he could examer.

    After checking for some more time, he went back to the camp.

    The team already returned and Tamas is currently performing a ritual on the dead body of a Demi-Giant. Everyone had a solemn expression.

    Night Ghost immediately walked towards Sam and started the report.

    "Boss, the situation is difficult than we thought, it is hard to break the formation. It has extreme ice elemental energy. We tried our best to break the formation. They really didn¡¯t know about myte-stage cultivation.

    But even after we broke past the formation, the first thing that came to obstruct us is not the elder, rather they are ghosts.

    We don¡¯t where these ghosts came from, but they have ice elemental energy and they are using it damn well.

    The cannons of the goblins are not exactly powerful, but they will be a nuisance. We didn¡¯t manage to get deeper, we are only a few feet in and the resistance is already high, the ice attacks of the ghosts are affecting the soul too.

    We only managed to kill this elder easily because, he is angry that his son died in our hands and rushed out like an idiot, we killed him and once again tried hard to break the formation ande out.

    The formation healed back and they didn¡¯t pursue us. We are going to have some trouble boss. This ce is not easy to deal with.

    Tamas finished extracting the memories by now and transferred them to Sam.

    When Sam went through them all, he is surprised once again.

    It turned out that the prophet this time, not just gave them clues but also some extra tools to help them. He guided them to this valley, not just because of the defensive properties of the valley, but because the ice walls of the valley are actually ten thousand-year-old ice,pletely made of pure frost essence of the highest grade.

    The valley itself is a burial ground for many people who tried to get the core of the valley which is the reason for these ice walls to stand this strong for many years.

    If a person manages to get that core, they could refine it to make weapons, formations, even use it for cultivation. It is a great resource, but they didn¡¯t manage to get it and died here. The souls were frozen as well.

    The prophet gave some formation blueprints to the demi giants, one of the formations makes the frozen souls wake up and defend the valley, the icy dome around the valley is the result of another formation and all of these work on the ice elemental energy of the valley walls.

    The number of souls in the burial ground is quite high in number. They are also of high-level cultivation. There are at least ten Late-stage Transcendent souls, and no one knows how many of them are hidden.

    The Demi Giants really prepared thoroughly this time.

    He exined the situation to the rest of the team and said.

    "I will do some experiments; you guys throw some small liquid energy cells on the formation and see the reactions.

    I need to do some experiments."

    With that Sam went into the cave and took out the pieces of valley walls before trying a few things. The ice elemental energy is not that stable to begin with. It is hanging on a delicate bnce and Sam tried to excite this ice elemental energy a bit to see how it would react and the results surprised him.

    He couldn¡¯t help but smile.

    Even though it is a bit too cold and ruthless to use this method, he really does have a proper method to deal with this situation and he would even have to pay minimum effort.

    He came out, he let the team try and wrestle with that formation for the rest of the day.

    When they didn¡¯t see any results by that night, Sam spoke to them.

    "I have a method to deal with them. But after I am done with it, not a lot of people would survive, it would be no surprise if just the family head survives the ordeal and the rest of them all die inside. Night Ghost and Tamas, even if by any chance the family head dies, I want you to make sure that no souls escape. This family has a rtion with Paras¡¯ revenge, so make sure you collect all of them."

    They nodded their heads, but they don¡¯t know exactly what Sam wants to do and how he is going to do it.

    "Then let¡¯s go. There is no need to wait."

    "You don¡¯t need to prepare anything?"

    "I have a lot of toys that I didn¡¯t test yet. I don¡¯t need any preparations, let us go. You guys wait out of the dome and I will finish it in no time."

    With that, all of them left and went near the valley.

    Sam once again took on Sky¡¯s back and made some rounds around the dome before hovering in a single position.

    He patted on the Sky¡¯s back and said.

    "It would be a bit cold. So, please do bear with it. I will cook you something good after it."

    Sky nodded in eptance and Sam smiled.

    Then he took out the new machine he wanted to test.

 Chapter 1068: Bazooka

    Sam took out the new toy that looked like a bazooka. He mounted it on his shoulder and took out arge liquid energy cell and inserted it in the groove provided on the lower side of the bazooka.

    He looked at the valley and yelled on top of his lungs.

    "For all the people in the valley. My name is Sam and I am here to deal with the Demi Giants. But from the looks of it, a bunch of Merchants are stuck inside. Even though we don¡¯t really have any enmity, I am sure with what I am about to do, you will all die inside. I will give you fifteen minutes, Demi Giants, in these fifteen minutes, you can send a few of your youngsters and the merchants out. So, that your genes can live on and unnecessary people wouldn¡¯t die.

    For the sake of giving you guys some food for thought..."

    Sam paused and aimed his bazooka on one of the outer sections of the valleys.

    The energy beam hit the ice wall. This is one different from the assault rifle. The assault rifle creates energy explosions of different levels, but the bazooka can do much more than that. It can create pure energy attacks, the energy beam he sent now excites the ice valley walls and injects the ice elemental energy forcefully. If it was reced with a fire energy cell, then it would make the other party melt with the heat.

    It is as simple as that. And that is one of the most basic functions of this bazooka.

    As the energy beam hit the ice wall for a few seconds, the ice wall exploded and crashed into the ground.

    When it crashed the pieces of ice walls released all the stored ice elemental energy inside of it in the form of a wave and the surroundings were affected by it, they were covered with an additionalyer of ice.

    Even if the people cannot see what happened when the ice crashed, they definitely saw the ice hitting the ground and they definitely felt the energy wave released by the wall pieces, this made their heart run cold.

    At this moment, Sam¡¯s words could be heard once again.

    "You are inside a valley surrounding your three sides, and the walls are pretty high, if all that ice crashes on you, I don¡¯t think you would have a great ending. So, if you want to live, get out now."

    Those words had a great impact on the people inside the valley.

    Demi Giants¡¯ expression turned solemn, they are really think of what to do, before the merchants knocked on their doors. The merchants that have direct dealings with the Demi Giants are powerful enough in their own realms and most of them are even from the same realm and the same.

    They demanded the Demi Giants to let them out right there and then. When the Demi-Giants refused to do so, the people from the same realm, immediately took out several things which are used to contact their families in cases of emergency.

    When the Demi Giants saw their actions, they knew they are in a tight spot and it wouldn¡¯t be easy for them to get out of this situation.

    Many arguments broke out and finally the merchants managed to convince them, but there is only two minutes left.

    One of the merchants yelled from the valley towards Sam.

    "Mister Sam, the Demi Giants agreed to let us out, but please refrain from attacking for ten more minutes, we need to gather our people and it might take some time."

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything and just stayed with the Sky in the air.

    Soon, the merchants came out and there are some Demi Giants among them. The younger generation Sam allowed them to send outside.

    As soon as they all came out, Sam got ready to start shooting, but at this moment, the Demi Giants in the merchant group came out and used the cannons to aim at Sam and his teammates.

    The cannons shot the frost beams.

    But the team is alert enough to notice this and dodge the attacks, but that is not the end, as Sam dodged the attack, he moved more towards the dome of the valley and from the dome, a soul took shape and came at Sam and Sky.

    Sky moved like a roller coaster as he tried to dodge the attacks of the soul which is also filled with ice elemental energy.

    Sam pointed the bazooka and shot the beam at the soul continuously as they dodged the attacks. The soul soon froze.

    The energy beam is even affecting the soul when it hit directly.

    After the soul was gone, Sam moved away and started shooting the demi giants that are shooting the cannons, when the beamnded on them they were frozen on the spot and turned into ice statues along with the cannon.

    Sam then turned towards the valley and started shooting at the valley walls.

    The continuous beam was focused on the valley walls as it exploded at every ce it touched as he moved along with the wall and the wall started copsing.

    The ice blocks with so much excited ice elemental energy became even more unstable as they hit the formation and started waves of ice elemental energy making the formation fluctuate repeatedly.

    Soon the formation was destroyed and the Demi Giants who were inside and trying to keep the formation stay afloat was shocked by this and got hit by therge chunks of dangerous explosive ice.

    When the dust settled, all they could see is arge pile of icy rubble with some corpses here and there.

    But the team didn¡¯t rx.

    Sam held his bazooka as he looked at the ice rubble with energy vision searching for any possible life forms hidden under it.

    The rest of the team also started scavenging the rubble to bring out any people that are alive.

    Night Ghost dove deeper and went for the ce where the family head¡¯s mansion previously was.

    As he was searching there removing the rubble, the Demi Giant suddenly popped up behind Night Ghost.

    Night Ghost turned around, but by then the other party already held in him a bear hug as she started crushing him.

    Night Ghost felt the pressure on his bones and spine and tried his best to resist, the Demi giant is also trying his best to channel all his leftover energy into his arms to crush the night ghost and snap his body in half.

    The family head is angry after all. All the prophecy, the formations, preparations all that turned into a bunch of bullshit with just one continuous energy beam from Sam.

    Their losses are enormous. The whole family died and he might even be thest survivor and he is sure that is only for now and he will die soon enough.

    That is why he at least wanted to get rid of one person along with him.

    After struggling two more times, Night Ghost didn¡¯t care anymore and said.

    "You asked for this."

    With that, two ghosts came out of his body and held the head of the family head in ce while Night Ghost stared into his eyes.

    Some soul-like creatures started escaping Night Ghost¡¯s eyes as they entered the Family-head¡¯s mind.

    This is one of his special techniques and this is done by using lower-level ghosts.

    As his cultivation level increases the low-level ghosts wouldn¡¯t be useful for his cultivation anymore and no matter howrge the quantity is, they would turn useless. So, he created this technique and he didn¡¯t even bother to name it.

    The goal of this technique is simple. He will store all the low-level souls in his sea of consciousness and will send them to the enemy through the eyes.

    When the low-level souls enter the other party¡¯s sea of consciousness, they will nibble on the soul and in process, strip the other party of the senses, feelings, memories, and emotions one by one. The main problem with this technique is that the enemy wouldn¡¯t stay in such close vicinity every time and they wouldn¡¯t stay long enough for him to properly establish the connection.

    But now, the family head did it himself and slowly his body copsed on the ground.

    The souls came out of his body and returned to Night Ghost after finishing it.

    Night Ghost sat on the ground immediately and started refining the memories of the family head.

    After refining them he walked towards Paras and poked him on the forehead making the memories transfer.

    While all of this happened, the merchants are looking at it from outside.

    They didn¡¯t expect they would be able to witness something like this.

    Some of their eyes shone brightly as they looked at the bazooka in Sam¡¯s hands.

    Some of them had ideas to threaten him and some wanted to coerce him into the business and some wanted to see if they could snatch it directly, but Sam didn¡¯t care what they are thinking, he changed the mode of the bazooka and aimed at the remaining valley wall and started carving the three words.

    SAM WAS HERE.

 Chapter 1069: Oasis of the Ice Plains

    Sam and his team retired to their camp instantly. They didn¡¯t care what the merchants thought, they will be leaving this ce by the next day, even if the merchants really brought someone, with Sam¡¯s temper, he might just kill them all.

    After they returned, Sam started cooking. Since he promised Sky that he would cook, he can onlyply, but as soon as he started the stove, the tes lined up one after the other from the beasts to the teammates.

    He sighed and just went on with it.

    The atmosphere in the cave is really warm. There is not a single sign of the massacre they just did.

    But there is one person who is gloomy. Paras.

    Sam knew that Night Ghost gave him the memories and from that point on, he became like this.

    Sam took two tes and passed one over to him before sitting down beside him.

    "What happened?" He asked.

    Paras took the te and said with a sigh.

    "I got some valuable information. If we catch the heads of the five great sects, I will get all the answers."

    "The five great sects? That is a tricky one. But that still doesn¡¯t exin your current mood."

    "I have a clue on why this all happened. And I don¡¯t want it to be the truth."

    "Hmm, wrestling with the truth. Been there and done that. The thing is, the truth never changes. Even if you don¡¯t want to believe it and you don¡¯t want it to be the truth, it is not possible to change it. The sooner you ept it, the better it would be. So, if you tell me, why you don¡¯t want it to be the truth, then I might be able to help you digest it faster."

    "It involves another god. Other than these three that are already involved and the reason behind all of this might seem too petty. I suspect these three used the hands of that god to deal with the whole. They hid the matter only because they are afraid that the other god might learn the truth and make them pay for it."

    "So, you are saying, you are now mad because it was all because of some shit that gods had between themselves and you and your people had to pay the price."

    Paras nodded.

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "Do you know the Demi Giants, why do you think they died?"

    Paras didn¡¯t answer, but Sam continued.

    "They didn¡¯t do anything to me, they didn¡¯t harm me, there is no enmity. But they still died. The Demi Giants are a warrior race, but they died like that buried under some ten thousand-year-old ice. All because they worshiped a god that likes to y with their lives. We are the ones who killed them, but the god they earnestly worship day and night is the one who led them to their deaths.

    Compared to their situation, you at least have a chance to get revenge, even if it is the gods that made your people go through all this, you at least have a chance to fight for yourself. You only think about that chance and hold on to it. Work with it, get your vengeance and in the process explore for that answer you are looking for.

    After all, it is no use thinking whether they died for a petty reason or some greater cause, the point is they died. Your loss wouldn¡¯t diminish its value just because the reason behind it is petty. Now get over it, eat and get ready, we are going to a different ice field tomorrow."

    "What did you say, boss? Ice field again?" Saber Monarch yelled from the other side of the cave.

    "Stop yelling you numb skull, everyone can hear you if you speak normally." Vidyut retorted even before Sam could reply and then the banter began.

    The next morning, Sam¡¯s team met with the merchants to get some news about their next target as they both belong to the same realm. As for why two powers such as these are staying in a single realm unlike the Night Demons who conquered realms, this realm is actually bigger than the Night Demon realm and there are a few powers that could rival the Night Demon realm and they have smaller realms that provide them with resources.

    But their next target is not like that, they are hidden in a different way.

    This time, the target is a sect that is based on ice golems and they worship Hel.

    The sect only epts Ice element users and every sect member will have an ice golem which they create themselves and develop along with different materials along with their cultivation journey.

    The entry into the sect is only granted directly after awakening. They will hold the admission test and they purely test the talent, the affinity, and the raw creativity of the children they want to take in.

    Along with that, there is something else that is a bit troublesome about this sect. Nobody knows its exact location.

    There is a city in the middle of a region called the Ice ins and in that city there is a branch of the sect where their external affairs are managed.

    The products the sect sells and the products they want to buy are all bought and sold by these people.

    They take the mercenary tasks assigned to the sect and they connect the word to the sect.

    Nobody knows where the sect is. Legend has it that there is only one guy who managed to find the location of the sect and he did just for the sake of it. He didn¡¯t have enmity, it could be said, he only focused on the glory thates with it.

    The Sect leader came out and announced to the whole world that their sect¡¯s secret hiding spot was uncovered by one man and one man alone and he would be the honorary elder of the sect and his descendants will be the friends of the sect for eternity.

    That is the only incident that this secret sect made a proper appearance on to the world.

    But they are notplete without a presence in the city. Now and then, the prodigies of the secte out and challenge others, they go to tournaments in other realms, they take some serious missions that involved some high-level beasts and killers within the city and the surroundings.

    Currently, Sam and the team are traveling with a merchant group. Since they are in the same realm, they didn¡¯t bother to use the Dimensional drifter and a reason for that is they needed to hear something in great detail from this merchant group about their next target city.

    The city is called the oasis of the ice ins. Because that ce is the only one that doesn¡¯t look like it was carved out of ice.

    There the trees can be grown, the soil of the ce is normal. The only difference between that and a tropical area is the sunlight. Except for that it is all the same and this oasis has appeared or this city has been converted into an oasis only two years ago.

    From the description of the merchants, a young man came to that city and found some liquid deposits under a valley by ident, and from there, he createdrge-scale machinery all by himself as he worked for six months.

    After that machine was activated, it started spewing fire elemental energy out of nowhere and a bunch of formations that were run based on this fire elemental energy was activated making this city an oasis of the ice ins.

    Sam became interested in this information and tagged along with these merchants to hear about it in great detail and when he reached the city, he was clearly stunned.

    The city is just like the merchants described, the whole city looked just like a normal tropical ce with some greenery and a lot of brown earth clearly exposed.

    He stood at the city gate to turn around and see the white ice ins stretching far and wide and turned back to see the city which lookedpletely normal without a single hint of snowkes.

    He walked in and their team separated from the merchant group.

    Since they don¡¯t have direct ess to the sect, they need to focus on this external branch that runs external affairs for it.

    This time the situation will be a lot trickier than before and there is no way they could just directly finish this off in a day as they did with the Demi Giants.

    Sam went to the external branch and saw that it is arge enough estate. There is arge arch at the entrance with the words. The Tundra Sect is carved on it.

    He went in ced a mission before paying some advance and checking their operations, in-process he also left a couple of shadow mice to snoop around a bit.

    After that, he went to the center of the city where the center of attraction is located the tower that made this city what it is today.

 Chapter 1070: Distillation tower

    Sam looked at therge metallic tower in front of him. It is at least thirty meters tall. It has a great structural design and even from the outside it looked pleasing to the eye.

    The metallic tower is glowing with faint red color indicating the fire elemental energy it is using and as he moved closer to the tower he could feel the burning heat being emitted by it.

    Sam activated the energy vision as he looked at the tower to see if he could get a glimpse of the energy cirction.

    But he couldn¡¯t get any. Because the whole tower is covered with a bunch of inscriptions and formations that made it is impossible for one to directly get ess to the visibility of the energy cirction inside the tower.

    He walked forward and touched the tower-like many others. It is warm, hot in fact. He used closed his eyes and used his observation ability.

    With his current cultivation level he could definitely scan it all, as he looked through it, he noticed that a liquid is currently being circted within the center of the tower along its vertical axis.

    The liquid is at different temperatures in different levels and even its density seemed to have changed with every level.

    When Sam saw this tower, he was reminded of a process. Fractional distition. Fractional distition is used for refining various oils from the crude oil obtained from petroleum ore.

    In a tall tower, the crude oil will be heated until it was evaporated and as the gas goes upwards, eachponent of the crude oil that has a different boiling point will turn to liquid in differentpartments of the tower. The petrol, diesel, kerosene, and other oils that are obtained from the petroleum are obtained this way.

    But this tower has one major difference here in the process and that is all the different oils are being consumed as soon as they are deposited.

    The whole tower has different levels of heat at different sections because the heat energy released by thebustion of each fuel is different.

    The heat energy obtained from different fuels is being used to supply different nodes with the energy required to keep the whole city warm. The location of petroleum ore is not far from the city and the tower has a direct connection with this.

    In Sam¡¯s opinion as sophisticated andplex as it might be, this is a waste of some good resources. The whole tower and the heating system arepletely inefficient and a lot of energy is being wasted from this.

    And there is also something else Sam noticed, it is the familiarity in the styles of formations that are inscribed on it. These are simr to the two major formations he came across in the journey. The Maze and the mountain prison in which Saber Monarch and Vidyut were trapped.

    This made him feel surprised and then he remembered that Vidyut told him that there are three people in the group and one of them is the maker of the maze and the other is the maker of the mountain prison, so this might be the third guy¡¯s specialty.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but smile and then looked deeper into the tower to observe anything that was leftover.

    After a while, he returned to the inn to meet with the rest of his team.

    "So, any news?" Sam asked as he sat down while sketching something.

    "No, boss. The matters of the sect are not much discussed. Even the merchants that have businesses with them only deal with the external branch. The same goes for the people who give them missions.

    Unless the mission is something too important and extremely high value, nobody other than the external members of the sect and the person who is in charge of the mission wille into contact with them.

    It is even worse in the business. Even if it is a billion spirit stone deal, only the external members contact them. The highest-ranked person is called the Deacon and he is thest lead we can go if we proceed normally.

    Nobody knows how the external branch contacts the main branch of the sect. Nobody knows in which direction, the entrance of the sect could be in, they don¡¯t even have the faintest idea."

    Sam heard the reports as he kept on sketching, after they are done, he looked at Vidyut and said.

    "The tower is the work of the people who imprisoned you." Vidyut was surprised.

    "Really? They did this? What could their purpose be, imprisoning another one?"

    "Not really. Even when they imprisoned you and Saber Monarch, it was not their original purpose, Saber Monarch happened to be the suitable target of the young masters who promised to use his formation and you happened to be the one that pissed them off at the right moment. You guys are just means to an end. What they want is the glory and the satisfaction of making something incredible.

    They did it with both of you guys and they did again with this tower. Making a warm city in the middle of the vast ice ins. That is their goal."

    Sam said as he finished his sketch and then he continued.

    "Everyone of you spread out in the city and stay in the different inns, ce assignments in the sect branch. Choose the most dangerous ones you could think of in this ce and set some high price. But not right now, wait for the two days. The shadow mice will be back with most of the info regarding the personnel of the external branch.

    Meanwhile, see if someone ispeting with the sect, or if there are any conflicts, big or small that we might be able to take advantage of, an arrogant young master of the sect, a ck mark of the sect, anything tries to search. Generally, the lowest level of the workers have much information regarding this, try to see if you can get anything.

    After we get the list of people and you drop the missions, see if the sect will send anyone other than the external members.

    Inform me if they did and I will take it up from here.

    Do not kill anyone from the sect until now. It is different from before, even though it is registered that only a Late-Stage Transcendent stage cultivator of Astral ne is in charge, with the current sect situation and with so many mysterious actions of them, we couldn¡¯t be sure about anything and Hel is a real pain in the ass, if Hou Yi could do something like this, there is no saying what she would do. Be careful and try to change your appearances as much as you can."

    Sam gave instructions and sent them away. From his current room, he has a great view of the tower. But every time he looked at he couldn¡¯t help butment. The other party has great proficiency in the formation department, but in terms of machinery and energy efficiency is very far behind.

    For Sam, this tower is a waste of energy and resources.

    He couldn¡¯t help but think about what he would do to correct them and increase their efficiency and that was what he was sketching when he was speaking to the team.

    He couldn¡¯t help himself. He is really too into improving this. But he knew that it would be difficult if he touched the tower to modify it, the whole city will deal with him, and that too with a united front without and disparities.

    The tower is too valuable for the residents, not because of thefort it provides, but rather for the tourist attraction it was and the prosperity it brings with that attraction.

    It is impossible for them to let Sam mess with it.

    But he didn¡¯t care. As long as he has ns ready and dealt with the sect, then he would be able to do anything with this tower and no one would have the balls to stop him.

    For the next two days, the team was trying to dig any possible information they could get about the sect.

    But they didn¡¯t have much sess. The sect¡¯s reputation is too clean.

    The shadow mice returned and they gave some information to Sam.

    He passed that info to the team and told them to drop the missions.

    Everyone from the team ced the mission separately. In the past two days even though the information about the sect wasn¡¯t obtainable, there was another information they managed to obtain.

    The dangerous creatures and the resources that are avable in the ice ins and some that could even require the action of some Middle stage Astral ne Transcendent cultivators.

    For example, there is a frost wyvern tribe on a mountain nearby and the beast in charge of the tribe is a Middle stage Astral ne Transcendent creature.

    Kiran went and ced a mission that he would need the blood of that creature and he offered a sky-high price.

    The rest of the team also proceeded to ce the missions of such level with a certain time gap of at least half a day in between.

 Chapter 1071: Investigation

    Sam¡¯s team ced the missions, some of them ced the missions at the same time and some of them ced with a decent gap like half a day at least.

    They took three days to ce all the missions. By the time thest mission was ced, the sect members already contacted Kiran who ced the first mission. It was about the wyvern blood mission and since the transaction amount is a bitrge, they decided to check it properly.

    So, the sect members arranged a meeting with Kiran in a restaurant that is being operated by the sect itself.

    When they met, the sect sent three people. One of them is the person who took the details and advances for the mission from Kiran, the second one is one of the elders of the external branch and finally, the third one is the one Kiran is currently focused on.

    He is not part of the information that the shadow mice brought, there is a high probability that he part of the main branch of the sect and it is more than likely to happen because at a middle stage Transcendent stage cultivator is needed to deal with the wyvern and sessfully get its blood and since the head of the main branch is only ofte stage, it would make no sense for the outer branch to have some middle stage transcendent cultivator of Astral ne to exist. If it really happened, then they would have to reevaluate the sect¡¯s actual strength.

    They talked for a while about the details of the mission and after the sect members probed lightly about the promised financial sum and Kiran confirmed that he has the sum, the sect members left.

    But from within the shadows, the shadow mouse followed the sect members to see if they can manage to find any information through their conversations.

    The shadow mice are not exactly a great pick to follow the people in ice ins, because everything is white and the shadows are not dark enough for the mice to hide, they would be too eye-catching even in their hidden state.

    But luckily the tower made the city a fair ce for shadow mice to snoop around increasing Sam¡¯s informationwork.

    The shadow mice followed the trio and its main focus was on the person they suspected to be from the main branch, after they returned to the external branch, the target went to meet another attendant and the elder before going to meet another person in a bar run by the sect. This meeting is with Saber Monarch, he asked for a three thousand year frost essence which is possible to be obtained in the river flowing beside the city.

    It seems like the two missions would be taken by the same guy.

    For the next two days, three more new faces appeared and met with the rest of the team and four shadow mice followed them and tried to gather as much information as they could within the city.

    There was information that confirmed the two of them are definitely from the main branch, even though the remaining two might be from the main branch as well, but it was better to have a direct confirmation before Sam decided to act.

    After they went to the missions they took upon, Sam chose one of them and followed them out.

    This is a mission ced by Agar and Argan together and it is to collect the skin of a type of beast that is abundant in the forests around this ce.

    It is not extremely dangerous, but tracking, catching, killing, and skinning the beasts take up a lot of effort and from the sheer amount that was needed, the number of people required would also be too many.

    So, an Initial stage transcendent cultivator of the astral ne was sent from the main branch and he would be leading a bunch of people from the external branch to the hunt and finish the mission.

    Out of all the missions ced by the team, this one is the easiest but also most time-consuming one of all and this is also easiest to tail.

    Sam took off on his hoverboard.

    The higher he traveled in the realms, the less attention this hoverboard is gaining and the fewer and fewer people are being surprised and from the looks of it, it would only be a matter of time before he found people floating on different things.

    Sam followed the team from afar and he was as discreet as he could be, but still, they noticed his movements.

    But his cultivation level is not enough for them to make a move on.

    After some time, Sam changed the direction and took a different path, the team ignored him, but what they don¡¯t know is Sam found a way to take a parallel path and he is using the telescope and his enhanced vision to take a look at them while traveling.

    After a while, the team started battling. Sam saw the way they used ice golems and he used the energy vision to clearly observe how their fighting style is.

    The ice golems are really well made. It was as if they are carefully sculpted and the shapes of the ice golems are varying in arge spectrum.

    There are some beast-type ice golems, some humanoid, some bird type, and some that even resembled the user.

    When he activated energy vision from afar, even though Sam couldn¡¯t clearly see what is happening, he could see the faint concentrated energy deposits within the ice golems. They seemed to be the golem cores.

    After gaining a faint understanding of the whole scenario, Sam carefully followed them to get a proper opportunity, he needs to find a way to send leaving something on the leader to track him down to their sect location.

    He followed them for quite a while and finally, he found an opportunity.

    The golems are not invulnerable, so they are damaged here and there. So, after they traveled far and finished more than half of the mission, the leader let them repair their golems.

    Everyone took out some bunch of items, frost essences, age-old ices, special liquids, and such, Sam used this opportunity to his advantage and created a distraction, he diverted a bunch of beasts from within the forest to attack the group and when they are doing that, he took out one of the special puppets.

    He never got the opportunity to actually use it as the applications are limited and it has a one-time use.

    This puppet¡¯s job is only one thing, the user can record a spell within it and once you lock a target the puppet will find a means to go near the target and tag it with the spell before dying down.

    It only uses four spirit stones and the distance range is not that just much, barely thirty to forty meters.

    After creating the distraction, Sam let this puppet out and took out a small disc which is inscribed with the spell for Sam¡¯s spiritual imprint.

    This disc method is what Sam made. He can choose any disc he wants and ce it inside the puppet before sending it away.

    The puppet which is shaped like a spider stealthily crawled towards the golem of the leader of the team. It crawled onto its leg and it imprinted the spell before dropping down and dying down.

    Then a golem that was passing by smashed into some small metal clump making itpletely unnoticeable.

    Sam followed them from afar as he observed them, but he returned before the mission ispleted, after the initial hunt which almost finished half of their mission, the beasts became a bit scarce and they had to search high and low to get the rest of them.

    Sam didn¡¯t want to follow them and waste his time, he returned to the city waiting for them to return.

    Meanwhile, Five elemental King is carrying out the investigation from a different side.

    His mission is for a guide who has experience in exploring a very special region.

    The region is called the ice volcano.

    It is actually a mountain that is flooded with frost essence, asionally when the frost elemental energy increases it will explode just like a volcano, but instead ofying everything to waste by melting and burning, this willy waste to everything by freezing.

    This frost essence is too crude and polluted which makes it impossible for the cultivators to improve their cultivation, but it can be a good raw ingredient for some ice golems and a repairing material and there are many mutated ice elemental nts that could be found.

    Five elemental kings acted as an attendant of a high-level potion master and he is here in search of these mutated herbs.

    Five elemental King kept on trying to see if he would get any information from the guide he hired. Even if there is a small hint. In fact, his questions are nothing about the location or the direction, not even the poption and the residents. Rather, his questions were mixed in small talk making him seempletely normal and devoid of suspicions.

 Chapter 1072: Clues

    Two dayster all the missions were finished and coincidentally almost at the same time.

    Sam couldn¡¯t feel the location of his spiritual imprint at the moment because the user might have ced his golem in his spatial storage. All Sam could feel is that the spiritual imprint is there on the golem and was not removed.

    When Five elemental King arrived at the city, he went to the inn he was residing in and waited for Sam¡¯s call.

    This time, Sam didn¡¯t let them alle to him, instead, he decided that it is a great chance to test one of his new toys.

    This one uses the hologram technology he came across along with the live broadcast function he used and themunication device all three techs merged together making the video call possible as if they are talking side by side and face to face.

    Even though this tech is not new in this world and in fact used in many ces, the scale of usage is different. Nobody uses this type of tech to make individual calls as it needs somerge-scale formations and resources.

    They set the time for the call to be that night.

    Sam is currently focusing on his spiritual imprint. Since the missions are over, the batch of main branch members are going to leave and even if they didn¡¯t use the ice golems when they are going to sect, once they are at the sect, he is sure that they would use the ice golems back in the sect where they train.

    And that would be the time, he could estimate the location of the sect.

    But to his surprise, that night, Sam felt the spiritual imprint location. He closed his eyes and focused and from what he could sense, it is from the external branch of the sect. Sam frowned at this.

    Even if they are still at the external branch, there is no need for them to use the ice golems, from what he observed, the sect members don¡¯t use the ice golems that easily, they would only take them out when they are serious.

    He immediately left the inn and went to the bar nearest to the external branch, so that he could have a better estimation.

    The ice golem is at the rear of the external branch.

    He could sense that it is standing in the same location for a while.

    Sam closed his eyes and kept his focus and soon he sensed a movement from the ice golem, it seemed to be descending downwards from the spot, not front or back and not even flying through the air.

    It jumped downwards and soon he felt it rapidly moving downwards before suddenly going through some rapid twists and turns like a roller coaster and then it moved forward. The motion is fast, but it is against something and the location ispletely different from what it was a few seconds ago.

    The ice golem is already out of the city. Sam was shocked and he came out and took off on harbinger in the direction of the ice golem.

    He kept on trying to get the location, but the ice golem is moving constantly and all of a sudden Sam suddenly lost the connection with the spiritual imprint.

    It is not like the previous time when the golem was stored in the spatial ring.

    At that time, even though he couldn¡¯t feel the location, he can at least sense the existence of the spiritual imprint.

    But at the moment, the spiritual imprint didn¡¯t exist at all, itpletely disappeared.

    Sam frowned and he immediately returned to the city at full speed.

    He didn¡¯t dare stay out in the open and definitely not pursuit the ice golem¡¯sst signal before it disappeared.

    Because there are two cases in which the spiritual imprint might have gone, the first case would be the golem is damaged somehow and the piece where the spiritual imprint was ced was destroyed and the second case is that they detected the spiritual imprint of the golem and destroyed it willingly.

    If it is really the second case, then the situation would be dire.

    As soon as he went there he would be suspected and they woulde after him. Once they realized that someone is searching for theirir they wouldn¡¯t let them off easily. And when preparing this n, Sam didn¡¯t rule out the scenario where the spiritual imprint was discovered. But the n to go smoothly, even if the other party discovered that, they shouldn¡¯t confront them at this point.

    After returning to the city, Sam made the conference call to the teammates and said.

    "The n with the spiritual imprint failed. The imprint was destroyed, but I don¡¯t know if they knew about it and destroyed it deliberately at a specific ce to lure us out or it is just sheer coincidence.

    But I discovered something. There is a passageway from the external branch to the outside of the city, we don¡¯t know where it is and how it can be essed, but there is definitely a way."

    Sam exined his findings.

    "Boss, I got a few hints from them. But all of them are regarding the environment around the sect.

    First, they have their own fields and they don¡¯t explore herbs that much. They have a strong source of frost essence with a decently high purity nearby.

    The person that came with me is fond of many fish that aremon in this ce and he seems to be used to eating them daily. But among the fish he mentioned, one of them is not somon in the stream near the city.

    It is rarely seen in the stream but mostly stays in some rtively stagnant water, at least ording to my inquiry.

    They have mountains in their region and the wild beasts are not somon in their territory as they would send all the people to the city to take missions rted to wild beasts to get the basic battle experience.

    I don¡¯t know if this is useful. But this is the only thing I could get."

    Five Elemental King exined his findings.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel surprised by his findings and then he gave out a smile. Because, even though these findings look normal, they are absolutely not.

    They are actually very important and narrow down the search for a few ces in the vicinities.

    The first clue is that the sect grows their own herbs, if this is a regr ce then this information is not worth the trouble, because every sect would have its own herb field. But they are currently in ice ins, every part of it is covered in thickyers of snow and ice, it is not easy to maintain a field, and findingnd that could be cultivated year-round is a task that would make one curse their own ancestors.

    The source of frost essence is also an important clue. Even though the frost essence is not that rare in these ice ins and they could be seen everywhere, in the stream, on the mountain, sometimes in the forests too, but it is mostly crude and impure. To have a pure frost essence resource, the ces are few.

    In the same way, even the location of the fish is a hint.

    Now they can narrow down some locations and search to see if they could find any clues.

    The meeting was over after the rest of the team described whatever they learned.

    There are not many significant discoveries they got.

    The next day, they focused on getting theyouts and maps of the surrounding areas. These are mostly bought by some low-level cultivators who are amateurs in exploring, but they didn¡¯t mind, they got everything they could get and then they marked the areas with all the discoveries that Five elemental King made.

    And then the searching began.

    While the team went to different locations, Sam followed the route left by the golem before it disappeared.

    Of course, he didn¡¯t go to the rear of the external branch, he went to the ce outside the city and started his search from the point which is the first location he sensed from the spiritual imprint.

    But when he went there, he was surprised to see that there is nothing there.

    He couldn¡¯t see anything.

    There was only an ice field without anything in the sight, but he still followed the path he could map out with his memory and finally stopped at the spot where the spiritual imprintpletely disappeared.

    This made him feel a bit confused. There are no signs of battle and in fact, there is not a single sign of any activity except some Frost Elks that are moving around in the field taking a bite of some frost grass that was growing there.

    Sam hunted an elk and went back to the inn with it as he cooked the food.

    He was confused by what he saw. The whole path ispletely clear and there is no sign of anyone moving there. But the spiritual imprint definitely disappeared there.

 Chapter 1073: Mission for the sculptor blade

    For the next few days, the team went of searching in the surrounding areas to find out any clues, even if they didn¡¯t find any, they left some of Sam¡¯s puppets there to keep the surveince.

    They marked every ce that even has five percent chance of being or be a lead to the hidden location of the sect, but there was no result whatsoever.

    The activity of the sect seemed extremely mellow and stale to have any clues.

    After a week of fruitless efforts, Sam knew that he needs to do something big and cause some extreme chaos to see any possibility of finding the location.

    He thought of something and assembled the team.

    "Find a hidden location of our own in the surroundings and assemble in the restaurant in front of the external branch in two days."

    He only gave this one instruction and left the ce. The team went out and searched for a hidden location, where they could stay temporarily.

    After all, since they don¡¯t need any resources and they don¡¯t have to n for development, they could find any ce for their hiding.

    The only requirement Sam has is that the ce should be the least likely suspect if someone were to try and search for them.

    The team roamed around many ces in the past week, so they did have some ideas.

    They worked for the next two days and all of them assembled in the restaurant in front of the external branch of the sect.

    The group is pretty eye catching with their cultivation levels and presence of Sam in the middle of them is even more eye catching as he is the weakest but people are catering to him.

    When the guards and some attendants of the external branch saw thisrge group, they couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit vignt, because these people came to the sect and ced some missions a few days ago and at that time, they acted as if they don¡¯t know each other, all of a sudden they came to together.

    This made them look suspicious.

    They immediately went to report just in case.

    The group picked a location and right before the meeting is over, Sam said.

    "Night Ghost and go and look for the lowest level worker in the external sect that takes the missions and ce a mission ording to these requirements.

    As soon as you do that and pay the advance, don¡¯t even wait for a single second, even if they want to talk to you just casually and even if the elders want to chat with you on the ount of the previous mission, make an excuse and act dramatic, but either way you should be out of there no matter what happens. We will be waiting for you outside."

    With that, Night Ghost left and Sam along with his team came out of the restaurant a minuteter.

    They waited for ten minutes.

    Night Ghost finished the task and came out, right before he was about to join the team, an attendant came running and said.

    "Sir, the elder would like to speak with you. If you don¡¯t mind can you wait for a few minutes inside."

    "I wille, but I need to give something to my friends."

    With that Night Ghost came to the group, as attendant watched, them all of a sudden, the group started running towards the city gate.

    The attendant was stunned and didn¡¯t know what to do, and finally after he came out of the initial shock, he ran into the external branch and talked to the elder who gave the task to him.

    The elders came out and started chasing the group, but the group soon made their way out of the city and ran out towards a specific location. The elder didn¡¯t want to make the chase obvious at the start, but as the group moved faster and faster, he couldn¡¯t help but do it.

    They went to the nearest mountain region which has a lot of twists and turns and disappeared.

    The elder was disappointed.

    He didn¡¯t expect the other party to be this fast. He went back and reported everything to the deacon.

    "Why did you guys even tail them? Did they do anything suspicious other than cing some missions separately?"

    "One of our members saw the weakest of that group following them when we are doing a mission. It was a bit suspicious at that time and after that mission one of our people have an ice golem marked with a spiritual imprint. We are already trying to secretly investigate the matter, but the main branch members whose golem was marked, didn¡¯te into contact with any other cultivator while he was in presence of the golem.

    At first he ignored this person, because he is weak, but now that they are all together, we couldn¡¯t help but suspect them."

    The deacon thought for a moment and asked.

    "What did that person do before they left? You said he came to ce a mission. What mission did he ce?"

    The attendant immediately ran and brought back the book with all the mission registrations, when the deacon saw the mission registration, he was shocked.

    There night ghost registered his own name and as for the task of the mission, it is for finding a de and when the deacon saw it, he couldn¡¯t even control his aura as it raged wildly.

    ¡¯The Frost Serpent Fang sculptor de.¡¯

    That is the name of the de the Night ghost wanted.

    "Use all the man power we have, even the external contacts and mercenaries, make sure that you guys search for the group. Send me a report every hour, even the tiniest possibility and the clue shouldn¡¯t be ignored."

    The deacon gave the orders and went back into his room. He took out a jade token and small object that looked like a pen.

    He carved the whole matter on the jade, injected his spiritual energy into it.

    The carvings on the jade token disappeared.

    Meanwhile, somewhere hidden, the core region of the Tundra Sect.

    An old man is sculpting an ice statue carefully. The statue seemed to be of arge snake battling with a frost dragon.

    A jade token simr to the one the deacon used was on the table on the corner of the room and it started glowing.

    He stopped the sculpting process and walked there to see it, when he read the message, he couldn¡¯t help but frown, the tranquil expression he had while sculpting waspletely gone.

    He tapped the jade token with the sculpting de he has in his hands and the message disappeared. He carved something with the de and sent a message back to the External branch, saying that he would take care of it.

    He then immediately called for the attendant who is waiting outside.

    "Call for the elders immediately, and the core disciples too."

    In ten minutes everyone he asked for came in and stood in attention.

    "Someone who is ate stage transcendent cultivator of Astral ne came to the external branch today and left a mission.

    He asked us to search for the Frost Serpent fang sculptor de."

    Everyone was stunned and looked at him.

    "You heard me right. Someone is after our sect¡¯s heirloom. From the report of the deacon, he has a team of people and this team left missions with us in the past week. Some of our core disciples and elders went to finish these missions."

    He spoke and then recited all the missions that team took and the core disciples and the elders who performed these missions for the team came forward.

    "You all came into contact with these people. I want you to give a brief description of their cultivation level, their behavior and anything that could help us find what their motives are."

    The group tried to give some clues that might help, but they didn¡¯t help much.

    The sect leader shook his head and said.

    "It is no use. From the report, they escaped and disappeared into the mountain region. From what I could guess, this is a method to lure us to them.

    But even if it is a lure, we need to find them.

    I will be making a move personally, since they have ate stage cultivator. Only people who are in Astral ne transcendence and peak of Pre-transcendence will be making a move with me.

    We are going to search for the clues, meanwhile, the rest of you study the missions they gave us and see if you can find any clues through them."

    He gave out the orders and everyone prepared.

    The next day, around thirty people appeared in the backyard of the external branch by the smallke that was present.

    The deacon is already waiting for them to show up. He greeted them and took them in, to exin the details and gave the portraits of the team members.

    After getting the details, they moved and went to the mountain region to start the search.

 Chapter 1074: A Message

    A few days passed since Sam let Night Ghost leave the mission for the heirloom of the Tundra Sect.

    At this moment, the Tundra sect leader and the elders along with all the external branch members are searching in the mountain regions and its vicinities in which Sam and his team disappeared.

    And Sam and the team are currently watching their helpless and fruitless search on a screen as they camped on different mountain which exactly in the opposite direction of the mountain they disappeared on.

    As soon as they entered the mountain region, Sam used the dimensional drifted to quickly transport everyone out of that mountain region to the mountain they are currently staying in.

    After they came here, he slowly released small bird puppets everywhere that established a temporarywork to see what is happening in the mountain region and how the Tundra sect is searching for him.

    From the asional discussions they had and particrly the one the small bird puppets managed to eavesdrop on, he realized that the leader of the sect is actively participating in the search.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit surprised, but he didn¡¯t change his ns that much.

    At this moment, he is looking at the leader who is having a meeting with some of the core disciples in a cave and in the dark corner of the cave, there is a rotten corpse of a beast inside which one of the bird puppets is currently giving a live feed to Sam.

    "What do you guys think about all of this?" He asked the core disciples.

    The disciples looked at each other and nobody wanted to answer first.

    Seeing them like this, he sighed and said.

    "I think we are being yed by the other party. From the looks of it, they are clearly not in this mountain region, but they appeared here and disappeared into thin air. I think they deliberately lured us into thisplex range of mountains to divert us."

    When the sect leader said this, some of them had a regretful expression, they thought the same too, but they couldn¡¯t bring themselves to say it out loud. The sect leader continued without minding their expression.

    "If that is true, then what could their goal be? Are they really after our de or are they just trying to find the location of our sect for the fun of it? Or are they trying to y us because we are always hidden and they wanted to give us the taste of our own medicine?

    When the core disciples heard this, they started discussing their ideas since they lost of the first because of their timid reaction.

    While Sam saw this, he couldn¡¯t help but raise a brow and changed the screen to a different live feed.

    This one is actually given to him by the shadow mice he left back in the city. Since most of the external branch is busy, they are not that vignt, there are not many people to keep a tight security, so he let the shadow mice fix some surveince devices here and there to get a proper look at what is happening there.

    And his main focus is on the backyard of the external branch from which the primary target disappeared.

    After checking different angles and making sure that all corners are covered, Sam selected the tundra sect on the wrist screen.

    A few minutes after he did that, Hel arrived at the Ice statue in the hidden temple of the Tundra Sect. The attendants who were assigned to manage the temple saw it and the word went to the sect leader in no time.

    The sect leader widened his eyes in disbelief as he immediately used his golem to rapidly go to the external branch.

    He directly went to the backyard and Sam is looking at the scene with utmost concentration.

    He looked as the sect leader jumped into theke along with his golem. Sam was stunned when he saw this. He did have some expectations regarding this and thought thatke might be somehow rted to the hidden route, but he couldn¡¯t think of. After all, from the golem tracking he did, there is no spatial transfer it is definitely a straight motion.

    After thinking of other possibilities he made a few spections and waited for the sect leader toe out or others to go in and thetter happened. The sect leader seemed to have understood what is happening and called the other core disciples and elders back to the main branch.

    Soon, Sam saw many peopleing to the backyard and they activated ice elemental fusion let their golem hug them before jumping to theke together.

    Even though Sam was confused, he knew that the entry point was from theke.

    He thought for a moment and left the mountain alone and went back to the ce where the golem disappeared.

    This time he didn¡¯t check the surroundings, he ced his palms on the icy ground and used his observation ability.

    Instead of using all his range to look as wide as possible, he used it to increase his vision vertically downwards.

    He didn¡¯t dare let his concentration waver as he delicately observed everyyer of ice that he could see and soon, he was stunned by another revtion.

    There is an underground water current deep down.

    Sam moved from that location to a bit towards the city and stayed on the path mapped by the spiritual imprint tracking before doing the same on that spot.

    He looked carefully and he could observed the tips of the underground water current.

    It is deep and it is too far topletely observe it directly.

    Sam checked another spot before confirming a spection.

    He immediately went back to the mountain region to hold a meeting with the team.

    "I believe they are using an underwater current as a gate for their hidden spot, it is even possible for them to bepletely underground. What do you think we should do? Give me some ideas."

    Sam said as he himself started brainstorming.

    "Why don¡¯t you just send a medium sized liquid energy cell into the water current and let it do the work?"

    Saber Monarch said casually.

    Sam smiled, as he also had the same thought. But he didn¡¯t want to do it like that.

    "Kiran must be feeling lucky today, he cannot infiltrate even if I want him to." Sam said and Kiran is indeed smiling.

    After they gave some ideas, Sam liked the one that was given by Night Ghost.

    He instantly sent out a bird puppet with a spatial ring and it was received by the shadow mice in the city and it delivered it in the external branch discreetly.

    An attendant saw the spatial ring and took a peek inside, there was a scroll, he looked at the contents, felt shocked and immediately ran to his superior who in turn ran to the deacon. When deacon saw it, he was even more shocked and sent a message to the sect.

    A core disciple came and collected the scroll and delivered it to the sect leader.

    "The underwater current is good. I am really impressed by that.

    Anyway I am Sam and I am pretty sure you would have already heard of me, so I wille directly to the point.

    I want your de. We can do it two ways, one is you give me your de and your hidden location will remain hidden and two, you don¡¯tply and I will st open the hidden location andy you bare for the world to see.

    Do not worry, I willpensate you for the de if you want. I am open for the negotiations. So, to prove that I am bluffing, I left a small gift which would show itself anytime now.

    If you want to send a message, just send one of your disciples at lower level to the mountain range you guys are searching and make him drop the message in the cave with the rotten corpse."

    The sect leader read this letter and frowned. The first thought that came to his mind is that the other party is bluffing. But as soon as he thought that, he got a message from the deacon that there is an explosion at theke.

    This made the leader let go of all the ideas of the other party bluffing.

    He didn¡¯t know what to do, he was already in the meeting and he told them this issue to give him some ideas.

    While he is busy, Sam also made himself busy.

    He took some of the small liquid energy cells, drilled some holes in the path along the underground water current and ced them inside them inside the holes.

    This is just a contingency.

    When he arrived back at the mountain cave, Gran also came back holding a scroll.

    Sam read through it and smiled.

    "The other party wants to negotiate face to face. They wouldn¡¯t want to continue this otherwise."

    Sam said to his teammates and they were surprised.

    "Boss, theyplied this easily? I think there is a trap."

    "Of course, there would be. I would be really disappointed if there is not."

 Chapter 1075: Trap

    The meeting spot was arranged, and Sam needs to go there along with his team the next day.

    Sam sent the bird puppets there and let the team rest and prepare for the next day.

    The location of the meeting is the forest. Sam looked at the screen to make sure that the tundra sect is not doing anything fishy.

    While Sam is doing this, the sect had another meeting. It is not about how to deal with Sam¡¯s matter, rather it is to discuss the possibilities on how their location might have been revealed and how they should ovee it.

    For then, being hidden is a necessity and there shouldn¡¯t be any problems regarding that matter.

    As for why they are leisurely chatting about this instead of thinking of ways to deal with Sam, in their opinion, Sam is already done for.

    Once they met with him in the meeting, everything would be easy. That is what they thought and they believed it wholeheartedly. In their opinion, their only problem at the moment is to find a way to rectify the mistake.

    "Why don¡¯t we just wait, sect leader? We can interrogate him tomorrow and ask him how he found it." As soon as the elder spoke, the sect leader shot him a re.

    He gave a sweeping nce to the rest and said.

    "What do you guys think? Do you really think that nobody would make Hel give us such a warning personally? What if he already estimated that he might die and gave the secret to someone else? If that is true, what if he rather died and not told us anything? Hell, what if he is currently trying to sell this information? Do you know how many people are currently waiting to find our hidden location and do you know how many people would flock here if they really managed to find our location and our real identities are revealed?

    Just don¡¯t be dumb and think we are invincible. That is what the sect¡¯s ancestors did and here we are. In this shitty realm now trying to think of ways to not reveal ourselves like some cowards and all because of a brat who is still green behind his ears."

    The whole room turned silent, nobody even dared to make eye contact with the sect leader.

    At this moment, one core disciple spoke.

    "I think the problem is with the spiritual imprint detection."

    When he said this, everyone looked at it him as if he was an idiot.

    "What do you mean by the problem being the spiritual imprint detection? As soon as the imprint reached the end of the water current and the mouth of the entrance, all kinds of spiritual imprints not only will be detected but also destroyed at the same time. What could be wrong with that? Even the spiritual imprint he left was destroyed the same."

    The core disciple whose golem was marked by Sam spoke. He is already having a tough time because he let Sam imprint his golem for the past few days, now if someone really said that it is the only reason why they are in this situation, he wouldn¡¯t be able to hear the end from his peers.

    "That is the problem in itself. Think carefully, the underground water current is actually quite deep and even our sect leader uses his spiritual sense from the surface it wouldn¡¯t be detected but what if there is another method to see things that are not right in front of our eyes and beyond spiritual sense.

    Most of the time even if someone used the spiritual imprint and followed the path, they would be fooled as they wouldn¡¯t expect us to use a current of underground water, and even some meticulous people will be fooled by the formations we ced along the way that helped us avoid the detection.

    But what if someone took the time to examine the path carefully and managed to spot the traces of the water current.

    That is a possibility that we cannot eliminate."

    The sect leader looked at him and nodded in satisfaction.

    He knew a bit about spiritual imprints as they use golems. There is a possibility to track the real-time movements of the imprint and once a person puts their mind to it, it is indeed possible for them to think of some possibilities.

    "Youe with us tomorrow." The sect leader said and turned to the rest of the group.

    "Think of a way ovee this. Dismissed."

    The meeting was over.

    The next day, the sect members that are selected for the task all went to the forest.

    Sam and his team also arrived soon after the sect members arrived.

    This forest is full of tall trees that towered them over. Everyone looked so small and insignificantpared to the trees beside them.

    Within this forest, there is arge patch in the middle. The sect members are all standing there.

    Sam and his team arrived on the other end and stood face to face.

    "So, did you bring the de? What do you want for it in exchange?"

    The sect leader looked at Sam who just spoke as he sized him up.

    "Do you really think that we would bring the de to you? Do you really believe that we will sell it directly?"

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "Not really, I am just asking for courtesy. I know for a fact that you would never sell it. I just asked so that I would feel less guilty when I snatch it from you."

    "To snatch it, you must stay alive first. Since you know that we are not giving it away, I hope you are prepared to die."

    With that, he mmed his foot on the ground and arge energy movement urred in the forest.

    Sam was a bit surprised, but he didn¡¯t show it in his face, he immediately activated energy vision as he looked at the energy moving around activating arge formation bit by bit, when saw this, he took out a throwing knife and filled it with fire elemental energy and threw it in a specific direction.

    The knife enveloped with golden mes zoomed through the air as it was lodged into the tree making it burn in mes.

    The formation which was still in the activation mode suddenly stopped spreading to the side.

    It was now only partially activated.

    Everyone from the sect¡¯s side was shocked by Sam¡¯s sudden move and when they saw the effect of they were shocked beyond belief.

    This is the formation the sect arranged a long time ago. This is one of the ces where they train and cultivate and this formation is made to support their ice elemental attributes.

    They didn¡¯t expect Sam to counter it. But the sect leader didn¡¯t worry too much. Even though the formation is only partially activated, the effects will still be there. Maybe not to their desired extent but they would be sufficient to give them a decent advantage.

    Meanwhile, Sam¡¯s team felt the effects of the formation. The formation increased the intensity and density of the ice elemental energy in the air. It is almost like the normal spiritual energy in the air ispletely reced by ice elemental energy.

    As they tried to absorb the energy by instinct, they could feel the freezing cold seeping into their bodies.

    They are sure that even with their cultivation, they shouldn¡¯t stay in this ce for a prolonged period of time.

    The team immediately jumped to battle mode.

    "Try to use as little energy as possible. I will find a way to get rid of the formation."

    With that, Sam took off on the harbinger as he dodged an attack.

    Night Ghost and the sect leader stood face to face while the rest of the team started fighting with the remaining elders and the core disciples.

    Sam was confronted by the core disciple whose golem is in the shape of a wyvern and could fly a little.

    "You are mine."

    The core disciple said as he threw an icicle on Sam. But Sam just dodged it and took out the executioner sword. He increased his speed suddenly which made the other party stunned for a second as he swung his sword at him,

    The sword¡¯s aura ispletely different from before. Since it has a spirit, it can umte energy with time and increase the effectiveness of the attack.

    The core disciple felt threatened and instinctually used the golem to block.

    The sword slid through the golem as if it is cutting through the air and the surrounding ice near the sh turned purple as the corrosive poison spread into it, the ice corroded a bit, but it didn¡¯t spread like it did when it was used against cultivators and other creatures.

    Sam took a hard turn and stabbed at the core disciple once again, but the strike was once again blocked with the golem, but this time, the wing was used and the stab made a crack appear on the wings.

    Sam took advantage of it and stabbed once again to make a hole appear in the wing.

    The Golem lost its bnce in the air and almost crashed into the ground which was stopped by the core disciple.

    Sam didn¡¯t pay him much attention and activated his energy vision to take a look at the formation.

 Chapter 1076: One strike

    Sam is having trouble with the formation. Not because it is a high-level formation, rather it is pretty basic, the problem is that it is extremelyyered and all theyers are made with many nodes. Even if there are some nodes missing, the formation will shift to a different form with almost the same output.

    The formation destruction is not exactly difficult but it is time taking and persistent. Particrly in a battle, he would need to find that one point that would destroy the formation. As for the core of the formation, he couldn¡¯t find it. This is one of the coreless formations.

    If not for the fact that he made the move while the formation is still activating, the temperature in the formation would have been far worse than what it is now.

    The core disciple went after Sam without giving up and the rest of the people are being kept busy by the team.

    The sect leader was stunned by the disy of power from Sam¡¯s team.

    They are in constant upper hand even though the environment is against them, but he didn¡¯t worry too much.

    "Go defensive, don¡¯t try to kill or injure, just drag for the time."

    The sect leader directly announced his instructions, he is still in a staredown with the Night Ghost, not starting the battle yet.

    But the tension is building up and they are sure that the one person who loses patience will be the one to lose.

    After half an hour, Sam noticed that the team is currently feeling a bit problematic with the ice elemental energy invading their bodies.

    Sam felt the urgency. He activated fire elemental energy fusion and walked shed the sword at the core disciple which left arge sh on his chest and then focused on the formation.

    He took out a bunch of knives and moved around on the harbinger and started throwing them at different spots.

    The core disciple who was shed with the sword is suffering from the corrosion effect on the body as he rolled on the ground. His golem covered him with the humungous body and tried its best to block all the attacks.

    The sect leader frowned for the first time.

    He didn¡¯t that the core disciple would fare this bad. From start to finish, he didn¡¯t stand a chance against Sam. Every single attack Sam madended and he is not even focusing on the fight. He is clearly focusing on the formation.

    As he looked at the fiery knivesnding on different spots, he had a bad premonition.

    He wanted to make a move, but Night Ghost is giving him too much pressure. He has been in this cultivation level for a few decades and he could clearly sense that Night Ghost recently broke through, but his instincts are screaming to be careful. The danger this man represents is so high that every second he looked to the side made him feel like he is being preyed by some savage ready to rip him apart.

    After some thought, he couldn¡¯t take it anymore as he looked at the futile attempts of the core disciple to take care of Sam by himself and yelled.

    "Battle formation 2"

    As soon as he spoke, the elders took a step back as they took out an ice sculpture from their storages.

    All the ice sculptures are golems as they moved and jumped around before standing in different spots. The formation changed and the temperature further reduced. Sam felt as if even a single breath is freezing his lungs.

    And that is even with his fire elemental fusion and the evolved lungs of the fire element.

    He looked around to notice that all the core disciples who are supporting the elders to deal with the teammates are now free as the temperature decreased and his teammates are feeling suffocated and feeling obstruction in their energy cirction, but still they are holding up on their own. The least effect was on Kiran and Saber Monarch who don¡¯t have any elemental affinity.

    They are going all out as they started ying one elder after another, but there are still too many of these people.

    Sam lost his patience and he was about to make a big move. But the core disciples already surrounded him.

    Most of them arete-stage Pre-transcendent cultivators.

    But they still managed to fight against the initial stage transcendent cultivators and peak stage Pre-transcendent cultivators with the help of the formation.

    Sam took out the reaper sword and threw the bunch of fiery knives around without much care. He shed straight on the disciple that came at him and kicked a knife up in the process before hitting with the sword.

    It was lodged at some spot. He shed another opponent and hit another knife making itnd on another spot.

    The golems are being sted away as he challenged all his energy.

    When the core disciples saw Sam¡¯s strength, they became a bit timid to approach him, they immediately activated an ice elemental fusion and merged with their ice golems.

    Sam was stunned for a second when he saw this.

    This is one of the high-level arts of the golems. It is extremely difficult to achieve. Merging with golems andbining their power is extremely difficult and takes too much skill.

    The fight became difficult. By every second, the situation is worsening.

    And then he saw something else. The ice monkeys that acted as the nodes of this new formation started dancing on the ce creating waves of frost energy that hit his team. It is not too powerful, but it could stop them from using their strength and create deadly distractions.

    Sam finally lost patience.

    He took out a metal pole which has arge number of inscriptions.

    The sect leader looked at it frowned.

    "Seems like he had enough of your tricks." Night Ghost said from the side.

    Sam moved to the center of the formation and nailed the metal pole on the ground.

    Half of the metal pole has a transparent body made of used-up spirit stones. Inside is fire elemental energy liquid and on top of it, there is a small cork that acts like the piston of an injection. Sam jumped off the harbinger and mmed his foot on it while his fire elemental fusion is still activated.

    The golden mes entered the pole while the piston moved down forcefully injecting the liquid energy downwards into the lower half of the pole.

    From the bottom of the pole golden mes started spewing out into the ground and slowly it started cracking as golden mes came out of those cracks like some fissures. The ice in the surroundings started melting and that included the monkey sculptures and golems.

    The whole formation is being full of hot air instantly overwhelming the fire elemental energy.

    Sam threw a fiery knife which is thest of its set to a spot and a formation was activated.

    A fiery explosion urred as that formation exploded outwards, towards the ice formation.

    Both energies shed making both of them eliminate each other.

    And with the fire pole in the middle, the atmosphere suddenly turned against the Tundra sect members.

    The sect leader is looking at the whole situation with widened eyes full of shock and disbelief.

    He couldn¡¯t believe what he was seeing.

    What shocked him is not the fact that the situation turned around in an instant.

    As surprising as it is, this is not the most shocking thing.

    The most shocking thing is the liquid energy he saw inside that metal pole.

    He involuntarily turned around and obviously distracted, but at this moment he sensed that the monster he was guarding against all this time is still there.

    Night Ghost made his move.

    A bunch of ghosts came out of his body as he channeled all his energy into his palm. The ghosts raged towards the Sect leader and caught hold of his soul as if they are trying to tear his soul and body apart.

    The sect leader realized and started channeling his ice elemental energy and even tried to make the ghosts freeze there and then. He activated ice elemental fusion and was ready to meet the attack.

    But the type of attack that came from Night Ghost ispletely different from what he expected.

    Night Ghost put all his energy into this one palm as he mmed it into the chest of the sect leader.

    The sect leader didn¡¯t feel any pain and in fact, it barely even made him feel anything. But the next second, he closed his eyes and his fusion was gone along with his body falling down limp.

    Everyone at the scene was shocked.

    They saw as the soul of the sect leader was separated from the body and is being torn apart by the ghosts as they fought within themselves to absorb more and more of the soul.

    Night Ghost fell on his knees in exhaustion. The attack seemed simple enough, but it took all his energy. He felt like fainting right there and then. If not for the fact the ghosts are hungrily devouring the sect leader¡¯s soul, he would definitely fall down and lose consciousness.

 Chapter 1077: Divine Dimension

    After the sect leader and the formation were gone, everything else was easy. Some of the members tried to run away and some just wanted to fight to the death, the team gave whatever they wanted. They killed the people who sought death and they just let the people who wanted to escape without any pursuit.

    After they escaped, they gathered some information from the dead soul about how to enter.

    Sam was quite surprised by this.

    There is an underground river that passes through the area under the city. The Tundra Sect dug a hole and created ake connecting to this river in their backyard and used a formation from which the water wouldn¡¯t be able to enter the city.

    The exit is also somewhat simr, but instead of ake, the underground river was directed even deeper and in the downwards direction to make a waterfall.

    Between this bend of the river after which it turns into the waterfall, there is a formation that filters all kinds of spiritual imprints and stuff on the golems before letting them enter the sect.

    And since the current of the underground river is extremely cold and fierce, even the elders wouldn¡¯t dare to go there normally.

    They would use ice elemental fusion and then fuse with their golems before jumping.

    Sam finally understood how they are traveling and he also learned that the sculptor de was inside the sect itself. The thing is nobody can wield it yet and it is a mere decoration in the sect by now.

    It was said that the de¡¯s spirit is extremely stubborn and wouldn¡¯t even be let stored into the storage unless someone worthy wields it and ording to the sect¡¯s tradition the worth of the person was not decided by a simple spirit battle with the spirit of the weapon, rather a sculpting challenge. The de should approve of the final result.

    Sam didn¡¯t care much about how unique the de is. He is going to leave it for the gods to take and exchange it for resources. If it really doesn¡¯t enter the divine dimension, then he will just immediately exchange it for resources.

    But before that, he needs to enter the sect.

    Sam sent Night ghost to deal with the Deacon of the external branch before proceeding towards the path that he marked with the small liquid energy cells.

    He and the team stood far away before he took out the tokens and destroyed all of them.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    A series of explosions urred in a blink of an eye.

    Actually, Sam made this to be a contingency n in case things go wrong, but now they came in handy.

    After the explosions which eliminated a lot of ice and rocks covering the ground, the underground river gave out somerge high pressured streams.

    Only after the final explosion did everything calm down and the high pressured and high-speed current turned a bit mellower as the current expanded a bit.

    Sam took out a breathing device and said to his team.

    "I will check it a bit and then call you."

    After that, he dove into the water as swan deeper to search for the entrance.

    It is actually pretty easy, from the information he got, at the point of the entrance, half of the river will split into two before going through the entrance as a water wall, so the water movement will lead him to it and it did.

    But when he reached the entrance, Sam was shocked.

    For the sect members who entered secretly, it is impossible for them to see what he saw now.

    Because, the light couldn¡¯t prate the underground river and since they would be in the middle of itpletely and the pressure is also high, the only thing they care about it is entering.

    But Sam could see it, from what he could see, there is a membrane in front of him and it is not an ordinary membrane it has rich spatial energy inside it.

    Sam ced his hand through it.

    He could see the faint spatial fluctuations happening through it.

    He swam back upwards and took a few more breathing devices, gave them to his teammates, and dove back inside with them.

    All of them passed through the spatial membrane and they felt like they were falling down through a waterfall.

    They fell into theke created by the waterfall and came out. Since the tundra sect is so sure that their secured location was not seen by anyone, they didn¡¯t ce any guards here. But there are still some people meditating near the waterfall.

    Before they could react, Sia and Gran knocked them out one by one.

    Sam looked at the whole scene and was very surprised. His shock was way beyond what his teammates could imagine.

    Because he felt the feeling of entering a membrane, like this before. This ce which looked like any other ice field that spanned a veryrge area is giving him a familiar feeling and that feeling was not because of the familiarity in the appearance, but rather in the familiarity of the atmosphere.

    This ce is a divine dimension.

    Sam never thought that he would enter a divine dimension this early in his journey. Even though the Astral ne cultivators are powerful, they are still far beyond acquiring the divine dimension like this.

    The divine dimension is obviously not as high quality as the one Sam had and it is definitely not as versatile and vast as the one Sam had.

    But this is definitely a divine dimension, but the ess of the dimension is a bit different than Sam¡¯s.

    The team separated and they started exploring the ce.

    There is arge ice structure that seemed like the main base of the sect. Night Ghost who finished of the external deacon joined them together as he came following the stream and Sam entered the ice structure along with him. Inside there are some elders who are still discussing the situation and when they heard themotion outside, they were stunned by the two unfamiliar faces.

    They were about to yell, but Night Ghost¡¯s aura made them admit defeat instantly.

    After that Sam walked in and said.

    "I don¡¯t have anything against you, I don¡¯t care to kill you all. Escape now and don¡¯t look back while you leave. I am only here for the sculptor de."

    With that, Sam walked to the core area, where Hel¡¯s statue is and at the feet of the statue there is the sculptor de which was exquisitely forged with the handle looking like a snakehead.

    Just as the information they got suggested, the de didn¡¯t let Sam hold it, Sam just smiled and tried to force it into a spatial ring, it didn¡¯t budge.

    Sam wanted to try a different method, so he asked the shadow sword which is the oldest spirit he knew, and the spirit of the Lightning saber to give him suggestions.

    After following their instructions, Sam managed to put the spirit to sleep and managed to carry it around.

    Even though he could have traded here, it would take some time and he doesn¡¯t want to waste so much time, he would much rather just carry it around a bit. Anyway, the sculptor de is small and could fit in on his body without any trouble.

    After that, they ransacked the whole dimension and stored all kinds of resources.

    Turned out the main source of ice elemental energy for the sect is not the spirit stones rather, the waterfall. The underground river carries rich frost essence with great purity. It is just a bit diluted with water.

    Once they managed to process it, they would be able to use it for their own development.

    After that, Sam came back into the stream and tried to look for the container of the divine dimension. Just like the blue crystal on Sam¡¯s hands, there should be a container for every divine dimension as long as it is separated from the user who created it.

    There is bound to be a container.

    But for that Sam had to approach the membrane from the other side.

    He came out and started digging the ground from the other side and finally found an ice crystal.

    He immediately signed a blood contract with it and the space membrane was closed instantly.

    This divine dimension not only holds the riches of the sect, but also the legacy of their ancestors. This is a bountiful harvest.

    As for talking with Hel, he decided to give that a break and go back to the city first.

    He is going to modify the tower a bit and he is going to do that in an eye-catching way.

    He let some of the external members of the sect give out the news that he and his team are the reason for the destruction of the Tundra Sect and some of the elders who wanted to stay even after the de was gone and continue the sect in a smaller scale, legitimized the information.

    Sam took this chance given by the fear caused to the people and started modifying the tower as he wished.

 Chapter 1078: Butterfly Effect

    Sam stayed in the ice fields for a week, but by the end of the week, there is nothing in the vicinity that made it look like the ice field. At least within the radius of thirty kilometers around the city, nothing is frozen.

    Even the ice on the mountains is melting down and joined the streams. The surrounding forests are flooded a bit, but as soon as the ice didn¡¯t melt at the same time and happened gradually most of it just flowed gradually into the ice fields outside the range.

    As for the city, everyone was stunned by what Sam did with the tower.

    He modified a lot of it and even though it didn¡¯t look much different externally, a lot of changes urred and thergest eye-catching thing is the ball of glowing mes condensed together a few meters above the top of the tower.

    It looked like a sun and in fact, it is indeed an artificial sun Sam made for this area and that is the reason why the thirty-kilometer radius waspletely affected and was rid of ice.

    The artificial sun was created with the gases of the highly vtile gases of the fuels with high calorific value distilled within the tower.

    The heat energy from the fuels with medium calorific value was used to heat up the immediate vicinities of the city while the lower level fuels were diverted to a tank for the usage of the citizens.

    After finishing off the project, the citizens were shocked and were in awe.

    Sam decided to leave the ce even before he coulde out of that shock. He left with the team.

    But before his departure, he pissed of Hel once more before destroying her statue inside the new divine dimension full of ice elemental energy. It is kind of ironic how Hel who is master of the dark mes managed to subdue a sect based on the ice elemental energy, but he didn¡¯t care too much and prepared for the next journey.

    "Now, all the troublesome targets of the second twelve are over, the remaining are easy for us. So, just pick whatever target you want to choose. We will select them directly without any trouble and face them head-on. This way you can also have yourbat training down."

    Sam said as he looked at his team.

    The most troubling candidates in the second twelve of the third phase are over.

    They just need to finish the remaining targets and move on to the third phase.

    These targets might take some time, but they wouldn¡¯t pose any serious threats.

    So, he left the freedom for his teammates and let them select who they should face next and how they should proceed.

    Sam nned out the next eight months for both dealing with the targets as well as the expansion of the dusk organization.

    It has been too long since the dusk organization expanded in recent years and they arepletely stable at the moment.

    And since Sam also got some serious manpower waiting to be utilized inside the chessboard, there is no need for him to worry too much.

    So, while he left the team to decide on the targets, he went back to deste to organize the next expansion n and along with the expansion in terms of ces and business, Sam also made sure that they expanded the schools as well.

    The first batches of schools are already showing the results.

    Sam now has hundreds of Pre-transcendent and transcendent stage cultivators who graduated from various schools. Most of them are sent to the higher realms to develop further and some of them even joined the college in the Charbhum realm.

    Even the school he opened in the Charbhum realm is actually a great ce that showed enormous results, currently, in the elven government of the Charbhum realm, Sam has one of the greatest influences as the students of his school joined as bureaucrats and climbed ranks like crazy.

    These results cannot be ignored.

    Sam needs a properwork to make sure that the school is stable. As long as he is alive and can still roam around the realms, it is all okay. But there woulde a time where he might not be able to take care of everything and he would need some stable and loyal people who don¡¯t lust after the power that is the organization.

    Even if there are some weeds that try to take over the organization, there should be someone in secret whose duty is to deal with these weeds.

    So, Sam also wanted to take in some students.

    They are not like his direct disciples who would follow in his footsteps. Rather he is going to be their temporary instructor and a mentor.

    He also gave some requirements to some of the loyal executives to scout for such people in the already existing realms.

    His main target is the people with utmost dedication and also nothing to lose. And he is not going to take them as his students directly. He is going to test them, they will go through one of the worst phases of life and the cruelest training this world could ever see.

    But he is sure as hell going to make them go through it and make some tough nuts to crack out of that training program.

    He also let out some of the people on the chessboard who arepletely tamed and made soul contracts with him to supervise the expansion.

    They are going to take care of the new branches and they will support the education division in his organization to establish the new schools.

    While Sam is making big ns for his own organization, he doesn¡¯t know the butterfly effect he caused by destroying the Tundra Sect and the modification of the tower.

    Far away from the Ice ins, in a that is solely dedicated for a sect.

    A sect that was spread among different ces ruled by the different branches of the sect.

    There is one icy mountain range on which the headquarters are located and currently they are conducting a meeting.

    An old man with a muscr body stood bare in that ice castle¡¯s main hall with a bunch of elders sitting on either side.

    "Two of the lower branches are destroyed. What is happening?"

    The old man asked an elder who stood up.

    The elder was nervous a bit and said.

    "The stone temple is destroyed, the investigators already went there, but still didn¡¯te back. Right when they are returning, the Tundra sect was also destroyed.

    So, I sent a messenger to them to go there and investigate."

    "Why, what is the rest of the investigative department doing?"

    "They are too far away."

    "Is that reason enough?"

    "Sir, the other branches are trying their best to usurp power. Particrly the earthen branch. Since the stone temple is under their control, they are trying to pin some me on us. They are deliberately suppressing the investigative branch. The more they dy the stone temple¡¯s situation, the more they would be able to pin this me on us for ipetence."

    The old man looked at the elder and said.

    "Do I need to remind you guys? No matter how many branches we have and which god each branch worships, there is one thing they all have to follow. The ruling branch rules and makes the rules. The investigative department is under us, even if they have more earthen branch members joining in and even if the fire branch members mix in it.

    Go and order the investigative department that they need to finish the investigation in four days. I don¡¯t care what methods they would use, but I want that to happen.

    And the tundra sect has one of the divine dimensions with them. Make sure to find that out."

    "Yes sir."

    After the Elder left, the old man looked at the rest of the elders and said.

    "It seems like the other branches are forgetting why we are the ruling branch. Go and show them."

    With that, the meeting was dispersed.

    "I want to know who is daring enough to trash two of my branches. I will find you and deal with you no matter what." He muttered to himself.

    And that is not the only reaction Sam invoked.

    In another realm, on an ind, there is a tower in which three men are currently having dinner.

    One of them has long hair braided and a lean build. The second one has blonde hair which was tied into a ponytail and the third one has silver hair which is short and spiky.

    As the three of them speaking, the silver-haired guy suddenly said.

    "The spirit I left in the tower in that ice ins is destroyed yesterday."

    The remaining two stopped clearly showing their stunned expressions.

    "What do you mean was destroyed?"

    "I don¡¯t know what happened, I already sent someone to get the details, they would be here in a week. By the way, I also asked them to check about the maze and the mountain on their way. So get ready to see if something happened to our creations. If there is anyone with brains in the lower realms."

    "I already lost hopes." The blonde guy said and they continued eating.

 Chapter 1079: Hou Yis Plan

    Eighteen Months Later

    Even though Sam actually nned for the remaining targets to be finished earlier, it took a total of eighteen months.

    That is because once again Hel and Hou Yi both yed dirty and this time even Indra joined them.

    They cannot information the powers under their jurisdiction directly about Sam¡¯s possible arrival, they took a different approach.

    When Sam selected the first target based on the suggestions of his team, which happened to be Hou Yi¡¯s subordinates, Hou Yi made an appearance through the statue and gave instructions to the other party.

    He made the record the instructions and even added his spiritual imprint even though faint will give off his aura and sent them to different powers with those recording crystals. The rest of the powers that are under Hou Yi¡¯s control didn¡¯t take much effort to be convinced that something serious is happening.

    Meanwhile, Indra and Hel appeared in their own powers and gave them one instruction.

    "I cannot give you more information because of some restrictions, but if you find someone traveling to your headquarters with a recording crystal with the instructions of the god named Hou Yi in it believe everything and do as he says."

    As for what instructions Hou Yi gave, it is very simple. First, he made them use all their fortune to hire as many people that could oppose Sam and his team as they can. And their goal changed from definitely killing Sam to killing anyone in Sam¡¯s team.

    The next main instruction which made things really difficult for Sam is that Hou Yi told an elder to run away with their heirloom, he was ordered to run to different realms. His main goal is to find a way to not let Sam get the heirloom no matter what happens.

    Anyone can understand that Hou Yi¡¯s only goal from this drag Sam and make sure that he doesn¡¯t get what he wants.

    Now all of a sudden if Sam gives up on the organizations under Hou Yi and Hel, then he would have to target other organizations for the resources he needs for his own organization.

    This will definitely cause a dispute between him and the rest of the yers. If there is anyone that can cause any possible trouble for Sam within the realms he is roaming that would be the remaining yers that are also in this long and stupid game.

    Hou Yi figured that Sam would either give up or invade other powers, but he didn¡¯t expect some other action at all.

    Sam went after each and every member of different organizations that escaped with heirlooms.

    For the first target, when the person escaped with heirloom escaped, lets call him carrier for now. When the carrier escaped with the heirloom, he is a bit skeptical about the current situation and didn¡¯t dare go too long and he even bribed a merchant to make sure that he could get the news about what happened to the organization.

    After hearing that his organization is destroyed, he thought for a while and since he remembered Hou Yi¡¯s words that the most important thing for Sam at the moment is the heirloom, he decided on something.

    He directly sold the heirloom to the heard of the merchant organization he got the information from and created a diversion, he deliberately attracted Sam¡¯s attention and made him follow.

    He was quite persistent and managed to escape for over a month. But Sam and his team hunted him down and learned what he did with the heirloom and then they had to target the Merchant organization.

    The merchant organization is actually a lot bigger and a lot more powerful than the organization he defeated earlier and they have threete-stage transcendent cultivators and Sam doesn¡¯t know who has the sword.

    And these people are smart enough to hide their tracks

    Sam was so frustrated that he wanted to destroy the whole organization at first, but he calmed himself down and contacted the rival organization. Since the other party is merchants, they can only me themselves for pissing Sam off. After all, he is a businessman himself and he can do a lot more than these people.

    After he learned that there are a bunch of rival organizations for them, he arranged arge-scale auction and sold many of his designs, recipes, and products to the rival organizations, and now the target merchants are outdated in the public eye.

    Now they have no other choice but to target Sam as they couldn¡¯t do anything to the rest of the merchant organizations.

    Late, all Sam had to do is kill everyone that came at him and take the heirloom.

    When they went to the next target, Sam realized the ploy.

    He couldn¡¯t help but curse the gods and then his hunt began.

    Even if he felt frustrated, he still wanted to piss the gods off, and since they went to this length just to hinder him, he decided that he would see through it even if it dys his progress.

    Anyway, the rest of the yers are far behind in the race, so there is no need for him to worry about being left behind.

    In fact, he is sure that when he finishes this phase three he might have to wait for around a year or a year and a half and that might happen even after this dy.

    So, in these eighteen months, while hunting them down, one thing benefitted Sam and his team and that is thebat experience and the resources.

    The cultivation progress of everyone became fast with the additional resources they are getting and thebat experience not only honed their skills further but also increased their understanding. Even Sam is feeling great with his progress.

    The only downside is the amount of bloodshed that is happening in the process.

    Sam has killed thousands of people in the process. Even though most of it is taken care of by his teammates, the blood is still on his hands.

    Even at this moment, he is currently in the middle of a battle.

    He is holding the two swords and water elemental energy is running through him.

    The reaper sword is of neutral energy and the sword has a very high affinity with all the elements, the spirit adapts and absorbs any element that he injects into it.

    As for the executioner, it is a bit different. It can take on multiple energies and adapt, but the full prowess of the swordes when it is on water and poison element.

    At this moment, Sam is using the exact same thing. He is trying to fuse the fusions of both water and poison elements and it seems like he could seed.

    He is in the middle of the forest surrounded by some people wearing dark cloaks.

    Even though Sam is just standing there, the rest of them didn¡¯t dare to do anything to them.

    There are a dozen corpses around them all died with a single clean sh that cut them into two or a sh that grazed them but their corpsepletely rotten.

    All the while doing this Sam was standing there with his eyes closed and barely moving his arms.

    So, the rest of them are all feeling a bit scared to go forward. But they are also scared to go back because they were made to die at times like this. Their current mission is to stop Sam here until their liege arrives.

    And their liege is currently in the battle with Sam¡¯s subordinate.

    In their opinion, Sam is just ying into their ns, but what they don¡¯t know is that the more they wait, the faster they are going to die, because, Sam would fuse faster if he is not disturbed and the more they stayed idle the faster the fusion happens and the faster they would die.

    And the moment arrived a few minutester.

    Sam¡¯s body is a mixture of blue and purple, but only blue energy was being passed through the reaper and the mixture of both energies are going through the executioner.

    Actually, it is easy to use them bothbined as both elements came to him from the Hydra.

    But if he took that method, he wouldn¡¯t be able to do what he wanted to do.

    Sam suddenly opened his eyes and swung the reaper sword.

    The sword spirit manifested. The spirit which looked like a savage with that humanoid upper body and blood color has currently changed to the merger of blue and blood color and the right hand was extended as it morphed into a sword and glowed.

    The strike looked like arge tsunami, but all the energy and momentum of a tsunami waspletely concentrated into a thin de. As his strike went through half of the targets were cleanly cut into two and the strike still didn¡¯t stop. It went on destroying trees in its path and leaving arge line on the soil.

    It is too clean to the point it looked it therge cut was a cleanly drawn line.

    As he swung the reaper sword, the nine heads of the hydra also manifested as one strike transformed into nine strikes and struck the remaining targets, they are corroded to rotten mush in a brief second and the remaining of the nine strikes were strayed into the forest and the ces where the strikesnded created an area of corrosion.

    Sam is quite satisfied with the oue of the sword technique as he smiled at the liege of these people appearing in front of his eyes.

 Chapter 1080: Assassins Organization

    "You are the cause of all this. You are the reason why my family died, you are an abomination sent from hell to destroy us."

    The ¡¯liege¡¯ muttered as he walked slowly towards Sam. His body is full of injuries, he was beaten ck and blue. He waspletely tortured by his teammates as he tried to escape.

    "I will kill you at least before I die." The man wanted to raise his hand and kill Sam.

    But as soon as he raised his hand, an arrow came and lodged into his throat.

    "Idiot."

    Sam muttered as he took off that guy¡¯s spatial ring and took the heirloom.

    He sighed in relief as he muttered once again.

    "Finally, this batch is over. Now onto the next one."

    Sam is really feeling a bit tired this time around. He kept on running around and his name became known to many realms by now.

    "Boss, why don¡¯t you take a break and finish your research."

    Vidyut who was hiding for a while came out suddenly and said with a smile.

    His aura ispletely different because he achieved a breakthrough to the middle stage of Astral ne Transcendence.

    Sam smiled and asked.

    "Why are you so interested in my research?"

    "Well, the ne you gave me is working well. But it is of too low level. If you finish your research to find something for our level, then it would be great. We can also fight well with our next targets."

    Vidyut said as he touched the ne he wore. It has a square-shaped locket that has a faint shine of indigo. And it is in a crystal form.

    This is one of the many benefits he got in the past eighteen months, since he managed to get the ice divine dimension, Sam can now openly go inside the divine dimension without revealing his own original divine dimension to the teammates.

    And since all of them are chasing after and running around, most of the time they traveled through the regr wormholes instead of the dimensional drifter which made things easier for Sam to focus on his research.

    This ne or more likely the crystal is one of the results of the research.

    But it is most suitable for low-level cultivators in Mortal ne, even in the Mortal ne cultivation, this is not that useful for consummate level cultivators. But since he only has Astral ne cultivators for teammates, he decided to test these on them.

    As the rest of the team gathered around, it can be seen that all of them are wearing these crystals of different colors, shapes, and sizes on different parts of their body. Some wore it as a ring, some as a bracelet, and others as a ne.

    The crystals are part of arge project Sam is creating. And their current purpose is to make the recovery of energy and injuries easier.

    Currently, only energy recovery is possible.

    Once the owner made contact with it cannot be changed, of course, Sam can change it because he is the one who made it. He has master ess. As for the bond with the owners, it will only be gone once they die if Sam didn¡¯t remove it.

    And for everyone else who wears it, it would be nothing more than a piece of decorative jewelry.

    But for the owners themselves, as long as they willed it, the spiritual energy will be infused into their bodies in an extremely gentle manner such that natural absorption of the body will be enough for the energy recovery.

    And all that is needed is for the people to store spirit stones in it. Currently, a crystal made for a certain element works only with that. Sam is researching to make something that could convert neutral spiritual energy into elemental energy.

    But the teammates on which he used the product, wanted him to raise the energy capacity of the crystal instead of conversion.

    If Sam used it well, it would be a good thing for the cultivation of the low-level cultivators. But he is not making it for his own use. He is making it as a product to sell it in higher nes.

    The higher the nes, the more resources people has and the more resources the people have thezier they will be.

    Even an ordinary citizen in the realm they are currently in will be a Consummate stage cultivator, so most people don¡¯t have too much interest in cultivating and people who are satisfied with normal wouldn¡¯t bother putting too much effort and would live by.

    And this crystal would aid them. This will decrease their effort in cultivation if it ispletely made. As for what he would do with it for his own organization members, he has different ns.

    The ns are too big and too far away.

    "I am not doing that. They are not meant for people of your level. You need to wait for a few years for something that could be really useful to you. Don¡¯t think too much and let us go to the next target."

    Sam said as he took off on harbinger and started flying towards the city. There is an assassin organization that was helping this guy and they are all done for, Sam found secret storage in the city that has some treasures, it is about time he took them.

    While Sam is moving the rest followed.

    "Why do I feel like his speed increased again? It only increased six months ago when he broke through to thete stage. What the hell is up with that board, is it growing with his cultivation as well?"

    Agar muttered as she saw Sam¡¯s fleeting back.

    Sam broke through to thete-stage and the first thing he said to Agar and Argan who are currently at peak stage is that.

    "I am catching up."

    It is even unknown whether she would have an advantage if they were to fight. Sam¡¯s growth is too fast for them.

    The rest of the teammates felt the same way as they followed. Now on harbinger, he is almost as fast as Initial Stage of Astral ne Transcendence, cultivators.

    "He is really catching up. He already fights like that, if he really catches up with us, he wouldn¡¯t even need us. We need to speed up."

    "How much faster do you want, you just broke through to the Middle stage," Kiran whined, but he is in a better state than the rest as he already broke through to the Initial stage of Transcendence.

    Gran and Sia are right behind him, they are on the verge of a breakthrough.

    As for Tamas, his breakthrough could be said to be the smoothest as if he could have broken through any time he wanted as he broke through to the Astral ne transcendence.

    While they are all bickering, everyone finished the looting and made ns.

    They were given the choice for the next operation as well.

    Since even Paras has already gotten arge clue rted to his incident, they don¡¯t need to focus on investigation anymore until they reached the fourth and final phase of the organization.

    So, currently, it is all about them fighting and dealing with organizations.

    When they looked at the list of twelve organizations, they all felt confused about what to pick.

    And everyone has different opinions.

    By the next day, they finally managed to get on with some consensus and selected an organization.

    When Sam saw this, he was a bit surprised and asked.

    "Are you sure, you want to do this first?"

    "Yes, boss. This is the most troublesome of them all. If we can take them on first, the rest will be easy."

    "I am pretty sure this is not the most troublesome one, but this would be annoying. I am sure of that."

    "At least, the rest of the ces wouldn¡¯t go anywhere and we can deal with them ourselves. But this is right up there with what we are doing right now. If we do it, then we would be able to deal with them."

    "Well, I don¡¯t think the rest of the organizations would be in the same positions. If Hou Yi and Hel take the same action as they did now, things would once again be messy. Anyway, since you guys made a decision, let us just go. Where do you think we should start our operation?"

    "Of course from the nearest branch."

    With that, they all went to the wormhole to go to the adjacent realm.

    The next target is a bit tricky.

    Because the organization doesn¡¯t have a specific headquarters anybody knew of.

    It is an underground assassin organization and once again Hel is the boss of this.

    The leader of the organization is a Peak stage transcendent cultivator.

    The specialty of the organization is that they have many small branches all over four realms, but they don¡¯t have any headquarters that was known to the world. And there is no one who ever saw that leader.

    They will kill as long as they could get the money. Even the leader of the organization could be hired for the tasks.

    This is going to be a real pain the ass with them moving all over the ce to find the exact ce where they could find the heirloom.

 Chapter 1081: Black Curtain

    Sam and the team reached the realm where the assassin organization¡¯s branch is.

    The organization is actually disguised as a merchant association. And they are called the ck Curtain Merchant association.

    Everyone knows they take jobs for killing people, but nobody dares to confront them, in every ce, they are right now, they control the underworld and even the local governments have toply.

    If they were made known about Sam¡¯s arrival because of Hou Yi¡¯s stupid attempt to dy Sam, then things would have been really troublesome, as they had a great experience in going to hiding and fight longsting annoying battles.

    But luckily the team managed to cut off the chain when they dealt with thest organization that are responsible for spreading the news to others.

    Anyway, if the chain reaction would have to trigger again, they would rather let this ck curtain gone first before anything else happens, it would be really annoying if the guys from this organization escaped with the heirloom.

    Sam and the team entered the city directly this time. All they did is try their best to hide their cultivation and keep a bit of a low profile.

    They enquired a bit and entered the inn that was under the ck Curtain.

    When they settled in, Sam conducted a meeting.

    When everyone came in, he took out a small device and pressed a button, an energy wave urred and a few small popping sounds were heard in the walls and corners of the room.

    "Too many things to spy on the people."

    Sam muttered and said to the team.

    "I want you guys to enquire about some rare herbs in the vicinity and how to find them. Try to be a team and at the same time be on odds with each other when you are not with each other. Act a bit suspicious."

    "Boss, what is with all the acting? Can we not just deal with them directly?"

    "They have at least eighteen branches in different realms and every realm has at least one or two organizations that have people with Peak stage Transcendent cultivation of Astral ne. But they still didn¡¯t manage to take control of this group. Of course, part of the reason would be that they use them for their dirty work, but that doesn¡¯t make them any less dangerous.

    If we openly do something to them, we would be poking a ho¡¯s nest. If the hos are just targeting us, it would be okay, but these hos will just escape from our sites.

    We need to create confusion and some chaos. Then after making sure that another chain reaction doesn¡¯t ur, we can deal with them."

    With that, Sam gave them some specific instructions before letting them go.

    The next day, Agar went to the pharmaceutical shop to ask about some herbs,ter that afternoon, Tamas went there and sneakily approached the shop attendant. He took out a picture of Agar and asked him.

    "I think she came to the shop you are working at this morning. I want to know what she asked for."

    The attendant looked at him suspiciously.

    But Tamas just slipped a spatial ring into his hands and asked.

    "Now can you tell me?"

    "Sir, I really am tempted by your offer, but she was very secretive about the whole process and talked to my boss privately. But if you want, I have a way to get some information. The price will be higher."

    "Don¡¯t care about the price. I need the information."

    With that Tamas left as sneakily as he met him.

    The same things kept on happening the next week. Everyone on the team contacted a seller on something and every one of them wanted to find what the other is buying.

    The whole process is chaotic butpletely under the wraps, except for the few people in the city and the people that are involved in the sham without even knowing cared about it.

    Sam is also involved in this.

    In fact, he actually managed to fish some more information than the others and after exactly one week, he went to meet the manager of the inn.

    "Hello, I heard that you wanted to meet me."

    The manager asked Sam.

    "Yes, I do. But do you mind stopping the recording devices all over the room? It is getting a bit problematic for me to ignore them."

    The Manager smiled and used some tokens to turn off the recording devices.

    "So, now you can tell me."

    "I would like to put up an assignment."

    "Oh, really? Our inn is specialized in that. What kind of assignment do you want? Beasts, herbs, metal ores, delivery? We could all kinds of jobs around the realm."

    "How about an assassination?"

    The manager¡¯s smile disappeared for a second and then it came back again, but this time it is a bit different.

    "You should have said that from the start."

    "I would like one of my teammates who is staying in room 18 at the moment gone, tomorrow, he is going to leave the inn and enter the forest. I would like you guys to deal with him there."

    "What is the cultivation level of your teammate?"

    "Initial stage Transcendence of Astral ne."

    "Okay, that would be possible. Just so you know, anything beyond that will take some time. For the middle stage two days,te-stage four days, and peak stage one week. Without that buffer period, we wouldn¡¯t take any assignments of those respective levels." The manager exined.

    "I don¡¯t think I asked you about that."

    "Of course, but I believe that with the behavior of your group, it would only be a matter of time. By the way, for our existing customers, we would give a grace period if they were also targeted through our organization.

    If one of your teammates ces a hit on you, we will give you a heads up, you can either escape within three days or you can pay triple the price on your head to kill the client that ced a hit on you.

    And for your earlier assignment, for every failed attempt, you need to increase the price by ten percent.

    If in any case, we don¡¯t finish your assignment, we will return all the money you gave us. If you agree with that, let us sign a contract."

    With that, he took out a ck scroll.

    "I don¡¯t know if you have ever heard of this. This is called the Devil Scroll. The contract made has to be fulfilled and cannot be broken unless both parties agree. Read the condition properly before making a decision."

    Sam nodded and read the scroll before signing with his own blood and spiritual imprint.

    He knew a bit about devil scroll. This is made from the skin of the beast which is going to be harvested through special means. A beast that has attributes of dark elements and abilities to use soul for attacks is used and it will go through a special style of breeding and it would be fed with souls and all these souls will be forcefully merged together with the soul of the beast as the main body.

    This abomination of a result will be merged into the scroll made of the skin of the same beast.

    But the abomination wouldn¡¯t be physically linked to the world.

    They would be in a space where the stray souls used by the spirit enchanters reside and they would make a link with the two people who use that contract.

    The one who breaks the contract will be marked by the abomination and it would transcend from that stray world to the actual world no matter where a person is.

    Sam carefully read the contract by keeping that in mind.

    After it was done, he left.

    The target of the contract is the Saber Monarch.

    As Sam made the contract and went back to the room, he informed the teammates and made them great ready for the next step of the n.

    Night Ghost and Sam will be going there along with the Saber Monarch using the Ice divine dimension. Sam used the hologram formation he made to make them believe that he is inside the room.

    And the next day, Saber Monarch left for the forest early in the morning.

    He took his time and explored the forest leisurely. When he went deep enough by noon and took a rest in the cave, the assassins finally showed up.

    Two throwing knives from two different directions were thrown at Saber Monarch.

    He took out his saber instantly and took a three-sixty degree turn creating arge arc of saber ray slicing the throwing knives as well as thrashing the cave away forcing the assassins out of their hiding ce.

    The assassins came out, they are wearing dark cloakspletely covering their bodies.

    They moved the same and even their auras are simr as they attacked Saber Monarch.

    Sam who is watching the scene from inside the divine dimension didn¡¯t expect that the other party would send two assassins at the same time.

    It seems like they wanted to make sure that everything goes well with the operation and no mishaps would ur.

    The skill of the two assassins is better than most of their peers, so most of the people at same level would surely die.

    But to their bad luck, they are all but a small part of thisrge n. Otherwise, they would have a decorated career as assassins.

 Chapter 1082: Chess Pieces

    The battlested for fifteen minutes.

    At this moment, Saber Monarch is currently standing in the middle of arge mess while panting as the two assassins are on verge of death with a bunch of scars on their bodies still rolling around.

    The reason why he didn¡¯t kill them is that in the middle of these fifteen minutes, Sam changed his mind after watching their battle techniques and decided to take them in.

    He decided to throw them into the chessboard but not before teaching them a proper lesson.

    So, Saber Monarch was in charge of the lesson.

    Sam came out, gave them some basic first aid to avoid any critical condition that mighte, and then threw them into the chessboard.

    "But boss, wouldn¡¯t it take longer for us to get information?"

    "It is not a problem. We need to see the operations too and most assassins no matter how high their status is wouldn¡¯t be in on the information regarding the operations of the organizations, they would mostly act as tools.

    So, the information we get from the manager will be most useful and the information from assassinations is not that needed.

    We will wait for more people toe and see how they operate while scouting some members into my own organization. Because of the recent expansion, the chessboard became a bit empty. I only have some emergency soldiers left."

    Night ghost nodded at Sam¡¯s reply.

    They stayed for the rest of the day and went back to the inn.

    Sam visited the manager at the night and pretended to be angry.

    "Why is he back to his room after going to the forest?"

    The Manager¡¯s face didn¡¯t look as good asst time. He seems to be a bit frustrated and said.

    "I am sorry, my people didn¡¯te back and there is no response from them. We don¡¯t know whether they are alive or dead. ording to the protocol we need to wait for a proper response, but since there is none, we would need to wait for another day, before proceeding assuming they are dead.

    So, I will give you a response by tomorrow."

    "Can you not finish him off in the inn?"

    "We have our rules. We cannot harm anyone who is staying within our inn or any of our establishments and we cannot let anyone else harm them. This is the rule of our organization. So, you have to wait for him to go out."

    "Okay then, he will be going out tomorrow night. Make sure you finish him off. Here is the extra money for the increment."

    With that, he gave the money and left in frustration.

    The next day Saber Monarch left the city once again and this time he went to a different forest.

    And the organization increased the people they sent, there are three people who came to kill and one of them is an archer.

    At first, Archer made the attack as the two assassins slowly neared him wanting to finish him.

    This time, Sam let him kill one assassin and kept the archer and the other assassin on the chessboard.

    Sam felt a bit weird with this.

    Five Initial Transcendent cultivators are not a small resource. No matter how big an organization they are targeting at the current time, they are bound to feel the pinch. So, Sam is extremely keen on seeing how the manager reacts.

    As for the information from the assassin, as he predicted it is nothing important. There is not much information regarding the organization and from the looks of it, the memories are of a person who is a normal solo cultivator.

    It seems like he joined the organization from outside, instead of being nurtured.

    Thetest memory of him is that he received a message from a restaurant in the neighboring city and he came here to kill Saber Monarch as per the instructions.

    The next morning Saber Monarch came back to the inn but this time, he and Sam made a y in the inn¡¯s restaurant as if Saber Monarch already knew but is only looking for the right moment.

    Sam directly went to the manager and yelled at him.

    "I gave you two billion and two hundred million spirit stones.

    Do you know how much that is? He already had suspicions about me and now he is ready to pounce on me the moment I show a little weakness.

    My cultivation is not enough to deal with him at the moment.

    Do you understand what I am saying? I want him dead right now."

    The Manager looked at Sam, there is a clear trace of frustration on his face. He is definitely more frustrated than Sam. But he couldn¡¯t burst out. He is a businessman and Sam is a customer he should act ording to the rules.

    "We will finish him off today. You don¡¯t have to worry. But you need to pay the increment."

    Sam just threw the spatial ring and said.

    "I need you to finish him off immediately. If pushes to shove and he kills me, that means you broke the contract. You should know better than anyone else, what it is that means to break a contract on the Devil Scroll."

    With that, Sam mmed the door and left the ce.

    The manager is frustrated. Out of the five people he sent in the two days, only one of them is confirmed dead.

    When the assassins are dead the manager who assigned the mission will know because of a special token the assassins leave at the manager.

    It will break as soon as they die.

    But only one person dying and the remaining four disappearing has never happened before.

    He doesn¡¯t know how to proceed further and after some deep thought, he could only grit his teeth and use a special token.

    Since the client doesn¡¯t have time, he has to take some extreme measures.

    This is a specialmunication token to contact one of the elite assassins that could only be used under special circumstances.

    "Number 1240. I am the manager of your branch. There is an emergency, I want you toe to the inn by afternoon."

    "1240 reporting. Will be there at the inn in two hours."

    The manager took a deep breath and called for Sam once again.

    "What else do you want? Do you need more money or did you call me here to cancel the contract?"

    "The mission will bepleted tonight. But I want you to lure that guy out. As I said, we cannot let our guests be hurt when they are in the inn. That is against our policy."

    "Fuck your policy. Just go in there and kill him."

    "Please understand my trouble. I would definitely kill him tonight. Even if some mishap urs which wouldn¡¯t I will give you security from that guy."

    "So, you are not confident enough to take him down? Is all the reputation you guys have aplete overestimation of your abilities?"

    The manager really wanted to p the shit out of Sam, but he controlled his urge and convinced Sam to agree.

    Sam went away and came back after an hour before saying.

    "He will be going towards the slums of the city at midnight. He thinks I will be there, go and deal with him."

    Sam didn¡¯t even wait for the reply and left.

    That midnight, the Saber Monarch left the main area of the city and went to the slums particrly to an area where not many people are present.

    After reaching that deste area, he stopped and yelled.

    "Come out, already. How long are you going to stay hidden like that?"

    As he yelled, a woman came out of hiding. She is a middle-stage Transcendent cultivator. She also wore ck but she didn¡¯t hide her face.

    She is ying with a knife in her hands as she sized him up.

    "You have keen senses. Now, where are the people that came to kill you."

    "Since I am here alive and kicking, where do you think they are?"

    "They are definitely not dead. You only killed one guy. So, be a good boy and tell me where they are, I might let you off easily."

    "What if I don¡¯t want to?"

    As soon as Saber Monarch finished his sentence, he took a step back and took out his saber as he swung it forward.

    The Saber met the knife which was being thrust at him by thedy.

    Saber Monarch was surprised as he looked at thedy still standing far away. But as he saw her, that image far away slowly disappeared into thin air as if it never existed.

    "Hmm, it has been a while since I saw someone see through this. You would be fun to kill."

    The woman said as she stepped back.

    Saber Monarch was excited and wanted to deal with her, but he controlled the urge and said.

    "I really do want to fight you. But too bad, I am not your opponent."

    With that, he took out the ice divine dimension crystal and let Paras out before he disappeared from the spot.

    Paras held his ax over his shoulders as he looked at the woman.

    "So, shall we start?"

 Chapter 1083: Kicked Out

    The woman looked at Paras with a frown. This is the first time she showed any expression other than contempt and amusement.

    "How did you guys do it?"

    She asked Paras in a low voice. Even her tone changed; she was clearly shaken.

    But Paras is not Saber Monarch, he wouldn¡¯t entertain her with words. He lunged forward as he ran towards her with the ax and stopped right in front of her all of a sudden and used the momentum to take a big swing at her.

    The ax didn¡¯t feel any resistance as it went right through the abdomen and only then did Paras realize that the thing he hit is not the woman, it is another deceptive image that dissolved into thin air.

    But Paras didn¡¯t stop in confusion, rather he increased the force and continued with the swing as he made a three-sixty degree turn to his rear.

    The ax met with the knife that wasing towards him.

    The knife and the ax shed, but the brute force of the ax won as the woman was pushed backward. She could feel her hand going numb for a moment and she almost lost the grip on the knife.

    She was stunned for a moment and stood there standing, but Paras didn¡¯t.

    He leaped towards her with an overhead ax strike to her spot and this time she dodged with the utmost desperation.

    But with all the speed she could muster up all she could do was dodge the ax by hair¡¯s breadth.

    She felt the cold, sharp, and tyrannical force passing right by her body and felt cold.

    As the axnded on the ground, cracks appeared all over and she felt terrified just from the shock wave of the attack.

    She trembled on her spot as she looked at Paras as if he was a devil.

    "Who are you?" She asked in a trembling voice. Paras took a step back and channeled his energy into the ax as he got ready for a cleave once again.

    He got ready with another overhead strike, but right when he was about to make contact, he stopped and turned around, he leaped high into the air and got ready tond with another overhead strike.

    The woman who was standing disappeared. She used the same trick again, but this time Paras was prepared.

    At this moment, the woman is trying to escape. She instantly knew that she couldn¡¯t defeat Paras. Nd this is not what she signed up for. And the fact that this guy appeared out of nowhere, could answer the disappearance of the assassins who are still alive ording to the tokens they left.

    She immediately wanted to report the whole thing to the manager and then to the higher-ups.

    But when she saw that Paras was already prepared and he already leaped into the air with his ax, she felt her feet run cold, she wanted to run but she couldn¡¯t, it is as if the surrounding air turned dense not letting her move and even the spiritual energy is manifesting around her, obstructing her way.

    She looked at Paras who is high up in the air and is rapidly descending, she could guess the trajectory of the attack, she tried her best to get rid of the resistance around her and moved to the side before heaving a sigh, thinking that she would be safe like before.

    But Paras only grinned as he channeled more energy into it and it condensed around the ax. As Parasnded, the ax touched the ground. The spiritual turned into arge sharp cleaving ray as it destroyed the whole area all the while cutting the woman into two.

    Sam and Saber Monarch came out of the Ice divine dimension. They anticipated that the manager might attack Saber Monarch with a middle stage transcendent after two consecutive failures, so they decided to prepare before theye here and their preparation was not in vain.

    The manager really did proceed as they predicted and they managed to kill her easily.

    "Sorry, boss. I wanted to spare her, but I couldn¡¯t control my strength."

    Paras said with an awkward smile. He was just lost in the moment as this is the only time he could have a real fight with a person of same level after his breakthrough. As for a sparring between themselves, Sampletely rejected it after Saber Monarch and Vidyut went overboard with their sparring and almost killed each other.

    Now Paras felt like he made Sam lose a person with a unique ability.

    "Don¡¯t worry, her ability is not that great anyway. It is just a petty trick."

    Then only Paras felt relieved. Sam performed the memory extraction from the soul of the woman who died and got some detailed information regarding the organization.

    Unlike the assassins before this woman is nurtured by the organization itself. But even she never reached the headquarters and met with the leader.

    This amused Sam quite a lot. After all, the leader is only a peak stage transcendent cultivator of the Astral ne, but he didn¡¯t even meet with a cultivator of Middle stage Transcendent cultivation of the Astral ne. This ispletely illogical.

    But he didn¡¯t bother too much as another interesting piece of information was obtained.

    Most of the assassins of the ck curtain are actually not nurtured by the organization, they are just normal cultivators most likely to be stray cultivators without any sect, family or organization backing them.

    And they are used for the regr assassination attempts. As for the people nurtured by the organization, they have different duties, they manage their business, scout for talents, and act as elites of the branches.

    These Elites are used for either assassinating troublesome targets, emergency security for Branch managers, or for assassinating the assassins that joined the ck curtain and betrayed them.

    And this woman is one of the elites. The elites differ from branch to branch, not just the cultivation level but for a number of people as well.

    In the current branch, she is one of the three Elites and the remaining two are also of Middle stage transcendent cultivation.

    Sam took out some blood and made up Saber Monarch as if he is really injured and entered the Ice divine dimension along with Paras.

    Saber Monarch weakly went back to the inn in the in sight of others, while limping and groaning in pain.

    He went to Sam¡¯s room directly where he made a ruckus after Sam came out of the divine dimension. The ruckus alerted everyone in the inn including the manager.

    The rest of Sam¡¯s teammates pulled Saber Monarch aside and gave him medicine to let him sleep.

    Sam looked at the manager who came running because of themotion and his expression turned from terrified to ugly.

    The manager¡¯s expression also turned ugly as he could predict that he would get an earful from Sam. He knew that he messed up.

    He also got the message that the woman had died, but after that, he became so engrossed in the pain of losing an elite and nervousness in how to exin the situation to headquarters, and in the process failed to think about Sam.

    Now he knew that he made a mistake and immediately took Sam over with him to his room to discuss the issue.

    "I am sorry, I would try my best to remedy the situation immediately."

    The Manager spoke as soon as they entered the room.

    "I don¡¯t trust you anymore. If you don¡¯t kill him right now, I will die."

    Sam¡¯s voice was hysterical and he almost sounded like he was crazy.

    "Don¡¯t worry, nothing of that sort will happen. You will be okay. I will protect you in the name of ck Curtain. I, no... not just me, the ck Curtain will take responsibility for this incident."

    "If you want to take responsibility, go and kill him right now. Otherwise, I will be dead before dawn."

    "I cannot do anything to him at the moment. It is the organization policy."

    That triggered Sam even more as the argument became heated.

    Soon, the manager finally agreed to something.

    "Try to get him out of the ce and we will deal with him."

    "How can I get them out of this ce, they are suspicious of me, you dumb fuck. They will kill me the moment, I speak anything remotely close to making him go away from this ce. Luckily they don¡¯t know that you are the assassins I hired, otherwise, they would have already barged in and killed both of us."

    The Manager once again fell into deep thought, so he decided on something else.

    "I have a n. But you must y along."

    With that, both of them discussed the n and went to the Saber Monarch¡¯s room where the rest of the team are currently looking after him.

    When they saw the manager and Sam together, they frowned a bit.

    "I am the Manager of the Inn, today your friend broke the rule of our inn by attacking a fellow guest, from what I learned from Sam, he is also part of your group, so we wouldn¡¯t look into it further, but the policy of inn doesn¡¯t change just because of some rtionship between the guests who are part of the conflict.

    So, he has to move out and since you are all connected, I ask you to move out too."

    The team was stunned and was about to refute, but Night Ghost pretended to gesture them to stop and spoke to the manager.

    "We will move out and that means our whole team. So, don¡¯t worry."

    "Thanks for your cooperation. I have a friend who is also operating an inn nearby, you can go there and they will arrange the rooms. If you go elsewhere, you wouldn¡¯t be able to find any residence after knowing that you are kicked out of here."

    The Manager gave out a helping hand and Night Ghost epted it.

 Chapter 1084: Pieces of the heirloom

    The team went to the inn and took the rooms. And coincidentally, the inn ispletely empty without any other customers.

    They are the only ones in the whole inn.

    When they are in the empty lobby Sam said calmly.

    "The whole inn is a killing formation, with curses actually. Even Night Ghost will be dead if he is not careful."

    "So, what do we do boss?"

    The rest of the team is not concerned at all, Saber Monarch who was supposed to be hurt is actually yawningzily.

    "I do have something that might help us with this, I also wanted to find a ce to test this, let us see how this works."

    With that, Sam took out some tokens and gave them. The tokens are metallic and there are a bunch of inscriptions on them and there is a space jade in the middle of it.

    "So, take care guys. Be alert and don¡¯t let Saber Monarch die."

    "Like hell, these guys can kill me." Saber Monarch said casually.

    "Okay then, change of ns. Everyone stay in your own rooms and don¡¯t bothering out no matter what happens. Let Saber Monarch handle everything. I would also like to take a nap." Sam spoke casually as he gave a side-eyed nce to Saber Monarch.

    Saber Monarch immediately got tense.

    "Boss, what are you saying? The only reason I said they cannot kill me is that you are all here. Don¡¯t think too much into it. How can I be safe without you?"

    After some random bickering, everyone went to their own rooms.

    Soon, the whole inn started glowing with ck patterns inside.

    The rooms are assigned by the manager of this inn who went away after the assignment. So, except for the room the Saber Monarch was in, all the other rooms have patterns with shadows that looked like vines.

    They all came out of those shadows purely manifested by dark elemental energy and enveloped the whole team.

    Sam who already guessed what would happen has been observing the situation with the energy vision and as soon as he got a slight energy fluctuation, he immediately entered the divine dimension, only when the formation was fully activated did hee back and he went to take a look at remaining people.

    All of them are entangled, but they are not anxious, they held the token in their hands, but they didn¡¯t use it. After all, these maniacs have too much pride, so they wanted to see if they could get rid of the entanglement by themselves.

    And to his surprise, the one with the most progress is actually the twins from the Sr Fragment tribe.

    Agar and Argan who have a faint hint of bloodline from the Golden Sun crows have the highest resistance against these curse shadows.

    The quality of the purity of the bloodline is making the cursed impurities of the shadows.

    He let them be and went to take a look at Saber Monarch¡¯s situation. The shadows of this room are different, they looked just like vines, but they seemed to have thorns all over them which made it worse, he got a lot of small stabs all over his body and some of them are bleeding generously.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "Stop it with your stupid pride. Just use the damn token, it will work."

    But the Saber Monarch ignored the words and tried his best to get rid of the vines, meanwhile, Argan managed to break the vines and ran out of the room, and at the same time, Night ghost also came out.

    Sam was surprised by this, but Night Ghost exined.

    "I have a cursed ghost on me that could swallow other curses of lower power and absorb their qualities for it, this is actually beneficial for me."

    "Well, you could have said so. I even told them that you could also die here."

    Night Ghost just smiled and looked at the Saber Monarch who is still struggling, when Saber Monarch looked at the other two who escaped, he became even more determined to escape by himself.

    At this moment Agar also came out, Sam wanted to make some snarky remark, but Night Ghost sensed something.

    "Some people are approaching the inn."

    Sam closed his eyes to take a look through the crystal table and said.

    "Come on guys, ytime is over. There are some guests more than a dozen assassins are making their way here. They areing at full force. We need to deal with them."

    As soon as he finished his words, some vines started growing out from the walls. They arepletely ck even darker than the shadow vines that entangled them.

    The vines grew at a rapid pace grew fruits before the fruits exploded into a puff of smoke.

    "Come on guys I wouldn¡¯t ask you again. Some gas is being released in here. Use the tokens and use the breathing devices."

    With that, he went towards the gas and took a deep breath to see what that is. After taking in he understood what it is, it is just an anesthetic. The most it would do is make them fall asleep, but the duration of the sleep would be very long.

    While Sam is specting what they want to do with this gas by making everyone fall asleep, outside the inn, the manager of the ck curtain branch is leading the assassins.

    "Do not attack anyone other than the target. But he cannot die yet, he needs to give us some answers regarding the missing members.

    There is also a possibility that some of the teammates are on the side of the target and might know of this, so make sure you secure our client and keep him under anesthesia for the whole interrogation.

    Kill the target after you get your answers and finally, we will erase the memories of the interrogation from them. That is the n. So, be careful."

    With that all of them entered the building, but as soon as they entered the building.

    Meanwhile, Sam started roaming around the building to get a look at how this formation is working.

    The teammates, activated the tokens, as soon as they channeled some energy into it, the token started glowing with bright light.

    But the glow didn¡¯t spread along with the room, rather it injected itself into the skin of the user and spread all over his body, as the glow passed all over the cursed shadows started letting him go, and everywhere the light touched them made them behave like some injured snakes.

    When the assassins led by the manager entered the building, he saw the teammates and Sam standing in the hall.

    Sam is still looking at the nodes and he is dropping small liquid energy cells made of light elemental energy here and there while he let the rest of the team decide what to do.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    With a bunch of explosions, not only was the formation was gone, even the building copsed into the rubble as the teammates started doing their job.

    Within an hour everything became calm.

    The assassins are currently kneeling down side by side in an orderly manner. But there is only half of them that are alive.

    The rest are dead.

    Sam checked the remaining candidates and recalled the battles and picked four of them and threw them into the chessboard.

    He then left for Night Ghost.

    Night Ghost simply killed the manager first and went through the memories while Tamas tried to make the remaining two into high-level undead.

    One of them failed and another one seeded.

    As their level goes up, a necromancer would be able to retain the skills rted to the muscle memory of the dead bodies when they turn undead. Even though they still work on instincts, they would be able to use some skills they drilled into their bones.

    Sam is not really that focused on necromancy and building an undead army so he didn¡¯t care much, but Tamas is really trying his best to perfect the art since he broke through to the Astral ne Transcendence as it is the perfect time to make high-level undead.

    Night Ghost transferred the memories directly to Sam after the extraction.

    Sam was stunned when he saw the memories.

    This manager really did have some high-grade information because he is the son of one of the core members in the ck curtain, they really lucked out by this coincidence.

    Even though most of the information is helpful, it is not exactly a pleasant thing to learn.

    Because it turned out that there is not just one leader. There are at least six leaders with the same level of cultivation and all six of them have one piece of the heirloom.

    The heirloom will bepleted only after all six of them are hunted down one by one and every piece is collected.

    Six Peak stage Transcendent cultivators of Astral ne. This ck curtain is really no pushover and it is toote to back down.

    Sam was just frustrated at the time that would take to deal with these people.

    But he is also d that they selected this first. If this is gone, then the rest would be easily finished.

 Chapter 1085: Tracker

    Sam and the team went into hiding after they are done with the assassins and the manager.

    He held a meeting with the team to decide on their next step. The team is divided into two opinions. One of that since they knew the location of one of the pieces of the heirloom. The father of the current manager has one so they wanted to take advantage of the incident and directly attack them by surprise.

    As for the second opinion, they wanted to wait here. Since there is a possibility that another party might know that his son died, he will definitely take some action and send some people here, in fact, he might evene here directly, so they wanted to lure him out and deal with him slowly.

    Both of them have their own advantages, but Sam leaned mostly towards the second n, but since he let his team members decide what to do he didn¡¯t interfere and just went to take the rest.

    The next morning, the teammates are all looking tired and the surrounding forest area ispletely damaged.

    The final decision was made after a duel and it seems like the second n was finally chosen.

    Sam immediately sent out bird and insect puppets for surveince over the city along with the shadow mice.

    He wanted to see how fast the ck curtain will react.

    He deliberately left the corpses of the manager and the rest out in the open without care. He wanted to make the other partye out in the open. No matter how sneaky they want to be, there is no way they could simply hide away from the surveince Sam set up.

    The city guards already took over the area of the inn and started an investigation, even though they said they are investigating, it could be said that they are merely guarding the ce so that any possible evidence wouldn¡¯t be missed from that spot.

    By afternoon, some people came to the original ck curtain inn. Since Sam and others didn¡¯t destroy it, they took the residence there.

    After they arrived, the city lord sent his son to talk to them.

    An hour or soter, they immediately made their move and went to the copsed inn. The group consisted of ten people and six of them are middle-stage transcendent cultivators with the remaining four beingte-stage transcendent cultivators.

    They started investigating immediately and Sam looked at the whole operation through the surveince he left.

    Even though he couldn¡¯t hear the audio all the time, sometimes he managed to guess what they are doing.

    But one thing surprised him a lot.

    e-stage cultivator among them isying down a formation around the copsed inn and used some kind of hand signs which Sam had never seen. After he was done with that, there is a faint glow thatsted just for a few seconds.

    After that, there is no change at all.

    Sam frowned when he saw this.

    The group of people then went back to the inn and then that person made the same formation there in every room. The whole process wasted the rest of the day, but he still did it, Sam didn¡¯t know what he saw, because he couldn¡¯t see anything through surveince. Maybe some energy bats would have had better sess here, but there is no way he could use them. He could only wait and see what these people nned.

    That night there is not much movement from the group, they just rested as if nothing happened.

    But through a window, Sam managed to see that the person who made the formations around the inn and the copsed inn is actually doing something.

    There are a bunch of glowing orbs around him and it seemed like he is watching something inside of them.

    After three hours or so, that guy stopped and started resting.

    Sam then went to meet the Night ghost.

    "I want to take a look at the cursed ghost you have."

    Night ghost was curious why asked that, but he didn¡¯t think too much and showed the cursed ghost. It looked like a normal ghost, but it has a dark grey shade and the cursed ghost had that eerie energy.

    "Now can it use the dark vine curse you absorbed in the hall?"

    "Yes."

    The dark gray vines popped out of the ghost. They could entangle anything.

    "How did you get it? I never even read of a ghost-like that."

    "It is actually a long story.

    There used to be two brothers who turned into archenemies. One of them is an expert in curses and the other guy doesn¡¯t have any talent in curses so he trained a different way to get rid of these curses and even use them for his advantage.

    He somehow managed to find a forbidden technique of a demonic n and that helps him absorb the curses or to be precise devour them, and utilize them against the enemies until the energy from that cursested.

    He managed to best his brother and kill him, but that guy didn¡¯t die in vain, he left something for his brother and that is one of the most vicious curses ever. He use his own soul as a cursing medium and left arge curse on his own soul as long as he was killed, the killer would be affected by both the curses, the one that he ced on the soul and the one he used the soul as the medium.

    One curse is forceful soul merger and the other one is the soul attachment curse. The first curse merges the two souls directly and both of them wouldn¡¯t find peace, they will roam around the stray soul domain as for the second one, it will make it impossible for the soul to leave this world and will be attached to this world and stays here with all those haunting memories for eternity.

    It is practically eternal suffering for him with the memories and the torture from his brother¡¯s soul.

    So, I took pity on him and made him into my ghost in which way he would at least lose his memories. I never really tried to use him to improve my skills, as finding curses is really rare and difficult. I only used them when I asionally came across curse users and I could get some immunity."

    Sam nodded.

    "It seems like this will be useful for you now. I will try to find a way to get you more curses to absorb, after all, you will have to constantly sh with a bunch of people of higher cultivation than yours, something this cursed ghost will be useful. For now, try to absorb this."

    Sam said as he took out some scrolls and ced them in front of him. These are some basic curses, he practiced with them when he was trying to understand his dark elemental energy better, he didn¡¯t explore curses that much after that.

    Even though these curses are for low-level cultivation, they are profound and are from the books in the divine dimension library, most of them arepletely new to Night Ghost.

    When he absorbed each one of them he demonstrated his abilities, Sam is really impressed and said.

    "This might even be your best weapon against the enemies of higher cultivation than you."

    With that, Sam thought of how to improve the curses the whole night. He needs to find a way to get his hands on some advanced curse techniques.

    The next morning, Sam once again focused on the surveince.

    He noticed that the man who ced those weird formations all over is taking the lead as the rest of the group followed him from afar.

    The man in the lead just walked around the road while the rest of them are moving while hiding.

    They went to the copsed inn first. Sam thought they would be investigating once again, but that didn¡¯t happen. The man walked around the copsed inn for a few rounds before walking out of it and climbed to the nearest roof as he started jumping off from one roof to another, he moved towards the slums.

    At this Sam couldn¡¯t help but frown, he felt that this moving pattern is extremely weird. He was confused and felt that there is something wrong with what the other party is doing but he couldn¡¯t put a finger on it.

    All of a sudden, he saw that the other party jumped towards a broken roof in the slums and kicked a beam beforending on the street next to the house.

    Sam suddenly widened his eyes in disbelief as he yelled.

    "Everyone gets into the ice divine dimension, we are changing the hiding spot. Now."

    With that, Sam stored the surveince equipment away and only held the small crystal tablet in his hands.

    The rest of the team are shocked when they saw Sam¡¯s behavior he is moving in a hurry.

    But they all entered into the divine dimension and Sam took it before taking off on the harbinger and moving away.

 Chapter 1086: Trap

    Sam travelled at his top speed and covered a long distance and on the way, he dropped a bunch of surveince puppets. He found a mountain with a cave and covered the entrance with enough air pockets.

    He immediately let the people out and set up the surveince equipment. He didn¡¯t even exin anything to the team as he looked at the group once again.

    They are currently in the forest jumping over the trees and within a few minutes he is already at the cave the team was upying a while ago.

    Now the teammates already understood why Sam suddenly moved this fast.

    "How did they find out boss? This never happened before."

    "If only I could understand that. But the first guy on the screen is responsible for that."

    Sam replied in frustration. As they watched they could see the man in the lead walking around the cave and the surroundings in a random manner, it seemed extremely stupid. But Sam is frowning harder and harder as he recalled everything everyone didst night.

    After a few more minutes, the man once again ran into the cave and from there he started running back at full speed in one particr direction.

    "Fuck it, it is just like I thought."

    Sam muttered as he looked at the screen.

    "What happened boss?"

    "He is tracking our path. I don¡¯t know how, but it is either scent or energy traces, he is using either one of them toe for us."

    "That is possible?"

    "I don¡¯t know. But ording to what I saw until now, that is the best possible exnation."

    "So, what are we going to do."

    "For starters, I would really like to know how he did that, so that I can take some measures for the next time. As for what we have to do immediately is that take advantage of the fact that they don¡¯t know we know about their tracking and deal some damage.

    They would take a while beforeing here, so let us take the time to set up something for them. But before that, Night Ghost how sure are you that you can extract the soul and the memories even if the body is turned mush with your cultivation level."

    "It is still a bit hard."

    Sam nodded and started thinking, but no matter what n he could think of, it will take some time to throw off fourte stage transcendent cultivators and six middle stage transcendent cultivators. That is a really tough team to deal with.

    So, they decided to move from this ce to a different spot.

    Once again everyone was inside the ice divine dimension and Sam immediately took off.

    And once again he dropped the surveince puppets. He is really d that he made so many and at the same time, he made the ones in the city slowlye towards him so that he wouldn¡¯t lose them.

    Right after he found the spot, he made some arrangements in the surroundings. He looked through the surveince and the other party already found the second spot and now they are already moving to the third.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but be awe because of this ability. After all, this is a perfect ability for tracking someone and terrifying ability for an assassin to have. They could easily track their targets no matter how hard they try to escape. Of course, there are always exceptions, but Sam still don¡¯t know what they are.

    He took out a bunch of formation discs and started cing them all over, he still didn¡¯t let the teammates out of the dimension and made the preparations as fast as he could.

    After he was done, he let them out and exined the n.

    Now, all they had to do is wait for the other party toe.

    Sam tried his best to ce as much distance between them as possible leaving enough time for him to n, so the man took his time and the group only reached by evening.

    They looked at the hill and climbed up towards the cave hidden deep inside.

    When they reached the cave, the tracker is still moving around randomly and all of a sudden, he stopped in his trackspletely.

    He looked to the outside of the cave and said.

    "There is no traces after this spot."

    He said as he stood exactly in the middle of the cave.

    "What do you mean there are no traces? Did they disappear into thin air? Maybe with some spatial artifact that could teleport them away?"

    One of the group members asked and came inside looking around vigntly.

    "No, there are not any spatial fluctuations here too."

    "What kind of sick trick is this than?"

    Slowly one after the other the group starteding out of their hiding.

    As they looked around, one of them looked upwards and saw an icy blue crystal stuck to the ceiling of the cave.

    "What is that?"

    He asked as he pointed at it, everyone looked upwards, but at this exact moment, arge metallic object covered with blue lightning suddenly came out of the blue crystal and fell over them.

    Everyone reacted swiftly and five of them managed to escape, but the remaining five were struck in the thunder prison.

    Night Ghost, Vidyut, Paras came out instantly as they engaged with the guys that are outside.

    There are threete stage cultivators and two middle stage ones outside. Exactly half, either by coincidence or pure luck, Sam¡¯s team benefitted from this.

    By the time the assassin group even realized what they are going through, half of them are stuck in a cage made of metal and lightning while the remaining half are engaging with three people.

    Night Ghost sprung into action as he unleashed the cursed ghost to use the new curse he obtained and made it go after one of thete stage cultivators all the while using the small curses just annoy him while dealing with the remainingte stage cultivator as for the middle stage cultivators, even though if it is three vs two giving the other party an advantage in numbers, it didn¡¯t look like that at all.

    They are dealing with them perfectly.

    As people got busy and the fight started slowly damaging the cave walls as the wall was damaged enough on one side a metallic object fell off, Vidyut took a step back from the spot and shot two arrows, one arrow made the object fly off and it appeared near one of the opponents when another arrow hit it.

    The lightning energy inside the arrowpletely transferred into the cave as it was amplified a bit and hit the opponent on the back.

    The opponent felt paralyzed for a few moments as he experienced the full force of the lightning and Paras chopped his head right off in that instant.

    While the battle is going on and all the free opponents are upied and all the caged opponents are on verge of going crazy to get out the cage, the rest of the team slowly came out of the ice divine dimension.

    They stood on the one side of the cage so that the cage would be in the middle of them and the battle.

    When Sam saw the group crazily attacking the cage, he tapped on the metallic part and said.

    "Don¡¯t even bother, the person who made this wouldn¡¯t make it so that you can get out of here. It would be tarnishing his name."

    As he spoke, he ced his palm on the cage and the lightning from one of the walls hit something inside the ground.

    The top surface of the ground cracked revealed a formation disc and purple fog starteding out of it.

    With another thought another lightning struck and another hole opened with more purple fog.

    The people started feeling irritated as the poison seeped into them.

    They tried to struggle out and even tried to attack Sam and the group, but the thunder prison obviously didn¡¯t let that happen.

    Sam started opening formation after another as he made the people inside miserable and soon the battle on the other side is done.

    Sam suddenly opened the cage and the people started running out crazily as they inhaled too much of the poison fog, even though the pure venom couldn¡¯t do much damage with their cultivations being higher than Sam by a lot, they are still feeling a bit troubled with the corrosive effect inside the lungs and the windpipe.

    But as soon as they came, they are met with blows that could easily knock them out.

    Sam threw the twote-stage cultivators inside the chessboard along with another middle-stage cultivator while the rest of them were killed and their memories were extracted.

    When Sam looked through the memories he was stunned. Some of thete-stage cultivators that were killed were actually some of the direct elites of the ck curtain and they have some detailed information on the rest of their peers that mighte at Sam.

    As for the information regarding the tracker, he was even more surprised.

 Chapter 1087: Second Group

    Sam was going through all the information that he gained.

    He threw the tracker into the chessboard as he really didn¡¯t want to lose such a skilled person. So, he wasn¡¯t able to get much information about him. But still, from the other members on par with him, Sam got some information.

    His technique is based on something called energy scent and it is only possible because of some constitution of the body. Even though spiritual energy will be purified when it goes into the body based on the cultivation level and technique, it will also be marked by the person. It is the cultivator¡¯s energy from that point onwards.

    There will be something that is faintly simr to the scent when used. But that scent could not exactly be sensed normally. Only a special constitution like this could make it possible for someone to sense the scent of something like this.

    Even though it is called scent it is more like distinguishing between different energies based on the user.

    But the range of the sensing will be very small and that is the exact reason that the other party managed to find their location.

    At first, he used a formation that would amplify his sense to catch all the possible energy scents and then he went back to his ce trying to distinguish between all of them byparing these scents with one he obtained in the rooms of the ck curtain inn, the rooms in which Sam and his team stayed.

    Once he managed to identify them, he carefully followed the scent. Since he could only sense something within the range of two to three feet, he has to follow the exact path the person he is tracking has taken and he followed him through like this.

    Sam ispletely stunned with all the information, even though he has a brief understanding of the spiritual cores and constitutions because of the book he studied at the start of the journey, with how rarely he ising across them, he didn¡¯t pay too much attention, so after he found out about this, he went back to that memory and tried his best to remember everything.

    As for other information, it is something rted to the organizational structure of the ck Curtain.

    The Elites that came this time have more roles than just assassinations. They are not just the forces of the organization but they are part of the personal forces of the current leader they are targeting too.

    These forces are nurtured by the leader himself and they carry out other operations like infiltration and assassinations for their leaders within the organization. After all with such arge organization up for grabs, there is bound to be some conflicts within them. There is no way that they wouldn¡¯t covet the position of being the sole leader of the organization at all.

    So, he got some information about the conflicts between the leaders. One of the elites has actually just finished an infiltration mission. The current leader they are targeting is named leader 3 and he has some deep enmity with leader 1 who is also the fiercestpetitor for being the leader of the organization, in fact, leader 1 makes most of the decisions and it wouldn¡¯t be an exaggeration to say that currently, he might even be the leader of the organization. He does and has everything a leader does except for the title.

    His main opposition is the leader three, both of thepetition in terms of forces, assassination assignmentspletion, sess rate, ie, and many other aspects.

    And in this process, most of the time they resort to sabotaging each other.

    This fellow was actually appointed in the leader 1¡¯s territory for a long time and managed sessfully sabotage an operation that was worth at least fifteen billion spirit stones.

    He not only made the enemy escape, but he made sure that the enemy escapes towards the leader 3 territories so that they can take over the task and finish it.

    But with that, his cover was blown and he has to return to the leader 3 territories immediately, but right after he came, he was assigned to deal with Sam and he was killed here. Not only did he lose his life, but he also left a lot of valuable information with him.

    Sam thought of something and took out a bunch of liquid energy cells and started cing them inside the dead bodies.

    He then said to Gran and Sia.

    "Go to the city at night and hang them at the city gate. Let us lure this leader 3 to us."

    With that, the twins left with the bodies and Sam then focused on Kiran.

    "I want you to go to the territory of the leader 1, pick Paras or Vidyut and go there separately.

    ce a bounty on your partner, use the same technique we used here to deal with them, and collect the dead bodies. I need the bodies no matter what. Use your disguise technique properly.

    Don¡¯t get caught. It will take a lot of time if you go by yourself, so I will drop you off and you start your operation tonight. You only have three days and you have to finish it properly."

    After that, Sam took out something that looked simr to the re gun and some of the transference scrolls. Along with them, he gave a bunch of small liquid energy cells, and three medium liquid energy cells, and finally some tokens that he could use to track them.

    "Use them wisely, if pushes to shove, but one of the small energy cells inside the gun and shoot at the target, that will do the trick and use these scrolls to escape. Keep these tokens on you at all times, if something happens I could track you. If you don¡¯te back in three days, I wille looking for you."

    With that, he nodded and picked Vidyut.

    Sam took both of them to their target destination with the dimensional drifter and came back immediately.

    That night Sia and Gran knocked out some city guards and hung the bodies along with a translucent ck cloth to the city gate.

    When some of the patrol guards found out about this, they were stunned. They didn¡¯t expect something like this to have happened at this moment. The very next day the ck curtain branch was destroyed, something like this to have happened ispletely inconceivable to them.

    But the administrators thought of apletely different matter, they are both afraid and curious of the organization or the person that dared to deal with the ck curtain in such a manner. The ck curtain is a colossal organization after all.

    Not many people can just piss them off like this and live to see another day.

    While everyone is thinking about this and what would happen the next day, Sam is currently inside the ck curtain inn, setting up some small liquid energy cells and a few medium energy cells.

    After setting them straight into the structure without leaving any traces he retreated back. They changed their hiding spot closer to the city.

    The next day, the bodies were not touched and left at the city gate, even though the lord of the city is the ruler of the realm, he didn¡¯t have the guts to just touch these corpses he doesn¡¯t want to get entangled in the mess and left everything to the two parties to duke it out.

    By now, he doesn¡¯t want to care whether the ck curtain would be able to do something about this or if they would be tasting defeat time and again.

    He doesn¡¯t want to care whether the party that is dealing with the ck curtain is a friend or a foe or someone neutral he could befriend.

    He silenced all the administrators and elders andpletely stayed neutral.

    Even when the new batch of people a dozen red-cloakedte transcendent cultivators came to investigate the issue, he didn¡¯t greet them and let them talk with amander of his who is also ate-stage cultivator.

    This time, thete-stage cultivators didn¡¯t act as a single group. They divided into groups of three and one of them went to pursue the route that the previous team took, one looked at the copsed inn, one at the city gate, and thest one at the ck curtain inn.

    As soon as the three of them entered the ck Curtain Inn. Sam made the energy cells explode.

    *BOOM*

    One big explosion as all the cells exploded at the same time and that made the whole city stop what they are doing and looked at the spot.

    Sam used fire elemental ones, so when the dust settled all they could see is arge crater and a pool of magma.

    The rest of the teams that are in the vicinities of the city immediately ran there to check the situation, but they couldn¡¯t even see any trace of the people that went there.

    After some futile tries and went to the city gate to get the bodies down.

 Chapter 1088: Traps

    The city lord is looking at the sted city gate and a bunch of broken corpses along with the few ck Curtain members who are struggling with severe injuries as they are being healed by the healers the city lord brought.

    The whole scene left people stunned and even nauseated.

    At first the City lord really didn¡¯t want to bother with the whole fight. Even though initially he helped the ck curtain members a bit and gave them freedom to deal with the matter and let them use some of the city guards if they needed, when the first team was hung on the city gate and the second team arrived, he realized that he is currently in the middle of two powers that he couldn¡¯t mess with.

    So, he decided to take a step back and let them duke it out all they want so that he could at peace.

    But this time, he has to get involved, because the two explosions one at the inn and the other at the city gate are too eye catching and too powerful for him to ignore. Now the whole city is living in fear and he has to make a move and show them that he cared and he is capable enough to handle the mess for them to be at peace.

    That is why, he started investigating the things himself. Luckily he managed to get some of the information from the spatial rings of a few dead bodies of the group 2 sent by the ck Curtain. They seemed to be recording everything step by step to create a detailed report.

    The information he got was that there are a few people who arrived at the inn and one of them ced a mission on a fellow member of their group and the ck curtain failed again and again to deal with them and finally when they tried to use the cursed inn, things backfired and everyone died.

    As for the information regarding the investigation of the second group, very little was left. He couldn¡¯t find out anything rting to that.

    He could only think of investigating from here, but he didn¡¯t have many hopes of it. All he could do is make the elders and all the powerful people under him to start looking around the city and the forests surrounding it to avoid another mishap. Any suspected individual is being arrested instantly.

    But the rest of the ck curtain members particrly the three that went out to follow the investigation route of the group 1 managed to find some clues.

    It turned out there is a way for the ck Curtain members particrly those that are under the Leader 3 have their own method of leading their members for the clues. Sam failed to observe this or might have never even bothered with this even if he has seen as it as he was so focused on the tracker, but the group 1 left some marks on the trees, rocks and on the ground as they followed the routepletely.

    Only when the three members of the group three managed to reach the first location did Sam understand about this.

    After not finding anything at the copsed inn, those three also decided to join this group. So, now sixte stage transcendent cultivators in red cloaks are trying to track Sam and his group down. They are obviously not as fast as the tracker, in fact nowhere near. So, Sam has enough time to make a n and this time after he saw how they are handling things, he wanted two of them be captured and the remaining four can be killed.

    So, they started setting up traps for one after another in the path to the second hideout.

    First trap is within a small rocky path they woulde across.

    Sam went there and for the first time in a while he made a golem. But the golem is not that sophisticated neither does it have some impable work put on it, it is the most basic and crude. He then ced a medium liquid energy cell inside and left it there.

    When the group of six reached there, the golem which is lying in the middle of the rocks opened itsrge mouth and bit on the leg of one of them.

    As he was struggling the group stopped by the sudden streak, before he could break the hold, Sam sted the energy cell.

    But the group is not as easy as Sam thought, even though they stopped for a moment, they immediately thought of the trouble that Sam caused them by now with the inn and the city gate, so they instantly jumped to the side and even the guy that was stuck came out of the shock faster than Sam expected.

    That guy instantly tried to kick himself out of the golem and destroyed its mouth.

    By the time the explosion urred his leg is already out and he is in mid-air jumping away from the spot.

    But he didn¡¯t escape scot free.

    When the dust settled, his leg waspletely gone. He is rolling on the ground with pain and since the liquid energy cell Sam used turned out to be earth element one, the earth elemental energy seeped into the injured area and the flesh felt like it is turning into stone.

    One of hispanions immediately ran to him and checked the leg, he is not a healer, he could only see so much, he could only give him some high level potions and pills that could promote the growth of the leg back.

    They made a temporary camp nearby and scouted the surroundings to make sure that there are no more traps.

    As for going back, they didn¡¯t even think about that, they need to see through this, even if they had to die. Otherwise, the leader wouldn¡¯t let them off.

    Sam looked at their actions in the surveince and from the looks of it, it seems like they are not going to move for the rest of the day, so he decided to set up a new trap while they are resting.

    He went through the rest of the terrain and looked for a suitable spot.

    After a while, he found a patch of trees which felt like a great spot for some next level trap.

    He took out a few wood elemental and dark elemental liquid energy crystals and ced a formation.

    Then he took out some metal poles that are simr to the one he used in fighting the Ice golem sect, but this time they are of wood and dark elemental energies and started injecting the energies.

    The trees, grass and vines rapidly grew with the wood elemental energy with the support of the formation and Sam who is watching it from a far, let a tiny liquid energy cell with only a few drops of liquid energy inside in a special spot and went back to hiding.

    The next day, the group started moving again. The one who got his leg injured has his leg grown back, but the muscles are not there yet and he has a bit of limp.

    Sam didn¡¯t know how it would be to heal from the elemental energy attack directly as every time he used these energy cells and explosions people never survived, but from the looks of it there is some kind of problem with the leg as it didn¡¯t healpletely.

    But he didn¡¯t care too much, the more baggage they have the easier it would be for him.

    As they slowly entered the patch Sam set up, they were stunned, they felt that something is wrong, the forest is too overgrown and the wood elemental energy is too high.

    They couldn¡¯t put a finger on it, but they knew that something wasn¡¯t right. They are also vignt of the traps.

    But they don¡¯t have any other way, the clues left by the previous group all lead to this ce and if they tried to moved around it, they will lose the trial.

    They could only harden themselves and get in there. They moved slowly and cautiously making sure that nothing rash happens to them.

    After they moved to the middle of the forest, they rxed a bit, but not too much, they just found a possibility that there is no trap at all in this ce.

    That thought onlysted a minute though.

    Sam who is leisurely looking at the surveince with the wine gourd in his one hand crushed a token with the other.

    A small explosion happened within the forest and the group immediately got spooked. They became alert and took out their weapons.

    As they are looking around for anything that could pose a threat to them, what they couldn¡¯t or didn¡¯t notice is that the roots of the trees are suddenly turning ck and soon enough the trunks are also turning ck with death energy.

    When they saw this, they immediately started running away, they don¡¯t know what is going to happen, but they sure as hell knew that nothing good is going to happen.

 Chapter 1089: Asking Ling Tian

    The treespletely turned ck soon enough and the leaves fell off one by one, the vines also started growing thorns that lookedpletely unnatural and out of ce on a vine and started enveloping one member after another as they sucked the vitality.

    One of the group members is a fire elemental user who is the first one that managed to break out of the hold, but as the fire spread over the trees and vines they are burning while still going after the group making it hard for the rest of the group members, which made him stoppletely.

    They could only chop down one branch and one vine at a time to escape from the forest.

    Half a dayter, they finally came out and the fire elemental user finally let loose as he started burning the forest down.

    He is extremely frustrated and the wind elemental user, assisted him in spreading the mes to take out his anger as well.

    They are all exhausted.

    Even though they tried their best to dodge all kinds of attacks focused on them, they felt extremely dried up because of the vitality that has been asionally sucked out of them.

    They felt like they just fought for a hundred days straight.

    They could only bring themselves to check the surroundings before making camp and recovering once again.

    And they didn¡¯t want to back down yet, because the more traps they encountered the more two of their beliefs were solidified.

    One of them is that the other party is weaker than them and that is why they are using the traps and the second is that they are sure that the path they are taking is the correct one.

    They didn¡¯t know that Sam can see them moving and all their actions, they only believed that these traps are set in the path when they are escaping to their hideout.

    While Sam is thinking like that, he saw something else in the surveince that he left back in the city. Kiran and Vidyut returned safely through the wormhole and they moved to the slums as soon as they did.

    They agreed that they will return through the wormhole and move to that spot so that Sam could pick them up. Sam left some surveince there for that reason.

    Sam took one more look at the group that wasing towards them and went to the city through dimensional drifter, and brought the duo back.

    They aplished the task perfectly and they managed to bring some bodies of elites. They worked faster than Sam expected.

    It turned out that the administration under leader 1 is a little more flexible and as long one pays the premium price they can hire the elites in the city. They killed them and immediately brought those elites back.

    As he waited for the group to continue their journey, he moved out to set up the next trap. It is through a small canyon.

    Sam carved out a hollow structure along the length of the canyon and started cing some small liquid energy cell traps. Then he filled the hollow structures with the corrosive liquid mixed with some liquid used for preserving corpses for the undead.

    As much as this liquid preserves the dead bodies, it is not pleasant for the living beings toe into contact with this.

    As long as the person didn¡¯t clean himself properly aftering into contact with it and the cleaning is not just exterior of the body by the blood and fleshpletely with their spiritual energy, their vitality will be slowly dripping out.

    He set the trap and went back waiting for the people toe.

    The next day they did make their way towards the canyon and as soon as they reached, Sam started sting the canyon walls, they instinctually ran forward as the strange liquid started falling at the mouth of the valley.

    They thought that trap might have missed. But as they moved forward, one explosion of another happened with further timing as the rocks along with the corrosive and undead liquid fell on their bodies.

    Their clothes dissolved instantly along with the armor and the undead liquid slowly seeped their vitality out and slowly the corrosive liquid started hurting their body in an extremely irritating manner.

    They felt like they are being stabbed by hundreds of pins and needles at the same time all the while scalding hot water is being poured on their flesh.

    This burning sensation kept on increasing as they exited the canyon and copsed while rolling around and screaming in pain and they used their spiritual energy to cleanse themselves.

    Once again they halted giving Sam time to set up something else that could harass them.

    But before he does that, Sam has to do something else.

    He visited the store to exchange some heirlooms and also have some talk with Ling Tian.

    "So, what is it this time?" Ling Tian asked as soon as he arrived.

    "Don¡¯t tell me you don¡¯t know about the little stunt Hou Yi pulled."

    Ling Tian chuckled and said.

    "We are taking care of it."

    "How long does it take?"

    "Actually, they are acting slippery and trying to dodge the responsibility and all the gods that had their yers died are suddenly supporting him. You are just messing up thepetition a lot and taking their fun away. Since three gods are involved this time, they are thinking of brushing it off with each other."

    "Well, I need some knowledge regarding curses. If it is a book of high-level curse spells, then it would be better."

    Ling Tian thought for a moment and said.

    "I can actually find a way, but the person who has the best curses in the universe is Hel. If we use the previous incident we could get that from her for a cheap price."

    "If that is what it takes then do it. But I need the curses. Thank you."

    With that, the conversation was over and Sam went back to torturing the group for the next few days.

    Meanwhile, Ling Tian is having a conversation with Gambler.

    "Why do we have to lie to Sam like this? The only reason that the three gods got away with this until now is that you really didn¡¯t care about doing anything. You could have just said that to him."

    "Of course, I could have, and do you think he wouldn¡¯t understand that if we don¡¯t say it. I just want him to be more proactive in contacting us. And this will prompt him to do so.

    After all, he is not dumb enough to take such ame excuse like the gods are dodging the responsibility for this. If he is a little bit more proactive in contacting us when he is in trouble, he would get maximum benefits and we can also maintain a proper rtionship with him.

    If he had contacted us sooner he would have gotten a lot more than stupid knowledge about curses. He could have gotten some high-level treasures, cultivation resources, and much more."

    "Well, he would. But by now, I think he is sure that he doesn¡¯t have to resort to these things. He is doing pretty well for himself."

    "Doing pretty well? He is doing better than myst toy."

    "Well, that previous guy is softpared to Sam. He might have a superior intellect but he doesn¡¯t have interest in destroying things, people, and regimes like Sam does."

    "That is true. So, I will get going and deal with the Curse thing and you go deal with whatever you have to do."

    Gambler disappeared from the spot and reappeared outside the mansion he was staying in, he first went to Hou Yi¡¯s realm once again and stood in the front porch of Hou Yi¡¯s mansion.

    Hou Yi appeared instantly and asked.

    "Why are you here?"

    "You know why I am here you piece of shit. Just because some time has passed since thest stunt, doesn¡¯t mean I will let you off the hook.

    That little stunt you pulled was targeted against my yer and now I am here to collect the debt. Do you want to settle now or do you want me to beat the crap out of you and then set up the meeting before shredding your invisible honor into smithereens and then taking what you owe me?"

    Hou Yi gnashed his teeth and said.

    "If you are that capable why don¡¯t you go and demand something from the remaining two involved in the n. Too much of a coward to do that?"

    As soon as he said that, a fissure appeared behind him and a w grabbed him by the nape.

    He could sense what it is, it is a dragon w.

    "Void dragon? When did it be so powerful?" Hou Yi muttered to himself, but Gambler just smiled and said.

    "The one who got beat up shouldn¡¯t be leaving snide remarks. That doesn¡¯t satisfy the rules of winners and losers. So, stay up and tell me what you would use to clear this debt, or I might have wrecked this body of yours."

 Chapter 1090: Meeting

    Hel is staring at the three people sitting in front of her while gnashing her teeth.

    The Gambler is sitting opposite to her with Indra on one side and Hou Yi on the other. He ced his hands over their shoulders holding them closely as if they are close friends for years.

    "I am not giving the Myriad Curse Guide to you. Particrly, when you are going to give it to Sam. That bastard and me has too much bad blood and if he every bes a god, then I would be the one that has to face some serious heat. So, get lost."

    "Really, Hel? Do you think you would be able to get rid of me with that? A mighty goddess of the underworld is trying to brush this off without taking any responsibility and she is even using the excuse saying that you don¡¯t want to do that because you are afraid of some human who is being yed by gods for several decades wille up and kick your ass? Just how shameless are you?" Gambler said from the side.

    Hel gritted her teeth and said.

    "The Myriad curse guide is an art I created for my followers. Even though it didn¡¯t take much from me, it is a high-level technique that could even work on gods when used properly by a cultivator of a high enough level. I cannot let this go just because of some blunder I did."

    "I am not saying you have to let that go. I only need a copy. You can give it to other followers all you want. Nobody is forcefully taking your ownership away from that."

    "That is too high of a price for me to pay."

    "Then take whatever it is that you want from the remaining two. I only need that book and that is from three of you. So, if you give me the copy the remaining two will be paying the corresponding price. And as for how much, it is for you to decide."

    Hel wanted to argue more, but Gambler continued.

    "Okay, now. I am not taking no for an answer. If you are not going to give me the book now, then I will start pulling the tricks as well.

    You all know what kind of organizations I have under me."

    "Well, two of us don¡¯t have yers and the remaining one hopes that his yer dies a tragic death. What can you do about it?" Indra said with a sneer.

    The gambler smiled and said.

    "Well, what you said is true. But what if I start trouble for the rest of the yers and if theye knocking at my door, I will dismiss it with this.

    ¡¯Since it is okay for you three to pull the stunt, then I thought it was okay for me to do so too.¡¯

    I am pretty sure that the rest of the gods would like to pay a visit to you by then. Particrly, Sun Wukong and Kartikeya, are so straightforward and easy to get along with after all. Particrly Kartikeya, right Indra?"

    The three gods were immediately dumbfounded and didn¡¯t know what to say. They knew that Gambler would do as he says. There is literally no one he couldn¡¯t offend. He would just go and y around and with Zeus and pull off Odin¡¯s beard at the same time if he wants to do it. He is that crazy.

    "Okay, I will give it to you. Damn it, this is second art that bastard Sam is going to get from me."

    She spoke as she took out a book and gave it to Gambler.

    Gambler browsed through it briefly and said.

    "By the way, he doesn¡¯t like being called a bastard. So, you better be careful when he arrives here, after bing a god. That would just add extra heat to the heat that you would already get."

    Hel wanted to curse him, but a spatial tear appeared behind Gambler and he smoothly fell backward into it with a smile on his face while waving the book."

    She looked at the two and said with a hint of anger in her tone.

    "You two bastards better pay up by tomorrow. I am not as strong as him and I am also not as lenient as him. I will burn pces to fire if you don¡¯t give me what you owe me by tomorrow."

    With that, she left.

    Meanwhile.

    Sam is really having a great time as he yed around with the group of six.

    As he yed around with them, he thought of new traps. Simply put, they became his test subjects and he doesn¡¯t want to kill and capture them until he tested them all.

    This is thest day of the game he is ying as they neared the second hidden location, Sam left thest trap.

    Sam left the corpses of the subordinates that are under Leader 1 in the second hidden location after he set up the trap.

    When the group came there while following the leads they found themselves in the cave and they saw the corpses of Leader 1, they were stumped. They are more or less familiar with some of the elites working under different branches. So, they didn¡¯t expect the corpses to be here.

    The first thought that came to their mind is that these people are involved in the incident and Leader 1 might have been the one leading the whole scenario.

    But they instantly brushed off the idea, because no one clever enough to y such arge game would be stupid enough to leave the corpses of their own people here.

    They started discussing the possibilities and it didn¡¯t take long before they came to a possibility that this might b some third party¡¯s doing. But as soon as they thought of that, the mountain they are in started copsing with them in it and they couldn¡¯t do much but follow the rubble to fall down.

    When the dust settled they came out of the rubble with the already exhausting bodies only to meet with Sam and the team all ready to deal with them.

    And just like that this phase of the n went smoothly.

    Sam and the team went back into the hiding to wait for Leader 3¡¯s next investigation team to show up.

    While waiting Sam visited the store to check if the curses are ready and he was delighted when he saw the Myriad curse guide. He was fascinated by just the basics he read on the first page.

    He decided to study this while waiting for leader 3 to show up.

    Meanwhile somewhere in a nearby realm.

    A middle-aged man in ck robes is sitting on a chair. A table with the legs made of some beast bones and the tabletop with transparent crystals is in front of him on which he is currently looking at the portrait of the branch manager Sam has killed.

    This is the leader 3.

    At this moment, a young man barged in and said.

    "Father, four of the remaining six members in the investigative team are dead. At least, let me go now. I will find out who killed the younger brother."

    The middle-aged man didn¡¯t have any reaction. By now he already got used to his subordinates dying and some of the missing.

    And every time he looked at the information of the missing people they turned out to be the most skilled of the bunch.

    "So, who died this time?"

    "The top 2 are alive, the remaining four are done."

    "Once again, the most skilled and talented are missing while the rest are dying. If not for the fact some of them are groomed by me since they were infants I would have thought that they are some spies sent by different organizations."

    "Father, please let me go. I will definitely avenge brother."

    "No, son. You cannot go alone. I wille with you. As much as the strength is your forte, this time most of this happening through schemes. So, you wouldn¡¯t be able to handle the situation and something might happen to you. We will both go with the rest of our elites and see who is daring enough to mess with me."

    The son wanted to say something else, but he didn¡¯t and just agreed with his father.

    With that, the third branch of the ck curtain moved like never before. All the assassins under them were called in the next three days and they didn¡¯t even bother to hide their movements.

    Leader three didn¡¯t even care about guarding his own territories.

    But he is not worried about them. Since the other leaders are bound to keep an eye on him, he is sure that they are going to know how angry he is and they would know where to keep their hands.

    After the three days, the wholerge group went through the realm and came to the city. It almost looked like an invasion.

 Chapter 1091: Starting a War

    As soon as the Leader 3 arrived in the realm and started investigating, Sam let one of his puppets leave a scroll near his residence and called it back along with the rest of the puppets he deployed.

    It is about time for him to leave anyway. But before that, he painted a picture of perfect scenario at the spot where the mountain copsed.

    Now they have to go the leader 1¡¯s territory and do something from that side.

    After reaching the city where Kiran and Vidyut made a mess, Sam let all the teammates go into the Ice divine dimension. He went to the ck Curtain Inn and asked a room. He paid arge price to get the most luxurious treatment the ck Curtain can offer and acted like a young master.

    For two days, he chatted with the manager and came into contact with him at all times. On the second day, he started his n.

    He used a holographic projection technology to create a room exactly the same as the one manager used as an office. The table, the wood, the chair and everything is in the exact position.

    Inside the room Kiran who disguised as the manager stood and started giving instructions to one of the subordinates. The subordinate is also an holographic projection and he is currently kneeling with his head down while listening to the instructions.

    The subordinate is same as one of the dead bodies that Kiran and Vidyut brought.

    They recorded the whole made up scenario and even let Kiran switch sides with the subordinate to speak while they made the manager into holographic projection.

    The conversation is actually quite simple. First, the manager gave the instructions regarding some special explosives they got and how they should be used to defeat the leader 3 branch manager and deal with the investigators that came.

    The subordinate understood all, but he asks, why he was given such a heavy task of leading the team even though he is not exactly the strongest of them.

    The manager just brushed him off saying that he has some reasons.

    Then another video was taken with the subordinate hidden in another ce whispering.

    "Master it seems like my cover was blown. I think the Leader 1 is trying to use this opportunity to spark some conflict between Leader 3 and you. That is why I am recording this video. I don¡¯t know if I will get a chance to send it to you. I hope you can find it. I overheard that the manager is already making preparations to make sure that my death looks legitimate and avoid suspicions."

    With that the video ended.

    Sam used two different recording crystals and didn¡¯t use the one he or his organization factory made. They are the most normal recording crystals one could ever find.

    After finishing this, he went back to the Leader 3¡¯s territory and observed how he is doing with the investigation.

    In the past two days while Sam is fabricating some evidence, the Leader 3 who found the scroll left behind by Sam already found the dead bodies of the Leader 1¡¯s people and his own in the mountain rubble. There are some traces of battle around the area.

    He easily identified that they belonged to Leader 1 with the things in the spatial ring.

    But they are still looking for more clues as the people went missing.

    Sam was really surprised by this.

    He was actually half expecting the Leader 3 to rush to Leader 1¡¯s territory and start a war after finding this out. After all, the whole scene was as natural as it could get. Sam didn¡¯t even clean up any traps he left, except for erasing the traces of his presence there.

    But the Leader 3 is focusing more on the scroll that was left behind by Sam. He is feeling suspicious thinking whether someone is trying to screw him over. He believed that there is a great chance, someone is using him to sh with the Leader 1. It might be the plot of another leader.

    That is why he held back and tried to find any other clues.

    As they are searching around, Sam set up the recording crystals in the vicinity. He ced them in a obvious ce, but the people can still understand why they couldn¡¯t find it until now. Once the recording crystals were found, the Leader 3 was stunned.

    He is still suspicious of the scroll, but the recorded evidence is right in front of him to see. After all, he never heard or seen someone forging a recording in a crystal. But now that he saw this, and from the fact that it was found within the vicinities of the copsed mountain, he is thinking that someone might have secretly helped him get this.

    At least he believed so. Even though he couldn¡¯t understand what their motives might be, at least he is sure that the leader 1 indeed had something to do with this.

    He immediately sent one of his trusted elites to the leader 1¡¯s territory. He gave him his badge so that he can look through the assassin registry in which they would record all the assassinations they took up and which assassin was assigned to each job.

    The subordinate went there the very day and looked through the registry. Even though the manager didn¡¯t like this, he doesn¡¯t have the authority to stop someone with a leader badge on them.

    He could only wee them to look through the records.

    After confirming the details of the dead assassin being dead but by a different cause, the subordinate is sure that the manager himself is the one who did this and this is definitely Leader 1¡¯s conspiracy.

    The subordinate asked a few more questions to the manager and left in a hurry.

    After returning back and reporting everything to leader 3, the leader stopped thinking and let rage take over him for a second.

    "The First, you piece of shit. I will kill you with my own hands. I will definitely kill you. How dare you kill my son, you bastard."

    He started cursing as he destroyed everything in his room. This is the first reaction he had after his son¡¯s death. Until now, he was extremely calm and collected as if the one who died is not his son rather a fellow colleague, and the investigation was also done as if it was his duty as a part of the organization. This is the first reaction from him as a father.

    After calming down, he called for all his important associates and gave orders.

    "Call for the Death soldiers. I want them to enter Leader 1¡¯s territory right now and deal with the assassins, branches, and everything that has anything to do with Leader 1 and his branch.

    Use the emergency tokens of the outer forces and the Dead Clients and call them all. I am going to take over Leader 1 and kill him.

    It seems like I have been too calm the whole time. I didn¡¯t want to deal with the other members of the organization and slowly wanted to separate myself from them, but now I will show them what will happen if they really piss him off.

    All of you, follow me into the war."

    With that, every associate is moving faster.

    There is a reason why leader 3 is a strong contender for Leader 1. But the rest of the leaders knew why.

    It is mostly because Leader 1 made him into one.

    Out of the six leaders, leader 1 is the best assassin with the most sess rate and kills. But Leader 3 has his own expertise. Not only his sess rate and kills are right behind Leader 1 with a minute difference, but he also has great expertise in training. He has the best subordinates of all.

    The rest of the leaders are all envious of his subordinates and Leader 1 who is on verge of bing a leader even became afraid of this.

    For this reason, he made a move on Leader 3 like an Idiot which made Leader 3 angry and from then on he started dealing with Leader 1¡¯s ns.

    Everyone thinks that he is in the race for bing the true leader of the organization, but what many people don¡¯t know is that the only reason they got that idea is because of all the trouble Leader 3 brought to leader 1 after he was pissed.

    Every attempt of Leader 1 that could possibly give him a lead in the organization or get some good connections with external powers were all destroyed by leader 3pletely.

    Since Leader 3 is attempting to sabotage leader 1 they assumed that he is also interested in the position of the leader. But he is not.

    That is the only reason, that even though he has a lot of hidden power, he didn¡¯t show it to them. But today, he is going to do that, no matter what. Sam and the team stayed back and decided to watch a good show.

 Chapter 1092: Leader 3s strength

    Sam and the team are currently in leader 1¡¯s territory.

    They are currently in the city where the branch that they used and set up the whole scenario is located.

    They are looking at the chaos that is urring in the shadows without the citizens even knowing. They were surprised by the sheer number of experts that are under themand of Leader 3.

    From the memories they gathered from the subordinates, they didn¡¯t get any information from this. There are more than a hundred Late transcendent cultivators under Leader 3 which is something that neither Sam nor the rest of the leaders expected.

    Sam tried to gather some information, but everything is so tight with both of the branches, they are both attacking and defending against each other.

    The team started thinking of ways to get a dead body and find some information, but for over a week, they didn¡¯t manage to get any. Shadow mice got some information, but nothing is crucial, it is more or less the battle ns of both parties.

    Sam didn¡¯t want to make his presence known at the battlefields first. Most of them are assassinations and both sides are going at it discreetly. There are very rarely any shy battles and provided by the fact that the first week both parties started taking out the weaker parties on each side just to reduce the numbers are morale for their opponents, it ispletely understood.

    To get more information, Sam even tried to get some dead bodies that died in this assassination spree and extract them from their souls, but that didn¡¯t happen, because every time they wanted to proceed someone from either side ising to the spot.

    Unless there is one high-profile sh with multiple members in the battle, it would be hard for them to get a hold of a body of a person that has any notable information.

    So, they are pretty much just spectators for the whole week.

    After one week though, they managed to find a ce where arge-scale battle would take ce.

    It is an ambush on the remaining son of Leader 3 being nned by the branch manager of Leader 1 who also happened to be his son.

    Son of Leader 3 and son of Leader 1 are going to sh and the people that are assigned to both of them are of pretty high level and are bound to have the proper information.

    So, Sam and the team waited near the ambush ce.

    The son of Leader 3, from what Sam heard, he is actually no brain and only brawn. He is the guy that would look for a way to brute force through anything and the only time his brain works is when is assassinating somebody.

    He doesn¡¯t have any talent in management whatsoever. In the past week from what Sam could estimate, he killed around eighteen members on the other side. Combining both the people that came after him and the people that he went after, he reached eighteen.

    Now that he bared his fangs like that, the other party understood that he should be eliminated as soon as possible.

    But Leader 3 is not stupid, so he immediately made preparations and sent a bunch of elites to protect his son and also kill everyone that came at them.

    From the sheer numbers, Leader 3 is a clear advantage, now all that depends on the quality. From the looks of the people, it seems like Leader 3 also had an advantage in that.

    As Sam saw the performance of these people, he is tempted to modify his n.

    At this moment, he wants both the leaders to fight each other and destroy each other forcing them to reveal their true prowess in both numbers and strength, he would only reveal himself at thest minute and finish them off and escape with the heirloom fragments without making his presence known.

    Then, he would proceed to deal with the rest of the ck curtain.

    But now that he saw Leader 3¡¯s prowess, he has half a mind to let him cause more chaos in the ck curtain. If he sessfully destroyed the rest of the branches and even if he didn¡¯t, as long as he could damage them enough, Sam could swoop in and take everything away.

    This ambush might be the deciding point of the change of ns. As far as Sam knew the Leader 3¡¯s son wouldn¡¯t know about the ambush, so he could see their group¡¯s performance.

    As they hid a fair distance away, they looked through the surveince set up as they waited for the ambush to take ce.

    After half an hour or so, Leader 3¡¯s son walked into the area with his group. But as soon as they walked into the group and the Leader 3¡¯s son became alert and made the first move. Sam was pretty impressed by this.

    The battle went on, everyone is making killer moves and trying to defend themselves from others.

    Just one proper hit is enough as long as itnds on the opponent and they will die. They are indeed skilled assassins.

    The battle went on fifteen minutes and the Leader 3 group has the upper hand. But when Sam saw that one of them is dead and Leader 1 group already had several casualties, Sam thought of something and took out a different puppet, he changed the energy cell inside and let it go towards the battle field slowly.

    He ordered the puppet to explode and an extremely shy explosion urred right in the middle of the battle field.

    Even though it is shy, it is not exactly powerful, but this made the already tension-filled contestants in the battlefield to flee without taking care of their fallenrades.

    Both sides thought that the explosion was caused by the opposite party and they thought that their opponents might have reinforcementsing to them.

    Sam knew that this bluff wouldn¡¯tst long, so he immediately sent Night Ghost to capture all the corpses and they ran away instantly.

    After reaching a hidden spot, they took out the corpses and performed the memory extraction.

    Sam went through those memories and got as much information as they could.

    The members of the Leader 1 group didn¡¯t give much information, it seems like Leader 1 operated the whole organization pretty calmly, the only secret he got is that the presence of death soldiers.

    These are the specially groomed people that perform the mission they were assigned to irrespective of the cost.

    They would blow themselves up if they have to kill the enemy. Their attitude towards death and their recklessness is their main weapon. They don¡¯t have any feelings, emotions and they couldn¡¯t be bought off.

    And every branch leader has these people.

    But just from one body of the Leader 3 group, they got some serious information.

    For starters, the Leader 3 group also has death soldiers, but they are not that high in number, that is also the reason that even though the other leaders took Leader 3 as a threat, they didn¡¯t rank him as the highest threat.

    As for the rest of the information, it shocked Sam.

    There are other forces under the Leader 3 group that the rest of the groups didn¡¯t know of. The groups act aspletely independent forces and on the surface they don¡¯t have any connections with the ck curtain, they managed to cover it up really well because they are mostly disguised as the merchant groups.

    These people are called the External forces of Leader 3 and they act mostly in intelligence and scouting.

    They operate a myriad of businesses and theye in contact with many types of people making it easier for them to gather any form of information.

    They also look for talented kids in perilous situations and send them to Leader 3 who nurtures them into the deadly soldiers under him.

    And then came the Dead clients.

    Dead Clients is another force under Leader 3 and the existence of these forces is only known to extremely close confidants.

    They are actually the people that are supposed to be dead under the hands of the ck Curtain, particrly under the hands of the rest of the groups other than the Leader 3.

    Leader 3 has a great spywork by which he managed to gather a lot of information in other branches. But what most people know is that the spies of Leader 3 are not exactly focused on getting into high positions, but rather they are focused on getting into lower positions like the attendants who take jobs, or people who record the registry of the clients and the assassination targets.

    His main target is that information and once someone obtains the information of someone putting a bounty on a powerful target, they will ry to the Leader who will try to contact the target before the ck curtain could take action and convinces him to join his force.

    Even though it doesn¡¯t work most of the time, there are some targets who took his help to escape the situation in exchange for a favor.

    Sam was impressed as he went through the memories and got more and more information.

 Chapter 1093: Chisk

    Sam became more and more impressed as he learned about the Dead Clients.

    Even in these Dead Clients, there are two sub groups one with the people that owe favors to Leader 3 ande and help him in case of emergencies, but the second group is the most lethal.

    These are the people that are targeted by the ck Curtain because of therge sum of money offered by somerge organizations. Even if they manage to escape the ck Curtain, they wouldn¡¯t be able to live a peaceful life. Simply, put if an organization is super strong but cannot act on the target in the public eye directly and pick ck Curtain to do the job, Leader 3 will go to them, save them create a fake death that is particrly convincing, give them a new identity and finally taking him under him.

    Now, Sam understood why there are so many people under Leader 3.

    His branch alone is equivalent to a high-level phase three organization of the list. And nowbined with the remaining five, Sam felt really d that he decided to not mess with them directly and used tricks to make them fight within themselves.

    He also decided to use Leader 3 to start going after the rest of the branches.

    Anyway, the rest of the branches are already having some thoughts of their own and they are sure to act on them given the time and scenarios.

    In fact, Sam is even tempted to directly meet Leader 3 and cut a deal straight away. But he knew for sure that it wouldn¡¯t go as well as he nned if he knew that Sam is the one who really killed the Leader¡¯s son.

    But he got another n with the extra information he got from this guy¡¯s head.

    Because even though he is a close associate of Leader 3, he is actually a person who worked in Leader 2¡¯s territory before acting as a spy for Leader 3, and from the looks of it, there is the realm in which half of it is managed by Leader 2 and the other half is managed by Leader 1.

    The representative of Leader 2 in that realm working as a branch manager is actually a bit entric which could be taken advantage of a bit.

    This guy is actually the younger brother of Leader 2 and is full of ambitions. But he is not smart enough to have such ambitions, so the spy from Leader 3 managed to make use of his destroyed some serious earning opportunities and is also cost a lot of client credibility. As a result, he was demoted to a level of branch manager from a high-level executive and was even sent to a that was in the realm shared by both Leader 1 and Leader 2.

    This caused him to lose his standing within the organization, so he is trying to bounce back. As soon as Sam learned this information, new ns were formted in his mind. An ambitious idiot can easily be manipted and is bound to be less problematic to do so.

    So, he set off with the team to that and let Leader 1 and Leader 3 duke it out here.

    The they are entering is the Drake.

    It was once a full of wildlife and wildlife alone and the apex predators are different types of Drakes.

    Drakes of different species and elemental affinities are used to upy different areas.

    This time, Sam also wanted to collect some drakes to breed. They don¡¯t have much higher bloodline like dragons, but once he used his bloodline refinement techniques, they could be good mounts for the students and other employees in the organization and with his current cultivation level, if he used the bloodline refinement on the mortal ne beasts, he could refine bloodline of over a hundred beasts at the same time.

    While thinking about all this, they arrived at the drake.

    They directly went to the city where their target is. His name is Chisk.

    This time Sam didn¡¯t go to him directly and just observed him from afar with the surveince and the shadow mice for three days and just as Sam expected this guy is not cking off.

    He is making some preparations and particrly, he is moving around meeting with a bunch of family heads trying to get some help from them in the form of strong cultivators so that he could take over the business of ck curtain in one of the cities under Leader 1.

    But he didn¡¯t manage to get any help from anyone.

    One could easily understand just how low his standing in the ck Curtain was. Leader 3¡¯s son was taken care of properly by the local lord, but here the branch manager was beingpletely ignored.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but smile as he thought of how easy it is going to be.

    Chisk is trying so hard to get some support and when he was getting drunk Sam also managed to learn that this guy actually asked his older brother, Leader 2 for some manpower so that he could take over a city or two from leader 1¡¯s territory.

    But the only answer he got was that it is not possible.

    He knew that his brother looked down on him, so the rest of the organization also did so and then the rest of the world did so.

    He is trying to regain his dignity.

    While the situation is like this, Kiran suddenly made an appearance in front of Chisk in a bar with his disguise.

    Kiran is only a middle stage transcendent cultivator of the Astral ne and even Kiran can hold him off a bit.

    He went directly to the table of Chisk in the private room in the most unsuspecting of the disguises he could think of.

    "Who the fuck are you?" Chisk asked as soon as he saw Kiran.

    Kiran just smiled and sat down before opening a wine gourd, when Chisk smelled the wine, he couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit entranced.

    Kiran poured the wine into two crystal sses and spoke.

    "Master Chisk, I heard you are in need of manpower."

    Chisk frowned and said in a cautious tone.

    "I don¡¯t know what you are talking about."

    "No need to y dumb, Master Chisk. I know a lot of things than you think. I am here to offer a deal. If you ept it, I assure you, you can gain a lot more than just one city. I am sure that you would regain your footing in the ck Curtain."

    Chisk¡¯s frown became deeper as he got ready to make a move.

    But at this moment, he suddenly felt a chilling sensation on his back, he couldn¡¯t exactly sense a physical presence, but he could feel that something horrifying is behind him.

    "Don¡¯t be rash now, Master Chisk. Mypanion is in the next room and he happened to be a lot stronger than you, before you could even make a move, you would die. If all I want is to kill you, you wouldn¡¯t even know how and why you died."

    "What do you want?"

    Chisk asked nervously.

    "I need your help and in exchange, I would help you. My boss has some bad blood with the Leader1 of your organization and he has been wanting to deal with him for a long time. In fact, we came from a realm far away from here.

    If not for the involvement of Leader 3, we would have already made our move, but since this already happened, we decided to take advantage of this opportunity.

    To ensure the destruction of Leader 1, we would reduce their forces and influence in their cities while they are at war.

    And once we caused that destruction, I want another branch to take over those cities so that Leader 1 couldn¡¯t revive. Since you are the one closest to this area, we would like to ask you to take care of this.

    We don¡¯t need any territory or resources that you obtain for yourself. The resources we obtain for ourselves would be ours, but we wouldn¡¯t take any territory.

    Are you interested in the proposal?"

    Chisk thought for a moment and said.

    "How can I trust you? Not the just fact that there is a possibility of you betraying me, but there is also a chance that you are not even capable of what you are saying. What should we do then? How can you prove that working with you wouldn¡¯t be a loss?"

    "It is not unreasonable of you to ask that. Then, do one thing. Come to Python city tomorrow. You can see something beautiful. The branch of the ck curtain will be met with a disaster and it would be of dark elemental energy.

    After you see that might, you can think about whether you want to agree or not. We can meet in the most expensive bar in Python city at night. I wille and meet you myself."

 Chapter 1094: Chisks conquest

    Kiran hurriedly went back to the hiding spot after misleading the people following him. He came alone to meet with chisk and the only thing that apanied him is one of the ghosts of Night Ghost.

    After reaching the location of the team, they immediately set off to go to the python with a dimensional drifter.

    The ck curtain branch of the python is currently deste, except for a few people who are necessary for maintaining the side businesses of the branch there are not many people. They even stopped the inn services for a while and even the assassination assignments were put on hold.

    So, they didn¡¯t take long to find the exact location and set up some traps.

    By noon the next day, they are done with all of that.

    This time, Sam only used dark elemental liquid energy cells and sted the inn.

    The whole city was shocked. Some big shots in the city heard about the war between the two branches and they knew that their territory is within the range of the Leader 1 branch. They anticipated some chaos within the city.

    But since this is the battle of assassins, they are not that worried about their lives and territories being disrupted and now it seems like they are being too rxed. They didn¡¯t know that the ck curtain would make this type of move.

    So, in order to not disrupt the peace in their territories, they started making preparations.

    Chisk also appeared in the city that morning secretly and kept an eye on the inn.

    When he saw what happened by afternoon, he was stunned.

    He saw a dark elemental energy explosion emerging from within the inn and destroying everything into smithereens.

    The explosion left arge dark elemental energy cloud which is extremely vtile, when one of the city guards went there to investigate, his body was immediately infused with dark elemental energy and made him get poisoned by elemental energy, he even died shortly after that.

    This scene caused Chisk to go crazy. He immediately ran to the most expensive bar in the city and waited there for Kiran toe.

    If anyone sane was in his ce, they would think of a different matter. If Kiran and his group were this strong and could create such argemotion without even leaving any evidence, then why would theye for some lost cause executive who doesn¡¯t even have any influence within his own organization? Only after finding any possible answer, no matter how farfetched, one should make a deal.

    But Chisk is stupid and as soon as he saw the power of another party, he immediately became excited and got ready to make a deal.

    Kiran didn¡¯t show up at the bar until night, but the team is observing this guy from afar.

    He is muttering to himself, sometimes even talking out loud, sometimesughing to himself, it is as if he is a crazy guy.

    If not for the fact that he ordered the most expensive wine and sat in a private room, the manager would have kicked him out.

    Kiran arrived at the bar at night and went directly into the private room. He wore the same disguise as the day before and he ispletely nonchnt as he spoke.

    "So, are you ready to make an agreement?"

    "Yes, Yes. Just what do you want me to do, tell me and I will do it."

    "I heard ck Curtain has a process of taking over the city branches by another branch manager if the local manager dies suddenly or stuck in special situations.

    We will be creating those special situations. Most of the time, people might go missing or even death with a lot of damage to the branch quarters.

    You juste over and take over the area. I don¡¯t want anything going back to Leader 1. That is it."

    "But what would you get out of this."

    "As I told you, my boss wants revenge that is it."

    "Do not worry, I will definitely help you with this," Chisk said as he extended his hand to shake on the deal.

    Kiran looked at him with a dumbfounded expression. It could be said that the deal ispletely benefiting Chisk. He wouldn¡¯t need to do much and just has to take over the extra territory and he is still acting as if he is doing Kiran a favor by taking over.

    This kind of behavior is a bit unexpected for Kiran as he never came across someone so shameless.

    He just shook his hand and stood up to leave, but right before that, he took out a spatial ring and handed it over to Chisk.

    "As you are short of manpower, hire some people with this. I am pretty sure there are many people who want to join for a decent sum of money."

    When Chisk looked through the contents his eyes gleamed with greed, but he suppressed it and thought of how to hire people.

    "It wouldn¡¯t be enough in long term, but the money would be enough to hire people for one or two cities. You need to use the resources you obtained in every new branch to pay for people. But if you are short money even after that, you can ask me since we keep in touch. But don¡¯t you dare try to bite off more than you can chew.

    After all, you are also a branch manager that runs an inn simr to the one that we destroyed today."

    With that warning, Kiran left.

    Chisk also left instantly, the very next day, by noon, he already arrived and took over the ck Curtain branch.

    There is always the spare in with curses and killing formations in every branch, in the situations like these, that inn would be used as base of operations and even the emergency reports and contact methods of elites and other branches will be ced there in secret.

    He took them and summoned all the elites by night and took over as the temporary branch manager.

    The Elites are familiar with this process. It is not the first time this happened and they sure as hell knew that this is not going to be thest time. The term temporary only stays temporarily. Every time a temporary branch manager took over, that branch will always go to the leader he is working for and the elites have to work for them unless they say so themselves.

    After Chisk took over the first city, he couldn¡¯t stop his glee from showing on his face.

    Sam and the team moved to the next city and started nning something. The branch manager of this city actually wanted to take over the previous city but Chisk beat him to it, so he became a bit suspicious as well as cautious.

    But it is of no use.

    Two dayster, Kiran contacted Chisk again asking him if he would take over another branch for which Chisk agreed instantly.

    And another branch was destroyed instantly.

    Chick hired a bunch of people and took over this city as well.

    Now everyone from ck curtain became suspicious as soon as they heard the news. One city was already okay for Chisk to take over as everyone knew that he is desperate to get some credit and he might have reacted instantly.

    But now they are suddenly feeling that something is wrong.

    And after four more days, another city was taken over by Chisk and all three city branches are destroyed in the same way.

    If the ck curtain didn¡¯t understand what is happening, they would all be idiots.

    Leader 2 who is supervising the war that has been dragging on for a long time got the news and immediately called for Chisk and Leader 1 who is supervising the war also heard of the news and realized that someone is putting his ass on fire.

    So, he couldn¡¯t help but send some people to inquire, when he got the report he was stunned.

    He doesn¡¯t know what to do exactly, but leader 3 is not even giving him any breathing space, so he cannot do anything for now. He has to deal with this after the war was over.

    Since Leader 1 himself didn¡¯t do anything, the rest of the ck Curtain stayed silent.

    But Leader 2 is afraid of what would happen if he let Chisk do whatever he wants.

    He sent people to call Chisk directly and wanted to talk to him, but for some reason, three days passed without any response.

    Even if Chisk didn¡¯t want toe, the messengers would havee back and said so. But now the messengers disappeared and Chisk is nowhere to be seen.

    One week passed like this. Every attempt Leader 2 made to meet with Chisk was repelled and he wasn¡¯t able to talk to him even once. He wasn¡¯t even able to give a message at all.

    In this week, Chisk managed to ¡¯conquer¡¯ two more cities and is on cloud nine.

 Chapter 1095: Recording Crystals

    Chisk doesn¡¯t know that his brother is trying to contact him, because Sam and the team tried their best to stop every single messenger that wanted to approach Chisk and made them disappear. They killed some, they imprisoned some in the chessboard, but not a single message was passed to Chisk.

    But after this week, Sam imitated the writing of Leader 2 and modified the scroll. He had to use some special tricks to change the message so that the scrolls would still have the spiritual imprint of the Leader 2.

    Sam never expected that such a forgery would take such a long time.

    Kiran disguised as one of the captured messengers and took the scroll to Chisk.

    Inside the scroll, the original message was for Chisk to stop the madness and go back to Leader 2 instantly, but the current message is about praising Chisk for his contributions and telling him to expand the territory even more and even faster.

    Sam made sure that they recorded the interaction between the ¡¯messenger¡¯ and Chisk. He doesn¡¯t know whether he would be able to use itter, but it is better than having nothing when the situation arises.

    Chisk met with Kiran and showed his brother¡¯s message. He wanted to use his brother¡¯s support as well as Kiran¡¯s support to expand faster and Kiran immediately granted his wish by agreeing to it.

    The whole realm was subverted into chaos as Chisk rapidly took one city after another and Leader 1 couldn¡¯t bear it anymore.

    A realm that was originally shared by Leader 1 and Leader 2 is currently only being upied by Leader 2¡¯s forces. This is obviously a p in the face for him.

    And all the development just happened in another week.

    This change caused Leader 2 to be anxious. Out of six since two are in a war, the rest didn¡¯t want to involve themselves in this shitty situation and get themselves messed up.

    It is almost like a pact.

    Leader 2 was extremely careful and only sent messages to Chisk because he didn¡¯t want to give the other leaders any wrong ideas. If by any chance they misinterpreted his presence in the territory of Leader 1 as a sign of his alliance with leader 3 and all the activities conducted by Chisk were misunderstood as his own actions, things would get tricky.

    The remaining three will definitely think that Leader 2 and Leader 3 are nning to steal the organization for themselves and they would gang up.

    But this sudden rapid upation made him terrified. With Sam and his team¡¯s presence, themunication between him and Chisk has already gone down the hill. Both are getting the messages only Sam wanted them to get.

    So, he was a little unaware of this sudden expansion.

    After he learned of it, he couldn¡¯t control himself anymore and decided to secretly go and meet with Chisk so that he would stop his madness.

    But as soon as he entered the city that Chisk is in, arge ice structure appeared outside of the city, and inside the ice, structure is the bodies of the assassins and branch managers under Leader 1.

    When Leader 2 saw this he was shocked.

    Because he is an ice elemental user and the way the assassins were killed was actually his own method. This is his way of doing things when he encountered some interesting targets.

    After the initial shock, he realized something. When his brother is not responding, he already understood that there might be an involvement of a third party in this whole mess and now that he has seen this with his own eyes, he is sure of it.

    Now, this news will definitely spread, and anyone from the ck Curtain who saw this ice structure would definitely think that he is the one that made all this mess. This is tantamount to dering war against Leader 1.

    He wanted to destroy the structure immediately. But at this moment, the person he wanted to talk to for over two weeks just came over.

    Chisk had a grin on his face as he came running towards his brother.

    "My Brother, you are indeed a level above me. Look at the ice structure. I didn¡¯t expect you to be bolder than me."

    *PAK*

    Leader 2 immediately pped the face of Chisk and said.

    "What the hell is wrong with you? Why are creating such a mess? No, I don¡¯t have time. I need to destroy that structure immediately. I will deal with youter."

    He immediately ran out of the city and started destroying the structure. But he is not relieved at all, as he knew that the problem was already created.

    He came back and asked his men to capture Chisk.

    They went to the ck Curtain branch and he asked.

    "What the hell did you do, you fool? Do you want me to die?" Leader 2 said exasperatedly.

    "What do you mean brother? Our territory expanded half a realm because of me? Shouldn¡¯t you at least show me some appreciation?"

    "You want appreciation? Your piece of shit, don¡¯t you know how much mess you have created?"

    "What kind of mess are you talking about? I didn¡¯t attack each and every city. They are all attacked by some third party, I only took over following the rules."

    Listening to his answer, Leader 2 doesn¡¯t even know whether he should scold his brother or not.

    "You are indeed stupid. Can¡¯t you see? Even if there is no proof, there is no third party¡¯s presence that is visible to anyone and every city was destroyed in the same way and every time you were right on time to take over. Do you really think that everyone would be as stupid as you? If it was one or two times, nobody would care whether you are really connected to the attacks or not, but it happened over a dozen times. Now they don¡¯t even have to think about the so-called evidence.

    And where is this third party that you are talking about? I want to meet them."

    "He said he would meet you tonight. We need to wait."

    "Tonight? What is his name?"

    "He said it was Ash."

    "Why did he even made a deal with a guy like you?"

    "He said that it is revenge for his boss?"

    "What is his boss¡¯ name?"

    "I don¡¯t know."

    "What organization do they belong to?"

    "I don¡¯t know."

    "What realm did theye from?"

    "I don¡¯t know."

    "Just what do you know about them?" Leader 2 asked in an exasperated sigh.

    He is fifty percent sure that the other party is just ying. Not giving any details regarding them other than a name and that too, the name doesn¡¯t even have ast name, even if it had, they are not sure whether it is true or not.

    He tried to ask all kinds of questions but there was no use. The only thing Chisk was able to answer is that they are rich and powerful and they are the ones who destroyed the bases.

    They waited till night and went to the meeting spot. But no matter how long they waited there is no sign of another party. Now, Leader 2 ispletely sure that his brother was yed. He looked at his brother in exhaustion he doesn¡¯t even have any energy to be angry at him.

    Sam and his team already left after Leader 2 arrived.

    They didn¡¯t even bother waiting to see their reactions and how they would proceed after they ced the ice structure outside the city.

    They just left and this time, they went to the core areas of Leader 1¡¯s territory.

    Kiran disguised as a different person and went to the ck Curtain Inn. He is extremely nervous.

    At least he acted so. He held a recording crystal and spoke to the manager in a nervous tone.

    "S... Sir, I am a low-level hunter. I went hunting for some beasts this morning in the forest and I saw someone cleaning a battlefield from a cliff. It seems like someone has fought intently and the whole ce is a mess.

    After I left, I went to check the ce to see if I could gain anything, but on my way, I found one of them on dying breath. He seemed to have been injected with a special poison. He gave me this spatial ring and asked me to give it to you."

    The branch manager frowned and took a look at the contents of the spatial ring. Looking at the recording crystals, he frowned and took a look at them.

    They are all the interactions of the messengers and Chisk. He was dumbfounded.

    "Describe the person that gave you this."

    "His face is unrecognizable. But he wore ck-cloaked attire."

    "Where is his body? Show me the way."

    "I caught a glimpse at the people who killed them, sir. After disposing of the dead bodies they came searching for him. I don¡¯t know if he is still there. But I can show you the spot."

    "Quickly, lead the way."

 Chapter 1096: Myriad Curse guide

    Simr scenarios happened in all the territories of the ck curtain. Every leader somehow got a copy of the recording crystals from Leader 2¡¯s territory and everyone was stunned by how rampant Leader 2 is.

    From the recording crystals, they spected that leader 2 is full of himself and wanted to use the craziness of his brother as an excuse to conquer the territory of Leader 1.

    Some of them spected that he is in cahoots with Leader 3, some thought that he is just taking advantage of Leader 1, but either way, they are not going to let this go easily.

    They need to do something.

    At this moment, Leader 1 left the frontlines and met with Leader 4. Leader 1 and Leader 4 are the only ones who have a rather good rtionship. Leader 1 wants power and authority while Leader 4 wants money and resources along with luxuries.

    Unlike Leader 1, Leader 4 knew his limits and understood that he wouldn¡¯t be able to grow much and he already realized all his potential. So, he doesn¡¯t want to fight for authority and territory, not even glory is worth it in his opinion. All he wants is some peace and luxury.

    So, even among the leaders, he is more like a mercenary and most neutral of them. But he is also the one who is easy to change.

    Leader 1 immediately met him secretly and offered a sweet deal.

    "I will manage the territory in your stead and you don¡¯t have to take any additional responsibilities, but seventy percent of the profits thate will be handed over to you. Support me in this battle, as long as we get a female target, I will capture them and bring them to you.

    Just help me this once. Leader 2 is not as strong as you. You can deal with him, while I fight with Leader 3."

    Leader 4 agreed immediately. He made these kinds of deals with Leader 1 many times, so he didn¡¯t have any problem.

    So, he started attacking Leader 2¡¯s territory and started upying the very same day. He is subtler than Chisk and he is perfectly proficient in doing so.

    Looking at the Leader 4¡¯s movements, the remaining two leaders felt left out. Now four leaders are involved in the war and the two of them wanted to stay out and take advantage when everything went astray.

    But they knew that it would be impossible.

    And soon they got some news that Leader 2 joined Leader 3 as soon as Leader 4 joined the battle. Now there are two groups with two leaders in each and the two leaders single and outside.

    Whether they joined the forces are not, a sh is bound to happen when the current wars are over. A new war is bound to happen, no matter what.

    Sam looked at the whole situation and couldn¡¯t help but smile to himself.

    But he didn¡¯t stay put because of this. He went to Leader 5¡¯s core territory where the main branch is located and ced a high-profile assignment.

    It is to kill a middle stage transcendent cultivator of a certain power.

    Sam¡¯s rewards are different. If the assignment ispleted within two days, then the ck curtain would get triple the amount.

    The leader was delighted by such an assignment and sent an elite immediately.

    Meanwhile, Sam and the team notified the target of the ck Curtain operations indirectly making him prepare.

    The target is actually a young master of a different organization. Even though he is not exactly powerful, he is the future hope of the organization and this organization is named the Phoenix tail sect.

    This is one of the organizations under Indra.

    Since the three of them messed with Sam by making their subordinates alert and made him run circles, he wanted their organizations to suffer as well.

    With Gamblers warning this time, they would be extremely vignt about doing something stupid like before.

    But Sam can do whatever he wants and until the news reached the gods, he could y with their subordinates as much as he wanted.

    For the next two weeks, he roamed around with his team and started conflicts between many people and the ck curtain.

    More than twelve realms dwelled in chaos because of his actions.

    After creating all the mess, he waited for the people involved to blow it out of proportion and let his team keep an eye.

    As long as the leaders are shing directly, then he would make a move, but from the looks of it, it would take a few months for it.

    So, he decided to study and research meanwhile and cultivate at the same time.

    He is currently involved in the Myriad curse guide.

    This book actually subverted everything that Sam knew about curses.

    The contents of the books can be divided into four basic categories.

    The first one is direct curses.

    The Curses are basic and profound at the same time.

    Rotten curse, Curse of Pain, the curse of chaos, the curse of destruction, the curse of hallucination, the curse of sleep, the curse of fear. There are many curses that are cast directly face to face or indirectly, but all these are curses that have immediate effect.

    They came in the second part of the book. It is about elemental curses. These are various methods to use different elemental energy attacks to fuse with dark elemental energy to create a special curse.

    In the second category, all the elemental attacks can be converted into curses. For example, a fireball can be fused with the curse spell and inflicted on the target, instead of the shy fireball moving through the whole area, the curse will be ced on the target directly and the target will undergo all the changes that the fireball brings to their body. Like charring and the burning pain and the damage that the fireball would inflict and at the same time, a normal curse could be attached to attack. A curse of pain that caused immense pain in the soul of the person can be attached to the fireball and when the fireball strikes the person, not only would they take the damage caused by the fireball, the curse of pain will also be inflicted on them.

    The third category is a fusion of curses. Its purpose is fusing basic curses with a Medium that doesn¡¯t have any other effect other than acting as a binding agent for merging the curses. And these curses are not suitable fornding in a direct battle, rather they are better to be set traps or attached to the projectile weapons and beunched at people.

    In this merging process, an elemental curse and normal curse can be fused. Two normal curses can be fused, two elemental curses can be fused and in the same way, the numbers are not exactly limited to two, the maximum number of curses they could fuse is ten.

    The fourth category is the concept of dispelling the curses.

    There are many ways on how the curse can be dispelled, there are many exnations using the construction methods that were given in the previous three categories.

    Sam was really impressed by Hel¡¯s detailed analysis. It could be said that Sam looted more from Hel than any other god. He got the whip from her Pce of Inheritance, he got the repel stylebook and now he got this Myriad Curse guide which in his opinion nowhere inferior to the Repel style.

    He could think of many ways to use these things. He already had nned on how to uses these to enhance Night Ghost¡¯s strength as well as to improve all the weapon systems he had.

    For the next two months, Sam mostly started experimenting with curses. He never uses the dark elemental energy this much directly. Most of the time, he used death or even shadow elemental energy. This is the first time he used the dark elemental energy this much.

    After constant practice, Sam came out. The war also reached its peak stage. Leader 3 cornered Leader 1 with the help of Leader 2. As for Leader 4, he was actually kept at bay with the reserve forces of Leader 3. More than half of Leader 4¡¯s forces were eradicated in the process, but Leader 3 still managed to bring more forces as if he didn¡¯t suffer any loss.

    Now, Leader 1 and Leader 3 are on verge of shing directly, in fact, there are already some skirmishes in the process of saving some elites they couldn¡¯t lose.

    While these four forces are like this, Leader 5 and Leader 6 are in their own pickling situations.

    Sam made them lock horns with some pain in the ass organizations by cing bounties and revealing them directly to the targets. But they are not on the verge ofplete extermination.

    But that was enough for Sam, all he wanted is for them to have some problems.

    Anyway, as soon as the current war within ck Curtain was over, the remaining leaders would try to vie for the territory of the fallen ones and in process, there are bound to be more conflicts and that is enough for Sam to blow it out of proportion and deal with them.

 Chapter 1097: Using Curses

    Sam and the team moved to the city where Leader 3 is currently located.

    Both leaders are in the same realm at the moment but in extremely different situations. Leader 1 lost almost all of his troops except for some close confidants.

    The rest of them all died. Now all that is left is a direct sh between him and Leader 3 which could subvert the situation.

    While Leader 3¡¯s group is tracking, Leader 1 is escaping and hiding while killing Leader 3¡¯s troops here and there. He threw all the rules of war out of the window. Since all his territory is upied by Leader 2 and Leader 1, there is nothing much they could do to him in return.

    But he is sure that once he was spotted, the game would reach the final stage and he wanted to deal as much damage as possible.

    The team got this information and decided to help Leader 3 a bit by tracking the other party. So, first, they ced surveince at Leader 3¡¯s ce and then waited for his move.

    And the very next day, Leader 3 got the news and he moved along with his group. Sam sent some surveince equipment closely with them so that he could capture a hint of audio on where they would be going. As long as he got a city name, he is sure that he could help leader 3.

    After much effort, he managed to get the city¡¯s name as Leader 3 briefed his soldiers while they are moving.

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to call for all the surveince equipment directly by himself. He left Agar and Argan there to collect the equipment as well as keep an eye on the troops of Leader 3 to see if they could find anything.

    He also gave them some transference scrolls so that they could move faster towards the city Sam is currently going if something happens.

    Sam then used the Dimensional drifter to move to that city destination faster.

    He arrived only around twenty meters outside the city and already let out of the surveince equipment without even bothering to examine the surroundings. He and the team ran towards the city while dropping the surveince equipment.

    When they reached the city, there is stillmotion and they followed the group to see where themotion leads.

    Soon, they found themselves in the ck Curtain inn¡¯s location, where the inn ispletely destroyed.

    Leader 1 and his group are not low profile at all, there is only a pir left intact in the whole inn and there are a bunch of dead bodies tied to it.

    They heard the whispers around and found out that Leader 1 is still in the city.

    Sam understood why that guy is so leisure. He just wants to piss off Leader 3.

    He could wantonly do what he wanted and since it would take a few hours for Leader 3 toe and do anything, he would leisurely rx for a while before leaving the ce. Sam even heard someone saying that Leader 1 throwing out to a challenge Leader 3. He said that he would stay for an hour and a half in the city and he wants to let Leader 3e and get him if he can.

    It is just a fake provocation. He is neither going to be there when Leader 3es and nor does he stand on fighting directly if Leader 3 reallyes.

    But Sam decided to take this chance to his own advantage.

    He immediately took residence in an inn with the team and let Five elemental King take control of the surveince.

    Meanwhile, he and Night Ghost sat in seclusion.

    Sam sat cross-legged as he let Dark elemental energy envelop himpletely and soon half of it is converted into shadow elemental energy.

    Their energies merged together and soon an energy ball slowly started forming in front of Sam floating in mid-air.

    Night ghost looked at the ball and could feel some sinister aura from it along with a lot of shadow elemental energy.

    As the ball grew bigger and bigger, it took a few minutes to stop at a certain size.

    Sam opened his eyes and looked at Night Ghost who understood instantly and brought curse ghost out.

    The cursed ghost looked at the ball of energy intently and Night Ghost could feel its greed-filled emotions, with just a mere thought of approval, the ghostpletely devoured the curse.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop there though.

    He immediately started conjuring another curse and this time, the dark elemental energy ball that appeared in the air, and soon Sam¡¯s fire elemental energy started riling up.

    He activated fire elemental fusion and breathing a lot of air the surrounding spiritual energy waspletely absorbed. He is using the bloodline art of Golden Sun crow. Therge streak of golden mes was shot at the dark energy ball and one could see that both energies are merging perfectly.

    Sam became exhausted. If it is a normal scenario, maybe he wouldn¡¯t have a need to use so much of his energy and would have been possible to use two to three bloodline arts.

    But storing a bloodline art in a curse is something unfathomable. In fact, even Hel who created the technique wouldn¡¯t have thought of using something like this.

    Using a bloodline art of such high caliber to mix with a curse? No one with a sane mind would think of that. For many people, the curse is a disgusting art while bloodline art is something noble. How could they ever think of mixing them up?

    But Sam did. The only ssification he had regarding the arts are, useful, useless, forbidden. And that is it.

    When the cursed ghost saw this curse, it became excited beyond belief. Night Ghost didn¡¯t feel such a strong reaction from any of his ghosts much less Cursed Ghost which has the least activity of them all.

    He let the cursed ghost swallow it and this time, the ghost took some time before itpletely digested it.

    After they are done, Sam then sent Night Ghost and the team to attack Leader 1 and his team while he rested inside the divine dimension. He ispletely powerless at the moment because of his two curses.

    Night Ghost directly went to the restaurant that was upied by Leader 1 and his team.

    They created an explosion on the road with a small energy crystal right outside the restaurant, which made the leader 1 alert.

    He immediately came out with his team and observed. When he noticed that Night Ghost is just ate-stage cultivator, he became confident and wanted to deal with him right away.

    But another explosion happened as Vidyut used an arrow to shoot a small liquid energy cell to shoot at the restaurant.

    Within themotion, Night Ghost immediately let the cursed ghost out and let it attack Leader 1 with the two new curses it got.

    The first curse fell on the Leader making him feel stupefied. Before he could think of what is happening, suddenly a shadow silhouette simr to his rose from the shadow and started fighting with the Leader 1.

    This is one of the curses that cause the shadow counterpart from the shadow world to emerge and make a fight with the owner.

    It is not exactly something that could kill the other party, but it would inflict some decent damage and it would also be extremely time-consuming.

    There is no need for him to worry about the scenario.

    At the same time, the cursed ghostunched another attack and this time it is the Curse mixed with the bloodline art of golden sun crow.

    When Night Ghost felt the energy consumption for this attack he was stunned.

    He is a Late-stage transcendent cultivator. One realm of cultivation was their difference in strengths.

    But even he felt a pinch from the attack, much less Sam. He now understood why Sam was so tired.

    As soon as the cursended...

    "AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH...."

    Leader 1 screamed on top of his lungs. After all, the second curse is not exactly a small thing. Even if he is a Peak stage transcendent cultivator, currently he is defenseless too. The burning sensation that would happen when his flesh was burned with the bloodline art.

    Taking this to his advantage the shadow silhouette started attacking.

    The fight between them will go on for a while and in the meantime, the rest of the team started attacking Leader 1¡¯s team.

    The battle on that side didn¡¯tst long, but leader 1¡¯s battle with his own shadow is going longer than anyone expected. It is almost like a circus freak show.

    Even when leader 1 wanted to get out of the situation, there was nothing he could do. The shadow is moving along with him.

    He couldn¡¯t sever his own shadow after all.

    So, he could only fight.

    Sam came out after the n was perfectly established and he asked Night Ghost to take of the cursed ghost once again.

    There is one more n he wanted to use and he quickly recovered with the Heavenly wine to make another curse. This time it is not a bloodline technique, Sam wanted to use a different approach.

 Chapter 1098: Carrier Curse

    Sam first created a medium that could fuse three normal direct curses. He merged three curses of pain. It didn¡¯t take much energy and Sam made three more fused curses just like that. But he didn¡¯t use the same curse of pain on it, instead, he used the curse of flesh corrosion, the curse of illusion, and the curse of slumber.

    All of them are different curses and effects different parts of the body and mind.

    After created four of these curses which are individually formed by merging three same curses, Sam once again created a different medium and merged four of these curses together.

    He didn¡¯t stop after that, he called for Five elemental King.

    "I want you to use your trump card. An attack that could use five elemental energies."

    Five elemental king was curious on why Sam wanted to use that attack, but he just nodded andplied.

    Sam instantly started curse generation and gestured the five elemental king to attack the dark energy ball.

    When the five elemental energies fused together and gathered in Five elemental King¡¯s palm, he hit the dark energy ball.

    But to his surprise, nothing happened. Only the energy and the momentum in his arm disappeared and dissolved into the dark energy ball.

    Sam called for Paras next and asked him to do the same.

    Therge ax strike disappeared as it merged with another dark ball.

    Then Vidyut came and gave his most powerful arrow strike.

    The Saber Monarch, as for Kiran and twins, Sam didn¡¯t ask them.

    Sam finally asked the night ghost to use his own attack. His attack would injure and strangle the soul which would make the body¡¯s reaction timepletely sloppy.

    After creating each curse with these attacks, Sam fused all of them together and fused the resultant curse along with the curse that he made with a fusion of basic direct curses.

    The resultant thing waspletely unbelievable. The sinister energy sent chills down everyone¡¯s spine.

    But that didn¡¯t stop there.

    Sam looked at Night Ghost who took the Cursed ghost out. It devoured the curse happily and digested within a few minutes. After that, Sam started building another curse.

    "Use the curse you just absorbed on this one."

    Night Ghost was puzzled, but he did as he was told and the attack merged with the curse.

    Sam once again started constructing a different curse and fused both of them and finally, he attached everything to an arrow.

    There is a reason why Sam used this roundabout way. If he let the cursed ghost absorb the curse, it would be able to use Night Ghost¡¯s energy and be able to utilize the curse multiple times. If it is not there, Sam would have simply merged it with the arrow direction.

    But now that Night Ghost can use it repeatedly, even though it would take a lot of energy if they attached it to different weapons, things would be different and everyone among the team would have a trump card that could help them is perilous situations.

    Sam looked at Vidyut and said.

    "Can you shoot this at Leader 1 while he is fighting the shadow or do you need any more assistance to do that?"

    Vidyut thought for a second and said.

    "A little assistance would be good. If the other party¡¯s senses are distracted for a moment, it would be a lot better."

    Sam nodded and turned to the remaining teammates, Night Ghost raised his hand and said.

    "I will do it. It would be too dangerous for the rest of them."

    Night Ghost immediately went out and his mere presence alerted Leader 1. After all, he is in a perilous situation and a Late-stage Transcendent cultivator of the Astral ne is a significant threat to him at the moment. He might even be killed.

    Night ghost closed his eyes and sent a ghost out towards Leader 1.

    Leader 1 who is actually expecting some straightforward physical attack, was surprised by the attack to the soul. His senses were blinded at little and his shadow managed to leave a wound on his body.

    Vidyut took the opportunity when Leader 1¡¯s senses are blurry and shot the arrow right at the wound. He only used neutral spiritual energy and didn¡¯t use even a hint of lightning energy. Sam specifically asked to do so.

    The arrow lodged itself and it just left a small stinging pain on his body.

    The leader pulled the arrow and threw it away. Taking this situation to their advantage, Night Ghost and Vidyut went back to their hiding ce.

    Leader 1 wanted to pursue them, but he couldn¡¯t as he was still in the battle with shadow. When team members saw that the attack didn¡¯t do anything to Leader 1, they were surprised.

    But there is no change in Sam¡¯s expression, even though they are tempted to ask what really happened, nobody did and they just stayed put.

    Soon the battle with the shadow is over and Leader 1 immediately started running out of the city. He knew that Leader 3 might have neared the city, so he has to escape.

    As soon as he came out of the city gate, he caught a glimpse of Leader 3 and his team who are approaching at an incredible speed.

    Leader 3 also saw Leader 1ing out of the city and he immediately started the pursuit.

    Leader 1 is already exhausted and the charred feeling he is experiencing in his flesh because of the curse was not gone. He is still feeling the pain. As much as he tried to escape, he was simply not fast enough and was caught by Leader 3.

    "Third, you cornered me. You leave me no other way. Even if I die, I will just drag you down with me."

    Leader 1 spat coldly and started fighting. He didn¡¯t even bother defending himself anymore and straight-up used all his trump cards to attack Leader 3.

    Leader 3¡¯s team members are all standing a bit away as they observed the battle. They are ready to swoop in and help the leader whenever it was needed. But from what they can see, Leader 1 is actually very weak. He is not even putting in any decent fight. He is fighting like a madman and that is the only reason he even managed tond any hits on Leader 3.

    Leader 3 also frowned. He could observe Leader 1¡¯s condition and understood that the other party is indeed too weak for his cultivation. There are some injuries which he saw.

    It seems like he was in a troubling fight. He was confused as to who posed such a problem to Leader 1. After all, he is sure that the branch in the city doesn¡¯t have that much power.

    But he pushed those thoughts to the back of his head and continued with the battle.

    Soon, Leader 1 copsed with his reckless fighting and dropped down with no energy. Leader 3 is also panting as he sat on a rock nearby.

    "First, why did you push it this far. You know I don¡¯t have any thoughts about taking over the ck Curtain, why did you start all this?"

    Leader 1 took a deep breath and spoke in a painful and exhausted tone.

    "What do you mean by that, you bastard? You are the one who started it and as for taking over ck Curtain. It is mine, and mine alone whether you want to or not, you don¡¯t have any right to take over it."

    As he spoke, his final breath left his body while his eyes were still staring at Leader 3 with hate and envy.

    Leader 3 leaned forward to close those eyes. But at this moment, he suddenly felt something is wrong as a small wisp of energy came from leader 1 and hit his chest.

    But he didn¡¯t feel anything to his chest and closed his eyes to check his body. While he is doing so, he felt that something is wrong as a different kind of energy is being swelling up inside.

    The curses are taking effect.

    When Sam made Vidyut shoot the arrow, he didn¡¯t directly attack the curse so that the victim would be affected, the curse was modified a bit and it is a carrier type curse.

    That means, the victim who got hit by the curse is not the one going to be affected, rather he would act as a carrier, and based on the construction of the curse, the curse will take effect.

    For example, currently, Leader 1 is a carrier of the curse, and Leader 3 is the victim and the means of the curse transfer is the death of the carrier. The killer will be subjected to the curse.

    And the means of transfer can be set ording to the creator¡¯s requirements. They can set a specific amount of damage received by the carrier, a certain amount of spiritual energy level of the carrier, a certain level of pain experienced by the carrier, and so on and so forth. Many types of means can be employed and Sam used death as the means.

    Now, Leader 3, the true victim is being targeted by the curse¡¯s true might.

 Chapter 1099: Aftermath

    Leader 3 felt like his brain is going numb, he couldn¡¯t think clearly for a second and before he knew it, he started feeling dizzy and fell on the ground directly.

    The subordinates of his immediately ran over trying to check up on him. But when they came near, all they could see is him being unconscious, with facial expressions full of pain and suffering. He is muttering something as if he is dreaming.

    When they saw all these symptoms they felt puzzled and lost. They thought that he fainted because of the exhaustion or some hidden injury, but no matter how much they examined they couldn¡¯t see anything.

    After all, none of them are healers. But if they were, they would have noticed that the flesh of their leader is slowly being corroded from inside out.

    One of them immediately carried the Leader on the back and started running towards the city with the rest of them following. They even discarded the Leader 1¡¯s dead body and the spatial ring as if it is not their business.

    As soon as they left, Sam and the team came and picked up the spatial ring. Night Ghost swallowed the soul while Tamas took the body.

    Inside the spatial ring, Sam saw a small piece of metal which seemed to be a part of a de¡¯s edge.

    He could feel that it is special and that also fits the description of the heirloom of the ck curtain, being a dagger.

    This is one of the dagger pieces.

    He stored those away and the team slowly followed the group of leader 3 towards the city.

    Half way there, the group suddenly stopped.

    They ced Leader 3 on the ground trying to see what happened to him.

    Leader 3 is spasming uncontrobly. He is still in the slumber and his energy ispletely out of order as he experienced worst of his nightmares through the curse of illusion and the curse of pain intensified the pain caused by the curse of flesh corrosion.

    While he is experiencing all of this, suddenly the chest of the Leader cracked open and blood started seeping out. The subordinates hurriedly removed the robes to see what happened and all they can see are two shes diagonally on the chest. They are extremely clean as if they were cut of sharp des.

    But that is what confused the subordinates the most, because as they checked Leader 3 before, they didn¡¯t find anything wrong with the other party¡¯s body.

    Before they could think of what to do, five elemental energies attacked the Leader followed by a long and dense electric shock. The soul attack of Night Ghost already attacked him but the effects are not visible to the naked eyes.

    The subordinates don¡¯t know what to do, but they are sure that things are extremely troublesome and before they knew it, Leader 3 died.

    The curse of slumber, illusions and finally Night Ghost¡¯s attack made it impossible for Leader 3 to even resist and the rest of the attacks caused by the curse made it impossible for him to survive.

    The subordinates were horrified by this development.

    Before they could evene out of the shock, Sam¡¯s team already arrived and a battle started.

    Night Ghost sneaked an attack on one of the people while Vidyut shot an arrow at another one.

    Both used the stored curses once again and two people died in the simr way the Leader 3 died.

    Now the rest of the group are easy to deal with. After killing everyone, Sam found the second fragment of the heirloom and left the bodies like that. The city is not far away and people are bound it see it sooner orter.

    Unlike before, Sam only let Night Ghost take the souls of the people and Tamas only got the bodies of the subordinates. The body of the leader was left there for people to see.

    By the next day, the upper echelon of the city already came to know that Leader 3 or ck Curtain died. His subordinates are nowhere to be seen and Leader 1 also disappeared.

    The news shook the remaining four ck curtain leaders to the core.

    They don¡¯t know how the situation turned out this way. Some of them even went to the funeral conducted by the remaining son of Leader 3 just to make sure. They wanted to see the body and confirm it.

    And after confirming it, their shock only doubled. The body is in such a tragic state. The flesh is corroding slowly and the muscles are all charred from outside, the two cleaves on the front of the chest are also a shock.

    They immediately went back to their headquarters to make ns.

    Now that leader 3 died and the situation of Leader 1 is unknown, they knew that chaos would reign supreme once again within the ck Curtain.

    From the injuries on Leader 3¡¯s body, they could confirm that a third party is involved in the battle. They knew Leader 1¡¯s abilities, so they are sure that Leader 3 was not killed by leader 1 himself.

    They spected that leader 1 must have paid arge price to get someone to kill Leader 3.

    But where did he go? No one knows.

    The most nervous of all is actually leader 2. He joined hands with leader 3 after Leader 1 made a deal with leader 4 to suppress him. Now that leader 3 is gone, he would be forced to deal with leader 4 all by himself and he doesn¡¯t have any confidence in doing so. Particrly with his new expansion of the territory, things wouldn¡¯t be easy for him to start a war.

    And leader 3¡¯s son is also in a pickle. The trusted subordinates of his father advised him to collect as many resources as possible and leave the ce immediately.

    They knew that the rest of the leaders will now look at Leader 3¡¯s territory like a big fat piece of meat ready to be eaten. Every leader would want a share.

    That is a lot of territory. But at the same time, they are worried about the third party involved. The third-party which they spected as someone the leader 1 hired.

    But they couldn¡¯t bring themselves to just let this go and leave the territory to rot like that.

    So, all the leaders had some tacit understanding. They would just take over leader 3¡¯s territory and leave Leader 1¡¯s territory up for grabs for himself if he ever shows up.

    As for Leader 2 who was involved in the war, Leader 4 is not going to let it go, but Leader 3 who is also adjacent to leader 2¡¯s territory is also nning to take a bit over. They all knew that at least one more leader is going to die.

    But only Sam knew that more than one is going to die.

    After all, starting the conflict is the harder part, since the conflict already started escting is a piece of cake. This might take two more months to reach the final stages, but that doesn¡¯t mean it wouldn¡¯t be worth it.

    From the looks of it, ck Curtain is the most troublesome of all, so it would be easy for them after this was done.

    And Sam didn¡¯t stop there. Someone anonymously tipped Phoenix tail sect about the ck Curtain who made a move on their future hope and their current situation.

    So, now they are going to join in the fun.

    Sam created chaos as time passed. Every day they arrived at one of the ck curtain¡¯s locations and just did things to escte the situation more and more as the war intensified.

    Nobody wanted to back down and even the Phoenix Tail sect is too involved and embroiled in the war.

    And Sam took the chance to contact the rival of the Phoenix Tail sect and made a deal with them. All that he has to say is that they have some bad blood and want revenge. They would create chaos while they take over the Phoenix Tail sect¡¯s territory.

    Everything went well.

    And two and a half monthster. The final battles took ce between leaders and Sam collected one fragment after another. In every battle, one leader disappeared while the other one died.

    And finally, only leader 4 remained and he managed to make peace with the Phoenix tail sect from his side.

    He even offered to help them with the war against their rivals.

    But after he promised, Leader 4 mysteriously disappeared, never to be seen again.

    Only at that moment did Sam finally selected the ck Curtain in the list.

    He noticed that all the leaders have a statue of Hel in theirirs, so Sam performed the ritual from the Leader 4¡¯sir after they dealt with him to talk to Hel.

    "How are you doing, Hel?"

    "This is awfully fast."

    Hel said calmly.

    "Not really, It has been a few months. How clever of you to include an organization like ck Curtain in this game. That is as big as six organizationsbined."

    "But Leader is still a Peak stage Transcendent cultivator."

    "Anyway, thanks for the Myriad Curse guide. It is really good. It really helped me in dealing with your organization."

    Hel was dumbfounded.

    "Okay, that is all I wanted to say. So, goodbye."

    With that, Sam destroyed the statue and left.

 Chapter 1100: Future Plans

    For the two weeks, Sam focused on the Phoenix tail sect and got their heirloom after finishing them off.

    By now two organizations are over in twelve and the remaining organizations are all smaller than the ck Curtain for sure.

    And with the newfound usage of curses and all the toys he had, any surprise could easily be tackled.

    They wouldn¡¯t have much trouble dealing with them.

    But there is no use in finishing them faster actually. Because, after they finish with this, they would be facing thest of the organizations. Phase four organizations.

    Phase four organizations are a bit tricky.

    There are only twelve of them in total and they can be further divided into four groups of three.

    The first group only has Initial stage Consummate cultivators of Astral ne and thenes the second group with Middle Stage Consummate cultivators of Astral ne, the third group has Late-stage Consummate cultivators of Astral ne and finally the fourth group with Peak stage Consummate cultivators of Astral ne.

    With each group only having three organizations each, the situation would be tough for the yers to handle.

    Each organization has several branches under them that worship different gods, but they only have one heirloom each. The value of heirlooms is too high and the resources they would get for that are too many.

    Even for Sam with his team, the organizations are too big and powerful. For every organization, ,multiple yers are needed to fight and there is a great chance that yers would die in the process.

    By the end of it all, only two to three yers might live.

    So, acting alone would be a bit reckless, so he needs to wait for the rest of the yers to finish up Phase three and it might take a year or two.

    In this time, Sam has to make ns to not waste any time. Hisst expansion went great and everything is running smoothly. He can start the next expansion.

    This time, Sam wants to involve himself in the expansion this time and eliminate every problem. He also wants to expand the education department under the organization and strengthen it.

    As he progressed in this game and dealt with organization, he realized some things. The gods are powerful and mighty, generally, there shouldn¡¯t be any need for them to care about these people and they really don¡¯t.

    But these people worship him so much and the gods are also reluctant to lose these people even though they don¡¯t care about their well-being.

    From all the memories he collected from various forces he also learned that the gods really did support the growth of these organizations and their strengths even though they don¡¯t care. This piqued his curiosity and he believed that there is a need or at least a use for gods with these people.

    If he wants to contend with the gods, he might need some people like this. And with the number of organizations under the gods, he has seen. He was sure that his organization is not big enough.

    Along with that, there is something else Sam was confused about.

    For example, the feathered race which was the subordinate race of Goddess Nike, used to send people outside as soon as they broken through to a certain cultivation range.

    Where did all these people go? That was one of the things that bugged him a lot.

    During his break time, while challenging people here and there, he came across some organizations that are under Nike¡¯s control. But he didn¡¯t see a single feathered race cultivator. They don¡¯t even know the existence of a feathered race subordinate organization that worships Nike.

    Simrly, he also came across different organizations that sent their cultivators to their god. They all have one thing inmon. The people that were selected were selected to be the soldiers for the god.

    If so, where did these soldiers go? What are they fighting against? Where are they stationed? He didn¡¯t even see any form of the battlefield or never even heard of something like that.

    There are many things that are bothering him.

    After all, he nearing the fourth phase of organizations and they are the pinnacle of Astral ne cultivation. After that, the ne of cultivation ispletely on a different level. The disparity is toorge.

    He doesn¡¯t know what the next part of the game would be but he is sure that they woulde across that next ne cultivators.

    That ne of cultivation is closely rted to the gods. The Divine ne of cultivation.

    They woulde close to the immortals and gods. So, Sam needs to understand their situation better before entering that area.

    But the information is scarce and impossible to attain at the moment.

    So, he has to work with whatever he has at hand. For that reason, he decided to focus on the development of the force. He wants to strengthen the organization and increase the cultivation limit of the core power.

    Currently, the Dusk Organization has a strength of a middle-level Phase two organization without including its own team.

    In these two years, he needs to build a solid foundation so that this could increase. After he was done with the organization, the team wouldn¡¯t have much to do with Sam and would join the organization increasing its level. The next five years after the organizations are done, the level of the organization should reach phase four, no matter what.

    He took a week off after dealing with the Phoenix tail sect and started setting up a n.

    He thought of many things. Even though it might take a long time for this whole process to be over, it is not exactly a long time when the work done needs to be considered. He also needs to leave a strong next generation.

    From what he can see the gods cannote down whenever they wanted, so the next generation of leaders must be properly trained so that there wouldn¡¯t be any mishaps with the organization after he was gone.

    So, after the n, he started dealing with the remaining organizations in phase three while giving some orders to the administrators of the organization.

    He wanted them to finish tasks that are easy but extremely time taking.

    He ordered them to pick kids who just awakened. He wanted Watt to give some basic lessons for them, but he was stunned when he learned that Watt has already left the home he was staying in. He resumed his journey a long time ago.

    Sam sighed, it seems like he was too disconnected from what is happening back at home.

    But he bounced back instantly and just sent orders.

    He ordered to construct academies on every they are on. Theary academies will only train people until they reached the Mortal ne Pre-transcendent stage and there would be one Interary academy for every fourary academies. In that academy, the people will only be trained until they reach the Mortal ne Consummate stage.

    For every realm with multiple Interary academies, there would be one Supreme academy which would be for the Initiation stage Astral ne students.

    But there is one catch, the recruitment of the academies wouldn¡¯t be done in a normal way. For the normalary academies, anyone can directly join as long as they are within the Acolyte or Novice stage after passing the test. But within their time there, they would be checked for some requirements and if they reach those requirements, they would be selected to a special program through which they would be sent to the Interary academy after they finished their studies there.

    Even in the Interary academy, there would be two branches dividing the regr academy that would teach up to the Pre-transcendent cultivators and they would also be selected in the same way as otherary academies.

    Among the students that enter the Interary academy once again, people will be selected based on some special requirements which would then be selected the Realm Academy.

    This is the basic structure of the educational system.

    For this, Sam needs a lot of cultivation techniques that could cover the whole spectrum of things.

    But even before that, he decided to open a special academy in major cities of every the Dusk organization was in.

    A school for primary education. The school wherews and principles of natures, different elemental energies, and all kinds of basics would be taught.

    Any kind who is six years old or above can join and they can study different aspects until they reached Acolyte or some even Novice stage.

    After the kids awakened, they would be taught how to use energy efficiently. They would be tested there and would be directly sent to theary academy if they are qualified.

    When the administrators saw the ns they were stunned. They didn¡¯t know why Sam suddenly put such an expansion n forward. This is going to be quite difficult to do. But Sam didn¡¯t care. He made up his mind and used all the resources to them. Currently, his main source of ie is not even the profits from the organization. In fact, he didn¡¯t even collect profits for a long time.

    His current ie sources are the organizations he is constantly destroying one by one.

    So, he mobilized all the funds he has in profits and started constructing academies.

    All the excess staff he had from the Deste and the Feathered are appointed as the temporary administrators and supervisors for the construction of the academies.

 Chapter 1101: Preparations

    Sam¡¯s ns didn¡¯t just stop there. While they are dealing with the organizations and the construction of the institutions are happening, he busied himself with one more thing.

    Making new materials for the educational institutes.

    But before he made the materials, he worked a few machines. The first one is a copier cum printer. He needs books for all the schools and he cannot copy all of them by hand and he would need hundreds of copies for all the schools he is establishing. So, he decided to make the machine and print all the textbooks regarding basic sciences.

    Not only that he also decided to print the cultivation techniques. Not just the cultivation techniques that he has on the divine dimension, but he fished through all the memories of the souls he extracted until now.

    After all, every person memories their cultivation techniques and that information would also be extracted from their soul. Most of the time Sam ignored it. But he didn¡¯t do so from now.

    Every person they killed in that process from then on would have their memory extracted and their cultivation technique would be copied and printed into hundreds of copies before they will be distributed to all the academies that he is going to establish based on their level.

    The second thing in the itinerary is a recording device that could be used to record things in a three-dimensional way and could project it using holographic technology. Along with that another machine that could copy the holographic projections and recordings from one disy device to another disy device and make many copies.

    He would be using these things to create three-dimensional lessons that could be taught to the students. All kinds of lessons from the basic sciences, energy cirction, efficient energy usage, cirction for battle techniques, cirction for cultivation techniques, Sam wants to create three-dimensional holographic lessons for everything that would be taught in his academies.

    For that, he would be using the simtion function in the second-floor divine dimension to simte all the battles he has been in and witnessed and then capture all of them with the holographic recording device.

    Along with that he went through the cultivation manuals and started simting the body of the cultivator and simte the cultivation technique¡¯s energy cirction and battle techniques¡¯ energy cirction along with the meridianworks and other factors.

    He even let his body strengthening technique be made from ancient yoga and simted it.

    Along with that, he simted formation lessons with different energy circtions and core principles on how the energyworks work, inscription lessons, the forging lessons.

    How to take advantage of the environment in the battles. Everything he knew about battles was recorded.

    But he must say that he had the hardest time with the cultivation techniques and battle techniques.

    He has to read each cultivation technique, understand it, and simte the meridianworks and circtions and he also needs to make the images of the cirction process one by one. He needs to make one model with a normal body, the second one with only an energywork, and the third one with the energywork and the body without the skin so that they could ovep.

    The same for the battle techniques. He decided topletely eliminate the spell casting and hand signs.

    He cracked every battle technique he came across, whether they are of divine dimension or that of the techniques he came across directly from the cultivators, he simted each one of them and recorded everything.

    In fact, he even bought off the cultivation techniques off of his teammates along with their battle techniques, except for their absolute trump cards.

    He knew that these things would attract some greedy eyes, but that doesn¡¯t matter for now.

    Currently, the priority is the primary education schools, the construction and design ns for theary and the subsequent academies areplicated and they are going to be custom made based on the environment of the and the realm.

    He gave the job to the Architecture and formation departments toe up with a proper n.

    As for the jobs of being administrators, he is going to give them to the personal force he raised by himself.

    The same force that underwent his personal training and broke through to the Astral ne.

    The academic expansion n wouldn¡¯t go at the same pace in every area. They are obviously going to start the n in their own territory first and within this territory, Sam and his subordinates have aplete grasp of the situation and Sam has this loyal force.

    He is going to make them the principals of theary and subsequent academies. In that way, they can still fend off for themselves and he can be sure that the techniques and study materials are in good hands.

    Anyway, he already decided to create a self-destruct mechanism in all holographic study material. He decided to ce many restrictions that would make the material only useful within the academy premises and that too under some specific conditions. For example, the projection can only be made when it was ced within a certain formation and the formation would be integrated with a certain room.

    And neither the room nor the device would be useful without the other.

    If anyone tries to study it, he would make it so that they would explode.

    He wouldn¡¯t let others steal his technology. It is too much of a trouble at the moment.

    When the time is right and his organization has enough power with at least a bunch of Astral ne Transcendent cultivators, then he would be able to rx a bit.

    After he was done with these things, Sam started another set of ns from the side. It is about the beast squads. Although Dusk organization has a lot of squads and troops who use beasts as mounts and fighting partners, they are still far and few.

    He wants to make it a general thing for every cultivator and student from the organization to select a beast and for their achievements and potential they would be awarded a different beast as well.

    They would grow with it, take care of it and work with it at all times.

    He started creating a holographic library of the beasts and their abilities. Since the academy and the organization are expanding they would be having an internalwork within for them.

    So, the students can consult experts on the beasts look through the holographic library, and decide on what beast they should raise and how to feed it, how to increase its growth to the maximum.

    As he did these things, he also passed orders. He wants to take in a few students. Not disciple, just some students that he could raise.

    It is not time for him to raise a personal disciple yet. He decided to only raise a few disciples after he crossed this Astral ne cultivation.

    Until then, he would take students.

    He put the organization up for the task to search for ten students.

    The requirements for their selection are pretty strict andx at the same time. Because, Sam wanted to look for people¡¯s talents, constitutions, bloodlines, and special spiritual cores.

    He wants ten of them and he also wants people that are just awakened.

    As Sam did all of these things a year passed quickly and they are done with the Phase 3 organization. Along with that Sam achieved a breakthrough to the Peak stage Pre-transcendent realm and this time, the shadow mouse bloodline upgraded something Sam never expected.

    It upgraded his shadow.

    He is already familiar with one of the shadow mouse¡¯s bloodline arts. He actually used that before.

    The Shadow transference used the user¡¯s shadow as an ess point into the shadow world and moving him across and throws him out at apletely different point. It is a great escape technique and if one has enough control, it is a great technique for assassinating and transporting.

    If one can reach a high enough level, they would be able to use the technique and travel through the shadow world, identify the shadow of the person they want to target and use that shadow as the exit point ande out, assassinate and use the same shadow as the door and travel the same path back to the initial location.

    It is that precise.

    The second ability is an ability that is good for closebat, scouting, and assassination as well.

    It used the shadow elemental fusion and he can use his own shadow as armor which will take the form he wants and envelop his body in his elemental fusion form.

    It is a great ability. In fact, only when shadow mice are strong enough to use this ability do they have anybat effectiveness.

    But it is hard for them to survive without anybat ability up until this point.

    Currently, Sam has ten shadow mice that are on the same level as him and with this breakthrough, more than half of them can use this technique. Now along with the scouting and information gathering, they would also be able to do assassinations.

 Chapter 1102: Students

    The first thing Sam did after finishing the Phase three organizations is to try and find where the rest of the yers are.

    It took a whole week to do that and he went to meet Arkiv.

    "You came to me on your own initiative? Is something wrong?" This Arkiv¡¯s greeting as soon as they met.

    "I am done with the Third Phase organizations of my share. How much longer would it take for you to do it?"

    Arkiv was stunned and hurriedly opened the list on the wrist screen.

    He went through the list rapidly and cursed loudly.

    "Fuck. Just when I thought, you slowed down. What is wrong with you, man?"

    Sam didn¡¯t mind this outburst and just smiled.

    "Don¡¯t overreact alright. I need to talk to you about this."

    "Okay, tell me."

    "I asked, how long would it take for you and the rest of the yers to finish all this?"

    Arkiv roughly calcted a bit and said.

    "Maybe a year and a half or it might even take two years."

    Sam thought for a moment and nodded.

    "It is okay then. I have a deal for, Noah and Akhil. In the next year and a half you will be meeting them once or twice, so discuss it with them. If you agree to meet me,e to the capital city of the first realm of the three puppet realms."

    "What is the deal?"

    "As you know, the fourth phase organizations are tough to deal with. There are also divided into four groups based on the cultivation of the heads of these organizations.

    They are going to be difficult to deal with.

    Even the Puppet which is the lowest of the organizations in Phase four is something difficult to deal with.

    So, I want to know if you guys want to cooperate.

    It is not that I cannot deal with them, but it would be easier and less dangerous for you guys to not tackle them directly.

    In fact, even if we don¡¯t make an alliance like this, we would still be hard-pressed to deal with them and since we have limited choices, we wouldn¡¯t be able to avoid colliding with each other.

    And the organizations from now are free for all. All the fourth-phase organizations are worshiping multiple gods, so there are no restrictions ced on them for the yers. They could deal with any one of them.

    It is inevitable to cross one another while dealing with the organizations.

    We would sh and we would also sh with the organization. There is a good chance that there would be casualties this time.

    We would be safer if we have an alliance."

    Arkiv thought for a moment and said.

    "I will try and see. But if we make an alliance with you, your contribution will be higher and your share will also be higher. And I highly doubt that you would be satisfied with taking an equal share with us as you have such arge organization to feed."

    Sam didn¡¯t know what to say. It is indeed the case. He needs a lot of resources. Way too many, in fact. And he is sure that he would be the one making the highest contributions of them all. So there is a need to draw the line.

    But it would be hard to decide who gets what at the moment.

    "We can discuss it at that time. Just think about it for now and keep it on the down-low, don¡¯t let the other yers know. And if I am not wrong, they would probably ask you guys for an alliance as well. After all, it has always been me versus everybody else. And if they have the same ns as before, tell them this time, I wouldn¡¯t be holding back."

    With that Sam left the ce and went back to deste.

    In the past eight months, the organization managed to bring the ten students he requested. They are currently waiting for him on the deste.

    First, he checked the reports on the progress of the construction of the Primary schools.

    More than half of the schools are finished with the basic structural construction while the rest of them are done with the foundation.

    After going through the report, Sam went to meet with the ten students he got.

    Out of ten, four of them are girls and the rest are boys.

    He went through their profiles and was surprised to see the constitutions. With howrge their range of search it is a little surprise for them to gather ten people with different constitutions and spiritual cores.

    The first candidate¡¯s name is Ratri. A girl. She looked haggard, to say the least. She just awakened a year ago, but she is still in the Initiation stage without any progress. The basic cultivation is not working for her and she has a different core. Even though the team couldn¡¯t identify what her core is, they believed that she is especially based on the events that came across surrounding her.

    During her awakening when the initial surge of spiritual energy touched the surroundings, all the grass and vegetation started corroding. It is not even simple withering and dying it, they became grey while still retaining their original shape and after touching, they simply disintegrated into powder and disappearedpletely after touching.

    Many people and even her parents believed that she was cursed. Whenever she tried to feel a bit of spiritual energy, whatever she touched cracked and turned grey making it disintegrated into powder.

    What surprised Sam, even more, is that she belonged to the Deste. She belonged to a vige and they abandoned her when they saw her destroying everything.

    When the people from the Dusk organization found her, she was actually sitting in the middle of a grey patch of soil within the forest with nothing in the surroundings, from what they saw even the patch of soil turned a bit different and didn¡¯t have the same consistency of the soil in the surroundings.

    They even brought some soil with them.

    When Sam looked at her with scrutinizing gaze, she became nervous. Since the time of awakening, she was having a hard time. It is really surprising for her to even live in the wilderness for such a long time without dying with her current strength.

    Sam extended his hand to ce it on her head, she flinched and almost tripped backward. But all of a sudden she felt like something held her from falling and pushing her forwards. But when she turned back nothing was there. It was Sam who used the wind to stop her fall. He ced his hand on her head and used observation ability.

    Even though there is a method to identify the core, it is limited. People cannot directly see the core even with their spiritual sense. Generally, cores are identified with the nature of the energy it is emitting, the description of the cultivator who can see the core and all the other factors and reactions of the energy.

    But Sam can see it with his observation ability.

    When he observed the spiritual core, he could see dark elemental energy with a grey hue.

    He then took out the grey soil and tested it for a minute, before he picked up some items like rocks, branches, and leaves all of the lowest quality before cing them in front of her.

    "Channel your energy into them."

    She hesitated a bit, but she did it anyway.

    Sam saw as all the items turned into grey dust and almost blew away with the wind, but he controlled the wind and collected them all to examine separately.

    He was surprised again. All the different things are turning into the same grey dust. There is nothing special in any of them.

    He thought of something and looked at her, he felt like there is some change in her.

    Sam took out some low-quality spiritual herbs of different elements and asked her to do the same with them.

    When she used her energy on different elemental herbs, it took a long time for her to destroy them. Initially, she became exhausted, but as the herbs started disintegrating into grey dust, the energy in her increased. Sam could clearly sense it.

    He immediately understood what her spiritual core is.

    It is a variant spiritual core of dark elemental energy. Just like how shadow mice have variant cores with shadow energy, this core is of devouring energy.

    The energy of this core has one simple property, it would devour any other energy and try to absorb it for its own leaving only some grey particle dust. When devouring the dark elemental energy herb, even that grey dust was very small, it is like only the roots of the herb were turned into the grey dust and the rest of it disappeared into thin air.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but smile and took out some dark elemental fruit juice and gave it to her.

    "Drink this first. Someone wille here and will take you to your new home. You can take a bath and they will send some food. You can rx. You are my student now. We will start your sses tomorrow."

 Chapter 1103: Students II

    Sam called for an attendant who is at the gate of the ground they are in and said.

    "Bring her to one of the high level rooms with decent defenses in the school dorms."

    The attendant nodded and respectfully took her away. Now that Ratri is the direct student of Sam, her status within the city and the whole of the dusk organization is something that nobody could fathom. Maybe only Sam¡¯s three friends would be of higher status than them and the rest of the organization ispletely below them.

    Sam them focused his attention on the next person in the list.

    A feathered race boy. But it seemed like he is a bit different from normal feathered race member. His wings are a bit different than normal. His name is Mani.

    Sam looked through his profile. His situation is not as bad as Ratri¡¯s, but his parents and the rest of the tribe don¡¯t know what to do with him at all. From the report, he seemed to have activated metal elemental affinity which is not bad for them, but seemed to have a problem. Because as soon as he started releasing energy, instead of conjuring metal on his skin, he is attracting metal towards him.

    Sam could easily guess, what the problem is and he is sure that it is not even a problem at all. He has a special constitution called Maic Divine Body.

    It gives an ability to control maism. His whole body is like a giant ma and more spiritual energy he uses, the more powerful the attraction of the ma it. A person who has this body needs a delicate control over their energy. Otherwise, they would be brining harm to themselves rather than their enemies.

    Sam checked the purity of the constitution and then checked the wings of the boy. The wings seemed to have undergone a mutation due to the constitution activation. The feathers of the wings looked like they are made of metal, even for the touch they felt the same way.

    Sam was really impressed and intrigued by this constitution. He is really looking forward what this boy can achieve.

    Sam gave him some fruit juice too and called for another attendant before specifying what kind of room the boy should be in and moved to the next person on the list.

    Arvi, another girl. She had blonde hair and one of the most beautiful pair of eyes Sam has ever seen. But when he saw those eyes, he couldn¡¯t help but a feel a bit sad. She has most lifeless eyes he has ever seen. There is no life, no joy, no innocence. She looked like she was lost and abandoned. It is almost like she lost all hope on the world and the life.

    Sam knew those eyes, he has seen them before. In a mirror. He extended his hand, but Arvi flinched and stepped back hurriedly. She tripped and fell and Sam once again caught her with the wind energy and let her stand.

    "No problem. I won¡¯t do anything. Nothing is going to happen to you. Do you feel any pain anywhere?"

    He spoke in an extremely gentle way and carefully caressed her hand. She looked at him, but she still didn¡¯t speak.

    Sam used the observation ability to check up on her. He didn¡¯t check for constitutions and cores, rather he checked her physical body to see if he was okay and what he saw made his bloodboil for a second.

    He ground his teeth as he tried his best to control his anger.

    He shook his head for a second and called for the attendant.

    "Bring the person who brought her here, I want him to be here in five minutes."

    Then he proceeded to check for the constitution and the body. Sam was surprised once again. This is a body with light elemental affinity. Not just in terms of constitution but also the spiritual core.

    She has the partial fusion body.

    As long as he injects the elemental energy into her body, she would be having partial elemental fusion. For her,prehending elemental fusion would be easy.

    Looking at her shivering body when he held her hand, Sam felt like someone is gripping his throat. Unwanted memories are rushing back.

    He simply made her fall asleep and called for a female attendant from the orphanage.

    "Bathe her cleanly. Make a female healer erase any traces of filth that were left on her body and make her sleep in a room with these requirements."

    Sam gave her a scroll and continued.

    "Give this to an attendant and tell them to go to the formation department to finish the room instantly. I don¡¯t want any dy. Do you understand?"

    Sam¡¯s voice is a bit cold and that made the attendant feel a bit afraid, but she nodded her head and carefully took the girl back.

    Looking at the scene the rest of the kids are feeling a bit afraid and tense.

    Sam calmly said. "There is nothing to be afraid, she is a bit sick and I am sending her to get treatment. Now, Habi,e forward."

    This time it is a boy and he Is alright. He didn¡¯t show any weird signs like the other three. He is also a bit cheerful.

    "You are from the city?"

    Sam asked with a surprise. He didn¡¯t expect that there would be this many people with special abilities in deste and one of them is even from the city.

    "Yes, Sir. I have seen you so many times." He said with a smile and his eyes are full admiration and Sam smiled. He felt a little refreshed and asked.

    "So, what is your speciality?"

    "I don¡¯t know exactly what it is, but my teacher said that my spiritual energy is too sharp and I might have affinity for using des. Even my punches cut like des."

    He said and threw a stone upwards and punched it lightly.

    The stone was sliced into two as the spiritual energy took the form of a de.

    Sam checked his body and was surprised. The core is normal. It is just a pure warrior core. But his meridianwork is a bit different. Some of his meridians are clogged. But that didn¡¯t give him a problem, instead it gave him an advantage, depending on how one uses it. His energy cirction was forced to go in a special way due to the clogged meridians which makes the energy sharp when it was finally out.

    "Indeed, you have an affinity with des."

    Sam said with a smile and asked.

    "So, what would you want to learn? Sword? Saber? Dagger?"

    "I want to learn them all."

    Sam raised an eyebrow and asked.

    "Really? That would be difficult you know?"

    "Yes, my mom said so too. But I will definitely learn all of them."

    Sam rubbed his head and sent him to his room.

    Then he turned towards the remaining people. Two more girls and the rest of them are boys.

    One of the girls is wearing a special seal on her body which makes her unable to use spiritual energy. Sam looked at her and said.

    "So you are Rin. Can I remove that seal?"

    "It will hurt me."

    She said with a flustered expression.

    "I will be careful don¡¯t worry, I am here. So, nothing will hurt you."

    She nodded lightly and let Sam take the seal off.

    As soon as he took off the seal, she gave out a pain expression. Sam ced his hand on her head and checked used the observation and he immediately understood what is wrong with her.

    She has two different conditions at the same time. Her body is of Ice elemental energy. She has a constitution. The Frost Constitution and the core is of fire elemental energy. The two conflicting energies are affecting her.

    Sam thought for a moment and changed the formation on the seal. The conflict stopped and she felt relieved.

    "Now try to use the spiritual energy."

    She did. It didn¡¯t hurt, but she couldn¡¯t make energy full move out of her body.

    "Your body has an affinity with ice elemental energy. If you manage to cultivate ice elemental energy, you would be able to be a good Ice elemental Warrior-mage. But your spiritual core is of fire elemental energy. This is challenging, but I think we can make it beneficial to you. We will meet tomorrow, today just rx and roam around the city if you want."

    Sam sent her away and moved to the next girl.

    Madhu; she is a half-elf.

    Sam observed her and the situation is quite direct. She has a wood elemental affinity like any normal half-elf. But her affinity is too high and her healing ability is off the charts even for her cultivation level. Sam cut her arm a little and it actually healed back just with some spiritual energy cirction.

    The Healing Wood Constitution.

    He sent her to a special room and by now the person who brought Arvi arrived.

 Chapter 1104: Students III

    Sam looked at the guy who just came and asked.

    "Are you the only one who brought Arvi here?"

    "No, Sir. There are a bunch of people who came with me. We were sent in teams."

    "So, how was she when you guys found her?" That guy became a bit confused and asked.

    "I don¡¯t understand, Sir."

    "How was her mental state, when you took her?"

    "She is silent and lifeless sir."

    "Did you force her toe here? Did she resist?"

    "No Sir. Actually, we didn¡¯t find her by ourselves. After we got the order, we sent news to different city lords to find people with special abilities before going to search by ourselves. When we arrived at a particr city, the city lord gave her to us. He said that he found her in slums and she was resting after healing. We took her back. Pretty much most of the journey, she just kept on sleeping or stayed silent."

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "Call for the rest of the team. Tell them toe here as fast as possible." After that, he turned back to examining the new students.

    Now, all that left are four boys and one of them is a dwarf. His name is Rangit and he has a special body constitution.

    Earthen Fire constitution. The constitution of fire and earth elementsbined. Even though it is quitemonpared to the rest, it is actually a great constitution for a dwarf who is a natural-born artisan.

    He would be a great golem or puppet maker if he tries. After all. Puppets are not just made by metals and not all stones and rocks are weaker than metals. And his fire can even make use of stones just like metals. He can melt them and solidify them again and again.

    He doesn¡¯t have any problems at home and he is a decent kid. In fact, his parents were exchange students that came from the Banished Realm.

    The next boy, Bran.

    He is a Half-Barbarian.

    When Sam checked his body, he was surprised. His muscle structure is a lot different than a normal barbarian. As we already know, that barbarians are offspring of some high-level demons and it seems like Bran managed to embrace the demonic side a bit more. At least in biological terms.

    His body constitution is called the Berserker Body constitution. He will be Warrior who can burn his blood to increase his strength exponentially for a short time.

    Sam sent him away to his room.

    Now only two boys are left. One of them is actually a Dragon Hawk tribe kid. Sam was surprised when he saw this.

    He checked his body and bloodline and he was even more surprised. The bloodline purity is off the charts. The merger of the Dragon Hawk bloodline with the rest of the body is as stable as Sam¡¯s own merger with his bloodlines.

    After reading the report he understood how this came to happen. This guy is offspring one of the Dragon hawk tribe members that followed Sam for conquering of the Unconquered Beast realm. It seems like he hunted down a few descendant beasts of the dragon hawks and fed the flesh and blood to his wife while she was pregnant.

    He got this idea from the books he read from the library that Sam arranged for the regr ess of organization members. He put his blind faith in and the results really surprised him.

    His son might even be the hope for the ascendance of the Dragon Hawk tribe to the higher realms.

    Sam looked at the name once again. Vron.

    He sent the guy back to his home which is located in the city itself.

    He finally moved to thest boy.

    Sam is interested in this guy the most. He has his eyes closed. And with just one look, Sam could guess that he is a descendant of a Demi-Giant.

    He seems to be the offspring of a Demi Giant and a human. He is not as tall andrge as a Demi-Giant, but he is not exactly as small as a human. He is around six feet and four inches. Since he is only fifteen he would definitely grow. But from the looks of it, he would at most grow another four to five inches.

    Simply put, he would be like an NBA yer back on the earth but with a lot more muscle and a lot more strength.

    Sam looked at the profile and his name is Kasi.

    He looked through the anomalies and asked.

    "So, you can see the souls of people?"

    Kasi opened his eyes nodded, but he didn¡¯t speak.

    "Let me check."

    Sam ced his hand on his head and used observation ability when the examination was done. Sam was a bit confused.

    This guy has a great physique. Even without any form of constitution of special core, he would be a great warrior, his body condition is nothing short of having a constitution.

    Other than that, there is nothing special about his body. Sam couldn¡¯t identify what is so different about him.

    His spiritual core is also normal. Sam thought for a moment and let Specter out. Specter is currently in his invisible form.

    As soon as specter came, Kasi flinched and huddled in fear.

    Sam was shocked and the specter is the same. Both of them didn¡¯t expect that someone who just barely awakened a few months ago managed to see Specter when he is in this form.

    "Boss, check his brain and the sea of consciousness."

    Specter said from the side.

    Sam thought for a moment and then realized.

    Most of the time, the souls are always linked to the dark elemental energy. But Sam forgot there is another way to ess soul. And that is the mental energy.

    If one¡¯s mental energy is strong enough, then they would be able to sense the presence of the souls around them and there is a chance that there is a variation or anomaly in the brain or the sea of consciousness or even the soul of a person that made him able to see the souls around.

    There are some constitutions that allow people to do so. But Sam never even considered those constitutions because he felt it is almost impossible for someone with such a constitution to appear in front of them.

    They belong to higher realms.

    Sam ced his hand on Kasi¡¯s head and focused all the observation ability on the head to check the brain.

    After noticing some difference in the nerve structure, he used his mental energy to pry into the sea of consciousness of Kasi.

    Inside the sea of consciousness, Sam saw something that he never expected.

    Kasi¡¯s sea of consciousness is actually vaster than it should be. Maybe only a Nascent Soul cultivator would be able to rival in terms of it. This means his spiritual sense range his eye. He has an impable brain and intelligence and finally, there is something that is extremely powerful than both of them.

    A small silhouette is sitting cross-legged in the middle of the sea.

    That is the duplicate image of Kasi himself. That duplicate is staring at something.

    Sam ordered Specter to go back into the divine dimension.

    The duplicate immediately closed his eyes and when specter came out once again, the duplicate opened his eyes.

    Sam took his mental energy back and looked at Kasi with a smile.

    This is the Astral Soul constitution. Even among the special constitutions, this one stands on top of it all.

    His smile slowly turned into a wide grin.

    "Keep a peaceful mind and don¡¯t think too much. The attendant will lead you to your amodation. We will talk the rest tomorrow."

    After sending all of them away. Sam shifted his focus to the people that just arrived.

    The team that fetched Arvi.

    Sam looked at them coldly and the smile and tenderness he had while inspecting those kids werepletely gone.

    "I will be asking some questions. I want you all to answer me truthfully. If by any chance you lie. You do know what your consequences are. I will put you in a cell with mes that will burn you for a whole day and a formation that would heal you and freeze for the next day.

    The cycle repeats on for a month and you wouldn¡¯t even be able to kill yourself if you want.

    So, you guys should understand the depth of the matter."

    All the members of the group gulped nervously.

    "Now, let us talk. Did any one of you force yourself on Arvi?"

    "No, Sir. No."

    Everyone immediately shook their heads.

    Even though Sam is not the actual ruler and thewmaker of the deste, there is one rule for all the Dusk organization people. If anyone ever tries to force themselves on a woman, he would be forcefully castrated and he would be thrown into a bunch of horny apes that would take them from behind.

    This rule was extremely specific and even though the punishment is vulgar, it is still written directly in ck and white.

 Chapter 1105: Students IV

    Sam looked at the group and waved his hand indicating them to get lost. But before they could get out of the area, he yelled.

    "Day after tomorrow, you guys areing with me to the ce where Arvi was found. If I find anything fishy, you know the consequences. So, stay in the city until then. No missions, no tasks and no excuses."

    With that, Sam went back to his own room.

    All the way through, he kept on thinking about how lifeless Arvi is and how much she had suffered.

    When he used the observation ability on her, he could see that she is vited and repeatedly at that. Even in that ragged state, she looked so beautiful, he could imagine how she looked when she was cheerful and happy.

    Someone forced themselves on her repeatedly and they behaved like an animal.

    Her body suffered abuse that anyone else of her age would have died of.

    Even though he doesn¡¯t concern himself too much with the situation of the western continent and the government, he is very clear to Ark about what the ruling should be like. He wanted a fair and transparent government with responsible nobles so that he doesn¡¯t have to worry about someone just pestering his branches.

    And he is particrly strict about the orphans. He doesn¡¯t want the nobles and others to take advantage of them. He even constructed the schools for them with all the facilities necessary for their life. All he asked the government to do is deliver the orphans at the doorsteps of any facility of the organization.

    From the profile he saw, Arvi is an orphan and she was not sent to the organization even though she is fifteen years old. Even though the noble reported she was from the slums, he felt like something is fishy.

    He shook his head and to put these thoughts at the back of his head for now and started making preparations for the basic sses for the students.

    Vron, who is a dragon hawk tribe member attended the schools since he was a little kid and so did Rangit who is a dwarf. So, they have an edge over the rest of the yers regarding the lessons and other things.

    He needs to make the rest of the people catch up with them.

    It is not a bad idea to let them go through the new holographic lessons first.

    Sam started preparing the formation discs for it.

    By the next day, he was already done with these lessons and he assembled them in one of the training halls within the tower.

    "From today onwards this is the ce you would be gathering in this room at sunrise. We would decide on what to do after we met here.

    Since you guys are my students, you will be getting some privileges in the city and the rest of the organization.

    You can take advantage as much as you want. No matter what line you cross. Nobody will do anything. They will be all be afraid of me.

    But there is one more thing you should keep in mind before doing anything. You should also be afraid of me. They might not do anything to you. But I will beat the crap out of you, if you ever take advantage of your status.

    Because, the status you have is not what you have earned, it was given to you. Until you have earned the status and you genuinely feel like you deserve it, then you can unt it as much as you want.

    Next, in your free time, I don¡¯t care what you do. But there is one thing I want you to be aware of. Until you are eighteen you are not allowed to have any romantic rtionship. Even after that, before youmit to the rtionship, I want you to bring your spouse to me.

    I might ept it or not. I might give you my blessing orpletely ignore it. But whatever decision you make after that, I will not stop you from doing it.

    You might think, I am being tyrannical and intruding too much into your life. But the status of being my studentes with a price and that includes the fact that many people with ulterior motives will approach you. They will entice you with romantic partners, power, priviliges, gifts, pleasures and many more.

    You should think thrice before greeting anyone. You are almost like a royal descendant. Every decision you make and every rtionship you maintain should all be seen and examined with vignce.

    Now that we got that out of our way. Today, you will be going through some basic lessons. There are special rooms constructed for these things on the new floor constructed at the academy. Take a room each and they will be your exclusive. You will go there and look at the lessons. For the next few days, you can go through them.

    Every day, you note down the doubts you might have and asked me the next day.

    But I will not be avable for the next two days. So, for now try to get through the material and note down your doubts.

    We will talk how your cultivation goes after Ie back.

    With that he gave few spatial rings with various holographic formation discs and continued.

    "There are some metal cards inside the spatial rings. They are the identity cards of you and you can show them to any shop or restaurant in the city. Go and eat, drink do whatever you want. But you have to finish the lessons I marked as today¡¯s quota in the schedules which were also in the spatial ring.

    Now, before you go. Let me reintroduce myself to you.

    My name Sam. I was born in a remote vige named Lava rock vige of this continent. I started my journey when I was fifteen and moved to the starwood city, falcon cliff city and moved until I came to the capital. I was invited for some sort ofpetition at the Thunder god temple and had conflicts with the emperor Orion.

    You might have heard some stories about me. But whatever you heard, I am not as glorified as they made me out to be.

    I am a cruel guy and I built all of this on hundreds of thousands and might even be millions of lives. But one things is true. I worked for this. I learned relentlessly and found ways to utilize what I learned to my advantage. I created deadly weapons, helpful things, gadgets that could save lives, trinkets that could help the lives of the people.

    I destroyed regimes, established new ones, ughtered families, took care of orphans. I roamed around the realms unhindered by anyone facing enemies always, bigger and stronger than me. But every time I won. Because, I learned and I prepared. I got ready to face everything that came to me.

    I met with people that you cannot possibly fathom now.

    But I am telling you now. As a teacher, I would wholeheartedly teach you what you need. If I am unable to do it, I will find someone who can do that for you. I don¡¯t know if you have any responsibilities that you should definitely fulfil. Vengeance, paying back or whatever it is, I will help you achieve them and fulfill those responsibilities and much more.

    You cane to me with any problem that you might face. A problem with your parents, your home, your health, your work or anything that you could imagine.

    I wouldn¡¯t solve everything thates at your face. But I will be there to make sure you don¡¯t fail in solving that problem and I will make sure that you wouldn¡¯t give up the problem and I will teach you everything you need to face that problem head on.

    You can treat me like your teacher, parent, friend and a guardian.

    Whatever your identity is until now, whatever your identity might be in the future. You are going to be students of Sam from now on."

    With that Sam left. He just jumped off the window and took off on harbinger.

    He arrived at the city gate in no time and looked at the group waiting for him.

    With just a wave of his hand, he threw them in the Ice divine dimension and took off on harbinger. With the speed of harbinger, it only took a couple of hours to reach the city they were supposed to go.

    He let the group out and they all went to the Marquis mansion. Only Sam separated from them and went to the slums.

    Even though they are called slums, they are decent houses, it is just that they don¡¯t have too many appliances that are popr now-a-days in the continent and they don¡¯t have a bunch of defensive formations.

    He looked around and asked for information while showing Arvi¡¯s picture. But every result came out negative. Nobody has seen her. But he went deeper and deeper as he searched and he observed a sudden surprise of a woman who was shocked after seeing the picture from the side and immediately left the ce.

 Chapter 1106: Scheme

    Sam looked at the woman running away silently and took a step forward, he disappeared from the spot and reappeared in front of her a few hundred meters away.

    Looking at Sam¡¯s sudden appearance, she was stunned and fell on her back.

    She tried to stand up and run away once again.

    Sam looked at her coldly and the pressure in surrounding areas increased. It is just his spiritual energy, but that felt like she is carrying hundreds of tons on her back as she was stuck to the ground.

    Sam once again took out the picture and asked.

    "I want to know everything you know about her."

    The woman looked at Sam fearfully and hatefully as she spoke through gritted teeth.

    "Let me go."

    Sam increased the pressure on her and looked into her eyes.

    "You don¡¯t seem to understand what kind of situation you are in. I have a hundred ways to make you open your mouth. So, you better start speaking before I decide to use any of them."

    By now, many people from within a few streets surrounding them came running to see what is happening. When they saw a familiar woman being pressed against the ground, they all wondered what happened and they are also a bit hostile towards Sam.

    He didn¡¯t care and increased the pressure. The people didn¡¯t want toe forward and just started yelling.

    "Who are you?"

    "Let go of her."

    "Do you think that guard wouldn¡¯t care if something happens in the slums?"

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother with them at the start. He just let them yell at him. But as time went on it became annoying and Sam snapped his finger.

    The houses and the street in the surroundings turned into rubble in an instant and the yelling stopped immediately.

    He crouched down and looked at the woman before asking.

    "This is thest time, I am going to ask you. If you don¡¯t answer me, I will kill you and extract your soul to read the memories from it. The only reason I am giving you a chance until now is that I felt that you might be an innocent person involved in this, but from the looks of it and your friends that are trying to observe the situation from the surrounding streets are giving me a different idea."

    As soon as he spoke, he waved his hand and the wind became turbulent.

    "ARGH."

    "SHIT."

    "DAMNIT."

    All kinds of painful groans areing from the two sides of the street and many people fell out from hidden spots.

    Even though Sam broke through to Astral ne a long time ago and can dorge-scale attacks that could span for hundreds of meters, they are not useful in the fights he was in.

    Even if he couldrge-scale attacks, when facing an equal opponent, those are not useful. To hurt the opponents, he needs to focus and concentrate thatrge-scale energy into a small space.

    But when dealing with people like this who are so weak that even if he let them kill him they would be incapable of it, these attacks that could cover arge scale works pretty well.

    And with this action, the woman who is trying her best to resist speaking, broke down. She understood that Sam is too powerful for her and decided to cave in. But there is onest straw that she is clutching on. If that straw doesn¡¯te to use at this moment, she would definitely give up.

    As she was thinking, a young man wearing luxurious robes came running towards the slums with a bunch of city guards and yelled.

    "Who are you? How dare you be impudent in this city like this?"

    When Sam saw him, he frowned. From the city guards and the robes, he is definitely of higher level and as he heard the whispers of the citizens, he immediately understood who he was.

    He is the son of the Marquis.

    Sam ignored himpletely and looked at the woman.

    "Are you tell me or not?"

    She widened her eyes in disbelief. When she didn¡¯t speak, Sam just waved his hand and her head was separated from her neck. With another wave of his hand, her soul was extracted and he closed his eyes to absorb the memories.

    As soon as he saw this, Sam¡¯s eyes became colder and he turned to look at the son of Marquis who is standing a few feet away.

    When the young man looked at Sam, he felt like he was being stared at by death itself.

    He became nervous andmanded.

    "How dare you kill someone in front of me? Guards, arrest him."

    But as soon as he finished his words, the guards who were about to make a move were stered to the ground with a lot of pressure bearing on their backs and Sam disappeared from the spot before reappearing in front of the young man and caught him by his neck.

    Sam really wanted to rip his head off, right that moment, but he controlled his urge and let the shadow undead out. They ran to different sides of the slum to do something.

    Meanwhile, Sam disappeared from the spot along with the Marquis¡¯s son and reappeared in the city square. He threw the guy on the floor and sat at the edge of the city fountain.

    He waved his hand and Sky came out.

    "Go and fetch Ark here, go as fast as you can."

    Sky left instantly. The city guards who saw the young master of the city being thrown like a ragdoll wanted to deal with the criminal, but anyone who came a few feet near Sam is all being pinned down unable to move.

    Soon one of the city guards ran towards the Marquis mansion.

    Meanwhile, inside the Marquis mansion, the team that came with Sam is all sitting at a table with tea and snacks served for them.

    The team leader had a frown on his face and said.

    "Marquis, it seems like you are not getting what I say or you are deliberately ignoring it. I said I want to know the full details about the origin of the girl."

    Marquis has a ttering smile on his face as he looked at the team and said.

    "Sir, we can discuss thatter. I will ask the city guards to search around and see if they can find it. But as far as I know, she is just an orphan with no family whatsoever."

    This is the only thing the Marquis kept on repeating and stalled as the team asked questions.

    As the team leader was about lose his cool, the attendant ran inside and reported the situation of Marquis¡¯ son.

    The team leader overheard it and was shocked.

    "What did the man look like?"

    "He is a handsome young man who looked to be in his twenties. He is wearing ck all over."

    The attendant exined.

    The team leader clearly understood who it was and immediately ran towards the city square, followed by the Marquis.

    When Marquis saw his son¡¯s situation, he became extremely angry and yelled.

    "WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU? YOU..."

    *PAK*

    But before he could finish the sentence a pnded straight on his face. It is the team leader who did this.

    Sam looked at the team leader and said.

    "Call the representative over."

    The team leader ran by himself and brought back the representative of the dusk organization in two minutes.

    When the representative saw Sam, his knees felt weak and he immediately bowed with respect.

    "I am sorry, Lord. I didn¡¯t know you are arriving. Otherwise, I would have received you myself."

    Even though the small-time nobles and some people of this time, didn¡¯t remember or know of Sam¡¯s appearance, even if they knew his name, the organization members are sure to know about it. Because they don¡¯t dare to forget the big boss above him.

    Sam didn¡¯t care for his greetings and said.

    "Come forward and stand in front of me."

    The representative looked at the young master and nervously walked to the front.

    "What did I say about the situation regarding orphans."

    Sam asked in a cold voice.

    The representative immediately started sweating profusely.

    Sam didn¡¯t repeat his question and just waited. In ten minutes, the shadow appeared, and along with them are a bunch of young kids. All girls. Within the age of ten to fifteen.

    When the marquis, his son, and the representative saw this, they were stunned.

    They knew what is happening clearly and they also understood who the person currently they are dealing with.

    Sam looked at the representative and said.

    "When I started the organization, I repeatedly gave you instructions regarding the orphans and women. But you just have to go on and ignore what I said."

    "I... I..." The representative wanted to say something, but he couldn¡¯t and stuttered. Sam looked at the team leader and said.

    "I want to know whoever that is involved in this. Whether they are members of our organization, nobles,moners, government officials, I want to know every single name right now."

 Chapter 1107: Ploy

    In the city and the surroundings, the Marquis and his son are collecting little girls who are orphans, and sometimes they are even killing the parents and kidnapped the children to hide them in the slums.

    The policy of the Dusk organization for adopting the orphans was established a long long time ago and from then on, it has be rare for orphans to exist in the slums. But every day many hunters with families go into the forest and the orphans are bound to exist no matter what.

    The Marquis and his son happened to have a fetish regarding the girls between ages ten to fifteen and they kept these girls for their personal pleasures.

    They would just kill them after they cross fifteen years old and wouldn¡¯t bother with them anymore.

    This time Arvi is also some who was supposed to be killed. But from what Sam could guess, Arvi who cannot take the abuse identally used her energy which resulted in the activation of the partial fusion of her light elemental body.

    As the light element is soothing in its natural form, these scum bags must have just enjoyed her more and when they found out the dusk organization is looking for special kids and the reward is extremely high for whoever could give information on them, Marquis figured that the reward would be higher when he handed over the kid directly.

    The representatives of the organization didn¡¯t announce earlier that the kids are for Sam¡¯s students as they didn¡¯t want the desperate and greedy assholes who might fake the reports to just get a chance of getting in.

    So, these guys assumed it is nothing important and just gave her away. They indeed got a great reward that is almost as much as their whole family fortune. Now they are enjoying it.

    The woman, Sam killed at the start is actually one of the key yers of this whole scheme and she is in charge of luring the kids and taking care of them.

    She knew that there is a strict policy against anything that is harmful to the children, so she is very much afraid when Sam showed that picture and wanted to inform the rest of the group. But Sam noticed and everything blew to this.

    The Marquis, the son, and the representative are all kneeling down in front of Sam and slowly the numbers started increasing as the three of them spilled one name after another.

    There are not many people involved in the organization. The representative is actually the son of one of the executives of a park in the Duke city nearby and managed to tone this matter down with the help of his father and only a few of his close attendants are involved in the whole scheme.

    But as for the government, almost a dozen, vige heads, city lords, counts, and a bunch of other administrators are involved in the scenario.

    Sam sent shadows to various ces that were told by these three people and made each and every one of them appear here within a few hours.

    Even the executive from the Duke city came here and he also knelt beside his son as he pleaded his innocence.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care. He just waited for Ark to arrive and an hourter, Sky returned in full size as he held Ark with his talons.

    He dropped Ark and returned back to his original size. Sam let him back inside the divine dimension and looked at Ark with a frown.

    Ark looked at Sam and said.

    "Sam, I know you are stronger than me and you have more influence. But I am still the emperor of the western continent. You should at least show some respect."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply immediately and just raised his aura which put pressure on Ark who knelt on the ground.

    "Where is Ark?"

    Sam¡¯s question stunned everyone. An d the biggest shock could be seen on ¡¯Ark¡¯s¡¯ face.

    "It seems like I have been toox in my administration since I am not around much. Everyone became socent thinking that I wouldpletely ignore this ce."

    As Sam spoke, the earthen spikes appeared under ¡¯Ark¡¯ who is currentlyying t on the ground and all his limbs were pierced.

    "So, who are you? Where is Ark?"

    Sam asked the question as he walked towards the guy calmly.

    ¡¯Ark¡¯ has a horrified expression on his face as he could see Sam¡¯s devilish smirk before he cut his head off.

    Sam returned to the city after extracting the memories. He let the team he took there to deal with the Marquis and temporarily handle the government there.

    After reaching the city, Sam didn¡¯t wait there and directly went to the Thunder god temple through the space gate.

    The people in charge of monitoring the space gate were stunned by Sam¡¯s arrival.

    But as soon as he appeared there, Sam took off on the harbinger as he went to the main ind of the thunder god temple.

    When he arrived outside the temple, he was quite high profile and attracted the elders and the head of the temple.

    Sam looked at the head of the temple and smiled. It turned out to be Arthur.

    Looking at Sam, Arthur was horrified. Sam is still as young as ever. He looked to be in his mid-twenties. But Arthur looked like he was in histe thirties.

    Samnded in front of him and spoke.

    "I wondered who has the balls to try and harm my organization, it seems like you are way in over your head after Arman left this ce. You guys will never learn your lesson, do you? The only reason you managed to survive this long is because of Arman, but you are taking it for granted.

    Go and called for that Astral ne cultivator hiding inside the temple."

    Sam spoke calmly. Arthur was shocked as soon as he heard Sam¡¯s words.

    Arthur didn¡¯t even know what to say as they didn¡¯t think that they would be exposed this fast.

    Sam looked at him and smiled once again, but this time it looked a lot colder.

    The whole scenario is a chain reaction from this ce. Sam managed to deal with many of Indra¡¯s organizations, but he forgot there is one right here. The thunder god temple is the organization that worship¡¯s Indra and since Sam ignored it and he is not staying much in the deste, he tried to take advantage of this and wanted to destroy the core of the Dusk organization.

    Indra helped the grand elders to break through to the Astral ne and one of them disguised as Ark to enter the western continent as the emperor. He deliberately promoted shitty nobles and made it so that they would disrupt the system Sam established. The kidnapping of girls is just one of them. After all, Indra figured that the main source of fighters for the organization are orphans and poor kids.

    He wanted to stop them and also sent some people to the school in the disguise orphans to steal the knowledge as well as grow in ranks.

    The son of the executive who is a representative in the Marquis city is one of the people who was bought out by them.

    Sam didn¡¯t expect that the pursuit regarding Arvi¡¯s incident will lead to such arge n hatching under his nose.

    Arthur didn¡¯t react and Sam just stepped forward and disappeared from the spot as he reappeared in the temple.

    He stomped his feet with earth elemental energy making the whole temple quake and everyone started running out.

    Soon an old man came out and looked at Sam. This is the grand elder who used butterflies to keep track of the others.

    "You are as impudent as ever. But this time, we don¡¯t have to be afraid of you. We have the thunder god¡¯s blessings."

    But as soon as he finished his speed, Sam stepped forward and reappeared in front of the old man and threw a punch with void style.

    The punchnded on the chest squarely and the old man exploded with bloody mist.

    Sam then walked towards the core area of the temple where currently another old man is meditating in front of Indra¡¯s statue.

    Sensing Sam¡¯s presence, he opened his eyes and said with a tired voice. "It seems like we indeed made a wrong choice. Will you at least leave our younger generation alone?"

    Sam just killed the guy without even speaking.

    The Old men are in Astral ne initiation at best.

    Sam performed the ritual and summoned Indra. When Indra saw Sam, he was shocked.

    "How many times do you need to be taught a lesson to stay put. You are really pissing me off."

    Indra didn¡¯t answer and just left with a snort.

    Sam destroyed the statue and left.

    He looked at Arthur and said.

    "Ark should be back in his imperial pce in an hour. Forget about everyone that was sent. The thunder god temple will be in seclusion for three decades without any contact with the outside world. The only other choice is death. I need an answer sent to the city by tomorrow morning."

    With that, Sam returned to the city and gave the orders for the major clean-up.

 Chapter 1108: Teaching

    Luckily the infiltration is not deep and there are barely any members that actually managed to enter the organization. Most of them are in the position of nobility. He left the rest for the executives to deal with.

    That night, he called for Ling Tian to have another talk through the exchange store. He described the situation with Indra and asked him to take care of it.

    The next day, Sam went back to the room to meet with his students.

    He let them take a seat and asked.

    "So, how did the study go? Did you not understand anything in it?"

    Kasi raised his hand and Sam gestured him to speak.

    "Teacher, I understood the concepts, but what I don¡¯t understand is why we have to study all the other elemental energies. Even though it would be good for us to understand how to counter the attacks, I don¡¯t believe this much of a detailed study is necessary."

    Sam smiled and said.

    "Of course, you wouldn¡¯t find it necessary. Particrly when you think of an opponent of your age and strength. But what about a person with more experience? A person who is stronger than you? What would you do then?

    You need to find ways to utilize the environment around you, the weather, any external factors that may appear and disappear at any moment. You need to find out even a minute thing that could help you in that situation.

    And to be able to utilize them effectively, you need more than average knowledge.

    You need to understand the possible energy cirction of the attack of the opponent. You need to understand the very basic principle of the elemental energy the opponent is using and think of every single factor that might influence that elemental energy.

    If you are familiar with the meridianwork and have a basic knowledge of formations and energy cirction you can do wonders.

    I will exin that to youter and you would understand."

    Kasi nodded and stayed put.

    Sam then looked at the students and said.

    We will still be focusing on the theory along with training on efficient energy cirction. As for the cultivation, we can do that after a month. I can assure you that you wouldn¡¯t be left behind. Anyway, you would not only catch up with your peers, you would even be able to surpass them.

    With that, Sam started exining some theoretical lessons until afternoon, and then he took out some seals shaped in bracelets and gave them to them.

    These are the energy suppression bracelets. This will not allow them to circte more than the permitted energy and even the energy cirction will be different.

    That day, he only made them practice the energy cirction until evening and let them all go. Everyone except Arvi.

    Sam took Arvi who is still lifeless to the Marquis territory on the back of Yanwu. Yanwu¡¯s light elemental affinity gave some sense of familiarity to the little girl.

    They went to the Marquis city by night, where the Marquis and his son along with everyone that are involved in the issue regarding Arvi were hung on the arch of the city.

    Sam bent a little to match Arvi¡¯s height and said slowly.

    "I told you yesterday, that I will be looking after you and that is the truth. These are the people that harmed you. They are the people that killed your parents. Now their lives are at your disposal. You don¡¯t have to do anything. I will be punishing them in my own way. When you think they suffered enough, tell me to stop and I will give them a swift death. No matter how long it takes, we will both be here."

    Sam then started their torture. He only used light elements and made them suffer from theser beams.

    He observed Arvi¡¯s situation while doing so. As she heard their screams, he could see her eyes watering.

    It is as if arge ice block is finally melting.

    Sam wanted to see this reaction. All this while, Arvi ispletely stuck in a spot where she couldn¡¯t see any hope. All this while she waspletely suffering from the physical and mental trauma forcefully inflicted on her.

    Her parents¡¯ death, her abduction, the constant vition all made her believe that she is helpless and there is no hope in asking for help from anyone.

    The Marquis and his son were in a position of invincibility within her mind, making the whole world dark and cold.

    Sam understood her position all too well. He went through the same thing but he was a bit younger than her. So he knew what to do to make her have hope again. Even if she doesn¡¯t recoverpletely, she would still be able to recover a little after he made her believe that the Marquis and his son are not invincible and they are not even that strong.

    They can be killed easily, they can also suffer and the person who can inflict such suffering on them is now her teacher and she can rest assured that something like that wouldn¡¯t happen to her again.

    He made her look through the whole torture. No matter how much they screamed and suffered, how much they bled, she didn¡¯t even flinch. She just looked at them as she wept like the little girl she was.

    From what Sam gathered, she was like this since she was ten. Five years of suffering is not something she can ovee easily.

    Sam tortured them until dawn. They begged for death many times, they tried to plead, beg and even provoke Arvi since they understood that she is the decision-maker of their fate.

    But until dawn the next day, the whole city heard the screams of the group and Sampletely destroyed their wills and bodies.

    Only then did Arvi spoke.

    "Enough."

    Her voice is melodious and beautiful just like her. But it was filled with sorrow and grief.

    Sam finished them off and except for their skeletons, nothing else remained on the spot.

    He went back to Arvi and looked into her eyes. She broke down once again and started weeping uncontrobly before hugging him.

    Sam didn¡¯t push her away and let her hold him. After more than fifteen minutes, she finally let go.

    Sam wiped her tears with a smile and said.

    "From now on, you are not alone. I am here for you, so are your fellow students and so does the organization that has thousands of people. Nobody would even dare toy their hands on you and even if they tried, you will be able to defend yourself. I will make you strong. Stronger than you ever imagine and stronger than anyone else that wants to harm you."

    This is thest time you are ever going to be afraid. From today onwards, you don¡¯t have to fear anything. Anything and everything in this world shall be and will be afraid of you."

    After consoling her a bit, they took off on Sky.

    They reached the City in a few hours. They are a bitter for the ss. But the students are already practicing.

    Sam let them practice first and continued the theory ss in the afternoon.

    By evening he gave them a break and called them back to a special room where a simted battle was yed.

    This is one of Sam¡¯s battles while he was still in his early stages of cultivation.

    The battle simtion was analyzed in great detail to the point that Sam even exined the energy cirction process of both Sam and his opponents.

    Most of Sam¡¯s battles were against multiple opponents and some are of even higher level. He is currently showing the battle for the admission of the Starwood academy where he fought against the seniors.

    He only used fire elemental energy at that time.

    He gave a detailed exnation of the battle. How he used the dark wind wolves, the pits, the abilities of his teammates at that time, grass, and the beasts in the forest.

    He showed them everything.

    He even simted the dark wind wolves¡¯ reaction after inhaling the liquid. He simted the biological reactions of different organs and why they became like that.

    The whole thing looked so magical for the kids.

    After everything was over, Sam gave them some devices.

    It is a transparent sphere trapped in a cube of which the top and bottom faces are made of metal with formation engraved.

    "Take these and with the bracelets on, try to inject the energy. When you can inject the energy inside the sphere and fill itpletely in a single attempt, we will start your cultivation immediately."

    "But, you said you will start the cultivation after a month."

    "I wanted to do that too. But now I think that a littlepetition is great. So, work hard and practice whenever you have time. I have a lot going on myself, but we will have lessons every day. sses might be a bit random at times."

 Chapter 1109: Threatening the Gods

    Sam gave those instructions to the kids and left to meet his team.

    For the past few days, they are resting in the city. After all, Sam is constantly making them move around and all the killing and fighting is bound exhaust them mentally. But now that they rested for few days, they felt like they are as good as new.

    So they came back to get their next task from Sam.

    Their initial contract with Sam is only a decade after all and even Sam is sure that they wouldn¡¯t leave him after that, it is still better for him to be cautious and use them well while he still can.

    "I need more people."

    Sam said as soon as he entered the room.

    The team didn¡¯t speak and just let him continue.

    "We would be here for at least another year and a half. So, I want you guys to do something for me in the meantime.

    I want you to move across all the territories we have covered. Every realm that is under the fourth phase organizations can be visited. I want you to get in touch with the leader there and try to get the death row inmates, criminals or whoever that is. I want people in Astral Pre-transcendence and transcendence and in a lot of them.

    If you can, you can even capture the beasts of that level."

    The team was a bit surprised by this, but Night Ghost asked.

    "Boss, how many do you want exactly? If we can get an estimation of the number, we can try to recruit them."

    "No, I don¡¯t want people that can be recruited. I want people that are impossible to recruit. Just go through the realms and find powerful people with bad reputations. There would be many organizations like ck Curtain, even if they are not at that scale, there will many organizations and powers and even some individuals, that are prey on other people for their lives.

    Try to find them, beat the crap out of them, make them unconscious and throw them into the Ice divine dimension.

    For every three months,e back here and I will send you back to the ce where you came from after a few days of rest and I will deal with the people you captured.

    Take all the riches and rewards you gain in the process for yourself. All I need is people. I don¡¯t care what race they belong to. All I need is manpower.

    With the current expansion of the schools and academies, I need powerful people to be in charge of them. Even if my administrators arepetent, there is no way I could just leave everything for them and they are bound to have difficulty when dealing with some local strong people.

    So, I will station these guys there to take care of them. They will even act as a deterrent for the administrators who have different ideas.

    If you kill anyone, don¡¯t forget to copy their cultivation technique through their memory."

    The team left immediately after Sam gave his order and he even gave them a lift with the dimensional drifter to their first location.

    The team is even a bit excited as this is a great way to increase theirbat experience which also aid them in cultivation. Sam¡¯s cultivation speed made them feel a bit afraid, so they don¡¯t dare dilly dally and rx. And when they were separate, they were geniuses in the surroundings as they didn¡¯t have any peers that could threaten them.

    But now, the rest of the peers are as disgustingly talented as themselves, which made them even morepetitive. So, they are not going to let this opportunity go.

    After dropping them off, Sam focused on his chess board.

    There are around a dozen members inside who are ying at least ten games per day.

    In fact, there is no time for them to rest as Sam just set them to fight each other again and again. By now, each of them died hundreds of times and they are losing their will slowly making them colder and colder.

    In two more days at least, Sam would be able to force them to sign a soul contract with him and he can utilize them for his own use.

    After he was done with that, Sam continued with the lessons for the kids while he worked on somethings.

    First one is to find the beasts suitable for the kids.

    He is a beast cultivator and has a bunch of beasts that could rule over realms in their prime. So, it is only natural that he would encourage his students to be beast cultivators as well. And since the beast cultivation methods don¡¯t restrict them too much and they will even get more freedom and apanion fight with, it is in fact a great way of cultivation.

    But every single one of them is unique and Sam must find a proper beast for each of them.

    After much research he narrowed it down to a few beasts, but it would be difficult to gain them. He could use the heirlooms to exchange for them, but it would be too big of a price.

    At first Sam just wanted to endure the pinch and buy them off with Ling Tian¡¯s help, but now that Indra intervened, he would be able to get some discount.

    He also needs some cultivation techniques for them that would be suitable for them and the beastpanion they would have.

    At first, Sam wanted to create them himself, but he doesn¡¯t have any knowledge of Divine ne of cultivation and how they would proceed there, so he finally decided on asking Ling Tian for these cultivation techniques as well.

    So he immediately made a visit to the store and contacted Ling Tian.

    When he finally managed to get in touch with the man, Ling Tian was stunned as he looked at the list.

    "You want these beasts and that too when they are at Initiation stage?"

    "Yes."

    "Do you know how valuable they are?"

    "I do know. Since Indra owes me something, ask him to give me half the beasts and half the cultivation techniques suitable ording to the requirements.

    After he gave them, make sure that Gambler double checked them and there are no problems whatsoever. Those are for my students, if something happens to them, I will destroy every organization that worships both Indra and Gambler without caring about your game.

    I don¡¯t know why they need these organizations and people worshipping them, but I am sure that they have their own uses, so tell them to be careful."

    "Really, Sam? You are threatening while asking for a favor at the same time?"

    "What? You are the only ones who can threaten me? Indra is getting on my nerves anyway. I will just go on and destroy everything that is rted to him and I will also go and destroy rest of the organizations under Hindu Gods and I will make sure that they understand it is because of their King that they are suffering.

    So, tell him to give half of them for free and for the rest, I will only give one heirloom for a set of beast and the cultivation technique. So, I want everything for five heirlooms and those heirlooms are of the third phase organizations."

    "The higher end of the third phase?"

    "No, the lowest end."

    "Sam, you are practically ripping his flesh off."

    "Of course, that is the whole idea. Do you think that I am that easy to provoke. Let this be a message to others, I will make sure that they will pay an even terrible price if this repeats again. And until now, it was only a spection that these organizations are useful, but from your reaction I am sure that they are useful and might even be necessary.

    Tell him to make a wise choice. After all, my new toys are created for mass destruction."

    "You are essentially making him an archenemy by doing this. Your toys might be good for now, but there woulde a time where you wouldn¡¯t be able to utilize them as you want and that is also the time you would be facing these gods head on. Are you sure you want to push him into a corner now?

    And at that time, your protection for being a yer would be revoked and your organization could be attacked."

    Sam just smiled without replying and just looked at him calmly.

    Ling Tian sighed and said.

    "Okay then. Your wish. I am sure that they willply, but you better be careful from now on."

    "Alright."

    With that Sam left.

    Now that one task is out of his way, he started focusing on the second one.

    Creating something that could help his students with the cultivation.

    He has been working on this for some time now. This is the most revolutionary thing that he made after he managed to learn the liquefication of energy.

    But it is in its final stages and now that he took his students, he has to finish making it now.

 Chapter 1110: Cultivation Chambers

    Sam is currently inside the second floor of the divine dimension as he looked at therge egg shaped pod.

    It ispletely transparent and looked like it was made of crystal. There is a small seating tform inside the pod which is also made of crystal.

    There are some circr holes all over the pod and Sam is currently cing some metallic hollow cylinders that are in the size of a small battery.

    After that, he took out some flexible tubes made of ck meteorite sand fibers and connected them to these small hollow metallic cylinders at one end.

    The other end of each pipe is connected to variousrge cylinders that were ced on four different sides.

    He lifted the pod and ced it on a tform which has hollow bottom from which he could gain ess to the bottom hole of the pod which isrger in the diameter than the rest of the holes.

    He took out a tube ofrge diameter and connected it there.

    The other end is connected to a crystal table. The table top is translucent. He took out another small tube and connected the table top to another cylinder with liquid energy which prompted the table top to glow.

    A bunch of icons and buttons appeared on the table top. It is like a touch screen keyboard.

    Sam smiled as he looked at it.

    He then went to the four cylinders that are connected to the pods. The cylinders are also made of the same material as the pod and inside there is another cylinder with much smaller diameter.

    Sam checked if everything was set in ce and went back to the table.

    He clicked on the ¡¯CYLINDER¡¯ button on the table. The rest of the buttons disappeared and on the top left corner an arrow mark indicating the ¡¯BACK¡¯ option appeared on it. The ¡¯CYLINDER¡¯ tab was magnified and was ced on the left side, four lines branched out from it connecting to four more tabs with "CYLINDER 1¡¯ to ¡¯CYLINDER 4¡¯.

    He pressed on the first one and ten more tabs branched out, the first was named ¡¯NEUTRAL¡¯ but the rest of them are empty.

    He selected the ¡¯NEUTRAL¡¯ tab and clicked on the second cylinder, simrly, ten more tabs appeared with the first NEUTRAL and the rest of them empty. He did the same for it and then continued on to do the same for the third and fourth cylinders.

    After selecting the four, he clicked on enter button which is in the bottom right corner.

    As soon as he pressed it, the cylinder tab was closed and everything went back to normal with a bunch of icons and buttons.

    At the same time, the four cylinders started glowing as liquified neutral spiritual energy started filling all four of them.

    After they are filled to the brim four-cylinder icons appeared on the top right corner. They are small and could easily go unnoticed. When Sam pressed one of them, a tab branched out showing the percentage of the cylinder that was filled, and currently, it is a hundred percent.

    He closed that tab and shifted his attention back to the original icons. There is an icon that indicated the pod. He clicked on it and a bunch of tabs opened up.

    He selected the one with ¡¯RECOVERY¡¯ on it and the meteorite sand tubes started glowing a bit which soon made the pod glow.

    Sam pressed another button beside the icon which opened the pod. Sam walked to the pod and sat inside before pressing a button inside the pod which closed it.

    Sam closed his eyes.

    Soon, he could feel the smooth energy being thrown at him. Even the natural absorption of his body managed to absorb multiple times worth of energy in just a few minutes.

    After those few minutes as soon as his energy reached the peak the pod opened by itself as he came out.

    He went to the table and looked at the cylinder icons which are now half empty.

    Sam smiled widely as he looked at this.

    This is the cultivation chamber and this is the best thing he created recently.

    This is a device that is used for taking full advantage of the properties of the liquified energy and makes it easier for cultivation.

    The problem with liquified energy is that it is too pure. As much as it can be absorbed easily when it was absorbed there is a high chance of energy overdose happening which will tear down the body of the cultivator if they couldn¡¯t control it properly.

    But this Cultivation chamber not only eliminates those problems but also provides many other things that could help the cultivators.

    The first function is obviously cultivation. Any cultivation technique can be entered into the data storage section of the chamber and it will make it easier for the cultivator inside to absorb the energy as well as with the cirction of the energy making it impossible for any cultivation deviation and such.

    The second function is the recovery that Sam just underwent.

    The third function is Immunizing.

    This function is to increase the immunity of a cultivator to certain elemental energy or even some substances.

    For example, for a fire elemental cultivator, the ice element is detrimental. Even though the final result of a battle still depends on theirpetence, it can be said that the fire elemental cultivator will definitely hold some disadvantages.

    But in this chamber, the fire elemental cultivator will be forced to face the ice elemental energy in a controlled way so that he could gain a certain level of immunity. Even though it is impossible to haveplete immunity, it is still beneficial to a certain extent and as the cultivation level of the cultivator increases, they can increase the dose to increase their immunity too.

    The fourth function is to regte energy efficiency. This will make it harder for the cultivators inside to absorb energy. The energy will be a lot denser for them to absorb and will not be able to ingest it as they liked.

    It would be hard for them to absorb and they would have put more effort.

    This is to modify the bodies of the cultivators a bit to get used to the scarcity of energy which will in turn force the body to absorb it more efficiently. When they were ced in a situation where energy is abundant, their cultivation speed, absorption speed, energy recovery will all be better than any of their peers.

    Even though it doesn¡¯t look like much as their cultivation increases, this will be able to make arge difference inrge-scale battles.

    The next function is healing with the light element or wood element, and they can evenbine.

    Any form of flesh wound can be healed.

    A detoxification process would suck any toxin from the body.

    Like this, there are many functions.

    Sam believed that this thing would revolutionize the cultivation world. Not only can this pod help with the cultivation, it can also help with creating some simted atmosphere for the cultivation.

    For example, it will be hard for the fire elemental cultivator to absorb energy in an environment filled with ice elemental energy, he can simte that to increase the familiarity of the cultivator with such an environment. With enough training like that, they can even absorb energy even when they were in the Tundra region.

    His students will be the first batch of people to ever use this cultivation chamber.

    He put a lot of effort into it and there are more than five hundred spirits working to make the whole thing work properly.

    While Sam is in delight at the fruits of hisbor, someone is feeling frustrated because of his threats.

    Gambler is sitting in front of Indra, but this time they are not alone, the rest of the gods are also there.

    Indra had an expression full of anger on his face.

    He looked at Gambler and said.

    "How dare you say the information regarding the ces of worship to a mere mortal? Now look at him, he is threatening me like this. What if all the yers do the same? Should we give everything to them? I say that we eliminate him from the game and from the world."

    "Yeah, right. Do you think everyone is so stupid to not realize what the function of these so-called ces of worship is? I bet that every cultivator might have already realized that even though we are far away, we have some use for these ces of worship.

    Do you really think they wouldn¡¯t think about why we are responding to some low-level cultivators just because of a stupid ritual?

    Even if we didn¡¯t say anything, they would realize it sooner orter and even if we say it out loud, what does it matter? It was you who pissed him off too much. You can just try and send spies into the organization he built by himself even though it is against the rules, but he cannot retaliate with a threat? Just how self-centered are you Indra?"

 Chapter 1111: Beasts for Students

    Indra didn¡¯t reply and just sat there as he stared at Gambler angrily,

    The gambler looked at the rest and said.

    "I don¡¯t know how he found it, but I don¡¯t think there is anything wrong with what he did. After all, we can guess that he might have found out about it earlier, but he didn¡¯t get just threaten us directly. Even with the enmity he has with Hel who killed his friend, he didn¡¯t go after her organization out of the rules of the organization, so why would he do that now?

    It is because of Indra¡¯s overstepping of boundaries.

    As for whether he understands what the ces of worship are for and whether it is right for him to know, I don¡¯t think there is anything wrong with it either. They are going to learn it sooner orter. In a few years, and when they learn it, they will all think of us as cowards for not revealing such a thing. You can think about it. If you ask me, it is better to tell them beforehand. I don¡¯t want to be called a coward from a junior."

    Everyone stayed silent. One of the gods then spoke.

    "I don¡¯t think there is anything wrong with that, but we wouldn¡¯t give the answer without them asking, and even when they did, we would only answer when they pay a price for it."

    The rest of the gods agreed to it as for Indra¡¯s situation, none of them bothered to help him out. They know how he does things, so they didn¡¯t want to support them.

    After finishing off the deal, Gambler went back.

    Two dayster, Sam visited the store once again and the things he needed were delivered once again, but this time Ling Tian also arrived to speak.

    "I want to know, how much do you know about the organizations and the worship towards gods."

    Ling Tian asked directly.

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "To be honest, not much actually. I just thought that they are important, but I didn¡¯t know how much. But now that Indra caved in for this threat, it is fair to say that I have a new understanding about these organizations."

    Ling Tian smiled and said.

    "There is new information that can be bought through us. If you want to know, all you need to do is pay with a low-level heirloom."

    "Really? What would that information be?"

    "Something that might be useful in the future."

    Sam thought for a second and nodded before paying the price.

    "The organizations that you are destroying are called the ces of worship by the gods, they supply gods with a much-needed faith energy."

    "Faith energy?"

    Sam was surprised.

    "Yes, the faith energy. I cannot go into too many details. But for gods the faith energy is important. And after reaching a certain level, it would make arge difference between the strengths of gods and their power levels. So, your threat did work. But do remember one thing, after you progress to a certain level in the game all the bets will be off, you wouldn¡¯t be able to protect your organization with just the rules.

    So, even if you managed to protect your organization now and even got something out of it, you also made sure that Indra would attack your organization with all his might as soon as it is okay for him to do so."

    Sam thought for a moment and nodded with a smile.

    "I know what to do. Thanks for the info anyway."

    With that Sam left with the cultivation techniques and the beast infants all stored in different beast pouches.

    Sam brought them back to the students who are practicing their energy control.

    "Okay guys, stop your practice a bit ande here. I have something to give you."

    All the students came running to him.

    Sam looked at them with a smile and said.

    "I have some presents for you."

    He took out one beast after another and gave them to the students.

    For Ratri, he gave out a Dark Pegasus. Its elemental energy is simr to that of her, but the Pegasus energy focuses mostly on destruction while Ratri has destruction energy as well as devouring ability. But there is no beast that couldpensate both energies for her and it is not possible for her to have two beasts. So, he chose the betterpanion.

    For Arvi, he gave the Divine Pegasus or simply the Pegasus, it ispletely opposite to the Dark Pegasus with light elemental energy. This is perfect for Arvi with her light elemental affinity.

    For Mani, Sam found the Silver Winged Condor.

    A bird-type beast with high-level metal affinity and an affinity with maic variance. This is a beast that is just below the Sky sovereign roc when ites to the superiority in the bird-type beasts.

    For Habi, it is a Two-legged ck Porcupine.

    Even though it is not exactly the same level as the first three beasts when ites to bloodline superiority, this beast has its own specialty when ites to battle and it is not that low level either. It is right up there with the Forest bear that Sam has.

    But itplements Habi and his weird body with high de affinity.

    Because the spikes on the porcupine are not only structured differently, they act like des. As the porcupine also has two strong hind legs, it only uses them for walking and uses the front limbs as arms pretty much. It sometimes breaks its own spikes to use them as des to fight. Its speed is also extremely high. This would be a perfect fit for Habi.

    For Rin, the situation is a bit different. She has an ice elemental body and fire elemental core. This is actually a trickybination, but after much search, Sam managed to find one beast that is suitable for her.

    A Fire-Frost Serpent Dragon.

    It is a serpent dragon that was born due to the union of a fire serpent dragon and a frost serpent dragon.

    There are two cases the baby would have. One with the body of fire element and core of ice, while the second case would be with the body of ice and fire elemental core.

    Sam picked the second one obviously. This beast can live in both fire and ice elemental environments, but the ice elemental body is mostly used for immunity against the ice elemental attacks. And it would be aplete immunity, even if it was attacked by some high-level being, the damage would be minuscule.

    Sam wanted to develop Rin in the same way. A fire elemental user who has extreme immunity

    For Madhu, he got a snake.

    It is called the Myriad Flower Serpent. This is a wood elemental snake that could be considered as a fourth most powerful snake in terms of bloodline superiority.

    For Rang it, the dwarf with both earth and fire elements, Sam got Earthen-Fire Dragon. This was the easiest choice Sam has to make as it was easiest to search.

    Actually, he could find dragons for all the students for their elemental affinities as the dragons have a broader spectrum of elemental affinities. But he didn¡¯t want to do that because they are not the best match, but for Rangit, it is the best choice without any confusion.

    For Bran the half-barbarian with a Berserker body constitution, Sam got the Divine blood ape.

    This is one of the beasts that have a simr ability to the Berserker. It is of neutral energy just like the Golden Ape Sam has, but its bloodline is a little inferior to the Golden Ape.

    For Vron, who is a Dragon Hawk tribe member with great purity and fire elemental energy, Sam got a Dragon Hawk. If the Earthen-fire dragon is the easiest choice, then for Vron, this is not even a choice at all.

    He doesn¡¯t even have to think whether he should go for another beast.

    Thest one is Kasi.

    The Half Demi-Giant who has Astral Soul constitution.

    This is one of the toughest choices Sam has to make. He couldn¡¯t find any beast that has the same level of affinity with the soul and the body as Kasi, but after a great search, Sam managed to find one, but he was not sure whether he should give it to Kasi or not.

    Even now, he is hesitating a bit.

    He took a deep breath to calm himself down and gave it to Kasi.

    This is a Devil Dragon.

    The one beast that has the highest affinity with the souls.

    Even though one might think that this beast has an affinity with dark elements, they couldn¡¯t be any more wrong.

    The Devil dragon has a strong body with ck scales and two horns with an eerie aura around it. It consumes and ys with the souls even though it could end the enemies with a single attack of its body.

    It is not necessarily evil, but its nature is a bit sinister. In fact, the mentality of the Devil dragon is closest to that of a human and it is not really the best option for a beast cultivator if they don¡¯t have enough willpower. But he felt that as a teacher, it is his responsibility to not just give the best option to Kasi, but also make sure that he would be able to face any troubles that are caused by that option, so he took a leap of faith and gave it to him.

 Chapter 1112: Training

    The kids and the beasts are looking at each other curiously. All of them except Kasi and Devil dragon. The rest of the people are within Sam¡¯s organization¡¯s influence since they were born and didn¡¯t have to get introduced to violence from a young age. But Kasi is different, Sam knew that this guy killed a couple of people even before awakening.

    And as he looked at the Devil dragon, he could see that there is a sense of rivalry within them. Both of them are staring at each other¡¯s eyes.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but smile wryly.

    They are off to a rough start and it would be hard for Kasi to make a contract with it.

    He shook his head and looked at the rest of them before saying.

    "From now on, these beasts are you,panions, in life and death. You would be cultivating with them. I have cultivation techniques for all of you that arepatible with the beasts, but to cultivate, you already know the first condition. You need to fill the sphere with your energy.

    Now, I am giving you the second condition. You need to make sure that you managed to befriend your beastpanion and make them willingly make a contract with you.

    You wouldn¡¯t get your cultivation technique until then. I have their favorite foods prepared in these spatial rings."

    With that, he gave the rings to them and sent them back to the practice.

    Everyone except Kasi of course.

    "I need to tell you this. You must have already observed that the Devil Dragon is a bit troublesome. I will be honest with you. Your condition is a bit unique and there are almost no beasts that arepatible with you. The Devil Dragon is of a high-level bloodline even among the dragons.

    But it is a bitpetitive and cunning in its thinking. You need to win him over now since it is still a toddler.

    Once it grows, it will be harder. I know I am asking too much and it might seem a bit unfair whenpared to other students, but I have no choice. I cannot simply waste your potential, just to make it a bit easier for you.

    So, try your best to win him over and ask me for help if you need it."

    Kasi bowed to Sam and said.

    "You don¡¯t have to worry teacher. I know what to do. I will win him over for sure."

    "Even after winning him over, you need to be careful a bit. You should never let him get hurt emotionally. Devil dragons are dangerous, whether they are allies or enemies. You need to trust him and you should make sure that he knows that.

    If you cause it severe emotional pain, your soul could be devoured.

    If you think it is too dangerous, I could take it back, but I am telling you that this is the bestpanion despite all the ws."

    "No need, teacher. I will keep him with me. I am sure we will get along fine."

    He looked at the Devil dragon with a smirk that is not so pleasant.

    Sam knew that some trouble is something he should be looking forward to.

    After sending them away, Sam went back to build more cultivation chambers. Most of the crystal structure is created with the molded empty spirit stones and the structure is extremely demandingpared to anything he ever created when ites to the structure.

    He would take a long time even if he worked on it on the second floor on the divine dimension with the added time bonus he could have.

    In the next month, he solely focused on making these devices. But he didn¡¯t create an extra table operator, because he designed it to be connected to multiple pods at the same time.

    In that one month, a lot of things happened with the students. He regrly taught basics, he made them constantly use energy with extreme precision and made sure that they don¡¯t have any trouble with it and he also helped them get along with their beasts.

    And to his surprise, the first one to get along with their beast is actually Kasi.

    The Devil dragon which he thought would be more troublesome was actually won over by this guy.

    Sam was surprised and shaken; he almost couldn¡¯t believe that something like that is possible.

    But it happened and Kasi rode on that wave as he finished the task Sam gave him which is to finish the sphere by the twentieth day.

    Sam appreciated him in front of the remaining students and then gave him his cultivation technique. He wanted him to get familiar with it.

    Seeing this the rest of the students also got riled up and started increasing their practice amount. They are still in the Initiation stage so sleepless nights will still exhaust them a little, particrly when they are constantly using energies.

    But soon one after the other they finished the tasks and by the twenty-eighth day, they are all done with both filling the sphere and befriending their beasts.

    Sam already gave the cultivation techniques so that they could familiarize themselves with them.

    After the month has ended, Sam then took out the body refining technique which he made with the Ancient yoga and made them practice it every day.

    For the next month, he didn¡¯t take them to the cultivation chamber and only cultivate them naturally without any aid of the formation so that they would be able to get a clear picture of what they are doing and how the energy absorption works in normal conditions.

    After one month of that training, he then took them to the cultivation chambers. He ced them all on his own floor within the tower and made them get inside as they cultivated. Their schedule slowly got packed with four hours of normal cultivation within the cultivation chamber, one and half hour body tempering function in the chamber and then another one and a half-hour body tempering outside, basic energy cirction for two hours, then the lesson on battle analysis for two hours, immunity training in the cultivation chamber for one hour. Training their beasts for another hour. The remaining time for resting, eating, and do whatever they wanted to do.

    They are lucky that Sam didn¡¯t directly throw them into the schedule and made them gradually understand it.

    Sam supervised everything closely while he cultivated himself.

    It has been a while since he solely focused on his training without any research and deadlines.

    After another month like this, the team returned with the first batch of forced recruits.

    There are around two dozen, Astral ne Pre-transcendent cultivators from initial stage to the Peak stage and there are another dozen Astral ne Transcendent cultivators who are in the Initial stage.

    This is a great harvest. Sam threw them all on the chessboard and went through the reports.

    They are all-powerful in their realms but most of them are tyrants and criminals. Some of them are assassins, some are rapists, some are leaders of the underground organizations, they don¡¯t have anything good in the report.

    Apart from this harvest, the team had brought around fifty cultivation techniques for which he was surprised. Along with the cultivation techniques, he would get from the people inside the chessboard after they arepletely brainwashed, there are a total of eighty cultivation techniques at the moment.

    That is a great addition to him.

    After sending them back on their conquest.

    Sam went back to training the students and training himself again.

    They broke through the Acolyte stage in no time and are progressing levels faster than Sam.

    Provided that he doesn¡¯t have the same facilities and a proper training regiment and such, they are still faster than he was by arge margin.

    After they broke through, Sam started teaching formations to them.

    Even though he didn¡¯t want them all to be the formation masters if they don¡¯t want to be one, he wanted to teach the basics principles of the formations because they would be facing some serious formations that could simply kill them, and the more knowledge they have about formations the better.

    Along with the formations, Sam started teaching some secondary things for the students. He picked a student one day and started training them in an aspect that could help their specialty. For Rangit the dwarf who is good at earth and fire element, Sam started the lessons at golem making and weapon smithy.

    For Madhu, he started teaching healing and botany with the focus on understanding various nts and herbs along with gic modifications so that she could create different kinds of seeds that could be grown into the kind of nts that could help her in the battle.

    The modified soul-devouring vines he used in the realm of undead are a perfect example of the feats the seed modification can create.

    For Arvi, he focused on healing as well as attacking. She already has partial fusion, so he started teaching how she could change the frequency and create different kinds ofsers that can cause different kinds of damage.

    Like that, he focused on everyone so that they could focus on what they are good at as well as the basic training.

 Chapter 1113: Talk with Students

    Another month passed and everything is going well in the training. But one day, Sam called off the training.

    "Today is your rest day."

    When they heard this, the group of students was stunned. They are actually enjoying the training. The feeling of getting strong and increasing strength is something they couldn¡¯t get enough of.

    They are all a bit disappointed and didn¡¯t know what to do. They wanted to ask Sam if they could continue, but they couldn¡¯t dare to bring themselves to.

    In the past few months, even though Sam is smiling and friendly towards them, they also learned some stories about him. These stories only circte throughout the executives and administrators along with some high-levelbat teams.

    Even though some of the stories are old, they are great nheless and fearful too. Now that they were Sam¡¯s students they came across these stories many times and often they couldn¡¯t rte the smiling young man in front of them to those stories, but they knew better than just striking them off and became more cautious with the way they talked with Sam.

    So, they didn¡¯t dare take his kindness for granted. But they are also not willing to go on for a day without training.

    Sam looked at them with a smile. He clearly understood what they are thinking. They are having trouble because they are breaking through at an incredible rate. It has only been a few months and they are already on their way to thete stages of Acolyte.

    And Sam is sure that they would break through the Novice stage in no time and then proceed at the same pace to the Great realm and Grand realm cultivation stages.

    But this rapid rate is what made him take them a break.

    "You will be taking a break from your cultivation. Because tomorrow, you will be going through some practical examination.

    You will be fighting against all the students of the schools who are at the same level."

    The students who are contemting on how to convince Sam to let them train for a while were all stunned and looked at him in surprise.

    "Not just the students from this school, we have many schools and most of them are connected through space gates to the feathered. One by one each school will send people here from today onwards.

    By tomorrow morning, everyone will arrive and all of you will be sent to the central continent where a special arena was built.

    You will be injected with a special device I made. If your body receives a certain level of damage, you will be taken out of the Arena and sent outside.

    Thepetition will only be over when only ten people are left out of more than a thousand people. I want it to be your ten."

    When they heard Sam¡¯s exnation they are all excited. Even though they are going throughbat training every day with Sam, they didck practicalbat experience. They are unable to utilize it properly.

    But now that they have a chance they are really excited.

    "Don¡¯t get too excited yet. I am not done.

    You will not be allowed to take off the restriction bracelets. They will be kept on. In fact, I decided that they will be on you until you reach Astral ne of cultivation, you are only allowed to remove them when you are in a life or death situation."

    The students were stunned and Kasi asked.

    "Teacher, wouldn¡¯t it be unfair to us to fight against thatrge group of people without using our full strength."

    "Your bracelets don¡¯t limit your strength, it only limits your energy usage. It makes it harder for you to circte the energy. That is it. This way you will learn to conserve your energy.

    As for being unfair. How unfair do you think it is for my students to fight against the students who only studied basic curriculum."

    Kasi didn¡¯t say anything and became silent. But Rangit raised his hand and asked.

    "Teacher, then why wouldn¡¯t let us practice now? I think we are on verge of breaking through to the Late stage of Acolyte, so we would have a better chance at winning."

    "Well, you need to learn how to beat stronger opponents. This is a way for you to do so. Anyway, you guys prepared enough, so it is always better to rest well before a big test. So, today we will just talk. Ask whatever you want to know. Not about the cultivation of course. You can ask me about everything else.

    I am pretty sure that you heard a lot of nonsensical things about me around the city, so you can ask me about them if you want to know."

    "Teacher, is it true that you made a throne out of the arm bones of the people that targeted you and your friends. I also heard that there are two arms of a prince in the chair."

    It is Vron who asked this with an exciting look.

    Sam shook his head and said with a wry smile.

    "Yes, I did."

    Everyone looked at him in awe.

    "Teacher, how can you be so sure that you wouldn¡¯t be killed by the emperor of such disrespect?"

    "Information, Kids. Information can let you do many things. I was a part of thepetition and I cut off their arms within thepetition rules. Thepetition is conducted by Thundergod temple. You must have heard about it too. The Pce of inheritance is done every three years. Many people from our organization go there too.

    Thunder god temple is selecting candidates, so the emperor cannot interfere.

    Since I knew of that, I used that to my advantage and cut their arms off. But escaping after that mostly depended on my luck and some things that I obtained in the Pce of Inheritance."

    Students went on and asked a lot of questions about Sam, they wanted him to tell stories about his feats on his journey across realms, stories about the opponents, who is the toughest, who is the most cunning, most frustrating battle he has ever been in and so on.

    Sam patiently exined everything with a smile.

    He really liked this. The peaceful and cheerful smiles of children and their innocent curiosity about what he has gone through and their excited expressions because they imagined themselves in his shoes, really felt great.

    This unknown feeling is something he couldn¡¯t get enough of.

    After some time, Kasi raised his hand and asked once again.

    "Teacher, how did you be so formidable?"

    Sam smiled as he looked at the anticipation in the kids¡¯ eyes for that question. He didn¡¯t answer immediately and instead asked.

    "What do you guys think would make a person formidable?"

    The kids fell into deep thought immediately. They are all specting different things.

    One of them raised their hand and said.

    "To not be afraid of death. If one person is not even afraid of death, they would be formidable."

    Sam chuckled at the answer and when he saw that the rest of the students all seemed to agree with it, he couldn¡¯t help but think how innocent these kids are to believe that.

    "Before we talk about death, let us talk about life first. Do you guys think life has any value?"

    "Yes, every life is valuable." Kids almost answered in unison.

    Sam shook his head and said.

    "A life¡¯s value is what you wanted it to be. A life¡¯s worth is what you believe it is worth."

    When he looked at their confused expressions, Sam smiled and said.

    "You ate some fowls yesterday night. What do you think the worth of a fowl¡¯s life is? For you, it is worth a night¡¯s dinner for the fowl itself, that is all it had.

    Your enemies¡¯ lives are always worthless in your eyes and your life along with the lives of your family are always worth more than the others. Denying it is pure idiocy.

    And death makes all the lives worth less than they actually are. For it, every life is equal and worthless. If you start being afraid of it, then that means, you are proving that your life is worthless.

    You should be epting of death, you should be ready to embrace it, but you should always carry a level of healthy respect and fear towards death.

    Fear of death will help you grow strong, force you to do things to improve yourselves that are not exactly the things you wouldn¡¯t do normally.

    That fear will drive you to be something that you would never be.

    That doesn¡¯t mean you should cower at any possibility of your death. You shouldn¡¯t, you should dance with the death like it was your friend and you would see the improvement you have never seen. You would feel more alive than you ever were."

    "Does that mean, we should always fear death?"

    "No, there will be times where you shouldn¡¯t fear death at all.

    When you are fighting for something more important and valuable than your life."

 Chapter 1114: Two years

    After that little talk, Sam got closer with the kids.

    He sent them away to rx, as he is sure that they wouldn¡¯t be able to rx after thepetition ended.

    And his guess was right.

    Thepetition went on for over a week inside the forest patch as everyone tried their best to survive and to be thest one to leave.

    Even though the students managed to stay until thest day, not all of them managed to be top ten.

    Seven of them lost while the three of them only managed to luck out. They cannot use the beasts of their full power at the moment, so they are already troubled from all the pressure they are facing and they are only middle stage acolytes. Thete-stage acolyte particrly the peak stage ones are extremely problematic to deal with.

    They lost.

    Sam met with them the very night after he rewarded the top ten and sent the schools away.

    He looked at his students who are feeling down. Even the three who managed to score a position are feeling a bit down.

    "So, how are you feeling?"

    They didn¡¯t reply. They wanted to, but they couldn¡¯t find any words.

    "I know you are probably feeling that you would have won if you managed to use the energy without restrictions. If your bracelets are off, you would have managed to gain a win over them. Right?"

    They nodded heavily when they heard Sam¡¯s words.

    Sam just smiled and said.

    "That is the mentality you have to let go of. That is the thought process I wanted to eliminate in your mind from the start. In fact, I made this wholepetition up for this.

    The biggest mistake all the cultivators do is training to be the best among their peers. It is a mistake because it is not enough. If we look at thepetitors, everyone who managed to win is a peak stage cultivator of the Acolyte stage which constitutes seven of the top ten.

    Only the three from your group are middle stage cultivators. You managed to subvert two sub-stages and won three ces.

    That is the only thing the rest of the school administrators are doing and you did that with directbats.

    Every one of you focused on fighting your opponents head-on, you used your environment to your advantage but not the best of it.

    You are so fixated on winning head-on and the glory of the winning, you forgot the most basic lessons I always taught you.

    Only Rangit and Madhu utilized traps. Why did only two of them do that? What happened to the rest of you? You could have lured the others, worked together with each other, made others sh with each other by setting them up. Why didn¡¯t you do any of it? There is barely any cunning in that battle you have done.

    Everyone thinks that there needs to be fairness in fighting. But it is not true. It is good enough that there is fairness in duels and somepetitions. There is no need to ask for fairness in every battle.

    Because the world is made of unfair things. It has only one job and that is to bring you down to your knees and m your head to the ground while cing a foot on your neck until you die.

    If you look for things like honor and glory in every single battle you face, you will die a meaningless death.

    All of you worked alone even when you met each other. You could have had a better chance if you worked together. Only Ratri and Arvi managed to work together. But they were soon overwhelmed by the alliance of yourpetitors.

    All of you wanted to win this alone, defeat more enemies and get the first ce all by yourselves.

    Go back and rest for the whole day and think what you did wrong and how you could and should have gone about it."

    After that, he sent them away.

    This is a big blow for the students, but Sam wanted them to experience it. They are Sam¡¯s students, after all, if they didn¡¯t win in apetition solely created for them, it is not a disgrace to them, but to Sam.

    They already heard several skeptical voices focused on them. They are even questioning Sam¡¯s decision of choosing them as their students. There are even sentences specting that Sam might not be as good of a teacher as he was a fighter and inventor.

    This made them feel ashamed.

    After the break is over, Sam once again started their training and he could see the change. They are a lot more determined and they didn¡¯t just only focus on the breakthroughs. In fact, they didn¡¯t even focus on them at all. They started focusing on thebat abilities, how to work together and how to increase their chances of winning.

    Everyone is also focusing on the traps in their free time.

    They are not wasting any time.

    Days passed, Sam saw their rapid progress and felt extremely satisfied. He couldn¡¯t help but get drunk in this feeling. Helping the students grow is a lot more satisfying than creating arge organization. He could feel it.

    And along with his training and stabilizing the organizational expansion, everything is going way too fast.

    While progressing in the cultivation, Sam also started moving towards his next project. This is also mainly focused on helping his students and would be revolutionary things in the future.

    He could imagine thousands of yearster after the inevitable fall of all the organizations and powers he built, people would still be talking about his legends and the technology he is creating would be the symbol of that.

    Even though Sam is not exactly so drunk of being glorified, it is still a great feeling when he thought of what kind of impact his technology would bring to others.

    Sam started making ns for the future. And one of the ns is regarding the ce of worship. Since he understood that faith energy is something essential for anyone who wants to be a god, and from what he observed the gods when summoned to the ces of worship using the ritual, they would be able to help their followers.

    All the gods had a hint of contempt towards their followers as they merely looked at them as livestock for their faith energy. Maybe not all gods, at least the ones that Sam came across.

    But Sam¡¯s case would be different. His ces of worship would be at most constructed in the branches of his organization which is already big enough. At least these would be fixed and permanent ces.

    Some ces might be added in the future. He cannot act and behave like the other gods and from what he could guess after he became a godly being, there is little chance for him toe back and as soon as he became one, the other gods particrly, Indra, Hou Yi, and Hel would let all their organizations go after his own.

    So, Sam has to make his ces of worship more essible and more useful for the followers and the next generations of his ce.

    Even though it seemed a bit narcissistic, he cannot avoid it, if he wants to protect all his hard work and pass it on to his students and descendants.

    As he nned all these things, while his team is collecting new followers and students progressing rapidly, two years passed.

    In these two years, the team managed to gather eight hundred members along with seven hundred and twenty beasts.

    Out of which eight hundred and thirty are of the Pre-transcendent stage and the rest are of the transcendent stage, ranging from the initial to the peak stage in both cultivation realms.

    This is a considerable force. Particrly when considering the fact that they were dealing with forces led by Peak stage Transcendent cultivators and now they have over a hundred Peak stage, transcendent cultivators, under him.

    Sam threw them all into the chessboard in batches as he released the previous batches who were brainwashed and made soul contracts with him. He sent them to look over the schools and new branches of the organizations.

    As for the gains regarding the cultivation techniques and the battle techniques, he managed to get around thirteen hundred cultivation techniques on top of the cultivation techniques handed over by the people he forcefully subdued.

    As for battle techniques, there are more than two thousand.

    Sam used the printing machine to copy them again and again and sent them to all the Realm academies.

    Now Sam¡¯s academies became the biggest schools across the realms and the Dusk organization also acquired the name of the superpower.

    Along with that the Raiju tribe inside the tempest valley was reduced by a bit as they were all sent to different realms to either train themselves or to assist Sam¡¯s organization.

    Sam got ready to depart to the location to continue the next phase of the journey, but there are some talks he needs to do, with the students, with the administrators, and with the Old Beast.

 Chapter 1115: Alliance

    Sam¡¯s first choice is obviously the administrators. The expansion of the organization was done properly and it is perfectly stable now.

    He gave orders to the organization members to develop in a different sector. The Medicine and Health care.

    He has ns for the expansion in this area and he is going to open a clinic in every branch of the Dusk organization.

    He needs to do this for the future ns. After giving out the orders, he went meet with the Old Beast.

    In these two years, he asionally met with the Old Beast and they talked a lot, but Old Beast didn¡¯t reveal anything about the next ne of cultivation. He only said one thing, whenever he asked and that is ¡¯you are not ready¡¯.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know what requirements he needs to fulfil to be considered ready, but he couldn¡¯t push him too far. Others might be afraid of him, but Old Beast might even spank the shit out of him if he pushed him too far.

    When Sam arrived, Old Beast looked at him and said.

    "Give me a cup of that wine."

    "Old Man, aren¡¯t you a little too unfeeling? I am leaving and you don¡¯t even know when I woulde back and all you care about is wine?"

    "What is the point of feeling emotional? Are you still a little kid that I need to think before sending you off? You are grown ass man. Go and die for all I care."

    This is the regr banter they had. After drinking the Heavenly wine for a while, Sam asked.

    "I am getting closer to the goal. Even if you don¡¯t want to tell me the details of Divine ne of cultivation, just tell me how to get you out of here. Is it possible for me to just take you out with the dimensional drifter?"

    "Like that is possible. The Dimensional drifter cannot do anything. Anyway, you don¡¯t need to worry. As I said, I am not being oppressed by anything. All I need to do is wait for a while and I would be able to get out of here by myself."

    "Really? Are you sure?"

    "Do I need a brat like you worry about me?"

    "Okay."

    "Didn¡¯t you say that you are going to the first puppet realm?"

    "Yes, why?"

    "A thousand kilometers from the capital of the first puppet realm, there is small valley. Inside that small valley there is a hidden creak that leads to a divine dimension that can only be essed by a creature with Raiju bloodline.

    No one in that area knows about it as they couldn¡¯t perceive without Raiju Bloodline. Inside the divine dimension, there is a pool of blood which you can consume.

    You will directly breakthrough to the Middle stage of Astral ne transcendence.

    But to digest all the blood you need at least one week to digest and once you consume that blood, the divine dimension might be perceived by others. So, be careful. Since you have a team of people with you, I think you can manage."

    Sam was stunned upon hearing this.

    "How do you know that there is one?"

    "I am the one who kept it there. I killed a Thunder Phoenix in that realm and collected the blood of the Phoenix in the divine dimension of the Phoenix itself and ced it there. I wanted to leave to my descendants with a decent talent, but before long I became a god and my descendants nevercked resources.

    So, it has been there like that. I am pretty sure the seal I ced is still there and no one would be able to crack it, at least not the people of that realm. So, go there and take it. It would just be a waste to leave it there."

    Sam really didn¡¯t know what to say for a second. He just nodded and before he could speak again, the Old Beast said.

    "Now, pour me another cup and get lost from here."

    Sam nodded and left after pouring a cup which is the in the size of a barrel and left.

    He then went to his students.

    Students are a bit sad for Sam leaving them like that.

    They knew that they are not ready to go with him, they wouldn¡¯t even be able to endure the shockwaves of the battle.

    Sam looked at them and said.

    "It will take a while before I coulde back. Do not neglect your training. The next time Ie back, I will give you a gift. I left a bunch of assignments for you toplete before Ie back. I am pretty sure that you wouldn¡¯t be able to finish them, but the person who finishes the most will get a reward.

    Every now and then, the administrators will conductpetitions. Participate in them regrly, they are also part of the assignments.

    I already gave the instructions to the administrators. Vron¡¯s father will take care of your necessities and he will taking you around to other realms based on the schedule I gave him."

    When he looked at their gloomy expressions, he smiled and said.

    "I want you guys to grow faster. Because there is a task that I want you guys to take lead on.

    There wille a day, the whole organization will be targeted by many people from outside. There will be many organizations with strong people trying to conquer and destroy us. I want you guys to be ready for that time and lead the organization for the victory, because I wouldn¡¯t be here."

    The students were surprised and shocked by his words and looked at him.

    "Don¡¯t worry, I will not be dead. But I wouldn¡¯t be here either. As soon as I am gone, those people will think that the rest of the organization is easy to take over. This is built with a lot of effort and hundreds of thousands of lives are dependent on it, so I want you guys to protect it."

    After coaxing them a bit, Sam left went to the terrace where his team gathered.

    Currently no one in the team is in Pre-transcendent stage. In fact, everyone grew leaps and bounds in the past two years.

    Night Ghost in on verge of breaking through to the Astral ne Consummation. Vidyut and Paras are inte stage of Astral ne transcendence and are about to breakthrough to the Peak stage.

    Saber Monarch is right on their heels as he broke through to the Late stage recently.

    Five elemental King, Kiran, Sia, Gran, Jw and Tamas are all on Middle stage of Astral ne transcendence and Agar and Argan who the weakest are also on verge of breakthrough to middle stage of Astral ne transcendence. There is a great chance that they would breakthrough in a couple of days.

    They are trying to not to be surpassed by Sam, whose cultivation growth is too fast for them to handle.

    But they are bound to be disappointed as he has a direct ticket to Middle stage of Astral ne Transcendence.

    He took out the dimensional drifter and all of them arrived near the First realm of the three Puppet Realms.

    The organization they are dealing with next have three realms as their core. There are three branches with three people leading the organization.

    The organization is also called the Puppet organization. As the name implies, every direct member of the organization controls at least one puppet.

    Sam knew from the start that this is going to be a pain in the ass. But before he delved any deeper into this, he went to the meeting spot, where he previously agreed on meeting Arkiv.

    In fact, six months before, he already came here, but Arkiv who came here only said that he would need more time and fixed that day as the meeting day.

    When he went there, Sam was surprised to find that only Arkiv was here.

    Sam already let the rest of the team inside the Ice divine dimension and went to meet Arkiv alone.

    Arkiv looked at Sam and said with a wry smile.

    "The alliance didn¡¯t go through. Akhil and Noah refused."

    Sam didn¡¯t ask any reasons and said.

    "Well, that is alright. I am sure they would be doing fine."

    "So, what is the n?" Arkiv asked casually.

    "I have something to do here first. So after I am done with that, we will be starting our operation. I will send my team for scouting the capital first.

    The Puppet Organization worships three gods and all three branches worship them together. From what I know there is not much of rivalry between the three leaders either. They are quite harmonious. So, we need to do some ground work to find where the heirloom is and how to get to that heirloom.

    It would be great if we could avoid fighting, but I don¡¯t think it is possible."

    "That is alright. What about the alliance share?"

    Sam thought for a moment and said. "Are the rest of the yers at the same cultivation level as yours?"

    "Yes, pretty much."

    "Okay then, for the fourth phase organizations we don¡¯t have any choice and all of us have to target the Puppet organization first as it is too vast and too powerful. I am pretty sure everyone follows the list and in fact, they might even be here.

    So, let us divide the tasks based on the situation. Most of the time you and I will be fighting against the yers while my team deals with the organization, of course, that might change based on the situation.

    As for the loot, the resources of the organization would be divided into four shares and I will get three, you will get one.

    As for the heirlooms, in the first three of the phase four organizations, you will get the first one while I get the remaining two.

    If you are okay with that, we can proceed."

    Arkiv just smiled and shook Sam¡¯s hand.

 Chapter 1116: Thunder Phoenix Valley

    Sam sent the team and Arkiv to the city so that they could investigate. He also let the shadow mice go. Arkiv is mostly concerned about the rest of the yers. Hemunicated with other yers the most, every just thinks that he is sociable, but what they don¡¯t know is that he has a keen observation towards the behavior, habits and the nature of people.

    That is the reason Sam wants to work with him. After all, he doesn¡¯t need any sociable people with him, his beasts are a betterpany than any other creature could give him.

    Arkiv¡¯s special understanding towards the other yers is the reason why Sam made an alliance with him and another reason is that they became a bit closer with time. He is the best person to see if there is any activity of other yers nearby.

    He could pick up subtle clues and track them back to their estimated locations and hiding spots.

    Sam kept Night Ghost with him as they went towards the location that Old Beast told about.

    Sam used the dimensional drifter to arrive at the valley so that he doesn¡¯t have to waste any time.

    He arrived a hundred meters away from the valley, along with Night Ghost, as soon as they arrived, they were shocked. Because there are a lot of people at the mouth of the valley, Sam was worried that they would have been noticed, but from the looks of it, no one paid any heed.

    Sam and Night Ghost slipped from the spot and took a high vantage point nearby and looked at the valley only to feel another surprise. Inside the valley, there is arge skeleton.

    It is the skeleton of the Thunder Phoenix. Sam didn¡¯t expect that something like this to be present here. Even the Old beast didn¡¯t mention it. There are many people around the Thunder Phoenix skeleton and it is giving off some ferocious aura of lightning energy.

    When looking at it, Sam was reminded of the Hydra skeleton he had in his divine dimension. Even though Mia¡¯s mother agreed with him to do whatever he wanted with the Skeleton, he didn¡¯t want to tinker with it.

    After all, since he and Mia are like family now, it is beyond his bottom line. He kept the skeleton with him for now and decided to bury it in the Hydra grave in higher realms about which he learned directly from the Old Beast.

    Since Mia needs to take revenge for her mother, the hydra beasts would have face him sooner orter, then he would be able to dig through the graveyard of other hydras and use those skeletons to do whatever he wanted.

    Sam looked at the valley full of youngsters. All of them are lightning elemental users and they are all meditating at various ces near the skeleton and some of them even sat in the middle of the rib cage.

    There are also some people who seemed to be guarding these youngsters.

    Sam felt the aura of the skeleton and felt that it is not as strong as the aura of the Hydra skeleton, the difference is almost as vast as the strength between an Initiation cultivator of Mortal ne and the Initiation cultivator of the Astral ne.

    But there are this many people to gainprehension from such a skeleton. Now only Sam understood what kind of resource he held.

    But that is not bothered him now. He needs to find the location of the hidden entrance to the divine dimension the Old Beast mentioned.

    With the number of people here, it would be almost impossible to go unnoticed.

    Luckily the strongest is only at Late stage Transcendence of Astral ne which is a bit of a relief.

    Sam wanted to find more information about the whole situation and sent out some insect type puppets to see if he can hear anything from the people that are at the mouth of the valley.

    Everyone is talking a lot of nonsense, but finally there is someone who is speaking something that has some useful information.

    "So, how many days the valley is going to be open for us this time?" An elderly man in a luxurious robe asked a middle aged man who is standing behind all the crowd.

    The middle aged man smiled and said.

    "Why are you so worried Elder? I heard you have been asking this question to everyone."

    The Elderly man smiled and said.

    "It is just that my grandson is on verge of breaking through the Astral ne. As you know he is quite talented. But he might need some time for theprehension. I just want to be prepared."

    "Oh? Your grandson is already on verge of the breakthrough. I thought it would take some time. It is no problem. This time our Puppet Organization is going to hold the valley open for fifteen days. You don¡¯t need to worry. Tell your grandson to focus on justprehension and the breakthrough inside."

    The elderly man beamed with joy and said.

    "That is a relief. I am really thankful for the Puppet organization."

    "Haha, what are you saying? Your lightning swan sect is one of the loyal subordinates of the Puppet Organization, and you have every right to use this. If your grandson has any problem tell me, I will try my best to help him."

    As the two them started ttering Sam brought the puppets back.

    From this talk and the rest of the misceneous talks around, he understood what is going on.

    As the Old Beastpletely ignored this skeleton as it is worthless in his eyes, the situation is different for the Puppet organization.

    They used the aura of the skeleton as amodity through which they reward their subordinate members.

    They would give ess to other asionally and this time they are going to let other enjoy the facility for fifteen days.

    So, Sam should either cause amotion by revealing this ce while all these people are here or he can just wait for fifteen days toe back when there is a rtively a smaller number of people are here.

    He chose the second option and left with Night Ghost and this time they travelled by foot.

    He wanted to the study the terrain in the path between the City and the valley.

    After a few hours they are back at the capital and they entered the inn where they decided to meet.

    Arkiv¡¯s face is quite serious as he waited for Sam and as soon as he saw him, he sprung on his feet and said to Sam.

    "The rest of the yers are all near the capital and it seems they havepany."

    Sam was quite surprised by the sudden outburst and wanted him to calm down.

    "We need to get out of the city first."

    Sam frowned but nodded. All of them started getting out of the city one by one and when they reached a certain ce, Sam took them into the Ice divine dimension and found a hidden location to ce it. They didn¡¯te out and held their meeting there.

    "So, what is the trouble you are talking about?"

    "All the remaining yers are here now and they seemed to have nned something big."

    "So, they already formed an alliance? Is that why Akhil and Noah rejected the proposal."

    "I don¡¯t know if they are working together. But from what I could see each of them havepany of someone powerful. In fact, Dayus is currently in touch with one of the young masters of the Puppet organization. He is roaming around the city like he is not afraid of anything."

    "Did they find out about you?"

    "Yes, they saw me and they also know about each other¡¯s presence. They knew about your presence too. I don¡¯t know what each of them are nning but it is about to turn chaotic.

    But one thing is for sure. Dayus is nning this for a long time and so is Kumar. I overheard their conversations with other people and that is also the time they spotted me.

    I couldn¡¯t get a hold of what they are nning but it seems like they are doing something big. We need to be careful.

    Sam nodded and took out a shadow mice before giving it some orders and sending it to the city. Now that the shadow mice finally had hisbat ability, he can now roam around the forest without any problem.

    He sent the shadow mouse to inform the rest of the shadow mice to target the yers and keep an eye on them.

    At the same time, he let the surveince equipment out and they made a camp to have a proper look.

    Since they are not far from the city, they got the live feed instantly. That night nothing happened.

    The next morning though, something caught Sam¡¯s attention, tworge groups arrived at the city through the wormholes and went to headquarters of the First branch of the Puppet Organization.

    By afternoon some of the shadow mice returned with some information.

 Chapter 1117: Plans of the Players

    The shadow mice gave some information regarding the yers as well as the tworge groups that arrived in the city.

    The first information is that the yers are indeed nning something and Kumar who is inpany with some unknown group is trying to do something at the Thunder Phoenix valley.

    As for Dayus, the information is not much valuable, because Dayus refused to talk about the n and he even directly said to the young master he is apanying that some is listening their conversation.

    Even though young master repeatedly assured that there is no one, he still insisted that someone is listening and if that person listens to their n, they would be back to square one.

    They onlymunicated through writing and that too in a cipher.

    Sam suspected that Dayus might be implying about him, but there is no way to know at the moment.

    As for the information regarding the two groups, they are from the remaining two puppet branches of the Puppet organization and they are here for some kind of internalpetition between the youngsters of the organization.

    Apart from that information the rest of it is not that important. The remaining yers are no where to be seen and only one of them was caught by one of the shadow mice.

    It is Noah. But she managed to disappear after she entered the forest.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know what they are nning.

    But it didn¡¯t take long for them to figure out Dayu¡¯s n.

    That afternoon.

    In the city.

    Many people are visiting the city to witness the Internalpetition of the Puppet organization. Arge arena was also prepared for this.

    Dayus is currently sitting in a bar along with the young master he made friends with.

    He is currently holding amunication token and spoke.

    "Are all units in position?"

    "Yes."

    "Yes."

    A bunch of voices sounded from the other side.

    "Report to me when the target is fifty meters away from the location."

    They waited for a few minutes and soon someone spoke from the otherside.

    "Target reached the hundred meter point."

    "Good."

    Dayus said and looked at the young master before him.

    "It is your turn."

    The young master nodded and ran off. He ran quickly towards one of the groups who are making their way to the arena.

    The group consisted of the young master from the second branch of the puppet organization and his personal entourage. He caught up with them and talking with the young master with a smile.

    "Hey, Brother two. You are already going to practice in the arena? You didn¡¯t even meet me aftering to the capital yet. Come on, let us go and have a meal. You can practiceter. I hired a new chef for my restaurant, he makes the best wyvern stew that you ever tasted."

    The young master of the second branch looked at the young master of the first branch with a startled expression as he didn¡¯t expect him here.

    He smiled and said.

    "Brother One. I am not going for the practice. There are many people in our branch who never came to thepetition and they arepletely unfamiliar with the arena. I just want to show them so that they wouldn¡¯t be confused during thepetition."

    "Come on brother. It has been a long time since we met. Some of our hunters caught a fire wyvern, bring your juniors too, we can have a feast, then I will give you a tour through the Arena myself."

    As they spoke, Dayus listened to the whole conversation carefully and when the group was about to turn around, he gave amand in themunication token.

    "Activate the setup."

    At this moment, within the arena, there are a bunch of people who mmed some formation gs on the walls of the arena and ran outside through a secret entrance.

    Arge amount of fire elemental energy gathered

    *BOOM*

    The main entrance of the arena suddenly exploded with golden mes.

    Sam watched the whole scene through the surveince and was stunned and so were the rest of the team and Arkiv.

    Before long something even more surprising happened. A bunch of people started running off through the streets of the city with a bunch of city guards and the puppet organization members chasing them.

    When the team and Sam looked at the attires of the people who are running away, they felt like beating the crap out of Dayus, because they are wearing the attires that are simr to that of Sam and his team.

    Sam more or less understood their n and as he expected the group of people managed to escape the chase of the city guards.

    Meanwhile, the Brother two looked at the entrance in shock after the explosion. He could estimate the time and if Brother one didn¡¯te, then he would be under that explosion. Even if he managed to survive the explosion, the rest of the juniors wouldn¡¯t be able to.

    As he thought of this, his heart ran cold.

    A city guard member ran towards Brother one and whispered something.

    "Brother two, a group of city guards spotted some suspects escaping the city. I also have some suspicions on someone, a friend of mine said that someone has eyes on our Puppet organization. Let us go and see if they are the same. If they are, you can count on me to give you a proper exnation.

    Let us go to my restaurant and we will talk there."

    With that he led the group to the restaurant. All of a sudden, Dayus also appeared there while panting and said.

    "Brother One. My guess is right. It is indeed that guy."

    Looking at Dayus¡¯ ragged state, no one would believe that he was sitting in the restaurant a while ago.

    Brother two looked at him with a frown, but when he saw that Brother One let Dayus sit beside him and even pour some water, his frown was gone and looked at him in anticipation.

    Dayus drank some water and said.

    "It is indeed that guy, Sam. He is the one who did this. He really is after your organization."

    "Who is this Sam? Why is he after the organization?" Brother two asked coldly.

    "Sam is a powerful guy from my native ce. He takes on mercenary jobs and someone might have given him a job to take down your organization.

    At least that is what he told us. He destroyed the Night Demon family, the Phoenix tail sect, the ck Curtain and many other organizations. At first we really thought that he is just a mercenary, but one of hispanions who cannot take on his evil ways betrayed him and only managed to let out some information before dying.

    He said that Sam is doing this as a task from some devilish forces. He is going after some specific gods¡¯ followers..."

    Sam looked at the whole scene with a cold smirk. He didn¡¯t expect that Dayus has such creativity in him. He really created a proper n to make Sam an enemy. It was always Sam who does the damage first and reveals himselfter, but this time, the situation changed. Even before he finished his scouting, the other party already marked him.

    As Sam looked at this situation, something else is happening at another location which is being recorded by the shadow mice and some of the recording puppets he gave the mice.

    Kumar arrived at the Thunder Phoenix valley along with his ownpanions.

    They stood a few hundred meters away from the valley and thepanions stood in a formation to activate something.

    A vine appeared and drilled into the ground. It rapidly travelled underground towards the valley and came out slightly in the middle of the rib cage of the skeleton.

    The vine immediately started growing a flower which gave out some invisible gas which spread throughout the valley rapidly and forced the kids inside to faint.

    The vine buried back into the hole after the flower wilted, withered and disappeared, before turning to stone mysteriously.

    The guardians who came with their kids were stunned by what they saw.

    The shadow mice that got the video collected the puppets and started moving away.

    But on their way to Sam who is five hundred kilometers away, in the middle of a dense tree patch a woman suddenly appeared and used vines to catch the shadow mice.

    "Sorry, little ones you cannot go and show them to Sam. If he is added to the mix, things would growplicated. Particrly if he knew about the incident immediately. Let it blow up a bit. I will let you go after our n is done."

    It is Noah. The shadow mice continuously struggled in the trap. Soon Kumar and hispanions arrived.

    Kumar looked at Noah and captured shadow mice as he frowned.

    "Did Sam already know?" Kumar asked.

    "I don¡¯t think so. It seems like these mice recorded things but didn¡¯t deliver."

    "Why don¡¯t we finish them off then?" One of thepanions of Kumar asked. They heard of this person named Sam a lot of times from Kumar and Noah. But they felt like their stories are a bit exaggerated.

    Kumar looked at him and said.

    "It is not that simple. Sam would know which mouse is which and he would definitely know we killed it, then we can forget about peace. We don¡¯t have any enmity with him and it is better to not start one now."

 Chapter 1118: Labeled

    "But he is looking into our matters, doesn¡¯t that mean, he doesn¡¯t share the same sentiment as you."

    One of theirpanions replied to Kumar.

    Kumar shook his head and sighed as he looked at Noah. Gesturing her to exin to them.

    "It is different. We knew him for a long time, so don¡¯t worry too much. Even if he knew the information, we are not worried that he would do something to us. It is just that he would make use of it to concoct a bigger n and get away with the heirloom by himself. He is skilled and he has a verypetent team. His means are beyond ours. So, it is better to not let him know about this. At least, he shouldn¡¯t know how we did this and what our n is."

    "Whatever, if you ask me, it is better to kill them. After all, it is not like he would be sure that we are the ones who killed them. And the shadow mice don¡¯t have many abilities. Any reason could have applied for their deaths, he couldn¡¯t just pin them on us."

    Anotherpanion said from the side.

    The shadow mice that were caught in the vines suddenly activated shadow elemental fusion and their shadows turned into armors as they covered the mice.

    Their small ws turned sharper than ever as they spun and cut down the vines, they looked at the twopanions with anger burning in their eyes and made their move.

    The ck shadows danced from one side to another as they left deep and long scratches on thepanions.

    They didn¡¯t kill them though, they just stood on a tree branch as they looked at Kumar and Noah. Arge amount of shadow elemental energy gathered around them as they disappeared from the spot. This is the shadow transverse ability.

    The shadow mice reappeared in the hiding spot of Sam.

    Sam frowned when he looked at the shadow mice that appeared out of nowhere.

    He is already pissed at the moment and now that he could guess that someone must have messed with his mice, he wouldn¡¯t let them off easily.

    The shadow mice recovered a bit after taking a few sips of the Heavenly wine and exined the situation to Sam.

    Sam understood what happened. He didn¡¯t expect that Kumar and Noah would be working together and they even hadpany.

    And when he thought of the n they had, he couldn¡¯t understand what they wanted to do, but from what he could specte, the most probable n would be turning the subordinate organizations against the Puppet organization.

    That is a usible situation that could cause chaos in the Puppet organization.

    When all the subordinate organizations, rebel together particrly since their younger generations are involved, the Puppet organization is bound to make some concessions and they would need to give some exnation which couldn¡¯t be just given by anyone.

    They would have to send some important members which essentially splits up the core members separately, giving them chance to deal with them and also a chance to concoct and execute many ns. Some of them could be used to cause a conflict between Puppet organization and their rivals and so on.

    But these are spections. Even though there is a great chance that it would be true, it is on the basis that Noah and Kumar are not working together with Dayus.

    Meanwhile, Kumar and Noah were stunned by the shadow mice¡¯s sudden escape. They immediately had one thought in their minds.

    Return to the Capital.

    Since the information is bound to reach Sam, they could only execute it as fast as they could.

    But as soon as they returned to the capital, even at their fastest speed, they were stunned by what they saw.

    Sam and his team¡¯s posters are circting around the city at the moment.

    They hit a random bar and got the information on how Sam and his team became fugitives.

    They went to their hiding spot and discussed.

    Both of them knew that Sam is not silly enough to get caught by doing something like this, so they could guess whose n is this. Dayus is the only one who didn¡¯t bother trying to hide his presence and all the yers are sure that he concocting something like this.

    But none of them expected that he would be insane enough to y with Sam. The hidden yers are waiting for a good show.

    Soon, the news about what happened in the valley came to the city along with the angry guardians who are carrying their youngsters with them.

    They all arrived at the Puppet organization¡¯s headquarters demanding exnations.

    Sam looked at the whole scene without any reactions, he wants to see how the puppet organization will react to this situation first, and then he will show what his reaction is to them. He would make the Brother One vomit a bucket of blood just from the sheer destruction he brought upon his sect by framing Sam for his own motives.

    While Sam is looking at the city for further development, in a ce where he couldn¡¯t watch, a meeting is being currently held.

    Along with the head of the first branch of the organization and the elders, the brother one, the two groups that came from the other two branches are also here.

    Apart from the members there is one person who is currently being pressured by the elders and the head of the branch to speak the truth.

    It is none other than Dayus.

    "Are you telling the truth? Are you saying that the two incidents are done by a single person?" The head asked once again.

    Dayus decisively nodded his head and said.

    "It is indeed him. He is the only one who has such means to use something to make people faint without any traces. In fact, he is an expert at various poisons. He must have wanted to cause chaos on both ends, by causing trouble between the branches and also causing trouble with the external subordinate powers."

    Dayus¡¯ exnation sounded logical and he is calm. But only he knew that inside he is cursing Noah and her eighteen generations of ancestors.

    He knew that Noah is in the city, he doesn¡¯t know if she is working by herself or if she is in alliance with others, but she and Sam are the only ones who can use wood element in yers, the elders already identified that what made these kids unconscious is of the wood element.

    He knew that Noah must have been the one who did it, but he decisively threw the responsibility on Sam as he doesn¡¯t want the organization to divert their manpower towards Noah. He wanted Sam to fall as soon as possible.

    He is his biggestpetition. He felt like he could handle everyone else. At least those are his feelings and he is that confident about his abilities. But no matter in terms of individual strength, manpower or resources, he is far behind Sam. As long as Sam is eliminated, he would be able to progress further.

    For that he has been nning this for over a year and because of some encounters he managed to gain more resources from an external party and nned this perfectly, he cannot let others ruin this.

    And thus the me for this was also ced on Sam because of Dayus.

    When the announcement was made, the whole city was in turmoil, in the minds of citizens, Sam is now an insane individual who doesn¡¯t know the difference between heaven and earth. Not only did he n to kill the juniors of the puppet organization, he even nned something with the external organizations under the puppet organization and tried to sow discord between them.

    He is really trying to reach for the stars with this.

    Kumar and Noah were stunned and immediately panicked. Now, these two are also cursing Dayus and his eighteen generations of ancestors. They would rather take the me directly and ruin their n than let Sam take the fall for them. They knew the consequences would be dire.

    Now they are thinking of ways to make sure that Sam doesn¡¯t misunderstand that they are in on Dayus¡¯ n. They really hoped that Shadow mice reported everything they talked about so that Sam could deduce that they are innocent of this.

    Meanwhile.

    Sam smiled coldly when he saw and heard the whole situation.

    There was a time when Orion emperorbeled him as a terrorist, then he showed them what the real terror feels like.

    Now that these people also did something simr, Sam decided to show them how it feels to be targeted by him.

    He is thinking whether Noah and Kumar are involved in this when they saw something.

    Noah and Kumar ran towards the slums of the city and started calling out for the shadow mice to talk, they even ced some scrolls down and walked away so that the shadow mice could take them away.

    Sam sent a shadow mouse to collect the information and bring it to him.

    After getting the information, he smiled.

    Noah and Kumarpletely denied any involvement in the me that was ced on Sam and they even briefly exined their original n which is simr to that of what Sam spected.

    He sent back a message saying no problem to them through the shadow mouse.

    After dealing with that, Sam then called his team and said.

    "We are about to get busy. So, get ready."

    With that, he directly selected the Puppet organization from the list.

 Chapter 1119: Action

    The gods that are worshipped by the Puppet organization are all Hindu Gods. Indra, Agni, and Kartikeya, and all three of them are involved in the game. When Sam selected the organization in the list all three of them got alerted.

    Since all they need to do is give out information, only one of them decided to go and since Indra who has a grudge against Sam cannot go and Kartikeya who has a yer still it could be biased, Agni decided to take the job. Since they have a choice, they could take it.

    Since all three branches worship all three gods, the statues of Agni lit up in all three branch organizations at the same time.

    The one in the First branch was visited by the leader of the first branch and the elders that came for thepetition early on from the other two branches.

    Agni gave gist and said straightforwardly.

    "A person named Sam woulde for your heirloom due to certain reasons. Try your best to stop him from taking it away and defend it until he loses all the hope of getting the heirloom. If you are capable you can kill him, but check whether you are able to do so or not. You wouldn¡¯t be getting any help from me or the other two when you are fighting with this guy. So, be careful."

    His words were concise and without any bullshit.

    The leader of the first branch recovered first from the shock and asked.

    "Lord, are you telling me that there might be a possibility that we might not be able to defend against him and would need to ask you for help?"

    "Yes. Because of some circumstances we are currently shackled against him and couldn¡¯t help. This warning is the only help we can give you. My personal advice does not go after him actively and focus on defense."

    With that Agni disappeared.

    The branch leader fell into deep contemtion with Agni¡¯s concise words, the story Dayus told only became more reliable.

    They need to get more information before they could proceed. So, the branch leader sent someone to summon Dayus to have a talk.

    Meanwhile, the rest of the yers are looking at the list as Sam selected the organization. Since the Phase four organizations are limited, multiple yers can select a single organization. But no one wanted to select the organization at the moment. After all, the Phase four organizations are a whole different ball game for them.

    Sam is the only one with enough measures to take this step.

    They also knew that with what Dayus did, Sam wouldn¡¯t just stay idle. Dayus who looked at the situation is also a bit nervous and excited.

    While he was going to meet the First branch leader, Sam is having a meeting of his own with his team.

    "As you can see, we are branded as wanted men here. So, do you have any ideas on how to proceed?"

    "Come on, boss. You obviously thought of something. Why waste our time?" Saber Monarch asked impatiently.

    Sam smiled and said.

    "I really didn¡¯t think of anything. I have my ns with the people but how we do is totally up to you. I am guessing you also want some revenge after beingbeled for something you didn¡¯t do right?"

    Night Ghost replied immediately.

    "Boss, let us target the Brother one first. We need to gather information on him. Let us make him feel the aftermath of trusting Dayus. Clearly, he is the bridge between Dayus and the Puppet organization. Let us see how Dayus would react after the bridge is burned."

    Sam nodded and said.

    "So, we need to collect information. But too bad, the shadow mice could only do too much with the level disparity. That leaves us only one option."

    Sam and the rest of the team all looked at Kiran.

    Kiran sighed and knew that he couldn¡¯t escape once again.

    He has to gather the information like everyone else.

    Sam started making a small n and used the shadow mouse to send something to the Brother one.

    The said Brother one is currently feeling nervous by the fact that Dayus was called by the leader of the branch.

    After an hour or two, Dayus came back and when he noticed the nervous expression of Brother one, he smiled and said.

    "Don¡¯t worry, brother. Everything is alright. The branch leader decided to call back all the troops that are outside. From the looks of it, the remaining two branch leaders are also preparing. They would be busy and you can use your tricks to do what you want."

    Brother one grinned and said.

    "This calls for a celebration."

    "Yes, it does. And called the Brother two and Brother three over."

    Dayus said with a smile.

    "Why are they needed for a celebration wouldn¡¯t they feel suspicious?"

    "Of course, we are not going to call it a celebration openly, we will call them for a ¡¯meeting¡¯ so that your younger generation can discuss the ns to help the higher-ups. Luckily, the incident at the valley also happened, there is a need for some key people to go to some important subordinates. It is advantageous to us."

    Brother one smiled brightly and immediately sent invitations.

    He booked the special room in his inn and met with the remaining two young masters.

    While their entourage is eating together in another ce.

    Sam who got the gist of the whole n is currently looking at the surveince that was given by the shadow mouse.

    Currently, the video was focused on one of the closerckeys of the Brother One.

    At this moment, a waiter arrived with arge tray filled with wine jars. He ced one by one at both theckey table and the young master table.

    As soon as they drank the wine, everyone is having different effects. Dayus and Brother one are still talking with the rest of the young masters. Theckeys are dead drunk and fell on the table.

    But theckey Sam is targeting felt that his stomach is upset and went to the restroom of the restaurant.

    When he entered the restroom, the waiter who served the wine followed and knocked him out instantly before waving his hand and making the person disappear.

    The waiter¡¯s face changed to someone else and went out of the restaurant and disappeared into the crowd.

    Kiran carefully exited the city and brought the young man in the Ice divine dimension safely to the hidden location.

    Sam woke theckey up and when theckey looked at Sam¡¯s face, he was stunned.

    He was very familiar with the face. In fact, it could be said that he was way too familiar with the face. He is the one in charge of copying the posters and cing them all over the city.

    Sam took out a dagger and said with a smile.

    "Hello, you must have already heard of me. I am Sam. Let us get to know each other."

    Sam activated a noise-canceling formation and began extracting information from the guy.

    For this mission, Kiran needs the bodynguage, words, ent, ng everything on point when he imitates this guy.

    There is arge demand for the task, so he needs to keep this guy alive and he also needs to know how this guy acts when he was in pain and was being tortured for the information.

    When Kiran looked at the requirements of the task he had an idea and immediately put up objections only to shut his mouth after he got his hands on a pitcher of Heavenly wine. That was his main target anyway.

    But Sam already decided to squeeze every bit of Kiran¡¯s ability into this task.

    By dawn, Sam was done with the guy and managed to gain a lot of information. Even though he knew he would eventually get it after killing the guy, he didn¡¯t want to waste his time and made some preparations throughout the night.

    Kiran disguised himself and entered the city secretly after getting the memories extracted from the deadckey.

    Now his name is Prash and he is the most loyalckey of the young master. The young master who would even doubt his lovers never doubted Prash.

    This is a great advantage for them.

    ¡¯Prash¡¯ went to Brother One¡¯s house while holding the stomach with a painful expression.

    Brother One is currently talking with Dayus about how they should proceed.

    Prash just stood outside the room without intruding. In fact, there is not much to hear even if he intruded.

    The n is simple, Brother one of this generation failed to muster the same level of harmony as his predecessor and wanted all the puppet organization to himself.

    But his intelligence in puppet making didn¡¯te in handy with the scheming and plotting as he believed that even he has to damage the foundation of the remaining two branches, he would weaken them and take over.

    Dayus arrived at the perfect time and took over a year to befriend this guy and gain this level of trust and n everything for him. Almost like he is spoon-feeding the guy.

 Chapter 1120: Blasting the Mines

    Dayus took advantage of this Idiot with no brains but big ambition and nned the whole thing. He knew that this ce would be Sam¡¯s first target, so he wanted to deal with him using the Puppet organization and since Sam wouldn¡¯t go down without a fight, the puppet organization would be damaged and he would deal with it from inside.

    He thought that since Sam needs time to prepare and it is those preparations that make it possible to attack the organizations, he wanted to eliminate the preparation phase by cing him under the eyes of the organization heads from the start.

    He thought he would win. He felt that since Sam wouldn¡¯t be able to take any kind of humiliation would create trouble for the organization left and right. In his opinion as intelligent as Sam is, he is impulsive.

    If only Dayus knew how wrong he was and how Sam usually dealt with the organizations on his way to his current situation, he would have thought of apletely different n and knew this wouldn¡¯t work.

    And Dayus is only a little aware of Sam¡¯s abilities, he clearly forgot to factor in the possible technological development of Sam.

    Currently, Sam dropped his teammates in different realms surrounding the First Puppet realm they are currently in.

    Since this Brother One dearly gave Sam that much credit, Sam decided he should repay. From the information he got from Prash, they can leave a lot of presents for the young master.

    Kiran who is disguised as Prash entered the room after they stopped discussing. Brother one looked at Prash and asked.

    "Where have you been the whole night?"

    "I felt dizzy when we drank young master. It seems like the liquor is too strong for me andter it caused some ache in the stomach. I had to leave to expel the excess energy."

    "Oh, are you okay now?"

    "Yes, young master. I am already. So, what should I do today?"

    "Thepetition is temporarily put on halt. The two groups from the remaining two branches are leaving now.

    I already talked with the remaining two young masters and divided the subordinate powers under us which we should visit.

    This is the order of the ces they are going to visit. Send squad 1 and squad 3 after them and tell them to deal with them. Also,mission Squad 2 tounch fake attacks on me while I was on my tour. This is the list of my tour."

    He gave two lists and Prash memorized everything carefully.

    The list for Brother One is full of subordinate organizations with which he had great rtionships.

    In fact, the first young master has a greatwork of businesses spread along with all these areas.

    Kiran instantly sent the information to Sam through a special device. All he has to do is scan the scroll once and the information would be sent through the surveince system.

    While Kiran is looking through the list, Brother One continued.

    "You will not being with me to the tour. Squad two that feigns attacks on me will retreat to this capital after every attack along with the two remaining squads, you need to take care of their needs and you also take care of the business in this realm. My herb business, restaurant, and the weapon business shouldn¡¯t have any setbacks."

    After receiving every instruction, Kiran nodded and left to do what he needs to do as Prash.

    The three squads are the secret forces nurtured by Brother one and he is using them to achieve his goals.

    When Sam received the routes of the three young masters, he started formting his own ns.

    The journey will start for a week and this week his team will gather as much information about Brother One¡¯s business and subordinate organizations as they can.

    Sam would facilitate the n like that.

    Meanwhile, he and Kiran nned to deal with the businesses that are present in the realm.

    Brother One has eight fields on differents growing herbs belonging to eight different elements. His business is one of the biggest ie sources of the Puppet organization.

    Along with that, he has arge armory in the realm which is second only to the main armory of the Puppet organization.

    The Puppet Organization¡¯s armory only makes high-level equipment and the equipment needed by their subordinates they are also responsible for most casual repairs of the puppets.

    But Brother One¡¯s armory is a lucrative business as he uses the resources of the Puppet organization to procure the low-quality metals as well as the scraps remaining from the high-quality metals in the main armory and made alloy weapons that are both low grade and above average.

    If the Puppet organization focused on the quality of their products and gaining more money by making masterpieces, his armory focused on mizing the quantity.

    The third most profitable businesses are inns and restaurants that spanned across the realms.

    He needs all the money he could get to nurture his forces and he did a pretty good job until now. Sam is really impressed by Brother One. But his personality is too straightforward and he doesn¡¯t have a good understanding of the emotions and behaviors of others which makes him really bad at scheming. Sam thought that he is just a guy with no brains, but it is just that he doesn¡¯t have the right kind of brain.

    This one week he started making preparations while Kiran familiarized himself with Prash¡¯s position.

    He started creating curses, but not in a normal way. He created liters of energy liquid of different elemental energies and started cursing them and even the curses he left are dormant ones that would only activate when a certain time has passed.

    For the next week, he mainly focused on that and as soon as the journey of the Brother One started, the team also returned to the Capital.

    Kiran sent the three squads ording to the requirements of Brother One.

    After that, he took the cursed energy liquids and started visiting one business after another.

    The liquid mixture of metal and fire elements was used in the alloy factory as Kiran poured every drop of it into different alloys.

    Then different elemental energy liquids were poured into different herb fields, as for the restaurants, Sam left them for now as the effect would be immediate for the restaurants.

    Kiran finished all his tasks in three days and Sam is ready to start the next step of the n.

    He just waited for the squads that were sent to attack the two young masters of the other branches and the remaining squad that went to feign the attack to return.

    They took another two days to return and reported to Kiran about the status of their job. The feigning attack was sessful and extremely believable. As for the two attacks on the other young masters, they are not aimed to kill them, instead, their goal is to give them a probing attack making sure that they knew that are being targeted. They only killed one subordinate in each team.

    Kiran sent the report back to Sam who finally made his move.

    He left Vidyut and Tamas so that they could help Kiran if necessary along with a set of surveince equipment and even an energy bazooka just in case, and took the rest of the team to the first target.

    The realm they are going to is under the organization named the Lightning Swan sect. the organization that Sam heard about in the Thunder Phoenix valley.

    They have a close rtionship with Brother One.

    Brother one has a few businesses here. A chain of restaurants in partnership with the sect, a few branches of his weapon business, and a few mines in partnership with the sect.

    He obtained these businesses with his skill in puppet making. Almost half of the spirit stone mines and the metal mines under the Lightning Swan sect were only extracted because of the special puppets Brother one made which made the extraction possible.

    That is why he managed to obtain that much business.

    Sam didn¡¯t want to bother with the restaurant chain here. It is hard as the ingredients of the restaurants mostlye from the local produce.

    So, it would be hard to sabotage them. But he is sure that after he was done there, Brother One wouldn¡¯t be able to keep the restaurant share.

    His immediate target is the location of the mines and Prash the ultimateckey has all of thismitted to his memory, so Sam knew of these locations too and arrived at the ce in no time.

    He didn¡¯t even shy away from using his dimensional drifter repeatedly as he decided to getpensated for this task from the pockets of the Puppet organization.

    As soon as they arrived at the mines, Sam used a special drug to make all the miners go to slumber while the team knocked down the guards before entering the mine.

    He let out a bunch of puppets that started mining while he collected all the mined spirit stones. They stayed inside the mine for half a day and mined as much as they can.

    Sam then modified the excavation puppets a bit and sent them towards the vein of the mine.

 Chapter 1121: Destroyed Businesses

    The modification to the puppets made the spirits obey Sam instead of the lightning swan sect and now they are stationed at the vein of the mine.

    He and his team escaped immediately and went to another mine. For the next two days, they moved around all the mines that the Lightning Swan sect has a partnership with the Brother One and did the same.

    The news reached the Lightning Swan sect pretty early. They didn¡¯t expect that in one mine after the other every worker would suddenly faint.

    All their spirit stones were gone. Before they could think of what possibly happened, they didn¡¯t let the workers back into the mine, but as soon as the workers were evacuated, the puppets moved and went to the vein of the mine.

    The puppets all started mming into the veins with their mechanical arms and slowly uncovered the glowing core of the mine which is the source of all the spirit stones.

    The puppet¡¯s arms started glowing as it mmed into the core and arge amount of pure and chaotic energy was injected into the vein and the same thing happened with the rest of the puppet.

    *BOOM*

    Arge explosion of spiritual energy happened to copse the minepletely, there is not even a single trace of mine left there and the energy waves stuck the surroundings destroying the hills, rocks, and any kind of possible terrain that surrounded it.

    When the dust settled all the people could feel in that spot is the turbulent chaotic waves of energy that could destroy the low-level cultivators as soon as they entered the area and arge pile of rubble formed by the mine and the surrounding terrain.

    As soon as the explosion happened the officials who are stationed in the nearest town to investigate the matter ran over to take a look and reported back to the sect.

    Inside the main hall of the Lightning Swan sect, the sect leader is holding a meeting with the elders regarding the mine incident. Not the explosion but rather the theft.

    But in the middle of the meeting, an attendant ran in and informed me about the explosion.

    "Elders, one of the robbed mines had exploded."

    "What? How?"

    The elders were stunned. But that is not over. Another attendant soon ran over informing of a simr incident and then another attendant followed.

    Sam and the team didn¡¯t stay there to see the aftermath, they just left as soon as they robbed and went to their next target directly.

    It is the first organization the Brother two from the second branch visited. They proceeded to do something simr as they robbed and destroyed the mines for three days and left to the third ce which is the organization visited by the Brother Three of the third branch.

    Here on top of going after the mines, Sam went afterrge fields too. He let the Zoi termites have a feast of their lifetime and they made a death elemental energy rain over the empty fields afterward.

    One week took the first circle of the trips and Sam sent the team to the next target which is the second organization visited by Brother One who is on the way to the third organization, while he went to the Capital to get in touch with Kiran to get the new information.

    Currently, the rest of the yers are cold and are not doing anything. Akhil and Donner didn¡¯t even reveal themselves, while Dayus is with Brother One. Kumar and Noah are also staying out of business, for now, to see what happens. Their n failed as the me went to Sam.

    The kids are still here with the guardians. The poison would take a lot of time to get out of the system before they woke up.

    Normally, they would have made amotion at the subordinate powers and made them suspect the Puppet organization, but no matter what they did now, the me would go to Sam and they cannot guarantee that they would be able to create a proper conflict between the subordinate organizations and the Puppet organization.

    Sam got the required information from Kiran and Shadow mice before leaving.

    Kiran is still regrly going to the businesses and kept on using the cursed energy liquids.

    The news about the sted mines already reached the Puppet organization, but Sam didn¡¯t care too much about it and he also learned that the squads are doing their job properly.

    The probing attacks and the feigning attacks are being made.

    Sam proceeded like this for another week and destroyed a bunch of subordinate organizations¡¯ resources and obviously, all the me was pinned upon him.

    Brother two and Brother three who lost a considerable amount of people in the previous attack and barely managed to escape went back to their branches.

    But Brother One refused to do the same and currently, he is in the capital having a meeting with the Organization head and Dayus is beside him.

    "Thirty-two spirit stone mines, twelve metal mines, eighteen herb fields all destroyed in two weeks, and all of them belonged to the subordinate organizations that had their children poisoned under our watch. Just what is happening? What is the motive of the Sam guy you mentioned? Or is thispletely a different person and that Sam or whatever his name is had nothing to do with this?"

    When asked this question, Brother One didn¡¯t know what to say, but he gritted his teeth and bluffed.

    "He is the one rted to the incident and he is the one that did all this. Try using the family resources to capture him instead of grinding me like this. I have another diplomatic visit to do."

    The head of the branch calmed down and said.

    "This is about the diplomatic visit. We are nning something."

    With that, the branch head exined the n. That day the news of the next visit of Brother one was spread rapidly among the other branches, the capital, and the subordinate organizations too.

    The news spread like wildfire.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know what exactly they are nning, but whatever it is, he is ready to see through it.

    Right before Brother one is about to leave the city, Kiran who is disguised as Prash ran over to him. His body is full of injuries and he is in an extremely pathetic state.

    "What happened Prash?"

    Prash didn¡¯t reply and just fainted.

    Brother One immediately had hispanions take him to rest while they fed healing pills to him after confirming that he only suffered flesh wounds.

    He sent attendants to find out what happened and half an hourter, they came back.

    When he heard the news, he was stunned and ran out to take a look himself.

    He went to his main weapon shop in the capital and currently, there are more than a hundred people flooding it and demanding a refund and all of them held broken weapons in their hands.

    From all the shouting he could hear, the weapons are all corroded and copsed only a few days after they bought them.

    He then went to the herb and medicine shop and the situation is the same, in fact, it is worse because the repercussions are worse here.

    Many people are asking for an exnation as they could feel something wrong with their bodies. They are coughing violently and they are all extremely weak and all of this happened because they used the potions and pills from this shop.

    There are also some pill makers and potion makers who bought the herbs and came to ask for a refund.

    He knew that he cannot show his face at a time like this and since Prash cannot wake up now, he called for anotherckey to report as soon as he went back to his residence.

    When he learned the news, shock is an understatement to describe his emotion.

    All the weapons sold in the past week are damaged and everyone came for the refund and all the herbs and medicines that were sold are all turned out to be rubbish and some people even got some kind of infection from them.

    And the worst part is the biggest buyers all made their way to the Puppet organization headquarters. He now understood why Prash came running towards him, but he seemed to have been beaten up by one of the buyers and fainted before he could deliver the news.

    Dayus who learned the information as he sat beside Brother One, felt a bad premonition in his heart.

    He is already regretting his actions in the past few days due to the after-effects. He thought that Sam would react the same way he did when he wasbeled as a terrorist by the empire. But attacking the Puppet organization directly, but instead, he went after the outer members of the puppet organization who are merely subordinates, this didn¡¯t make sense to him.

    But he is already feeling a headache as Brother One started trusting him less and less day by day.

    Still, since the rest of the n is going well, he managed to stay away from too much suspicion and the young master didn¡¯t resort to extreme measures.

    But with this incident, he is definitely feeling a bit troubled.

 Chapter 1122: Ambush

    Brother One didn¡¯t think that all the businesses he had would be gone like this. The businesses he had with the subordinate organizations are gone, but he could still grit his teeth and endure it since it is for the future ns to seed. And the greater the damage Sam did, the greater the pursuit of the other branches would be when the two young masters died eventually.

    But now that the businesses that are the core of his entire growth were damaged, he couldn¡¯t help but feel distressed.

    He wanted to rip Dayus into pieces for getting him hooked with Sam like this. But before he could even open his mouth, he got a summons from the Branch head once again and this time he has to go there instantly.

    Dayus understood the scenario and wanted to escape from this ce. He knew that he blew the n up too much for his own good.

    But Brother one is not done with him.

    He called for his guardian and said.

    "Don¡¯t let him go from here. Keep a close eye on him."

    The guardian simply blocked Dayus from going anywhere. Dayus¡¯s cultivation is only at the Peak stage Pre-transcendent level of the Astral ne. There is no way he could contend with a guardian at Late stage transcendent level.

    He could only stay down calmly.

    Brother One went to the branch head and came back after an hour.

    His face is gloomy and he is clearly angered by something. But he didn¡¯t speak of what happened as he called for his entourage.

    "We are going to thest visit. Let¡¯s go."

    The guardian frowned and asked.

    "Young Master, the current situation is not good. We need to remedy the situation with the armory and the medicines."

    "I know that too. But due to my ipetence, the businesses were ¡¯temporarily taken over by the organization and I will be ¡¯supervised¡¯ by a special trainer who is already experienced in the business."

    The guardian became furious after hearing this. He is the guardian that is only loyal to Brother One and not the puppet organization. He has seen the young man try his best to grow these businesses with his blood and sweat.

    But now they are trying to devour him because of one mistake.

    He really wanted to beat the crap out of everyone there.

    While he is thinking Brother One continued.

    "Apart from that, the organization already made a special n in thest location, they cannot withdraw it now. So, we need to go there no matter what."

    With that, all of them moved and Dayus was specially escorted while the guardian held his hand. He didn¡¯t even let go when they are in public.

    Dayus knew he was in trouble.

    They went to the visit and are going to stay there are for a few days.

    After arriving at the location once again the news was spread. Even though they are both far away, the news was even spread in the capital.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but smile at the tricks of the puppet organization. They are so desperately trying to lure him that they didn¡¯t even bother covering up their desperation.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care, because he has his own n this time. And he is even bringing Tamas and Vidyut who were stationed to help with Kiran with him. Kiran was left alone. So, Sam gave him a bunch of transference scrolls and liquid energy cells, and so on. Anyway, Kiran is the master of disguise and escape. So, he is notpletely worried.

    As soon as squad 2 which is responsible for the final feigning attack was moved, Sam also moved. This time he didn¡¯t wait for the young master to depart from there and went after one mine after another with the team. When they arrived at thest target mine, they finally understood what the other party¡¯s n is.

    They stationed a special group of puppet masters in that area to deal with them.

    Sam didn¡¯t want to get into a fight with them as a bunch of Peak stage transcendent cultivators of Astral ne are not that easy to mess with and he cannot confront them directly. Not after what he had in n.

    He took out a few puppets he recently made and started cing them around the mine area.

    There are ten of them in total. After cing them, the team just sat back and got ready to watch the show.

    Sam closed his eyes as he sat down on the ground and controlled his crystal table.

    He activated the puppets through it.

    The puppets are in the shape of a spider and as soon as they activated their legs started moving with the eyes glowing. The ten metallic spiders started moving around. The people hiding in the ambush don¡¯t know about this and are still waiting for Sam and others toe.

    From the previous investigation, they learned that Sam uses something to make people faint. They disguised themselves and waited in ambush as soon as the miners faint, they will make a move.

    But what they don¡¯t know is that Sam makes a clear investigation before he could even make a move and see if there are any anomalies.

    And here these guys are the anomalies.

    So, he is using a different method.

    After spiders crawled to their desired locations, all the legs lodged into the ground and the head of the spider opened.

    A barrel with a diameter of a few inches protruded and something is glowing in the middle of it.

    Instantly light elemental energy beams were shot out of the barrel.

    The ten people lying in the ambush noticed the sudden sense of danger but they were unable to react in time. So, they could only use their puppets to defend themselves.

    The puppets were met with the continuous light energy beam that was shot towards them.

    All the people that are lying in the ambush were targeted by either one of two light elemental beams.

    Before they could make sense of the situation, the light elemental beam was diverted towards them leaving arge molten cut on the puppet¡¯s body. They tried to block the beams with the help of rocks and another natural terrain, but nothing stopped the light elemental beam which acted like aser beam.

    The ambush waspletely gone and the puppet organization members are trying to dodge theser beam.

    They took out their spare puppets and used them as an extrayers of shields while they hid behind them and startedmunicating.

    One of them used a flying bird puppet to levitate and get a glimpse of what is attacking them.

    When he noticed the locations of the spiders which are not properly visible due to the white light surrounding them, was already being targeted by the light beams, so he hurriedly descended but lost the bird puppet in the process.

    Afternding the puppet masters started discussing and decided on something.

    One of them took out arge puppet that looked like a giant elephant, but with a much fatter andrger trunk. It raised the trust in one direction. The hollow trunk suddenly shot out something.

    It looked like a metallic ball and flew in arge parab beforending near the spider puppet.

    The ball opened up to reveal a beetle puppet which moved towards the spider puppet and started using its mouth to tear the spider puppet apart.

    But one of the legs moved and shed down the bug puppet instantly.

    Sam looked at the whole scene and was surprised. The giant elephant puppet kept on shooting these bugs in different directions. He couldn¡¯t help but be impressed by the tactics and the skills of the other party.

    Even though the bug puppets are weak, they are still numbered greatly, it is not easy for Sam¡¯s puppets to deal with them while shooting constantly. So, he would be forced to attack the elephant puppet which seemed to have more defenses, even if he changed the focus of one puppet, then the people would have a chance to take a breather. One puppet master will escape and the situation would change.

    But Sam didn¡¯t bother to do that as he called for Vidyut and Night Ghost.

    He really didn¡¯t think he can deal with the puppet masters by himself with a few puppets, he merely wanted to test them as well as create a distraction and now that the distraction is sessful, it is about time heunched the real attack.

    Sam changed one of the spider puppet¡¯s aims and targeted the elephant.

    The puppet master immediately moved with his puppet as he moved towards that spider puppet to deal with it.

    At this moment, Vidyut shot a cursed arrow at the moving puppet master while Sam redirected the aim of the spider puppet to him.

    Sensing the threat from two different sides, he immediately became alert and got ready to defend himself, at this moment, Night ghost appeared from his hiding and used the soul binding technique making him unable to move.

    The cursed arrow and the light elemental beam nodded, leaving a burned flesh wound as well as the curse that would cause unstoppable bleeding and sleep at the same time.

    Night Ghost immediately left the spot as fast as he came and ran.

    The rest of the puppet masters are all agitated by one of them falling and they took the risk to save his life.

 Chapter 1123: Suspicion

    Half an hourter, the puppet masters all fainted as they lost a lot of blood. Sam and the team went there and collected them into the chessboard.

    This time, the battle is a lot easier than Sam had originally thought. Once their puppets are kept busy, there is nothing they could. And since they were caught by surprise, it only became easier.

    After they were done, Sam and the team proceeded with the usual bombing of the mine and went back to the city.

    There is only one more step left in this part of the n.

    "Get ready for the battle."

    They went back to the city where their next target is currently staying.

    Dayus is currently feeling extremely stressed. Since the incident in the capital of the Puppet organization in which Brother One lost all his assets, he didn¡¯t speak with Dayus again. But every time he looked at him, Dayus could feel the coldness.

    He knew that he already fell out of favor. He is currently praying Zeus so that Sam would be caught by Brother One and he would take over Sam¡¯s assets to cover his loss. In that way, he could escape the wrath or at least save himself a bit.

    He really wished that the n of the puppet organization would seed.

    As he thought of this, a sudden intrusion of an attendant running into the room made hime out of his daze.

    He looked at therge table filled with all kinds of dishes as Brother One ate and awkwardly talked with the young master of the current organization they are in.

    This is the banquet organized by the subordinate organization and there are a lot of people at the long table.

    He looked at the attendant who is whispering something to the head of the organization.

    He looked at Brother One and said.

    "The ambush at the mine has failed. The mine was bombed."

    When Brother One heard this, he was stunned. That mine ambush was theirst hope, now it was also lost. He looked at Dayus with a cold gaze. He really wants to rip this guys face off.

    Looking Brother One¡¯s expression, the head spoke.

    "You don¡¯t have to worry too much young master. Since there is a backup n, we can just use it. The first branch leader already gave the instructions to me."

    Brother One was stunned.

    "What Back up n?" He didn¡¯t know anything about it. The Branch leader didn¡¯t inform him of any such thing.

    "Well, since that person is attacking young masters, one by one in every ce whenever young master and his group were caught off guard, we decided to rey the situation.

    The First Branch leader secretly arrived here and is in the hiding along with the rest of the elders. Once the attack happens, they wille out and catch those criminals."

    When Brother One and Dayus heard of this, they were stunned and looked at each other.

    "No way, Branch leader said that he needs to meet with the other two branch leaders to form a proper n to deal with him in case this fails. How can he be here? Why didn¡¯t I know of it?"

    Brother One asked with agitation.

    The leader just smiled and said.

    "It is just that the First Branch leader was afraid that there might be some spies in your entourage so he didn¡¯t want to tell you the whole n."

    Even though the leader said that, Brother One could interpret what he really meant. The First Branch leader is suspecting that this was all orchestrated by Brother. After all, he was in the middle of this since the start and he is the one who was most active during this period. From introducing Sam as the enemy to the travel ns of the three young masters, everything was done by him.

    Just like how the Brother One suspected Dayus after the n backfired, the First Branch leader is also suspecting Brother One.

    "It is better for you and your group to rest for a while. The n will begin at evening near the river a few kilometers deep inside the forest."

    "I want to meet with the Branch Leader."

    Brother one asked seriously.

    He is clearly mad for being left our like this. He is the core disciple of the Puppet Organization. He has certain privileges even if he is just a disciple. The Branch leader acting like this is not eptable and he knew very well that his feigning would be exposed if this n went through.

    After all, Sam never attacked him.

    But the leader acted as if he didn¡¯t see the mad expression of the Brother One and just said calmly.

    "Branch Leader is in a secret location and wouldn¡¯t be able to talk with you now. We can talk after the task was over.

    You have two hours, you rest along with your team. If you need anything, ask the attendant that was assigned for you."

    With that the leader left along with the rest of the members. Only Brother one, Dayus and the rest of the entourage are left on the spot.

    Brother one immediately took out a specialmunication and tried to contact someone, but suddenly he realized that he might in some surveince and held back.

    He went to the room assigned for him and took out his puppet.

    This is arge puppet that looked a lot of like an ape.

    He made some adjustments here and there and the chest of the ape opened as the metal tes slid to both sides.

    There are a lot of holes in that area with metal spikes inside, they are for shooting at the enemies. Along with that, there is a hidden lever which he pulled.

    The abdomen also opened up which is a muchrger cavity with a lot of mechanisms. He bent forward and looked like he is making adjustments.

    But in reality he activated a noise cancelling formation inside and took out a token to contact the leader of the squad two.

    After trying for a dozen times, he still didn¡¯t connect, but he still tried and tried.

    When it finally connected, there was also a knock on the door.

    "Young Master, we need to go."

    It is the attendant that was assigned to him.

    Brother One hurried and said.

    "We are aborting the n. Leave immediately and go back to the capital."

    With that he didn¡¯t even bother hearing the reply and just turned off themunication token as he came out of the puppet.

    By now the attendant already entered the room.

    When he saw that Brother One is fixing the puppet, he smiled and said.

    "Branch leader is waiting. Pleasee. We need to execute the n properly. So, let us go to the briefing."

    He closed up the puppet and stored away before following the attendant out. He really wished that the squad 2 received the message and wouldn¡¯te.

    He is confident that they did as themunication was connected.

    After an hour, Brother One, Dayus and the rest of the entourage are on their way towards the river with a bunch of fishing rods.

    Everyone is tense.

    A few hundred meters away the first branch leader is currently standing on the tree as he waited for the signal.

    They stayed there for an hour. Brother One is relieved a bit that no one came.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is that the branch leader has apletely different opinion. An elder asked carefully.

    "Branch Leader, there is no one showing up. Do you think the news leaked?"

    The Branch leader didn¡¯t say and looked at Brother One, he is emitting a faint killing intent. The Elder was stunned and asked.

    "Leader you couldn¡¯t be thinking..."

    "Elder, you tell me something. In the middle of the city the arena entrance exploded and was timed to kill the Second young master. But coincidentally the first young master just happened to stop it from happening.

    Then, he happened to have a friend who knew the person that attacked us and what his goal is, even though Agni also said that someone named Sam will try to trouble us, we have yet to see him or his team.

    How can someone else know about this incident before our god could inform us? I felt that something is fishy about that Dayus then. He might be hiding something.

    And all of this happened with the first young master, who believed that our organization needs to be unified. I couldn¡¯t help but think that these guys are taking advantage of the crisis and ming all of this on Sam while they are doing all of this to deal with thepetition.

    Maybe Sam ising, but that doesn¡¯t mean these people arepletely unrted to this incident.

    If no onees here to attack or if someonees just to bluff here, then I will kill this First young master right here and now."

    But as soon as he spoke, he saw a purple lightning-covered arrow zooming through the forest andnding near the river causing a shymotion.

 Chapter 1124: Digging the hill

    Everyone had different expressions on their faces when they saw the arrow that flew over.

    Dayus was shocked and doesn¡¯t know what to make sense of the situation. Because he knew that the Squad doesn¡¯t have any lightning elemental users and he is sure that this is not the way they used to attack.

    Brother One is nervous and afraid. The first thought that came to his mind is that he clearly gave the order to withdraw and not attack, but the attack still came. But after the initial shock, he realized what Dayus realized and started thinking rapidly about who this might and both of them came to a single conclusion.

    It is Sam. It has to be him.

    As for how he did this, they have no idea.

    This time, it didn¡¯t happen because of the high-level intelligence gather Sam usually does, rather it was extremely simple and straightforward.

    When Brother One is desperately trying to call squad 2, they were unable to pick up, because they were in a battle.

    As soon as they reached the city, Sam and the teamunched an attack on squad two who were camping in the forest and they clearly observed the incessant alerts on themunication token when they are almost done with the squad.

    So, Saber Monarch held the saber at the neck of the squad leader and made him pick up the call, they heard the hurried order, and the line was cut off.

    Saber Monarch cut off the throat and Sam instantly concocted a n.

    Even though the fishing n and the ambush were part of the trap, the n for fishing was made beforehand and squad two was already informed of it.

    Fishing is what this city is famous for and from the memories they gathered from the death squad members, the original n is for Brother One to fish along with the young master of the subordinate organization and the attack will happen. Brother One would ¡¯heroically¡¯ save the young master of the subordinate organization and almost died only to be able to survive because of the ¡¯luck¡¯.

    That was the original n.

    And now the n seemed to have been modified.

    Immediately Sam and the team went to make preparations.

    They don¡¯t know how long they would have and if they could have enough time to set the traps. So, they prepared a simple ambush that would mostly depend on the surprise of the opponents.

    So, the shy purple arrow which didn¡¯t attack anyone except create a shy light was part of the n.

    Currently, the branch leader is the one who is feeling most relieved, even though an attack is happening. Because even though he suspected the first young master, it is mostly his position and his duty speaking.

    As an elder for a child, he hoped that something like his thought didn¡¯t happen and luckily nothing like that happened. This attack was confirmed.

    While Brother One and Dayus are nervous about the unexpected attack, the elders and the Branch leader are thrilled instead.

    As the purple arrows rained down, the Branch leader and the elders started running, there are ten of them moving.

    Even though ten elders were sent to the mine, there are the joint forces of the three puppet organizations. But currently, the one that the Branch leader is leading is the main force of the First Branch. If they fall, they would be done for.

    It only took a few seconds for them to cover the distance. By the time the third volley of arrows hit them, the Branch leader and the elders are already there and the branch leader let out of his puppet which appeared to be a giant humanoid that aimed and shot two wind elemental cannons which made the arrows stop in the tracks.

    The Branch leader stood on the shoulder of the puppet and looked at the arrow trajectory in disdain.

    He then turned to three elders and said.

    "Take the young master and the other youngsters away and protect them. The rest of you follow me in going after the enemy."

    He could clearly guess the approximate location with the trajectory of the shooter, so he got ready.

    The rest of the elders took out their puppets and started moving forward, deep into the forest.

    Meanwhile, around a thousand meters away from the spot, Vidyut is currently standing on a small hill as he aimed at the targets.

    A thousand meters is a long distance but for people at their level, it is small and insignificant.

    If it is in a straight t ce they would even be able to see each other with the naked eye.

    For an archer like Vidyut, it is a piece of cake to drop a few volleys of shy arrows.

    And with the rtively higher vantage point and the cover of the trees, not only was he hidden, he was also able to guess the location of the group of elders through themotion they are making and how slowly they are moving as they are afraid that the group would have left any traps, they let the spare puppets check the area before moving forward.

    At the foot of the hill, the team is currently digging some holes in the hill at an extremely fast pace. Tamas and Sam even used their undead to dig the holes.

    Even Night Ghost was not exempt from that and Sam¡¯s beasts, including the shadow mice, ape, and some extra beasts that he has inside are all digging the hill at various ces.

    While Sam is tinkering with the harbinger.

    He sat on the ground and kept the harbinger on hisp as he removed the energy cells and reced them with a new metallic device he made.

    This is thetest addition to the harbinger and this uses the space cells and energy liquefication methods to form a constant supply as long as he reced the space jades with wind elemental energy stones.

    After fixing that, he turned the harbinger over and took out another metallic object.

    It is square in shape and fits perfectly in the middle of the board like a mp.

    He ced it on.

    At this moment a human silhouette that has an uncanny resemnce to Sam came out of the board and looked at Sam.

    Sam smiled at the human silhouette. This is the spirit of the harbinger. Sam didn¡¯t know why it took so long for the spiritual infancy of the harbinger. Butter he understood, it is a humanoid spirit and quite a high-level one at that and when the spirit manifested, it looked surprisingly like Sam, but slight changes in the facial features.

    Sam pressed a button on the square metallic device he attached to the board and the spirit which looked white like a condensation of energy suddenly had colors.

    This is the holographic projection and some faint energy waves were being emitted from the square device.

    Harbinger slowly floated on by itself took a spin around the hill in a quick motion and came back in front of Sam.

    "You know what to do."

    Sam said and the spirit actually nodded and the harbinger left the hill as it zoomed into a different direction.

    When the board is gone, Sam turned to the hill and started using his earth element to dig the holes.

    After they were done with the holes, Sam started taking out medium-sized liquid energy cells and cing them in different holes.

    They are all of space elemental energy.

    Vidyut looked at Sam and said.

    "They are already halfway there. They can see our activities any minute now."

    "Use the liquid energy cell arrows."

    Sam gave an order without even taking a look and started cing the liquid energy cells carefully. He didn¡¯t dare be careless at the moment as this is something he hasn¡¯t done before. At least not in reality, he has done this countless times in his brain and in the simtion in the second floor of the divine dimension.

    He is careful because the after-effects of this thing are beyond imaginable.

    After cing the small and medium energy cells, he took fiverge liquid energy cells and one cylinder that is almost as big as arge fire extinguisher and started cing them in special spots within the hole.

    Meanwhile, the Branch leader and the elders are shocked by the new volley of arrows, they just tried to block them like before, but as soon as they arrived at a certain level, the arrows exploded creating many lightning energy sts slowing down their pace.

    The second half of their pursuit took double the time of the first half of the pursuit.

    When they reached the foot of the hill, Sam and his team are standing on top of the hill.

    Sam held the ice elemental divine dimension as his teammates disappeared and he held the dimensional drifter in another hand.

    The elder recognized Sam immediately.

    "Surround him. Don¡¯t let him escape."

    The Branch leader ordered and zoomed in, they had already thrown their attacks, but none of it was aimed to kill. They are not skilled at soul extraction, so they need to interrogate Sam.

    But as they climbed over the hill, they felt that something is wrong. Sam took a deep breath and kicked his foot on the hill as he leaped a bit into the air before he activated the dimensional drifter.

    He disappeared from the spot and at the same time from the ce he was standing a faint gray glow started appearing.

 Chapter 1125: Controlled Explosion

    Sam disappeared, the branch leader and the elders felt the changes in the energy.

    They all thought, escaping is Sam¡¯sst resort, since the path was free from any traps, they didn¡¯t think that there would be any here and now that they saw something is wrong, they wanted to escape.

    But it was already toote.

    The surrounding space was suddenly restricted making them unable to move. They all froze. They could even move their limbs or even jaws to speak. Even breathing became order, some of them who were about to leap over were stuck in mid-air.

    They struggled with their energy and wrestled against the spatial lock. But that is not the end, the spatial energy slowly started to be turbulent and covered a hundred-meter radius with the hill as the center.

    At first, the spatial lock was strengthened and then they felt the surrounding space distorting slowly and they could feel the spatial tears appearing.

    The spatial energy soon shed with itself and within a minute...

    *BOOM*

    It exploded.

    All that was left in the ce was arge space crack covering a circle of a hundred-meter radius. In fact, it couldn¡¯t even be called a crack, it is just an area with turbulent space currents sucking everything in the surroundings inside.

    Anything that went into the area was sucked in and thrown into the vast void never to return again.

    And on the edge of that cluster of energy mass, a hand appeared as it clutched the ground and slowly a middle-aged man appeared out of it.

    His body is a bloody mess and his clothes are tattered. His whole body ispletely infested with spatial energy.

    This is the branch leader of the first branch. The leader of the puppet organization.

    Heid down on the rubble as he looked at the sky. He felt pain. He really wished that someone would kill him right now.

    As soon as he thought so, someone appeared near his hand he looked upwards to see Sam.

    Currently, the person in front of him didn¡¯t look like an all-powerful leader of an organization. He didn¡¯t even look like someone who is an Astral ne consummate level cultivator.

    He looked like a dying old man he is.

    Sam dragged him out and looked at his hand. He used his sword to kill him off and he could see the relief that came to the old man from dying like that. The spatial energy corrosion is not something a body can bear.

    The st that Sam made is created with the liquid energy cells and a little experiment of Sam.

    He wondered what would happen if the energy st that was always chaotic and destructive was contained and this is the result.

    He created a formation that circtes the energy to be contained within certain limits and boundaries. In the initial stages of the energy destabilization, the formation which was active before the destabilization will contain it causing the chaos to breed, and as time passes the destruction increases and finally causes the destruction.

    As for why the Branch leader survived, it is because of the quality of the Astral ne Consummate cultivator.

    This is the knowledge he gained from the Old Beast. In the asional talks he had with him over two years, he repeatedly learned information regarding the Astral ne Consummate cultivators which could help him in killing them by himself. Then he learned something. The Astral ne cultivators at the Consummate stage can ess space.

    Not the space element. The real space, the void.

    They can endure it.

    Generally, they wouldn¡¯t discover it until they reach the Divine ne for some reason, but their bodies can endure a bit as the Astral ne Consummation is a stage in which their body undergoes the qualitative changes that would enable them to continue the cultivation in the Divine ne.

    That is why Sam came to check whether this guy is dead or not.

    This method is indeed suitable for killing people of this level, but there is one drawback. Nothing will remain of them.

    The spatial rings in which the heirlooms are stored most of the time will also be destroyed.

    But this time, Sam knew that it is an exception and dared to kill the other party using this method. This also serves as an experiment.

    As for the heirloom itself, it is a furnace that is divided into three parts.

    It is actually a furnace made with the bones of a high-level fire-type beast and it has multiple functions.

    The three branches divided the furnace into different parts.

    The first branch kept the core mechanism of the furnace which is responsible for melting. The second branch kept the tempering system of the furnace and the final one took the furnace body itself which has over a thousand formations inscribed into its structure and dozens of spirits enchanted to facilitate the heating and forging processes.

    When Sam saw the description he was tempted by it too.

    But it is only temporary. His production unit is still the best.

    Anyway, since the heirloom is like this, the branch leaders cannot take them out as they wish as the furnaces constantly run due to their puppet and weapon productions. So, they are back at the headquarters.

    Sam activated the dimensional drifter once again as he got ready to move away. It is about time to greet a fellow yer.

    A few minutes earlier.

    Right after Sam sent the harbinger away.

    Harbinger zoomed through the wind at full speed and soon caught up with the group that was escorting Brother One and his entourage soon.

    Harbinger and his spirit form attracted the attention and Dayus¡¯ face changed into one that of shock and anxiety.

    He knew that Sam would havee, but to still see him, he was shocked and afraid all the same.

    He became vignt and took out his spear. He knew that escaping now is futile, he needs to defend himself and find a way to slip up which Sam bes busy with others. The entourage is big and the two elders along with the guardian are quite strong.

    He has a chance.

    He is waiting for Sam to stop and say something. But instead, the harbinger zoomed past them as small circr des were shot from the front of the board towards them and a half-filled small liquid energy was dropped at one of the elders¡¯ puppets while he blocked.

    The cellnded on a joint of the puppet and destroyed half of it while the elder was knocked down from the sheer force of the st.

    When they saw the st and the state of the puppet one of theckeys wanted to escape, but the front end of the harbinger from which the metal discs were shot changed into a small cannon, and a wind elemental energy beam was shot at that person.

    As soon as he was hit by the beam, a small storm of wind des happened in that one spot mincing the flesh and bones and making him fall with a lot of blood lost.

    The energy beam was then focused on another target who is also on run but was hit by it again.

    Harbinger then changed the target to the puppets one by one as he damaged it and whenever a person wanted to get away from the group or wanted to fight back, he changed the energy beam¡¯s direction towards them.

    As for the attacks, harbinger is most dexterous when the rider was not on it.

    It doesn¡¯t have to care about injuring the rider and can move as he likes.

    The attacks didn¡¯t hit. Sometimes the cultivators felt like the attacks hit, but they didn¡¯t see the board stops.

    After some time they started attacking the board. But to their dismay, as soon as he was overwhelmed by the sheer power, harbinger just dropped a liquid energy cell and escaped.

    The elders who wanted to chase had to dodge the energy cell and jump.

    As soon as the explosion subsided and they came back to their feet, they are vignt and look around.

    Dayus who felt that this is the best time to escape was captured by one of the elders and was forced to stay there.

    After confirming that harbinger is nowhere to be seen, they started their journey, but as soon as they came across a dense forest patch, harbinger returned and started harassing them.

    The harassment continued.

    The Harbinger didn¡¯t even kill another person apart from the first two weaklings, it only harassed them again and again and the time they traveled halfway towards the city, they could have made at least eight rounds.

    But when the situation is already this frustrating they suddenly heard a loud explosion.

    *BOOM*

    They looked towards that direction and saw the spatial turbulence creating a storm.

    It is clearly visible and they can imagine the effects of the turbulence.

    While the effects of the explosion are still visible, harbinger kept on attacking them.

    Dayus who saw the explosion felt that something is wrong and looked at the board. He felt like he knew Sam well and he couldn¡¯t wrap his head around him not talking all this while.

    After all, in his opinion, Sam is cocky, arrogant, and too full of himself to not boast when he is creating this much disturbance.

    He took out his spear and threw it straight towards the board when ¡¯Sam¡¯ dodged, he was met with another spear. Harbinger created a small sh with an energy beam and let the spear go through the projection.

    Dayus clearly felt this and frowned and then realization dawned on him.

    "Sam, you bastard." He muttered to himself.

 Chapter 1126: Dealing with Dayus

    Dayus didn¡¯t understand how Sam did this, but he sure as hell knew that the figure on the harbinger is not Sam and in fact not even a creature at all.

    That is why he couldn¡¯t help but curse as he wasn¡¯t able to digest the fact that Sam managed to fool him that easily.

    But as soon as he muttered those words, he couldn¡¯t help but feel a sense of trepidation as spatial fluctuations urred nearby.

    Sam appeared out of thin air and the harbinger which is making a mess out of the group perfectly appeared under him so that he wouldn¡¯t fall and directlynd on the board

    Sam tapped on the metal mp which disappeared into the divine dimension and took out the ice divine dimension to let out his team to sh with the other party.

    He didn¡¯t take action as he let the team fight. The entourage and the elders are injured and frustrated, they even expended half of their energy.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel proud of what harbinger did. It is just a machine but it managed to make these experts a bunch of clows and brought them to their knees.

    He sat down on the harbinger with his legs hanging down.

    Since the board can control the thrust by itself, he doesn¡¯t have to worry about controlling it anymore. He has been waiting for this day for a long time.

    He controlled the harbinger which moved to face Dayus who is still in daze.

    Dayus came out of his shock as soon as he saw Sam who is sitting leisurely in front of him while floating in the air.

    He couldn¡¯t help but gulp in nervousness. He is in such a daze not because Sam appeared, but because he knew that he lucked out by calling Sam a bastard a second before Sam arrived.

    If Sam was one second earlier or he spoke the words one more secondte, he would be in trouble. It is not like he is afraid of Sam. In his own twisted and self absorbed opinion, he is not any less than Sam, in fact he is even superior because unlike Sam who fights like a coward with all the extra essories and tricks which could be used by anyone and destroy anything, he relies on himself.

    In his opinion, the invention and research effort put by Sam behind all of this are not really considered as Sam¡¯s true abilities and are even considered lowly.

    But he knew that he would be in for it if Sam got crazy after hearing the word bastard and bent on chasing after him, with all his might. He wouldn¡¯t even have a peaceful meal for a long time and that is based on the fact that he would even be able to escape the cmity.

    Sam looked at him with a smile and said.

    "Nice to meet you again Dayus. How are you doing? It seems like you made some friends in high ces."

    Dayus didn¡¯t reply and just got ready with his spear.

    Sam looked at the young master who is shing with his team members.

    "First Young master. Quite the status he had and from the looks of it, he really is skilled in business and puppet making. I have seen some of his work. But in politics and judging people, he is a dunce.

    You made a great choice by partnering with him. But he acted like a dumb fuck partnering with you."

    Sam¡¯s words made Dayus angry and he swung his spear.

    Harbinger moved and dodged the attack.

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "What is the hurry? Do you really want to fight me that much?"

    "Let me go." Dayus said coldly.

    "Why? Aren¡¯t here to deal with me and take over the furnace from the puppet organization, you have both the opportunities in front. The First Branch leader just died and I am right in front of you. Go ahead and make your move."

    Sam¡¯s nonchnce made Dayus mad, but he knew better than recklessly make a move. He just said with gritted teeth.

    "I will forfeit this ce, you can have it all to yourself."

    Sam just smiled without replying immediately.

    He just looked at the rest of the entourage who descended into shock because of the news. Brother One was the most shocked person.

    "You are lying. How can a brat like you can kill the Branch Leader?"

    Sam just smiled and replied.

    "What do you think the previous explosion was? Do you think I did it for some entertainment? It is to kill your branch leader and the rest of your elders. None of their bodies even remained."

    Brother One immediately changed his attention to Sam and wanted to attack him. But Sam disappeared from the spot along with the harbinger and appeared at another spot dodging the attack.

    Dayus wanted to slip away, but Sam once again used his spatial ability to appear in front of him blocking the route.

    "Where do you think you are going mister? Our debt is not settled yet."

    "I already told you, that I forfeited on this one. What more do you want?"

    When Sam heard this, he was dumbfounded for a second. The next moment he disappeared from the spot and all of a sudden, Dayus felt a pulling force at the back of his cor and before he could react, his head was mmed into the ground and Sam sat on his chest while putting pressure on his face while looking into his eyes.

    "Just how much of a self-centered piece of crap are you? And just what do you think I am? You forfeiting to get the furnace is thepensation for framing me, using my name and even trying to deal with me?

    And forfeiting? You are saying it as if you have a chance to begin with.

    You piece of shit, if I don¡¯t make you remember this day for the rest of your life, I will change my name."

    Sam punched Dayus in the face. Dayus became angry and purple lightning surrounded him as he mmed his feet on the ground to get away from the submissive position.

    He activated lightning elemental fusion directly and looked at Sam.

    "If you daree and fight me without your petty tricks and see if you can win. Piece of shit who only knows how to win dirty tricks."

    Sam raised an eyebrow and took out the reaper sword as he was covered with silver lightning. But unlike Dayus, he only used partial fusion.

    "I seemed to have remembered wrongly. Nagin realm, Nike, First Pce of Inheritance, second pce of inheritance. I beat the crap out of you too many times and you dare spout those words."

    Sam ridiculed him and zoomed forward.

    The spear and sword shed as silver and purple lightning crackled.

    When the sh happened, Dayus was pushed back and Sam stood there like a mountain. Unmoving.

    Dayus looked at Sam angrily and the unwillingness could be clearly seen.

    Sam thought for a moment, and stored the sword away, before taking a spear out.

    This is the same spear he got from the Pce of inheritance that was meant for Dayus.

    When Dayus saw this, his expression became furious.

    "You dare battle me with a spear? You are really arrogant."

    Sam didn¡¯t say anything and made his move.

    He lunged forward as he shot the spear with one hand.

    Dayus used his spear to m Sam¡¯s spear into the ground and moved forward with a stab.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop the spear motion and instead stabbed it further into the ground and used the spear as a support to spin around and kicked Dayus in the face.

    As soon as the leg connected with the face, the silver lightning stuck him in the face. But as soon as he was hit, Dayus felt an uncontroble force throw him away.

    This is the effect of Repel style Sam used when kicking.

    As Dayus tried to control himself in mid air while stabbing the spear on the ground, Sam already threw the spear straight towards Dayus and ran after it.

    Dayus managed to regain his bnce and used his spear to block the iing attack, but his timing missed as Sam spun in the air andnded a kick.

    The spear which is already fast turned into a silver streak as it went through the shoulder of Dayus andnded on the ground.

    Sam stood there and looked at Dayus with a mocking smile.

    He then took out a staff and got ready for the next move.

    Looking at Sam not attacking, Dayus made a move, his spear spun in the air roaring like a lightning dragon as it went for Sam¡¯s throat.

    Sam blocked the spear with his staff and made a counter attack which was blocked by Dayus by a hair¡¯s breadth.

    After a few shes, slowly Dayus lost the momentum and the staffnded squarely on the shoulder wound and he was crashed into the ground.

    Sam looked at him and stored the staff away before taking out a dagger.

    When Dayus looked at Sam¡¯s expression of disdain, he could understand what is happening.

 Chapter 1127: Trying to Escape

    Dayus looked at Sam with immense anger and indignation. As soon as Sam changed his staff and reced it with a dagger he understood what he is doing.

    He is showing off his skills. This is the answer to Dayus¡¯ im that Sam is nothing without his tricks.

    He is using different weapons to deal with him and with a sword, the staff, and the spear, Sam came out on top on every exchange while Dayus whose only weapon is a spear and his best fighting condition he couldn¡¯t win against Sam in even a single exchange.

    This made him feel a burning sensation on his face. But he doesn¡¯t know whether it is the shame or the kick Sam gave him on the face.

    He cannot stand his humiliation and rushed at Sam with his spear.

    Sam dodged the lighting spearing at him and swung his dagger at Dayus who barely managed to dodge.

    Once again the exchange became heated. This time Dayus started using his head and tried to keep Sam at a distance so that he wouldn¡¯t be able to attack him with the dagger.

    Sam looked at the streaks of lightning that areing at him with every swing of the spear and could only dodge or block with the dagger.

    His expression showed that he was troubled. Dayus grinned at this sight and charged forward faster. But as the spear moved, Sam suddenly smiled and moved towards the spear instead of dodging it, he let the spear go below his armpit and slid over the spear.

    Dayus wanted to dodge while dragging his spear, but Sam held the spear tightly with his arm and dragged Dayus forward with all his strength, and stabbed the dagger into the same shoulder extended the wound even more and kicked Dayus back once more.

    The Dagger was stuck there.

    Sam then took out his bow and aimed at Dayus with a smile.

    Dayus tried his best to regain his bnce and dodged the first arrow and the second one.

    Sam started shooting rapidly and Dayus didn¡¯t even find a chance to counterattack. After around fifteen volleys, Sam suddenly nocked three arrows and held a bow at a different angle. All three arrows cut through the wind and moved towards Dayus, all three aiming at three different points on Dayus¡¯ upper body.

    Dayus spun his spear as he blocked two of them, when he was about to hit the third one which ising at his throat, he suddenly sensed something, an arrow came from nowhere and hit the tail end of the spear which made his posture change with the sheer force and the arrow which was supposed to be hitting in the neck hit on the dagger lodged in his body.

    The dagger got deeper into the shoulder and even a part of the hilt was inside.

    Sam stored the bow away as he looked at Dayus with even more disdain. This made Dayus even angrier.

    "How dare you humiliate me like this? How dare you? YOU BASTARD. How dare you do this to me? I will kill you. I will definitely kill you."

    Dayus muttered as he made hand signs.

    He is using the blood art.

    The Blood Art was given to them by the God who chose him.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop him. He just looked at him calmly.

    The word Bastard is ringing in his head. After all these years, no one dared to call him that to the face. He is definitely feeling angry. He really wanted to rip Dayus apart, he started breathing rapidly. But he is calmer than before. He didn¡¯t want a mindless ughter even with all the rage bubbling inside him.

    For him to gain this level of calm, he had to cultivate till Astral ne.

    He shook his head and tried his best to suppress the urge. After a few seconds, he closed his eyes and just waited for Dayus to finish the bloodline art and started taking deep breaths before finally opening his eyes.

    Dayus is currently charging at him with the blood-red spear which is surrounded by purple lightning. He is wearing blood-red full body armor that looked like it belonged to a Medieval Knight.

    Sam blocked the attack and used the force to take a step back. His partial lightning fusion was gone.

    He looked at Dayus and shadow energy surrounded his body. As he finished the shadow elemental fusion and his own shadow started extending with the injection of the shadow elemental energy.

    Soon the few strands of shadow extended as they coiled around Sam¡¯s limbs and slowly started covering his body.

    Dayus felt a bad premonition and he immediately made his body. He channeled a lot of energy into the spear and got into a throwing stance as he aimed at Sam.

    The purple lightningpletely covered the spear and made itpletely invisible. It just looked like a condensed and concentrated bar of lightning in his hand and threw with all his might.

    The ground below his feet cracked as the spear left his hands.

    The spear destroyed everything in its path as it made its way towards Sam who is currently coiled with the vines made of his own shadow and is slowly merging.

    When the spear was about to meet him, Sam just smiled and the shadow vines caught the spear.

    *BOOM*

    Arge explosive sound could be heard as dust rubble rose.

    When it settled, Sam is still standing in the spot with the shadow vines holding the spear in front. All the energy and the force have been negated.

    Sam¡¯s smirk is still there.

    The shadow merging waspleted and the dark mass covering him slowly converged into an armor.

    A full body armor that perfectly fit his body. Dark smoke was being emitted around him. He threw the spear away and made his move.

    Dayus widened his eyes in disbelief and only came back to his sense when Sam finally made his move.

    He extended his hand and the blood spear Sam threw away came back to him as he got ready to fight and stabbed at Sam.

    But Sam disappeared into a puff of dark smoke and before he could realize it, he felt a strong impact on the back of his ear.

    Sam¡¯s kicknded on the back of his ear making him crash into the ground.

    Dayus wanted to get up, but Sam already arrived and dropped an ax kick on the already injured shoulder.

    Dayus used the other hand to stab Sam with the spear, but Sam dodged and kicked Dayus¡¯ face with repel style making him fly away from the ground.

    While he was still in mid-air, Sam appeared above him and stomped him on his head in midair making him crash into the ground once again.

    Dayus used his spear to stab the ground and lessen the impact. When Sam reappeared beside him with a kick, he used the spear to block it, but the shadow armor on Sam¡¯s leg immediately extended some vines which coiled around the spear, and when Sam lowered the leg, the spear was also dragged down with it.

    Sam used his other leg to kick Dayus in the face, making him fly sideways.

    And that was only the beginning.

    For the next fifteen minutes, Dayus had the beating of his lifetime. Sam didn¡¯t use any of his techniques, any other elemental energies and none of his attacks are made to kill. He is just beating the crap out of Dayus.

    By now the team was done with the rest of the group and brother one is currently held by Saber Monarch.

    And he looked at the scene with horror.

    He readily agreed with Dayus¡¯ n because he felt like nothing much would happen since a ready-made scapegoat was avable for him and if he failed to use it, he would be an idiot.

    But never thought that the other party is nothing like a goat much less his scapegoat. He is not some meek animal that is ready for ughter.

    He looked like the one that would be the cause of the ughter.

    He clearly knew of Dayus¡¯ strength. The first thing he did when Dayus came with this proposal is to test his strength.

    He knew what he was capable of. But in front of Sam, he is nothing but a helpless man who can only take abuse.

    "STOOOOP."

    While he was in a daze a shout made hime back to his senses.

    It was none other than Dayus who yelled.

    Sam stopped and looked at him.

    "Please let me go. I will not get in your way. I will never even show you my face voluntarily."

    He pleaded.

    Sam just looked at him coldly without replying.

    "I apologize for plotting against you. I apologize for my arrogance. Please just let me go. I want to live."

    Sam¡¯s cold gaze wavered a bit and he turned his attention a bit as if he was really thinking about something.

    At this moment Dayus took out a token and crushed it as spatial elemental energy surrounded him.

    "Hahaha, what a fool you are. How dare you humiliate me like this? I will have my revenge one day and then you wouldn¡¯t even have a chance to run."

 Chapter 1128: Outer Deacon

    Dayus activated an interdimensional transference token which he got his hands-on with a lot of effort. He had to pay arge price for it, but it is guaranteed to work which is another lifeline. So, he didn¡¯t even hesitate while paying the price.

    He looked at Sam with malice as he was being sucked by the spatial elemental energy around him.

    But all of a sudden, Sam disappeared from the spot and he reappeared right behind him. His shadow armor was gone and he is currently in his partial space elemental form.

    He held Dayus¡¯ nape and drew him back while spatial energy ran wild.

    Dayus suddenly felt that he stopped. The force that was about to pull him away from this spot, seemed to have slowed down.

    He turned his head to look at Sam in horror.

    "What? Do you think I would fall for your pathetic acting? And do you really think a toy like this can save your ass? "

    Sam spoke coldly as he used his spatial energy to counter the spatial energy responsible for the transfer of Dayus.

    Spatial energy is something he used the least, but that is not because he is not good at it, rather it is extremely energy-consuming and Sam who is obsessed with energy efficiency couldn¡¯t possibly use it in every battle.

    After he broke through a bit more, he would be able to use it as he liked, but since he doesn¡¯t have any reason to conserve his energy now, he decided to use it and show Dayus what Despair truly means.

    Sam held the hand that was holding the token and started injecting his own spatial energy. The tokens and transference scrolls work on the same principle, they create a temporary node to transfer the person away like a one-sided space gate.

    But for the temporary node construction, some time would be needed and within that time, if Sam managed to restrict the spatial energy and make the token expend all the energy, he would be able to stop the other party.

    As Sam injected more and more energy Dayus groaned painfully as he looked at Sam and tried his best to control his own energy to expel the spatial energy.

    But his energy is being depleted at a rapid rate and soon he felt it being collected at the shoulder joint of the hand.

    He widened his eyes in disbelief as he looked at Sam.

    At first, Sam used the spatial energy to just dissipate the lightning energy, but the very next instant he started doing something else, he used the uniqueness of the spatial energy and blocked the energy blow, and made the lightning energy umte at the shoulder joint.

    If this happens, the energy will soon explode and destroy the joint as well as the flesh surrounding it. The spatial energy will corrode the flesh and he wouldn¡¯t be able to heal it back unless he found a healer who has experienced elemental poisoning or a space elemental cultivator who can absorb and direct the space elemental energy.

    He would lose his arm.

    The worst part is, if Sam has done this at the elbow joint, he would have cut the remaining arm eliminating the corroded partpletely to heal, but he is doing this at the shoulder joint. There is nothing to sever there.

    "Sam, No, please, no. Don¡¯t do that."

    He spoke in a low voice which is trembling in fear and despair. But Sam didn¡¯t care and looked at him with a cold smile and said.

    "You need to pay the price for your decisions. Good luck trying to find a person who can regrow your arm. I heard there is a person named Vardar who is a great healer when ites to elemental corrosion and poisoning. You can find him and try to get your arm back."

    "No, Sam. I have important information that I could give you in exchange..."

    As he spoke...

    *bOOm*

    A small explosion was heard at the shoulder joint and Sam also released the space elemental restriction.

    "NOOOOOOOOO...."

    Dayus screamed in agony and heartache as he looked at his arm while the token sucked it and transported it away.

    Sam looked at Dayus who is currently screaming in agony.

    "So what is the information you are talking about?"

    Sam asked as he looked at him calmly.

    Dayus looked at him with hateful eyes.

    "You either tell me that or I would use the soul extraction after killing you. And if you tell me the truth, I will cure the elemental corrosion, otherwise, I will cut off another arm in the same way and then leave you in the lurch. You know what will happen to you after that."

    Dayus looked at Sam and said.

    "It is because of the Night Demon family. One of their members is part of the Five great sects and has a decent position in the outer branch. He was in your pursuit after you exterminated their family. I identally met him and we both nned this."

    "So, the transference token would have led you to him?"

    "No. I got it somewhere else for a high price."

    "Now that the n failed, what will happen to your cooperation?"

    "Of course, I am going to escape. That guy invested a lot in the n. The golden me explosion that urred at the entrance was created with a lot of effort and he had to owe someone a favor for that."

    "For that little trick?"

    Sam said with a raised eyebrow.

    Dayus didn¡¯t bother to reply to that and continued.

    "He paid arge price for that. If I go back to him after the failure, he would be on to me and I would have to pay him back. He is stronger than me. So, I am going to escape."

    "Is that it?"

    "Yes."

    "Are you sure, there is nothing for you to tell me?"

    "No, just clear the corrosion already, I can feel the spatial energy spreading."

    Sam ced his hand on the injury and sucked the spatial energy out. He didn¡¯t heal the rest though.

    He then thought for a bit and called for Night Ghost.

    Night Ghost made some hand signs and Dayus felt something entering his sea of consciousness forcefully.

    "This is a soul imprint. If you are in the same realm as I am I would be able to track you down and I would be able to identify your soul scent.

    So, if you have any ideas of going against my organization, be careful of what is going to happen next. I think you already know what I did to Arman at the beginning of our sh. I will give you ten times the torture."

    When Dayus heard this, he widened his eyes in disbelief. When Sam saw that expression, he knew that this precaution was necessary. Dayus is really thinking of doing something to the organization to vent some anger.

    Dayus took a high-grade pill and his arm slowly started growing back. Sam let him go.

    He didn¡¯t want to kill him. At least not yet. This time, because of Dayus¡¯ involvement he managed to finish one-third of the task easily.

    He didn¡¯t have to create a plot from the scratch and only had to improvise the already existing n. For now, the more yers the better.

    After Dayus left, Sam finally changed his attention back to the First young master.

    The first young master looked back at Sam and said in a trembling voice.

    "I... I am sorry. Please let me go."

    Sam smiled and said.

    "Should I really let you go? Give me a proper reason?"

    "I... I..."

    Brother One couldn¡¯t find a single reason for that. Even though it was Dayus who egged him, he is still the one that framed Sam and made him a target of the puppet organization. Luckily, Sam managed to get the information beforehand because of his surveince and Arkiv. Otherwise, they would have been in a bit of trouble.

    And the ns of other yers helped him a bit.

    Otherwise, if he was directly in the city and he was already wanted by then, he would have had to sh against the puppet organization unprepared.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "Even though you are smart, you are not cunning enough. I will give you a chance. If you can utilize it properly, you can live, otherwise, you will die."

    Brother One looked at him with widened eyes. He didn¡¯t know that there is still hope for him.

    "But after this ended, you wouldn¡¯t be able to rule over the high and mighty puppet organization because I don¡¯t have time or resources to spare people to rule this organization, instead you can work for me. If you agree to that you can live, or you will die and I will n it from there."

    The first young master looked at Sam and carefully thought what he should do.

    "I will join you."

    "Good," Sam said and turned towards Night Ghost, who got ready to do a soul contract.

 Chapter 1129: Diverting Attention

    Night Ghost finished the soul contract instantly and Five elemental King proceeded on exining the n while the first young master heard everything clearly.

    When Five elemental King narrated the whole thing, the first young master gulped in disbelief.

    "So, you understand what is going to happen next. You need to handle the elders of this organization." Five elemental king said to the first young master.

    Sam looked at the city and asked.

    "Why did they note even after all thismotion?"

    "They were ordered not toe. No matter what happens here, they will note unless someone reaches and city and exins the situation to them." The first young master said from behind.

    "Why?" Sam asked curiously.

    "Actually this organization is divided internally. One part supports the second branch and the other supports the first branch. Nothing stays a secret in that organization and it is hard to find which member belongs to which faction.

    So, the Branch leader used the special situation which also gave him a special authority to make them stay here.

    From what I could guess, the first branch leader must have been forced to take the role of the attacker in your case because the problem started in your branch, so since he is taking the risk the first branch leader would have demanded absolute authority in the mission and made this external organization stay out of it."

    "What is all the secrecy for? I thought your organization is beyond all this?"

    "Yes, they don¡¯t want to devour each other, but there is another kind ofpetition. They like to be the ones that had the best branch. On top of that, you are also someone who was directly informed about by the gods themselves, so the branch leaders are really curious about you. So, the first branch leader wanted to know what is it that is so special about you, before the rest of the branch leaders."

    "Such simple issue," Sam muttered to himself as he looked into the horizons while the rest of the team executed the n.

    After an hour, the First young master is running towards the city gates, followed by two more elders. They are injured and bleeding everywhere.

    The young master¡¯s puppet is damaged severely, but it is still running beside him and supporting him asionally.

    There is arge hole in the middle of the puppet which had arge hole in middle and a human arm is hanging in that hole.

    It was Dayus¡¯s hand.

    The three of them and the puppet fell at the entrance of the city. When the guards noticed this, they immediately sent the word to the sect and brought them to the city guard post.

    Soon, the sect members arrived and took them away to examine them. The young master is the only one alive and the two elders were dead. They looked at the arm that was in the hole of the puppet.

    It looked like the arm was responsible for that hole, but in the process, it was severed and kept there.

    They started treating the first young master and kept the arm as evidence.

    They also sent people to check where the rest of the people are. They are already curious about therge-scale spatial energy explosion, but they couldn¡¯t investigate it because of the orders they got. But now they can do it without any issue.

    But the investigation resulted in, one of their elders dying in the void opening apart from finding that the branch leader is dead.

    By the time the investigation team returned the first young master woke up.

    The leader of the sect came and asked.

    "Young Master, what happened?"

    First young master weakly sat up and took out something from his spatial ring and gave it to the sect leader. It is a recording crystal.

    The leader looked through it and everyone in the room was shocked.

    The video showed, Dayus, the first young master, and the elders along with his entourage all retreating after getting orders from the Branch leader.

    But after they reached a certain area, somebody ambushed them and Dayus who is in the middle of the entourage started killing the First young master¡¯s subordinates.

    Not a single face in the group of people belonged to Sam¡¯s group. They are all unfamiliar faces.

    This is clearly, a well-nned ambush from Dayus and his group.

    But the n didn¡¯t seed. Dayus lost an arm and a lot of members of their group died along with the entourage. He and apanion of his escaped in a desperate attempt.

    When the sect leader looked at the young master, he finally spoke.

    "Dayus has nned this for a long time. He belonged to a different group, but his goal is the same as Sam. It is just Sam¡¯s information came to use earlier, if Dayus would have continued with the n his information would have alsoe.

    But he cleverly managed to fool me into changing my focus and organization¡¯s focus towards Sam and hatched the n.

    Even the thing with the youngsters in the thunder phoenix valley was his doing.

    He steered all the direction to this person named Sam and lured us here. His group killed the Branch leader and all the other elders. The first branch has fallenpletely.

    Except for a single enforcement team, the rest of them are all dead.

    One-third of the puppet organization has fallen and I am the sinner who did all of this."

    The first young master said in a gloomy tone. Anyone could see how gloomy he is.

    Sect leader looked at the young master and said.

    "I will immediately arrange for your travel back to the first branch and I will also inform the second and third branch leaders. Since Dayus escaped and was in that injured state, then he wouldn¡¯t make a move instantly.

    We can have a safe time. I am sure the other branch leaders will find him and avenge him in the meantime."

    That very night the first young master went through the wormhole and returned to the Capital of the first realm.

    When he returned, he waited in his residence, and Kiran who is still disguised as Prash came along with Arkiv.

    Sam left Arkiv here to keep an eye on the rest of the yers and he is using the shadow mice and the surveince equipment to keep an eye on the rest of the yers.

    Kumar and Noah are still in the open and passive. But the remaining yers were nowhere near. But he still kept an eye out for them.

    When the first young master looked at ¡¯Prash¡¯ he felt a bit emotional.

    Prash diedpletely unfairly. But he knew he cannot me anyone. After all, he is the one who is solely responsible for all this mess.

    He made an enemy out of someone foolishly because of his mad ambition which was easily taken advantage of by someone clever and sly.

    This is a lesson for him.

    Kiran stood by him and said.

    "The remaining branch leaders will try to interrogate you and me, so stick to the story and I will do the same as well.

    We don¡¯t really care if the puppet organization copses or not. Our main goal is to get the remaining two parts of the furnace from the other two branches, so your task is to keep the attention of the organization memberspletely on Dayus and hispanion that killed your first branch leader.

    Try to slip in the involvement of the Outer deacon of the Five great sects who is a Night Demon.

    Tell them the story of, how Dayus had a grudge against Sam and he wanted to share the riches of the Puppet Organization with that Outer deacon.

    Don¡¯t slip any other unnecessary information. You understand everything?"

    The first young master nodded. Kiran resumed his acting as Prash and Arkiv took the role of a servant in the residence so that both of them can observe the other branch leaders or elders that would being here.

    Within a few hourster, the two branch leaders arrived.

    They didn¡¯t even bother to go to the main building of the organization and directly went to the first young master¡¯s residence.

    They asked about his condition and then proceeded to ask about the situation with Dayus and how the Branch leader died.

    The first young master didn¡¯t give much of an exnation on the branch leader¡¯s death and just showed the video on how his team was attacked.

    The video was shown from a perspective of a dying entourage member.

    After watching the video and all the information that Dayus said along with the part regarding the involvement of the Night Demon Outer Deacon from the Five great sects, they became serious.

    They felt like the situation is a lot grimmer than they already thought.

    The Five Great sects are a lot stronger than the puppet organization and for them to have a hand in this, is something they didn¡¯t want to be real. But even though the first young master¡¯s exnation is vague, they couldn¡¯t help but think of the possibility.

 Chapter 1130: Breakthrough

    While the two branch leaders and the branches are in turmoil with the newfound information, Sam and his team appeared near the Thunder Phoenix valley.

    Currently, the valley is on aplete lockdown and a couple of elders are patrolling it along with the guard team.

    The valley is the reason for the small group of elders to not participate in the fight against Sam.

    Otherwise, these people might also have been done for.

    Even though there is not much security and there are definitely not many people here, Sam didn¡¯t immediately make a move, because currently, Night Ghost is about to make a breakthrough.

    So, Sam and the team camped a few kilometers away from the valley and let him breakthrough. If he broke through they would have an Initial stage Consummate at hand. Even though he just broke through, he is still on that level and could kill the enemies when used in a perfect n.

    They didn¡¯t hurry.

    Night Ghost sat down cross-legged and started pushing for the breakthrough. For the whole night, the rest of the team saw him struggle with the bottleneck and he was done only dawn.

    After that, they made a move openly, now that he broke through, he also needs to get used to the new energy, and the elders who are still in the Astral ne Transcendence are perfect targets.

    He knocked them down in a few seconds and his team took over the valley for themselves.

    The first thing that Sam did is not to search for the entrance of the divine dimension, rather it is to check the corpse.

    He could still feel the aura trying to suppress his different elements, only when Sam activated his Raiju bloodline did he manage to ovee the suppression because of its lightning affinity.

    He checked the skeleton with the observation ability and after making sure that it ispletely unscathed, he smiled, and with a wave of his hand, the skeleton disappeared.

    The rest of his team was stunned.

    They didn¡¯t expect Sam to steal the skeleton. But when they thought of how precious the bones are and what kind of weapons they could be made into, they didn¡¯t feel that surprised. It is really a waste to leave the skeleton to an organization that is about to be copsed anyway.

    After that, Sam concentrated on his sense of smell and activated the Raiju bloodline to his limit and searched around, after a few minutes, he could feel some unique smell attracting him and he started moving deeper and deeper into the valley.

    Soon, he saw a small creek which is not even fit for a shadow mouse to normally go in, he used his earth elemental energy to extend, and finally, he saw a small spatial crack inside the creek.

    He really didn¡¯t think that the puppet organization would have left such a crack undiscovered. He got curious and deactivated his raiju bloodline and to his surprise, the crack disappearedpletely.

    The Old Beast sure was cautious.

    None of his senses, including his spiritual sense, couldn¡¯t identify the presence of the space crack.

    He extended his hand and he was immediately sucked in.

    He was stunned by what he saw inside.

    All that was present is a mass ofnd. It is not even that big.

    There is only a pool of blood in the middle of the mass of thend. The color of the blood is a mixture of red and purple.

    Sam could sense the immense lightning energy present inside. He couldn¡¯t help but feel the temptation from his raiju bloodline.

    This is also the best choice for him at the moment as the next evolution of his body would be of the lightning element due to the Raiju bloodline.

    He removed his clothes and then jumped from the edge of the pool andnded in the middle of the pool. The blood is so dense and condensed as he slowly reached the bottom of the pool.

    He waspletely surrounded by the lightning elemental energy and the Raiju bloodline in his body is directly absorbing the condensed blood.

    It is not even absorbing the essence and energy. The condensed blood is directly being absorbed and consumed.

    He felt like his body is being torn apart as the blood is being rapidly absorbed inside through the pores of the skin.

    The pain that he is experiencing is something he couldn¡¯t exin. It is as if every single pore is being expanded forcefully.

    The rest of the team who followed Sam saw him disappearing in the middle of nowhere.

    They couldn¡¯t see the crack at first, but after Sam started absorbing the pool, they could see the spatial crack too and it started expanding bit by bit and soon turned into an entrance big enough for a grown man to enter.

    Vidyut felt the strong sense of lightning energy inside. He could feel how turbulent and controlled the energy is.

    After exchanging a nce, they decided to enter the crack and soon they found themselves in the smallndmass.

    They saw arge whirlpool happening in the pool of blood and in the eye of the whirlpool Sam is sitting crosslegged with a painful sensation. He ispletely naked and they could see his veins clearly visible from the outside of his body as they glowed with lightning elemental energy. It is almost like purple red lightning flowing in his veins.

    This process continued for hours and only by evening did the bloodpletely disappear.

    But Sam still didn¡¯t move, the dense lightning energy is still being circted inside.

    The team ran towards him to check up on him, but when they extended their hands, they could see the aversion the lightning energy is showing towards them.

    Currently, Sam is like an overcharged battery.

    They didn¡¯t know what to do and just waited there.

    But from the looks of it, his vitals are still fine and from his expression, his pain also seemed to have eased a bit.

    So, they didn¡¯t worry too much and sat there around.

    After another hour or two, they finally sensed a change in Sam¡¯s situation. The turbulent cirction of lightning energy inside his body started calming down and became gentle and dense.

    Soon they saw a faint silver spark in the middle of all the purple blood lightning cirction and it slowly started spreading. The purple blood lightning became silver very slowly and after a long time, it finally turnedpletely turned into silver lightning which also started disappearing.

    Only by night did they see the lightning energypletely being assimted within Sam.

    All of a sudden, Sam opened his eyes and shook his hand to let the beasts out of the divine dimension. The beasts immediately surrounded him and Dia used the gravitational, maniption to slowly lift him out and carefully take him out of the crack leading outside.

    Before long the whole group of beasts came outside of the lightning divine dimension and appeared in the valley preparing for the breakthrough.

    All beasts formed a circle around Sam and finally, he managed to find relief as he spread the overcharged energy to the rest of the beasts.

    While doing so, Sam finally understood how he is going to break through to the Middle stage of Transcendence directly even though there is much more energy.

    It is because he has to share this with the rest of the beasts.

    If a cultivator doesn¡¯t have to share this energy and managed to refine the energy and assimte it into their body, they would have managed to break through from Peak stage Pre-transcendence to at leastte-stage if not the peak stage of Transcendence.

    But with the addition of all his beasts, he wouldn¡¯t be able to do so. But still assimting and refining the energy is not exactly a walk in the park.

    After another hour, the breakthrough was finallypleted and all the beasts opened their eyes. But Sam didn¡¯t. They looked at Sam carefully and particrly Raiju who is looking at him with glowing and exciting eyes.

    Sam¡¯s body ispletely surrounded by lightning energy. The silver lightning crackled all over his body and it turned into a current as it entered his veins.

    It was divided into two small parts, one went to his brain, the other went to his nose, and final one which is thergest part surrounded his legs.

    The lightning energypletely seeped into the cells of his body as it evolved some parts. The small parts that entered his nose and the brain are altering his olfactory nerves to improve his sense of smell.

    While the lightning energy that is seeping into his body is slightly altering his muscle structure and bone density to improve his leg strength.

    As the time slowly passed, he could faintly feel the changes in the body.

    When he finally opened his eyes and rxed, he could finally understand how much his sense of smell improved.

    He could sense the presence of the teammates through his nose more clearly than his eyes and the improvement is too high that he has an urge to close his nose and block the smell immediately.

 Chapter 1131: Useful target

    The sense of smell is too strong for him to bear. It seems like he needs to take some time to get used to it.

    He then started checking out how his legs are, but then only he realized that he is butt naked in front of all his team. He hurriedly wore his clothes and went back to his usual self and started checking his legs out.

    He sprinted, jumped, and practiced some kicks. Overall, the flexibility, strength, and agility of the legs improved a lot.

    He felt a lot lighter on his feet.

    He finally changed his attention to the rest of his teammates.

    Finally, he is not the weaker member of the team. When they saw Sam¡¯s smile, everyone looked away. Even Night Ghost who is an Astral ne Consummate level cultivator looked away.

    Sam wanted to ask someone for a spar.

    But as he was about to open his mouth, Vidyut hurriedly interrupted.

    "Boss, take a look at this."

    He took out a quail egg-sized purple crystal and showed it to Sam.

    Sam looked at it and took it into his hands.

    This is the divine dimension crystal of the thunder phoenix.

    Sam looked at it andpared it to the other two divine dimensions he had and he couldn¡¯t help but feel that this is more simr to the ice divine dimension than his own divine dimension.

    Both of them are simr in a way as they could open a spatial gateway for the entrance, but it is not the same for his own divine dimension.

    It is apletely confined space and could even be considered as a small world of itself. But these two divine dimensions can be connected to the outside world. He doesn¡¯t know why this difference is there, but he is curious to find it out.

    At this moment, two des of grass at the mouth of the valley suddenly disappeared.

    While Sam and his team are in the valley, a kilometer away, a group of people gathered. They are Kumar and Noah¡¯s group. A Noah is currently sitting on the ground with her eyes closed and so did another guy in the group. They opened their eyes.

    "Sam took the Phoenix skeleton away and he broke through."

    Noah said to Kumar.

    "What level is he at?"

    Kumar asked.

    "Middle stage transcendence of Astral ne."

    Kumar was stunned, the rest of the group doesn¡¯t know why he is so surprised. But they didn¡¯t ask and only waited for them to continue.

    "Currently, the yers are at the Late stage of Peak stage of transcendence. He ced an extreme distance between us. It will be hard to catch up." Kumar said dejectedly.

    "It is not time to think about that. Think about how this affects our future ns in the game. He already has a team of strong people and one of them is even an early stage Consummate level cultivator. All of his team and he himself is in the transcendent stage and they have highbat efficiency.

    Within the first three powers, the Puppet organization and the Myriad Beast sect are the only ones with multiple Consummate stage cultivators. The other one doesn¡¯t have only one and the Myriad Beast sect is of Beast cultivators which makes it difficult for us with the addition of beasts at the Astral ne Consummate stage.

    I think we need to move to the third option immediately work. The yers who didn¡¯t show up until now might have already gone there.

    We need to leave this ce. Sam already had the first piece anyway, even if we get any of the other pieces, we are not going to get the first piece from his hands."

    Noah and Kumar exchanged nces and the rest of the group just shrugged.

    They immediately left.

    Sam and his team don¡¯t know about these people, but as they moved, Sam suddenly felt like he smelled something familiar and looked in that direction.

    He looked there curiously trying to remember, what exactly is going on, but he didn¡¯t bother after some thought. He changed his attention back to the lightning divine dimension and as thought more and more he started seeing new ns to move forward.

    Then he looked at the knocked-out guards and he thought of something.

    He arranged a stone table with the earth element and took out some surgical tools as he brought the guards one by one onto it while he performed surgery and ced something inside them while Night Ghost made sure that they stayed asleep while Sam worked on them.

    After they were done, the surgical wounds were healed without any marks and were thrown at their original ce. Night ghost ced a slumber curse on them so that they would stay asleep for a lot of time.

    Sam then turned to his teammates and said.

    "Let us go back I have some new ideas."

    With that, Sam and the team used the dimensional drifter to go back to the city outskirts.

    Sam set up his surveince equipment back and took out amunication token.

    "Young Master? How is it going on your side?"

    The young master replied.

    "The branch leaders bought the story. They are trying to see if they can get any information on that outer deacon. They are also calling for help from subordinate organizations. All their strongest and core fighters who are not involved in the regr administration are summoned to the three capitals to guard the heirlooms. Particrly the first one."

    "Good, if you find any information on the outer deacon, you send it to me through the surveince puppets nearby.

    What about the furnace core though, if they are guarding this first part so much, would you be able there?"

    "I will find a way to go there by tomorrow. I can take Prash with me."

    "Okay, I will send the recement tonight. You need to do it perfectly and there should be no doubts at all."

    "Yes, Boss. I will do it."

    "By the way, I need some information on the people inside your prisons, all their strengths, crimes, and such. I will be sending something to you and Kiran so that you can use that.

    Kiran, there is a slight change of n and you would need to take some beating."

    "What do you mean by beating?" Kiran asked anxiously.

    "Well, we stole the thunder phoenix skeleton and made some extra ns there, so you would be taking some serious beating."

    "Boss, that is unfair. I am already infiltrating this deep. Why would I need to take a beating?"

    "Because you would get an extra ss of heavenly wine."

    "Okay boss. Deal." Kiran agreed immediately.

    Sam just smiled and exined the remaining n to them and contacted Arkiv separately.

    "So, how is the situation? Is there any special candidate we can make use of in the groups of Second and Third branches?"

    "There indeed is. But before that, I need to tell you, Noah and Kumar left."

    "They left? You saw them?" Sam asked with a bit of surprise. After all, Noah and Kumar really did make a suitable n, but their ns were based on the subordinate organizations and they prepared things in advance to rile them up. But now they are useless as the me went to apletely different person.

    Their ns are done for and now the subordinate organizations wouldn¡¯t direct their anger to the puppet organization just because some external person attacked them because of their rtionship.

    "Where did they go?"

    "I don¡¯t know, they are very cautious. Even I was able to find out only because I managed to identify one of theirpanions and they went to apletely neutral realm. I don¡¯t know which organization they are targeting next."

    "Well, there is no alert from the list, so we can only wait. So, what about this candidate. How useful is he?"

    "Well, it is actually three candidates. One of them is a female disciple in the second branch and the remaining two are the two young masters in the second and third branches."

    "A love triangle?"

    "Yes. The woman is a piece of work. She like attention, in fact, I think she is almost addicted to it. From what I heard from the guards of the second branch, she managed to cause some seriousmotion in the second branch. To gather more attention, she even started rumors about herself. Many disciples and guards were expelled and killed. Her father who is an elder started restraining her in the second branch and didn¡¯t let her loose.

    But for some reason, she was allowed toe here and she is making the two young masters her toys to y around with. They are going crazy and jealous over her."

    "Interesting, then why did she not try her charms on the first young master."

    "Well, I heard that she already did previously a few years ago, but was beaten ck and blue from him. From that day onwards, she wanted to deal with him and make him go down on his knees to gain her attention, I think these are her attempts. She wanted to gain his attention with the help of these two young masters."

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but smile at this.

 Chapter 1132: Getting the Core

    The Next day.

    The first young master entered the core area of the puppet organization where the high-level members forge their puppets as well as the weapons for their special exclusive customers.

    Currently, the core area ispletely shut off, nobody is working there. The furnaces that take a lot of time to reach a certain heat which assists the artisans to enhance their fire elemental energy and to save their energy as well, were still burning.

    And in the middle of all the furnaces, there is onerge furnace which is made of high-level stones that were cut and sculpted with a lot of effort.

    The effort that was ced into the building furnacested for years.

    He walked towards that furnace and took out his puppets. He is a good artisan and he is skilled in both puppet making and weapon making. All the puppets he had were self-made. Since his puppets took a lot of damage from thest battle, he managed to get permission to repair them himself and since he is still the core disciple of the organization, he managed to get ess to the main furnace.

    He touched the only part of the core mechanism which is protruded outwards. This is a crystal ce on which he ced his arm and to connect with the spirit of the mechanism which controls the furnace.

    The spirit will create a temporary bond with him and the furnace and with his fire elemental affinity he would be able to control the high-level mes of the furnace to melt the metal.

    With the utmost familiarity, he started forging the puppets and the weapons that he usually installs on the puppets.

    ¡¯Prash¡¯ is assisting him as he moved different tools and metals from different ces. But in the pretense of that, he is also cing several formation gs which are specially made by Sam in different ces.

    When the young master is finally done, he activated the formation and the young master and Kiran immediately got down to their job.

    After an hour, they are done and both of thempletely came out of the workshop after removing any traces of the formation they had ced. The formation only has one job, to create an illusion that the furnace is properly working and Prash and Young master are still forging their equipment while they didn¡¯t.

    Everything went smoothly, way smoother than they expected. By the time they returned it was already evening.

    Young master went to a bar as he started drinking wildly showing his troubled state of mind and he even forced ¡¯Prash¡¯ to apany him in the drinking. Both of them wanted to get intoxicated with all the alcohol and didn¡¯t bother taking care of it with their spiritual energy and slept on the table.

    This prompted the bar to call for his servants and Arkiv the newest servant came and diligently picked them up before taking them back to the residence and in that drunken stupor, the young master gave a huge tip of Arkiv in a spatial ring.

    Arkiv took that spatial ring with glee and went back to his residence. He ced the spatial ring on a table and after a sh shadow, it was gone from there. The shadow ran past the city and the forests and finally appeared in front of Sam with the ring.

    Sam opened the ring and took out the core mechanism of the furnace. The furnace is at most as big as the dimensional drifter when it waspletely closed.

    But it is responsible for heating some of the toughest and most heat-resistant metals he has ever seen. He was really intrigued by the capabilities of the person who made it. He used observation ability and checked on how well it was made.

    After observing the intricate formations for a while, he put it away and went back to business.

    "Next step of the n will be executed tomorrow morning."

    That is the only order he gave to the three subordinates that are inside the city.

    While Sam and his team are highly productive, it was not the same for the puppet organization, because that morning the whole organization was thrown into an uproar because of the news they got.

    The Thunder Phoenix skeleton which managed to bridge some cordial rtionships between them and their subordinate organizations were lost and the guards and elders who were standing guard there returned to the news that morning as soon as Young master went to the furnace.

    The Branch leaders immediately led a team to investigate thoroughly. But there are not many traces left there. The skeleton was stolen cleanly without any signs of battle, between guards and the thieves. They couldn¡¯t even feel many presences there.

    After half a day of investigation, they didn¡¯t have any results. They could only keep the guards and elders in house arrest so that they would be able to answer the questions in interrogation and give any clues they could have possibly noticed involuntarily.

    Even though it is highly unlikely since they don¡¯t even know how they lost their consciousness, it is highly impossible for them to notice something like this.

    But they still held them there as they are indirectly responsible for the loss because of their carelessness and they wouldn¡¯t just be able to shift everything away.

    The branch leaders don¡¯t know whether this is also part of the scheme of Dayus or this is the work of Sam who their god warned against.

    Thismotion is also the reason why the Young master managed to get ess to the furnace easily.

    He didn¡¯t have any resistance and any strict surveince ced on for the rest of the day.

    After that day is over, the first young master proceeded with the next step of the n.

    He directly went to the Two branch leaders to meet them privately and said.

    "I think, I might have a lead to meet Dayus and he is also the one responsible for the skeleton theft."

    The two branch leaders were shocked by his revtion and asked.

    "How are you sure?"

    He silently gave them a spatial ring.

    "This is something I stole from my subordinate Prash. He is the traitor of the organization. Yesterday, he apanied me to the core area and while he was helping me, I saw him slipping towards a corner where another furnace is and throwing in some items.

    He thought I didn¡¯t notice as I was involved in the forging operation, but I saw it and took these things out.

    He joined hands with Dayus and his team and he is the one that led him to me. He is the one that is responsible for fooling me and keeping the distractions away from Dayus and even the Thunder Phoenix skeleton was also part of their problem as it is beneficial for Dayus who is a lightning elemental user. At first, they should have stolen it right after we started the journey, but their trap backfired and activated early making the youngster unconscious and their n was revealed. So, they threw the me at Sam and proceeded with the rest. Now, he returned and stole it away. I think you can interrogate Prash and could get some information.

    I tried to get some information out of Prash yesterday by making him drunk. But I was not that sessful so, I cannot do anything anymore. But from the evidence, Prash as a soul sealing curse ced on him. If we extract his memories from the soul, whether he is alive or dead, they would all be scrambled and we would get nothing."

    "How do you know that?"

    "There is a formation n used for that Soul sealing curse. I saw it in the evidence I gave you. "

    The two branch leaders went through the spatial, inside there are a bunch of secret scrolls used for information transmission, a bunch of recording devices with videos of Prash and Dayus discussing ns as well as some other evidence including the formation scrolls and inscribed tes that assist in soul sealing.

    When they went through all the information, they were even more shocked.

    Because, ording to the info, the guards and elders specifically guarded the thunder phoenix skeleton on the night it was stolen were also a part of the n.

    The two branch leaders looked at the first young master and said.

    "This is extremely valuable information. You made a great contribution to the organization. Good job."

    "No, please don¡¯t say that. This is not even a fraction of the harm I brought the organization."

    "Don¡¯t beat yourself over it, no one can do anything with the traitors deep inside the organization like this. We will deal with this matter."

    "Thank you. I have another favor that I want to ask of you."

    "Do tell."

    "I would like to resign my position of the core disciple and return to a normal disciple status and if possible I would like to be transferred to a different branch. I cannot stay in the first branch anymore. I couldn¡¯t take the guilt bearing on me."

    The two branch leaders were stunned and said after exchanging a nce. "We will talk about this after the investigation."

    The first young master nodded and left.

 Chapter 1133: Imprisoned

    As soon as the first young master left, the two branch leaders exchanged a nce, before the second branch leader spoke.

    "Do you think he is telling the truth?"

    "I think so. What about you?"

    "I am more inclined in believing him, but we didn¡¯t watch over him properly when he was forging in the core area. That is why I couldn¡¯t dismiss all of my suspicions on him."

    Both of them became silent. It is apparent that they are still suspicious of the first young master. After all, he is the only person that survived an attack that took the lives of around two dozen Astral ne transcendent cultivators and an Astral ne Consummate cultivator. This is not something believable.

    Granted that they can assume that the other force might have suffered some mutual destruction and retreated and this guy only managed to survive through sheer luck, in their opinion, it is a bit farfetched to think so.

    After some silence, the second branch leader said.

    "All these years, he was not suspicious at all. If he really had a hand in this, there could only be two options. One he is here is for revenge and hid perfectly with patience and two he was tempted by something to create this destruction. But none of his actions support the second one, except for the fact that he survived that attack.

    As for the first one, let us go through the records of his origin and any possible events that could have matched with his arrival here and see if there are any possibilities. If there are no serious anomalies, we will proceed further."

    "Okay, but we cannotpletely dismiss his ims, we need to interrogate the guards and Prash. I would summon them to the office, while you check the records, based on the results of the records, we can decide on the method of interrogation."

    Both agreed and went on with their tasks.

    The second branch leader went through the records of the first branch with help of his personal disciples, while the third branch leader invited the two elders, the guards, and Prash to his office.

    He asked some random questions regarding the incidents concerning them and as for Prash, he only asked about any possible changes of the young master, which could evoke suspicions of any kind.

    While he is asking different questions and making them wait there, the second branch leader came by afternoon and nodded his head indicating there is nothing wrong with the First young master.

    He looked through all the information. The first young master is a son of a good cksmith of the organization, but his father doesn¡¯t have any talent in puppet making but has good enough weapon-making skills. His mother is also a weapon smith and he was born in the organization.

    All the expertise he gained in puppet making is through sheer hard work. His contributions to the organization are five times more than the remaining two young masters. He was really surprised when he saw all this.

    This information was hidden by the first branch leader as he was afraid that the other two branch leaders will poach him. After all, they onlypete in who has the best branch, and disciples count as a part of the branch and even the most prestigious one at that.

    Now that he saw the records, he can confidently exclude the young master from the suspicions.

    The third branch leader looked at the group and his smile turned ten times colder than usual. His attitude changed in a second and he immediately sent them to the cells.

    Sent is not too appropriate to use in this context. They were dragged to their cells.

    The Branch leaders don¡¯t know whether the elders and guards have soul seals, but they didn¡¯t want to risk it and lose precious information so the torture began.

    Kiran who is disguised as Prash went through the torture. Currently, he is an Astral ne Transcendence cultivator, but he is posing as an Astral ne Pre-transcendence cultivator, there is no way he could die from this torture and he wouldn¡¯t even break under that pain in way possible.

    But it is incredibly annoying and irritating. He also needs to act. Now he understood why said that he would be taking a beating and he also understood why Sam wanted him to learn the expressions of Prash when he was experiencing pain.

    He has to act like he was being tortured and struggling. He felt like he was ripped off by epting this only for a single ss of heavenly wine, he should have gotten another small pitcher.

    He didn¡¯t say anything to the branch leaders. After all, Sam still didn¡¯t give him any orders on how to proceed from the hereafter.

    While he is thinking about how long he should be doing this, Sam is looking through the information of various criminals inside the prisons of the Puppet Organization.

    Arge organization such as this is bound to have enemies and they are bound to be imprisoned as sometimes they are not worth killing and would be saved for executing on a grand asion and some of them are worth too much to kill just like that.

    They could be exchanged for ransom or they might be having a lot of information in their hands which could be helpful. That is not all though, some of them are here because of the personal grudges of some high-level people in the organization without any proper reason.

    Sam is going through their profiles. And some of them garnered his attention. Some of them are indeed cold-blooded criminals who have decent cultivation and some of them are of enemy organizations.

    He could think of many ns.

    After going through all of these things, Sam finally decided on what to do. He contacted the first young master and Arkiv to give the instructions.

    The evening, the first young master and Arkiv went to visit ¡¯Prash¡¯ in the prison. But they were not allowed to visit him by themselves, they have to visit in the presence of an elder.

    The First young master looked at ¡¯Prash¡¯ in the cell and said with a trembling voice.

    "Why do you have to do this?"

    "Do what?"

    ¡¯Prash¡¯ said casually.

    "Why do you need to be a traitor? I treated you like my brother and this is how you backstab me? You destroyed the entire first branch."

    ¡¯Prash¡¯ stayed silent and looked away.

    The first young master took a deep breath and said in a calm tone.

    "Whatever it is the reason you did this, I wouldn¡¯t ask again. But I am telling you, it is time for you to let it out and speak. I can at least grant you a painless death like that. But if you insist on it, you would be subjected to more torture.

    I bought you some time and there would be no torture exactly until midnight. So, at least by midnight, or even at the midnight, talk."

    ¡¯Prash¡¯ just didn¡¯t bother and let him talk. After a few minutes, the first young master and Arkiv left with the Elder.

    Kiran who was sitting in the cell suddenly became serious as he meditated. The interrogator didn¡¯te for the rest of the day and he was left alone in the cell. When the next torture session at midnight started for the rest of the inmates, he was the only one left inside.

    At that moment, he started taking some deep breaths and after some effort, a quail egg-sized purple crystal came out into his mouth.

    This is the Thunder Phoenix divine dimension and Sam sent it to him the day before.

    He took out a small device which as soon as he activated gave a very faint and gentle energy wave and after that, it pointed out towards a corner.

    He went to that corner and ced the device back in before taking out a noise-canceling formation and activating it and taking out amunication device.

    "Hello, Boss. You said to take a beating, there is nothing in our deal regarding the torture."

    He said in an extremely low voice.

    Sam directly ignored thement and said.

    "There are some small insect puppets inside the divine dimension, there is something I want you to do. Listen carefully..."

    With that Sam carefully exined everything that Kiran needs to know and asked.

    "Do you understand?"

    "Yes, but for my payment..."

    "I will give you a bonus after the mission is over, but if you annoy me again I will kick your ass. Check themunication device after every torture session. I will be in touch with that."

    With that, themunication was cut off. Kiran threw themunication token back into the divine dimension and took out a crystal tab in which he saw some information regarding his task. He was done studying and he threw it back into the crystal also removed the noise-canceling formation disc and threw it in before swallowing the crystal again.

    Due to his disguise ability, people wouldn¡¯t be able to see what exactly inside with just normal spiritual energy scanning. They would need to use the observation ability of Sam or some high-level healing ability.

    After he was done, he waited for the rest of the inmates toe in. When they were dropped off at their cells. He moved forward and spoke to the inmate in the cell directly opposite to him.

    "Hello, Markan. How are you doing?"

    Kiran asked in an extremely low tone, but the person opposite to his cell was surprised by Kiran¡¯s sudden greeting.

 Chapter 1134: Poaching Prisoners

    Markan looked at Kiran with a shocked expression.

    "How do you know my name?"

    "Of course, I know your name. The oldest prisoner of this ce. Thrown here just because you didn¡¯t love a girl that loved you. All the hard work you put in to be an Astral ne transcendent cultivator that too to thete stage was currently wasted in this dark and damp cell."

    Markan looked at Kiran with a frown and asked a bit coldly.

    "How do you know so much information about me?"

    "I know a lot of things Markan and I also know a way to get you out of here and even get your revenge. Do you want my help?"

    Markan frowned and looked at Kiran suspiciously. Who can me him though? A person who is sitting in his opposite cell with just Astral Pre-transcendence cultivation saying that he can get him out of here and even the revenge, ispletely nonsensical, to say the least.

    Kiran understood his suspicion, but only faintly smiled and said.

    "The woman who you made you into this, is actually in the capital at the moment and the truth of the matter is, she never really loved you.

    All she needed was some attention from outstanding guys like you and since you didn¡¯t manage to give her that, you were here?"

    "What are you talking about? I am here because that woman loved me, even though I didn¡¯t love her back, when she came to meet me, the person who loved her couldn¡¯t take it and brought a whole group of people to deal with me. That is the only reason. Nothing more, nothing less."

    Kiran chuckled and said.

    "Wow, I didn¡¯t think that you are this na?ve. We will talk a bitter and I think you will change your mind then."

    With that, Kiran went back to the corner and meditated. The next morning, he went for his torture session and came back, he made the setup and waited for Sam¡¯s message.

    As soon as he got it, he exchanged something with Sam and cut themunication off.

    He then took out a small insect puppet that is shaped like a bee.

    It is very small and will perfectly fit in one¡¯s ear.

    The bee puppet flew out of his hand rapidly and arrived at Markan¡¯s cell without making any noise and activating any formations.

    Markan looked at the small metallic bee in confusion.

    Kiran came to the entrance of the cell and wore another simr bee into his ear.

    Markan ced that in his ear in a simr fashion.

    "Now, can you hear me?" Kiran asked from another side. Markan nodded calmly.

    "Okay, I will show you a video now, the audio wille from the bee inside your ear, focus."

    Markan looked at the small crystal tablet in Kiran¡¯s hands. Even though the image is small and it is not exactly bright, he can still see it.

    The first thing he saw is the familiar face of the woman, but her demeanor is nothing like he remembered.

    "Where is that stupid first young master?" She said to a guard in the video.

    "He went to the bar to drink. With Prash¡¯s betrayal, he is feeling a bit down." The guard replied. The woman smiled and went to the bar, but as soon as she sat down, the second young master and third young master already arrived.

    They started ttering her and trying to kiss her ass, but she didn¡¯t budge and showed that peafowl arrogance.

    Her attention was all focused on the first young master, who only gave them an asional fleeting nce and nothing else.

    "This is her weird fetish. She likes to y with the hearts of the people and really likes to gain everyone¡¯s attention. So, the whole thing regarding you killing the guys and ending up in this cell is her n.

    In fact, she doesn¡¯t even remember you. She deliberately threw you in the First branch prison with the help of a perverted old man who caters to all her needs, so no one is going to bother with you and you have to die here of old age. All the generations of puppet organizations will torture you while you live your life of hundreds of years."

    Markan was silent. Kiran smiled and said.

    "You can decide. Keep the bug with you, just hide it in a small groove in the cell wall before going for your sessions."

    After he was done with that, Kiran focused on the next target.

    There are a total of six prisoners he wanted tomunicate with and they are all nearby. Five of these prisoners are ofte-stage and thest one is a peak stage transcendent stage cultivator.

    These cultivators are obviously powerful and all of them are here due to some personal grudges, not some grave sins theymitted.

    For the next week, Kiran spent his time trying to convince them.

    In this week, the branch leaders went through all the information regarding the First young master while waiting for their prisoners to crack open.

    The basic records themselves are impable and when they made an in-depth investigation, the business development, puppet making, weapon making, client rtionships, exploration and resource gathering, recruitment, in every aspect the first young master is ten times better than the other two young masters.

    They didn¡¯t understand how an ordinary man who was an offspring of a normal organization member became this powerful.

    But they understood that he is worth a lot.

    Now they started considering his request, transfer to other branches. Even if he wants to stay as the core disciple, they wouldn¡¯t object, but he is even willing to resign that.

    From the looks of it, he wants to resign that.

    He is in a depressed state, if they managed to make him feel at home in their branch, they would be gaining a person who doesn¡¯t want authority but could contribute a lot.

    Both branch leaders started eyeing him.

    They knew that the other party also wants him, but they cannot reveal it openly and can only discreetlypete for him.

    Sam learned all of this and felt ecstatic. He is really thinking about how to get the other party out of here without raising suspicions now that they want the first young master, this will be easy.

    This whole week, Sam made the first young master drink like a pig in the bar and act like a drunkard.

    Even though he is not exactly a drunkard, he still made him look the part.

    Both branch leaders wanted to take advantage of that and the third branch leader used a high-level weapon. His daughter. She was immediately called from the branch. She and the third young master are assigned to the task of convincing the first young master to pick their ce.

    Looking at thepetition and all the attempts they are employing, Sam thought of something.

    So, the next day, The First young master went to meet the two branch leaders and said.

    "I would like to visit both the ces and stay for ten days in each and decide after that. Is it okay?"

    The two branch leaders exchanged a nce, they could see how frustrated the young master is, so they didn¡¯t decline and agreed immediately.

    So, the next day, the first young master along with Arkiv went to the second branch along with the second young master and the attention-seekingdy.

    The second Branch leader was happy because now that he is back at that branch, he has a better chance at convincing the first young master without the disturbance of the third branch.

    The Attention-seekingdy was happy because she gets to hit on this first young master in her own territory.

    The Second Young Master was happy because there is nopetition from the third young master.

    What they don¡¯t know is, Sam who is hidden far away from any one of these people is the happiest of them all as he saw their behavior.

    Two days after the first young master left, Sam started his next step of the n.

    Kiran got the news from Sam and he talked to the rest of the inmates he targeted.

    "Guys, I don¡¯t have much time. I need your answer now."

    His statement was followed by silence for a few minutes and when he thought he failed to convince them, the first voice was heard.

    "I am in."

    It is Markan who spoke first.

    Followed by that, the rest of the targets also agreed.

    "Okay then, tonight, stay close to the gate of the cell and hold tight."

    Kiran replied and went back to give the message to Sam.

    Sam instantly took of a translucent crystal tablet while Kiran took out a cylindrical device and tapped on it.

    A faint and gentle energy wave spread throughout the entire prison and instantly, Sam got a visual on the tablet.

    He has ten glowing dots visible on his disy.

 Chapter 1135: Prison Break

    Sam looked at the translucent tablet without doing anything and soon more and more glowing images are appearing on it.

    This is the function of the device Kiran is using. He created this after he created the energy bat puppets, it uses the same principle as that, but it has a wide range of functions than the bat.

    The device lets out of the spiritual energy in form of a gentle wave. The movement of the energy would be so subtle that any formations wouldn¡¯t be triggered.

    When energy touches any formations or any object that is carrying a certain amount of energy, it will resonate with it and the device will send a location of the object to the screen.

    But that is not all, the parameters for the resonance could be set before using the device and Sam set the parameters so that the guards and elders from thunder phoenix valley who had something imnted into their body are resonating with the device and along with that, he also set to find out the formations that are ced in the prison.

    And the more energy waves were released, the clearer the area of influence under the formations is being revealed on the tablet, and then finally the rest of the prisoners and people are being revealed.

    Since he already marked the imprisoned elders and guards, they are visible as glowing dots while the rest of the prisoners and prison guards looked like they are normally dark dots.

    Sam looked at this and smiled.

    Currently, there are a bunch of energy tokens inside his hand and he looked at the tablet intently.

    When one dot representing an imprisoned guard move towards the gate of his cell, Sam crushed one token.

    *BOOM*

    An explosion urred in the prison cell. The guard exploded when he was at a corner where the cell gate and the wall were linked destroying both of them. That cell is right next to the cell of another guard who was dumbfounded.

    The explosion is not very destructive. It is concentrated to a very small space to not create too muchmotion.

    The formations were activated though.

    The second imprisoned guard who looked at the destroyed wall and the gate which is probably his only way out thought for a moment and decided to run away.

    As soon as he came out, he started running towards the entrance, but the guards are already there.

    It is idiotic, to say the least expecting the prison guards to not show up.

    But in the face of desperation, everything is possible.

    When he saw the prison guards, he immediately ran back and wanted to destroy the wall of the prison, but his strength is not enough.

    The prisoners were notpletely sealed off from using their strength, rather special seal was ced on them which makes it painful for them to use their energy and if someone managed to ovee the pain and still use their energy, the formations would activate which would make the guards alert who could easily deal with them in a subjugated stage.

    The same thing was happening now. One of the prison guards leaped onto the escaped guard and pinned him to the ground in a mounted position.

    Both of them struggled, and as soon as they reached a certain point.

    *BOOM*

    The prison guard blew up and the cell along with the guard that mounted on him was destroyed freeing another prisoner. A couple of formations were also destroyed and the prisoners could feel the suppression of the seal releasing a bit.

    When the rest of the prison guards saw this, they became alert and someone informed the higherups.

    They locked on to the imprisoned guards and elders to see if there are any abnormalities, but they didn¡¯t care to get too close.

    The imprisoned guards are also scared. They wanted to get out desperately, so they started running towards the cell gates and yelled.

    "Let us out. Why did they explode like that? What did you guys do to us?"

    "Are you trying to kill us like this? What are you nning?"

    "Why is this happening?"

    The guards didn¡¯t want to get close to them and started attacking them with their weapons to keep them at bay.

    "Move back and sit beside the rear wall of the cell. Do note close to the gate and the corners."

    The prison guard chief yelled as he led the guards to control the prisoner.

    At this moment, the rest of the prisoners are still in a bit of a daze on what is happening and why is this happening. They don¡¯t exactly know what is wrong with this, but they are not as paranoid as the rest of the imprisoned guards as they lived here for years.

    But soon, some prisoners started yelling and joining in on themotion which created a chain reaction.

    The whole prison is in chaos.

    Markan tried to grab one of the guards and this prompted others to do the same. When one of the imprisoned guards seeded in doing so, the prison guard shed his de leaving arge wound on his arm.

    The imprisoned guard went crazy and held the cell gate and...

    *BOOM*

    He exploded and this time, it is of ice elemental energy. The surroundings froze and the formations in the hallway of the prison also started wavering.

    At this moment, the prisoners realized that the formations that were holding up and defending the cell gates were being spoiled because of the energy waves.

    The first two explosions didn¡¯t make it apparent, but the third one made it weaken.

    The Elders came and when they looked at the mess, they were furious and also the alerted.

    "Everyone stop. Calm down. Guards retreat from the hallway for now."

    After the guards retreated, the elders walked in and they stopped at the cells where the two elders who were in the thunder phoenix valley and asked.

    "What the hell is happening here?"

    "You are the one that should be telling us. Why are you asking us in return?" An imprisoned elder asked back in frustration.

    And the argument began. Both parties don¡¯t know why exactly this is happening, but they desperately wished that their opposite party knew and they were the reason so that there would be a chance to reverse it.

    As they were arguing, the two imprisoned elders, felt bloated and weird.

    A blue lightning glow and fiery red glow started appearing from each of them and they looked at the two elders with their eyes wide open.

    They knew what is going toe next.

    And in thatst moment, both of them exchanged a nce and used all their spiritual energy to ovee the pain of suppression and lunged at the two elders to catch them through the cell gate.

    Two elders were caught as they were still stunned by the sudden change in the imprisoned elders and...

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The sudden explosions full of fire and lightning elemental energies made the whole prison shake.

    The walls were destroyed and the formations were gone.

    The explosions this time arerger than the previous ones and they are more destructive.

    The adjacent cells to the elders were also destroyed and the prisoners in that cell died just like that and the next cell walls copsed.

    When the dust settled, all the restrictions on the cell gates were gone and the walls are all cracked. Half the prisoners were injured and even Kiran and the six members he contacted are no exceptions, but he swiftly made his move.

    He walked out and reached out to the six prisoners and gave them some potions which are mixed with some heavenly wine.

    Their injuries started recovering rapidly.

    "Boss, they are recovering, what about the seals ced on them?"

    "I already left something in the divine dimension. The golden discs."

    Kiran took out the said golden discs and ording to Sam¡¯s instructions ced them on the bodies of the six prisoners.

    They could feel their seal loosening up a little bit.

    This is not exactly a great invention but something Sam tinkered up just for this.

    Seals are a special kind of technique and most of them are made to affect the soul with dark elemental energy and some are justplex formations that are a bit flexible to suppress the energy flow.

    The first kind is easy to relieve, but the second kind is different as most of the work by absorbing the energy from the person who is being sealed which makes him unable to have enough energy to ovee it.

    Since he learned about what these seals are the first young master, even though he didn¡¯t get the whole blueprint, he just tinkered up something that could just relieve the seal a bit.

    Now the prisoners could feel that they could use some energy and they are not as weak as before.

    "Don¡¯t worry, we don¡¯t need to fight that much, the rest of the prisoners will do so."

    He spoke as he pointed at the prisoners that are barging towards the entrance and even the rest of the imprisoned guards are in the group.

    But it is not that easy to escape, because therge-scale explosion of the imprisoned elders already garnered the attention of some people in the puppet organization, and that included the two branch leaders.

 Chapter 1136: Robbing the Library

    The branch leaders were currently in a meeting room. They are talking with some dark cloaked men and there are some scrolls and spatial rings on the table.

    "We need to find out why this Outer Deacon of the Five Great sects colluded with this guy. As you already know, we are no match for the Five Great sect, we need to find out if this is done by the sect itself or that one man did it for personal gains, we can have some room to breathe and react if we know what is going on."

    The ck cloaked man who seemed to be the leader of the team said.

    "You do know that we are also not a match for the Five Great sect¡¯s right? Even though we deal in information, we are very careful when ites to certain powers."

    Second branch leader rolled his eyes and ced another spatial ring on the table.

    "This is the best we can do. As you see our first branch is currently in recovery period. We are short of resources."

    The ck cloaked man smiled and checked the contents before saying.

    "Okay then, we will contact you in three more days."

    After that the ck cloaked men left and the two branch leaders personally sent them off from the gate.

    At this exact moment.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Several explosions one by one with brief intervals were heard as they felt faint tremors on the ground. The underground prison is being sted.

    They were both surprised and gathered the elders to go there.

    This is the time Kiran and the six other prisoners he recruited for destroying the First Branch are currently recovering their energy.

    And a bunch of prisoners are barging at the entrance of the area.

    The elders and the guards are moving to restrain them. But the weird explosions made them cautious and they are waiting for the two branch leaders.

    The prisoners became rowdier as the time passed, because they knew that once the branch leaders came they would be done for.

    So, they tried their best to breakthrough from the prison.

    Sam who is controlling all of this knew very well that once the branch leaders emerge, they would be in deep trouble, so he created a proper distraction.

    At the exact moment the branch leaders were making their way to the prison, they suddenly felt arge heat wave from the core area.

    They widened their eyes as soon as the energy wave hit them. The core area was actually built on a fire elemental mine and all the furnaces gain their energy from the very mine.

    Even though they save a lot in terms of resources, they also have one problem with this, a mine¡¯s vein should always be kept stable and any problem for that could make the whole mine explode, just like how the mines in the subordinate organizations exploded.

    The two branch leaders are sure that anything rted to the core area should be dealt carefully and with utmost priority. If anything happens, there the whole branch would explode and no even a single bone fragment would be visible.

    So, they instantly changed their minds.

    "Call for all the elders and disciples and tell them to head to the prison, we are going to the core area."

    The second branch leader ordered instantly and the two branch leaders went to the core area.

    Sam who saw this through the surveince, smiled and spoke to Kiran.

    "Are you guys a safe distance away?"

    "Yes, Boss."

    "Okay then, brace yourself."

    As soon as he spoke...

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Explosions urred in the prison.

    The prisoners who are flocking at the narrow entrance as they climbed the stairs and fought with the puppet organization members are extremely rowdy and for sometime they forgot about the exploding prisoners and that was probably their biggest mistake.

    The imprisoned guards exploded one after the other as they took the lives of prisoners, guards, elders and at the same time destroyed the entrancepletely.

    Kiran and the rest of the prisoners immediately ran out of the entrance while throwing the corpses away from their path.

    Kiran then took out six space-jade rings and gave them to the six members.

    "Start running in different directions and meet me outside of the estate, drop these things in different positions. Don¡¯t leave a single thing inside behind. Trust me, if you have even one of them inside you, you would die before crossing the gate.

    Try to throw them into some important infrastructure of the organization."

    With that he turned around and ran towards a building closer to the core area.

    On his way, he threw a bunch of liquid energy cells.

    These are smaller than the original small liquid energy cells. These are only half the size of a normal spirit stone.

    As he threw them and exploded them instantly, he created argemotion which gave him a chance to change his face and clothes instantly. He is currently in the disguise of the elder who died because of the exploding guards.

    He ran towards a small tower near the core area. This is the puppet organization library.

    The puppet organization is a fair one and they don¡¯t do things like others and even the high level arts of the organization are ced in the library albeit with more restrictions, if some serious threat arrived in this ce, they would evacuate the whole tower or even destroy it, but with the years of peace they had, they are sure that they could defend themselves and created this library.

    Kiran went into the library without much trouble and took out a metallic cylindrical object. As soon as it was ced on the floor near the entrance, a bunch of insects which looked emerald green in color came out. The cylindrical object almost looked like the hive of these insects.

    The insects went towards the scrolls and books ced neatly in the library and as soon as the insects touched the scrolls, the scrolls disappeared instantly.

    The insects came back to the cylindrical objects entered it and then once again came out and went after these books.

    The insects are not triggering any formations whatsoever.

    This is one of Sam¡¯stest research results and he is currently watching it in work.

    He couldn¡¯t help but smile in glee at the perfect thieving took.

    When the library attendants who were alerted by the explosions and the sudden disappearance came out to face Kiran, he looked at them and coldly said.

    "The Branch leaders ordered evacuation. I am taking the scrolls and books to them. You guys go to the core area."

    The attendants were skeptical a bit, but this elder is part of the enforcement team, so they didn¡¯t dare question back and left the ce.

    Kiran sessfully took everything in the library and changed his direction as he ran towards the entrance and on his way, he changed his appearance to that of a normal disciple and after exiting the gate, he changed back to Prash¡¯s look and took out a bunch of transference scrolls.

    These scrolls are made by Sam himself with his spatial ability and as soon as they activated they disappeared from the spot and appeared near the hidden camp of Sam.

    Kiran is the only one who was not there. He looked the organization and crushed a bunch of tokens before activating his scroll.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    A series of explosions enveloped the whole organizations and none of the members dared to move anywhere.

    Meanwhile, the branch leaders and the strongest elders are all in a position where they do not have any leisure to confront the chaotic situation outside.

    Because, their core area is fuming with red hot light as fire elemental energy spread wildly.

    The furnaces made of high grade materials which are made purely for resisting heat started melting as the fire elemental energy from the core furnace started overflowing.

    The two branch leaders even with their fire elemental affinity and the superior cultivation could still feel the heat.

    The rest of the attendants and other members who came running here, couldn¡¯t stay for long and immediately left the area.

    As the two branch leaders tried to shut down the furnace with no reaction whatsoever. The furnace started glowing with the red glow brighter and brighter.

    They almost felt that the furnace would explode.

    Most of the mine¡¯s energy was used to keep the core furnace running, if this thing really explodes, they knew that they would be done for.

    Even then cannot sustain the explosion of a whole mine.

    So, they instantly thought of escaping and they amplified their voice with spiritual energy and yelled.

    "Everyone evacuate the estate instantly. All of you run towards the exit. Every residence within the hundred meters radius outside the estate should also be evacuated."

    "Run, Run."

    All the puppet organization members started running.

    Within fifteen minutes, everyone left the estate and they are still running far away.

    The branch leaders waited for the explosion toe.

    But no matter how long they waited, the explosion didn¡¯t happen.

 Chapter 1137: To to the Second Puppet Realm

    The two branch leaders and the rest of the organization members waited for an hour, but the explosion didn¡¯te.

    After some thought, they neared the estate and they could feel the energy waves reduced. They finally managed to muster enough courage to enter the core area once again and as soon as they entered the core area, they were dumbfounded.

    All the furnaces are not working and got shut down. Mostly because their outerbodies were molten and the formationid on them to keep them working disappeared along with that molten material.

    But the core furnace is different. They didn¡¯t know what exactly happened to it as the body of the furnace ispletely intact, when they neared it though, all they could feel the faint fire elemental waves.

    Both Branch leaders became suspicious and suddenly they remembered the words of Agni. He said someone woulde for the heirloom.

    That is what they were told and that person¡¯s name is Sam.

    But after the incident with the first branch leader¡¯s death and Dayus¡¯ supposed involvement along with the probable plot of the five great sects, they almost forgot about it. But as soon as they saw the furnace which is bing cold, they couldn¡¯t help but remember it and run to check.

    The more they checked the paler the branch leaders¡¯ faces became.

    They didn¡¯t expect that the core would be missing at such a crucial time. This means only one thing. The person named Sam seeded.

    After all, even though the First young master said that there are other people who also wanted to get their heirloom along with Sam, the god only mentioned about Sam excluding others. Even if there are other people, they are willing to believe Sam himself did this.

    They retreated and checked the situation of the whole organization.

    After looking at the whole situation, they don¡¯t know what to say. Their prison was destroyed, their library was robbed, many of their elders and guards were dead. Their core furnace was gone. Their losses were devastating.

    When they looking through the dead bodies and the skeletons and started counting the casualties near the prison and started investigating it, they found out that they saw six prisoners escape.

    Kiran was not noticed by anyone as he kept on shifting his appearance.

    When the two branch leaders went through the information regarding the six prisoners, they felt a little trepidation when they saw the details.

    All the prisoners were either unfairly imprisoned or the people belonging to the enemy factions.

    They didn¡¯t know what they would be facing because of their escape.

    While they are thinking and started cleaning up the mess, Sam is facing the six prisoners.

    Kiran already changed back to his form as Sam removed the sealpletely. He got his reward and finally felt relieved.

    Sam faced the six prisoners and said.

    "Four of you are unfairly imprisoned by the Puppet organization because of some petty grudges and the two are from a rival organization.

    I assume that all of you have great resentment towards the Puppet organization.

    So, I offer you a deal. I will release the seal ced on youpletely and in exchange, you help me destroy the remaining two branches of the puppet organization."

    The six of them looked at Sam and the Night Ghost who is an Astral ne Consummate cultivator. They didn¡¯t expect that the person that made them escape has that much fire power.

    All his subordinates are of Astral ne transcendence and they all have dangerous auras. They are the best of the best among their peers.

    Seeing that no one is talking, Sam said.

    "You guys have an hour to think about. We need to move immediately. So, do make your choice quickly."

    With that, Sam went back to the camp as he started roasting a hind leg of a goat type beast on a fire created with some special wood.

    At this moment, Markan stepped forward to him and hesitated to speak. Sam looked at him but didn¡¯t say anything waiting for the other party to talk first.

    After some contemtion, Markan finally opened his mouth.

    "I need to have a word in private."

    Sam left the roasting to Argan and went to talk with him separately.

    "So, what do you want to talk about?" Sam asked casually.

    "Are you familiar with seals?"

    "A bit, why?"

    "Apart, from the seal that was ced on me by the puppet organization there is another seal ced by someone else. I don¡¯t know what kind of seal that is. And anyone who can remove a seal like that is someone I cannot meet. I wonder if you could help me.

    If you help me take off that seal, not only would I help you will the Puppet organization, I will owe you a favor and wouldn¡¯t refuse no matter what it might be."

    "What is your favor worth?" Sam asked him in surprise.

    Markan thought for a moment and sighed.

    "In my current state? Nothing but once I turn back to who I was, it would worth a lot more. Please help me."

    Sam looked at the man carefully. His words, the expressions, the eyes everything seemed genuine. This man either has to be a great actor or he is really something.

    "Let me check the seal first, after that we can talk. All these promises would be a waste of time, if I cannot even deal with the seal in the first ce."

    "Thank you."

    Markan said with a smile.

    He really doesn¡¯t know what Sam is capable of, but in the past few days, all kinds of weird things were shown to him by Kiran and when he asked about them, he told about Sam being maker of those things.

    So, he can only bet on Sam to see if he could help him.

    Sam first removed the seal ced by the puppet organization and the rest of the group followed eventually.

    Sam removed all the seals, had a meal and they all left to the next realm.

    The Capital of the Second Puppet realm.

    When they arrived, the whole second puppet realm was already set up for what they are going to bring it and it was all set up by Arkiv and the first young master.

    After arriving outside the city, they set up a camp and Sam took out his surveince puppets and sent them to the city.

    After that, he took out amunication token.

    At that moment, Arkiv and the first young master who are currently in a restaurant eating while discussing something. Both of them felt theirmunication tokens being alerted and activated them.

    "You are already here? I thought you would take some time."

    Arkiv asked as soon as he picked up.

    "I am done there. I found some extra help on the way, so I am already here. Anyway, what is the status here? First young master, did you make her fall in love yet?"

    First young master shook his head a bit and said.

    "She is all over me. All I did is do some subtle hints and I am not seeing the end of it."

    "Okay keep up the work. You will receive the fake tempering core in a few days. Then the task would be done.

    If my guess is right, the two branch leaders will return to their respective branches after they are done cleaning up. The first branch is officially gone. So, we don¡¯t have much time.

    Arkiv, did you find the target I asked of you."

    "Yes, close associate of the second young master. He is not particrly good at anything, except for giving ideas to sabotage other people. He will be a good fit."

    "Perfect, try to find a perfect timing, we will rece him with Kiran proceed further. Be careful and make sure to not spoil anything. By the way, First young master, I need the details regarding the assigned positions of personnel in the second branch. We cannot let our helpers sit idle here."

    "Sure, I will get that by tomorrow."

    With that hemunication was cut off.

    Right after the two of them entered this realm, they already started this n rapidly and first part of it is to make the second young master jealous.

    So, all the first young master has to do is to make the attention-seekingdy to get some hints that he might be, just might be interested in her, based on the circumstances and all hell broke loose.

    The second young master didn¡¯t like anything regarding the first young master since then.

    And since this is the trial period and the second branch leader told repeatedly that they should poach the first young master, his hands were tied.

    After that was done, the First young master started focusing on the forging aspect. He even directly asked the second young master and the attention-seekingdy to participate in a special project.

    The project was actually Sam¡¯s idea which focuses on improving the material of the puppets using the tempering function of their furnace. And obviously, it is smart which made the attention-seekingdy be starry-eyed regarding the first young master and making the second young master burn in envy.

 Chapter 1138: Complicated Seal

    After giving instructions to both of them, Sam went to meet Markan privately.

    "So, do you know any details regarding this specific seal?" Sam asked as both of them sat down on the ground on the bank of a stream.

    "It has an ability to suppress elemental energies."

    "How high is suppression?"

    "A one hundred percent."

    Sam was stunned when he heard that. Markan looked at him and said.

    "I don¡¯t know what kind of seal this is, but I don¡¯t know that it is tailor made. When I was first attached with this seal, I lost consciousness and I lost all of my elemental energies, apart from that, even my cultivation progress has slowed down."

    "All of your elemental energies? How many do you have?"

    Markan hesitated a bit and said.

    "Six."

    Sam was once again surprised. Six elemental affinities is something he hasn¡¯t seen yet. Throughout the long journey Sam has been through until this point, the person with highest elemental affinities is the five-elemental king.

    Now someone with six elemental energies arrived.

    "What are the elemental affinities you had?"

    "Water, Lightning, Dark, earth, metal and wind."

    "That is a weird set. So, apart from all these elemental affinities, you are also a warrior?"

    "Yes. But the people that tried to harm me, didn¡¯t know that, so they only prepared the seal for the six elemental energies."

    Sam digested all the information and started asking questions again.

    "So, your six elemental energies werepletely suppressed and your cultivation progress was also halted, are there any other changes?"

    "My appearance changed?"

    Sam didn¡¯t feel surprised anymore, just confused.

    "How?"

    "My face haspletely changed. I don¡¯t look like this at all."

    Sam frowned and extended his hand to use the observation ability on the face. He didn¡¯t extend the ability and only focused on the face itself which gave him a much more detailed view of face. When he was done with that, Sam was beyond surprised.

    "Someone seemed to have surgically changed your face?"

    "What do you mean?"

    "They have used the face of another man and ced in on yours after skinning the outeryer and forcefully healed it. Even though, I couldn¡¯t get a detailed vision, I could still see the minute signs of rejoining at the edge with my ability.

    Are you sure they just wanted to harm you? They changed your face, took off your elemental abilities and suppressed your cultivation speed and then threw you out somewhere. If you ask me, there is a possibility that they knew you being a warrior but deliberately let that ability go. Now you are apletely new person."

    Markan didn¡¯t even speak and just sighed. It seems like he is also aware of the possibility. Sam just shook his head a bit and said.

    "Okay continue with the symptoms. Any other changes other than the face?"

    "I can absorb the elemental energy, but it doesn¡¯t reach my core at all. It is like miraculously disappearing as soon as it entered my body. I can only absorb pure spiritual energy. But whenever I want to use elemental energy, there would be no problem internally, at least at the core, I could feel the elemental energy conjuring ording to my will, but when I wanted to circte it in my body past the core, it is disappearing once again."

    Sam just took a mental note of all these things. He is already numb for all kinds of surprises. There is no need to be shocked anymore.

    After asking a few more questions, Sam finally said.

    "Okay, first I need to check your core. You need to trust me. I know a person¡¯s spiritual core is a dangerous thing to expose to other person, particrly in your case, but just let me take a look and don¡¯t resist my attempts."

    Markan nodded heavily. He knew he doesn¡¯t have a choice.

    Sam ced his hand on the other party¡¯s head and used the observation ability, he directly went for the spiritual core without any dy.

    When he looked at the spiritual core, Sam was really impressed by what he saw.

    It just looked like any other spiritual core, but the difference is that it has six different colors turbulently moving. If one looked at it, they might misunderstand that the energies are conflicting with each other and it would have been harmful, even Sam would have thought that if he didn¡¯t use observation ability. But he can clearly see now and it didn¡¯t look like a conflict between energies at all. Rather it looked like the six elements are dancing in harmony.

    But that is not the only thing that impressed Sam.

    There is an even more impressive thing around that spiritual core.

    There is a ck dot on one side of the core and from that ck dot emerged a pattern simr to a spider web whichpletely enveloped the whole core.

    That is the seal on the core.

    Sam removed his observation ability and asked Markan.

    "Expend your energy. Empty your core."

    Markan nodded and used all his energy tounch a sword attack at the stream. The sword ray flowed along with the stream following the path and disappeared.

    The water rained around like crazy and everyone could see arge line appearing under the stream.

    Markan once again sat down and Sam ced his hand again and used the observation ability to look at the core.

    The glowing energy of the core clearly dimmed indicating the expended energy.

    He took out a bunch of different energy liquids and asked Markan to absorb them one by one.

    When Markan absorbed the neutral energy, it indeed reached the core and it slowly started filling. But when it changed to the elemental energy, the liquid in the container is disappearing but it is not entering the core at all.

    Sam wanted to check the remaining body while absorption is still going on, but he knew it would be difficult to do so because he wouldn¡¯t be able to observe the seal if he spread out his observation ability too much.

    So, he just focused on the core first.

    "Okay now, use elemental energies. Anything is fine."

    Sam said while still observing the core.

    As he looked, soon the dark elemental energy moved and the seal didn¡¯t block it at all. It moved out of it and entered the meridianwork but soon the energy disappeared as if it was never there.

    Sam was shocked and told Markan to continue.

    After some attempts, the result is still the same.

    After expending all the energy, they moved to the next test.

    "Try to cultivate."

    Markan hesitated a bit once again, but he gritted his teeth and did so. After all, his whole meridianwork is open for Sam to see, his cultivation technique could easily be leaked.

    And it is not exactly a good think to leak some thing like that.

    Sam focused on the core, after the energy circted over the body and entered the core, he finally found how the suppression works.

    The seal is absorbing most of the energy and the spider web is using that energy to suppress the core which absorbed the remaining energy.

    This made Sam shocked and excited at the same time.

    It has been a while since he saw something this profound.

    After he was done with the examination he said.

    "I understood how the seal works. Give me some time and I might be able to break it. But there is one more problem. I cannot understand why the elemental energy is disappearing as soon as it entered your meridianwork. When that happened, your seal is not reacting at all."

    Markan became nervous instantly as soon as he heard it.

    "Don¡¯t be too nervous, let me break the seal first and then we will test again, if the same scenario repeats itself, we can think of a way."

    "Are there any possibilities you could think of?"

    "I actually didn¡¯t encounter this kind of case, but from what I could see, there might be a problem with your physical body itself. It might be something rted to the meridianwork or there might even be some kind of seal ced which was hidden behind this seal."

    After Sam said that Markan became silent.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "Don¡¯t worry. We will take it one step at a time."

    With that Sam left.

    He directly entered the ice divine dimension and then entered his divine dimension.

    He sat in the second floor of the tower and simted the seal as he looked at it upclose.

    The seal acted like a real life form as it stuck to the core and absorbed the energy which was meant for the cultivation growth. That is what he noticed during the testing session.

    He was really fascinated by such a phenomenon as he never saw something like that.

    He never had any encounter with something like this and he didn¡¯t evene across anything simr in the books he read.

    He could only test and experiment slowly.

 Chapter 1139: Branch Leader Returned

    While Sam is researching the seal and thinking of ways to break it, the next day Arkiv came with their target. Theckey of the second young master, who gives him the dirtiest ideas.

    Sam came out once and just took a look at him and left the rest of the teammates. He already exined what they need to do, so Sam doesn¡¯t have to exin again.

    Kiran started observing the behavior of this guy.

    Meanwhile, Arkiv gave out the list of the businesses and other things the Second Branch along with the people that are assigned to different positions.

    The extra help Sam hired would be used to deal with them.

    "So, we only have six days. We need to speed up. Of course we need to speed up."

    "I know, but I think we don¡¯t have that long. In at most three days, the clean up process would be done in the first branch, the two branch leaders will go back to their respective branches and at that time it would be impossible to not suspect the first young master.

    Particrly, with him being thest person to be at the furnace of the first branch and the current n of ours also involves the same thing, his presence at the furnace. So, it would be hard to not draw any suspicion and as soon as the suspicion hits, we need to get away from this ce. For thest branch we could just deal with them directly, even though that would take some time."

    Arkiv thought for a moment and nodded. When he was about to return, Sam suddenly said.

    "I saw a few ck cloaked men in the first branch. They are definitely not the members of the Puppet Organization, see if you can find anything rted to them. After all, in this turmoil, I don¡¯t see any reason for the puppet organization to entertain any guests."

    "Okay, I will try. But I think we need to wait until the Branch leader visits."

    "He will visit."

    With that Arkiv was gone and Sam looked through the list he brought. He divided the list into six parts and one part to each prisoner.

    "These are your targets. They are spread all over this realm and you have to deal with them. I don¡¯t care how you deal with them, but they shouldn¡¯t be able to fight. There is also another condition.

    I want you guys to not deliberately hide away, at least while you are attacking. You don¡¯t have to deliberately reveal yourself, but don¡¯t deliberately hide while you are fighting."

    "Why do you want us to do that? Are you trying to use us as a bait?"

    One of the prisoners asked.

    "Yes, actually. But not particrly to divert their attention to you guys. But to divert their attention away from me. I will give you something to save yourself in a critical time."

    With that he took a bunch of things and gave them to the six prisoners.

    "There is a mask that could disguise yourself. It is not the best out there, but it can still help you in fooling the people at the worm hole of the, just make sure that you encounter the higher level cultivators and not definitely the branch leaders.

    If you can do that, you will be good.

    And you don¡¯t have to destroy everything, destroy seventy-five percent and that would be enough."

    He sent them away. Five prisoners walked away while Markan still stayed and it is because, his targets are within this.

    "I need you to asionallye back here in the next three days while you are dealing with those people. I will crack the seal no matter what."

    He nodded and left.

    Sam once again went back to research, his team is preparing for the inevitable sh with the second branch.

    After all, the only reason, the first branch is easier is because their elders are all dead earlier.

    So, now they need to be prepared.

    While the team is preparing, Sam is feeling a bit frustrated while researching. No matter what he did, the seal is like a ck hole devouring everything.

    In fact, it didn¡¯t matter what kind of technique he used on the simtion, it just kept on devouring the set up he is making and it is close to the core, if something happens, Markan canpletely lose his cultivation.

    But no matter what he did, nothing is working.

    He didn¡¯t give up though, he persisted and for the next two days, Markan came back at night after dealing as much damage as he could in different ces of thes.

    Sam conducted a few more tests to it and tried to make some progress, but to no avail.

    Meanwhile, in those two days, the second branch suffered severe losses due to the prisoners and they became alert. The news that the prisoners are doing this didn¡¯t escape them and many elders are dispatched, they also sent the news to the branch leader who is still in the first branch dealing with the aftermath.

    But the branch leader didn¡¯t get the message, because he was busy with something else.

    He was in a meeting with the ck cloaked men that went away after fleecing him a lot on the day the first branch is destroyed.

    "What happened in three days?" The leader of the ck cloaks asked casually.

    "Many things happened. Do you have the information?"

    "Of course, we would always meet the requirements. Here it is." He took out a scroll and gave it to the second branch leader.

    The two branch leaders looked through the scroll carefully and were stunned by the information they saw.

    "Are you sure this is true?"

    "Yes, it is."

    There is a mixture of excitement and relief in the eyes of two branch leaders.

    Third branch leader took out another spatial ring and gave it to the ck cloaked men and said.

    "Thank you so much for the information."

    The ck cloaked man took the ring and stood up.

    "Pleasure doing business with you."

    With that he left along with his entourage.

    The two branch leaders sat alone in the room and there is a silence looming in the area.

    "So, what do you think we should do?"

    "I didn¡¯t expect that someone high up would be involved in this. I thought it was just the five great sects. But it turned out that the outer deacon is just a pawn."

    "This became way moreplicated. ording to the rules, the upper level powers shouldn¡¯t be messing with the matters of the lower level powers, currently Sam trying to deal with us is like a war between him and us, the other party don¡¯t have any usible reason to attack us.

    Even the reasons they have the grudge against him are not exactly valid ording to the rules, so it would be impossible for us to gain too much help from them."

    "But some subtle help could be expected. Let us just slip in the information about Sam and see if we might attract something. Anyway, until now, he did everything carefully without showing himself, but if we make him show himself with proper nning, we might be able to get rid of him with the help of a foreign hand."

    They discussed their ns for a bit and immediately sprung into the action. The aftermath was instantly dealt with and before the same day, the two branch leaders left.

    When the branch leader abruptly arrived at the second branch, they were stunned but also excited. After all, the pressure on the elders was too much due to the sudden loss of members.

    The second branch leader is not exactly pleased by the numbers but he didn¡¯t dwell into the matter too much and passed the orders.

    "Use all the resources you currently have to hire the mercenaries. I want every mercenary within the realm to be at door step. Tell them that we would be giving a puppet with an independent control which has thebat power of at least Initial stage Transcendent realm to them and we will also give one weapon or armor of their choosing after they finished the task.

    Call for all the subordinate organizations that are loyal to us. Within a day, I want the capital to be flooded with them.

    Ask for the citizens to retreat to the emergency bunkers and use the lowest level disciples to guard them. Arrange every kind of defensive formation you know around the city and every kind of trap formation you know in the city. Same goes for the estate. Engage every defensive formation. In just one day, the whole city should be in lockdown.

    After everyone arrives, seal it and seal the core furnace area. Every member that has a task there should leave it in the middle.

    Take out all of your puppets with the independent control and let them patrol.

    I don¡¯t even want a single flying in or going out of the city without our permission."

    As he recited the orders, all the branch elders ran to execute them.

 Chapter 1140: Unseal

    Arkiv and Kiran along with the first young master are currently sitting in the room.

    "What the hell happened to the branch leader? He came one day earlier than he was supposed to and he even gave such an order. We cannot n anything this way. Even the whole city was locked and there is no way he can contact Sam with that. Even the small surveince insects are being blocked from going out of the formation. Just what happened to him."

    Arkiv said in a frustrated tone. He is really pissed.

    ording to their n, Kiran already entered the city in the disguise of theckey.

    Now, the first young master should be using the core furnace for two days straight and on the second day, theckey should provoke the second young master to do something to the core furnace to sabotage the project but in actual fact he is sabotaging the furnace.

    But the branch leader suddenly arrived before the n even started and gave these orders. In a single day, the whole city went under lockdown and Sam was stunned when he saw this.

    The branch leader didn¡¯t even care about the prisoners that attacked their businesses and offices across the realm. It is as if doesn¡¯t care about the losses at all.

    This made things extremely troublesome for them.

    With the sudden increase in manpower and the tight security all over and the particr orders that no one should go anywhere near the furnace, things would definitely getplicated.

    Now they cannot sabotage it and in turn couldn¡¯t steal the core.

    The only silver lining is that themunication between them and Sam didn¡¯t cut off. Even though the insect puppets which acted as surveince are the ones that transported materials between both parties, they are now gone, even the shadow mice couldn¡¯te and go as they pleased like before.

    So, the only they can do at the moment ismunicate and make do with whatever resources that they had.

    At this moment, Sam is currently inside the camp as he looked at the live surveince of various areas. He had a deep frown on his face and the whole team could recognize that he pretty pissed at the moment.

    The seal breaking showed progress, but the method he came up with extremely dangerous and he is not hundred percent sure that he would be able to do it.

    While he was already frustrated about this, he came out of the research to discuss with Markan, but to his surprise the current situation of the second branch is what awaited him.

    "First young master, did you try to fish any information from the branch leader? He still didn¡¯t say anything?"

    "No, Boss. No matter what I asked regarding this, he only smiled and said that they have a detailed n and I only need to wait and see and enjoy when the first branch was avenged.

    One thing I am sure of is that, you are the target. It is almost as if they are sure that Dayus is not the one who did this."

    When Sam heard this, he thought of a few possibilities.

    "Is there a way for you to contact the third branch?"

    "Currently, no boss. There is a wormhole connecting the two capitals, but at the moment, it waspletely blocked and guarded."

    "Are there any close aides for the branch leader that we could take advantage of?"

    "No, Boss. There are some, but from the looks of it, they are also kept in the dark about the situation."

    Sam thought for a moment and sighed.

    "Kiran, how many liquid energy cells do you guys have?"

    "Three dozen small ones and three medium ones."

    "I will contact you guyster. Let me take my time to think of some n."

    With that Sam went to Markan and the rest of the prisoners as he exined the current situation.

    "For now take a rest and recover. I will tell you what you need to doter."

    Everyone left except for Markan.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "I have a method to break the seal, but it is extremely dangerous and if something bad happens your core will be damaged.

    You need to be leave the control your body and energy to mepletely and shouldn¡¯t try to do anything like a dead body. Think about it."

    Markan just thought for a moment and said.

    "Just do it. There is no point in staying like this. I have responsibilities to shoulder and without my identity they are impossible to take care of. And without those responsibilities there is not much reason for me to live.

    I would rather die trying than stay alive."

    Sam sighed and nodded.

    He immediatelyid down a formation and made Markan sit in the middle of it.

    The formation immediately bound him to the ce and he couldn¡¯t move.

    Next, Sam took out a metal seal and ced it on him making him unable to use any energy. Even the energy circting within him has stopped in its track.

    Sam sat in front of him cross-legged and ced his hands on his head.

    He activated the observation ability and went directly towards the core.

    He could still see the seal in the ce. As strong as ever. His energy slowly started enveloping the shied. Markan could feel the foreign energy on the core.

    This is a dangerous thing. Generally, the energy in the core is refined and whenever a foreign energy entered it through the body would be refined there and that only works efficiently and harmlessly because the foreign energy is not being controlled by an external entity.

    But currently, the situation is different, the energy Sam is controlling is a foreign energy being controlled by him. If Sam wanted to, he could cripple Markan right now with just a single thought.

    Markan just took a deep breath and tried to get rid of those thoughts.

    Sam meanwhile, is extremely focused.

    If one could see what is happening in the core at the moment, they would see the energy Sam sent inside is being divided into strands and it started moving like snakes and it carefully intervened itself between the seal and the core.

    The thread of energy is forcefully going in between them which made the Markan shiver in fright, but he tried to calm down, while Sam continued with the task.

    After all the threads got under the seal near the central dot of the seal, they slowly started moving along the web and for every branch of the web, two energy threads started braiding themselves around in.

    And for every braid they need to make coil around the branch and go under the seal once again, brushing dangerously against the core.

    The process is extremely delicate and it took more than three hours just to finish the braiding process on the front.

    But Sam didn¡¯t stop. His beasts are currently out and they consumed the energy continuously while sharing it with him so that Sam wouldn¡¯t be exhausted.

    The process went and on for another two hours and finally Sam was done with braiding.

    If one looked at it now, they could see the ck spider web that was enveloping the core is now being enveloped by white threads and as they contrasted against the six colored core, it looked a bit weird and artistic at the same time.

    When the process reached this spot, Sam slowly started channeling energy so that the braided threads wouldn¡¯t disappeared and with a single thought the small threads of energy became a bit turbulent.

    Markan shook a bit as he sweated profusely.

    Inside, on the core the ck web branches that were enveloped by the energy threads are slowly being disintegrated and the white threads are taking the fragments of this ck energy web to stick with them so that they wouldn¡¯t stray into the rest of the body.

    The disintegration process was done with Sam¡¯s energy maniption. After all, at the end of the day, the seal is just a mass of energy structured in a detailed and profound way.

    So, this is the most direct method, this is also indicative that Sam¡¯s knowledge and expertise in seals is not good enough to break this one and he could only opt to this. As frustrating as it is, he doesn¡¯t have any choice.

    The seal slowly started weakening as he destroyed the branches slowly and uniformly.

    Both of them started sweating and soon the white threads turned to ck threads as they absorbed and held the ck web energy in them and only the dot in the center remained which is trying to extend the new web branches again to maintain the seal.

    But all the energy threads Sam controlled moved and enveloped the central dot as he slowly started disintegrating it.

    Markan felt an extreme pain as he tried to grit his teeth and hold it in. He instinctively tried to use the spiritual energy and if not for the formation holding him, he would have died instantly as soon as the energy started moving.

    After half an hour of struggle, Sam finally opened his eyes and his energy swiftly returned to his hands from the other party a ck lump is hovering over his hands.

 Chapter 1141: Probe

    Sam looked at the dark mass of energy and was stunned. It struggled like crazy as it tried to get out his grasp. It is like a sentient creature trying to get out his grasp. But he didn¡¯t let go and used the golden mes to burn it down.

    But as the golden mes hit it, the dark energy tried to absorb the energy and in fact it did, but only half of it was absorbed and the other half made the energy turbulent. It is as if its screaming in pain due to the torture of being burned.

    Sam tired many methods and every elemental energy that was being injected into it is being absorbed, but due to the superiority of Sam¡¯s elemental energy that was obtained due to the bloodlines of the beasts, the energy is being tortured.

    After some thought, Sam took out a container used to make medium sized liquid energy cells and forcefully ced it inside before sealing it.

    The energy struggled for a long time and after some futile attempts, it became dormant.

    Sam then looked at Markan who is sweating. He is still in that cross-legged position as he started cultivating. Years of suppression and now his core is back to normal. There is no way he would be able to stop himself from cultivating and this is actually the best chance for cultivating. His body and core would be like drynd absorbing every bit of water that was thrown at it, it wouldn¡¯t be an exaggeration to say that he would be able to achieve a few breakthroughs consecutively if he tried hard enough.

    While he is cultivating, Sam left the spot to recover. He really wished that Markan¡¯s problem is solved, because he needs to busy himself.

    He left the team and the prisoners there to go to the capital of the third puppet realm to see if he would be able to get any information regarding the situation. But to his surprise, even the third realm capital is on apletely lockdown.

    They did the same as the second puppet realm branch. They hired a bunch of mercenaries and they called for all their subordinates across the realm and fortified the city a bunch of formations.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit exhausted.

    If things go this way, he would have to directly attack the organization to get any results.

    He returned to the second realm that very day and exined the situation to the rest of the teammates.

    "The remaining yers must have already left to the other organizations, since they don¡¯t have much help like me, they would need some decent time to make preparations. But still we cannot afford to waste too much time here.

    We need to finish this as fast as possible. But both of these guys are tough nuts to crack. Either battle is not something we could finish off in a day or two.

    The only advantage we have is that we are small in number. We are much smaller targetpared to them."

    Sam said as he looked at his teammates.

    After some thought, he said.

    "Paras and Night Ghost, both of you go to two different sides of the city wall. Don¡¯t deliberately try to hide your presence. Test how good these scouting puppets are and what these things are good at.

    Vidyut, you stay a point from where you could support both of them. Three of you take the transference scroll so that you can return to the camp if pushes to shove.

    Don¡¯t attack fiercely. It is only a probe at the moment."

    Three of them nodded and left. He then turned to the rest of the group and said.

    "I want you guys to be on the top form on all times. You should be able to attack whenever I ask you to."

    They nodded and left while sat in front of the surveince equipment. He looked at the Night Ghost and the other two moving. Those three are the strongest he had under him now. They are the best candidates to test what the Puppet Organization has in store with the guarantee that he doesn¡¯t suffer any losses.

    Soon, Paras and Night Ghost appeared at two different locations almost at the same time.

    There are a bunch of stationary puppets on the city walls that are looking at the surroundings. As soon as Paras was within the ¡¯visible range¡¯ of this stationary puppet, it started glowing a bit and immediately surrounding puppets that are mobile, rushed to his direction instantly without any dy.

    There are three kinds of puppets that came and two puppets for each kind totaling six puppets.

    The first kind is arge humanoid puppet that looked cylindrical. The two puppets stood at a distance from him and activated two formations which are meant to keep him there. They also started shooting metallic projectiles.

    The second kind are also humanoid and they seemed to be good at throwing punches. Their knuckles have extremely sharp metallic essories and do does the rest of the body.

    And the third one are flying puppets that are attacking with projectile weapons from the air.

    Looking at Sam instantly understood what their purpose is, they are not here for killing Paras even though, they would do so if it is possible. But rather, they are here to make him stay for as long as possible so that the reinforcements will arrive.

    Sam looked at the surveince more puppets as well as some cultivators areing to this section of the city wall. But they still didn¡¯t descend from the city wall.

    It is possible that the cultivator¡¯s job is only to check the cultivation level of the intruder and Sam¡¯s guess was right. The three cultivators who came immediately retreated after looking Paras and they took outmunication tokens to inform someone.

    Instantly, Sam saw some movements in the city as three figures along with their puppets making their way towards Paras.

    "Paras, retreat."

    Sam ordered and Paras who is on defensive since the start finally made a move. His ax shined with energy as it cleaved through the first humanoid puppet punching at him and he destroyed the second puppet with an upward swing.

    The head of the puppet hit the bird puppet in the sky making it crash.

    He then moved towards therge puppet and instead of directly attacking it, he used it as a footing to jump upwards.

    As he kicked on its head, the head was crushed and with that he used the recoil to leap high into the air and cleaved down wards heavily and in a single motion the bird puppet and therge cylindrical puppet were both destroyed and the cleave ray swept the approaching puppets from that side.

    Paras made his escape while destroying the puppets that are about to follow him and at a perfect time, three lightning arrows were shot destroying the three remaining puppets on his tail.

    Paras escaped.

    Meanwhile, Night Ghost was a little hard to detect.

    Even though Sam said that he doesn¡¯t need to hide himself deliberately, that doesn¡¯t mean he should reveal himself directly.

    He just moved at his natural speed without bothering to hide himself.

    But his speed was still too much for the stationary puppets and he was only detected when he was almost near the city wall and that too by a mobile puppet which is the humanoid one that is good at punching.

    The signal was once again sent and many puppets started running towards him.

    The situation is simr to Paras. He tried to defend and didn¡¯t destroy them outright. But as soon as the cultivators saw him, their eyes widened and they took out a re and fired it into the sky.

    The whole city seemed to have shaken from the re as even the branch leader became vignt.

    All of a sudden, the formation of the city seemed to have changed immediately and Night Ghost could feel something targeting him.

    "Night Ghost, Retreat."

    Sam ordered instantly and Night Ghost retreated with Vidyut¡¯s help.

    Two minutes after Night Ghost¡¯s retreat, the branch leader and the elders arrived on the city wall and looked at the area.

    The branch leader even jump off and crossed the formation as he observed the signs of the battlefield.

    He immediately retreated with his elders and went back to the estate.

    He entered a special room which has arge formation and millions of spirit stones loaded over it.

    He activated the formation.

    "What happened?"

    The third branch leader¡¯s voice appeared from the other side.

    "The other party has an Astral ne Consummate level cultivator. Initial stage." The second branch leader replied in a solemn tone.

    "Are you sure?"

    The third branch leader asked.

    "Yes. There is a high possibility that there is one. We need to speed up the n."

    "Should we just go for ck Ghosts once again? They also do mediations, right?"

    "I don¡¯t see any other option. We can only do that."

 Chapter 1142: Puppets to the Puppet Organization

    After the probing attack, the three of the teammates returned and Sam just sat there as he looked at the city through the surveince. He looked at both inside the city and outside walls.

    After some thought, he took out a bird puppet and let it out. It flew over and soon an isometric view of the city appeared on the screen.

    The rest of the team didn¡¯t disturb Sam at all and just stayed there calmly waiting for his orders.

    After half-an-hour Sam finally moved.

    "We are changing the camp."

    Sam said and without a word, everyone else followed. Soon, the camp location was changed and as soon as they arrived there, Sam left the camp set up to his shadow undead while he took out the crystal table and created an image.

    The three-dimensional image covered the surrounding forest as well as the whole city.

    He looked at the image and he could outline the formations of the city faintly. Even though he cannot guess exactly what kind of formation that is, he can at least see which formation covered which part of the city.

    He circled around the table as he zoomed into the city to take a look and finally he went out of the camp to let out the modified energy bat puppets. There are some new essories added to them so that they would be able to provide some extra help to Sam.

    And the Bat puppets weren¡¯t hidden this time and they didn¡¯t move stealthily. They just moved normally as they flew high up in the sky and made their way towards the city. He was about to return, but halted in his tracks before taking out three more giant puppets. These are three bird puppets and they looked awfully familiar to Sky and Yanwu. One looked like Sky, another like Yanwu and the third one looked a bit different as it has both features.

    He opened some hidden metallicpartment and loaded it with over a dozen ofrge liquid energy crystals for each of them and let them follow the bat puppets.

    Meanwhile, Sam went back into the camp and he ced a few formation discs on the crystal table as he closed his eyes.

    He activated the formation discs and ced his palm on the crystal table.

    The light elemental energy flew out of the formation discs as well as his hands as it enveloped the image of the city and soon another three-dimensional holographic image has formed.

    Sam used his maic control to move the formation discs at the same time and the new holographic image also moved along with it.

    He took out anotherrge table and the city image was ced on it.

    Now there are two images of the city side by side.

    The teammates are already used to Sam doing these kinds of things, but the escaped prisoners were dumbfounded as they looked at it.

    One of them even tried to touch the second image and his hand went right through it to the table.

    Sam went back to the first table and soon the energy bat puppets are already above the city.

    Spiritual energy flew from his hand as it spread into several threads and touched the images of bat puppets on the crystal table and at this exact moment, the bat puppets started using the energy resonance technique as they roamed around the city.

    On the crystal table, the holographic image changed as the formations started manifesting.

    Sam stood at the second table and started modifying the formation discs a bit as the formation domes appeared on various spots in the city.

    Meanwhile, the branch leader and the elders were already notified about the bat puppets and they all came out to take a look.

    The branch leader observed what the bat puppets are doing and had a thoughtful expression on his face and soon he sneered and said.

    "Want to use puppets against the puppet organization? You are out of your mind?"

    As soon as he spoke, he gestured with his hand and the people moved to make calls to different spots.

    Soon many bird-type puppets came from different directions of the city as they made their way towards the bat puppets and started attacking.

    The projectile weapons were easily dodged by the bat puppets and even their task was not disturbed, they are still using the energy resonance perfectly as Sam created a holographic image to get theyout of different formations across the city.

    Soon, the elders and the branch leader understood that the projectiles wouldn¡¯t cut it, so they decided to change it up a bit.

    The bird puppets went in for a direct sh.

    At this moment, everyone¡¯s attention was suddenly attracted by three new figures that appeared above the city.

    The three bird puppets.

    And they are all glowing with elemental energies.

    The first one that looked like Sky started glowing with wind elemental energies and with the glow of the metallic sheen was eliminated, everyone would believe it to be a real-life beast using elemental energy.

    Even the detail in the feathers is impable to see.

    The same could be said for the second puppet which is like Yanwu. Sam even made the third leg and it is glowing with golden mes.

    The third puppet is glowing with both golden me energy as well as wind elemental energy.

    As they pped their wings and arrived over the city, they zoomed towards the bird puppets of the puppet organization.

    Feathers shot out from their wings and the wind elemental ones cut the puppets in half while the fire elemental ones made them burn and melt in the air.

    The bird puppets were easily destroyed without even any resistance.

    The branch leader was shocked.

    He never saw puppets like that.

    There are puppets that use elemental attacks, but they need to have energy contact and they couldn¡¯t be independent puppets. At least, he never saw one on his left yet.

    But here he saw three puppets and one of them can even use two elemental energies at the same time.

    He became vignt and looked at the two elders and said.

    "You go and deal with them. Try to knock them down without damaging them too much. We can see how that puppet maker did this."

    The two elders nodded and boarded their puppets.

    The small fry bird puppets stoppeding and the bat puppets went on with their task.

    But after the two elders came on with their puppets, Sam shifted his focus to the crystal table and started focusing on givingmands so that they wouldn¡¯t be destroyed.

    Since the elders are in direct contact with the puppets, they can use them to channel the elemental energy attacks. One of them has fire elemental energy and the other has ice elemental energy.

    As they started attacking, Sam gave the orders to the three puppets through the crystal table and made them dodge.

    The puppets of the other party as not as fast as his puppets use the meridianwork structures to be that fast and the other party barely uses mechanisms.

    But there was a drawback to this. As he focused on the three bird puppets, some stray attacks hit the bat puppets which made them copse.

    But the three bat puppets that copsed didn¡¯t go to waste and the aftermath of their copse made the branch leader not want any other bat puppet to copse.

    Because as soon as the bat puppets copsed, theynded on the formation dome, and at that exact moment, they exploded.

    *BOOM*

    To be precise, the liquid energy cells that are used as their power sources are the ones that exploded as soon as theynded on the formation.

    A small crack opened up in the formation for a moment and Sam took this chance to let one bat puppet swoop throw it and it directly dashed towards a city guard post and exploded there.

    The metal parts of the puppet exploded along with it and lodged everywhere destroying everything in the surroundings.

    Not just the city guard post, even the disciples in the surroundings died just because of a stray piece of the wing of the puppet was stabbed into them.

    Branch leader, the elders, and disciples, no one was calm when they saw this.

    "Retreat. Retreat immediately."

    The branch leader ordered the elders.

    From what he could see, the puppets of the opponent are of extremely high quality, but they are also powerful and the other party is not hesitating to waste them.

    The four bat puppets were destroyed and three of them temporarily damaged the formation and the fourth one killed ten people. Albeit they are of low level and wouldn¡¯t contribute much to the war, the loss is still a loss.

    He didn¡¯t want to imagine what would happen if one of therge bird puppets exploded.

    At this stage, he doesn¡¯t want to lose so much.

    He must try to find a way to defend against this strong firepower.

    He let the bat puppets roam around. Anyway, no matter how he thought about it he couldn¡¯t find any reason why these puppets are roaming around like this, for all he knew they are trying to get in and explode.

    So, they stepped back and became vignt.

 Chapter 1143: Meeting in the Branch

    Sam let the puppets return after he was done.

    With the energy resonance and the crystal table, he managed to map out every formation and he even managed to map out the elemental energies the formations used and got an idea of what kind of formation that it could be.

    He lost four puppets in the process, but in turn, managed to make it so that the other party wouldn¡¯t try to destroy the rest of the puppets and at the same time tested the durability of the main formation.

    All it needs is one and a half medium-sized liquid energy crystal exploding on top of it which would be enough to create an opening. Each bat puppet has a full-sized medium-sized liquid energy cell ced in them and half of the energy for each cell was consumed due to the energy resonance technique.

    From this, he could estimate how much energy he needs to destroy the formation when it is in apletely defensive state.

    At the same time, in the cap, the second table was filled with the whole holographic map of the city along with theyout of the formations. Now the crystal table can be used to monitor the real-time movements as well as givemands to his puppets and the team members while the second table can be used to n their strategies based on theyout.

    Sam went outside and started receiving the bat puppets.

    At this moment, Markan who opened his eyes came. He is brimming with energy and seemed like he was on a verge of a breakthrough to the Peak stage transcendence of the Astral ne. But he is extremely dull. Nothing like a man who just got a new lease on life.

    "What happened?" Sam asked with a bad feeling in his heart.

    "My cultivation is back. I can cultivate again and I can feel the progress."

    "And?"

    "My elemental energies are not back. The energy is disappearing whether if I absorb it from outside or move it from the core. I don¡¯t know what to do and without these energies, I wouldn¡¯t be able to prove my identity."

    Sam didn¡¯t know what to say. He felt frustrated and felt like bashing something in.

    But he took a deep breath. Sucked it up and spoke.

    ¡¯" Let us do a different type of test. We have focused on the seal all this team and felt like this is the problem all this while. But now that we know the problem is different, let us see what other possibilities are."

    Markan didn¡¯t say anything and just nodded with a heavy heart. He just had his hopes up only to be ruthlessly crushed back again. He cannot help but feel glum.

    Sam sent him back to rest and started thinking about how to proceed.

    The price for destroying the formation is toorge. He needs to divert the attention of the patrolling puppets for a long time because as soon as the puppets saw their presence, the personnel is arriving in a short time frame, and in that time frame, it would be hard to locate the nodes, much less trying to destroy them.

    And he cannot y that cat and mouse game for a long time.

    As for the inside help, he has three of them and one of them can get ess to some level of information inside and the other two parties are good fighters within their realm.

    The situation is not too bad but not too good either.

    But first, he decided to use what he has inside the city.

    He called Arkiv.

    "I need you to do something for me there."

    "Tell me."

    "Was Kiran ced properly beside the second young master?"

    "Yes."

    "Okay then, good. Now, I want you to kill every person thates into contact with the second young master."

    Arkiv was dumbfounded and stayed silent for a moment before asked.

    "You want me to kill everyone hees into contact with?"

    "Yes, he seems to have been deployed to a particr area of the city to act as a supervisor of the troops there."

    "Yes, he was sent there."

    "Apart from his immediate subordinates, he would be meeting many other people. As long as their strength is lower or equal to that young master, kill them directly. If possible kill the people who are stronger than him too using Kirans help in an unsuspecting way.

    But not immediately though. Give it some time, but do not take more than twelve to fourteen hours.

    And don¡¯t leave any traces of yourselves there. If possible, I would prefer if you can use some special technique to kill the stronger members with your archery. Use only spiritual energy arrows, do not use any physical arrows."

    "When do you want me to start it?"

    "From tomorrow. Today, the Branch leader will call you guys for a meeting. At least, the first young master would definitely be invited. Have you heard the explosions?"

    "Yes, I have seen them."

    "Those will be the reason for the meeting, they would ask for a way to destroy those puppets or at least negate them and find a way to take them down without triggering the self-destruction. So, we are going to use this chance. I will spare you the technical details and talk to the First young master. While he would work from there you need to work on these killings."

    "Okay then. I will be on my way. I need to make some preparations."

    "Don¡¯t get caught. I don¡¯t want to rush this."

    "Don¡¯t worry about it."

    With that, the call was cut off and Sam immediately called the first young master.

    He started exining the details regarding the n and the first young master carefully listened. After over an hour, the briefing was over and the first young master was given the rest of the instructions before the call was cut off.

    As the First young master looked at his notes in amazement, an attendant came for him.

    "Young Master, the branch leader called you for a meeting."

    The First young master, stored all the notes in the spatial ring and went to the meeting.

    There are a bunch of elders, the second young master, the attention-seekingdy, and the branch leader.

    The Branch leader looked at all of them and proceeded in a solemn tone.

    "Most of you have seen the puppets that attacked us. We lost one-third of our independent flying puppets instantly.

    And the worst part is, even if we managed to take them down, we are the ones suffering the damage, other parties are barely suffering a loss of a puppet. They managed to kill over a dozen soldiers in the city guards responsible for patrol and immediate action upon infiltration.

    If we need to proceed forward in this war, we need to find a way to reduce our losses that might be the result of self-destruction of the puppets."

    And the discussion began.

    Many ideas are being thrown into the meeting whether they made sense or not. The first young master had a thoughtful expression and he didn¡¯t even seem like he is paying any attention to the rest of the meeting.

    "So, what do you think, Brother One?"

    All of a sudden the second young master¡¯s voice was heard and everyone¡¯s attention was diverted to the first young master.

    The first young master looked stunned and everyone could guess that he is not paying attention at all.

    "What?" First young master asked in confusion.

    "I asked, what do you think of my idea?"

    The second young master pressed with a wicked smile. He is still hostile towards the first young master, because of the Attention seekingdy. So, he is now trying to take advantage of the situation and make the first young master feel embarrassed.

    But to his surprise, the first young master didn¡¯t stutter or try to embarrassingly remedy the situation. Rather, he casually said.

    "I am sorry. I didn¡¯t listen. I was thinking something else."

    When they heard this, everyone in the room was dumbfounded.

    The second young master¡¯s smile also froze and he said.

    "I said, that we should lure them out with a n. Since there is an Astral ne Consummate cultivator on that side, we can just propose a duel openly. And since they are here for the core, we can propose the core as a wager and our branch leader will make the duel take a lot of time.

    Since they sent the independent puppets this far, but still managed to give some orders to them, that means they are within a certain range.

    So, after we lure the strongest here, we would send the elites of our branch out and try to search for them. What do you think? Would this n work?"

    The rest of the elders all looked at the second young master with a smile and then looked at the first young master with disdain.

    They received the message that the branch leader wanted to keep this guy here through the second young master and obviously, they received a biased exnation from this guy. So, they are a bit averse to him. And now that their young master wanted to rip this guy a new one, they are gloating secretly.

 Chapter 1144: Intelligent First young master

    The First young master looked at the second young master with a look of pity in his eyes. When everyone saw this, they were surprised. After all, it was clearly the first young master who was in an embarrassing situation but why is he pitying the second young master.

    That is the question in everyone¡¯s mind.

    "Brother Two. I can understand your enthusiasm, but you should be careful while nning something like this.

    On what basis are you sure that other party would be willing to agree for a duel? And how are you sure that the rest of our elites will be able to deal with the remaining team if we keep the Astral ne Consummate level cultivator upied. I mean, how are you sure that he is the only present there. Are you really basing this all on Dayus¡¯ information? Even though I was foolish enough to believe in him at first, it was proven that he has ill intentions towards us.

    What if the information ispletely wrong?

    Even if it is right, then why should the other party agree to the duel? After all, they had the upperhand against us since the start. We are the one holing up while hiding our citizens, while they were outside attacking as they like. At the same time, we are the ones who werepletelyid bare in front of them and just now they even had a confirmation that our formation could be weakened by the self destruction of their puppets.

    Will they leave all these advantages and juste over to fight us in the open? How did you get that absurd idea?"

    When the elders heard this they were stunned. They really didn¡¯t consider these problems because they never even bothered to assume that the information Dayus gave them was wrong.

    Looking at their expressions, First young master continued.

    "If you ask me, it would be better if we keep our defensive stance and tire the other party out. We need to figure out a way to defend against the self-destruction of the puppets and we would be doing enough.

    We need to mentally exhaust them and make the desperately attack our city openly in a do or die fashion. Only at that time would we have any possibility of winning."

    Second young master became a bit embarrassed and said.

    "What do you mean any chance of winning? Does that mean, you don¡¯t think we have any chance of winning?" He clearly asked the question to egg the first young master to be on opposite ends of the rest of the elders and the branch leader.

    But the First young master is not fazed at all and said.

    "No, not at all."

    Everyone widened their eyes in disbelief and looked at him as if he was a crazy guy. The second young master smiled cruelly and wanted to m down the first young master even more, but the first young master continued.

    "I would like to ask. The city bound formation wouldn¡¯t activate unless there is something that poses threat to it. But why did it glow as soon as the bats appeared and hovered around the city."

    The second young master had an expression that told him he was looking at an idiot and said.

    "Of course, it is because of the potential damage the bat puppet could cause. Didn¡¯t you listen when the explosions happened? Or are you so drowned in your own so called research that you didn¡¯t get it?"

    "Actually, I listened it too damn well and that is where the problem lies.

    We don¡¯t know the lethality of those puppets until they self-destructed. We, a bunch of puppet masters that have abined experience of over five to six centuries in the fields of puppet making. But even we didn¡¯t manage to find out their lethality until the explosion.

    So, are you telling that the formation is smarter than us in analyzing the threat of the bat puppet.

    Have you observed, how those puppets are only revolving around the city and even though there is a massive energy release from each one of them, there is no attack, no defense, no nothing. Why do you think that happened?

    Did anyone of you even bothered to think? I did."

    He then tossed a scroll towards them and said.

    "The puppets are modelled after beasts called Energy bats. I don¡¯t know if the puppets have the same function as them. But from what I know of them, the energy bats have a function to resonate with the energy by emitting energy waves.

    This resonance will give them chance to avoid danger zones, find treasures and so on. If that function was somehow replicated, then we are in deep shit.

    We are going have the hardest time of our lives, because he might have just known the locations of the formations.

    Even if the nodes and cores are not revealed he knew the areas that are covered with various formations.

    The Bat puppets are just scouts and even they can do this much damage to the main formation with their self-destruction.

    Imagine what would happen if his attack puppetse and hees along with the team after that.

    We need to find a way to counter these energy explosions..."

    The first young master went on a rant and took out one scroll after another. After an hour, he took the group outside into the courtyard and set up a formation.

    "When I saw this energy explosion the first time in the capital in the First puppet realm, I started researching it. I might not be able to replicate it exactly, but I can do to some extent."

    With that he activated a formation and the energy exploded a bit. It looked like the energy explosion even though the effects could be consideredckluster at best whenpared to the orginal energy explosion.

    There is not any damage at all.

    But the elders and the branch leaders were still dumbfounded.

    The First young master took the chance to set up another formation for this ¡¯energy explosion¡¯ and then he started setting up another formation around it.

    He activated both the formations at the same time and as soon as the energy explosion urred, the second formation was activated and sent an energy wave which up on hitting the target area, started rippling like crazy diffusing the explosion.

    He then turned to looked at the Branch leader and the elders before saying.

    "I want you guys to give me a chance and until then, find a stop him from attacking the city. I will set up a formation no matter how tough it can be and counter the energy explosions. Even if I cannot negate, as long as I could diffuse it a bit, I would be able to reduce a lot of damage to the city and we will have a chance to fight back."

    The rest of the elders instantly came out of their shocks and asked.

    "You did this all by yourself?"

    "Yes, I have been researching since the explosion happened in the city and this is the progress I made. I never really cared much about the formations and the energy cirction techniques, but from the looks of it, they are a lot more dangerous and interesting.

    So, I started researching them and these are the results. It would take a lot of time for me to create a formation that could diffuse all the energy explosions. So, I need a lot of members in my team."

    The branch leader immediately agreed and gave the first young master freewill to pick members for his team.

    To everyone¡¯s surprise, the second young master was selected into the team. But after the shock has passed, they were filled with admiration. The First young master is noble enough to keep the petty grudges aside and use the intelligence of the second young master which could possibly lead him to share the glory with him.

    And there is another surprise. The Attention-seekingdy was also selected. But they didn¡¯t express anything, because the attention seekingdy might beautiful, but that doesn¡¯t offset her talents in other fields.

    She might not be exceptional at anything, but she is above average in many aspects. Formations, puppets, forging and even inscriptions.

    They just thought that he might be trying to use a person who has a diverse range of skill set.

    The research team was established and the first thing the first young master did is to call Sam the very next day and inform him of the n¡¯s sess.

    Sam smiled at this and said.

    "Proceed with the rest of the n. Just imitate everything I told you to and you would be fine.

    If things are problematic, just directly contact me and don¡¯t bother to hide this anymore. I wille and help you as fast as I can."

    With that, the first set of the n was over.

    As for the other n, Arkiv started executing it perfectly.

 Chapter 1145: Parasite

    The second young master became frustrated as he looked at the current situation. He felt like the first young master ispletely stealing his thunder in every situation. Even the idea of energy diffusion felt like it was being targeted at him. He felt like it was made to overthrow his own idea not for the sake of the branch.

    After all, he is that self-centered. How can he not think like that?"

    So, as soon as the meeting was over, he went to the residence he was given as the supervisor and he snuck in a prostitute from the refugee area where the evacuated citizens are located and took his frustration out on her.

    His personal guards sent her away and dropped her at the border of the refugee area. They were very discreet about the whole thing as this is against the rules and they didn¡¯t dare go inside as they would be spotted by someone and the second young master would be in big trouble.

    The guards of the refugee area who were bribed earlier discreetly took the woman away from the point and gave her a temporary residence in the refugee area. This is a personal residence, even though it has only one room, in the refugee area that was a luxury.

    And the woman is also extremely satisfied with the arrangement as she needed to share the room with ten people previously.

    She felt like the rough treatment she received was worth it as she slept on the bed to rest.

    Arkiv looked at the whole process from far away and marked the location of the woman.

    He took up a spot in a nearby building and hid away as he waited.

    Arkiv felt like it would take a long time so he drew the bow string and a spiritual energy arrow was formed. He released it away and the arrow shot through the window into the room and diffused into a small wave of energy. The woman woke up from the impact of the small energy wave and stood up as she looked around in wariness.

    She walked towards the door to call for the guards in panic, but as soon as she crossed the window, a spiritual energy arrow struck her on the neck and she died on the spot.

    Arkiv left the spot and went back to the residence of the first young master.

    Since Sam¡¯s surveince insects are on the second young master¡¯s tail, he doesn¡¯t need to tail him and find out about each and every person he came into contact with.

    So, he got instructions from Sam and the way was guided by the insects as he went to the next target after two hours.

    The n is going smoothly for now and Sam is waiting for the results to show.

    Meanwhile, he got busy with something else.

    At this moment, he is currently doing another test of Markan.

    Sam looked at his situation and couldn¡¯t help but sigh helplessly.

    No matter how much elemental energy was injected into his meridianwork, it was being simply disappearing.

    He doesn¡¯t know where it is going and how a mass of energy could disappear into nothing like that. No matter how many supernatural things are in this world, Sam is sure that this world still obeys all thews of nature andw of conservation of energy is one of them.

    He doesn¡¯t believe that the elemental energy is being sucked away just like that.

    So, he can only search more and more.

    After searching for every kind of seal possible, at least to the extent of his knowledge, Sam didn¡¯t find remotely any trace of seal on Markan¡¯s body.

    He is sure that his body ispletely devoid any form of seal.

    This made him even more frustrated about the problem.

    As he thought of different scenarios, he decided on taking a different approach.

    He sat on the ground with his legs crossed and took a deep breath as he entered the state of meditation.

    He started eliminating all kinds of elemental energies, spiritual energy and other supernatural things from his mind and started thinking differently. He started analyzing the problem as how a normal doctor would.

    First, he needed to find an analogy for the problem Markan is currently facing.

    After some thought, he equated the spiritual energy to the nutrients and the Markan¡¯s situation is deficiency of energy and another symptom is the nutrients are disappearing as soon as they entered the body and deficiency is not being cured.

    And if those specific nutrients are even being secreted by body but they are still disappearing to nowhere.

    If it is a modern time, what would doctors think? As he thought process went in this direction, he suddenly had a thought.

    "Parasite."

    He muttered as he opened his eyes.

    Tapeworms in human bodies will absorb the Vitamin B12.

    Whether they are being secreted from the food in their body or taken through an external source.

    Since he came to this world, he involuntarily didn¡¯t think of anything rted to viruses, bacteria, parasites and such. After all, all the sicknesses either came through the poisons, elemental energy ipatibilities or most of them are physical injuries.

    He didn¡¯te across sicknesses that are caused by microorganisms. Except for the one that he started himself for General Spark many years ago with urine and mucus of some beasts.

    So, his thoughts didn¡¯t go in that direction at all, but once they went there, he couldn¡¯t stop himself.

    He immediately ran out of his tent and went to Markan.

    "I need your blood." Sam asked directly.

    Markan looked at him in confusion, but he still took out a dagger and drew some blood into a container Sam has brought.

    Sam went back into his tent and started his test.

    First he took out a crystal te which has an inscription drawn on one side. It is of a healing formation which keeps the vitality intact. This is a prototype for a surgical table Sam is designing in his leisure.

    On the te, he ced a drop of blood and activated the formation keeping the cells in the blood alive.

    After that, he used the observation ability on the drop of blood.

    With his cultivation, the observation ability has also grown which is obvious and there is also another aspect of the ability that improved and that is, the more concentrated his range of observation is the more detailed the image would be.

    So, the smaller the volume of the object he is observing the more detailed the picture would be.

    Since he is focusing all his observation ability on a drop of blood, he can even see the structure of each cell in a detailed view.

    And when he saw that he was dumbfounded.

    Because, he could see the obvious structure of the different bloodcells, but there is one type of cell which is definitely not a blood cell.

    And soon he realized that it is not even a cell at all. It is a whole organism which is only the size of a cell. This made his breath run cold. He came across these kinds organisms back in his past life and they were the ones that one should be afraid of at that time.

    But he didn¡¯t think they would be here too and as soon as that thought came, he felt like a stupid. How could he possibly eliminate a possibility just because he didn¡¯te across that. That is not like him.

    This made him scold himself in his head while he proceeded to observe this organism.

    He ced a hand on the crystal te and injected some elemental energy which moved towards the drop of the blood.

    As soon as the energy touched the blood, he could see through his observation ability that these foreign organisms are swallowing the elemental energy.

    They are absorbing instantly without even a fraction of second dy and right there and then, they becamerger.

    The more they absorbed therger they became. He became shocked as he saw them bulging more and more and soon they multiplied. Right in front of his eyes, the volume of the blood increased and that is not because of the increased blood cells, rather it is because of thepletely expansion of these parasites.

    After some thought, he kept on increasing the elemental energy and soon the first set of the organisms multiplied another time and they soon died off and the second set of the organisms are also close to multiplying once again.

    Sam stopped the observation and inhaled a breath of cold air.

    He didn¡¯t expect this. He suddenly thought of the energy he stored in the container and took it out. This mass of ck-colored energy is still as lively as ever and as soon as Sam injected energy into it, it became livelier.

    He suddenly thought of what kind of person could make these things. A parasitic energy seal that makes a person unable to increase their cultivation and a parasitic microorganism that would make a person unable to showcase his abilities.

 Chapter 1146: Markans Identity

    Sam shook his head to throw these thoughts away for the moment. Whoever it is, and whatever his motives might be, he is a really talented person in this field, and knowing who did that will not help solve this problem in short term.

    He needs to find the answer to this as soon as possible.

    All this while, Sam was after the skills and strength of Markan who has six elemental energies and for someone to seal him and throw him away and even going as far as making him change his face so much, he must have been really something. So, he really wanted to take advantage of that.

    But now, his interest in the matter only increased with the added kick of solving the trouble caused by a genius mad scientist who managed to use some parasites like this.

    So, he started thinking about how to deal with these things and kept on observing them for a while. After some thought, the first thing he did is to inject death energy into the drop of blood and to his surprise, the parasites are even swallowing that energy crazily.

    And the death energy seemed to have no effect whatsoever on them directly.

    They are devouring and soon they started dividing once again.

    But this time, after the new batch of parasites arrived the old batch died.

    One batch of parasites seemed to have the ability to create two more batches. That means, the parasitic reaction might have only started from a single parasite and they must spread all over his body.

    This also means that the other party might just use this as a slow poison inside Markan.

    This is truly formidable.

    Sam let the death elemental energy stop and checked with other elemental energies and the result was the same.

    They can only divide twice.

    After some thought, he then stopped the vitalitying from the crystal te and he kept on observing.

    The parasites stayed dormant for a while as they couldn¡¯t get any more vitality from the blood cells and they are not getting any elemental energy as well, this made them dormant for a while and soon they started devouring the blood cells and before Sam¡¯s astounded eyes, the only thing remained on the te is a bunch of transparent liquid with a faintly red hue.

    He didn¡¯t stop and kept on observing which made him finally find out that the parasites are finally dying.

    He sucked in a breath of cold air.

    These parasites are dying only after they devoured everything and there is nothing to devour anymore.

    This is something extremely problematic.

    The only good thing is that these little parasites are not multiplying when they devoured the blood which was devoid of the elemental energies and vitality.

    So, the thing that needs to keep the parasites alive is vitality while excessive amounts of elemental energy is needed to make them grow.

    And Markan is trying to use his elemental energy every day.

    He not only made these parasites livefortably he even extended their families like crazy.

    But the only feasible method Sam found it to find a way to remove the vitality and let the parasites die by themselves.

    He cannot use the method he used on the elfdy who was poisoned. At that time, he used his vampire and the hydra bloodlines and drank all her blood and digested it along with the poison all the while making her bone marrows generate more blood stretching her vitality to the limit.

    But now, things are not so simple. If he used the same method, the parasites would enter his body and there is a chance he would be infected by them as well. Then the trouble he had to face would a million times harder than now.

    He cannot lose his elemental energies no matter what.

    If he cut off the vitality to Markan, he would die as there is a chance that parasites might devour his flesh in the absence of their energy.

    The death energy is also not working, this is a lot more troublesome than he thought.

    He once again reverted back to his previous thought process. He wants to make this analogous to a normal human problem. It worked the first time and there is no fault in trying again.

    So, he thought of a few scenarios. The tapeworm was the first thing that came to his mind, but he immediately rejected the idea. The tapeworm would die for some kind of medicine, but the situation is different here, the medicine is also being devoured. The only way would be to surgically remove it, but the parasites are too hard to remove surgically.

    He then changed his thought process again.

    He thought of the problems rted to blood. And first thought it obviously the blood cancer, the only method is to use controlled radiation to kill the excessive cells.

    As soon as the thought hit his mind, Sam immediately began taking action. He poured out another drop of blood on the te and activated light elemental fusion.

    He shot a light beam on the blood while using observation ability. The intensity of the light beam is very light and it wouldn¡¯t destroy the whole te and the blood there. It was just to conduct a test and he controlled it. He wanted to see if the parasites would devour the light beam too. After all, everything is a mass of spiritual energy and he wants to see if the light created by the concentrated spiritual energy which would have already changed forms into the light would also be devoured.

    And to his relief, it didn¡¯t. But there is also no change.

    Sam did the same thing with the fire, water, and such for a few more drops of blood and the result is the same. This thing might absorb elemental energies, but not the manifested things of those elements.

    So, there is still a chance to deal with this.

    He then shifted his focus to his partial light elemental fusion in which he started changing frequencies of the light beam he shooting. It could be said he is tryingsers of various frequencies on the drop of blood while observing.

    Some beams don¡¯t have any effect on the blood or parasite and some don¡¯t have any effect on the parasite but kill the blood cells.

    He repeated the experiments until the blood was finished. He went out and ran back to Markan. Looking at Sam¡¯s face, Markan didn¡¯t know what to make of it and asked.

    "Did you find anything?"

    "Yes." With that, Sam exined the whole thing regarding the parasite and asked.

    "Just who is a person that is so skilled to ce such a parasite on you without you knowing. This parasite is so good that spiritual sense and vitality search used by healers wouldn¡¯t be able to pick on them. Without my special ability, I highly doubt I would be able to figure out its presence.

    I am pretty sure someone that skilled would have been noticed by you. Can you think of anyone?"

    Markan looked lost as he thought of a person. There is only one person who is skilled enough to do this, that he came into contact with.

    "Have you heard of Vardar?"

    When Sam heard this, he was stunned.

    He is very familiar with the name. The first time he heard it was from the mouth of dark elf when he was trying to poach the five elemental king and from then on, as he climbed up the realms, he heard his name frequently. But not because of his direct fame, rather the fame of his was spread by his disciples far and wide as they treated many difficult illnesses.

    Looking at Sam¡¯s expression Markan understood, that he heard about this and he continued.

    "I met with Markan briefly before I was sealed. A week to be exact. And in that one week, I have been busy fighting off assassinations aimed at me. I fought around twenty-five assassinations. So I was very active with my elemental energy usage."

    When Sam heard this, he became thoughtful as he calcted the energy usage approximately, in turn also calcting the propagation rate of the parasite.

    A week is indeed feasible for the parasitic creatures to spread enough to be devouring all the elemental energy and cover all the limbs.

    "I heard he is quite the healer and quite the high level one at that. How did you even get into contact with him?"

    "Because of my identity."

    Markan sighed and hesitated a bit before saying.

    "I am the next-in-line sessor of ck Ghosts."

    Sam was once again stunned. He didn¡¯t expect that Markan¡¯s identity would be so deep. Because ck Ghosts are one of the organizations that are on the list. In fact, they are part of the second three ranking beside the Five Great sects.

    "You are the next sessor of the ck Ghosts?"

    Sam asked once again just to confirm.

 Chapter 1147: Second Young Masters Plight

    ck Ghosts are an organization that is extremely difficult to deal with. In fact, they might even be stronger than the Five Great sects. They are an organization, that specializes in information and mediation.

    They cover a good portion of information within their peer organizations and the organizations that are lower than them.

    And on top of it all, except for the leading members who were chosen from the different branches of the organization, the rest of them will have a cult-like mentality.

    Except for the leadership candidates and the subordinates that the candidates themselves handpicked the rest of the members of the organization would bepletely loyal to the organization and wouldn¡¯t interfere in the race.

    After the race for the sessor is over, they would have to follow the new leader no matter what.

    Sam remembered all the information that he has on ck Ghosts and the reason he has it is not because he investigated it, rather it is mostmon information in the circles he is currently operating him.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel surprised about the fact that Markan is the sessor of this organization.

    "I am the sessor and I even have the sessor seal which I created by myself in the presence of twelve grand elders who enforce the rules of sessor and leadership of the organization.

    ording to the rules, after I won, the rest of the candidates should revert back to their original positions without eyeing for the leadership. But they obviously didn¡¯t want to do as they were told and they banded together to deal with me, this is the result of that."

    "Then, they could have killed you. Why are you still alive like this?"

    Sam asked in confusion.

    "I don¡¯t know that. But what I know is, once I unlock my elemental energies back, I would be able to prove my identity and the grand elders will take care of the rest. But from the looks of it..."

    When Sam heard this, he shook his head and broke out into a smile.

    "Don¡¯t worry. I am pretty sure I can cure you. But there is something I would like to ask."

    Markan just stayed silent and let Sam continue.

    "The ck Ghost Disc? How useful is it to your organization?"

    Markan was stunned and looked at Sam in surprise.

    "How do you know about that?"

    "I was assigned by someone to get the ck Ghost Disc just like how I was assigned by someone to get the heirloom of the puppet organization.

    There are six more peoplepeting with me out of which Arkiv is one of the people I made an alliance with."

    Markan looked at Sam for a moment and sighed.

    "Not much actually."

    When Sam heard this, his eyes brightened, and said.

    "Can you give that to me, if I cure your problem?"

    Markan thought for a moment and said.

    "It really doesn¡¯t do anything for the organization. It is just a symbolic heirloom that was used by the founder of the ck ghosts. So, it is just there as a symbol of respect. But for me to give you that, I need to first take over the position.

    And from what you said, if Vardar really did this to me, there might be a bigger conspiracy brewing behind the scenes."

    Sam replied.

    "Okay then. I will cure you and help you get your position back, then you have to give me the heirloom and help me deal with the Five Great sects and the Great Giant tribe. Even if you cannot involve yourself directly, I want you to help me with the information aspect."

    Markan hesitated just for a moment before shaking Sam¡¯s hand.

    Sam smiled and got ready to work. For the next few days, he stayed inside the second floor of the tower in divine dimension and he only came asionally to take the blood samples from Markan.

    After repeated attempts, Sam finally found a suitable method for dealing with these things. He has to give them an electric shock which makes the parasites a bit number before treating them with a light of a very low frequency.

    It is even lower than ultraviolet light and it has to concentrate and dense.

    But the problem then arose. Given enough vitality, the liquid blood can sustain both of these treatments, but the problem is that the body tissues cannot endure the torture that goes into this.

    Even if he was unconscious the whole time, he would be having the worst time of his life and if Sam is a little bit unfocused, the meridianwork and the bones will be fried permanently crippling Markan.

    So, Sam has to think of another way and he thought of dialysis.

    The process in which the blood is purified outside of the body and would be sent back inside.

    And he proceeded to do so.

    He started building a machine. But he cannotpletely devote himself to doing that and has toe out once in a while as they are in the middle of the war.

    For the past few days, Sam was not exactly making any moves against the city. He just observed the city and made preparations to give them a big surprise.

    But meanwhile, the first young master and Arkiv are making big strides in the city.

    The First young master started the ¡¯research¡¯ and he assigned people to do only one thing, create an amplification formation that works with mobile nodes which are carried by the puppets.

    So, the group of puppets act as formation nodes and create a portable amplification formation and they has to create at least ten formations like that while he personally made sure to make the diffusion process more effective.

    Since the rest of the group didn¡¯t have much experience in the energy aspect and there is not much time regarding this, they didn¡¯t bother asking for more details.

    By now the first young master managed to make a great impression on others and the attention-seekingdy is also mesmerized with him. Instead of her making him fall head over heels for her, she is falling more and more and this is enough to piss the second young master off.

    But the second young master is suddenly not feeling that good to deal with the first young master at the moment. Because he was aware of the murders happening.

    The first time he was aware of this is when the refugee area guards informed him about the prostitutedy.

    "What do you mean she is dead?" That is the reaction he had when he heard that.

    "Young master, she was killed with a single piercing on her neck. It was quick and it seemed like assassination and there are no traces of anyone left there and no signs of weapons. She doesn¡¯t have any family and only a few friends in the circle of whores, so we can cover that up if you want."

    Guard said casually as he exined. Because in the guard¡¯s opinion this happened because the young master must have blurted out some things that the woman shouldn¡¯t have heard and she is dead because of that.

    But the second young master didn¡¯t know what the hell is happening.

    "Let me look into it first. I didn¡¯t order the hit at all. I want to confirm it with the subordinates."

    After that, the guard of the refugee area left. Until then the death of the woman was hidden perfectly. After all, this is a ticket for profit for the guard captain there, so there is no way he would let it go just like that.

    But when the guard is moving away and he was about to cross a secluded area, he felt a sense of threat, but before he could realize what ising for him, a spiritual energy arrow pierced through his neck from the side killing him on the spot.

    The area is devoid of any activity as it lies between the refugee area and the rest of the city. There is no activity there to be found. It is like a blind spot.

    So, it took a long time for him to be found out and the person that found out about that is also part of the refugee area guards who were sent to go to the second young master as well as find out where the first guard is.

    He took the dead body back to his leader and they were stunned. The death is simr to how the woman died in her room.

    They don¡¯t know what to make of it.

    Meanwhile, the second young master met with one of his close subordinates and asked about the situation, but the subordinate was sure that none of them had ordered the hit. So, they can only go to the next level subordinates under the hierarchy and try to find out what happened.

    They called one of them and the second young master ordered.

    "Gather all your peers and ask if any one of them has anything to do with the death of the woman and if no one is involved send someone to the guard captain of the refugee area and tell them that it has nothing to do with us."

 Chapter 1148: Interrogation

    The second young master gave these orders and went to join the research. He is good at puppet making, so he was given the job to design the mobility of the puppets for the formation.

    While he went there and worked, the subordinate who he talked to, was shot down dead while he was on his way towards his peers.

    Since the mobility project waspletely under him, he barely came into contact with anyone else who is in charge of the nodal design and the formation design. The only person who came into contact with him while working is the First young master.

    When he came back, from the research area to take some rest, he was stunned by the new changes that awaited him. The first thing is the subordinate who he ordered to do the tasks was found dead and the news came that the murders of the prostitute and the guard of the refugee area were reported by the guard captain.

    The second young master immediately arranged for a meeting for the guard captain as the deaths of the two are being investigated.

    "What do you mean by this?" The second young master asked as soon as the guard captain arrived.

    "I am just doing my duty."

    "Of course, you should be doing your duty, but why did you add my name into the report. The guard discovered the prostitute dead and you found out that he contacted me directly to take advantage of the fact that I sneaked her out of the refugee area? When did that happen? The guard clearly spoke your name in the conversation with me."

    "Of course, he did. But Young master, after I found him dead and in the same way that woman died, I thought of something. You were sending me a message. I clearly sent him to get more benefits from you, but for that, you killed him, just like how you killed thedy for something she might have heard or seen which she shouldn¡¯t have.

    So, I decided to act on the situation to save myself. If I am not going to get benefits from doing your dirty work, I will get them by doing my proper work.

    That is what I did. Nothing more, nothing less."

    "What the hell are you talking about?"

    "What am I talking about? I don¡¯t know what happened to you young master, but this method is too easy to catch on to. If you are hiding something, then do with proper men and proper methods. The death of a prostitute that you took from the refugee area and you even ordered to keep her in a separate room with a view of your choice and she died the very night.

    After she died, a persones and asks you what to do with that death and that person dies in the same way. It is a bit suspicious."

    With that, the guard captain left.

    The second young master is still confused. He doesn¡¯t know what exactly happened. He only fucked a woman and since he took so many emotions out on her, he asked her about what she wanted. She asked for a room with a view of her choice and he did as she asked.

    That is the only thing that he could be sure of, the rest waspletely out of his control.

    And to his surprise, two hours after the guard captain left, a group of enforcement members arrived at his residence.

    "You need toe with me, young master. I am the person in charge of the investigation temporarily. I want you toe with me to answer some questions."

    The Second young master didn¡¯t even know what to say about this. But he tried his best to calm himself down and said.

    "Can we do this here, I have a lot to do. I am still working on the design."

    "Okay then, you can keep on working and I will ask questions."

    With that he set up a recording crystal and started speaking.

    "The prostitute that died recently, is it true that you secretly made here here?"

    The second young master¡¯s smile stiffened a bit, but he still answered.

    "yes."

    "Isn¡¯t it against the regtions? Why did you break the rules and bring her here to your camp?"

    "I was a bit frustrated and overwhelmed with everything going on here, so I wanted some femalepany."

    "Then, you could have gone there. Why break the rules like this?"

    The second young master became silent and didn¡¯t say anything, because the answer to that question will make him look like a small man. The answer is, ¡¯I just wanted to use my authority so that I could feel important because the first young master is overshadowing me¡¯.

    Even though this makes him feel small, he knew this is the reason, but he doesn¡¯t want to expose himself. The enforcement officer stayed silent as he looked at the second young master and continued.

    "Do you know that around a few hours after she left, she died? In a room that you arranged for her with a specific view. Why did you arrange a special room for her?"

    "It is just the payment for her service."

    "But why are you so specific about the view of the room?"

    "She wanted that view. Why is everyone so obsessed with the view of the room?"

    "Well, after examining the wounds, we felt that the wounds are most likely the result of a projectile weapon shooting from a certain distance and from the angle of the wound, we can conclude that it was done from a building nearby which is part of the view you described to the guards."

    The second young master was dumbfounded for a second, but he still got himself together and said.

    "I don¡¯t know how it happened. But the view was described by that woman."

    "Then do you happen to know why she asked for a specific view like that?"

    "I don¡¯t know. I don¡¯t even know her name, why would I know what she prefers and why she would prefer it?"

    "Okay, why did the guard arrive here from the refugee area after the woman was dead instead ofing to us directly?"

    "I think you should be asking that question to the guard captain. Not me."

    "I know what should question should be posed to whom. You don¡¯t have to give me advice regarding that. Just answer the question."

    "He came to ask whether I had anything to do with the death of the woman as he didn¡¯t want to offend me identally by reporting the death to the enforcement team."

    "Why would he think that?"

    "I don¡¯t know."

    "Well, I could make some spections. It is not really a good thing to get on the nerves of the core disciple and it is definitely not worth it for a guard and the guard captain to get on your nerves for a nameless woman."

    "That is quite a spection. But as you know it is a spection, even though there is some truth about not getting on my nerves."

    The investigator raised his eyebrow as he looked at the young master and said.

    "The guard who left this ce also died just like that? Why do you think that is?"

    "I don¡¯t know."

    "Then, why is your subordinate dead too?"

    "I don¡¯t really know. I was surprised as well when I heard the news."

    "You cannot keep answering that way young master. The subordinate was ordered to deal with the issue regarding that woman¡¯s death, ording to our investigation, but he died just like that. Why do you think happened?"

    "I SAID, I DON¡¯T KNOW."

    The second young master lost his fuse as he raised his voice.

    The investigator didn¡¯t bother with him and just let him be while continuing with the questions.

    "Do you know that the guard captain that visited a few hours ago died as well?"

    "What?" The second young master finally showed emotion. He was shocked with disbelief written all over his face.

    "The guard captain died. When he was on his way back to his post after visiting you? What do you two talk about?"

    The second young master became a bit nervous and said.

    "We just talked about what happened. I went to research duty after I got the news about that woman¡¯s death. I didn¡¯t care much. And when I am back, there were already reports made, so I asked the guard captain who made the report to get a better understanding of the situation."

    The investigator suddenly stood up and turned off the recording crystal.

    "That is all for now, young master. If we need anything more, we will be contacting you."

    The second young master didn¡¯t reply and just waited for that guy to go away.

    After he left, he copsed into his chair and started pulling his hair in frustration.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is that this is just the beginning and he has no idea what is about toe at him.

 Chapter 1149: Planting a Seed

    The second young master is pacing around in the tent nervously as he bit his nails.

    He is sweating profusely as he muttered incoherently with an anxious expression. His subordinates are looking at him with equally anxious expressions.

    It has been three days since the interrogation from the investigators of the enforcement department was done.

    In these three days, the whole second branch of the puppet organization ispletely shaken to its core with a lot of turmoil.

    For starters, Sam started creating an external nuisance as heunched several attacks on the city from various sides.

    He didn¡¯t damage much, but of the infrastructure and definitely didn¡¯t kill the people, but he destroyed a lot of puppets and managed to exhaust the forces repeatedly as he attacked only with his puppets.

    It is more like a testing ground for thebat ability of his puppets and he clearly showed one thing to the puppet organization. He showed that he can clearly destroy them and he does have the means to do it and it is just that the price is really too high to pay.

    Every time, the puppet organization barely managed to save themselves from some extremely dangerous situation that could have opened their formations up by sacrificing a lot of puppets.

    While the situation is like this from the outside, the inside is not at all calm.

    The first thing that happened is that the investigator who interrogated him was dead in the same way the previous three people died.

    The investigators didn¡¯t find any traces of the killer around and obviously, all the fingers are pointed at the second young master who was ced on a temporary house arrest.

    Another investigation team was sent to interrogate him and his subordinates and to the dismay of the elders of the organization, one after the other every member of the investigator team died.

    Even the team leader, who is a low-level elder was dead and his death is the only one that had any traces as it seemed like some battle has urred.

    Apart from that, the rest of the deaths are all silent and clueless.

    This made the second young master terrified. Because the implication of killing a whole enforcement team is not something he could bear. Even if he is the core disciple, it is not something he could shoulder the responsibility for.

    And after that death, the second young master immediately wanted to go to the second branch leader and exin. But he was not allowed to go out of the room at all.

    He was locked in with a bunch of guards not even allowing him to step out of the door.

    And at this moment, the elders and the branch leader are having a meeting on how to deal with him. They don¡¯t have any tangible evidence against the second young master and if they really dealt with him without any evidence, they would lose integrity within the organization as they only favor talent and capabilities.

    The second young master started as a normal disciple here even the current branch leaders and elders started as normal disciples. They need to do this fairly.

    But they are worried about what the second young master¡¯s motives are if he is really involved in this. After all, they are going through a war and the opponent is exactly a pleasant enemy to have. So, they are a bit wary of this all and the investigation is not showing any results.

    At this moment, the elders and branch leader are discussing how to proceed. It is leaning towards just dealing with him and the discussion is pretty one-sided. But there is one person who is against it all and at this moment, that person¡¯s voice holds a bit of power.

    It is none other than the first young master.

    "Don¡¯t do anything drastic. I don¡¯t think the second young master will be doing this. He has been pretty loyal to the organization all these years and this is the ce he practically grew up in. And if he is really hiding something and is killing everyone who came into contact with that matter, will he really be doing all of this openly.

    I don¡¯t think he is really that dumb. If I had to believe something, then I would believe that someone is trying to frame the second young master and are trying to make us kill him."

    The elders didn¡¯t know what to say, but one of the hot-headed ones immediately replied.

    "Are you saying that one of us is doing this?"

    "It is a possibility. But I am leaning towards someone infiltrating the city before we imposed this lockdown and they are causing all of this. Isn¡¯t it more feasible and appropriate?"

    "Even if you are right, we cannot just let him go like that. There are still some suspicions surrounding him." The branch leader spoke.

    "You are right. But currently, we cannot afford to lose some like the second young master and his subordinates. He is skilled and I need him to work on my project. If the project is not ready, we wouldn¡¯t be able to face Sam no matter what.

    And from the looks of it, he is getting ready for arge attack. After all, the firepower on the other side is increasing with each skirmish."

    The discussion went on and the first young masterpletely convinced the other party to let the second young master off the hook and the only condition for that is for the first young master to personally look over the second young master.

    When the second young master heard this news, he was stunned. The attendant who delivered the news left, but the second young master didn¡¯t feel relieved at all. In fact, he became angry.

    "Why the hell is he helping me? What is nning?" Those are the thoughts of the second young master. He didn¡¯t think that the first young master helping him is out of goodwill or responsibility. Rather he felt that the whole thing is a n.

    As soon as those words were spoken, one of the subordinates standing on the side had a smile on his face. It is Kiran.

    All this while he has been passive in this role as the n has changed due to the imposed lockdown.

    But now it is his time to act.

    "Young master, I think the first young master is really nning something."

    The second young master looked at him in surprise. Even though he is thinking about what kind of ns the first young master might have hidden here, he knew he is just thinking of spite and jealousy.

    But when one of his subordinates particrly one with the most cunning mind said so, he couldn¡¯t help but take it seriously.

    "Second Young master, don¡¯t you feel that it is weird that everyone you came into contact with is dead. Except for our batch of close subordinates, the guard, the guard captain, the prostitute, investigators, enforcement elder, all of them are dead just like that and every one of them hase into contact with you.

    This happened right after you took up the research project that was given by the first young master as if someone was trying to sabotage it so that you wouldn¡¯t get the credit you deserve after the project ispleted.

    And now when you were thrown into the pickle, the first young master out of all people, goes on and supports you.

    Don¡¯t you feel that it is a bit suspicious?

    Why is he supporting you when both of you clearly don¡¯t like each other? Why did he even make you join the project?"

    The second young master fell into thought, even though he felt that it was a bit farfetched, he still couldn¡¯t help but think and the subordinate continued.

    "Just think about it. As soon as he gave you permission to enter the project, all the elders, branch leaders, and the executives of the branch were in favor of him. They felt like the first young master is not only talented, but he is also extremely virtuous for letting your grudge slide in the face of war.

    Now, he is trying to get you out of this impossible situation even at the risk of being implicated as you were put under his supervision.

    His image only grew brighter in the hearts of the people and elders. Now they are all suspicious of you and the first young master is being praised and admired. They are thinking of disposing of you while consulting him. What do you think that means?

    In their eyes, you are no longer the core disciple of the second branch, you are a liability that they need to get rid of and he is going to be the one who protects the liability despite his grudge."

    When Kiran finished his words, he could clearly see the change in the expression of the second young master.

    He couldn¡¯t help but smile. The seed has been sessfully nted and this step of the n is perfectly executed.

 Chapter 1150: Attack

    For the next week, the second young master was under the strict supervision of Arkiv and the rest of the subordinates under the first young master.

    Since the supervision was given to the first young master, as his trusted subordinate, Arkiv was given easy ess to this post. He took a look at Kiran who is still in his disguise and smiled.

    The second young master was wrapped around their finger for the past week as the defensive project is going in full swing.

    One part of the city wall was destroyed and a bunch of puppets under Sam¡¯s control managed to infiltrate and destroy the infrastructure. In the process, destroying a formation and killing over two dozen people and some of them are elites who are in charge of patrol and immediately action at the city walls.

    This made the puppet organization speed up the project and this one week, the research team worked day and night.

    The team worked on amplification formation and the puppets, while the First young master solely worked on the diffusion formation.

    At this moment, the puppets are being deployed to their locations while the formation is being put in ce.

    The second young master is making rounds to all the puppets to check the mobility of the puppets for one final time.

    The check went until afternoon and the second young master was sent to his residence along with his close subordinates. Coincidentally, Arkiv was called off for something important by the first young master, which gave him a moment of secrecy.

    He had a few moments of secrecy like this in the past week and in these few moments, he prepared for something big.

    He instantly activated a bunch of formations as he and Kiran went into the room. They took out a bunch of blueprints and the second young master marked different points on the blueprints with a checkmark.

    After he was done, he looked at Kiran and said.

    "These are the things I already modified. I ced all the bugs where they needed to be and they would work properly on time. Now, I need to find a time to ce the things that would deactivate the bugs they needed at this point."

    He continued as he pointed to a certain point on the map of the city.

    "I need you to find out when it was the perfect time to do so between now and dawn tomorrow. I heard that was the time they would be activating the diffusion formation."

    "Yes, boss. Don¡¯t worry. I will find out and give an appropriate time in an hour."

    Kiran then left and the concealing formations were deactivated.

    After leaving the room, Arkiv came back with the rest of the security and Kiran started a conversation with Arkiv.

    "So, how is it going?" Kiran asked.

    "The nning is perfect, therge-scale formation would be activated by afternoon. Thebat ability and mobility of the puppets were already tested, so the city will be protected by dawn tomorrow."

    "That is great."

    The conversation went on for a few minutes and Kiran went out to take a stroll around the area.

    After an hour, he came back and gave a time for the second young master.

    "One hour before midnight."

    That was the timing given to him and the second young master waited for the time toe.

    When the time arrived, he sneaked out with Kiran¡¯s help and went to the designated location where a metal pir was ced.

    He ran towards it and looked around to make sure no one is seeing him, he took out an inscription brush and made some markings on the pir before leaving.

    After he left, a few minutes passed and the first young master finally arrived at the scene. He made some more modifications on the pir and left.

    Time passed slowly and dawn arrived.

    The elders and the first young master and the elders are having a meeting as they went through the final review to start the puppet formation.

    As the meeting continued, all of a sudden, an attendant ran in and said.

    "Branch leader, Come out and take a look. We are being attacked."

    The branch leader frowned. The attacks in the recent days were known and they are not severe enough for the Branch leader to react by himself, but for the attendant to be in this hurry to even forget the etiquette, he had a bad feeling and went out directly.

    As soon as he did so, he waspletely stunned by what he saw.

    The sky above the city is being covered with a dozen puppets. All of them are modeled after different birds and all of them seemed to have metal elemental energy circting throughout their bodies.

    The puppets are not hiding their presence at all.

    The birds are huge and from their construction structure, the Branch leader even recognized a few of the birds on which the designs are based.

    As the bird puppets hovered over the sky, every bird puppet belonging to the puppet organization that went upwards was not being able to reach them as the metal elemental energy became too rampant andbined with the wind element, they are creating fierce metal winds. And the one force that the puppet makers couldn¡¯t see but feel is the maic force.

    Sam used some of the meridianwork models of Dia and implemented them as secondaryworks in the bird puppets that are based on the metal elemental bird-type beasts.

    This helped him create a maic field that would have a great effect on metallic things and the puppet organization has too many puppets with them for their own good.

    All this while, the bird puppets at least managed to reach the targets, but this time, they were being torn apart from the maic field and the metallic winds and made them crash into different ces of city damaging the infrastructure.

    As they roamed around the sky, the bird puppets suddenly opened their mouths wide and started shooting energy beams. All of them are metallic energy beams and theynded on the base formation.

    The formation started to waver a bit as every spot hit by the metallic energy beams looked like it was under the attack of arge-scale metallic sand tornado concentrated to the size of a basketball in a single spot.

    The branch leader looked at this in shock. He didn¡¯t expect something like energy beams. After all, Sam didn¡¯t bother to use them in the past two weeks he has been dealing with them.

    The first young master looked at this and said in a hurry.

    "We need to activate the formation immediately. These energy beams also have the same principle of energy explosions. We need to proceed quickly. I will go to the pir."

    As soon as he spoke, he started running and the second young master who is beside him said.

    "I will alsoe."

    The first young master just nodded and ran forward and the second young master followed. After they got out of the building they took off on their bird puppets as they hurriedly made their way towards the metal pir.

    At this moment, the second young master is feeling anxious. He didn¡¯t expect that Sam woulde with such an attack. Particrly at this time.

    This is the worst time an attack like this could have happened.

    And there is a reason for him to think like this.

    From the past week, he and Kiran are plotting to make some mess of the formation. But not a big one, it would only be a slight failure which would be the work of him changing some minor things in the formation and it would only make the formation output a little lesser.

    As for how he is sure that only the output will be affected, it is because he and Kiran overheard when the first young master is discussing with himself and they managed to get some calctions of the formations which made it easier to do what he did.

    He wanted to let the efficiency drop during the final activation and wanted to be the hero to save it as soon as it happened.

    But he didn¡¯t expect that an attack would be happening at this exact moment.

    If the formation didn¡¯t work ording to his calctions, not only would the city face severe consequences, they might even be destroyedpletely because of the firepower.

    Many disciples and elders would be killed instantly.

    So, he couldn¡¯t help but run after the first young master so that he could change back the inscription modification he made on the pir.

    But as soon as they reached the pir he was shocked. The inscription change is beyond what he didst night and he could easily recognize it.

    "Wai.."

    Before he could yell out loud, the first young master already activated the pir due to his momentarypse.

    As soon as the pir was activated the puppets ced on different corners of the city activated and bright light pirs started appearing from their bodies and the light pirs slowly dissolved into curtains as they moved towards different directions.

 Chapter 1151: Attack II

    The dissolved light pirs formed light curtains that merged as they spread throughout the city, creating ayer of light over the basic defensive formation that is currently ced on a lot of stress due to the constant energy beams being fired from the bird puppets.

    As soon as the energy beams struck this light curtain it was being diffused into a pure concentrated cloud of energy.

    Even though the energy being light is a bit dangerous for people as that might lead to energy corrosion of the bodies, it is still better than being hit by the energy beams and anyway, the barrier formation is protecting them from these energy clouds.

    As everyone watched, the whole city is being covered with energy clouds, but they are still feeling excited. They believed that as long as the energy explosions are being countered, they could ovee everything that the energy threw at them. Even though many of the disciples don¡¯t know what these energy beams are, they felt that they are rted to the energy explosions, so they are still happy.

    The elders and the branch leaders, who knew more than normal are a bit more excited than the rest.

    But the excitement soon turned into despair when an attendant ran inside.

    Looking at the sameck of etiquette and urgency the branch leader frowned.

    "Branch leader, we need your urgent attention on an important matter."

    With that he looked at an entrance and two guards carried an injured person. When the branch leader saw the person, he instantly recognized him. Because he is none other than the cunning subordinate of the second young master.

    He is in an extremely weak and pathetic state and he seemed to have been hit by the stray beams that managed to slip through the cracks before the formation was activated.

    "Why did you bring him here? He should be taken to the healers." The branch leader said with a frown.

    "He said that it is a matter of utmost importance and he should meet you right away."

    The attendant replied nervously as he looked at the branch leader who in turn looked at the severely injured young man.

    "Branch Leader. There is something wrong with the formation. Second young master did something terrible."

    With that, he hurriedly took out a recording crystal and gave it to the branch leader.

    The branch leader looked at the footage of the second young master tampering with the formation the night before.

    "I followed the second young master the night before after observing some suspicious movements and managed to capture it, the second young master spotted me, but he doesn¡¯t know I was recording, so he just captured me and imprisoned me in a house at outskirts.

    But the stray energy beam hit me now and freed me. I immediately came running to you. I also found some documents in the house I was imprisoned. Even though there are not many and most of them are destroyed, I think they would be helpful."

    With that he took out a bunch of documents which are broken blueprints the second young master used to mark the tampering he did to the formation and the puppets.

    The branch leader looked at half-damaged scrolls and was stunned when he noticed a few crucial points that were marked.

    He then looked at the light curtain and as if it was on cue, it started wavering and the energy beamsnded back on the formation barrier. But that is just the start of the nightmare.

    At this moment, the second young master was stunned as he looked at the light curtain disappearing. At first, he was rather relieved when the light curtain was working properly. He felt like he was worried over nothing, or maybe his tampering didn¡¯t even affect the formation at all.

    But as soon as he thought so, his mind went nk instantly as the light curtain disappeared. He was stunned for a second and he wanted to go and take a look at the pir.

    "What the fuck happened?" The first young master beat him to it though, he started checking the inscriptions on the pir.

    The second young master looked at the first young master¡¯s expression and hesitated a bit before going there and acting like he is checking something.

    "Why is the inscription like this? I think it should be different ording to the design." He spoke with genuine confusedced in his voice.

    The first young master looked at the inscription and his eyes widened in shock.

    "let me change it." Seeing that the first young master didn¡¯t do anything, the second young master is eager to rectify his mistake and he tampered with the inscription again.

    "No.." The first young master was about to stop him, but he was toote. As soon as the second young master touched the metal pir with his inscription brush, a wave of energy suddenly blew him away and that wave continued to spread in all directions like a ripple and all of a sudden, the formations in the city stopped working.

    That included the main defensive formation which is the only thing that is stopping the energy beams from destroying the city and as soon as the formation disappeared, the bird puppets swooped in like they are waiting for it and they directly crashed into the infrastructure while they released the metal elemental energy beams, the energy clouds that are hovering over the formation also slowly made their way down.

    All the troops that are neatly stationed became extremely panicky.

    The branch leader looked at the scene and knew something might have happened due to the pir.

    He looked at the elders and ordered.

    "Go after the bird puppets, destroy them instantly and make sure that the troops escaped from the ce of destruction before you did so.

    I will go and check what happened to the formations."

    He immediately took off on his own bird puppet as he zoomed towards the pir in the center and on his way, he managed to block a couple of energy beams sacrificing two of his weapons, but saving a lot of city area and troops.

    When he reached the pir, he saw the first young master and the second young master groaning in pain as they tried to stand up.

    The blow from the energy ripple is too strong.

    When they saw the branch leader, both of them had different expressions. The first young master had an expression of pain and regret while the second young master had an expression of panic.

    The branch leader didn¡¯t even bother to ask any exnation and just captured the second young master before speaking to the first young master.

    "Please, fix the formation as fast as you can. The casualties are severe, we cannot fight without that formation."

    With that, he left the spot. The first young master just sighed and sat there without moving. The n was executed perfectly. Even though he yed a big part of it and now he is a part of Sam¡¯s troops, he is a bit guilty of doing all of this.

    As the branch leader took the second young master, he ced a seal on him and threw him into the main estate leaving him to the guards to ce him in arrest while he joined the elders to destroy the puppets.

    The elders are dealing with the puppets as fast as they can and the destruction they brought ispletely unprecedented.

    Even though they are the ones destroying the puppets, there are either facing some damage due to the explosion or some troops are dying. The infrastructural damage is coteral at best.

    At this moment, Sam and the rest of the team along with the escaped prisoners all appeared out of nowhere at the city gate and easily entered the city.

    The direct sh is finally about to happen.

    "I am in," Sam spoke into themunication device as soon as he entered the city on harbinger. Dozens of puppets both in the air and onnd followed the team as they destroyed everything in the city. They didn¡¯t care about the infrastructure, city wall and the formation nodes, they destroyed everything that came in their way.

    Arkiv, the first young master, and Kiran all heard him speaking and they immediately started working.

    Arkiv who is in the middle of the disciples of the first organization started killing them one by one and Kiran who is in the healing quarters also took out his sword and started killing the guards and the healers.

    The first young master just walked to the pir and started adjusting the inscriptions.

    As they proceeded to do their tasks, they took out some tokens in the middle and started detonating them.

    Every token they detonated destroyed some of the nodes of various formations and also disrupted the order of the troops of the puppet organization.

    And in the middle of all thismotion, Sam slipped through everything and arrived at the core area in a few minutes and Kiran who is nearest also came along with him as he killed the guards. He and Sam went into the core area and reached the furnace.

 Chapter 1152: Retreat

    Sam looked at the majestic furnace in front of him. The furnace was the only thing that was being used in the past few days to build the puppets and other tools required for the mobile formation they made.

    He ced his hand on the core and made some adjustments before stopping the furnace and removing the core out. He then reced it with some device he made and let the formation run again.

    He then came out of the core area along with Kiran while both of them dealt with the guards and disciples around.

    The estate is where the weakest currently stayed in and within a few minutes, Sam managed to put them to sleep and kill the people that are ought to be killed.

    Then they made their way to the library and stole every book and scroll there is in the same way they did in the first puppet organization branch.

    After he was done, Sam looked at Kiran and said.

    "Since the healer quarters is destroyed, you are supposed to be dead now. Go and meet the first young master and take on the face of one of his current subordinates. Almost all our arrangements here are finished and only Night Ghost, Paras and Vidyut are left to act as they are going to deal with the elders and the branch leader. Be careful."

    With that Sam left the ce and joined the battle. Everything is going smoothly in this chaos and the Night Ghost focused on the branch leader as both of them met face to face.

    The Branch leader took out all the puppets he had in his hand that would be useful in the battle and started fighting with Night Ghost.

    Night Ghost didn¡¯t have an upper hand at the start. He only managed to deal with the puppets that are independent as he is specialized in dealing with ghosts and spirits, he managed to deal with them easily.

    But the controlled puppets and the branch leader made it a bit difficult for him. Paras, Vidyut, Saber Monarch, five elemental king and the rest of the teammates are dealing with the elders and high-level disciples.

    Even though Sam doesn¡¯t have much enmity with them, the situation is already irreconcble with them. It is inevitable for them to be archenemies, so he decided to reduce their strength as much as they can and made the teammates deal with all the elders so that he wouldn¡¯t have to face this threat in the near future.

    He has too many enemies already and he is not keen on adding more just for things like fairness and integrity. Anyway, as far as he was concerned only half of the blood of these organization members is on his hands and the rest of it falls on the hands of the gods that are making their followers the pawns of this game.

    While the team is fighting and killing as they were ordered and the puppets are causing chaos and destruction, the first young master is safer than ever. Kiran just ran towards him after Sam¡¯s orders and as soon as he came, the first young master finally moved to the pir and started making adjustments like Sam ordered to do.

    After he did that, the light curtain suddenly appeared, but there are no formations left in the city as they were destroyed.

    It has been over an hour since the infiltration and everything descended into utter chaos and rubble.

    The energy beams that were being shot by the puppets asionally started diffusing and even the explosions happening inside the city are diffusing and clouds of elemental energy are appearing everywhere. Both outside and inside the city.

    But this is only helping in energy explosions and energy beams, the destruction caused by direct attacks didn¡¯t stop.

    Time passed slowly. In the battle, every minute felt like an hour for the disciples of the puppet organization and the battles even went on for the rest of the day.

    This is the longest battle Sam and his team ever had once they started the direct confrontation. Every time until now, they would just make the other party despair using his tricks and then finish them off instantly with their superior might. After the direct contact, the most they would go through would be an hour or two.

    Now they fought for a whole day. Particrly, the battle between the Night Ghost and the Branch leader.

    Night Ghost felt like he met with an opponent for the first time. Granted that the other party is using the puppets, they are but weapons.

    The most important thing is the skill level the other party is using.

    And the branch leader skillfully led Night Ghost outside the city, they are deep into the forest by night and their battle is going in a slow pace.

    But the injuries were inevitable, particrly with Night Ghost¡¯s fighting style of sneak attacks through his ghosts, the soul bindings, attacks to the souls were all hard to defend and the branch leader managed to suffer some serious damage.

    Most of the elders are killed and the remaining few are severely injured. They are currently moving to the core area which is located right next to the wormhole area leading to the third puppet realm and other realms.

    Sam ordered the team to not to pursue them and let them go away. The citizens are still in the refugee area and they were not harmed by either party. Only the puppet organization members are escaping.

    As for the mercenaries, half of them escaped and the remaining half were killed instantly.

    This is one of the biggest bloodbaths Sam has every created. The whole city is painted red no matter where he looked.

    While the puppet organization members are retreating, Sam¡¯s puppets inside the city started exploding.

    The diffusion formation worked, but the energy clouds started created the energy corrosion.

    The branch leader looked at all this from far away and sighed.

    "Why are you doing this?" He asked the Night Ghost, the Night ghost didn¡¯t reply and looked at him coldly.

    "I know I am about to die, just let me talk to a disciple."

    Night Ghost nodded and the branch leader contacted the first young master.

    "Leave the city and go to the third puppet realm. Tell them the details of what happened. Take the captured Second young master with you. I hope the puppet organization survives this. And give him my message. If he is not sure of dealing with Sam, even if just one percent, tell him to give up the furnace body. It is not worth it."

    With that, he cut themunication off andmitted suicide.

    Night Ghost didn¡¯t let him off though, he extracted the soul andpletely swallowed it.

    Sam ordered the rest of the group to retreat and they went back to the camp.

    The next day.

    In the third puppet realm. The third branch leader is currently looking at the few dozen members of the second branch that survived.

    The original n is to defend against Sam and if pushes to shove, they would use wormholes to help each other. But Sam¡¯s attack was too sudden and perfectly timed. And they thought that they had a chance to beating Sam so, they didn¡¯t arrange anyone at the wormholes.

    But it backfired big time and they were massacred.

    He looked at the first young master and the two subordinates that survived.

    The two subordinates are obviously Arkiv and Kiran.

    Three of them have severe injuries. The first young master had his hand severed. And the remaining two has their limbs severely fractured.

    They are looking extremely pitiful.

    "First young master, how did the battle go? Were we even able to fare anyway? Is there really no time for you guys to inform us through the wormhole?"

    "We were caught by surprise. The elders and the branch leader who are the only people that had ess to the worm hole were gone into the city to deal with some special puppets the enemy sent, and they were stuck with the enemies after that. After all, all the wormholes were sealed as the branch leader didn¡¯t want to give them a chance to ambush through the wormholes, it would take some time to unlock them.

    The enforcement elder that was stationed at the worm hole was also in charge of saving the refugee area nearby, so he was not directly involved in the battle and no one was there to take charge and give him orders. The branch leader told him to treat anyone without organization anywhere near the wormhole as a deserter and kill them.

    Only after the battle reached an unimaginable state did he willingly open the wormhole gate and even helped us unseal it."

    The third branch leader became thoughtful and after some time he heaved a huge sigh and was about to say something.

    But at this moment, his close associate ran towards him and passed him a slip, when he looked at the slip, his eyes suddenly brightened.

 Chapter 1153: Curing Markan

    Everyone was stunned as they looked at the expression of the Branch leader. They didn¡¯t know what could make him feel excited in a situation like this. Three-thirds of their organization waspletely destroyed and they also lost two parts of their heirloom.

    The sheer defeat they suffered is enough to erase their smiles for the next few years. They couldn¡¯t fathom how this man could have felt excitement at the moment. But the branch leader is not really up to exin anything to anyone.

    "Take the first young master and his subordinates to a new residence. Let them rest. We will definitely avenge our fallenrades."

    With that, he sent them away and soon the normal elders who didn¡¯t have high enough authority were also sent away.

    Only the third branch leader and the highest level elders were left in the room. Even the third young master, the core disciple of the branch was not allowed into the meeting.

    The third branch leader ced the slip he received on the table and said.

    "The ck Ghost sessfully established the contact with the other party."

    The elders had a look of shock and finally a look of excitement.

    "We would be receiving them tonight. But remember everything has to be a secret. We don¡¯t have another shot if we miss this. The second branch leader sent a message before he died.

    He wanted us to make sure that we can beat the opponent, if we cannot beat them, we should be giving the furnace body away. The second branch leader is not exactly a person who exaggerates particrly not when he was about to die. So, we need to be careful regarding this situation and shouldn¡¯t be making any mistakes.

    We will receive our guests secretly. Nobody should know when they areing and why they areing. Even their presence in this ce should be kept absolutely secretive.

    Do you understand?"

    The elders nodded.

    "Now, go and make arrangements properly."

    With that, the meeting was dismissed. There was no exnation on who the other party is or what the whole situation is about. But all the elders clearly understood what is going on and what they should do."

    The first young master, Akriv and Kiran are obviously kept in dark about this. Even though, after making contact with Sam, they got some more toys with them to help from inside, they are not exactly supposed to activate them instantly.

    They were told to wait for three days to do anything.

    Because currently Sam is still in the camp of the second puppet realm and is busy treating Markan.

    At this moment, while the third branch leader and the elders are busy with nning the wee for these special gifts, Sam is tinkering with the makeshift dialysis machine that could clear the parasites.

    He didn¡¯t bother making it sophisticated.

    He doesn¡¯t need to make this into a product or make it user-friendly at the moment. There are many teams of people waiting to do that back in the organization.

    Currently, there is arge device standing in front of him.

    There is a vertical rectangr frame around six feet tall and the frame was mounted with a bunch of thin pipes connected to each other both vertically and horizontally.

    There is another frame parallel to it mounted with a bunch of projectingmps made of some crystal materials and there is a small bulb within those crystallinemps filled with liquid light elemental energy.

    Apart from all of these, there is a tank with a capacity of a few liters connected to the first frame and another tank with the same capacity connected to the second frame.

    Sam is making some final checks before he could operate the machinery.

    After half an hour, he was finally done with it and called Markan over.

    He took out a crystal table and let Markany down on it as he exined.

    "You would be put in a state ofa. You wouldn¡¯t be aware of the surroundings and your nervous system would be in a frozen state. I don¡¯t want you to use your spiritual energy instinctually to disrupt the process as it would pretty invasive.

    I would be sucking your blood out and it will be collected into the first tank, where it would be supplied with sufficient vitality and the blood will be then passed through the frame-mounted with pipes.

    These transparent pipes ensure a steady flow of the blood and the specialmps I created will kill the parasitic creatures in your blood in the process of which the blood cells will be losing a decent amount of vitality.

    They would be collected in the second tank where they will gather enough vitality and then it would be injected back into your body.

    While this is happening, you would be in an induceda as I already told you before and that state will be close to a dying state. Your brain activity would be numbed down and your body would be close to the state of a dead body. The vitality of the body wouldn¡¯t be active at all.

    Because I don¡¯t want the cells to use your body and its energy to multiply while I was still killing them out here. Due to theck of vitality in the body, their instinct would be to go after the nearest source which would be the blood in the tank, so they would be separated from your organs by themselves if they weretched on to it.

    If by any chance this vitality supply of the blood is disconnected then your body would be nibbled down by them and you would die in a few seconds."

    Markan looked at Sam with a dumbfounded expression.

    "Maybe, it would have been better if you didn¡¯t tell me the risk at all."

    Sam shrugged and replied.

    "Of course, it would be, but it would be better to know how you died if you really died. You will get closure."

    With that, Sam took out a syringe and gave him a shot.

    Markan immediately drifted into sleep and slowly his vitality is being sucked by the crystal table.

    This table has only one function at the moment and that is to make sure that vitality stays within the specified range.

    As Markan became unconscious, Sam ced his hand on his forehead and calmly observed the situation. After he reached the desired state, Sam connected a tube to the vein of Markan and the blood slowly starteding out and collected into the tank.

    After a few minutes, the blood moved from the tank to the pipes and then themps focused on it started glowing.

    The light looked like a darker shade of violet almost like a ckmp and Sam ced his hand on the frame of the pipework to use observation ability.

    He closely monitored the reaction of the blood cells and the parasites in the blood.

    After making sure that the cells are not dying out, he moved towards the collection tank where the blood is collected from the body. The vitality absorption of the blood cells is good enough.

    Everything worked properly and as the parasites died, faint sediment is deposited on the pipeline.

    Sam knew that this would happen.

    But he didn¡¯t care much about it. If this machine is for constant use, it would indeed be problematic, but he is only using it for this one time. He didn¡¯t bother solving this problem.

    The process was slow, but it is happening properly.

    After an hour or so, the first portion of blood entered Markan¡¯s body after the parasites were cleaned out.

    Sam instantly ced his hand on Markan and used his spiritual energy to control the blood. It wouldn¡¯t be urate to call it control, rather he made his energy envelop it creating a faint barrier for every cell and the parasites that are already inside the body wanted to jump into this blood. Since the parasites only operate on the vitality and the elemental energy, normal spiritual energy has the highest resistance, and before they would be out of energy before they could do anything with the energy barrier.

    Their only option would be to move out of the body following the bloodstream into the tank and feed on that vitality.

    And after they reached the tank they are being sent into the pipeline and then died there.

    The process went on for around four hours, Sam cut off the blood cirction outside and checked Markan¡¯s situation once again.

    The parasite countpletely went down.

    As checked the blood samples, there are no traces of parasites.

    Markan finally woke up and Sam checked all his vitals.

    Except for a little dy in the reaction time and some numbness all over the body, there is nothing wrong.

    Sam gave him some heavenly wine and after some recovery time, he asked.

    "The results are good. Try and see if you can use your elemental energy."

    Markan became a bit nervous at the thought and took a deep breath before extending their hand. He circted his energy and when he opened his eyes a water bubble is hovering on his palm.

    His nervousness disappeared and his eyes showed an expression of delight and happiness.

 Chapter 1154: Ambush

    Markan felt a wave of emotions hit him as he looked at the blob of water. He lost his face, lost his elemental energies, lost his cultivation growth and potential, lost his identity and position, imprisoned for a stupid reason.

    During this whole fiasco, he slowly lost all hope and decided to live this life normally without any ambitions. He wanted to travel to a lower realm and live a life of peace and quiet, but he was never freed no matter how many days, weeks, and months he waited in the prison.

    When he finally lost any hope there, someone offered to free him, and here he was.

    He changed the energy cirction and soon it changed to the lightning element, then earth, wind, metal, and finally Dark elemental energy.

    He can use all his elements again.

    As he was feeling ecstatic, he suddenly felt dizzy and the energy in his hand disappeared. He almost fell off of the bed, but Sam supported him and said.

    "Your body has gotten used to not having elemental energy and you are also a bit rusty in terms of control, so take it easy. Just practice slowly and you would be able to catch up to your previous form. It would be better if you don¡¯t break through until you master the control in my opinion."

    With that, Sam sent Markan off after making sure everything was okay one more time and packed his equipment.

    That night, his team spread to differents and cities within the realm as they looted the mines and other resources of the puppet organization.

    This time, Sam paid a lot to destroy the second branch. The formations and the sheer defense were something that he never came across until now and to destroy that he has to let go of a few good puppets in his hands. And this is when he had inside help, he couldn¡¯t imagine what would have happened if he didn¡¯t have any inside help.

    He would have paid arger price and it would have taken a long time. Maybe, if he used the controlled explosion technique with liquid energy cells, he might have a proper chance, but he cannot be sure that he would be okay facing the well-prepared puppet organization head-on with limited members.

    But he doesn¡¯t have to worry, with all the information they had on the puppet organization and the fact that they were just destroyed before the other organizations could make a move, he already sent his teammates to collect all the resources.

    All the resources under the second branchbined are many folds than his losses, he not only covered his losses, he also made a decent profit.

    For the next three days, Sam finally covered all his losses and the team finally moved to the third puppet realm.

    Like always, Sam used the ice divine dimension to let his teammates in while he used the dimensional drifter, but since the prisoners are not his long-term teammates, he just let theme with him through the dimensional drifter and they all appeared in a forest a few hundred meters away from the city.

    Sam looked at his surroundings and packed his dimensional drifter, as he took out the ice divine dimension, to let out his teammates, he suddenly felt a sense of crisis.

    Not just him, the six prisoners including Markan felt it and they immediately dodged to the side.

    Sam used his spatial element and blinked away as he reappeared twenty meters away.

    *CRASH*

    The spot they were in was met with arge boulder. But only when they calmed themselves down that they managed to see that the thing in that spot is not exactly a boulder.

    Sam squinted his eyes and used his eye technique as he also let his teammates out of the ice divine dimension.

    "Don¡¯t ask questions, we were ambushed, as soon as we appeared. Other party¡¯s identity was unknown. Ate-stage transcendent cultivator of Astral ne."

    He exined briefly and looked at the other party to reveal themselves. Sam could guess what was in the crater, but he didn¡¯t say anything and stood there, the most urate thing he could guess at the time is the cultivation level of the attacker.

    As the dust settled, the ¡¯boulder¡¯ that suddenly crashed into the ground started moving and it opened up to show a stone golem in a humanoid shape. It looked like an earth elemental being, but Sam is sure that it is a golem because of the person that came out when the golem revealed itself.

    It seems like the golem folded itself into a ball in the middle of which the attacker stayed.

    An attacker is a young man with long brown hair, robust build. He is at least six and a half feet tall and had eyes matching his hair color.

    The other guy looked at the prisoners and Sam with a grin.

    But none of them attacked including Sam¡¯s teammates.

    They all looked past the young man as a few people appeared one by one.

    A youngdy who has simr cultivation to this young man came on a stone golem which looked like a bear.

    A young man came on a stone golem that looked like an ape.

    Following him, a bunch of people arrived on bird puppets and within that group, the third branch leader was also present.

    Sam was surprised by this sudden turn of events, but he didn¡¯t show it on his face, he gestured for the prisoners toe towards and they regrouped.

    His teammates, took out their weapons as they got ready as they saw more and more people appear out of nowhere. Soon, another new group of people appeared and this time Markan showed an expression of shock and disbelief.

    A few men wearing ck cloakspletely covering their bodies and faces came. Only their eyes are visible and a grey embroidered mark of the hexagonal star on their chest is the only indicator of their identity.

    They are the ck Ghosts.

    Sam looked at Markan¡¯s change and he could vaguely guess what the identity of these people is.

    As they stood there, they are soon surrounded by a bunch of people.

    Apart from the three people with the stone golems, the third puppet branch members and elders including the branch leader are there, even though not all of them hade, most of their core members are here.

    Along with them, the ck ghost members and finally some people with different golems are also present.

    As Sam observed his opponents, the other party also started observing him and the young man who crashed into them spoke.

    "You must be Sam. I thought you would be something from all the things I have heard about you. But the reality is quite disappointing."

    He spoke with an expression of disappointment. His eyes then shifted to the ice divine dimension crystal, Sam has in his hands and said.

    "But the talk about your nerves must be urate as you are using the property of our sect so openly."

    Sam frowned and looked at the ice divine dimension crystal and a thought struck in his mind.

    "The Tundra Sect?"

    Sam muttered lightly. There is no response from the other side and of course, he is also not expecting one.

    He just stored the ice divine dimension crystal into the divine dimension and took out his reaper sword as he got ready to fight.

    "Are you sure you want to fight after seeing all of this?" The young man asked mockingly, but Sam didn¡¯t care about him looked around before saying.

    "Kill as you like, but keep the bodies intact, I need their memories. And for every kill, you will get a ss of heavenly wine."

    Sam said to his teammates and their expressions showed clear excitement and anticipation. All of a sudden, they looked at the surrounding opponents with burning eyes as if they are beasts looking at juicy pieces of meat.

    Sam then took out amunication device and said.

    "I am here."

    With that, he put themunication device away and his energy surged.

    The opponents didn¡¯t want to wait as well and made their move on themand of the young.

    "Capture them, do not kill them. You can cripple them, however."

    With that, all of them moved.

    Sam directly went after the young man that crashed.

    He is currently a middle-stage transcendent cultivator of the Astral ne while his opponent is at ate stage. The match is a bit advantageous to the other side and with the added help from golems, this is bound to be a tough fight for Sam.

    But Sam is not worried, rather he was excited. Since his breakthrough, he didn¡¯t have a proper fight. His teammates are not willing to spar with him. This is the perfect opportunity.

    He ran forward with his sword as the opponent also moved along with his golem. The golem and the young man wanted to do a pincer attack, but right before they made contact, Sam disappeared from the spot and reappeared behind the young man with his sword aimed at his throat.

 Chapter 1155: Battle

    The sword made its way towards the neck of the opponent, but it missed slightly as the other party hurriedly dodged.

    But before the opponent could move away, the energy on Sam¡¯s body changed as an earth elemental energy circted instead of spatial energy, and the gravity increased in the ce making the opponent¡¯s movements hard.

    Samnded on his feet and turn around while swinging his sword sideways, with earth elemental energy.

    The sword ray went straight for the opponent caught off guard by gravity and waved his hand hurriedly. Arge stone golem arrived in front of him as it blocked the sword strike.

    But golem was destroyed with arge destructive cut in the middle and the sheer impact threw the opponent off.

    Sam wanted to follow up on the attack, but the humanoid golem attacked him from behind, which he barely dodged and he swung his sword upwards.

    *BANG*

    The sword struck the stone golem and it sounded like an iron bell being struck. The sword didn¡¯t go through the stone as he wanted it to. It only left a small nick on it.

    Sam was really surprised by this.

    Meanwhile, the surprise of the opponent is also not small, because this is the first time someone left a nick on his golem when he was battling his peers. He looked at the sword in Sam¡¯s hands which has a dark blood red de and a ck handle.

    It looked eerie and sinister. One could easily guess that it has been through a lot of battles. He looked at it with squinted eyes and was stunned after a realization struck him.

    "A Blood Iron Sword?" He said it out loud which attracted the attention of the rest of the puppet masters and the people on stone golems who are battling with Sam¡¯s teammates. Currently, except for Sam, the rest of the teammates are all fighting with multiple opponents, but they are still faring well.

    Sam swung his sword slightly and looked at his opponent with a smile indicating that he was right and all of a sudden, the sword started glowing and the opponent widened his eyes in disbelief.

    He wanted to say something, but he couldn¡¯t find any words. Sam turned around and swung his sword at the golem which blocked the sword once again. But this time, the sword went through the stone golem, like it was going through butter and the arm was smoothly cut off.

    Sam nodded in satisfaction as he made his move on the opponent and the other party mmed his foot on the ground as he moved backward while an earthen stone wall appeared in front of Sam.

    A sword cut through the wall and went straight towards the opponent, but he dodged and arrived in front of Sam with a single swing. His arms are covered with stone as he activated partial earth elemental fusion as he punched towards Sam.

    Sam used his remaining arm to block and he also activated the partial earth elemental fusion. He caught the punch and as soon as he did that, his stone hand suddenly started changing shape and it sealed both hands together in ce.

    The young man tried to change the shape of his hand and escape, but Sam¡¯s control is faster and no matter what the other party did, he made sure that both hands stayed there perfectly.

    They came to a standstill and Sam stored the sword away as he looked at the young man.

    "Let¡¯s dance."

    Sam said and his right arm is covered with stone and some small spikes appeared on his knuckles as he sent the punch straight to the young man¡¯s face.

    The opponent wanted to dodge, but he couldn¡¯t and took the fist straight to his face.

    A tooth fell off and he spat out mouthful of blood.

    The opponent was dumbfounded. Sam is clearly a stage lower than him in terms of cultivation, but his attacks are nowhere near weaker than his, in fact, he almost felt that they are stronger than his.

    He instantly activated full earth elemental fusion and his golem also joined in.

    As the golem was about to hit Sam from behind, Sam moved to the side and pulled the young man towards him before making him stand in between.

    The young man struggled to make the golem stop, albeit barely, but Sam kicked him in the back making him crash into the golem¡¯s fist which was extended.

    He didn¡¯t stop there and made his foot be covered with stone as he kicked him on the back of his head.

    Then he started dragging the young master towards him and started punching in the ribs while blocking the puppet using him.

    When the rest of the people saw this tragic scene, they couldn¡¯t help but wince in pain for the young man.

    Within a few minutes, the young man ispletely drenched in blood and his fusion body disappeared. His facial bones, ribs, the shoulder bone all cracked and some even protruded out in the limbs.

    The golem is still helpless. It is an independent golem and it cannot injure the young man no matter what, so Sam used his as a meat shield whenever the golem arrived and evennded some clean hits on the golem with void style.

    The remaining three youngsters are currentlymanding the battle while fighting with some of the teammates.

    Half of Sam¡¯s teammates are stronger than him and the Tamas¡¯ undead creatures made up for theck of numbers while Vidyut¡¯s archery controlled the battle perfectly.

    There is no way they could easily leave their current positions. But the rest of the troops can help them.

    And many people starteding at Sam. Some with fire golems, some with wooden golems, some with the puppets, and even some ck ghosts, and some of the high-level cultivators in Late-stage and Peak stage transcendent stage are making their way towards him.

    The three youngsters with stone golems also released all their golems.

    It could be said over one-third of the army is making its way towards Sam.

    But he only had a cold smile on his face without. Not a hint of fear was visible.

    He palmed the arm of the young man in his captive and severed that at the shoulder joint. He then leaped towards the golem andnded a kick on its face with void style, but he used spatial elemental energy this time.

    A void crack appeared on the head of the stone golem and it crumbled the stone head as it slowly devoured the stone.

    Samnded on the ground and took out harbinger. With a wave of his hand, two handguns appeared.

    These are the modified handguns. It is inevitable that he would modify these things after he created the liquid energy crystals and the modification is quite different this time.

    He created new bullets which would be loaded through a space jade installed in the gun and there is a magazine slot.

    Sam took out two magazines. Both of them are made of empty spirit stone material and are filled with spatial liquid energy.

    He inserted the magazines into the guns and aimed at the iing troops as he stood on the harbinger in an elevated position.

    *BANG* *BANG* Two shots were fired at the same time. The two bullets zoomed through the wind as theynded on two stone golems that areing at him.

    The heads of the two stone golems were instantly destroyed, but they are still running as the core doesn¡¯t seem to be in the heads, but their run soon came to a halt, because at the necks are of the golem, the crack spread as a spatial crack attached to the golem appeared and it is crumbling the stone from inside as it devoured the stone fragments until the cores were devoured into the crack. Finally, the mobile crack became stationary after the golems were gone.

    Sam smiled and started shooting rapidly.

    The golems and puppets are obviously the easier targets for the bullets and the attached spatial cracks that are spread are a great way to take them down with a single shot.

    And when the troops at the rear crashed into the spatial cracks due to their momentum, they are suffering from the suction which took a chunk of flesh off of their bodies, an arm, a leg, or at least the weapons and armors.

    The damage is really good.

    In this battle, Sam really didn¡¯t think of using guns initially, but since the other party is sending troops at him regardless of their cultivation level, Sam can only deal with them like this.

    Sam moved around on the harbinger as he dodged the ranged attacks while he shot at them.

    The puppets and golems are endless though. After all, there are just objects and they have too many of them at hand. They are just sending more and more. He soon had to focus on the people.

 Chapter 1156: Retreat

    As Sam started shooting at everyone while they are still making their way to him, he suddenly felt a sense of crisis from behind. He titled his board making the thrusters below the board face backward and an air cannon wasunched.

    He used the recoil to move away from his spot and therge air cannon hit something.

    Sam hovered a distance away looked at the thing that appeared out of thin air. It is arge throwing star. And it was invisible. If Sam was even a little bitx, he would have been cut into two by that star. It was thatrge. Large enough to cut a person into two.

    Apart from the star, there is also another person who appeared from the invisibility. He is a man in the ck cloak.

    He is part of the ck Ghost team that attacked them.

    The man disappeared once again. Sam just smiled and activated energy vision. Even though in this chaotic battle the energy is running rampant, with his level of control, identifying this man is a piece of cake.

    As he looked forward, he could see a mass of energy spinning sharply and making its way towards him, it is definitely the thrown star.

    Sam aimed his guns at it and shot.

    The two shots connected and the throwing start was stuck in two space cracks hanging in mid-air.

    Sam then aimed at the man who was about to throw another star and shot four times, before turning around and aiming at the puppet that almost reached him.

    He shot the puppet three times making it copse instantly and aimed at the nearest puppet organization member.

    After killing him with a headshot, he turned around and harbinger zoomed through the air and barely escaped another projectile attack from the invisible young man. The projectile attack lodged into the nearest golem dealing energy for Sam.

    Sam tapped on the side of the guns and started shooting once again and this time after reaching a certain distance the bullets exploded creating faint spatial cracks which are extremely mild. Unless some extra force widened it or a strong impact happened, the crack wouldn¡¯t be dangerous and there is a high chance of escaping too.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    The ck ghost member who is still invisible was stunned as Sam shot continuously. He is shooting the opponents that are nearing him and also blindly towards his direction.

    Looking at this the ck ghost member finally heaved a sigh of relief. Because he thought that Sam could see him as he managed to dodge two throwing stars and also shot at him twice. Even though he dodge, he felt like his advantage of being invisible and able to avoid the spiritual sense would be lost.

    But to his relief, Sam shot blindly at different spots. Even though it is within his range and these new bullets felt like traps, he still felt relieved. As long as he didn¡¯t trigger traps, he could still hold his advantage.

    Sam continued with his shooting. Soon many dead bodies covered him along with the fragments on golems and puppets with a bunch of space cracks opening hear and there. Anyone who wants to approach him now should be careful.

    While Sam was unscathed, it didn¡¯t mean he was exhausted. In fact, he didn¡¯t feel this tired in a while. He took out the gourd and took a huge swig of the heavenly wine. He felt refreshed and continued with the shooting and he started moving in a specific direction.

    It is the same direction Sam has been shooting all this while creating a lot of faint spatial cracks. The attacks followed him in that direction as they didn¡¯t care too much about the cracks.

    The cracks are only especially dense in one small area, the rest of the area is open and the cracks are spread here and there, if they controlled themselves, they would be able to easily reach Sam without worrying about the cracks.

    Looking at Sam¡¯s tired face, the invisible ck ghost member slowly moved forward. After five minutes, Sam finally smiled and stopped shooting. He took out a mini-liquid energy cell of spatial elements and looked in a specific direction.

    The invisible ck ghost members met Sam¡¯s eyes and he was terrified. He had a bad feeling about this and he hurriedly wanted to change his position. But currently, he is in the middle of all smaller spatial cracks which would be activated if he made rash movements and he would be easily targeted by Sam.

    He wanted to move slowly and carefully. But before he could move away like that, Sam threw that mini-liquid energy cell into the middle of all these cracks and he shot a bullet at it before it evennded.

    And before the bullet could even hit, Sam¡¯s body was covered with spatial elemental energy and he disappeared along with the harbinger and reappeared a hundred meters away.

    *BOOM*

    A small explosion urred at this moment, but the explosion is not attracted everyone¡¯s attention.

    As the explosion urred the surrounding faint space cracks started expanding rapidly as if a fabric is being torn widely from a small tear.

    All the space cracks started expanding and some even merged together to create arger crack.

    All the troops that followed Sam to deal with were stuck in the middle of these expansions and they desperately tried to run away.

    But not all of them seeded and even the few that seeded lost a limb or two.

    Sam smiled at this and started shooting near the edges of the space crack as he expanded it towards the main battlefield. Looking at this the opponents frowned and felt a sense of trepidation.

    If Sam really dragged the space crack until here, there would be severe casualties.

    They are already having a hard time as it is with Sam¡¯s team. They already had severe losses.

    Sam looked at his teammates and frowned. The Night Ghost who is strongest is still okay as he dealt with the branch leader. The battle is tied at most and even Night ghost had a faint upper hand.

    Paras, Vidyut, Saber Monarch, and Five elemental King are also clearly dominating the field.

    Tamas is doing okay and so are Sia and Gran. But the same couldn¡¯t be said for Jw, Agni and Argan. They are all struggling a bit.

    Even though they dealt with dozens of people, they are still showing obvious signs of exhaustion and they are really in a bad spot at the moment.

    It has to be expected after all, as they climbed higher and higher with the challenges, the harder and harder it would be for them.

    Even Sam barely managed to stay normal because of his endless tricks and his understanding of elements. The same couldn¡¯t be said for his teammates. Even if Sam gave them some toys and trinkets that could help them, they wouldn¡¯t be able to use them properly.

    He then looked at the prisoners who are also struggling. If this goes on, they might desert him to save their asses.

    Sam shook these thoughts and wanted to finish the battle and retreat instantly. So, he took out a small liquid energy cell of the spatial element and threw it towards the edge of the extending spatial crack.

    *BOOM*

    Therge explosion expanded the crack at a rapid pace and turbulent spatial currents started flowing sucking everything into it.

    The other party that already struggled so much looked at this in horror and Sam didn¡¯t waste his time as he threw another cell.

    *BOOM*

    The whole ce is turning chaotic and the other party decided to retreat.

    The golem users took the lead followed by the branch leaders as they moved towards the city.

    Sam made sure that his teammates didn¡¯t pursue them and they retreated to a different side.

    On their way, Sam took out amunication device and spoke.

    "Use the blueprint one and set up the formation at the gate. Some troops of your city areing, activate it as soon as they arrive. Hurry up, they might be there in fifteen minutes.

    After everything settled down, contact me. I want a clear briefing of the situation."

    Sam gave orders to Kiran and Arkiv while retreating.

    Tamas and Sam are at the rear as they let the undead and the puppets carry the dead bodies of the enemies, he needs to extract information to find out why this attack happened.

    The ambush was so sudden. It is almost as if Sam¡¯s arrival location and time were previously notified to them.

    The attack was almost immediate.

    And even the other party¡¯s arrival was out of nowhere. It seemed like they used some spatial tool to arrive at the location.

    Even though they are high in numbers, they are still not to the point of overwhelming Sam and his teammates.

    Otherwise, things wouldn¡¯t have gone like this.

    After retreating to a certain extent, Sam didn¡¯t feel safe enough to camp anywhere. After all, even their arrival was predicted, he didn¡¯t think the other party wouldn¡¯t be able to find out their location.

    So, until he found out the method they used to find their location, he can only assume that he was in open view.

 Chapter 1157: Golem Sect

    Sam thought for a moment since he assumed that they are in open view for the other party, he decided to make an open camp. He would make a setup that would make the troops to hesitate to attack them even if they are out in the open.

    They stopped at the nearestke and Sam threw the ice divine dimension in. They are going to camp inside that.

    Outside, he made a setup with small energy cells creating formations for controlled explosions.

    After that, he went in and met with the recovering team.

    Tamas and Night Ghost already started with memory extraction along with Sam¡¯s specter.

    Sam also joined in with the memory extraction and within the next fifteen minutes, Sam obtained all the information needed. But he is not exactly in a hurry to look through it, he checked up on his teammates and the prisoners first.

    They are injured. Particrly, the sr fragment twins and Jw. Their injuries may not be critical but they are not exactly light either.

    Sam immediately started treating them as he was filled with thoughts. The battles would only get tougher as they moved and these people wouldn¡¯t be able to fare any better. He shook his head off his thoughts. He would deal with it after the first three organizations were dealt with.

    After he was done with healing everyone, he gave them heavenly wine. He was generous this time and gave a pitcher each and finally, he sat down to analyze the information.

    After five minutes, he finally opened his eyes with a frown. He came out of theke and stood on the bank to take a look around. Finally, his gaze stopped on a small bird sitting on the tree. He went back into theke and entered the divine dimension.

    He finally got an exnation for all the shit that has happened.

    From the information he gathered from the three forces, the puppet organization, the ck ghosts, and people with the golems, he managed to find out what exactly happened and how exactly he was found out.

    This can all be rted to the incident with Dayus and his scheme to deal with Sam.

    The real perpetrator behind Dayus is not exactly the outer deacon of the five great sects, in fact, he is only a mediator.

    It turned out that the outer deacon doesn¡¯t have any notable power to mess with the organizations like the puppet organization.

    It turns out there is a rule that higher-level organizations shouldn¡¯t kill the lower-level organizations directly, as for who made this rule and who enforced it, Sam doesn¡¯t know yet. But because of that rule, the outer deacon of the five great sects don¡¯t have any authority to do anything here.

    But with the support of someone even more powerful, he managed to do this.

    As for the reason, this certain someone supports him, it turned out Sam has pissed off some bigshots without even knowing.

    The stone temple and the tundra sect he destroyed before belong to a certainrge organization and they are direct subordinate branches.

    And thisrge organization is The Golem Sect which is a high-level power and currently something even Sam didn¡¯t want to go and meet without at least a month of preparation.

    The young men with stone golems belonged to that golem sect and they are the ones that made contact with the outer deacon of the five great sects which is a lower-level organization the Golem sect.

    The Golem sect cannot interfere with the puppet organization, but if an organization lower than them interferes, they can enforce rules and deal with them. So, they wanted to use the five great sects as stepping stones and deal with Sam and if the plot is revealed, they promised to save the Outer deacon in process of enforcing rules.

    In this way, they tried to deal with Sam.

    But after the n failed, the puppet organization investigated the issue with the help of ck Ghosts and they managed to find this thread and the puppet organization used the ck ghosts to mediate between them and establish contact with them.

    Now, these youngsters came with some tricks and toys of their sect and used them to not only find Sam¡¯s location as soon as he arrived, but they also brought a space gate formation disc that has a certain range to transport the troops here.

    They moved a lot of troops from the puppet organization as well as the other subordinate organizations of the Golem sect just like the stone temple and the Tundra Sect.

    He also gained another piece of information and that is the vastness of the Golem sect and the different factions in it and it also turned out that the biggest opponent behind Sam¡¯s tail is not actually the Earth Golem faction, rather the Ice Golem faction who is also the current leader of the Golem sect.

    It turned out that the divine dimension was given to one of the trusted aides of the Ice golem faction because the father of the tundra sect¡¯s head who is the disciple of that faction was the one who obtained it. He managed to slip it through the higher-level organizations and obtained the ice divine dimension at a high cost.

    So, in order to avoid the eyes of the rest of the factions and the higher organizations, they immediately gave it to the Tundra sect head and sent him to a lower level realm to recruit the disciples for their faction.

    They didn¡¯t think that divine dimension is some kind of storage device that Sam uses. It is a valuable resource. So, they wanted to keep the resource to themselves and only bring it up after they reached a certain level. As for why the Ice golem faction didn¡¯t inform the rest of the faction, it is because this was a secret that only they hold, in fact from the information he got, there are three more divine dimensions in the Golem sect, but they arebined riches of the sect, but this one belongs to the Ice Golem faction alone.

    But this secret spilled when the Ice Golem faction is trying to reach out to Sam which the Earth Golem faction took advantage of and threw them off the trail and started this plot.

    There is also something that piqued Sam¡¯s interest. The members of the Golem sect are all referring to the divine dimensions as divine dimension fragments, not divine dimensions.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know the difference between the two, but he could tell that the ice divine dimension is different from his own divine dimension. His own divine dimension felt close, it is like an independent world of itself. But the ice divine dimension and the lightning divine dimension, he had at hand, didn¡¯t give him the same feeling. But he didn¡¯t have to time analyze the differences until now. So, he put it aside. Now that he heard them referring to it as a fragment, he once again thought of these differences.

    Once again, he didn¡¯t have time. He needs to wait for a few days to get any answers. At least, he needs to deal with the puppet organization first and can thinkter.

    After he digested the information he went back to his team and said.

    "You guys rest properly. We wouldn¡¯t do anything until tomorrow. Be careful."

    With that Sam arrived outside of the divine dimension and floated over theke on the back of harbinger. He sat on the board while the spirit carried out the task as he looked around.

    He is looking for the things that are used to find his location upon his arrival.

    While he is busy, the city and the third branch of the puppet organization are in an all-time chaotic state.

    As soon as Sam passed the orders, Kiran, Arkiv, and the first young master started taking action.

    They didn¡¯t dare dy even for a second.

    Kiran infiltrated the city guards immediately and joined in as he ced the small liquid energy cells in different ces ording to Sam¡¯s formation. When the city guards noticed that something is wrong, with Arkiv¡¯s help he silently killed them and while he took action, the first young master finished the remaining job secretly.

    After that, they disappeared from the spot and immediately escaped.

    They ced the dead bodies of the city guards at the gate in the middle of the formation area and left before anyone else spotted them.

    They were fast and left many traces of their presence and the presence of battle at the city gate, but they didn¡¯t bother taking care of it and left it there.

    When the troops that escaped starteding back to the city gate, they noticed the pile of corpses of the city guards in the middle and frowned.

    The standard practice is that if someone spots something near the city gates, they would inform first and let the puppets engage before directly taking action, but here there are no signs of it, as it was almost an inside job.

    When the people started investigating, Kiran who is looking at it from faraway, activated the formation.

 Chapter 1158: Flesh Golems

    *BOOM*

    The explosion at the city gate not only shook the people that are retreating but also the people inside the city. They didn¡¯t expect that after preparing so well, someone would still manage to st open their entrance.

    The losses are incredible.

    But the main purpose of this explosion is to show Sam¡¯s firepower and resourcefulness.

    The formation he gave Kiran is that of a controlled explosion formation and they used the fire elemental energy cells.

    It is not as lethal and destructive as the controlled formation he used against the first branch leader, rather it is a very limited and most basic controlled explosion he created.

    Sam knew that the third branch leader might not trust the first young master and his subordinates when they arrived here. Even if he did, it is almost impossible to entrust something to the first young master as he ¡¯failed¡¯ to judge the second young master who turned out to be a ¡¯traitor¡¯ and entrusted him with the crucial formation that led to the defeat and destruction of the second branch.

    So, Sam didn¡¯t n to let them go and steal the furnace body by themselves anyway. He only gave those toys away to create enoughmotion inside the city and to make the people terrified.

    After all, he has been dealing with the puppet organization for almost two months, he is wasting too much time here while the remaining yers are dealing with other organizations.

    He cannot be held back here. After all, when five yers are dealing with one organization, the fall woulde faster than normal and there would be a sh. They might even be as fast as Sam in dealing with the organization.

    Before the sh between the yers started Sam needs to be there.

    So, he has to deal with the third branch as fast as possible and the controlled explosion formations are there to destroy it from inside.

    But since the other party already showed their power by finding Sam¡¯s location and attacking him, almost making him suffer severe losses, Sam also wanted to show his hand a bit making them panic.

    So, he made this controlled explosion happen at the city wall right when the retreating troops entered.

    The losses are high, but the lowest level troops are the ones that got destroyed.

    When the dust settled in the ce of the explosion, arge crater filled with charred ground and covered with magma was what they saw in front.

    The branch leader has cold sweats and suddenly he remembered the words sent by the second branch leader through the first young master.

    If they are not confident enough to deal with Sam, it is better to give up the body of the furnace.

    The branch leader then looked at the Golem sect members who were beaten ck and blue and then at the ck ghost members. A part of him is telling him to take the advice of the second branch leader. But a part of him is telling him that he might have gone too far to go back now.

    He shook those thoughts off his head and went into the city with the rest of the members. But even when they are going to their home, they didn¡¯t even feel the faintest sense of security inside. After all, their door was broken, what would the other party do next and what cannot he do next?"

    While they reached the city and went to recover.

    After an hour, the golem sect members, the branch leader, and the elders all gathered in a secret room.

    Apart from them, there are a dozen members sitting on the floor forming a circle and a formation was ced in therge circle. Various images are shuffling in the formation and after ten minutes, it stopped.

    It showed the image of Sam sitting on the harbinger over theke as he looked around leisurely.

    Nobody spoke and just looked at the image.

    Sam looked around for a while and then waved his hand. A bird puppet the size of a normal eagle appeared in his hand. He ced it on hisp and started tinkering with it a bit. After that, he took out a crystal tablet and the bird puppet¡¯s eyes started glowing with fiery red as it hovered over the sky.

    As the bird puppet moved, the image moved closer and closer in the formation back in the puppet organization and they couldn¡¯t help but frown. Particrly the golem sect members and all of a sudden, arge red me enveloped the screen and the image suddenly disappeared.

    The golem sect members were shocked and at the same time, one of the people sitting around the formation jerked a bit.

    Meanwhile, back at theke, Sam who is controlling the bird with the crystal tablet smiled. Nearby, the tree is burning and on the tree, there is a small sparrow that is burning along with it.

    This sparrow is one of the reasons that Sam¡¯s location was found out.

    It is actually close to what Sam uses for his own surveince, but his surveince is a lot simpler, efficient, and reliable than the one the golem sect uses.

    The surveince technique that golem uses, needs flesh golems. Which are essentially dead bodies refined into golems. After that, two souls will be bonded together to form a soul pair and dozens of these soul pairs will be hammered into the golem and finally, a single strong soul will be hammered into it to control it properly.

    After the flesh golem is created, they would take small flesh golems which are dead bodies of various small animals and one soul from a pair will leave a fragment into the golem. The golem would then act as a surveince device. The information seen would be passed through the soul fragment to the original image using their soul connection and the second soul in their pair would help with projecting the image in the formation to which the flesh golem is attached.

    The surveince is extremely high-end and uses a lot of effort. But it is hard to find them as these golems don¡¯t have any energy signature other than the basic signature of the animal, so the golem sect uses it.

    Sam got all this information from the dead body of the golem sect member. Even though the process was not detailed, at least he understood the theory and he couldn¡¯t help butugh at this.

    The process is difficult and extremely evil and in his opinion extremely stupid.

    It is not like there is no such thing as surveince in this world. In fact, there are formations that could project the happenings of a whole forest even in a ce like the Starwood city which is a very remote ce and weakest ce.

    But the problem is that the surveince area is fixed and it can be easily countered. Throughout the journey, Sam saw much advanced surveince techniques, but none of them are useful for wartime purposes and they are barely useful for entertainment purposes and as the means to judge trials and tests.

    Sam didn¡¯t believe that no one is intelligent enough to think of joining themunication devices and the recording crystals making them into a proper surveince device. He just thought that only a few high-level organizations had that, but even the golem sect is using such a crude method, which disappointed him a bit.

    And now that he found out about them, there is no need to leave these little things here.

    Sam operated the bird through the crystal tablet like he is ying a game and started burning the flesh golems along with the trees.

    He even asionally closed his eyes as he used the crystal table to locate their presence easily and sent the bird puppet to burn them down.

    Meanwhile, back in the secret room of the branch, the screen shifted continuously but every image soon turned into an image of burning fire and then a nk screen, and every time that happened the flesh puppets started jerking a little bit.

    After an hour, the first flesh golems fell on the groundpletely disconnected from the formations.

    "Fast, fast. Escape you damn corpses."

    The golem sect members cursed the flesh golems continuously ordering them to make the flesh golems in the forest to escape. They cannot lose the flesh golems that easily.

    They are extremely expensive and something way beyond their paygrade and influence. In fact, bringing them here was because of a whim from these youngsters and they felt nothing would happen to them as no one here is aware of this kind of technology.

    But Sam not only found out, but he also destroyed them one by one and he only used a single puppet to do it.

    This loss is something beyond their reach.

    As for going out and stopping Sam directly, they didn¡¯t dare to do so.

    They barely escaped, even though Sam was the one that was ambushed by them, they still need to recover before they made any move. They wanted to assess Sam meanwhile, but Sam is destroying their eyes directly.

 Chapter 1159: Hexagram Summon

    Sam not only destroyed the flesh puppets of the surveince, but he also burned the wildlife around him and also ttened thend without any rocks or protrusions.

    Within a radius of five hundred meters around theke waspletely charred tnd not even a de of grass was left. He didn¡¯t want to leave any method for the other party to do a check on him, so he left a bunch of small bird puppets that could destroy any flesh puppet that came here burning them to the crisp.

    After he was done with everything here, Sam felt relieved. It is really not a good feeling when someone else is looking at him like this. He can be at ease for now.

    After that, he went back to the ice divine dimension to meet with Markan.

    This time the ck Ghosts are involved. But Markan didn¡¯t even hesitate to kill them. In fact, his attacks were mainly focused on the ck Ghost members as if he had enmity with them for the past three lifetimes.

    When he went back in, he saw Markan checking out the corpses of the ck ghost members which they brought back.

    He already stripped them naked and even checked their spatial rings.

    When he saw Saming there he gave out a bitter smile and greeted.

    "What is the current situation?"

    "I set up a perimeter with traps, if anyone enters it we would know, I also destroyed the surveince system the other established. So, for now, we arepletely safe. We don¡¯t have to worry about the current situation that much."

    "Well, is it possible for you to talk in private? I guess you have a lot of questions to ask."

    "Of course, I do."

    Both of them walked a bit away and Sam asked.

    "So, why did you kill them like that?"

    "They are the members of the faction led by my rival. These people are not regr members of the ck Ghosts. They are direct descendants of the higher authorities and were part of a faction that was opposing me." He paused for a moment and before Sam could ask other questions, he continued.

    "As I told you before, the grand elders take care of the appointment of the leaders and the leader of the organization would take care of the administrative and financial matters. The forces under the grand elders only interfere when the administrative members of the organization need to be investigated or punished.

    Apart from that, the grand elders are also responsible for training the normal members of the organization. The members are created by collecting orphans when they were children and nurturing them to be a follower of the organization with cult-like mentality.

    We are mostly an information organization and the administrative officials of the organization also do mediations.

    Currently, the link between the Golem sect and the Puppet organization is clearly created by these administrative officials.

    The administrative officials are nothing but the descendants of the founder of the ck Ghost organization. His many sons formed different branches and the descendants grew increasingly with time.

    Most of them die in the power struggle bncing the overpoption so that there wouldn¡¯t be too many people holding the administrative power.

    As for the regr members trained from a young age by grand elders, they wouldn¡¯t be able to interfere in the administrative matters and they would only be able to do so if a certain official gave them some temporary ess.

    They would be promoted to the enforcement team under grand elders and with enough development and promotion, they would ascend to be grand elders.

    They don¡¯t participate in the power struggles and once they do by any chance, they wouldn¡¯t be able to get promoted and had to spend the rest of their life as ordinary regr member.

    And even in administrative factions, there are certain powers distributed over certain factions and they are the only ones in charge of these certain organizations. And the golem sect and five great sects fall under the branch of my opposition."

    Markan went on with a long exnation. Sam heard it clearly and just nodded.

    "So, how much involvement do you think the ck Ghosts will have?"

    "Normally, they wouldn¡¯t have even sent these people here, they would have just mediated between two parties and would have separated themselves from the actual situation, but it seems like the rules have changed in my absence."

    Sam thought for a moment.

    "Or, they might have been sent here to look for you. After all, I believe with the informationwork of the ck Ghosts, they might have already known that I took the help of prisoners and I don¡¯t think they would be unaware of your imprisonment here.

    After all, someone is bound to know about your facial change and the new identity they gave you."

    Markan was surprised for a second. This is such simple logic, but he failed to connect the dots. He shook his head and remained silent.

    "Okay, if they involve too much at the moment, it would be troublesome. So, I need to find a way to deal with this instantly. Do you have any methods to deter the ck ghosts, even if they are notpletely gone, I need something that would make them think before they make a move?"

    Markan thought for a moment and said.

    "I do have a way, but my presence will be revealed if I did so."

    "It doesn¡¯t matter if your presence is revealed because after this branch is done we are going to apletely different realm and it would be nowhere near this ce."

    "Then this would be feasible. I would like some elemental energy stones."

    Sam nodded and gave him a spatial ring with the six energies Markan can use.

    Markan came out of theke and Sam sent him past the traps with the help of a puppet. There in the charrednd, he started setting up a formation.

    He is setting up by digging pits and filling them with elemental energy stones to the brim.

    This is one of the crudest techniques of the formation and this could be easily found out.

    But Sam didn¡¯t interrupt and just watched him ce the formation. After a few minutes, he was done and stood in the center of it and activated the formation.

    All of a sudden the glowing elemental energy manifested and gathered together to form arge beam and gathered into the sky.

    After it was done, arge explosion urred in the sky and six bright colors of various elements created a hexagonal star in the sky.

    It was bright and eyecatching clearly revealing their location. But Sam didn¡¯t care much and just waited for the results.

    Markan and Sam waited there.

    Meanwhile, back in the city, therge star that appeared in the sky caught everyone¡¯s attention and every soldier on duty looked at in awe. The ck Ghost members who are involved in the war are also notified of this, they widened their eyes in disbelief.

    They are still with the golem sect and puppet organization members.

    "Damn it, it is the hexagram summon." The ck Ghost member cursed as he looked in the sky. Therge start stayed there for good five minutes before it took another ten minutes to slowly dissipate.

    The Puppet organization members and the golem sect members are obviously confused. But the ck Ghosts didn¡¯t bother exining anything to them.

    They immediately ran out of the area and then towards the city gate. They ran towards Markan¡¯s location.

    While they were on the way, they saw several men and women running out of the city as well.

    The guards don¡¯t know what to do and when they consulted the puppet organization higher-ups they were ordered to let them go. The order was directly given by the branch leader.

    He doesn¡¯t know what exactly happened, but he knew very well that the situation is seriously based on the action of ck Ghosts and when he heard the reports of how many people are running out along with these ck ghosts, from the mercenary groups they hired, from the refugee area of their city and even some disciples of organization, he couldn¡¯t help but feel a sense of dread.

    The Golem sect members are discussing something between themselves, it seems like they have a faint idea of what is happening.

    Soon, the ck ghost members reached the location and stood in front of Markan and Sam.

    Markan looked at them and said solemnly.

    "As the core administrator of the ck Ghosts, the owner of a Hexagram Insignia, with my power authority, Imand you to get out of the puppet organization and leave this city. Nobody is to help the puppet organization and the information from here shall not be sent back to the headquarters unless it was approved or demanded by another one on the same level as me or someone superior.

    And if the information was asked by such personnel, tell them that Markan has returned and for the next fifteen days, the influence of ck Ghosts shall not act in the third puppet realm when the matter is rted to the puppet organization. Understood?"

    "Yes, Sir."

    The ck ghost members replied in unison.

 Chapter 1160: Attack from Inside

    Sam is looking at the scene with a bit of surprise and amusement. He didn¡¯t expect that there is this kind of system in ck Ghosts, he was also surprised by how many people infiltrated the branch of the puppet organization.

    If Sam had this many insiders in the puppet branch, he would already destroy the branch and would have already been on the way towards the next location.

    While Sam is looking at the situation with interest, Markan looked at the ck ghost members with a sweeping nce.

    Every one of them stood straight without moving. But there are a few people who have different expressions on their faces.

    One of them couldn¡¯t hold back anymore and said.

    "Lord Markan has pronounced dead in action a few years ago." He didn¡¯t say anything else and didn¡¯t even ask any questions, but his intention was clear. He is doubting Markan¡¯s identity.

    But Markan didn¡¯t bother to answer with words, instead, he extended his hand and six elemental energies slowly gathered at the tip of his fingers. Then he mmed the palm into the ground and a hexagram appeared around him with six elemental energies.

    When the ck Ghost members looked at this, their eyes widened in surprise and delight. But of course, the members that worked with puppet organizations have ugly expressions.

    "Get back and execute the orders. And the people who mediated between the Golem sect and the puppet organization, you would need to answer to the Enforcement department on why you joined forces with them and battled."

    He then paused and pointed at the strongest of the bunch and said.

    "Imand you with my authority as the administrator, take them back and make sure the trial is conducted."

    The ck ghost member saluted and they all made their move. The mediators didn¡¯t resist. They are not stupid enough to do so and obediently follow.

    After they left, Markan looked at Sam and exined.

    "This is one of the specialties of the ck Ghost organization. Even though some of the high-level powers know of this, they don¡¯t understand what exactly this signifies.

    The Hexagram insignia is a symbol of authority of the ck Ghost members and only high-level administrators hold this. Even though I am the leader of the organization now, my authority is only second to him.

    Once this insignia is shown, all the ck ghost members nearby shoulde and visit that ce. If any member hid and didn¡¯t show up and they were stupid enough to be noticed by any other ck ghost member they would be dead meat as the grand elders themselves would put a hit on him.

    So, they didn¡¯t have a choice and came here to take orders."

    Sam nodded in understanding. It seems like running an organization like a cult has its advantages. But Sam would never be able to bring himself to run his organization like that. After all, what he is mostly after is not thebat strength of his followers, rather their brains and all kinds of skills without discrimination. He needs free minds that could think, innovate and develop. Not some ¡¯yes men who would do anything without thinking.

    He just nodded at Markan, but suddenly he remembered something and asked.

    "Is there another way to get out of this realm? Or are they going to go through the wormhole of the city?"

    "No, the ck ghosts wouldn¡¯t use the main wormhole, they would go on a roundabout way. If my information is not wrong, there is a wormhole in a city to the north that leads to a which has a connection to an outer realm, so they might take that route."

    Sam nodded and went back into the ice divine dimension, to discuss the next n with the team.

    The connections between different realms areplicated as he doesn¡¯t know how these wormholes connecting different realms happened to be present. And most of the time the wormholes are all present side by side even conveniently far enough from each other to construct a building.

    He didn¡¯t meet someone that could exin this to him either. But it is not his problem for now. He just asked this because, if the ck ghost members went through the city, he would have them do something for him, but since they are not he didn¡¯t bother.

    After an hour, Sam finally came back once again and looked for any flesh golems in the surroundings and made contact with Arkiv.

    "So, how is the situation in the city?"

    "It is in curfew. Except for the handpicked city guards at the gates and walls, none of the other troops are allowed to leave the residence. They are afraid that the mole who nted the explosion at the entrance might do something crazy again."

    "Then, their guess is right. You guys are about to do something crazy this time.

    Send Kiran out in disguise and make him set up the small energy cells at different spots around the city wall. I want the nodes of the barrier formation to crumble.

    Send First young master to the core area with an excuse..."

    Sam went on and gave instructions to the three of them.

    Currently, the first young master is staying in a residence outside the estate. That is also the reason why they managed to set up the explosion.

    After receiving Sam¡¯s instructions, he took out amunication token and contacted the third young master. Currently, the third young master is the only one in the estate he could make contact with.

    "Brother three. I think I know who the traitor is."

    He immediately went to the point and the third young master was shocked when he heard this.

    "Brother One. This is not something to joke about."

    "I know brother three. I know for sure. I saw the destruction of two branches. I am very sure what the consequences would be. That is why I am afraid. I think one of my subordinates is the traitor."

    The third young master was stunned.

    "What did you say?"

    "Yes, I think one of my subordinates is the traitor. In fact, I think it is someone disguised as my subordinate. I just found out a formation disc in the subordinate¡¯s room beside the window. This disc created the holographic projection of my subordinate, but the actual person is nowhere to be seen. I think he went out. He also knocked out my other subordinate.

    I am afraid of what that person might be capable of doing and I couldn¡¯t contact anyone else other than you."

    When the third young master heard this, he felt an immense sense of dread. He witnessed the explosion clearly and he knew exactly how powerful it is. If something like that happens in the core areas of the city, things would be extremely dangerous.

    "Brother One. I will send a special team to escort you to the estate. Be careful and bring that formation disc with you. I will inform the branch leader."

    "Please hurry up."

    With that, themunication was cut off.

    Arkiv sitting beside him smiled and said.

    "Be careful, the situation is extremely dangerous. As soon as the barrier explodes use the transference scroll. They wouldn¡¯t be able to stop you. I will set down the rest of the traps."

    "Are you sure you can set them all up?"

    "I don¡¯t need to go to each and every ce myself. I am an archer. I have my ways. Anyway, the current curfew is perfect for this."

    With that Arkivid down on the bed and acted as if he was unconscious.

    Soon, they sensed someoneing over and the first young master immediately went to the door.

    They looked at Arkiv who is lying on the bed inside.

    "Let him rest. I already gave him medicine. But he seems to be in aa. I cannot wake him up now."

    The other party nodded and didn¡¯t bother bringing Arkiv.

    After they left, Arkiv woke up and took out his bow. He took out some special arrows and started tying up the small liquid energy cells to the shafts. He then went to the nearest window and shot the arrow to a building far away.

    Since there is a curfew, the patrols are few and far in between and he is using a special method to conceal the sound of the arrows and he is not aiming at people. This is mostly target practice to him.

    He went to different windows and shot at different buildings and roads from different angles. He covered arge distance and managed to empty out all the liquid energy cells.

    Meanwhile, the first young master sessfully entered the core area and met with the branch leader and the rest of the people in the meeting. They were discussing the departure of the ck ghosts and how this would affect their war.

    But then the third young master came with the news given by the first young master. They immediately sent people to search for Kiran and wanted to capture him.

    But Kiran is currently sneaking around while changing disguises and dropping liquid energy cells and he already reached the nearest city wall.

 Chapter 1161: Compromise

    First young master ced the formation disc on the center of the long table as he stood calmly after exining the ¡¯suspicions¡¯ he had about his subordinates.

    The formation master who has highest level of understanding andprehension started examining the formation disc carefully.

    Branch leader looked at the first young master¡¯s hand. He is holding amunication token. Observing his gaze, the first young master exined.

    "My other subordinate is injured and currently unconscious, I am waiting for him to wake up."

    The branch leader nodded in understanding and didn¡¯t bother talking anymore. He is waiting for the results of the inspection on the formation te.

    At this exact moment...

    Themunication token of one of the elders and themunication token of the first young master both started glowing.

    The first young master took out a token and crushed it at the same time he took out a transference scroll.

    The branch leader who saw this, immediately became vignt and was about to capture the first young master, but at this moment, the formation disc in the hands of the formation master clicked a bit and a bunch of mini liquid energy cells jumped outside instantly as they shot towards different directions in the room.

    Most of the people in the room were shot directly while some managed to dodge or block it which is not exactly useful as they exploded.

    Before they could even explode, the first young master already disappeared from the spot.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    As series of explosions happened and they were followed by a bunch of explosions in the city. Arkiv who looked at the shy explosions outside also activated his scroll and disappeared from the spot.

    Kiran looked at the guards that were chasing him and showed them his middle finger before disappearing as well.

    Soon, three shes appeared at theke near a metal pir.

    Sam is standing by the metal pir as he counted the time carefully.

    When the three shes materialized into three people. He smiled and nodded.

    The metal pir is one of his new inventions. It acts a spatial node. It can be used a node for the transference scrolls he created. When the users activated the transference scrolls they would appear at this pir.

    This can stored and moved. But the transference scrolls can only be used when it was stationary. This is in fact his first test. If this pir was not there or didn¡¯t work properly the users would be transferred far away like a normal transference scrolls.

    He checked the results and then spoke to the three.

    "Ice divine dimension is ced under theke. Go and rest properly. We can talkter."

    Sam said as he used the surveince puppets to take a peek at the state of the city.

    The current city is in chaos. There is no previous majesty or any signs of it being a normal city. It looked more like a ruin. If not for the presence of active elemental energy which is cause of this destruction, it would perfectly go as the ruin.

    Along with the city, even the estate was not spared exactly.

    Particrly in the hidden room where every key person involved in the previous attack was gathered.

    It was in a state of aplete mess.

    A few corpses could be seen lying around and a few people that survived didn¡¯t expect unscathed. And in the current state, Sam managed to direct his surveince puppets directly to this room without any problem or resistance.

    He looked at the scene and smiled. He then thought of something and took out a silver pigeon before sending it to the puppet organization branch. He ced a scroll in the spatial ring it was carrying.

    When the branch leader, who has severe burns all over his body looked at the silver pigeon dropping the spatial ring, he took it and saw the scroll inside.

    He opened the scroll while groaning in pain as he read through it.

    "This is Sam, the one you wanted to deal with so badly.

    We didn¡¯t have any enmity in the past and all of this destruction started with your organization pinning something on me. Of course, I wanted the furnace and that was the reason to.

    Anyway, I am giving you a chance. Give me the furnace body and I will leave this realm. All things would be settled. But if you insist on continuing the war, then I wouldn¡¯t be courteous. You have two days.

    After these two days, I will be started my attack.

    By the way, give a message to the golem sect members.

    They don¡¯t need to try and get to me. It wouldn¡¯t be too long before Ie and find them."

    That was the only thing on the scroll.

    The branch leader came out of the building and looked at the city in ruins.

    It seems like he made a mistake by attacking Sam directly. They lost a lot of people there and the core force is clearly injured. The rest of the people wouldn¡¯t be able to defend themselves against Sam and his teammates.

    At the same time, it seems like Ambush has triggered Sam. After all, even when he was dealing with the second branch, he took his time, but now he directly dealt with them using all these tricks.

    The branch leader fell into deep thought. But what he doesn¡¯t know is that he is clearly overthinking too much.

    The reason Sam didn¡¯t attack the second branch is that the lockdown came too sudden and he didn¡¯t have any method to send things inside. He can only talk with his teammates.

    If he had a chance to send the things inside, he would have directly sted the formations and would have just finished everything off in two days.

    Now, there are three moles inside with a full arsenal of supplies. He can easily destroy the formation and the surprise attacks are ample. He can definitely defeat everyone other than the branch leader and some high-level elders with just his toys.

    His team would easily deal with them after all this destruction was brought upon themselves.

    The branch leader didn¡¯t know all of this, so he only thought that Sam made his move because he was ambushed before.

    After all, in his opinion, all of these explosives and attacks Sam made would cost a lot. The things that could bring upon such destruction are bound to be expensive.

    While he was thinking calmly, the golem sect member nearby collected the corpses of hisrades.

    All of the golem sect members died and only he who was far away and managed to use his golem as a cushion managed to survive.

    He looked at the destruction brought upon by this explosion.

    When the branch leader saw his panicked expression, he sighed said.

    "Young master. I would like you to leave this ce. I will safely escort you to the wormhole. We are not willing to fight this war anymore."

    The nervous youngster looked at the branch leader in a daze for a while and nodded.

    The branch leader acted on it immediately. He took out some high-level medicine and healed the young man, before handing him over to some female attendants so that he would wash up and get ready. After everything was done and he calmed down a bit, the branch leader personally sent him to the wormhole and sent him off.

    After that, he went to the core area where the forging process would happen and stopped in front of the furnace in the middle of it all.

    The body of the furnace is made with the bones of arge fire elemental creature and it is extremely powerful.

    He turned the furnace off and cut the supply from the fire elemental mine.

    After that, he carefully dismantled the furnace and took off the body.

    It took over an hour, by now the sun has already set.

    He brought the furnace body in a spatial ring to the city gate and ced it outside before standing nearby.

    He waited there calmly without even healing his injuries.

    The sunset and it is already dark, but he just stood there.

    After some time, Night Ghost arrived and looked at him.

    "This is the furnace body. We don¡¯t want this war anymore."

    The leader said in a low voice.

    Night Ghost nodded and stored the body in his spatial ring. He then took out another spatial ring and tossed it towards the branch leader.

    "Thepensation for the furnace. It would help your organization to rebuild. It is better to go into seclusion for a while."

    With that, he left.

    The branch leader looked at the spatial ring with a wry and exhausted expression. He didn¡¯t expect much about thispensation and went back to his organization.

    He sat in his room after washing up with an exhausted expression. He sighed every now and then and started getting drunk.

    After a while, he looked at the spatial ring that the Night ghost gave him and looked at the contents which made him instantly sober.

 Chapter 1162: The next target

    The branch leader was shocked as he looked through various scrolls and books. He skimmed through them and felt like a brand new world opened for him.

    This is a treasure trove. All of a sudden, he felt like losing the furnace body is worth it. After all, no matter how valuable or rare it was, it was just a furnace after all and its only function is to heat and melt the metals. It makes their job easier.

    But these documents gave them knowledge and development that was leaps and bounds away from their current state.

    These are some of the research documents Sam. He gave some of the research on mechanisms, inscriptions, and formations that are suitable for puppet making to the branch leader.

    Since the other party didn¡¯t take it too far and made the situation into a life and death battle, Sam decided to give him some reward in return.

    Anyway, this saved him a lot of time so he didn¡¯t mind being a bit more generous.

    At this moment, Sam is assembling the furnace.

    While assembling it, he instructed his teammates.

    "Rest here for two days. I will be going back to the deste and meeting my students a bit. I need to see if they are doing okay with their training.

    We will leave after these two days."

    The team didn¡¯t object and took some well-deserved rest.

    He then turned to Arkiv and said.

    "I want to propose a change to the alliance."

    Arkiv was a bit confused, but he waited for Sam to continue.

    "How about we share resources instead of heirlooms. As soon as we obtain an heirloom, I will exchange it. Two-thirds will be mine, one third will be yours."

    Arkiv shrugged and said.

    "That is good enough for me. But are you sure you want to give one-third away for me? You are working more than I do and your team is doing most of the work. If you want, I can just take one-fourth and you can keep three-fourths. It doesn¡¯t take too many resources for me alone anyway."

    Sam looked at Arkiv calmly and said.

    "Just take it. My team is getting most of the resources in the form of loot from the opponents and my organization is stable enough to be self-sufficient and grow. I am not nning any expansion in the near future. And the extra loot from the organizations which are not useful to my teammates are going to the organization anyway."

    He paused for a second and asked.

    "So, I told you to think about establishing an organization how did it go?"

    Arkiv was stunned for a moment. He didn¡¯t understand why Sam would ask such a question suddenly, but he still answered.

    "Since you told me to, I did open an organization. But it is notrge like yours. It is an explorer team. After I dealt with the organizations, I would let the team explore the secretirs and territories of the organization and also the forests and other ruins that were under the organization¡¯s control.

    They would arrive at the puppet realm in a month or so. That would be the most chaotic time as various forces wouldpete for puppet organizations. They would fish in this muddy water to get some precious treasures."

    Sam nodded and said.

    "Try to expand it. It would be useful in the future. I don¡¯t know how, but I think there is a possibility that the organization woulde in handy after this round of dealing with the organizations is over."

    Arkiv looked at Sam¡¯s serious expression and just nodded.

    After he was done, Sam went back to the deste using a dimensional drifter to meet his students. He wanted to wait for a few more days toe back. But after observing the battle and the status of his teammates and the increasing difficulty of the conquests, Sam wanted to do something and give some instructions to the subordinates here.

    So, he arrived earlier than he wanted and met with his students. He gave some instructions and cleared some doubts and then met with the administrators giving them instructions, before exchanging the furnace for the resources.

    He distributed some to the trusted administrators to use them properly for the development of the organization. He also gave the books he got from the puppet organization so that they could copy them and send them to different branches of his educational institutions.

    He also emptied the chessboard and made every captured person sign a contract with him before sending it to different branches of the organization to increase safety.

    After doing all that in two days, he returned to the puppet realm and gave one-third of the resources to Arkiv as promised.

    Before they started their journey.

    Their next target is far away from the puppet realm.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know why the gods have selected the next two targets far away from the remaining ten.

    The remaining ten organizations, including the puppet organization, are all within a certain zone as they are connected one way or the other.

    But these two organizations are too far away from this zone and they are almost unrted.

    That is also the reason that Sam didn¡¯t concern himself with revealing Markan¡¯s identity with the ck Ghosts.

    As long as Sam and Markan didn¡¯te into contact anytime soon, the ck Ghosts will be pulling their hair trying to find them and it might take a month or two or even more for them to return after being prepared enough.

    And then there would be no need for Sam to even worry too much about this.

    Sam said his farewells to all the prisoners except Markan and used the ice divine dimension to move all the teammates to the next realm.

    Their next target is a tribe of a race that Sam has never seen before.

    The Fiend race and the gods they worship Norse Gods. Among them, Hel and Thor are involved in the game.

    There is one thing Sam and probably the rest of the yers are happy about and that is the Tribe of the Fiend race and their third target, the Myriad Beast sect are both in the same realm being their headquarters.

    In fact, these two are not the only organizations present in that realm. There are three more organizations present there and each organization has a in theirplete control.

    As for why all the organizations are cramped in this one realm, Sam doesn¡¯t know the answer and Markan also doesn¡¯t know because the ck Ghosts don¡¯t have their ws spread to this realm yet.

    Even the information about various organizations staying in this realm was obtained by Arkiv who got that because he destroyed a subordinate organization of arger organization in that realm.

    So, taking Arkiv¡¯s advice, Sam didn¡¯t directly go to the headquarters of the fiend tribe and instead arrived at one of thes which has a lot of foreign traffic and also happened to be a under the joint control of various races.

    After arriving there, Sam and the team went to the nearest city and spread around to gather some information.

    After two days, they had a basic understanding of the situation. The reason for the realm to be upied by so many people is because it is toorge and too precious.

    It was said that once this realm is upied by some extremely high-level Gandharvas, the artisan race. They were just like the Merene family, due to some terrible sin, the gods forsook them and they were targeted and plundered by many other high-level races.

    All the treasures, knowledge, and resources were gone. At least the ones that are deemed valuable by a high-level race.

    Those high-level organizations all had one tacit understand and that is to not upy this realm. Anyway, it is toorge for any one of them to take care of it and their egos wouldn¡¯t allow them to share.

    So, this gave an opportunity for the low-level races to get here and upy it. The leftovers of the high-level organizations were valuable treasures to these people and wars were fought over for those leftovers and they established their headquarters in this realm.

    The rumors are that the whole realm was still not explored and there are many strays that have a lot of resources left that were unexplored.

    Along with that, there is another interesting thing here. Most of the transportation between differents does not just happen through wormholes. But also through the inteary and inter-dimensional space gates.

    Sam¡¯s curiosity was finally satiated when he learned that. With all the realms that he traveled the most anyone had is inteary space gates. The inter-dimensional space gates are something that he got from Ling Tian. He didn¡¯t expect that even though the design is notpleted, not even a single realm has it.

    Maybe most of it was because thes and the realms were connected through the wormholes and there was no need. But that also made him curious on why this realm uses them they also have the wormholes.

 Chapter 1163: Investigation

    Sam didn¡¯t know the answer to the questions he had in mind. But it is not time to ponder about these trivial things. Because they met with some interesting information and that is currently the two forces they should be dealing with one by one, the Myriad beast sect and the Fiend Tribe are currently in a war.

    Sam and Arkiv exchanged a look at this piece of information.

    The war appeared too coincidentally and it started exactly two months ago. Sam is willing to bet that this has something to do with the rest of the yers.

    After all, even though Arkiv noticed the presence of all the other yers in the puppet realm, they soon disappeared after Sam arrived. Kumar and Noah tried but they still gave up soon after. As for Akhil and Donner, they are nowhere to be seen.

    So, Sam is willing to bet that the rest of the yers might have been the reason for the war. While Sam and Arkiv are iming the puppet organization for themselves and Dayus was getting his ass kicked, they worked on these two organizations.

    After they got this information, Sam and the team spent the next week investigating it more. It didn¡¯t too much effort and they managed to get decent information. Currently, the war is not hot yet. It just turned from cold to warm.

    It all started with some deaths of the young masters of the fiend tribe in the territory of the Myriad Beast sect and then it slowly escted.

    Even though in the current state, everything is normal, the two organizations are trying their best to take over each other¡¯s properties in the neutrals.

    Currently, the main forces are not involved and the remaining three organizations are sitting on the side watching the show.

    Both sides employed mercenaries and other stray cultivators as they attacked each other¡¯s organizations¡¯ resources and destroyed businesses.

    If the mercenaries finished the missions given by the organization they are working for and give these resources or the results of the destroyed businesses to them, they would gain rewards.

    At the moment, Sam and his team are in the city governed by an organization other than the two targets and this is a city with a lot of crystal mines. Crystals that have enhancing effects when they were added to weapons while forging and such.

    Many people gather here and search for the gems and make it big by selling it. Even Astral ne cultivatorse and search for them. This also leads a lot of merchants to this ce. Even some from the other organizations upying this realm.

    This is one of the most bustling cities on this so they can get a lot of information from these merchants.

    In wartime, particrly a war such as this which is goingpletely undercover is the time when merchants hold most information.

    This is the perfect time for them to make a fortune that mightst them for a lifetime. That is the current situation. So, Sam started buying the information from these merchants.

    They paid a high price to get as much information regarding the Fiend tribe and the Myriad beast sect as possible.

    The information he mostly looked for is about mercenaries. Particrly human mercenaries.

    If his guess is right, the yers must be the cause of this war and even if they weren¡¯t, if Sam was in their ce, he would be a mercenary and join a side to create some heavy destruction on the opposite side.

    This will make the opposite side¡¯s retaliation equally ruthless and if the yers have an alliance then another side will also have someone who could fuel the chain of hatred.

    So, he looked for this particr information regarding any notable human mercenaries and also the information regarding any possible attacks in the nearby area.

    After three more days, they got as much information as they can and gathered to discuss their next tactics.

    "We need to get in touch with one of the two organizations, but before that, we need to keep the yers in check. We also need to find out if all the yers are here or not."

    Sam said as he looked at Arkiv who nodded in agreement and spoke.

    "From the information I got, the next attack might be on the Marsnds nearby. A vige focused on pisciculture. A merchant group who is a regr in this city, the Marsh vige and another city came here and they already canceled their trip to the Marsh vige.

    The information came that a mercenary group led by a young human with staff is going to attack the Marsh Vige."

    "How sure are you that is Akhil?"

    "Very sure. The staff user acted rashly and fought like there is no tomorrow. That is what the merchant said. He didn¡¯t even care to keep the secret that he is going to attack Marsh Vige.

    Of course, he didn¡¯t openly proim that he is working for the Myriad Beast sect, instead, he said that he felt like eating fish for the next few days, so he would be taking over the Marsh Vige."

    Arkiv went on to exin as he chuckled.

    Sam is sure that this is Akhil. Only he would behave like this. He is the only one who is daring and reckless enough.

    "So, did you get any information on how the Marsh Vige is preparing?"

    "There was no news on that." Arkiv shook his head.

    Sam thenid down the map of the surrounding cities and viges. He questioned his team about different cities and marked them on the map.

    After some time, he said.

    "From the looks of it, the best choice for the Fiend Tribe would be to destroy the Marsh Vige and set up some trap for theing mercenaries, so that they would die along with the vige."

    Everybody was surprised and confused on why Sam came to such a conclusion. So, Sam went on to exin.

    "There are three areas closest to the Marsh Vige. One of them is this city, the other one is the city under the control of the Fiend tribe and thest city is the one where Akhil is currently at.

    If the fiends want to protect the vige, the best course of action would be to send people from their city. But the north and east of the city belong to the Myriad Beast sect and they are separated by the forest which would be the territory of the Beasts, if they send their troops here, they would be in big trouble from the other side.

    In fact, I think the whole provocation might even the part of the n.

    If the fiends take the ce they would be leaving their city a bit bare. And I think they wouldn¡¯t be thinking of mobilizing the forces from the headquarters of this for a small vige.

    After all, from the information we gathered, the space gates are only located at the headquarters and they are only connected to different continents, not for the cities within the same continent. And even if they have, I doubt a low-level resource point like Marsh vige has one.

    So, they either have to take the bait or they have to leave the Marsh Vige while killing them."

    Sam exined as he looked at the map. He is thinking a lot of things at the moment.

    "Currently, we don¡¯t have the concrete information on the other cities and attacks. Most of them are spections and we would need to gamble. But since we know about this, Akhil is the perfect breaking point to contact the rest of the yers.

    So, let us go and greet him."

    With that, Sam started exining the n and the whole team made the move that very night. They didn¡¯t dy any longer.

    They moved across the forest to reach the Marsnds and finally they were near the outskirts of the Marsh Vige by dawn.

    However, this ce is not really suitable for a camp and Sam doesn¡¯t want to camp outside. He mounted the lightning divine dimension on a ring and gave it to Kiran. Kiran changed his appearance and Markan Joined him along with Tamas. The rest of the team went into the Lightning divine dimension as they formed a team.

    After a few hours after the sunrise. The three of them appeared at the Marsh Vige.

    They arrived at the vige but they were not granted entry. Apparently, they were already aware of the attack that is about to happen. So, they asked the guard to inform the vige chief to meet them and made sure to emphasize that they are not enemies.

    The Vige chief is one of the fiend tribe who is a pure-blooded fiend. When the trio looked at him, they couldn¡¯t help but feel surprised a bit.

    A fiend has a humanoid appearance, but they have apletely different skin color. There are supposedly two small horns that arepletely covered with the hair. They have fangs and even though they have five-fingered palms, they have ws. Their eyes are dark red in color. It is on the darker side of the blood-red.

    The vige chief is a water elemental fiend and he has blue skin and blue hair. When he arrived, he looked at the three of them with a cautious gaze and asked.

    "I was told you wanted to meet me. Please state your business."

 Chapter 1164: Capture

    "Are you looking for mercenaries?" Kiran asked with a crooked grin. At this moment, he looked like a brute who is only good at killing. He stank of blood and there is a wide scar on his face.

    When the Vige looked at him and heard this question, he was both surprised and became cautious.

    "Are you sure you came to the right ce?" The vige head asked carefully. After all, everyone knew that the mercenaries that are hired by both the organizations are only used for attacking others and not defending.

    Because the organizations are cautious on hiring them to defend and there is a good reason for that. At the start of all this, both organizations did hire some mercenaries to defend some small scale viges like this Marsh Viges. But both mercenary groups are filled with traitors and instead of defending, they destroyed the vige.

    So, from then on, defending was left for the main members only. It is just that this vige is not worth defending for the main force particrly at the cost of the poor defense of the city.

    While the vige head is thinking rapidly and became cautious, Kiran said with that same grin.

    "Don¡¯t think too much. I came to the right ce. You see that scar on this face, it was given to me by that monkey bastard with his staff. I heard that he ising to your vige to attack. I would like to take some revenge on the way."

    The vige head was stunned. He didn¡¯t expect this to be the reason. Even though he cannot trust himpletely, he saw a little hope.

    Kiran didn¡¯t care about his thoughts and continued.

    "We won¡¯t enter the vige. You can activate your defense as per normal. We will set up an ambush outside. If we seed in defending, just give us this week¡¯s output of your special spring water. I heard that it makes a good apaniment for herbal tea."

    The vige hesitated. At this moment, Kiran and the remaining two raised their auras, startling him and they spoke.

    "If we want to sack your vige, we don¡¯t need to scheme against you. It is extremely easy. In fact, it could be considered a waste of our time. We are only here because of the personal grudge."

    Only when he felt the pressure did the vige head rxed a bit. Because, he knew that the other party was right. If they really want to sack the vige, they can do it head on. Because ate stage transcendent cultivator and a middle-stage transcendent cultivator of astral ne is a bit of an overkill.

    After all, the rumor has it that the mercenary who ising here is only a Peak stage Pre-transcendent cultivator. And the rest of hispanions are more or less the same.

    "How can someone like you get injured by that guy?" The vige head asked Kiran. After all, the difference in power is too big.

    Kiran just smiled and said.

    "I was tired and unconscious. It was a sneak attack while I was recovering."

    The vige head nodded and then they proceeded with the cooperation. Even though, the vige head believed what he said, he didn¡¯t let them in. The trio just set up their trap around the vige entrance

    There is only one proper entrance to the vige and the remaining three sides are covered with marshnds out of which the rear was developed to rear their water creatures.

    The trio waited for the attack to happen.

    And by the next day, they finally saw someone arriving in the vicinity.

    Sam looked at his crystal table as he observed the situation in the woods.

    He saw Akhil standing on a tree with the staff in his hand and couldn¡¯t help but smile.

    There are a bunch of other cultivators of various races following him.

    They jumped on the trees as they made their way to the marsh vige.

    "Kiran and Markan deal with the extras. Tamas, follow my directions. We are going to capture Akhil, in the Marsh right in front of the vige. He shouldn¡¯t suspect anything."

    The three of them proceeded with Sam¡¯s instructions. Kiran and Markan left immediately, while Tamas waited for Akhil to arrive.

    In a few minutes, Akhil is only a few meters in front of him in the vige.

    He looked around and frowned at the absence of the rest of the mercenary group, but he didn¡¯t care too much and moved to attack the entrance of the vige as he ran through the shallow marsh.

    But suddenly, he sensed something is wrong, but before he could react, a shadow appeared from the marsh and it held his leg in the ce.

    At the same time, another shadow appeared behind him, held him by the shoulders, and pulled him back.

    Akhil almost lost his bnce, but he used the staff to support himself and kicked into the marsh as he jumped upwards in process of which he twisted his body to get rid of the grip on his shoulders.

    He stood on the staff that was vertically nailed into the ground and looked at the marsh carefully.

    The shadows disappeared as if they were not even present in the first ce.

    Akhil looked around vigntly. His beast-like senses are on full alert.

    All of a sudden, a creature that looked like a lizard suddenly leaped out of the water and directly came at him.

    But one look and Akhil could see that it is not a real creature. It is an undead.

    Akhil leaped upwards and did a somersault and grabbed the staff as he channeled his energy into it. The staff was mmed into the creature and its head turned into meat pulp.

    He once again nailed the staff into the ground and stood on top of it, but this time, he didn¡¯t have much time as he suddenly felt the staff going down as if it was stuck in quicksand.

    He used Void style and kicked on top of the staff. The energy traveled through and an explosion happened at the bottom of the staff, giving him the leeway to escape from it. But in mid-air, he was met with a few more shadow undead, which he started fighting against.

    Sam who is looking at the whole thing, was impressed. Apart from him, Akhil is the only one who came close to mastering void style in the pce of inheritance at that time.

    And now looking at it, he has improved over the years and the mastery of the void style is close to Sam¡¯s.

    Too bad it is not going to help Akhil escape.

    Because, Tamas¡¯ job is to not defeat or kill Akhil, rather just distract him while he sets up the trap to capture Akhil.

    While the shadow undead is buying time, some other undead is already setting the formation up.

    Tamas didn¡¯t even reveal himself until now and he is pretty rxed.

    Sam watched as Akhil jumped from one spot to another using his staff and not evennding once in the marsh, all the while dealing with the undead that was thrown at him.

    But soon, it was over.

    "Activate."

    He instructed Tamas who took activated the formation.

    As Akhil jumped kicked a shadow undead and made it disappear from the spot and used the recoil to jump to a different spot, the Marsh suddenly acted up.

    The mud and water moved at the same time turned into arms as they swung themselves at Akhil.

    Akhil felt a sense of trepidation as he started swinging his staff mid-air with void style to destroy the arms made of mud and water. But it didn¡¯t help him much a new arm was created as soon as one was destroyed and soon Akhil lost his footing and fell to the ground.

    All the armsnded on it from all sides. And he was coiled with water and mud before they hardened sealing his ce.

    At this moment, a voice was suddenly heard in his head.

    "Hello, Akhil. My old friend. How are you doing?"

    As soon as Akhil heard the voice, he was dumbfounded.

    "Sam?"

    He asked with a shocked expression.

    "Of course, it is me. It is good that you remember me. Now, rx and one of my guys wille for you. We need to have a good long chat over some wine and drinks."

    "Holy fuck, it is really you." Akhil cursed as he yelled out loud.

    Tamas came out and Kiran and Markan are also done with the rest of the group.

    The three of them brought Akhil along with them as they moved away from the Marsh vige.

    In the forest nearby, Sam finally came out of the divine dimension and looked at Akhil with a smile.

    "Long Time no see."

    Akhil smiled wryly and said.

    "You are already done with the puppet organization?"

    "Well, it took longer than I thought. But it could be said, I had a great time and a greater harvest."

    "Just when we thought we had a lead over you."

 Chapter 1165: Meeting

    Kiran and Markan went back to the Marsh vige and handed over the mercenaries who were knocked unconscious and had their cultivation sealed to the vige head.

    They exchanged them for a ton of spring water and they came back.

    Back in the camp, Sam, Arkiv and Akhil are sitting around a small fire as they ate some meat and drank wine while making small talk.

    They are having a normal friendly exchange.

    The rest of the team is also nearby.

    "You really have quite the team. It is no wonder you are having an easier time."

    "Easier time? I wish. I would like to think it is just going faster. I had arge organization to manage and I have to take care of them. The buffer time I buy is being spent on the organization directly. My research too is taking too much time."

    "Of course, you are the one that is swallowing that much. You cannotin."

    "I think you are the one doing that." Arkiv said from the side.

    Akhil just red at him and said.

    "So, how is your alliance going?"

    "Why? You want to sow some discord?" Arkiv once again remarked snidely.

    Sam looked at both of them and asked.

    "What is the matter with both of you?"

    "Nothing" Both of them replied in unison. Sam just shook his head with a smile and said.

    "I don¡¯t care. Let us get down to business." He paused and looked at Akhil.

    "So, what is the n? You sessfully dragged the two organizations into a war, taking advantage of their location and you are trying your best escting it? Did you and the rest of the yers agree on some terms?"

    "Of course we did. In fact, we were supposed to escte this war faster. But that bastard Dayus arrived in the middle, messing it all up. He somehow dyed our ns and here we are. He even convinced that it would take a long time for you to deal with the Puppet organization and babbled on something about some high level organizationing after you and hindering your work.

    He fooled us into getting on with an even more borate n. At first we wanted to trigger a war by destroying some resource points and businesses, but Dayus took over the nning somehow and dyed it saying that it would be more effective and we went after the young master. But the esction didn¡¯t happen.

    Who knew that the rivalry between these organizations is so cold? Even the initial reaction is not as much as expected. So, we tried to drag on and on and just recently the events started warming. We don¡¯t know why everything is so cold.

    If it was any other organizations that we dealt with, they would have been on each other¡¯s throats by now."

    Akhil exined with a dejected expression.

    "Okay, what are the terms?"

    "Currently, we are on same cultivation level, except you. So, we decided that we would escte the war and destroy the organizations first and finally select the winner with some duels. But now that you came, it seems like our ns are in vain."

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "How about I y with you guys?"

    Akhil sneered and said.

    "Fuck off, you are already a pain in the ass when you are our equal, much less when you are superior in cultivation. And now you have an elite team that could do all your bidding.

    There is no way we are ying with you. It will just waste our time."

    "Just arrange a meeting with rest of the yers, you guys hear me first and we can discuss. After all, you guys are pissed at me already, I don¡¯t want to piss you off more."

    "Since when did you be so conscious of others?"

    "It is not like I am conscious of your feelings. I am just afraid that we might need each other¡¯s help in the future. I don¡¯t want us to be bitter enemies by then. Anyway, since you already worked so hard, it wouldn¡¯t be good, if I just swooped in and robbed you of your hard work. We are all on the same boat here."

    Akhil thought for a moment and said.

    "Okay then, we rest for the night and we go there tomorrow. Promise me, that you wouldn¡¯t go ballistic at us."

    "I won¡¯t. It is not like you guys cannot escape."

    "We can¡¯t say for sure if it is you we are going against."

    With that, their discussion ended and the next morning they moved. Luckily, the meeting spot is within this. It turned out that currently, the rest of the yers are all working in this only. So, they travelled at full speed and reached the ce by evening on the beasts.

    The meeting is in a deep valley that looked like an entrance to an abyss from the top.

    When Akhilnded there with Sam and Arkiv, the rest of the yers are shocked. And Dayus in particr had an extremely funny expression.

    "Hello, guys. I expected a bit more enthusiastic wee. Howe you are all cold and silent?" Sam said with a chuckle.

    Then only they recovered and looked at Dayus with angry expressions.

    The group is sitting around a fire. The area is extremely dark and they lit up torches here and there for light. Sam sat on one side and spoke.

    "I am sorry guys, I wanted toe early. But I was held up with the puppet organization. Now that I have cleared, I hope I am not toote."

    All the yers looked at Sam and no one spoke. Sam looked at Dayus and said with a smile.

    "How is your arm?"

    Dayus involuntarily held his hand with another one.

    He is extremely angry, but he knew better than showing it out directly. Who knows, he might lose that arm once again.

    "So, I heard you guys are ying a game. I thought I should also join in. After all, we are fellow yers."

    "No way, not possible." Dayus is the first one to react. Everyone looked at him weirdly. They obviously didn¡¯t know about the altercation between Dayus and Sampletely. They knew Sam kicked his ass, but they don¡¯t know how far and hard did he do that.

    But from the looks of it, it seems like Sam did a pretty good job.

    Dayus didn¡¯t care about these weird looks, he strongly opposed to Sam.

    "Your cultivation level is way higher than us. We cannot allow you to join in this and you have that stupid team of yours. In fact, it is better for you to get out of this ce. Or you would be making all of us your enemy because of ruining our n. After all, all of us left the puppet organization for you, after we learned that you made a n."

    Sam raised an eyebrow at this and looked at the rest of the yers.

    "Is this all your stance?"

    "Hell No."

    "No way." All of the answers came in unison. Even Donner didn¡¯t agree with Dayus¡¯ opinion.

    Sam looked at Dayus and shrugged before saying.

    "Guys, I really do have the best team and trust me, I can escte this war way faster than all of youbined if I use them all. But I don¡¯t want to make all your preparations go to waste.

    As for the puppet organization, I think you guys understand what really happened and why you guys left. They made it personal and you know that it is impossible for me to not deal with them."

    They thought for a moment and Noah said.

    "It is true. But the fact is you are still higher than us in terms of cultivation level and you also have the team and a lot of other resources. We cannotpete with you."

    "That is why I am here. To make it fair for all of us."

    "Then, how do you propose we do that."

    "First, I wouldn¡¯t let my team participate this time. They wouldn¡¯t participate in any case. Of course, unless I am in a situation where there is a possibility of my death.

    I would also seal and suppress my cultivation to your level.

    I would not use my liquid energy cells. The surveince equipment is still fair game. I am sure, Noah also has her own surveince tricks.

    Me and Arkiv will y along with your rules. We will participate in esction of the war and we will destroy the two organizations together. We can also decide who gets what ording to your rules."

    "What if we don¡¯t agree?"

    Dayus yelled from the side.

    Sam looked at him and activated his wrist screen. He looked at Arkiv who shrugged and took out his wrist screen too. The yers looked at both of them in disbelief.

    "You are not doing that." Noah said as she red at Dayus.

    If Arkiv and Sam really selected the two organization directly, there is no way they could still continue with this. Particrly since one of the organizations is linked to Hel, she would definitely ce all the me on Sam and the war will go cold once again. All their hardwork will be gone.

 Chapter 1166: Joining as Mercenary

    "I agree to your terms. No team, no usage of liquid energy cells or whatever you call them and you have to seal yourself." Noah said it straight.

    She knew that Sam is not bluffing. If they really didn¡¯t agree now, he would definitely select the names on the list and he would throw all their work into sewers.

    Kumar looked at her with a bit of surprise, he didn¡¯t expect that she would agree that easily. In fact, he thought that she would be thest one to agree with Sam. After all, as far as he knew, she alwayspared herself andpeted with Sam. He knew that better than anyone. But after thinking a bit, he felt that this is the most direct and fairpetition they could get at the moment.

    "I agree too." He spoke as soon as these thoughts crossed his mind.

    "Me too." Donner also said and became silent once again.

    "I don¡¯t have a problem," Akhil said casually and everyone looked at Dayus.

    He gritted his teeth and looked at Sam with hateful eyes. He really wants to rip Sam¡¯s smug face apart, but he knew he couldn¡¯t do it. Not at the moment. This is definitely not the time.

    He could only helplessly nod and agree.

    After that was over, Noah stood spoke up.

    "Now, that we got that out of our way. Let us go through some rules. We are seven people. We will divide ourselves into two groups. A group of four and a group of three.

    One group acts from the side of the Myriad beast sect and they will attack the Fiend Tribe. The other group does the opposite of the first group.

    So, let us get on with the groups."

    Nobody spoke up. Everyone just exchanged nces.

    "I want to be in a group with Donner, Akhil, and Arkiv." Dayus finally spoke up seeing that no one talked.

    Everyone looked at him weirdly.

    "I don¡¯t have any problem with being in a group with you. But if by any chance you want to fucking order me around. I will shove my staff up your asshole. If you are okay with that, I will join." Akhil said as he gave his staff a spin with a grin on his face.

    Dayus¡¯ expression froze at Akhil¡¯s words and he even got a mental image and what would happen. He couldn¡¯t help but shudder a bit and say.

    "I am okay."

    Akhil just shrugged and left it at that. Donner looked at Sam once and then turned to Dayus before nodding. He knew he couldn¡¯t be in a group with Sam. He would have to be constantly on guard if he did that.

    Dayus looked at Arkiv. He is afraid that Arkiv wouldn¡¯t agree, but to his surprise, he agreed with a shrug.

    He was finally relieved. There is a reason why he asked for those three. He cannot be in a group with Sam. At the same time, Kumar and Noah are a bit pissed at him, because he overrode their n and made implemented his own which didn¡¯t work as effectively. They wouldn¡¯t listen to his opinion much less let him lead the group.

    And he didn¡¯t want Arkiv to be with Sam which would strengthen their alliance and also act as a huge advantage with them working together. They would get more loot from the two organizations.

    And he also doesn¡¯t want Akhil to form an alliance with Sam which is more likely to happen how both of them deal with things.

    Dayus thought this through. But what he doesn¡¯t know is that he is just overthinking.

    "Now, that the groups are formed. We are going to work ording to that. Dayus and the group will be working from the Myriad beast sect. Since Akhil already revealed himself to be working for them, it would be impossible to shift.

    Me, Kumar, and Sam would work from the Fiend tribe¡¯s side.

    One more thing, even though we formed groups, you guys can either work together or you can act separately, but just don¡¯t mess with other¡¯s ns."

    Everybody nodded. But Noah is not done. She continued with her tasks.

    "The Myriad Beast sect¡¯s group¡¯s goal is to destroy all the resource points as well as kill all the personnel of the fiend tribe on this. We have fifteen days to do that. The Fiend tribe¡¯s group, which means my group will deal with the resource points and the personnel of the Myriad beast sect in the same time period.

    We will be meeting back here after fifteen days.

    Do not let your identities slip away and we should not select the names of the organization in the list until we entered thest phase of the ns.

    Any resources you get from the loot are yours individually. If you have any pre-arranged partnership, you can act ording to that.

    Finally, we cannot use any external help. We cannot hire mercenaries, use the private teams, and in the case of Sam, his toys are excessively destructive. If you all got what I said, we can leave right now."

    With that, the meeting is over. Sam said goodbye to Arkiv and left the valley along with Kumar and Noah.

    They went out on Sky.

    "So, did you guys tie a knot or something?" Sam asked as he started drinking some wine and gave them some.

    "NO WAY."

    "WITH HIM?" Both of them denied and in fact a bit over. Sam looked at their blushing faces and couldn¡¯t help but smirk.

    "So, why are you guys acting together?"

    "We joined a sect together. That is it." Noah said quickly as if Sam would think too much into it.

    He just smiled and changed the topic.

    "So, where are we going first? Do you have a n in mind?"

    "Before you came in, we wanted to go to the Fiend tribe¡¯s Water Crystal city. All this while, we took some small missions, and sometimes, we even acted on our own. But now we wanted to join some mercenary army the fiend tribe is assembling.

    It is happening in that city and the recruitment is tomorrow. Only a select few are allowed to enter.

    Let¡¯s go there and join in before we do anything else. This way, we could get more information and also keep a close eye on any possible changes in the war if we perform well."

    "Okay, let¡¯s go there."

    Sam said and they spent the rest of the night traveling.

    The Water Crystal city is simr to the first city Sam and his team visited when they arrived on this.

    It has arge stream nearby and it is full of water crystals that are useful for making weapons or even increasing the elemental energy of the water.

    The crystals gathered in the water could be used for breeding water elemental creatures. In fact, some low-level crystals would be sent to the Marsh vige from this point.

    The next morning, the three of them arrived near the city and walked from there.

    At the city gate, the guard looked at them and asked.

    "Purpose of the Visit?"

    "We heard there are new work opportunities here," Kumar replied calmly and showed a special token to the guard who nodded his head before saying.

    "You might want to go to the River bay restaurant. There are many people getting work there. Ask for the private room 1500"

    The three of them nodded and went to the restaurant and asked for a private room.

    The attendant nodded led them towards the private room in the corner.

    After the private room was closed the wall on the side opened up and a set of stairs leading downwards appeared.

    The three of them exchanged a nce before walking downwards and soon, they reached arge underground room that almost looked like a banquet hall.

    There are many stone tables and many people are sitting around them looking towards the stage asionally while making small talk.

    They looked around and finally sat down at an empty table in a corner and waited for the event to begin.

    Soon a female fiend withpletely dark ck skin and red eyes came onto the stage and said.

    "Before the event starts, I want all of you guys to ce the invitation token on your table. For each token, you can only have four people. Any more than that is uneptable."

    Kumar took out the token he showed to the guard earlier and ced it on the table.

    A bunch of fiends with different skin tones came out and went to the tables. They ced a drop if the blood on the tokens and it turned into red smoke instantly.

    Only one table has ck smoke instead of red and the fiends immediately made a move against the four of them and killed them.

    After that, the dark fiend on the stage spoke once again.

    "Now, that we got the pesky pests out of here. Let us get down to business."

 Chapter 1167: Rules and Registration

    The female fiend paused a bit after saying that and gave a sweeping nce to everyone.

    "You are all mercenaries at the moment. You might have different identities outside and you might have different statuses outside.

    But currently, you are mercenaries until the war is over. You have one duty and that is to help the Fiend tribe destroy the Myriad beast sect as much as they can.

    Every kill you make, every business you destroy, and every resource point to spoil, you get a bonus from the Fiend tribe. Everything you get from the loot can be kept by you and if you find something valuable you can also sell it to the fiend tribe.

    This ce is going to be your operational base for the time being and you are going to move and act from here.

    You can either act as a team or you guys can work alone. But once you make a choice, it is impossible to change it back.

    Now, each of you will be given a crystal token."

    As soon as she spoke, the fiends who took out the table came with some thin rectangr crystal cards.

    They gave a card to every person and the female fiend continued.

    "You can make a contract with the card with your blood. After the contract was made, this would be the identity card for you guys until the war is over.

    After you are done with killing someone, finishing a mission, destroying a business or resource point of the Myriad Beast sect, even taking down a city, you need toe back here once and register your contribution into that card.

    As for how you could register it, you need to bring some evidence. As long as the evidence is convincing, your contribution would be noted and you can get some contribution points equivalent to that.

    You can redeem your contribution points anytime and get rewards for them. It might be resources, weapons, or any other stuff, you might like. You can even buy a position as an honorary member of the tribe and be a lifelong friend for us, enjoying a status of power and influence."

    She paused a bit and let them digest the information and continued.

    "Now, let us talk about the missions. You can get missions from this base. Every mission will give you significant aforementioned contribution points and if the difficulty went beyond the mission description and you can provide sufficient evidence for that, you will get paid extra.

    You can also act independently without caring about the missions and do the damage as much as you like and as long as it doesn¡¯t interfere with some important missions¡¯pletion, we wouldn¡¯t mind. If you make any contributions that way, you need to register them here and it might be a tedious process.

    And there is a chance that assigned missions would give you more points because they were valued and prioritized by the fiend tribe."

    She exined some more rules and the registration process started. Sam looked at the token and felt a bit suspicious. Because he didn¡¯t hear a thing about the confidentiality and secrecy of the whole situation.

    The female fiend who identified as Commander Miran didn¡¯t even mention a single thing about the consequences of revealing information to the enemies, betraying them, and showing the location of the secret gathering to others.

    She didn¡¯t even indirectly hint at that.

    Sam felt this is fishy and judging from the expressions of some other people including Noah and Kumar, he is sure that they also felt the same.

    But he looked at the others and saw that many are calmly making a contract. He wanted to wait for a bit and see how the situation goes.

    At the same time, he injected his energy into the token and used his observation ability.

    He could see the crystal structure and the very minute inscriptions engraved all over it. There is a disguise inscription that makes all the inscriptions disappear and there are also a bunch of other inscriptions which are for the other uses of the card.

    After looking through all of them for ten minutes, Sam finally concluded that there is no serious threat to them. He also noticed something else in it.

    A dormant spirit can only be triggered over some specific conditions and it has a very different job.

    He cut his finger and made the contract and gestured for Kumar and Noah to do the same.

    Both of them didn¡¯t question him and made contracts.

    After another five minutes, everyone was done.

    Commander Miran looked at all of them and said.

    "From now on you are all secret soldiers of the Fiend tribe. I hope you help us win this war and your contribution may bring all of that you wish for."

    With that, she left.

    A table was ced on the stage a Male fiend sat on the chair ced behind it.

    "I am the Deputymander in charge of this base. My name is Myrion. Commander Miran is a busy person so I would be helping her in looking after you.

    Now, everyone one of youes here by teams or one by one and registers on how you want to act in this war.

    Whether you want to be independent or you want to be assigned,e and select quickly.

    Sam looked at this deputymander who has a gray skin tone. His cultivation level is the same as his own. The Middle-stage transcendence of Astral ne.

    All three of them went to the stage and registered as an independent.

    Myrion looked at them and said.

    "Your cultivation level is not bad, but you are only considered average in the war. Are you sure you want to act independently? It might get dangerous."

    "We are sure."

    Sam said once again and the other party just shrugged and left them alone. The other fiends looked at them in disdain for which Sam didn¡¯t understand the reason why.

    But it didn¡¯t take long for him to figure it out. People who got their missions assigned could get some detailed information on their mission, but for every information, the independent people have to participate, they need to pay some contribution points.

    This means, they have to gather their own information and since it is a war, it would be a hard thing to gain the information urately about a ce if there is no neutral city or town nearby, where they could at least get some information from merchants.

    But the trio didn¡¯t care. Gathering information might be hard, but not for them. They survived worse situations and they are sure that they wouldn¡¯t die trying to gauge the strength of their usible target.

    Anyway, Noah already has targets in her mind as he already nned this a while ago.

    Three of them took off on the sky and moved towards their target destination.

    On their way, they started discussing how to escte things.

    "I don¡¯t think we need to specifically do anything. From the looks of it, the gloves are about toe off on both sides. They are clearly going after the main members of the organization and if my guess is not wrong, the myriad beast sect might also be doing the same.

    I caught glimpse of the missions assigned to others and they are all the missions targeting main businesses and main personnel of the Myriad Beast sect."

    Sam said as he looked at the map Noah prepared.

    She already marked some of the locations of the usible targets that could escte the war.

    "We should still need to do add some fuel to the fire. The fiend tribe is unusually cold and their defense is extremely tight. Except for the Marsh Vige, only Akhil had some sess among others in dealing with them.

    When we made a young master who was quite high-profiled die in the Myriad Beast sect¡¯s core area, the reaction didn¡¯t evene for a few days. The fiend tribe went on with their activities normally for a week, before they even reacted.

    So, we cannot expect the other group to provoke the fiend tribe enough. We need to do that for both of them and make the Myriad Beast sect act rashly to make the fiend tribe react more."

    Noah said from the side.

    They stayed silent and reached their destination by evening. They didn¡¯t act immediately and waited near the woods.

    They arrived at the town under the control of the Myriad Beast sect.

    This is one of the areas that take care of the food for the Beast sect. They breed low-level beasts that are suitable for bing food for the low-level cultivators as well as contracted beasts in the sect.

    This area in particr is an area with rich wood elemental energy.

    From the information Noah gathered, the Myriad beast sect didn¡¯t even bother mining the wood elemental stones from the vein they found there, they just grew the herbs that would act as feed for the beasts they are breeding here. This is basically a giant farm with a pasture. Everyone trying to grow herbs and raise beasts.

 Chapter 1168: Withering the Farm

    "So, what is the n here? You marked this ce as a secondary target in the map."

    Sam asked as they monitored the entrance of the two through his surveince equipment. But both Kumar and Noah didn¡¯t respond as they just simply gawked at the crystal tablet in Sam¡¯s hands and the crystal clear live feed disyed on it.

    They knew that Sam has some high-level surveince techniques up his sleeve, but they didn¡¯t expect it to be this good.

    They don¡¯t even have to make a move to know what is happening and where it is happening.

    Sam looked at both of them and asked.

    "I asked you guys something. Can you be in the daze after you answer me?"

    Only then did they recover and Noah said.

    "The person-in-charge of this town is a young man from the Myriad beast sect. From what I know, he is an inner disciple who came here to finish the task to be a core disciple. This is the test for him. And he has a girlfriend, Who is a core disciple and she is well-known for her temper.

    She has brought many troubles to the sect with her hot and short temper, but until now, they didn¡¯t escte that much. But the rumor has it that she is causing trouble internally as the people trying to woo her are going after this kid, the fellow core disciples in particr. She couldn¡¯t do much against them, except to beat them up in the name of sparring.

    This boyfriend of hers is trying his best to be core disciple so that she doesn¡¯t have to go through this."

    "The information is pretty detailed," Sam said while digesting it. He understood the n. If they take this guy out and leave an obvious trace that it is the work of the fiend tribe¡¯s work, the situation would be in the bag.

    With a core disciple of the Myriad Beast sect, raging over it and making a rash move, the war is bound to go hot.

    "This guy is a drunkard. He wallows in his own self-pity and says this story to the people inside the bar. I don¡¯t know if he is really drunk and talks all of this, or if he is trying to make sure that the news of him and that girl being lovers will spread far enough. But I got all of this information from his own mouth."

    Kumar said from the side.

    "We need to create chaos in the town. The produce from thends and pastures directly under the control of the Myriad Beast sect is closely rted to this young man¡¯s promotion to the core disciple.

    I think we can take advantage of that." Noah spoke and started exining her n.

    Sam listened carefully and after the exnation was over, he said.

    "Just how long are you nning for this?"

    "This is one of the moves we wanted to make from the start after destroying some resource points of fiend sect. But Dayus¡¯ interference messed it up. If not for the fact, that his n to deal with the young master has a hundred percent sess rate, we wouldn¡¯t have agreed."

    "So, how much is the sess rate for this n?"

    "Ny percent. I don¡¯t know if that guy would react as we like. There is no saying what would be going in his mind at that moment. If he reacts as we expected, then things would be simpler."

    With that, all three of them sported some casual disguises and entered the town after some surveince. The guards are being strict and there is tension everywhere in the city.

    City guards are trying their best. They are arresting every person that looked suspicious and release them only after they made sure that they don¡¯t have ill intentions.

    Sam, Noah, and Kumar tried to be as normal as they could be and they visited different stores and farms that are selling herbs and animals. Particrly wood elemental beast cubs are in great demand here as many people are breeding them.

    They asionally brought something so that no one would misunderstand them.

    After buying some beasts and herbs, they stayed in the most luxurious inn in the town asking for the highest of the services. They really seemed to havee to vacation. As they stayed for the whole day with nothing but spending money, the suspicion on them was lifted.

    And this is the moment the three of them are waiting for. As soon as they entered the town they already noticed someone monitoring them, so they made sure that the other party will leave after not noticing anything wrong with them, and currently, that happened exactly like they anticipated it to go.

    Now, they don¡¯t need to hide and can proceed with the n.

    They are currently staying in a cottage with a full view of the beautiful farm that was directly under the control of the Myriad Beast sect.

    They can even see some beasts that are of goat type and cattle type moving around under the evening sun while they are grazing some high-quality grass grown on the edges of the fields.

    They came to the backyard of the cottage and Noah took out some seeds as she ced them on the ground. When she was about to proceed, she suddenly stopped and asked.

    "Can your surveince collect the footage of this?"

    "Of course, the formation is not that great anyway, it can be easily overridden."

    With that Noah nodded and ced her hands on the ground as she started injecting wood elemental energy into the seeds.

    Sam took out some formation tes and ced them around creating aplex concealing formation.

    After it was done, he just watched the show unfold along with Kumar.

    Noah closed her eyes as she constantly injected the wood elemental energy inside. The seeds started sprouting within a few seconds and the small sprouts that came out soon became a bitrge and soon started to spread around.

    It is a vine that is coiling around itself without any problem. But that is the only part of the vine that is spreading.

    The roots of the seeds are also spreading from under it as they extend towards the farm of the Myriad beast sect at a rapid pace.

    The roots almost acted like vines and they are not spreading out like normal.

    Within ten minutes, the roots reached the field of the farm and Noah finally opened her eyes.

    All of a sudden, instead of injecting the energy into the vines, she started sucking. But the vine didn¡¯t show any signs of energy depletion, it is still filled with a lot of vitality, but Noah is constantly sucking energy.

    Sam who is looking at the farm through his surveince was stunned and this time Kumar has more of a moderate reaction than him.

    The herbs in the field are slowly being sucked of vitality and they are withering at a visible pace from the center of the field.

    Now, Sam understood where all the excess energy ising from.

    Soon, not only Noah is getting more and more energy, even the vine is growing thicker and longer. It also started producing flowers and then the fruits which started extremely small.

    This went on for a while and the staff at the farm only noticed the strange phenomenon of the fields only after it was toote.

    The whole farm fell into chaos and the farmers working there immediately ran over to the authorities to report the situation.

    The young man in charge came on a bird-type beast flying at a rapid pace andnded near the field.

    He is the inner disciple they are targeting.

    His went pale as he looked at the situation. The herbs are withering the grass already withered. And this phenomenon is spreading to all the corners of the farm. He doesn¡¯t even know why it happening and how it is happening.

    "Go and check. What is happening here?"

    He yelled and he also went into the field to check. But he couldn¡¯t find anything at the spot. All he could see is that the energy and vitality of the herbs is being sucked rapidly out of them into the ground.

    Meanwhile, Noah finally stopped absorbing energy after the vines bore fruits.

    They are brown-colored fruits that looked round and shiny.

    She plucked them one by one and for every one of them, she plucked some vines that withered rapidly and turned into debris as it merged with the ground without leaving any trace.

    She threw three fruits to Sam and said.

    "How is my new trick? It might not be as fancy as yours, but it is good enough right?"

    Sam looked at the fruits and used his observation ability and he was shocked by the results.

    The fruit is essentially a mass of wood elemental energy.

    This is like an elixir for a wood elemental cultivator. For Sam currently, it might be able to boost his recovery, the same goes for Noah, but a low-level cultivator would definitely be able to achieve some breakthroughs, and that even goes for the Initiation stage Astral ne cultivators.

 Chapter 1169: Reaction

    The fruits in Sam¡¯s hands made him feel surprised and excited at the same time, he looked at Noah and was about to ask something.

    "Nope, I am not telling you anything regarding this. Even if you have a single clue, I am afraid you would remake it."

    Sam was confused and said.

    "Then why bother giving me these fruits? These are also a clue you know."

    "Of course, I know. I just want to see you struggle a bit trying to make these but to no avail. That would be a great sight to see."

    "What have I ever done to you?" Sam sighed and put the fruits away.

    "Nothing." She just said and went back into the inn, Kumar shrugged at Sam and left after her. Sam could almost see smugness dripping out of his face.

    He really doesn¡¯t understand what is wrong with the rest of the yers. Every single one of them could only think of ways to trouble him.

    But when he looked at the fruits in his hand, he couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit excited about taking on this challenge. He threw them into the storage and went back into the room after removing the formations.

    The backyard looked like nothing happened here at all.

    They are now waiting for the results.

    Meanwhile, the Inner Disciple, who is the person in charge is looking at the withered fields hysterically.

    He doesn¡¯t know what to do. He just kept on yelling at the farmers and other people in charge to do something and find out what happened.

    It took over an hour for him to calm down and he also realized that his life is at the stake and what the consequences should be and what his first action should be.

    He immediately called the town administrators including the guards responsible for the safety and said.

    "I want the whole town to be on lockdown. No one should be able to get out of the town, irrespective of their status, rtions, and the money they had. The town should be on lockdown. And activate themunication jamming formation. No one should be able to contact anyone outside the city from within.

    No one should be able to get even a single message out through other means ofmunication.

    We and the rest of the world should have any contact whatsoever for the time being until I ordered otherwise."

    Everyone was stunned. They didn¡¯t expect that the young man who recently came here would have such absurd orders. They wanted to ask what is wrong, but when they looked at his cold gaze, they didn¡¯t want to and just followed orders.

    Anyway, if anything happens, the responsibility also falls on this young man. All they have to do is follow orders as they were supposed to do.

    After that was done, the Inner disciple went back to the farm area and he used formations to block anyone to get a view of the farm or the pasture.

    He doesn¡¯t want anyone to know what is happening. Since this is past the sunset, he doesn¡¯t have to worry too much about other people finding out as they expect the view for the morning. But as for what he would do in the morning, he doesn¡¯t exactly know.

    He went to a pasture where a lot of smallmbs are ced together and inside the small wooden cottage at that pasture his personal guards are holding down all the farmers in ce.

    He came in hurriedly and asked a guard who is holding a knife. Blood is dripping from the end of that knife and all the farmers are currently groaning in pain trying not to yell out loud as they bled from various knife wounds on their bodies.

    "What is the situation? Did anyone of them say anything? Who did this?"

    The guard looked at the Inner disciple and said.

    "None of them said anything. It seems like they are not really rted to this incident."

    The Inner disciple couldn¡¯t take it in and suddenly grabbed the cor of the guard.

    "How can they not be rted to this incident? How? If they, who are always at the farm are not responsible for the incident? Then are you responsible for this? Huh?"

    He became more and more aggressive as he kept on grabbing the cor near to him.

    The guard looked cold and he slowly grabbed the arm of the Inner disciple and twisted it a bit making him lose his grab on the cor.

    "It seems like you have forgotten your status. We are only your personal guards in the name. We are not your servants. We are only here because the youngdy was insistent on marrying you. Even the youngdy wouldn¡¯t treat me with such disrespect. But you, who is just living off on hugging a woman¡¯s thigh is trying to treat me like this? You better mind your ce."

    With that, he and the rest of the personal guards left. Only one person who is his personal attendant stayed there.

    He carefully walked to the young master and said.

    "Young Master, I think this has something to do with the news we received a few days ago. This might be the plot of the Fiend tribe against the Myriad Beast sect."

    The Inner disciple suddenly looked a bit stunned and he felt that was possible, but all of a sudden, his eyes dimmed again and he said.

    "Even if it was true, what is the point. The sect elders clearly stated, even if a war urs, I am the only one responsible for the safety of this ce. I cannot just escape this responsibility. They also particrly mentioned that I would need to personallypensate the losses to the sect. I cannot let this happen."

    "Yes, of course. What you said is hundred percent true. But there is another option. Even if you failed to defend this field, if you managed to find the person that did this and offer them up to the higher-ups of the sect, they would focus on them instead of you and even if you don¡¯t escape scot-free, you can escape with little damage.

    And there is also a way to the escape that little damage."

    The inner disciple finally looked hopeful and asked in a hurried tone.

    "What is it tell me? Please tell me. If you help me go through the crisis, I will make you a proper disciple of the sect, in fact, I would even give you a high-level beast for the contract which would be suitable for the attribute. Please tell me."

    The personal attendant bowed slightly with a smile and said.

    "It is a simple young master. All you have to do is salvage a bit of loss and im that you apprehended the culprit in the middle of sabotaging your crops."

    "Salvage a bit of loss? I don¡¯t have anything left but withered herb stalks. What can I do with that?"

    "Of course, you can do something. What if instead ofing for the main farm, the attacker came at the whole town? The herbs of the other people will also be destroyed and while you are investigating the issue, you found the traces of the attack on the main farm. You managed to stop it by slightly losing some herbs and also the herbs going down in their quality a bit.

    But you would still be the person who managed to stop such arge-scale evil scheme of the Fiend tribe from seeding and even caught the culprit.

    Since the guards don¡¯t bother with outing you on this, all you have to do is erase the evidence after the deed is done with their help and making this story soundpletely legitimate."

    The Inner disciple started thinking rapidly and the more thought, the more this idea made sense.

    All he has to do is steal all the produce from other private farms in the town and im that it is his produce and rece the product with withered stalks overnight while the farm owners are busy with something important without anyone guarding anything.

    Then, he would ¡¯catch¡¯ the culprit and secure his position.

    He immediately ran after the guards and met with the guard captain who is the person that threatened him earlier.

    "I have a task for you. Go and capture Red."

    "Red, the guy that operates the stealing and banditry in the surroundings?"

    "Yes, capture him and bring him back. He is the culprit of this incident."

    The Inner disciple said with a meaningful smile.

    The guard captain looked at him disdainfully as he understood what he is nning, but he didn¡¯t care too much about how he did and what he did as long as he lived up to his expectations. Only results matter.

    But he still asked.

    "Isn¡¯t he someone who pays you themission on time? If you turn on him, the situation with others will not be good."

    He advised kindly for the youngdy¡¯s sake.

    "What do you mean turning on him? He is the one who took bribes from the fiend tribe and tried to destroy the fields here. We are only catching him in action. Do not forget that."

    With that, the inner disciple left without caring what the guard thought.

 Chapter 1170: Stealing the Product

    That night. The town is in utter chaos.

    Everyone is protesting on why they were not allowed to get out of the town.

    But there was no reply.

    After some people tried to use money, status, and even forced to get out of here and werepletely shut down, the chaos temporarily ceased and everyone went back into the town.

    If this situation is confusing enough, then the next waspletely unfathomable for everyone else. The Inner disciple called for all the farmers in the town who either owned thend or farming for some organization toe for a meeting in the Townhall.

    The context of the meeting waspletely unknown.

    The Inner disciple looked at all the farmers and said.

    "A person named, Red who acts as bandit around the area has been bought out by the Fiend tribe and he took up the task of destroying the produce of the whole town."

    He made the announcement calmly, at least his representation of calmness.

    The farmers were all stunned and they didn¡¯t know what to do at the moment. All they could do was to urge the young master to give more details, but before they could raise their voice, the young master continued.

    "From the information I got, Red managed to bribe a few farmers and ced some kinds of objects in your fields. Currently, our men are searching the fields and looking for these objects. But we don¡¯t know which farmers are involved in this. So, we cannot have you all get out of this ce for the moment."

    As soon as he spoke, the farmers reacted.

    "No way, how can we stay here while our fields are in danger. We cannot stay here." One man yelled back.

    "That is right. I am not staying here. We need to go there and take a look ourselves. Months of hard work will be wasted."

    They started protesting. But the young master is having none of it.

    He looked at them and yelled back coldly.

    "Nobody is getting out of this room alive unless I say so. If that object is not found, the product will be gone, and the vitality and nutrients of thend will also be dismissed. The whole area will turn into deadnd. I am not going to let any of you go until I find out the reason for what happened."

    After he said that, he ignored the protests and went outside.

    "I want all the farms to be empty, even the houses. Tell the guards to set up the concealment formations around all fields. All the beasts should work instantly and harvest the produce in one hour.

    I think, losing all the products will be suspicious. So, steal fifty percent and rece it with the withered debris.

    Leave the rest as it is. And make sure that you steal at random ces."

    "One hour? Many of the herbs will be damaged?"

    "Of course, they would be. But we are ¡¯saving¡¯ the herbs from such a ¡¯deadly object¡¯. How can they bepletely unscathed?"

    With that everyone just silently went away and did their tasks.

    Meanwhile.

    Sam, Noah, and Kumar are watching the activities of the guards carefully. They couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit lost by this intense reaction of the Inner disciple.

    "Please tell me, this is within your prediction as well."

    Sam asked both of them.

    But they didn¡¯t reply for a second and only sighed.

    "I only thought that he would lock down the town and harass the people. I didn¡¯t expect his reaction to being this extreme." Kumar spoke from the side.

    "What do we do now? Do we proceed with the same n?" Sam asked once again. Even though the situation changed a bit, they might necessarily not have to change their n. They could just do some slight modifications and deal with them.

    While they are brainstorming on what to do next, the guard captain who went outside came with a man in tow. He was captured and kept on yelling. From the distance of surveince, they couldn¡¯t hear what he is saying but could only make up what he is saying through lip reading.

    But they got little information and without any context, they couldn¡¯t find much. The most they could understand is that the inner disciple might have suspected this guy.

    "We need to make a move as soon as possible if we have to proceed with the original n. The guard captain has a higher cultivation level than us. We need to lure him into the trap and weaken him. If the reaction of the young master is as we expected, then we would have had an easy time luring them out. What should we do now?"

    Kumar asked both of them. He knew he is not as good when ites to nning. So, he didn¡¯t bother overthinking from his side.

    After some time, Sam said.

    "We will get and set the trap as usual. I will find a way to lure them in. But are you sure the trap would work properly? He is a middle-stage transcendent cultivator of the Astral ne. If we need to have any chance of defeating him, he should at least be a little weaker than the initial stage transcendent cultivator of the Astral ne."

    "I have the perfect blueprint for the trap. In fact, I tested it repeatedly and it worked many times. With the right ingredients, it can even work against someone higher."

    "If you say so. What do you want me to do?"

    Noah took out arge gourd and said.

    "Drink this poison."

    Sam was stunned for a second and looking at his expression she chuckled and said.

    "I know about your hydra bloodline. I learned about it a bit. Your hydra seems to be a variant, then you should have that ability right? Absorbing and secreting poison?"

    Sam nodded and took the gourd from her before asking.

    "Where did you learn that?"

    "From our sect."

    Sam looked at her for a moment and turned away silently. He just took the poison and started chugging it down like it is some chilled beer.

    Within a few seconds, he was done and he sat cross-legged as he absorbed the energy from that poison.

    This is one of the most potent poisons he ever consumed. He didn¡¯t expect it to be this strong.

    After some time, he opened and asked.

    "Just what kind of poison is this?"

    "I concocted it myself. It contains the nt toxins of eighteen realms."

    Sam was dumbfounded for a second and just sighed. It seems like he has been neglecting the yers a little too much. They managed to learn too much about him in all these exploits, while he failed to learn anything about them.

    This would be detrimental if he were to fight them unprepared, particrly if he has to fight multiple yers simultaneously.

    He calmed down and focused on secreting the poison.

    With the hydra secretion, the poison would not just be more potent, it also has some adverse effects and acts faster than normal. It would be harder to cure as well. Even if someone manages to find the cure for the poison that was secreted from the nts of eighteen realms, they wouldn¡¯t be able to cure this poison that easily.

    After he gave the poison back to her, she said.

    "We need to get out of here without making anyone suspect us. Do you have a way to do that?"

    "I do actually. But I don¡¯t know if it falls under the rules we established before."

    He spoke as he took out three formation discs and started tinkering with them and within no time, three holograms of the three people appeared exactly like them.

    Noah looked at them in shock. She doesn¡¯t know that Sam creates such a perfect hologram.

    If not for her spiritual sense, she would definitely think that they are real clones.

    Kumar who is standing beside was quick to recover as he nudged her out of it.

    "No problem use it anyway. I also want you to record the harvesting process of these guys."

    With that, Sam set the formation in the room creating an illusion that they are here with the help of holograms and the illusion formation.

    After that was done, the three of them sneaked out.

    Noah took out formation blueprints and they need to uproot some trees and nt them in a different ce.

    Sam decided to do that while Kumar started setting up different spears in different positions ording to the formation.

    Noah started using the poison on different trees in the formation.

    Sam observed the blueprint and easily understood what the formation is supposed to do and he is very impressed with Kumar and Noah¡¯s efforts. This is a very good trap and it has a high sess rate and with the added guarantee that Sam would definitely lure them here, this would definitely seed.

    After they are done withying the trap down, the three of them went back in.

    Sam collected the recorded process and made copies of them.

    They observed the situation a bit more waiting for the farmers to be released and see what kind of actions that the inner disciple would take.

 Chapter 1171: Luring

    The three of them waited for a few more hours until the farmers were finally released. But they are all dejected.

    As they are leaving, the Inner disciple gave another announcement.

    "I know that you are feeling unhappy at the moment. But there was nothing I could do. I did my best to save your fields and only that much was possible.

    I caught the culprit and after extracting the information, we would be holding a public execution and his assets will be divided among the farmers based on the losses they suffered."

    After hearing this announcement, the farmers are a bit relieved, but they are still dejected and go back to their own farms to see what was left for them.

    The inner disciple finally sighed after this was over. Now, he could find a way to save his ass and he was closer to his goal than ever.

    After another hour, Red who waspletely tortured and almost on verge of death was taken to the front of the town hall where a makeshift stage was created and on top of it, they created an execution tform.

    "He is the culprit that was destroyed all your hard work. In order to answer your grief, he will be executed in front of you."

    With that, he took a dagger and sliced his throat.

    Red looked at the Inner disciple dead in the eyes as he slowly lost his life with every drop of blood that was being seeped out of the cut on his throat.

    The execution was over.

    "Everyonee to the town hall in the afternoon with the documents of your farm and the proof of the crops you grew. We will evaluate them and willpensate you for his assets."

    With that, the crowd cheered and praised him before they dispersed.

    The inner disciple and the guard captain disposed of the body and went back inside. But as they reached the main hall of the town hall, they saw the attendants looking at something.

    A small box was ced there and there was a note left along with that.

    "To the Forever Inner disciple."

    That was what¡¯s written on the note and the Young master was shocked, and soon the shock turned into anger.

    He picked the box and opened it.

    There is a recording crystal inside and the young master had an extremely bad feeling about this.

    He sent the attendants away and after some hesitation let the Guard captain stay and yed the video.

    It is the video of the guards harvesting the produce from various farms. As the video progressed showing different guards harvesting different farms from different angles with different beasts, his face also showed different expressions.

    From surprise to shock, to fear, and to despair.

    The sense of relief he felt a few minutes ago waspletely gone.

    The guard captain also frowned at this. Even though they are the personal guards of the Youngdy, they are also the members of the sect, if the higher-ups got the wind of this video, not only would they deal with them, they would also take advantage of the situation and deal with the youngdy.

    This is something that shouldn¡¯t happen.

    As they continued to look at the video, the image of the town and the farm disappeared and an image of the forest appeared.

    The image moved as it went past a few trees and rocks and finally stopped at a spot where a young manpletely donning ck with a cloak covering his face and only his eyes out to see was sitting on a stone with a staff in his hands.

    "Hello, my dear fellow disciple. Oh, I am sorry. I shouldn¡¯t call you my fellow disciple. After all, you are way beneath me in the status with your inner disciple title.

    I wanted to test you a bit and see how you would react, but not only is your reaction cowardly, it is utterly pathetic. Stealing produce from farmers? Do you know what this would do to our sect? I really hope what kind of punishment, the enforcement hall would give you."

    When those words were heard, the face of the young master paled. It was as if the blood was forcefully drained from it.

    "Anyway, good luck and wait for your punishment. I will be looking forward to it."

    With that, the video disappeared, and at the same time, the recording crystal in turned into dust.

    "FUCK. FUCK. FUCK."

    The inner disciple started cursing like he went crazy.

    The guard captain on the other hand is calm and even closed his eyes as he thought of something.

    Looking at him like this the inner disciple got angrier and yelled.

    "What the fuck are you doing? What should we do now? My position in the sect, fuck even my life is at jeopardy."

    But the guard captain didn¡¯t respond back.

    The inner disciple got angrier and threw something nearby onto the guard captain.

    The guard captain caught it and threw it to the side, before saying.

    "Come with me now."

    With that, he walked outside and called for all his fellow guards.

    A group of twelve guards and the inner disciple all moved sneakily and went into the nearby forest out of the town.

    "Where are we going?"

    The inner disciple asked from the side.

    The guard captain didn¡¯t reply. Just when the inner disciple is about to throw a tantrum again, he saw something familiar in front. The stone on which the ck-cloaked guy sat down.

    "This is the ce they sat down."

    The guard captain said as he looked at the spot and they soon found the traces of that person.

    "The nearest ce that could take them out of the other than our town is the city under the Fiend tribe¡¯s control. So, they need to travel to another ce under our control or territory belonging to a neutral ce.

    Either of them would take a significant time.

    So, we still have a chance to catch up."

    The guard captain said and he led the group following the traces.

    As they moved through the forest quickly. The inner disciple calmed down a bit.

    But that calm didn¡¯tst long as he said.

    "That guy must be a core disciple by the way he spoke. So, are you sure you can take him? He might have his personal guards."

    "There is a reason why the youngdy holds the most territory and status among the core disciples. Because she has the best teampared to the rest of us.

    All you have to do is hold off the core disciple for a few minutes and we will find a way to support you to hold him off for more before we destroyed thempletely."

    "What would you do if he has a transference scroll?"

    "So be it, as long as one of his guards stays behind, we can turn this around. All that would change is that instead of Red being sold out to the Fiend tribe, it would be him being sold out to one of our own."

    "But it is a core disciple..."

    The inner disciple wanted to say something, but he stopped as the guards stopped in their tracks, they saw the man in ck standing in front of them with the staff in his hands.

    "Why did my spiritual sense not pick on his presence earlier."

    The guard captain muttered as he felt there might be an ambush in the front and asked them to move carefully making them spread a little bit and look around cautiously.

    But at this moment, the guard captain suddenly yelled.

    "BE CAREFUL."

    The whole area was suddenly covered with wood elemental energy as vines appeared from underground and coiled around everyone¡¯s legs crazily dragging them down.

    As they tried to stabilize themselves, a bunch of spears suddenly manifested in thin air around them from various corners.

    It almost seemed like an illusion, but they could feel a sense of danger. The problem is that they don¡¯t know which spear is just a mere illusion or which spear really gives them such sense of danger.

    So, they are basically sitting ducks.

    The spears wereunched and the targeted people could feel the strong sense of the spear intent surrounding them.

    They crazily tried to get rid of the vines and blocked the spears.

    Out of thirteen people seven people seeded and even the inner disciple who panicked the most used a lot of artifacts that managed to block the attacks for him.

    The six people had their bodies pierced by the spears in various spots and had grim injuries while the remaining seven, although blocked, have small scrapes and cuts all over their bodies.

    The least injured is obviously the guard captain.

    He managed to block the spears in time because of his senses due to his superior cultivation.

    But his main concern is towards the vines that are coiling him than the spears that were being shot.

    He took out his dagger as he crazily swung it at the vines.

 Chapter 1172: Formation

    As the guard captain and the rest struggled, they noticed that the vines on the injured people are going after the wounds that were inflicted on them and trying to restrain them more and more.

    At this moment, the illusion created by Sam in the surroundings disappeared. The ck cloaked figure also disappeared without a trace as if it was never there.

    Noah and Kumar can be seen on either side of the group. Both crouching down with their hands on the ground.

    Sam stood on the third side with a staff in his hands and a leisurely smile on his face.

    As they were revealed, so was the formation.

    The trees in the surroundings rapidly extended their branches and became intervened and created a barrier of branches which were protected by thebined wood elemental energy of the forest.

    Sam activated his energy vision to take a look at the energy flow and he can see all the wood elemental energy and vitality being sucked out from the rest of the forest surrounding and it was being transferred to the trees that are surrounding the group.

    Noah willed and a lot of poison was being emitted by these trees into the circle of the group making them inhale it.

    The guards became vignt and held their breath as they tried to shield the injured parts of their body with their spiritual energy and attacked the vines around their legs.

    The guard captain with his superior senses could feel it even if the rest of the guards who are in panic could not. The vines are sucking their vitality out of their bodies and it would only decrease their chance of their survival more and more.

    Guard captain followed by some of the guards finally managed to get rid of the vines coiling the ground. They immediately made their move as they attacked different spots of the barriers.

    But their attacks are being repelled. If that was the only problem they would have been a bit content, but out of nowhere, spears condensed by pure wood elemental energy are being condensed behind them and are being shot at them from the backs.

    They hurriedly tried to block them, but even if that happened, the residual force is enough to make their wounds get worse.

    Noah and Kumar are hurriedly using all their concentration and energy to make the formation work at full capacity.

    Noah is making sure that they stayed there with the barrier and the branches and weakening them with the poison and asional vines that are catching them by surprise. She is also responsible for channeling all the energy of the forest into the formation.

    Kumar is in charge of the direct attacks and he is using the energy Noah dragged from the forest to make these spears with her cooperation.

    Sam smiled at this.

    "Like hell, you don¡¯t have anything going on. It seems like I need to prepare another wedding gift."

    He muttered to himself as he slowly spun his staff and moved towards the barrier.

    He just waited at the entrance patiently while ying with the staff.

    Inside the chaos increased as various attacksnded and the barrier sucked up more energy from the forest making many trees wither and die rapidly.

    After five more minutes of this, the guard captain had enough of it and got ready to use his trump card to break through this barrier and took out another dagger.

    But as soon as he gathered energy, he noticed that he felt weaker than ever. He looked at his skin and saw a lot of green boils appearing out of nowhere.

    Not just him, the rest of the group also noticed this green boils on themselves and the weaker they are, the higher their number is.

    One of the injured guards hurriedly rubbed them which made them pop. Green pus came out of it and as it spread among the skin which is still clear, it became green, and boils started appearing.

    He fell on the ground as his energy depleted and a spear lodged itself into his heart.

    The vines coiled around him and soon a nt started sprouting from his body and rapidly grew into a small-sized tree and even bore fruits.

    The fruits looked green and eerie.

    The guard captain knew that the situation is only going to get worse and the inner disciple panicked as he took all kinds of medicines and antidotes to chug down his throat as he looked at the faint green boils on his right arm.

    He is the one least affected because of the artifacts.

    Everything went past in the blink of an eye.

    The guard captain held two daggers in a backhanded position and leaned forward a bit.

    The spiritual energy started gathering at the ends of the daggers as he gritted his teeth and focused all his concentration on one point he has been attacking for a while.

    The dent he has ced is already being recovered, but he didn¡¯t care and lunged forward as he opened his arms causing two-de rays to be shot at the point forming a cross.

    He followed those rays and brought the daggers down at the same point.

    The four attacksnded on the point consequently. The four rays forming two crosses sliced through theyers of the barriers.

    Noah frowned at the sheer powering at the barrier and she gritted her teeth as she sucked as much energy as possible to recover it faster.

    Kumar is also attacking the guard captain with spears from the rear.

    The captain finally lost it and didn¡¯t care about the attacks from the rear as he crazily attacked in the front. He is adding more and more sharp rays to the existing ones to increase the pressure.

    Sam looked around and noticed the trees withering rapidly.

    He frowned at the scene and felt like things wouldn¡¯t go well if they go on like this.

    He activated energy vision and looked at the barrier to check its durability and the attacks that are happening at it.

    He frowned and walked to the exact point where the attacks are happening.

    Even though Noah is using the energy from the whole forest, most of it is going to waste as he is doing so forcefully and in a hurry. It wouldn¡¯t be enough to stop this attack.

    He took a few steps backward and made his right side face the barrier as he held the staff in his hands with one end pointing that barrier.

    He slowly activated partial spatial fusion as he took a deep breath and yelled.

    "Kumar stop the attacks."

    Kumar who is on the opposite end frowned for a moment, but still stopped the attacks.

    "Noah, let the barrier loosen at that point."

    Noah frowned and opened her eyes.

    Sam looked at her and said.

    "Trust me and loosen the barrier."

    She hesitated a bit and did as she was told.

    As soon as the barrier was loosened a bit, Sam tightened his grip on the staff and lunged forward before disappearing from the spot.

    The barrier tore open and a gust of dagger rays came out destroying the surroundings and the guard captain also stumbled forward making him stop his hand movements awkwardly in the middle with the disappearance of the barrier and this also made him stumble more.

    Within that fraction of a second, Sam bypassed all the dagger rays that just hit the spot he was standing before and appeared in front of the guard captain, in the same posture he was in before.

    He stabbed the staff forward whichnded straight in the guts of the captain which made him freeze on the spot.

    He couldn¡¯t move for a moment and he could even feel his blood cirction stopping. His body is imbnced as he fell forward, but Sam forcefully rose his staff upwards as it tore through the flesh and finally went through the throat andnded on the chin squarely.

    *CRACK*

    A cracking sound was heard as the staffpletely lodged into the broken chin and Sam forcefully ripped it apart and pulled the staff back making the guard captain fall forward.

    He then kicked him back into the barrier forcefully and Noah who caught a breather hurriedly swallowed the brown fruits simr to the ones she gave Sam earlier and recovered.

    The guard captain felt the blood cirction release once again, but that only made the blood seep out of the long tear on his body.

    Vines appeared from under him and covered himpletely from all sides. A sprout appeared and then started growing rapidly turning into a small tree with a bunch of green fruits and these are bigger and brighter than the ones before.

    The guard group who just felt relieved were swallowed by despair as they couldn¡¯t find in themselves to get out of the barrier.

    And one of the weakest ones fell immediately only to be swallowed by the vines all over.

    He was then followed by another one and another and another one.

 Chapter 1173: Killing the Inner disciple

    Noah and Kumar are slowly getting exhausted. Even though the energy for the barrier and the attacks ising from the forest, they are stilling stressing themselves physically and mentally to channel all that energy to a proper use.

    Sam just stood there and waited for them to be done.

    Inside the barrier there are around eight trees by now and all of them have those green fruits the rest of the guards are not really feeling extremely confident in taking down the barrier and are fighting in desperation.

    And one of them just attacked a tree for the sake of it and a fruit fell down.

    As soon as it touched the ground, it exploded into a puff of green smoke. The green smoke spread all over the barrier area and the guards started choking as the boils on their skin became bigger and if there was any ce that had no boils, they got some.

    The only person who was still rtively safer until this moment was the inner disciple. The number of artifacts he had on him in unfathomable. Even Sam didn¡¯t have that many defensive artifacts in his hands and not to mention antidotes. The inner disciple swallowed at least a thirty antidotes in this short time frame and in fact he is suffering from a slight overdoes of medicine, but he doesn¡¯t care.

    The medicine managed to stop the poison spread for a minute or two and that was reason enough for him to swallow as many as he can.

    But after this green smoke appeared, he couldn¡¯t possibly deal with it as he needs to breath. And that is not the worst part. After the first fruit exploded and turned into a green smoke the rest of the fruits on different trees are trying to absorb the green smoke in their surroundings and soon the second one which is the closest to the first fruit exploded.

    That was followed by the third one on the same tree and then the fourth one which led to all the fruits exploding on the tree and that was followed by the simultaneous explosion of the fruits on the nearest tree to that and that was followed by another tree.

    One by one all the fruits started exploding and when the tree is devoid of any fruits, it started withering.

    The people started dying quickly and soon the dead guards once again turned into trees with green fruits that exploded once again.

    The cycle went on until only the Inner disciple was left and finally Noah and Kumar rxed as they released the barrier down.

    But before they did that, Noah controlled the trees to absorb all the green smoke.

    Sam is immune to the poison and she is immune to this poison, but Kumar is neither, so she didn¡¯t want to risk it andpletely let the vines absorb the gases and finally released the barrier.

    Both of them sat on the ground panting as they looked at the area that was covered by the barrier.

    All the grass has withered and even the debris is not visible. Even the soil looked devoid of vitality.

    The inner disciple is standing in one corner of this area as he shivered uncontrobly. There is still a barrier on him. There are a bunch of stones and jewelry on the ground around him making him.

    All of them are the artifacts and they are currently broken signifying their usage was over.

    He looked at the three people that surrounded them like this and the cause of all these deaths.

    Sam is not covering his face and he still held the staff in his hands, he walked towards the inner disciple, who wanted to escape as soon as he came out of that daze.

    But Sam just spun his staff with wind elemental energy which created arge wave of air and stumbled the guy to the ground.

    He leisurely walked forward and started increasing the gravity in the surroundings making the Inner disciple unable to move.

    After getting near to him, the Inner disciple who had his face stered to the ground suddenly turned around with all his might and there is arge red colored crystal in his hands glowing. He threw it at Sam who used his staff to destroy it mid-air causing an explosion.

    The inner disciple too his chance and let his beast out.

    It is arge Hawk typed beast, called the Golden sky hawk.

    He boarded on it and hurriedly flew away.

    Sam just looked at him with disdain as he got rid of the mes around him and left Sky out before boarding on him and chasing the target.

    The capture process didn¡¯tst long.

    In fact, the Inner disciple released a bunch of flying pets to challenge Sam, but Sky tore them all apart. In the aerial battles, no beast at the same level is a match for him and it was proven quickly.

    Sky swooped past the Hawk rapidly and stopped in the front and in process it tore the belly of the beast apart making it and its owner fall down rapidly.

    "AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH..."

    The inner disciple screamed at the top of his lungs as he descended at a rapid pace. Sam looked at him for a few seconds and tapped on Sky¡¯s back making him descend. Sky first caught carcass of the Hawk and then Sam caught the Inner disciple as both of them flew towards Noah and Kumar.

    He threw him on the ground and then started setting up arge skewer on the ground with earth element. He used the wind element to remove the feathers and the skin of the hawk in few seconds and started roasting it while pouring different herbal oils and spices on it.

    By now Noah and Kumar recovered a bit and Sam said.

    "I was wondering why this guy didn¡¯t use his beast. It seems like it has not much of a use and from the looks of it, both the beast and the man doesn¡¯t have anybat experience whatsoever. He really climbed this far by holding the hem of a skirt. Quite a talent."

    Sam said as he continued the roasting.

    Noah and Kumar took in the delicious smell but still controlled themselves before proceeding to the young man.

    His skin is pale green and there are some boils.

    Noah healed him a bit and said.

    "I need you to answer some questions. Are your guards also the members of Myriad Beast sect?"

    The young man looked at her in daze and fear, but tried to his best to voice out some words.

    "I am the fianc¨¦ of the core disciple of the Myriad Beast sect. You cannot do this to..."

    *BAM*

    Before he could say anything more, Kumar gave a kick straight to his face and Noah once again healed him.

    "Now, answer my question."

    "You... How dare you do..."

    *BAM*

    "YOU WILL ALL BE..."

    *BAM*

    The interrogation continued and after a long while, the young man finally came to his senses and Sam is also finished with his cooling. He brought a wing and a leg to Noah and Kumar whole he took a leg himself and started munching on it with some wine.

    The young man looked at the hawk that apanied him since childhood with a wry smile as he spoke.

    "They are also members of the sect, but they are from the Guard extension."

    "Guard Extension?"

    "A branch of the sect that solely trains people to be guards of the main members of the sect."

    "So, they wouldn¡¯t go through beast cultivation?"

    "No. Beast cultivation is only reserved for main members. And few members of the guard extension are promoted to be main members. They would be brainwashed to be guards since childhood. So, once they are in, there is no way out.

    They would have some beasts with them, but most of them are useful for only travelling."

    Sam looked at them and asked.

    "Just how long do you guys take for interrogation and you also need to verify the truth of the matter after this, just from the words he said to you." Sam said from the side.

    "What else can we do?"

    Sam just smiled and said.

    "Leave the information to me, just tell me what the next part of the n is and we would be done."

    "We need to kill this guy and leave some evidence which would make his backer the core disciple extremely made beyond reason."

    "Is that it?"

    "Yes."

    Sam then finished the leg in his hands and took out a recording crystal. He threw it to the Noah and she started recording him.

    Sam walked behind the young man and made him stand on his knees.

    "No, No. What are you doing? Let me go. Let me.. mmph."

    "Don¡¯t let my face show up in it." Sam closed the mouth of the young man while holding his chin with one hand and the back of the head to the other.

    *CRACK*

    With a single twist, the neck cracked and then the flesh connecting the head and the rest of the body was torn apart as Sam removed it directly.

    Kumar closed his eyes and Noah did the same.

    Sam just used his water elemental energy to clean himself up and let the specter deal with the memory extraction while he got back to eating the hawk.

 Chapter 1174: Return to Water Crystal city

    Noah and Kumar couldn¡¯t even look at the dead body while Sam is already back at eating as if he didn¡¯t do anything.

    They couldn¡¯t help but shiver a bit. With all the bloodshed they caused throughout the years, they couldn¡¯t be half as bold and cold as Sam.

    While specter is collecting the information from the soul of the Inner disciple, he let his shadow undead out to dig out the bodies of the guards. Even though the trees sucked all the flesh and blood and what was left was a skeleton covered with barely any skin.

    The shadow undead cut the heads of these people and brought them to Sam who threw them into a separate storage device along with the head of the inner disciple.

    He took the undead back and finished the rest of the meat that he roasted carefully.

    After he was done with the cleanup, he left the bones of the beast along with the headless body of the inner disciple at the gate of the town, tying them up to the arch. At the same time, he threw the copies of the recording crystal to different people in the town.

    He left the copy of the recording crystal that has the video of him killing the inner disciple with his body and left the ce.

    Later, the three of them once again got on the back of Sky as they made their way back to the base of the operations so that they can take the contribution points.

    On their way back the atmosphere is a bit awkward. Sam is calmly enjoying the view while talking with Sky as if they are on a pic.

    He looked at their awkward expressions and felt a bit troubled.

    "What is wrong with you guys? You are awfully calm for a while. It ispletely unlike you."

    They don¡¯t know what to say. After some hesitation, Kumar spoke.

    "Sam, have you ever thought that what we might be doing is wrong? Destroying one organization after another, killing thousands of people, and then being responsible for the turmoil caused by the elimination of these organizations.

    Do you know how many people die because of the aftereffects of the disappearance of these organizations?

    I have seen them, we have seen them. Throughout the years, we have triggered countless wars, the number of innocents that were killed in the process is unimaginably high.

    We are carrying the sin that could make an army of men die of guilt.

    But we are doing it anyway.

    Even the young man and the guards we just killed, we don¡¯t have any form of rtionship with nor do we have any rivalry, but we still killed him in cold blood.

    Every time we killed like that, we cannot keep our minds calm, but we had to move on and force ourselves to do this again and again.

    But you seem..."

    Kumar paused there a bit and observed Sam¡¯s expression and Sam just smiled and said.

    "I am very okay with it? Is that what you want to say?" He asked.

    "Not exactly, but along the lines," Kumar replied awkwardly. Then Noah spoke.

    "We know that you are cruel to your enemies, but you are not exactly cruel to the people you don¡¯t know. You might disregard them, ignore them, but most of the time, you were polite to them and acted perfectly normal.

    But how can you just get on with your life after ripping a man¡¯s head off like that as if you did nothing? That man did no harm to you. How can you be so cold about it?"

    Sam chuckled and asked.

    "Let me get this straight before I say anything. Are you asking me this because you want to know exactly why I was cold and don¡¯t seem to feel anything after doing all this? Or do you want to know how I do this so that you could feel okay with all this? What do you want to know?"

    Both of them became silent for a moment and Sam gave them their time to mull over it and said.

    "Whatever the reason your question is for, here is my answer. I don¡¯t know how to make you guys feel okay for what you did and what you are about to do and I wouldn¡¯t say I ampletely okay with whatever I have done and whatever I am about to do.

    It is just I don¡¯t let the guilt bear down on me.

    After all, in this particr situation think about it. The gods that were being worshipped by our organization for decades, centuries, and in some ces thousands of years. But they are willing to let them die in the hands of us, the yers which they picked just for their own entertainment.

    Those same gods brought me here forcing me to kill their worshipers to provide their entertainment and I don¡¯t know what the consequences of that would be.

    I don¡¯t say that it is their mistake for worshipping such gods. I don¡¯t know if it is, and I don¡¯t say that I don¡¯t carry the sin of killing this many people and being the cause of death of many more. It is just that I value myself more and my pursuit of truth than all the lives I would take in the process.

    I just feel that if ites to it, the guilt of killing these people is lighter than the burden of not knowing why I am here and why I am doing what I am doing."

    "Are you saying that all these thousands of lives are worth less than your curiosity?"

    "I don¡¯t know what they are worth and I cannot possibly fathom. Maybe they are and maybe they are not.

    Anyway, we don¡¯t know what the gods do to us if we don¡¯t do what they asked of us. If this is the start of our journey, I might have just killed myself and would have been done with it, but I have traveled too much ande too far, I cannot stop this in the middle anymore. So, I have to see the end of it."

    The rest of the journey was silent.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know if they are convinced or understood. And his reason is not some noble and profound this. All of it is but the selfishness of a human being.

    They arrived at the Water crystal city and showed their tokens before entering the secret room once again,

    Inside the room, the deputymander is sitting at the table as he is talking with a team.

    They waited for ten minutes before the talk was over.

    They went to the table to meet the deputymander.

    "Hello, the three-person group and independent, all humans. How are you guys doing?"

    "We are doing good, how are you?"

    Sam said as he took out recording crystals and ced them on the table and then proceed to ce one head after the other beside them.

    "The Farm town of the Myriad beast sect. Destroyed the farm, made the rtionship between the farmers and the sect sour, killed the person in charge and all of his personal guards. Need evaluation and the points and we will be on our way to the next target."

    The deputymander Myrion looked surprised, but he looked at Sam and said with a smile.

    "You guys are good, but we need to do some confirmations and it would take a few hours. Why don¡¯t you guyse after four hours? We will arrange your stay in the inn."

    Sam shrugged and looked at the other two, they nodded and three of them went outside guided by an attendant and were led to the inn.

    "Go and check at the information desk."

    Myrion said and went through with the recording crystals.

    He looked through the destruction of the fields and the guards stealing the produce.

    As for the killings, Sam didn¡¯t submit the video of it and only gave the heads. Their faces could be identified through the videos and it is pretty obvious.

    After a few hours, the person who went to the information desk came back with the confirmation that the town was indeed under chaos and he also got the information about how Sam left the headless corpse near the gate.

    "Call them."

    Myrion sent someone to call the trio back.

    "Give me your tokens."

    The trio ced the tokens on the desk and the deputy took his token and tapped on all three of them. A number appeared on them with all three showing one hundred on each.

    "You did a great job. You are the first person to destroy the system of a town. The news must have traveled to the sect by now and they might even be sending someone down there. So, be careful. We might not be able to avenge if you die in their hands."

    "Thanks for your concern."

    Sam said as he took the three tokens and gave the two back to Noah and Kumar before they walked away.

 Chapter 1175: Next Plan

    Sam, Kumar and Noah left the city immediately. They didn¡¯t waste anymore time and this time went to a different location on the map that was already marked by Noah.

    This ce is actually a special ce too. Because, this is the ce ruled by a Myriad beast sect member whose very presence is a ck mark to the Fiend tribe.

    On their way, Noah narrated the whole story.

    "It is actually a long story, a long and detailed n of the Myriad beast sect against the Fiend tribe and they managed to take a really good resource point out of the Fiend tribe¡¯s hands.

    A Fiend tribe¡¯sdy who was quite talented has her own territory. A city which she actually built herself around a resource point with her own ability after sessfully exploring and establishing a proper output method.

    After she took over the city, she was gradually seduced by a Half-elf and Half winged race person. The good looks of both races made him a proper seductive material and he managed to get into her pants, slowly made her go astray from the tribe, gave birth to a son.

    Until then, even though the fiend tribe is unhappy, with her cultivation and her contributions to the tribe, they are okay with her decision, albeit barely. But after the birth of the son, it was revealed that the man who seduced her is actually a member of the Myriad Beast sect.

    Before she could react, all the administration was already taken over by them and she also became a victim of a special poison making her unable to use her strength.

    The manpletely separated the son from the mother and made the son grow up into a psychopath. He doesn¡¯t have any moral boundaries and he doesn¡¯t have any bottom line. He is worst than a beast and have no qualms about doing anything.

    In fact, even until this day, his favorite past time is torturing his own mother.

    You can guess what kind of person he is. He is now in charge of the city and from the city as base which has a strategic location, the Myriad beast sect already conquered the surrounding area unable to make the Fiend tribe make anyrge moments.

    The elders who were already unhappy about the woman from the fiend tribe, took this opportunity to make the fiend tribe make any moves to save her so that her faction would lose a powerful member.

    Our next target is going to be this.

    If we finish this properly, not only would be have more trust from the Fiend tribe, we would making our names known to the public. The sect would take us seriously and the way we operate, I highly doubt that they would be able to keep their hands to themselves and let us do what we want.

    From then on, not only would we be able to deal with the targets, we would attract the prey to ourselves directly."

    "Okay, then how are we going to go about this?" Sam asked as he looked at the detailspiled by the Noah and Kumar. The details of the next city they were about to go.

    It is a city based off on two mines. An earth elemental spirit stone mine and dark elemental energy mine.

    Another resource apart from the two elemental stones is something called Curse rocks. The rocks that are natural made resources that could be the perfect curse carriers.

    The people who go there search for these curse carriers to sell to the fiend tribe and some small ones are sold to other people.

    Just like any other town and city on this, the resource points attracted some merchants and the merchants created shops and this attracted more visitors which made the dining and inns flourish and soon it became a full-fledged city.

    "This time, we are going for a more straightforward approach." Kumar said from the side.

    Sam looked at him in askance.

    "We are not going to destroy the resource point. We are going to take down the administration of the city and kill all the sect members before they could get the reinforcements from the other two nearby cities under sect control.

    We also need to take over the only two routes connecting these two cities to this city and make sure we kill as many people as possible.

    We want to let the fiend tribe take over the city."

    "But the war is not out in the open yet. It is still warming up." Sam replied.

    He doesn¡¯t know the exact reason why both sides are not on each other¡¯s necks, but the war is still not hot enough yet.

    "We will use this to make hotter. We would put the fiend tribe in between the rock and the hard ce. If we managed to let the fiend tribe take over the city openly, the Myriad Beast sect is bound to lose enough face and image that they must make a bold move. At least one bold move. A single chink is all we need to tear open the hole." Kumar exined.

    Sam nodded in understanding. This is quite good strategy. After all, he still didn¡¯t learn enough about these two powers like them. He just came and already started the action. So, all he needs to do is follow their n and it worked out pretty well while they are dealing with the first target.

    Soon they arrived at a mountain andnded on there. Sam left Sky back into the divine dimension and he looked at the city far away.

    The city is located in a mountainous region and there are only two routes connecting to the city. One at the front and the other at the back and the remaining sides it is fully covered with mountains and creeks.

    The route is too rocky, too uneven and the mountains are so tall that they touch the clouds. Even with the flying beasts, it is hard to reach the city without alerting the guards and the air defense that was arranged around it.

    It is really puzzling how the dark and earth elemental energies are found around this city that was located this high.

    Sam looked around for a bit and noticed that their peak is the only spot from where they could get any view of the city and the creeks surrounding the area are too many and they are too narrow.

    One or two persons would fit in there and any beast that could fly and could carry a person wouldn¡¯t be able to enter any of these.

    If a person falls into these creeks, even if he manages tond safely from that height, it would be hard for them to find a way out from there as all these creeks formed a natural maze.

    So, as long as the twond routes are upied and properly defend there is no way to invade the city and this city can easily send the reinforcements to the other two cities connected to it through these ways whenever they need.

    Even though they decided to take a straight forward approach, they are obviously not barging into the city. They first need to do some arrangements in the paths and investigate a bit.

    The only thing they would not be doing is setting the traps for the targets in the city, but they would still need to find a way to deal with the reinforcements that woulde after they dealt with the city and they woulde through these paths.

    So, for the rest of the day, they went around investigating. Luckily, they are not deep into the routes and unlike the rest of his peers, Sky can fly pretty high, otherwise they would have had to disguise and go to the routes normally to investigate.

    That night they got back andpiled all the information they got.

    "The dark elemental energy in the mountain paths is quite decent. It might be dormant, but if a curse is ced properly, it can be quite a good carrier. I would say we go with curses when dealing with peopleing from the other two cities.

    Even though there are some patches of woods on the way, in both paths there is long enough area where they have to go through a rtively narrow canyon surrounded byrge rocky cliffs on both sides.

    I can use those ces to make a some really good traps."

    Sam said as they sat around a small fire and ate.

    "I will set traps with in the patches of wood. Mostly poison rted. Do you have any special poisons with you currently?" She asked Sam.

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "I do have a few, you can choose from them."

    With that Sam gave out a few poison bottles and the data he has on them to Noah.

    Kumar looked at Sam and said.

    "I need your help with my trap. I am working on a new killing trap formation made of spears and I think it would be suitable for this ce. Even though it works now, I don¡¯t think this is its best form. If you can update it, it would work well."

 Chapter 1176: Entering

    Sam and Kumar are looking at the formation blueprint in front of them.

    He is really impressed by what Kumar has done with the blueprint. This is a single-use formation and uses spears as primary nodes with only around ten formation gs.

    When the formation was activated by the presence of targets inside it, the first spear would be activated and move to attack them, then one of the nodes will disappear, and this changes the formation to a different one and a second spear with a different level and type of attack will be triggered, followed by another change in the formation and another attack.

    This is an extremelyplex formation and an enclosed area like this mountainous region is indeed the best ce to use.

    But there is one problem with this.

    Kumar wanted to have onerge attack with thest ten spears as the final attack which would mark the end of the formation, but he couldn¡¯t make a big enough attack to happen by himself. The attack is not powerful enough to kill an opponent if the disparity between him and the opponent isrge as the power of the formation is solely dependent on his own strength as he would be the person who would channel the natural spiritual energy into the attacks.

    After checking it several times, Sam really did find the problem and started exining it to Kumar.

    "I understand what the problem is, but my knowledge of formations is not enough to solve this problem, it would take a lot of time." Kumarmented. But Sam just smiled and took out a formation disc as he started inscribing a formation on it.

    "Take this and ce it in the position of the fifth node. Everything will be good."

    Kumar looked at him in confusion.

    "That¡¯s it? You are using a formation as a node?"

    "Of course, both of you are good with formations and merging them with your abilities, but what youck is creativity and some research ability. Start thinking outside the box and stop limiting the imagination.

    I have used this technique before I turned twenty. Do you remember the city I built in deste? The first city named after me? I used this technique then I killed a bunch of Consummate realm cultivators with it."

    He said casually and stood up to stretch a bit.

    Kumar and Noah looked at him with a dumbfounded expressions.

    "Is it really necessary to flex at every chance you get?" Kumar muttered from the side as he ced the formation te in the storage ring.

    They are not moving that night. They are making their move the next day.

    The next morning they started working with the dawn. They went to the front path directly.

    Even from the location they could barely see the city, they still cannot go to the city directly, even they need to take the paths if they are not confident in taking the city through the air.

    After they reached the front path, they arrived at the forest patch first, so that Noah could set her formation up, while they are at it, Sam started creating some cursed wood elemental attacks. Even though he might not be as good as Noah when ites to wood elemental energy attacks with her various modified seeds and stuff, he still has a decent foundation.

    He started merging them with curses to get added effects and ced them there just to have some extra help.

    They worked for a few hours and then went to a stone creek where Kumar¡¯s formation needs to be set up, even there Sam used the earth elemental curses he created with the help of the Myriad curse guide.

    Finally, they went to the stone canyon.

    This is where it took the longest of all three.

    The whole canyon has some earth and dark elemental energy which would help him carry the curse properly.

    He observed the canyon a bit and divided it into different sections and in each section, there would be aplex carrier curse with earth elemental energy.

    The curses would start as soon as Sam identifies the person that came in as the target and then a chain reaction would be triggered.

    Most of the curses are of pain, slumber, torture, and such and the earth element is mostly used to make physical damage. That would be from the rocky canyon walls, but after observing the whole area, he decided to set up curses on the pathway as well.

    On the ground, he made an array of curses andbined them into one.

    After he was done, it was already afternoon and they wore disguises as they moved to the city through this path.

    When they neared the city gate though, the three of them were a bit surprised. At the city gate, the guards are searching for something on anyone that desired entry.

    At first, they don¡¯t know what they are searching for, but it didn¡¯t take long for them to figure that out because someone had what they wanted.

    The identity token of the Fiend tribe.

    It seems like someone took a mission rted to this city and wanted to enter it and got caught.

    As the guard chief came and attacked him, the disguise was gone and the trio could even recognize the person who got caught.

    This made them stop in their tracks and luckily they are far away from the gate and managed to understand their current situation.

    The tokens are impossible to store in the spatial ring and Sam even tried using the divine dimension and for some reason, even that doesn¡¯t work, after studying a bit, he found out the reason. It is because there is an inscription that is making it unable to go through the spatialyer that opens up and connects between the spatial ring and the same principle applies to his divine dimension and even the space jades.

    Sam looked at the guards who have beasts apanying them while they upied all sides of the gates and the city wall to make sure no one escapes if they got caught.

    "What should we do now?"

    Kumar asked anxiously as they hid in one of the creeks.

    "We cannot leave these tokens. That is for sure." Sam replied as he thought.

    "Why?"

    "I will exinter, but believe me when I tell you, we shouldn¡¯t think of leaving the cards away for a long time."

    "Then how are we going to enter the city. We need to ess the second path and the city is the only way. If we need to go there from the other side, it would take another day or two. Should we just waste time? There are only fifteen days to deal with the Myriad Beast sect powers and we have already used up three days."

    Noah said from the side.

    Sam just stayed silent and thought to himself.

    There is no way they can just abandon the tokens, if that happens, the consequences would be dire. Until a certain time, they couldn¡¯t abandon them.

    But they need to make sure that they enter the city as well.

    "How good is your disguising ability?"

    Sam asked all of a sudden.

    "It is decent, why?"

    "Decent is not enough."

    Then he took out the formation discs and started carving on them rapidly. He gave the discs to them and said.

    "Both of you disguise yourself and get in, go to the inn operated by the sect and ce these in two different areas and activate.

    These two would give out some holograms of random people giving out an illusion that someone is attacking them.

    So, you need to set up traps that would destroy and cause enoughmotion."

    He paused and took out a re gun.

    "Use this to shoot into the sky right before you activate the formations so that I would know.

    After you activate these things, you shouldn¡¯t have any suspicions about you and you should be able to get out of the city from the rear path within ten minutes after activating the formation discs.

    We have a margin of forty minutes, for which you could stay away from the tokens.

    In these forty minutes, ten minutes would be consumed by the checking, you have twenty minutes to do what I told you to do and then ten minutes to escape. We need to meet after forty-five minutes you separate from the tokens at thetest."

    They looked serious as they tried to get Sam¡¯s n into their heads. They didn¡¯t know why they cannot stay away from the tokens for now, but they are sure that is not a good idea since Sam is that serious.

    So, they agreed with Sam¡¯s n and immediately made their move.

    As soon as they got out of the creek after giving their tokens to Sam, they moved towards the city at a rapid pace.

    They cut the line several times and acted like absolute brats to get to the front. After they finally did that, they finished the checking as fast as they can and ran towards the inn run by the Myriad beast sect.

    Looking at them, everyone felt weird, but the guards didn¡¯t bother as there is no rule against running at full speed and the two of them acted as if they are racing for fun, so they didn¡¯t bother interrupting them and only kept an eye.

 Chapter 1177: Crossing the City

    As soon as they left, Sam started cing formation nodes in different spots within the creek. The nodes are made with normal formation gs instead of the liquid energy cells.

    He used the shadow elemental energy to move around to ce them as fast as he can.

    After he was done with it, he came out of the creek and went back to the path as he slowly walked to the city in a ck cloak. All three tokens are in his hand. As he neared the city gate and the guards are about to search him, he crushed a token in his hand.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The formations he set up started exploding at the very instant.

    He made his move and took a dagger. ck smoke surrounded his body as he slit the throats of the guards one by one, taking advantage of the shock caused by the explosion.

    He didn¡¯t bother hiding his presence and waited for the guards toe at him and he just went on a killing spree. Every stab was being made to kill and he killed ten guards in an instant and eight beasts followed them by the two more beasts barely staying alive.

    At this moment, a shy red light appeared in the sky.

    Sam looked at the guard chief who is the only one standing along with his beast. The beast is of a dark elemental bear type. Sam looked at him calmly. Only his eyes are visible and the guard chief looked straight at them and asked.

    "Who are you? Why are you doing this?"

    Sam didn¡¯t speak and directly went after the guy. The bear took the chance and came at Sam from behind, just before Sam and the guard chief were about to sh, he suddenly dissolved into his shadow and moved through the legs of the bear and appeared behind it.

    He used his dagger to cut the back of the bear as he jumped upwards with all his strength.

    *ROAR*

    The bear roared in pain and the guard chief was stunned. He ran forward and attacked Sam from the side, but he once again used his shadow ability to disappear and attacked the bear and this time with a stab on its neck and he stood on its shoulder as it tried to get rid of him.

    The guard chief held his sword as he ran after the bear and tried to attack Sam, but he was unable to catch him.

    Because Sam started moving around the bear¡¯s body as he stabbed it on different parts while escaping the guard chief¡¯s attacks.

    The guard chief didn¡¯t dare to attack too rashly as the bear might die.

    But from the looks of it, even if he didn¡¯t attack it would definitely die sooner orter.

    He still hoped that he would be able to save it when the other guards arrived. But what he doesn¡¯t know is something else is happening in the city and the guards would be busy there dealing with that trouble.

    They wouldn¡¯t be able to help him no matter how much they tried.

    As the frustrated guard chief wanted to get rid of Sam even at the cost of the bear, Sam suddenly left the bear and jumped at the guard chief.

    He shed at the shoulder and slipped into the shadow before leaving another sh on the leg.

    Before he could react, he once again clung to the bear.

    Sam just toyed around with the guard chief to waste some time.

    Meanwhile.

    Inside the most luxurious inn of the city, two holograms are moving around in an area while arge tree is growing with a lot of vines creeping around.

    Many guards are trying to fight the tree, but they could nothing as the vines are whipping around and destroying everything.

    The exquisite furniture, the carvings on the walls, and the whole building are about to be destroyed.

    Many fire elemental beasts and cultivators alike are trying their best to burn the tree down. But nothing is happening to it.

    Noah and Kumar are currently on their way towards the rear gate while all the city guards are running towards the inn.

    When they are almost at the gate, the formation discs projecting the holograms inside the inn suddenly disappeared and the tree also couldn¡¯t hold on anymore.

    The guards rxed a bit and half of them stayed back to investigate while the remaining guards went to the gate to assist the guard chief in dealing with Sam.

    Sam saw the guardsing from far away and immediately made his move.

    The bear was already dead. He stored it inside the spatial ring and channeled dark elemental energy throughout his body as he activated shadow fusion.

    He stood still without making a move and the guard chief took advantage of the situation to attack him. Sam caught the arm of the guard chief and the shadow elemental energy enveloped him too and before the guarde and assist the chief, the shadow elemental energy surrounded them as they disappeared from the spot.

    The guards were stunned and they stopped in their tracks.

    They couldn¡¯t make sense of the situation.

    A few secondster a figure flew through the city andnded on the spot.

    He has two wings on his back and his skin tone is dark blue which is simr to that of the fiend, but the body structure along with the facial features looked like an elf.

    "What happened here?" He asked the guard who arrived in a cold tone.

    "We.. we just arrived." One of them spoke with some hesitance. This made him turn to some of the people who are still standing a bit away from the entrance and he approached them.

    Meanwhile.

    Noah and Kumar already arrived outside the gate. They are in new disguises, different ones from what they wore when they entered the city.

    They just waited a bit far away from the entrance.

    They are a little anxious. After all, they created a lot ofmotion and there is no evidence and trace of any cultivator there. So, the city will start a search and two people who ran through the city at the same time are bound to raise some suspicions. They need to get away from the city as fast as possible.

    At this moment, a ck mass of energy appeared near a shadow projected by a rock nearby and Sam appeared from it in his cloaked get up.

    Along with him, there is a man who is barely alive with a lot of injuries.

    Sam looked at them and let Sky out without exining anything. The three of them boarded Sky and left the spot as they followed the path at a rapid pace along with the guard chief.

    "Who is he?" Noah asked as she looked at the guard chief.

    Currently, the guard chief is in a state where he ispletely unrecognizable.

    Every inch of his body is covered with the shadow elemental energy corroding it. The injuries have also seeped with shadow elemental energy and it is eating away at his flesh and bones.

    "The guard chief at the entrance."

    "Are you sure?" Kumar asked with a raised eyebrow. The guard chief looked nothing like himself.

    "It is him."

    Sam said as he finished off the guard chief and extracted the memory.

    "He is too good of a memory source to leave him there. So, I just brought him with me."

    Sam spoke as he gave the tokens to them and heaved a sigh of relief.

    "Now, let us finish the traps as fast as possible. It is only a matter of time before they started searching for us along this path. We need to be done by evening and by night we go back and attack the city."

    While Sam, Noah, and Kumar are discussing their ns, in the Farm town in which they got their first harvest of contribution points, a youngdy is currently holding a meeting with the farmers of the town.

    In the same conference room in which the Inner disciple put on a show for the farmers about the so-called threat, she is looking at all the farmers as they heard their rants.

    If possible, she just wanted to kill all of them and be done with it. And if not for the elder sitting beside her, she would have done exactly that.

    After the farmers are done with their rant, she stood up and bowed to them.

    "I apologize for the grievances you suffered because of the ipetence of our disciple and the Myriad beast sect willpensate for your losses and I can vouch for that on my personal honor.

    We request you to not leave the farm town because of this incident. We will provide extra benefits aspensation for you..."

    She went on for a few minutes and finally appeased the farmers before sending them away.

    *BAM* *CRASH*

    As soon as they left, she mmed his fist into the stone table which turned into rubble.

    She looked at the administrators that arrived and said.

    "Tell me everything regarding the incident from the start to finish. Whatever minute detail you know."

 Chapter 1178: Hunting the Hounds

    The youngdy heard everything the attendants have to say. They don¡¯t have much to say to begin with. After all, they only knew of the presence of the recording crystals and didn¡¯t even know the contents, and immediately after getting their hands on them, the Inner disciple and the personal guards already made a move sneakily to chase after the people.

    And all they found, in the end, are some buried corpses nearby and the headless corpse of the Inner disciple along with the bones of his pet at the gate of the town.

    At this moment, the Youngdy is holding the note that came along with the recording crystals.

    She read the contents again and again. The killing intent being emitted from her body couldn¡¯t be undermined by the calm fa?ade she is maintaining.

    If not for the Elder shielding them these people would have been stuck to the ground just with the amount of killing intent she is emitting.

    But even now, they are still nervous.

    "You can leave now." The elder dismissed them.

    The old man with a clean shaved face and a square jaw looked extremely handsome and majestic for his age. The youngdy looked at him with a frown but didn¡¯t object.

    After the attendants left with a bout of relief, the old man looked at her and said.

    "This incident has nothing to do with the sect."

    The youngdy looked at him with a gaze that wanted to rip his insides out.

    "How are you so sure? The note clearly suggests that they are a core disciple trying to stop him from promoting."

    "I know it because I met with all the core disciples that very day. All of them are preparing for the uing trial from the Grand Elder. They don¡¯t have time to mess with your little boy toy.

    In fact, they could care less about who you marry. All this while, they are only pissed at him because he is a mere ordinary disciple who came this far by hugging your legs and even wants to marry a core disciple.

    They felt like their status as a core disciple has been sullied with how easily he fooled you and they cannot swallow it calmly.

    So, they wanted to deal with him and be done with it, since dealing with you woulde with more consequences from the sect.

    But since you are so adamant and even went as far as using your influence and favors with the elders to promote him to the core disciple, they are disgusted by you more than him and didn¡¯t even want to deal with him using these techniques.

    They already have a n for that.

    They would have killed him directly on the stage in the uing disciple exchange with a life and death duel.

    They don¡¯t need to go as far."

    The youngdy fell silent. She doesn¡¯t know what to make of it. Her mind is clouded by anger and hatred, but that didn¡¯t make herpletely stupid yet. She can at least understand the situation when someone exined it to her in such detail.

    Seeing her being silent like that, the elder continued.

    "I believe that this is the work of the Fiend Tribe. I heard that they recruited a bunch of mercenaries recently, approximately at the same time as us.

    They want to destroy the businesses, resource points, personnel. They put a bounty on everything and everyone that is rted to us.

    Their system is more borate and flexible and even more rewarding than ours.

    These mercenaries became bold with this. In fact, the tribe offered a position honorary member out just to deal with us.

    I do not think this is their work. Anyway, there is no core disciple who is good at using wood elements like this and the guards are the best of the guard division they would have dealt with them as easily as flipping a hand..."

    He went on and on and finally managed to convince the youngdy that this is the work of the Fiend tribe.

    When she was convinced, the elder finally heaved a sigh. He knew this girl since she was a child and he doesn¡¯t know when she became so muddleheaded.

    All it took was a young man who barely had some cultivation talent and no talent in battle, beast breeding, or any other talent at all. He is good for nothing through and through.

    He had to move mountains and rivers just to save her from the troubles that were created by that guy. Now that he is finally dead, he was relieved, to say the least, but the effort he needs to put in just to make sure that this woman doesn¡¯t go astray and start causing a ruckus in their own sect is too much. He felt exhausted a bit. But finally, he seeded.

    "I will put a word to my connections in the information wing. I will try to find the information on the people who did this. After we identify them, you can deal with them as you like. I will make sure that the sect wouldn¡¯t interfere no matter what and you can have full freedom to deal with them."

    The youngdy nodded and left the room. The Elder finally sighed in relief. He walked to the window and looked at the night sky.

    Meanwhile, at the same time a few hundred miles away, Sam, Kumar and Noah are looking at the city that was under full lockdown through the surveince.

    After the trio caused a mess, the city waspletely locked down. Many guards and mercenaries were sent out to search for the troublemakers.

    In fact, while setting up the traps, they came across some but managed to escape before they were noticed.

    Now that all the traps are done, they decided to make their move.

    "We don¡¯t need to care about the mercenaries, we need to deal with the guards though. They could give us the contribution points."

    "The problem is they, have too many beasts, that are suitable for this area," Noah said from the side.

    Sam smiled and said.

    "The guards all use the Mountain Hound. A beast that is small in size, flexible, and has decent lethality, particrly when they are in groups. But don¡¯t worry. I have ways to deal with them."

    Sam said as he took out shadow mice.

    Noah and Kumar are a bit surprised.

    "Moutain hounds have earth elements and they can run through these creeks while attacking, shadow mice are dark elements and the creeks are not even trouble for them. Now that they have attacking capabilities as well, they are perfect for this."

    As soon as he finished the shadow mice already disappeared.

    As they ran away into the surroundings, their bodies glowed with a ck light and soon the shadow armor surrounded them.

    The three of them also moved in different directions following the shadow mice.

    Sam arrived at the canyon. There are some creeks here that could lead people to the forest patch ahead. The guards are looking through these creeks, assuming that the trouble makers left through these paths, they felt like they are bound to leave some clues behind.

    They already checked the main path for a long time, but they couldn¡¯t get any clues, so they are left with this.

    He looked at a three-man team made of Late stage Pre-transcendent cultivators and the three mountain hounds.

    A shadow mouse appeared near Sam. As soon as he gestured, it moved again and arrived at the feet of one of the mountain hounds. With a single jump, it cut the hound under its belly with a single straight cut and disappeared into the shadows.

    *HOOOWWWWLLL*

    The hound howled in pain and anger as it looked around. It sensed a weird smell, but it couldn¡¯t find it as the shadow mouse disappeared.

    As it looked around aggressively while bleeding, the guard felt confused as he looked at the hound and tried to control it.

    At this moment, the shadow mouse appeared once again and this time it stood on the head of another hound making it curious.

    The first hound sensed its smell and came at it.

    The guards also noticed the small dark figure, but couldn¡¯t make out what it is as it disappeared.

    The shadow mouse then cut up the third hound which doesn¡¯t know what is happening.

    As it dealt with hounds one after other and toyed with them, Sam appeared out of nowhere and snapped the neck of one of the guys with a single swift motion.

    The other two were stunned immediately. They couldn¡¯t react fast enough though. Sam gave each of them a kick on their heads and they are down.

    He looked at the shadow mouse and seeing that the three hounds are dead, he nodded his head in satisfaction. This is just the test for the shadow mice.

    Now that they are doing good enough, it is time for him to go after big fish.

 Chapter 1179: Hunting the Hounds II

    Sam zoomed past the trees as he searched for one particr target.

    The captain of these hound guards. The hound guards have three teams and each team has a captain. Sam, Noah, and Kumar decided to take down each team and Sam directly wanted to go after the captain first.

    Once the leader is down, the chain ofmand with copse and it would be easier to deal with the rest of the guards.

    It didn¡¯t take long for Sam to get near this guy.

    He is in charge of checking all the possible hiding spots in the forest and it is necessary to take him and his team out as fast as possible so their traps wouldn¡¯t identally go triggered or damaged.

    Sam once again sent the shadow mouse to attack the hound. The captain is a Peak stage Pre-transcendent cultivator and even his hound is on the same level. The shadow mouse he is using now is not the one that he made the contract with, this is also on the same level as the hound.

    The mouse pounced onto the hound and started carving his skin up.

    *HOWL* *GROAN* *GROWL*

    It started making different noises in pain.

    The shadow mouse left more than ten wounds and stood in front of the hound. The guard captain and the two guards following him were stunned by this scene. They didn¡¯t expect that a mouse would be present here and it is even dealing with their hound that easily.

    The hound didn¡¯t even wait for the order from his owner and pounced onto the mouse which dodged and zoomed onto a rock, the hound stopped and turned around to go after it.

    This time, the mouse dodged a littleter, making the dog unable to dodge in time and crashing into the rock Of course, there is not much damage from the rock and it even got crushed.

    But the dog became angrier.

    "Stop, it. Come back." The guard captain yelled as he looked around. But the hound didn¡¯t listen to him and just kept on fighting with the mouse.

    Sam who looked at it felt a bit surprised. The beasts are always loyal to the person with who they contracted with. Of course, there are differences in contracts. Like one of master and servant and another like a contract of equals, but in either of them, the beast will definitely listen to the words of the person. But here it ispletely different.

    The beastpletely disregarded him and that too the beast is a canine. Sometimes, as long as a person managed to cultivate a better rtionship with the canine even without a contract, they could be friendly. Much less with the contract.

    Sam just thought about that for a moment and took out a spear.

    He channeled his spiritual energy into it and threw it towards one of the guards.

    The guard sensed the danger and moved to the side and was about to turn around, but the spear just stabbed from his left side into the ribcage and went through his body toe out of the other side.

    Sam jumped down at the same time and the guard captain and the guard looked around stunned.

    They were just about to deal with that mouse that is toying around with three hounds like they were some harmless little puppies.

    They immediately jumped to theirrade to support him as he is barely breathing while the guard captain took out his sword and he looked around vigntly.

    He suddenly swung his sword to the side and Sam who just appeared there, blocked it with his hand and the feather coat is glowing with a golden light on the area of contact.

    His other hand was covered with a faint gray metallic luster as he activated metal elemental fusion and threw a punch in the rib.

    The ribs punctured the lungs and the guard captain started panting heavily as he tried to breathe while his lungs are drowning with his blood. He took out a pill and swallowed it while trying to realign his bone after he pulled the guard to buy some time from Sam.

    But all Sam did was give him a Spinning sidekick on the chest with the same partial fusion and the guard¡¯s rib cage was broken making all the bones go through the lungs and heart. The guard fell down as he palpated while the life slowly left him.

    The guard captain became anxious and tried to look for help from the hounds. But they are not in a good state themselves, one of them already died, and the other had limbs torn open. Thest one is still struggling with the mouse.

    "I.. I am the Guard Captain of the Hound Guards. You cannot do this to me. The Myriad Beast sect wouldn¡¯t leave you alone."

    Sam shook his head in exasperation at the routine words that are being said to his face.

    He lunged forward and gave a front kick straight to his chest and this time used void style. The chest exploded and Sam could see the broken ribs and the punctured lungs along with the faintly beating heart.

    He walked forward and used extracted the memory before collecting their corpses. The mouse was also done with the hounds. He threw them into the storage to feed the Zoi termites and other beasts.

    He took themunication token of the guard captain and tried to contact the subordinate guards.

    "Everyone,e to the forest patch. Take a left from the main path and get to five hundred meters. I have a lead on the targets."

    Sam said it in a whispered tone, cut themunication immediately, and didn¡¯t even pick the token when the other side tried to contact.

    He just sat there with a bow and waited for them toe.

    After five minutes, he saw the signs of the first person and since Sam¡¯s eyesight is better than his peers because of Roc¡¯s bloodline, he spotted them way before they could spot him and he took an arrow to aim at them.

    He channeled light elemental energy to shoot and the arrow went without any sound and at a very high speed as it lodged itself into the eye of the target, before he could react. He died while his mouth stayed open.

    The group halted in their tracks and immediately tried to take cover.

    Sam just nocked another arrow and used fire elemental energy this time.

    The arrow went through the forest setting a small trail of fire as itnded on the hound of the person he killed.

    *BOOM*

    The arrow caused an explosion of golden mes, forcing the guards out of their hiding.

    Sam changed to a wind elemental arrow instantly and attacked the guard who barely managed to block it.

    But unfortunately, the arrow went and hit the hound of another guard which made the hound turn into a shredded lump of meat.

    The guards couldn¡¯t help but gasp in horror.

    They are extremely far away and with the added veil of the trees and the forest, they could barely see Sam and estimate his location.

    As for attacking him from this far, it is not exactly possible as they might not be able to aim their sword attacks that far. And for a sword ray to reach that far, it takes too much energy.

    If they did that, they would be sitting ducks if Sam didn¡¯t die in a single shot.

    One of the guards even tried that in desperation, but Sam didn¡¯t even bother to dodge. The sword ray that was shot at him, didn¡¯t even make anywhere near him. But the next arrow directly hit the guy squarely in his face. Right in the middle of his forehead and killed him.

    Sam then nocked another arrow and this time, he used water elemental energy and his poison energy at the same time.

    He looked at the remaining guards who are about to run away and shot the arrow.

    The guard managed to dodge it but the hound was hit. But this time, unlike the other the hound just didn¡¯t explode outright.

    Rather it started bulging like a balloon and it soon exploded after bulging to a certain extent.

    The blood sprayed all over the ce mixed with the poison he shot and made the skin of the guards and the hounds burn.

    "ARRRGGGG" "HOWWWWWWWLLL..."

    The people and their dogs are groaning and howling pain like crazy.

    The guards ran with all they got.

    Sam used the dark elemental energy next and this time, he used a curse.

    The arrow hit the hound. But it didn¡¯t die instantly. It ran along with the arrow. The guards didn¡¯t think much of it and let it run like that, but all of a sudden, the hound pounced on to the nearest guard and bit on his neck.

    The rest of the guards tried to break them down, but the dog becamepletely made and tried to kill whoever came at it.

    While they are struggling, Sam changed to lightning element, and this time, he didn¡¯t shoot straight. He pulled the string to its limit and aimed higher before leaving the arrow. The group saw the shy attacking from the spot and started running as they left the hound and theirpanion to die.

    The arrow created a silver parab across the sky as itnded right in the middle of the running ground.

    *BOOM* *CRACKLE*

    The lightning explosion made them all crash around. Their bodies are slightly paralyzed and numb all over.

    The people nearest to the strike were injured severely and if they are not treated instantly they would die.

 Chapter 1180: Baiting

    The guards and the hounds are dying one after the other without any discrimination, even though they are still trying to run away, they couldn¡¯t escape Sam¡¯s range that easily.

    Sam changed the elemental energy to the earth element and this time used a different technique.

    He once again shot the arrow into the sky and it made an arc. While it is descending towards the guards though, its speed is unusually high even by the standards of an arrow.

    When itnded in the middle of the group, everyone understood why that is.

    *BOOM*

    Arge explosive sound came as soon as it reached the target. The earth quaked as if a disaster arrived and in case of the guards it is nothing short of it. The ground cracked at first and then each section once again crumbled into its own while the guards and the hounds are still standing there.

    When the dust settled, the guards and the hounds are half buried into the ground. The solid ground that was under them was nowhere to be seen and at this moment, they are in the middle of a quicksand. The more they struggled, the more troublesome it became to get out.

    But the quicksand wouldn¡¯tst long. If they tried to endure a bit and block the attacksing at them, they might have a chance to get away from that ce. But in their terrified states, they couldn¡¯t think much and only Sam knew of this.

    So, he didn¡¯t wait and shot another arrow. As the arrow was lodged into a guy who is just about to stand up, he froze on the spot and a bunch of metal spikes suddenly came from inside his body and he died instantly.

    When the guards and the hounds saw this, they couldn¡¯t help but feel their throats run dry. They never felt so terrified. The gruesome scene is too much even for them and they couldn¡¯t even get their limbs to move in that instant.

    And Sam took advantage of that.

    He shot an arrow towards a small group where two guards and a hound are standing and the arrow hit the hound, which was nailed to ground instantly.

    The guard suddenly came out of the daze and came to themselves before deciding to run, but before they could make a move, a bunch of vines came out of the corpse of the hound and held on to them as they sucked their vitality.

    The more they struggled, the easier it became for them to dragged into the quicksand along with the vines.

    The vines didn¡¯t stop there and proceeded to crawl towards the rest of the group and they desperately tried to get away.

    They took out their swords and tried to swing it around them in the hopes that the sand will clear away and they could escape.

    And a man who did it fast enough managed to do so and crawled outside, but before he could feel happy, an arrow came and lodged into his body and this time, he couldn¡¯t even sense anything rted to the arrow.

    He just died like that.

    By now, only three people and a hound were left, looking at this state, they didn¡¯t want to die, even when they quicksand stopped sucking them in, they didn¡¯t struggle, they just stayed there and raised their hands and even the hound didn¡¯t make a move.

    They are showing their intent to surrender.

    Sam thought for a moment and decided to keep them for now and used harbinger to reach them.

    When the three men and one hound looked at Sam, they felt terrified and didn¡¯t even dare to make an eye contact.

    "We surrender."

    One of the guards spoke.

    "I can see that." Sam replied and gave them a sweeping nce.

    "Who among you is a person of some authority?"

    One of them raised their hands a little more and said.

    "I am the vice-captain."

    "That is good enough. Contact the city and ask for reinforcements and don¡¯t you dare use your code words like crimson forest, and golden sky. You will get a punishment far worse than death if you do something like that."

    When the Vice-captain heard this, he widened his eyes in horror.

    "How... How do you know the code-words?"

    "How do you think?" Sam replied with a smirk.

    "Cap..Captain."

    Sam didn¡¯t answer and just waited for him to make a call.

    The Vice captain made a call with shivering hands and spoke as Sam instructed.

    After he was done, Sam let the four of theme and made them sit beside the a big rock.

    He took out hismunication device and called Noah and Kumar.

    "I am done here. Are you done?"

    "Yes."

    "Yes."

    "Okay then,e to my location as soon as possible. I have a surprise for you guys."

    With that he hung up the call and waited for his partners to arrive. They didn¡¯t take long and when they looked at the four captives, they frowned in confusion.

    "What did you keep them for?" Noah asked.

    "To lure in some more targets. They are the bait."

    "They areing here?"

    "Yes, it would take another ten minutes. Another guard squad, get ready. We would be doing this until they get any doubt, so we can chip them away as much as we can. Meanwhile, I have something for you guys."

    Sam said as he pointed at their foreheads as he shared the information he got from the guard captain.

    When they went through that information, they didn¡¯t find anything wrong but they knew that something is wrong since Sam showed this particrly.

    "What¡¯s up with this? We already got most of this information from the City guard captain yesterday."

    "Of course, in both cases, something that should have been simr is extremely different. Observe the details regarding the beast contract process."

    As Sam said, both of them once again went through the process.

    The beast contract is one of the earliest memories of the guard captain. It is almost a century ago.

    But it is still clear. When both of them saw the beast contract process, they knew that something is different.

    "Is that some kind of special beast contract process that is used by beast cultivators?" Kumar asked in confusion.

    "Yes, it is. But this is a bit different even by those standards. The contract process is clearly shown, but from the looks of it, there is some preparation process which was not shown, until we could get our hands on it, I couldn¡¯t be clear, it would merely be a spection until then.

    One thing I know is that the city guard captain went through a different process and his was normal."

    "Do you think this would effect our task?"

    "If my guess is right, the situation would be influenced on arge scale by this. We need to be careful."

    As they spoke, a shadow mouse came and informed Sam of their next prey¡¯s arrival and the three of them got into action.

    Sam once again took up his bow while Kumar and Noah moved towards their target. This time, things went a lot faster than normal and the soon the group fell. They only let the captain of the group stay alive and dealt with the rest of them.

    "Now, you are going to call the city and ask for reinforcement and tell them the situation has reached a bronze eagle level."

    The captain was stunned.

    "How do you know our code words?" Sam didn¡¯t answer and just replied with a p on his face.

    The code words obviously came from the memories of the two guard captains.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know why the city has this many codewords, but he doesn¡¯t mind. At least, since he already knew they wouldn¡¯t be much of a problem.

    And the code Bronze eagle means, the situation is a bit difficult and the other party has some height advantage and are taking them down. But the threat is not too high to the point they need to send arge scale troops. They are only requesting the city to send some ranged attackers.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know what kind of criterion they used to make these codes, but they are only half-decent.

    They changed the location a bit, they are near a creek which has a bit of wide opening leading to some cave upside.

    Sam brought the captives to the foot of that path and left them there.

    "You know what happens if you slip your mouth." He warned them with his bow.

    And then he walked upwards and shot some random arrows along the path to fool theing prey.

    He even shot the captives with some normal arrows without much strength. They could only groan in pain, but they didn¡¯t dare say anything back and just let it be.

    Sam, Noah, and Kumar waited in their hiding for the next batch toe.

    When the next guard captain along with a bunch of archers came on their beasts, they finallyunched their attacks.

 Chapter 1181: Meeting in the City

    The next squad that came, came on the insect-type beasts. They are also not exactlyrge beasts, a person can barely stand on the spider without falling.

    Sam recognized the spiders instantly. They are the ck-Devil Spiders. Unlike the Devil dragons, these things are not exactly rted to the Devil race in any way. They are just named because of their vicious instincts and their ugly appearance that could make the crying infants stop and the smiling infant cry.

    Sam aimed straight at the guy in the lead and shot a normal arrow without any elemental energy.

    The spider under his feet, aimed at the arrow and shot a web.

    The web came out as a lump like a bullet and an arrow was shot down instantly.

    The captives looked at the reinforcements and felt a bit pained. They didn¡¯t want to sell out theirrades, but they already did. They couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit guilty. One of them wanted to call out, but he heard the whistling sound of the arrowsing and immediately shut himself down.

    He looked upwards and a bunch of arrows are being shot at the Spider guards that are making their way towards them.

    The spiders kept on shooting the arrows down while the guards started moving towards the captives.

    The guard captain looked at the vice-captain Sam captured and asked.

    "How many archers are there?"

    They could understand that question because Sam is in rapid-fire mode. He is not even stopping for a fraction of a second as he shot at them randomly.

    The captain mistook that there are multiple archers just from the sheer amount of arrows shot at them.

    The captives didn¡¯t speak anything, they didn¡¯t dare to. They have this feeling that if they spoke, death is just right above their heads. As long as they spoke, the arrow would be lodged into them. It is like death staring into their soul.

    So, they didn¡¯t speak and stayed put.

    "What the hell is wrong with you? Speak up, you idiots." The Spider Guard captain started yelling on top of his lungs as he saw the captives not speaking anything.

    But the captives didn¡¯t need to go through that torture and guilt for long. Because a bunch of vines suddenly came out of the stone pathway leading up the creek and they started coiling around the spiders that are climbing upwards.

    The Spider guard captain looked shocked as he saw the spiders struggling to get out.

    He led his troops and started hacking the vines. The fire element users immediately used their abilities in hopes that they would be able to burn the vines down.

    But to their disappointment, the vines are unusually and unnaturally resistant to the fire element as if they are made of ironpletely absorbing the heat.

    And in fact, their spection is right. The vines are actually absorbing the fire elemental energy and it is channeling it to the spiders making them squeal for that burning sensation.

    They forgot about the archers and the arrows for a moment and went directly to free the spiders.

    After all, until now, they didn¡¯t feel much of a threat from the arrows. But that changed as soon as they entered the creek.

    The arrows cut through the air and when they lodged into them, a vine started growing out of nowhere, eating them from inside. Within no time, the horror dawned on them.

    They are just target practice for the archers above. The other party just wanted to have an easier time and wanted to lure them inside so that they can take them all out in one swoop.

    But that is not the end. Along with the arrows, soon the spears starteding at them with much more destructive force.

    The whole area turned into a death zone with all the chaos.

    The captives looked at this scene and felt lucky for being able to survive that long. They felt lucky for having a much easier time than the spider guards.

    Within ten minutes, Sam came out along with Noah and Kumar.

    Except for the Spider Guard Captain, almost everyone is dead and the ones that are still alive are barely able to keep their breath in.

    And just like that, another captive is added to the bunch.

    Sam made them all sit down and he sat on a rock along with the other two and asked.

    "So, now you are going to call and ask for a Silver Panther."

    The spider guard was stunned and said.

    "How do you know our code words?"

    Even though he was defeated miserably, there is that authoritative tone in his voice that pissed the three of them off a bit.

    Sam just smiled and said.

    "I didn¡¯t say you could ask any questions. You are just going to call them and tell them what I wanted you to say."

    The guard captain just looked at him hatefully.

    Sam walked towards him and he stood up to match his gaze.

    "What are you looking at? Just because you seeded in an ambush you dare talk down to me? Why don¡¯t you take these shackles off and go for around and see if you will have that cocky expression on your face."

    Sam was surprised by those words and said.

    "You asked for it."

    Sam said and with a snap of his fingers, the shackles on the Spider Guard¡¯s hands were removed.

    The captain was stunned for a moment and the next second he took a step back and got ready to fight. He lunged forward with a bunch. But Sam disappeared just before the fist was about to him and while he was still in a daze, he felt his vision go dark.

    Sam is currently holding him by his face while covering his eyes with one hand. He lifted him up and mmed him into the ground.

    *THUD*

    The leaf debris was blown to the side.

    When the vision returned to the guard captain, Sam looked down on him as he stood there with a smirk and he ced his foot on his neck.

    "Now, be a good captive and make the call."

    The captain was still reluctant, but he took out themunication token and made a call.

    "Hello, what is the status?"

    The guard captain looked at Sam and spoke.

    "Code.. R... *Mmpf*"

    Sam didn¡¯t let him speak and broke his neck.

    He looked at them and sighed.

    "This guy, he could have kept his life, but he just has to do this."

    He then finished the memory extraction and looked at the captives.

    They felt nervous and said.

    "Please just let us go. We wouldn¡¯t talk to anyone else. We will just escape."

    The vice-captain said pleadingly.

    Sam looked at Noah and Kumar and they just shrugged.

    "Okay, then. Let me apany you to the path."

    With that, he walked with them and watched as they slowly walked away through the path.

    Sam stood there while they went away as he kept an eye on them and also observed whether someone ising from the other side.

    After all, the call from the Spider Guard captain should have created some reaction.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know how right he is.

    Currently, there is an emergency meeting held in the city.

    That Quarter-elf, quarter-winged and half-fiend man, the current lord of the city is currently going through a frustrating phase.

    His hands are extremely itchy.

    Looking at his frustrated expression the administrators all understood one thing.

    The young lord didn¡¯t have the ¡¯ytime¡¯ with his mother.

    It is not exactly good timing for them to disturb him, but they cannot do anything. The situation called for it and they could only bite the bullet.

    "Lord, two teams arepletely gone. The hound guards asked for a Bronze Eagle, so we sent the spider guards, and we received a call from the Spider guard captain and he wasn¡¯t even able to finish the sentence.

    We should assume the worst for both of them. We need to send more forces out."

    "All of them happened from the rear gate. What about the situation from the front gate?"

    "Except for the explosion that happened this morning, nothing is there. It seems like it was meant as a distraction."

    "What about the destruction in the Inn?"

    "The Inn waspletely destroyed. Except for the excessive wood elemental energy and traces of spear intent, there was nothing present. None of the people even recognized the faces of the attackers. All we know is that they looked human and they wore some weird attire that looked like a uniform."

    "The attacker at the front city gate?"

    "He disappeared into thin air at the front gate and there are some people saying that they saw him at the rear entrance escaping with others, but they were unable to describe him."

    "You don¡¯t know who attacked at the front and you don¡¯t know who is attacking at the rear? What the fuck am I feeding you all bastards for?" The young lord coldly said as he looked at all of them with a psychotic gaze.

 Chapter 1182: A little Competition

    The Young lord looked at all the executives and they couldn¡¯t help but shiver in fright. His gaze itself is making even the superior cultivators a bit scared.

    After all, he is but an Astral ne Pre-transcendent cultivator. But he got authority that no one else does in the sect. He is the invincible and indisputable lord of this city and he also had considerable authority in the adjoining two cities.

    He couldn¡¯t tolerate the disrespect and the damage to his pride caused by Sam, Noah, and Kumar¡¯s actions.

    He is boiling with rage and on top of all that, the torture he regrly does to his mother as a part of the routine has to be postponed because of this whole incident.

    He is in a very bad move.

    "Send the Python guards and the Bee guards together. I want everyone rted to the incident caught and I will kill them myself personally."

    "But, Lord. The two guards are the main force of the city, if both of them goes to the rear side of the city, we wouldn¡¯t be able to deal with any attacks that mighte from the front side."

    "Of course, we can. All the administrators will go do the guard duty tonight. You know what, not just tonight. The administrators will do the guard duty until the whole case was over. So, go and guard the gates on both sides while those two guard groups go and do what I told them to do."

    The officials looked at the person who spoke with angry gazes. He really had to ask that.

    "I am going to my Mother¡¯s chambers. No one shall disturb me."

    The Lord turned around and said before leaving the room.

    With that, the two most powerful guard units of the city left the city through the rear gate going towards the location where the Spider guards were sent to.

    Sam who came to the path to send the captives off is still standing there and after half an hour of waiting, he managed to get a glimpse of the two guard unitsing towards them with his telescope.

    He went back to his partners in crime and said.

    "More reinforcements areing. It seems like the other party understood that something is seriously wrong here. So, they sent more people.

    One group has bees with them while the other group has Pythons with them. Both beasts are not exactly of arge size and are not suitable for traveling. But they can be put to good use in the creeks with the narrow area."

    "So, what are we going to do?"

    "Go into the creeks and lure them there."

    Kumar was dumbfounded with the answer and Noah¡¯s expression is not any better.

    "They are good in that terrain and you want to drag them inside."

    "Of course, I want to drag them inside. After killing three hound guard units and one spider guard unit, they would definitely be cautious. The only way they would be confident in fighting us is if they are confident about the location of the battle.

    Anyway, if we lure them to that area, we would catch them off guard and by surprise. They would also think that we dealt with the first two guard units that are not really good in that terrain by utilizing the same trick. So, they would be more confident."

    "Doesn¡¯t that seem too farfetched?"

    "It is. But it might work. Anyway, it doesn¡¯t matter much to us, does it? All it would take is a few minutes of extra time."

    Sam said and the other two shrugged.

    "So, which area are we luring them in?"

    "I saw a natural stone pir maze here, why don¡¯t we try that?"

    They just nodded and they made their way towards that area.

    Meanwhile, Sam appeared in front of the guard units.

    The guard units saw him and the captains took a step forward to ask him questions. But Sam suddenly used a sh created with light element to divert their attention and ran away from the spot towards the creek leading to the natural stone pir maze.

    When the two guard captains came back to their senses along with their guards, they barely managed to get a glimpse of where Sam was.

    They looked at each other and the Bee guards captain spoke.

    "I think this is a lure."

    "You think? This is obviously a lure. It can¡¯t get any more obvious than this."

    "Alright, what should we do?"

    "What else do we do, we will follow. This is our home terrain. We will deal with them here and even if he felt otherwise, we still have to follow, what else can we do with a lord like that." The Python guard captain is clearly frustrated and led his teammates into the creek as they moved towards the maze.

    The bee guard captain shook his head and led his group behind him.

    After they reached the maze, they split up into ten groups. In each group, there are three Python guards and three Bee guards and two of the groups are obviously led by the two captains.

    They moved to different paths leading to various directions in the maze.

    Sam is currently hanging from a stone pir as he looked at the groups dividing at the mouth of the maze.

    He took out hismunication device and spoke.

    "Ten teams and each team has six cultivators and six beasts. Want to have a friendly bet?"

    "I am down."

    "Me too."

    "The one who gets most kills would get to deal with the psychotic young lord of the city. Beasts count as kills too."

    There was a slight pause from the other side, but soon the answer came.

    "Deal."

    "Deal."

    *CRASH*

    As soon as the voice ended, there is a crashing sound of the pir and from the left. That was where Kumar was. He already made a move as soon as he made the deal.

    He could also hear some rumbling sound from the left side where Noah is. She is also using her vines.

    Sam smiled and used his earth element to create a stone tform from the pir that could amodate him enough to stand there.

    He took out his bow and aimed at the Bee nearest to him.

    He used a cursed arrow and shot it.

    But to his surprise, the Bee managed to dodge, the attack, but he didn¡¯t worry as the attacknded on the python.

    When the attacknded on the python, the dark elemental energy turned into a puff of ck smoke and entered its brain making its eyes turn ck.

    It then lunged forward and swallowed the bee that just dodged the arrow.

    The guards who are barely able to notice the arrowing didn¡¯t even have time to reach and search for the shooter before the sh between the bee and python happened.

    The python is trying to swallow the bee as a whole while the bee is using its stinger to get out of the tough situation.

    The two guards who are the owners of the two beasts, couldn¡¯t even make the beasts get out of the fight. The remaining guards managed toe out of the daze and looked around vigntly, they particrly kept an eye towards the possible route.

    But they couldn¡¯t get a glimpse of Sam from the position they are in, because, Sam made another tform on the other side of the pir and shifted on to it immediately.

    He then jumped to a different pir and created a tform before shooting again.

    This time, the bee dodged once again, but the cultivator fell prey for it and he swung his saber onto the dodged bee from the rear. The wings were torn immediately making the bee fall on the ground and the cultivator shifted his saber to the guard standing next to him.

    The sabernded on the shoulder-grazing past because the other party dodged it.

    Sam took advantage of this and shot another arrow onto the bee that fell on the ground with broken wings.

    A vine came out of it and attacked the python¡¯s tale nearby.

    He then shot the same python with a cursed arrow which then turned attention to its own contractor and tried to swallow him.

    Sam shifted from that spot and jumped to a new pir from where he shot at the guards.

    Within a few minutes, the six guards and twelve beasts are dealing with each other with their backs wide open to him and he finished the injured ones himself with the arrows.

    He came down on harbinger to collect the bodies and moved to a different spot. He already let out the surveince, but the only problem is that he gave crystal tablets to his partners in crime as well.

    So, thepetition would be a bit tough.

    But this is exciting as well and the real tough time is for the guard teams that came unknowingly into the trap of three killers who are using their lives as determining factors for a bet on who could take the life of their boss.

 Chapter 1183: Competition Ends

    Sam jumped from one pir to another. He already put the harbinger away. Even though it is convenient, it is extremely eye-catching.

    The other party would be easily able to see him.

    He looked at the crystal tablet and went after a group of guards. After reaching a certain distance, he created a tform once again and started shooting at them.

    He is at their rear with their backs wide open and he once again used a cursed arrow to shoot at the python.

    The python is lunged at the guard next to it and coiled around him as it tried to swallow him.

    Sam then, used the wood elemental arrow on them that made a vine growing out of the python¡¯s body that devoured the python and the manbined.

    By now the group noticed that arrowsing from the rear and unlike the first group that devoured into chaos, these people didn¡¯t care about the dying two and went to the nearest stone pir to hide.

    Sam is currently standing a long-distance away. Certainly, his spiritual sense couldn¡¯t reach that far. But his energy vision has some use here.

    He jumped from one stone pir to another to take a look from different angles and finally managed to get the view of one person and a bee.

    He immediately shot him with the cursed arrow. But this guy failed to take the bee down as it was vignt enough to move away.

    The guard went after the bee and came out into open. And to Sam¡¯s surprise, the Bee started retaliating. After all, even if the contracted beast didn¡¯t like the owner or if he is doing something to him, there is no way a beast could retaliate because of the restrictions of the contract. At least, that is the situation in the mostmon contracts.

    He couldn¡¯t help but grow curious about what kind of contract these people went through. First, a Canine rejects any and all orders from the cultivator and now a Bee is directly attacking the guard.

    The guard whose mind is clouded didn¡¯tst long with the bee and was shot down and the bee was shot down immediately as it became distracted with the guard and left its back wide open.

    Sam shifted his position and started moving a bit closer to the group.

    From his energy vision, he could see that they are trying to use the cover of the stone pirs to close the distance between them.

    He tried to take a shot a few times, but he couldn¡¯t find the proper gap to do so.

    After some time, Sam got frustrated and he aimed his arrow at the pir far away.

    He activated energy vision and looked at the changes in the energy and as soon as he noticed the change, he released his arrow.

    The arrow whistled past the air as it rotated at an extremely fast speed andnded on the stone pir, but it didn¡¯t stop there, the earth element around the arrow acted as it drilled through the pir in a fraction of a second andnded on the back of the guard.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop and shot another arrow at the same pir and close to the previous spot.

    The stone pir started cracking.

    *CRASH*

    The stone pir fell to that side, but it didn¡¯t copsepletely, it leaned onto the pir next to it.

    But at least, the bee with the guard died with that arrow.

    The guards who are hiding and skillfully making their way to Sam were stunned for a moment as they looked at the copsed pir, they didn¡¯t expect that someone would be this tyrannical.

    But they didn¡¯t know that it was just the beginning.

    Since they are hiding behind these pirs, Sam thought of other ways to attack, and drilling through the pir is just one of those methods.

    The next arrow he shot didn¡¯tnd on any guard or beast, but itnded on the ground near two guards and their beasts.

    But as soon as itnded, the guards felt their knees grow weak as the gravity around them acted up. The Bee couldn¡¯t even fly and felt like it was being pulled down by someone forcefully.

    And Sam shot another arrow which spewed golden mes crazily and he kept on shooting the two arrows until the two guards and the two beasts were roasted to the crisp while they are still alive.

    Soon, the second group was over and to his surprise and delight, the third group was actually attracted to the mes as they came here by themselves, allowing Sam to shoot them dead easily.

    When he was done here. He started moving towards his fourth group. But the problem is that, this happened to be thest group for everyone and on his way, he saw Noah and Kumar making their way too.

    He stopped in his tracks and shot an arrow at the group. But before even the group could react, a Spear flew through from a different direction and shed with the arrow destroying it in mid-air.

    Sam looked at Kumar who is a bit far away and jumped downwards. As he hid in the middle of pirs while shooting.

    But to his dismay, wall of vines appeared out of nowhere and blocked the arrow.

    Sam felt frustrated by this, but that didn¡¯t stop him from doing what he needs to do. He kicked the stone pir he was hanging on to andnded on a new one as he made his way towards the group.

    The group is currently standing in a space big enough to amodate their battle and they are a bit confused.

    They could see Sam¡¯s shy arrows being shot at them, but they also saw other shy attacks blocking and saving them.

    They didn¡¯t know what to make of it and they arepletely out of the loop.

    Sam looked at the other two yers and estimated that their arrival time at the location would be faster than his.

    So, he decided to make it even.

    He shot an arrow at both sides simultaneously and it ispletely aimed at the stone pirs instead of the yers themselves.

    Noah and Kumar were caught off guard because the stone pir they were about to kick to get the momentum to reach the next one, suddenly copsed and their trajectory changed. Noah almost fell down and she saved herself with a vine hammock while Kumar stabbed the spear into the body of the stone pir to stop his fall.

    Sam took the chance and two arrows were shot at the group who are still in a daze.

    He managed to get a python and a guard who was targeted because a bee dodged.

    The two arrows are the cursed ones and they immediately acted on with clouded minds causing chaos in the group.

    But this didn¡¯tst long.

    Because the leader of the group is the Bee guard captain and he decisively killed the guard and python as soon as they acted on others.

    But the damage is already done for others and they are injured severely.

    Sam took this chance and started shooting arrows. Three arrows managed to make it before a wall of vines was made in his way forward and blocked the arrow and himself moving forward.

    Sam is really surprised at how far Noah could reach in this stony area, but he didn¡¯t care too much.

    He just turned on his light elemental fusion and zoomed past like a light beam making a hole through the vine wall.

    Noah and Kumar were stunned once again. They didn¡¯t expect this from Sam at this moment, it could be said that they grewcent and for a second and involuntarily forgot about Sam¡¯s many elements and his versatile use of them.

    He managed to cover a lot of distance with every leap and before long he reached the group faster than the other two.

    He jumped from the pir and on the way, he stored the bow away while taking his sword out. He shed forward as the golden light crescent sliced past the group while taking the Bees down as hended on the ground.

    The guard captain¡¯s bee which is of a higher level than the rest is the only thing that managed to dodge the attack, the rest were sliced into two cleanly and the cut was as if it was butter.

    Sam didn¡¯t wait for the other party to react as soon as hended he lunged to the side and stabbed a guard in the guts killing him on the spot.

    He was about to move away, but a Spear made its way towards him, so he had to dodge which let the spear take the head of the guard he was after.

    But Sam didn¡¯t waste his time and sliced the python into two.

    At this moment, three weird objectsnded at his feet and exploded with a puff of brown and green smoke.

    Noah has reached her attack range.

    But Sam is not worried, he just smiled as he looked at the guards that are inhaling the poisonous gas and going unconscious, he just waved his hand and Mia came out.

    Her nine heads moved as four of them inhaled the poisonous smoke and three of them bit off the heads of two beasts and one guard while thest one shot a poisonous ball at the guard captain.

    Sam sent Mia back in and just stretched his body in rxation.

 Chapter 1184: Cleaning the City

    Sam tapped on the floor and a stone p protruded upwards making a seat for him.

    The team leader and the remaining guards looked at him in surprise.

    They didn¡¯t know why Sam who is way ahead of them and even had the element of surprise didn¡¯t attack them. They couldn¡¯t make sense of the situation. But Sam just rxed as he cleaned the blood off of himself calmly.

    Noah and Kumar already made their way and both of them are extremely disappointed.

    Because Sam killed exactly the number that would make him have more kills than the other two.

    Noah is particrly angry and she directed all of that to the remaining guards, the guard captain in particr who retaliated had the worst bashing he has ever faced in his whole life.

    She didn¡¯t kill him instantly and beat the crap out of him before asking.

    "How many more guard units are there in the city?"

    The guard captain panted heavily as he struggled to reply.

    "Only one. All guard units are destroyed."

    "What are the other defenses inside?"

    "Apart from the formation around the city and the administrators, there is nothing inside."

    He hurriedly replied.

    After all, he doesn¡¯t like the young lord that much anyway, so he didn¡¯t feel the slightest bit guilty about giving this information out.

    Sam looked at the situation with an amused expression. He could guess why she is so angry, maybe she is just frustrated that she couldn¡¯t deal with this mother torturing psychopath herself, but to even go as far as to torture the guard, he couldn¡¯t picture herself as the same person who asked how he is dealing with killing so many people that have no enmity with him.

    After some time she calmed down and Sam said.

    "You know I have a way to get the information after this guy dies right? Why bother with the interrogation. It is a waste of time."

    "I just felt like it."

    Sam just chuckled and said.

    "Okay now that we are done here, let us go to the city and greet people there. I suggest we sneak in and attack them. Even though it wouldn¡¯t matter much if we just attacked straight, I think we can save ourselves some trouble and energy if we attack them sneakily.

    Poison, ambush and assassination."

    "Let¡¯s just go. But how are we sneaking in?"

    "With this guy of course."

    Sam brought out the shadow mouse and also the lightning divine dimension.

    Sam let both of them in before following them inside and letting Shadow mouse handle the infiltration.

    "Is this the divine dimension fragment?" Noah asked and Kumar is also looking around with bright eyes.

    Sam nodded and asked his question.

    "Do you know about these things?"

    "We read some documents in our new sect," Kumar said from the side as he checked the soil.

    "Then, I have a question. What is the difference between a fragment and a divine dimension itself?"

    "Do you know how the Divine Dimensions are formed?" Noah asked instead of replying.

    "By the Divine ne cultivators?"

    "Yes, until they reach thest stage of the Divine ne and were about to cross to the next ne, the Divine dimension wouldn¡¯t be called a full-fledged dimension, until then it would only be a fragment.

    And the primary difference is the space inside.

    The Divine dimension fragment is not an independent space, it absorbs the spiritual energy from outside, of course, thews formed inside would refine and purify the energy so it is suitable for letting creatures grow inside, but a fragment can only grow so much.

    But once it became a full-fledged dimension, it would be a world of itself and the crystal would only be a transfer point to it.

    And every crystal representing a divine dimension or a fragment is only obtained after killing the person who formed it and until then, it would be an inherent part of the creator of the dimension."

    As she exined, Sam carefully listened and nodded in understanding.

    "You know a lot about this stuff."

    "Well, as I said, we have a decent library within the sect we joined. As long as we have enough authority, we could read anything we want."

    "Sounds like a great ce."

    "Yes."

    "By the way, what are the uses of this fragment?" Sam asked.

    "There are not many. Some people use it to grow herbs and some people use it grow beasts and some people use it for theprehension of the youngsters and their cultivation."

    "Cultivation? I thought people couldn¡¯t cultivate inside."

    "It depends actually. The creator of the divine dimension cannot cultivate inside and the basic understanding is that the Divinews separate from cultivators and beasts. A beast can cultivate inside a cultivator¡¯s divine dimension or fragment and a cultivator can cultivate inside the Beast¡¯s divine dimension."

    Kumar answered this one.

    Sam was about to answer some more questions, but he stopped as they arrived at their destination.

    They came out of the dimension and looked around.

    They are in a remote alley inside the city.

    Sam turned to them and asked.

    "Now, what. Where should we go first?"

    "From the information we got, the administrators were given the guard duty for the city. They will sooner orter understand that the Bee guards and the Python guards are not going toe back, so they would be alert. We should attack them before they could realize this.

    I know the locations of the watchtowers in the city. I think the administrators would be there. We can go there first."

    Kumar said and the other two nodded as they made their move.

    The city is not exactly calm. Even though there is this tense atmosphere around, the situation is not exactly chaotic. Unlike the previous times in other cities, the whole city is not under lockdown. The most they did is not get out of the city and restrict entry. The citizens themselves are roaming around free. For some weird reason even though it is way past midnight the city is still full of people.

    The lord is really rxed even though they lost a lot of guards and since no one saw the three of them before, so they don¡¯t have to worry about getting caught or something like that.

    They reached their first location within a few minutes.

    They could see some guards roaming around the watchtower and with the telescope they could get a clear and detailed view of the administratorzing around on the top of the tower.

    After all, the city was at peace for a long time and any violence that has urred was actually caused by the Young Lord.

    Even though this attack is new, they really didn¡¯t care much and felt like they would bounce back instantly. That is why the administrators are taking it easy.

    "I will deal with the guards, you guys go upstairs and deal with the guy."

    He spoke and disappeared from that spot. He acted like a ck shadow and appeared behind one of the guards as he snapped his neck with a single swift motion and disappeared.

    *Thud*

    The slight thud made the nearby guard look in that direction and run towards hispanion to check on him, but before he reacted, he felt a strong impact and lost consciousness.

    Sam is looking down on him and with a snap, he painlessly killed the guy. He once again disappeared into the shadows and went towards another guy. The whole process is painless and simple. This is the easiest time he had dealing with the guards and these people don¡¯t have any beasts with them which indicates that they might be from the guard extension.

    As Sam is dealing with the guards, Noah and Kumar had an easier time as they climbed up the watchtower. They took the stairs like they are taking a walk in their own establishment.

    After ten minutes, Sam also went upstairs and everyone is dead.

    He ced his hand on the administrator in charge of the watchtower and made him into undead and he did the same with the rest of the guards.

    He left them to roam around and left.

    The whole process of theming here and leaving didn¡¯t alert anyone and they are making their way towards the second watchtower and in the way, they took care of a few guards who are scattered here and there.

    For the next hour, there is nothing but death in the city but no one was able to see it. The roads also calmed down and not many people are roaming outside, there is barely anyone.

    The three of them dealt with all the watchtowers and the only thing left is to deal with the town hall.

    The top dogs of the area will be present there.

    And they walked directly there as if they are walking into their own home.

    The guards are no issue.

    "So, guys do you have something to deal with the cultivators in Initial stage Transcendent cultivators."

    Sam asked.

    "What? Do you think you are the only ones with the preparations?"

    "I don¡¯t think so. I just hope you guys are ready. You already lost the main guy to me. If you dy a bit, you would lose without getting any kills here."

 Chapter 1185: Top Dogs

    "Are you sure about that? I think it would you, that is going to have troubles with all your little overly powerful toys being restricted from the user due to our rules. I think you wouldn¡¯t even have some mildly powered things to use."

    Noah said as she gave him a side-eyed nce.

    "Oh, really? You don¡¯t really have to worry about that. In fact, I am pretty sure that I would be able to deal with anyone in this ce and as for the top dogs of the city, the administratorse powerhouses of this city, I would be able to deal with them, without even using my own attacks."

    "Yeah, yeah. We will see."

    Noah said snidely.

    "How about a wager then?" Sam said which made the other two, stop in their tracks. They looked at Sam with surprise. They just felt that Sam is a bit bragging when he said he wouldn¡¯t use his own attacks to deal with the opponents. After all, the people they are about to face have high-level cultivation, at least some of them and it would be impossible to not throw in their attacks. In fact, they need to use everything they have including some trump cards.

    But now that Sam is asking for a wager they were really surprised.

    Noah thought for a moment and said with a smile.

    "If we win, you need to design a city for us. All the defenses and constructions suitable for our affinities and strengths."

    "A city for both of youbined?" Sam asked as he looked at them weirdly and understanding the meaning of that gaze, both of them blushed a little.

    "Alright, but what would you give me if I lose?"

    Noah thought for a moment and said.

    "The exclusive notes of the research of Divine dimensions and their fragments."

    Sam raised an eyebrow and smiled.

    "That is a deal. You guys better prepare the notes in advance."

    "You need to win first," Noah said and the two of them turned around going inside the hall.

    They were greeted by a number of administrators who are still busy with their duties.

    Sam stayed a step behind and started doing some hand-signs. Dark elemental energy surrounded him as he activated fusion and a spell that couldbine multiple attacks into a single curse appeared in his hands.

    He controlled his energy as he made sure the spell didn¡¯t destabilize and closed his eyes. The shadow undead appeared from under his feet and surrounded him.

    By now, the administrators already reacted and started attacking.

    A Fire serpent spat arge amount of Slimy magma at Sam, but he just kept his eyes closed and created an area around himpletely under his influence with his spatial element which makes the attacks slow down by arge margin.

    He is bncing the curse power, the shadow undead, and the space element altogether and therge ball of magma didn¡¯t make it towards him and slowed down.

    Sam controlled his Merging curse and swallowed the Magma ball.

    He slowly walked forward and the shadow undead directly went after the serpent with their attacks.

    The serpent was taken down in no time and meanwhile, Sam caught a ball of lightning aimed at him andrge turbulent air cannon focused on him.

    But he just kept on moving forward without even opening his eyes. One of the administrators observed this scene and felt a bit lost, all the ranged elemental attacks that were focused on Sam stopped in front of him and they mysteriously disappeared into the mass of dark elemental energy hovering in front of Sam.

    He picked his sword and ran towards Sam tond an attack directly.

    But as soon as he entered the range of the influence under Sam¡¯s control, he couldn¡¯t even move his hands much less attack. He stopped in a weird posture and couldn¡¯t even breathe properly as he hovered in the air and just when he thought that he would be free when Sam moved, he realized how simple his thinking was.

    He actually moved along with Sam. Nothing changed except for their initial positions. Everything in that area of influence rtive to Sam remained the same.

    Before the administrator could do anything, one of the shadows came with a dagger and sliced his throat, and then only was he freed from the spatial lock.

    Noah and Kumar looked at the situation and couldn¡¯t help but shake their heads in exasperation. Particrly, Kumar. He looked at Noah and said.

    "You just had to provoke him didn¡¯t you?"

    "He started it first."

    "Of course, he started it, because he can back his words. Did you see that ck thing in his hands? Even I can feel that it can pack serious damage from here."

    "What are you soining about? It is not that big of a deal even if we lose. All we need to give away are some notes."

    "You and I know that it is not about the payment of the wager."

    Noah didn¡¯t retort and just focused on fighting.

    She knew that it is not about the payment, it is just they kept on losing Sam since this game has started. He was just overly prepared every time. It is almost like he is terrified of losing and prepared for every scenario in advance.

    She couldn¡¯t even think of one instance where he felt a genuine fear of dying and not being able to do anything to change the situation. He always had a way to turn around and it was not even that hard.

    All the things that are hard were the preparations for that situation. As for the execution, it was always the easiest part in his case.

    It could even be said that throughout the game over the years, Sam had the most smooth-sailing journey of them all.

    So, since they caught with the rules of not using his excessive preparations, she felt like they would have some edge over him.

    But she really did underestimate him and didn¡¯t learn from the previous failures. Now, there is going to be another loss in her ount.

    While she is thinking and killing, the three yers noticed some external presenceing into the room and looked up the stairs.

    The Young Lord and was followed by two men and one woman whose cultivation level seemed to be Initial stage transcendence.

    They are the three top dogs of the city.

    The yers couldn¡¯t help but exchange a nce.

    This coincidence just made things easier for them.

    They don¡¯t have to worry about extra people attacking them while dealing with these people.

    The young lord also looked at the three yers in this gap and sneered.

    "I will kill those administrators on the guard duty today, how dare they ck off like this and let these three pests enter the town hall."

    He paused and looked at the administrators that are already dead and the struggling ones that are still alive.

    "Just how useless can you guys be, you can¡¯t even kill three people."

    The three administrators standing behind the young lord couldn¡¯t help but grit their teeth and suppress their anger.

    The Young lord they are serving really doesn¡¯t have any self-awareness and cannot process the situation properly.

    Even they could tell that the people on the guard duty are either dead before they knew it orpletely unconscious.

    If it was just one or two people, then it could be considered them cking off, but if that many guards didn¡¯t manage to notice three peopleing in and particrly in such an overbearing manner, there is no way they would all fail.

    So, the administrators are not to me.

    But they are sure that this thick-skulled young lord wouldn¡¯t be able to understand even if it wasid bare and exined to him.

    As they thought, the young lord turned to him and said.

    "Take care of them. I don¡¯t want them dead. I need to interrogate them. So keep that woman alive. She looks good enough."

    He looked at Noah as he licked his lips.

    Noah gritted her teeth andunched herself forward as a bunch of vines suddenly appeared under her feet and pinned down all the administrators around her.

    One of the top dogs came in her path and blocked her ascent and when Kumar was about to help her out by blocking that top dog, another top dog came in and stopped him.

    "Spear user? That is good."

    Kumar said as he changed his spear and looked at the top dog with a cold smirk.

    The person who is fighting against Noah is a sword user.

    And thest top dog who was also the only woman of the three turned out to be a mage.

    Sam still didn¡¯t open his eyes, but he ¡¯saw¡¯ everything that is going on here and the woman that happened to be the mage didn¡¯t know that she is in for something good.

    He is the worst opponent she could have picked now.

 Chapter 1186: Chasing the Young Lord

    Thedy looked at Sam with interest. She didn¡¯t see the battle as she was in a meeting with the young lord.

    As soon as they arrived, they saw the current scene. She didn¡¯t know how Sam dealt with so many people without a single scratch on them. If he was holding a sword with blood dripping on it, she would have understood, but he is just standing there with his eyes closed.

    Lightning crackled as aimed at it and arge bolt of lightning was aimed at Sam¡¯s head.

    For the first time, Sam moved while an attack ising.

    He ducked into a defensive position while still holding the ball of ck mass while spatial energy rumbled around him. The sphere of influence around him shook wildly as the lightning struck it with all its might.

    Sam gritted his teeth and he used all his concentration to slow the attack down and freeze it within the sphere and finally the ck ball in front of him swallowed it with utmost difficulty and Sam had a smile appeared on his face and he suddenlypressed the ck ball making it shrink and when it is as small as an egg, he stopped.

    The ck ball then started floating around him like a revolving around the sun.

    Sam just stood there and rapidly made hand signs.

    Meanwhile, the woman who attacked Sam didn¡¯t do anything for this short moment as she tried to understand how Sam¡¯s power works.

    After she saw another ck ball appearing in his hands, she once again made her move. She couldn¡¯t understand where the attacks are going and do not know how to make him stop doing it. One thing she knew is that Sam is struggling to block and absorb the attacks, so she decided that as long as she attacked him hard enough things would be good for her.

    And thus began a swarm of lightning snakes attacking Sam constantly and arge snake with electric blue scales helped the woman as coiled around the sphere influence as it attacking him lightning and sheer physical strength.

    Sam started struggling as she expected. In a few minutes, he almost knelt down on the ground as the spatial sphere of influence which ispletely invisible is being shrunk gradually.

    He opened his eyes finally and looked at the woman with a pained expression. The lightning snakes that came at him are being absorbed into the ck ball, but his endurance is taking a toll.

    He knelt down and let the lighting ravage him after three minutes and the blue lightning entered Sam¡¯s body.

    But he didn¡¯t let it take over him and tried his best to channel most of it into the ck ball.

    Thedy looked at Sam with a disdainful expression.

    The six shadows couldn¡¯t do anything to her. The shadows are only good at closebat and she is skilled enough to not let them near her and deal with her.

    And Sam couldn¡¯t let them fight to their full extent by giving any instructions because he is too focused on the Merging curse and defending himself.

    That is why she felt like there is no challenge whatsoever.

    She wanted to finish off Sam and was about to make the final move, but all of a sudden, a smirk appeared on Sam¡¯s face.

    His hair is standing on its ends because of all the electrocution he has to suffer and even smoke is emitting from it.

    Sam stood up and waved his hand. The first small ck ball shed towards thedy and when she tried to attack it to defend herself due to her bad feeling about this ck ball, the shadow undead suddenly appeared and blocked all her attacks one by one.

    Sam then removed the spatial area of influence and the snake suddenly coiled into due to the abrupt disappearance catching it off guard, but soon it came back to itself and tried to crush Sam.

    He didn¡¯t bother to defend the coiling and just mmed the second ck ball into its body.

    *HIIIIIISS*

    The snake hissed wildly and at the same time...

    "AARRRRHHHHH"

    Thedy started screaming on top of her lungs.

    Sam looked at one beast and one person going through the torture of absorbing the attacking power of multiple attacks on their body in a single instance and took out some heavenly wine to heal himself.

    He recalled the shadow undead and looked at the other yers.

    "What is it guys, do you want some help? All you have to do is ask nicely."

    He said with a grin making Noah and Kumar want to bash his head in. But they don¡¯t have the luxury to think of these things as they had to focus on their current opponents.

    Soon the torture was over and the two people are dead.

    Sam shifted his focus to the young lord who had an extremely weird expression on his face. Sam is extremely familiar with this expression. This is the expression of a person who is so in over his head and when something that could knock some sense into their dense skullses across, they would deny it in their minds with all their brain cells, but the small, tiny part of the brain that is rational is telling them to either fall on his knees and beg for forgiveness or to run the fuck out of that ce because his delusions wouldn¡¯t save his ass.

    His legs shivered as he looked at Sam looking at him with that grin. He looked around for some more support, but none of the people who are alive could halt Sam even for a second, and with that realization he ran away.

    "Guys, finish it off. I will be going after our final prize."

    He said before chasing the young master who went upstairs with all his might.

    Sam leisurely followed him while he recovered his energy and soon they are on the rooftop. It is already past dawn and the sun is rising in the east.

    Sam took in the view with a smile. He could see therge stone pir maze that was outside of the city from here and it looked great with that sunlight as the background.

    The young lord suddenly halted in his tracks as he looked stood at the edge of the terrace.

    Sam frowned at this, after all the young lord has wings. He couldn¡¯t understand the reason why this guy is not just running away.

    But he didn¡¯t bother to think too much as he neared the young lord and when he was only a few feet away from him, the young lord mmed his foot onto the stone b under him and a trap under Sam¡¯s feet triggered.

    Sam looked a bit surprised. The young lord immediately spread his wings as he flew away.

    Sam felt a lot of dark elemental energy entering his body as it tried to seal him in the ce.

    But he didn¡¯t feel anxious at all.

    He channeled his dark elemental energy into his feet and used ripple style as he slowly raised to his tiptoes and hopped a bit on the spot.

    The dark elemental energy rippled and it sent all the energy of the trap to be spread out making the trap unusable.

    He looked at the young lord who is already halfway to the city gate.

    His body glowed with wind elemental energy as he activated fusion and his feather coat adjusted a bit as two gaps appeared on the back.

    Two wings formed out of his body and spread out to their full glory and when Sam deactivated the wind elemental energy, they turned to the roc wings and he pped them as he flew after the young lord.

    Sam felt a bit ufortable at the start as he didn¡¯t use the wings for a long time. Even now, he is just doing this for fun. He knew for sure that this young master wouldn¡¯t be able to get too far away.

    He is just chasing him like this for fun. If he took off on harbinger or even on Sky, he would have already caught up to that guy.

    The young lord looked at Sam who is flying behind with eyes widened in disbelief.

    He didn¡¯t expect that Sam would be able to fly like this. Because, he is counting on the fact that Sam would only be able to fly on a beast and as for why he did that, it is because he has a way to escape if it was just another beast.

    And Sam also understood as soon as he saw the young lord just dove into the stone pir maze after he crossed the gate.

    If Sam was on Sky, it would be hard for him to find him. Even though the path is arduous through the mage, since the young lord¡¯s goal is to keep himself alive, he would care and would go through there.

    But now his n is a big failure because Sam also dove into that maze right behind him.

 Chapter 1187: Releasing the Mother

    Sam pped his wings as he followed the Young lord and he must say that the chase is more interesting than he thought.

    The young lord is really skilled at flying and he tried to red right of Sam in the stone pir maze a few times within the first three minutes. But it is just that Sam is also as good enough and experienced in these chases that made it impossible for him to simply be thrown off.

    The young lord looked over his shoulder to take a peek at Sam who is chasing after him and cursed under his breath.

    He suddenly spun in the air and his wings glowed with wind elemental energy which condensed into the curvy wind des that were suddenly discharged at Sam who is on his tail.

    Sam was stunned for a moment and took an extremely hard turn upward, barely managing to dodge the des. He hovered over and saw the young lord taking several directions and increased his speed to catch up to him.

    The wind des were kept onunching towards Sam and he kept slowing him down.

    The chase went on for the next five minutes and Sam understood how less equipped in terms of experience he is when ites to a battle like this.

    He practiced many times when he first got these wings, but most of the time he practiced with Sky and Yanwu.

    He didn¡¯t get to do any practice with the winged race and other flying humanoid races. Now he understood that he never ounted any thoughts to the tactics of cunningness and cowardice.

    He couldn¡¯t think of those when practicing and now he is paying the price.

    Sam activated wind elemental fusion and sped up.

    And this time he didn¡¯t dodge the wind des that wereing at him, instead, he started attacking with his own wind des and blocked them.

    This gave him enough lead to catching up with the young lord who looked at Sam and yelled.

    "Fucking let me go, you pesky little shit."

    As he said, he suddenly took out something and threw it at Sam. It looked like a ck ball and Sam rotated to the side as he barely escaped it.

    *BOOM*

    But when it was right next to his stomach, it exploded.

    Sam was blown away by the impact as he crashed into the stone pir and then started dropping. Sam felt himself being forcefully corroded with dark elemental energy as he tried to p his wings.

    He folded the wings instantly and turned to the dark elemental fusion as he absorbed the excess energy flow and then used that excess energy to turn the dark elemental fusion to the shadow elemental fusion which made it easier for him to get out of the current situation.

    The young lord looked at him free-falling like that and couldn¡¯t help but smirk. Too bad, he didn¡¯t bother to check what happened fully. Sam looked at the shadow of the pir near him and smiled as he then looked at the young lord trying to escape.

    He estimated his speed quietly and he dove faster to reach the shadow.

    He channeled spatial elements and as soon as he hit the shadow, he disappeared from the spot. There is no crash, no destruction, and not even a sound. All that was there is his disappearance.

    And when the young lord just thought that he lost Sam, suddenly saw Sam appearing from in front of him and arge wind de was thrown at him abruptly.

    The young lord took a hard turn to the right as he used a stone pir which has a sharp edge to get a grip and change his direction.

    But to his dismay, Sam confronted him from the other side and a punchnded squarely on his face making him crash into another stone pir.

    Sam didn¡¯t waste time and tried following up with another attack, but the other party showed his experience in flying. He used his wings to move in the air and let his feetnd first on the pir and he kicked it tounch himself at Sam.

    Sam moved to the side a bit and caught the hand of the young lord with one hand and then used the other to hit the other party in the armpit with a single strike the shoulder bone broke. But Sam has no intention of leaving him with that and the tango in the air began.

    Both parties used wind elemental energies as they threw punches at each other. But the young lord kept on missing as every time he made a move before he could even finish it, he was being hit in the head by the fist.

    It is as if he could see where it ising from and when it is going toe, but he still couldn¡¯t avoid it no matter what he did.

    This made him feel extremely frustrated but he couldn¡¯t do anything.

    Sam kept on pushing him backward and soon they were against a stone pir. Sam held him by his throat against the pir while he ced his other hand on the pir to use his earth element and make some protrusions that could shackle the young lord to it.

    The shackles held him by his feet, hands, and even at the hip.

    He then stepped back and looked at the young lord.

    "You look perfect here."

    *BAM* *BAM*

    After that, what happened is just a barrage of punches raining on his face as one tooth after another fell off.

    "I wouldn¡¯t leave you alive. I will skin you before killing you." The young lord yelled through the swollen mouth.

    Sam just looked at him in disdain and kept on repeating the punches and soon the words gradually changed.

    "Stop hitting me you asshole."

    *BAM* *BAM*

    "No, no. It is hurting you piece of shit."

    *BAM* *BAM*

    "Please, I beg you. I beg you."

    *BAM* *BAM*

    After pounding him for a good while, Sam finally flew close to him and held the wings. The young lord looked at him in horror and said.

    "What are you doing? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? TAKE YOUR HANDS OFF? DON¡¯T TOUCH MY WINGS."

    He yelled. But Sam didn¡¯t care.

    *RIIIPP*

    "AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHH......."

    A ripping sound reverberated aloud in the maze followed by the soul-searing scream that outdid it.

    Sam threw the wings away and caught hold of him so that he could bring him back to the city.

    He directly went to the hall.

    There he saw Noah and Kumar sitting leisurely with the dead bodies of the two dogs and their beasts in the hall.

    "Good that you are finally done."

    "We were done a long time ago, we are waiting for you toe back. What took you so long to catch this pipsqueak." Kumar replied as he stood up.

    "He is good with wings and he had his way around the stone pir maze. Anyway, just be d that either of you didn¡¯t win thepetition, otherwise, our young lord would have escaped."

    "Is he really that good?" Noah asked doubtfully.

    "He is good. At least, at escaping anyway. I was really wondering how can be born so talentless when I saw him, but his talent lies in the ces we wouldn¡¯t consider much."

    "Really, what is that?"

    "Cowardice and namecalling."

    "PFFT.. Hahahaha." Kumarughed lightly and three of them moved upstairs while Sam dragged the young lord with him.

    Soon they arrived at one of the rooms and opened it.

    Inside, they saw a fiend woman with barely any clothes standing with a cor on her neck that could suppress her cultivation and shackles chained to her limbs making her hand like a cross.

    Her body is full of knife scars and whip bruises. She looked a bit dazed and lost.

    When the three of them arrived, she looked at them with a frown and when her gazended on the young lord, her eyes changed.

    She didn¡¯t speak and Noah slowly went to the shackles on the walls and slowly unlocked them so that the woman wouldnd carefully without hurting herself.

    After releasing her, she didn¡¯t speak immediately and Sam broke the silence.

    "We are the mercenaries hired by the Fiend tribe." He took out the token and showed her. When she saw the tokens the woman¡¯s eyes were excited for the first time. She looked at them and asked.

    "How did you get here? What about the security of the city?"

    "Everything is over. We took over the city hall and none of the people who can call shots or throw their power around are alive. All of them are dead."

    She heaved a sigh of relief, but then noticed the cor on her neck.

    Sam looked at her and said.

    "I am sorry, but we are not skilled enough to remove that cor, that is outside of our area of expertise. We can send the news to the Fiend tribe and they cane over and take care of that."

 Chapter 1188: Waiting

    "We need to get out of here. The reinforcements from the two cities wille if we don¡¯t leave."

    The woman said in a hoarse tone. Her eyes are telling she is still anxious.

    Sam couldn¡¯t fathom what made a genius like here to this. And the bruises on her body told him that it was more of an emotional and mental situation.

    "I am sorry, Ma¡¯am. We know that you are anxious, but there is a problem here."

    "What is it?"

    "We are not here to leave. We are here to handover the city to the Fiend tribe and you will be handed over along with the city. As for the reinforcements from the two cities, we are actually counting on it, rather than feeling scared about it."

    "You are crazy. Do you know the people that are in charge of the two cities? Do you think that they let this little prick take over the city without any contingency? He is but a Peak-stage pre-transcendent cultivator, how can he even be qualified to be the lord of the city. On this at least, the bare minimum qualification is to be a transcendent cultivator of the Astral ne.

    The only reason he took the helm is because the other cities are in charge of this city. He is only here to piss the Fiend tribe off." The woman exined.

    "Shut up you whore." *BAM*

    The young lord cursed and Noah stomped him in the face making him shut up.

    "I know what you are worried about. But we prepared for this. Just let theme. If my estimation is right, the rear troops would already be here in an hour.

    First you go and freshen up."

    Sam said and left the room. Noah helped her up while Kumar took care of the young lord.

    They left him alive because Sam thought that he might be worth a lot more when he was alive for the Fiend tribe.

    While Kumar and Noah are taking care of two different guests in two different ways, Sam went out into the streets. He called for the remaining administrators that are of low level and the ones that the young lord didn¡¯t seem worthy to even fight.

    "I want all of you guys to get out there and make announcements all over the cities and bring me the best merchant group you can find. The one that didn¡¯t have anything to do with the Myriad Beast sect and the one that has enough background andwork.

    I want them here and I want them fast. The one who does the job properly dies thetest. Any funny Ideas, then do remember that I am not exactly merciful. I am really disappointed by your city anyway. So, I might just kill you out of annoyance if you even think of doing anything other than what I told you to."

    The guys left and half an hourter, the whole city is in turmoil. Everyone wanted to get out of the city and when they noticed that there are no guards, they immediately escaped, they knew that trouble would being, so they didn¡¯t want to get in the mess.

    While everyone is leaving, Sam met with one merchant group led by a young man. He is a Half-Dark Elf.

    Sam looked at him in surprise. He met with Dark elves, he met with elves and half elves, but Half dark elves is a first.

    The young man looked at Sam and said.

    "I am really surprised that a person with your cultivation took down the city?"

    "Really? Why?"

    "I don¡¯t know, I thought that some bigshot would have sneaked and snapped here, but it seems like the nning must be much more difficult than I thought. Anyway, why do you want to meet me."

    "I want you to go to the Water Crystal City to inform the Fiend tribe about the city. Tell them, that Sam, Noah and Kumar sacked the city and are defending against the other two cities¡¯ reinforcements."

    "I can do that. But what is in it for me."

    "I will sell you something."

    Sam said with a smile. The Elven merchant chuckled and said.

    "Sell? I thought when someone is asking for favors, they would buy things, not sell."

    "After you see this, you would be willing to buy it."

    With that he took out a scroll and gave it to the merchant along with a Jar of wine.

    The merchant saw this and then tasted the wine and raised his eyebrows in surprise. That was his reaction even after trying so hard to control himself.

    "You wouldn¡¯t be able to find the recipe even if you travelled all the realms and with the amount of outside traffic here, you would be able earn a lot."

    "How much?" The Merchant asked with a smile...

    After fifteen minutes, the business deal was signed.

    "By the way, you can give out the word our sacking the city to others with no restraint. All I want is for the news to reach the Water Crystal city byte afternoon."

    "I can do that. Don¡¯t worry. They would get the word earlier than that."

    "Thanks. I have another job if you would like to take it." Sam said and the group leader looked at him curiously.

    "I want you to leak this information too but to the Myriad Beast sect members." With that Sam gave a scroll and the merchant group leader was stunned.

    "Are you sure you want to do this? That woman is a crazy psychopath."

    "I am not too bad in that field myself. It doesn¡¯t matter. I want her to know about this. But in a subtle manner. It shouldn¡¯t be like arge announcement like I was bragging. Just some information that was slipped by unintentionally."

    "A trap?"

    "Something along the lines."

    "I will do it. It is just spreading rumors and Merchants are good at that."

    With that, the merchant group left.

    Sam then shifted his focus to a different issue. He took up a room and started setting up equipment. Soon Noah and Kumar joined him and a lot of crystal screens were disyed in the room.

    This is the surveince of the pathways on the two sides and on the rear side, they already see some people making their way towards the City.

    "It is over a radius of two dozen kilometers. Very impressive. How did you make this stuff."

    Noah asked as she checked different screens.

    "That is what I do. As for how, I don¡¯t even know. It justes to me.But for this time, I stretched a little thin. All my surveince equipment is up to cover the whole radius under the field. Even if they use the forests and the mountain mazes, we would be able to locate them."

    "Why go so deep? This would be easier for us. The traps are perfect. I don¡¯t think they would be skilled enough to dodge them."

    "I am not setting this up with the first wave. I am thinking of the things that woulde after we deal with the first wave."

    They both nodded, but Noah suddenly asked.

    "Do you think our n will work? I mean, even if the Fiend tribe needs to take this city on, they wouldn¡¯t be able to do it unless they cross the front and rear cities. The defense there is tight. Otherwise, the most they could do is send some people to defend this city at the most."

    "Don¡¯t worry. This will work. Since they would receive the message, the first thing they would do is try to verify it. I already sent the recording crystals and the testimony of that woman. And just in case, something else happens, I asked the person who is helping us to do a little something.

    Along with that I also let the information about our endevors in the farm town spread. So, either the Fiend tribe sends the people, takes advantage of the fact that we lured some people from the two cities and attack them from the other side, or that woman from the Myriad beast sectes and tries to deal with us to die here forcing the higher ups to act since their core disciple came out in the open.

    Either way, we would escte this war now.

    And if our luck is good, both things will happen.

    If the fiend tribe really doesn¡¯t care about this and tries to hide from this, our little merchant group will do something that would make them act.

    Don¡¯t worry. As long as we can keep ourselves safe, it would be okay."

    He then went out and called the administrators.

    "Tell all the merchants to leave the city if they want to, even the civilians are wee to do that. But if they want to stay, tell them to retreat into the City hall grounds. Tell them to staypletely still here without causing any trouble.

    Anyone who wants to be a hero and wants to bring justice to their former ruler will die."

 Chapter 1189: Spear Trap

    The three of them waited for the forces from the rear city toe a bit closer.

    Sam knew they would being earlier than the forces from the front city, because he released the captives just for this reason. He knew that they would go and ramble their mouths to the rear city to save their lives.

    After all they wouldn¡¯t be able to just disappear into thin air, not before crossing the rear city and since all the flow of the people for the rear city are stopped from their current location, it is hard for them to blend into some random group and disguise themselves casually and escape.

    Sam counted on it and it actually happened. They sent a lot of forces too.

    But they are moving too slow. They are too cautious, they move like every step they are taking is a trap.

    Sam looked at them for more than an hour and they barely reached the ce of their first trap. The first trap in the rear path. It belongs to Kumar.

    He set it up.

    The three of them are currently looked at the scene to see how well the trap works. One could see that there is a faint sense ofpetition between them.

    All three of them don¡¯t know why there are feeling that way, but they are feeling it. This sense ofpetition and slight rivalry. These are the only things they could get out of this pathetic controlling life of killing and following orders from those gods that are looking down on them in entertainment.

    The forces of the rear city entered arge area with a bunch of rocks. The whole terrain is rocky and it is a bit elevated. The scout team and their small falcons entered first. These falcons are smaller in size and they are just a little bit bigger than a regr falcon. They are the perfect beasts for scouting this area.

    After they finished the scouting, they sent a green re upwards with a scroll and the rest of the team moved. They upied the ce and rearranged their formation for the uing terrain while the scout team once again moved.

    From what the trio could see the forces are a team of sixty members. It is like two guard units. But most of them are Peak stage Pre-transcendent cultivators and there over a dozen of them at Initial stage transcendent stage.

    The leader is even a Middle stage transcendent one.

    Sam now understood why the Fiend tribe woman locked up here said that the forces of the other two cities are not easy to deal with.

    If the initially deployed forces who are generally sent to test the waters have a Middle stage transcendent cultivator of Astral ne, then there is no way the city¡¯s forces are weak.

    As the group waited for the scouts report toe, one of them who was looking around suddenly stepped on a rock that clicked.

    *CLICK*

    The clicking sound could be heard quite loud and clear.

    And all of a sudden the spiritual energy in the whole area started rising. The troops got alerted and they looked around.

    "Everyone get your beasts and weapons ready. We don¡¯t know what ising.

    The formation masters, check the surroundings; it seems like a formation is activating."

    "We¡¯re already on it."

    The leader gave the orders and his subordinates are replying to them, but they are a tad bitte and it didn¡¯t take much time for them to realize that.

    The spiritual energy became so dense and concentrated and soon everyone felt a lot of spear intent. All the sharp weapons in their hands started vibrating and particrly the people who held spears in their hands and covered in spear aura felt like they are being suffocated.

    It felt like they are in a territory which was imed by someone far superior than they could ever be and they are just here trespassing beyond their limits.

    The team leader observed the situation but he didn¡¯t know what to do. If it was an attacking from a certain direction and made by some people he would have been able to figure it out. But unluckily, it is neither of those.

    Before he knew it, the spiritual energy started condensing above their heads. And soon spears formed.

    The spears emitted the spear intent stronger than anything they have seen before. They wanted to defend themselves, but the power soon overwhelmed as the rain of spears hit them.

    No amount of defense could stop them from being injured if not dead as the spears rained down one after another and after the first wave came the second and the third.

    The team leader who managed to defend most and had suffered the least damage looked around in the chaos and saw that there was only a certain portion of the area that was being attacked and yelled his orders.

    "Everyone, defend yourself and move forward, the formation covers a limited area."

    With that he started moving forward.

    The formation masters who wanted to look for the nodes didn¡¯t dare to move anywhere else, but once the leader mentioned they noticed the borders of the formation and started moving along with the leader to the edge of it.

    The rest of the forces followed behind as they moved to the edge and crossed past. For some reason there is no barrier and the density of the spears raining down is higher if they wanted to retreat backwards.

    So, they could only move forward.

    But the damage was being done no matter which direction they moved.

    Some people were so desperate that they used the corpses of the dead beasts and theirpanions as meat shields to get out of the area.

    After fifteen minutes of struggle, the people who were alive got out along with their beasts and as if someone was monitoring it, the formation stopped as soon as everyone left.

    The spears didn¡¯t rain anymore and it lookedpletely normal.

    Kumar looked at the screen and then at Sam as he spoke.

    "That formation disc of yours, really did wonders didn¡¯t it? The timing is precise."

    "Yeah, an intelligent being doing a task is always better than an intelligent machine doing it. The formation of spirits is used for a reason."

    They once again focused on the situation after their little exchange.

    With all the scouts, their beasts, the total force counted up to 124 candidates. Out of them the dozen scouts and their dozen falcons are not in the formation zone which left hundred people and out of them, there thirty candidates died.

    Only ny four of them are left.

    When the formation disappeared, the scouts finally returned and they were dumbfounded by all the destruction that has happened.

    The whole areapletely changed. The rocky terrain has turned into a terrain of rubble. in and loose at the same time.

    They camped there and recovered as they patched up the injured ones.

    The leader went to the formation masters and asked.

    "What kind of trap is that?"

    The formation masters didn¡¯t know what to say.

    "Don¡¯t tell me you didn¡¯t understand even a bit of it." The leader asked again but none of the formation masters spoke.

    "I think it is a single formation. We have never heard of anything simr to what this was in any books. Not even the thousands of our sect records have something like that. We didn¡¯t see any trace of the known formation styles within our realms and the realms surrounding it.

    It is apletely built up formation made of fully original ideas.

    The basic styles we learned and were taught all came from the Gandharva race. As much as they are profound and useful, they also made our perspective limited.

    Whoever that is doing this, hase from outside and they are really good at what they do.

    From what we observed, the formation is acting on based of spear intent which ispletely unfamiliar to us. If my guess is right, for it to have such an intense intent, the formation¡¯s core foundation should be absorbing the energy and refining it like a spear user. That is all I understand."

    The leader looked at the one who spoke. He is not even a formation master. He is just a normal soldier from a unit.

    The formation masters looked at him with a frown.

    "I have never seen you. Are you a formation master by any chance? Can you show me your badge if you are one?"

    One of them even directly asked.

    The leader frowned and said,

    "Are you familiar with the formations?"

    "Yes, a little bit." The soldier answered to the leader, ignoring the formation master.

    "I am not really good at constructing them and creating them, but I can analyze the ones that are created." The soldier continued seeing that the leader was silent.

    "How does that work? If you can analyze them, you can imitate them right?"

    "Not really. The formation nodes need to be ced in a certain order. I can know which node does what after cing it, but I don¡¯t know which node should be ced first and which node should do what before cing them. If I blindly imitate it, there is a chance I would be dead while messing with a formation. That is why I didn¡¯t bother about it."

 Chapter 1190: Failed Display

    "If you are so skilled at the formations, why didn¡¯t you break it?" One of the formation masters asked the soldier.

    The team leader also looked at the soldier a bit coldly. He is also clearly not very happy about this situation.

    The soldier has escaped scot-free and his beast which is an ape-type beast very close to their size is also scot-free.

    He escaped with just some small cuts on his armor which wasn¡¯t even cutpletely.

    The soldier looked at them and said calmly.

    "You would probably believe me if I said this, but the thing is the activation time of the formation is too fast and as I said before, I am most familiar with the formations of the standards followed in this and the surrounding realms. It would take a long time to properly analyze the formation to let such arge group escape.

    The only reason I managed to escape is that I am sensitive to the energy fluctuations and their presence. I could feel the energy flowing in the surroundings as long as it is notpletely hidden. The person who set this formation is not from here.

    I could have just stayed put and I wouldn¡¯t get these res you are throwing at me. I just came to warn you.

    The general scouting and the regr formation check wouldn¡¯t work in this situation. We need to be more careful. That is what I wanted to tell you so that more people wouldn¡¯t lose their lives.

    If we are not confident in tackling these formations and the other traps they might have set up, it is better for us to return, at least we wouldn¡¯t deprive ourselves of the manpower."

    With that, he didn¡¯t bother to exin himself anymore and left.

    The leader didn¡¯t know how to react, he just stayed there for a moment in silence and finally spoke to the formation masters.

    "I don¡¯t know what you do. But I don¡¯t want you to make sure that the others formations will not be triggered. We don¡¯t have a lot of time on our hands and there is no news from the city after those guards arrived. We need to find a way to safely go there and capture these people."

    With that, he went on to help with the recovery of the rest of the soldiers and the beasts.

    They stayed there for an hour and a half and finally made a move.

    This time, along with the scout¡¯s team, the formation masters also moved and even the soldier that warned these people about the formations was sent with them even if he insisted that he didn¡¯t want to go.

    After all, since he is not in a leadership position, he could only oblige.

    For the next two hours of the journey, they didn¡¯t see any traps and they finally reached the forest patch.

    The scout teams changed as the falcons are not suitable for this area. The snake-type beasts were used to scout.

    The scouting went on smoothly and soon the forces arrived in the forest after they got the green light from the scouts.

    But as soon as everyone entered the forest, something changed.

    Some vines that are all over the ce within the forest started moving and they went after one of the beasts in the final row of the formation.

    The beast is a canine and the vines crawled up to its body crazily as they dragged it down.

    The soldier who is the contractor of the beast stopped and started cutting the vines as he warned.

    "Guys, something is wrong."

    With his loud warning, everyone turned towards him and saw the beast being buried under the vines and soon they could see the beast¡¯s size reducing right in front of their eyes.

    The flowers started growing on the vines and the process was over before the others couldn¡¯t react. The flowers soon turned into fruits that are in blood-red color.

    "Everyone stay vignt. Do not touch the vines or fruits. Fire users, burn everything down within your surroundings, including that vine."

    He yelled as he pointed at the dog that was buried. The soldier is crying at the loss of his partner, but he was dragged away by the other soldiers.

    The soldiers all got into smaller groups with each group having a fire element user as they burned down the surrounding trees.

    One of them aimed the fire at the vine with the red fruits.

    Instead of burning down and turning into ashes, the fruits exploded into red smoke which made the fire user a bit intoxicated and as if it was on the cue, a vine appeared coiling around his legs and dragging him into the ground.

    The small group in charge saw this and immediately made his move with the sword. He wanted to cut the vines apart, but to his surprise, the vines are unbelievably and unnaturally strong to the point that only a small mark was left on the vines.

    But he didn¡¯t stop.

    "Help me, the vines are too tough."

    His teammates started helping but they are involuntarily inhaling the red smoke that wasing out of the fruits that exploded and without even knowing something else is happening in their heads and as if it to prove that point one of the subordinate who is hacking off the vines with the ax missed the vine and hacked the leg off of his teammate.

    But by now, the teammate couldn¡¯t even yell to show his pain, his body started thinning down.

    The leader of the force saw this scene and felt a sense of trepidation which didn¡¯tst long as it was reced by a sense of loss and desperation, because more and more vines are appearing as they coiling around the people and even if someone managed to get out of the coiled vines, they could feel the extreme loss of energy in their bodies.

    The fire elemental energy is not working and the red smoke that ising from the exploded is making them feel like they are on some kind of recreational drug. They couldn¡¯t make sense of their surroundings and the friendly attacks are happening in every group.

    The situation started with a single attack on a single beast which made them vignt and the next attack took a long time while they are attacking with the fire element, but then all of a sudden all the vines popped out of nowhere. If it was a gradual change, they would have been able to understand or even predict.

    But even for an attempt at an unpredictable attack, this is a bit sloppy.

    Sam looked at Noah in confusion as he looked through the screen.

    "What are you looking at? Those idiots didn¡¯t react as I thought."

    "As you thought? It is as if you know who ising."

    Noah dodged his gaze and Sam suddenly widened his eyes.

    "You know who ising didn¡¯t you?"

    Noah just sighed and said.

    "I know who the leader of the group is and how he operates."

    "You even hid this from me?"

    Kumar asked in shock.

    "Okay, okay. Just don¡¯t get so excited. I just guessed okay. I didn¡¯t say anything because it is not that relevant. I only know how the leader reacts and I just yed on it a bit. For you, it doesn¡¯t matter whoes for you. Your traps are standard for everyone anyway."

    "Then why is yours not the same?"

    "I just wanted to have some, alright. I wanted to set up a dramatic disy and it just failed. I will beat the crap of the leader after hees here. If only he acted a bit faster and a bit more decisive, things would have been better. It would be like fireworks in the sky and not even half of them would be left for your trap."

    As they were bickering, the force started moving. They are having a terrible time.

    Just when they thought that the vines are all they need to avoid, the trees started moving and the branches started prating them like pitchforks.

    The attacks are so random that pissed the leader off.

    But he cannot do anything about it at all. The only silver lining is that this randomness made their escape a bit saferpared to the spear formation.

    The body count is not much. More beasts were dead than the cultivators themselves and the leader is a bit relieved about that.

    Noah¡¯s mood turned sour though.

    Sam and Kumar couldn¡¯t help butugh while covering their mouths as they saw her expression.

    Therge eye-catching disy she set up didn¡¯t work because of some unknown reason.

    Sam suddenly said.

    "Don¡¯t worry too much. I think your craving for therge disy wille when they reach my trap. I think they would all be dead there, we wouldn¡¯t even need to go and get them ourselves."

    Meanwhile forces stopped after they escaped the forest for the recovery

 Chapter 1191: Cursed Canyon

    The forces werepletely exhausted from the forest. They could only sit there and recover for another two hours. By the time, they moved from that spot it is actually afternoon.

    Noah is still having a bad time with the failure of her grand preparation.

    Sam couldn¡¯t take it anymore and ask.

    "Just what is wrong with you. Just tell me what you nned, then I will think of a solution. You cannot be sulky just because your trap didn¡¯t work as well as you wanted it to be. You are acting like an immature little girl."

    Noah just gave him a side-eyed nce and spoke.

    "There is nothing wrong with the trap. It is his reaction that was at fault."

    "Okay, what part of the reaction is at fault?"

    "He was way too cautious. He didn¡¯t react fast enough. If this was him before, he would have just burned that stupid dog up as soon as he saw the vines coiling around it. If he did, the rest of the vines would have reacted at the same time. Instead, he first went after the vines surrounding them instead of going after the immediate attack.

    How stupidly cautious one has to be to do something like that?"

    Sam couldn¡¯t believe what he was hearing at all.

    "Of course, he would be cautious. Your badass boyfriend just killed one-third of their bunch in three minutes. What do you expect him to do? Just walk around in the forest and just attack whatever thates across. That would be the stupid thing to do. He did what he was supposed to do."

    "No, he didn¡¯t. He did something stupid and didn¡¯t attack the vines instantly. My n failed that is it and I am going to beat him up after hees here."

    Sam looked at Kumar. Because at this moment, his attention was captured by the non-reaction of Noah towards the fact that she didn¡¯t deny him calling Kumar her boyfriend.

    Noah left the room without noticing her mistake and Sam looked at Kumar with a grin.

    "You must be a real charmer. Noah? Really? How did you manage to do that?"

    Kumar just rolled his eyes and turned around, but he didn¡¯t deny anything.

    While Sam is having his fun, the forces are not having any of it.

    They reached thest trap set up Sam used. Therge rocky canyon.

    The remaining people are extremely cautious and they don¡¯t know what danger they would be facing, but they know that this ce is the perfect ce to set up another trap.

    This time, the team leader went to investigate himself along with the scout group.

    He tapped every ce that could be used as trigger for the trap to the best of his knowledge. He threw the attacks around just to see if any traps would be triggered by that. He searched the whole canyon for an hour.

    But he didn¡¯t find anything.

    The canyon is as small as it could be and some beasts that take that up as their residence died just for their paranoia.

    The leader is a bit relieved. Even though he is still cautious while leading them inside, he still felt like they are rtively safer.

    After all, they already lost almost half of the troops before they even reached the city. Any more, and they might as well not go and wait for the reinforcements toe.

    But as soon as they entered the canyon together, he understood how wrong he was to feel relieved.

    As soon as every single person and beast are within the canyon confines, the trap is triggered.

    The trap that made everyone feel like they are being stared at by death itself.

    The first curse that triggered was obviously the curse he created with earth elemental energy, the gravity increase.

    The people felt the struggle to move forward and before they could think of what the reason might be, they subconsciously started feeling thirsty. They felt parched all of a sudden and the sunlight felt like it could burn them and just evaporate them into nothing.

    And this is a problem, the cultivators generally don¡¯t carry things like water and such as they are confident they could find some source and they can live for days and weeks without water, but now they felt the desperate need to drink water.

    Since they couldn¡¯t find any, they took the next best thing, the Wine.

    The more liquor they drank, the more they started feeling thirsty, they couldn¡¯t control themselves at all. Even the team leader who was vignt in the first two traps couldn¡¯t find this anomaly as something harmful, because another curse is ying a game and messing his brain up without him knowing.

    Sam and Kumar saw as the people drank liters of wine, gulping it down like water and there is even small friction within the soldiers as they tried to grab other people¡¯s wines.

    In this process, they didn¡¯t bother using their spiritual energy to keep themselves away from the intoxication which made them slightly numb in the head.

    Soon, they started feeling itchy all over their bodies and started scratching without knowing it, their arms felt numb no matter how much they scratched and the itch didn¡¯t go away. One of the soldiers couldn¡¯t tolerate the itch and scratched it too hard making it bleed.

    Many of such things happen to different soldiers in different parts of their bodies.

    When one of the soldiers noticed the bleeding, he yelled.

    "What the fuck?"

    He looked at his shoulder which is bleeding and removed his clothes to apply for some medicine as he stopped. The leader looked at him and the rest of the soldiers.

    He felt a little tipsy as he couldn¡¯t think of what the reason for the blood is and said.

    "Guys, I told you to recover properly at the forest, see, now you are bleeding like this. Everyone let us camp here and recover."

    For some reason, he didn¡¯t find anything wrong with what he said and just sat there waiting for his soldiers to recover.

    As they applied medicine to each other, they suddenly felt hungry.

    *Grrr...*

    Stomach grumbles could be heard all over the camp and everyone was surprised. Generally, after reaching a certain level, they wouldn¡¯t feel hunger or thirst. Their spiritual energy would be supplementing all their biological and metabolic needs to keep them moving.

    Only if they are deprived of energy to a great extent, would be their body show the reactions of hunger and thirst.

    The leader looked at the soldiers in a daze.

    "Seems like we are traveling for a long time, we need to recover properly and also try to find some food while we are at it. It has been a long time since we had a proper meal. The potions and pills can only bring us so long."

    He said and everyone looked around to hunt.

    Even though the canyon only has a range of rocks, they have a lot of wildlife. Like the stone lizards and such.

    They looked for them, as for leaving the canyon, for some reason they couldn¡¯t think of such thing, it is as if going out of the canyon is something extremely bad in their opinion and they shouldn¡¯t be doing it at all.

    After finding some food, they started acting, at first, they at least managed to cook it, but soon their patience ran out and they started eating the raw flesh of the beasts.

    But soon they ran out. They couldn¡¯t find enough supply for all of them.

    They started eating into their pill and potion reserves. They couldn¡¯t think of doing anything but eating them up.

    Some people ran out of those too and then started eating bones of the beasts they just finished eating and then resorted to eating sand and rocks.

    They felt that something is wrong for doing something like that, but they didn¡¯t know what is wrong with it and felt like they should just continue.

    Kumar looked at the scene and flinched.

    "Dude, what the hell did you do to them? Why are they behaving like this?"

    "It is a curse. Itrge curse is a result of setting a number of curses into an array. It is actually an experiment on how it would work and it is working perfectly fine."

    "But it is too nasty. Are you sure they wouldn¡¯t get out of it?"

    "No, they wouldn¡¯t get out of it. If they are anymore unprepared, they would all just die there."

    As he exined, they noticed that everyone stopped their actions and looked into the sky in a daze.

    "What happened now?"

    "Hallucinations. They are currently looking at the person who they are close to but did something extremely guilty."

    "What?"

    "A friend they betrayed, a soldier they abandoned, apanion they killed, the kid they couldn¡¯t be with. All the things they felt guilty for and the one they felt most guilty for will be haunting them for the rest of the time they are in the canyon."

 Chapter 1192: Information Reached

    As Sam said, all the people in the canyon started seeing hallucinations a bit by bit, everything that they felt guilty for, is ying in front of their eyes.

    One soldier felt saw the scene where he left his beastpanion back so that he could escape safely. At this moment, the beast ising at him, looking into his eye as if it is asking why he left the back then.

    Even though he felt dazed, he couldn¡¯t find himself stopping from the hunger, but he stopped eating the soil at least and just looked at the beast in a daze.

    Soon, the beast starteding at him with extreme anger as if to punish him for his deeds. The guilt made him not act at first, but soon he became enraged for some reason and started fighting back.

    The same thing is happening with the rest. But for Sam and Kumar who are watching this, the people in the canyon are fighting each other.

    "When will this nightmare end?" Kumar asked as he couldn¡¯t see this anymore. This is nothing more than pure torture for the people involved. This is way too extreme for a trap. But unfortunately, this works too well and it cannot be denied this is more effective than the other two traps.

    "It will be another fifteen minutes till the final stage of trap is activated. Then, they would also get some rity, and the people who managed to retain the rity from that one moment and managed to escape the ce will survive.

    If my guess is correct from the observations I made from the start, only around ten to twenty people will survive, as, for the beasts, they might not make it."

    "Damn."

    Kumar said as he looked at the screen. Sam then turned to a different screen and said.

    "Go and call Noah, the front city also sent the troops and there are more of them. This time, her trap is in the beginning, so her painting the picture with some destruction might work here."

    Kumar walked out to call for Noah.

    Meanwhile.

    Water crystal city.

    The half-elf merchant reached the city and he directly went to the River bay inn.

    "I have some information for the Fiend tribe."

    He went to the receptionist and said. The receptionist looked at him with some suspicion, the young merchant just smiled and took out some identity token. Looking at the identity of the merchant group, the receptionist rxed and said.

    "I will inform the person in charge. Please wait for a moment."

    After two minutes, the receptionist was back with a Fiend and he smiled at the young merchant before saying.

    "I didn¡¯t expect a visit from the young master of the ckwood merchant group. What brings you here?"

    "Oh, I have taken up a task from someone named Sam. He, Noah, and Kumar. The three-man team that is responsible for doing something for you has actually done something big. If you don¡¯t mind, we can talk in private."

    With that both of them went into the room and after five minutes, they came back. The young merchant still has that smile on his face, but the fiend has an anxious expression.

    "Young master. I am sorry for this. But I cannot apany you for the time being."

    "Of course, I know. Please carry on with whatever you want to do. I will be going to my room and resting a bit. I have traveled without stopping."

    "Yes, let me arrange the amodation for you."

    With that, the fiend called for the receptionist and gave some instructions, before leaving the ce.

    He then went to the secret room immediately where Myrion is looking through some information.

    Looking at the anxious manager of the inning like that, he frowned and asked.

    "What happened?"

    "Something big happened. The three-man human team. Sam, Noah, and Kumar. They captured the Mountain city. They killed all the members of the Myriad Beast sect and captured that abomination while they released his mother.

    Now, the front and rear cities of the Mountain city are attacking them through the two mountain paths."

    With that, he took out a bunch of recording crystals and ced them on the table.

    Marion had a frown on his face as he looked through all the information and the recording crystals briefly and said.

    "God damn it. They did something this big? Now I understand why they want to be independent. They are good at stirring the shit on their own without any instructions.

    How did you get this information?"

    "The ckwood merchant group. The young master himself delivered the information."

    "Did you say ck Wood?"

    "Yes. They sent the information themselves and it seems like Sam hired him to do so."

    As they were discussing another attendant ran inside and said.

    "Deputymander, the city has a new rumor. The news of Sam, Noah, and Kumar taking the Mountain city has spread and the fact that they took down the Farm town is also spreading around."

    "How did the news leak out so fast? ckwood doesn¡¯t do that. They wouldn¡¯t divulge confidential information particrly when someone hired to deliver this."

    He went silent for a second and said.

    "Arrange a meeting with Young master of the ckwood group. I will speak to him myself."

    After ten minutes, he is in a room with the young merchant and they are talking while drinking some special wine.

    The young merchant started exining how things went. From the initial attack on the city to deal with the guard units one by one and sacking the city by morning.

    "Young master do you know why the rumors are spreading so much about Sam and his team dealing with the Farm town."

    "Well, actually the conversation of Sam when he dealt with the Young Lord of the city has leaked to some low-level workers, who spread the information among the inns by ident. All the merchants knew of it and they left one by one earlier than me.

    So, there is a possibility it spread because of that."

    Myrion went silent for a moment and then changed the topic to some small talk.

    After ten minutes, he left the room and went back to inform the Commander of the operations along with the other higher-ups, and soon they used their methods to contact the higher-ups back in the tribe.

    A meeting was held within an hour and every important person of the tribe with any form of decision-making power has arrived there.

    "Why did the mercenaries stay there and send this information out to the public, instead of silently getting her back here?"

    One of the elders spoke in a frustrated tone.

    "They might have gotten greedy over the contribution points. After all, handing over a city is indeed arge contribution. Who would want to miss that?" Another elder spoke.

    "We cannot risk it though. I think it is better to send someone to inform them to just bring that woman out there. We can deal with the rest ofter."

    "But they are stuck in the city now. They don¡¯t have the manpower to keep the city under proper lockdown, so they released the merchants out. The news already spread and the front and rear cities would have been focusing on capturing them by now. They cannote out and we cannot send the information in."

    "Then what should we do?"

    "We take this chance and attack either front or rear city take them down and take over the mountain city and bring thedy of our tribe back."

    An old man who is silent since the start of the conversation spoke.

    "But if we do that, we would risk exposing the war and escting it. Currently, we are doing as much damage as in dark and if we reveal ourselves first, the rest of powers willbel us as starting the war."

    "It doesn¡¯t matter who started the war as long as we win it. After all, the winners take the controlling rights on writing how the history went. So, you only need to resort to this, if you are not confident in winning at all."

    The incident sparked a dispute in the upper echelons of the tribe.

    Meanwhile.

    In the Farm town.

    The Youngdy, the core disciple of the Myriad Beast sect, Lana is sitting in the room along with the elder. A merchant is standing in front of them nervously.

    "Is what you said true?"

    "Yes, mydy. The young man who is currently upying the mountain city is the one responsible for the destruction of the Farm city. He said it himself."

    "How did you get this information?"

    "Many administrators were released after the city was sacked and they witnessed the battle between the young lord and the person named Sam, in between that person spilled this information. The administrators that escaped, didn¡¯t hold back in sharing this information outside. I am one of the merchants in the city and I came here as soon as possible, knowing that you might have been looking for them."

    She looked at him for a minute silently and threw a spatial ring at him.

    "Thanks for the information."

 Chapter 1193: Forces Reached

    The Core discipledy looked at the elder and said.

    "I am going to the Mountain City. I will take care of this situation."

    "We are still not sure that the narrative is true."

    "Whether it is true or not. I would be doing the job of a sect member, don¡¯t I? Anyway, these guys are not ying the hidden game anymore. They openly sacked our city, so I can retaliate."

    "But..."

    "I am not asking your permission elder. I am telling you about this."

    "Then, let mee with you."

    "I am sorry, you need to be in the farm town to manage the aftermath. It is still not stable yet. We need to keep our existing farmers and also attract some new ones. You are noting with me."

    With that, she came out and took her personal guards. All of them moved on some bird-type beasts as they made their way towards the Rear city which is nearest to them.

    Meanwhile, back in the Fiend tribe headquarters.

    The meeting was about to end.

    An old man stood up as he tapped his back as if he is suffering from some back pain and said.

    "I am going to send my son to bring that girl back. She has suffered too much over the years due to our silence and voluntary ignorance of her situation. I will not do that anymore. Those youngsters whoever they are did a great favor for the tribe. With this we will not only save her and bring her back, I would also bring that abomination and if possible the father of that abomination to erase the shame that was brought upon us."

    "Elder 9. You should know better than doing this. It would be a waste of resources if something untoward happens. We are on a war with the Myriad beast sect."

    "Really, Elder 6? How is Flower city doing? I remember that a few years, your son who was put in charge of the city got conned by the Myriad Beast sect and lost the city. He was taken, hostage.

    This woman, this girl who you are considering the waste of resources went there and killed three hundred and twenty people that day and out of them, forty-five people belong to the Myriad Beast sect.

    She gave you back the Flower city even though she absolutely deserved it. Your son lost a year¡¯s worth of produce.

    That was one of the reasons why the Myriad beast sectid down a n like that and made her into this. You are part of the reason she is suffering now.

    And all you can see in this situation is your and your son¡¯s fragile ego is extremely hurt and broken and you believe that if she disappeared everything would be okay. Your nefarious heart would be satisfied.

    Isn¡¯t that right?"

    The meeting room turned silent and the old man left silently.

    The rest of them didn¡¯t know what to say.

    But that day, arge group left the Fiend tribe¡¯s headquarters and they directly went to the Front city Openly.

    From the size, one could easily say that they are surely invading the city and from the looks of it they might even take it down directly.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know that his actions made tworge groupse to the two cities at both sides of the mountain city.

    If he knew, he would be cheering himself right now. But at this moment, Sam is currently looking at the situation of the forces that were sent by the Front city towards the mountain city.

    This time, Noah¡¯s trap worked perfectly and she is a bit less grumpy. A beast was locked by the vines as it rapidly devoured its blood and vitality and as every person withmon sense knows, the fire element is the only thing that would make the wood element easily nullified and they used it to burn the vine and the beast down to stop the spread of the vine.

    But to their dismay, the vine grew stronger and the fire on this vine triggered the rest of the vines to attack at the same time killing a lot of them.

    The people that escaped had to make a camp right next to the forest patch to recover.

    As for the people from the rear city, only a dozen people were left. As Sam said the beasts couldn¡¯t survive. The beasts died as the cultivators fought dirty, hook or crook to kill them.

    The Leader who escape this looked at himself.

    His body is bleeding in many spots. His arms were almost mangled by his own contracted beast. He had several broken bones and his head is still aching. His stomach is a mess with all the bones, rocks, and sand he swallowed.

    He couldn¡¯t even stand up.

    Even in this state, this guy took out a scroll and started writing. He couldn¡¯t hold a pen so he wrote with his finger and blood. After he finished the scroll, he rolled it up and took out a small formation disc.

    As soon as he activated the disc, the scroll disappeared and the disc waspletely destroyed.

    Sam frowned when he saw this.

    He doesn¡¯t know exactly what this is, but he is sure that this is not exactly a good thing.

    He immediately took the dimensional drifter out to go and Kumar and Noah followed.

    The three of them disappeared from the spot and reappeared at the scene a few hundred meters away. Sam couldn¡¯t get the exact location pinpointed from there, but it isn¡¯t that far away. They reached the area and when the leader saw them, he felt hopeful and started yelling.

    "Help. Please help. We are the Myriad Beast sect members. Please help us, you will be rewarded for your efforts."

    But the trio didn¡¯t respond and just walked towards him calmly. Kumar and Noah finished off the rest of the people instantly making the leader¡¯s face turn pale.

    Sam took out his sword and finished him off. With his current state, even a Mortal ne cultivator would be able to kill him much less him.

    He instantly extracted the memory and finally understood what happened.

    "He sent the details of the traps to the Rear city. This is an extremely high-level device that could teleport small objects."

    He picked the formation te as he said.

    "Wouldn¡¯t that make our traps useless?"

    "Not necessarily. From what I can see, he only gave the locations of the traps. He didn¡¯t know the triggering points and conditions, neither does he know the true extent of the traps. If you ask me, this is an opportunity, more people will be sent now and this will make more people die in the traps. We can just wait and rx for a bit more time."

    With that, they collected the bodies and went back to the city to look at the forces of the Front City.

    The time passed slowly as the Front city troops advanced forward and soon they arrived at the canyon where Sam¡¯s trap is present and for some reason, the trap worked better on these guys than on the guys from the rear city.

    In fact, these people were so into the hallucination that they killed their own beasts and ate them while the beasts devoured their contractors alive.

    The loss of personnel is extremely high.

    There are less than half of them left alive after they crossed the path. The leader this time, used the teleportation disc earlier and sent back the scroll.

    Noah was surprised by this and asked.

    "Didn¡¯t you say it was extremely rare? Why does he have one too?"

    "These cities are in charge of mainly taking care of the Mountain City. This is for the safety of the city so that thedy from the fiend tribe doesn¡¯t escape. That is why they didn¡¯t spare any resources here."

    "Just for that? These people are too rich."

    "Yeah, they are."

    They waited till evening and the front city troops didn¡¯t move from their camp. It seems like they are waiting for the reinforcements. But they didn¡¯t get any no matter how long they waited. Even after the sunset.

    But the Rear city already sent the troops and in fact, they sent more of them. Sam even noticed the people with special attire and a woman leading the forces this time.

    Noah and Kumar looked at her and said.

    "She is the Core disciple that maintained the boy toy of the Farm town." Kumar exined and Sam nodded in realization."

    "Seems like our provocation worked. But she is a bit earlier than I thought."

    "Who cares? I am pretty sure, even she wouldn¡¯t be able to escape your nasty curse canyon."

    "That is not what I am worried about the most. If this much force appears at this moment right after our traps activated once in such arge scale today, it would take a long time for it to recover and recharge. If the people from the Fiend tribe didn¡¯t make a move, we would have to move by ourselves and leave this city."

 Chapter 1194: Core disciples actions

    Sam, Kumar, and Noah are watching the Youngdy of the Myriad beast sect march forward with the troops. She is holding a scroll in her hands and it seems to be the same scroll the previous leader sent back to the city.

    When she reached the first trap, she created a tight-knit formation with the shields all over themselves and tried to march forward. But then she realized that their strategy is not enough because, the sheer force from each spear drilled through the shield like it was nothing and as if they were being aimed by a person, the next spear directly went through that hole and lodged itself into the cultivator holding that shield.

    It took a lot of effort on their part to cross the trap, but just before they thought, they are about to leave the trap, something happened that destroyed the rear end of their formation.

    The energy stopped condensing into small spears and started condensing in the middle of the giant formation as it became arge spear. The spear hit the rear end perfectly killing ten people.

    The Youngdy didn¡¯t use the beasts in this formation as most of her force¡¯s beasts are too big to be used in these narrow areas and even if they were used, ording to the records in the scroll, they are not much use in these types of formations, in fact, they are a bit of a drawback.

    So, she made everyone carry them in the beast pouches to avoid extra losses in the form of beasts¡¯ death.

    This made the cultivators the only target for the spear and ten of them died and a dozen more lost their limbs in thatst attack.

    But unlike their predecessor who led the troops, the youngdy didn¡¯t bother to stop for recovery.

    She seemed to have arge stash of high-level pills and potions, she fed them to the injured and made them move forward while they took the energy recovery drugs. By the time they reached the next trap, they more or less recovered.

    She turned towards her troops and said.

    "Everyone, you should be careful in the next trap. Nobody knows who will be attacked first, they would be coiled with some vines and it is almost impossible to escape death if you were caught.

    I do have a n for this, but we don¡¯t know how well it works.

    If something happens, there is a high possibility the rest of us wouldn¡¯t be able to save you. So, be careful and don¡¯t get caught up in the first ce."

    She told them and waved her hand making a beast named ck me Serpent appear in front of her.

    The Serpent started spewing ck mes towards the forest path as it moved forward and the rest of the troops followed that path that was burned to oblivion.

    But Noah who is looking at this, couldn¡¯t help but sneer.

    Her traps are particrly set to be fireproof in fact, they grow faster with the fire. Particrly, when one of the vines is already activated and it was attacked with the mes, the rest of the vines connected to it will grow at a crazy pace.

    But thisdy who thought she is destroying all the traps didn¡¯t know that with her move, almost all the traps would be triggered and she would be facing much more severe damage than the rest.

    And as she thought, soon the Serpent itself became the victim of the first vine. The vine coiled around its tail as it greedily sucked the energy out of therge serpent.

    *HIIISSSS*"

    Therge serpent hissed angrily and all the troops stopped in their tracks. The serpent aimed its head at its tail and started spewing ck mes at it.

    It has resistance to its own fire, so it didn¡¯t bother holding back.

    But to its surprise, as soon as it started spewing mes, not only did the vine be extremely resilient it grow faster and sucked its vitality faster, the rest of the vines around the path were also triggered instantly and they are after the troops.

    The youngdy who held the scroll but still fell in the traps felt like shit and Noah who looked at the trap felt better and since the two groups fell properly into the trap, shepletely pushed the me of the first failure to the guy who is already dead.

    While they are looking at this group of people, suddenly something was triggered in the city hall they are staying in. One of the low-level administrators they used to make announcements came running towards them and informed them.

    "There is amunication line from the front city. They are trying to contact us."

    Sam frowned at this and looked at the surveince of the front city troops. They are still not at the canyon as they are waiting for their troops toe.

    They are pretty anxious, but they still didn¡¯t dare to go back as they are afraid that they wouldn¡¯t be able to escape the traps this time.

    So, they stayed where they are.

    He is already feeling that something is up with the front city since they didn¡¯t even send any troops from the other side.

    After some thought, he decided to check what themunication is about.

    He followed the administrator to themunication room and looked at therge screen in front of him.

    It seems like a pretty huge formation. This technology is simr to the intercitymunication back on the deste, but there are also some major differences.

    He activated the formation and immediately a middle-aged fiend appeared in front of him on the screen.

    The administrator was shocked. He didn¡¯t know what to do or say. He expected someone from the sect would be contacting them, but it turned out to be a fiend. He suddenly thought of what he was about to do and felt his throat run dry.

    Sam is also a bit surprised. He is half expecting to have someone from the sect appear on the screen and threaten him until he felt bored.

    "Hello, Are you Sam?"

    The Middle-aged Fiend man asked with a smile. For some weird reason, his smile felt sinister and pure at the same time because of his fiend face."

    "Yes, I am. You are?"

    "I am a member of the Fiend tribe. I am here on the orders of the tribe and sacked the front city. We were nning to march towards the city directly, but we got a scroll from the city leader here and it has some information about the traps. We assumed we set it up, so if you tell me how to deactivate it, we will be making our way to the city."

    Sam beamed with a smile in realization. The troops from the Fiend tribe are also here, now things would be interesting.

    Sam replied.

    "One of my teammates is near the traps. Tell your troops to march out of the city, he will be meeting right at the mouth of the first trap and bringing you all the way to the city."

    "How will you contact him though?"

    "We have a method to do so."

    The fiend man just shrugged and themunication was cut off.

    Sam went back to the surveince room and shared the news with them.

    "Kumar, I will drop you off at the forest and you need to go out and greet them, with any of our presence the traps wouldn¡¯t trigger so just go there and lead them here. They should be here before thisdy reaches the city with her troops.

    Make them move as fast as they can and tell them about the issue with this youngdy¡¯s troops."

    With that, Sam took Kumar away with the Dimensional drifter and dropped him at the forest patch.

    He walked out of the forest patch and waited, within fifteen minutes, the fiend troops are there. They seemed to have moved at full speed to reach there.

    Kumar went to the leader and exined the situation.

    "From her attire, she should be a core disciple and her personal guards also seemed to be here," Kumar exined and the middle-aged fiend man thought for a moment.

    "I didn¡¯t expect they would deploy a core disciple this early, but this is also good news. She would be a perfect hostage to capture to hold them off for the time being. A core disciple too valuable, even more, valuable than a city for them.

    So, we can n something after capturing her."

    Kumar just listened to him and waited there, after that, they moved at full speed towards the forest patch and continued forward.

    Meanwhile, back in the rear path, the core disciple couldn¡¯t help but take a rest this time. Everyone was injured and felt weak at the moment and they couldn¡¯t make do like the first time, so they made a camp.

    Sam felt relieved with this. The more time the core disciple wasted, the better it is for them. If the two troops arrive at the city at the same time, that would be for the best.

 Chapter 1195: Cracking the Cursed Canyon

    Time passed and a few hours went by without much activity. Sam looked at the troops on both sides and watched as they moved towards the city.

    When the fiend troops arrived at the second trap and crossed it without triggering anything, the rear troops already reached the third trap.

    They started going crazy and this time, the youngdy didn¡¯t have any other choice other than sending the spare beasts of the troops first to check the traps, they lost too much in the first two even though they had the scrolls and they felt like they prepared enough.

    She also kept on recording the results of the first two traps to send back to the city.

    But this time, she couldn¡¯t help but feel her throat run dry when they reached the third trap. The details of the third trap are written in blood on the scroll and she knew that everyone died after this. So, he wanted the spare beasts to test the situation out.

    But after a few minutes, she saw the beasts attacking each other and eating each other alive, most of the beasts died and the few beasts that are too weak to move around and eat each other, started gnawing on the rocks and the soil.

    She couldn¡¯t help but feel like a chill has run through her spine.

    But Sam who is back in the city couldn¡¯t help but frown at this.

    Even though the traps recharge with time, there is no way they would be able to recharge within seconds, they need to make sure that there is some extra time between each activation so that they can have enough energy.

    But the troops already arrived and for the canyon, this is already the second activation. He is afraid that the third activation wouldn¡¯t be as powerful if the cultivators just followed these beasts, even an hour or two might not be enough to gather enough energy.

    In fact, even the third activation might not be powerful enough topletely stop the rest of the troops if it happens immediately.

    The youngdy seemed to hesitate though. After all, the situation with the beasts is too cruel and dangerous, she didn¡¯t want to take the risk.

    But she looked through the scroll and went through the process in which the beasts went crazy.

    She thought of something and decided to test it out.

    She looked at her personal guards and said.

    "We are going in, you guys are going to follow me and keep on following my orders inside, do not do anything other than what I say no matter how much urge you have to do it."

    The guards nodded without question.

    So, she went in with her forty personal guards and they ran at full speed.

    The rest of the forces are standing back and waiting for something to happen. They are nervous and anxious, but their expected consequence didn¡¯te, instead, they just slowed down a bit as they felt the thirst.

    But the core disciple looked at her personal guards sternly and said.

    "Do not, drink anything. Hold the thirst it. It is just an illusion. It is just an illusion."

    She kept on yelling as she led her troops, her personal guards who almost went for their gourds stopped their actions and just kept on running and soon they are hit by the rest of the curses, the itch, the hunger, and even the hallucinations.

    But every time, it happened, she controlled her own urge with a lot of effort and she went on with giving themand to the rest of the guards.

    Since the guards are absolutely loyal to her and listen to their everymand, they didn¡¯t dare give in to their urges. In fact, Sam is a little surprised by this, even though he couldn¡¯t hear every detail because the surveince is capturing this from far away, he could understand what she is doing and he was shocked by how efficient her method is.

    One has to understand that he created this Cursed Canyon to make the beasts and the contractors kill each other and he seeded the first time. A bond that wouldn¡¯t let harm each other no matter what, was broken that easily in this canyon, but these people managed to cross the canyon in a way that Sam couldn¡¯t even fathom.

    Their bond is so much stronger than the bond between a contracted beast and the cultivator whose lives are linked together.

    For a person to harbor such loyalty towards others, it is not an easy thing to do.

    He couldn¡¯t help admire this youngdy for a moment.

    But Sam is a bit troubled after the youngdy and her troops crossed the formation.

    Because, this counts for the third activation of the canyon, but since there are not many people in the third activation it didn¡¯t take a lot of energy and maybe a fourth one will be possible, but it wouldn¡¯t be as effective. It would take at least a few hours for the recharge and the troops could cross it freely. This is exactly what he was worried about.

    But luckily, the forces didn¡¯t know this and they didn¡¯t dare to cross the canyon directly. Sam is really hoping that the formation masters that came with them couldn¡¯t notice this.

    They could only wait.

    But the next thing that happened surprised Sam.

    The youngdy is looking at her personal guards and went to each one of them to ask about their experience in the canyon.

    She started documenting all of them rapidly to get a quickparison, after she was done, she looked back at the forces on the other side and then at the guards.

    "We are going to the other side once again. I will be giving orders to you again. This time, each one of you will be carrying two people and no matter how much they try to wiggle out of your grips and how much they try to cry and yell and say something to convince you, you shouldn¡¯t be leaving them until we cross the canyon again."

    The guards nodded and she led them back.

    The fourth activation Sam has worried about happened and the guards listened to her orders and more than half of the troops were picked up.

    Halfway back through the canyon, suddenly thedy realized that she is not feeling the hallucinations anymore.

    But she didn¡¯t think too much and just felt that the continuous moving around made her immune to it.

    They crossed the canyon in fifteen minutes and dropped off the troops there who felt a bit dizzy, but still alright.

    They went back into the canyon to get back and pick up the remaining people. But once again halfway through, she suddenly looked at her guards and asked.

    "Do you feel the hallucinations?"

    All the guards shook her head and she suddenly thought of something. She ran towards the remaining troops and asked.

    "One of youe here."

    They all exchanged nces, but no one dared to move. She pointed at one and asked them toe.

    The soldier reluctantly came forward and she dragged him into the canyon and asked questions based on the scroll.

    "Do you feel thirsty?"

    "No."

    "Itch?"

    "N.. No."

    "Any hunger or hallucinations?"

    "No."

    The soldier shook his head and thedy had her eyes brightened. She immediately yelled at the remaining troops.

    "The energy of the formation ran dry,e fast."

    The troops were reluctant but they still moved forward and soon they were relieved that they are feeling everything.

    Sam who is looking at the screen the whole time, felt a bit down. But he is not extremely disappointed and just looked at the front-end troops they are currently waiting as they wanted to recuperate.

    It would take around an hour or so for them toe to the city.

    Before that, the troops from Rear city will arrive.

    Sam looked at Noah and said.

    "It seems like we need to prepare for battle. How about some surprise attacks at the gate?"

    "Let¡¯s go."

    With that, they went to the city gate and started cing some basic traps.

    "You know, if only you had let me use those liquid energy cells, we wouldn¡¯t have had to do this at all. The formations wouldn¡¯t have run out of energy and we could be atplete ease with the situation."

    "Stopining and just do this. It is not like you don¡¯t have other tricks up your sleeve."

    "Of course, I have many, but the problem is they are unsuitable to use here."

    "Why?"

    "It would be an overkill."

    Noah looked at him as he ced down a few formation gs near the gate.

    He just threw one g after another to different positions and left.

    They went back and took up some hidden positions tounch the first attack.

    Soon, thedy and the troops reached the gates. They are obviously no guards at the gate and they directly came in.

 Chapter 1196: Engage

    The Youngdy from the Myriad Beast sect didn¡¯t stop even for a second to consider any tactical engagement or sorts before she ran headfirst into the city gates along with her troops.

    Sam didn¡¯t activate his trap immediately, because to have a better effect Noah activated her trap first and it is a verymon wood elemental energy trap. The vines appeared suddenly from the ground and the troops got caught with the high momentum they had until that point, they couldn¡¯t even control their fall.

    As they fell forward face-first, they felt like a force ten times greater than the normal gravity is pulling them downwards.

    It is the gravitational increment Sam created so that they wouldn¡¯t be able to control their fall and to make sure that they fell on the ground and took some time to get out.

    Almost all the soldiers that arrived at the gate got into the trap and looking at them, the rear troops halted outside the game.

    The youngdy and her personal soldiers, however, managed to control themselves even in the surprising situations and it seems like they are half-expecting a trap, so they used some special knives that are glowing with death elemental energy to cut off the vines and used all their might to jump off of that the gravitational field.

    While they are in mid-air Sam activated the trap.

    *BOOM*

    A controlled explosion of energy. Sam must say he became really fond of these things, if though the effect would be best when the liquid energy cells are used, the normal formation gs that use the natural energy in the surroundings are also not a bad thing.

    It is like carrying a bunch of explosives at hand and if one could set it up as fast as they want it to explode, it would be a perfect weapon to use.

    The explosion didn¡¯t kill too many people, but the people that are within the absolute range of the explosion are dead and at the edge of the explosion range are sent flying to different directions with severe injuries.

    Everyone was shocked by this. But that is not the end of it. The troops immediately became alert and let their beasts out.

    It was stupid of them to not let their beasts go first and it is also stupid of them to not be cautious enough even after facing so many deadly traps, but now that they also bit the bullet here, they could only do what needs to be done from now on and let their beasts out for an all-out fight.

    But as soon as their beasts came out, they suddenly felt a bit frightened, because Sam who didn¡¯t use his beasts in a long time let out his own beasts as well.

    Not all of them, Yanwu and Sky teamed up to deal with the birds, while Dia and Raiju teamed up to deal with the beasts on thend along with the Golden ape. The shadow mice also joined the fray to finish off the injured ones with one swift move.

    Sam and Noah joined in the battle directly.

    Even their first target is the injured ones and before the troops could react properly, they are already having severe casualties.

    Finally, after a minute, the youngdy¡¯s mind became clear enough to make sense of the situation and she took the charge of controlling the troops and gave themmands.

    But before Sam and Noah¡¯s coboration, it became less fruitful.

    They almostpletely ignored the ranged attacksing at them as they kept on moving at an incredible pace. It is almost like the two phantoms dancing around like crazy.

    They arrived at one soldier and Noah made her vines coil around him, Sam used the window to stab him in the throat with the sword, and in the meantime, he kicked on the ground backward and a stone protrusion appeared exactly in the middle of another man¡¯s legs hitting him in the testicles.

    He stopped in his tracks and Sam threw a knife into his chest at the same time a shadow mouse appeared and shed that guy¡¯s throat.

    Meanwhile, Noah¡¯s vines coiled into another guy and made him go down into the ground.

    Sam jumped towards him while dodging a spear strike andnded right on his neck and jumped once again breaking his neck in the process.

    As Sam is in mid-air, arge boulder suddenly flew towards him, but before he could even react, some vines caught it and swung it towards another soldier.

    Meanwhile, Sam shed his sword and the sword ray shed vertically past Noah and sliced a guy¡¯s arm off and Noah used his chance to shove a weird fruit in that guy¡¯s mouth and kicked him towards his teammates.

    He flew into the middle of the group and the fruit exploded in his mouth with a pop.

    It seems like a wood elemental poison in the fruit and they felt like their lungs are being upied by something and they soon realized what it is. Their lungs are being upied by the sprouted grass all over and it sprouted out of their chests.

    Everything happened within a few seconds and this went on. Soon, the personal guards and the youngdy herself joined the fray.

    Some of them have higher cultivations than Noah and Sam, so now they have to be careful on how to proceed further.

    Sam took out a ss container filled with purple liquid and Noah took out arge green sphere both of them exchanged a nce with a smile and threw it towards the personal guards. Sam shed in the air and sword ray made both objects explode on the spot, a green vapor and a purple vapor appeared as it spread among them.

    Of course, they were prepared and cleared the area which forced them to break their formation. But Sam and Noah didn¡¯t stop while they are killing the soldiers in the rear, they kept on throwing these poisonous things around so that the youngdy cannot gather her personal guards and create a formation.

    Soon, they spread far enough and it would take a lot of effort to regroup. Since her personal guards don¡¯t have any beasts under them, Sam felt extremely lucky. It would be a lot of effort to deal with them if they had.

    Sam and Noah went after one personal guard at a time and as soon as they arrived there the first they did is throw the poisonous gases on either side so that the others wouldn¡¯t intervene and they got to do the job.

    Sam mmed his foot into the ground and the small piece of ground under the guard turned into quicksand and the earthen hands appeared holding him. Noah¡¯s vines came in and started dragging him into the quicksand.

    With another stomp, Sam dodged the attack from the guard and increased the gravity, before silver lightning condensed on the edge of his de and as he shed it onto that guard, a shadow appeared from behind him and stabbed him on the side of his neck. He was paralyzed on the spot and let the quicksand suck him knee-deep. At this moment, someone used the wind element to clear the poisonous smoke, but Sam didn¡¯t bother with it and broke a small poisonous vial in the mouth of their current target and both of them left.

    The poison caused the paralysis and the wound on the neck bled out rapidly while the poison and the sh on the chest did their jobs along with it.

    They once again took out their poison containers and went for the next targets as they moved around. They went for the personal guard on the edge of the whole group and dealt with him in almost the same way. But this time, he got vignt about the stomps and he jumped backward instantly, but right where he was aboutnd, two shadows appeared from under him and stabbed him in the back.

    Sam jumped into the air used the excessive gravity tond on him while stabbing him inside the heart, Noah just to make sure held some poisonous thorny vines to deal with him and both of them ran deeper into the city.

    Their advantage over the group with the element of surprise is almost gone, there is no way they would be able to keep this up for long.

    Along with them, Yanwu and the rest also followed with the chaos clearing a little bit, the youngdy stood there in daze as she looked at the beasts.

    "Sky sovereign Roc, Golden Sun crow. Golden Ape, Raiju, Mare of Diomedes. All legendary beasts, who is this person?" She muttered to herself as her eyes started glowing with desire, excitement and greed. These are the beasts that the beast cultivators would die for. In fact they would even sign a reverse contract of being a ve just to be that beast¡¯spanion and that is considering only one beast, but all four of them are under one cultivator¡¯smand here and she observed the lightning attacks which are extremely simr to that of the Raiju¡¯s and the gravity that is simr to that of Dia¡¯s.

    She couldn¡¯t help but feel the desire to snatch these beasts from him and she impulsively acted up on it as she led her guards and the remaining troops to go after them.

 Chapter 1197: Chipping

    Sam and Noah ran into the streets of the city crazily. There is no citizen left inside the city now and all of them are driven back into the city wall grounds. So, the whole city is a battle-field and they don¡¯t have to care about any property damage, so as soon as they reached deep into the city Sam recalled his beasts back into the divine dimension and disappeared into the cluster of the buildings.

    The troops spread a bit to cover the escape routes, but that is what exactly the two of them wanted.

    When a group of three led by the personal guard are in an alley way, three shadows popped up and put them in naked chokes and three more shadows came and started stabbed them in the chests. Everything went in a sh and they disappeared after that stab.

    Before they could react, the shadows disappeared, the vines appeared. The personal guard managed to hold the pain and tried to sh the vines and almost ran out of the alley, but Sam appeared behind him and stabbed him in the heart from the back.

    He died on the spot and the remaining two troops followed them along.

    They just didn¡¯t even care enough check whether they died and their lives were gone. They just went after another group.

    Their teamwork is impable for it being the first time.

    But Sam is constantly checking for a special signal from Kumar. He would really like if the other brings the fiend tribe¡¯s forces.

    They don¡¯t have to put this much effort and fight with all of them. It is a waste of time.

    So, their main goal is drag it down and take them soldiers down as much as they can so that they can make this youngdy stay here for a long time.

    And as soon as the forcese into y, they would be able to sit back and rx.

    So, they picked up the pace and soon the youngdy realized that even the teams of three are too easy for them. She took hermunication token and yelledmands to make everyone join together at the junction.

    Sam and Noah stood at the nearby building and waited for them to gather.

    He took out his bow and yed with the string as he asked her.

    "Do you have any other tricks you can y with?"

    "I have some, but they are good at the close quarters. My ranged attacks are not as good."

    "Really? why don¡¯t you take it out, I will take a look."

    She took out a small ball that looked like a green crystallized marble.

    He took it and used observation ability, he was surprised by the view he got. This small marble holds a lot of energy in it and it has a lot of functions.

    "Why is it only suitable in close quarters? You can use it from far, at least from its size."

    "It needs two triggers of energy. First when I throw it which absorbs energy and the second trigger should make the energy hit one single point so that the attack would be perfectly timed.

    It would be hard to maintain both of them from such a long distance. There are too many external factors involved."

    "Can I give it a try?"

    Sam asked and she just shrugged.

    He smiled and the hand he is holding the marble turned metallic and a faint metallic coat appeared on the marble before it was further modified and turned into some patterns.

    Noah frowned and Sam just smiled without exining. He took out an arrow and ced the sharp tip of the arrow at one single point which looked like the emergence point of the patterns.

    He then injected some metal elemental energy into the arrow and left the marble. But the marble didn¡¯t fall off. It just kept on hanging while it stuck to the arrow tip.

    Noah was stunned.

    "How did you do that?"

    "Just a petty trick of maism."

    He then nocked the arrow on the bow and aimed at the group.

    Wood elemental energy was injected into the arrow and it clogged up in the stem.

    He shot the arrow at the group and on its way, the marble started absorbing the energy from the atmosphere. When the arrow reached the destination and someone even tried to block it, the maic lock holding it was gone and right before it fell off, the wood elemental energy was lodged into the marble making it unlock.

    The marble cracked in midair and soon a few small sprouts came out of it, before it could even touch the ground, the sprouts grew bigger and turned into thick vines with different thrones and that went after all the surrounding people.

    As the vines coiled they dug out the flesh of the people and created a very bloody scene.

    They sucked the vitality of and grew bigger and bigger, the more people that got caught the bigger it became , not just in the number of vines and the length of the vines, even the thickness of the vines and then the size of the thorns of the vines also grew bigger with time.

    The fire elemental user started attacking crazily along with his beasts.

    The vines started burning and the group felt a little relieved as they thought this would also be another struggling moment with the vines having fire elemental resistance.

    But to their luck it didn¡¯t have. What they didn¡¯t know is that there is something in store for them.

    The thorns that grew bigger and almost in the size of a kitchen knife shot out the vines as it burned down and they lodged themselves into the bodies of the soldiers surrounding them.

    The raging thorns did a number of them and five men fell out of which four died on the spot with one being critically injured.

    Sam looked at how fell the marble worked and said.

    "This really works great. I am a little tempted to steal your idea and just mix some of my vor with it."

    "Do it if you can. It is not that easy. And you still have something to figure out. Do you really want to add this to your te."

    "Of course, I always like my te full. The more it has the faster I finish it. Now, give me some of those so that we could finish these guys off."

    Noah threw five of them at him and left the spot. To directly confront them.

    Sam shot the second arrow. This one alsonded perfectly, but this time the fire elemental user didn¡¯t dare burn it directly. But a dark energy elemental user used a curse to suck the vitality of the vine, but to his dismay as he worked on it, the thorns suddenly shot out and when they lodged into the bodies of the people, they felt the vitality being sucked out of their bodies.

    It was notpletely apparent when the fire element was used, but it seems like the vines and thorns have an ability to attach the attacks used on them.

    The battle went on and finally, the youngdy and the personal guards understood the situation they are in. When they are separated, they are being hunted down, when they are together they are being chipped down.

    Even the fact that they could guess Sam¡¯s location from this far didn¡¯t make it any less dangerous for them.

    So, she made a quick decision. Escape.

    She knew it is impossible to move like this. The traps on the path already chipped their forces down and the enemies are more elite than any enemy she had every faced. She stormed cities alone before, but she couldn¡¯t even take two people ying cat and mouse with her at the moment.

    All she could do was escape and this made her feel shame. But when she thought of the legendary beasts Sam had in possession, she didn¡¯t want to just give up. She decided to go back and bring some trusted elders so that she could hunt this guy down and get those beasts.

    So, he immediatelymander her personal guards to retreat.

    But Sam is not really ready to let them go.

    All the borate nning was to capture this youngdy. If she escaped there is kind of no point for the relentless effort they put in until now.

    So, he chased after her with a bow and shot at her to take her down, but since what he is doing are direct shots with not much specialty her superior cultivation finally came into y and she managed to dodge the attacks.

    But some of her personal guards are going down with two to three arrows.

    Still, Sam didn¡¯t give up the pursuit and soon he didn¡¯t have to because Noah arrived on the other side and arge vine wall appeared out of nowhere blocking the escape routes.

    Sam caught up from the rear and now there is the youngdy, four personal guards, and the two of them with the ying field all for themselves.

 Chapter 1198: Spear

    Sam looked at Noah and asked nonchntly.

    "You do you want? The Sidekicks or the main chick?"

    "I am taking that woman. You can deal with the sidekicks."

    "Okay, but be careful. Your cultivation level is different and she is not exactly a bad fighter, you wouldn¡¯t have an easier time as before. If something happens to you, your boyfriend will pick a bone with me."

    She just gave him a re and Sam merely chuckled and ran towards them.

    The youngdy and the Personal guards could clearly listen to what they were speaking as they didn¡¯t bother to conceal their words and when the personal guards looked at her, the youngdy just nodded giving them her permission.

    The Sidekicks ran towards Sam to deal with him.

    They led their fight to the next alley and they engaged without any dy. Meanwhile, Noah and the Youngdy are in a staring contest with each other and after some time, the youngdy lost patience andunched an attack.

    She is not a fire element user or does she have any other element. She is a pure neutral energy user and a warrior through and through.

    And it seems like she is good with a few weapons at least. Noah dodged the spear that was thrown at her and started running towards the youngdy while she bit her thumb and made some hand signs. The blood armor appeared around her and the drop of blood that came fell into the ground started growing the trees rapidly.

    As she ran through the streets, either side of her the trees grew rapidly and within no time the middle of the city became a forest.

    Noah closed their distance rapidly and when they are close enough she leaped towards her with a kick to her face.

    The youngdy swung her spear and got ready to stab Noah using her own momentum. But just before the spear and Noah were about to make contact, she disappeared and turned into a thing vine that was shot at the youngdy¡¯s face.

    Noah is nowhere to be seen and the youngdy was shocked. The sudden appearance of the vine caught her off guard and when it hit her face, she felt a bit dazed and involuntarily took a few steps back and to her surprise, she hit the wall of vines and...

    *BOOM*

    An explosion happened.

    She was blown away and crashed into the road as she turned around to take a look. There are a bunch of fruits on the vine wall behind her. She examined her wound and realize the adverse effects of this.

    Her skin on the back is hurting with a burning sensation and she could feel it seeping into her flesh. She couldn¡¯t help but take some sharp breaths to control her pain as she used her energy to control the spread of this burning sensation.

    But while she was in the middle of it, she swung her spear towards aing vine making it split into two and looked around to make sure no sneak attacks would happen.

    For the next two minutes, everything is silent.

    "Why are you hiding? Come out if you dare. There is no point in regretting now since you already made your decision. Come on, I want to see that cocky face you made when you told that guy you would take me on."

    "pfft... you call that provocation? There ten-year-old kids I know that could provoke others better than you, try harder." Noah¡¯s voice reverberated in that patch of trees and the youngdy tried to find her exact location, but the voice came from all sides making her confused.

    She then wanted to walk out the wooden patch, but she could as a spontaneous wall of vine blocked her path.

    "Fuck it." She cursed and energy is condensed on the tip of her spear as she stabbed it forward at the wall of vines.

    Just when the spear and the vines made contact, a fruit appeared at that spot and upon contact, it exploded.

    *BOOM*

    The fruit exploded and it threw the youngdy away, but at the same time, the vine wall was torn apart from the force of the spear attack. But the youngdy who is in mid-air didn¡¯tnd on the ground, a wall of vines appeared and she stuck to it.

    A sticky substance came out of the vines making her stick to it and even slowly bury herself into this. She struggled to get out of this, but she couldn¡¯t. No matter how hard she pulled, she couldn¡¯t get out.

    At this moment, Noah appeared from the middle of the woods and stood in front of her.

    "I thought you would be stronger, but you are not that good." She said as she walked towards the youngdy.

    "Hahaha...hahahaha..."

    All of a sudden, the youngdy who was stuck on the wallughed and Noah frowned as she halted in her tracks. She suddenly felt the air around her is vibrating crazily. The sharp sensations made her feel something she is familiar with, but there is a faint unfamiliarity in it.

    The youngdy stored the spear away and a Halberd appeared in her hand. The spiritual energy emitted from her body like sharp des as itpletely cut the vine wall into shreds as she made her way towards Noah.

    Noah looked at the whole scene in surprise, then she understood what is happening. She is really embarrassed, to say the least. She couldn¡¯t believe she fell for such an obvious one.

    But her expression instantly turned colder as she looked at the youngdy.

    She is walking towards Noah and for every step she took, it is like a storm of despletely ripping every tree, vine, and even every piece ofnd beneath them into pieces.

    The surrounding forest was instantly cut down giving both of them a lot of space.

    The youngdy lunged forward and swung her halberd at Noah to sh her vertically. But the vines shot out from the surrounding trees not only creating a wall to block the attack, but also dragging her down and attacking her with the explosive fruit.

    But to Noah¡¯s dismay, she gave the halberd a spin and the sharp rays emitted from it destroyed everything that came at her and the halberd returned to the previous shing posture.

    Noah frowned and leaped backward to dodge which she barely managed to do.

    *CRASH*

    Arge crater appeared on the ground, demolishing everything on the spot. Noah felt a sense of trepidation as she looked at the youngdy. It seems like they underestimated her too much. Her Halberd Intent is so strong that it is almost on par with Kumar¡¯s spear intent.

    The drawback is that she sucks at leading a team, that is why so many people died without any returns. But she is really good at closebat, it is almost tyrannically unfair to her opponents of the same level.

    Noah and the youngdy exchanged a nce and the energy riled up surrounding both of them.

    Noah made a bunch of hand signs and spread her arms. The vines and and the trees surrounding her which are formed from her blood art are all withering at a rapid pace as all the energy entered her body rapidly.

    The youngdy also got ready as the surrounding energy riled up enough to glow around her and it all started condensing into the de of the halberd.

    Both of them got ready for onest move to end this quickly.

    The trees witheredpletely and arge clean and circr crater surrounded the youngdy.

    She looked at Noah and jumped into the air. The halberd made a beautiful arc as she made her way towards Noah.

    Noah who is standing on the ground extended her right hand forward. Her body is currently glowingpletely with the wood elemental energy. The sheer amount of energy is clearly more than a cultivator of her level shouldn¡¯t have contained, but she did.

    With just a mere thought a bunch of vines extended from her hand and shot towards the youngdy as the farther they moved from her the thicker and stronger they became with a bunch of thorns extending from them.

    The youngdynded on one of the vines and used it to run towards Noah, but she was faced with a bunch of thorns, smaller vines, explosive fruits, and even the marbles that Sam used at her.

    She took a lot of attacks and soon, she found herself in arge globe created by vines with thorny pikes extended towards her and stabbing her, but the globe was destroyed within a few seconds as it was cut apart into several shreds and she jumped at Noah finally closing the distance.

    Noah¡¯s left hand which is dormant for all this while suddenly had arge amount of energy concentrated in as she got ready to meet her attack head-on, but right when both of them were about to make contact...

    *WHISTLE*

    A spear whistled through the air it lodged into the chest of the youngdy, her momentum was lost and she fell towards Noah.

    Noah who already made her move, widened her eyes in disbelief and changed the trajectory of the attack with extreme effort, and caught the youngdy with her vines.

    Her expression got colder as she looked into the surroundings. Sam who already dealt with the sidekicks and watching the show from afar is also looking in the direction the spear came from.

 Chapter 1199: Return

    Sam took off on harbinger and appeared near Noah who is exhausted, to say the least. Thest punch she was about to throw consumed almost all of her energy.

    He looked in the direction while guarding her as she recovered. The youngdy of the Myriad Beast sect is nailed to the ground with the spear still in her chest. She is also exhausted and the bleeding didn¡¯t help either.

    The spear move is indeed powerful and the energy behind it made Sam extremely vignt. But soon, someone came to the sight.

    Kumar and a bunch of fiends areing towards them slowly.

    Sam just gave them a nce and took the spear out of the youngdy and started healing her. She was surprised, but she didn¡¯t stop him from healing her. She knew that she is in a pickle and she would like to hold on to any chance she could get to live.

    By the time, Sam was done with her the fiend tribe troops already made their way towards them. Looking at Sam, the leader who he already spoke with through the citymunication channel said.

    "She is an enemy. There is no point in saving her. We don¡¯t need to take her as a prisoner."

    "I know that." Sam replied ndly and looked at Noah. He gestured her with his head and she walked towards the woman calmly before crushing her neck with a vine with a single wave of her hand.

    The youngdy was shocked. She didn¡¯t expect that as soon as he thought she found a straw to hold on to, she would die like this. This ispletely unexpected.

    The leader of the fiend troops frowned at this.

    "What is the meaning of this?" He asked without holding his thoughts back.

    "She is our target. Not yours." With that, Sam picked up the spear that attacked the youngdy and threw it towards the leader.

    He caught the spear and looked at Sam with a cold gaze.

    "You work for the tribe. So, every one of your targets is our target."

    "That might work with the others you hired. But it wouldn¡¯t work with us. Our targets are our prey and only we can hunt them. It is uneptable to intervene in our hunt, much less trying to snatch the prey at our mouths."

    Noah said from the side.

    The deputy of the leader who is standing behind him came forward and said in a serious tone.

    "You seemed to have forgotten your status and position here. You are but a mercenary team hired by the fiend tribe to do our bidding. That is your position and you should be self-aware when you are speaking to someone of higher stature."

    His aura raged as he held his sword.

    Kumar already separated from the group and looked at his deputy as if he wanted to eat him alive.

    Sam walked to the woman and started extracting her memory as he spoke.

    "Yeah, our position is that of a mercenary. Maybe, we are even lower position than the soldiers."

    "Good that you are self-aware. Nowe and apologize to themander."

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "I have something to say about our status. You know, at this moment I think our status is the three-man team who are of peak stage pre-transcendent cultivation and all three of us are human. We took down a city the Fiend tribe couldn¡¯t for the past decade and rescued the woman who your tribe has forsaken in the name of some petty reasons that you tell yourself so that you have a probable excuse.

    And all that we have done was only done within two days. So, you better watch your words. As for the apology, I wouldn¡¯t hold it against you for trying to steal our kill this time."

    With that, Sam stored the body away and they walked towards the city hall.

    The soldiers behind themander wanted to make a move and particrly the deputy, but themander didn¡¯t let them do it.

    The information that Sam is the one who helped them deal with this city is well known everywhere. If they really made a move, the credibility of the fiend tribe would be gone in a second.

    After all, everything Sam said is true. They didn¡¯t take this city in a decade and the three mercenaries did. Not only would be they painted as ungrateful if they made a move, but the remaining mercenaries also wouldn¡¯t be working with them anymore.

    And in this war, the role of mercenaries is kind of important no matter how one looked at it.

    He let the troops wait in the city and went after Sam and the rest.

    Inside the city hall, Sam handed over the woman to themander along with a spatial ring and said.

    "This contains the recordings of most of our activities, the traps we set up, and even some tokens that could help your team bypass these traps. They are set in both pathways, so if you try, you might be able to use them to defend this city.

    But if the group that crosses the path didn¡¯t have at least one token with them, they will not be able to escape them.

    I have a copy of all these things too so that we can have our fair share of contribution points."

    After that, he took out a scroll and looked at themander.

    "I would like a spiritual imprint signature in this scroll."

    Themander frowned and read the contents.

    "You don¡¯t trust the fiend tribe? This is insulting to us."

    "I don¡¯t trust a tribe that can just sit around and let their women be tortured like this for a decade just because of some pathetic political reasons. I don¡¯t know how you will handle her situation from now on, but I need my contribution for that.

    Who knows, you guys just might make her presencepletely unknown and might even cut our contribution points just to make sure that others believe that I didn¡¯t find her. I don¡¯t have any higher authority to report to and get my scores settled.

    If you give me this, I would have a better hold of the situation and I will have something to justify myself for settling the scores."

    "No offense but settling scores? You are a mercenary. If you take a city down, how many can you do? What can you do to a tribe that is ruling a realm on its own?"

    "You are in such a luxurious position as you think you are in. You are fighting against an organization that is equally powerful. And if you make an enemy of the people that could take down the city and hold it on for a few days with their own abilities and no external help, what do you think happened when the war escted."

    With that, he got the signature and left with the other two yers.

    As they were on the path to go for a ce where they could get out on Sky, Noah asked.

    "Can we just dimensional drifter? I need to take a break."

    Sam just shrugged and took it out. They disappeared from the spot and reappeared near the water crystal city, but they didn¡¯t go immediately and instead set up a camp at the river bank to take a break.

    "This is convenient. Why wouldn¡¯t you use it every time?" Noah asked as she rxed on the bank.

    "Because it is damn expensive. Even I would feel the pinch if I use it so often like that."

    "But you are filthy rich, I doubt you would be able to lose much even if you use it. You are pretty vain sometimes."

    "You are right, but if I use this unnecessarily too much, it would still be too much of a waste. Anyway, in our current situation, we could go anywhere within a few hours on this and since we need time to discuss the ns, we might as well do it while traveling. It is not like we are wasting much time.

    We are just using the same time we need to discuss the n and instead we are both traveling and discussing in the process we would also do some scouting on the way."

    "If you put it that way."

    They rxed until dark and finally went to the Water Crystal city and went to meet Myrion.

    But to their surprise, Commander Miran is also there and it seems like she was waiting for them.

    She looked at them and said.

    "you are the three mercenaries that turned the mountain city upside down. Good job."

    "Thanks, but before we discuss any further, I would like you to see some things."

    Sam said and gave the recording crystals to her. There are many recordings and she skimmed through them briefly, but there is one recording that caught her eyes, it is the confrontation between the fiend troops and Sam¡¯s group.

    "I know we are mercenaries and we don¡¯t have much status topare with you guys, but please tell your people to control their level of intervention. It is a great offense to steal the prey of a hunter. Particrly, when the hunter is working for you. It would be seen as bad faith which is not good for any working rtionship."

    He paused and looked at her to see the reaction.

    "I would give you some time. It will take some time for you to evaluate our contributions. We wille back in the morning."

 Chapter 1200: Special Mission

    The next day.

    Commander Miran is sitting together with the trio in the private room of the restaurant. They didn¡¯t speak much since they came.

    "Let me give you your points." She said after a while and the three of them took out their tokens. She tapped her own token on the three and the numbers changed.

    Now each token has an extra 1200 points in them.

    "I called you guys here especially, because I have a mission for you. Even though you are an independent team and might not be interested in taking our mission, this is a special situation. I hope you would make your decision after you listen to what I have to say."

    Miran said after the point transfer waspleted.

    The trio exchanged a nce and waited for her to speak. She then took out three scrolls and ced them in front of them. She spread them on the table and each scroll contained a profile. There are some details, in them. But not many, there are barely any details and most of them are spections.

    Except for the first one, the other two don¡¯t even have the pictures.

    "These three targets are your mission and for every target, you finish off, you will get ten thousand points."

    The trio looked at her in shock. The estimated cultivation level of the three targets is around the Middle-stage transcendence of the Astral ne.

    It is not that strong, the people of the previous mission, know for sure that the massive points are not because of the other party¡¯s strength. So, they just stayed silent and continued listening.

    "The three profiles in front of you are key figures of the Myriad Beast sect.

    They are spatial elemental users and all three of them manage the space gates responsible for connecting the Myriad Beast sect to the other strays and Asteroids on which the sect collects materials and resources."

    "Not all space gates go directly from the sect area?"

    "No, only the space gates they constructed ourselves are the ones that are directly connected to the sect. Not the ones they found." She paused and looking at the trio¡¯s expressions, she smiled and continued.

    "It seems like my guess is right. You guys are not from this realm, are you?

    There are two types of space gates that are currently in operation in this realm. One type of them is the space gates we construct themselves. The second type is a bit different.

    They are the already made space gates that lead to different strays and some asteroids. To be precise they could be called the leftover ruins of the Gandharva race in this realm.

    These ruins are not exactly easy to explore and it takes a lot of time to figure out what resources it holds, and even if they find out what resources it has, it takes a long time to get them all out.

    Half of the members of every organization actually work in all of these cesbined. These three people are the ones that take care of more than half of these pre-existing space gates.

    Since you killed a core disciple and even took down the city directly, the reaction from the Myriad Beast sect is right around the corner.

    They would first the already existing troops to fight it out with us, the terrain might even be the Mountain city, the front city, and the rear city. With our n, we can hold them off and even defeat them, but once we do that, the sect will call for the members from the space gates under the control of these three people.

    So, if you can find them out and get the information regarding the location of these space gates, we would be able to take down one-fourth of the total forces of the Myriad beast sect easily. So, your mission is not only dangerous, but it is also highly important."

    The trio looked at the profiles once again and Sam spoke.

    "But there are no details whatsoever. Even the names are not clear. How can we find them?"

    "That is the tricky part. The Myriad Beast sect knew these people are the weakest link, but they also didn¡¯t want to spread the information because of the possibility of the leak.

    So, they let these three hold most of the information other than the core elders regarding this issue.

    They also took all the precautions to make sure their identities are hidden. But with a heavy price, we managed to find the identity of this one person and a possible ce he might be staying.

    Throughout the years, there are some people who managed to figure out the location of these three and tried to attack, but they couldn¡¯t bypass the security that was arranged around them.

    They ultimately failed and in turn, they revealed the ws in the existing security which helped the Myriad beast sect strengthen it even more.

    After paying a heavy price, we barely managed to find the possible location of this one person. If you can get to him and make him open his mouth, you would be able to get to the location of the remaining two.

    Whatever you do, I need the location of the already existing space gates."

    "I have a doubt." Kumar asked as he looked at the profile. Miran gestured for him to ask away.

    "After reaching the runes, they could have built a space gate that connected to their sect and destroyed the gate that was left behind by the Gandharva race. Why didn¡¯t they do that?"

    Miran chuckled and replied.

    "It is not that simple actually. It is not like anyone hasn¡¯t tried, but for some reason, it is impossible. Until now, nobody managed to find out the reason why it isn¡¯t happening or more like they couldn¡¯t be bothered to figure out the reason, because their focus was captured by the resourcespletely."

    The trio stayed silent and Sam spoke.

    "We need some time to decide. Can we get back to you in the afternoon?"

    "Sure, but the mission details have to be absolutely secret."

    "No problem."

    With that, the three of them left and had a discussion in one of their rooms.

    "So, are we taking this or not?" Kumar asked as soon as they entered.

    "I think we need to take this. But I am not sure how our progress with the destruction of the properties of Myriad Beast sect will go." Noah said from the side.

    "We need topromise on something here. We either stay here and destroy the business or we do this mission.

    Since the other parties are so secretive with their locations and information, it might take the rest of our time on this.

    But I think we can trigger a bigger reaction if we deal with this than if we proceed with the original n."

    "That means, if we fail we solely have to depend on the progress made by the other four people to proceed with the remaining destruction of the organizations."

    "That is true."

    "I have a doubt though, why are all the key figures on this. None of the organizations¡¯ headquarters are here. The fiend tribe, the Myriad beast sect, and even the other organization don¡¯t have any headquarters here. This is one of the most neutrals. But this one has the most businesses and resource points at the same time, enough to tilt and escte the war to an unimaginable extent.

    Now, we found out the existence of these space gates, just what is up with it." Kumar said and Sam also realized this.

    He thought for a moment and said.

    "Maybe we are missing some information. Let us deal with this and see if we can get any answers after that. If these people have information and control over such important resource points they are bound to have some info on that too."

    With that, they decided to take the mission and went to meet Miran again.

    After they took the information they had on the only known target and his possible location, they immediately left the city.

    By night they arrived near their destined location. This is one of the most neutral cities on the. When ites to the resources. The city only has a few Neutral Spirit stone mines in the surroundings and thend is not exactly a good ce to grow some herbs and stuff.

    The city is under the control of the Myriad Beast sect, but they don¡¯t have the absolute authority here, they are only responsible for keeping order and the administration duties.

    The city only developed with its location. It is at a perfect distance from four cities under four different organizations and among those four cities, not one belongs to the Myriad Beast sect.

    The four organizations are afraid that if the city is under any of their control, they might have ideas on other cities. So, they gave it to the Myriad Beast sect and in return, the sect would get taxes.

    All the best products from the four cities will be traded in this ce.

 Chapter 1201: Saran City

    The city is called Saran city. And the sheer number of people that visit this city every day is enormous. With thisrge-scale merchant trade happening, the small-scale vendors also found their ce and it is a city filled with hustle.

    The three of them waited outside the city in a mountain nearby, before they could proceed. This time, even the travel time is not enough for them to prepare a n properly.

    And the first reason is their skeptical nature towards the information itself. They couldn¡¯t believe that a person in charge of suchrge-scale resource points of the Myriad beast sect would be in a ce like this.

    After all, this is the ce that the Myriad Beast sect should keep him far away from. If anything happens to him, it would be extremely difficult for the Myriad Beast sect to find him at all.

    But only after going through all the information did they find out the reasons. The first reason for the sect to be this leisurely about this is the constant movement of this guy. He moved around the and even the tribe couldn¡¯t get any information on his travel ns. All they know is that most of the special resources that the Myriad beast sect bringse from this guy and it seems like he had a partnership with one of therge merchant groups that are is not openly supportive of any of the ruling organizations.

    All the special materials that are produced from the resource points will be given to the sect and once the sect assesses them, they will keep the useful ones and the not so useful ones but still, valuable ones will be given back to him to sell and exchange them into something useful for the sect.

    He uses thisrge merchant city as the outlet for that and with his deal with the merchant group, it bes easier.

    But it is hard to catch him even with the information. Because he moves around a lot and hees in and goes out sneakily. No one knows when he is or he is not in the city.

    If Sam had to guess, except for the branch manager of the said merchant group that had the deal with this guy, no one would probably know, including the city guards and the city administrators responsible for the city.

    The merchant group is a big one and has considerable power. This group is also an entity that truly connects with the external realms.

    This made it a bit hard for the trio to make a decision.

    They cannot just go and deal with this group of people. If they make any mistake and create a slip-up, they would be poking a ho¡¯s nest.

    "I really wish, I could use Kiran now. If that guy is here, half of our work would be done easily. He would just infiltrate the merchant group and keep an eye on the surroundings and find a way to tell us when our target arrives."

    Sam said as he sighed. There are just too many variables and there are not too many openings for them to make a move. He really wished that he could get Kiran to work.

    But he continued to work and after finding no direct way with their current level of information, they could only enter the city and find more info and they immediately did.

    Sam let his surveince out and he also let the shadow mice out to keep a look. The first spot they left a mice is the branch office of the Merchant Group.

    It is the ckwood merchant group and he immediately remembered the Half-Dark Elf he made a deal with in the mountain city.

    The ck Merchant group branch office is different from their actual store. The store only sells and buys things here from individuals, the branch office deals with the auctions and bigger business deals.

    They took residence in an inn and the next morning they gathered some information regarding the branch office. It turned out that there are many few people who met the branch manager and nobody even knows where he lives.

    It is said that there are only four people who are ess to the branch manager. Even then, nobody knows where they meet and how they meet at all.

    But Sam went on with the good old shadow mice to do the job for him. First, they located the four of these Assistant managers and let the shadow mice tail them.

    Along with that, they kept up to date on the news regarding any special items that could be ced on the auction of the ck Wood branch.

    Two days passed like that, but there is no news. Meanwhile, the trio started looking at the surroundings of the city. No matter how easy they could get in and out of the city without anyone knowing, there needs to be a way for them to get in.

    And if there is no secret passage whatsoever, there should at least be a space gate connecting into the city or the target must being through the front gate directly either with a disguise or some other hidden way.

    In these two days, they couldn¡¯t find any secret paths. If there are any, then it would have been some extremely high-level method to conceal it.

    At the same time, they didn¡¯t get any leads from the manager too. The Assistant managers didn¡¯t meet with anyone.

    Their activities are as clean as they could be.

    Sam, Noah, and Kumar met in the inn.

    "So, what should we do next? There are no hidden passages around the city, the branch manager is nowhere to be seen. He either didn¡¯te here or he just left, both of which are bad news for us."

    Noah said as she took a huge swig of wine in frustration.

    "If these options are closed, we can only check on the other options. The first thing we need to confirm is the existence of the space gate which would be a bit difficult, but I do have a theory in mind which would most probably work.

    As for the Branch manager, I think we need to find a way to get him out if he doesn¡¯te out. We need to make sure that we have a tail on him.

    We need to make an issue big enough for the assistant managers to run to their branch manager."

    As they discussed further, they soon got some ideas and formted a n.

    That night Sam went out of the city as he used his surveince puppets to get a good isometric view of the city and started setting up some special formation gs on which he drew the inscribed formations at different locations.

    It took a whole day for him to finish the calctions and finally set the formation up.

    While Sam is busy doing this, Noah also sneaked out of the city and changed her appearancepletely. Her dressing, her hair, and even her demeanor changed a lot.

    She directly went to the ckwood branch and met with the receptionist there.

    "I would like to meet with your Assistant manager." She asked.

    "May I ask what issue you want to meet him with?"

    "I have a product I want to sell."

    The receptionist still had a smile on her face as she slowly took a form and gave it to Noah.

    "Please note down your product information and leave a sample if possible."

    Noah looked at her for a moment and wrote down the details. She then ced a marble along with the form and said.

    "If possible test the product immediately and I would be in the Ruby inn, by afternoon I would be going to the Red rock Merchant group with this if you don¡¯t contact me."

    The receptionist¡¯s smile stiffened a bit, but she didn¡¯t dare say anything that came to her mind and just nodded at Noah¡¯s request.

    At this moment, someone came from the side and looked at Noah before asking.

    "Wow, you sure are confident in your productdy."

    Noah looked at him and said calmly.

    "I am confident. It took decades of research and it finally came to fruition. I am sure anyone would be able to see its worth after they saw it in action."

    "Really? I have some authority here, so how about I test it for you now. If it is really as good as you say, I will instantly arrange a meeting with the assistant manager."

    Noah smiled slightly and asked.

    "What is the catch here?"

    "If you cannot reach the expectations you set up, you would need toe out for dinner with me."

    He said as he openly ogled her.

    Noah just kept her smile and replied.

    "Sure, let us go and test it then."

    The young man took the marble and the form and led her to the backyard of the branch office without even bothering with the receptionist.

    [Author¡¯s note: Shout for the novel from my cousin. ¡¯Game of Extermination¡¯ Just take a read and support him if you will.]

 Chapter 1202: Assistant Manager

    "So, what should we do now?" The young man asked Noah.

    "You would need an opponent." She replied.

    The young man looked at one of the guards standing at the entrance of the door and called him. He made him stand at a distance and looked at Noah in askance.

    "Inject your spiritual energy into the mark on the marble and throw it at it from where you are standing."

    The young man did as he was told and as soon as it hit the guard who tried to block the attack, a vine started breaking out of the marble, and in the blink of an eye, it became big enough to envelop the guardpletely and coiled around him.

    The guard fell on the ground as the vines slowly increased in tightness like a python. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn¡¯te out of it, and soon as the vine sucked the energy, it grew thorns all over it as they slowly stabbed into his skin.

    At this moment, she walked to the guard and used her wood elemental energy to free him.

    The guard had faint stabs all over his body with slight bleeding from every hole that appeared on him. He stood up slowly and took a healing pill. The young man threw a spatial ring to him and said.

    "This is for your troubles. Now get out there. Don¡¯t tell anyone what you saw here."

    His tone of voicepletely changed. He has a serious expression on his face and his lustful look over Noah was gone and was reced by a look of vignce and cautiousness.

    "Now, can I meet the Assistant manager?" She asked him calmly, she didn¡¯t show a single reaction for his vignt expression.

    He looked at her once again and wanted to ask something, but he controlled his impulse and led her into the building and two minutester, they are sitting inside an office room and on the other side of the table, an old man is sitting while looking at the recording of the demonstration.

    It seems like the demonstration grounds are rigged with these devices previously to record every single demonstration.

    After looking at it, the Assistant manager looked at Noah and asked.

    "What kind of product is this? How does the production process work?"

    "A special gic mutation in the seed and the artificial solidification of the energy. The marble is the crystallization of energy, at least the outeryer while the growth of the seed inside is suppressed indefinitely until it was used. At first, it only worked with wood elemental energy, but a friend of mine made a little tinkering. As long as the spiritual energy is concentrated enough, the marble will work.

    As for the exact production process, I am not really ready to share it with you, before discussing the deal."

    "You are not from this realm." The assistant manager asked.

    "No."

    "With this, you can make a lot of money, yourself why did youe here."

    "We tried to go for the business in our home realm, but some people can¡¯t keep their hands to themselves, so we don¡¯t have a choice but to leave that ce."

    "We?"

    The assistant manager asked curiously, but Noah didn¡¯t answer. She looked at the young man that escorted her inside.

    Looking at this, the assistant manager gave him a look from which that guy took the hint and left the ce.

    After he left, Noah took a deep breath and said.

    "Me and my twin sister. She is currently acting as the mercenary for the Fiend tribe. I don¡¯t know if you heard it, but she is one of the three people that killed the core disciple, took down the mountain city and the farm town of the Myriad Beast sect."

    The Assistant manager widened his eyes in disbelief. He looked at Noah who had a gloomy expression on her face as she continued with the exnation.

    "She stole all my inventions and as soon as we escaped and arrived in this realm, we wanted to go directly to the nearest ckwood branch, but she betrayed me and escaped with all the trinkets I made.

    She used them to do what she did until now."

    The assistant manager stayed silent for a moment and asked.

    "So, what can we help you with? If it is just to sell this product, I think we can reach a partnership that is fair for both of us. We at the ckwood don¡¯t steal the inventions, we value the work behind the things than the things themselves and we invest in your capabilities."

    "I know. I have enquired about your reputation and I know I wouldn¡¯t be short-changed here. But I have one condition in this business deal.

    The first product would be these marbles and we need to establish a manufacturing nt and I need some wood elemental energy users to train first. You get eighty percent since you would arrange the raw materials, the location, and the workers, I will only take ten percent."

    "What about the ten percent?"

    "I want you to use that ten percent to join the bridge between me and the Myriad Beast sect. Even though it is not public yet, I know that the war is going on and my sister is fighting on the other side. I want the Myriad beast sect¡¯s help in capturing her. I want to take revenge for betraying me like this."

    "So, you will give that percent for them?"

    "Yes. Whether it is the form of a discount or straight up paying that sum. I want them to find my sister and bring her alive. If you do that, I will give you eighty percent in this product, seventy in the next one and sixty in the third one, and from then on, you can get sixty in every product.

    That is my deal. I don¡¯t want to negotiate, I don¡¯t want to bargain back and forth. If you can do it, it is okay or I will go for Red Rock."

    The assistant manager just smiled and said.

    "Do you happen to have a few more to perform some tests? I would like to show it to our manager, he would be the one making the decision. But I am pretty sure, he would agree."

    Noah nodded and gave three more marbles to him.

    "I advise you to not try to analyze the structure so that you can replicate it, it wouldn¡¯t end well for the person who tries to do that.

    I wille by tomorrow at noon."

    With that, she left and went out of the city, after reaching a certain distance she disappeared leaving some of the people that belonged to the ckwood merchant group that are trying to tail her.

    After losing her, they went back to how she disappeared and asked him what they should do next.

    The assistant manager sat there as he looked at the marbles and heard what Noah said to him.

    He looked at the form she filled. The name she left behind is Rona. After looking at the form for a while, he decided to go and meet the manager.

    The shadow mouse followed him to his house. But when they came out, the shadow mouse is following a soldier instead of the assistant manager.

    The soldier went back to the outer regions of the city and entered a fairly mediocre house. He spoke with the neighbors amicably while he was on the street as if he belonged here.

    After entering the house, he removed a b on the floor and went down. The shadow mouse followed him all the way and soon they reached a long passageway through which the soldier walked.

    Soon, he reached arge room in which an old man tinkering with a formation te.

    There are a lot of things around him thrown all over the ce.

    The soldier waved his hand and his outfit and the face disappeared revealing the assistant manager.

    "Hello, Manager.

    I would like your opinion on something."

    The old man didn¡¯t even bother looking at him and said.

    "It better be something important. I already told you many times not to disturb my research. You wouldn¡¯t have a good ending if it is not worth my time."

    "I wouldn¡¯t dare to waste your time if it is a normal issue, but I think this is an opportunity knocking on our doors."

    With that, he took out the marble and showed it to the old man while exining the deal Noah proposed to him.

    "A deal with Myriad Beast sect? This is definitely a great deal for us. Currently, the news on those three mercenaries is unknown to even us, so if there is anyone who can get to them, that would be a myriad beast sect since they woulde across in the war.

    And she only needs ten percent for this.

    This is indeed a great deal. But why do I feel like it is too good to be true."

    "That is why I came for you. This is indeed a good product, but for someone to give up that much profits just for revenge, they are either stupid and don¡¯t have the business acumen or they are trying to screw us over."

    "Then let us hope it is former. Talk to her tomorrow and probe around a bit. I will talk to our contact in the Myriad Beast sect. He would being here in two days."

 Chapter 1203: Assistant Manager- II

    While the assistant manager and the manager are discussing the possibilities of these Marble businesses, Sam is busy in the woods.

    The formation he set up is something he came upon a whim with theoretical knowledge he had. It is toorge and it uses spatial energy which is dangerous in itself. Particrly, when he is covering the whole city on his own.

    He couldn¡¯t get the desired precision on the first try, but as he tinkered with it more and more, he managed to get it by the fifth try.

    Sam sat on one of the formation nodes as he closed his eyes and meditated while checking the effects of the formation.

    At this moment, in his vision, the whole city has turned into some kind of wireframe mesh. Even though it is not as detailed and in fact considered a mess, he could still differentiate what he wants.

    In this method, he could see the exact location of everything within the city, whether are underground, above ground, and even if they are hidden inside the formation which is of extremely high level and couldn¡¯t be scanned using this method, he can still get the formation in the scan.

    And in all of this mess, there is one group of things that would make it easy for him to track and those of the things that use spatial energy.

    Particrly the formations that use spatial energy, like the space gates.

    Currently, he is looking for the space gate formation within the city and in the process, he discovered a lot of hidden things, for example, he already saw the movements of the Assistant manager and his shadow mouse which is tailing him.

    He looked at the secret room of the manager of the branch in which there are a bunch of trinkets all over the floor, table, bed, and in every corner of the room.

    He now realized the location of this guy.

    But that is not the only thing he got. There is another hidden tunnel inside that room connected to another location and the Spatial element is glowing there.

    That small room definitely has a space gate or a simr formation installed to it. Even though Sam could not get a precise answer, the most probable bet is the space gate formation.

    Sam opened his eyes and sighed. He went back to the inn inside the city and he didn¡¯t even bother to take down the formation. The nodes are buried underground and they are pretty ordinary looking even if anyone found out. He is sure that nobody would bother digging in that close range from the city.

    "So, what are your findings?"

    By the time, Sam reached the inn, Noah and Kumar are chatting their time away.

    "I think there is a space gate underground. There are no tunnels connecting the city from outside, but there is a tunnelwork within the city leading from the outer region and there is one tunnel connecting to the room.

    If my guess is right, our target would be arriving in that room and will be leaving from that room.

    But we don¡¯t know for sure."

    "Is there a possibility that the Manager is leaving this ce and our target is noting here?"

    "There is indeed a possibility, but I think the first case is most probable. There must be a loose end in his operation that made his identity revealed in the first ce.

    But we don¡¯t exactly what it is yet.

    Anyway, I think the assistant manager you met, has gone to meet the manager with your marble. They might be considering your proposal. Maybe tomorrow we will get some information."

    While they are discussing, Kumar is sipping his drink sulkily. He couldn¡¯t get involved in this, because he couldn¡¯t help in this part of the n.

    "Okay, I will be getting back outside. The shadow mouse will stay there inside that hidden room to keep an eye on that manager. Try to get some information out of that Assistant manager tomorrow. I wille back after your meeting is over."

    Both agreed and Sam left after discussing some more details.

    The next day, Noah arrived at the branch once again and met with the Assistant manager.

    "Rona, I met the manager. He is really interested in the deals. But before that, we need to confirm some things. It is about your sister and your identities."

    "Please do ask. If it isfortable for me, I will clearly answer."

    "Which realm are you from?"

    Noah stayed silent for a moment and said with a sigh.

    "I don¡¯t even know if you have heard of it, it is too far away and it¡¯s called the Ashwood realm."

    "Ashwood realm?" The Assitant manager asked in confusion. He really didn¡¯t hear of that ce.

    "So, what is your identity there?"

    "Nothing much, me and my sister are wandering cultivators and we have a wood elemental affinity. But my sister is more of abat-oriented one and is good at attacking and killing, she used to take the mercenary jobs.

    But I am not really good with my attacking and such, I could only defend myself at best and I am good with research."

    "Are there any other inventions before this?"

    "There are some, but..."

    She just trailed and didn¡¯t answer. The Assistant manager understood and said.

    "I talked to your situation and conditions to our manager. But there is a catch and I wouldn¡¯t beat around the bush. My manager liked your invention very much and he would like to cooperate with you, but to discuss terms with the Myriad beast sect would be a problem. We cannot guarantee anything, but a representative from the Myriad Beast sect we are working with for a long time is going to visit the day after tomorrow night.

    He said he will discuss it with him. I will give you an answer day after tomorrow."

    Noah¡¯s eyes brightened at this and asked.

    "Is it possible for me to talk with that person?"

    "That..."

    "Please."

    "It is not that I don¡¯t want to let you meet him. His identity is a bit special and every time hees into town, he only speaks with our manager and does business before leaving. He would stay here for a long and wouldn¡¯t even show his face outside unless there is something extremely special."

    "Special?"

    Noah said as she looked at the marble sample on the table.

    The assistant manager felt a bit embarrassed and coughed awkwardly before saying.

    "Your invention is indeed special, but I am really sorry to say this. It is not enough to let him meet you. Maybe, after the nt was created and they used the first batch. There is a possibility. Even then, the person that might meet you will be someone different."

    Noah became silent for a moment and it looked like she was hesitating, but after a sigh, she stood up to leave and said.

    "Thank you for your time. I wille again on the day after tomorrow."

    The assistant manager also stood up and sent her off to the entrance. All this while Noah looked extremely hesitant and she even almost spoke up from time to time, but it seems like something is stopping her.

    Looking at this, the Assistant manager became extremely curious and decided to report the news back to the Manager.

    The old man listen to the events and thought for a moment before saying.

    "If shees tomorrow, treat her well. Say that you and I tried so much to convince the assistant of the representative who handles the meetings and activities of the representative to let him meet her.

    But unfortunately, we failed.

    Sell this narrative to her and make her believe that we tried our best. There might be a chance that we could stumble on something good."

    The assistant manager didn¡¯t understand, but he agreed and left.

    After this meeting is over, Sam contacted Noah.

    "It seems like your n worked. He came and reported to the manager."

    "Of course, it was so obvious. I got some news. He said that the representative ising tomorrow night. I don¡¯t know if it is the same person though."

    "It has to be. From what we observed none of the ck Wood branch businesses are associated with the Myriad beast sect businesses in this ce. There are no contacts whatsoever until now. If it is not him, then we would be in for a long chase."

    "Let us hope it is him then. Do you have any leads from your side?"

    "Not many. This old man looks like a freak. He is tinkering with a bunch of formation discs and inscriptions all the while.

    But we might know something in a few minutes. I let the shadow mice rece when the assistant manager visited him again."

    As he spoke, the shadow mouse came and it gave him a narrative.

    "From their conversation, it might be him that ising and it seems like the manager bit the bullet. Go and visit tomorrow, they are trying to y the role of the extremely friendly and helpful business partners. We would be able to let them take the bait easily.

 Chapter 1204: Target Arrived

    The next day, Noah went back to the branch office ording to the n. The assistant manager was in glee at her arrival, but he didn¡¯t show it on his face.

    All he showed was some confusion and when he looked at her expression showing her struggle to say something, he decided to push it a little bit.

    "I asked my manager about your request yesterday and he contacted the assistant of the Myriad beast sect¡¯s representative, he didn¡¯t agree to your request.

    They would probably buy things and even agreeing to your proposal might be a bit difficult. After all, your sister Noah did too much damage to them both in terms of resources, personnel, and reputation.

    It would be hard for us to just bargain that kind of enemy from them. After all, she is worth at least a city."

    Noah looked at him and then looked down as if she was thinking something. She bit her lips and clenched her fists, showing her struggle.

    After some time, she sighed and took something out.

    It is arge scroll.

    Arge scroll that didn¡¯t even fit in the table of the Assistant Manager.

    "I want you to take a look at this."

    After she spread the scroll on the table, the assistant manager was surprised. This looked like a construction project and it is the blueprint of the final product.

    Noah spread the scroll properly and took out a scroll. She ced it in the middle of the scroll where there seemed to be a fountain represented in the blueprint.

    She activated the formation disc and the blueprint started glowing. All the lines on the blueprint glowed and soon formed a wired mesh that soon turned into a solid hologram that showed the three-dimensional virtual image of the whole city.

    The assistant manager was shocked.

    "What is this?"

    He asked as he looked bewildered. Noah didn¡¯t immediately speak, rather she took out a ring and wore it before she touched the fountain in the middle. A bunch of thin light barriers appeared on the holographic blueprint and surrounded it.

    "This is the blueprint of the city I designed. This is a city with defenses perfectly suitable to build in an area with rich wood elemental energy."

    She exined as she tapped on the hologram in various ces showing different defensive mechanisms.

    The Assistant Manager was bewildered, but not just by the city blueprint, but also by the presentation itself.

    "How did you create this blueprint?"

    "The city design?"

    "No, the blueprint presentation."

    "I didn¡¯t create it. I had someone do it for me. I designed the city and the formations all by myself and gave normal blueprints to that person from my realm. Then he used all that to create this."

    As she spoke, she turned the ring on her finger a bit which changed the image. The buildings slowly disappeared and the whole project went to the foundational level showing how the foundation should be dug for the construction.

    Then she tapped once again showing the next phase of the construction. Like that she went on and on showing which building should be built first, what are the buildings that are connected to the base formation, and so on.

    The Assistant manager just silently looked at the whole presentation.

    "I can use this blueprint to cut some kind of deal." Noah said as she wrapped the blueprint up and finally, the Assistant manager came out of his daze.

    "What kind of deal do you want?"

    "A deal in which I wouldn¡¯t suffer too much of a loss and a chance to meet a representative from the Myriad Beast sect who can guarantee my sister to me."

    "Are you sure that is all you want?" The Assistant manager asked in doubt.

    "Yes."

    "The person who created that blueprint presentation, who is he? Where can I find him?"

    "He is a person from back home. He is also an inventor. We worked on some projects together. This is a technology he has been working on for a long time. If I am not wrong the people that were after me were also after him. We escaped at the same time."

    The Assistant manager¡¯s eyes brightened and he excitedly stood up before asking.

    "Where is he now? Do you know?"

    Noah looked at him awkwardly with how agitated he is.

    "I may have a possible way to contact him..." Her voice trailed off. The Assistant manager understood her hesitation and said.

    "Rona, please wait in the branch for a while. I will give you an answer right away. But, can you give me that demonstration one more time, I would like to record it and show it to my superior."

    "I have something that might help you." She said and gave out a formation disc which is embedded with some recording crystals.

    "This is also one of his creations, this will allow you to show the essence of the blueprint presentation properly." She gave a slight demonstration and then the assistant manager left while Noah was escorted by someone to her residence.

    After making sure that no one was near her, she took out themunication device and contacted Sam and Kumar.

    "I think they took the bait. I am sure this will work. Do you have any leads? Not yet. But I think we don¡¯t need to worry too much. As long we get to meet that person, we can find a way to capture him."

    "Then why don¡¯t you just leave that surveince on the space gate. Since he ising definitely."

    "Just a contingency. Let us just wait."

    Kumar just listened silently. He was just being filled with the info so that he wouldn¡¯t stay out of the loop. He is preparing for something that could be useful when the fight breaks out.

    After that, they just waited.

    Two hourster, the Assistant manager directly came to Noah and said.

    "We found a way to get you to meet that person.

    When the representative arrives, the branch manager will take him here for the demonstration of the blueprint. He kept the formation disc to himself to show the representative and he will bring him here.

    You would be introduced as the designer of that blueprint. You can make the request then. We will only be mediators in this sale and we will take ten percent asmission whatever you get from the Myriad Beast sect, we will get ten percent only.

    If you don¡¯t get anything, you don¡¯t have to give us anything.

    But you have to introduce us to the person who created the presentation."

    Noah went into deep thought and said.

    "It is a deal."

    "That is great. You can stay here if you want. The meeting will be tomorrow morning. Three hours after the sunrise. You can directlye here."

    "Thank you. I will be leaving for now. I still have something to do."

    "Okay then."

    Noah left and came out of the city. She went into the forest directly to where Sam is.

    Kumar followed after her.

    They waited for the night and Sam just stood there as he maintained the surveince.

    At midnight, he finally saw something in the surveince for the first time.

    The old man who is staying in the underground room entered the other tunnel that led to the smaller room.

    After he entered the formation glowed suddenly and a middle-aged man arrived.

    "It seems like our target is here," Sam said to his teammates.

    They just nodded and proceeded with their preparations.

    Sam let all the remaining shadow mice out and gave them to Noah.

    She took out a bunch of Marbles of various kinds and gave them to the mice.

    They stored all of them in their storage devices and went to do their assigned tasks.

    They only have one shot tomorrow and they need to cover all the bases.

    So, Sam also gave his traps to some of the shadow mice so that they would set up in his desired locations.

    While they are busy preparing, their target is conversing with the branch manager.

    Currently, the branch manager and the target are sitting in the front room while drinking. The target already gave all the things that need to be sold and asked.

    "Are there any interesting things that I need to know about?"

    The manager smiled and said.

    "In fact, there is. A very interesting thing, that came knocking on your door, and only the Myriad Beast sect has the opportunity to get it. Even if the other parties want it, they wouldn¡¯t be able to have it."

    "Oh really? What is that?"

    The manager took out the formation te and said.

    "This is the video of something that we got. A blueprint of the city. This is just the demo version without many details, but if you agree to the deal, you would be able to see the real one."

    With that, he activated the formation and at this exact moment, Sam smiled.

    All this while, the underground room was sealed with a formation that prevents all kinds ofmunication with outside, but now that the te is activated it doesn¡¯t. At least as long as the formation is active he could hear it.

 Chapter 1205: Preparation

    "What is this?" The Representative from the Myriad Beast sect looked at the holographic video and asked.

    The Manager smiled and said.

    "This is new technology. This is to get a clear three-dimensional video of the things as well as create three-dimensional blueprints. We just came across it, we are trying to contact the creator for further cooperation.

    Anyway, that is not the start of the show. Just looked at the video for now."

    With that, he disyed the blueprint and exined it here and there. After that was done, the target turned to the manager and said.

    "So, where did you get that blueprint? Is it from the same person you got this new technology?"

    "Technically, yes. But the creator of both is not the same though. The person who came to us is the creator of the city blueprint, not the technology and that person has a special request that this blueprint is sold to the Myriad Beast sect."

    The target was surprised and asked.

    "Really? And your ckwood¡¯s ck merchant hearts are letting this happen. I don¡¯t think you would be able to control the urge to get this city blueprint to yourself and auction it off to make tens of billions."

    "Of course, we have those thoughts, but there are some things that person asked and we cannot give it to her, only the Myriad Beast sect could do.

    She would like you toe and meet her tomorrow. She would give you the full and proper presentation of the blueprint, not this half-assed version and you can decide the price and the favors she asks for would be worth it or not."

    The target became silent and said with a frown.

    "You do know that I don¡¯t like toe out of this ce right? My identity is too sensitive. The only reason that you know of this is that I am buying my privacy from the business opportunities I bring.

    If I expose myself, things wouldn¡¯t be good. Neither for me, not for you."

    "You are right. But that is only if your identity is leaked. This is not something prenned and except for one person who is the Assistant manager that brought this deal, no one knows about it. No one knows about the girl and even if they saw her a few times, no one knows about what she asked.

    Anyway, only I know your identity, you can wear a disguise ande with me and things would be good enough. It is not really that big of a deal and you don¡¯t have to be that paranoid."

    "It¡¯s not about paranoia. There is news that my identity has been leaked, because of my excessive activity in this city. They deduced from the materials I supplied to you guys. I don¡¯t know how true it is, but from then on, the other two candidates are trying to nibble my power away.

    I cannot take risks."

    "You don¡¯t have to." With that, the old man went inside and brought a mask as well as a glowing ball.

    "This mask will give you a perfect disguise. In fact, you can even disguise yourself as a woman and this ball, once crushed, you will return to this ce within thirty seconds. So, all you have to do is wear this disguise ande here and if things go south, you only need to go use the crystal ball toe back."

    As he spoke, he suddenly deactivated the formation te and Sam who is listening in on the conversation lost the connection.

    But now, he got the n. He only needs to find a method to make sure that all the ns of other parties should fail.

    He closed down the surveince and even send his shadows to bring back the nodes around the city while he talked to Kumar and Noah.

    He first gave the gist of the situation and said.

    "The target is a space elemental user and by the looks of the tinkering that old man did in his room, he is also the same as well.

    If it is any other person with different abilities, we could use the spatial lock which is the best option to deal with them and buy enough time to capture them.

    But now the situation is a bit different. Both of them are of higher level cultivation. The target is the Middle-stage transcendent of the Astral ne while the manager is thete-stage transcendent of the Astral ne.

    Things would be rough. We only have a few hours to n the perfect trap."

    He paused for a bit and asked.

    "Do you guys have any ideas?"

    "I don¡¯t have any, but one thing I am sure is that my traps are not useful to capture people in ces. There is not much that I can do in that part." Kumar said with a shrug.

    "You just tell us your n. We will see if we can do that or not." Noah said from the side.

    "If you ask me, Kumar would be in charge of dealing with the external factors that might disrupt our n in the location. After it was started, the guards and the other employees would be alerted and even if the branch manager wouldn¡¯t need their help, they will still swarm over from different sides. You need to take care of them from far away.

    Noah would be in charge of the people that are in the surroundings. In fact, your traps that are in shadow mice¡¯s hands will do most of the job, but if there is a problem and if any of the guards and personnel cross Kumar¡¯s ande near, you need to do deal with them.

    I will try to deal with making them stay in the ce with a few traps, we need to use that time to make them stay inside for a long time.

    That is the gist of the n."

    "I am good with the role, but are you sure you don¡¯t need help in taking on such a big role? They are too powerful and the power difference is too vast." Kumar asked.

    "We don¡¯t have a choice. Anyway, I would be doing the heavy lifting, I will leave it to the traps and I think if anyone is the greatest risk here, it would be her." Sam said as he pointed at Noah.

    She looked at him in confusion as Sam exined the n.

    As he went into details, the two of them couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit troubled. The n is a bit too risky. Everything has to go smoothly like two gears moving in a mesh carefully.

    They couldn¡¯t even let one thing slip past them otherwise, things would go crazy real fast.

    Particrly, Noah needs to make an appearance near them and even talk to them for a bit.

    She should be able to escape instantly and it should be done with extreme precision so that the other party doesn¡¯t doubt their involvement at all.

    After all, they would be staying in this realm for quite some time and ck Wood merchants are not exactly some low-level people. They have too much influence and power in their hands and if by any chance that involvement of the three of them gets out, things would be extremelyplicated.

    They nned their disguises, loose-ends, and even contingencies if anything failed and after exining everything, Noah and Kumar sighed.

    "This is too dangerous, but a bit exciting too. I just don¡¯t know if this excitement is worth it or not."

    "How about this, I would use my crystal table and the risk would go down a little, you want me to use it?"

    "No need. We agreed on some terms and we are going to follow them through. That crystal table is the nastiest of all your gadgets, it is not fair."

    "Do you want fairness or do you want results? This is too dangerous. Anyway, it is not for me, you are the one taking the most risk and I can find a hundred ways to get out of here, but I cannot say the same for you."

    "No need. Is it too much to ask you to be normal and even the ying field a little bit with us. Would you die if you don¡¯t show off too much?" Kumar remarked from the side.

    "Dude? Really, that is what you are thinking about. Your girlfriend¡¯s life is at stake, so what do you think would happen if something goes wrong."

    Both of them stayed silent and Sam said.

    "Okay, if the n goes well, we wouldn¡¯t use the crystal table, but if things go crazy, I would use all things at my disposal to get us out of there."

    "Do whatever you want."

    With that, they came to an agreement and Sam jumped into the divine dimension¡¯s second floor. He has too many things to think of about this n and there are too many things to prepare. That night, he needs to use the curse energy like he never did before.

 Chapter 1206: Attack

    Sam took out a lot of leathers on the second floor and let out the shadows to cut them up into small rectangr strips.

    He then set up arge formation with dark elemental liquid energy cells and then used the space elemental liquid energy cells to set up another formation around the first one.

    He sat in the middle and by the time he was done with that, a shadow already brought the first batch of the leather strips to him.

    The rectangr leather strip is one inch wide and three inches long.

    It is very small. He ced it on the ground and started channeling the cursed energy. He used the energy from the formation instead of his body and then he used the spatial energy to create a spell, or any attack before he merged it into the curse.

    When the curse is perfectly merged, it pped it downwards to the leather strip and used the dark elemental energy to make the leather strip a carrier.

    He put that one aside and took out another strip. Every single curse only needs one and a half minutes and he kept on going for a long time.

    He only created these leather strips from midnight to dawn and came out with all of them.

    He then once again called the shadow mice that went into the city. They already set up the initial traps they gave him and now Sam divided the leather strips into batches and gave to them, before giving them instructions.

    He sent them away and met with Noah and Kumar.

    "How are your preparations?"

    "I am good." Noah answered and went back to doing what she was doing. He then turned to Kumar who just shrugged.

    He didn¡¯t bother them too much and just let them prepare, while he prepared disguises.

    They are going in disguised as Yakshas.

    As far as they knew there are barely any Yaksha race members in this realm and the surrounding realms and there are definitely no organizations or powers that have Yakshas as their main force. In fact, the Myriad Beast sect is the only one that has the most Yakshas of all.

    So, they decided to go with that disguise.

    The disguising technique is nowhere near as clear as Kiran¡¯s, but it works for now.

    Only Kumar and Sam disguised though because Noah has to be present beside the manager and the target and she shouldn¡¯t cause any suspicions. She would be in her Rona persona and will be proceeding with the tasks from that point.

    Time passed as they constantly double-checked their ns and finally the time hase. Sam and Kumar entered the lightning divine dimension and Noah ced that crystal in a ring on her finger.

    She went to the Branch office and arrived at the designated room with the leaders of some attendants.

    She waited there anxiously and as the time passed away slowly, she felt her heart beating louder and louder.

    She looked at the room to get a grasp of the surroundings. This is actually the same room she had the meeting yesterday, the office of the Assistant manager, the only difference is that the smaller table is reced by arge one and the seats are rearranged in the room.

    She looked for a moment and saw the shadow mouse moving around the room. Since Noah is the only one here, it didn¡¯t bother to conceal itself.

    Noah spent her time observing the mouse calm herself down and after a few minutes, the door finally opened.

    The Old man who is the manager and a middle-aged man who might be the target came along with the Assistant manager.

    The Assistant manager greeted her with a smile and said.

    "Rona, this is the Manager and this is the representative from the Myriad Beast sect."

    "Hello, it is nice meeting you two."

    Noah greeted them with a polite but nervous smile.

    "Hello, Rona. I have heard so much about you from our manager for the past two days. I am really interested in what you are about to show us."

    "Of course, I am sure I will not disappoint you."

    There is no response from the representative of the Myriad beast sect, so Noah just walked to the table and spread the blueprint scroll, and ced the formation in the middle.

    She first showed the image of the fully constructed city along with the formations and then reverted the image back to the foundation stages as she exined the construction n, the defense mechanisms and all the secondary advantages this n could have, the surveince system of the city that uses the vegetation and so on.

    While she is exining the blueprint to them, the shadow mice started moving around in the branch office.

    Four shadow mice moved around right outside the room they were in as they ced different traps and one shadow mouse created a perfect distraction while they are at it.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sound was heard at the entrance of the branch and immediately the Manager and the Target became vignt. They looked around anxiously and the target yelled.

    "What the fuck happened?"

    The manager looked at the Assistant manager who nodded and left the ce. Then he looked at Noah who is acting anxious and still in shock with the sudden explosion.

    "What.. what happened? Is there trouble?"

    She asked while stuttering a bit and both of them felt that her expression is genuine. They didn¡¯t know what happened, so they kept their suspicions to themselves.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    At this moment, a series of explosions happened in various ces of the branch. Even though the explosions are not of high firepower and wouldn¡¯t do much damage to any of them, this is clearly a tant provocation.

    "You stay here."

    The Manager said and went out of the room along with the target.

    Two shadow mice appeared in the room at the moment and they started spreading all over the room and left behind a trail of leather strips that Sam made.

    At this moment, Noah finally got rid of her anxious expression and took out a formation disc which she ced on the ground and activated, it created a concealment formation and a hologram of herself at the same time, and at this moment, she took out the lightning divine dimension crystal and at this moment, the roof of the roof blew open.

    *BOOM*

    The manager and the target flinched and were shocked at how they didn¡¯t even realize an attack wasing. The roof waspletely gone, and the few seconds they took to go back inside, Noah threw the divine dimension crystal high into the air far away and Sam appeared out of it just in time holding a spear in his hands and he threw it out towards an alley nearby and Noah used a scroll.

    She disappeared from the spot and reappeared in the alley the spear was thrown.

    When the manager and the target came inside, Sam who is slowly descending, stood on the harbinger as he instructed the shadow mice.

    The two mice left the room with shadow transverse and Sam finally activated the leather strips.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    A series of explosions happened as soon as the target and manager entered the room.

    "NOOOOOOOOOO..."

    They looked on as they watched the spatial currents that appeared around them tear Noah¡¯s figure apart and they looked horrified.

    Only then did they manage to look around and notice that the whole room is filled with unstable spatial energy.

    "What the fuck is happening here?"

    The target asked as he grabbed the manager¡¯s cor.

    The manager pushed him away and looked at the hole on the ceiling, Sam is standing on the harbinger in his Yaksha persona. At this moment, Kumar appeared beside him and used a transference scroll to leave the ce and appear at a vantage point a bit far away.

    The rest of the shadow mice started running over the courtyard of the branch office as they left the traps randomly.

    The Manager looked at Sam coldly and said.

    "You are going to die here today."

    As he spoke he spread his hands and the spatial energy started riling up. The turbulent and chaotic spatial currents in the surroundings calmed down a bit and he is channeling his energy to mend the space cracks.

    "I am leaving."

    The target said as he anxiously took out the crystal ball that would take him to the formation.

    "Don¡¯t do that, you stupid idiot. The space around is extremely chaotic now, if you use it now, you would get lost in some random void dying without even your body remaining for the funeral.

    We need to mend the space around us before we move. Now, if you help me, we can move faster."

    The target calmed down a bit and started mending the space with him. But Sam just smiled without saying anything.

    The two of them wouldn¡¯t move around until the space is stabilized and wouldn¡¯t even be able to attack with their own spatial energy recklessly. At this moment, the surrounding fabric of space around them is almost on verge of copsing because of the leather strips, and in this gap, Sam could do whatever he wants.

 Chapter 1207: Successful Execution

    Since he got the chance, Sam didn¡¯t even bother to hold back. While the target and the manager are trying to mend the space around them, he threw the leather strips all over the ce making the space more and more unstable with every second.

    Dozens of stripsnded on the circle that was formed by the fluctuation of the spatial energy.

    Sam knew the moment, he stops doing this is the moment, the manager would attack him and the target would escape, but he cannot just do that. At least not yet.

    He looked at the guards that areing to the area from all the corners of the branch. Not just guards, even other employees areing.

    "Kumar, it might be a good time start dealing with them. Noah, you too. The resting time is over."

    "I am on it."

    "Me too."

    They replied and all of a sudden a glowingrge spear that is in the size of arge beast flew through the air as it made its way towards the guards that are closest to the circle.

    *BOOM*

    Arge explosive sound came as the spear that was condensed with spiritual energynded on the ground and the guards were blown away to all the sides.

    The damage is not extremely severe, but it is not small either. The spear intent is making the air sharper around them and it is hurting to even breathe. Their spiritual energy flow is in a slight turmoil which needed them to calm down.

    But at this moment, in the between a group of the guards, a small red flowed appeared from the ground out of nowhere and they frowned at this. Before they could react, a bunch of vines started protruding out of the leaves and the red flower becamerger andrger until it could fit two people on it.

    The vines started coiling around them people and the flower caught one of them as it closed up.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* "MMPH"

    Some sounds of explosion and the muffled yells could be heard from inside the flower, there is even some smoke from the gap at the top. But he wasn¡¯t able toe out.

    As for the people coiled in the vines, they are trying to hack it or burn it way. And they are almost seeding, but whenever a small explosive sound urred within the flower, two short vines from the flower acted like whips and they would be surrounded with mes as they hit the people that were in captive.

    Sam took a peek at this and spoke in themunication device.

    "Kumar, your girlfriend is kicking your ass in the damage department. You are going to get your ass kicked literally after you guys got married."

    "Just how easy is your task that you have time to joke around about my possible plights." Kumar spoke from the nearby building as he prepared another spear.

    The spear in his hands looked like it was made of pure energy concentrated and condensed together and as he channeled that energy, it turned sharper and wilder with the spear intent.

    He aimed at the people that are regathering and...

    *BOOM*

    Another explosive sound urred and this time, after it hit the ground, not only did a crater appear, something else happened. The spiritual energy turned into ripples as they spread outwards. Each ripple is like a condensed and unified wave of spears moving at the same time and many low-level guards died on the spot.

    "That is good. Both of you just need to hang on for two more minutes like that." Sam said as he looked at the damage they are causing. In fact, their moves are shy and dangerous to look at and they didn¡¯t pack too much of a devastating damage.

    But they could deter the people a lot."

    If they neared their location recklessly, Sam would have trouble in keeping the manager and the target in there.

    As for why he is doing such a repetitive and irritating task to just keep these two men here for a little while; there is one step of the n that is being executed at the moment and until it is perfectly clear, he wouldn¡¯t be able to let them go.

    In fact, all the attacks he and the other two doing right now arepletely useless.

    They don¡¯t serve any purpose other than causing chaos.

    "Sam, I think we are dragging too long. We need energy to escapeter, if things go south. Just finish it off quickly."

    Noah said through themunication line.

    "I know. It is almost done."

    As he spoke, he closed his eyes for a few seconds and reopened them again before speaking to the other two.

    "Use all your prepared fire power. All the traps and all the attacks, in the next thirty seconds, do not hold back anything and get your escape tokens ready.

    We are going to leave."

    As Sam said, he looked at the Old man and the manager and suddenly stopped attack with the leather strips.

    He acted as if he lost energy ad started yelling into a normalmunication token.

    "Guys, I need backup. I am out of them. Come fast."

    As he yelled like that, the manager¡¯s eyes lit up and looked around to confirm that there is no immediately threat in the surroundings, before he made a move.

    His body started glowing silver gray as he used the spatial elemental fusion. The energy spread around and the space mended at an incredible speed as if the fabric was being sewed with a bunch of needles.

    Sam just looked at him while maintaining that terrified expression.

    "Guyse fast. The target is escaping the formation. The target is loose."

    As he yelled, he couldn¡¯t stay there anymore and started flying away on harbinger. Meanwhile, the circr crack has mended enough for both target and the old man to escape.

    "Couldn¡¯t you have done that sooner?"

    The target yelled at the old manager.

    "If there was an explosion in the already existing cracks, while I am doing this, my soul would be damaged with the bacsh. Now, stop whining and get the fuck out of here."

    Sam started moving at full speed and the old man manager used the spatial blink to catch up. They crossed a few hundred meters in just a few minutes and at this moment, the target also took out that crystal ball and escaped.

    As the spatial energy enveloped him and he was about to disappeared. Sam suddenly turned around and looked at the old manager who came at him calmly and right before he could strike, he disappeared into thin air.

    The old man observed the spatial energy fluctuations around Sam and couldn¡¯t help but frown.

    He had a bad feeling about this and he ran back to the ce of attack. But there was nothing there. The attacks also stopped and all his staff are relieved. There are not many casualties, barely any people died and they are low level cultivation. The rest are barely injured at all.

    He looked around and started looking for traces. He couldn¡¯t put his finger on it, but it seems like there is something really wrong in this whole scene.

    The attacks that are not particrly aimed to kill, theckluster traps that are only shy with no substance. Even though the timing is perfect, the whole trap looked extremely clumsy to him.

    He couldn¡¯t even bring himself to think of this as a proper sneak attack.

    And that is what made him feel something is wrong, the people are skilled and even the shy attacks are done with utmost precision. They are sure capable, but they acted with utmost stupidity.

    But there is nothing in front of him that gave him any clues.

    He doesn¡¯t know how right he was though.

    Because, at this moment, Sam, Noah, and Kumar are currently in the secret underground and in particr, the room with the space gate.

    The target is currently trapped inside the lightning prison.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    The constant bashing on the cage walls could be easily heard.

    "Who the hell are you people? Let me out now. You guys don¡¯t even know who I am and what I am capable of. The people behind him will skin you alive and pick the bones off of your body.

    Sam just looked at him with disinterest.

    This guy¡¯s insults and threats are not even creative.

    He started cing formation nodes around the lightning prison and activated the formation, the lightning prison disappeared on the spot and the trio soon followed the prison.

    Right after they left, another spatial fluctuation happened and the old man appeared here. He didn¡¯t find the target and felt the spatial fluctuations around the room.

    The bad feeling which felt was intensified to arge extent.

    Meanwhile, the trio and the target are currently in the forest as they appeared near a mobile space node Sam set up. He is ying with the little Void hopper.

    This void hopper is the reason why they managed to execute the n perfectly anyway and now he is using that to make Sam y with him more.

 Chapter 1208: Return

    The little void hopper is the one that made the whole n feasible.

    He made the underground secret space gate formation that didn¡¯t work with his space element while the trio is slowing down the target and the old man with the shy and useless attacks.

    When the space was mended and that glowing sphere was used, he appeared in that room, but he wasn¡¯t able to use the space gate to run away from that spot.

    And on top of that, the little hopper had some fun whilepletely freezing the space around him and made the target stuck in the ce and before he could make sense of it, the trio disappeared from the spot and Sam mmed the prison on him and used the one-off space gate formation and went away.

    Now they are all sitting in a forest nearby while eating a meal.

    "This is the most disgusting and stupidest battle you ever had. There is no struggle, no power, no danger, and most of all, those two superior cultivators are acting like some little girls. I cannot believe such an obvious and stupid trap.

    God, I feel ashamed of myself for this. I would never tell anyone about this."

    Noah said as she gulped down beer.

    She is really upset. Even though she agreed to the n at first, she at least thought that there is going to be a n. They didn¡¯t even use their spiritual sense properly. It is almost like they are so full of themselves, this is too pathetic for her.

    There is no challenge at all.

    Sam didn¡¯t know that these people would be upset over something like this.

    After all, everything happened within a span of a few minutes and everything went ording to the n. In fact, the n was too easy for even him. Except for the excessive preparation they had to do, it was easier than most things they had done in their lives.

    "Alright, just stop your whining." Kumar said from the side as he drank cold wine.

    Sam is standing outside the cage as he looked at the middle-aged man inside.

    "Can you remove that stupid disguise?"

    The middle-aged man was stunned. The mask that the old man gave him turned out to be useless, Sam could easily spot that. Maybe, staying with Kiran for a long time helped him understand.

    "Who are you guys?" The middle-aged man removed his disguise and asked.

    By now, the trio also removed their disguises. And he has a feeling who these people are, but he doesn¡¯t know how to confirm it.

    "We are the mercenary trio working for the fiend tribe. You might have heard of us when the topic of your dead core disciple, the mountain city and the farm towne up."

    The middle-aged man widened his eyes in disbelief.

    Sam just casually continued.

    "Anyway, I want some information about the other two people working with you in the same position as you. The location and information on your peers."

    "I am telling you that."

    "Oh, you are going to. You might think that you can act tough and just grit through this, but you don¡¯t have a choice whether you want to tell me your information or not.

    If you tell me directly, I will give you to the fiend tribe, intact. But if you don¡¯t do that and you act like this with me, I will just kill you and extract your soul and then extract your memories from it. This choice is yours."

    The middle-aged man was terrified. He could tell that Sam was serious, but he wanted to put up a struggle.

    But Sam just smiled seeing that he doesn¡¯t want toply. He ced his arm on the thunder prison and manipted the energy in it.

    The lightning walls that are making him stay in the cage suddenly molded into a lot of lightning chains and tied him up from top to bottom.

    Sam walked in as he struggled to get out of the grip and ced a set of sealing shackles on him.

    All of a sudden, the target lost all his strength.

    Sam looked at him with a smile and said.

    "We are going to have so much fun if you don¡¯t speak now. And my friends here are really upset at how easy it is to kidnap you from your ce. So, they are not really going to go easy on you.

    And I happen to know how to cause the maximum amount of pain to a person with minimal effort. I am not sure if you would like that."

    The Middle-aged man was terrified as he looked at Sam¡¯s smile as he made the move.

    "AAAArRRRRRRRRRGGHHHHHH..."

    Then came the soul-searing cries of the man that reverberated throughout the forest making the beasts and birds frightened alike.

    After an hour, Sam got the information he needed.

    He looked at him finally and asked.

    "How am I to be sure that you are not lying to me?"

    "I am not. I am not lying to you."

    "We will find out soon enough."

    Sam said and took out a scroll.

    "Use your spiritual imprint to sign the document, this is one of my new tinkerings to check if there is any sort of lie in this. If there is, then you would die like a chicken that has its throat cut with a small de.

    So, please do be careful before you sign it and I will make you sign it."

    Sam spread the scroll in front of them.

    The middle-aged man didn¡¯t even bat an eye as he signed it with his imprint.

    Sam sighed and felt a little disappointed as he saw no changes in the middle-aged man.

    When came out of the cage, Kumar looked at him and said.

    "Now what are you sulky about?"

    "I really wanted to see if this scroll would work. I couldn¡¯t even run a proper simtion to this properly."

    "That¡¯s why you interrogated him like this?"

    "Of course, why would I waste my time by asking him like this? I would just kill him, extract memories, and be done with it.

    This is going to be the new tool in my investigations department of the organization. But it seems like he actually told the truth. Quite a disappointment if you ask me."

    With that, they took the target to the Water crystal city and met with Miran.

    "We got the information on the other two people. They are also extremely secretive but if we manage to go now, we would be able to capture them without alerting the other party. By now, the news must have been spreading to other people up in their hierarchy.

    We don¡¯t have time to waste."

    "We would like to confirm the information first."

    "I already did. I would have just killed him and got you the information with memory extraction. But I figured you wouldn¡¯t trust me, so I brought him here."

    After that Sam turned around and left with Noah and Kumar to wait for their results.

    The next day, they were called back.

    "The information is correct. You guys can proceed."

    "Okay, thank you. But this time, we would being with the two guys at the same time. We don¡¯t know if the news already traveled to them, but if it didn¡¯t this would be a lot easier than the previous one."

    With that, the three of them went on their journey to deal with the next target.

    While they are doing this, back in Saran city something else is happening.

    The consequences for their actions are showing up there.

    The Branch Manager, the old man is standing in front of a young half-dark elf with whom Sam actually made a deal.

    "So, you are saying, someone came here attacked the branch, and left without taking anything or targeting anyone to kill. Do you think that sounds reasonable or rational?" The young master asked the old man.

    "That is the truth. They came here when I was in a meeting with a woman who imed to be the twin sister of a woman in the three-man mercenary team of the fiend tribe that has been poprtely.

    She has some kind of grudge against her twin sister and had a deal with the Myriad beast sect. We were just mediating the deal and this happened."

    "What happened to that woman then? She is not here?"

    "She died. When the sudden spatial explosion urred, she was torn apart by the spatial currents and was thrown into the void."

    The young master stayed silent for a moment and asked.

    "Then what about the representative of the Myriad Beast sect? What happened to him?"

    "I don¡¯t know. When we mended the space, he used my trinket to get back to the underground secret room, I tried to chase the guy that attacked us, but he disappeared so I went back to that room, but he disappeared from that room.

    I felt the spatial fluctuations around, so I assumed he left using that space gate."

    "You didn¡¯t tell anyone about this right? The deal with the Myriad Beast sect, did you talk about it to anyone other than the representative?"

    "No."

    "Then let us keep it that way. I will see what we should do."

 Chapter 1209: To the third one

    For the next few days, the whole was in turmoil and all of it was caused by Sam, Noah, and Kumar.

    The first thing they did after handing over their first target in the Water crystal city is to go after the second target and when they reached the city he was supposed to be in, the target is still present there without escaping.

    The information about the kidnapping of the first target didn¡¯t spread fast and it seems like the ckwood merchant group didn¡¯t leak anything yet.

    The trio is relieved and because of this, their second job became a lot easier.

    Their second target is actually good at disguising himself and is leading double lives within the city. Unlike the first target who asionally came to the city for his own safety, the second guy asionally left the city.

    He has two identities within the city and one of them turned out to be an employee of the Purple Sky Merchant group. Anotherrge Merchant group that happened to be on par with the ckwood merchant group.

    They have simrwork levels and they cover this area of the. The second identity he has is of a miner in the spirit stone mine owned by the Myriad beast sect.

    The space gate leading outside is not within the city, rather it is in the depth of mine shafts through which he would ess the outside world.

    And he only goes through that door once a week and takes care of all the operations he needs to take care of andes back within two days. He would then wait another week to sell all of them through the Purple Sky and go back.

    This is his daily routine and ording to the first target, currently, that guy is outside and would be returning that very night or the next morning.

    So, the trio decided to make an early trip so that they could finish this off easily and go for the next target.

    And to their surprise, this went easier than they thought.

    The first thing they did is kidnap three miners and disguise themselves before they scouted the mine-shafts along with the shadow mice.

    After the scouting party was over, Sam used his special formation surveince technique and the bat puppets to locate the formation.

    They went to the space gate formation that waspletely hidden and was ced in the middle of the walls withplete disguise.

    Noah and Kumar set up the traps while Sam started making inscription arrays to modify the formation.

    After the preparations were done, all they had to do was wait.

    So, wait they did.

    After waiting through the whole night, at dawn, the formation was finally activated and a middle-aged man who looked a lot younger than the first target appeared in the middle of it.

    He seemed to have been fatigued a bit as he stretched his body for a moment and leisurely tried to walk out of the formation.

    But all of sudden, he froze on the spot for no apparent reason. His foot is in mid-air while he was still yawning. He froze like that.

    He wanted to struggle and yell, but he couldn¡¯t do that either. He couldn¡¯t even close his mouth to grit his teeth.

    Next, Noah and Kumar activated their traps.

    Kumar¡¯s energy condensed spears managed to leave some injuries on this guy and Noah¡¯s trap enveloped himpletely while strangling him. They threw the guy in the thunder prison before taking him away with their own space gate formation

    The process was as smooth as a hot knife through butter.

    There was no resistance whatsoever and nobody even noticed their arrival and departure.

    They took that guy away and tried to get more information from him. This time, Sam used his scroll properly.

    At first, he got the guy to sign the scroll without exining everything in detail before asking.

    "The first guy said, you know most about the final one. So, why don¡¯t you tell me about it?"

    Sam asked casually and the target didn¡¯t even want to open his mouth, but as he resisted, he felt extreme pain in his head and fell down on the ground.

    "Mmph, mmph..."

    He groaned in a muffled tone as for some reason even his voice couldn¡¯te out. He looked at Sam who is just observing him with a gaze of scrutiny.

    "The more you resist the more painful it would be and in the next ten minutes, you would die in the most gruesome way you could possibly imagine.

    Then I will use memory extraction to get the memory and thus my information. If you choose to say it on your own, there is a chance to save yourself. I will give you to the camp of the fiend tribe and they might take you, prisoner. It is your choice."

    And with just that probe, that guy sang like a bird.

    Then he was shipped back to the Water Crystal City where they had to wait for the stupid procedure to waste more time.

    The third target is a bit tricky. It seems like she is an open secret that anyone could grasp but nobody knows as they didn¡¯t bother looking into that direction.

    In the eyes of the world, she is the dealer between the Myriad Beast sect¡¯s representative and the merchant group named the Snake Fang.

    As far as everyone is concerned, she is the employee of the Snake Fang group that goes and meets with the representative to get the goods from all these external resource points.

    But it turned out that it is just a disguise.

    The method she used to fool everyone is also great. First, she normally joined the Snake Fang and then used one of her subordinates to y the part as the Myriad Beast sect¡¯s representative.

    She held arge auction and tasks to make a big deal about the whole thing regarding the longsting contract and made sure that the Snake fang group won.

    Now, she is the representative of the Snake Fang group and she is also the representative of the Myriad beast sect too.

    With this, she would also get a lot ofmission for each sale the Snake Fang group makes.

    This also made their situation a bit tricky.

    Even though the five organizations are ruling the whole organization, the merchant groups are not exactly some small fries.

    Therger merchant groups have ties from the other realms and they even have contacts with some more powerful organizations. If things go south, the organizations here might not be able to endure the heat without losing something at least.

    So, it is not a good thing to provoke the merchant groups.

    The trio went to the city to scout and get some information on thedy so that they could proceed with their n, but it didn¡¯t go so well, because as soon as they entered this city, the first news that caught their attention is the news regarding the disappearance of the first two representatives and the news is actually being spread by the ckwood and Purple Sky organizations.

    The trio was surprised and they immediately got into an inn to have a meeting.

    "What do you think happened. It has only been two days since the second one disappeared and the news spread like this?" Kumar asked in surprise.

    "It is not the two days that we need to be surprised about. The Water crystal city didn¡¯t have any of such news when we started, but the news spread here like wildfire." Noah replied and went into deep thought.

    Sam also didn¡¯t understand why the information spread like this.

    Right before they left Water Crystal city, they didn¡¯t hear anything regarding this. There is not a sign. They even thought it was weird that the ckwood and the Purple Sky immediately didn¡¯t me the Fiend tribe and just washed their hands off of this matter right after the targets disappeared.

    But the ckwood didn¡¯t even release any form of news regarding their attack, only the other merchant groups spread the news.

    Now, it seems like they are nning something after this happened.

    As they discussed various possibilities, they finally concluded the most possible scenario.

    The two merchant groups might have been royally pissed off with how easily Sam and the others took them away. So, they might be trying to get them back now by doing this. Even if they are not directly involved this spread of information is enough to make the third target vignt.

    There is also another thing that confused them though.

    At least in the case of the first target¡¯s case, they made a huge mess, but in the second target¡¯s case, they didn¡¯t even show their faces and just kidnapped the guy directly from under their noses. They should have taken a few days to realize that at least.

    But surprisingly, they just came to the conclusion that the candidate was kidnapped.

 Chapter 1210: Increased Security

    The trio¡¯s spection is not actually that far off.

    Because, the young master of the ckwood nned this scenario after he realized that there is a possibility that the representative, the first target they made contact with might have been kidnapped from right under their noses.

    He actually contacted the Purple Sky merchant group to warn and keep an eye on their representative and for some reason, they took his suggestion seriously without any resistance. But they don¡¯t know exactly where the secret location of the space gate was.

    That guy already went on the trip this time before they could even think of informing or protecting him.

    And before they could even find the proper location, Sam already arrived with his teammates and directly kidnapped him.

    As soon as this happened, there is no way they could sit still.

    Granted that the whole thing is a mess between the Fiend tribe and the Myriad beast sect, this is almost the same as the trio spitting on the faces of the Merchant group.

    The only reason that the Myriad beast sect is lenient about the safety of these three people and didn¡¯t increase it during the war is because of the involvement of the Merchant groups. Even the fiend tribe wouldn¡¯t offend them.

    But to their dismay, the current situation is absolutely terrible. They lost two out of three people which means, the fiend tribe knew the locations of two-thirds of the external resource points that hold almost one-third of the forces of the sect.

    For all they knew, the tribe might have already deployed the people to deal with them.

    Sam also understood the whole situation a lot better than the spection. The reason the fiend tribe gave this job to the trio is that they could wash hands off of them after the war is over to get into the good graces of the Merchant groups.

    Even if the merchant groups wanted to pick a bone with the tribe, they couldn¡¯t just tantly use them when everything was done with mercenaries.

    But in the process, the mercenaries used would be dispensable.

    The trio doesn¡¯t care about this though.

    They knew that behind all of this, once they are done only they will remain along with the two heirlooms of both the fiend tribe and Myriad Beast sect, but the two organizations themselves would bepletely destroyed in process or heavily crippled.

    But before all of that could happen, they need to find a way to kidnap this third target.

    "We need to act fast. The provocation against the Myriad beast sect could be working at any time. I don¡¯t know how our friends on the other side are working, but I think we are on verge of war and we shouldn¡¯t be wasting too much of our time here.

    Luckily we are way ahead of the schedule. As long as we kidnap her, we could cripple the Myriad beast sect by a lot."

    Kumar said as he held his head in exhaustion. He is clearly frustrated by the sudden change of things.

    Their difficulty increased by at least ten-fold in his opinion.

    Since the news spread like this, the Myriad beast sect should have definitely given protection to that target.

    All of a sudden, Noah suddenly realized something and said.

    "Guys, I think we have a window of opportunity here."

    Both of them looked at her and she continued.

    "From the information we got from that second guy, this woman¡¯s identity as the representative of the sect was unknown to the Snake Fang.

    She managed to join the Snake Fang with some rmendations and got this position and she yed the double game so that she could stand to get some benefits from the Snake fang, like themission.

    So, there is a high chance that no one at the Snake Fang would know about her true identity."

    Sam also realized and said.

    "That means, she would not be the one getting the direct protection from the Snake Fang. Rather, one of her subordinates who openly goes as the representative of the Myriad beast sect would be the one getting this protection.

    Even if the Myriad beast sect wants to protect her, they wouldn¡¯t be able to directly aid her while she is performing her duty in the Snake Fang, because they cannot reveal her identity now, or else they would be making the Snake Fang their enemy for the infiltration."

    "I think we can take advantage of that and kidnap her. All we have to do is make arge distraction by attacking the fake target and get over to the real target and silently slip her in."

    Noah said with a bright expression.

    But Sam smiled meaningfully and said.

    "There is something more we could do actually."

    "What do you mean?"

    "What I mean is that the opportunity in front of us, bigger than that. We can actually use this chance to deal a big blow to the Myriad beast sect.

    What if it was revealed that she infiltrated the Snake Fang. What do you think they would do to the Myriad Beast sect?"

    Noah and Kumar nodded in realization.

    "But Merchant groups directly don¡¯t get involved in the war. Once they were known to take sides, the other groups wouldn¡¯t be as kind to them."

    "Of course, they wouldn¡¯t be involving themselves directly, but there is something else they can do. After all, money is an important asset and the Snake Fang happened to have one of the richest reserves.

    And the insult they suffered from the Myriad Beast sect is ginormouspared to what we did. All we did is take away the people that are sort of under their protection, but the Myriad Beast sect was after their profits.

    They wouldn¡¯t be able to tolerate that. We can add this fuel to the already burning me."

    "Then what are we waiting for? Then let us go and work."

    "Yeah, but we need to do something before that. Our faces might havee out by now. The ckwood knows our identities, they would have released our pictures to the others if they really are trying to piss us off. I am really surprised that they didn¡¯t go after us right away as soon as we came in."

    "Then what could have caused the dy?"

    "We don¡¯t know. We just need to take precautions. We are leaving the city." Sam said as he took out the lightning divine dimension.

    After a few minutes, all three of them are on a hill nearby. Meanwhile, the shadow mice are roaming around the city as they let out the surveince puppets all over the city while Sam is setting up the surveince equipment.

    "We are going to get a detailed understanding of the city. Then we would proceed. I think we can take our sweet time with this. We have a little less than a week. I think we can execute it perfectly.

    Meanwhile, the fiend tribe would be dealing with the external resource points of the Myriad beast sect. I think we are closer to our goal than ever before. We just need to prepare properly."

    While they are getting ready, something else is happening within the city.

    In a courtyard within the estate of the Snake Fang group, a youngdy is standing at the window as she looked outside while she talked to a man standing at the door.

    "Are you the only person here for my security?"

    "Yes."

    "The sect only sent you here. One person? I am the one who holds most information regarding the sect. So much that even the sect couldn¡¯t deal with the external affairs without my presence for a day. But you are the only person I get when my life is probably in danger? What is the meaning of this?"

    "I cannot answer these questions. I am only here to protect you from any possible kidnappings."

    She tried to calm herself down by taking deep breaths and asked.

    "Did the Snake Fang start searching for them?"

    "Yes, they did. But there are no signs. Some people at the market and the inn street are saying that they saw someone simr, but there are no traces. The snake fang assumed that these people are just trying to get some money with that fake info."

    "But what if it is real. What if they came and left after learning about therge-scale measures you have taken?"

    "We didn¡¯t see anyone leaving the city with simr features after we got the pictures."

    "This is such a drag."

    She looked out of the window and saw a courtyard nearby filled with a lot of experts inside. She couldn¡¯t help but grit her teeth in frustration.

    "Why does that fake need so many personnel at her side. I am the real deal here."

    She muttered to herself in frustration. But she knew this is the result of her greed. She just reached for too much and this is the consequence which she has to face for that.

 Chapter 1211: Pillars

    Four days passed.

    Sam is currently standing on a tree as he looked at the city with a telescope. He disappeared from that spot and appeared on another tree at a different ce and looked at the city from a different angle.

    He did that a few times and blinked from one tree to another until he covered the whole city from various angles. After that, he disappeared from the trees and arrived at a small patch where they camped.

    Noah and Kumar and currently looking for a blueprint as they examined some tokens as well as some metallic puppets that Sam tinkered in the past four days. They are what they prepared for the kidnapping n.

    In thest four days, they got a lot of information from many ces in the city. The three merchant groups actually helped with the security in a way that Sam never expected.

    They didn¡¯t send their own people or make strategies. They just used the one resource that they have the most. Money.

    They managed to hire more mercenaries than the Fiend tribe in one day and now almost half of the residents of the city are mercenaries. Granted that the normal residents of the city are mostly merchants anyway, it was not hard to make them move when they noticed the changes in the city.

    The more Sam and the team dyed their advance to the act, the more chaotic the preparations became. They don¡¯t know whether they are going toe and get the third target or not.

    After the first two days, Sam thought they would slow down with the precautions, and in fact, it happened for a few hours, but all of a sudden as if they got a new lead, they increased their speed of preparations.

    The formations were tampered with and strengthened all over the house of the fake target. And in the middle of it, they saw the original target who is secretly being protected by only one guy, which became extremely annoying for even Sam and the others who are watching her secretly.

    She wanted to be the one protected. She is almost like a spoiled brat throwing a tantrum.

    But the three merchant groups didn¡¯t let anyone in. They just made her stay there in her house. The Myriad Beast sect also didn¡¯t hear her pleas, no matter how she tried. All that was left was that one guy who is protecting her and even he almost blew his fuse sometimes.

    Seeing her struck like that, Sam was really relieved. This should make things a lot easier.

    "So, are you guys done? Are you familiar with the whole situation and what we should do?"

    "Yes, we are. But are you sure, you would be able to handle all of this? We are using arge of energy here and you are going to suffer the mental pressure that would be put on you for transferring it. You wouldn¡¯t be able to do it easily." Kumar asked in a concerned tone.

    "Don¡¯t worry. I wanted to try this for a long time. Believe it or not, I haven¡¯t done anything shy in a long while. This would be a perfect way to do something that could be used as good teaching material for my students too.

    This is can be a lesson on how to use theirbined powers properly and efficiently."

    "Speaking of your students, you are talking a lot about them recently. Why did you take in students all of a sudden? You are feeling generous?"

    "Not really. I just thought that there should be someone you trust in this world to take care of your affairs when you are gone. Even if not dead, there is a possibility that we might not be able to properly ess what we left behind when we reach a new ce." Sam said with a smile.

    Noah and Kumar frowned.

    "It seems like you are talking something rted to ourpetition."

    "Of course, I am. But I cannot give you the details. If I am wrong and you prepared in how I told you to do so, you would be ming me if they cannote into handy.

    Apart from that, I enjoy teaching them actually. They are really good kids."

    "The students are directly taught by Sam. Seems like a pretty heavy title to me. They should be subjected to a lot of expectations and a lot more tests."

    "Of course, they are going to. They cannot get the benefits without the drawbacks. Anyway, enough about my students, you can talk to themter if you want. I will be going back to deste after these two organizations are dealt with, to spend some time with them. You cane.

    For now, we need to deal with the situation at hand. It seems like, all the preparations are done."

    "Yes."

    With that, two shadow mice collected the puppets that are arranged around them and move towards the city.

    They reached the Snake Fang estate soon enough.

    The surrounding area of the Snake Fang ispletely evacuated.

    For the next two blocks, there is not a single person other than the guards and the personnel of the Myriad beast sect and the Merchant group mercenaries.

    The mice sneaked into the estate and reached the blind spots that Sam discovered.

    They ced the puppets on the spot.

    The puppets are small cylindrical metallic objects and after the shadow mice ced them, the limbs came out of them and made them drill those limbs into the ground.

    Arge amount of earth elemental energy suddenly came out of them and within a few seconds, Stone pirs starteding out of the ground. The stone pirs have a hexagonal area of the cross-section with six faces.

    Each pir is six feet tall and the puppet rested on top of the pir. Arge metallic protrusion came from the bottom surface of the puppet as it drilled into the pir¡¯s center joining together.

    Then inscription marks started spreading from the puppet bodies to the stone pirs.

    Everything happened fast, but the guards already noticed them and immediately ran to inform the superiors.

    Before they could even reach their superiors though, the pirs themselves revealed their presence.

    The six sides of every pir started glowing with different colors.

    One side has a red glow with fire elemental energy, the second one has a blue-colored glow with water elemental energy.

    The third side has ck colored glow with dark elemental energy, the fourth side has a white-colored glow with wind elemental energy.

    One side has a yellow-colored glow with earth elemental energy. The final one is glowing with lightning elemental energy.

    The puppet is glowing with the space elemental energy.

    Arge formation is activated. Even though it is not exactly a barrier-type formation, it is clearly visible to every single person in the estate and the fake target, as well as the real target, are terrified with such a shy disy.

    The person in charge of the whole operation looked at his assistant and yelled.

    "See what is happening. Call everyone that is patrolling the city. I want every single person to report back to the estate."

    "Yes sir."

    The assistant ran and gave orders to the other subordinates.

    A person came back and reported.

    "Sir, weird stone pirs appeared around the estate and they are disying different types of elemental energies. A formation seemed to have been activated."

    "Who dares toe here and directly install a formation in the estate? How is that even possible to happen? Are you guys so fuckingx in your guard?"

    The assistant didn¡¯t dare to speak up and just stayed silent.

    The person in charge calmed down and said.

    "Let¡¯s go and see who is daring enough. If it is those three mercenaries from the Fiend tribe, I would like to see what gives them the guts to be this bold and fearless. I would rip them limb to limb."

    He started walking out and the scene in front of him made his eyes widen in disbelief.

    From the view of the balcony, he felt like he is in apletely different world.

    It is raining while sharp winds started blowing everywhere.

    The sky above the estate is covered with ck clouds as lightning crackled all over.

    The earth seemed to have been on a fire.

    The people looked at the rain and lightning with a dumbfounded expression. Some of them just came out of the estate. The contrast between the sunny weather and cloudy area is too much.

    Sam looked at it in his crystal tablet and looked at the other two.

    "You guys ready to go."

    They just nodded and crushed a token as they disappeared from the spot.

    Sam also took a deep breath and used the token to disappear from there. They appeared in the middle of the formation with a bunch of guards standing there looking around.

    Some formation masters are standing at different pirs as they tried to examine the situation and the trio¡¯s interruption made them turn their attention to him.

 Chapter 1212: Formation

    Sam, Noah and Kumar are currently looking at their wrists. They have something that looked simr to the wrist watches.

    They turned the frame of the watch a bit and soon they started glowing.

    "It seems like we are connected. Now, get ready and be careful."

    Sam said while the guards are surrounding them. As he finished his words even before Noah and Kumar could even reply, they disappeared from the spot.

    He closed his eyes and stood there nonchntly as if he is not in the middle of enemy ground.

    The surrounding guards were surprised by this sudden disappearance of the two intruders and became vignt.

    They split up and one group surrounded Sam.

    "They are the three mercenaries from the Fiend tribe. They really dide."

    The real target looked through the window and said to the guard assigned to her. The guard also looked through the window with interest.

    The guards surrounding Sam are vignt because of his behavior, a personing into the middle of their enemy ground and not doing anything. Just standing there as if he owns the ce. It is not exactly a good sign for them.

    But one of them gritted his teeth and made his move. He raised his hand and fire manifested at the end of his palm aimed directly at Sam.

    Arge orange fire ball came towards Sam, but it stopped mid-air before it could hit Sam and some invisible force diverted it towards another guard standing behind him.

    The guards were stunned and soon they couldn¡¯t hold the tension anymore and decided to attack together like a barrage.

    Sam¡¯s frown got deeper as the spiritual energy started coiling around him. The fire elemental energy that ising of the burning earth moved around him with a glowing light like a ming snake as it went after the fire elemental attacks aimed at him.

    It didn¡¯t block them or catch them, the snake just took the attack directly and let it bounce off into a different direction making the other guards his target.

    The same went for the water elemental attacks, the wind elemental attacks and other elemental attacks.

    The physical attacks however were stopped by the space elemental energy.

    Sam still has his eyes closed as all the attacks were diverted or stopped. Some guards already took some damage and the situation around him is in perfect control.

    But that is not what he is worried about.

    Currently, his focus is on the situation of Noah and Kumar.

    After they disappeared from their initial arrival spot, Noah and Kumar reappeared in two different directions. But both of them are focused on the building of the fake target where the real guards of the Myriad Beast sect are stationed at.

    Noah appeared on the rightside of the courtyard and Kumar on the left.

    As soon as Noah arrived, she obviously attracted the attention of the guards.

    But before they coulde at her, she mmed some marbles to the ground and when the guards neared her, they becamerge vines as they coiled around them and at this exact moment, the lightning in the ck clouds above them riled up.

    And Noah suddenly disappeared from her spot.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The lightning stuck on the guards that were blocked with the vines. Even though they didn¡¯t die immediately they were heavily paralyzed.

    Noah reappeared behind the paralyzed guards and finished them off, before she disappeared once again.

    The other guards in the surroundings came over to catch her, but she was not there by then. But something else met them to their surprise.

    The shadows of the guards rose from the dead bodies followed by the visible ghosts of the soldiers and finally the bodies themselves rose from the death.

    The guards were caught off guard, but they recovered pretty quickly and let their beasts out. Unlike the first batch of the guards, they decided to take the help of theirpanions, but the beasts have one disadvantage they are just too big and could be hurt anywhere if someone knows how to hurt them.

    Arge earthen hand appeared and it caught the underbelly of one beast andrge mes followed the arm as it started incinerating.

    While it was stuck there, arge icicle formed in the clouds and pierced the beast on the back followed by the lightning that stuck the top of the icicle.

    The beast died instantly and an undead shadow came from it catching the beast nearby. The undead guards directly went after the guards and attacked them.

    As if that was not enough, Noah suddenly appeared behind them and started attacking them. The wood vines and the man-eating nts are working wonders as they killd them one by one and every dead body turned into an undead creature.

    Sam actually is not controlling the undead creatures. The formations are creating the undead with the death energy obtained from converting the dark elemental energy. They are loose cannons and the death energy supports their sustainability.

    They attacked every living thing around here and Sam¡¯s only job is to make sure that Noah and Kumar are not near them or any other threat in the right moment and the right time.

    At the same time, Kumar¡¯s side is not that much different.

    He didn¡¯t have that many traps set, but he has some special spears prepared. Loaded spears, that is what Sam liked to call them.

    Kumar loaded the spears with spiritual energy and locked it with his spear intent.

    When he uses the spears to attack, the lock would be unlocked and all the energy locked inside would be used for that attack. It is that simple, brute force.

    So, as soon as he arrived, he threw the spear to the nearest group of guards that are on to him.

    One guard died on the spot and the other two lost their limbs due to the residues of the attack.

    He then disappeared from the spot and some earthen quicksand traps appeared nearby capturing the nearest guards that just appeared.

    The quick sand areced with the fire elemental energy boiling them while Kumar appeared behind them and killed them on the spot.

    The people that are watching the whole spectacle from the windows were surprised. They couldn¡¯t understand how the two attackers are disappearing right when they were about to be attacked and reappeared right behind their own guards.

    This is way too disadvantageous for them to be happening in their home turf. Literally their home turf.

    The person in charge used themunication token to call for the formation masters at the pirs.

    "What is happening? We are going down at a fast pace. We need to find out what is up with that formation? Any lead?"

    "No, sir. But we are trying."

    "Why don¡¯t you just destroy the formation? The fucking bacsh can go to hell. I don¡¯t care about that anymore. Even if we lost some people, It would be better than this shit storm that is going on now."

    "That is not it sir. There is one thing that we are sure about in this current situation. If any one of the pirs are destroyed we will all be dead in a single explosion."

    "What do you mean?"

    "The formation is aplex one. It doesn¡¯t follow the regr techniques of this realm. It is abined with both nodes and inscriptions and on top of that they wereyered.

    The only thing we could decode from that right now is that we don¡¯t decode it properly and go on about it in a normal way, the formation creates a controlled energy explosion that destroys all of us in.

    The energy capacity is too high and there are at least six elemental energies in y. It would be like millions of spirit stones worth of energy destabilizing at the same time and the six elemental energies will only create more destruction.

    Even you will not be able to escape it sir. Even if you did, your body would beced with elemental corrosion that would make your life a living hell.

    So, stop rushing us. We are trying our best."

    The person in charge doesn¡¯t even know what to do. He couldn¡¯t think of aeback to say to the rant the formation master gave him.

    This is extremely dire situation and when he looked through the balcony once again, all he could see is Noah appearing wherever she shouldn¡¯t be appearing and disappearing whenever she shouldn¡¯t have.

    And when he went to another window, all he could see is Kumar ripping through the guards like they were made of cotton candy.

    There was no effort whatsoever. It is almost like the nature is helping them kill their guards.

    Then finally he looked through thest window and there Sam just stood there with his eyes closed.

    asionally, the metallic thing on his wrist is glowing, but apart from that, there is not a single movement or attack from him and none of the attacks made by guardsnded on him.

 Chapter 1213: Question

    The person in charge¡¯s instincts are screaming that Sam is the one ying the key role in all of this. But he couldn¡¯t say why or what he is doing. But he still decided to follow his instincts anyway.

    He took out amunication token and gave out orders.

    "Guards, stop going after the two active intruders, focus on the stationary one in the front. Attack him with all your power and kill him."

    As soon as the orders were given, the guards didn¡¯t dy and just rushed to attack.

    Sam just smiled as he looked at the increased attacks all of a sudden, most of the attacks are still being diverted and the guards are the only ones that are getting it.

    But at this moment, a few guards joined together as they all channeled their energy into one point.

    Argepressed fireball is being created at one point with all their energy. The same thing is happening on the second side, arge lightning ballpressed into the one point from several lightning users is being used and the third is filled with frost energy.

    Since Sam is not moving, they decided to take their sweet time with the attack.

    The person-in charge clenched fists as he waited in anticipation. He is really anxious that the other two parties wille and disrupt these attacks, but to his relief and surprise, Noah and Kumar are still charging into the mansion of the fake target and it became easier since the number of guards reduced by a lot.

    But after thinking that they are only going for the fake target, he calmed down a bit. As long as they interfered in time and acted like they are trying to save the fake target, it is okay even if she died or even taken away. After all, she doesn¡¯t have any information. Except for the information on the real target.

    But once the fake target is gone and by the time the fiend tribe realized this, he would shift the real target to some ce safer. Something like the headquarters of the Myriad beast sect.

    As he is drifting in his thoughts, the three attacks were ready to go andunched at same time.

    But right before they could touch Sam, he disappeared from the spot and he is hovering over fifteen high in mid-air right above his previous standing location.

    *BOOM*

    The three attacks shed together at the same time and created arge explosion.

    The guard were blown away with many of them seriously injured and the closest ones even dying. The injured ones were captured by the earthen hands that areing followed by the incineration from below and finally the undead created from the dead bodies.

    Sam hovered on the spout the help of the hoverboard or the wings and he must say, even he felt surprised.

    This is also the effect of the formation. Currently many elemental energies of nature within the formation are under his control and they are helping him hover like this.

    The only problem is that his head is hurting like hell. It is like someone took a three-inch nail and started nailing it into his head with a hammer.

    The control of this much energy is really putting a lot of pressure on his brain and even on his spiritual core.

    So, as soon as there is some space cleared up under him, he slowly descended. The guards didn¡¯t dare to attack him recklessly and just looked around.

    The person-in charge couldn¡¯t take it anymore.

    "Everyone, let us get out. We have indulged them enough. Kill all three of them."

    With that, he also moved along with some high-level cultivators. All of them are in middle-stage transcendent level and they all moved towards the three of them.

    But the trio didn¡¯t show a hint of worry. In fact, they were extremely delighted because of how well their n worked.

    They stopped moving and waited for the arrival of these big dogs.

    As they reached closer and closer, suddenly, the three of them disappeared from the spot and they all reappeared in the room of the fake target where there is only one guard left.

    Even though, the person guarding is of a high level cultivation, it is of no use. When he was about tounch his attack, Sam disappeared once again and reappeared at the back of the fake target and he strapped a metallic bracelet on her hand.

    The guard swung his sword at Sam, who disappeared once again and reappeared with his friends.

    Kumar took out a loaded spear and aimed at the fake target, the guard stood before her and got ready to meet the attack with his own counter attack.

    But the attack didn¡¯te. To his shock right before the spear was about to be released, the doors mmed open and even the walls broke as all the people that were after the trio outside and got ditched reappeared here but the trio themselves disappeared once again.

    Even when Kumar¡¯s motion the spear throw was in the middle, he was still transferred like that and he reappeared in the room of the real target along with the other two. The spear attack was aimed at the one guard that is present there.

    The target and the guard, both were shocked.

    The loaded spear attack is not easy to handle even for a Middle-stage transcendent cultivator and he has to block it with all his might.

    In this window, Sam appeared behind the target and mmed the bracelet on her too as she got ready to attack.

    When the guard and the target finallyunched their attacks, the trio were not even there.

    All three of them finally reappeared at their starting entry point and didn¡¯t move anymore.

    The guards and the elders guarding the area felt extremely humiliated as they were being yed.

    "Guys, I am at my limit."

    Sam slowly muttered in a low voice as he wiped the blood off of his nose.

    "What about the formation energy limit?"

    "It is also at the threshold. I think it is time for the final step. I will set the formation up for the final move and you guys have to deal with the rest." Sam replied and he sat on the ground as he rxed.

    The formation pirs changed a bit and the formation masters who almost cracked the formation, suddenly saw all their work go to waste.

    One of them took amunication token to call the person in charge and yelled anxiously.

    "Sir, stop the attacks. They set the formation up to self-destruction. We need a lot of time to solve this. We don¡¯t know what they did, but if there are any changes, try to stall for as much time as possible."

    "What the fuck do you mean? You are supposed to crack the formation by now and now you are saying that you need to start over again?"

    "Unfortunately, yes. But if we don¡¯t do this, everyone will die."

    "Why the fuck are you wasting so much time? You are formation masters with centuries of experience. What is the use if you cannot even be useful to decode a formation made by a kid?"

    "Sir, the formation technique ispletely different from what was normally found in his realm. It seems like we were so used to the gandharva technology, that uses unique methods to create their formations.

    Our basics arepletely different from the rest of the realms and most of the time we feel that ours is superior because it works better than the others, but now it seems like we are defeated. A formation that ispletely based on the basic foundational principles that are unfamiliar to us in the realm has be the bane of us.

    But we are trying, so please hold on. If you do anything rash, the formation might just explode with the single thought from them."

    The person-in-charge gritted his teeth and yelled.

    "Stay back everyone."

    He retreated along with the guards to the fake target¡¯s house once again.

    At this moment, Noah and Kumar finally looked at their wrist watches and tinkered with them a little.

    The fake target and the real target disappeared at the same time and reappeared a few feet away from their location.

    Noah took a step forward and said in a loud voice.

    "Your formation masters might have already notified, but currently, you are in the middle of arge formation that might explode at any moment now and the trigger for that explosion is my friend sitting in meditation here. If he is disturbed for even a bit, the formation will explode and everyone of you will die.

    Even if some people survived, they would wish they were dead.

    Now, we want to ask a few questions from the two people in front of us."

    Noah looked at the two of them and took out two scrolls. These are the truth scrolls Sam created with curses. The one he experimented on the first two targets.

    She made the two women sign the scrolls and said.

    "Now, let me ask you a few questions.

    Who is the representative of the Myriad beast sect?"

 Chapter 1214: Myriad Beast Sect is down

    Both the targets looked at each other in shock and now they understood the gravity of the situation. Even the people from the Myriad Beast sect understood what they are in for if both of them opened their mouths.

    They immediately wanted to make a move, but suddenly the person in charge of the Snake Fang group stepped out and said.

    "You are not allowed to move. Your formation masters themselves confirmed the risk of explosion. Let us make things easier for all of us. Anyway, it is not that much of a problem when they are only asking for a simple question."

    The Myriad beast sect¡¯s person-in-charge immediately understood that they are being screwed over big time.

    Meanwhile, both the targets are feeling a torturous pain in their soul as they tried to suppress their urge to tell the truth. They don¡¯t want to open their mouths up and they don¡¯t want to speak at all. But they couldn¡¯t stop themselves from having the urge to speak up.

    And the real target felt the most pain, which made her break and she raised her hand.

    "I am the representative."

    The snake fang group members were stunned and then they became angry. They understood that they were yed. And the sect members understood why the trio targeted the fake even though they should have had information from the first two targets.

    They just thought that the first two targets might have managed to fool them and made the fake target take the fall, but now they understood the n of these mercenaries. They just wanted to reveal the whole story in public make the snake fang group humiliated and in turn make them fall out with the Myriad Beast sect.

    The other merchant groups even the rivals of the Snake-fang group wouldn¡¯t be happy with them and hard times are about toe.

    When someone deals with bad faith in business transactions the other groups would not be willing to deal with them anymore.

    "Why are you acting like an employee of the Snake-fang group then?"

    "To gain some money over the transactions and to get ahold of some high-level merchandise by getting the inside information from the merchant group. The merchant group has more connections in obtained high-quality products, so I got the information here and passed it to the sect, many times they beat the snake fang to get the products for themselves."

    After the words were heard by everyone, Sam opened his eyes and adjusted the wristwatch. Four of them disappeared from there and the stone pirs crumbled while the puppets that are responsible for the stone pirs were molten into a lump of metal.

    The formation is gone and the crisis was averted.

    The fake target finally heaved a sigh of relief as she copsed to the ground. But this is just the beginning.

    After they disappeared from that spot, they reappeared back at their camp and Sam copsed on the ground in exhaustion. But before that, he managed to let Sky out so that they could move.

    The target is locked up in the thunder prison and then got shackled before she was transported over.

    Sam slept throughout the journey and he didn¡¯t even find any strength to meet Miran to report on the things.

    He left all the work to Noah and Kumar and he only woke up after a day.

    This is one of the reasons he doesn¡¯t use this type of formation. Of course, one of the reasons is that he only recently developed this tech and the other reason is that they took too much of his energy.

    At least if he used the liquid energy cells, the pressure on him would have been reduced by a lot, but to his dismay, he already made a deal with the rest of the yers that he wouldn¡¯t be using any of the liquid energy cells and some overpowered puppets, so he could only use the energy cells as the sources and that too many of them.

    Energy maniption is that much harder because of this.

    If he used this type of trick, he would fall into a helpless state for some time, unless there is someone trustworthy to take care of him, he shouldn¡¯t be using this.

    He decided to take a few days off to make sure he is back in his full form.

    But these few days are enough for arge chain reaction to be triggered.

    The first thing that happened is the news of the Myriad beast sect¡¯s bad faith being spread all over the realm. All the merchant groups are currently holding a bad opinion of the sect and many business deals were canceled.

    Particrly, in this wartime, medicine and weapons are crucial and when the war is warming up with the mercenaries of both sides shing, they wanted to increase their stock of these essentials, but the yers interfered big time making it impossible for them to keep it warm. The time period was shortened and now particrly with Sam¡¯s big move, their channels were closed and the war got hot, faster than they expected it toe.

    That problem might be big, but that is the least of them.

    The Fiend tribe didn¡¯t wait to make their move after they got a hold of the locations of their external resource points.

    They sent some extreme elite and started the plunder. Their external resources and one-third of the forces werepletely dealt with in a short time span.

    But with the involvement of Sam, Noah, and Kumar in these invasions, things just got hotter and hotter as they always found a way to escte the situation.

    Either killing some high-level authoritative young master or kidnapping the spouse or concubine of some hard-headed elder that is only in a position of privilege because of the privileges they give out in bed, airing the dirtyundry of the sect again and again. All of these things made sure that there is no peace between them.

    Meanwhile, the fiend tribe is not exactly having an easier time.

    The remaining yers are not exactly soft persimmons, they are in their own league. They did almost the same damage to the Fiend tribe as Sam did to the Myriad beast sect.

    In fact, after ten days, both groups were pitted against each other as the two organizations decided to use the mercenaries to deal with the other party¡¯s mercenaries.

    But their sh didn¡¯t cause any casualties, at least not between the two groups, rather the other important figures around them were dead or severely injured because they wanted to get involved in the sh.

    Both parties retreated and were assigned to different ces once again.

    Soon, they were out of that and then dealt with others. The war just went on bigger and bigger.

    The rest of the organizations were surprised by this. Because, no matter how harsh the war was previously, they all managed to find a way to get some truce and preserve themselves, but now things are getting out of hand.

    It seems like either one of the powers is not ready to stay under the same sky with the other power, much less get along.

    Some people thought this is an opportunity and started adding chaos into the mix and the war only got harsher.

    While things are going like this, the scales slowly tilted towards the side of the Fiend tribe since they had the headstart because of Sam, Noah, and Kumar.

    The fiend tribe also noticed this and weed them deep into their ranks as they moved forward to destroy the Myriad Beast sect once and for all.

    This war would be going on for days and in this time period, Sam and the yers don¡¯t have to interfere too much.

    While things are already bad for the Myriad beast sect something else happened. The Snake fang group and other merchant groups that are friendly with them started supplying essentials like medicine and weapons to the Fiend tribe at a discount price.

    This made the Myriad beast sect leader want to raze down the Snake fang group. But he knew he is incapable of such a feat. He knew that his current situation is not exactly considered optimistic and he knew is going to be screwed big time.

    Like this, one month passed and the Fiend tribe closed in on the headquarters of the Myriad Beast sect.

    By now, some of the unfaithful members already disappeared with whatever they could get from the sect, and only a few remained to guard the ce.

    Sam, Noah, and Kumar are standing outside the sect with the rest of the troops.

    The other four yers already escaped and disappeared. Since the Myriad Beast sect lost, they don¡¯t have to work for now and just has stay put.

    That day, arge battle urred as the head of the Fiend tribe in the sect leader of the Myriad Beast sect and his beast as he brought their heads back to the Fiend tribe in full glory.

    A glory that is not bound tost long.

 Chapter 1215: To the Fiend Tribe

    After the Myriad Beast sect copsed. A lot of territories, particrly thes, the external resource points that are connected through those old space gates, mines, fields, and even people are avable for everyone to prey upon.

    Of course, the Fiend tribe swallowed as much as it could. Even though they are the ones who essentially destroyed the Myriad Beast sect, they are not going to get everything the sect owns. In fact, they are unable to swallow it with their current strength.

    The remaining three powers and even some merchant groups might gang up on them if they really tried to do it.

    Not only would they devour the territory and resources left behind by the Myriad beast sect, but they would also lose their own territory and also their connections with other organizations.

    Sam, Noah, and Kumar disappeared from the eyes of the Fiend tribe after the war is over.

    Because the first few days after the war, the whole organization would be dealing with the aftermath and they would be a bit loose over their administration. Some plundering would be happening for some personal gain.

    This is the time if anyone wants to profit to make a move.

    This is also the time, Sam and the other yers can do something to these members that are on loose. Before the high of the victory is gone and the administration has gone stricter, they should be making a move.

    So, they are currently in a meeting in the secret valley they first met.

    There is a campfire in the middle and Sam is using his spiritual energy to enhance the me so that he could have a special taste for that meat being roasted on the me.

    This is one of the beasts he caught when he was in the war with the Myriad beast sect.

    The rest of the yers looked at him weirdly, exhausted with his antics. He has been doing this for a while, without caring what others are discussing as they ate.

    As for their discussion, it is about which team kicked the other team¡¯s ass in this war. So, he doesn¡¯t have to participate as he kicked everyone¡¯s ass just like always, so he is enjoying his food.

    But after he was done eating, he was also done listening to them.

    "Okay, guys. I have had enough of this bullshit, now let us go and deal with the Fiend tribe. The faster we are done with them, the better the situation will be."

    "ording to our previous n, we have to deal with the winning side bit by bit. We need one month in which the aftermath happens and chip away at their lower ranks and make them pissed off so much that they wouldn¡¯t be able to contain themselves until they go full berserk. Anybody wants to weigh in on that?" Akhil said as he got bored from the argument.

    "I have one point. But I need two servants to be at my beck and call." Sam said as he opened a beer.

    Everyone looked at him with raised eyebrows.

    "Of course, I don¡¯t mean literally my servants. They just need to act as messengers so that they can go to different ces in the and the realm where the remaining yers are operating to give you the locations of the candidates we are going to take out."

    "Then why don¡¯t you call them messengers? Why servants?"

    "Because I want them to bring back some local specialty food or wine when they return. I am sick of eating my own cooking for a while. So, I would like if I can have something else for a change. Is that a problem? And this realm has so many resources that I want to taste everything."

    Everyone was dumbfounded, but Sam continued.

    "I, Noah, and Kumar have some good rep in the Fiend tribe. The contribution points we have are not cashed out yet. Even without them, we have some special ce in the tribe like an honorary member. Kumar even got a marriage proposal from one of the elders.

    If I can get in and obtain the information of the people assigned to different ces, things would be easier for you guys and the rest can take care of them one by one.

    Meanwhile, I will try to do something to core figures from the inside. See if some maniption, poisoning or any other tactics work. I will see if we can weaken them so that we can crumble them from inside."

    "What about us then?" Noah asked.

    "This is going to be dangerous and I want to act alone for a while. If I want help, I would ask. But I think it is better if you act externally and speed up the process."

    "I will be the messenger." Akhil said suddenly. Everyone looked at him in surprise.

    "Are you sure? I think you would want to be the chipper."

    "I would like to, but I need a break. I will just run around for a while."

    "I will be the messenger too," Donner said and this surprised them even more. After all, that one incident after the Nike, nobody thought that Sam and he would get along again.

    Donner tried tooth and nail just to avoid him. But now he wants to work with him.

    "I don¡¯t see a problem. But you have to travel back and forth within a day no matter how far I send you within the realm. Get ready for that. We will be leaving tomorrow. And tonight, the booze is on me."

    With that, the yers peacefully drank and had some sleep which rarely happens.

    The next day, they went to do their tasks.

    First Sam went to the Fiend tribe along with Akhil and Donner. They stayed on the outskirts of the city while Sam entered the tribe to meet with Commander Miran.

    "Hello, how are you doing?" Sam asked as he entered her room.

    "I am doing great. Where did you go? We haven¡¯t seen you after the final attack."

    "I had something to handle."

    "Where are Noah and Kumar?"

    "They have something to handle too, but not the same thing. It has been a long time since they had some alone time and it could be hard for a couple. So, they went for a little getaway to spend some time together."

    "Oh? Noah and Kumar? I would have never thought of that. Why would she go after him when you are there?"

    "It is impossible between both of us. Anyway, can we talk about anything other than love lives? I am pretty sick of it actually."

    "Well, there is something. The Chief of the tribe wants to reward you three in a grand ceremony along with some other soldiers and generals. It would take some time though. We need to clean up after this and make sure that other organizations wouldn¡¯te after us while we are licking our wounds."

    "That is great. So, can I stay in the city for a while? We have been traveling for a long time and we would like to settle down for a few years."

    "Settle down? Then why don¡¯t you guys join the tribe? We will give you honorary membership. You will have some status here. Maybe same status as Myrion. Your contribution ispletely irreceable to the war.

    It could have been dragged out for years if not for your help. So, you arepletely wee here."

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "I don¡¯t think that is actually a bad idea."

    "We will confirm your membership after the ceremony is over, until then you can stay in the tribe estate. Many of the soldiers that are injured have returned. You can meet them if you want. They are looking forward to it."

    "Okay, see youter then."

    With that Sam got out, an attendant met him and made a lot of arrangements.

    His residence was arranged close to the residences of some of the ¡¯friends¡¯ he made in the war.

    He got to know a lot of soldiers that are even core members. He went to one of the residences without much wait.

    He is one of the captains of elite teams. His members are too elite to the point they can lead their own teams. But they are all batched into this one team and most of the time they go on solo missions. It took a war to join the ten of them to be joined and theirbined strength needed to be used.

    "How are you doing, captain?"

    "I am great Sam. How are you? You disappeared after the war is over. I almost thought you got killed in action."

    "It would take a lot more than this war to kill me. So, where are your teammates? I want to see their faces once after they knew that I got more kills than all of thembined."

    "They were sent to lead some people to clear the aftermath. They are responsible for handing over some properties to other organizations as gifts so that we don¡¯t seem greedy and attract some unwanted attention."

    "Oh, who went to the Ind in the west? I don¡¯t think Mirkin would be sent to that ce."

 Chapter 1216: Attacks from Inside

    The captain was a bit surprised and asked in amusement.

    "How do you know that?"

    "Mirkin said he had some old me in the ind that he doesn¡¯t want to reignite. But I don¡¯t know what he isining about so much. Doesn¡¯t get jealous when he hits on other women and even brings them to bed just to please him. She cares about him, great professional talent. I even saw her picture. She is beautiful. What more does he want?"

    "Her sister."

    "What?"

    "It is a long story. Simply put, there are twins. He hit on one sister, he seeded in wooing another one. He only found that outter, but when she said it to the one who fell for him, instead of getting angry, she became ecstatic and started convincing her sister. It didn¡¯t take much effort.

    He is even fine with that. Who gets twins that easily? But the problem is after that, a cousin of theirs wanted in the action and even a distant aunt. If not for their father, I doubt even their mother would have joined in andpeted.

    The whole family freaky."

    "Fuck, that is crazy. Did you send him there then?"

    "Of course not, even if I want to see that guy suffer, I will never send him there. I sent him to the Southern state, Jade city."

    "Oh, then who went to Mirkin."

    "I sent Priver. That guy is the only one who can run away from that freaky woman. She always gets overly freaky when one of our tribe members goes there. He is the only one that could get away from her."

    "That is great."

    After some more small talk, Sam got some other information and got out of that ce.

    Even though he has the information on the location of these important people, he didn¡¯t act on it immediately. He would be an idiot to do that. After all, not all of these tribe members are innocent. Even if the captain didn¡¯t find him harmful, he would still be suspicious if his team dies as soon as he told him about the location of these people.

    It would be way too obvious and the fact that he had an honorary membership in the tribe, wouldn¡¯t be able to do squat when he was suspected.

    So, he decided to go after some info which he normally wouldn¡¯t have obtained in any way. With no trial whatsoever. The shadow mice went into action and found something like that within a few hours.

    They managed to sneakily hear some conversation between two administrators discussing some distribution ns of territory in the and selecting a candidate who is most likely to cut a deal without huge losses.

    He got the name and the location, so he usedmunication tokens to give instructions to the two messengers.

    Akhil moved and went to the yer who is located closest to the said and passed the details to him.

    By the next morning, that guy was found dead in his guest room arranged by the local forces.

    Akhil came back with some fire elemental venison meat which he kept half to himself and sent the rest to Sam who cooked it over carefully and savored it for a long time as he tried to find the next target.

    This went on for the first week without any hitch. But the fiend tribe already took note of the deaths of ten of their representatives in different territories.

    They know that something is wrong and they felt extremely cautious.

    Constant meetings were held as the elders started analyzing the situations.

    Some wanted their representatives to be called back immediately to prevent any further loss to the tribe. Some wanted to wait and see if this is just a coincidence or if something is really happening.

    Some are saying that this is the ploy of the other organizations to deal another blow or even upy their territories or even swallow them as a whole.

    Sam was obviously not called for these meetings, but he had his little mice sneak into some and get some information.

    After analyzing their reaction, Sam decided to do some changes to their original n.

    He started sending tips on the people in a different manner so for the next week, the organization that is closest to the Fiend tribe has twice as many deaths of Fiend tribe members in their territory as the other two organizations.

    This made things a bit rocky between the two organizations as the fiend tribe that has too many doubts couldn¡¯t find it in them to take this as a coincidence.

    The elders who wanted the representatives to be called back got more support now.

    At this moment, Sam finally gave the information on the first elite team to the yers. The information on all nine of them and he even gave the information regarding the possible call back of them.

    So, they hurried up and killed them all.

    That was thest straw on the camel¡¯s back. Finally, the fiend tribe couldn¡¯t take it anymore and called their people back.

    But at this moment, Sam gave all the information he got and asked the yers to kill whoever they can.

    When the representatives finally reached the home, only one-third of them are left.

    The fiend tribe lost a lot of elites, tacticians and negotiators, experts, and even some elders.

    Their losses are too severe as they happened right after the war which already reduced their manpower a lot.

    Currently, the Fiend tribe is the weakest one among the bunch.

    This one month passed like this.

    But this month, that is not the only thing Sam has done. He actually tried a lot of other things to find a way to deal with the Fiend tribe and figured out that there are not many particr things to use. Not even alcohol

    He wanted to use the good old addiction n to just directly deal with the whole situation. But when he thought about it, it wouldn¡¯t be easy to make a bunch of Astral ne cultivators to be addicted to some wine when they are still trying to figure out what is happening to them.

    Even food is the same. They are in no mood to eat leisurely every day.

    Later he found out that they are sending some elders to investigate.

    All of them are at least in the Late stage of Astral ne transcendence which would give them a great chance at their survival.

    The core forces of the tribe are going to different locations to investigate, this is a great time to deal some blows to them as well as home ground.

    Sam gave out the information to the yers on what to do with which targets while he focused on the Fiend Tribe¡¯s headquarters.

    He started using curses. He started by using the curse of rage on one soldier sneakily making him attack his fellow soldier brutally and soon the whole group of soldiers is trying to kill each other and half of them seed while the other half is saved by some elder stopping them.

    Another conflict happened as Sam used his curse on two young masters who don¡¯t like each other and often came to blows. But this time, one of them died at night while the other young master who slept after getting drunk with some strong liquor dreamt that he killed his rival.

    The situation escted with two eldersing to blows and one of the elders had his limb broken into several pieces.

    The healer used a special numbing medicine while setting the bone straight. The medicine was freshly made from the herbs directly collected from the garden.

    After patching the leg up, it rotted away in two days.

    Everyone looked at the other elder in disgust as they thought he might be behind this and that escted quickly, into that elder getting stripped of his elder status. And one night, the elder who had his leg rotten died while the one who got his title stripped disappeared.

    Things went on and on like this for the next two weeks and the tribe headquarters is in chaos as every incident is bing more ridiculous than thest one.

    While the internals of the tribe is like this, these two weeks also dealt some severe blows to the externals of the tribe.

    One mine copsed and exploded all of a sudden and nobody knows why.

    A beast tide happened in another establishment without any prior sign. Several restaurants were burned down because of the shitty food they served.

    The weapon shops are out of business because of the crappy quality.

    Sam went through the Myriad Curse guide like he is going through a ybook.

    He destroyed so many things that belong to the Fiend tribe and even the Myriad Beast sect didn¡¯te close to this in the first two weeks of the war.

    Businesses, soldiers, workers, elders, elites,manders, everyone is being affected by a small curse that was being ced on them at the right time and right ce.

    While things are like this, news came out that one-third of elders they sent to investigate are dead.

 Chapter 1217: Whistle

    The deaths of elders caused a lot of chaos in the tribe. Nobody expected that they would lose the core elders that they didn¡¯t even lose in the war.

    Sam was really impressed when he got the news. He didn¡¯t expect the yers to perform this well. After all, the targets are almost a whole realm higher in terms of cultivation, but they still managed to kill a lot of them.

    They must have ced a lot of effort into that.

    He changed his focus on the next step of the n. The internal chaos caused by his curse is still not cooled down. He is causing some small troubles here and there to add them to the pile.

    Taking this chaos to his advantage, he went to meet Commander Miran.

    When he entered her office, she is sitting in her seat while holding her forehead as she looked through the reports.

    "Hello, it seems like I came at the wrong time. Do you want me toeter?" He asked with a smile.

    "No need, take a seat. I am not that busy. It is just that I am too exhausted with all the chaos going on. By now, we can even confirm that some other organization is trying to spread their hands into ours. This would be troublesome; we barely survived a war. We cannot go on to the next one. The time for preparation and gathering manpower wouldn¡¯t be enough.

    Anyway, this is my headache, I don¡¯t want to bore you with it. Why are you here? You said it is something important."

    "It is actually rted to the current situation. I have something that might help you."

    He said as he took out arge scroll and gave it to her. She opened it with slight confusion and was a bit surprised when she was the formation blueprint inside.

    "This is a defensive formation, I have been working on for a while. I modified it so that it would suit the terrain of the city and there is a sub-section of the formation which only covers the estate separately."

    He then started exining how the formation works.

    "This is great. This will be really useful in the current situation. What do you want for this?"

    She asked him with bright eyes.

    Sam hesitated to speak though.

    "Please speak your mind. I might not be able to promise you anything, but I could at least try."

    "I want the Beast Whistle for my research. Is it possible to get it?"

    Miran immediately went silent.

    The beast whistle is the heirloom of the sect that was needed in the list. It has been in the sect for generations, but nobody knows how that thing works. It was just there as a decorative piece at most.

    That is the reason Sam even dared to ask directly. Otherwise, he knew for sure that he wouldn¡¯t be able to get it by any chance.

    Before Miran could even reject him, Sam tried his best to persuade her.

    "I can create formations like this, in fact even better than this. I can create one for every major city you have within days. You can also use all the contribution points that belonged to me, Noah, and Kumar."

    Miran frowned at his desperate attempt to convince her and asked.

    "Why do you need it so desperately?"

    "I want to research. I might havee off as some killer and assassin to you, but my main expertise is in professions. I can make weapons, formations, and inscriptions and my level are very high. My main passion lies in research and recently I heard a lot of things about the Beast whistle.

    It was said that it was one of the reasons, the Myriad Beast sect was established as it is today, but for centuries nobody has seen it being used. Some say it was damaged, some say it was just a legend created to use it as a symbol.

    But I would like to believe it was the former and I want to research it."

    "What would you do if it works?"

    "I don¡¯t know, I will move on to the next research project."

    Miran felt a bit conflicted, but looked at Sam¡¯s genuinely enthusiastic expression and then the blueprint that made her enthusiastic, she felt like this trade might be worth it.

    "I will talk to the Chief of the tribe. But I don¡¯t know if he will agree with these conditions."

    With that, she left.

    Sam also went back to his residence and sent instructions to the yers.

    He waited for any form of reaction from the Fiend tribe regarding this proposal.

    And it didn¡¯t take long for the reaction toe. The next day, he was summoned by the chief of the tribe to his office and was escorted by an elder.

    He sat there in the office as the Chief looked at him intently. Miran is sitting beside the chief as felt a little nervous.

    "So, you want the Beast whistle?"

    "Yes, Sir."

    "Why do you need it so desperately? With the contribution points you have, you can even have your own city. A proper territory to govern and a lot of resources for you to enjoy, why would you trade them away along with these valuable formations just for the broken whistle."

    Sam just smiled and replied.

    "The Beast whistle is a legendary thing people always talked about. I would like to see if there is any truth in those legends."

    "That is it? Truth? Is it worth it?"

    "Sir, I am a researcher and an inventor. I study the existing things so that I can use them to make new things. I take joy, satisfaction, and pride in that. No amount of territory is going to let me have the same amount of satisfaction as researching an object like that."

    "What if it really doesn¡¯t work? What if it is just a decorative item?"

    "Then so be it. I will at least have the satisfaction of trying. If I managed to make it work, that would be great, if I cannot I can always find a new objectter. There is a long life ahead of me."

    The chief looked at him with a scrutinizing gaze, but Sam didn¡¯t avert and just looked at him calmly.

    "Okay, then. I will agree with your deal. But I don¡¯t want these extra formations. I will take this one, but instead of all those extra formations you promised, I want your best work until now."

    Sam fell silent as if he is hesitating.

    The old man smiled and said.

    "If you don¡¯t give your best work out, then the offer ispletely off the table."

    Sam gritted his teeth and took out arge scroll.

    He ced it on the ground instead of the table, as the table is too small for this.

    When the whole blueprint was ced on the ground, Sam ced a formation disc in the center and activated it.

    This is a city blueprint, but not the same one as the one Noah used in the ck Wood merchant group.

    This is apletely different one.

    One must think that Sam has too many of these things, but he didn¡¯t create all of them. The blueprints he had in hand are the ones that are already constructed. Most of them are created by the students and administrators of the Dusk organization.

    He only had them in hand because he wanted to use this holographic presentation technology.

    In fact, both the blueprints, one in front of him and the other Noah used are basically above average at best within the organization.

    But they are based on the basic principles Sam altered into the curriculum of the students making them think outside the box and most of them are based on Sam¡¯s city as a reference.

    But for the people who hadn¡¯t seen city constructions like these, this is a masterpiece. They never thought that a city could be built like this and when they thought of what makes it possible, the principle behind it is very simple.

    It is just that no one with an orthodox mind would think of using these principles in such a way.

    "This is the best work I have done. I don¡¯t think it isplete and I can still improve on it with given time, but it is still usable."

    There is clearly a tinge of pride in his tone as he looked at it.

    The Old man checked it for a long time and finally smiled.

    "You have a deal young man. But one condition. You should never sell this blueprint to anyone else. You need to give me a soul contract signed with that."

    "Yes, no problem."

    Sam smiled as he handed over the blueprint and the formation te. The beast whistle was handed over to him and the old man asked.

    "How did you do that holographic presentation?"

    "That is not my making, it is done by a fellow inventor back in my home realm. He does a very great job in these kinds of things. As long as you give the blueprint to him, he will create this presentation which would be easier to understand for the construction workers and artisans."

 Chapter 1218: Contagious Curse

    "We would like to meet that person."

    "He must be within the vicinity of this realm. But it would be hard to contact him. He is good at hiding."

    "What is he hiding from?"

    "The curse brought upon him because of his skill. People often covet the result and try to make it theirs and in the process, they ignore the value of the person who made it, his efforts, intelligence, skills, and even the fact that his very existence is the cause of that result, they so dearly covet that much.

    And any person who can get results that are extremely coveted by someone is considered cursed. And among all the cursed people I know, the weight of his curse is the greatest."

    "Where did you get this curse theory?"

    "He told that to me. Anyway, I would be roaming around a bit to get some inspiration for the research. I might not be able to spend as much time here. I hope it is not a problem."

    "Not really. We are going on defensive currently and just keep in touch with the outside world a bit and you would know if you are necessary here."

    "That would be great. Thank you."

    With that, Sam came out of the city and went into the forest before disappearing.

    He went to the camp where Akhil and Donner are staying.

    "So, what is the current status?" Akhil asked.

    "I got the Beast whistle. If my guess is right, they will be constructing the formation and it might start immediately. They don¡¯t have time to waste. With all the chaos we caused, they arepletely believing that some other organization is definitely eyeing them. They need the best defense they could possibly afford at the moment."

    "That is great. So, what do we do now?"

    "Tell the yers to gather up here. We would be waiting it out and dealing with some guys whoe and go often. From now on, don¡¯t leave their bodies after killing them. Clean up the whole ce after the battle and try to make it look like what it was before the battle. It is important.

    We need to create some sense of terror and add some mystery re to get the job done properly."

    "Your wish. We will be going now."

    With that, they left, while Sam started making preparations.

    In this time he spent in the Fiend tribe, he understood one particr thing, there are not many factors that he could take advantage of when dealing with the Fiend tribe.

    They are not thirsty or greedy for anything in particr, except for the bloodshed. But even that urge ispletely under their control. Except for the really immature ones, not many people could be influenced easily to let that urge go wild.

    He wanted to use, alcohol, food, sex, or any other kind of addiction that could make them go wild and weak, but there are no holes in that direction.

    If he had ess to the liquid energy cells, he would have had destroyed half of the tribe by now. But now there are very few choices he could make and one of the most feasible ones is a contagious curse.

    One of the high-level curses even in the Myriad Curse guide and he needs to use a lot of energy to activate it and even then, there is no guarantee, it would work properly in a single attempt, so he needs to test them out before all the yers assemble here.

    If things work out, with the contagious curse and the efforts from other yers, the tribe would be down in a few days.

    So, he let his beasts out after a long time as he used them to guard him while he practiced.

    Forest Bear and Dia first created a leveled area that could be used as his experimental setup. He could use the simtion on the second floor so that the time difference would be able to help him get to have more time to practice.

    But he just decided to do it outside so that he can see the effects on the surrounding environment. The curse has too much dark elemental energy and no matter how much he could replicate the environment, it doesn¡¯t beat the real thing.

    So, he started painting the inscriptions on the ground creating arge array that almost took two and a half hours for him to create and after it was done, he stood in the center and activated the array.

    The dark elemental energy started gathering in his hand slowly forming a glob ck sphere.

    The inscription ink slowly disappeared.

    At this moment, he activated energy vision to see what is happening in the surroundings and he could see the inscription array absorbing the surrounding energy and converting it to the dark elemental energy which has an extremely sinister feel to it.

    It took five minutes for the whole array to disappear and the ck sphere in his hands glowed with ck light.

    He tried to suppress it, but he is already short on energy due to the array and he knew he cannot keep it for a long time.

    So, he aimed at the tree nearby and threw the ball onto it.

    The tree was hit by this dark energy ball and it slowly started aging, first, the tree started growing branches and the leaves became dense,ter the leaves withered one by one and fell down before the tree itself withered away.

    As it was dying, Sam signaled the forest bear who injected the wood elemental energy to the nearest tree to make its branch grow towards the dying tree and make contact with it.

    When the first treepletely died, the second tree touched it. All of a sudden, the second tree started going through the same aging process.

    The forest bear repeated the process with a few more trees and as this constant contact was maintained, the chain reaction didn¡¯t stop.

    Dozens of trees died in a few minutes and after some time, Sam cut off the chain reaction.

    Thest dead tree emitted a lot of energy which it shouldn¡¯t have. The energy is far more than the energy present in the initial curse Sam created.

    The change in the quantity of energy is because of the curse¡¯s absorption ability. When it was attached to the target, it absorbs all the energy from that target and makes it its own.

    After the target died if there is no direct physical contact with another living body, it will slowly dissipate the energy until it was finally gone and merged with the atmosphere.

    But if there is physical contact by a single entity or multiple entities, things would be different.

    The energy would be sent to the new entities that are in contact. If it is only one, it would absorb all the energy and if there are multiple entities, the energy would be distributed equally amongst them.

    The curse will continue to propagate as it absorbs more and more energy.

    Currently, the curse Sam used is actually a short version of it. For it to be used on a cultivator of his level, the curse needs a lot more energy and it would take a lot of time for it topletely absorb the energy from the target.

    There is a possibility that if the target is powerful enough, he might be able to suppress the energy and forcefully expel it from his body even at the expense of their injury.

    After going through some data on results, he once again went on with the practice after recovering the energy with the wine.

    The next day, the yers starteding one by one and they saw Sam practicing the same curse again and again.

    As he drew the arrays one after another, he got more and more familiar with them and he managed to do it faster every time.

    By the time all the yers are there, Sam is confident that he could create a full-scale contagious curse that could make a person of his cultivation level, the original cultivation level with Middle-stage transcendence of Astral ne die and even if he managed to save himself, he would have to go through a lot of effort and would be as weak as a chicken.

    After he was done with the process, Sam looked at the yers and said.

    "I hope you guys all have enough tricks up your sleeves. I already got the Beast Whistle and kind of used Noah and Kumar¡¯s points. So, the remaining four of you are the main yers here and need to step up.

    You guys should be able to bring that Tribe Chief and the Grand elders down.

    I am telling you, if things go south, I will break the whole pact and just use my toys to take him down and I wouldn¡¯t have to share anything with you guys. We already wasted too much time here."

 Chapter 1219: Spreading Curse

    Everyone looked at Sam weirdly.

    "What happened? Why are you like this all of a sudden?" Noah asked as she took a seat and stretched her body a bit.

    "Nothing, I have been working like a mule in the past few days and you wouldn¡¯t believe the stress I have been enduring mentally. So, I want you guys to seed no matter what.

    I will only be with you at the start of this final operation and the rest would have to be taken care of by you."

    "Yeah, yeah. Don¡¯t worry about that. Give me a beer first and I will make sure this whole thing seeds." Akhil also sat leisurely and even asked for a drink.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother with them anymore and said.

    "Find the Fiend tribe members thate out of the city and capture them if possible. Every battle should be clean, there should not be any traces left. Nobody should know of your presence there. Collect every dead body you create and even Raiju shouldn¡¯t be able to sniff any blood after it was cleaned up.

    By the way, make sure that the captive doesn¡¯t see your faces while you are capturing him. We don¡¯t need some extra eyes on us. I don¡¯t want to move from spot to spot."

    They didn¡¯t reply and just continued rxing. Sam just went back and started preparing an array for the contagious curse, so that he doesn¡¯t have to hurry when their first targetes.

    The yerszed around for an hour and finally made their move. After a few hours, they returned with three Fiends and around a dozen bodies.

    "These three are the only ones that are roaming around alone. They don¡¯t have any teammates, so we figured they would be better. As for the rest, they are just some small teams patrolling the surroundings." Noah exined after handing over the three unconscious targets to him.

    Sam nodded and brought one of the guys to sit down with his back against the nearby tree.

    He then went on to start the array and condensed the curse into his hand, before throwing it at the target.

    He went to him and injected another anesthetic that would make him unconscious for another two hours and handed him over to other yers.

    One of them took that guy away and left him in the forest close to the city.

    After that was done, Sam went on to create another array and did the same with another target, but this time, the dose of Anesthetic is higher and he was left on apletely different side of the city. The same thing happened to the third one.

    "Okay, that is enough for today. We will make our next move tomorrow. Do not cause any ruckus."

    They rested there for the night and the next day, the yers moved once again to capture new targets.

    While they are proceeding with their n, back in the city the results are slowly showing. The first target, Sam ced the curse on was left in the forest nearest to the city gate.

    He was soon rescued by someone that came from the city and was soon sent to the healer of the tribe.

    The first thing they did is to try and wake him up. But they couldn¡¯t identify the anesthetic and they don¡¯t want to use some random antidotes that might cause more harm than good to him.

    So, they waited for him to wake up. But by the time he woke up, what the leaders didn¡¯t notice is that his energy is being sucked dry slowly.

    After the time limit for the anesthetic was over, he finally woke up.

    He jumped off the bed immediately and looked around.

    "Where am I? Where am I?" He muttered to himself as he became vignt, but the healer already came in to make him calm down, before exining the situation to him.

    Even though he doesn¡¯t have a full understanding of the whole scenario he gave a gist of it and finally asked.

    "Do you know what happened to you? You were in a deep sleep when they brought you back. You seemed to have been under the effect of a strong anesthetic."

    "I don¡¯t know what happened. I was going for a hunt, but all of a sudden, I lost my vision and copsed on the ground. I don¡¯t know what happened at all. The only thing I could feel at the moment is the strong pain on the back of my head."

    "Have you seen or heard anything from the people who did this to you?"

    "No."

    "Do you know any usible reason that someone might do this to you? After all, nothing was stolen off of you. Even your spatial ring is there, you were not attacked at all. Apart from the possible blow on the back of your head which made you unconscious and the anesthetic, there is no other harm to your body.

    It is almost like the other party doesn¡¯t even want to hurt you."

    "Are you saying that this is a lesson being taught to me by someone?"

    "There is a possibility. It could even be a simple prank. But currently, the situation of the tribe is not good and we need to be careful regarding everything. That is why I am asking these questions."

    "I couldn¡¯t think of anyone. I don¡¯t have any enemies. At least not the petty ones like these."

    "Okay then. You can go back to your residence and rest for a while. The Anesthetic is powerful, it might leave some residual effects in your body, it is better to rest and let them dissipate."

    "Thank you."

    With that, he left the healer and went to one of the barracks of the city guard andid down on a small bed.

    He is a regr city guard and that is his day off after a long time. He wanted to go out for a hunt and rx a bit. But this happened to fuck his ns up.

    He closed his eyes and went to rest.

    An hourter, another young man was brought into the healer room just like this and he also gave the same ount. He went back to the residence in the Fiend tribe Estate to rest.

    And the final one is the son of an elder. He went directly to the Elder¡¯s mansion as soon as he was discovered by someone. He was treated there and everything was arranged to him properly. His father even ced his most trusted maid to serve him properly.

    But soon, the three people in three different ces with three different social statuses are showing the same symptoms one after another.

    The city guard is the first one to exhibit them.

    His energy was slowly sucked dry and no matter how much he tried to absorb energy through the medicine and other efforts, he was unable to do so.

    Hisrades are not in the camp at the time, and he couldn¡¯t even stand up and walk out. He could barely crawl and even his voice was not heard by anyone.

    He crawled out of the room and by that time, his body thinned down to bare bones.

    He couldn¡¯t breathe and his throat is parched along with his tongue.

    He felt like his vitality is being sucked dry by someone.

    When he finally managed toe out of the barracks, he didn¡¯t have any strength and he copsed at the door.

    One of the guards saw this and ran over.

    "Help. Help." He yelled as he carried the almost dead guard and ran towards the healer¡¯s camp within the barracks, but he died before he could reach the area, and without him even knowing some kind of energy entered his body.

    In the residence within the estate, the second target also exhibited the same principle, but unlike the first target, he didn¡¯t have anyone nearby and even though he managed to crawl out of the house, he wasn¡¯t able to catch anyone.

    So, he fell to the ground and died.

    The energy in his body touched the grass and vines on the ground and they started withering.

    The vine has fruit at that time which was being plucked by a rabbit and while eating it, the small rabbit touched the vine while the vine withered.

    The rabbit then ran into another residence but felt extremely weak.

    One of the servants of the house saw the rabbit and ran towards it.

    "Oh my god. Young miss¡¯ rabbit seemed to have eaten something weird again. She would be furious if she finds out."

    As he anxious ran to another fellow maid who is capable of handling the rabbit, the rabbit died.

    Meanwhile, the third target. The young master who is the Elder¡¯s son exhibited the symptoms. The healer and the maid are the two people who were in contact with him at thest moment of his birth.

    The Elder who lost his son looked at the maid furiously as he took his anger out on her.

 Chapter 1220: Dayus Delusions

    One week passed since Sam sent the first three curses through the first three targets into the city and the fiend tribe.

    In this week, they sent another twenty people with the curse attached to them while they changed their camp nine times.

    The Fiend tribe officially dered a lockdown over the city.

    The twenty-three targets caused a pandemic inside the city, but the most affected are obviously the Fiend tribe members.

    The normal local people are not really affected, except for a few casualties as they were not allowed toe into contact with the targets that were sent back in.

    And the contact has to be made when the target is dying, so the normalmoners don¡¯t have any way to contact them.

    But the deaths within the fiend tribe are increasing day by day and the main reason for that is the chain reaction that started from the elder¡¯s son.

    After he died and the curse was transmitted to both the healer and the maid, the Elder who was furious started taking his anger out of the mage while the healer went to do some research on the body to find the cause of the death.

    While going through all the abuse, the life of the maid went away earlier than expected and in the process, the Elder caught the curse.

    Meanwhile, the healer who got the curse managed to spot it earlier than the others as soon as the symptoms started showing. He started taking medicine and used his light elemental energy to try to diffuse the curse.

    But to his dismay, it is not working. It is barely slowing the curse down. He managed to hold out for a whole day before he died, but while he was dying, three healers are holding his body making three of them catch it.

    The effect of the curse is slower on them as the energy was distributed. But it is not much slower than the first curse Sam ced. After all, going through so many people strengthened itself a lot.

    Meanwhile, the curse that went through the rabbit to the maid, followed her as she was demoted to the barracks arranged for the maids to die that night, and many maids who tried to help her caught it.

    Since their cultivation is lower, by the next morning, the maids that got the curse were showing the symptoms and some more people came into contact with it.

    The city guards also had the same trouble. But when they felt like this was contagious they contained it with only over a dozen deaths, but that didn¡¯t stop them from getting infected, it only stopped it from the curse going outside of their camp.

    After all, they couldn¡¯t understand that the curse is only contagious after the person is dead, not before. But they are refraining from touching the people when they were alive while they are touching the bodies after they are dead.

    This caused a rather rapid spread.

    When Sam got the gist of the news from the shadow mice, he stopped the whole cursing and just sat back and rxed.

    "I did my part. The city will be in utter chaos and there would be many people that are going to die, even if they didn¡¯t, they would be weakened and that includes the Chief of the tribe, granted that hees into contact with something dead due to the curse which is most likely to happen.

    So, now deal with them and bring back the heirloom, so that we can finally put an end to this stupid pact."

    "Why? You don¡¯t like this. I liked it actually. It is fun." Akhil said from the side.

    "Of course, it would be fun for me too, if you wussies are not so damn weak. I have to hold back my strength and my tools so much that I am feeling exhausted."

    All of them just ignored hisments and left to do their jobs. Before they left Sam warned.

    "Don¡¯t touch the dead bodies of the cursed and if you did,e to me immediately and we might have a chance, otherwise you would be dead and unlike the previous yers who died, you wouldn¡¯t even get a proper burial."

    "Don¡¯t Jinx it you asshole. Your masty curse might really get me." Akhil yelled back while the rest of them just chuckled and went away.

    For the next two weeks, the Fiend tribe felt the terror bigger than the one they faced at the war. Even in that war, they didn¡¯t feel like they are going to be uprooted, but they felt it now.

    Every now and then, the fiend tribe people came out to collect and buy herbs from other ces so that they could aid the research of this contagious curse, but none of the people that came out ever managed to return. They died.

    When people started going to investigate, but there are no traces. They disappeared into thin air. At least, that is what they thought when they saw no trace.

    People are dying inside out and by the end of the two weeks the son of the tribe chief also got the curse because he cried while hugging his brother who died the day before.

    And that night, the tribe chief caught the curse from his son.

    But with his cultivation level, he managed to observe it immediately. But he could at most suppress it as it grew too big after passing through so many high-level cultivators. He couldn¡¯t just expel it forcefully.

    That would make him extremely vulnerable.

    At least for now, he could keep suppressing it and at least maintain his position. Otherwise, the external members wouldn¡¯t just remain calm. They would just burn the whole tribe up if they saw a small crack in his behavior.

    But his worries came true faster than he originally thought.

    The other organizations slowly started dealing with the other areas under the control of the Fiend tribe on variouss.

    But the tribe doesn¡¯t have enough manpower to retaliate.

    They could only sit and wait as their elites died one after another. Not in some mighty war, rather on a sickbed.

    While the situation is like this, the yers slowly started bing more and more daring.

    After the two weeks of this farce, Dayus suddenly selected the Fiend tribe in his wrist screen.

    Sam frowned at this, but he didn¡¯t give out any obvious objections. He doesn¡¯t care if he wanted the glory all to himself, but that is impossible to achieve anyway.

    All the other yers also selected the Fiend tribe in the list. Since multiple selections is avable now, there is no point in Dayus¡¯ action.

    It is just that Noah, Sam, and Kumar couldn¡¯t keep their identities hidden anymore.

    They would be exposed and by now, there is no point in hiding them too.

    For the next week, the yers came on to the Fiend tribe crazily.

    They attacked openly and started chipping it away bit by bit.

    When the tribe chief learned about the situation from the gods, he understood that everything will be gone as soon as he gave up the heirloom.

    He looked at the dying members one by one and immediately made a decision.

    He met with the yers and decided to give up the heirloom in exchange for the cure for this situation.

    Sam didn¡¯t reject it at all and he gave the cure to them. It is just a very special liquid. A small amount of light elemental energy liquid was mixed with various herbs that have effects on the curses as they were made into potions.

    Everything went smoothly.

    They got the heirloom.

    Now, the situation changed. Two heirlooms are in their hands and now the problem is how do they split the resources. In fact, it is not even the question of how they should split, it is whether they would split it or not.

    They all gathered in the camp as they ate.

    "So, how do we go about this?"

    Sam is the first one to break the question.

    Everyone is silent, nobody wants to say anything. They knew this trouble woulde sooner orter. But nobody wants to break that ice.

    "Trust me guys. If you really don¡¯t want to talk, I would just take the whistle and get away from here. There is no reason for me to worry about giving you guys a chance."

    "We need to have a fair fight regarding this, but before that, I want you to hand over the beast whistle to us."

    Dayus suddenly spoke up. Sam raised an eyebrow as he looked at him.

    "Us? Who is this ¡¯us¡¯ you are talking about?"

    "The rest of the yers and I don¡¯t trust you or Arkiv. Both of you are in alliance. Your cultivation level is higher than that of us and you even have a team lurking somewhere nearby.

    We cannot deal with you with our current might and we don¡¯t want to take the risk. Only if you handover the heirloom now, would we have the trust that you would fight fairly."

 Chapter 1221: With Players

    Sam looked straight into Dayus¡¯ eyes, he thought for a moment and stood up. He took out the Beast Whistle and held it on his extended hand as he looked at him.

    "Take it."

    That is all he said. He didn¡¯t speak anything and just looked at Dayus.

    Dayus also looked him in the eyes and stood up. He is taller than Sam a bit and even his whole stature is a bitrger than him, he is currently looked down on at Sam, but he didn¡¯t feel the least bit confident.

    The beast whistle is right in front of him. There is not a single sign of energy rush in Sam, he is just standing there still. But he wasn¡¯t able to bring himself to take it from his hand. He felt like his life is in danger. He knew exactly what Sam is capable of and he knew that if Sam really wanted to harm him, with their current cultivation level difference, he would be crushed.

    Sam just smiled at his non-reaction and got closer to him as he whispered into his ear.

    "There is a reason why you didn¡¯t take it even when I offered it to you Dayus. And I know that you know the reason. You know that, if I want to, I can walk away with this and you and the rest of the yers wouldn¡¯t be able to stop me. I don¡¯t even need to use extra tricks. I and my beasts would be able to tear through like a hot knife in butter.

    You know that very well because you experienced it first-hand multiple times. So, don¡¯t insult me with the words like trust and such.

    The very reason you need to trust me is that I am ying this with all of you when I don¡¯t need to. So, don¡¯t insult me again, or I will cut your balls off. Do you understand?"

    Dayus felt a small sense of terror raise up in his heart and he involuntarily nodded. Even he didn¡¯t expect that he would nod just like that. His face became red with embarrassment.

    Sam sat down once again, he just threw the whistle to the middle but no one came forward to take it.

    "I don¡¯t care what you guys pick. If you want to fight, we can fight."

    "We can divide the spoils equally. Seven parts, seven members. I don¡¯t have any problem with that." Noah proposed and Kumar also shrugged following her suggestion.

    "Me neither. I also don¡¯t have a problem with that proposal."

    "I agree. It is a waste of time for us to beat each other up." Akhil saidzily. Arkiv just shrugged. He is also fine either way.

    Finally, Donner also agreed. The only one who is not exactly happy with this is Dayus. For some reason in his twisted way, he thinks he is better than everybody and he wholeheartedly believes it. Either he brainwashed himself too much or he is just that delusional since birth. But he felt like he needed a bigger part for a reason he couldn¡¯t even think of to justify his own thoughts to himself.

    The rest of the yers didn¡¯t have any intention to convince or coddle him. Either he agrees or he might not even get that one share.

    The yers will easily gang upon him.

    He could only grit his teeth and agree to it.

    "Okay, Sam. If you want to, you can buy my share for a city blueprint. I want a perfectly designed city from the ground up with a perfect defense system." Noah said as soon as the agreement was reached.

    "I can do that," Sam said without even thinking and continued. "But if you want a perfectly tailor-made one, I would have toe and survey thend before doing it and check the resources and such. It would take some time too."

    "I can wait. It will take some time anyway. But I want the design to be solely made by you. None of your organization¡¯s designers and artisans can get involved in the designing process. Your construction team must be responsible for the building, I will provide you with all the materials."

    "Deal."

    They reached an agreement perfectly and Kumar spoke.

    "My share for a special offensive weapons design."

    "What kind?"

    "That can kill a person that has a few stages of higher cultivation than you."

    "I can understand that. What I don¡¯t understand is what kind of mobility should that weapon have? Should it easily be carriable? Should it be stationary, like being a part of the city? Should it be like a mobile fortress? There are too many requirements buddy?"

    "A mobile one. I will give you the specific requirementster. I have found some special materials suitable for the job. You can give me suggestionster after you check them."

    "You got a deal."

    "You guys gave up two shares for a city blueprint n and a weapon?" Dayus asked with a genuinely surprised expression and every other yer looked at him with a dumbfounded expression as if they are looking at an idiot.

    After all, now it is not easy to get Sam working. Even when he was at a lower level, he created things that could take down people that are far more superior than him, and when he could do all that with the limitations on his power, they could only expect more now that a lot of his limitations are being widened.

    He could do a lot and it would be hard to get such works of art even in these higher realms.

    Every one of them thought it is a fair price, of course, Dayus had different ideas.

    Sam ignored himpletely and said to the rest.

    "If you guys want something just like this, I wouldn¡¯t mind."

    "I want a special staff, with these requirements," Akhil said as he gave out a scroll. Sam opened it and was surprised to see the unique design requirements.

    "That is a great design for a staff. I didn¡¯t know your brain works."

    "Fuck off." Akhil just cursed and went back to his drinking.

    "Anybody else? This is a limited offer." Sam asked once again and after some hesitation, Donner also came forward. Arkiv and Dayus didn¡¯t and Sam knew that Arkiv wouldn¡¯t want anything, for now, so he could only exchange the resources and give them to them which he did.

    After the distribution was done, the yers didn¡¯t know what to do. Their ns were only made until this moment. They didn¡¯t n what to do in the future.

    "Are you guys going to continue with this teamwork thing?" Sam asked curiously.

    But all of them shook their heads.

    "This is just a temporary truce. Since two forces are in the same area and they are also made at each other, we just wanted to take advantage of that and it was easier with all the yers.

    We are going our separate ways from now on." Noah replied immediately.

    "That is great. Even though this works, it is not advisable in long term. Those gods wouldn¡¯t be happy with this kind of thing, this willpletely spoil their entertainment after all." Sam said after some thought.

    "Where are you going?" Noah asked Sam.

    "Why?"

    "I will stay out of your way for that and in exchange, you stay out of my way."

    "I am going after ck Ghosts and I have a conflict with the Five Great sects."

    "Two of the next three?" Noah asked in surprise.

    "Well, they made it personal and I have a person from the ck Ghosts working for me."

    "Who is working for you?"

    "The sessor."

    Everyone was dumbfounded.

    "Why would a sessor work for you? You are shitting us aren¡¯t you?"

    "No. The original sessor was betrayed because of family politics. His cultivation growth was sealed and even his elemental energies were stopped with some peculiar parasite.

    His face was changed and he was apletely new person with a new identity. It is a cold-blooded revenge ploy if you ask me.

    I identally rescued him from the puppet organization and I kind of promised to help him get back to his original position in exchange for the heirloom."

    "Damn it. Even your luck is good."

    "Maybe it is."

    "But what about the Five Great sects?"

    "Remember the Night Demon tribe? One of the outerdeacons happened to be a member of the tribe and now he might be thest main branch member left alive. He tried to kill me with a borrowed knife when I was dealing with the puppet organization."

    "What happened exactly?" Akhil asked with interest.

    Sam smiled and looked at Dayus.

    "You want to tell them?"

    Dayus¡¯ face stiffened and he gritted his teeth.

    Everyone looked confused and at this moment Arkiv opened his mouth.

    "Our friend Dayus here made a deal with that outer deacon who was in turn contacted by the Golem Sect members. They all got involved with the Puppet organization to deal with Sam and me."

 Chapter 1222: Return

    Everyone turned to look at Dayus. They couldn¡¯t even be bothered to hide their disgust.

    Dayus could almost see their intent to beat the crap out of him just for that.

    "You really are a rat fucker aren¡¯t you? You teamed up with organizations to deal with one of our own?" As usual, Akhil had no filter as he directly asked. Dayus looked at him angrily because of the insult.

    "What? You are angry. Want a piece of me? Or are you going to take some help from other organizations to deal with me? You stupid piece of shit." Akhil stood up and took out his staff ready to beat the crap out of Dayus.

    But Dayus didn¡¯t dare make a move. The other yers wouldn¡¯t shy away from ganging upon him. Teaming up with the organizations to deal with the yers is not really a good thing. Nobody likes that, after all the rest of the yers wouldn¡¯t want to be on the receiving end of such a plot.

    "Don¡¯t act like some saints. I did what I had to do. This Sam is using his disgusting tricks to gain on us. You all have to thank me for being the only one who has the guts to stand up against him. Without him, our wholepetition would be fair. Otherwise, sooner orter we would be facing trouble because of him."

    Everyone looked at him as if he was stupid.

    They all know one thing for sure that Sam is trying his best to keep the game as fair as possible. While dealing with the organizations, he always held back and gave up on many organizations so that they could have their share.

    He stopped for months and even years so that they could catch up, without just impatiently dealing with the organizations that they are targeting which would obviously be a simpler option for him.

    He is fair in transactions and he would help them out if it is not an overboard request. They all knew that they can count on him if things are really tough and he would help them out.

    Compared to him, they have more trouble with Dayus. He was always scheming and thought that he is better than anyone else even though he is clearly not. He is not exactly a friendly person and they don¡¯t even want to have any transactions with him no matter how good they are. Because they knew there would be a catch.

    He has the least amount of integrity among the group. So, him acting all saintly about his actions ispletely enraging them.

    "I am not coborating with you anymore. If any of you are nning on doing that, tell me now so that I could cut my ties with you guys too." Akhil said directly.

    Noah and Kumar just looked at him with a side-eyed nce andpletely ignored Dayus. It is sure that they are also not going to coborate with him anymore.

    Arkiv¡¯s stand is simple and thest one left is Donner. He just stayed silent and from the way, he averted his gaze. His actions are enough to understand his stance on the situation.

    Dayus gritted his teeth in anger and looked at Sam who is just smiling at the whole scene.

    "You did this intentionally."

    "What did I do exactly?" Sam asked in return with a confused expression. He didn¡¯t care what others thought of Dayus, he doesn¡¯t have any problem if they coborated with him or not. The only reason he didn¡¯t mess with Dayus too much is that an extra yer would be able to cause extra chaos to the organizations and it would be helpful for him in the long end of the goals.

    "You knew that it would be impossible for a single yer to deal with the organizations that we are about to face next. You intentionally isted me so that the other yers wouldn¡¯t cooperate with me and you could profit from that.

    You are threatened by me. So, you intentionally sabotaged my rtionship."

    Sam was amused by the usations.

    "You better keep your mouth in control. Otherwise, I will rip it off directly."

    Dayus became silent immediately and Sam said.

    "I don¡¯t give a flying fuck about your coboration with others. I don¡¯t even think about what you think of me or what you are capable of. You might be thinking that I am sitting here scheming on how to deal with you. But you couldn¡¯t be more wrong.

    You are the person that I think about the least in my whole life. So, don¡¯t tter yourself and call yourself a threat to me."

    With that, he just ignored Dayus and minded his own business.

    Dayus looked at the rest of the yers who are still extremely angry at him.

    He knew that the rest of the organizations are not going to be easy for him. The yers would kill him if he sabotages even one of their ns from now on since he lost all the decorum with them and he knew how hard it is to escape from all of them.

    Many thoughts ran through his mind and he couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit crazy.

    He stood up and said.

    "I will make you all regret making an enemy out of me."

    With that, he left.

    Nobody bothered with him even then.

    "I will be going back to meet my students. I won¡¯t be active for a month or so. If you want to deal with the Five Great sects, that would be your window. But Once Ie back, I wouldn¡¯t be holding back. So, you decide what you want to do."

    Sam gave them a heads-up and the next morning everyone went on their own way.

    Sam dropped Arkiv with the rest of his team who are already busy with something else. Since he knew that he would be stuck in dealing with the two organizations and the rest of the yers, he didn¡¯t want to make his teammates waste any time and sent them to help Markan deal with the ck Ghosts a bit.

    They are not exactly going on an all-out war and Markan didn¡¯t openly reveal himself to them, rather they roamed around in the outskirts of the area of influence of the ck Ghosts organization to fish some information on the internal structure and they did a great job until now.

    They got a lot more crucial information than they initially thought they would get.

    After letting Arkiv go with them, Sam broke some bad news for some of the teammates.

    Jw, Agni, and Argan are being sent back to the organization for carrying out different tasks.

    Even though they felt a bit down about this, they knew that they are getting in the way of the team more often than not. They are not being able to keep up with the cultivation level of the opponents and even their teammates.

    It would be hard for the teammates to keep a lookout for them, every time they battled. So, Sam sent them back and assigned different tasks for them. They need to train as well as oversee some minor expansions that could stabilize the organization.

    After that, he went back to meet his students who are eagerly waiting for him.

    They are growing fast in terms of cultivation and the cultivation chamber is working wonders. Many researchers are eager to get their hands on one to see how this thing works. But Sam didn¡¯t make it public in the organization.

    He knew the significance of this.

    The very reason he made this is to make sure that the students here wouldn¡¯t be disadvantaged in terms of their cultivation atmosphere.

    The higher realms have a better atmosphere and that made the kids have more talent since birth.

    But the atmosphere with deprived spiritual energy is not aplete disadvantage, the natural adaptation of the body helps them with a higher absorption rate and more energy efficiency.

    The cultivation chamber is an attempt tobine all of these factors and see what would happen if that adaptive body was ced in a higher realm atmosphere and the results are showing.

    The kids are also slowly catching up on the battle site and are improving their battle instincts. Thepetitions that are specifically held for their improvement are proving to be useful.

    Along with that they also took the jobs of the lowest level in their interested field.

    Things are going smoothly over at home and Sam felt satisfied.

    He stayed for the month and took care of everything that needs to be taken care of while working on the staff design that Akhil asked him.

    After he was done here, he made his way back to the designated location with newfound excitement. Because the day to meet with his friends is nearing.

    The location they decided to meet is getting close and he is sure that he would be meeting them soon. He cannot wait to see them again.

 Chapter 1223: Investigation results

    Sam reached the location he agreed to meet with his teammates.

    They are currently inside a house they bought in a vige. When he arrived, he could see that the teammates are all excited.

    "Okay, guys. We cut down some teammates, so you know what that means, you guys get more action. Now, let us not waste any more time and just get into it immediately. I think we have wasted so much time and all this while the holding back made me so frustrated."

    "Good to see you too, boss. I am fine. Thanks for asking. How are you doing? Oh great? You had such a great time with your friends ying around? I really wished that was me..."

    Sam looked at the Saber Monarch who is running his mouth over and over.

    "Dude, what are you? An eight-year-old seeing your father after a year wouldn¡¯t react as you do."

    Kiran said from the side.

    Sam ignored them and sat beside Markan.

    "So, how are you doing? Is the information worth the effort you guys put in? Do we have anything that we take advantage of?"

    "I don¡¯t know you tell me. For me, nothing looks like an opportunity here. It is more like everything is a fucking disaster. The ck Ghosts went from a neutral party that sells information and arrange mediations to this shit show these assholes are running.

    I want to kill that bastard right now. But I cannot do that, because the whole organization my ancestors built has be his ything and he is ying with it like never before."

    Sam could only stay silent at his frustrations and soon, Markan and the rest of the team started giving the information they have been collecting so far.

    For starters, the ck Ghosts are currently spread in over twenty-one realms which is too much for even Sam.

    He has never seen an organization¡¯s presence in so many realms. The five great sects which is divided into five branches only have their influence in eighteen realms out of which eight realms arepletely in its control while the remaining eight are shared by organizations that are as strong as the five great sects.

    But the difference is that the ck Ghosts don¡¯t rule the realms, they only control the whispers of the realms. ording to Markan, there is only one realm the ck Ghosts haveplete control on and even there, they are mostly an enforcement organization rather than the ruling party.

    They are like a god for whom themoners pray when the rulers don¡¯t hear their pleads.

    This realm is where the grand elders stay and the training areas of the ck Ghosts are present.

    The residence of the head of the organization is also there which in turn means that the disc is also there.

    But entering that ce is hard. It is called Sky Mountain.

    It is a single mountain peak and the area is actually very small. It is impossible to infiltrate. They could at most directly enter it and get killed at this stage. There is an only possible way to get this thing, that is to make Markan hand it over the disc himself.

    And from the looks of it, the location of this ce didn¡¯t change even with the change of leadership.

    Apart from that, the operations of the organizationpletely changed.

    The ck Ghosts is basically an information organization, but now they are doing a lot more than that and are spreading their fingers in many fields.

    The first and foremost thing they never did was the assassinations. They never killed anyone for money. If ites to saving themselves or their interests, they might have killed a lot of people, but for money, they never did that.

    But now they are doing all kinds of dirty work. They are even sending out hired thugs for jobs like kidnapping, plundering.

    They are also currently running a brothel racket with forced prostitution. Taking advantage of theirrgework of over twenty realms, they are kidnapping beautiful women of different races from different realms and shifting them to apletely different realm, forcing them to sell their bodies.

    But that is not all, they are also into gambling now. Particrly, forced-fighting pits are popr nowadays in every ce they are in.

    They kidnap men from different ces and are throwing them to fight with each other forcibly.

    They are not even discriminating against the cultivation levels, in fact, they are even dealing with teenagers who didn¡¯t even awaken at all.

    For some reason, the people want to see weaklings fight it out. And most of the time the fights are for deaths.

    As Markan exined everything, Sam could feel his anger bubbling.

    "You said that Grand Elders are the enforcers and they act when the leader and the administrators don¡¯t do their job properly, what is the problem now? Why are they not acting up?"

    "The Grand elders couldn¡¯t find the direct involvement at all."

    "That is hard to believe don¡¯t you think?"

    "It is hard to believe, but the thing is the grand elders don¡¯te down to the low-level members to investigate their actions and to find some hard evidence. For some reason, the Grand Elders are especially fixated on this evidence thing. I thought it was to protect the innocent victims that got excused and to shut the opposition. But now I understand that it is my naivety to think like that.

    This bastard is actually running another organization under his name. He recruited a bunch of guys from the failures of the training program the ck Ghosts have and made them the administrators or at least by name in that organization.

    When the Grand elders¡¯ investigation team went on to investigate the situation, all they found was that there is a new organization that is spreading and these members have friends in the ck Ghosts. That¡¯s it."

    "Wait, isn¡¯t that a bit too far-fetched. No matter howx the investigation is, they should be able to differentiate between having some friends and running the organization themselves. This isughable."

    Sam replied in amusement.

    "Except it is not. These guys are good. The ck Ghosts are trained in stealth, you put them in a group and you wouldn¡¯t be able to pick that they are special.

    They are maintaining this group so secret that when we started the investigation, even we couldn¡¯t find anything wrong with the situation.

    We couldn¡¯t find a connection between these rackets and the ck Ghosts for a very long time.

    We were shocked, to say the least. They are that good." Night Ghost Exined Sam¡¯s doubts.

    "Then how did you guys catch a break?"

    "One of the subordinates of the close aides of the current leader. Markan identified him. We caught him and got the info from him. Only after that did we manage to go after the correct target who has the connection between both the organizations and managed to get all this info."

    Sam was really surprised by all of this and didn¡¯t even know how to react.

    "Just what happened to your organization. You said that they have this cult-like following. So, wouldn¡¯t they have to follow the established rules? How did they manage to get so many people that would break so many rules? This is insane."

    "I know that is insane and that is what I am about to talk to you next. I found something wrong with one of the people we killed. He is one of the administrators that work in this parallel organization and there is something wrong with him."

    "Wrong? What is it?"

    "The memories of the person didn¡¯t add up. I know of him from the training grounds and I know some of his dark secrets which he had to carry to the grave, if not for me knowing it. But when we checked into the memory, we didn¡¯t find those events."

    Sam was surprised and asked.

    "Who extracted the memory?"

    "Night Ghost."

    Sam turned to Night Ghost and asked.

    "Did you see anything interfering in the extraction process?"

    "No. His soul is clean without any foreign interference."

    "Do you have the body now?"

    "Yes."

    Night Ghost took the body out from the death energy chamber that Sam used to preserve the bodies. He used the observation ability on the body and was surprised.

    "I think I have a theory, but we need to confirm it first. Why don¡¯t we go and capture another person who you know of and see if we can find a simr anomaly? I think I can make a more urate guess if I am involved in the process."

    Markan thought for a moment and said.

    "I think I know the perfect target for this." He said and started giving out the details. In the city close to them, there is a racket of fighting ring going on and the administrator there who belongs to the ck Ghosts are known to Markan.

    Actually, they are waiting in this city especially for him. They wanted to capture the boss of this guy who they expected toe here to check up on him

 Chapter 1224: Self-destruction

    They exined the situation to Sam.

    "Who is that person¡¯s boss? Do you know him by any chance?" Sam asked Markan.

    "I don¡¯t know him personally. But I know that he has some status under the current leader. So, we wanted to wait and capture him."

    "Then, why don¡¯t we use Kiran like always. We will capture this guy and rece him with Kiran and we would be able to capture him too. We could save some time in the process."

    Everyone looked at Kiran who has a sulky expression. It is clear that he doesn¡¯t want to be used as this infiltration piece. He knew that he is good at it and if Sam is not wrong, the other teammates must have already asked him once or twice, but he must have refused both times and they didn¡¯t bother to pursue more.

    Sam looked at him with a meaningful gaze and he said.

    "Boss, don¡¯t look at me like that. I will go" He relented immediately.

    "Why did it take so long for us to convince you, but you still refused, but Sam can immediately make you agree?" Sia asked as she looked at Kiran weirdly.

    "It is because Boss is not a numbskull like you guys. You cannot n as well as the boss. If it is him, I can be sure that I would be safe, even if I have to meet the enemy boss. But with you guys, I wouldn¡¯t be able to feel safe even if I have to infiltrate into a little kid¡¯s bedroom."

    Everyone looked at him with a sharp gaze, but Kiran is looking at Sam with a ttering smile.

    Sam sneered a bit and threw a jar of wine to him which Kiran caught and stored away in glee.

    After that, the team made a move.

    By evening they already captured their target and brought him back.

    He was tied up to a chair and Sam ced his hand on that guy¡¯s head to use the observation ability and this time, it only covered the head of this person.

    Sam then looked at Night Ghost who is suppressing this guy and nodded for which he slit the captive¡¯s throat.

    Sam then used the memory extraction on the captive before sitting on the ground cross-legged while going through the memories.

    Sam looked through each memory and each image carefully and his frown only got deeper and deeper.

    He opened his eyes and he transferred the memories to Markan to get his opinion and when Markan looked through them he also frowned.

    "Did you notice anything weird in this?" Markan asked as soon as he opened his eyes. Sam nodded and said.

    "These memories are not... I don¡¯t know how to put it, but I think they are not concrete. They are not solid enough. It is like the memories are faint and are mere illusions for these guys. Did you notice anything?"

    "Yes. There are no personal memories for this person."

    "Personal memories?"

    "Yes. The training of the ck Ghosts is actually pretty tough, but the thing is, the training regiment and process didn¡¯t change for hundreds of years. If they are assigned to one division within the organization in their childhood, they would go through the same training process.

    This person has the memories of all the training and all the possible interactions with the trainers and examiners and even some elders. But other than that, there are no personal memories.

    Every trainee will get to go outside once in a while, to get used to the vanity. That is also a part of the training. They would be given ess to all kinds of vain things, alcohol, status, women, and all kinds of addictive things.

    They would be attached to something and the trainer will kill that attachment while it was still a bud. It is impossible to know what that attachment is because that trainer reports directly to the Grand Elders.

    This is what we call personal time and every memory we make in that time period is called Personal memory. Most of the time, the personal memories are keptpletely secret from the normal trainers and even the examiners. It is almost impossible to get that information from anywhere else other than the person themselves."

    Sam fell into deep thought before he exined what he observed.

    "First thing¡¯s first. I don¡¯t think this guy is the same person."

    Everyone was surprised.

    "What do you mean?"

    "He is not the original person, he is a duplicate. I noticed the same type of muscle structural changes in your face. The captive¡¯s face has definitely changed. Which means that the original is dead and this duplicate was created with that face."

    Everyone was stunned and dumbfounded. But Sam continued.

    "Did you notice anything else missing?"

    Markan thought for a moment and said.

    "The final ceremonial days. After the candidatepletes the training, they would be given ess to the estate of the Grand Elders in which they would meditate in front of the stone tablets that contain the wills of the ancestors to get their blessing.

    I don¡¯t see that in him."

    Sam nodded and stayed silent for a while.

    He then turned to Kiran and transferred the memories to him and said.

    "Get ready to infiltrate. This time, it would be easy. You don¡¯t have to portray any emotions, you just have to be robotic with your actions and responses."

    Kiran nodded and started his preparations.

    Sam turned to Markan and said.

    "I don¡¯t know what the significance of the lost memories within him, but from the looks of it, they managed to erase that cult-like respect towards the organization and changed it to the obedience towards your rival, the current leader.

    So, they are more inclined to work for and lie for the current leader. That is why they are operating these separate rackets.

    But we have to know the answers to some other questions. How many people like this are there in the organization and how do they manage to do this? Do they have any external help or if this entire ploy is something that came from external sources? We need to find answers to these questions.

    Before we can explore in that direction, let Kiran have a try and see if we can capture the boss that might arrive in a few days and see if there are any clues that we can get.

    If he is a normal person and not a duplicate like these guys we might know what happened.

    Meanwhile, I will look at these bodies and see if we can find anything else."

    With that, Kiran was sent into the ce of the captive by that evening, while spent his time on the research for the next few days.

    A few days passed just like that and in these few days, Sam checked each and every inch of the dead bodies. He even went as far as dissecting the body and checking different organs without the extra protection of the bones and skin, even though he has the observation ability.

    After so much effort, he finally managed to find some traces. A trace of the curse was ced on both of them.

    Sam doesn¡¯t know which curse it is and they don¡¯t have a soul to see the potency of the curse and what kind of purpose it serves.

    But at least, this is a start.

    Meanwhile, on Kiran¡¯s side, the infiltration seeded and the boss they are waiting for finally arrived.

    Even though he is called the boss, he does not actually have that high of status, he had the same cultivation level as Kiran and he just kicked that guy¡¯s ass and brought him here.

    This time, Sam didn¡¯t kill him immediately and searched for the curse, but he couldn¡¯t find any, he also used the observation skill on his face which didn¡¯t show any signs of that weird facial surgery.

    "It seems like we caught an original this time."

    Sam said as he looked at Markan.

    Markan was surprised and he looked at this guy carefully.

    "You were a shortlisted candidate for sessor position in childhood right?"

    The captive was stunned when he heard that question.

    "How did you know? Who are you guys? If you know who I am, then you should also know what I am capable of."

    "Boring threats. Just shut up already."

    Kiran said from the side as he enjoyed his hard-earned wine.

    Markan channeled his energy into his palm and a hexagram made of six elemental energies formed there.

    "You... You... How is that possible? You shouldn¡¯t be here. You shouldn¡¯t be alive. No... No... This cannot be possible."

    As he stuttered and spoke, he suddenly started chanting something.

    Sam had a bad feeling and tried to stop him, but he was still toote.

    The body exploded and died right there.

    Sam hurriedly performed the memory extraction, but he wasn¡¯t able to find anything.

    "His soul dissipated. This self-destruction is quite powerful."

    He muttered in disappointment.

 Chapter 1225: Bust

    Sam checked the remains of the person who just killed himself. Even though he doesn¡¯t know what kind of technique he used to destroy himself and the soul and why he did that. He doesn¡¯t know what kind of secret this guy held, but they knew one thing for sure.

    The candidates that were selected as a prospect to be future sessors have much more free will and thoughts than the normal followers. That also means this guy who failed to be the sessor has been convinced into joining hands with the current leader and is helping in handling all these extra rackets.

    "It seems like some self-activating curse. All they need is to chant those words and it is activating."

    Sam said as he looked at Markan who has aplicated expression.

    "The sessors don¡¯t have to go through the same training as the others particrly the training programs that are designed for the mentality. It is because they are the decision-makers instead of just blind followers."

    "That means, they don¡¯t need to be reced by duplicates, all they need to do is convince them. Since these people will already have some administrative hold on low-level members, things are way easier. Seems like cancer caused by your rival has spread too much in the organization. We need to be careful while handling this."

    Sam said and he looked over at the team before asking Markan.

    "How big is your authority in the organization at the moment? Not the authority you currently hold, rather the authority you can hold with your current rank."

    "It is pretty high, I am right next to the Leader of the organization and I can even veto some of his decisions if I appeal to the grand elders and provide a proper reason."

    "Can you have personal subordinates working in the organization?"

    "I cannot just inject new ones in. Every subordinate must be taken in from various training areas. Why?"

    "From the reaction we got from this guy, he clearly doesn¡¯t know that you are alive. But we already made sure to send the information that you are alive through the subordinates of your organization when we are dealing with the puppet organization.

    But why did this guy not know that you are here? He reacted as if you should be dead. It is as if the news didn¡¯t spread at all.

    We sent almost two dozen people back here just to spread the news, it is almost impossible to not hear it."

    "Unless someone suppresses it deliberately," Markan replied and he felt like he touched upon something.

    "It seems like your Arch-enemy doesn¡¯t want your presence to be known," Sam said with a smile.

    "I think your disappearance might have a lot to do with the convincing of the other sessor prospects helping in these rackets. It seems like we are not as disadvantageous as we originally anticipated."

    Five-elemental King chimed in.

    "It seems like we can put the information you gathered to good use and we don¡¯t even have to wait. It is just that there is no good reason for our presence with you. The grand elders might make a fuss about it. Let us just think of some other ways, if we cannot find any other ways, you can carry the Lightning divine dimension with you and we can just hide in it."

    With that, they dispersed and started preparing for the move.

    After half an hour or so, Markan suddenly got an idea and called everyone.

    "I think I have a way."

    Everyone looked at him waiting for him to continue.

    "I used to have a crew with me when I disappeared. During the ambush, all of them died. I think we can pose you as that crew.

    They used to wear cloaks to cover their faces, even though they never used any concealing formations to aid their disguise and just wore them symbolically, we can just add the concealment to the cloak, and with some exining, we can just sell you guys as the crew. But the problem is, there are two members who cannot do that and I think Sia and Gran would be better offing into the divine dimension.

    Our group has three more members than the crew and all of them are men. If Sia and Grane in divine dimension, they wouldn¡¯t have to go through the hassle of disguising themselves as men. But even then, we have one person more, so one of you guys also has to go into the divine dimension."

    The group exchanged nces and Sam volunteered after some thought.

    "I will go in. Since I will be doing most of the nning and less of the fighting, it is better for me to be inside. I can also leisurely look at the situation and don¡¯t need to waste time with the pretenses and the meetings. I can find a better use of my time."

    Thus the preparation started once again.

    Sam started preparing the cloaks properly. He took the temte from the guys they captured and created the perfect ck cloak that could create the most proper concealment that is needed for their operation.

    After that, they decided to make their move immediately.

    He looked at the team that assembled before their departure and said.

    "The investigation team¡¯s arrival was always known to the ck Ghost members, so they are prepared. But now we are moving with the person who has the second-highest authority directly and gives them surprise and after every cleanup, we are going to make that a secret.

    We are going to do a sweep. We are going to move fast.

    Markan, you are going to use your authority tomand the local ck Ghost members to keep a watch on the whole racket after we busted it. We will record everything and present the witnesses, confessions, the scenes, and even the interrogations all of them to the Grand Elders.

    This operation not only restores the ck Ghosts to normal, but it also helps you to get your position back."

    With that, Sam started giving instructions and soon they moved out.

    They went to bust the fighting ring they had been eyeing for a while.

    Currently, they already busted the main leader and even the supervisor, but both of them are unfortunately dead, so they can only capture the deputy who is also a ck Ghost member.

    They arrived at the ring, Markan stayed out of the door while the rest of the team members went in blocking all the exits.

    At this moment, Markan performed his Hexagram Summon in the city.

    The ck Ghost members all around the city looked at the sky and even the city administrators, and others are stunned by this symbol and started running to the underground ring.

    The attendants that are outside saw the summon and understood that their bosses¡¯ asses are about to go on fire and wanted to get in touch with them to give this information, but before they could get there, the team made their move and pinned down every ck Ghost member there is along with the members of this parallel racket.

    The doors were opened and Markan entered. When the deputy saw this, he was about to chant the same thing as the previous one did, but Kiran who was beside them ced a disc on his back before he could chant and inject his energy.

    The energy started in his body riled up. It was actually supposed to flow to their hearts and brains before blowing up, but now it is just in utter chaos.

    Markan looked at the Deputy who is groaning in pain.

    "Long time no see. But I doubt that you remember my face."

    "I... I.."

    "I didn¡¯t know that bastard has a grip on the previous sessor prospects too. You are older than us by at least fifty years. Why bother digging into this shit? You know how the ck Ghosts work."

    "You were supposed to be dead. You were not supposed to be alive."

    "Oh, I was dead. I was dead as Markan and returned as Judgement for you and your boss. How dare you sully the name of the ck Ghosts. How dare you do this to our sacred organization? All of this for what? Huh?"

    The other party didn¡¯t dare say a word, he knew that he wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything now that even the chan didn¡¯t work.

    The ck Ghost members came in and knelt down before Markan.

    "You are to hold the racket. None of the information leaves this ce. I have seen every member here and until mymand, Markan¡¯smandes, you are to stay in the ce. I am vetoing the power of the current leader of the ck Ghosts with the Grand elder. Until that trial ends, the leader doesn¡¯t have the authority to veto mymand unless hees here himself. Do you understand?"

    "Yes."

    "That is right. Now guard the ce. Make sure that none of the administrators know what is happening and give them a warning in the name of me and make sure that not a word slips by. Otherwise, they would incur my wrath."

 Chapter 1226: Meeting the Grand ELders

    The ck Ghost members made their move, blocked the entire street, and didn¡¯t let anybody in. Most of them are still in the initial disguise they used for the mission in this city, so most people particrlymoners, didn¡¯t recognize them being the ck Ghost members.

    The administrators knew about it though and when they were about to make contact with the ck Ghost members and ask about the current situation, they were just shut down with the same warning Markan gave.

    They didn¡¯t dare stay there any longer and left.

    That day, Sam and the team stayed within the ring and started interrogating every officer.

    Some of them are low-level administrators of the ck Ghosts and they are actually duplicates, so there is no use in interrogating them much. So, they were just captured with a set of special shackles and were put away in Sam¡¯s chessboard.

    Meanwhile, the only person that could give them information, the Deputy is trying to chant again and again, but as soon as the energy that should have gathered to aid in his suicide didn¡¯te and every time there is a movement in energy, it was being shut down by that disc which could diffuse the energy.

    With this Markan started his interrogation.

    "Please, just kill me. I knew I screwed up. But just kill me and be done with it."

    He begged Markan, but they were all futile. Markan didn¡¯t have any thoughts of leaving him alone or even killing him for that matter, he would be part of the evidence he is going to use against his arch-enemy who is currently ruling the ck Ghosts in his stead.

    So, he made this guy sign the Cursed truth scroll and made him forcefully sign it, before asking the questions.

    "So, why did you betray the ck Ghosts and join hands with that bastard to create this parallel racket?"

    "I..." The captive wanted to open his mouth, but he felt a soul-searing pain in his head making him shut down.

    "The pain you are going through now, is because of a curse, as long as you don¡¯t tell me the truth, you wouldn¡¯t be able to get rid of it. So, be wise and tell me the truth."

    "I..."

    He tried to resist, but he felt so much pain that he couldn¡¯t even find the strength to voice it out. He gritted his teeth and tried to endure, the more he tried the harder it got. So, after an hour, he decided toe clean.

    "That is a new record. He managed to keep it in for an hour, I will do a leaderboard and see how everyone else does in this investigation." Sam thought to himself as he looked at the investigation process from inside the divine dimension.

    "I only joined this because of the greed. I wanted more resources. In the previous generation, I am a sessor prospect, when I was seventeen, I was selected because of my talent. I felt honored and proud, but as the time passed and when it really mattered, I wasn¡¯t able to surpass my peers and was left behind in the dust.

    So, all the glory and resources I had were gone. I wanted them back, but there is no way I could get them from ck Ghost, since this new leader came, he managed to make this possible. Since we cannot directly get them from ck Ghost, we decided to use ck Ghost to get them from elsewhere. It is just that, nothing more, nothing less. At least for me.

    But if I knew you were alive, I wouldn¡¯t have dared to join him. He reassured us many times that you were dealt with. He said that you were gone. But here you are. The Nightmare that wouldn¡¯t leave us alone has manifested in front of us."

    Seeing the fear in his eyes, the rest of the teammates were really surprised. They didn¡¯t expect that Markan would have such an influence. To make them fear him that much to the point they aremitting suicide just in his presence said a lot about him.

    Markan knocked the guy out and threw him into the chessboard. They recorded the confession of others, all the employees and workers of this parallel organization, and locked the whole thing down, the ck Ghost members were given the authority.

    With that, they got out and the very same day, they went away to the next city, they knew that the news will spread soon enough as it is impossible for them to lock down the whole city, so they decided to move faster and the best way is to use the Dimensional drifter. As for the expenses of the travel, they used the loot they got from the underground ring.

    They went to the next city and immediately Markan used the Hexagram Summon, before the merchants even left the first city, they already took down the racket in the second city and even moved to the third city.

    In the next three days, before the word got popr and anyone couldpletely believe it, they are done with every city where the racket is established on this and they just left to another and continued their spree.

    The only reason it is seeding is that they are moving faster than the information. The administrators of the city stayed mute since they learned that it is the personal beef between the members of the ck Ghosts, they didn¡¯t dare interfere with the spread of information.

    That contributed to the limited spread of the information which is highly beneficial to them.

    The interrogation went smoothly for the first three weeks, but by the fourth week, the leak already happened. The administrators that came from the ck Ghost tried to escape hurriedly and some of them even seeded.

    They couldn¡¯t catch as many people as they wanted to.

    They still managed to stop some. They captured some people right in the dens, some they had to chase a bit and some justmitted suicide without even thinking of escaping.

    None of these scenarios came as surprise to them and like that the first month in their conquestpletely passed.

    It could be considered a grand sess.

    By now, they suddenly stopped going to the city after city, because they knew the news must have reached the ears of the Grand Elders and they would be trying to summon Markan back to their headquarters.

    So, they waited in theirst location for them toe.

    Soon, the Enforcement team directly under themand of the Grand Elders came there and met with Markan. The leader of the team looked at Markan¡¯s changed face with a frown and whipped out his badge before saying.

    "Leader of the Enforcement Squad-III. I would like you to verify your identity as Markan."

    Markan stood in attention and replied back.

    "I would like to use my personal seal to identify myself."

    The enforcer nodded and Markan performed his personal seal once again. The Enforcer looked at his badge which showed Markan¡¯s name and then only his frown rxed a bit.

    He and the rest of the enforcement team bowed immediately.

    "Greetings to Lord Markan."

    Markan gestured them to stand and said.

    "I know you are confused about my face, but I don¡¯t have time to exin it to you guys. I would like to return to the Headquarters. I need to speak with the Grand Elders."

    "As you wish, Lord Markan. Wee back to your home."

    Markan just nodded and they all made their move. They went to the headquarters by that night and Markan didn¡¯t waste any time resting and idling.

    He directly made his way towards the chamber of the Grand Elders and the enforcers that escorted him already gave the information.

    But when he entered therge hall where the Grand elders were all seated, there is one person standing in front of them. A young man with a crooked smile is talking to them and when he entered the hall, he became silent and looked at Markan with a vicious light in his eyes.

    He really wanted to jump and kill Markan right there and then.

    He had an attire simr to that of Other ck Ghosts, but it is a bit different as it has golden borders at the hem and there is a golden line on the left side of his chest.

    The golden line is the indication of his status as the lord and the young man couldn¡¯t help himself but show it off to Markan.

    But when he saw the look of indifference and disregard in Markan¡¯s eyes who is walking with full confidence as always, made him want to rip that face-off. He couldn¡¯t even hide his killing intent.

    "Markan greets the Grand Elders."

    The Grand Elders just looked at him and Markan performed his seal once again, all the Elders who had a small badge on the table in front of them had their badges glowing and then only their frown rxed a bit.

 Chapter 1227: Impeachment

    The Grand elders looked at Markan and didn¡¯t know how to react. After all, Markan was supposed to be the current leader of the organization. He should be having the status and power that the other young man is so daringly unting and everything Markan has obtained has been obtained with truthful methods following all the rules and traditions of the organization.

    They thought he died and just gave the power to someone else. When they looked at Markan¡¯s face which ispletely unfamiliar with them, they felt a bit less burdened by this as they were notpletely at fault.

    Granted they should have investigated more and looked into the incident on why it happened all of a sudden and why Markan disappeared without a trace, they just gave the position to the next best candidate since they felt that digging into the old matters is not worth it anymore. There is no one to question it anyway.

    But now that the person in question himself appeared in front of him, they couldn¡¯t help but feel ashamed of their own actions.

    Markan didn¡¯t care whether they are ashamed or not, he just stood straight as he waited for them to ask the questions.

    "Markan, you disappeared a long time ago. We thought you were dead." One of the Grand Elders spoke to break the ice.

    "I was indeed attacked and I almost died, but I managed to escape with the help of my crew."

    "Your crew?" The one who asked is not any of the Grand Elders, it is the current leader of the ck Ghosts. There is a clear expression of shock on his face and no one in the room missed it. The Grand Elders clearly understood what that meant, but they didn¡¯t call him out on that.

    "Yes, my crew. They managed to fake their deaths and escaped, but they were unable to save me. They were recuperating all this while. Meanwhile, I almost died and when I finally recovered and woke up, I was in the middle of nowhere, with my face changed. Not just that, I found a seal on my spiritual core and a parasite in my blood. They suppressed my cultivation growth and the parasite even made me unable to use my six elemental energies.

    I was imprisoned by the Puppet Organization in some stupid case.

    I lost my identity, but luckily, I managed to find someone that could undo the seal and kill all the parasites.

    I got the elemental energies and also my suppression was lifted.

    I noticed that the ck Ghosts cooperating with the Puppet organization are actually fighting along with them against the person that helped me and that shouldn¡¯t have happened as it is against the very core of our rules.

    So, I changed my mind to return and started investigating the situation of our organization. The results indeed disappointed me.

    The ck Ghost members, particrly several previous generations¡¯ and the current generation¡¯s sessor candidates are running a parallel organization while utilizing our forces and are making money out of it.

    They are dabbling in assassinations, prostitution, gambling, and even trafficking of ves. All the trades that the core of the organization is opposed to.

    So, I busted several of those branches myself and I came here with evidence so that you would act on it."

    "Excuse me, before you do anything that is rted to the ck Ghost organization, we have to confirm what you have been doing all this while." The leader finally spoke and his words caused everyone to be confused.

    "What do you mean?" Markan asked coldly.

    "I mean, you just disappeared into thin air all this while and we don¡¯t really know what you had done. You are saying you were attacked, you are saying that you were imprisoned. Why should we believe you? Even your face is not the same, we can even doubt if you are the real Markan at all."

    Markan locked his eyes with him and didn¡¯t speak for a moment.

    Then he turned towards the grand elders and said.

    "I am not here to give any exnations. Whether you trust me or not, it is up to you. All you have to do is listen and decide. I will not try to prove my position. Whether you want to doubt me or not, I am Markan."

    With that, he took out a Truth Cursed scroll and gave it to the grand elders.

    "This is a scroll that I got from a friend of mine. I want you to call one of your most trusted subordinates and test the truth detection. You can also check the scroll yourself and see if there are any tricks."

    The Grand elder didn¡¯t doubt him and did as he was told. He called for a subordinate in the enforcer team and made him sign the contract.

    "Tell me truth. Any kind."

    "I am the leader of the Enforce squad."

    The enforced didn¡¯t feel anything when he said it.

    "Now, say that you are not the leader of the Enforcer Squad."

    Markan said from the side. Everyone looked confused, but the subordinate tried to do as he was asked for, but all of a sudden, he held his head in pain.

    "I... am... ARGh."

    He tried to speak, but he wasn¡¯t able to.

    "Stop trying."

    Markan said and finally, the enforcer felt relieved. Markan turned to the Grand elder and said.

    "This is the scroll used for only getting the truth. The person who signed wouldn¡¯t be able to tell alike until the scroll existed."

    After that, he took out another scroll and gave it to the grand elder to check, after making sure that it is the same scroll and there is nothing wrong with it, he decided to sign the scroll himself and started speaking.

    "I do not know who attacked me and I do not know what their motives are. But when I came to myself, my face was already altered and my cultivation suppressed with my elemental energies sealed.

    A person who had a use for me came to save me at that time and I asked that person to help with the seal and the parasite.

    That person saved me and brought me back here. Even these scrolls are his creation."

    He didn¡¯t even flinch as he spoke and then turned to the leader in askance.

    The leader didn¡¯t know what to say. He couldn¡¯t just refute that the scroll was rigged when the Grand Elders are the ones that confirmed it is not. He would incur their ire if he did that.

    But that is not over, markan continued.

    "As for the investigation of these parallel rackets I told you about. I captured the people with the help of my current crew and many of them are from the ck Ghost organization, most of them being the sessor prospects that got rejected in the current and previous generations.

    I used the scroll to make them speak the truth enforcing all the methods to make sure they didn¡¯tmit suicide.

    I have all the interrogation material and even brought the said people here with me. So, I would like the Grand elders to be the judges and resolve the situation."

    The grand elders looked solemn and one of them asked.

    "Is there anything else you are leaving out?"

    "From the investigation results, I have a reason to suspect that the current leader is behind this parallel racket, he is the one running these businesses that our organization ispletely against since the establishment.

    I am here to apply for impeachment with my status as the Lord of the ck Ghosts."

    The leader looked at Markan in horror. He is already terrified by the fact that Markan appeared out of thin air. But there is no way that he would have thought that Markan would be this daring.

    When he heard that two to threes have lost all of the rackets they are running secretly, he is already terrified, but he just thought that Markan is angry at the rackets, after all, he is so devoted to the ck Ghosts that it only rivals the brainwashed devotion of the subordinates.

    Because of the chants and suicide methods of the subordinates, he is confident that he wouldn¡¯t be linked to all of this.

    But what hit him in the face is the request for his impeachment.

    This is beyond ridiculous.

    He cannot contain the anger as well as horror in his heart. He couldn¡¯t even find words to react.

    "Markan, you know the price you need to pay for using the leader of the ck Ghosts. There are many lords who did this in the past and not all of them had good endings.

    We can understand that what happened to you is unfair and even the organization didn¡¯t do its part properly in searching for you. But you shouldn¡¯t take it out on the leader, it might backfire on you."

    "I am not doing it out of spite. I am doing this with my responsibility as the lord."

 Chapter 1228: Trial

    The whole room is silent for a moment.

    Impeachment is not a new concept to them. As the grand elder said, there are several attempts at impeachment before and they barely seeded and no matter what the result is, the aftermath would be ugly.

    The two participants will no longer be able to see eye to eye and there is a chance that one of them would end up dead a few days after the impeachment result was given. Sometimes, the murder could be linked to the other party, but most of the time, that doesn¡¯t happen.

    The grand elders discussed something for a moment and one of them stood up and said.

    "We would like to take some time to go through the evidence brought by the lord. If the evidence is convincing enough, we would be proceeding with the impeachment trial and if it is not, Lord Markan would lose his position as a Lord and will be demoted to an ordinary informant for the rest of his life without any chance of promotion."

    Markan and the Leader both walked out of the room and waited in the corridor. They are looking at each other as if they wanted to eat the other person alive.

    "How is life as some no-name cultivator in a low-level realm, Brother Markan? I thought you would have been used to it and wouldn¡¯t want toe back at all. After all, the life of a sole cultivator with a face nobody knows and no tensions of improving your cultivation. Isn¡¯t that a peaceful life?

    You should have just stayed there. But I guess, your desire for power is stronger than I thought."

    "If it was really a peaceful life like that, I wouldn¡¯t have been bothered toe back. Maybe, I would go back to such a life after I retired and fulfilled all my responsibilities. But right now, I have to take care of many things.

    I need to kill the bastard the attacked me, destroy the piece of shit that plotted against me, torture the fucker that helped them do it."

    The Leader grinned and said.

    "It seems like your dreams will not be fulfilled. Because none of those things are possible. The people involved are unreachable from your current level."

    "Yes, but I can always find some help from the people that can reach them. After all, you don¡¯t happen to think that you are the only one that has the ability to cut deals like with likes of Vardar don¡¯t you?"

    The Leader¡¯s face changed a bit as his smile vanished, but Markan didn¡¯t bother with him anymore as the grand elders called them in.

    "We have taken a brief look at the evidence that you have brought and we understand why you believe the current leader has a hand in it, so we are agreeing to the trial for impeachment. For both sides, we are giving exactly one week to collect all the evidence that was needed to prove your positions.

    After reviewing the evidence, Markan would get the chance to ce the lord in the stand of judgment to conduct the trial, if the evidence provided is sufficient.

    That is it. You can leave now. All the best for your trial."

    "Thank you, Grand Elders."

    Markan stood up and bowed. He walked out of the room without even giving a single nce to the leader.

    The leader kept his cool as he walked right behind him and went back to his residence. Everyone expected an outburst, or at least a show of anger from him, but that didn¡¯t happen until he reached his residence.

    Inside he started destroying everything.

    "I will kill him. I will kill him. I will definitely kill him with my own hands."

    He muttered to himself as he broke every piece of furniture in his house and even destroyed some walls.

    But he soon came to himself and called every one of his faction members.

    "Go to every realm and bust every racket of ours. Kill everyone that is working there. Do not leave a trace. I don¡¯t want any loose ends."

    "But sir, everyone that works in different rackets is all sessor candidates, they have their own factions supporting them and there are many of our faction members there too, we cannot kill all of them."

    "Yes, we can and we are doing it. If you don¡¯t want to do it, I will kill you first and then someone else might do it. Do you want that?"

    The subordinate shivered in fright and said.

    "No, sir."

    "That¡¯s what I thought. Now get the fuck out of here and destroy every racket we ever opened and kill all the subordinates. Use all our faction members to make a move and hire every extra man you can to destroy them.

    I want everything gone in one week and you should be back here."

    The subordinates immediately left. But what none of them noticed is that a small shadow also left the room along with them.

    Meanwhile, Markan also started gathering his faction members and along with Sam¡¯s team, he has the manpower to tackle the situation.

    "I want every one of you to capture every single man that is working in these rackets. With the situation we are currently in, that bastard wouldn¡¯t dare to use the Organization¡¯smunicationwork and would attack directly. He might want to destroy all the evidence and witnesses, so your job is to not only make them not do that, you also have to bring back the people that are working there."

    He paused and took out some discs.

    "When you are capturing them, always keep a close eye and for every five minutes, inject some energy into this disc and touch it on their backs.

    You should do that without fail, or the person willmit suicide, even if you ce the energy blocking shackles on them."

    "Yes, Sir."

    The subordinates nodded and took the discs.

    "And, my personal crew would being with you guys. Listen to theirmands and if they are doing something by themselves, let them do it. Do not, I mean do not ever hinder them or try to show your dominance over them."

    "Yes, sir."

    And with that, the subordinates left.

    For the next seven days, the realms that have the influence of the ck Ghosts even by a little bit are inplete chaos.

    Every racket that was opened by the ck Ghosts was attacked, either by the leader¡¯s faction or by the Markan¡¯s faction.

    Although they have apletely different goal, they did attack them in the same manner.

    Both factions are to the neck and neck as they finished one group after another and as the time passed the Leader of the ck Ghosts became anxious.

    He couldn¡¯t find a proper way to handle the situation after the first three days, because for every racket his faction is busting, Markan¡¯s faction is doing the same, but his faction is destroying evidence, while Markan¡¯s faction is collecting them.

    By now, he understood that he cannot do much about proving himself as innocent. He knew that the evidence is enough to get a very vicious punishment from the grand elders. But the only silver lining he had is that he could reduce some of that punishment because he managed to destroy some of the rackets.

    Soon, one week passed, and on the day of the trial, in arge assembly ground of the ck Ghost organization, many people gathered as they wanted to take a look at the trial.

    In front of the audience, Markan sat on the left while the leader sat on the right along with his trusted subordinates.

    There is a stage in front of them on which all the grand elders took seats.

    There is a stand-in middle facing the grand elders.

    One grand elder stood up after everyone gathered and announced.

    "The trial of Impeachment shallmence now.

    Lord Markan, the intiff of the case will now proceed to provide his evidence."

    Markan stood up and gave the attendant a spatial ring with all the required evidence.

    The grand elders looked through the recording crystals, some of them are the recording crystals that are previously shown.

    But there is one that is different. When the grand elders opened it, they saw the scene of the leader ordering his faction members to kill all the members who are involved in the rackets.

    All these factions who had their members killed, already understood what happened and they are ready to withdraw their support from the current leader.

    But the leader had only one thing in mind now and that is to get rid of the current trial, he would deal with whatever thatester, but in the middle, he already lost the hope of winning the trial and he is awaiting whates next.

    In the past few days, he tried to contact the one party that could help him out of the situation, but he wasn¡¯t able to do that.

    Now he doesn¡¯t care anymore. He doesn¡¯t care about the trial, Markan, or the factions that are itching to deal with him. He doesn¡¯t care about anything.

 Chapter 1229: Confession

    After reviewing the evidence, the Leader was asked to step into the Judgment stand.

    This is simr to a lie detector, or even somewhat simr to the scroll that Sam made. They would feel the extreme pain in the soul if they lie and it is done by a bunch of cursed ghosts attached to the stand.

    The leader stood on the stand indifferently.

    Even before the grand elders could speak, he started talking.

    "I would confess everything. There is no point in this trial anymore."

    The grand elders looked at him intently but still gave him a green light.

    "I am the one who started this parallel organization that runs all these rackets, I am the one responsible for enticing the sessor candidates of my generation and the previous generation who are the only ones that have a free will that could desire things other than the devotion to the ck Ghosts.

    I enticed them and brought them to join me to create this parallel organization.

    But apart from the desire for personal benefits and the growth of the organization in other areas, I don¡¯t have any other malicious intentions. I believe that we are limiting ourselves with our current style of operation.

    I wanted to get us out of this shell.

    I know that if I do not be the leader of the organization I wouldn¡¯t be able to achieve what I wanted to achieve, but Markan is a better candidate like he always was and I was not able to achieve what I wanted.

    I never really thought of killing him until then. I just wanted to achieve the difference I wanted in another way.

    But with Markan¡¯s mentality, that would be impossible and when I am conflicted with what I need to do, someone contacted me.

    He wanted to experiment and test something on someone and Markan is perfect for that test, so I made both of them meet, Markan was injected with a special parasite that devours his elemental energy, then he was attacked, without the elemental energy, he is not at his full strength, with a constant twenty-five attempts on him, he was finally captured alive and he was nted with the seal.

    His face was changed by the same person, he changed it and threw Markan in a different realm. He observed his actions for a few days and after achieving his desired results, he went away.

    I took some things from him in exchange for this help and used them to create this parallel organization.

    That is the whole story."

    The leader spoke without a hint of frustration or any other emotion for that matter. He is direct and precise. He didn¡¯t bother with any nonsense. He knew he is fucked and he knew it the moment Markan safely returned to the headquarters.

    Markan is someone he cannot handle himself and this is known to all the sessor candidates who participated in this.

    There is a reason theymitted suicide when Markan appeared in front of them. They knew the fate worse than death would be awaiting them if they were alive and got captured by Markan, his love for ck Ghosts is too much.

    So, they decided tomit suicide.

    If not for the fact that it would be impossible to kill himself in the headquarters after the impeachment trial was epted, he would have done the same.

    Even the week he used to destroy the rackets, it was just a desperate attempt to reduce the amount of disgust the grand elders would have of him so that he could get a lenient sentence.

    But now that the evidence was clearly shown in front of everyone, he decided toe clean.

    There is no point in struggling.

    "Who is the person that approached you?"

    One of the Grand Elders asked and this made the leader smile.

    "Do you really want to know? I don¡¯t think you would be able to do anything to him, even if I tell you. Besides, Markan already knows."

    "I am asking you a question and all you have to do is answer me."

    "The Divine Healer Vardar."

    His words made the Grand Elders lose all the color in their faces. Vardar is someone they could never dream of touching. Even making a contact with him will take all of their connections and favors they have collected over the years.

    If not for the Judgement stand, they would have chosen to believe that the leader is lying. But they cannot deny it now.

    The leader looked at Markan and said.

    "I believed that I would be able to achieve my goals after you were gone, but only then did I realize that Vardar wanted to control the ck Ghosts through me. The men you have seen with duplicate memories and faces are all sent here by him.

    He managed to create those faces as well as the memories for them. They are not the ck Ghost members. I have the people who were injected into the organization right here."

    He said as he pointed at his head. He had a smile on his face as suddenly took a knife and stabbed himself in the heart.

    Everyone ispletely caught off guard. They didn¡¯t expect that this guy would just kill himself as soon as he revealed the truth.

    He slipped down the stand as he fell on the floor. Markan ran along with some other guards and attendants.

    "It is right here." The leader said as he once again pointed at his own head and lost his life.

    Markan thought for a moment and he called for Night Ghost who is currently disguised as a member of his crew.

    He performed Memory extraction and transferred the information to Markan.

    Markan was surprised when he learned of the details.

    Vardar¡¯s goal from the start is to find the best information organization, but Markan is not just some side effect or coteral damage, he is also a target. But there is no reason or cause exined in those memories.

    But there are some details exined.

    One of them is that Vardar has been trying topletely control all the organizations that are based on the information trade on all levels. In these surrounding twenty realms, ck Ghosts are the best. They regte all the information.

    The same thing happened to many other organizations like them.

    But Vardar didn¡¯t use the same method as Markan, eliminating their cultivation and such.

    He used a simple method to kill them with the help of his subordinates and moved on with controlling the organizations.

    But there are no reasons or exnations regarding why they are being controlled and what their motive is.

    There is also something that made him understand why the leader killed himself. It is because there is a destruction mechanism simr to the suicide chant of the duplicates and other subordinates. The subordinates that are directly working with Vardar could have killed him if he was alive and the memory extraction wouldn¡¯t have been possible as the soul would be destroyed.

    Markan also noticed the identities of the duplicates and gave all the information to the Grand Elders.

    The very next day, the funeral happened normally. Even though many people resented the leader for what he had done, they figured that there is no need to hold the resentment towards the dead.

    The next day, Markan took over the organization and a mass execution was made as he killed every single duplicate.

    After that, he went to the personal room of the Leader where he saw the ck Ghost disc hung on the wall behind his seat.

    Suddenly, Sam appeared in the room. He came from the lightning divine dimension and looked at the ck Ghost disc.

    He looked around the office and said.

    "You have a nice ce here."

    "Yeah, for a while."

    "While?"

    "Yeah, a few decades maybe. I think I will be reced in thirty to forty years."

    "That is a long time. Anyway, let us not waste any more time. Luckily this whole thing was concluded faster than I thought. That guy who is your enemy is not as bad as I thought. He is at least honest and didn¡¯t upy some hypocritical pedestal. He is honest to himself and died like that.

    If he didn¡¯t kill himself, he might have been killed by that destruction mechanism that would have been activated.

    This is the least he could do after all the shit he has put you and the organization through."

    "I think so, too. At least, he didn¡¯t waste your time."

    Markan said and he took out the disc from the wall and gave it to Sam.

    Sam used the observation ability and created a hologram of it before giving the disc back.

    "I will give you the duplicate by tomorrow, we can exchange. If you want anything else. Tell me now. I will prepare and leave as soon as it was exchanged."

    "Give me another day. Since you are now my crew in name, I need to make up something to let the team go away."

    "That would be great. I am really d that we didn¡¯t have to put much effort this time. Because the next journey is going to be a great ride and interesting one at that."

 Chapter 1230: Surprise Attack

    The next day, Sam spent all his time inside the second floor of the divine dimension. He recreated the ck Ghost disc. But the one he made is not just meant to look like the original. Rather it has a lot of additional things that Sam added.

    Completely new things, that could help but with attacking, defending, counter-attacking, and even escaping features that might help Markan and the ck Ghosts in the future.

    At least now, the ck Ghost disc is not just a d¨¦cor item.

    After he gave that to Markan and exined everything, Markan also gave them the details of their departure. Since most of the team is acting as his crew, he made up some bullshit mission and is going to deploy them in that name while he picked a new crew from his faction.

    Along with that, Sam also selected the ck Ghosts in the list and Markan stayed within the temple and ordered to have some privacy so that he could hear the god say his bullshit and shut down. No one would know anything about it and nor do they need to know about it.

    Everything went smoothly.

    The night before departure, they sat down together, to have one final drink since they wouldn¡¯t be able to see each other for a long time, as a parting gift, Markan looked through all the records and archives of the ck Ghosts and retrieved all the information rted to the Five Great sects to him.

    Sam was shocked to say the least when he looked through the information. Let us just say there is a lot of it and he was even more surprised by therge spectrum the information covers. They have the information regarding the present sexual affairs of the young masters to the sexual orientation of the old men who used to rule the sects three generations before.

    Every detail that could help or to be known is there. The details about the internal feuds that are not normally known to outsiders, the details about the affairs between the wife of one elder and another elder, the secrets regarding the fetishes of a grand elder, most of the information is extremely personal.

    But that is not all there is to it, there is also information regarding the personnel of the Five great sects.

    They have the information on the power structure, the realms that are under the control of the Five great sects, the people assigned to be the administrators and the rulers of various ces in these realms, the resource points, the spies that are nted by a rival organization, the spies nted by the ck Ghosts, the spies nted by a superior organization, the activities that are conducted by the sect which are known to the public, like the ve trade and the fighting arenas which actually turned out to be the inspiration for the previous leader to open these rackets.

    Sam got a lot of information.

    This saves them weeks of time if not months. Now they don¡¯t have to worry about sending shadow mice and surveince puppets to infiltrate every single ce and gather information on every usible target that they could take advantage of.

    Paras looked at the information eagerly and they understood why he is doing that. The Five Great sects are linked to the massacre of his home a few decades and from the looks of it, there is bound to be some kind of information about this incident in this archive.

    But it would take some time to search through all of it, so Sam decided to make a copy with the help of the copier machine he created. He created copies of every documented information even copied the video information.

    In the process, he found the information regard Paras¡¯ incident which he read and handed over to him.

    There is not much detailed information, but there is enough to understand what has happened and who is involved.

    A few decades ago, the Five Great sects conducted the tournament for the best of the best cultivators within the Astral ne Pre-transcendent stage.

    Many organizations sent their best candidates to participate in the tournament. The organizations that Paras interrogated before are also part of that bunch.

    After selecting the candidates of the four sub-stages in Astral ne Pre-transcendence, they made teams so that the members of the five great sects and the selected candidates could group together on a mission.

    But it turned out the Five Great sects are not the only ones who did this. There are some other organizations that have names that they don¡¯t even know about, are also involved and they brought the candidates they selected themselves to the five great sects. There are three other organizations that arrived and they brought threerge groups.

    For every group, there is a leader selected and that leader even though was a familiar face, behaved oddly in that period.

    They were led to their assigneds with the leaders and for some reason, a massacre was triggered in a fews.

    Nobody knows the exact reason why, but before it triggered, one of the ck Ghost members who is disguised as a normal team member doesn¡¯t know what exactly happened, but he mentioned that he saw some bigshot members that acted as leaders of the subgroups within this onerge group, are pleading and begging the leader of the group as if he was their ancestor or even a god to control himself.

    When he read through the information, Sam got a fair gist of the situation and even Paras understood that it is not just simply the doing of the Five great sects, but the people involved in his belonged to the Five great sects and the subordinates they brought from different realms with these tournaments.

    Paras became angry at this, but he could only suppress and control his emotions.

    Meanwhile, Sam is analyzing the situation. His focus is one particr section, in which it was mentioned that all the bigshots are begging the group leader as if he was their ancestor.

    But Sam knew that there could be another case which he cannot confirm now.

    After getting all the information copied, Sam and his team made their move.

    They used the dimensional drifter as they arrived near the headquarters of the Five Great sects.

    The headquarters is actually a whole city in itself and there are five sub-sects in five different areas of the city.

    Arge city enveloped this small city from all sides.

    Therge city outside is called the Outer city and the smaller one is obviously called the Inner city.

    Sam¡¯s identity shouldn¡¯t be known for many people here. His information was in hands of the Golem sect members, but they are a higher level power than the Five Great sects.

    ording to the ck Ghosts, except for the Outer Deacon, the rest of the Five Great sects are not involved in the incident.

    So, it is safe to say that he is not exactly that popr in this area and the most that could happen is the Outer Deacon might recognize him and Sam actually wants him to do that.

    He moved along with Arkiv while the rest of the team separated into groups of two as they moved to different areas.

    Their main focus at the moment was the structure of the city, the city walls, theyout, the city guard posts, and such.

    After a day of scouting, Sam and the team came out at different times and wanted to regroup at a previously decided spot.

    Arkiv and Sam are leisurely walking as they took in the pleasantness of the forest.

    But all of a sudden, they sensed something and both of them jumped to the side.

    Arge wind de swept past their previous location as it left arge gash on the earth.

    Sam looked around with a frown, but he couldn¡¯t find anyone in the direction the attack came even with his long-range vision. Even Arkiv failed with his visual prowess. He took out his bow and got ready.

    At this moment, Sam sensed something and he once again leaped to the side, the tree he was hiding behind was destroyed by another wind de and this Arkiv blindly shot in the direction the wind de came.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit frustrated as the trees are blocking most of the vision and he couldn¡¯t get a clear view around.

    He looked at Arkiv and both of them started moving, they didn¡¯t stay at a single spot for more than half a second as they decided to move deeper and get a high ground.

    But the wind des kept oning from different directions. It is almost like there are a bunch of people who could see them from the top surrounding them through the sky.

    They finally spotted a small hill from where they could get the required high ground, but all of a sudden, arge meteor came from above and crashed into their path making them only frown deeper.

 Chapter 1231: Reunion

    Sam felt frustrated when the attack happened and he decided to retaliate directly. From the attacks, he could guess that the opponent is not even that powerful.

    Neither the wind de nor the meteorite might have caused him any critical damage, he would have been injured at most. But this passive stance is not something he could endure.

    He activated wind elemental fusion and wings appeared on his back spun around, the wind riled up around him and destroyed every tree that is around him. Arkiv finally got the view he needed, while Sam his way upwards.

    As he appeared in the air, a wind de from the front and arge fireball from the rear came at him at the same time.

    Sam dodged making the two attacks collide.

    He then got a clear look at the two attackers and he was shocked.

    He immediately folded his wings back in as he took Harbinger out and stood it. He looked at the two opponents who are floating just like him and made his move. He took a hard round in the air creating arge wind de that went directly at the opponent using the wind elemental energy and used the momentum to move towards the person who is using the fire element.

    Arge meteorite was shot at him by the opponent.

    Sam moved along with the harbinger as he made a somersault in the air making arge sharp de ray cut the meteorite in the half before moving forward with a bunch of his own.

    The metallic fist collided with a solid fire fist making the opponent move backward.

    But the opponent is smart enough to move in that direction by himself to not lose bnce as well as control and even managed to reduce the damage. But Sam is faster as he made his move and his hand which is under partial metal fusion underwent another change as a metal spike appeared on his fist with golden mes surrounding it.

    The fists collided once and this time, at thest moment, Sam changed the direction of the impact a bit making the other party¡¯s attempt to move in the direction of the recoil to reduce the damage a waste and that served only to make him lose the bnce faster.

    Meanwhile, the wind elemental opponent in the rear didn¡¯t wait and came forward with his own attack.

    Sam took a hard turn and a wind de appeared in between both of them and Sam used this chance to throw arge golden fireball to attack the opponent while reducing the altitude as he moved towards the other opponent who is trying to regain the bnce.

    The battle continued.

    Arkiv looked at the three people in the sky and couldn¡¯t help but smile as they kicked and punched each other while throwing eye-catching attacks at each other.

    "Oy, are you guys going to kill yourselves?"

    He couldn¡¯t help but yell and only then did the three of them stop fighting.

    Sam had a wide grin on his face as he looked at two of his friends hovering on the very boards he made himself.

    Watt and Philip are standing on either side. All three of themnded and they hugged each other.

    "I didn¡¯t expect you guys here."

    Sam said as he couldn¡¯t control his excitement.

    "It is called a surprise for a reason, dude." Philip said as he looked at Sam¡¯s harbinger. Sam is the one who made the boards for all of them and they knew very well how Harbinger was designed, he could easily recognize the changes on the harbinger.

    "Don¡¯t look at it like that. I will modify yours too. I got some new gains in research all this while and by the way..."

    Sam paused and the spirit of the harbinger appeared out of nowhere.

    While Watt and Philip are surprised, Sam didn¡¯t stop and showed off the spirit of the Feathered coat.

    "Damn, you really did gain a lot. Spirits for both of them? I didn¡¯t expect that. It seems like I would need a lot more time to get a spirit for my coat." Philip said as he caressed Sam¡¯s coat.

    Arkiv looked at all three of them as they showed off what they have on them eagerly.

    He is also surprised by the cultivation levels of the two. They reached the Initial stage of transcendence of the Astral ne. It is surprising because even he, as a yer is barely at the peak of Pre-transcendence, granted that he is extremely close to the breakthrough and he might even break through before the trip is over, this is still something that is hard to digest.

    After all, Sam¡¯s friends don¡¯t have the same resources as Sam and they are not the most talented of the deste, unlike the yers who are literally the most talented of the deste as they are picked by the gods.

    But it seems like all of this is bullshit in front of these guys.

    "So, how did you guys know I am going to be here?" Sam asked and meanwhile, the rest of the team are making their way there.

    Arkiv decided to exin the situation to them so that they wouldn¡¯t attack while Sam chatted with his friends.

    "You will know a bitter. Come on let¡¯s go first. We arranged a ce already."

    With that Sam and his team followed his friends to a mountain nearby where they prepared a cave residence.

    But as soon as Sam entered the cave, Philip and Watt jumped out and Sam sensed a sword raying at him.

    Instead of bing alert, he became excited instead and took out the reaper as he blocked the ray head-on.

    At this moment, Jack jumped out of nowhere as he used the ck Meteorite sword to directly attack Sam.

    The two swords shed as they stayed in close contact trying to push on each other.

    "I was kind of expecting you." Sam said with a smile.

    "Me too," Jack replied and changed the direction of the sword to attack Sam, but Sam dodged and blocked it again before moving forward.

    The metal against metal sound reverberated in the cave as both of them fought crazily.

    "You really improved a lot." Sam said as he blocked Jack¡¯s attacks and both of them stopped.

    Jack smiled and shook his head before saying.

    "Apparently not enough."

    They both hugged and Sam noticed the left of Jack.

    "What¡¯s with the scar? Who gave it to you?"

    "It is my teacher, you will meet him soon anyway. Don¡¯t worry too much."

    And with that, the four men once again reunited all together after so many years.

    "So, how do you guys know that I aming here."

    At this moment, Philip dramatically stood up and said.

    "Meet, the direct disciple of the Guardian of the Five Great sects. Jack."

    Jack just pushed him away and said.

    "I knew about the Night Demon incident. I was there actually. I was apanying some of the disciples, including the young master of the Night Demon family at that time. I warned the rest of the disciples not to interfere in the incident and piss them off, but they did anyway.

    Soon, they heeded my advice after you spewed mayhem on the estate.

    The outer deacon tried to use the sect to get me to spill the name, but I didn¡¯t budge. Later I saw Dayus meeting the Outer Deacon.

    Dayus tried to use the Outer Deacon and told him that he will be going after the Five Great sects as well, but he didn¡¯t care about that much. In his opinion, you would die as soon as you came here. So, he wanted to wait, but Dayus tried to instigate him and they managed to contact the Golem Sect who is actively searching for him because of the case of the stone temple and the Tundra Sect.

    I understood that you would being here so I started searching for these two idiots.

    Watt was easy to find, but this guy Philip made me go around a single realm three times before I was able to make a contact with him."

    Philip grinned proudly as if he did something great.

    Sam took in the information and said.

    "This might be awkward then. I want the heirloom of the Five Great sects and one of my teammates has to take revenge. I don¡¯t think I would be going in a peaceful route with this."

    Sam said as he looked at Jack.

    Jack smiled and said.

    "Don¡¯t worry, you don¡¯t have to. My teacher might be the Guardian of the Five Great sects, even though he took a vow, there are a few things that allow him to break this vow. I am already on the way with my ns.

    Just wait for a few days and you are free to do whatever you want to do."

    "Seems like you have prepared enough."

    "Of course, for the next few days, let¡¯s rx. We have a lot of catching up to do anyway."

 Chapter 1232: Demon Soul Swordsman

    After chatting for a bit, Jack felt his sword slightly vibrating and he said to Sam.

    "There is someone that wants to meet you."

    Sam was a bit confused, but as soon as Jack held his sword and injected his spiritual energy into it, the spirit manifested out of it.

    When Sam looked at the spirit, he couldn¡¯t help but feel surprised. Because the features of the spirit are extremely familiar to him. The spirit had a mix of ck and white colors and it is humanoid. But that is the least of his surprises. The ce where the face is supposed to be, there is nothing.

    It is covered with this ck and white smog, but for some reason, it didn¡¯t look out of ce for a human figure to not have the face.

    Sam couldn¡¯t understand how such a spirit manifested.

    Jack passed on the sword to him and Sam held it tightly, the sword vibrated and when he injected his own spiritual energy into it, two sharp eyes finally appeared on that face. But except for the eyes, the rest of the face didn¡¯t appear.

    Sam moved the sword a bit and it didn¡¯t feel out of ce at all.

    "What is happening?"

    Sam asked in confusion. But everyone else feels that some kind of limit has been lifted off of the sword.

    "I don¡¯t know what is happening either. But from the day the spirit that has manifested is in infancy, it has been sending me the message to want to meet you. I asked my teacher and he said it happens sometimes when the creator and the user of the weapon are not the same.

    It is more like a blessing from the creator so that the weapon could really connect with the user."

    Sam looked at him a bit weirdly, he didn¡¯t expect that there is something like that rted to the weapon spirits.

    This almost feels like giving off a child to marriage.

    He gave the sword back to Jack and asked.

    "Where is your teacher?"

    "He will be here by night. Until then, can you take out some wine? I haven¡¯t had a decent wine in a very long time."

    And then they started drinking.

    By night while the friends are catching up, the team just stayed vignt around the surroundings. Even though Sam trusted his friends so much, it is not like they can just rx in an unfamiliar environment.

    There was no even whatsoever though. But all of a sudden, Night Ghost became cautious.

    "Did you sense that?"

    He asked the rest of the teammates, but they didn¡¯t sense anything which made them even more cautious. If only Night ghost can sense it, then the opponent must be really powerful.

    Night Ghost couldn¡¯t get rid of this unease no matter how many times he confirmed that no one is there, so he let out all his ghosts and kept the Cursed Ghost near him to make sure that he would be able to attack as soon as he could see someone.

    "Wow, that is quite some soul power. I am really impressed."

    All of a sudden a voice was heard behind Night Ghost. The teammates immediately turned to that spot to look at a middle-aged man who is standing there with a sword at his waist.

    He looked at Night Ghost leisurely.

    Night Ghost gulped nervously, he gritted his teeth and was about to make a move, but he felt a sharp pain in his head which made him stop his actions and the middle-aged man spoke.

    "Hold your horses, young man. I am not the enemy here. Where is that brat, Jack? Didn¡¯t he tell you that I aming?"

    He spoke and started walking towards the cave residence. The teammates were hit with a realization, but they didn¡¯t feel relieved.

    If even the Night Ghost cannot hold a candle to this guy, then the person they are dealing with is extremely dangerous, so there is no way they could stay calm.

    Meanwhile, inside the residence, Sam and the trio are still eating and drinking. Sam is enjoying the cooking like never before when the middle-aged man entered the room.

    "Damn, brat. You are enjoying such good food and wine, while this old man is out there working his ass off for your request?"

    He yelled loudly which made the chatter stop. Sam suddenly felt something invading his soul and his mental energy gathered to defend it instinctually. He had a frown on his face and he closed his eyes involuntarily.

    "Not too bad. No wonder these brats are praising you."

    The Middle-aged man just took a seat without any hesitation and just started eating the meat he found on the nearest te.

    Jack just smiled wryly and introduced.

    "Sam, this is my teacher. He is called the Demon Soul Swordsman. As for his real name, I don¡¯t really know. Maybe it is because it is too disgusting that he doesn¡¯t want to share it. But he is mostly called the Demon-soul.

    Old Man, this is my friend Sam, I talked to you about."

    Sam bowed slightly and said.

    "It is nice to meet you."

    Demon soul looked at Sam as he sized him up and said.

    "You have so many elements in your body, did you ever get to use them all together?"

    "Not at the moment, no. Most of the enemies died with just one or two."

    "That is a shame. To have all those tools and not be able to use them. I would feel too itchy."

    Sam shrugged as he sized up the man.

    He has a tanned skin tone, ck hair, and a lean but strong body.

    His eyes are sharp. It¡¯s like they are spewing swords out with every nce.

    "I heard you got the inheritance of Murali."

    Sam was stunned and looked at Jack who just shrugged.

    "Don¡¯t look at him. I know Murali and I know the ce you came from. The Deste. Why do you think I took your friend as a disciple? It is because he is the same ce as that bastard and acts almost like him. Relentless. He doesn¡¯t know when to stop."

    "Do you know where Murali is?"

    "He is dead. Maybe you might find some ruins he left behind with some of his soul fragments staying there. But the real guy is already dead."

    "Dead?"

    "Yes, why do you think he left all those inheritances back on your home? That is right before he was about to die. He was injured too much and I am the one that helped his soul divide into some fragments and morphed them into spirits so that they could reside in his inheritances and some other ruins.

    It has been many years since that happened."

    Sam felt sad for a moment. Murali is not someone close to them. They didn¡¯t meet him in person, but that guy left a lot of resources in the deste, and in fact, he helped Sam a lot with the shadow sword. He really wanted to meet the guy if he was alive. But now those hopes are gone.

    Sam thought of something and took out the shadow sword.

    When Demon Soul looked at him, he was surprised and said.

    "Oh, you still have that shadow sword?"

    "Why? Didn¡¯t your student tell you about that?"

    "He did, that is why I assumed that you would have dropped that off somewhere. That is one hell of a sword."

    He said as he caressed the shadow sword which vibrated a bit, the sword on the Demon Soul¡¯s waits also started vibrating a bit.

    He caressed that one too and spoke.

    "Don¡¯t worry, I am just admiring him. Don¡¯t get jealous."

    He gave the sword back to Sam and said.

    "Don¡¯t lose it. If you managed to keep your sanity and the sword at the same time for this long, then you guys are meant to be."

    "What is the story behind this sword?"

    "It is a legendary sword back in the day. But most people don¡¯t know about it because the person who wielded it didn¡¯t leave anyone that could have known this sword alive.

    This sword for some reason has too much power in its spirit that almost all the people who wielded it died. In fact, this is not the only sword in that category. My sword, the Soul sword is also that kind.

    Only a select few can control them. In fact, Murali is the one that named this sword Shadow sword. Before that, it was just called the Dark Bewitching sword while mine was called the soul bewitching sword.

    Theirplete stories are lost in legends centuries ago.

    Murali, who felt pity for a sword to bebeled as such just because of its prowess and the ipetence of its wielders suppressed his cultivation and went back to the deste to roam around and find some suitable person.

    Apparently, in his opinion, your is and of miracles, but he didn¡¯t manage to find any and only managed to attract some stupid attention from the local powers which he beat ck and blue. Later he left it in his inheritance and finally ended up in your hands.

 Chapter 1233: Full Story

    That night, Demon Soul didn¡¯t disturb them much. He just said those few stories and went to a corner. But the main reason is that Sam gave a pint of Heavenly wine. This made the guy silent for a while and he sat down with the trio as they chatted the night away.

    They talked about Watt¡¯s new family life which he didn¡¯t experience much, as he left home only after a year of being there. They talked about what Philip and Jack did and any of the possible romances they might have ignited over time and it seems like there are indeed some mes they had in the journey, but none of themsted long.

    Sam talked about his students and even showed them pictures and videos on how they are performing.

    There are many things they talked about. They have separated for many years after all.

    The next morning though, they are back to normal.

    They finally had time to deal with the serious stuff, that would decide their further actions against the Five Great sects and the Demon-Soul is also part of this conversation.

    "So, Jack said that you are going to break the vow or some contract you have with the Five Great sects and you are hatching a n to do that. May I know what you are nning exactly?"

    "The guardian position of the Five Great sects was solely created for me, because I saved their sorry asses a few years ago. The Five Sect Masters at that time, are full of gratitude and made a contract with the sects.

    In every new resource that the sects obtain, I will be getting the first pick. All this while, I didn¡¯t bother with it. I have a ce to stay and the atmosphere is good, so I didn¡¯t care much. I really didn¡¯t care about the measly resources they would bring me.

    But now that my dearest disciple asked, I asked for a huge chunk and asked them to honor the contract. I asked for my share in every resource they took over without offering me anything, so now they have no other option than to break the contract.

    Now that the five great sects are also in their most peaceful times, they are not going to hesitate to break the contract.

    As long as they break it, I am out of the picture and you can just do whatever the fuck you want."

    "Thank you."

    Sam just replied with those two words and went out to meet his teammates.

    He took out a list of people and passed it to Paras.

    "From the information, we have from the ck Ghosts, these are the direct participants from the Five Great sects, go on and deal with them as you like. Take Vidyut and Tamas with you.

    If you go ording to the list, you would be able to deal with a few of them that you can definitely handle and get the required information. By then, the situation with Jack¡¯s teacher will be cleared and he wouldn¡¯t interfere, so we can join in."

    Paras held the scroll tightly and took a deep breath before bowing to Sam.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop his actions and just let him do it. After bowing for a minute straight, he didn¡¯t even say a word and went away with Vidyut and Tamas.

    Sam came back in and sat down with Demon Soul.

    "I want some more information about the Five great sects."

    "What kind?"

    "I want the information regarding the incident a few decades ago. The incident that involved killing the people of an entire without leaving a single lifeform intact."

    Demon Soul who is about to take a bite from the meat stopped in his tracks as he looked at Sam.

    "Seems like you do know something about it. I want to know exactly what happened." Sam said after he got a look at his expression.

    "How do you know of this incident? This should have been buried with time."

    "Apparently, the time didn¡¯t seed. And fate didn¡¯t allow it. The subordinate I just sent away. Paras is thest survivor of the. We need to know exactly what happened. I know that he might lose his control over his emotions and might do something stupid, that is why I sent him away."

    "I don¡¯t know the exact details. But what I do know is that not just the was massacred. I don¡¯t know how your friend survived, but the aim of that time is to kill every creature on the, not just cultivators."

    "Why?" Sam asked in horror. Even though he is a cold-blooded killer himself and he had a decorated record to support that im, he felt that massacring a whole is still something beyond. At least he didn¡¯t do something like that yet.

    "I don¡¯t know all the details, but the goal of the expedition is to spread the faith of the gods the Five Great sects worship.

    The Five Greats unified some of therge organizations simr to their level far away from this ce and took the teams to strays in different realms.

    That is not the only one they visited, in fact, they visited a lot ofs. Around three dozen of them.

    The choice of thes is also quite unique. They selected the with the most amount of natural disasters and most of them are caused by the beasts and some other external races that worship other gods.

    They yed the role of saviors and created habitable living environments for somes and built temples for their gods.

    I even got curious and participated in a few expeditions, but there was no challenge there, so I got bored.

    But the next thing I hear is that fours have been massacred by all of them and not even a single organism on the, including the insects, beasts, trees, nothing was left. The life force of the was sucked away.

    Maybe your friend only stayed there until he witnessed the massacre of the cultivators, but a lot more happened after that.

    They killed millions of people and they even contracted some undead creatures, like Ghouls, Wights, and Vampires from the Undead realm to feast on theses.

    They made sure that not a single life form everes out of it."

    Sam took a breath of cold air.

    "But I have seen the memories of some of the people that participated in the incident, why didn¡¯t I see the rest of this? All I saw is that they are killing all the people randomly."

    "Of course, the subordinates are not there for the whole thing. After that massacre was done, some elders went there to do the rest."

    Sam stayed silent for a moment as he tried to put the pieces together. Seeing this Demon Soul continued.

    "I don¡¯t know exactly why they decided to do this, all of a sudden. I don¡¯t know what prompted to make them to promote this fate and stuff.

    But after the incident was over, there was a strict restriction on talking about it.

    Sam nodded as he stayed silent.

    He knew something that the old man doesn¡¯t know.

    Within the memories he saw previously, he noticed some things that gave him the necessary information.

    It all started with the gods themselves.

    When the leaders of the expedition are giving the orders, some of the subordinates also noticed something and follow everything without resistance and that is the presence of their gods.

    From what Sam could guess, the gods have possessed the leaders and led the expedition themselves. If he has to specte, even more, he would think that this might be another one of the games these gods are ying because they were bored.

    They must have made a contest on who can build more faith in a certain time and something must have gone extremely wrong in thoses which prompted them to this massacre.

    But the big question is what went wrong there?

    He cannot know the answer though. The only way he could get is to get the information from the heads of the five sects.

    Only they would have enough information regarding this situation.

    He then went to a corner along with his friends as he started nning.

    He and his friends are going to deal with the young masters of the sects first.

    In two to three days, Demon Soul would be gone and until then, they shouldn¡¯t show their hand until then. If they realize the danger they are going to experience, they wouldn¡¯t let Demon Soul go. He was the ultimate trump card that the world doesn¡¯t know.

    But since they are sofortable all these years without any trouble, they are ready to let him go. They cannot disturb this.

    "You guys need to create a long scenario and attract the young masters. They should want to beat the crap out of your guys, but they shouldn¡¯t be able to do it.

    And since Jack¡¯s teacher is going to leave, the young masters who had some hard time dealing with this guy wouldn¡¯t hesitate. So, take advantage of that."

 Chapter 1234: Invitation

    Three days passed.

    Sam still stayed inside the cave residence. He already deployed the surveince like he always did and he went through all the information he got from the ck Ghosts.

    Paras, Vidyut and Tamas didn¡¯te back yet and Sam didn¡¯t want them toe back yet anyway. The n is to join themter when the contract between Demon-Soul and the Sects was broken off.

    In these three days, Sam got a clear understanding of the Five Great sects.

    As the name implied, they have five branches, each being its individual sects. Even though they are one big joint organization, most of the time they operate individually.

    Each sect is named after the five elements and it was said that the founders of the five sects are users of five different elements.

    The Fire Sect, Water Sect, Metal Sect, Wood Sect and the Earth Sect.

    At the time of the foundation, they only took in the people with those respective elements in which limited their entry even though they have so many people.

    But as the sects were passed from generation to generation and they expanded a lot, they diversified. They kept the names as it is, but they started taking other elemental users in and soon only a few rules from the original foundational members remained.

    Every sect could only select the person who has the same element as the sect¡¯s name as the leader.

    They cannot appoint another elemental user to be the leader of the sect. The five sects are not to be separated and they should stay as one organization no matter how much they expand. And no matter how big one branch got, they should not try to swallow another branch and no other branch should eye for what one branch might obtain or acquire through their efforts.

    When one branch gets into trouble for something, all the other branches should help them unconditionally, whether it is through providing manpower or finances.

    There are some more rules which Sam didn¡¯t care much about.

    But there is one interesting thing. Within the inner city there is one ce where all the five branches members gather.

    They have themon library, somemon administrative and educational departments established there. For example, there is a formation department which is responsible for teaching formations for the young disciples and people from all five branches can learn from that.

    There is a Mission hall, from where the branches post the missions that could be done by other branch disciples too.

    It also has themon arena where themon tournaments for all the branches are conducted and there is this Grand Hall where all the meetings between branch leaders happen.

    Sam is interested in this ce because he felt that a ce that gathers all the top dogs asionally mighte in handy when he is trying to deal with them.

    He doesn¡¯t have to go through the effort of dealing with them.

    But there is no detailedyout in the information from the ck Ghosts as they didn¡¯t see it as too important.

    Sam could only wait for Jack and the Demon Soul to return to ask them about it.

    While Sam is nning and creating a hit list so that they could take down people in that particr order, his partners in crime are working.

    Currently, the Demon Soul is standing in the Grand Hall as the five Sect leaders, the Grand Elders, the elders and even some core disciples are in front of him.

    All of them gathered together.

    One of the members of themon administrative area took the spatial rings from the five sect leaders and walked to the Demon Soul as he handed them over with a slight bow.

    The Demon Soul checked the contents of all the rings and smiled.

    "This is not bad. I think this covers all of it. You guys might have felt quite a pinch."

    He said with a smile.

    At this moment, the five sect leaders stood up and the one in the middle who is the leader of the Fire Sect spoke.

    "Guardian Demon Soul, we are thankful and will be eternally grateful for what you have done for our sect. Because of the contract you made with the sect and your character that values that contract, you were trapped with us all this while.

    And now that the Five great sects have reached the heights that made us face few dangers, you do not have to feel trapped by protecting us anymore.

    We hope that you would take your leave and see much bigger world waiting for you."

    Demon Soul¡¯s smile widened as he said.

    "So, you boys grew up and wants to throw this old man out of this ce?"

    The sect leaders just smiled and didn¡¯t say anything.

    The Demon soul thought for a long while and said.

    "Okay then. I will take my leave. This ce has be boring anyway. There is no adventure left here. It is too nd for my taste."

    With that, he turned around and started walking.

    "Guardian, before you leave the realm, we would like to hold a banquet this afternoon. The arrangements are already done. I hope you will visit along with your disciple and his friends."

    "My disciple and his friends too? You are being way too generous all of a sudden." Demon Soul said with a smile.

    "We insist. Please let us show our gratitude. Anyway, two exciting young men are not a burden for us."

    "Okay, we wille by afternoon."

    With that he left and took out amunication token.

    "Jack, I want to talk to you about something, what are you doing now?"

    "I am the middle of something with my friends. I will be there in fifteen minutes."

    "Okay. I will be waiting."

    With that Demon Soul cut themunication off.

    Meanwhile.

    Jack, Philip and Watt are currently in a bar. They are seating at a small round table while a six people are surrounding them and a lot of people are looking at them.

    The six people are the young masters of the Five great sects. They belong to two sects in particr. The Water Sect and the Earth Sect and they are direct descendants of some of the founding and first generation members.

    If everything goes right, these fellows would end up being the Elders and Grand elders of their sects.

    And right now, all they want is to kill the trio in front of them.

    "What? Did you call your teacher for you help? Want to go and cry in his arms and ask him to save you?"

    One of the young masters said as he got ready to start the fight.

    Jack looked at him like he was an idiot and said.

    "Did you put someone¡¯s dick in your ears? Didn¡¯t you hear what I was talking with him?"

    The young master was embarrassed and lunged forward.

    Watt waved his hand and the wind pushed the guy from behind making him slip, Philip who is sitting raised his head and dropped an ax kick on that guys head mming him into the table and then into the wooden floor all while without standing up.

    But he didn¡¯t stop there, mes erupted from his leg as he burned the hair off of the guy¡¯s head, making him bald.

    The other young masters were stunned and lunged forward to attack.

    Jack took out his sword as he sliced upwards the young master in the front has his cloths cut off as they dropped down.

    Watt threw a wind de at another guy, who used an earthen wall to block the attack, but he is still a tad bit slower as the wind de just sliced off on that guy¡¯s head and cut the upperyer of the scalp clean.

    The trio stood up and started beating the crap out of them. They didn¡¯t use any fancy technique and made it into an old fashioned fist fight while they shaved their heads off with wind des and sword strikes and cut their clothes off too.

    They fainted after that and the trio left.

    The sight they left behind is embarrassing to say the least.

    This is the third time they did something like this in the past three days.

    They pissed the young masters who are on the same level as them as much as they could and beat the crap out of everyone that came at them.

    They left these embarrassing scenes everywhere they went and did most of it in the Outer City which made the citizens almost shit in their pants.

    After all, who bullies the young masters of the sect right in their home ground? They didn¡¯t expect to see someone with such big balls roaming around.

    Some of them recognized who Jack is and this made the situation that much gossip-worthy.

    Everyone started talking and by now the news already spread to the sect elders and administrators. But they didn¡¯t dare react because the sect leaders are trying to cut ties with the guardian as smoothly and openly as possible.

    But now that the ties are cut, it is time for them to react.

 Chapter 1235: Ambush

    The trio went to Demon Soul¡¯s residence.

    "Where have you been?" He asked Jack as soon as they entered the residence.

    "In the bar. We are beating those young masters."

    "How far did youe from that side?"

    "We have beaten the direct descendants of the founders who are on the same level as us in thest few days. Even though we didn¡¯t cover all of them, we at least did the more high-profile ones dirty. They are currently bald and when they were found, they were naked in the streets or other public ces.

    So, I would say, we did a pretty good job, if you ask me."

    "Yeah, it seems like you indeed did a pretty good job. Perhaps, even overdid it. The Sect leaders are inviting us to a banquet this afternoon and the invitation is for your friends too."

    "Banquet in the middle of the day?"

    "Yes."

    "These guys don¡¯t have any sense for celebration," Philipmented from the side.

    "Who said it is for the celebration? If they only invited me and Jack, I would have believed so. But they are also calling you guys and they even insisted. It seems like they nned something very good for you guys."

    "What would that be? Some good food or some washed-up necks?" Watt asked as he stretched his body and dropped on the bedzily.

    "Who knows? Maybe both of them. But it seems like your n is in the final stages. It will be a direct confrontation any time now. I am expecting some dueling challenges from the direct descendants that are as strong as you or even stronger.

    That is the most general and direct approach they could take. They might think of humiliating you or even ¡¯identally¡¯ killing you. So, be careful."

    "You would be there right?"

    "Of course, I cannot miss such a show."

    They made some small chat as the old man couldn¡¯t stop speaking at all.

    They informed Sam about the situation through themunication devices and waited for the banquet.

    When the time of the banquet neared, the sects actually sent an attendant to invite them all over to the banquet and they followed that attendant to the Common Area.

    The Grand Hall is being used for the banquet and when they arrived, almost all the important figures of the five great sects are present inside. They are clearly taking this seriously.

    And among the important members, the trio saw some bald heads and burned faces.

    They clearly recognized them.

    They are the bald heads they created.

    The youngsters are all, looking at the trio as if they want to eat them alive. But the trio just grinned calmly and went to their seats.

    They didn¡¯t care about manners or respect. They just started eating and drinking as they liked even before anyone else started.

    The Demon Soul also didn¡¯t hold back and didn¡¯t stop them. He also started devouring food without any table manners.

    He even called a server out in the middle to get some food he liked that was ced on another table. He behaved as if it is his home.

    And it didn¡¯t take long for the young masters to react. They couldn¡¯t take it and many times they wanted to get up and shoot their mouths, but for some reason, the elders are all keeping their eyes on them carefully and whenever someone wanted to act out, they shot them a nce making them sit down.

    After a while, the Five Sect leaders stood up and one of them started talking out loud gathering everyone¡¯s attention.

    "Today, we gathered here on the asion of our Guardian leaving our Five Great sects.

    He has been the guardian of our sects for decades as he has seen the growth of our sects with his own eyes. He has been a witness to many changes we have been through as well as many difficulties we have ovee.

    He knows better than anyone, how far we havee. But all good things muste to an end and our rtionship with our Guardian is the same.

    From today onwards, our Guardian is moving on from our Five Great sects and is going on the bigger world waiting for him."

    As he spoke, he lifted his ss and an attendant came out with a special gourd of wine as he poured into his and the rest of the sect leader¡¯s sses, after which they filled Demon Soul¡¯s as well as the trio¡¯s sses.

    The sect leader who gave the speech raised the ss and gulped it down along with the other sect leaders.

    Demon Soul took the smell of the ss while the trio did the same.

    The smell of the wine is too rich and strong, it has been a while they felt that some wine could be this strong.

    They also gulped it down. Even the Demon Soul didn¡¯t hold back and the banquet went smoothly.

    This made the four of them feel surprised. After all, they expected some ruckus and some resistance for themselves, they thought of the proud young masters challenging them to restore their stupid pride. They wanted to bash a few heads to the ground and make the sect leaders and the Elders rage only for them to stop acting because of Demon Soul¡¯s presence.

    But none of it happened. They could onlye out with disappointment.

    After the banquet was over, the four of them leisurely walked out of the city, and by the time they crossed the gate, the trio felt something happening to them. The regr absorption of energy became a bit difficult as if something dense is clogging their meridians.

    When they checked their bodies with a spiritual sense, they noticed that the dense sludge blocking the meridians is not actually some foreign thing.

    It is just spiritual energy that became dense and blocked the meridians. Soon, apart from the general absorption, even the cirction became hard.

    They had a bad feeling about the situation and Jack didn¡¯t hesitate to make the Demon Soul know of this finding.

    Demon Soul thought for a moment and said.

    "Be careful. I think I am also feeling something simr in my body."

    This made the three of them frown and their bad feeling only increased.

    As the four of them vigntly walked into the deeper section of the forest, Demon Soul took out his sword and made five swift movements, the sword rays went in five different directions as they cut off the trees and forced some people toe out.

    After they came out, five more people followed from a hiding ce a bit far away.

    The four of them were surprised. Because the people that came are grand elders and the young masters of the sect.

    They didn¡¯t expect that they would manage to appear in the exact same route they are going to take.

    "How do you know we would be taking this route?"

    Demon Soul asked out of curiosity.

    "We don¡¯t. We just stationed a group in the three most probably routes and we managed to find you here."

    One of the Grand elders spoke and then paused before he continued.

    "Send the three over. The youngsters will handle themselves, I am sure you wouldn¡¯t be able to deal with us while shielding them.

    They might even die of aftershocks of the sh."

    "Demon Soul just shrugged and looked at the trio. They nodded and walked out of the encirclement of the grand elders and entered one that was prepared for them separately.

    One of the young masters looked at Jack and said.

    "Didn¡¯t expect this situation did you?"

    Jack just looked at him nkly without replying. There is a look of disdain on his face that made the other party feel embarrassed.

    "You can be arrogant all you want. But that wine you drank will make you think that messing with the sects is the biggest mistake you did.

    I am pretty sure that your meridians are being clogged as we speak. You would be like that for a few hours and that is more than enough time to kill you guys a dozen times.

    As he spoke, the wind element suddenly razed and he created arge tornado around him which slowly gotpressed into a small tornado in his hand and aimed at the trio.

    Watt leisurely extended his hands and pped once.

    The wind elemental energy became chaotic for a second as ripples formed around them. The tornado that was making its way towards them, disappeared as if it was never there.

    "shy moves, no substance."

    Watt said as he shook his head in disappointment. He has seen so many wind elemental cultivators and everyone is doing the same. They are making big and shy moves that could create a lot of ruckuses.

    Of course, they are destructive but not as destructive as they actually can be.

    He sighed and wind elemental energy gathered at his hand as he swung it fiercely.

    Arge wind de condensed densely arrived right in front of the young master who attacked him in a sh.

 Chapter 1236: Shitty Battle

    The wind de was fast and precise and was aimed directly at the neck. The young master hurried to block the attack with an air cannon at such a close range.

    The wind de didn¡¯tpletely disappear as it should have, instead, it barely changed the direction that it wasing from earlier and cut off some of the opponent¡¯s hair while he was pushed back by the recoil of his own attack.

    But Watt didn¡¯t let him get away with it that easily, he swung his arms a few more times as he walked forward casually and this time the wind des are aimed not just at his throat, rather at his feet and arms as well.

    The other party who is already out of bnce tried his best to control himself and dodge all the attacks, but he could only use another air cannon on the ground tounch himself a bit into the air barely dodging many attacks. But one of them still managed to leave a nick on his torso.

    Everything happened in a sh. The rest of the young masters who were a bit shocked by the defense of the first attack finally came to themselves. Jack and Philip shook their heads once again in disappointment.

    These guys have no battle instincts. They are good at using shy attacks and packing raw power, but they don¡¯t have good enough instincts and battle IQ.

    To be dazed for two seconds is like serving their lives on a silver tter. Lucky for them Jack and Philip didn¡¯t act on it and kill them right on the spot.

    But that didn¡¯tst long.

    When one of the young masters wanted to attack Watt from the rear while he is toying with the first young master, he sent a sword ray which made the young master jump up in fright.

    He gritted his teeth and took out an earthen golem as he let it go after Watt while he himself went after Jack.

    Jack fought with two people at the same time and most of the time, he just blocked their attacks with the sword.

    He didn¡¯t retaliate too much and just yed along and only left some small scars here and there and lucky for him, the people that he is fighting are earth and wood elemental users and he is having fun cutting their attacks down with ease.

    It is almost like just sword practice for him.

    As for Philip, the people that were left are the fire element user and the metal element user. When they revealed this, they are a bit confused, as there is no water element user in the bunch and instead a wind elemental user appeared.

    But as if to clear their confusion, the wind elemental user who is being toyed with by Watt, suddenly gritted his teeth and cursed out loud.

    "I didn¡¯t want to use this, but you forced me."

    And with that, both water and wind elements raged.

    The moisture in the surrounding atmosphere condensed together to form small water drops and then into needles.

    Watt could feel the humidity decreasing around him and apanied by the strong wind the water needles starteding at him from all sides.

    Meanwhile, the earthen golem is smashing around as he dodged both the needles and the golem.

    These water needles and the hidden wind currents that are carrying them are really doing a great job in making the attacks as fast and precise as possible.

    Watt started using the air cannons for defense but unlike his opponent, he didn¡¯t feel the least bit out of control. He perfectly utilized the energy and the recoil to stay bnced.

    But the water needles are not just there for attacking randomly.

    They are slowly increasing in speed, size, and precision. Watt barely dodged three vital attacks to his heart and two for his eyes.

    And the reason for that is the golem.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit frustrated. He took a deep breath lunged forward without caring for the needles for a moment. He punched straight into the body of the golem and made a hole as he held on to it before he continuously punched it again and again with wind elemental energy raging with every punch and hitting the golem.

    The fragments of the stones are flying everywhere while the needles tried to attack him from the rear, which the coat handled for a while, even then there are some needles that managed to hit the face and the legs.

    But once the golem is destroyed, he stood there and a wind current started revolving around him as it stopped the needlesing at him. He took out a pack of metal packs as he shuffled them. Small wind des flew from them as they created miniature turbulent currents within his hands.

    He looked at the opponent calmly as he started throwing one card after another.

    None of them are directly aimed at the opponent in front of him. They moved inrge curves as they cut through the water needles and destroyed them as Watt controlled their motion with his wind currents.

    The young master who is controlling the needles until now, looked at Watt with hateful eyes as both water and wind elements raged inside him.

    The water and wind condensed into two dragons as they rotated around him before moving upwards as they coiled around each other.

    All the other young masters looked at it in horror. They didn¡¯t expect that their fellowpanion would use the ultimate move this early.

    The fight was short-lived. As soon as Watt countered his first proper move, he directly went to his final move.

    The wind and water dragons ground against each other and finally collided their heads as water spears were created from every single ssh of the water supported by the wind element to reduce the resistancepletely.

    All of them are targeted at Watt who is standing there while shuffling the cards. The small needles disappeared and now only these spears remained.

    Watt spread the cards and they rotated rapidly as the wind element churned them continuously.

    Wind des started circling around them and he finally waved his hand as the water spears also starteding at him.

    The metal cards started moving inrge curves as they cut through the water spearspletely deconstructing them and making their way towards the young master who was terrified by the counterattack.

    When the dust settled, the rest of them only saw the cards flying back to Watt and a pile of flesh and bones is left in the ce the young master sat.

    "What kind of fight is this? You don¡¯t have any sense at all. I thought the young masters will give me some challenge."

    Watt muttered out loud and looked at Philip and Jack.

    "Finish it up. I am fucking bored."

    Jack and Philip looked at their opponents and suddenly their speed increased and the sword rays and fire and metal meteorites are the only things anyone could see for a moment before the young masters were done for.

    They killed them cleanly and looked for the battlefield of the Demon Soul and what they saw surprised them even more than the ipetence of the young masters.

    The five grand elders are all stacked on each other with their heads cut off and the Demon soul is sitting there watching the show.

    They didn¡¯t notice that until now as they are so engrossed in toying with the young masters.

    "When are you finished?"

    "After you started engaging. I knew these guys are a waste of time. I knew those five young masters are also a waste of time. Take their bodies with you. I have something interesting to show you."

    With that, they went to the cave residence.

    When Sam saw the bodies, he called out Specter to start collecting the memories.

    When the memories were transferred to him though, he was dumbfounded.

    "These people..."

    "You are smarter than I thought. These brats gave you way less credit." Demon Soul said as he started drinking.

    "What are you guys talking about?" The trio is curious.

    Sam stayed silent for a moment and said.

    "Someone is spreading their fangs too far in the realms. These guys are not the real people. The grand elders and young masters are not real people. They are a type of clone. Their faces are created by someone and they are being controlled."

    When the trio heard these words, they don¡¯t even know how to react.

    They couldn¡¯tprehend this, particrly Jack who has been interacting with these people for a while.

    "How is your battle with these guys?"

    "They died instantly. They don¡¯t have any battle IQ. They are easy targets. If not for the toying they would die instantly."

    Sam looked at Demon Soul and asked.

    "It seems like you are not really surprised by this. Do you know this from the start?"

    "No, I only came to know when they are attacking me. I have an affinity with the souls, but I don¡¯t just keep on sensing and studying them in other people. They would easily notice and it is invasive. I don¡¯t want to deal with all the troubles thate with it. I only do when I am in a battle. So, when I noticed the difference in the five grand elders, I decided to check these kids and they are the same.

    Something else is happening under the wraps."

 Chapter 1237: About Vardar

    The faces of the bodies are not real, the memories are in bits and pieces. Sam could understand why their battle prowess is so weak and unreal. After all, with their positions as young masters and, it is impossible for them to be so weak in front of his friends.

    Even though he is sure that they would lose, the difference wouldn¡¯t be overwhelming like it is now.

    Compared to the substitutes ced in the ck Ghosts these guys are more in number and worst in terms of quality. Their memories were not implemented in them properly to the point that the basic battle instincts and the reflexes are absent.

    "How do you know about these guys?"

    Demon soul asked as he noticed Sam¡¯s deeply thoughtful expression.

    Sam came out of his daze and started exining the situation with the ck Ghosts.

    "So, you are saying that Divine healer Vardar is behind all this."

    "I don¡¯t know if he is involved in this and he is responsible for this himself, from what I learned Vardar is only focusing on the information gathering organization, and in this area, ck Ghosts are the ones handling the intelligence trade.

    So, I cannot confirm whether it is the work of Vardar or not. But with my minimum knowledge of the surrounding realms, only he is capable of doing it."

    "That Old Bastard. He never changes does he."

    Demon Soul muttered involuntarily.

    All four of them looked at him in surprise.

    "You know Vardar?"

    "Well, we have crossed paths before and it is not exactly a pleasant experience for both of us. I have known him before he became this so-called Divine Healer. He used to do a different kind of work and it seems like he never really stopped that kind of work from the looks of it."

    "What kind of work exactly?"

    Sam asked curiously. It seems like he has been crossing paths with the Vardar too often. It started with his disciple at Five Elemental King¡¯s ce and then with Markan and ck Ghost¡¯s incident and now the Five Great sects.

    At least the first two incidents have a specific gap between them, but now he came across his name back to back.

    Demon Soul thought for a moment and said.

    "He is actually a Mercenary to put it nicely. He might not be that powerful when ites to direct confrontation, but with enough preparation time and resources, he would be unstoppable."

    Jack looked at Sam and said.

    "Sounds like someone I know."

    Sam just gave him a side-eyed nce as he listened to what Demon Soul had to say.

    "Vardar, is not really good at anything else. Even his organization is actually a small one. The Pce of Divine only consists of his close disciples, the attendants and servants, and in some rare cases the disciples of the disciples.

    The realms and territories in the surrounding area, just give him protection fees.

    He knows his limitations well. The ruling is not his forte and he doesn¡¯t want to take that responsibility. He doesn¡¯t even have any resource points under his control except for the ones he has in his estate.

    But there is another main source of his ie. It is doing the dirty work for some bigshots."

    Sam was surprised a bit and he looked into the wrist screen to check.

    The Pce of Divine is third on the list. It is part of the final three. One of the strongest organizations they have to face. Even for Sam, it is going to take months if not years. He is even nning to wait for the other yers and prepare with them again.

    But this guy is just a person who does dirty work for others?

    That is kind of unbelievable.

    "Why are you so surprised?" Demon Soul asked as he watched Sam¡¯s reaction.

    "I doubt there are any organizations, that can really make the Vardar do their dirty work. He is way too strong for that isn¡¯t he?"

    "Yes, he is. But it is voluntary. He makes his living like that and he does the bidding of the organizations on par with him.

    He heals, cures poisons, and even solves gic conditions. But that is just a farce. He does a lot of dirty work and this infiltration with clones is something along the lines of his choice.

    He must have not known I am the one who is guarding this ce. So, he tried something like this."

    "Maybe, he knew it was you and that is why he is so discreet?"

    "No, that doesn¡¯t sound like him. There are very few people who were still alive after knowing his past and those few people are someone that he couldn¡¯t mess with. I am part of that group. It is just that I maintained a low profile for such a long time, that he might have missed my presence here.

    And every time he is this discreet something big is going to happen."

    Demon Soul who is always yful and rowdy turned extremely serious. Even Jack who is a disciple hasn¡¯t seen him like this before.

    After a few minutes of silence, he stood up and said seriously.

    "I need to leave. You guys should be careful."

    "What? Where are you going?" Jack was shocked and he almost yelled out loud.

    "Jack, stay with your friend for a while. I need to go and settle some things. I don¡¯t know if the situation is really as bad as I think, but if it is things wouldn¡¯t be peaceful for a while. The nearby realms would be burning in war.

    If things reallye down to it, the four of you guys just leave this ce and stay there for a decade or so."

    With that, he paused and took out some potions.

    "These are for you." He gave more to Jack and then Sam. Jack has many vials of the same potion, but Sam has different elemental potions.

    "These things are brought from a different ce and they are not ordinary ingredients. So, be careful when you use it.

    Philip and Watt, you guys just used it recently, so make sure that you wait for a few more months.

    Jack, you know how to use yours."

    He then turned to Sam and said.

    "You are a lot smarter than I ever expected. At first, I thought your friends are boasting and now I know that they are not giving you enough credit.

    One thing I observed from your story is that you are on a winning streak. It is almost like losing is impossible for you. You have never even faced a possibility of losing until now. Maybe it is thanks to your preparations and I highly doubt that it has nothing to do with it, but you must also be extremely fortunate.

    But be careful that luck always runs out.

    I really like you. I am really looking forward to seeing your future. And the bond you have with your friends is something that most people wouldn¡¯t have even in a few lifetimes, so don¡¯t lose it."

    He then turned around and didn¡¯t turn back again as he slowly walked into the woods.

    Sam suddenly thought of something and turned to Jack.

    "Give me your tracking token."

    Jack took it out and gave it to Sam.

    Sam took off on harbinger as he went to meet Demon Soul in the woods.

    "Demon Soul."

    He yelled as soon as he was in sight.

    Demon soul turned to him in confusion.

    "What is it?"

    Sam gave the token to him and said.

    "This is something I gave to Jack so that he would be able to contact me in case of extreme emergencies.

    Since we got back together, I would like you to have it. Contact me if something is up, whether you are in danger or something you need to warn us about..."

    "Danger? What can a brat like you do to me, if even I am in danger? You would die just from the aftershocks of the battle."

    "I know, but it doesn¡¯t hurt to contact me does it. Just keep it for my sake."

    "Okay. Don¡¯t bother me."

    With that, the old man picked up his pace and went towards the city.

    Sam went back to the cave residence and sighed.

    "Well, that is that. I thought he would be helpful in dealing with the Five Great sects, but maybe we cannot expect that much."

    "I thought so too," Jack said with a hint of mncholy in his voice.

    "Okay guys, let us continue with the initial n. All the dirtyundry of the sects will be aired while we split and finish the assassinations.

    Since we don¡¯t know how many duplicates are there in the organization, we can also wait and see and might even be able to identify them with the way they react.

    They would be the easier target and we will also get a true estimate of the actual power we are going against.

 Chapter 1238: Explosion

    While Sam is discussing the situation with the team and his friends, Demon Soul arrived back in the city and he directly went to the Five Great sects¡¯mon area.

    When the attendants saw him, they immediately ran to inform their superiors. One of the grand elders in charge of the supervision came out and looked at him with a smile.

    "Hello, Demon Soul. What are you doing here? Did you forget something?"

    "I want to use the Wormholes."

    The smile on the Grand Elder froze for a moment before he continued.

    "Well, the wormholes connecting this to another area in the city a few hundred miles to the east. From that, you can use the wormholes connecting to another realm, I will give you an attendant who will escort you there. With our rtionship in mind, you wouldn¡¯t be charged and you wouldn¡¯t even need to wait."

    The Grand elder tried his best to sound casual. But Demon Soul is having none of it.

    "Don¡¯t y this bullshit with me. I know better than anyone that your sect grounds have wormholes connecting to outside realms. Your act of generosity to leave the wormhole station far away is nothing but bull crap. You found two sets of wormholes connecting this ream to another and oneplete set is here.

    You rat bastards are so afraid that you chose this ce that connects to a faraway realm so that you can escape. I want to enter that realm. So, be good and let me get in, otherwise, you would be having trouble of your lifetime."

    The Grand Elder didn¡¯t even know how to react, but by now, other grand elders and even some sect leaders arrived and when they heard these words, they are also a bit surprised.

    It is their secret. When their founders are conquering this realm, they found different wormholes in differents connecting each other, but there is one that has connections with nearby realms and another one with a faraway realm that barely has any connection with the realms nearby. It is not only their escape ne but also a training ground and resource gathering area. They didn¡¯t expect that their secret is not a secret for a long time.

    Demon Soul looked at all of them and said.

    "I will count to five, if you let me in, nothing will happen, if you don¡¯t I will cut through all of you and go inside."

    1, 2, 3 , 4 , 5. "

    Everyone was dumbfounded by how fast his counting is and before they could React, he directly took out his sword and attacked.

    The first Grand Elder in front of him was split into two while he went after the second one and the third.

    The grand elders and sect leaders were in a frenzy as for the first time, Demon Soul is not holding back at all. His strength is too high. Too high to the point they cannot even guess his cultivation level.

    All of a sudden, the sect leaders knelt on the ground and yelled.

    "MERCY."

    Demon Soul stopped with a disappointed expression. The sect leaders themselves led him to the portal and he has to leave.

    Before leaving, he turned to the direction where the cave residence is and muttered.

    "This is the parting gift. Don¡¯t waste it."

    The sect leaders didn¡¯t understand, but they didn¡¯t dare ask too.

    After he was gone, the Sect leaders, immediately sealed the sect doors and didn¡¯t let the news of them losing serval grand elders leave to the outside world. They even went so far as killing some subordinates that are directly involved in this.

    Luckily, Demon Soul didn¡¯t create arge ruckus and killed everyone with one sword blow, not many people arrived there.

    But that didn¡¯t change the fact that they weakened tremendously. If a rival organization makes its move, the five great sects will copse. They really wished that no one has those thoughts.

    But the wishes always wouldn¡¯te true.

    For the next few days, Sam¡¯s teampletely split up as they went after different targets.

    Sam created copies of every dirty thing the Five Great sects ever did and started spreading them all over the city or the town the team visited to kill anyone.

    They didn¡¯t even spare the information rted to the Five Great sects¡¯ secret activities to screw over some rival organization. He revealed the information of the spies ced by the Sects in different organizations and he made sure that information went to the spies of the rival organization present in this particr one.

    In just one week, they killed around one hundred and twenty-six members in total while leaking all kinds of information.

    The Five Great sects went into a panic.

    Just when they thought the situation couldn¡¯t get any worse, it did. Nobody knows how the information regarding their darkest secrets and their most vulnerable things got out like this and they are spreading like wildfire.

    Whoever did this, they have no filter on when to stop as they just leaked all kinds of information. One of the young master¡¯s sexuality was also leaked, as he liked men, there is even video proof for that, but he is scheduled to marry the young mistress of another organization that is just slightly less strong than the Five Great sects.

    Not just that, the information regarding how one branch of the five sects screwed over another is also being spread and the internal affairs of the five sects are too tense.

    By the end of the weak, the sect leaders couldn¡¯t even stand each other¡¯s presence as they realized how badly they screwed each other over. They plotted against each other for resource points,s, women, and even business deals from higher-level organizations.

    When they were doing it, all they could see is that one particr asion and the benefits thate with it, but now that all of it was added up, it was apparent that they cannot even trust each other.

    Many grand elders died already and the leaders didn¡¯t have any unity left. With this, all the burden was left to some grand elders who are still alive. But for the Fire sect, not a single grand elder was alive and an elder with a rtively higher birth has to take charge.

    They all met in themon ground to discuss things, but what they don¡¯t know is that Sam is waiting for them to gather there.

    A young attendant came out of themon area as soon as the meeting started. He directly made his way out of the inner city and then the outer city and only stopped when he reached the forest.

    He is none other than Kiran.

    He was already sent in three days ago to leave some gifts to the Five Sects.

    "Only Grand Elders are gathering, the Sect leaders don¡¯t want toe and meet. They did too many backstabbings to be peacefully cooperative. We would need to wait a lot of time to deal with them."

    He informed Sam after he arrived at the cave residence.

    "Well, we can make do with the current situation, As long as they are weakened further, it is all okay."

    Sam said as he controlled a small insect puppet that was left behind by Kiran there.

    The puppet circled around as it finallynded on one spot and Sam crushed a token.

    *boom*

    A puppet exploded. It is not exactlyrge and destructive. It went away with a small explosion, but something else happened after that explosion.

    The fire and ice elemental energy suddenly raised in the surroundings creating a hot and cold alternative atmosphere. They couldn¡¯t understand what is happening and soon realized that the stone pirs that have various sculptures on them have some kind of containers that appeared out of nowhere as they glowed with red and blue energy.

    *BOOM*

    Arge explosion urred and it is focused precisely on the Grand Hall.

    The fire and Ice elemental energies shed with each other and wreaked havoc in the surroundings, the attendants and disciples that are near the grand hall were blown away by the impact. Some of them died, but some of them survived.

    But the people that survived wished they were dead as both fire elemental corrosion and ice elemental corrosion made their way into their bodies.

    They could feel some muscle fibers and meridians freezing while some others are burning. The spiritual energy in their bodies became chaotic as they couldn¡¯t control it to resist the corrosion effects.

    When the explosion cleared, all the sect leaders who are nesting in their own quarters until now already arrived at the st scene and looked for the grand elders.

    The one elder who is not powerful enough died, two grand elders were in theatose stage while the remaining two are barely conscious.

    All their bodies are being corroded by ice and fire elemental energy.

    Sam didn¡¯t use much energy in this controlled explosion, at least this is way less than what he used in dealing with the puppet organization.

    His goal is not to directly kill the grand Elders, rather make them useless as well as to give the sect leaders something to fear.

 Chapter 1239: Final Moves

    The elemental corrosion is something that even extremely high-level cultivators couldn¡¯t resist that easily.

    The grand elders that survived the explosion are not bound to survive for long. The pain caused by the corrosion would make them give it up in the middle. For that reason, the sect leaders immediately arranged some special formations and some fire and Ice elemental users to try and absorb the excess energy causing the corrosion in their bodies.

    But due to the forceful mixture of these conflicting energies, there is little they can do.

    "We need to go to the Pce of Divine.

    There is no one else who could cure them now."

    One of the Sect leaders said anxiously. The rest of the sect leaders agreed, but the problem is whether they could get the treatment at the Pce of Divine.

    Everyone knows that the treatment is not cheap there, particrly when there are four Consummate level cultivators, it is almost impossible.

    The sect leaders looked at the site of the explosion.

    Even they barely managed to enter and retrieve the grand elders, they couldn¡¯t really fathom being inside such an explosion and endure it. This also showed them that whatever the threat they are facing, it is not to be taken lightly. Now that they are weakened further and there is a huge dent in their finances because of the payment to Demon Soul.

    The situation is getting worse and worse.

    They don¡¯t even know how to reach the moment.

    After some time, the Fire Sect leader spoke.

    "I will take them to the Pce of Divine. It is indeed expensive and I know we cannot be sure that they could get the treatment. But they are the grand elders we cannot just let them die like this. You four stay here and impose a curfew. No one should be moving outside in the inner city. Gather everyone in the sect grounds and defend it.

    We need to fish out the person that set off these explosions, there is definitely a spy inside, so look for him."

    With that, the sect leaders gritted their teeth and made their move. The fire sect leader left with some attendants to take the grand elders to the Pce of Divine, meanwhile, the other sect leaders are trying to minimize the damage that was currently done.

    But what they don¡¯t know is, there is noing back from the current situation.

    Many of their people are already assassinated in various ces and the information about their weakening state has already been spread all over the ce.

    All their rival organizations are in the know of this matter.

    In fact, some of the scouts sent by the other organizations are currently inside the Outer City and they knew of the explosion. They immediately carried the required information to their headquarters so that they could get a piece of the Five Great sects as they are getting ready to their downfall.

    Meanwhile, the whole team gathered at the cave residence once again.

    Even Paras, Vidyut and Tamas are here.

    "We are at the final stages. From the information that was given by the ck Ghosts, there is one escape route for the Five Great sects which we do not know of. It is most likely in the wormholes that are within the estate. So, before they make their way there, we need to finish them off one by one.

    But the problem is that we wouldn¡¯t be able to defeat them normally. The Middle-stage Consummate stage cultivators arepletely different from anyone we have ever faced. Their endurance is high and even the controlled explosion I created earlier wouldn¡¯t be able to do kill them.

    And with what happened, they would be extremely vignt.

    Only Night Ghost has the slightest chance of directly hurting them and we need to find a way to use that chance to kill them.

    Currently, the sect leaders are split into different tasks, so before they realize how we areing and what we are about to do, it is better for us to deal with as many of them as possible.

    If things really go wrong we really couldn¡¯t do anything to them, I have another n, but this might attract a lot more attention than we want.

    I will be preparing for the final steps in our n while the rest of you, use the surveince equipment to keep an eye on the inner city. See who is working on what and if possible continue with the assassinations.

    None of the main members of the Five great sects should survive."

    With that, Sam went into the cave residence while the rest of the team including his friends came out to camp.

    Sam started creating a curse, a contagious curse once again, and this time, he has something else in mind. He needs to experiment a bit, but theoretically, it is possible and this is the only sure-fire method that could help them deal with these strong enemies.

    Sam stayed inside the second floor of the divine dimension most of the time, the trio knew this and made sure that the other teammates doesn¡¯t know about this. They took the job of messengers between the team and Sam.

    After all, the team doesn¡¯t know that Sam has this full-fledged divine dimension. Even though most of their partnership was based on the contract and Sam is sure that they wouldn¡¯t betray him, he couldn¡¯t just let someone know of this divine dimension, because once the decade is up and if they left and gave this information to someone else, he has too much at stake to lose.

    His organization has be too big and spread across too many realms. One mistake and he would have a lot to pay.

    So, he is careful about this matter.

    In the next four days, the team only focused on killing the members of the Sect while keeping an eye on the inner city and along with that, they performed one particr task for Sam. That is collect the souls of the assassinated targets.

    They were given to the three friends who went inside to give the souls to Sam who is inside the divine dimension.

    When Sam finally came out with results, they gave him the report on the situation.

    The Sect leaders called for everyone that belongs to the sect spread all over the realms. In the process of their return, the team managed to assassinate half of them at least, the remaining people all reached the sects, but they didn¡¯t feel safe.

    Since an explosion urred in the grand hall which is supposed to be the safest ce, they couldn¡¯t feel safe even when they are in the sect leader¡¯s residence.

    And from the looks of it, the sect leaders are all not exactly staying together.

    They are spread out as they made sure that all of them are not in one ce together. They don¡¯t want to give the other party a chance to bomb them like that.

    And even when they are alone, they are using all their means to make sure that nothing suspicious is around them.

    The shadow mice are also had to use the shadow transverse to get out of the inner city because of the strict measures that are being taken.

    After going through the information, Sam focused his attention on one particr sect leader. He is in charge of maintaining the surveince of the inner and outer cities so that he could find anyone suspicious.

    He already managed to fish out quite a number of spies from the rival organization and some infiltrators in the outer city.

    He is working great and he is meeting with all the other sect leaders to give the reports and collect the information from their side.

    This is also to avoid another group explosion. They don¡¯t know how anyone caused the first explosion, because anyone who saw that was dead.

    Their spection is that some suicide bombers caused this and they felt that the suicide bombers will act when they are all together.

    So, they reduced the meeting to a minimum, and even when only two of them met, they made sure that no other person is within the surroundings.

    For the method that Sam is about to use, this guy is perfect and their current cautiousness is the perfect scenario he could imagine.

    He took out a dagger and gave it to the Night Ghost.

    "This is something I made with the souls we collected from the victims of our assassinations. You have one shot to use this on the target.

    You also need to maintain a specific timing when doing this. He should only be attacked on his way to meet another sect leader. Not before and definitely not after.

    And no matter what happens, whatever the situation is, do not ever cut yourself with this dagger. If things even go a little wrong, even I would be unable to save you.

    This thing is nasty and disgusting to the point even I feel that it is a bit immoral. So, be careful."

 Chapter 1240: Night Ghost Vs Earth Sect Leader

    Within the Inner city.

    A middle-aged man is currently looking through all the documents. Some people who are alive after the shock from the explosion managed to give some information. They are a bit far away from the location, but they still suffered from the aftereffects of the attack.

    At first, they were unable to say anything because of the corrosion as well as the chaos in their bodies due to the explosion.

    But after these four days, they recovered and they gave out some information, even though it is of little help.

    They saw the glowing objects that suddenly appeared on the stone pirs out of nowhere and they gave a brief description of how they looked and reacted.

    At the same time, they also gave some information regarding the small explosion created by the small insect puppet in the middle of it, before therger explosion happened.

    Their spection for the suicide bomber was gone with this. But they are still worried about the fact that the person who nned this and nted the explosions were not caught.

    But at least, they got to know what they should look out for.

    He took outmunication and spoke to someone.

    "I want a meeting with the formation masters. Make sure that they are thoroughly checked, they cannot bring their spatial rings. Even if they want to bring them, they had to be thoroughly checked."

    "Yes, sect leader. Where do you want the meeting to be?"

    "In my current residence. Remember, only two of them shalle and no one else."

    "Yes, Sir."

    With thatmunication was cut off and he just waited there. He is the earth sect leader, who is working on the investigations.

    The remaining three sect leaders are focusing on the defense and even some backup ns. They are already preparing for an escape. They knew that there is a possibility of beingpletely wiped out and this might be the time for them to use the escape n they prepared while the whole construction of the five sects began.

    As he thought of their situation which made them feel holed up, he couldn¡¯t help but curse Demon Soul who is the main cause of their situation.

    If they had all the grand elders, they wouldn¡¯t have had to go through all of this.

    He killed around ten Grand Elders.

    There is no way they would have been hiding like this without any proactive measures if they are still here.

    As he was thinking, the formation masters finally arrived. They are carrying a bunch of stuff with them as they couldn¡¯t wear their spatial rings.

    They sat down as the Earth Sect leader started exining what they are looking for based on the information given to him from the recovered witnesses.

    After exining what clearly happened, the formation masters came up with some spections and presented a n for the detection of that said material. After all, there is no way those things suddenly appeared out of nowhere. They are nted there, but they were covered with a really good concealment setup.

    So, their goal is to detect some cylindrical devices with highly active energy sources with very high concentrations and cover up with high-level concealment.

    The formation masters went to work immediately and the Earth Sect leader took a copy of the ns to meet with the other three sect leaders so that he could exin as well collect their share of resources to make the formation while the masters worked on theplete design.

    As he walked through the streets with all the thoughts weighing his mind, he suddenly felt a cold sensation on his back as he felt some chills go through his spine.

    It is almost like something truly evil is eyeing him hungrily.

    He stopped in his tracks and immediately activated earth elemental fusion.

    There is a reason why he was chosen for investigation.

    The main reason is of course he is good, but the other reason is that he is the second strongest person but with the best defense possible.

    He is sure that no one can take as much damage as him within the same realm, so he got ready to fight immediately without wasting any time doubting whether there is someone around him or not.

    All of a sudden, he felt somethinging from his side and involuntarily stomped his feet, arge earthen wall appeared in front and he didn¡¯t wait to punch at the wall.

    The wall molded itself to make way for the fist as it literally went through. He felt the presence there with his spiritual sense, but for some reason, he couldn¡¯t feel the impact of hitting that presence.

    And when he was confused, a ghost materialized in front of him as it passed through the wall and manifested in front of him as it tried to enter his sea of consciousness to attack him.

    He closed off his mind with mental energy as he struggled and with his cultivation being higher than Night Ghost he managed to do it.

    But he was pretty shaken from this as he couldn¡¯t focus for a moment and Night Ghost took advantage of it as he came through the wall to stab him with the dagger in his hands.

    The Sect leader made another stomp even in that shaken state and an earthen pir shot straight to the testicles of Night Ghost who is in midair because of his lunge.

    A stone pir strengthened by the spiritual energy of someone who is stronger than me, Night Ghost doesn¡¯t want to take the risk and used the ghost that could do physical damage to get swing himself away as he changed the trajectory of where he is going.

    The sect leader got steady, made some hand signs, and mmed his hands onto the ground.

    The earth tremored around and quicksand appeared under Night Ghost who is trying to regain his bnce because of the sudden motion. Hended right into the quicksand directly. He used two of his ghosts to carry himself out of it, but before the ghosts couldn¡¯t even act, something grabbed on to him.

    A sand snake appeared from underground as he grabbed him on the torso. Before he could hit it and destroy it another one appeared from the rear and bit him on the other side of his torso, another came and dragged him from the shoulder.

    He was being pressed into the quicksand and even though he was caught easily, it couldn¡¯t be said that holding him down was easy.

    The sect leader is surprised with how much energy it is taking to capture one person who even has cultivation lower than him.

    He is holding the handsign as he continuously channeled his energy to make the snakes suppress Night Ghost, but that didn¡¯tst long.

    Night Ghost waved his hand and the dagger in it disappeared as he forcefully made his hands go closer and pped.

    A loud screeching noise urred causing the sect leader to be shaken once again. He felt his soul shivering.

    Using this chance, Night Ghost got out of the trap and ran towards the Sect leader, and this time, he didn¡¯t directly attack him normally, he used the soul seizing technique that would make his soul unable to function for a while making his bodypletely out of sync.

    Afternding two hits, he took out the dagger and was about to stab him, but the sect leader fell backward voluntarily and used the momentum to roll himself up. His earth elemental fusion was modified a bit as he turned into a boulder with some stone spikes all around it.

    As he moved forward, the spikes were shot one after another at the Night Ghost who started dodging and making his way towards the sect leader.

    But the sect leader started rolling deeper into the inner city, towards the residence of another sect leader.

    He knew that he wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything if two sect leaders arrives here. All this while, he onlysted because of his unique fighting style, if the other party decided to stay and got used to his style, he would have slowly lost his advantage over him.

    Night Ghost immediately made his move. He ran after the rolling boulder with all his might. He exerted all the power he could and once he is in a certain range, he started making hand signs and pped his hands.

    All of a sudden, time seemed to have slowed down for a moment as a bunch of souls appeared out of nowhere and all of them surrounded the boulder.

    *SCRREEEECHH*

    A loud screeching sound appeared from all the ghosts and the boulder stopped in its tracks, the sect leader lost his boulder form and even his elemental fusion fluctuated a little bit.

    He was caughtpletely unprepared. If he was standing in the battle, he might have had the chance to counter the attack as he would have sensed it, but now that he is focused on running away he is in trouble.

    And that trouble didn¡¯t stop there. Night Ghost made his move and stabbed the dagger in that guy¡¯s chest.

    But not beforending a punch of Night Ghost which sent him almost a hundred feet away.

 Chapter 1241: Vs Water Sect leader

    Night Ghost could feel his ribs and internal organs shaking a bit. He never felt this weak in a while. By any chance, if he were to get hit by those punches a few more times, he could just die here.

    He spat out a mouthful of blood and looked at the Sect leader. The dagger went straight into his chest and Night Ghost¡¯s mission wasplete.

    So, he casually took out the transference scroll and escaped.

    The earth sect leader made a move to catch up to him, but before he could do anything he escaped.

    Night Ghost arrived back at the camp and went to rest immediately as Sam gave him some wine to recover himself.

    Meanwhile, the Earth Sect leader looked around with a scowl on his face. He is extremely angry, in fact, furious about what has happened here. He was chased by a person who has one cultivation level less than him.

    This is beyond humiliating and what made it even worse is, that the other party escaped after dealing him an almost critical blow. In his opinion, if he was even a little bit less vignt, the dagger would have gone straight to his heart.

    If only he knew that the attack was just meant to stab him anywhere and Night Ghost didn¡¯t even have any other target to achieve, then he would have been much more vignt. But too bad for him, he doesn¡¯t have any other choice now.

    He carefully pulled out the dagger and took a look with a frown. He felt that the dagger is a bit different. It definitely didn¡¯t look the same when it was stabbed into his chest.

    But he didn¡¯t have time to think about it too much. He took a pill that could speed up his recovery as he ran towards the nearest sect leader.

    Before he could reach him, that Water sect leader is already halfway towards him. It seems like he also noticed themotion. If only he came a bit faster, then the other party wouldn¡¯t have escaped.

    "Let¡¯s go. I have something important to talk about."

    The earth sect leader didn¡¯t stand there to talk, they went back to the water sect leader and they started the discussion.

    "How many people came to attack you?"

    "Only one. An Initial Stage Consummate cultivator."

    "Only one? Then why are you in such shape? Not to mention, the other party is weaker."

    "I know, but that is not important here." With that, he paused and looked around silently while gesturing the water sect leader to stay silent as well. He took out a scroll and a brush as he wrote something on it to let the water sect leader read.

    The other party frowned after looking at the content, but still nodded and both of them took out a beast so that they could fly over into the sky a bit.

    Then only the earth sect leader heaved a sigh of relief and talked.

    "I think they bugged us."

    "Really? Bugging the core area? If they could do that, they would have just ced whatever caused the explosion there and killed us. Even if the explosion didn¡¯t kill us, we would be half-dead and even an Astral ne Transcendent cultivator can kill uster."

    "I know this sounds ridiculous, but I have a reason to believe it. At least we cannotpletely rule out that angle. Here, let me show you..."

    With that, he took out the ns given by the formation masters and exined them to him.

    "Right after I discussed these ns, they came after me. I have reason to believe that they are maintaining surveince on us."

    The Water sect leader didn¡¯t know what to think, he looked at the ns for a while and said.

    "Indeed we cannot rule out the possibility, but don¡¯t you think it would be more logical to kill off the formation masters than you. After all, even if you are dead, the formation masters can definitely give the information to us and they would still be able to construct this formation."

    Earth Sect leader also became silent. Indeed the other party was right, but he cannot shake that feeling off for some reason and his paranoia only increased as he kept on thinking.

    All of a sudden all kinds of weird thoughts starteding into his head.

    Water sect leader looked at him and continued.

    "You don¡¯t need to think too much into it. But if it is true, there is a possibility that the formation masters are going to be attacked."

    "No, I am the one leading them, I would be the one getting attacked." The earth sect master couldn¡¯t help but say that in a quivering tone.

    "Brother, I know you are a bit cautious now that you have been attacked. Maybe it is just because you are the one roaming around in the current situation and you might be the only target they could get to, to cause significant damage to us. I already told you to not think too much into it."

    "Roaming around? Do I look like I am wasting time and leisurely strolling around?"

    "What? No? What are you even talking about?"

    "Now, you are saying that I don¡¯t even know what I am talking about?"

    Water Sect leader was dumbfounded. This way of talking is quite unreasonable.

    "What is wrong with you? Are you okay?"

    "Now, you are saying that there is something wrong with me? Do I look like a nutjob to you?"

    "No. Let¡¯s... Let¡¯s just go back. You need to rest for a while. We can think after you rested a bit. Let¡¯s go and have a drink."

    "So, you are saying I am too frail to talk with you? Do I need to rest just to talk with you? Who do you think you are?"

    The Water sect leader never heard this type of unreasonable conversation much less be a part of one.

    He looked at the eyes of the Earth sect leader and he noticed that he looked a little crazy now. The expressions kept on changing as if so many emotions are overwhelming him.

    "Brother, you are not okay. We need to go down. Tell your beast to go down."

    "Who are you say I am not okay? Who are you calling weak?" The earth sect leader turned crazy and he slowly activated the earth elemental fusion. The Water sect leader became vignt and he also turned on water elemental fusion.

    "Why are you activating your fusion? Are you nning to get rid of me because I am weak? Is this your way of saying that I am useless to even get stabbed by a weaker guy?"

    Earth Sect leader spouted as hepletely ignored the fact that he is also activating his fusion and only pointed out the actions of the Water Sect leader, before lunging forward.

    *ROAR*

    The Beast under their feet roared as it couldn¡¯t take the stomp of the Sect leader and hurriedly moved downwards to descend.

    The Water sect leader immediately jumped downwards. He knew that something is wrong with the earth sect leader and he definitely knew better than directly fighting. But what he doesn¡¯t know is that the earth sect leader didn¡¯t share the same thoughts.

    He jumped right after him and turned into a boulder in the middle of descent. This time instead of spikes he was covered with holes that are channeling the sand at an extremely high rate making every grain fly around almost creating a curtain of sand falling over the area.

    As the sand entered his fusion body forcefully, the water sect leader tried his best to control the flow of the water so that he can separate the sand particles from himself.

    But the boulder hit him while he was in the middle of the process and the Earth Sect leader forcefully started turning his body into the sand as he tried to enter the water elemental fusion body.

    The sh waspletely different than normal. They are not fighting, instead, they are trying to absorb each other¡¯s bodies into their own fusion bodies so that they could destroy the other party.

    This is an extreme measure. And only because the sand and water have this kind of ability it is possible for one of them to reign over the other.

    Either the sand has topletely absorb or reduce the water into nothing or the water should flow too much to dissipate the sand into nothing.

    Either way, if they persist in this direction, either one of them is of them would die a tragic death and even if they turned back to themselves in time, they would have to face intense bacsh.

    Sam is looking at the surveince from the cave along with the others. Currently, the whole team has nothing to do. Everyone in the sects is holing up and they don¡¯t even have anyone to assassinate.

    So, they are just looking at the show and it is extremely interesting at the moment.

 Chapter 1242: 2 Vs 1 [Bonus Chapter]

    The two Sect leaders hit the ground with a ssh of sand and water. All of a sudden both of them got separated as they went back to their normal forms from the fusion forms.

    Both of them started spitting blood continuously as they felt their insides hurt like crazy.

    The earth sect leader looked at the Water Sect leader like a hungry wolf looked at an injured deer. He lunged forward and started punching him in the face.

    A water bubble appeared in the middle as the water sect leader tried to defend against the attacks. He soon stood up and started the counterattack.

    Even though the Earth sect leader is used to taking a beating, the water sect leader has a way with his attacking. It is dangerous to have the Earth sect leader so close as he maniptes the ground to his advantage andnds a hit or two on the vital parts while taking the beating.

    So, the Water sect leader made sure that he wouldn¡¯t be attacked like that and used his water element to increase the distance between him and the opponent.

    After evading a few attacks catching an open, he ced both of his palms on the torso of the Earth Sect leader, to shoot him with arge high pressured water stream at point-nk range.

    The Earth sect leader has flown away and crashed into the ground like a ragdoll being thrown away by a kid.

    He stopped his motion by digging his fingers into the ground and using his earth elemental energy to cushion his inertia and he activated the earth elemental fusion once again and started making the hand signs.

    When the water sect leader watched this, his eyes widened in horror, he could sense the earth¡¯s elemental energy in the surroundings and knew that he is about to face something big.

    "BROTHER, STOP THIS MADNESS NOW."

    But he didn¡¯t care, he just went on weaving his hands at a crazy speed and the water sect leader gritted his teeth to do the same.

    The water elemental energy upied his surroundings as it revolved at a crazy speed and soon the water condensed into arge water dragon that looked like it was swimming in the air.

    At this exact moment, the earth sect leader mmed his palms into the ground and looked at the sky, his eyes are glowing with the earth¡¯s elemental energy and slowly the glow spread to his whole body.

    The ground around him and the water sect leader started quaking as the earth molded itself intorge abominations withrge mouths as they moved towards the Water Sect leader. The Water dragon gave out some roaring sound as it attacked the earth¡¯s abominations.

    It destroyed one after another, but if one was destroyed it was being reced by two. The whole ground became a material resource for making these abominations as they lumped together and attacked and soon, arge wall surrounded the water sect leader and the water dragon as they closed in.

    The Earth Sect leader took off his palms and weaved a few more signs before mming them again and at this moment, the wall of earthen abominations started glowing with earth elemental energy and inside the wall where the water sect leader is desperately struggling to get out, the mouths opened up and they started spitting out sand.

    The sand moved with extreme speed and force as it slowly sted everything, the water dragon disappeared first and the elemental fusion of the water sect leader was gone next and finally, his skin started eroding with the sand grains.

    Then the bloody flesh was being eroded.

    The Water sect leader, opened his mouth wide with tears in his eyes, but he couldn¡¯t even get out thatst cry because of the sand and its motion.

    When everything was cleared, the Earth Sect leader walked to therge crater he created and all he could see is a skeleton with a lot of tiny holes giving it a porous structure.

    He looked at what remained of a person who was treated as a brother in the past and a moment of rity returned to his eyes, but it onlysted for a second, before that crazy look returned.

    At this moment, something gray came out of his body. It has multiple faces all over its body and is transparent. Night Ghost who is looking at this through surveince looked at it in horror.

    "This... This.." He looked at Sam with fear.

    Sam just nodded confirming his suspicions with a solemn look.

    This is a Cursed Ghost. A different type though. It is also called a Ghost Chimera in the circle of the cultivators who use ghosts. This is the greatest of the abominations anyone can create. Ghost Chimeras are hard to find and even after the creator who is the only person who has absolute control dies, it doesn¡¯t go away.

    It will be a stray, it will possess whoever is next to it, every soul that was part of this creation will channel its negative emotion into the new host, making him go crazy over the smallest of the mistakesmited by people around him.

    It was known that once a Chimera managed to possess a sword cultivator and he killed eight hundred people because the soup he ate didn¡¯t taste as good as it did before.

    This is the story that Night Ghost heard when he was at the starting stages of his cultivation and now a Ghost Chimera like that is in front of them.

    And he is looking at it performing the worst thing that it can do. Devour the soul of the victim and merge with it so that it can increase its power.

    They saw as the grey ghost slowly pulled out the soul off of the Water Sect Leader¡¯s remains and forcefully merge it and an additional face appeared on its body before it went back into the Earth Sect Leader¡¯s body.

    By now, the other two sect leaders arrived at the spot.

    They looked at each other in shock when they realized what had happened.

    Earth Sect leader is standing there with a weird bloodthirsty look while the Water Sect leader¡¯s skeleton lied there.

    If only they were closer. Because of the fear of triggering another supposed suicide bombing, they stayed too far away in their own sect headquarters that are in different corners of the Inner City, and now by the time they made their way here, one of their brothers was killed by another one.

    They became vignt and the Metal Sect leader asked.

    "Brother, what happened? Why did you do this? You better hope you have a proper exnation."

    He said as he used the elemental fusion. Since the Earth Sect leader also has the fusion body activated, he figured that it would be better if he is also prepared. But he doesn¡¯t know that it is not his same brother.

    "Why are you activating fusion? Do you want to kill me too? Are all of you nning to kill me from the start? Those enemies are trying to kill me, you are trying to kill me. All of you are trying to kill me. This is unfair. This cannot happen."

    The Earth Sect Leader covered his face as he muttered continuously in some pain. He could almost hear the whispers of some voices in his ears.

    ¡¯Yes, they are trying to kill you.¡¯

    ¡¯They don¡¯t care for you. They want your life. They crave for your life.¡¯

    ¡¯You need to die for them. Otherwise, they wouldn¡¯t back down.¡¯

    ¡¯You are going to die. You are going to be killed by your brothers.¡¯

    "No, No. NO. NO. STOOPP. You can¡¯t kill me."

    As he muttered constantly, he looked at his two brothers. Looking at his state, the two sect leaders felt concerned. They may be rivals, but they really did treat each other like brothers, they cannot see one of their own suffering like this.

    They took a step forward to take a look at him. But all of a sudden, the Earth Sect Leader yelled.

    "DON¡¯T COME FORWARD. DON¡¯T YOU DARE COME TO ME. YOU CANNOT KILL ME. I CANNOT DIE. I WILL KILL YOU. I WILL KILL YOU ALL."

    He yelled as he made hand signs.

    The two sect leaders looked at each other and understood that their brother has really gone mental, they could only prepare themselves to defend and both also made hand signs.

    The Earth Element, metal element, and wood element raged constantly as they started attacking.

    Even though the Earth Element Sect Leader is exhausted from one battle, he still did great. He is holding his own against two other sect leaders and one could see why he is the second strongest. Too bad, the first strongest is not here. Otherwise, things would have been a bit better for them.

    But they couldn¡¯t do anything but fight. The two sect leaders wanted to bank on the fact that the Earth Sect leader is not in his top form to capture him, but soon they realized that they are being too ambitious.

 Chapter 1243: Holding Hostage

    One hourter.

    Sam and the team including his friends are all walking into the inner city. At the gate, the team spread as they started taking out the patrol guards and other people that are roaming around.

    They took one person after another without hesitation and they moved slowly.

    After an hour of this hunt, they finally arrived at one ce they are looking forward to entering.

    The ce where the battle between the sect leaders happened. The three sect leaders are allying on the ground with wound-ridden bodies. They couldn¡¯t find any energy in themselves to even stand up.

    The Earth Sect master, not only kill the Water Sect leader, he managed to fight the other two sect leaders to a draw right after that. Sam is really willing to see how strong the Fire Sect Leader is. But too bad, he is not here at the moment.

    But luckily, that was to their advantage as Sam is not sure that he would have been able to do what he did now with him present.

    Things would have ended extremely badly.

    Sam neared them along with the team as they looked at the three groaning middle-aged men in pity.

    The battle has just been over. They figured that they would make their way here in time for that, so they started exactly an hour after the battle started, and here they are.

    The battlested almost two hours.

    Night Ghost sent his ghosts out to take a quick patrol to check the positions of the remaining Grand Elders, who didn¡¯t show up at the scene which is kind of confusing.

    With themotion these four people created, it is almost impossible for the Grand Elders to not sense it with their cultivation level.

    But he didn¡¯t care much.

    He just looked at Paras and said.

    "You can do what you want with them. It is all yours now."

    With that, he took the spatial rings of the three alive leaders and the one dead leader as he walked along with the rest of the team. He left the Ghost Chimera there which is something only he can control so that Paras can have some backup.

    Currently, all the three sect leaders are wasted and they wouldn¡¯t be able to recover for months with the best treatment, much less attack now.

    And thus, the torture for the revenge began. Specter was also left there just in case Paras wants some memory extraction, so Sam doesn¡¯t have to worry about that side of things and can proceed with his ns.

    Sam entered the nearest sect headquarters, the Water Sect headquarters.

    When he entered with the team, all they got to meet are the young masters and some normal elders. There is not a single sign of the Grand Elders. Sam frowned at this.

    He put all of them in a formation set up for a controlled expression within a single hall and left one of his friends there with the trigger as he left for another sect.

    He was met with the same sight yet again and he did the same again and the same for the next three sects.

    Now, he essentially held all the people inside the sect hostage.

    He went to one of the high-level young masters and asked.

    "Where did the grand elders go?"

    "I don¡¯t know." The young master answered resolutely.

    *PAK*

    A p wasnded on the face as the young master fell onto the ground with blooding out of his ears.

    He turned to another young master and asked.

    "So, where are your grand elders? Where did they go while the sect is about to go extinct?"

    "I... I..." He wanted to say that he didn¡¯t know but when he looked at his peer on the ground, he gulped and said.

    "I don¡¯t know exactly where they went, but from what I heard, they are making preparations for the backup n. They are there to arrange things."

    "Where?"

    "I don¡¯t know. But all of them went to the Wormholes."

    Sam nodded and threw him back into the formation.

    "You guys might have heard and some of you might have even seen the explosion that urred in the grand hall a few days ago.

    I am the one who did that and you are currently inside the formation that could do the same but just a dozen times stronger. So, even if you are stronger than your sect leader, you wouldn¡¯t be able to escape and even if one of you tries to do that, the formation will trigger and everyone will die without even a piece of your body left. Be careful.

    I don¡¯t want to create another genocide today."

    After that, he went to the buildings with wormholes. Sam doesn¡¯t know how these wormholes appeared in this world. In every realm, they are different and at least one set of them would always be in one ce whereas if someone carefully put them there.

    He got one of the guards and asked to show which portal leads to that special ce and which portal the Fire Sect leader used to take the grand elders for the treatment.

    After marking both the portals, he got ready with some formations. The first thing he did is set up the thunder prison at the mouth of the portal used by the Fire Sect leader. The second one is a controlled explosion formation ced at the mouth of the second portal leading to the backup.

    After setting them up, Sam and the group waited.

    Meanwhile, on the other side of the first portal out of which Sam is eagerly waiting, a realm existed which housed The Pce of Divine.

    The Pce in which Vardar the one who is famed as the Divine Healer stayed.

    At this moment, he is sitting in front of the kneeling Fire Sect leader, who has all the grand eldersid down on some stretchers behind him.

    Vardar is an old man who looked to be around the sixties and had white hair. He had this weird feeling of divinity and holiness surrounding him.

    He had a gentle smile on his face, which seemed harmless to say the least.

    "So, the Fire sect leader of the Five Great Sects. I didn¡¯t expect a visit from you."

    "Thank you for granting the audience for my unworthy self, Lord Vardar."

    "Don¡¯t lower yourself like that. What is wrong with your subordinates? They look pretty unwell. That much elemental energy corrosion, that too of different elements that have conflicting properties, you seemed to have offended quite a formidable enemy."

    "We don¡¯t know who the enemy is my lord. We were suddenly attacked out of nowhere and this is the result of an explosive trap set directly in our grand hall. Our Sect is in utter chaos and because of some altercations, we lost at least ten other grand elders. We are in a pretty weakened state right now and we are potentially seeing a mass exodus to preserve our legacy."

    Vardar suddenly frowned. His calm demeanor waspletely gone for a second and he waspletely silent. He seemed to have been thinking something seriously. After a minute of that silence, he finally spoke.

    "My disciples will do the initial treatment. After that primary cleansing of the corrosion, they would need some special medicine for a few days and I would deliver the final treatment. Don¡¯t worry too much.

    After the primary cleansing ispleted, you can go back to your sect and take care of the matters there. You don¡¯t need to be present here."

    The Fire Sect leader was delighted, but he didn¡¯t show it and only showed the expression of sincerity and respect as he bowed once again.

    "Thank You, my Lord."

    "Do not worry about the payment now. We can talk about it after the situation with your sect is over. You can leave now."

    With that, the Fire Sect leader and the grand elders were taken away by attendants.

    After that, Vardar immediately stood up with his gentle and holy smilepletely gone. He went into his personal room as looked at therge expanse ofnd in front of him.

    "What the hell is this? Why am I having such a bad time now of all times? First, the grasp over the ck Ghosts ispletely gone, and right after that, within a few days, Grand Elders of the Five Great sects along with those young masters are also gone.

    All the moles ced in different cespletely disappeared. The situation ispletely going sideways and the deadline is nearing for me.

    What should I do?"

    He muttered to himself as he looked at the serene view in front of him.

    He thought for a moment and called for a disciple of his. The most recent disciple. A young dark elven woman.

    "Eleven, I want you to go with the Fire Sect master of the Five Great sects and take a look at the situation there. I want you to learn everything that happened there and who the enemy that caused all of this is."

    "Yes, Master." The Elven woman agreed and bowed before she left.

 Chapter 1244: Capture

    For the next three days, Sam just waited as he looked at the two portals. But there is no movement whatsoever. The people that are stuck inside the formation with explosives are feeling panicky by now. They thought, they would be saved by their Fire Sect Leader and the Grand Elders.

    But from the looks of it, they knew that their captors are looking forward to their arrival than them. On one hand, they want the sect leader toe and rescue them, but on the other hand because of the excitement Sam and the group are showing, they felt like if the sect leader and the grand elders came, and they died, the captives wouldn¡¯t be useful to Sam.

    For some odd reason, they didn¡¯t want to find out and even felt that the situation they are in would freeze like that without any changes.

    But the reality doesn¡¯t work that way and they knew of it too. When the Portal showed the signs of someone arriving, they understood it even more clearly.

    The Grand Elders arrived and as soon as they came, what they saw is Night Ghost standing in front of them.

    He made a move and started beating the crap out of them while his ghosts also started working, after a while when they are beaten down a bit, they were made known of the explosive formation and what would the result be, if they didn¡¯t anything funny.

    After they were also captured, there is only target left.

    At this moment, Sam went to meet Paras.

    "How are you feeling?"

    "A bit empty."

    "Seems like you are lot better than I thought." Sam replied and said.

    "Did you get the answers you are looking for?"

    "Yes. But I didn¡¯t feel what I thought I would feel when I got them."

    "Revenge always works that way. It fuels you with purpose and motivation throughout your whole life and then leaves youpletely empty after that purpose was gone. At least, you are not going crazy over it and trying to kill yourself. From my experience ny percent of people with your level of vengeance would alwaysmitting suicide."

    "I don¡¯t want to die. I just..."

    Sam didn¡¯t push him and just waited for him to continue.

    "Even though I got the answers, and knew the real reason for all of this happening, that only made me angrier first and then when I clearly digested the power and status of the people that are the cause of this, I felt so powerless that this whole purpose seemed empty.

    All the effort I put in, all the lives I have taken, all the distance I travelled, All of this seemed meaningless."

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "Do you know why Agni and Agun started working with me?"

    Paras didn¡¯t know the answer and just looked at him.

    "They wanted to kill a god. The God Hou Yi. Because that guy possessed the leader of the Sr Fragment at the tribe and raped a woman. He saw her through this idol ritual which she is conducting and couldn¡¯t control himself in the face of beauty and proceeded with this method.

    It is neither his body nor his genitals, but for the brief moment in which he could feel her, he decided to take her in.

    The Tribe chief rejected her because, he felt like he didn¡¯t do anything to her and didn¡¯t want to ept someone else¡¯s ruins. The God Hou Yi didn¡¯t care about her, in fact he would have already forgotten about her.

    But the woman, got pregnant and twins are born. They don¡¯t know who their father is. Biologically it is the tribe chief, but he didn¡¯t take them in, mentally, it would Hou Yi, but he didn¡¯t even care.

    This is the story they told me when I met them. They knew they are hitting their peak of their potential and they are not going to go so far. They knew they cannot even fathom getting back at the God that ruined their lives, but she directly told me, that she wanted to kill Hou Yi herself.

    Even now, she went back to the organization branch and started training kids with just my word, because she believes that I would be fulfilling her promise to let hernd the final blow no matter what her strength is.

    So, if you believe me just like she does, I would let you have your vengeance, the true vengeance."

    With that, Sam stood up and walked away. At the same time, Kiran ran over to inform that the Fire Sect leader came, but there is a small problem with that.

    When Sam arrived, he was dumbfounded by what he saw.

    Inside the Thunder Prison, three people are standing. One of them is obviously the Fire Sect leader and the other two are different. One dark elfdy and another person who seems to be her guardian.

    Sam recognized her.

    "You are that disciple of Vardar, aren¡¯t you?"

    "People call me Eleven now. And it would be better if you leave me now, before I get angry."

    "You are one cocky little girl. Why don¡¯t you rein in your temper for a moment and stay put?"

    Saber Monarch said from the side as he held a saber over his shoulder. The guardian looked at the surroundings vigntly. He knew that he cannot escape the thunder prison for now. That is the first thing he tried.

    "No matter what this is, we are sure that this has nothing to do with us. So, let us go and we will forget this ever happened."

    He spoke calmly, but Sam ignored him and looked at the Fire Sect leader.

    "I am waiting for you toe, but you brought guests, if you hadn¡¯t brought them over, things would have been a lot simpler."

    "Who are you?"

    "Me? I am the guy who is responsible for the ruin of your whole legacy. I am the destroyed of the Five Great Sects, among many other organizations of course."

    "You? You caused all of this?"

    "Yes, by the way, your four other sect leaders are dead."

    The Fire Sect leader was dumbfounded. He didn¡¯t want to believe it, but when he thought of where Sam and the group currently are, he couldn¡¯t help but believe him.

    "Okay, now there are three ways to do it. The first one is, I will kill all three of you and leave this ce.

    The second one is that you kill yourself, and I will leave the other two to go back to wherever they came from.

    The third one is that guardian would kill you, so that they could leave. You guys choose."

    The guardian gulped at this, because he knew he couldn¡¯t kill the sect leader. He is not that strong.

    "I cannot kill him. I am weak." He directly blurted out without thinking. The sect leader looked at him coldly but he didn¡¯t dare say anything. After all, Vardar has that guardian¡¯s back. If anything fishy happened, he would be the one that has to pay.

    "Well, then I would pick the first option. All three of you will die and I will leave the sect alone, Vardar wouldn¡¯t be able to find you guys and wouldn¡¯t know what happened. Since I will leave the sect alone and go away, he will take it out on the remaining Sect members."

    "Is there any option, in which I could live?" Fire Sect leader asked calmly.

    Sam thought for a moment and turned to Paras.

    "It is up to you."

    Paras too a deep breath and thought of the memories he has seen in the four sect leaders. That time, he could clearly see the fire sect leader in those memories, but his role is different from the rest.

    After some contemtion he said.

    "Give us your heirloom and we will leave you alone. Anyway, you wont be able to live here. With your sect weakened you will be going to that backup ce of yours. I don¡¯t really care whether you live or die."

    With that he turned around and left.

    Sam raised an eyebrow and looked at the Fire Sect leader.

    "You are in for some luck. So, you better cherish it. I won¡¯t give you the same choice if I were him after all."

    The Fire sect leader looked around and gritted his teeth, before he took out his spatial ring and threw it to Sam.

    He caught it and looked inside.

    It has thest piece of the heirloom, Sam needs.

    He opened the wrist screen and selected the Five Great sects. He didn¡¯t care about the gods¡¯ presence in the temple and just called for his teammates.

    "You guys go back ande back after an hour."

    Sam said as he looked at the grand elders. They did as they were told and Sam removed the formation there.

    Then his friends followed his instruction and removed the formations in different sects, before finally gathering at the Thunder Prison.

    One after another, they started using transference scrolls as they appeared in cave residence, and finally Sam did the same as he called the thunder prison back.

    Both the prison and him disappeared with only a difference of a second and finally the Five Great sects or at least what remained of them were free of him.

 Chapter 1245: Break

    Sam and the team arrived at the Cave residence and they started preparing to leave. He called for all the surveince devices and destroyed all the evidence of his presence including the cave residence.

    He threw all the team members into one of the divine dimension fragments and left his friends outside.

    "Where are we going next?"

    Arkiv asked.

    "Thest organization. I am actually kind of surprised that the other yers didn¡¯te here. So, I want to go there and take a look. I would like to see if that organization is finished off, if it is, then we go after the next three organizations after a break. We need to improve our cultivation.

    If it is not, let us help them out a bit and then proceed with the ns."

    "Help them out? It seems like someone is feeling generous." Watt said from the side.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "Seems like someone learned a few more words. Anyway, they didn¡¯te after this one and the ck Ghosts. If they did, things wouldn¡¯t have been easy for me. Their intervention would have caused a lot of trouble for me. So, I am just returning their favor, but intervening just enough to make them have an easy way."

    With that, they went to the next organization and as they presumed, all the yers are indeed there. Sam and the group met with Noah and Kumar.

    They are surprised to meet the trio and were curious enough to listen to the whole story. Just like Sam assumed, they didn¡¯t want to intervene with the ck Ghosts and the Five Great sects, because Sam already had his sights set on them. But they didn¡¯tpletely give up. They agreed to participate, if Sam was not finished before they are done in this organization, they decided to try their luck.

    In fact, ording to their initial estimates, they would have met Sam in the Five great sects.

    Sam was not really surprised, but they were shocked because Sam finished the sects and the ghosts before they could even make some significant progress in this organization.

    It turned out, the problem is once again with Dayus. He seemed to have gotten some people from who knows where and even though he couldn¡¯t just deal with the organization as Sam did, he can easily sabotage the ns of other yers which is exactly what he is doing.

    He is not making any progress and he is not letting other yers do so as well.

    This time, the yers didn¡¯t even have any prior agreement, except for one. They wouldn¡¯t interfere with each other¡¯s ns and whoever gets to the heirloom keeps it and if anyone wants it, they can duel and try to take it under fair circumstances.

    Except for that, there is nothing else in the cooperation.

    But Dayus was not even included in that agreement. Because of the incident, Arkiv revealed, he was ostracized. Giving out the information on one of the yers to an organization is something they cannot bring themselves to ept no matter how much they considered it.

    They couldn¡¯t even find an excuse to justify his actions, so they didn¡¯t bother cooperating with him and now he is taking revenge in this twisted way.

    So, Sam decided to help them.

    He didn¡¯t go after Dayus¡¯ men, he just went on and created more chaos in the organization with his team and within a few days, Dayus¡¯ ns didn¡¯t work anymore.

    In this chaotic situation, everyone is trying to get a piece of this organization and Dayus who is ambitious of them all, couldn¡¯t stop himself from getting some ideas with all the chaos caused, and one of the main reasons is that he doesn¡¯t know that Sam is involved in this.

    All of a sudden, he found a lot of openings and opportunities for some reason, but he didn¡¯t question it and attributed everything to his luck and fortune. But every opportunity he took up didn¡¯t work well. The results are alwaysckluster, to say the least, and sometimes, it even dyed his progress and made him take a few steps back.

    This is something he didn¡¯t expect to happen, but it did.

    Sam spent two months there, while his team focused on cultivation and only caused chaos in the breaks while the rest of the yers went on to deal with the organization.

    After these two months, Noah and Kumar managed to get the heirloom and no one bothered to fight it out with them.

    For a normal yer, the resources that they could get from an heirloom are too many and they can cultivate for a long time, so losing a couple of heirlooms is no big deal for them. They don¡¯t want to fight it out like that.

    But Dayus is not having any of it. He decided to fight and Noah took the opportunity to give him a basing of a lifetime.

    Dayus is only good at fighting headfirst. Maybe, Kumar would have been a better opponent for him with a close-call fight, but Noah is tricky, she yed him like he was an angry bull and led him on until he waspletely drowned with pain and suffering.

    She took out all the frustration, he made her feel on him.

    And when the yers are about to leave, Sam made an appearance to bid them goodbye.

    It turned out that everyone is going to take a break.

    They also know that the next six organizations are kind of a big league. Thete-stage Consummate stage cultivators of Astral ne would be the leaders and there is a chance that there would be more than one leader.

    Most of the yers are still within the Astral ne Pre-transcendent stage. They want to take a break for six months. They managed to find some things that could grow their progress with the exchange of heirloom they had until now and they are sure they would reach Sam¡¯s level in six to eight months.

    Sam decided to take this chance and take a break as well.

    Even if he didn¡¯t have something that could increase his progress by two levels as they did, his teammates have to increase their cultivation and many of them are very close. So, in this time period, they would increase their cultivation which would make him feel at ease.

    So, Sam made a deal with them.

    He would take a six months break and he would go after the first of the next three and they will go after thest of the next three.

    If things go well, they would meet in the middle and make the same deal they made when they are dealing with the fiend tribe and the Myriad beast sect.

    But if not, whoever finishes theirs first can go after the middle one.

    With that, Sam returned to deste.

    He introduced his students to the trio and they also went to take a look at the city. There are many changes, new weapon systems, puppetworks, surveince upgrade,s and many others.

    Most of the structure remained the same, but new formations were added.

    They felt nostalgic and then they went to Watt¡¯s home. His wife was surprised when she saw him and ran into his arms.

    Watt introduced the two new members to her and they spent the day there chatting.

    Watt stayed in his house for the next three days and only came back to deste after that.

    The trio went to meet the students they taught in the school, the administrative divisions they managed, and the people they trained to take over the administrative roles.

    Meanwhile, Sam took the teammates to the cultivation chambers, to see if this can assist them in cultivation and it really did.

    For the next six months, they stayed there and worked their ass off. Without any surprise, Sam didn¡¯t manage to have a breakthrough to the next stage. But many of his teammates did. His friends also didn¡¯t have a breakthrough because they just had one, when Sam visited them.

    And the best thing is that Night Ghost managed to have one, because of the Souls he got from the two sect leaders.

    Sam didn¡¯t let the Ghost Chimera eat them, because it is already too powerful. He only managed to control it because he created it, if it became too powerful, he wouldn¡¯t be able to control it. He really must thank his mental energy to hold it in for now.

    He went after the next target with newfound excitement. It has been a while since he and his friends worked together. Even though they worked against the Five great sects, the most satisfying part was gathering intelligence as they figured out how they could screw the others over easily.

    They couldn¡¯t do it for the Five Great sects, but now they can do it for the next organization.

    While they are going there with this excitement, what they met there is not exciting at all.

    Sam was met with a big surprise that could change his life and make it upside-down instantly.

 Chapter 1246: Trap

    Sam and the team arrived at the realm just like every other time.

    The headquarters is a city of the desert.

    This is an oasis city and is built on the bank of a mysterious spring that created a stream that spanned throughout the desert to the forest far away.

    They arrived at the forest which is around a hundred kilometers away from the city of the desert. The desert here is extremely dangerous and is ridden with all kinds of dangerous creatures and natural traps.

    There is only one path that is beside the stream that is rtively safe and the temperature of the desert is so high that it almost feels like they are inside a volcano. Even Astral ne Consummate cultivators feel parched and they would also need to take rest within this journey from the forest to the city.

    They arrived at the forest because Sam wanted to test all kinds of creatures and traps that are within the surroundings of the path along the stream so that he might use it to his advantageter.

    The people from the next organization always move from the forest city to the desert city on this side, to conduct trades and other stuff.

    If this is not the area theye out, the next one is to the rear of the city which leads to the mountain and the path is ten times as dangerous and twice as long as this one.

    Unless one is an Astral ne Consummate, there is no way to say for sure that they can travel this area safely if they didn¡¯t stay beside the stream. Because there are always crowds of people namely merchant groups moving here and there.

    This is the only route that has the Elders ofrge organizations acting as the leaders of the merchant caravans.

    Most of the time, they provide escort service and they wouldn¡¯t leave anyone to die here unless the said person strayed too far away from the path particrly when they ignore the warnings of the leader of the group.

    And at this moment, Sam and the group are traveling on their own and since Night Ghost is a legit Astral ne Consummate cultivator, there is no problem for them and from their demeanor, someone even asked if they could tag along for some money.

    Sam didn¡¯t take in any of them of course. He doesn¡¯t want any extra burden and responsibility on this trip.

    And all the way through, Sam is using the crystal table to check the whole area within the influence of the table.

    He noticed a lot of creatures under the sand and they are really dangerous. He noticed their nests and one particr beast interested him a lot. A Purple ck Scorpion. This one stayed underground and all the beasts nearby are trying to please this one so much.

    They are bringing any natural resources that are growing nearby, hunted merchants or cultivators and even some beasts and are leaving them all to this onerge scorpion.

    From the looks of it, the cultivation of the scorpion is very high.

    That is not the only thing, Sam found interesting though.

    He heard some of the merchants talking about something that made not just him, but a lot of first-timers going to the city a bit curious.

    The news is that nothing came out of the City of Desert for the past few days. At least for the past three days, no one has seen peopleing from the City of Desert, and no one who went there returned yet.

    The merchant who talked about it is pretty nervous. As for how he is so sure, it is because one of the people that went and didn¡¯te back is his cousin and one of the reasons he is going there is to find his cousin and bring him back.

    At first, many people thought he was bullshitting and didn¡¯t believe him, after all the City of Desert is one of thergest trading zones in this realm and this ce has the richest earth elemental resources that one could ever buy in the whole realm.

    Nobody wants something that big to happen in a ce like that and their best way to deal with it now so that they don¡¯t have to face the disappointment, for now, is denial. The good old denial.

    But Sam doesn¡¯t have those problems, when he heard that no one ising out of the city, he has both a good feeling and a bad feeling.

    The first one is that this means, the city of the desert has a problem which he could take advantage of and easily get to them.

    The second one is that there is a possibility, they were informed of Sam¡¯s or the yers¡¯ arrival in advance and they might have been prepared.

    Even though it is a long shot, Sam felt that it is a possibility that he cannot ignore. After all, this happened before and there is no absolute certainty that it wouldn¡¯t happen again.

    But no matter what it is, Sam didn¡¯t have a choice. He has to reach the City of Desert.

    After a few hours of travel, they finally arrived at the city and all the merchants were dumbfounded by what they saw.

    There are a lot of guards at the entrance of the city and there is arge tollbooth arranged.

    Every group is being checked repeatedly and they were being sent to a specific location under the supervision of an Astral ne Consummate cultivator and they need to go through another checking process.

    One of the high-level merchants asked.

    "What is the asion for you to check us this much?"

    "Sir, we are really sorry for the inconvenience, but there is some problem within the city for the past few days, so we need to make sure that no one troublesome enters the city."

    "Troublesome?"

    "A group with certain characteristics are attacking the city and they are trying to sneak in. So, we have to check. I cannot give more details."

    Sam listened to every word they spoke. He is still a bit vignt, but a bit rxed as well. If the search is for some other one, then the first case scenario, the city being under some problem is advantageous to them.

    The guards checked Sam and the group, before saying.

    "Go to the Sand Mortal Inn, in the southwestern corner of the city. That guard will escort you."

    Sam just nodded and followed the guard to that Inn.

    But what they didn¡¯t notice is that the guard seemed to be nervous going to that ce.

    While Sam and the team are walking they noticed that city is silent.

    There are no people other than the guards walking outside. It is as silent as it could be. Every shop on their way is closed and every house they went past is locked tight and for every few houses, there is a guard standing nearby.

    Soon, Sam and his group arrived at the Inn¡¯s entrance and were sent inside.

    Inside the Inn, there is no one present at the entrance, and even the ground floor which is supposed to be the restaurant of the Inn, ispletely empty. It is devoid of tables and any other seating arrangements.

    "Hello,

    Anybody there?"

    Saber Monarch yelled and apart from the slight echo of his voice, there is nothing inside therge hall.

    Sam and the group walked there and the bad feeling Sam had suddenly increased. He couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit scared as well.

    This feeling made him sweat.

    All of a sudden, he suddenly looked at his teammates and said.

    "Get a transference scroll ready."

    But as they were about to take a scroll out, Sam felt something and he immediately waved his hands. His friends and Arkiv along with Kiran and the twins, Sia and Gran are captured into the lightning divine dimension.

    And before Sam could even enter or take other teammates with him, his body froze at an awkward angle.

    Not just him, even the Night Ghost, the strongest of them all couldn¡¯t move at all. When he noticed that his physical body is unable to move, he tried to use his mental energy, but someone appeared out of nowhere and looked him into the eyes while muttering.

    "You are going to stay put without causing anymotion. You hear me right?"

    Sam looked at him from the corner of his eye as he couldn¡¯t make a move. He is trying to channel his spatial energy to see if he could get out of this lock, but he was unable to.

    The man who appeared near Night Ghost is someone very powerful which is very apparent. He has a simr build to the night ghost and he even looked the same age. But he has a square face and arge beard and he didn¡¯t wear any upper clothes.

    At this moment, Sam heard some footsteps

 Chapter 1247: Three Wishes

    Sam tried to turn around and look, but he couldn¡¯t, but after a few tries, all of a sudden, he felt someone turning him over forcefully and he finally faced the people who are entering the scene.

    There is a young man in the lead, who is being pushed on a wheelchair. One of his legs is missing. There is just a stump indicating the amputation. He only has his left leg. But that is not all. Even on the upper body, only his right arm is present.

    His face is distorted. There are a lot of scars and even some facial deformation that could be seen. His eyes are dull, but there is this sense of evil that has rarely been seen before.

    One look at those eyes, Sam could easily guess, what kind of destruction this guy could bring if it is needed. He is someone who doesn¡¯t stop no matter what happens and what kind of obstacles he would face.

    He would kill anyone and everyone including the children and elderly, ughter them as long as they served his purpose.

    Almost like Sam without the moral dilemma that sometimes makes him think.

    His cultivation level is the same as Sam¡¯s. He is being followed by a bunch of people and even the person who is looking deep into Night Ghost¡¯s eyes to keep him check stepped back and joined the group.

    In the group, one particr person had Sam¡¯s most attention. Dayus.

    That one guy whom Sam should have killed a long time ago. If not for the fact, Sam felt that his schemes might help him in dealing with thest batch of the organizations, he would have done exactly that.

    He looked at Dayus with an intense coldness that the other party didn¡¯t dare to meet his eyes. Then his vision went on to another person in the ground.

    A middle-aged man, who has a dignified look on his face as he walked gracefully beside the man in the wheelchair.

    They stopped a few feet away from Sam and the young man in the wheelchair finally spoke.

    "Hello, Sam.

    I am Sivan. It is nice to meet you. I have heard so much about you."

    Sam stayed silent as he waited for them to continue. No matter how he tried, he wasn¡¯t able to move his body. Even his energy cirction is mostly locked. He couldn¡¯t even channel the energy into his arms or legs so that he couldunch attacks. The most he could do is concentrate on his eyes.

    But even if he tried to attack in his current state, the only result that would await him is death.

    The other party has at least a dozen Consummate cultivators in his posse which made Sam suck in a breath of cold air.

    "Your friend or should I say, arch-enemy Dayus here ratted you out on something. For some reason, he managed to find out what I wanted most in this life and he delivered that information straight to me.

    What do you think I want, Sam?"

    Sam looked at him but didn¡¯t speak. But the other party didn¡¯t seem to mind as he continued speaking.

    "Well, you might have guessed. It is a body.

    You know, I wasn¡¯t born like this. One of my father¡¯s concubines, got jealous of my talent when awakened and she and her elder son did this to me the very night. The night of the celebration of my awakening.

    From that day onwards I lead the worst possible life. Luckily, my father knows how to think with his head sometimes instead of just his penis. My mother who is as powerful as him put him in his ce and decided to raise me and he didn¡¯t dare object.

    In these years of suffering, in fact, decades of suffering, there is one thing I have been trying to do. I hired many people to conduct research to regrow my arm and leg, I wanted to restore my face, but it was deemed impossible.

    You see, my father¡¯s concubine did something stupid so that any healer wouldn¡¯t be able to regrow them.

    After finding that out, I branched my thinking out and decided on one thing. Since I couldn¡¯t have my body, I will have someone else¡¯s body.

    But ordinary bodies are reallyckluster. They don¡¯t have enough potential, at least not equal to mine.

    I was sick and tired of checking them out and in fact tried to create one.

    The Five Elemental King you are using for your goals is actually one of those experiments. Vardar is the one who made him and threw him into the wild after some experiments failed. By now, the five elemental kings should have died, but he is alive and I heard that you have something to do with it."

    Sam finally showed a change of expression. Five Elemental King is one of his loyal subordinates. If Sam had to trust anyone without any soul contract, he would be the one.

    He knew Five Elemental King¡¯s body like the back of his hand. The amount of suffering that person has to go through is something he couldn¡¯t help butment.

    "So, you are here because you want me to restore your body too? Don¡¯t you think it ispletely inappropriate to talk about a business deal like this?"

    Sam said casually. His tone showed no hint of fear, not even a hint of panic.

    "You think too highly of yourself, don¡¯t you? You arrogant prick."

    Dayus chimed in with gritted teeth and it only took one look from Sam to silence him.

    The young man in the wheelchair just smiled and said.

    "I heard of your exploits, Sam. You are indeed one of a kind. Your body and mind are a perfect match. Your versatile thinking and your powerful body can handle that many elements. It is something that happens once in eons. I have inquired about your exploits.

    You are someone that would be remembered through the eons of history in different ways in different ces. Your stories would turn from stories that would be discussed by centuries toe and people will remember you for a hundred generations.

    But too bad, you are born in the same era as me and I am the one who is going to put an end to your legend here.

    I am taking your body, Sam."

    Sam stood there, without showing any change in his expression. His teammates though arepletely different, they are trying their best to break free from the shackles and now they are even willing to risk anything to just get a chance to let Sam escape.

    "Stop." Sam said calmly and the teammates wanted to retort, but they were unable to speak, only Sam was allowed to speak now.

    When the young man looked at the subordinates who instantly stopped but still had that hint of panic, he smiled.

    "It seems like the stories didn¡¯t do you enough justice. Don¡¯t worry, after I take your life, I will leave your legacy undisturbed. I shall have your name and legends written in the history books of our n and passed down to every single of your organizations so that they could remember your life as it is."

    "Are you sure about doing this?" Sam asked.

    "You are awfully calm about this. I like you more and more. If you really manage to survive the procedure, we can be friendster."

    Sam just smiled.

    Dayus had a vicious smile on his face. He felt satisfied by what he is seeing in front of him. Sam has been a thorn in his neck since the first time they met in the Deste. He has been undermining him in every single aspect.

    He couldn¡¯t take it anymore and decided to make a big move and it seeded.

    "Do you have any wishes, before I start the procedure? I wouldn¡¯t mind promising a few things and be assured that I would be a man of my word."

    "Then agree to sign a soul contract for three of my wishes."

    "Three?"

    "Yes."

    "Okay, I will sign. As long as your wishes are not overboard, you don¡¯t have to worry about it. Let¡¯s hear them first."

    "The first one, let my teammates go. They will leave immediately and they wouldn¡¯t attack you. They will go back to my organization¡¯s headquarters and stay there."

    "That is okay with me. Their deaths serve no purpose to me."

    "You will leave my organization alone. You or your subordinate organizations, any of them, and even your rival organizations wouldn¡¯t attack them and that includes Dayus, the one behind you. That is your responsibility."

    "I cannot offer permanent protection for your organization for the whole life. You know that."

    "Okay then, for a decade. Butplete protection. You shall not think of taking over my businesses or acquiring any inventions and such and you will protect them from any other organization doing so."

    "I can promise you that. A decade is within my limits."

    "You have onest wish."

 Chapter 1248: Procedure

    "You have onest wish."

    Sam stayed silent as if he was thinking something. But suddenly the dignified man beside the man on the wheelchair suddenly spoke.

    "Sir Sam, would you please refrain from using the techniques you are trying. I am feeling a bit uneasy and that is not good for you. If I am unable to control myself, you would be in peril."

    Sam was stunned and so were the rest of the people in the room.

    The young man smiled as he looked at Sam.

    "You are an amusing young man. If you survive this procedure, I need to spend a lot of time with you. There is no one who managed to make Butler Si those words. You see, his control over energy is best in the realm.

    Just what kind of techniques are you using?"

    "Young Master Sivan, I think he is using those bloodline techniques. I once heard he managed to escape the seize of a few Mortal ne Consummate cultivators, while he is just a grand realm cultivator."

    Dayus spoke from the side and Sam looked at him with anger apparent in his eyes. He really wanted to kill Dayus more than ever. He is really regretting his decision of letting him go so many times. He should have killed him when he attempted to take his life on Nike.

    He made a mistake letting him go. Just because of his scheming mind, Sam wanted to use that to go against thergest organizations ever, but it turned out that his decision is wrong and it bit him in the back big time.

    "An escape ability, it seems like you are still hoping to get out of here." The young man spoke.

    But Sam didn¡¯t answer. He is indeed trying to use his bloodline arts. In fact, he has tried to use all of them, but for some reason, this spatial lock not only refrained his movement, but alsopletely locked his energy usage.

    He could barely use it and the most he can do is use energy vision.

    He used all the bloodline arts, the golden sun crow bloodline arts, Sky sovereign roc¡¯s arts, Hydra¡¯s shadow mice¡¯s, and even the lightning arts.

    The shadow transverse which always worked didn¡¯t even work now.

    He doesn¡¯t even know what he should do to get out of here.

    "Anyway, I don¡¯t feel offended by that. It is actually a bit respectful. I will still grant your third wish, just ask away and try to get away as much as you want. I want to see how you will react in the face of absolute failure."

    Sam took a deep breath.

    "Before I ask, I want to know the procedure."

    "Why?"

    "You keep saying if I survive the procedure, so I would like to make a wish based on my chance of survival and after I hear the procedure, I will be able to estimate my chances of survival."

    "Interesting."

    Sivan looked at Sam with intriguing eyes. He has seen many people who stood in Sam¡¯s position. This is not the first body, he attempted to take over, but not even a single person¡¯s body managed to impress him to perform thest step of the procedure that could make him take over.

    And everyone he faced, always threatened, requested, and finally begged to be left alive. Sam is the first person talking as if this whole thing is a business deal.

    "Young Master Sivan, you shouldn¡¯t listen to his words. He is definitely trying something."

    Sivan gave Dayus a look and said.

    "Did I say this is your ce to talk?"

    Dayus felt a shiver down his spine and didn¡¯t dare speak anymore.

    Then Sivan turned to Sam once again and said.

    "Since you are so cooperating this will be less painful for you too. So, listen to the procedure properly.

    First, my soul and your soul will connect and I would be performing the soul cloning technique. A technique in which a soul would be replicated with the same exact memories.

    It is highly dangerous and severely against naturalws. One must need a lot of mental energy to perform this technique, in fact, their mental energy should be three to four times the normal mental energy for their cultivation.

    My soul and your soul will both undergo this process and if your mental energy is not enough, I will forcefully make a clone out of it, which would make you unable to survive the process.

    After the clones are created, they would be a bit dormant and slow, in that process, I will leave my clone in my original body and forcefully, inject my original into yours recing your original.

    Your original will then be forcefully injected into my body.

    Since your clone will be dormant, I will take over the body and slowly absorb the memories, mental energy, and all the secrets of your soul which would make me one with the body.

    It would feel like I have been living with that body for my whole life and if you manage to do the same with my body, you would also feel the same. But it would be hard for you to take over my body since my soul is a bit harder to crack."

    "Crack?"

    "Yes, every dormant soul uses something to block themselves from the devouring procedure, I think yours will be harder too, but I think I will be able to do it."

    Sam thought of the situation, while he tried to take out things from divine dimensions and spatial rings, none of those things are working.

    He couldn¡¯t help but look at the man named Butler Si. He is indeed something. He could just control himself and his subordinates like this.

    Sam thought of all the possible ways to escape now, but he couldn¡¯t. The cultivation differences in terms of strength and numbers are too many.

    Head-on confrontation is impossible. Sam looked at Sivan for a moment and then turned to Dayus.

    "Myst wish is rted to him."

    "Do you want me to kill him? But that is not possible, I already made a deal with him regarding that. Unless he offends me in some ways, I wouldn¡¯t be able to break the promise."

    "No, I don¡¯t need you to kill him, rather I want you to keep him within your organization until Ie."

    "Until youe from where?"

    Sam just stayed silent, he didn¡¯t answer.

    "Is that all there is to it?"

    "Yes, I want you to sign a contract. No matter what happens here, you and your organization will hold on to this agreement."

    Sivan looked at him with an amusing look and gestured for someone in the rear to get something.

    They brought a scroll and Sivan wrote all the conditions before signing the contract, Sam looked through everything, and after making sure that there are no loopholes whatsoever, he just went on to sign.

    He took a deep breath and looked at Dayus.

    "One day, I wille for you. It might be near or far from the time now, but I will being for you and that day I will tear you apart inch by inch.

    I will capture your soul and attach it to dead bodies as I let you get the feeling of the rotting slowly.

    I will create you into the worst kind of specter there is and make you go through the worst of the tortures known to men and gods. You will regret ever starting this with me, you will regret ever meeting me, after I am done with you, the pain I leave behind will besting for you throughout your reincarnations until the end of time."

    "You really mean that don¡¯t you. I am kind of hoping you would survive now." Sivan spoke with amusement while Dayus felt a shiver down his spine. Something deep in his mind is telling him that he made a wrong decision today.

    Sam turned to Sivan and spoke.

    "There are a few things you should know about this body before you take over, the dormant phase mightst longer than you think and I don¡¯t want you to make mistakes in that period of time that would destroy the body and your soul."

    "Why, thank you. Do tell."

    "First, my cultivation technique is linked to the legendary mythical beasts and they all currently stay in the divine dimension, you need to share the energy with all those beasts linked via cultivation and since my soul clone would be dormant, they wouldn¡¯t respond to you.

    And you should never force yourself on them. You shouldn¡¯t try to forcefully subdue them. They are too proud and their status is far too nobler than you. They will kill themselves, which in turn will kill you. So, slowly win them over.

    For every breakthrough, you are going to obtain you need to do it with all of them and you wouldn¡¯t be able to cultivate inside the divine dimension, so you need to get them out.

    Bloodline arts will put too much strain both physically and mentally, so don¡¯t use them unless you need to.

    Don¡¯t expose the beasts or bloodlines to the outside world, I wouldn¡¯t even go as far as trusting your butler with that, I don¡¯t know how powerful your organization is, but if they are shown, I dare say that every single cultivator with some strength and confidence will want to have them.

    There is a tower inside the divine dimension and there are some beasts guarding it, if you want to enter it, you must win over the beasts linked to your cultivation and they will convince those beasts to let you in, until then you wouldn¡¯t be able to get in.

    And finally, I am sorry."

    "What do you mean sorry?"

    "You will understand soon enough. I am ready for the procedure."

 Chapter 1249: Escape

    Sam just stood there calmly. He didn¡¯t even bother to speak. Butler Si, set the teammates free. Sam wanted to throw the lightning divine dimension to them, but all of a sudden, he stopped as he thought of something.

    He looked at the team and said.

    "Get back to the headquarters, don¡¯t worry about me. I will being back."

    "But Boss..."

    "I said, I will being back. Since when did you guys start questioning my judgment? You seemed to have grown some extra brains while I was talking here."

    Sam spoke in a harsh tone. He is clearly pissed and he doesn¡¯t want his team to second guess him at the moment. He knew they would be upset and angry at themselves and him for not putting up a fight, but what they don¡¯t know is that he is nning on putting up a fight. But not just some short and futile one.

    He has killed everyone that wanted his things and now someone is directly asking for his whole body and soul. He wouldn¡¯t let him off the hook no matter what. But the only difference is that Sam would let this guy enjoy what he asked for.

    After they were sent away, Sam just extended his arms and awaited the procedure to be done.

    "I am really liking you more and more," Sivan said with a smile.

    "You wouldn¡¯t do that for a long time don¡¯t worry."

    Sivan didn¡¯t mind his words. He believed in logical facts, not some emotional threats and statements. He just gestured for the people behind him and they started drawing arge inscription circle for the ritual that is about to happen.

    Even while they are doing that, Sam kept on trying to use different bloodline arts and the one that he is trying the most is the shadow transverse. Since he already had his organs upgraded because of the shadow element, it is a great escape method that uses a very small amount of energy.

    But to his dismay, he wasn¡¯t able to use this.

    So, he moved on as he tried the bloodline arts of other beasts. Raiju¡¯s attacks are useless too and then he went on to use Dia¡¯s and then forest bear¡¯s. None of them showed any reaction other than the Butler Si, having a weird expression on his face.

    Sam finally had only one option to choose from and that is the Void hopper. The Void hopper is a very special beast and Sam really didn¡¯t understand the significance much as he barely used space element in his fights and that is when he even fights these days.

    But that day, Sam understood the significance of it, but not just the normal significance, but also something else in the middle of the procedure.

    He wanted to use the bloodline ability of the Void hopper and this time, it finally had a bit of reaction.

    Butler Si, suddenly grew vignt as he looked at Sam.

    "Sir Sam. Please make my job easier, so that I don¡¯t need to hurt youter."

    Sam just smiled and didn¡¯t reply.

    Soon, the time came for the procedure. After therge inscription circle was gone, Sam and Sivan sat in the middle of it facing each other.

    Sivan started making hand signs quickly as he channeled the energy from the circle.

    Sam could feel the energy entering his head.

    He closed his eyes and looked into his sea of consciousness to see the energy condensing into another sea of consciousness as it replicated the first one.

    The process went on for four hours. By the end of it, Sam had two simr seas of consciousness inside the body and he could feel one being dormant and the other being active.

    He manifested consciousness into soul forms. Two silhouettes simr to his formed inside his head and one of them is active, while the other looked like it was sleeping while standing.

    The first one moved to the second and ced its arm on its face.

    Sam flinched a bit, but for a moment and the first took off the arm, but the very next second, he ced the arm once again as Sam rapidly thought.

    All of a sudden, the second dormant silhouette started glowing even more. It normally looked like a condensation of the light and now it is glowing and at the same time, the light seemed to have shifted a bit and rearranged back into its original state.

    At this moment, Sam¡¯s original soul, the active one felt a suction force. Within that space in his mind, something simr to a portal appeared as it sucked the first soul out and when Sam regained his senses back, he is in a simr space, but what awaited in front of him is a dormant soul replica of Sivan.

    It is unlike Sam¡¯s that majestically stood while sleeping, this one is crouching on the ground as it huddled its limbs.

    He touched the soul and tried tomunicate, but it is impossible to do so, he felt an extreme resistance.

    Meanwhile, the situation inside Sam¡¯s original head is not exactly bad. He looked at Sam¡¯s dormant soul with great excitement. He wanted to absorb it right at the moment so that he could live his life normally with great power.

    But at this moment something happened.

    Sam who is inside Sivan¡¯s body opened his eyes and he still felt a faint connection with his original body. Even though most of it has to do with thest thing he did with his soul, it is going to work.

    Sivan wanted to open his eyes and explore his new body, but all of a sudden, he felt a sudden change.

    The Dormant Soul which shouldn¡¯t have been active at all, suddenly moved even with his eyes closed, and all of a sudden, Sivan felt a soul-searing pain as his soul form held its head involuntarily.

    The Ghost Chimera appeared out of the Dormant body as it created a certain lock all over the dormant soul, but only one small piece of the soul was left outside of the lock and that piece was actually severed.

    While Sivan was feeling the pain, the piece of soul manifested and went directly into the Lightning divine dimension and hit Philip¡¯s head.

    But that is not the end of it.

    The Void hopper¡¯s bloodline started churning and this time, Butler Si doesn¡¯t know what to do. He has half a mind to stop him, but Sam who is already in Sivan¡¯s body said.

    "Are you sure, you want to stop him? It is your master after all. It is his doing."

    His words worked as Butler Si, didn¡¯t dare to use force on the young master.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is that his young master desperately wants him to use that locking technique to make the body powerless for a moment.

    The sudden attack of the Ghost Chimera made him unable to even take over the body much less use the attack.

    At this moment, Sam¡¯s body changes. All of a sudden, his right hand that had lightning and ice divine dimension rings along with two more spatial rings, had a transference scroll in it and it was activated. Spatial energy riled up as the arm was cut off cleanly at the elbow and it disappeared along with the transference scroll.

    His teammates used the transference scrolls to return after they were given a green light and at this moment they are in the process of destroying their presence there, but all of a sudden, the node activated and the arm appeared out of nowhere.

    Before they could react, Sam¡¯s friends, Sia and Gran, Kiran, and all of them appeared out of it with gloomy expressions.

    Meanwhile, back in the City of Desert.

    Butler Si, was dumbfounded when the arm disappeared, but before he could react everything happened. Since it was his young master¡¯s new body, his focus waspletely on Sam, which made him unable to react on time.

    He looked at Sam in Sivan¡¯s original body and threatened.

    "What is happening?"

    "Whatever it is happening, don¡¯t worry, your young master will survive. He just underestimated me a bit, that is all. My soul has a lot more to offer than he thinks and it is a lot harder to obtain it just because of the duplicate he created.

    Tell himter, that I would definitelye looking for him and take that body back."

    Butler Si had a bad feeling about this, but all of a sudden Sam¡¯s original body moved its left hand and palmed Sivan¡¯s original body in the chest.

    This time Butler Si, is ready and he used his spatial lock to block the energy, but all of a sudden, his movements became slower. Not just his movements, even his thoughts became slower. Before he could evenprehend what is happening in front of him which looked like it was happening in a sh, the palmnded on Sivan¡¯s original body and a spatial vortex appeared before it swallowed Sam with his new body.

 Chapter 1250: [Bonus Chapter]Disperse

    Sivan finally opened his eyes as his pain ispletely gone.

    He couldn¡¯t feel his right arm and felt a bit shocked and anxious, but only after he felt how strong his body is and how powerful he felt, did he realize that the process is a sess.

    He finally changed his body and then came what happened in thest second.

    Sam left a residual soul fragment and the Ghost Chimera in the duplicate at thest moment before his departure. The Soul fragment had themands and the Ghost Chimera possessed the duplicate which is the original resident of the body even though it is a duplicate, managed to easily use the body in the moment that Sivan is trying to take over.

    This unexpected and bold resistance caused Sivan to unable to focus and the Void Hopper bloodline activated. The first thing it did is, send his friends and the rest of the teammates home while the bloodline technique, Spatial transfer was used to send Sam who is already in Sivan¡¯s body away to a distant unknown location.

    This Void Hopper¡¯s ability doesn¡¯t seem special, but it can actually send anything to some unknown ce and even if a person with a stronger cultivation ability was caught off guard without any chance to evade and has no idea whatsoever on how to resist the spatial energy, he would still be sent away.

    Sam made the old body use the technique on the new body so that he could disappear from that spot.

    There is no way, he is staying here after the transfer. He would definitely be getting his body back, but there would definitely be consequences for the organization behind Sivan. So, he took the chance to getaway.

    Butler Si ran to Sivan and asked.

    "Young master, are you okay?"

    "I am fine Butler Si. But where is that guy?" Sivan asked with a hint of anger in his tone. He finally understood why Sam apologized out of the blue while giving advice to him. He sessfully fooled everyone and Sivan mostly.

    He was actually trapped with over a dozen Astral ne Consummate cultivators surrounding him and his team and even the team¡¯s strongest is unable to take down one of these twelve people.

    But not only did he manage to send all his teammates away, he also made him sign the document making him even responsible for the protection of the organization and everyone who belonged to it which also includes Sam¡¯s team, but he also disappeared from the spot.

    This is the biggest p in the face.

    Even though Sam gave up his body in the process, he looked like the winner.

    On the other hand, Dayus is terrified. There are two things he observed in this situation. The first one is that Sam escaped from the spot when every one of them was sure that he would barely survive or be dead and the other thing is the one moment before Sam escaped.

    He felt some kind of invisible force around and within him and he felt so slow. In fact, he couldn¡¯t even finish the thought that he was slow for a moment, but Sam¡¯s body and Sivan¡¯s body, the two people that are within the influence of the bloodline art didn¡¯t have this effect, in fact, they looked faster than ever.

    That palm strike was not even visible to them and so is the disappearance. It happened so fast. It is faster than the lightning strike and thatparison is not metaphorical.

    But Sivan who is within the art range didn¡¯t feel anything. He felt like everything went at a normal pace.

    He stood up and took some medicine Butler Si gave him and felt better than ever as his arm regrew.

    He started throwing punches in the air as he felt stronger than ever. He closed his eyes and looked into the sea of consciousness. Sam¡¯s soul is locked up inside the body of the Ghost Chimera.

    The Chimera has dozens of heads protruding out of it as it looked at Sivan¡¯s sea of consciousness hungrily, but they didn¡¯t move. Sam¡¯smand is to guard the body at all times, they would only go for the meal when the sea of consciousness attacked.

    He knew that cracking the dormant soul is not going to be easy. In fact, it is a hundred or a thousand times more difficult. If he attacked the chimera and triggered its fear, it would take over the dormant soul and forcefully sh with him.

    And if he lost, Sam¡¯s dormant soul would be forcefully activated sooner and since it is the natural host of the body since the beginning, it would fit right in without any problem.

    He couldn¡¯t help but smile as he thought of how Sam did all of this.

    He had perfect nning for six months. He destroyed a city and killed everyone in that to set up a n. But Sam outsmarted everyone else.

    His subordinates came to take care of him as they started their journey back to their home and Dayus was forced to tag along. None of the subordinates bothered to discuss the smallpse of time they experienced at that moment.

    They all only cared about the sess of their young master. But Butler Si had different thoughts.

    "Young master, should I arrange a team to find Sam?"

    "No need."

    "But he has your face. If he does anything serious..."

    "Let him do it. I want to see what he can do with that fragile and crippled body."

    Meanwhile.

    Somewhere far away. Many realms away from the that City of Desert. In arge snow in, Sam woke up with a dizzy head.

    He looked at the surroundings in surprise. He didn¡¯t expect to wake up in a snow in. Of course, he didn¡¯t expect the exact location anyway, but the snow in is thest thing on his mind.

    He opened his eyes and took a look at his body once again. He really wished that all of this that happened could be a dream and it would all be gone once he woke up.

    But he knew for sure that this is not a dream.

    And there is one thing that made him curious more than the ce surrounding him.

    The bloodline art he used.

    The void hopper is a space elemental beast and Sam knew the working of the Bloodline art and it is definitely not supposed to be like this.

    This Spatial transfer art should only be sending the target to somewhere random. But Sam has half a mind that his first attempt would fail because of Butler Si¡¯s interference because that guy is also a space element cultivator and he is way stronger than Sam.

    He really thought that he would be stopped and even had a backup n ready with the second bloodline technique of the Void hopper.

    But for some reason, Butler Si wasn¡¯t able to react at all.

    Sam noticed that his movements became particrly slow. Even his energy waves were released slowly and same with all the other subordinates that wanted to make a move.

    He felt that he caught on to something regarding this void hopper and if he was in his original body, he would have definitely started doing some tests, but now it is not possible.

    He looked for the spatial rings and checked the items inside. He was surprised by what he saw. There are no weapons, whatsoever. All it was filled with are a bunch of transference scrolls, a couple of wheelchairs that don¡¯t have any special features except for some extrafort and some crutches. Apart from that, there are some pills that could heal and alleviate pain, some recovery potions, that is all.

    Sam was relieved to find out the crutches at least and decided to make a move.

    He slowly stood up and started walking. He has a lot to do and he should be doing it as fast as he can. But before all of that, he also needs to find the ce he was currently in.

    These are the two sides of this scenario, the third side whichpletes the story is the side of Sam¡¯s friends and subordinates.

    Currently, all of them are still in the forest outside the desert.

    Everyone is gloomy. Philip who got that small piece of soul fragment in his head is currently meditating as he tried to absorb all the contents of the fragment. It is actually a bunch of instructions left behind by Sam, along with the blueprints and stuff.

    After he was done, he looked at them and said.

    "Arkiv, Sam asked us to help you in the game from here on out. The deal will be the same. The team wille with you and Jack will apany you instead of Sam. You can take charge of the nning if you want or they will do it for you. I think you can figure out how to proceed.

    He insisted that you don¡¯t stop this."

    He then turned to the rest of the team and said.

    "You guys will be finishing an organization and then you need toe to the headquarters, but in process, you need to capture the cultivators. So, use this."

    With that, he gave out therge ice divine dimension

    He finally turned to Watt and said.

    "We have something else to do. So, we are going home."

 Chapter 1251: Preparations

    Philip and Watt left to deste along with Five Elemental King.

    Sam specifically asked for this, in his message to Philip.

    The only problem through the return journey is that they don¡¯t have direct transportation like the Dimensional drifter at their beck and call. They couldn¡¯t just go back in a blink of an eye, so they started moving in an old fashioned way.

    They skipped from one realm to another as fast as possible and since most of the wormholes are within a group in every realm, they managed to get back easily and within one week, they came to one of the realms that have the Dusk Organization and finally, they didn¡¯t have to wait.

    They went there and took a series of connecting space gates to finally reach the deste.

    Only after arriving there, did Philip break the news to Five Elemental King.

    "There are a few reasons for you to be called back. One of them is that you would be helpful to us in securing the dusk organization in Sam¡¯s absence and help us develop the weapons, the second reason is that Sam found out who made you."

    Five Elemental King was surprised. He couldn¡¯t even reply and Philip continued.

    "The person that took over Sam¡¯s body is the one who ordered to make you and Vardar is the person that made you. Sam told that you should have been dead by now, but because of Sam¡¯s interference you were not only alive, you even progressed this far."

    Five Elemental King didn¡¯t say anything and just stayed silent.

    "Sam said that you are the most mature and calm people in the whole team, so you might understand why he did this. It is always the calmest that mess up the most things when they be emotional.

    The next few months or even a few years would be delicate for us. So, you need to be sure that you don¡¯t blow off. You can take it out on them as soon as Sam returns. Until then, first, take a few days off and get back here to help me in the defenses."

    "Thank you so much."

    Five Elemental King said and left the room, after that Philip summoned every single executive in the artisan department.

    "For the next few years, most of the ie thates from the profits all over the organization, particrly Sam¡¯s share would bepletely spent on construction of some machines. The Artisans need to be prepared. They would have some restless months. So, tell them to finish any project they might have on hand in the next two weeks."

    The executives left.

    "Watt, get the list of all the subordinates across all the realms. Everyone within might be soldiers. Procure their information and see if anyone is worthy of some special treatment. We need a force that is most Elite in the whole universe.

    We would use all the resources at our beck and call to do that.

    And also send a message to all the heads of the organization, tell them to buy the inmates from different organizations and even capture them. Anyone who has crimes that are beneath the basic moral code, particrly rape or some psychotic killing urges, capture them separately and if most of it is some mistakes or even people that are being captured because of some stupid misuse of power, make them sign a soul contract while they are still in the prison before taking them back here.

    We will station the second group as our soldiers, while the first group will be used for training."

    After that, Philip called the Architecture department and gave them a rough sketch of the structure and said.

    "These are only basic requirements. Try to give me pitches with your ideas, the best idea will get this construction project and also a project that will a part of new defense upgrades that will being in the next three months.

    I don¡¯t want any mistakes."

    Philip kept on giving orders and when he was finally done, he started drawing some blueprints.

    He doesn¡¯t know how these blueprints work or how these machines are truly made. Sam just sent those blueprints along with the message and he is drawing those ns which would then be used to create defenses.

    While Philip is stressing out of his wits, there is a person far away from Deste who ispletely ecstatic.

    Sivan is walking around in his new body.

    For the past week, he managed to use his new body to practice a few elemental energies. He could also see the difference between Sam¡¯s physical body and the rest of the people on the same level.

    Apart from that, there are some things that intrigued him a lot. For starters, the feather coat.

    He could clearly feel the feather coat has a spirit contracted with Sam and that contract is with the dormant soul of Sam which is currently blocked and sealed with Ghost Chimera.

    Apart from that, he also took a round in the Divine Dimension and one must say he was shocked beyond belief.

    He instantly understood why Sam warned him to be careful about the beasts.

    After just taking one peek, he ran to the library of their n and started going through the scrolls and books containing ancient records and found some details about these beasts.

    All of them are of supreme bloodlines. Except for the Forest Bear, the rest of the beasts are something most people never even heard of.

    He couldn¡¯t help but take a breath of cold air.

    All this while, he is thinking he is all that, because of the status and the authority he holds, but Sam was in apletely different league.

    He looked at the herb gardens that are spreading to arge expanse and the beasts that are the ¡¯guardians¡¯ of the tower.

    The Golden Ape, Zoi termites, and locusts are all acting as guardians because of Sam¡¯s words.

    Sivan really wanted to try and win over the beasts immediately so that he could check what is inside the tower, but he was unable to do so because the beasts are not even looking at him. They are extremely aloof and arrogant.

    But for some reason, Sivan didn¡¯t even show a single trace of anger on his face. He even smiled delightedly as he went on to roam the divine dimension.

    The brewing area which is limited to Golden Ape, the Hydra Skeleton and the Thunder phoenix skeleton, the fruit orchards, all of these things arepletely new to him and he knew that every single one of them is extremely valuable.

    He finally stopped at three things that are floating around.

    The three swords. Reaper, Executioner, and the Shadow Sword.

    He could clearly sense the spirits in them and could see majestic craftsmanship. But he is unable to wield them.

    These three swords are the only weapons that are left outside the tower and it is just to distract Sivan. Give him something to aspire to, but not being to win them over.

    If Sivan saw the hoverboard, the production units, simtion function, the library, he would freak out, to say the least.

    When Sivan was done, he went outside and had to drink three jars of wine just to calm himself down.

    After all, this is something he never expected.

    He didn¡¯t expect that Sam managed to collect this many valuable things over the years. The herbs and fruits that are growing inside are something that even he had some difficulty collecting andst but not least, therge number of spirit stones scattered here and there.

    In just that amount, Sam is richer than Sivan ever was.

    This made him feel embarrassed about the tone of superiority he used against Sam. He felt that Sam is far more superior than he ever was in all the terms.

    From the information he got from Dayus, Sam is pretty much independent. Even though Dayus has given a bunch of nonsense the first time, Sivan had his ways to make him talk and he talked as such.

    He gave out Sam¡¯s full history and before he could give out the information regarding the game they are ying and the people that are making them y this game, he let Dayus off.

    With that information, he could guess that Sam has survived on his own.

    Even though many people would judge Sam by their own personal standards and think that he wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything without any external help or a backer, Sivan is beyond that. He knew better and has seen things that made him realize that there are people who are capable in this world.

    Capable enough to do things that normal people cannot fathom and those people might even have done everything on their own.

    He knew better than judge Sam like that. But this also made him a bit cautious.

    Sam confidently gave up the body and he was pretty decisive about that.

    Right before the procedure ended, he set up a trap that would send one of his arms away and also made a seal with a Ghost Chimera, a powerful one at that to trap his dormant soul which will make the merging process that much harder and finally left from this ce.

    Even an idiot can guess just how confident Sam is about getting his body back and this made Sivan think of the preparations he needs to make.

 Chapter 1252: New Body

    Sivan really felt a tad bit anxious when he thought about it. But when he remembered the state of his body, before he gave it to Sam, he felt a little relieved.

    It would take a miracle for Sam to even survive in that body for long if he fell into a dangerous situation. There was a time when he wanted Sam to survive ande back to see what he can do.

    Now, he just wants him to fall into some danger and die right there along with his body.

    But unlucky for him, Sam is not exactly in the most dangerous situation.

    While Philip is working on the defense of the dusk organization and Sivan is getting to know the perks of what he gained with this new body and the new resources, Sam is still walking in the snow.

    In this one week, Sam walked barefoot through the snow and finally made it to a mountain that looked rtively safer.

    There is a small cafe at the foot of the mountain which he took as a temporary residence before he could get used to this body.

    He stayed there for a night and rested before checking his new body. The first thing he did is check the meridianworks.

    For cripples, the cultivation is a tad bit difficult as the meridianworks wouldn¡¯t beplete. So, when they use a technique that is suitable for a normal person with all the limbs, they need to do some extra work to have a proper cultivation process and there is a need for some specific requirements to meet.

    And one of those requirements which are also most important is the energy maniption ability. One needs to have impable control over the energy to the point that they could replicate the cultivation process a bit. Just enough to simte and modify the energy in the same way a cultivation cirction would do.

    Even if they don¡¯t have the ability to urately replicate the process, as long as it is close enough, they would be able to go through the process and have a breakthrough.

    This might limit their potential, but at least it works.

    But some people will have some techniques tailor-made for the cripples and if they went through that process things would be much simpler. In this process, some of the meridianworks and nodes would be left unused.

    So, Sam decided to check them to see what kind of cultivation technique the other party used and it seems like Sivan opted for the first case.

    But there is something else that Sam noticed and he was stunned by that finding.

    The meridianworks showed something that would alter his ns and calctions by a lot and that is the intentional destruction of cultivation.

    He stopped the observation for a while andid down on the cold stone floor so that he could rearrange his thoughts.

    It seems like Sivan is not of his cultivation level from the start. He forcefully destroyed his cultivation a bit so that he would match Sam¡¯s cultivation level.

    From this observation, Sam could think of a few things and one of them is that the cultivation of both participants in the procedure should be the same.

    And this is a troublesome thing.

    One of the reasons that Sam decided to leave his body back without killing himself in that situation is because, he knew that Sivan would take great care of it and he also knew that Sivan would have ess to more valuable cultivation resources, which would, in turn, help his cultivation grow.

    Once he went back and took his body back, he would be able to have an excellent body with higher cultivation.

    That is also the reason he decisively left the divine dimension to him.

    For a person like Sivan who knows the true value of things and managed to survive this long in a high-level n that is bound to have some politics, these things Sam left are way too valuable.

    He is shrewd, calcting and he is smart enough to know what to do.

    Sam is counting on the fact that these things would make him silent, even if he did reveal them, the beasts are far too valuable for them to use forceful measures.

    Every record they have on these beasts, indicates one thing, if the beasts were to be forced, they would die and take the person with them than ever agreeing to make a contract with them.

    And if something happens to the beasts, Sivan could say goodbye to his new body as the cultivation would definitely be destroyed.

    So, he has to safeguard them properly. And if by any chance any exposure happened, their n would get heat from all the rivals and they would be in deep trouble which would make things easier for Sam when he attacks them.

    Now that he found out that the current body¡¯s cultivation was forcefully destroyed, he needs to change the ns a bit.

    Before he could think any further, he aligned his thoughts and continued with the inspection. He went to the spiritual core and Sam was once again surprised.

    And this time the surprise was a bit pleasant.

    The spiritual core that Sivan¡¯s body has is a special one. He could now clearly understand why people got jealous and crippled him like this.

    This spiritual core is one of the higher grade cores within the book that Ling Tian gave Sam. This one is on the same level as Sam¡¯s original core and in fact, they have a lot of qualities inmon.

    Sam¡¯s core has the ability to amodate other elements with the addition of bloodline, but this one doesn¡¯t.

    But the rest of the abilities are simr.

    The ability to observe and manipte. In fact, they are a lot more powerful for this core than Sam¡¯s own.

    He clearly understood why Sivan has opted for the first method. His spiritual core¡¯s nature allowed him to control energy to an impable level.

    Unlike Sam who has to practice hundreds of hours, he can easily control energy and even condense it precisely into the form of a thread, and even the observation ability is way too overpowered.

    Sam used the observation ability to see how different it is and he is really stunned.

    If the ability of his original body can make him observe things at a molecr level, this one can let him see at an atomic level.

    When used, he could even see the bonds between each atom closely.

    He canceled the ability and then focused on the physical strength of the body.

    Even though he is crippled and the meridians are damaged a bit, he is still strong. It seems like the other party didn¡¯t just focus on spiritual energy cultivation. He is indeed a body cultivator and is a good one at that.

    But the problem is, it seems like he only focused on the strength and flexibility of the body, he barely had any fights and from the muscle stiffness, he could guess that the other party barely had any physical activity.

    The body was only toned because of the cultivation, not effort or anything else.

    With two limbs absent, there is barely anything Sam could do, so first, he decided to practice the energy maniption to see if he can make any offensive moves for himself.

    Then the practice started.

    The first thing he did is condense the energy into the palm of his hand into a small size.

    In his first attempt, he managed to condense the energy inside the whole cave in a natural state the size of a football.

    He diffused the energy and once again started condensing. As he practiced, again and again, the size of the condensed energy started lowering.

    Soon, he managed to condense the energy of the cave into the size of a baseball.

    He is ying with it in his hand as he leaned against the cave wall and looked outside of the entrance.

    There is a dead withered tree covered in snow which he could see.

    He looked at the condensed energy ball and threw it at the tree.

    *BOOM*

    A small explosion happened, but the ball of energy actually didn¡¯t hit the tree. It exploded as soon as it crossed the mouth of the cave and arge pit of snow dispersed to its surroundings.

    It is almost like arge pit appearing out of nowhere. Sam slowly stood up and walked forward with the support of the crutch as he looked at the pit.

    The pit is not asrge as he thought, but it is wide and the explosive power of the energy ball is also not small.

    He can still feel the energy waves in the surroundings that are extremely chaotic.

    And all of this happened with just condensed energy directly opening up and expanding to its original size.

    Sam thought for a moment and went back into the cave.

    He is getting tired, but he still has the recovery potions in the spatial ring, so he decided to feed on them for a while and increase his proficiency.

 Chapter 1253: Exploring the Bodies

    For the next week, Sam just stayed in the cave as he practiced. He started expanding his limits on how he could manipte and condense the energy into.

    He practiced condensing the energy into smaller sizes, shapes and made the energy turn more chaotic and turbulent, sometimes smooth and mellow.

    On the seventh day, he managed to condense the energy into the form of a cane that he could use to support himself and managed to walk for three minutes before it disappeared.

    As for the energy balls, he could now control and throw the balls to a certain distance and make them explode at perfect timing.

    The tree in front of the cave has long since disappeared and turned into smithereens. Along with that, the surrounding area was covered with holes.

    He also managed to understand how to control the damage of the attack by manipting the turbulence of the energy ball.

    Apart from that, he also learned how to condense the energy to form shields, barriers, and even some short cold weapons that could be used for a few minutes.

    Sam decided that it is time to leave the cave. But before he leaves, he decided to try a few things first. He closed his eyes and ced his right arm on the stump of the amputated right leg as he condensed the energy.

    Slowly the energy started condensing into the shape of the leg and the shape is the exact mirror image of the left leg he still has.

    He wanted to see if he could really do something like this, but the condensed energy almost exploded right there because of the momentarypse of his control.

    If something went wrong, he would have sted himself into a thousand pieces and died a tragic death.

    After a failed attempt, Sam then focused on another important thing. The dormant soul of Sivan.

    This is one of the cards that he couldn¡¯t lose no matter what and luckily, Sivan is so cocky that he didn¡¯t even bother to use any other protection as Sam did with Ghost Chimera.

    Ghost Chimera is one of the most disgusting things that are ever created, by nature or by man. They are vicious and their only goal is to make others be doomed as them. If by any chance Sivan became a bit reckless in dealing with the Ghost Chimera, he can kiss his soul goodbye.

    Sam¡¯s dormant soul is a key to a lot of things.

    As long as Sivan manages to assimte that dormant soul, everything Sam built and obtained with all this effort, the beasts, the weapons, the creations, the dusk organization, everything would fall into Sivan¡¯s hands.

    Apart from that, there are some dangerous ideas that were already formted in Sam¡¯s head for a long time that he didn¡¯t want to use as they would bring destruction that could make every being in a sumb to him.

    Sam and Sivan are the same kinds of people. They will look for any means they could use to achieve their goal, but after this rebirth, Sam has changed a bit and he ced a few lines that he would never cross, but that doesn¡¯t mean, he wouldn¡¯t get the ideas that are way beyond those lines.

    They wouldn¡¯t even stop at mere thoughts, there are many things that Sam theoretically constructed in his imagination, all those ns and ideas, added with a bunch of talented artisans, formation masters, and inscription experts all of the different elemental usage, the world would see the shift of regime. Even though it is impossible to conquer every realm in these cosmos as they are too many to even reach much less conquer, Sivan and his organization would be able to conquer everything that has life within their area of influence in the cosmos.

    Sam knew very well what those thoughts are capable of. The only things that are limiting him are the resources and the moral integrity.

    Sivan is not that kind of guy. He doesn¡¯t have bottom lines, he wouldn¡¯t dare cross. He doesn¡¯t have the mindset of minding his own business. He is a born conqueror and he will live up to that potential if he had those ideas.

    Sam doesn¡¯t want his creations to be the cause of this severe destruction, even if he couldn¡¯t save the whole world, he should at least be able to save the world he built by himself.

    That is why he sent some of those ns that are more focused on defense than offense to Philip and sent him back to deste.

    In the worst-case scenario that Sivan managed to get his hands on any of Sam¡¯s ns, at least the dusk organization would be safe.

    Sam¡¯s thoughts ran wild as he looked at Sivan¡¯s dormant soul.

    He could try to destroy it, but then the body wouldn¡¯t ept his soul properly. He would be facing intense bacsh and unless someone is training in possession, they wouldn¡¯t be able to keep themselves in this body.

    Sam is obviously not trained in this area.

    His own soul form sat in front of the dormant soul form which is also sitting in nothingness as it huddled into itself.

    Sam used his mental energy to probe the dormant soul and was met with resistance, when he probed harder, it started fighting back. But he didn¡¯t care.

    Sam slowly and gently wrestled with the dormant soul in the contest of mental energy and the mental energy is something he trained himself in.

    But after some time he understood that the other party is the same.

    Sivan was also trained in mental energy. After all, he has very few things to do, and his whole n is based on the fact that his mental energy trumps everyone else¡¯s so there is no surprise there.

    But Sam is sure that he would be able to win. He is confident in his skills in mental warfare and he is sure that he would seed a lot sooner than Sivan ever could.

    Once he obtains that Dormant soul, he would be able to get all the information he needs regarding Sivan, his n, his strength, the details on his subordinates, the power structure of his organization, his rivals, enemies, friends, supporters, sex life.

    Any memory that is rted to Sivan would be his and Sam could prepare from then on and most of all, the one he is looking forward to is the cultivation technique of that guy.

    Once he figures out that cultivation technique, Sam could try to keep up the cultivation so that when he gets back, he and Sivan would be on the same level and the ritual could be done once again.

    After checking what this body and soul has to offer and familiarizing it, Sam changed the robes and started walking outside in the snow with the help of the crutches.

    He didn¡¯t know which direction he should take as there are no signs of life forms or tracks left behind by anyone, so he just decided to walk straight until he sees something or someone.

    He walked for three days and finally, he saw some tracks in the snow. There are a bunch of footprints and sled marks following them.

    Someone is using some canine beasts to drag sleds here.

    He changed his direction and started following the tracks.

    Meanwhile, somewhere else.

    Sivan is currently in the backyard of his residence. Butler Si is standing in front of him as he attacked.

    The golden mes, silver lightning, water, poison, vines, earth elemental attacks. All kinds of elemental attacks are being used at a rapid rate.

    Sivan is extremely excited.

    All his life, he was bored as hell. He wanted to kill himself out of boredom more than anything.

    He couldn¡¯t do anything with his ability, he couldn¡¯t fight, he couldn¡¯t create things, but Sam has a boon that is exactly opposite to his curse.

    Sam¡¯s physique is perfect, he can use around ten elements.

    This is the perfect body he dreamed of many times.

    Butler Si, who suppressed his cultivation to the same level as Sivan, is having a hard time keeping up with Sivan¡¯s attacks and when the sparring end, Butler Si is left with a few superficial wounds but Sivan is exhausted. There is no energy left even though he is not injured.

    His energy efficiency is really shitpared to Sam.

    "Great job Young master. Apart from a bit of energy control, you did great in everything else. This body is indeed suitable for you."

    Butler Si walked towards Sivan as he appreciated him, but all of a sudden, Sivan experienced a weird feeling. Abination of hunger thirst as he felt his nose twitching continuously.

    He involuntarily turned to Butler Si and his vision ispletely focused on the blood that is dripping from Butler Si¡¯s shoulder.

    He ran forward as he tried to bite into the butler¡¯s body without any self-control.

    Butler Si, who is of superior cultivation immediately stopped Sivan and looked at him in a puzzled expression which then turned into that of horror.

 Chapter 1254: Village

    After an hour.

    Butler Si is serving Sivan who is sitting at a crystal dining table as he ate some food.

    He is calm and is not speaking anything. He elegantly finished his food and heaved a sigh before he started drinking some wine.

    "I have to say, this Sam really knows how to enjoy his life. Eating such a food and drinking such a wine every day. This must be dream of a lot of people."

    He spoke as he finished the jar of wine.

    Butler Si looked a little concerned as he looked at the young master.

    "What did the healers say?" Sivan asked.

    "This body is also a vampire and they also noticed the gics of different beasts. He is a beast cultivator and a vampire at the same time."

    "Vampire? Really? But I am pretty sure this guy is alive. Vampires are cold and dead creatures." Sivan said in confusion.

    "Yes, Young master. But there are some rare cases. Vampires make newborns while procreating with humans and some times other species. When the baby is born and grew to a certain age, the vampire bloodline will suck the rest of the bloodline of the body. But in some very rare cases, the vampire bloodline wouldn¡¯t be able to take over which will make them part vampire and part living."

    "So, Sam is the son of a vampire? I don¡¯t believe that we have any information regarding this."

    "No, it seems like he has hidden this very well."

    Sivan stayed silent and Butler Si, hesitated before continuing.

    "Young master, this is going to be a bit dangerous. Vampire instincts are hard to control. You weren¡¯t even able to control just with a little scent of blood. You cannot suppress it and once you take in blood you would get addicted to it.

    You would want to have blood for every meal."

    "What is so bad about it? It is not like I can only survive on the blood of cultivators, I can also just take in the blood of other creatures like beasts.

    This is also a great situation if you ask me. I can drink blood of extremely high level beasts, feast on my meat and increase my cultivation faster than ever.

    This is the perfect scenario."

    "Yes, young master. It is indeed a lot easier to consume blood and increase your cultivation, but you wouldn¡¯t be able to control the urge to take in the blood of cultivators if you start consuming beast blood. It would just appear that much more enticing."

    "What is your point?"

    "Young Master, don¡¯t take this the wrong way. Your current situation is not exactly great in the n now. You got everything you have because you were no threat to anyone. All this while, you were just some cripple who had a good birth.

    You were smart and calcting and the n left the strategies to you, but you werepletelydevoid of any chance to get into the race of the n head.

    But now, you have this perfect body. It is known to everyone in the n. The elements, the perfect physique and even a full fledged divine dimension with such a rich herb garden and orchards.

    You have everything, even without the beasts, you suddenly came back into the race.

    I am sure that we can handle ourselves, but the vampire bloodline is a hindrance, if we go down that path, you will lose control once in a while and consume blood of cultivators, I have no problem with that, I will even collect blood for you, but if any other n members find out, they will use this to suppress you."

    Sivan thought for a moment and said.

    "We will cross that bridge when we get there. Right now, I want to be strong."

    Meanwhile.

    Sam followed the sled marks for over a few hours, before he saw some signs of people.

    There is arge forest, but it is not exactly dense, the trees are far apart enough for the sled marks and there are more and more. It seems like the whole forest is extremely active.

    He slowly walked for a few minutes, before he finally saw someone. A young woman is riding a sled with four snow wolves dragging it as they ran after an Ice Bear.

    It seems like she is hunting the bear.

    The bear is fast and it is using its most basic attack. The Frost fur, an attack that would shoot the small thin ice needles formed from the edges of its fur.

    It is just throwing the fur at the wolves and the sled rider without even turning back.

    It kept on running.

    Sam leaned against the tree as he looked at the rider and the first thought that came to his mind is that she is weak.

    She is not even a cultivator of Astral ne. She is a mortal ne transcendent cultivator at middle stage and the bear is barely at thete stage.

    But the wolves are also at the middle stage, which makes the bear a rtively easy prey with so many predators following it. The only problem is the bear is really, really fast. It is faster than wolves and it is extremely familiar with the surroundings.

    It is making use of the terrain perfectly.

    Sam just sat against the tree as he looked at the hunt for the next fifteen minutes.

    For some reason, the two parties are not leaving the forest and kept on fighting within the forest.

    After some time, they finally noticed Sam¡¯s presence. Currently, Sam is using a cloak to cover his face.

    He just looked like a normal cripple with a pair of crutches beside his side. But he just sat there without any worry. He didn¡¯t bother with the surroundings and just watched the two of them fight it out.

    But neither the cultivator nor the beasts realized what he is doing there and neither do they have any idea about what his cultivation level is.

    For them he is just a normal person. In fact a normal cripple. In their opinion, no matter what he is, he has no business being in this ce.

    Thedy on the sled suddenly let two of the four wolves go and they covered two routes of the bear and the only route left for the bear is to go straight and that is where Sam is sitting now.

    "Get away from there."

    Thedy yelled loudly, but Sam just sat there without any worry. As the bear charged at him, thedy took out a spear and got ready to throw it at the bear, but she is afraid that Sam would die of the spear attack.

    "Hey, you bloody cripple. Get out of here, or you would definitely die here."

    She yelled out angrily.

    Sam looked at the bear that is right in front of him and looked into its eyes as he released his killing intent.

    All of a sudden, the bear suddenly halted in its tracks in fear and even went so far as to go in the same direction in which the girl ising.

    Thedy finally felt relieved, but also shocked. But she didn¡¯t care and threw the spear at the bear while the two wolves came from the side and tackled it down.

    Thedy finally finished the hunt and Sam also stood up as he slowly walked towards her.

    "Hello, I am Sam. Can you lead me out of this forest? I am kind of lost here."

    Thedy looked at Sam weirdly. She wanted to sense his cultivation, but she couldn¡¯t find a hint of energy from his body.

    "What is a cripple like you doing here?"

    She doesn¡¯t mean to be rude, but this is the most respect she could muster. After all, Sam almost destroyed her hunt in her own opinion.

    She doesn¡¯t want to kill someone unnecessarily but the bear is extremely agile, if she had thrown the spear and the bear had dodged, things wouldn¡¯t be the same. He would have died a tragic death. She doesn¡¯t want that on her conscience.

    Sam didn¡¯t care about her disrespect so he just casually replied.

    "As I said before, I am lost here. Can you lead me out of here? Even pointing a direction is fine."

    She just pointed towards one direction and Sam started walking out of there.

    "Thank you so much. If we meet again, I will repay the favor."

    With that, Sam walked and soon he found more tracks of the wolves and the sleds.

    Thedy even crossed him on the way.

    After two hours, Sam finally arrived at a small vige. It is full of igloos, there are barely even any stone houses.

    The vige is not exactlyrge, there are only a half a dozen streets in total and around a few hundred people might living here.

    He went to the only restaurant in the vige and ordered some food and some wine as he heard the news about the vige.

 Chapter 1255: Repaying the Favor

    The vige is not an actual settlement, it is a temporary establishment and it is more of arge camp.

    It is called Hunter¡¯s Vige and every year, at this time the Ice Bears of different levels wreak havoc in this area as they kill every single beast that is not of their kind.

    They eat everything that they deem edible and destroy the whole ecosystem. There are three towns in different directions, just a few miles away from Hunter¡¯s vige and they are all within the area of these Bears¡¯ influence and every cultivator is deemed edible by them.

    So, every year the three towns send a few hunters and a decade or so ago, a merchant group took advantage of that and created this hunter¡¯s vige.

    Every structure in the city is owned by that merchant group. The restaurant, the weapon shop, herb shop, and the street stalls are all owned by merchant group and they rent out of these street stalls to others who wants to earn some money on the way.

    Sam got a simple understanding of the vige and then got the route to the nearest town. He decided to go to that town before deciding on what to do. But before that, he needs to change his attire a bit.

    He went searching for a small weapon shop with an artisan. He didn¡¯t want to buy any weapons. The strongest in the whole vige is a consummate cultivator. These weapons wouldn¡¯t evenst for a single swing in his hands. Even before the attack reached the enemies, the weapon would be destroyed.

    He didn¡¯t go to the weapon shop of the merchant group. He doesn¡¯t want to encounter the arrogant guys that are everywhere. A cripple is severely looked down upon and even in the restaurant, he had to pay before he could get something to eat. He is sure that he would get a simr or even worse experience than the restaurant.

    He found a weapon shop down the street and there is a young man who seemed to be a Demi-Giant at the counter.

    "Do you take custom orders?" Sam asked as soon as he entered.

    "Yes." The shopkeeper replied.

    "I need two things. Can I have something to draw?"

    The Demi-Giant looked at Sam for a second, but still gave a brush, ink, and a scroll.

    Sam took them and drew two things and he gave them to the shopkeeper.

    "If you don¡¯t mind, can you show me what metals you have? I would like to select the material you use for this."

    The Demi-Giant didn¡¯t mind and just nodded. He took out some metal samples. Sam looked through the metals and selected what he needed.

    "You cane back in four hours."

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "Can I watch the process?"

    Demi-Giant frowned. It is not a good thing to ask this to an artisan. Sam also realized the mistake and apologized before leaving.

    He just wanted to make sure that these things are done perfectly.

    He roamed around the vige and took some rest in the inn. He came back after four hours, paid the other party up and collected his things.

    One of them is a mask. A ck metal mask that covers his facepletely. Even though Sam got a new body, he doesn¡¯t want to use this face. He would rather cover it like this, than show himself.

    The second one is a peg leg.

    His leg was amputated below the knee, so a peg leg might help him a lot while moving. He doesn¡¯t have to face too much doubt and questions while moving, even if it is there just for show.

    Before wearing them, Sam went to a cloth shop and bought a ck cloak and then to an inscription shop to buy some ink and other tools. Finally, he went back to the inn as he drew the inscription formations on the mask to conceal his face.

    He wore everything and finally walked out of the inn and then the vige.

    He looked a lot better now. That luxurious robe and the crippled limbs are not exactly a great match for his demeanor.

    He slowly walked towards the town.

    On his way, he saw so many sled marks, some bear tracks, and wolf tracks. It seems like these bears are everywhere. If not for the fact he doesn¡¯t have his fire elemental energy, he would have caught one and definitely cooked it.

    As he was thinking of these trivial things, he suddenly heard something from the woods.

    *ROAR*

    *GRRRR*

    He looked around and noticed that there are four bears surrounding someone. He just wanted to leave.

    "HELP."

    The familiar voice came and Sam walked towards them. The four bears are surrounding the youngdy that showed him the way. Three of her wolves are severely injured and one of them is dead. The bears had blood stains all over as they neared into her.

    Thedy looked at Sam who is in his new outfit and yelled once again.

    "HELP. PLEASE SAVE ME."

    Sam aimed his hand and a small energy ball in the size of a pebble was condensed at the fingertips and he shot it at the bear.

    The energy ball moved like a bullet andnded right on the head of the bear.

    The bear¡¯s head exploded like a watermelon with arge ssh of blood and the rest of the bears turned to Sam.

    He once again aimed at them and shot another one down. The other two bears were afraid and immediately left.

    "Thank you so much."

    Thedy thanked him hurriedly and walked towards the wolves to check upon them. The first one is dead and she couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit sorrowful, she went for the others and started feeding medicine.

    But they lost too much blood and they might die soon. Sam looked at them for a moment and took out a healing potion.

    "Take this. It is of extremely high power. Only give them a sip each. And I returned the favor."

    With that, he slowly limped away once again.

    "Favor?" Thedy was puzzled, but she didn¡¯t have any intention of pursuing this instantly. She gave the medicine to the wolves and to her surprise, the bleeding stopped in no time and even the flesh regenerated in some ces at a rapid pace.

    She rested there for a while and finally took the time to think about who Sam is. When she linked the word favor and the limp to someone, she finally figured out, who that person is.

    "But isn¡¯t he just a cripple with no cultivation?" She murmured as she collected the bear corpses and they slowly made their way out of there.

    Sam is in the town by the next day.

    This town is a lot normalpared to Hunter¡¯s Vige.

    Sam went to an inn to get some more information about the people that rule this ce. Unless this ce is a stray like deste, he wouldn¡¯t have any way out, at least not until he figured out somece just like the core of the Central continent in the deste with arge space gate.

    But with the spiritual energy in the atmosphere, he guessed it is connected.

    So, he learned about the ruler of this ce and they turned out to be the Four-leaf Sect.

    The continent which is thergest on the turned out to have a variety in itsyout. The northernmost part has a lot of snow and ice. The Winter State is what they wall it and Sam is currently in one of the northernmost parts of the Winter State.

    The eastern one is called the Forest State as it hasrge amounts of forest patches.

    The Western One is called the Desert State because of itsrge desert and finally, the southern state is the Marsh State with arge amount of marsnd.

    In the middle of it all is the central state which has a rtively normal climatepared to all four. In the capital city of the central state is the headquarters of the Four-Leaf Sect.

    After getting the gist, Sam first decided to make his way to the capital of the Winter State and the branch of the Four Leaf Sect in this area. The Frost Leaf.

    From there he can find a way to get to the central state.

    He once again started to walk, but as he was halfway through, he suddenly heard a yell from behind.

    "Hey, you wait for me."

    Sam turned around to see thedy from before.

    She is riding the sled and instead of four, there are only three wolves. She stopped in front of him and spoke.

    "You are the cripple from before?" She immediately regretted it as soon as she spoke.

    "Yes, I am that cripple from before."

    Sam was not offended and just replied casually.

    "Thanks for saving me."

    "I am just repaying the favor."

    "Where are you going? I can give you a ride. It would be hard for you to walk."

    "Don¡¯t worry about me, I don¡¯t want to be a bother."

    This went back and forth for a while and Sam finally yielded after a lot of insistence. At least, he doesn¡¯t have a limp for a while.

 Chapter 1256: Aiwa

    As they are traveling on the sled, Sam started conversing with her and learned a lot of things about her and the Frost Leaf.

    Her name is Aiwa and she turned out to be a disciple in the Frost leaf Branch and even a core disciple at that. She came here for a special test from her master as a part of the selection process for the Annual games that happen in the Central State at the headquarters of the Four-leaf sect.

    Her mission is to kill a certain number of Ice bears. All of her peers are sent to the different corners of the state to kill the beasts of the same level and she picked the Ice Bears. And her luck was good. Except for the death of her one wolf, she did great and met the target a lot faster than expected.

    She can go back home and finish the rest of the missions earlier and the first one to finish can skip thest battles for the positions.

    Sam just listened to her as she spoke and only gave asional nods until the conversation came to his origins.

    "Where are you from? Why are you in the middle of nowhere in your current state?"

    Sam just sighed and said.

    "It is a long story. Just leave it at that."

    "We have a lot of time, you know. You can talk." She answered with a smirk.

    At first, Sam thought she might be some aloof girl, but he realized that he is not at all as he imagined. She is actually quite cheeky, but her mouth has no filter and she speaks too straightforwardly. That is why she directly called him a cripple to his face.

    Anyway, he is not really willing to share his story with her, so he just brushed her off, no matter how much she asked him to.

    So, he changed the subject with a lot of hard work.

    "So, what are these annual games you are talking about?"

    "There are the special games conducted to select the cream of the crop disciples and other cultivators. Everyone from the Transcendent stage to and Consummate stage can participate. Of course, both of them have different divisions.

    The four leaves will conduct the games every year and then send the best of the best to the central continent, where another tournament will be conducted to select the best of them all, and finally that group would be sent out of the to participate in some sort ofpetition.

    This happens every year. Thepetitions start exactly at the middle of every year in the four-leaf branches and then by the time thepetitors go out of the ande back with the results, it would be the end of the year.

    This is a bigpetition.

    And this year, I will be the champion from this side. I will definitely win."

    "What is thepetition outside the?"

    "I don¡¯t know exactly."

    Sam was dumbfounded by this answer. Just how confident this girl is to say that she will win thepetition that she didn¡¯t even have any idea what it is about.

    "I would like to get out of this."

    "Oh, that is impossible." She answered without any hesitation.

    "Why?"

    "The Four-Leaf Sect is the only way to go out and they have everything under their control. I don¡¯t even know what method they use to get out of this ce and even the people who returned from thepetition wouldn¡¯t speak about it.

    They are so strict about this."

    "I can¡¯t use the money to get out?"

    "Pfft, how much money can you give to the sect that owns the whole? Sam, did your brain freeze and make you dumb?"

    Sam just smiled at herment, then she became silent for a minute before speaking.

    "Are you strong?"

    Sam was a bit confused but still replied.

    "Yes."

    "When I get selected for the finalpetition outside the, I can take a guard team. But I need to pay for them out of my own pocket. I cannot afford them now and I am looking for some sponsors.

    The guards need to be at least Consummate Initial stage. Do you meet the requirement?"

    "Yes. I think so." Sam replied in amusement.

    "Okay, after we reach the city, I will test you. If you can clear them, I can let youe with me as my guard."

    "Are you sure? You are not really familiar with me and you trust me with your guard duty?"

    "Of course, you are stronger than me, if you have wanted, you would have killed me already, there is no reason for me to not trust you unless you were nted by other core disciples." She looked at him with a scrutinizing gaze.

    "Don¡¯t worry, I don¡¯t even know where I am at until you told me. You don¡¯t have to worry about that."

    With that, Sam decided to be a guard to a Middle stage transcendent cultivator of the Astral ne for no reason. After all, he still has the option of forcing the Four-Leaf Sect and using their means to get out, but even for that, he needs to understand the current situation of this ce and there is no need to show off his strength just because he has it.

    He can take it slow. Anyway, he will need a lot of time to use this body to the full strength of a Middle-stage transcendent cultivator of the Astral ne, until then he decided to keep a low profile.

    After three days of traveling, they finally reached the Capital of the Winter State.

    Even within the city, people are using sleds. Aiwa rode to the residence she had within the city and let Sam stay there.

    "I will go back to the sect and register the kills."

    "Didn¡¯t you say you are a core disciple? Why are you not staying in the sect?"

    "I have a residence there, but there are too many rules we need to follow inside. I need to greet every time an elder passes by and need to be polite to the useless seniors. I don¡¯t want to go through all of that. Here, I can be however I want."

    With that, she left while Sam stayed in the assigned room.

    He looked at his peg leg and must say that it is extremely ufortable to wear. The wheelchair is indeed a lot morefortable. But unlike Sivan, he doesn¡¯t have the luxury to just sit there and let others do the fight.

    He could only think of making a few adjustments to it, but he doesn¡¯t have his fire element. He is really getting frustrated with this. Luckily, he got a ride on the sled, otherwise, things would have been pretty tough if he had to walk all the way here. He is pretty sure he would have captured a beast to ride, but this is a lot less trouble.

    After two hours, Aiwa finally came back and said.

    "I submitted the bears and I really am the first person to get here. I can go on with the next task."

    "Congrattions then. What is it?"

    "I don¡¯t know. They will only reveal it after two days. Apparently, they are concerned about the well-being of the disciples and don¡¯t want to stress me out with back to back to tasks.

    Those bastards. They just want to dy me a bit so that the score difference wouldn¡¯t be too drastic between me and others."

    "They might even it out by letting others wait two days as well."

    "No, they wouldn¡¯t. This already happened before. They will only leave one day lead for me. I want to beat them to death."

    She ranted for a while and calmed down.

    "I need to train for a while. Sam, can you spar with me. Since you are stronger, you shouldn¡¯t have any problem right?"

    Sam didn¡¯t even know what to say, he just shrugged and agreed.

    "What weapon do you use?" She asked.

    "There is no need."

    She shrugged and took out her weapon. A spear and the ice elemental energy surrounded with a thinyer of fog.

    She lunged forward as she attacked.

    And of course, even though Sam suppressed his cultivation, he didn¡¯t do it to the same level. He suppressed it to thete-stage transcendent stage of Mortal ne. But even then, it is impossible for her to attack him or injure him.

    His body is way too strong for her to injure him.

    Even though Sam is crippled and only has one hand to use, with the least mobility with only one leg, he still managed to win over her and it didn¡¯t even take much time.

    Sam looked at her usage and said.

    "You are not using your ice elemental energy properly. You need to use it efficiently. Make very few movements, your spear tip doesn¡¯t need to reach every ce you want to attack..."

    He went on giving her tips and showed her how to attack with maximum effect.

    "Wow, you are good at this."

    She said in awe and for the next two days, Sam just kept on giving her tips while she learned quickly.

 Chapter 1257: Helping Aiwa

    Aiwa is currently meditating as she controlled the ice elemental energy. Small needles started forming around her as she stacked it on arge sculpture that waspletely made up of these ice needles and the only thing that is holding this sculpture is her ice elemental energy.

    Once her concentration breaks, Sam is sure as hell that it would copse, and even now it is barely holding.

    He sat a bit away from her as he looked at the sculpture. He is still wearing the mask and the ck cloak as he tweaked with the peg leg.

    He is just adding some touches so that he wouldn¡¯t feel that irritating sense on the stump.

    *knock* *knock*

    *crash*

    A knock on the door was heard at that time and then the sculpture crashed instantly. That is the limit of her concentration.

    She looked at Sam awkwardly and then at the door with a grudging expression.

    "This better be good. Otherwise, someone is going to get it."

    She went in and opened it.

    "Miss Aiwa, your master is calling you. Your next task has been assigned. Please visit him as soon as possible."

    It is an attendant from the Frost leaf.

    "I will be back in a while." She yelled at Sam and went away. After an hour, she came back and looked a lot sulky.

    "What happened?" Sam asked.

    "My next task. It arrived. I need to catch a Snow Chameleon and I need to catch it alive. Who wants to catch a snow chameleon, alive or dead? It doesn¡¯t even taste good. The meat of that chameleon sucks."

    Sam was surprised with her outrage. The more time he spent with her, the more thought she like a little teenage girl who does everything on a whim.

    "Snow Chameleon? You have those beasts here?"

    "Yes."

    "Then why did you guys even bother going after those ice bears?"

    "What are you even talking about?"

    "Snow Chameleons love Ice bear meat. They feast on them a lot. For some reason, the big bad bear is prey here and this small cial reptile is actually a predator."

    "I don¡¯t know that. I didn¡¯t even find that in the library when I was studying the ice bears. Are you bullshitting me old man?"

    Sam didn¡¯t even what to reply to that.

    Sam then wrote down something on paper and gave it to her.

    "Take some Ice bear blood, some meat, and its liver along with the other herbs in this recipe and give it to a chef who knows what he is doing. Cook until it turns into a paste. If everything goes well, it would be a gel in an ice blue color.

    Take it and create an ice sculpture in the form of a bear with the needles and apply this paste all over it. When the chameleon arrives, you will no and all you have to do is let the needles explode. If you are moderate, you will be able to capture it while it¡¯s barely alive."

    Aiwa looked at Sam with a suspicious expression.

    "What is with that look?"

    "Nothing. I wille backter. Bye."

    Aiwa went away and Sam sat down on the ground as he closed his eyes and started meditating. He entered his sea of consciousness and targeted the dormant soul of Sivan.

    He trained himself in mental warfare for years and he is sure that he would be able to wrestle with this dormant soul and win.

    His mental energy swept towards the soul, but it waspletely blocked by the mental energy of the soul. It almost created a visible barrier.

    Sam poked on that visible barrier as his mental energy turned sharp and resembled a sword aura. The dormant soul inside the barrier shivered as if it met something that is fearsome.

    Sam felt a slight headache as he tried forcefully and finally, there is a hole in that barrier and his mental energy enveloped the dormant soul. He tried to devour the soul as the whole, but as he could feel a part of that soul seeping out of the barrier, he suddenly felt extreme pressure.

    His mental energy was finally forced out and a new barrier was formed. The dormant soul¡¯s position changed. It huddled into it even more and almost resembled a ball.

    Sam looked at it for a moment and noticed that the glow of the soul dimmed a bit, indicating its weakening. He didn¡¯t try the next attempt immediately and went out.

    He let his own soul digest the information he got and finally had some clues about his body¡¯s situation. Sam doesn¡¯t know exactly what method the other party used to destroy their own cultivation to cause the damage.

    He thought he would need to take some time to go through a special diagnosis and find out.

    But now that he got the information healing will be easier.

    Currently, those meridians are his first priority. Even though they are healing with the natural recovery of this body, it is not happening fast. For them topletely heal, it would take at least a dozen years.

    It turned out that Sivan has Overdosed on the Meridian Cleansing medicine. And he didn¡¯t just overdose it normally, he did that in a controlled manner and made sure that the Meridians cracked as little as they could along with the spiritual core to lose just the required cultivation level.

    After he got that information, Sam already had ideas on how to undo it. Luckily, Sivan is considerate about himself enough to heal the spiritual core, otherwise, it would have taken over a year just for that.

    Sam has many methods to heal the meridians back and in fact, he doesn¡¯t need a lot of high-level medicine, he can use some low-level medicine in a huge amount to heal one meridian after another, but even for that, he has to get out of this first.

    He just kept on thinking for a while and before he knew it, a few hours passed. Aiwa returned and this time, she came running.

    "Who are you? What are you? How did you..."

    She started raining questions down and only after five minutes did she let Sam speak.

    "I take it that you caught the Chameleon."

    "Of course I did. Just what kind of ck magic did you use to do it? Cause I don¡¯t believe that such a stupid trick works."

    "It is not stupid. It is called being clever and knowledgeable. I know a lot of information about beasts and can take advantage of that easily. So, a thank you would be better."

    Aiwa patted Sam on the back as she said with a grin.

    "Of course, of course. I am really grateful. With this gratitude, I am taking you in my guard without any test, alright? Now,e on smile."

    Sam didn¡¯t even know what to do at that moment. He didn¡¯t even feel this disheartened when his soul was stuck in the body of a cripple and he was thrown into some kind of snow in. But now he did.

    He couldn¡¯t help but sigh.

    "Okay, okay. Are you smiling or not? Why don¡¯t you remove that mask and show me?"

    She almost went as far as touching the mask, but Sam stopped her and said.

    "Don¡¯t touch the mask."

    "Why? You are not that ugly. I already saw your face. Why would you hide that and have this creepy child molester mask on?"

    "Don¡¯t joke about molesting and I have my reasons. Don¡¯t pry too much and get back to the next task."

    "I wouldn¡¯t be able to get to the next task immediately. They are making me wait again, but this time I caused a ruckus, they couldn¡¯t make me wait for too long, they have to give the result by night."

    "Okay, then go and rest."

    That night Aiwa was contacted once again and she got the next task. This one also had something to do with the beasts. She doesn¡¯t know exactly why every task this year was rted to the beasts, but she couldn¡¯t care less.

    She ran back to the house and ced the task in front of Sam.

    "Frost Bees? Really? You have those things too?"

    Sam asked in surprise. Neither Bees, nor chameleons are creatures suitable to live in these extremely cold environments in normal cases, but there are always exceptions. Snow chameleons and the Frost Bees are extremely rare exceptions.

    But having two exceptions in one area is something even he who roamed around dozens of realms rare.

    "Are you going to help me or not? You can get surprisedter."

    "Of course, I can help you, but it would take a bit of effort on your part. I don¡¯t believe you are focused enough."

    "I am focused enough alright, don¡¯t treat me like I am a dumb brute."

    "But you are one."

    Aiwa didn¡¯t even know what to say for a second. But Sam carefully exined his n to her and he even went as far as exining a couple of times.

    Aiwa was ecstatic as went out and came back the next morning with a grin on her face.

 Chapter 1258: The tournament

    Frost Bees collect frost essence from natural ces to store them in theirrge icy hive. Arge amount of extremely refined frost honey can be found in their hives, but the problem is finding the location of their hive and taking it out even after they found it.

    Even if the frost bees are weak, it is almost impossible to get out of that hive if they are not knowledgeable enough and even the most knowledgeable ones have to take a chance sometimes.

    But with Sam¡¯s n, Aiwa not only found the Bees, she even collected a lot of honey, captured a bunch of bees and gave them back to the sect, and finished the mission. All in one night.

    Looking at Aiwa who is jumping around, Sam couldn¡¯t help but smile a bit. Even though he is crippled and in such a bad state, he felt a bit relieved with his life in the past few days.

    He doesn¡¯t have to think about his organization, it is almost independent and he bought a safe period of a decade for it to grow while leaving the management to his friends.

    His team and Arkiv would be finishing the organization missions without many hups, he could take a break and rx while thinking of ways to get back to his body. Since he cannot hurry this up, this forced him to have a lot of time with nothing much to do.

    The most he could do is to create new designs and research new things. Other than that, he could just rx, recover, meditate and try to probe that dormant soul once in a while. If there is any retirement, Sam would choose this, he would just go to a random realm and find some cheeky brats to mentor a few days and disappear from there.

    That day, Aiwa didn¡¯t go to the sect again. She has a lot of frost honey, it would be stupid of her to not use it immediately.

    When she was about to directly consume it, Sam stopped her and created a proper n on how to consume it.

    After that, she took the portion required for that day and Sam made her practice somebody refining methods. He even went so far as to give away the strength poses of Yoga, which he used for his own refining.

    Frost honey is the best way to refine the body.

    The next day, Aiwa went to the sect and got the next mission after causing a lot of ruckuses and it seems like her master also sided with her after a long time, she became ecstatic.

    This mission is also ironically rted to the beasts. She has to go fishing for a shark in the sea.

    Sam gave tips once again and within two days, she caught the shark and came back.

    "This is great, I only have two more tasks and I would be the first one to finish all of the tasks. I will be the only one selected without needing to fight for the ce."

    "Do you really think, you wouldn¡¯t need to fight for the ce?" Sam spoke and poured some cold water on her excitement."

    "What do you mean?"

    Before he could exin, someone came knocking on the door.

    Aiwa was summoned by one of the Elders to have a talk.

    "Does this elder has a disciple or a child that is participating in thepetition?" Sam asked after the attendant left.

    "Yes. So, what?"

    "Well, this is trouble. They are going to force you to hand over the methods you used to capture the beasts. So, be careful."

    "They wouldn¡¯t dare. I am also a disciple of elder and my master ranks higher than this guy."

    "Force doesn¡¯t always mean brute force, you idiot."

    Sam said as he took out two tokens and gave them to her, along with that, they also stayed connected with themunication token.

    If things go rough. Just use this token on someone not so important and take out the other one to threaten them. Don¡¯t turn off themunication token. I will be on my way as soon as things go south."

    "What are you even going to do even if you are there? Do you think you can take on the elder?"

    Sam just smiled which she couldn¡¯t see behind the mask.

    She just left with the tokens, while Sam heard all the conversation in themunication token. They indeed gave out a few threats, but Aiwa was unyielding and came back in an hour.

    This went on for the next two days and in these two days, no matter how much Aiwa tried, the tasks were held back while other elders tried to get information out of her. Aiwa went so far as to dere seclusion until the next task arrives.

    Sam got a bit annoyed, so he went out of the house and decided to piss these guys off even more. So, until Aiwa was in seclusion, all the snow chameleons disappeared. There are not even any traces of them and even if they managed to find some tracks, they could barely reach them.

    The same thing happened to the Frost bees. Their regr route of collecting the Frost essence waspletely devoid of them.

    After maintaining this situation for the next three days, the elders finally yielded and so did Sam.

    He went back and let Aiwa finish thest two tasks.

    He really felt relieved that things didn¡¯t go rough. It would be too weird of him to kill a bunch of weaklings. No matter how overbearing the other party behaved, if he went on a spree, he would bebeled as a bully. He doesn¡¯t care about his image, but Aiwa who helped doesn¡¯t need to get that.

    But after the tasks arepleted, Aiwa faced the final trial at the oppression from the elders. She couldn¡¯t recruit any guards. Even when she went so far as using the frost honey for payment, no one wanted to work for her.

    As the days got closer, she felt frustrated with this overbearing measure taken by the elders, but she also got stubborn.

    "I am not giving those bastards anything. I will just go along with you if I have to. But I am not giving them anything."

    And that is exactly what happened. On the day of departure, Sam is the only one in her guard as they went to the Central State to the headquarters of the Four Leaf.

    There, Sam witnessed a three-day tournament between all the candidates from the Four Leaf Sect battle it out and Aiwa did surprisingly well.

    Sam would see the change in her battle style because of the tips he threw in. She even ranked second. For some reason, as he looked at her, he missed his students.

    He doesn¡¯t know if he is qualified to call them his students when he is away most of the time. But he really wanted to go back at the moment.

    Still, all he can do is wait.

    He needs to get out of this and heal the meridians. Then he would be able to take a more overbearing approach.

    After the tournament is over in the Central State, they were taken to the secret grounds where the wormholes for another is connected.

    An elder from the sect came along with them and exined.

    "For the first three days, the tournament wouldn¡¯t start. You will be going through a special pre-tournament phase in which the candidates will be interacting with each other. After three days, the tournament will begin, but then our sect leader and other leaders will all arrive."

    After sending them to their arranged residences, the elder didn¡¯t show up for the next three days.

    The tournament is being conducted on an indrge enough to be a city. But it was not developed. There is only onerge castle in the middle of it where everyone is gathered. The rest of the ind is as wild as it can get.

    Sam kept on checking the ind in the first three days, while Aiwa attended the formal meetings with the rest of the candidates.

    On the third day all the sect leaders arrived and on the fourth day, the tournament has begun.

    While Sam is getting used to his new life, Sivan is more than used to it.

    Here Sam is guarding a little girl, while Sivan is leading the most active life he can.

    As Sam is in the middle of the tournament, Sivan is in the middle of feasting.

    He is currently sitting in the middle of Yanwu and the rest of the beasts as he shared his energy with them.

    In front of him is arge empty bowl with some blood spilled around.

    Butler Si is holding down arge Sand Badger as he slit its throat and made the blood flow into the bowl.

    When the bowl was full, Sivan opened his eyes and started drinking the blood. He felt the earth elemental energy fill his body as he digested it with the vampire bloodline. His eyes are red and his hair also gained the blood-red hue.

    His aura became a bit sinister and evil and that grin on his face only made it darker.

    The beasts felt a bit revolting when they felt his aura, but they didn¡¯t act up, instead, they took the share of their energy and went back into the divine dimension.

    "Not bad, they are at least taking the energy now. Sooner orter, they would ept me."

    Sivan muttered as he went into the sea of consciousness and looked at Sam¡¯s dormant soul.

    It stood straight with the Ghost chimera surrounding it.

    The bodynguage of the soul resembled that of a fearless man which made Sivan envy Sam a bit.

 Chapter 1259: Lustful Young Master

    Sam might not know this, there is a message behind the posture of the soul form. Particrly Dormant soul which is the urate clone of the emotions and memories with no actual free will. Its form would be instinctual and it represents their mindset.

    Sivan¡¯s form which is a man huddling himself is a symbol of fear. He clearly knows that, but every soul he has seen until now, are always worse than him, there are few that are a bit better, but they are all weak.

    This is the first time, he saw a soul as strong as him or even stronger than him, but have this kind of posture.

    The soul looked like it belongs to a man who can take on the burden of the whole world solely on his shoulders without a second thought.

    He gritted his teeth and tried to probe the soul.

    The Ghost Chimera that sensed the activity against the soul, immediately targeted Sivan¡¯s soul, all the faces made their way towards him as they roared soundlessly.

    Sivan flinched and got away and the ghost chimera went back to the dormant soul.

    "I will defeat you."

    Sivan said in a deep voice before he went out.

    "Let¡¯s go. I need to train."

    Sivan said to Butler Si as they both left.

    Meanwhile, Sam is looking at the rules of tournaments with a weird expression.

    "No wonder, the guards are important."

    For the past three days, Sam learned a lot about this tournament. This is actually a recruitment ground.

    There is a special group of people who are the most important guests. They are the recruiters. Theye to another realm with a bunch of organizations that have Astral ne Initiation stage leaders.

    The people that gathered to participate in the tournament are actually from various sects ruling over thes in a small realm and they all gathered here to organize the tournament so that the recruiters might take a liking to their candidates and take them back to their realm where the organizations would be selecting their preferred candidates after reviewing the recruiters¡¯ reports.

    But the participation rules are what is different.

    Each candidate will have a sphere which they should guard. The very reason for employing the guards is this. Of course, some people take this chance to make the guards protect themselves from the other candidates.

    Candidates can kill each other and do whatever they want. Except for the guards killing the candidates, anything and everything is eptable. Sam never sawpetition as simpleminded as this.

    The winning is also just as simple. The person with most spheres at the end of the wholepetition until only the candidate remains and the rest of them either quits or dies.

    As for the selection criteria, only ten people will be selected. The first five will be thest five people to stay in the game while thest five would be the special choices of the recruiters or simply put some rmendation jobs.

    In the first three days of interactive time, they have been showcasing what organizations are selecting and Aiwa is already hooked with one of them that is located in icy mountains.

    "Just give the sphere to me and let me follow you. Problem solved."

    That is all Sam has to say for this.

    "Old Man Sam, no offense, but you are a cripple, and you were abandoned in a snowy in for a few days. Are you sure that you can take on the elite guards alone like that? I am thinking of trapping and hunting."

    "No need. Let¡¯s just go and deal with them directly."

    Sam said and took the sphere from her hands as they roamed around.

    When the first group of people came at them, he just aimed his finger at them and threw those energy bullets.

    Three guards just exploded right before everyone¡¯s eyes.

    Aiwa was stunned for a second, but she proceeded to fight with her first target and within fifteen minutes, she got the sphere.

    The same thing kept on repeating for the rest of the day and the rest of the candidates immediately hid for the rest of the day.

    But as if they knew all of their locations, Sam and Aiwa managed to track them down and capture them easily.

    By the end of the second day, thepetition was cut short. The leaders of other sects are furious, their candidates were taken down by Aiwa like they are little kids being bullied.

    But they couldn¡¯t care less.

    The top position was hers. They waited for another three days for the Consummate stagepetition to be over and finally, they are out of that realm.

    But they were not directly sent to their desired organization, rather there is some kind of special meeting and ceremony where the organizations can try and poach the twenty candidates in the two divisionsbined along with a lot of other candidates that came from other realms just like them.

    Sam is a bit overwhelmed by all the processes. Except for the selection process for the Pce of inheritance, none of the other selections were this hard andplicated, but the tests are simple and direct.

    But at that point, Aiwa finally hit the first obstacle with the recruiter responsible for her admission into the organization she wants.

    The young master of the organization who seems to be the prime disciple of the organization actually came to the selection process and it seems like he is really lustful.

    "Can you believe it? That bastard asked me to sleep with him if I want to join the Ice temple. I want to kill him. I want to kill him."

    Sam didn¡¯t know what to say about that. He really wanted to go and kill them immediately, but he figured that entering an organization when a friend of hers destroyed the prime disciples and the elders supporting him would not be a good start.

    So, he became sensible and gave her advice.

    "Go and talk to the elders. I remember they sent you an invitation toe and meet them. Bring the tokens I sent you."

    "Are you sure those tokens are going to help me at all? You are just a cripple abandoned in the snow ins, they are the elders of the organization for god¡¯s sake?"

    "You have been saying this for a long time. I am telling you, even if the leader of the organizationes at me, I will be able to deal with him easily. So, just go and talk to them and make sure to stress that you don¡¯t want any of those kinds of deals."

    "Okay." She just shrugged and went to the elders. She wanted to do that anyway.

    But when she met with the elders and exined the situation, their answers almost made her want to quit the whole selection process and get out of there.

    "You might think of quitting this, but the Grand Elder, Madam Aqua has taken a liking to you, if you don¡¯t agree with young master¡¯s request, then it would be your loss. You have a chance to be a disciple of her. You better think clearly."

    Aiwa was stuck, she really didn¡¯t know what to do at the moment. There is no way she is going to sleep with some creep to get a disciple position and she doesn¡¯t want to lose the chance to be a disciple of this amazing woman.

    She has heard of her a lot in the past three days and she is really looking forward to just meeting her. She instinctually chugged the ss of wine on her table and as soon as she did, she realized it is a mistake.

    She felt the effect of aphrodisiac immediately and the prime disciple or whatever that guy¡¯s name ising out.

    He caught ahold Aiwa¡¯s hair and said.

    "Don¡¯t worry, the disciple position of the grand elder is at least worth your virginity."

    Prime Disciple¡¯s hand was suddenly frozen and Aiwa punched on that frozen hand. Arge ice shard entered the arm and tore it through until it reached the shoulder.

    One of the Elders caught hold of Aiwa and held her in his grasp as the other one attended to the prime disciple¡¯s injury.

    "Young master. Please go back to your room. We will bring her there."

    "Don¡¯t make her faint. I want her to be awake while I do her."

    With that, he was gone.

    Aiwa tried to struggle out of the grasp of the elder, but she couldn¡¯t. Her strength is not enough and in desperation, she reached out to the token, Sam gave out and used it on the elder directly.

    *BooM* *SPLASH*

    The energy bullet exploded his head and sshed it all over her.

    Sam who is meditating as he tried to probe the soul of Sivan a bit suddenly only opened his eyes.

    He looked in the direction, Aiwa went and hopped onto his feet as he leaped towards it.

    Some people are going to die today. It is about time he really got something to vent and the reason is also perfect.

 Chapter 1260: Visiting the Temple

    Sam hopped on his one normal leg from one spot to another as he made his way to the room.

    Aiwa is soaked in blood and brain matter and she waspletely shocked by the situation. Her body is still reacting to the aphrodisiac though, the second elder was also surprised by this.

    She took out the remaining token and aimed at the second elder as she backed herself against the wall.

    The prime disciple, who just left, came back with his hand still healing and his guards and other elders from the organization came along as they heard themotion.

    When they looked at the situation, they couldn¡¯t help but frown.

    "What is it? Why is an elder dead?" The Prime disciple asked in an annoyed tone.

    The elder exined what happened and the prime disciple frowned as he looked at the token.

    "Three of you, go and catch her from three sides. I would like to see if she would dare to use the token." He said in an arrogant and cold tone as he looked at Aiwa viciously. A loss of an elder is not that easy to exin, but if they catch this girl and put the me on her, they would still be able to escape the me a bit.

    The prime disciple already thought it through. He would just throw the me to the dead elder and the me of that elder¡¯s death on this girl and everything would be alright.

    Aiwa started shivering as she controlled her carnal desires amplified by this aphrodisiac. Her mind is not clear and she couldn¡¯t even the three guardsing at her to use the token on them. All she could do is instinctively wave the token around, but the guards already noticed that her senses are dull and became more confident.

    Just when they were about to capture her...

    *crash*

    The wall was broken and Sam hopped in. He looked at all the people in the room coldly and his eyes finally stopped on Aiwa who is on the floor. His expression grew colder and killing intent exploded.

    Everyone froze on their tracks and even the arrogant words they wanted to spew were noting out.

    Along with the killing intent, Sam stopped hiding his cultivation and just the sheer pressure made them fall on their knees as they widened their eyes in horror.

    After all, their leaders of the organization are just Astral ne Initiation cultivators and even their superior organizations which they serve as a leader of Astral ne Pre-transcendence.

    There is no way, they would have a chance to meet an Astral ne Transcendent cultivator, much less a cultivator of that level trying to kill them.

    Sam crouched on the floor as she observed her situation and took in a cold breath.

    The guards who are closest to him didn¡¯t even know what to say.

    The elders who understood the situation a bit better immediately stepped forward and one of them spoke.

    "Sire, we are very sorry, we didn¡¯t..."

    *boom* *ssh*

    Before they could finish their words, they were stopped as Sam waved his hand and three small energy bullets exploded in the heads of the three guards.

    Sam ced his fingers on Aiwa¡¯s forehead and tapped a bit. The spiritual energy in her body rippled a bit and her condition became less severe because all of her bodily functions were disrupted for a moment.

    He doesn¡¯t have any medicine with him and he doesn¡¯t have his elemental energies, he couldn¡¯t cure her even if he wanted to do.

    Sam turned to the prime disciple and said.

    "Antidote."

    "I... I..." The prime disciple stuttered and Sam¡¯s energy riled up. The young master peed his pants and knelt on the floor.

    The elder beside him understood that the situation is getting worse. He yanked the young master and whispered in his ear, but the answer the young master gave him shocked him.

    "You don¡¯t have the antidote?" Sam¡¯s voice became cold and he became extremely angry. By now, the elders and recruiters from other organizations already arrived and when they felt Sam¡¯s aura, they didn¡¯t dare talk or let their ignorant youngsters talk.

    Sam looked at one of the elders of the other organizations and asked.

    "I need a beast that could fly."

    The elder hurriedly took out his beast pouch and gave it to him. The beast came out and Sam slowlyid Aiwa down. He then looked at the young master and grabbed him by his neck and boarded the bird while they flew.

    "Show me the direction of your organization." The young master panicked, but still showed the direction of the organization.

    Theynded at the entrance in a few hours, meanwhile, the elders also started behind him and chased after him. Elders from other organizations also didn¡¯t hold back.

    All this while, Sam held Aiwa and kept on making the energy a bit unstable in her body, making her body impossible to function. But even after a few hours, she didn¡¯t have any change in her body¡¯s condition. She is still feeling the effects of an aphrodisiac.

    Sam threw the young master like a ragdoll and entered the sect gates.

    The guards who came at him, couldn¡¯t even take a few steps forwards because of his aura. The beast slowly followed Sam meekly while carrying aiwa.

    The Elders and grand elders came out as soon as they sensed his aura.

    "Senior? May we know why you visited our temple?"

    The Temple¡¯s head asked in a humble tone, but when he saw the youngdy on the bird and the young master threw away like a ragdoll beside him, he understood that things are not simple.

    He could guess what happened and finally, the prime disciple¡¯s deeds came knocking on the door.

    "Antidote."

    Sam asked the Temple¡¯s head.

    "We... We need to check her condition first."

    Sam nodded and one of the healers diagnosed her, their expressions changed a bit as they ran back and whispered something in the ears of the temple head changing his expression too.

    Sam didn¡¯t even wait for the exnation and killed one of the elders who just arrived from the recruitment ce.

    "I don¡¯t care what reasons you have, if the antidote doesn¡¯te in two hours, I will kill one person every two minutes. With the size of your temple and the members, I think you canst for another three hours at most. Act faster."

    With that, Sam didn¡¯t even bother with them and just checked on Aiwa.

    Aiwa¡¯s condition is not exactly great. After some more diagnosing, Sam understood that this is not a regr aphrodisiac. This one doesn¡¯t leave the body until she takes part in the sexual activity of taking the antidote.

    The most he could do is alleviate her condition with his present resources.

    The temple head sent people out to get the antidote, but he knew for sure that two hours wouldn¡¯t be enough. Some people are bound to die. While he is nervously waiting, he saw Sam focusing on the prime disciple who is still sitting on the ground with his legs huddled together.

    He is shivering in fear.

    Sam limped towards him and lifted him by his neck once again and started forcing all his killing intent onto him. The young master could have sworn that he smelled blood. The killing intent is so dense that it made him suffocate. He peed himself one more time.

    Sam took off his spatial ring and checked for the aphrodisiac. He took all the doses and poured everything into his throat and made him forcefully swallow it.

    Sam still held him by his neck and said.

    Small energy rippled entered the young master¡¯s body making him yell in pain.

    "If you get an erection, you will have to experience this every minute."

    This made the young master shiver in fright. He couldn¡¯t control the effects of the aphrodisiac, but the pain that ising is too much. he couldn¡¯t stop or endure either of them.

    He could only look at the temple head pleadingly.

    But even he cannot do anything to help.

    Time passed as the young master went through the soul-searing pain every minute until the antidote arrived.

    In the waiting, twenty people died one after another randomly, and there were some elders, some disciples, and some guards.

    Sam didn¡¯t hold back and he did what he told he would do.

    He killed all of them and when the antidote came, he gave it to Aiwa who finally recovered from her condition.

    Meanwhile, the young master who was psychologically scarred from the incident lost his erection and he never felt so relieved by anything.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is that this is thest erection he could ever get and it is gone.

    Even the aphrodisiac in his body couldn¡¯t make it possible for him to get that erection again.

    Sam looked at the temple head and asked.

    "What is the best healing medicine you have? I mean, the medicine you have been cooping up for decades not daring to use."

    The temple head gulped nervously and took out a special potion and gave it to Sam. It is a light elemental energy potion, the holy water used for healing. Sam is really surprised.

    He then looked at the disciples and said.

    "How many of you are victims of this aphrodisiac?"

    Some of them raised their hands instinctively. There are a lot of female disciples.

    "Temple, a ce of worship. What a great name for such a vile ce." He left those words and brought Aiwa out of that.

 Chapter 1261: Holy Church

    Sam didn¡¯t take the beast this time, he walked out of the temple grounds and met with the elders of other organizations.

    "Where is the wormhole to your superior realm?"

    One of the elders took the step forward and said.

    "Sire, I will take you there. My beast is big enough to amodate you."

    Sam nodded and just boarded the bird as they traveled.

    "What is the superior realm of yours called? Who is in charge there?"

    "It is the holy church, Sire. They worship the angels and they have a lot of realms like ours under their control. Their leader is an Astral ne Pre-transcendent stage cultivator."

    "Is it normal for people from your realm to go there?"

    "There are no restrictions, Sire. But the tax on the other side of this gate is high. We need to pay arge sum if we want to visit on our own. Otherwise, the wormhole supervision wouldn¡¯t let us get out of the city."

    "City?"

    "Yes, the wormholes connecting to all the other realms are gathered there, the Holy Church built arge city there and the security is only second to their headquarters. The security is called the Supervision team and they all guard the wormhole city with their life.

    They wouldn¡¯t let anyone out."

    "So, this potion Holy water is their doing?"

    "Yes, Sire. The Holy Church is an organization with an emphasis on light elements. Anybody who has a light element along with any other element is wee there. Particrly, people with light and fire elemental energies.

    They also despise dark elemental energy and necromancy is something they are wholeheartedly against."

    Sam just sneered in his heart as he heard that.

    He then looked at Aiwa who is sleeping with exhaustion and asked.

    "Is there any ce suitable for her to join?"

    The elder almost wanted to say his own organization¡¯s name, but he understood his ce and didn¡¯t dare blurt that out.

    "There is an adjacent realm to the Holy Realm sire. The leader of that realm is an organization specialized in ice elements. I think she would be a good fit there."

    "Okay, thanks for the information."

    For the rest of the ride, Sam stayed silent. He closed his eyes and started poking the dormant soul once again. He is still angry with the earlier incident and it waspletely shown on the soul. He forcefully tore the soul apart to get the information and digested it.

    This time, it isrger than the previous one and in this process, he had to suffer severe headache in bacsh as he suffered the bacsh from the soul.

    But when the digested information was revealed, he couldn¡¯t help but feel the pain is worth it.

    Because this is something regarding his location.

    Sam knew that his bloodline art, no matter how powerful wouldn¡¯t have just thrown me somewhere too far. After all, he is not that strong. He is already surprised enough that he crossed several realms.

    Now with the location details, he was finally relieved.

    He is actually within the area of influence of the City of Desert.

    He is currently in one of the lower realms that are a bit far away from the Mavin realm the city of the desert is located in. But from the looks of it, if he moved with the hierarchy of these realms, he would be able to go back to that realm, but it would take a few months for him to go.

    The information didn¡¯t just stop there, it also have the hierarchal structure from the Mavin realm until it reaches Sivan¡¯s n.

    What is more surprising is not the information itself, rather the need for Sivan to learn so much about these subordinate realms.

    Sivan is just the younger generation of the n he is part of, but he is already inter stages of the Astral ne transcendent stage, there is no need for him to care about the realms that are this far away.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care too much about it. Whatever the reason the other party has, at least it is useful for him now.

    Sam was dropped at the wormhole. Aiwa and he walked in and arrived at the Holy realm.

    The first thing they saw aftering out of the wormhole and walking out of the door are tworge burly men in full metal armors standing with their hands-on their swords and the luxurious cloaks behind their shiny armors.

    "Entrance fee, please."

    Sam didn¡¯t object and just paid the fee. One of the knights led the way out after learning that it is their first timeing here.

    "May the Lord have his blessing upon you."

    The knight said before leaving.

    Sam shrugged and limped to the nearest city along with Aiwa. They arrived after a few hours and they took residence in an inn.

    "You are awfully silent for a feisty girl. What is wrong with you?"

    Sam asked as he tinkered with his peg leg.

    "Nothing, I am good. I never thought I would get the chance to even get out of the Winter state, but now, I crossed the, then the realm, and from what you said, we will be going to another realm. This is so amazing that I am overwhelmed to even speak a few words."

    "Are you sure you don¡¯t want to go back? Don¡¯t you have some family members?"

    "Nah, they are all dead before I even knew them."

    "That is one closed end."

    "Oy, Old man."

    "Yes."

    "Thanks for helping me. I never knew a cripple could be so strong."

    "Is that apliment or an insult?"

    "Either way, since you are so strong, why were you abandoned in such a backward ce. From what I can see, you are way too strong and you are way too calm about these realms and stuff. I didn¡¯t even know there are other realms and the cultivation beyond Consummate stage is only legends and myths to me."

    "Guess, the world is bigger than what you can fit in that fish brain of yours."

    "Who are you calling fish brain?" And thus the banter started. Sam felt so light-hearted with all of this. In this ce, no one knows him and he can be as he likes. This might not be his life at the moment, he has too much to do and too many things to aplish, but he decided that if he ever has a retirement, he would choose such a rxed life.

    After some more banter, Sam took out the holy water and got ready to treat himself. Normally, this kind of medicine wouldn¡¯t be enough to heal his meridians. With the healing energy spread all over his body and the requirement because of his high cultivation wouldn¡¯t be enough at all.

    But with the energy control and maniption given by this body, things would be different for him.

    He doesn¡¯t have to let the energy go to waste and he can make all the energy focused on one meridian and make it heal. If the energy is left after that, he can direct it to the next meridian.

    He closed his eyes and leaned against the wall as he swallowed the potion. All the healing energy was channeled in his body and Sam controlled it before channeling it to the meridian forcefully.

    He used his own spiritual energy as a carrier to take it to the meridian and locked all the energy there.

    Even if it wants to spread around, it wouldn¡¯t be able to do so. All it could do is heal this one meridian using all the energy.

    The process went on for half an hour and Sam could feel a slight pain all the time.

    After dealing with that, he opened his eyes and heaved a sigh. The whole dose is barely enough to heal one meridian. If he wants to heal himself, he at least needs fifty doses of this potion and he is sure that an organization like the Holy Church might not even be capable of producing that many.

    The ingredients for a potion like this are really rare and an organization with an Initial stage Pre-transcendent cultivator of Astral ne is not big enough to get that many.

    He is even surprised that they gave out something like this to the Ice temple.

    "We will be spending some time in this realm. We need to go to the headquarters of the holy church and make a business deal.

    After we are done there, I will take you to the realm where you can stay."

    "Why don¡¯t you let me follow you along? I kind of like this adventure."

    "You are too young and too weak to be a part of my adventure. In my hometown, people with your cultivation level would at most be soldiers now, so don¡¯t think that you are all that, just because of your talent. The world is very big."

    She just made a face at him and went out.

    "I will take a look around the city for a while."

 Chapter 1262: Pretentious Pope

    Sam and Aiwa are on the road, she shopped around in the city and changed from her fur clothing, and after some rest and she got rid of all the effects of the antidote and the aphrodisiac. But they didn¡¯t go in the direction of the Holy City immediately, instead, they went deep into the forests in the surroundings.

    "Where are we going? We have been roaming around for two days."

    "Just wait." That is the only answer Sam has given her during this time. He is looking around for the traces of the beasts and their footprints.

    After two days of search, Sam finally found one that he is interested in.

    "I am not walking for such a long time. I need to find a beast that is fast enough." Sam finally replied.

    He hopped on his one good leg and made his way towards a den on top of a hill. A head popped out of the cave and growled at Sam.

    It is a Cougar and when he looked at its fur, he was delightfully surprised. He ran into the cave and after an hour, he finally came back with it as he rode on its back.

    This is arge cougar. It looked like a normal cougar in every way and even its name was just that, a cougar. This is one of the beasts that have neutral energy without any elemental influence.

    It is fast, agile, patient, and a perfect hunter. Even though many of the qualities of the actual cougar back on the earth are not present in this one, this is a good enough beast for Sam at the moment.

    He picked up Aiwa and both of them moved to the Holy Church¡¯s headquarters.

    Meanwhile, Sam started thinking about what kind of deal he needed to make with the Holy Church. He needs that potion named holy water inrge quantities. Some of the medicine that he has now is of a higher quality but it is not exactly for curing things.

    Most of them are for recovering the energy and the ones that are for injuries wouldn¡¯t work on the meridianwork. They would mostly stop bleeding for him at best and clear him of physical exhaustion and muscle rejuvenation.

    The holy water has pure light elemental energy that works perfectly for his situation. He could try to exchange the potions he has at hand for them, but he believed that they wouldn¡¯t fetch enough.

    This Holy water potion is an all-in-one potion for the low-level cultivators, for mortal ne cultivators, this might as well be considered aplete resurrection potion.

    While thinking, Sam managed to reach the holy city in an hour at full speed. The cougar is at the peak stage of Astral ne Initiation. This might even be the second strongest creature in all of the realm or at least on this.

    If only he had Sky with him. He would have made it a lot faster. But now, he had to travel for half a day at full speed to reach the destination.

    After checking into an inn, Sam observed the situation for the next two days, while Aiwa once again went on a spree for shopping.

    The Holy Church is actually the same kind of church that was present back on the earth. But instead of worshipping the god almighty and Jesus, the people here worshipped the angels directly.

    The Archangel Michael, Gabriel, Azrael, and so on. They worshipped various angels and each angle has different buildings within the church estate.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel surprised. All this while, he has been touching various people and gods of different mythologies from back on earth. Many characters were something he was familiar with.

    The only thing he didn¡¯t get to meet are the Characters from Christian Mythology.

    Now, he did that as well.

    Even the preaching of this ce is simr to that of the church back on earth. Everything they say is about god almighty. Praising their gods and angels for every single thing. Every visitor that came from outside was encouraged to be a believer.

    In the two days, Sam visited the church. The open area where he could see the angel statues. He wanted to see if he can find one for Samael or Lucifer. But there is none.

    He went on to purchase some of the texts and go through with them and the teachings resemble extremely close to the biblical studies, the lucifer is marked as the fallen-one.

    He couldn¡¯t help but smile about how uncanny all the mythologies are so close to the ones back on the earth. He always wondered what the connection between the earth and these realms are and now curiosity only grew more.

    After the two days of basic scouting, Sam got the idea of the hierarchal structure and who to meet here in this ce.

    He went to the administrative area of the Holy Church where people with various serious injuries and illnesses register themselves for treatments. Healing is one of the most basic ie sources for the church.

    He revealed his cultivation directly and said.

    "I want to meet with the person in charge."

    The administrator took some time to recover from the shock and immediately ran in.

    After a few minutes, a man with arge and luxurious robe which even made Sam take a second hard look came out with grace and an air of superiority.

    He looked at Sam for a moment and said.

    "May I ask, what brings Sir here?"

    "I need to talk a business deal. Would you mind finding a private ce for us?"

    "I am in the service of the lord. I don¡¯t talk business with you. I will arrange a meeting with the administration, you can talk with them."

    Sam looked at the high-grade silk robe hanging on the old man and noticing his gaze, the old man felt embarrassed.

    Sam raised his aura and said in a deep voice.

    "This is something only you can decide. A person with power and authority."

    "I am but a servant sir. I am no man of authority or power."

    "What is your position here?"

    "I was rewarded with the title of the pope for my work."

    "Even the titles didn¡¯t change..." Sam muttered a bit and continued.

    "I may not be as wise as you and your lord, but I am pretty sure of one thing. The only type of person that is dangerous than the man who likes to unt his power and authority is a man who denies that he has the power and authority all the while using them to the fullest."

    The pope looked at Sam with an embarrassed expression. Sam continued.

    "You must understand by now, that I don¡¯t need to have this current discussion. I can just take what I want. So, take it when I am giving the respect. I have it in a limited amount and if you stretch it too much, you might not get any of it anymore."

    Only after that did the pope stop being pretentious and led Sam inside.

    "I want thirty doses of holy water potion."

    The pope was dumbfounded. He doesn¡¯t even know what to say about that.

    Sam knew he would get rejected with just this, so he already prepared a detailed n.

    "Before you reject me, hear me out properly..."

    He went on to go through with the rest of his proposal.

    "This is a long-term partnership between us. I will give you the most detailed construction n in the next three days if you agree with this.

    We can sign a soul contract."

    Sam then took out a special token and continued.

    "This is the exchange token. Someone wille here in a few years with an exact token that matches with this. You can pay my share to that person and they will give you a long-term business deal that could extend for a few more decades."

    "Who is that person that will being here?"

    "Either my subordinate or a friend. Whoeveres with this can get the share. Think of this as my investment here. When the timees, my organization will be in full contact with you."

    "We can only sign the deal after you show the n. Until then all of this is but an empty talk."

    "Sure. But I need a few light elemental inscription masters."

    "There will be a residence arranged for you in the church estate, they will be sent there."

    "Thank you."

    With that, Sam went out and met with Aiwa.

    "We are moving into the church estate. We will get out of here after three to four days."

    "Into the estate? They just let you in?"

    "Of course, they will let me in. It is all business. It is all about profits."

    "But I heard that not many people can stay inside the estate."

    "Yes, and you just heard that it is all about profits. Don¡¯t be too surprised."

 Chapter 1263: Dwarves

    Sam and Aiwa moved into the church estate.

    For the next three days, Aiwa was in the city. She walked around, bought everything she wanted. Most of her life was spent in the winter state. She was unable to see the outside of that frozennd much in her life.

    Now that she got the chance, she is enjoying it very much.

    In these three days, Sam created a design of the tower that works on the light element. He made the inscription masters make the formation te required for the demonstration.

    The demonstration wasplete along with the construction n. The holographic presentation was perfect. But the inscription didn¡¯t even realize what they had done until they finished it. When they thought of replicating and creating the technology by themselves, they were left with a lot of confusion because nothing they did added up to the final product.

    Sam didn¡¯t care what they tried, he had his ways to make them work to create technology, but them not being able to replicate it.

    He presented it to the Pope of the Holy Church.

    This is the Holy tower of Healing.

    This works on arge supply of light elemental energy and it is suitable for healing mortal ne cultivators. Each floor of the tower runs on healing formations that are suitable for different cultivation levels.

    He didn¡¯t create anything for the Astral ne cultivators, that would be too much of a price to pay for a partnership with one such organization.

    After giving out the detailed n and the formation masters and artisans confirmed that this would work, the Pope gave out the potions as well as the soul contract as Sam asked.

    Along with that, Sam also got a rmendation letter written down for Aiwa so that she could go to the Organization that would be good for her ice elemental energy development.

    The rmendation was from the pope himself, so there is no way the organization that has business deals with the Holy Church would reject it.

    After that, he bought a beast pouch suitable for the Cougar and moved to the next realm along with Aiwa.

    They stayed there for two days as they explored the surroundings of the organization as well as scouting the hierarchy and etiquette.

    Sam particrly focused on the bad apples of the organization. If they are within the limits of his tolerance, then the rest of the organization wouldn¡¯t be that bad.

    And he was really satisfied with it.

    So, Sam went to the organization with Aiwa.

    "Are you sure you don¡¯t want me to apany you? You are a cripple, after all, you may need my help."

    Aiwa asked and Sam could only smile about that. He doesn¡¯t need much help from Aiwa and any other help he might need is way beyond any means Aiwa could have on her hand.

    After thinking for a while, Sam replied.

    "I am currently in a bit of a pickle and I cannot exin it to you. The next time we meet, I wouldn¡¯t look like this. I wouldn¡¯t have a mask and I wouldn¡¯t also have the peg leg. I would no longer be a cripple and I will show you my true face."

    "I already saw your face on the ins."

    "I already told you that is not my true face. That is the face I have to live with for now. Anyway, you will recognize me, even when Ie back with my original face, then you cane with me back to my hometown.

    Until then, try to improve. With your current strength, my chef¡¯sst apprentice can take you down."

    With that, Sam left her in that organization, and with the rmendation letter and his strength, the head of the organization himself directly met with him and processed the recruitment.

    After he was done there, Sam went into the snowy mountains alone as he meditated once again. He decided to proceed further after he healed himself.

    He got all the things he needed.

    He stayed in the caves for two days topletely heal the meridians one after another.

    After the healing is done, he focused on the soul once again. The more he attacked the soul, the more it is trying to resist him. He noticed that the bacsh from the first and second times are vastly different.

    The second time, made him feel acute headaches for quite a while.

    So, he needs to be much more careful.

    Sam wrestled with the soul and after much effort, he managed to get the third piece without harming himself.

    But digesting it didn¡¯t give him much information. They are tactics Sivan used to deal with some of his opponents when their n is going against other organizations for some resource points and territory.

    He left the realm after that and went to the next realm. He got some information from the Holy Church on where he could find the best artisans nearby and he got a decently positive address.

    This is an organization of dwarves. They are the best when ites to crafting with metal, so he doesn¡¯t have to worry they would screw it up if he gave the perfect ns.

    But before he could go there, he needs to collect some metals that would be perfect for the product he needs.

    So, he went on the search for them while he started designing the products he need so that he could present it to the dwarves.

    He also needs to make something to repay the dwarves.

    For the next week, he was on the conquest and collected some materials. After that, he sat down once again and decided to take some more information from the soul.

    This time, he got some more internal information about Sivan¡¯s n. The internal deals between the n elders, disciples, and the subordinate organizations could be used as dirt when he needs.

    Sam didn¡¯t even know what to do with that information in his current situation. But he is sure that this woulde in handy when he goes back to get his body as well as take revenge.

    He doesn¡¯t know how far the yers will progress with the organizations, but Sam knew that they wouldn¡¯t be able to deal with thest three without his presence. Even if they were able to deal with it, they would at least wait until they reach the Peak of transcendence and even the Astral ne Consummate stage, and even before that, they even have to deal with the remaining two organizations before that with the heads being at Late stage of Astral ne Consummation.

    It would take a few years at least and that would be enough time for Sam to get back into his own body.

    After this piece of currently useless information, he just went on with the search for materials. He spent the next three weeks for the materials and tried to rip the soul apart one by one, but all the information is mostly about Sivan¡¯s personal life.

    His trashy childhood and the oppression. The memories of the starting stages of him being crippled.

    His revenge on some people caused him this condition. With his psychopathic behavior towards his enemies, Sam is really sick of this guy.

    He got it tough, but Sam knew many people who got it as tough as him if not tougher. But none of them turned out to be as psychopathic as this guy.

    This guy has no bottom line, he would torture an infant to get a confession from a mother if he needs to and he actually set precedence for that.

    Sam understood that he is in an even worse situation than he actually thought. Getting his body is not just a matter of strength and power, he would have to y with this guy¡¯s unpredictable mentality.

    But that is too far away.

    After gathering all the material he needed for the next project andpleting the design, Sam finally made a move to the Dwarven tribe.

    This is one of the closed organizations and Sam is tempted to see if the other party is the same organization that was connected to the Banished Realm, but once he reached there, he instantly realized that he is not.

    These dwarves are more or less simr to that to the previous dwarves he meant, but it could be said these guys are variants. In this sense, all these dwarves only have metal and fire elements which is a greatbination for a species that is known as great artisans throughout the ages.

    The first thing Sam did after arriving at the realm is go to the best weapon shop in town. He looked at the weapons to judge the quality of crafting. Looking at Sam checking the weapons, the shopkeeper is really intrigued.

    Sam is looking at all the right ces and whenever he spotted a good one, he has his expression showing it, so he approached Sam and excitedly showed the collection.

    "Do you take custom orders?" Sam asked after he was done window shopping.

    "Of course."

    "Then, I have a few designs that should be produced. They need to be precise to the point. Do you mind arranging a meeting with the weaponsmith?"

 Chapter 1264: Staff

    "My master is the Weapon Smith and I am also his assistant.

    So, if you don¡¯t mind, please show the designs to me. If it is notplicated enough for the Master to review directly to agree to make it, I would never hear the end of it."

    Sam just shrugged and took out three scrolls. He opened one of them is it actually arge staff. This is not a Bo staff used for battling directly. It is a walking staff, which would help him walk. But the staff is divided into various parts with a veryplicated internal structure.

    The remaining two scrolls are also part of this design, they are magnified designs of the internal structures that could help them get a clearer idea of what they need to make.

    After looking through the design, the shopkeeper was shocked.

    "Who designed this?"

    "I did."

    "You are an artisan?"

    "It is kind ofplicated to exin. Will it be possible for your teacher to do this? Can I meet him now?"

    "Yes, of course. Please follow me."

    After that, the shopkeeper decisively closed the shop and led Sam outside. They soon reached the estate of the chief of the dwarven tribe. Within the estate, there is another building behind the main mansion and there is a middle-aged-looking Dwarf working at a forge.

    The shopkeeper went to him to talk and after a few minutes, Sam was invited in.

    The Weapon Smith looked at the design and said.

    "Are you really the one who designed this?"

    "Yes." The dwarf looked at Sam who wore a mask and a cloak.

    "Your attire is not so convincing."

    "I know that. But I don¡¯t have any intention or necessity to lie to you."

    With that, Sam raised his cultivation. He is a lot stronger than the dwarf who is Astral ne Pre-transcendence. If not for the fact that Sam is currently in trouble and he is not willing to go to higher realms for some reason, he wouldn¡¯t have evene here.

    The Weaponsmith stayed silent for a while and proceeded to look at the design.

    "It would take some time. This is veryplicated. We need to make a lot of small things and the materials needed are also kind of rare. The outeryer of the staff needs to be thin like a sheet of metal, but it also needs to be strong enough to endure the physical attacks and the energy cirction.

    From the looks of it, you would be adding the inscriptions too and it looks like they are for some serious energy usage and an offensive one at that.

    This is going to be difficult."

    "You don¡¯t have to worry about the materials. I have them. I even know of the alloy forme that need to be used. If possible, I would like to be with you throughout the process. But if not, I can only give out the instructions."

    "No problem, you can follow along as long as you don¡¯t interfere in my process."

    "That was easier than I thought."

    "My techniques are not exactly that easy to imitate just by watching them and it is not some inscription or formation work to reveal too many secrets. They need practice and most of it is spontaneous. I am not afraid that you would steal my technique."

    "That is great. Can we start as soon as we can?"

    "I have a project at hand. I willplete it by tomorrow morning. We can start ours in the afternoon."

    "I will stay at the East Side Inn."

    "I will send someone to inform you. We can discuss the payment details tomorrow."

    Sam went back to the inn.

    The next day, he was called by the shopkeeper and went back to the forge. They started discussing how to proceed and the payment that Sam offered is something that the old man didn¡¯t expect.

    Sam is giving out the knowledge of the material studies of the dusk organization, some wine recipes, and some rare metals on top of that.

    The old man skimmed through the introductory knowledge of Material studies and was really surprised. Sam also tossed in this world¡¯s adaptation of the modern earth¡¯s manufacturing processes like the powder metallurgy and the Weaponsmith didn¡¯t really give him much trouble before epting.

    Sam spent two and a half weeks finishing the staff along with his old man. While the old man finished each part separately, Sam finished the inscription side of it.

    By the time all the parts werepleted, Sam has attacked the soul two more times and only got something rted to the financials and the sexual affairs of the people from Sivan¡¯s n.

    When the staff is finally assembled, it looked just like a normal bo staff, but it was a bit thick and its cross-section is not exactly circr. Only the top part where Sam holds the staff to get some support while moving, the rest of the staff is mostly square in terms of the cross-section.

    The staff is divided into three parts from the handle down. Each part has a square crosssection and in the middle of each part, there is a small circr piece joining the two parts.

    Sam held the staff and walked with its support. It is better than the crutch and he went out into the forest to test some of its functions.

    After he was satisfied with it, he came back and spoke to the Weaponsmith again.

    "I actually have other projects that I want you to make, do you want to do it?"

    Sam said and took out a bunch of scrolls, when the Weaponsmith looked at the scrolls, he was stunned. He couldn¡¯t help but gulp with his eyes wide open.

    It took a while for him to calm himself down.

    "I would be really honored to do this for us, but I am unworthy of such a great product."

    "You don¡¯t need to be so hard on yourself. You did a great job with the staff."

    "Yes, I did and it took everything I had to make it. I am not suitable to make something like this. But you don¡¯t have to worry. I know of someone that would be more than happy to make something like this. In fact, he would do it for free and even go as far as getting you the best possible materials too."

    Sam was surprised.

    "Really? There is someone so generous in this world?"

    "It is not exactly generosity. It is more of a pride thing. He just wants to be recognized. It has been a few decades since he sent this challenge.

    He challenged everyone to bring a challenging design that would make him feel stumped and make himpletely overwhelmed. If he can get that design, he would get the best possible materials from his own collection and make the product for them with all he got."

    "How can people trust his words that he is not really dazzled by a design?"

    "He sits in a special formation that resonates along with his soul. As long as he has an emotional reaction, even if he hides it in his face, he wouldn¡¯t be able to hide it with his soul.

    I will give you my token and he would allow you to meet him directly, you don¡¯t have to go through the regr queue.

    Show him this and you would be able to see the reaction. I am pretty sure, this is going to be the best product he has ever seen."

    With that, he gave him the token and told him the way.

    Sam was immediately on the move. Now he has a staff in the hand that attracted some weird attention when someone looked at it closely.

    After entering the wormhole and reaching the ce, Sam took a deep breath.

    There is arge queue in front of the Artisan¡¯s mansion. People have various designs in their hands and they are eagerly praying to whatever the gods they are worshipping that they should be the one getting selected.

    Sam showed the token to the guards that are patrolling the queue so that no one causes any ruckus.

    He is actually surprised a bit by the diversity in the guards. Some of them are human, some are elves and there are even some dwarves.

    The guards didn¡¯t shoo him off or immediately weed him in, rather they returned the token back to him and they went to inform their leader, who then came back and checked the token again before going back in. After this repeated two more times, finally Sam was allowed inside.

    When Sam met the person, he was a bit surprised. Because the artisan is actually a half-elf and half-dwarf.

    This is something he didn¡¯t expect.

    He has seen a lot of half-elves, but most of them only procreated with humans as they resemble the elves but are a little uglier.

    Dwarves are too short and their looks are too crude.

    So, he didn¡¯t expect any union between the two, but since the person is in front of him, he had to believe it.

 Chapter 1265: Useful information

    "Give me the designs."

    The Artisan looked at Sam emotionlessly. There is not a single trace of any emotion in his eyes or face. This is the ultimate poker face. Sam took out a few scrolls and ced them in front of him.

    "One design would be enough, give me the best of the bunch."

    "All of thesebine to make one design."

    Sam said as he opened the first scroll with much difficulty.

    The assistant came and helped him spread the scrolls one after another as he brought some disy boards used by some artisans while working.

    When everything was spread, the Artisan was stunned, at this moment the spiritual energy in the surroundings vibrated a bit and the people outside of the mansion could clearly sense it, all the guards and others looked at the mansion in shock.

    The guard captain came out and said.

    "The selection process isplete. Sir Gravin has found the design he liked. Now, please leave the premises."

    And thus the ruckus began.

    Some people started questioning the judgment, some said that it is unfair and some said that they would present theirs and it would definitely be better than whatever the artisan has selected.

    The guards are no pushovers though, they immediately cleared the whole mess.

    Meanwhile, Inside the mansion.

    Sam just waited for Gravin to take in the excitement caused by this design. He didn¡¯t interrupt his thought process.

    "This is great. Who designed it?"

    These are the first words that came out of his mouth.

    "I did," Sam replied calmly.

    Gravin looked at him with some suspicion, but he didn¡¯t question him further.

    "This is a great design, but the materials you have specified are not exactly the best for them."

    "I know that. But I am not in a situation where I can get the materials that I like. I have topromise."

    "Good thing that you met me. I have the right materials for this."

    With that, Gravin waved his hands and material, Sam is extremely familiar with came out. Meteorite Sand.

    Sam is impressed, to say the least.

    "You really have a vast collection."

    Sam said as he touched each pile of sand.

    His favorite ck meteorite sand is there, then the Silver, the grey, the fire, almost all major kinds are there.

    Gravin looked at Sam inspecting the sands calmly.

    "Are you sure you want to use such a precious collection on me? I am sure they didn¡¯te for a small price."

    "They didn¡¯t. They are way too expensive, I paid way too much for that. But I am going to use them to create the greatest masterpiece I have ever made and you brought the design for that. So, I am going to use the best I have."

    "If you say so."

    Sam agreed and they made a deal.

    "I have another one if you want to take a look. I want that to be made as well. But I don¡¯t know if you have enough sand with you."

    Sam took out the second design and gravin grinned in delight this time.

    "Don¡¯t worry, I have just the materials. But I have to say, using these things is not exactly easy. Are you sure you are up for it? The energy control needed is something even higher cultivators cannot do."

    "I am sure. Controlling energy is the only thing I am good at at the moment."

    Gravin just nodded and they shook on the deal.

    This time, the production process is going to take longer. Sam once again missed his body and the divine dimension. Now, to make these two things, it would take around two months at least.

    Sam has to wait around for this time. Of course, he could find the materials for the breakthrough, but the current realm is not powerful enough to hold the materials that could help him break through to the next level.

    He is sure that Sivan would have been trying his best to break through with his new body and the new potential he discovered for himself.

    He is in fact counting on it. Sivan¡¯s n is rich and theirworks are broad. He would be able to gather all the materials needed for the breakthrough easily and could cultivate peacefully. Now, Sam only needs to find materials for only one person¡¯s cultivation which is a lot easierpared to finding the resources for nine people.

    He would take this chance to let the other party grow his body¡¯s cultivation while he maintained the cultivation of this body and when he performed the exchange, he would be able to get his body at higher cultivation.

    Most of it is Sam¡¯s guess, but from what he learned about the other party¡¯s personality through the memories he has been obtaining for a while, this could be considered as an educated guess.

    And Sam doesn¡¯t know how right he is.

    As he is thinking of what to do in these two months, Sivan is chugging pints of blood one after and eating raw flesh one beast at a time as he tried to increase his cultivation faster and faster.

    He even went as far as getting different beasts as prey for Yanwu and the rest to improve the cultivation for both sides.

    He is taking on this aggressively.

    Back at Gravin¡¯s ce, Sam decided to do some exploration. Gravin could do most of the work by himself except for the extremelyplicated parts where he might need Sam¡¯s guidance, he doesn¡¯t need Sam around for much.

    So, he decided to go around and see if he could find anything worthwhile.

    At the start of the journey, Sam once again tried his hand at the Dormant soul.

    By now, the soul dimmed noticeably and it is shivering in fright whenever Sam came around to take a peek. Sam forced it to constantly undergo the stress of his soul energy as he tore one part after another.

    Even though the bacsh increased a bit, he is also getting faster at gaining the information he needed.

    And this time, he finally got the information he needed.

    He was confused since the first time he got the information regarding his location from Sivan¡¯s memories.

    He couldn¡¯t understand why Sivan from such arge n knew of these small organizations around and he finally got the answer.

    These are all actually Sivan¡¯s vassals. This guy has many organizations under his control. In fact, the Holy Church is also under his control, but even those organizations don¡¯t know that he is their true boss.

    Sivan has created arge hierarchal structure and is getting taxes from each and every organization. He is going after the quantity to increase his riches.

    He has arge force under his personal control without any rtions to the n and for it to thrive, he needs to find resources suitable for all cultivation levels as he nurtured them since they awakened.

    He has a troop in every cultivation level from the Mortal ne to the Astral ne Transcendence.

    This is indeed arge army and to nurture it, he has organizations of various levels under his control that would send him resources annually. Along with the resources, many talented people will be recruited by him as they go through various tests within this hierarchal structure and reach him to join his force.

    And all of this is happening without even revealing his name.

    Sam is genuinely impressed. To run such arge racket without even revealing any information to his n and the rest of the world, would take a lot of intelligence and wisdom.

    Now, when Sam paired this information with all the schemes and ns their family is using to suppress Sivan even though he was a cripple, he couldn¡¯t help butugh.

    Sivan should be the weakest candidate as he has the least battle prowess, at least Sivan wasn¡¯t able to gain much prowess as he gave up on himself personally fighting. But when ites to the forces, he is the best of the best.

    Not a single Elder much less a candidate can oppose him when ites to it.

    Sam immediately held his journey off and made a list of organizations and their hierarchal structure.

    This is the foundation of Sivan¡¯s strength that could help him stand politically as the leader of the n as well as many realms.

    Even now, he is dictating how the lives of people in various realms will be going on and no one knows he is controlling their fates.

    If he matures properly, that would be a force to reckon with. It is alreadyrger than the Dusk organization in terms of numbers and it is also a lot stronger as Sivan has way too many Astral ne cultivators under his control.

    Sam really wished, he got the names and identities of the people within his force knowingly or unknowingly. But he only got the organization names.

    But still, Sam decided to take action.

    He is not willing to let this guy go that easily. So, he would start by destroying his foundation one stone at a time until his whole empire copses.

 Chapter 1266: Forced partnership

    Sam changed his destination to the Primate realm. A realm that is known for the primate species it houses. It has almost all kinds of monkey species of a decent bloodline. There are manys with different environments housing different kinds of apes and monkeys.

    There are many organizations in this realm and in particr, the Primate sect is the best of them all. The Sect has thousands of years of history and has a deep connection with the Apes of this world.

    When Sam enquired a bit about the sect near Gravin¡¯s estate, he got the news that the sect is so famous in that area and so connected to that realm that some high grade and highly dangerous ape tribes in the wilderness has connections with the sect and wouldn¡¯t harm its disciples no matter what and even goes so far as to help them in critical situations.

    This is a decent organization, but the leader of the organization is only a Peak stage Pre-transcendent cultivator of the Astral ne.

    It is easy for Sam to take this down and he decided to take it down without any second thoughts.

    After reaching the realm by crossing some wormholes and then crossing another two to reach the the sect is in and finally traveling on cougar for three days straight, he finally reached the sect.

    He could have used some force to use the space gates of the sect, but he doesn¡¯t want to alert them which might lead to their escape or even cause a biggermotion alerting the supervisor of this organization in a higher realm which would blow his cover.

    He would sooner orter be found out by Sivan, but he would rather be itter than sooner.

    But once he reached the city, Sam didn¡¯t hold back at all.

    He directly went to the main gate of the sect ground.

    The guards looked at him weirdly.

    Sam has only one arm and he is limping. His peg leg is not exactly hidden properly. He is holding a walking staff which is weirdly shaped in their opinion.

    He is wearing a cloak and a ck metallic mask. No matter how they saw it, he didn¡¯t look okay in that surroundings.

    "Excuse me? What are you doing in the premises of the sect?"

    One of the guards came forward and asked him.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother looking at him much and tapped his staff on the ground as he moved his hand a bit downwards on the staff.

    At the grip of the staff, there are three holes that are exposed and three small cylinders popped out of them. The three cylinders are extremely small they looked like some slight protrusions.

    The three of them are facing three different directions. The middle one straight ahead, the top one to the left, and the bottom one to the right.

    Energy gathered in it as the three energy bullets went and hit the three different directions.

    Two energy bullets hit the walls on either side of the gate while the middle one destroyed the gate itself.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The three explosions made the wall and the gate copse while the guards crouched down in terror. They couldn¡¯t even take the aftershocks of the explosion.

    "If you want to live, you guys better run."

    Sam said those words as he moved forward. The three protrusions constantly oscited in the staff. They are very small, each with only two centimeters diameter by the power they are packing is too much for these people.

    The disciples and the elders are already running towards the gate. But Sam didn¡¯t care. He just walked in as if he owned the ce and the slow pace he kept up and the limp made him even scarier.

    "Who are you? Why are you here?"

    One of the Elders sane enough to know that someone that confident in the enemy territory shouldn¡¯t be taken lightly asked.

    But Sam just aimed the staff at him and the energy bullet wasunched.

    The body of the elder exploded and in that ce, arge crater and a bunch of meat paste and blood.

    He walked forward and another elder arrived. Another energy bulletnded and another elder exploded.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother sparing anyone. Generally, he would have gone easy on people that are not of his concern. He carried a lot of power throughout the years and if he wanted, he could have made a lot of people disappear and upy everything he wanted and needed with pure tyranny.

    But he is not that guy. Even the destruction of the organizations and killing so many people were out of necessity. He didn¡¯t have any more personal agenda other than their gods asking him to kill their own followers.

    Now, the situation is different. Sivan is the one who threw the first punch and anything that is supporting him is his enemy and opposition. He doesn¡¯t care if they are only following orders or if they are indirectly involved and didn¡¯t even know of their involvement, he can only clear them out, so that they wouldn¡¯t be used against himter.

    Soon, the elders gathered and formed a barricade as they attacked jointly.

    Sam tapped the staff once again and all therge-scale attacks from the Astral ne cultivators were simply blocked by a single transparent energy barrier that was formed around him with the staff as its center.

    Meanwhile, the energy bullets are still being shot and the elders were unable to escape death.

    The leader of the sect finally couldn¡¯t take it anymore and activated all the trump cards he could think of, but everything was just useless.

    When he finally realized that he couldn¡¯t do anything against Sam, he finally relented and knelt down before asking.

    "Sir, you are clearly a person of great strength, why are you fighting with us? How have we offended you?"

    "It is not you who did it, it is your superiors that did it. I have nothing against you."

    "My superior? The Golden Silk Sect?"

    The sect leader said involuntarily. Sam just smiled behind his mask and remained silent. He didn¡¯t care what this guy thought of the reason behind his demise and his sect¡¯s destruction.

    Sam got ready to make a final move and the sect leader couldn¡¯t let himself go like that, so he desperately pleaded.

    "Sir, please give me a chance to redeem myself. Whatever the offense our superiors brought you, I have no idea. Neither I nor my subordinates have any hand in it. I plead with you to give us a chance to redeem ourselves. Please. I believe we deserve a chance to at least save ourselves."

    Sam paused and his energy bullet that was about to be shot disappeared.

    He stayed silent and gave a quick thought.

    What the other party said is right. But he is reluctant to let the subordinates of the other party go just like that. After all, the primate sect is one of the pirs that is providing financial assistance to Sivan without even knowing. He of all people knew that financial assistance can be of great importance in this world.

    He defeated most people with just massive amounts of money which enabled him to get manpower and materials forrge-scale things that could attack in his stead.

    But now that this guy pleaded to do whatever it takes to please Sam, he thought of something else.

    "Bring all of your core members and arrange a secret meeting. None of the matters from that meeting can be revealed outside."

    The elder hurriedly nodded and immediately called for a meeting with all the core members in the sect.

    Sam then startedying his demands down and the core members¡¯ faces paled.

    They were tempted with some of the offers he has presented, but they were also not exactly ready to give up their freedom as making a soul contract with Sam is one of the basic things to do in the partnership, Sam is proposing.

    "Sleep on the matter ande back tomorrow. I will be staying here. I will give you a sample of the things, I would be offering you and if you think it is worth it, you can sign the deal."

    That was what he said and the sect members did as they were told.

    Sam created a bunch of designs overnight. He didn¡¯t make a big deal out of it and only made some normal designs.

    Most of them are rted to the sect¡¯s defense.

    "These designs canpensate you for the defense youck because of the elders I killed. I will give these to you first. You can call your formation masters and check them. Remember that this is just the tip of the iceberg."

    He said to the sect members in the next day¡¯s meeting.

    They checked everything with the formation masters until evening and came back hurriedly.

    The sect leader hurriedly agreed, after all the alternative is death, and that too for no apparent reason. He would for something he didn¡¯t cause.

    "I will be staying here for three more days. Lock down the sect and begin your construction process for the defense. Also, I need the locations for some rare cultivation resources that would be useful for me. I am sure there should be some forbidden zones that you are afraid to go."

    The sect leader nodded and did as he was instructed.

 Chapter 1267: Cultivation Technique

    Sam stayed there for three days and finished the designs. They are not some new designs that he created out of blue. They are already premade and most of them are the designs done by the students and other designers within the Dusk organization. They are not even his own designs.

    When the leader of the Primate sect looked at the designs he was ecstatic. Sam killed around nine elders. Generally, that kind of enmity wouldn¡¯t go away that easily. Even Sam had forced them into the contract, they would still hold the resentment.

    But the Primate sect leader lost the resentment immediately. He didn¡¯t care if Sam had killed the elders, he only cared that he has new cards in his sect that could help them prosper even more.

    "From today, onwards you guys will be able to earn more from what I provided to you. You will be giving me the ten percent share of the gross ie you have with the help of these things. And with that ten percent, you will open an orphanage. From infants to teenagers, whether they have awakened or not, they would wee in the orphanage and they would be trained once they are awakened.

    If they were to reach the requirements of your sect, they will join the Primate sect, if not they can stay in the orphanage until the Great realm cultivation stage. They would contribute to developing the organization.

    Sooner orter, a few people from my team wille and they will take over the orphanage part of it, so you don¡¯t have to worry too much.

    Do you understand?"

    "Yes, Sir."

    "As for your regr hierarchy and partnership with the Golden Silk sect, just let it go as it did before. But every disciple you send there should be a spy if they ever recruit anyone from this site, that person who be a spy for you and in turn for me."

    "Yes, Sir."

    Sam nodded in satisfaction and got the list of the forbidden ces within the realm. When he looked through he understood most of the locations have nothing useful to him. They would have been useful if he has his previous body, but currently, he doesn¡¯t have other elements, and ingesting other elemental energy substances ispletely useless.

    After going through all of them, he only had one ce left to visit.

    The Primal Valley.

    Sam made his way there and reached it in three days. The surrounding areas of the Primal valley arepletely empty. They are devoid of all living creatures. Except for the trees and the grass, all the other creatures are gone.

    Sam entered the valley directly without much fear. He is a bit vignt though. No matter how confident he is, this is indeed a new ce and he doesn¡¯t know exactly what kind of danger he is going to face.

    He spread his spiritual sense as much as possible as he walked forward. Soon, he sensed something, the energy within the valley is extremely pure and dense. Every breath he took made him feel refreshed.

    But along with that, he also sensed a threat. He tapped the staff and a barrier appeared around him.

    *BAM*

    Arge force hit the barrier at the rear. He looked around to see arge ape looking at Sam viciously and to his surprise, it is a creature of Astral ne Transcendence, even though it is in the initial stage, this is the strongest creature, he has seen in a while.

    This is called the Primal Diamond Ape. Many people will mistake that it is a creature that has some earth elemental variation rted to diamonds, but no, the dame diamondes from the shape of their joints.

    They are shaped sharply like diamonds and when the enemies were hit, they would be in for hell.

    Sam saw first hand as the fist stayed on the barrier for a brief moment, how those diamond fists look.

    The ape jumped backward as it looked at Sam with vignce and hatred.

    Sam is clearly stronger than the ape, but he still wanted to try his luck with a sneak attack as it has a great chance of seeding, but now the surprise element is gone. The ape can only fight and hope that Sam leaves the valley.

    So, it started attacking.

    Sam¡¯s barrier was strong though, the ape wasn¡¯t able to prate it even after so many hits, but soon it seemed to have realized something. Ittched itself onto the barrier and started smashing its elbows at a single point.

    Those diamond-like pointy elbows smashed the barrier after twelve hits thatnded in three seconds and Sam was really surprised by it.

    The Apended straight at the staff and grabbed a hold of it tightly. It knew that Sam¡¯s barrier came from that staff, so it is adamant in taking it away first.

    Sam just smiled and the top section of the staff, the part that is right below the handle and has a square cross-section opened up. Arge rectangr protrusion spanning the whole length of that section came out and energy gathered at it.

    The ape became vignt and jumped to the side, but an energy beam came out of it and scratched past the side of the ape removing a chunk of its flesh before hitting the cliff wall behind it.

    *BOOM*

    Arge explosion happened to make the whole valley quake and the rubble resulted in the explosion spreading everywhere along with dust.

    Sam used his barrier to shield himself from all of it and when the dust settled, he could see the ape huddled itself in a corner with the side of its abdomen bleeding profusely.

    It didn¡¯t dare move forward and Sam went to the middle of the valley without any obstructions.

    There is arge pond in the middle and there is a tree on the bank of it.

    The water in the pond is glowing with silvery-white light. The water even appeared a bit milky to look at and the tree has some fruits that are ripe and they looked like pears but with extreme white color.

    This pond is the reason for that pure energy atmosphere within the surroundings and these fruits are the result of the nourishment given by the pond.

    It is obvious what this ape is guarding so adamantly.

    Sam thought for a moment plucked two of the four ripe fruits as well as a few gallons of water from the pond before leaving the ce. He doesn¡¯t need all of it. These kinds of resources will be useless as they take more and more of it.

    He stored them in the spatial ring before leaving the valley. He even threw a recovery potion for the ape before going away.

    The ape hurriedly walked to the pond and when it saw that the pond is still there and the tree is alsopletely intact, it was relieved.

    It went towards the pond and drank some water after drinking the potion clumsily. It looked in awe as it saw the wound recover.

    Sam went back to Gravin¡¯s realm to check the progress of the products and when he noticed that there are no hitches, he finished some inscription work that needed to be done for the finished parts and once again went after the dormant soul.

    But now, the dormant soul is not even in a huddled sitting position, rather it is lying down huddled into itself while shivering in fright.

    Sam didn¡¯t care much and started picking on it. Once again mental wrestling has begun and after an hour and taking some blows, Sam finally tore the soul apart.

    He took arger chunk this time and the soul became extremely transparent and the glow has be dim.

    With another three to four tries, it would bepletely gone.

    Sam absorbed the soul piece he obtained and got some really great memories this time. Along with that, his mental energy also recovered a bit and his soul got stronger for some reason.

    This time, he got even more useful information. Information regarding Sivan¡¯s cultivation technique and other fighting techniques, including his mediocre battle experience.

    Sam knew that Sivan hadn¡¯t battled much in years. But he didn¡¯t expect that it would be this bad.

    The battle experience is so little to the point he felt a bit ashamed to be in this body for a bit.

    Sivan only learned how to use his energy to defend himself from the attacks and he could barely make any attacking moves.

    He mostly used the energy to manifest some physical attacks, like a punch, or an ax cleave, a hammer smash, or something.

    He does use energy bullets, but he barely even used them.

    Most of the fighting in his life is done by someone else.

    Particrly that guy named Butler Si. Sam couldn¡¯t help but sigh at this pathetic guy¡¯s life.

    At least, he got the cultivation technique and other required information though, he could use this to cultivate and increase his strength.

 Chapter 1268: Carrier

    While Sam went as far as gaining the information on cultivation techniques and battle experience, Sivan is currently feeling extremely frustrated as he couldn¡¯t even get a scratch on Sam¡¯s soul.

    The Ghost chimera is looking at him like he was a little kid who strayed into a jungle and ended up being prey to the king of it.

    He couldn¡¯t even take a closer look at Sam¡¯s soul because of this chimera. He has been cultivating his soul because of this difference, but until now, there is barely anything he could do. The most he was able to do is exchange a couple of mental blows with the chimera and then had to back down.

    When he looked at the face of Sam¡¯s soul which is currently covered with the chimera, he could only imagine a smug smile pasted on it.

    He frustratingly came out of the sea of consciousness and looked at Butler Si, who is standing in front of him.

    "I want to use the dark elemental energy and cultivate a soul strengthening technique. Go and check the library for a suitable one."

    Butler Si frowned.

    "Young Master, it is not a good idea." He looked at Sivan¡¯s blood-red eyes and the jet ck hair that had a faint red blood hue, he couldn¡¯t help but object to his ideas. His vampire bloodline is on aplete raise since he started consuming the blood of the beasts.

    He had to take at least four meals a day to even control that urge. Butler Si already warned the young master about this situation, but the young master didn¡¯t bother to listen to him.

    Now if he cultivated some soul strengthening technique with dark elemental energy, he would be even more out of control.

    It would only fuel the instincts of the vampire bloodline and make him more violent. He is already hard to control and the other young masters who are trying to pick a bone with him will be the ones to pay the price for it.

    But when he looked at the stubborn look of the young master, he knew that it is inevitable. He is cursed with obedience towards his master, he has little strength to resist against him.

    He sighed in exhaustion and went to the library to check for the techniques.

    Meanwhile, at the deste.

    Philip is currently supervising arge-scale construction project.

    It is as big as arge ship. Many artisans are working on it with various equipment and many inscription masters are simultaneously drawing the inscriptions. Philip held a blueprint in his hands as he looked at the whole project.

    Sirona walked towards him from the side as she took a peek at the construction project.

    "When did even design this? I never saw something like this in the projects we worked on together and never saw anything rted to this in the library."

    "Did you guys work together a lot?" Philip asked instead of answering the question.

    "Not really, but every time he came back, he woulde looking for me to get a second opinion on every major project. I helped him in the puppet meridianwork, Cultivation chambers, and many other projects.

    I am surprised that he didn¡¯te to me with such arge project and some of the parts of the design are missing some of his usual res. They appear a bit..."

    "Raw." Philip finished her sentence and Sirona nodded.

    "Yes, they appeared too raw. The usual finesse and elegance he usually adds to his projects are not present."

    "Well, he didn¡¯t actually design the project on paper, it appeared straight out of his head. Most of the design was actually done in his head and he sent it directly into my head."

    "No wonder, he didn¡¯t even name it. Too bad."

    "Bad? I think it is amazing that he didn¡¯t name it. That guy has no sense of naming whatsoever. I still feel sorry for all the things he named before."

    "I don¡¯t think they are that bad."

    They both chuckled.

    "You look a lot more cheerful than before." Philip said to Sirona.

    "I am. I never knew I could feel this way."

    "Good for you then."

    They stayed silent and after a few seconds, she asked.

    "So, are you going to name this?"

    "Yes, there needs to be a name for better coordination."

    "What is it?"

    "I am thinking ¡¯The Carrier¡¯."

    "Really? Carrier?"

    "It might sound normal, but I cannot think of a better name. After all, it carries a lot of things."

    Back at Gravin¡¯s mansion.

    Sam was done with understanding the cultivation technique and other battle techniques that guy used.

    He immediately decided to start cultivating and the first thing he took out is the water he collected from the pond.

    He drank half of it as he sat in a calm environment without any disturbance and started cultivating. His mind is peaceful as he let the energy circte around his body. He removed his peg leg before he started and in the ce of the arm and leg the energy condensed together to form a temporary circtionworkpleting the meridianwork of the cultivation technique. As he circted, Sam felt rxed.

    His whole body seemed lighter than ever and he felt moreplete. He couldn¡¯t even notice the missing limbs.

    He never had such a cultivation session. His cultivation technique might be profound, but it is also a bit straightforward and for ack of a better word, crude.

    He didn¡¯t need to control the energy too much and he doesn¡¯t need to loosen the bottlenecks one by one as he reached the next level.

    All he needs to do is destroy each bottleneck with an excessive amount of energy along with the rest of the beasts.

    He is more of a beast than a man in the process of cultivation. But now he felt like a true cultivator.

    Soon, the energy from the water waspletely gone as he strengthened his cultivation and then he started absorbing the energy from the rest of the water.

    He finished absorbing all the energy. But he didn¡¯t directly go for the fruits.

    He stopped the cultivation and decided to go for the next organization that helps Sivan¡¯s growth.

    And for this organization, Sam is sure that he doesn¡¯t need to hold back at all.

    He would never in a million years partner with these guys. The atrocities theymit arepletely beyond Sam¡¯s bottom line.

    He decided to take all of his recent frustrations with this body on them.

    But this organization is a bit branched out and no one knows the supposed headquarters of it. But from what Sivan knew, Sam learned that there is no such thing as headquarters for this organization. It is constantly moving and all the core members are in constant motion as they fulfill their duties.

    They gather in amonce now and then to discuss important matters and that ce is not even known to Sivan.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care. He would destroy all the ces of this organization spread across three realms and he went on that journey.

    The first ce he arrived at is actually arge bar. He directly barged into thergest private room of the bar and tapped the staff on the floor.

    *Crash*

    A secret door was crashed open under the stone b and the stairs were revealed.

    The waiter was stunned and he immediately ran out to call for their boss.

    But by the time they returned, he was already inside and they started hearing some explosion sounds from under it.

    Sam went through the stairs and reached arge underground room. Where some people are drinking and gambling. In the corner of the room, there are a bunch of little girls huddled together as a guy inspected their looks one by one.

    Sam aimed the three protrusions at the handle at the gambling table and only by then did they notice Sam¡¯s presence. They are not even rmed by the forcefully reveal of the door and Sam¡¯s entry.

    "Who the fuck are you?"

    One of the gamblers asked, but he was only replied with three energy bullets.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Three explosions.

    The person who asked the question took one bullet all by himself as he was turned into meat paste. The second onended in the middle of the table and all the gamblers were blown away and in the process, the third one hit two guys, who died with half of their bodies gone.

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to wait for them toe back to their senses.

    The energy bullets wereunched without and propriety and the dozen or so gamblers died along with the guy who is inspecting those little girls.

    Meanwhile, the bar manager came in with a few people and some more people came from the adjacent room and attacked him from the rear.

    Sam activated the barrier and turned around slowly.

    He looked eerie with all the blood and gore behind him and the ck mask and the cloak didn¡¯t help. The staff is an added bonus to that creepiness.

    Sam started shooting the bullets once again.

 Chapter 1269: Cleaning up

    The energy bullets rained down and soon a the foundation of the room was on verge of copse. The people in the bar upstairs had already run out when they noticed the quakes.

    They couldn¡¯t understand why something like this is happening all of a sudden and when they noticed that the rest of the street is as calm as ever, they understood that someone is causing all of this from underground.

    Meanwhile, some people who knew what is happening underground hurriedly ran in different directions to inform some people who are involved with the racket, and within five minutes, a bunch of young masters, some administrators, and even some old men who didn¡¯t make an appearance in a few years arrived.

    *crash*

    By now, the bar copsed. Sam came out of that rubble unscathed, followed by the little kids. He saved them with his energy barrier when the bar was copsing and now they are also escaping this ce without any additional injuries.

    But the young masters and the old men that came here are not exactly happy. One look and Sam could guess that these guys are. Pedophiles.

    These people are the customers or might even be the partners of this disgusting racket.

    "How dare you..."

    One of the old men was about to open his mouth with some self-righteous yapping. But...

    *Boom*

    An explosion happened and his upper body turned into a bloody mush.

    Sam didn¡¯t wait for others to talk back, he aimed at every person that showed even a hint of hostility and walked past the group along with the kids.

    He made his way towards the space gates of the city that will lead to another city where there is a wormhole connecting to a different realm.

    He took the children to the Primate Sect and left them there. It turned out all of their parents are either dead or the kids don¡¯t even remember anything about themselves. So, this is the only thing Sam could do.

    Anyway, since the orphanage work is already underway, he could at least leave them with somewhere to live and learn freely.

    After that, he went back on the quest to destroy this disgusting organization once again. His first direct onught actually alerted the nearby branches and the word is spreading like wildfire, but he didn¡¯t care.

    He is not really ying any long game and he doesn¡¯t need anything from them. He just needs to kill these guys and be done with it.

    So, he did exactly that.

    For the next three weeks, he roamed across the three realms, one realm a week as he killed every member he could get his hands on saved two hundred kids in the process.

    The only people that are left now are the leaders of the organization that is in an extremely desperate situation.

    Sam almost caught up to them three times and they had to escape with they everything they had. Now, they are afraid that they would be caught for real this time and they are trying to get help from the superiors they are paying taxes to.

    But to their dismay, no matter how much they tried, they couldn¡¯t stay in a ce for a long enough time to make this special ritual contact them. And from the looks of it, even if they managed to contact these people, they wouldn¡¯t be able to reach these guys since they are on a constant move.

    So, after a lot of thinking, they decided to proceed with a different n.

    When Sam reached their next hiding spot, only one of them was present, while the rest of the group escaped.

    Sam caught to him trying to flee through the forest and when he was caught, he only had one thing to say.

    "I know where these people are going. This time, You don¡¯t have to do this blind chase, I can definitely lead you to a ce, where you can definitely catch up to them."

    Sam was confused.

    "You are selling out your partners just like that?"

    He didn¡¯t even ask the other party anything, why would he reveal such information.

    "You didn¡¯t ask me anything, so you are definitely going to kill me. If I am going to die, I will at least take down everyone else with me."

    Sam shook his head with a sigh. It seems like loyalty is a really expensive thing in the world. Not many people could afford to have it.

    "Sign a soul contract first."

    Sam demanded. After all, there is no way he could trust the enemy with face value.

    But to his surprise, he even signed the soul contract immediately. It seems like he is way too desperate to help Sam.

    But since he signed the contract immediately, Sam didn¡¯t worry too much and thus their journey began from then on.

    They crossed threes through the wormholes and eighteen cities within by foot before they reached a mountain range.

    They climbed the range reached the peak and to Sam¡¯s surprise, there are a bunch of leaders along with some more people that he doesn¡¯t know.

    The guy that led him here suddenly took an inscription scroll and used it to create a distraction and escape.

    But to his dismay, this body¡¯s senses towards the energy waves are way too keen and before the scroll could even activate, Sam created a barrier.

    He tapped the staff once again and an energy bullet destroyed the escaping guy on the spot.

    "How dare you attack the subordinates of the Grand Silk Sect. You shall leave your life here."

    One of the men, Sam is not familiar with spoke.

    "So, the Golden Silk Sect is also superior for this organization? Just how many subordinates do you guys have?"

    "You knew of us?"

    "It doesn¡¯t matter now, does it? Let us just get this over with."

    And then, Sam finally revealed his true cultivation making everyone¡¯s eyes widen in horror. The leaders of this disgusting racket are only at Peak state Pre-transcendence and the people that the Golden Silk sect sent are three Initial stage transcendent realms of the Astral ne.

    "Why is someone powerful likeing after a low-level organization? How disgraceful."

    "Say that to someone who cares."

    With that, the mayhem ensured made the peak littered with half-destroyed corpses and Sam was done there without a scratch.

    He returned back to Gravin¡¯s estate after that to look at the progress of the projects.

    To his surprise, Gravin ispleting it faster than he thought. It seems like he figured out some techniques and improved himself while doing this.

    Sam went to his residence and started probing the soul once again.

    In this journey, he didn¡¯t stop dealing with the soul. He just gave it a break.

    Now, that he is back to a peaceful ce, he decided to resume the probing.

    From the looks of it, he would definitely be done with this soul before he broke through to the next realm.

    After some struggle, he got another piece and now he got some more detailed information on all these subordinate organizations. Information on how they contribute to Sivan and what their actual duties are.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but shiver a bit when he went through all of that. Seventy percent of all the organizations under this guy are extremely filthy. They all are earningrge amounts of cash with the most disgusting of the jobs.

    The Golden Silk Sect is one of the organizations that have the most disgusting organizations under its ranks.

    He couldn¡¯t help but want to curse them for doing all things.

    Sam is the kind of person who never thought of himself as a goody two-shoes guy who stresses himself over saving people.

    He never acted out of his own benefit and everything he has done until now was either for his progress, entertainment, or organization.

    He didn¡¯t save people out of goodness of his heart.

    He never really cared how filthy the world is and how disgusting it is to stay there. He never took it upon himself to clean it up. When the world decides to be this filthy and the people are so adamant about making it even filthier, he didn¡¯t need the feel to correct them and clean it up for them.

    But for the first time, he felt genuine hatred towards an organization that has nothing to do with him. He really wanted to kill everyone who is a part of this organization and every subordinate organization under them.

    Now that he has detailed information on who stays where he decides to act on it immediately.

    He went back to Gravin and informed him.

    "I will be out for another month, if you are done before that, just leave them as it is, I will finish the inscriptions and we can assemble them together. Meanwhile, you can study this."

    Sam said and gave him another scroll before leaving.

    For the first time ever, he really wants to clean up the filth in the world. He had a feeling that even if there is no link between the Golden Silk and Sivan, he would have had this impulse and he decided to act on it.

 Chapter 1270: Golden Silk Sect

    In the next month, the realms have seen chaos that they never even knew before. A ck-cloaked man wearing a ck mask roaming across the realms destroying one organization after another has be a topic that the kids in the slums to the leaders in mansions discuss every now and then.

    They didn¡¯t know what his agenda is, they didn¡¯t know what his criterion was for destroying these organizations, but everyone is on the edge of their seats.

    Some are wishing they are not going to be the target, some are wishing that their opponents be the target. Some tried to get in touch with him with some resources as gifts so that they could ask him to do something for them.

    Some are trying to see if they could join him.

    Everyone has different thoughts, but he is the onlymon thing in those thoughts for everyone.

    There is one organization among all of them that knew answers to some of these questions thought.

    Many people don¡¯t know that every organization that has been attacked in the past few days is the subordinate organization of the Golden Silk Sect and even if the whole world didn¡¯t notice the connection, it is inevitable for them to notice it.

    They immediately made the connection to Sam to the one who destroyed that disgusting organization and also the one that killed their three elders in the process a month ago.

    They wanted to try their hand at him when he is going on this spree, but they couldn¡¯t get a hold of him no matter how much they tried.

    Sam is not revealing any pattern, order, or systematic approach he might have taken. Every organization he is destroying is being chosen randomly.

    It is almost like he is pulling names out of a hat and going there to destroy them. But the Golden Silk has too many organizations under their control for their own good and now they cannot spread their elders and core disciples to such a long-range. It would only make it easier for Sam to kill them.

    They could only grit their teeth and calcte Sam¡¯s appearance and attack with a sure-fire method. Or they could sit and wait for him to arrive at the gate of the Golden Silk Sect.

    In the past month, they chose the first option many times, but by the end of it, they realized that the second option is the only option they actually have.

    So, they prepared all their defenses and got ready to face him.

    From the information they bought here and there, they concluded Sam¡¯s cultivation level.

    They have three people of Middle-stage transcendence of the Astral ne. They felt like they still had some upper hand and waited to prey on Sam.

    And Sam didn¡¯t disappoint them.

    But at the end of the month, he arrived at the gates of the Golden Silk Sect.

    He looked at the massive gates made with some golden metal. There is an emblem of a golden silk moth on the arch of the gate.

    There are no guards whatsoever at the game and Sam aimed his energy bullet at the arch and shot it.

    *BOOM*

    But the energy bullet didn¡¯t destroy the arch as he wanted it to, instead, it bounced off of an invisible barrier and created arge crater.

    Sam looked unimpressed. He expected as much. There are even some low-level organizations that managed to do this.

    He tapped the staff on the ground and the surrounding energy gathered, the first section of the staff opened up revealing therge energy rectangr protrusion aimed at the formation.

    An energy beam formed and was aimed straight at the moth on the arch once again.

    *CRASH*

    This time, the beam wasn¡¯t shot back, rather the barrier shook as the energy forcefully prated through that and made the arch crash.

    The elders and the core disciples that got notified by this immediately got ready to counterattack.

    In the middle of the sect. At the core area. One of the three Middle stage Astral ne transcendent cultivators is sitting along with some elders and core disciples as they created a formation.

    They are all making hand signs in sync. They are seated in arge circle facing inwards and in the middle of them all there is arge Golden Silk Moth coordinating with them.

    It is reeling out the golden silk threads and the silk threads started weaving themselves into various objects at a rapid rate as all of them made hand signs.

    Meanwhile, the other elders who are at the Initial stage and the remaining two Middle stages transcendent cultivators came out to face Sam, or more like stall him.

    They prepared for the best of their attacks as they waited for Sam to break the barrier and be caught off guard.

    Sam kept on attacking the barrier at the same point with the energy beams as he moved forward and after some shots, the beam turned continuous. It didn¡¯t stop anymore. It is onerge continuous beam that was aimed at one spot on the barrier.

    Soon, the barrier couldn¡¯t hold up and it was destroyed.

    Sam calmly walked towards the gate and sted it open with an energy bullet.

    As soon as he stepped past that broken gate, he sensed threerge attacks aimed at him.

    One is arge meteoritic dragon made of full fire and rocks, the other is a swarm of ice moths made of pure ice elemental energy and finally, thest one is an earth attack that would trap him in the ground with arge quicksand and the wooden vines are added to the mix to keep him more trapped.

    Sam felt himself going down as the two attacks came from the front.

    The elders hoped that Sam¡¯s face showed some expression of fear or at least anxiousness. But it was covered with the mask, so they assumed they showed those exact expressions.

    But if they could see, all they would see is an expression of disdain.

    The only thing that barely impressed him is the earth trap with the wood elements added into the mix. That would catch anyone off guard as long as it is perfectly timed, but the remaining two attacks are all showy.

    They are good for destroying arge number. If it is for dealing with one person, they are utter waste. They are taking a long time toe at him which would give him a chance to escape.

    But the problem is they are confident that their earthen trap would fail at all.

    Sam pressed a small button in the middle of the first and second sections of staff and the bottom of the staff opened up. It spread open like a small metal flow with only four petals. It is very small.

    Energy gathered under it. Sam took a deep breath and tapped the staff once again.

    Arge barrier appeared around him and it rippled outside.

    Not only did the quicksand bepletely useless in an instant. The ice moths and therge meteoritic dragon hit the repeated barriers that are appearing because of the ripple effects.

    Each barrier is expanding rapidly and is making it hard for the ice moths and the dragon to reach Sam.

    When they are finally near him, all the barriers wear them down and they are simple attacks that Sam overcame with a swing of his walking staff.

    Everything happened in three seconds. The Elders were shocked.

    They couldn¡¯t help but feel the cold sweat running down their spines.

    This is the first time they felt so terrified in their lives.

    This is not the first time they used thisbination attack. This is one of their signature moves and they have used this against stronger opponents and caught them off guard.

    They didn¡¯t expect that Sam to be this prepared.

    One of the two Middle stage cultivators looked at the staff, he managed to notice that the rippling barriers came from that staff.

    This type of defensive maneuver is something he hasn¡¯t seen and in his opinion, a normal cultivator of the same level as him shouldn¡¯t be able to do it.

    So, he attributed everything to that staff just like any normal person. But the problem is he issuedmand.

    "Make him lose the staff. That is what makes him use the technique. He is a cripple, there is no way, he is this powerful without that staff."

    Sam also heard the order and he couldn¡¯t help but shake his head in disapproval. All the elders came out of the hiding with their weapons and charged at him while the few mages started attacking from long range.

    But all Sam could see are a bunch of shooting targets moving towards him.

    He clicked the same button as before and the staff returned to normal. He started using the basic energy bullets as he attacked every person that came at him.

    The few weaker elders who dove headfirst were taken down easily. But it turned out that the other elders seemed to have some decent battle experience and they managed to do dodge the few attacks.

    "It seems like, this wouldn¡¯t be as boring as I thought."

    Sam muttered to himself as he stepped forward.

 Chapter 1271: Golden Silk Moth

    The Elders attacked Sam from all sides. But most of them areing from their left side. With his right leg being a peg leg and the left hand not even present, it is indeed a very good spot for them to attack him from.

    While the elders from this side are focusing on him, the rest of the elders are focusing on taking his staff down. They wholeheartedly believed that his bizarre attacks areing from the staff itself.

    But most of Sam¡¯s focus is on the long-ranged attacks.

    He dodged a dagger strike from the left barely and waved his staff a bit. An inclined energy barrier appeared in front of him and arge fireballing from an elder far away hit the barrier and moved upwards as if it is a ramp.

    While the fireball went away, Sam blocked a sword strike from the right and tripped the swordsman with a small energy wave aimed at his legs. The sword moved sidewards and went at the attackering at Sam from behind who was forced to abandon attacking Sam and had to block it.

    Sam tapped the staff and arge horizontal rectangr barrier appeared in front of him and with another tap, right at the moment arge lightning snake hit the barrier, the barrier repelled the snakepletely which attacked a spear usering from the left.

    While it is happening, Sam ducked and used the staff¡¯s tail end to poke at the foot of a nearby attacker with a small ball of energy gathered at the tip of that tail end.

    *boom* A small explosion happened, but not only did the footpletely explode, there happened to be a secondary explosion because of the usage of the void style on something so close to an energy bullet which made the guy who fell after the foot was exploded to lose arge chunk of flesh and bones in the torso as well, immediately killing him.

    As Sam focused on this, arge earth golem came at him from the top and he failed to use the barrier at the right time. The golem didn¡¯t even bother to attack Sam and just went after the staff.

    Sam used his left leg which is still intact to kick upwards on therge body of the golem.

    *BOoM*

    The kicknded squarely and the energy explosion was shot from the rear end of the golem to the front end making the golem copse into a pile of rubble.

    Sam didn¡¯t wait long and kicked his leg on the ground using repel style to slide over and dodge three spears thatnded in the ce he was in.

    He stood up hurriedly and spun his staff before swinging it to the rear.

    The energy condensed into arge snake and went after the attackersing from that direction while Sam moved away to dodge another fireball.

    The snake didn¡¯tst long. It started exploding at different sections and some of the attackers were severely injured and blown away with some of them being dead.

    He suddenly turned to the side and the energy gathered in the staff as he used it to swing towards his rear. Arge icence that crept upon him through the ground, was hit squarely and half of thence flew away hitting another fireballing at him.

    He tapped the staff on the ground creating a small ripple of energy once again and all of a sudden, some vines creeping up on him through the ground froze on the spot and they exploded.

    The whole fight came to a stalemate for a second as nobody wanted to go headfirst at him.

    In this short span of a minute, a lot of things happened and all the elders started panting.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but grin under his mask. These elders really did have great battle experience and they are using it to the fullest. He now figured that when he is looking for opponents in the future, he should be looking for multiple opponents to fight, not some famed single opponent no matter how good it is.

    He felt like his multiple elements wille in handy with a fight like this. Otherwise, he just needs to stick to two to three elements and even then it wouldn¡¯tst long.

    But now, even with those elements, he is having fun. All he needs to do is, pick some decently capable opponents and fight them all together.

    While Sam is thinking of these absurd things in the middle of the battle, the opponents are scared out of their wits.

    They didn¡¯t expect Sam would be too good even in the close quarters. None of their attacksnded. It is as if he had eyes all over his body and could see every attacking at him from all sides and all angles.

    They knew they, had to give it their all to even have a chance to defeat him. The two Middle-Stage Transcendent leaders also decided to stop holding back. They decided to use their full strength or what is left off of the full strength to deal with Sam.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care, he was looking forward to it.

    He held the staff and swung it like a club all of a sudden and arge fireball that came at him was hit by it.

    The fireball didn¡¯t vanish or disperse, instead, like a ball, it was shot at another opponent who was caught off guard.

    Sam smiled and moved to the side while swinging his staff sideways, the energy condensed into arge horizontal board on which the icences and spearsing from a side got stuck. He kept on modifying the board so that not a single ranged attack with attack him while dodging the attacks from the rear.

    When there are more than fifteen spears andnces on the board, he tapped it with his staff and all of them were shot at the opponents.

    The people that threw the spears didn¡¯t expect this from Sam.

    They even had a thought that Sam might be having some hard time with so many attacks from one spot, but it turned out that he is just trying to counter it.

    He didn¡¯t even have time to look at what thosences and spears did, before moving to the side and sweeping the staff on the floor in arge arc.

    The energy condensed into thatrge arc and expanded as it moved away like a de. It swept through everything in its path while destroying the ground, causing tremors.

    Three cultivators who couldn¡¯t dodge in time, lost their legs and two who were already on the ground were cut in half.

    "ytime is over, guys. Time to get serious."

    Sam said and arge ball of energy was condensed on top of the staff while a barrier appeared around him.

    The energy started glowing brightly like a star blinding the opponents¡¯ eyes as it grew bigger and bigger.

    The opponents knew that some bad is about to happen just from the size of it and they immediately threw all their attacks on Sam.

    But they were unable to destroy the barrier no matter what they did and Sam tapped the tail end of the staff on the ground.

    The energy that was gathered on top of the staff is in size of arge Hot air balloon, and it waspressed into the size of a marble in an instant before it went through the staff and hit the ground through the tail end.

    Large energy waves rippled from that tip of the staff as they moved away bit by bit and whenever a ripple neared an opponent it started exploding bit by bit with the void styles.

    Some opponents wanted to dodge it, but the ripples are not stopping.

    They areing one after another and this went on until all the opponents are either dead or severely injured to the point they cannot fight again and then these ripples went on to destroy the surroundings and half of the main building in the estate before they finally dispersed.

    All the grass and nts within this range werepletely uprooted and with a gentle breeze, they flew away.

    Sam walked through these flying des of grass as he reached deeper into the estate.

    He is feeling arge amount of energy gathered in the middle with a sense of threat cautioning him to be careful which intrigued him a lot.

    He slowly made his way towards the center and what was presented in front of him blew his mind away.

    Arge Golden Silk Moth is in the middle of all the cultivators as the golden silk condensed into armors around their body as well as weapons in their hands. This included the Leader of the Sect who is also thest remaining Middle-Stage Transcendent cultivator.

    Sam could guess what is happening. This is the bloodline art of this Silk Moth, but it takes a lot of energy. The energy that the Silk Moth cannot contain and needs external assistance.

    It seems like the Golden Silk Sect managed to keep their ce by using this.

 Chapter 1272: Warriors

    The Golden Silk Moth is actually not some kind of high-level beast. It is not even on the same level as Golden Ape.

    It is mediocre in terms of bloodline at best. The only reason it even became mediocre is because of its bloodline art. When they are in a group or even when they are with some friendly creatures in their wild, they can activate this art with external assistance.

    It is very rare for them to do it. But once it does, the results are actually pretty good.

    Currently, in front of Sam, there are around a dozen warriors standing with fully body armors made of this woven golden silk, and even their weapons are enhanced with this silk.

    Their auras are fierce and raging at the same time refined. This is the effect of the Golden Silk Moth. After the bloodline art was used, the allies of the golden moth would be assisted by it in the best way possible.

    In this case, these warriors¡¯ powers would be enhanced by these golden armors and weapons created by its silk.

    The golden silk moth works best when the allies are of neutral energy. Sometimes, it tends to conflict with the elemental energies which willter bring more harm than good for the allies if used like these armors.

    So, they would be provided with some other assistance like, creating distractions to the opponents or using the golden silk to create shields to block the attacks of the opponent.

    Sam really felt excited about this battle. He even made the first move.

    He shot multiple energy bullets at a rapid pace.

    The moth spat out arge amount of silk which was instantly woven into arge nket which took the hit of all the energy bullets.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The series of explosions tore the nket into multiple pieces with a lot of holes, but the nket is being quickly woven again and within a few seconds, it turned as good as new.

    Sam raised an eyebrow as he looked at therge silk moth in ridicule. He kept on shooting the energy bullets at the nket, since all the attackers are warriors trying to close the distance, he let them do it while he focused on thatrge nket.

    He made it riddled with holes and the moth is trying to recover the nket with its best effort at an equally rapid pace.

    Meanwhile, the Warriors closed the distance until Sam is in their attacking range. They surrounded himpletely and got ready to attack.

    Sam waited for them to make a move as the silk moth seemed to have realized this and started converting the nket into smaller nkets that could help them in defense.

    A swordsman made the first move at Sam, which he blocked directly with the staff and gave him a head butt, when another attacker was about to make a move from the rear, he tapped staff on the ground letting an energy wave sweep him away while Sam ducked from a saber strike from the left.

    He swept the staff horizontally on the ground to make the saber user lose bnce when he did, he gathered the energy at the top of the staff and hit the guy in the face as he fell down.

    The small silk nket came in between as the staff and the warrior¡¯s face were about to meet.

    *BOOM*

    An explosion urred at the point of contact, but most of it was negated by the nket which turned into a bunch of rags that fell everywhere around. But the guy was not unscathed.

    The explosion was strong enough to make his face disfigured as well as to throw him away.

    Sam smiled as he aimed the staff at the same guy once again and shot an energy bullet.

    The nket didn¡¯t make it time and

    *BOOM*

    The explosion destroyed the armor of the target and made him crash into the ground.

    Meanwhile, Sam took a staff hit from some other guy and almost got stabbed by a sword which he barely managed to block in it.

    He jumped upwards and shot eight energy bullets at eight different people which were blocked by the silk nkets in process of which the eight people were unable to attack Sam for that brief moment.

    Sam took this chance and attacked the one nearest to him.

    He used the void style with an energy bullet, the silk nket exploded by the first one and the second explosion made the target lose a chunk of flesh on the chest along with the silk armor, Sam took this chance and lunged forward withnding one final blow, killing him.

    As soon as he was done with that, Sam hurriedly used the energy barrier to block the attacksing from the rear.

    But he was a tad bitte and he felt a sh on his back. His ck cloak was cut and he was scraped lightly.

    Sam took in a cold breath and looked at the attacker. It is actually the only Middle Stage transcendent cultivator left in the sect. The sect leader.

    Sam looked at him coldly and lunged forward as he repeatedly tapped the staff on the ground in the process.

    Energy rippled asrge craters were formed while blowing everyone in the surroundings of.

    Sam skid on his peg leg as he dodged the sword strike and the blockage of the silk nket as he swung his staff sideways aimed at the legs of the sect leader.

    The armor te made of the golden silk suddenly materialized outwards and blocked the staff strike, Sam just smiled and the first rectangr section of the staff opened up.

    *BOOM*

    The energy beam wasunched and Sam used the recoil to roll away.

    A bunch of silk nkets that were helping the other attackers moved rapidly, but they were unable to reach the spot in time, and even the ones that reached didn¡¯t manage to block the attack fully. The sect leader lost a leg in the process.

    Sam stood up quickly and swung the staff at the head of the sect leader who fell forward from the rear.

    The nkets that wereing to block the leg changed their direction to block the blow and two nkets coiled around the staff¡¯s rectangr section as they forcefully tried to dissipate the energy gathered around it.

    Sam channeled that gathered energy to the tip as he used void style tond the blunt blow on that guy¡¯s head which was blocked by the silk sheets.

    But the staff went through the nkets, even though most of the attack was dissipated...

    *BOOM*

    There is a small explosion at the rear of the head.

    The skull was cracked open with blood and brain matter gushing out.

    The leader was dead.

    *SCREEECH*

    Sam looked at the Golden Silk Moth that is doing the screeching sound. It seems like it was genuinely hurt by the death of the sect leader.

    Instantly all the silk that was spread around became active, even the warriors who were covered in the full body armor suddenly lost control of their bodies.

    The silk moth is not controlling their body directly, rather it is moving the silk armor in such a way that the body would move ording to its will. No matter how much the warriors tried, they couldn¡¯t make a move at all.

    Sam tapped the staff and a barrier appeared around him as the silk tried to drill through it from different directions.

    He used the energy bullets which went past the barrier to shoot down the weapons and attacks that wereing at him.

    Sam finally started feeling the pinch as he felt a bit exhausted.

    He is expending too much energy. The energy levels of this body are certainly not as good as his original one.

    Sam could only sigh and made his best move.

    He stabbed the tail end of the staff into the ground and energy gathered into it as each and every lock of the staff opened.

    With a lot of clicking sounds, a bunch of protrusions appeared all over the surface of the staff. The three energy bullet shooters at the handle, the first section which opened up, before, also had another protrusion on the opposite surface.

    The tail end opened up like a flower.

    The third second with a bunch of small needle-like protrusions in all four faces while the second section of the staff opened up to reveal something simr to that of an osciting piston.

    Energy gathered as the piston moved rapidly creating ripples in the surroundings. But the ripples are not chaotic or extremely powerful, they gentle and they are only creating more ripples. The energy gathered at the protrusions and in a count of three, all the bullets and beams wereunched along with the void style at the oscition of the piston.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM**BOOM* *BOOM**BOOM*

    The rapid explosions covered the whole area with bright energy lights while Sam just stood there, along with the normal explosions, that came from the energy bullets and the energy beams, the real damage done by the piston in the second section which seemed to be the least harmful of them all.

    The energy ripples that were rapidly but gently propagated by this and the trigger of the void style created a bunch of small but rapid explosions that made destroyed everything in the path.

    When the dust settled not a single dead body was intact and there is not a single golden thread visible.

    Even the golden Silk moth far away was covered in blood and it is no longer floating in the air.

 Chapter 1273: New limbs

    Sam went to the body of the silk moth to take a clear look. It is barely alive, but I cannot move. Its wings are destroyed and there are multiple holes all over its body.

    It is struggling to stay alive.

    Sam hit it with the staff onest time to put it out of its misery. After he was done there, he didn¡¯t even bother to clean up. He took all the spatial rings and went into the core areas of the sect to check for any resources that he could get and exited the sect.

    That day many people from within the city came to check the Golden Silk Sect. After all, for the past few days, the sect was extremely active as if they were preparing for war. Some of the rival organizations were even panicking as they thought they might be the target of the war.

    But instead of attacking the Sect went on to strengthen their defenses. This piqued their curiosity so they sent a bunch of their people to the city to keep an eye.

    They could hear themotion Sam has caused in the sect and by the time Sam left and they reached the sect, all they could see some disciples who were too weak for Sam to even consider killing them were running around the sect and started taking whatever it was useful for them so that they could run away.

    Particrly, the library is so active that it looked like it was being piged by a group of bandits.

    But they didn¡¯t care about that. All they had was ecstasy that the Golden Silk Sect was destroyed.

    Word traveled fast and the agents left behind immediately ran back to the organizations and they started going to the external businesses of the Golden Silk Sect without any reservations. It became a free for all buffet and everyone is trying to grab as much as they can.

    Sam went back to Gravin¡¯s estate after this and met with him.

    "So, how is the project?"

    "My part is done, all you need to do is add the inscriptions and we can add it."

    Sam nodded and said.

    "Then, let me start. I will finish it as fast as I can."

    With that, Sam just sat in the workshop for three days straight to finish the inscriptions on the parts of the two products.

    After he was done, Gravin and him started assembling the project bit by bit. Only the assembling took a day of work and when it was finally done, both Gravin and Sam were extremely satisfied and happy.

    Sam looked at the two products with a smile.

    One of them is a mechanical arm and the other one is a mechanical leg.

    The two limbs which he didn¡¯t have were now made. Even though, he didn¡¯t see much resistance and difficulty in the current situation he was in and everyone was easy to deal with, he knew for sure that the more he climbed, the more troublesome it would be for him.

    The limping and theck of an arm is going to be a hindrance in the future battles, he cannot simply offset all the disadvantages with the staff. It might make things easy for a bit, but it is definitely not a good long term solution.

    But now, he doesn¡¯t have to.

    The long term solution is right in front of him.

    "Can I get a cleaner room with some privacy? I would like to attach them as soon as possible."

    "Can I See?"

    "Of course."

    Gravin nodded and led him to a private room. It is serene and calm. The sound of the sting furnace and the constant hitting of metal with a hammer couldn¡¯t be heard and it is extremely clean.

    Sam sat in the middle of the room and started gathering energy at the palm of his only usable hand. He used the palm to cut off the stump of the maimed hand and then took out some recovery drugs to heal it.

    But this time, he didn¡¯t let it heal unevenly like before. He adjusted the shape by repeatedly cutting off the excess part.

    And when it is in his desired size and shape, Sam took out the mechanical arm. He injected his energy into it and a clicking sound could be heard as the top most part of the arm opened up like a flower.

    He ced it on the stump and once again injected the energy, the flower closed over the stump and tightened around it.

    Small thin needles. So, thin that Sam almost couldn¡¯t feel a thing on his arm were slowly prated into the flesh of the stump as they were connected to the meridianwork.

    Sam didn¡¯t design this thing with the purpose of connecting it to the neuralwork. Rather this design is inclined towards controlling the arm with the energy itself.

    Even the opening up and closing on the top of the arm is part of the energy controllingwork.

    Sam realized that since this body is capable of exhibiting such an energy control to the extreme precision, he might as well use this to his advantage.

    He created a simrwork of veins, and meridians in the mechanical arm, but all of them are mostly done by metals with almost simr flexibility.

    When Sam injects his energy into thiswork and condenses it, the mechanical arm acts as a perfect mold for that condensation and the inscriptions help him preserve the condensed arm without any destabilization. He can just move the arm around like it was part of his body with just a thought.

    But in reality, he is moving the energy condensed inside the arm and the arm is moving along with it.

    Apart from that, he also added many features to it which would make things easier for him in the battle.

    Sam then proceeded to do the same with the leg and attached it to his body.

    After he was done, he took a deep breath and hopped onto his one normal leg and ced the mechanical leg gently as he took a few steps forward.

    For the first ten steps, he felt a little ufortable, but soon, he became used to it. Except for theck of sensation that there is a leg and arm, he can walk pretty well.

    He started testing his arm too. Moving it around as much as he could. He went as far as using some battle techniques.

    After he waspletely fine with the limbs, he got rid of the peg leg and felt relieved. He got dressed again.

    "I cannot guess your expression with the mask, but I assume you are happy."

    Gravin said from the side.

    "Relieved mostly."

    "So, want to have a drink? I have a special bottle of wine that I wanted to open for a special asion like this."

    "Sure, I think I could use some."

    Sam said and both of them sat down while they started drinking. They chatted away as they covered many topics. From the basics of Artisanship, to the weapons Gravin forged, his days as students and many more.

    "This is the most satisfying day of my life. I wouldn¡¯t evenin if I had to die tomorrow."

    Gravin said with a smile.

    "Why? You have a long life ahead."

    "What is the point of living in this dirty world? Making weapons is all I am good at and it gave me some status and power. I really like making them too.

    But I slowly lost the feeling of satisfaction I get from every weapon I make. And when I lost itpletely, I didn¡¯t see any point of living. I wanted to find love for a bit, but that didn¡¯t work out. Then out of spite, I announced this challenge as a distraction. Everyday, I used to spend my time verbally destroying every guy that came across that gate with a design saying that it would be the best thing I ever made.

    Even though I know it is impossible for someone to present their most incredible design for an outsider like me to make it, I just wanted to have some hope and you brought that.

    I highly doubt that I would get anything like that again."

    Sam didn¡¯t even know what to say. It seems like this world is not just about killing and surviving. He never expected someone like Gravin who had such a great skill at his hand to feel this empty.

    Maybe sometimes, being too good at something is also a sin.

    From what Sam could see, Gravin could forge anything he wished. He doesn¡¯t need a bunch of machines to help him in the process, he could forge it as long as the metal softens for his mes and he can change it into any shape he wants.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "Maybe you will find it or maybe you don¡¯t. But holding on to the hope that you might find something like that is not a bad thing. After all, you knew that something like that wouldn¡¯te, but here I am. I brought it myself didn¡¯t I? Maybe, there would be someone else on their way."

    "Cheers for that."

    They clinked their sses and chugged the wine.

 Chapter 1274: Dark Range

    Sam left Gravin¡¯s realm and made his way to another realm. Now, he doesn¡¯t need to carry the staff in his hands and he also made some modifications to his metal mask.

    Instead of covering the face as a whole, it is mostly covering the upper half of the face. With his mouth and chin visible outside.

    It gave out a less eerie feeling to the others. He also changed his hairstyle. He cut it short, just the way he used to have it in his real body.

    Now, he felt morefortable with this body than before. He doesn¡¯t have to limp, he has two hands to use and he can run and hop at an extremely high speed that is suitable for his cultivation level.

    He is currently going to a nearby in the same realm. It has a special location called the Dark Range.

    It is a mountain range with a lot of dark elemental energy and even many variations of dark elemental energy. He heard of the location from Gravin and he was amused by the story behind it.

    It all started many centuries ago with some dark elemental beasts called the Twilight Elephants. These elephants have one of the most basic behaviors of a normal elephant. They move to an elephant graveyard when they are on the verge of death.

    They used this Dark Range as that spot. This ce used to have nothing. It was just arge lump of stone with mediocre spiritual energy. Even the earth elemental beasts nearby wouldn¡¯t go there for the mediocre herbs and resources avable in that ce. There is no food chain whatsoever in there.

    But as the elephants died and their blood and flesh seeped into this area over the years, the terrain changed.

    Dark elemental energy and death energy along with the natural cursed energy prevailed and soon the whole range changed.

    The mountain range that used to be deste and useless has changed into something else.

    Now, the mountain range houses hundreds of ghosts of the Twilight elephants along with the undead and ghosts of both elephants and other creatures that came in the hopes of feasting on an almost dead elephant.

    When the creatures finally started noticing that arge elephant is going to die here and a fresh corpse could be found without any struggle and they could feast on it, it was alreadyte.

    The range already started showing some changes. At first, some of the creatures managed to eat the flesh and got away with it, but as the time passed, the range became dangerous and the beasts that went to feast on the corpses of the elephants never came back.

    The cultivators took notice of this area and they also went in for the skeletons and tusks of the elephants along with the other beasts.

    After all, the bones of many beasts are used in making weapons, defensive artifacts and such. So, many people believed this to be a treasure trove and gradually it became a no man¡¯snd to one of the most visited ces of the.

    As for why Sam is going there, it is to get an assistant. After he came back from destroying the Golden Silk Sect and wearing these new limbs, Sam got some new ideas on how to proceed further with the n.

    Sivan¡¯s n is a powerful organization. No matter how disturbed it was with the politics and how despised Sivan is to the youngsters, there is no way they would let someone like Sam deal with him and the rest of their organization.

    So, he needs a proper n and he is sure that his regr ns wouldn¡¯t work. Dayus must have already exined everything rted to his n to this guy which is the reason they managed toe to the Desert city andy down a perfect ambush.

    This time, Sam needs to be a lot more cunning but should appear direct at the same time.

    For this reason, he thought of a n and for that he needs a dark elemental user and if that is not possible, he needs a specter that is powerful enough.

    Both of them are not easy to obtain, but he has no choice but to try.

    He reached the Dark range in a day.

    There is a town that was established not too far from that ce. The organization nearby managed to coin thend fast enough and established this town after they understood the importance of the range.

    Sam went there to gather the information. He went to the restaurant to have a meal and got some information from the conversations of the other patrons and also the waiters.

    He got some information regarding the top dogs of the Dark range. Peoplee here in hopes of finding some treasure. They might obtain some special fruits that grow in this ce, they might catch a special beast that has mutated or some people evene here looking for some special undead creatures, especially necromancers.

    Some curse userse here to get some material that could be used as a good curse carrier.

    There are three expedition teams that run the show in this dark range. One of them is the team directly under the control of the organization that established the town.

    The town government is not exactly solid, they are just there to take care of the administrative work and provide a moderately safe ce for the merchants. The only proper rule in the town is that fights are not allowed.

    Everyone would follow these rules, including the three top dog expedition teams, but if the fight ever broke out and the members of these government expedition team were involved, they would always be supported within the town as long as the dispute is not too obvious and that expedition team has the vastwork of spies within the town which helps them get some extra information.

    The second expedition group belongs to the rival organization that barely missed the opportunity to establish the town.

    They are second in everything to the point that they are called the Second team in the town which they absolutely hate.

    The Third team is created by a group of friends that don¡¯t belong to any organization. Only three people of the group are fixed. They are called the Three ghosts in the town. They go on expeditions by themselves and they do the scouting of the mountain range.

    In fact, they are the only ones daring enough to stay in the mountain range overnight.

    The rest of the expedition teams barely do that. Sam got as much information from the three groups as possible.

    Most of the members are dark elemental users. At least the important members that have authority to call some shots.

    The three people in the Three ghosts are also dark elemental members. Sam is sure that he wouldn¡¯t be able to poach a guy from the main members of the Government group and the Second group, his best choice is to find some secondary members who joined these two groups directly without any links to the organization.

    Or he has to convince one of the three ghosts toe with him.

    If he couldn¡¯t do any of this, he has to find the best specter in the mountain range and employ one of these groups to help him capture it.

    No matter what decision it is, he decided to join the expeditions of the three groups and look at their performance first hand before proceeding with his further ns.

    So, he waited for the expedition groups to announce their next expeditions.

    Luckily, he didn¡¯t have to wait for long. The very next day, the second group announced their expedition.

    The second group has two teams. One is the scouting team led by a necromancer and the second one is the main fighting team.

    The scouting is obviously smaller, but its members are also fixed. They are all the members of their organization and they haveplete loyalty to the group.

    While the recruited external members will be added to the main fighting group.

    Sam read the expedition details posted on a notice board in the bar.

    They are looking for ten members and it would be better if they are warriors who are good in close-rangebat.

    They are going into a valley within the mountain range and they are looking for a special specter. Anything that was found individually apart from the specter, could be kept by the person and if something was found by the group, then they will sell it and the profits will be shared. Apart from that, there is no payment for the people who join the group.

    Sam was amused by this. The expedition groups clearly knew that everyone that came here would be dying to get into the top three groups and they wouldn¡¯t need any payment. After all, with the top three groups, people can go deeper and have a higher chance of finding something valuable.

    In every expedition even though the group had only one goal in mind, they would always find some extra valuable items which would then be sold and the profits are divided.

 Chapter 1275: Expedition Teams

    Sam entered the selection process of the Second group. It is a simple tournament between the applicants. Needless to say, it was easy for Sam. After all, the strongest person in the second group is only at the Peak of the Pre-transcendent stage.

    Saying Sam had an unfair advantage is an understatement.

    Sam ended every fight faster and he made sure that his original cultivation is not shown.

    The second group selected him.

    "The expedition is tomorrow. Everyone should gather at the mount of the southern cliff, we will be climbing from there. The rest of the details would be exined then."

    The next day, Sam went to the cliff and the group is waiting. Team 2 which is the main attack force fully consists of warriors and there is only one mage.

    "We are going through the Death Eating Spider Valley. We would be going through a lot of narrow areas, that is why we specifically asked for the warriors.

    For any of you who didn¡¯t know about the Death Eating spiders, they are very peculiar creatures. They move towards everything that has vitality. First, they would shoot their webs that would suck your vitality slowly. The longer you stay in contact with the web, the harder it would be for you to get out.

    The vitality will be sucked out faster and faster as time goes by.

    Once you arepletely devoid of vitality, they would make you into a small cocoon and slowly eat savor you.

    So, be careful with them. I have vitality beads and every one of you would get one. If you are cornered, throw them high inside the valley towards a wall. Make sure that there is none there. The spiders will be attracted to them because of the burst of energy. Be careful with that.

    Next, we would be going past the piranhake. We discovered a small underground cave that was dug by the Stone Mole and our scouts discovered something valuable there. So, our target is what is inside.

    As for what exactly it is, you will know it when we get there."

    Everybody nodded at the briefing and they were distributed with the vitality beads. This is just a gimmick used by cultivators to travel freely inside the areas with undead creatures.

    These things really do work on the Death Eating Spiders.

    The group proceeded forward, but first, the Scout team climbed up the cliff and checked the surroundings, they gave the signal that everything is clear and the attacking team climbed over the cliff.

    Then they proceeded forward as they walked for an hour carefully under the lead of the scout team before they reached the Death Eating Spider Valley.

    Here, they didn¡¯t bother with the scout team and the main team difference. Because they know exactly what is going to happen and what they are going to face. There is no need for a scouting team to go and confirm that.

    They slowly walked into the valley. Sam could already feel the gazes of the spiders. They are looking at them carefully as they waited for them to enter deep into the valley.

    When they are in the middle of it, the spiders suddenly dig out of the walls and the ground. They came out of the cliff wall cracks. It would be more urate to say that they were squeezed out of the cracks.

    "Defend yourself. Don¡¯t let the webs touch you."

    The spiders shot the webs and Sam just used his energy shield to barricade himself from the webs as he proceeded forward. He only attacked at the spiders when they are near him and they were dealt with a single blow.

    Meanwhile, he is also focusing on the original members of the second group. The leader of the group is solely focused on guiding the rest of the team.

    He is shouting out orders and he is frankly good at that. When the spiders managed to get near him, he was actually being helped by the rest of the group members.

    In contrast, the scout team¡¯s leader, the necromancer has a better battle sense.

    Sam collected a few carcasses of the Death Eating Spiders so that he wouldn¡¯t stick out and cause suspicions and walked forward with the rest of the group.

    For some reason, the spiders are noting out of the valley. They are confined to it and they are not willing to get out of that space. It is an advantageous situation for them, so they didn¡¯t care much.

    They arrived in a forest and there are some undead skeletons that came at the group now and then which were quickly destroyed.

    In the process, they came across three undead creatures that were the undead made of the three Dark Mountain Lion corpses. This small group attracted the group¡¯s attention as the skeletons of the Dark Mountain Lions are great materials for being curse carriers.

    Particrly, the earth elemental curse.

    This is the best time for the leader of the group to act, but even now, he couldn¡¯t manage to perform that well.

    As the journey proceeded further, he finally understood that the second group¡¯s leaders are not as good as he needed them to be, they are definitely not a great material for making a deal.

    They finished the rest of the expedition and when they reached their destination, he finally realized another thing. Half of the warriors that are recruited as the temporary aid for the main attack group are not exactly outsiders, from his observations they are definitely working with the Second group from the start.

    The second group seemed to have cut a different deal with them so that they would support them, group when the time for the division of the profits came.

    The impression of this group further dropped.

    Sam went back to the town with the group, the division of profits was done, and he took that measly change, and went back to the inn he was residing in.

    He waited for the next notice and the first group posted the expedition notice. He went for the selection, got selected, and moved.

    The main members of the group are indeed good, but they are not what Sam is looking for. These guys are even ying dirty. The rest of the group members might not have noticed this, but Sam clearly did.

    These guys have deliberately directed the extra member to certain ces so that they would die there and they don¡¯t have to give them a share.

    The rest of the group is not noticing the problem as they are too afraid to even think. Sam heard the rumor that the first group goes on the most dangerous expeditions of all, now Sam understood why the rumor came to be.

    The main members of the group are also entering these special ces and they are giving a great performance of them ¡¯barely¡¯ escaping the clutches of death, but the temporary people are just not able to cut it.

    He really wanted to quit this crap in the middle and turn back, but he just endured it to see if he can find anyone remotely interesting. But there is no luck.

    He came back and waited for the Three Ghosts to post the notice. But for a week there is no action from them. Meanwhile, the first two groups went on to do another expedition.

    Sam has half a mind to give up on people and just go with finding a specter. He even wanted to task the second group for that, but then the three ghosts posted the notice.

    The three people only want another extra person for their next expedition. But the requirements are a bit strict. They need someone with the cultivation of Peak stage Pre-transcendence and they also need someone who is capable of both long-range and short-range attacks.

    It is indeed a strict requirement considering that the leaders of the expedition groups are all Peak stage Pre-transcendent cultivators.

    The selection venue is actually inside the Dark Range. A small patch of the forest invested with the undead trees.

    Sam was really intrigued by this.

    He went into the forest for the selection the next day.

    He was thest person to go there. As soon as he entered, one of the three ghosts spoke out.

    "The selection process will now begin. So, get ready."

    He directly announced. Sam looked around and there are only around six participants. One of the reasons is that the selected venue is in the dark range.

    No one wants to get into the Dark Range by themselves, even the leaders of the expedition groups wouldn¡¯t take the risk. There are just too many dangers, but the three ghosts deliberately did this.

    This is a direct elimination of the unworthy candidates. Easy and precise.

    Sam really started liking these guys. At least these guys are better than those cunning assholes who are killing the teammates and the other group that is putting out some false fronts.

    And the next test only increased Sam¡¯s interest in them more.

 Chapter 1276: Three Ghosts

    "The test is simple. On the other side of this Undead forest, two of us will be waiting. The third one, that is me will be racing with you guys to that point. If anybody manages to beat me, they will be the candidate.

    If no one beats me, then the person that came right after me will be the candidate.

    If multiple people beat me, then a battle would decide who stays and who leaves.

    And, a fair warning. The Undead forest is full of dangers, everything in that forest tries to kill you guys. The trees, the insects, the beasts, all of them are the creatures that are either undead or they feed on the death energy inside.

    Even the n growing under a tree might kill you, so be careful and we wouldn¡¯t be responsible for any of the deaths or dangers you might encounter. So, join in at your own risk."

    With that, two of the three ghosts made their move, two minutes in and they can already faintly hear the sound of the battle.

    After ten minutes, the third ghost spoke up.

    "They must have reached there by now. Remember, this is thest chance you are going to get to leave this ce. Once you are in there, I cannot guarantee anyone¡¯s life and I will note and save you if you are in grave danger. You better think before you enter."

    He looked at everyone to see if anybody backs down.

    "Good."

    With that, he turned around and started running into the forest. The rest of the candidates did the same.

    Sam held his staff while running. The branches of the undead trees are already making their way towards the candidates as they moved.

    Sam used his staff and some energy to smash any branch that neared him and this made it quite easy for him to defend. The rest of the candidates are also not doing that bad.

    Sam focused on the third ghost the most.

    He is using two daggers and most of the time, he is dodging the branches. Only when it is absolutely necessary did he start using the daggers and Sam was really impressed by his footwork and the dagger usage.

    He didn¡¯t make anyrge shy and unwanted movements. He is precise with his strikes and he is using cursed energy at the des.

    This is not a new thing, but many few people will use this. For this, a person has to keep the curse going on at the edge of the des and it takes a lot of concentration. Even the regr curse users wouldn¡¯t opt for something like this.

    But this guy is really using it perfectly and he seemed to have used the curse of corrosion which really did a good effect in the battle.

    The more shes the opponent takes the easier it would be for him to win.

    Soon, the dangers started increasing. The branches are being aided by the vines and then came the undead creatures, specters, ghosts, some rodents that like the death energy, all kinds of things areing at them, and one candidate after another started giving up.

    After fifteen minutes, only Sam and another guy were left in the race along with the third ghost.

    The third ghost is clearly holding back. From his actions, he is extremely familiar with the terrain and he is also familiar with the dangers presented in every area, he is also rxed with his actions.

    He is trying to give the candidates an advantage.

    Sam didn¡¯t run past him though. He just ran at being the close second.

    They soon reached their destination and Sam finished as the second. The three ghosts looked at him and the other candidate. One of them went to the other guy and said.

    "I am sorry. But you lost. Recover a bit and we will escort you out of the mountain range."

    The other guy didn¡¯t seem to be too upset, he just nodded and went to the side, then three of them walked to Sam and started sizing him up.

    "Your battling is weird, but you are good. You don¡¯t seem to be tired."

    "I am not."

    "That is good. Let us meet in the same spot as today. We will proceed with the expedition. I will brief you on the details then, but this is the most dangerous expedition in the Dark Range to ever happen. So, be prepared."

    The first ghost, who seemed to be the leader of the gang said to Sam.

    "I thought the Government group does the most dangerous expeditions in the dark range," Sam said with a smile to see their reaction.

    "Yeah, the most dangerous for the temporary members." The second ghost who stayed silent all this while spoke up.

    They shook their hands and left. They didn¡¯t even discuss the price for this. They just agreed on equal share with whatever they are going to obtain at the end of the expedition.

    The next day, Sam went there at the agreed time.

    "Within the dark range, there is one central mountain which is full of dangers. It is the most dangerous ce, but it also has the most valuable resources.

    There is an Undying Wyvern¡¯s nest in that ce. Do you know about it?"

    The first ghost asked as soon as he arrived.

    Sam was surprised and shook his head. Undying Wyvern is a rare beast. Even though it is not as good as dragons, it is as rare as them.

    The Undying Wyvern has one very peculiar ability. It only eats undead creatures. Whether they are normal undead, ghosts, specters, wights, ghouls, or vampires. It eats all of them, except for the shadow undead.

    But they have another quality and that is after they die, they turn into undead. Not just their bodies, their souls will also turn into ghosts and attack everyone that enters their premises. He didn¡¯t expect such a creature to be here.

    "The Undying Wyvern is a peculiar beast..." The First ghost was about to exin, but Sam interrupted him.

    "I know about the Wyvern, I just didn¡¯t know that there is one here."

    "That is great. And there is not just one, there used to be a small family of Wyverns there. But recently they are all dead and every one of them turned into undead. And on top of that, there is an egg inside their cave. An egg of Undying Wyvern.

    Our target is that egg.

    If we manage to get the carcasses, whoever takes it down with the final blow can keep it. We will check the grade of the egg and see if the bloodline is pure enough, we would like to keep it, we will give your fair share of the price and if it is not, we will auction it at the town and we will equally share whatever we get.

    Do you have any problem with that arrangement?"

    Sam shook his head and then his hand, sealing the deal.

    "Don¡¯t you want some soul contract or something?" Sam asked.

    "No need, we are three and you are one. If anyone needs a contract, that should be you."

    "Well, I don¡¯t need one in particr."

    "Then we are all good."

    With that, they started moving. Sam kept up with their pace and never once revealed his cultivation. With all the dangers they encountered on their way, they got quite a haul. It is better than any expedition the other group could do.

    They traveled for a day and reached the foot of the Central Mountain by night.

    "We will stay here. We are not moving at night. It is too dangerous."

    The first ghost said and they camped there for the night.

    Sam could feel the death and dark elemental energy everywhere in the surroundings.

    If one is exhausted or injured in this ce, they would definitely die with the death energy corrosion and all the other creatures that are within this area.

    The next morning, the four of them moved by dawn.

    They started facing the beasts that areing at them. Most of the Central Mountain is filled with beasts and ghosts. There is barely any undead and even the trees present are not exactly undead trees. There are only a few of them in thisrge patch.

    Sam didn¡¯t exhibit any of his true strength. He just kept up with them and only acted as an equal. He didn¡¯t overwhelm anything.

    They traveled on the mountain for the whole day and once again camped at the night.

    The next day, they once again moved and this time, they reached the Wyvern cave by afternoon.

    As soon as they entered the cave, they came across the undead wyverns that are staying at the mouth of the cave.

    There is no sneaking in. It is a straightforward situation. They just have to fight if they want to get to the egg.

    Even now, Sam was only acting as support just like the three of them wanted him to be. Sam used the mild energy bullets that would barely injure the wyverns while the three ghosts fought with these creatures.

 Chapter 1277: Offer

    The battle soon ended.

    All this while, Sam only acted as support, but he is also the one without a scratch. The three ghosts were also without much damage, because of Sam¡¯s excellent control, but they are a bit exhausted.

    At least, they got the egg. The first ghost went to check the egg and after confirming the bloodline purity by the patterns on the egg, he shook his head.

    "Not that high. We can auction it off in the town."

    The other two ghosts looked at Sam in askance.

    "I don¡¯t have any problem if you don¡¯t have any."

    "Okay, then. Let¡¯s go back."

    With that, the four of them went back to the town after another two days of the journey. As soon as they arrived at the town, the first ghost said.

    "There is an inn called the Ghost Shack. We will meet you there in the afternoon. We will arrange for the auction house. We will just finish this off today as soon as possible."

    "No problem."

    Sam left the trio and went back to the inn he was staying in. After he left, the three ghosts started walking towards the Ghost Shack.

    "First Brother, don¡¯t you think this guy is too weird? I can¡¯t put my finger on it, but he is giving me chills for some reason."

    Second Ghost asked the First Ghost.

    "Of course, he is weird. He kept up with our pace throughout the whole journey, he didn¡¯t once flinch or falter for many dangers we have encountered. He even came out of the wyvern cave without a scratch. If he is normal, I wouldn¡¯t know what weird is."

    "Do you think, he is stronger than us?"

    "I think he is. We should be careful when dealing with this guy. Why would someone hide their true strength toe to this god-forsaken ce and do these missions? I heard he even participated in the expeditions of the Government group and the Second Group."

    The third Ghost spoke all of a sudden.

    "We will know what his goal is tomorrow. If he just takes his share and leaves, we wouldn¡¯t have any problem with him. So, we don¡¯t have to worry too much. Just be careful around him and make sure to avoid all the friction and conflict if anything happens."

    They agreed on that and went to rest in the Ghost Shack. After an hour or so, the two of them went to the biggest auction house in town with the egg.

    Even though there is barely a few hours before noon, the news of the Undying Wyvern Egg has spread like a wildfire.

    There are many people gathered at the auction house within an hour.

    Sam arrived at the ghost shack by noon. Third Ghost is there waiting for him.

    "The other two are at the auction house. Let¡¯s go."

    He led Sam to the auction house and they went to a special booth reserved for the Three Ghosts.

    The auction started soon and the egg went for an extremely high bid. They took the money and went to a restaurant with a private chamber to distribute the share.

    The three ghosts are feeling a bit relieved. For some reason, they felt Sam is eyeing them like some prey. They felt a bit naked and defenseless in front of his gaze.

    And that only intensified when Sam refused his share.

    "What is the meaning of this? Are you doing us some service?" The First Ghost asked with a frown. Generally, a bigger share for them is a good thing, but they don¡¯t get why Sam is refusing to take his. If this is not weird, then nothing in the world is.

    "Don¡¯t worry, it is definitely not a service. It was more of a test."

    "Test? What are you testing us for?"

    "Talent, Potential and Skillset. I want to see if any of the three will meet the criteria, but surprisingly all three of you are qualified."

    "Criteria for what?"

    "To be my assistant." The room went silent for a bit. The Three ghosts were dumbfounded.

    "Are you out of your mind? Are you retarded or something?"

    The third Ghost asked as he looked at Sam weirdly.

    "Not really," Sam revealed his cultivation and the three ghosts were surprised. They knew that Sam was stronger, but they felt he was just stronger than them in the same cultivation level, it is not like they didn¡¯t see such kind of people. They have seen them quite often.

    But it turned out that Sam¡¯s cultivation is way ahead of theirs.

    "What the hell are you doing in a ce like this?"

    First Ghost finally became serious. All this while, even though he felt Sam is stronger than them, since he assumed is of same cultivation level, he knew they still had a chance if pushes to shove.

    But now that he saw the difference, there is no way he could still hold those thoughts, he needs to make sure that they are safe.

    "Don¡¯t worry. You can¡¯t escape if I really want to take you guys down and you should know better than to look for escape routes that openly.

    Anyway, I have a deal and it should bepletely consensual, there is no pressure whatsoever.

    I am here at the Dark range in search of an assistant. For the next few months, if not years, I am about to go on some tough endeavors. I would be shing with some extremely powerful people and organizations and there would be a lot of killing done.

    But in my opinion, all of these people are going to die in vain if their corpses are left just like that. I need a talented necromancer, who has a high enough affinity with dark elemental energy to learn curses.

    That was my goal when I came here.

    But when I saw you guys, I am really tempted. If possible, I need all three of you guys toe with me. You have basics nailed in the curse category, you can all do basic curses without the hand signs and seals, which is a great thing.

    Your necromancy could use a bit of help, but not by much. Your soul skills are spot-on which is also one of the things I am looking for.

    Anyone of you will suffice to be my assistant, I would take all three of you if you guys agree.

    Think it through and make a decision. But before that, you should also know what I am about to offer.

    Sam took out a booklet he prepared and gave it to them.

    "I am sorry, there is only one, you should make do with it."

    The first ghost went through the booklet and was stunned. He passed it to the second and third while he stared at Sam.

    "This is the first chapter of a curse guide. There is no exaggeration if I say that it is the best curse guide in the whole universe. It is created by someone whose power is something you cannot even fathom.

    So, make sure you think properly before you decide on this. If youe with me, I will give the rest of the guide and personally teach you all about the curses there is to know.

    In exchange, you will be working for me as I asked. I will leave you guys to it.

    Let us meet here in the same ce at the same time."

    With that Sam left. The trio was stumped, they didn¡¯t even know that they would ever be in such a situation.

    They were independent all their lives and they were supposed to stay that way in their estimations for a long time. But now they got the offer to learn something great, but in exchange, it wouldpromise their freedom a lot.

    They went back to their residence to discuss and think about this.

    The next day, Sam arrived early and waited for the trio. After an hour, they came and sat down.

    "You guys arete."

    "Sorry, we lost track of time while arguing." Third Ghost said with a huff.

    First Ghost took a deep breath and said.

    "We considered your offer a lot and in fact, it is way too tempting for us to give it up. The curse guide¡¯s first chapter in itself has a lot to offer for us and we are really keen on learning the rest of it. But it would be a bit difficult for us toe with you.

    We have certain targets to fulfill here."

    Sam just waited in silence for them to continue.

    "There is a sentient Undead creature in the valley behind the central mountain. The most dangerous ce in the whole Dark Range, we want to capture it. We were working on this for a long time. We were just middle stage Pre-transcendent cultivators when we came here and we started expediting ourselves since then.

    We just put in too much effort toe out of it now."

    "Unless?" Sam asked with a smile. He knew how these conversations go. All this build-up is just a way of the other party asking for something in return.

 Chapter 1278: Sentient Undead

    The First ghost felt a bit awkward. Even though Sam¡¯s face is not fully revealed, he could see just from his eyes, that Sam has understood what he is hinting at.

    Being exposed this bluntly made him a bit embarrassed, but he took a deep breath and spoke.

    "Unless, we finish the task right now. We made a pact that we would catch that Sentient undead ourselves, but the external factors around the forest are making it a bit difficult. The undead creatures in the surroundings are extremely defensive when ites to this one¡¯s defense.

    From what we could guess, this sentient undead is actually nning on gathering arge enough undead army so that it can invade on this town.

    It has already gained enough power to create undead from corpses. It is only short of an artificial core formation for it to be aplete undead creature and the starting stage of it would be Initial Stage Transcendent stage of Astral ne.

    Which means..?

    "I know what it means." Sam replied as he went into deep thought. He didn¡¯t expect toe across a sentient undead creature in a ce like this.

    The sentient undead creature they are talking about ispletely different from the undead creatures like the vampire and ghouls who have sentience to do their own things, rather this sentient undead is apletely normal undead that became sentient because of the natural causes.

    It might be because of the long time it spent in the death energy to gain a spirit by itself, or a ghost or a specter that was forcefully attached to its body and slowly it strengthened enough to form its own consciousness. But either way, it is not exactly a good thing.

    This thing is actually an abomination even vampires and ghouls wouldn¡¯t let spawn. It is possible to artificially create this, but no one wants to do it, because anyone who did it in the history became a prey for this undead creature and turned into its food.

    This undead creature is like any other undead creature, it has no pain, fear or other emotions, but it has extreme hunger and has intellect on top of all of that which makes it dangerous than any other undead.

    Once an undead manages to grow an artificial core, things would be even more problematic. It would be nothing short of a cultivator and growing its strength is extremely easy. It just has to feast on the vitality of living beings and soon it can help other undead creatures go sentient as well.

    Sam could imagine the nightmare the people of this realm will need to go through if that thinges out with its army.

    Not many people would be able to deal with these things.

    Undead are actually terrifying creatures, the only thing theyck is a proper person who can use them wisely. Now that there is such a creature in the dark range there are not many good days left for the people in the town.

    "So, you want me to help capture this creature?"

    "In a way, yes. But we don¡¯t need you to attack it directly. We need you to help us stop the legion of undead it has in the valley and in the surrounding mountains.

    From the past year, we have been doing expeditions solely rted to this mission. We were trying to eliminate its greatest allies as well as to see the status of its enemies. Undying Wyvern family is one of the enemies and it is actually quite detterent force against the Sentient Undead.

    But now they were gone. It seems like the sentient undead didn¡¯t know the special ability of the wyvern, so after they died, they became berserk in protecting their egg. Since the attackers that came at them must have already been injured, they must have left."

    Sam nodded in understanding.

    "So, what would you guys have done, if I am not here? If they went as far as destroying one of the deterrent forces, they must have had a lot of progress don¡¯t you think?"

    "Yes, we had a different n. We would have checked three more locations and based on the information we got, we would arrange arge expedition and show them a glimpse of what we know and what these undead creatures are capable of, then the other expeditions groups will be forced to work and then we would swoop in and capture this creature."

    "Do you really think that the other expeditions groups don¡¯t know about this?"

    "They do know. But they don¡¯t know the threat it pose to the town and the. They just view it as a source.

    A source for a constant stream of undead creatures. After all, most of the corpses that we get from the dark range are from the creatures we wouldn¡¯t normally be able to hunt. The beastse here based on their instincts for the resources, but they die in here and the expedition teams take their carcasses for the resources they provide.

    But what they don¡¯t know is, that only one out of ten such creatures escapes the hands of this Sentient Undead."

    "You guys are really smart. You nned this out well didn¡¯t you? But there is one thing I don¡¯t understand yet?"

    "What is it?"

    "Why are you constantly saying, that you want to capture this thing? You are not saying destroy or kill, you are asking to capture this thing, why?"

    The first ghost hesitated a bit before saying.

    "The Sentient undead is actually formed because of a ghost chimera. It is just too valuable of a source to pass on."

    "A ghost chimera. This is an awfully weird coincidence isn¡¯t it?" Sam muttered slightly to himself.

    "What?"

    "Nothing. A ghost chimera, is not something that easily created, who did this?"

    "We don¡¯t know, there is some sort of weirdo who wanted to create the chimera with the ghosts in the valley and wanted to devour it. But instead, the chimera devoured his soul. But he is strong enough to struggle and his sentience is being merged with all the negative emotions of the other souls in the chimera and they all took over his body."

    "So, a humanoid sentient undead and the basis of its sentience is the set of negative emotions of the Ghost Chimera? Is that what you are saying?"

    "Yes."

    "It is very close to manifesting an artificial core and that too at the same power level as an Astral ne transcendent stage?"

    "Yes."

    "You guys are in a tougher spot than you think. It is not easy to counter the ghost chimera."

    "We know, we prepared something for that."

    The three of them, then took out three formation gs with various inscriptions on them. Sam took a look at them and within two minutes, he understood what they are.

    "Soul Purgatory formation. Where did you get this curse?"

    "We found these on the spatial ring of the guy who created this chimera. When he was on the verge of copse, he recorded the video of himself exining the situation and sent it out with the help of an undead creature of his, which we captured."

    Sam sighed. He didn¡¯t expect he has to go through this much just to get some assistants for himself. This ispletely uncalled for.

    He looked at the formation gs and said.

    "This formation is iplete and second rate. A chimera of that level will easily breakthrough from that."

    "You know curse formations? But you are not a dark element user."

    "Of course, I know. It is a long story, so I don¡¯t want to go there. But I know curses better than you do.

    You guys need to modify this purgatory curse. The main element of this curse is not to capture the soul, rather to corner the soul.

    This formation would make the soul go through an invisible passageway through which it feels the burning sensation. You need the wisps and consciousness of many tormented souls just like a chimera and integrate them.

    They would divert all their emotions towards the soul that was trapped inside.

    Their emotions would sh with the already existing emotions within the trapped soul and will make it go through the pain.

    This isplicated guys. This would be such a drag."

    "So, you agree to help us?"

    "What choice do I have? I really need an assistant. That way, things would be lot easier. Anyway, go get ready for a few long days, you guys are going to be exhausted. We need to make some modifications on these formations."

    "Why cant you do it?"

    "Didn¡¯t you already say it before? I am not a dark element user." Sam gave him a side eyed nce and walked out.

    "Come and meet me at my inn with the tools and those formation gs. Don¡¯te empty handed though. Bring some captured specters and ghosts from the dark range.

    Quality doesn¡¯t matter. Quantity is the key here. The more the better."

 Chapter 1279: Valley

    The next day, the three ghosts arrived at Sam¡¯s room at the inn.

    As Sam asked, they captured a lot of ghosts and specters in the Dark range Overnight. They have a lot of them. They felt that they would be enough.

    But as soon as Sam weed them in and asked them to show the ghosts, he only had one thing to say.

    "They are not enough."

    He really believed that they are not enough. The soul purgatory curse is not for the body, it is for the soul. The only advantage they have against the Chimera is that they know that it is a Chimera.

    No matter how much a single consciousness overpowers the rest of the consciouses in the Chimera, it is impossible to eliminate the parts of those souls. It would take a long time for all of these souls to strictly merge into one.

    Until then, all the conflicting negative elements would still be present, even after the other party manifests the artificial core. That is also one of the reasons these things are dangerous when they just get the cores. They would have power, and the ability to stabilize it and contain it and finally they would have this sentience that would be constantly affected by these conflicting negative emotions.

    There is nothing good that woulde out of it.

    And soul purgatory is actually a simr curse, but the negative emotions are used as fuel to create something that is equivalent to what fire is to a normal body. This soul me of sorts along with the formation will make the soul trapped inside burn based on the negative emotions of the other party.

    Sam exined it all to the three ghosts and pointed out why the specters and ghosts are not enough. Because the chimera is too powerful. If they couldn¡¯t inflict a pain proportionate to its power, then they might as well not attempt it.

    "We will make do for now. You can go get somete."

    Sam said and started teaching the purgatory curse formation to them. He made them merge one ghost after another and one specter after another into the formation and also made them understand what kind of ghosts go first, and how consistent they should be to have the proper formation.

    After all the ghosts and specters were used up. Sam kicked them out and made them go back to the dark range to collect more.

    They came back the next day.

    This routine went on for a few days and finally, the formation wasplete.

    After that, they didn¡¯t waste any time and made their way to the Valley. Sam really didn¡¯t want to waste his time, doing nothing. He has all the time in his world but at the same time very limited time.

    He is afraid that the chimera he left behind for Sivan might not be of help for a long time. If that really happens, things wouldn¡¯t go well for him in the future.

    If possible, he wants to go there and force the exchange immediately. But he is also waiting to reap some benefits from that body. He wants Sivan to increase the cultivation of the body so that he could just enjoy the benefits without wasting any of his own resources.

    Sam is thinking while they went to the valley. But what even he doesn¡¯t notice is that some people are following them. It is hard for the three ghosts to stay in the town for so long and not get unnoticed.

    They are somewhat of celebrities here. So, it is inevitable some people recognize them immediately. Particrly, people like the spies of the Government that always wants to steal information from other teams.

    They reported everything rted to Sam and the three ghosts from the past few days. Of course, they don¡¯t know what they are doing inside the room. But they are sure that it is somewhat important based on the behavior of the three ghosts.

    Their frequent trips to the Dark Range are only making the rest of them suspicious.

    The Government Expedition group decided to spy on their ns and follow them.

    The three ghosts and Sam didn¡¯t notice this, as they are following them from afar and they are making sure that their presence goes unnoticed. They are not engaging in any battles and try their best to not provoke any creature that they came across.

    After one and a half-day, the three ghosts and Sam are at the mouth of the valley.

    Arge amount of death and dark elemental energy is oozing out of the mouth of the valley. If any person sees this for the first time, they wouldn¡¯t be able to help themselves and would have gone in immediately.

    This is way too enticing. In general, the resources emitting this much energy would even be enticing for someone of Sam¡¯s level.

    But everyone in the dark range knows that anything inside the mouth of the valley is a death zone.

    Sam took the lead from there with the three ghosts slowly following beside him.

    He used his walking staff as he moved forward and soon the sounds of explosions came out of the valley.

    The undead didn¡¯t wait too long, as soon as the group reached the middle of the valley, the undead already surrounded thempletely and are going at them crazily.

    Sam was surprised by what he saw. The undead is well organized. More organized than he thought. They sneaking up, making formations, supporting each other. This is just like a bunch of normal soldiers attacking them.

    The Sentient undead seemed to be a lot smarter than what the ghosts let on.

    Along with the undead creatures, there are a bunch of ghosts and specters and even some small chimeras that are formed with the mergers of very few ghosts.

    "You guys did well bying now. Otherwise, you would have been toast no matter how many people you have."

    He couldn¡¯t help but say that out loud to the three ghosts.

    Currently, the three ghosts are inside his energy barrier along with him, while he attacked the undead with the energy bullets.

    The sheer number of them even made Sam shocked and the quality of each undead is impable. Every single of these creatures was only killed by one attack when they are alive and most of their bodies are still intact.

    Their skeletons are still perfectly good and this sentient undead is still controlling them perfectly.

    Soon, their target revealed itself and Sam destroyed enough of the troops. It stood on a tall rock in the middle.

    The Sentient undead is holding a staff to support itself, because of the difference in the lengths of the legs.

    The second leg¡¯s foot was chopped off and it is making do with the staff and it still couldn¡¯t speak.

    But it is screaming and yelling, showing its emotions which are the main indication of its sentience.

    Its focus is on Sam as itmanded its troops.

    "Okay boys, you are up."

    With that, he moved forward along with the three ghosts as the energy barrier continued to protect them. But he used the energy beam from the second section of the staff as he destroyed everything in the path.

    He left the undead to attack him from the rear and the sides while he cleared the path from the front.

    As they are closing in on to the Sentient undead, the undead creatures in their way suddenly move to the side, letting a path open directly.

    Sam was surprised and stopped in his tracks as he used the energy vision. Even though he is currently cannot use its full capability because of the change of the body and due to the eyes that were not refined enough by the energy usage, he could still get a good enough glimpse for now.

    And he was shocked by what he saw.

    The energy is being gathered inside the Sentient Undead. It is being channeled. He really didn¡¯t want to believe, it but from the looks of it he had to.

    Taking his shock to its advantage, the Sentient undead used its one foot to leap towards them in one swift motion.

    The staff was smashed on top of the energy barrier and smashed it through.

    Sam had to block the attack with his own staff as he closely took a look at the undead being.

    This is an unexpected surprise.

    Even the three ghosts are all shocked. They knew what this meant. The undead creature in front of them, the sentient undead has formed its core and it is actually as powerful as Sam.

    It didn¡¯t just form the core, but it has even increased its strength with that¡¯s core and this is extremely bad news for the three ghosts, the dark range, and the town.

    If Sam hadn¡¯t arrived today along with the rest of the ghosts, the whole town and then the would have beenpletely turned into one big dark range.

 Chapter 1280: Tricked and Trapped

    Sam pushed the staff upwards and the Sentient Undead stepped back. It kept on hopping on its spot on its one foot as it looked at Sam menacingly. Itpletely ignored the three ghosts.

    Sam tapped the staff on the ground creating an energy wave that made the undead creaturesing at the three ghosts to be thrown away to the sides.

    He looked at the three ghosts and said.

    "Things are going to get tricky. I doubt it would be possible for you to capture it."

    They didn¡¯t even know what to say to that. When the undead creature destroyed the energy barrier, they felt closest to the death they have ever been. They couldn¡¯t even take the aura of the Sentient Undead.

    They are still in shock and only with Sam¡¯s attack did theye back to themselves.

    "I have no time to babysit. You might want to use some of your moves here."

    Sam said and suddenly swung his staff in the air. It hit the staff of the Sentient undead that was not even there the second before. The opponent is fast and precise in its movements. If not for Sam¡¯s senses, his head would have been blowing up with that attack. Even if he survived that, he would have been dead by the next two following attacks.

    The opponent is dancing with Sam as it used the staff skillfully. It seems like one of the souls in the chimera is actually a staff user.

    Sam focused more on blocking and diverting the attacks as he led the fight far away from the three ghosts.

    One stray attack from the opponent and they would be dead as a rock.

    The three ghosts also came to themselves and unleashed their own undead creatures. All three of them are necromancers, even though that is not their main attacking force, it is still something that is something they are capable of.

    The undead creatures they have umted and nurtured over the years came out all of a sudden and created a barricade around them, making the enemy undead creatures stoping at them.

    The three of them stood with their backs against each other and their undead started letting one enemy after another slip by.

    They knew that it is impossible to hold the undead creatures like that, it would be a lot easier to let them have one passageway on which they would focus and limit their advance so that they could deal with the one-on-one.

    The three of them are finishing the opponents quickly.

    Sam who took the fight far away looked at this and sighed.

    He then turned to the sentient undead that is looking at him hatefully and smiled.

    "Now, let¡¯s get serious, shall we? Let us see what you got."

    With that, Sam made the first move. He dashed forward as he spun his staff and swung it to the side of the opponent, it was blocked by the energy staff, but Sam used the repel style which made the opponent fly away a bit and the opponent used the staff to stab into the ground to control itself, but at this moment, an energy bullet was shot at its face, which it had to dodge hurriedly to the side, tripping on its maimed leg and falling to the side.

    Sam is already there with energy gathered at the tip of the staff as he mmed it on its head.

    At thest moment, the undead creature used its hands to block the attack. The void-style explosion blew only one of the arms to Sam¡¯s surprise.

    What was even more surprising is that after the creature rolled to the side and stood up, the arm that was blown to bits and with an exposed bone, started healing itself.

    He widened his eyes in disbelief. He didn¡¯t expect that such an advanced undead would be here. Generally, not all undead creatures can heal themselves. They need to have a lot of grasp over the death energy which is not easily manipted by the lower level undead. But this one seems to have decent skill in this.

    From this Sam also understood one more thing, unless, he destroyed every bit of it and that means destroying the base skeleton as well, there is a possibility that this thing woulde back into existence.

    He really didn¡¯t expect that he woulde across something this powerful and interesting in a ce like this.

    He took a look at the three ghosts and noticed that they are not doing that bad.

    The enemy undead creatures seemed to be following their instincts by themselves. The sentient undead only gave an order to attack them, it is no longer directing them.

    This is a good thing for now.

    But all of a sudden, at this moment, Sam sensed anothermotion as he fought with the enemy.

    At the mouth of the valley, some undead creatures are stampeding inside. But that is not all. The Government Expedition group, that was in the hiding was forced toe out because of the stampede.

    Sam was surprised by hisck of senses. An enemy tailed him this long and he didn¡¯t even notice it. It really is a bit problematic as he didn¡¯t have the previous spiritual sense.

    Since his mental energy has been split into two when creating the duplicate soul, he lost the mental and spiritual range he used to have. This really upset him and it clearly showed in the fight.

    He moved forward as he constantly mmed the staff on the opponent¡¯s staff.

    He didn¡¯t use any technique whatsoever. He just gathered the energy as he used the repel style and mmed it from upwards.

    Even though the energy should have been repelled, the direction the repulsion force is pushing is downwards into the ground, like a hammer hitting the nail.

    The Sentient Undead felt the full brunt of the attacks as it was brought to its knees. It looked at theing staff that was rapidly nailing down and risked it. It swung its staff and intercepted it. The repulsion force made the undead roll backward with a few bones cracking.

    But it didn¡¯t take long for the creature to heal and while it went through the whole process, the sentient undead called for its underlings to block Sam for a while.

    Sam started using the energy bullets again as he made his way forward. The undead creatures are not exactly a threat, but they are just too many and they are too annoying.

    He used the second section in frustration as he moved forward and asionally used the third section to make the undead creatures blow away in his way.

    He didn¡¯t expect that this many underlings could get into this small gap in this small timeframe.

    Meanwhile, the three ghosts suddenly became a bit free.

    Because of the appearance of the Government expedition team that are more in number, the undead creatures have split and now that the Sentient undead called for some of its underlings to defend its own ass, they are a bit free.

    They made their own undead creatures go offensive and they moved towards Sam and the Sentient Undead.

    Sam cleared the way rapidly as he made his way towards the Sentient Undead while the three ghosts took out the purgatory formation gs. Sam looked at them, but he didn¡¯t react, if his attacknds properly, they would be able to ce the formation gs properly and the undead would be trapped.

    He looked at the momentum and realized that it is usible.

    Sam leaped into the air as he spun his staff and gathered his energy evenly over it. He channeled void style as he swung the staff over his head towards the head of the sentient undead.

    Right before the attack was about tond, Sam suddenly saw a change in expression in the face of the Sentient Undead.

    He had a very bad feeling about this. Hended and on his feet and the attack continued, but all of a sudden the energy in the attack dissipatedpletely into thin air and he Sam felt a soul-searing pain.

    But he didn¡¯t scream. He gritted his teeth and looked around in surprise. The three ghosts are looking at him with a cold smile as they controlled the purgatory formation.

    The formation that was supposed to be focused on the Sentient undead is actually focused on him. He is feeling suffocated and his soul is undergoing a lot of stress as it faced the full burn of the purgatory he himself created.

    The first ghost looked at him and said.

    "I must say, that you are the toughest prey we had to hunt. But it seems like you are way too na?ve for your strength. You are really careless with us. If you hadn¡¯t shown that first chapter of the curse guide, we wouldn¡¯t have nned to do this. Rather, we would have let you go, after all, you are way too powerful for us to risk it, but that curse guide is so enticing and you even let us make the weapon to go against you, it is way too tempting to let this go. Thank you so much for this. We will definitely remember you for the rest of our lives."

 Chapter 1281: Reversed Trapping

    Sam felt like a Dumb Fuck.

    That is what he wanted to call himself. If not for the fact that he didn¡¯t want to embarrass himself before these pipsqueaks, he would have yelled that out loud. And he should thank the fate that he was in a different body and is now literally a different person.

    Otherwise, he would never know where to keep his head from then on. At least, this head would be gone when he meets Sivan once again.

    There is one more thing he is really grateful for and that is the fact that his friends are not here to see this.

    If his three friends and particrly Philip has seen this state of his, he would never ever hear the end of this for the rest of his life, and maybe if possible that asshole would follow him to the next lives toe and yap about it.

    It is that embarrassing.

    Sam really lost himself in the feeling of finding these perfect candidates and just didn¡¯t care to investigate as much. He became cocky too as he felt that he had nothing to worry about in the middle of these weaklings. But he was really outdone.

    First Sivan and now these little brats, he has been suffering defeat one after another and he couldn¡¯t help but feel frustrated and luckily, he has perfect targets standing in front of him.

    First Ghost looked at Sam and then at the rest of the Government Expedition squad who are dying one by one far away.

    "This is the favorite part, whenever we do this. I can¡¯t help myself but exin my grand n every time. So, you have no choice but to hear about it as you suffer that pain."

    He spoke to Sam in a calm tone.

    "Actually, we are not three or four people. I am a single entity. I am a ghost chimera created by the merging of a few thousand specters and I took over thebined consciousness of this all.

    This ce didn¡¯t turn into the Dark range because of the dead elephants. I am the reason for this. A cocky piece of shit buried me here. I was a specter and I was sealed here, buriedpletely by a necromancer who nurtured me. But I hate to be a part of that guy. I don¡¯t like him and I don¡¯t want to be his weapon.

    So, when I tried to rebel, this is what I got.

    But too bad, he chose the wrong spot. The Dark elephants, that came over here died miserably and this triggered the seal that was ced on me. That bastard wanted to use me as a weapon in a desperate situation. He didn¡¯t want to give up on mepletely. Now, he cannot do that though.

    I am now free. I must really thank that elephant race. Once I am out, I used all the skills I stole from my previous master to make this ce as it is. Everything in the ce is my servant and everything does what I say.

    Once we devour you, then we will no longer have to limit ourselves to this ce. We will take over the town and the continent and the.

    And this little purgatory formation you have given me and the information in your soul will be your greatest contributions for my raise.

    One day, I will raise ahead of all the other creatures and everything will be consumed by death."

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel even more embarrassed by his words. This is the lowest point in his life. Even being outyed by Dayus and Sivan is not this embarrassing. At least one of those guys is a yer and another one is extremely talented and intelligent, this specter, however...

    This is an utter disgrace.

    Sam looked at the First Ghost and said.

    "You are right, I am really stupid."

    As soon as he spoke, he suddenly walked out of the formation as if nothing happened.

    The three ghosts were stunned. They clearly saw the painful expression Sam had as he walked out of that ce, it really did hurt him. So, there is no way he could have juste out of that ce like that.

    But what they don¡¯t know is that Sam¡¯s consciousness didn¡¯t just have his soul. He has Sivan¡¯s remaining dormant soul as well.

    The purgatory tortures the soul of the victim. If this is his original body and his soul wasn¡¯t forcefully duplicated, his regr mental energy is more than enough for him to ovee this purgatory formation.

    But now that he doesn¡¯t have that, the alternative is to either suffer the brunt of the formation with his soul and kill these guyster or to let the sufferingpletely go to this dormant soul and kill these guys now.

    And for some reason, he doesn¡¯t want to give this specter any satisfaction of his suffering, so he went with the first option and as an added bonus, the dormant soul would be an easy pick for him to absorb.

    The three ghosts moved away immediately and the Sentient Undead, which is also part of the specter came at Sam.

    That is the only thing that could match him in directbat. The three bodies or the three ghosts would be easily killed.

    Sam extended his left mechanical hand upwards and channeled his energy.

    The Sentient undead¡¯s body suddenly stopped in his tracks and was lifted up by an invisible force.

    The three ghosts had a shocked expression, but soon they saw something spectacr when they tilted their heads a bit.

    The mechanical arm projected an arm condensed purely out of energy and caught this guy in the spot without letting him have any chance to move.

    And the condensed energy is actually transparent, at least at the start, it is slowly showing.

    Sam channeled a wave through the energy and...

    *BOOM*

    It exploded directly.

    The body of the sentient undead turned into meat pulp. The only reason, he didn¡¯t use any of these attacks, is that he wanted to test hisbat ability with these limbs. He didn¡¯t have any practice after he attached these objects to him and now the undead was a perfect target for the practice.

    He was just having some practice and felt that there is still some chance to let these guys capture this thing. But now he doesn¡¯t have to worry about that.

    The undead body is mashed.

    Not even the bones are spared.

    There is arge crater and a corporal specter is standing in the middle of it. It looked just like a normal human, but Sam knew better than that.

    He created an energy barrier around this specter and let him crash around while he used the mechanical arm to project the energy arm and pick the formation gs of the purgatory formation.

    He stabbed those gs in a triangle around this specter and made it go crazy.

    *SCREEEEECCCCCH*

    The screeching sound was heard and even themotion of the undead creatures and their fights didn¡¯t stop that screeching.

    All the undead creatures are diverted towards Sam and the three ghosts started running away.

    But Sam didn¡¯t n on letting anyone go.

    He kicked on the ground with his mechanical leg and an energy explosion happened at the same time it boosted Sam out of that ce.

    With that single kick, Sam arrived right in front of the three. He kicked the first ghost and grabbed the other two with his remaining two arms.

    The kick killed the first one and the specter fragment inside of him flew away and merged with the main fragment inside the purgatory.

    Sam threw the other two into the formation and soon they started screaming. All of a sudden, the undead creatures that were charging at him halted in their tracks.

    Without anyone controlling their motion, it is impossible for all these creatures to move and since their bond wasn¡¯t cut off, they are not going to go berserk.

    He looked at the specter struggling inside purgatory formation and walked towards it. Then he started channeling his energy into the formation to make sure that the energy never runs off.

    "LET ME GOOO."

    The specter screamed on top of his lungs. But Sam didn¡¯t care. He just channeled his energy and created hell for it.

    After half an hour, Sam finally opened his mouth.

    "You have two choices. You either die trying to get out of this formation or you be my ve. I will ce my soul imprint on you and you would be locked forever with me.

    You have no freedom, no choice, and no peace.

    But the first option wouldn¡¯t be as short as you think it is.

    I will not let you die and I will not let you feel at peace.

    This torture will go on for a year and I will add the formations attached to this so that the energy output will increase. I will hire people to capture specters to add to the purgatory and torture you until you feel like you are better off disappearing and wishing for it but never obtaining it. The choice is yours."

 Chapter 1282: First Fragment

    Sam stayed in the valley for one week. The ghost chimera also didn¡¯t budge for this one week.

    He increased the torture levels, used his own mental energy to poke the chimera a bit, and destroyed the undead creatures that are connected to the specter one by one, making its mental energy weaker.

    Sam knew better than anyone that he should follow through with this torture. By this point, the specter would be willing to die and if he killed it, then it would be more like a blessing than a punishment. So, he made sure that he brought the specter to the edge of nullifying its existence and then brought it back, never granting that relief.

    In this one week, there is something else he has done.

    Since he diverted all the torture from the formation to the Dormant soul. It has be weaker than ever.

    So weak, that Sam is sure that he would be able to destroy it and absorb itpletely in one shot. But he wanted to be sure, so he started wearing it down in the past week and got it ready for absorption.

    But he didn¡¯t proceed with it, because, when he was busy with the mental battle, the body would be a bit vulnerable. It is okay in the outside world, most creatures could only do slight physical damage, but if he is in that state within this area, he is afraid that any stray specter or a ghost might want to take advantage of that.

    He didn¡¯t want to leave it to the chance. But he is so eager to give it a try.

    Along with that, there is one thing that happened. A nuisance of sorts. The Government Expedition team that followed them had died in the valley because of the undead creatures.

    The government couldn¡¯t let their disappearance go and came to the valley. They went as far as disturbing Sam and even trying to interrogate him.

    Sam could only show his cultivation and oppress him.

    Sam is currently meditating as he checked up on the dormant soul. He could see that the dormant soul is ready to give in. Even before it gained any consciousness. This is the perfect absorption method that Sivan wanted to achieve. But Sam knew that things wouldn¡¯t be as simple for that guy.

    As he thought, he suddenly heard a scream.

    "I ept." The scream didn¡¯t sound like a scream attack. It is like a loud whisper. Sam knew that the specter became weak. This might even be the weakest the specter has felt in its whole life and even after the death.

    "Are you sure you want to surrender now? You are only fifty-one weeks away from the one-year deadline I have set up, I have so many other things nned."

    "Yes... Yes, I am sure. I ept."

    Sam nodded and started imprinting his soul imprint on the specter. The specter allowed it without any resistance and this made things easier.

    After the imprint was done, the specter just stayed attached to Sam¡¯s staff after Sam took it out of the formation.

    Sam walked out of the dark range with a sigh.

    This time, there are no attacks and there are surprises. The specter has called everything to deal with Sam and now everything that is dangerous, except for the undead side, was back inside the valley.

    So, the mountain range itself is extremely free and open. Sam came back in half a day in a rxed pace.

    He went to the town and went back to his inn. He meditated as he tried to destroy the dormant soul once and for all and absorb it.

    He started poking the soul continuously as he tore one part of the other. The resistance is so futile that within no time, he managed to absorb the whole soul.

    He sat there as he digested the newly found mass of mental energy that was being merged into his as well as the memories that are flooding in.

    Deepest darkest secrets of Sivan, his insecurities, his backup ns, secret plots, fetishes, kills, concubines, Sam came to know everything. Including the technique, Sivan used to swap their souls. The things that excited him the most are the backup ns he set for himself.

    Sivan is a paranoid guy in a way. He is so paranoid that every n might fail, so he decided to set up a few backup ns and backup organizations that would help him hide deep to bounce back.

    Along with that, he also found out something that made him feel surprised. He is the secret controller of intelligence organizations in many realms. He is also the one that hired Vardar to control the ck Ghosts.

    It seems like even though they didn¡¯t know of each other¡¯s existence, they were still on the opposite ends from the beginning. They are destined to be enemies like this.

    He didn¡¯t rest and just started his journey. Now, he got his required assistant, and all he has to do is destroy every one of Sivan¡¯s organizations. He would make sure that Sivan regretted ever getting into Sam¡¯s body.

    Sam got ready to leave the town and go to the next target.

    Meanwhile, something else is happening on the opposite end. Sivan who is inside Sam¡¯s body is currently sitting in the middle of a formation.

    Souls of many creatures are visibly diving into his head, but inside they are not attacking his soul, rather they are all moving towards the ghost chimera surrounding Sam¡¯s dormant soul.

    The Ghost Chimera got busy for the first time. On, one hand it is trying to devour the souls that came at it. After all, the souls are its food, on the other hand, it is also trying to resist the attacks of the souls that it could devour.

    Sivan is observing the whole thing for quite a while.

    At first, he tried to strengthen his own soul, but cultivating mental energy in itself is a torturous thing. He knew that he wouldn¡¯t be able to endure it. As for his previous massive mental energy, it was because of his natural talent. His soul was born that way and Sam even thought that Sivan was training and improving his mental energy. But only half of it was true.

    Sivan never tried to increase his mental energy, rather he only kept the training limited to using the mental energy as a weapon.

    So, he didn¡¯t want to start the procedure now and go through that torture, he decided to make Sam¡¯s soul weaker.

    He has been like this for three days and who knows how many people and beasts they have killed in the process, but they clearly saw the Ghost Chimera Weakening a bit.

    And as soon as it weakened and an opening presented itself, Sivan directly went after the dormant soul himself.

    He tried to rip a piece and leave the spot immediately.

    But to his surprise, the bacsh that came from just touching it made him sweat bullets.

    This is because of the nature of the dormant soul. Sam¡¯s dormant soul is aggressive in nature, in a simr way, Sivan¡¯s dormant soul waspletely timid in nature.

    The aggressive souls don¡¯t have direct defense, rather they counteract and the bacsh is way too high.

    Sivan didn¡¯t even know what to say to that. He forcefully took a piece of the soul, even though it is just a tiny fragment, and came back to his senses. The formation was instantly stopped as soon as he opened his eyes.

    "Get out, leave me some privacy."

    He got rid of all of his subordinates in the room and slowly digested that small piece of the fragment.

    Soon, he opened his eyes and was surprised. He hurriedly grabbed a scroll and a brush as he started painting something.

    The design of the methane grenade soon took form. Sivan looked at it with surprise and confusion at the same time.

    The methane grenade¡¯s working was clearly understood, but he couldn¡¯t understand the use for it. Because in their realm, the people at the cultivation level of the Novice and Great realm wouldn¡¯t even be fighting.

    Particrly in their n, they would just be going through training. Killing the kids is not exactly done by other kids or any other creature of the same level as kids. If any kid dies, it is mostly an elder venting the anger on another elder who might be the parent of the kid.

    So, he didn¡¯t see the point in this invention.

    Luckily, to make sense of it, he has someone to exin. This and along with another piece of information he got.

    He called for Dayus.

    "What is this? Why did he make something like this?"

    Sivan asked in a frown.

    Dayus looked at the design and understood that it is the grenade. He was the victim of this thing in the second Pce of inheritance.

    "That is the methane grenade. One of the first inventions of Sam. Why are you asking me about this? Did you digest his soul?" Dayus¡¯ tone grew more and more surprised as he thought of the possibility.

 Chapter 1283: Sivans Curiosity

    "No, I only got a fragment and this is in that fragment. What is the point of this invention?"

    "I don¡¯t know how to answer that. This thing explodes. That is its function."

    "I can understand, but how much destruction can he bring with this? From the calctions he gave out, this only kills people at the Novice stage and injures great realm stage cultivators. And who would dig up feces of fire elemental beasts just to make this"

    Dayus looked at Sivan as if he was an idiot. Even though he is often cautious and wouldn¡¯t show these expressions out in the open, he couldn¡¯t help but show that expression.

    "You have never been outside of this realm have you?"

    "I have, but not much. What does that have anything to do with this?"

    "The lives of people in other realms are not exactly the same as your realm. The ce we came from is a stray. We just managed toe out of that ce by luck. There is fighting and individuality starts at the age of fifteen.

    After they awakened and crosses the Initiation stage, they are on their own. They need to work, fight and kill for their own survival.

    The strongest on that is barely a consummate stage cultivator, so it is kind of necessary and for Sam who never had any affiliation with any organization, he had to resort to these cheap tricks.

    For that, he would shamelessly dig into people¡¯s graves if he has to, much less some feces."

    Sivanpletely ignored the snide remarks. He never thought about the lives of other people, so he just assumed that everyone¡¯s fight would start at the same starting line.

    For someone of his intelligence, it is kind of surprising and kind of stupid to not think of that. Sivan kept on asking himself, why he assumed that.

    He called for Butler Si and asked.

    "Butler Si, when was your first kill?"

    "Beast or a cultivator young master?"

    "Either one, the first one."

    "It is when I was sixteen. I reached the Novice stage and I was not under the protection of our local force anymore. So, eating is the only source of spiritual energy I had. I killed a python to eat it."

    "Cultivator?"

    "Fifteen years old young master. I had to keep my quota of spirit stones for myself, but someone is trying to get them, so I had to kill him."

    "The protection in our realm is until they reach the Nascent stage. I always assumed you were from around here? What is the average cultivation of people in your home realm?"

    "Great realm stage. I think so."

    This time, even Dayus was surprised. The great realm stage can be considered as the average cultivation level for the Deste as well. Butler Si came from that kind of and here he is standing as the right-hand man of one of the strongest powers.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit awed.

    "Then, why are we not using this kind of system here? You seemed to be quite strong for someone from a realm that weak."

    "It would be impossible, young master. The average cultivation of this ce is the peak of the Mortal ne Consummate stage. This is very high, but even themoners can have this here.

    They can save their kids easily from the regr danger and they can afford to nurture them without any problem. It has stayed that way for a very long time.

    So, it would be hard to change it and it is not exactly a great method without any drawbacks. You might have an increase in the quality of the cultivators, but the quantity will decrease drastically by a dozen times at least."

    Butler Si and Sivan went back and forth as they discussed this and Dayus just stood there like an Idiot. After Sivan satiated his curiosity, he finally asked Dayus.

    "I have another question for you? What is the game of gods? There is also something about the Pce of inheritance and names of other gods like Indra, Sun Wukong, Zeus, Kartikeya. They are of different faiths and different categories, why are they all lumped together?"

    Dayus was stunned when he heard this.

    "How big of a fragment did you absorb exactly?"

    "Just a small one. This is the only information that was revealed."

    Dayus was surprised once again. He knew a bit about soul fragments and absorption as he started reading up on the matter within this n¡¯s library. The first fragment will always give the most trivial information and the deeper it goes the crucial the information is.

    For Sam to consider this game as this trivial information shocked him. Because, Dayus, himself felt pretty strongly about this after all.

    "I am still here. I want an answer."

    Sivan said coldly.

    Dayus has half a mind to lie, but when he looked at Butler Si, he lost the will and just exined the situation roughly.

    "So, you and Sam are some of the pawns selected by gods to y a game for their entertainment in which you are forced to destroy their own followers? Is that it?"

    "Yes, it kind of is."

    "So, is our n involved in this game?"

    "I think so. You guys are ourst target."

    "Last target? Does that mean, everyone would be going after all the other organizations and thene to it, is that it?"

    "Yes."

    Sivan¡¯s eyes started brightening up. Many thoughts are running through his mind.

    "Now that I am in Sam¡¯s body, can I participate in his stead?"

    "I don¡¯t think so. I think you need his soul. The god that was the sponsor of Sam is actually quite entric, at least that is what Zeus said to me.

    So, if you merge his soulpletely, there is a chance that you would be able to y."

    "Okay, you can go now."

    Sivan went into deep thought. He kept on thinking about the game and the gods, he is very eager to destroy Sam¡¯s dormant soulpletely. More eager than he ever was.

    He immediately sat down to cultivate. He is close to a breakthrough into the Late stage of Astral ne transcendence, once he is there, things would be easier, after all, Sam¡¯s dormant soul wouldn¡¯t grow along with his cultivation level. It would stay the same while his own soul will be stronger.

    He needs to win this soul and information over to realize the full benefits of getting Sam¡¯s body.

    He really didn¡¯t want to lose any of this.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is Sam already destroyed his soul and now is theplete owner of his body and all of his secrets are already out.

    Sam is currently meditating on a mountain top. He just finished eating the fruits he got from the Diamond Ape valley and started circting ording to his cultivation. His new limbs, although artificial, made things a bit easier as he doesn¡¯t have to create theplete cirction out of condensed energy in thin air.

    Now the mechanical arm was designed in such a way that there is a passageway in which if Sam circted the energy, it imitates the circtionwork of the cultivation.

    He finished digesting all the energy inside the fruits but was unable to break through thatst bottleneck. He would need some more energy boost and he would be able to breakthrough.

    He really didn¡¯t like this situation now. He has to look for these kinds of special elixirs all over the ce. But luckily, Sivan¡¯s memories provided the locations of where they are stored. His subordinate organizations.

    He opened his eyes and looked at therge city in the valley far away from that mountain top. It looked like a small model city from there. He really missed his enhanced vision because of the Sky sovereign roc bloodline mutation. That was something on a whole new level than any normal vision.

    He could only adjust with this.

    The next target he is looking at is the sect in the form of a city.

    It is called the Mountain Sword Sect and ny-nine percent of people in this ce are members of the sect. The remaining one percent are the merchants who bring goods from other ces and the people who sell foods here.

    There is only one inn and it is run by the sect people for the outsiders who came for any business with the sect.

    The sect members mainly perform mercenary jobs in the surrounding mountain region which is actually very dangerous. They knew this ce like the back of their hands as they were trained here since they were kids.

    It could be said that within this mountain region, they are the only active party and they could be considered as the owners of this territory.

    So, for anything that concerns this mountain, they need to get the permission of the sect.

    Sam leaped down the mountain as he made his way towards the city.

 Chapter 1284: Weird Blonde

    Sam arrived at the city gate in no time. He looked at something that looked like a tollbooth and walked towards it.

    "Your name and purpose of your visit please?" The receptionist inside asked politely.

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "I am Sam, I am here to meet your sect leader."

    The receptionist was stunned and sized up Sam before replying.

    "Do you have a prior appointment, Sir?"

    "No."

    "Then it might be impossible for you to meet the sect leader. You have to go to the office at the city square and try to fix an appointment there. If you are lucky enough, you would be able to meet him in two to three days. If not, you will get an appointment to meet a week or a monthter."

    "Thanks for the information."

    With that the receptionist, made a mark on something that looked like a seal and gave it to Sam.

    "Enjoy your stay in the Mountain Sword City."

    Sam nodded at him and walked inside. He couldn¡¯t help feel a bit pleased by the service, but he knew that feeling wouldn¡¯tst long. After all, he didn¡¯te here to meet the sect leader for a chat over some wine. Things would get messy soon and the polite behavior of the sword sect members will be void in just an hour or so.

    Sam walked around the city for a while as he observed the surroundings. There is a giant formation surrounding the city and it is extremely lethal. Not just for people who try toe in forcefully, but even for the people who are staying inside.

    He could feel the energy waves caused by the effect of formation, being repelled by the token he had in his hand.

    These tokens are the only way the formation wouldn¡¯t effect the people inside and if they are gone, they are going to be attacked.

    Sam couldn¡¯t understand why someone will use this kind of formation. Granted that every person who tried to sneak in will be effected, but there are too many drawbacks. If someone wanted to kill someone else, all they had to do is destroy the token and the formation will take care of the rest.

    In fact, he was itching to see something like that.

    He went to the office at the city square and gave the details for the appointment. Once again he had answer a bunch of questions and when the final question came, the purpose of his meeting with the Sect leader, Sam only has one thing to say.

    "Talk a business deal and do tell your sect leader that if he doesn¡¯t meet me fast enough, I will just barge in without any decorum."

    With that, Sam raised his aura and pressured the attendant who is asking the questions to write it down.

    The attendant looked at Sam in horror and he wanted to shout for help, but Sam¡¯s gaze was enough to shut his mouthpletely.

    "Your cultivation level, Sir?" The attendant asked the final question and Sam replied.

    "Same as your sect leader."

    The attendant gulped in fear and immediately filled it out before running away from the spot with that form. He didn¡¯t dare to leisure around and neither did he want to pass it off to someone else.

    If Sam is really that strong which he looked the part, then a hell would await him if he didn¡¯t follow what he said.

    He was dispensable. Even if he was killed, the sect leader wouldn¡¯t care, so he decided to just pass down Sam¡¯s instructions to the relevant people and take a leave for the rest of the day.

    Sam waited in the office for a while, but there is no response whatsoever, even after an hour. His patience ran thin and he decided to find his own way in.

    In this past hour, something else happened.

    Inside the person quarters of the Sect leader, there is a room with small stage, giving it a theatrical look and on that stage, there is a blonde womanpletely naked strapped to a cross. She looked young and her proportions are what many woman could only dream of. Her hair is so long that it reached her ankles.

    In front of her is the attendant that took Sam¡¯s application. He is covered with many wounds as heid down on the ground, slowly bleeding. The form Sam gave was right beside him.

    The Sect leader is sitting on a chair looking at the show while a woman with ck hair is holding arge flexible sword and used it to torture the young man.

    She is barely scraping of the skin, enough to cause irritation.

    "How dare you disturb us with something like this? If someone just says that they will barge in, will they be able to do it? Will they be able toe in and go back alive? You are so afraid of him that you dared to disturb our private time with our new toy? How dare a mere outer disciple behave like this?

    It seems like this mistress has been away for too long that you guys grew a pair all of a sudden, huh."

    The young man wanted to plead for mercy, but his tongue was cut off and he couldn¡¯t lift his arms up. So, all he could do is try and fail.

    "Come on, speak up your bastard. Speak up."

    Looking at this torture, the blond woman, that was tied up to the cross finally opened her eyes. Her eyes looked deep ice blue in color and they are so deep as if a real frozen ocean was hiding inside them.

    She looked at the form, at the door and finally at the Sect leader and spoke.

    "In a few minutes, you are going to die. You better leave this guy and me, or else the torture will only increase while you die. You wouldn¡¯t even be able to endure a few minutes of it."

    Her voice sounded melodious and it reverberated throughout the room. The torturing youngdy closed her eyes in a pleasurable tone.

    "That voice. That very voice. That is the reason I captured you. But I was unable to hear it. Come on talk more. I want to see how that sounds when you moan in pleasure that was forced up on you."

    Thedy didn¡¯t bother with the young man anymore and walked towards the cross.

    "You guys better leave. I sensed the presence that will end your lives. So, you need to leave this ce within five minutes."

    "Really? What would happen if I didn¡¯t do so?"

    She said and started moving her finger against the Blonde¡¯s groin. But the blonde didn¡¯t even show any expression.

    There was not even a sound out of her mouth much less a moan. She just looked at the entrance and said.

    "The more time you spend here, the less time you have to escape.."

    The sect leader had a deep frown on his face. For some reason, he had this weird feeling in his head that is telling to him listen to that girl¡¯s words and it is making him ufortable.

    This girl is just some toy his wife has brought back home to y with, he didn¡¯t believe that a random girl on the road can have such effect on her.

    So, he directly pushed all of this to her ethereal voice of hers.

    But that bad feeling didn¡¯t go away that easily.

    At this moment, suddenly the door was sted open.

    Sam is standing at the doorway with one his hands wrapped around the neck of a sect elder and the other hand holding another guy by his cor as he dragged both of them inside.

    "Hello, I tried to make an appointment but there was reply from your side, so I just made myselffortable, I hope you don¡¯t mind."

    Sam said as he dropped the two guys and walked in. The specter followed him closely behind and started extracting the souls of the two dead elders immediately.

    The sect leader stood up and took out his sword, he spread his spiritual sense to check the situation outside and was shocked to see the scene.

    The whole area is surrounded by blood, but he didn¡¯t hear a single thing. There are so many bodies around and he didn¡¯t sense a hint ofmotion all this while.

    "It is toote. You agree to all of his terms, he would just leave you alive."

    The ethereal voice came once again and this time, even Sam was shocked. His soul vibrated a bit when he heard that voice. That faint vibration is like it was being pleasured by that voice. He shook his head to get rid of these thoughts and looked at the blonde woman who was tied up like that.

    Thedy still had her finger where it was before and this made him frown.

    He looked at the sect leader with disgust and said.

    "I have a deal for you, if you agree to it, you would be able to keep your life, if not, I would have no choice."

 Chapter 1285: Destiny

    The sect leader looked at the Blonde woman and then at Sam. He has half a mind to believe that both of them are rted. He could sense Sam¡¯s cultivation and is sure that they are of the same level. He decided that it is better not to have conflict and said.

    "If you are here for this woman, then take her back. I didn¡¯t know that she belonged to someone already. It was a mistake. Since you killed so many of my people, we can call it even."

    Sam frowned as he looked at the blonde woman and then at the sect leader.

    "He is not here for me. He is here for you."

    The Blonde woman once again spoke.

    Sam felt the same sensation again, but he didn¡¯t like it. Someone else like this mistress or the sect leader might have liked the pleasurable sensation, but for Sam, this ispletely uneptable.

    Aplete stranger who can affect his soul albeit mildly with just her voice. This just has a lot of danger signals in his mind.

    "Can you please stop talking for a while?" Sam directly asked the youngdy and she was surprised a bit. This is the only expression she has shown all this while.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother with her and turned to the sect leader.

    "She is right though, I am not here for. I am here for you. I want to make a deal and if you agree to all my conditions you get to keep your life. Otherwise, you would die."

    "Hmph, you dare yap your mouth here?"

    The mistress swung her flexible sword and a sword ray was shot at Sam.

    Sam didn¡¯t even move from his spot, an energy barrier came in the middle and blocked the attack.

    "I am still talking. If you make a move one more time, the deal is off, you will die." Sam said coldly.

    "He is telling the truth." One more time that blonde¡¯s voice made Sam close his eyes and take a deep breath. He turned to her and said.

    "Youngdy, I don¡¯t know who you are. We don¡¯t have any enmity, but if you speak one more time, you will regret it."

    "I am sorry. It is a force of habit." The blonde spoke once again, but this time Sam didn¡¯t frown, rather he was a bit surprised. Because the voice sounded just like before, but there is no effect on his brain like before.

    He was relieved and ignored her for the next few moments because the couple in front of him decided that the deal is off.

    They exchanged a look and swung their swords as both of them made a move at the same time.

    Sam blocked the hits with an energy barrier and punched out towards the Sect leader.

    *BOOm*

    The sect leader blocked the blow with his sword and an explosion urred there. The energy exploded and the sword started cracking which made the sect leader stunned, but that is not all.

    Sam twisted his mechanical hand and the energy barrier that was condensed in front of him suddenly turned into a snake and coiled around the mistress through her sword and then to her hand while he used his right mechanical leg to kick forward.

    A ring of invisible energy was shot at the sect leader who couldn¡¯t even sense it until it came too close to him. The ring surrounded him and exploded.

    *BOOM*

    He took the brunt of the attack from all the sides and copsed on the spot. All of his skin cracked and he is bleeding profusely.

    *BOOM*

    Another explosion urred through the energy snake around the mistress. She died on the spot. Specter went to her remaining body and started collecting the souls while Sam walked to the sect leader.

    "I told you, all you had to do was ept my terms and you could have lived. Too bad you chose the hard way."

    "Who.. who are you?"

    The sect leader as he looked at Sam¡¯s face that covered by the mask.

    Sam paused for a moment and removed the mask.

    "Lo.. Lord SIVAN?" The Sect leader yelled out loud.

    Sam just smiled and said.

    "Not really, your lord Sivan has stolen something from me and since you knew him, you should know what he has stolen from me too. So, if you want to me it on someone, me it on him. You are just coteral damage because you are his foot soldier."

    Sam then finished him off with a single strike and walked away. Specter did his job by collecting souls and followed Sam closely.

    Sam stopped in front of the Cross the blondedy was tied up to.

    He removed her from the binds and she dropped into his arms. He reflexively caught her, but when he realized that she was naked, he immediately dropped her to the ground.

    He took out a robe from his storage and threw it to her.

    "I am sorry."

    He spoke those words and was about to leave.

    "Wait."

    She hurriedly stood up as she wore the robe.

    Sam stopped and looked at her.

    "Do you need something?"

    "No, let me see your face."

    Sam frowned and said.

    "I am sorry. I am not going to do that."

    "You just showed him, what difference does it make."

    "He is dead right after he saw my face. Do you want the same fate?"

    "I know you wouldn¡¯t kill me. I know I am not going to die today. I know my fate for the next day. What I am interested in is yours."

    Sam frowned and decided to walk away by himself.

    "Wait. Even if you don¡¯t show me your face, I can still feel that we will meet once again. You are dragging the misfortune of a million people with you and you wouldn¡¯t stop until you deliver it all to those people.

    But from what I can see, that also changes the fortune of a hundred million people. You are about to change the lives of so many people. You are going to free the souls that were oppressed. I can feel it."

    Sam looked at her with a frown as she neared him. He could feel her using the same voice as before. Something that speaks directly to his soul.

    Sam just stood there as she neared him and removed his mask slowly.

    She looked into Sam¡¯s eyes as if she is trying to look into something deeper.

    "This is not yours is it?"

    Sam frowned once again and came out of stupor. His eyes widened in horror and he was about to go berserk, but at this moment, her voice was heard once again.

    "I can see it. I can see past this face of yours. I can see your true face. It was stolen. That was the trigger of this misfortune.

    Indeed, you are the one I came looking for."

    He said as she held Sam by his face.

    That voice made Sam calm down, but instantly he became vignt and held her arm roughly before pushing it away.

    "Who are you?"

    He asked in a cold tone as he put his mask back on.

    "I am the one who followed your fate toe here. To meet you, to confirm your existence with my own eyes."

    "I don¡¯t know what you are talking about."

    "Of course, you don¡¯t. You are not supposed to know about it. But I know, I can see it more clearly than before. You and I will meet again and again. We have the same destination, same path, but not at the same time."

    "I am not indulging you anymore." Sam turned around to leave and this time she didn¡¯t stop him.

    She tightened the robe and slowly walked through another entrance as she entered the forest.

    "Finally, I met that person. The Bringer of Misfortune.

    I shall act on it now."

    She then looked at the sky and smiled.

    "Someone that can question you. Someone that can confront you. Someone that can destroy you and you are the reason that he is in this world.

    But I hope he would be able to ovee the obstacles that you ced in front of him. I hope to see him destroy you, fulfilling, his, mine, and your destiny. Altogether."

    She then walked into the forest and disappeared from there.

    Sam didn¡¯t know what she talked to herself in the forest, but even if he knew he wouldn¡¯t be able to understand what she spoke. It didn¡¯t make sense after all.

    This is the first time, he met someone like her.

    As he walked away, he realized that there is a faint scent of her on his body, he took a deep sniff and frowned.

    "She is a Gandharva?" He muttered to himself.

    He is slightly familiar with the Gandharva race since he destroyed a branch of theirs. He knew the scent, but he didn¡¯t expect he would meet one after such a long time. If he had the previous body and senses, he would have been able to identify her immediately, but it took this long because he didn¡¯t have them.

    Now, he understood why she had that effect on his brain. It was a special ability of some of the Gandharvas, she tried to mess with his head with her voice.

 Chapter 1286: Venting

    Sam couldn¡¯t get rid of her out of his head, no matter how much he tried. He is feeling extremely frustrated because of this.

    He left the forest surrounding the Mountain sword sect and started walking alongside a stream calmly to clear his mind. But it was as if she took residence in his head. He couldn¡¯t get rid of her words no matter what.

    The words misfortune, fortune, and destiny are all ying around in his head. He couldn¡¯t get rid of them no matter what.

    He couldn¡¯t get rid of the vibrations caused by her voice in his soul.

    He didn¡¯t want to experience it again. For a freak like him who likes to have everything under his control, it is already bad enough that he lost his body and everything else that is rted to him. He is just getting used to this life.

    But now, there is someone else who could just directly go on and y around with his mind. He could take it.

    He arrived in a canyon and started destroying everything in his surroundings and only after blowing off that steam, did he manage to be calm. He took out some of the elixirs he got from the sect leader of the Mountain Sword sect and started drinking them as he sat down to cultivate.

    He needs to increase his strength. That is the only way he could at least temporarily put this mental torture behind him. He needs something that is close to a feeling of power, a feeling of superiority. It might just only help his vanity, but it is the help he needs. Even if he couldn¡¯t find a proper solution, he at least need something to make him feel temporarilyfortable and relieved.

    He cultivated there for three days and finally had a breakthrough. This time, he felt weird though. He didn¡¯t have any extra metamorphosis, he didn¡¯t feel the strength of his other beasts around him. He couldn¡¯t help but hate Sivan more and more.

    He wants his life back desperately. This frustration only got worse with the increase in his strength and he decided to take it out on the foot soldiers of Sivan.

    He churned through Sivan¡¯s memories and picked the dirtiest of all organizations. This is even dirtier than the Golden Silk Sect. He doesn¡¯t have to care how they die at all.

    He doesn¡¯t have to feel any remorse whatsoever.

    It might take some time for traveling, but he can also find a lot of ces to let some steam off in the middle.

    Sivan just had too big of awork for his own good and within this region of realms, Sam is going to cripple itpletely and the time is also nearing to send Sivan a message. He will not let him have any peace and he just knew the perfect way to send that message.

    And thus Sam started his journey. A small journey just to let his steam off.

    His first target was an assassin organization in the same realm but on a different.

    It is disguised as a merchant group.

    Sam directly went to the merchant group and openly asked the receptionist.

    "Where is your leader?"

    "Huh? What business do you have with him?"

    "That is none of your business. Just tell me where he is, or I will kill you and get the answer from your soul."

    The receptionist frowned and stood up.

    Two guards came from the main entrance and stood behind Sam.

    "If you are trying to create a scene, you picked the wrong ce buddy. You have onest chance to leave."

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to reply and swung his staff. The staff hit the head of the receptionist and he died on the spot. He then turned around and swung it on the head of the second member whose head exploded like a watermelon and the aftershock just went as far as destroying the office room.

    The remaining guard was horrified by Sam¡¯s strength.

    "You have two seconds. Where is your boss?"

    "I... I..." *BAM*

    He didn¡¯t finish and Sam just swung his staff and killed him. Specter moved behind him and started collecting the souls. Sam moved deeper into the building and by now some people already noticed themotion.

    They directly started attacking Sam without any questions. Every one of them is nimble in their movement and they are extremely agile, but Sam didn¡¯t care. His staff started shooting energy bullets at everyone that came towards him.

    Every presence he detected that wanted to harm him was being sted away.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    That is the only sound that was heard in that building as Sam moved forward. Soon, he reached the stairs which is the only way that was left. There are many peopleing down from upstairs and he just went on shooting them.

    The specter following Sam was terrified. After all, it tried to trap Sam and wanted to kill him. Of course, even if Sam easily managed to escape. That still left some fear in it. But now it understood what Sam is really capable of.

    He can be a lot ruthless. At least, when he was on verge of death, he knew what he did. He knew that he pissed off Sam when the other party came with good intentions, but now the situation is different.

    The people that are dying in Sam¡¯s hands didn¡¯t even know what is happening and why he is attacking them. From what he knew, this is the first time Sam is even meeting them. But he is even killing them without any hesitation.

    All that was left in this ce are the headless carcasses, body-less heads, meat paste, and blood sttered around the whole building.

    As Sam caused moremotion more and more people starteding down from the building and more and more people are dying.

    Soon, the leader of the organization, who is on the top floor of this eight-story building came down to see what Sam left behind as he came at him.

    "Who are you? Why are you doing this?"

    The leader asked as he looked at Sam.

    But Sam is in no mood to tell him anything. He lunged forward and ran towards this leader. He knew the energy bullet wouldn¡¯t be able to do much damage for him, but that wouldn¡¯t be the same for Sam¡¯s hits. Particrly with the increase in cultivation.

    Sam stored the staff away and threw a punch. The leader dodged and threw a punch in return to Sam¡¯s temple, but a small energy barrier stopped it in the middle and morphed into a trap as it held the fist in the ce.

    Sam moved to the side and used his palm tond a strike on the arm cutting it in half.

    "ARRRGGGHH..."

    The leader groaned in pain, but Sam didn¡¯t stop. He held the arm that the stump of the arm with his mechanical arm and pulled that guy towards him. Hended another palm strike on the shoulder, removing the armpletely.

    He then used his elbow to strike the leader in the neck from the side making him copse and after that, he finally gave his head a kick, separating it from the rest of the body.

    Sam looked at the specter and said.

    "Extract his memory. I want to know the location of the viges."

    The specter wanted to ask what viges, but he didn¡¯t dare and just went on with the extraction process and then, he immediately understood.

    He now understood where this many skilled assassins came from. This organization is actually just a subsidiary organization of arger one.

    The assassination is just a side business. Their main business is to train assassins from their childhood and sell them to different organizations and their main branch to whom they are acting as a subsidiary has these kinds of branches in many ces within the surrounding realms.

    When he learned the information, he immediately understood why Sam didn¡¯t even bother with small talk. He just jumped into the action directly.

    He finished the soul extraction for the rest of the bodies and followed Sam. He gave the locations of viges and they started their journey.

    Their nearest vige is actually not too far away.

    They went there within an hour on the cougar.

    The vige is hidden deep inside the forest and any normal cultivator wouldn¡¯t be able to find it. There are many concealment formations and defensive formations around the city that even an Astral ne transcendent cultivator of the Initial stage wouldn¡¯t be able to identify the location.

    Even Sam would have taken some time if he didn¡¯t know the location beforehand.

    But since he knew, things became easier.

    He immediately found a blindspot in the formation and entered it.

    The vige has a bunch of houses and there are many guards wearing the same attire as the ones in the building inside the city that Sam just visited.

    When the guards noticed him, they immediately became vignt and got ready to attack. But they are a tad bit toote as Sam made the first move.

 Chapter 1287: Breeding ground

    Sam zoomed past the two guards and in-process burst open their chests with his fists. They died on the spot. Specter went to them and did what he was told to do.

    There was not even muchmotion for the other guards to be alert. Everyone is busy with their own task.

    He ran towards the nearest guard post and climbed upwards. He held the two guards by their necks and jumped downwards, with their faces hitting the grounds first and their heads burst open because of the force Sam applied on them from the back.

    This time, themotion alerted the guards and they started moving. Sam didn¡¯t bother hiding or trying to run. He is not in a mood for cat and mouse, he doesn¡¯t want them to chase him while he takes them down, he came here to blow off some steam and he would do exactly that.

    He ran towards the first guard that showed up as he dodged the ranged fire attacksing at him.

    He caught the guard¡¯s hand and pulled before he punched with the remaining hand. The punchnded squarely on the neck of the guard who used his free hand to hold it and tried to breathe. But his windpipe was broken he cannot breathe even if that is the only thing he wants to do in this world.

    Sam didn¡¯t stop though, hended an uppercut on the chin with the same hand and then an upwards elbow, the chinpletely cracked and there is a small but definite line on the neck showing the small separation between the neck and the head from one side.

    Meanwhile, the rest of the guards showed up one by one, Sam kicked the dead body towards one of them and an energy bullet followed that.

    *BOOM*

    The energy bullet exploded the body into pieces of meat. The closest person to the explosion was blown away to the side. He took this chance to lunge towards the nearest andnded a punch on his face. He made the guard fall down and mounted him beforending two more punches that cracked his face open.

    Suddenly, Sam rolled to the side and held up the guard under him to be on the top and a spear was lodged into the guard¡¯s heart from behind.

    Sam grabbed the spear by its front and pulled it out as he stood up and used the mechanical hand to catch another spear that wasing at him.

    He threw one of the spears at the guard far away killing him with one shot straight to the head and ran toward the one that is throwing the spears.

    A guard blocked his path while another one started using earth elemental attacks from the rear.

    Sam stabbed the guard in the front with the spear and dragged his body along with it towards him before kicking it with his mechanical leg.

    The body flew towards another guard and...

    *BOOM*

    It exploded and in the process, the guard that wanted to catch the dead body lost his two arms. He knelt on the floor in pain and horror.

    "NOO..." He screamed on top of his lungs, but it was cut midway as the spear tip hit him from the side, exploding his head.

    Sam is like a bloodthirsty maniac as he took one life after another as he moved deeper into the vige and every street he passed through waspletely drenched with blood. He killed them in a gory way. There was no clean and precise killing he always preferred. He didn¡¯t care if his attacks were efficient.

    He didn¡¯t kill anyone for pleasure in a long time, but now that he did it, he is kind of missing this feeling. He felt extremely nostalgic.

    Meanwhile, while he was going on a killing spree, he could feel some unfamiliar eyes watching him in awe through the windows of the houses in the vige.

    He even caught a glimpse of the faces of some curious kids and horrified women looking at him through those windows and door creaks.

    But he wasn¡¯t bothered by it, neither did he bother them. He just killed every single of the guards and stood on a high vantage point and yelled.

    "Everyone in the homes. If there is any guard or any other person from that organization left in your house, you better me now. I will guarantee your safety and I am determined to kill everyst one of them."

    His voice reverberated throughout the whole vige and he started walking through one street after another as he said the same thing again and again.

    He is sure that there would be some people hiding in these houses and he didn¡¯t want to let them go. He is determined to kill them and he would do so.

    He was in thest street and was almost convinced that there is no one else left, but he heard something and immediately ran to a house at the end of the street.

    *BAM*

    He kicked open the house and he saw a bunch of guards holding some women tightly while blocking their mouths with their hands. Every one of them is naked.

    His gaze grew colder.

    "Don¡¯te forward. If you even take a step, I will kill her.." One of the guards threatened as he cowardly moved into the corner.

    The woman tried her best to struggle from the grip and managed to speak a few words herself.

    "Please, even if you have to let me die, kill him here and now. He is the young... *MmPh*"

    "Shut up you bitch." The young man once again blocked the woman¡¯s mouth.

    Sam suddenly made a move and his palm went straight through the head of the young man killing him in a single blow and after a smallmotion, every guard inside the room was dead. The naked women were covered in blood, but they were not feeling horrified, rather they are relieved. They started tearing up in joy.

    Sam didn¡¯t even take a second look at them and left the room. He decided to check on the other houses, even if there was no sound and it was a wise decision because he managed to find another ten guards and after killing them, he waited for specter to finish off collecting the souls.

    He went to the onlyrge building of the vige which is themon residence for guards and used for the residence of the officers of the organization whenever they came and started carving something on it.

    When he was done, his three words were left there.

    "SAM WAS HERE."

    There were the three words he left behind in many ces, but this time, they carried a whole different meaning.

    After the specter was done, he came back to Sam.

    "Where is the next vige?"

    "It is on the other side of the, it would take at least a day for us to go there."

    "Then, we better get started."

    With that, he made a move.

    After he left, finally the residents of the vige who stayed inside the house, even after all themotion finally came out of their houses to take a look.

    They are wearing some kind of cors that are ced on them to withhold their cultivation.

    It was not even some technical lock, it is just a normal lock.

    If one took a look, one would definitely be shocked by how many different races of women were here. There were elves, dark elves, half-elves, demi-giants, dwarves, mermaids, Gandharvas, half-Gandharvas, blood demons, and so on. All kinds of women were there and there are kids surrounding them.

    Kids are all of the mixed races.

    These are all the kids these women gave birth to.

    This is the breeding ground of the organization. They capture the women of various races and men of various races with good bloodlines and make them breed forcefully. The women would be ced in the viges like this all over while there is only one vige for men where are all of them are prepared for the breeding process.

    The men would be taken to various viges and they would be forced to have sex, the women will be left with pregnancies and they would have to raise the children that would be taken away by the organization as soon as they were awakened.

    They would train them and then sell them to various organizations that are in need of some death warriors, assassins, private forces, and such.

    Of course, when there is a vige full of women that cannot resist, some guards are obviously going to take some advantage, but they don¡¯t dare make any woman pregnant, because in the opinions of the higher-ups, these women are simr to high-quality mares and they could only be knocked up by the high-quality stallions, not any random steed can knock them up.

    All of these things went through their minds as they felt emotional. They never thought they would be able to free themselves in this lifetime. They didn¡¯t even have the freedom to kill themselves, but now there is a man that came and killed everyst one of the guards.

    But they are still a bit afraid. After all, they didn¡¯t know who he was and they didn¡¯t know if he would destroy the organization as a whole. If he didn¡¯t destroy it all, the organization mighte back.

 Chapter 1288: On to the Next

    When the women finally reached the main residence in the middle while looking at the scene left behind by Sam, they were greeted by a blonde woman.

    The same blonde woman Sam would have recognized if he was in aatose state. The same blonde woman that was tied up in the Mountain Sword Sect.

    She is currently holding her hands over arge stone block in the main yard of the residence as she guided her spiritual energy through it.

    Bit by bit, the stone block is being deformed slowly and started revealing a humanoid figure. The women didn¡¯t understand who she was but noticing that she wasn¡¯t hostile towards them and in fact, wasn¡¯t even bothered by them, they dared and walked into the residence to the guard captain¡¯s body. His spatial ring was still there, they checked it to find the keys for the cor locks around their necks and freed themselves of the restrains. The keys started passing through the viges and the women became free women that day.

    They are no longer the breeders for this organization.

    But they still don¡¯t know what to do. They were stuck in this ce for years and they don¡¯t have any idea what to do at the moment.

    They could only look at the blonde woman who is standing in front of the stone block while deforming it slowly.

    After an hour or so, there is a sculpture in the ce of the stone block. And surprisingly it is the sculpture of Sam.

    It has his original face. The face he got when he arrived in this world. The face was stolen by Sivan.

    If Sam was here, he would be shocked and he would definitely question this woman endlessly, but he is not here.

    The blonde woman looked at the statue with a smile and then at the carvings left behind on the building behind the statue.

    "SAM WAS HERE."

    Sam¡¯s endless killing intent was clearly represented in that. His frustration and his thirst for revenge were shown directly.

    She made some hand signs and started chanting.

    The words highlighted a big and all the glow gathered into an orb which then merged with the statue.

    She finally turned to the women that are gathered at the building and said with a smile.

    "From today onwards, you are free. You no longer belong to any organization and you no longer are breeding objects. You are on your own. You can either stay in the vige and live here, you can go out and roam around. But do remember one thing.

    This is the man that saved you. He is the one that gave you this new life. He is the one that helped you, even when the gods you prayed for years have forsaken you.

    Remember his face and remember his name.

    He is Sam. He is your liberator."

    Her voice reverberated in their minds and the Blonde Woman walked away from that spot. The women gave her way as she walked out of the vige and they looked at the statue.

    Finally, one of the women in the front went towards the statue and kowtowed and made her son do the same, before going back to her residence.

    She started cleaning up the doorway where the blood was sttered and the path in front of her house that has two corpses.

    Then she changed into a new set of clothes after washing herself in the stream and walked to the nearest herb field left behind by the organization to tend to the herbs. She has a faint smile on her face.

    Thedies watched all of this take ce with silence and they suddenly realized that this is all true. They don¡¯t have to worry about any more oppression and they don¡¯t have to be the soulless breeders for these evil bastards, they all walked to Sam¡¯s statue and started kowtowing.

    Some of them went back to the houses in the vige and some of them went outside of the vige along with their kid after taking some things from the spatial rings of the guards that were dropped dead.

    But every one of them is ready to live the new lives that are awaiting them.

    Meanwhile, Sam doesn¡¯t know what happened after he was gone.

    He was neither looking forward to bing the liberator of this woman nor did he have the desire to garner their worship.

    If he wanted that, he would have freed them himself and given a speech. He is sure that he can convince them to work for him like ves much less respect and remember him.

    He is on his way towards the next vige and by the end of the day, they reached that ce.

    Since they already destroyed the headquarters of the organization, the rest of the ces only had some small fries as guards. He doesn¡¯t even have to worry about dealing with them. He can just behave as he wished and he did exactly that.

    The journey took a day, but it only took twenty minutes for him to sweep the whole vige, in process, he also destroyed the branch of the organization in the neighboring city and then they moved to another within this realm where there are a bunch of viges and branches left.

    Everywhere he went, he left behind his three words and the blonde woman started appearing there magically, a whileter after he left.

    She is not following his exact path, but she is ending up in the same ce as him.

    And she started leaving his statues behind everywhere.

    For the next week, this is the only thing both of them did. Sam kills people in different ces and this woman leaves his statues behind.

    But what both of them don¡¯t know is that someone else is watching the hints left behind by Sam.

    The three words left behind at the main branch and the side branches were being visited by another person.

    A person following the trail left behind by Sam.

    He is the person from the main organization for which the current organization is subsidizing.

    It is impossible to keep such arge even mum. And people immediately sent this guy from the main organization to check this subsidiary. The only problem is that no one knows the vige location.

    Since Sam had extracted every soul on his way, he cannot even extract the souls, there are no records left behind about the location of the viges. That was the deal between the subsidiary and the main organization. They wouldn¡¯t discuss the locations of the breeding viges and they didn¡¯t. Now, he has given up the viges which he wasn¡¯t exactly willing to do.

    So, he started going after Sam, but that guy was always a few steps ahead of him and before he knew it, the whole organization waspletely destroyed. Not a single person was left behind. Sam traveled faster than the news itself and by the end of the week, there is only one branch left.

    The person directly went to that branch after he understood that he cannot predict Sam¡¯s next attack location.

    So, when Sam arrived there, he was greeted with a surprise.

    A person of the same cultivation level as him. An astral ne transcendent cultivator inte-stage is waiting for him.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care.

    He lunged forward and started attacking the person.

    He punched straight at the other guy which was blocked and then the opponent tried to lock his arm.

    "Who are you? Who sent you here?"

    The opponent asked Sam coldly.

    Sam¡¯s arm suddenly started glowing with energy and it gained dominance in the arm lock. The invisible energy held the opponent¡¯s arm in ce and Sam used his mechanical arm to chop at the shoulder joint as he tried to cut the arm off.

    The opponent realized this and wanted to block the attack. But Sam turned around and ced his back against the opponent¡¯s face. When the attack of that remaining handnded on his back, he also took out the left hand of the opponent.

    Sam fought messily. There is no usual finesse he showed when he did things. He behaved like a maniac and he liked it for some odd reason.

    The opponent who lost an arm in the very first exchange looked at Sam vigntly. He felt horrified with just Sam¡¯s gaze.

    Sam who is soaked in blood didn¡¯t care and started attacking the guy once again. When he was done, the opponent is on the ground spitting blood while all of his limbs were distorted.

    "Extract his memories."

    Sam said coldly and the specter did as he was told.

    When he looked through the memories, Sam was surprised.

    "Oh? You are from the main organization? I didn¡¯t expect you toe now. You really died in such a backward cepared to your own. What a shame. But don¡¯t worry, I will definitely kill the rest of your members and they would die in an even lesser ce than you.

    But before that, I have other subsidiaries to deal with and you gave the locations at a perfect time. Thank you."

    He looked at the corpse and spoke before leaving the ce.

    [A/N: Happy New Year Guys.]

 Chapter 1289: Second Subsidiary

    After Sam killed the guy from the Parent organization.

    He is currently in a realm a bit far away from the previous one. At this moment, he is standing in the middle of a stream in a mountain range.

    He just finished swimming around and currently, he only has his lower body covered. His upper body ispletely exposed and even now, his face is covered with that mask.

    Sam stood in the middle of the stream and looked ahead as he took in the beautiful view.

    "Such a beautiful ce and it is only used to cover that much suffering. What a shitty world..."

    He muttered to himself as he started walking forward along the stream. He walked slowly and gently as he looked at the pleasant evening sun.

    He is currently in this realm to deal with the next subsidiary. This one is notpletely rted to the activities in the first subsidiary, but this is equally evil.

    This organization focuses more on experimentation. They experiment with a lot of things on people, children, women, and some animals. There are three side branches for the organization along with the main branch.

    The side branches are responsible for their individual research. One of the researches, new kinds of poisons and medicines that would cause harm to the body. They test the poisons on people of all kinds of ages and strengths here.

    The second branch experiments on the mutated creatures. They are responsible for trying to trigger mutations in the beasts and microorganisms. The beasts are for mostly testing, microorganisms are creating disease for the enemies, but the worst part is, they actually test some mutations on the pregnant women with the help of some mutated microorganisms, beast blood, and other resources to create babies with some special mutation which might result in a physical constitution.

    This is kind of a gic mutationb.

    A third branch is actually a ce where they make enhancement drugs. The drugs give the cultivators a temporary boost of power in exchange for destroying their cultivation slightly or sometimes, severely.

    If they are just making drugs, it would have been okay, but once again they use the cultivators and kids of all ages and strengths. One thing, in particr, is this ce has a link between the first subsidiary organization and the second subsidiary organization.

    In the first organization, after they tried to breed some special kid from someone and when they awakened they failed to get a good specimen, they will sell those kids to this second organization where they would be test subjects.

    That is not all. If the mother in the first organization didn¡¯t give a good enough baby three times straight, then she would be sold here for the second branch of the second organization where they would do tests of gic mutation as well.

    Sam was not unfamiliar with either gics or the experimentations regarding that. But most of his tests are voluntary and they wouldn¡¯t cross a line. They wouldn¡¯t go from testing to torture. He respects science so much that he couldn¡¯t bear to use science as a pretext to torture someone.

    Neither did he use torture in the name of science to get results.

    He couldn¡¯t help but thank Sivan for running these kinds of organizations, after all these people are so much easier to kill. He might not be eaten away by the guilt if he killed someone innocent and aplete bystander who has nothing to do with him.

    But he would know that he made a mistake and he would be constantly reminded of it, before he killed anyone. That might not hinder his actions, but the constant reminder of the fault could be a bit annoying and he kind of left behind those days back in the past life.

    As he thought up to this point, he suddenly remembered the blonde woman once again. He must say that she is disturbing him too much and not in a good way.

    She is like the annoying fly that wouldn¡¯t go away buzzing at his ears.

    He was reminded of her words of him lessening many people¡¯s misfortunes. Sam is not exactly interested in doing good for others. He would make mutually beneficial deals at most or sell a useful product to consumers which is also kind of a deal in his opinion.

    Apart from that, there is nothing he particrly likes about helping themon folk whenever they are in danger or suffering. Thest time he did that in his past life because the most precious person wanted him to, he ended up losing her.

    He knew that both are not exactly rted, but if he wasn¡¯t working on that in seclusion with no contact whatsoever with the outside world, nobody would have dared to touch her.

    But there is a small concern in his mind, that is telling him that he is currently doing what he is doing to free these people and them being some kind of filth is only an excuse so that I could kill them freely without feeling any burden.

    And this voice is eerily simr to that blonde woman which is not exactly something he wants to hear.

    Sam thought all of these things as he walked inside the water along with it and soon the flow became a lot more turbulent and the white waters are soon visible. The water is going down arge cliff and Sam suddenly sped up.

    He started running at his top speed. The water sshed everywhere as each of his powerful steps created waves of energy, when he is on the verge of the cliff, he kicked his mechanical leg on the bed of the stream.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosive sound, he was shot into the sky like a firecracker, except the fire is not the thing that is fueling him. He went to the maximum distance he could do and when his altitude was about to go down, he immediately kicked the mechanical leg once again.

    *BOOM*

    The energy repelled him which made him fly far away, but in the process ttened some trees on the ground. He did this again two more times and when he reached one point, he suddenly changed the posture of his body in the air.

    His legs went upwards with his head down and the staff appeared in his hands.

    Energy started gathering at the top of the staff as Sam once again kicked his mechanical leg.

    *BOOM*

    The explosive sound was followed by Sam¡¯s rapid descent to the ground.

    His destination is a vige which is one of the branches of the Second Subsidiary. In fact, this is the third branch that focuses on performance enhancement and as Sam descended closer and closer the energy gathered at the tip of the staff became denser and chaotic.

    The residents of the vige heard the explosive sound in the sky and they also saw Saming down. The guard captain came out of his residence and noticed that Sam is diving right towards his residence.

    He hurriedly ran in and activated the formation of the vige. But...

    *BOOM*

    Sam mmed the staff on the formation barrier and along with the explosive sound, the barrier crumbled like a ss container immediately. It waspletely brought down with that single hit and in fact, the aftershock destroyed the building directly underneath the point on the barrier Sam was attacking.

    That is the residence of the guard captain who is also in charge of the vige.

    The building crumbled, but that is not all, some of the impacts were distributed a bit because of the interference of the formation and it spread to the surrounding guard residences.

    When the dust settled, Sam is standing in the middle of arge crater which is in the middle of the guard captain¡¯s residence with the staff in his hands.

    He looked around with his energy vision as he searched for the guards and the guard captain.

    He lunged forward as soon as he caught someone.

    The guard ising out of the rubble as he coughed profusely. He didn¡¯t even understand what the situation is when he saw Sam running towards him.

    "Who..." *smash*

    His voice was cut short as he died with a single hit. His head exploded and Sam moved to the next target. When they are still in confusion, Sam started killing them, and half of the guards resting the residences are dead, while the remaining half tried to get out of there after noticing Sam¡¯s strength, but they were stopped by the guards who are on an active duty that ran towards this ce due to the destruction.

    But that is the mistake they did. A bunch of energy bullets came at them as they gathered at one spot and Sam followed the energy bullets as he started beating the crap out of them.

    One hit, one kill. He didn¡¯t waste any more energy.

    Specter followed him and collected the souls as usual. After Sam was done with the guards here, he went towards the research buildings as he walked through the streets leisurely.

    The test subjects who were imprisoned in various houses of the vige are peeking through the windows and doors as they looked at his blood-covered figure carrying the staff over his shoulder with that ck hand.

    He looked gruesome, but for these people, he looked like a god who came to save them.

 Chapter 1290: Sending Wrong Information

    Sam walked into theb and all that was heard for some time is some screaming and begging along with some explosive sounds and the crashing sounds of theboratory building and when he is done with it, the buildingpletely copsed as Sam walked out along with the head researcher.

    He scouted the rest of the vige for the guards and researchers. He didn¡¯t spare the houses of the test subjects and after confirming that there are none left, he knew he was done here.

    He didn¡¯t even take a second look at the test subjects and walked out of the vige towards the waterfall at the cliff that he came from. He dragged the head researcher along with him. He tied him up with the same cultivation restriction cors he has been using on the test subjects and just for the sake of it, he broke his limbs.

    There he washed the blood off of his body making the wholekepletely red. He killed that many people today. He also got the relevant information from the memory extraction about the locations of the second branch.

    He didn¡¯t go after the main branch first, because the parent organization would have definitely known about his massacre of the first organization, so there is no way they wouldn¡¯t have sent more people to the other subsidiaries to check if Sam ising there.

    And if they did, Sam wants to send them on a goose chase just for the fun of it. Luckily he got the information about this side branch from the leader of the first subsidiary which helped him locate this one first.

    Now he got the locations of the remaining two side branches. He also has the location of the main branch from the start because of Sivan¡¯s memories. He has a choice to pick which branch he wants to attack before the news travels to the main branch. Which would be extremely slow as he killed everyone in the vige.

    As he rxed in theke water while bathing, what he didn¡¯t notice is that from a cliff far away, the blonde woman is looking at him with a faint smile on her face. She looked at him for a while and left the ce before reaching the vige.

    The test subjects here are a bit too weak to evene out because of their cors, only a few of them have any strength left and they are helping the weaker subjects out of the cors.

    The blonde woman appeared in the vige and she started building the statue there in the crate.

    When the test subjects noticed this, they curiously looked at her and after she was done, she once again told them.

    "He is the one that ended your suffering by taking the lives of all your oppressors here. He is your savior. I hope you remember his face for the rest of your lives."

    With that, she left the vige.

    The reaction of the test subjects is kind of simr to that of the women and children in the previous viges. They don¡¯t know what they are going to do, but they are not strong enough to leave the vige and since this vige was in the middle of nowhere, they decided to stay here until some of them recover before going away.

    Sam who is just a couple of thousand meters away didn¡¯t know this is happening.

    He finished his bath and walked out of theke before focusing on the head researcher.

    "You have two choices. The first one is that you listen to whatever I say and do whatever I say without adding anything, I will kill you with one blow.

    The second one is, you don¡¯t listen to whatever I say and don¡¯t do whatever I say, then I torture you until you wish you were dead and beg me for it and do whatever I say before I slowly kill you. You pick one."

    He looked at the researcher dead in the eyes while saying this and there is not even a single change in his expression. He looked cold, emotionless, and even a bit too calm.

    The researcher gulped in nervousness and wanted to ask something, but...

    *PAK*

    A pnded on his face and it took ayer of skin off of that face in that strike.

    "AHHHHHHHHHHHHH..."

    The researcher cried in agony.

    "What kind of pathetic researcher are you? With all the things you have done to people decisively, at least have the balls to be decisive when you consider your own life."

    "The... first one. First one." The researcher immediately said when he looked at Sam¡¯s face. He is clearly getting annoyed by researchers¡¯ cries.

    "That is better. Now, do you have a method to contact the main branch?"

    "Yes. Yes."

    "So, how do you do that?"

    "A city in the west. There is someone whoes in and checks the vige often. Whenever I have any updates, I give them this report and they send the information to the main branch. I don¡¯t know how they do that, but they give back the reply or even bring the main branch members here within three days."

    "Okay, do you have any recovery drugs?"

    Sam said as he looked through the potions in the spatial ring of the researchers. He was surprised by the variety of valuable medicines, some of them even helpful for him. He took them and only gave one recovery potion to him. Barely enough to heal his legs and one arm. He didn¡¯t let him heal his other injuries.

    "Let us go to the city."

    Sam said as he removed the cultivation restriction, but not before making the specter make a soul a contract between the two so that the researcher wouldn¡¯t do anything funny.

    They traveled to the west and by the end of the day, they reached the city.

    Sam didn¡¯t enter the city along with the researcher, he followed him from a few hundred meters. Everyone looked at the researcher weirdly, but no one bothered to interfere with whatever it is going on.

    The researcher soon reached the ce where the informer is staying and entered the house.

    "What happened to you? Why are you here like this?"

    The informer asked as he looked at the head researcher in horror.

    But before the researcher could even say anything, Sam barged in and punched the guy in the face. Knocking him unconscious.

    He once again used the cultivation restriction cor and started asking a different set of questions and when the informer didn¡¯t cooperate, Sam just killed the researcher with a punch to his heart and said.

    "I actually don¡¯t need you to cooperate, as long as I kill you and extract your memories, the news will not travel to the organization and I would still get what I want.

    So, be obedient and you will have a quick death."

    After that Sam started ¡¯convincing¡¯ the guy to sign a soul contract which didn¡¯t take many words. Only some extreme actions were necessary until he signed that contract.

    The informer then went out and sent the message to the next person in the chain of information andmand triggering Sam¡¯s n.

    After that, Sam left the ce

    The information Sam sent is that everything in the vige is destroyed and that includes, the researchers, guards, and the test subjects. There is nothing left and the researcher that the informer found in the near-death state, gave the information that there is a team of people that destroyed the branch and they is the ones that destroyed the first subsidiary too and they are currently going after the second side branch.

    It didn¡¯t take long for the information to reach the headquarters within the chain ofmand.

    Luckily it didn¡¯t take much convincing on the informer¡¯s part. Because just like Sam guessed the Parent organization members have arrived in this ce. But for some reason, they weren¡¯t able to take any action.

    Inside the headquarters of the second subsidiary, the head of the organization is currently in meeting with some of the people that came from the parent organization.

    "I already told you someone is targeting our organizations, the first subsidiary was also stubborn like you and they paid the price when we weren¡¯t able to react because of no prior knowledge. That is why we came to you immediately.

    But you did the same and you lost one of the branches. So, now do you want to give the location of the second branch or not?"

    A woman who was sent from the parent organization yelled on top of her lungs as she looked at the head of the subsidiary.

    A man sitting on the side gave her a look making her calm down. The head of the subsidiary organization looked troubled. It is the contract between the parent and subsidiary that they wouldn¡¯t reveal the locations of the main research bases to the parent organization just like how the first subsidiary didn¡¯t reveal the location of the breeding viges.

    They wanted to save their Geese thaty golden eggs hidden from the parent organization and they also agreed. He was hesitant when they came and asked about this a day ago, but now it seems like his hesitance cost him a side branch

 Chapter 1291: Abominations

    The leader of the second subsidiary gritted his teeth and dictated the location of the remaining two side branches.

    "I would being with you." That was the only condition he ced in exchange for the information. It is inevitable that the parent organization now knows about the side branches, but he cannot let them take any research directly by themselves.

    He should be present there and make sure that he gets the price he deserves for anything they might take and better yet, he should prevent them from taking anything at all.

    Thus the leader of the subsidiary left the ce leaving everything there for the deputy to manage. The team sent by the Parent organization has three members and the girl who yelled at the leader of the subsidiary was left behind here, just in case of unforeseen situations.

    But what they don¡¯t know is, as soon as they left the main branch, Sam appeared there.

    The main branch of this organization actually has threeboratories and barracks attached to these threebs for the final testing of their sick products they make before the final sale will be proceeded with.

    Along with that these people also conduct secondary research in which they try tobine the products of the three side branches.

    This is hidden deep inside the mountains and they don¡¯t nurture disciples and manage businesses. They only do the experiments and the guard units under theirmand are only used for defending, carrying information and hunting down the beasts and capturing the test subjects they needed.

    Sam took the mountain path to the organization and slowly walked towards it.

    The guards were told to be on high alert and when they saw Saming to them directly, they became vignt and the guard captain in charge of the estate door immediately sent the news to the superiors instead of engaging with him.

    The Deputy who got the news immediately, gave orders.

    "We are not expecting anyone. Activate the defenses and don¡¯t let hime in. Send the mutant guards to detain him. If he resists kill him and bring him inside. We can use the soul extraction."

    Those were the orders he gave. He was decisive and didn¡¯t beat around the bush by asking who the other party is, because he had a hunch.

    The orders were executed and when Sam was twenty feet away from the estate gate, it opened up and a few men starteding out of that ce on the beasts.

    At least, that is what it looked like on the first nce. But immediately Sam realized that they are men at all.

    He widened his eyes in horror as he looked at the creatures in front of him. He cannot even call them creatures. They are abominations.

    The men sitting on top of the beasts are not normal. Each of them have different bodies. One of them has fun all over, another one has ws for limbs. The third one has a hunched shape that is simr to that of a werewolf, one looked like a giant snake, one has scaly reptilian skin.

    The beasts are even weirder. One looked like a cross between a wolf and ape. It has a gori¡¯s body with a wolf¡¯s head and ws. Another looked like a cross between an alligator and bear.

    Sam didn¡¯t even understand what kind of sick mind created these things.

    He couldn¡¯t even sense their cultivation levels. They have auras that are between Initial stage transcendence of Astral ne and middle stage transcendence of Astral ne. At least the energy wavesing from their bodies are giving out that kind of aura.

    He felt disgusted just looking at them as they surrounded him. The estate gate closed and the abomination in the lead spoke.

    "You are trespassing in our property, you need to follow us." At least the voice sounded like it belonged to a person.

    "Property? Whose property is this?"

    "We are the only ones that are going to ask these questions alright. You need to follow us now, or we would consider you are resisting."

    "Of course, I am resisting you shithead."

    "Then, be prepared to die."

    As soon as he finished one of the beasts lunged at him while the abomination stayed back.

    Sam took out his staff and pinned the beast¡¯s head to the ground with it and held it there as it struggled. This is the one that looked like the cross between the alligator and the bear. Most of its head and scales on its body looked like that of the alligator, but physical structure is different.

    The rider who was on the beast before moved forward to attack Sam, but an energy bullet was shot into the head of the beast through the staff.

    *POP*

    It gave a popping sound instead of an explosive burst as Sam used very small amount of energy. He was surprised. A normal beast of that level wouldn¡¯t survive if the energy bullet exploded that close to its head, at least it would faint.

    But here...

    "GRRRRR..."

    It started growling angrily, but this acted as a hindrance to the rest of the people and the beasts.

    Sam gathered a bigger energy bullet and this time, it exploded.

    *BOOM*

    The head was burst open and the beast stopped struggling. The rider couldn¡¯t take it anymore and came at Sam who blocked his punch with the staff and countered it with a strike to the chest. He used void styles and it burst open the scaly skin.

    He used the chance tond another hit making the staff go through the chest ande back from the rear like he was stabbed by a spear.

    He kicked the body off of the staff and hit swung it to the side using ripple style blocking the attackers that were about toe from the side.

    Sam took a sniff on the staff and was disgusted by the smell. This thing is indeed an abomination. He couldn¡¯t even stand these guy¡¯s sight and he decided to finish this off.

    He kicked the ground and jumped towards the nearest guy as he mmed the staff from overhead, the rider managed to dodge, but the staff went through the beast splitting its head into two. He swung it to the side hitting thatrge ape with wolf head in the gut leaving a deep gash.

    The ape came at him with extreme rage, but Sam stepped forward as he kicked it in the gut with his mechanical leg and tore open the body making the guts spill out.

    The rest of the riders became horrified with Sam¡¯s kills. The guard who is watching this from afar immediately reported the incident to the higher ups for the backup.

    Sam finished the group off and walked towards the gate, just when he was about to break it, it opened once again and a bunch of new creatures came at him which he started killing once again.

    In the next five minutes, he killed two more waves of these abominations, before he went after the guards that looked like normal cultivators.

    He entered the guard post and killed the captain who just sent the message of the gate¡¯s breach.

    Sam walked deeper into the group as he met with the backup sent by the higher ups. And this time, at least they looked normal.

    "This is as far as you go."

    The captain of the new group spoke, but as soon as he did that...

    *BOOM*

    His head exploded into a bloody mist and Sam jumped into the group as he started killing once again.

    By the time this group was done, the deputy realized that the person is not to be messed with and he gathered the elders and the person from the parent organization to deal with him.

    The rest of the guards were ordered to go back and they directly decided to engage with Sam.

    Within five minutes, Sam is surrounded with a dozen elders and the deputy along with the woman from the Parent organizations.

    "Good thing, you didn¡¯t try to escape, it wouldn¡¯t be of any use." The woman said as she looked at him coldly.

    Sam looked around and said.

    "Why would I be escaping? I don¡¯t see any of my blood spilled here."

    "It will spill soon. Who are you? Why are you attacking our subsidiaries?"

    "You are so confident in spilling my blood, why don¡¯t you kill me and extract those answers yourself. I am pretty sure a vile organization like yours has the means."

    "Vile? Is that all of this is about? A stupidly moralpass?"

    The woman kept on asking and Sam looked at her with intrigue.

    He suddenly smiled.

    "You have no confidence in taking me down, do you?"

    "What?" She asked in half anxious and half confused tone.

    "You are an amateur at this. You cannot deceive a five year old at this rate. You have no confidence at taking me down. You might even be ready to get out of here now if things go rough. You are only staying here to get more information."

 Chapter 1292: Amateur

    Sam looked at the woman and his gaze made her feel like she has nothing to hide in front of him.

    "You are an inexperienced woman who is new at this kind of thing. Aren¡¯t you?" Sam asked once again and everyone subconsciously focused on her for a moment.

    The woman became embarrassed and took out her sword as she spoke through the gritted teeth.

    "I will kill you right here and now and let us if I am just trying to fish the information out of you or not."

    Her voice sounded so determined and strong as she lunged forward with the sword in her hand and stabbed at Sam.

    Sam was really impressed by her sword aura, but it is not enough to faze him. They are both of simr cultivation level and Sam could see that her affinity and technique with the sword and sword aura are really good. She is even a lot younger than him. He is really impressed by everything about her, but he can clearly see that she has no experience whatsoever in a death battle.

    There are too many openings, of course, granted they could be considered as cheap shots in an ¡¯honorable battle¡¯ yed for preserving some dignity, this is not just a noble battle. Here the winner gets to keep his life no matter how dirty they yed.

    Sam spun his staff and energy gathered at the tip of it as he used the repel style of diverting her attack to the side. He spun around with the recoil and went towards an elder who is standing in the circle.

    He swung his staff at his chest, catching him and the rest of the group off guard. The attack caused energy waves inside his body which blocked his heart and Sam tapped the staff on the same spot once again.

    *burst*

    A hole appeared on the chest right where the heart should be and blood started spilling out of it.

    He looked at the surprised group and the woman and said.

    "What? Are they just here to watch the show?"

    He said with a smile.

    "I am your opponent and I alone am enough to deal with you. Don¡¯t bring them into this." Thedy said coldly and swung her sword at Sam.

    *ng* *ng*

    The sound of metal striking metal came as yed defense for a while as he sized up the woman. She is a lean woman with long ck hair, wearing men¡¯s robes. There is not a single thing feminine about her in terms of demeanor and the way she wielded the sword. It is too masculine, too aggressive and it is not that refined. It is almost like a lot of potentials is being lost just like a gem in the rough.

    Looking that Sam is not attacking, the youngdy became more and more aggressive and started taunting him.

    "What? Are you going to block all the time or are you going to fight back? Or did your balls suddenly magically disappear?"

    She took a step back and prepared for a big swing with sword aura riling up. But as the sword was about to cut Sam up, he lifted his staff, hebined the repel style and the ripple style as he blocked the de.

    The repel style diverted the attack and it was then assisted by the ripple style which propagated it.

    The sword ray was diminished, but it still hit the elder who is standing on the side. He was caught off guard and before he realized it, his stomach started bleeding and left a puddle under his feet.

    "What where you are aiming, you seemed to be too preupied thinking about my balls."

    The elders on the side were about to make a move by now. After all, they are just being some bystanders but they were attacked twice with one of them dead and another severely injured.

    But the girl is just too na?ve.

    "DO NOT INTERFERE. THIS IS MY FIGHT."

    She yelled as her sword aura raged. Then she took a deep breath and calmed herself down before continuing.

    "This is my fight and this is thest time, I am going to tell you about this. No one shall interfere in this fight until I say so. If you are that afraid, stay vignt or stay away from this ce. If anybody interferes again, I will cut them apart."

    She then stabbed Sam, who blocked the attack once again.

    "Are you sure, you are not going to need any help?"

    Sam asked once again and this time his voice even sounded like he was genuinely asking which made the sarcasm more unbearable for thedy.

    She started attacking with increased rage, but Sam is blocking, diverting, and even redirecting at the elders who are standing by.

    After thirty more blows were exchanged, Sam is still as agile and adamant as he was at the start. He didn¡¯t attack that much and he is not even breaking a sweat. In the process he destroyed four elders, three of them died and one was severely maimed.

    Thedy is panting and sweating profusely while she held the sword tightly and looked at Sam hatefully.

    "You better start packing up. I kind of like you. It would take some time before Ie to the main branch, so you would have some time to try and put up a proper fight."

    Sam said calmly as he held his staff.

    The Deputy leader looked at the whole scene and felt extremely frustrated.

    "Get into your positions. Make your move properly and only move when you are sure you cannd the blow. Don¡¯t make any unnecessary moves and keep up your defense all along."

    As soon as the words came out of his mouth, thedy yelled.

    "I said this is my fight. Do not interfere."

    The deputypletely ignored the sword aura projected at him and looked at her coldly.

    "Young Mistress, it seems like you are not clear on something. This is not the parent organization. This is our organization and you only have the authority if I say you have authority. I cannot let you y around for your stupid pride. I don¡¯t have time or patience."

    As soon as he spoke, he lunged forward and threw a punch at Sam¡¯s face.

    Sam dodged to the side and the punch barely brushed past his face, at the same movement, he swung his staff to the side and blocked a saber strike and a rectangr energy shield blocked the inferno.

    "Now that is some decisive action, I hoped from the start. I think you would be more of a leader than your own leader. Who the hell believes the information this blindly and leaves the main base unprotected?"

    Sam spoke and the three protrusions on the handle opened up. The energy bullet was shot at the face of the deputy from a close range, but he dodged it and it left a small gash and went past his cheek before hitting an elder in the face.

    The face bled as the bones cracked.

    He then kneed the balls of the deputy while swinging the staff at the crotch of the elder attacking him from behind.

    They didn¡¯t dare take the blow and took a step back.

    At this moment, the sword came straight at Sam from the side, which he barely managed to dodge. The elder who was about to attack from another side had to stop in his tracks as the sword almost caught him.

    "I told you, this is my fight."

    She said and it seemed like she stopped holding back anymore. Her sword aura raged and the sword rays were shot at Sam for every strike.

    Sam looked at her and shook his head.

    "You are going to regret this."

    As the sword came, Sam spun around and kicked on the ground with his mechanical leg, creating arge energy wave, blowing the elders away. He then came out of the encirclement, dodging the attackpletely.

    In the process, he created a gap between himself and his opponents. All the elders are on one side and thedy is on the other.

    Sam took a deep breath and put his staff away as he looked at both of them while standing sideways.

    "Come on guys, what are you waiting for?"

    As he spoke, his hands and legs started glowing with energy. Thedy is obviously making the first move followed by the five elders and the deputy attacking close range while the remaining two attacking from a long range.

    He swept his foot on the ground towards thedy, the energy condensed and rippled in the form of an arc that hit her feet as she tripped in the most embarrassing way possible. She slipped forward and her stabbing waspletely off.

    Sam moved forward and held her hand that had the sword with his own hand andnded a knee to her chest.

    The flesh on her chest rippled and burst into a bloody mist before the impact tranted to her ribcage, lungs, and heart. She even levitated a bit and Sam took the sword from her hand before kicking her away.

    While she was flying away, thedy who is on verge of death, felt like she saw everything in slow-motion and she saw something she never even dreamt of seeing.

 Chapter 1293: Trap

    Sam grabbed the sword, but to her surprise, the energy she put on the sword and the rays it was emitting didn¡¯t dissipate since Sam didn¡¯t hold it for long, in fact, he didn¡¯t even hold it at all. He just diverted the sword to the eldering from the side, stabbing that guy in the heart precisely.

    Blood squirted as the elder stopped in the tracks and Sam gave a spinning kick to the sword hilt making it go through the elder¡¯s body to the other side.

    He then ducked and dodged a saber strike beforending his fist on the balls of the second elder, another bloody mist appeared and Sam stood up while the elder is falling down only to take a blow on the neck in the process.

    Then Sam grabbed the punch of the deputy and gave him a lever blow. The deputy¡¯s defense is much stronger, but thebination of the ripple and void style is not for show. The flesh burst open and the liver shook, making even the cultivator of that level to groan in pain.

    Sam kicked him away, and moved to the next one who ising with the sword strike, Samnded a kick on that guy¡¯s right leg, it burst open and fell forward. Sam used the momentum to divert the sword at thest remaining elder who is about to strike with his saber and diverted that saber attacking to the head of the elder who got his leg busted.

    All of this happened in two seconds. But for the youngdy, this felt like the fight has been going on for the whole hour.

    Sam used the body of the guy as a meat shield for the ranged attacks from the two elders and used the mechanical arm to grab them with invisible condensed energy and exploded it one after the other.

    Their flesh was ripped open and they are unable to fight again.

    Now, he and the deputy are the only ones standing.

    And when the deputy looked at the surroundings, he turned to Sam with an exhausted expression.

    "Fuck you. Young man."

    *BOOM*

    Hemitted suicide.

    Sam didn¡¯t expect that, but he was not too shocked either. He then walked to thedy who is still faintly breathing.

    He looked at her calmly for a moment and said.

    "Do you guys really think that you could take me down? I even told you to escape right then and there you would have been safe, you didn¡¯t expect that just one attack would make this much damage do you?"

    "N..o."

    She was barely able to speak.

    "I really did like you a bit. I never expected someone like you still exist in this world. All it took was one dirty trick and you in this state."

    Sam took her spatial ring and was surprised. This is quite a haul.

    "You are definitely someone important. It seems like I would be chased down by someone especially strong. This should be interesting."

    He paused and thought for a moment before taking out a recovery potion.

    "Maybe I shouldn¡¯t just let you die like this..."

    With that, he made her drink a few potions and even that made her barely recover. The potions are of extremely high quality, Sam really felt the pinch for using them on her, but he has no choice.

    He used one of the cors he got from the previous branch and ced it on her, before making some arrangements.

    First, he went to the research areas one by one. Then he tied the researchers up and sent any test subjects that were left in thebs back to the barracks. Since this ce was only for secondary testing, there are very few test subjects so it didn¡¯t take long.

    After that, he took out some formation gs and started cing them around thebs. He didn¡¯t just create new formations, he used them in conjunction with the already existing highly defensive formations which are being powered by a lot of energy.

    Theyout of thebs also gave him an intriguing idea.

    He started inscribing some formations on a pir and ced it exactly in the middle of threebs.

    He then walked towards the unconscious and weak youngdy.

    "Do your thing specter."

    After that, Sam left the estate and hid in the mountains for the leader and the others toe.

    He waited for three days and finally, the people from the Parent organization returned, but the leader of this organization was nowhere to be seen.

    When they arrived, all they could see were the traces of the gory presentation Sam left for them. The dead bodies and the blood marks are everywhere. They became extremely anxious as they ran deep inside.

    Their anxiety was reduced only after they saw the youngdy sitting beside the pole unconscious.

    They almost felt their lives leaving their bodies at the thought of her dying. Just like Sam guessed, she is an extremely important person and they are supposed to be guarding her. That is the reason when the leader of the subsidiary said that the information that Sam deliberately left is genuine and it can be trusted, they left her here.

    But too bad, they didn¡¯t expect that Sam would y them life fools. But at least, they got what they wanted from the trip.

    They took some more high-quality medicine and made thedy drink, when she opened her eyes, one of them spoke.

    "Young Mistress, as you might have understood, we got the wrong information, but we decided to proceed with the secondary n. We destroyed the second side branch and took over all the research. Even the test subjects are not spared. No one would know what has happened there.

    But we really apologize for this inconvenience. As soon as we realized that there would be no attack there, we decisively came back.

    Thank god you are still alive."

    She nodded at him and didn¡¯t say anything. She just sat there leaning against the pole.

    "Madam, let us go back inside. We will go and deal with the third branch before this person catches up and if he is there, we would be able to deal with him there. You can rest here, junior brother will take care of you."

    The person who looked like the person in charge spoke.

    "No need." The youngdy spoke but they didn¡¯t understand what she meant like that.

    But before they could ask what it was, she spoke again.

    "There is no need for you to go anywhere. You are all dead men anyway."

    "What? Madam, what happened?"

    All of a sudden the energy inside the youngdy¡¯s body started bing chaotic...

    *BOOM*

    And her body exploded, making the group blown away from that spot. Everyone looked at the ce with the bloody mess in horror. They are not horrified of the way she died, they are horrified of the consequences of her death. They didn¡¯t expect this at all. This is not supposed to be happening.

    But what they didn¡¯t know is that this is just the beginning.

    After the explosion, the pir started glowing. For some reason, it wasn¡¯t damaged even with the explosion of the cultivator that close to it.

    And it is because Sam made it in such a way that it absorbs the explosive spiritual energy and distributes it to the formations inscribed. The formations activated and it created a chain reaction, one formation after another all of a sudden, all the formations in the vicinity including the three major defensive formations of the threebs were also activated.

    The energy became chaotic and the group realized that they are in a trap. It was toote though.

    *BOOM*

    Onerge explosion happened. All the explosions went on in sync creating this onerge explosion. But is not an explosion that just made everything disappear within its range. Rather it created a storm of chaotic energy that started tearing everyone and everything inside apart. Unlike the controlled destabilized explosions, which only leave the chaotic space with energy, this one only lets the energy take over for a few minutes and disappear.

    When he heard the explosion, Sam finally came back and collected the souls from what remained of those bodies.

    With specters level, they managed to extract half of the souls at least.

    Sam looked at the destruction he created and suddenly felt a little peaceful. He vented enough to calm down and assess his own mistakes.

    This time the n is wed. The message sent to the main branch is a very long shot. It is just he wanted to y these guys a bit and gave it a try, but even that farfetched unappetizing bait was hooked, so he took the chance.

    As for what happened here, the person thatmited suicide is not actually the youngdy. It is the specter¡¯s doing.

    The specter has spent arge part of its life deceiving others by pretending to be three cultivators, for him it is easy to pretend to be thedy.

    After Sam made her recover, he killed her much more swiftly without any physical damage and left a small part of the specter to take over her body before cing her there.

    The rest happened by itself.

    He went to the barracks and gave the keys of the locks to the test subjects before leaving this ce.

 Chapter 1294: Meeting

    Afterpletely destroying the main branch of the second subsidiary, Sam went after the remaining third side branch the next day andpletely finished it off.

    None of these people are strong enough to stop him anyway.

    This subsidiary was finished and before the parent organization could even learn about the news. He just went with the flow and this spree went on.

    Three monthster.

    Sivan is currently sitting in his private yard with his legs crossed. Yanwu and the rest of the beasts are sitting around him as they shared the energy from the formation around them.

    There are a lot of corpses in the surroundings with their blood sucked out and Butler Si, is looking at them with an expression of slight regret.

    Sivan absorbed and shared the energy and could feel the barrier for the next level slowly breaking down. After another five minutes, his aura changed and the energy started condensing in his body. The breakthrough for thete-stage Transcendence of Astral ne.

    He could feel the increased strength in his body and soul and the first thing he did after that is to use his soul to go after the dormant soul of Sam and the Ghost Chimera that was surrounding it.

    After the small fragment he initially managed to attain, he didn¡¯t get anything else. The ghost chimera became extremely vignt and its defense became unbelievably tight. He could only grind his teeth in frustration all this while.

    From what he heard from Dayus, he could guess that the secret regarding the game and the gods is one of the important secrets of the yers, but for Sam, it is something that could be revealed in the very first fragment of his soul which means it is not that important.

    Even Sivan felt that the game and the god¡¯s information is extremely important, so he is curious about the information that Sam considers as important.

    Now that he broke through, he is extremely confident that he would be able to bypass the Ghost Chimera.

    His soul started attacking the chimera first, instead of going for the soul itself. The chimera indeed became a bit passive and he felt he would be sessful now.

    Five minutes passed.

    "FUCK" *CRASH*

    Sivan is smashing the wall of the room he was in. He is extreme rage.

    He really felt confident about the Ghost Chimera this time, but his confidence was unfounded. He now understood just how much Sam had done while they were talking when their soul exchange was happening.

    The Ghost Chimera seemed to have been programmed with a lot of differentmands.

    This time, he managed to go past the chimera and was about to take a chunk out of the dormant soul, but even before the soul could react, the chimera acted up. It tore a few souls apart and fed him forcefully.

    He involuntarily absorbed the soul fragments and instead of some valuable information about Sam and his inventions, he had to digest the negative emotions of the soul fragments from the ghost chimera.

    That is why he is venting his rage on the building he was in. By now the beasts had already gone back into the divine dimension.

    Butler Si waited for another five minutes for Sivan to vent and speak up.

    "Young Master, your Half-yearly meeting is tomorrow, we need to go now."

    He acted as if nothing happened, but one could see the clear signs of worry in his expression. He is really worried about the young master. At least when he didn¡¯t have this body and was just a cripple, the young master was rtively calm and peaceful.

    Attaining a body with such attributes should have been good news, but a dormant soul is pissing him off so much that Sivan wasn¡¯t even able to enjoy the benefits of having such a body. The only time he was calm is when he was done fighting someone or when he is cultivating, the rest of the time, he is not being himself.

    At least, he hoped that this Half-Yearly meeting would get his mind off of these frustrations. But he realized how wrong he was when they were in the meeting.

    The Next day.

    Sivan is sitting at the head of a long table. On either side of the table, there are some men and women who wore special masks to hide their identities. There are a total of twelve people.

    Butler Si is standing behind Sivan as he observed the meeting.

    These twelve people are the direct subordinates of Sivan. They are his ie source as well as the providers of the manpower when need arouses.

    As for why they wore masks, Sivan made sure that he would be the only person that knew everyone in the room. Of course, Butler Si knew them as well. But for the twelve people themselves, no one knows the rest of their peers.

    Sivan doesn¡¯t want them to cooperate directly and reduce his own gains. If they ever want to trade something, they had to go through Sivan and cut him a giantmission.

    But it is not for nothing. These organizations were in a terrible state when Sivan contacted them and merged them all together into one. He is the one who made them who they were, otherwise they wouldn¡¯t have been able to survive this long. They would have just disappeared into history.

    Sivan looked through the reports and when he came into contact with thest two, he couldn¡¯t help but frown.

    He looked at them coldly and asked.

    "What the hell is this?"

    One of them said calmly.

    "We were attacked. Every indirect subsidiary we held, the assassin breeding organization, poison, and gicbs, trafficking, assassination organization, everything waspletely gone.

    Even the organizations you asked me to supervise were destroyed in the past three months."

    "How did that happen?" Sivan asked coldly.

    The middle-aged man took out a new set of documents along with a bunch of recording crystals and passed them over. Sivan turned to another person and asked.

    "What is your situation?"

    "It is the same sir. We were also attacked."

    He also took out some documents and recorded crystals before passing them over.

    Sivan took them and started looking into both the documents. His aura raged suddenly and mmed his hand into the table, breaking it into pieces.

    "What the fuck is this supposed to be? Seems like both of you are tired of living, is this some kind of joke?"

    He felt extremely angry, he really wanted to beat the crap out of both of them.

    But these two people were also confused. They don¡¯t know what is wrong with their reports. It is not umon for two different branches to be attacked simultaneously, it has happened before.

    They didn¡¯t dare to voice their opinions though.

    "You guys dared to y with me, if you don¡¯t give me a proper exnation, you will wish you were dead. What are these reports supposed to mean?

    You don¡¯t have any clues on who the attacker is, you don¡¯t which organization they came from, you don¡¯t know the motive behind the attack, and worst of all, you only know that attacker is one man and you don¡¯t even know what he looks like.

    The most amazing this about this is, both of your reports are absolutely fucking same."

    He said as he threw the papers at their faces.

    The two men were baffled as they looked at each other.

    The rest of the members also looked at them vigntly. They are having doubts. Sivan explicitly prevented them from getting to know each other, but that is not exactly possible. Some people have faint ideas on who is who, but they pretended that they didn¡¯t know and didn¡¯t cooperate in any circumstance to avoid incurring Sivan¡¯s rage. But no it seemed like two parties dared to do that and that too to fool Sivan directly.

    But soon they understood that they are overthinking this. Both men immediately defended themselves.

    "Young master. I wouldn¡¯t dare dream about fooling. The recording crystals I provided will have the videos of the locations that were destroyed. The attacker left the same message everywhere he went. Please take a look at them."

    "Me too, young master. Everything in the report is true. I know it would be hard to believe, so I brought the recordings of the scene.

    Sivan frowned and took a look at the recording crystals. He yed two recording crystals belonging to two of them simultaneously and what appeared in front of him stunned him.

    He saw the same three words in both the projections.

    "SAM WAS HERE."

    Sivan¡¯s face became nk. He looked dumbfounded. Butler SI was also shocked. Both of them never in a thousand years would have guessed these three words would be present in these two videos.

    More than the fact that some words are present in two videos, they are more surprised that these words are present at all.

    Now he ispletely clear that the two parties are not coborating to fool him. But now he wished they were just coborating. In that way, he could just kill them and rece them with others, but now he had a bigger problem at hand.

 Chapter 1295: Outburst

    Sivan looked through the reports once again after going through the videos.

    The scene left at every scene is simr. There are dozens if not hundreds of bodies left at each ce and every building and infrastructure was turned to ruins. Finally every ce has the same three words.

    SAM WAS HERE.

    "The problem is not with you guys. It is with me." Sivan muttered calmly. As the twelve members are looking at the images curiously while they are drawing some spetions inside their heads, Sivan ordered them to leave the room and only kept the two men who brought the reports.

    "Did you guys find any minor leads? Your reports said that there are no major leads, anything minor or any insignificant dead-end clue?"

    "No, young master." One of them said directly.

    Sivan turned to the second one who looked at Sivan directly. Instead of answering the question he asked one of his own.

    "Young master, do you know who attacked me? Why did the same attacker go after the two organizations that are not known to be rted to the outside world. Even both of us don¡¯t know each other, but how did someone outside know of us and even went after our branches and subordinates?"

    Sivan looked at him with a frown. Butler Si also looked coldly, he was about to issue the warning, but the man continued.

    "Young master Sivan. My daughter died in that person¡¯s hands. That fucking coward attacked every organization sneakily, he didn¡¯t dare go after the main branches and direct business. He just destroyed the weaker branches and every time, he escaped before we knew it.

    I want to know who did this. I want to kill him with my own hands.

    All this while, I was thinking that it was my enemy, who did this, but there was no way that our two organizations can have the same enemy. From the sectors we operate in, I can guess that we don¡¯t cross each other paths at all.

    You are the onlymon point here, you are the only connection to both our organizations. You are the boss of our two organizations, which means the enemy that came at us, is not our enemy, it is your enemy.

    Am I right?"

    Sivan looked into his eyes for a few seconds and said.

    "You are right. He is my enemy." His voice was calm and Butler Si was surprised by that. Sivan is someone that couldn¡¯t tolerate anyone trying to exert dominance over him, even the slightest signs would enrage him, but here someone is directly questioned boldly to his face.

    Even if it is Sivan¡¯s enemy, the other party shouldn¡¯t be speaking this much. Sivan would have put them down a long time ago. But now not only did he just let the guy speak without interrupting, but he is also even enabling him.

    "If he is your enemy, how did he manage to find out the link between your subordinate organizations? From what I know, even your n members arepletely unaware of our cooperation."

    "But this person is aware. He knows a lot of other information too."

    "Then, please give me a lead to killing this person. I wouldn¡¯t be able to have a moment of peace if I don¡¯t kill him. I cannot stand the thought of letting him get away with killing my daughter. I want to kill him. I want to destroy him."

    His expression turned hysterical as he spoke and Sivan smiled coldly at that. He looked at the remaining guy and said.

    "Keep on investigating, but do not take any action until I tell you so, I will be sending a team to help you with the investigation process. Did you find out the secret locations of your subsidiaries?"

    "No young master. They were extremely secretive about that throughout our cooperation. As you know that was the condition when we poached them to be with us. We even tried soul necromancy in the scenes, but not a single soul was left behind. Everything was cleaned up.

    There are some minor traces of death energy and my necromancer told me that there are some traces of soul necromancy on the body. If the other party really got the information from them, then the secret bases would have also been destroyed."

    Sivan nodded and replied.

    "Then you can leave. Use my share of this year to restore the losses, try to poach another organization that is simr to the previous ones. Now, try to keep in contact with me from now on. The usual channel will once again open."

    The man stood up and left the ce.

    Sivan turned to the first guy who was questioning him.

    "Take off your mask."

    The man did so revealing a kind of aged face. He looked like a man in his fifties and his face is showing his suppressed anger and rage. He is barely keeping himself in check.

    Sivan smiled and patted him.

    "I am really sorry about what happened. I didn¡¯t expect this coward to go after you guys and I am sorry you weren¡¯t able to contact me. I would have saved you if I had known, but as you know I am adjusting to my new changes and in a difficult state myself.

    But I will help you take revenge.

    The reason why he wasn¡¯ting for the main branches is that he is weak. He shouldn¡¯t be stronger than thete-stage Transcendence of the Astral ne.

    And from what I see with these reports, I can guess what his usible targets could be. He would be going after the weaker branches of the other organizations that are under me.

    The other guy that was in the room until now is still under attack and there are only a few organizations left under him, so I will give you the locations and you can go there and find him. Torture him or kill him as you like, don¡¯t hesitate."

    With that, Sivan took out some documents from his own storage and gave them to him along with the reports.

    "Rupurn. I am trusting you with this information and this operation. You can do whatever you want with him to vent your anger. But you should kill him no matter what happens. Do you understand?"

    Rupurn, the old man, took the documents with a bright expression. He was really happy that Sivan gave him this.

    He knew that if Sivan got angry with his behavior he might have been killed, but he still decided to give it a try. He couldn¡¯t just swallow the fact that his daughter died unjustly. He couldn¡¯t even find her body.

    So, he didn¡¯t care whether Sivan would decide to keep him and his organization intact if he pissed him off, he only wants to kill Sam at this point and he decided he would do whatever it takes. But since Sivan is supportive, he is happy.

    He took the documents and left.

    After he left, Sivan¡¯s expression distorted. It became uglier and uglier as he suppressed his rage.

    "How? How? HOW? HOW CAN HE FUCKING DO THIS? HOW CAN HE EVEN BE CAPABLE OF THIS? THIS SHOULDN¡¯T HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE AT ALL. BUT WHY DID THIS HAPPEN? WHY WAS HE ABLE TO DO THIS?"

    He started yelling on top of his lungs as he controlled his urge to berserk, but even his energy is not under his control, the golden mes, hurricane winds, poison, lightning, the earth, and metal energy, everything ispletely out of control. All the furniture in the room was destroyed and the damage is spreading on the walls like crazy.

    Butler Si looked at him with a worried expression, but he didn¡¯t stop. He knew that Sivan would take it out on himself if he didn¡¯t vent his anger. So, he let him be for a while.

    After some time, Sivan calmed down and looked at Butler Si.

    "Butler Si, tell me how is this possible? How can he know the locations of my organizations? The people that provide me with manpower, the people that work under me, the very foundation of my power was damaged by him. How does he know their locations?"

    "Young master..."

    "I am asking you Butler Si, please give me an answer."

    "He must have digested your soul."

    "How is he able to do this? How can he be this strong? He was stripped off of his own body and he was thrown into an unfamiliar body that waspletely crippled. His soul was torn into two and his mental energy should be weaker than it ever was. Even the spatial ring he carried didn¡¯t have anything but some recovery potions when he disappeared.

    How did he break through before I could?

    How did he digest the soul before I could?

    How could he even get used to that crippled body and be that strong before I could even get used to this perfect specimen of a body?

    How did he bounce back and destroy so many organizations?

    Butler Si, how can I get these answers? Why is this happening?"

 Chapter 1296: Butlers Suggestion

    Sivan¡¯s hysterical episode ended with him fainting because of the exhaustion. He exhausted all of his energy and almost destroyed the entire estate if not for Butler Si constraining his attacks.

    After he was out, Butler Si carried him back to the n and let him rest for a while, and when he woke up, he is a lot calmer.

    "I am sorry for troubling you, Butler Si. I was just angry at my ipetence."

    "Never mind young master. I can understand your pain. But if the young master doesn¡¯t mind, I have a suggestion."

    "Come on. Butler Si, you don¡¯t have to ask me permission for that. You have the right."

    "Thank you, young master. I think that you are not angry at your ipetence, you are just angry at someone¡¯spetence."

    "What do you mean?"

    "Young master, this person named Sam... he is not normal. You are not actually familiar with the outside life as much as you are with the politics of arge organization, so I will try to exin this to you, please don¡¯t take offense.

    In the world where Sam lived, no matter how much talent he has, he shouldn¡¯t have survived at all. He never had any organizational backing like Dayus or other people that he mentioned, he never had extreme financial support that was not earned by him.

    He created everything from the scratch. Even if the talented body with all the bloodlines and the abilities he has is a god¡¯s gift, they attract more envy and trouble than advantages they provide.

    But he still managed to survive. I was from a like that and I know how difficult it is to grow from there. But he did that.

    He just didn¡¯t grow, he created arge organization that baffles even me.

    His mind is something that works beyond what you and I can fathom. You must have thought that his achievements and gains are all from the body and the resources he had. No, it is the mind that is valuable. It is his brain that created all of this. You have seen his soul. You are seeing it every day. You should understand this by now. He is just a different creature in terms of mindset.

    You should be gauging him differently. You shouldn¡¯tpare him to you or anyone else for that matter.

    You should estimate him differently.

    Do not think of him as your opponent, think of him as a hunting target. Prey that is stronger than yourself. You should stalk it, try to understand it, analyze its actions, predict its moves, estimate its weakness, you should slowly wear it down and hunt it.

    You shouldn¡¯t just hope that he is weaker than you and way less ipetent than you. That doesn¡¯t magically happen. You are intelligent and ruthless, that was enough for all the enemies and obstacles you have destroyed, but that is not enough for you to go against him.

    You should have patience. If I am not wrong, he is the greatest enemy you will ever face. Even your n members and rivals will not be able topare to him and any enemy you might face in the future would alsoe shortly.

    Keep that in mind, when you try to deal with him. Please."

    Sivan looked at Butler Si and asked.

    "Butler Si, are you telling me that I am not as good as Sam? If he is smarter than me, why did he fall into my trap."

    "Young master, please do not take offense, but it is better to ept the truth than to live in denial and suffer than like this.

    You were a person that epted your own shorings when you were a cripple. Because at that time those missing limbs helped you process your own shorings, you didn¡¯t even have a chance to deny them, maybe that is because you never saw the shorings your own mentality and your ipetent peers andpetitors might be the reason for that.

    But just because you got a better and superior body, that doesn¡¯t mean your shorings will vanish. Only once did you ept them would you be able to guard against them. I will leave you alone for a while to think things through."

    With those words, he left the room.

    Sivan felt troubled. He didn¡¯t have a single day of peace after he entered Sam¡¯s body. Sam¡¯s dormant soul ispletely out of his reach all this while and the ghost chimera is giving its own body up to save Sam¡¯s soul.

    He knew that he would eventually reach the soul, but he is really frustrated. Particrly, when he guessed that Sam not only digested his soul but also destroyed some of his foundational organizations, he felt even angrier.

    Now that Butler Si, directly said it out, he understood what his problem is, he ispeting with Sam even though both of them are currently not connected at all.

    Sam might not even understand or know what he is thinking at all, but he is constantlyparing himself to Sam. He calmed down and called Butler Si back.

    "I want you to deal with everything rted to Sam, until it was done, you are in charge of the businesses as well. Even if they are all destroyed and I lost everything, do not inform me.

    I will be in long seclusion. I will not be involved in this. I will focus on Sam¡¯s soul, from what I heard, he has many inventions, I will be in contact with the research division and I will see what I can gain.

    You don¡¯t talk to me about Sam and the business until the whole matter is resolved or you arepletely incapable of resolving the issue."

    "That is a good decision young master. I will try my best to resolve the issue."

    With that Butler Si once again left and took out a specialmunication token. This is created by him and can only be used by him.

    "Come to the n."

    That was the only message he gave and within an hour, ten people in grey robes arrived at the n. The guards and the gatekeepers were all frightened when they saw them. Everyone in the n knows who Butler Si is and everyone who knows butler Si knows these ten people.

    They are his students and all of them are space element users. These ten people are only summoned when Butler Si is angry or when the young master Sivan wants to remove someone off the earth. They are scarily good.

    They arrived at Sivan¡¯s quarters without any interruption.

    "Greetings Master." They saluted Butler Si politely in unison.

    "I have a task for you. Someone is bothering Young Master Sivan..."

    He gave a briefing regarding Sam and what the current situation is.

    "Young Master Sivan already sent someone at Peak stage Transcendence to deal with him, but if my guess is right, he wouldn¡¯t be able to finish the task.

    So, send someone to follow him and scout him first.

    He is extremely talented in battle and he is very very intelligent. Estimate that he is smarter than me by three times at least before you deal with him. Understand?"

    "Yes, Master."

    The group saluted once again and they left.

    Sivan looked at their receding backs in mncholy. He has a feeling that he wouldn¡¯t be able to see some of his students again, but he knew that this is the only way. If he sends anyone less skilled, they wouldn¡¯te back for sure. With his students, he still has a chance.

    If possible, he would have moved by himself, but he is currently in a state in which he cannot leave the young master¡¯s side no matter what.

    He really hoped that what he taught to his students was enough to deal with Sam.

    While Sivan and Butler Si are worrying over Sam constantly and make ns to deal with him, Sam is currently walking out of a valley.

    The valley is filled with dead bodies and blood.

    He just finished off another small branch under Sivan.

    He is soaked in blood.

    Aftering out of the valley, he went to the nearest stream and started washing up.

    "Now, the message must have been sent. I wonder what they would be bringing towards me."

    He muttered to himself as he thought of the possible actions that Sivan might take to go against him.

    He came out of the stream and dried himself up before taking out arge scroll in which he wrote down the organizations and created a flow chart.

    Even though it is all in the head, it helps him to take a look once in a while.

    As he looked through them, he crossed off the recently destroyed organization and then rounded up two more.

    "He must have noticed that I am in the middle of dealing with this organization, so these two ces might be the usible locations they identified. I better make it easy for them toe to me. I am getting bored."

 Chapter 1297: Rupurn

    Sam really did make it easy for the other party to track him down.

    He arrived at the next organization and when destroying it, made the merchants in that city slip and even made sure that they would agree to let him be poprized all over the ce.

    He made sure that the word would spread enough. He even went as far as letting some of the subordinates in the organization go and inform their supervising organization in the chain ofmand.

    He knew that the people would being after him from all the different fronts because of this, but he didn¡¯t care. He just waited in the city as he slowly destroyed the organization and killed one person after another at random. The people in the city are horrified by this.

    Sam expected that a person from the supervising organization would have been sent immediately when they knew of his presence, but to his surprise none of them came. Theypletely ignored his message.

    He was puzzled by this. He knew about the Half-yearly meeting. Even though he doesn¡¯t know exactly content of what was discussed in the recent meeting, he knew it happened. That is part of Sivan¡¯s routine, even if the world order is copsing he would still hold that meeting.

    Sam destroyed so many of his organizations and branches and left the messages so that he would know that Sam didn¡¯t die. It is a tant provocation.

    He is even expecting him to send someone from his n to these two organizations to get a chance to deal with him. But there was no action whatsoever even when he sent the message directly.

    But he soon understood why.

    Three days after he sent the message, Rupurn, the fifty year old man arrived at the city.

    He directly came to the estate of the organization where Sam is staying with his sword.

    He didn¡¯t hide his aura and he didn¡¯t even care about stealth. When Sam is ying a game of cat and mouse with some disgusting young masters of the organization, he felt the aura of Rupurn and turned towards the gate.

    "Finally, some action."

    He leisurely walked to the front yard and saw the old man walking forward. When he saw Sam, walking towards him, he immediately guessed who he is.

    "*hmph* I didn¡¯t know you have balls toe in front of me. Why don¡¯t you try to runaway? I would like to see if you are capable or not."

    "Runaway? Why would I do that? Are you going to fart or something?"

    "Be sarcastic all you want. I will kill you in the most gruesome way and I would ask you to tell me the same jokes you are spewing right now. We will see, if you would have the balls to open your mouth then."

    Sam didn¡¯t speak immediately and felt the killing intent of Rupurn, he then noticed the sword in his hand. The sword is very simr to someone else¡¯s sword he recently saw.

    He searched through Sivan¡¯s memories to look for this guy and when he connected the dots, something clicked.

    "You are rted to that Amateur swordswoman?"

    The killing intent increased and the Rupurn¡¯s grip on the sword tightened as he almost made a move. But he controlled his urge. He didn¡¯t want to make a move immediately. He needs to know somethings before he attacked Sam.

    "You are indeed rted. Are you her father?"

    "Yes."

    "So, you are the one that taught her swordsmanship?"

    "Yes."

    "No wonder, she is so shitty."

    "YOU...."

    "Trust me, I am understating it. She would have died the moment she made her first move, but I spared her life. I wanted her to escape. I even told her to, but as if she is obsessed with me, she just stayed there and swung that sword like a little girl she was and..."

    "And What?"

    "What else? I got sick of her and killed her on the spot."

    Rupurn finally lost it and lunged forward with the sword to stab at Sam.

    Sam felt the aura of Rupurn who is clearly stronger than him in terms of cultivation, but he is a bit confident in himself to deal with him.

    As the sword came at him, Sam didn¡¯t take his stsff out, instead, he just used both of his hands to create an invisible energy barrier, that stopped the sword.

    The sword stopped, but Rupurn, couldn¡¯t even see what stopped him, he felt like he is hitting a big thick te of metal, he was about to pull his sword back, but Sam already made his own movie, the energy barrier turned into coiled energy snakes and held the sword there.

    Rupurn was caught off guard and as he tried to pull back the sword harder and Sam condensed the energy on his foot andnded a low kick to the side of his knee with void style.

    *BOOM*

    A small explosion urred on the stop and a fewyers of skin was torn open as well as his leg slipped, Rupurn became angry and surprised at the same time.

    Sam didn¡¯t stand there and let go of that sword before hopping back.

    He looked at Rupurn vigntly. He carefully observed the other party¡¯s every move. He didn¡¯t even want to get hit by any idental move or it would be extremely detrimental.

    Rupurn also looked at Sam vigntly, the hit to his leg might not be too damaging, but it is because of his cultivation level, if they are on the same level, he knew for a far that his leg would have been ripped off and the fight would have already been over.

    He lunged forward and the sword-swinging, he diagonally shed downwards and when Sam extended his two hands to create a shield, rupurn turned the sword a little bit and it slid over the invisible shield, rupurn immediately changed his stance and attacked Sam from the side.

    Sam barely managed to dodge, but there is still a long sh on his abdomen. If he was even a minutete, he would have been sliced into two. But it was not for nothing, in the process of dodging it while stepping to the side, he threw another kick to the back of the knee, with the void style once again.

    *BOOM*

    Blood was sprayed as Rupurn slipped and fell on his knee and almost fell forward which he stopped with his sword, but Sam took advantage of this and hit the same spot again and this time hebined it with ripple and void style.

    *pop* *pop* *pop*

    The energy rippled in the knee area and every ripple exploded after half a second creating the popping sound as the flesh and muscle fibers were cut open.

    "You little shit, fight me directly if you dare," Rupurn yelled as he stood back up and swung his sword, the sword ray came at Sam, but he dodged it easily.

    "Now, I know where your daughter¡¯s stupidity came from. Do you really think that this is some saintly battle for honor and pride? You came here to kill me and I am trying to defend myself. Get over your high horse and fight back you idiot."

    Sam provoked him even more and the battle went on.

    Rupurn wanted to stab Sam, but he barely missed and an energy barrier pushed the sword to the side before Sam threw another low kick on the knee.

    A diagonal sh from the top and Sam used his left hand to block it, but this time the force is too much that he was barely able to take it and he fell to his knees.

    The energy barrier was about to explode, but Sam used his right hand, to aim at the knee and shot an energy bullet.

    *BOOM*

    Rupurn fell onto his knee once again and Sam shot two more energy bullets.

    Rupurn blocked one with a sword ray and rolled to the side to dodge another one. He came back to his feet and wanted to go after Sam, but suddenly he realized that his movement haspsed. He looked at his left leg which was constantly attacked and felt shocked. He couldn¡¯t move his leg.

    Sam who just got back to his feet far away looked at him with a smile.

    "You are way too orthodox my friend. It seems like yourck of experience in both battle and skill was passed on to your daughter which led her to her death.

    Now, you are going to die as well."

    Sam said as he extended his mechanical hand.

    It gave out some noise of mechanical motion inside and five small holes opened up at the tip of his fingers.

    The holes are glowing brightly with energy condensation and soon energy bullets came out as they were rapidly fired.

    Rupurn looked at it in horror as he rolled to the side, but all Sam had to do is incline his hand a little bit and the energy bullets areing at him once again.

    All this while, Rupurn was in the offensive, but he fell for the most basic of the foul ys and was too clouded with rage to even fight back. Now, Sam took over the offensive and he doesn¡¯t even have to go near him to deal the damage.

 Chapter 1298: Disciple

    Rupurn is frustrated and rightfully so, he is being harassed by someone of lower cultivation than him, and that someone happened to be a person he wants to kill with all he got.

    The injury on the leg is way too much. He was too stupid and too angry to realize that Sam had the strength to deal the leg this much damage and only focused on attacking him. Now he is running with all his might to dodge the massive barrage of small energy bullets.

    These bullets are only as big as marbles and they areing at a rapid pace that made him feel like he was standing in the hail storm of energy bullets.

    It took some time for him to adjust to that and he once again started going after Sam.

    By now, Sam who didn¡¯t have to move around for a while took three potions to recover from the injuries and the exhaustion.

    Even though everything was nned out well, he really took some invisible damage from this guy. Even from the first attack, everything Sam blocked at close range came with a recoil and the few shes he took to his body are absolutely no joke.

    He ignored all the damage and just focused on the leg just to create this situation.

    After he recovered he stopped the energy bullet swarm and went after Rupurn directly.

    He was met with a sh to his head and Sam created an energy barrier and this time, it is not even invisible. But it is a bit different from before. The energy barrier was created with three stylesbined.

    Sam created the t barrier and used the repel style to push the barrier towards the sword and when it took the sh, the energy rippled and each ripple exploded with the void style.

    This made the sword and in turn, Rupurn who wielded the sword takes the recoil and be blown away a bit throwing them out of bnce. Sam took this chance and moved to the side, before once again aiming at the knee with the mechanical arm. He shot with the small bullet from the tip of the index finger.

    *POP*

    It didn¡¯t create a lot of explosive sounds, but the blood spray is enough to understand what is happening.

    If Sam had gone with this method from the start, he is sure that he would have lost the advantage of being underestimated, and also the other party wouldn¡¯t have been this careless in the battle. Now that he managed to injure the leg beforehand, Rupurn is not as fast as Sam leveled the ying field.

    Now all, he has to do is wear him down bit by bit and destroy the opponent.

    "You slimy little bastard," Rupurn yelled and came at Sam once again.

    Sam looked at him coldly and took a deep breath to calm himself down. This rage is what brought his opponent down to his one knee, so Sam tried to channel it properly.

    He stepped forward and used the three-style barrier once again to evade the attack, before aiming at Rupurn¡¯s body, but this time, the bullet didn¡¯te from the finger rather the palm of his mechanical arm opened up and arge energy beam condensed there.

    *BOOM*

    Rupurn was stunned by the energy in it and hurriedly swung his sword to block it but to no avail. The sword ray was decimated and the energy beam stuck Rupurn on the side of his abdomen removing a chunk of flesh from that spot.

    Sam gritted his teeth and took out a potion to recover his energy and moved forward once again. He created two barriers to evade the sword rays and once again shot the man. But this time, the energy beam missed and only the after-effect of the explosion affected Rupurn.

    This went on for five minutes and Sam who took in three more potions looked at the exhausted rupurn and aimed his arm.

    "Dodge this if you can."

    The arm gave out the mechanical sound and the five fingertips also opened up,. The energy condensed to the maximum capacity as it gathered into onerger energy beam and five small energy beams.

    All six beams were shot and Sam slid three feet to withstand the recoil.

    The six dense energy beams went straight to Rupurn who used all of his strength to run. He could feel the energy inside the beams and knew that he would not survive this.

    He used all of his energy to send his biggest sword strike at the beams and jumped to the side as he ran away.

    But when he turned back, what he saw shocked him. The energy beams didn¡¯t collide with the sword ray, instead, the six of them maneuvered around it and took a curve to go after him.

    Rupurn felt horrified as he looked at Sam and then only he realized.

    These six are not just energy beams they are snakes of energy and their tails are still connected to Sam¡¯s mechanical arm who currently had his eyes closed and was focused on controlling the energy snakes to attack him.

    Rupurn tried his best to run away and turned many times, but the snakes followed him and with his injured leg and the abdomen that was profusely bleeding, he didn¡¯t have much in him. So, before he knew it, he fell.

    He didn¡¯t have any more energy and sumbed to his fate. The six energy snakes crashed into him at the same it and thergest one even went through his body.

    *BOOM*

    The body exploded on the spot and when the dust settled all that was left is arge crater and some pieces of flesh and bone are all that was left inside.

    Sam walked to that spot and spoke up loudly.

    "Are you going toe out or should I drag you out?"

    He is standing beside that crater as he looked at the remains, to see if the soul extraction is possible, but his words were directed at someone elsepletely.

    "I know where you are, there is no point in feigning it."

    Sam took a deep breath and aimed his mechanical arm at one spot, he didn¡¯t wait and just shot a bunch of small energy bullets.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Amidst a series of explosions, a young man in a grey robe came out unscathed as he looked at Sam calmly.

    His whole body is covered in a grey cloak and his cultivation level is simr to that of Rupurn who just died.

    Sam looked at him vigntly. There is a reason why he drank so many recovery potions non-stop. He sensed this person a while ago and he knew for sure that he didn¡¯t have any good intentions. And when he looked at how useless Rupurn is and how stupid he is in terms of battle, he understood that Rupurn is just bait.

    That is also the reason why he tried so hard to not use his mechanical arm¡¯s full strength from the get-go. He cannot have someone with bad intentions see all of his cards, he needs to hold them carefully.

    But he almost lost it when Rupurn pissed him off and blew the whole cover off. But luckily he managed to hold it in and didn¡¯t reveal everything he had. Although, he wished that he didn¡¯t use thest attack.

    It consumes a lot of energy and that is why he started drinking the potions beforehand so that this hidden party wouldn¡¯t take advantage of him after the fight was done.

    But now, he is confident, even though he is not exactly at his hundred percent, he is sure that he would be able to get away even if he cannot win the fight.

    "How did you find me?"

    The other party spoke up in a calm tone. Even though Sam just killed a person who essentially is considered his peer in terms of cultivation, he didn¡¯t feel threatened. He is more interested in how Sam found him.

    "I am way too familiar with the space element to be fooled by such a lousy hiding spot."

    The other party looked at him with slight surprise.

    "Not bad. It seems like the master has his reasons to be worried about you,"

    While the other party is speaking, Sam is currently looking through Sivan¡¯s memories and found out who this guy is, he is the disciple of Butler Si.

    "You are the disciple of that Butler. I really admire your master and now I am honored that he is even worried about me. But I think the real worry is for Young master of your Butler."

    "His worries are my master¡¯s worries and I am surprised you knew who we are. It seems like we need to act faster than I thought."

    With that, spatial energy surrounded him.

    "We will meet soon and I would like to see what else you have got."

    He was about to use blink and disappear, but at this moment, Sam aimed his metal arm and shot arge energy bullet through the palm.

    The disciple frowned and used his spatial energy to create a barrier with utmost difficulty as he was in the middle of blinking away.

    *BOOM*

    The energy bullet exploded and the disciple was gone when the dust settled.

 Chapter 1299: Lure

    Sam looked at the spot, while specter proceeded to try and collect the soul from Rupurn¡¯s body. He then came to the ce where the disciple disappeared.

    He closed his eyes and examined the ce for the energy waves of spatial energy. There are small traces and he examined them deeply to see how turbulent they are and when he got the answer, he couldn¡¯t help but smile.

    He felt that what he left them is a perfect gift for the first-time meeting.

    When the specter finished its job, he left the ce and went for thest organization that is in his itinerary.

    Meanwhile, somewhere far away from the organization, the disciples of the Butler Si are currently sitting around waiting for theirpanion.

    At this moment, they felt the spatial waves outside the cave and one of them came out.

    "Seniorse here."

    The person who went out immediately yelled when he saw how the disciple who went to check on Sam reappeared.

    The oldest of them all, Disciple One hurriedly came forward and examined him.

    The disciple that just came back is bleeding all over and he is extremely weak and feeble. He is barely conscious and is unable to say a word out loud.

    "Ten, Ten? Can you hear me? Ten?"

    Disciple one yelled out and as he called for him. Disciple Ten could barely nod with all the energy seeped out of him. Disciple one is a bit relieved and started examining his body. After that, he hurriedly gave him some medicine and took him back inside to rest.

    The rest of the disciples were solemn the whole time. This was just a scout mission and they believed that there would be barely any trouble, that is why they sent the junior disciple, Disciple Ten, who has the least experience on the field.

    All he has to do is take a good hiding spot far away and then take a good look at what is in front of him.

    Apart from that, he doesn¡¯t have to do anything else. He should havee back scot-free. But the person in front of them looked like he was in a long battle.

    Disciple one put the Disciple Ten to rest and exined the situation to the rest of his juniors.

    "He is fine. But it will take some time for him to recover."

    "What happened to him, senior brother?"

    Disciple Nine, the person who went out first to check on the disciple ten-spoke out.

    "I don¡¯t know. But the traces of the wounds and the chaotic energy in the body indicate that this is from the spatial turbulence. He seemed to have had troubleing through the spatial blink."

    "What how is that possible?"

    "We don¡¯t know, we just have to wait until he wakes up and finds out. Meanwhile, Five, you go and keep an eye on the target."

    "Yes, Senior."

    With that Disciple Five left the cave and went back to the organization to see if Sam was still there, but to his disappointment, Sam already finished the remains of the organization and left the.

    Disciple five took out a special bird from his beast pouch and sent the message back to the cave before leaving the as well.

    Back in the cave, when the disciples got the news, they were not much surprised. But they are a bit troubled as they cannot move now. Disciple Ten¡¯s injuries are indeed from the spatial turbulence, so he cannot go through the wormhole until he ispletely healed.

    Disciple One is still inspecting his body but still couldn¡¯t figure out what is happening.

    He checked for two days and didn¡¯t see much progress, so he decided to take him back to his master.

    And when he did, he was surprised by his Master¡¯s Diagnosis.

    "Be careful. Even though you have a higher cultivation level than him, it is possible for him to kill you easily, so be very very careful." Butler Si said with a solemn and thoughtful expression.

    "Please borate master."

    "The opponent knows the spatial elemental usage very well. When Ten is using the blink with the help of the token, there would be some temporary spatial nodes created that temporary gate for that moment and it should bepletely stable to ensure safe travel.

    But it seems like your brother was attacked when he was blinking, that part was correct, but he wasn¡¯t attacked directly, the other party targeted the node and they managed to create a chaotic disturbance in the spiritual energy waves in the surroundings.

    That created an unstable spatial tunnel that brought Ten out of that ce damaging him like this. I can cure him, but he would need to rest for another week or so.

    You can get back and tell the disciples to be careful about this."

    Disciple One felt a bit pressured by this new information and he immediately went back to the rest of the disciples, he gave them the brief on what their master told him and all eight of them went to the next where Disciple five and Sam are currently at and decided to wait for his arrival.

    This organization is a bitplicated and there are a lot of small branches spread all over the. Sam needs to take his time traveling around destroying them one by one and since he already knew these disciples are after him, he decided to throw them off track a bit.

    Instead of going after the side branches first, he directly went after one of the three main branches first.

    Even though they are prepared, they are caught off guard and they couldn¡¯t do much about the situation. After that was done, Sam then went to the branch organizations. Disciple Five who already had some dy when following Sam was also caught off guard, he was thinking Sam would go after the nearest branch to the wormhole, but instead, he traveled for a whole day to reach the main branch first and destroyed it.

    And then, Sam acted like a maniac and destroyed one side branch after another randomly. It is so random that Disciple Five couldn¡¯t even connect the dots no matter what angle he looked at. And Sam is getting a lead of over a day, because of the dyed news he is getting.

    He is tapping into the merchant information channels, which are the only channels left for them on the and they are sort of leisurely news distribution, so it is troubling him a bit.

    After a series of constant failures, he decided to just wait in one location and let Same to that ce. It is one of the main branches and that ce has the strongest cultivators of the organization altogether.

    Disciple Five figured that no matter how random Sam is, he would definitely deal with this branch atst.

    Then when Sam arrives, he would be having a perfect look at Sam and understand how he is fighting. All this while, he has seen the traces of the battles left behind by Sam. All he could feel are some energy waves that are turbulent and a bit chaotic, but apart from that, there is nothing much he could gain, so he is really looking forward to seeing what kind of fighting style Sam has.

    For the next few days, Disciple kept on hearing the news about what Sam is doing all over the and came to this main branchst.

    He indeed met the expectations of the Disciple Five.

    But Sam arrived thereter than the Disciple five thought. He estimated Sam¡¯s travel speed throughout the, so, he guessed that Sam would have arrived two days earlier.

    Disciple Five didn¡¯t think much of this dy, he just took up a perfect hiding spot and decided to take a good look at the battle.

    Sam is easy to identify as he came directly through the front gate with his walking staff and the mask on. He knocked down the gates and went in. Disciple Five was eager to see the battle, but what awaited him was a bout of confusion.

    The battle didn¡¯t go as well as he imagined it to go.

    Sam is not as aggressive as he hoped to be. He is slower than his estimation, he is clumsier than his estimation. It almost made him think that Sam lucked out with ambushes all this while, but he knew how farfetched that it is.

    In the middle of the battle, Sam took a serious hit and started running away from the scene. He is using his top speed and he didn¡¯t even take a look back once. He just looked straight and used an energy barrier to cover his back and as he made his way out of the city and into the woods.

    The elders of course didn¡¯t dare let him slip out that easily. They are hot on his tail and Disciple Five who is looking at this battle in visible confusion followed them along sneakily.

 Chapter 1300: Trap

    Disciple five followed the whole entourage of the elders chasing Sam for a good hour deep into the woods and all of a sudden, Sam stopped running.

    He is standing in a clear patch within the woods and with one look anyone could see that it was cleared recently.

    Disciple five who was estimating Sam¡¯s arrival understood why the dy is. Sam was setting a trap here and now he managed to lure every one of his targets into this ce. He doesn¡¯t know why he did that, but he just started making mental notes of everything.

    That is his job with this scout mission. He needs to follow Sam and understand what he is doing in the process of destroying these organizations. He needs to understand how Sam moves, how Sam fights when he is surrounded by a group, how he deals with individual battles, how does he approach the organization that he is about to destroy, these are the things that he needs to understand and exin to the rest of his fellow disciples.

    Then they would be making a proper n on how to deal with Sam.

    But just after five minutes, Disciple Five felt that something is wrong with the current situation. Sam fought back and his movements are back to normal. They are smooth, precise, and lethal. Every single attacker is dying with a maximum of three attacks.

    This is fast and efficient, but the more the fight was like this, the more puzzled Disciple Five has be.

    If Sam is this good, he couldn¡¯t think of any usible excuse for him to lure every one of them this far away.

    After all, if he is this good, they might as well be chucked in a small room and Sam would stille out on top, so the question is, why did he run so far and brought them all here?

    As he tried to connect the dots, Disciple Five stumped, he cannot think of any proper reasons and when Sam is almost done with the attackers, he found out one usible reason and it is not good.

    He activated a token and wanted to disappear from that spot, but all of a sudden, Sam took out a token and broke it.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    A series of explosions urred in the surroundings and Sam finished off the remaining attackers while they are happening.

    When the dust settled down, he called out for specter.

    "Collect the souls. Where is our target¡¯s location?"

    Specter pointed to a particr direction and went there. Within two minutes, he looked at arge crater that was filled with the debris of the trees and roots, and in the middle of it all, the Disciple Five is lying down while bleeding profusely.

    The damage he took from the explosions is too much.

    Sam went into the crater and picked and brought him to the center of the empty patch.

    He made him lean against a rock while Sam himself sat on one and smiled.

    "Hello, nice to meet you. You must be Disciple Five."

    Disciple Five who is barely holding together didn¡¯t even react. He just looked at Sam silently.

    "You must have already known me. I am Sam. Your target. So, how is the trap I specifically set up for you? You fell for it pretty hard didn¡¯t you?"

    Sam said with a smile that made the Disciple Five want to crawl and bit him to death.

    Sam has nned this since the start. He knew that these disciples wille after him once again and from Sivan¡¯s memories he knew which person is which. He actually waited after he destroyed one of the three main branches of the organization to take a look at the disciple.

    Even though these people are good at sneaking and scouting, they are just too full of themselves. Sam managed to identify who ising after him and decided to set a trap.

    In fact, he even prepared just in case multiple disciple mighte there, so he created these formations for controlled explosions.

    Too bad, he didn¡¯t have time to create the liquid energy, otherwise, this would have been even more destructive.

    Luckily only one of them came and they are within the range of traps.

    Specter used some of the extracted soul fragments as the formation spirits that kept an eye on the people within the vicinity.

    So, when there was even a slight energy fluctuation caused within them, Sam would be notified. When Disciple Five used the token, he got the news and he activated the formations immediately.

    The explosions stopped the token from activatingpletely as well as did some great damage to Disciple Five.

    The bacsh from the token is an added bonus.

    "So, where the rest of your fellow disciples? When are theying?"

    Sam asked with a smile.

    Disciple Five is also a Peak stage Transcendent cultivator of the Astral ne. He should have been stronger than Sam if it was a head-on battle with direct confrontation, but currently, he is in this state, because of one trap Sam properly set up.

    After grilling him a bit more, Sam killed him off and collected his soul too.

    He then made Specter turn this guy into undead and attached the lowest quality soul in the collection to the body. He also looked through the spatial ring and took out some items.

    There are some tokens that let them escape the ce and reach the node set up. The range is quite big. Big enough to cover the. Sam guessed these disciples might have been on the same. He also looked through the beast pouch.

    It has some birds that looked simr to the silver pigeons, but when Sam examined them, he understood that they are the result of the mutation studies. These pigeons are now mutated with space elements, adding more speed to them.

    They are even altered in such a way that they would be able to sense the direction of the node and fly in that direction, after all, creating tokens like these is expensive. Sam knows from experience.

    After looking through everything, Sam finally found one formation te.

    This is a formation te that freezes space for a while and if the user has enough skill, he can control the specific portions of the space and make specific people halt as he desired.

    Sam took out an inscription brush and started altering the formation disc. Even though he doesn¡¯t have a space element, he doesn¡¯t need it to just make a few modifications. He only tampered with the neutral portions of the inscription and after it was done, he gave it to the undead that was made from this injured body and made it use the token to go back to the node.

    Meanwhile, far away from the spot in another cave, the remaining eight disciples are gathering. There is a pir ced inside.

    They sensed the spatial energy waves and this time they all went out together.

    Once again they were greeted with one of their fellow peers arriving with severe injuries.

    Disciple eight who is the first to arrive outside ran towards Disciple five hurriedly and he was followed by Disciple six and Disciple Three.

    Disciple Three who is stronger than them and had higher cultivation suddenly felt that something is wrong with Disciple Five and started yelling.

    "BACK OFF."

    *BOOM*

    An explosion urred before the Disciple eight and Disciple Six could even react to his yelling.

    The undead Disciple Five activated the formation just like how Sam ordered.

    The formation disc focused on the space within its influence and it locked on to it firmly. But instead of stably holding the space, it started twisting it, creating an explosive spatial turbulence sh.

    All the disciples that areing for them were blown away.

    Disciple five¡¯s body waspletely destroyed and the two disciples closest to him, Disciple Eight and Disciple Six were severely injured. Both of their bodies have slight spatial energy corrosion and there are severe injuries all over the body bleeding profusely.

    Disciple Three also lost one of his arms, but he is the least injured of the three.

    Disciple one came back to his feet first and ran to Disciple Eight and Disciple Six to check on them.

    His calm face distorted into anger and unwillingness.

    He is filled with hatred and rage towards Sam and didn¡¯t even know how to react to it.

    But first, he has to bring these people back to his teacher and he did exactly that. This time, he needed the help of his fellow disciples though.

    After the treatment was arranged, Disciple One and Butler Si decided to talk alone.

    "You didn¡¯t even start engaging with him, you just barely started tailing him and he attacked five of you. Out of which, one died, three of them wouldn¡¯t be able to do any battle for a while and thest one is going to need some time to recover.

    I remember telling you guys to be careful."

 Chapter 1301: Star Eye Sect

    Disciple One didn¡¯t know what to say for Butler Si¡¯s words. He is a bit ashamed by the failure he had to face and he is a bit conflicted about the fact they might have to face it again.

    As his master said, Sam killed one of his juniors, one was injured moderately and three more were almost died and barely stayed alive.

    He did all of this without even meeting three of them. When he thought of how they are going to face him again, he couldn¡¯t help but feel stumped.

    "Master, how should we proceed further?" He directly asked without any shame. He knew better than to proceed in this matter with some blind attachment to his pride and honor.

    "I told you to think of him as a smart person. Smarter than me. But you just left Ten, track him down alone. Do you really think he didn¡¯t anticipate any moves from this side? He might even be waiting for you guys toe at him.

    Until now, we at least had a lead on him, because we knew exactly where he is going to be. But now, he finished up at this end. We need to wait for him to start at another one.

    Young master has twelve main subordinates that mostly provide him with ie and resources and some select few foot soldiers.

    Each of the twelve organizations provides us with direct influence in over twenty realms, but they have their own extensive subordinate organization which is currently being targeted by Sam.

    He finished two of them. Except for the main branches, none of them have any resources and subordinates left. Theirpetitors are raving and taking them down. That is one-sixth of young master¡¯s resources gone now.

    Anyway, now we have to see which of the other ten he is going to target.

    We wouldn¡¯t be able to guess for sure. But we can try.

    Wait till Disciple Three recovers, and from now on an act together. None of you are going to go move against him alone and that includes you too."

    "I am an Astral ne Consummate stage cultivator. I might just be at the initial stage, but I think I can handle a cultivator of Astral ne Transcendence."

    "When I say, you cannot. You cannot. Have you ever seen me warning you about anyone? You have killed a cultivator stronger than you and I know what you are capable of more than you do. So heed my warnings.

    I will send someone to the ten organizations so that they could inform us at the first notice.

    After I narrow down, where he is, I will try to use my connections to predict is usible future location. Until then, focus on preparations. Create formation discs. The more the better. Try to think of ways to use every ability you have to capture him.

    Use the other subordinates we have if you want, but I need results.

    Do you understand?"

    "Yes, Master."

    "Now, go back to your brothers. Make sure they understand the gravity of this situation."

    Disciple One waited for Disciple Three to recover his handpletely and after a few hours, they left.

    The disciples went back to their original residence and didn¡¯t stay on the others for now. As their master suggested they focused on making preparations to deal with Sam.

    Meanwhile, Butler Si became busy. As he said to Disciple One, he immediately sent some of his subordinates to different realms under their control along with their teams so that they will inform him of any presence of Sam.

    While they are waiting there, he decided to try and find Sam in another way. He went to Sivan to talk about that matter.

    "Young Master, I need your help with something rted to Sam."

    Sivan frowned as soon as he heard this. This ispletely unlike Butler Si after all, for him to ask for help directly means, that the situation is a lot more troublesome than he had anticipated.

    "What happened Butler Si? Is everything okay?"

    "It is just my disciples were being stupid and they tried to engage Sam one on one. They didn¡¯t heed my words and acted recklessly."

    "Oh? So, what do you want me to do?"

    "I am going to the Star-Eye Sect to get a possible lead on Sam. But as you know, we need something that has Sam¡¯s soul presence."

    Sivan nodded in understanding and after some thought, he gave the feather coat away.

    "This one has a spirit, but it is contracted with Sam, so I think you can use that."

    Butler Si took the coat and bowed deeply.

    "Thank you, Young Master. I will return it as soon as I can."

    With that Butler, Si took the coat and left the, but before he left, he met with one of the elders of the n and said.

    "I will be gone for two days, I want you to take care of the Young master until then."

    "Take care? I don¡¯t want to be his babysitter."

    The elder is sitting in his room in the darkness as he chugged one jar of liquor after another.

    "I don¡¯t need you to directly take care of him, I just need you to protect him if someone tries something. My subordinates will take care of his daily needs."

    "Butler Si, our n cares deeply about our family. Why are you so afraid we would attack one of our own in the estate?"

    His voice contained a tinge of sarcasm and a lot of mncholy, but Butler Si just rolled his eyes and left the room even though the other party didn¡¯t show any admittance to the role.

    He knew that young master would be taken care of anyway.

    He went to the Star-Eye sect that day itself.

    The star eye sect is a sect of seers. They try to predict the future and most of the time they are right. But they don¡¯t look into it often and they don¡¯t look for too many details.

    This is an organization on par with Sivan¡¯s n, but these people are more respected and since they do not infringe on the benefits of others, for the most part, they are more on the neutral side in the power bnce between the realms.

    When Butler Si arrived, he wasn¡¯t stopped at the gate for any verification, in fact, all the members of the sect are greeting him politely. He directly went to one of therge mansions in the estate, where a lot of powerful cultivators are lining up.

    One of the core disciples of the sect is acting as an attendant to maintain order in the lines. When he saw the Butler Siing, he immediately ran towards him and bowed deeply.

    "Sir Si, I didn¡¯t know you wereing."

    "I didn¡¯t know it either, Kid. It was spontaneous."

    "Please follow me, Master is currently in the middle of his painting practice. I will take you to him."

    Butler Si nodded and they walked inside the mansion.

    The rest of the powerful cultivators are a bit disgruntled. Some of them knew of Butler Si and some of them merely heard of him, they knew how powerful he is, but in their opinion, he is still just a butler. After all, that is his chosen profession.

    Since they have more respectable positions, they decided to ignore his strength, influence, and power which truly matter, and started bitching and moaning about the so-called professional superiority.

    Butler Si was led deep into the mansion and there a middle-aged sat with his eyes closed while holding a paintbrush as he painted something on a canvas.

    He sensed Butler Si¡¯s presence and immediately stopped the painting.

    He stood up and bowed to Butler Si with respect.

    "What brought you here Sir Si?"

    Butler Si took out the feather coat and gave it to the middle-aged man.

    He held it carefully and he had an astonished expression on his face.

    "Butler Si, these feathers..."

    "Don¡¯t ask the questions that you shouldn¡¯t ask."

    "I apologize."

    "The coat has a spirit and it has a contract with a soul. I want to know the usible future location of the person who made the contract."

    "How urate do you want the location to be?"

    "As long as the realm location is urate and the error doesn¡¯t exceed two or threes, I am good."

    "Please wait for a few minutes."

    With that, the middle-aged man walked into the adjacent room which has arge formationid out with inscriptions.

    He sat in the middle of the formation and ced the coat in front of him. It started levitating and the middle-aged closed his eyes as he channeled his energy into the formation while chanting something randomly.

    After a moment, he opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling. His pupils shrunk and he started shivering as if something horrifying is looking back at him.

    After a few moments, he closed his eyes and started panting.

    He came out of the room to inform Butler Si.

    "The most possible location is the Blue in the Eighteen Star Realm. It would be in five to eight days."

    "Thank you very much. But I would like to ask you to impose you to remember the soul signature of this person, I mighte back."

 Chapter 1302: Capture

    Butler Si, returned to the n and sent the news to his disciples. He didn¡¯t just say it is the blue though. He also added that there is a possibility that he might arrive at two of its adjacents so that they would prepare.

    Along with that information, Butler Si also sent the information regarding the organization and its branches that are operating within the vicinities of the Blue and other adjacents.

    As soon as Disciple One got the information, he sat in the meeting with other remaining disciples.

    Currently there are only six of them left to fight. They need to be careful with the current n.

    So, Disciple One gave the brief and exined every detail of the organization. They knew that it would be hard for them to tail Sam around since he would be having a lead over them and they might fall for another trap of his.

    After discussing for a while and exchanging ideas, they finally agreed on one and immediately made a move to execute it.

    They lost a day just for the meeting, but that means they still have at least four days lead. They are fully determined to make proper use of time to gain an upperhand over Sam.

    They arrived at the Blue directly and met with the branch of operations as they made preparations.

    Meanwhile, Sam is not exactly idling either.

    He is currently on a without any of Sivan¡¯s subordinate organizations. After he was done with thest branch of the second organization as well as the disciples that areing at him, he figured that he should be a lot more careful than usual.

    From Sivan¡¯s memories, he had a decent understanding of these disciples. They did a lot of Sivan¡¯s dirty work.

    They carried assassinations, they destroyed organizations, they kidnapped people for ransom, they did every dirty deed in the book and they are well coordinated. The only reason, he managed to pull one over them like this, is because of their one big drawback.

    They are unbelievably cocky.

    They have too much sess rate in their endeavors that they are way in over their heads and Sam is sure that they would behave in such a way.

    They did exactly that.

    From what he understood of Butler Si through Sivan¡¯s Memories, Sam is sure that he is a cautious man and he could guess what his orders would have been. He wouldn¡¯t believe that he didn¡¯t warn them about him, but they still sent just one person and did the same mistake twice.

    But now Sam is sure that they wouldn¡¯t dare send just one person again. His advantage was over but he still needs to keep his upperhand in the exchange for a while.

    So, he decided to make some extra preparations.

    At this moment, he is making the liquid energy. Even though, he doesn¡¯t have elemental affinity for now, he is sure he can still do wonders with this liquid energy. Particrly, with the control of energy he now has, it would a lot easier to make it by himself.

    But the problem is, he cannot wait and make it inrge bulk quantities and without the supporting formations and inscription arrays he used when he was trying to mass produce the liquid energy, even with the advantages of the body, he would still fall short.

    So, he would have limited supply of these liquid energy cells. But he has a separate n arranged for them.

    For the next five days, he focused on creating the energy cells and after he obtained the required amount, he decided to make his move.

    But his first target wasn¡¯t the blue. It is the adjacent to that and when he arrived, there is no resistance whatsoever in the branch, he was able to smoothly sail through it.

    After he was done there, Sam made sure that the word of it spread rapidly by bribing the merchants.

    The branch only took a day to deal with and he took a day off. He really wants to make sure that the disciples would definitely be at his next possible location.

    Only after that did he got to the Blue to take care of the branch. Even though he didn¡¯t have any luck with the disciples in the first branch, he is still careful. He didn¡¯t directly go after the branch. He changed his attire a little and nned something special.

    He hired a few small mercenaries to create a small diversion for himself.

    On the day Sam arrived at the city of the branch he was targeting, the disciples are eagerly waiting for his entry too. In the past few days, they took over guard detail and the subordinates of this branch and kept a tight watch over this.

    They gave out the details on how Sam looks and currently they are all acting as eyes for them.

    The disciples are a bit tense, after all the time frame their teacher gave was that of five to eight days and it is already the sixth day, so they are a bit tense.

    But their tension was gone, when themunication token in disciple one gave an alert. He immediately activated it and spoke.

    "Did the target arrive?"

    "Yes, sir. A person fitting the target description ising from the west city gate, he is a hundred meters away and is slowly approaching the city."

    The disciples felt extremely delighted by this, they got ready to move, but at this moment, Discple Two¡¯smunication token also got an alert.

    They were confused.

    He activated the token and asked.

    "What happened?"

    "A person fitting the target description ising towards the eastern city gate. He is currently going through the toll."

    While the disciples were baffled, another alert came for Disciple four.

    "The target could be seen in the Inn Street. He is currently entering the bar. What action should we take?"

    The disciples were dumbfounded.

    But that is not the end of it.

    "Target is currently entering the brothel on fifth street."

    "Target is drinking in a bar near the southern gate."

    "Target entered the city from the Northern Gate."

    One after the other the alerts kept oning and the disciples were dumbfounded.

    They could immediately guess what is happening. They knew for sure that these people are arranged by Sam.

    This is a really good distraction.

    The disciples discussed and immediately came to an agreement.

    "All guards and soldiers, you would being across more than one person that fits the target description. Detain everyone of them. Do not let a single one go, detain everyone of them. Call back if there is even the slightest resistance from any of them."

    After the order was passed down, everyone the guards immediately made a move to capture the people that came dressed like Sam.

    The city was in chaos as soon as they did though. Because not all the targets just yed along properly and surrendered. There was slight resistance from every one of them and the resistance is not them directly going against the guards, rather they caused chaos in their surroundings. They destroyed some infrastructure, created some terror in the citizens, and started running around.

    The guards immediately called back and informed the disciples about this, but the disciples didn¡¯t make a move yet.

    Because along with the information about the resistance, they are also informed about how they are putting up the resistance.

    The disciples immediately eliminated all the targets that have an elemental affinity. No matter what form it is, they are sure that Sam didn¡¯t have any elemental affinity.

    That eliminated two-third of the targets.

    The rest of the targets are being captured one after another and every target that was caught was also eliminated.

    After ten more minutes, they finally managed to narrow down targets to two people who managed to get past them without any elemental attacks and killed a few guards before they ran out of the city.

    Disciples decided to split up into two groups and ran out of the estate.

    They are excited to capture Sam. Even though this didn¡¯t go as well as they nned it to be, they are really looking forward to capturing Sam and torturing him because of what he did to their fellow disciples.

    The two groups of three didn¡¯t take long to catch up with the two most usible targets.

    Not only did they catch up, they even cornered him by surrounding him.

    The disciples didn¡¯t take the chances though. They took out the formation discs they prepared beforehand and ced them around the target. Even though they are sure that one of the two is not their real target, they decided to be extra cautious.

    Disciple One took out hismunication token and contacted the other group.

    "Disciple two, how is your situation?"

    "Captured the target, we ced the formations too. What about you?"

    "Same here. Check the target. Whoever got the wrong one will meet the other. Don¡¯t act till all six of us are together."

 Chapter 1303: Tricking

    Disciple One and Disciple Two removed the masks of the targets at the same time and they were shocked.

    Any of the two targets that they captured is the real target.

    "Not the target. An Undead."

    "Mine is not the target either. An Undead."

    They couldn¡¯t help but feel stumped. Once again, Sam fooled them and this time, he did so collectively.

    Disciple One looked at the undead creature in front of him and suddenly sensed the energy fluctuations.

    "Move. Move. Brother Two move away from the undead and meet me back at the estate."

    But as soon as he finished his words...

    *BOOM*

    An explosion happened from the body that was cornered. The three disciples were blown away, but the closest one to the body lost one of his arms because before he crashed into a rock nearby.

    The same thing happened on the other end. Disciple Two ispletely fine, but the other two were unable to escapepletely unscathed. At least, they didn¡¯t lose any limbs, they had some fractures all over the body.

    Disciple One gritted his teeth as he looked at the exploded body hatefully, he looked at his injured brothers and cursed Sam and his ancestors for causing this.

    Meanwhile, back at the estate, Sam is standing at the gate. He is not wearing the cloak and the mask. He just showed the face directly. Even though he doesn¡¯t like this face, it really dide in handy this time.

    The disciples were so held upon his description as he moved in the mask and the cloak since the beginning that they forgot that he has a face. He is not some faceless creature just because he lost his own face.

    He just entered in this normal attire without any mask and came straight to the city without any trouble. All the people that dressed up as him were the small mercenaries he hired to do his own bidding. He explicitly gave them instructions that they should give little resistance and just surrender.

    With big enough reward they did that easily. All he needed was to draw inscriptions on a bunch of cloaks and masks that couldpletely hide their faces.

    As for the two undead creatures that are ced in the mix, they are obviously controlled by the specter and they were set up miniature liquid energy cells. Sam didn¡¯t have many, to begin with, so he has to make do with what he has got.

    So he set up small ones in these undead creatures. He knew the guards are not going to be much trouble. The specter who controlled the Three ghosts for a while fighting against strong people could easily manage to create these undead creatures to deal with some small guards.

    They ran away making the disciples split up and now the estate ispletely open for him to deal with.

    He took out a small liquid energy cell from his storage. Then with just a thought, there is some mechanical motion within the hand and a small slot opens up.

    A slot that perfectly fits the liquid energy cell. As soon as he ced it, the arm started glowing from within the joints, and instantly the five finger cannons and the cannon in the middle of the palm opened up with energy gathering at it.

    Sam aimed it at the main entrance and shot it down.

    The energy beams went past the entrance and directly destroyed the building that was behind the gate. The guards standing behind the gate were dead and none of their bodies were left in a single piece.

    He stepped forward and kept on shooting. Just one energy cell has a lot of power. He destroyed a lot of people within the first two minutes.

    The leaders of the organization didn¡¯t even have any courage to face up against Sam, but since they felt like it is theirst day, they decided to just go with it and put up thest fight.

    The presence of the disciples made them lose all hope. So, now they are just like chickens that gave up on their lives and got ready for the ughter but tried to put up the final resistance anyway.

    Sam walked through all of this like he is walking in a park.

    While Sam is going through the targets at a rapid, the people that marked him as the target are currently in a deep pickle.

    The explosion turned out to be the least of their problems at the moment because as soon as they came out of the initial shock, they realized that their situation is tougher than they had initially anticipated.

    The formations they ced to trap ¡¯Sam¡¯ were affected by the liquid energy cell explosion. They are the space freezing formations and they are quite simr to the one Sam altered and sent back to the disciples through the Disciple Five a few days ago.

    They were impacted by the energy turbulence that urred due to the explosion and now they are in such a terrible state that the formation created several spatial rends around them.

    If they were normal rends, they would have been able to mend them easily. It would have been a piece of cake with his level, but the situation is a bit troublesome because the formations they ced are set for capturing an Astral ne Consummate stage cultivator.

    So, the failure impact was also that high. The spatial turbulence is too chaotic and he needs to let the rends stabilize themselves a bit and then only would he be able to mend the cracks and move from that ce.

    If not for the difference in the locations of the spatial rends and the injuries, it could be considered that the same situation is mirroring on two ends. Disciple two is also facing the same trouble.

    Disciple One looked at the situation of his brothers and understood one thing clearly. Even this time, they are done for. They are not going to catch Sam this time and he is going to get away just like before.

    He looked towards the city and he could see a few people that are running away due to the chaos in the city.

    This is one more loss for him.

    He waited an hour before the space stabilized a bit and started mending the extra rends and then he went to his brothers to give them medicine. The situation on the other end was a bit better, so by the time Disciple one and his team went back to the estate, Disciple two is already there.

    They looked at the vast ruin left behind by Sam. He did fast. Faster than they thought. An organization that has over three hundred members and Sam didn¡¯t even take a hour and a half to destroy them. Except for the few kids and helpless youngsters, there was not even a single person left.

    Not only did they fail to capture him while he destroyed an organization under their nose, but four of the six were also injured.

    They fell for the oldest trick in the book and they are supposed to be the best of the best subordinates working for Sivan.

    They felt embarrassed. They could already imagine the disappointed expression of their master.

    But they could only go back.

    They met with their master the next day.

    Butler Si looked at them and sighed.

    "Can you guys do it or should I go by myself?" He asked directly and from his tone, he is not even being sarcastic, he ispletely serious about this.

    "Master, please don¡¯t take this away from us. We will avenge ourselves no matter what."

    "I gave you the usible location and time and he came within those constraints. I cannot help but doubt your capability in handling him and the more losses you suffer, the more emotional you are going to be and the easier it would be for him to y you like the fools you are."

    "We will handle this matter. Please just give us the next location he would be in. We would definitely capture him this time."

    "What is there for me to give you? He started destroying this set of organizations and with the loss you suffered, he wouldn¡¯t be stopping. He might even be full of confidence and delight.

    Go back to that Eighteen-star realm and set up a trap in one of the branches. If you are lucky, he might evene there drunk with the victory and might even be able to capture him."

    With that, Butler Si left without even looking back.

    Disciple One gritted his teeth and left along with his fellow disciples.

    The injuries were not too severe, so they recovered pretty quickly. Every one of them is angry and they are really looking forward to destroying Sam.

    But what they don¡¯t know is that Sam is also looking forward to meeting them once again as he had still a few tricks up his sleeve to show them.

 Chapter 1304: Pins

    One week passed.

    In this one week, Sam has done a lot.

    He destroyed five branches and all of them were targeted at random. The disciples weren¡¯t able to find where he is no matter how hard they tried. The best they got was that the information came to them while Sam was in the middle of destruction. By the time, they got there, he was long disappeared after collecting his loot.

    The disciples could only go back to their master once again, to get the usible location. Butler Si is already getting angry at these disciples for being this useless. He couldn¡¯t help but be a bit disappointed. After all, he trained them for decades by himself and every one of them has gone through the hell that he put them through.

    The closest they got to Sam is when he tricked them with some duplicates running around the city they were in.

    If this thing was revealed around his peers, he could guess how happy they would be. He just felt that they should have done better, considering all the training and resources they have consumed.

    But this time when they came, he gritted his teeth and once again contacted the Star Eye sect. He asked for the usible location once again and he got the news. But the time is a bit tight this time as the time frame is only two days.

    So, the disciples went there immediately and set up traps.

    What they don¡¯t know is that Sam arrived right after them and he also started setting traps. While the disciples set traps in the branch organization, Sam set traps outside the city in the path leading to the forest. This time he had to spend a lot more money than usual as he needed an artisan for making these things.

    Once the traps were set, Samunched a bit of sneak attack on the organization and he escaped immediately after throwing it into chaos. The disciples were a little reluctant to go after Sam, but he actually almost fell for a couple of traps they set up and barely managed to escape.

    So, they dared it and followed him.

    But they also became vignt for any traps Sam might have set up.

    At this moment, Sam is running in the front with his lead and the disciples are following him cautiously.

    They are taking the exact same route as Sam and didn¡¯t dare spread out open.

    After getting a bit far away from the city and not even touching a single trap, they finally became a bit daring and decided to move faster.

    The disciples suddenly disappeared on the spot.

    Sam immediately understood what they are doing and halted in his tracks instead of moving forward, he kicked his mechanical leg on the ground with energy gathered underneath it, the explosion made him hop high into the air and he started running in a different direction.

    The disciples appeared a few feet away in his original direction. Everything happened in a fraction of a second.

    The disciples were a bit surprised, but they also became more confident. They blinked once again, but this time they spread out a little. One of them wanted to reappear in the ongoing path, while another one wanted to reappear at the rear of Sam¡¯s ongoing path, one to the left and another to the right.

    Thest two covered the diagonal from top left to bottom right.

    Sam constantly kept an eye on the group and as soon as they disappeared, he once again kicked the ground as he hopped up.

    He kicked the air and changed the direction before he shot himself down.

    When the disciples reappeared, Samnded right after the Disciple in his front. He threw an energy bullet at him and kept on running.

    *BOOM*

    The disciple blocked the energy bullet with his spatial energy, and since he already experienced the consequences of blocking Sam¡¯s attacks with the spatial barriers, he immediately blinked away from that spot and followed Sam, while he was still in the middle of casting that barrier.

    The chase continued and every time, the disciples are managing to go near Sam than before. They finally thought, that Sam is being cornered and as if to prove them right, Sam acted desperately as he chose random direction every time, to the point that he appeared at the same spot twice.

    And at this moment, Disciple One managed to appear right next to Sam and he swung his foot at Sam¡¯s head.

    Sam lifted both of his hands and created an energy barrier. When the legnded on the barrier, it was instantly broken, but within that instant, Sam who activated repel style managed to take the impact and convert it into the force that threw him away from that spot.

    He didn¡¯t put any resistance which made it even easier for him to fly away. Hended almost fifty meters away and he regained his bnce immediately. Of course, this came at a price. His right hand felt numb.

    Disciples were dumbfounded by this.

    All this while, they just thought that Sam was quick on his feet and it would be over once one of them caught up to him, but the reality is indeed different and it hit them pretty hard.

    But they still felt that this is the best shot they have. This time, the disciples all tried to block Sam¡¯s escape route from the hits and they are getting closer and closer.

    Just when they are getting a hand of this, Sam slowed down which made them a bit happier as they thought he was getting tired. They immediately blinked to appear around him.

    Sam once again hopped upwards, but this time, he left behind a small liquid energy cell in his previous spot and created arge energy barrier while he was in mid-air as he applied to repel style to it constantly.

    *BOOM*

    Right when the disciples reappeared, the explosion urred.

    Sam who sheltered himself inyers of thick barriers also felt brunt a bit, but mostly he was thrown away.

    Even though the disciples are stronger than him when they appeared near the explosion zone, they had their guards down because they came with an intention to attack.

    They were all blown away from the spot as they crashed in different directions, Disciple three is once again injured as he is the closest one. For some reason, he was always the closest one whenever there is an explosion caused by Sam.

    The disciples were shaken and they couldn¡¯t control their energy for a small moment and Sam took this chance to get away from them. He created a massive lead and started running towards the forest.

    While Sam is running away, the disciples slowly managed to get back onto their feet one by one and start chasing him once again.

    This time, they decided to not hold back anything and used their full strength as they blinked. Disciple one and Disciple two who are way stronger than the rest directly blinked and cleared half of the lead Sam had and for some reason, Sam didn¡¯t change his direction to this blink.

    Instead, to their surprise, he turned around and ran towards them at his full speed.

    They halted in their tracks due to the sudden change and frowned, they inspected their surroundings quickly and didn¡¯t find anything there, but still cannot shake off this dangerous sensation.

    So, they decided to block Sam off.

    When he came within his control range, they froze the space immediately and Sam who leaped forward at thest second barely stopped in front of them. He is only a few feet away floating in the air, about to crash into the ground.

    The disciples didn¡¯t feel happy that they captured Sam, because they knew that something is not right here. They knew that something really fishy is going on. They anxiously looked towards the remaining disciples who barely managed to recover from the shock and starteding towards them.

    "What are you nning? Tell me now, or I will rip your limbs off."

    Disciple One asked anxiously, but Sam didn¡¯t say anything and just smiled. This smile only made the disciple one more anxious.

    "Brother One. I think there is nothing he could do. Let¡¯s just capture him and leave this ce."

    "No, there is definitely a problem here. There is no way, he would be surrendering like this." Disciple One replied as he manipted the space. Sam felt his right arm distorting a bit at the shoulder joint.

    He closed his for a moment and just gritted his teeth to endure the pain and spoke slowly.

    "Anytime now."

    As soon as he spoke, the two disciples looked towards their juniors who are running towards them.

    The specter suddenly appeared in the middle of them and exploded a small grenade, before disappearing once again.

    *BooM*

    The explosion is not exactly loud of extremely damaging, but it did manage to throw the small pins out at the disciples that are just about to blink and that is when the real damage started.

 Chapter 1305: Message

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    "ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHH..."

    "ARGGGGGGGG..."

    "NOOO...."

    Many explosions covered the four disciples in the rear as they were on verge of blinking away from the spot. Various sounds of pain and suffering could be heard from them. Disciple One and Disciple Two immediately blinked away from that spot. They even ignored Sampletely.

    Sam didn¡¯t even dare to ck off a bit. He drank a potion and immediately ran away from that spot.

    On his way the specter joined him and they went back to the city directly and on his way, Sam couldn¡¯t help but sweat profusely and sigh repeatedly.

    This time, the n is a bit too dangerous and the risk is too high. His life was at stake.

    When he set up the whole scenario, he thought of many variables that might affect him negatively and he was right.

    The disciples are a lot more skilled than he thought. If not for his superior control of the energy and the usage of repel style, he would have been dead the moment Disciple One kicked him.

    He is strong, but he is not as strong as an Astral ne Consummate stage cultivator even of that cultivator is at initial stage. He is levels beyond that strength.

    But there is one thing that he counted on most.

    The fact that the disciples wouldn¡¯t be willing to kill him instantly and he was right. The disciples were way too emotionally involved to kill him the very second they saw him. If they were aiming to kill him, he would have been dead already.

    They would have instantly killed Sam the moment they caught him, but they didn¡¯t. That is why he took the first hit from the Disciple One.

    He wanted to see whether they really wanted to kill him on the spot or not and his bet paid off at that moment and he proceeded with the rest of the n.

    He made them participate in the cast and mouse game as he took advantage of his mechanical leg¡¯s hopping ability and made them lose a good chunk of their energy.

    What they don¡¯t know is that they lost way too much energy than they had anticipated and that is the result of the trap he set up.

    Sam¡¯s trap is not some attacking formation or something disrupts their motion or attacks, it is arge cursed formation that spanned a few hundred square meters and it has only one purpose to drain the people that were not supposed to be in while recharging the person that was within it.

    The cursed formation was ced with the help of the specter to whom Sam taught the curses.

    After they lost enough energy, Sam wanted to separate the group. No matter how many people that were separated, he decided that he would target the group that has lesser strength.

    The two big dogs were separated while the rest are struck back a little.

    Then finally the specter arrived from within the formation while the two disciples panicked a bit and activated the small pin grenade. This is one of the things Sam paid for the artisan to manufacture.

    The pin grenade doesn¡¯t contain any lethality by itself, but the pins themselves are a different story. Each pin is a curse carrier and Sam fused the energy bullets into the curses before attaching them to the pins.

    And each energy bullet is not small, they are strong enough to destroy someone of Sam¡¯s cultivation level instantly.

    Thest thing he counted on is the behavior of the Disciples that he studied thus far. From the memories of Sivan and from the past few encounters, Sam understood something about them. The disciples are too close and too attached to each other.

    They cannot be decisive when one of them is in danger.

    So, as soon as the explosions happened, the two disciples that came at Sam, immediately left him there and went to meet save their brothers.

    Sam took this chance and escaped to the city.

    Everything worked out well, but he knew for sure that this n is way too risky for his own good. There are some errors in his judgement which almost made him lose his life quite a few times.

    He decided that he needs to enhance his defense a lot. But before that, he took out some more pin grenades he has got and started throwing them at the rest of the people in the branch that he came to destroy.

    Meanwhile, Disciples are having a hard time.

    Disciple one and Disciple two are horrified by the scene in front of them.

    Disciple Three is dead. In fact, he waspletely dismembered. The remaining three are barely hanging by a thread. At least ten pins directly hit all four of them and the remaining exploded within a close vicinity. They are in no way safe.

    All three of them have a varying degree of damage on their bodies.

    They took out all the healing potions and made them drink first so that they would at least stay alive for a while.

    After that Disciple one started taking out the scrolls from within the spatial rings of the three disciples.

    These are the special scrolls their master prepared for them. It was for extreme emergencies and this is one of those situations.

    They activated the scrolls immediately and all five of them disappeared.

    They reappeared in the middle of Butler Si¡¯s residence within Sivan¡¯s n.

    Butler Si, who was currently serving Sivan with some blood collected from the beasts, got an alert on hismunication token.

    "Young Master, I have an urgent matter to attend to."

    "Go on."

    Sivan just waved his hand as he focused on his meal.

    Butler Si disappeared from the spot and reappeared at his own residence.

    He saw his disciples in their sorry state and he didn¡¯t even have any words to say for that. He held back his disappointment as well as the words of criticism. Disciple One and Disciple two are shedding tears, he could easily guess what might have happened and called for the n healer toe.

    The healer checked the conditions of the disciples and started treating them.

    "They would be unable to wake up for a few weeks. I need to ce them on a life support formation and slowly heal each injury in different parts of their bodies. At least, they didn¡¯t have any brain damage and their other critical organs are repairable. But I cannot speed it up any longer."

    Butler Si nodded and let the healers take his disciples away. He looked at Disciple One and Disciple Two and sighed.

    "Leave this matter. Do not interfere anymore. I will let someone else deal with him or I would go there myself."

    The disciples didn¡¯t speak anything and just stayed silent.

    Disciple One is the oldest of them all and also the strongest of them. He has been with his master for most amount of time, the rest of the disciples came after him and they are named in that order.

    He was always taking care of them and looking after their safety.

    But now, because of his reluctance to kill Sam and hisck of caution cost one of his brothers to die and the remaining three to be in critical stage.

    He felt extremely defeated and disappointed at himself. Butler Si looked at them and sighed once again.

    "Just take care. I will create new scrolls for you, until now stay within the residence. I have something to handle. Don¡¯t think about this matter anymore and rest. Think of how to rectify the shorings and don¡¯t me yourselves.

    As long as you take the scroll once again, I wouldn¡¯t stop you from going anywhere you want. But until then, stay here. Otherwise, get ready to be punished."

    With those words, he left. The two disciples went to two different rooms to have some alone time.

    By evening, Butler Si returned to the residence and he immediately frowned. He hurriedly came inside and opened the door for the room of Disciple One.

    The room turned out to be empty and he sighed in exasperation. He knew something like this would happen. He knew that Disciple One wouldn¡¯t stop, that is why he warned that guy about the scroll and punishment.

    But it seems like the impact of this issue is too much of Disciple One.

    He called for Disciple Two and said.

    "I want you to go look for Disciple One in thest branch you guys visited.

    Don¡¯t let him go berserk and bring death up on himself. If he is not there immediatelye back and report to me."

    While Butler Si was giving this order, at the exact moment, Disciple One is actually standing in the middle of the ruins of the destroyed branch left behind by Sam.

    There is arge stone pir in the middle which was engraved with a few words.

    "I will be in the Redmatter in fifteen days. The Red Glove mercenaries are my target. Come and get me if you can."- Sam.

 Chapter 1306: Blood Cry City

    The Blood Cry City.

    A city in the Redmatter.

    This has this name because of the Red soil it has. All kinds of different soils and rocks it has, are red in color. Everything about this ce is red. Even the nts that grow on thisnd are red in color.

    This is one of the most chaotics in the world. Only five percent of thend on this was conquered. The small patches here and there and all of them have wormholes that connect to the others and even other realms.

    Nobody knows the reason why the whole is red. There are many legends regarding this ce, but there is one more popr than all the othersbined.

    It was said, that a god was killed on this and his blood seeped into the whole. They say it gave this ce the color it got. It was said that the whole has mutated and given out this red color.

    Every resource that was in this soil, the metals, rocks, nts, herbs, and even the beasts, all of them mutated.

    Even the cultivators that are used to be in this ce were mutated and a new race was created. They are called the Bloodborne. They are humanoid monsters that are seven feet tall. They have an extremely high conception rate. They eat anything that breathes and has flesh on its body.

    They are extremely vicious and there is no means tomunicate with them. They have fully red skin and their heads and upper chests are covered with fur. The legs below the knee caps also have fur but not as much as the heads.

    They are like beasts, acting on instincts and are great natural hunters.

    Their flesh is not good for cultivators to eat and even the beasts that eat it, go through some mutations, that is if their central nervous systems can handle it.

    But these Blood Born have one particr use and that is being a great research material. The gic data these things offer is way too much.

    In fact, some of the samples are in the gicbs that Sam destroyed previously. The with over ny-five percentnd ispletely unconquered and full of resources. The cities that were established in this ce are a bitwork of goods.

    They find all kinds of mutated, herbs, beasts, metals, and other things in the surroundings. Even the spirit stones of this ce are rare and there is only one city on this that has ess to the mine.

    Even they couldn¡¯t mine it at full swing and can barely get scraps.

    But the most precious resource of all is the Bloodborne.

    Bloodcry city is the second most powerful city on the and it is run by an organization that is just one rank below Sivan¡¯s n.

    But this city is also the biggest producer of BloodBorne and the ones that consume all of them are one of the branches that were under Sivan¡¯s control.

    That is the Red Glove Mercenary group.

    The Mercenary group is the strongest force right behind the city authorities. The city authorities don¡¯t go deep into the forests outside though. Their iees from the taxes paid by the people inside the city.

    Everyone who enters the city needs to sign a soul contract agreeing to share their earnings.

    If they do not sign it, they wouldn¡¯t be allowed past the wormhole. A consummate middle-stage cultivator guards the wormhole, so it could be said it is impossible to enter.

    Of course, if Sam had the dimensional drifter, he would have easilye in, but now he also needs to sign the contract.

    At this moment, Sam is currently drinking inside a bar.

    Even the wine in this ce is different because of the fruits that are obtained here. But he must say it really is a great liquor.

    He is sitting by the window as he looked at the tower right across the street.

    The tower belongs to the Red Glove Mercenary group.

    He has been observing that for quite a while and he is also waiting for the Specter toe back.

    After another hour of looking at it, Sam left the bar and went to the inn he boarded in.

    Specter appeared out of thin air and stood in front of him.

    "Now, what is the status? Did you do as I asked you to do?"

    "Yes, Sir. I ced a curse on one of them. I would be able to trace him easily."

    "Good. Now, try to get theyout of the tower. I need to make some special preparations. It has been a while since I did something big. I need to prepare for the Disciple One toe here."

    "What kind of n is it boss? Can I help in any way?"

    "Just keep your souls ready for the possession, any soul that you have collected in the past few exploits but doesn¡¯t give any significant growth, keep them ready and feed them some extra energy. I need you to control a lot of bodies at the same time for me."

    "Okay boss."

    Sam sat on the bed as he created small condensed energy pellets in the size of a thumbnail as he arranged them three-dimensionally in the air.

    He started simting some formations while containing them all inside an energy barrier. He also set up a special formation barrier that conceals everything. So, even if Disciple Onees here, it would be hard for him to find where Sam is.

    And there is also another strict rule in the Inn he is currently staying in. No one is allowed to fight in this ce and that rule applies to everyone including the Red Glove Mercenaries.

    This inn is run by the city authorities, so no one dares to do anything inside the inn. As long as Sam is staying here, he will bepletely safe.

    For the next few days, Specter was on move. It followed all the Red mercenary group members and exactly two dayster, it gave the required toweryout to Sam.

    After getting theyout properly, Sam started creating more simtions.

    Five dayster, finally, the specter came and informed us about someone Sam is waiting for.

    "Disciple One has arrived."

    The news put a smile on his face as he looked forward to dealing with the guy.

    Disciple One directly entered the Red Glove Mercenary tower. Technically, being the direct disciple of Butler Si, he is superior in the chain ofmand. He directly met with the Leader of the Red Glover Mercenary group.

    "Hello, Sir. It has been a long time since I saw you. What brought you here?"

    The leader greeted him with a pleasant smile.

    "I have some business here. A person named Sam is targeting all of Young Master Sivan¡¯s organizations. He is a tough opponent. By now more than three dozen organizations were destroyed. He should have already been here by now.

    I am here to kill him."

    The head of the Mercenary group was stunned. He didn¡¯t expect the first words Disciple one would speak would be news that his organization might be destroyed.

    But he recovered pretty quickly and said.

    "When will he being, Sir?"

    "Within the next ten days, he mighte anytime. Tell your subordinates to be extra vignt. If I am not wrong, he might have evene here to make preparations. These are the portraits. He might wear this cloak and the mask; behind that mask, this is his face.

    Tell your subordinates to take a look around the city and alert your contacts in the city authority to see if they identify anyone."

    "Yes, Sir. We will do as you say."

    He immediately summoned his deputies and started giving orders. After giving the immediate orders, he proceeded to introduce Disciple one to the rest of the subordinates and warned them to listen to hismand.

    The leader of the Mercenary group is actually a Peak stage Transcendent cultivator. If not for the backing of Sivan and his subordinate organizations, there is no way he would be able to hold on his own in the Redmatter.

    So, he clearly knew who the real boss was and gave up all themand over his troops to Disciple One.

    Meanwhile, Sam also started the next phase of his preparations.

    "Specter, proceed with the next step. Are the souls ready?"

    "Yes, Boss."

    "Pick the targets wisely and make sure that you are at your hundred percent at all times. If you need anything, tell me now."

    "If I have a formation supporting me with energy, I would do much better Sir."

    "Okay, then."

    Sam immediately ce a formation within the room.

    "Is this enough?"

    "Yes, Boss. Thank You. I will handle this from here."

    With that, the Specter Closed his eyes, and a bunch of souls suddenly sprung out of its body. The souls are screaming and trying their best to get out of the grasp, but they are unable to do so. With just one thought, they were immediately silenced and turned invisible.

    Only the specter can see them now. All of them were shot out of the window as they made their way towards the forest outside of the city.

 Chapter 1307: Visitor

    Days passed quickly.

    Disciple One, couldn¡¯t find Sam no matter where he looked and by the end of eighth day, the only ce that was left is the Inn Sam was staying at.

    Neither Disciple One, Nor the Red Glove Mercenary group has any strength or authority in the inn, so they didn¡¯t poke their noses into it early on and Disciple One was also convinced, that Sam wouldn¡¯t be just hiding. He is sure that Sam woulde early to prepare and hiding inside an Inn withplete protection is not something he would do.

    But after there was no ce left to search anymore, he couldn¡¯t help but wonder if he is really there.

    As if confirming his guesses immediately, Sam peeked out of the window as he looked at the passerby while drinking the wine, he spent the eighth day doing just that and the members of the Red Glove Mercenary saw him. It was too hard for them to miss.

    Disciple One hurriedly ran over to see if that is true and when he looked at Sam, he looked back and waved his hand.

    "Long Time No see. Disciple One. How was your trip to the Red matter so far? Mine is delightful. I like the wine so much that I almost want to just stay inside and drink. You should try it sometime. After all, you were too busy running around for quite a while. A drink might help cool your hot head."

    Sam said that out loud and that attracted the attention of the people on the street. But they didn¡¯t bother much after one sweeping nce.

    As long as there is no fight, nothing interesting would happen.

    So, they just left. But the guards of the inn and the city stayed there and took a look silently. They have a faint idea of who the Disciple One is. They don¡¯t know his exact identity but they know that he is part of the people backing the red glove. So, they are a bit vignt about him from the start.

    "I thought you were here to do something. What are you doing hiding in the Inn like a coward? Oh, sorry I forgot you are indeed a coward. That is why, you sneak around and destroy the organizations,ying traps down for the people thate at you, because you don¡¯t have balls to fight them head-on."

    "Wow, that hurts. But tell me something Disciple One. I took three blows from you, from the close range. But none of them managed to kill me, why do you think so?"

    "Because of your slimy tricks, what else?"

    "Nah, you are giving me way too much credit. Granted that my tricks would have definitely kept me alive, I should have been severely injured at least. But I was almost unscathed.

    You are an Astral ne Consummate cultivator, only at the initial stage, but I am only ate-stage cultivator of the Transcendent ne, don¡¯t you think you are way too useless."

    "Why don¡¯t youe down and find out? This time I assure you that I won¡¯t have any mercy."

    "Oh my god, is that supposed to be a provocation? Does that usually work for you Disciple One? It is not half bad for someone of your intellectual capacity, but I am sorry, I brought my brain this time, so I am not falling for that bait."

    Disciple One looked at Sam hatefully while the rest of the crowd watching the show burst into chuckles, even the guards couldn¡¯t help butugh. But the Red Glove Mercenary group members had a dumbfounded expression.

    For the past few days, their boss has been warning them constantly about what a big shot this guy is and they are abiding by it, but now that someone dragged his face into the mud like that, they don¡¯t even know how to react.

    If possible, they would have made a move to capture that person to win some brownie points, but that is not possible now that Sam is in the inn.

    As they were thinking about this, Sam once again spoke up.

    "Disciple One, I have a deal for you, do you want to hear it?"

    "Does that deal include serving your head on a silver tter?"

    "Almost, just there would be no silver tter."

    "What is it?"

    "It is a bet. I bet that without even moving from this ce, I will destroy every single member of the Red Glove Mercenary group? Anyone who stays within the vicinities of the Blood Cry city will be dead. If I win, you will let me go without any fight.

    If you win, I wille out and stand in front of you. You can capture me as you like."

    "And I need to take your word for that?"

    "No, no. That would be stupid. We are going to sign a soul contract."

    Disciple One looked at Sam for a moment and said.

    "I will sign it. Send it down."

    Sam quickly drafted the contract and signed it before throwing it down to Disciple One. He also signed it and threw it back to Sam.

    "Now that the contract is signed, you can go back and wait. There is still some time."

    Disciple One was gone even before the words were finished. He went back to the tower and gave out orders.

    "Search for all kinds of new things that entered the tower. Check all the tower formations. He is a master in setting traps, you all wouldn¡¯t even know how you died if you miss something he set up."

    For the next two days, they desperately searched for every nook and cranny of the tower and when they didn¡¯t find anything, the leader suggested something.

    "Sir, I think it is better for us to scatter and get out of the city for a while. It would be hard for him to capture us with all of us divided."

    Disciple One went into deep thought. He also kind of agreed with that idea, but suddenly he felt something is amiss.

    "Do you have any rivals?"

    "Yes, Sir. Apart from the city authority, the Blood Band Mercenary group is the next in line when ites to strength after us and they are trying to snatch our position for a long time."

    "Do you have any inside men there?"

    "Yes, Sir. Why?"

    "Ask if there is anyrge-scale movement within the mercenary members of the Blood Band, particrly the main members."

    The leader of the Red Glove left and came back in half an hour.

    "There is indeed arge-scale movement sir. When asked about it, they said that someone ced arge order for the Blood Born and some special fruits, and the whole group was mobilized. I don¡¯t know if that is true or not."

    Disciple One suddenly stood up and said.

    "Call back, everyone. Every single member of the Red Glove Mercenary group must be back in the tower as soon as possible."

    "But Sir, it would take at least three days to gather everyone as they are spread around deep in the forest."

    "Then you better move faster. Call back everyone."

    "Yes, Sir."

    "Sam, I will see how you will destroy the Red Glove Mercenary group."

    Disciple One muttered to himself. But what he doesn¡¯t know is that one of the attendants in the room has his pupils dted and at the same time back in the Inn, Sam is looking at the Specter who is repeating everyone¡¯s word Disciple One said.

    He couldn¡¯t help but chuckle at those words and gave out orders.

    "Load the curses specter. Load every curse that we stored."

    "Yes, Boss."

    With that for the next three days, Red Glove Mercenary group became busy with calling back all their members while Sam was busy preparing the special treat. Of course, he is not busy himself, rather he kept the specter busy while he enjoyed the wine.

    There were only two days for the fifteen days deadline to end and Sam decided to act on thatst day.

    But the day before that, Sam had an unexpected visitor.

    He was directly allowed into his room which surprised Sam a bit. He became extremely vignt and got ready to use everything in his arsenal.

    But when he looked at the person, he rxed a bit. Because the one that came in is only a Middle Stage Astral ne cultivator. A young man.

    He looked at Sam and said.

    "I almost thought that no one is in the room when I sensed it from outside, the concealment formation is too good."

    "Well, my very own creation. It is bound to have some standards."

    "You are confident in yourselves. That is good. I am here to make a deal."

    "Before we get to it, can you tell me why I should be making a deal with you?"

    "No, you are not making a deal with me. You are making the deal with someone else. I am just a messenger."

    "And who are you carrying this message for?"

    "Ever heard of Gaja n?"

    Sam¡¯s face turned from skepticism to disbelief in an instant.

 Chapter 1308: Another Visitor

    Sam was indeed very surprised by the words Gaja n.

    In fact, he has ns to pay this n a visit.

    Gaji n is on par with Sivan¡¯s n which is called Mari n.

    They are known as eternal rival ns within their circle of influence and they have been at odds for a millennia if not for more.

    Since Sam is going against Mari n and he cannot contact his own forces for a while, he has to go for the rival that has enough hatred against Mari n.

    In fact, even if this body-changing narrative hasn¡¯t happened, he would have still gone to them in his original body, offering a deal. After all, the Mari n is a colossus. It is impossible for him to destroy it all on his own, even with the other yers, he is sure that he would fall short.

    Of course, there are other ways, but contacting a rival n is a better way to go about it.

    "From your reaction, I will assume you know about it."

    The young man spoke again, shaking Sam out of his stupor.

    Sam came back to his senses and said.

    "It is hard not to."

    "Really? In the realms you are currently operating at, It wouldn¡¯t be much of a surprise not to hear about my n. So, I take it that you are interested."

    "Of course, I am interested, but whether I would take it or not will still depend on the type of deal you are offering."

    "I am pretty sure, you wouldn¡¯t be able to reject it.

    I am one of the sessful candidates of the Gaji n, a generationter than Sivan¡¯s generation, but I am stillpeting with their generation for a long time. My n marked me as a prodigy of some sort, but I would like to call myself ambitious.

    While my n ispletely focused on thepetition presented by the core members of the Mari n, I have a very different outlook. I am focusing on the younger generation of the n members and Sivan has attracted my attention more than anyone else.

    I have been watching him and his Butler for quite a long time and I must say, I was really impressed.

    In fact, I took a page from his book and started increasing my forces in a simr way. I never knew that the lower realms have this much to offer and one can be stronger with quantity too."

    "Well, he is indeed pretty smart when you look at it that way."

    "Of course, he is smart, but not smart enough to hide everything away. He managed to do it from his n members with the help of the threat of his Butler and their underestimating behavior towards him. But I am different and I was proven right with his sessful body switch.

    I have been recently informed that he switched his body to a new one and this one is the perfect fit he was looking for. I became curious and started searching for the original owner of the body and I unearthed some things about you.

    I must say, that I am more impressed by you than I was with Sivan. When I inquired, even more, I learned that you managed to escape with this new crippled body and I started searching.

    It took quite some time, but I managed to finally find you."

    "You still didn¡¯t tell me what kind of deal you want to make."

    "Information. I want to buy information from you."

    "What kind of information are we talking about?"

    "The information you are hiding inside your head. I researched the body-switching technique, by duplicating the souls. It is actually an ancient technique created by soul necromancers and it was found in ruin by some sole cultivator. It finally ended up in Sivan¡¯s hands.

    From what I know, you have a dormant soul of Sivan inside your head. I want to get the information from that. He knows way more information than any of the other members in the n and he has the information of the massive power he has hidden deeper. I want to know the information regarding that."

    "What would you do if you have the information?"

    "Destroy the organizations of course. I will attack the Mari n and take credit for it within my n. My session chances will increase."

    "What would I get back in exchange?"

    "Revenge against Sivan? I believe that is what you are doing currently."

    "It notpletely that. I actually nning on getting my body back."

    The young man chuckled when he heard that.

    "You really believe that you can get your body back."

    "There is a reason why the Disciples of Butler Si are deployed to deal with and this also tells me that you don¡¯t know me enough. There are very few things that I didn¡¯t manage to obtain after I set my mind to it. And this is my body, to begin with, I will obtain it by hook or by crook."

    "So, what do you want in return?"

    "For starters, immunity for a few years."

    "I guess that is within my hands. What else?"

    "I will ask what I want after I tell you what I can offer and I am sure you would be surprised by what you gain from this."

    "Oh really? Then I look forward to having a clear discussion with you, I heard that you would be finished in this realm by tomorrow. We can leave together after that."

    "That would be great and if possible, get a room with the view of the Red Glove Mercenary tower. That would serve as a nice demonstration."

    "Alright."

    The young man turned around to leave and Sam realized that he didn¡¯t get the name.

    "What is your name?"

    "Grivon. Grivon Gaji."

    "I am Sam."

    "Okay, see you tomorrow."

    With that, the young man left the room and Sam just stayed there waiting.

    Disciple One is currently pacing back and forth as he thought of the deal he made with Sam. He is trying to remember every single detail written in the contract to see if there is any loophole. But no matter how he looked at it, he felt that he covered everything properly.

    He let the Red Glover mercenaries check the information further and it turned out, Sam is the one who ced the assignments in the Blood Band Mercenary group. He figured that Sam¡¯s n was to scatter the red glove mercenaries and kill them one by one, that is why he hurriedly called back everyone.

    And his belief only solidified when he heard that some of the members indeed died where the Blood Band mercenaries are operating.

    But now that he managed to gather everyone he can, he felt that something is amiss.

    After all, there is no way, that Sam would admit defeat like this. Thest time he looked he was serving himself by getting caught, one of his brothers died and three more are severely injured.

    This time, he is getting a simr feeling. But he searched every nook and cranny of the tower and there is no danger no matter where he searched.

    Slowly it was midnight, but he didn¡¯t rest, he just stood there at the window of the tower as he looked at the inn, at this moment, he suddenly sensed something and looked towards the city authorities¡¯ building.

    At the same moment, someone came and banged on Sam¡¯s door.

    It was Grivon.

    Sam frowned and looked at him.

    "There is an unexpected visitor."

    Grivon said in an anxious tone. Sam frowned.

    "Who?"

    "Butler Si."

    Sam was dumbfounded and he immediately went inside

    "Specter, activate our tools."

    He said as he started picking his formation tes up.

    At this moment, within the red glove mercenary tower, one-fourth of the members suddenly came out of their rooms and started moving to different corners of the tower.

    They are silent and don¡¯t gather too much attention as they are moving separately. But no matter who called for them, they didn¡¯t respond which gained some confusion in return.

    But Disciple one was not free enough to take care of this issue.

    He looked at the city authorities¡¯ office with a frown. He sensed his master¡¯s presence and before he could think further, he felt a spatial fluctuation beside him.

    Butler Si appeared out of thin air and...

    *PAK*

    He directly pped on Disciple One¡¯s face.

    "What the hell do you think you are doing here? I told you to stay at my ce and not move without a scroll, you idiot."

    Disciple One was about to reply, but at this moment, Butler Si, sensed something and he ced his hands on Disciple One, both of them disappeared in an instant.

    *BOOM*

    At that exact moment, the whole tower exploded at the same time as it crashed into the ground directly.

    Butler Si and Disciple One reappeared in the street in front of the tower and looked at it while it crashed, but that is not the end of the destruction for that night.

 Chapter 1309: Ghosts

    Butler Si and Disciple One along with a bunch of onlookers watched as the tower started copsing in front of them. They were stunned by such an event happening right in the middle. Everyone heard of what happened at the inn a few days ago.

    They heard of the challenge between Sam and Disciple One, but no one expected Sam to take this kind of action.

    The explosion clearly showcased the chaos of the energy waves. When the copse of the tower waspleted, only half of the people inside the tower were alive and even they were severely injured.

    But that was not the end of it. From what looked like distorted corpses and bloody messes, several ghosts suddenly shot out.

    *SCREEEEEEEEECCCCCCCCCH*

    *SCREEEEEEEEECCCCCCCCCH*

    *SCREEEEEEEEECCCCCCCCCH*

    Several screams were heard from them as they dove towards the weak and puny members that are still alive. Butler Si felt a cold shiver through his spine as he looked at what transpired next. Even with the decades of experience and the bloodshed he himself created, he couldn¡¯t digest what he saw.

    Each ghost possessed the bodies of the mercenary group mercilessly and inflicted what seemed like a soul searing excruciating pain.

    "AAAAAAAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHHHH..."

    "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO....."

    "HEEEELLLP...."

    Everyone started screaming even though they barely had any energy left in their bodies. They are feeling the most pain they had ever felt in their lives.

    And the pain is not for their bodies, it was directed to their souls. They felt the pain of being pierced with a thousand needles, being burned in a furnace and drowned in ice cold water all at the same time.

    Apart from that, they also lost the control over their bodies. They started attacking each other as if they are archenemies for several lifetimes.

    One by one they started losing lives and the original souls in the bodies are merging with the cursed souls that are taking the possession of their bodies.

    As the cursed souls increased their strengths, they all turned towards Butler Si and Disciple One.

    Butler Si, immediately understood who their target was.

    Sam has programmed the souls such that they would increase their strength with the help of the souls of all the red glove mercenary members and they will then target Disciple One.

    From their strength, Butler Si, immediately understood one thing. If not for the fact that he is present here today, Disciple One would die worst of the deaths.

    He immediately extended his hands as his spatial energy transcended the physical space and blocked theing ghosts.

    They couldn¡¯t cross the barrier created by Butler Si, but they were managed to attack the barrier which started damaging Butler Si¡¯s psych.

    Meanwhile, Sam walked out of the inn and came to the street as he looked at the Master-Disciple Duo.

    "Fuck." He cursed out loud as he looked at the mercenary tower area.

    Three ghosts are currently rapidly coursing through the rubble as they collected the spatial rings and flew towards him.

    He collected all the rings and started running towards the city authority office.

    He needs to get out of here no matter what. He even used the mechanical leg to its full extent as he kicked on the ground and flew over the streets and houses.

    Grivon looked at Sam escaping with bright eyes. He felt an excitement that he has never felt before. It is like a treasure that nobody around him could see was clearly visible to him and only him. It was a treasure that only he could ess, obtain and utilize as he liked.

    He took out amunication token and spoke.

    "Send the authorities. Even the strongest guard at the worm hole should be here near the tower. A guy named Sam with ck metallic hand and a ck metallic leg will be arriving. Waive his tax and bring him to safety. If anyone, particrly Butler from the Mari n asks, tell them that he left and show them the wormhole to a far away realm."

    "Yes, sir."

    The other party agreed immediately without any hesitance.

    The ghosts that Sam unleashed on Disciple One are not just menacing and powerful but they are also numerous. Even though they are master and disciple, they only have two cultivation stages separating them at the moment.

    Butler Si, has hit his peak a long time ago and there is not a lot of growth left in him. But still this guy turned out to be a lot more powerful than Sam had thought. He already saw how proficient he is with the space element to the point that he managed to even stop the ghosts.

    But if he had stayed for a bit more, he would have see that the only reason why Butler Si is even struggling with this is because of the presence of his disciple. There is no way he would have had this much trouble if it was just him.

    Sam reached the city authority building in not time. He was received by the person in charge which surprised him a bit.

    "Young Master Girvon has informed us that you would be here, please follow me immediately."

    Sam was a bit skeptical, but when he thought of the threat posed by the Butler Si andpared it to the threat of this organization, he still felt it would be safe here.

    He immediately ran to the back.

    He was shown to a room full of concealment formations. There are way too many to the point even if an Astral ne Consummation stage battle urred inside, it wouldn¡¯t show a single sign to the one standing outside of the room.

    Butler Si, noticed that Sam was running towards the City authority building. But he didn¡¯t give any chase immediately. After he blocked the ghosts, he looked at disciple one and said.

    "Try to blink to the next street."

    Disciple one did as he was told, but as if they were not even there initially, the ghosts directly disappeared from the spot zoomed past Butler Si, as they went to the next street.

    Butler Si also disappeared from the spot and reappeared right next to the Disciple One.

    He knew that something like this is going to happen. Disciple One¡¯s soul is marked by these ghosts and they wouldn¡¯t stop until they get to him or until they disappearpletely.

    He could only battle it out with them.

    But it didn¡¯t take long within a few minutes, he destroyed all the ghosts and caught a hold of Disciple One as he got ready to leave this ce. But he has stop because someone else arrived at the ce. The strongest wormhole guard and people in charge arrived which made him stop. He knew there is no easy way out.

    If he just disappeared like this, Mari n would have to exin, so he calmed down and had a discussion with them and only then was he able to leave.

    Even then, he was walked to the wormholes.

    "A young man who had fake leg and fake arm came here running when the explosion started. Where did he go?"

    The guard posted there pointed into one of the wormholes and after taking note of which ce the wormhole leads to, he went back to Mari n along with his Disciple.

    Sam waited there in the room as he thought of ways to escape this situation if pushes to shove. He looked at the hundreds of thousands of inscriptions runes on the wall as he analyzed them. He managed to differentiate a few formations separately.

    He took his own brush and started writing here and there. He knew there is no way out, but if it reallyes to it, he willpletely destroy the whole thing and find a different way with the specter ad try to escape. The worst case scenario is that he would die which he is extremely unwilling to do.

    As he was thinking, Grivon entered the room and looked at Sam who is extremely vignt.

    "Don¡¯t worry. You are way too valuable for me to kill you like this. I have a lot of things that I need you to do for me."

    "I am not a goon to be hired. I don¡¯t do dirty work of someone else. Those days are far too behind me."

    "Of course, I am not hiring you for a goon. I am looking for your strength, I am hiring you for your brain."

    "That is something I am still selling. But I doubt you would be happy with the price."

    "You never know, until you name it. But first, let¡¯s get out of here. I have a perfectly safe ce where any of your enemies can never reach."

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "I am not leaving without a contract."

    "Really? You are that cautious?"

    "Last time I was not cautious, I lost a body and that is to someone from a n like yours. I am way too far away from my own organization and I am deprived of all of my resources which I painstakingly built over decades. I don¡¯t think I can ever be cautious enough in the future."

 Chapter 1310: New Workplace

    Grivon looked at Sam silently for a moment and asked.

    "What if I don¡¯t want to sign the contract? You do know that I am the only way out for you from here right?"

    "Maybe you are or maybe you are not. But you are not going to get anything out of me unless you give me the contract. I can assure you that. I am sure of it than you being my only way out."

    "Alright." Grivon agreed with a smile and they both made a simple contract.

    Grivon wouldn¡¯t be able to coerce, kill or ckmail Sam forcefully whatever he has to offer, and only when the price right would Sam offer his skills. Sam is not responsible for following orders all the time and for every service he provides, he would be given a fair price that would be discussed at that moment.

    After the contract was signed, Sam was finally relieved. He knew that if Grivon was not here, he would be in a pickle. Butler Si should have already been pissed off at Sam for killing two of his disciples and making a good chunk of them unable to even walk.

    If he started chasing Sam, he is not sure that he would be able to escape from him for long.

    But even in that condition, he didn¡¯t like the fact that his life would bepletely sold away to a stranger from some other n. Now that he has the contract, he felt a bit relieved.

    After the contract was signed, Grivon, his guards, and Sam all moved immediately, they didn¡¯t waste any more time.

    They traveled for two days as they crossed between the realms and finally when they reached a specific ce they took an interdimensional space gate and finally reached their destination.

    When Sam entered that ce, he was really surprised. It is an ind that is of the size of arge city, apart from that there is nothing else around it except the seawater.

    "This is a stray realm. I don¡¯t know if you have heard of it. But this is one of the realms that don¡¯t have any threatening life forms or massive resources. They are not really that valuable, but they make good hideouts.

    This is the only in the realm orbiting thergest star this realm can handle and this ind is thergestndmass on this.

    This ce has a moon and that acts as our waste disposal. Any trash thates out of here goes to it. It took a lot of time and strength to make a formation there.

    Now, let me show you around."

    Grivon started exining as he took him out of the main mansion.

    "This ce is for my especially talented people. Some of them are the best killers in the making, some of them are great artisans, some of them are great healers and pill makers, and some of them are inscription masters and formation masters.

    There are some people talented in one more than the other. They are good at what they do.

    They all gather here to do research while I don¡¯t have any assignments for them, but when I do have assignments they gather together to solve my problem.

    Let me show you a few things."

    With that, Sam was taken to a few rooms, there are some innovative things created, one of them is a healing room that makes it possible for a dozen healers to work on a single patient at the same time on different ailments.

    There are some puppets with unique designs, special training rooms for killers, different kinds of illusion formations, defensive formations, special weapons. Models of special structures and so on.

    Sam was really impressed by the work these people did. He also understood how different Sivan and Grivon are.

    Sivan is a person who is keen on mizing any result he got. His research bases are all over the realms and their only goal is to either gain his money or get his limbs back.

    And even the first one which focused on money is done by mizing destruction and all of his research activities are focused on that area. Not that Sam has any right when criticizing arms dealing, after all, he created the weapons that could level cities down. But even he felt that the methods the other party used were a bit below the belt.

    But Grivon is different. He gave them the freedom to the researchers and inventors here, even though he mized the products, they are not just for supplying some mindless killers or two fuel wars between organizations, there is a diversity in the range of products they used and the researchers here looked happy to be a part of this organization.

    Their creative freedom is way too precious for great inventions.

    So, Sivan might have earned more money and might have the lethal weapons like poisons and viruses but he is sure as hell didn¡¯t have the best team when he needs to solve the real problems.

    After looking through everything, he was taken to arge warehouse-like building with a lot of empty space.

    "This is your ce, this is where you are going to work from."

    "What should I work for?"

    "You can work on whatever you want," Grivon said and took out a list of names.

    "These people are experts in various fields, from now on can be considered your subordinates and you can call them whenever they are needed. Make whatever you want. I will give you whatever resources you want.

    We can discuss the price of the product after you are done with it and give me a proper demonstration."

    "No, this is not going work that way."

    Sam said calmly as he looked at the list of people. Their field of expertise is written right beside them.

    Grivon frowned in confusion as he looked at Sam.

    "What do you mean?"

    "Trust me, you don¡¯t want to give me the creative freedom that you give others. Particrly without any budget and resource limit.

    You wouldn¡¯t be able to bear that burden both financially and time-wise. So, just give me the assignments you want and I would give the results to you as fast as I can.

    "Where do you want me to get assignments all of a sudden? It would take some time, let me see what new problems I will caught up in, then I woulde back."

    "Okay then, meanwhile, I will work on something for my own use, if you don¡¯t mind."

    "You can do whatever you want."

    "Thanks."

    With that, he was sent away. Sam looked through the list of people and started marking the people that he needs.

    After that, he made a list of resources he needs for the first project he is going to take upon and gave it to the attendant.

    The attendant brought back the resources by evening and Sam then gave out the list of the people that he needed.

    They were also brought to the building.

    He started briefing them on the project he has in mind.

    This is a project he has been thinking about since the day his body was changed. He really missed this one feature a lot after he lost his body.

    That is the simtion of the divine dimension.

    He could model three-dimensional drawings of the projects he wanted to make, he could simte how they work, he could do many things with that. He had ideas on creating a simtion device like that for a long time, but he didn¡¯t act on it as he never needed it until now.

    Most of the products he made are either for his own personal needs or byproducts when he was focusing on the products for his personal needs.

    Only a few projects were done out of pure curiosity without the final results in mind.

    And since there is not much left to explore in the simtion system of the tower, he couldn¡¯t bring himself to take up his time and create a new one from the scratch, but now that he is in a situation where he couldn¡¯t use the system, he has to make this one.

    A lot of things would be easier after it was done.

    For that, he got the light elemental users and the inscription masters that are present on the ind. They are not the best at what they do, but with Sam¡¯s guidance, they are good enough for now.

    This would take some time, and he needs to do some experiments, but since the person who provides for the resources doesn¡¯t have any objections, he is free to do what he wants to do.

    While Sam is working on some of his ideas, he is not the only one who is exploring the fruits of his creative brain.

    At this moment, far away, some more people are feeling fascinated by the work he presented and those people included the friends and the foes alike.

 Chapter 1311: Creations

    Philip is currently working on a new set of designs. He has been trying to draw these perfectly for days, but he wasn¡¯t able to do it no matter how much he tried.

    This time, the design just came into his head, but he was not smart enough or experienced enough to create a blueprint from a full-fledged design for the artisans to understand. But he knew that he would eventually get there because this is not the first design, he made like that.

    In fact, this is the third one.

    Sirona walked in with her usual cold face and asked.

    "You are still not there?"

    "No, this is taking a lot more time than you think. Why don¡¯t you try this? I will transfer the memory to you and I will take over the construction."

    "No need, I amfortable with the constructions. You can just deal with this yourself."

    Philip sighed and shook his head in exasperation. He put down the tools and stood up before stretching and walking out along with Sirona.

    "So, how is the construction going. Did we finish the first part of this set?"

    "Yes, I think we are ready for a demonstration."

    "Demonstration? With that? People would be scared out of their wits if they saw something like that. We cannot use it in deste no matter what. Let¡¯s move it to the feathered. I heard there are some useless barren inds there."

    "Your wish. I will disassemble it and move it with different spatial rings, it wouldn¡¯t fit in a single storage."

    "No, no. Don¡¯t do that. I don¡¯t have that much time. Here, use the divine dimension fragment. I think this would do the job."

    Sirona took the ice divine dimension fragment and went to somece far away from the woods.

    In the middle of nowhere, there is arge colossal tower standing proudly. Several artisans are working on it as they checked the different parts.

    When they saw Sirona, they jumped down the tower one after another and gave the reports to her.

    "We checked everything ten times Madam. Everything is alright."

    "You guys go and rest. You need to go to Feathered in a while, the demonstration would be held there."

    "Thank you, Madam."

    They left and Sirona stood there as she took in the massive figure. The tower stood at least sixty meters above the ground. This is not the biggest thing they made thus far, but this tower held most of the capabilities they didn¡¯t even think possible until now.

    Sirona never thought Sam would be holding something like this in his brain.

    She knew he created many fascinating things and thought she has seen his limit, but now she could see what he is really holding back.

    When she thought why he might have held back from making this, she could only think of one answer.

    ¡¯The world is not ready for this.¡¯

    This thing causes too much destruction if it is in the wrong hands and if the designs of this thing were to leak to others and someone managed to reconstruct it or reverse engineer it, for most of the cultivators that have great individual strength, their significance would be lost.

    The Mortal ne cultivators would be utterly useless no matter how she looked at it. They wouldn¡¯t stand a chance and even most of the Astral ne cultivators would have to be careful about the presence of such an object, only a very few cream-of-the-crop cultivators would be able to resist what this thing could bring on them.

    She used the divine dimension fragment to store it away. No spatial ring as a linear space to fit the whole tower while it was still standing. So, she could only move this thing with the divine dimension fragment.

    She took it to the feathered for a demonstration.

    The demonstration was done pretty quickly and when they saw it, they couldn¡¯t help but feel their hearts go cold. That day, an ind wentpletely missing from the, and not even a single trace of it was left and it happened in exactly three seconds.

    While Sam¡¯s friends are feeling terrified by the fruits of his creative mind, somewhere far away some of his foes are looking at another set of fruits but much less destructive and much less valuable.

    Sivan got the second memory fragment a few days ago, but the ghost chimera once again threw in another fragment of its own into his head, messing with his thoughts and actions.

    It took four days for him to just calm down and look through what memories Sam¡¯s fragment has brought and he was really surprised.

    These are the memories of his early days in the deste, it contained the memory of him scaling the volcano, obtaining the feathers of the golden crow tribe, him traveling to Starwood, making of his first weapon, the golden crescent, forging the ck Meteorite Sand for Jack, making the harbinger and so on up until he created the first park.

    Everything regarding the journey came out and every invention he made on the way opened up to him.

    The creation of energy cells, the blueprints of harbinger, the blueprints of Sam¡¯s park construction.

    Everything came to his mind and he was dumbfounded.

    He knew that Sam has this flying board and he was really looking forward to seeing that, but it was nowhere to be seen when he opened up the divine dimension.

    After he got these memories, he immediately asked Yanwu who is the only one that is even willing tomunicate with me among the beasts.

    "Where is the harbinger?"

    "That was sealed inside the second floor of the tower, with the rest."

    When he heard this, he didn¡¯t know how to feel.

    He has half a mind to kill the golden ape and destroy all the locusts and termites and all the other beasts that are acting as guards to the tower, but whenever this thought came to his mind, yanwu and the rest of the beasts are looking at him with hostility.

    He knew better than messing up the fortune of gaining such beasts¡¯ loyalty. After so much effort, Yanwu started talking to him, he knew that he shouldn¡¯t piss them off and he also felt there is hope.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit shocked and awed about what else could be stored inside the tower.

    He immediately went back and started preparing for making the energy cells. He needs to use the maniption ability which he possessed even in his crippled body to make the empty spirit stones into powder,pact them again and make them into energy cells.

    He couldn¡¯t help but think of the uses Sam had for these things and felt excited and most of all he is excited to have the harbinger.

    But only after he started making the energy cells did he understand how difficult it is to make them.

    He might have had the experience with maniption ability, but he didn¡¯t have the same focus Sam has. The concentration that was needed to make these things is too much and he was never the maker, to begin with.

    After some time, he decided to give the blueprints to his artisans and research different ways to make the harbinger move while he gave the blueprints of the parks to his subordinates to create them in the realms with more mortal ne cultivators to gain the extra ie.

    He was a money whore, to begin with, and this is the perfect object for him.

    After he was done with that, he sat down with Butler Si and asked.

    "Butler Si, none of our artisans thought of using these things like this, the basic formations and inscriptions seemed to bepletely different when they fell in the hands of Sam. Why is that? Why do you think he is so capable of doing things like this?

    I am really fascinated by this moneymaking park. He did it when he was in his teens, can you imagine that? The artisans that are hundred of years old couldn¡¯t even do that, but he managed to do it.

    What makes him be like that?

    I am really looking forward to seeing what his brain holds. I want to dig it up now. I want to devour the soul as a whole, but I realized, the more desperate I appear, the easier it is for the chimera to deal damage to me.

    But I really cannot help but think about it."

    When Sivan spoke like that, Butler Si remembered the scene he saw a few days ago in the Red Matter.

    He doesn¡¯t have an answer for Sivan¡¯s question, but sure as hell knew that his young master didn¡¯t even scratch the surface of what Sam can do.

    After all, he did destroy a branch without making a move himself and everything happened in a few minutes in which, Butler Si himself almost got injured.

    When he looked at this that way, Butler Si started connecting some thoughts and came to a conclusion. He shouldn¡¯t let Sam stay away for a long time. In the few months, he was away, he managed to create that cursed ghost destruction, he doesn¡¯t want him to make something more powerful.

    He immediately excused himself and went to meet the elder from the Star Eye sect.

 Chapter 1312: Resistance

    Butler Si went to the Star eye sect once again. This is already the fourth time. The first two times, he went there because of Sam, but the third time, he went there to get the location of his disciple and he barely made it there.

    Now he is back here for another location on Sam and this time, he hoped would be thest time.

    When he went to the elder¡¯s residence, the elder was taking a nap. He is resting normally, despite his immense cultivation.

    The attendant went there and woke him up as soon as Butler Si arrived inside. The elder woke up and bowed to Butler Si.

    "I am really sorry Sir Si. Currently, the toll on my body is too heavy. The first time it was okay, but after I searched for that person named Sam, the second time, I felt a bit fatigued as if some extra resistance is added and I only learned that resistance stayed when I tried to look for your disciple.

    That is why it already took so much time to find your disciple.

    Currently, the resistance is wearing off a bit, but I will need some more time to get rid of itpletely, and then I will do whatever you want."

    Butler Si was a bit disappointed. He already learned about this situation when he came here looking for Disciple One, but he hoped it would have been gone sooner, but it seems like he was in too much of a hurry.

    "Don¡¯t worry, elder. Please rest as you need and don¡¯t rush your recovery because of me. But please do inform me whenever you are ready."

    "If it is really important, I can rmend you to someone from the sect. I assure you that they will hold every secret for you."

    "No, elder. I will just wait for you to recover. No matter how secretive they could be, they could neverpare to you and I would only take your services. There is no need for someone else to be involved in our partnership. I will take my leave now. Please do inform me, after you recover."

    "Yes, Sir."

    With that, Butler Si had to return to the n in disappointment. He doesn¡¯t know why this so-called ¡¯resistance¡¯ came upon the Elder, but he does know that anything rted to prying into the universe¡¯s secrets is dangerous and detrimental. It shouldn¡¯t be taken lightly.

    If there is such a strong resistance ced on the Elder, then that could only mean that he shouldn¡¯t be seen or tracked like this, it is a signal from nature to the elder who is prying.

    But everything these Seers do is against nature, so they often ignore these omens and things and will just brace to suffer consequences that might be triggered by their actions. But this is the first time, the bacsh hit and stayed for so many days. At least this is the first time, Butler Si, witnessed something like this.

    He stayed put for fifteen days and only after that, did the elder contact him.

    He went back to the Star eye sect and the elder is ready for doing the same ritual again.

    He sat in the middle of therge inscribed formation as he looked for Sam¡¯s location once again.

    He felt the same resistance as before, but he gritted his teeth and looked for it anyway. He could finally sense the location, but as soon as he was done.

    The formation in the room started burning. The ink itself started burning as if it was some kind of fuel being lit up and the mes centered on the elder as they hit him on the chest.

    The Elder spat out a mouthful of blood and felt extremely weak.

    Butler Si ran in without a second thought and caught hold of him.

    "Elder, are you alright? Elder?" He felt a bit anxious. He doesn¡¯t know how to react to such a situation. After all, the very reason the Elder was close to him is that he saved his life once, but from the looks of it, Butler Si put his life in danger this time.

    He felt guilty and ashamed.

    Elder cleared his throat and said.

    "Don¡¯t worry, Sir Si. I am alright. This is a normal urrence. Sometimes, one formation can only take some much pressure from the nature so when it reached its limit, something like this would happen once in a while."

    Butler Si, was still doubtful about this, but he didn¡¯t know what to say for such an answer. So, he could only believe what he was told.

    The Elder cleaned up the blood, while Butler Si waited outside. After he came out, he looked a bit pale, but he wasn¡¯t too exhausted.

    "Butler Si, I am really sorry for the sight you had to witness."

    "No, it is okay. I am really sorry that I put you through this."

    "I have some information, but I don¡¯t think this would help you."

    "Please tell me what it is."

    "The person you are looking for is within the territories under the Gaja n."

    Butler Si was shocked. This is thest thing he wanted. Sam alone is enough of a problem, but it gets mixed with the Gaja n, there would be endless trouble.

    "Do you at least know, where the approximate location is?"

    "That is what I am about to tell you. His location is being masked by the Anti-Seer lock. Which means, he is with one of the young masters of the Gaja tribe in their secret location."

    Butler Si sighed deeply.

    He looked at the Elder once again and bowed a bit.

    "I am really sorry for the trouble Elder. Please ask me if there is anything you want me to do for you."

    "Don¡¯t be like that Sir Si. I am really sorry, I couldn¡¯t help you. I will see if I can find his actual location."

    Butler Si nodded and left the ce.

    He went back to the n, but he didn¡¯t go to meet Sivan immediately. He felt a bit powerless and wanted to spend his time alone for a bit.

    But to his surprise, Sivan himself came looking for him.

    "I thought you would be here. It seems like you are also being troubled by Sam."

    Butler Si stood up hurriedly and bowed before saying.

    "Yes, young master. I wasn¡¯t able to stop him. He destroyed the Red glove mercenaries and two of my disciples died. I don¡¯t even know if the injured ones will be able to ovee the mental trauma.

    I just cannot find a way to corner him. He is just way too prepared."

    "That is where you are wrong. Red Glove is only a part of one of our 12 sets of organizations. The set it was part of was notpletely destroyed. It was only partially dealt with. You still have time."

    "No, young master. From the information I got, Sam is not within our territory anymore. He is actually in Gaja territory."

    Sivan raised his eyebrow in surprise.

    "Well, then that means, you rectified the immediate problem we are facing. I thought we wouldn¡¯t be able to get rid of him in the short time, but he escaped to the Gaja territory after you got involved, which means he felt the pressure.

    That is one problem solved, but now we have a bigger problem." They kept on discussing how to deal with this problem.

    Meanwhile, Back in the stray dimension.

    Sam¡¯s research is going smoothly. He wants to create a simtion device that simtes any person¡¯s thoughts if they willed to do so. Irrespective of their elemental affinity, but the simtion system itself works with light elemental energy, so it is a bit troublesome. But still, most of his theories were right and he knew he is going in the right direction.

    While he was deep in research, Grivon came.

    "You came faster than I thought, it has been barely two days," Sam said as he cleaned his hands after he was done inscribing something.

    "Well, I have some trouble. While I came looking for you, some of my brothers and sisters from the n are trying to reach out their filthy ws into the pie that I carefully cooked for myself.

    So, I decided I would take your help in getting rid of the ws."

    "What is the problem exactly?"

    "My brothers and sisters are trying to take over some of my businesses. Granted they are the weakest businesses without much profit, I was just trying to prate into the market discreetly in some of the neutral areas."

    "Neutral Areas?"

    "Areas that are neither under our control nor Mari n¡¯s control."

    Sam chuckled when he heard this.

    "Your ns really are self-centered. You divided realms based on that?"

    "What can I say? It was hereditary. Anyway, those fields are something that I was not good at, to begin with, and on top of that, I suffered some significant losses just so that I could enter the market, now that the hard part is over, they are taking it over.

    I cannot even stop it now, because the n meeting regarding that was over, while I was in redmatter. So, I need revenge and I am here for your help."

 Chapter 1313: Shields

    "What kind of revenge do you want?"

    "What do you mean?"

    "If you just want to kill them, you don¡¯t have toe to me. But if you want to kill them without anyone knowing and with a sense of mystery left behind, I could help you a bit."

    "No, no. No killing. If the n finds out, that I killed my peers even before my previous generation heir selection was not over, then I would be dead."

    Sam shrugged and said.

    "Okay, that is just one option anyway, there are others.

    If you want to take revenge on the business side of things, there are a few methods. You can prate the market and take away their share of customer base, you can destroy their business without any involvement in the market too.

    If you ask me, these two are the best options. I would proceed with either of those two."

    "What about others?"

    "they involve some killing and smearing the reputation and a lot more deeds that umte to kill their business."

    "Then I will go with the first two options, but still the question is which one is better?"

    "That is the question you need to answer. Do you have interest in prating into that market?"

    "Of course, I have interest, but those ces were a bit too difficult, my brothers and sisters saturated their position a long time, in fact their parents did that for them when they gave those businesses to them. They have decades of loyalty and reputation behind their stability, I would say it is impossible."

    "Nothing is impossible. Particrly in the business world. Customers might appear extremely loyal to a single enterprise, but that cannot be more wrong. They are fickle, as fickle as weathers in the wind. They just fly away along with the strongest current.

    Most of the time, the customers appear loyal to one particr brand because, there is no other brand offering a better of simr service or there is no other brand with a better service that they could afford.

    It is easy to get majority of customers to shift their interest as long as they have better product."

    Grivon looked at Sam with a but skeptical expression.

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "Okay, it seems like your age-old n teachings really got to you. I will prove it. Give me the profiles of the main businesses of the people you want to take revenge on. I will pick one as a trail and prove my point to you."

    Grivon still had that skeptical expression and took out a bunch of profiles, Sam looked through them briefly and picked one.

    "This is new. I never knew that people can target this niche and gain that many profits."

    Grivon took a peek and said.

    "Well, that is because of the loyalty and the brains behind the creations of that business. There is one main person behind this business. My sister only takes care of the customer and financial side, the person who creates the product is aplete outsider from the n."

    "She is not your real sister, is she?"

    "What do you mean real?"

    "Is she born to the same parents as you?"

    "Oh, in that way, no. She is the daughter of my father¡¯s younger brother. But she is a bit older than me."

    "That¡¯s good. You wouldn¡¯t feel as bad when you wrecked her business."

    "Wrecking her business? Do you know the percentage of market she holds in terms of defense artifacts, within that realm? Ny percent and the reason why she holds so much is that she created that market. She searched for this weirdly talented guy who was so interested in the defense artifacts and made his products more usable to people. She made them need these things."

    Sam just shook his head. He is tired of exining it to him.

    "Juste back in two days, to collect the results. I will show you, how you can wreck a person¡¯s business without doing anything underhanded."

    Grivon also shrugged as he left.

    He clearly doesn¡¯t know too much about Sam. After all, the Dusk organization didn¡¯t spread far enough. Even though it has a greater influence in dozens of lower realms, it is not the same in the higher realms. The most he reached are the Medium level realms.

    If Grivon knew how much Sam has earned in business and how many types of businesses he has monopolized, he wouldn¡¯t be this skeptical.

    Sam once again started giving out a list of materials and a list of subordinates to the attendants who brought them to the warehouse within a few minutes.

    He started designing things without much trouble. He didn¡¯t even have to think that much. After all, Sam has a decent experience with defensive formations to the point that he created a bunch of new types of defensive methods using the formations in a more unorthodox way.

    Even from the top of his head, he can think of a hundred different kinds of designs that could swallow the business of Grivon¡¯s sister.

    The assistants he asked for were stunned by the speed, Sam is dishing out the designs. If they didn¡¯t know any better, they would use him of copying from something, because only copying would grant them that speed.

    For the next two days, Sam kept himself and the rest of the group busy with the products. He created exactly one hundred models all with various elements and various functions, but all of them have one thing inmon, before activation, they all looked the same. They are but a small metal cylinder in their hands.

    It is half a foot long and they all have one button on top of them. That is also anothermon thing, but the buttons on the bodies of the cylinders varied very much as they had different functions.

    Most of these artifacts are created with the experiences of his new body as inspiration.

    Due to him having so many elemental energies and defensive measures, Sam never really got the opportunity to explore the defensive methods in other areas.

    Particrly, the energy barriers is something he only used for formations. But now that they are part of his daily routine, he managed tobine his knowledge of energy barriers and elemental energies to create varying models.

    After two days, Grivon came back and he was surprised by the cylinders neatly arranged on the table.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "All hundred products are of hundred different models. They have almost all elements. Fire, wind, water, light, dark, lightning, earth, metal, wood and space. Of course, there are some neutral models which could be used by anyone."

    "Really? Almost? What else was left?"

    "Maybe Time?"

    Grivon shook his head as he looked around.

    "Where are the neutral ones?"

    Sam pointed at a row and Grivon picked one of them.

    It has one button on the top for activation and two more on the body for variations within.

    Sam showed all three buttons and exined which is which.

    Grivon pressed the activation button. The energy suddenly condensed from within the cylinder and the surroundings as it condensed in the form of arge shield in front of him.

    It is translucent and it is glowing.

    Sam stood in front of the shield and said.

    "Hold it properly."

    Grivon held it tighly as Sam took a step back and threw a punch. He used the strength of a middle stage Astral ne pre-transcendent cultivator.

    *BAM*

    There was a loud sound, before the translucent barrier rippled and the blowpletely dissipated. Grivon was stunned. He almost didn¡¯t feel the impact at all. It as if the shield directly took the attack and sent it somewhere else.

    "Use the first variation."

    Sam said as he lunged forward and moved to the side attacking from the opening there.

    But as soon as the first variation was pressed, the shield expanded and covered Grivon in spherical barrier. The attack was once again absorbed.

    "The second variation."

    Sam said calmly and Grivon pressed it. This time it still stayed as a spherical barrier, but the as soon as the punchnded, Sam was blown away from that spot and was sent flying.

    He moved mid-air andnded safely as he walked forward.

    "The second variation works on both normal activation mode and the first variation. To deactivate it, all you have to do is press the button on top again."

    Grivon pressed it and the shield was gone.

    "I didn¡¯t think these kinds of barriers existed. I know defense artifacts use energy barriers, but these barriers are different."

    "Of course, they are different, I made them."

    "What about their durability though?"

    "That¡¯s what I am going for next." With that, Sam took out a very different device. It is a small stand with a groove that fits the cylinder base perfectly. The cylinder stands in it. Within that stand, there is another groove where he ced a space jade.

    "One charge of the artifact can take ten blows from an Astral ne Pre-transcendent cultivator at Middle-stage, three fromte-stage and one from peak stage. As for the Initial stage, I think it canst for quite a while.

    After it was gone, as long as the cylinder was not damaged, they can ce it in this and ce a space jade filled with spirit stones and ce it here, the cylinder will charge itself.

    Sam then turned the stand upside down and there is a small glowing semi-circle on it.

    "This circle indicates the charge it holds, if it isplete, then the charge is full."

 Chapter 1314: Business Class

    After Sam was done with the demonstration, Grivon started asking other questions, the questions rted to the financial side of things.

    But when he heard the price of making this, he was stunned. He didn¡¯t expect that it would this easy to manufacture and this cheap.

    "Why did no one thought of this before?"

    Sam didn¡¯t have the answer to this question. In fact, he himself had this question hundreds of times, every time he made something new from the simplest of the techniques, he asked this question to himself, but there was no one who can give him that answer.

    "So, what should I do now? How should I proceed with this?"

    "Find an organization within that realm that has a good reputation and grip over a different market, of course, it would be better if it was in the weapons market and buy a portion of that organization. Arge portion would be better.

    If it is not possible, then make a partnership with them, but only for these artifacts, after they became popr enough, we will introduce the new products and by then they would ask you to be their partner and your value only increases by then."

    "Do you want me to release this product from under the banner of others? Why shouldn¡¯t I just open my own organization?"

    "I already told you, there are many ways to wreck a business and if you don¡¯t reveal your identity as the young master of the Gaja n which you really didn¡¯t want to release, to begin with, they would devour you in whole within a week.

    There are many means and methods, I don¡¯t have time to exin to you that. I don¡¯t even know how you can be so smart and stupid at the same time.

    Why are you so dumb when ites to the business?"

    "I am not really interested in the process I guess. I am more of a military guy. Even now, all I could think of is how to utilize these artifacts to benefit my forces. I was never much of a business guy."

    "At least, you are self-aware enough to admit that you don¡¯t understand this. The business is just like war. Good products are Strong soldiers, bad products are weak soldiers. The people who run the business are themanders. If themander is good enough, they can use the weak soldiers to defeat an army of strong soldiers, but if he is bad, even if he had strong soldiers, he wouldn¡¯t be able to defeat an army of weak soldiers.

    Currently, these are strong soldiers, but they are your secret forces. You cannot go there directly and establish your strength, if you do that, your identity as the general would be revealed. You want to remain secret, so you need to appoint amander there.

    If you have a really strongmander, but none of the other parties know his strength, they would attack him, but he would be able to withstand it, but if themander is directly rted to you, they would have a chance to rte to him to you.

    But if you hire a strong local force to act as a cover while your secret soldiers act as their force to attack your enemy, your cover wouldn¡¯t be blown as a general, no one would connect the excessive strength and rte it to you. They would rte it to the local force.

    Your cover would be saved and you would gain the victory."

    Grivon looked stunned and there is a look of enlightenment on his face.

    "I never looked at it this way. I just felt burdened by all of the financials, the research burden, and all the other things that need to be handled, I couldn¡¯t even find a proper analogy to understand this.

    But now, I do. This is actually quite a simple logic."

    Sam just shrugged and said.

    "It is better that you understand, so from now on if it is business-rted, try to think this way and don¡¯t continuously ask me why I told you to do some certain things. Figure it out yourselves."

    With that, he handed over the blueprints for the artifacts to him and he went back to his simtor research.

    He has way too much to do. He just barely managed to scratch a surface.

    Grivon immediately went back to the n and contacted his secret business associate. His loyal subordinate handles all the secret businesses he is maintaining without the knowledge of his n or his peers.

    He told what Sam told him and the associate understood it immediately. He didn¡¯t need any analogies to business and war, like Grivon.

    Grivon decided that he should make him meet Sam directly so that he would be less burdened by these details.

    Along with that, he also contacted other subordinates who tried to find a ce to establish the factory for the manufacturing of the artifacts. His associate decided that it is better to not ce the factory in the same realm because there is a chance that his sister and the very organization they made a partnership with might target the factory.

    So, they decided to go for one of the ces where they have maximum influence in and decided to establish the factory there.

    After finishing the initial arrangements, he came back to Sam.

    "So, what is your price for this?"

    Sam thought for a moment and asked.

    "What would be the value of trumping all your peers and your senior sessor candidates in businesses and profits?"

    "That would make confirm my ascension to the sessor seat fifty percent more usible. The n only sees, the benefits the sessor brought to the n financially and tactical. So, you can guess how important that is if I managed to increase my share of revenue to the n while decreasing the revenue of my brothers."

    "I will make you achieve that. I will triple your revenue while I reduce the rest of your peers¡¯ revenue by half, would you be able to get me the heirloom of Divine Pce of Healing?"

    Grivon was stupefied.

    "Divine Pce of healing? Do you mean Vardar¡¯s ce? What do you need his heirloom for?"

    "I have my reasons. I heard Vardar will sell his soul if he can obtain something of great value for it. I want his heirloom, The Blessed Umbre. Will you be able to get it?"

    "I guess I can try to buy it from him. But I need to check it first."

    "Try it. If it is possible. I will give you a new lease on the business side of things. Your peers or seniors wouldn¡¯t be able topete with you. I will give you the ideas and designs and I want some of the revenue from it. Are you down for that deal?"

    "Let me see how it goes with the Divine Pce of healing first. If I can I would agree to it. I have no problem with that and as for the revenue, you don¡¯t have to worry about it. The researchers here have a rule, if I managed to obtain any revenue from any design or product they created, they would be entitled to twenty-five percent of the profits I made.

    You are no exception."

    It was Sam¡¯s turn to be surprised.

    "You are really way too generous for someone from a n like this."

    Sam muttered, but Grivon just smiled and left the ce.

    Sam went back to the research.

    While Grivon is working on the first deal between Sam and him, Butler Si is feeling a bit conflicted.

    He is currently pacing around his yard as he kept on thinking for a solution to the current problem. He believed in the prediction of the elder from the Star eye sect.

    There is no way he could be wrong, but if Sam is really in the Gaja n, he knew how troublesome it would be for Sivan.

    He needs to find a way to deal with Sam before something drastic happens and he had a feeling that the more he waited, the more powerful and disastrous the iing attack would be.

    After an hour of this continuous pacing, he finally had a determined expression. He looked through the spatial ring and took out a special token.

    It looked like it was made of condensed and solidified blood.

    Sam would have easily recognized this. This is a token made of blood iron.

    "It seems like, it is time to involve those people."

    He sighed and disappeared from the spot.

    He traveled for three days and finally reached a small without many powerful beings.

    The strongest person on this is barely Peak stage of Astral ne Initiation.

    At least that is what the rest of the world sees. He went to a corner of the deep in the woods where no one ever showed up.

    There is an underground construction there which he essed through a hole in the ground.

    There a space gate formation was present and there is a groove on the pirs surrounding the formation.

    He ced the token in that groove where it fit perfectly and entered the formation which made him and the token immediately disappear.

 Chapter 1315: League of Blood Iron

    Butler Si, reappeared in the middle of some woods, but there is not a single sign of life around him. Even the trees in the woods arepletely withered. There is not a single leaf in sight, and even the ground is devoid of any dried leaves.

    He currently stood in a small circr patch in the middle of these dead woods and the Blood Iron Token once again came back into his hands.

    There is a small path leading somewhere and he looked at that path with aplicated expression. He is quite reluctant to go there, but by now, he is already at a point of no return. He took a deep breath and started walking in the path.

    He walked slowly like a normal person and it took ten minutes for him toe out of the woods and he appeared before arge stone gate.

    He ced his hands on it and gently pushed.

    It opened without making a single noise, even though it is literally grinding against the floor.

    Inside, there is a stone-paved path that lead to therge stone house in the middle of the plot ofnd.

    There is a string of words etched on top of the house.

    "LEAGUE OF BLOOD IRON."

    Butler Si, had a determined expression as he walked to the stone house and opened the door, revealing a small room with nothing but a stone table and a middle-aged man sitting behind it.

    There is not a single sign of any other person or things inside the room. The middle-aged man is sketching something on a piece of beast skin with what looked like a piece of charcoal.

    He didn¡¯t even take a look when Butler Si walked.

    Only when Butler Si came to the table did he look at him.

    "Wee to the League of Blood Iron. May I know what your membership status is?"

    Butler Si, didn¡¯t answer and took out the Blood iron token once again, before cing it on the table.

    The middle-aged man who has a turban on his head with a face full of beard looked at the token with a smile.

    "Oh, an honorary member. It has been a long time since we had one of those visits this ce. Please let me verify."

    Butler Si just nodded.

    The middle-aged man took the token and ced it on the table as he removed the beast skin and the charcoal from there.

    The token lit up and a projection came out of it. He looked through the details and smiled once again.

    "Sir Si, wee back to the league. Are you here for making your membership permanent again or are you looking for someone to carry out an assignment for you?"

    Butler Si pursed his lips and said.

    "I would like a temporary direct membership for now. I don¡¯t think I would be able to stay longer and I also need an assignment carried out."

    "Let me process that. It would take some time, please wait."

    With that, he took the token and went through a door on the wall behind him. He came back after five minutes and gave the token back.

    "Your temporary membership has been confirmed. You would be a full-fledged member for a month and in this one-month period, you would be able to go to the league¡¯smon room directly through your token if you wish to.

    Please take the door to your left and you would arrive there."

    "Thank You."

    Butler Si, said politely as he entered the door to his left. He could feel the space warping around him and he reappeared in the middle of what looked like a bar.

    There are over half-a-dozen people there among them three people are sitting together, while the other three are sitting by themselves separately.

    Apart from them, there is a bartender at the bar counter, who is polishing some crystal ss.

    Butler Si walked to the counter and took a seat.

    "I would like a Sudden death."

    "Right away sir."

    The bartender politely said as he walked to the shelves as he picked different kinds of alcohol from which he started preparing a drink.

    He poured it into arge crystal ss and served it to Butler Si who took a sip as he reminisced.

    "Just like I remember. Thank you."

    "You are wee, Sir Si. Are you back in business?" Bartender asked with the same polite smile.

    "No, not really. I am here for something personal. I would like to ce an assignment."

    The bartender nodded and took out a scroll which he gave to Butler Si, who started filling out the nks in it. This is an application form, after he was done filling it, he took out a portrait of Sivan, which means it is currently a portrait of Sam, and attached it to the scroll.

    The bartender looked through the details, there are some details even regarding the body switch, Sivan made and how the current possessor of the body is not Sivan and making sure that the person has no good rtions with the Mari n.

    "That is good enough. I will ce the order and inform the league members."

    "Thank you."

    "By the way, Sir Si. That person hase back." He said while wiping a ss with his head down. His voice is still polite, but it is not as vibrant as before.

    Butler Si, stopped sipping his drink and looked at the bartender with a surprised expression.

    "He came back? Why did he suddenly appear out of nowhere? I thought he lost his strength and went into the hiding in some low-level realm."

    "No, Sir Si. He is stronger than ever before. He was only taking a break from all the bloodshed, but suddenly he came back.

    He said something about someone crossing a line once again and this time, it seemed to have affected the secluded life he was living. He came back with increased anger and the Twelve Keys are having a hard time appeasing him."

    Butler Si downed the whole ss of cocktail and felt a bit frustrated.

    "Every member of the league has let loose a bit with him not being present here for quite some time, some of them even went so far as acting asckeys for the members of Divine League. He is really furious and is looking through the documents one by one relentlessly."

    "How long has it been?"

    "A few months." Butler Si finally sighed.

    "So, there should at least be some league members who arepletely safe and willing to take the assignments right?"

    "Yes, there are."

    "That is enough for me. I don¡¯t really care what he does. Let him go berserk for all I care."

    "But your issue with him. He mighte looking for you."

    "If he would havee for that, he would have already been at my ce. Do you really think, just stepping out of the league would have given me a way out? You and I both know, what it takes to get out of that man¡¯s sight."

    "Yes."

    There was some silence. Butler Si had another drink before taking out the token.

    "I need to go out and get rid of my other responsibilities for a while. Even though temporary I still need to follow the league rules, so I will be busy for the next three days. Just don¡¯t bother about the vetting and hire whoever is willing to do the job."

    "Yes, Sir."

    "And don¡¯t mention my arrival to that person by yourself. Only talk when he asks for me."

    With that he took the Blood Iron Token and injected his energy, it took him back to the formation in that remote, from where traveled another three days to go back to the Mari n.

    He met with Sivan immediately.

    "Young Master, I wouldn¡¯t be able to serve you for the next month."

    "What happened Butler Si, are you okay?"

    "Yes, young master, I am trying to handle the issue regarding Sam. He is currently in the middle of the Gaja n, even the star eye sect is unable to pinpoint his location. I will go undercover to the nearest realm and see if I can find anything.

    And I also assigned the task in the league, so they should be able to find his location."

    "What? You went to the league? Are you out of your mind? Is that why you are leaving for the month?"

    "Yes, young master. ording to the league¡¯s rules, any temporary or permanent member cannot work for any external organization. I applied for the temporary membership so that we can have more ess to some high-level members. The normal members wouldn¡¯t be able to enter the Gaja n."

    "You can just stay here. You can just resign the post and just stay here without working for a while."

    "No, young master. League¡¯s rules are absolute. If we respect them, the league respects us back. And by respect from the league, I mean them letting us survive. I hope you will go into seclusion for this month.

    I already made a deal with your uncle, he would be able to look after you within the n.

    Go to your special residence and don¡¯te back until I am back here."

 Chapter 1316: Grey Marsh

    While Butler Si made arrangements to deal with Sam, the person in question is knee deep in research.

    But he has toe out of it because, Grivon is asking so many doubts about the business and their strategy. Only when he once again met with him after this week did he understand, how much Grivon has done and how fast he managed to move.

    Within a week, he established a factory with people to forge cylinders and people to draw the required inscriptions and finally the people to assemble and test the product properly.

    He had done all of this in a week. Maybe the pre-existence of the building might have helped a lot, but it is still faster than Sam had expected. But on top of that, he actually had teams currently discussing deals with three different organizations.

    His associate directly contacted the heads of the three different organizations, he kept his identity and his rtion to the n a secret, but he still managed to give them a taste of his strength and power so that the other party would be open and a bit more honest about the whole cooperation.

    Now, he is having trouble because, he doesn¡¯t know which organization he should choose. He came to Sam once again since even his associate cannot pick one.

    Sam looked at the profiles of the three organizations carefully.

    "You have a very great opportunity here, but I don¡¯t know if you are capable of shouldering and powering through it."

    Sam said casually as he took a sip of some wine.

    "Opportunity, what is that?"

    "The profiles of the three organizations arepletely varying. They belong to different organizations but they also happened to be the top three organizations of this onerge realm.

    You can cut a deal with all three of them without stepping on anybody¡¯s toes."

    "How is that even possible?"

    "It is right before your eyes. Just how dumb are when ites to business.

    The first organization, is an overlord. They own half of the realm. They have superior authority over the realm and they don¡¯t have too much of their branches spread over to the other realms, because they know that the hold they have on their own realm is good enough.

    After all, that is a realm with over thirty eights that have abundance of resources. If I were them, I would act like that as well.

    Apart from the neen surely subordinates, the rest of thes also had to give them some leeway for their businesses.

    The remaining two organizations are considerably younger and weakerpared to the first one, they are just recently expanding and even though they are ranked number 2 and 3, their main strengthes from the external realms.

    They knew they couldn¡¯t tackle the first organization with the resources inside the realm, so they expanded outwards and are increasing their strength, I must say they are doing really good as they managed to get a decent share over the market with their businesses in the given timespan.

    But you don¡¯t have to consider their internal market grasp. You go for the first organization for the market grasp of that realm within which would defeat your sister, then you would go for the other two organizations for the external development.

    You would supply all three of them.

    First one, would sell the items in the realm, the second and third will export them to the different realms they are operating in.

    It is that simple."

    "But the heads of the three organizations don¡¯t see eye to eye, how can we make them all agree and make sure that they don¡¯t eat each other out."

    "That is where your strength and promisee in. You use a carrot and stick method. You first make all three of them afraid of you and then you have to give them a promise that you would give the next batch of new products you might have to them.

    At least, when it concerns the business within that realm and the realms they are exporting.

    They have their own pies and they would eat them without eyeing others."

    "That sounds so simple, why do you think that I didn¡¯t think of that?"

    "Because of the same reason you said. You are retarded when ites to business. But your business associate might have seen this, why didn¡¯t he tell you this."

    "Well, he is kind of a linear person. He would only do the task that I ask him to do. I asked him to find the best options to cooperate, he did and when I asked his opinion which would be better choice between these three, he gave me the first one, since my objective is to take over my sister¡¯s market.

    But I didn¡¯t ask for any alternatives that might benefit me, so he didn¡¯t give them to me."

    Sam just shrugged.

    "Then ask him from now on. Don¡¯t disturb me for every small thing."

    "Well, I will ask him. But I am here for something else as well."

    "What is it?"

    "Sivan¡¯s branches. Give me a location. I need to flex my muscles a bit. I will personally lead a group take them down."

    Sam thought for a moment and replied.

    "Do you know the named Grey Marsh?"

    "I know that, it is a in the realm not so far away from here. Does he have a branch on that?"

    "Branch? He owns that. Every special, exotic beast thates out of that is something he reared it inside. The organization that is ruling the is under him and they take the creations from one of the gicbs, Sivan has and leave the creatures there is a controlled but natural environment.

    They will grow enough after feeding on the creatures and he will hunt them and they will be sold out as exotic earth and water elemental beasts that are so desired by argemunity.

    Have you ever wondered, how he is managing to catch a few hatchlings as well whenever he had creatures? Because, he is only catching the creature from the marsh while he brought the hatchlings from theb."

    Grivon was dumbfounded.

    "Grey Marsh is a neutral area, but we have some friends there. The organization you are saying that rules the are friends with one of my brothers."

    "Isn¡¯t that brother¡¯s name, Gyron? I know of him too. He is feeding some of your information to the friends he had on Grey marsh which is ending up on the table of Sivan.

    Why do you think all the conquests that were undertaken by the youngsters of your organization werepletely gone wrong? Do you really think that it is a coincidence?

    That strife between you guys and the younger generation of mari n was actually caused by Sivan, because he was bored.

    He wanted to see which group would win by staying united and he enjoyed it thoroughly."

    "What? To enjoy it?"

    "Yes, there is no other motivation, he didn¡¯t even care to look for the hidden forces that were brought out or the special weapons that were used, he had people record everything and he had those videos in his private collection.

    Trust me, when I looked through those memories, even I was entertained."

    "Holy shit. My brothers were yed."

    He looked horrified. Sam was a bit surprised.

    "I thought you don¡¯t like your brothers."

    "Of course, I don¡¯t. I am feeling sad because I missed this."

    Sam was dumbfounded this time. He really fell in the middle of some twisted freaks.

    "Anyway, since I gave you the location, do me a favor. Pick some of the beasts they created. It would be better if they are alive, but even the corpses would help and also my specter would being with you."

    "Why?"

    "I am going to collect the souls. I need them for something. Also, don¡¯t reveal your identities."

    "Of course, we are not going to reveal your identities. When ites to battle, I am sure I am better than most. Who knows, I might even better than you."

    "Its good to have dreams, but it would be better if they made any sense. Now, go and take care of your business and don¡¯t disturb me for the next week, even if you came back with the task. I am at a critical juncture of my research."

    Sam went back to research and Grivon went back to handle things on the other end.

    He went to the business associate and exined Sam¡¯s n.

    "That is indeed usible." The associate said nonchntly.

    "Did you know that before?"

    "Yes."

    "Then why didn¡¯t you tell me anything?"

    "You didn¡¯t ask me for that. You said particrly when you hired me that I should just do as you asked and obtain the results that you want. I am doing the same."

    "But this is a better result."

    "Yes, it is. But this was not the result you wanted."

    "Okay, okay. I am an idiot, if you have better ns, tell me from now on. Okay?"

    "Yes."

    After that small discussion, he went back to his troops and with a team of ten made his way to the grey marsh.

 Chapter 1317: Double Agent

    Grivon entered the Grey Marsh that same day along with his crew and directly went after the main branch of the organization.

    He and his team wore navy blue cloaks fully covering their bodies. They even used some crystal eye masks that mask their eyes. They are extremely powerful. His team has extremely high-level cultivators and every one of them could be considered overkill.

    He has a necromancer who collected souls and got the information. He learned who the head of the organization is passing the information to and where they are keeping the mutated hatchlings and the locations of the contained environments for the fully grown beasts.

    He went with the team and started hunting until the next day as he collected the beasts and specter collected souls.

    They finished the whole thing and came back to the stray dimension. But he didn¡¯t disturb Sam, instead, he focused on the information he got and decided to investigate it himself all the while keeping an eye on the business deal that was going on.

    One week passed like that.

    Sam managed to make his minor breakthrough in the research. At the moment, he is standing in the middle of a metal box as he wore a pair of gloves as he tried to draw something in the mid-air.

    A few lines which looked like they are made of condensed like appeared in the air. He pressed something on the gloves and they changed their color, he tried to hold the lines and he managed to do it.

    He moved it like a stick. He turned off the whole thing and smiled.

    This is the big step, but it is not ready yet. He still has a lot to do regarding this and he knew he would be having more fun doing this.

    After he was done there, he handed over the gloves for the assistants to test them once again, before he left and went to take a bath.

    He knew that Grivon would being that day. He had a meal and went to meet with him.

    "So, what do you need to learn today?" Sam asked directly.

    "What do you mean?" Grivon was really surprised.

    "I gave you business lessonsst time. So, I was wondering if you want to learn something else. Cooking, drinking, maybe some tips for bed."

    Grivon gave him a side-eyed nce and said.

    "That is really funny, now can we talk some serious business? I have brought everything you asked for. The Grey Marsh ispletely dealt with and today, my business is officially starting. My sister already moved some of her forces from the n grounds and even she moved.

    It seems like she wants to deal with this problem violently. I sent my own team there and they are going to handle any surprises that my sister might create."

    "That is one problem solved. Anything else?"

    "Not much. I brought the things you asked for. You can take a look at them. And I also have new information from the Grey Marsh, I investigated and I want to see if you know anything else before I decide to make a move."

    "What kind of information?"

    "The leader of the Grey Marsh directly reports to someone named, The Cook."

    "The Cook? I know that guy from Sivan¡¯s memories, he is an intelligence broker. He is also one of the guys that operate solely and don¡¯t belong to the twelve foundational organizations of Sivan. That information is urate, you can act on it if you want.

    But it is hard to find him."

    "That is the point here. The Cook is actually an agent of the Gaja n. He is the intelligence broker we employ. We work with him, we put him there."

    Sam was surprised by this.

    "What do you mean you put him there? It is Sivan who made hime here. Sivan saved his life and The Cook didn¡¯t want to stay in his debt forever, so he was ced in the middle of your territories and his territories to broker intelligence.

    He finds people who have intelligence on your n and gains that information to pass it over to Sivan and Mari n."

    Grivon looked horrified when he heard this. Sam looked at his expression and a thought popped in his mind.

    "Don¡¯t tell me, your n did the same."

    "Yes, that is what exactly happened. One of the sessor candidates of the past generation. The guy who might be considered my uncle has found this guy and brought him to the n, we saved him and ced him in the middle to trade intelligence for us. This is the picture."

    Grivon showed the picture and Sam¡¯s facial expression changed once again.

    "You guys are screwed, in the most royal way. Somebody is ying on the two sides of the game and he might really not be of any side.

    He is ying for his own side and is trying to screw both of your ns over by managing the intel. That is a pretty nice n. I have done something like that before too and trust me it is extremely effective."

    "I don¡¯t think he is doing a good job at that. None of his intel was wrong. We almost got everything down to the teeth whenever we followed the information he passed down to us."

    "I thought you are good at warfare."

    "I am good at warfare. But this is not warfare."

    "This is warfare, Grivon. You are indeed too young and na?ve. Espionage is a big part of warfare. If you cant even be good at that basic thing, you can never be good at warfare.

    Just go to the spot, the next time you set up a meeting, catch him and get the information you need.

    That is all you need to do and the problem will be solved. You will understand after you extract his memories."

    "The next meeting is in two days."

    "You can do that then. What else? Do you have other matters? I want to go back to my study, I have way too many new ideas to give you lectures here."

    "Well, this might be a bit problematic, I don¡¯t know if you will agree."

    "Just tell me what your problem is. I don¡¯t like this beating around the bush and you projecting your doubts early on. You can be direct and precise and I will give you what you want if I can give you what you want and if I don¡¯t want to, I will deny it with an equally direct and blunt response.

    So, just ask me. You will get an answer."

    "We have a person in the n. An old man who sweeps the n grounds. I don¡¯t know who he is, neither do my brothers and sisters, subordinates, and even the elders.

    But some of the highest levels of elders with enough authority let him be. He would be in different ces randomly as he sweeps the courtyards, streets and sometimes, he sits under a tree.

    He doesn¡¯t show a single sign of cultivation. There is not a single energy wave we feel from him. Some people just make fun of him and some people just ignore him. But I want to befriend him."

    "It still doesn¡¯t exin what you need from me."

    "I will get there, let me exin first.

    That old man is one of the oldest members of the n, he is over one thousand years old and he should be at the peak of Astral ne Consummate stage."

    "And how do you know that and the rest of your peers don¡¯t?"

    "It is because I read through the library that was not touched since three hundred years ago and there are records of our ancestors. This person was a legend back then. He destroyed everything that stayed in his path with a calm face.

    There is a story that said that the head of the Mari n at that time, literally wet his pants in a battle with him."

    "That still doesn¡¯t answer the question, you are giving me too many waste details."

    "He doesn¡¯t have a leg now. I don¡¯t know what happened, but his leg was gone."

    "So you need an artificial limb to bring this guy to your side."

    "Yes."

    "Then, your question should have been, ¡¯I need you to make an artificial leg to a person I am trying to poach, will you do it?¡¯ I don¡¯t need all of these details."

    "Well, you are an expert in many things, I just want to get your opinion."

    "I don¡¯t think so. You are not getting opinions, you are trying to fish for information."

    "What do you mean? Do you really think, I would think you have information on one of my ancestors? How stupid do you think I am?"

    "No, I think that you think that you are keeping a good cover while you are analyzing me. You are cing different scenarios, including the business n, the shield problem, and now this old man thing to test me."

 Chapter 1318: Old Man

    "What do you mean ¡¯analyzing¡¯ you? Do you really think that I am that bored?"

    "Don¡¯t treat me like an idiot Grivon. You are insulting my intelligence if you think that you could just get out of this situation with those slimy words.

    I make my judgment calls only after I clearly understood the situation.

    Every problem you have mentioned in front of me, even if I don¡¯t have anything to do with it sometimes, you are looking for my reaction. Of course, you might be looking for my insights, but your utmost priority was that you are looking for my reaction.

    You don¡¯t know much about me. You don¡¯t have enough information around you that could help you understand what kind of person I am.

    With the limitations of your knowledge, in your view, I am just a guy who was worthy enough to be targeted by Sivan and skilled enough to survive and even damage Sivan after that. That alone makes it worth it for you to poach me.

    But apart from that, you don¡¯t know me, you don¡¯t understand my intentions, you don¡¯t understand my thought process, you don¡¯t get why I would trade such technology just for you helping me take revenge.

    You are trying to get inside my brain and the start of it, are you trying to understand my reactions to different situations and things, and this time, a thing is an old man without a leg."

    Sam smiled after he was done and Grivon stayed silent in his seat, he doesn¡¯t know what to reply, he wanted to refute, but he was caught off guard, he waspletely blindsided by Sam openly questioning his motives, even though he is notpletely right, he is close.

    He is indeed trying to understand Sam, but he is not looking for the answers regarding the questions Sam thought he was pursuing, he only needed to know how greedy Sam can be, how rational he can be, how confident he is in his ideas, he wanted to know Sam¡¯s emotions, what he cares about, what could invoke sympathy inside him, what would make him angry, what would make him excited.

    So, far he didn¡¯t find anything.

    The biggest emotion Sam has shown him is amusement when he said his problems or irritation when his research was being disturbed.

    Apart from that, there is not much emotion. He smiles asionally, but he was never particrly happy, but he was not particrly sad either, which is weird for a guy who got his body stolen like that.

    He just wanted to have a better grasp on a dangerous person who is working with him. He just wanted to avoid risks. But he already got caught.

    Sam smiled when he looked at Grivon¡¯s expression.

    "You don¡¯t have to worry too much. You are not the first person that wanted to read me like a book. At least you are trying to be subtle about it, I have had experience with much more direct and blunt approaches.

    It is just that you don¡¯t have any experience in this, you are not really good at this.

    So, if you want to study further, learn first."

    He had that amused smile on his face which made Grivon feel a bit embarrassed. But Sam just continued.

    "As for the answer to your question, I will make the limb, but bringing the old to me and making him agree to measure his leg is your problem.

    By the way, it takes a long time to make this and I need the best of the best artisans who are good at making things precisely.

    They should be the epitome of perfection. I don¡¯t need artists who are extremely creative, I need tools that would easily learn and adapt faster. If there is even a slight chance, then I wouldn¡¯t be able to ensure that the old man wouldn¡¯t be angry."

    "The thing is, I already made the old man agree, all you need to do is,e out and take measurements and after you are done with the product, you also need to train him a bit to understand how this thing works."

    "So, when are we going?"

    "We can go anytime you want."

    "No better time than now. Let¡¯s go."

    Grivon led him out of the stray dimension and they went to the Gaja n¡¯s main estate. It is huge. Massive. It is as big as a small town and it was all for essentially one family.

    Sam looked at the luxury and elegance shown in the surroundings, the gardening is something that made him chuckle.

    They are using floral sculptures that could be groomed in the garden. It seems like they are extremely obsessed with the looks of the n.

    While they were walking, Sam observed the behavior of the guards, servants, and even some lower-level n members. All of them saluted to Grivon and there is not a single n member who just walked past him without greeting him.

    It is almost like they have no problems whatsoever between them all the while they are trying to make a mess out of each other.

    Sam is currently wearing the ck cloak to cover his facepletely. If his face was shown within this n, he would be killed before he could even make a sound to start exining how he is not Sivan.

    After they walked for some time, they finally reached an old shack.

    There are a bunch of trees in the vicinity, this ce was not as well-groomed as the surroundings. The old man had long hair and arge beard, they are messy, but he is clean. He wore clothes that looked old and ragged, but even they are clean, they were just a bit roughed up.

    They walked there and Grivon was the first one to meet with him, he gestured Sam to stop and walked towards him and started speaking in a whisper.

    After he was done with the whispering, he gestured for Sam toe.

    "You can proceed."

    Sam ced his hands on the right leg of the old man as he used an observation ability. He observed the whole leg for every single minute detail and made sure nothing is hidden from him.

    But the more he looked, the more surprised he was. He couldn¡¯t help but nce at the old man who seemed to have understood his thoughts and just smiled while he slightly shook his head.

    Sam looked at him and nodded in understanding.

    He finished getting the structure of the leg and then focused on what is left of his left leg before finishing up.

    Both of them once again walked out of the estate and Sam couldn¡¯t help but ask.

    "That old man..." But he was cut off.

    "I know, I know. The old man is not as powerful as I made him out to be. He lost a lot of his cultivation. He is not even one percent as strong as he was in his prime."

    Sam looked at him in surprise and swallowed the words he was about to say and changed them.

    "If you know why are you trying so hard for him. You do know that this limb doesn¡¯t fall under the category of the deal we made regarding your businesses.

    This is apletely new deal and it wouldn¡¯t be cheap."

    "I know that too. It is just that man has contributed so much to the n to be only treated like dirt at the moment. He spent his whole life fighting for the n, I read the stories and I felt terrified whenever I imagined myself in a situation simr to the one he was in.

    And he managed to do that when the n was not what it is today.

    He is the reason why we are lording over like this, but he is but a crazy old man in the eyes of his descendants.

    I don¡¯t really like that treatment he was going through.

    I just wanted to make sure that he gets what he deserves, but since it is a bit too far away from me, I will do whatever I can do to thank him."

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but smile, but it is not the smile of joy or kindness or eptance. It is once again a smile of amusement.

    This guy wanted to open up to Sam and study him, but instead, he opened up and gave out such an important character trait about him that easily.

    "Don¡¯t ever be my enemy Grivon. You are such easy prey. Even with all the resources and fighting strength you possess, you wouldn¡¯tst a month against me."

    "Why is that?"

    "You are too empathetic. I am not saying it is a bad trait, but the methods I employ when I am really going at my enemy will make your blood churn and heart go cold. You wouldn¡¯t be able to properly think after seeing one of the scenes I will leave behind.

    You would be like a mouse trapped in a maze filled with cats, you would be searching for routes toe out of the maze of confusion I create for you, but you will always end up in the mouth of one cat or the other.

    Which means, you should be careful in the current battles you are going through."

 Chapter 1319: Medicine

    Two days after Sam and Grivon made the trip to the n.

    Sam took a break from his research. He is a bit tired of the grunt work and handed it over to the assistants as he rxed with some chilled liquor.

    Grivon sat beside him in his blue cloaked attire. He just returned from dealing with The Cook.

    "You are right. I looked through the memories. He hates both of our ns and yed two young masters from two ns and made them fools. He mixed up the intel on both sides. He is not even ying some grand scheme, it is not even formted in his head yet.

    But currently, he is just making sure that both ends got the correct information so that they would destroy some of their opponents¡¯ targets. Then he is nning of sending some of ours and some of theirs on some suicide missions by messing the intel."

    "Why is he doing that?"

    "I don¡¯t know exactly why. That is what is most surprising. It seems like there is a voice inside his head indicating his hatred towards both the ns and he is taking revenge. He knew that our ns wronged him, but he doesn¡¯t know how."

    "That is really interesting, maybe you should have brought him here, I would have loved to take a look."

    "Really?"

    "Since he is dead, I can say whatever I want. It doesn¡¯t make any difference. Anyway, what else do you want, you are disrupting my break."

    "Since you said that it would take a long time to make the limb, why don¡¯t we talk about my other brothers and sisters?"

    "Sure, what kind of revenge do you want next?"

    "I saw one of my brothers is having some trouble recently. He is currently going through some rough patches. My intel tells me that his close associates are found dead recently."

    "Someone killed the close aides of your brother in the n?"

    "Not in the n, they were dead in the realm where his business foundation was established. Both of his subordinates died out of the blue. I don¡¯t even know whether they are killed or something else happened.

    All I know is that they are critical in running his medicine business which I want to enter now. My associate is already getting in touch with some other business organizations. I need your help."

    "Medicine? What kind?"

    "All kinds, he has a massive grasp on the market and I want to destroy it. I want to take over everything before he finds the proper recement that could hold his own market."

    "I can help you, but I would need another set of people working for me. Your other research projects might be hindered because of this."

    "No problem, if I can get that market under my control. I wouldn¡¯t worry if all the other research fell behind for a decade."

    "It wouldn¡¯t take that much. It is not that hard actually. I was actually dabbling in some medical research before my body was stolen and I wanted to introduce to the market under my control first. But I think I can introduce in yours since I would get twenty-five percent, that would also give me a lot of money before I go back to my organization."

    "Why? Are you that sure that your organization would be poor in your absence?"

    "It would be a bit strained for spirit stones, but not for the reasons you can think of."

    "Now that I think about it, why didn¡¯t you directly go for your organization? You are just staying within this ce and ying around with some dangerous people under Sivan, you could have just gone to your organization and prepared there right?"

    "No, I cannot, there is a loophole in the contract I made with Sivan. He would be waiting for me to go to my organization."

    "Why is that?"

    "In the contract we made, it was written that ¡¯In my absence, the organization wouldn¡¯t be attacked for a decade by any of Sivan¡¯s forces and his subordinates¡¯ forces. If I go back, it wouldn¡¯t be considered my absence and he would be able to attack my organization. It is not the time for me to go and meet them.

    They are making preparations, but once they were done, I will be out of here."

    Sam exined as he started drawing something on paper.

    He has some ideas regarding the medicine industry. He wanted to use some of the new techniques he learned to increase the speed and efficiency of medical recovery.

    He now has a chance and he can also make some money on the way. He is sure that Philip would be exhausting all the money Sam stashed up and the profits from the organization for the preparations, so it wouldn¡¯t hurt to have some more.

    "I think, I can give you a prototype in ten days, do you think you can wait for that long?"

    "Prototype? you are going for a machine?"

    "Yes and no, you will understand when I am done."

    Sam then started writing down some recipes for potions and gave them to him.

    "These are some of the potions I like very much. I think these would help you if you really cannot hold back for now and this will also give you a chance to establish yourself in the market.

    Once you release the star product outside, you will be able to take over the whole market by yourself. Just give me ten days."

    "Alright."

    Grivon didn¡¯t bother much and took the recipes before leaving.

    Sam worked on the thing for the next ten days along with some of the assistants he had and it really seeded perfectly.

    Meanwhile, Grivon indeed prated the market, and this time with the effort from his business associate, he managed to gain a great deal with just the potions.

    But there is something else that he also noticed, some more subordinates of his brother are dead and so are some of the subordinates of other brothers and sisters.

    They all died the same and the nunched a deeper investigation into the whole thing.

    "They are thinking it is some kind of deadly microorganism.

    This is something Mari n often uses. They will throw these kinds of mutated abominations on us and we only find out when some die like this. I believe this is another attempt from them."

    Sam was really surprised by the revtion.

    At first, he just thought that those subordinates were killed because of the normal shes between the same n members. After all, that is a cruelerpetition than the rest of the worldbined.

    But it seems like the current situation is a lot more interesting than he thought. He even went as far as thinking that this whole thing might be about him.

    As conceited as it sounded, he felt that there is a possibility.

    But he didn¡¯t mention it and took out the new product he was working on for a while.

    It is an Automatic Medicine Injector. It looked like a gun, but it is used for injecting medicine into the body.

    Sam decided to take the injection route of the medicine which was very minimally explored in this world.

    The injection is mostly used for killing, not for saving, so he decided to even it a bit and make sure it is viable for both of the cases. But there are some added tweaks that would enhance the effect.

    "Pick one of the researchers and injure him a bit."

    Sam asked as he looked at Grivon.

    Grivon looked a bit surprised and reluctant. He looked at the researchers, but instead of reluctance, they are all quite excited. He was confused and picked one of the artisans.

    Sam took out a space jade and ced it on one of the grooves of the injector. The artisan cut himself on the arm and just left his natural healing to take care of it, but he injured himself deep enough that it would take a day for it to healpletely.

    Grivon looked at him as if he was looking at a crazy person.

    He couldn¡¯t understand why someone would be so reckless just for an experiment. But Sam just smiled and took out a small ss vial and loaded it into the injector.

    He closed it up and injected the medicine into the researcher¡¯s hand.

    The shot was done in an instant and everyone could see the refreshed look on the researcher¡¯s face, but they didn¡¯t look at him for long as their attention waspletely diverted to something else.

    Looking at the injury on their hand to the surprise of Grivon and his subordinates, the wound started healing at a rapid pace.

    It is almost the same speed as apetent healer healing on the spot. It is fast and precise and before they knew it, it is as good as new.

    Sam waved the injector in front of Grivon and said.

    "This is the new product that takes the market and ensures that there is a constant stream of ie because the medicine thatplements this is only avable at your business. How is it? Enough to shake your brother¡¯s market?"

 Chapter 1320: Leagues

    Grivon looked at Sam with a bunch of questions, but none of them areing out, he wants to ask them all at once, but he couldn¡¯t decide which one.

    Sam looked at him but he didn¡¯t bother to exin, he just led him and the rest of the assistants to a separate room where the machines are kept.

    They are a setup made up of some special crystal ss he made up. They are automatic potion makers. All the potion makers have to do is monitor the volume of the herbs and other ingredients in different sections of the setup and maintain the heating, extraction and other procedural sections of this setup and the final product will be a special injectable medicine that could heal an injury.

    That is just from one setup, there are around a dozen setups that act for internal injuries, resistance for poisons, resistance for some mutated microorganisms and infections and all of them would be ced in the injector he made when they were needed and cing the space jade with a specific set of elemental energy stones that are of the same elemental affinity as the patient using them, it would give them an extra addition and increases the speed of absorption of the medicine into the cells.

    The cells absorb the energy far quicker than they do with the medicine so this diffused energy will act as a catalyst to make the medicine enter the cells a lot faster.

    But there is one particr setup that is way different than the rest of them. It is the setup that could create medicine for suppressing the elemental energy corrosion which is extremely valuable. Each vial of this could be auctioned off and Sam made equipment that could create ten vials a day and the blueprints that could make as many machines as they want.

    Apart from that, Sam gave out another setup to make poisons and this one is a little different. There is no specific recipe to use this thing. As long as they have poisons and venomous substances, they will get an output poison and they can use it as they liked.

    "Holy shit. Sam, do you know what is going to happen with these things? You will not be able to fathom the storm we are going to raise?"

    "Fathom? There is one thing you should never forget when you are here with me and particrly when you are talking about my inventions. I always fathom what my inventions can do and will do. I never put something out without knowing the consequences and that is also the reason, why I don¡¯t really put things out that easily."

    "You are incredibly arrogant. You might want to check that attitude, or you wouldn¡¯t be able to make friends."

    Grivon said with a smile as he looked at the crystal set up carefully.

    "I don¡¯t need any new friends. I have enough of my own and trust me, there are no better friends in the world than those that ept you for who you are."

    "Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I am too excited to even argue that point. I have such medicine in my hands that the whole world wants to gain it, but they cannot. I am the sole seller and anyone who wants it, has toe and buy from me."

    Sam looked at him with a smile and shook his head.

    As much as he was amused by this guy¡¯s excitement, he has to disagree with thest statement. Because he is not the only guy in the world who has ess to it, maybe he is the sole seller, but he is not the sole manufacturer.

    At this moment, while Grivon ispletely excited about the new products, back in the deste, Philip and Sirona are currently in a room as they looked at different soldiers who are voluntarily acting as test subjects.

    There are a bunch of healers and potion makers along with them and every one of them has an injector in their hands, but these ones are way different than the ones Sam made for Grivon.

    Because instead of one vial they can fit around four vials at the same time and they can even modify the output of each vial individually ording to the preference and situation.

    There are around forty-five crystal setups and each one ispletely different. Even the ones that Sam made back there are different here because the output is at least five times higher.

    They are currently testing different effects of different vials on different types of cultivators.

    As they were testing, a healer who is in charge of the project came towards Philip.

    "Sir, are you sure you don¡¯t want to sell this medicine. This method is new and this is revolutionary. If we put it for sale, we could earn billions in a month."

    "No. We don¡¯t have the authorization to put it up for sale."

    "But..." The researcher was extremely reluctant, and as he was about to argue more, all Philip had to do was give one look and he shut his mouth up.

    "I don¡¯t know if you are in the deste when we started up early on. One year after the city was constructed we managed to find out a few moles in the artisan and other towers. We brought them to the stage and burned them alive because they gave out a few secrets to other major powers.

    And as I said, that is when we just started out.

    So, you better keep your thoughts in check, if even the news of these things got out, I wille for you and your research team and I will burn all of you alive in a furnace."

    With those words he left and the researcher gulped in nervousness.

    Days passed.

    Sam went back to the simtor research and made himself busy while Grivon came back and forth as he asked for advice for the medicine business.

    He didn¡¯t start right away and took ten days to properly set up the factory.

    He didn¡¯t set up the factory somewhere else though. He knew that the situation wouldn¡¯t be easy when someone got greedy for these things, so he needs to find a safe ce for the factory, where the enemies cannot ess no matter how much they tried.

    Within these ten days, they interacted more and more and Grivon started understanding what kind of person Sam is, of course, the information he is constantly collecting from different realms is also being helpful.

    He started looking at lower realms in which Sam acted before he came to the city of the desert.

    "You did a number on the puppet organization, didn¡¯t you? What did they do to you?"

    "Nothing."

    "They did nothing and you still went as far as making them extinct for their furnace? This is insane."

    "Yes, it is."

    "Why did this golem sect get involved in this? They are not really fans of puppets, so they wouldn¡¯t partner with the puppet organizations that easily."

    As the words golem sect came to his mind, Sam suddenly remembered something and asked.

    "Do you know anything about Divine dimension fragments?"

    "Of course, why?"

    Grivon was so casual about this.

    "I need to get some. Where can I find them?"

    "That wouldn¡¯t be easy. Divine Dimension fragments are only in the hands of organizations that have a leader who is at least atte stage Astral ne Consummate realm and they are very few even in organizations like our n. It is hard to find them.

    If you know about them, you should know how they are made, so it is hard to find them. But there is a ce where they are rtively abundant, to the point that everyone uses them like spatial rings."

    "Where is that?"

    "Divine League. Sivan doesn¡¯t have it in his memories?"

    Sam frowned and said.

    "He has something rted to a league and he knew the name of Divine League, but he doesn¡¯t have much information on either of those. All I know is Butler Si has some connection with this ce called League."

    "Divine League is a ce where people who arepletely at peak stage Astral ne Consummation and are on the verge of breaking through to the Divine ne Cultivation. They are also some people who are the leaders of the league who are almost on the verge of Divine ne Cultivation and are still trying but cannot stay in the Divine Realms.

    They act as couriers between the Divine Realms and our realms. Even for them, the divine dimension fragments are valuable, but since the members are few and they have ess to the Divine realms, they can obtain them.

    Why do you need them so badly?"

    "For research. I have some ideas, even though it is not possible for me to use them immediately, they would be perfect by the time I go back to my organization."

    "Maybe, by then if we manage to destroy some of the young masters of the Mari n, you might get some Divine Dimension fragments, some of the current generation sessor candidates hold them. Of course, they hold them in secret, so we would only find out after we defeated them."

    "We will just have to wait and see then. By the way, we need to go back to your ancestor."

    "Why?"

    "I have a prototype for the basic structure, I want to see if it fits and the joint is strong enough. After all, I don¡¯t know the exact strength of your ancestor, I cannot estimate whether it would be enough until I test it on him directly."

 Chapter 1321: Retarded Genius

    Sam and Grivon once again went to the n, but this time, they are taking a different route as the old man is currently roaming around the n grounds.

    As they were going, Sam suddenly came across something interesting.

    There is a young man who is of same age as Grivon working in arge patch of empty ground with some rocks.

    The rocks are actually sculpted into different shapes and sizes with a lot of holes created in them and even the holes are of different shapes and sizes, some circr, some square and some triangr.

    Some rocks had their edges sculpted off too making them into an extremely irregr shape and these rocks are being piled up on one another on the and there are different piles in different sizes.

    But the main attraction to anyone is the way the young man is sculpting and the way he behaved.

    He is using light elemental energy and the light beams to sculpt the rocks which made Sam feel refreshed. He didn¡¯te across anyone that could use light element for attacking, these light beams are good enough to snipe out a candidate from hundreds of meters away.

    As Sam was marveling, Grivon spoke.

    "He is retarded."

    Sam looked at him in surprise.

    "Retarded?"

    "Yes. He was like this since he was born, he has great cultivation talent, he has affinity to both light and dark elements, he even managed to use the light element to attack, but he cannot heal, he cannot do necromancy, curses or any other dark elemental attacks.

    All he does is y around with these rocks for half a day and the other half a day, he would just look through the books.

    Nobody knows what he is doing, his father is powerful which makes it possible for him to survive, but not all youngstersy off of him, they make his life a living hell and a few months ago, after taking some severe beating, he started making this.

    I think he is making a sculpture or something to get his mind off of the torture he has to endure, but he feels at peace here."

    Sam nodded as they walked forward, but he couldn¡¯t help but look at the piles of differently sculpted and structured stones being arranged weirdly like that. He felt like he is missing something.

    "Did he make anything simr in the past?"

    "Of course he did. His personal courtyard is full of those things. But they are of a much smaller scale."

    "I would like to see them after the tests are over."

    They walked over to the old man who is sitting under a tree as he looked at ake and Sam took out the basic frame of the leg as he attached it to the old man.

    "Try standing up and see if this would be able to handle your strength, of course, along with the reinforcement of your energy."

    The old man stood up and shook the leg for a few times before nodding his head.

    Sam sighed and felt relieved. He really didn¡¯t know if this thing would be enough or not, but now that he the proper material and the structural integrity, the rest of would be easy.

    Time consuming, but easy.

    They walked away and on their way back, they decided to visit the guy¡¯s courtyard.

    The courtyard was singled out from the rest. The yard ispletely full of dead leaves and debris, there are a bunch of stone sculptures and they looked like abstract art, as Sam looked at them, he focused more on the shadows of the sculptures than the sculptures themselves and even when as far as using energy vision for some time.

    He couldn¡¯t help but smile in excitement when he was done.

    "I want to meet this guy."

    "Why? I told you, he is retarded, he doesn¡¯t speak well with others. Did you really like these abstract sculptures that much?"

    "Retarded? He is a fucking genius. I am noting back without meeting with him."

    With that, Grivon just shrugged and brought Sam back to the ce where the young man is sculpting. When he saw Sam and Grivon walking towards him, he smiled calmly.

    "You have a good rtionship with him?"

    Sam asked in surprise.

    "Of course, I like him better than all of my brothers and sisters. He is a great guy and has a pure heart."

    "That is great. What is his name?"

    "Milind."

    Sam walked forward and extended his hand.

    "I am Sam. Nice to meet you Milind."

    Milind hesitantly extended his hand and when Sam didn¡¯t do anything and just shook the hand, he had a delightful expression on his face.

    Sam looked around the sculptures and said.

    "You are doing some great work here, but there is a small problem."

    "W.. What. Is. It?"

    Milind asked as he spoke brokenly.

    Sam smiled and took out arge leather scroll before scribbling something on it, Milind took a look and had a frown on his face.

    When Grivon and came and took a look, he felt extremely confused. There is not a single word in the scroll, Sam only drew different diagrams which he couldn¡¯t even understand.

    He was done within a few minutes and gave the scroll to Milind.

    "I think this will help. You have a great medium but youck the basic concepts a bit. Once you are good at those, this will be much stronger and the defects would bepletely gone."

    "Thank. You. Sam." Milind said with a smile of a child. Sam once again shook his hand before leaving.

    "What was that about?"

    Grivon asked as they walked towards the n gate.

    "Are the houses of the people that bully him very near to that empty patch he is using?"

    Sam asked instead of replying for the question.

    "Yes. Why?"

    "In around two months, let¡¯se back here. I will show you something amazing and along with that, I got some insane ideas that I can explore after I go back into my body and I cannot wait to do that.

    So, let¡¯s speed up our process.

    I will give you the next set of information. This time lets go after one of the twelve heads of Sivan¡¯s foundation."

    Grivon suddenly became excited. He is really looking forward screwing Sivan over and he is only waiting for Sam to give the information out.

    "Let¡¯s go to my personal estate outside. We can discuss there with my special team."

    Sam nodded and then they went to the personal estate which is a few kilometers away from this ce. There Sam saw the rest of the blue cloaked people who are Grivon¡¯s aces.

    He started exining the details of the organization and what they do, a briefyout of the organization that he could get from the memories, the number of people in charge and their details and so on.

    The team started making ns and Sam was included in that as well.

    But as they were speaking, someone contacted Grivon on his personalmunication token.

    "Young master, one of your subordinates died today in the city."

    Grivon frowned and he immediately made a move. Sam followed him to take a look at the situation.

    They reached the city and went directly to a bar where Grivon¡¯s subordinate was lying dead.

    There is a lot of blooding out of different orificies of his body and it was extremely gruesome.

    "This the same way the subordinates of my brothers died. This is troublesome. We were still unable to identify the microorganisms that are doing this."

    Grivon said as he refrained from going near the body, he turned to the owner of the bar and said.

    "I will give you a new location and building in the street outside of the estate. I am really sorry for this, but I don¡¯t think it is advisable to keep this bar open, we need to burn it down."

    The bar owner was not least bit sad by those words, in fact, he became extremely happy when he heard the words building outside the estate.

    That is a huge steal.

    Meanwhile, Sam frowned as he looked at the situation. Even though the death is extremely simr to some of the deaths caused by virus, he felt that there is something more to it.

    Sam has seen a simr death before in his previous life and he still had a vivid memory of that, even now after so many years.

    He looked at Grivon and said.

    "I don¡¯t think he is infected."

    Grivon looked at him with a frown.

    "What do you mean?"

    "I think he was assassinated."

    "Assassinated? In the city? I don¡¯t think many people would dare to do that. And no one saw this guy with anyone.

    From the witnesses he suddenly screamed in severe pain and started rolling on the ground, before he started bleeding and finally he died. This is the same way the first few members died."

    "I know, I understand how he died. But trust me, he was assassinated, try using the soul extraction if you don¡¯t believe me."

 Chapter 1322: Blue Cloaks

    Grivon was really not convinced by what Sam said. But he made his subordinate perform the soul extraction and his face changed immediately because the soul was not there.

    Someone already did a soul extraction on this one and that means, someone is here before or someone really killed this person and took the soul.

    Every time a person was killed like this, the Gaja n members thought it was a virus or some other microorganism as they experienced this a lot of times.

    The Mari n due to Sivan¡¯s great exploits in this field managed to make this almost a daily routine. They always send a new variant they obtain from the research to the Gaja n almost like it was their testing grounds and the n members are like their test subjects.

    They release the viruses and Bacteria like they were releasing relief funds for some victims of natural disasters. Of course, the Gaja n replies in kind with their fierce attacks. They just don¡¯t hide like cowards and use viruses, they go to the Mari n territories, kill a few guys ande back out in the open while holding their opponents¡¯ heads.

    When the Gaja n saw some guys dying with blood in their orifices, they assumed it was Mari n and already started taking down some heads back home.

    They didn¡¯t think twice.

    But now that Grivon saw it, he immediately went to the n to exin the situation while Sam and the rest of the Grivon¡¯s subordinates, went back to his personal estate outside the n¡¯s estate.

    They took the body with them and Sam used his observation ability on the body to see what changed and when he focused on the brain of the person, he immediately understood what is wrong. His guess waspletely right.

    When Grivon came back, Sam directly said.

    "Someone is on the loose on your n¡¯s young members. That guy is a covert killer and trusts me, you wouldn¡¯t be able to notice him while killing you while he is standing right in front of your face while talking to you nicely about yourst dinner."

    "what do you mean?"

    "He is using the nerves of the victim to kill them. He is making their brain stress, putting pressure on it with the energy inside the victim¡¯s body itself."

    "Energy in the victim¡¯s body? And the victims don¡¯t even know it. With all due respect, Sir Sam, I believe people would notice that their energy is being tampered with. It is impossible for someone to be that dumb."

    One of the blue cloaks said with a cold face.

    Sam looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

    "It is possible. If the person is skilled enough, they can do wonders with the energy control."

    "Of course, what you are saying is theoretically possible and that is true when you think about the work you do in theb, but trust me, the direct confrontation wouldn¡¯t work like this."

    Another blue cloak spoke and Sam frowned this time. He didn¡¯t expect that someone would give him this much resistance. He couldn¡¯t even think of a proper reason for that.

    But he still exined.

    "If you have a good grasp of the brain of a person, you can do whatever you want with them. Each nerve there controls a different part of your body. If you have enough understanding, you can make a person cry,ugh, depressed, angry, and even make thempletelyatose.

    Making them bleed to death through the orifices is almost the easiest task of them all."

    "I am also not buying it Sir Sam. No matter how powerful that person is, I think I would be able to put some resistance when they are attacking my brain sneakily. After all, it is impossible to control the energy present within my body.

    I think your exnation is too farfetched."

    Sam looked at the other blue cloak that just spoke up with a deeper frown.

    Grivon also noticed that something is a bit off.

    "What is wrong with you guys? Let him exin his piece and we will see what happenster."

    "It is not like that young master. Nothing is wrong with us. I know you have a high opinion of Sir Sam and we agree that he has some decent skill in terms of invention, but when ites to killing, I think we are more well versed and with the number of battles and assassinations we are involved in, I think we would know of skill like this if it existed."

    Sam looked at them and Grivon and said.

    "That¡¯s good then. I also don¡¯t want to bother myself too much. Let me go back to theb, I have a ton of research, and the sooner it ispleted the faster I could back home.

    And, you can get the details of the next target locations from me at thebter. Goodbye."

    With that, he got out of the estate and went back to the stray dimension.

    He doesn¡¯t need to convince anyone about his expertise in anything. Sam knew what he is good at and how good he is at those things. It is because of that attitude that he managed to keep himself in the upper hand in most of the situations he had to deal with in his whole life.

    After reaching the stray dimension, he wrote the details of the next location on a scroll and gave it to one of the attendants while he went back into the research.

    This attendant is like his secretary that helps with everything and when he took those scrolls, he suddenly spoke up, which he doesn¡¯t normally do at all.

    "Sir Sam, would you mind if I say something?"

    Sam was surprised and nodded.

    "Please don¡¯t take the words of the Blue cloaks the wrong way. They are just a bit jealous of you."

    "Jealous, for what? I am not here for their jobs."

    "Yes, I know. But they are just jealous because they were Young master Grivon¡¯s main priority before you came along. They are his solution for everything. The blue cloaks, protected his businesses, saved him from assassinations, killed people for him, and made him what he is. In fact, they even helped with conquering this stray dimension.

    So, the young master used to give them a lot of special treatment, in fact, they are extremely privileged when they were within the stray dimension or young master¡¯s personal estate.

    But you took that spotlight away from them. You already gave the benefits worth half of what they gained young master in a few years. You didn¡¯t that in just a little over a month which made the young master be fond of you too much.

    They are a bit threatened."

    "So what? I don¡¯t see how that is my problem. I don¡¯t have time to pamper some spoiled brats. Let them be jealous all they want, if they are stubborn, they are the ones that are going to end up dead."

    After that little conversation, Sam went back to the research. Grivon took the list and went to the next location to destroy some people and take some heads back.

    This time, this is the head of one of the twelve foundational organizations of Sivan. Since Sam already took one down himself, this is the second one. This is extremely special.

    But it took some time for Sivan. A little over a week. But he gained significantly. He gained some new territory to open up his businesses, he gained a lot of money and resources, he gained some artifacts and heirlooms and finally, he managed to gain credit for this from the n and got their rewards too.

    He stayed in the city and celebrated with his blue cloaks team. Of course, they are wearing the blue cloaks openly, they are just acting as his business owners. They are a secret force after all.

    As they are sitting in the private room of the bar and drank while cheering and yelling, one of the blue cloaks suddenly held his head in pain.

    "Argh. My head."

    "Yong, what happened?" The person next to him asked in surprise, but before he got an answer, the blue cloak fell down and started bleeding from the orifices.

    Grivon and the rest of the blue cloaks were stunned.

    They immediately caught hold of him and realized that he is on hisst breath. Grivon didn¡¯t think much and quickly took out the injector before directly injecting a shot of basic healing medicine and energy stability medicine.

    Meanwhile, one of the blue cloaks injected some more healing medicine and one of them even injected the corrosion resistance medicine out of desperation.

    They don¡¯t know what to do and to their surprise, they managed to keep the guy alive.

    "Go out and check the person. See anyone suspicious."

    Grivon yelled out and the leader of the blue cloaks immediately made a move. He went out to look around, but to his dismay, everything lookedpletely normal.

 Chapter 1323: Warning

    Sam looked at the Blue cloaks standing in front of him with a look of amusement. They all had embarrassed expressions on their face and Grivon in particr wants to bury his head and never show it again.

    But he has to wear some thick skin and ask Sam for help.

    Only when this happened right in front of them did they manage to believe what Sam said about the killer.

    Sam ced his hand on the brain of the blue cloak and used his observation ability. He then checked the rest of his body.

    "He is doing fine. But he would need a lot of rest. He wouldn¡¯t be able to walk properly for a few weeks and it would take even more for him to fight like before and if he can reach the full performance as before, we have to wait and see how severe the nerve damage is."

    "You mean to say that there is a chance that he wouldn¡¯t be able to recover fully?" One of the blue cloaks asked hurriedly.

    "Yes, that is exactly what I mean. Good job on injecting all those shots, onemon point on those shots is that energy will be slow and stable inside the body for a moment and that disrupted the killer¡¯s actions.

    From the looks of it, he controlled the energy within the body and made it go through the nervous system inside the body to the brain. But the energy stability, made it stagnant in one spot and the rest of the process also halted.

    He might have thought, he was caught and he escaped immediately without finishing the deed.

    I must say that you also got lucky this time. So, just hope that you are as lucky the other times."

    "It can¡¯t be. I was right there. I was sitting right in front of him. How could I not sense the energy fluctuations when someone that close to me is getting attacked."

    The leader of the blue cloaks said agitatedly and looked at Sam for an exnation, but all he got was a shrug.

    Sam didn¡¯t bother much and was about to go back to research.

    "Young master Grivon, let¡¯s take him to the n healer. I want to get their opinion. I still believe it is the virus."

    One of the blue cloaks said and Sam gave him a look of surprise.

    "If it is the virus, then he shouldn¡¯t have been saved just like that. He would have died no matter what medicines we injected in. The n elders already said so. They cannot find any reaction to the normal medicine in the blood cells of the infected people. They couldn¡¯t even identify the virus."

    "Maybe, they managed to react to this medicine because of the different methods of ingestion. Or the cure for that virus infection must have been in that injection itself. Who knows."

    The blue cloak replied and looked at Sam coldly.

    Sam frowned and this time, it is not out of confusion, he is clearly annoyed this time. He turned around and looked at him straight into the eyes with a hint of killing intent shing now and then.

    "What does that supposed to mean?" Sam asked before Grivon could even speak.

    "After all, a virus and the antidote are great ways to increase the ie. Mari n does this all the time. They will let a mild gue fall on a nation or a and sell the antidoteter. It is not like it is a new practice. It wouldn¡¯t take a genius to figure out to put the dots together." The rest of the blue cloaks also looked at Sam coldly by now and they spread out like a fan, almost as if they are circling him.

    "That¡¯s right. All it takes is an idiot with half a brain." Sam said with an equally cold tone. He didn¡¯t react for the blue cloaks circling him. He just focused on that one guy.

    The blue cloaks are all strong, but the strongest of them is an Initial stage Consuammte level cultivator.

    Sam¡¯s team is stronger than them by many times. He is not the least bit intimidated by them. After all, he managed to make the disciples of Butler Si go on a wild goose chase and kill a couple of them. He doesn¡¯t believe that some team that used to brute-forcing through everything would be able to do much to him.

    "Enough. Guys, where do you think you are. Back off. Now."

    The blue cloaks backed off and Grivon looked at Sam and said.

    "I am sorry Sam, we are out of line. Let¡¯s just leave it at this."

    Sam controlled his killing intent and was about to step back, but the first blue cloak kept on yapping.

    "How convenient. Good job saving his ass young master."

    "I said enough." Grivon got angry and looked at him coldly. Even he had had enough of this nonsense.

    "Why should I young master? You are too trusting of this guy. Hees here and he gained your basic trust and now he might have released the virus and made some of us die. He managed to make you believe him and gave you this unrealistic theory. Tried to kill one of us, and ¡¯coincidentally¡¯ only his medicine works on this virus, now he has a lot of money to make."

    "Use your brain dipshit. I already gave you the designs and recipes of the medication, what money do I get to make in here?" Sam asked calmly.

    "Maybe, this is not theplete antidote, you might sell theplete antidoteter. I am sure you are the one that is behind this."

    "And what is my motive?"

    "Your motive is to make money of course. After all, you are a coward who couldn¡¯t even fight his own battles and hide behinds his pretty inventions. You just want to make money while making the Gaja n and young master Grivon do all the dirty work."

    "Back off, Bigon. You are crossing your limits. You wouldn¡¯t be able to take back the words you said." Grivon also seemed to have be angry and he stood in front of that blue cloak directly saying it to his face.

    By now, Sam lost the frown and his expression turned to the one of derision and disregard, this guy is really imaginative. By hook or crook, all he wants is to paint Sam as the culprit.

    "Young master, what I am saying is true. Let me beat the truth out of him."

    As he spoke, he sidestepped Grivon and made a move. Of course, Grivon is just a middle-stage Transcendent stage cultivator of the Astral ne. He cannot react in time.

    But Sam already sensed the energy fluctuations and he reacted faster.

    He extended his hand and an energy barrier appeared in front of him.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sound appeared as the fistnded on the barrier, but instead of the recoil, the Bigon felt a suction as the barrier used the force to ripple apart and suck the fist into it.

    Sam pulled his hand backward and the barrier changed its shape into a bunch of energy snakes as they coiled around the arm and then around the rest of Bigon¡¯s body and before the rest of the blue cloaks could react, Bigon is lying with his face down under Sam¡¯s foot while his limbs are tied backward like he was some wild game.

    A rope of energy also held tight against his mouth and was pulled back exposing his clean throat.

    Sam looked at the rest of Blue Cloaks and Grivon as he spoke slowly and calmly.

    "I might look easygoing Grivon, but don¡¯t take that for granted. Even if it is not you who did it, I wouldn¡¯t tolerate it because it is your job to keep your subordinates in check.

    I am not here to cate their insecurities."

    *crack*

    The left hand of Grivon was twisted like a rope as many bone protrusions came out of the flesh in several ces from shoulder to the knuckles.

    "Now, the legendary blue cloaks of Grivon, the young master of the Gaja n.

    What makes you think that you are better than me? What makes you think that you have a right to talk down to me?

    My team would mop the floor with you in three seconds and even they don¡¯t dare to talk back to me like that and trust me, every one of them is a maniac with a controlled mind. You might think you are all that because you killed a bunch of people.

    Remember this when youe against me the next time. The deaths I have caused in this life are more than the deaths that all of you have witnessed in this and the rest of your previous lifetimesbined.

    I have killed people in many ways than you could even dream of."

    *CRACK*

    The right hand is also gone.

    "So, next time you yap your mouth, just be ready to get killed, and trust me I have methods that will make you want tomit suicide with all you got and I wouldn¡¯t hold back to use them."

    *CRACK* *CRACK* *CRACK*

 Chapter 1324: Preparations

    The group looked at Bigon¡¯s body in shock. They couldn¡¯t even nce at it for more than three seconds straight.

    Bone shards are protruding out of his limbs and even the spine is deformed and he looked like a bloody mess.

    They are shocked that he was even still alive.

    Sam just released him like that and started walking away.

    "Tell the healers to start with the spine, cut open and start healing it from the top to bottom, same with the limbs.

    Tell them to attach the nerves and muscle tissue properly, otherwise, he wouldn¡¯t even be able to move properly for the rest of his life. He would be a cripple that needs a wheelchair to even more than a few feet. He would have all of his limbs, he would be able to feel them, but he wouldn¡¯t be able to utilize them."

    He didn¡¯t even care what Grivon thought of his little episode. He just walked away. Grivon gestured the rest of the blue cloaks to carry this guy away first and went to the healers within the stray dimension.

    They took a look and said they could heal him, but they would need to conduct an extremelyplicated surgery for which he agreed and then went to meet Sam immediately.

    "Sam, about that..."

    He was about to speak up, but Sam cut him off immediately.

    "I don¡¯t care what kind of exnation you want to give. There is something you should know Grivon, you are not smart enough to conduct analysis experiments on people¡¯s mentality, so in the future don¡¯t try it again.

    At least don¡¯t try it on me.

    You wanted to see how I would react and that is why your response is minimal when that piece of work is yapping, but soon you realized you didn¡¯t stop it soon enough as he started crossing lines.

    If you want to know about me, stop trying to get into my head. You are way too young and inexperienced to do that and I am saying it with the most respect I could muster.

    You are good at many things, you are talented and you are smart enough to strategize further. I like you a lot and your way of thinking amuses me as you remind me of someone I knew in the past, but just because I enjoy you doesn¡¯t mean, I would tolerate you and your shenanigans all the time."

    Grivon gulped and swallowed all the words that he was about to say and replied awkwardly.

    "I am sorry."

    He knew that exining and absolving himself from the situation wouldn¡¯t change a thing. He knew he screwed up big this time and he decided to keep his mind games in check in which he is obviously not that good at.

    "Keep your team in check. It seems like they are way in over your head. The only reason I didn¡¯t bash their heads in is because of you."

    "I need to do that. I recently noticed the change in their behaviors, they are bing more and morefortable with their superiority."

    "No, they are bingcent and gettingfortable with the sense of superiority. They are not superior Grivon,pared to the disciples of Butler Si, your guys are just average, if they were to sh, your team would be wiped out in a few minutes.

    A killer¡¯s killer is always his pride. So, don¡¯t let them get to that point and don¡¯t let them close to me again, otherwise, you would lose your team in your home ground."

    Grivon sighed and stayed silent for a while. At least he is d that Sam is not mad enough to leave the ce.

    "I couldn¡¯t help but notice, I think you felt more insulted than angry at thements he made. Why? Is it because he called you a coward?"

    Sam gave him a look and Grivon awkwardly smiled.

    "I am just curious. You don¡¯t have to tell me if you don¡¯t want to."

    "I was indeed insulted, but not because he called me a coward. Everyone is a coward in one situation or the other. There is not much of an insult there. I was insulted because even if this was indeed a virus which it is not, he associated its creation with me.

    I would never create something so pathetic and inefficient. If make a virus, you wouldn¡¯t be standing here talking to me.

    You would beying down under a nket while consuming all kinds of rare herbs just to survive a bit longer while you see the rest of the people under your n¡¯s rule die one after the other and the kills would be so many that at one point the people who are tasked with clean up would give up.

    Even the burning the corpses would turn burdensome."

    Sam said everything so casually, but Grivon couldn¡¯t help but imagine it in his head and he immediately shivered in fright.

    Sam shook his head and said.

    "Don¡¯t think too much. I am not really fond of biological warfare that much.

    As for the killer, you should be really careful.

    From the pattern that I see from the kills, I can say that the other party is collecting the information bit by bit. It might be to find someone or even find me, but no matter what his intentions are, it would be hard to keep your secrets."

    "Why do you think that?"

    "The first subordinate of yours that died, doesn¡¯t know much, but I believe he knew about the lowest level blue cloaks doesn¡¯t he?"

    Grivon thought for a moment and said. "He doesn¡¯t know about the Blue Cloaks, but the person who was attacked is rted to him and he knew that I am making him do something important."

    "That¡¯s it. He extracted that soul and got the information he needed, now if this blue cloak was killed and extracted, he would get the memory of the stray dimension and some more of your secrets, the chain will continue until the killer found what he needs to find.

    So, if I were you, I wouldn¡¯t let your group move out and will stay here. Try to contact the n and give that information."

    Grivon nodded and went back to the residence of the blue cloaks within the stray realm, but when he went there. Half of them are not present and that included the leader.

    He gave the information to Sam and went out to look for them.

    Sam sighed at this and stopped his research temporarily, if his guess is right, someone mighte here and if the other party is really looking for him, then things would be much moreplicated.

    He decided to make some preparations.

    He called for all the subordinates that are under him and passed them a blueprint.

    "I need you to make these things, as fast as possible. Make as many as possible as soon as you make it ce them around the already existing formation connecting Grivon¡¯s estate to the stray realm.

    And call for the space elemental users and make them construct a space gate that would connect us and the estate. But this one should be one-sided and shouldn¡¯t be anywhere near the first one.

    Give the information to the young master Grivon and make sure that he knows every bit of our n. Tell him toe back as fast as possible or stay back in the n in the presence of an elder."

    They immediately went to work and Sam called out the specter.

    "Start using the curses. Use every soul in the reserve, if the person that enters is as powerful as I imagine, then things wouldn¡¯t be easy. We need to be careful and even if we waste resources now, it would be better than beingpletely blindsided.

    Make every soul a carrier of the soul-devouring curse."

    The specter also immediately went to work.

    Sam started working on the formation holds these things together.

    By evening, Grivon came back, but only three of the Blue Cloaks are back, two more are gone, when Sam saw them, he looked at Grivon and said.

    "It seems like people here forget who is the boss and who is the subordinate. You need to work on your leadership skills. You might be friendly with them, but they don¡¯t have the right to act like some spoiled bitches with you. If you have these types of people under you, they would bring the death of you.

    If you want to be safe from the current situation, listen to what I have to say. Nobody goes out through the space gate. There shouldn¡¯t be any presence. Let me finish the formation and you people have to get ready for any possible situation that mighte, so be in your full shape."

    With that, Sam went back and Grivon looked at the Blue Cloaks coldly. He couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit embarrassed. He now understood that he has given these guys too much leeway and now they don¡¯t even care about the orders he is giving, they dared to walk away without any regard to him. He really needs to teach them a lesson.

 Chapter 1325: Drunk

    Grivon went into his personal room as he downed one ss of wine after another.

    He couldn¡¯t handle the stress.

    It has been four days and the Blue Cloaks that went away didn¡¯t return, but themunication he maintained with the n gave him a clear idea. Some of his subordinates are dead because of the ¡¯virus¡¯ and for some reason, they are not really willing to believe that this is not some kind of virus and someone is trying to kill them and it seems like the other party is making sure that it looked like a virus as he killed a few of the subordinates of other people.

    On top of that, he managed to find the location of the two other blue cloaks and they are not really hiding. They are in some regr ce they used to visit and Grivon immediately understood how spoiled they have be.

    They are clearly thinking that he is some kind of soft persimmon they can push around as they like. They just feel so self-important because of all the privileges that Grivon has given them over the years and now they are thinking that they are too great that Grivon had to go and beg them toe back.

    But he doesn¡¯t care anymore.

    He understood that the Blue Cloaks are really crossing the lines too much and they don¡¯t see that Grivon is their boss and they need to obey him.

    Anyway, the two of them are not the strongest or the weakest, but they have the potential, so Grivon showed some extra attention to them, but now that he came back to his senses he didn¡¯t bother to go and inte their ego anymore.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel like he is being crushed by some grindstones.

    Just a few days ago, he was on top of the world. He hadunched two new business ventures, made a lot of money, and trumped over two of hispetitors all the while destroying some of the core organizations of Sivan.

    He was supposed to celebrate his triumph, all of his brothers and sisters from the n are extremely envious of him but now felt lost.

    All the reasons for his frustrations are not his enemies, but his subordinates, who he had nurtured and cared for over years.

    While he was feeling like shit, Sam finished the preparations that needs to be made in the past four days.

    This time, it didn¡¯t take that long for him to prepare because the design of the formation itself was just some modification of the formation he used back in the Redmatter.

    It is extremely easy and he doesn¡¯t need too much energy because he could use the space gate formation for his benefit.

    After the whole project waspleted, Sam rxed for a while before going back to the research.

    On that day, Grivon got the news that one of the blue cloaks staying outside was dead and the remaining party barely managed to escape.

    He is currently moving towards the stray realm.

    Grivon started drinking more and more as he made his way towards Sam.

    Sam was surprised as he looked at Grivon¡¯s intoxicated expression, he ispletely drunk and it seems like he didn¡¯t use the spiritual energy to clear himself of the alcohol.

    It looked like he really wanted to get drunk.

    Sam chuckled and made him sit down.

    "Why are you getting drunk? Are you feeling betrayed because of your subordinates?"

    "Why? I don¡¯t even have the right to feel down?"

    "Of course, you have a right to do a lot of things, but don¡¯t you think you have brought this upon yourselves? There is no point in feeling down now."

    "Yeah, that¡¯s really helping Sam? I never thought you are so good at consoling. I guess you forgot to brag about it while you were bragging about the rest of things."

    Sam smiled with an amused expression as he asked.

    "What¡¯s wrong?"

    "What do you mean what¡¯s wrong? Your constant bragging is what¡¯s wrong. Since the day you came here, you kept on bragging about yourself. You were so arrogant. You kept on saying, ¡¯I can do this ¡¯I can do that I am this good¡¯ ¡¯nobody is better than me¡¯ What is with that attitude man? Do you really think you are all-powerful, all-knowing God?"

    Sam¡¯s smile widened as he looked at Grivon who is slumping on the chair andzily pointed his finger at Sam while questioning.

    "So, what if I am bragging? I am backing up my talk right?"

    "Of course, you are doing it, the businesses for defense artifacts is booming. Do you know that I saw my sister bash her associate with a vase because they cannot think of a solution? I felt so bad."

    "For the associate?"

    "No, for the cleaner. The vase broke into very tiny shards, it would take forever to pick them all up."

    Sam rolled his eyes and looked at him.

    "What do you want Grivon?"

    "I don¡¯t know what I want. I am supposed to be happy, but why did I be like this? I am happy because of your help, but now I am feeling sad because of you too. It is because of you, that those blue cloaks got jealous.

    If you hadn¡¯t bragged so much about yourself, I wouldn¡¯t have yapped about you in front of them and I wouldn¡¯t have made them jealous and I wouldn¡¯t have had this plight now. What should I do now? I am about to lose two of my mostpetent men and I cannot do anything about it."

    Sam just smiled as he looked at Grivon.

    He liked Grivon a bit, that is why he is constantly giving out advice. There was once a young man he met with the same ambitions as grivon but he was also a bit too pure for the rotten world. Both of them are a bit too idealistic and they didn¡¯t think of the worst of the people when they need to.

    If there is any other person in Grivon¡¯s ce even if it was the brothers and sisters of the n, they would have simply taken advantage of Sam because of his plight. After all, they don¡¯t know Sam¡¯s full story, so they wouldn¡¯t believe that he would be able to survive the Mari n and they are bound to demand a lot more from Sam even if they wouldn¡¯t get it.

    But Grivon asked just for partnership and in a fair way which he shouldn¡¯t have done, even after Sam came here, he gave him too much freedom. If it was anyone else, they would have demanded Sam and guilt-tripped him if they have to, to get the required information.

    He could have done a lot of things.

    But Grivon is just too soft, he gave too much freedom to the people and he was too dependent on them and the main problem here is the Gaja n.

    After all, Sam gave enough freedom to his researchers and his subordinates, apart from the basic rules on their etiquette, he doesn¡¯t have many restrictions on them, but when Sam gives out a word, they would drop everything and work for him. They wouldn¡¯t dare to act all spoiled with him.

    The cheekiest one of them all, the Saber Monarch doesn¡¯t even act like that in front of him and when Sam is around, he even keeps his yboy act in check.

    Kiran is too proud, but he acts meek and Sam simply made him a mole in many cespletely ignoring his swordsmanship, but he still does it even after someining.

    It is not just because Sam is their boss, but it is mostly because, Sam is self-made, he managed to bring them to be his employees by himself without any extra help, but in Grivon¡¯s case, the most important resource that helped him get to work for him is his status of the young master of Gaja n which he didn¡¯t obtain by working for it.

    And with his loose strictness, the situation just turned out to be like this.

    "What should I do Sam? Tell me, how to resolve this. You are bragging so much from the start, so brag a bit more and slip in some advice in the middle."

    Sam just smiled and didn¡¯t reply for his drunken yapping.

    "I just got the news that one of the two blue cloaks outside is dead and the remaining guy just sent the news confirming that your theory is correct and is escaping towards the stray realm. Tell me what should I do now? Once again, brag away with your advice."

    "You don¡¯t have to do anything. Just sit back and rx."

    "Rx? Why? Why should I rx? Would you rx if you are in my ce? I think I should bring out y secret forces. There are some really good guys hidden away from even the blue cloaks, once they are here, I would feel safe."

    He almost took out his token in a drunken stupor, but Sam stopped him and said.

    "I said you can rx, just rx. We are prepared."

 Chapter 1326: Old Man

    "I said rx, so just rx, we are prepared."

    As soon as Sam spoke those words a token that was ced on the table nearby started shing.

    "It seems like our intruder is here."

    Sam took out an injector and gave Grivon a shot. He is too muddleheaded to even use his own energy to clean himself properly, so the shot helped him be more clearheaded and both of them started running towards the space gate.

    When they reached there, two people are inside the space gate formation with a bunch of stone pirs of different sizes ranging from three feet to ten feet are randomly ced around the formation.

    The space gate was locked and the two people cannote in or go to the other side.

    One of them is the petty blue cloak who is injured and bleeding from his mouth. The other guy is an old man with a hunched back. His face is full of wrinkles and he is covered with a full beard.

    He looked around as he took a deep breath and patted his own back near the middle of the spine and said in an old grumpy voice.

    "I am really getting too old for this. This little brat really made me run all the way here, but finally, I am here."

    He then turned to look at Sam who is standing there quietly and said in a loud voice.

    "Hello, you must be Sam. Someone ced a good bounty on your head and I would like to take it if you don¡¯t mind. Please don¡¯t take this the wrong way, I am just an old man looking for a good retirement and the bounty you have on your head will cover it just right."

    As he spoke, he raised his hand and Sam activated his energy vision.

    He saw very tiny energy vibrations which arepletely imperceptible to any normal spiritual senses and that energy is slowly creeping on to Sam.

    But he just stayed calm and looked at the way energy waves propagated to understand how the old man managed to kill without leaving a trace.

    The rest of the people in the surroundings, didn¡¯t do anything as they didn¡¯t see what is happening. Even Grivon looked puzzled as the old man stood there and looked like an idiot while he extended his feeble-looking thin hand full of wrinkles.

    He looked at Sam who also looked like an idiot as he keenly while moving his head to get a look at the energy waves from different angles.

    This made everyone confused, except for the old man who understood what Sam is really focusing on.

    He became flustered and split the energy waves into two separate currents and attacked Sam from both sides.

    Sam side-stepped and looked at it for two more minutes and finally smiled.

    He deactivated the energy vision and looked at the old man. The old man is actually not that powerful, his cultivation is high, but from what Sam could see, he is at the end of his life span and there is no potential left.

    He is slowly wearing down with time and his current strength certainly doesn¡¯t match his cultivation level.

    He crushed the token in his hands and the stone pirs started glowing along with the space gate.

    The energy waves started attacking the old man who is inside the formation and he held his head tightly, the blue cloak stuck inside along with him and also started spitting blood immediately.

    Sam extended his hand and an energy hand condensed which dragged the blue cloak outside.

    The old man wanted to take this chance and escape too, but he was bombarded with more energy waves and before he knew it...

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Explosions urred around the formation destroying the space gate and tearing open the spatial fabric. The old man felt the brunt of the spatial currents, but since he is on hisst legs, he decided to go all out and used all of his energy to resist onest time.

    An energy barrier formed around him as it pushed against the spatial currents and diverted those currents without any problem.

    He wanted to wait till the effects of the explosions were mitigated, but before he could be content with that, ghosts starteding out of the stone pirs as they attacked the old man.

    The ghosts are all soul-devouring curse carriers which is an extremely powerful and damning curse that puts the soul through awful torture as it consumes the soul bit by bit by chomping on it.

    It is just like how some beasts tear through the flesh of their prey, but here around a hundred beasts are after one prey.

    The old man was terrified by this, but he was not the only terrified one, Grivon also looked at it in awe and when he looked at how the ghosts moved, he was reminded of the mayhem Sam created back in the red matter.

    The old man couldn¡¯t hold on for long and after some time he simply gave up, he turned to Sam and said with a smile.

    "I am just the beginning, you are going to face a tough two years and that is if you survive for that long."

    With that, he copsed and the ghostspletely devoured his soul.

    Sam let the specter out and made the ghostse back to it. After getting them all together, the specter synthesized through the parts of the soul of the old man to get the memories.

    Meanwhile, he looked at Grivon and said.

    "I told you, we are prepared. You should just rx a bit. Now get your affairs back in order and meet me tomorrow. Be sober this time, alright. You are not a goodpany when you are drunk."

    With that, he walked back to his residence and waited for the specter to digest the memories.

    After a few hours, the specter finally transferred the memories to Sam.

    He got quite a bit of valuable information from this. Particrly, the one piece of information regarding the technique the old man used. It is not the old man¡¯s skill, rather it is a type of stylistic technique like the void style and ripple style, but a lot less valuable and a lot inefficient.

    It is still a good technique and particrly good when it was added to some of the formations that are used for trapping people.

    Apart from that, he also got information regarding where the old man came from.

    The League of Blood Iron.

    He was a bit surprised but soon realized that this league of blood Iron is the League Sivan knew about in his memories.

    After connecting all the dots, he managed to summarize the information.

    Simply put, Butler Si tried to locate Sam with the help of the Star eye sect and wasn¡¯t able to do it because of the resistance lock of Grivon which was ced on the stray realm, so he ced an assignment in the league of blood iron.

    This old man is a part of that league.

    He arrived in the Gaja n¡¯s territories and started killing and absorbing the soul of the subordinates of the young masters. He got the information of the closer subordinates and after killing them he confirmed whether the said young master came to meet Sam or not.

    In that way, they managed to reach until the blue cloaks and now he came after the stray realm.

    He died here.

    Sam also understood the meaning of thest line the old man said.

    The League of Blood Iron is an organization that is independent of the territories and realms, they are actually like a police department that makes sure that the rules were being followed. For example, the rule of higher-level organizations like the Golem sect do not interfere with the affairs of the Puppet organization.

    In fact, from what the old man understood, the Golem Sect has faced some serious heat from the league after the puppet organization¡¯s matter has blown up.

    And this organization also has another rule. The members of the league cannot be part of other organizations, they can be friendly, but they cannot be subordinates, particrly when they are full-fledged members. They cannot be an employee of any normal organizations and they can ce assignments in the league.

    But when the assignment stays for two years without anyone being able to finish it, the case goes cold and they would scrap it off.

    So, if Sam doesn¡¯t want to die prematurely, he would have to be careful for the next two years and he would be having an easier time than ever.

    Apart from this piece of information, there is one more thing that attracted him and he immediately ran out of his room hurriedly towards the dead body of the old man.

    He is still lying in the middle of the formation as the spatial tears are still present. The attendants need to wait for a while to get the body out.

    Sam looked at the body of the old man and he condensed the energy arm and maneuvered it around the spatial tears to reach the chest of the old man where a locket is hanging.

    The locket looked like a ck sapphire and Sam looked at it with bright eyes like a little kid.

 Chapter 1327: Learning

    Sam pulled the crystal from the ne and examined it carefully. He closed his eyes and let his consciousness prate the crystal and he immediately saw the scene inside. Arge patch ofnd,rge enough for his vision to not grasp it directly stretched across with a lot of dark elemental energy.

    This is a divine dimension fragment.

    Sam was delighted by what he saw and he couldn¡¯t help but feel the excitement surge through his heart.

    "Finally, something good after a long time." He grinned as he looked at the crystal closely.

    One of the attendants looked at Sam¡¯s expression and his excitement and decided to inform Grivon while Sam went back to his ce.

    It didn¡¯t take long for Grivon to arrive and he asked.

    "The attendant is scared as hell when you took a crystal from his body, what did you do?"

    Sam is still grinning as he showed the crystal.

    "I got a divine dimension fragment from the old man. I was really looking forward to obtaining some of these things for research and finallyL I have one now. I was a bit too excited."

    "Really a divine dimension fragment? Where did this guye from? It is not easy to obtain one and I don¡¯t believe an ordinary hitman would be able to obtain it that easily."

    "He is from a ce called the league of Blood Iron. I don¡¯t have any information from Sivan¡¯s memories. Do you know anything about it?"

    "No, not really. I never heard of it. I only of the Divine League. Could they both be the same?"

    "No, this old man also has memories of the Divine League. It seems like both of these organizations are a bit hostile towards each other and at the same time, some members from both sides have some friendly arrangements.

    The league of Blood Iron is some kind of policing organization for ns like yours, but I doubt they will be able to do anything about the expansion you youngsters having."

    With that Sam exined the information he got.

    "So, do all the members of that ce have these divine dimension fragments? If yes, then maybe we could collect some of these things. Since they areing after us anyway."

    "Us? Are you sure you want to get involved in this whole shit storm? This old man is one of the weakest guys and he is only a middle stage Consummate level cultivator of Astral ne. I told you half expecting you to kick me out of here with all the trouble you might attract. These guys are no joke after all."

    "It is indeed something to be afraid of. But I realized that I have a lot to learn from you. You managed to survive so much on your own and I don¡¯t believe that I am only capable of building something and destroying it on my own because of my ipetence and ignorance.

    I hope I would be able to understand and learn how to lead from you in this process and I want to know how to survive."

    "Are you sure? I am not really a good influence. You wouldn¡¯t be having a good time with the subordinates in the first few days. They might even hate you."

    "It doesn¡¯t matter. I would like to learn."

    "Then get ready. In the first lesson, go and resolve things with the blue cloaks. Do not coax them or give them benefits, give them ultimatums.

    For that, you need someone who has the strength to back it up. You said that you have someone in your secret force not being used currently. Call two of them with enough strength and make sure they listen to you. Please tell me that they are not spoiled like these idiots here.

    "No, they are alright. They are given to me by my mother. So they arepletely good."

    "That is better. After theye here, confront the blue cloaks, force them to understand their situation and the best way to put that into their heads is to make them go through some training.

    Make these two people train them for two months. The training should be torturous and these things would help."

    With that, Sam took some bracelets and gave them to Grivon.

    "Make them wear these things and go through the whole routine again and again. You should be the only one givingmands throughout the routine and the two secret weapons you call would only be the people that make sure that yourmands are executed.

    These boys will straighten up and if they don¡¯t, you better dispose of them."

    "Dispose of?"

    "Yes, my best choice would be to kill them, since they know too much about you, but since they helped you so much, it is better to imprison them in a luxurious ce for the rest of their lives, so they can die in peace."

    "You are way too violent with this, aren¡¯t you? Should I really be that cutthroat?"

    "I am not being violent, I am being decisive. Do you really think that there is an easy way to be the boss? You are lucky you are running your own organization and are only responsible for your own growth and the people that are just under you.

    Do you know what kind of decisions you have to make when you are in charge of the lives of the people that are weak and innocent? You would wish you couldmit suicide just because of the hard calls that you need to make asionally, of course, provided that you have a conscience."

    "I thought authority is supposed to be great. Why are so many people trying to fight over it if it is that difficult?"

    "Because authority is addictive. The first few years, you would be burdened by responsibility and everything the person does is to think of ways to stand up and be truthful for that responsibility and every decision they make in that time is in good conscience, they make good for the people that are relying on him.

    And that brings the person with the reward of the authority and privilege the people provide. This continues and soon the person¡¯s authority will think differently since he did everything until they in good conscience and did the right thing, he would think that everything he is doing is the right thing. No matter how wrong it is and no matter how bad it is, he wouldn¡¯t see it. He will be corrupt.

    That would be the start of his destruction and sooner orter, he wouldn¡¯t be able to survive."

    "The power that everyone is fighting for, is so corrupt and rotten?"

    "Yes, it is. It is more corrupt than anything you could ever possibly imagine. Anyway, that is too much philosophy for you, the most you have to do is know how to keep your mob in check. That is very simple and you don¡¯t have to think too much.

    Just don¡¯t let the power get to it that is all."

    "Okay, what else. What are the ns about the league?"

    "We would take that as ites. First, tie up all the loose ends of the stray realm. Don¡¯t keep that space gate formation connecting both ends. We will only use a one-sided space gate from inside to out and then we will use tokens to return to the realm. There would be no other way from outside to inside.

    I will also set up arge-scale trap formation around the space gate and we can ce one of your strongckeys there and they would deactivate the trap after confirming the person that came is one of your own.

    We also set up a differentmunicationwork than before. If someone is struck outside with that, they will send the coordinates and the message to us and we would send someone from inside."

    "Just give me the required materials, we will do it."

    "We need proper surveince. Give me all of the candidates you have within the realm where your n is located. Everyone that wants to track me down, woulde there to see the clues left behind by the previous one.

    And currently, the old man died right after dealing with some of your subordinates. To tie that loose end, we need to find some of the subordinates of your brothers and sisters and kill them the same way the old man did to make sure we are not suspected."

    "I can find a few. I have some really hostile rtionships with some of them. But how can we simte death the same way. I don¡¯t think I have anyone skilled enough."

    "I have a way. I understand the technique and I think I can create a formation suited for this method of killing."

    "Anything else?"

    "Nothing much. Let¡¯s do this for now. After it was done, I will tell you what should be done for the next two years. I will n out what to do, after we get whatever we can from the league of blood iron, I will be done with you, you would be able to secure your position in the n and I would go back to my organization.

    We could then finally deal with the Mari n."

 Chapter 1328: Migron

    In the next few days, Grivon did as he was told. He first called his secret subordinates, his mother gave him and since Sam mentioned, he understood the difference between these people and the blue cloaks.

    At first, he only thought that these guys are just too uptight and doesn¡¯t know how to be more flexible, and are a badpany. But now he understood how different they are.

    They always maintained the distance between themselves and Grivon and only followed his orders precisely and offered only when they were asked to or when they believed that they had more merit and Grivon is making a mistake with his orders and that too discreetly.

    They didn¡¯t cut him in front of strangers and maintained the decorum that they are the subordinates and he is the boss.

    This made him see the contrast between them and the Blue Cloaks and he understood how wrong he was.

    As friendly as the Boss and the Subordinates are, there should be a clear distinction. The Subordinates should have self-awareness and should maintain their position as subordinates no matter how friendly the Boss is and should only take it as the Boss¡¯ generosity.

    The Boss also needs to treat the subordinate as the subordinate and should have the self-awareness that as much as he was dependent on the subordinate but the dependence is not something to be taken advantage of.

    He called what remained of the Blue Cloaks with one of them injured and another dead and assembled a meeting.

    He didn¡¯t even let them sit this time. He made them stand across the room while he alone sat. he didn¡¯t pour them wine like before, he just drank it himself while he looked at them casually.

    One of them even wanted to take the wine after the young master was done pouring into his cup, but the subordinate on the senior subordinate on Grivon¡¯s left stopped his hand and looked at him coldly.

    "That is young master¡¯s wine, not something a subordinate can take it from his hands. Stand back and stay there."

    The Blue cloak was stunned, but Grivon just looked at him calmly without any change in his expression.

    The Blue cloak stepped back with a frown.

    Grivon looked at them and said.

    "I have made a mistake by giving you guys too much freedom, from now on, we would be maintaining the clear distinction on who is the boss and who is the subordinate.

    For the next two months, you guys will be going through a special training program and the two people that are standing behind me are the two trainers. They will receive orders from me and they will evaluate you. You are going to report to them and only when they dere that you passed, at the end of the two months, will you be able to get out and join the team once again.

    Otherwise, you would be going for the training of another two months and even if one of you didn¡¯t pass, all of you would have to go back."

    "Training? Young Master Grivon, we are the best team you have. What kind of training can we possibly undergo again?"

    Grivon raised an eyebrow and looked at him coldly.

    The man to his left raised his hand and pped in the air, the wind pushed the blue cloak to the wall and held him there.

    "Did the young master ask you to speak? How dare you interrupt him?"

    The rest of the blue cloaks were stunned, but they didn¡¯t dare make a move, because the other party has cultivation that is far beyond theirs and they would have their asses handed down if they went against them.

    So, they just stayed put, Grivon left behind the bracelets Sam have him before leaving the room.

    He then deactivated the outside space gate that leads to the stray realm. He assigned a specific team to create the tokens that would be used foring in from outside.

    They only have that one job, creating tokens for various ranges.

    After that was done, he once again came back to Sam after three days.

    In these three days, Samid off of his research and busied himself in the specific research so that they could kill the subordinates of other young masters just like how the old man used to do it.

    Of course, these kills wouldn¡¯t be as covert as the old man did and it is almost impossible to do that, but at least they decided to n it as openly as possible.

    This is actually just a formation te, but for it to have a proper effect, the other party must be unconscious. With this limited time, this is the best Sam could do.

    But to assist with making the target unconscious, he helped the medicine research team to concoct the best anesthesia which would go well with this formation.

    Grivon took all of these things and employed some of his close subordinates to carry out the operation. So, for the next week, they killed a bunch of close subordinates of Grivon¡¯s peers and some even belonged to the previous generation sessor candidates.

    After the week, they didn¡¯t bother to kill anyone anymore.

    Now that this thing was done, Sam gave out the information regarding their next target.

    They are going to take a break regarding Sivan¡¯s personal forces, because if they keep on targeting them continuously and they left any traces behind, Sivan would immediately manage to understand that Grivon is the one attacking him, and then Sam¡¯s location would be found out.

    So, they decided to go after another bunch of organizations that are under the control of other young masters of that n.

    The information indeed came from Sivan¡¯s memories but that doesn¡¯t mean he is the only source, so even if Sivan is extremely pissed and suspicious, he couldn¡¯t do anything about it.

    Grivon started nning for that and Sam gave some specific information regarding how to proceed, while he himself busied himself with another thing.

    Tightening themunicationwork of the subordinates with the Gaja n¡¯s territory.

    It is inevitable to have a properwork and surveince which Grivon clearly doesn¡¯t have and for this, Sam went as far as taking out a few inventions of his own surveince techniques. Of course, he didn¡¯t take out the insect puppets and other high-grade inventions, rather he took the basic surveince system with stationary devices that are disguised into the surroundings.

    He gave the blueprints to the other departments within the stray realm and while they manufactured it, he went back to researching the simtor.

    While Sam is busy, Grivon started executing the n ording to his instructions. So, the very next day he went to meet another young master who he chose after long deliberation.

    This person is someone that Grivon didn¡¯t have any particrly good rtionship with, because this guy does a lot of underhanded dirty tricks and even leaves the traces that indicate it is him that did it, but there would be no concrete proof and as soon as he pulled a stunt like that, he would go back to hide under his mother¡¯s skirt.

    Not even his father, his mother who married into the Gaja n. Her mother was part of the organization that was on par with the Golem Sect with the leader being ate-stage cultivator of Astral ne Consummation and she has a tight grasp over it as her brother is the one leading it and essentially she raised her brother.

    She could have been the head of that organization, but she gave it up and married into Gaja n and within no time her husband who was not particrly bright rose in status with her help. She wrapped him around her finger perfectly and whatever she says goes.

    So, after their son was born, he now has a strong organization under him which does his dirty work and he uses them very often. In fact, one of Girvon¡¯s businesses was taken over by him, while he was investigating Sam¡¯s whereabouts and came searching for him in the Red Matter.

    If not for this sudden change of events due to the old man from the Blood Iron, they would have targeted this guy¡¯s ce next.

    But now, they are targeting it in a very different way.

    "Long time no see, Grivon. How you are doing? I heard your restaurant chain was in deep losses a few days ago. A chain that spread over three realms, that has to sting a bit, right?"

    Grivon just smiled and didn¡¯t humor this twisted idiot and changed the topic.

    "I have a proposition, Migron."

    "A proposition? What kind?"

    "A proposition regarding the Mari n. I have a tip regarding Mari n¡¯s secret territories. They are under the control of one of the youngsters of the Mari n and they have very high-yielding mines under their control.

    I want to cooperate with you in taking over that ce. Are you interested?"

 Chapter 1329: Academy

    Migron looked at Grivon with suspicion.

    "You have a tip and you areing to me with that. Come on Grivon, you can do better than that if you really want to trap me."

    "Who said, I am trapping you. This is real, whether you believe me or not."

    "So, exin. Why did youe to me with such a piece of information? We are not close enough to share such arge credit with each other."

    "Because I want to be on the down low for now. I just took over one of the organizations under the Mari n and that too one of the organizations under Sivan. There is just too much attention on me. The previous generation sessor candidates are currently targeting me. I already picked traces on their movements, so I cannot move arge-scale force by myself and I also don¡¯t want to attract any attention."

    "So, you want to partner with me?"

    "Yes, but I wouldn¡¯t be aplete partner. I will give you the information and I would only give out ten percent of the total forces that are needed. I would only take one in return for that."

    "Only one? Grivon, why do you think this deal is too good to be true? You could just wait until this is over and you would be able to take the whole realm for yourself, why are you giving me this? I cannot wrap my head around this."

    "I don¡¯t care about your suspicions Migron, I have my own troubles, but this thing needs to be done now. If you want the truth, I can give you this. The information I have wouldn¡¯t be useful after a certain period of time.

    From what I know, the Mari n has attracted some new enemy and from the information, I gathered, the enemy is moving solo and is targeting various branches. Currently, he is their biggest headache and this is one of the open areas on which the focus has been reduced because the young master kept this cepletely secret from the rest of the n.

    But this is run by some of his main forces, which he needs to move to defend against this mysterious enemy. This would be the perfect time to take that down and I cannot take that down. So, I am giving this to you."

    "But you have some people who have a closer rtionship with you. You can give this to them, why are youing to me? We don¡¯t have the best of the rtionships."

    "They don¡¯t have the capability to move the forces in such a short time frame. If I have to make a deal with them about this situation, I would have to go to at least three people to gather enough forces to meet the requirements, but you can move them within a day.

    And I also want that.

    I have some ns for the metal mine. I got my hands some blueprints and that metal is a necessity for that."

    "What kind of blueprints?"

    "That is the information that ispletely irrelevant to our cooperation. Now, if you want to make a deal, this is a perfect time.

    In normal times, there is no way I would cooperate with you, but this time, we are the perfect match."

    "Let me think about it for a while. I will answer you an answer tomorrow."

    "Deal."

    Grivon then left and started preparing his forces. But as Migron thought, he is not moving some small amount of forces, rather he is moving arge scale force so that they could move from different directions.

    He sent messages to the subordinates who are spread across different realms and sent people to them with a bunch of instructions. He recalled some of his mother¡¯s secret forces which she gifted to him and gave them these tasks.

    When his mother passed these people to him, she gave out some information on their basic profiles, what they are good at, what skills they are most proficient in, what kind of roles they yed before, and other information rted to that.

    He picked a few and assigned them teams along with the missions they have toplete.

    That very night while Migron consulted his mother regarding Grivon¡¯s n, Grivon sent hundreds of people toplete various small missions.

    The next day, he went to meet Migron once again.

    "I will agree to this deal, but you have to share the information regarding the blueprints."

    "I am sorry, that is uneptable."

    "Once you start a business with that, I am bound to find out. If it is a good one, I can reduce my percentage share in the current conquest and both of us can gain from it."

    "It is not for the business. It is for a construction project. I am solidifying my defenses and this metal can be an addition to a special alloy required for that construction project. I am not entering any other business at the moment and not any business rted to that mine."

    Migron looked at him deeply for a moment before saying.

    "Okay, then. Deal. But my people will lead theplete operation and you guys should only operate on that one. As for the rest of the realm, they are only responsible for giving out information."

    "I am okay with that. But I have another request."

    "What is it?"

    "The conquest should be over within the two months. No matter how slow it is, we need to finish it off in two months. The young master wouldn¡¯t be able to send forces for a while, at least not his full forces, but the longer we wait, the more problematic our situation would be."

    "Don¡¯t worry. I am not really looking forward to hogging all the territory. I would destroy most of it and take the only ces left with the resources under control.

    I have a special team that is good at surveince and assassinations, once the forces of that Mari n member are involved, they would take action and if possible we would assassinate the young master himself, so there wouldn¡¯t be much problem for us."

    "You can deal with it however you want. My only requirement is regarding the time limit."

    "Then you don¡¯t have to worry about it. I can handle it."

    With that, both of them shook their hands and went on their own ways. They agreed upon the ce where the two of their teams will meet and gave out the information regarding the team leaders, now the cooperation is solidified.

    After that was done, Grivon kept an eye on the actions of the rest of his subordinates who were sent outside, but he also kept a bit of a high profile as he started the project openly in the n.

    He decided to open an academy with a different curriculum than normal. A curriculum is simr to the one that Sam had back in the deste.

    He proposed this idea with one perk that attracted the attention of all the n members.

    The members who graduate the academy will be recruited by the n members into various divisions, either into personal forces of the young masters, n guards, enforcement department, n research groups, and so on.

    They didn¡¯t expect that Grivon would be this generous regarding something like this. They all believed that they would just keep the idea to themselves and open an academy in a lower realm and recruit the candidates directly, but they didn¡¯tin since such an opportunity came knocking on their door.

    Grivon went as far as to involve some of the other young masters into the idea and he made them keep the big profile to the point when the idea was made public and known to the lesser members of the n, no one knew who the idea really came from except for the elders and the young masters themselves.

    The elders have no reason to divulge the information and the young masters don¡¯t want to divulge the information as they want the credit for themselves. So, the project started.

    Migron didn¡¯t care about this project at all and he just figured that Grivon is nning something else with others to escape the heat from the previous generation candidates that are targeting him.

    He figured it was a great strategy and only cared about the conquest.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is that grivon is really happy that Mirgon has felt such way and he is even more d that other young masters readily took credit for the academy idea, because this is all the part of a big n.

    And this is just the first step.

    After he gained enough attention, Grivon once again secretly met with another one of the young masters within the n.

    But this one is not from his generation, rather he is a member of the previous generation and a very likely sessor candidate.

    He is one of the three biggest prospects and also a perfect cover for what Grivon wants.

 Chapter 1330: Prospect

    "Hello, Brother Vydon."

    "Hey, Grivon. It is weird for you to contact me. I saw that you are making yourself busy with the academy and stuff. I never knew the youngsters are so eager to take part in the n growth. It seems like we became old and the younger generation is trying to take our ce."

    Vydon the prospect, Grivon came to meet said with a smile. Grivon could see the malicious intent past that smile and the hidden meanings of the remarks. He is clearly stating that Grivon is spreading his hands beyond his reach into the sessor race.

    After all, even Vydon and his peers hadn¡¯t settled who the winner is among them, but Grivon is swinging too hard in the past few days.

    "Just my share for the growth of the n, brother Vydon."

    "That¡¯s good. Please don¡¯t hesitate if you ever want my help."

    "Actually, I came here precisely for that. I am here to ask you a big favor."

    Vydon was surprised as he looked at Grivon¡¯s eager face.

    Even though they are of different generations because of their ages and births, they are stillpetitors at the end of the day. He is clearly keeping up appearances while suggesting, he cane for help, but he didn¡¯t expect that Grivon is really there for something.

    "Brother Vydon, I actually came across a really good opportunity in the past few days and I am sure that it would be a great investment. So, I came here to see if you want to partner up."

    With that Grivon took out arge scroll and spread it across the table.

    "Gaja Park?" Vydon asked as he looked at therge blueprint.

    This is nothing but the blueprint of the Park, Sam made when he was still a candidate for the pce of inheritance back in deste.

    Even though this doesn¡¯t seem like of much use for an Astral ne Consummate cultivator, when considered on arge scale, this is stillpletely relevant and useful.

    Grivon started exining various things about the park and which part has what function. After seeing the faint interest in Vydon¡¯s face, he finally took out a formation disc and ced it in the middle creating a holographic three-dimensional blueprint.

    Vydon got immersed in the whole thing.

    "Brother Vydon, the academy is just a small frypared to this. The academy can get us some recruits after a training and lot of investment from our part while they are still in. But it takes a lot of time and the range of the people we could recruit is very small and limited."

    "So, how is this park is going to help?"

    "First thing is that we are going to construct the Park in every one of our lower realms. Everywhere there is a consistent poption of the Mortal ne cultivators. Do you know how many talents are hidden there?

    We would set up prize money and rewards for all the games we have in the park and we would be able to identify a lot of talents and recruit them.

    Do you know how many people we could get like this?"

    Vydon looked at the whole thing with bright eyes. But he came back to his senses.

    "So, why are you here? You certainly have the capital to do this thing on your own. Don¡¯t tell me that you are feeling generous."

    "It is not like that Brother Vydon. There is one thing I am pretty sure of myself and that is it is too farfetched for me to be the sessor candidate and be the head of the n.

    There is just too muchpetition and there are just too many obstacles and we have the previous generation, with you guys and I am pretty sure that one who is selected between you guys would have a long reign. The most we could get is the grand elder position which is what I am aiming for.

    After I came to the conclusion, I decided it is about time I started working, so I am taking all of my hidden forces and I also figured that I would benefit much if the next in line head is someone that I supported and in turn will support me.

    So, here I am."

    "So, you are saying that I am the most likely candidate in your opinion."

    "No, Brother Vydon. You are the candidate with the most potential growth that I could see and you are the most flexible and adaptive. In the current situation, the brother Mingiv and Sister Giyon are the most likely candidates and you are a close third.

    I am sorry for saying this, but the elder backing they have is too much."

    Vydon frowned by he didn¡¯t refute what Grivon said and just asked.

    "Then why are you supporting me? Wouldn¡¯t it benefit better if you supported one of those then?"

    "As I said, you have the most potential, the other two have their victory guaranteed in a way and they don¡¯t need much help from me. Their growth is stagnant along with their positions, you on the other hand arepletely different.

    You have a lot of room to grow and if I facilitate that growth, then I believe I would benefit much. I want to be the youngest grand elder in the n¡¯s history, after all, you know that the age threshold for being the grand elder is a lot more than the threshold for the n head."

    "That is your ambition?"

    "Yes. It might not sound like a lot, but some of the current grand elders have seen the reign of two leaders and they are still there.

    And I believe being a grand elder is a better job for me. After all, I am not particrly good at politics and business. What I am good at it is fighting in a war and making up strategies for troops, if I be a grand elder I could do all of that and I can leave my legacy in stone for the n. What do you say? Do you want to team up?"

    Vydon stayed silent for a long while. He started deliberating about all the pros and cons of this partnership. He doesn¡¯t know whether he could believe Grivon or not. After all, no matter how reasonable it sounded, it is the position of n¡¯s Head. He couldn¡¯t bring himself to believe that someone wouldpletely give it up that easily.

    But on the other hand, when he thought of what kind of person Grivon is, he figured his words might be right.

    So, he agreed.

    "Pleasure to be working with you. Let both of our construction teams work together. How do you want to go about the earnings?"

    "You tell me."

    "Fifty-fifty is good for me."

    "I don¡¯t need that, you pay for seventy percent and you can have sixty percent share. After all, this is my blueprint and I had to pay a lot for the research and development of it, so I pay thirty percent and get forty percent share in the profits."

    "Sixty-five and thirty-five. Even though you might have paid a lot, it is not going to be a match for the construction costs. We are talking about establishing it in every ce under our n, it will take a lot."

    "Okay then, I agree. But you would have to take the lead on the project then. You would have to sit through the meetings and talks with the n members and other local authorities. I wouldn¡¯t want to do that grunt work."

    "Are you sure? People might mistake this being my whole idea."

    "I don¡¯t care, as long as my part of the credit is known to the n members, I won¡¯t bother with what the public sees my contribution as."

    They shook their hands and they went on their own ways.

    As soon as he left the area, Grivon¡¯s smile turned back to scorn as he thought of the slimy greedy smile of Vydon, he went back to the stray realm to meet with Sam.

    "Are you sure this is the right thing to do? After all, that is a big money. Even with all the riches and the n finances, I feel the pinch."

    "I know and that is precisely why we need someone like Vydon to take the lion¡¯s share of it."

    "Why?"

    "You wouldn¡¯t understand now. Let¡¯s wait for all the ns to bear fruit. Now, just send the word to the person I told you about. That guy is the information rodent acting for Sivan and you need to make him hear the news about your partnership with Migron.

    The news should be precise and exactly what I told you. Don¡¯t change anything and make sure it is convincing. If you don¡¯t know how to do that, thene back again."

    "Don¡¯t worry, now I have some people that could do that. They are really good at this stuff. They seem pretty experienced."

    "That¡¯s good. Experience is something hard to buy. Make them follow those instructions precisely and let the information spread.. You can also make your hidden troops make all the hidden attacks as we discussed before."

 Chapter 1331: Two Months

    Two Months passed.

    Gaja n main estate.

    Inside a mansion, in the private bedroom, a middle-aged man sat on the chair while a middle-aged woman leaned on the headboard while sheid on her side as she looked at Migron who is pacing back and forth in the middle of the room like a cat that got its feet hurt.

    "What happened my dear son? You said you need to talk to me, but you are just pacing around. Tell me what do you need?"

    Migron¡¯s mother asked as she looked at her son.

    "Come on now. Tell us what you need or get out." Migron¡¯s father looked at his son and said impatiently.

    "I feel like I am in some trouble. The deal I made with Grivon seemed to have more than that meets the eye."

    "What happened?"

    "I managed to deal with the organization that we targeted and just like how Grivon mentioned, things went smoothly. There are many problems because that guy who owns the organization really did send measly troops and most of the time, they are trying to just survive there, they didn¡¯t even manage to defeat us at all.

    And when I saw deeper into the organizational structure, I must say it is rotten. Even though the whole thing looked sturdy from the outside, the key figures that keep the foundation strong were all pushovers. The whole organization is about to copse internally and from the looks of it there are some small merchant groups and other small organizations that are just there in the process of taking over this organization by dividing it into small pieces."

    "So, what is the problem? It might have only be easier for you to take over that ce."

    "Yes, but it seems like I have a target on my back. Because of my presence, all of these small organizations that were already in a cooperative agreement suddenly became closer and banded together to go against me.

    They knew my identity, but they didn¡¯t back down at all. In fact, they became more aggressive and started attacking my troops. To my surprise, their forces are stronger than the forces that belonged to the organization I just took over.

    Now, because of this, my forces are stuck in that realm without a way out. If I bring them back, the ce I took over with so much effort would be gone and I don¡¯t even know what will happen if I don¡¯t take them back.

    I don¡¯t know if I would be the winner at the end."

    "What about Grivon? Did you talk to him about this?"

    "Yes, I did. But he is pping with the same words I used on him. I asked or rather demanded him to not interfere in the rest of the realms¡¯ matters and I only asked him to deal with one which he wanted from the start.

    Now, he is saying that he wouldn¡¯t interfere outside of that and he would solve any crisis that might involve that."

    Migron¡¯s mother frowned and went into deep thought. But she couldn¡¯t think of any solutions thate to her mind immediately.

    "I will think of the matter. Leave the details with my maid outside, I will look over and think of a solution."

    "Yes, Mother."

    With that Migron left the room. The father finally heaved a sigh and joined his wife in bed, who is teasing him coyly.

    While Migron was left frustrated, Grivon is also having a meeting with Sam.

    But this one is full of cheerful atmosphere and both of them are downing some hard liquor.

    "I can¡¯t believe the n went smoother than we nned. Sivan is currently all over Migron and most of his troops are locked over in that realm. If he calls them back, not only would he suffer the losses in manpower, but all the resources he expended for the battle would also be a waste expense.

    I just hope that he wouldn¡¯t figure out that it was I who did this to him soon."

    "Don¡¯t worry, if you y your cards right, he wouldn¡¯t be able to find out at all. Anyway, Sivan is not going to let him off that easily for the new few months or even years if Migron is persistent, so he would have his hands full."

    Sam said as he took a sip from his wine.

    He couldn¡¯t help but smile and when he imagined the look on Sivan¡¯s face, he couldn¡¯t help but smile even more.

    The whole n was actually made to make Sivan and Migron fight each other.

    The organization that Grivon used to entice Migron is indeed an organization under the control of one of the young masters of the Mari n, but Sivan has been trying to take over that organization for years.

    He infiltrated the organization with many of his spies and made it rot from inside, all the small organizations and merchant groups that are trying to take over that organization are all under Sivan¡¯s control.

    He wanted to use those small organizations as the cover and take over before merging together once again.

    But as his efforts were about to bear fruit, Migron suddenly appeared out of nowhere and took over the organization, but it is not just that, while Migron is taking over, Grivon¡¯s secret troops are taking over another batch of small organizations that are connected with the small organizations that Migron is fighting now.

    Since Grivon acted secretly and securely without revealing his footprints anywhere, the me fell on Migron which is why Sivan is retaliating in full force making Migron run to his mother.

    But that is not all. The information tip Sam wanted Grivon to spread to the informant of Sivan yed a huge role and currently, Sivan is having the most frustrating time in a while.

    In the Mari n.

    Sivan is also downing liquor crazily and he is downing poison liquor taking advantage of the poison immunity of the body.

    The poison liquor is extremely hard and is good for drunkards who are extremely used to drinking, of course, granted that they are immune to it, they can really enjoy it.

    But now, he is not enjoying a single drop of it. All he has in the front is the stack of documents that are rted to Migron¡¯s invasion into his territory.

    He looked through them and wanted to tear Migron apart immediately.

    The most frustrating part is information that he heard in the middle of this war.

    The information stated that Grivon the young master of the Gaja n who took over one of the twelve foundational organizations of Sivan got the information regarding these organizations from Migron himself.

    The information is detailed, and it further stated that Migron gave up the tip because of the favor he owed to Grivon. After some further investigation, it was noted that Migron is a troublemaker and always tried to go after the businesses of his peers but always managed to blow up the matter, making him owe a lot of things to a lot of people and in process of that he gave Grivon this tip by enticing him with the credit of taking down a Mari n¡¯s secret organization.

    Sivan didn¡¯t want to believe this at first, but soon he couldn¡¯t help but agree that this might be the case.

    He wanted to go after Grivon and already started digging deeper for some more dirt, but he was unable to find much and he couldn¡¯t reach Grivon, because he is actively participating in the academy construction.

    And to his surprise, the academy curriculum which he obtained with great efforts matched the academy curriculum he obtained from Sam¡¯s memories he gained recently.

    In that part of the soul, he managed to gain the memories of Sam¡¯s first Pce of inheritance experience, the war against the emperor Orion, and finally gaining the city as a reward. He got the construction n of the city as well as the academy along with all the rules and curriculum he ced on the academy.

    Sivan thought that Grivon might be the one in touch with Sam when he looked at this, after all, he destroyed one of the organizations and now the academy came into being, but before he could take action, he got the information regarding Migron being the one giving the information away.

    As if to solidify that, he came across the news that Vydon one of the three sessor prospects that are likely to win started the park project.

    With all of these leads, Sivan believed that Migron might be the one who is in touch with Sam and he is now selling ideas of Sam as a favor while he offered protection to him.

    So, he went and dug deeper into Migron¡¯s past and when he realized how many times his mother saved his ass, he couldn¡¯t help but feel that he is the most likely candidate.

    This made his retaliation a lot harsher than it would have been.

 Chapter 1332: Retards Retaliation

    Currently, Sivan is going all out on dealing with Migron, the only reason Migron still had any hope left is that Sivan didn¡¯t reveal his full strength immediately and most of his troops are moving in stealth.

    Sivan¡¯s style was never to move directly, he always worked in stealth and he always caught his targets when they least expected him.

    Meanwhile back in the stray realm, Sam and Grivon wrapped up the drinking session. Even though this is the first proper victory they had, all they did is clean up the mess. That is all.

    At this moment, Grivon is not the focus of anyone. Even the league of Blood Iron was fooled and they sent people in a different direction. In fact, in the past two months, someone came from the league and they focused on the scapegoat that Sam and Grivon created.

    With the new and improved surveince, they managed to identify the members that came and used Grivon¡¯s powerful subordinates to catch them.

    After they drank enough, both of them walked to the cell they were being held on.

    Even though the subordinates are strong and they managed to catch these people rather easily, they didn¡¯t kill them. They knew that Grivon would want information and they decided that it would be better if Grivon collected the information by himself by performing the soul extraction right in front of him.

    Sam looked at the two guys and recognized them immediately. They are part of the old man¡¯s memories. These two are the brothers that joined the league and they always act together in every assignment.

    Currently, these two brothers are tied to two chairs buck naked with all of their storage stripped, and even their hair was cut off.

    They are in a miserable and pathetic state.

    "Your subordinates are really something, they managed to catch these hitmen perfectly. These guys are notorious."

    "Really? I never heard of them."

    "Of course, you haven¡¯t. That is their specialty. They don¡¯t leave any traces, in fact, their killings would be cleaner than the old man before, because these guys don¡¯t even leave the dead bodies there."

    "You killed the old man?"

    One of the brothers asked in shock.

    "Yes. And you are going to die as well. Goodbye."

    Grivon gestured for his subordinate who made a move. He immediately killed both of them and Sam made specter extract the souls immediately. These people are of Astral ne consummate level. They are some quality souls that could improve specter¡¯s abilities by leaps and bounds.

    After extracting the memories, the specter sent them to Sam and left the ce to digest the souls.

    Sam looked through the memories and his eyes were brightened immediately. He looked through the belongings of the two brothers spread on the table nearby and picked two rings.

    They lookedpletely normal, in fact, they are less than normal. They looked like they were carved out of some kind of solid stone.

    But both of them are actual divine dimension fragments.

    Sam looked through both of those things. They are smallpared to all the other divine dimension fragments he came across. But they are indeed divine dimension fragments and both of them are exact the same copies.

    Sam threw one of them to Grivon and said.

    "This is for you. You can have the things inside too."

    Grivon looked at the ring and checked it out.

    "Damn, these Blood Iron league members are really rich, does every one of them have a divine dimension fragment?"

    "Who knows? I hope they have though. In that way, all of this effort would at least be worth it."

    "I hope they have many more. In that way, I could get more of them too. I can have my own breeding bases and training camps inside. I can even carry some research teams that could readily create formations for me. If I have enough of them, it would be like carrying a whole army with me."

    As they were talking, Sam suddenly remembered something and said.

    "Hey, lets go. I think today will be the day."

    "Go where?"

    "The n grounds. To meet your Genius Cousin."

    "Are you sure today will be the day? Thest two times you dragged me there, we ended up seeing nothing."

    "Of course, trust me. Your cousin is going to do something amazing and a lot of your n members are going to make a move on him today. You need to be there and support him."

    "You said the same thingst time."

    Both of them left the stray realm and made their way to the Gaja n grounds to the ce where Milind was making those weird sculptures.

    When Sam and Grivon arrived, he looked at them and waved his hand with a smile.

    "He seemed to be in a good mood. So, you might be right. He must have finished it."

    Sam looked around without replying and dragged Grivon to the corner.

    "Why are we standing here? We can have a better view from there."

    "No need. We need to be here. We might get in the way."

    They stood there for around fifteen minutes and finally, Milind stopped with the sculptures and took onest look at the whole thing before walking into the middle of all of them.

    He stood there taking deep breathes while keeping his eyes closed. Soon bright light started emitting from his body and it is shot at all of the sculptures at the same time. The light created shadows and all of them took specific forms.

    The shadows looked like ghosts with ws.

    Milind took a deep breath and opened his eyes which are filled with dark elemental energy and the shadows suddenly came to sentience as they moved. They looked humongous as they became thirty feet tall each.

    A total of twelve shadows on twelve sides of Milind all looked menacing.

    Grivon was stunned as he looked at the whole scene. He felt shivers running down his spine as he looked at therge shadows. He could sense the auraing from them which is menacing and bloodthirsty. The power they are disying is way too much for him to handle.

    He started sweating profusely.

    Beside him, Sam has apletely different expression. He activated energy vision as he took it all in. He looked at it as if it is an elegant piece of art.

    He couldn¡¯t help but take a few deep breaths again and again.

    They are not the only people that noticed the situation. There are many more people in the n grounds that noticed the sudden appearance of this shadow. Within two minutes a lot of people appeared at the spot.

    One of the shadows looked at one particr group and dove towards them.

    The ws of the shadows ripped through one of the subordinates of the young master standing there and almost caught the young master.

    "That guy is one of the bullies that made Milind¡¯s life a living hell. His residence is the closest to this ce." Grivon said as he took in a cold breath.

    The young master started running towards his residence while he used themunication token to contact someone. He ordered his subordinates to cover his back while he ran away.

    Two more shadows joined the pursuit and the three giant shadows started moving towards him like dark shes.

    The subordinates couldn¡¯t hold the shadows down for a second, they were killed instantly and soon, one of the shadows caught the young master right before he was about to enter his residence.

    "Let go of me, you bloody retard. Let me go or you will be dead."

    As if answering his provocations, the shadow ripped his leg off like it was a twig and brought him towards the sculptures.

    By now, many more people starteding out of their residences.

    After throwing the young master into the middle of the sculptures, the shadows moved once again. Half of the shadows stayed there while the remaining moved away in pairs in three different directions.

    In one of the three directions, the pair met with the target even before they reached the spot. The shadows started going on a rampage and captured the young master while the rest of the group was either severely injured or even dead.

    As for the remaining two targets, they didn¡¯t evene out of the house. They are still inside and they could see the shadows from far away, so they immediately activated all the defensive formations, but the shadows reached those two houses rapidly and started attacking the defensive formations.

    Themotion caused by this is too much and everyone in the n grounds came to know of this.

    At this moment, a middle-aged man suddenly appeared near the sculptures and yelled out loud.

    "MILIND. YOU BETTER STOP THIS, BEFORE THIS GOES OUT OF HAND. YOU WOULD BE FACING SEVERE PUNISHMENT IF YOU DON¡¯T STOP THIS NOW."

    But Milind didn¡¯t even bother to respond. Sam looked at Grivon and asked.

    "Who is this guy?"

    "An External Elder. He is in charge of the external recruits of the n. He shouldn¡¯t be here. This is the private area for the youngsters of the n."

    "Maybe he came here to meet some youngsters of the n in private."

 Chapter 1333: Backing Milind

    As soon as Sam said those words, Grivon realized something.

    "No wonder these assholes are getting the first pick over the subordinates from external members. This guy is meeting them in secret."

    "Don¡¯t tell me, you didn¡¯t know that something like this is happening behind the scenes. If that is true, you are a lot more na?ve than I thought."

    "I didn¡¯t know, because I didn¡¯t care alright. I don¡¯t participate in this stupid subordinate recruitment setup. I recruited all of my subordinates by myself while roaming around various ces and the rest of the subordinates are given to me by my mother."

    "Whatever you say."

    Sam said and his attention was already grabbed by the shadows that made their move. The six shadows didn¡¯t hold back even though the person that attacked him was an external elder.

    The six shadows surrounded the middle-aged man and attacked him one after the other.

    The elder soon realized that he is no match and wanted to escape, but one of the shadows grabbed hold of him and started ascending into the air, after reaching the maximum height it can reach, it balled him up and threw him down to the ground at full speed.

    *BOOM*

    The Elder crashed into the ground creating a crater, but the bashing didn¡¯t stop there, the shadows started beating the crap out of the elder as two of them stood on either side of the crater as they punched him deep into the ground.

    Meanwhile, the four shadows that are at the residences of the other two young masters finally prated through their barriers and caught the young masters while destroying the residences. The shadows rapidly brought them to the sculptures and threw them to the ground.

    The four young masters joined together as they looked at the shadows in horror.

    "Did this retard finally gopletely insane? How did he even get these shadows?"

    One of them asked the other three, but they don¡¯t have any answers. They are also questioning the same thing.

    At this moment, the two shadows stopped pummeling the elder and surrounded the four young masters and from the looks of it Milind seemed to have nned something really excited for them which made them nervous.

    Only when they saw a silhouette past the shadows did they manage to heave a sigh.

    It is an elder of the n who came to their rescue.

    "Milind. Stop this. We can discuss any problems we have. Trust me, you don¡¯t have to do something you will regretter."

    But Milind didn¡¯t say anything and just continued. The shadows huddled together and one of them threw a punch at the four. They immediately dodged and threw attacks, but the shadows didn¡¯t even feel the attacks, they kept on punching and soon everyone realized that Milind is just toying with them.

    They are running around trying to avoid being punched by those enormous fists, but he is not even throwing those punches seriously, he is just ying around.

    The Elder looked at this and felt angry, but he knew that it is not his ce to say anything, so he contacted some senior elders toe.

    When a middle-aged man with a higher authority came, instead of asking Milind to stop, he asked about the situation in detail.

    Sam looked at this and pushed Grivon out.

    "Go on and back Milind out."

    Grivon came out of his stupor and ran forward. Many of them didn¡¯t notice his presence as he just stayed put in a corner.

    Grivon directly went to the Elder and spoke.

    "Elder, Milind is just taking revenge for all the suffering they put him through."

    "Revenge?"

    "Yes, you might not have noticed this, but the four of them put him through hell since we were just kids and in the past year they just kept on crossing the line. Now, he is just retaliating in full."

    The Senior elder is dumbfounded. He doesn¡¯t know how to react. When he looked at Milind and the other four young masters he knew that this wouldn¡¯t be solved easily.

    All of their parents are not exactly small fries. They are all on par with him in status and if he had to consider the birth rights some of them would even have higher status than him. If he interferes and treats one side unfairly, he would be having endless trouble.

    As he was thinking rapidly, he suddenly sensed something turned around to find out that the five people areing from different sides.

    They are the parents of the five kids involved in this mess.

    As soon as they arrived on their beasts, four of them stood together while one man stood on the other side. At this moment, the External Elder who was pounded into the ground came out and ran towards the four elders standing together and knelt on the ground.

    "Elders, you need to seek justice for me. This insane maniacal retard did this to me. You cannot let this go."

    Grivon looked at him and took out his sword as he ced it on the throat of the external elder before the four elders could even react.

    They were stunned by his actions.

    "Grivon, what are you doing?"

    One of the elders asked.

    "A Measly External Elder shouldn¡¯t even be in this Private ce for the youngsters of Gaja n, but not only is he present here, but he is also even calling one of the young masters of the n a retard and a maniac.

    What do you think I am doing Elder?"

    He spoke confidently without stepping back.

    Grivon¡¯s status ispletely different than ordinary young masters. They are all peers by the time of birth, but their birthrights arepletely different. Grivon¡¯s father is a core elder and his grandfather is a grand elder. His mother is powerful as well as she is a member of an organization on par with the Gaja n.

    Even though she doesn¡¯t have any status in the n, even a senior elder would have to bow when seeing her. The only reason that the rest of his peers are even able to talk to him freely is that his parents don¡¯t stay in the estate and prefer to live in seclusion in a stray realm. But still, the Senior Elders knew better than antagonize him over an external elder.

    The External Elder looked at the Senior Elders in hope that they would stand up for him. But they didn¡¯t.

    "Young Master..." The External Elder wanted to plead Grivon, but his words were cut off because the edge of the sword made a mark on his neck.

    "Just stay put and await your trial by the enforcement division. Until then, if you talk, I will just kill you myself. Don¡¯t get involved in matters that you are not even worthy of knowing. Do you understand?"

    The External elder was too scared to even answer, so he just nodded his head.

    The Senior elder who is the father of Milind looked at Grivon and nodded in greeting which he gave back in return.

    "Elders, I only have one thing to say in this matter. If you want to punish Milind, I wouldn¡¯t object as long as the previous actions of the other four are punished.

    But if you don¡¯t want to punish them and just want to treat those acts as the yfulness of the youngsters, treat this as the same."

    Grivon simply stated his stand and the four elders felt their faces go ck. This is the worst possible scenario for them.

    If Grivon was anything like their children they would have feared that he is just bluffing and talking big, but he is not.

    He is not a person who runs back to his parents for every grievance and not a person who asks his parents to clean his mess up. He is reallypetent and in recent days the inner circle of the n elders is already full of his name.

    The academy and the parks are a running hot topic.

    They knew better than to brush off his words.

    So, they could only grit their teeth and stay put regarding this matter.

    "Young Master Grivon, I agree that this is just Milind Paying back, but I believe the youngsters have suffered enough and understood their mistakes. If he lets them go, we can call this matter off."

    Grivon looked at Milind¡¯s father who nodded and walked towards the sculptures.

    "Milind, it is enough, let them go. They will apologize for their mistakes."

    The shadows stopped for the first time and Milind¡¯s eyes stopped glowing reducing them back to their normal sizes projected on the ground. He looked at his father in askance.

    He smiled and reassured him.

    "They will apologize for what they did to you. Now, let them go."

    Milind nodded and the glowing shadows disappeared. The four youngsters stood up with all of their bodiespletely sore.

    They looked at Milind with hateful gazes which made him frown and riled his energy up making these guys scared.. They bowed down and apologized before running back to their parents.

 Chapter 1334: Back To Business

    The conflict was resolved way quicker than Sam had thought. He really underestimated the influence Grivon held within the n. Not only did the elders not make any trouble, they even took their sons and left silently after the apology.

    Milindpletely deactivated the formation and came out. He happily waved at Grivon, but not once did he look at his own father.

    Sam came out of the corner and walked towards them.

    Milinid once again waved happily which Sam returned.

    Milind¡¯s father looked at Sam. It is unusual for a person to be covered like this, with the face and even the limbspletely covered with ck cloth, Sam is not revealing anything about him except for the eyes.

    But he didn¡¯t care much and just left after he failed a few more times tomunicate with his son.

    Sam spent some time with Milind and gave them notes on a few more topics before leaving along with Grivon.

    "What happened between that son and the father? They don¡¯t seem to get along very well."

    "Well, Milind is pretty angry with his father, because when this whole thing with those idiots bullying him started, he didn¡¯t believe Milind¡¯s story at all. He ignored him for a few months and this made these idiots go crazy without any restraint. Only when things almost got out of hand did the father react and by then it was toote.

    Milind didn¡¯t talk to him anymore. He listens to him sometimes and he does somethings his father told him to do which is the only form of acknowledgement he is giving him."

    "So, ssic father issues."

    "Maybe."

    "Okay, now that the show is over, let¡¯s get back to work. In the past two months we ignored your business side of things. Lets go and deal with it."

    Grivon¡¯s eyes brightened and said.

    "That is what I am looking forward to, the most."

    "Of course, you would look forward to it, why wouldn¡¯t you? Anyway, I thought of something regarding our agreement."

    "What is it?"

    "The thing about Vardar. You didn¡¯t approach him yet, did you?"

    "Not yet, I don¡¯t want to draw any unnecessary attention."

    "That is great. Don¡¯t approach him by yourself. I forgot to consider this myself, but there is some problem here. Sivan definitely knew what was I doing in these realms and he definitely knew that I would be needing Vardar¡¯s heirloom.

    If by any chance he kept his focus on that side, that would expose you and then me to him. So, we shouldn¡¯t meet Vardar by ourselves, but we still need to get the heirloom."

    "Do you want to make a deal with another young master here?" Grivon asked as he thought of the possible candidates.

    "That would be the best case scenario. This way, we could make another one of your peers as Sivan¡¯s target while we stay undercover a bit more.

    But I don¡¯t think no matter what we offer, no one would be willing to be the mediator of such arge deal."

    "I have a few people in mind who are fools enough to do so."

    "Of course, there are always who can do the dirty work without the consequences but the problem is they would attract too much attention after the whole deal was over. They wouldn¡¯t be able to keep the new riches hidden and wouldn¡¯t know how to be discreet. Sooner orter, they would rat us out and the whole thing would be exposed.

    Sivan would easily track us out and the whole thing would be out in the open."

    "Then what should we do?"

    "Let me think. Meanwhile, let¡¯s go and do some business. Let¡¯s target our friend Migron this time. Since the young man is busy taking the brunt of Sivan¡¯s attacks, we might as well take over his market share."

    "I think it would be difficult. Migron took over the Restaurant and bars of many of hispetitors within the realm and he has thergest chain at the moment."

    "Well, that is indeed right. But there is always a way to snatch the market share back and trust me, this wouldn¡¯t even be difficult. Just bring me the details about the types of beasts that could be bred in the different areas of the realm

    I will cook up some recipes and then we will think of the perfect n to win the market."

    "You have experience in this business too?"

    "I do. My organization is involved in all kinds of things. From mercenary groups to the massage centers. There are just too many things we dabble in."

    "Alright. I have a report of the Market research when we were first trying to enter the market. I will send it to you."

    Sam went back to his room in the stray realm.

    He went to the simtor model he made and started ying with it. The project is close to the ending. He can make the holographic images appear from his brain. The modelling function is perfectly working, the simtion function of the simtor is not working properly.

    The simtor doesn¡¯t have enough knowledge and intelligence programmed into it to make it think and process the functions by itself, which he is working on. He has some ideas on how to add both of those things though.

    As he was thinking, the Market research report came in.

    The report is pretty detailed. The realm is divided into variouss and then into various regions within the and there is a detailed record of which animals are being bred and groomed and what kind of edible goods like herbs and fruits would be abundantly avable through either the wild collection or through farming.

    After looking through it for the rest of the day, Sam decided to take a different approach than before. He didn¡¯t use any modern techniques to make the restaurantyout. After all, there is a chance that Sivan might gain some of his memories and understand theyout and once again, he will get a lead to catch him.

    But even if he went traditional style, Sam decided to experiment with food and some marketing strategies.

    After all, Sivan only has Sam¡¯s memories and ideas, not his thinking. He might be able to get all kinds of knowledge and designs Sam possessed in those memories, but he wouldn¡¯t be able to get the new ideas Sam had in this new body.

    He started making recipes up. Most of them he didn¡¯t even try, he just wrote them and down and let Grivon¡¯s people try them, by themselves.

    After he was done with that, he gave out the ideas and Grivon made his business associate meet with the local lords who would be the face as well as the partners in the operation. The discussions were over in just a week and the recipes were also finalized.

    Now, all that was left is to make sure that the restaurants are modelled properly and the marketing stunt they are trying to pull would work.

    Meanwhile, Sam started thinking about the situation with Vardar.

    He needs the heirlooms of the organization.

    If his estimations are correct, the rest of the yers might still be fighting with the remaining two organizations with the Middle stage Consuammate cultivators of Astral ne as the leaders.

    They are going to take their time, wearing the organizations down bit by bit while they took it over and obtained the heirlooms.

    One of the organizations was already destroyed by Sivan and it is safe to assume that the heirloom fell into Dayus¡¯s hands.

    Currently, Sam couldn¡¯t ess his wrist screen, which makes it apparent that he needs his body y the game.

    But he is not willing to wait until he regains his body, because he doesn¡¯t know how long it will take for him to get the body back.

    So, he decided that he would take over the heirlooms anyway. At least the ones that belong to the organizations that are a bit higher on the list.

    Even if they are not counted as part of the game, he could at least make sure that the other yers are not getting their hands on them.

    And Vardar is the easiest of the three organizations to obtain the heirloom from. But it would be hard to hide his tracks no matter what method he used to get it from Vardar.

    As he thought of many possibilities, he finally narrowed it down to a few and out of them, only one seemed most usible with minimal damage to himself and also with minimal exposure of his active part in all of this.

    But it is also the most unlikely scenario.

    Still, he ced the idea in front of Grivon, and to Sam¡¯s surprise, Grivon actually agreed with the idea and even said.

    "There is a perfect person for this job and I am sure we can convince them to keep the secret to the grave as long we are truthful and offer enough benefits."

 Chapter 1335: Giyon

    "Really? Are you sure there is someone who would agree to this and that too with the full truth?"

    "Yes, there is and that person is another prospect for the next sessor and in fact far more capable than Vydon. She is Giyon Gaja."

    "Then, can we meet her?"

    "Let me check with her associates, she is kind of busy. She is the business tycoon in their generation. She holds most businesses out of every one of her peers and brings in the most revenue for the n. She also recruits many people for the External part of the n.

    But I doubt that she is using that as a way to infiltrate the groups of other people of her generation."

    "Try to make an appointment then. I would like to get this done as soon as possible. If things work out well, not only would I have the heirloom we would make Sivan even busier with the strongest prospect for the next sessor in line being his possible target."

    "That is indeed true. I will see what I can do."

    With that Grivon left and Sam went back to his research. Grivon only came back in the evening with the good news.

    "I got the appointment for tomorrow morning. The meeting will be held in the n grounds."

    "That is good."

    "But there is something weird though."

    "What is it?"

    "I actually managed to meet Giyon directly, not for long though as she was on her way to somewhere else, she immediately agreed to the meeting and said.

    ¡¯Don¡¯t forget to bring your new friend.¡¯ But she said this before I even mentioned about you."

    "Well, she might just be smart. We will know when we meet her tomorrow."

    The next day, Sam and Grivon went to the Gaja n grounds, directly to the residence of Giyon.

    There are many people at the residence all seemed to be extremely busy as they are holding meetings and discussions at many ces. In the front yard, the hall, and the dining room.

    As soon as they entered the residence, they were received by an attendant and led to a small meeting room. The room is very small, it is only suitable for free people, with a single table.

    On the other side, a youngdy who looked like she was in herte twenties, sat while looking through some documents.

    She has arge bun of hair on her head tied up straight and her eyes are a bit usually dark and smokey.

    She looked at both of them and ced her documents aside.

    "You finally showed up. I was really looking forward to this meeting." She greeted them as she gestured them to take a seat.

    Grivon and Sam took a seat and Giyon smiled while saying.

    "Why don¡¯t we start by introducing your friend here? Why wear a cloak to a business meeting?"

    Grivon didn¡¯t know how to start, but Sam looked at Giyon¡¯s eyes and had a hunch.

    "I am Sam. A new researcher working under Young Master Giyon."

    "Sam seems like you don¡¯t like beating around the bush either. You are just as the rumors said."

    "So, Lady Giyon has heard of me. I am ttered."

    "Don¡¯t be. You are being modest."

    Grivon was the one who was most surprised in the room.

    "You know him?"

    Giyon chuckled and said.

    "Please, little Grivon. You are not the only one with the ambition and you are certainly not the only one with thework. Do you really think that you are the only one keeping tabs on that vile snake Sivan?

    I have been keeping tabs on him for a while too, but you are a few steps ahead of me every time, because of my busy schedule over different realms. I learned that Sivan obtained the new body and I started digging through the information regarding the person who stole his body, while you were on the search for the person directly.

    That was my mistake and I realized it as soon as I got the information on Sam.

    And trust me, from what I know, you didn¡¯t investigate him long enough, before going towards him. You don¡¯t even know half of the things he had done over the realms.

    I wanted to recruit him myself, but you already beat me to it.

    At first, I didn¡¯t believe that you managed to find him, butter you started the energy shield business and then the idea of the park, the academy, the medicine business, and your uing food business. I knew that you are not smart enough to create all of these things yourself, so I guessed that you might have managed to reach him and my guess ispletely right."

    Grivon took in a breath of cold air. He couldn¡¯t help but feel buck naked in front of her. She knew almost everything about him.

    Looking at Grivon¡¯s face, Giyon chuckled.

    "Don¡¯t worry my little brother. I don¡¯t have any conflict with you, so your secrets are safe with me. But if I were you, I would tell your associate to stop using the n transportation space gates whenever he goes for a business meeting.

    He is clearly leaving a track. Even though he was being stealthy and disguised, there are ways to identify a person when they are disguisedpletely. Their stench will be all over the ce."

    "Stench?" Grivon was confused even more.

    "Soul Scent."

    Sam said from the side and Giyon smiled once again.

    "You are indeed as good as the rumors say."

    "They are not rumors, almost every story you might have heard about me is true," Sam said calmly.

    "Since we know who is who, why don¡¯t you take off that cloak."

    Sam shrugged and removed his cloak.

    "This face is also not bad. You didn¡¯t lose out in that section."

    "As far as I am concerned this might as well be the face of a pig," Sam replied without any expression.

    Giyon chuckled and asked.

    "So, why are you guys here?"

    Grivon who is still in shock finally came out of his stupor, but he still doesn¡¯t know if he is ready to talk the deal at the moment.

    After all, he just realized that all of his secrets are not really secrets. All of his preparations over the years are gone to dust.

    Giyon looked at his panicked expression and said with a smile.

    "Don¡¯t worry. I am not really looking into you topete with you. I was looking to get to know you."

    "Yeah, right. And I am the most handsome guy in the world." Grivon blurted out without thinking.

    Giyon once again chuckled and said.

    "Hear me out, Grivon. Have I ever lied to you over the years? I practically raised you when your mother and father went on their constant honeymoons. Why would I hold a grudge against you?"

    "Honeymoons? They went to make deals with other ns and who knows what these n members do for the position of the n head? We already saw fathers murder their sons and sons crippling their fathers."

    Giyon sighed and said.

    "Hear me out alright. First of all, your mother and father just used the ns as an excuse to go on their little honeymoons and I don¡¯t have anything against you because I don¡¯t want to be the head of the n. So, don¡¯t get all panicky and stay rxed."

    Grivon was dumbfounded and this time, even Sam was a bit surprised.

    For someone who has the best prospects to be the next n head to not wanting to be one is indeed a surprise.

    After all, the Gaja n head essentially controls around two dozen realms directly and indirectly a lot more than that. It is almost iprehensible for someone to not desire that power.

    Giyon looked at him and said with the same smile.

    "Don¡¯t think that I am not ambitious. I have my own dreams and agendas for establishing the businesses I run. I want to run my own organization and I aspire to make it as big as Gaja n one day.

    And for that, I am using the Gaja n as a cushion. I can use the authority I have as the young mistress of the Gaja n to make my business.

    I would increase the revenue for the n while increasing my riches and influence in many more realms and finally I would make it big.

    As for why I am looking into you, I would prefer someone capable to be the n head instead of those arrogant jerks that only see the power in the n but not the responsibility."

    "Why do you care if you are going out of the n anyway?"

    "Because she thinks it is her responsibility."

    This time Sam answered and Grivon looked at him in confusion.

    "She believes she is the most worthy candidate to be the next n head and since she is leaving behind the n, she believes that it is her responsibility to choose the next best option and support them to take over the n.

    Am I right, Lady Giyon?"

 Chapter 1336: A Deal

    Giyon looked at Sam with a smile once again. But this time, the smile is a lot different than before. All this while, her smile is just polite. She was just smiling to keep up the appearance.

    But now she is smiling with intrigue.

    Sam didn¡¯t show any expression and just sat there calmly. He looked at Grivon who is constantly surprised and shocked for every little thing and shook his head.

    He is way too expressive and it wouldn¡¯t do good for him if he is like this all the time.

    "So, now if Grivon is done with his shock and surprise, we can talk why you guys are really here?"

    Sam looked at Grivon and figured it would be better for him to talk.

    "We need you to do something for us. I need the heirloom of the Divine Pce of Healing."

    "The Umbre?"

    "Yes. I need that and I want you to be the one that buys the Umbre."

    "Is the Umbre up for sale?"

    "What do you think?"

    "It is Vardar, of course everything would be up for sale at a right price." Giyon replied.

    "So, I want you to buy the umbre from him and I don¡¯t want you to hide your identity when doing that.

    Sivan knows some of my secrets and he would have known that I would need the umbre. So I need you to attract his attention."

    "So, you want me to be the scape goat, while you hide along with Grivon?"

    "To bepletely blunt, yes. I want you to be the face and you are the only one Sivan wouldn¡¯t dare make a move that easily."

    "Why are you so sure?"

    "Because, he is weakening. He doesn¡¯t have his full strength with him. If he realizes that you might be the one hosting me here, he would have to think thrice before making any rash move. You are just too huge."

    "But that doesn¡¯t mean, he doesn¡¯t make a move at all. It is not like I am invincible and he ispletely useless.

    There is a possibility that might risk it."

    "Yes, there is a possibility. But that would only happen, if he is sure that you are the one hosting me, but I am doing everything I can just to avoid giving him that conclusion.

    Now, if he had to weigh in all the options, Migron is the one hosting me and it would take some time for him to realize that there is a possibility that Migron is not the one hosting me, he would have weigh in the other options.

    The most likely suspect would be Vydon who is taking over the park project. Park is something I made in the starting stages of my life and it is a lucrative money making business. It focuses on gathering small amounts of money inrge quantity and it is kind of my signature project.

    So, Sivan might go for him, but he cannot rule out the possibility that Grivon and the other two youngsters involved in the academy project as the academies are one of the foundational things about my organizations.

    He would have too many options for him to conclude it was you who is hosting me and it would exhaust his time to learn whether it is true or not."

    "Lets say, he takes his time, what happens when he finallyes. After all, all the other members are taking something from you, but I am the one giving you something if I did make the transaction, which is a suspicious, I don¡¯t believe he would take that much time to confirm that."

    "Yes, he wouldn¡¯t, but I would also be trying my best to make him busy on other fronts. Out of his twelve foundational organizations only ten are left, two of them arepletely gone and third one is on the way.

    Grivon would be dealing with these organizations making Sivan busy enough as it is and I would be making deals with other youngsters of the n so that they would be on the radar as well. I will give up small organizations under Sivan one by one. And I have a hunch that Vardar wouldn¡¯t be the first person that Sivan is going to look for."

    "Oh really? Why would that be?"

    "From what I understood about Sivan, he wouldn¡¯t think that I would be giving such an important task as getting the heirloom to one of the outsiders, in fact he might even think that I am not focusing on the heirlooms as having my own body is a prerequisite for me to even have any use for those objects."

    "This seems like an oveplicated sketchy sales pitch. Anyway, I don¡¯t want to hear how you are going to do, what I want is that Sivan shouldn¡¯t be anywhere near me for a few months at least after I finish the purchase. But what would I gain from this?"

    "What do you need?"

    "You are asking as if you can give me whatever I need."

    "I might actually be able to do that. Why don¡¯t you give it a try and ask me?"

    "I will hold onto the favor and see what I can get from you. But I need some extramission for the transaction itself."

    Sam looked at Grivon who is listening from the side and he nodded his head in eptance.

    "Anything else?"

    "Yes, I wouldn¡¯t be making the transaction happen until you make some of the youngsters as possible targets for Sivan and also make him lose another organizations. I just want to confirm how well you can y this game.

    The better your performance is, the better my performance would be."

    "So, this is a deal?"

    "Yes, it is."

    Sam and Giyon shook hands while Grivon did the same.

    After that the two of them left after Sam covered his face back in the cloak.

    As they were walking in the n grounds, Sam suddenly spoke.

    "Grivon, I need a favor."

    "What is it?"

    "Make some of your subordinates wear cloaks like me. If I am the only one walking around, it would be pretty suspicious."

    "Is that it?"

    "No, Change your business associate. Shift the secret business associate to your open businesses. It would be hard to escape the soul scent once it was marked. He wouldn¡¯t be able to keep your business secrets. Wherever he goes, Giyon¡¯s people would ne able to track him down."

    "But he is the only guy skilled enough to operate my secret businesses, what should I do if I have to lose him?"

    "I will make the deals, if it is truly needed. But you cannot use him for the secret businesses. Send him to the open businesses that are under you. That is the best we can do for now. At least until we can confirm that Giyon doesn¡¯t have any reason to harm us."

    "If you are doubtful of her, why did you give out such information like that?"

    "To confirm some of my suspicions."

    "And?"

    "It would take some time to confirm them. I would tell youter. For now, let¡¯s get back to work."

    With that, they went back to the stray realm doing their own jobs.

    While Sam is trying to make preparations for the future possibilities of entering the game again, someone else is trying to eliminate all the possibility of him entering the game once again.

    Back in Mari n.

    Dayus is currently inside the temple as he performed a ritual for Zeus.

    The statue started glowing and Dayus immediately knelt.

    "Salute to Lord Zeus, the God of Lightning. Your humble servant Dayus is here in your presence."

    "What do you want?"

    "Lord, recently one of the n members of the Mari n has managed to take over Sam¡¯s body and Sam who got trapped into this person¡¯s body is nowhere to be seen. He has been inactive in the whole game for a few months and didn¡¯t attack any of the organizations in the list.

    I want to know whether he is still in the game or not."

    Zeus stayed silent for a moment and said.

    "What does it matter to you, whether he is the game or not?"

    "It doesn¡¯t matter to me, my Lord. I just want to know if it is possible for him toe back. I thought that since he lost the body he was given for the game so carelessly, he might have to face some consequences and I just wanted to know what they would be so that I can strategize. He is my toughestpetition of all, so I would like to be prepared."

    "You just do what you need to do. Don¡¯t bother about the unnecessary stuff. Remember, I want you to win the game and you winning the game means, me winning the game. Do remember, I don¡¯t like to lose and I never lost. So, don¡¯t make this the first or you will regret it."

    "Yes, My lord.. I will try my best to not bring you any shame."

 Chapter 1337: Meeting

    In the heavenly realms of Olympus.

    There is one particr realm housing only onerge expanse ofnd and the whole realm is covered with clouds that are crackling with lightning constantly.

    There arerge expanses of gardens with many mythical beasts residing there ignoring the lightningpletely. In the middle of it all, there is a mountain present.

    There is a small area which looked like a royal courthouse on top of the mountain surrounded by the clouds, instead of being under a room and enveloped with majestic walls, it ispletely out in the open and the only one person is sitting on the throne all by himself as a group of beautiful women that could create wars with just their looks are scantly d as they danced.

    But the person on the throne who they are trying to please is not exactly enjoying the efforts of the women, he currently had his eyes closed as if he was thinking something.

    He is none other than the god Zeus.

    He opened his eyes after a while and gestured for the dancers to stop. They immediately left and they disappeared as soon as they were out of the court area.

    "Nike."

    He spoke out loud and the Goddess Nike flew over like a sh beforending in front him on her knees.

    "Send a message to the rest of the gods who are in the game. I need to talk to them."

    "As you wish My Lord."

    He gestured his hand and an invisible force made here face to face with him. But she didn¡¯t dare to meet his eyes and closed hers.

    "Now, you areing to the meeting this time. Are you ready for what you are training in this realm for?"

    "Ye... Yes, My Lord."

    "You should know Nike, I don¡¯t like losing, and if you lose then that means I lose too. What do you think would happen if you lose?"

    "I won¡¯t dare to lose my lord."

    "You better not. After all, the challenge thrown by that vermin was ages ago and you were not confident about the battle even though he just ascended. You do remember why you are in my realm don¡¯t you?"

    "Yes, My Lord."

    "Why is that?"

    "It... It is because I was scared, my lord. I was scared of losing my life, so I came here to seek refuge and increase my strength and technique to fight."

    "That is right. There were already whispers among the gods that I am housing a coward and defending the coward. You better tell them that I am not.

    If you lose, even if the other party spared you..."

    "I won¡¯t lose my lord. For your sake, I won¡¯t lose." Nike interrupted his words and spoke. Zeus didn¡¯t get angry and instead smiled.

    "Now, go and arrange the meeting. Tell them to meet at the Olympus directly. I don¡¯t want to go to another stupid meeting of illusory images."

    "Yes, My lord."

    Nike bowed before she disappeared from that spot.

    A few hourster, one god after another who participated in the game, came to the Olympus and it caused an uproar. After all, none of the gods are small fries in any circle and the one that surprised the most is the presence of Gambler.

    They remembered him when he came here because of Ling Tian and Nike fought. Even though it is not much of a fight and Nike won because of her goddess status, they were shocked by Ling Tian¡¯s defiance against someone so powerful.

    And now in front of them, Ling Tian apanied Gambler and he is also a god. He broke through long ago and before he left the previous time, he challenged Nike for a duel which should have taken ce as soon as he broke through.

    But Nike simply went into hiding in Zeus¡¯ realm in the name of some duty which everyone knows to be a cover to escape the duel when she found out how powerful Ling Tian really is.

    Now, it seems like Zeus¡¯ patience has reached its limit and she has to go through the duel.

    Many of the gods who has high enough status to visit Zeus directly are looking forward for this duel. After all, Nike is a seasoned god and Ling Tian is a newbie through and through. For her to hide from him is a surprise in itself.

    The gods gathered together in an open area with arge round table in the middle.

    Except for the twelve gods, only Ling Tian and Nike are present.

    Gambler ced his legs on the table and asked casually.

    "So, why did you call us here? It is better to be important if you asked us toe in person."

    "I am sick of the illusory meetings. I am not going to attend another one of those. If you want to meet in the future, make sure it is in person."

    "We can see about that. First, tell us why we are here."

    Sun Wukong asked impatiently as he took a swig from his gourd.

    "It is about the dismissal of a yer from the game. I propose to dismiss Sam from the game, effective immediately."

    Everyone frowned. Of course, some of them frowned in confusion and some of them frowned in annoyance, but everyone has one thing inmon, curiosity. They don¡¯t know why Zeus arranged a meeting, just to go after a yer. After all, Sam never did anything to Zeus, at least not like he did with Hou Yi, Hel and Indra.

    This came as a surprise.

    But Gambler as the person who is essentially the concerned party just replied casually.

    "Why should we dismiss Sam from the game exactly?"

    "Because he lost the body we have given him."

    "So, what? He is still alive, essentially and he is even thriving from what I sawst time. Why should we dismiss him exactly?" Karthikeya asked.

    "He is not worthy of this game since he couldn¡¯t even keep the body we gifted to him. I don¡¯t want him in the game anymore."

    Gambler chuckled and looked at him.

    "Is that so Zeus? I don¡¯t quite know what is the gift we have given to him? And what do you mean ¡¯we¡¯? ¡¯I¡¯ am the one who captured his soul from the forgotten realm and made him enter a body, out of all through which he doesn¡¯t have any choice.

    We are essentially forcing these yers to y for our entertainment. Don¡¯t make it sound like it is a blessing."

    "We are Gods, everything we give shall be taken as a blessing. Whether it is a curse or even death."

    "This is not a discussion about your ego, Zeus. We can talk about thattter, the thing is, we don¡¯t have any rules stating that the yers should only continue with the body we have given him. Essentially the souls are the one ying the game."

    "I agree with that. It is not the part of the rules we established before the game started. We cannot take him out like that. It is not fair."

    Many voices raised in support of Gambler, which didn¡¯t really sit well with Zeus. His gaze turned cold as he replied.

    "We also didn¡¯t establish that it is okay to leave the body. If your argument has merit so does mine and whatever I say is fair, is fair."

    "Really? Sounds like you are so desperate to let your candidate win and just want to take out the best of the lot with this chance."

    Sun Wukong said directly and Zeus looked at him sharply.

    "What? Do you want a piece of me? Why don¡¯t we have a go right here, right now?" Sun Wukong provoked as he raised his aura.

    *Tap* *Tap*

    Gambler tapped on the stone table, making the two gods who could shake the realms turn towards him.

    "Zeus, I have not patience to go through with your petty tricks and we can just argue like this for years, so let¡¯s do it this way.

    Today, we are obviously here for two reasons and Sam¡¯s dismissal is only one of them. The other reason is the duel between two of our subordinates. Why don¡¯t we link them together?

    I will propose an idea that I consider a middle ground and you can propose an idea that you consider as the middle ground. After that let our subordinates battle and whoever wins the argument too.

    Are you up for that arrangement?"

    "Sure. But say what you want first."

    "Okay. Even though there are no rules explicitly stating that anyone shouldn¡¯t leave their bodies behind, the wrist screen is only essible through their original bodies, to be precise, it is essible only when the bodies and the souls match.

    So, if Sam cannot return to the body before the current round of the game which involves them destroying the organizations is over and still stays in his current body, we can eliminate him."

    The rest of the gods just shrugged and didn¡¯t say anything.

    "My middle ground is that we dismiss him without killing his soul," Zeus said coldly.

 Chapter 1338: Petty

    "Killing his soul? So, all this while you are yapping about dismissing him, you wanted to kill him?" Karthikeya asked with a frown.

    "Of course, all the yers that are eliminated until now are dead. So, why should this guy get any special treatment?" Zeus replied like it is a given.

    Gambler looked at him silently as the tensions around the table are getting high. He shook his head slightly and said.

    "Okay, we will do as you said. I am okay with that. Now let us move on to the next step. Ling Tian Versus Nike the winner decides who the winner among us is."

    Zeus looked at Nike and gestured her to go forward and with a snap of his fingers the table disappeared along with the chair and all of the gods started floating in the air leaving Nike and Ling Tian standing there.

    "Gambler, care to Gamble?"

    Sun Wukong asked from the side.

    "Of course, but I am on Ling Tian¡¯s side on this one, so you only have one side to pick."

    "No, not about the battle, I am talking about what would happen after the battle. I want to bet on that. Do you care to take the bet?"

    "What would the bet be?"

    Sun Wukong smile and said something, but this time it wasn¡¯t heard by other gods, the voice only sounded in Gambler¡¯s ears which made him looked at Zeus for a moment.

    "Oh, yes. I will take the bet."

    As they were done speaking, the battle started below.

    Ling Tian is the one to make the first move. He held his sword and disappeared from the spot like a sh as he reappeared near Nike, but she is fast enough to disappear from the spot and reached towards the back of Ling Tian to catch him by his nape, but Ling Tian twisted and shed the sword at her.

    She dodged once again and went after his torso.

    They moved like two shes and their speed ispletely iprehensible. But the gods floating there could clearly see what is happening below.

    They could see the tiniest of the movements.

    If any mortal was present here, it would be impossible for them to watch this and even the aftershock would have killed them.

    The battle went on and within a few seconds, a few other gods in the Olympus made their way there.

    Gambler looked around and couldn¡¯t help but chuckle.

    "It seems like the word has spread deep enough in the past few days. Every important figure of the Olympus is here."

    "Yeah, they are. Why? You are feeling nervous?" Kartikeya asked with a smile.

    "I am kind of nervous indeed. But not because of the fight. I am just worried how Zeus would react to the humiliation of the loss he is about to take."

    Gambler didn¡¯t even hide his voice when he said this and Zeus along with all of hisckeys from the Olympus heard those words.

    And as if an answer to Gambler¡¯sment, Ling Tian was kicked into the air by Nike and he spat out a mouthful of blood.

    Zeus smirked and looked at Gambler in the provocation, but Gambler returned the smile and muttered.

    "It is way too early for you to be happy. You would only be more devastated when the resultes out."

    "I want to see how it would be possible," Zeus said with the same smile as he looked at Nike getting the upper hand.

    Half-an-hour passed.

    "How is this even possible?" Zeus muttered with his eyes widened in disbelief.

    He looked towards the ground where Ling Tian is currently standing with his bare upper body as he looked down on Nike who is kneeling on the ground with her golden feathered wings covering her body as if she is shielding something.

    Ling Tian¡¯s body is full of injuries. Both blunt and sharp.

    He swung his sword and after a series of sword rays....

    "AAHHHHHHHHHHH...."

    Nike cried in pain and agony as she looked at the sky.

    Two golden wings fell to the side as they bled profusely.

    Ling Tian sheathed his sword and said with a smile.

    "This is all I want. I don¡¯t want to take your life. You can go on life, but you wouldn¡¯t be the Feathered Goddess Nike anymore. I am stealing that title and your feathers from you and you can¡¯t even do anything about it."

    As he spoke, he waved his hand and the wings disappeared from the spot. He turned around and was about to fly towards Gambler, but all of a sudden he felt pressure pressing down on him, trying to make him kneel, but he used his sheathed sword to support himself and looked at the point where the pressure ising from.

    It is none other than Zeus.

    He looked at both Ling Tian and Nike coldly and the lightning crackled in the sky.

    The thunderstruck Nike and she disappeared from existence.

    And the thunder then starteding at Ling Tian, but as if the space in that spot was resistant to it, it stopped the thunder strike in ce and the space around rumbled.

    Zeus looked at Gambler who is looking back at him coldly.

    "Zeus, Zeus. For all the stories you have and for all the mighty king of gods you im yourself to be, you are but a petty little man who cannot swallow any shorings.

    You killed a trusted aide that would die for you on her own just because she lost a fight. What kind of a twisted existence are you?"

    He waved his hand and the lightning was pushed back.

    Zeus looked at Ling Tian, who is staring back at him coldly with anger apparent in his eyes. He didn¡¯t back down even though he is exchanging stares with one of the powerful creatures in existence.

    He looked as if he is looking at a dog that shat in his front yard.

    Zeus didn¡¯t like that and was about to make a move once again, but as the energy in the surroundings started churning with lightning, the space was locked and ck lightning appeared out of nowhere and blocked Zeus¡¯s purple lightning.

    "Lightning against me? Are you dreaming Gambler? Do you think you can win with that?"

    Gambler looked at Zeus calmly and said.

    "It seems like you haven¡¯t realized something Zeus. I already won. The moment you couldn¡¯t ept your loss and started making a move on my subordinate, you lost. Not just the match, but the dignity your position holds was also gone along with that woman.

    And if the fight is what you want, you know better than anyone I would never back down. If you want a taste of it, make a move. I don¡¯t care if youe alone or you will bring the rest of the Olympus along with you. I wille and fight you alone."

    As their auras shed, suddenly a third raging aura hit them.

    They turned to the side to look at Sun Wukong with a staff in his hand.

    "There is something both of you forgetting. You might not have known but we are actually the witnesses of the deal you made and Zeus you are breaking it right in front of us. I don¡¯t know about the rest, but I am not soft persimmon. I wouldn¡¯t stand idly by."

    "What do you mean that you don¡¯t about others? Do you l look like a fool to you?"

    Karthikeya took out a spear and looked straight at Zeus.

    The rest of the Olympus gods are still watching the show. They don¡¯t want to enter the fray without orders from their leader. Even if they meant good by offering help. Zeus would take it the wrong way. He is that petty.

    They don¡¯t want to risk being the target of that pettiness.

    Zeus gritted his teeth in anger and stopped the lightning and the rest of the gods backed down.

    "Our match has concluded and Sam has until the end of this round to reim his body to stay in the game. Goodbye."

    With those words, Gambler left along with Ling Tian without looking back.

    The rest of the gods soon followed and they all gave Zeus a look of ridicule. Even the gods who are not particrly fond of Sam didn¡¯t support him and just jeered at his situation. Because, they knew what kind of person Zeus is and even if they have deep enmity with Sam, they are not exactly fond of Zeus either. They are not really willing to side with him just to deal with Sam.

    One could guess how much of a pain in the ass he is.

    After everyone left, the Olympus gods also went to their own ces and Zeus also went back to his court up on the mountain.

    He sat on his throne as he gritted his teeth in humiliation. He couldn¡¯t swallow it no matter what and after some time he couldn¡¯t take it anymore and decided that he should get back.. He decided to take revenge.

 Chapter 1339: Clan Meeting

    Zeus immediately looked towards the sky and his eyes glowed with purple lightning. Immediately the other important gods from Olympus arrived in front of it and he looked at them with the same angry expression he had until now.

    "I want all of you to do something for me."

    He said and they all just stood there, saying nothing. They are waiting for him to finish his piece.

    ...

    While Sam¡¯s current situation triggered conflicts in ces he didn¡¯t imagine, he has busied himself with a lot of work.

    He became extremely busy for the past few days that he didn¡¯t have any time for rest. He had to check his research and also check the details of Grivon¡¯s business since they are currently on the same boat.

    But luckily, thetter didn¡¯t take much time and he managed to get the operational structure of the secret businesses fast enough for him to catch up.

    The associate that previously helped with the secret businesses also helped him out and for some reason, he is really excited about leaving the secret side and going to the open side.

    While Sam took a few days to go through it all, Giyon sent a message through someone to one of Grivon¡¯s aides outside the stray realm.

    "Someone from Blood Iron league is here and he is looking for Sam, so be careful. This guy knows more than others."

    Grivon immediately became vignt and went to meet Giyon to get more details, but he was unable to because Giyon was not even the realm by the time he reached n grounds, she went to a different realm to solve some crisis.

    He felt lost and didn¡¯t know what to do. All he can do is go back to the stray realm and be prepared while maintaining a close look at the surveince to see if they can spot anyone suspicious.

    Meanwhile, Sam just made Specter prepare another trap good enough to deal with the uing threat. There is not much Sam can do apart from making preparations for some possible scenarios. And he has to refrain from going out of the stray realm which he does very little anyway.

    After getting a gist of the businesses and instructing Grivon on what to do and how to negotiate the deal for the restaurant chains, in other realms, he focused on creating blueprints and recipes of the previous businesses he had in various realms.

    The alcohol business with vodka, rice wine, and beer. The Wine business he had in several ces. The food business with Biriyani and Kheer he opened in the CharBhum realm. The resort business he had in the Naga realm.

    Sam started making copies of everything he had in different realms andpiled them into various categories and it took around a week.

    While he worked non-stop this whole week, Grivon was being constantly pestered by someone.

    At the start of the week, Grivon came to meet Sam with an exhausted expression.

    "Migron and his parents are grilling me. They are asking for information about how I got my tip. They are constantly pestering me. I don¡¯t understand, but they seem to be very interested in the source of my information."

    "So, what did you tell them?"

    "Nothing of course. You are the source of information and I am not nning on giving you up."

    "Then, just keep it up if they ask you again."

    That is what Sam said and that is exactly what Grivon did for the whole week. Migron acted extremely desperate and found out Grivon¡¯s location by hook or crook. At first, this all started as some casual exchange, but by the end of the week, Migron is only short of begging Grivon.

    Of course, Grivon notified Sam of this unusual change. But Sam ignored it until he received some interesting news on thest day of the week.

    "Migron has been kidnapped yesterday."

    Sam was stunned and then couldn¡¯t help but smile.

    "Seems like someone made a move to reach me."

    "Do you think it is Sivan?"

    "No, I don¡¯t think it is him. He wouldn¡¯t dare to do so. He is not that careless. Only a few people who overestimate their own strength and underestimate the power of your n would do something so stupid as kidnapping a young master of a n.

    In my opinion, Sivan does neither of those things."

    "Then who could it be? After all, it is not easy to kidnap someone right under the noses of our n. Migron might not have the same level of forces as me, but trust me, he has some really good guards. I was even tempted to poach some of them myself and some of the other youngsters didn¡¯t even acted on the temptation but only failed. They are super strong and fiercely loyal and they always stay by his side. I don¡¯t believe he got kidnapped like that. Who do you think did this?"

    "I think it is that someone Giyon mentioned."

    "The person from the league?"

    "Yes."

    "Oh my god. Do you think that Sivan has given the extra information they obtained to the league?"

    "That might be the case. After all, your sister mentioned that this person knows more than others. There might be other possibilities too. But that is not what is important here, What should we do now?"

    Sam asked calmly.

    "We are staying put of course. We don¡¯t need to do anything. The n can handle this pretty well."

    "I know they can handle it. The thing is, this person is from the league. He might have a divine dimension fragment and there is another issue. What if the information about you giving the tip leaks out? They might connect the dots and we might get caught."

    As they were discussing suddenly Grivon received an alert and he frowned.

    "This is a special alert for a n meeting. I need to go."

    Grivon immediately left the stray realm and reached the n grounds. He entered a special building were in arge conference room that has onerge table and a series of small tables arranged in the rest of the room along with different chairs, some of the most important people has gathered.

    The Head of the n, the elders, the enforcement division, the core external disciples, and the younger generation of the ns.

    Even Giyon who never liked the meetings came and sat at the main table without any reservations.

    Grivon sat at the small table behind her and leaned forward to talk.

    "What is happening? Is it rted to the kidnapping?"

    "What else could it be? Migron¡¯s Parents are making a fuss. This meeting is actually about you."

    Grivon was shocked.

    "What do you mean by that? Why would this be something about me?"

    "You just have to wait and see. You should have brought Sam here. He would have been able to help you a bit."

    "Bring him where? You already said someone from League is here. Wouldn¡¯t it be more dangerous?"

    "Oh, I forgot about that. That guy didn¡¯t make a move yet?"

    "No, he didn¡¯t. He doesn¡¯t know about us, so he didn¡¯t make a move." Grivon exined and suddenly became more confused.

    "Wait a minute, why are you asking as if you knew that person would make a move. Sister Giyon, did you sell me out?"

    "Please stop your cynical suspicion. It doesn¡¯t suit your personality and if your mother heard that, she would spank my ass even at this age. I already told you, I am on your side. Trust me, even if the whole n turns against you, you can count on me."

    Grivon looked at her in deliberation and was about to say something when the n leader came into the room followed by the elders.

    n leader took the seat at the head of the table. Some of the elders are surprised to see Giyon taking a seat at the main table and particrly there is one young man who came after the elders.

    He is none other than Mingiv the third remaining prospect among the top three contenders to be the next n Head.

    He looked at Giyon sitting at the main table as if she killed his ancestors.

    Giyon didn¡¯t even take a look at him though, he greeted the head of the n and once again sat in the same seat.

    One of the elders couldn¡¯t take it anymore and said.

    "Giyon, the main table is for the Head of the n, Core Elders, and some other people who hold esteemed titles. You cannot sit here. Go back."

    Giyon looked at him while the rest of the youngsters are looking forward to her going back. But she once again looked at the head of the n and said calmly.

    "I am here to im my esteemed title."

    n¡¯s head looked at her with amusement and asked.

    "Oh? What would that be?"

    "The greatest financial contributor the n. I have earned you a lot of money. My contribution alone is equal to the sum of the contribution of all of my peersbined. And I made more money than any of the sessor candidate that ever existed in the n history, that includes you my dear n head.

    I believe I deserve some recognition."

 Chapter 1340: Twisting The Story

    Everyone in the room became silent. They didn¡¯t expect Giyon would be daring enough to talk to the n head directly like that. They didn¡¯t even know how to reply to that, because that is true. In fact, they wanted to hold a meeting regarding that, but not to give her the title, but for something different entirely.

    The person in charge of the finances of the n cleared his throat and asked.

    "Giyon, there is something wrong with the financial reports you submitted."

    "What is that?" Giyon asked with a raised eyebrow.

    "You haven¡¯t submitted all the earnings you made with your businesses. After all, ording to the n rules, for any business that was set up with the help of the n, the n would hold the bigger share, but from what I learned through inquiry, you only submitted thirty percent of the profits."

    As soon as he was done, everyone took in a cold breath. Just thirty percent of her profits are more than what everyone else paid to the nbined, they couldn¡¯t help but wonder what would the money be if she gave up everything.

    Giyon looked at him with a smile and said.

    "It seems like your reports are wrong sir. The percentage I gave up I not thirty and only twenty-five and that is because the businesses are not helped and funded by the n. Every single business you are seeing has been funded by my own money and is established by my own contacts. I didn¡¯t use the n¡¯s name to register the business in any of the realms and the n is getting twenty-five percent because I am taking the raw materials from the n.

    That is the only contribution of the n and twenty-five percent I gave you amounted to twenty times the market price of those raw materials.

    So, essentially I am giving you a lot even though I didn¡¯t take any of n¡¯s help."

    The elder incharge of the financials was not pleased by this. He looked at her with a frown and then at the elder in charge of the n¡¯s materials and resources and he nodded.

    "If you are taking n¡¯s resources and giving the money, then it is just buying from the n, that doesn¡¯t count as your contribution."

    Mingiv spoke through gritted teeth.

    "Oh, okay then. I would terminate the contract with the n and I will get the resources from elsewhere. It is not like I am collecting the rarest of the resources, they are avable even in the small organizations that are under the n and the local organizations I am conducting business with. I would also save some money for myself."

    Giyon spoke and was about to get up, but n¡¯s head cleared his throat and said.

    "We are here for a different reason. Giyon, just sit down."

    Giyon grinned at the elders and Mingiv before sitting down. Everyone else was stunned. This is essentially the head of the n supporting Giyon¡¯s position on the main table.

    "Can we talk about the real problem here? Elder, do you want to speak now?" n¡¯s head asked.

    Migron¡¯s father stood up as soon as n¡¯s head finished his words and his wife stood up along with him even though she sat behind him.

    Before they could speak, Giyon ced a recording crystal on the table recording the whole meeting, but no one objected to her this time, because some other people also did the same.

    Migron¡¯s father took a deep breath and started speaking.

    "My son, Migron has been kidnapped yesterday and his life is in danger. The kidnapper made contact today and he wants to get some information from one of us. If that person is willing to give up that information my son will be saved."

    Everyone in the room was confused and before the elder could continue, one of the youngsters spoke out.

    "Elder, you are saying that a young master from the Gaja n was kidnapped and the only solution you could think of is giving what the kidnapper wanted?

    Don¡¯t you know how ridiculous that sounds?

    We own two dozen realms and hundreds of millions of people bow before us and in a few dozen realms the rulers drop down to their knees just from hearing our name and someone was kidnapped from us and all you could think of is asking the information from another member of the n? What are you even thinking?"

    Everyone looked at the elder. They didn¡¯t even rebuke the youngster for speaking out of his turn, because those are the same thoughts the rest of them had and they are not exactly pleased by the way the elder is handling the things.

    Migron¡¯s mother looked at the youngster hatefully and said.

    "Can you at least wait till my husband made his casepletely?"

    "We also felt insulted and humiliated by what happened, but that is what happened. Migron sneaked away from his guards to catch a breather in his private estate outside of the n grounds and the kidnapper took him away from there.

    We don¡¯t know who he is and what he is capable of, but he is powerful and he doesn¡¯t care about the n¡¯s reputation. We believe he is being backed up by the Mari n which makes this the issue of the whole n. So, if the person gives up a small piece of information, we would be able to save my son."

    "Who is the person you are talking about?"

    Another Elder asked and Migron¡¯s parents immediately looked at Grivon.

    Grivon couldn¡¯t help but sigh and Giyon rolled her eyes in annoyance.

    "Do you want me to handle it?" Giyon asked in a whisper.

    Grivon took a deep breath and said.

    "Don¡¯t worry Sister Giyon I will take care of this."

    Grivon stood up and asked MIgron¡¯s parents.

    "Are you saying that I should give up some information that would save your son from a kidnapper?"

    "Yes."

    "Hmm. Let¡¯s set aside the question of why I should give the information for a second even if I have it. I need to ask some questions first."

    The n head nodded his head giving his permission.

    "Where has Migron being for the past week?"

    "He was at many ces. How is that even relevant?"

    "You seemed to have forgotten my uncle. It is extremely relevant. From the past week, you and your son kept on asking me about something and that is also rted to the information I supposedly have in your opinion. Why did you and your son ask me these questions?"

    "We don¡¯t know what you are talking about? We didn¡¯t meet the whole week, except for the asional crossing paths in the n grounds."

    Migron¡¯s mother immediately denied everything.

    Grivon smiled and took out a recording device and threw it onto the main table.

    "I really didn¡¯t want to record this, but it is hard to get Migron in that groveling state, so I recorded it for my own amusement. So, let me ask you, why is the information he constantly kept on asking me the whole week when I am constantly saying that I don¡¯t have any idea what he was talking about suddenly became very important that someone kidnapped him.

    By any chance, did he really know beforehand that a crisis ising and asked me this information?"

    An elder yed the video and in the video, it was clearly shown that Migron was just short of begging Grivon.

    The whole room turned to MIgron¡¯s parents in askance.

    As the elder was about to speak on his wife¡¯s cue, suddenly Giyon spoke up.

    "Before you answer, elder. Think properly. If you already knew there is a crisising for your son, you should have at least informed the n earlier, our Investigative department is top-notch and they would have found the person that might have threatened him. So, what are your intentions for hiding this information until now?"

    Migron¡¯s parents couldn¡¯t help but feel tongue-tied.

    As they were dying their response, Grivon immediately spoke to the n head.

    "I know why they are doing this. I will tell you the whole story.

    A few days ago, I got some information from a friend of mine that an organization that was under the control of one of the young masters of the Mari n was being crumbled from inside.

    It became corrupt because the young master wasn¡¯t able to give enough attention to that organization because that is his personal secret organization. So, I wanted to go against it and take it over to be my personal organization, but it was too far away from my influence and I had to find a partner and only Migron has some influence in that area.

    I went to him with that piece of information and he went behind my back and wanted to take over the organization as a whole, but I interfered and only managed to gain one as an exchange for the information I gave him.

    But only after poking it did he realize that there is some problem there and he now wants me to give up the friend that got me the information. I didn¡¯t want to sell my friend out and refused. Now, suddenly the young master Migron.

    The young master of the Gaja n with his father being the senior elder and her mother being the former heiress of an organization that is just a step behind ours was kidnapped and this piece of information has be the only way to get him out.

    Please tell me, that you also see the irony in this situation."

 Chapter 1341: Title

    As soon as Grivon was done, everyone looked at Migron¡¯s parents in shock.

    Migron¡¯s parents are shocked even more. They even forgot to breathe for a moment. They knew the full story behind it, the person that came to her son is indeed Grivon, but the rest of the story is a bald-faced lie. At least more than half of it, if not the rest of it all is a lie.

    But before they could reject it, Grivon continued.

    "I am willing to show the reports on my forces¡¯ operations in that and the report on the whole take over process. The only that I gave is a small tip on the organization regarding its corruption. So, Migron decided that I don¡¯t get more than one, I didn¡¯t want to gain too much attention and also didn¡¯t want to start a conflict and since I also have some resources I need from that, I took it graciously.

    But from what my friend who just left that realm told me, I can tell you that Migron is not exactly holding well there. It seems like the internal corruption of the organization is a n created by another young master within the Mari n and we can say that Migron dived headfirst into an internal conflict of Mari n and now the Mari n is retaliating.

    I don¡¯t know what kind of situation Migron is in and what kind of actions he has taken to save himself, but he kept on harassing me to give the name of the friend that gave me this information, but I don¡¯t want to give it.

    As for why they did it so well, until now. I believe, Migron wants the n¡¯s help but once the n gets involved, the organization would be the n¡¯s property and doesn¡¯t belong to Migron alone, he wouldn¡¯t be able to swallow the profits of the territory on a whole. So, they are hiding this information for profit but still want to reap the benefits of the n.

    I must say there are really bold."

    Grivon finished and looked at them with scorn.

    Giyon smiled in amusement and said.

    "They are bold indeed."

    The Elder and his wife froze on the spot. They don¡¯t even know how to rebuke the situation But they knew for sure that if they don¡¯t rebuke it, things wouldn¡¯t end well for them.

    Once again taking the advantage of their silence, Grivon turned to n head and spoke.

    "Sir, I don¡¯t have any ill will towards Migron, so if he is really in crisis, I wouldn¡¯t mind helping him out, but it is not fair for my friend¡¯s name to be sold out because of his hotheadedness and I also cannot bring myself to believe them with all the secrets.

    So, I would request the n to investigate the matter on a deeper level before proceeding with the judgment."

    n¡¯s head looked at the elder and his wife calmly.

    "n head, this is not the case. Grivon is lying. He clearly set our son up."

    "Elder, you are not giving me much ground here. Grivon exined everything in such detail and the onlyeback you can muster is that he is lying. Do you want me to take your words at face value?

    That wouldn¡¯t very fair now, would it?

    The investigative department will take charge of the matter and if your son is really kidnapped, the n would spare no effort to save him.

    Until then, this issue is adjourned."

    "Now that this petty issue is resolved, I would like it if my title is officially sanctioned."

    It hasn¡¯t been a second before Giyon spoke up as soon as n¡¯s head finished his words.

    The elders looked at her coldly.

    "n head, it is unprecedented for people to give titles for the financial contributions." One of the elders said calmly."

    "So what? This can be the first time. Our n leader himself was the reason for one such event. He was given a special title, ¡¯The Reaper of the n¡¯ because he killed the most number of people on a single battlefield protecting the n.

    From then on the title has been established and we are selecting the Reaper of the n for every generation.

    Our n leader¡¯s father, the previous n leader also managed to create a new title. ¡¯The Star strategist¡¯ because he managed to implement great strategies in the war that saved the n in many ways.

    We select Star Strategist for every generation.

    So, I am establishing a new title myself and it would start my generation.

    I would like the n head to consider this seriously."

    "How can youpare the achievements of the n leader and the previous n leader with earning some money?"

    "Some money? Because of my contribution, the resources for the teaching facilities of the n disciples and the External members have doubled.

    I managed to open up eight new trade routes with the people we have never even talked to before and we have ess to new resources that our n only heard but never saw.

    That led to the new reinforcement to the walls of the n estates across the realms. The new weapons and the armors of the enforcement squad are a direct result of one of the alloys I created and are currently one of the main products of the n that would be auctioned off every year.

    My contributions are no less than the n leader when he was just a candidate.

    The only difference is that he reduced the losses of our n by killing the enemies in the war and I reduced the losses by making our n more prepared. In fact, I dare say that my contributions are much more long-term than killing people in the battle."

    "Are you saying that your contributions are greater than that of the n head? How dare you?" Mingiv yelled out loud as he stood up.

    Giyon didn¡¯t even blink as she looked at him with a frown.

    "So what if I am saying that. I believe that my contributions are greater than the n head. I am not afraid to say the truth out loud."

    "You dare say those things. Giyon, do not forget your ce. You are a person of the younger generation. You better show some decorum and respect."

    Before the Elders could even react, Mingiv already took the liberty of scolding her. But Giyon didn¡¯t even acknowledge him this time and just looked at the n head, waiting for his reaction.

    "I approve of the title allocation. But we cannot decide it immediately with a possible crisis to one of our members. We will discuss it in the next meeting when the case is resolved.

    All the members in the current meeting shall stay within the n grounds until the case is resolved and that includes you Giyon. Don¡¯t go running anywhere.

    For now, you all are dismissed."

    Slowly one after the other everyone walked out of the room. Migron¡¯s parents are thest ones to walk out. Their faces are gloomy and they don¡¯t know what to do or say.

    Migron¡¯s mother is generally intelligent, but she couldn¡¯t find a solution at the moment and might as well be dumb as a rock.

    As Grivon was thinking of what to do now that he cannot leave the n grounds, Giyon suddenly came up from behind and twisted his ear.

    "Now, now. Someone seemed to have grown up a bit. Good thinking. You almost got caught up in the mess, but you just threw Migron into a deeper one."

    "Well, what can I do? That is the only way out. We already knew something like this might happen."

    "You knew?"

    "Yeah, I was doubtful at the start on why I needed to give such arge share to Migron so I discussed things with Sam. This is to make sure that Migron doesn¡¯t throw me off the boat when the timees.

    Even if he says that this ispletely my idea and someone connects the dots, I would be the suspect for holding Sam and Sivan¡¯s people wille after me, so Sam arranged this. After all, no sane person would think that I gave up such arge portion of territory just because I wanted to frame one of my peers."

    "But you did exactly that. Not bad. But I am sure that you didn¡¯t know you would need to use that today right?"

    "Of course, I didn¡¯t know. That came as a surprise. I take credit for that quick thinking and using that groveling video of Migron."

    "So, you didn¡¯t record it on purpose?"

    "No, I just wanted to remember that asshole¡¯s face like that. After all, it is indeed hard to get him to that state since his mother cleans up all the mess."

    "That is true."

    "By the way, I wanted to ask, why do you need the title exactly? You don¡¯t want to be the leader of the n, so why would you need a title?"

 Chapter 1342: Another Deal

    "Title has some special privileges and I would like to use them."

    "Special privileges? Howe I didn¡¯t know about these things?"

    "You know them, you just don¡¯t realize it. If a person has a title, they don¡¯t need to participate in every small n meeting like the one that happened today and can skip them as long as they are not directly involved in the case themselves."

    "That is considered a privilege?" Grivon asked in confusion.

    "Of course, it is a privilege. You don¡¯t understand that now, but since you are reaching certain standards with both power and strength, you would soon learn how annoying the meetings could be as they try to involve you in every little thing that they want to achieve. All this while you were mostly a spectator, but from now on you would be a participant. You will understand soon, there is no point in exining now."

    Grivon shrugged and changed the topic.

    "By the way, what do you mean by the message you sent? Do you happen to know who the person that came from the league is?"

    "Of course, yes. I know him very well. In fact, I have done some business with him in other realms."

    "Can¡¯t you give me his identity directly? It would save a lot of trouble."

    "There is no fun in that now, is there? Take it as a test from my side. Even though him and I don¡¯t have a deeper rtionship and the business transactions we had were very straight to the point and superficial, he came to me first to confirm whether I am involved in this or not and only after I rejected my involvement did, he proceed.

    If I imed I was involved, he wouldn¡¯t have troubled me. Since he showed me that much courtesy, I cannot get involved in this.

    You can deal with him as his own.

    But since you are my lovely little brother, I would give you some advice regarding this situation.

    This guy is actually very knowledgeable and he knew suspected that Migron is just a pawn after some careful investigation. He understood the behavior and mindset of Migron unlike the others who came before and blindly poked all the holes.

    And he really might have threatened Migron¡¯s parents regarding the information since we know that Migron would have been already broken and spilled the beans about your n.

    So, if you want to escape Scot free, you better move fast and find him. I am confident that he wouldn¡¯t kill Migron, but he might psychologically damage him enough to make his parents hate you for this and they mighte at you with full force.

    With some many external enemiesing after you one by one, it would be better for you and Sam to not create any new mortal ones within the n."

    She then took out the recording of the meeting and gave it to Grivon.

    "Take this back to Sam. He might find some clues. Be careful and if you are really in a desperate situation,e to me and I will solve this, but then our deal will be off regarding Vardar." She finished and waved her hand before leaving.

    Grivon¡¯s expression became solemn and he made his subordinates contact Sam to make hime to the n grounds since he cannot move.

    This time, Sam came with a bunch of subordinates who are also wearing ck cloaks just to make sure that Sam alone wouldn¡¯t stand out.

    Sam came to the n grounds and met with Grivon in his residence.

    "What happened with the meeting? I have plenty of things to do, so finish it fast."

    Grivon didn¡¯t say much and showed the recording to him and Sam frowned.

    "It seems like they are not lying or they have to be really really good actors."

    "Giyon said that they might not be lying at all..."

    With that he exined what Giyon said and Sam understood the situation immediately. He felt that as long as the member from the league didn¡¯t find them, they didn¡¯t have to make the first move, but now the league member is forcing them out like this.

    "But I don¡¯t understand a few things in this situation. Why did Giyon say that he wouldn¡¯t kill Migron? It would be a lot easier to confirm with the soul extraction, right?"

    "Of course it is easier, but what about the wrath of the Gaja n? It wouldn¡¯t be easier to endure and I believe there is a reason why league is in secret and not lording over everyone else. They are also a bit vary ofrge ns and I don¡¯t believe if a person makes such a mistake the league will back him to begin with.

    The only reason Gaja n is not taking extreme measures is because their young master is alive even in the kidnapping. Once the young master is dead, the leverage will be gone and the person whomitted the crime will be hunted down."

    "Then what about kidnapping me?"

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "It seems like you are really underestimating your own influence. After the previous incident with Milind, I looked into your parents and you, you don¡¯t understand how important you are in the n and what kind of figures your parents and grandfather are.

    The very fact that your grand father is the grand elder makes you untouchable and even the Mari n wouldn¡¯t necessarily kill you if you were presented on a silver tter in normal circumstances much less a lone kidnapper from a hidden league.

    I am telling you, you have a lot of learn, you are intelligent enough but for some reason your thought process didn¡¯t develop properly. I wonder why."

    Grivon looked at Sam with an exhausted expression. This has been a daily urrence by now. Sam would be making these remarks that would imply him to be a muscle head, air head and dumb brute and Grivon already lost interest in defending himself as he learned how ipetent he is.

    "What is the n?"

    "Let the hearing continue. Let your n investigate a bit and make it hard for Migron¡¯s parents. I have an idea and we can use one of our pre made traps to deal with him and see what we could do?"

    "Are you sure this trap would work? What if the other party is too strong?"

    "How strong can they be? The most they would be is Middle stage to Late stage Consummate cultivators, which is almost impossible. Your two special subordinates are Middle-stage Consummate cultivators, I am confident we can take care of the opponent even if he was a Late-stage cultivator. So, don¡¯t unnecessarily worry too much.

    Now, I would like to return to the stray realm and continue my research. If you have anything to say contact me. I wille as fast as I can."

    With that Sam left and Grivon waited in the n grounds.

    In the next three days, Migron¡¯s parents were harassed continuously and the investigation team finally concluded that almost everything Grivon said was true and the remaining parts are impossible to verify.

    So, a meeting was held and Migron¡¯s parents were held ountable for hiding the information with a deep cut in n resource allocation and allowances along with a suspension in privileges. The n didn¡¯t ask Grivon to give out the information and decided to help find the investigator.

    Giyon was given a title on the same day. The new title was created.

    The Fortuner Maker of the Gaja n and the selection for the next generations Fortune Makers is also going to be held.

    Of course, the next generation is Grivon¡¯s generation and his peers are going topete to gain that title.

    Now that, that¡¯s over. Migron¡¯s parents are feeling a bit lost.

    They are angry, but they don¡¯t know where to divert that. They only felt that since Grivon¡¯s parents aren¡¯t nearby and he is rtively simpleminded, they might as well put him in the spot in front of all the n members and make him give up the information.

    As they were feeling extremely helpless and wished that the n would be able to find their son, Grivon made a visit to their residence.

    "What do you want? You pushed our son into this. If something happens to him even if I have to die, I will drag you along with me." Migron¡¯s mother yelled on top of her lungs.

    But Grivon stayed calm and looked at Migron¡¯s father.

    "I have a proposition to get your son back. I am sure that n would still take a few days to get your son back, but if we make this deal now, you might be able to get him much sooner."

    "Do you really think that you would be able to convince us to make another deal with you guys? You already pushed us into enough trouble. I don¡¯t trust you."

    "You can decide after you hear me out."

    Grivon unceremoniously took a seat and started exining his deal.

 Chapter 1343: Trap

    After half an hour, Grivon came out of the room with a wide grin on his face and went back to the stray realm excitedly.

    A few hours after he left, there was a mysterious incident in one of Grivon¡¯s own establishments within the city outside the estate which attracted the attention. Grivon came along there and covered up the whole thing as an incident with the malfunction of a formation.

    This made everyone feel convinced that nothing is wrong. Even the n didn¡¯t bother much since Grivon himself imed there is nothing wrong.

    But after the attack happened, Migron¡¯s father took out amunication token and talked with someone on the other side.

    "We have what you want. We would like to meet you."

    "You cannot. Once we meet, things would bepletely in your favor. I need a soul contract signed by you that you wouldn¡¯t do anything rash when we meet in person.

    You understand what I mean right?"

    "Yes, I understand."

    "The contract will arrive at your home by tonight, you just have to sign it, and then we can meet."

    With those words, the other party cut themunicationpletely.

    After that, Migron¡¯s father waited patiently and by midnight a scroll appeared on his front porch without anyone noticing.

    He doesn¡¯t know how that came, but he knew who sent it.

    He picked the scroll and started reading through the contents and after making sure that nothing is wrong with it, he immediately signed the contract, before cing it in the same ce.

    He looked at the spot intently as if to not miss anything, but he doesn¡¯t know how it happened, the scroll disappeared from the spot with bare minimum fluctuations, even the formation of the residence couldn¡¯t stop it.

    The scroll just disappeared like that.

    As he waited for further information from the other party, one hour passed.

    Themunication token received an alert and the other party spoke.

    "Come to the Dog mountain by dawn. You will get your son thereafter you give me what I need."

    "Alright."

    Themunication was cut off and Migron took a deep breath. He looked at his wife with a tired smile and reassured her before leaving the n grounds secretly.

    He made his way to the dog mountain carefully making sure that no one is tailing him and waited at the location till dawn.

    And at the designated time, a man wearing bright red clothes and a face covered with a ck mask arrived and stood in front of Migron.

    "I am really sorry, Sir. I didn¡¯t wish things would go this way. But I had no choice."

    The man spoke in a calm tone.

    Migron¡¯s father looked at him with hatred but didn¡¯t attack. He had to use all of the patience he could muster to control the urge.

    "May I get what I asked for please?"

    Migron¡¯s father took out a token and threw it towards him.

    The man carefully examined it as Migron¡¯s father exined.

    "You must have already heard of the incident in Grivon¡¯s establishment in the city. I was the one who caused it. I stole this token from one of his trusted subordinates."

    "Where does this lead to?"

    "The ce where the person who gave the information stays."

    "Why didn¡¯t you do this earlier? Your son would have been able to avoid the suffering in the past few days."

    "It was ast resort. You are an outsider, so you don¡¯t really know what kind of consequences I have to suffer for attacking the establishments of one of our own. It is as good as me betraying him."

    "Please, the n members kill each other all the time."

    "For professional reasons. To get a leadership position, to win over a business. It was never personal. You just made this person now.

    Anyway, I don¡¯t have any patience to talk to you. Give me my son and I will be on my way."

    The man nodded and waved his hand.

    Spatial fluctuations appeared and Migron appeared out of nowhere near his father.

    As soon as he appeared, a locket hanging on his neck suddenly burned itself and turned into debris before falling off.

    Migron looked ragged and tired. He is weak and exhausted both physically and mentally. He is clearly happy to see his father and immediately hugged him.

    A grown was brought to his tears and is extremely fearful of the man in a red cloak.

    "Where does this lead me exactly?"

    "The man asked Migron¡¯s father."

    "From what I learned, it is a stray realm where that mysterious informant is currently staying. Grivon went as far as his n sanctioned stray realm to this guy to keep him safe. I believe he is the one that could give you what you want."

    "That would be great. A stray realm is a perfect ce for me too."

    As he spoke, he immediately activated the token as Migron¡¯s father looked at him coldly.

    The man just thought that the father was still angry about his son and ignored it, but as soon as he disappeared into the spatial tunnel connecting his spot and the stray realm, he had a bad feeling about that and it was reinforced when he reappeared in a remote corner of stray realm and in the middle of what looked like a giant formation.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    He immediately wanted to escape the ce, but all of a sudden he felt bolts of energy from all around him and he was bombarded with various attacks of fire, earth, and darkness. Before he knew it, he was exhausted and unconscious within the formation with a bunch of ghosts cing random curses on him while he was surrounded by a bunch of earthen walls that appeared out of nowhere and a bunch of translucent hands holding him in ce without any chance to move.

    Sam and Grivon who are staying at his research station suddenly looked in a specific direction and smiled.

    "It seems like it worked."

    "Of course, it would. Trust me, the curses that we used are no joke. They are fused with the attacks of Middle stage Consummate cultivators and there are around two dozen of them in one second. That is already unbearable for even a Peak stage Consummate realm cultivator. They wouldn¡¯t be able to endure itpletely.

    So, I believe our opponent wouldn¡¯t even be a problem."

    With that, both of them used a space gate and went to the location where the trap was set up. There the special guards of Grivon already arrived and they are currently waiting for Sam and Grivon to show up.

    Sam walked towards the earthen walls and tapped on one of them.

    The wall disappeared into the ground and the man in a red cloak was shown. Of course, none of the red cloak and the ck mask were spared. All they have in front of them is a middle-aged man buck naked with a bunch of severe wounds bleeding out and being hung by a bunch of translucent hands that are holding him from falling down.

    Sam took out the Injector and gave him a shot.

    The Middle-aged man slowly regained consciousness and was shocked.

    He immediately tried to escape.

    "Don¡¯t even bother. You arepletely caught. You wouldn¡¯t be able to escape even if you double your strength immediately. But I must say your resistance is admirable. I thought you would be dead as a rock after all those attacks."

    Sam is currently not wearing his cloak and when he saw his face, the man immediately recognized him. He also understood that his resistance is futile and stopped.

    "So, you are the third attempt from the league of blood Iron. How many would there be?"

    The man didn¡¯t reply, but Sam didn¡¯t bother. He just asked another question.

    "I have one doubt.

    The league¡¯s assignment was ced before Migron¡¯s situation and even if League knows about me going after Sivan¡¯s properties, Migron¡¯s situation is unique and few people know that Sivan has his eyes on that property. As for the secret properties, we took over while trapping Migron, only Sivan and Butler Si know them.

    So, tell me. How do you know that?"

    "You will get your answers after soul extraction. What is the point of asking me now? Just finish me off and be done with it."

    "You are right. But it just seemed more fun."

    Sam said and gestured for the guards to finish it off. Specter finished the soul extract process and gave Sam memories before going off to digest the soul.

    This person is a Middle stage Consummate cultivator of the Astral ne which is already strong. Luckily Sam has ess to Grivon¡¯s guards, otherwise, he wouldn¡¯t have had any chance to deal with them with his current strength.

    After he digested the memories. He immediately got the answers he was looking for.

    The answers for the person who gave the league the connection between Migron¡¯s situation and the league assignment and he was a bit surprised. Because the person that gave this information is someone Sam doesn¡¯t even know.. He has never seen him, never met him and from the looks of it, he doesn¡¯t even seem that strong.

 Chapter 1344: Invite

    Sam and Grivon are sitting in the small simtion room, he created.

    The project is in the final stages, and of course, even though some of the critical functions are not ready, there are some functions that it could provide and one of them is creating holographic projections from Sam¡¯s mind.

    Sam is currently wearing something that resembled a metallic headband which is glowing and a three-dimensional projection is happening within the room.

    This is the incident from the memory of the league member they just killed. The memory is of the informant giving this league member the required information regarding Migron¡¯s situation.

    But for some reason, the memory is a bit vague. It didn¡¯t give specific information on how Sam was directly responsible for Migron¡¯s situation and operated through Grivon. But rather the tip is so vague on how Grivon might have the information regarding the new anomaly that appeared and started changing the dynamic among the younger generation of the Gaja n.

    After all, the whole mess that Sam created by making different people go into different businesses is to precisely divert the attention of Sivan and assume that Sivan is giving the information to the league, they would also be confused by this.

    But this guy who attempted to clear this confusion didn¡¯t do itpletely which made the guy go after Migron, just to be sure.

    He learned about Grivon¡¯s high status and didn¡¯t want to antagonize someone he couldn¡¯t afford to offend directly, so he left that to Migron¡¯s parents, and just like he predicted, he managed to get a way in, which essentially became a trap.

    After the memory waspletely yed out, Sam then changed the image to the three-dimensional image of the man who gave the information.

    "I don¡¯t know this guy. I don¡¯t think he is of any importance within the city. If he is, I would have known him."

    Grivon answered, even before Sam asked him.

    "Are you sure? Maybe he is a low-level guard from some of your peers? Vydon might be responsible for this or even other young masters you are partnering with within the academy project."

    "There is a possibility, but I am sure that I know the regr guards of theirs too. The only people that I don¡¯t have knowledge of but still rted to them would be some secret subordinates or some insignificant guards that act as errand boys."

    "Maybe, this is an errand or a secret operation," Sam muttered as he looked at the image and paused before continuing.

    "But I would lean towards thetter, after all, it is highly unlikely for them to treat this as a simple errand."

    "I think so too."

    As they discussed, Sam once again yed the memory and looked at the insignificant details and suddenly said.

    "By any chance do you recognize the bar?"

    "Not really."

    Sam then changed the image to that of the bar and recorded it into the recording crystal attached to a wall.

    "Let your subordinates find out which bar it is. After that, you go to the bartender personally and see if they know our mysterious informant."

    "Why? Do you think that he is a regr there?"

    "I don¡¯t know. My guess is a bit farfetched, but he looked extremelyfortable in that ce. This is a long shot. I am just shooting blindly. But even if there is no real connection between them, I think that bar is the only lead we have.

    Send his picture to all of your subordinates spread across and that includes the spies. We can only spread our as wide as we can and hope that we could catch something.

    "I will see what we can do."

    Grivon left with the image and Sam went back to research.

    The next day, Grivon met with Giyon, who surprisingly didn¡¯t leave the n after the title was given to her.

    "Why are still staying? I thought you were busy?"

    "I am. But I decided I would stay in the realm until you solve your current situation."

    "I think it is basically solved. We dealt with that guy with a red cloak and ck mask."

    Giyon was impressed and said.

    "You guys are really good. What did you do?"

    "We bombarded him with twenty full-scale Middle stage Consummate attacks of Astral ne at the same time in premade trap."

    "That is clever. But twenty attacks? How did you manage to do that?"

    "Sam has something for that. So, since it is solved, are you off now?"

    "We will see. How did that guy get the information? I asked him, but he didn¡¯t say anything and left."

    Grivon didn¡¯t answer immediately and thought for a moment, before showing the image of the bar.

    "Someone tipped him with the info in this bar. That is all we know of. But we don¡¯t know the identity of the person that tipped him."

    Giyon smiled when she looked at the bar¡¯s image.

    "I know this bar."

    Grivon was surprised and asked eagerly.

    "Really? How do you know that? Where is it?"

    "I know it because it is my bar. It is in the same realm but on a different. The third with a lot of metal mines. It is the capital of that."

    Grivon immediately turned silent and looked at Giyon skeptically.

    Giyon understood what he is thinking and said.

    "Don¡¯t worry. I am not the one who tipped you guys off. If I really wanted to do something, do you really think I would leave such an obvious clue behind? I will inform the bartender and the rest, you can go there and find them yourself."

    Grivon nodded, but he is still a bit suspicious.

    *flick*

    Giyon flicked his forehead and said.

    "I already told you, don¡¯t think too much. If I wanted to do something to you, I would have swallowed you whole a long time. I just know way too much about you. Apart from keeping those secret subordinates and hiding the stray realm, you really didn¡¯t do much of a good job at hiding your activities.

    It is good that you met Sam when you met him. If you didn¡¯t meet him, I would have had to take care of you myself and teach you how to do things."

    Grivon rubbed his forehead in pain and said.

    "Alright, alright. I believe you. But you should understand, why it is hard for me. You are just way too dangerous."

    "Yeah, for others. You are my little Grivon after all. It would almost impossible for me to harm you. Anyway, do you want to have dinner tonight?"

    "Dinner? Why?"

    "Jyon ising today."

    Grivon¡¯s eyes brightened a bit.

    "Really? Jyon ising? Was she finally sick of her Maternal Grandfather?"

    "It is hard for that. She really enjoys ying the flute after all and Grandpa is the only one who can truly appreciate that music. She might leave after a while."

    "Is she not afraid, that she would be left with nothing if she is absent for so long?"

    "She is not interested in authority."

    "I don¡¯t think this is about authority, it is about survival. If she doesn¡¯t have a proper footing in the n, she would be simply used as a pawn in some political marriage. She should at least prepare for it."

    "Why do both of us exist if she has to do it herself? We are already neck-deep in this shit, at least let her be free. With her innocent mind, she is not really suited for these things anyway."

    Grivon just shrugged.

    "I wille."

    "Bring Sam too."

    Grivon frowned and asked.

    "Why?"

    "Just for fun. He might be a friend for a lifetime and he would make a greatpany in dinner."

    "I will ask. But I can¡¯t promise that he woulde. Anyway, I will send my people this afternoon. Send someone from your guard team to the bar. I need to find the information as quickly as possible. I need to weed out this rat otherwise, things would be troublesome if someone more powerfules from the league."

    "Don¡¯t worry. The league of Blood Iron is powerful, but it is not that powerful. Even though there are some troublesome characters that might really cause some trouble even in our n, they wouldn¡¯t interfere just now. They woulde at the end of the two-year time span.

    As long as you are careful enough, you would be safe."

    "Okay. See you tonight."

    With that Grivon used his token right there to disappear and go back to the stray realm. He gave the information about the bar to one of his secret subordinates and made them go investigate at the bar.

    He then went to Sam.

    "You have a dinner invitation."

    Sam was confused.

    "What dinner?"

    "Giyon invited you and me to dinner tonight."

    "For what? She wants to make another deal?"

    "I think this is more of a friendly dinner. Sister Jyon is returning today, so it was just a friendly dinner and since we are not really friendly with the rest of the cousins, she decided to invite you."

    "So, I am a fill-in?"

    "I don¡¯t know man. She said you would be a goodpany. I don¡¯t know. Juste with me.. Alright."

 Chapter 1345: Dinner

    Sam sighed and shook his head.

    "She just doesn¡¯t know, how wrong she is."

    He knew better than anyone that he is not a greatpany. He is brutally blunt and doesn¡¯t care much for other people. He might be polite, but it is hard for him to respect someone just from the face value and he doesn¡¯t like faking some smiles and making some idiotic small talk.

    In fact, he is the worstpany one could ask for, particrly when they are having some ulterior motives for the friendship to be forged.

    The only ce he could be a goodpany would be with his friends and he is sure that he and Giyon are not really that close.

    "Are you sure you want me to be there? I am fine if it is a business deal and I would even be fine if it is just to cook up some plot against someone. But I don¡¯t think I am close enough to her to have a friendly dinner."

    "I don¡¯t really mind. I am just a bit confused. Maybe she is extending an olive branch?"

    Sam shrugged and agreed before going back to the research.

    By evening, a subordinate returned from the team that went to investigate the bar.

    "The bartender recognized the person. But not because he is a regr. It is almost like he was looking for someone in the bar.

    The bartender noticed him because he came regrly for a few days and got drunk like a fish. He drank from morning to evening and one day, he met with this guy in a red cloak and a ck mask, who is extremely eye-catching in the crowd which made the bartender remember them.

    After talking to that guy, he hadn¡¯t seen either the guy in the mask or the informant in the bar again.

    The team leader started inquiring in the surroundings. Particrly inns and the slums to see if anyone would recognize the guy."

    "That is good. You go back and report to me tomorrow. I don¡¯t care if you have any results, report me no matter what the progress is."

    "Yes Sir."

    The subordinate went back.

    Soon, it is night. Grivon and Sam went to the dinner.

    It was arranged in Giyon¡¯s personal estate and the arrangements were done in the garden. The whole mansion is not particrly full. There is not much furniture and apart from the structural integrity, there is nothing special in the way it was constructed.

    In fact, this might be the ndest and simple residence in the whole estate among the peers of Giyon.

    In the garden, Giyon sat beside another girl whom Sam assumed to be the sister Jyon Grivon mentioned earlier.

    She is also as beautiful as Giyon, but a bit different, and from the facial feature and the body, Sam felt that she might have a few different bloodlines and one apparent one is the elven one.

    Even though it is not strong enough to make her look like a half-elf, some of the facial features clearly showed it.

    She has Silver hair tied into a bun on top just like Giyon and wore emerald-colored long robes. There is one more thing that grabbed Sam¡¯s attention and that is the flute she ced on the table.

    It is also made of some material that looked like Emerald jade. Just one look and he could see the great craftsmanship behind the instrument.

    They took their seats and greeted each other.

    "Sam, this is my younger sister, Jyon. She just came back from her Maternal Grand father¡¯s ce. Jyon, this is Sam." Giyon introduced.

    Sam smiled politely and greeted.

    "It is nice to meet you."

    Jyon looked a bit confused by Sam¡¯s presence which clearly indicated that she didn¡¯t know about his attendance today and is still perplexed about it, but she still smiled politely and replied.

    "Nice to meet you too." She just greeted and shifted her focus to Grivon.

    "Grivon, I heard that you grew a pair of wings and started flying. You are doing well for yourself."

    Grivon smiled and said.

    "I am not doing that bad. I started a couple of new businesses and they are looking promising. And recently I got a new partnership with Migron that had a great yield."

    Giyon was confused by this and looked at him in askance.

    "It is for solving his kidnapping problem. The deal I made with his father and I get arge portion of his profits in exchange."

    Giyon looked impressed and asked.

    "How much is arge portion?"

    "Fifty Percent."

    Giyon was stunned for a moment and looked to Sam as if asking it that was his idea too. But Grivon immediately protested.

    "It ispletely my idea."

    "You really taught Migron quite a lesson. I hope he would be good from now on." Jyon said with a smile and they started making small talk.

    Sam was left outpletely. Grivon tried to bring him into the conversation, but he was left listening since the girls are leading the conversation and Giyon really didn¡¯t involve him as for Jyon, she didn¡¯t even want to look at him for some reason.

    For some reason, she felt a dangerous vibe from Sam. She couldn¡¯t put her finger on it, but she felt that he is really unapproachable. It is almost like the surrounding atmosphere formed an invisible shield around him, making himpletely unreachable.

    But Sam didn¡¯t mind. He just ate the delicacies slowly and savored the wine and now and then, he sneaked a nce at the flute on the table, and in the middle of the conversation, Jyon ced her hand on it while talking to her siblings about her music advancements and Sam sensed something from it.

    And he immediately felt a bit gloomy. The other three recognized that immediately. The aura around himpletely changed and Giyon finally spoke.

    "Sam, you are being awfully silent. I heard that you are a musician too, why don¡¯t you talk about it?"

    Sam was surprised and spoke.

    "I seems like you really dug way deeper into my past than I thought."

    Jyon ignored hisment and looked at him curiously.

    "What instrument do you y?" This is really the first time she showed interest in him and Sam replied with a wry smile.

    "A flute."

    Jyon was surprised and touched her flute again.

    "Really?"

    Sam looked at her flute and said.

    "It seems like you do too."

    "I am. I really love ying it."

    "I y it for more of a hobby. I am not really that good."

    Sam said calmly.

    "Come on Sam, Don¡¯t you think you are being a bit modest."

    "I don¡¯t think I am, Miss Giyon. Of all my skills, I wouldn¡¯t say I am the best at music and since you even know I y, you should know the rest of my skills too. You tell me, do you think I am that great."

    "Well,pared to your other skills, you might not be, but that doesn¡¯t mean you are bad at this. You are still great."

    "If Sister Giyon said so, you must be really good."

    Sam shook his head with a smile and continued eating his meal.

    "Maybe I would get to listen to your music one day Mr. Sam," Jyon said politely to end the conversation, but Giyon was not really ready to give up.

    "Actually, Jyon. Someone you know can vouch for my statement."

    Jyon looked at her in confusion.

    "Maternal Grand Mother¡¯sst disciple. Gaana. You can ask him. Sam and he had a history and it is not something Gaana can forget."

    Sam was stunned and looked at Giyon in shock.

    "It can¡¯t be..." He muttered.

    "Yes, it can be. Gaana Merene. Ring any bells, Sam?"

    Jyon looked at Sam in shock.

    "No way, you are the Sam Gaana told me about?"

    Sam looked at both of them and sighed.

    He knew that there is no way Giyon would call him for a friendly chat. Gaana Merene is actually the young master of the Merene family Sam fought with and spared.

    "No, wait a minute. He has a painting of Sam and him in the battle within his room. You don¡¯t look like him at all."

    "Well, It is a long story. I am going through a rough time and this face is not exactly mine at the moment." Sam said tiredly.

    "No, no. Not the face. The aura. The Sam in that painting looked majestic, free, unrestrained. He looked like he was the all-powerful and all-capable god of the elements. I got a feeling that all the elements are bowing before him.

    He has absolute control over everything and anything that stood in front of him.

    But now you look constrained and gloomy. I cannot rte to both of those auras at all. Are you really the same Sam?"

    "Hahahaha..."

    "pfft...hahaha."

    Sam couldn¡¯t help butugh out loud and so did Giyon.. Grivon is still trying to make sense of the situation while Jyon is genuinely puzzled about what she said might have been funny at all.

 Chapter 1346: Dinner II

    Sam controlled hisughter within a few seconds and said.

    "Sorry, Miss Jyon. It is just I couldn¡¯t help butugh out loud at how urate your description of my current state is.

    I don¡¯t know how I was described in that painting and from your description, it might have been really that good, that might just be Gaana¡¯s perspective of me, but your current description of me is extremely urate.

    You didn¡¯t miss a single thing about my mental state in my current situation and I couldn¡¯t help butugh out loud I believe that your Sister feels the same.

    Am I right? Miss Giyon."

    "Yes, you are right. The deeper I dig into your history the more things I unraveled, the more surprised I became about your current situation. As tragic as it is, I can¡¯t deny it is a bit funny."

    Jyon is still a bit puzzled.

    "Mr. Sam. I don¡¯t understand what you are saying? Why do you feel so trapped? I mean, there is no way I could believe that Gaana made a mistake in his representation and there is no way I could believe that a person portrayed in that painting could be the current you. I cannot wrap my head around it."

    This time it was Sam¡¯s turn to be surprised.

    "By any chance, Miss Jyon, did Gaana omit my face from it?"

    "Yes, your face was notpletely visible."

    Sam nodded in understanding and said.

    "The situation is that someone from Mari n, stole my body and duplicated my soul to swallow all my memories, experiences, ideas, and creations as a whole and I am currently stuck in the body of the person who did it.

    I was forced to do this exchange to save the lives of my friends and subordinates and there are many things I left behind without finishing.

    The research, my students, the home that I so painstakingly built. The organization expanded over dozens of realms. It is a bit hard to leave as I built everything from scratch.

    I was invincible then. I had hundreds of tricks up my sleeve that could save me from many threats. Now, I am just a researcher that was struck in a different body. I lost a lot of weapons from my arsenal and now I have to create a new one even though I believe I wouldn¡¯t stay in this body for long.

    It is all a bit pathetic."

    Jyon was surprised and she once again ced her hand on the flute. She thought for a moment and said.

    "Can you y the flute?"

    "I don¡¯t think it is a good idea at the moment," Sam said as he rejected the idea with a polite smile. He is clearly ufortable.

    "You have been looking at my flute since the start of the dinner. I thought you are interested in ying."

    "No, not at all. I am more interested in craftsmanship and I was a bit nostalgic thinking about my own instrument. The flute I made for myself. If I was with it, it would have also generated a spirit by now. So, I am feeling a bit... what is that feeling... Gloomy?"

    "You can make an instrument?"

    "As I said, music is really not my great suit, I just y to relieve my boredom and I have many more skills that are better than my music and making things is one of them. You can ask your brother and sister. They can vouch for that.

    And Gaana must have also mentioned that I lost in the battle of music and I had to resort to my brute methods to counter him forcefully."

    "He did mention that, but not in those exact words. But he also mentioned that you spared his life with respect to his musical prowess. He is really grateful for that. Believe it or not, he actually kind of worships you. He talks to your picture every morning before he practices and thanks to your picture for one more day."

    "You spared an enemy¡¯s life." Grivon suddenly interrupted with a shocked expression. It seems like his dyed response is due to him trying to even process the possibility of Sam sparing someone¡¯s life.

    "How do you think I ended up here? It is because I spared an annoying pest¡¯s life and he sold me out to Sivan.

    Anyway, Miss Jyon. That really surprises me. Gaana being grateful for me ispletely beyond my expectations. After all, I am the guy that killed hundreds of his family members. Granted I didn¡¯t kill any of them directly, the blood is on my hands.

    I don¡¯t think thanking me makes much sense."

    This time even Jyon was surprised.

    "You are the one who killed all of his family members."

    "Of course, why do you think we ended up fighting at all? I am not really fond of personal duels just to see who is a better fighter. That only intes egos of the people."

    "Why... why did you kill all of his family?" Jyon asked in a shivering voice. Sam was surprised and Giyon who is sitting beside Jyon ced her hand on hers just to make her calm down.

    Sam frowned and was about to say something to stop the conversation, but Giyon gestured him not to and told him to continue.

    He was confused, but he still spoke.

    "There is a bit of ulterior motive, but the main reason is that one of my subordinates has a deep-seated grudge with their family. She was hunted down quite a lot and when she was finally safe, she met me. I recruited her to do my bidding and in exchange, I helped her enact revenge against her family that was determined to kill her."

    Jyon calmed down a lot but didn¡¯t say anything anymore.

    Grivon who wanted to lighten up the mood spoke.

    "Now that does sound like you. Killing a few hundred people for your subordinate. Sparing someone¡¯s life doesn¡¯t sound like you at all."

    Sam just gave him a side-eyed nce and they finished the dinner with Grivon telling his embarrassing childhood stories to lighten the mood and only stopped after Jyonpletely left behind that tension.

    After they finished dinner, Grivon got some alone time with Jyon as he took her to the side to show her something and Giyon and Sam were the only ones left at the table.

    "So, Miss Giyon. Would you like to tell me what exactly your motive is?"

    "What motive? This is just a friendly dinner?"

    "Really? I don¡¯t believe we are friends and I don¡¯t believe that we became anymore friendly after tonight¡¯s awkward dinner."

    "Awkward? I don¡¯t feel that way at all. In fact, I was quitefortable."

    "Comfortable, cing me in an awkward position. Please don¡¯t beat around the bush and tell what this is about exactly."

    "Well, I just wanted to introduce you to Jyon. She was actually curious about you. In fact, the first time I came across you is because of her. She told me about your painting in the hands of her newfound friend and was fascinated by that.

    She didn¡¯t understand, how someone can be so majestic and arrogant to assume amanding position over the elemental energies. So, I wanted her to meet you."

    "So, you wanted to break her fantasy."

    "No, I believe I just made her realize that the fantasy is true. She would understand what kind of person can assume thatmanding role."

    "Really? What kind of person is that?"

    "A person who is strong enough to talk about massacring a n on a dining table without so much as a change in his expression. Do you think she was afraid of you killing all of them? No, she was afraid of how casual you were about that. She was afraid of how natural you were when telling that.

    She was afraid of how unfeeling you are about the lives that you stole."

    Sam just shook his head and downed another ss of liquor.

    "So, that is the only purpose of all of this?"

    "It is."

    "I thought you ask me to talk business. But it is just to y some mind game with your sister. I don¡¯t really understand the motive behind it and I certainly don¡¯t understand what good it would do for your sister to meet me. But I enjoyed the food and wine.

    Thank you."

    "They were cooked by my personal chef. You can borrow her if you want."

    "Please don¡¯t make those promises. I am actually known to be a great boss. You must have known. None of my subordinates ever left me once they worked for me.

    Anyway, are you in the mood to talk business."

    "I am always in the mood to talk business, Sam."

    "That is great because now that I know how deep your informationwork runs, I think you would be a perfect long-term partner.

    I have a proposal that would help you develop an organization. It wouldn¡¯t give you instant growth from what you have to that of an organization as big as the Gaja n.. But it wouldy down a solid foundation to achieve that state eventually."

 Chapter 1347: Offer I

    "I am listening," Giyon said as she gracefully picked her wine ss.

    "It is actually a system I used myself in my own organizations. It has two things one should consider and I don¡¯t know if you would agree with my ideas. They are not orthodox and it would take a lot of time and money as an investment."

    "I am fifty years older than you Sam. I might have done more unorthodox things than you think."

    "I am pretty sure you didn¡¯t." Sam said with a chuckle and continued.

    "One of the foundational things about my organization is the talent recognition and recruitment. Actually, all the big organization makes some fundamental mistakes. They always try to recruit talented people when their talents are fully shown out. They will wait until their potential is out there for the world to see and sometimes, they even wait until they arepletely matured.

    The main reason for that is they don¡¯t want to waste time and money on someone who might not mature and realize their own potential."

    "Well, isn¡¯t that correct? The resources could be better used in another ce with much better odds."

    Sam smiled and replied.

    "That is why I told you it is a mistake. Ms. Giyon, you tell me. Would you recruit me under your wing if I couldn¡¯t get my body back and permanently stuck in this crippled body?"

    "Of course, yes. You are worth more than your body."

    "Why is that? After all, I wouldn¡¯t be able to work with all the elemental energies I previously used. I wouldn¡¯t have the same battle prowess and I definitely wouldn¡¯t have the same versatility I had before."

    "But you are still smart and your experience is worth more than you think. You are creative and innovative and I don¡¯t believe that you feel disadvantaged in this new body. You are just as confident as before."

    "That is right and why do you think that is?"

    "What do you mean?"

    "Why do you think I have all those qualities you mentioned. The qualities that make me worthwhile."

    Giyon doesn¡¯t have an answer and didn¡¯t know what to say.

    "Not many people know of this, but I was trained by someone when I was just a little kid. They wanted me to train as an assassin and wanted to make me as versatile as possible and do you know what they did? They didn¡¯t just grind me on killing techniques, they left me free for half of my training. They made me learn everything I wanted to learn, they made me train in everything I wanted to train, and trust me, I was the best assassin they had ever trained and these are their exact words.

    They realized that my core strength is not my physical prowess, rather my learning ability and they let me train in every skill I wanted and they made use of those skills and made me use those skills to better my assassination ns.

    Ny-nine percent of my assassinations were done in such a way that the person who died didn¡¯t even know for thest second that they are dying. They never saw me or my approach. They just died without even knowing that they were being killed and I walked away from that like nothing happened."

    "What do you mean by this? What are you trying to say?"

    "What I am trying to say is, all the organizations are trying to recruit a specific set of talents instead of trying to utilize the talents in the way they want.

    You are all trying to recruit the best fighters, best formation masters, best artisans, and such. You are waiting for their skill to bloom and will start fighting over him at a high price. But in search of this, you are missing a lot of valuable people in the process.

    The method I am about to tell you would be in conjunction with the academy idea I gave out to Vydon. But that academy idea is a half-baked one. What I am about to tell you is theplete one.

    The first step in this n is to build an orphanage and let every orphan from infants to the age of fifteen join, along with that start another orphanage for the people who just awakened and cultivated until Acolyte or Novice stage.

    For the kids in the first orphanage, start teaching the basics."

    "What basics?"

    "Basics of everything. Basics of elemental energies, spiritual energy, the artisan work, the formations, inscriptions, the basic fundamentalws of nature. How fire is made? Why Ice is cold? Teach them from the most basic things until they are fifteen and in this time, you give them food that would nurture their body with bare minimum spiritual energy.

    The amount that would only benefit them and not destroy them.

    After they are awakened, test them for the elemental affinity, the nature of their spiritual cores, the physical body constitutions. Their talents in different things and their interest in different things.

    Give them a basic curriculum and then train them in their interests. Try to align their talents with the interests they have.

    Instead of trying to grow them into something that is useful to you, let them grow and think of ways to make use of what they are growing into.

    The results would be amazing. You would gain the most loyal subordinates you could ever have."

    "This is all good in theory, but don¡¯t you think this is a bit impractical?"

    "Impractical? How do you think I established my organization? Half of my main forces are formed from this method.

    The curriculum I designed along with various experts in various fields. You wouldn¡¯t believe the type of contributions that they made.

    I have people who don¡¯t know how to fight at all, the bare minimum they could do is defend themselves, but they can create an architectural building in a day that could defend against the attacks of a cultivator that is at least five times more powerful than them.

    I have a person who knows nothing but giving massages, but I wouldn¡¯t trade her for a hundred top-notch fighters. Just her presence and her techniques not only made her able to train a hundred more people with a decent skillset, but she also helped the fighters and other cultivators rx and improve their conditions by a long shot.

    Some of her massages can even clear some severe muscr injuries. But if you ce her in a battlefield with her peers, she would be dead as a rock in three seconds.

    But her presence in the rear end increases the efficiency of battle by fifty percent because of her involvement in the training.

    I have healers that couldn¡¯t kill a beast for a meal.

    I have a painter who uses his fire elemental energy and he could scorch a dozen of his peers within three minutes.

    I suggest you take upon this method and you will see some serious improvement in your forces within a few years. I will give you the curriculum I follow in my own organization for this."

    "Then what is the second part of this method?"

    "Rewarding people.

    You should reward these people for every achievement they have."

    "That is amon practice, everyone rewards their subordinates for a good job."

    "That is not enough. You should make thempetitive. Competitive enough to use their skills to the fullest,petitive enough to explore their own talent more and more, but notpetitive enough to backstab their friends.

    I have a system called the Patent system, that helps with the people on the creation side. They can design anything and they can give the prototype to the experts in the department if the product is as useful as they described and it has practical application, the department will give them a certificate.

    A document stating the usefulness of the patent and they would get rewarded with money every time the product they created is used."

    "Does that mean, if my subordinate creates a poison and I use it, I would be paying him for that?"

    "Yes. Not just that. If you sell that poison to someone else, you would be paying them a share you get. And the share wouldn¡¯t be decided by you, it would be discussed between you and them. And the patent system is just one of them.

    There are still many things you need to do.

    For example, you need to createpetitions. After you established the academies, you should createpetitions within each academy and then apetition between the academies, regions, and many more.

    You should make thempete in difficult things and reward them generously enough for them to push themselves harder.

    The mistake many organizations do is paying people high prices while recruiting them. This might ensure their arrival, but this also intes their egos.

    They would feel self-important.

    In my method, you pit them against each other.. You will reward them generously but they would know that they need to earn it, they would have to understand that there are a lot of people close on their tail to catch up."

 Chapter 1348: Offer II

    "Wait a minute Sam. You are saying your organization this and your organization that. But no matter how far I dug into your past, I couldn¡¯t find anything rted to your organization. You are giving these statements that it is all that great, but how can I be sure of it?"

    Giyon asked solemnly.

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "Of course, you wouldn¡¯t be able to find it. It was way too far away from here that I am sure that even if I took wormholes connecting constantly I will take more than two weeks to go there."

    "Two weeks? Are you crazy? You could cross over hundreds of realms in that time."

    "Exactly my point. My organization¡¯s influence is too far away and it is definitely not among the top-rated powers like yours. Of course, that doesn¡¯t mean my organization is actually that weak. It is actually pretty strong."

    "Really? Why don¡¯t you tell me about it? You might be able to convince me of adapting to your method."

    "Actually, if you consider the overall strength, my organization is considered weakpared to the ns here and even some of your subordinate organizations. The strongest subordinate I have when I was thrown into this situation is a Middle stage consummate cultivator of the Astral ne. He is called Night Ghost.

    But I am sure that I have more Astral ne Initiation cultivators than your n and Mari nbined.

    And not all of them are aged with burned-out potential. Most of them are young and have a lot of potentials, all growing at the same time. I have a decent number of Astral ne Pre-transcendent cultivators and a few Astral ne, Transcendent cultivators.

    Of course, I am speaking about the people who arepletely loyal to my organization without the use of any force.

    I have some other types of subordinates that are considered more like ves. So, if you count them, then I would be able topete with Golem Sect, everyone except the top brass with a bunch of Late stage consummate cultivators of Astral ne.

    As for Mortal ne Cultivators, none of your organizations would be able topete with me. I am sure that in the next decade, I willpletely overtake your organization in terms of Astral ne Pre-transcendent cultivators, and even the Astral ne Transcendent cultivators would the same as your organization if things go well.

    In three decades, my organization will overtake the Gaja n in terms of forces. Of course, if you count pure influence, I already surpassed you guys, because my organization¡¯s influence is definitely in far more realms than the Gaja n. I have businesses in a lot of realms and I have a rtively notable intelligencework."

    Giyon was surprised and didn¡¯t even speak for a second.

    "If you are that strong, why are you going around destroying organizations on your own. You could wage a proper war. Why risk so much like this by moving with such a small group."

    "My thinking is exactly the opposite. Currently, with my team, I am a much smaller target. The organizations wouldn¡¯t see meing. I just make deals with different people if I want extra manpower.

    This is also much more fun."

    "Yeah, look where your fun led you to."

    Sam didn¡¯t have an answer for that. So, Giyon continued.

    "Let¡¯s assume everything about your organization you just said ispletely true, why would you give such a core foundational structure of your organization to me. I am pretty sure this is more valuable than some of your products.

    I don¡¯t suppose you are giving me because you are lost in my beauty."

    Sam shook his head with a chuckle and said.

    "I want you to be the face of mine and Grivon¡¯s operations from now on."

    "Face of your operations?"

    "Yes. I want you to make deals with the rest of the young masters with my previous products. I need them to be the decoys topletely throw Sivan off. But I don¡¯t want to do it with Grivon as the mediator."

    "And why is that?"

    "He is not ready. At first, I thought we could manage, but the way the league is doing things and Grivon¡¯s subordinates, I don¡¯t think he is ready yet.

    In fact, he is not even ready to be a proper sessor candidate. I am really surprised that he managed to keep all of his secret businesses together without molespletely infesting them. It would take a lot more time to pull such arge operation with him."

    "But if you switch to me, wouldn¡¯t Grivon suffer the loss. He would be sidelined."

    "That is not going to happen at all. I have a n for that. I will be making new products for Grivon and he would be focusing on developing his new businesses and taking over the businesses of his peers."

    "But you are also selling the new business ideas to the same people you are stealing businesses from. Isn¡¯t that a bit contradictory?"

    "Of course, yes. But the solution is not that difficult for this problem. All I have to do is divide the businesses of the peers into two. Therger part would be where Grivons new secret businesses would wreak havoc and thisrge part would be the ces where they originally had secret businesses.

    When I offer them my old business ideas, they would only be applicable in the business they are operating on behalf of the n and while the n takes most of the profit away from that ce, they would have less money, to begin with and in that small portion, you would be taking a piece and giving Grivon a piece."

    "So, not only you are using them as decoys to mislead Sivan, you are crippling their financial resources they would be getting from their secret businesses and also reducing their share in their n-rted businesses.

    You are giving them big, but what you are taking from them is bigger, but they wouldn¡¯t even know that a single person is doing both of these things. In the process, Grivon is the one benefitting from this situation as a whole as his financial resources will keep on increasing.

    You are too cruel aren¡¯t you?"

    "It is a necessary quality for survival."

    "The whole idea is great. But I am a bit skeptical about your organizational structure. I couldn¡¯t wrap my head around it."

    Sam thought for a moment and answered.

    "I have an idea. Why don¡¯t you round up twenty kids? All below fifteen and a few months for their awakening.

    Divide them into two groups. One group would be left alone. They would just proceed with their normal lives. But the second group would be different. I will teach them myself since there are no teachers trained yet.

    When they awakened, let¡¯s have them battle. See who has better usage of energy in their raw form.

    If you are satisfied with the result. We can move along with the exchange."

    "I am down for that."

    With that, they shook their hands, and Giyon changed the topic.

    "Let¡¯s talk something else other than business. What do you think of my sister?"

    "She is perceptive."

    Giyon was dumbfounded for a second and asked.

    "Really that is what you noticed from all of that?"

    "That is what mattered among all the things I observed. She is unusually perceptive. Maybe it is because of her artistic mindset, she perceives everything in the world like art and she did the same with me.

    Just like she could read the art, she could also read my current state."

    "That¡¯s it? Nothing else mattered?"

    "I didn¡¯t listen to her y, so that is all for now."

    "How does she look?"

    "She could be considered good-looking."

    "considered? What is wrong with you? Are all your organs working properly?"

    Sam looked at her with a frown. Giyon also realized that she babbled a bit too much and said.

    "I am sorry. But aren¡¯t you the least bit attracted to her?"

    "Physically, a bit. But that is just a biological reaction."

    "Of course, attraction always starts with the biological reaction. Then why didn¡¯t you say that when I asked you about her."

    Sam sighed and said.

    "What are you driving at Ms. Giyon? Please don¡¯t beat around the bush."

    "Are you interested in her?"

    "A romantic interest?"

    "Yes."

    "No."

    "You just said you are physically attracted to her. Why not?"

    "If that is the case, I am physically attracted to you too. Should I pursue a romantic rtionship with you too?"

    Giyon¡¯s face turned red and she immediately became flustered.

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "If this is your attempt at a blind date, you are not really good at it."

    Giyon sighed and said.

    "You see, Jyon is a bit too na?ve for her own good and she is not interested in increasing her forces and strength.. If she is like that, the n would force her into a political marriage and all that would await her is endless suffering."

 Chapter 1349: Trial

    "That still doesn¡¯t exin the blind date," Sam said as he took another sip from his wine.

    "The thing is, even Grivon knows this and he ispletely freaking out on this matter. When I am still present in the n, I can try my best to stop it from happening. But sooner orter, I would have to move out of the n.

    As I said, I don¡¯t want to be another small part of this n¡¯s legacy. But once I am gone, things wouldn¡¯t be the same. She would lose her one main support which is me. I wouldn¡¯t have much say in the n¡¯s operations once I am out of here.

    And that time would still be soon for Grivon to have any real power. The most that could happen is that he would be next in line which is still a lot lesspared to the power of the rest of the elders and the n¡¯s head.

    Even his parents¡¯ support and the grandfather¡¯s support arepletely useless if the n really pushes the marriage. After all, the parents mostly deal with external stuff and wouldn¡¯t have much say internally. And the grandfather is still only one grand elder. The other four would simply outnumber him.

    So, if I have a choice, I would rather send her away with someone powerful, smart, capable and on top of all that, someone she likes. So, I try my best to let her meet some usible candidates."

    "Really? And how many candidates are there?"

    "Including you? Only one. None of the other guys didn¡¯t really cross my threshold."

    "That must be a pretty tough standard. Anyway, I am not really interested in settling down."

    As he finished his words, they suddenly heard an extremely melodious tune from far away.

    "It seems like they went to the pond. Let¡¯s go there."

    Giyon said and both of them walked deeper into the estate where they soon reached the pond.

    Jyon is sitting on arge rock on the bank of the pond while Grivon is looking at her while sitting on the bank of the pond with his legs in the water.

    He is enjoying the music.

    Sam looked at Jyon as she yed the flute. She had her eyes closed and the water in the pond is reacting to her music. But not too dramatically. A small quantity on the topmostyer of the pond turned into droplets as they danced to her tune gently creating ripples all around.

    As they moved upwards, they created a beautiful scene under the moonlight.

    Sam was really impressed.

    As he listened to the gentle music, he suddenly felt unburdened. He felt like forgetting all the possible troubles that areing at him from all sides and just wanted to be stuck at that moment forever.

    Aftering to this life, the best musician Sam had ever met is actually Gaana, the young master of the Merene family. But now he was beatenpletely.

    Jyon just yed for a few minutes and he is sure that she is better than Gaana Merene.

    As he was lost in the music.

    The spirit of the emerald flute came out and merged with the water droplets.

    The water droplets started converging as they formed the silhouette of a beautiful woman who started dancing on the pond.

    Sam took a refreshing breath and rxed for a movement. He couldn¡¯t help but feel light.

    Giyon looked at Sam and whispered.

    "You see, she is great. Why don¡¯t you give it a try?"

    Sam didn¡¯t answer her question and just stood there as he looked at the dance of the spirit on the water. After a few more minutes, Jyon finally stopped ying and looked at both Sam and Giyon in surprise.

    But her gaze lingered on Sam more as if she is looking at someonepletely different.

    Grivon and Giyon were surprised by her looking at Sam weirdly.

    Sam ignored her looks and turned Giyon. Thanks for the dinner Miss Giyon. If you don¡¯t mind, I would like to take my leave now."

    Grivon also stood up and said.

    "Yes, Sister Giyon. I would also go. I still didn¡¯t find that rat. I still have a lot to do."

    Sam turned to Giyon one more time and said.

    "Think about my proposal Ms. Giyon. Meanwhile, I will proceed with making more decoys. But I think it would be better for us if we proceed with my new n. I don¡¯t want to put Grivon in the spotlight before he fully matured."

    "I will think about it. I will send the ten kids to you tomorrow. You also think about my proposal."

    Sam smiled and said.

    "That is an impossible scenario. Please don¡¯t waste your time thinking about it."

    With that Grivon and Sam walked away.

    "What proposal are you guys talking about? You are not thinking of ditching me and joining her are you?" He joked.

    Sam chuckled and exined the whole n.

    "But wouldn¡¯t that put me in too much of a passive and hidden situation? The n head would need to be more active."

    "There would be a lot of time for you to be active. You don¡¯t need to worry about it too much. An organization like your n will care more about results than the image you garner over the years. As long you benefit the n most, they don¡¯t care if you are a genocidal pedophile. They would still make you sit on the chair."

    Grivon was dumbfounded for a moment and rebutted.

    "That is my n you are talking about. Can you at least have a better opinion of them? Our n is not the one that is hunting you down is it? We are much better than Mari n."

    "Really? Better than Mari n? That is not much a high standard. A rapist in the slums is better than the Mari n when ites to moral integrity. Come on Grivon, you and I both know what your n cares about the most. It is benefits and legacy.

    You guys are not some bunch of saints trying to make this world a better ce."

    Grivon didn¡¯t have an answer for that.

    "Anyway, your sister will send ten kids tomorrow. Arrange their residence within your personal property. Don¡¯t bring them into the stray realm. I would be staying with them for a while. You also need to stay with me sometimes, so that you can learn the concept of what I am trying to do."

    "You are selling my sister this whole thing. Why don¡¯t you do the same to me?"

    "It is not the same. Your sister is still establishing a proper organization. She is currently spread all over the ce and is trying to gain power and foothold in different ces. But you are different. You would be gaining an organization that already has its foundationid, it is already a fixed one.

    You cannot change itpletely, but you need to modify the existing practices with what I am about to teach you."

    "Are you that confident that I would be the n¡¯s head?"

    "It is only a matter of time. The one thing you have and the rest of the candidates don¡¯t have is self-awareness. You know what you are good at and what you are not good at, you know when to ask for help and when to take responsibility yourself. You are eager to learn and know when to give credit to others.

    You are a good leader and have great qualities, but you just don¡¯t have any skills on the other side of the coin which you are going to learn from me.

    From what I saw until now, the rest of the candidates are extremely in over their heads and they wholeheartedly believe that they deserve the position of n¡¯s head for some reason. On the other hand, you are trying to be the deserving candidate for the position.

    You are the better option no matter how I see it. The only opponents you have are the sessor candidates from Giyon¡¯s generation and I will help you deal with them too.

    Anyway, we have a lot to do."

    That night, Sam felt at peace. Jyon¡¯s music really worked wonders on him. His brain is clear after a long time and new ideas are popping inside his head.

    He couldn¡¯t wait till he tinkered with the simtor once again and with specter¡¯s help, he worked through it the whole night.

    He was done with most of the process. The next day, Grivon got the news about the guy that spread their information. He was not from the third and they also found out which he originally came from.

    On the third, instead of staying in an inn, he stayed with a friend, and once the guards managed to catch that friend, the rest of the information flowed out.

    They went to look for that guy on that.

    And by afternoon, Giyon sent the kids to Grivon¡¯s personal residence within the n grounds, where Sam went to receive them.. But the person that apanied the ten kids surprised him.

 Chapter 1350: Teaching

    "What are you doing here, Miss Jyon?"

    Sam asked as he looked at Jyon who is sitting along with the kids. There are five boys and five girls and she is ying around with them.

    Jyon looked at Sam and smiled.

    "Mr. Sam, my sister assigned these kids to me. I was going to teach music to them for a few months. But she said that you are going to teach them something for a while."

    "I would be teaching something for them for a while. It takes a few months. Tell me where you are staying, I would send the kids over after I am done with their lessons. It would take a lot of time."

    "No, it is okay. I will just wait. I already promised them that I would spend some time with them this time. But suddenly your sses came up. So, I would just sit in the sses if you do not mind."

    Sam didn¡¯t know what to say about that. He knew that this was something Giyon deliberately cooked up and from Jyon¡¯s expression, he could see that she is a bit ufortable staying with him.

    He thought for a moment and asked her with intrigue.

    "Are you staying here because you are afraid about what I would teach them?"

    Jyon¡¯s face was flustered in surprise as she lowered her head. Sam chuckled and continued.

    "You can stay if you want. But I assure you, I am not teaching them how to be genocidal maniacs. I am pretty sure the world has enough of them."

    With that, both of them walked into a bigger room with the children following them.

    That is the training room and it has big enough space for Sam to demonstrate and exin things. He took out some formation tes and recording crystals which he prepared for this ss specifically. With the simtor almost there and currently can already project his thoughts outside, he doesn¡¯t have to worry too much about the contents of the lessons.

    In fact, he can even do three-dimensional modeling in the simtor currently and it helped him prepare for the lessons faster.

    After setting everything up, Sam started teaching them the very basics. The basics regarding the materials in the surroundings, how the materials are affected in various conditions. He taught them about the solids liquids and gases, the molecules, and how atoms make up every one of them.

    He just drilled them with basics and then rted that to the study of spiritual energy and elemental energy about how it is also made up of small energy particles.

    He then rted the elements and how the elemental energies that are being controlled by the cultivators modify the surrounding objects and environment.

    He didn¡¯t hold back on the lessons and the projections really helped him as the kid¡¯s really liked what they are seeing. But Sam must say that these kids are really shelteredpared to the kids he met back in deste and other lower realms.

    These guys clearly didn¡¯t see the cruelty of the world yet and of course, it is because of the average cultivation level here. These kids even if they were left on the road, no one would bother doing much to them. They don¡¯t have anything to offer.

    If a fifteen-year-old kid is living well in a deste without anyone helping him or backing him, killing him would bring some profit, but here the average cultivator on the road wouldn¡¯t get anything from them and the cultivators of below-average strength wouldn¡¯t dare do anything because of thews.

    If these kids were to be left on the streets, the most they would have to worry about is starving to death because of theck of food, apart from that, they don¡¯t have to worry about anything.

    They are really more innocent than the kids he was used to.

    This also made it easier for him to teach these guys. They are very eager and curious to learn. They don¡¯t have this sense of urgency. They know they have all the time in the world and they know they are safe.

    It is a bit refreshing to Sam as well, as he taught them carefully.

    After he was done with the lesson for that day, he gave them the recording crystals of the lesson and told them to go through it by themselvester.

    Jyon who sat through the whole lesson was surprised how well Sam is doing with the kids. He was interactive, he smiled a lot and even took some silly questions from the kids without being annoyed.

    She was surprised, to say the least.

    Sam looked at the kids and said.

    "You would have another lesson tomorrow. Don¡¯t forget to study what I taught you today."

    "Yes Sir." The kids all answered in Unison and Sam smiled at them.

    He walked to Jyon with the same smile and said.

    "You can take them back now. Bring them back tomorrow at the same time. In fact, it would be better if you don¡¯te and send them to someone else. It would just be a waste of time."

    "No problem, as I said, I promised them to spend some time, so I woulde by myself."

    Sam just shrugged and walked away, but before he did, he looked at her flute one more time.

    For the next week, the kids came on time, and Jyon came along with them. Sam gave them different lessons.

    On the seventh day, he taught them about the water element and how versatile it can be. He didn¡¯t particrly teach them how to use water elements for attacks, he just showed them what the properties of water are how the water is conjured by the cultivators how it can be manipted and how easily and urately it could be manipted if anyone concentrated on the water molecules as the blocks and constructed the model of everything they want to make.

    After he was done, he looked at the kids and asked.

    "Think of something you want to manipte the water into if you are a water elemental user. Try to draw it and show it to me. I will tell you how usible it is. But remember, the thing you are making the water into should be useful for something. It needs to have practical application."

    With that, he took off and started drinking some fruit juice on the side as he looked at the kid¡¯s brainstorm.

    Jyon who is standing on the side came towards him and asked.

    "I am surprised you gave them such an assignment."

    "Why? Are you sure that I am going to teach them how to kill in different ways with the water element?"

    Jyon was stumped for a moment and didn¡¯t know what to answer.

    "Don¡¯t worry. I know how you feel. It is not new for me." He said to reassure her.

    "What is not new for you?"

    "People think that I am a cold-blooded killer and doesn¡¯t care anything else but killing."

    "So, you are used to being misunderstood?"

    "I never said they are misunderstanding me. I am a cold-blooded murderer. It is just that there is a bit more to me than being a killer. As you saw, I am a decent teacher."

    "Why didn¡¯t you teach them the direct applications? I heard that you have quite a few ways to kill."

    "Everyone can be a killer Ms. Jyon. If you ask me, apart from the emotional burden on one¡¯s mentality, it is the most versatile job as there are many ways to do it. But there are some things that only a few people can be. Like musicians, painters, sculptors, architects, cksmiths, healers, and many more.

    If I teach them how to kill now, they might never realize what they could have been apart from the killer and I am never one to do that."

    "But wouldn¡¯t battle insights be more useful for them in the future? After all, this is the world of cultivation. It is survival of the fittest our there, they might benefit from it. They have little backing unlike me to save themselves and explore their talents."

    "Of course, I could teach them how to kill, but as I said, it is the most versatile task. You can do anything you want. This task not only helps me understand their talents, it also helps me understand the way they think and we don¡¯t know their elemental affinities, so it is no use for them to know how to kill now.

    They have a lot of time."

    "So, you are nning to teach them how to kill?"

    "Yes. I am going to teach them how to use every element as flexibly as possible and they can decide on how to use them as they like."

    "Where did you learn this way to teaching?"

    "My teachers taught me that way. At least some things and after that I started learning that way."

    "You are really good at this. Maybe you are just as good at music like my sister said."

    "As I said, that is not my best skill."

    "How does it fare when it ispared to your teaching?"

    "I think I am better with teaching. I mean, I have a lot to teach and many ways to teach as well.. There is only so much I could do in music."

 Chapter 1351: Lead

    "I would like to listen to you y once," Jyon asked in a very gentle and low voice. She is clearly hesitating to ask.

    Sam looked at her flute once again and shook his head.

    "It is best if I don¡¯t. I am not in the mood for a musical retreat. I have a lot to do."

    "Why? You are always looking at my flute, you clearly want to y."

    "It is not that. When I lost my body, I also lost many things which I made myself, and my flute is one of those things. The flute I made with meteorite sands, if it was with me, it would have been gaining a spirit now. I was looking forward to seeing what kind of spirit it would be.

    I am just a bit disappointed."

    Jyon nodded in understanding.

    "My sister said that you lost a lot. I am really sorry about that. But what is your enmity with the person that stole from you?"

    Sam smiled and asked.

    "Are you thinking that I might have done something to him?"

    Jyon once again avoided eye contact in embarrassment. Sam chuckled and continued.

    "Actually, we didn¡¯t even meet before that day. He just came into my life. Barged in and stole everything from me, including my body."

    "Then are you trying to get it back?"

    "That is why I am here in your n.

    Why are you so curious about me Miss Jyon? Did your sister tell you to get to know me?"

    Sam asked directly and Jyon was stumped for a second.

    "Why... Why would she want me to get to know you?"

    "Then?"

    "I am just a bit curious. I cannot rte to a person who can kill hundreds of people without a flinch and be a good teacher to kids like this. This is new to me. I never met a person like you before."

    "It is understandable. After all, there are very few people like me in the world."

    "Now, you are just praising yourself. Isn¡¯t it a bit narcissistic?"

    "Not a bit. A lot. I am pretty proud of myself."

    Sam said and at this moment, kids started finishing up their drawings and Sam started asking them to exin their ideas. He corrected them a bit and then exined the mistakes they did before sending them away.

    Sam sighed after they left and contacted Grivon.

    "Come to your residence immediately. We need to talk."

    Grivon came hurriedly and asked.

    "Is there a problem?"

    "Yes, there is. Your sister Giyon is trying to set your younger sister Jyon up with me. Tell her this is not a good idea and tell your younger sister not toe here anymore."

    Grivon was stunned. His brain stopped working at Giyon setting Jyon up with Sam.

    "What did you say?"

    "You heard me right the first time. I am in no mood to repeat myself. Tell your elder sister to stop messing around. This wouldn¡¯t be good for anyone."

    "I will go talk to her immediately."

    Grivon didn¡¯t even wait for a moment before he ran out. He went to Giyon¡¯s personal residence where she was in a business meeting at that moment and barged in.

    "What were you thinking? Are you out of your mind?"

    He yelled at her directly.

    Giyon frowned and looked at him angrily.

    "Get out of here. Now." She said in a calm but cold voice and Grivon realized that he might have been over the top a bit and walked out of the room.

    Giyon finished her meeting soon and let him in.

    "If you pull a stunt like that again, I will literally spank you in front of the whole n."

    "I am sorry. But my question still stands. What were you thinking? Setting Jyon up with Sam? Are you out of your mind?"

    Giyon sighed and spoke.

    "So he told you, huh. Never expected him to act this way."

    "Of course, he told me, what do you expect? At least, he is a decent guy to tell me this, if this was any other guy, they would have immediately taken advantage of Jyon."

    "And why do you think I tried to set them up? It is because he is the guy that doesn¡¯t see the need to take advantage of Jyon. She needs a person exactly like him."

    "Like him? He has so many enemies and he is nning on making more of them. Do you know how dangerous it is to be just associated with him? She would be the primary target even if someone hears a rumor about them being together, much less they actually be together.

    I don¡¯t approve of this."

    Giyon was about to reply when suddenly Grivon¡¯smunication token got an alert. He frowned and checked it out. The news surprised him greatly and he immediately made a move.

    "He finally found the location of the guy who gave the information to that league member. I have to go.

    And by the way, this is not over. We are going to talk about this in detail."

    With those words, Grivon left. He went back to his residence first before Sam and he used the transference tokens to go back to the stray realm.

    There, one of the subordinates is tying up their target to a chair.

    It has been so many days since they started the search. After they got the initial lead from the bar and the target¡¯s friend, they had to search for a whole weak just to get the next clue, but finally, they caught him.

    "Young master Grivon, he was on a constant move from the past few days. He was trying to go the Triangr Realm and from the contents of the spatial ring, he is trying to join the Divine Pce of healing as a servant."

    Grivon looked at the guy in surprise.

    "Trying to escape into the Divine Pce of healing? Do you think Vardar would be able to protect you if were to catch you there?"

    The target didn¡¯t speak and just stayed there silently.

    Sam didn¡¯t waste any more time and snapped his fingers.

    Specter flew towards him and finished off all the while devouring the soul.

    He got the memories and was stunned once again.

    Looking at Sam¡¯s expression, Grivon knew that something is not right.

    "What happened?"

    "The person that gave him this information is a prostitute."

    "A prostitute?"

    "Yes. A prostitute on the eighteenth of your realm. She gave him that information." Sam used the simtor to give out a clear image of her and then gave the information the subordinates need.

    "Catch her immediately. Don¡¯t waste any time."

    The subordinates moved immediately and Grivon even used the n¡¯s inteary space gates to speed up the process.

    They went to the eighteenth and went to the brothel Sam gave the address to. But when they reached the brother, they found out that the prostitute they are looking for is dead.

    In fact, she was killed just a few minutes before she arrived and even her soul was stolen.

    The subordinates were stunned. They immediately sent a message to Grivon and Sam through their informationwork not knowing what to do.

    The team leader rounded up the brothel workers and the prostitutes and also tracked down every single customer that came here that day. They also went to the wormhole guards to see if anyone hurriedly left in the past hour and gave them instructions to look for any suspicious people.

    Sam and Grivon made their way to the brothel.

    Sam looked at the surroundings. This is the most luxurious brothel there is in the whole realm. Not even the brothels on the with the Gaja n¡¯s headquarters are this luxurious.

    Sam looked at the women and noticed that they are top qualities in terms of physical attractiveness. Their difference in racial qualities and their physical bodies is so much that he is sure that any man across the realms could find their personal fetish among these women.

    He walked to the brothel manager and asked.

    "I want to know the price range."

    Grivon and the subordinates were surprised.

    They knew better than assuming that Sam wanted to have some time with women here, after all, they are in the middle of something very important. The request is too strange.

    But the manager still gave out the prices and Sam was surprised.

    The price ranged from tens of millions of spirit stones to hundreds of millions of spirit stones.

    He was really surprised by the expense.

    After all, even for the astral ne cultivators, a few hundred million is a bit of a decent expense.

    As he went through the prices, he asked about the price of the woman who just died and she is one of the top picks here.

    Sam left the brothel and talked to Grivon outside.

    "From the memories of the guy, he came here because of a treat. I thought he came across the information here from the brothel because of the woman, but now that I look at it, someone sent him here deliberately.

    We need to go after the person who gave him this treat."

 Chapter 1352: A Mole

    Sam gave the sketch of the person that treated this guy to the brothel and gave the description of the ce they were in. He also went back to the brothel manager to ask who that person is.

    She looked at the picture and Sam noticed a flinch, but she denied seeing him before.

    "Manager, I don¡¯t have time to interrogate you and make you spill the beans, the person that is asking you is not me, the young master of the Gaja n.

    Not only is he a sessor candidate, but his grandfather is also a grand elder and his father is a core elder. You know how that goes. If you don¡¯t answer me immediately, he would use extreme measures and I doubt whatever you are trying to hide would be able to save you."

    She gulped down and looked nervous. She looked around trying to avoid eye contact.

    At this moment, energy gathered at Sa¡¯s fingertips and a very small bullet was shot at her hand.

    The arm was severedpletely and fell down holding a spatial transference token.

    Sam then aimed his fingers at her forehead and said.

    "I already told you, I don¡¯t have much patience."

    *BOOM*

    The head exploded and the specter immediately came to collect the soul, but Sam didn¡¯t stop and aimed the hand at another woman in the line and shot an energy bullet.

    The bulletnded on her shoulder and the arm fell off with the token. The rest of the women started panicking as they didn¡¯t expect such a gruesome scene.

    Thedy who lost her arm tried to run away, but Sam aimed the energy bullet at her leg which she tried to block the attack with a shadow which made Sam a bit intrigued.

    But the shadow waspletely destroyed and the leg was still injured.

    By now the guards and Grivon all came in and looked at the whole scene.

    "Seems like we got the moles."

    Sam killed the woman without a second thought and got the information from her too. After he looked through the information, Sam was even more confused.

    The prostitute who was about to escape was actually the one who killed the woman they came for. Apart from killing her, this woman doesn¡¯t know anything.

    The manager on the other hand also doesn¡¯t know the full story, she got the instructions from the same guy that gave a treat to the informant.

    There is also no confirmed location of the guy, except for the few usible locations.

    Sam took the spatial transference tokens of both of them and examined them. The coordinates locked onto it are of a space gate somewhere and they are leading to the same ce.

    Sam talked with Grivon and gave him all the required details.

    "Can we make more of these tokens and go to that ce?"

    "We can, as long as the formation and inscription masters get the exact structure of the token, it is quite easy. I can give that structure to you."

    "I will call them here. Make that structure. We wouldn¡¯t go back and just stay here. I think we need to seal the newspletely. What do you say?"

    "It is better that way. If that guy has any way of learning this information, it is better for us to seal itpletely."

    "I thought so too."

    Sam went to work on the structure of the token while the formation masters and inscription masters with space elemental expertise were called from the stray realm.

    After Sam gave the detailed structure of the tokens, they started making extra tokens.

    Meanwhile, Sam kept on brainstorming about what is happening around.

    The person who gave the information directly to the league member is now dead, but the lead he has is only up to the brothel and here they caught another guy whose location ispletely unknown and the only lead they have is the usible location that he might be at.

    The main thing they need to know is how these people even came across the information. But even more problematic is the fact that the other party managed to know the time they are arriving in this ce beforehand and managed to kill the woman in the brothel.

    And even that killing happened in such a way that there are two extra links attached to her death.

    Someone is clearly trying to escape without any possible connection with this ce and they are also one step ahead.

    Sam looked around. There are some Blue cloaks, the secret subordinates of Grivon and the leader of the group who assumedmand over these people, the subordinate that came with Grivon¡¯s inheritance from his mother.

    They are all standing guard in various posts around the brothel.

    He walked to Grivon and asked.

    "Blue Cloaks. How are they doingtely?"

    "They are doing fine. The training is actually working well. They were tamed faster than I thought."

    "The secret subordinates that are workingtely?"

    "I never had any problem with them. They only take orders."

    "Your mother¡¯s guard?"

    "They are the best of them all. Why are you asking all these questions?"

    "How many people knew that we areing here today?"

    "Are you suspecting that there is a mole in guards? They all have a soul contract binding with me. They wouldn¡¯t dare break that and if they did, we would have already known about it."

    "Where are the contracts?"

    "What?"

    "The contracts. I need to see the details."

    "What? Do you think there are loopholes? I believe the contracts are perfect."

    "Nothing is perfect in this world Grivon. There is always a w and there is always a loophole in everything that exists.

    Get the contracts for me. I will be staying alone for a while. Don¡¯t disturb me."

    Grivon nodded solemnly and ransacked his whole storage for the contracts, he gave them to Sam secretly and he started looking through them.

    He studied every line a dozen times and he spent the whole day reading through them.

    After the day, he came out and by now the tokens are also ready.

    The whole team immediately used the tokens and they were transported to a different. The space gate is in the middle of the woods.

    The team spread out and soon they found a city in one direction and the rest of the ce isplete dead ends.

    When they reached the city, Grivon immediately recognized the ce. This is a subordinate organization directly under the control of another young master.

    Grivon¡¯s thoughts immediately went for suspecting that young master, but Sam immediately rejected them.

    "Don¡¯t jump to conclusions. Let¡¯s just go into the city and check it. Do you have any spies here?"

    "Yes."

    "Contact them and don¡¯t let the blue cloaks go. Use other subordinates."

    "Why?"

    "I think I am on to something. Let me see first. Tell the blue cloaks that they are under mymand."

    With that Sam who took arge room in the biggest inn in the city gathered all the blue cloaks and spoke to them.

    "From now on, you are under mymand. I believe there is a mole in the other subordinates. We don¡¯t know exactly who it is, but we would find him out.

    You guys are the only ones I could trust at the moment. So, follow mymands properly and don¡¯t do anything differently. You should also not interfere with the work of others. Do you understand?"

    They all nodded their heads.

    "Now, we got the information that the person we are looking for is in the next city, we would need to travel for over an hour and the path is a bit dangerous with some beasts and there is a bandit group in the middle. We need to be careful and we are going there now. Do not let the other subordinates know. For them, we are also searching the city.

    Also, take these tokens. This is the specialmunication token I designed, you cannot store it inside the spatial storage, but the range is better. We need to sneak out of the city one by one and we will meet at the westside forest. Don¡¯t bete."

    Sam left the room after that and directly went to the west side city gate to stand at the west forest.

    There as he waited, he held the token in his hand as he waited.

    One person after another, the blue cloaks started showing up and within the next half an hour, every one of them gathered again, but in the process just once, the token blinked for a while. Of course, Sam just acted as if he is tinkering with it while waiting and didn¡¯t bother exining.

    The blue cloaks also didn¡¯t think much of it, after all in their opinion, Sam is just a dignified nerd.

    After everyone gathered, they made their way towards the next city and the forest path is true as Sam said, extremely perilous and they even encountered the bandit gang. They dealt with all of them and the beasts by themselves.

    In the middle of it all, the blue cloaks separated several times for scouting purposes and meantime Sam always checked that token, which blinked asionally.

 Chapter 1353: Traitors

    When they are halfway through, Sam finally stopped the journey.

    He made all of them gather around him as he tinkered with the token in his hand while sitting on a rock.

    They are around half an hour away from the city if there are no beasts to obstruct them. The next city is another half an hour away. They are perfectly in the middle.

    The Blue Cloaks didn¡¯t understand why Sam made them gather here, but they didn¡¯t have to wait too long to know why.

    "As I said, I suspected there are moles in Grivon¡¯s subordinates, but I lied a bit about it. The moles are not in the other batch of subordinates. They are between you guys."

    The blue cloaks expressed shock and some of them became extremely angry.

    "Sir, Sam. You better speak carefully. It is not okay to use us like this." One of them openly said out loud.

    Sam looked at with a calm smile and did something with the token in his hand and suddenly audio yed out with a few familiar tones.

    "I couldn¡¯t get to hismunication token. I cannot contact him now. But I don¡¯t know what he is doing at the next city."

    "Maybe Young master got the wrong information."

    "It is possible. But if there is even a small possibility that the information is correct, we will be in trouble. He is thest link between the incident and us. If we got rid of him when we still can, we would have beenpletely alright.

    Now look at us, we need to stay every minute vigntly."

    "Don¡¯t worry about it. The worst thing we could do is show that we are tense. Until now there is no suspicion towards us and we better let it stay that way."

    "But what if that guy is indeed in the next city, we would be forced to capture him. And this bastard wouldn¡¯t let us off easily if anything goes wrong."

    "idents happen. We just have to make sure that we are the ones that get to him first. There we can kill him and make him disappear in the guise of an ident.

    We would escape Scott free. It is not like he would dare to kill us and extract our memories."

    As the audio yed, the face of everyone changed. There are ten blue cloaks at the moment and out of them, seven of them are wearing expressions of shock, the remaining three have an extra expression, shock along with fear.

    They are extremely afraid.

    One of them wanted to escape immediately and was about to take out a transference token, but he stopped when he heard Sam¡¯s words.

    "Let¡¯s see who is faster. Your token or my bullet."

    Five energy bullets are already hovering around Sam¡¯s hand as he nonchntly spoke.

    Then he looked at the rest of the blue cloaks and said.

    "Surround the three of them and capture. Don¡¯t kill them."

    The group hesitated a little, but they still reluctantly surrounded them.

    One of the three couldn¡¯t take the pressure anymore and speak up.

    "Guys, don¡¯t believe him. He is framing us. This time it is the three of us and next time it could be any of you. He is deliberately sabotaging our rtionship."

    The group members swayed a bit, they looked at Sam in askance, but Sam didn¡¯t bother to exin himself and let the token in his hand do the job.

    One after another the token started ying different audios. The audios are of various scenarios, some of them are the audios of the battles they just had, some are them cursing when they are on scout duty and so on.

    "I recorded everything that has happened. And if I have to frame you, I don¡¯t need to do all of this. Don¡¯t insult me like that."

    With that, the group immediately made a move and captured them. The three of them didn¡¯t put up any resistance. They knew for sure that they wouldn¡¯t be able to win or escape, they figured that they would have to go through less suffering if they surrendered quietly.

    Sam brought the group to the city and handed over the three of them to Grivon.

    "They are your subordinates, you can deal with them however you want. And these are the loopholes in the contract, you better rectify them."

    Sam gave the contracts back and only when Grivon looked at the highlighted parts, did he notice how they could be twisted.

    The derived meaning is extremely farfetched and to be put in simpler terms, the three of them managed to spill the secret about Sam and Grivon and their participation in the whole scenario in an extremely indirect way.

    First, they managed to get in touch with this useless fellow who acts as an errand boy within the brothel, after getting in touch with him, they made him drunk and acted as if they were friends. They gave him some hot gossip of the Gaja n and the city headquarters.

    Then they indirectly gave out the news, that somebody is trying to gain information regarding Migron¡¯s current situation and they casually mentioned who it is and they also said that the bad luck of Migron has started only after his meeting with Grivon.

    They knew this guy would do anything for money and resources of course except fighting and struggling, so he decided to take this chance and made an borate n. He used one of the prostitutes in the brothel to let a person in a desperate situation and used her to broker a deal with him and manipted him to go to the league member.

    All this while, the three blue cloaks only gave him suggestions and never actively divulged the important information.

    They knew that the league member only needs a lead and doesn¡¯t need much information, so they only gave out a lead in a way that doesn¡¯t betray the contract.

    After Sam and Grivon learned about the brothel, one of the three took the duty of arranging the n space gates. To use the gates they need to register in the n and he took up the job himself and in-process used Grivon¡¯s ownwork to send the information faster to this guy.

    He immediately used another prostitute to kill the first one and escaped after he gave the tokens for this space gate formation in the woods.

    As for how he got them, it was once again the blue cloaks. They killed a few of the other young master¡¯s subordinates go the tokens for this special space gate and gave it to him in case he needs to escape. He gave the two of them to the prostitute and the manager, but now one thing led to another, everyone is caught.

    Of course, even though the idiot from the brothel was not caught, he is not exactly necessary. He only knew that someone is looking for the information and he has the information. He doesn¡¯t really know the significance of it and he definitely doesn¡¯t know how powerful Grivon and Migron are.

    To catch that guy, Grivon doesn¡¯t even need to dirty his own hands. All he has to do is give the details to Migron¡¯s father and he would do the job.

    But the situation with the three blue cloaks is something he should be dealing with himself.

    He is extremely angry, but even that anger is clouded by disappointment.

    After all, he has been genuinely good for these subordinates and treated them as friends for them to go far as to stab him in the back, which is something he didn¡¯t expect.

    He wanted to ask why, but before he could even ask, they already spilled the beans.

    "It is not to betray you. It is to make him go away."

    One of them spoke while pointing at Sam which made him chuckle.

    "He changed everything between us from the day he came. We cannot stand him. We figured that when ites to it, you would choose yourself over him, so we wanted to make him get caught and figured that everything would go to how it was before."

    "So, all you wanted is to be treated like brats by me, without any decorum of subordinate and the boss. You liked lording over me, doing things behind my back and mooching off of me, undermining authority every chance you got."

    The three of them didn¡¯t have an answer for that, but their silence could be regarded as eptance. After all, that is what they had done all this while. They took advantage of Grivon. They influenced his decisions, they had some real power to the point that they forgot they are the subordinates in this rtionship.

    But they couldn¡¯t really say it loud.

    Grivon gritted his teeth and took his sword out. With a single swing, he severed the head of one of the three and moved to the other one.

    He did the same to the others too regardless of their pleadings and requests.. He just killed them and let specter extract their memories to make sure that they are telling the truth.

 Chapter 1354: Convincing Jyon

    The fiasco was finally over.

    The three of them were killed and this time, Sam even managed to hold his urge to torture one of them even though he called him bastard which even surprised him.

    Anyway, the problem is resolved for now, so they went back to the stray realm without any dy. Grivon went to meet Migron¡¯s father to give the details of the one who gave up Migron¡¯s situation and let him handle it.

    The investigation this time really surprised him. They managed to get the face of information pretty easily, but they weren¡¯t able to capture him for a week or so and as soon as they caught him, they managed to figure out the whole thing within a day and the worst part is, the investigation ended right under Grivon¡¯s nose, with his closest subordinates exploiting some loophole in their soul contract.

    This is all a bit overwhelming for him and he didn¡¯t want to interact with anyone for the next few days. In fact, he even forgot to deal with Sam¡¯s issue of Jyoning to him daily along with the kids.

    Sam really wanted Grivon to go to Giyon and stop this whole fiasco, but now he couldn¡¯t bring himself to pester Grivon about the issue, since he took a pretty big blow.

    There are only two other options. One is to go to Jyon directly and tell her about her sister¡¯s intentions, but there is a chance that this will backfire big time. There is a possibility that Jyon would have some new thoughts which were not there before and instead of getting away from Sam, she might even fulfil Giyon¡¯s wishes.

    The power of suggestion is sometimes too lethal.

    The third option is going to Giyon and try with her again.

    After two days of dodging him, Giyon finally agreed to meet him.

    "Can you stop Jyon froming to meet me? It is extremely ufortable and it is effecting my teaching performance."

    "Really? The kids are saying that you are amazing, they are extremely impressed by you and they don¡¯t want to do anything else but to listen to your sses all the time."

    "Of course, they would. They didn¡¯t see my best yet, but my teaching skills are still better than every teaching experience they had, but still, I am not satisfied with not being my best."

    "So, why don¡¯t you tell her that yourself? I am pretty sure she would understand."

    "No, she wouldn¡¯t. She is thinking that I am about turn these kids into genocidal, cold blooded maniacs and she wants to make sure that I don¡¯t do anything of that kind. If I suggest that she doesn¡¯te, she would definitely assume that I am doing something of that kind and she wouldn¡¯t move.

    She would stick closer, which is thest thing I want."

    "Then it seems like both of us cannot do anything about this matter."

    "You can. Please call her back."

    "Why are you so reluctant? Do you know how many men out there would wage a war to be with her?"

    "Do you know how many out there are stupider than me?"

    Giyon was stumped and said.

    "I am not telling her anything. If you really want to get rid of her, why don¡¯t you tell the truth about you. Tell her all the massacres and genocides you created and tell her the destruction you bring everywhere you go. She would never be interested in you in that way."

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "You really treat me like a fool. Do you really think I am going fall for that? Your sister is a body full of optimism. The more I tell her about her, the more she would be curious about what I am not telling her and once she knows about that, she would think that I am some profoundbination of a saint and a devil.

    If anything, my past will only attract her to me more. Please take her away. I am telling you this because I am sure you don¡¯t want to let your sister suffer."

    "You are her only way out of suffering as far as I could see."

    "No, if she is with me, she would be jumping into the stove from the pan.

    I will be direct with you. I would never be able to give themitment and attention she deserves, she is pure, too pure for this world and she deserves a partner that would take care of her and treat her right.

    I wouldn¡¯t have time or energy left behind to treat her that way.

    I have a long and dangerous journey ahead of me and Mari n is merely a small part in it. You think she will suffer in a political marriage, but she would have to face a million enemies that would try to attack her in a million ways.

    I don¡¯t want to be responsible for such suffering on any person."

    "You have your friends. They are also in the same danger you mentioned. But I don¡¯t see them suffering."

    "That is different."

    "How?"

    "We grew together. There is no use or a way to separate ourselves. We grew as one and we arepletely stuck together."

    "Treat her the same way."

    "I cannot. Please understand my situation and don¡¯t push your sister into an inevitable suffering which you knew wille in fear of the possible suffering which she might or might not have to face."

    With those words Sam left the ce.

    He believed that Giyon would consider his words and stop Jyon froming, but the next day as he waited for the kids, he saw Jyon walking with them once again and sighed.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit frustrated, but he still finished the ss and directly went to her.

    "Did your sister talk to you?"

    "Yeah, she did."

    "What did she say?"

    "What does it matter to you about what happened between me and my sister? Why are you asking Mr. Sam?" She asked with a smile and just from that smile Sam knew that this would be a difficult scenario.

    After the ss is over, he directly went to Giyon. He didn¡¯t even bother to make the appointment like before and barged into her meeting room, where instead of a meeting which she was supposed be in, she is in the middle of enjoying a meal.

    Sam looked at her with frustration and said.

    "What would convince you to even consider my words? Why can¡¯t you understand? There is no use in forcing your sister into a marriage with a person that doesn¡¯t love her? Why are you so adamant about this?"

    "I am pretty sure, it would be okay even if you don¡¯t love her."

    "What made you think that?"

    "You are a guy who values responsibility. That is why you are so adamant on not to let this happen. You knew that if she bes your wife, you would be responsible for her safety, you cannot stop yourself from dividing your time and resources to save her and prepare her from any possible dangers she might have to face because of your exploits.

    You cannot let that happen and take your time away from all the things that you need to do.

    That is why you don¡¯t want to do this.

    But that is exactly the reason that I believe you are the perfect person. You are responsible and ountable. You respect their traits too much to leave her without giving her enough attention. After all, it would be your responsibility as her husband, to make her feel loved."

    Sam doesn¡¯t know what to say. He became exasperated.

    Giyon chuckled at him and said.

    "I already told her not to go to you anymore. Of course I couldn¡¯t say all the things you said to me. But I tried to stop her from going to the ss, but she is adamant on going.

    I believe you are a bitte with your request yesterday. She might have gained interest in you."

    Sam wanted to pull his hair out. But he controlled his urge and said.

    "Can¡¯t you really do anything about this?"

    "I cannot. I am really sorry."

    He sighed and left the ce, when he was exiting the door, he couldn¡¯t help but say out loud.

    "At least, pretend you are not pleased by the situation. That grin on your face is giving it away."

    Sam walked back to Grivon¡¯s residence and then went to the stray realm. He decided that he better drown himself in work than care about this situation. Anyway, he is not staying here permanently, so all he has to do is wait it out and make sure that he doesn¡¯t give any unnecessary signals.

    Once Grivones back on to the track, things would be easier.

    So, he went there and he saw Grivon already loading himself with work.

    He came to Sam with a list of people.

    "These are the next targets for decoys. I looked through the list of businesses you have and these people are involved in those businesses. But before that, it is better to make them suffer losses in their secret businesses.

    So, if you give out your next product, we can start working on this.

    The faster this is over, the faster we could get Giyon on board and you will get that umbre."

 Chapter 1355: Weakness

    "Are you sure you are good to go? We could take a few days off if you need."

    "Why would I need to take days off? I am not sick and I am not recovering from any injuries. I am perfectly alright."

    "Betrayals are known to hurt more than any of the physical injuries and this is the first real betrayal you experienced. I wouldn¡¯t be surprised if you were actually sleeping in your room all this while and I wouldn¡¯t even be surprised if you are going to sulk for another few months.

    That is an expected and proper reaction."

    "I don¡¯t need to sulk. I am ready to get back to work and I will be working faster than usual now that some rats are caught. I don¡¯t need to worry about a few more popping up."

    "That is good. But if you need a break, just tell me beforehand, it would be troublesome if you broke down in the middle of the work. I don¡¯t want to deal with the extra bullshit."

    Grivon appeared surprised by Sam¡¯s words and it was clearly shown on his face.

    But Sam just smiled and replied nonchntly.

    "I am not someone that coddles you Grivon. If you are really ready, be on board. I ampletely okay with you taking the rest and taking a few days off, even a month is not a problem for me. I can still handle things on my end and all you would have to do is present at the meeting at thest minute, but if you are going to fail in the middle of this, it would be a lot more troublesome for me than it is now.

    Sometimes, people in your situation would try to push through the situations like this as if nothing happened. You would be colder, more decisive, and seem emotionless for a few days, but all that would be a cry for help.

    You would pretend that you don¡¯t need any help, but your mind and heart crave for it. You want to feel reassured by someone and you want to show that you can trust people again.

    I know this routine. I have seen it a thousand times at least and I am not saying that figuratively. I literally saw it more than a thousand times.

    That is the problem with you good guys. You don¡¯t have the stomach for all of these things. You cannot digest this easily.

    But you would get used to it after you experience a few of them."

    "So, you are saying, that I either have to work without any emotional disturbance or I shouldn¡¯t work at all."

    "Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. I will handle the next transaction, just have one of your subordinates show me the locations if you are not feeling well. Anyway, I already promised that I would deal with the secret businesses, we can start here."

    Grivon stayed silent for a while and said.

    "I would like to take some time off."

    "That would be great. I will deal with two of your peers and you cane back after that. I would definitely start the secret businesses first, throw them out of the business in the ces and give them support with a different type of business, in a different ce. That is the gist."

    "That would be great. Thank you so much."

    With that Grivon left the stray realm and he went to meet Giyon.

    "What are you doing here? Shouldn¡¯t you be celebrating? I heard that you managed to root out the ratspletely." Giyon asked.

    "I should, except the three rats I killed are my closest subordinates."

    Giyon stopped looking at the report in her hands and looked at him.

    "How are you feeling?"

    Looking at her expression, Grivon was surprised.

    "You are really putting aside your work for me? I was half expecting you to kick me out as soon as I started speaking."

    "Come on, don¡¯t treat me like that. I might be hard on you in usual times, but I was there whenever you needed me."

    "Well, it has been a long time since I came across a situation like this, so I am a bit down on the dumps."

    "Okay, let¡¯s have an outing. Jyon wants to go to the waterfalls today and since I rejected her, she was originally nning to go alone. Why don¡¯t we go there?"

    With that, both of them contacted Jyon and all three of them went to the waterfall in the woods.

    Jyon practiced her flute gently while Giyon and Grivon talked.

    "So, it seems like the rest of your subordinates are supportive enough to take on the businesses to give you some free time. That is a good sign. It seems like you still trust them."

    "Well, I was actually about to head to work and I even did some menial work by myself. You could say, I was not really ready to trust them that easily."

    "Then what changed your mind?"

    "Sam did. He said that he would rather me not be present there than be there with these bottled-up emotions. He said he doesn¡¯t have interest or tolerance to coddle me through this time and wanted me to take some time off so that I could get coddled elsewhere."

    "That is guy is more impressive than I thought and he really is gutsy to tell you that straight."

    "Why?"

    "Well, most people in your situation wouldn¡¯t react well to such kind of advice. He might be better at judging people than I thought. He is a great person to work with. You better use him well while he is still here."

    "Yeah, I still have around twenty-one months left."

    "You cannot count on that. After all, there is always the other side to these ns. Something that could shift the whole situation might happen. So, squeeze him dry as fast as you can."

    "The league members are being dealt with. The decoy n is going smoothly. Sivan has no idea who Sam is really working with. It would take a lot of shift this situation around. I doubt something of that scale will happen."

    As Grivon and Giyon are talking their time away.

    In Mari n grounds, Sivan¡¯s personal residence.

    He is currently sitting in the middle of a formation with a bunch of cultivators sitting at different nodal positions.

    He had a deep frown on his face and inside his head, he is currently going through arge battle. As his expression changed and the formation started glowing brightly, one of the cultivators in the formation suddenly opened his eyes and fell on the ground while holding his head.

    "AHHhh... Somebody help me. Some..somebody help. It.."

    He wasn¡¯t even able to finish the word when one of the subordinates came in and took the guy away from the room.

    "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH...."

    Soon another woman in the formation screamed louder than before and she couldn¡¯t even speak properly. The subordinates took her away too.

    The same thing kept on happening until all of the cultivators in the formation were dragged away because of some screams and pain that arepletely uncalled for.

    Sivan opened his eyes and his face broke into a wide grin as he wiped the sweat off of his forehead. His nose started bleeding slowly, but he wiped that away too and grinned wider than ever.

    He walked to a table nearby where a bunch of potions and pills are ced as he started taking them in.

    As he was consuming the medicine, the Disciple One of Butler Si came up to him and asked.

    "How are you doing Young master? Is the procedure a sess?"

    Sivan looked at him and asked.

    "What do you think?"

    "I think it is pretty sessful from your expression."

    "It is more than sessful. I finally got rid of that abomination. I eliminated the ghost chimerapletely. Can you believe that it took twelve cultivators out before beingpletely separated again?"

    "I have seen it, sir. All the cultivators who were infected were taken away and are being disposed of."

    "That is great. I don¡¯t want anyone to know about this. They might be my subordinates, but they are actually spies of some of my peers in the n. Now, I used them to get rid of this pest from my soul.

    Now, there is nothing left for me to stop digging at Sam¡¯s soul. I can pick on it as much as I can and get the information I need.

    I will absorb it and dig through all the secrets that bastard is hiding and I also got some pretty exciting new information regarding his weaknesses."

    "What would that be young master?"

    "He doesn¡¯t like being called a bastard. I thought he didn¡¯t have any weaknesses except for his friends, which arepletely out of bounds because of the contract, but this guy killed so many people because of this one word.

    Bastard. And I just saw a ughter in his memories.

    He ughtered ten of his peers in the most gruesome way.. I never knew that people could even be killed in those ways."

 Chapter 1356: Irritated

    "The word bastard is his trigger. I saw it in the first part of the memories I managed to obtain from his soul, but I ignored it, now I can see how angry he could be.

    But what I couldn¡¯t find is, that all of his memories are from when he was fifteen years old. There is not a single memory before that. Even though there are some memories, they are like a sh, he didn¡¯t have any notable memories that he is cherishing.

    It is almost as if he had a new life after he was almost dead at fifteen.

    I have seen the memories of a few years, but until now, I haven¡¯t seen a single memory of him being taught by someone. This is all a bit mysterious."

    "Maybe, his memories are the repressed young master. Because of the traumatic incident on which he almost died, he must have repressed all the memories that led him to that incident and stored them deeper in his soul.

    I have seen some of these incidents in the soul extraction."

    "You are right. But whatever that memory is, the word Bastard is a trigger for him. This weakness came at a perfect time.

    Butler Si contacted me through our intelligencework a few days ago. He said that the league¡¯s progress is not going well and even his investigations are turning up at dead ends. He is saying that there is a possibility that Sam is captured by the Gaja n itself instead of a young master there."

    Disciple One didn¡¯t speak anything and just stood there.

    After some thought, Sivan spoke out once again.

    "I have an assignment for you and for this, I don¡¯t need you to fight or kill anyone. You just have to be a bit creative that¡¯s all."

    "What should I do? Young master?"

    "It is very simple..."

    Sivan gave his instructions and the more he heard them, the more disciple one frowned.

    "Are you sure you want me to do this young master? This is a bit silly."

    "Don¡¯t care about that. As long as it works on the enemy, no strategy is silly and I for one believe that Sam wouldn¡¯t take this as something silly.

    Now, go and proceed with this as fast as you can."

    Disciple One saluted and left.

    After that, Sivan went to his room and wrote a letter before calling one of his associates and giving it to them.

    "This needs to reach Butler Si."

    The associate nodded and left the ce with the letter.

    Two dayster.

    In the City of the Gaja n.

    Sam is walking along with some of the guards who are also dressed in ck cloaks on the street. He is going to the Gaja n grounds to teach the kids once again.

    But as he was nearing the Gaja n gate, he saw something on the walls of an inn where arge group of people are gathered.

    He frowned at what they are seeing and walked towards it to take a look and he was stunned when he fully saw it.

    "SAM THE BASTARD."

    Those three words were carved on the wall and the word Bastard was particrly carved three to four times on the same spot to give some boldness to it.

    Sam took a deep breath and controlled his urge to smash that wall. He turned around and slowly walked away, but to his surprise, all of a sudden there are a bunch of papers raining on the streets and everything only had these three words.

    "SAM THE BASTARD."

    Sam gritted his teeth and crumpled the paper, he threw it away and started running towards the n grounds.

    When he reached Grivon¡¯s residence, his mood ispletely dark and it is clearly reflected by the dark presence he has around him.

    He removed his cloak and stood at the head of the ssroom waiting for the kids toe as he tried to y with some energy in his palm.

    He is just molding it into different shapes to calm himself down. As he was thinking, Jyon and the children came over.

    He looked at them and from their expressions, he could guess that they also saw the fliers and the graffiti.

    He took a deep breath and put on a smile.

    "Come on Kids, today is a surprisepetition. The winner gets a special prize from me."

    The kids immediately became excited. Sam started sketching on therge board in the room and it is actually a puzzle.

    It is more like a cultivator puzzle and he let children figure out the solution for the problem as he sat down on the side.

    Jyon came over and sat down beside him.

    As she was about to say something, Sam beat her to it and said.

    "If you are thinking whether it was targeted at me, I believe it is, but there is a slight possibility it is not.

    I don¡¯t know who might have done it and what their goal is.

    I am trying to draw some spections and I am pretty sure, I can narrow down the suspects."

    Jyon didn¡¯t speak to him for a moment and just kept on looking at him.

    Sam looked at her with a frown and asked.

    "What is it?"

    There is clearly some annoyance in his voice.

    "Your aura. It is chaotic. It is like you are about to explode."

    "And?"

    "But you don¡¯t want to explode. You are trying to restrain it. You are trying so hard. Why are you so offended by one word?"

    Sam took a deep breath to calm himself down. He doesn¡¯t have the mood to exin anything to anyone. He looked at Jyon for one second and asked.

    "Why are you here?"

    Jyon was confused and Sam continued.

    "What are you doing here in the ss? Why are you here? Your sister already told you not toe here, but why are you stilling? Are you taking such pleasure in trying to unravel my character?"

    "No, not like that."

    "Miss Jyon. I am not an exotic creature for you to take joy and intrigue in unraveling me. It is a bit offensive if you think about it. You might have his opinions on me. I don¡¯t care how bad they are. I am not particrly interested in changing them and I wouldn¡¯t mind if you keep that opinion of me for the rest of your life.

    Please don¡¯t invest yourself in me. I am not, particrly a goodpany. I might admire your music, but I don¡¯t particrly enjoy yourpany that much. Your constant curiosity about what my past is and what kind of person I am. I am not reallyfortable about sharing that with you.

    You are not my friend. We are at most friendly acquaintances. I don¡¯t feelfortable sharing about me with a person I barely know.

    And please don¡¯t give me that look of pity. I don¡¯t need it.

    I might even be the greatest murderer this world has ever seen, I wouldn¡¯t pity myself if I were you. If you don¡¯t believe it, go and ask your sister. Ask about how many people I have killed and she would tell you the stories that might give you nightmares.

    So, stop trying to reach that vulnerable side of me to try and justify my genocidal tendencies. After all, there is now stating that a murderer cannot be a great teacher and there is definitely now stating that a murderer can never be a musician.

    Just because you are a great person who ys the flute doesn¡¯t mean that everyone who ys it is a good person and I am the prime example of that. So, please don¡¯t waste your time and don¡¯t waste my time."

    With that, he stood up and walked towards the board as he looked at the children brainstorming. His words were not loud and he made sure that the kids wouldn¡¯t hear them. He spoke slowly and softly. But Jyon didn¡¯t miss a single one of it.

    She is a bit troubled by those words and there is a myriad of emotions showing on her face.

    For some reason, she has an urge to cry and there is this sense of disappointment and loss looming over her heart. She doesn¡¯t know why she is feeling that way and most of all, she doesn¡¯t know why Sam spoke to her that way.

    She could feel his aura. His aura is still as chaotic and dangerous as it was before. It is about to explode.

    The reason why she asked him this is not because she is just curious about him. It is because all this while, every day she felt his aura which is also extremely powerful and domineering, but it was serene and stable. He was restrained, confident, and calm.

    But now all of those were gone and all it did was someone promoting his name and associating it with a barely derogatory term.

    She couldn¡¯t understand why that is and Sam is somewhat right, she has never seen a person like Sam who can be so different in different situations.

 Chapter 1357: Song

    Sam finished the ss a bit earlier than normal and sent the kids away. Along with them Jyon also left as usual.

    But after dropping the kids off, she didn¡¯t stay there to teach them music, rather she went to Giyon directly.

    Maybe only Jyon is the one who can meet Giyon any time she wants. Giyon went as far as to cancel the meeting in the middle when she was Jyon¡¯s expression.

    "What happened?" She asked with concern and Jyon exined the situation.

    "So, he doesn¡¯t like your presence there, you can just ignore him. Why are you feeling sad?"

    "I am not sad. I am conflicted. My thoughts are a mess. I just thought that I was a bit curious about him and his past. After all, it is hard to find someone sopassionate and so cold at the same time. He is like a chameleon. He is different in every environment.

    In fact, even calling him a chameleon is an understatement. Chameleon only pretends to be that color, but Sam is genuinely different in different ces.

    At dinner, he is just not reflecting his mood due to the stolen body, he was also reflecting on the fact that he was stuck in that awkward dinner where he thought he didn¡¯t belong.

    Then I met him with the kids.

    I could see that he really is genuinely caring andpassionate when teaching the kids. He enjoyed teaching and he loved the curiosity of the children when they are asking different things. His aura and his presence indicated that.

    Then I remembered the painting.

    The painting might be him ying the flute, but in reality, he was fighting at that time. He was in the middle of a battle and music was just a medium for that battle. I understood that when he is in a battle, he is that majestic andmanding being that even the elements that are responsible for what the world it is now, to bow before him and dance to his tune as he wanted them to.

    They have absolute subservience.

    Now today, he has this behavioral change. He is like the embodiment of restrained chaos that is resting in the abyss but was about to wake up.

    He tried his best to control it in presence of the children and he was in that mood when he talked to me too.

    I cannot understand him. I cannot wrap my head around a person. I cannot distinguish and determine his mentality.

    He is likepletely different souls forcefully merged into one. I thought I was understanding the existence of that person, but only after he told me did I realize that I am trying to find justification for his existence.

    I wanted to believe that deep down he is just a normal person that is within the reach of my understanding and the rest of it all is something that was just there because of the circumstances he has gone through."

    Giyon stayed silent for a moment.

    She could understand what Jyon is saying. Sam thought that she is trying to find a justification for Sam¡¯s violence and destruction, but that is not true. Jyon is trying to find the justification, but it is a justification for his whole existence.

    He was offended just for the first case, she could imagine what he would do if he really found out someone questioning his overall existence.

    He might not react and do something crazy, but he would sure as hell not be friends with them.

    Giyon helped Jyon calm down and sent her away.

    She then asked her subordinates to get some news on what is happening on the streets and she was surprised.

    The words ¡¯Sam the Bastard¡¯ is the only thing the people are talking about. Nobody knows where the talk started from, but it has been going on for quite a while and it spread so deep that it is currently impossible for anyone to track down who started it.

    She didn¡¯t understand who would do such a thing. After all, for them to do such a thing, they should be aware of Sam¡¯s presence in this ce which in itself is dangerous, and for them to use a derogatory word that could rattle Sam like this.

    This is a bit troublesome.

    She then started asking her informants about the situation in others in the realm and only when she got the news that even some main cities in the others have this news did she feel relieved.

    This means the other party doesn¡¯t know that Sam is within the city. Someone is deliberately trying to rile Sam up and it seems like this is working.

    Meanwhile, back in the stray realm, Sam is also listening to the same piece of information. He also learned that his name has be synonymous with that of a bastard in others within the realm.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel angry, but he doesn¡¯t know who he should be angry at.

    Sam looked at Grivon and asked.

    "Are you sure that no one else other than Giyon and Jyon knows about my presence?"

    "I am positive. No one else in the n knows about you at all. In fact, they don¡¯t even know you, they don¡¯t focus on Sivan so there is a little chance of them knowing about you in the first ce."

    "If that is true, there is only one possibility left."

    "What is it?"

    "This is Sivan¡¯s doing."

    "Sivan did this."

    "Yes. He must have gotten a good chunk of my memory out. That word doesn¡¯t really sit well with me."

    "What do you mean it doesn¡¯t sit well?"

    "I killed ten people in the most gruesome way you could imagine because they called me a bastard and I did that in front of their masters, parents, and elders."

    "How gruesome could you be?"

    Grivon asked in a surprised tone. After all, killing someone just because they used a derogatory term is a bit over the top in his opinion.

    Sam thought for a moment and showed the whole fight he had for the resource distribution tournament. He showed how he killed the Beast faction members one by one.

    Grivon kept on flinching and in some parts, he closed his eyes, not even daring to watch.

    "What is wrong with you?" He looked at Sam and asked.

    "I don¡¯t like that word that is all."

    Grivon noticed that Sam is not his usual self. So, he didn¡¯t want to bother him. But he also understood that it is not a good thing to let Sam be like this.

    "What do you want to do now?"

    "Nothing, I will be staying inside your residence within the n. Anyway, currently, my research hit the theoretical phase.

    The secret businessunches in two different realms were already processed and they are going tounch it tomorrow. You can take a look at how they are proceeding. We can reach out to them by the next week and propose a business that would make them reliant on n resources.

    I already gave the specific details to your associate and if they need anything, tell them toe to me."

    "Are you sure? Do you want to talk about this?"

    "No. I don¡¯t need to. It would only get worse."

    With those words, Sam went directly to the n grounds and stayed in grivon¡¯s residence.

    Soon, he started the guards discussing the weird publicity for these three words and he couldn¡¯t help but feel exasperated.

    He couldn¡¯t keep a calm mind.

    A whole city of people calling him a bastard. Even though he knew that they don¡¯t mean any ill will towards him in particr and this is all an borate prank, he does feel a bit frustrated nheless.

    Maybe because he has been listening to Jyon ying for the past few days, coupled with the frustration, he felt like he should y some music which might help him rx a bit more.

    But he doesn¡¯t even have a proper flute with him.

    He just shook those thoughts off and immersed himself in the research for the next three days.

    The businesses wereunched and Sam continued with the teaching and the research without obstacles.

    Luckily for him, Jyon is also not there.

    He doesn¡¯t have any disturbances and even the servants were ordered by Grivon to not disturb Sam at any cost.

    But soon the peace waspletely disturbed. It was okay to say it was destroyed rather than disturbed.

    Because Sam heard a new rumor.

    A rumor that made his blood boil.

    Because, he learned that there is a bard on the streets of the city, singing a song. It is a song about a bastard named Sam.

    When Sam heard this, his first reaction was directly going to that guy and trying his best to kill him. But he controlled his urge and stayed put.

    He didn¡¯t want to blow his cover and another three days passed like this.

    Sam is waiting for Grivon toe with the final reports on the proposals they are going to make to their decoy targets, but Sam was visited with something entirely different.

 Chapter 1358: Competition

    The kids came; Sam received the kids as usual and he is trying his best to do what he needs to without blowing his top off. These kids already knew that Sam is already being a bit disturbed by all of thismotion. They knew that he is not in the best of his shape and they also knew that he is Sam, the streets are currently discussing.

    So, they also didn¡¯t try to bring up the matter and just stayed for their studies and left when they need to.

    But that day, the attendants that were escorting the kids didn¡¯t know the whole situation properly and they are currently discussing the song outside.

    From their words, Sam learned a few things. The first thing is, the number of singers increased. There are around a dozen singers in the city upying different areas and they are all singing this one song.

    They are not busking and they are definitely not thinking of getting noticed by someone rich. They are just singing this one song.

    Along with that, Sam also learned a few things. The lyrics of the song, are utterly degrading.

    They are targeting, him, his birth, his mother and his whole existence as every line insinuated that he is a bastard through and through.

    As the guards discussed this with extra zeal, they even forgot the presence of the kids.

    Sam looked at them and took a deep breath. He doesn¡¯t want to do something rash and bring trouble to himself, so he received the children and sent the guards away.

    But as they were leaving, one of the guards spoke to the other.

    "Hey, do you think there is any chance that this teacher is the one the song is about?"

    "Why would that be? Did you hear the song properly? ording to it, he is a whore¡¯s son, his birth is a disgrace, his father wanted to kill him right after the birth, but he left the ce he couldn¡¯t stand the sight of the kid even while killing.

    If these lyrics are really targeted at me, I would run over and kill that bard who started singing this the first day.

    This teacher should have heard it, why would he stay put without throwing a tantrum? Anyway, why do you even think that he might be the target?"

    "I don¡¯t know, I seemed to have heard the children called Sir Sam or something. So, I thought he might be the one."

    "No way, even if he has the same name, these kids are under Young Mistress Giyon and Young Mistress Jyon¡¯s care, would both youngdies send the kids to someone like that."

    Sam listened to the conversation and stood there like a rock for a moment. He gritted his teeth and tried his best to control his anger.

    Not even anger, it is close to white-hot boiling rage that is threatening to explode at any moment and it seems like he doesn¡¯t have enough tolerance to stop it.

    He looked at the kids and decided it is better to finish the ss earlier than usual.

    "There is a special assignment for you. Let¡¯s divide the ss into two groups."

    Right as he spoke, the kids divided themselves, and unsurprisingly it is boys and girls.

    He smiled lightly and took out two tokens. He wrote something on it and ced it face down on the table.

    "Now girls¡¯ teame and take your pick."

    One of the girls came forward and picked a token. There is fire written on it and Sam then revealed another token as he threw it to the boys.

    There was wood written on it.

    "Now, the boys are all wood elemental users and the girls are all fire elemental users.

    There are five members in each group and each one of you will pick a number.

    Now, all the boys have to imagine themselves as wood elemental users and you would Acolyte stage users at that. You will be creating attacks that can be used by an acolyte stage cultivator. The same goes for girls. They are all fire elemental users at the Acolyte stage. They will also create a bunch of attacks.

    After I have seen all the attacks simted them and made sure that they are within the eptable energy range of the acolyte stage cultivator, I will approve your moves and every one of you need to gain my approval by the end of the week to participate in the final part of this assignment.

    On the night of the seventh day, both groups will go through a simted battle. Of course, the battles would be one on one.

    The first battle would be between the peoplebeled as one in both groups after one of them is defeated, the defeated group would send their second member, the first group can continue with the first member or they can send them to reserve to useter and send the second one up.

    The first group to lose all their members would lose.

    You cane to me at any time in the next week for the approval of your moves, but without the approval of the moves within the energy limit, you wouldn¡¯t be able to participate."

    Sam gave all the instructions and the kids became excited. They are way too excited in fact and after they got all the details, Sam sent them back with one of the attendants and sat down to meditate.

    He was not nning to do something like this. In fact, this assignment ispletely new for him. He just made that up on the spot.

    Luckily, he is trying to create the simtor and he needs to test some of the advancements, so he figured this is one of the best ways to do it.

    He meditated for a long time and only opened his eyes again when Grivon arrived.

    "Are his proposals okay? Did you go through all of them?" Sam asked calmly.

    Grivon looked at Sam for a moment without speaking.

    "Is there a problem?" Sam asked with a frown.

    "How are you doing?"

    "I am fine."

    "I heard that you sent the kids earlier than usual. What is the matter?"

    "I gave them a special assignment and they don¡¯t need to be here to do that. It would be better for them to roam around to get some new ideas, so I sent them away."

    "Is that it? Or are you trying to be alone?"

    "If I am really trying to do that, you are making it harder, don¡¯t you think so?"

    Grivon was stumped and sighed before taking out the proposal. Sam nodded and said.

    "Take your sister Giyon as a witness if possible. You need to ensure that this deal and business ispletely affiliated with the n and doesn¡¯t go into the secret business of your peers."

    "I will do that. But it doesn¡¯t matter. They will just embezzle the funds if they need to."

    "Why do you think that I asked your sister Giyon to be the witness? Sometimes, the person who facilitated the deal would be the sole reason for the deal to stand. As long as she gets into the picture, the risk of losing funds would be very low."

    "Okay, alright."

    Grivon left.

    For the next week, Sam doesn¡¯t have any sses to take, he just stayed there and kept on working on the simtor design. In fact, the body of the simtor ispletely ready and Sam even managed to make some extra progress with making it smaller, the problem is the brain of the simtor and that is what he is working on now.

    He even went as far as bringing the whole simtor to this house to perform different tests for this.

    The brain of the simtor, not only needs to be able to handle and process a lot of data, it also has the duty to calcte the possibilities by taking every factor into the consideration and then disy the possible oue based on that.

    This is extremely troublesome to achieve no matter how good Sam is. He is currently using different spirits and testing the stimtion level and uracy with some preprogrammed attacks with preprogrammed results and that is why he asked the kids toe up with the attacks.

    He would estimate the energy consumption, the oue, and all the possibilities by himself with his own brain and pre-program itself with leave very little for the simtor to figure out.

    This is the very first trial, for this.

    As he is working on it for the next few days, the kids showed up at random times asionally and they are not showing up together

    They are taking thispetition very seriously and Sam is extremely impressed by their creativity. They really dide up with some creative ideas.

    And on the sixth day, the day before the deadline, one girl visited Sam. By now, most of the moves for everyone else are approved and they are all in the final stage, but this one girl is not done yet, because she is aiming for much more than the others.

    Sam gave her the required ideas and sent her awayte in the evening with an attendant.

    But after a few minutes, the attendant came running back in panic.

 Chapter 1359: Abduction

    Sam frowned as he looked at the attendant. He shouldn¡¯t be here for at least fifteen minutes, and from the looks of him, he is not reallying back after dropping off the woman safely.

    "Sir, Sir. The young master.. the young master took the girl."

    Sam frowned deeper and looked at him in shock. He held the attendant closely and asked.

    "Be calm and tell me everything from the start."

    The attendant tried to calm down and Sam noticed some injuries on his body, he used observation ability and noticed that the injuries are mostly internal. He took out an injector to give him some medicine while the attendant exined.

    The attendant and the girl are going back normally, but the girl is a bit slower than usual as she is focusing on the moves. She is making the final corrections.

    The attendant also didn¡¯t disturb her and walked slowly. But as they were moving, a young master of the n named Mav has seen both of them and he seemed to have taken a liking to the girl. Looking at the attendant¡¯s uniform he knew he belonged to Grivon.

    He asked about the girl and why he is apanying them. Sam¡¯s presence is a bit of a secret and Grivon asked him to keep it quiet, so the attendant panicked, not knowing how to answer, Manv seemed to have misunderstood his panic and thought that the girl was there for him for some other purpose.

    He eyed the girl and then demanded that the guard leave her here and bring Grivon over to exin himself, when he refused and tried to exin that the girl is under Giyon¡¯s care, Manv¡¯s attendants beat the crap out of him and took the girl away.

    "Sir, please contact young master Grivon. Things wouldn¡¯t be good for the little girl. Young Master Manv is a known lecher in the n and he was not even punished once, no matter how disgustingly he acted.

    Please call young master now."

    Sam frowned and used themunication token to contact one of the people in the city to go to the stray realm and bring Grivon.

    He then called all of the attendants and sent some of them to Giyon¡¯s residence.

    "Tell the attendants there, that it is urgent and young master Grivon is the one issued the order. Don¡¯t worry about lying. After you get near Giyon, you could tell her that it was me who told you to go there and make sure to give every detail regarding this.

    You don¡¯t have to care if you are using some young master of the n. As long you make sure the message reaches her, I will guarantee your life and you would be Scott-free from this whole mess.

    I want that kid to be safe no matter what and no matter how you decide to help that, I will back you and even Grivon wouldn¡¯t object to that."

    After sending the attendants there, he looked at the first attendant who brought the news and asked.

    "Do you know where they took her?"

    "I don¡¯t know, exactly, but they didn¡¯t go towards his residence, they went towards the n gate, maybe they went into the city."

    "Do any of you know any possible residences that this guy has outside the estate?"

    The attendants shook their heads and Sam once again made a call to Grivon¡¯swork.

    But it is still a bit troublesome as there are way too many usible locations. This guy has four residences in four different directions and his brother has three more which are also used by this guy, apart from that he has some permanent rooms in different inns around the city.

    Overall, this is a pain in the ass.

    Sam then sent two attendants to his residence in the n grounds. Of course, there is little possibility of something like this happening with the n grounds, particrly when he knew that Grivon mighte.

    So, Sam also spread the attendants over the city after he gave themunication tokens to contact him as he also went there to search himself.

    He also called the information and updated his location now and then so that Grivon woulde there by himself as fast as they can.

    Sam moved in full speed, but he still didn¡¯t forget to cover his face.

    Soon, Grivon and Giyon¡¯s people also joined in the search, and Giyon in particr is having none of this shit.

    She directly wrote down a scroll and sent her personal assistant to the elders with a message.

    "One of the girls under my care has been abducted by Malgav. If anything happens to that girl, I will not spare Malgav or any of the subordinates that are involved in this and the people that try to cover up wouldn¡¯t go unscathed.

    I will take this as a deration of war and the level this war esctes would be dependent on how the elders act on this situation."

    She bared it open without any pretentiousness and the elders knew that Malgav caused some big trouble this time. They knew that the situation escted to a point that things couldn¡¯t be smoothed over with just talking.

    They informed Mingiv who was in training over at some secret n grounds, but it would take some time for the message to reach him and for him toe back.

    Their parents are not present and even if they did, they are of high enough level and the elders don¡¯t want to involve in this matter. Otherwise, they could only imagine what would happen if Grivon who is also involved in this involved his parents as well.

    They couldn¡¯t help but shudder at this thought and sent people to search around and inquire about what exactly happened.

    It didn¡¯t take long for them to confirm what happened and soon they all narrowed down the possible location of Malgav, but to their bad luck, Sam managed to find the location beforehand.

    "Grivon,e to the inn at the southwest side of the city. Right next to the slums. He is here."

    Sam just gave the message and didn¡¯t even wait for a reply before informing the attendant nearby to send the message to Giyon and her associates.

    He then barged into the inn and made his way towards the room where Malgav is at.

    But the manager of the inn and the attendants wanted to put up resistance, which didn¡¯t sit well with Sam.

    He is not as calm as before to try and talk this through. He has been on the edge for over a week because of all this publicity he is getting.

    He doesn¡¯t have enough patience and tolerance to go through with this, so he took out the staff and started shooting energy bullets left and right.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The explosions startled everyone in the surroundings. The policing and security in the city is top-notch. After all, this is the headquarters of the Gaja n, there is no way they could let any incident happen here.

    But Sam¡¯s actions arepletely stomping on that policing. The guards immediately arrived. But grivon¡¯s attendants stopped at the entrance.

    They didn¡¯t even bother to exin and they directly used Grivon¡¯s name topletely shut them down.

    Sam dealt with the attendants inside the inn easily and then proceeded to kill the receptionist and finally stopped at the manager.

    "Use the remaining attendants and workers to inform other customers. Tell them to stay inside their rooms and make sure that they don¡¯t interfere in what is about to happen here. Also, tell them that if anybody gets involved I will kill them without any hesitation.

    Do you understand?"

    The manager nodded and when Sam left him, he scrammed immediately to execute his orders.

    Sam stored the staff away and walked through the stairs carefully. He reached the corridor where the room of this guy is staying. The whole corridor was blocked off without anyone staying there. There are some guards who are standing outside. But they are not actually calm. At this moment, they are in a hurry as one of them banged on one of the doors.

    Malgav impatiently opened the door and looked at him with a frown. His upper body is bare and he is clearly frustrated.

    "What is it?"

    "Young Master, your brother¡¯s attendants contacted us just now. Giyon and Grivon are searching for that girl. Giyon even directly imed that this is a deration of war. You better let her go now. They might already be on their way here."

    "That bitch. Can¡¯t she mind her own business?"

    "This is apparently her business. Your brother is in the secret n grounds he might take a long time toe here. So, let¡¯s go into hiding."

    As they were talking, Sam showed up in the corridor attracting everyone¡¯s attention.

    The guards looked at Sam and one of them yelled.

    "Who are you? You cannote here. Get the hell out."

    Sam didn¡¯t reply and just looked at the guards to estimate their cultivation level.

 Chapter 1360: Losing It

    Sam looked at the guards without answering them. Malgav went back inside to get dressed.

    The guards are actually not that strong. There are two guys who are Initial stage Astral ne cultivators of Consummte stage, apart from that the rest are all Astral ne Transcendent stage cultivators spanning from Initial stage to peak stage.

    Sam is clearly outnumbered and out matched in terms of cultivation level. But he doesn¡¯t have to worry too much about it.

    He has a fair amount of tricks up his sleeve and they are actually lethal enough for him to not even feel a little anxious about the two Astral ne Consummate cultivators.

    After he reached the Gaja n safely and established himself with a bit of stability, along with the research, Sam also started working on creating something to save himself too.

    He doesn¡¯t want to bepletely helpless in the situations likeing across Butler Si¡¯s disciples. So, he made some preparations and they are on his hand now.

    He took out a liquid energy cell and loaded it into the metal arm as he aimed at the cultivators in front of him.

    His metal leg dug into the floor to get some stability in and the arm started glowing. Energy gathered at the finger tips and at the middle of the palm as the six energy beams were shot.

    Sam attacked without bothering to answer their questions or making his own questions. He doesn¡¯t want to discuss anything with some dogs of a lecher who wants to rape a little girl. No matter how much of a cold blood killer he was, his words are way too valuable to waste them on a rapist and hisckeys.

    The guards reacted quickly and immediately defended themselves, but they couldn¡¯t. They are just way toote.

    The corridor is narrow and there is not much ce left for them to go, the beam prated through half a dozen of them before the people at the rear broke into the rooms to save themselves and the beams were headed at the two Consummate stage cultivators who dodged the attack.

    When they thought that they are safe since the beam has went past them, they were hit from behind and the beams exploded there.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    They felt the explosion at its full power and their backs started bleeding.

    Sam looked at the whole situation was surprised to see that the inn is actually still intact. Except for the doors and some superficial damages, there is no structural damage whatsoever.

    He took out the empty cell from his hand and also took out the staff and impaled it into the floor. It created a shield around him as he slowly picked another energy cell to ce in the arm.

    The two guards recovered and along with the other gods that managed to save their asses, they also started making their move as they ran towards Sam.

    Sam also waited until they are past the room where the little girl and Malgav are currently in as he shot another set of beams.

    The guards once again broke into the rooms to dodge the beams, but this time, the beams moved like snakes and attacked from different sides, killing them on the spot.

    The ranged attacks that were targeted at Sam are mostly being negated by the shield created by the staff and as for therger scale attacks that are a bit too powerful, Sam had to use the ripple style and the repel style at the same time, to create a special defensive effect.

    The energy barrier wouldn¡¯t try to take in the blow or block itpletely, it creates a smallyer around it which sticks the attacks to itself and carries them away repelling them off of it.

    Of course, the barrier would suffer a bit in process, but it wouldn¡¯tpletely gone and it could be reinforced with his own energy.

    This is the best he could at the moment. He is sure that he would be able to handle the situation.

    He didn¡¯t bother attacking in any other way and destroyed everyone. Within five minutes only the two Consummate cultivators were left and even they are not really up for the task because they are extremely afraid of the energy beams.

    They couldn¡¯t even defend against these attacks properly as when they exploded, they destroyed the defense easily.

    Sam is sweating profusely on the other end as he quickly reloaded the arm and shot one beam after another.

    While they are shing, back inside the room Malgav is actually huddled into a corner as he felt the tremors of the battle and the chaotic cirction of spiritual energy because of Sam¡¯s energy explosions.

    The room and the entrance of the room are destroyed and the girl is actually tied up on the bed with barely any clothes covering her body as she struggled.

    The after effects of the battle are effecting her as she is just a normal person without even any awakening.

    Malgav almost peed his pants as the situation slowly sunk in. He knew that he messed up big time now and a load of trouble awaited him.

    At the same time, Grivon and Giyon already made their way towards the inn and they could also sense the tremorsing from the battle.

    As they were about to go in, Mingiv also arrived.

    "What are you doing at my inn?"

    Mingiv asked coldly and Giyon looked at him with equal coldness. That expression made Mingiv a bit hesitant but he knew that it is toote to back down and decided to hold his ground.

    "Why is one of the kids under my care dragged here by your brother?" She shot her own question and Mingiv just shrugged.

    "Do you have any proof that my brother did it?"

    "An attendant saw it."

    "Really? You are using a young master of the Gaja n, a person with same status as us based on an attendant¡¯s words? Which attendant is daring enough to use one of us with such a crime?"

    Grivon who stayed silent, gritted his teeth and spoke out loud.

    He called for his personal associate who takes care of his daily needs, sort of like a butler but not enough status.

    "Yes, young master."

    "Do you still have the emergency contacts my parents left with you?"

    "Yes, young master."

    "If the girl is in anyway harmed when this is all over and if we couldn¡¯t even find her or if the whole matter doesn¡¯t end as it should. Contact them.

    Tell them that their son is dering a war against Mingiv the grandson of one of the grand elders and also tell them that the war only ends with one of us ending up dead."

    His voice was low but clear enough for everyone to hear.

    Mingiv and Giyon were stunned, the rest of the subordinates were inplete shock.

    Grivon looked at Mingiv and said.

    "That girl was being apanied by one of my subordinates from my residence to Giyon¡¯s residence. How dare your fucking lecher of a brothery his hands on her, when she is under my protection? Do you think that just because I don¡¯t unt my status around, you can do whatever you want to the people under me?

    You so much as try to suppress this matter or downy it, you will see what will happen, when I unt my status."

    His voice was cold andced with anger. He wanted walk forward into the inn, but Mingiv¡¯s subordinates stopped him.

    "This is my inn and you would need my permission to enter. Otherwise, don¡¯t even think about it." Mingiv still wanted to suppress this matter. He knew that the situation is not exactly in his favor, but he knew he cannot afford to offend Giyon and Grivon at the same time.

    And for that to happen, the girl should be safe and she shouldn¡¯t have any connection to Malgav. Something needs to be done for that to happen and for that, he needs to make sure that the girl wouldn¡¯t be found here.

    He gestured some of his other subordinates to get in while he tried to block the entrance. But what he doesn¡¯t know is, he is a bit toote.

    At this moment, Sam is currently shooting another shot at thest two guards. They are now close enough and their attacks are bing lethal, but they also have very little room for dodging. At this moment, the six beams wereunched.

    They separated into two bunches as they attacked the two targets.

    But instead of explosive energy, the beams suddenly dispersed when the two guards were about to block it and shot down a bunch of needles which almost seemed like they appeared out of nowhere.

    Sam was actually making the condensed energy carry these needles and they are now shot at guards.

    The needlespletely went past the blocking measures by arge angle and touched the guards.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

 Chapter 1361: Losing It II

    The needles that Sam released are actually the curse carriers. These are part of the contingencies he prepared for stronger opponents. He knew he doesn¡¯t have many resources in his hand even with the help of Grivon and the Gaja n.

    He cannot hide if he makes too many things and he is definitely not particrly willing to shar that he can make liquid energy cells.

    So, he decided to create curse carriers with fused attacks made by Grivon¡¯s subordinates. These needles are parts of the traps he created to deal with the league members.

    Grivon might even know that Sam stored some away from the lot, but Sam didn¡¯t care. He decided to save some for himself so that he could save himself when he needed them and now he used four of them.

    The blows of middle stage consummate cultivators of Astral ne are no a joke for the Initial stage Consummate cultivators of Astral ne. They are dead as a rock as soon as the attacksnd.

    Sam walked past their dead bodies and while doing that he kept on observing the structure of the inn. For some reason, it is extremely strong. He couldn¡¯t imagine someone building a corridor of an inn to be this strong.

    This is unconventional. This is something that is not normal no matter how luxurious an inn is. A structure to endure an attack from Astral ne Consummate level cultivator ispletely unorthodox to the point even Sam felt that this is ridiculous.

    He felt that something is off about this inn.

    But he doesn¡¯t have time for that now. He walked into the room and saw the kid still tied up to the bed. She is struggling and there is some debris all over her with cuts and bruises. She is bleeding from many ces and she is weeping in pain.

    Sam carefully walked to her and cut the binds before covering her with a robe. He gently let a single string of spiritual energy enter her body as he tried to stop the bleeding from different injuries.

    He took out a medicine vial and rubbed it on the wounds. Just a few drops covered the whole body.

    Even though Sam is covered with his cloak and his face is not visible, as soon as he came near her, she understood who he is.

    She hugged him immediately and wept.

    Sam took a deep breath and embraced her gently as he whispered.

    "You are okay. Don¡¯t worry. You are okay. I am here."

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel frustrated and angry. His mind is slowly being clouded with his rage that he couldn¡¯t channel.

    The old wounds that arepletelypressed are being ripped apart. He looked at Malgav who is still shivering in the corner.

    Sam¡¯s cold stare made himpletely stupefied.

    Sam checked his cultivation level, he is barely a transcendent stage cultivator of the Astral ne.

    "Specter, get a hold of him and bring him along with you."

    Sam spoke and carried the girl out carefully. She closed her eyes and just hugged him tightly as she couldn¡¯t even find the strength in her legs to stand up.

    Specter held Malgav and dragged him down behind him. As they came to the end of the rubble-filled corridor, Sam sensed energy fluctuations from downstairs. He walked down slowly and noticed that there are a bunch of people fighting.

    At the entrance of the stairway in the ground floor, Grivon¡¯s subordinates are fighting with Mingiv¡¯s subordinates and Giyon¡¯s subordinates.

    It seems like Mingiv came fully armed and prepared, but Giyon and Grivon are not as their forces are spread thin all over the city in the search and they didn¡¯t have time to regroup them all together.

    But they are currently evenly matched, but with every passing minute, Mingiv is being pushed back.

    "Grivon."

    Sam yelled out loud and everyone stopped fighting.

    They are currently in therge empty lobby of the inn where everyone is gathered. Giyon ran towards Sam and no one dared to stop her, even Mingiv didn¡¯t dare because he knew there is no use in doing that now.

    Giyon took the girl into her arms.

    "Miss. Giyon, please ask the healer to see if she is vited. It has already been a very long time since I came here and I couldn¡¯t bring myself to check."

    He said in a very low tone and his voice is shivering. This is something that Sam is extremely nervous about. All it would take is a single second with his observation ability, but he didn¡¯t dare to do that.

    Giyon was a bit surprised. This is the first time she has seen Sam so expressive. He is showing the emotions like fear and anxiety out in the open and for Grivon this is an utter shock.

    Giyon might know more about Sam, but all she had were stories, but Grivon is different, he has seen Sam in action back in the red matter. He has seen Sam n an attack against an organization stronger than you and toy with them for days.

    He has seen him destroy hundreds of lives in a single stroke and get away from his greatest opponent with utter confidence.

    He watched Sam as he negotiated a deal when he was trapped in a ce that definitely didn¡¯t belong to him. But now he ispletely anxious and afraid that some terrible might have happened to a girl he has been barely teaching for a few days.

    Giyon nodded and took her to the healer who used a concealment formation and checked.

    Mingiv wanted to take this opportunity to take his brother away from the specter who is clearly invisible.

    But Sam extended his metallic hand at Malgav and said in a cold tone.

    "One more step and I will kill him on the spot."

    Mingiv frowned and stopped in his tracks.

    "You wouldn¡¯t dare."

    Sam didn¡¯t hesitate and shot the leg of Malgav.

    *BOOM*

    "ARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHH...."

    Malgav screamed in agony. Sam looked at Malgav and said.

    "There are a few things that I don¡¯t dare to do. So, don¡¯t try your luck."

    Mingiv¡¯s face became colder than ice and he looked at Giyon who is standing beside the concealment formation.

    "Giyon. Take care of your subordinate here. You would need to give me an exnation for this."

    Giyon didn¡¯t even bother with what Sam did and just waited for the answer from the healer, so when Mingiv yelled out loud, she just calmly replied.

    "He is not my subordinate."

    Mingiv frowned and turned to Grivon.

    "He is not my subordinate either."

    Mingiv then turned to Sam and asked.

    "Who are you? Identify yourself."

    "I am the guy who holds the life of your younger brother. That is all you need to know for now. So, shut the fuck up and stay put, otherwise, the next target would be..."

    Sam shifted the metal arm to the crotch of Malgav and Mingiv felt his blood turn cold.

    He stayed put involuntarily and only looked for the result. He had a bad feeling that if the result is not what the guy in the cloak wanted, things wouldn¡¯t end well, so he made his team get ready as well.

    After two minutes, the healer came out of the concealment formation and whispered something in Giyon¡¯s ears.

    Both of their expressions are solemn and extremely sorrowful. Sam could guess what the result is.

    Giyon looked at Sam and nodded gently indicating that the worst has happened. He suddenly felt his legs turn weak and knelt on the floor as he supported himself with his hands from falling face down.

    Giyon and Grivon looked at him in surprise and what surprised them, even more, is that they saw a few drops of tears dripping down and falling on the ground. This is the first time they saw him shed tears.

    He didn¡¯t cry when he waspletely stripped of everything. His riches, his resources, his friends, his subordinates, his properties, and his body that has an affinity with all the elements, his beast. He didn¡¯t shed a single tear when they were all gone. But now he did.

    They didn¡¯t expect such an emotional response to this.

    "Sam..."

    Grivon slowly stepped forward and called out for him to check if he is okay.

    Mingiv frowned as he felt the sound was a bit familiar.

    But the rest of the people who heard the name immediately connected it to the song, but no one tried to say it out loud as they knew the situation is a lot tense than it seems.

    As Grivon gently stepped forward, Sam also slowly stood up and looked around.

    "Any artisans here?"

    He asked out loud.

    Everyone was puzzled, but seeing as that no one responded, he looked around and his gaze finally stopped at a pir nearby.

    He slowly stepped forward, his body is a bit hunched down as if he is carrying something extremely heavy, his arms just dropped like that as he weakly walked to the pir and ced his hand on it.

    For the first time in a long while, he used the maniption ability to disintegrate something.

 Chapter 1362: Losing It III

    As everyone looked at him in confusion, Sam¡¯s spiritual energy was wrapped around the pir and it started turning into powder at a visible rate.

    Mingiv doesn¡¯t know what is happening, but at this moment, he knew that things are not going to end well if his brother stays near Sam.

    He wanted to step forward, but Sam coldly spoke.

    "I told you to stay put, you fucker."

    MIngiv¡¯s face stiffened as he replied.

    "Whatever that has happened, has happened. I don¡¯t deny that this is a crime, but we need to go through the n proceedings. I don¡¯t care who you are and what your rtionship with the girl is, you don¡¯t have any authority to detain a young master of the Gaja n.

    You better know what the consequences would be. You are not a member of the Gaja n, so the consequences would only be severe."

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to reply as he focused on the pir.

    Grivon looked at Sam, he couldn¡¯t see his expression, but he could imagine that Sam is extremely furious.

    He couldn¡¯t understand what he is doing, but he also knew that nothing good wille out of this. He carefully walked towards him and whispered.

    "Sam, let him go. I already said I would go on a war with him. We can do whatever we wantter. Currently, the high-level members of the n are involved. Let it go for now."

    Sam shot him a re and Grivon immediately shut up.

    Giyon who is standing a bit far gestured him toe back. From her expression, it is apparent that she is also angry, and she is also trying her best to control her urges. But she is currently focused on the little girl more than the guy who caused her the pain.

    As they waited in that tense situation, Sam was finally done with the stone pir. Now there is a blunt mace in his hands.

    The mace ispletely devoid of any spikes and it is wholly sculpted out of the stone of the pir. From handle to the ball.

    It is not exactly a practical weapon, but Sam figured that it would work for now.

    He dragged the mace on the floor as he slowly walked towards Malgav.

    "Put him down." He told the specter, who unceremoniously dropped him on the floor.

    Malgav was horrified to the point that he couldn¡¯t even get a few words out of his mouth.

    He kept trying, but he just couldn¡¯t get the words out of his mouth. He crawled away since his leg is already out ofmission.

    He looked at his brother with a pleading expression.

    Mingiv knew that something horrifying is about to happen, but with the specter so close to his brother, he didn¡¯t dare make a move.

    He turned to Giyon and said.

    "I don¡¯t care who he is and what he is to that girl, but tell him to stop and I might let him go after all of this. This is the matter between the young masters of the n, an outsider like him has no business interfering."

    "What makes you think he would listen to our words? Why don¡¯t you try your luck once again? This time, he might go for the third leg that cost your brother this much and you wouldn¡¯t have to worry in the future again. Of course, if he has a future."

    "Giyon, you are making a big mistake."

    "I don¡¯t give a fuck. Your threats don¡¯t scare me and I am pretty sure that guy is not scared of pretty much anything in this world. So, save your words."

    Mingiv is getting desperate as he looked at Sam leisurely stepping forward without any hurry.

    Malgav is trying to crawl away desperately, but all he could do is paint the floor in red with his blood while moving very little. It is almost like Sam is letting him crawl as much as he liked.

    But soon that stopped. Malgav felt weak and powerless and stopped with the crawling.

    Sam lifted his stone mace and gathered his energy and was about to take a hit, but Mingiv had enough, he immediately turned to his troops andmanded.

    "Stop him at any cost. Save my brother. Kill everyone thates in your way."

    His words left his mouth and his subordinates attacked.

    One of them directly went to Sam as he threw arge ming eagle made of pure fire at him.

    Sam stopped in his tracks as he tried to block the attack, but he was a tad bit slow as his shield didn¡¯t react in time.

    The cloak on his face burned with mes.

    The attack is not particrly significant in terms of damage, so he just took out his staff and mmed it into the ground to create a barrier around him while he aimed his metal arm out to help Grivon and Giyon¡¯s subordinates.

    Giyon and Mingiv shed.

    More and more of Grivon¡¯s and Giyon¡¯s subordinates areing and joining the battle, but all of a sudden out of nowhere a different group of people came.

    They are definitely not from Grivon¡¯s side or Giyon¡¯s side and they are definitely not n members.

    Sam looked at them with a frown.

    They are wearing tights with a cloak covering their body. Their figures are lithe and lean and their arms even reached their knees.

    He could sense that their energy waves are extremely different than that of a normal cultivator.

    He aimed his arm at one of them and was about to attack. But Mingiv who already saw the prowess of Sam¡¯s energy beam attacks suddenly stepped away from Giyon and made his move at Sam.

    He held his saber tightly and sliced in the air. Arge saber ray was shot at Sam and even the barrier couldn¡¯t hold it.

    Sam barely managed to dodge his attack, but in the process, half of his cloak was cut off. With the initial burning and now, he waspletely bare from chest up with his face wholly revealed out.

    Mingiv immediately stopped in his tracks as he looked at Sam. Giyon¡¯s subordinates didn¡¯t dare to attack Mingiv even at that time as they didn¡¯t want to bear the crime of injuring a young master of the n.

    But Giyon soon caught up and blocked him from proceeding further.

    "You seem to know that face well."

    "That is Sivan. You are helping a person from Mari n. How dare you?" Mingiv said coldly. But Giyon smiled and said.

    "Apparently he is not Sivan and I also learned now how weak your informationwork is."

    As they shed again, Sam killed the people that are near him and noticed that many more people are getting involved in this too much. He gritted his teeth and sighed before taking out a bunch of needles. He looked at specter and nodded as he threw the needles into the air.

    A bunch of souls appeared out of specter and caught the needles as they hovered around Mingiv and his subordinates, of course, they didn¡¯t care much about them, but the ghosts dropped a few of them on some of the subordinates.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    shy red mes enveloped the three targets and they are burned to crisp immediately. The attacks are too severe that everyone stopped in their tracks.

    Sam finally got some peace and said.

    "Every needle holds the same amount of energy and I will drop them if anybody makes a move. I am really getting impatient."

    Sam¡¯s face is cold and detached. It really didn¡¯t show any expression, not even impatience. But for Giyon and Grivon who have seen his face much more than the rest, knew that his expression is weird. No matter how frustrated or busy Sam was, even when he was being forced to spend time with Jyon, he didn¡¯t look this detached.

    They could feel that for some reason, in this state, he became more lethal.

    Sam finally heaved a sigh and walked to Malgav with the mace.

    "Now, it is just you and me. We can have some fun. Tell me how does it feel to vite an innocent fifteen-year-old girl who has no strength to resist whatsoever."

    "I... I.."

    "I don¡¯t know who you are. I will give you whatever you want. Leave my brother alone."

    MIngiv yelled once again and at this moment, one of the ghosts holding the needle dropped it on one of the lithe figures standing in the rear.

    *BOOM*

    "I already told you to shut the fuck up. Next time, I will kill a person for each word you say."

    As his words ended, the macended on the chest of Malgav.

    *BAM*

    *ARRR....HAH."

    Malgav felt all of the air escaping his lungs. He couldn¡¯t evenpletely yell in pain as he felt out of breath.

    "Tell me, you piece of shit. Tell me how powerful you felt when viting a little girl."

    *BAM*

    The macended on the stomach and this time, the energy is a bit turbulent and created a bloody mess out of the outermostyer of the skin.

    "Tell me, I am waiting for your answer."

    *BAM*

    The macended on the shoulder,pletely crushing it.

 Chapter 1363: Going Crazy

    *BAM*

    "Tell me how it felt? Did you feel so macho and powerful as you forced yourself on a helpless girl?"

    *BAM*

    "Tell me how much satisfaction you had when you are raping her."

    *BAM*

    Sam kept on bashing and after a few hits, the young master lost consciousness. Sam pulled out a wine gourd and pulled the cork.

    "Hey, you sick freak, what the hell are you doing? You better let him go. The n members are nearby, you are going to be done for. No matter who you are." Mingiv yelled at Sam, but there is no response. They are all a bit tense at the ghosts looming over their heads.

    It shouldn¡¯t have been much of a problem in normal cases, but this time even if they managed to destroy the ghosts, the needle might activate or fall on them, they don¡¯t exactly know the trigger for the needle and they definitely don¡¯t know the extent of the damage, that is the only thing stopping them.

    Mingiv looked at Sam¡¯splete nonresponse to everything and knew that this wouldn¡¯t end well. He is desperately waiting for the n forces to show up so that they could stop this madness.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is that the n forces are not showing up anytime soon.

    Sam poured the alcohol all over the wounds.

    "AARRGGGGGHH...."

    Malgav screamed out loud as he opened his eyes in pain. The alcohol gave this burning sensation all over his skin making him drown in agony.

    Sam turned to specter and said. Make sure that he doesn¡¯t faint again. This is going to go on for a long time.

    Sam lifted the mace again and aimed at Malgav¡¯s chest.

    "Please... Please leave me alone. Please. I will not do this again. I beg you."

    Malgav pleaded in a shivering voice, but Sam didn¡¯t even show a change in his expression.

    *BAM*

    He mmed the mace once again and make Malgav puke some blood.

    His hits are controlled. He is only making Malgav experience pain but not any critical damage.

    "You still didn¡¯t answer my questions. How big did you feel when you are forcing yourself on her? Tell me."

    *BAM*

    "I am asking you a question.

    *BAM*

    "TELL ME."

    *BAM*

    "TELL ME."

    As Sam was about tond another blow all of a sudden, Mingiv yelled out loud.

    "YOU SICK BASTARD. LEAVE HIM ALONE NOW. ONE MORE HIT AND I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN TO THE EDGE OF THE WORLD. WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TO ACT IN SUCH A WAY IN GAJA CLAN¡¯S TERRITORY. DO YOU THINK GRIVON AND GIYON CAN PROTECT YOU FOREVER? I WILL KILL YOU AND YOUR WHOLE FUCKING FAMILY."

    Sam stopped hitting and looked at Mingiv. His eyes are still tearful as he slowly brought his mace down.

    Mingiv looked at this change and felt that his words are finally gone through as he gestured with a hand behind his back so that his subordinates will act as he wanted, but what he didn¡¯t expect is what Sam did next.

    Sam raised his mace once again and ripple-style energy was gathered all over its head. He then used his leg to separate the thighs of Malgav.

    "HEY HEY HEY, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? GUARDS FUCKING STOP HIM."

    But as soon as he finished his line, Sam swung the mace aiming at Malgav¡¯s crotch.

    *BAM*

    The crotch was immediately crushed into meat paste and then the energy proceeded to spread all over the flesh and the ripple style energypletely destroyed the skin until the muscr fibers are exposed.

    Even his face was gone with just one blow and he started bleeding all over.

    At the same time...

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The needles alsonded on the guards of Mingiv and even the Mingiv himself. The bright red mes zed over as they burned one by one.

    Grivon and Giyon were shocked and looked at the scene with horrified expressions.

    They never expected that Sam would make a move, but what happened next, is even more surprising.

    Sam lunged forward and kicked his metal leg to the ground, it gave out a spiritual energy explosion as it propelled him into the air and he mmed the mace into the spot where Mingiv stood for a while with void style and arge lump of energy being transferred from his metal arm.

    The energy is being transferred from the liquid energy cell and was being channeled into the mace. The blownded on something solid and a cracking sound was heard. The smoke and dust from the attacks were cleared and Mingiv could be seen standing as in arge translucent sphere while spewing some blood.

    Sam took the recoil and flew away as he crashed into the ground.

    But he didn¡¯t care and stood up. His eyes are full of rage, this is the first sign of emotion he is showing after a long while of being lost in sadness.

    He lunged forward and attacked the sphere once again, he didn¡¯t give MIngiv any chance to recover and just attacked again.

    *BOOM*

    The explosive void style cracked the barrier as well as the mace. This time Sam managed to find the bnce and came back to the sphere faster. But by now, his arm muscle was torn a little and started bleeding.

    The third hitpletely destroyed the sphere and the mace also crumbled throwing Mingiv into the ground.

    Sam threw the handle of the mace to the side as he took out an injector with five vial slots.

    Five different vials are attached to it. Two of them are healing vials while the other two are small liquid energy cells.

    Grivon looked at him in confusion and he had a bad feeling in his heart.

    "Sam. Let it go. We can deal with himter." He took a few steps closer and tried to talk him out of it, but there is no response. Sam didn¡¯t care what Grivon or anyone else thought at the moment, he directly injected the five vials at the same time into his arm.

    Sam suddenly felt the energypletely circting forcefully in his veins as he tried to divert the energy to different parts of his body.

    The healing vials started repairing the torn muscles, but the increase in energy is making the body take a toll, his muscle fibers are getting a bit too excited with the energy.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care. He lunged forward once again and mmed his fists at Mingiv who is still recovering from the needle attack.

    The only problem is that Mingiv is an Initial stage Consummate cultivator of the Astral ne. He is way stronger than Sam and the barrier which is created with a defensive artifact helped him escape the death from the needle Sam also noticed it immediately and started pounding with the mace.

    Mingiv is notpletely unscathed though, he is a bit stumped with the energy disturbance caused by the needle attack and the constant bashing on the barrier, as it is created with Mingiv as the medium by the defensive artifact.

    But now, he recovered a bit and not only did he block Sam¡¯s punch, but he also twisted Sam¡¯s arm first, before using the motion to hold him in a rear-naked choke.

    "You sick psychotic bastard. I will kill you right here and now. Guards, take Malgav to the healers, NOW."

    There are not many guards left alive, the ones that are barely alive pulled themselves together and followed the orders.

    Giyon and Grivon are a bit anxious and were about to make a move against Mingiv, Grivon even wanted to hold Malgav hostage to force Mingiv to let Sam go, but before they could react,

    Sam just smiled crazily and he started gathering energy on his upper back which surprised Mingiv. Before he could make sense of it.

    *BOOM*

    An explosion urred on Sam¡¯s back with bloody mist blowing up on Mingiv¡¯s face along with therge energy explosion that threw him away with one of his arms gone.

    Sam whose back was torn wide open with the explosion fell forward, but even before he touched the ground, his back started healing by itself because of the vials.

    Sam stood up with his back still dripping blood as he spat some more blood because of the shock to his internal organs. But he still had that crazy psychotic smirk on his face as he stomped on his mechanical leg and lunged forward towards Mingiv, whose arm was torn open.

    He once again threw a punch and when Mingiv tried to block it with his saber with his normal hand, Sam suddenly opened up his mechanical arm and threw an energy beam at a point-nk range at the arm that was already injured.

    The saber barely grazed back Sam¡¯s fist, but it still tore open the ligaments, but Mingiv was blown away like a rag doll with his stomach torn open a bit.

    Sam just shook his hand as he automatically healed.

    But he didn¡¯t even let that happenpletely before he went after Mingiv once again and this time he managed tond a proper punch to Mingiv¡¯s gut.. Thebined usage of void style and ripple style made the abdominal wound open wider than before.

 Chapter 1364: Beast

    Even though Sam managed to do some damage to Mingiv, he himself took a great deal of damage, his fist once again copsed with the bonespletely out of order.

    But he is too angry to deter for that. He readjusted the bones without a change in the expression and lunged to at Mingiv once again.

    Mingiv also stood up and wanted to take a healing potion, but he was unable to do that as Sam acted like a rabid dog, and in fact, he literally acted like that as Mingiv delivered a roundhouse kick which Sam caught with both his hands.

    The impact made Sam skid for a few feet, but he held the leg so tight and absorbed all the damage that even if his flesh was torn apart, he didn¡¯t care.

    He used his mental hand and opened up the five small holes at the fingertips to let energy threadse out and drill through the leg.

    Mingiv tried to pull his leg away in pain, but Sam didn¡¯t let go. He is so determined that when Mingiv tried to use excessive force which almost made him slip, Sam forcefully bit into the leg and channeled energy through his teeth.

    The energy condensed into sharp des at the edge of the teeth and he tore the flesh apart as he left the energy threads to get more ess.

    The energy was wrapped around the bone and Sam made it explode.

    *boom*

    The small explosive sound made the leg emit a bloody mess and the bone crumbled into powder.

    *ARRRGGHHHH....."

    Mingiv cried on top of his lungs.

    Sam who suffered severe injuries from the kicks and his own explosions is bleeding profusely in several ces, but he didn¡¯t show a single change in his expression, he still had that smirk on his face and the look of immense hatred directed at Mingiv.

    He started wobbling a bit due to the constant impact, but instead of stopping himself, he took out the injector and this time took a dose of five vials of healing medicine.

    Grivon wanted to stop him, but Giyon frowned and blocked him.

    She could see that Sam is not in a clear state of mind, she is afraid that he might do something to Grivon if he butted in.

    She has half a mind to butt in herself, but she refrained because she noticed that someone is observing the scene here and she believed they would interfere when things really go bad.

    Sam felt like he is on some recreational drugs as his body rapidly healed, but he sensed that he doesn¡¯t have much energy left, the forceful increase of energy with the liquid energy injection didn¡¯tst long.

    But this time, he didn¡¯t dare inject another dose because he believed that he wouldn¡¯t be able to bear it, but he also believed that he doesn¡¯t need it anymore.

    Mingiv is not any less injured and in fact, he doesn¡¯t have as versatile a recovery system as Sam.

    So, Sam loaded his metal arm with another liquid energy cell and walked towards Mingiv slowly with his blood-soaked body.

    Mingiv started crawling backward just like his brother did. He only has one leg now and he is not sure he would be able to deal with Sam with just one leg.

    Even with that massive cultivation difference, the circumstances and his momentarypse in reaction made him like this.

    Sam aimed his metal arm at him and the five energy beams were shot.

    Mingiv couldn¡¯t even block itpletely and took the brunt of the attack as Sam neared him.

    Soon, Sam is near and he immediately took a mounted position over Mingiv and punched his face.

    "What did you call me earlier? Come again."

    *BAM*

    "You, a piece of scum that is trying to protect a rapist dared to call me a bastard? How fucking dare you?"

    *BAM*

    "Why don¡¯t you call me again, you piece of shit? Call me a bastard. Come on. Call me a Bastard."

    *BAM*

    "Come on. Sing that newly popr Song. Why don¡¯t you do that?"

    *BAM*

    "Sam the Bastard born alone in the streets."

    *BAM*

    "Birthed by a whore that is everyman¡¯s sheets."

    *BAM*

    "No one knows who his father is."

    *BAM*

    "Because that might be any man his mother ever sees."

    *BAM*

    "Come on, Sing with me, you scum. Sing with me."

    *BAM*

    "SING WITH ME."

    *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

    "I SAID, SING WITH ME."

    Sam¡¯s voice became crazed as his eyes welled up in tears. He couldn¡¯t control his emotions and kept on pounding on Mingiv¡¯s face.

    *BAM* *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

    Mingiv a cultivator that is far stronger than him, fell unconscious as he couldn¡¯t take Sam¡¯s abuse.

    Giyon and Grivon couldn¡¯t help but flinch as Sam sang the very song that was on the streets for the past few days.

    They felt that Sam is calm and only a bit frustrated as he was acting calm. He even took the sses with children, even though the timings are a bit affected and he is not as cheerful, he was still alright. The quality of sses didn¡¯t go bad.

    So, they just left him alone upon his request, but it seems like he has bottled too much that just one word in his already angry moment, triggered him to be this self-endangering beast of a person that pummeled Mingiv into the floor.

    Of course, it came at a price and it showed within a minute.

    Just when Giyon was about to stop Sam from killing Mingiv, Sam himself suddenly stopped his actions and fell to the side and rolled on the ground as he tried to take deep breaths.

    His eyes rolled back as his chest expanded and contracted rapidly. The energy in his body became chaotic.

    Grivon and Giyon ran towards him and they tried to control his situation. Specter came beside him and said.

    "His body is reacting to the overdose of energy and medicine, he should be put in an induceda and in a special formation that dissipates the energy residues from his body."

    Grivon was surprised and looked at Specter skeptically.

    "How do you know that?"

    "He told me a long time ago. He gave me these instructions in case he ever uses this technique in a battle. I could manage it, but I believe it would be easier if you guys take care of it."

    Grivon nodded and took an injector of his won with anesthesia and injected Sam with it, cing him in aa.

    Specter sent a memory of the formation to Grivon who immediately made arrangements with the gs. It is a simple formation, and it didn¡¯t take long to arrange it.

    As soon as the formation was ced, Sam¡¯s body stopped twitching and rolling as it was calmed downpletely.

    His breathing became normal and his body went into a dormant state for a while.

    Giyon looked around and yelled out loud.

    "ARE YOU STILL GOING TO WATCH THE SHOW? OR ARE YOU GOING TO SHOW UP ANYTIME SOON?"

    As soon as she spoke, three middle-aged men came out of nowhere wearing golden robes.

    They are the enforcement squad of the n and Giyon looked at them coldly.

    "Why did you let this go on for this long? You came a long time ago."

    "n¡¯s head ordered us to not interfere in the conflict unless any young master is on verge of death."

    "Then what about Malgav, he is on a verge of death."

    "Well, he also gave the order that Malgav is stripped off of his title as a young master of the Gaja n, effective immediately. So, we didn¡¯t bother."

    Giyon instructed subordinates to retreat along with the little girl and stayed there. She decided to stay until Sam is stable and move after that.

    As the enforcement squad is taking Mingiv away, she turned them and said.

    "Tell the elders, Mingiv¡¯s parents, and even the n leader, that this is just the beginning. If they want to punish Sam, tell them toe to me. They need to go past me first if they want to do anything to him.

    Tell them that this is the start of a war that would only end in one way should they try to interfere. It would be good if they let us youngsters settle our disputes, there might be some fairness in it, but if they want to involve themselves, tell them that I am ready to contact my father and grandfather as well and you must have already heard Grivon¡¯s deration before this whole thing started."

    "We will make sure that the message is delivered young mistress Giyon."

    The leader of the squad bowed and carried Mingiv away.

    Giyon looked at Sam who is currentlyying on the road peacefully and sighed.

    She didn¡¯t expect that Sam would blow up like this. Even though she dug a lot of information, it is true that she was unable to dig it all. She didn¡¯t hear of this side of Sam and she then remembered Jyon¡¯s words.

    Sam is like a different person in different scenarios and in this scenario, he is an uncaring beast that tears its prey apart no matter the cost.

 Chapter 1365: Past I

    Two days passed.

    At this moment, Sam is currently inside Giyon¡¯s residence resting on a bed. He is in deep slumber since that day and even though his body returned to normal, he is stillpletely out ofmission.

    Grivon and Jyon are sitting on the chairs beside the bed and Jyon is ying a melodious tune on her flute.

    After a few minutes, she stopped and sighed as she looked at Sam.

    "How long do you think he will take to get back?" Grivon asked.

    Jyon has been ying flute asionally for the past two days when Specter told them that Sam¡¯s soul is a bit erratic and isn¡¯t stable. She is using the music to make the soul reach some peace.

    Specter appeared out of nowhere and said.

    "He is bing stable faster than I thought. He can gain consciousness within a day or two."

    "That is great. There is a shitstorm outside. It is better for him to wake up as soon as possible."

    Grivon replied with sigh and at this moment, the door was swung open and Giyon made her way in.

    "How is he doing?"

    "He is alright. He is almost there."

    "That is good. I need to tell him myself that he owes me big time."

    "How are Mingiv and Malgav?"

    "Mingiv is still in aa and Malgav is undergoing surgery. Sam is really cruel. Not only did this guy bust up the testicles of the guy, but his attack is so precise that those energy ripples only destroyed the skinyers and left the muscle alone.

    It is extremely difficult for even the healers to nurse him back and Vardar is not responding to the calls. Our healers could only think of ways in which his balls would be gone if the skin is restored and they don¡¯t know how to restore the balls at all.

    They are in a big dilemma.

    I am pretty sure that the grand elder will destroy Sam up on sight."

    "What did my grandfather say?" Grivon asked nervously.

    "What do you expect him to say? He just said good job on finding a great friend."

    "He really said that."

    "Of course, from what I know of him, if you had let Malgav go after he abducted a girl right under your nose, he would have probably disowned you."

    "But the trouble with Mingiv¡¯s grandfather?"

    "There is not much that old man can do. He is weak as a quailpared to your grandfather, what do you think he can do? The most he could do is use some political pressure within the n. Even that wouldn¡¯tst long.

    My father and your parents are returning."

    "WHAT?"

    "Dad ising?"

    Two different tones, the shock from Grivon and the excitement from Jyon were made at the same time.

    "Of course Jyon, Dad ising. I sent a message that you are also here, he said that he would bring a flood dragon to eat this time." Giyon said with a smile.

    "Oh my god, my parents areing." Grivon copsed into his seat. There was a silence of few minutes in the room and Grivon spoke again.

    "Why do they have toe now? This issue is not that serious right? We can handle it right? Sister Giyon please contact my parents and tell them note."

    Giyon sighed and said.

    "Grivon, they are a little extreme, but don¡¯t you think you are overreacting a bit. Particrly with what happened just two days ago."

    She looked at Sam and Grivon did the same as well.

    They clearly remembered Sam¡¯s crazed state. He was angry because of the rape, but he became a rabid dog after Mingiv called him a bastard. The rage that seemed to have been bottled up for a long time seemed to have erupted.

    They didn¡¯t expect something like this from Sam.

    After all, he took the fact that his body was stolen like it was nothing. The day he fell back, he started nning hiseback and he is doing great. He destroyed a decent amount of Sivan¡¯s properties that even a young master from their n couldn¡¯t do over the years.

    But just one derogatory term that was a term that was used too much in day to day life triggered him so much.

    After all, at their cultivation levels, they are not that easily fazed by verbal abuse and even though they guessed that this might have been the work of Sivan or the league members, they didn¡¯t expect how this would help them.

    When Sam was irritated, they just thought that the other party was trying to rattle his concentration, but only when he was really out of control did they realize what they are trying to achieve.

    By now, they knew for sure that Sam¡¯s location and his affiliation must have been found out by the spies set up by Mari n.

    Sivan would have already received the news and the same goes with the League.

    Things are about to get chaotic real soon.

    As they were talking and discussing, Sam who is sleeping peacefully on the bed suddenly showed an expression of pain and agony as his thoughts drifted to the unwanted and undesired past.

    In a training facility.

    Eight year old Sam was standing in the empty room under a spot light.

    He is buck naked and he is looking around while trying to cover his genitals.

    "Teacher?"

    He called out to the art teacher that took him out of the house of the middle aged couple he poisoned.

    "Teacher?"

    There is no response. He doesn¡¯t know what happened. He remembered falling asleep in teacher¡¯s house and when he awakened he is here.

    "Teacher?"

    "Shut up. You brat. There is no teacher or preacher here. What is your name?" A middle-aged man¡¯s voice was heard.

    "Who... who are you?"

    "I asked your name, you bastard."

    "I.. I am not a Bastard. My name is Sam."

    "Of course, every kid thates from outside is a Bastard. Otherwise they wouldn¡¯t be here. So, remember that."

    Two yearster, A ten year old Sam is in the training room as he ran over on a treadmill while participating in a shooting exercise on therge screen in the front of him.

    He finished it up and got down.

    Two middle aged men came to him and one of them said.

    "I never expected a Bastard to be this good. This hasn¡¯t happened in a long time within the organization."

    "This Bastard is different from the rest. The rest could barely be suicide bombers or some thugs, but this one is the real deal."

    As they are talking, Sam gritted his teeth and said.

    "I am not a Bastard."

    *PAK*

    A pnded on his face as he crashed into the ground. The middle aged man spoke.

    "I told you on the first day. Every kid thates to the organization from outside world, is an unwanted bastard. Otherwise you wouldn¡¯t be here."

    Sam wanted to talk back something, but the other middle aged man ced his leg on Sam¡¯s face and made him shut up.

    "Now, why don¡¯t you go and finish the procedures for his transfer into the internal branch. I will teach some sense into him while you are at it."

    The first guy left and the second picked Sam up like by his cor like he is a toddler and said in a whisper.

    "Now, repeat after me.

    ¡¯I. Am. A. Bastard.¡¯"

    Sam didn¡¯t say it, but he started shivering as he looked into the eyes of the middle aged man.

    Looking at Sam¡¯sck of response, the man mmed Sam on to the wall nearby.

    *PAK*

    A pnded on his face.

    "Say it."

    Sam shook his head.

    *PAK*

    "SAY IT. You are a bastard. Say it out loud and you can go."

    *PAK*

    "SAY IT."

    Sam still shook his head. The middle aged man¡¯s grin widened and he threw Sam into the floor like a rag doll and removed his leather belt.

    *PAAK*

    The beltnded on his back and Sam squirmed on the ground. But he didn¡¯t scream and he didn¡¯t say what the man wanted.

    *PAAK*

    *PAAK*

    *PAAK*

    *PAAK*

    *PAAK*

    *PAAK*

    A monthter.

    Sam is sitting in arge cafeteria at a table. There are several kids from ten to fifteen years old. Sitting at various spots.

    Sam is the only one sitting alone and his uniform is different than the rest. All of them wore grey uniforms, but Sam¡¯s one has a red cor.

    At this moment, a group of thirteen-year-olds came to Sam¡¯s table.

    "Hey, Bastard. Get the fuck off. We are taking this table."

    "I am not a Bastard."

    Sam replied as he kept on eating. One of the group members dragged him by his cor and took him to the water dispenser. They ced him on the table and started waterboarding him with the ice-cold water from the dispenser and the only thing Sam clearly heard for the next hour is.

    "Say it. Say it out loud. I. AM. A.. BASTARD."

 Chapter 1366: Past II

    One hour after waterboarding and beating the crap out of him, Sam was left alone on the floor of the cafeteria.

    He slowly picked himself up and walked out of the room.

    One weekter.

    At the same time in the same cafeteria.

    Sam is sitting at the same table and eating while a different group of kids came.

    "Oi, Bastard. Get lost."

    "I am not a Bastard. Stop calling me that."

    "Then why don¡¯t you tell that to the instructors. They call you the Bastard all the time. Until the time they stop calling you that, you will always be a bastard. Now, dear bastard. Fuck off from the table."

    Sam ignored them and kept on eating.

    "You are indeed a hard-headed Bastard aren¡¯t you? Get him, guys."

    They dragged him by his cor once again and they started beating the crap out of him.

    "Come on. Say it. I. AM. A BASTARD."

    One hourter, Sam was left with bleeding injuries, a broken nose, and dislocated shoulder in the middle of some spilled food.

    He once again slowly stood up and limped away.

    One weekter.

    Inside the restroom.

    Sam was urinating, when he has suddenly pulled away from there and he was taken into the bathroom stall and his head was dunked into the toilet bowl.

    "Hey, Bastard. Big brother put a bounty on you. The person that makes you admit that you are a Bastard is going to get rewarded big time.

    Now, admit it or I will flush you down ten times before I ask you again."

    Sam who was shocked out of his wits didn¡¯t even know what was happening and before he could make sense of his situation...

    "Time is up. Happy flushing. You Bastard."

    One weekter, Sam was left outside in the open field buck naked throughout the whole night because he didn¡¯t admit he was a bastard.

    Another weekter, he got jumped in the library. His head was bashed against the wooden bookshelf until it waspletely broken and his forehead started bleeding.

    Another weekter, he was waterboarded with hot and cold water continuously while he was in the shower.

    Another weekter, he was ganged up on hand-to-handbat lessons and he lost three ribs on that day and got a concussion.

    While he is going through the abuse he could only hear one thing.

    "Say it. Say it with me. I. AM. A. BASTARD."

    Time passed, he became eleven years old. He became a bit taller and a bit stronger, not much but the training he went through made up for what he needed to do.

    In the same cafeteria. Sam was once again sitting on the same table, alone.

    A group came and asked.

    "Hey Bastard, fuck off. How many times should we tell you? You are not to sit on this table."

    Sam didn¡¯t speak and just stood up. But instead of getting away, he picked up his steel te and turned it sideways before smashing the edge on the head of the guy who spoke.

    The sharp edge of the steel te made a small hole in the forehead and the te lodged there.

    Sam looked coldly as the boy bled and lost consciousness.

    He looked at the rest of the boys with the same coldness.

    "I am not a Bastard."

    Of course, the boys retaliated, but they didn¡¯t have the expected oue.

    One hourter. Sam is standing with a lot of cuts and bruises on his body with his chest bare. He didn¡¯t look like an eleven-year-old kid. He is currently holding a thirteen-year-old boy on the counter of the cafeteria and a bunch of other kids is rolling on the ground with the forks and knives lodged into their bodies. The only thing he didn¡¯t do that day is killing them.

    He held the fork at the boy¡¯s throat and said.

    "Say it, say it with me. YOU ARE NOT A BASTARD."

    The body looked at Sam crazily and said.

    "Do you think you can get away with it? We are internal kids, you are a bastard, you will pay hell for this."

    Sam sighed and picked up a cloth nearby and dipped it in the hot soup in arge container beside him before cing it on the bruised face of the boy.

    "That is not what I asked you to say."

    With that, he took a steel mug, scooped the piping hot soup, and poured it over the cloth on the boy.

    "SAY IT. SAY IT WITH ME. YOU. ARE. NOT. A. BASTARD."

    He poured over four steel mugs worth before a middle-aged man came in and looked at the horrifying scene and stopped Sam.

    One hourter.

    Sam was brought in front of a middle-aged man.

    "You did all of that in Cafeteria. Why?"

    "Because I am not a bastard and they kept calling me that."

    "Hahaha, you are an outsider and the core reason you are in the organization is that your parents have forsaken you, you are an unwanted burden nobody wants to be responsible for. You are a Bastard through and through, whether you ept it or not."

    Sam looked at him coldly and spoke.

    "I am not a Bastard."

    The middle-aged man smiled and suddenly grabbed Sam¡¯s hair and mmed him onto the wooden table.

    "You don¡¯t talk back to me, you Bastard. You listen when I speak and admit when I say, you are a Bastard. Do you understand?"

    "I am not a Bastard."

    *BAM*

    The middle-aged man punched Sam in the face, knocking him out instantly.

    Sam woke up back in his dorm.

    The next day in the library, he mmed the head of a guy on the table and the other one into a bookshelf breaking both.

    Three dayster, he dunked a guy¡¯s head into the toilet seat and hit him to the edge until the other guy bled and fainted, and he shoved a garden hose into another guy¡¯s ass.

    A weekter, he shoved roasted chicken legs and made a guy swallow so many that he had to go to surgery to remove them and in the process almost died.

    Of course, every time, he did such a thing, one thing awaited him.

    He was always dragged by that one middle-aged man and tied up. A leather whip was used to punish him to make sure that Sam got that less.

    "How many times do I need to tell you? A Bastard is gonna be called a Bastard and the more you react this way, the more you would suffer. Of course, it would be my pleasure if you do more things like these.

    We could get this alone time and it would be my pleasure to educate you more and more."

    He said as he whipped Sam until his skin cracked.

    But Sam was unyielding and the very next day, he dragged a fellow ssmate to the kitchen in the middle of some theory ss and dunked his head inside the boiling stew because that guy threw a rolled paper ball with the word Bastard written on it.

    Days passed and soon Sam is twelve years old.

    One day in the cafeteria.

    He is sitting on the ground with his legs crossed and eating from a te with his blood-soaked hand.

    His whole body is soaked in blood and there are some cuts and bruises on his bare upper body. There are a bunch of guys soaked in their bloodying down unconscious on the floor and the kitchen staff is already left in fear.

    Sam ate the food with his hand and looked at the rest saying softly.

    "I told you a million times. I am not a Bastard."

    He used the edge of the te to smash on the guy¡¯s abdomen cutting it open and stood up as he limped out.

    The middle-aged man opened up the cafeteria door and looked at Sam and the rest of the kids.

    There are at least thirty kids with broken limbs and other severe injuries.

    The middle-aged man is extremely angry and he took the whip which hung on his belt as he looked at Sam with a menacing expression.

    Sam turned around and ran away without looking back.

    "Stop right there you sick bastard. Today I will kill you."

    Sam ran behind the counter and yed the game of cat and mouse with the guy. But soon he was caught. They grabbed Sam by his shoulder and whipped him on the face.

    Sam didn¡¯t even flinch as he not only took the hit, but he even caught the whip by his teeth and grinned at the middle-aged man with a psychotic look.

    Thirty minutester.

    A bunch of guards ran into the cafeteria, but Sam and the middle-aged man are not there, they looked at the open kitchen door and walked into it and the scene shocked them.

    Sam is currently sitting over arge boiling pot of soup. The pot is so big that it could be used as a hot tub. But that is not what shocked them.

    The shocking thing is the fact that between Sam and the pot, the upper body of the middle-aged man is being dunked into the soup as used his whole body weight to make sure that the head is fully submerged.

    The middle-aged man¡¯s arms were burnt as well as there are very deep teeth marks and some flesh was torn off of them making thempletely useless not giving the man any leverage to push upwards.

    There are bloodstains at his crotch and the blood is actually dripping from there over his pants and one of his legs is in a crooked shape. He clearly couldn¡¯t stand up from there.

    Sam didn¡¯t even care that his own legs are submerged in the boiling soup. He just ignored the burning feeling and dunked the middle-aged man¡¯s head and made sure it stayed in that soup.

    The guards ran over and forcefully pulled Sam off.

    His legs are covered with long boots which saved protected them a bit, but the same couldn¡¯t be said for the middle-aged man, his skin simply came off and even the hair fell off as if it was not even the part of the scalp.

    The guard checked the pulse and breath and confirmed that the man is dead and looked at Sam in shock.

    Sam looked at that face which doesn¡¯t have any resemnce to the original appearance of the man and said coldly.

    "I am not a Bastard."

 Chapter 1367: Weird Creatures

    "I am not a Bastard."

    Sam loudly muttered in his slumber and suddenly opened his eyes.

    He looked around in vignce as his energy riled up. He is ready to go, but when he looked at the three faces, he finally stopped and sighed.

    Jyon, Grivon, and Giyon are looking at him in surprise. Sam has been muttering for an hour or so and he showed expressions of pain, anger, and unbearable sorrow.

    He should have taken at least two more days to wake up but he suddenly woke up without any signs except this muttering.

    Of course, except for thest line, the three of them really didn¡¯t understand what he is saying or going through within his dreams, but they knew that he is going through something extremely agonizing.

    "Calm down, Sam. You are Giyon¡¯s residence, you are not on a battlefield.

    Sam sighed and leaned against the headboard. He tried to recall what happened and he distinctly remembered what he did to Malgav, Mingiv, and their subordinates. He sighed once again and this time in disappointment.

    He slowly stood up, his body is still aching, but at least he felt he is not in that much of a bad state. He took out a robe from his storage to cover his body and then finally bowed to the three of them.

    This took the three siblings off guard.

    "I am really sorry for what I have done. I shouldn¡¯t have lost control over myself. I not only acted out of my bounds but also brought problems to you. You definitely didn¡¯t deserve this and I shouldn¡¯t have put you through this after the hospitality you provided.

    I really apologize from the bottom of my heart.

    If there is any way to make things right, please do tell me. I will try my best to fulfill your wishes before I leave."

    Only after finishing his piece did he stand up back again. The three of them exchanged nces in confusion and Grivon asked.

    "Leave? Where are you going?"

    "I don¡¯t know how long has it been since I lost consciousness but by now the news must have already spread to Mari n, Sivan, and the league members. It would only bring more trouble to you if I stayed here."

    "It has been two days since you are out and there is no way the news would not reach by now. They must have already known that you are within the Gaja n and they must have also known about your affiliation to us.

    So, there is no point in you going away now.

    And there is no need to go anywhere. You are staying here."

    Grivon said decisively.

    "But..."

    "There is nothing to discuss here. What? Are you thinking of using this as an excuse to escape your work? We made a deal and you said you would help me be the sessor.

    Thest time I checked, I am still not the sessor of the n. So, you better stay here and fulfill your end of the bargain, before you think of even leaving.

    Do you understand?"

    Sam didn¡¯t know how to respond. He is a bit conflicted. After all the situation is not ideal for anyone here. Giyon and Grivon are in open support for him in the battle and now the politics of the n would be pulled out into the open.

    He figured his presence would only make things worse for them, but on the other hand, it didn¡¯t feel right to leave the whole mess for them to sort out and leave directly.

    As he was thinking, Giyon finally spoke.

    "Our parents areing and Grivon¡¯s grandfather already took action. The n head is acting as if this never happened and even if he acknowledged it in some discussions, he is barely considering this as a squabble between youngsters and refused to consider this as anything more than that.

    The internal situation within the n is not that troublesome. The real trouble is from outside and even if they knew where you are and whom you are affiliated with, they wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything rashly.

    After all, what you said is right, Sivan wouldn¡¯t dare to try something on me and even if he did it with his unorthodox and underhanded techniques, your presence would only save us some trouble."

    Sam didn¡¯t know what to say for the moment.

    He has brought too much trouble because of the momentarypse of his self-control.

    He has been enduring these insults for the past week or so and all the frustration was channeled at Malgav because of his actions of viting his student. That bundled-up anger waspletely let out and even the slightest provocation and insult would have made him angrier, but Mingiv just had to go for his sore spot.

    It made him go crazy for a moment.

    He is ashamed of himself for being so easily irritable and dangerous. He almost destroyed his own body to get momentary revenge.

    If he is in his own body and had everything that he owned, he would have had no problem. But currently, his means are limited and this is the time where he should be a bit docile and low profile, but he not only blew his own cover, he even went as far as making some extremely troublesome enemies as if he didn¡¯t have enough already.

    As Sam is thinking, Giyon suddenly broke the silence.

    "By the way, it is great that you woke up now. I need you to take a look at something."

    Sam looked at her in askance.

    "We found something at the inn. Among the dead bodies of some of Mingiv¡¯s subordinates. They are a bit weird, so I want you to take a look at that for me. They are in the basement if you would like to take a look now."

    "Please, let¡¯s go."

    "Are you sure you are okay? I am pretty sure whatever you injected yourself with, put a real toll on your body."

    "I am alright."

    Sam said with a faint smile and all of them went to the basement. Giyon wanted to send Jyon away, but she insisted oning down.

    When they reached the basement, Sam was presented with three dead bodies on three different tables.

    One of them lost half of its body on the left side, the second one didn¡¯t have ahead, the third one is a bit more wholesome.

    "Your needles didn¡¯t leave much of anything, but these three are the mostplete of them all."

    Sam nodded as he examined them closely.

    These dead bodies are definitely not of human or any other race Sam came across. In fact, they don¡¯t even look like cultivators.

    The skin of these bodies is extremely rough and tough. It is almost like a beast hide that waspletely cleaned and processed. It is almost like some high-quality leather.

    The height of the bodies is something astonishing as well.

    They are almost seven feet and all three bodies are of approximately the same height, the difference would only be in millimeters.

    They are bald and do not have any hair on the head or on the face. They gave pointy noses and ears. The ears almost looked like they are elven but muchrgepared to them.

    Sam went to the onepletely intact body to check their eyes.

    He was even surprised by the thickness of the eyelids.

    The eyes don¡¯t have pupils or corneas. They looked like it was one big brown ball.

    Sam used his observation ability to check the internal structure of the body and was a bit surprised by what he saw.

    The muscr structure of the body is extremely tough. Even if these things are only Initial stage Consummate cultivators of the Astral ne, the density of these muscles is twice as tough as a normal warrior of the same level.

    The teeth of the creatures are extremely sharp to the point that they are more suited to be called fangs.

    The teeth are stronger and more lethal than the teeth of Golems and vampires that feast on raw flesh and blood.

    But the most shocking thing is the internal organ structure and various systems of organs.

    The first important thing is, these things don¡¯t have reproductive organs. There are no genitals and even if these creatures are considered to be simr to the Blue Seamen Sam came across, they don¡¯t even share any simrities to that creature.

    The respiratory system of this creature is very huge. The lungs upied most of its upper body and there is no intestinalwork.

    The digestive system only consists of the stomach and there is only one intestine that seemed to be connected to the only excretory organ present.

    The heart is almost the same size as that of a Demi-Giant.

    Way toorge.

    The surprising thing is its brain. It is small.. Way too small for a creature of this size and when Sam focused more on the brain to check it more precisely, the neuralworks are extremely simple and there is no usualplexity.

 Chapter 1368: Butler Si And The League Member

    Sam looked at these creatures for a long while. Apart from these organs, he didn¡¯t find any of the other organs. There is no liver, pancreas or spleen.

    The bone structure is extremely formidable to the point they felt like they are made of some high-grade metal.

    He couldn¡¯t understand how these creatures are made. They are way too abnormal to be born by themselves and their brain structure is not mature enough for them to survive by themselves. Even the dumbest of the beasts could be smarter than these things.

    Sam finished his examination and exined his findings to the others.

    "Are they some kind of creatures that are made through experimentations?"

    Giyon asked.

    "I don¡¯t know. But it is the most likely possibility. And if it is true, it is way beyond the experimental phase, after all, if they are still experimenting, it would be impossible to create such perfect specimens without any differences between themselves.

    They must have seeded and figured out the whole process."

    "You are saying that their brain structure is underdeveloped. But they are moving around freely during the battle and they are very good at it too. They are really hard to counter for the people of the same level."

    "They must be controlled. It is impossible for such a brain to amodate aplex mentality. And even walking and moving would be difficult for them with that neuralwork. Somebody must be controlling them.

    By any chance did you guys notice where did theye from. I was too clouded to notice, it almost felt like they came out of nowhere."

    "They came from inside the inn. We just figured they were guards there. We only felt that something is off after we started cleaning up the mess and one of my subordinates noticed that these people are off."

    Giyon replied.

    Sam closed his eyes and thought for a moment and said.

    "Can we go back to the inn? I would like to check something?"

    "To the inn? Now? The situation is still a bit too hot. It would be quite troublesome to go there now."

    "We cannot dy it. Once Mingives to himself, he might seal off the inn. In fact, he might even be doing that now. I have a few spections and if they are right, we cannot let the inn be sealed off or let them make any changes to the inn."

    Giyon and Grivon are feeling a bit conflicted.

    "The whole incident blew up too much. How about we go tonight? That is the best we can do. If we take you outside now. Not only would the rest of the n shift their focus to you, but even the spies of Sivan and League would also be after you."

    Sam nodded and went back to check the bodies once again. He took some samples of various tissues, including the flesh, muscle, bone, and even the heart and lung samples.

    He also started checking the meridianwork of the bodies.

    The siblings left him to do his research peacefully.

    While Sam is in peace, in many ces, the peace waspletely disrupted and one of the ces is extremely close by.

    Butler Si is currently sitting inside a room within an inn right outside the Gaja n headquarters. A person is sitting across from him. It is a woman who seemed to be in herte thirties with arge braid bundled into a bun.

    "So, Sir Si. To what do I owe your visit."

    Butler Si took a deep breath and said.

    "I heard from the league that you took the mission regarding Sam."

    "Yes. But I am about to withdraw from it. After all, with Ms. Giyon supporting him, I am quite helpless. If she gets angry at me, I wouldn¡¯t be able to save myself."

    "Don¡¯t withdraw from this. I want you to proceed through the mission."

    "But Ms. Giyon..."

    "I know you think that, but from what I know, Sam and Giyon are not that close. The only reason Giyon is supporting Sam at the moment is because of the mary benefits along with her rtionship with her brother Grivon.

    Apart from that, they are not exactly close."

    "Even that is not enough for me to proceed. After all, I wouldn¡¯t even dare to go against Giyon even if it is just stopping some of her mary benefits. In fact, I wouldn¡¯t even dare to stop her lunch. So, please don¡¯t force me."

    Butler Si, felt a bit conflicted.

    "I am watching the n for a few months and I have been looking for the clues regarding Sam. Most of the information that the league received regarding this situation was given by me.

    If I am not wrong, Sam is trying to reduce his presence as much as he can by distributing his business to other young masters and when I looked a bit deeper into it and paid some heavy price, I realized that Grivon is the one partnering with Sam.

    He is the one delivering the businesses. The only reason that Giyon even came into contact with Sam is because of Grivon. It is purely coincidental.

    The reason that she even got involved in the dispute with Mingiv is that the girl is under the care of Giyon.

    As long as you don¡¯t harm Grivon or any of his other subordinates, you can deal with Sam. If you seed in taking him down, I would arrange for your retreat and safety."

    "I am sorry. But as a league member, I cannot work with organizations and that means even seeking refuge.

    And hiding in the league is impossible. The league might think that they are all-powerful, but both you and I know that the power these ns hold is a lot more than they show and Giyon is extremely active in the Grey circle for the past few months. Everyone is straying as far as possible.

    So, please don¡¯t involve me in this.

    Anyway, if you are really so confident about this, why don¡¯t you make a move? After all, I have seen few people that could tackle you in a fight and fewer people that could stop you from leaving a fight. Why are you pushing me ahead?"

    "Sam is way too cunning, he would have made preparations for the league members, but for me, he would have made a foolproof n. He knew I am after him and he would be prepared. I would only alert him more and might even make him disappear.

    He must die as soon as possible."

    "Why are you so concerned? I heard that your young master is doing great now. He is in the process of pumping out new businesses and making new things which I believe are the fruits of Sam¡¯sbor stored in his memories, he is doing fine with this soul absorption.

    Sam has be ackey of the Gaja n, this is a fair fight. Not something you need to be this anxious about."

    Butler Si, sighed and said.

    "It might seem like that, but it is an unfair fight from the start. I looked through Sam¡¯s past exploits, this guy is specialized in manipting people with rewards. No matter what kind of person he is dealing with, they are bound to have a problem and Sam always managed to find the solution for every problem no matter how niche and unorthodox it is.

    He is specialized in dealing withrge targets and Mari n is thergest target he could ask for.

    He doesn¡¯t even need to target Sivan directly, he could even make the Mari n give up on Sivan and even turn people on him.

    This is all a big stupid mess.

    The young master is not convinced about this at the moment, but I believe the more he absorbs the memories, the more he will learn.

    Anyway, please ept my request, I will do anything you ask of me."

    The woman looked at Butler Si in surprise.

    "You shouldn¡¯t slip your tongue Butler Si."

    "I mean what I said. I would do anything."

    "Then I can consider the deal. So, let¡¯s see what are the limits of your anything are..."

    At the same time back in the Mari n. Sivan is in the backyard of his personal residence and he is currently testing something.

    He is holding an energy cell. The solid energy cell that Sam used to make.

    He closed his eyes with a deep frown and started manipting the energy before he threw it away.

    *BOOM*

    The explosion urred just like he saw in the memories and Sivan couldn¡¯t help but smile.

    "What a perverse creation this is. To think that he thought of using pure energy as a weapon. This guy is a piece of work."

    Sivan had a pleasant smile on his face. He went back to take a seat and looked through the reports he has been seeing since the night before and the smile widened.

    "I knew that Bastard is his weakness. This is perfectly exploited and he is out in the open. Now that the fox is out of the cave, it is about time I catch it."

    As he muttered a man wearing a white cloak came from the front yard and bowed to Sivan.

    "What do you need me to do, young master?"

    Sivan smiled and started giving the instructions.

 Chapter 1369: Tests

    That night. Back in the Gaja n.

    Giyon, Grivon, and Sam sneaked out of the n grounds to go back to the inn.

    But they were surprised to see that there is an elder guarding the inn against outside. They looked at him from far away and stopped in their tracks.

    "That guy is ackey for Mingiv¡¯s father. He is here to do their bidding." Giyon said as she thought about how to get in.

    After a few seconds, she couldn¡¯t help but shake her head and sigh. "There is only one way no matter how much I think."

    "Knock him out and go in?"

    "Yes, how did you know?"

    "That is the only idea, I have too."

    Giyon immediately slipped from their hiding location and ran towards the elder from the side.

    By the time elder even realized, she is already near him and even before he could see her face, she punched him on his and knocked him out.

    The three of them got in carefully. After all, if the elder is standing guard outside in the open, there is bound to be someone inside doing something.

    The three of them are very careful as they don¡¯t know what kind of opponent they are facing, but within two minutes of their entry, they sensed something.

    Within the corner of an inn, a silent explosion of fire elemental energy urred. The only reason they observed it was because of the energy wavesing from that spot.

    When they took a look from their position, they saw a ck shadowy figureing of that ce and running towards the exit.

    Giyon ran towards the exit from her position while Grivon and Sam ran towards the room that was set on fire.

    But Giyon was not fast enough as that guy managed to escape from her hands, so she also came to the room without chasing him.

    Sam checked the energy waves in the surroundings and noticed that there is a formation ced to keep the mes going on for a while. He looked through the entrance from various angles and finally found one position from which he shot an energy bullet.

    *BOOM*

    The mes riled up for a moment before they died down almost instantly.

    They entered the still hot room and looked around, but there is nothing present. It is just a normal room in the inn and it was set on fire along with all the furniture.

    Sam spread his spiritual energy across the room and used the observation ability, within a minute, he walked to one particr corner and shot an energy bullet on the tile on the floor.

    The tile was burst open and a passageway opened up for them.

    They jumped inside and there the whole room is filled with ashes. There is not a single thing left. They looked around and noticed that there is a door to another room and they walked in.

    There was nothing left there too, except for passageway to a different one.

    There is literally a floor below the ground floor of the inn and it is currently all emptied out and except for some fresh ashes, nothing was left behind.

    The trio came out a bit disappointed as they made their way back.

    "Why did you even suspect this ce? I mean, I didn¡¯t see it. I just thought they might have stored the creatures there, but from the looks of it, they created them here." Grivon asked and Giyon is also looking forward to the answer because she also didn¡¯t notice.

    "The construction material of the inn. The Inn is actually built pretty sturdy. With all the battle I had on the first floor, there is minimal damage, except for the outermostyer of the whole thing, the rest of the ce was not damaged at all.

    It is a waste expense for an inn to have such a sturdy structure, after all, there is only so much they could earn through an inn, I only had suspicions until now, but now my spection is confirmed. This inn is theboratory for these creatures and either Mingiv or his father is directly involved in the creation of these things.

    If my guess could be right once more, they might as well be making an army of these things."

    "But how?"

    "That is something for them to know and us to find out."

    Two dayster.

    Sam stayed in Giyon¡¯s house. He didn¡¯te out of the basement and he even had some equipment shifted over by Grivon as he did a series of tests on the bodies.

    Most of them are the tests on physical properties of the flesh and bone. Even though they are dead and should be weak and get weakened every second, they are still as strong as the time Sam first saw them.

    It is almost like they don¡¯t even decay at all.

    He then also tested the effects of various elemental energies with the help of Giyon¡¯s subordinates and even more surprising things happened.

    The body of this creature is almost resistant to the abrasive effects of elemental energy. Then only he understood why the damage caused by the fire elemental fused curses that he unleashed on them through those needles.

    These creatures didn¡¯t burn to death, at least notpletely, they barely had that burned flesh. The main damage and the cause of death is actually the pure physical stress the body has undergone due to the explosion caused in such close range.

    After doing all these tests, he called Grivon and Giyon to give his findings.

    "No decay, at least until now, high elemental resistance. The blood quantity in the body is extremely high and it is actually quite different from any blood I have seen.

    There are some simrities with human blood in terms of cellr structure, but apart from that, I didn¡¯t see any. I couldn¡¯t identify any simrities between the gic structure of the tissues with any other being I can think of.

    These creatures are nowhere near the experimentation phase, they arepletely done and perfect as they are. Of course, they might be making some variations on improvement, but they are ready for mass production."

    "So, how are they creating these things, do you have any ideas?"

    "That is the only thing I couldn¡¯t think of. If there was even a piece of equipment left behind, I would have had a better understanding and could have made some deductions regarding the whole matter, but now it is extremely difficult to find out.

    If this was in a bit of a less developed state, it would have been easier too.

    But one thing I am sure of is these things are extremely dangerous and couldn¡¯t be taken lightly. If there really is an army of these and they are unleashed on an army of the same level cultivation, it would be a one-sided ughter."

    "Can improve their strength?"

    "That is one of the things, I got an idea of. They cannot cultivate. Thework of the meridians inside is not made for growth and improvement. It was stagnant and it couldn¡¯t be improved or strengthened naturally. So, it cannot improve its strength, it is made this way.

    This means, there is a possibility that this is their limit or if there is anotherb like this with a better creature that could be made with higher cultivation, trouble ising for you."

    "I always thought these kinds of things are beneath us and only be done by the Mari n members, but Mingiv and his father really brought disgrace to the n."

    Grivon said angrily.

    Giyon chuckled and said.

    "It is good that you still have such a positive outlook on the family. I hope that doesn¡¯t change with time."

    Grivon didn¡¯t understand her meaning, but they didn¡¯t continue on that as she changed the topic back to the creatures.

    "So, is there a way to deal with these things?"

    "The best way is the physical attack or the pure spiritual energy attack, like what I do.

    The elemental energies are mostly repelled unless the force is too strong and powerful. They will negate almost everything thates from simr strength cultivators.

    Even the physical attacks are not invincible against them.

    They are extremely resistant even to those attacks. Their muscle fibers are way too structured. It is almost like they are woven by an extremely skilled fabric maker.

    If your n members don¡¯t deal with these things properly and if by any chance they have a way to reproduce, your realm will be in for a lot, and I mean a LOT of distress.

    It would literally be an apocalypse.

    At least for now, I don¡¯t see any way for them to grow their strength and reproduce which is the only good thing about them."

    "Do you think, you can make something that could deal with them?"

    "Given enough time and resources, I can do that. After all, no matter how good these things are they are still manifestations of the flesh and bone.. I think I can try."

 Chapter 1370: Meeting

    As they were discussing, someone knocked on the door entered. It is Grivon¡¯s personal assistant.

    "Young Mistress, Senior Elder Ma is here."

    Giyon frowned and walked out. This ispletely unexpected.

    She met him in the hall of the mansion, where is waiting while sipping on some fruit drink prepared by her servants.

    "To what do I owe the pleasure of our Senior Elder Ma visiting me? This is not something happens every day."

    "Young Lady Giyon. It has been a long time since I saw you. How are you?"

    "I am fine, but I don¡¯t if I would be after I learn the reason to your visit."

    She said as she looked at him coldly.

    The Senior Elder Ma is actually a young man who looked to be in his early thirties, his ck hair was cut choppily and he had dark green eyes that looked a little creepy no matter how one looked at it.

    "I havee here on behalf of a Core elder. Mingiv¡¯s father to be precise. He is inviting you to the n leader¡¯s residence along with your brother Grivon and your friend named Sam."

    She frowned and asked.

    "Is the n leader inviting me or is it the Mingiv¡¯s father?"

    "It is most definitely Mingiv¡¯s father. So, if you could grace him with the visit, things would be finished quickly."

    "When did Mingiv¡¯s father have any authority to invite me over to n leader¡¯s residence."

    "Of course he doesn¡¯t have any authority over the residence, but he does have the authority to call for a meeting with a junior member. So, he is calling you on that authority."

    "It seems like hepletely forgot to mention you this. I am officially a special title holder of the n and my status is simr to his. I don¡¯t have any obligation to go and meet him and on my authority as the title holder, I am currently in a meeting with Grivon a junior member, which negates his summons.

    As for Sam, he is a guest of mine. So, you can shove your invitation wherever it is convenient and get the fuck out of my residence."

    Senior Elder Ma looked around the residence silently, particrly towards the hall and the entrance and smiled at Giyon for onest time before leaving.

    Right when he was about to exit through the door way, he stopped and ced his hand on the frame as he turned his head.

    "Are you sure you don¡¯t want to reconsider, young mistress?"

    "I am positive, now get out, before I kick you out myself."

    Senior Elder Ma nodded and left.

    Giyon went back into the room with a weird expression.

    "What did he say?"

    "He is here to invite us on behalf of Mingiv¡¯s father to the n leader¡¯s residence."

    "What? Senior Elder Ma did someone¡¯s bidding? Are you kidding me?" Givon was so shocked.

    "I thought so too. He doesn¡¯t even attend the n meetings and takes the punishment for that that sit through and mingle with others. I cannot believe Mingiv¡¯s father made Senior Elder Ma to run a chore.

    That is impressive."

    Sam didn¡¯t get what they are speaking, he was about to ask but the attendant came in.

    "Young Mistress, the attendant from n leader¡¯s residence is here."

    Giyon frowned and walked out once again and this time Sam and Grivon followed.

    "Youngdy Giyon, n leader is inviting you, young master Grivon and your esteemed guest Sam to the n leader¡¯s residence."

    "Right now?"

    "Yes, young mistress."

    Giyon sighed and all three of them went to the n leader.

    Ten minutester.

    In the meeting room of the n leader¡¯s residence.

    n leader is sitting with Mingiv¡¯s father and the Grand elder who is Mingiv¡¯s grand father on one side as they waited for Giyon and the rest toe.

    "Where are they? They should have been here five minutes ago." The grand elder said with a frown.

    "Not really, Grand Elder Pon. It would take thirteen minutes to walk from her residence to here."

    "Walk? Youngsters today are too insolent, they should be running at tehir top speed as soon as they heard that n leader is calling them."

    "Why would they do that? After all, it is an invitation, not an order. In fact, she could even reject it and she wouldn¡¯t be at fault."

    "You are too indulged n leader, you shouldn¡¯t be cutting this much ck for youngsters."

    "Of course, I shouldn¡¯t have cut too much ck, it was because of me that Malgav became such Ephebophilic rapist. I should have kept a better eye on them."

    As soon as he spoke, the atmosphere in the room turned strange, there is a tension in the air and the Grand Elder Pon is looking at his son with disappointment.

    After all, it is because of his son¡¯s ipetence to raise the children properly that he had to take this shit from the n leader.

    If not for the fact that he only had one son, he would have killed him by now.

    At this moment, the door opened and Giyon came in along with Sam and Grivon.

    Sam looked around and noticed the tension between them, but he didn¡¯t speak. He just bowed slightly along with Giyon and Grivon who performed the courtesy greetings.

    They took their seats opposite to the other three and Giyon spoke up.

    "For what do I owe this pain and pleasure of having this meeting?"

    n leader smiled and said.

    "Grand Elder Pon has a favor to ask you and I am just here as witness in case the deal was made."

    Giyon turned to Grand elder pon who is a robust old man and asked.

    "What kind of deal does Grand Elder Pon want to make? I never thought that Grand Elder would be interested in business."

    "It is not about the business. It is the deal about my grand sons."

    "I am not really willing to do that, but on the courtesy of the n leader, I will hear you out."

    Grand elder pon¡¯s face darkened and he said.

    "I ask you to withdraw the officialint on Malgav through the n. With such a serious charge he lost the title of the young master, if you withdraw theint, he would get his status back."

    "And why would I do that? So that he coulde and rape some other little girls under the protection of my estate? I am really sorry, I wouldn¡¯t do that."

    Grand Elder Pon took a deep breath and said.

    "It has been three centuries since thest young master or young mistress lost their title, and I don¡¯t want such a thing to happen in my household for such a disgraceful crime. You withdraw the case and I would skip the trial and make him go through the punishments that are suited for the crime. But not officially. After all, he would get his punishment, so you should be content with it."

    "It seems like grand elder is way toofortable passing on judgments regarding what others should feel content with for so long. But here is the wake up call. I don¡¯t give a fuck what you think is enough. He would punished through the trial and I am going to advocate for my end of the case and that is the end of the matter."

    "What I am telling you is for your own sake?"

    Grand Elder Pon spoke through the gritted teeth and an invisible pressure mounted on Giyon, Grivon and Sam.

    n leader cleared his throat and said.

    "Giyon, I think you should consider some of the grand elder¡¯s suggestions. In fact, you should have a seat with your father and ask his advice regarding them."

    As soon as he spoke, the pressure was gone in a poof. Grand elder¡¯s eyes widened in disbelief and he looked at n leader in askance.

    "Oh, it seems like Grand elder Pon doesn¡¯t know. Big brother Gin ising, he would be here by tomorrow. So, I am pretty sure Giyon would talk to him and get his advice on how this matter goes. You can leave it at that.

    Also, you said that you need to ask our esteemed guest something, so if you proceed faster, we could be done here."

    Grand Elder Pon stayed silent for a moment with gritting teeth, before he turned to Sam.

    "What method did you use to destroy the testicles of my son along with the skin, the healers are saying that he would lose thepleteness of either one of those. They couldn¡¯t identify what kind of damage happened to correct it."

    "They didn¡¯t regenerate those balls yet?" Sam asked calmly.

    "They said that if the testicles were regenerated first, the rest of the skin generation wouldn¡¯t be smooth and he wouldn¡¯t reach his original state, but if he focus on that, the testicles would bepromised and they don¡¯t know if they would recover the full function. What did you do to him?"

    "What kind of stupid and pathetic healers do you have?"

 Chapter 1371: Attack

    Sam looked around as everyone in the room turned silent. Then he realized what he said was wrong and smiled.

    After all, the healers would have been the best of the best the Gaja n could afford, they really are the cream of the crop, but that doesn¡¯t mean they are good enough for this.

    Sam didn¡¯t feel bad and said.

    "There is nothing in the world that would make me tell you what you want to know and if your healers really couldn¡¯t think of a way to save both his balls and save him from the disfigurement caused by the skin regrowth, then they really are pathetic.

    What is even more pathetic is the fact that you really asked me to reveal my technique of attack.

    What did you even think I would do? Just hand over my possible enemies, my attacking technique and even help them save the one person I wish I had killed? What is wrong with your brain? If I were you, I would get a brain check."

    "How dare you?"

    The old man mmed his hand on the table as he looked at Sam angrily, but Sam didn¡¯t even flinch and looked back at him.

    "How dare I? How dare you?

    How dare youe in front of me and ask me to save the beast of a guy who vited my student? How dare you, the person who is supporting a shameless pathetic rapist that targets little girls, talk down to me?

    How dare you to evene and act all deserving and righteous even after knowing that you contributed to the fact of creating such a vile thing as your grandson?

    Don¡¯t try to show your almightiness in front of me. It is not the first for me to have stronger enemies and I am pretty sure this is not thest. You don¡¯t scare me. Not in this lifetime or the next."

    "You are in Gaja n¡¯s territory, I would watch my mouth if I were you young man. After all, from all the information I had about you, you are surviving solely because you are in my n."

    "That only means your information is half-baked. Why don¡¯t you try to dig deeper and you will see that the only reason that your little grandson is still alive is because your big grandson slipped his tongue at a perfect time and the only reason he is alive is because his opponent is someone with two substages of cultivation levels behind.

    And even then, he was knocked out and from what I am hearing from the healing assistants, if the surgery doesn¡¯t go well, his face would be a hot mess for the rest of his life and he would need a mask.

    You must be really proud, Grand Elder Pon. You are the greatest Saber User in the history of the n, you killed two Grand elders of the Mari n single-handedly in one battle. You went ahead and ced your g inside the core area of the Mari n.

    But your descendants, one has been obsessed with helpless little girls and the other was busy defending him and on top of everything, you are busy threatening someone for those sorts of descendants.

    I am sure you are very proud."

    Giyon spoke calmly and she looked straight into the eyes of the Grand Elder Pon, whose face turned red in embarrassment.

    All Giyon did was list some of his aplishments, but that only made him feel more and more embarrassed.

    After all, for him to produce a descendant such as Malgav is indeed an embarrassing thing to do.

    "Hmph, do you think we wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything without your help? We are going to invite Vardar and we will see through the trial. Lets see how you are going to escape unscathed by the end of it."

    Mingiv¡¯s father spoke and Giyon just rolled her eyes. She looked at the n¡¯s leader and said.

    "Grivon¡¯s parents are alsoing along with my father. I am nning to have a dinner. We would be happy if you would like to join. From what I heard, Sam has some pretty good recipes, I think he would be sharing some of them for this asion."

    "Oh really? Then I must definitely try that exotic taste. I will surelye."

    "If that is all, I would like to take my leave."

    n¡¯s leader turned to Grand Elder pon, who just nodded and the trio left.

    "What is the point of him asking us? He doesn¡¯t look like an idiot, he should know that there is no use in asking this of us."

    Sam asked with confusion.

    "He is just fulfilling his duties as a father. He cannot just let his son go without doing this much. Now he has a perfect excuse and he can alsofort himself saying that he tried his best."

    "Really? He came here and endured all that scolding from you and me, just for that? He is so powerful, he could just say his son to go fuck himself, that would have been easier."

    "Of course it would have been easier like that if he is not whipped for his wife. You wouldn¡¯t understand, after all you have been single your whole life. You find the perfect woman and you would know."

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but roll his eyes, this ispletely and utterly iprehensible to him.

    "I destroyed the balls of one of your cousins and almost killed another one making literally half of your n my enemy and you are still trying to set me up with your sister, are you out of your mind?"

    Grivon suddenly remembered this as he forgot it because of all the distractions in his life.

    "That is right. I was about to ask about this. Sister Giyon, did you really try to set him up with Jyon? He is right, are you out of your mind? You must be, otherwise, why would you even think of that much less executing that.

    Do you know how many enemies this guy has? Do you know how many people want to kill him? Do you know how little time he spends at home?

    Oh, of course you know, you know it better than me, so why did you still try to set them up."

    Giyon just pped on the back of his head to make him shut up and didn¡¯t even bother to exin to him, rather she turned to Sam and said.

    "You destroyed the balls of a rapist and almost killed a guy who insulted your birth and your mother. And you did that despite the possibility of killing so many people. So, if you ask me, this is a plus in my book.

    You tell me, if you have a sister, would you not try to find her a husband like you?"

    "Of course not, if I have a sister, I would kill any guy like me thates near her. A guy like is only good for bringing death and destruction to the surroundings. I am never a goodpany unless the interests are aligned.

    So, stop with your madness. I believe we need to prepare for some serious revenge."

    They reached Giyon¡¯s residence once again, but as soon as they stepped foot at the entrance...

    *BOOM*

    An explosion urred, and a puff of green smoke starteding out of their entrance.

    Giyon reacted quickly and waved her hand.

    A barrier appeared and covered all three of them.

    Sam looked at the green smoke. This ispletely unexpected, but he sensed some familiarity from this green smoke. He just couldn¡¯t put a finger on why and where he saw that smoke before.

    As he was contemting, Giyon suddenly made a move. Her punch went past the barrier and shed with something that came from within the green smoke.

    *BAM*

    Energy shock waves blew the smoke away.

    "Everyone, activate all the formations of the residence. All the servants move to the basement-2 and activate the anti-gas formation. Now."

    The servants immediately ran in and even some of the servants who fell prey for the smoke, were carried by the rest. They quickly ran into the second basement and they were given emergency treatment.

    As the green smoke cleared a figure became clearly visible. A person wearing white robes and white cloaks and something clicked in Sam¡¯s mind.

    He knew that person. He definitely know who he is and what he does. But not from his memories, rather from Sivan¡¯s memories which also exined his momentarypse.

    "He is an expert in poison and disguise. He is about your cultivation level, I don¡¯t know if you can deal with him though."

    Sam quickly said and pulled Grivon to the side. He decided to help Giyon out and took out his staff.

    He is not fighting though. He stomped the staff on the ground and immediately the remnant smoke was cleared with the energy waves.

    Along with that an energy barrier was created.

    "You can deactivate your barrier and you focus on attacking, I will take care of Grivon and the poison."

 Chapter 1372: Slave

    Giyon looked at the opponent in surprise. She has never seen him or heard of him, but from the looks of it Sam knew who he was and she could specte who sent this guy.

    But those spections are what shocked her. If he belonged to either Sivan or the League, they wouldn¡¯t normally dare toe inside and attack Sam, but if someone still came, they are either mad or theypletely lost hope on their life and wouldn¡¯t mind giving it away like this.

    Sam¡¯s barrier worked better than Giyon¡¯s barrier as it repelled all the poisonous gas.

    The man in the white robe took out some darts and started throwing them towards Sam. Even though Giyon is his toughest opponent there, he didn¡¯t care, his target was Sam and he decided to focus on that one target.

    Sam channeled the energy through the staff and shot energy bullets at the darts, even before the darts made their way to the barrier, the energy bullets reached them and exploded.

    The darts didn¡¯t reach and taking his opportunity, Giyon started attacking from the side as she came out of the barrier and punched at him.

    The opponent threw a dart at her, but a thin translucent barrier appeared, not only did it block the dart in a timely manner, it also diverted it and the barrier immediately disappeared without hindering Giyon¡¯s attacks.

    *BAM*

    The punchnded squarely on the man¡¯s ribs and he flew past a dozen meters and crashed into the ground.

    Giyon ran towards him to continue with her attacks.

    The opponent spewed some blood out of his mouth and his white robe is no longerpletely white, he took out two spherical fruit like objects and threw them towards Giyon and Sam.

    While in mid-air, they started giving out this green smoke.

    Sam didn¡¯t know what they were, but he sure as hell knew that they were not good to fall near.

    He waved his staff and two energy bubbles formed around the two fruits, while they are still in their air, stopping them from hitting the ground.

    As soon as they hit the bubble wall, they started spewingrge amounts of poisonous green gas, which at the moment, ispletely blocked by the two bubbles.

    Giyon without any hindrance, managed to attack the guy once again and this time, she managed tond a critical blow, breaking his jaw while he was trying to dodge.

    The man was knocked unconscious with just two attacks.

    Sam diverted the two energy bubbles carrying the poisonous gas into the divine dimension fragment he got from the old man. The dark elemental energy divine dimension fragment and let them go.

    The poison leaked out, but in that vast expanse, it doesn¡¯t really matter.

    The battle was over quicker than they thought.

    Sam was really impressed by how strong Giyon is, she managed to deal with an opponent on the same level with just two blows. Of course, if she had to worry about the poison too, she might have needed to take a few more blows, but it is still pretty impressive.

    Giyon walked to the guy and coldly twisted her neck hard enough to kill him.

    "Who is this guy?"

    "Mari n¡¯s ve."

    "The ves to Death?"

    "Yes, he is part of them. I think we can get the required information from his memories."

    Sam said as he gestured to Specter to deal with him.

    Meanwhile, Grivon is looking at the whole situation in utter shock. He didn¡¯t expect that someone would dare toe into the Gaja n territory to attack Sam.

    He never expected this, he felt pretty safe inside after all.

    But he also felt relieved that things went the way they went, but he is now a bit troubled about what would have happened, if he was alone when the people attacked.

    As he was thinking, Sam finished extracting the memories and digested them. When he was done in a few seconds, he finally understood what the matter was.

    "Sivan sent him, even though he is here to kill me, it is definitely not what Sivan believed."

    "What do you mean?"

    "There is this Mari n custom which many people don¡¯t know. The ves to Death are a particr group of people that are enved for generations. They would marry, give birth, but even the newborn would be the ves and they also need to serve the n till their death.

    But there is an opportunity for them to be freed from their ve status, if one of the direct descendant of the Mari n, like their young masters, fathers a child with one of the female servants of a family line within the ves of Death groups, the whole family line would be freed from their very.

    Of course, that child wouldn¡¯t get official status and the woman wouldn¡¯t be his concubine or something, but she would be a normal subordinate in that young master¡¯s household, something like a maid and that child would have freedom to go out of the n and pursue his own life.

    This man has a daughter and Sivan enticed him with the offer that he would father the child with his daughter, in fact the offer is more than that, he actually bargained with the genes of my body."

    "What do you mean by bargaining with the genes of your body? What difference does it make?"

    "What difference? It makes a huge difference actually. My body is a work of art in itself. It is a perfect fusion of human, beasts and vampire gics. Even I was tempted to see what woulde of the person that I gave birth to.

    So, Sivan said that not only would he father a child with this old man¡¯s daughter, he even promised to nurture that child and send him out when he reached the Astral ne cultivation along with the mother to live their lives freely.

    Now, this is the result.

    This guy didn¡¯t even bother to think twice beforeing here and killing himself like this."

    "This guy might not know what the consequences would be and how this goes, but Sivan should know that it is impossible toe here and do this, then why did he send him like this?"

    Grivon asked as he was genuinely perplexed.

    As they were standing there and talking, the guards came and decided to clean up the mess. Sam took off the spatial rings and let the guards take care of the body.

    The poisons inside the storage mighte in handy.

    Giyon called the n¡¯s investigation and enforcement departments.

    "Someone from Mari n not only managed toe past the gates, but they also made their way to my personal residence, I don¡¯t know what kind of work you are doing to let such a blunder get by, but if I don¡¯t receive a proper exnation by tomorrow, I wouldn¡¯t bother this case anymore.

    Because, my father ising and he would take care of it."

    The expressions of the people became horrified as soon as they heard it. Their faces paled and they couldn¡¯t help but imagine the scenarios of what they would have to face if Giyon¡¯s father really took over the case.

    They immediately left and the word that Giyon¡¯s father ising and a day before that Giyon was attacked, made everyone in the n be excited. They knew that they were in for some really good shows.

    After sorting the mess out and deactivating all the formations, Sam went to the basementb to get back to his research.

    This attack actually happened at a great time. He is already thinking of using toxins to test the effects on these weird creatures, and now he has a storage of an expert in poisons. This cannot be anymore timely.

    He started fishing through the whole thing.

    There are not many spirit stones, but there are many many ss vials as well as those weird fruits that acted like some poison grenades, the darts and so on.

    The ss vials and ss containers, stored more than a thousand different toxins and along with the base toxins there are some mixed toxins.

    Apart from that, there are some scrolls and books written by the man himself about different toxins and poisons and the notes regarding his experimentation with the toxins on various beasts and creatures with natural toxin resistance.

    Sam is really impressed by what he saw.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel a sense of admiration for the guy. The ves normally don¡¯t fight the battles, they act as guards for the young masters when they didn¡¯t awaken and the guard duty is only bound to the n grounds.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel sorry for the oldman to die in such a way. He has been serving Mari n for the best of his abilities and he even contributed to them so much with his expertise which helped them kill so many people, but he without much battle experience arrived at the Gaja n without any backup or a n for that matter and died unjustly like this.

    A talented person just left the world. That is really a shame.

    But apart from that faint pity, Sam also felt something else, confusion.

 Chapter 1373: Clues

    Sam immediately went back to meet Giyon.

    "What happened? I thought you are looking forward to checking his research."

    "I was, until I came across something more interesting in his memories."

    "What is it?"

    "Before, I skipped past most of his memories as I was looking for Sivan¡¯s orders and such, but now that I went into a little more detail, I can now understand more.

    For starters, the memories of him entering the n are nowhere to be seen."

    "What do you mean? How can memories disappear like that?"

    "I don¡¯t think they disappeared, I believe they don¡¯t even exist. Thest thing he has regarding this entry is that he came into contact with someone in the city secretly, they talked through letters and after their n was ready which this guy doesn¡¯t even know, he was given a special medicine and he lost consciousness after that.

    The next memory he had is the memory of himing directly to your residence. It is almost like hended on the path to your residence."

    "So, he fainted after the medicine and came here. There is only one possible method that he might have had toe in that state. Someone must have smuggled him in."

    "Yes, I knew that spies would be present in the n but this is too much, someone managed to smuggle a man like that in, if that is the case, then you guys are in some serious trouble."

    "Are there any other clues?"

    "Yes, from the memories of this guy, he doesn¡¯t have much field experience. He is one of the ves that spent almost every day of his life inside the n grounds, he didn¡¯t evene out for half a dozen times and even that time was to go look for the poison herbs he is researching.

    So, I was a little intrigued on how he might havee this far without any problems so I took a deeper look at the minute details and found something.

    He was given a proper route by Sivan. He was given locations and routes of the ces he needs to visit and what kind of means he should use to go there."

    "Then, that exins it. Sivan just gave him instructions."

    "Yes, those instructions included on how to contact Sivan¡¯s spies and subordinates spread across the route and thest one of those contacts is not actually a spy. I looked through the information many times.

    Sivan specifically told him that this person is not a subordinate and he is just a helper. He also told him that he wouldn¡¯te into contact personally and there is only one way they could contact him.

    Now, we have that method to contact him."

    "I don¡¯t think that method would be useful at the moment though. After all, that guy should have already known about us killing this ve, so he wouldn¡¯t keep thatmunication method open."

    "Of course, he wouldn¡¯t but I think I can find a way to get some clues out of that method ofmunication."

    "Are you sure? I mean, the person would have most likely destroyed it by now. Do you really think you can find something from there?"

    "If the method ofmunication is just as mentioned in his memories, then I most certainly can.

    Oh, and there is another clue, but I don¡¯t know if you would be able to use it in any way."

    Sam said and started writing something on a scroll.

    "This is the handwriting on the letters this guy received from the spy in this ce. I don¡¯t know if this would be helpful, but I think it would be a bit useful. I believe it would be better to search secretly."

    Giyon frowned and started thinking she couldn¡¯t find a way to find someone based on their handwriting, but Grivon thought otherwise.

    "n records. I think I have a way to follow this lead. I will take care of it."

    He excitedly took the paper and left. Meanwhile, Giyon and Sam went to look for that clue.

    Giyon¡¯s subordinates who were distributed over since she is inside the n already came over and all of them went outside the city. They stopped at a particr ce in the woods and Sam started checking the position before he finally stopped in front of a tree.

    This is a big tree with a small burrow.

    He climbed up the tree and looked through the burrow. After confirming that it was the tree, he immediately uprooted it and threw it inside the divine dimension fragment.

    He them moved to another location where he found another tree. In that way, he uprooted a total of eight trees and after he did that, he boarded a bird type beast to get a high vantage point to take a look at the spots that were left behind by the trees.

    "We are done here. Let¡¯s go back."

    Giyon was a bit confused. She doesn¡¯t know what exactly Sam managed to find out, but she didn¡¯t ask. She decided to wait for him to exin it himself.

    After they went back, Sam directly went to the basement and started working with the trees. He worked until the night and finally managed to get some clues.

    "I got what we need."

    He ran back to Giyon and said excitedly.

    He then led her back to the basement and started to exin.

    He currently had eight small wooden blocks ced in different positions of the room.

    "The person is using the tree burrows as the nodes for a small space gate formation. So, if you reverse engineer it, you can find the coordinates of the otherside?"

    "The formation was removed, there is little chance we can do that, but even if the formation is intact, it would be difficult. The formation is a bit different than normal ones.

    There are some differences and one of them is that one of the burrows is the ess point through which they send the objects and messages to each other.

    The remaining burrows are the nodes concentrating on this one point and sending the objects away from here, there is no physical connection between the transfer point and the rest of the nodes.

    The second difference is that this is not a direct space gate. This is a new method, which I didn¡¯t know existed, but if my guess is right, this formation doesn¡¯t have all the required mechanisms to act as a full fledged space gate.

    It is using a normal space gate as a transit to do the work.

    "What do you mean?"

    "A typical space gate has several mechanisms infused into its formation. The coordinate reader, coordinate locator, nodal activator and so on, but this formation only has the nodal activator from this side and the coordinate locator which should connect to the other end is not present, instead it is reced with a special tool which seems to be an original creation.

    If my guess is right, this tool locates the space gates in the vicinity and tampers with it, in fact this formation uses very little energy and using that energy this tool tampers with the nearest space gate that is full of energy and then uses the locator and nodal activators as well as the energy of that formation to move to the other side.

    Whoever did this, is a genius."

    "How does this help us?"

    "The range of this tool is not much. So, if my guess is right, the space gate formation is within the city.

    And if my guess is right, the Gaja n doesn¡¯t allow external space gates of other organizations within the city, the space gates must operate under their own control.

    So, now we know we are looking for either a person who has ess to the space gate formation mechanisms or a person who has ess to the resources that could let him have a secret space gate formation.

    This also exins how this guy came to your residence in the first ce.

    Our mystery target must have used this to bring him here.

    So, piece all the information I have and think of the possible suspects."

    Giyon went into a deep thought, but there are some doubts that are conflicting her judgment so she decided to clear them first.

    "You have Sivan¡¯s memories, so howe you don¡¯t know who this person is?"

    "That is also something bothering me. If I have to specte, I would say this person came into contact with Sivan after the transfer of the souls, if that is the case, you can say that this person is not a spy, but rather a person who wants to go against you."

    "That is slightly better. How did you find all of this through the burrows of the trees, I mean, you said that the formations are removed."

    "Of course, they are removed, but there is always a downside when someone is using the natural objects as nodes.. They are bound to leave some clues down unless they destroy the objectpletely, but our target must have overthought somethings and under thought some other making this costly mistake."

 Chapter 1374: Narc Test

    "How costly do you think this mistake is?"

    "Costlier enough to probably get him caught. When natural objects are used as the nodes, they would be drawn with all kinds of inscriptions and they would always leave a residual trace of the rune used for the inscription.

    Most of the time the trees would be destroyed.

    The other party must have wanted to make sure that we didn¡¯t feel any suspicions because of the tree locations which would be noticed too much if they are destroyed, after all that is a big giveaway.

    But the other party didn¡¯t expect my presence here, I don¡¯t need some other extra clues to think of the position of the trees and what kind of formations he might have used. So, I just checked the few usible trees and finally I got the trees rounded up and checking the residual traces of the runes, although difficult, is actually very easy for me.

    In fact, I have been dying to try this technique and I managed to do it without any hitch. Now we can narrow down the suspect by a lot.

    One thing is he either has an extremely talented subordinate who is specialized in spatial element or he himself would have been a great user with space element.

    The second thing is, someone who has ess to the space gate formations of your n or the person capable of maintaining a secret formation. I am sure with yourwork, you would be able to narrow it down easily."

    As they were talking, Grivon suddenly ran into the basement with some documents.

    "I have found the person. I have found that person."

    He acted like a little kid who finished a task their parents gave, he is just too ecstatic.

    Giyon looked at him in surprise.

    "What did you find, exactly?"

    "The handwriting of the person who sent the letters. I think I figured out the person who sent these."

    He hurriedly took out a document from within the n and ced it in front of Sam and Giyon.

    Giyon gave it a quick scan and was stunned.

    "These are annual reports of the n members? Are you nuts, you looked through the whole heap of them?"

    "Of course, but I was fast enough to go through them. See, I found out."

    Sam was surprised by her reaction.

    "What is it? Why are you so surprised? I think it is a good idea that he thought of the annual reports."

    "Of course, it is a good idea. But the problem is these reports are something that even the person who is supposed to see them would ignorepletely.

    They are some pieces of scrap that are just thrown out every year and every year they just increase in number. To go through them is a nightmare."

    Giyon said in a depressed tone, it seems like she had some really bad experiences with them.

    "Anyway, I still managed to find it, so some appreciation would be nice and this guy is actually a member of the expedition squad. They are staying with the n grounds for over two weeks, they just recently finished this expedition, so they are staying put at the moment."

    Giyong looked through everything and thought.

    "Expedition team, high ess to the space gates, in fact constant use. That checks out, but the problem is that he doesn¡¯t have any expertise in formations, inscriptions and he is not good at space element."

    "At least he is a start. Why don¡¯t you guys go and check him out? I will work on the creatures we got. We need to find the solution for that as fast as we can."

    "We don¡¯t need toe. Someone will bring him here."

    She took out her token and contacted someone.

    Sam shrugged and went back to his research. He took out all the toxin samples inside the old man¡¯s storage and arranged them neatly he took minute samples from each one of them and started testing them on the muscle tissue of the creature.

    As far as Sam knew about these creatures, the only thing he could do at the moment is think of ways to destroy the flesh physically. He doesn¡¯t know if they would be infected by the virus and other microorganisms and he couldn¡¯t test what the level of their healing abilities are.

    He doesn¡¯t know how effective the physical damage and to what extent they need to go to destroy them.

    The toxins that could either corrode the creatures directly or the toxins that could make the muscle tissues die are the only things he could work on at the moment.

    As he was working, Giyon and Grivon brought their target from the expedition team.

    Giyon directly dragged them into a special room with the residence and made him sit on a chair forcefully.

    "You have thirty seconds to tell me what I need to know after I ask the question, if you don¡¯t, nobody would be able to save you.

    You wouldn¡¯t be able to escape my wrath, even if you beg for help at the n¡¯s leader himself."

    The young man gulped in fright.

    Giyon simply took the letter that Sam forged based on the old man¡¯s memories and showed it to the young man.

    "You wrote a letter with same contents, why did you write this? On whose orders?"

    The young man was shocked out of his wits and didn¡¯t even know what to say for that.

    "Youngdy Giyon. I didn¡¯t write any letters."

    GIyon¡¯s killing intent eruptedpletely and narrowed it all on to the young man.

    He started shivering and the whole attire ispletely drenched in sweat and for the lower garments are even more pathetic as they were drenched with urine along with the sweat.

    Sam looked at him with a frown. He looked genuinely confused. He is either a really great actor or he is telling the truth.

    Giyon tried a few more times, but he couldn¡¯t find anything from him and he even fainted from fear.

    "I don¡¯t think he is lying."

    "Then do you think some other guy did this? I mean the writing is way too on point with this. Ipared it and it is extremely simr. Even the slightest curves are to the point."

    Grivon said from the side.

    "Maybe, someone might have forged this, but just like how you said, they wouldn¡¯t expect us to find someone through these n records and hand writing, so I don¡¯t think that is a very big possibility.

    What if he did indeed write the letter, but he doesn¡¯t know it at all?"

    "Do you think someone might have controlled him to do this?"

    "That is a very good possibility. Does anyone else know that we brought him here?"

    "Except for my team, none of the other people know about this." Giyon replied.

    "Let¡¯s keep it that way, why don¡¯t you go to the space gate crew and find someone who is extremely trustworthy, someone who you would hand over a knife in your most vulnerable moment and ask them if they could find out about this guy.

    Ask them if they saw any activity of this guy near the space gates in the past few days. A few weeks even.

    Also ask some other people to check whatever other ces he might have been. If possible find whatever he did, every single thing in the past few days. Every single activity and every single minute."

    "I think I can find it."

    Sam then turned to Grivon and asked.

    "You seem to have a lot of pull in the n, then you should have some pull here and there. Why don¡¯t you see if we can find any method to get this guy to tell the truth? He should only speak truth. Some hypnotic truth telling method?"

    "There is one in the enforcement squad. I will try to pull some strings. I really do have some connections. But I think we need to do it tomorrow. There is no way I can make them do it now. It is midnight."

    Sam looked outside the window and he was a bit surprised.

    They never expected that the day would go by this fast. It is way too unexpected.

    "Its okay. We can pick up where we left tomorrow. But do it as fast as you can. We need to find this as fast as possible. Otherwise, we would be having some serious trouble."

    Sam went back to the basement to check the toxins and kept on doing some tests the whole night.

    The next morning. They started working by dawn. Giyon used all her contacts that she could contact at the moment and got all the information Sam asked within a few hours.

    Grivon also pulled some strings and got someone from the enforcement department to conduct something simr to the narcotic test used in modern world to make people talk in interrogations.. It is a special drug and they are conducting test in Giyon¡¯s residence.

 Chapter 1375: Test Results

    Giyon, Grivon and Sam along with the person from the enforcement squad are all sitting together in one of the rooms in Giyon¡¯s residence.

    The person from the expedition team was tied up to a chair and he is still feeling a bit lost and afraid. They fed the medicine to him and the enforcement squad member started guiding him through the process.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit surprised and familiar at the same time. The narcotic test is so familiar to him because it was part of his trained. There are many things that the modern world has and this world doesn¡¯t, but now there is this test with almost same steps as the one in the modern world, so he was caught off guard a bit.

    As the test went on, the enforcement squad member started asking questions.

    Some of them are the obvious questions. Like name, parents¡¯ name, upation and such.

    "Are you a spy of Mari n?"

    "No, I would rather than be a spy of Mari n."

    "Have you betrayed Gaja n?"

    "No."

    "Do you have thoughts of betraying Gaja n?"

    "No. Never."

    "What did you do at dawn two weeks ago?"

    "I sneaked out of my lover¡¯s house."

    "Why did you sneak out?"

    "Because her father doesn¡¯t like me as my position is too low in his opinion."

    "What did you do in the afternoon one week ago?"

    "I was having a meal with my lover in the wild. I hunted a Blood Hare which she cooked. It was a delightful afternoon."

    The questions went on and on as they asked about everything regarding his schedule. He answered everyone of the general stuff correctly, until one question.

    "What were you doing at midnight three days ago?"

    "Midnight.. Midnight.... Midnight... I don¡¯t know."

    "You don¡¯t know? What were you doing two hours before midnight?"

    "I was at my lover¡¯s house."

    "What were you doing an hour before midnight?"

    "I was leaving my lover¡¯s house and was going back to my residence."

    "What were doing at the midnight?"

    "I... I... I can¡¯t remember. I don¡¯t know."

    The group was a bit shocked to say the least.

    Because this guy really doesn¡¯t have any recollection of what exactly happened. But when they looked at the schedule they got, he was actually seen going into the space gate area.

    "What were you doing half an hour after midnight."

    "I.. I don¡¯t know."

    "What were doing thirty one minutes after midnight."

    "I was in my residence."

    The enforcement squad member took a step back and whispered to the trio.

    "I am pretty sure that he ispletely unaware of what he did in that time period.

    Giyon pointed out a few points in the activity log of this guy and said.

    "Ask him about these."

    The squad member did as he was told and all the answers were useless. The other party either doesn¡¯t know or cannot remember.

    The trio immediately came to a conclusion, they are pretty sure that he was being used all this while. He must have been manipted by all of this.

    As the questioning continued, the expedition team member suddenly answered one question differently.

    "What were you doing at sunset three days ago?"

    "I... I... I saw a snake. I saw a snake." He answered drowsily with slurred speech and as soon as the word snake was mentioned, Giyon¡¯s expression changed.

    "What did you do after seeing the snake?"

    "I watched the snake for a long time and fell a sleep on a meadow."

    Giyon gritted her teeth and identally destroyed the arm rest of the chair with her grip.

    "This is definitely that bitch¡¯s doing."

    Sam and Grivon were stunned. This is the biggest emotion that Giyon has shown in a long time.

    Even before they could ask her what is wrong, Giyon stood up and said.

    "I think I know who did this. You can end it here."

    But Grivon hurriedly objected the ending, Giyon just shrugged and left the room. Sam doesn¡¯t know what to do and followed Giyon. Since she said she has a lead, it is better to work out the rest of the process with her.

    As they walked out, Grivon started asking the guy from the expedition team about his battle achievements. Apparently, his battle record is extremely decorated, so he wanted to see if they are really true and when the questions continued, it turned out that this guy is not only good at what he does, his achievements are also somewhat robbed.

    This made Grivon ecstatic.

    "Wake him up."

    After the guy woke up, Grivon looked at both the enforcement and expedition team members and said.

    "Would you guys willing to join my team?"

    Both of them were surprised and ecstatic at the same time.

    Joining the team of a possible sessor candidate is not that easy. After all, most of the time they develop their own forces from the scratch and only recruit people from outside and the external branch because they cannot be sure of what kind of spy they might bring in if they recruited from within.

    But now Grivon extended the olive branch, they could only take the bait and hold on to it.

    Meanwhile, Giyon is extremely frustrated outside and Sam observed her carefully.

    She kept on muttering something iprehensible. After a few minutes, she took a deep breath and calmed down.

    "I can guess who did it. I know of a person who ys around with the snakes and she is extremely skilled in hypnosis and can make people do anything she wants them to do. If my guess is right, she would still be near."

    "What about her formation and spatial elemental expertise?"

    "Non-existent, but she has a special technique which makes it easier for her to cooperate with someone that knows about these things. It is a bitplicated, I will exin itter. But right now, I need to fish her out as fast as I can. If she has even the tiniest doubt that I am looking for her, she wouldn¡¯t even hesitate to run away."

    "But once the people move, it is impossible to hide it."

    "Yes, that is what I was thinking. I am trying to think of a way to detect her without causing too muchmotion."

    As she was thinking, Sam said.

    "I think we can use Grivon¡¯swork. That is the first thing we modified after I entered. Hiswork is extremely passive and dormant. No one would be able to suspect anything."

    "How did you guys even do that?"

    "We ced many of Grivon¡¯s subordinates as menial workers in various ces. Particrly, bars and restaurants. Along with that, we managed to poach a few people without revealed Grivon¡¯s face and identity to get the information. They are normal waiters, prostitutes, bartenders, cleaners, door guards, street vendors and so on.

    They would be pretty useful.

    You just give the description of her and I am sure someone must have seen her before."

    "It would be hard for someone to notice her. She wears a cloak all the time."

    "Are you sure? I mean there should be at least one ce she would have removed her disguise while she is still in the city. Is there anything that she likes more than the rest?"

    "Food? She is actually very much interested in eating and tasting various delicacies. She couldn¡¯t control herself and at that time, she definitely removes her veil at least."

    "That is good enough. In fact perfect. Just give the details of her facial features and I will take over the rest. If she is really here and she is really tempted by the food as much as you say, I will flush her out in the next two days.

    All you have to do is wait and make sure that this whole news doesn¡¯t go out."

    "I can manage that."

    As they are talking, the enforcement team member and expedition team member left the room and hurriedly ran away from Giyon¡¯s residence.

    Grivon came after them with a smile.

    "What happened?"

    "I just recruited them. They are going back to turn in their resignations."

    Giyon and Sam were a bit surprised, but they didn¡¯t bother too much, because some thing that they should bother with came knocking on the door after an hour.

    It is Mingiv¡¯s father.

    He barged into the residence when Giyon and Grivon are discussing the facial features of Giyon¡¯s suspect to inform their informants.

    "Giyon. Send that scoundrel Sam out now. He better tell me, how to treat Malgav now or he would be in for some serious trouble."

    Giyon was a bit surprised by this guy daring toe here. She knew for a fact that everyone in the n wouldn¡¯t cause her any trouble and that includes the n¡¯s leader, particrly on this day. But this guy dared toe in and demand her something she wouldn¡¯t do.

    "What happened? Did your brain turned to fluid or something? We already told you yesterday, that he is not willing. Now, get out."

    "I want to see that Scoundrel right now. I am not leaving without him even if it meant dragging him out myself."

    "You better watch your mouth. It is because of this yapping that your elder son will never look the same again.." Grivon said coldly from the side.

 Chapter 1376: Disciple

    Giyon and Grivon looked at this guy as if he is an idiot. There is a reason why Grand Elder Pon backed down yesterday but this guy who is the son of that grand elder couldn¡¯t even realize that and is acting like some bigshot here.

    It is almost like he believed that he can drag Sam out of here if he wants to.

    "We invited Vardar from the Divine Pce of healing and even he is unable to save both the manhood and the appearance of my son. We need topromise one of them. There is a possibility that we might be able to save both of them if we know the type of attack used. I need him to tell me that now, or I would torture him until he begs me for death."

    "I don¡¯t give a fuck about what Vardar or anyone else wants. He is the leader of the Divine Pce of Healing, isn¡¯t be a bit ashamed about not knowing how to treat someone and even went as far as asking the person who caused that damage?

    Even I am feeling embarrassed about this." Grivon didn¡¯t hold back and started taking shots.

    Of course, Vardar is not here. But he still couldn¡¯t help it. After all, the very thing that is making Vardar survive without any opposition is his reputation as the invincible healer. Now they could understand that his reputation is extremely unfounded.

    All Sam did was give one hit to Malgav that literally busted his balls and yed his skin at the same time. They saw it with their own eyes, he was not even particrly focusing on the guy. He did it in a second.

    But even the supposed greatest healer couldn¡¯t fix it now. They really couldn¡¯t understand what Sam had done to make the situation like this and they couldn¡¯t even wrap their head around the fact on how the healing of the balls and the skin are rted, but they couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit awed.

    Just as Mingiv¡¯s father was about to blow his top one more time, a young man came knocking on the door and directly entered without Giyon¡¯s permission.

    This made her frown in annoyance as she looked at him coldly.

    "Sir, My master needs your permission for the treatment. Please,e and make the final call. The more you wait, the dangerous it could get."

    Even though the young man is talking to Mingiv¡¯s father, his looks are hovering over Giyon and that unhindered lust is clearly being show on his face.

    Giyon gave him a hostile stare as she spoke in an extremely calm and cold tone.

    "Get the fuck out."

    "Pardon?" The young man acted as if he didn¡¯t hear what she is saying.

    "I said get the fuck out of my house." The young man was dumbfounded as he sensed Giyon¡¯s killing intent enveloping himpletely as her aura raged without any control.

    He and her are of same cultivation level, but he felt like a candle in the middle of a snow storm. He felt cold, weak. He felt like he is something that could be extinguished at any given moment,pletely at the mercy of therge and dangerous storm.

    Sam who is in the basement experimenting suddenly sensed the auras raging and he came out.

    He has long since stopped wearing the cloak since his identity has been already revealed. When he walked into the hall, the young man who is buckling under Giyon¡¯s pressure took a look at him and revealed a shocked expression.

    Sam frowned and looked at him with the same expression. He saw this guy before and it is not exactly something he would be mistaken or forgotten.

    Because he was part of therge entourage that followed Sivan during the soul exchange process.

    Sam hurriedly ran towards him and asked Grivon.

    "Who is this guy?"

    "From the looks of it, he is the disciple of Vardar."

    "Vardar is here?"

    "Yes, he is here. It seems like Grand Elder Pon must have called out a huge favor for this one."

    "So, what are they doing here?"

    "Vardar is unable to find a way to save both the balls and the appearance of the guy so he asked his father to choose which one they need more.

    And it seems like Vardar said that there is a possibility of saving both if he knew the type of attack that was used. So, he is here to demand and this disciple is here toe and call the old man to give a go ahead for the treatment.

    In process, this idiot gave an improper look to my sister and the situation in front of her is the reaction."

    "I never knew that Vardar¡¯s disciple selection criteria is this pathetic." Sam muttered after listening to the exnation.

    Vardar¡¯s disciple became angry and looked at Sam with a hateful expression.

    "At least, this pathetic disciple is part of the reason why you are leading such a pathetic life now, Sam. How is the life of the cripple treating you?"

    The young man said with much difficulty and this only made Giyon increase the pressure on him. She didn¡¯t even want to make a direct move as she felt that it is beneath her.

    The young man finally buckled and knelt down on the floor.

    Sam walked towards him and held the chin of the guy with his metal hand.

    "Do I look like a cripple to you?"

    As he said that, a very small miniscule energy bullet came out of the finger and exploded right beside the ear of the guy.

    The explosion is very small and minute, that it barely did anything to him, but the sound of the explosion made him go crazy.

    "FUCK."

    As he swore, Giyon walked towards him and caught him by his throat and said to Mingiv¡¯s father.

    "You get out right now and tell Vardar that if he needs his disciple, he cane here and collect him. As for the treatment method or the technique used on your pathetic son, it wouldn¡¯t be given out even if your fatheres here now.

    So, get out, before I use the n rules to kick you out."

    Mingiv¡¯s father was a bit shocked. He didn¡¯t expect that Giyon would hold Vardar¡¯s disciple hostage right there and then.

    He didn¡¯t expect that his small emotional outburst would lead to such a transgression. This might even involve Vardar not treating his son at all.

    This made himpletely terrified, but looking at Giyon¡¯s angry expression, he knew that this matter wouldn¡¯t be resolved easily.

    He immediately ran away to inform this to his father. This is the only thing he could think of at the moment.

    He went away and informed his father.

    Grand Elder Pon who is trying his best calm down by meditating, couldn¡¯t help but lose his cool and p his father.

    "The discussion was already over. They refused and we are going to n trial. How dare you go and cause ruckus there? And you led Vardar¡¯s disciple to Giyon¡¯s residence? Are you out of your mind? Don¡¯t you know what kind of person that guy is? Is he any better than your second son? Why would you take him to the den of people who likes busting the balls of the lechers? Do you want to create an irreparable rift between the n and Vardar?"

    He couldn¡¯t help but curse himself for how he failed to raise his son. In his younger days, he was so involved with his craft that he ignored his children and since their marriage is political the mother of these childrenpletely led them astray and that is the very reason his wife and another one of his children died.

    Now, his son is also leading the family into a simr situation.

    He immediately made him way to the n¡¯s leader and exined everything.

    "This is a bit tricky. Even I don¡¯t want to get involved with Giyon and Grivon today. Their parents areing and your son went ahead and made this mess? Do you think Giyon would hand over a guy like that just because we asked her to do so? Particrly, when her father might very well be right around the corner. You tell me, do you think this is feasible?"

    "Please try. I am tired of these kids. I just want everything to be over now."

    "I will try. You make sure that the information doesn¡¯t go to Vardar at any cost. Otherwise, things wouldn¡¯t be good for any of us."

    n leader immediately made his way to Giyon¡¯s residence, but what he doesn¡¯t know is that it is already a bit toote.

    Right before he started, Vardar already made a call to his disciple through amunication token.

    Giyon picked the call and talked to him.

    "Who are you? Where is my disciple?" Vardar asked in a cold tone.

    "Ask someone where Giyon¡¯s residence is and they will lead your way to where me and your disciple are currently at. Come here and we can talk.." Giyon replied coldly and cut themunication off.

 Chapter 1377: Confront

    Vardar looked at themunication token coldly. He is extremely angry at the moment. This is the greatest insult he has ever received at least out in the open.

    He coldly looked around to find an elder and after he did that, he gestured him toe near him.

    "Lead me to Giyon¡¯s residence."

    "Sir Vardar..."

    "I am not asking if you are willing to or not. I am telling you to lead me there right now. I would like to see what your Gaja n¡¯s hospitality is first hand. How dare one of you to keep my disciple hostage? Lead me there now or I would ount this transgression to the whole n, which means this would be the end of our cooperation for once and for all."

    The elder gulped and decided to just lead him there and wash this matter off of his hands.

    But as they reached that spot, the n leader also coincidentally came at the same time. When he looked at Vardar¡¯s figure, he couldn¡¯t help but hold his forehead in frustration.

    He knew this would be a headache, but he didn¡¯t know that it would be this much of a headache. Now that Vardar is here, there is no stopping this situation.

    Vardar stopped in front of the n leader and both of them are standing right outside the entrance.

    "What is this n Leader? Are you aware of what is happening to my disciple and did you still let that happen?"

    "No, Sir Vardar. I was just made aware of the matter and I immediately came here to free your disciple. I was about to bring him directly to you after getting him back from her, but you came here before I had a chance."

    "It is still good this way. You can be the witness to the whole thing so that your n doesn¡¯t me me for being unfair to someone of the younger generation."

    With that, he walked straight and didn¡¯t even bother to knock before opening the main door of the building.

    n leader shook his head once again in exasperation when he saw this.

    "Who the fuck is that so mannerless toe barging into my house?"

    She directly yelled without any restraint. Vardar stopped in his tracks as his face turned red in embarrassment. A woman of the younger generation is scolding him for being mannerless. This insult ispletely unbearable.

    Before he could speak, n¡¯s leader who is standing behind him knocked on the door and an attendant came running towards them.

    "Tell Giyon that n leader and Vardar came here to visit."

    Vardar was shocked by his words. The attendant just casually nodded and went back to running to Giyon.

    "You are the n¡¯s leader and you still have to ask for permission from her? Did the youngsters of the Gaja n be so insolent nowadays?"

    "I am the leader of the n, not the ruler and I am responsible for n members¡¯ safety and even I don¡¯t have the right to invade their privacy as I like. Particrly, when we are entering the house of a youngdy uninvited.

    Moreover, she is not just anyone. She is the financial genius of our n and she brought more profits than anyone else in thest century, so she deserves some respect herself and her status is no less than that of a core elder."

    When Vardar heard this, he immediately guessed where the problem came from. He knew how his disciple acted when he was not present and sometimes, he doesn¡¯t even care whether Vardar is there or not.

    Even though he is the disciple of Vardar, his official and generational status is still less than that of a core elder. It is not right for him to treat a core elder that way. But he still couldn¡¯t stomach this and walked forward after the attendant returned.

    When Vardar and n leader was led to the hall where Giyon, Sam and Grivon are sitting along with their subordinates, Vardar saw his disciple kneeling on the floor with his whole body drenched in sweat. Giyon is calmly sitting on her chair with fruits served to her on a tter which she is eating with her fork.

    Vardar looked at her angrily and was about to yell when his look stopped on Sam sitting beside her.

    Sam looked at him and gave him an evil smile. The fact is that Sam and Vardar are meeting for the first time. But Vardar knew too much about him because he knew Sivan very much and learned of his face.

    He also learned that Sam is the reason why his grip over the intelligence organizations in various ces waspletely gone.

    He is a littlete on the news because the incident that revealed Sam¡¯s location only happened a few days ago and he was in seclusion for a bit.

    But now that he has seen Sam, he knew that he is in for something big. He also realized that there might be some underlying factors involved in this hostage situation.

    Vardar didn¡¯t speak and just stood there. Giyonpletely ignored him and kept on eating her food. When the disciple realized that his master is here, he was about to stand up, but Giyon¡¯s aura surrounded her and enveloped the guy pushing him to submission once again.

    "Did I say you could leave?"

    "Giyon, you better let him go right now and I might just forgive you for the whole matter. Otherwise, things wouldn¡¯t end badly." Vardar said calmly.

    n leader sighed and walked close to the Vardar as he whispered.

    "Sir Vardar. I apologize in advance for what I am about to say. If you really want your disciple in one piece or even want him at all. You better not rile her up. Ask her what the problem is and resolve it peacefully."

    "Hmph... Just because you are used to coddling youngsters, I don¡¯t have to amodate them."

    *PAK*

    As soon as his word left his mouth, his disciple¡¯s face was hit with a palm and the face then hit the ground.

    The Vardar looked at Giyon with widened eyes.

    "You are the master of this lecherous piece of shit aren¡¯t you? Don¡¯t you know to teach any better than this? First, he barged into my private residence without my permission. Second, he looks at me lecherously and misbehaves here, and finally, he even threatens me.

    Is that all your teaching is worth?"

    "YOU..."

    "Before you went on yapping about who you are and what you are, I am telling you, I don¡¯t give a fuck. I am already in an extremely bad mood now and I am really not willing to talk to some unworthy teacher of a lecher. So, listen to me...

    You can take your disciple back, but in exchange, I need that umbre that belongs to your Divine Pce. I don¡¯t want to negotiate and with time, the price will only increase. So, you better decide, and for every hour you dy, I will destroy one joint of your disciple and you better believe that your status and power wouldn¡¯t help you get you out of this situation."

    "I would like to verify that im," Vardar spoke and his whole body is covered with spiritual energy as his aura of Peak stage Consummate realm cultivator enveloped the whole room.

    "My dignity is not something you can challenge youngdy."

    The Vardar spoke coldly and stepped forward.

    "I thought anyone with twenty-two thousand three hundred forty-two spirit stones can challenge that. What changed?"

    Sam¡¯s voice reverberated around the room and for a few seconds, everything turned silent. Vardar¡¯s aura raged uncontrobly but it was still silent. Everyone can see that he is extremely embarrassed and ashamed of this line.

    Everyone looked at Sam.

    "Oh, I forgot what changed. It is just that the price has increased. And even then I thought that the price of the life of one of your disciples is more than enough, when your dignity could be sold by three thousand acres of Marsh used to grow Red rough Algae. I guess I miscalcted.

    This lecherous disciple is indeed not worth that much."

    The spiritual energy in the room fluctuated continuously as Vardar¡¯s eyes turned red. He even forgot Giyon for a moment and turned to face Sam.

    "You better watch what you say?"

    "Oh, what are you going to do if I don¡¯t? Would you go andin to Sivan or would you do the same thing you did to the Demon Soul swordsman long ago?

    If you are nning to do thetter, you better remember how big it backfired. It almost blew up in your face."

    The Vardar opened his eyes wide in disbelief.

    "How do you...

    It seems like you are really tired of living. I will kill you now."

    He was about to make a move when suddenly he felt an enormous pressure bearing on him. He looked at the n¡¯s leader, but the man is leisurely standing there with a helpless expression.

    "I already warned you.. Now that guy is already here and I doubt you will be safe even after paying that ransom."

 Chapter 1378: Sonic Prince

    Everyone looked towards the door and even Vardar who was about to make a move on Sam, sweated as he looked at the door.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel chills down his spine. This is the most afraid that he has ever been in his whole life. Maybe the second most, but there was only one time he felt this afraid and that is one of the moments, he repressed with a lot of effort.

    A man who seemed to be in his mid-thirties came in. He looked tall, handsome, and above all of them, he looked so sophisticated.

    His dress is not too luxurious, but it is simple and elegant at the same time. His hair is not too long. He maintained shoulder-length hair and he has this fairplexion.

    Sam instantly activated energy vision as he was intrigued by the aura and the energy emitted from this man¡¯s body.

    The energy waves in the surroundings arepressing the energy waves that are being emitted by Vardar.

    At first, Sam felt Vardar¡¯s energy and aura is suffocating enough, but now, this power and strength which didn¡¯t look like much as there is not a single emotion in the man¡¯s face could be this powerful.

    It is simple, refined, dangerous, and controlled all at the same time.

    The handsome walked slowly as his face slowly produced a smile.

    He soon neared Giyon with that smile and both of them hugged. Giyon also smiled gently.

    Sam was even surprised by that smile a bit because this is the first time, he has seen her smiling this genuinely. The smile was gentle, joyful, and pure.

    "How are you dad?" Giyon asked with the same smile and Sam was taken aback.

    He has never met Giyon¡¯s father, but he assumed that guy would be a bit older. At least he thought the man would look to be in his early forties and he also assumed from the stories that the man would be farrger, cruder, and rougher.

    But instead, he looked like prince charming.

    "I am great dear. How are you? I heard your name a lot in the circle within the past few months. You were a busy bee."

    "Of course, I wanted to make a name for myself. I couldn¡¯t sully the name of the Sonic Prince."

    "Sullying my name? You are the best daughter anyone could ever ask for.

    Anyway, what is happening here? I seemed to have sensed the aura of a pest while I wasing."

    As he spoke, he looked at Vardar who is still standing there and a hint of killing intent came out of his bodypletely focused on the Vardar.

    Sam who felt this killing intent, couldn¡¯t help but feel a sense of threat even though it is not directed at him. He looked at the man with apletely new outlook. He felt a tinge of intrigue and a tinge of admiration, even though they just met.

    For him to have such killing intent, he must have gone through hell ande back and for him to suppress and control it like this, he must be the best of the best. He is an apex predator.

    Giyon looked at Vardar and then at Vardar¡¯s disciple before giving the gist of the situation and the more he heard, the more the killing intent leaked.

    Both of them are of the same level, but the difference is like night and day. He walked towards Vardar and stood in front of him.

    Vardar¡¯s overbearing attire and luxurious presence were immediately overshadowed and he coldly spoke.

    "Hello, you must be Vardar. I am Gail a member of the Gaja n. Giyon here is my daughter and I am known to be protective of her.

    So, I don¡¯t like it when someone has bad thoughts towards her. If I was here a few minutes before, I would have killed your disciple and then hunted you down and killed you too. But now my daughter already made a deal and I am giving you a chance.

    Go and get that umbre, and hand it over.

    You will have a chance to live. I am sure you know that I am more than capable of doing so."

    Vardar gulped.

    "I... I..."

    "I didn¡¯t ask you to speak Vardar, I asked you to give the umbre and you are going to give that umbre. Or are you trying to get out of this situation using your contacts with Mari n to get out of this situation?

    That brat, Sivan might be decent, but do you think he would be able to save you from me? Even if you take refuge with the help of his father, as long as Ie face to face with him and ask him. He would hand you over without a second thought.

    If you don¡¯t believe me, you can try."

    "You, you..."

    *PAK*

    The pnded on the face of Vardar and the flesh off of his face was removed along with it, making it bleed.

    "I told you not to speak. So, don¡¯t speak. Are you going to hand it over or not?"

    Vardar felt extremely suffocated and he almost wanted to pee in his pants. His hands are shivering as he slowly raised his hand and an umbre came out of his storage into his hand.

    The umbre is extremelyrge and it looked like it waspletely made of some silver metal.

    It looked extremely well made.

    Gail tossed the umbre to Giyon and tapped the cheek of Vardar once again.

    "I don¡¯t care what you think of this situation. If you ever dare to take this out on the rest of the n. I would kill you and destroy your whole empire all by myself.

    If you don¡¯t believe me, go and meet a friend of yours called Draconian. Go and ask him about Sonic Prince. Ask him, if it is wise to do something I told him not to.

    If he answers yes, you cane and get your umbre.

    Now get out."

    Gail looked at the n¡¯s leader and said.

    "I will talk to youter."

    "No problem, Big brother. Giyon invited me to dinner. We can talk then."

    "Alright."

    The n leader immediately dragged Vardar and his disciple away.

    Gail turned around and looked at Sam.

    "You must be Sam. I have been hearing a lot about you recently."

    Sam frowned in confusion.

    "Don¡¯t feel so confused. My circle is a bit different and entric. The normal gossip there is actually some top-grade intelligence in many other ces.

    Your name has been overflowing since your body switched with Sivan, you disappeared after that. Many people tried to look for your past and found some of your exploits. You really an intriguing person. I was really looking forward to meeting you."

    Gail extended his hand and Sam shoot it with a smile.

    Gail then turned to Grivon and hugged him.

    "Seems like the little kid is finally growing up. You have been pretty busy recently. How are things going on?"

    "Everything is good uncle. How are you? Did you bring me a present?"

    "Of course, how could I forget. I found a perfect alloy for your sword. I gave it to a friend to forge, I will leave you with a brand new sword before I leave this ce.

    By the way, your parents would be here by night. They are taking care of something."

    "You guys met on the way?"

    "Actually we met at ourst destination. We traveled together and just separated yesterday."

    After some initial greetings and exchanges, Gail asked for Jyon.

    "Where is my little girl? I haven¡¯t seen her in a while."

    "As you might have already know, Sam here is attracting a bit too much heat recently, he had this conflict with Grand elder Pon¡¯s family and now someone sent a guy to attack him at my own residence.

    So, I figured it would be better if she stayed within her residence until we find the culprit."

    "Have you guys figured it out?"

    "I think I have. I believe it is the doing of that Snake Bitch."

    Gail was surprised a bit.

    "She attacked you?"

    "That is what¡¯s surprising me, but a guy lost memory of a few things he had done over the past few days and the only thing he remembered about the first time it happened is the snake. You tell me, who has this skill set."

    "I can name a few, but most of them are not alive, She might be the one."

    "So, have you started the search?"

    "We are nning to do it on the down-low. Sam has an idea, he believes he could fish her out."

    "Need any help. I think I can find her."

    "No need. We will handle it, if anything really happens that troubles us, we would definitely ask for help."

    Gail just shrugged.

    Sam went back to the basement after conversing a little while, Gail, Grivon, and Giyon went to Jyon¡¯s residence.

 Chapter 1379: Parents

    The next day.

    Sam has already prepared to make a n to fish the woman out. That woman whom Giyon only called the Snake Bitch.

    But only after he asked a few more times did he realize that it is actually her nickname.

    The Snake Bitch. He wondered what kind of person she is to have such a name. He is sure that he would know when they captured her.

    So, he created two special recipes. It is actually a hot pot with some exotic meat that could only be avable within this realm and is very hard to get.

    By afternoon, he sent all of Grivon¡¯s subordinates and even activated every dormant subordinate they set up for Grivon¡¯swork, and they were given only one job. They have to spread the information regarding the new restaurant that is going to open with this exciting exotic meat and the new method of eating it.

    In fact, that night itself is the grand opening and they are doing this massive free sale.

    For this, Sam made Grivon buy one of the restaurants under Migron¡¯s control secretly and they used the assistance of the subordinates working in Grivon¡¯s stray realm to remodel it as quickly as possible.

    Sam made the hot pot set up as fast as he can with the help of the artisans and arranged the restaurants by the evening.

    By night, the service was open and a lot of people came because of the free service and the promised exotic menu.

    The service went on and on almost until dawn, before they were forced to close down because the ingredients are finished.

    The next day, the word of the restaurant spread like crazy. That is the only thing anyone is talking about. Even the young masters and young mistresses of the Gaja n are looking for to taking a bite here and even the elders managed to hear a word or two.

    But they didn¡¯t go right away as the restaurant announced that they are doing this special discount service for the next three days which attracted a lot ofmon folks and created arge rush in front of the restaurant.

    They don¡¯t want to create amotion in the middle of it all.

    The restaurant doesn¡¯t open until lunch, but people started lining up in the morning.

    Sam, Grivon, and Giyon looked at the crowd from far away were surprised. The response to the ce is a lot more than they thought.

    As they were thinking, Gail suddenly came out of nowhere and stood beside them. They are currently on the balcony of a home far away from the restaurant. This is actually Gail¡¯s secret house right in the middle of the city.

    "It seems like your n is going well. The word around the city is that this restaurant is the best venture Migron has ever stepped in. The food is absolutely delicious as well. Snake Bitch wouldn¡¯t be able to control herself from trying the food at all.

    But are you sure, the next step would be done properly? I mean, she is a powerful cultivator and it would be hard to fool her easily.

    And if my guess is right, she doesn¡¯t have any spatial elemental expertise and the things you exined to me seemed extremelyplicated. She would have a teammate who is extremely skilled in that area. They might hinder her."

    "I have absolute confidence in doing so. If shees here today, she will definitelye tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and the day after the special sale ends.

    The more times shees, the easier it would be to make here back and I already made a n to make here back here. I made a few more recipes which we would be introducing after shees here." Sam said with confidence.

    As they were speaking suddenly, Grivon¡¯smunication token and Gail¡¯smunication token received alerts.

    But they are frompletely different people as they moved aside to speak.

    Grivon came back with a frown.

    "The new subordinate from the Enforcement team found something. He ising to Sister Giyon¡¯s residence. He doesn¡¯t want to speak about it from within the enforcement department as he doesn¡¯t feel safe there."

    Gail also came and said.

    "That would be good because we need to go to Giyon¡¯s residence as well. Your parents are here."

    Grivon¡¯s frown turned to surprise.

    All of them went to Giyon¡¯s residence as soon as they entered the house.

    A sh went past them and Grivon almost felt like he was tackled.

    "Oh, my little baby. How are you? Why did you be so skinny? Are you not eating well? I already told you, even if you can make do without eating and just with cultivation, you still need to eat three meals a day. You need to fatten up a little.

    Why did you be so tan? Are you working too much?..."

    Sam heard this melodious loving voice instantly going on and on.

    He looked at a woman who looked to be in her early thirties holding Grivon tightly while speaking as he asionally kissed his forehead in the middle.

    Grivon felt a bit suffocated as she held him in a bear hug and even his hands were stuck.

    Thedy has long flowing hair and she really has the loving motherly aura even though she wore dark ck.

    "M..Mom.. I.. can¡¯t breathe."

    Grivon managed to squeeze those words out of his mouth and thedy finally realized that she might have been holding him way too tight and released him from the hug.

    "I am sorry my dear. How are you? Are you alright? Do you need to lie down?"

    Giyon and Gail rolled their eyes and thetter said.

    "Yuvani, cut it out. He is not a little kid and no he doesn¡¯t need to lie down. Just let him breathe a bit."

    "Big Bro, you can¡¯t say that. How can he say he is not a little kid? He is not even thirty yet."

    A graceful but based male voice came from the side and then only Sam saw the other person in the room.

    He is as tall as Gail and they both looked almost the same with some differences. This man has very short hair and he is almost wearing a crew cut.

    He is wearing ck and his eyes are a bit darker than Gail¡¯s. He had a sword on his hip as he slowly walked forward.

    His every action is sharp and his aura is like a living sword. Sam hasn¡¯t seen such an aura since Demon Soul swordsman. This is one of the purest sword auras he has ever seen.

    Gail looked at his brother with a smile and said.

    "Really Gamin? By thirty, you were in the middle of Mari n¡¯s territory ripping the throat of the young master because he misbehaved with Yuvani in a gathering. Are you sure you were a kid back then?"

    "That is different. Completely different. It is likeparing apples and oranges." He just denied everything and went to hug his son tightly just like his mother.

    Giyon and Gail are smiling and then Jyon walked from inside the house.

    "Uncle, Aunt. Leave Brother Grivon alone, you are embarrassing him in front of his friend."

    Finally, the couple looked at Sam who is standing there looking at Grivon and his parents.

    They sized him up and down as if they are inspecting them openly.

    "So, you are Sam. Too bad, we cannot see the real you in this body, but you still don¡¯t look bad. How are you feeling here? I heard you and my son struck some deal. How is it going?"

    "So far, it is great. Our cooperation is impable."

    Gamin smiled and patted Sam on his back.

    "Great, it is nice to meet you. We heard that you are a great artisan, I need to consult you on somethingter."

    "Nice to meet you too."

    Gamin turned back to Giyon and greeted her before asking with the same smile.

    "I heard you guys were attacked in the n grounds. Tell me, did you find out who did this."

    Even though he is smiling, his aura is clearlyced with the intent to kill. He is really angry.

    Gail patted on his shoulder and said.

    "You don¡¯t have to worry too much. They are handling it."

    "But.." Gamin wanted to say something but he was cut off by Gail.

    "I said they are handling it. Do you think I would let them if they are not capable of it? Our kids are stronger than you and I think they are."

    "But Gail..." Yuvana also wanted to say something but sighed and let it go.

    "Anyway, we are having a feast tonight. Giyon send someone to inform the n¡¯s leader, he must be excitedly waiting since we postponed it already."

    "Yes."

    Giyon nodded and left. At this moment, Grivon¡¯s new subordinate arrived with some new information.

    Grivon and Sam took him to a separate room to hear them out, while the rest went to the backyard to sit under a tree and rx.

 Chapter 1380: Princess And A Sovereign

    As soon as they entered the room, the new subordinate immediately took out a few documents. Heid them out on the table and showed them to Sam and Grivon.

    Grivon went through them and was surprised. Sam could see some details, they are regarding a Narc test too and it s for a person and there is no name on it, instead there was some kind of numerical code written in that ce.

    "What is this?"

    "A Narc test conducted by one of the secret enforcers of the Enforcement department, within the enforcement department."

    "And?"

    "The test was actually conducted on the guy from the expedition team and the secret enforcer is actually the Senior Elder Ma."

    Sam turned silent and he doesn¡¯t even know what to say to that. They kind of forgot the presence of Senior Elder Ma the day attack happened. They just ignored it as they were too busy trying to find what happened and who tried to kill Sam.

    "Don¡¯t tell me that his expertise is Space element." Sam said solemnly, but Grivon gulped and said.

    "Unfortunately, I have to, because it is his expertise. We need to go and talk to Giyon."

    They immediately ran out of the room and met with Giyon who was actually sitting with the parents and Jyon.

    They pulled her aside and filled in on the new information.

    "We need to confirm something first."

    As she said that, she took out hermunication token and contacted someone.

    "Why are you calling me?"

    The voice was extremely familiar to both Sam and Grivon and they were shocked, because that is the voice of person that they never expected Giyon to contact.

    He is Grand Elder Pon.

    "I need to confirm something and it is rted to the attack that happened at my home. Did you send Senior Elder Ma to call me to the meeting?"

    "I didn¡¯t. Anyway, when did that kid ever follow the individual orders. If we need to make him do something, we need to either hold a n meeting and order him on behalf of the n or we would need to make him like the thing he is doing."

    "Just ask your son and confirm if he has anything to do with this. Because Senior Elder Ma came to my residence and invited me to the meeting with your name."

    "I will call you."

    With that the call was cut off and Giyon called the n¡¯s leader next and this surprised them even more. Not everyone has the freedom to contact the n leader on their whim.

    It would be okay if their parents had such contact, but Giyon to have that, means they clearly don¡¯t know how deep her connections go.

    "What is it Giyon?"

    "Did you send Senior Elder Ma to my residence to invite me to the meeting with Grand Elder Pon and his son?"

    "No, absolutely not. I might have the authority, but Ma doesn¡¯t go around and do such errands."

    "Alright. We will meet you at dinner."

    "Is something wrong?"

    "Nothing I can¡¯t handle."

    She cut off themunication and directly walked into the room as she grabbed her father¡¯s arm and pulled him out into another room to talk to him.

    Grivon and Sam waited for a few minutes, and they came out. But they just directly went past them to get out and Sam could see feel the changed aura of Gail. He is clearly not just Gail anymore. He is the sonic prince now.

    As they left, Sam and Grivon wanted to follow, but at that moment, Sam¡¯smunication token rang. He immediately became alert as it was someone from the new restaurant.

    "Sir, the person you wanted us to identify hase to the restaurant. We are giving theced recipe to her."

    "Do it. I wille there and take a look. Make sure all the recording devices around her are working properly. Do you understand?"

    "Yes, sir."

    "Good. Now, don¡¯t let suspect anything. Send in the best candidates to be her waiters and make sure that she just enjoys her meal like normal."

    "Yes, Sir. We are on it."

    Sam said and he ran towards Giyon and Gail, but before he could catch up, he saw Gail holding his daughter and kicking the ground.

    *BOOM*

    He created a sonic boom on the ground and leaped into the air, he then started stepping on the air. He ran in the sky like he was running on the ground. The spiritual energy is enabling him by acting as a tform.

    He was in awe, but it was toote for him to reach out to them. He tried themunication token, but Giyon didn¡¯t pick up.

    Grivon, who was confused came to him and asked what happened.

    "The person who has the same facial features and other physical characteristics as Snake Bitch is spotted in the restaurant and the waiters arecing her food. I just want to have a direct confirmation, but we need someone that can identify that person first.

    Now, your sister is gone and we don¡¯t have anyone for the task."

    "What task?"

    Gamin suddenly asked and both Sam and Grivon jumped in fright.

    Yuvana was standing behind him and she asked Grivon with a frown.

    "Honey, what happened? Are you having some trouble? You can tell your Mom, I can get you out of it."

    Grivon had a brief shback on how their parents handled trouble in the past few years and almost wanted to rejected the idea.

    But before he could do it, Sam beat him to it.

    "Do you know who Snake Bitch is?"

    "Snake Bitch? Did that Bitch try to seduce my little boy?" Yuvana¡¯s energy instantly changed and for some reason she seemed more dangerous than Gamin.

    Gamin shivered for some reason and they have a feeling that it is not because he is afraid of his wife.

    "That Bitch is here? And she is the reason for your troubles? Why didn¡¯t you guys tell me that earlier?" He also became angry and they for sure have an ax to grind for this woman.

    Sam calmed them down and started exining what happened.

    "So, what are we waiting for? Let¡¯s go. We know exactly how that Bitch looks like."

    Yuvana took the lead and she hugged her son before she stepped on air and left, Gamin caught a hold of Sam and did the same.

    He was excited and surprised at the same time as he was carried in the air at such a height. This is not his first time at this height. In fact, he has been on this height, since he was just a Novice, because of his harbinger. But running t on their feet is something else.

    Before he could even take it all in, he suddenly realized that they are nearing the restaurant and Yuvana evennded in front of it.

    "Oh Shit, we are not supposed to appear in front of her. The n would be spoiled." Sam muttered out loud.

    Gamin just smiled and said.

    "Don¡¯t worry. She is the snake Bitch."

    "You can see her from here?"

    "Yes, I can. Even if I cannot see her face, I can see her eating and that is exactly how she heats. She is like a hungry pig that just devours everything."

    Before Gamin could evennd, Yuvana walked in and went straight to the Snake Bitch¡¯s table.

    "How are you doing? You little Bitch."

    As soon as those words were spoke, Snake Bitch who is eating like crazy stopped all her actions. Her whole body shivered and she slowly and hesitantly raised her head to take a look at Yuvana.

    "The Hurricane Princess? What the hell are you doing here?"

    Yuvana just looked at her coldly and then at her son. When Snake Bitch connected the dots, she was horrified.

    She leaned back and her chair copsed on the floor along with her.

    She crawled backwards as she spoke.

    "Wait, wait... I didn¡¯t know he was your kid. I didn¡¯t even know you have a kid. I just thought he was a normal young master. It is not my fault that your identities are a big secret and there was no information on his parents from the person that gave me this assignment."

    "Assignment? So, this is the league¡¯s job? They dared to attack someone who is the friend and guest of the daughter of the Sonic Prince and the son of the Hurricane Princess and the Sword Sovereign? It seems like the league has grown too many pairs of balls, while we are ying in the big leagues. It is about time we showed you what would happen if you did something like this."

    "What? What did you say? The daughter of Sonic Prince? I didn¡¯t know. I didn¡¯t know it was her. I just thought the guy was Giyon¡¯s guest. I didn¡¯t know they were rted to you.

    Not just me, even the guy who told me didn¡¯t know that. Please. Don¡¯t do anything rash. We can talk this out.. I will give you all the information immediately."

 Chapter 1381: Visiting Ma

    Snake Bitch is horrified and she is shivering non-stop.

    No matter how much she tried, she couldn¡¯t even think of anyway to escape. As for using the transference scrolls or tokens, that thought didn¡¯t even cross her mind, because she knew first hand that they are useless and will only bring more pain if she used them in front of these people.

    She looked at Yuvana¡¯s cold face and then noticed the Gamin has alsonded at the entrance of the restaurant. She felt a bit afraid and rified herself once again.

    "I really don¡¯t know that the Sonic Prince has a daughter and I never knew Sam is so close to them, otherwise I wouldn¡¯t have attacked your kids even if I had ten times more guts. Please leave me, I will give you all you want to know."

    "Of course, you would be giving me that, but before that you need toe with me."

    With that, Yuvana grabbed therge hair bun on her head and once again started running back.

    They went back to Giyon¡¯s residence and she threw the Bitch into the grass in the yard before taking a seat on the chair nearby.

    Gamin also joined her after dropping Sam off.

    Sam and Grivon are looking at the whole thing with confusion and shock.

    Sam clearly never heard the words Sonic Prince, Hurricane Princess and Sword Sovereign. Now that he heard them for the first time, he doesn¡¯t know whether he should be shocked by their naming sense or the fact that the people carrying these names are so powerful.

    He doesn¡¯t know what kind of power and influence these people wield to make others so afraid of them.

    When he looked at Grivon, he felt even more troubled. Because it was one thing for Sam to not know anything about it, but for Grivon to not know anything too means, either their names are way too discreet and only a few members know about them or they operate and stay active in a very far away ce which doesn¡¯t rte to their current realm no matter what.

    "Now, tell us everything. Don¡¯t you dare leave a single detail out."

    Yuvana said as she poured some tea for herself.

    "Yes, yes... I will tell you everything..."

    Snake Bitch immediately revealed all the details.

    Apparently, she is a league member who epted the job and when she realized that Giyon is involved, she decided to leave the ce because she has been hearing Giyon¡¯s name a lot in their circle.

    But the Butler Si who is the one that ced the mission, didn¡¯t want to let this chance go and convinced her that Giyon and Sam are not that close and he is only here because of his connection to Grivon.

    So, they decided to make a move.

    They used this ve from the Mari n who was sent over by Sivan.

    Then, she used the member from the Expedition team and hypnotized him, making him do things for her.

    The person who ced the formation is actually Butler Si himself and he is also responsible for cing the spatial node inside the n with the help of a mole the Mari n has inside.

    They ced a temporary spatial node in Giyon¡¯s residence and used that to send the ve there to attack Sam, but the ve Died before doing anything.

    Even though, they expected this scenario, they also wanted to take advantage of this. They left some clues behind on purpose so that their suspicions would linger around their n which would make Giyon and Grivon more concerned about their n¡¯s safety than Sam.

    If they are even more cynical, they would ditch Sam to save themselves some trouble which would be helpful. They decided to act further based on the reaction from the siblings, but they were already caught.

    Sam who is listening to this frowned and asked.

    "Who is the one that ced the Spatial Node?"

    "I don¡¯t know. I am telling the truth. I definitely don¡¯t know who ced the spatial node. Butler Si, didn¡¯t reveal any information regarding this."

    "Alright, where was the node ced?"

    "It was definitely inside the house. It was supposed to be ced in the hall which is a rtively closed roompared to the outside. That room would be a lot more advantageous to the ve than the outdoor fight as the poison wouldn¡¯t just disperse with the wind."

    Sam also nodded, but he went into deep thought and so did Grivon.

    Gamin frowned and asked.

    "What happened?"

    "The node was not inside. It was actually at the entrance of the residence."

    "Maybe, the mole lied to Si about this and was unable to actually ce it inside." Grivon suggested and everyone once again turned to Snake Bitch.

    "No, no. Butler ispletely sure that the node was ced inside. He is very confident about the mole he ced."

    Yuvana who is sipping her tea suddenly stood up and grabbed the Bitch her by hand making her stand up.

    "Why are you wasting your braincells by thinking so much. I have a better option.

    Now this Bitch will go and find that Butler and bring him back to us. It would be a lot easier for us get information from him than thinking too much.

    You would do that for me, won¡¯t you?"

    "Anything, anything. I would do anything."

    "Good, now get out of this ce and bring that guy with you. You do know what will happen if I don¡¯t see you here, right?"

    "Yes, I will bring him as fast as I can."

    With that Snake Bitch ran out of the residence like a little child and didn¡¯t even dare look back once,

    While they got the information from this end, Giyon and Gail also got something else on the other side.

    They are currently sitting in front of Senior Elder Ma in his own yard.

    Even though Gail aggressively brought Giyon here, he didn¡¯t act rashly and since he came here, he has been acting normally without any anger or aggression.

    He took a sip from his drink and Ma directly asked after some time.

    "Why are you here, Brother?"

    Giyon was a bit surprised, but she didn¡¯t show it on her face.

    "The incident at Giyon¡¯s residence. What do you know about it?"

    "By incident you mean the assassination attempt on her new acquaintance? Actually, I know quite a bit. What do you want to know?"

    "How are you involved in all of this?"

    "Well, I am not really involved in the incident perse. I actually got some suspicions on the expedition team member who is behaving oddly, so I decided to follow him around and noticed that he is doing some tinkering to the space gate formations.

    Of course, he didn¡¯t touch up on any core things, rather he is only using some small formation extensions which would do the rest after they were attached.

    After I looked at those, I followed the ce they were connected to and I reached your daughter¡¯s residence.

    I conducted the drug induced truth test on him and I learned that he doesn¡¯t know much. He was hypnotized.

    I didn¡¯t know how to handle the situation, but there is one thing I know for sure. This guy is useless to catch the person and it would only make the culprits escape if I look for the clues in some ces that I can find some information.

    So, I just changed the space node from inside the residence to the entrance of the residence which saved her from the attack and at the same time.

    I also realized that a space elemental user should be helping them from inside to ce the space gate there, so I started investigating to find that person and you came at a perfect time."

    As soon as he finished speaking, two people wearing half masks the covered only upper half of their faces came with menacing auras and they are holding a guy who is currently unconscious and weak.

    "This is the spy that was ced by the Mari n inside and from what I know so far, he might have been ced by Sivan, the cripple of the Mari n. He is a sleeper agent ced here and he was activated just a few days ago."

    "Sleeper agent? This Sivan is a lot more capable than I originally thought. If you don¡¯t mind, I will take care of it from here."

    "Of course. But don¡¯t forget that you owe me one."

    "Yes, I do. I will give you a position in the team in my next expedition."

    "Sonic Prince¡¯s expedition? I would love that. Thanks."

    "Next time, you need to give the information to Giyon before you take action. I don¡¯t want her to be in the dark."

    "Okay, I would. It was not intentional this time. I believed that she can handle herself. I trusted her because of her newly attained reputation in the circle."

    At this exact moment, Giyon was shocked.

    "How did you..."

    She wanted to ask something, but Gail stopped her in the middle.

    "We will take our leave. Send him to her residence."

    "Alright. You can visit me anytime.. It has been a long time since we caught up."

 Chapter 1382: Consult

    As Giyon and Gail areing out and are on their way back to her residence, they got a message from Sam about what they found out.

    When Giyon heard that part, everything added up and she exined what they learned back to Sam and Grivon.

    Now all the pieces of the puzzle are in their ce.

    The n is to either kill Sam or ostracize him from Grivon and Giyon with the help of the ve Butler Si made a great n and Senior Elder Ma who is involved in the whole thing by coincidence actually helped them.

    If not for the fact that Gail is here Giyon, Sam and Grivon would take apletely different approach regarding Senior Elder Ma and it wouldn¡¯t be as amicable and simple as it was now.

    "Why didn¡¯t senior elder Ma tell me about this before? Things would have been a lot easier if he had told me this earlier. If you are not here, things would go extremely bad." Giyon said to her father.

    "Of course, that is what he actually wanted. Ma is a very different person. He is entric in his thinking and he doesn¡¯t like to be bored.

    He probably heard what you guys are doing and might have taken a bit of interest. He must have just wanted to attract your attention and wanted to y around a bit.

    If you had taken an aggressive approach, he would have manipted you for some time and would have taken all that you can throw at him, before actually revealing what really happened. This would give him some entertainment."

    "He hid the matter because of some entertainment? Is he nuts?"

    "He might be. But he gets things done and he is extremely loyal to the people he took a liking to. From what I know, he likes both of you. So, don¡¯t go around creating problems for him. He would only get more excited and would crave for more.

    For him, the life and death struggle that you guys go through are barely games that he could y around as he wants." Gail exined as he rxed while sipping wine.

    "He likes ying around with the trouble he deliberately attracts?" Sam asked with a surprised tone.

    "Yes, in fact, he makes sure that the people that areing at him are absolutely safe and if he attracted them from their original problem like the way it happened in your case, he would even go as far as solving the problem while ying around and when he finally revealed it, your problem would bepletely gone.

    It is like some sort of fee for wasting your time."

    "He is indeed entric. I haven¡¯te across people like that in a while." Sam said as he went into deep thought about something.

    "Anyway, how far did the cooking go? I am really looking forward to this meal. I didn¡¯t eat anything good in a while."

    Gamin interrupted his thought process.

    Sam stood up and replied with a smile.

    "I will go and check."

    With that, he left the room.

    After he left, the family once again fell into small talk. Sam has many questions he wanted to ask these people. About the weird nicknames and their strength as well as how they are all connected.

    All three of them are stronger than the n head and from the looks of it Ma is also a strong person, but why did they not have some influential and authoritative positions within the n? He couldn¡¯t understand that.

    Their names are also quite famous and their reputation seems fearsome as someone who can deal with Butler Si is almost pissing her pants.

    It seems like there is a world out there that he has no clue about.

    He went to the kitchen and checked everything before he came back. But he was shocked because there is a whole crowd waiting for him.

    They are his students and unexpectedly even the little girl who was abducted by Malgav came and they all have smiles on their faces as they talked to the parents.

    Sam frowned as he stepped forward towards the girl and asked.

    "What are you doing here? Shouldn¡¯t you be taking rest? We can continue the ssester. You go and rest."

    His voice is filled with genuine concern.

    "You don¡¯t have to worry about me, teacher. I am feeling perfectly fine."

    "What do you mean perfectly fine? You have been through a lot. It is not time for you to worry about lessons and catching up. Just go and rest. You would be fine when I say you are fine."

    "No, teacher. I am really fine. We are actually worried that you are canceling the sses. We have prepared so much for thepetition and you didn¡¯t even conduct it."

    "Is a stupidpetition so important now? It seems like no one ever taught you how to keep your priorities straight. We can talk about thatter. Just go back and rx. If you really want sses assignments, then here is a new one.

    Go and live a normal life for the next few days. You need to do something exciting and something that makes you happy, I want a list and a detailed report on every activity you performed.

    Do you understand?"

    As Sam tried to shoo them away, the parents, Giyon and Grivon are all looking at Sam weirdly, even Jyon looked at him differently.

    Sam didn¡¯t even care about their presence and tried his best to make the kids go away.

    "Sam, why are you forcing them to go back, they don¡¯t look so distressed."

    Giyon said from the back.

    Sam looked at her with a frown and ignored her.

    "We can conduct the testter, you need to get rest first. You would be in trouble if you don¡¯t go now."

    "Teacher, please. We are waiting so much for thispetition. You are taking forever. I need to kick these guys¡¯ ass before I could even get some sleep."

    Sam was surprised as these words came from the very girl who underwent this incident.

    Sam sighed helplessly as he looked at them and asked.

    "Just who brought you here? There is no way, you came here by yourselves."

    "Big Sister Jyon."

    One of the boys said out loud and Sam looked at Jyon angrily. But it is more of helplessness than anger as he couldn¡¯t even understand what to do now.

    He doesn¡¯t have much experience with kids, to begin with. He doesn¡¯t have a normal kid¡¯s life to understand how the rest of the kids are doing to know how to handle it.

    He would rather go and fight against a hundred guys with his hand-tied down than deal with them.

    "Sam, why don¡¯t you finish the test and then send them away. They might be able to rest after this is taken off of their minds."

    Gail said as he supported the kids.

    "It¡¯s just that they might take thepetition too hard. What should I do then?"

    "Just what kind ofpetition is it that you are so worried about it?" Gamin said casually.

    "Come on, Sam. We also want to see it. Why don¡¯t you just conduct it and get it over with? Kids wouldn¡¯t let it go that easily." Yuvana also added.

    Sam sighed and after some consideration, he agreed.

    "Okay,e back by dinner time. I need to set up the simtor here. We can conduct the test tonight. But after that, you need to take a rest and you need to finish the assignment that I just gave you. Is it a deal?"

    "Yes. Yes."

    "Yes."

    All the kids yelled out loud and they happily left along with some guards.

    Sam sighed and contacted some of Grivon¡¯s subordinates to get the setup needed for the simtor.

    After he was done, he couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit exhausted.

    The subordinates came one after another along with the equipment and started setting everything up.

    As they were doing that, Gamin suddenly seemed to have remembered something and said.

    "Sam as I said before, we need to consult you on something. Are you okay to do it now?"

    "No problem. I don¡¯t have anything to do now. The setup and the cooking will take a long time."

    "Well, we are looking for matching vehicles that wouldn¡¯t let our speed be reduced, but we couldn¡¯t get any designs that could impress us."

    "What are your requirements? Do you need a vehicle that could fly?"

    "No. We can walk in the air as we like. There is no need for us to go overboard with the vehicle. We need something that could move on thend."

    "Land?"

    "Yes, we need to travel on the ground and the speed should be as fast as our own speed. And it should be able to move in all kinds of terrains and it needs to be flexible, shy, and big." Yuvana exined from the side.

    "Can I see what your current designs are?"

    "Of course."

 Chapter 1383: Contest I

    Sam looked at the designs given by Gamin and Yuvana. There are many designs and some of them are good too. But every single one of them is based on too much of their energy. To maintain their top speed on these things would make them just as exhausted as when they were walking.

    "These are inefficient. You should rather run than use these things." Sam directly said after taking on a nce at them.

    "That is what we thought. They are not just for the show even though that is our main purpose." Gamin said without feeling shy.

    Sam chuckled at his words.

    "We need something a little more efficient. As long as the energy consumption is a bit lesser we can ept any of these designs." Yuvana added from the side.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but shake his head.

    "What do you mean by that? You cannot just consume so much energy even when you are using a vehicle. It defeats the whole purpose of having a means for transportation."

    "Then what do you want to do? At our level, it is hard to use any means to even catch up to us, to keep up the speed at that level, the regr means of energy usage are impossible to even implement."

    As Sam looked at these things, he suddenly had a sh in his mind. Actually, this is rted to one of the research fields he is currently dabbling in.

    It is the next step to the jewels he made for his team with the space jade and liquid energy. He has been thinking of continuing the research for this project. In fact, the very reason he is desperately trying to create the simtion is not just to facilitate his regr projects that he would be doing for getting his body back, but also for continuing this project as the next series of inventions that are about to be used for this situation are going to be a lot moreplicated and he wouldn¡¯t be able to handle all of the calctions with his brain alone.

    After thinking for a while, Sam smiled and said.

    "Actually, I am currently looking into something that might help you. But for that, I would need some time. May I know how long you would be staying here?"

    "This time, we are staying for a long time. It is kind of like a long-term vacation from our exploits."

    Yuvana answered.

    "That is great. I have some ideas regarding the energy source, but for now, let¡¯s discuss what kind of look and motion you need.

    Most of these things are like carts and chariots are you interested in this design? These are not versatile and even if they are shy, theyck certain sophistication inplicated terrain.

    They wouldn¡¯t look good and their bnce wouldn¡¯t be great when you are traveling in a rocky and hilly terrain..."

    Sam quickly changed into his engineer mode as he started exining various pros and cons of the designsid out on the table.

    He even made some rough calctions, force diagrams and started listing out the ws in each design that was present there.

    He didn¡¯t even realize how long it has been like the sun slowly set and he only stopped when an attendant from the kitchen came and informed them that the dinner is ready.

    At this moment, one of the subordinates also came and told him that the setup for thepetition is ready.

    Sam called for one of Giyon¡¯s subordinates to bring the children back while he went to the simtor which was set up in the back garden to make the final preparations.

    He sat in front of a semi-translucent table that looked exactly like the table that he made for the Cultivation chambers. He sat on a chair and carefully started loading all the data he stored regarding the attacks, the kidsposed.

    When the children arrived, they are extremely excited.

    Meanwhile, nearby, the table for the dinner was already set and even the n¡¯s leader arrived. All of them are sitting as they watched the whole thing in anticipation.

    Sam checked everything and took a deep breath.

    "Kids, who got the number one on either side?"

    One girl and one boy raised their hands.

    "Step forward."

    They stepped forward and they are in the range of the simtor.

    The simtion device shot light rays over their two bodies and within a minute two holographic imagespletely resembling the two kids appeared in front of the same right in the middle of the simtor, a few feet apart.

    On the top of their heads, they have two cylinders each, one indicating their energy and the other indicating their health.

    Sam then loaded the previously saved attacks of the wood element and the fire element as he looked at them.

    The subordinate standing beside him took out two metallic headbands and gave them to the two kids.

    "Since the girls got the first pick in the elements, the boys get to choose to attack first. As long as he started the attack, you are allowed to attack.

    You just have to think of what you want to do in terms of the physical attacks and movements and the holographic image would do it. You can test it first."

    The kids nodded and they tested. The boy¡¯s holographic image jumped on the spot and did some somersaults, while the girl tried to use some hand-to-handbat techniques.

    "The motion and feats of your holographic body is limited to the strength and ability of your body. If your original body cannot do it, the image wouldn¡¯t do it either.

    The green cylinder indicates your health level. The attacks you received and the damage you received because of those attacks could be reflected on it.

    The red cylinder indicates the energy you have left and for every movement you use, every action you take, and every pre-recorded attack you use, the energy would be reduced. A person would lose as long as the energy cylinder or the health cylinder is emptied and the next candidate from their group can step up.

    The winning side can either keep their candidate up or call him back so that they could use him again in ater time.

    The fights will go on until one side loses every single candidate.

    There would be no second chance and there would definitely be no cheating allowed and there would be no leeway.

    So, fight wisely and wholeheartedly.

    Are you guys ready?"

    "Yes, Sir."

    The kids are obviously excited as they spoke in unison. They couldn¡¯t help but feel this sense of rush in their bodies.

    Sam nodded and took a deep breath before activating the rest of the simtor.

    The two candidates¡¯ holographic bodies are currently standing in the middle of a brown earth field with the soil on the ground. There are a few patches of grass here and there.

    The boy immediately made his move, even before Sam announced.

    Of course, he didn¡¯t have to move by himself. His thoughts were sent to the table Sam was connected to, he is also wearing something simr to a helmet which read the thoughts of the kids and he started making the simtor to project the exact actions.

    He is currently acting as the brain of the simtor as the energy reactions and the physical actions arepletely within his calctable range.

    The boy¡¯s image started running and there is a faint green light under his feet as he moved forward.

    The girl clearly couldn¡¯t see what exactly is happening on the ground as there is no visible reaction, but she could see that the energy bar of the other party is reducing a bit, so she extended her hand with two fingers pointing out like a gun as she shot small fire bullets at the young man.

    The energy bar barely moved as she aimed at his vitals and the joints of the body.

    She clearly took Sam¡¯s lessons about efficiency seriously.

    But the boy is really athletic, too athletic that even Sam was a bit surprised. He is actually extremely agile and quick on his feet that he dodged every single fireball while hopping, somersaulting, and just casual ducking as he closed in.

    The girl didn¡¯t bother to keep the distance and only tried to control his level of motion with the fire bullets and when that didn¡¯t work and he neared her, she decided to shift to hand to handbat, and her punch covered with mes was shot at the guy, he dodged it barely as he jumped a bit and his knee was aimed at her face.

    The girl wanted to block it with her arms, but all of a sudden a few vines came out of the ground and held the arms tightly in their ce.

    The Kneended straight on the face and the girl felt the full impact of the attack as her body titled backward.

    More vines appeared from the ground as they were wrapped around her body and pulled her to the ground.

    The boy took a mount position and aimed his fists at her face and throat. The attack was effective but his energy cylinder is only half left, but his health didn¡¯t change.

    Meanwhile, for the girl, the energy bar has barely changed but her health was lost by more than a half.

 Chapter 1384: Contest II

    The boy and the girl are yingpletely opposite strategies. The girl is more focused on her energy than her health and the boy is more focused on health than energy.

    But both have their ws and both have their advantages. Currently the boy managed to get slight advantage over her, by taking this mount position.

    He was about to pummel her down, but at this moment, the vines that is holding her down was suddenly burned to crisp as her energy rapidly reduced to dust and a punch flew out as she tried to intercept the boy¡¯s fist with her own.

    As if he is anticipating this, the boy suddenly changed the direction of the attack and made itnd right beside the head of the girl on the ground. His energy consumption increased once again, but at least hended his fist where he wanted it tond, but for the girl, the situation wasn¡¯t very good as the attackpletely missed the target and she consumed a lot of energy.

    Before she could pull herself back from this situation, something else happened.

    From the punch of the boy thatnded on the ground, the soil split up and some vines emerged, coiling around each other and they formed a sharp w with all of its insidespletely covered with thorns and ittched on to the face of the girl mostly aiming at the mouth.

    When two fingers entered her mouth, he boy didn¡¯t hold back anything and let the sharp vines emerge from the fingers as they grew faster and faster until they ripped her throat.

    *AAAAHHHHH...."

    The girl couldn¡¯t take in anymore and yelled out loud.

    The boy stopped it and stepped back while panting. He removed the helmet, ran to the side and started puking his guts out.

    This is the first thing that came close to having a real battle for them and both of them did great.

    But the boy who didn¡¯t care about the aesthetics and risked it all won. But the price is not exactly small if one looked at it.

    Even though he has more than three-fourth of his health, he has less than one fourth of his energy left which might not help him fight the next candidate.

    Sam looked at the Boy¡¯s side to see what decision they would make and they called this guy back.

    At this moment, the second boy came out and took the stage.

    The first girl who lost is trying her best to hold her tears back, she is really disappointed, but she stayed strong and went back to her group while she was reced by the second girl.

    The battle started once again.

    This time the strategy changed a bit on both sides. Both of them started using the energy and the health with a decent bnce and by the end of it, they are both tied as they lost at the same time.

    The third battle is a bit dramatic.

    The girl who came in is extremely aggressive and from the start, she just stood there, but energy ball slowly started reducing as the boy tried to figure out of what she was doing. But when he couldn¡¯t figure it out, he decided to make his move.

    He ran forward and vines followed him with every step and by the time he neared her, both of them are surrounded by sharp vines that assisted him.

    The vines coiled around her arms and limbs as they held her up in the air making it easier for him to attack.

    But she didn¡¯t react even then, only when the boy leaped up a bit in an opinion tond a punch on her face, did she react. She looked at him straight in the eye and opened her mouth.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive ball of mes hit him on the head. He fell down immediately and lost all of his health in a rapid pace.

    The girl freed herself from the vines and stomped him on the chest finishing him up.

    She lost a bit too much of energy for that one attack, but her health didn¡¯t change much. She only lost around five percent at most.

    She withdrew from the next fight and the fourth fight is also a tie as both of their health stayed as it was with barely any changes and they kept on using long range attacks which exhausted both of their energies.

    They just yed a game of cat and mouse.

    Now, there are two boys and two girls left. One boy who already fought and the one who didn¡¯t. The same goes for the girls. One who fought and one who didn¡¯t.

    While the girl who fought came first, the boy who didn¡¯t fight until now came first from their side.

    This time, the girl didn¡¯t use the same strategy as she previously did. It only works once and since the element of surprise is actually gone, there is no way for her to use it on this boy once again.

    As she was thinking of what to, the boy who had his arms crossed stomped his foot on the ground and a few vines popped out as they coiled around and created a shell around him.

    The girl is extremely confused, but by the time she could react, the shell waspleted and there are even some fruits hanging around the shell.

    The boy¡¯s energy depleted a lot in a single step. He lost almost four-fifths of his energy.

    The girl was stunned. After all that is eighty percent and at this moment, even she has more energy than him.

    She immediately made her move as she concentrated most of her remaining energy into a fist and aimed it at the shell.

    But as the punchnded, not only did her mes spread across, she even had a feeling that she hit a big iron wall.

    The worst part is that after the fistnded, the vines separated a little bit and fist was stuck inside.

    At this moment, one of the vines moved and it carried the fruit that the boy created. The fruit touched the girl and...

    *BOOM*

    It exploded with wood elemental energy.

    The body of the girl was forced to absorb the energy and her health immediately disappearedpletely as she doesn¡¯t know what is happening.

    Before long, she died.

    But the boy¡¯s health isplete and for some reason the energy bar didn¡¯t go down even though the fruit exploded.

    Now there is only one girl left and she is the girl that underwent the recent event.

    She made her move immediately and the excitement is clearly shown on her face as much as in her actions.

    She started with a small fire ball which exploded on the vines, but they didn¡¯t catch any me.

    Theypletely repelled the mes. But she was not disappointed, in fact she is a bit excited as she closed her eyes and slowly a small orange ming ball appeared out of her mouth. It slowly flew around and neared the boy¡¯s shell. Itnded on the shell and just stayed there.

    Another orange ball followed the first and then another one followed the second and then the third. The small balls slowlynded on the shell at various spots and the energy bar of the girl reduced a lot.

    By the time it hit half, the girl finally stepped up and ran towards the shell.

    She extended her hand slowly and ced it on the shell which opened up a bit and caught a hold of her hand, but she didn¡¯t panic and closed his fist. All the orange balls thatnded on the shell, suddenly turned into small tongues of mes as they seeped into the small cracks that formed on the shell due to the vine movement.

    The boy also realized that something is not right, so all of a sudden, the girl felt that her arm was caught a hold by the boy and the shell opened in the rear as he stepped back rapidly.

    The girl was pulled into the shell while the boy exited it while his clothes caught the mes that came out of nowhere.

    His health finally budged and he lost a bit more of his energy, but before she could rejoice in that, she was pulled into the shell and the vines coiled around her.

    All the fruits exploded.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The energy in the explosions is not much. In fact, for people at Sam¡¯s level, it is barely a fluctuation in the surrounding energy, but for the level, the kids are ying, this is a serious blow.

    The girl took the full brunt of the attack and when the dust settled, she is barely holding up with most of her energy gone and most of her health in particr disappeared.

    Her health was reduced so low that it is barely showing on the bar. She is literally barely holding up.

    The boy slowly stood up and caught hold of her with a vine and was about to finish her off.

    But all of a sudden, all the remaining energy at the girl¡¯s side waspletely gone and a streak of mes escaped her mouth as they enveloped the boy catching him off guard.

 Chapter 1385: Simulator

    The boy who was on verge of winning lost. The mes that came out of this girl¡¯s mouth are vastly different from the mes that came out of her friend¡¯s mouth. The mes out of the previous girl are explosive.

    But these mes are more turbulent and have more burning intensity than the explosiveness of the before.

    Actually, this is what this girl was working on by taking such a long time to record her attacks.

    She wanted to increase the damage in a very small area, but she made sure that it would be effective to the full extent within that area and she really did great.

    But unfortunately, before she could rejoice in the victory she obtained and the possible victory she could have given her team, if she yed the game with a little more thought, the boy who lost emptied the arena and gave the helmet to thest remaining teammate.

    The first guy who entered the arena still has a bit of energy and a lot of health.

    The girls who were cheering suddenly stopped.

    The previous boy gave them the toughestpetition so far. After all, if not for the strategy and the extra work thest girl put up, the rest of the girls understood that they wouldn¡¯t be able to deal with it, so they kind of lost in the moment and didn¡¯t bother to think too much.

    Now, that they are met with the reality, they are a bit disappointed.

    The Boy didn¡¯t show any mercy and finished the game immediately.

    The Boys won.

    They had fun and they are ecstatic.

    The girls lost, they are a bit dejected, but they also had fun.

    What both sides did inmon is that they fought and they learned a lot.

    "Okay, now stop with the ruckus. Go to your table, finish your meals and get back to your residence. I will take exin everything about what you did right and what you did wrong in the next ss. When we do this again next time, I don¡¯t want to see the same mistakes repeating again.

    So, if I were you, I will go back and study what mistakes I did. Do you understand?"

    "YES SIR."

    Every one of them said in unison as they excitedly ran to the table that was arranged for them a bit far away.

    Sam looked at the table in front of him and entered some data as well as stored some records, before turning the simtor off and going back to the stable.

    On the table, everyone is looking at Sam, the kids, and the simtor in awe. The only one who is least surprised is Jyon as she saw more of Sam¡¯s sses and already knew how he uses the holographic technology to teach the kids efficiently.

    But even for her, this is a bit overwhelming and as for the rest of them, they acted like they were struck by lightning.

    Sam washed his hands and joined them at the table.

    He sipped his wine and cleared his throat.

    "Shall we start?"

    As soon as he spoke, everyone came out of their stupor.

    "What was that?" The n¡¯s head turned out to be the most impatient one as he directly asked.

    Sam looked at him and casually said.

    "It is the performance of my students."

    The n¡¯s head was stumped a bit and asked.

    "I can understand that, but what made that performance possible? They are clearly normal kids who haven¡¯t awakened yet. They shouldn¡¯t be able to think all of that. They shouldn¡¯t be able to understand how they could attack with fire elements like that and how the wood elemental attacks work.

    They shouldn¡¯t be understanding how to use the wood element to counter the natural energy it has, the fire element.

    But not only did they understand, but they also performed really well.

    The best part is that you managed to manifest to a visual level to the point even I thought it is a real battle. How can that be possible?"

    "Let¡¯s just say that it is the result of my new invention."

    "What is it called?" Gail is also very intrigued by it.

    "It is called the simtor. It simtes the reality to see the results even before the things are executed."

    "Will it simte everything? How does it do that?"

    "It doesn¡¯t simte everything, at least not at the moment. The simtion is created by continuous calctions. They calcte the possible scenarios that could happen when an action takes ce. For example, if I ce a leaf and start a me with it and assume that the simtor has the data about the leaf structure and knows the properties of the leaf, it shows how the reaction happens.

    The leaf would burn when it was met with the mes and the simtor creates that while taking the heat of the me, the aggressiveness of the me, and the environmental conditions into ount.

    It also calctes, how long each molecule of the leaf canst while burning under the me and how far can the me propagate in those environmental conditions.

    In the same way, the current simtion happened."

    "How can a device calcte so many things at the same time? It is surreal."

    "Well currently, I acted as the brain of the device. At its current state, it definitely cannot simte the whole battle as it did now. Rather it could at most do some smaller simtions.

    I am actually working on it."

    "It really is a great invention. I really can¡¯t wait to see what it can do after it was done." Gail said as he raised his ss for Sam.

    Sam returned the gesture with a smile.

    "That is great."

    "What else can this thing do?" Gamin asked with much more keen interest.

    "Well, when it was created as I imagined it to be, it could do a lot of things. Simting formations, some small battles, war strategies, some of my other inventions, and so on. There are some features that I additionally added. I can show it you after the meal if you like."

    "I am looking forward to it."

    After that, the conversation was mostly about the simtor, and particrly the n¡¯s leader is not willing to let go of it even when the others did and some of them even changed the conversation to the amazing food that was on the table and more amazing dishes that were being brought from the kitchen.

    Kids obviously finished the meals first and they still held that excitement of these mock battles within the simtor and they couldn¡¯t stop talking about it, even on their way back.

    Soon after, the adult¡¯s table was almost empty and everyone leaned back with their stomachs stuffed.

    For the people of their cultivation level to feel stuffed, one can only imagine what kind of food they ate and how much it took to fill them up.

    "Come on, let¡¯s go and y with the simtor, I cannot wait."

    Gamin directly stood up like a little kid and Sam could only take the group to the simtor with a shaking head.

    Sam first wore the helmet and started projecting some of the thoughts. He simted the table and the meal they just had, but everything was seen from his perspective.

    He then took out some headbands and gave them to the rest. As they started imagining different things within the space.

    "It is simting everything right now. Why did you say that it doesn¡¯t work?" Gamin asked in confusion.

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "Currently the device is only projecting what we are thinking. Let me show you."

    As he said those words, everyone stopped doing whatever they are doing and focused on him.

    A tree formed in front of him and it ispletely dead and dried. A me emerged out of nowhere and slowly touched the tree.

    But instead of burning, the tree started freezing and it was soon covered with ice as the me spread over it.

    "Did you see that? This method will just project, whatever I want to project. There are no limitations for that."

    "Oh? Then how does the simtion work."

    "I will show you in a bit."

    After that, Sam went to the table and changed it to the simtion function.

    Then they started seeing things a bit differently. The objects are just as realistic, but when they tried to make them react to certain conditions, they couldn¡¯t do it.

    For example, Gamin made a big block of very special alloy and he simted it loosely, but when it was met with the mes, it didn¡¯t react in any way as there is not enough data about exactly what kind of molecr structure it has, what kind of metals were used and such.

    Sam then showed some very basic simtions that involved very basic elemental usage and such.

    When that happened, things were smooth and without any hitch.

    "How long does it take for you to finish this?"

    Gamin asked Sam with an intrigued expression.

    "It would take around a month or two. I already have a structure for the thinking and calction nned. If things go right, it wouldn¡¯t take that long."

    "So, what else can this thing do until then? I mean, if the primary thing is just imagining, it isn¡¯t that useful for you, right? Maybe for the lessons of the children but it is not much you can do about it for now."

    Sam smiled and said.. "There are a lot of things one can do with just the current basic simtion."

 Chapter 1386: Drawing A Line

    Sam put on the gloves and started the modeling function. He drew a wireframe. Even though he could imagine it, sometimes imagination is not exactly consistent when it needs to be drawn really.

    After creating the wireframe of a chair, he simted a specific kind of wood and created the chair in the wood.

    He then started applying forces on various nodes using the simtion function and when the chair broke, there were a few numbers disyed on the table.

    There was also a clear representation of where the chair broke and why did it break and which part was affected the most in both the three-dimensional holographic image as well as in the form of data on the table.

    "Now, I have data on how this force is affecting this chair and I can start calcting once again to see how I can rectify this."

    Sam did the calctions and modified the design a bit and now the chair withstood the force and only broke after it absorbed a lot more than before.

    "This is basically the function. As long as it is something your brain can handle, you can actually simte and design many things, way faster. After all, it would take a long time for a person to manually calcte and estimate why the chair broke, even though it is a very small project.

    This reduces the time a lot."

    The group looked at the whole thing with fascination and one after another they took the gloves and started trying to model things. They couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit excited and went crazy with the things they did.

    Sam let them y for a while and after some time they managed to let it go and came back to sit down at the table.

    They started making small talk and most of their questions are about Sam¡¯s journey from deste to hear. Sam patiently answered them, of course, he didn¡¯t go into deep detail, but he gave them a gist about how he made deals in Naga Loka, how he fought the Seamen in Charbhum realm, his maniption of the bureaucracy, and his enmity with the Sr Fragments, how he recruited the strongest of their bunch.

    He exined everything to them briefly.

    In the middle of this discussion, all of a sudden the topic once again arrived at the simtion and they really wanted to know what he was thinking while he was trying to make it.

    Sam obviously couldn¡¯t say that it is a verymon tool back in his world. Even though they didn¡¯t grow to the point to this level, a simtion program is amon thing for many decades before he was even born.

    And he also couldn¡¯t take the credit that the innovation behind the simtion program is his idea.

    So, he tried his best to brush this off. While this discussion is going on, the n¡¯s leader spoke.

    "Finish it quickly. This will help the youngsters and the artisans of the n so much."

    As soon as he said those words, Sam turned silent and turned towards him with a frown.

    The rest of the members on the table also noticed the change in his demeanor instantly and turned silent.

    n¡¯s leader looked at the still atmosphere and at this moment, Sam spoke.

    "It seems like you are mistaken, Sir. This is MY simtor."

    Sam particrly stretched on that word my just to make the n¡¯s leader understand which made him feel embarrassed.

    "It¡¯s just that..." The n¡¯s leader wanted to say something else, but Sam once again stressed.

    "No Sir, you seemed to have not understood what I was saying properly. This is my simtor and mine alone. Even Giyon and Grivon don¡¯t have any authority over it. My deal is not with the Gaja n, rather it is with Grivon and Giyon and even that deal doesn¡¯t include me sharing my inventions with them.

    It would solely depend on my willingness if I want to share.

    So, don¡¯t expect anything from me. Particrly when it is from the n."

    The n¡¯s leader and even the parents are looking at Sam a bit weirdly. They knew that it is out of line to ask something for the n like this, but still, Sam tightly drawing a line doesn¡¯t sit that well with them.

    After all, no matter what kind of deal he might have made, he is still staying under the umbre of the Gaja n.

    Sam also realized how they must have taken it and sighed before saying.

    "I don¡¯t really like to be associated with your n. My partnership is with Grivon and Grivon alone, whatever he wants to do with the things I gave to him is up to him. Now Giyon is added into the mix because of Grivon and I can ept that.

    But I really don¡¯t have that much of a great opinion on the Gaja n. Particrly after the recent incident. So, I wouldn¡¯t be conducting any kind of business with the Gaja n directly.

    I feltpelled to draw the line clearly because of that. I am sorry if I offended you because of my bluntness."

    "Even after learning that you are the enemy of Mari n, we still sheltered you, despite an attackering into our home. Why such prejudice?"

    "Your tolerance for me is precise because I am the enemy of the Mari n. Although I am grateful, it is to Grivon and Giyon and even their parents, for the n itself? I don¡¯t really care much.

    As for the prejudice, I must say that it is because of you shielding a pedophile."

    "Shielding? It seems like your information is half-baked. I revoked his title as a young master. What do you think anyone else could have done?"

    "I don¡¯t care what else could you have done after the task, I mostly care about what you could have done before so that things like this wouldn¡¯t have happened.

    This is definitely not the first time, things like this happened and the only reason you acted up is because of my involvement. It is because I blew this whole thing up out of proportion.

    What if I wasn¡¯t able to react? Or what if it was toote and the girl had already died? After all, it is an Astral ne Cultivator raping a little girl who hasn¡¯t even awakened. Who knew what would have happened if I wasn¡¯t there at the right ce and the right time?

    An organization that enabled such behavior is something I hold in disdain and I would be less than happy to associate with it."

    "Then, why are you staying here? It is because of Grivon and Giyon. Most of it is because I previously gave my word that I would help their causes and the rest of it is because, they stood by me, as I took action.

    They don¡¯t have the position of power to have prevented this, and they are not currently in a position to represent your whole n.

    But you have both."

    The n¡¯s leader was a bit embarrassed by what Sam said and the embarrassment is followed by anger.

    "It is easy to talk big. You are not in my position. Sometimes, it is inevitable to let some things slide no matter how much you detest them. The circumstances wouldn¡¯t allow them. It is the trouble that anyone in a leadership position would have to go through.

    You wouldn¡¯t understand it anyway."

    "And what makes you think that? My organization is not as powerful as yours, but it is wayrger than yours at the moment. Most of your subordinates that make up the numbers belong to separate subordinate organizations that have at least some autonomy.

    But my organization is something that operates as a single entity. I haven¡¯t even visited it in months and I can tell you for sure that there is not a single incident like this that happened even while I was away.

    Why do you think that is?

    Because I am capable enough to not rely on letting a pedophile run wild and rape little girls to keep my position in ce.

    I have trained and created good enough subordinates that wouldn¡¯t hesitate to execute my orders and follow the rules.

    I have enough authority and strength to not even worry about defending my position and making my point go through everyone¡¯s head.

    I don¡¯t need to suck someone¡¯s ass and let something slide just to have this little authority.

    The only reason you didn¡¯t act on him is that you are afraid of the Grand elder Pon¡¯s retaliation and the backstabbing of every elder that might follow Grand Elder Pon.

    In your opinion, a few little girls and their lives don¡¯t matter if you get to keep your position for a few days.

    Not only do I understand what kind of decision that is, I absolutely detest it with all of my heart.. If a dayes when I have to do something remotely close to that, I will slice my own throat and die than go through with it."

 Chapter 1387: Grey Circle

    Sam didn¡¯t leave anything hidden as hepletely said what is on his mind.

    The n¡¯s leader is embarrassed. His face is red and he couldn¡¯t even make eye contact with anyone at the table. But he managed to give Sam that dirty stare. The stare that said that he wanted to swallow him whole.

    Sam stood up from his seat and bowed a little.

    "I am really sorry for interrupting your pleasant time with the meal. I really didn¡¯t mean to do that, but I couldn¡¯t stop myself from making myself clear so that I would avoid any future misunderstandings."

    With that Sam left the table. But the tension at the table is not cleared at all.

    The rest of the meal was awkward and halfway through the n¡¯s leader gave some excuse and left.

    As soon as he left, Giyon and Grivon ran to Sam¡¯s room hurriedly.

    "What the fuck is wrong with you? That ispletely uncalled for."

    Grivon yelled directly. Giyon stayed silent, but her expression indicated that Sam better has a goddamn good exnation.

    "This is going to happen sooner orter anyway. I am just making sure this happened with my words."

    "What do you mean?"

    "I mean, I am going to kill Malgav and at that time, I will definitely be targeted by your n. So, I am just tearing the decorum a bit sooner thanter."

    Grivon and Giyon were dumbfounded. They looked at Sam in surprise.

    "You are going to kill him?"

    "Of course, I am. There is no way, Grand Elder Pon and his son chose to keep the face of the guy over his genitals and as long as those genitals are not disposed ofpletely, he would still do the same things.

    After all, it is not his pretty face that made him rape so many girls. So, I am going to kill him."

    "Still, don¡¯t you think this is a bit unnecessary? After all, why do you have to make enmity with the n¡¯s leader."

    "Enmity?"

    "Of course, you just called him a pedophile supporter and he did that just to keep his n¡¯s head position. How would you feel if someone said that about you?"

    Sam just gave a faint smile and said.

    "This is to establish character and also to make sure that all the masks are off and I deliberately did that in front of your parents.

    Before I exin any further, both of you guys tell me this, do you guys honestly believe that your n is full of saints? Do you really believe that once they realized that every new invention you are getting originally belongs to me, they will stay put and note for me? And that includes your n leader, do you really think he wouldn¡¯t use the n is bigger than any individual card to swallow any of our business in the future?"

    Giyon and Grivon turned silent. They couldn¡¯t be sure. In fact, they have more belief that everything Sam said would happen than not happen at all.

    "There it is, I believe I know what your silence means. It is only a matter of time before your n makes a move against me. In fact, there is a possibility that wouldn¡¯t even need to kill Malgav and he might be even be killed by someone else and I would be med for it.

    Many people in your n might be moving under shadows and your n leader who supposedly supports me, wouldn¡¯t stop it.

    Now that I openly tore the decorum apart, the moves wouldn¡¯t be in the shadows as before. At least before people wouldn¡¯t directly attack me in the fear that the n¡¯s leader will side with me, but now as far as they are concerned I am a guy who insulted n¡¯s leader.

    They might even want to make sure that the n¡¯s leader knows that they are the ones making this attempt."

    "This is a way too far-fetched dude and I couldn¡¯t even see how this would help you at all. At least, you could have just kept the fa?ade and everything would have been fine as it is. We could have just rejected any proposals for doing n¡¯s business." Grivon said with a sigh.

    Sam turned to Giyon with a smile and she sighed heavily.

    "Are you sure, you want to go this way? This would be a much harder way to tackle this."

    "I know. Anyway, it is not like anything I have said in it is false. It ispletely true. So, let the matter spread out a bit."

    "Sure, bute back for the dinner. They are still waiting."

    "You guys aren¡¯t done yet?"

    "No, only n leader was done. We are still eating."

    Sam shrugged and went back to the table.

    For the remaining nobody talked about Sam and his incident with n¡¯s leader. Of course, the rest are not Giyon and Grivon, they could understand why Sam did this even without him exining. They have a far better experience and they would surely have a better understanding of why he did what he did.

    So, the topic slowly turned to their adventures and exploits.

    "Now Mom, Dad, and Uncle. Are you guys going to tell me what your secret fame is all about? I knew you guys were strong and even the n¡¯s leader is a bit afraid of you, but howe you seem much more powerful than you are supposed to be?

    This Snake Bitch and what is up with these weird titles, Sonic Prince, Sword Sovereign, Hurricane Princess? What kind ofme nicknames are they?"

    "Tsk, tsk. My son heard my nickname for the first time and he didn¡¯t even like it. He called itme. I should really kill the guys who gave me that." Yuvana said with an expression ofment.

    Sam shook his head with a smile at herment.

    Grivon didn¡¯t care and just waited for them to speak.

    Gamin gestured his brother to speak and Gail shrugged before exining.

    "We are actually members of Grey Circle.

    The Grey Circle is not an actual circle it is awork of people who came into contact with four organizations. The first one is League of Blood Iron, the second one is Divine League, the third one is the Divine Graveyard and thest one is the Pseudo Divine Realm Battle-field.

    When a person learns about the existence of all four of these ces andes into contact with them with a deeper understanding with the members and have any battle experience with members of the two leagues and the remaining two ces, they could consider themselves as Grey circle members.

    There are very few people, basically a few hundred members in this circle.

    The basic requirement for any person to be considered a member would be to have a cultivation level of Astral ne Consummation and your sister might even be the newest member of the circle.

    That circle is the ce where the strongest of the bunch would roam around freely ande into contact.

    There are friendships, enmities and rivalries, partnerships, everything. It is just that the stakes are higher and there is absolutely no one who keeps the order between them except for the few unwritten rules.

    If someone crosses these rules, the two leagues that are involved which are the only two official organizations acknowledged by the circle members would take it upon themselves to deal with them."

    "Howe we don¡¯t know about this?" Grivon asked in confusion. After all, he is a young master of the Gaja n. There are a few things he doesn¡¯t know about in this world.

    "It is because you haven¡¯t explored enough. There is no invitation or entrance test to join the circle, it just happens. You would realize that you are part of the circle, only after a long time have you been part of the circle.

    After finishing enough missions and gaining enough strength, your parents and I who obviously don¡¯t have any interest in the strength of the n started roaming around, challenging stronger opponents and before we knew it, one day, the strongest of the bunch gave us these nicknames.

    As we are in the pursuit of challenge and improvement, soon we managed to enter the circle without even knowing.

    It is actually apletely intangible concept. There are no secret messages or specialmunication methods between the circle users, it is just that they no longer operate on the same grounds as the rest of the people and organizations and mostly roam around ande across each other in the most dangerous ces in the world as they try to pursue the strength beyond the Astral ne Consummation."

    "So, you mean to say, there are some other entities out there that are stronger than the top ns and organizations like us?"

    "There are way stronger people.. The dangers theye across the Divine Graveyard and the Pseudo Divine realm are way too much that the n wars seem like child¡¯s y to them."

 Chapter 1388: Sivans Troubles

    The parents didn¡¯t speak anything more about the grey circle, so Grivon started pestering Giyon to tell him more, but she didn¡¯t say anything much either. She is really a new member along with her close subordinates who are there to protect her and a bit stronger than her.

    Even she knew very little about the circle and what kind of people it holds. Snake Bitch is someone she came across as she is one of the weaker members of the circle.

    The dinner went on without a hitch. The earlier hitch Sam caused by speaking with n¡¯s leader in such a way seemed like it never happened.

    That night, Giyon instructed some of her maids and attendants to spread the word about the n¡¯s leader and Sam¡¯s situation among the circle of servants.

    That is the best way to spread rumors. After all, these servants are the people that gossip a lot more than anyone else. After all, it is inevitable for them toe across something exciting about the powerful people they are serving and they just couldn¡¯t keep it to themselves.

    Giyon¡¯s subordinates are a lot better, but now that she has given permission, they did their word to spread it as much as they can.

    The next day, when Sam and Grivon went back to Grivon¡¯s residence outside of the n. Of course, the simtor was also taken away and Grivon¡¯s parents followed them.

    Gail went on to spend some time with Jyon while Giyon became busy herself.

    Sam and Grivon went back to the ns of ambushing and destroying the businesses of their peers and the fresh target is actually Malgav and some of Mingiv¡¯s business.

    Both brothers are currently grounded to their residence in the n. Even though the excuse given out was that they are still recovering from the injuries and getting treatment, they are just embarrassed and Grand Elder Pon doesn¡¯t want them to embarrass him more.

    This is the perfect time to deal with them and this time, Giyon also joined in and she actually went to deal with some of these things.

    She is getting her own artisans from her own stray realm so that they would get the required data, blueprints, and production process from Sam.

    Currently, Giyon¡¯s foundational business and resources are all far away from the n. That is the ce with the least influence of Giyon¡¯s n and most of them could be considered as an almost neutral area, but notpletely.

    She made sure that the n wouldn¡¯t swallow up the whole thing when they want to.

    Grivon who is trying to take over his n and Giyon who is trying to establish her own power haspletely different goals and they don¡¯t have any conflicts of interest.

    Their initial ns of using Giyon as a guise tounch their business, and secretly confusing the Sivan and Mari n are allpletely destroyed since his identity ispletely revealed for the world to see.

    It might be a bad thing as the attacks like what happened with the ve would keep on happening.

    But the bright side is that they don¡¯t have to think of borate ways to secretly work.

    As far as the businesses are concerned, they could openly do it and the two siblings can do the same business, but in different areas without stepping on each other¡¯s tails.

    So, they are focusing on businesses and even their goals are somewhat simr. Grivon needs to deal with his peers and seniors, while Giyon is after the local authorities and powers. They need to destroy businesses and create new ones.

    This is perfectly within Sam¡¯s expertise as he has been doing this for a really long time.

    While Sam is doing this here someone else is also working on expanding their businesses with Sam¡¯s idea in the same way.

    Sivan who finally destroyed the chimera and is now picking apart Sam¡¯s soul is currently inside his personal stray realm along with all of his artisan and formation master subordinates.

    He had his hands extended onto a table under which there is arge glow.

    When the glow was finally stopped, there is something Sam is extremely familiar with under his hands.

    The energy cell.

    When the rest of the researchers saw this, they were dumbfounded.

    Sivan had a smile on his face and he ced his hand on it once again and destabilized it this time.

    *BOOM*

    The energy cell exploded.

    "Finally, I was able to do this. I don¡¯t know why I took so long to do this, but I managed to do it anyway. I will soon catch up."

    He then turned to the rest of the group and said.

    "I want you guys to find a way to make these things happen on arge scale and without my direct interference."

    "Sir, it is impossible for us to deconstruct and reconstruct these cells. It is only possible because of your special ability and constitution."

    One of the formation masters who have high expertise in energy maniption said directly.

    "Then what am I paying you guys so much money for? I want you to make a machine that could make these things in bulk. I want to create a business in all of the low-level ces. There is a lot of market and money to be made. I wouldn¡¯t take no for an answer."

    He just stuffed the requirements and brief in the hands of that guy and left the ce to go to another room.

    The formation master who saw the brief sighed and shook his head.

    "Why does he think that this is even possible? The very reason this cell is created is because of the impable energy control and a lot of mental energy and most of all, the spiritual core that is currently inside his body.

    We could rece the first two and think of a way to obtain it through other means, but what about the rest? We cannot get the qualities of his spiritual core which are essentially making the spiritual energy do all these things.

    I highly doubt even the original creator of these things even made this arge scale business."

    The formation master could only go and try his level best along with his assistants.

    In the next room, Sivan was in, currently, there are blueprints of ships.

    But that is not what the focus is currently on. It is the formationwork connection that Sam created with the fleet of ships back when he was invading the Usain sect.

    "How far have youe studying this? Are you sure you would be able to replicate it on arger scale?"

    A formation master and an artisan stepped forward and said.

    "Sir, we don¡¯t have any problem understanding this, in fact, we could clearly understand how each ship¡¯s structure was built and it is already a marvel in itself as we never came across something like this and even the formation used in is not exactly that difficult. It is just a simple defensive formation that wasyered again and again to create the required sturdiness, but the problem is, the design of these ships and this formation is corrted.

    If you want us the exact same fleet, we would be able to do that with the same features, but modifying it is a bit difficult. If we change the ship structure, the formation creation is impossible and if we cannot implement a new formation into the current fleet as everyrge-scaleponent of every ship is an integral part of the formation.

    We can try to use this principle, but with our current level of expertise, we don¡¯t believe that we can make something that could be used in the wars our scale in short term."

    Sivan¡¯s face turned uglier and uglier as the exnation turned longer and longer.

    After all, he is very experienced with these exnations. The longer the exnation, the more possibility there is for the makers to say no.

    "How dumb can you be to not being able to do something that even a kid can do? I don¡¯t give a shit about your excuses, I want results."

    He threw the documents on the face of that guy and went to another room.

    "If it is that easy, why don¡¯t you do it yourselves. You stole the body and ideas of another guy. Why don¡¯t you try and see if you stole his skills too."

    The artisan muttered as he picked the records, but he made sure that no one heard his words.

    After a few minutes, Sivan broke open the door of another room and walked out as he doused the room with the golden mes and a guy is burning down there.

    It seems like two disappointments are what he could take in one day. Another guy who is barely alive walked out of the room behind Sivan.

    Sivan turned to him and threw him a scroll.

    "I want this puppet ready no matter what.. I want you to do it and it should have all the functions I want it to be."

 Chapter 1389: Sivans Troubles II

    This is the situation for the past few days within the stray realm of Sivan. After finally defeating the Ghost Chimera, he slowly started absorbing Sam¡¯s soul. No matter how much resistance Sam¡¯s soul has put up, it is still dormant and Sivan is using a lot of methods to keep the soul dormant as he slowly absorbed it.

    The reason, he is not taking it all, is because the information Sam¡¯s soul held until now is way too much. It is just way too much and he doesn¡¯t want to overwhelm himself. Since he had this opportunity to savor all the information bit by bit, while understanding and exining everything to others, he decided to do that.

    So, he started businesses one after the other with every idea he is getting. The problem is that, even if he could understand what Sam is doing with the idea and what he is getting, he couldn¡¯t digest the rest of the technical details and the logical routes Sam has thought while making these things to decode the real science and technique behind them.

    The most he got at the moment is just the bunch of information to construct the things Sam did.

    In fact, the energy cell making is something that Sam did way before he even constructed the fleet and invaded the Usain sect.

    But Sivan just barely managed to master the energy cell creation and destabilization now.

    Until now, the most he managed to do with these businesses is creating machines that could improve the production of weapons. Thethes, drills, cutting machines, furnaces, etc.

    He just made his artisans go through the existing designs and rece the shitty metals with the extremely rare metals until they finally managed to get the correctbination.

    But this trial and error method is not exactly working when they tried it on others.

    The fleet, for example, is based on manyplex calctions that even the material of the ships is considered and very crucial to make the whole fleet and the formations associated with it.

    His artisans or he could only replicate it which ispletely useless at their cultivation level and the enemies they could possibly face and even useless for the people that they could possibly sell.

    They couldn¡¯t get anything from these things.

    In fact, the person he just burned is in charge of making the Bee puppet and the tfish puppet.

    They managed to figure out the structure of the puppets and Sivan even went as far as to note down every single calction Sam used to make these puppets.

    But no matter how much they tried, they couldn¡¯t make sense and even Sivan who could make sense of that because it was directly loaded along with the equations, couldn¡¯t create a new calction for the materials they have in their hand and they couldn¡¯t figure out what material to use to make a puppet that could be used by a person of Astral ne cultivation.

    Sivan is met with failure after failure as he obtained more information from Sam.

    The only thing he is currently seeding in is the food business as he got a lot of recipes from Sam¡¯s study of the library in the tower of the divine dimension.

    Along with that, the beverages are also doing well. Particrly, the beer. He could obtain various levels of wheat easily and that is the only recipe he managed to scale to the astral ne level without much trouble.

    He went back to the n residence with the headache.

    When he reached there, another bad news awaited him.

    "Sir, Butler Si has gone off contact. He sent a message two days ago and it just reached now. He used our slowest and most inefficient channel too."

    Sivan frowned and took the letter which was unopened.

    He looked at the contents and frowned and as he read more and more he mmed the desk in front of him and the wind elemental energy turned it into very small pieces until it almost turned to a pile of splinters.

    This is the fourth table this week.

    "Fuck, fuck, fuck. This is supposed to be my good time. I got a new perfect body, I have new ideas that are already proven to be sessful, and I have the vast empire I created for myself to support all of these new ideas, but why does nothing work.

    Now my most trusted subordinate not only has to leave me for a whole year and now hepletely went off contact."

    He started thrashing everything in the room and Butler Si¡¯s first student who took over his teacher¡¯s job came and tried to calm him down.

    "Young master, please stay calm. You wouldn¡¯t be able to think good if you are this angry."

    *BAM*

    All he was met with is a punch on his face.

    Of course, the disciple has a higher cultivation level and Sivan is not using any energy, he just wanted to let his anger out and the disciple took it without a chance of expression.

    He is angry inside. He is in fact burning up inside. He couldn¡¯t take this insult. He has done a lot of dirty work for Sivan. He killed innocent people, women, little kids, and people who don¡¯t even know why they are dying.

    He lost a few of his fellow disciples in order to quench the enmity Sivan has with one of the biggest pains in the ass he has ever known ande across and this is the gratitude is getting every now and then.

    A punch on the face.

    Sivan realized what he did, but there is no change in expression on his face either.

    "Stop giving me stupid advice and go and search where your teacher has been, you idiot. I need you to know why he went off contact. All he did say is that someone ising after him and he couldn¡¯t contact us any longer for a while.

    Find him and tell him toe back here. I couldn¡¯t care less if the stupid league or something that he mentioned is going to give him trouble or I don¡¯t give a shit if someone is after him, tell him toe here.

    None of the ns are working with him away. I cannot deal with all of these pricks who don¡¯t even know what to do even though they are given everything they need."

    As he yelled and ranted, he looked at Disciple One who is still standing there, and yelled once again.

    "What are you staring at my face for? Get the hell out of here."

    Disciple left with gritted teeth and clenched fists. He couldn¡¯t help but feel this anger inside him. If it was anyone else, he would have just punched them in the face and been done with it, but the person he is angry at is the one person in the world to which he shouldn¡¯t show his anger to.

    Sivan watched as the Disciple one left and couldn¡¯t help but feel more and more frustrated, he called for a subordinate.

    "Go and prepare a woman for me. Someone from the Elven n would be good."

    "Yes, young master."

    With that, the subordinate ran away.

    Apart from trying to create a rip-off of Sam¡¯s old ideas and failing spectacrly, Sivan is only doing one more thing, which is having a lot of sex.

    Due to his crippled situation, he is not even willing to have sex until now as he could sense the peculiar emotions women feel for him when he was in the bed with only one hand and one leg.

    Because of this, he killed a few women in earlier days, and now that he has this full-body, he is having sex with all kinds of women he has dreamed of.

    He calmed himself down a bit and went to the bedroom to have some time for himself.

    But what he doesn¡¯t know is, that his troubles are just starting and bigger troubles are brewing far away from his home and he doesn¡¯t know that within a few months to a year, he would be facing something that he would have never anticipated.

    Back in deste.

    Philip, Watt, and Jack are sitting together as they went through various reports on arge table. They are going through all the data and there are three subordinates standing to the side taking one report after another from their hands along with the instructions that are to be passed on to the other people.

    As they were doing that, someone knocked on the door and entered. It is Sirona

    "A Fire unit has been ready now. If you guyse over and check it out a bit, we would be able to send them to their first expedition and we can finalize the manufacturing of these products."

    All three of them stood up and followed her out and they went to the feathered and used some interdimensional space gates to reach a specific location in the Unconquered realm where a special base was set up near a very highly potent volcano.

 Chapter 1390: Unit

    Philip, Watt, and Jack arrived at the base wherein arge room that looked like a training room there are a group of ten people standing in the middle.

    They all stood in attention and they are all wearing this big cloak attire with a hood covering their heads and their faces covered with translucent red crystal masks.

    The masks didn¡¯t cover their facespletely. Most of the upper part of their face is covered with only a bit of forehead right below the scalp is revealed.

    The bottom half of the mask is uncovered at the mouth part with both sides of the jaws covered.

    Their eyes are not visible outside as they are covered with ck lenses too.

    The trio took a quick look around and Philip stopped in front of one of them and touched on the cloak.

    The arms of the people are covered with red metallic fiber gloves and when their cloak is moved a bit, there is this very fine armor underneath. The armor is very thing almost as if it is a scuba diving suit tight to the skin.

    The whole body ispletely covered and it could be said that there is not a single millimeter of the flesh that revealed out except for the little skin on their face.

    On that well-designed armor, there is a small bump on the chest which is actually a bump created to ce something from inside.

    After examining everything, Philip looked at them once again and said.

    "You guys are the First Fire Unit. You can name it however you like it after the final test. But no matter what you call yourselves, you are but a death squad under the Dusk Organization. You will be under the directmand of your boss Sam and in his absence us three.

    You wouldn¡¯t take anymands from the rest of the members of the organization. Whether they are the elders, administrators, or even our own wives if they are present.

    Between you, choose a leader by the end of the week, and in the absence of everyone else, you will follow that person¡¯s orders.

    But do remember, that the leader¡¯s head will be the first one to roll if he leads you all into something against our wishes.

    You are not for sale and you are not going to be bought by someone promising you any benefits that are known to man.

    I am pretty sure, your training under Sam¡¯s special squad has already made sure that you understand that.

    Now, let¡¯s go for your test and we will talk againter."

    With that, the unit of soldiers moved simultaneously in an order out of the training hall and they were led out of the base.

    Soon they arrived in front of arge wall where an elevator awaited them.

    They went to the top of the wall and from within they can see a lot of massive beasts roaming here and there. It is arge area surrounded by a big wall with arge patch of forest inside.

    The trio stood there and Philip spoke once again.

    "You need to get rid of every creature in this ce. Every one of your cultivation level is of Middle-stage Astral ne transcendence and every single creature has a cultivation level at the minimum of Late stage Transcendence and thest one is at peak of Astral ne transcendence almost one foot into the Astral ne Consummation.

    Your goal is to make sure that not a single living creature is present. I don¡¯t care if you are going to be discreet. I don¡¯t care if you work together, use the strategies you learned in your training, or if you are going to work together as a single entity.

    But All I need is that everything there needs to be burned to nothing. Do you understand?"

    "YES SIR."

    "Your test starts now."

    As soon as he spoke, the squad took out their weapons, one had a bow, the other had a staff. One spear user, a saber user, some don¡¯t have weapons.

    But all ten of them immediately jumped off the wall as their whole bodies are covered with mes.

    Philip stood there as he looked at the move while Jack and Watt checked the data regarding what kind of targets were left in therge area.

    "This test is really a bit troublesome. Do you think they would pull it off? This kind of reminds me of the first test I had back in Marquis city during thatrge selection process.

    "Yeah, I remember that too. You almost got your ass handed to you." Jack said from the side.

    "What do you mean by that? Did you remember? I hung down ten guys from an arch. Do you think you could have done a better job?" Watt who is obviously pissed shot back.

    "Of course, I would have. It seems like you don¡¯t remember how badass I was even at that time. I am the best swordsman there is."

    "Like hell you were. You might be good now, you were just so so."

    "Stop it, you guys? When did you be so childish?" Philip interrupted their banter and Watt couldn¡¯t help but chuckle.

    "Since when did you be so uptight. Weren¡¯t you the clown of the group? You were like this since we came back. Rx a bit alright?"

    Philip sighed and sat on the edge of the wall. Watt and Jack joined him as they popped open a bottle.

    "I am just pressured alright. That asshole just gave me this information and left. What does he expect me to do? And I couldn¡¯t even fathom how he managed to cook up such arge n in such a short time and even thought of sending it to me.

    The next time I meet him, I will beat the crap out of him."

    "Like you could beat him up. Anyway, currently, every single of our ns is going well. Even the first unit got ready. If everything goes well. We would be finished by the end of this year. Another six months and we can start the war.

    So, breath in a bit."

    "I know. But it is still a bit of pressure. But I couldn¡¯t help but wonder one thing. Why did he hide all of these things? In six months we managed to build half of these things without a hitch when we delegated it to the rest.

    Most of the research for the second half of the remaining products was also done. The whole thing leaps and bounds ahead of his regr research. Most of the products are also extremely saleable. People would take auctions for every batch even if we mass-produce them.

    Why is he is not doing that?

    Instead, he was stuck with this energy efficiency thing, the food, liquor, even clothes.

    If he made these things, he would have a proper army that could help him in any way possible and he could also earn a lot of money and expansion would be easier, in fact, he wouldn¡¯t have had to resort to so much effort when he is fighting"

    Philip said with a sigh as he looked at the raging mes far away in the test area.

    "I don¡¯t know why, but there is one thing I could tell you. One thing I noticed in particr." Watt said as he took a huge swig.

    "What is it?"

    "All the products we are manufacturing from the past six months are either things that could kill or things that aid the things that could kill.

    This is one big production of destruction. That is what we are doing.

    Maybe, just maybe he just doesn¡¯t want to go down the path of destruction once again and even then he couldn¡¯t help but create one or two dangerous things.

    You have seen what the controlled explosion formations created by those liquid energy cells could do right? They are way too lethal and destructive."

    All three of them turned silent when Watt said this, they couldn¡¯t help but feel that he is right. If Sam went down the path of a pure arms dealer and with the chaos this world is actually in, he would have been easily able to rack up fortunes, conquernds and collect subordinates without even moving a finger.

    But he always chose to continue his research on making puppets, energy production, and such. Most of them are even auxiliary.

    Maybe they are right, but they cannot say it for sure. After all, it is not like theypletely understood what goes on in Sam¡¯s head.

    As they were thinking and sighing, they saw the ten red figuresing towards the wall. The ten of them kicked the ground near the wall and the ming explosions sent them up and they almost scaled half of the wall in one leap.

    And they quickly kept on climbing up.

    The trio once again focused on the test area and there is a satisfying smile on their face. The lush and green test area is currently burning down turning to ashes. Philip took out a tablet to take a look and he couldn¡¯t help but smile wider. This is theplete three-dimensional surveincework they established in the test area.

    No matter which spot he checked, everything present in that spot ispletely dead and burning.

 Chapter 1391: Plan

    The trio and the unit all went to the base where Philip connected the tablet to the small bump on the armor to see some data.

    Some other artisans who were involved in armor development came and took a look at these things and they were also surprised by the data.

    "Sir, every armor is in perfect condition. All the functions are in optimal condition and the damage recovery is also great. We seeded."

    "Yeah, we did."

    Philip smiled and stored the tablet away before sending the researchers away. He then turned to the squad and asked.

    "How do you guys feel?"

    There was no answer just silence.

    Philip smiled and nodded.

    "That is good, you shouldn¡¯t feel anything. From today onwards, your past as the scum is going to be erased. You the worst vermin this world has ever generated are now going to turn over a new leaf. You should have nothing to do with who you were.

    Whether you had a life or not, from now on this is your life now.

    Your only job is to kill who we tell you to and save who we want you to. You are no longer the murderers, bandits, robbers, and traffickers of the past.

    You are the members of the First fire unit under the dusk organization and you will officially be given new identities, new names, and new lives. Go back to your base and train. Await our orders."

    As soon as he finished his words, all of them saluted before leaving the base.

    "So, are we unleashing them now? They did great in the test. I am really looking forward to what they are going to do in a base of Sivan. I would like to see that asshole¡¯s face when he looks at the burnt crisp that was left behind after this unit acts up." Watt suggested as he stretched his body.

    "No, we are creating more units. Sam¡¯s team led by Night Ghost and Arkiv collected many people in the past few months. They even went as far as to recruit and capture every known strong man within the realms they are visiting.

    They are even capturing the people that are under the control of the organizations they are destroying.

    We have a wide range of forces to create.

    We will only move after every man is trained to be the best he can be and added to the best team he would fit in.

    I want at least two thousand units and they would be spread among every cultivation level above astral ne transcendence to Astral ne Consummation of Late stage by the end of this all.

    If that was not possible I will settle for the middle stage. Only then would make a move.

    As he was speaking, Sirona walked in and said.

    "Good thing you guys are still here, the lighting unit just got ready. Do you want to test it now?"

    Philip smiled and nodded before going away followed by Watt and Jack.

    "I wonder when the wind unit will be ready. I would like to see them in action." Watt casually said.

    "They wouldn¡¯t be better than the de unit that was in the final stages." Jack countered as theyughed and left.

    While the Dusk organization is preparing for war, Sam is not sitting still.

    After he presented the next business steps for Giyon and Grivon, he also prepared for dismantling another group of organizations under Sivan and this time Giyon is also joining in for the dirty work.

    He also took a much milder approach this time.

    "Out of twelve, we arepletely done with two and the third one is halfway done and from thetest info, Giyon got, our actions triggered some insane internal conflicts, particrly since half of the influential people don¡¯t even know their organization¡¯s involvement with Sivan and their subordination to them.

    This civil war will make our situation a lot easier when we go after themter.

    So now, we are shifting to another organization and this one is a bit special.

    You are going to have a lot to gain from this thing.

    This is a merchant organization through and through and they don¡¯t conduct anything other than business.

    They only have direct control and authority over one realm and they indirectly control five more realms that arepletely barren and devoid of any resources with the produces and resources they sell there.

    In this way, they recruit talents from five realms and hold a monopoly over everything there.

    They control food, herbs, metals and in turn, they control potions, pills, weapons, armor, and every other thing that could help a cultivator.

    They don¡¯t have any other conflicts with other organizations because they bought every mercenary they could buy with their money.

    They are rich, way too rich, but the only thing theyck is a very powerful person that could protect their riches so they give money to Sivan and the very powerful people that Sivan could control and move to save their riches.

    In fact, they are the only organization at that level that could make deals with the even Vardar who is the most pricy mercenary in the surrounding realms.

    We are targeting them next and we are doing that in a very subtle way using their very own ws. When you take over everything, you can farm the best herbs and food products, rear the beasts, make the best medicine and create the best weapons from the precious metals obtained from those barrennds.

    If my estimation about the resources is correct and they were coupled with my designs and ns, your riches will double."

    Both Grivon and Giyon who were intently listening to the whole thing were shocked.

    "Sam, do you even know mywork? My riches are not that small so they could be doubled easily. They are just way too vast." Giyon said just to confirm.

    "I know if my calctions are correct and the estimations that are used to make that calction are more or less close. You are six times richer than Grivon."

    Grivon who is sitting on the side suddenly widened his eyes in disbelief and stood up while Giyon opened her mouth wide in shock.

    "Sister, Giyon. Howe you are way richer than me? I know you have businesses everywhere, but I thought you are only twice or thrice as rich as me, but six times? That is insane."

    Giyon didn¡¯t answer him and looked at Sam.

    "Oy.. OY Sam, how are you so sure about that? No, how do you even know about my worth? How did you calcte?"

    "Information Ms. Giyon. In this world or any other world, if a person has enough information and knows how to use it, then they would be able to do and aplish anything they want. All we need is data and know-how to process and put it into the application.

    And I must say Ms. Giyon. You must know how not to slip the information while you are making small talk. The information such as the poption of a ce, average cultivation, the spending limit, the resources avable in a ce and the same data of other ces that were also under your control, your business approach, you never really revealed what really is happening and how much you made from each ce, but if a person has a right mind, they can calcte it pretty easily."

    "You... You calcted it? Sitting in your residence, without even visiting one ce? You calcted it?"

    "Not really, I calcted it while we are having the meal. You are so zealously talking to your father, uncle, and aunt about your exploits making sure that you didn¡¯t reveal too much for the n¡¯s leader. I was bored, so I calcted it all."

    "What else.. what else do you know?" Giyon kept on stuttering.

    But this time, Sam didn¡¯t answer and just stood up as he wrote down on the board.

    "For the next expedition, most of it would depend on you Giyon, some of your forces and businesses are located in the realms nearby.

    You are to conduct a financial invasion with your subordinates there.

    The permission to do business is very easy in that ce. They are so conceited because, not only would a business establishment pay taxes, they would have to buy the raw materials from them too as they can provide the best of the best, every establishment has to take one service or the other from them.

    The money is just ending up in their pockets while providing a thriving economy.

    You are going to enter the market with our products, the best of the best while damaging their financial stability while Grivon would take some of your subordinates and his own subordinates to damage the stability within their organization in another way.

    We would be making chaos but in a controlled and organized way.

    I will brief you on each step of the n as we go. So, move as fast as you can. This time, it is going to be a bit fun and you can also show off to your parents about what you are about to do.. I am pretty sure they would be proud of you.

 Chapter 1392: Fig

    The briefing was done.

    "You guys prepare the people and resources for the first step of the n. You guys need to start in the next two days and also Ms. Giyon, I would help if you can give any information on the movements of the people that are supporting Mingiv¡¯s father and Grand Elder Pon.

    They would be the first idiots that are going to make the move against me. It would help if I could get some information from you. That would make things easier for me."

    "What would make it easier? You need to get to the stray realm and stay there until wee back alright. Don¡¯t walk around and be a target."

    "Bing a target? I am already one."

    Giyon thought for a moment and said.

    "Sam, tell me the truth. What exactly is your n with the pissing off the n¡¯s leader. Don¡¯t give the same excuse you said thest time. I am pretty sure that you are not doing this just to draw the line and draw out some people to kill Malgav in the end.

    There is going to be something more than that and you are hiding it from us for some reason. What is it?"

    Sam stood there and looked at her with a thoughtful expression and sighed.

    "Fuck it, there is not much point in telling you guys anyway. I have some n in mind, for that I need to throw the n into a bit of chaos. I don¡¯t want to tell the details, because there is no point in you guys knowing if this doesn¡¯t seed.

    At first, I wanted to do it a bit discreetly, but the situation with the n¡¯s head at the dinner is way too good to pass up and I didn¡¯t have to lie much. Everything I said to him is true and I wouldn¡¯t get any other chance to piss him off better than that.

    If you guys want, I can exin it to you, but if you can trust me, I will continue on with it on my own."

    Grivon and Giyon looked at Sam with a bit of skepticism. But they didn¡¯t ask any more questions.

    "Just don¡¯t go overboard. I believe with howcent the n has been, a bit of chaos could turn their chins a bit downward. But make sure that not all of it is lost." Giyon said those words and left.

    Grivon wanted to say something too but hesitated.

    Sam smiled and said.

    "Don¡¯t worry, you wouldn¡¯t lose anything. I will leave your n in your hands before I leave. Didn¡¯t I already give you my word? It is a matter of my pride, since I gave you my word, I am going to fulfill it. In fact, even this n will help me do that."

    Grivon just sighed and nodded.

    "I will trust you. But like Sister Giyon said. Don¡¯t go overboard. But don¡¯t get yourself killed. It is still better if you stay in the stray realm and save yourself while you are away, but if you are moving outside, keep in contact with my parents and uncle.

    Many n members might not know what they are outside the n and what their names and faces could mean in the outside world far away, but they know they are strong and even the n leader has to stay away from them if things go south.

    So, ask for their help if that is what it is needed for you to be safe."

    "Don¡¯t worry. I have way too much to do and way too many people to kill to die like this. Even if your whole n goes to hell, I will still be alive."

    Sam sent him off and went back to the stray realm.

    He needs to make some other preparations for this n.

    For now, he has felt that he doesn¡¯t need to worry too much about the league of Blood Iron. Even though there is more than one and a half years for his assignment to go cold, with Snake Bitch getting such a warning, the word is bound to spread.

    Even if she didn¡¯t spread it, the next league member that is bound toe will be stronger than her or at least of the same strength as her and it is possible for that person to know the royal nicknames of these people and there is a chance they would be scared off too.

    All he has to think of is a way to avoid getting killed by Sivan¡¯s goons and then make sure that the people from the Gaya n don¡¯t kill him for the businesses and the profits he could give them.

    For the next two days, he didn¡¯te out of the stray realm and made preparations.

    After two days, Giyon and Grivon left the n in a high-profile way and Giyon gave Sam ess to her informationwork to get some intelligence regarding the movements of the people that might make a move against him.

    But even after Giyon and Grivon are left for two days, nobody showed any obvious signs.

    Apart from the fact that the meetings of the n¡¯s leader have increased a lot as the rumors of Sam¡¯s defiance and disgust towards him were spread.

    Sam kept on observing the people that are meeting him and noticed that most of them are the ones that support the Grand elder Pon and some are the people that are in charge of the financials of the n.

    Sam didn¡¯t worry about most meetings, but there is one meeting that gained his attention.

    An elder whom even Giyon was wary of a bit and also the one who he is hoping to make a move.

    He is not even that much of an authoritative figure. But he is a peculiar guy that is notorious for his weird decisions.

    For example, he is the same guy who was actually a sessor candidate alongside Mingiv and Giyon, but instead, he gave up right before even the race started and became an elder.

    He is actually the youngest elder in the n¡¯s history.

    But he never attends n meetings. He neveres to meet with the n leader and he never cooperates with the elders and other youngsters of the n.

    He conducts various businesses and ording to Giyon he is almost indirectly controlling a realm¡¯s worth of resources and almost a force equivalent to that of one of Sivan¡¯s twelve organizations.

    He is doing it secretly, but he is doing it with the partnership of the n. He is not hoarding them up for himself. He is contributing everything to the n and if Giyon¡¯s information is a hundred percent urate, he is a direct subordinate of the n leader at the moment.

    For him to have a meeting with the n leader, this must be something important.

    So, Sam immediately called the intelligence officer that is in charge of the info regarding the n leader and his subordinates.

    "I need to get the details of the meeting of Elder Fig and the n leader. Even if we cannot get the internal info of what exactly happened in the meeting, I need to find out whether he is deploying any of his own subordinates here or if he is leavingpletely without any traces.

    If he is staying within the city or the n, I need to know how many people he ismanding here.

    Everything you could think of. When can you get it for me?"

    "By tomorrow. We have a cold agent within the n leader¡¯s residence, I will see if we can contact him and get the information needed from the meeting. But no promises though.

    The information would be with by tomorrow night."

    "Thank you so much. That would be all for now."

    That night Sam went through everything to see if he would be able to find any anomaly and in process, he divided all notable n members into different categories.

    The first one is actually, the ones on the side of Grivon and Giyon. Every elder that is following the Grandfather of Grivon is directly on that side. They are inplete opposition to anything that is rted to harming Sam.

    It seems like the old man is very concerned about Grivon¡¯s interests which might lose out when Sam is touched.

    These are called the Supporting Side.

    The second one is obviously the opposing side.

    This includes everyone that is directly under the subordination of Grand Elder Pon and some who are working to improve the financial side of the n with the n businesses.

    They all want a piece of Sam and his inventions.

    There is one group that he couldn¡¯t ce a proper name on and that is the Neutral Side. The neutral side doesn¡¯t mean they are not a harm to him. They are just the direct subordinates of the n¡¯s leader.

    They keep the lowest profile and they show the least eagerness in craving for power and authority.

    The only reason even Sam took notice of them is because of Giyon¡¯s information on their secret activities and right now, even though the possibility is that the opposing side is the one that makes the move, he is most looking forward to seeing if the neutral side makes any move.

    He wants to see the reaction of the n leader for the humiliation Sam caused him.

 Chapter 1393 - Merc Group

    <h4>Chapter 1393 - Merc Group</h4>

    Afterpiling the list.

    Sam shifted his focus to something else. The toxins. The weird creatures that are under Mingiv''s control are still a threat. If not for the fact Grivon and Giyon''s parents came, Sam would have kept on working on that.

    He wouldn''t have had any other thoughts.

    In fact, he must thank them. Only after he was distracted enough was he able to reorganize his thoughts and thus cooked up all of these ns.

    Even though it is past midnight, he didn''t really care much as he made his way to Giyon''s residence.

    There unexpectedly Gail is staying even though his daughter is not present.

    "Hello."

    Sam greeted him politely.

    "Hey, Sam." Gail returned the greeting.

    "I have something to do in the basement."

    "At this hour? What could that be?"

    "Some research actually. Do you want toe and see it? You might be able to help me."

    "Why not? I am feeling kind of bored."

    With that Gail also followed Sam into the basement and soon they ended up in the makeshiftboratory Sam has established here which is full of weird creatures.

    When Gail looked at them, a big frown appeared on his face as he slowly caressed them and after giving them a quick scan, he couldn''t help but look at them in disgust.

    "What are these?"

    "We don''t exactly know. But these are the things that supported Mingiv and his subordinates in the battle against us.

    When I caught them off guard with my outburst and suicidal moves, they were left unconscious and they weren''t able to clean up.

    Then we got these corpses.

    I don''t exactly know what these things are, but they spell trouble¡­" Sam continued to exin what they are and what they could do and what his spections about making them are.

    Gail''s frown only deepened as he listened to his words and he couldn''t help but be angry by the end of it.

    "I thought, only Mari n is rotten enough to conduct experiments like this. The Gaja n has clearly deteriorated when I was gone."

    Hemented as he thought of the rivalry they had and all the leaders that died in the battles between them.

    In fact, one of the core reasons that Gaja n garnered a somewhat positive image among the neutral areas and often their support is because of their stance.

    These people believed that Gaja n wouldn''t resort to the same means the Mari n does to just win a rivalry.

    But because of this one guy who resorted to these means, all those beliefs are meaningless.

    "I am working on a substance that could deal with these creatures in a purely physical sense. Going after it with some physical force or elemental energy sts is a bit expensive thing to consider at the moment."

    "Are you sure you would be able to make one before they were used in battle?"

    "I guess so. After all, from what I could see, the creatures are directly under themand of MIngiv and his parents or grandfather doesn''t know much about it. That is the only reason there were no serious threats or attacks on us until now.

    He clearly doesn''t want the outsiders to know and with the house arrest he was put under by his grandfather, he couldn''t find a proper excuse that would let him mobilize his forces for this.

    So, until I see any obvious movement from him, I have enough time.

    Anyway, I got a headstart because Sivan was generous enough to send a toxin expert here. Even though that guy died, his memories and the storage gave me a lot of things I could use and experiment with."

    Sam spoke all the while cutting the piece of the creature down and cing it on a test surface where he sprinkled some toxic concoction on it and then used the observation ability to see how it is affecting it.

    "I will leave you be. I am not much of an expert on toxins. I cannot help you here."

    Sam nodded and continued with his work.

    He kept on working until dawn and even then he only came out because he received some information through hismunication device.

    "What is it? Anything suspicious?"

    "There is some movement from Fig''s side and I got some information from the inside agent. In the meeting, there was no discussion whatsoever. They just talked aboutmon stuff and the n leader asked how Fig was doing and everything else.

    Apart from that, there is nothing. Not even about the businesses under Fig, the n problems, finances, nothing.

    They either had not really discussed anything or they might havepletely managed to cover up that they discussed anything.

    Either way, it is hard to get what you need from that point. Anyway, as for the information I wanted to share, it is about some people who are acting a bit suspicious.

    There is a new group of people out of the n and one of them is someone from Giyon''s database. He is a mercenary and he does a lot of dirty work. He is the go to contact for many nobles to kidnap their own illegitimate children and kill them.

    He would make it look natural no matter how many guards are present and no matter how much resistance there is, he would always finish the job.

    His arrival here at this moment is definitely not good news. Be careful."

    "Thanks for the heads up, you don''t have to worry about keeping an eye on him. I will send Grivon''s subordinates. Hiswork is better suited for this job."

    "Alright. I will send the documents on this mercenary."

    Sam came out of theb and soon he got the information.

    He couldn''t find any connection between this guy and the members inside.

    Then again, he is a mercenary, after all, the good ones don''t keep too much of a connection with the customer.

    While Sam is thinking, Jyon arrived with the kids.

    "Hello, why did you bring them here? Again?"

    Jyon smiled awkwardly. Ever since the incident, the kids are staying with her as even though they are under Giyon''s care, they are closer to Jyon, so Giyon figured it would be a good thing to let them stay with her until this trauma has passed.

    But the only problem is she is way too amodating with these children.

    She doesn''t know how to say no, which led to the exam he conducted with the simtor.

    All the kids avoided eye contact leaving the questions to Jyon.

    "I am taking kids outside."

    "Outside? Into the city? It is way too dangerous. There are just too many people trying to get a piece of me, with my stance regarding the kids, they are an easy target for the kidnap."

    "No, no. Not the city. We are using the n''s internal space gates to go to the realm under the n''s control. It is a realm for vacations, kind of exclusive to the n members. I will take them there. They will rx a bit.

    They are really looking forward to sses, but you are not taking any, so I need to keep them upied."

    Sam raised an eyebrow and asked.

    "Are you really ming me for not teaching them sses immediately after that incident? Is that what you are doing Ms. Jyon?"

    Jyon didn''t speak and just looked at him before saying.

    "I will be taking them. We will stay there for two days and you better be prepared to take sses, it is not just about the sses and the study, Sam. They miss spending time with you."

    Sam sighed and took out a spatial ring.

    "Give one each for the children and keep one for yourself. Anyway, are the guardsing with you?"

    "Guards are not allowed and so were the fights. The grand elder stays there and as long as he detects anymotion he will give people some severe punishment."

    "Alright, but keep these tokens on you all the time. If there is any trouble, just inject a bit of energy in one of the tokens. Even though the kids cannot do that, as long as you do it one of them, I can find the rest too."

    She nodded and turned back as she left followed by the children.

    They also gave him a look before running away and Sam was stuck on the spot in shock before he shook his head and went back to theb with a wry smile.

    "Miss spending time with me? That is thest thing they would do if they knew the real me." Sam muttered to himself slowly.

    He thought of how he behaved near children and he had to say that he was really caring and calm with them. Maybe it is because of their innocence or that he is basically teaching them very little, he was a bit more gentle to them than he was with his students.

    And it garnered this impact.

    Just as he was about to enter theb, he got amunication alert from subordinates.

    "Sir, the team you wanted us to monitor is making a move. They are going to the Gaja n''s public Space gates. They seemed to be traveling somewhere. This ce might even just be a resting stop."

    "Don''t let them get out of your sight. Make sure you check where they are going."

    Sam said as he looked at the documents of these people.

    They are not even that strong. The leader of the mercenary group and this guy is only a Peak stage Transcendent cultivator.

    This is also a bit reassuring; as if someone really wanted to make a move, they wouldn''t really be able to do much with just this.

 Chapter 1394 - Bad Feeling

    <h4>Chapter 1394 - Bad Feeling</h4>

    Sam wanted to go back to theb, but he has this bad feeling that he couldn''t shake off. He took out a token and sat down at the table.

    Gail who is sitting at the same table while going through a book looked at him.

    "What is wrong? You don''t look too well."

    Sam looked at him and didn''t even know what to answer.

    "I feel like something is wrong. Jyon is taking the kids somewhere and at the same time a guy who was suspicious is also getting out using the n''s public space gates."

    "It could just be a coincidence," Gail said with a faint smile.

    "I have seen far too many things to believe in coincidences."

    "Then why don''t you just confirm it? It never hurts to try. Go and rify your doubts instead of brooding over here and trying to guess whether you are just overthinking. It is only a waste of time."

    Sam immediately nodded and took out hismunication token. He walked out of the room and contacted Jyon.

    "Ms. Jyon why did you n this vacation at this moment?"

    "What do you mean why? For the kids of course."

    "I know it is for kids, but is there any trigger or any suggestion from anyone you know or don''t know that might have prompted you to take the vacation right now at the moment?"

    Jyon stayed silent for a moment and said.

    "Sam, I respect you a lot and with all the recent incidents my respect only grew, but don''t you think you are being a bit too paranoid? Nothing will happen to the kids and I am taking the kids outpletely out of volition. Even if it is hard for you to believe, Ipletely thought of that idea on my own.

    I am near the space gate and I would be leaving now. You wouldn''t be able to contact me through this token, so just don''t bother. You also need to take a break from this, so just rx. Nothing will happen to the kids."

    "Listen.."

    Before he could even speak, she cut themunication off and he wasn''t even able to contact her again.

    Sam sighed.

    Overly paranoid. That thought also crossed his mind, but he has this feeling that he is definitely not overthinking.

    He couldn''t suppress it and contacted one of Giyon''s subordinates stationed at Jyon''s ce. He asked her some questions and he still didn''t get any answers that he needed.

    From the looks of it, everything is normal.

    Sam then made a call to the subordinate outside.

    "Where is the mercenary group going?"

    "They are in the line for one of the subordinate realms, Sir. Nothing is wrong. I also inquired from which realm did theye and it indeed looks like they just stopped here."

    "What about the suspicious activity outside the n? Why did they show it?"

    "Maybe their force of habit sir. A team is looking into it, but that all we could think of at the moment."

    "Alright. Just keep an eye and make sure that you report to me if there are any changes in their n. Also, call me after they left."

    "Yes, Sir."

    Sam walked in and Gail asked.

    "So, what is the situation? Is your gut instinct wrong?"

    "I believe so. Everything seems normal. I don''t know why, but I just couldn''t shake the feeling off."

    Gail looked at him deeply for a moment and didn''t say anything before going back to the book.

    Sam also took a deep breath and went back to theb.

    He went on with doing concoctions while looking through the reactions of the flesh. He even saw some results that could be useful here and there.

    An hour passed and finally, the call came from the subordinate.

    "They left sir. There is no activity whatsoever."

    Sam sighed and just decided to go with his own work. But before that, he looked at the token on the table.

    He slowly picked it up and was about to store it away and all of a sudden, it started glowing.

    His eyes widened in disbelief as he immediately grabbed the token and ran out. He went to meet Gail and said.

    "Something is wrong on that vacation spot. Pleasee with me."

    Sam said as he took out another token and threw it to him.

    Gail frowned, but he still caught the token and got ready. Both of them crushed the token at the same time and the whole room is surrounded with spatial elemental energy. But when it stopped, only Sam disappeared from there and Gail looked at his hand with a frown.

    The crushed token is left in his hands, and he also felt it working, trying to envelop him and trying to take him away from this spot to a different one.

    But all of a sudden, he felt a lot of resistance and it didn''t work anymore.

    The bad feeling that Sam is speaking about also starteding for him and he immediately ran out of the house.

    He leaped into the air and rapidly made his way to the space gates. It didn''t even take two minutes for him to do that and he grabbed the person in charge there.

    "Where did Jyon take the kids?"

    The person in charge couldn''t even speak because of the suppression and could only weakly point at a space gate.

    Gail threw him away and ran towards it. The subordinates there hurriedly activated the space gate, but when Gail entered it, it didn''t work.

    No matter what they did, Gail didn''t disappear.

    "What the fuck is happening?" Gail asked coldly.

    "We¡­ We don''t know sir. Something is wrong with the space gate all of a sudden."

    "Then fix it. You idiot."

    Gail then looked at the elder who is in charge and said.

    "Call the n leader here. If something happens to my daughter on the other side, I will not let this go."

    As Gail is seething in anger on a faraway which is solely used by the Gaja n members for vacationing on a beach.

    The kids are all frightened as they surrounded Jyon and hugged her. In front of her, there are a group of people.

    And that group is the same mercenary group Sam has suspected all this while. Behind that group, Malgav stood coldly looking at the whole scene.

    "Malgav, this wouldn''t go away easily. My father wouldn''t let you go."

    "What does this have anything to do with me? I didn''t cause this. All I am doing is standing there and looking at what is about to happen. I ept that I don''t have the guts to do anything to you or the kids, but I am definitely not going to be the hero that is going to step in and stop something that is going to happen to you."

    Malgav paused as he touched his disfigured face and skin. They are all wrinkly and there is clearly no trace of the charm this young man used to have.

    "Just because, I enjoyed myself a bit with a girl, your sister''s dog did something like this to me. I would like to see if these kids would be saved by that guy."

    Jyon was horrified. She doesn''t know if what Mgav said is true. She doesn''t know if these people really don''t have anything to do with him.

    But she knew that malgav is the only one around them and she needs his help to save them.

    She then turned to the mercenaries and yelled.

    "The Grand Elder, wouldn''t spare you. You wouldn''t be able to use this barrier to stop his senses for long."

    Before the mercenaries could say anything, Malgav said.

    "Too bad, the grand elder is not on this. He has gone back to the n to report something. It is just you and those vermin along with these mercenaries. It would be a good show to watch."

    As he said that, he used his spiritual energy to pile the sand up a bit and sat on it.

    Jyon held the token in her hands and squeezed it hard. She already sent the energy into it, but she doesn''t know if this would help her at the moment.

    She took her flute and started ying. The water in the sea riled up and surrounded her and the kids creating a barrier.

    The Mercenaries just smirked and started attacking. Every one of them is actually a warrior and they are using different de weapons.

    The leader in particr sliced through the water barrier and entered. But was shocked to see another water barrier in front of him.

    "let me see how manyyers you could create miss. This would be fun."

    He swung his de and theyer was torn off.

    Jyon started panicking and she almost started weeping. Her eyes clearly became wet with tears and at this exact moment, she sensed the spatial energying out of her token and was surprised.

    Before she knew it, the token flew out of her hand and hovered in the air and Sam appeared out of nowhere.

 Chapter 1395 - 12 Seconds

    <h4>Chapter 1395 - 12 Seconds</h4>

    Sam looked at the situation and sighed. He clearly didn''t see these people before. But from their looks he could rte them to the description he had heard from the subordinates.

    They are definitely the same mercenaries, he came across before. He then turned to look at Malgav.

    "This look suits your pedophilic tendencies way better than the previous one. But why are you still here? Shouldn''t you be shivering on a bed huddled into a big ball while holding your balls that you almost lost permanently?"

    Malgav looked at embarrassed and enraged, but both of those feelings arepletely overwhelmed by the fear that came from looking into Sam''s eyes.

    He still remembered as clear as a day on how Sam busted him in front of so many people. He couldn''t even bring himself to garner any energy to even throw an insult back. In fact, it is even hard for him to directly look at him.

    "What are staying mum for? Is this batch yourtest trick?"

    Sam asked coldly. Malgav, wanted to deny it, but before he could do so, the mercenary group made a move.

    Sam didn''t even understand, where did they get their confidence from. Except for the leader of the group who is at Peak stage, the rest are allpletely at his level or some even at a lower level.

    But when he looked at the way they are moving, he immediately understood what their strength is. They are not attacking him. They are attacking the kids.

    Sam gritted his teeth and took out the staff before jamming it in the ground.

    Arge energy barrier appeared in front of him and enveloped the kids and Jyon as well.

    *BAM* *BANG* *BOOM*

    The energy barrier is collided with myriad of attacks and Sam turned back to look at Jyon.

    "I can fight them off, but I need to be sure that children would be safe in your hands. Can you do that?"

    "I¡­ I¡­" Jyon panicked and almost broke down.

    Sam wanted to yell at her. But he knew that wouldn''t help. He tried to calm down a bit and said.

    "If I have to maintain such a wide barrier good enough to make sure that even the after effects of the attacks wouldn''t reach the kids, I wouldn''t be able to fight. The moves I can make would be very limited and with the area around us so broad, the battle might we as well go on forever. Can you pull yourself together and focus on the barrier?

    All you need to do is make sure that the kids are okay. I already notified the situation to your father, he should being here. So, you don''t need to be afraid."

    "SAM¡­."

    As soon as Sam finished his words, Jyon yelled on top of her lungs and Sam frowned. He also sensed something and turned around.

    He was stunned by what he saw.

    The leader of the mercenary group stood before the barrier and he wore some kind of glove that is glowing with energy patterns.

    He then stabbed it into the barrier straight towards Sam.

    And actually, it went through it without any resistance.

    Sam took in a breath of cold air and dodged while doing a spinning kick aimed at the arm.

    A saber appeared in the hand of the leader and the kick shed with it.

    The de and the metal leg of Sam are shing together and when Sam looked at other mercenary groups also wearing these gloves, he immediately made an energy bullet converge at the end of his metal leg.

    *BOOM*

    The energy bullet destroyed the saber and almost took the hand of the leader if he was not quick enough to pull it out and move back.

    Sam immediately used the staff to create moreyered barrier to make the thickness high enough to not let the glovespletely prate it.

    He then turned to Jyon and the kids. If possible, he would have really sent these kids away through the spatial tokens. Even if they went to the stray realm of Grivon, they would at least survive, without much trouble. But their bodies wouldn''t be able to withstand the spatial suction. Their internal organs woulde out before they could even disappear here.

    The only instantaneous method that he could use is the space gate, which he doesn''t have.

    "Jyon, you have to pull yourself together. They areing from all sides. I need you to save them."

    As he spoke those words, he noticed that she is shivering in fright.

    He couldn''t help but shake his heads and said to her in a very low tone while the mercenaries already spread throughout the barrier as they are trying to use the gloves to prate the barrier. Luckily with Sam''s barrier, he managed make it a bit slower.

    "Jyon, Jyon. Don''t panic. Just make one barrier. Before I came here, you were ready to fight them, right? Just like that. I don''t need you to do much for me. Just twelve seconds. Create a strong barrier and maintain it while counting to twelve.

    By the time you finish counting, I will be back and we can leave this ce.

    Do you understand?"

    Jyon looked at Sam who is trying to calm her down and nodded.

    She took her flute and started ying.

    Water started manifesting around her and the children and it created arge barrier and it became thicker and thicker until it reached Sam''s barrier.

    Sam finally smirked and took off his barrier. He spun his staff and took a leap forward towards the leader.

    He swung his staff diagonally downwards.

    But the opponent managed to block with the saber which he realized is futile. As soon as the staff shed with the saber, One of the sections opened up and shot energy bullets directly at the leader at a point nk range.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Out of those two, one of them brushed past his face and exploded behind him while the other one exploded at his chest.

    He was enveloped by the two explosions while Sam created a barrier than threw him off a bit.

    In mid-air he maneuvered himself a bit while kicking his metal leg off. The energy sted and he changed his direction to the nearest guy attacking therge water barrier.

    The staffnded on the guy''s head bursting it open and with the same momentum Sam kicked the ground and slid on the sand to the next guy.

    He swung the staff diagonally as he moved past him and his mid-section was exploded with just one hit.

    By the time Sam stopped sliding, he aimed the staff at the third target and used the energy bullets to shoot them down.

    *BOOM*

    He didn''t rest and kicked the ground, jumping high into the air as he crossed over the barrier with a single leap andnded on the other side in a big parab.

    While in mid-air, he shot the energy bullets at two more opponents who were already running away from the barrier, but they were shot down immediately.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Even though they were not dead, they were unable to move anymore.

    When hended, Sam sted the head of one guy with the staff with a direct hit and then shot down the other two guys with energy bullets.

    "And that is twelve."

    He muttered to himself and took a deep breath.

    He looked at Jyon who is ying the flute with a big frown and tapped on the barrier.

    She opened her eyes and looked at Sam and then at the rest of the surroundings, finally stopping the flute.

    She finally felt relieved.

    But Sam didn''t.

    Because, he immediately sensed something and made a move.

    He disappeared from the spot as he dashed forward.

    *BAM*

    His staff shed with a saber. The leader of the group who is bleeding from his mouth and with a big gaping hole in his chest and on the back is gritting his teeth as he made a move.

    Sam realized that this guy doesn''t even have that much strength left, so he sighed a relief and moved his staff, pushing the other guy out. But once again, the opponent lunged forward and leaped at Sam who caught him by his shoulder with one hand while storing the staff away.

    The man struggled so much and Sam muttered.

    "What are you struggling so much for? Just die in peace."

    He was about to throw a punch, when the man spat a mouthful of blood on Sam''s face.

    Sam''s punchnded on his face right after that,pletely breaking his head open.

    But the blood has entered his eyes and mouth and he felt something odd about it.

    He just shook the feeling off and turned to Jyon.

    "Take the kids back through the space gate. I have something to do here."

    Jyon looked around and noticed that the kids are shivering in fright. They are clearly traumatized by the situation.

    She slowly gathered them and led them out of this ce.

    Sam turned around and let Specter out.

    "Gather the souls and the information.." He then turned to Malgav and looked at him coldly.

 Chapter 1396 - Poison

    <h4>Chapter 1396 - Poison</h4>

    Malgav is already horrified. Last time, he hasn''t seen Sam fighting. All he saw its destruction. He hasn''t seen his moves, skills, or his precision. But now he has seen it all.

    At leastst time, Sam wasn''tposed. He was almost borderline crazy. But now, he ispletely clearheaded and for some reason, he is feeling a bit more afraid than before.

    "I¡­ I really have nothing to do with this. I am telling the truth. I have never even met these guys before."

    Malgav immediately felt the need to disassociate with these people.

    Sam slowly walked towards him. He doesn''t know whether these guys are rted to Malgav or not, but he is sure that he wouldn''t be letting Malgav go.

    And luckily for him, the barrier these guys used is still there and for a forever reason, that grand elder wasn''t able to sense it until now. He figured it would be better if he killed this guy now and threw all the me to the mercenaries that came here.

    It wouldn''t be that hard for him to make it look like this piece of shit died while fighting. Of course, his death would appear more heroically than what Sam would have wanted, but he couldpromise.

    As he was thinking on what approach he should use to kill this guy, he suddenly felt that something is wrong with his body.

    He shook his head wildly and walked forward.

    But soon he realized, his whole body is feeling numb and his tongue is going dry. He is feeling a bit weak and heavy.

    He was drugged or he was poisoned and then he remembered the blood that was spat into his mouth and the eyes and he realized instantly what happened.

    He immediately charged all of his energy into his bloodstream and used the observation ability on himself. Particrly the bodily fluid.

    He felt his eyes swelling and going blurry. His legs felt heavy too. But he ignored all of them and stood there as he observed the bloodstream, the stomach, and his eyes to see if he could identify the foreign bodies that are causing this to him.

    But before he even knew it, Sam involuntarily felt his one normal leg go heavy and knelt on it. He realized that all of his muscles are bing hard to control and are bing extremely stiff.

    He is not the only one that noticed this though.

    Malgav who is close to him and Jyon who is far away from him and finally the specter who is very near him also noticed this.

    Sam didn''t worry or be panicky. He kept a cool head and took out one of the detoxing vials along with the injector and gave himself a shot of it.

    This is one of the basic vials that could slow down and sometimes evenpletely neutralize a broad spectrum of toxins.

    At the same time, Sam gave himself a shot of another vial which could be considered the spiritual energy equivalent of the antibiotics, just in case it is some kind of infection that is rapidly spread.

    And to his relief, he could feel the detoxing medicine acting up. It is doing perfectly good without any necessary aid from the antibiotic vial which made Sam heave a sigh of relief.

    Sam who has his observation abilitypletely active noticed that after the detoxing medicine entered his bloodstream, the blood-red cells Sam saw until then turned ck.

    At least some of them and when the medicinepletely reacted with it, the ck blood became heavier almost to a consistency of sludge.

    Sam used his spiritual energy to try and guide the sludge to his arm and made an incision there to let it out. But it is hard. After all, he is not a water elemental user now and if he solidifies the spiritual energy to do that, his bloodstream would be blocked.

    As he was slowly guiding the sludge out of his eyes first, he suddenly sensed something around him.

    Malgav who was standing still until then wanted to run away when he saw Sam''s plight. But when he saw one of his legs go down, he immediately had a different thought. He changed his mind and ran towards Sam to tackle him to the ground.

    Sam whose reaction is obviouslyte was tackled to the ground.

    Malgav held Sam by his chest and tightly squeezed him with all of his strength.

    He is not even trying to kill Sam quickly, he is trying to squeeze Sam to death. It seems like what Sam did really made him go crazy.

    Sam felt the crushing pressure on his ribs which he shouldn''t have with his cultivation level. But he is feeling weak at the moment and most of his concentration was at his eyes.

    He is using the spiritual energy and even went as far as making very thin needles, almost as thin as hair strands to force the sludge out.

    It almost looked like he is letting out ck tears.

    He couldn''t divert any more of his energy to anywhere.

    He wanted to just let Malgav be and go on with the process, but as a few seconds passed, he realized that the pain in his lungs is distracting him a lot. But he still tried his best to focus.

    Jyon who saw this looked at the children and didn''t dare to leave them alone as she was still vignt.

    When the specter was about to make a move, Sam refused.

    "Don''t focus on the soul extraction and process the memories. I will deal with this guy myself."

    As soon as he muttered those words, he was done with the extraction from his eyes and then made a move. Even though his muscles still felt heavy and he felt a bit weak, he still managed to gain an upper hand immediately.

    Sam pushed the head of Malgav to the side and made it go under his armpit as he held him a headlock.

    He couldn''t exert any physical strength because of the toxins that are still needed to be let out, but he manifested the spiritual energy around his arm and made it perform his hand the functions that are needed for a proper headlock and this spiritual energy itself held the lock tightly and made it tighter with every second.

    He didn''t leave his legs ideal. He wrapped them around the waist of Malgav, squeezing him with all he got, the metal leg acted as the foundation for leveraging the strength of the remaining leg and he once again used the spiritual energy to squeeze him tighter.

    He then started whispering to Malgav.

    "What is it Malgav? Are you feeling suffocated? All this while, you must have been feeling so good viting little kids, now, let me make you feel what would make a man feel vited."

    As he spoke, he squeezed the locks tighter.

    "ARR¡­arrgh¡­" He couldn''t even scream as he felt the pressure on his neck and the waist. His whole face is pushed into the sand and he couldn''t even breathe freely without the struggle. On top of that, the squeezing on his waist is making him feel immense pain as he felt his liver getting crushed slowly along with other internal organs.

    "Come on, say something you piece of shit. You were so strong when you were crushing me, weren''t you? Where did all of that strength go? Come on squeeze me like you mean to kill me. Otherwise, you would be dead."

    Sam spoke through gritted teeth as he tightened his grip and within the next ten seconds, Malgavpletely lost the grip on Sam''s waist and he pulled his hands from under his body to try and free himself.

    He was beating around like a fish out of the water and Sam made him suffer every second of it.

    He could have snapped his neck and been done with it. But he didn''t want to. He wanted to make him suffer.

    He held that guy for the next five minutes like that. Letting his breath in the middle while breaking a bone here and there.

    As he was about to finish him off after that, suddenly the barrier around them which is to keep this whole thing from the grand elder was sted away as a familiar figure appeared in front of Sam''s eyes.

    It is actually Gail.

    As soon as he arrived, Gail didn''t go to Jyon or Sam, instead, he stepped up once again and mmed his fist straight. As if it was on cue arge dragon condensed with pure wind appeared out of nowhere and was destroyed.

    "Uncle, it ispletely unruly of you to sneak attack a junior with your cultivation. Don''t you think so?"

    His voice was not particrly loud, but he reverberated around and soon an old man came running from the depths of the area. He came running on the wind and floated there as he looked at Gail.

    "How are you doing Gail? I heard you were back for a while.. Took you long enough for you toe here and visit your old uncle."

 Chapter 1397 - Paralyzed

    <h4>Chapter 1397 - Paralyzed</h4>

    Sam still held Malgav in the headlock and looked at the old man coldly. He was really stunned and afraid for a second. If not for the fact that Gail came and saved him in the nick of the time, he would have died without even knowing what has happened to him.

    "You might want to leave that guy. Gail might be stronger than me by a long shot, but he wouldn''t be able to stop me from injuring you. So, it would be better if you let that guy go."

    The old man spoke to Sam who is still in shock. Sam looked at Malgav reluctantly, but he knew that he wouldn''t be able to kill him now. He might be bold enough to verbally humiliate n''s leader, but that verbal humiliation is merely him stating his stance, now killing Malgav here will vite some serious rules of the n and they would have some serious legitimate reason to deal with him.

    Even though he wanted chaos, that doesn''t include this level death threat to him. But he is already pretty satisfied with what he had done to Malgav now. The old man might make him let go, but he had already done what should be done to make Malgav''s life living hell one more time.

    So, he just let go and weakly stood up.

    Gail looked at the old man coldly and asked.

    "It seems like you really didn''t ck off from your duty, but I wonder why my daughter and the kids that came with her weren''t protected with the same zeal."

    "I wasn''t here at that time and by the time I came back, that fellow already took care of everything."

    Gail just scoffed and turned back.

    "Let''s get out of here."

    Sam nodded and limped weakly. After a few steps, he started manifesting spiritual energy around himself to help him walk a bit more normally. He couldn''t believe how weak and stiff his muscles were, considering just a few minutes ago, he was jumping around like crazy.

    Looking at Sam''s struggle, Gail just picked him and both of them joined Jyon and the kids far away.

    Then the whole group went to the nearest space gate to leave the ce. They went back to Giyon''s residence.

    "Can you just leave me on the table inside theb?"

    Sam asked in a husky and low tone.

    Gail nodded and ced him on the table.

    Sam closed his eyes once again and started controlling the spiritual energy in the surroundings. Soon a few thick needles manifested in the air above him along with a small de all made of condensed spiritual energy.

    The de moved quickly as it moved around and cut off his robes while the needles moved a bit slowly as they reached various points on his body and they made some holes at different positions.

    The needles created these small incisions from which the ck sludge ising. The whole table and the floor below the table was soaked in this sludge and after a long time the sludgeing out of his body is followed by some blood too.

    Only after letting enough blood out that could almost barely make him passout, he opened his eyes and weakly took out the injector.

    Gail looked at his shivering hand and took the injector from it. Sam nodded gratefully and took out a vial which gail took injected into Sam.

    The wounds which are not too big to begin with started healing rapidly at a visible pace and before they knew it, Sam is as good as new, at least visually. But he is still feeling a lot weaker than he want to as he almost lost a lot of blood.

    He took out amunication token and contacted a subordinate.

    "Collect all the sludge from the floor and ce it in a separate container. Call a skilled water element user and make them separate the sludge and the blood as well as the impurities that came from the floor and the surroundings.

    Tell them make it as clean as possible."

    The subordinate nodded and left.

    Gail walked out of the room after the subordinate and Sam wiped his body clean off of the blood and wore a new set of clothes before walking out.

    He then contacted another subordinate.

    "I need the Blood Venison stew. Tell the chef to make it as fast as possible."

    When he reached the mainhall, he saw the kids still lurking around there.

    "What are you guys still doing here? Get back to your residence and take rest. I will start sses for you from day after tomorrow. You don''t need to do anything to busy yourself."

    The kids left silently and Jyon looked at Sam''s pale face and wanted to ask him about something, but even she left after some thoughts.

    After they are gone, Sam sat at a table and called the specter out.

    "Give me the memories you got from them."

    The specter did as it was told and Sam started studying the memories. But there is not much to gain from them.

    The only thing he knew is that Mav clearly doesn''t have anything to do with the attack.

    The whole n is like this, the mercenaries would arrive at the Gaja n''s city and will use the space gate they were told to. They would be taken to a different location because the space gate would be tampered with, they need to attack the little kids that would be present there.

    If a persones and defends the kids, they need to kill that person no matter what and capture his soul with a special device, but if that person didn''t, they would have to kidnap a couple of children and leave the ce with some transference tokens.

    There is no information on who actually ced the assignment as they took it through a Mediator, there is no actual information on how the space gate changes and who made the changes, there is also no information on who informed them on what space gate they should enter, because the message came in the form an unanimous letter.

    They didn''t see who delivered it, nor did they bother who sent it. All they knew is that they have received the payment and they just need to finish the assignment.

    Sampiled all the information and sent it to Giyon''s and Grivon''s subordinates to investigate and on Gail''s request heid down the whole thing in front of him.

    "This is odd, there is no way this is a coincidence that Malgav and Jyon just decided to go on a vacation at the same time and from the looks of it, there is no way Jyon even had the thought of vacationing at that ce, someone must have definitely put that there.

    From this info, the mercenary took the job a week ago and the other party must have known that she would be vacationing a week ago.

    This doesn''t make any sense at all."

    "It would after the investigation isplete."

    After going through all of this, Sam was about to go to the dining table to finish the stew he asked for, when Gail spoke.

    "I should really thank you for saving Jyon, but I am quite surprised that you let go of Malgav right away. I was almost sure that you would kill him."

    "I didn''t essentially let him go actually. I did a lot to him within that time frame. You will know soon."

    With that he finished the stew to recover some of the blood and went back tob as he concocted toxins. That day''s experience gave him some new ideas and he believed he would be able to make these work.

    He didn''te out of theb that night and the next day, a word spread among the n members.

    Malgav who just recovered from a literal ball-busting injury is now paralyzed.

    The healers are unable to do anything as it is something rted to his spine and any treatment they have nned would injure the spine even more and there might be a chance that he wouldn''t recover anytime soon.

    Sam came out after two days from theb and Gail immediately asked him.

    "What did you really do to him? Grand Elder Pon''s son barged into the house yesterday evening and almost made a fuss. He is really pissed."

    "I reset his spine in a very different way and reduced his bone density. His spine is now extremely brittle and if they try to reset it, the bones would break and it would be impossible for you guys to increase the bone density without breaking it and healing it back again.

    Now if they really do break the spine, the bone would be fractured too much. It would turn into very small pieces.

    They would have to take them out surgically and regenerate the whole spine? But how many healers have really regenerated a spine before?

    I would like to see how they would solve this problem."

 Chapter 1398 - Interrogation

    <h4>Chapter 1398 - Interrogation</h4>

    Gail didn''t ask Sam any further questions regarding this. He knew that Sam wants to kill Malgav but leaving him in a situation like this is worse than killing him in some ways.

    He can think of many people who would end their lives than live like this.

    Sam didn''t stay there for long and went to Grivon''s stray realm. There are some things he should be doing there and if his guess is right, he would be getting reports from both Giyon and Grivon on their current tasks.

    And his guess is right. He got the reports and he became excited as soon as he saw what was in them.

    Both Giyon and Grivon sessfully finished the first step.

    In fact, they even went above and beyond and did better than what he had anticipated.

    Giyon''s task was to disguise herself as a merchant from a faraway realm who wants to open a business within their target realm.

    As Sam previously said, the permission to open a business within the capital of the realm which is the base of the organization they are targeting is actually as easy as it could get.

    As long as Giyon could fork out enough money, things would go smoothly. Sam was content with normal permission, but Giyon went as far as getting a special agreement with a grand elder of the organization.

    The agreement included a lot of tax subsidies and special privileges for the rest of the business permissions that would be needed for them to open shops at different ces within the realm.

    This would make the next step easier.

    While things are like this with Giyon, Grivon is not doing that bad either.

    They are entering the realm as a mercenary group and they arepletely disguised.

    He went as far as disguising his top-secret subordinates as the mercenaries within the group and their job is to get as much attention as possible at one particr ce.

    The gambling den of the organization.

    The Gambling Den is actually the name of the business the organization is running and even though it is called a Den, it is actually arge pce-like structure that attracts gamblers like moths to mes.

    This is one of the most profitable businesses of the organization as they took advantage of the prosperity of their realm and made the people go for this gambling den and lose most of their money.

    This is one of the ces where billions of spirit stones just change hands every day.

    The best part is that this ce will ept any and all kinds of bets based on what game a person is betting and the best of these gambling games is actually the beast fighting.

    They would force two beasts of extremely simr kind and sometimes the same kind and make them fight until one of them is dead.

    There is also another option that the two participants can bring their own beasts and put them up against each other. In fact, beast fighting has been some kind of profession here for years.

    People bet on these fights based on the odds at the bookie table, which means they are betting against the house. But there are also other kinds of bets that people could make with the gambling den as witnesses.

    The individual bets are actually very popr here. Both sides will bet something that they would be giving up and bet against each other and the Gambler''s den will act as a witness for the bet. As long as one party didn''t hold up the bet, they would make sure that the winner gets what he deserves, even if that means they have to kill the loser.

    Until now, Gambling den has always been fair, going so far as to make a young master cough up the money that was owed in one of these bets forcefully.

    Grivon''s main objective is within this ce.

    One of the prime sessor candidates of the organization has this obsession with gambling, particrly the Beast fighting arena to the point that he has several beasts he specially groomed for fights like these.

    And he has never ever backed down from a challenge.

    Of course, he didn''t just win every time, but it could be said that he never stopped gambling here with his beasts.

    Even though this problem might have caused him a lot of trouble normally, his position as the sessor candidate and the status that position brings is helping him a lot.

    No one bets way too big against this young master.

    But Grivon is going to change that norm for their n.

    After arriving here, the first thing that Grivon did is go against the young master and he did so consistently in the past few days.

    He constantly betrge amounts and lost several times.

    That is what the n is actually and only thest game did Grivon win. This stuck a chord with the young master as they both became acquainted and can now could be considered friends.

    This is the perfect scenario Sam wanted and they executed these tasks perfectly.

    Now, Sam needs to give them instructions regarding the next steps and the information required for formting those steps was also sent to Sam through these reports.

    Sam went to work immediately and started preparing what they should do next.

    Giyon is going to sell something there.

    The food business.

    She is going to enter the restaurant business there under her banner''s name and is going to target the specific ces where the organization itself has the best food and best ie regarding the food-rted business.

    As he was preparing this, Sam felt that it is very great of Sivan to have a particr focus on this one organization among the twelve as this brings him a shit load of money.

    The fickle nature of Sivan helped him get some detailed information that is now going to help him take care of this organization far easier than it should have been.

    As for Grivon, the task is a bit more troublesome. He would be disappearing for a bit from the realm and go on beast hunting in different realms.

    It could be said that Sam''s knowledge of beasts is second to none and it is not an exaggeration to say that he would be able to pick a beast that is the best counter for any beast that the young master has at his disposal.

    So, he is preparing the beast list that Grivon needs to capture.

    After preparing everything, he sent the information through the same channel they sent him the reports and retired to theb.

    He is so close to finishing up the task of making poisons and all he has to do is finish it up and conduct some testing on the dead bodies.

    He stayed in theb for the next two days and he managed to obtain the results he wanted.

    But he cannot be sure that this would work on the live ones, so he would be needing to test it on them directly once.

    While the situation is like this on this end, there are some results for the investigation conducted on the incident with the mercenaries.

    They managed to catch the guy who altered the space gates and it is actually Senior Elder Ma who once again caught him.

    Sam was surprised at why this guy is so interested in their affairs, but it seems like this time he really helped them a lot.

    Gail took over the interrogation since his daughter is also involved directly in the n.

    He was taken to Giyon''s basement and he asked what he wanted to know.

    "Who asked you to tamper with the space gates?"

    "I¡­. I.."

    The guy was stuttering and Gail continued.

    "I knew that it is the job of some high-level internal person within the n since they went as far as blocking my entrance into the with some serious spatial restrictions.

    I don''t know how Ma caught you, but you must have been promised some asylum somewhere safe. Far away from me, but what the person that instigated to do this forgot to tell you is that if there is a possibility of learning the truth, I would never resort to extreme measures, like torture and death.

    And there is also a reason why I am still keeping you alive instead of just killing you and obtaining information from the soul search.

    It is just so that you could be usefulter and we could cut some deal of sorts. If you cooperate and help me flush out the guy who put you through this, I would then leave you alive. Do you understand?"

    The man who was covered in sweat immediately nodded and started speaking. But when he heard this information, Gail couldn''t help but frown.

    He knew that someone big might have been involved and it couldn''t be wrong, but from the looks of it, that someone big has used a very different and unconventional way to put himself out of suspicion and leave deadends for their investigation.

 Chapter 1399 - Scare

    <h4>Chapter 1399 - Scare</h4>

    It turned out that the reason this guy altered the space gates so that it created a problem for Gail to enter is that a young master of the n, who is the son of a core elder is trying to court a youngdy.

    And that youngdy happened to be the granddaughter of the grand elder incharge of the vacation spot.

    So, the young master bribed this guy to lock the spatial formations and nodes a bit so the grand elder who went to meet the n leader wouldn''t be able to return immediately.

    Both of the events are not rted at all.

    It appeared like some kind of coincidence. But when they looked at it that way, they could only think of the most recent even that they almost ignored because of the coincidence of mercs appearing and Jyon Vacationing.

    Gail decided that he would go deeper and investigate, no matter how ridiculous the reasons and coincidences might be.

    So, he imprisoned this guy and went and caught hold of the young master who went to court the Grand Elder''s granddaughter.

    "I have a few questions and if you answer them truthfully, you would be able to leave this ce sooner, and trust me, as luxurious as this ce appeared to be, it is not a good ce to stay with me in it. Do you understand?"

    The guy couldn''t even bring his voice up and just nodded his head.

    "Now that we are on the same page, tell me. Why did you bribe this guy to manipte the space gates? What is in it for you?"

    Gail asked as he showed the middle-aged man who was caught before and admitted to changing the space gates.

    "I¡­ I wanted to meet Sona. Thest time I met her, she said that she would go out on a date with me if I win a bet that is significant.

    So, I bet her that I would make her grandfatherete by three minutes than usual and I won because of this n."

    "How did you approach this guy in particr? There is no way for a small fry like you to be acquainted with an elder that has this much power."

    "I actually overheard it from someone else. I didn''t know it myself."

    "Overheard?"

    "Yes, I overheard when Mardo is talking to his subordinates in a bar within the city."

    "Mardo? Is that bin''s kid?"

    "Yes, Elder bin''s son."

    Gail sighed and went to meet this Elder bin who cooperated instantly and brought his son to Giyon''s residence itself.

    Gail questioned him again and then got the answer that he didn''t actually know whether the elder at the space gates is taking bribes, apparently someone said that to him and he is another young master.

    As Gail looked through it more and more, he felt that it is indeed a coincidence, but there is also a tinge of doubt and suspicion. After all, how is it possible that every single one of them knew about the elder and the space gate indirectly and how is it possible that they knew it in this specific pattern at a precise time frame that this lover boy''s exploit exactly coincided with Jyon''s trip.

    This all looked like arge puzzle all falling into one ce miraculously.

    But he didn''t give up and only increased the speed of his investigation. He didn''t care about being polite anymore and finally, he rounded the whole thing up to two suspects. One of them is actually Mardo''s brother. Elder bin''s other son.

    The other one is another young master named Vigon.

    Gail just brought two of them at the same time and put them on the chairs of the almost cramped cell.

    The whole-cell is filled with the people that Gail brought. There are over fifteen people including these two young masters.

    Gail sighed in exhaustion as he said.

    "I wouldn''t ask you guys more than one time. I want you to tell me the truth when I ask any question. The only reason I am stopping you from killing me and making memories is that I don''t want to kill a member of the n in vain, in case you are not at fault.

    But don''t think I would stop just because of that.

    I have been interrogating everyone from the morning and I am currently on brink of a copse. I wouldn''t be able to hold on to my morality for long and I might just kill you guys the moment you annoy me.

    So, be good and answer me alright.

    Whose n is it to attack my daughter in the vacation ground?"

    Both of them gulped nervously as they looked at Gail.

    "I¡­ I don''t know what you are talking about."

    "Me too, I am innocent. This is the first time I am hearing about it."

    Gail sighed and said.

    "You are only making it difficult for yourselves. Is it really worth losing your life over for this? I for one know for sure that this couldn''t be your n at all. Are you really going to die just saving that someone?"

    Gail raised his aura and the spiritual energy in the surroundings suffocated both of them.

    "Really, I don''t know what you are even talking about."

    "I am innocent, please don''t kill me."

    As they are constantly rejecting it, Sam came in to stop Gail and whispered something in his ear.

    "Indeed, there is a possibility that she might have seen them, I will try."

    Gail muttered out loud and left the room. Sam then looked at the room full of people and couldn''t help but shake his head.

    A group of people that are just leading their regr life. Every single one of them here is a mediocre person with mediocre talent and mediocre life, at least what is considered mediocre within this realm and city.

    But they are almost involved in the killing of a lot of kids without even knowing what they are doing. Whoever is the cause of this, is a mastermind, to say the least.

    Gail came back in a few minutes and shook his head.

    "There is no use. She couldn''t make sense of who she saw. She couldn''t remember. But she did say that she heard someone talking about the vacation."

    Sam sighed and looked at both of the young masters and said.

    "It seems like we need to go for the extreme measures. Let''s just take these two to the other room along with thest suspect. They are not going to admit it. We can just kill them there. I don''t mind killing an extra person to save my students.

    What about you? Do you care if another guy dies in process of finding someone that attacked your daughter?"

    "I don''t particrly care."

    "That''s great."

    The two young masters looked at them in shock and their throats went dry when Sam and Gail dragged them out.

    "No¡­"

    "Please, leave me. I am innocent."

    They were dragged into a room and there, a person is tied up to the chair with the face and the bodypletely covered with a ck cloak and mask.

    That person''s body is dripping with blood.

    An attendant was there standing and Sam asked.

    "Did you give him the medicine yet?"

    "No, sir. I was waiting for you."

    "Okay, then. I will do it. You go and get two more doses from theb. We would be needing it now."

    "Yes, Sir."

    With that, the guy left the room and Sam took the injector from his hands before he left and injected it into the body of the person tied up to the chair.

    The two young masters looked at the whole process. The person tied to the chair was struggling previously and it continued on for two more minutes before he stopped.

    Sam looked at them and spoke.

    "Didn''t I tell you, I would give you a peaceful death? This is a special medicine I have developed. It would help me a lot. First of all, it would put you to sleep before killing you and then destroys your body andpletely disposes of it along with that, it would turn your spirit into a specter that falls under my control.

    I don''t even have to extract your memories and just have to inject this into your bodies and rx."

    As he spoke, the body of the man tied up to the chair started emitting a bit of smoke and gave out a putrid smell before a ck liquid slowly started dripping, and soon only the ck cloak was left on the chair.

    And before long, a soul manifested out from within the cloak and entered Sam''s head directly.

    Sam looked at them and said.

    "See, it is that easy. You wouldn''t feel a thing. All it would take is the medicine and two minutes for you to fall asleep and you wouldn''t even know you died. Great invention right."

    As he finished speaking, the attendant came back with two more vials.

 Chapter 1400 - New Info

    <h4>Chapter 1400 - New Info</h4>

    The two guys were stunned and within that one moment, Sam quickly injected both of them with the vials.

    "Now that we are done here. I just have to wait. I should have just injected you guys with this from the start. I mean, Mr. Gail here is a busy man and we shouldn''t have wasted his time for that long."

    Sam turned around and stepped away from them.

    "Its him. He is the one who did this. Just leave me alone. I was the one that suggested the vacation to Miss Jyon. I made a maid of hers to act and suggest the vacation. But the whole n was actually his. You can kill him. Please don''t take my life."

    All of a sudden, Vigon med everything on the Mardo''s elder brother.

    "No, no. I didn''t do anything. I don''t even know this thing happened."

    "What do you mean you don''t know? You exined the n yourself, you are the one that even included your brother in the n." Vigon defended his opinion and then turned to Sam before saying.

    "I don''t even think that this is his n, he is not smart enough, he seemed to have been following someone''s orders. But he is the one that told me to give indirect suggestions to Ms. Jyon. I am really sorry, but I didn''t know that Sam they would be implicated with some mercenaries. If I had known, I wouldn''t have done it."

    Both Sam and Gail looked at Vigon.

    Vigon was startled by their sharp gaze.

    "Mr. Gail, it seems like we got a hold of the person we are looking for."

    "Indeed."

    Sam then grabbed Mardo''s brother away outside of the room.

    Gail walked to Vigon and asked.

    "I was almost getting convinced by you. You know, that other kid is not even able to defend himself properly, maybe he was nervous, but I was leaning that he might even be the one who did this.

    And you are good at lying too. Adding some truth in it is the indeed the best way to lie. But there is one problem, you have used too many truths and forgot to draw a line in the story."

    "I.. I didn''t do anything¡­"

    "It seems like you really don''t know this, but actually the thing is, no one knows about the presence of the mercenaries, except for the elder who manipted the space nodes and that was because I told him.

    The information about the mercenary infiltration was not leaked, because it is a shameful thing for such a big n. But you seemed to know about this too. You just gave yourself away."

    Vigon was shocked and he started struggling.

    Gail didn''t bother much and just waved his hand. Vigon died on the spot and Sam''s specter came out and caught the soul and absorbed it before transferring the memories to Gail and then to Sam who came back.

    They looked through the memories and felt a little surprised.

    Until now, they have very little information, but now all of a sudden, with killing one person, they got a shit load of info.

    They managed to get so many others who are directly involved in the whole matter.

    From these memories, Mardo''s brother is not particrly involved in this matter at all. This was the n of a subordinate of Fig.

    And they actually incited Vigon with a particr price. If he finishes this task without any loose ends, then they would let him join a special squad of the n.

    Sam doesn''t know anything about this special squad and it is the same with Gail. He is also shocked to learn that there is even a secret squad of the n that he doesn''t know of.

    Even though he doesn''t have an official position of authority within the clean, he is the strongest n member there is. It almost didn''t make sense to him that he doesn''t have any knowledge of a secret squad and from the looks of it Vigon clearly knew about the squad for a long time and he was really eager to join the team.

    Maybe he is not the only one.

    There are not many details within the memories and Gail almost had the urge to go to the n''s leader directly and get the answers out of him. But he controlled himself and decided to investigate and interrogate the people that are currently involved in the whole n.

    While Sam and Gail are making a list and confirming the locations of the people on the list through the informationworks, what they didn''t notice is, Mardo''s brother who had a relieved expression until then suddenly turned serious and ran to a certain direction.

    He directly went out of the n gates and then to the slums of the city. There he barged into a house and looked at a young man who is meditating.

    "Brother Larx, we are in trouble. That person Gail, father of Jyon is making a ruckus. Not only did he not condemn Sam for putting her in trouble with his dispute, he is also helping him with the interrogation.

    Vigon was busted and they got his information out. They are goinge after our auxiliary members soon. We need to get the squad out of the city as soon as possible."

    The young man who had a peaceful expression all this while suddenly frowned.

    "I will talk to Captain Fig about this."

    He then stood up and pushed a secret button which opened a door.

    "Take this route and stay in the house a block away. I will contact you. Don''t roam around."

    "Yes."

    Mardo''s brother nodded and entered the tunnel. He reappeared in a house one block away, but was surprised to see that there is someone already present there.

    He could hear the moans and thuds and understood what is happening.

    Within the hall some people of the slums are having sex. He went out and shooed them away.

    They barged the doors and window wide open as they hurriedly escaped and Mardo''s brother went on to go and close the doors.

    He was feeling a bit anxious and didn''t bother to coverup his face while he was closing the doors and windows and didn''t know that someone has noticed his presence here.

    One of the Grivon''s subordinates who stays dormant here to keep the surveince spotted this guy and immediately sent a message back to his superior and within ten minutes the message reached Sam''s ears.

    Sam who was already penning down the locations of all their targets, frowned when he heard this.

    "This guy should have gone back to his home or directly to his father. Why did he go to slum and our guy is sure that he didn''t see him enter through the street directly and can be assured that he didn''t enter the house through the front door?"

    When Gail heard this, he frowned and felt like they might have missed something.

    As they were thinking, Sam got another alert, when he got the message, he frowned again.

    "Some of Fig''s people that we managed to pin down in the slums are moving. They are all moving at the same time and it seems like they are going away."

    Sam then contacted someone from within the n who knows Fig''s whereabouts and got the same answer. Fig is leaving and it is all so sudden. He even stopped the meal he was having with one of the business partners half-away.

    Sam and Gail don''t have confirmation whether they are connected or not, but if they are connected by any chance, they knew for sure that they cannot let them get away from this.

    So, Gail and Sam immediately made a move. Sam moved Giyon''s subordinates that are nearby to capture some of the guys and Gail went after one person that seemed like the captain or the leader of the group that came.

    He took the specter with him while Sam waited for the rest of the subordinates.

    Gail returned within fifteen minutes and in this time, Fig''s team members are gathering. The young man who Mardo''s brother has met with also arrived at the n''s residence of Elder Fig and reported the situation.

    Fig looked at the man calmly and said.

    "Who approved the mission?"

    "Vice-captain approved this sir. He used his special privilege to approve this mission and he only did this because the source of the mission objective and n is trustworthy."

    "And where did that lead us? I told you, that your pattern ns are not going to work everywhere and this is one of those scenarios. Did you even know about that guy named Sam and do you even have any idea who Jyon''s father really is?

    Malgav could easily be sacrificed and I am sure no matter what his brother says or does, he wouldn''t say a word if the benefits are huge enough and there is no damage to his reputation. But the very involvement of Jyon in the n even with her safety guaranteed is a big negative. We need to remedy the situation or the secret squad would be ripped wide open and revealed.

    The n leader has no idea about this and he would also be affected.. We need to fix this."

 Chapter 1401 - Meeting

    <h4>Chapter 1401 - Meeting</h4>

    Fig''s tone is calm, but everyone in the room knew that he is getting anxious. At this moment, one of the attendants came running into the room to inform.

    "Sir, I went to pick up the auxiliary team members at the meeting point, but their leader has already been captured by Gail, and some of the members in their team were also caught by Sam and Grivon''s other subordinates.

    Vice-captain seemed to have already disappeared from the n grounds."

    Fig''s expression changed drastically. At least, until now he managed to hide his expressions and emotions a bit as he was worried that it would affect their morale, but now he cannot even do that.

    "Is he captured?" He asked the attendant.

    "I don''t think he is captured, Sir. Since yesterday, we weren''t able to contact him or see him."

    "Try to establish contact again. Also, try and reach out to the mission assigner. I will be going to the n head''s residence. Good thing that the Auxiliary team members directly connect to this ce. But we need to be careful."

    As he spoke, he moved out and directly went to the n leader''s residence to talk to him. On his way, he was constantly drenched with sweat as he thought of what might happen to him.

    But he really underestimated the quickness of Sam and Gail.

    Not long after he left, both of them arrived at that ce. This time, Gail didn''t waste time likest time, he killed the auxiliary captain and realized that the captain of the real team is actually Fig.

    So, he immediately came here. The same thing happened with Sam. Among the members he happened to catch by the rest of the group, he caught the vice-captain of the auxiliary team and got the information.

    He didn''t kill and just captured the rest of them and held them within Giyon''s residence beforeing here and meeting Gail.

    Sam walked to Gail and whispered something again.

    Gail looked at him with a bit of a surprised tone but still nodded. He helped Sam capture every one of them and made them wear the special shackles Sam made.

    Now there are only a few people that are rted to this squad and are still roaming outside.

    The first one is actually Fig, the second is the Vice-captain, the third and fourth one are the ones that went to look for the Vice Captain and the person that went to look for the mission assigner.

    After capturing them, they just waited there and before long, Fig contacted one of them.

    "Lead everyone to the n''s leader''s residence. Don''t dawdle ande fast."

    "I am sorry, Fig. They cannote there now. I mean, they were currently captured, so it would really hard toe by themselves. Do you want me to help them out?"

    Sam asked with a hint of sarcasm.

    "Sam?"

    Fig asked in disbelief.

    "Yes, that''s who I am."

    "What the hell are you doing to my subordinates?"

    "I still haven''t decided yet. But killing them all is right up there on the top of my mind, so I might just go for it. Do give me some suggestions though."

    "No, don''t. This is just a big misunderstanding. They don''t have anything to do with this. Most of them are even young masters of the n, you wouldn''t get away with killing them."

    "Are you stupid? Do you really think that I am the only one here? I don''t have to kill your guys, I have someone who would do that. You must know who I am talking about right?"

    "Let me talk to Mr. Gail."

    Fig asked directly and Sam just replied with¡­

    "Why not?" And threw the token to Gail.

    "What do you want? I am actually angrier than that kid. So, if you are looking for a way to get out of this situation, you are barking at the wrong tree."

    "No, Sir. I still believe that you are the wiser one among you two and I trust your judgment. Please don''t make any rash decisions ande to the n''s leader''s residence. We talk this over here."

    "And, one what authority are you asking me toe there? Do you really think that you have what it takes to summon me there?"

    The other side turned silent for a moment.

    "Brother Gail, it is me. Can you pleasee to my residence?" n''s leader''s voice came from that side.

    Gail frowned. He really didn''t want to go, but he knew that he should. He still believed that with all the things that n''s leader knew about him, he wouldn''t have been foolish enough to involve his daughter in this plot.

    "Alright, we will be there."

    Gail grabbed Sam without even a heads-up and leaped into the air. Before long they are in the n''s leader''s residence.

    "First of all, let me exin how Sorry I am for Jyon to be involved in this whole farce."

    Both Sam and Gail are silent and didn''t bother to reply to this sentence out of the n leader''s mouth.

    Then Fig stepped forward and bowed to Gail.

    "Sir Gail, I am the captain of this secret squad and the only goal of this is to keep the n people in order. As the factions are growing and the Grand Elders are dividing the n into several pieces with different ideologies and goals, we believed that there is a need to have something that would defend the n and the administrators of it when something drastic happens.

    That is what our squad is for.

    But ever since I returned recently, I was busy with something else and I didn''t care much about my n. It is true that my actions might have appeared suspicious, but I was doing something that holds the interests of the n as a whole.

    In my absence, my Vice-captain took a hold of the team and he seemed to have different ideologies than the rest as he thought that Sam is a person that has insulted the n with his actions and wanted to deal with him.

    But our squad doesn''t have any authority within the n grounds in the current situation, but he still went and did something anyway because of some trusted source who gave the idea of this mission.

    Except for the vice-captain, no one knows who that person is and we are currently looking for both of them.

    My team in my absence took the orders from the Vice-captain which is what they had to do and used the auxiliary team that acts as a reserve for us to execute the n.

    I know that some kids that arepletely unrted to this and your daughter Jyon were involved in this mess, but what they wanted to do is to create an immediate me between Grand Elder Pon and Sam.

    They explicitly made sure that your daughter wouldn''t be harmed by this. So, please go easy on our team. If you really want to punish us for this, please take the Vice captain''s head and my own head. But please leave our team out of this."

    Gail scoffed and replied.

    "Oh really? So, how did you guys make sure that my daughter wouldn''t be involved in this? Do you think that just because Malgav is present at the scene you would be able to make Sam and Grand Elder Pon archenemies?

    If it is was that simple, don''t you think they would have already been on that path?"

    "From what I heard, when the poison thates out of the person''s body enters Sam, he would be unable to move for a while which would give Malgav a chance to attack him.

    He is a coward through and through, so that is the only time he would attack and if Sam is weak, he would die and if he is strong he would kill Malgav as a counter-attack.

    If the poisoning didn''t even happen, there is a chance that Malgav would be the one that Sam suspects the most. The way reacted when his students were harmed is a giant factor in this n. My team believed that he would kill Malgav out of suspicion."

    "So, the person who led this operation, that guy in your mansion currently captured, used the auxiliary team to create the suggestive patterns within two days and made every person involved in the n appear at the right ce and the right time.

    Is that it?"

    Sam asked from the side.

    Fig nodded and Sam continued.

    "It is really impressive. Trust me, I haven''t seen something this impressive in quite a while. Do you know what is even more impressive? You think that if Gail forgives you, everything will be over.

    Because that is impossible my friend. Even if Gail forgives you, I will not stop this until I kill everyone that is involved in the team.

    Just because you believe that it was for your n, I don''t have any reason to forgive you. All the lives of your team members who have any rtion to this whole farce are mine. That includes your Vice-captain too."

 Chapter 1402 - Hostage

    <h4>Chapter 1402 - Hostage</h4>

    The whole room turned silent with Sam''s deration.

    Fig looked at him with clenched fists and gritted teeth. He has an urge to bash him on the head. But calmed down a bit and spoke.

    "Mr. Sam. I have heard a great deal about you and you definitely live up to your reputation, but there is one thing I need to tell you.

    Even though I won''t approve of the methods my team members used in this situation, that doesn''t mean I don''t agree with their opinion of you.

    Your actions against Malgav at the first time might be justified because of what he did for the student, but your words against our n leader are something that you are not worthy to say and you should be d that I didn''t hold you ountable for that."

    "d? I am actually itching for you guys toe at me. And I am unworthy? What kind of a n leader wouldn''t even bother about the safety of a young child? Isn''t the order and hierarchy in this n to save the weak from bing the prey of the strong within? If they can''t even do that, what is the point of its existence?

    And to ignore such an atrocious thing just to keep one''s authoritative position safe and sound, I believe it is more despicable than even what Malgav did to my student.

    He did it for a young helpless girl and your n leader is doing it for his responsibilities."

    Fig''s aura raged and it took all of his strength to just hold back. The n''s leader looked at Sam with an emotionless face, but his fists are clenched and there is a crack on the tile under his foot.

    Gail looked at their reactions and shook his head.

    When Sam whispered into his ear back when they were in Fig''s residence, he understood what Sam''s n exactly is.

    He might really have the ideals and his words targeted at the leader might be his true opinions, but he is doing this so openly for a few reasons and they are actually working.

    Even now, the reaction of these two people indicates that they are working perfectly fine.

    He is just ying with them more and more and they are letting him do that.

    He just shook his head and didn''t bother to say it out loud. By the time they realize it would be his daughter and nephew that are going to benefit from this.

    There is no need for him to go out on a limb and save these guys.

    Fig might speak about ideals and stuff, but he doesn''t have that much of a big opinion on the n and that is the reason the position of the n''s leader ended up in the hands of the current leader in the first ce.

    "Mr. Gail. Please say it. How do you want to resolve it?"

    "The head of the vice-captain and anyone who is involved in preparing the n. I need those lives. And I need the name and details of the person who gave you the idea for this assignment. I won''t know who thinks that it is okay to use my kids for their agendas."

    "You will have them. If you could excuse me for a minute, I will find out if there is progress."

    When n''s leader and Gail nodded, Fig walked to a corner and made a call.

    His expression changed drastically by the time he was done and he lifelessly came back.

    "The Vice-captain of my team is dead and there is no news on the person who gave us this assignment. All the leads are cold and dead." He looked at Gail nervously and as expected, he saw a cold expression on his face.

    "Mr. Gail. I am really sorry¡­"

    "I don''t care for you apologies kid, they don''t mean shit, and if your squad can act independently just because you are not present and don''t even know what to go ahead with and whatnot, then your apologies mean that much less.

    Just make sure that you hand over the rest of the bunch. If I don''t give a message out right now, then every man with some strength and subordinates will think that I am a pushover."

    Fig shuddered and nodded.

    "Sir, the rest of my subordinates in the house¡­" Fig asked nervously.

    "You can ask him about that. He is the one that captured them. Not me."

    Fig was surprised and turned to Sam.

    Sam had a smirk on his face and took a thin crystal table. He kept on tapping on some of the icons and said.

    "So now, let us talk Mr. Fig. You are quite notorious for your spontaneous decisions and entric thinking. Why don''t you try to use those skills on me? Let''s see if you could save the lives of your team members."

    "As I already said, this is somethingpletely unrted to my team members, this was the misdeed of mine and the vice-captain. If you have balls,e at me."

    "I mean, to insult your n''s leader might be my deed, but weren''t my students who cannot even defend themselves, hell, even didn''t awaken their cores are the ones that are targeted by your subordinates?

    Even if they don''t know why they are doing it, they sure know what they are doing and who they are doing it too. Are they so disciplined that they didn''t see the difference between the cultivators and helpless kids to plot against them? Or are they in stupid?"

    Fig didn''t answer and stayed silent.

    Sam sighed and said.

    "Okay, now I will give you a chance. Contact one of your subordinates and ask him why did they go through with their n? Did the kids deserve to die just because they are my students? Ask him and their fate would depend on their answer."

    Fig didn''t want to do that and just stayed still.

    Sam smiled and said.

    "Mr. Fig. I didn''t just capture your teammates, you might be thinking there is a chance that you could just release them if Mr. Gail is not involved. But they are not just captured, they are currently hostages."

    As he said, he took out a metal puppet that has the same shackles the team members are currently wearing.

    Sam ced it on the other end of the room and tapped something on the tablet.

    *BOOM*

    The puppet waspletely destroyed. There is not a single trace left behind that could indicate the remains belong to a well-made puppet and along with that, there is a hole in the wall and many people came running towards this ce.

    But n''s leader passed an order to his attendant to keep everyone away.

    "Are you sure your subordinates can take the explosion and still live? I mean, the shackles have another special feature that makes it almost impossible for them to use their strength or gather any spiritual energy.

    Do you think they will be fine without the spiritual energy?"

    Fig''s face was engulfed with horror.

    "If anyone them has even a scratch. I will kill you."

    "With Mr. Gail standing right next to me? I believe in my current situation even the n''s leader wouldn''t be able to kill me. So, you better control your mouth and make the call."

    Fig heaved a deep breath and took out themunication token reluctantly. He called one of his subordinates who picked up and he asked the question just like Sam asked him to.

    "What is the point of caring about those kids, Captain? They don''t have any use for the n anytime soon and this presence of Sam for even a single day is a big insult for the n. So, we must kill him and if the cost is just some kids who the n offered a helping hand to, they should be d to give up¡­. *BOOM*."

    An explosion was heard from the other side of themunication token and everyone looked at Sam.

    "I am sorry, I can''t let someone talk about my students like that. Now, tell me Mr. Fig, what do you think I should do? If your team thinks that my students deserve to die just because that might lead to my demise, then doesn''t that give me enough reason to kill the rest of your subordinates even if they are just following orders, just to send a message to not mess with my students?

    Why is it right in your case and wrong in mine?"

    This time Fig has no answer. His ideas are a bit different than his teammates and he only learned of it now.

    For him, the special squad is for the time when some power-hungry individuals rebel against the n''s leader when they are unable to take the position properly.

    It is to stop the individual factions from creating unnecessary damage through their schemes against the administration.

    It is to provide enough financial support for the ns when the time arises.

    Not to kill someone just because they insulted the n leader in a private meeting. If a n leader cannot even defend his honor in a battle of words, then it is his problem.. Their loyalty is to the n and its administration not for the leader himself.

 Chapter 1403 - Price

    <h4>Chapter 1403 - Price</h4>

    Fig suddenly felt exhausted. He didn''t even want to think about what his teammates did and how to convince Sam anymore. He just looked at him helplessly.

    "So, can I kill them now? Or do you have anything else to say?"

    "What do you want?" n''s leader asked all of a sudden. Sam turned to look at him and he continued.

    "If you really wanted to kill them, there is no need to hold them hostage ande this far. You could have killed them right there. What do you want exactly?"

    Sam smiled and said.

    "That is a great observation. I was afraid that I might need to spell it out. Simple, the lives of these people are for sale. Fig or you can buy them if you want them to live."

    "What is the price?"

    "There are two conditions. The first one is, you are responsible for finding out who suggested this mission to this special squad. I don''t care if it is a young master, an elder, or a Grand Elder.

    I want every detail regarding that person."

    "The lead that connects to him is dead. We would need a lot of time."

    "I can wait."

    "What is the second condition?"

    "The secret businesses of the young masters that I am currently held, hostage. I want every one of them to be transferred over to Grivon."

    Both Fig and n''s leader was stunned.

    "What did you just say? Do you want all of the secret businesses of the young masters there? There are around twenty of them, do you know how much does it is worth?" Fig eximed.

    "Come on, don''t kid yourselves. These are not really powerful young masters. These guys are small fries. I highly doubt that all of thembined would have a worth that could equal Grivon''s and when wepare them to Giyon, they are basically tiny.

    So, don''t give me that shocked expression."

    Sam paused and took out a few pieces of paper and gave it to Fig.

    "These are all the secret businesses they have. The business which you don''t even know existed. I want every one of them transferred. I would be sending Grivon''s subordinates to take over one by one and do make sure that there is nothing wrong with the financials. Only after everything is settled down will they all be released.

    If you agree to it, then I will leave them alive and do tell them, that there are more features to those shackles than just keeping them in check and they might want to control their words because of that."

    Gail and Sam left after leaving those conditions without even waiting for the other people to speak up. Their intention is clear, they are not willing to negotiate.

    Fig looked through the list and gritted his teeth. The squad has a special rule that is actually a core requirement to join and that is to not have any personal businesses run in secret.

    The sole purpose of the squad is supporting the n''s administration, after all, so they wouldn''t be using any of the resources they got from the n in secret to fund their own businesses. But it seems like since he didn''t make them sign any secret contracts with their soul, they seemed to have gone on to create their own little empires.

    After looking at this, he didn''t even feel like negotiating for them.

    He went to the residence and gave the conditions. Of course, none of them are willing to admit to these businesses'' existence.

    "Don''t worry, whether you agree or not, the squad is going to dissolve, and mediating this deal is thest thing I am going to do as a squad captain."

    When they heard this, the whole squad is flustered.

    They don''t even know how to react, but before they could do, Fig spoke up.

    "He is determined to kill you and from the looks of it, you knew how the death would be." He said as he pointed at therge mess caused by the explosion of one of their peers.

    "You only have one choice. End up like him or give up your business. I don''t know what exactly these businesses are worth to you, but if I were you, I would choose life over that."

    One of them stepped forward immediately and said.

    "I will do it. What should I do to finish the process?"

    "I will inform him, he will send some of Grivon''s subordinates and they can finish the process with you. Only after everything was taken over would you be let go from those shackles. If anyone wants to do the same thing he did, do tell me. I will be waiting for the next room."

    As soon as he left the room is filled with utter silence.

    But one after another, they went into the room and gave up.

    That night.

    Sam is holding the documents of the soul contracts. Almost everyone broke down immediately and gave up all of their assets. He made the transfer through soul contract and ced some extremely tight restrictions on it so that they wouldn''t be able to y around and try to snatch anything back.

    Gail looked at Sam and asked.

    "Are you sure this is the right way to do that?"

    "Are you having second thoughts on supporting me there?"

    "No, I am just worried, that you might have made the problem bigger. Until now, you only Grand Elder Pon''s faction to worry about. They might not make a move because they are trying to find a way to heal Malgav, but once they are done, they would definitelye after you.

    The n leader incident is something we cannot analyze yet at as he is not really reacting. From what I know of it, he must be in some deep internal conflict with himself about the words you said.

    Only after he shows a reaction would his faction react. But almost all the young masters in that faction are targeted by you just now and you now became an enemy to a lot of people. Over a dozen elders, a two dozen youngsters.

    There is that hidden enemy who suggested the whole n that happened now.

    Aren''t you just making more and more trouble for yourself?"

    "I am. That is what I want actually."

    "What do you mean?"

    "There is around one and a half years for the league to push my assignment away. Until you are here, they might note and attack me, but you wouldn''t stay here permanently and I figured I wouldn''t be able to stay away from my body for that long.

    I would need to get it sooner than that. If things go exactly as I nned, the chaos I am creating will make things settled in the n for Grivon and Giyon within the next six months and then I would be able to leave this ce.

    I would be starting my real counterattack on the Mari n and Sivan.

    I actually like staying like this. But even if I want to, I shouldn''t be staying like this. If I had my previous body and the resources, that little girl definitely wouldn''t have been abducted like that. She would have been a lot safer.

    I figured that my body is the best thing for me and I shouldn''t be away from it for so long."

    Gail didn''t reply and just stayed silent.

    Sam went back to do his own thing. He decided to deploy the subordinates to take over the newly acquired businesses and decided to inject their products into it as soon as possible while changing the name.

    For the next week that is what he did. Meanwhile, Gail went to stay with Jyon as she is too terrified by the attack.

    Sam started the lessons once again and the children cheered up a lot.

    While things are going smoothly here, the situation on Grivon''s side, just got a lot smoother.

    While Sam is busy acquiring new cash cows for him, Grivon went beast hunting. He went to the ces Sam mentioned and started catching the beasts there and in the process, he fell in love with the creatures.

    Now he is pretty proud of the collection that he has and came back to the city to meet the young master.

    He went to the Beast fighting Arena directly and met with the young master.

    "How are you doing Gevin? Did youe back here to lose more money to me?" The young master taunted as soon as Grivon came in. Gevin is the alias he took up in this realm.

    "I actually got a new collection. So, I am pretty confident that I would be the winner today."

    "Oh really? What beast do you want to fight against? I have all of the mine good and ready to go."

    "Sure then, let''s go with your Mountain Razor Snake. I have a perfect counter for that thing."

    "Your wish. Don''t cry if you lose once again.. Since it is bound to happen."

 Chapter 1404 - Mantis Vs Snake

    <h4>Chapter 1404 - Mantis Vs Snake</h4>

    Both of them gave out their beast pouches to the attendants.

    "What is the name of your beast sir?" The attendant asked Grivon politely.

    "It''s called the Thunder Shelled Mantis. You can disy it for five minutes before you take the bets and announce that they can make a direct bet with me. No matter the amount, I will take it as long as thebined total doesn''t exceed twenty billion spirit stones."

    "It seems like Mr. Gevin is feeling generous today. Are you sure you would be able to win? Or are you looking to lose some more of your money like you didst week?"

    Grivon just smiled and turned to the attendant.

    "Collect all the bets and you can take two percent of the winnings as your fee."

    The attendant was a bit skeptical. After all, it means his tip would be dependent on whether Grivon could win, but they were trained to not show such expressions on their face. So, he left with a polite smile.

    "So now, Young master Gwan. What is your wager? I have some really good gains during this hunt and I even managed to secure a product deal from a merchant in exchange for his protection. I can see a lot of money being made in the near future. So, don''t hold back."

    "Really? It has been a while since I yed big. What is the product blueprint you got? Let me see and if it is really valuable, I will match something to that level."

    Grivon smiled and took out a blueprint. It is an armor blueprint given to him by Sam. It is suitable for wind element users which are abundant within the organization they are targeting and this helps them do some gliding maneuvers and they will also help them move around, jump around and assist them with the wind elemental attacks.

    Even though it is named armor, it is like an exoskeleton, focusing mostly on providing better aid in moving with extreme agility and speed. Even the defense the armor provides mostly is based on its features that support and enhance the meeting.

    But as Gwan is looking at it, Grivon suddenly grabs the blueprint back and said.

    "I am sorry, I took the wrong one. I actually wanted to show you this one."

    As he said, he took out the energy barrier blueprint and gave it to Gwan.

    Gwan wanted to say something, but he just looked at the energy barrier blueprint.

    "I heard that a merchant group that came into your realm is about tounch a simr product and the merchant I saved used a lot of money to buy this blueprint from them and is about tounch this product in his own realm which is way far away from your own.

    He has quite a few enemies and is very powerful too. We managed to save him and safely sent him back to his own realm and in exchange, he gave us one of the blueprints he had. He said there are many kinds of barriers and he only managed to acquire three. Out of which, he gave us one to make a copy.

    Do you want to see a prototype?"

    Gwan nodded involuntarily and Grivon gestured as one of his subordinates took out the energy barrier. It is actually a wind elemental one and he showed off its features.

    "What do you think young master Gwan? Is the bet big enough for you?"

    Gwan nodded, but he still asked.

    "What is the other one you showed me?"

    "Oh? That. Please, it is not something I can y around with. It is way too valuable for that. Anyway, I can''t wait. Let''s see what you are going to put against this."

    "I have a hectare ofnd on the growing Purple Dust flowers. I will wager the wholend. How about that?"

    "I will take it. Thanks."

    As they are speaking. Both of their beasts are let out into therge arena for the audience to see.

    The announcer is hyping up the audience.

    "Now, now. Everyone.

    We are here for a special match today.

    Our young master Gwan brought back the undefeated Mountain Razor Snake and now he is fighting with the Thunder Shelled Mantis.

    A new beast we have never seen and is brought back by Sir Gewin. The leader of Gewin mercenary group."

    As he spoke, a mantis the size of a human was let out and from the other side of arena, arge snake was sent out.

    The snake is at least forty feet long and it raised its head up as it coiled on the ground. In front of it, the mantis looked insignificant with its small body.

    As the snake looked at the mantis, its scales slowly turned different. They turned to a stony texture and small razor-like des popped up from their scales and went back in.

    The Mantis on the other hand had the colors of ck and Purple colors. Unlike the slim and sharp structure of a normal mantis, this one is a bit bulky with external shells on its limbs, and on the back.

    It crackled with purple lightning all around it as it looked at therge snake calmly.

    It didn''t show any movement or emotion through it. It just stayed there small and tiny.

    "Really, Gevin? You are really using this against my snake? I at least thought you would give somepetition."

    "I don''t have anything to say to you for that. Let''s just wait until the fight is over and the same rules apply right? If the opponent is dead, the winner gets the remains."

    "Of course, but I don''t know what to do with those shells? Maybe I would make armor and sell it."

    "Well, you will never know."

    The match started at that moment and both of them stopped the conversation they were having and paid attention to the arena.

    The snake looked at the mantis with a look of contempt as it circled around the arena and it suddenly dove forward from the rear at the creature.

    The mantis was suddenly covered with purple lightning and it huddled together forming an ellipsoid as it jumped up. When itpletely dodged the attack. It opened up and changed directions before turning to that ellipsoid once again.

    The mantis shot itself at the snake with the purple lightning covering its body.

    *BAM*

    The ellipsoid hit the rock soil scales of the snake and bounded back.

    The lightning did little to the stone.

    The mantis didn''t stop though. It bounced, opened up, closed again, and jumped straight back at the snake.

    This time the speed it shot itself increased by a lot and the force it hit the snake multiplied.

    *BAM*

    The snake used its tail to smash the ellipsoid to the ground and kept on beating it up.

    *BAM*

    *BAM*

    *BAM*

    The hitsnded continuously.

    "Why don''t you give up Gewin? You would at least have that beast. Even though it is not that strong, its speed is great. It might have justcked some training. You can try another time."

    Grivon just smiled and didn''t reply.

    *BANG* *CRACKLE*

    Large-scale lightning hit.

    And at this moment, the arena suddenly turned silent, prompting Gwan to check the situation.

    He looked at the snake that was standing still and it seemed to be processing something that is hard to fathom.

    In the ce of the ellipsoid, the mantis stood tall and proud even with that little figure. It just looked the same height, but it is extremely imposing and powerful to look at.

    The shells were gone. They fell off and in ce of those shells, there are sharp des. The des contained an aura that is so sharp and ruthless that even Gwan who is sitting far away was stunned.

    Beside it, the tail of the snake was cut off cleanly andpletely that even the blood is not squirting out. The body of the snake didn''t even realize it was cut.

    *PSSST* the blood suddenly squirted out of its body.

    *HISSS*

    The snake hissed in pain.

    "You see, young master Gwan, the Thunder Shelled Mantis is actually a very peculiar creature.

    The shells are not actually protection from external things, it is so that it wouldn''t cause unnecessary damage to the surroundings it is staying in and to hinder its speed so that it can move normally without expending too much energy."

    As soon as he finished his words, Gwan saw as the mantis disappeared from the spot in the form of a purple lightning ray.

    The des oozed that sharp aura as it went directly for the head of the snake.

    The snake tried to hide and dodge, but the lightning de formed cleaved through its neck as if it is sliding through butter without any resistance.

    The Mantis stopped mid-air and changed the direction with a big lightning bang as it went to the severed head.

    Before the head fell off, it was sliced into multiple pieces and by the end of it, it turned to a bunch of pieces of flesh, scales, and minced meat along with brain matter and the mantis ispletely covered with blood.

 Chapter 1405 - Fleecing I

    <h4>Chapter 1405 - Fleecing I</h4>

    The whole arena is silent for a long moment thatsted for over five seconds and suddenly it burst into wild cheers.

    The audience cheered with excitement and Grivon looked on with a smirk. The Mantis which is soaked in the blood slowly stepped back and looked around to make sure that there is no other threat left around it.

    Slowly the lightning started condensing into its body and the skin started oozing out some kind of purple liquid that turned into the shell once again.

    Gwan looked at the whole process and gulped. He didn''t even know how to react.

    "Young Master Gwan, shall we proceed with the transfer? Today, I am feeling really happy, so I would go and take a look at what the newnd I just obtained is like if we are done with it soon."

    Grivon''s words brought Gwan back to his senses.

    "How?... It is just so small. But how is it so¡­"

    He couldn''t finish his senses with such a brutal loss and felt extremely irritated and then when he realized he just lost a hectare ofnd with such a profitable herb growing there, he couldn''t help but want to swear and scream at someone.

    But he knew he couldn''t just pay it off.

    "Why don''t we y again? We can finish all the transferster? We can go for bigger stakes?"

    "No, young master Gwan. I learned to quit while I am ahead. I like to gamble, but I don''t want to be a gambler. So, maybeter. For now, I would be happy if you finish the procedure. I need to find a buyer for thend after all. I am just a mercenary and I cannot keep thend for myself."

    Gwan wanted to argue, but at this moment, the attendant who took the bets ran towards them excitedly and gave the bet money to Grivon.

    "Sir Gevin, here is your collection. You gained twenty billion spirit stones."

    "Thank you so much. Don''t forget to keep your two percent."

    The attendant was ecstatic. He was skeptical before the start of this, but now he knew how lucky he was to be an attendant for Grivon on that day.

    And he only felt luckier after listing to Grivon''s next words.

    "Young master Gwan lost a bet and is about to transfer the property he wagered. Could you bring you the manager here? I would like to be the witness and process the agreement with the Gandharva oath.

    I heard he is very skilled at that."

    "Yes, Sir."

    "And, tell your manager that I would want you to be my attendant whenever Ie here."

    "Yes, Sir. I will definitely do that."

    The attendant ran away with ecstasy apparent in his eyes.

    Gwan who wanted to convince Grivon to just go for another bet stopped thinking of that. Since Grivon went as far as calling the manager, that only means, he is really not interested in the bet again.

    "Your next bet should be with me Gewin and next time, we are going for much higher stakes."

    "Of course, young master Gwan. I will definitely acquire something big as I have some things lined up and for every big thing I get, I wille to you to wager. I have acquired quite a big collection of beasts and I cannot wait to show them off to you and pit them against your own."

    With that, the manager came and the property was transferred.

    Grivon didn''t even wait for a second. He took his beast and left the ce as if he would lose the property if he stayed there any longer.

    After going to the residence they were using, he went to meet Giyon secretly who is currently staying in the headquarters of the realm. She can see the Headquarters of the organization from her window.

    It was already night by the time Grivon reached there.

    "So, how are you doing out there? Did the target take the bait?"

    She asked as she made some tea.

    "Yes, he did. And here is the first gain."

    He pped the deed on the table and Giyon went through it with surprise.

    "A hectare ofnd and the Purple Dust flower crop that is ready to harvest? This guy is really an idiot and he is also a gambler. Quite an idioticbination that is."

    "Yes, it is an idioticbination. And it is great for our benefit. So, how are you going to proceed with this?"

    "The Purple Dust flower is the main ingredient in many medicines that are used for bone strengthening. It is great medicine for Mortal ne cultivators and even some Astral ne Initiation cultivators.

    It is a big business as it is. But I want to send the details to Sam and see if he has a better idea."

    "He probably would have. What is the first product you areunching?"

    "Since we are already into the food industry and it is getting some decent money, I want to target the weapons next. The medicine is the biggest here and I figured it would be better if we poked at itter. I don''t want to cause chaos before I make some serious connections from people outside of this realm that act here."

    "That''s good. Go for the energy barrier business if you can. I just showed it off as a wager to this young master and I said someone isunching the product here in the capital.

    So, if you do that, I might gain some extra credibility when ites to info and it might help me out."

    "Energy barriers? Not a bad idea. It is actually easier to prate since there is not muchpetition for it. I will go for that."

    "Send a message to Sam then. He will help you set up the production faster and I also acquired the list of the properties under Gwan. I want to know which would be the better picks. So, ask him on my behalf."

    "Sure thing."

    As they had some more discussion about the businesses and some general chat, night slowly crept away and by dawn, Grivon moved back. He went back to the city and waited for a message from Giyon regarding Sam''s answer.

    Two days passed and he finally got the answer. In fact, Giyon brought it herself.

    "He just wanted you to go for it. You have absolute freedom. You can take whatever type of property or resource you want. The only requirement is that it would be better if they are close to harvest."

    "That is something I can do. I have a very long list to pick from now. So, why are you here?"

    "You have been noticed by the people in the capital. For some reason, the hectare ofnd you took was noticed even though it is the private property of Gwan.

    Maybe it is because they are a bit caught off guard with how quickly it came into my hands, so they are thinking you might have targeted Gwan with hidden agenda."

    "But I did target the guy with some hidden agenda."

    "Just keep it in control and don''t get caught. Just don''t gamble with him for a while and wait until he approaches you by himself. Also sell, the carcass of the snake to somebody else so that they won''t doubt you too much.

    Also, act like a normal mercenary sometimes. Go on a mission, do some dirty work, and conduct expeditions."

    "Sure, Sister Giyon. Sure. Is that it?" Grivon spoke with a sigh.

    "What is with that tone?"

    "You speak like my mother. Why do you always end up taking that tone whenever we talk? It is almost annoying."

    "Well, then stop acting like a child. I just came here to warn you. Goodbye."

    With that, she disappeared.

    For the next few days, Grivon didn''t act up. He spent three days outside conducting some high-profile expeditions, at least that is what the people and the city heard.

    And since he got a hectare ofnd from the young master, his news is something so many people are paying attention to.

    Gwan on the other hand is paying attention too much. He already noticed that Grivon is deliberately escaping him.

    He is trying so hard to not meet with Gwan and in fact, he is trying too hard which is easily noticeable.

    This puzzled Gwan and on the thirdvnight, when Grivon and his team came back from an actual expedition, he was ambushed.

    Not with an attack, but with Gwan being alone without any guards.

    "What are you doing sneaking up on us like this young master Gwan? You could have been killed you know?"

    Grivon said with a frown.

    "Gewin, it seems like you forgot about our deal. You didn''te to the arena."

    "Well, I didn''t find the time to. Haven''t you known about this? I am a mercenary."

    "So, what? It seems like you are deliberately avoiding me.. Don''t tell me that you don''t want to continue right after beating me. Are you that scared of losing?"

 Chapter 1406 - Fleecing II

    <h4>Chapter 1406 - Fleecing II</h4>

    "Of course, I am afraid of losing."

    Grivon answered matter-of-factly. Gwan who is standing in front of the group was stunned. He expected Grivon to dismiss his ims and feeling offended. He wanted to provoke him into getting into this. But instead of that, he openly admitted.

    Looking at his reaction, Grivon smiled and said.

    "I am afraid of losing. Because everything I gained is something I gained with my life on the line. I don''t want to lose it all on some gamble. Particrly not when I am getting threats from some big hidden figures."

    "You were threatened?" Gwan was shocked.

    "Of course, I got a few threats that I shouldn''t gamble with you anymore and if I did, I better lose if I knew what is good for me.

    I don''t care about who they are and what they want. I don''t care if they are stronger than me, but I have to keep my members safe and I can''t just y and lose on my own. I don''t like throwing fights no matter if they are some gambles or some fights that decide fates. So, I would rather avoid.

    Now get out of the way ande and meet me only after you have big enough to balls to gamble with full stakes and no hidden and outer threatsing at me, just because I can win."

    Grivon and the team were about to take a detour and leave, but Gwan once again blocked their way.

    "Young master, you might really get your ass kicked if you keep blocking me. Trust me, the people that threatened me didn''t say anything regarding beating the crap out of you. They only told me to not win any gambles against you."

    "Who is that threatened you? Tell me. I will sort this out."

    "Sort this out? If you really think you can sort this out, you would have done it already. Who knows how many victories you scored all these years because of these people. And here I was thinking that you are some highly skilled beast tamer and trainer."

    With that Grivon didn''t stop and went back to their residence.

    The next day, Gwan came to his residence and this time, he brought the manager of the Den along with him.

    "What are you doing here, Young master? I already told what I wanted to tell you. Now get out."

    "I am here to make a deal. In all the future gambles that you and I have, there wouldn''t be any of my n members trying to sabotage the payment if you win and I will try my best to help you if they try to threaten you.

    I will be doing the Gandharva Oath right here and record it. I will spread it all over the realm so that my n wouldn''t be able to deal with you."

    "Are you sure you want to do that?"

    "This will give you what you need. You cane and gamble. I will prove it to you that I am not a person who tries to renege on my debts."

    "Sure thing."

    Grivon grinned and epted the oath.

    He couldn''t help but feel a bit ecstatic while he did that. He didn''t expect that Gwan would take such extreme measures, but this helps him do things far easily.

    "Okay now, lets go to arena, I would like to get my field back and much more from you."

    "I am sorry. But I already sold your field."

    "WHAT?" Gwan was stunned.

    "You heard me. I already sold the field. I didn''t bother to wait for you to win it back and I don''t have any use for it."

    "Who did you sell it to?"

    "I don''t know. Someone from the capital. A new merchant group."

    "I need to look into it. The field is quite profitable. As he mumbled he walked out and Grivon followed him.

    They both went to the arena and once again they started betting. This time, Gwan took a different type of beast. A Dual elemental beast.

    A wolf with both wood and wind elements. The Grass de Wolf.

    "Another undefeated contender of yours. I thought you would save this for a bit. I also have a wolf in my possession. Let''s see who wins."

    Grivon sent his beast pouch and gave the same offer as the day before. Twenty billion spirit stones for the bet.

    The audience are looking forward to it as the announcer hyped up.

    The wolf Grivon gave was revealed. This time, the size of the creatures is equivalent. They looked equally dangerous.

    The wolf Gwan is using has the green mane with a single white patch on its crown, where as Grivon''s wolf is of golden color.

    Its mane had this metallic sheen that glimmered like it was just polished.

    The Golden Wolf. A metal elemental beast.

    The announcer created hype while Grivon and Gwan started discussing the wagers.

    "I will need that energy barrier blueprint and I will also need that thunder mantis."

    "Oh my god. You are really betting big. But do you really have enough capital? I mean, the worth of the mantis is a lot more than it just being a beast. Its worth is at least the same as the hectare of thend it won for me and even more.

    Since I am feeling generous again, I will take a bet. But you need to ce the wager of something that is twice as valuable as the Land."

    "How about an orchard? The me Tangerine Orchard. Thend has been fertilized with the fire elemental essence and the blood of the fire elemental beasts for centuries. Every year instead of decreasing the fertility, it is increasing rapidly.

    I think it is a good deal. The tangerines are also on the verge of harvest. It would be enough."

    "Sure, I will take that deal. I am pretty sure I can find a great buyer in no time."

    "You wouldn''t be able to, don''t worry."

    As they were talking. The battle started.

    Grivon had a smile on his face as he looked at the green wolf running around. Every where it stepped there is a patch of grass appearing there and a swift wind carried the grass and it into literal des of grass.

    When the grass des shed the golden wolf, one could see a faint green mark left behind along with the small scar.

    The wolf''s special attack, poisonous grass des. This is an attack that does a lot of damage as the time goes on and with the wolf''s natural agility, it can drag on the fight as it liked and the constant pelting with the grass des only makes it worse for the opponent.

    But when the Golden wolf took the hits at the start, it winced in pain, but only for a second, the next moment its golden mane brightened up and the metallic sheen intensified.

    The next barrage of grass des werepletely deflected from the skin and the Golden Wolf looked at the Grass de wolf before howling into the sky.

    *HOWLING*

    The Grass de wolf suddenly felt the shivers down its spine and stopped the attack. The Golden Wolf slowly walked forward and suddenly it body appeared to berger in the eyes of the Grass de wolf.

    "What the fuck is that mutt doing? Why is backing down?"

    "A wolf is a canine beast Young master. They have some serious instincts when gauging their opponents and your wolf just realized that it is against a stronger opponent, both in terms of strength and hierarchy."

    "What do you mean hierarchy? My wolf never mixed up with the rest of the tribe, it doesn''t know any of these things."

    "I knew you would think that. But instincts for beastse through gics. When there is an overwhelming power difference, you cannot make them fight. If you are doubtful, you canmand it to fight. But beware that it would die."

    "I don''t fucking believe it."

    As he spoke, hemanded his beast through the contract.

    As soon as he did that the grass de wolf tried its best to resist but for its owner, it made a move.

    The Golden Wolf became angry and leaped forward. It disappeared like a golden sh and in one second, the Grass de wolfy on the ground with blood all over its body dripping out.

    The crowd turned silent again.

    "What the fuck is happening? It was only one hit."

    "I told you, the overwhelming power difference thates from gics. It is not easy to beat. Anyway, shall we talk about the transfer of the orchard? I need to find a buyer."

    "We can go again. Right now."

    "No, young master. I have an expedition lined up. I am going after a mine that was recently discovered and there are some problems. It is actually discovered by your organization. I just took the contract. So, I can''t just abandon it."

    "But¡­"

    "Please young master. You just swore an oath that you would make sure that your family doesn''t help you renege your debts, but now you are trying to avoid it by making another bet.. We can''t just have all the fun in a single day."

 Chapter 1407 - Business

    <h4>Chapter 1407 - Business</h4>

    Grivon and Gwan are standing in front of the manager of the Gambling den as they processed the contract.

    After it was done, Grivon left with his team.

    "Young master Gwan, you should be careful when dealing with a person like that. It seems like he has studied your beasts critically after he lost to you once and went on to correct his mistakes.

    He is not just any random person who desires to win, he is a person who works to win. You might think that this is all just a gamble, a game of chance, but it stopped being a game of chance a long time ago.

    It stopped being that when your opponent analyzed the risks and obstacles and prepared for them.

    If you want to win, prepare well. Change your beasts, acquire new ones, train them. Try to trigger mutations. Do what you need to do. Understand your opponent. Because if you go on like this, you would be done with all of your properties and money before you even know it.

    With those words, the manager left the ce leaving Gwan to stand there and think as he looked at the battles of other beasts.

    He went to the rooms of the arena where the wolf is being treated.

    The Golden Wolf showed some mercy for some reason, maybe because they are of the same kind. So, he got to keep the beast.

    When he thought of the manager''s words, he decided that it is about time for a chance. The beasts he had were trained by him for years and he spent so long with him. He had so many wins with them, that he got ustomed to it.

    But then he remembered what Grivon said regarding his organization threatening and for some reason, he managed to link it to some of the close victories in many of which he thought he would have lost but still won.

    He suddenly couldn''t feel the sense of pride from all the gambles he won.

    If Grivon knew what his little ploy is making the young master go through right now, he would be shocked.

    Gwan lets the wolf get the treatment before leaving the city. He decided to take some time off from gambling and think of ways to improve his collection and find ways to beat Grivon.

    As he thought of the victory, he thought of that blueprint of the armor he has seen. He couldn''t get that out of his mind.

    In fact, the very reason he went as far as making that oath to Grivon is because of the armor.

    He knew that his standing within the organization is good, but not great enough to surpass the sessor candidates with andslide.

    He believed this armor blueprint would achieve it.

    At least it would put a lot of distance between him and other candidates and he believed that gambling is the best way to achieve it.

    He went to find a way.

    The next day Grivon received the news and sent the message to Giyon who is also extremely busy herself.

    While Grivon is trying his best to fleece the young master, Giyon is waiting for the production nt of the Energy barrier project to set up.

    The newly trained artisans in this area were sent from the Gaja n and Sam also arranged the machinery by making them within Grivon''s stray realm.

    By the time Grivon sent the message, the setup waspleted. She was surprised by how fast the whole thing happened.

    After making sure that everything is okay. She started the production and luckily Sam also sent a batch of energy barriers so that she could immediately start her business.

    Of course, she already set up the store and the first store is within the capital.

    When the shop opened the whole capital was stunned as she made a grand demonstration within the arena.

    If not for the fact that she divided the premade batch into several smaller batches and limited the products, she would have run out within the first day.

    Particrly after she got the letter from Grivon stating that Gwan was nowhere to be found and went on this little getaway, she decided to extend it as long as she can and slow down the business a bit.

    Since Sam would also take some time to make new inventions from the things Grivon is going to acquire, this would be the perfect method.

    Once the new inventiones around, then she can release it and change the attention to that one a bit and let this business spread slowly under the shadow.

    So, she started slowing down a bit.

    The organization of course took note of her along with the merchants that came from other realms.

    The second day, after the stock she assigned for that day is finished, an elder from the organization approached her.

    "My name is Raun. It is nice to meet you. Miss Gyon. I would like to talk to you about a business proposition."

    "I am sorry Mr. Raun, I already rejected everyone that came to me with a proposition regarding the distribution of the Energy barriers.

    Currently, my production is not exactly stable and as you can see, the demand is already quite high for myself and I cannot manage the supply."

    "Of course, that is why I am not here to ask for distribution. Rather, I am looking for a partnership in the production itself.

    Our organization is already widespread and has a solid foundation with connections and has enough financial stability. If you can sell this product to us, we will manufacture and distribute with ten percent profits to you.

    You don''t have to do anything. All you have to do is give us the blueprints and you will receive arge sum of payment along with the ten percent profits."

    Giyon looked at him with a smile but didn''t reply for a second.

    "Your Answer Miss Gyon?"

    "Are you sure you want to listen to that Mr. Raun?"

    "I am if it is a statement on eptance."

    "It is not. So, you know my answer. Please take your leave. I am selling the product blueprints to you. I have my own ns."

    "I don''t know where your confidencees from Ms. Gyon, but it would be hard for you to survive within this realm and within the circle of merchants in the surrounding realms if you don''t partner with one of the behemoths like us.

    Otherwise, you wouldn''t be able to develop yourself and might be swallowed as a whole. Then you wouldn''t even reap the profits I am currently giving to you."

    "We will see if that day reallyes. But anyway, I have a contract from your organization stating that I would be provided with subsidies as well as no hindrance in the growth of my business from your organization would be imposed on me.

    So, you are openly viting that agreement as you are trying to threaten me here.

    I might just go and take it up with your justice department here and even the head of your n."

    The elder was stunned and looked at the agreement that was whipped out by Giyon.

    "How did you get that?"

    "Oh, it seems like you don''t even know about its existence. Inconsistency within the organization I guess, but I think you need to ask that question to someone else. Goodbye."

    With that, she left.

    For the next two days, she kept on getting these kinds of offers one after the other and in these two days, the production was also properly arranged. There is a consistent flow of energy barriersing out.

    Giyon lifted the restriction on selling a bit. Of course, she is not selling them in bulk and on the fifth day since she opened the store, she found a small local partner on another within the realm far away from the capital.

    That person is actually just a salesperson though. It is a local weapon shop and he is like a distributor who gets ten percent off of the profits from each product.

    This is Giyon''s usual business practice. In all the realms that she expanded, she always found the local businesses that are genuine and stable to prate the market easily this time, she did that same.

    On the sixth day, Sam sent a message to her again and this time along with the message, there is a lot of equipment and other stuff.

    And in that stuff, there was a recipe and instructions on how to make the product with the Purple Dust Flower.

    Giyon was ecstatic and was shocked when she looked through the effects of the product.

    This is something she didn''t expect.

    The profits would be unimaginable with this product and she can also focus more on the distribution n of the energy barriers while this setup was ready.

    So, by the sixth day afternoon, she started going all out on signing deals with small business partners. Instead of partnering with a big merchant group that spread across a realm, she contracted with the small businesses that covered a single or even a region of a in the nearby realms too.

    Of course, this didn''t sit well with the big merchant groups.

 Chapter 1408 - Strategy

    <h4>Chapter 1408 - Strategy</h4>

    Giyon''s rapid expansion using small merchants in all of the areas is not really appreciated by the big merchant groups and rightfully so.

    They were just imaginingrge-scale profits that they could reap with the Energy barriers, in fact, they don''t even need a wholesale price from Giyon, they are ready to pay the retail price she is selling at her shop and are still confident that they can make a profit.

    But now the situation ispletely out of their hands.

    Giyon''s move was sneaky. For the first few days, shepletely dodged everyone saying that she doesn''t have any thoughts on expanding her business and only wanted to stay in this one ce, and just when everyone is thinking that it might be true, she made this big nasty move that caught them off guard.

    Some of the merchant groups wanted to take it out on Giyon a bit, after all, every raw material and all kinds of other products arepletely managed by them. They wanted to cut the supply off for a bit to teach her a lesson.

    Only when they are looking for the people who are supplying to Giyon did they realize something, none of them are the material suppliers for Giyon and none of them actually supplies anything to Giyon.

    It is almost like she ispletely independent of the other merchant groups within the realm.

    The next thing they wanted to do is to go after the small businesses across the realms. Every single one of the merchant groups has this one realm where their influence is high. So, they wanted to go back to their realms and try to buy off the small-time merchants and take over the ce as the distributor.

    But things didn''t go well when they learned about the details of Giyon''s contract with these people.

    Giyon''s contract clearly states that the contract is only valid with this particr person she chose, even if it is their child or nominee, the contract wouldn''t be valid and she can stop the distribution whenever she wants.

    In fact, one of the distributors sold out immediately and handed over the contract to the merchant group. He clearly didn''t read it thoroughly, so when the merchant group saw it, they don''t know exactly how Giyon would even know whether the owner kept the contract or not.

    After all, he might be sending his people to pick up the supplies. But soon they realized.

    The supply is actually sent by Giyon herself and when the person came and saw that the person who signed the contract is not there, he immediately left.

    He didn''t care about the merchant group that tried to stop him. He just killed the people they sent and left without saying a word.

    The groups finally understand that Giyon is not as simple as they thought. They wanted to try other ways, but soon they realized that Giyon''s tactics are not done yet.

    Exactly one week afterunching the energy barrier product, she announced the next product, Body Strengthening Bath.

    She not only announced the product, but she went as far as opening the second floor of her building from which the sales happen.

    The product is actually made of the Purple Dust flower and it is Sam''s take on how this flower could be used in the most effective way possible.

    He created a powder that could be used as a bath salt which is extremely effective for strengthening the body of even an Astral ne Initiation cultivator.

    Once again, on the product release day, she did some free trials and went on to regte the supply a bit.

    Along with that, by the third day, she had a meeting with the distributors she chose. Not all of them only some of them. She gathered all of them in arge room and spoke to them.

    "All of you are the proper distributors from the first batch that I selected.

    Now, I would like to give you another opportunity. You must have already heard about the medicine store I opened on top of this ce.

    It is an exclusive product and it is only avable for limited days. After all, the ingredients that are needed are rare and need some time to be grown properly. So, the supply would be a bit regted which means people who sell it will not have the same level of ie as you.

    But still, I want every one of you to rmend someone to me. Someone who has adequate knowledge of medicine to sell them and who is as genuine as you. Someone who wouldn''t betray and sell out the business.

    Of course, tell them that I have other medicines lined up and they would be introduced very shortly and in those products, there are medicines that would be sold within these exclusive medicine stores.

    So, they don''t have to worry about being stuck with one product.

    Select one person and build another floor on top of your current shop or build an attached shop beside yours and even if that is not possible, open the shop in the samepound side by side.

    If you find me a genuine person like asked and they don''t disappoint, I will distribute the next weapon through your channels and you would be able to get more. Do you understand?"

    The merchants were dumbfounded and they became ecstatic. It is actually not that much of a tough job. All they have to do is find someone they can trust and good-hearted. They don''t have to be saints, they just don''t have to betray Giyon.

    Within their cities, they definitely have connections with local medicine sellers and they knew some good ones too.

    They immediately left the capital and went back to convince their friends and acquaintances.

    The process was not hidden and the merchants understood what Giyon is doing.

    She is trying to build her own group at a rapid pace.

    The problem with therge-scale merchant groups is that they need to find someone trusted and make them develop influence in a locality beforeunching a big proper shot.

    But Giyon is doing the opposite. She is not revealing her handpletely from the start and began it with one product.

    She went after the small-scale local merchants first and gave this product like an olive branch.

    She filtered the good apples from within that group and is making them look for other good apples in a different field and gave them an offer with a different product and made sure to promise that she would be giving her next product to these guys if they impressed her with their loyalty.

    This also means that if they don''t do a good job, she wouldn''t let them have the second product if they are not sessful with this.

    She is making the small-scale merchants earn her trust with the enticement of more profits. But the condition is that they need follow him.

    They don''t even know how to react to this. Some of them wants to take extreme measures and wanted to kill a few of the distributors to make Giyon understand her ce, but for some reason, the people that were sent of the distributors never came back.

    Meanwhile, on Grivon''s end, the young master Gwan who is the perfect sheep for fleecing just came back.

    Grivon who didn''t see him all this while was a bit worried.

    But Gwan came back with extra enthusiasm.

    "I would like to gamble. I want that Thunder Shelling Mantis and the Golden Wolf."

    Grivon thought for a moment and shrugged.

    "You don''t have a problem with the possibility of losing two beasts that are best in your collection?"

    "Trust me, they are not the best in my collection, and who said they are the only beasts of their kind in my collection. I actually brought an extra mantis and a wolf."

    Gwan was stunned and looked at Grivon in shock. Who in the right mind would get the same extra beasts, particrly when they are making a collection? That is his question, but Grivon just shrugged and said.

    "I knew these beasts would be popr after I win a few rounds with overwhelming differences and then I would auction these extras off for a huge profit."

    "What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you so obsessed with money?"

    "Because I never had enough of it and I am a mercenary. Have you ever heard of a mercenary who is not in love with money? I haven''t."

    Gwan sighed and didn''t want to continue with the conversation.

    "Anyway, what is that you are wagering. You need to wager something big. Something that is worth as much as the flower field and the orchardbined."

    "Of course, I have the perfect thing in mind. My wind elemental herb garden on this. That is one of the best herb gardens in the surrounding realms and I have a wide variety of herbs already on verge of maturing.

    You will gain a lot."

    "That is great.. I would take that."

 Chapter 1409 - Trying To Get Info

    <h4>Chapter 1409 - Trying To Get Info</h4>

    A few minutester.

    "Yes, yes. Finally. I won. I am back." Gwan is yelling out excitedly as he punched the air around. Grivon stood beside him with a gloomy face.

    He looked at the beast that just lost the fight and took it back. Since he spared the wolfst time, Gwan was considerate enough to let this beast go. But in this bet, Grivon lost the mantis and the wolf.

    Of course, as he said, he did catch extras in his journey. I mean since it was done easily by his high level subordinates, he didn''t really hold back.

    He gave the extras to the young master and left the arena.

    But only after he left the arena did his expression change and reveal his original intentions. He started smiling widely.

    He couldn''t help but show a wide grin on his face as he walked back to his residence.

    This is his n from the start. He nned to lose now no matter what kind of beast Gwan brought, but luckily for him, Gwan really did make an upgrade and brought some new powerful beast.

    He managed to lose and made sure that Gwan''s ego ispletely within the zone.

    Some times there is a possibility that no matter how addictive a gambler is, they might slow down or even give up if the blow is too big.

    In this case, the involvement of Gwan''s organization is inevitable if he lost too much. Even though Gwan signed an agreement that only helps him at the start as it goes down, he would have to reveal his hand and strength to the organization and might need to use forceful measures.

    To dy that inevitable, Gwan needs his ego within a certain range so that the gambler within him wouldn''t suffer with any big blows

    So for the next three days, he did everything he could to make sure anything drastic happened.

    He managed to win the first day and get his beasts back, but then gambled them away in the second day. On third day the bet was a bit bigger and Grivon lost again.

    This time he had bet a lot of money. The gains he had in the past few days from the other audience was all gone to Gwan.

    Gwan on the other hand is ecstatic. When he won two times in a row, he couldn''t help but feel like he came back to his top form and various thoughts popped up in his mind about the armor and the energy barrier blueprint.

    He already heard about the energy barrier that came into the market recently and knew that his organization is having some trouble dealing with thispetitor. Giyon''s poprity is raising with her products rapidly and even he who doesn''t show much interest in what happens within the capital and headquarters noticed this.

    He wanted that barrier blue print so that he could help out the n a bit. So, he decided to bet on that the next day.

    "I need that blue print."

    "I am really sorry, young master. I already sold it."

    "Sold it? To who?"

    "The person who is currently selling the barriers. She knew that I have one in my possession and contacted me. She doesn''t want to havepetitors popping around here and there, so she bought it off."

    "Then you didn''t make any copies?"

    "Young master Gwan, I might like money, but I don''t really do something as shitty just to get some more money in my pockets. When ites to trade, I am very honest with my customers."

    "Whatever."

    Gwan left the arena with a grumpy mood even though he won.

    He doesn''t know exactly what to do now. He is really counting on this barrier to make sure that the rest of his peers don''t catch up. The only silver lining is that none of his peers managed to score this product from him. So, they at least didn''t get any boost from their current level.

    As he is thinking, the armor blueprint suddenly crossed his mind.

    He knew for sure that the armor blueprint is a lot more valuable than the energy barrier. But he doesn''t know how to get it.

    Grivon didn''t talk about selling it. But when he thought of how Grivon sold everything silently, he knew that it is possible.

    So, the next day, he asked Grivon about it after their bout.

    Gwan won again, but this time, the bet is a little on the low side and didn''t have that much excitement to it.

    "The armor blueprint you showed me, did you sell it?"

    "That one, I didn''t. It is still with me."

    "How much does it cost?"

    "Trust me young master. You wouldn''t be able to afford it. It is way too expensive and even your organization would feel a massive pinch."

    "Where did you get it then?"

    "Some questions are better left unanswered young master. I don''t think your organization is big enough to hold something like this. This belongs to the big ns and sects. You guys are just not there yet."

    "If a mercenary like you can hold it. So, can we." Gwan didn''t like Grivon belittling their organization and fired back.

    Grivon smiled and spoke.

    "Young master. You don''t know nothing about me. Don''t pass your judgements too quickly and live to regret itter on. You might think your organization is all that, but after you have seen the world that I have seen and more, then you say the same thing. Maybe I will believe you then.

    All you have ever done is gamble in this stupid city. You barely left the realm at all."

    "What do you mean by that?"

    "I don''t mean anything that I didn''t say. Just be cautious when you overestimate yourselves and underestimate others. I might just be a mercenary and I might have dodged the fight with your n. But there are a lot of things you need to know before youpare yourself and your organization to me.

    See you tomorrow, if you areing to bet that is."

    Gwan doesn''t even know what to say to that.

    He knew he was being insulted, but he couldn''t think of anything to refute.

    He indeed doesn''t know who Gewin really is. For all they knew, he is just a mercenary who recently set up shop here and he is doing great. He took over expeditions and finished them in a snap. He had a perfect rate and his subordinates are doing a great job here.

    But why is here? They don''t know.

    What exactly is the strength of the whole group.

    They don''t know.

    How did the group really got their hands on such a high level blue print?

    They don''t know that either.

    When he started asking these questions, he realized that all he knew is that the other guy is a gambler who likes to win and has means to do that.

    That is it.

    He doesn''t know anything about him. But when he remembered the design of the armor, he couldn''t help but feel tempted.

    So, he immediately went to the manager or the den and spoke.

    "I need a meeting with the Elder."

    "Which elder? There are currently three of them within the vicinities of the."

    "Is Elder Mani still present?"

    The manager was a bit stumped and asked.

    "Why do you want to meet her?"

    "I need more information about Gewin and I believe she is the best person for the job."

    "Yes, she indeed is, but you should also know, it is not really a good thing to ask things from her. They oftene with some big price in the form of favors."

    "I know. But I need it fast and I need it to be secretive and precise."

    "Then she is your person. Lucky for you, she is also on the, so you don''t have to travel much to meet her. I will try to set up an appointment tomorrow if you want."

    "That would be great, thank you."

    The next day Gwan didn''t go for the arena and instead went to meet with the elder.

    He travelled to a city nearby and met with her at noon for lunch.

    The elder is a middle-aged woman wearing simple robes without any sign of extravagance of an elder of a reputed organization.

    "What do you want Gwan? I never knew even Gamblers might need my assistance."

    Gwan smiled awkwardly and said.

    "I need to find information on someone. His name is Gewin and he is a mercenary."

    "Why do you want to know about it?"

    "Is it possible for you to do this without asking any details?"

    "Yes, it is. But the price for that is something you cannot afford any time soon."

    "What would that be?"

    "In your case, you cannot pay me with enough money, treasures or favors, so you would have to do my bidding for over a decade to three decades based on the type of favor you are asking me. Are you okay with that?"

 Chapter 1410 - Capture

    <h4>Chapter 1410 - Capture</h4>

    Gwan was dumbfounded. He never knew that a simple information-gathering could be this expensive.

    "All I am asking for is some background information."

    "Of course, you are just asking for that. That doesn''t mean it wouldn''t be dangerous for me. If the other party is too dangerous, I need to rethink whether it would impact my other interests and if it does, I need to reevaluate the pros and cons before deciding to proceed with the task or not.

    If the importance of information is too high and the price is high as well, I would be proceeding with it or I would just quit.

    There are many other factors like this."

    "So the cost of the information would be based on how important it is for me, rather than how much trouble you have to go through."

    "Something along those lines."

    "What if the importance is too minuscule and the risk is too high?"

    "Then, I would abandon the task and give an update on the situation, if you still want it, you need to amp up the price, if you don''t, I will pay the advance back."

    "The manager said that you take the payment in terms of favors."

    "Yes, the advance has to be mary though. The second part of the payment would be the favorite."

    "Alright."

    Gwan muttered and exined the situation.

    After listening to the whole thing, Mani replied.

    "A mercenary named Gewin appeared in your city running a group on his own name and he has all the means you told and he has a very special blueprint which shouldn''t normally be in his possession with his current strength."

    "That is exactly right."

    "I can look into it. But it is not going to be cheap¡­"

    They discussed the price and Gwan paid arge amount of money before leaving.

    Mani who got all the details went to work immediately.

    The first thing she did is to follow Gwan back to the city to see if he was being tailed by anyone else. She has been an information broker for far too long to not consider this a big fat conspiracy blowing up on her face.

    This is the first thing she does after epting a task. Check the person who assigned the mission to see if they are being manipted and even the possibility that person is trying to manipte her.

    After confirming that neither are true, she moved to the next thing. To take a look at Grivon.

    She took a vantage point a bit away from his residence and blended in. She has a very peculiar camouge technique just like a chameleon. She blended perfectly into the trees without any peculiarity whatsoever.

    There she got a clear view into Grivon''s residence and she observed the whole house until the next day.

    By the next morning, she was done and started rubbing her hands together. Soon spiritual energy gathered into it and turned into small fliespletely condensed of spiritual energy as they flew away.

    She then sneaked out of the trees and went into the woods and sat on an empty patch with her legs crossed.

    The flies meanwhile, flew slowly. They flew so close to the ground and in between the grass that no one noticed them and they went directly into Grivon''s residence.

    They covered the whole area and soon some of them even went into the house as they sneaked into every single room.

    Mani could hear the footsteps of people moving around and she can also see some people through these flies. She started listening in on the conversations and tried to look for any possible information that might slip out.

    For fifteen minutes, she didn''t get anything. But at that point in time, she could hear the rapid footsteps. It is almost like everyone in the house is getting out.

    She was confused about why this happened and started exploring, but for the next ten minutes no matter how much she looked and listened, she couldn''t find a single person and hear a single sound from the house and even the yard.

    This confused her and prompted her to search a bit more. Another ten minutes,ter. The results are the same.

    She didn''t know what happened and opened her eyes in confusion only to be startled and horrified.

    Grivon and the rest of his group are standing in front of her. Some members surrounded her from other sides and blocked her escape routes.

    "It seems like someone wants to get to know me a bit better."

    As soon as Grivon spoke, a wind de went past him and hit the shoulder of Mani.

    It is a subordinate of his who attacked her.

    "Are you trying to leave now? That is not good. I mean, you tried so hard fromst night just to get my attention. Now that you have it, do you think you can just dump me and leave? That is a big mistake."

    "Just let me go and I will nevere across your path again. I am the elder of the organization that is ruling this ce. You wouldn''t be able to escape scot-free if you do something to me. My organization members wille after you."

    "Maybe that is what I want. Your organization membersing after me." Grivon said and gestured. The subordinate beside him made a move¡­

    Ten minutester. Back in Grivon''s residence. He sat on a chair while in front of him the elder is also sitting on a chair but she is tied uppletely with the special shackles.

    "Now, now. What are you up to? Why are you looking into me?"

    "Just kill me and get it over with. I don''t like being in this position."

    "Who said that I am going to kill you? I did some digging on you too. Elder Mani, the great information broker within the surrounding realms. It would be a waste to just kill you. If you can sign a soul contract with me regarding something, then I might just let you go and live your life.

    And after another month, I might not even show myself to you for the rest of our lives. Doesn''t that sound better than just dying?"

    Mani was surprised and then it turned into a stream of thoughts. She frowned and it only got deeper and deeper as she thought of any possibility on why Sam might let her go. After all, prying into your life is a very big taboo here, particrly who knows, just like Grivon everyone is hiding something and they would kill to just keep it hidden.

    But when she looked at the whole group and their cultivations, she gulped and agreed. She couldn''t find any other way.

    "Alright."

    "That''s great. So let''s just start with this. Who sent you to collect info on me?"

    "Gwan."

    This time it was Grivon''s turn to be surprised.

    "Gwan? Really?"

    "Yes, he said something about the blueprint and wanted to get it. He just wants to know what the consequences are going to be."

    "Consequences? He is finally using his brain?"

    "He is."

    "Now, that is good. I was thinking of how to speed up the process. I can''t stay in this hole for a long time.

    Okay, Mani. There are only a few tasks for you to aplish. I want you to hand over your businesses. The ones that you are managing on behalf of your organization."

    Mani was stunned and looked at him in shock.

    "What the hell do you mean, handover? Do you think it is that easy?"

    "Of course, not. But do you think, you have a choice? You are going to transfer the businesses. You can keep all of your personal business. But you need to transfer everything you have on behalf of your n. I need every single spirit stone you have that belongs to your organization. After transfer, you can leave without a trace for over a month and you cane back. Things would be settled by then."

    Mani gritted her teeth and just nodded her head in agreement. She is clearly very reluctant to this whole thing.

    "Now the second task is even easier. But after doing this, you need to disappear for a month."

    "Just tell me what it is."

    "Well, you need to go back and inform Gwan that I am dangerous and the only thing he needs to know is that if he really wants to obtain that blueprint, gambling is the only way.

    Tell him that, I am a force to be reckoned with and he shouldn''t be doing that something that might blow with. Things like trying t steal and such.

    I think you know what I am implying."

    "Yes, I do. I will do it."

    "Great, I was really thinking that you might take a lot of time and energy from me.

    Thanks for cooperating. But remember that it is not easy to just betray me if you want to.. I don''t want to make a visit to the Eldon Inn within the capital and p the manager to death just because you betrayed me."

 Chapter 1411 - Big Bet

    <h4>Chapter 1411 - Big Bet</h4>

    Mani was stunned.

    "How did you¡­"

    "You are not the only one good at digging. You are decent when ites to the realms like these, but when the true yerse from outside, you wouldn''t even be able to see how small you actually are.

    So, be calm and make sure that you do everything I ask you to without any ws. Otherwise, your daughter in that inn would be dead."

    "Yes, I will do it." This time, her voice is a bit more assertive and she really did agree to do this. Maybe it is to make sure that everything will be over as fast as it can.

    Grivon made her sign the soul contract so that she would do everything she said she would and left her to go.

    She sneaked into the woods once again and disappeared for three days.

    On the third day, she reappeared back in the city and went straight to Gwan''s residence.

    "Elder Mani? Did you get the info?"

    "No."

    Elder Mani replied and gave the advance back to him.

    "Why? What happened?"

    "The other party is way too dangerous. You cannot go and sh with him in a confrontation. Even our organization would have a really, really tough time. So, if you really want to get that blueprint, the best way is actually through the gamble.

    But if I were in your ce, I wouldn''t gamble too much. I will find one proper gamble in which I would definitely win. I will win that blueprint and leave this ce, going back to the capital.

    If you want to do it, this is the best approach.

    Don''t contact me again for a while. I am busy with something else now."

    Before Gwan could ask more questions, she simply disappeared from his sight and left. He slumped into a chair and started thinking about how to proceed and after a long time, he finally got an idea.

    He took a scroll and a pen as he started writing things down.

    For the next two days, he didn''t evene out of his room as he kept on nning something big.

    Only after two days, did hee out and he directly went to get some beasts that he needed for this big n which took another two days.

    Finally, he met with Grivon at the arena.

    "Where have you been young master? You are disappearing a lottely, which I suppose is notmon. Where did you go?"

    "I was nning something really big."

    "Oh really?"

    "Yes, I have a very big event nned if you are interested."

    "Tell me what it is."

    "A big beast fight. Ten of your beasts and a ten of mine. Within the forest outside of the city. I will prepare a temporary arena and the one who loses all of his beasts first loses. Thepetition just goes on until all the beasts on one side die."

    Grivon stayed silent for a moment. There are a series of thoughts going inside his head.

    He couldn''t understand why it took four days for Gwan to get this idea. After all, there is not much to think about this. The betting method didn''t really change.

    Their beasts will fight and the winner gets the wager.

    "It is not a bad idea."

    "Yes, but the bets cannot be as small as they are now. We need to bet something big."

    "What do you have in mind?" Grivon asked with a smile.

    "How about that blueprint you have with you?"

    "So, you are really not going to give it up, huh?"

    "I cannot let such a good thing go and since you were being so mysterious about how you got it, I can only think of this way. Why don''t we gamble?"

    "I am actually down for that. But you need to give me something of an equal amount if you lose. What are you going to bet for this?"

    "I¡­"

    "Come on young master Gwan, you and I both know that there is nothing in your possession that you can offer. Your resources are not enough to buy that one blueprint. All of your personal propertyes short by arge margin."

    Grivon said it with a smile. There is a slightly mocking expression on his face. Gwan gulped nervously as he closed his eyes and took a deep breath before speaking.

    "I will bet all of my property and the property of my family within the organization."

    "Your family?"

    "My immediate family. My father is currently on a long expedition, so I am the current person in charge of the family. I don''t have any siblings so it is mine by the right to inherit. So, I would bet all of the property of my immediate family.

    I am sure, that I would be able to match the price of your armor."

    "Really? Why are you so sure it would be enough?"

    "It is a big amount. That is the personal property of all of my immediate family. We even supply the regr consumption of the organization and its properties with the extra resources and have some really big businesses based on them. It is bound to be enough."

    Grivon thought for a moment and said.

    "I am game. I will take that bet."

    "That is great. I will start the preparations for the arena."

    "Wait, before you proceed, I want you to sign the contract before the bet. I don''t want you to renege on itter."

    "Why would I renege on it?"

    "Maybe I will renege on it. Just make a contract for every step of this process. Just to be sure that we wouldn''t screw over each other. After all, this is a big thing."

    "Then, I would also add a use. You shouldn''t be saying anything about this blueprint to anyone. Our organization might be strong, but it cannot handle enough heat that this blueprint brings. Some organizations that are stronger than us, including the big ns, mighte for us."

    "Of course, I know that. Why do you think I kept it with myself without selling it? Even selling it off would be a big problem without proper preparations.

    Anyway, good luck to you. I don''t think you would have a real victory no matter if you win or lose. This blueprint might just be your bane."

    "I would like to see it for myself."

    As they were speaking, the manager came, made them sign the contract before Grivon left with the group while Gwan went away and started making preparations.

    He went to the forest with a bunch of artisans, earth elemental users, and wood elemental users and started making arge arena.

    Of course, it is temporary and it barely has the walls leaving the inside terrain mostly the same without any changes.

    The wall is long, spanning over a few kilometers in circumference.

    The whole process went on for two days and meanwhile, Grivon made a visit to meet Giyon.

    "So, how is the situation here?" He asked as they sat for another meal.

    "Not much. These people are trying to go after the small businesses I contracted with, but their people are disappearing one by one. It is a good thing that the head of the organization is only at Peak of transcendence. We can roam around freely here. If we are doing this to a stronger organization, things would be hard.

    I wouldn''t feel as safe as I am now." Giyon said calmly.

    "It is true. Anyway, I managed to hook that guy. Gwan is now betting all of his fortunes on this one big gamble."

    "All of his fortune?"

    "Yes, all the personal property of his immediate family. Of course, I would have liked it if he bet all of the organization''s properties under their control. But this is good enough for now.

    This would garner enough attention to spark some serious dispute and this guy actually wrote a contract that he would make sure to try his best from preventing his organization from attacking me because of a bet.

    This would be a fun thing to watch."

    "Yes, it would be. But be careful."

    "I am alright. I just wish that things would go a bit faster. We can get out of here in a month."

    "I do too. But my end needs a bit more time. After the initial and foundational objectives are achieved, I will leave it to one of my subordinates."

    "Anyway, I also got a chunk of official properties of the organization from an elder. They are not many, but they are definitely worth something."

    "An Elder? You are on a streak aren''t you?"

    "I am trying. Anyway, I just wanted to warn you that things might get chaotic on my end after this, so be careful."

    "Don''t worry about me. These people wouldn''t even know what hit them. My second product is already on the market now and this time theunch is big enough to attract a lot of attention in all of the ces.

    I earned a lot and didn''t take as much time as the first one.. I am now waiting for something regarding that Tangerine Orchard."

 Chapter 1412 - Raccoon

    <h4>Chapter 1412 - Roon</h4>

    Grivon left after chatting some time with Grivon. By the time he came back the arena is already set up and there is even a formation to view the battles to the audience back in the Gambling den.

    He was really impressed with how Gwan had done this quickly.

    The day of the battle. At dawn, the manager of the gambling den who is acting as a special referee for the battle met with Gwan.

    "You stepped big this time and you are gambling a lot. You wouldn''t be able to go back now. This one moment will either kill you or bring you to new heights.

    I hope whatever you are fighting for is worth all of this trouble."

    "I hope it is worth it too. I don''t know what too over me, but that armor is something that will not just change me. It will change the power and ability of our whole organization. We would be able to triumph over the deadlock our peers set up for us.

    We would be able to earn money that we have never seen before.

    We would be able to cross the resource barrier we have for the top-level executives that are stuck at the same level for a long time.

    This is the key for all of it."

    "And you want to be the one to obtain that key? When did you care so much about the glory? You were a gambler who is happy-go-lucky all this while. Why take this risk?"

    "I am a gambler and that is why I take these risks."

    "No, you are just gambling. One thing I know about gamblers is that they convince themselves that they are risking it for something great and something better, but no. They are just gambling. They are just satisfying their craving to gamble and looking for a shortcut and luck to turn the tide and win by some kind of miracle that never existed.

    I really do hope that you win, but a part of me wants you to lose so that you wouldn''t go near that again."

    "Thank you for your concern. But I made preparations. I am not just simply gambling. I have plotted for this and went against every personal rule I set for myself when I gamble. This is me trying to win this armor."

    "Maybe you could have found other ways. In my opinion, you are just trying to find a shortcut for your glory through gambling the fortune of your family. And it is not really a good thing."

    With those words, the manager left and went to his seat on the wall from where he could ess all the screens for the battles within the arena.

    Gwan couldn''t help but take a moment to digest the whole situation. Now only did he realize what kind of gamble he took. If he really lost this, his immediate family will lose all the power. They wouldn''t have money to bribe and keep the supporting faction they have.

    It would make his endeavor to be the head of the organization nothing more than a pipe dream.

    As he was thinking Grivon came and said.

    "It seems like young master Gwan is finally getting worried. With how confident you were when proposing the bet, I thought you were so confident about your victory.

    I was worried a bit. Now, it seems like you have a shed of worry too."

    "Of course, I have. I am betting a century''s worth of fortune against a single blueprint that might or might not help me. I realized how risky it was betting like this."

    "Well, you realized toote. Sorry about that."

    "I am going to win this anyway."

    With that, both of them went to their seats and gave the beast bags to different attendants who started moving on the wall.

    They to half-an-hour to move to different parts of the wall and let the beasts from the beast bags go.

    "Ten beasts each and the first to have all ten of those gone will be the loser. The battle has started."

    The manager spoke softly. Grivon and Gewin''s seats are nearby so they heard him clearly. There is a formation in front of the manager and a few people sitting around it as they tried to disy what is happening in different ces.

    It is an extremelyrge formation and since it is a rush job, they couldn''t install a proper formation that could give a live feed, so they are using some formation masters that controlled the formation spirit to project the image.

    Inside the image, they could see different beasts roaming around.

    Surprisingly there are five apes that belonged to Gwan.

    "You went all out with these apes, haven''t you? I heard that your ape collection is something that you don''t take out lightly. You are being serious."

    "Of course, I am," Gwan said calmly.

    At this moment. The five apes are seen moving together as if they are training and they are covered with some kind of armor.

    An armor is definitely not something a beast would have naturally, but that is something Grivon didn''t mind. There are many people who give drugs to the beasts and used barding for their bodies, it is not that umon in the beast fight arena.

    But what he saw next rattled him a bit.

    The apes met with each other and ran to a very specific site out of the blue as they started hitting the ground.

    As he frowned and watched as the apes started digging out. One ape in particr which is the earth element one made it easier for the rest and a bunch of weapons were unearthed from under there.

    Five weapons. A mace, a hammer, arge staff, an ax, and finally arge metal club.

    Grivon, the manager, and the subordinates were all stumped. They didn''t expect that Gwan would arrange such a thing.

    "A cheap trick from the king of gamblers? That is surprising."

    Grivon said casually.

    "I didn''t store these weapons here after I made the bet. They were ced by my subordinates here before the bet was even proposed. I just picked the ce and I don''t even know the specific location. The apes found the weapons themselves and ording to the contract it is a fair game."

    Gwan defended himself, but inside he is burning up. He knew better than anyone else that he is simply bullshitting.

    He is the reason why the weapons are here in the first ce. He just wanted to dodge it because of how petty and underhanded he was being. He used a trick that many of hispetitors previously used on him to get some additional advantage in a bet.

    This is disgraceful even for him.

    But for the sake of winning, he didn''t care about anything. He just wanted to win this and get that armor and he wants to get that through the gamble.

    This weird obsession he had. One could guess that it is not about the armor, it is about getting something big through gambling.

    Grivon looked at him and smiled to himself.

    He is looking at something that is described by Sam. The man here has been gambling since he was a teenager and ever since he has been trying to win something big. He has been craving the victory that he needs. He said that once the man sees the armor blueprint, everything will be done by itself.

    The man did the job to screw himself over.

    He couldn''t control the urge to gamble for something this big. He has been trying to prove to others that his gambling addiction is not exactly a problematic addiction rather something that is beneficial.

    But no matter how big and how much he earned, his profit is barely passable. Other youngsters his age are earning more than him without the risk of losing everything with proper businesses.

    He has been starving for this victory for way too long and now it is showing. His track record of not cheating once has been broken. It shows how much he is looking forward to this.

    As he was thinking, he saw apes start tracking down.

    The five apes are of a very different kind. Different elements, different strengths. But one of them has the sense of smell that is even better than the felines and canines and the other has the sense for a sound that it could hear the footsteps from a dozen kilometers away.

    They are tracking towards one of the beasts Grivon released. The Golden Wolf actually and it seems like Gwan has given particr orders about it.

    They are targeting the wolf first because it is the most troublesome in his opinion, but Grivon is not focused on that. In fact, he is looking at something else entirely.

    There is one particr beast. Arge snake that belongs to Gwan moving towards one particr ce.

    At that spot, there is a small roon standing.. A roon is a bit bigger than a normal roon and a body full of ck fur.

 Chapter 1413 - Undead

    <h4>Chapter 1413 - Undead</h4>

    Gwan was surprised. He looked at Grivon who had a smirk on his face.

    "Is that really your beast?" He asked in confusion.

    The roon looked mediocre in every way possible. It is around four feet and the ck fur is a bit noticeable. But apart from that, it lookedpletely normal no matter how one looked at it.

    It moved around a bit and dug up something. It looked like some kind of the root of a tree, it started munching on it.

    Even the manager was confused and directly showed it. Apart from the surprise that was created by the apes finding their weapons, this is the only expression he has shown in all the time Grivon had seen him.

    The snake reached the roon in no time and it looked at the small creature in contempt.

    This snake is green in color and when it opened its mouth a green-colored poisonous vapor was released as it moved forward like that, some green saliva fell on the ground searing and corroding the debris and rocks on it.

    But even with all of this happening, the roon just stood there and focused on the root.

    The snake moved forward and opened its mouth to swallow the roon, but right before its mouth was about to reach it, the snake''s head hit an invisible wall.

    The snake was stunned and shook its head as the roon looked at the snake calmly while eating the root.

    The snake moved to the side and tried to charge again from there, but once again, it hit the invisible wall.

    It didn''t even feel like hitting, it is more like it was stuck in some kind of thick substance making it unable to move forward.

    The audience and the manager along with Gwan were all looking at it in surprise.

    "What is happening there?"

    "Space element?" Gwan and the manager asked simultaneously and Grivon nodded for the second question.

    Finally, the manager understood why Grivon is so relieved. He didn''te across so many beasts with that element in his life, but whenever he saw one, they were always beyond his expectations. So, he is sure that this roon is not just there because Grivon is out of his mind.

    And just as the thought came to his mind, the roon also finished its root and looked at the snake that is trying to hit it from different sides.

    It looked around for a moment before jumping onto a rock and opening its mouth wide open while facing the snake.

    At first, it just looked like the roon is only opening its mouth normally, there is nothing odd about it, but when it stretched its mouth as much as it can, space elemental energy condensed at its jaws and teeth.

    Arge spatial tunnel opened up along with its mouth and a giant ape walked out of it.

    Everyone who is watching had a reaction about this but the biggest reaction is definitely from Gwan.

    "What the FUCK?"

    He couldn''t control himself when he looked at the ape and it is not because it is cheating. It is because he cannot press down the im of cheating on Grivon.

    The ape that came out is an undead creature which technically doesn''t make it a beast. But he would have still managed to say that it is cheating or tried to force Grivon to take it back if he hadn''t used the weapons for the apes.

    And on top of that, Grivon''s method is more legitimate as the roon made and stored this undead creature with its own abilities without any external assistance or coincidence. It is like a weapon of its own.

    They were not the only ones who were caught off guard though. The most important victim of this shock is the snake itself. The ape came out of nowhere and caught hold of the snake''s neck in a headlock.

    The snake tried to move and get rid of the hold, but it was unable to do so. The ape held the grip so tightly that the snake almost passed within a minute.

    But it held on and opened its mouth wide open as it started spewing the green vapor.

    The green vapor although targeted down, since there was not much force behind it, moved up immediately targeting the ape''s arm and the face.

    If it was a normal ape, it would have let go because of the pain, but it is not a normal ape. It is an undead ape. There is no way, it could just let go just because of some corrosion on the flesh of its arm.

    The snake struggled a lot, but the ape is brutal and straight. It held the lock and started punching on the snake''s head.

    Everyone watched as the snake slowly wiggled and died like this.

    But what surprised them, even more, is what came after that. The roon that is standing on a rock like it is watching a show turned to the snake''s dead body that fell on the ground and opened its mouth.

    Once again, therge spatial hole opened swallowing the whole snake by itself.

    The snake disappeared from the spot and the roon moved along with the ape apanying it.

    The audience was stunned. They didn''t expect something like this, but they also understood that this is going to be an exciting fight to see.

    Meanwhile, on the other side of the arena, the five apes finally managed to narrow down the Golden Wolf.

    Even though they managed to track it down, the wolf itself is pretty quick and powerful. It managed to leave a lot of wounds on three apes and one of them even lost a chunk of flesh from its body.

    It tried to run away, but it could only get so far with the wounds from the ambush and it finally died.

    The apes moved after the wolf was done. They didn''t do anything to the corpse.

    As they were leaving, at that exact moment, the roon and the ape stopped their movement and it started sniffing around as if it had found its prey, and all of a sudden, the ape moved at top speed.

    Within a few minutes, they reached the ce where the wolf died.

    Gwan was stunned and there are some thoughts creeping up in his mind, which he didn''t want to let loose, but from the looks of it, it is almost impossible for him to do that.

    The roon sniffed the wolf''s body for a moment and finally stepped back as it opened its mouth.

    The snake came out first. This one is also an undead creature now and it coiled to itself and stood on the side.

    The roon then aimed at the wolf''s corpse and swallowed it before starting its journey again.

    "What the hell is happening there?" One of Gwan''s subordinates couldn''t hold back and ask.

    Everyone looked at Gwan at that moment to see how he is reacting and all they could see is a man drenched in sweat, trembling like a leaf.

    Grivon smirked.

    The Roon was actually prepared for something else entirely. It is prepared for a one on one battle with a certain beast in Gwan''s collection.

    But now that Gwan wanted thisrge battle, he couldn''t help but feel ecstatic. When he caught this beast, he realized that this doesn''t show its maximum potential in a one-on-one battle, rather a group battle like this is the best ce as it could create its own minions, and currently, it has three of them.

    The whole thing is very exciting.

    At this moment, Gwan really wished that he could scream andmand the apes to go back and deal with the roon that just started moving from that spot, but he couldn''t.

    It is impossible and against the rules.

    As they were thinking the battles went on.

    Even though the golden wolf died, the Thunder Shelled Mantis is doing an amazing job within the forest. It took advantage of therge trees and its small figure as it shredded arge Board that is of the metal element.

    It even activated its metal elemental fusion, but it waspletely destroyed within a few minutes.

    The roon managed to sniff it too, but for some reason, it didn''t go. The audience though could see the reason and they were even more surprised.

    Because the corpse of the boar is a state that ispletely impossible to make it as an undead.

    It is almost like the roon could smell the state of the corpse and it ispletely ignored.

    Some people realized that the most interesting thing in the battle is the roon and just looked at it.

    Meanwhile, Gwan is praying to every god''s name he heard of in his life that the apes will find the rest of his beasts and team up with them just like he gave them instructions to do so.

    He knew by the end of it, things are not going to be good for him if the roon kept on doing this. It would have arge group of creatures surrounding it.

    So, he hoped that his beasts formed a group of their own before that and dealt with one beast after the other of Grivon''s side.

 Chapter 1414 - Raccoon Vs Apes

    <h4>Chapter 1414 - Roon Vs Apes</h4>

    The battles went on and Gwan''s prayers weren''t answered. There is only one beast that the apes managed to visit and the rest of the beasts were left to fend for themselves.

    Even that bear was not exactly powerful as it was injured by the mantis. The apes came in time and saved it while they all ganged up and took some blows before killing the mantis.

    Once again, everyone looked at the roon to see its reaction, and just like they expected, the roon sniffed in the air and moved forward without turning again as if it knew that the mantis is smashed into pieces that it is impossible to use it as an undead.

    From both sides, the roon and its undead creatures are killing Gwan''s beasts while the apes and the bear killed Grivon''s beasts.

    But both cases are moving forward differently because, in the roon''s case, the strength is increasing as they moved.

    The most it lost is that the body of the ape was destroyed a bit which makes it incredibly detrimental to fight at full strength, but the rest of the corpses that is collected as it moved forward are as good as new and for some reason, it kept one in its mouth.

    Soon, it was the final stages of the battle. Nobody thought that the battles would go this quickly.

    Of course, the reason is because of the Apes and the Roon.

    Grivon''s beasts managed to kill four beasts of Gwan and the apes along with the Bear are left there. But Gwan made much more damage by killing seven beasts and the remaining two are also injured even though they managed to escape.

    Since Grivon hadn''t given any particr instructions regarding this battle, the beasts only focused on either killing or saving themselves, they didn''t really care about grouping up and fighting together.

    Of course, the only instruction Grivon gave was for them to not harm each other.

    Currently, from what they can see, the two injured beasts are hiding in twopletely different corners while they are trying to heal from their injuries.

    As for the roon, it is moving towards the group of the apes. The apes stopped in one area where they are also recuperating.

    They fought too much. Even though most of the fights are five versus one. The beasts that Grivon brought are no joke. They managed to leave some serious injuries on the apes even in such a disadvantageous situation.

    At this moment, Gwan knew that he has little chance of victory. They are very slim.

    He will definitely win if the roon is not as strong when the five apes are fighting with it and the undead and since the remaining two beasts are gravely injured, he would have a really good chance to win.

    He is really hoping that he would have some time for the apes to recover.

    He almost wanted to go there andmand the apes himself, but he knew it wouldn''t be possible. The contract will act up if he did that and the natural elements wouldn''t leave him alone.

    Particrly, not when the person who made the oath, the manager is a lightning elemental user.

    Even if he died, he knew that the experiences he would have to face right before he died are something he wouldn''t even want to dream of.

    As he was thinking of all the possibilities, he focused on the roon. The apes are good at tracking and the roon is kind of has arge entourage which is easier to notice.

    So, the apes are able to notice the arrival and move around. They are shifting their base constantly as they moved around and recuperated.

    But the roon is getting closer and closer with every move as it sniffed and identified the direction perfectly.

    For some reason, every new base the apes shifted, the roon got more urate and precise than the previous one and it is directing the undead creatures in a way that the apes are bound to be caught.

    Within an hour, it managed to catch up and Gwan wished that the whole hour and more is enough for the apes to recover. But Grivon had apletely different expression. He had a smirk on his face and he seemed like he is looking forward to what is about to happen.

    The roon appeared in front of the apes and the undead creatures surrounded the five apes as they brandished the weapons getting ready to fight.

    But the calm roon made sure that it doesn''t need to directly act and left all the attacking to the undead creatures that it collected which changed all of a sudden as it stepped forward and there is a change in its expression.

    It sniffed around a bit and after marking down all the five apes'' scents, it stood on all fours as its body slowly started changing.

    The muscles spasmed and the fangs were erged. The ws on it also changed a bit with a weird grey lighting out of them.

    Then the whole ck-furred body started glowing grey in color as it looked at the apes hatefully.

    Grivon became excited as he leaned forward to take a closer look. The manager and Gwan noticed this and knew that something big is about to happen and when they thought of the two elements the roon has, they couldn''t help but feel a bit nervous.

    The roon which didn''t move until now suddenly became like this and it looked like its whole personality changed. When the transformation isplete, it looked to the sky and roared.

    *ROAR*

    Everyone in the audience was stunned. They never expected that a roon can even roar like this.

    As soon as it roared, the undead creatures went crazy and started attacking the apes. It is almost like the roon no longer cared about anything and it also jumped forward at the ape that stood at the front.

    The roon blinked from its spot and appeared right before the ape as it scratched.

    The wsnded on the armor and it tore through the metal. The space elemental energy created a small rend and destroyed the armor easily.

    It is no longer useful.

    Itnded on the ground and blinked again, before attacking the ape from the rear.

    The ape blocked the attack with its staff, but the roon caught hold of the staff with the front ws and leaped forward to catch the flesh on the back of therge ape with its mouth.

    The fangs entered deep and it simply tore out the flesh off of the ape''s body.

    The ape stumbled forward as the blood-soaked the fur on its book.

    "What the hell is wrong with this roon, why did it be so aggressive all of a sudden?"

    The manager muttered out loud and Grivon chuckled.

    "The roon is called the Ape killer. There is a reason why I brought it here. I wanted to use it against the apes in the arena with the young master.

    But we made this bet before I could use it.

    The roon''s race is gically aversive to the ape-type beasts. It is like they are natural enemies for the apes since birth. They cannot stand their presence and they try their best to kill any ape that is near them.

    For some reason, they can even sense the souls of the ape creatures within the vicinity because of their death element and they can estimate the strength if they focus enough.

    They are clever and they can make undead creatures. There is also the space element that helps them with the defense and offense.

    They can make some simple strategies.

    It tracked down the dead bodies and created the undead creatures before it decided to deal with them like this.

    The roon is actually a crazily good fighter and the only reason it didn''t fight is to save the strength to kill the apes by itself.

    The ape undead it stored at the start is actually something it killed by itself."

    As Grivon exined, Gwan and the manager saw the first ape fall down.

    They gulped in nervousness looking at the bloodsoaked roon that brutally killed the first ape and moved to the next one helping out the undead creatures.

    The rest of the fight is aplete massacre.

    The apes wanted to get away from the spot, but they couldn''t. Whenever one of them moved away, the roon blinked from the spot and attacked the ape that was escaping.

    The attacks are always targeted at their limbs and joints making them temporarily immobile or slow down enough for the undead creatures to catch up.

    Grivon was right, the roon is clever. It is notpletely dependent on instincts like most creatures. It almost behaved like it has an immense battle experience and it learned many lessons through those battles.

    And within the next ten minutes, they saw its full strength as one ape after another fell and when there is only one ape left, Grivon stood up and adjusted his clothes a bit as he looked at Gwan.

 Chapter 1415 - Attack

    <h4>Chapter 1415 - Attack</h4>

    Two dayster.

    Back in the Gaja n''s headquarters.

    Sam and Gail are sitting at the dining table of Giyon''s residence as they are having some soup. Both of them are enjoying it from their expressions and Sam is looking at a letter at the same time.

    "How are things with them?" Gail asked as he called the attendant for another serving.

    "They are doing great. Grivon worked faster than I thought. That gambler kid got hooked and lost all of his property. Now the news will definitely go to the headquarters fast enough and they will be trying to get the property back.

    Finally, creating a direct sh. If everything esctes as well as I thought, within two weeks everything will be done. Grivon and Giyon wouldn''t need to be there after that."

    "That is great. I came here to spend time with them. It would be great if theye back earlier."

    "Don''t worry they will be here."

    After they were done with the soup, Sam went to theb and started listing down things. Some recipes for the tangerines and some other solutions for the resources that Grivon recently got.

    He finished up everything and sent the letter back.

    After that was done, he took out some sheets of paper and started checking their contents. They are the tests for the kids.

    That is the only rxation he could afford at that moment.

    While Grivon and Giyon are struggling far away, Sam is not exactly having a good time even though he stayed within the Gaja n quarters.

    Because the chaos he wanted to stir up starteding at him.

    The first and most annoying problem is a group of young masters. After he made the members of the special squad let out of the businesses they had in their hands, for some reason, someone spread the news about this and many young masters who are Grivon''s peers are trying to get a piece of it.

    And the fact that the twenty or so sets of properties are not exactly based on the same property, so Sam had to n properly and use the subordinates of Grivon to make sure that not a single thing falls into the hands of others.

    As if that is not enough, Sam started noticing some strange movements within the city once again.

    For now he is sure that the head of the n is still not using his power to deal with Sam. He is really too wary of Gail, Gamin, and Yuvana. This is helpful to Sam, as he had one less thing to worry about.

    And another peculiar thing is that MIngiv and his father arepletely quiet in the past few days. Sam doesn''t know why, but they didn''t bother him with anything. The treatment method for Malgav was also not asked which made Sam a bit surprised.

    So, he took this gap seriously and became productive with the toxins. He even gave the toxin forme to the people in the stray dimension to create as much as they can.

    He also designed the special poison arrows that operate on Poison vapor and some that operate with the poisonous liquid injection into the body.

    He went to work on them again after he was done sending all the letters and finished checking what kids had done with their tests.

    As he was busy working the whole day, he got an attendant that came running to him into theb while panting.

    "Sir, Sam. A property of young master Grivon¡­"

    "What?" Sam asked with a frown."

    "Some weird creatures areing out of the property of the young master Grivon. We don''t know what they are. They looked like humans, but notpletely. They are like savages. We cannot control them.

    The elemental attacks are not working and the physical attacks are too hard to reach.

    Sam frowned and hurriedly stood up. He took out a recording crystal and showed the recorded video. Inside there is an image of the weird creatures when he was doing research on them.

    "Did they look like this?"

    The attendant took a look and his eyes widened in shock.

    "Yes, they are just like that."

    "FUCK."

    Sam cursed out loud.

    "What is their cultivation level? You don''t have to be precise, just give me something based on your feeling."

    "They look like they are of your cultivation level, sir. The Late-stage Transcendence of Astral ne.

    I cannot say that is their exact cultivation level, but the aura they are giving out is at that level. They came digging up from under the house and started attacking all the attendants and servants in the house.

    Along with that, they started attacking civilians too. The city guard came in time and used the formations to keep them in, but the formations are not holding that well.

    We just found the time to inform you and the n leader. We need to clear this up immediately otherwise there are going to be a lot of casualties."

    "Did anyone from the ne? Other than the city guard?"

    "No, Sir. Someone just went to inform the n leader to get his permission"

    "Alright, lead the way."

    Sam said while he made some calls to the subordinates on the way. They moved at full speed.

    By the time he reached the area, the subordinates he called for also arrived. One of them even came from the stray realm and he brought the arrows and vials that could be helpful with these creatures.

    When Sam looked at the situation, he was dumbfounded for a moment.

    The whole house was already destroyed. There are some walls here and there standing creating a look of ruins.

    Thepound is fully infested with these creatures and there are holes on the ground indicating their arrival from the underground.

    Nobody knows how did theye here and even Sam doesn''t, but he knew some answers that others don''t.

    It is the answer to the question of who sent them here.

    He looked around and noticed that there are not many people gathered here. The city guard used a blocking formation to make sure these things didn''te out.

    Sam walked forward and called for one of the trusted subordinates of Grivon. He gave some instructions.

    The subordinates went and talked to the city guard and the guards stepped down a bit, but still held the formation.

    Sam walked into the formation along with the subordinates as they looked at over a hundred creatures.

    He doesn''t have hundred people at his disposal that could deal with all these creatures and they are very strong, to begin with. So, he immediately gave orders.

    "Don''t rely on elemental attacks to deal blows to them. It wouldn''t work. Try to attack physically and use the poison vials. Be generous with them and don''t think of using them tactically when you are surrounded.

    From what I know, the side of the neck is actually a good weak point, apart from that, go for the limbs. If you take down the joints, it is hard, even for them to live."

    "Yes, Sir."

    Sam continued.

    "Wear the specialmunication device. I will be speaking to all of you, follow my orders to the teeth and I will try my best to be safe.

    One thing is for sure. Not a single one of them should be able to get out of this ce. Do you understand?"

    "Yes, Sir."

    "Good, get ready."

    As they stepped forward, the creatures already noticed them and they started charging.

    Sam extended his left hand as he aimed it straight at the group. The five-finger cannons and the central cannon of the arm were fully charged.

    *BOOM*

    The energy beams were shot and they were aimed at the six creatures that are at the lead of the attack.

    *BOOm* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The explosions happened simultaneously and maderge holes in the bodies of the creatures. They copsed immediately and Sam changed the energy cell.

    But by now, they are too near to have energy explosions happen. So, Sam took out his staff and led the charge.

    Currently, he only has thirty subordinates and he didn''t want the city guards to directly get involved in this.

    Within these thirty people, there are five archers that are at the edge of the encirclement as they got ready to shoot the poisonous arrows at the creatures on Sam''smand.

    The battle started.

    Every single of them is charged by multiple creatures at the same time.

    Sam mmed the staff on one of the creature''s shoulders and kicked it in the inner thigh right at the knee joint, making it fall. He pulled the staff back, gathered the energy, and mmed it on the side of the neck.

    The energy exploded there a bit as the neck was burst open making the blood stter all over the ce.

    The creature copsed like a rag doll.

    "Twenty-two, dodge to the right on my count of three. Archer 1, aim straight at twenty-two''s current position and shoot when I say so."

    Sam spoke into themunication device as he held the creatureing at him in a headlock.

    "3, 2, 1. Shoot."

    *CRACK*

    He broke the neck of the creature using the ripple style and twisted it off, while the soldier dodged to the right even though he is the middle of a battle.. The arrow went to the position he was standing in and went past it before it went into a hole in the ground.

 Chapter 1416 - Arrest

    <h4>Chapter 1416 - Arrest</h4>

    *GRRR¡­* *RUBBLE*

    The arrow that was shot into the hole is actually an injecting arrow with poison in it. As soon as it hit the target, the earth around the hole rumbled a bit as a creature came out. Sam looked at it with a frown.

    Because it is not the same creature as before.

    He managed to notice that something is wrong when the creature that doesn''t exactly have any intelligence is trying so hard to keep that soldier near that hole. He figured something must be in there and he also knew that someone is nearby controlling the creatures.

    So, he made sure that he didn''t miss the creature and alerted the controller in the process.

    But what was in the hole made himpletely unbelievable.

    The creature that came out of the hole ispletely different from the ones that are moving out.

    The creature is a bitrger and its arms are much longer and bigger. It is hunched forward like it was an old man that couldn''t stand straight.

    But from the looks of it, it is definitely not weak. It is just not as strong as the creatures outside.

    The arrow was stuck straight at his chest and the flesh there turned purple and green.

    Sam kicked the ground and jumped high with his staff as he made his way towards this creature.

    He smashed the staff at its neck with void style making it crack and held the creature to use the observation ability on it.

    "Be careful at the holes. Archers aim at every hole you can see. Don''t hold back. Three arrows for each one."

    As soon as he spoke, the arrows whistled past and the holes were targeted. Some creatures burst out of the ground after the arrows hit them and they struggled as the poison made their flesh corrode rapidly and they are unable to put up any fight.

    Within the next fifteen minutes, Sam guided the fight to finish it off.

    All the creatures are dead. And except for some serious injuries to a few people, he managed to keep them alive.

    Sam heaved a sigh of relief. He knew that he cannot afford to lose these people. They don''t work for him, they are Grivon''s subordinates and he felt that it is his responsibility to keep them alive when he was gone.

    He sighed as he asked the subordinates to collect all the corpses. He even stored the new creature on his own. He saw the basic structure and some differences of the creature and could see that its purpose is entirely different than the ones that are fighting.

    But as they were cleaning the mess up, the enforcement team arrived.

    Sam looked at the person leading the team and frowned. He had a bad feeling about this. Because this person is on the list of people on Grand elder pon''s side.

    He shouldn''t be in charge of this area at all. But currently, he is the one who came here.

    Sam knew that something was off.

    The enforcement team didn''te for Sam and the subordinates, rather they went for the city guard and got the details. After that, the team captain directly came to Sam and said.

    "We need you to follow us to the enforcement office of the n."

    "May I ask why?"

    "We need you to question you regarding this scenario."

    "You can question me here. I am notfortable abouting to your office."

    "Why would that be?"

    "Because I don''t have a good impression of your n."

    "Says the freeloader who is mooching off of our strength." At this moment the vice-captain of the team came spoke in the middle.

    Sam looked at him with a frown.

    The captain gave the vice-captain a stern look before he turned to Sam.

    "I apologize. But I believe the safety of the citizens and the n takes precedence over yourfort. We need you toe to our office."

    "I am sorry. I am noting. If you have any questions, you can either ask here. Or you cane and meet me at Giyon''s residence."

    "What? You became ustomed to hiding under her skirt and now that she is not here, you are findingfort in her home?" The vice-captain shot out once again and this time Sam''s aura changed. Killing intent burst out as it enveloped the vice-captain.

    "It is not a good thing to test my limits, Vice-captain. It is easy to talk, but it will be hard to bear the consequences. So, captain, if you want your team to be in one piece, you better know how to reign them."

    The captain looked at Sam coldly as he blocked him from looking at his vice-captain who froze on the spot because of the overwhelming killing intent.

    "I hate to do this, but you leave me no choice."

    "Mr. Sam under the suspicion of being the cause of releasing these creatures into the city, you are under arrest."

    As soon as he said it out loud, the enforcement team surrounded Sam and Grivon''s subordinates.

    Sam looked at the captain coldly. The captain had that slight smile on his face and the vice-captain showed the tant mockery in his eyes.

    Sam looked at the enforcement team. Everyone is at the Peak stage of Transcendence and the vice-captain and the captain are at the initial stage of Astral ne Consummation.

    It would be hard for him to secure the victory.

    He would lose too many people. As for escaping this ce, it is still an option. He doesn''t know what will happen if Sam really lets himself be captured by this team. He is sure that as long as the news reached Gail, Gamin, and Yuvana, they will try to get him out.

    But he doesn''t think that they would be forceful about the approach. They will not just disregard the n leader and forcefully take him away. He is not their son or rtive. At most he is a business partner of their children.

    As he was thinking, he closed his eyes and let himself calm down, before extending his hands.

    "You can arrest me, but I demand an immediate trial with the n leader."

    "Immediate trial? Mr. Sam, we need to investigate your involvement of you in the crime. The most you are is a suspect that is not cooperating, you wouldn''t get a trial unless you were proven to be guilty."

    "Yes, I won''t. But I am sure you will get a trial. I am filing aint against you for arresting me without any reasonable grounds for suspicion."

    As soon as he spoke, the five archers who are standing on thepound wall took out the transference tokens and escaped followed by the subordinates who are standing around doing the same thing.

    They all left the scene and only Sam stood there.

    The captain looked at Sam calmly.

    "Are they going to file theint to you? Do you think some subordinates who are a bit better than guards can score an audience with the n leader?"

    "No, but Grivon''s parents can."

    As soon as Sam said that, the smile on Captain''s face stiffened up a bit. He is stumped.

    Hepletely ruled out this possibility from the start and didn''t think much. he didn''t think much because he believed that Sam wouldn''t just surrender like this.

    After all, who in the right mind would let themselves be arrested. Particrly, when they knew that the person arresting them is a pawn of the enemy.

    He was actually counting on that fact and thought that Sam would run away. That is their n from the start.

    If by any chance Sam didn''t refuse the arrest andplied. They knew what to do after bringing him in. But now things are tricky. Every citizen in the surroundings heard all themotion.

    The city guard captain who was monitoring the situation from the start also frowned. He didn''t like the enforcement team''s approach. In his opinion, Sam''s timely arrival saved many people. The city guards are too scattered to gather at one spot easily and even if they did, most of them are not up to par with a situation like this.

    They need to call the special squad which is not enough to deal with hundred opponents that they have no idea or means to defeat.

    Sam and the subordinates saved their asses, but the enforcement team is suspecting him of the crime.

    He immediately understood that the enforcement team has an ax to grind. So, when Sam spoke out loud, he immediately made his move.

    "The city guard shall guard the crime scene until the trial is over."

    The enforcement team captain''s face turned cker immediately. He knew he fell into the hole he dug himself and he awkwardly arrested Sam before taking him back to the n grounds.

    By the time they reached the enforcement department, the n leader''s attendant is waiting for them with the trial notice.. The notice for the witnesses was also sent as the city guard captain himself sent a request to testify.

 Chapter 1417 - Weird Trial

    <h4>Chapter 1417 - Weird Trial</h4>

    Sam sat in the lobby of the enforcement department as he looked at all the officers trying to intimidate him with their gazes.

    But he looked at them with a mocking smile as if they are all idiots.

    The leader of the enforcement team had a cold look on his face as he asked Sam.

    "Why did you let those weird creatures loose in the city? What are those creatures?"

    Sam looked at him with the same smile and asked.

    "Really? You are going to lead with that?"

    "Just answer the question."

    "I am not answering any of your stupid questions. You know better than anyone else where these creatures areing from. You are there because you knew that I would be there to deal with these things with the subordinates since it is Grivon''s property."

    "You are using an enforcement team captain of the Gaja n. Do you know what kind of crime that is? Particrly, when you are mooching off of my n?" The Vice-captain fired up once again.

    "You are using a guy who broke the balls and stiffened up the spine of a grandson of the grand elder that would make you piss your pants with just his gaze. Tell me, who is in more trouble?"

    The whole room was stumped by his words.

    Sam stood up and stretched before speaking.

    "I am telling you, I don''t care who ordered you to do this. But I will pay you back for this."

    At this moment, they got ready to go to the trial.

    After ten minutes, they are in the main hall of the n.

    The n head looked at the whole fiasco with a frown. He for one could guess that this thing has nothing to do with him and when he realized that the captain of the enforcement team that arrested Sam didn''t even belong to the area that they actually went to, he knew that this is a setup.

    But to his dismay, he cannot just strike this. He looked at the elders who are supporting this adamantly.

    He thought he would have the power to change the n and the way they operate, but half of the time he just had to waste it to save his own ass.

    He looked at Sam and spoke.

    "You are the guest invited by one of the youngsters of the n. So, you are an important person to us and we do like to treat you with the respect you deserve. If your case is true and you were really used of something that you didn''t do, we will definitely see to that the person who used you will be dealt with appropriate consequences."

    Sam nodded without replying.

    The n head looked at the enforcement team captain and asked.

    "Why did you arrest him?"

    "We have reason to suspect that he is the one that set off the attack with those weird creatures."

    "How did youe to the conclusion?"

    "These creatures are something we haven''t seen before and from what I learned, the city guard wasn''t able to deal with them, as they seemed to have some resistance against elemental attacks.

    Even the physical attacks were minimally effective.

    But for some reason, this person managed toe with a team and dealt with these creatures pretty quickly.

    Not only does he have information on their weak spots, he also had the poisons that could help him deal with these things.

    He was way too prepared.

    Along with that, we learned that he is very well-versed in various fields and these creatures were not here before he came. We thought he might be the most possible suspect and even if he is not, someone from the outside might have let them loose to fish him out.

    After all, he has a lot of enemies. Either way, I think it is the best course of action to interrogate him and make him spill the beans regarding the incident."

    "What is your opinion on this one, Mr. Sam?"

    "Stupid."

    Sam spat out casually and everyone was stumped. They thought he would at least defeat himself. But he just mouthed off one derogatory term. That is it

    "Is that all you have to say about this?"

    "There is something more.

    I feel genuinely offended since they rted these creatures to me and my research which I absolutely cannot stand.

    My work would never be this mediocre. These creatures are an absolute waste of time in my opinion. So, don''t everpare my inventions with it."

    Everyone is stumped once again.

    "So, your main concern isparing you to these creatures? Is that what you are saying?"

    "Yes, as for the other concerns. You should know better than listening to his bullcrap. If I want to attack this city, that wouldn''t have been my style. Release creatures, that have no brain? That is not something that I would do."

    "How do you know that they have no brain?"

    "Because I studied them."

    "Why and how?"

    "When Giyon and Grivon were cleaning up the mess at the inn that was created when I busted the balls of a horny dog, they found some dead bodies of the creatures.

    I conducted an analysis and managed to find the poison that affects their body and the most vulnerable points of this body.

    The creature was created by someone in ab. It is the work of someone who wanted to y god and create something incredible but ended up inventing shit.

    That is also the reason why I don''t want to be associated with that thing. It is insulting."

    "Why didn''t Grivon and Giyon report to the n?"

    "I don''t know. You can ask them yourselves after they came back."

    "So, you don''t have any evidence to substantiate your im?"

    "Not really, no. But I think I have evidence to show you that it is a n made by the enforcement team captain."

    "How would you do that?"

    "By proving that I don''t need an army of iplete abominations if I really want to attack the city. You will realize why I wouldn''t stoop this level."

    "Really? How would you do that?"

    "Just give me a second and the permission to contact someone."

    "Please go ahead."

    As soon as he spoke. Sam took out hismunication token and made a call. The person on the other side picked up and didn''t speak

    "Light out the red firework."

    Sam didn''t say anything else and just finished the call.

    As soon as he did that. One of the attendants came out and the red firework was exploded in the sky on the top of Giyon''s house.

    The sh is so big and so eye-catching that the people in the main hall can see it through the windows.

    The n leader had a bad feeling as he looked at Sam.

    And his bad feeling was the right feeling to have at the time because at that exact moment, a series of explosions are urring right outside the city and in the woods.

    The news quickly traveled within a few minutes and came to the main hall.

    As soon as it was heard, the whole room turned silent.

    Sam looked at them and said.

    "You know what I am capable of now. So, you should also know that if killing civilians is my agenda and creating chaos is my goal, I can do it more efficiently within a minute.

    So, my argument for this situation is that the way this was executed ispletely beneath me."

    The whole hall was dumbfounded. They never knew that Sam''s argument would be like this, but when they thought of what might have happened outside, they couldn''t help but agree.

    If he can cause such destruction in a few minutes and all it takes to trigger is a red firecracker, there is no need for him to let these creatures lose into the city to make them.

    "That doesn''t negate the second possibility, someone might have done this to lure you out."

    "As much as I agree with your statement, I cannot take the me for that. I have been roaming around openly without any efforts to hide. So, why would they want to lure me out, unless it is not to frame me in a situation like this?"

    The n''s head looked at Sam and sighed. Sam already caused some damage to the city just because he was used of damaging the city. He doesn''t want to know what would happen if they pursue this any longer.

    "This whole thing is a farce. You can leave. I apologize on behalf of the enforcement team."

    Sam nodded and turned around to leave.

    The n head stopped any other person that wanted to talk against it and then turned to the enforcement team.

    "I would like a word in private."

    The team captain stiffened up but nodded.

    They went to a room on the side and the n''s head spoke.

    "Your duty is for the n.. Not for the grand elder you want to suck up to."

 Chapter 1418 - Letter

    <h4>Chapter 1418 - Letter</h4>

    "Sir, My suspicions are legitimate."

    The Enforcement team captain still persisted.

    n''s head shook his head and sighed.

    "Okay then, your suspicions might be legitimate, but let us assume if they are not, there are some possibilities that I cannot just simply shake off."

    "What would that be sir?"

    "If your suspicions are not legitimate and Sam is indeed not framed, then I have to think of the creatures that arrived out of nowhere.

    They came under from Grivon''s building, but Grivon was not even here for the past few days, then I would look for other suspicions and the only suspicious activity I could find is you going there, because it ispletely out of your bounds.

    Should I order your arrest, because of my spection?"

    The captain was stunned. He didn''t know how to answer.

    "Do you see how ridiculous that sounds? Just because you have spection you arrested that guy and put him through all of this.

    I will investigate the creature''s incident, but when ites to the whole farce that was attached to it, I am not going to be involved. Tell that to the people that made you do this. They managed to use the elders to pressure me into entertaining this farce.

    If that maniac takes his anger out on you and your team because he cannot directly go and knock on the doors of people who ordered it, then also I would just act like I acted today. Just like how I am letting you go now even though I knew you did this with your own personal interests in mind, I will let Sam go as long as I cannot prove it with solid evidence.

    That too if he gets arrested first. And from the reports we have heard about the explosions in the city, I believe you will get the gist of what will await you if you go there and take a look."

    The n leader left without turning back.

    He is pissed at Sam from the start because that guy called him names and used him of being a man who clings to his power and does anything to do it.

    The very reason he is pissed at Sam is that he knew it is right.

    That is the only reason he stayed put without doing anything against Sam and just let him be.

    He knew that the other factions wouldn''t stay put though, but even then, he didn''t expect something like this.

    He went back to his own office and ordered one of his trusted aides to investigate the whole truth.

    Meanwhile, after the enforcement team captain, went outside, he was summoned by some of the people who ordered this whole thing.

    In that room, Mingiv and his father are present. He didn''t expect that these two would be the only ones there.

    "Why did the n fail?"

    Mingiv''s father asked.

    "I don''t know sir. But Sam didn''t think of escaping the ce or resisting the arrest. So, I was caught off-guard and arrested him on his own ord.

    We failed to take the presence of the subordinates into ount as they disappeared and they are the ones that informed Sir Gamin and his wife who then filed the petition to the n leader for the trial.

    You know what went downter."

    "That is what I am asking. Why did Sam not run away and just got arrested willingly? And that damn n leader. How can he take the argument of being able to cause more destruction as a valid one when the trial is about him being wrongfully arrested?

    He should see why Sam would be wrongfully arrested and since there is ground for suspicion and the arrest is legitimate, he should have just put him in the cell.

    What the fuck is wrong with him?"

    Mingiv''s father sidetracked and started cursing out loud.

    "I don''t know why Sam let himself get arrested. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he knew very well what might happen if he resists or if he escapes. We even tried to provoke him. My vice-captain did all he can to make Sam angry, but he was calm and didn''t lose his cool."

    Mingiv looked thoughtful and gestured for the captain to leave.

    "Why did you let him go? We need to know exactly why the n didn''t work." His father is unwilling to give up.

    "I know exactly why the n didn''t work. It is because Sam is smarter than we know. He might have guessed the possibilities based on the situation.

    Our original n is to either for Sam to escape so that we can pin the whole thing on him and smear his name, or it is for him to resist and we take him intoplete control with the enforcement team and beat the crap out of him before smearing his name and killing him.

    He might have seen through them."

    We just underestimated him. That is the only thing that has happened. But the n leader''s bias is a bit shocking for me. Why did he let Sam go that easily?"

    At this moment, the elders who supported Mingiv and his father are trying to find exactly the same, and n''s leader looked at them coldly before throwing a stack of documents at their faces.

    "The testimonies of the city guards and the civilians. Not only were they in support of Sam, they are also against the enforcement team and all the atrocious activities they are conducting with their authority.

    What do you think would have happened, if I dragged the trial longer? I would have had to show this evidence in court. Do you think that is an oue we can afford?"

    The captain of the enforcement team went out into the city after the meeting with Mingiv and his father.

    When he walked through the streets, all he could hear are people''s discussions about explosions, he remembered what Sam did and went to the city walls and saw one of the explosion sites that made him stunned.

    A part of the city wall is damaged and there is arge crater at one spot.

    The crater is still burning up with heat and smokeing out.

    Even from the top of the city wall, he can feel it. He gulped down when he saw the sheer size of the crater and imagined the explosion.

    He is sure that he wouldn''t survive this. He thought of the creatures and then thought of the explosions, he knew that he got involved in something he shouldn''t have.

    That day, everyone is talking about the n''s leader''s judgment on leaving Sam because he created explosions, the possibility of Sam being framed, and the appearance of weird creatures.

    But that was only until they saw something that was left in ce of the incident.

    The Vice-captains body that waspletely mangled was tied to a tree stump in the ce of the incident.

    The city guards saw this and even they were stunned.

    The team captain of the enforcement team went there to take a look.

    He remembered how Vice-captain had provoked Sam relentlessly, but now he is dead as a rock. Sam''s payback came back the very next day.

    Three days passed and the enforcement team was being hunted down one by one.

    Every morning they saw a different corpse appear at the same spot over and over again.

    The captain tried his best to ask Mingiv and his father for help, but they were unable to do anything because they are busy with the next n to deal with Sam, and this time they decided to n something big.

    They don''t want to get involved with the enforcement team that is under everyone''s gaze and mess up their ns.

    The captain went to different authorities and elders, but no one helped him until he tried to meet the n''s leader.

    "I already told you, captain. If your loyalties were to the n, I would have helped you. But you wanted to hurt a person who doesn''t know his limits to preserve someone else''s interests and in turn your own.

    This is something that ispletely out of my hands now."

    The captain doesn''t know what to do. He wanted to beg, but from the looks of it, the n''s leader ispletely unwilling to help him.

    After all, this is to his benefit. This will warn the rest of the departments that have people supporting various factions to be wary.

    They wille to know that when the consequences of their actionse back, the n wouldn''t support them which means the n''s leader wouldn''t be on their side since they were not on the n''s side.

    On the fourth day, Sam received a letter from Grivon and Giyon and his moodpletely took a turn.

    He hurriedly stood up and ran out to give orders to the subordinates.

    Gail frowned and asked.

    "What happened? You didn''t make a fuss like this even when you are killing the enforcement team members."

    "I need to go meet Giyon and Grivon.. Something is happening there."

 Chapter 1419 - Variable

    <h4>Chapter 1419 - Variable</h4>

    Four days ago.

    Right after Grivon won the battle in the big arena with the roon ripping thest ape apart, he simply asked Gwan to sign the properties over and left the ce.

    The manager, Gwan, and the rest of their subordinates, all sat right there in shock and with a big sense of loss

    Of course, Gwan felt those more than the others. After all, he just lost the umted fortune of his family. He is going to be in big trouble.

    Only a long time after Grivon left did hee back to his senses and look at the manager.

    "Sir, what should I do? I.. I cannot hand over all of my family''s property."

    "You have to. You made an oath. A Gandharva oath. You wouldn''t be able to survive the consequences and even after that, your family''s property will still belong to him. He can even im them directly by showing the contract to the n head in an open court.

    Particrly, the news will spread to your rival factions, then wouldn''t let any of your faction members rest until they make you guys hand over the property.

    This time, you really did cause big trouble."

    As they were talking, what they didn''t notice is that a small flypletely condensed of energy is flying over their feet listening in on their conversations. When the manager left, Mani hid in the forest until they came out and met with Gwan who ispletely alone.

    "You lost?"

    "What are you doing here?" Gwan asked in confusion and shock.

    "I want to know more details about this Gewin guy. I think I found a lead, but it is a bit dangerous. If I can find who he is, I might find a way to get him out of this ce and save your property too."

    "What is that way?"

    "I cannot tell you yet. But you need to give me the details. Every minute one that you might have noticed from this guy."

    Gwan nodded and narrated everything that he knew about Grivon.

    After that Mani left and Gwan went back to his quarters. But by the time he was there, Grivon is already there with his subordinates and said with a smile.

    "Young master, why don''t we finish the transfer process now. If we are done with that, both of us can rx peacefully."

    Gwan''s face stiffened as he looked at Grivon and said.

    "I¡­ I also want to get this over with. But because I was so confident that I would win, I didn''t tally the records and didn''tpile the property list. I need some time to do that.

    So, if you could please bear with me for a day or two while the process is happening, that would be helpful."

    "Oh? That is understandable. I will definitely wait for two more days. It is not like I am going anywhere. But please do stand by the deal. Even though you lost the fortune that took a century to gain in one gamble, I still respect you.

    That is only because you are going to fulfill the promises. But if lose it, things wouldn''t be the same and the way we talk wouldn''t be the same."

    "What do you mean by that?"

    "It means, if you even think of breaking the promise and even try to find the loopholes of the contract, I will hang upside down with a stick straight up your ass and ask you to transfer the properties while tapping on it.

    So, be careful."

    Gwan shuddered as he imagined what it would be like and Grivon left him alone after that.

    But what any of them doesn''t know is that Mani who was threatened by Grivon is actually using every single connection she has to find out who Grivon might be and by the end of the next day, she managed to find who he is.

    From her organization, she is the only one that has a bit of influence in the realms that are stronger than theirs. So, she managed to find out something like this news. In fact, she was actually not sure of Grivon''s identity and only rted to him because the timeline of his disappearance, the strength of his subordinates, and his cultivation level matched.

    But she still wanted to try her luck and made her way to a different location after she got this information and that is to the Mari n.

    Even though she is not as prominent in the circle of higher ns as this, she has a bit of influence and she knew major information like the rivalry and enmity between the Mari n and Gaja n.

    She also knew that her organization is affiliated with one of the young masters of the Mari n. So, she decided to go and meet Sivan who is that very young master and divulge the information regarding the young master of Gaja n trotting in his territory.

    She knew that this would fetch arge price.

    So, after she went to Mari n''s territory, she visited Sivan''s residence with much trouble and when the attendants asked for a message, she directly told.

    "I have information about a young master from the Gaja n trying to take over one of young master Sivan''s territories."

    When the attendant heard this, he frowned and said.

    "You do know that young master wouldn''t tolerate if your information is wrong right?"

    "Yes. He can execute right here if my information is wrong, but from what I know there is someone who is trying to take over the territory bit by bit."

    The attendant went away and after a few minutes came back to take Mani with him.

    When Mani met with Sivan who is standing in Sam''s body, she hurriedly bowed down and said.

    "Young master Sivan, I am from the territory of¡­"

    "I know where you are from, just tell me what you know."

    "A person hase in the guise of being a mercenary a few days ago and he directly made with one of the young masters of our organization who is also a well-known gambler.

    He ispletely unhinged when ites to gambling and this mercenary started using that to his advantage.

    At first, he made the young master transfer a few properties through bets and when I was trying to get some more information from him, I got caught.

    He threatened and took all of my property, then let me go because he didn''t want to stir enoughmotion as I am an elder in that territory.

    But he made a mistake by not making me sign a soul contract topletely shut my mouth about him and the whole fiasco because he is so confident about his strength.

    Later, he made arge bet with the young master and won all of the property that belongs to the immediate family of the young man.

    That is why I confirmed that he is after the territory."

    Sivan frowned and went into deep thought before asking.

    "Do you know the name and other details of the person?"

    "He at least said his name was Gewin, but when I inquired within my circle, I learned that a certain young master named Grivon has been out of the Gaja n for a while and the timeline matches with Gewin''s appearance in our n.

    Apart from that, I have his portrait made."

    She took out the portrait of Grivon and Sivan immediately recognized it.

    They must have been from the rival factions, but that only makes them more curious about each other they also have more information on each other. That includes the facial information.

    When Grivon looked at it, he knew it was Grivon. He grinned and looked at Mani.

    "Do you want to leave your organization and join me?"

    Mani widened her eyes in disbelief and was stunned for a few seconds without any words.

    "Yes, yes. I will be honored to work with you."

    "I could use someone like you. You can leave now and tie up all the ends in your old organization before joining here. You can meet my butler and he will arrange for your position."

    "Thank you, sir."

    After they were done with this, Sivan immediately started calling his soldiers and assembled a special team.

    Mani had done a great favor to him. A greater favor than she could ever imagine. She only knew Grivon is the young master of the Gaja n, but she doesn''t know that Grivon and he have another enmity connected to Sam.

    For Grivon who wants to kill Sam with everything he got, there is no way he would let this chance go.

    Particrly, when Grivon ispletely blindsided with this.

    So, the very next day, he traveled to the Grivon is staying in along with his team and started making ns.

    He first started gathering intel. The young master Gwan had to transfer all the property over to Grivon since Mani hasn''t responded to him yet and Grivon is pressuring him with the oath.

    So, the transfer isplete.. Grivon now properly finished this step within this n, but with this new variable in town, there is bound to be something that would mess this up.

 Chapter 1420 - Prison

    <h4>Chapter 1420 - Prison</h4>

    Sivan entered the and even the city very sneakily.

    Unlike Grivon who only brought part of his elite squad to cover his tracks, Sivan has a lot more people at hand. Since this ce is also very close to his headquarters, he brought back triple the number of people Grivon brought.

    He moved all of them in one day and before Grivon could even imagine the probability of someone from the Mari ning for him because of the elder he left alive, he was already targeted and every one of his subordinates is marked.

    If it was a job as sloppy as the one Mani did, they would have been caught, but unlucky for Grivon, Sivan has apetent team and since they didn''t have enough to react, everything happened too fast and most of it stemmed from the negligence of Grivon and his members as they never thought that anyone of their level ising here.

    But before they could realize everything happened fast.

    After marking every one of them, Sivan met with the leader of the organization.

    "Master, we could have handled him by ourselves. You shouldn''t havee here. This kind of situation is beneath you."

    Sivan looked at the old man with grey hair trying to suck him up even now.

    "Don''t worry. You are my loyal subordinate and this guy is in cahoots with Sam, the one who I took the body from. So, I am almost duty-bound to deal with them myself."

    "That person should indeed be punished for working with a person like Sam. The person that is ungrateful for the grace you have bestowed him by taking his body."

    The organization members looked at the old man with contempt. The head of their organization is sucking up to Sivan in such an obvious way. Of course, they knew that he didn''t go senile or crazy, in fact, they knew exactly why he is sucking up like that.

    It is his nature.

    He is a greedy, old man who is extremely hungry for power. They knew that he behaves like this.

    It is just that these kinds of statements are a new low even for him.

    "Anyway, since you are already here. I want you and your subordinates to do something for me. Pick the best formation masters and make them stand in these spots marked on the map.

    They need to make sure that they areying down these small formations andyer them up properly. There shouldn''t be any slight connections between the formations and they should never let them interlock until I tell them."

    Sivan took gave the map that was marked around the residence and estate Grivon was living in.

    He then took out a set ofmunication equipment, that looked exactly like the ones Sam used to have and distributed the devices to every formation master.

    "You are going to receive orders from me and you are going to do exactly what I say."

    As soon as he finished the distribution, he sent them away to make the setup.

    Sivan then redirected the crew he brought and sent them into different spots.

    Everyone started setting up formations. Some with small gs, some with inscription ink and they did everything at the utmost speed they could muster.

    Grivon and his crew are coincidentally staying within the residence since the transfer of the property because they didn''t want to attract the heat from the parent organization when they are outside.

    They are waiting for the organization elders and elites toe knocking on the door, so they are waiting up.

    But what they didn''t know is that their waiting up is about to bring them trouble.

    Sivan made sure that his subordinates worked fast and he also made sure that everything was done in stealth.

    Within the hour, all of a sudden arge formation that was clearly visible to the naked eye due to the condensation of spiritual energy appeared.

    It covered a few streets on either side, creating arge hexagonal prism.

    Within that prism there were smaller hexagonal prisms that were condensed by the energy too. It all looked like arge beehive and within all of this, the residence in which Grivon and his subordinates stayed is present.

    Grivon and his subordinates immediately sensed the situation and came back running. As they looked at therge structure forming in front of them, they took out the transference tokes as a first instinct, but they were a bit toote as they werepletely useless. The spatial nodes in the surroundings stopped reacting.

    While they were trying to activate them the prism waspleted. The subordinates all ganged up together as they started attacking it.

    One of the subordinates who is the strongest Grivon brought and middle stage consummation of Astral ne took out his saber and made a full-fledged swing at the hexagonal wall that surrounded their residence.

    The saber ray went straight to the wall and hit it squarely. But instead of a copsing sound, all they heard was the wall that looked like it was carved out a crystal suddenly turning into some kind of jelly upon contact and letting the hit slowly go through with it.

    Right after the saber ray crossed the hexagonal wall around their residence, they couldn''t see it at all.

    It is not because it disappeared into thin air, rather the small prisms that are just barely big enough to fit two to three people while they are standing close together created this image that made it hard to see what was on that side.

    The subordinates were stunned by what happened.

    They all started attacking and soon it came to the point that they attacked at one point together.

    This time cracks appeared on the wall, but what they saw shocked them.

    There are hundreds of prisms that could fit three people in them all stacked neatly in some kind of regr pattern.

    They felt like they are looking into an odd structure made of crystal ss and before they could take it all in, the wall started healing back.

    "What the fuck is happening here?"

    Grivon held his head in panic as he copsed to the ground.

    His subordinates all looked around as if they are trying to find something.

    And one of them looked above their heads and called for Grivon.

    "Young master, I think this is the ce we need to focus on."

    Everyone turned to that person immediately and looked at where he pointed at. There is a small hexagonal section that is about two feet wide on top of the residence at one area and for some reason, on that one particr area, they could see the sky.

    It is like a small hexagonal duct within this crystal prison.

    The hole is not big, and definitely not big enough to insert a person in.

    But Grivon decided to try their luck out there.

    "Attack that point."

    As soon as he said that everyone targeted the one point. The hexagonal crystal te broke and the straight went straight through that.

    Then they heard a few more crystal tes breaking and they could see the sky more clearly. It is indeed a duct and it healed a lot slower than the wall.

    Grivon looked at it carefully until the whole hole waspletely healed.

    He then took out his beast pouch and took a Four-eyed raven.

    He quickly wrote down the letter and then hung a transference token around the neck of the bird, before storing it away in the beast pouch once again.

    Then he attached the beast pouch to a simple formation disc he made.

    "Attack the hole again."

    He stood on the roof of the house and held the formation disc and the beast pouch hanging on it as he aimed it straight at the whole.

    *BAM* *CRACK*

    The hole opened up and the disc flew in through it as it made its way through the duct and finally came out of the gigantic prison.

    As soon as it came out as if it was perfectly timed, the formation disc acted up and the beast pouch that should have been sealed broke open.

    The raven was out.

    Sivan''s subordinates who took various positions around the prism looked at the raven that came out nowhere.

    They wanted to take action, but with Sivan''s gesture, they stopped.

    The raven pecked on the token hung on its neck, breaking it immediately and disappearing from the spot.

    The transference token took it to a long way away from the ce and then to the person who acted as the messenger between him and Giyon.

    That very night, Giyon got the letter and she immediately sent a letter to Sam while she made her way towards the city that Grivon was stuck in.

    When she reached the city along with her subordinates she was shocked by the sight in front of her.. Because from what Grivon described, she was expecting only his residence and a few streets around him were the ones that got trapped, but what she doesn''t know is, while the time it took the letter to reach her and for her to travel back, Sivan set up another formation.

 Chapter 1421 - Dome

    <h4>Chapter 1421 - Dome</h4>

    Giyon stood at the entrance of the city along with her subordinates and looked at the massive crystal dome she could see from there.

    Therge dome covered the entire neighborhood of Grivon''s residence.

    Nobody from outside could see what is inside the dome, all Giyon and her subordinates could see is the presence of the hive-like structure with the hexagonal prisms of the dome too.

    Between therge dome and the hexagonal prism that covered the residence, there is space that formed therge ring and within that ring, Sivan took up a spot as he used a small projected formation to control therge formation that created this structure.

    He is examining everything and there are a bunch of formation masters that are trying to exin and operate the areas in which Sivan doesn''t know anything of.

    At that moment, one of his subordinates came to him and reported.

    "Young master, someone powerful seemed to have entered the city.

    She has arge entourage with her and every one of herpanions seemed to be extremely powerful too."

    "Her? I thought Grivon would be sending the message to Sam, why would he call for some woman?"

    As soon as he finished the sentence, he thought of someone and stood up.

    He ran to the side and there crystallized energy steps were present which he climbed up and reached a vantage point.

    This is one of the points just like the one Grivon and his subordinates found out on the roof of their prison.

    He looked through it and noticed that Giyon and her team are running towards the dome, in fact to the very spot that Sivan is currently standing at.

    He couldn''t help but smile and mutter to himself.

    "Good thing that I decided to build the whole thing. Otherwise, things would have gone sideways very easily."

    He went down and met with his subordinates

    "Giyon Gaja is in town. The n shouldn''t fail. From the information I have on her, I would rather have this n failpletely andnd in hands of Sam, rather than half-ass it and get caught by her. So, be careful."

    "Young master, how long should the formation be active?"

    "As long as we need to get everyone trapped properly in separate ces. Why?"

    "There are almost eighty people acting as primary nodes for the formation, they need to be stationary in one spot and replenish this energy along with that, they also have to control the minor formations under theirmand on their own.

    This is an exhaustive task. I think it is a bit excessive to use such a thing just to get them trapped.

    We could have just gone for a normal barrier formation."

    Sivan immediatelyughed out loud.

    "Hahahaha, Did you really think that this is just a formation to hold them there? You will know what this can do soon enough. All you need to do is see them lose their patience.

    And those eighty formation masters are not the only ones operating this. There are a hundred and twenty formation spirits within it.

    Compared to the work they are doing, the formation masters are just standing there andzing around.

    Just inform them to wait for my orders and make sure they stay on their top form throughout the whole operation.

    I don''t want anything sloppy happening. Do you understand?"

    "Yes, Sir."

    After reaching the dome, Giyon immediately started attacking, and with every attack that just disappeared into the dome without so much as any reaction from it, she couldn''t help but feel a bit anxious.

    Meanwhile, within the prison, Grivon and his subordinates who couldn''t see the appearance of the dome were also feeling anxious.

    They were afraid that the only way they have to send the message didn''t work and some of the subordinates are feeling a bit desperate.

    Grivon is having a bit of a hard time keeping the cool himself, so he left them to try whatever they want.

    And in this process, one of the subordinates was frustrated with how the formation is taking everything in started punching it directly.

    But as soon as he touched the wall, it opened up and a suction force dragged him in.

    "AAAAAAAHHHHH¡­"

    He screamed on top of his lungs as the wall closed down and everyone ran towards him.

    *BAM* *BAM*

    He started knocking on the closed crystal wall and as Grivon and his subordinates saw him and tried to break the wall, the man disappeared.

    "Oh my god."

    "Fuck."

    "Where did he go?"

    "Young master, do something about this."

    Everyone started freaking out and even though Grivon didn''t say anything it is because he is more shocked than anyone else.

    While they are panicking, the man who was sucked in wasn''t exactly feeling relieved.

    He found himself in the small hexagonal prism that could amodate two more people like him. In that small space, no matter where he looked, all he could see is the crystal walls and the ovepping illusion created by the hexagonal prisms.

    At first, he at least saw Grivon and the rest of his subordinates trying to break him out, but as if he disappeared into some new world and of crystal prisms.

    *BAM* *BAM*

    "Somebody, let me out of this ce.

    Let me out now. Please."

    He kept on banging on the wall as he yelled, but no one could hear him. He found himself in that illusory space and he got a feeling that he is moved around, but no matter where he looked, either below him, above him, front or back, all he could see is the visual majesty of ovepping crystal prisms.

    Meanwhile, back on the spot from where he was sucked away from, the subordinates are banging and attacking the wall and all of a sudden, another one of them was sucked in and when he was about to be grabbed by someone else, the hand of the person who tried to grab got cut off by the wall.

    Grivon and his subordinates were stunned.

    Because the person who tried to grab is actually a peak stage transcendent cultivator Astral ne.

    Even then, his arm was cut off as if it was made of butter and the wall is a hot knife.

    "Everyone step back. Only use long-range attacks. Don''t get close to the wall."

    Grivon yelled out loud and all the subordinates followed his orders.

    While Grivon''s subordinates were stuck like this, Giyon didn''t have a good time either. Three of her subordinates were sucked in by the dome just like how Grivon''s subordinates were sucked by the prison.

    She also ordered her subordinates to step back.

    Meanwhile, the subordinates that are trapped in the small prisons are trying to use all of their strength to attack.

    Particrly, one of Giyon''s subordinates who is a fire elemental user, sted the wall of the prison with everything he got, but the fire didn''t do anything to the wall, instead, when he was done, all he could see is the six prisms around him are filled with mes continuously and disappeared one by one.

    That night, nobody in the city was able to rest. Grivon and his subordinates are panicking as they couldn''t see anything outside of those sixrge walls, Giyon, and her subordinates because they don''t know anything that is happening inside the dome, and finally Sivan and his subordinates as are trying to keep what they got into the walls within them.

    As for the rest of the citizens, they are all wondering why and how did this giant structure get into their city walls.

    None of them were able to rest.

    The next day morning as Giyon decided that they should be changing the way approach the problem and decided to hold a meeting.

    "Even though the dome isrge, it is also in a hexagonal shape. There is a reason why most barriers are circr, the polygynous barriers tend to break at the edges. We are going to target the edges.

    Even on the edge, we will be targeting one point and one point alone.

    The attack should be condensed, powerful, tyrannical, and precise.

    The space element users take the lead and they will be followed by other elements. So, get ready."

    "That won''t work."

    As soon as she finished speaking, a voice was heard loud and clear and everyone turned to the entrance of the camp.

    Sam is standing there as he looked at therge dome in front of him.

    Giyon looked at him and felt relieved.

    "Good thing you arrived. Did my father suspect anything?"

    "Suspect? I told him everything."

    "Then why is he not here?"

    "Because I persuaded him not toe. Not just him, your uncle and aunt too."

    "How were you able to pull that off?"

    "Is that really important now? How about we think of ways to get your brother out first?"

    Giyon shook her head and came back to her senses.

    "So, why did you say that our n doesn''t work."

    "Because I am the one that designed this formation and I know how that operates.. The more you attack, the more trouble you would be adding to yourselves."

 Chapter 1422 - Crystal Hive

    <h4>Chapter 1422 - Crystal Hive</h4>

    "You made this formation?" Giyon asked in surprise as Sam looked at the dome.

    "Not exactly. I never finished the design and put it on the paper, it was something I made up in my head.

    It is called the crystal hive."

    Giyon frowned and asked.

    "So, Sivan made this out of your memories?"

    "Exactly. This project is something I started after I got the space element. But the thought process was not fully formed. This is like a puzzle that keeps your mind upied."

    Giyon and the subordinates looked at therge formation and gulped down. They are already clueless and helpless when ites to the formation and Sam is saying that it is not even theplete one and he is even saying that it is nothing more than a puzzle that keeps his mind upied.

    They don''t know whether tough or cry. Sam didn''t care about what they are thinking and started exining the formation.

    "This is called the Crystal Hive formation.

    It consists of mainly two parts. The first one is the Prison. It is inside the dome and within that prison is where Grivon and his subordinates are trapped.

    The second part is the barrier.

    Which is the dome. The dome is to keep the outsiders away.

    The person who is operating the formation and the rest of the subordinates would be staying within the ring formed by the barrier and the prison."

    Sam paused and moved to the table. He opened a fresh long scroll and started exining everything in detail.

    There are several hexagonal prisms that make the prison and the dome. They are like the bricks that formed the structure o the prison and the barrier.

    But instead of the solid bricks, they are hollow and empty and are fully formed by condensed energy giving it off a crystalline structure and appearance.

    The hive-like structure formed by these prisms gives an illusory appearance without any gimmicks and formations.

    No matter how you try, you wouldn''t be able to see what is happening inside and people inside the prison wouldn''t even know what is happening outside.

    The information is cut off and everyone is trapped.

    Now, the people within the ring will have time to prepare for the onught.

    The one drawback of the formation which is one of the three factors that makes this formation iplete is the energy depletion.

    Unlike most formations that sustain on the energy from nature, this one needs formation masters actively monitoring and supplying energy.

    Along with that, there would be more than a hundred formation spirits operating the formation in tandem. Simply put, most of the energy supply ising from the formation masters themselves.

    The second drawback is that the formation is notpleted in terms of the integration of spatial elements.

    Because of the absence of spatial elements, the barrier and prison are notpletely connected. Ny percent of the actual functions this formation should be doing cannot be done now.

    Thest drawback is the presence of so many formation masters.

    It is not exactly being controlled by a single person. Even though most of the control might be in Sivan''s hands, the formation masters that are acting as nodes will not be able to sustain it for long."

    Sam paused as he looked at everyone in the room. Everyone had different expressions, but mostmon thing he could find is that they are confused.

    "You are saying that these are the drawbacks, how can we utilize them?"

    "Except for the third one the other two are not exactly useful, the only reason they are drawbacks for the formation is that they are not troubling us in the way they should be doing.

    Anyway, let me get into the troubles the formation can cause us.

    First of all, the attacks you are doing are a waste of time and energy and not just that you are fueling the formation with new ammo to attack us."

    "How is that even possible?" Giyon asked.

    Sam looked at her and said.

    "Dont be in a hurry, I am about to exin that.

    There are three energy styles I learned. Void style, Ripple style, and Repel Style.

    They are extremely lethal and effective, I have been experimenting with these styles to create some formations and had many of them and this formation is a part of those experiments.

    It is made from the Ripple style and Repel stylebined together.

    The structure of the crystal energy walls is made in such a way that when an attack urs, at the point of contact, the energy will be rippled and propagated to all of the formation and into various prisms.

    Even though the prisms are forming the structure, they are also individual entities.

    The formation structure will loosen up and it will let the attack in and trap it in one of the prisms.

    The trapped attack will then be controlled and preserved there with the help of the propagated energy."

    This time Sam noticed that everyone is confused and even Giyon doesn''t have any rity.

    He sighed and said.

    "Okay, all you have to know is that the formation will catch the attacks as long as they are condensed from any form of energy, whether they are de rays or the elemental energy attacks and traps them in the prison.

    In fact it uses the impact force that was created on point of contact of the attack to preserve that.

    By now all of the attacks that you used from all directions might have been stored in each prism within the barrier.

    Since three of your subordinates are trapped, if you attack anymore they might be effected too. In fact, there is a chance that the attacks will be diverted to their prism and kill them inside.

    At the same time, as long as they are attacking from inside the same thing happens, first the prisms around them will be filled with attacks and the more prisms are full the more dangerous it will be to them."

    "But why did theypletely disappear. I mean, the prisms are transparent, even if we are unable to see clearly because of the illusory appearance, we could have seen them, at least have gotten a glimpse." One of the subordinates asked and Sam said.

    "Well, that is another one of the troubles.

    It is almost impossible for you guys to notice the location of the prism within the hive because the prisms would be constantly moving and even the person that is trapped inside wouldn''t be able to notice that.

    Only the primary controller would know the exact location of every prison as they would be watching it in the small remote formation."

    "What kind of twisted creation is this?"

    "I already told you, it is not a creation, it was just a thought to keep my mind upied. I never knew if it would materialize ande to any use."

    "Really? This is not useful? YOu cannot find any use for that?"

    "I can, but most of the time I would never be catching my enemy and trapping them like this. I can just kill them all in many other ways, so why would I be using this? Apart from being a technically difficult formation to create and theplexity that gives me the satisfaction of creation and practice in improving my skill, this thing is mighty useless.

    Maybe, it could go to my academy library for the kids to learn something from. That is it."

    As Sam said, he walked outside of the tent to get a closer look at the dome once again.

    Giyon came back after him and said.

    "Well clearly someone managed to find a proper use for it."

    "Maybe. I am more surprised by his ability to master it. Then again, this is one of the few ideas that he could directly use with just skill formation masters without any need of calctions and derivations."

    "That is not what is important here. We need to find out a way to get Grivon out of there."

    "Don''t worry, we can do that. Just tell your people to not attack the formation. At least until I tell them to.

    I need to make a round around the dome and check out the nodes once. After I am done with the inspection, we can execute the n and we will be reaching Grivon in no time."

    "What if he kills Grivon?"

    "Sivan wouldn''t do that, he is way too smart tomit such a mistake. He is here after me and he knew that once Grivon dies, we don''t have any need to stay here and go after him immediately.

    We can take our sweet revengeter.

    So, Grivon is going to stay alive. I just hope that he wouldn''t fill up the whole hive of the prison with attacks. Otherwise, his trapped subordinates are going to be doomed."

    Sam immediately made a move and started inspecting the dome.

    He only came back after an hour and started exining the n.

 Chapter 1423 - Entering

    <h4>Chapter 1423 - Entering</h4>

    After three hours.

    Sam started cing the strongest warriors Giyon has at her disposal at different positions all around the dome and he marked the points on the dome that they should be attacking.

    He also gave them amunication device each and started giving them orders.

    After everything was set up, he looked at Giyon and said.

    "The warriors will be attacking when I order them to. There would be an opening in which I would be entering the dome.

    Exactly after seven minutes and twenty-nine seconds, tell them to attack the same points again.

    At that moment, the barrier would copse, but make sure that you guys are not attacking it any time sooner orter. It needs to be perfectly on time without a single hitch. Otherwise, it wouldn''t work, and also be careful about the attacks that are trapped.

    When the dome copses, they might randomly hit different spots.

    It wouldn''t be easy to make sure that you are not going to get hit. With the intensity you guys used to make that attack, anyone who gets hit wouldn''t survive."

    While Sam is having a meeting with Giyon and her subordinates, at the same time, Sivan is also conducting another meeting as he looked at all of his subordinates.

    "The person that we are targeting today is the original creator of thisplex formation. To bepletely honest I just stole this design from him along with the body. Today, he is our primary target.

    I don''t care how many people we are going to kill today, even if we killed Grivon and Giyon both and the rest of his subordinates, we will still be considered as the losing side if we let that one guy walk away.

    Do you understand how serious the situation is?"

    "YES, SIR."

    "He would be trying to find many ways to destroy this formation and from the part of the memories I got from him, he didn''t finish this formation. So, there might be some ws that he would be taking advantage of.

    So, I want all of the formation masters that are not operating the formation to analyze the formation continuously, and as soon as you find the tiniest of the fluctuation, were in terms of structure or in terms of energy and you will rectify it at any cost.

    Do you understand?"

    "YES, SIR."

    "Good. If you mess this up. Heads will be rolling."

    Everyone immediately went to work

    At the same time, back in Giyon''s camp.

    "How are you going to destroy this?" Giyon asked with a frown as she looked at Sam.

    "There are some perks to being a creator and I also have a rather odd habit. I always keep a way out to save myself from every one of the things I created. Just in case, that I would have to face the thing I created."

    "Really? There are people who do that?"

    "I don''t know anyone else that does that. But they should be doing it.

    You might want to take a few steps back."

    Sam said as he took out his staff and started gathering energy on the tip.

    He hung themunication device on his ear and started giving instructions.

    "On the count of three.

    Three

    Two

    One.

    Attack."

    As soon he issued themand, all the warriors around the domeunched their attacks at the same time.

    *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

    The sounds of the attacks reverberated around the whole city. The citizens are panicking like crazy. But they cannot do anything and they definitely couldn''t find a sense of safety anywhere. Because the city guard might as well not exist from the day before as they couldn''t do anything when these behemoths are shing.

    The whole city trembled and the crystal dome that didn''t have a scratch until that moment, suddenly started glowing and it opened up like it was a blooming lotus.

    Sam ran forward and mmed the staff on the ground at the point where he collected the energy.

    *BOOM*

    The explosion pushed him and the staff high into the air as he jumped right into the crack that appeared in the dome.

    He fell straight into it with a barrier around him.

    At this exact moment, the formation masters who were not operating the formation but are just looking for any reaction and correcting it were shocked. Because the whole dome is almost split into seven different sections.

    They were shocked and horrified.

    Sivan who is controlling the remote formation in the middle was stunned as he tried to recover it and lucky for him, the formation started healing itself.

    Sivan and the formation masters tried to stabilize the formation and only felt relieved when they managed to do that.

    "What the fuck happened? Go and check what they did."

    One of the subordinates came down from the vantage point and gave the situation.

    "The formation has been attacked from seven different points young master. But they didn''t follow up."

    "What kinds of attacks did they use? Did they bring someone extra powerful?"

    "No young master, they are the same people we sawing with Giyon. No one knew came except for Sam."

    "Fuck, this must be that bastard''s doing."

    Sivan said out loud as he looked at the remote projection of the formation. He started checking all the prisms and suddenly he frowned.

    "What the fuck?"

    He muttered to himself in disbelief.

    At this moment, Sam is actually standing in one of the prisms of the barrier.

    He stored the staff away and just stood there as he looked around.

    He ced his hands on the walls of the prism and let his energy spread as far as wide as it can before using the observation ability.

    He opened his eyes and changed the position of his hands to one wall and started enveloping it with his own energy.

    The structure of the crystal walls is created with pure energy, but that doesn''t mean it is as potent as the spirit stone of the liquid energy.

    In fact, it is more stabilized and is almost close to the empty spirit stone material than the energy itself.

    He started using ripple style and repel style as he tried to disrupt the structure of the crystal wall. After ten seconds, the wall suddenly turned into a gel-like structure through which Sam managed to pass smoothly.

    As soon as he stopped the process the wall once again started healing up.

    But at this moment, the rest of the prisms stopped moving. One of the core mechanisms of the formation is that no matter how much the controller of the formation tries, it is impossible for them to move the prisms within if they are not fully healed.

    And Sivan who has a very faint idea about this. Didn''t prepare himself for the asion and is trying to move the prisms so that he could kill Sam who is currently trapped in the prism and was noticed by him.

    But he couldn''t do anything and Sam is doing everything he can. He is moving from one prism to another at a rapid pace and within three minutes, he is standing in a prism that is adjacent to another prism that contained one of the controllers of the formation.

    That ce is the node and one of the primary ones at that.

    Sam entered that node too and surprised the formation master.

    The prisms in the surroundings started shaking a bit, Sam didn''t give the man to react, before throwing the guy into the next prism by softening that wall.

    *GRRRR*

    The rumbling sound started as soon as the man left the node. But Sam didn''t worry. He had a smile on his face as he took the man''s position and took over the surrounding zone of the formation.

    Sivan who is looking at this through the remote, couldn''t help but grit his teeth and yelledmands.

    "Go to the fifth corner of the dome. I want all of the people stationed there. I will send this bastard out from that corner and you should attack him with all you got."

    The subordinates immediately moved and Sivan started trying to increase the healing speed of the prisms to move them once again.

    And within a minute they were healed. There is still around three minutes before Giyon''s team''s attack again, and he went straight to work.

    Sivan tried to control the nodes surrounding Sam and tried to make him move. But Sam already took the nodal position and he is immovable now.

    So, he decided to take a different approach.

    "Attack the walls in that corner."

    Sivanmanded his subordinates.

    When the subordinates did that, Sivan started collecting the attacks through the prisms as he started sending them closer to the prisms surrounding Sam.

    For some reason, Sam didn''t react and let him do that. He just stayed there with his eyes closed and spread his energy to all of the prisms in the surroundings.

    The time slowly ticked away and Giyon is waiting anxiously.

    Her attackers already got ready with their attacks and are waiting for the right moment.

 Chapter 1424 - Collapse Of The Dome

    <h4>Chapter 1424 - Copse Of The Dome</h4>

    Time slowly ticked away.

    Everyone is feeling tense.

    Sam just spread his energy all around him and still stayed there. The prisms around him are all filled with various attacks as Sivan tried to kill Sam.

    But Sam didn''t let him open up his prism no matter how hard he tried, so all the attacks are just piling up around him.

    Just when there is just barely fifteen seconds left for the attacking time, Sam suddenly opened his mouth and the prisms around him start moving.

    Sivan waspletely caught off guard as the prismsprising of all the attacks he just collected, started spreading out as switched ces with the prisms adjacent to the wall.

    Sivan who suddenly lost control over that small part of the ce was flustered and tried his best to resist. For some reason, he wasn''t able to take the control back from Sam.

    Giyon counted one second after another carefully.

    "Five

    Four

    Three

    Two

    One¡­"

    As soon as the countdown ended, the subordinates at the attack points made their move and attacked the dome at the same time.

    Sam who is inside the prism also controlled his energy to loosen up all the attack holding prisms that he just held up at the wall.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BAM* *BAM* *BOOM*

    The attacksnded and once again the whole dome split up like a lotus, but unlike before when it tried to heal immediately, this time the situation is a bit different. The attacks Sam just unleashed from the prisms copsed the entire wall in that area.

    The healing that was just about to start suddenly stopped because of that. An entire wall copsepletely disconnected the two edges and Sam who was within the prism took advantage of that and escaped.

    The people that are waiting for him at the wall¡­. Let''s just say that they made a bad decision by unloading everything they can into the prisms just because Sivan ordered it. They were not just exhausted, but they are alsopletely unguarded.

    When Sam unleashed the attacks at that wall, the situation didn''t exactly go well for him.

    As soon as Sam escaped, he started running towards the prison in the middle.

    Meanwhile, Giyon and her subordinates looked at the dome that has one sidepletely copsed and since Sam already left one of the controlling nodes that are responsible for controlling that specific area, it is not being healed.

    Sivan is trying his best to restore the formation, but then he realized that Sam might have escaped and immediately ordered his subordinates.

    "The barrier has been breached. Go near the fifth corner and find Sam this instant."

    Many subordinates who are stationed at different positions immediately starteding to the fifth corner.

    But since Sam is not alone he is not exactly worried. Giyon''s subordinates are extremely fast as they dashed into therge gap of the dome and enter the ring one by one.

    Sam is standing at the edge of the prison as he ced his hand over it and used his observation ability.

    "Guard him."

    Giyon ordered two of her subordinates whopelled and stood on either side of him before she led the rest in a different direction.

    The sh began and Sivan soon realized that the dome is not going to be fixed. In fact, as time passed, it became less and less stable as one of the sides is gone.

    At this moment, he suddenly heard themotion around him and saw Giyon and her subordinatesing.

    He immediately understood that he cannot restore the dome and in fact it is useless.

    But he still has the prison as soon as he realized that, he grinned wickedly as he looked at Giyon who readied her fists to beat the crap out of him.

    "I wouldn''t be doing that if I were you. Particrly if a brother I care about is trapped in a ce like that prison.

    Sam must have already told you about the attacks, so you better be careful before you make a decision."

    Giyon stopped in her tracks with a frown. Sivan wanted tough and was about to order his subordinates to take a step back, but before that, Giyon''s subordinates directly attacked them.

    "You¡­ do you not want your brother to live?"

    "What if I don''t? You want to kill him right? Why don''t you make a move?"

    "He will really die."

    "And your insurance will run out. You and I both know better than anyone else, that the moment something happens to Grivon, your insurance will be running out and I will be smashing your skull wide open.

    If you dare, we can test the theory."

    "You are crazy. Don''t you care what happens to your brother?"

    Sivan cursed inwardly as he looked around. Even though his people outnumbered Giyon''s people, he is the one on the losing side.

    He knew that things are not going well and at this moment, he took a look at the remote of the dome formation in front of him and its rapidly destabilizing state. He got an idea and immediately mmed his palm on the remote.

    *GGGRRRRR.*

    The whole dome rumbled like it was an awakened sleeping beast and the earth quaked crazily. Before Giyon and her subordinates could react, Sivan ran away from the spot as the dome formation copsed with some very loud noise.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The whole thing sounded like a series of explosions and Giyon immediately understood what Sam meant by warning them to be careful.

    She saw a bunch of attacks that were stored flying in different directions.

    Some of them fell right in the middle of them, but the people that were really affected by it are the subordinates of Sivan.

    Sam has already warned Giyon and her subordinates to take care when the whole thing explodes, so they were a bit prepared.

    As soon as the dome started rumbling, Sam who was checking the Prison with his observation ability to get a sense of what the situation is, suddenly opened his eyes.

    "Fuck."

    He cursed out loud and ran in the direction where the remote of the formation is.

    As he was running, he kept on looking at the dome in which one prism after the other is copsing rapidly.

    When he reached the remote, Sivan is trying his best to escape Giyon with the help of his subordinates.

    When Sivan saw Sam, he gritted his teeth crazily. Sam though acted as if he didn''t see Sivan at all and made his way towards the remote.

    "Move away from the dome and stay close to the prison."

    Sam spoke in hismunication device slowly making Giyon and the subordinates back down a little.

    Sam noticed that the attacks are flying mostly towards their area and he understood that Sivan might have used this to attack Giyon and the rest.

    Sivan understood that it would be impossible to stay here and started running along the ring with his subordinates and because of Sam''s orders, they even got the opening they needed.

    Sam took over the remote and started controlling the copsing dome.

    He mostly forcefully redirected the attacks that are about toe their way.

    Even though the prisms couldn''t be moved from one spot, the prism walls can be controlled.

    So, before all of them could copse one by one, Sam forcefully copsed the walls of the prisms that contained the attacks and adjacent to each other, making the attacks collide together before they could leave the dome.

    This caused the controllers of the dome who are connected to the prisms as the nodes of the formation to receive the energy bacsh. One by one they started puking blood out of their mouths and some low-level formation masters even died right there on the spot.

    Within the next few minutes, the whole dome copsed and the three subordinates that are trapped in it also managed to escape albeit with some severe injuries.

    Sam then shifted his focus to the remote of the prison. Even though the dome and the prison were meant to be a single formation, the design wasn''tplete. Sam''s idea was to create the two formations and then find a way to link them into one.

    Since he was not finished, they were not linked together and obviously, Sivan wouldn''t be able to do anything of that sort.

    He couldn''t even master the principles behind the grenades and puppets, he would never be able to do this.

    Sam controlled the remote and spoke out loud.

    "Grivon can you guys hear me."

    At this moment, within the prison, Grivon and his subordinates are all in a bit of a panicky state. They don''t know what exactly happened outside that caused the rumbling, but they do know that the situation is not going to be good for them.

    But when they heard Sam''s voice, Grivon almost felt like he found a breath of fresh air.

    "Sam? Sam is that really you?"

    He yelled out loud.

    But unfortunately for him, Sam couldn''t hear him.

 Chapter 1425 - Vs Sivan

    <h4>Chapter 1425 - Vs Sivan</h4>

    "If you are trying to speak Grivon, I am really sorry. Because it is impossible for me to hear you. But I can see that your subordinates are attacking the walls of that prison with extreme zeal.

    But I ask you to stop that immediately. It is only going to be more detrimental to yourself and your subordinates."

    As soon as he spoke, Grivon immediatelymanded his subordinates to stop the attacks. They waited as they looked up to listen to his voice once again.

    Sam checked the remote formation and nodded before exining.

    "The prison you are in is a very different one and it has some very peculiar features that are extremely harmful to you. So, I urge you to not attack it randomly¡­" He went on to exin how the formation actually works.

    After that was out of the way he exined.

    "Go to the extreme corner to your right and attack it there. Do not hold back, and also do not get too close to the wall."

    As soon as Sam said, that, he slowly moved the captured people within the prisms of the prison and let them go after moving the prisms close to the wall.

    After that, he started releasing the attacks stored in the wall to different ces.

    Sivan and the gang who are running to get away from here and prepare for the confrontation are suddenly bombarded by the attacksing out of the prison walls.

    *BOOM*

    Arge scale fire arrow was thrown in their path hitting the subordinate that stood right beside Sivan. He was burned to crisp and Sivan gulped down in nervousness.

    "Young master, I think it is better if we just get away from this ce, this became way too dangerous."

    Sivan thought for a moment, but when he thought of Sam, he couldn''t help but get angry one more time and snapped.

    "I don''t care, we need to kill that bastard today. We wouldn''t get another chance. Since he already knew my progress on how fast I am extracting his memories, he wouldn''t give us a simr chance like this."

    "But this is way too risky. Giyon and her subordinates arepletely out of our league. We wouldn''t survive for long in front of her."

    *BOOM*

    An explosion struck the group from behind and a few more subordinates died.

    This made Sivan be more pissed and spoke.

    "I am the one who stole his body. I am the one that is the young master of the Mari n, and I am the one who is going to be the leader of the Mari n in the future and every other ce that Iy my eyes on.

    I am not the one that should be running away when that bastard orphan is openly killing my subordinates."

    Sivan yelled angrily as he turned to all of his subordinates.

    "We are going to make a round along the ring. We would stay close to the prison, but we need to make sure that we are not going to die.

    We will make a turn and meet this bastard and hispanions on the other side.

    We are not going away without killing Sam today. Do you understand?"

    The subordinates looked at Sivan in horror. They don''t want to fight. Particrly not at this moment.

    They already saw defeat when Giyon''s subordinates jumped at them with their weapons. They have this anger in them.

    Sivan''s subordinates almost thought they might have killed some of their loved one to be subjected to that anger.

    They are that loyal to Giyon and they showed that much rage just because of her onemand and her anger towards them and to add all of that, they are way too skilled and their experience seemed to be leaps and bounds over theirs.

    As the subordinates are hesitating, Sivan became angrier.

    "Don''t you want to see your families anymore?"

    He spat coldly and the subordinates gritted their teeth in frustration. They could only agree to his madness and they started running forward.

    As soon as they ran, Sam started the onught of the attacks once again. The hexagonal prisms are opening on the walls one by one like they are copsible cannons and they are shooting one attack after another.

    They are using every trick and technique they could just to stay unharmed.

    They would have done the whole round in a minute or two normally, but because of this, the whole round took more than ten minutes.

    When Sam noticed that they areing to their side, he chuckled and said.

    "Don''t go after Sivan. I want to deal with him by myself."

    "Are you sure? I mean, you spoke so much about your body, he has it now. Are you not worried he might kick your ass with your own body?"

    Giyon said lightheartedly.

    "A sword is as good as the swordsman."

    As soon as he said, heunched all the attacks that the prism has left and copsed the rest of the prison.

    *BOOM* *GRR*

    With an explosive rumbling sound, the whole thing copsed. Grivon and his subordinates were revealed when the dust settled and along with them, Sivan and his subordinates are also revealed.

    Now a triangle is formed with Grivon, Giyon and Sivan standing along with their subordinates.

    Sam looked at Grivon and said.

    "Leave him to me. I need to vent a bit."

    "Your wish."

    Sivan''s subordinates barely outnumbered Grivon and Giyon''s subordinates, but they are the most terrified of the bunch.

    They don''t want to fight with these guys. They want to leave immediately. But from the looks of it, they don''t have any option to leave.

    Giyon, Grivon and Sam started running forward along with their subordinates. Sivan''s group is actually passive in this whole thing.

    Sam directly went to Grivon, he didn''t even use the staff.

    Sivan''s body turned golden as the golden mes enveloped himpletely. The feather coat also turned golden.

    When Sam saw it, his face became ck. This means the spirit of the feather coat is not rejecting Sivan actively. He understood that it is because of the absorption of the soul. It would be hard for the newly formed spirit to differentiate in that stage.

    But as time goes it would only ept Sivan more and more.

    Sam extended his metal hand and a shield appeared.

    *BOOM*

    The Golden mes exploded as they came at him directly.

    The shield blocked the mes as Sam charged forward.

    Sivan increased the intensity but didn''t change the attack. Only when he noticed that Sam ising way too near did he think of changing it.

    He side-stepped and used quickly shifted to the space element as he tried to lock Sam in the spot. But Sam seemed to have predicted it and kicked the metal leg, creating an energy barrier all over him.

    The space lock failed and Sam used ripple style along with the void style making the waves of energy explode at Sivan.

    Sivan blocked the attack with his space element, but since it is a pure energy explosion, it didn''t stop it effectively and he flew backwards.

    He then activated the earth elemental energy fusion and created a barrier as Sam aimed the metal hand and started shooting the energy bullets.

    *BOOM*

    The earth wall shattered. Sam stepped forward as he continuously shot, but all of a sudden, he felt something under his feet. Two vines came out of nowhere and caught his legs.

    The metal leg acted up and sent an energy wave turning them into shreds. But right after that, the very second, the earth split up crazily and arge vine appeared with a man-eating flower on it.

    Sam jumped up, but the metal leg was caught.

    *BOOM*

    The energy bullet was shot.

    The vine was destroyed and Sam moved up.

    But just then, Sivan appeared out of nowhere with wind des brandishing at Sam.

    Sam dodged them with his barrier and then shot out energy des.

    As Sivan tried to dodge them. They exploded.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Sivan crashed into the ground and Sam took the chance to free-fall onto him with an extremely energy-intense punch ready to smash his face.

    But he had to divert because Sivan activated metal elemental fusion and arge metallic spike came out of his body.

    Sam''s punchnded on the metal spike and he crashed to the side.

    Sam stood up and looked at Sivan angrily. Sivan grinned wildly and took out a sword.

    When Sam saw this, his expression became colder and the metal hand opened up the holes in the fingers and the palm.

    He gritted his teeth and ran straight forward.

    The reaper sword didn''t activate the spirit. It clearly didn''t ept Sivan as its master. But it is not rejecting the usage either.

    The sword came straight at Sam as he didn''t bother to dodge at all.

    He let the sword slide over the metal hand and held the handle with his other hand.

    The metal palm faced Sivan straight in the face and Sam pulled the sword.

 Chapter 1426 - Sam Vs Sivan II

    <h4>Chapter 1426 - Sam Vs Sivan II</h4>

    Sam gripped the reaper sword tightly as he pulled it towards him. Sivan didn''t want to let go though. He just tried hard to hold it.

    Sam''s metal arm suddenly started glowing with the energy bullets forming at the fingertips and the centre of the palm.

    "There is no way in hell, you would attack me with that intensity, your own body will be destroyed if you do that."

    Sivan said with a sinister smile.

    But to his surprise, instead of anger, Sam also showed a smile and the metal arm was aimed in a different direction.

    The palm is now facing the ground right behind Sivan.

    *BOOM*

    The explosion happened as Sam moved himself to be right behind Sivan.

    Sivan hurriedly tried to get rid of Sam''s grip, but was unable to do so and thus had to take the full brunt of the after-effects of the explosion.

    He and Sam were both blown away from the spot and he could feel the impact of the explosion on the feather coat. The attack was blocked, but the sheer blunt force that it held almost made his internal organs shake.

    *Fuck. You crazy maniac."

    Sivan cursed as he tried to stand up slowly. But then only he realized that the sword in his hands is gone.

    He looked around hurriedly and saw Sam standing up as he spun the sword around with his normal hand.

    The reaper sword seemedpletely different in his hands. It looked like it fell into a ce where it naturally belongs.

    Sam looked at Sivan who is slowly getting up and smirking.

    As soon as he injected a bit of energy, the sword spirit is activated. The whole sword gave off this weird vibration. Sam swung the sword at Sivan without any intent to attack. The sword spirit manifested and came out of it.

    The spirit dashed towards Sivan and screamed in his face before disappearing.

    Sivan felt terrified. He looked at Sam for and then his fear turned into anger as he started attacking.

    Once again, he went back to fire element, but this time it is assisted by the wind element.

    Sam also opted to the barrier shield once again as he stepped forward. But only this time, he has a sword in his hand and his whole body is covered with a sharp sword aura.

    Sivan started moving around as Sam neared him, he started using all kinds of elemental energies Fire, wind, water, and he even tried to use poison in this process, there are a few things Sam observed and one of them is that Sivan is not very skilled at Space element and for some reason, he is not good at lightning element at all.

    He hasn''t used the two most effective and destructive elements in suchbat.

    It seems like even though Sivan is getting faster at gaining energy, hisprehension of Sam''s body in terms of strength and elemental control is not really good enough.

    Sam figured this might even be a good time to change the bodies back. But he knew for sure that it wouldn''t be easy.

    As he was thinking, he was also moving rapidly towards Sivan.

    The sword spun around swiftly as tens of sword rays zoomed towards Sivan.

    Sivan who was on the active side at the start is now pushed to the passive side and the more he was pushed back, the more frustrated he became.

    He has a body that has ten elemental energies, a perfectly bnced muscr body that gives him both agility and strength, but he was being pushed back by Sam who actually took over his original crippled body.

    Not only is he walking properly, but he is also even using the essories he put up in the ce of the arm and the leg to fight against.

    The shields, energy bullets and energy explosions. These are all the attacks that his body is capable of, but Sivan never managed to unearth these things.

    He felt ashamed of that when he thought of the reason. It is because he was so busy sulking that he never managed to do anything with his marvellously gifted body. But Sam who was thrown into a snowfield buck naked came back brandishing everything that Sivan''s body could offer.

    He felt embarrassed and then that turned to anger, making him angrier than he already was.

    *AHHH¡­."

    Sivan activated earth elemental fusion and mmed the hands into the ground while screaming.

    *BAM*

    A veryrge and thick rocky wall suddenly came out of the ground and blocked Sam''s descent with the sword.

    Sam''s mechanical had the energy barrier created around it, when he was about to hit the wall, instead of wasting the energy induced into the sword, he mmed the barrier to it and used the void style and ripple style with abination to destroy the wall.

    *CRASH*

    The wall crumbled down and Sam swung his sword.

    The white sword ray swiftly moved towards Sivan and Sam could see that he cut something down into two. But he immediately frowned.

    Because, whatever he cut started manifesting again.

    He focused on his spiritual sense and that made his frown go deeper.

    When the dust settled, he saw himself standing in the middle of six shadows. The shadow undead. The only good thing is that they are not the same shadows Sam created.

    These are the new shadows and it seemed like they were all collected by Sivan.

    Sam looked at Sivan who stood behind one of the shadows. The hair colour and the eye colour changed. They turned to pureblood red and fangs are protruding out of his mouth. The arms turned into ws.

    Sam frowned and asked.

    "What the fuck did you do?"

    "What did I do? I used your body to the fullest potential. Unlike you who is a coward, I used the vampire bloodline to the fullest extent to grow."

    "Then why is your strength still the same as me, you piece of shit."

    Sam muttered angrily as he made a move. The ripple style was used as he swung the sword at the shadow. The ripples dispersed the shadow for a moment and Sam kicked the ground to zoom past it.

    He went straight to Sivan''s chest intending to stab, Sivan stepped forward moving his body to the side at the same time.

    The sword barely brushed past the chest, but he still felt the sh on the flesh.

    But instead of that, Sivan extended his hand to catch Sam''s throat.

    Sam mmed his foot into the ground, to stop his motion so that he wouldn''t fall into that w. But as if he expected it, A shadow came out of Sivan''s shadow and moved to Sam''s rear shing at his back.

    Sam hurriedly activated the energy barrier, but it is already toote.

    *Urgh*

    He slightly groaned in anger as he looked at Sivan hatefully.

    He took a deep breath and lunged forward. The sh became intense. For some reason, Sivan is way stronger in the vampire form than in the normal form and Sam had to rely purely on technique to ovee the increase in physical strength.

    Grivon is not in the battle anymore. He is the weakest of all the people here and upon Giyon''s instructions he was sent away to a safer location and he has been looking at Sam and Sivan''s battle.

    He noticed that the intensity has been increasing by every second.

    Sam and Sivan slowly stopped caring about the damage their bodies took. But in this way, Sivan is having a slight upper hand as he could take the damage and heal himself without doing anything.

    Sam didn''t have such a privilege. He had to be much more careful.

    As the battle went on, Sam felt this weird sensation in his mind. He felt frustrated and angry. He realized that even though he managed to make himself a bit powerful even with this broken body, the more Sivan resisted, the more he understood what has left him.

    What he was forced to let go of. Even though he had his emotions under control, it is still not a good feeling to have.

    After a few more seconds, he gritted his teeth and took a step back. He looked at his own body and decided that it is not the correct way to fight this. He stored the sword away and removed the barrier.

    Instead, he put both of his hands up as he took a boxing stance.

    He looked at Sivan and gestured for him toe.

    Sivan grinned viciously as the six shadows made their move and attacked Sam.

    The next few minutes is a slugfest.

    When the shadows were about tond a hit on Sam, a small te made of condensed energy came out of nowhere and blocked their attacks, while Sam focused on Sivan solely.

    Sivan lunged forward with both the ws open.

    Sam ducked to the side and caught the left hand of Sivan, before using it as leverage to lean forward and kicked Sivan in the head with his left leg.

 Chapter 1427 - Saved

    <h4>Chapter 1427 - Saved</h4>

    The kicknded straight on Sivan''s forehead and he was stunned for a moment as he took a step back.

    Sam just let go of the hand and fell on his back, before he rolled to the side and kicked a shadow that came at him with the void style and the ripple style dispersing it into nothing.

    He stood up once again and took a boxing stance.

    Sivan looked at Sam with a frown. He felt like something is odd about Sam and he couldn''t put his finger on it.

    He lunged forward with golden mes zing. Sam also lunged forward as if he was going for a bunch with a thin energy barrier covering the mes for him. But just when they were about to sh, the barrier changed its form, it balled the mes and diverted it at Sivan''s face. Even though it didn''t cause him any harm, he was stunned for a moment and Sam took the chance to change his direction.

    Instead of going for a punch, he went straight for Sivan''s torso and lifted him up into the air before mming him down into the ground.

    But right before the point of contact arge mass of energy condensed into a te right on the ground and it exploded with void style.

    Sam was blown away from that spot, but Sivan flew straight ahead vertically into the sky. The feather coat still managed to sustain the damage though which kind of relieved Sam, the sheer force made Sivan puke a lot of blood as he flew higher and higher.

    When he finally stopped and descended, he looked at Sam and gritted his teeth, he activated the spatial element and blinked from that spot and reappeared right beside Sam, trying to use the fangs to kill him.

    But Sam barely managed to dodge it and caught the arm.

    He used the arm as support and swung his legs to Sivan''s neck to hold him in a choke and twisted the arm to make him fall down to the ground.

    He then held the arm in a lock while kicking Sivan in the torso breaking his ribs.

    Sivan activated the earth element and caught Sam who was on the ground and at the same time shifted to the wood element and created a vine coffin thatpletely encircled Sam and started dragging him into the ground.

    Sivan pulled himself away as he looked at Sam in horror.

    Sam sted open the vine coffin and the earthenyer that tried to cover him up beforeing out of it as he looked at Sivan with a wide grin.

    He lunged forward and ran to Sivan who started throwing wind des one after the other along with the mes, the water attacks and even the spatial rends that are created. But Sam dodged everything, but he is moving extremely abnormally.

    It is like he ispletely different from his usual self.

    He didn''t have the same grace he had before when he was wielding the sword, he didn''t have that extreme focus of a hunter like before. But rather, he moved like a barbarous monster now.

    Sivan tried to blink away, but the energy bullets areing at him and his blinking location was being predicted by Sam easily.

    The battle suddenly tipped the scale.

    Sam is not acting like himself, but he was getting the upper hand. Even the shadows that are helping Sivan are not really of any use.

    He reached Sivan soon enough and went for a punch.

    Sivan prepared to block it, but the punch never came. Right before the punch was about tond, Sam used his other hand to take out the reaper sword and stab Sivan in the gut.

    The ripple style waspletely active as it caused a sensation to the internal organs.

    Sam kicked Sivan away who fell to the ground while bleeding.

    Meanwhile, Sam wasn''tpletely fine. In thest second, Sivan managed tond his ws at Sam''s cor bone leaving a big wound there.

    But Sam didn''t care about it as he spun the reaper sword and walked forward.

    He looked down on Sivan and pointed the sword at him.

    "You really prepared for the fight, didn''t you. It seems like you are looking forward to this fight more than me."

    Sam then looked at the arm with the divine dimension ring on it. He wanted to take it off first and leaned forward.

    But before he could do that, he suddenly sensed something and he jumped backwards.

    A very tiny energy bullet went past the spot he previously stood in andnded on the residence nearby.

    *BOOM*

    A massive explosion happened, but in a very confined and limited space, destroyed only a small part of the house.

    Sam looked into the sky with his heart beating fast.

    The whole battle stopped and everyone looked at the sky.

    A young man who looked to be in histe twenties is hovering over the air on what looked like a translucent te condensed of energy. Even though Sam, Giyon and Grivon have never seen this guy, they could guess who it is.

    The resemnce between him and Sam''s current face is uncanny.

    He is Sivan''s father.

    He extended his hand and pulled in the air. A massive ball of energy condensed itself and caught Sivan pulling him into the air.

    He looked at Sam who stood there bleeding with many wounds and the sword in his hand.

    "You must be the person, my son stole the body from. And you even managed to master his constitution properly.

    You are not doing that bad in that body, why don''t you just take it and let it go? If you do that, I will stop this imbecile from going after you."

    Sam looked at him calmly and replied.

    "I want what is mine. I don''t care for anything else."

    "Are you sure? You might lose your life if you do that."

    "We don''t know that for sure. The only way to find out is for me to try."

    "You are an interesting kid. I wish you were my son."

    As soon as he said those words, Sivan''s expression changed. He was afraid and ufortable until then, but now he is clearly feeling angry and he started struggling.

    Sivan''s father looked at him coldly and said.

    "Behave."

    "Kill that Bas¡­ *Argh*" Sivan wanted to say something, but his voice was stopped.

    "I am not your subordinate Sivan. I am your father. The unlucky one who was cursed with you and your stupid mother. So, don''t order me around as you do with your subordinates. Do you understand?"

    While he was talking, Giyon made her way towards Sam and looked at the man.

    The man looked at Giyon and said.

    "You must be sonic prince''s daughter. It is a night to meet you. Send my regards to your father."

    He then turned to the point where Grivon said.

    "You too, remind your father that he still owes the wager for ourst bet."

    He finally turned to Sam again and said.

    "You are a good kid. But this imbecile is my son. So, I am duty-bound to save him. Next time, try to kill him before I can intervene if you really want him dead.

    See you again."

    With those words, he walked away in the air and disappeared like a sh.

    The subordinates of Sivan were all captured or killed and Sam took a deep breath before sitting on the ground while injecting himself with healing medicine.

    "Are you okay?"

    Grivon asked as he sat down beside him.

    "I am fine."

    "What is up with your battle? I mean, Sivan doesn''t have any battle experience, when did he get so skilled?"

    "My memories."

    "Really? Memories gave him the experience he needed?"

    "No, the memories gave him what he needed to fight with me. With those memories, he learned how to use my elemental energies effectively and he also learned what my thought process would be like.

    I have been in too many battles and fought too many opponents. It is easy to identify my pattern and think of what kind of move I could make.

    He read through my moves and almost beat me and the elements that I lost are mostly with him, so it is not helping either."

    "So, you almost got your ass kicked because of that."

    "What do you mean by that? Didn''t you see? His father had toe and take him back. In fact, you are the one that got his ass kicked. Remember a few minutes, I am the one that saved your ass. Otherwise, you guys would have been dead by now."

    "Like hell, I would be dead. I would have broken through that formation."

    "Yeah right. You and your subordinates can break through that one."

    Sam joked around as his wounds healed.

    "So, how is faring with your body."

    "Actually worse than I thought. Just like predicted, hepletely went for the space element. But couldn''t master it properly. Then he went for the basic elements, fire, wind, water, earth, wood and metal. He did alright there.

    The only problem is the nature of my elements is a bit too tyrannical as they are drawn from higher-level bloodlines.

    That is why he was able to showcase that power."

 Chapter 1428 - Kidnappings

    <h4>Chapter 1428 - Kidnappings</h4>

    As they were talking Sam finally healed himself, but he didn''t get up from that spot. The whole area ispletely out of shape.

    It didn''t look like a beautiful refined city at all, it looked like a ce that was hit with a bunch of meteors.

    Soon Giyon joined them.

    "How are you guys feeling?"

    "I am okay."

    "I am fine. I killed a few and escaped before anyone stronger thane after me." Grivon said with a grin.

    *PAK*

    Thennded a p on the back of his head.

    "Now that you are good, let us get to main point. How stupid of you to get caught like this? You were just imprisoned along with the rest of your subordinates in one single residence. I cannot believe how stupid you are."

    Grivon held his head and let her scold him for a while.

    After a few minutes of non-stop verbal bashing, Giyon finally stopped with a sigh.

    "Is it really his father?"

    Sam asked after a few minutes ofpletely silence.

    "Yeah. That is indeed Sivan''s father." Giyon said calmly.

    "Then why is he acting as if he is tied up with some extra burden when he looked at his own son?"

    Sam muttered to himself, but Grivon and Giyon clearly heard it. Grivon just shrugged as he didn''t know the answer, nor could he rte to what Sivan is going through.

    His parents wouldn''t leave him alone, even if he wanted to. They love him that much.

    "Well, it is mostly because of the kid''s mother. He was forcefully married to her. He made an oath to the n head that he would try his best to fulfil one of his wishes, when they arepletely equal in terms of status, strength and authority.

    Sivan''s father turned out like my father, increase in strength so much that the n leader''s position appeared small to him and his name has been spread in higher circles and even in the Grey circle.

    The n leader obviously arrived his position and to consolidate it, he forced Sivan''s father into a marriage with someone from a powerful n.

    He married her because of the oath. He also liked her. He took care of her responsibly. As you can see the grey circle people wouldn''t stay in the same ce for a long time, but he did. He stayed at home as much as possible.

    But the problem rose when the woman got greedy and burned in jealousy.

    When Sivan was a kid, he was mostly taught by his father and behaved ordingly, but there was a time, when her mother got extremely jealous of the calligraphy and some other stuff another kid is doing and forced Sivan to do the same.

    But he wasn''t able to. Meanwhile, his mother felt like someone else is more beautiful than her, so he found a concoction that destroyed her skin and used it on her.

    Sivan learned this quality and tried to use the same strategy on the other kids that are good calligraphy and physical activities to destroy them.

    But he was caught and thus lost his arm and leg.

    The story for the outside world ispletely different though. His mother tried her best to convince the rest of the world, that her son only ended up like that, because of his talent as the others got jealous and used it against them.

    In fact, she went as far as using some dangerous ritual to imnt a curse on Sivan''s soul to not to remember anything regarding this situation. So, he doesn''t know and he doesn''t believe this is the original story. In fact, he cannot even remember it when he hears it out loud."

    Sam nodded in understanding.

    He can understand what happened next. Sivan''s father, who was always responsible and caring, definitely couldn''t have stood there and let them have their way. He might even be the person that let Sivan''s limbs not heal back to make sure that he suffers consequences.

    Sam stood up and said.

    "I will be leaving this ce immediately. Take over the organization without dy. Some other organizations might have heard themotion and most of they would have also heard about the status of the yers in the game here..

    So, they wouldn''tpete with you.

    You guyse back as soon as you can. I want to speed things up even more."

    Sam left after leaving those words.

    Grivon and Giyon went into work and within the next three days, they finished the take over.

    With Sivan involved a bunch of them within the crystal formation, the local organization lost a lot of people within the nodes and a lot more in the battleter.

    There is no way they are in the league of this fight, so they died.

    The organization is in shambles. In fact for Grivon and Giyon to take it over, they didn''t even need much effort. All they needed was to go there and meet with the head of the organization and he caved.

    He wanted to suck up and keep his position which didn''t work.

    Grivon and Giyon decisively stripped everyone of their titles and authority before forcing them to move back to the Gaja n to serve as their foot soldiers, while they let their own subordinates to take this ce over.

    Since it is a forceful takeover, things happened smoothly. But they know that trouble would being from their n side.

    They might want to barge in to the business or something along the lines since the resources of this organization are a significant attraction.

    But by the time they returned home, they were met with something else other than the problem that they expected.

    As soon as the news came out that came back to the n, even before they could enter their own residences, people bombarded them on the way.

    "Your friend Sam is forcefully holding one of my subordinates. Tell him to let go."

    "That asshole Sam is crossing his limits, make sure he lets go of my brother. Otherwise¡­"

    Everybody is of a generation older than Giyon and Grivon and they are all threatening them like little kids. They don''t even know what is happening and these old men are not letting them move away.

    They had to use their subordinates help to forcefully get away and they reached Giyon''s residence in an extreme hurry.

    Gail is sipping some kind of tea in glee as he sat in the front yard.

    "Oh, you guys are back. From the looks on your face, you seemed to have faced those pests already."

    "Where is Sam?"

    Giyon asked with frustration.

    "In the basement."

    She ran immediately and barged in.

    "What the hell did you do this time? All the elders are riling up."

    "Well, first of all, wee back and second of all. I didn''t do anything."

    Giyon frowned. By now Grivon also arrived and even he was confused when Sam said he didn''t do anything.

    "If you didn''t do anything, why is this happening?"

    "It is a ploy from one of my hidden enemies. I don''t know if this is rted to Mingiv or not, but there is a possibility that this is linked to that person on whom we lost the trial on. The one that used Fig and his group."

    "What exactly happened?"

    "It is simple. By the time I returned from that realm, I obtained some evidence regarding some people trying to steal from your businesses. So, I used your subordinates to perform arrests and I only arrested like ten people.

    But all of a sudden the very next day, all of these people came barging towards me demanding I release their kids and subordinates. When I looked into the situation, I realized that before these people disappeared, their activities are simr to the ones that I arrested before.

    So, these people assumed that the subordinates and the kids that disappeared are also arrested by me and I am not just admitting to it.

    That is the situation."

    "Holy shit. You are gone for one day and they nned all of this?"

    "Yes, they did. But I think this is also an opportunity."

    Sam said as he put down the formation te in his hands.

    "What opportunity?"

    "The opportunity to deal with our hidden enemy."

    Sam spoke as he took out arge scroll and attached it to a board.

    "This is the list of the people who disappeared and the me fell on me and the list of all the activities they did before they disappeared.

    Most of them are young masters and some important subordinates holding serious positions. You tell me, would they be stooping so low and steal the business secrets themselves?"

    "Of course not. No matter how greedy they be, they will send someone suitable for the dirty work."

    "That is what I thought. But they really did perform most of these activities before they went missing altogether. They really did follow a pattern that might lead them to steal some of the business secrets.

    So, why did people of status do that all of a sudden, that too within such a short frame of time?"

 Chapter 1429 - A Hand

    <h4>Chapter 1429 - A Hand</h4>

    Giyon and Grivon stayed silent without saying anything. Sam just shrugged and answered his question himself.

    "It is because they are all prompted to do so by possibly the same person. If I had to guess it, they might have been either ckmailed by that person or they all work for the same person.

    The second is a bit far-fetched. After all, from the information you gave me, there are some people that want to kill each other within the group of people that disappeared.

    So, the first case is most probable.

    Now, we can narrow down our suspects to the person that has enough resources and capabilities to hold this much sensitive information about so many people. I believe that there are not many people who fit the criteria."

    Sam took out a paper and showed it to Giyon and Grivon.

    They looked through it with a frown.

    This is the list of the people who have the capability to gain all the information they need to ckmail all of these people. In fact, within the list, Giyon is on the top.

    "Why did you add my name?"

    "Because you fit the criteria, I just entered it out of habit. Don''t take it personally."

    "You have some really weird and annoying habits."

    Giyon said as she looked through the rest of the list.

    When she was done, she couldn''t help but sigh deeply.

    "Are you sure, you want to poke all of these people? One of them is a grand elder and the rest are also not some soft persimmons either. They have immense power within and outside the n. You wouldn''t be having a peaceful time if you really mess with them."

    "That is why I am not the one messing with them. You guys are."

    "What do you mean?"

    "You are going to use the secret forces and make a big move to divert all of the attention from me. The perpetrator who is trying so bad to me me for this whole thing wouldn''t be feeling happy about it.

    He will try to make a move and that would be the best time for us to identify him."

    "What kind of big move are we talking about?"

    "I will tell you, but before that. I want you guys to pick someone as important as the ones that went missing, but that person has to be expendable, for you and your n. I mean, even if he loses an arm or leg, the n shouldn''t be worrying about it.

    Do you have such a candidate in your mind?"

    "Lot of them."

    "Loads."

    Both Grivon and Giyon replied at the same time. Sam chuckled and said.

    Then that is great. Pick one from that lot and tell me. Also, arrange a meeting with a representative of your secret forces.

    I understand that it would be impossible for me to directly talk with all of them. It is unreasonable too. So, a representative would suffice. I will exin the n after everything is ready."

    Sam then went back to working on the formation te.

    By evening, Grivon and Giyon came back with all the preparations done.

    Then they had a meeting together where Sam met the two representatives of Grivon and Giyon''s secret forces.

    They also picked the candidate that ispletely dispensable.

    After getting the details of the candidate and his daily routine from the information, Sam started exining the n.

    As he went through with it, the expressions of the other four people within the meeting changed continuously.

    "Are you sure you want us to do exactly this? This might slight many people and the issue would gain the attention of the authorities."

    "It should have already been their issue. Why are they not investigating the missing cases and just believing that I am the one who did it blindly? Is it really usible for every single person that went missing to go after the assets at the same time?

    They should have done it already. But they didn''t do it. I have a suspicion that this person might even be part of the chain ofmand that controls the investigation or they are cooperating with someone who has the authority to control the investigation.

    We would be keeping an eye on the investigation department and the officials that have high authority within."

    "This is a bit risky. If the n authorities find out that we are involved, we wouldn''t be able to hear the end of it.

    If the perpetrator manages to link us to the whole thing, they might even take this as an incentive to make us scapegoats." Grivon said in a tense tone.

    "Yeah, they are definitely going to do that. But that would give us a great chance to find out who really did it. It would be a win."

    "What if they seed in scapegoating us? What is your n then?"

    "Not much. We would cross the bridge when we get to it."

    "Really? No n?" Grivon almost lost it.

    "Come on, Grivon. Stop it."

    Giyon reprimanded him and thought carefully.

    She knew that things are not going to be easy with the n and things could get really messy very quickly.

    "We will proceed with it. You can keep in contact with these two guys. They will be leading two teams. One will be in charge of doing the hidden dirty work and the other will be in charge of the rest of the things that you need to do out in the open."

    Sam nodded and then shook his hands with the two people. Then he gave themunication tokens.

    "Your first step is to abduct our target. You need to bring him in at the specific ce and time that I am going to mention. I would be on nting the evidence required. You make your men tail him every second. As soon as I contact you guys, the deed should be done.

    You will then hold him hostage and wait for my next instruction."

    They nodded and were about to leave, but Sam stopped them again.

    "Here are the masks. They are disguises that you need to wear. They will change your facial features and hide your face too.

    But it wouldn''t do anything to the aura and other stuff, for that the traditional cloak with the formations is the best."

    "Then why use this at all?"

    "You need to throw some faces as scapegoats. It would be much easier that way."

    "Whose faces are these?"

    "Someone that deserves some pressure from a n like this."

    Sam left after giving that answer.

    Immediately the two team leaders were deployed and a woman came out of nowhere following behind the target.

    Sammanded some of Grivon''s subordinates to fake the evidence and by midnight, he ordered the capture of the target.

    The woman who was tailing him got the order and had a weird expression. Because the target is inside a brothel.

    She gritted her teeth and went in anyway with the mask she got.

    She hit the target on the neck making him fall unconscious before escaping.

    Everything was done swiftly and the news of the kidnap didn''t stay put for long as it spread far and wide in a very short span of time.

    Another elder was added to the list of people that are trying to bug Sam.

    That night, nothing else happened. Except for the chaos and the meetings held by these elders, there is not a single thing of significance that happened.

    But the very next morning at dawn at the city gate, an arm of the target that was caught the day before appeared.

    The arm was cut off along with the robe and the spatial rings that were on them were still attached.

    They immediately recognized who it belonged to. Along with the arm, there is a letter.

    When the father of the young master saw the letter, he immediately went to meet the n''s leader with it.

    "This bastard Sam is bing more and more outrageous. How dare do such a thing?" One of the elders on the side said out loud and just when the rest of the elders are about speak in support of him, the n''s leader raised his hand to stop them.

    "It is better to throw usations after you learn the full story. This has nothing to do with Sam."

    "What? How can that be?"

    One of the Elders eximed out loud.

    Everyone looked at him for a moment before they turned to the n''s leader once again.

    "This is the work of new underground ground. They are expanding into our territory and they kidnapped all of our young masters and they don''t want the credit to go to Sam.

    So, they are giving this arm as a warning to say that whoever that is using the incident to go after Sam, should just shut it and stay down.

    So, any of you guys involved in this?"

    The whole room turned silent.

 Chapter 1430 - Deal

    <h4>Chapter 1430 - Deal</h4>

    The elders didn''t make any noise and just stood there like statues.

    The n''s leader looked at them with a sweeping nce and said.

    "The underground organization is called the ''Dawn''. They seemed to have just arrived, but their goal is very simple.

    They want to exchange all the young masters for a ransom."

    "What the fuck? A ransom? Who do they think they are? We are the Gaja n, we are the rulers of this realm and many more. Now a no-name organizationes along and asks for ransom after kidnapping them? Like hell, we are paying them. We need to show them what it means to mess with the Gaja n."

    "Yes, we cannot cave in just because of some thugs. We are the Gaja n, we will show them what it means to mess with us."

    Some elders immediately got riled up. For many of these guys, the name Gaja n is the only thing that made them what they are. They know very well that they mean nothing in the real world. They know that they are not worth much if they are travelling alone in the same realm.

    The name Gaja n is the only thing that gave them any worth. If an underground organization asks for ransom and the Gaja n paid for it, the name of the Gaja n will lose its worth and in turn, they will also lose their worth outside.

    As elders are voicing their opinions on how strongly they should retaliate, someone spoke.

    "Are we really sure that this is the work of this new organization? Why can''t it be Sam just trying to distract us, since we are giving him such a hard time."

    "Yeah, there is a possibility."

    The n''s leader sighed and looked at the two elders.

    "May I know what you guys think? I mean, what is even Sam''s motive to do this? Kidnapping every one of them at the same time and the evidence just randomly appears out of nowhere? I have been looking at the investigation department''s work too and they are prettyx.

    It is almost like they believed Sam is the true culprit.

    Now that there is someone iming the deed, you are still trying to point your finger at him.

    Stop focusing on one kid and try to find out who really did it. I will talk to the investigation department about this.

    Until it waspletely confirmed, don''t use anyone blindly and if my guess is right, that kid is going toe at whoever that is that used his name to create this scenario.

    So, if you confess it to me in private, I will try my best to help you. But after it is done, it is impossible for me to help you with it.

    You will be on your own and with the help of Giyon and Grivon''s parents he doesn''t have anyone powerful enough as an opposition."

    Some of the elders snorted, but they also stopped speaking at the same time.

    After the meeting was done, the n''s leader sent them away.

    He then called upon one of his trusted subordinates.

    He is a man wearing a ck cloak and a ck mask. Completely covering his whole body.

    "You don''t happen to be involved in this mess are you?"

    "No, Sir. Since you ordered me to stay outside, I stayed out of it. I did n on killing Sam, but with your refusal, Iplied."

    "Then who is trying so hard to frame him?"

    "Do you want me to investigate, Sir?"

    "Yes. I want you to turn every leaf and stone. Find whoever is creating this chaos. I don''t want to blow this up on our face. At this moment, it is literally the future of the whole n at stake."

    "Yes, Sir."

    With that, the man left and the n''s leader went ahead to call the whole investigative department.

    He gave them strict instructions before letting them go.

    While the n''s head is doing his part in a n that he doesn''t even know existed, Sam is having another meeting with Giyon and Grivon.

    "We are done with the first step. We need to move on to the next. We will be meeting with different suspects at the same time. Since the n''s head just passed the orders, the heat would be a bit too much for anyone to bear.

    The investigators would be looking in the same way we did and they would definitely be able to notice what is off with everyone disappearing at the same time. If they are really sincere, they might even narrow down suspects as we did.

    So, the suspects will be a bit nervous at this moment and we are going to meet with them with different excuses and try to bring the conversation this way. I guess you don''t need me to teach you right?"

    The siblings rolled their eyes before leaving.

    Sam also followed them out and he made his way towards Grand elder Pon''s residence.

    The whole n is actually watching him, so when they saw him go to the Grand Elder Pon who is the one person they thought he would never go to, they couldn''t help but feel a bit startled and curious. Everyone wanted to know what he is going there for.

    Even before he reached the gate of thepound, the news has already travelled and an attendant arrived at the gate.

    "My master wants to know why Sir Sam has visited."

    "Tell him, it is to talk about a deal regarding his grand son''s spine. I believe it is still not cured. Even by the great Divine Healer Vardar."

    The attendant nodded without any change of expression and left.

    Sam just stood there for five minutes before the servant came and led him to a meeting room.

    There Grand Elder Pon is sitting calmly.

    When he saw Sam, he gestured him to take a seat.

    "So, what is the deal that you want to talk about?"

    "Going straight for the business, are we?"

    "We don''t have anything to talk about other than business."

    "Sure, we can. With all the excitement going on in the n. There is so much to talk about."

    "Are you here with a deal or not?"

    "Of course I am. I want all of the properties Malgav and Mingiv have in their hands. The ones that are in partnership with the n and the ones they are secretly holding. The businesses, fields, mines, I want everything there is to their name. Including the spirit stones that they are currently holding in their spatial rings."

    Grand Elder Pon''s demeanour changedpletely.

    "Are you nuts? Do you know what you are asking?"

    "I know. I am asking for the entire fortune they acquired over the decades. A pretty steep deal even for me. But that is the price for your grandson being a pedophile."

    "You hate him to the guts, why are you even doing this?"

    "This is the question you should have asked at the start. Anyway, I am going to kill your grandson sooner orter. While I am here or when I am gone from here. It is bound to happen. I would just like to fleece him off. I will just take whatever he has and when he realized that he at least had life and stopped wallowing from his self-pity.

    I will take that life as well."

    As soon as he spoke, Sam felt the pressure holding him down, but he didn''t show a change in his expression.

    After a minute, the pressure was gone and the old man sighed.

    "You are indeed as ruthless as the stories say."

    "Stories? It seems like you have been doing research."

    "I should. I was trying to find your weakness. But it seems like poking anything I could find would only bring more harm to my grandson. Particrly when Gail and Gamin are still involved."

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "Maybe, you realized that but someone else didn''t."

    "You are talking about the kidnappings? I knew you didn''t do that."

    "And how is that?"

    "It is not your style. I would rather believe that it is indeed the work of the so-called underground organization."

    "Rather? So, you don''t believe it is them either?"

    "No, I think someone who tried to frame you is the one who did it. Too bad, they still don''t understand your style. You might be a pompous young man. But you are always cautious. If you had done it, you wouldn''t have been roaming around like this.

    You would have been hiding somewhere safe pulling all the strings from there.

    And if you really believed that there is no danger, you would at least give a clear message to all these young masters. You would have rubbed it in their faces that you did it.

    There is something really off about this whole thing. You didn''t do either of what I said, you are just minding your own business.. That means, this is not your business."

 Chapter 1431 - Possible Suspect

    <h4>Chapter 1431 - Possible Suspect</h4>

    "We are going off track. Let''s go back to the deal."

    The old man said as he looked at Sam''s intriguing expression.

    "Well, I told my price. You didn''t really offer a counter."

    "Mingiv''s properties are out of the question and I highly doubt you can even swallow all of them yourself."

    "Oh, no. They are not for them. I have zero interest in taking over your n''s properties. I have plenty of my own. They are for Grivon mostly and some for Giyon."

    "You are doing their business now?"

    "Just helping a bit. It was not really necessary to go after your grand sons'' properties. It is just that this way it is easier for me.

    You still didn''t give me the counteroffer by the way."

    "Malgav''s properties and one city that is under mymand."

    "Oh, the whole city?"

    "Yes, the whole city. You can take the taxes directly and you need to pay the employees of the city yourself. You can use the Gaja n tag directly, but you don''t have to pay any fee for that."

    "How big is the city?"

    "Three fourth of the city we are currently in."

    "Okay here is my counter offer. Malgav''s properties, the city and five spirit stone mines."

    "Deal."

    They shook their hands and Sam took out a scroll and a special medicine vial.

    "Tell them to use the medicine on the spine with the help of the injector. It helps with strengthening the spine without breaking or stiffening it.

    The rest of the treatment n is in this scroll. He would be fine in three days."

    "That is it?"

    "Yes."

    "I will inform you after I finish the preparations for the transfer. It would help if you give me the details on what property should go to who beforehand."

    "I will send in the details. Don''t worry."

    With that Sam left with a smile on his face.

    He has a feeling that the old man is definitely not one that is behind this. With the understanding that he has over Sam, it would be pretty idiotic of him to take this approach.

    As for the possibility of Mingiv or his father trying to do this? From the information that Giyon has on them which was pretty urate until now, they don''t have enough authority to stop the Investigative department for this long.

    It is because the faction Mingiv belonged to mostly has influence over the enforcement department. They are like two different boats and very few people are travelling on both of them at the same time.

    Luckily, Mingiv and his father are not part of this few.

    By the time he came back, Giyon and Grivon are already back from meeting their suspects.

    "So, how did it go?"

    "Grand Elder Pon is not behind this."

    "Core Elder I met is also not behind this. He has his own problems actually and in fact, he wants to meet with you." Giyon added.

    Sam was a bit perplexed and looking at his expression, Giyon chuckled and said.

    "His wife is pregnant and she is due for birth. But there seemed to be some seriousplications, healers have been dying her birth for quite a while. So, he wants your opinion on it. And that is also the reason, he doesn''t have any time to mess with you now."

    "I am not a midwife and I definitely not very experienced in delivering babies. What does he need me for?"

    "It is actually a pretty intriguing situation. I am pretty sure you would be excited. I will tell you after we are done with our current meeting."

    "Alright."

    Then both of them turned to Grivon who appeared to be a bit nervous.

    "What happened?"

    "Nothing much. I am a bit nervous because you are so sure about your findings, but I am not."

    "We will see what it is. Was he suspicious?"

    "Yes, he is. He has been asking about Dawn so much since I met him. I talked business only for a few minutes, he kept on asking how Sam reacted and what kind of person Sam actually is and all the stuff."

    "Really? What else?"

    "He asked, what Sam is going to do about the fact that the n did him dirty like this."

    Giyon and Sam exchanged nces.

    "How was his expression when he said that?"

    Grivon felt conflicted. Sam then suggested something else.

    "Let''s go to the simtor. I think you can project the conversation."

    Grivon sighed in relief and they projected the whole conversation. When they are done, all three of them came to a conclusion. This guy is the most suspicious of all.

    His questions arepletely veiled with an intention to get more information about Sam and Giyon than even Grivon himself.

    After that, they started going into more details about this guy and noticed something that could be useful for them.

    For the past few days, he has been meeting a woman who visited the Gaja n as a guest. That woman is actually the sister of another woman who newly got married to an official within the Investigations department of the Gaja n.

    Even though this connection is a bit far-fetched. This guy checked out all the boxes.

    Giyon immediately went to activate the next step of the n. She activated some of the dormant spies in the n to get the first hand information.

    These spies are something that she ced a long time ago. They are in so deep that they changed ranks in the past five years and are in various positions within various departments.

    Sam doesn''t exactly know how long Giyon is doing this and how deep herwork goes, but he must say that she might be the most resourceful person that belonged to a younger generation in an organization like this.

    The spies acted quickly and the suspects are once again marked. Even though Grand Elder Pon and the other person was cleared, they were also under a bit of surveince.

    For the rest of the day, they didn''t have anything noteworthy.

    The n also didn''t do anything regarding Dawn. Except for the investigation department rapidly searching everywhere, nothing else happened.

    But the next day, Sam ordered the next step of the n. There was an attack on some of the businesses directly under the Gaja n.

    The businesses are within the city. One of them is an inn, another one is a restaurant and the final one is a weapon shop.

    All three ces are attacked simultaneously and not a single thing was spared from the shops except for the staff.

    Along with the attacks, a letter came.

    "Your n cannot catch us. Your investigation is running in circles. You better pay the ransom we asked before we do something else that you might regret.

    This time we made sure that your subordinates didn''t die. Next time, we might not do that."

    And the letter is not actually just sent to n''s leader. A copy of that was sent to every elder that had a subordinate or a child missing.

    Not a single person was left out. This raised much moremotion. They all stormed the investigation building and didn''t budge until the n''s leader came there to calm them down.

    After that was done, the leader went back to his office and started brainstorming with the Grand Elders.

    "What should we do? If the offspring of this many people die at the same time, it would be detrimental for the next few years.

    But we cannot even pay the ransom. That is way too big."

    "We just have to buy some time."

    Grand Elder Pon said calmly.

    Everyone waited for him to continue.

    "We can open negotiations and dy them for a bit. We need to show that we are willing to pay the ransom but not that much."

    "We also need to find out how they knew our investigation process. Also, why did the investigation seem too rapid and chaotic, but there are no results since yesterday?" Grivon''s grand father spoke up.

    "I called the investigation officer, you can ask him yourself." The n''s leader replied.

    As soon as he did that, an attendant came reporting the arrival of the investigator.

    The grand elder looked at him coldly and asked the same question once again.

    "My superior officer told me to explore all the possibilities on the trials leading the missing people to Grivon and Giyon''s businesses. So, yesterday, the whole department is focused on eliminating all the false trials instead of opening new ones."

    "What kind of useless investigation is this? Do you think you are investigating some age-old cold case? There are several kids that had their lives at risk. Go back and investigate it properly. I want you to find out at least one possible suspect that is linked to Dawn and the disappearance of the kids.

    Otherwise, you will be demoted to the rank of a patrol officer outside the city gate.

    Get lost."

 Chapter 1432 - Jinah

    <h4>Chapter 1432 - Jinah</h4>

    After that short meeting in which the grand elder scolded the investigator, the process finally picked up the pace.

    The investigatorpletely ignored his superiors'' orders and did everything in his own style. Whenever someone asked, he only had one thing to say.

    "Take it up with the Grand Elder."

    The one statement shut up so many people. Grivon''s Grandfather is known to be extremely temperamental. He is extremely powerful and doesn''t take nonsense from anyone. Rumour has it that in the term of the previous n leader, he got beat up by this old man because he was abusing the authority as a leader too much.

    The investigator finally saw some light. The trial leading to Sam was obviously a dead end no matter which youngster they followed, but the start of that trial is not.

    Every youngster that suddenly started looking for Grivon and Giyon''s assets actually are doing something important on their own, but all of a sudden, they dropped everything and went after the businesses like they are some idiotic machines controlled by others.

    The investigator sent the best of the bunch he has to thest location the young masters were active before going away. Along with that, he went full force on the people that the young mastersst met to get even a little bit of a clue on what happened, when they suddenly left like that.

    Even though people cooperated because of the intensity of the issue. There is not much they can help him with. But there is indeed one special thing that he managed to notice. Every young master received a message or their attendant came to whisper something in the ear and someone even got a parcel.

    So, he went after the attendants and whoever that does courier best in the city to get any more details that he could.

    Sam, Giyon and Grivon rxed and made the forces rx too, while the investigation went on full swing.

    Sam believed that now, whoever the person that was behind the whole farce is bound to make the move.

    The more dawn pressured the Gaja n, the harsher the investigation is going to be and the more it was searched, the more clues would be unearthed.

    The more clues they unearthed, the harder it would be the one that actually caused this from the start. The whole n would be furious and with the number of elders that got involved, things wouldn''t be as simple as some n punishment.

    They will rip whoever it is to pieces.

    And just like Sam anticipated. The person who is the root of this is currently pacing around in his chambers.

    Elder Jinah.

    The same elder Grivon met and the most important suspect.

    He is pacing around his room back and forth for over an hour and finally sat down when ady barged in without any knock or notification.

    "What are you doing? Do you think pacing around will solve your problem?"

    "It is OUR problem. Don''t you dare separate us in this situation? You are the one that dragged me into this mess. You are the one who caused this whole thing. I was just minding my own fucking business. But you came into my life and dragged me into this whole mess."

    "Oh, stop right there. I didn''t fucking force you. You are the one that agreed to my terms. Fair and square. You are making it sound like I ckmailed you as you did with those young masters."

    "At least I was anonymous when ckmailing the youngsters, but you were not when you dragged me into this."

    "Enough with the veiled threats. Let''s just get back to thinking how to get out of this situation."

    "There is no way out. How are the kids doing by the way?"

    "They are fine, they are all sleeping soundly." The woman answered and it was followed by some silence in the room.

    Jinah looked at her and thought about the moment this whole thing started.

    This woman''s name is Sinya. She is the sister of the woman that newly got married into the n. Both sisters are unbelievably close and as she came here as a guest a long time ago, she didn''t leave yet.

    One day, when Jinah is just trying to improve his position with the help of his brother''s new role, he met with this woman. She approached him and gave out a n that serves both of their purposes.

    His purpose is to get a better position in the n while making himself acquainted with the people at the top while Sinya wanted to get in touch with the Mari n.

    Even though Jinah didn''t like the Mari n and didn''t particrly know why Sinya desperately wanted to gain Mari n''s favour, he still agreed to the n.

    They originally thought if everything goes well, they will frame Sam and kill him in process of which he would grow closer to Mingiv, his father and even the grandfather.

    Meanwhile, Sinya would be revealing what happened behind the scenes with the proof they recorded over time to Sivan back in the Mari n to get in bed with the n or even him.

    So, they made this borate scheme in which they used the information that the investigation department secretly holds and made them follow the trails.

    After that, they kidnapped them and held them hostage leading everyone to think that Sam is the one behind this.

    The original n was since Sam was not known to take shit from others, he would have made some rash move against the elders and while they are actively shing they would fake the evidence on how Sam did all of these kidnappings.

    They even tried their best to hide their identities from all the youngsters they kidnapped.

    If they are lucky enough, they would have even been able to make Grivon and Giyon abandon him because of all the problems and easily dealt with him.

    But they just realized that they arepletely in over their heads. They mistook Sam''s decisiveness and ruthlessness when he dealt with Malgav in both the events as rashness.

    They thought that with the way elders handled things, he would definitely retaliate. But his retaliation came in such a way that their burrows are being filled with smoke.

    Jinah already knows how good the investigation department can be. There is no way, he would be able to hide the whole thing forever.

    "We need to find out who the people that are pretending to be Dawn are and the kidnappers. Then we can even out the situation." Sinya said after some thought.

    "Do you think that is easy? Even the investigation department couldn''t find out. What do you think I can do?"

    "Of course, you can use your untapped informationwork."

    Jinah frowned immediately and asked.

    "How do you know about that?"

    "It seems like you didn''t know why I talked to you in the first ce? Do you think your brother is all that?

    No, the real reason I made a deal is because of you. The untapped secret informationwork that you only use when it was absolutely necessary, is what attracted me. You have the most probability of escaping this when you use all of your resources."

    "I am not using that. It is way too valuable and if by any chance the agents were identified, things wouldn''t go well."

    "I don''t know what you are talking about. I don''t think anybody in the n knows what kind of agents you use. Even your brother you have been grudgingly trying to ept that you are better than him doesn''t know what kind of method you use to get the information.

    What would change this time?"

    "The enemy this time are the people from the n. Not the people from outside. It would be easy for me to get info, but there is a chance I will expose the people to the investigators and their informers involuntarily.

    I don''t want to risk it."

    "Either you risk that or you risk your head. Your choice. But you have the key that could get us out of this situation.

    As long you find out who this dawn is, we can expose them. This all might be Sam''s direct retaliation to smoke us out. But we can also use this to our advantage. We can just lead the evidence trail that we are creating to dawn and connect it to Sam.

    Things would be much easier for us."

    "What if the people that are connected to this are Grivon and Giyon? What is this is their retaliation for going against their friend?"

    "Friend? Really? When does a n like yours have members that have true friends? Isn''t that kind of impossible?"

    Sinya stood up and left.

    Jinah didn''t know what to do. He is very conflicted about using his trump card. The trump card that he created with so much effort over such a long time.. If things go wrong, he would be up in mes along with this card that he created.

 Chapter 1433 - Secret Meeting

    <h4>Chapter 1433 - Secret Meeting</h4>

    Jinah paced around for over an hour before he made a decision. He then walked out of the n estate and went to a small bar within the slums.

    The bar is clearly the worst one in the whole city. It ispletely ragged and the weakest of the whole city are drinking there.

    Jinah stood out like a sore thumb, even though he is in a much moremon attire. That might even be the worst robe he could find within the few streets around the estate, but that looked like a luxurious piece of clothing in that area.

    He walked directly to the bar counter and took out a special coin before cing it on the table.

    "Special Room 6."

    The bartender looked at the coin and expressionlessly took it before nodding.

    Jinah looked around and casually walked to the shoddy private rooms in the bar. He went into thest room.

    The door handle is full of dust. It hasn''t been used in ages.

    He opened the door and walked in. There is a small round table with five seats. He sat on one and soon a waiter came with a wine jar and some sides.

    After waiting for over half an hour, someone finally arrived. It is a young woman with a uniform of Gaja n''s sales team.

    That is the group that acts as sales personnel in their various stores.

    She sat there after giving a nod to Jinah but didn''t speak up for a while. After a few more minutes another person came, this time it is a young man who belonged to a merchant group. The final two seats were filled by two people, one of them came with a cloak, covering his face while thest one is a woman who wore a seductive outfit showing off a lot of skin.

    Only after all of them sat down did Jinah finally speak.

    "I want to find out about the new group that is wreaking havoc in the city. The group is named Dawn."

    "The Dawn? Is it really that serious that you are using us to get the information?"

    Thedy in sales uniform spoke up.

    "It is serious for me. I need all the information that you could get. It would be much better if you can give me information on a person that is directly involved in this."

    "That would be difficult. I haven''t seen a single person that could be rted to this organization. We cannot see a single trace of their activity." The salesdy said one again.

    "Mine too. They literally came out of thin air."

    The woman in the skimpy outfit answered.

    When everyone looked at her, she continued to exin.

    "Almost every man that visited the city will visit our organization. As you know what we provide. But I haven''t seen apletely new face that is not affiliated with a merchant group or the organizations that we are familiar with.

    There is not even a sight of some new and powerful merchant group that came here."

    They nodded and Jinah finally looked at the remaining two. The man in the cloak shook his head and spoke in a very eerie voice.

    "As you know, I only operate after you tell me what you want. So, I will look into it now. But from the new information I gathered in the past few weeks, I don''t believe I have anything that could help you.

    As she said, they came out of thin air."

    Finally, Jinah looked at thest man with a hint of hope.

    "Don''t look at me like that. I don''t have anything on them either. In fact, I can surely say that there is not a single sign of a group that could create this muchmotion in the Gaja n in the surroundings and even some realms.

    If there had been one, we would have known about it.

    Unless they all travelled here alone in extreme stealth and grouped up within the most secure areas of the city, I would have found out."

    JInah was a bit disappointed when he heard this. He gritted his teeth and said.

    "Since you don''t have anything until now, don''t search for the information on a group that is capable of doing the kidnappings like this. Search for a group that is good enough to pull off these explosions and threats. That would be enough."

    Everyone frowned and the Salesdy was the first one to ask.

    "Why is that? The kidnapping process clearly leaves more clues to explore."

    "Because Dawn didn''t do the kidnappings. They are just a powerful group that is trying to take advantage of the deed someone else has done."

    Everyone was stunned and they widened their eyes in disbelief.

    "What do you mean by that? If they didn''t do the kidnapping, who did?"

    "That is something you don''t need to know. All you need to do is find out a group that can pull off the threats and explosions. That would suffice."

    With that Jinah stood up and left the room.

    The four of them sat down and started discussing how they are going to proceed. For some reason, they are much more talkative than when Jinah is here.

    "So, do share the information if you have any. I could use some leads in this area."

    The cloaked man said as he also stood up and walked to the door about to open it.

    *Knock* *Knock*

    At this moment, someone knocked on the door and all four of them became vignt. The cloaked man took a step back and looked at the door with vignce.

    He took out his sword and got ready, but the next second before he could react..

    *CRASH* *CRACK*

    The wooden floor broke open as arge vine came out of it grabbing the man in the cloak.

    The rest of the people inside the room jumped up to the corner, but a sword came from one of the walls and stabbed the young man from the merchant group in the shoulder making him freeze on the spot.

    Ice started forming in the remaining two corners as it stuck them to the wall.

    The next second someone casually opened the door and walked in.

    "Hello, we heard that you are looking for Dawn. So, I came here to meet you guys directly."

    The man said with a smile.

    A few minutester. Back in the n estate.

    Sam is working on another formation te when Grivon ran in with excitement.

    "We confirmed. Jinah is the one that did all of this. He is looking for Dawn using some of his secret informationworks. Our informant in the slum actually managed to find him.

    From what his agents said, he particrly ordered them to not look for a group that could kidnap this many kids, rather to look for a group that is capable enough to create this much mess with explosions and threats."

    Sam nodded and said.

    "Now, all that is left is find out the core reason on why he did it and then get our share of profits from the whole mess. This thing will be over. I believe that you can handle the rest of this."

    "I think I can too."

    As soon as he said, an attendant came running and whispered something.

    Grivon''s expression brightened even more as he spoke.

    "It''s from Grand Elder Pon, he sent a message that the transfer process is good to go. We can get it done tomorrow."

    "Seems like we will get a lot done tomorrow. Go inform your sister. We can finally put some things behind and then all that would be left is dealing with Mingiv and his stupid father.

    As soon as they are done, we can go back to conquering things."

    "Why are you doing everything in such a hurry?"

    "The battle with Sivan just made me want to hurry back. My other part of the soul wouldn''t be able to hold him back for long. If he gets all of my memories, your whole Gaja n will regret it."

    "You are still here aren''t you? You can think of some methods to resist the things that he might create from your memories."

    Sam just smiled and didn''t answer that.

    That is something he is never going to do. Not for the Gaja n or Grivon. It would be foolish of him to give some things to Grivon, no matter how close they get.

    After some more discussion about the rest of the ns, they went to meet Giyon and informed her about the situation.

    Sam then started giving the rest of the orders to the group to finish the rest of the process. It would involve making Jinah a scapegoat and ming the whole Dawn thing on him which he essentially did.

    But before that, they need to find out what this woman Sinya is doing and what her goals are.

    After giving all the instructions, all they needed to do was wait.

    Wait for the subordinates to finish the rest.

 Chapter 1434 - Transfer

    <h4>Chapter 1434 - Transfer</h4>

    The next day, the whole Gaja n was thrown into chaos.

    Each part of the day is chaotic in different ways. In early morning, the investigative department suddenly got a lead regarding Dawn and Jinah also got a call from his investigators.

    But both of them ended up in very different ways. The investigators of the Gaja n got the evidence connecting Jinah to the Dawn when they caught him red-handed as he tried to nt a formation that creates explosions.

    When he was about to be dragged away, he was rescued by some of hispanions from the investigators which only reinforced the belief of investigators.

    Jinah doesn''t know who these people are, but he figured they are Sinya''s people.

    But only after he met with the interrogators there who are none other than Sam and Grivon did he realize that he was in big trouble.

    With some of his skills, Sam managed to make him cough up all the information on the location where youngsters were kept, along with that he also made him sign a contract, transferring all of his secret assets.

    After that was done, he was made to sign a soul contract saying that he would never evere back to any realm that has any presence of the Gaja n before he was sent away.

    But when he was being sent away using some kind of transference device, some witnesses managed to see and informed the investigators.

    It was toote though. Investigators lost the lead.

    When they are feeling what could have happened for a man to escape alone when hispanions rescued him, they got another news. Grivon and his force managed to catch a lead on the Dawn and managed to lead everything to Sinya, her sister and her sister''s husband.

    The investigators, elders and even the n''s leader were stunned. They all conducted some kind ofrge trial in which the sister''s husband was stripped of all of his titles for revealing all kinds of sensitive information and impeding the investigation. He was even crippled by his cultivation and thrown into dungeons.

    As for the sisters, well they were killed. But the investigators realized that they don''t have any information regarding the dawn. They attributed it to Jinah as they thought he might have kept them in the dark.

    Grivon was praised for his contribution and when he was asked to choose a reward, he asked for every business and property the investigator holds.

    Of course, the elders wanted to oppose it, but the n''s leader didn''t back on his word and delivered on his promise.

    This also made the elders start analyzing Grivon''s total worth and they are surprised by what they saw. Just the assets that he is openly showing off are not something they could scoff at.

    Some businesses he is doing with Sam are bringing in profits. His projects are spreading rapidly.

    They also saw Giyon''s situation and they understood that even she is bing bigger than she already is.

    For some time, even the people that ignored Sam''s presence started noticing him.

    Some of them wanted to make a move. But are unable to do anything, because that afternoon, Gail, Gamin and Yuvana attended the assembly of the n regarding this whole thing.

    They are kind of sick of their kids and their kids'' friends being targeted by the people of the n again and again. First, an enforcement team has done them dirty by framing Sam and then came the investigation department.

    They directly asked if there is any other department doing this. They directly med the n''s leader for his ipetence in letting the departments behave as they liked.

    They threatened that if something like this happens again. Things wouldn''t be as peaceful as they were at the moment.

    After listening to this, the n''s leader understood that he is indeed tripping. He remembered Sam''s words about him and he gritted his teeth.

    That day, he made a decision that shocked everyone.

    Heunched an investigation into every elder that has remotely any official authority in the n and he didn''t leave the subordinates either. He just went full ballistic on them and a special teamprising of the secret force that is directly under n''s leader authority directly did it.

    Sam was impressed. But that is not the only thing that impressed him that day.

    That afternoon after a sumptuous lunch, Sam, Grivon and Giyon went to meet Grand Elder Pon.

    There Mingiv, his father and Malgav, all are present for the documentation of property transfer.

    They all took a seat and when Grand Elder Pon is exining the contract to Grivon and Giyon who are the people that gets the new property, Sam looked at Mingiv with a faint smile.

    "What the fuck are you looking at you prick?"

    "Prick? Really? That is the best insult you can think of?"

    "After the traumatic experience he had when he mouthed offst time, I am impressed he even came up with that."

    Grivon said as he read through the contract.

    "You take care of your business." Mingiv looked coldly at Grivon.

    "You give him that look for another second and I will gouge your fucking eyes out," Giyon said casually as she looked through her contract.

    Mingiv choked. Five minutes and all three of them insulted him directly and to think that he started this, he couldn''t help but feel frustrated.

    "See, Mingiv, your grandfather is such a man. He is such a straightforward person. Why the fuck did an asshole as youe out of his descendant? Are you adopted or something?"

    "What the fuck did you say?" Mingiv pped the desk and stood up as he got closer to Sam.

    But Sam didn''t show any expression. He just looked calmly and said.

    "You and I both know what happens if you make a move. Trust me you are not that great of a fighter and if we were to go again, I am willing to lose another limb permanently to kill you. So, be prepared if you want to make a move.

    This time, even your grandfather wouldn''t be able to stop you from doing what I want to do."

    "Really? The only reason you won is that you caught me off guard, you bitch."

    "That is right. It is because of your stupid head that you were caught off guard and thest time I checked there is still no cure for being stupid."

    "YOU¡­"

    As Mingiv was about to blow up, Grand Elder Pon gave him a look and he had to step back.

    Sam looked at Grand Elder Pon with intrigue.

    "I really like you, Sir. You are a great person. One of the best people I have ever seen in my life. You are straight forward and you take the responsibilities seriously even though you could have ignored these imbeciles a long time ago."

    Grand Elder Pon just stayed silent.

    "There is something I want to ask though. What would you do if you indirectly enabled these people way too much and created something really evil and dark because of that."

    "What do you mean?"

    Grand Elder Pon asked in confusion.

    MIngiv and his father stiffened up.

    Sam gave them a faint smile and said.

    "You must have remembered the recent enforcer shit that happened to me. The thing is, I don''t really know who managed to influence the whole enforcement department, but I do know someone who could unleash those abominations onto the street."

    "Be careful with your words Sam. Even though you are an irritating and frustrating youngster, I still have faint respect for you. Don''t lose it, but blindly throwing usations."

    Grand Elder Pon said as he finished the process of transfer.

    Giyon and Grivon stood up waiting for Sam to finish up.

    Sam also stood up and said to the old man.

    "You did your homework about me. Think whether I am a person thates up with random stories just you piss people off.

    There is something wrong with your kid and grandkid. I don''t want to spell it out, but what I can tell you is, now that all of my distractions are cleared. I am about to make my move. I will deal with it whether you agree to it or not.

    I just want you to be on guard and don''t say that I didn''t warn you."

    With those words, the trio left.

    Grand Elder Pon looked at his son and grandson.

    They are extremely nervous under the old man''s gaze.

    "I don''t what you are up to. But stop it right now. I don''t want to take care of you myself. But I am already getting sick of you causing all the trouble and me cleaning it up.

    I am not going to do that anymore. If Sames to deal with it, I will not stop it and if by any chance I find out that you are doing something that is beyond my bottom line, I will forget that you are my descendants.

 Chapter 1435 - Four Constitutions

    <h4>Chapter 1435 - Four Constitutions</h4>

    Sam, Giyon and Grivon went back after the transfer. They don''t know what exactly Grand Elder told his son and grandsons, but they knew it is going to be something serious.

    That is what not impressed Sam. He became impressed by the next visit the trio made.

    They went to the house of the second suspect. A core elder who has quite the reputation within the n.

    When Sam looked at the pregnant wife of the man, he only had one thought in his head.

    "WOW"

    Of course, he didn''t say it out loud, but everyone could guess from his expression that is what his thought is, even though the elder also understood this, he didn''t say anything. Because he expected that reaction from anyone who saw his wife for the first time in this state.

    The belly of his wife almost looked like it was about to burst open. Even though almost every pregnant woman will appear the same, this woman appeared way too much. If a pregnantdy that was right about to give birth were stood right beside this man''s wife, she would appear a lot slimmer.

    Sam ced his hand on the belly and used the observation ability. He realized that his shock is justified.

    Thedy is having quadruplets. But that is not the only thing. There is something special going on with all the four kids and Sam could sense multiple elemental energies within her womb.

    He looked at the elder and asked.

    "Can we talk separately? Me, you and your wife. If you arefortable, you can keep Giyon and Grivon here. Apart from that, send everyone out. The servants, attendants, rtives and even the healers.

    This is kind of a sensitive situation."

    The elder was a bit startled, but looking at Sam''s nk expression, he decided to do as he was told.

    Grivon and Giyon were surprisingly left there.

    "So, Elder, Saran. As you might have already known, you have to have four kids. Two boys and two girls. Let me congratte you on that first.

    Now, let me get right to the elemental energies part. You are of Wind and light elemental affinity and your wife is of dark and metal elemental affinity.

    We can find all four of those elements there. This might have already been told by your healers and they must have also told you the problem with the delivery.

    During a normal case with four children delivering, the wife would be exhausted and there would be a bit too much blood loss, so a constant light elemental energy injection is a bit of necessity.

    But now it is not possible because the womb of your wife is currently filled with all four of these elemental energies and if the light element is injected, the bnce would be broken as the dark and light elements wouldn''t be able to stay there."

    "All of this was exined by the healers."

    "Yes, but did they tell you why the elemental energies are so radiant in her womb?"

    "No, that is what they couldn''t find out. They guessed that the remnants of energies were stored in the womb due to our intercourse and they grew along with the children inside."

    "You can tell that it is utter bullshit. I have a theory, but before that, may I ask? What race do you belong to? You are definitely part human, what other race does your ancestry hold?"

    "I don''t know exactly, but I am definitely a descendant of more than five races. Why?"

    He then turned to the woman and asked.

    "Madam, if you arefortable with it, can you share your racial ancestry?"

    "I don''t really know for sure. My mother belonged to the pure Gandharva race, I don''t know about my father though."

    Sam nodded and said.

    "He must have had an ancestry of at least four different races."

    "What are you getting at? What does it matter?"

    Saran got a bit impatient.

    "Well, your races are kind of the cause of this current situation.

    Your four kids have four very different and rare constitutions.

    One of them is the Hurricane gale constitution, the other one has Starlight constitution, the third one has Devil night constitution and thest one has the Grey Gold constitution."

    The whole room turned silent. None of them spoke up, even after Sam finished speaking.

    "What do you mean by this? How is it possible for children that are just being born to have constitutions?"

    "It should have been impossible.

    The thing is, in fourteen years before awakening, the body of most of the races except for the beasts, tries to amodate to the spiritual energy and the gic memory they got from their parents and ancestors kind of modifies it to gain certain affinities.

    This is a natural process as an infant''s body is never strong enough to take on the absorption of spiritual energy, the creatures modified themselves and adapted to this situation.

    But your kids areing out strong enough because their gic codes managed to amodate to the spiritual energy while they are still within the womb of their mother.

    The main reason is because of the diversity of gic memory because of theplex ancestry both of you holds.

    All four of these constitutions were fully awakened and they are brimming with potential.

    The drawback is that the children''s constitutions are acting up against each other because of thepletely different affinities they possess and the energies formed bubbles blocking each other.

    Now once foreign energy is injected, things would go too bad too quick."

    Saran gulped as he looked at his wife.

    "Is there a way for my wife to be safe? I can take it even if the kids are gone. I cannot endure if something happens to my wife."

    "NO, NO. The kids should be safe. I don''t care what happens to me, please make sure that the kids are okay."

    Sam looked at them and said.

    "Your four kids are going to be the most talented people that are ever born in the Gaja n''s history if they are properly cared for. They could bring your Gaja n to a new ce and trust me, they will break past the limitations of the Astral ne easily.

    They are indeed something to look forward."

    "I don''t care if they are going to be the next gods that conquer the world for a million years. If they cause any harm to my wife, let them die for all I care."

    Sam looked at him and chuckled.

    "Don''t worry. I will make sure that both your wife and kids are safe. But I would advise you to keep the news away from anyone else. No wet nurses, no midwives, no ceremonies and celebrations. Because if they were noticed by someone, they are going to die.

    But the surgery is a bit risky. I would need to cut you open and I am going to make a special set up that will ensure the safe delivery of the kids and keeping your wife alive at the same time.

    You can be at the surgery to observe everything. But you are the only person that is going to be there other than me.

    This news is going to shut now. You are not to consult any other healers even if that is the divine healer Vardar.

    In fact, especially him."

    The wife and husband looked at each other, before nodding.

    Sam looked at her and said.

    "All you need to do is take the medicine until dawn. I will be back with the set up. I will work on it through the night.

    I know that you are suffering and the kids are also inside for way too long. They should have been out a week or so ago."

    They agreed and Sam immediately went out along with Grivon.

    Giyon decided to stay back since the midwives and nurses are not allowed. She offered to stay back and take care of the woman.

    Saran also felt a bit reassured.

    Sam went back and immediately went into theb. He started working on a set up as he rapidly made calctions without any rest.

    He kept the artisans to work at full swing. Not giving them any rest.

    After the whole evening and night he finally finished the set of tools he needs and went back to Saran''s residence.

    There he set up the whole equipment in a room after sterilizing it with a special concoction and arranged the surgery.

    Afterying her down on the table, Sam used his observation ability with normal hand and used the metal hand to create a very thin but sharp energy de.

    A de so small and thin that it looked like a needle and left a small indentation on the belly of the wife.

    He looked at that cut for a moment to understand the natural healing speed of the woman and then made some mental calctions before proceeding.

    "I would be proceeding with the surgery.. You will be put to sleep and within two hours, you would have four kids waiting for you."

 Chapter 1436 - Delivery

    <h4>Chapter 1436 - Delivery</h4>

    Sam gave her the anaesthetic shot and slowly started the equipment set up.

    It is actually just a special table with over a thousand inscriptionsid down on it along with a special formation inscribed that could bnce these four energies if necessary.

    Apart from that, it is responsible for giving enough wood elemental energy that could assist in reducing her chance of bleeding to death. There is also a makeshift catheter Sam made to keep her dder empty.

    Finally, there are a few holographic screens that popped up showing other parameters. Sam used the formations to create the makeshift measuring devices of blood pressure, temperature and stuff.

    He is not very experienced in performing this kind of surgery. He definitely didn''t do any of this kind in this current world, but he sure as hell know that when the person is unconscious and the spiritual energy is in a dormant state, it would be hard for them to survive and he needs to have a fair grasp of their vitals.

    If he had a few more healers who are good at diagnosing the patient by touch, he would have used them, but this time he cannot do any of that, because of the gravity of the situation.

    So, he had to make these things that he never thought would have been useful in this world.

    He doesn''t have a way to keep on observing all of her vitals while he was focused on the surgery.

    After checking everything, he finally opened up her abdomen and then uterus.

    When he opened it up, he finally saw the children.

    Sam covered both of his hands with spiritual energy as he slowly prated the small barrier created by the first baby with the wind elemental energy.

    He brought the baby out and ced him on one of the four smaller tables nearby. Sam activated the table immediately with just amand to the spirit and some wind elemental energy is injected into it.

    The wind elemental energy barrier that was created around the baby because of the premature awakening of the constitution was rapidly wearing down.

    But it was saved by the table. The barrier is being supported by the formation on the table.

    He left the rest of the formation spirit as the baby started crying.

    Sam went on to quickly but gently take out other children and ced them on different tables specifically made for them.

    As he was done with thest child, he noticed that the mother is having an issue. Her whole body that has been the battlefield for the conflict of the four children with such constitutions, seemed to have finally reached a copse as the blood has been running out of her.

    Sam really wished that the blood transfusion is possible for her. But theplicated racial ancestry she has and the varied amount of the bloodlines and their purities along with varied elemental affinity, it is impossible for him to transfuse.

    He immediately started healing her. The table''s inscriptions acted up. The first thing Sam did is to heal the uterus as he guided the wood elemental energy with the help of inscriptions.

    He also started trying to use the table''s inscription to maintain her blood pressure properly and the temperature along with it.

    He is also enhancing the natural regeneration of her body to stop the bleeding and assisting the healing of the cuts on the uterus and abdomen by bringing the ends together with the solidified energy that wasced into very thin threads that stitched the cuts.

    The wood elemental energy started healing as fast it could.

    Sam closed his eyes as he used the observation ability.

    After fifteen minutes of constant operation of the table and the inscriptions on it, the bleeding waspletely stopped and the flesh has healed.

    Only after making sure that her vitals are normal, did Sam feel relieved. Saran who has been looking at his little babies was also relieved after Sam said everything is okay.

    *BOOM* *CRACKLE*

    At this moment, they heard a loud noise that made their ears go numb. Saran and Sam, at their cultivation level, things like a lightning strike of a regr natural level wouldn''t bother him.

    But they heard the lightning crackle and thunder struck so loud that made their hearts thump heavily in their chest.

    At this moment, Grivon and Giyon who were in the hall were also struck dumb by the sudden noise and ran out to see the situation.

    It has just been a few moments since sun raised, but suddenly the whole sky is covered with dark clouds. They cannot see the sun.

    The rain started pouring down as if someone is forcefully creating the rainstorm and the thunder struck repeatedly.

    The most surprising part of this is that all the lightning and thunder came in different colours.

    The whole city and the surroundings were shaken as the clouds showed all their might.

    Out of all of these people, the ones in the n estate are most surprised and even out of all of them, Giyon and Grivon who are looking at the lightning strikes were even more surprised.

    They looked as different coloured lightning struck a small hill that was near Saran''s estate.

    The hill copsed a lot as the lightning ravaged it repeatedly.

    They couldn''t understand why lightning is striking a single ce. Along with this phenomenon, the colour is making them feel like this might be someone''s deliberate measure.

    As they were thinking, the clouds disappeared as suddenly as they came and when the whole storm was cleared, the rocky hill is still emitting smoke.

    The vegetation on it waspletely charred into useless debris. The stones themselves seemed to have changed as they emitted some kind of weird aura.

    Sam and Saran who were still in the makeshift operating theatre caring for the children and the kids also wanted to see what themotion is about and by the time it ended, Saran is already out, while Sam desperately tried to make sure that the children are not affected.

    But after themotion ended, he sensed some kind of weird auraing from the energy fluctuations that are caused by these repeated lightning strikes and the four formations he kept for the babies to incubate safely and transition from the energy bubbles they created to the real world, were gone.

    Sam almost panicked and thought that the children are going to be harmed, but to his surprise, the children didn''t feel ufortable, in fact, they are very peaceful.

    Sam became confused. From what he saw and the calctions he made, this should not be possible.

    The main problem after the delivery of the babies is their amodation in the new environment. In normal, cases they will cry for a bit and adjust slowly without any adverse effects, but now that they created this weird energy barrier around them instinctually when it was gone, the imbnce with their amodation is going to be more problematic than that of a normal child.

    That is why he went through the trouble of creating these special incubators overnight.

    But now they are rendered useless.

    He became so intrigued, but couldn''t find any clues to answers.

    Then all of a sudden, he used the observation ability on the surrounding air around him.

    He didn''t know why he did it, but the energy fluctuations of the lightning strikes made him do that.

    As soon as he did that, he could see that the environment around him has changed a lot. It should have been covered with neutral energy, instead of the four elemental energies, the same ones as the children perfectly bnced in the air.

    They are soothing the children.

    He frowned and couldn''t understand why.

    Saran came back running and looked at the babies sleeping peacefully.

    "Are they okay?"

    "Yes, their incubation is over. For some reason, they are naturally transitioning faster."

    "As long as they are okay, I don''t care about the means."

    "What happened outside?"

    "I don''t know. There is some sort of storm that disappeared without a trace within three minutes after it came."

    "Let me go and see. You can move them after the mother wakes up."

    Sam went out to check the situation. He could feel the energy waves more clearly now and he looked at the hill that was clearly deformed.

    Grivon and Giyon who are already standing there looked at him and asked.

    "How are they?"

    "They are perfectly fine. You can see them after a while. What happened here?"

    "We don''t know. The weird phenomenon just came and disappeared."

    Sam walked out of the yard and looked at the hill. He used the observation ability and realized that the four energies areing from this ce.

    The waves in the surrounding area consisted of all of these energies.

    He became more and more confused and intrigued as he looked at the hill that was just struck by the lightning, but instead of the lightning element, it is emitting the energy waves in such a subtle way that even his observation ability is barely able to sense them.

 Chapter 1437 - Interest

    <h4>Chapter 1437 - Interest</h4>

    As Sam is checking out the hill and the surroundings, he noticed that a bunch of people are making their way there.

    They are alling from different directions and within the people that came, Gail, Gamin and Yuvana are also present.

    Even the grand elders that don''te out of their residences usually are there.

    Gail took the lead and the rest of them backed down when he asked Sam.

    "What happened here?"

    Sam looked at the rest of the people and said.

    "It is an experiment. I was curious about the material of the hill and did an experiment to see how it can fare against lightning and other elements. It is indeed great. I am thinking about trying to use it in some of the projects."

    "Bullshit, there is no way a guy of your strength can create such arge explosion. What the fuck happened here?"

    One of the core elders screamed as soon as Sam said that.

    Sam looked at him and his clothes which seemed like they were hurriedly put on and guessed what he must have been doing.

    He couldn''t help but smile and said.

    "You don''t know me sir and I am pretty sure you don''t know what I can do. So, please get out of my hair. It was an experiment and I got permission from the person who is in charge of this area. Right Elder Saran?"

    Everyone looked at Saran who just walked out of the home. He looked at Sam who met his eyes and gestured something.

    Saran nodded and said.

    "It was just an experiment. You guys don''t need to mind it."

    "What kind of stupid experiment is this?" Another elder asked in frustration.

    But Sam smiled and said.

    "I am pretty sure I don''t have to reveal that to you. With all the things that are going on, particrly with how your n is trying to frame me time and again, I wouldn''t want to divulge any more information about me than you already have."

    Everyone grudgingly left after a few more failed attempts to get the information.

    After the whole scene was cleared, he went to meet with Saran and said.

    "Don''t ever, reveal your kids to the outside world. Tell the world whatever it takes to hide them. I will try to make some things that would help them hide their speciality in the future.

    Your kids are gifted and they will be legendary when they grow up, but thises at a cost of them being unable to interact with the people of their age and they should be careful of showing off their prowess.

    So, before you could figure out the perfect time, save them.

    And do not tell anyone about the lightning and the storm that just stayed for a few minutes. Because of its oddity, they will be convinced that it was just one of my experiments. Nobody will suspect you for that.

    No matter who asks, just put the me on me."

    Saran looked at Sam with a conflicting expression. He doesn''t know why Sam is helping him this much. After all, in the circle he mingles with, people don''t really do so much without expecting something in return.

    Sam knew very well what he is thinking, but he doesn''t have any exnation to say. Even if he did, it wouldn''t be believable, so he decided to just stay put.

    After giving out the instructions.

    Sam went back to Giyon''s residence with her and Grivon.

    They saw that Sam is in very deep thinking, so they let him be.

    But they are curious about the lightning strikes.

    The problem is that they are not the only ones that are curious about the strikes. The normal people of the city didn''t care much since the storm was fleeting. But the spies who are within the city from various areas are very curious.

    Curious enough to investigate and let the news of the whole situation pass to their higherups.

    They didn''t take the fact that Sam was experimenting at a face value. Even though Sam''s name has been going on and on for a bit within the circle, they just thought he is a variable in the Gaja n''s power struggle for youngsters.

    Of course, except for the Mari n members who knew a bit more.

    The news of the different coloured lightning strikes within the Gaja n estate spread like wildfire within the circle of organizations on the same level.

    It even attracted some people within the grey circle.

    And within that grey circle, one particr person with a notable authority took the news a bit more seriously.

    Far away from the Gaja n.

    In the realm called the Divine Graveyard. Within a, there is a small mountain that stood alone within arge dead forest.

    An old man with a thin figure sat in meditation. He has a long beard that reached the middle of his torso and his hair spread wildly behind him, clearly overgrown.

    A young man is standing in front of him with his hands crossed.

    He is tall, muscr and robust.

    He also has long hair that reached the floor.

    "I heard something. A four coloured lightning strike happened in the Gaja n estate. It struck a hill and it was said to be an experiment of a young talented man.

    But the thing is at the same time ady of the Gaja n was pregnant due to give birth."

    The old man opened his eyes and frowned.

    "Go on."

    "The news I got states that she was pregnant with quadruplets. Within this short brain I have, I remember something you said in a drunken stupor. So, I came here to give the news."

    The Old man''s frown got deepened and he immediately stood up. He slowly walked to the adjacent room with his hair dragging on the ground.

    The room is full of scrolls and books. He searched through the rack and finally fished out a very old scroll.

    He opened it up and looked through the information.

    "The four offspring of gic abominations shall summon the four lightning strikes and the offspring shall be the reason for a start of a new era."

    He read the words out loud as he looked at the scroll.

    He walked out with it and gave it to the young man.

    The young man read the words and said.

    "This is it. This is what you said. What do you want to do? You are still trying to solve the old man''s puzzles?"

    "Yes, I am."

    "Are you sure? This is the Gaja n we are talking about and you know the prince that belongs to that n. If he gets to be involved, we wouldn''t be having an easy time and we still need to take that crazy old couple into the ount."

    "Don''t get ahead of ourselves. We need to find out if the quadruplets are born without any trouble. That is apletely unavoidable condition for the prophecy.

    Also, confirm if they have any oddities rted to them.

    We need to confirm so many things before we make a move.

    But if they are confirmed to be fulfilling all kinds of conditions, we need to be prepared. I don''t care what it would cost. I will be needing those children.

    I want to have the cause of the new era to be within my control."

    The young man sighed and said.

    "Alright, father. I will try to do what you want me to do. But from what I heard. The prince and the crazy couple went home. Things would be difficult. Anyway, I am interested in this kid named Sam, is it okay if I dealt with him?"

    "Do you what you want. But remember, my name shouldn''te out. The name Ghora shouldn''t be anywhere near the whole incident."

    "Alright."

    With that, the young man left.

    While two absurdly hairy father and son duo are thinking of the four children which the Gaja n doesn''t even know about even though they were within their estate, someone else somewhere is also interested in this situation.

    Within the estate of the Star-eye sect.

    The sect that Butler Si used to find Sam''s location at the start of this farce.

    The leader of the sect received the information regarding the weird phenomenon and just like how the old man in the graveyard reacted, he also looked through the scrolls and took out a simr one.

    After confirming the information in it once again, he immediately ran out and met with one of the elders.

    "I need every spy we have to move to the Gaja n''s city. I need to find out if there is anyone pregnant at that time and if they had quadruplets born.

    I want to know everyone who was involved in this whole thing. Healers that were treating the pregnant woman, the midwives that facilitated the delivery. Everything."

    "Why are you so anxious brother? What is the importance of this?"

    "The importance is because this thing can change the fate of our whole sect. A fate that was notpletely predetermined. A fate that is nk canvas and can be painted beautifully with one variable.

    I will be the one to bring our sect to glory."

 Chapter 1438 - Investigation

    <h4>Chapter 1438 - Investigation</h4>

    The next day.

    Sam went back to Saran''s residence and checked on the babies, mother and then finally the hill.

    Saran looked at him with a hesitant expression and asked.

    "What is the problem?" Sam asked with a smile.

    "I wanted to ask, why you are taking so much risk. I have a feeling that the lightning and stuff is rted to the babies since you went to such lengths to hide it. From the way stressed it, I could guess that it must be very dangerous to rte them to this.

    But why did you take the me? After all, we didn''t even discuss the price for saving my wife and the children. Why would you even go as far as taking such me even before we could pay you for the huge help?

    You are throwing me into deeper debt by doing this. It is not afortable situation for me to be in."

    Sam took a deep breath and said.

    "Don''t worry too much. I can understand why you feel that way. I feel the same way when someone offers me a favour without asking anything in return.

    All I ask is to be supportive of Grivon when he is taking over the n. Stay on his side. That would be enough payment for me."

    "Would me siding with him help him much? I am just a core elder."

    "It would. You might just be the core elder, but your strength is different from the rest. You might try to hide it, but yesterday, when the lightning struck, you kind of revealed that a bit.

    Even though you tried your best to hide it, Gail noticed it."

    Saran smiled awkwardly and said.

    "Even if that is true, you shouldn''t just be asking that much. Your favour is worth more than that. Anyway, wouldn''t you be having too much trouble if the lightning phenomenon is that much of a problem? Why would you want to take that on all by yourself."

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "Think of it this way. You will be facing trouble because of the babies sooner orter, so what I am doing now is just giving you some breathing space before your world just goes to shit.

    That is it. Don''t read too much into it.

    And if people rte this phenomenon to your babies, they will definitely get more curious and the problem would onlye to you faster."

    Sam left after watching that the babies are okay.

    When he went back, he was met with the same kind of questions from Grivon and Giyon. Gail and Grivon''s parents are also very interested for some reason.

    Sam just ignored and went to research.

    Since the problems are gone for a while. They went back to focusing on business.

    Now that Sivan is going to go dormant for a while because of thest situation with his father and the many men he lost in the previous battle, they figured this would be the best time to take over another property.

    While it is like that, they also started searching for the creatures that came out of nowhere. The abominations created by Mingiv or whoever that he is backing.

    The mistake he did is to use Grivon''s property for the whole farce of framing Sam. Which means they can investigate everything there.

    Sam knew that it would be hard to get clues. So, he decided to investigate every bit of it by himself. He went on to use observation ability on every inch of the underground makeshift base that Mingiv''s people created to frame them.

    There Sam collected every possible sample that he can.

    The small leftovers of the blood of the creatures, the footprints, some hair strands, everything he could possibly find.

    Of course, most of them are useless. He didn''t have a highly equipped DNA database to check these things against.

    It is just that the hair strands helped a bit when they are narrowing down the subordinates of MIngive they needed to focus on. They found an awful lot of red hair strands here and there within the tunnels and caves.

    There are very few people within Mingiv''s subordinates that have red hair. Only three of them when they considered the close subordinates that they assumed MIngiv would befortable enough to share the dirty deeds.

    So, they targeted the three of them to spy on get some information.

    Apart from that, Sam also found a wine jar.

    An exclusive crystal wine jar used by a certain merchant group. A very very pricey wine jar that was crushed into pieces was found inside the tunnel and there is something Sam saw along with it.

    An arrow was pierced into the wall.

    The arrow actually broke the jar and from the spot that the arrow got stuck on the wall, Sam could guess that it was held by someone when the arrow came.

    The arrow was shot by Grivon''s subordinates on the day the whole fight happened.

    Sam frowned as he didn''t remember anyone being in one of the tunnels that day. He is even sure that no one left before the city guards guarded the whole ce and kept everything under control that not a single person left or entered the ce from that day onward.

    That leaves only one other possibility. The person has another way to get out of thepound and close the way or they used a space token or something simr to getaway.

    Too bad though, if Sam had checked it right after, he would have found any possible clues, but he couldn''t.

    Most of them were covered up.

    The only clue he has is the wine remnants that were stuck to the crystal bottle pieces, and only the smell was a bit useful.

    He found a canine beast from Grivon''s new collection and made it smell the wine.

    After getting that, Sam made Giyon and Grivon, get the most exclusive liquor then can buy all kinds of it from that merchant group.

    Then he started testing the smell of each thing with the canine beast until he hit a match.

    He went to Giyon immediately.

    "This Volcanic berry wine. This is the one that the beast reacted to. How rare is it?"

    "Not too rare. It would be a bit of trouble for us to find out. But I am sure this is only avable in one restaurant within the city and it is almost exclusive to the young masters and their friends. Apart from a few merchants thate from a ridiculous amount of money loaded backgrounds, only the young masters visit there.

    I think we can try and find out who bought the liquor within a certain time period.

    But I highly doubt it will help us."

    "Still do it anyway."

    "You know, if you would have not warned Grand Elder Pon about this alerted these assholes, we would have had a better way to catch them."

    "Do you think so? I believe the exact opposite."

    "Why is that?"

    "You are counting on the fact that they might get active again, but I am counting on the fact that they would now try to hide and erase all the evidence that could point out their activity at the moment.

    With the kind of person Grand Elder Pon is, he will definitely trust my words at least a bit and will definitely look into the shit that his son and grandson might have done.

    So, as soon as he shows the slightest signs, we would be able to see the panic of MIngiv or at least his father.

    We would be able to catch them then."

    "Let''s hope it works then. Currently, Mingiv is scared shit that he holed up here. The only person that is a bit more vtile is Malgav since we screwed him off of his properties."

    "What is he doing?"

    "He is trying to find a way to get back at you, without getting the crap beaten out of him again."

    "That would be impossible. And the next time, he might really die."

    "There is that too. Are you really going to kill him?"

    "Don''t doubt it."

    Giyon just shrugged and left. But as soon as she left, Jyon arrived.

    Sam who hasn''t seen her in a while was stunned. He kind of forgot her existence with so much drama.

    He was feeling relieved until now and she is here.

    "I heard that you were the one who did Saran''s wife''s delivery."

    Sam frowned and asked.

    "Who told you that?"

    "Well, I was there when Saran asked Sister Giyon for your help. I was the one who took her there. Me and Saran''s wife are old friends."

    Sam just nodded and didn''t say much.

    "Why are you helping them save the secret of their kids? I mean, you clearly stated that you always work and take risks for your own benefit. But you didn''t do that when ites to your students, is it kind of simr with these kids too?"

    Sam frowned and looked at her before asking.

    "What is it that you want Miss Jyon? I cannot understand. Are you taking me as some kind of emotional case study that could analyze? Why do you care what motivations I have as long as they didn''t concern your wellbeing?

    If you are really treating me as a case study, I must say, you are doing a big mistake.. I might show restrain because of your siblings, but I am a dangerous man and I don''t like other people analyzing me."

 Chapter 1439 - Investigation II

    <h4>Chapter 1439 - Investigation II</h4>

    Sam didn''t even wait for Jyon''s reply before he left.

    He really didn''t like the fact that she is trying to piece him up and study like a project. Even though he does that to people all the time, when ites to him he really didn''t like it.

    People might call him a hypocrite, but he doesn''t care. He is strong and he can back his words up. So, he does whatever he wants within his power.

    He dove deeply into the investigation along with GIyon.

    Since they narrowed down the restaurant, they could narrow down the suspects too. At least that is what they thought. But it has be impossible because every young master who frequents the restaurant was gifted a Volcanic Berry wine every week in thest few months.

    It is almost impossible for them to go through every young master. The most they did is to try and find the informants who could guess the location of the young masters who got the wine. If they can find where they stayed during the event of that abomination outbreak, they would have a lead.

    At the same time, some of their agents locked down on the three redheaded people and finally, some of them are watching Mingiv''s every move.

    He stayed within his n residence and didn''t go out. He didn''t take meetings, he didn''t take his businesses seriously. It seemed like he is doing everything he can to stay out of trouble.

    But Sam didn''t want him to do that. He wanted him to make a move and make a mistake along with that.

    Since that is happening, he wanted to give him a little push in that particr direction.

    So, the next day he went to that exclusive restaurant along with Grivon.

    They looked at the private rooms and showed one room that was just about to fill up.

    "I want that room," Grivon said coldly to the manager.

    "I am sorry sir. That room was reserved by one of the young masters of the Gaja n. He even did so yesterday, so it ispletely off the limits."

    "I am also a young master of the Gaja n. Should I take that as some kind of big deal? Why are you stressing about that imbecile''s status? And I want that very private room. Nothing else."

    The manager was dumbfounded a bit and he looked at the person that was just about to enter the private room. It is none other than Malgav.

    Grivon looked at his disdain and contempt as he asked.

    "Do you really need that private room Malgav?"

    Malgav didn''t even bother to react as he looked at Sam and tried his best to control himself, before walking away from the private room.

    "Show me the way for another room. I don''t need this anymore."

    "That is great. We will take it." Grivon and Sam walked towards them. But when Malgav was about to walk away, he suddenly tripped and fell face first.

    Everyone in the restaurant suddenlyughed out loud and then immediately stifled theirughter to control themselves.

    Sam who made him fall, looked at him and gave a smirk before leaving.

    That evening, they went to a bar that Malgav was in and did the same. The next day, they went to an area where Malgav was hunting and stole his prey. That night they went to the vacationing and took the spot that Malgav reserved for himself.

    And there is one thingmon in every ce they visited and that is Malgav falling face first.

    In the vacation house, Malgav lost it when he fell face-first right when he was entering the space gate formation.

    He made his guards make a move, but of course, they lost. It is not like he had a chance of winning.

    Sam immediately held Malgav in a headlock within a few minutes and whispered.

    "Do you remember what happened, when you were in a headlock thest time? How would you like your spine set up this time? I can make your stay like a ball for a few days. Do you want to experience that?"

    Malgav shivered in fright and didn''t even say anything. He felt suffocated both physically and mentally. He cannot take this level of abuse to his head. This ispletely out of his tolerance limit.

    Grivon looked at the guards of Space gate and said.

    "Tell Mingiv that his brother made a move foolishly and I took him back to my residence. Tell him toe with the property deed of one of his inns within the Western city if he wants his brother unscathed.

    If he doesn''te within an hour from now, I will hand over Malgav to my friend Sam here. He will treat him properly."

    With that Sam and Grivon left along with Malgav.

    Within an hour, Mingiv came running to Grivon''s residence and yelled.

    "You sick freaks, what the hell is wrong with you guys? We are already staying out of your way and didn''t bother to take revenge against you since we are from the same n. If you try to push too far. Don''t me me for whates at you."

    Sam and Grivon came out with Malgav standing behind them with shackles on.

    "What the fuck Mingiv? Where is the property deed?"

    Grivon asked coldly.

    "I am not giving you assholes anything. Let my brother go right now. Or else, nobody will be able to save you."

    "The thing is, we are not the ones that need saving."

    As soon as he spoke, Grivon''s guards surrounded Mingiv.

    "Handover the property deed and get the fuck of this ce with your stinky ass brother. We don''t need you here."

    Mingiv gritted his teeth and took out the property deed. He wanted to act tough, but he knew he will get beat up if he didn''t agree.

    After he gave up the deed, he looked at Malgav. The only reason he has to care about Malgav right now is because of his grandfather. Even if he is brother, with the problems that Malgav caused him until now, there is no way he can tolerate him.

    He would have left him to die on his own, if not for their grandfather breathing down their necks.

    As they are finishing the transfer, Sam moved closer to Mingiv and whispered.

    "You are this pissed off just because we caught your brother once, what would you do if I sent information regarding a certain red-headed person to the grandfather and the whereabouts of this certain red-headed person when the incident of the abominations attacking Grivon''s residence happened.

    What do you think your grandfather''s reaction would be?"

    Mingiv who had an angry expression until then suddenly became horrified. He simply gave up his facial expressions betraying his anxiousness and fear.

    Sam smiled as he knew that he hit the nail on the head.

    Their search process has been right.

    Mingiv realized that he might have been revealing too much with just the expression and started running out. He left Mingiv for his guards to handle and went directly to his residence.

    He started making calls and soon, a red-headed person entered his residence. After an hour, the red-headed guy started heading towards the space gate formation hurriedly.

    But right before he was about to reach the area, a group from the investigation department surrounded him.

    "What happened? Sir. I didn''t do anything. I am a subordinate of young master MIngiv and am going to run some errands for him."

    "You are arrested as a suspect behind the attack of the abominations in Grivon''s residence."

    The target widened his eyes in disbelief and he immediately made a move. He knew he shouldn''t attack, but he also knew that getting caught would be a much worse situation. He attacked them and took them by surprise, before running to the space gate.

    But he wasn''t being rational there which is exactly one of the scenarios Grivon and Sam thought of. They appeared in the path of this guy and made a move. They didn''t bother to capture him at all. Instead, they directly attacked him and killed him with the help of the guards.

    Sam made a move with spectre and collected the memories.

    The investigators caught up and looked at the young man that is now dead.

    "Thank you, young master Grivon. But it would have been better if he was caught alive. Anyway, we will take care of this from now."

    The investigators reacted unbelievably calm and took the dead body away.

    They went to MIngiv''s house after disposing of the body and started making a fuss.

    Meanwhile, Sam went back to Giyon''s residence along with Grivon as they started looking through the information.

    "This is way too easy. Are you sure we are going to get any proper information?"

    "Of course, it is simple. But that doesn''t mean it is not effective. This guy holds a lot of info. Particrly one of the locations where these abominations are stored.

    There is a person there that might help us find the rest.

    We need to make a move."

    "I will."

    "I will go and thank Saran for helping us with the investigator''s group."

 Chapter 1440 - Execution

    <h4>Chapter 1440 - Execution</h4>

    Three monthster.

    In the Gaja n estate.

    Everyone within the n has gathered together at the empty space in front of the main headquarters of the n.

    The n head is sitting as the head of the whole meeting while the Grand Elders and core elders are sitting on either side of him.

    It looked like arge royal court, except that it has been conducted outside in the open. All of the other elders, youngsters, personnel from various departments, external core members were all present.

    Even Gail, Gamin and Yuvana are present there too.

    Sam, Giyon and Grivon are also standing on the side. Even though Giyon has special status, the current meeting of a very serious issue that her opinion as the financial genius of the n doesn''t matter.

    Mingiv is currently in the middle of the whole court along with his father and his brother Malgav. All three of them are kneeling down with their hands tied behind their back.

    They are in an extremely pathetic state. Mingiv''s mother is standing beside them as she looked at her husband coldly.

    She then turned to n''s head and said.

    "Sir, I don''t care what you do with my husband and I don''t care what you do with that bastard either. But you must leave my son Mingiv. You cannot kill him here. Expel him from the n and we will sign a soul contract that both of us will not have any further rtionship with your Gaja n.

    I will take him away from this ce and we will live our lives without disturbing yours."

    The n head looked at her coldly. She also met his gaze. Even though she is afraid, she steeled herself to match his gaze as she continued.

    "If you do not leave him. I assure you that my n and yours shall forever be enemies."

    As soon as she finished her words with resolution that she mustered with so much effort, n''s leader''s energy surged putting an unsurmountable pressure on her.

    The resolution was immediately gone.

    She became afraid and the n''s leader spoke out.

    "Are you sure you can represent your whole n? Are you sure that they are going to make an enemy out of Gaja n, because I killed a traitor that was born and brought up by my n? Does your n has that much strength now?"

    She immediately turned silent.

    She doesn''t know what to say anymore.

    She knew that whatever she said until now is just an attempt of desperation. She knew more than anyone else how strong her n is.

    They are weak and patheticpared to the Gaja n. The only reason they rose to their current state, is because they are acquainted with the Gaja n with their matrimony.

    In fact, it could be said that her whole n prospered because of her seduction skills.

    As she was feeling hopeless, she looked Grand Elder Pon who is currently looking Mingiv in the eyes.

    Mingiv wanted to plead and beg for mercy from his grandfather, but when he saw that look, he knew that it would be utterly useless and might even make his grandfather feel disgust from his begging.

    As he thought to this point, he turned to look at Sam who is standing on the side with his hands in his pockets. He stood straight and his face has not expressions.

    All of this happened because he wanted to deal with Sam over a dispute that was caused by the lust of his younger brother.

    All because they pissed of this one guy who doesn''t have anything to his name when they consider the sizes and strengths of the ns that they usually fight andpete with.

    For a few days, before these three months, Mingiv was the one creating problems to Sam. But once that red-headed guy was caught, everything went downhill.

    One string of information was enough to bring the whole thing down.

    The whole operation waspletely destroyed.

    Years of effort and hundreds of billions of spirit stones worth of resources werepletely wasted.

    Along with that was gone the reputation he built as the prime candidate to be a sessor and all the businesses that he previously owned secretly are now transferred to Grivon and Giyon out in the open.

    Right after Sam got the information from the redhead, the very day, he went along with a group of subordinates and went to the area.

    That is the storage and maintenance unit of the abominations he created so painstakingly from all the otherboratories.

    He directly destroyed the whole set-up and destroyed everyst one of the creatures that were present there and got the information from the researcher that maintained these bodies.

    After which they found all of the manufacturing ces of the abominations and blew up the whole operation.

    The whole thing is a big immoral racket. The things that Mingiv did to gain this army that consists of thousands of abominations is actually so immoral that the n''s leader immediately ordered the execution as soon as it was presented.

    Mingiv actually kidnapped young women from all over the realms and created a very rare gic sperm sample, and forcefully made them pregnant.

    They carried these abominations in their stomach for over nine months, But instead of giving birth to a child, they gave birth to a symbiotic creature that takes over their bodies before it consumes them whole.

    So, to put it simply, every abomination is actually a young woman with potential, a beautiful life, family and many things that are awaiting them.

    He killed all of them and made them into these abominations that have no brain whatsoever. Sam also found out that there are types in these abominations. Sometimes, the abominations mutate because of special constitutions of the young women who gave birth to them.

    The execution of Mingiv was evident and there were many fights in every single researchb and every manufacturing point they went to. They killed hundreds of people and Sam destroyed every single bit of research and every person that is remotely rted to the whole farce.

    If Sam had passed the information to the n''s leader, they would have immediately executed Mingiv, but he didn''t want some of the elders of the n to shove their ws of greed into the whole research.

    He doesn''t want this thing to fall into other people''s hands.

    So, he only gave the evidence after all of the research was destroyed.

    Sam upied everything. He gave every single property he could find to Grivon and Giyon.

    He brought Mingiv, his father and his brother to their literal knees and in the process, he crippled Malgav in many ways that he couldn''t even imagine.

    Even at this moment, Malgav who knelt down on the ground is actually worse than a corpse.

    Within three months a whole faction of the n was eliminated by Sam, Grivon and Giyon and the damage is so extensive that the other factions that had designs against Sampletely backed down.

    Everyone watched as the crimes were dictated by the n executioner.

    The man has arge axe in his hands and he came to them slowly.

    The three men watched as the death loomed over them and finally as he swung the axe, they died with all the regrets they couldn''t swallow.

    Sam looked at the three heads that were rolling on the ground and then looked at the weeping mother on the side.

    She looked at him with hatred. She knew her son hasmitted unspeakable things, but that doesn''t mean she is willing to see him dead.

    Whatever her son did, in her opinion is not a crime that is punishable by death. Particrly a death that strips them of all of his dignity.

    Sam, Grivon and Giyon along with Jyon walked back to Giyon''s residence.

    This is also the day that some of the subordinates that they sent after the properties of Sivan.

    In these three months, Sivan has been unexpectedly calm. He didn''t make a single move and he took a rather disastrous beating on every side organization he had under his wing.

    They took over two organizationspletely and they are now under Giyon and Grivon''s control.

    Now they already sent people to take care of the third organization.

    As soon as they entered, their subordinates are already waiting there.

    While they are going through the reports, Saran''s subordinates came all of a sudden.

    "Sir Sam, Master Saran would like to see you. If you do not mind, he would like to invite you to his residence. He asked you to visit whenever you can."

    The subordinate is very anxious and Sam frowned because of that.

    "I will being now. Lead the way."

    After that, both of them went away.

    In a few minutes within Saran''s residence. The subordinate left Sam in the hall where Saran received him.

    He then took him to the private room.

    Sam saw Saran''s wife taking care of the four kids with a loving gaze. Sam couldn''t help but smile as he looked at them.

    "What do you want to talk to me about?"

 Chapter 1441 - Visitors

    <h4>Chapter 1441 - Visitors</h4>

    "There is some suspicious activity within the city.

    I found out some of the spies of other organizations are sniffing around the city, trying to gain information about me.

    They are trying to see if I am the same person as before the weird phenomenon. They are asking if I had kids and how my delivery went. It seems like keeping quiet about it and not letting anybody see the kids has raised some suspicions.

    But I don''t understand how someone can even know of the special situation of the kids. It is impossible for the news to go out through the n, as even the n members don''t know.

    The only suspicious thing is that hill and the lightning phenomenon which you took the me for. So, why are they stilling with more and more questions?

    From the past month, they have been increasing by arge amount every day. I caught three maids that are trying to infiltrate my household and two of my subordinates were reced by some disguised men.

    This is making me panic."

    Sam frowned as he heard what Saran said.

    "The situation is indeed troubling. "

    He looked at the children that arepeting with each other to gain their mother''s attention. He couldn''t help but shake his head.

    "What have you done after catching them? Did you get any information on who sent them?"

    "No. The only thing I know is that they are sent by the same person, but there is not much information about that person in their heads.

    They met at different locations and these people never even saw his face. He is very smart.

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "The situation is really bad. If you try too hard to hide your children now, they will be more curious ande after you with more force, but if you revealed them and your children turned out to be what they are looking for, things wouldn''t be good then either.

    I need to think about it a bit.

    I just hope that you handle it a bit gently. You cannot make any rash moves. I will try and see if we can find out anything regarding them with Giyon and Grivon''s intelligencework.

    If we know who the enemy is at least, we would be able to prepare ourselves for whates next.

    We need to know the motives before preparations. I will try and think of some remedies. I will stay in touch."

    Sam didn''t waste time and left immediately after the discussion.

    He met with Giyon and Grivon to exin the situation.

    "I am really puzzled by this. If the constitutions are the only things that are making these children special, why don''t you pull off one of your inventions that hides the said constitutions? I am sure you are perfectly capable of it."

    "Yes, I am. But that is not the problem here.

    I don''t exactly know whether the people that areing here are looking for just the constitutions."

    "What do you mean?"

    "From what Saran said, people are investigating him, particrly regarding the lightning incident, his kids and anything weird that might have happened after the babies are born.

    But why are they asking those questions? In fact, he said that they are looking for the number of children specifically. The news of the babies shouldn''t have even gotten out.

    This whole thing is bigger than I initially thought. And since the people behind this managed to send someone to infiltrate directly into Saran''s subordinates, things are not going to be easy.

    Help me find out who is looking and why are they are looking. I will then proceed with the rest."

    Giyon and Grivonplied without any resistance.

    They just let Sam use the whole informationwork as he pleased and for the next week, theypletely focused on finding people who came seeking information.

    They did get some tips. Sam didn''t alert them and only kept the subordinates on their tail trying to find out what exactly they are seeking.

    He was surprised by the results though.

    From the information he received and the description of how the groups operated, he categorized them into different groups.

    One group is mostly concerned about the timings of the delivery, the number of kids and the colour of the lightning.

    The second group is trying to get information regarding the gic ancestry of the parents.

    The third group is only interested in the supposed experiment Sam has conducted. But they are also a bit suspect regarding the children.

    After separating them and understanding how much they knew, Sam decided to make a move.

    They shouldn''t be here, but he cannot forcefully send them away without any proper reason as that would only increase the suspicions of the people behind them.

    So, he cooked up a n and decided to deal with them all in one fell swoop in a hidden way.

    The next day, the whole city turned a bit chaotic. Sam used his newly gained connections to make the city guards ck off in their patrol in particr areas. Then a bunch of mob fights started out of nowhere.

    All the fights urred at the very ces where these three groups of people are staying. The same group of people that sessfully created the dawn operation were put on this.

    And in what looked like a chaotic mob fight, all three teams are mostly dead. Barely one or two people with severe injuries were left.

    They immediately left the city to recuperate. They never expected that so many powerful people will appear like that and make their ce on a battlefield.

    They know for sure that if the investigation was to take ce, the Gaja n might look into them and their covers will be blown.

    So, they decided toy low outside the city for a short while.

    But as soon as they escaped the city, they were killed by Sam''s group and their souls were collected.

    A group decided to stay within the city, but they were also mysteriously killed, but no one was there to care about them anyway, so they were ignored.

    After collecting the information from the souls, Sam finally got some clues.

    The three groups are indeedpletely different as they don''t have any connection between them. But there is also no information on who the employer of each group is.

    They all seemed to be working for various mercenary groups. The groups might as well be hired by anyone in the world to get the information.

    But at least, now they have someone to go after directly.

    As Sam, Giyon and Grivon busied themselves, the Gaja n is also a bit chaotic.

    The same day that Sam created all thismotion, some guests visited the Gaja n.

    They are actually the n that Mingiv''s mother belonged to before she was married into the Gaja n.

    After the execution, she went back to her n, and for some reason, they visited the Gaja n.

    The n''s leader of the Gaja n met with the Grand Elder and some other elders and youngsters that belonged to that n.

    "What do we owe the pleasure of your visit? Elder Rebo?"

    "I am here to apologize on behalf of the impudent words that were said by one of our n''s offspring. We came here to make amends."

    The old man said with a smile.

    n''s leader looked at the old man with suspicion and asked.

    "Then why did you bring so many elders and youngsters? They are not the ones at fault and in fact we can understand why she said those words. We don''t have any problem with that."

    Old man Rebo smiled awkwardly and said.

    "I am ashamed to say this, but we also wanted to take this chance to let our youngsters experience the prowess of the younger generation of the Gaja n.

    We would like them to experience and broaden their horizons. That is if you don''t mind of course."

    n''s leader thought for a moment and just agreed.

    A few residences were arranged.

    But to the surprise of the Gaja n, another guest arrived the very next day.

    This time, the status of the guest is also very high.

    It is someone from a sect that is on the same level as the Gaja n, Mari n and Star-eyed sect.

    In fact, the person that came is the Grand Elder of that sect.

    "The Grand Elder of the Tri-Volcano sect, Mendi. Do what do I owe this fortune?"

    The n''s leader greeted the man with a smile as he went for a hug.

    "My dear friend. How long has it been since we met? A decade?" The man reciprocated the hug.

    He took a step back and both of them sized up each other.

    Mendi has thick red hair that was tied into a braid.

    He looked the same age as the n''s leader and from their conversation, anyone could guess that they were friends.

    After making some small talk, Mendi came right to the point.

    "I have a very interesting proposal and I am pretty sure you will be interested."

 Chapter 1442 - Competition

    <h4>Chapter 1442 - Competition</h4>

    Sam, Giyon and Grivon spent three days dealing with the mercenary group. But now they got some leads that are even more confusing.

    One of them is a young man whose identity that even the mercenary group doesn''t know about. The other mercenary group is targeted by a woman and she turned out to be a woman that belonged to another small organization, but she was also found dead by the time they went searching for her.

    As for the third organization, it is a mercenary group that did this by themselves. They are trying to suck up to Mari n as they originally operated within the area controlled by the n.

    Now they pissed someone off there too bad that they had to run away. They came to the Gaja n''s territory, learned about Sam and wanted to sell some information off back to Sivan so that they could have their ce secured back in their old territory.

    So, this eliminated one of the possibilities.

    But when they came back, they met with some surprise that made them feel a bit overwhelmed.

    The whole Gaja n is filled with a chaotic festive atmosphere. The youngsters of all levels of cultivation are training rigorously and arge-scale venue is being prepared in the middle of the estate.

    When they went to Giyon''s residence, Gail is waiting for them with the news.

    "Arge scalepetition is being held. A tournament for every cultivation level with the Astral ne.

    We are going to select the best from every category and the whole group is going to represent Gaja n."

    "Represent in what?" Grivon asked in a hurry as he remembered all themotion. Every member of the Gaja n''s younger generation looked so pumped. He felt like he missed out on something big.

    "One of the biggest tournaments of the century. I haven''t seen apetition of this scale for hundred years and even then, thepetition was held by the youngsters of the various sects and ns by themselves without the involvement of the management of the organizations.

    But now, the Tri-Volcano Sect took it upon themselves to organize arge scale tournament for the younger generation of all the major powers throughout the realms.

    Many organizations on par with the Gaja n are going to participate. Even organizations that we barely heard of are going toe."

    "Really? Why is a tournament of such scale suddenly being conducted out of nowhere?" Giyon asked Skeptically, while Grivon looked visibly excited.

    "The Tri-volcano sect, Star eye sect and Yavan n discovered a new realm by chance. They said that it is a realm that was connected by a dormant wormhole to another realm that was already in control of all three organizations.

    Recently the dormant wormhole opened up and from what they described, the realm is a treasure trove with all kinds of resources.

    They said that it is also connected with several other stray realms.

    The three organizations knew that it would be hard for them to keep it to themselves as it is not the gateway is not that far away and some skilled space elemental formation masters might even be able to open up a one-sided space gate, once they learned of this with some tries.

    The resources also seemed to have appeared too varied for their liking, so they decided to share the realm between the younger generation of all of the organizations.

    They will conduct a tournament and the winner of every category of the tournament will be winning some spectacr prizes along with part of the territory within the realm.

    They can keep the prize and if the prize is the permanent allocation of the territory, they can keep it as well, but as for the territory that is offered along with the prize, it can only be used by the winner temporarily for a decade.

    After the decade another tournament will be held and the winners will get the territories once again. This is to make sure that no one hoards the resourcespletely and everyone has an equal opportunity.

    This is going to be a legendary tournament and the first tournament is obviously going to be remembered as one of the best in history.

    Everyone who won now would be recorded in the history books."

    Gail exined with a smile as he looked at his nephew and daughter.

    "I will pass. I am not interested."

    Giyon rejected without a second thought.

    Grivon was stunned.

    "What the hell? Are you sure about that? Why would you miss such a tournament? It is¡­"

    "Because I genuinely don''t care. I have my own thoughts and I don''t need the help of a tournament like this to leave my name in the history books.

    Anyway, this thing doesn''t align with my goals. But I guess you can go."

    "Of course, I am going. I am going to be the best of my category and I will win every prize there is."

    Gail smiled and said.

    "Good thing that you are excited. I was worried that I would have to leave without anypany from you guys."

    "What? You are going?" Giyon was a bit surprised.

    "Of course, not just me. Even Gamin and Yuvana are going. We are going along with the n''s leader. To be the security for the participants. Jyon is alsoing with us since she is also excited to meet people from different ces."

    While they are all talking, Sam who didn''t care about any part of this left to meet Saran.

    "We found some clues, but only one of them is slightly warm. The rest went cold. One group is not even here to deal with the kids."

    "Why did you guys go by yourselves? I could have sent my subordinates to deal with this."

    "No need. All you need to do is care about your children and your wife. I will handle this."

    Sam said resolutely.

    Saran looked at him with a frown.

    "I know that you are trying to help. But this is freaking me out. You are caring way too much for a doctor that helped us as a part of the transaction. It is at least understandable that we are the ones that are overly affectionate to you.

    Why are you acting so affectionate and taking so many risks for us?"

    Sam stayed silent for a moment and took a deep breath.

    "I know you are worried. But your children¡­

    I just don''t want them to suffer the consequences for just being born. They are innocent just because they are born special."

    "Why are you so sure that they are going to suffer some consequences?"

    "I was not sure until the lightning hit and the hill started stabilizing the condition of your kids. Do you think that nature and the world are so kind that it would give such a great coincidental service that helps you?

    No, the world and nature might be generous with what they offer, but they are never kind. The lightning strikes on the hill might even be the work of someone for all we know.

    It was way too simr and way too beneficial to be close.

    And when something like this happens all of a sudden, there is no way you guys are the only ones that would know about childbirth. Someone knew and saved them, which means, there is a possibility that many others knew.

    The search parties that came only increased my suspicion¡­."

    Sam almost vented every thought he had regarding these kids.

    "Sam, they are my kids."

    Saran interrupted him in the middle and looked at him in a confused state.

    "Of course, they are your kids, I know that. They are lucky that they have a loving father like you and an even more loving mother like her. It helps that you guys are strong too. But things wouldn''t go the way we liked.

    But I just want to be sure.

    If my spections turned out not to be just spections, things would be way too dangerous and if something big enough to even cross the parents as you happen, there is no saving them.

    No kid deserves that.

    I just want to make sure that no matter what problem it is, it could be nipped in the bud."

    "We are in Gaja n Sam. I know that things are not always great here. But I do believe that if pushes to shove and something that you dread reallyes, the n would side with me and my kids.

    Even if they are not kind enough, they will think of the glory and talent the kids hold and will help me save them.

    This is not the first time the n has united to protect one of us."

    "I hope you are right. But from what I know, there is no such thing as unification in an organization like yours. You are like parties formed by mercenaries when the interests are aligned. You will never have a united front and in the cases like your children who are almost nothing now, but they hold something that could make them something in the future, interests will never align.

    So, take care."

    With those words, Sam left the room with a heavy heart.

 Chapter 1443 - Mole

    <h4>Chapter 1443 - Mole</h4>

    The next day.

    The tournament for selecting the representative candidates has begun. Everyone is excited and there are a lot of spectators from outside the n.

    Most people were allowed in as long as they were vouched by someone from within the n. The audience enjoyed the massive fights that took hours to be done and some fights that were over in a second.

    They all cheered for their favourite youngster of the n.

    The tournament went for three days straight and Sam stayed within the basement for three days as he created something.

    He made four robes and gave them to Saran on the third day.

    When Saran covered one of the babies with the robe, he wasn''t able to sense the constitution. The concealment is perfect.

    He heaved a sigh of relief and covered all the kids with the robes. Even though sometimes they might get irritated, he knew for sure that this is the best choice.

    Along with the robes Sam also gave a formation disc that could be used for short time frames whenever they had to remove the robe off of a baby.

    The day after the tournament was over, the selected candidates set off to the main tournament venue.

    From what Sam learned, the tournament would go for fifteen to twenty days. So, Grivon wouldn''t be here for that long and Sam has to take care of the forces andmand them.

    Sam and Giyon went to send them off. There are a lot of people leaving. Two Grand Elders along with Gail, Gamin and Yuvana. The security of the whole thing is scary.

    This indicated how important the tournament is and how nasty the situation would get if things were to go slightly wrong.

    The n''s leader didn''t go as he has a lot of things to manage from within the n, but he is relieved that Gail and others went as security. Now, he doesn''t have to be worried about anything.

    He looked at this friend Mendi who is taking everyone to the tournament venue. Even though he trusts his friend, there is a faint nagging feeling deep inside his heart. But when he looked at Gail, he knew things would turn out alright no matter what was thrown at them.

    After they left, Sam spent another week in seclusion. Except when he was giving lessons to the kids, he didn''t bother toe out of the stray realm. He gave instructions to the artisans to drop most of the other research to create some puppets and four of them are the puppets that looked like babies.

    The puppet bodies were manufactured and since Sam doesn''t need anythingplicated from these puppets they were pretty easy to make.

    After the bodies, Sam then proceeded to make flesh and skin for them. He needs to make sure they looked as real as possible.

    Even though it is impossible to create some kind of baby android, it is still good enough as long as it is convincing when the babies are ced in another set of robes, which he patiently made.

    Then finally Sam gave them a lethal touch.

    Since the mechanism is notplicated and they don''t have to make extreme movements, these baby puppets have a lot of space left inside even though they are very small.

    He filled the whole cavity with liquid energies of four different elements. Wind, light, dark and metal. The four elements that the babies are originally born with.

    He finished everything properly and took the puppets to Saran.

    He also gave the tokens to activate the explosions of liquid energy.

    "Please, be very, very, very careful with these tokens. Even if the person is of your cultivation level, things wouldn''t end up good if they are holding the puppet and has their guardpletely down.

    They will be suffering some serious damage."

    "Thank you."

    Saran just said these two words. From the previous rant Sam went on, he understood that he is just trying to help the kids to mend some of his past wounds.

    Since he figured Sam could have done anything by now, if he were really trying to harm them, he let him be.

    After getting the puppets, Saran''s family finally rxed a bit.

    Now they don''t have topulsively hide the fact that they had children even though the whole world knows it.

    Some of the servants who were tightly held back from visiting some of the rooms just to make sure that they don''t have to see the babies were once again allowed to do their previous tasks. Of course, Saran''s wife and the children were still kept in rtive privacy from the rest.

    After this, Sam gave orders to the informationworks to keep an eye on any person thates looking for the lightning, hill, babies of Saran and all three of them together while he immersed himself within the task of increasing Grivon''s assets.

    It could be said, Grivon''s wealth has grown very much since Sam came. He now has dozens of new businesses in new fields and he also gained new realms under his control. That alone is enough to make him the richest among his peers.

    In the process, Sam is also dealing with Sivan''s assets one by one.

    From the information he received, Sivan is also going to the tournament. It has already been three months since Sivan remotely made any more, Sam doesn''t know the exact reason, but they didn''t dare to attack a power very close to Mari n, since there would be a chance that they would get noticed and get attacked.

    But now that the Mari n must have also sent a lot of people away for the tournament and particrly since Sivan is gone, Sam felt that it is the perfect time to destroy some assets that are close to Mari n and also core to Sivan''s stability.

    This time, he didn''t even focus on conquering thend and taking over.

    The area he is targeting is too close to Mari n and they wouldn''t be able to hold the ground when the other side bes serious. It would be a waste of many resources.

    The main goal this time is to destroy a business, loot the collected resources and destroy the resource points.

    Sam drafted a list of ns and sent an elite team tounch attacks at different points.

    While things are going smoothly, something else is happening behind the scenes which both Sam and Saran don''t know anything about.

    And it is has something to do with Mingiv''s mother''s n.

    Since they came that day a few days ago, they didn''t leave. They stayed within the n and ording to the rumours they decided to stay here for two months. So, there is a lot of time for them to return.

    In fact, they even managed to get some of their own participants to try out in the selection tournament.

    Of course, they knew that they wouldn''t be selected, but the battle experience in a ce like this is bound to be prestigious for them.

    Everyone just thought that they are trying to remain in Gaja n''s favour and they are just here to kiss ass for a few months before leaving.

    It is understandable as the matrimony that kept the rtionship between the two ns was now gone.

    But without anyone knowing, the Grand Elder Rebo is doing something else.

    Outside the city, a canyon that is at least half-a-day away from the city, Grand elder Rebo is currently walking as he looked at every nook and cranny of the canyon with a scroll in his hands.

    He is reading the description again and again as he examined the shapes of various protrusions of the canyon.

    After twenty minutes of search, he finally found the spot he was looking for and injected his spiritual energy into the canyon wall.

    The canyon rumbled a bit and a small passage opened up right near his feet. He jumped in and the ground closed up once again with another rumble.

    Rebonded in an underground cavepletely illuminated with some trinkets.

    There is a group of people sitting at various spots while meditating and some of them are practising their battle skills with swords and spears.

    When they saw the old man walking, they all stopped what they are doing and one of them walked to him.

    "How is the situation in Gaja n? Did they suspect you?"

    "No. We sessfully got in and gelled together with them. There are no suspicions and they all left for the tournament just like you mentioned.

    I came to inform you that."

    "Oh? They finally left?"

    "Yes, Gail, Gamin and Yuvana. The three people that you are worried about are also not here. But the n leader and two more grand elders are still left behind. I am more concerned about them."

    "No, Grand Elders are far easier to deal with whenpared to those three. You wouldn''t understand even if I exin.

    Just go back and wait there.. We will inform you when the time is right."

 Chapter 1444 - Rebo

    <h4>Chapter 1444 - Rebo</h4>

    A week passed.

    Sam received the letter regarding the situation of the teams and how their attacks are going on the organizations.

    He is also keeping an eye on any new and suspicious people that are entering the city. He made sure that any inquiry regarding the kids, lightning, hill and Saran wouldn''t go past him. But luckily, nothing happened within the week.

    At this moment, he sat in the stray realm within his personal room.

    He had his legs crossed and eyes closed as he meditated.

    The energy fluctuations around him are chaotic, but when one looked closely even that chaos has a certain control and restrain to it.

    As minutes passed, the energy concentration kept on increasing.

    *BOOM*

    With an energy wave that came out of his body and a loud explosive sound, Sam finally opened his eyes. He broke through. He is currently at the Peak stage of Astral ne Transcendence.

    He must say that it is really easy to break through from within this body. The energy absorption rate is high, the cultivation technique is much simpler, the energy requirements are very lowpared to his old body.

    He doesn''t have to spare as many resources as he would have.

    As for why he hurriedly broke through in this chaotic mess, one reason is that there is no wrong time to increase the strength and the second reason is that he got the news that Sivan has broken through to the peak stage.

    It is necessary for Sam to keep p with Sivan''s cultivation since he doesn''t know when he would get a chance to take his body back. He needs to make sure that he grabs the chance and the exchange happens sessfully only when two of them are on the same level of cultivation.

    The only problem he currently has now is what method must have been used by Sivan to break through like this. If he is overdosing the body with medicines and all the other harmful shit that might impede the potential, then Sam would be needed to perform a cleansing of the whole body.

    Which is not exactly a good task to think about.

    He tested his body for his new strength for a few minutes before he walked out.

    He looked at the daily reports of the informants within the city and noticed something weird.

    The movements of Grand Elder Rebo and his subordinates are a bit odd. For the past three days straight, he has been visiting all kinds of ces within the Gaja n. At least every ce that he has ess to.

    It is something that shouldn''t be happening in normal conditions. The main reason he noticed is that some of the activity is focused on the areas of Grivon''s and Jyon''s residences.

    Even though Sam doesn''t have a particrly cordial rtionship with Jyon, it doesn''t mean, he could ignore anything that concerned her.

    At least luckily, for now, she is not present.

    Sam contacted Giyon who is still within her residence in the n estate.

    "Finally. I almost thought that you forgot you are doing business with me too. What made you contact me now?"

    "The Grand Elder Rebo that stayed here as a guest. I think he is up to something. Keep an eye on him."

    "That old man? Even I can handlebat if I am a bit prepared. What is the point of keeping an eye on him?" Giyon asked with a frown.

    "Here I thought you siblings might have learned something from your stay with me all this while. Do you really think cultivation level is all that matters? You might see a decently strong old man in him.

    I see a decently strong man with a few decently strong subordinates having ess to more than half of the estate within which there are many formation nodes that are hidden for outsiders to not get inside.

    What do you think the possibilities if they really are smart enough with enough resources and they want to do something?"

    "Alright, alright. I will check him out. Don''t worry too much. My brother is out there enjoying and even my sister went away.

    Just don''t think too much and take a break as well. With all the work you have been putting, I believe that you deserve it more than most."

    "Thanks for your consideration. I already had the informants keep an eye on the old man. But it would be better if you can work this out from the administrator''s point of view. I am pretty sure that even they might have noticed this."

    "You are probably overthinking. There is no way that old man Rebo has the balls to do anything against the Gaja n. Their n is way too cowardly and we are the only ones that are backing them right now.

    With our support, they ran rampant a few years. Now, they have no choice but to try and kiss the n''s leader''s ass."

    "I hope you are right."

    Sam went back after warning her. But for the next few days, they saw that the old man Rebo has been behaving oddly.

    He started paying visits to different parts of the estate and some even the ces which don''t have permission and ess.

    He is hovering over different locations and staying there for some time with some out of the ce talk.

    He talked about all kinds of things. Sometimes he pissed off some elders for no apparent reason. His demeanour also changed slowly as he became more cocky and bitchy about everyone in the n.

    After another week of this bullshit, one day.

    Grand Elder Rebo''s guest residence.

    *CRACK* *PAK*

    A ss broke and a p wasnded.

    Rebo has pped the attendant that served wine to him.

    "What is with that look of disdain on your face? For a pathetic attendant like you, even serving wine to someone like me should have been an honour, but you are giving me that expression as if you are treating a dog to a meal?

    Who gave you the guts?

    Do you think you can behave as you like, just because you are a pathetic attendant of the Gaja n? Even your n''s leader wouldn''t dare treat me like this."

    The attendant frowned at his words. He is not really concerned about the p on his face. Because he is not really the attendant.

    He is the informant of Giyon who infiltrated into the attendant ranks just to get here and confirm what this guy is doing.

    Indeed, he gave that look of disdain, because he absolutely disdains this guy. An old man acting all high and mighty, while using his guest status. He is the worst kind of person that he could ever interact with.

    With being Giyon''s direct subordinate, he hase into contact with many people. He has never seen anyone as fucking annoying as this guy.

    And now his words are tantly saying that he is so full of himself that he thinks the n''s leader of the Gaja n would be considerate of him to not dare do anything.

    He is clearly up to something.

    As he was thinking another p came at him. But this time he directly blocked it.

    "Don''t you darey your hand on me, old man? You better keep your mouth shut too. Things wouldn''t go well for you otherwise."

    He left the room as soon as he was done and he called Giyon directly.

    "Madam, this guy is getting out of line¡­ He went on to exin everything.

    "Stay there and keep him under control. Don''t let him go out of control anymore."

    She then called Sam and said.

    "Things are really as you suspected. I guess the n must have also noticed this. I will give a heads-up to the n''s enforcement and investigation department."

    "Please do."

    Sam said as he looked at a report that just came into his hand.

    There is a new group in the townst night.

    The group looked extremely suspicious. Sam doesn''t know if this is in any way rted to this or not. But as soon as they came, they went to an inn and stayed there. In fact from the information he got, they directly slept.

    They literally slept on the soft beds as if they don''t have anything else to do in this world.

    But soon he realized that something is indeed wrong with these guys.

    When the information Giyon gave reached the n''s leader, he sent the enforcement and investigative department heads directly to make the Old man Rebo and his subordinates. He decided to send them away.

    However, to everyone''s surprise, the whole fiasco didn''t go well.

    Instead, the old man threw arge tantrum.

    "Who the fuck do you bastards think that I am? Do you think that your Gaja n is all that because you are some kind of big and powerful n? How dare you disrespect me? I will kill you bastards. I will destroy all of you and your n.

    I will kill all of you.

    I will kill you for disrespecting me."

 Chapter 1445 - Attack

    <h4>Chapter 1445 - Attack</h4>

    Old man Rebo was dragged to the main hall of the Gaja n when his hysterical crazy screaming was in full swing.

    He screamed and scolded everything about Gaja n, spewing the worst of the insults. He didn''t even spare the Gaja n''s leaders and kept on scolding.

    This only stopped when he was drawn into Gaja n''s Leader''s presence. The n''s leader''s look of pure rage made the old man Rebo shudder in his own skin and he went silent directly.

    "It seems like Grand Elder Rebo has something to say about Gaja n. Please continue. I will listen to everything you have to say. But do remember this, the moment you finish your words, you are going to die.

    So, if you want to leave, you need to keep on speaking something. The second your mouth stops making noise, I will kill you in the worst way you could imagine."

    Rebo shuddered once again and he almost peed in his pants. He involuntarily looked at the floor. The crystal mirror-like floor reflected his pathetic face to him and when he looked at that tired, scared and disgusting old face, he couldn''t control himself.

    The anger once again came out and he looked at the n''s leader.

    "Do you think I am going to be scared shitless because of your threat? Do you want to kill me? For that, you need to be alive, you bastard. You will die today. Within a few minutes, you will die a tasteless, undignified death, you along with everyone else in the Gaja n.

    You are all going to die.

    How dare you insult our n? You can''t even control the crazy freaks of your own n. The experimentation of the Mingiv, do you think no one knows about it?

    Everyone knows. Everyone knows that Gaja n finally levelled the ying field with the Mari n, but being as disgusting as them.

    Your time hase faster than Mari n though. You will die soon and our n shall benefit from the death of your whole n and its legacy."

    Everyone in the hall was stunned to their core. They couldn''t fathom someone from a low-level n talking to them in that tone, much less openly threatening them.

    Before the n leader could say something though, the old man took out a token and broke it.

    As soon as he did that, the subordinates of the elder that are currently being locked up one by one at different locations of the n, suddenly stopped struggling and moving and stood still.

    They looked at the sky with no expression in their eyes. They became like zombies and spirituality started building up in their bodies.

    The guards that are capturing them noticed this and swiftly jumped to the side.

    But it was useless.

    *BOOM*

    Massive explosions urred as their bodies exploded with a bloody mist and a bit of spiritual energy wave.

    As soon as the first explosion urred the formation has triggered, but before it couldpletely formte,

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    All of the elders and disciples that came with the Old man started exploding. They exploded because of their self-destruction, and the explosions caused the formation to die out all of a sudden.

    Everyone in the n heard the explosions. Giyon who was going through the records in her residence, Elders that are working on their daily tasks. The workers and attendants that are performing their menial services.

    Everyone heard the explosions and they all felt terrified.

    This is the core of the Gaja n. Even when Sam threatened them with some of his own explosions, they were just afraid a bit as most of the explosions happened outside the city wall.

    But now something happened right in the middle of the n estate.

    There is no way, they could calm down after this. Everyone dropped their task and came out to see what has happened.

    Giyon in particrly came out running as she could sense the explosion''s location which is not too far away.

    When she looked at the scene, she understood what happened.

    The explosion is simr to the ones Sam caused, but this time instead of using some energy, formations and a clever trick, it is caused by the self-destruction of a person.

    The explosion disrupted the formation making it useless.

    She knows what that means. Someone doesn''t want the Gaja n to have a formation that could make them feel safe by restricting outsiders.

    It is an attack on the Gaja n.

    She immediately took out amunication token and spoke.

    "Emergency of the highest level. Assemble at my residence."

    Her voice was steady and firm. She didn''t panic, didn''t even know a hint of fear. She just coldly called for all of her top subordinates toe and meet her.

    Her elite squad is still in the city, so there are no problems. She also contacted Sam and exined the situation.

    Sam alsomanded every one of the elites under Grivon''s subordination and immediately sent them to the n''s estate, while he also wrapped everything up in the stray realm as he moved to the Gaja n.

    If even the Gaja n is under attack, there is very little that he could do, but he cannot stay there. He needs to save the children no matter what if pushes to shove.

    But before Sam could even make it anywhere near the gate of the Gaja n, someone else made it.

    A group of twenty-five people with menacing auras. The same group that Sam suspected the day before. The same group that Old Man Rebo met within the canyon secretly.

    The same group that is about to bring the biggest challenge that the Gaja n has ever faced.

    They barged through the gates and killed everyone they saw.

    Youngsters that are confused about the sudden explosions, the guards that are afraid of what might happen due to the absence of formations, the captain of the guards that was giving the instructions to his subordinates so that they could tone down the panic.

    Everyone that is within the few meters of the gate was killed one by one, without even having a chance to defend themselves, not as they could do it. But they didn''t even know why they are dying and what the problem is.

    They just died.

    After the initial ughter at the gate. The group split into three.

    One with eight, the other one with nine and thest one with eight members again.

    One group went directly to the space gate location of the n and the leader of that group is also a space element user.

    He went to turn off the space gatespletely so that no one would escape and the unwanted personnel wouldn''te and they also need to make sure that the person that they need to arrive would arrive here.

    One of the teams went to the main hall of the n. Where n''s leader and some of his highly skilled trusted subordinates and some important members of the n are present.

    At the same time, the third one ran in one particr direction, but halfway through their way, they split into two groups of four.

    Four of them went in one direction and the other four continued in the same direction as before.

    Giyon''s subordinates finally reached the gate, when the groups already split up and left. They immediately made their way to Giyon''s residence. And a few minutes after that, Sam managed toe to the gate. He stood there and observed the dead bodies a bit.

    He couldn''t estimate the strength of the people that came as the deaths seemed very swift. The range of strength could be from anywhere to anywhere.

    He gritted his teeth after some thought and looked at one of the dead bodies before using the spectre to collect the soul.

    He absorbed the memories to get a better idea of what happened when the person was dying and he paid all the focus and attention he could muster in that one moment.

    But he didn''t get much. Because all the person felt when they died is the terror and the overwhelming strength swallowing them.

    All Sam could say is that the attacker is at least a middle-stage Consummate stage cultivator of Astral ne.

    In fact, he might even be at ate stage or even peak stage. Sam has no way of determining.

    He looked ahead and thought of where to go. He doesn''t know if he should go and meet Giyon or to Saran''s residence.

    As he was contemting, Giyon suddenly called through themunication token.

    "Where are you?"

    "I am at the gate. I saw the dead bodies of the guards and an elder. They all died instantly. The cultivation level should only be Middle-stage of the Astral ne or higher. Not any lesser."

    "How many people entered the n?"

    "I don''t know¡­" Sam was about to say something, but the informants suddenly called in and said.

    "Sir Sam. The people that attacked the n is the same group that we noticed yesterday. The people that slept in the inn directly.

    They left a few minutes ago as soon as the explosions happened in the Gaja n and they didn''t go through the public space gates or the gates. They didn''t even use the secret routes of the slums. The n estate is the only thing we could think of.

    I confirmed with all the other informants in other areas."

    Sam sighed and called Giyon.

    "Twenty-five. That is the number of the group that entered the n.. But I don''t if they are the only ones."

 Chapter 1446 - Kids

    <h4>Chapter 1446 - Kids</h4>

    Giyon didn''t reply for a moment and said.

    "Don''t enter the n. We don''t know how the situation will turn out. If they really just came with twenty-five people, they must be really powerful.

    You are useless in this situation and will only get in the way."

    "I need to confirm that the kids are okay. My students and the babies. I need to make sure that all of them are safe before I get back."

    "Stop with your fucking paranoia, some lightning struck when the babies were born. Your obsession with looking into every single coincidence is not going to help you here. Get back to the stray realm now."

    Sam cut themunication token off and looked straight ahead. He knew that situation is dire. Nobody with the right mind will juste with twenty-five people and attack a behemoth like the Gaja n.

    Particrly not from the main gate like this.

    They either have to be dumb as a rock or they are way too strong.

    And he is pretty sure that thetter part is what made theme here.

    He knew that he would have some serious trouble if he needs to go on and save the kids, but that still doesn''t mean he can just leave them there.

    Particrly the students, cannot use spatial transference devices to escape. The transference tokens'' spatial transfer is a bit too rough. People who haven''t awakened wouldn''t be able to handle it.

    He needs to find them and ce them inside the divine dimension fragment he has before taking them away from there.

    He thought for a moment and gritted his teeth before he ran in.

    But as he was running he made a call to the subordinates of Grivon.

    "Everyone, none of you shall enter the n estate. The strength wouldn''t be sufficient. You would only be adding numbers to the death toll.

    So, stay out of the estate, but keep a tight watch on the city. Anything that appears suspicious should be reported to me without any dy."

    He didn''t even wait for their reply as he ran in. His first destination is towards Jyon''s residence where kids are staying. Even though Jyon took them in when Sam moved to Giyon''s residence, they didn''te back even after Jyon went for that tournament.

    They are being taken care of by the attendants, so Giyon particrly didn''t feel the necessity to bring them back.

    But when he is trying to make his way there, he saw some battle signs here and there and dead bodies that are popping up now and then.

    He collected their souls to see any clues and finally he had some.

    Giyon''s and Jyon''s residences are not that far away and when considering from n''s gate they could be considered to be in the same direction.

    From the memories of the dead, Sam saw four peopleing to this ce and right before this guy was dead, he saw them splitting up as they moved into four different directions.

    One of them happened to be Giyon''s residence.

    "One of them ising to your residence. Are you prepared?"

    Sam called her and asked.

    "How do you know that?"

    "I just know. Is it really important how?"

    "I told you to stay the fuck away from the n estate. What the hell are you doing inside?"

    Giyon spoke up and Sam wanted to answer, but before he could do that¡­

    *BOOM*

    He heard an explosive sound from the other side and Giyon spoke up again.

    "It seems like the asshole you mentioned just arrived. I am telling you once again. Get the fuck out of the n estate. I will deal with these people myself."

    Themunication was cut off and Sam looked a bit troubled. He doesn''t know if he should go to Giyon''s residence or if he should go to Jyon''s residence.

    But that dilemmasted only a few seconds. He immediately went to Jyon''s residence.

    He is pretty sure that Giyon would be able to handle herself and there is not much he can do in terms ofbat even if he wants to help them.

    So, he decided to go for the children directly.

    Luckily as he was making his way to Jyon''s residence, he didn''t see any dead bodies. There are of course some attendants and people that are running rampant in different directions, but there are no deadbodies and no signs of battles which is good news.

    But this changed when he reached the residence itself.

    His face paled as he looked at the guard lying dead at the entrance.

    He ran in while spectre extracted the memories from the guard. There are many more bodies of maids and attendants and he became angrier as he moved forward.

    "NOOOO¡­."

    All of a sudden he heard a scream from deep inside the residence and ran there.

    Inside Jyon''s practice room which is asrge as a battle arena, all the kids are currently struggling as a middle-aged woman is dragging one of the girls out of the group. A young man with a lecherous smile stood there as he looked at all the kids with hungry eyes.

    It didn''t take long for Sam to recognize who the woman was. It is none other than Mingiv''s mother.

    He doesn''t know where she came from, but he knows for sure that her presence here is not some sheer coincidence. This is revenge.

    Sam''s body surged with spiritual energy and he attracted the energy of the young man and thedy.

    Thedy herself is a bit startled. She is only at the peak stage of Astral ne transcendence, the same level as Sam and even the young man is of that cultivation level.

    There is no contest there. Sam is very confident that he would be able to deal with the situation easily.

    When thedy saw Sam though, she didn''t realize this and smiled crazily.

    "You are here. I thought you would be too much of a coward toe and I might have needed to record the whole thing and send it to you.

    Since you are right here. It would be even better.

    I will catch you and tie you up before making you watch all of these kids getting raped.

    Aren''t these bastards the reason for my son''s death? I will make you go through the ultimate suffering.

    Sam really didn''t care what she is saying.

    He was about to step forward when thedy crushed a token.

    Sam sensed something from behind and activated his energy shield covering himselfpletely.

    Green smoke came out of the walls with a slight explosive sound. The poisonous gas came at Sam with full force that he even felt the pressure of it.

    The smoke didn''tst long though. It disappeared as fast as it came and Sam stood there with the energy barrier.

    But his reaction was not fast enough as some gas managed to get in.

    He inhaled it involuntarily.

    "The poison concocted with a thousand different herbs. I heard that you are skilled in medicine. I would like to see how you will save yourself from this and if you are focused on saving yourself, who will save these kids?"

    *Cough* *Cough*

    Sam coughed as he felt the burning sensation inside his lungs.

    He could feel the poison getting into his blood. He took out the injector and just injected himself with it.

    But when he was busy with that, the young man went to the kids while thedy came to Sam and started attacking him.

    Sam created an energy barrier as he injected himself with one vial after another. The poison is indeed too diverse for him to directly cure it. Themon anti-venom he has is working, but it is not fast enough.

    He only felt a bit relieved after he injected himself with four vials. But even then, he managed to hold the barrier.

    He didn''t even flinch once and finally when he felt clear enough from the poison, he just deactivated the barrier and let her fistse.

    He caught the fist that came at his face. The energy exploded at the point of contact and the fist exploded along with it.

    "AHHHH¡­"

    "It seems like you didn''t know enough of me."

    "Sam said as he caught hold of the stump at the hand and kicked her in the ribs from the side, breaking them in the process.

    She started bleeding from her abdominal cavity and was about to fall on the floor. But even before that, another kick came in andnded on the same spot and this time, his foot went directly into the rib cage through the flesh and bone.

    Thedy died and fell on the floor.

    The young man who was trying to force himself on the kids was stumped.

    Specter went to the olddy to get the information while Sam walked forward to the young man.

    "I.. I didn''t want to do this. She forced me."

    The young man sensed the killing intent and spoke with a stutter.

    "I will find out after you are dead.. So, don''t bother exining yourself."

 Chapter 1447 - Plan

    <h4>Chapter 1447 - n</h4>

    Fifteen minutester.

    Sam wiped the blood off of his foot and the fist. He threw the corpses into the storage while the spectre transferred the souls.

    But before he could go through it, he looked at the kids and said.

    "I will give you some precise instructions now and you need to follow them.

    The Gaja n is under attack. Someone infiltrated the n and even the protective formations are destroyed.

    Most of the strength of the n was away. If Giyon''s father or uncle and aunt are here, we would have been much safer.

    I will not lie to you. We are in a dire situation. We don''t know if we are going to stay alive after this. But there is one thing I can tell you, as long as your teacher is alive, nothing will happen to you."

    He looked at the kids as he paused. They are all a bit tense. This is way too much for kids of their age, particrly when they grew up in a protected environment like this.

    If this is in Starwood city, the kids would have been looking for what they could gain from all this chaos.

    He shook his head off of these random thoughts and spoke again.

    "Did I ever say a lie to you?"

    The kids shook their heads.

    "I am not going to start now. Just follow my instructions and as long as I am alive, nobody can touch you. And your teacher is not something that could be killed easily.

    Since you are my students, you should be as strong as me mentally. Do you understand?"

    The kids nodded.

    Sam then proceeded to send them into divine dimension fragments. The earth elemental one he got from one of the League of Blood Iron members.

    After that was set aside. He went through the information while injecting a healing vial to him. For some reason, he is feeling a burning sensation in the lungs even though he injected the anti-venom vials he had.

    The poison clearly stopped spreading, but it seems like the impact on the lungs was immediate and it didn''t go away.

    Even after the healing vial, he still felt that slight burning sensation, even though most of it is numbed down a lot.

    But even that was thrown to the back of his head when he was done with the memories.

    He was so shocked that he stayed still for a few seconds in the middle of injecting and shuddered slightly.

    Thedy and the young man that she brought, both belonged to the same n as Rebo. But by now Sam clearly knew that they didn''t act on their n''s ord and this is a n created by some very high-level backing.

    He expected the backing to be from some kind of other n or sect. he even expected it to be a syndicate of a bunch of organizations, but what he didn''t expect is that it is actually Divine League that attempted this.

    The league that ys asckeys for the gods and the league Giyon, Gail and Gamin talked over for a few times.

    It is very powerful and it is more of an organization than the League of Blood Iron. At most the league of blood iron is a group of strong individuals that act independently. But the Divine league is much more tightknit. Even though they also act independently and everyone looks for their own personal interests with them being members of their own organizations, they help each other out and benefit from mutual gains.

    As long as they are ordered by the gods they frequently contact, they form a faction immediately and act as one.

    The only reason they are separated is because of their beliefs in god. They are like religious groups bashing each other. But even the gods don''t have any individuality here. They are driven by benefits. So, these people are no exceptions.

    They managed to bring 4 Peak stage Astral ne consummate cultivators, Eight Astral ne Middle stage Consummate cultivators and the remaining thirteen Middle-stage Astral ne cultivators with them.

    These twenty-five people not just infiltrated the n openly. Their n is to open up the space gate for more of their forces from their various organizations.

    There are dozens of Astral ne Transcendent cultivators and Astral ne initial stage and middle stage Consummate cultivators that entered through these space gates.

    This olddy and the young man are actually part of those dozens of people.

    From what Sam got from their memories, they actually are not supposed to be here. They should have been operating based on the orders, like the rest of the group as they targeted certain groups of people.

    But because of her personal grudge, she moved away and came here with this young man.

    Sam doesn''t know what the exact goal of this is, but he knew for sure that things are not going to go well. The number is too much.

    Dozens of Astral ne Peak Transcendent stage cultivators, Initial stage Consummate cultivators and Middle-stage transcendent cultivators. This is enough to make the n leader of this ce think twice. These four peak stage Consummate cultivators are going to be even more troublesome.

    He skimmed through all the possible information these people could have regarding this attack.

    But these are clearly small fries. So, all they knew is some of the goals of the attack and that is to eliminate all the prospective leaders of the n with great potential.

    Unlucky for them, Giyon is also on the list.

    Sam quickly calcted the number of forces Giyon had at hand and called her immediately.

    "Are you out of this n estate?"

    Giyon asked as soon as she picked up.

    "No."

    Sam replied as he walked out and saw some people running towards the building. He recognized them immediately. They are members of Giyon''s elite team.

    "I am at Jyon''s residence. Your elite team ising here."

    "What the fuck are you doing there? I said I would look after the kids."

    "Really? Mingiv''s mother was already here. I was barely able to save them. They would have gone through something much worse than death if I had been a bitter."

    Giyon immediately went silent. After a short pause, she spoke up once again.

    "I am sorry. But since you already got them. Leave immediately. Use the transference token and leave. You are not a member of this n, so you might not even be considered an enemy from the other party."

    "You are one of their primary targets. They knew you are staying here. They are going after every potential candidate that could inherit the n in the future. You are on top of their list.

    How many middle-stage or higher Consummate cultivators do you have with you?"

    "Four. The rest are on the tour to Mari n''s properties."

    "What a fucking timing these guys chose.

    Keep your subordinates with you. From the information I got, Dozens of people areing and there are even Middle-stage Consummate cultivators. So, we cannot say what is going to happen and how many they are going to send to attack you."

    *BOOM*

    As he was speaking, Sam suddenly heard an explosion from the other side and he asked hurriedly.

    "Giyon, what happened?"

    "I am being attacked. But it is well within the control. I will talk to youter. You go back to the stray dimension, using the transference token."

    "Why don''t you escape as well?"

    "I can''t do that. I am a member of the Gaja n. I need to defend my home. I might not have my sights set on ruling it in the future. But I do have certain responsibilities to fulfil."

    Sam didn''t say anything and just let her be.

    He took out a transference token and wanted to crush it. But all of a sudden, he remembered the four babies. He wanted to check them out. But then he realized the strength of Saran and decided to not worry too much.

    He sent the elite team of Giyon back to her residence and crushed the token to escape.

    But as soon as the spatial energy enveloped him, he suddenly felt pressure stopping him from going away.

    The spatial energy disappeared as fast as it came and Sam stood there in shock.

    He gulped nervously and broke another token. It was not working as well.

    "Fuck me."

    He cursed as he looked at the n estate in front of him.

    While Sam is thinking of what he was about to face and how to survive this whole thing, Giyon who was in her residence organizing all the troops she has under him as she faced an attack that she never expected.

    She stood at the entrance of her building as she looked at therge group waiting outside.

    There are at least a dozen people. Half of them are Initial stage Astral ne Consummate cultivators and the rest of Middle-stage Astral ne Consummate cultivators.

    Giyon knew she has to fight it out to survive this blockade today.

    She looked at the young man who is leading the team and grinned as her fists brightened with spiritual energy.

 Chapter 1448 - League

    <h4>Chapter 1448 - League</h4>

    Giyon looked at the young man in the lead and said.

    "The slimy snail is here. You finally grew a pair of balls toe and fight back? Did your father alsoe here? Just in case, you want to cry and go back to him after you get your asskicked.

    Of course, if you don''t die after that."

    The young man looked solemn and it almost seemed like, he got reminded of some terrible nightmare.

    He had a long sword in his hand and wore full body armour. Even his gloves are made of some high-level metallic fibre.

    Butpared to him Giyon who is wearing her beautiful dress looked fiercer and strong. The aura of both of them ispletely different.

    "I will kill you today bitch. No matter what it takes, I will kill you today. I will kill you myself."

    "Why don''t you try it? I will rip your balls off with my hands and shove them down your throat. And I will do that before I make you see all of your subordinates die."

    As she finished speaking, she lunged forward with a punch. She didn''t even bother to shorten the distance as she swung a straight punch.

    Arge fist was condensed with spiritual energy as it made its way to the group.

    Giyon didn''t care whether the people or stronger than her or weaker than her. All she did is punch at them all with a single swing.

    The energy is ravaging as it made the whole dozen of them feel a sense of threat and they all dispersed to the side.

    When they were busy avoiding, the subordinates of Giyon made their move. They took out their weapons as they went full power at their opponents. They are outnumbered, but that didn''t stop them. Just like how they didn''t care back when they are facing Sivan''s subordinates.

    They are fierce and they showcased it through their wrath.

    The battle is bing one-sided pretty quickly and the young man realized it immediately.

    He looked at Giyon and cursed himself realizing that he didn''t get enough people to stop her subordinates. He knew that he needs more people to fight with her.

    But just as he was about to think of other ways out of the situation, he saw the fisting straight at his head.

    He lifted the sword up and blocked it with the side of the de.

    *BANG*

    Arge sound that rang like a bell came out. The young man stepped back because of the blow and Giyon''s right hand went for a hook from the side.

    The punch brushed past the chin and the young man turned on his feelings, as hepletely lost his bnce.

    But he tried his best and stood his group before stabbing the sword at her.

    Giyon slipped to the side and let the sword go under her arm and past her, as she closed in before punching straight in the face.

    *CRACK*

    The nose broke and almost created a dent as he flew backwards. The sound of the cracking made the rest of the soldiers flinch. It was so loud and crisp.

    But Giyon was not done. She quickly zoomed forward and jumped up beforending another punch on the face from above and mming him into the ground.

    She then started swinging hooks while he fell down. The young man couldn''t even stand a chance. His grip on the sword was gone and he almost fell unconscious.

    Giyon looked at him coldly and dragged him by his robe, before tying him up to a tree nearby. She covered her right hand with spiritual energy and looked at the man dead in the eyes.

    "What are you doing?" He asked in a weak voice.

    "I am doing good on my promise. Today you will die only after I sever your manhood and shove it down your throat."

    "NOOOOOOO¡­. NOOOOO¡­ FAAAAATTTHHHHHHHEEEEEERR."

    He yelled on top of his lungs with mustered energy he should have possessed at all.

    But Giyon didn''t care. She delivered on her promise and made him shut up by stuffing his face with the testicles.

    Giyon just let him be and joined the fray of the battle with her subordinates. Her rageful and ferocious fighting style ispletely contradictory to her normal demeanour of mature and sophisticated.

    She looked like a whole different being as she pummeled the brains out of one person after another.

    Within the next fifteen minutes, the whole yard is cleared out of the people that came.

    She used one of her subordinates who has necromancy skills to get the information out of them. She was stunned by what she saw though. Even more shocked than Sam was.

    And at this moment, she looked in the direction of where the elite squad ising from. They are also a bit exhausted. Because they had to fight with some of the people that came in their path and they got dyed.

    But still, they hurried as fast as they can to aid Giyon.

    Now they are relieved that Giyon is safe.

    Only Giyon''s expressions got worse as she saw who they areing along with.

    It is Sam.

    He is along with the elite team.

    As soon as he realized that he is stuck in here, he didn''t even bother to y the ultimate hero and just followed these people along.

    For Giyon who just got the news from the souls of these dead people, this is the worst news possible.

    "What the fuck are you doing here?"

    "I cannot get out. The spatial transference ispletely blocked."

    Giyon widened her eyes in disbelief as she stared at him. Her heart started pounding like crazy in anxiety.

    She doesn''t know what to do now. She thought that she gained a slight upper hand by killing all of these that came at her, but it seems like this thing goes way beyond that.

    Looking at her expression, Sam knew very well that something is wrong.

    "What happened?"

    Sam asked as he looked at the deadbodies, he waved for the spectre to collect the souls, but it shook its head.

    "You got some info, anything crucial?"

    Sam asked after getting no answer from Giyon.

    "There is indeed some info. These people are from Divine League. Particrly that prick on the tree, he is the son of one of the major members of the Divine League, they are the ones that led the attack into the n."

    "So, you knew them from before."

    "Of course, I met him when I was just entering into the Grey Circle. I kicked his ass three times. The first time, I let him go because of the circumstances, the other two times, he got his father to cover his ass.

    Now, I finally managed to kill him."

    "That is great. So, why are they here?"

    "To kill everyone in the n of course. They want to eliminate the ns and establish the Divine league as the ultimate ruler." Giyon said matter-of-factly.

    But Sam didn''t buy it. He just looked at her calmly and look at her not even making eye contact, he knew something is up with her story.

    "Please don''t treat me like an idiot. You and I both know that your story is a bunch of bullshit.

    If the n''s extermination is what they are after, they wouldn''t be behaving like this. They have to first think of ways to kill your father, uncle and aunt. So, unless they are sure that they are dead, they wouldn''t make a move at the n directly."

    As he spoke, he noticed that Giyon flinched a bit.

    "What happened, Giyon?" He asked with a frown.

    "It seems like they found a way to deal with my father, uncle and aunt along with all of the talented youngsters that are not here at the moment.

    Even if they didn''t find it, it seems like they knew that something is bound to happen to them. That is why they have balls big enough toe here and act like this."

    Her tone was not as imposing as before. She clearly became worried.

    "The tournament is a trap?"

    "I don''t know these small fries don''t have much info. All they knew is that the people that went to the tournament will all die."

    Sam was shocked. He looked at the subordinates around him. He doesn''t know what to do now. He doesn''t know what happened to Grivon and rests.

    But to think that these people are so sure that even Gail, Gamin and Yuvana will be dead. The three most powerful people he knew of would be dead, this is so unbelievable.

    While Giyon and Sam are feeling confused and anxious about what is happening, somewhere far away. At the tournament venue.

    Gail is currently standing in the middle of twelve people that are on the same cultivation level as him.

    They are grand elders of many sects. Including the star eye sect, Mari n and all the powers that came to participate in the tournament.

    Gail looked at them with a smile.

    "I feel honoured.. Are you all the only ones at the party? If you are, trust me my brother and sister-inw will really get pissed if I am the only one that enjoys you all."

 Chapter 1449 - Party

    <h4>Chapter 1449 - Party</h4>

    "You just worry about your dear life, Gail."

    One of the twelve people spoke. Gail looked at him and smiled.

    "You are the old man from Mari n, aren''t you? How is Sin doing? I heard he had to spank his son Sivan a bit recently. If you don''t know why it is because my nephew and his friend kicked his ass in multiple ways on a single day."

    The Old man''s face twitched.

    Sin is the nickname for Sivan''s father and many people just called him that. Everyone in the higher circle particrly within the Grey circle knows the weird rtionship Sin and Gail have.

    They are members of two ns that are archenemies from generations. But they have this love-hate friendship. They are intense rivals, but they respect each other so much. They came to blows many times, but they also saved each other when someone is scheming against them.

    Nobody knows what is wrong with them. But the Mari n knew better than to include Sin in the n of dealing with Gail.

    As for why Gail brought up the Sivan''s incident, it is just to piss off this old grand elder, who is obviously stuck in his old times and couldn''t stand when someone from Gaja n gains a little victory over them.

    No matter how petty the victory might be.

    "You are going to die for that impudence.

    It is expected of the barbarous n of Gaja anyway. How can you know about respecting elders when you grew up there?"

    "Really? Can''t do anything better than that? You mapped out a whole tournament to get us here. At least stop using the pretentious bullshit.

    You and I both know that you are way past hiding behind some made up shit about each n."

    Gail said as stretched his body in the spot as if he is warming up.

    One of the twelve stepped up. He is a young man with red skin. He looked mostly human, but there is a scaly texture to his skin.

    He bowed in front of Gail and said.

    "I am really sorry to have met you like this Sonic Prince.

    I know, I have no right to say this, but please forgive me for what I am about to do. But this is for the greater good of the realms.

    I would not deny your right to defend yourself, please do so with all of your might and if you really can kill all of us and win, please do so by all means, I would just sumb to my fate and die in your hands.

    And dying in the hands of the Sonic Prince is not to be ashamed of.

    But I truly hope that we would be able to win and kill you today for the greater good of the realm."

    Gail looked at the young man and sighed.

    "The Draconian tribe. I might not have much contact with you guys because of your secr living within your realm. But I do respect one of your ancestors that participated in one of the great wars of Divine Graveyard.

    Whatever you are doing, you seem like you are convinced that you don''t have any choice. May I know why I am a hindrance to the greater good?"

    "Star eye sect has a prophecy. He said that the Gaja n would be having a new gift from the heavens and they would be the origin of a new war that would cause massive casualties in the realms all across.

    For that to stop, we need to eliminate the Gaja n as fast as we can.

    First, we will finish you and then go and attack your n. In fact, this whole tournament is a giant plot orchestrated by all of the powers to kill you, your brother and your brother''s wife along with some of your grand elders.

    This would be enough to weaken your n and we can eliminate them, much easier."

    "Seems like Star eye sect really managed to convince you guys. But too bad they didn''t inform you properly of what would happen when I am cornered."

    As soon as he spoke, his aura changed. The peak stage Astral ne Consummation cultivation showed its might as it pressured everyone to put their guard up.

    The twelve of them took their weapons and got ready with their spells. Gail looked around and smiled, before snapping his fingers.

    *SNAP*

    The snap of the fingers is unnaturally loud with the aid of spiritual energy. It even created a ripple in the fabric of spiritual energy and all of the cultivators surrounding him suddenly flinched.

    The sound hit something in their ears that they felt like an explosion happened right beside their ears.

    Within that moment of flinch, Gail made a move. His first target is the old man from Mari n.

    He moved like a sh. He didn''t use any elemental partial fusion technique, he didn''t use any spatial element, it is spiritual energy enhancing and amplifying the speed of his body.

    But still, it almost looked like he disappeared from the spot as he reappeared right beside the old man who didn''t even manage to recover from the flinch with his eyes partially closed.

    *BAM*

    A punchnded straight on his temple from the side and the old man flew in the air.

    *BAM* *CRASH*

    By the time everyone recovered from the sh, the old man already crashed into the nearby tree and then into the ground.

    Everyone else that are still standing was stunned. They gulped down nervously as Gail took a fighting stance.

    One arm raised up and the other arm, let loose on the ground as he hopped on his feet. He looked at the twelve of them and said.

    "There is something wrong with the prophecies, the more you try to eliminate them by eliminating the possible threat you see in it, the more it has a chance of bing real.

    So, you guys might have just been the trigger for the war that you dreaded oh so much."

    *SNAP*

    Gail snapped his finger once again and this time the sound is way too much than before. The people flinched once again and Gail disappeared once again. When everyone thought he would being for them, he actually went to the old man that crashed into the ground and punched him as he got up.

    The punchnded on the throat and the trachea got crushed with that one blow.

    The old man tried hard to breathe as he stood there. Gail didn''t let him and kept on punching him on the lungs and heart.

    The punches didn''t cause any damage that caused bleeding externally, but inside every punch crushed the lungs and every punch broke the ribs.

    By the time the group recovered, the old man almost copsed into a puddle, but Gail caught him and used him as a shield.

    *BOOM*

    Arge eagle manifested from pure mes came at him at the same time andnded on the old man who was already on a verge of death.

    The fireball definitely didn''t help and just became the final blow.

    *SNAP*

    Another fiery eagle was on its way along with a spear, but a snap of his fingers actually disrupted the fiery eagle and even altered the trajectory of the spear.

    Gail disappeared from the spot along with the dead body and he reappeared right in front of the person who threw the fiery eagle at them.

    But this time, the draconian man managed to get out of the snap effect faster than the rest a spear with red hot mes made its way towards Gail who was about tond a punch.

    When the spear neared him, instead of dodging, Gail snapped again, the fire around the spear got disrupted a bit and the dead body of the old man popped out of Gail''s storage taking the spear hit for him while Gail himself proceeded with the punch.

    *BAM*

    The punchnded on the temple and the mannded on the ground face first.

    The spearnded into the dead body and slowed down. Gail caught the dead body that came at him and stored it away along with the spear, before snapping again.

    *SNAP*

    Gailnded in the middle of a group of three andnded a punch on one of them, but the other two managed to get out of the effect faster than before.

    They are managing to get a hang of it and they attacked Gail from behind.

    But Gail turned back and blocked one of the kicks by catching the leg he used his elbow to block a punch that wasing at him.

    He threw the leg to the side and ducked down to avoid another blow before throwing an uppercut at one of them while getting up.

    The other man who was about to kick him got his bnce back and wanted tond a blow on Gail from behind, but Gail dodged to the side and weaved in before throwing a punch right under the armpit.

 Chapter 1450 - Three Sect Heads

    <h4>Chapter 1450 - Three Sect Heads</h4>

    Twenty minutester.

    Gail stood and looked around. Out of the dozen people, there is only one person left standing and that is the Draconian young man.

    "We might have just made the biggest mistakes of our lives that might trigger the destruction to these worlds that history has ever seen.

    We didn''t know that you could be this strong.

    The strength disparity within the members of same cultivation level is truly unfathomable."

    The young man said with a hint of mncholy.

    Gail stepped forward as he kicked the deadbodies on the way to the side. His whole body is covered in blood. None of the dead bodies on the ground is looking pieced together. Every single body was mangled and destroyed as he used them to his defence whenever he needed them.

    "I don''t have someone that could perform necromancy at hand. So, I would like it if you give me the information that I need now."

    Gail said calmly.

    "The n is indeed created by Star eye sect. they managed to convince the Tri volcano sect and they both convinced the rest of the powers. Of course, Mari n''s involvement and hatred towards you made things easier.

    The n is indeed as we said. We will be joining hands together to kill you and we will be splitting all the property of the Gaja n.

    Since we are doing this in secret, the Star eye sect took the responsibility to create evidence so that the reputation of the sects wouldn''t go back. They will also take over the process of exterminating the remnants of your n.

    Including the youngsters that are left behind and the children that didn''t activate."

    "So, are the star eye sect members back there?"

    "No. The star eye sect brought most of the people here. They cannot move them to your n."

    "Where are my brother and his wife?"

    "They were also lured out just like you. But as always they were together. If you are really as strong as you, I am pretty, they are alive now."

    "Of course I know they are alive. The star eye sect really brought all of you into this. They caused some real trouble for you guys."

    "I am sure that I am not in any position to ask you this. But I request that you go easy on my n. Even though our n ultimately took this stance, at least half of it is opposed to this from the start.

    I might appear like a hypocrite, but I couldn''t help but ask you this."

    "Don''t worry. I don''t take it out on the families and youngsters when people do things. I will give them a warning though. A harsh warning."

    Gail said and killed the young man immediately.

    He walked out and went to where Gamin and Yuvana were lured out to.

    By the time he went there, they wereing towards him and both parties were relieved for seeing each other unscathed.

    "How many did you get?" Gamin asked as soon as they met.

    "A dozen. What about you guys?"

    "Ten each. That means, there are still eighteen people. We also need to find the kids as fast as we can. I learned that they are using the younger generation to do the deed. Apparently, the Dracoinians didn''t agree for the elders ughtering the younger and even made a soul contract regarding that." Gamin exined with a tone of intrigue.

    "Well, these draconian might be honourable, but they are way too gullible. Let''s just go and deal with them. Since the younger are dealing with each other, I think our kids wouldn''t have that much problem fending for themselves."

    "We can''t count on that too much. I heard that they are within that special forest arena designed for the scheduledpetition tomorrow. This is the n of Mari n, to use some kind of powerful and torturous formation to kill the youngsters."

    "That means, we still have some time. If it makes you feel better, I will go for the kids and you guys go for the rest of the people. I think you can deal with these eighteen members. But I advise you to move fast and also capture the head of the sects.

    I want to talk to them before killing them off."

    Gail said and the couple agreed.

    Both of them went their separate ways.

    After ten minutes, Gail appeared at the forest arena and destroyed the formation in an instant. The youngsters of other ns that are having way too much as they hunted down their counterparts in the Gaja n were shocked.

    Gail quickly scanned to see where the members of the Gaja n are started bringing them together. The first three were easy as he was able to carry them without any problem.

    But it is harder from that. So, he ced them in a rtively safer ce, before he went to bring back the rest of the kids.

    All the kids are divided into various groups based on their cultivation level. The members from the other organizations also acted like that and they decided to hunt down the members of the Gaja n based on that.

    Simply put, everyone that is after Grivon is of the same cultivation as his and the same thing is happening to others.

    So, the Gaja n members not only handled it well until now, they also did some serious damage to other parties.

    And since their goal is to survive and the other parties'' goal is to hunt, they became a bit passive and stayed safe.

    Gail gathered them all in one ce and stood before speaking in a loud tone using his spiritual energy.

    "I am Gail from Gaja n. I don''t know whether you know of me or not. But I am here to take my n''s kids away.

    Since you are also youngsters and has to follow orders, I would be willing to overlook this whole thing and let you go, but my patience is very limited and if youe across the path when I am leading out, I will force you to go one on one with my n members and you would only be able to get away if you win by killing your opponent.

    And if you really think that you can just resist me from forcing you to be in a one on one, think again. Because, I will not hesitate even a second to fucking kill you right here, right now and trust me, even your organization leaders wouldn''t find the tiniest hint of courage in their ball sacks toe and get me."

    Gail''s announcement reverberated all throughout the forest and he started leading the group to the exit.

    The kids from the other organizations didn''t make a move. They knew that since Gail is here, something terrible must have happened there.

    They didn''t know what they could do, but they do know what they shouldn''t do and that is to test the patience of the man that even their elders are afraid of.

    Gail went back to meet his brother and sister inw in twenty minutes and those two were waiting for three old men kneeling down with bleeding injuries all over.

    "Oh, you are quicker than I thought."

    "They are actually waiting with the rest near the main exit out of this ce.

    They believed that we would be killing the first set of people, but they figured we would be injured, but too bad, we only managed to exhaust ourselves a bit and injuries werepletely out of question.

    It seems like organizations have really gotten bad since their involvement with grey circle has been lessened."

    Yuvana said as she braided her hair on the side with bloody hands.

    Gail looked at the three old men coldly and said.

    "I will give you five minutes, give me all the information regarding this attack. I want to know every single variable and factor that is involved in this."

    The three old men exchanged nces and looked at Gail.

    The leader of the star-eyed sect gritted his teeth and said.

    "You need to make a Gandharva oath that you would spare our organizations after we are dead if we give you the details."

    "I am not giving that oath, rather you are going to give me all the information I need. All I would be needing is a few snaps."

    As he said that, Gail took a step forward and ced his fingers right beside the ear of the old man from Tri Volcano sect.

    *SNAP*

    "AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH¡­"

    A loud snap followed by a horrific scream of agony and pain.

    The old man actually fell to the opposite side and the ear started squirting blood.

    The old man felt as if his whole brain is being pricked by a thousand needles all at the same time.

    He felt his whole body go numb and paralyzed for a few minutes before he lost the effect and gained some consciousness.

 Chapter 1451 - Snitch

    <h4>Chapter 1451 - Snitch</h4>

    Gail made the old man stand on his knees once again while he let the other two watch and ced the fingers beside another ear.

    "w¡­ wait."

    The old man wanted Gail to stop, but Gail himself didn''t even bother.

    *SNAP*

    The snap happened and the second ear also started squirting blood like crazy. This time it sprayed on the other two, while man fell to the ground and started squirming like a fish.

    Gail then turned to the remaining two as she spoke.

    "You can either talk, or you can go through this torture again and again. A concentrated sound wave enhanced with spiritual energy hitting you at such a range, is not something that you would be able to take for long."

    Star eye sect leader looked at Gail and then at the old man that is still rolling on the ground in pain. He knew what is the better option immediately. So, he spilt the beans.

    "The Star eyed sect has a prophecy recorded. When four coloured lightning hits the same spot on the same day as the birth of quadruplets, then those quadruplets are going to be the core of the dawn of a new era.

    They would be the key to dominating the new era.

    So, when I heard about the four coloured lightning that stuck the Gaja n, I knew that this is our chance.

    I know things would be hard for me if I wanted to take those four kids away from the Gaja n, so I decided to use the rest of the powers to destroy the Gaja n and get the kids."

    "Draconians said that you didn''t send anyone to deal with our n members yet."

    "No, I didn''t. But I did send someone to keep an eye."

    "Who is that?"

    "Kriyon."

    Gail, Gamin and Yuvana took a deep breath and said.

    "Kriyon, the grand elder of the Star eye sect?"

    "Yes."

    "Does he know about your stupid n?"

    "Yes, he knows about the prophecy and the importance of the kids, he also knows about the tournament n."

    "Fuck." Gail cursed through gritted teeth.

    Gamin controlled his urge to bash the old man out and asked.

    "Where are the Grand elders that came with us? And the elders too? Where did they go?"

    "They are killed. Only one of your grand elders survived and he escaped. We wanted to pursue, but you were our priority target, to begin with and that grand elder wouldn''t be able to escape for that long.

    He is suffering from elemental energy corrosion, he wouldn''t have even gone that far."

    "Is that all you have to say?" Gail asked coldly.

    "Yes. Apart from that, there is nothing."

    "Did you make any deal with the Divine league regarding this issue?"

    "Divine league? No, the information was strictly confidential. Only me and Kriyon along with a few key members in our sect knows about this. We didn''t even speak to the rest of the organizations that are involved in this."

    As he was speaking, the Tri Volcano sect leader was gritting his teeth in anger and humiliation. He couldn''t stand the fact that the Star eye sect managed to manipte every organization that got involved in this. They just made a mockery out of all of the top organizations, with the help of credibility that they have gained over years.

    He wanted to burst out and beat the crap out of this guy, but he knew he cannot do this and there is no use in doing it. He knew his time hase to an end. They just screwed with the wrong targets without even knowing what their exact strength is.

    Gail, Gamin and Yuvana finished off the old men after torturing them a bit to make sure that they didn''t hide any other info from them.

    After that, Yuvana went to look for the missing Grand Elder, while Gail and Gamin sat down waiting for her while discussing something.

    "What do you think the situation is back at home? "

    Gail asked nervously.

    "Don''t think too much brother. I am sure that Kriyon wouldn''t have brought the Divine league into this that easily."

    "I highly doubt that. He is the Divine league''s one of most loyal members. I just hope that he is still in the preparation phase of whatever n he is cooking up."

    "We can only hope that."

    "Let''s just pick up this grand elder and go back to find out. We can only be sure of that after we see it for ourselves. That slimy old snake can do anything. Let''s just put the kids in divine dimension fragment along with the old man."

    "Are you sure brother? That is where all our secrets lie."

    "We don''t have time to care for that. Anyway, with their strength, all we need to do is ce a restriction within and they will stay put. If we take them normally, we would take twice as much time to reach the n."

    While the two brothers are discussing, back in the Gaja n.

    Within the main hall of the n.

    The n''s leader is holding a sword as he looked at the man wearing a green robe with his emerald hair flying with the wind that is revolved around him.

    The whole hall ispletely chaotic as various elders fought the enemies. The grand elders are having battles with the enemies and everyone took more than one opponent.

    The hall lost all of its majesties. It looked pathetic, to say the least.

    "What the hell is Divine league thinking? Do you guys really want to destroy the bnce? Do you think that the rest of the organizations would just sit by and let this go?"

    n''s leader asked with frustration.

    "The other organizations? You wouldn''t say that if you knew what they are doing right as we speak. They lured your cream of the crop talent to the side and they are nning on killing everyone of them to get something from your n.

    Do you think they have time to worry about the fairness of the divine league in this matter?"

    "What the fuck are you even talking about? Do you really think the Gaja n would have survived all this while if we possessed something that could unite all of the other ns?"

    "Of course not, it just so happened that this something I am talking about arrived in your n not so long ago."

    The man said as he waved his hand to let a wind bullet shoot at the n''s leader. They have been battling for a while and they''re both trying to get some information out of each other.

    They are the leaders of both groups after all.

    But they are not giving anything that could y a key role until now. This is the only time that the other party gave out something.

    "How do you know that the other ns are nning this? I think you are just screwing with me to get me distracted."

    "Haha, I wish I had that much of a story making ability, but the thing is, our n is solely based on the plot of the other organizations.

    The leader of the star-eye sect found something really interesting in your n and wanted to take it. He also wanted to eliminate any further repercussions that could possibly happen in the future after he took it and decided to make an borate n to destroy your n and all the offspring.

    He really did n great. But too bad, he didn''t expect that someone would snitch on him."

    The man with green hair said as he grinned while attacking the n''s leader.

    "Who snitched on him? What are they thinking of taking from here?"

    "Do you want to know? Thene and kill me now. Right before I die, I will tell you all you need to know."

    "As you wish."

    As soon as he said those words, the n''s leader''s body changed. His aura became sharper than ever and the man in green had a frown on his face. The aura and demeanour of the n''s leader changedpletely within a second.

    He had a bad feeling creeping upon him as he saw the swording at his face.

    Fifteen minutester.

    The n''s leader stood in the middle of the hall with debris all around him. His robes are gone and he is bleeding from multiple wounds. He panted heavily.

    There is onerge wound on his shoulder that covered the rest of the arm with blood and as the blood dripped from the shoulder, arm and the tip of the de that was holding it, the drops fell on the face of the man with the green hair.

    He is barely breathing and ispletely weak.

    "Now, tell me." n''s leader asked as he tried to catch up with his breath.

    "It is probablyte anyway. That man must have already reached the destination.

    He is Kriyon, the slimy old snake.. He is the one that snitched on the Star eye sect, because of his faith in the god."

 Chapter 1452 - Plan Revealed

    <h4>Chapter 1452 - n Revealed</h4>

    The man in the green took a deep breath and continued.

    "Your core elder Saran and his wife had quadruplets on the day the four lightning bolts stuck in your n on that hill.

    That very day, the Divine league received a message from some of the gods. The lightning is actually the work of some gods. They paid a huge price to act in your realm and made those lightning strike at that exact moment and location.

    Those four kids supposedly have some kind of special bodily constitution and that could help for the gods in the future.

    So, they are to be stolen from your n and brought to the divine league to be brought up there.

    We know that this n is not going to be smooth, we made every calction from the past three months, particrly when Gail, Gamin and Yuvana are here, things wouldn''t go as we nned no matter how perfectly we n it.

    Then came across Kriyon. The grand elder brought the news from his sect that even their sect leader knew of this matter in form of a prophecy.

    We waited for him to make his own n while getting fed with the info in real-time while we made a n of our own.

    Now, if my guess is right. Most of your grand elders would be dead and even the people that went to the tournament would be dead.

    Your n is on brink of extermination in one single day and the kids will be stolen away from you and brought back to the divine league where they would be brought up by a special group of people the gods choose.

    The divine league would be the one entity that grooms the pioneers of a new era that woulde because of those¡­"

    *STAB*

    The n''s leader didn''t let him finish and stabbed him in the throat. But as soon as he was done, he couldn''t stand anymore and fell to the ground. He only stopped from crashing with his sword as he stabbed it into the ground and supported himself.

    *Cough* *Cough*

    He started coughing blood profusely.

    The battle might have been his victory, but he couldn''t feel like it because of the damage he took in exchange for killing the other party.

    After all, it was not some nobody, he is the leading member of the Divine league for fuck''s sake.

    The n''s leader looked around as he noticed that most of his elders are dying and losing. They couldn''t hold on anymore.

    Particrly, when the divine league members saw the current situation of the n''s leader, they are trying harder and harder.

    The n''s leader gritted his teeth as he took out a pill bottle from his storage. He looked at the pill bottle with hesitation.

    The bottle looked it was made of extremely thin translucent ss and it is the shape of a droplet. It looked like a blood drop with its intense red colour and there is one pill in it.

    One of the loyal subordinates of the n''s leader who just killed a member of the divine league and came towards him.

    "Sir, please don''t take that pill. We can deal with this situation. Please don''t worry."

    "No, there are too many enemies in the n. Even if we managed to save ourselves here, the situation wouldn''t be the same. All of our formations are gone with the Rebo and his subordinates'' self-destruction.

    I need to do this."

    The subordinate didn''t reply for a moment as he turned around and started attacking the divine league members that areing at them.

    He used all of his strength as he killed them one by one.

    He took a small break when the flow stopped and spoke to the leader again.

    "We have the upper hand within this area. Even if some elders died, we sessfully defended ourselves. After we recover a bit, I will send the squad to look through the n and rescue anyone that is alive including the kids.

    I believe Saran would be holding the ground until then, so we will rescue them and leave. We can make ae back even if we lose now."

    "No, I need to do this. We cannot let the n ground go like that. It is my responsibility as the n''s leader."

    As he spoke the n''s leader stood up forcefully and stabbed to the side, killing another divine league member.

    The subordinate gritted his teeth with his fist tightened.

    "I cannot let you do that. It is my responsibility as your protector." With that, he suddenly made a move forward and hit the n leader on the back of his neck.

    The n leader who didn''t expect this suddenly fell unconscious. The subordinate looked at the rest of his team members and yelled.

    "Finish everyone here. Right now. Remove all the limiters ced on you. We are exterminating everyone that intruded on the n today and saving everyone. Try your best with your lives on the line to hold the n ground."

    As soon as he spoke, all the subordinates of the elite team broke a bracelet ced on their wrists and their strengths rapidly soared.

    Most of them are at Middle-stage consummate cultivation and a few inte-stage, but their strengths reached the extreme they could have in that cultivation level and their opponents started falling one after another.

    Meanwhile, at Saran''s ce.

    Saran had an extremely angry expression on his face as he looked at the people that surrounded his estate''s entrance.

    He is fuming mad as he looked at the mean in the lead.

    "I am Kriyon, maybe you have heard of me. I am a grand elder of the Stay eye sect. I came here to take your children away and to kill you and your wife.

    So, if you cooperate, things would be easier."

    Saran looked at Kriyon. The man looked lean and tall. Even his arms appeared a bit unnaturally long. But there is some hidden handsomeness in all of his unnatural body.

    "You are a Naga aren''t you?" Saran asked calmly.

    "You are right. I am a Naga. The only Naga to evere this far in the past few centuries. I am doing well aren''t I?"

    "Here I was wondering, why you were called a snake.

    Anyway, I don''t give a fuck why you guys are here. But since you came to my home and threatened me, none of you is returning alive."

    "But it is impossible though. I am a peak stage consummate stage cultivator. There is no way, you would be able to take me down with your level. And just in case, I even went as far as bringing a couple ofte-stage cultivators and a few more middle-stage cultivators.

    In fact, I was even thinking I don''t have to make a move at all.

    You are just ate-stage cultivator after all."

    "Well, you are not the only person that can create some surprises."

    Saran spoke as he broke a bracelet that was simr to the ones on the hands of n''s leader''s elite team.

    His aura changed. His cultivation level is clearly not Late stage. He is also a peak stage cultivator just like Kriyon.

    "A limiter bracelet? Gaja n is still as sneaky as ever, isn''t it? Hiding your powers like this. Just how many peak stage consummate cultivators do you guys have? Even going as far as using these limiter bracelets.

    I am pretty sure that the Divine league''s Monitoring squad would be pissed because of this."

    "Since the Divine league itself has attacked the organization first, do you think you guys have legs to stand up for yourself."

    "Of course, you would think so. But the thing is, we don''t need to worry about that. Because the rest of your n is dying along with you. So, no one will ever find out the tale of what happened here.

    We can also use these limiter bracelets as an excuse after we dealt with you."

    As soon as Kriyon was done, he made a move.

    Saran also made his move and the sh started.

    While things are getting chaotic everywhere the Gaja n members are present, back at Giyon''s residence, she is having a bit of a hard time.

    Not just because of the enemies though, but because of an ally too.

    "Why do you need me to get into the divine dimension fragment as well?" Sam asked with a frown.

    "Because you are going to get in the way. I tried contacting every department and elder that I have any priormunication with. But none of them is picking up. The only ce holding up is the enforcement department and Senior Elder Ma is dealing with opponents of higher level with the special formations he ced there.

    It seems like he was notfortable with connecting the formations there to the entirework of the n''s formations. But at least he is holding up.

    I will send you there first. I believe that it is impossible for you to leave through the front gate. So, after I drop you off with Senior Elder Ma, I can fight without constraints."

    Sam went into deep thought and felt that made sense.

    He might be resourceful, but that doesn''t mean he ispletely invincible. In the current situation, he is not prepared. So, decided to go on with the n.

    But then came one enemy, whopletely ruined Giyon''s n.

 Chapter 1453 - Black Witch

    <h4>Chapter 1453 - ck Witch</h4>

    "Now now, don''t be in a hurry. I need something from you. You are not going anywhere until then."

    A sudden voice was heard out of nowhere and everyone instantly became vignt.

    Giyon and her subordinates grew vignt and got ready to attack.

    At this moment, a woman jumped off of a nearby tree. Her sweeping nce stopped at Sam and a smile of intrigue appeared on her face.

    "You must be Sam. I have some business with you. So, don''t go holing yourself up in the divine dimension fragments and such. I don''t have the patience to look for you.

    Just stay out. After I kill everyone here, I will take you away with me. Don''t worry though, I will treat you really well."

    The woman said it in an extremely seductive tone. Sam frowned and looked at her from up and down. She is a tall woman with short hair. She has brown skin and here is some smokey ck makeup highlighting her big eyes.

    Sam felt some dark auraing from her. She is clearly dangerous.

    She stepped forward as she looked at Giyon.

    "Giyon. I heard a lot about you. The newbie that ising up within the Grey circle. Too bad, your cultivation is a bit on the lower side. If you are at least ate-stage Consummate cultivator like me, you would have had a chance.

    But you are just a middle stage cultivator. You are still not a key yer in the real world and you will never have the chance to be as you are going to die now."

    "Who are you?"

    "I am what your aunt Yuvana calls, the seductress bitch. But I am mostly known as the witch of darkness. I am sure you heard of me."

    Giyon widened her eyes in disbelief.

    "You, what are you doing here? Why did youe here?"

    "Of course, because I am a member of the divine league."

    "But they don''t have the power tomand you to join in an operation that is focused on killing a n by breaking so many rules of power bnce."

    "You are right, they cannot. That is why I am here to gain some of my personal benefits and for them to realize I need help from your friend Sam here."

    Giyon suddenly thought of something and said.

    "Sam immediately get into the divine dimension fragment. We will handle her."

    "You cannot. Even if she is just ate-stage cultivator of Astral ne Consummation, she would still win with all of your subordinates present here.

    Her aura is screaming of danger. She is clearly the more powerful and dangerous one too.

    Hiding wouldn''t help either of us.

    I will stay out and I can help you while guiding the battle."

    "This is way out of your league. You will die even by a stray attack." Giyon insisted again and again. Sam frowned at this. He knew that is in troublesome situations, but taking the enemy out should have been their first priority. He cannot understand why Giyon is so insistent on letting him even when the enemy is wasting time by talking.

    As he was about to reply, thedy made a move.

    She pped her hands and two knuckle knives appeared on her fists as she lunged towards Giyon.

    She crossed the distance in an instant with a ck afterimage of dark elemental energy.

    One of Giyon''s subordinates who is also ate-stage cultivator tried to block her with his sabre.

    But not only did ck witch parry his attack with one of the knives, she even fluidly moved to the side.

    She looked like she is moving extremely fast and slow at the same time. It almost looked like a slow-motion effect of a fast-moving superhero character in movies.

    Sam frowned at this and used the energy vision to take a look. He wanted to see how the energy around her is going to react when she is using a technique like this to think of a way to counter it.

    He watched as the ck witch moved like a slithery snake and stabbed the subordinate on the back. She used the knife as a point of leveraging her weight on therge figure of the subordinate and threw a punch with her other hand.

    The punchnded on his face, but she also became vignt and jumped to the side as another subordinate attacked her with a spear.

    The spear just barely brushed past her, leaving a slight scar on her body, but she soon realized that spear was the least of her problems.

    The knuckle knife she stabbed on the back of the subordinate didn''te and out and her arm was stuck here.

    The subordinate used the earth elemental fusion to lock the knife there and grinned cruelly before twisting her arm and mming his sabre at her.

    The ck witch manoeuvred her body along with the twist and left the knife there and barely managed to escape the sabre attack.

    The two subordinates stood together as they looked at thedy. These two are thete-stage cultivators at hand currently, but even though they are outnumbering her, they are still feeling the slightest sense of fear as they took in the cold look of the woman.

    "You guys are good. But this wouldn''t be enough."

    Suddenly her whole body turned ck with dark elemental fusion. But the fusion is different from a regr one.

    Sam closely observed her movements and the energy cirction as he tried to understand what her speciality could be.

    It didn''t take long to find out.

    Even though the two men are strong enough and know how to work together well, the initial victory they had in that one exchange didn''t even mean much when they noticed what she did to the next.

    The ck witch''s shadow moved along with her and when she is giving off this confusing fast and slow illusory movement, the shadow acted on its own.

    Now the battle that was initially a one on two turned into two on two.

    The darkness that is being emitted from her body manifested into physical form as they acted like whips, des, ropes, chords even arms and tentacles based on her whim as she attacked the two of them from all sides.

    Sam looked at her for quite a while and suddenly a light build went on in his head.

    "The ck Shadow Ghost constitution."

    He muttered out loud involuntarily and all of a sudden, the ck witch stopped her attacks for a moment.

    Giyon and her other subordinates who are trying to enter the fray but couldn''t find an opening took the chance and started attacking her.

    Of course, the only ones who are attacking are the middle-stage Consummate cultivators, anyone weaker than that, just took a step back and didn''t even dare toe close.

    The ck witch engaged with five opponents at the same time. Her shadow and all the darkness that manifested around turned into arge shield and barrier that blocked the attacksing from all the directions.

    She looked at Sam with a wide smile and said.

    "It is indeed right of me toe here. Not only do I get to kill Sonic prince''s daughter, I will also get to obtain you and in turn all your knowledge and skills.

    I don''t know where you got the knowledge of these constitutions, but I am sure it will be helpful when I cultivate my new disciple that I am going to get today."

    "SHUT UP"

    Giyon yelled as she threw a punch straight at her face.

    She then pressed her arm over the mouth of a ck witch and said to Sam.

    "Sam take the rest of the subordinates and get them into divine dimension. We are escaping."

    "We can''t."

    "Sam spoke in a serious tone."

    "What the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you so adamant about not getting in?"

    "It is not about my stubbornness of adamant thoughts, it is a fact. The only way out of here is either defeating her and making her flee or killing her.

    Of course, if she didn''t kill us all first.

    Her constitution wouldn''t let us escape from this ce."

    Giyon suddenly felt something is wrong and immediately lunged backwards. The darkness almost cut her palm open.

    Sam looked at the ck witch and asked.

    "What do you want from me? Who is the new disciple you are getting and why do you need my help for that?"

    His voice was calm, but inside he is filled with trepidation. This is one of the constitutions that he didn''t expect to discover and in fact one of the constitutions he doesn''t want his enemy to have.

    If he was in his original body, at least he would have a chance to escape, but now he ispletely underprepared.

    "Why are you making a conversation with her? Do you want to go on a date or something? I told you to collect all of the subordinates into the divine dimension and go in along with them. We will try to escape."

    Giyon yelled once again.

    "Why are you trying so hard to not let him have a conversation? Are you scared of him learning something you shouldn''t?" The ck witch spoke with a smile.

 Chapter 1454 - Weakness

    <h4>Chapter 1454 - Weakness</h4>

    Sam''s frown deepened. Because of their perilous situation, he assumed that Giyon just really doesn''t want him to get involved in this get hurt. Not because she cared for him, but there are a lot of ns depending on him for her and her brother''s future.

    He has been in the situation before, so he didn''t think much into it.

    But now that the ck Witch highlighted it, he couldn''t help but think that way.

    Even Giyon''s expression has changed slightly and Sam became more and more suspicious.

    "Why are you guys here? Is it just to kill the ns and organizations?"

    "*pfft* you really went with that answer Giyon?" The ck witchughed out loud

    "SHUT UP." Giyon threw a punch at her face.

    But all of a sudden a huge amount of dark elemental energy converged into a bunch of spikes and expanded towards the whole group of them.

    Giyon and the subordinates, immediately jumped back to save themselves.

    The darkness went back into her shadow and the ck witch spun the knuckle knives over her fingers leisurely as she stepped forward.

    "I don''t know why you want to hide the information from Sam, but I guess revealing it will piss you off. So, let me do the honour.

    Our primary reason is not to exterminate the Gaja n, it is to take away the quadruplets that are newly born here. Currently, someone is already on the task.

    Even though I am a member of the Divine league, I am not particrly fond of the gods and stuff. I only acted because I heard a lightning strike infused with dark elemental energy also happen that day and one of the four would be of dark elemental energy constitution that the world hasn''t seen in dozens of centuries.

    So, I want to take that kid as my disciple.

    As for why you are my target, it is very simple.

    You took the me for the lightning to make sure that the kids'' situation is not revealed. So, you definitely knew what is so special about the child.

    I want to have someone under me who knows and understands these constitutions better. I also heard that you are an expert at formations and inscriptions. Your inventions as an artisan are mind-blowing.

    I would take you in and you just help me train this child. I will make her the best dark elemental user in the whole history."

    "Why do you want to take her as your disciple in the first ce?" Sam asked calmly. He didn''t even show any anger or rage regarding the children and the massacre that is urring at the moment because of them just being in the n.

    He is calm and cool-headed. This surprised Giyon.

    The very reason that she hid the news is that she knew that Sam couldn''t keep a cool head when he was being tested on personal matters.

    She knew how involved Sam became when it came to kids in the past few months. That is why she didn''t want Sam to go overboard and try to go on a new rampage at the moment.

    So, she tried to hide this matter as much as she can. She also wanted to go and confirm what the kids'' situation is after throwing Sam into the divine dimension fragment.

    But she didn''t expect him to keep a cool head now. At least nobody sane would after thinking about how he reacted to the word bastard.

    The ck witch looked at Sam with intrigue. She could see that his fear is reducing by every second. At first, his bodynguage is pretty guarded, but now he is much more open than before.

    She doesn''t know what he is thinking of doing, but she became very interested.

    "I have a pretty weird constitution as you can see. But it took me decades to recognize it, but all it took for you is a few minutes.

    Because of the dyed realization, I wasn''t able to use my body to its full potential. By the time I realized what I could do with it, it was already veryte.

    I learned a lot regarding the dark elemental energy and what we can actually do with it, but it was toote to utilize the knowledge on myself. Now, I am looking for a progeny. I want to train someone who will leave a mark on the history of this world.

    And I want to be recognized as the teacher of that person.

    That is the reason why the Divine league sessfully managed to convince me."

    As The ck witch lost herself while talking and thinking about the glorious life ahead, Giyon and her subordinates made a move.

    But as soon as they took the step forward, the shadow manifested once again and spikes protruded out of it keeping everyone at bay.

    "Enough ytime. I wasted too much time already. I will finish you guys off and be on my way."

    As soon as she said that the spikes turned into vines as they coiled around the weaker subordinates and started sucking up their vitality.

    Sam was standing there calmly until they extended his metal arm forward and the finger hole opened up. He aimed it at a point that is neither too close nor too far from the ck witch and shot an energy bullet.

    *BOOM*

    The energy bulletnded there and a small explosion happened.

    The ck witch looked at Sam with a frown as she couldn''t understand why he did that, but the next second she felt something weird.

    Sam frowned as he shot the energy bullet at the same spot again, but this time, he shot it with the ripple style.

    The energy ripples reacted as Sam observed them with energy vision.

    He didn''t use the ripple style to a full extent, but just scraped the surface of his expertise with the shot.

    He increased the intensity of the ripple with every shot and finished five.

    "What are you doing?"

    The ck witch asked Sam. She is getting a bit spooked and even threw the subordinates she is sucking the vitality of and tried to walk towards Sam.

    "Sam at least now, get into the divine dimension. We will try to escape. I don''t think we can win against her."

    Giyon said as she attacked her.

    But nothing couldn''t budge Sam as he ignored every single yelling from both allies and enemy.

    As he was doing that, all of a sudden, the ck witch felt her shadow squirm because of the energy ripples.

    Sam stopped and looked at the witch with a smile.

    His smile suddenly sent chills down her spine.

    "You just said that you didn''t realize the full potential of the constitution you have, that also means that you don''t know the full weakness it has. Too bad, you came across me."

    As he said he aimed the finger at the same spot, but instead of an energy bullet, a needle appeared there.

    The needle was shot at that one spot along with the ripple style. With an exact intensity that Sam has just figured out.

    The needle is carrying the curse that is filled with soul attacks of the spectre.

    That is the only preparation Sam could do without any help from Grivon and Giyon, so he did a lot.

    As soon as the soul attack filled with the needlended on the spot with the ripple energy, the ck Shadow of the ck Witch that is holding the subordinates and Giyon down vibrated crazily.

    *SCREECCH*

    It screeched as if it is an individual entity and the ck witch also felt like she is losing control over the energy.

    "The first lesson that the constitution holder of the ck shadow constitution needs to go through is to learn the energy control.

    The modification of the shadow would be most efficient and effective only if a person has the highest mastery over energy.

    That is something you clearly don''t have. And you have a mouth that is way too big and an ego that is way too inted. You shouldn''t speak so much in front of a person like me."

    As he spoke, another needlended at the same spot and ck witch felt like she lost control over her shadow.

    Giyon and her subordinates took his chance and started throwing attacks as their life depended on it.

    They didn''t hold back at all and started throwing everything that they stored until then.

    Sam shot the third needle and The ck Witch had enough of it. She hid her shadow back and used dark elemental fusion to jump forward and lunge at Sam.

    "You don''t know when to take an olive branch, do you? I don''t know what you did to my shadow, but since you know the weakness, there is no way I could let you live. You are going to die today."

    Sam stepped back and stopped shooting.

    Of course, that didn''t help, because as soon as he stopped shooting and she is out of the range of the ripples, she directly caught up to Sam.

 Chapter 1455 - Killing The Witch

    <h4>Chapter 1455 - Killing The Witch</h4>

    The ck witch caught hold of Sam and the shadow came out once again.

    She hung him by his arms with the vines manifested from the darkness. But for some reason, Sam didn''t show a hint of fear. He just let her hold him like that.

    As Giyon and her subordinates were shocked by this, they didn''t even know what to do. She wanted tomand an attack, but she knew it wouldn''t take much time for the ck Witch to rip Sam into multiple pieces.

    "Good girl. Just like your father, you have a brain inside that head. Stay back and rx, or I will kill this guy."

    The ck witch said and looked at Sam.

    "I am really tempted to kill you, but keeping you with myself is absolutely much more beneficial. I will take you away with me and I will forcefully enve you to myself. I will use your brain to¡­"

    As she was speaking about her future vainglory, Sam suddenly looked towards the sky and spat out.

    A ring came out of his mouth. A stone ring, which is also the earth divine dimension fragment he collected from one of the Blood Iron league members.

    The ck witch didn''t expect that and sent one of the vines to get a hold of it, but at that exact moment, Sam''s metal arm and leg started vibrating, as they created some energy ripples which made the ck vines lose control for a faint moment.

    "You¡­" The ck witch wanted to curse him, but to her dismay, Sam disappeared from her sight and she immediately knew where he went.

    He went into the divine dimension fragment, but what surprised her, even more, is actually the metal arm and metal leg was left behind in her hands.

    That confusion and surprise onlysted for a few seconds as she immediately wanted to throw them out, but¡­

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Two explosions urred as the arm and the leg exploded right when the shadow ispletely enveloping them and the two explosions areplete of ripple style.

    *SCREECH*

    The ck Shadow screamed as if it was being tortured and even ck Witch wanted to scream, but she couldn''t as she felt like her soul was being sucked out of her body.

    The explosions are nasty, even with her cultivation they are dangerous and the ck shadow''s weakness is her weakness too.

    The divine dimension fragment was shot back into the air andnded in the front yard of Giyon''s residence.

    Sam didn''te back immediately and just stayed there.

    Giyon and her subordinates were also shocked, but they didn''t dare miss this chance. They could see how energy ripples were messing the shadow up, so they immediately went to ck Witch andnded every attack they could possibly muster up with their energy.

    The ck witch who was actually very close to winning immediately got beat.

    She fell to the ground and enveloped herself with dark elemental energy.

    "Finish her off. She is using shadow transference technique."

    Sam''s yell came from the front yard.

    But as soon as he did, the ck witch looked at him hatefully and used all the control she could muster to summon shadow undead.

    The shadow undead is of a much weaker level, they are clearly not on par with the ck witch''s own cultivation level.

    The shadow undead are there to just defend against the attacks while she performed the shadow transference technique.

    But Giyon is also prepared for something else. She took out a scroll and spread it open in the air rapidly.

    There is weird energy from the scroll that created energy ripples, but they are a lot different from what Sam created.

    These energy ripples are much more controlled and they are much more tangible. They enveloped ck witch and the shadow-like they are some chains made of pure energy and exploded there.

    *BOOM*

    The shadow and ck Witch couldn''t take the explosion.

    The ck witch is particrly lost three of her limbs immediately and a big portion of flesh from her back was also gone.

    She copsed to the ground unconscious.

    Sam took out a pair of crutches as he slowly made his way towards the group.

    He looked at thepletely destroyed arm and leg and sighed.

    "What a waste. Such an amazing work is destroyed."

    As he spoke, the spectre made a move immediately to finish the ck witch off and take her soul to collect the memories from her.

    Giyon who is tired and exhausted copsed to the ground and so did her subordinates

    It is already a tough thing to deal with all theckeys that came before, but this is on a whole new level.

    "How are you?"

    Giyon asked Sam.

    "I am fine. She talks and brags way too much. It is easier to deal with those kinds of people. Because whenever they talk too much, they feel lost in their own pathetic vanity and forget their surroundings. I guess it doesn''t change no matter how powerful the person actually is."

    "What about you are arm and leg though?"

    "What about it? Killing a person with that constitution and cultivation is worth it. But I doubt I can find artisan skilled enough to make it here. I need to go and make a trip to meet that dwarf again."

    Sam then walked towards Giyon and started injecting her with recovery vials, he then did the same to the rest of the subordinates one by one.

    "These two needs to rest. They can''t fight any further."

    Sam said as he pointed at the two people whose vitality was sucked clean.

    They also agreed and entered the divine dimension fragment.

    Sam then sat near Giyon and both of them maintained some silence before Giyon spoke up again.

    "You can''t me me for hiding the info from you. I don''t know when you will behave like a crazy maniac."

    "I understand."

    "So, you are not mad?"

    "Not particrly and not at you. But I would appreciate it if you focus on your recovery. We need to go and check the situation with Saran."

    "Let me call his wife first."

    Giyon spoke and took out themunication token.

    But she couldn''t make a call no matter how much she tried.

    "It seems like going there is the only way."

    "I will enter the divine dimension fragment. But keep your consciousnessing and going through the dimension, I would be talking to you."

    "Sure. I never knew all it would have taken is talking to you directly."

    "Now, you know. So, recover fast. We can go there."

    After a few minutes, Sam entered the divine dimension fragment and Giyon wore that ring as they moved towards Saran''s residence.

    At the same time, back in the main hall of the n, the elite team was done and even the n''s leader has woken up again.

    He looked at the team leader with anger and frustration, but he couldn''t hold it long and sighed.

    "The intruders nearby arepletely killed and cleaned up. You also recovered a fair bit. The enforcement department is also sessfully defended. They have the least casualties, we can all make a move to Saran''s residence now."

    The team leader exined and the n''s leader nodded as he wore a new robe and started moving.

    "What about the grand elders?"

    He asked with a heavy heart.

    "They are all dead. But they severely damaged their opponents. We managed to kill three of them who are on the verge of death, the other two are currently recovering on their way to Saran''s residence.

    They are also severely injured."

    "Did you spot their locations?"

    "Yes, even though the defensive formation is out of ce, I activated the old Ghost scout formation. I know their locations."

    "Good, let''s go. Keep the link with the formation open and check their locations real-time."

    The whole group started moving towards Saran''s residence.

    As he crossed them all, the n''s leader frowned.

    "You broke the limiters?"

    "Yes, Sir."

    "Why did you do such a foolish thing? If I had used that pill all it would take is one life at most. Now the n''s real strength would be weakened if you are gone."

    "What is the point of hiding the real strength if we are not using it in situations like this. Anyway, as long as we survive this and fight back properly, Divine league has no legs to stand up for the excessive strength."

    "Let''s hope we win then."

    At the same time, at the Enforcement department. Senior Elder Ma ismanding his subordinates as they cleaned up all the deadbodies in the yard. He used the necromances to collect the information from each one of them and made undead creatures out of them at the same time.

    He took out a bunch of metallic vests and made the undead creatures wear them as he created a battle formation.

    "Make them stay in that formation. We are moving to Saran''s residence like this.. From what I learned from the n''s elite team, there are a bunch of people waiting to be ughtered there."

 Chapter 1456 - Gathered

    <h4>Chapter 1456 - Gathered</h4>

    At Saran''s residence.

    While Giyon, Senior Elder Ma and n leader lead their own groups of people to this ce. Saran is facing multiple enemies at the same time.

    He is panting a bit, but he is actually in far better shape than his first opponent Kriyon.

    Kriyon has his whole body bruised. He is in his Naga battle form and several of his scales were peeled off his skin and he is bleeding everywhere.

    One of his fangs was gone and it is actually stuck in his back.

    Half of the scales that are on his spine were taken out and one of his eyes is bleeding profusely. Saran did some dirty job on him.

    But currently, Kriyon is the one who is feeling smug and confident.

    "Come on, how long do you think you can hold up, with all four of us here? Do you really think a cultivator that has newly broken through could take all of us on at the same time?"

    Kriyon said as he extended his hands pointing at the new help he got.

    The whole front yard is littered with corpses of the people that are not of the same cultivation level as them but still tried to interfere in the battle.

    Saran killed at least two dozen people in thest fight, but there is not a single scar or bruise left on his body.

    Except for the sweat and panting, nobody would have thought he was even involved in the fight. His robe is even clear of any bloodstains.

    He looked at Kriyon with a deep frown while eyeing everyone that surrounded him.

    "I don''t care how many of you guyse at me today. Not a single one of you getting near my children."

    "Why are you so adamant? Just hand over your children and join the divine league. You are clearly strong enough and not only would your children survive, but they would also be blessed by the gods and groomed by the people that the gods choose.

    They are the luckiest children in the universe."

    "God''s chosen? The pathetkeys lick the feet of the gods because of the treats that are being thrown at them.

    What right do they have to teach my children?

    By what right do the gods you worship think they are worthy of even coveting my children?

    Helping these gods is my children''s luck? It is lucky for them that I need some more time to grow. Or else, I would have pulled the tongues out of every god and deity that even looks at my children."

    "You Gaja n''s members are as adamant and stubborn as always. How dare you guys think you are better than the gods that are ruling us? Your arrogance once brought your n close to extinction and this time, you sessfully brought it."

    Kriyon spoke and gestured for all of hispanions to attack.

    Saran braced himself as he got ready to attack as well.

    But right before they made contact.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    A series of explosions rained down from behind the group in the middle.

    Giyon just jumped off of some flying beasts along with her subordinates while she threw some of Sam''s needles into the fray.

    Kriyon looked at the rear and was surprised.

    "Why is Giyon here? Isn''t ck Witch supposed to handle her?"

    One of the other three was also shocked and said.

    "I already told you, that killing Giyon is a must if we attack her. Sonic Prince wouldn''t leave us alive if he even finds a hint of our involvement in her attack.

    We either had to steer clear of herpletely or kill her without leaving a trace."

    He started panicking.

    "Shut up."

    Kriyon yelled as he looked up, but at this moment, Saran attacked him from behind cutting his tail off in a single hit.

    "AHHHHH¡­"

    "You bastard. "

    He turned around and started attacking as he tried his best to defend himself and his friends also started battling with Saran.

    Except for the one who panicked of course.

    "I am going to go and kill her. I cannot let her live."

    "You sick bastard. What is wrong with you? The sonic prince must have died in that trapid down by the Star eye sect. he wouldn''t have survived it."

    "I don''t know. As long as I didn''t hear the news of his death, I don''t believe he is dead and if he is not dead, then his daughter must die as soon as possible."

    As he said that, he immediately ran back into the crowd and moved towards Giyon, who is fighting against the small fries at the rear.

    But just before he could make a move at her, all of a sudden¡­

    *SLASH*

    Arge de of spatial energy, dark elemental energy and death energy appeared out of nowhere right in front of him, throwing him off.

    The earth shook a bit and with huge spatial energy swirling around, Senior Elder Ma appeared out of thin air along with the rest of his subordinates, all of them standing in the formation.

    The old man who was after Giyon was forced tobat the attacks of the formation as one sh after anothernded at him with every hand movement Senior Elder Ma made.

    His real cultivation is the Middle-stage Consummation of Astral ne, but with the help of this formation and all the undead creatures that are within, he managed to not just block the Peak stage cultivator, but also attacked him.

    But Senior Elder Ma had a grim look on his face.

    He knew he wouldn''t be able to hold on to this person for long. So, he looked at the main battle-field Saran is still holding up against three people by himself.

    He thought of something and made a move.

    A sh broke the spatial barrier and appeared right beside kriyon who was about to attack Saran.

    "AHHHHHHHHH¡­"

    Saran screamed on top of his lungs and looked at Senior Elder Ma. That was another mistake as Saran took this chance andnded one hit on the heart from behind, killing him instantly.

    *SLASH*

    But he was also a victim of one sh on his back.

    *BOOM*

    Senior Elder Ma also got hit by this old man and his formation took a great hit. The damage of most of it is transferred to the undead creatures, but this decreased the durability of it all.

    Now there are three people, but Senior Elder Ma can barely take two more hits, as he was rapidly thinking, Giyon suddenly looked at him and threw him something.

    "Senior Elder Ma, take a look."

    She yelled out loud and he caught the thing. It is actually a formation te and when he looked at it, there is a small note carved on top of it.

    It is a set of instructions and he started calcting rapidly to see what will happen if he followed that and the result scared the crap out of him.

    He never thought of using a formation like this before, because that goes against every rule of formation that he ever learned. Formations were all about channelling the energy to create something that could cause destruction, but not creating the destruction itself.

    But he knew that this would be working wonders.

    *BOOM*

    Another hitnded on the formation and Senior Elder Ma immediately made his move.

    All the undead creatures changed positions and the formation was altered a bit. In the middle of the formation, he ced the formation disc and activated it before pping his hands together and making a few hand signs.

    The formation''s barrier disappeared for a split second and the old man that was attacking him immediately entered.

    He wanted to kill Senior Elder Ma with that one hit, but he was unable to do that.

    Ma and all of his subordinates suddenly disappeared and the barrier that disappeared reappeared again trapping the old man inside.

    The old man didn''t worry, though. He knew that he could break out of this easily, but she also realized something that he should have realized sooner.

    *BOOM*

    Arge scale spatial explosion was triggered with the formation disc as the origin and the old man was stuck in it along with a bunch of cultivatorckeys of Divine league.

    Senior Elder Ma and his subordinates reappeared on the other end of the crowd and they joined the fray of attacking.

    The explosion dust cleared and a lot of spatial tears could be seen in that spot, but the old man is still alive.

    Ma gritted his teeth and showed almost screamed in anger. This is the most emotion he has shown in a while.

    The peak stage of Astral ne cultivation is really hard to beat with just tricks.

    But it didn''t take long for his anger to turn into surprise and then relief.

    *SLASH*

    A sh of golden streak appeared out of nowhere andnded right beside the old man in the middle of spatial tears and cut him in half.

    "n''s leader is finally here with the Elite squad. Everyone ughter the enemy."

    Senior Elder Ma screamed on top of his lungs as he charged forward.

 Chapter 1457 - The Hairy Savage

    <h4>Chapter 1457 - The Hairy Savage</h4>

    Twenty minutester.

    Everything happened like it was a dream.

    Saran is standing along with the n''s leader and the rest of the elite team while Giyon and Senior Elder Ma are standing with their own respective groups. At least what has left of them anyway.

    All the intruders have been cleared up. In the process, they also lost quite a few people of their own.

    But at least this is still considered a victory.

    Giyon went past the dead bodies and met with Saran.

    "Where are they?"

    "In the basement. Please go on and take a look at how they are doing. I will clean up here ande down there."

    Saran said with an exhaustive tone. He felt like his body is drained out of any kind of energy it could possess.

    Giyon ran in and made her way towards the basement and after reaching the door, she waved her hand and let Sam out.

    Sam took the support of the wall and then brought his crutch out. They both walked to the door and opened it.

    Inside they saw Saran''s wife cuddling their children as she tried to put them to sleep. But they are so curious and eager about the deathly noisesing from out that they were refusing to sleep. They felt relieved to see that the mother of the children is also not panicking that much.

    She looked at them smiled.

    "We won, didn''t we?"

    "Yes, of course. This is the Gaja n you are talking about." Giyon said with a wide grin as she and Sam walked to the kids.

    When the kids saw Sam who sat on the ground near to them, they immediately turned towards him and tried to extend their hands.

    Sam smiled and slid towards them and started ying with them.

    "What happened to your arm and leg?"

    Saran''s wife asked with concern.

    "Nothing much. They are disposable anyway."

    "How can they be disposable? They are¡­"

    "Don''t worry madam, I exchanged them with a life of an elite Divine League member. I am pretty sure it is a fair trade."

    "Please ept my apology. You are not even a member of this n, but you had to go through this ordeal because of us."

    "Please don''t say that. It is just a coincidence and someone came for me specifically too. You don''t have to me yourself for it. All you need to do is stay safe and let the kids grow up in the proper care of both of their parents.

    That would be enough payback for me."

    "Is this why you tried so hard to hide our children? You took the me for the lightning strikes, you didn''t let us announce the birth of the children, you even went as far as making those puppets that looked exactly like them.

    Did you always anticipate this would happen?"

    "I had a hunch. I knew that people wouldn''t sit still when their rivals got something better. Particrly when that something is four children that could change the power bnce of the realms as soon as they be adults.

    I just understand the interests and mentality of people towards their interests a bit too well. That is it."

    "We should have moved to a secluded ce to give birth. Because of us, the n has suffered so much. How many people have died, protecting four children? Is it really worth it?"

    Shemented and started tearing up. Sam didn''t have the answer to that and he let Giyon console her. He just looked at the four children and kept them entertained.

    If it was him, he would have that it is worth it. Even if the whole n died, he would say it is worth it. Not because of the potential they have, just because they are children. They didn''t ask to be born, they didn''t ask for this talent and potential, they didn''t even know what they signify.

    It is the elders and grownups that are so obsessed with these things and when someonees from outside to covet it, it is the n''s responsibility to save these innocent kids. Whether they want to or not.

    Maybe his thoughts are unreasonable and don''t make any sense, but he really doesn''t care.

    Giyon briefly exined the situation on what happened outside and how things are going now. Saran''s wife felt like a weight has been lifted off her shoulders as she hugged her children tighter.

    "I think it is better for you to leave this ce and go stay in a stray realm for a while. I am pretty sure that Saran can handle any possible troubles if you are in hiding."

    Sam suggested and she nodded.

    "We are actually nning to. But we don''t know how to deal with the constitutions. It is hard for them toprehend the cultivation techniques. We don''t even know if we have a proper cultivation technique for them at all.

    We are in a confused state."

    Sam nodded in understanding. It is a bit for them to deal with it all on their own at the start. They might have even wanted to meet with n''s leader and have spoken about it.

    He started thinking about whether he could help in any way. Even though he has a lot of cultivation techniques at hand, they are not really suitable for the children. Their potential would be a waste if they used these techniques.

    Of course, he does have a few ways to get the cultivation techniques, but no matter what it is, he needs to get his body back.

    He cannot make contact with Ling Tian in his current body.

    As he was thinking and the women are talking¡­

    *BOOM*

    There is another explosive sound that came from outside. All three of them exchanged nces and their hearts shook.

    Giyon stood up and said.

    "You guys stay here, I will go and take a look."

    "No, wait¡­"

    Sam stopped her and started thinking. He rapidly thought of any possible scenarios that are happening and how to get out of them, his brain acted like aputer processing millions of things at the same time.

    Meanwhile.

    Outside Saran''s residence.

    Saran and n''s leader are standing side by side as they looked at the neer.

    Senior Elder Ma who is handling the clean up of the deadbodies was stunned when he looked at the person that came in along with his subordinates.

    The man has a robust figure with long hair dangling down his feet as he floated in the air.

    He is the same young man who talked to his father about the phenomenon of lightning with his father on a hill in the Divine Graveyard.

    "The Hairy Savage."

    Senior Elder Ma muttered with his eyes widened in disbelief.

    The n''s leader also frowned when he heard these words as he knew who that person is. He never met him, but he heard his name quite some times.

    The Hairy Savage. Albeit aical name is the name of a man who sent shivers through many people''s spines within the grey circle.

    And he arrived using a spatial transference along with his subordinates right after the Gaja n finished with one of the most exhaustive battles they had ever been in.

    Currently, there are only three peak stage cultivators of Astral ne Consummation and all three of them are exhausted beyond their limits.

    "Hello, leader of the Gaja n." The Hairy Savage said as he looked at the n''s leader and then he turned to Saran.

    "You must be one of the raceless abominations that gave birth to the prodigies."

    Saran''s gaze became colder as he looked at the man. But he didn''t dare make a move. He knew for sure that this guy is not going to be easy to deal with. And he even brought another half a dozen Peak stage cultivators.

    At this moment Giyon ran out of the basement and came to the entrance to look at the whole scene. She was stunned as she looked at the man standing in the air.

    "Why the fuck is this guy here?"

    She muttered to herself in disbelief.

    "I am really sorry to use this timing to my advantage like this. But there is nothing I could do about it. This chance is way too sweet for me to just let it go. Gail and Gamin are gone, your grand elders are dead and even you are all exhausted to a great extent.

    This is the best chance for me to take the kids away without causing any ruckus all the while killing you guys if I have to. Don''t you think so?"

    As the Hairy savage spoke, Giyon walked to Saran and the n''s leader slowly as she exined something. She also took out an injector and injected some recovery vials into the n''s leader and Saran rapidly.

    "What are you doing?" The Hairy Savage said with a frown.

    Giyon didn''t even look at her and kept on muttering in an extremely low tone.

    "I am talking to youdy. What are you doing?"

    But there is no response.

    Giyonpletely ignored him as if she hadn''t even heard his words.

 Chapter 1458 - Plan

    <h4>Chapter 1458 - n</h4>

    The Hairy Savage had a frown on his face as he looked at Giyon and became very pissed. He almost wanted to make a move and his aura raged.

    But right before he was about to attack, n''s leader raised his head and said.

    "She is the daughter of the Sonic Prince, If you want to make a move, then do so by all means."

    The Hairy Savage''s aura instantly calmed down. His frown turned into a smile as he looked at Giyon and he examined her keenly even from that distance.

    "No wonder you are that cocky. Now that I look at you again, you indeed have some resemnce with that asshole. Maybe your mother''s genes dominated too much.

    Since you are that guy''s daughter, I will let you go. Just fuck off from here."

    Giyon just looked at him coldly and took a step back. But she didn''t heed his words and leave the ce. She just stood there.

    "Trust me, I might respect your father, but that doesn''t mean I am afraid of him. If you really get caught up in this mess and die, then you wouldn''t even have a chance to regret it."

    Giyon still didn''t speak.

    At this moment, Saran put on a ring on his finger and looked around gaining The Hairy Savage''s attention.

    He didn''t speak but just looked at Saran with a frown.

    "Saran, just hand over the kids. Their fate and prophecies regarding their fates, make it impossible for them to be in your hands. You will never be able to bear the brunt of this. I will make it quick for you and your wife if you save me some effort and I will even leave the rest of the n."

    "You just said you are not afraid. Are you scared now that my dad will kick your ass?"

    "Him? Kicking my ass? I am sorry to disappoint you. But he was never able to defeat me."

    "Yeah, I heard. Because you had to run away every time."

    The hairy savage''s expression changed and he clearly got a bit angry.

    "You¡­"

    He was about to say something, Saran who was standing kicked the ground and used all of his strength to run into the building. He didn''t even bother to run to the side and go through the entrance, he directly sted the wall of the building and entered it.

    The hairy Savage was stunned and he immediately zoomed forward along with the five subordinates he brought. But the n''s leader used his sword and jumped into the air as he swung it at full power.

    *BANG*

    A spatial barrier appeared in front of the Hairy Savage as he blocked the attack for him and his subordinates.

    "Take him on."

    The Hairy Savage said as he zoomed towards the building. He quickly scanned the building first while the five others are fighting with the n''s leader.

    There is no one in the building. Neither the wife nor the kids. He frowned and then thought of what Saran did right before he ran away and turned to Giyon.

    He put pressure on her making her feel suffocated, before asking.

    "Where are the wife and the kids?"

    Giyon looked at the man coldly with stubbornness all over her face.

    But the hairy savage didn''t take this defiance lightly and said.

    "Did you give him a divine dimension fragment?"

    Giyon''s expression changed in one that of a shock and the Hairy Savage smirked as he left her alone before running on the air.

    His movement is quite different from that of Sonic prince and Gamin.

    They looked like they are walking in the air. But this man looked like he is making a tunnel through the air while sliding through it using his spatial element.

    He crossed the distance of a hundred meters like he blinked with the spatial elements.

    At this moment, the n''s leader who is defending against the five suddenly took out a blood-red crystal pill bottle that looked like a blood drop and swallowed the pill before the leader of the elite team could even react.

    He didn''t even get a chance to speak before massive pressureing out of the n''s leader.

    The blood in his body seemed to have boiled to the highest temperature and his whole skin turned red with his veins popping out. His muscles bulged and there is a massive chaotic and destructive energying out of his body.

    "AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH¡­."

    He looked to the sky and yelled before he lunged forward with his sword and made a move against the five of them.

    The sword strike created a massive ray that made all five people shake in their boots.

    "This bastard is burning his life away. Quick dodge."

    One of them warned the others as he tried to block the attack, but the barrier broke open and the sword cut him into two before it went straight for the second one.

    In one strike two people are dead.

    The Hairy Savage who was after Saran suddenly felt the aura and he was covered with a sense of trepidation. He looked at the rear and noticed how two of his people are killed instantly and frowned.

    He was in a dilemma on whether he should be attacking Saran or should he go back. But before he could even think of making a decision, the n''s leader already starteding at him.

    He kicked the ground and ran on the wind as he looked like a barbaric bloody demon that was unleashed on this world.

    The Hairy Savage looked at the sword aura that is concentrated on him and frowned.

    He turned around and met the sword ray that wasing at him with a spatial barrier.

    His subordinates who saw what is happening immediately ran towards them to make sure that their boss doesn''t suffer a loss.

    They are doubting whether their boss would win if the n''s leader manages tond an attack. Saran who was running until then suddenly turned back and both of them started attacking.

    The elite team''s leader who was stunned by his boss'' sudden transformation also turned back and started fighting the subordinates of Hairy Savage.

    Three Vs four battles. But even in that situation. The Gaja n''s side seemed to have gained an upper hand and even the Hairy Savage couldn''t recklessly hit him.

    But in the meantime, his subordinates are being broken down.

    While the battle is taking ce here. Giyon ran to Senior Elder Ma and started giving some instructions.

    He was shocked instantly and asked her to confirm.

    "Are you sure, he can pull it off?"

    "Yes, he can. But can you make that single-use transference tunnel instantly?"

    "I can. I have the formation discs that could help me with this. But the problem is the Hairy Savage can easily interrupt it. His spatial proficiency is way higher than mine. The cultivation difference is an added disadvantage."

    "Don''t worry. If everything goes ording to the n, we would be the ones winning."

    "I hope it works then."

    With that Senior elder Ma hurriedly took out a bunch of formation discs and started creating aplex formation.

    Giyon took out a transference token and gave it to him. Senior Elder Ma decoded it to make some adjustments to the formation.

    Within eight minutes, he didn''t everything and set up the formation sessfully.

    "I am done."

    "Already? Did you double-check everything?"

    "Yes, I did. As long as Saran uses the formation disc on his hand properly, everything will work out as you said. But I am pretty sure the hairy savage would be able to intercept it."

    "We are counting on it."

    As soon as she said that, she made one of her subordinates who uses fire element to shoot arge fireball into the air.

    Everyone''s attention was gathered by it and at this moment, the n''s leader who is narrowing down on the Hairy Savage suddenly made a move. He killed thest of the savage''s subordinates and turned his tail to run towards the residence.

    The Hairy Savage who was about to make a move frowned and looked at him. He was actually acting warily all this while, because of the weird situation of the n''s leader. He can estimate that the other party''s power is not permanent and is waiting for it goes down as he yed defence.

    But now that the other party is running away, he couldn''t understand why, because he cannot see the power decreasing any time soon.

    He turned around to see Saran who is standing there with a formation disc in his hand.

    He ced it on the ground with a transference token attached to it and then ced the ring on the disc.

    He immediately understood what is happening. But before he could react, Saran used the formation. The ring disappeared from the spot.

    The Hairy Savage closed his eyes and his aura raged.

    The spatial element in the surrounding area turned chaotic and the long hair he had suddenly spread like spikes to all directions.

 Chapter 1459 - Despair

    <h4>Chapter 1459 - Despair</h4>

    Everyone was shocked as they looked at the strands of hair extended like metal spikes.

    "Here ites."

    Senior Elder Ma muttered under his breath.

    The Hairy Savage opened his eyes as they glowed with silvery grey light. Now with his eyes, he could see the worldpletely differently. It is simr to the energy vision to a great extent, but it only works for spatial energy.

    He could see the temporary spatial tunnel connecting Saran''s current location and Senior Elder Ma who is operating the formation. A ring is going through the tunnel at a rapid pace. The n''s leader is running towards Senior Elder Ma.

    It didn''t take long for him to figure out what is happening.

    Saran distracted him along with the n''s leader drawing him into a fight, when he is fully involved and a bit far away from the residence and the n''s leader is still at full power, Saran used the spatial tunnel to send the ring away.

    The n''s leader uses that full strength to go after the ring and capture it, before escaping.

    He must say that it is a great n, but he knew for a fact that it wouldn''t work. In fact, they are foolish for thinking it would work.

    The Hairy Savage zoomed past everything and stopped at one spot. Some strands of his hair that are standing up like spikes turned normal and prated the spatial fabric around him.

    The space ripped apart and the ring that should have been on its way towards Senior Elder Ma appeared right in front of him.

    His grin widened as he looked at the ring and confirmed that it is indeed a divine dimension. His hair acted like sewing needles as they patched the spatial fabric back up.

    As the space is going back to its original state, the n''s leader stopped on his way back and looked at the Hairy Savage carefully. He got his energy circting all throughout and channelled it to the sword.

    As soon as the space was mended and good as new when the hairy savage least expected it¡­

    Four babies came out of the divine dimension ring and theytched on to his body. He was shocked to his core. Even with all of his strength, he didn''t expect something like this would happen. While he was in that shock, something even more stunning happened.

    Sam suddenly came out of the divine dimension in mid-air as he threw over three dozen needles at the man at the same time on the same spot.

    With that throw, he immediately went back into the divine dimension fragment.

    *BOOM*

    A massive explosion urred with all the needles hitting him at the same time. The Hairy Savage felt shook, but he didn''t take too much damage. There might be a hundred attacks from Middle-stage Astral ce consummate cultivator, but there is no way they could create some life-threateningly lethal damage to him.

    But what happened next could have.

    The Divine dimension fragment ring that was caught up in the explosion is blown away.

    Saran who is observing every moment, ran towards a certain point as he estimated the trajectory to catch the ring, while the ring is still en route though, something else happened.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The four babies that aretched on the Hairy Savage exploded simultaneously. The puppets that are filled with liquid elemental energy exploded at the same time and this time, the hairy savage felt the brunt of the attack.

    He started spewing blood like crazy and he felt the elemental energy corrosion in his body.

    The n''s leader who was waiting for this opportunity didn''t wait. He made his move and ran towards the Hairy savage with his sword fully loaded with his energy.

    He jumped into the air andnded a straight vertical sh on the Savage. He wanted to cut him in half vertically, but the sword didn''t go through.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sound came with a lot of dust raising from the surroundings. The earth shook a bit and the n''s leader felt his arms go numb and started to bleed.

    He gritted his teeth and kept on going as he mustered all of his strength to proceed with the cut.

    But after a few minutes, he jumped back with his sword. His hands are shaking and he couldn''t help but feel a sense of trepidation in his heart.

    The dust cleared and when everyone saw what is standing there, they are shocked.

    The Hairy Savage is standing on the ground, there is arge gash on his chest from his shoulder, his upper robe is fully gone.

    But thatrge and deep gash caused by the n''s leader is not exactly the most horrifying thing so see, instead there are four spots on hisrge body where a chunk of flesh is missing, and the exposed past is actually covered with elemental energy corrosion.

    He looked weak, he is bleeding all over and he clearly lost a lot of energy.

    But for some reason, he looked extremely dangerous. His eyes are covered with the silvery grey energy once again and the hair started moving once again.

    He slowly took a step forward.

    *Cough* *Cough*

    He coughed out some blood, but he didn''t stop. He looked at the n''s leader and all his hair spread out wide.

    The spatial fabric around him looked like cracked ss. A crack spread far and wide and ready topletely copse the ss at any given moment.

    "You bastards. How dare you? How fucking dare you attack me like this? How fucking dare you to sneak up on me?"

    He muttered constantly as the cracks spread wider and wider.

    Everyone who is within the visual range of these cracks, felt a sense of dread creeping upon them. They could listen to their hearts pounding.

    "It seems like we just woke up beast."

    Giyon said with gritted teeth.

    "No, it is the beast''s rage right before it is about to fall asleep."

    Senior Elder Ma said from the side.

    "What do you mean?"

    "He is about to copse. He didn''t have much energy left, the explosions that caused the elemental energy corrosion must be eating him up even at his stage because of the point-nk explosions, so he is just trying to make one final move before he wants to get away from here.

    He needs instant rest."

    "Then why bother with this attack. He might as well leave this ce."

    "He cannot do that. He cannot leave an impression that he lost this battle. That is a must."

    "Why?"

    "You will learn real soon. There is another Savage that is crazier than this guy and when you see him for the first time along with this savage, you will definitely understand.

    That is if you get out of here alive, brace yourself."

    Senior Elder Ma, used everything he had to create a barrier around. He didn''t spare a single thing on him.

    "Isn''t better to get into the divine dimension fragment?"

    "Of course it is, but that is a spatial attack, you would be lost in chaos before you even know it. If you can just live your life within the divine dimension fragment for the rest of your life, you can try it."

    "No thanks."

    Giyon is also prepared to brace the impact.

    The n''s leader who used up most of his energy felt exhausted. He has been in battle after battle and is operating on maximum energy. He cannot go on for that long.

    As that thought came to his mind, he felt a sharp pain from his legs, spine and arms. He could feel it. The pill is about to run out and he is feeling the aftereffects already. It is time for him to rest. If he didn''t there is a high chance that he would die.

    But when he looked at the Hairy Savage cracking the space like it was made of ss, he knew he couldn''t do it.

    He channelled what is left of him into the sword and looked at the Hairy Savage and then at the n members.

    He gritted his teeth even harder and ran forward.

    The Hairy Savage looked at him and said in a frosty tone.

    "Come on, you bastard. I will kill you right here and now."

    He extended his hand and spatial energy gathered at the end of it. He pulled it back to throw a punch.

    Arge fist that was formed by condensed spatial energy made an appearance as it went past all the cracks straight at the n''s leader.

    The n''s leader, felt the unfathomable energying from that and knew he wouldn''t be able to endure it.

    He stopped in the spot and lodged his legs into the ground. He swung the sword with all he got. His arm muscles tore apart with blood all over and the shnded on the fist.

    But the sword ray got disintegrated in front of the fist and the fist made its way towards the n''s leader.

    The Hairy Savage grinned wildly as he looked at the n''s leader, waiting for him to die.

    The n''s leader felt despair creeping over as he looked at the fist nearing him.

 Chapter 1460 - Old Man

    <h4>Chapter 1460 - Old Man</h4>

    The n''s leader felt the death creeping upon him.

    But all he could think about is what would happen after he died. After all, he is the strongest person there at the moment. He is the leader of the n. He is unwilling to die like this.

    He wanted to summon as much strength as he can, but he cannot. He cannot find any strength and he cannot find any help.

    As his thoughts wandered around, all of a sudden he felt a familiar aura approaching them.

    *KEENEN*

    A weird whistling sound came and before he realized it, a white sh appeared in front of him blocking the fist.

    *BOOM*

    The n leader took in the aftershock of the sh and flew backwards.

    But in the middle of it, he could see that familiar silhouette he admired so much over the years. He heaved a sigh of relief and let his consciousness slip away while he was still mid-air.

    He crashed onto the ground but stayed alive.

    The Hairy Savage looked at the figure that arrived in the middle with a frown. His grin is gone and he looked extremely frustrated. This aura is familiar to him too. But he didn''t feel relief. He only felt rage and irritation.

    When the dust settled everyone managed to see the figure standing there.

    It is none other than the Sonic Prince, Gail. He is standing there while panting. Most of his robe waspletely destroyed and even his inner garments are showing out. He looked like he just ran around the whole world beforeing here.

    "Flit, you sick bastard. How dare you attack my n while I was not here? You finally became too much of a coward to attack me directly and are nowing here to unt your strength when I am not here?"

    The Hairy Savage suddenly undid all the cracks in the surrounding space as he looked at Gail coldly.

    "Hmph? Me afraid of you? You and I both know that the only reason we aren''t able to decide the fight is that I was not allowed to. Otherwise, do you think you would be alive now talking all the yap in front of me?

    I came here for a different purpose and I am going back with that purpose fulfilled. You or anyone else wouldn''t be able to stop me."

    "Yeah? Really? I would like to see if your father woulde to stop me as I ughter you today."

    As soon as he spoke, two knuckle dusters appeared on his fists and he lunged forward.

    Flit mmed palms together and the space surrounding him thickened, trying to restrict Gail''s motion while he moved forward himself.

    But gail didn''t care. He just jumped headfirst as he threw his first punch.

    The fist whistled through the air and went straight to the face of Flit, but right before it made the contact, his long and thick hair moved to the front blocking the fist.

    He thought he nullified the impact, but the fist threw him off guard and he was sent back a few feet.

    Gail kicked the ground and moved forward as he threw more and more punches.

    Flit who was prepared for goodbat based on technique was caught off guard by the rapid barrage of Gail.

    The Gail he knew and fought so many times never fights like this. He was always tactical and very calctive. He would never waste his energy like this, but this time Gail seemed to have really gone over the edge.

    He just straight up behaved like a savage.

    The grace and refined movements that earned him the title of prince are nowhere to be seen.

    He punched and punched like his power is going to run out and he wants to use it all up.

    Flit who was already injured clearly couldn''t handle this barrage and constantly took steps back. He tried to conjure spatial elements to get back on his feet and defend against the attacks, but he wasn''t able to.

    Every punch is creating ripples in the surroundings and the whole thing turned into utter chaos. Flit is already a bit exhausted and his wounds are not really helping.

    On top of all that, his physical condition with elemental corrosion is not allowing him for proper physicalbat.

    The energy ripples are making it impossible for him to conjure spatial energy.

    At this moment, everyone looked at the beating that Gail is giving with a sense of dread. Even though Gail is on their side, they cannot help but feel a bit troubled by how he acted.

    He really looked like he lost it.

    But along with the fear, they also felt a sense of relief that Gail is on their side.

    Sam who came out of the divine dimension fragment is also looking at the fight in awe. He could clearly resonate with the rage that Gail is showing. It seems like the whole incident really made Gail go berserk.

    But as he was thinking, he frowned.

    "Did you also notice this?"

    Saran asked with a confused tone.

    "Yes, Gail is not trying to kill him. He is deliberately avoiding all the points of attack. He is trying to not cause any damage. Why?"

    "I can''t understand that as well. Why is he holding back? He has so many openings, he should have killed him by now."

    "I don''t understand it either."

    Sam is already using energy vision to barely get the movements and attacks of Gail, he didn''t even have enough focus left to estimate and guess what is happening at all.

    Soon everyone realized what is happening and they frowned.

    But soon they also understood.

    All of a sudden, Flit''s body glowed with energy and a barrier appeared out of nowhere. He looked like hepletely lost consciousness.

    "Finally, you are here, you old fuck."

    Gail said as he spat out coldly.

    An old man''s silhouette appeared out of Gail''s body. It is none other than Ghora, Flit''s father.

    "You again, Sonic Prince? How many times should I tell my idiot son to not fight with you? Did he ever heed my advice?"

    "Maybe he is just more of a man than his father."

    Gail said with a smirk.

    "A childish provocation? I expected more from Sonic prince. There is a reason why he is not allowed to fight you. It is because your death is not yet decided. Only after it was done, would I allow him to open that barrier. Until then, don''t get too excited to die.

    So, it is better if you stop messing with my son."

    "Messing with your son? Open your eyes wide open, you overgrown porcupine. This is the Gaja n. How dare you send your son to the Gaja n with yourckeys? It seems like you are the one that has gone crazy and is seeking death."

    As soon as he mentioned those words, the old man''s silhouette closed its eyes. After a few seconds, he opened them and looked at his son coldly with disappointment written all over his face.

    He then noticed the injuries on the body and then at Sam who is standing far away.

    "So, you are the brat that tried to mask the heavenly phenomenon as an experiment. How dare you take credit for a heavenly urrence."

    Sam frowned and didn''t reply. He could guess that the old man is talking to him and what he is talking about, but he didn''t understand why?

    "And you are foolish enough to involve yourself in a fight that is clearly not yours. My idiot son will take revenge on you. If he doesn''t kill you soon, I will disown him."

    "Then you can be childless soon. Because he is not going to even touch a single strand of that young man." Gail interrupted and spat coldly.

    "Hmph. We will see what he can do. He couldn''t even protect his own body and lost it, what is the point of trying to be a hero and try to save some kids.

    In my eyes, it is nothing but an act of self-deception.

    Trying to convince himself that he is worth something and can protect something."

    As soon as he said those words. Sam who is standing far away suddenly felt them reverberating in his mind.

    He kept on recalling the incident of Sivan stealing his body directly and him being helpless enough to ept this crippled body in exchange.

    He kept on recalling how much struggle he has to go through with this body.

    He kept on thinking of the scenes again and again. Sam tried toe out of this cycle, but he felt like he got stuck.

    "STOP IT, YOU OLD MAN," Gail yelled at the top of his lungs and only at this moment did Same out of this dazed and confused state.

    "You sick old bastard. What is the point of ying with the heart of a kid? Why don''t you try your tricks on me instead? Your inner voice versus my noise.. Let us see whoes out on top."

 Chapter 1461 - Losses

    <h4>Chapter 1461 - Losses</h4>

    The Old man looked at Gail and didn''t reply.

    His silhouette disappeared into Flit''s body and the next second, the whole area is once again surrounded with spiritual energy. Flit''s body disappeared from the spot as if it was never. Gail heaved a sigh and walked towards the n Leader lying unconscious on the ground with many injuries.

    He examined the guy and felt relieved after noticing that his life is not in danger.

    He looked through his spatial ring and took out a pill to feed the n''s leader. The leader of the Elite team came forward and took over the n''s leader to make him get some rest. Finally, the whole farce is over.

    Every Gaja n member that survived felt like they got a new lease over their life.

    At that moment, nobody wanted to think about what would happen next and just wanted to live out the rest of the day in peace.

    After an hour. Within Giyon''s residence.

    Gail, Giyon and Sam are sitting together at a table.

    They didn''t speak since they came back from Saran''s residence. All three of them freshened up and just sat there as they drank some wine.

    "I am really sorry. I should have been more cautious about this whole thing."

    Gail said after a long silence.

    Giyon shook her head and chuckled.

    "What are you apologizing for? It is not like you can go into the brains of every enemy of the n and look into it to see what is going to happen."

    Gail then looked at Sam and said.

    "What is the deal with Saran''s children? Why are so many people after them? Everyone is saying they are special, they have constitutions and all, but nobody has concrete details. Can you fill me in?"

    Sam thought for a moment and exined what happened during the childbirth and what could have prompted the people toe here.

    "It seems like you anticipated this way before than anyone else."

    Sam nodded.

    "I knew that the kids are special, but I never knew they are this coveted. I doubt that things would stop at this."

    As they are speaking, Gamin and Yuvana arrived along with Grivon.

    "I heard Flit was here. Did his old man bring him away again?"

    Gamin asked as he took a seat.

    "Yes. As always."

    Grivon ran to Giyon and started bombarding her with many questions. He then looked at Sam who is sitting without his mechanical limbs.

    "What the fuck happened to you? Where are your limbs?"

    "Lost them in the fight."

    "What did you do in a fight like this? I heard everyone that came is super strong?"

    "Yeah, they are. But most of them don''t have the brains to go with that body. We managed to kill The ck Witch because of those limbs. I guess that is kind of fair trade."

    Gail, Gamin and Yuvana were surprised.

    "The ck Witch came here?" Gail asked.

    "Yeah, she did. The Divine league promised to give the kid with darkness constitution as a disciple. So, she came here to kill me. But we managed to deal with her. Sam used his limbs to create some explosions that are very weird and made her shadow squirm in agony before we managed to kill her."

    "Oh? Thank god you are okay. She is a really foxy woman. It would have been really hard to kill her."

    Yuvana said as she heaved a sigh of relief.

    "Which god are you thanking aunt? The gods are the ones that wanted our n dead today."

    Giyon said in amenting tone.

    Everyone turned silent again.

    The next day, everyone within the n gathered for a meeting in n''s leader''s residence. The main hall of the n ispletely destroyed, so they chose the next best thing.

    As they all gathered, the n''s leader started looking at the reportspiled by the remnants of the investigative department and the enforcement department.

    He couldn''t help but feel the sense of loss.

    All the grand elders are dead. Most of the core elders and Senior Elders are also dead. There are a lot more enemy deadbodies than they had previously known within the n ground and there are even more dead bodies of the n members along with them.

    Almost all of the youngsters, innocent kids, regr members, external branch members, city guards, servants, maids, merchants and even some guests from the subordinate realms. All of them are dead. ughteredpletely.

    He also got the report from the secret forces of the Gaja n that are mostly focused on collecting information along with the and the realm.

    It was said that seventy per cent of direct businesses under the n were taken over by other organizations.

    Many subordinate organizations rebelled and joined together with other organizations immediately. Cities were destroyed. Many people died. It is almost like everything that is rted to Gaja n has beenpletely destroyed.

    If even the realm they are present it has been this much of a mess, only God knows what the other realms have been like.

    They couldn''t get much information on this.

    "Why? Why did this happen?" the n''s leader''s tone quivered as he looked at the reports.

    He then looked at Gail and asked.

    "Do you know how this happened?"

    "Yes. The organizations ganged upon us. The whole tournament is a ruse. We were also ganged up by many grand elders, but we managed toe out unscathed."

    "All of this for four kids that are prophesied to be the leaders of the new era?"

    "The things people do are indeed inexplicable. Particrly when they are done in the name of an uncertain future that they are not even sure of."

    Gailmented over it.

    That day, everyone gathered to stay together and maintained all the statistics of deaths and losses. As the numbers increased, their hearts grew heavier and heavier.

    In one day, Gaja n is reduced to twenty percent of its original size. That is assuming all of their external organizations are destroyed.

    To confirm this estimation, they have to wait for the reports toe from other areas.

    The whole n is in a sour mood.

    The next three days, all the efforts were made to get information from the areas under the Gaja n''s control to learn what the situation is.

    It turned out as soon as the attack in the tournament began, everyone already made their move.

    Every organization made a move, almost instantly to upy as much territory as they can.

    The worst fears of everyone in the Gaja n has been realized.

    Everyone is feeling troubled.

    Most of the Gaja n''s open resources are gone. Many of their external members arepletely on the enemy side now. The worst part is, even if they managed to retake the properties they lost, they don''t have members to hold them up.

    This caused a lot of mess for them.

    At this moment, Giyon who always didn''t get involved in the n''s activities, got herself involved for the first time.

    She took out a lot of hidden information and ced it in front of the n''s leader.

    "These are all the secret properties of the youngsters that died. They have their subordinates taking care of these things. There is no way all of these are taken away. I think Gaja n can use this information to bounce back a bit."

    "Thank you." The n leader said as he took the information with shaking hands.

    Grivon also did the same. He even went as far as giving out half of the newly acquired properties to the n.

    But since it is impossible to give out his own subordinates like that, he decided to be the n''s representative for the said properties and just ran them with his own subordinates for the time being.

    Looking at them. Some of the elders did the same as well.

    They knew that this is the direst Gaja n had ever been in a long time. They all had to get back together to bounce back.

    "We need to keep these things secret at all costs. We cannot let their presence reveal itself.

    We are going to seal the city. Since the merchants are already non-existent at the current rate, we will be rebuilding the city and we shall go be recluse for a few months.

    I believe even the ns wouldn''t dare toe and attack us without knowing what our exact strength left is and even they have to lick their own wounds.

    Meanwhile, poprize this whole thing. I want to see how they would react when people''s faiths don''t stay as stable as they were before.

    Let all of the subordinates on the outside publicize the matter of how many organizations had to gang up on us to destroy us. Of course, leave out the details."

    This is the first order, the n''s leader passed after the incident.

    "Are you sure you want to do this? I mean, it does appear as a provocation."

    The elite team''s leader asked.

    "We need to.. As far as I am concerned, this is the only way."

 Chapter 1462 - Plans

    <h4>Chapter 1462 - ns</h4>

    The n''s leader is pretty pissed at everyone that was involved in the incident. Three different groups who barely have any rtionship with each other made a move on Gaja n at the same time.

    They plotted and executed everything perfectly and the worst part of it all is that Gaja n had no clue whatsoever.

    They had spies everywhere, but they didn''t send any information back. He is trying to get them in touch to see if anyone is alive.

    But until now, there is barely any luck.

    Gail, Gamin and Yuvana are within the n. They didn''t go out to take revenge.

    Currently, the situation of the n is very sensitive. There are over ten organizations that just attacked Gaja n with a massive plot. Nobody knows when they will get desperate now that the Gaja n has survived this peril.

    The Peril that they should have never escaped.

    The seal to the city currently serves as a defensive move as well as a warning.

    It is saying the other organizations that the city is off-limits and they shouldn''t be arriving at all.

    Many organizations are currently contemting what to do with the Gaja n.

    There is a reason why they didn''t directly attack the n openly. The Gaja n has a great reputation. Manymon folks even in other territories knows about the n and they have a decently clean image.

    And for the organizations at their level, they need to keep up that image because of their need for faith.

    The faith that every Astral ne Consummate stage cultivator needs to have any chance to break through to the next stage.

    If all the ns attacked the Gaja n without a proper reason, even if they didn''t showcase their dissatisfaction and anger, there is no way they would just let it slide in their hearts.

    The whole faith they have umted over the years would be gone.

    The leaders of the Gaja n and the Grand elders who are into their old age are basically struggling so hard to keep this faith and are benefitting from it one way or the other.

    And the gods who are supporting these organizations are also feeding on the same faith from these people because of the reputation of the n.

    So, they made this deliberate and intricate n, luring them all over and killing everyone off. But now everything went sideways.

    On top of all of that shit they stirred, The n''s leader is not sitting still.

    He directly spread the information to the whole world.

    The Elite team''s leader used his external connections and friendships to spread the information based on the n''s leader''s orders.

    This is a direct provocation by directly killing the reputation of the other organizations.

    The n leader wants to use scare tactics in this situation. He knows very well that every organization would be on the edge. So, not only did he seal the city, he is also provoking them.

    He simply says that the whole city is under their control and they are strong and secure enough to provoke the organizations.

    They are simply asking them toe and get them.

    Three days passed.

    But there is no reaction from the other organizations.

    The n''s leader recoveredpletely and he finally went to meet with Gail, Gamin and Yuvana.

    "Thank you Brother Gail for the medicine. I am pretty sure it would have been an expensive thing even for you."

    "No need. We are of one n and in such a situation the price of that pill is negligiblepared to your life."

    "I am really sorry that I wasn''t able to save the n. I still remember you telling me on that day, how big of responsibility I am going to carry. But I was ignorant and only thought of the position of superiority I was going to obtain.

    But now I understand."

    "Don''t apologize for anything. You are a better n leader than any of the previous ones. Even the founder wouldn''t have done a better job than you.

    You stood your ground and put everything on the line. There is only so much one person can do no matter how powerful they are."

    Gail and Gamin consoled him a bit.

    "So, what is your next n?"

    After some time Gail asked.

    "Gaja n needs decades to recover from this blow. We don''t even know whether the Divine league would be staying out of this from now on. But there is a great chance they woulde back.

    The other organizations are also in a tense situation.

    We need to make sure that everyone thinks that we are strong enough and don''t attack us for a few years.

    We must keep up the image that even without the numbers we are as good as ever.

    We need to reestablish trade, increase the resources, develop again. Increase the territory.

    There are a lot of things, but first of all, we need to send them a few messages.

    The first one is, that there would be consequences for their actions and the second one is that we are still not weak enough for them to barge in and take us on even in this situation.

    If we cannot do both of them, we would soon be fish on the chopping board, ready to have the head severed."

    "What do you want us to do? Just tell us that."

    "It would help if you carry out some assassination attempts. We need to take down at least two grand elders from each organization and it needs to happen at a rapid pace.

    We cannot afford to put these organizations to drop down the edge and attack us at the moment. But we also need to make their power go less."

    "This situation wouldn''t get resolved like that."

    As the n leader is speaking, Sam suddenly said.

    Everyone turned to him.

    "if you really want to keep your organization safe while retaining this city, you need to make them understand that you are only staying down because you want to not because you have to.

    You have to show them that, you can walk around and grip them by their throats if that is what it takes.

    That wouldn''t be achievable if you are just assassinating.

    The best option is to pick a n or an organization and annoy them secretly. Make them go crazy in the most embarrassing ways that they wouldn''t be able to go and tell anyone or publicize. Make theme and attack you by themselves.

    Make theme to the city and defeat them. You need to absolutely crush them.

    Not a single piece of information should go outside. The only thing the world should know is how many hours did the weakened Gaja n take to destroy the full force of the n that came at them.

    If you publicize it and then proceed to deal with the rest of the organizations one by one. Picking up the pieces randomly but collectively at the same time, you will have some breathing space for a few years.

    In these few years, you can establish secret trades behind their backs and develop from their pockets while weakening them. If that is what you want of course."

    "Of course, I want that, why wouldn''t I? The revenge is bound to be taken on every single of these organizations."

    "Then in your current stage, trade is the best route. Contact a reliable merchant that does business on a massive scale. He must cover at least four to five territories that are underplete control of enemy organizations¡­."

    Sam went on to exin his n and the other just listened quietly.

    "You seemed to have done this before."

    "Many times, In fact, my organization must even be doing this now as we speak."

    "You are eviler than you look."

    "I never imed to be a good guy, to begin with."

    "Alright, then suggest this too. What should be the first organization that we should be targeting?"

    "Which n leader has the most inted ego?"

    All four of them looked at each other and gave out one answer.

    "Bain n."

    "Then that is your target.

    People with Big Egos are easier to explode. Go and pick on this guy."

    "You didn''t even like me, why are you advising me now?" The n''s leader asked.

    "Opinions are not permanent."

    That is all Sam said and left.

    He is currently on a peg leg and is walking away.

    "You can have your limbs made by the artisan department of the n. One of them is still alive and he is a really good worker."

    "No, I will wait. Traditional artisans would find it hard to get the concept of the limbs. I will find one myself. Don''t worry. Thanks for the offer though."

    He didn''t even turn back as he answered and went to meet the kids in Saran''s residence.

    "So, how are you doing? How is your wife holding up."

 Chapter 1463 - Bain

    <h4>Chapter 1463 - Bain</h4>

    Ten days passed.

    Sam is standing on the wall of the n estate as he looked at the city with a telescope in his hands.

    It is one of the new things he made. Since he lost his body, he couldn''t find a proper way to get the same visual ability he had.

    The mutation of the Sky sovereign roc to his eyes made him eye-sight impable among his peers, now with the help of this telescope he can get the same.

    Currently, he is looking at different spots of the city, observing certain people that are currently stationed to notify any changes that could happen at any moment.

    Grivon walked towards him and asked.

    "So, is your new toy working well? What is the point of using these things? Our eyesight will keep on improving with our cultivation anyway."

    Sam just shrugged and gave the telescope to him.

    Grivon looked through it and was surprised a bit.

    "I don''t know why, but looking through this tunnelled vision is a bit more interesting than I thought."

    "Of course. It would be. Any new perception is refreshing. You will find how useful it can be after you use it more and more."

    "Alright. Uncle Gail is asking for you, he is waiting for you at the guard post."

    Sam nodded and jumped off the wall. He went to the guard post nearby where Gail is sitting and watching the n estate.

    "You wanted to speak to me?" Sam asked as soon as he entered.

    Gail looked at Sam and gestured for him to sit down before speaking.

    "How are you doing? Isn''t staying with one arm ufortable."

    "It is a bit. But I would rather wait for a proper mechanical limb, than settle for a mediocre one."

    "Your wish. How are you feeling inside though? Are you hearing any voices? Did you feel like doing something that you wouldn''t normally be doing?"

    Sam shook his head and said.

    "No, still no such reactions. I believe I am perfectly fine."

    "I am sorry for asking you this every day, but I just want to be sure. That old man can do some funny business with just his words. Very few people escaped the after-effects of his words."

    "So, are you going to tell me what this is all about? I mean, all you are doing is asking questions every day, you are not giving me any other info."

    "Well, since you are alright, then it might not have any effect on you, so I might as well say it.

    That old man is called Ghora. A very powerful person within the Grey circle and he lives within the Divine Graveyard. Very few people in this world can even be considered his peers. It has been decades since hest fought by himself.

    His son Flit has been doing all of his dirty work.

    He spends his time on the mountain meditating.

    He is skilled in both space and dark elements. He can use weird soul techniques. The Inner Voice is one such technique. It messes with the hearts of the people.

    Your mind would be set on an infinite loop of all the bad thoughts you have about yourself. Guilt, regret, anger, hatred, envy, lust, sadness, despair. All the negative things that you usually suppress, things you wish never happened and the things that you are desperately trying to forget.

    The surface and run on a loop.

    There are many incidents in which he just said a few words to some people and they killed themselves in the most self-destructive ways possible.

    One of them went to his strongest enemy organization and battled to death attracting all of the enemies.

    Another one went and fought with the lover of the woman he loved. He died a tragic death as all his attacks are suicidal since the opponent is strong.

    He has done this many times and many people in the circle are even afraid to hold a conversation with him. He tried to do the same to you. I tried to interrupt it before it was finished, but I don''t know if I was toote.

    But since you are not seeing any changes in the past few days, it seems like you are doing fine. Your mentality is strong. Good."

    "That answers some questions. But what is this about him taking his son away from you? Why is he not letting you guys fight it out?

    I am not saying he could, but if Flit kills you, that would solve one of his problems doesn''t it?"

    "Yes, it does. But that is also something that I don''t understand.

    Every time, when Flit takes serious damage or he was about to break his energy limits, he woulde out all of a sudden and take his son away.

    Since he has expertise in space element, he was able to use the body impably well."

    "I guess the world has all kinds of weird people."

    "Yes.

    Anyway, how is the situation outside?"

    "About that, all the citizens are dragged into the estate. Everyone is safe. But are you sure that the Bain n is going to attack us?

    I mean, you said they would be here by yesterday, but there is not a single sign.

    Anyway, why do you think they are pissed off enough toe and attack us?"

    "Trust me, if these ten days didn''t piss off Bain, then nothing in this world would piss them off ever again. That means they lost all of their emotions, ego, pride and everything that is rted to it."

    "What did you guys do exactly?"

    "Ripped apart the Bain history.

    The history of the Bain n is filled with holes. Nobody believes it entirely because some truths came out about them to the world.

    The Bain n are originally bandits. The worst kind. They pige, cities, upy ces and then take over everything. Eat out the resources there within decades and move to a new one.

    They bring destruction everywhere they go and use women to reproduce more and more to increase the numbers.

    But they never got too big, because every battle they lose a lot of people. They are more barbaric than the barbarians and they don''t have any dominating bloodline within them.

    A century or so ago, they buried this past or at least they tried to established their n when their leader got close to Peak of Astral ne Consummation.

    But some of their rivals just went on collecting some information from the past to present in their territory destroying their faith.

    So, they are extremely sensitive. They cannot afford anyone destroying their reputation at the moment."

    "And you guys just destroyed that?"

    "Yes, I found every single thing that guy did along with all the evidence that is needed and made sure it was heard by everyone from a child to the old man on the death bed.

    The faith of the Bain n ispletely destroyed and I even went as far as to leave the name of the Gaja n.

    For some reason, this also served as a warning to the rest of the ns in a weird way.

    They are all afraid of the information that I might hold against them. After all, none of these ces is clean.

    They are also waiting to see how the Bain n would do against us to gauge the strength.

    There is a chance that the Bain n is trying to gain help from other ns though. That is why they are beingte."

    "That makes sense."

    "Tell, me though. How important is faith for you guys? I mean, I know it helps you breakthrough to the next ne of cultivation, but if I am guessing it right, the gods are getting most of the faith from the people even with those ns, how does this help the n and organization members."

    "Since you mostly dealt with lower-level organizations, you might not have seen this anywhere. But there is a very intricate mechanism to distribute faith.

    As you said even in the ns like ours, most of it goes to the gods.

    The only exception is the Gaja n. We don''t usually worship the gods here. We faced a lot of bacsh for that. In fact, most of the wars that are waged on the Gaja n are because of that.

    The Divine league that operates as the envoys andckeys for the gods are also keeping a tight watch over us because of this¡­"

    As he was exining suddenly a guard barged in.

    "Sir, the Bain n is here. They brought all of their force to the edge of the city.

    The leader of the n is about to shout an announcement out loud."

    By the time he finished the report, they already heard some noise.

    "BAIN CLAN. THIS IS A PROVOCATION TO THE GAJA CLAN. NOT ONLY DID YOU CONSPIRE AGAINST US, NOW YOU ARE INVADING OUR CITY WHEN WE ANNOUNCED A LOCKDOWN."

    "YOU SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT OF IT BEFORE SENDING PEOPLE TO SMEAR OUR REPUTATION WITH FALSE ACCUSATIONS.. TODAY, GAJA CLAN SHALL BECOME EXTINCT."

 Chapter 1464 - Draconian

    <h4>Chapter 1464 - Draconian</h4>

    "YOU BLOODY BARBARIC BAND OF DEBAUCH CREATURES. WHAT IS LEFT IN YOUR LIVES TO SMEAR? YOUR WHOLE EXISTENCE IS DISGUSTING TO THE CORE."

    The Gaja n''s leader yelled out loud.

    The whole city echoed with his words

    The Bain n members that are standing at the edge and the walls of the city also heard the words. They are dumbfounded.

    This is the worst insult they got and the fact that every single one of those words is true, made their skin crawl. They felt ashamed and burned with embarrassment.

    The n leader in particr turned red in anger. His whole body is covered with mes as he got ready to fight.

    He stepped in the air as the mes were left behind and he zoomed through the city gate.

    He created a melting crater along the path as he moved towards the n estate not caring about the destruction he is creating on the way.

    The n''s leader who is standing on the wall of the estate could see the maning towards him. He took out his sword and got ready to sh.

    All of the Bain n members entered the city as they destroyed everything that could see. They don''t n on leaving any citizens left after this battle. Their goal is to destroy every living thing that is present there.

    But they were stunned when they noticed that there is not a single living thing anywhere near the gates of the city.

    They scanned all of their surroundings, but couldn''t find a single person, guard or soldier.

    Every building is empty.

    While they are still stunned¡­

    *BOOM*

    An explosion urred in one of the buildings nearby.

    Three members of the Bain n were destroyed and turned into shreds as wind elements created a small tornado filled with wind des.

    *BAM* *CRACKLE* lightning stuck in another spot and four more n members got destroyed along with another building.

    The advancement of the troops suddenly stopped. Of course, it was only for the low-level members the high-level members are directly charging towards the n''s gate while scanning different spots of the city so that they could avoid any powerful Gaja n members hiding in corners and attacking from the backs.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Three explosions urred at three different spots when the Grand elders of the Bain n are travelling in three different directions scanning the city.

    As soon as the signals came. Gail, Gamin and Yuvana moved out.

    Behind them, the Elite team of the n also moved.

    Sam, Grivon and Giyon are standing on the estate wall as they spectated the whole thing.

    "You really did estimate these guys well. How did your father know so much about how Bain acts? The positioning of traps in houses, the positioning of signal explosions in three different directions and those old men reached the three posts all at the same time.

    It is almost like your father read their battle n reports beforehand."

    Sam asked in surprise.

    Giyon looked smug and proud of her father.

    "It is one of the perks of being a member of Grey circle. It might not be a real and official organization. But there are many ways to get some deep-seated info from many people. The Bain n''s information was also obtained that way.

    My father is kind of a badass there."

    "There is no denying that. He really knows how to use the information well. He is a really dangerous man."

    "I think his cultivation really contains the dangerous parts of him actually. Not much of the information."

    "I know you will think that. Your organization is still materializing. Tell me the same thing after you run an organization for a decade or two. Then I will agree with you."

    As they talked back and forth, the battle went on and on.

    The n leaders shed, the grand elders were attacked by Gail, Gamin and Yuvana at different locations.

    There are traps set everywhere.

    The Bain n are rats walking into a giant trap unable to escape or survive.

    Everyone was ughtered.

    There is not a single casualty from the Gaja n''s side.

    Sam who is controlling the spectre also participated in a battle like that. He collected hundreds of souls that day.

    Within a day the main force of a n was destroyed.

    Gail didn''t evene back to the estate and went to the Bain n''s territory directly.

    He came back after three days.

    By then the Gaja n members got the news of the destruction of the Bain n.

    Gail took it upon himself to destroy every single organization, sub-organization and even the youngsters of the n.

    He directly got the information from every n member that died in the Gaja n''s city and went after them.

    After the three days ofplete ughter and destruction. The word spread far and wide.

    The organizations that are watching the whole fiasco from the sidepletely went silent.

    None of them made a single sound about dealing with Gaja n.

    All the discussions within the enemy organizations are gone. None of them wants to be the first person to deal with the Gaja n and get fucked up in the process.

    They don''t want to be the test subjects for other organizations to gauge the strength of the Gaja n.

    And these thoughts were only reinforced when one of the organizationspletely folded.

    The Draconian tribe that is far away from the Gaja n, visited them.

    The Tribe chief stood outside of the city and yelled out loud.

    "I AM THE CHIEF OF THE DRACONIAN TRIBE. I AM HERE TO VISIT THE GAJA CLAN''S CHIEF TO SEEK REDEMPTION."

    The n leader was surprised and so were the rest of the people.

    But Gail, Gamin and Yuvana were not surprised. Particrly Gail.

    "Do you think this is a trap brother?"

    The n leader asked Gail.

    "There is a slight possibility, but I will bank on them really trying to seek redemption. The Draconians are a very prideful race and they are a bit too gullible in nature. I will take the chance if I were you."

    "Then let''s go and visit."

    Thus, the n leader, Gail, Gamin and Yuvana. The four strongest people went out and the first thing they saw is the tribe chief kneeling down in front of them along with the grand elders.

    The elite youngsters of the tribe are also kneeling down behind them and they started kowtowing all at the same time.

    The n''s leader was stunned.

    Before he could say anything. The tribe chief kowtowed a few more times and stood up.

    "Sir, I was tricked by the Star-eye sect into believing that your n is going to bring destruction to the world. My ancestors told me to trust the prophecies of the Star eye sect, but I never knew that we would be taken advantage of because of that belief.

    Now I realize that the only reason the Gaja n might bring destruction to the world is that the world hasbelled you to do so and we yed a part in it.

    I am ashamed of what we have done.

    If you want to take revenge or punish us in any way. Please take my life. It is my responsibility as a leader of my tribe.

    But I hope you can spare the rest of the tribe. Some of them might have encouraged the attack on you, but it is because they genuinely believed in the lies that were fed to them.

    If they had known that so many innocent lives would be gone for no reason but the greed of one old man, and they are part of it, then I assure you, they wouldn''t have done any of this.

    Please be lenient with them. I beg you."

    The n''s leader didn''t know how to react.

    It is indeed hard to deal with someone who is openly admitting their mistake and is seeking forgiveness.

    He looked at Gail.

    But Gail just shrugged and said.

    "It is your decision as to the n leader."

    Gail then looked at the n and the city that is severely damaged. He thought of their current situation and took a deep breath.

    "Please tell your tribe members to stand up."

    The tribe chief did as he was told.

    "Since the Draconian tribe has admitted to their mistake and you are honourable enough to take responsibility as the leader, you have won my admiration.

    I was a leader of my n also believed that my n''s prosperityes first.

    So, I have a proposal for you.

    I will not take your life. Since the Draconian tribe didn''t kill anyone at the tournament ce by themselves.

    But aspensation for this, I want the Draconian tribe to be a trading partner of the Gaja n.

    We will be getting back with some new products of our own and we would like your support in this trade agreement which we canter discuss. But I am telling you now that we will be taking a bigger cut in that."

    "It would be my honour to work with the Gaja n. I appreciate your generosity.. The Draconian tribe forever be indebted to Gaja n from his day onwards."

 Chapter 1465 - Request

    <h4>Chapter 1465 - Request</h4>

    That day, the news of the trade agreement spread far and wide.

    Of course, since there is no one entering or leaving the city, it is Gaja n who deliberately let the news get outside.

    This made the other powers feel anxious and relieved at the same time. Some regretted not taking this stand before. Now if they go out and say the same thing as the Draconian tribe, there is no way the Gaja n is going to believe them.

    But some people didn''t even care about that. They just wanted to go and take the same stand as the Draconian tribe.

    After all, just like the Draconian tribe, they also want to share the information far and wide before they go and ask for forgiveness. They didn''t believe that Gaja n would be making a decision as foolish as hitting a smiling face while the whole world is watching.

    But before they could even think of a way to do that, the Gaja n already started the counterattack on different organizations.

    The news of assassinations started spreading everywhere.

    People are randomly dying at different organizations involved. Of course, the most losses are in the Mari n and Star eye sect where even some grand elders died mysteriously.

    If anybody tried to make contact with other organizations openly to make an alliance and attack the Gaja n or if anybody is trying to use the public opinion and stuff to go and meet the Gaja n directly, they are getting some extra love and care from the Gaja n and more people are ending up dead.

    Of course, this didn''tpletely stop some forces from gathering together.

    Particrly the Star eye sect that is so desperate as they are the ones who initiated this thing. They want everyone''s support.

    Even if most of the Gaja n is gone, they don''t want to deal with them alone after seeing what happened with the Bain n.

    But the rest of the organizations are not exactly willing to work with the Star eye sect.

    In fact, they don''t even want to work with anyone at all. They are all looking for their own ways.

    The first reason is because of course, they don''t trust each other as much as they need to.

    The second reason is the Draconian tribe.

    The tribe''s open surrender and forgiveness clearly gave out that they are indeed involved in this whole thing and the rest of the organizations are currently indeed evil in people''s opinions.

    If they ganged up again, their reputation will take another hit.

    In fact, some of the organizations that have cranky gods are already having some trouble from the upper end regarding the situation of faith.

    While things are like this, the Gaja n is slowly trying to get back in the shape.

    The first thing they did is, see what they can do with the new and limited resources they have.

    Since there are few members of the upper-echelon left, there is not much of a power struggle, but everyone wants to contribute more and is so eager to push their own ideas to the front.

    This is because of their greed for glory. They knew that the current situation of the Gaja n would be recorded in history and they want to be one of the front runners who helped in the revival of the n.

    They knew if they do that, their branch of the family which they are obviously going to make can live off of that glory.

    But too bad, this time the n''s leader is a lot more adamant than ever before.

    He didn''t care about the person that gave the idea when considering one.

    He is genuine, clear and crisp about anything that is rted to the development of the n and he mmed down everything that is not rted to it.

    This surprised everyone. After all, no matter how good of a n leader he is, there is a time that he behaved exactly like Sam used him. He was careful about hurting the feelings of power and didn''t want to get deep into the issues.

    But almost dying while protecting the n seemed to have brought him to his senses.

    Even more surprising thing is that the n leader personally went to meet Sam one day.

    "You want to talk to me?"

    Sam asked in surprise. He is currently in the researchb of Giyon''s basement.

    Even though the n has changed a lot and there are a lot of things to be done, he didn''t really care much as they don''t concern him.

    He is still trying to leave the ce by the end of the year so that he could get his body back.

    He did help Grivon and Giyon greatly and by now, Grivon is indeed the only candidate suitable for session if Giyon doesn''t want to do so.

    In a way, he already contributed in every way he needs to.

    So, he is just focusing on the tasks that would benefit his journey and is making things that could help him in his own journey.

    "I want to make a proposal."

    "Do tell."

    "I want your expertise in creating things. I want new products. The most efficient ones and the most profitable ones. In exchange, I will help you deal with the Mari n."

    "What makes you think, I need your help with Mari n?

    From what I saw, it didn''t take much effort for someone to bring your Gaja n down to his knees, how is the Mari n going to be any different."

    "Of course, you would think so. After all, everything went south in one day. But you don''t understand one thing. The people that attacked the n consisted of a dozen Peak stage cultivators of Astral ne consummation.

    Do you really think you can bring that much power to Mari n''s doorstep by yourself?

    Particrly after what happened with us.

    Mari n might want to take a hit on us at the moment, but they would also be so eager to save their own asses, that they would be increasing the defence by many folds.

    Their key members wouldn''t be spread all over the world like before and they would all be currently in the n waiting for any possible attacks toe.

    For the next year or two, this would be the situation.

    You wouldn''t be able to do anything regarding that.

    Help us get back on our feet. We need your innovation, defence mechanisms whatever you can offer to make us preserve ourselves in the next decade.

    "Let me think about it."

    Sam said that and the n leader didn''t ask anymore and left.

    Sam went into deep thought. He is actually thinking of helping Giyon and Grivon set up a solid foundation and a n within a month or two and leave this ce.

    He has stayed enough and he umted whatever he wanted. He got all the information and weaknesses, he need to know about the Mari n and he even had ns made. Half of Sivan''s properties are gone and the other half is severely battered.

    He is sure that it is not long before Philip and the rest tried toe and make some noise in the Mari n''s territory.

    After thinking up to this, he went to meet Giyon.

    "The n''s leader came to meet me."

    "I know. I am the one that suggested him to meet you directly."

    "Oh? So, do you want me to help him?"

    "If it works for you. If you don''t mind. But I would prefer if you would do so."

    "I need to get some information from before I make a decision. I don''t know if it would be possible to get that info though."

    "What is it?"

    "I want to know how much of my dormant soul was absorbed by Sivan. The more precise the amount, the more beneficial it would be. Can you find that out?"

    "I think I can try. But why do you want to know that?"

    "If he finished absorbing it, I will stay there for more days and if he didn''t I will leave as soon as I can."

    "Really? Not the opposite?"

    "Not the opposite"

    "Why is that?"

    "If he has the overall information regarding me, he wouldn''t sit still until he really kills me and he would alsoe withrge scale preparations which would have already started the moment he finishes the absorptions.

    I need to make some remedies for those things and I believe this is the only ce that I can get the resources."

    "So, it would be beneficial for the n if Sivan already absorbed all of your memories."

    "Yes. It would be. And I believe it will be an equivalent exchange."

    "I might not be able to gain the exact information, but I am sure I know someone who can get the information for you?"

    "Who is it?"

    "My father.

    Go and ask him.. I think Sin will give out the information directly to him if he asks."

 Chapter 1466 - Visit

    <h4>Chapter 1466 - Visit</h4>

    Gail is not in the n at that moment.

    So, Sam had to wait for the night.

    When Gail came back, Sam directly asked about the information he needed.

    "It is indeed possible to get the information. I am visiting Mari n tomorrow anyway. So, I will ask him."

    "Will he really just tell you? You are going to kill someone in the Mari n, right?"

    "Yeah, he really doesn''t have much connection with the Mari n though. He grew up with his Maternal Grandfather most of the time and inherited his values.

    The only reason he stays with the Mari n is because of the principles that his grandfather taught him. Otherwise, he would have cut himself loose a long time ago.

    Even now, he spends most of his time in Divine Graveyard.

    It won''t be much of a problem to ask such a simple question."

    "Alright. Thank you then."

    After the conversation, Sam went back to his research.

    The next morning, Gail started out and went to Mari n.

    He trapped a Grand Elder and killed him.

    Sin who was within the n estate went to check the body and knew the instant he saw it that its Gail''s handy work.

    But after a bit of closer inspection, he found something. A message.

    He understood the message and went out of the city. A bit far away from the city there is arge tree that is as tall as the cliff that is beside it.

    Under that tree, Gail sat down as he munched on arge fruit of that tree.

    "There should be a monkey guarding the fruit. Where is it?"

    Sin asked as soon as he saw him.

    "It ran away," Gail answered nonchntly and threw fruit at Sin.

    Sin caught the fruit and sat down beside him on one of the roots.

    "So, what do you want to talk about."

    "How is your son''s progress with the soul absorption?"

    "Why do you want to know?"

    "Not me, the owner of your son''s current body wants to know."

    "You came to ask this from me, upon his request."

    "Yeah, why?"

    "You are the sonic prince Gail. Half the Divine Graveyard would get nightmares with just your name. When did you be information for a little kid?"

    "When you became the guardian to your little kid. Saving from all of his pathetic shenanigans."

    "Can''t help it. He is my son after all."

    "You should have thought of that when he was still growing up. He could have turned out to be a fine young man. You should have taken him out of that hell hole filled with backstabbing hyenas."

    "What else could I have done? The whole marriage was a sham, to begin with and you know how my wife used to behave? She made him into this and died peacefully. Now, he is beyond changing with my words and I am beyond helping him.

    He hasmitted too many things that even I can''t bring myself to forgive."

    "Don''t give up. He is his son after all. As long he learns a big enough lesson, there is still a chance to bring him back."

    "Enough with your advice. How is your daughter doing? I saw her a few months ago. She is beautiful."

    "Of course, she is. Just like her mother."

    "Indeed. Just like her mother."

    "So, are you going to answer my question?"

    "Yes. The soul absorption. Why don''t youe with me? I will show you directly."

    "Into Mari ns estate? I am not going into that shit hole."

    "Not to Mari n. My son''s stray dimension. A new one. He recently discovered it himself and for ten days, he is noting out. He is making some massive preparations. After you watch that, I will answer your question."

    "Alright, let''s not waste our time here then."

    An hourter.

    Sin and Gail walked into the stray dimension.

    It ispletely different from the stray dimension of Grivon and Giyon. Instead of neatly constructed buildings or some wild life. The whole dimension looked like onerge plot ofnd spanning for as long as they could see.

    In that space, in various spots,rge scale structures are being constructed.

    Not a single one of them ispleted. They are all in their skeletal stages. But they could see the faint shapes. Some looked like towers, some looked likerge blocks and some looked like they are weirdly shaped skeletons of animals.

    They walked in as they looked at different things many artisans, inscription and formation masters working their asses off.

    But even more surprising thing is the equipment they are using. The equipment lookedpletely weird. They are wearing different kinds of exoskeletons that could help them glide. The welding machine could make two pieces ofpletely different mental stick.

    A furnace that doesn''t need anyone''s constant supervision to burn.

    A machine that could cut the metal without any excess spiritual energy injection into it.

    There are many things that absolutely blew his mind.

    "What are these things?"

    "I don''t know. But I am pretty sure even my son barely knows them."

    "Then who came up with these ideas?"

    "Who? The original owner of the body. These are all the ideas manifested from Sam''s dormant soul. All inventions, half inventions, ideas, thoughts, designs, experiments. It has been a while since I saw information that is so valuable all hidden in one person''s head.

    But when I consider the strength of that soul, I can only say this is expected.

    The soul absorption speed of course increased with every attempt Sivan made, but every time obtained a small part, he learned the secrets of Sam more and more and he started a project.

    He slowly stopped caring about whatever that is outside. His powers, subordinates, he almost gave up on everything. The only reason he is clinging on them is because of the money they provide and how useful they are."

    As they are talking, they finally arrived at the barracks. There Sivan is sitting in an office as he talked to artisans instructing them about various projects.

    "This is made by a guy whose age is less than half of your whole experience. If you cannot crack it, then you better be off cutting your heads off. Do you understand?"

    He yelled at him and threw the blueprint.

    Sin and Gail entered the room as the artisans walked out.

    Sivan looked at them and frowned. Soon his frown turned into shock and as he was about to panic, Sin said.

    "you better shut your mouth."

    As if he is a puppet, Sivan closed his mouth instantly.

    "He is Gail. I think you already know of him. He has a few questions. Why don''t you answer them honestly?"

    Sivan held the armrest of his chair tightly and wanted to break it. But his father''s stare kept him in check and he held his attitude back.

    Gail looked at Sivan''s face and body.

    "No wonder Sam is so pissed that his body is gone. He indeed looks great."

    Sivan didn''t reply and just let him see. Gail took walk around the table as he scanned the body with a spiritual sense and said.

    "That coat, is it also Sam''s?"

    "Yes."

    "A great one, the spirit is extraordinary. What is with so many scars on the body?"

    "That sick headed bastard did it himself. He has a twisted mind. His insane logic is to remember the wound through the scar so that he wouldn''t make the same mistake again."

    "From the density of the scars, I say that he didn''t do that bad of a job. But the arms seemed to be way too clean."

    "He has a habit of cutting his limbs of now and then. Even when I was stealing the body, he did the same."

    "So, how is the soul absorption going on?"

    "I am almost there."

    "What do you mean almost there? Can you be a bit more direct about it?"

    "I cannot reveal all the details. I will tell you what I can and you have to find out the rest from Sam." Sivan answered as he took a deep breath.

    "Why don''t you answer itpletely?"

    Sin asked from the side.

    Sivan looked at him hatefully and said.

    "Don''t you feel any shame? You are asking me to give information to an enemy after bringing him to the stray dimension? What kind of person are you?"

    Sin looked at Sivan coldly with his aura raging. When Sivan was about to feel the pressure, Gail used his own energy to block the effect and said.

    "Don''t worry Sin. He is way too young to understand our situation."

    He paused and turned to Sivan before saying.

    "Tell me what you can. I will get the rest from Sam."

    "Sam''s soul is linked to something very powerful and superior to any of the realms that I know of.

    Because of that link, Sam and some other chosen people are to finish some tasks. When I was about to absorb Sam''s soulpletely, that small link stopped me from finishing it.

    So, apart from that small part, I absorbed everything that is rted to Sam.

    Everything about his childhood. His journey, his sick thoughts, his twisted craziness.. I absorbed everything apart from that small part."

 Chapter 1467 - Conversation

    <h4>Chapter 1467 - Conversation</h4>

    "Do you know what that small part consists of?"

    "I know some. The contracts to the beasts, spirit weapons and something else which is more important than both of these things."

    Gail nodded and said.

    "Thank you for answering." He then looked through the window and said.

    "I see that you are using all of his inventions to the full extent. Took advantage of all the information you obtained."

    "Full extent? I wish. All of these are theplete designs formed in his head. There are many half ideas, principles, theories that are far more advanced and lethal than these things, but I cannot find people smart enough to work with it."

    "Oh? So, what is your n next?"

    "I need to kill Sam. As fast as I can."

    "So, you should be prepared for that. Why are you wasting your time like this?"

    "I am not wasting my time. Sam is holed up in the Gaja n. From what I saw from his memories, there is a chance that he would be staying there if he knew that I absorbed this much of his soul.

    There is also another memory that indicated what information he sent to his friends. They are preparing to deal with me with all of the information he gave them.

    So, I need to prepare to attack the Gaja n and also defend against the Dusk organization."

    "A n''s young master being scared of an organization that is not even in the same circle?"

    "I wish it was just an organization within the circle. You must look into his head ones, you will see what kind of organization it is. The only deficiency it has is the absence of Astral ne Consummate cultivators at the helm leading it."

    "Really? He never talked much about his organization."

    "You should ask him."

    "So, you are nning to kill him and take over that small part of the soul and then the organization?"

    Sivan didn''t say anything. He just stayed silent.

    "Thank you for your time. I will leave you to your work."

    "Why did youe here to ask these questions? You are not even rted to that person. Sam is just a business partner to your daughter and nephew.

    A person of your status and power wouldn''t normally do this just for that."

    "I feel like I owe him. He saved my daughter recently and he even helped the n slow down a big adversary. So, this is the least I could do for him."

    Sivan then turned to Sin and looked at him with disdain.

    Sin smiled and said.

    "That look doesn''t do anything to me, Kid. I am pretty sure you don''t want me to be like Gail. He might love his daughters and nephew and might even be a messenger for the person that saved them.

    But if his daughter does anything hical and crosses any line, he will kill her without a spare thought.

    Think of the things you did, just because your mother said its fine. How many times do you think I should have killed you?"

    Sivan was tongue-tied immediately. He couldn''t think of aeback for that.

    Gail and Sin left the stray dimension.

    "So, what else? Everything okay with your n?" Gail asked.

    "Not too bad. But I am the one who should be asking that question. You lost most of your n members. How are you doing?"

    "Good enough to kick your ass."

    As soon as he said that, he kicked Sin.

    Sin blocked the kick with his arm and threw a punch.

    And thus the fight began.

    Fifteen minutester.

    Both Gail and Sin are standing in the middle of the forest with arge patch of itpletely destroyed. There arerge holes formed on the ground that looked like craters here and there and both of them are panting.

    "Alright. Enough for now. I need to get back."

    Gail said as he turned around and walked away.

    "I was winning."

    Sin yelled from the back.

    "Like hell you were."

    Gail replied with a smile and went away.

    The next day.

    Sam and Gail met within the Gaja n in Giyon''s residence.

    They are eating as Gail exined the situation.

    "Do you want me to go into details regarding what he is constructing? I think your simtor can help you there."

    "No need. I can guess what he is making. There are very fewpleted designs that could cause any danger to your n. I am sure I can narrow them down."

    "So, what about this small part of the soul he is saying?"

    "I actually don''t know, but if I have to guess. I think I can narrow it down to a few things."

    "Can you talk about that?"

    "It is not big of a secret. Some gods who are too bored put me and a bunch of other people from Deste to y arge game that is spanning over for decades.

    I guess our souls are connected to those gods in some way. So, that small part might be the connection."

    "Then, you should be able to feel that too, shouldn''t you?"

    "I don''t think so. I tried to contact the mediator between me and the God that I am representing, but I wasn''t able to in this body. I figured it is rted to the soul and the body.

    I guess, it only works when all of my soul and body are together."

    "Well, it seems like Sivan would be able to take your ce in this game if he kills you. He is also very eager about it.

    So, be careful."

    "I will."

    That evening, Giyon and Grivon met with him.

    "So, I heard you might be staying here," Giyon said yfully.

    "You heard it right. I am staying here. I will meet your n''s leader tomorrow."

    "What are you going to offer then? Are you going with business ideas?"

    "Not yet. Let''s focus on self-preservation first. From what your father said, Sivan ising with some big arsenal on his back. You guys wouldn''t be able to take it if you are not prepared.

    Things will go extremely nasty."

    "Really? Sivan is just a young master. How much power can he gather with just his subordinates?" Grivon asked in confusion.

    "You really don''t want to know. I will just go with themon defence first. Then I need to start with the research for the rest." Sam said with a sigh.

    The next day, he went to meet the n''s leader.

    "I am staying. For three more months. That would be the end of this year and if my estimations are right, I wouldn''t need to stay in your n."

    "That''s great."

    "But there is one condition. I am sure that you want to get back into the market and be back at your original position within your circle as fast as you can.

    But for the first month at least, you are not going to make any money. Everything you have, men, money and any other resources you could muster would be going into creating a defence for your city and the estate.

    It would be a defensive measure, unlike anything that you have ever seen or heard of. It would be enough even out the ying field between you and any other n thates at you. At least in terms of numbers.

    That I can promise you."

    "But that would cut dangerously close with our money. If the investment is not enough, it would be hard to make more money for the future growth."

    "Don''t worry, I have a way to ovep the investment of the defence with the business that you could do after this month is over.

    If you can trust me with that, I am ready to cooperate."

    The n''s leader thought for a moment and agreed.

    They shook hands and the deal was done.

    "Find the best artisans that you have in the people that are left. Formation masters and Inscription masters too.

    I also need a list of all the resources you could get. All the resources that you could even get from the Draconian tribe. You need to get everything that could obtain on the table.

    I have a design in mind, I will be using my simtor to create a three-dimensional blueprint.

    I need every smart person that your Gaja n could move around. Giyon and Grivon would be the ones directly cooperating with me.

    There is one thing I want to tell you guys though.

    I will give you whatever your n might need to survive this and develop to the state that you were before and even more.

    But if your members be greedy and try to steal anything from me to grow themselves. I will kill them on the spot.

    I don''t care if it is an elder, young master or your future prospect, I will tell that to Giyon and Gail and I am sure they will be more than happy to kill the people that are hindering the growth of the n they tried to protect.

 Chapter 1468 - Sonic Cat

    <h4>Chapter 1468 - Sonic Cat</h4>

    Sam went back to the basementb and started using his assistants to set up the simtor in the yard of Giyon''s house.

    It took an hour to set up the whole thing and in the process, Sam made some huge calctions on a big scroll and started making small drawings in the middle.

    After the simtor was set up, he started modelling the blueprint and the first step is of course the emptynd area of the whole city and then the position of the walls, buildings and then the estate.

    He started making quick simtions on what could be the most ideal formation for the attacks that woulde for them.

    He worked till afternoon before people from the n''s head came.

    He met with them and took the list of resources the Gaja n could afford. The list is very exhaustive, just like he wanted. Even the smallest of the resources that might just be some of the secret groups of subordinates that operate tiny businesses for the n were also mentioned in there.

    After looking through it, Sam got a few ideas.

    He turned to the team sent by the n''s leader and gave them instructions.

    "I want to see your best work. The best work you can do within twenty-four hours. Use whatever resources you have at your disposal and also the resources that are avable with Giyon.

    Don''t hold back a single thing and don''t think of its purpose. No matter how useless or useful you might think it is, I want you to do the best work you can possibly create in your whole life.

    And do remember that the results of your work are going to decide how much involvement you will have in the growth of your n.

    So, if you do hold back for some reason, it better be worthy enough to not contribute to the growth of your n."

    He left with those words and walked went to meet Giyon and Grivon.

    "I need to meet your parents. When are theying back?"

    "Tonight. Why?"

    "I need some things that only they can get and I need them as fast as possible. Inform me as soon as theye back."

    "Alright. How is the team?"

    "I don''t know yet."

    "There are not many, you can just get to know them easily."

    "It is not about the quantity. I need the quality. I asked them to make something, I will know how they are after they are done with it.

    Anyway, keep them aside for now. I need to ask you guys something."

    "Go ahead."

    "Gail said that Sivanpletely ignored his organizations. So, I want you guys to go to one of the organizations, or send your teams to cause some massive destruction. Gather everything you can there. Including the deadbodies, irrespective of their cultivation levels.

    I will send the spectre along with you and he will catch the souls. You can bring the dead bodies with you and store them in a special liquid, I am going to concoct now."

    Grivon frowned and asked.

    "Why do you need dead bodies?"

    "They are a resource Grivon. You guys don''t have numbers. We need to find a way to level that up."

    Sam answered and then continued before Grivon could ask another question.

    "I also need poisons. Any poison that you can get. I don''t care about the lethality, intensity or even the effects of the poison. As long as it is considered a poison in any possible way, I need it."

    Giyon frowned, but she just nodded and agreed.

    Grivon hesitated a bit. Dead bodies and Poison. The two things didn''t really sit well with him. But he didn''t think too much. After all, almost all of their n was ughtered. They don''t really have much of a choice.

    Sam went back to work. The team members that were sent by the n, which Sam decided to call the Gaja team are really dissatisfied with Sam''s behaviour towards them.

    But they also remembered what their n''s leader instructed them.

    "He has full power and authority over you. Even the kills you, after finding out you were doing something bad, I gave my word that I wouldn''t interfere as long as he can show reasonable suspicion.

    So, be careful around him. He is literally holding your lives in his hands."

    These are the exact words of the n''s leader.

    This made them shut up and work.

    They kept on working while Sam also kept himself busy.

    That night, Sam went to meet Gail, Gamin and Yuvana.

    "I need you guys to do something for me."

    "What is it?"

    "I need the deadbodies of your assassination targets. Along with their souls."

    "Dead bodies of the Astral ne Consummate cultivators? Sam, they are the deadbodies that are hardest to us in necromancy. Even the people of the same cultivation level might fail at using them. Why do you need them?"

    "I can do something with them. They will help extremely in the defence we are about to set up.

    Also, I need the poisons. Any poison that you can find. Weak, strong, lethal, nothing matters. I just need poisons."

    "Dead bodies and Poisons are really not our things."

    Yuvana said from the side.

    Sam nodded and said.

    "Yes, they are not. Your n''s thing was to fight head-on. It is noble. But where did that bring you? Every organization knows that no matter how many of them gang up the Gaja n would stand up and fight.

    That would have destroyed their faith, even if they won.

    So, they opted for something more practical.

    You also need to do something simr. You need to be more practical. Will you get them are not?"

    "Of course, we are going to get them. But it better be good. Because the dead bodies of that cultivation level will trigger some of the organizations if they went missing.

    I just want it to be worth it."

    Gamin said from the side.

    Sam nodded and continued.

    "I also need to ask you guys something else. Do you know any strong beasts?"

    "How strong?"

    "Your level and a little less."

    "It is hard to capture beasts of our level. In fact, the big ns slowly stopped relying on the beasts. They are too much of a hassle and at our state, they are smarter than most of the humans and cultivators."

    "But they are still beasts. I want you guys to make a list. You are going to tame those beasts and I would like to make some designs in the city based on the beasts you can acquire."

    "We are not really experienced with taming of the beasts."

    "I know, but I have enough knowledge to help you guys out to tame them."

    Gail only had to think for a second before saying it out loud.

    "I know where a Sonic cat lives. Can you tame it?"

    Sam was stumped when he heard the word.

    "Did you just say a Sonic cat?"

    He is really surprised.

    "Yes. A real Sonic Cat."

    Sam''s shock didn''t dissipate. In fact, it intensified.

    Sonic Cat is a rare beast. Its bloodline level is right up there with the Shadow Mice.

    They are extremely powerful and they assassinate targets bigger, stronger and lethal than them in a matter of seconds.

    On the same level, very few adversaries can go against them.

    "I can help you actually. But it would be a long process. It will take around a month.

    But before I go into exact details, I need to know something. How long since the Sonic cat is living in that ce."

    "Decades."

    "Then there must be something in that ce."

    "It grew up there. It is its home. What else could there be?"

    "No. That is now how that works. A sonic cat just doesn''t choose a normal ce for its home. Do you remember any details about the ce? One unique thing that sticks out."

    "I can''t think of anything.

    It is a beautiful ce for sure. There is a waterfall, vegetation is fresh throughout the year. That is all I could think of."

    "Alright, you can go and find out next time. Notice its surroundings. There would always be one thing that uniquely sticks out. The cat''s behaviour might indicate what it is. I want you to tell me what it is."

    "Why are you so eager and curious about it?"

    "Sonic cats are very good at making their habitats around some valuable treasure that is very useful for them."

    "Useful? As in their growth? Food?"

    "It can be anything. Food that helps their growth, strengthens their muscles, minerals that help with their training."

    "Training? Beasts train on their own?"

    "More than you guys know. These cats, in particr, train since they turn a year old. Every single cat develops its own unique fighting style even though the basic aspect ismon in all of them.

    They are dangerous for a reason.

    In fact, the training time of this cat might even be more than the training time of all three of you people."

 Chapter 1469 - No Humiliation

    <h4>Chapter 1469 - No Humiliation</h4>

    "You are kidding? A beast that trains itself so much? I don''t think so." Gamin directly rejected the idea.

    Sam just chuckled and said to Gail.

    "Are you busy tomorrow?"

    "No."

    "How long does it take for you to go back to that cat''s ce?"

    "Eight hours?"

    "Okay, thene to yard before dawn, I will give you something. You can trigger some friendship with that cat. Anyway, if you don''t mind me asking. How often do you visit the cat?"

    "A lot. We spar."

    "I guessed as much. It would indeed be a good sparring partner with your fighting style."

    "It indeed is. But I have yet to defeat it, so we are still in the stages of rivalry where it mocks me with every failed attempt."

    Gamin and Yuvana were surprised.

    "So, that is your mystery sparring partner that kicks your ass every time?" Gamin asked in shock.

    "Yes, it is." Gail didn''t hide it and said without any shred of embarrassment.

    He was embarrassed before, but not anymore. When he heard from Sam that the cat trains more than all three of thembined, he found it very believable. After all, he saw the growth of the cat in terms of technique with his own eyes.

    He had a feeling that it is studying him, just like how he studied it.

    Now, he can confirm that his suspicion is true.

    "I will see you tomorrow."

    "Alright."

    With that Sam went back to the yard and busied himself again.

    But this time, instead of focusing on the design. He took a break and made something else.

    It didn''t take long though. It only took a few hours.

    At dawn, Gail came to visit with excitement.

    But when he looked at the object that was given to him, he was shocked to say the least. He couldn''t bring himself to trust that this thing would work, no matter how much he tried to convince himself.

    "Are you sure this is going to work?"

    "Of course it does. Trust me. But you have to demonstrate in front of the cat."

    "I don''t believe you. That cat might be one of the strongest creatures that I have ever seen and you are saying this thing works on it? That too, to tame it? Not a chance."

    "Trust me. Try this and if the attitude of the cat doesn''t change even a little bit, I am telling you, I wouldn''t ask you to go back again."

    Gail was still skeptical, but after some thought, he reluctantly took it and started his journey.

    After eight hours of travelling.

    He arrived at one of the spots within the Divine Graveyard.

    A small patch of forest that looked like apletely normal area with not sign of any cultivator''s movement.

    That is because, no cultivator ever dares toe here. There are a bunch of beasts that are extremely weak roaming around happily.

    These creatures shouldn''t even be able to survive within the Divine graveyard, but they are enjoying their life here.

    Soon, he went a spot encased with a lot of trees.

    Behind those trees, there is arge water fall, flowing down into argeke.

    Every spot around theke is filled with lush grass and there are a few small trees here and there.

    A snow white cat is sitting under one of the treeszily as it looked at the sun.

    Everything about that cat looked normal. Its shape, facial features and even the shape of the ws, but there is one main difference.

    Its size.

    The size of the cat is same as a normal lion.

    It looked extremely normal apart from that.

    It looked at Gail who entered the patch and gave him a casual look before turning to look at the sun.

    It seems like even his presence didn''t bother it.

    Gail looked at therge cat and hesitated before he took out the thing that Sam gave.

    He started assembling it just like how Sam did.

    It is actually a metal pir and the body of the pir has small protrusions of over.

    The cat looked at him and the pir curiously.

    Then Gail took out a small crystal orb and injected his spiritual energy into it.

    It started glowing a bit and after five minutes of constant injection, he ced the orb in only one groove that is clearly visible at the bottom of the pir.

    As soon as he ced it, the pir started rotating rapidly and Gail turned his back against it and leaned on the pir.

    It is actually a massager. This is the thing that Sam gave him.

    He definitely didn''t believe it works, but when the protrusions brushed past his flesh, putting pressure on his muscles, he felt great.

    It is extremelyfortable and pleasurable experience.

    The cat looked at the whole thing and suddenly leaped upwards as it ran towards Gail.

    Gail got ready to fight back, but to his surprise, the cat went to the other side of the pir and sat on his hindlegs before leaning its back to the pir.

    *MEOOW*

    It called out as it felt the pleasure of it.

    Gail was surprised. In fact, Shocked would be an understatement.

    For the next twenty minutes, all he had is a nk face with nk expression like a dumb idiot who didn''t understand anything in the world.

    The Sonic cat literally and figuratively kicked his ass over the years many times. But now the creature appeared docile.

    After twenty minutes the cat finally came back to its sentence and looked at Gail.

    Gail also looked at it and casually shrugged before jumping to the other side of theke and raising aura indicating it toe and fight.

    Both of them fought.

    One hourter.

    *SPLASH*

    Gail fell in theke and the cat looked at him in disdain.

    But he is no tapped out yet. Instead, he kicked the bed under theke to jump up and high andunched another attack.

    The sonic cat met his attack with its own counter and left a sh on his chest before pinning him to the ground.

    The cat open its mouth and Gail immediately closed it.

    The humiliation thates after every loss he took. He got ready to face it again.

    But the cat looked at the pir and stopped.

    It got off Gail and turned its back on him before walking to the pir.

    Gail was shocked to the core.

    Over the years, he fought with this creature and lost over different cultivation levels, but he was always defeated, the only thing that changed is the time he survived with the creature before he got his ass kicked.

    There is one other thing that remained the same along with his defeat and that is a wet, white hairball spit on his face by this cat.

    No matter what happened, he would always be hit with that hairball after he got defeated.

    The cat didn''t go past that and kill him and it didn''t tone down one bit.

    He couldn''t understand why it did that. It could have killed him a bunch of times, in fact he saw the cat killing a bunch of people that followed him to see where he went every now and then.

    But when it came to him, it didn''t kill. Just humiliated him with the hair ball and let him go.

    This is the first time, he escaped this humiliation.

    The cat leaned against the pir and started rubbing against it once again.

    Gail looked at it for a while and recovered before walking out of the area and then went back.

    By the next dawn, he is back at the Gaja n.

    At that moment, Sam is actually standing in front of a bunch of old men along with the Gaja n''s leader.

    "You guys went running to him as soon as I rejected you? It took more than half a day to convince him toe here. Not too bad."

    Sam said as he looked at the n''s leader.

    The n''s leader appeared embarrassed.

    But he pushed past it and said.

    "Come on Sam, I can understand that you don''t trust them with keeping secrets. It is a problem with every skilled person in a n. But you only selected one person of the whole group and sent the rest of them away?

    How would you be able to work?"

    "I can use spirits to run the rest of the work."

    "The spirits? They don''t have enough brains to think. What if a sudden problem arises? You need to have someone smart to think on the feet."

    "No, I would rather work with the spirits than half-assed experts.

    The spirits don''t have insanely huge and fragile egos. They know how to perfectly follow instructions and they fucking listen when they were told something and don''t act like they understand when they don''t."

    Sam looked at them like he is looking at some scum that he felt disgusted by.

 Chapter 1470 - Hesitant

    <h4>Chapter 1470 - Hesitant</h4>

    "Shut up. I have enough of your bullshit."

    One of the experts within the Gaja team said out loud coldly as he looked at Sam.

    Sam didn''t even bother to acknowledge him and turned to the n''s leader to continue.

    But the expert wasn''t done with what he had to say.

    "n''s leader. I know you are an honourable man. But request you to put your honour aside for the n''s sake. Just capture this impudent and insolent young man and make him cough up all the designs.

    I am sure we would be able to figure out how they work and we can construct them on our own.

    Then we will be able to save our n and do it without every one of the stupid demands this kid has to make."

    Sam frowned and looked at the bunch of experts.

    "It seems like you focused more on what I was doing than I told you to do. No wonder yours is the shittiest of all." He muttered out loud and then turned to the n''s leader.

    "There is something I should have mentioned before. For me, staying here might be helpful, but let me bepletely clear now.

    This is helpful for me, but not necessary. Can you say the same for my involvement in here?"

    The n''s leader, didn''t speak. Because he knew that situation is really not in his favour. He doesn''t know if Sam really doesn''t need their help. But he couldn''t take the gamble, because he definitely needs Sam''s help.

    "So, you either keep your experts in check and let me do my work or I could leave right now."

    Sam said decisively.

    "You are not going anywhere."

    At this moment, they heard a voice and Gail is running towards them in the air.

    *BOOM*

    Hended hurriedly and walked to Sam.

    "It worked. It definitely worked."

    He said excitedly as he shook Sam''s body.

    Sam felt dizzy as he said.

    "P..Please let..go."

    Only then did Gail realize and ced him down.

    "What are you talking about? Do you really think you can go anywhere you want? You cannot. You are staying within the n for as long as it takes for me to finish up with what we started."

    He then turned to the experts and said.

    "As for you idiots. Your battle prowess is negligible. You wouldn''t be contributing much in the next battles we are going to face. You also don''t have any other resources to offer except for your expertise which is also deemed useless now.

    So, I might as well just kill you now, to save the resources of the n."

    All the experts felt the chills run down their spines.

    The n''s leader heaved a sigh. Before he could even react, Gail dragged Sam away, while the experts stood there in bewilderment.

    "It seems like I am really going too soft on you. I need to be more decisive from now on.

    So, whatever my brother said just now. They are my views as well. I can''t really put up with your shenanigans anymore.

    I have done and let you do things that I absolutely detest just for one sole reason, the future of the n. Now, the n''s future is not something we can predict when things remain the way they are now.

    To change these things, if all I have to do is, ignore your existence or even erase it, I will do so with my open arms.

    So, if you want to be a part of this, you can shut the fuck up and listen to that kid''s orders or you can just die in my hands right here and now.

    You can decide for yourself."

    He turned around and walked decisively.

    "n''s leader, finally grew a pair."

    Gamin said as he walked beside him.

    "I figured it is about time."

    "Of course it is. You are a great leader and put the n''s benefit over the rest for a long time. But to preserve the peace of the n, it is always not necessary to keep everyone pleased. You can also choose another path everyone is afraid of."

    "But pleasure brings sess."

    "No, pleasure bringsziness and impudence. Like today. You might want to be a good leader, but that doesn''t mean they don''t have to fear you. Fear is not a bad thing. That thing saved many lives than courage if you ask me."

    "It does.

    But I cannot help but worry about giving this much authority to Sam."

    "Don''t worry about it. You knew how Gail did things when he was Sam''s age."

    "Of course, who can even forget his history."

    The n''s leader said with a wide smile.

    "Some people are like that. Their unbridled nature and unnatural minds go hand in hand.

    I highly doubt this bit of authority really does anything to him. From what Gail said, his own organization is nothing to scoff at and his subordinates are loyal to him.

    He doesn''t need to crave some authority from an unfamiliar ce like this."

    The n''s leader fell into deep thought after leaving the ce. He was known to be soft-hearted and in a way he just let the problems fester while suppressing them, when dealing with them would have been a much better option.

    Meanwhile, back at Giyon''s residence.

    Gail is currently full of excitement as he gave a step by step description of what happened when he met the Sonic cat.

    "So, did you see the special thing, I was asking for?"

    Gail turned silent in a second and awkwardly smiled.

    Sam shook his head and said.

    "Don''t forget it the next time. The resources might really be helpful for your n. "

    "Alright, alright. But tell me? How did you do it? Why did that cat like that oversized back scratch so much?"

    "Well, it is a massager and the cat that trains like hell the whole day needs some sort of rxation. That is why the sonic cats could be found in lethargic and rxing positions many times.

    But they are also not very friendly and don''t even mingle much with their own kind. So, of course, they are going to appreciate something that helps with their situation and they don''t need to share time with some other creature."

    "I guess you are right.

    This one stupid pir has saved me from the humiliation I have been enduring all these years."

    "Then stop calling it stupid. It worked perfectly well."

    "Yeah, right. I shouldn''t call it stupid anymore. Anyway, what should I do next?"

    "I will tell you after you finish your next raid. I need the dead bodies and poisons for preparing."

    "Yeah, right. I forgot about that. I will leave along with Gamin and Yuvana today ande back by night. Prepare what to do next. I will leave tomorrow at dawn if I need to."

    "Alright."

    Sam went back to his work.

    While he is busy, back at his organization, everyone is also busy.

    Particrly, the trio.

    Philip, Watt and Jack are currently sitting in a room within the deste as they sipped some wine.

    "How are things on your sides? Please tell me there are noplications."

    "There are none. The team has captured every person they could get their hands on that fits our criteria. They are all assigned to different units.

    All units are ready. Testing for Fire, lightning, wind, de and earth units wereplete. The metal, water, poison, dark, light are still undergoing some testing. Some of them are in the final stages though. The rest of the units are in the final stages of assembly, they need to start the tests and it will be done within two days."

    Jack exined with an exhausted expression. He looked like someone who was deprived of any sleep for over a week.

    "That is good. How are things on your side, Watt? How did the testing on those massive structures go?"

    "The carriers are ready for action any moment. The sky towers are in the final phase of troubleshooting. The water and earthen towers are also ny percent done with their testings.

    The teams are still manufacturing puppets. They are a bit worried that the ones we have might not be enough.

    We have already used the recovered scrap metal from the useless armours and weaponry to make extra armour and equipped all of the undead legions.

    Specter collection is finished, the necromancer team is creating Ghost Chimeras as we speak.

    The cannon team is testing the mega-cannon for thest time.

    The Naval fleet is ready to go.

    Exo-skeletons for other secondary units operating on all these massive structures are also good to go.

    Everything is going well.

    The only things that might not be finished by the end are the new projects you started recently."

    "Don''t worry about that. I am almost done with everything. There is onest group of things we need to make which is making me hesitate a bit though.. I just wanted to run by you."

 Chapter 1471 - Nothing Special

    <h4>Chapter 1471 - Nothing Special</h4>

    "What on earth is this? Sam thought of it?" Jack asked with a gasp.

    Watt on the other hand didn''t seem surprised. He just looked at the design without any expressions.

    "So, this is the reason why you were sulking the whole year?" Watt asked casually.

    "One of the reasons," Philip said with a sigh. He then looked at Watt and asked.

    "You don''t seem so surprised."

    "Because I am not. What is there to be surprised about. It is not the first time that Sam created something that could take lives in thousands at a time."

    "But this one is way too¡­"

    "Cruel? Dirty? Underhanded?" Watt interrupted him as he could understand why Philip is feeling so confused.

    "There is a reason he didn''t make these things before. He could have done them better, faster and even more powerful by himself, without us all three.

    And you are the one who exined the reason to me." Watt exined.

    Philip sighed and replied.

    "I know. But why did he even think of such a thing? This goes beyond everything Sam has done."

    "It is not the first time. What about the thing we did in the realm of the undead. We almost annihted the species. What do you say about that?"

    Philip stayed silent.

    "Just like how he did with the rest of the things, Sam looked at it as a possibility of research. The theories were formed in his head based on what he learned of these elemental energies.

    Just like you said, he didn''t bring it out because of the destruction that he could bring out. But all three of us know one thing, he doesn''t like other people involving themselves in his own business.

    Sivan just went ahead and did that stupid thing. So, there is no way he would be holding back. Anyway, even you noted down that he only wanted to use it as ast resort.

    Even though you are hesitating now, I am sure you would be the first one to use it when the situation demands.

    Stop worrying and do it."

    "If you are worried about being a part of its making, then just leave it to us. We might not be as smart as you, but I am sure we can handle the construction from a blueprint." Jack said from the side.

    Philip smiled and said.

    "No need. I am alright. I just wanted to be sure if my thoughts are in the right ce when doing it. I just wanted to hear it from you guys."

    "Then just go ahead and do it.

    We are almost done with everything. After this is done, we can swarm Mari n. I want to see how Sivan would react."

    "Speaking of which, we need to send a few scout teams. We need to have some first-hand information of the situation there when we enter¡­."

    They started discussing other ns before Philip got started with the construction of thest product.

    Meanwhile, back in the Gaja n.

    With Gail''s warning, the experts stopped acting like assholes and started following Sam''s instructions. They even had to take his rejections with a big grin on their faces as if they were happy to be judged.

    Apart from working on the designs, Sam also worked on the next thing that Gail would be taking to the Sonic cat''s ce.

    "What is it this time?" Gail asked as he looked at the thing in front of him.

    "It is also a simr product, but a different. It is not as rigid as the one before and it can be moved around easily without any assembly."

    "Yeah, I can see that. But why does it feel like arge Bolster?"

    "Because it kind of is."

    "Why would that cat need one?"

    "Sonic cats like to sleep. In fact, they nap for an hour or two every day. But they cannot find afortable ce no matter how much they look."

    "Last time I checked, the bloody cat is so damnfortable. It iszily basic under the sun."

    "Well,fort has different meanings for you and the cat.

    Don''t worry and just take it. You have seen the previous thing working its charm. So, what is the problem now?

    You just have to take this and you will see the results yourself. But this time, please be clearheaded enough to check for the special thing I asked you about."

    "Alright."

    The next day.

    Gail once again arrived at the Sonic cat''s abode.

    This time, it is standing on theke, right below the waterfall as the stream hit it with full force.

    But it took it all with its eyes closed and a pleasurable face.

    As soon as it was done, it went straight for the pir.

    It noticed Gail''s presence and only gave him a side-eyed nce. But his next actions gained a lot more attention than that.

    He took out arge ck bolster andid down on the ground while embracing it.

    Even though he is very reluctant to do that, he really feltfortable while hugging it.

    There is slight vibrationing out of the bolster and a sense of warmth. He felt like he could really sleep.

    When the cat looked at his expression, it almost wanted to pounce on him and take the bolster. But it controlled its urge.

    Sivan who did the demo stood up and threw it at the cat before it could decide to jump.

    The cat caught the bolster with its front paws andid down on the ground while hugging it with its belly side.

    It felt extremely good. It couldn''t help but feel the warmth and vibrations on its soft belly and yawn.

    *MEOW*

    It is much more pleasurable than before and it started stretching its body.

    But before it could drift off into sleep, it decided to send the guest away.

    So, it reluctantly stood up and attacked Gail.

    The battle started.

    One hour and ten minutester.

    Gail is panting as he stood with his guard up. The cat is looking at him calmly as it walked around slowly.

    He is currently standing at the edge of theke and he is feeling exhausted. This is thest exchange they are going to have and he is sure that he will lose.

    But hested ten minutes more than the previous time, so he is still very satisfied with the result.

    Gail suddenly made a move¡­

    *SPLASH*

    The exchange ended with him being in theke once again.

    He came out in exhaustion while the cat went back to its new snuggle buddy.

    Gail walked out and sat down there to heal a bit.

    After recovering some of his strength, he walked out of the patch and started using his spiritual energy to look around the area to see if there is anything special that Sam is talking about.

    The sonic cat observed his actions but didn''t do anything. It just stayed there as if nothing happened. It didn''t attack him or intimidate him to stop his search.

    But Gail is disappointed.

    There is nothing that he could find. By the time he was done with the search, he almost doubted Sam''s words. But when he thought of the massage pir and the bolster the cat is using, he couldn''t help but trust him.

    He went back to the n and reported the situation to Sam.

    "You cannot find anything outside of that patch?" Sam asked with a frown.

    "Not a thing. In fact, there are a lot of small creatures living happily. There is not a single predator there. All of them are mild and docile creatures that could just live as long as they want."

    "That is impossible. If such creatures are inrge quantities the ecosystem would die. It will copse sooner orter."

    "They are not inrge quantities though."

    "If they are not inrge quantities, how can there not be any predators? Since they don''t have any natural enemies, they should be living long lives. There should hundreds if not thousands of each creature roaming around there eating every green thing they could find."

    Gail frowned.

    He subconsciously ignored this situation, because he didn''t think much of it. As far he is concerned a deer that is only within Mortal ne Pre-transcendence is not something he should be focusing on.

    So, he didn''t think much of these creatures.

    But now that Sam has mentioned this, he understood. It is impossible for these things to not procreate. It is unrealistic for them to refrain from reproducing.

    He has been visiting the ce for years and he noticed these creatures time and again, but he never stopped to think how it is possible.

    "Do you think the special thing you are talking about could be rted to the presence of these creatures?"

    "Could be. We cannot be sure. I wonder if I would be able to visit that ce."

    "I don''t know. But I am reluctant to try. There was a time when I was easy to track and some people followed me in, but they didn''t leave the ce. They died right there.. I don''t think the cat likes thepany of others."

 Chapter 1472 - Cavity

    <h4>Chapter 1472 - Cavity</h4>

    "How about I use your simtor to show you the visuals from there?" Gail offered after some thought.

    "We can try that. But the simtor only gives out your perspective. I think it would help if I have a new one.

    Anyway, let''s give it a try. But use the perspective of your spiritual sense if you can."

    "Will your simtor be able to handle that?"

    "As long as it can be pictured in your mind, it can show it. Let''s see how it goes."

    Gail was very excited to try the simtor. He almost behaved like a little kid as he put on the helmet and started visualizing everything he saw within the valley with his spiritual sense.

    Since it is a mental image with that sense, everything was shown in a veryplex way. After all, the spiritual sense observes everything. Including the things that are not visible to the naked eye.

    It is like aplex wireframe picture and even the small objects like leaves and stones are wireframed.

    Gail is amazed by what he saw. Sam on the other hand focused mostly on the details as he went through any possible unique object that he might encounter.

    But even after an hour, there is not much he could get from. The grass, trees and rocks, everything appeared normal.

    In fact, it appeared so normal that it surprised Sam.

    After all, a creature like Sonic Cat is obviously not going to set up its residence in some mediocre ce. Even if it is any other creature of that cultivation level, they would definitely pick a ce that has something special. A special resource that offers something.

    It might just be a resource that focuses on their pleasure, food, strength, nourishment. Whatever it is, they will just pick a ce with at least one resource.

    And Sonic Cat is very picky and it trains like crazy. It trains for days at a time without even showing any restraint.

    This makes the cat focused on some specific things that help its training. It is focused on the strength and battle prowess so much In fact, it would reject a godly resource if it solely focuses on increasing the cultivation.

    It doesn''t mean anything to the beast, as long as the resource somehow helps it to stand at the top amongst its peers.

    Sam doesn''t believe that the information in the bestiary is wrong after all these years.

    But no matter how much he looked at things, he cannot find anything strange.

    Then he finally found a spot to focus on.

    The waterfall.

    For some reason, Gail didn''t use his spiritual sense on the water wall and the cliff that the water is falling off.

    "You never went past that?"

    He asked directly.

    "No. I haven''t."

    "You never used your spiritual sense on the waterfall and the cliff too. Why?"

    "Most of the time, the battle only reached theke and I would bounce back immediately. We never really reached the waterfall."

    "But even then, you should at least be curious right? With all the time you spent there? Were you never curious about the waterfall?"

    "I was, but I didn''t get any chance to look past that spot."

    "Why?"

    "Well, I just go there, attack, fight, lose, recover ande back. That''s it. I just figured there is no use roaming around and looking into things too deeply and the cat is not escaping or doing some extremely agile and dodgy fight to move around a lot.

    We mostly stay within a certain space."

    Sam sighed and said.

    "Just how involved are you with this creature? You are so focused on beating it, you didn''t even bother to look at the surroundings?"

    Gail just shrugged.

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "Are you free tomorrow?"

    "No. I am going for corpse hunting for you."

    "Okay, then please go back there the day after tomorrow and this time, try to approach the waterfall. Something is definitely wrong there and I feel the waterfall might be the reason for that."

    "I will check it."

    Sam went back to his work and so did Gail.

    The next day both got involved with their own work.

    The day after that, Gail went back to the Sonic cat''s ce. But this time, he didn''t take anything to it.

    The cat looked at him with anticipation and he looked at it with a shrug and said.

    "The next gift is in the making. I can''t give you anything today."

    *meow*

    It replied lightly and just went back to hug the bolster seeing that Gail doesn''t seem to be in the mood to fight.

    It let him stay there.

    Gail casually walked around and reached theke.

    He looked at the waterfall as he took in the faint stter of it.

    He felt rxed for some reason. While he stood there with his eyes closed, the sonic cat looked at him with focus.

    It didn''t even care about the bolster and just kept its eyes fixated on Gail.

    Gail sensed this vignce, but he slowly extended his spiritual sense towards the waterfall and as it spread across theke, the cat stood up and slowly walked towards him.

    He instantly spread the spiritual sense to the waterfall to take a look and observed that there is a cavity in the cliff right behind the waterfall.

    But right before he could observe more, the cat leapt towards him.

    Gail stopped the scanning and turned to the cat that looked vigntly at him.

    It started attacking and the battle proceeded as before.

    "Why are you getting so angry about this? I am just curious about where the water ising from."

    The cat looked at him and shook its head.

    "You don''t want me to take a look?"

    The cat nodded this time.

    "Why? Did you hide some secrets there?"

    The cat once again shook its head and leapt at him trying to attack.

    "Come on, we are just having a conversation. You cannot just attack me like this. At least, confirm why you don''t want me to take a look there? Is that ce dangerous?"

    They stopped and actually nodded.

    "So, are you trying to not let me see inside because you want to stop me from entering into danger or do you just want to hide it from me?"

    Cat didn''t reply and just attacked.

    Gail fought with it and one and a half-hourter, he lost and walked out of the area with exhaustion and aching muscles.

    He went back to the Gaja n and met with Sam.

    "I went and checked the waterfall. The cat is saying that there is something dangerous there. I don''t know what it is though. It attacked me as soon as I tried."

    "Did you get any more info?"

    "There is a hidden cavity behind the curtain of water. But I don''t the specifics. It said that something is dangerous behind and it is not saying it is some kind of secret. I asked if it is deliberately trying to hide it from me or if it doesn''t want me to go and find out what the danger is.

    But it didn''t answer."

    "Alright. Now that we narrowed it down, I will give you something that is going to help next time. But before that, I need you to give me the urate distance estimation of the cavity you searched and the rest of the dimensions of the area.

    You also need to do some specific things that I tell you to do."

    "Just tell me what it is and I will do it."

    With that, the preparation started.

    Sam went back to one of the manufacturing units for the defensive structure and picked out something. It is actually a small puppet.

    It looked like a cross between a bat and an eagle.

    He started tweaking some of the formations on it and exined how this thing works to Gail before preparing him.

    Along with that, Sam also gave out the third thing that the cat likes and this time it is some kind of incense.

    After two days of hunting down some of the enemies, Gail went back to the cat''s ce.

    This time, he took out a small metal pir which gives out a concentrated scent of the flora that was put in.

    No matter what it is, as long as it is a nt product it can give out the concentrated scent and when Gail exined it, the cat was extremely ecstatic. While it is ying with the new toy, Gail walked to the middle of the whole space and turned to face the cat.

    He then took out the small puppet and held it at a certain angle. It is not aimed at the waterfall or the cat, it was just aimed in a random direction.

    The cat is also keeping an eye on him, even though it appeared distracted. Only after making sure that Gail is not focusing on the waterfall, did it momentarily focus on the toy and Gail made a move

 Chapter 1473 - Symbiote

    <h4>Chapter 1473 - Symbiote</h4>

    Gail gathered the surrounding energy and condensed all of it into his fingers and snapped

    *SNAP*

    Arge scale ripple appeared in the surroundings and it went straight at the cat who is still looking at the incense.

    But it didn''t even take a fraction of a second for the beast to react and prepare its defence. But while it is focused on the defence, Gail managed to inject his spiritual energy into the puppet.

    It started glowing and glided in the air directly while the cat is busy dispelling the ripple and before it could concentrate, the puppet went through the waterfall curtain andnded straight in the cavity.

    Gail went on ahead and got into a fight with the cat. Meanwhile, the puppet started doing its job.

    The cavity is actually an entrance to a big cave and the cave is filled with white crystals. The walls, rocks, the ground, ceiling, everything is covered with white and milky crystal.

    It is glowing and shed slightly as the puppet moved and recorded everything. But as it is trying to get every nook and cranny of the area, all of a sudden from the top of arge white crystal rock a few protrusions appeared and caught the puppet.

    The puppet tried to move away, but it couldn''t move at all. The spirit of the puppet tried its best to struggle the body out of it, but the protrusions modified themselves into a cage andpletely pulled the puppet into the crystal rock.

    Finally, after a few minutes, the rock returned to normal. The puppet was nowhere to be seen. There is not even a sign of it.

    Gail who is fighting with the cat sensed the connection between him and the puppet vanishing. He became vignt and turned to look at the waterfall, but the cat took the chance and pped the daylights out of his head.

    He came back to his senses and started fighting with the cat, but he appeared distracted and unfocused sometimes and the fight was over within fifty minutes this time.

    Gail looked at the cavity and then at the cat.

    He doesn''t understand what is there, but it is definitely not just some resource like Sam said. He also felt that the cat is honest thest time he was here. Something dangerous could be there. This possibility made him reluctant to explore this any further.

    He also looked at the cat and thought of something before sitting along with it.

    "So, if there is something really dangerous there, why are you not leaving this ce? It could be dangerous to you too, you know?"

    Gail asked in a low voice.

    The cat looked at him in disdain and rolled its eyes.

    *meow*

    "What? You are way too strong for something to happen to you?"

    The cat nodded without any hesitation.

    "Alright, don''t be such a narcissist. You are just a tad bit stronger than me."

    Cat looked at him once again and grunted in response as if saying.

    ''Who is being narcissistic now?''

    Gail managed to catch the meaning and frowned.

    "Okay enough the dismissal. Tell me, what is hiding in that cavity that made you stay here. A friend of mine said that you like to y with some special resources within your territory. But since you are so adamant about not letting me go there, I will assume it is not a resource.

    If it is such a dangerous thing, why would you even go there?"

    *Meow*

    The cat dismissed his question without even considering it and closed its eyes before focusing on the incenseing out of the device.

    "Alright. I have a really smart friend who can think of some really random shit that could change the situation here. If you are really stuck with something, just tell me what it is."

    The cat yawnedzilypletely ignoring him.

    Gail just sat there for a while before leaving.

    After he left, the catzed around for another hour before entering the cavity behind the waterfall.

    It directly jumped into it and spread its aura and energy like it is afraid of whatever is residing in the cave would miss its presence.

    The while crystals all around started extending protrusions rapidly as they all moved towards the cat. The cat closed its eyes and created a barrier around it that gave out ripples of energy along with a booming sound.

    *BooM* *BooM*

    The sound is odd, but it made the protrusions that areing at it, started vibrating because of both the energy and the sound. They slowed down considerably and by the time they reached the original position the cat was standing; it was already gone.

    It nimbly ran in the air and stepped on the protrusions and with every step, it turned the crystal under its feet into very tiny and small pieces that almost looked like ky salt.

    The crystal on the floor slowly moved a bit and tried to absorb the small pieces.

    But the cat jumped into the air once again and aimed at the ground before screaming.

    "MMMMEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOWWW"

    Even though it appeared like a normal scream, sound waves and energy wavesbined created multiple ripples making the small patch of the groundpletely powdered.

    Along with the crystal that was there on the ground from the start, the new pieces also turned into powder.

    The powder acted on its own as if it had a life and tried to solidify again by joining with the rest of the crystal in the surroundings.

    But the cat made it impossible.

    It started dodging the protrusions attacking it from different sides with the speed of sound and started attacking the same patch again and again.

    Until finally it stopped moving and lost its milky texture. It also lost its white colour and turned to grey before finally turning into some kind of grey sand-like material.

    The rest of the crystal didn''t go near the grey sand. It didn''t upy it, rather it tried to build over it and cover it up as a whole.

    The cat started painting as it looked at the massive crystal structure surrounding it.

    It looked at the never-ending protrusionsing at it.

    There is an expression of anger, frustration and deep-seated hatred in its eyes as it turned around and went back out through the cavity.

    It jumped into the water and swam around a bit before it went out and stood against the massage pir for a moment and went to sleep while hugging the bolster and taking in the incense.

    After a few hours.

    Gail reached the Gaja n. He went to meet Sam directly and took out a bracelet from his hand.

    There is a special crystal on it which Sam injected into a crystal tablet.

    A video was disyed.

    It is the video of the puppet exploring the cave.

    Both Gail and Sam looked at it eagerly and when Sam got a clear view of how the protrusions swallowing the puppet, he took in a breath of cold air.

    Gail frowned as he looked at it.

    "What the hell is it? Why did it act like it has a life of its own?"

    "Because it has."

    "You know what it is?"

    "Yes. It is a naturally born cursed creature. The Bone ash crystal symbiote. Now I understand what the deal with your cat is. This is indeed the reason the cat is there."

    "So, this is a resource?"

    "For us? Yes. For that cat, it is more like a training partner.

    The Bone ash crystal symbiote is created when there are a lot of skeletons stacked in a single area where both energies of death and energy of life are clubbed together at the same time.

    The bone ash turns into a crystal form and it starts hunting down creatures around it. As long as it feels like the creature is an animal, it tries to use the protrusions to drag it in and absorb all the vitality and the skeleton. The rest of the blood, flesh and other tissues are turned into manure which it throws into the surroundings and supports it with life energy.

    This makes the vegetation grow wildly around it and then attracts creatures of different kinds.

    It then eats those creatures again and the cycle repeats as it expands its size and shape.

    Now I understand what is happening there. The symbiote is living off of the surrounding ecosystem as it lured the weaker creatures and increased its size bit by bit.

    But Sonic cat entered the fray and because of it the high-level creatures arepletely out of the menu for the symbiote and no matter how much the symbiote tried to expand further, the cat must be destroying it bit by bit."

    "Isn''t this whole thing easier for the cat? Since it can just all the animals leave the ce with just one roar? The symbiote would die of hunger."

    "If only it was that simple."

 Chapter 1474 - Preparation

    <h4>Chapter 1474 - Preparation</h4>

    "If only it was that simple," Sam said with a sigh.

    "What do you mean?" Gail asked in confusion.

    "The symbiote survives on a symbiotic rtionship with the ecosystem. If every other creature within the surrounding environment is sent away, then the sonic cat would be the direct target of the symbiote.

    If my guess is right, based on the size of it, it is already way too strong. The sonic cat would have some trouble to fight it if it goes all out."

    "Then it could just flee after sending the other creatures away."

    "There is another problem with that too. The symbiote is not exactly a stationary thing. The only reason it didn''t expand through the whole forest is that the sonic cat must have been damaging it bit by bit.

    It is also partly because of the limited and controlled avability of the small beasts nearby.

    They are acting as a source that keeps the hunger of this creature in check.

    "So, how far can it expand?"

    "Once it bes desperate for food and starts searching everywhere for it, then the stretching begins. The whole crystal can be transformed into any solid structure as long as it wills it.

    From the size of a string to arge building. In fact, it collects the memories from various remaining souls that are present in the creatures that it absorbs.

    And it can increase its nourishment as long as it gains any bone material in the world.

    So, after expanding so much as long as it gets a small piece of bone, it can easily sustain for a few more days and expand a bit more.

    It is a dangerous creature. In fact, it could be said the Sonic cat alone is saving arge area within that.

    At its size and cultivation level, the symbiote could wreak some serious havoc in the all the whilepletely being invisible until it was toote."

    "How do you know so much about it?"

    "It is a material required for some very very high scale curses. I read an extraordinarily high-level curse guide before and this symbiote was mentioned many times.

    But even in that, I have mostly read about the ces and surroundings where I could obtain low-level symbiotes and going against the high-level ones and even thinking of capturing them was mentioned as suicide mission based on the cultivation level."

    "So, do you think this is the resource that is keeping the sonic cat in that ce?"

    "In a way. This is providing a great level ofbat experience to the cat. So, it is a resource for it too. But not as useful as it is to us."

    "You want to use that symbiote?"

    "Yes."

    "How is that even possible? You said it yourself, it is going to be a suicide mission. I am thinking of asking you to hasten on the process of cat taming. You are thinking about upying the symbiote directly?"

    "Yes.

    The symbiote''s power level and strength are not calcted by a very different metric. They are not measured with the cultivation level, rather based on the size.

    The size of the symbiote depends on the core growth level though.

    Since it went to this size, the core of the symbiote is definitely very big. If we manage to capture it and use a proper curse technique, we can use it to get a constant source of the Bone ash crystal powder.

    And as long as we capture the powder fresh right after it fell off from the core and the rest of the body, and process it with a special curse technique, we can create a temporary symbiotic curse.

    This is going to be one of the perfect defensive and offensive measures of your n. This will bring you back onto the map like nothing else.

    We are going to capture it and I am going to tell you how.

    I need you to go there tomorrow and meet the cat. Say everything you know honestly and say it that we want to help remove the symbiote from the permanently."

    "Why would it believe me?"

    "That is your job. Make it believe you. I am sure there is a reason why it lets you stay in that ce. It is not just because of your strength.

    It must have genuinely felt the connection and your fighting styles are also very simr. Combination of energy ripples and sound waves, if there is anyone who can convince the cat, then it is you."

    "I will try my best. But how are you going to capture the symbiote?"

    "There are always weaknesses for all kinds of creatures. The curse guide only mentioned that it is a suicide mission to capture the symbiote when it is that big, only for the people who don''t know how to capture it.

    It is not like it was never captured before.

    I have my methods concocted in my mind.

    In fact, I even have a much more efficient way. We would alright."

    "Okay."

    After that discussion, Sam handed over many of his responsibilities to the assistants he had from Grivon''s stray realm and went to work on something else.

    It is heavily dependent on thebination of ripple style and void style and he knows that it is going to be difficult.

    But the one big advantage he has is that he had done something simr before.

    He used it to destroy the walls of a city in a single sweep.

    But this time, he just has to make it much morepact and it only needs to act on a much smaller area.

    He worked on it day and night for the next three days.

    In these three days, Gail went back and forth to the cat and didn''t even fight in histter two visits. After the third visit, he sessfully managed to convince the cat.

    "It really took a lot out of me. Of course, a mattress simr to that bolster helped a lot. I only managed to get a negotiating chance because of that. So, thank you."

    Sam just chuckled and took out arge ball. It is twice asrge as a normal football.

    "This is going to be the primary tool you are going to use in capturing this thing. But it depends on how good you are going to do too.

    I really hope that I can visit the ce and do most of this by myself without your involvement."

    "Well, it is impossible. For some reason, the cat is not willing to let anyone elsee there. I really tried these past few days. It is only agreeing if I bring Giyon there as she is strong enough and also my daughter."

    "I know, they behave like that. I wish I had my old body. It would have made things easier."

    "How does your body make things easier? It doesn''t change your strength by much."

    "Well, it isplicated. Anyway, just remember what I am about to exin to you carefully and do exactly that."

    Sam paused and took out some special metal pirs as he exined how they should be positioned and operated and how the ball links all of them together.

    After an hour and a half and a bunch of simtions in the simtor, Gail finally got a sense of that and tried a few simtions before he convinced Sam that he is ready.

    The next day, he went back to the sonic cat''s abode and exined the whole thing to the cat too.

    The cat felt a bit confused, but still got a sense after some struggle and finally, both of them nned their attack.

    Both of them went to the entrance of the cave behind the waterfall.

    They entered and stood at the edge of the entrance as Gail took out a few formation tes and ced them there.

    These formation tes are created by Senior Elder Ma only for this capture.

    A special membrane was created at the entrance of the cave and they are finally ready to tackle the symbiote directly.

    Cat opened its mouth and roared.

    *ROAR*

    The sonic waves and the energy ripplesbined together as they are targeted into one specific corner of the cave where the crystal structure was rattledpletely and then appeared arge patch.

    Gail jumped to that ce with a whistling sound in the air as he stabbed one of the pirs in that spot.

    As the symbiote tried toe back to that spot and upy the pir and Gail too, he pressed a button on top of the pir and activated it.

    *HMMM*

    There is a humming sounding from it and the energy ripples extremely rapidly creating a small field around the pir that ispletely impossible for the symbiote to enter.

    It couldn''t prate it no matter how hard it tried.

    It used all kinds of different shapes, but there is no use.

 Chapter 1475 - Capture

    <h4>Chapter 1475 - Capture</h4>

    Gail and Sonic Cat stood as they looked at the one spot they ced the pir on. The first was easy since they caught the symbiote off guard.

    They watched as it tried to go past the small rippling barrier around the pir, but was unable to do so no matter how much it tried.

    Gail heaved a sigh of relief. Even though he tried a lot of simtions and had some faith in this whole thing, watching some real proof always helped calm his heart down.

    He looked at the Sonic cat and gestured it to make the second move as his body started glowing with spiritual energy. He is going into fusion with neutral energy which is not seen that often.

    *ROAR*

    The cat roared once again, at a different spot.

    The small patch was cleared off the crystal symbiote immediately. But this also alerted the symbiote which is focused on that one area that the intruders who caused all of this are still here.

    *swish*

    A whistling sound came as Gail zoomed past everything in his way andnded on the second spot. He stabbed his pir on the ground and activated it, before kicking the wall and moving back to the original spot with a swish.

    But this time, while he was in mid-air, a crystal barrier appeared in front of him all of a sudden. Before he could even react, the cat made a move.

    *ROAR*

    As it roared the barrier was shaken and Gail just crashed through the barrier without any problem.

    He reappeared on the spot. Cat and he got ready for the next attack, but as soon as they turned around trying to aim at their third spot, they are greeting with dozens of protrusions all in the shape of spears aimed at them.

    *SWISH*

    The spears came at them at full speed. Gail and Cat lunged forward and leapt into the air as they dodged the attacks whilending counterblows. The most effective way to not take any attacks is thebination of sound waves and the energy ripples and they are trying to use that for every block and attack.

    As went past the spears that areing at them non-stop, they reached the third spot.

    The cat took the stand and created an energy barrier around with rippling energy for a moment and let Gail set up the third pir.

    Now the protrusions couldn''te at them any longer as they are within the range of pir.

    Gail stood there and looked around to calcte the location of the fourth pir from that point.

    After identifying it, then went on with the rest.

    This went on for more than three hours as they ced around eighteen pirs at different spots and with every pir, the symbiote got angrier and angrier.

    It couldn''t stand the constant appearance of the pirs and now that all eighteen of them are present, it is going all out. But to its dismay, there is only limited space that it could move in as eighteen pirs at eighteen spots are covering arge portion of the cave.

    Making it hard for the symbiote to move.

    But that is not the end of its suffering. In fact, it is the start.

    After setting everything up. The cat and Gail are standing in two different spots out of these eighteen. They are far away, but they could see each other andmunicate.

    Gail took out therge metal ball that Sam gave him. The core of the whole n and the object that is going to help them capture the core of this symbiote along with the rest of the crystal body that is about to be removed from the core.

    He is really eager to see how it will all turn out, even though he is extremely anxious about what would happen if it didn''t work.

    He activated the ball and threw it into the air.

    The symbiote tried to catch it, but right before it could do that, the ball already reached its destination.

    It is hovering in the air and a formation was triggered connecting the ball with the eighteen pirs and enclosed space. The sonic vibrations and energy ripplespletely ran rampant within that space and the symbiote that was intact all this while started converging together into a small space to find an escape out of that space.

    It was not that easy though.

    No matter which direction it moves, all it could find are the energy ripples enveloping it from all sides.

    Gail sighed in relief as he looked at the symbiote.

    All of it is now enclosed into this one space and all that was left is the final step of the n.

    He looked at the cat and gestured it to get ready.

    The cat nodded and started condensing the energy into its front paw. Gail also started converging his energy into his fist as both of them looked at the symbiote struggling.

    As if they are on cue, both of them moved at the same time andnded the hits on the ball simultaneously.

    *BOOM*

    Arge explosive sound came, but nothing happened to the ball, instead, all of the energy is channelled into the ball and then towards the eighteen pirspletely increasing the intensity of the energy ripples.

    The crystal symbiote that is constantly changing forms to figure out a way to get out of that enclosed space suddenly got hit with this massive energy and the whole crystal body got shattered.

    All the pieces hit the ground and almost turned to powder.

    Except for one of course. There is one piece in the middle of it all that is still hovering and that looked like a rhombohedral crystal in translucent white colour.

    It tried to collect the rest of the powder back again, but couldn''t as the energy ripples interrupted the process.

    The cat looked at the whole thing and its eyes finally brightened.

    Gail who is standing on the other side sighed in relief.

    He was really afraid that this might fail. But lucky for him, the n worked smoothly. Nothing untoward happened and there is only one thing left for him to do.

    He gestured for the cat to get back and it did.

    Gail then used a token that has a connection with the ball that is controlling the whole formation and tinkered with it a bit.

    The formation was suddenly modified a bit and a small cavity appeared within that enclosed space without energy ripples.

    The rhombohedral crystal immediately moved to that one space as it tried to stabilize itself and it started trying to gain the rest of the powder so that it could make its body back again.

    But before it could do that, the cavity within which it is present at the moment, moved back a bit and the original spot was covered with ripples.

    The crystal moved along with the cavity in desperation.

    The same thing happened before it could stabilize itself. The cavity moved and the crystal moved.

    This kept on going until the symbiote is very close to the entrance of the cave.

    It is a bit far away from its crystal body to get it back. But it seems like it thought things through and used all of its strength to make a run for it as it hovered and zoomed towards the entrance as if luck was on its side the formation opened up a bit and it made it to the entrance.

    It prated the membrane that was there because of the formations Gail set up and disappeared on the spot.

    There is not a single trace of it left and even the membrane was gone.

    Gail heaved a sigh of relief as he looked at the divine dimension fragment ring on his finger. He closed his eyes and checked inside where the white crystal is trying to move around, but couldn''t as it got trapped in one space.

    That is the purpose of the membrane.

    It is Senior Elder Ma''s technique. He connected the spatial transference through the formation to a divine dimension fragment.

    The crystal powder that is the only floor is now currently turning grey and Gail collected it into his spatial ring.

    The cat looked at the cave that it has been fighting in for years and got a bit glum.

    It walked out of the cave moodily andid down on the mattress outside while hugging its bolster.

    Gail doesn''t know what to do. He could feel that the cat is sad, but he couldn''tprehend a way to make it cheerful.

    So, he stayed around for a while changing incenses within the machine and after a few hours, when the cat really got into sleep, he walked away from that spot.

    He went back to the Gaja n and gave the divine dimension fragment and the spatial ring to Sam.

    "Your n worked perfectly. Here is our reward. I hope you can find a proper use for it."

    "Oh, you have no idea how properly I can use them. Just wait and see."

    Sam said with an excited grin.

 Chapter 1476 - Fifteen Days

    <h4>Chapter 1476 - Fifteen Days</h4>

    Days passed.

    Fifteen dayster.

    The whole city is changing its shape. Sam has led one of the fastest construction the Gaja n has ever seen and the whole city along with the estate is part of it.

    The citizens are slowly moving out as they got their residences sorted out.

    Sam took the same approach he did in his own city. He made all the residences inrge apartmentplexes where people could live. Theseplexes are around the n estate.

    Being very close to the n, the residents are also more assured. The rest of the city is still undergoing reconstruction. But many ces are ready to go.

    Within the city apart from what looked like regr buildings. There are twelve new buildings that popped up.

    They are structural domes and all twelve of them are part of the new additions and in fact some of the core structures of all the city''s security.

    Within these domes, very few people are working and six different artisans are ced as in charge for two domes each.

    They got the blueprint and the mechanisms by heart. Even though they still couldn''t understand how the whole thing works and why it is working like that, they can at least be sure of what the structure of it is and they can make all those structural repairs if needed.

    Meanwhile, Grivon''s experts are kept in charge of everything else that happens within the domes.

    They don''t operate much and they don''t care about the regr structural maintenance of the domes, instead, they are kept in charge of the internal functions of the domes.

    The internal functions of the dome are to act as defensive and offensive measures when the enemy strikes, apart from that they also act as factories for some special products Sam designed.

    These products are secondary outputs of these domes and they can be sold through the draconic tribe''s trade deal and also be used in setting up defensive traps for the city.

    Sam who is supervising the whole project was really surprised by the speed that this whole thing went on.

    With his presence for the past few months, Grivon''s and Giyon''s artisans, formation masters and inscription masters learned a lot from him.

    They are all using many of his techniques to speed up the construction process. Along with that, Sam''s assistants that are given by the Gaja n''s leader are also working well after the incident with Gail.

    They didn''t dare to go against Sam and they didn''t dare to have any ideas behind his back.

    The construction of the whole thing is going faster than Sam has thought.

    At this rate, there is only a little more than two months and he would be back with his life once again.

    While the construction is going on full swing, Sam is also doing something else.

    Every day, he obtained new corpses and his spectre who has been idling a lot for the past few months finally started working as hard as Sam.

    It started collecting as many souls as it could from the deadbodies that are brought back.

    And luckily due to the undying curiosity of the Gaja n''s enemies they are getting a lot of spies that are trying different methods to see what the Gaja n is doing and they are leaving behind many souls and dead bodies.

    Along with that, Sam is also getting a lot of poisonous things and he is concocting some major poison in arge building within the estate.

    In fact, after looking at the scale of his operation, the n leader got afraid and offered a stray realm for the poison concoction. But Sam rejected him as it is impossible to move in the middle.

    Right beside the room, the spectre is focusing on working with the corpses. The first thing it did is to find the souls if there are any left and collect them if they are strong enough or direct absorb them if they are not.

    After that, it starts refining the corpses with the cursed formations that Sam made ity down.

    The refining process consists of three stages. The first one is tempering the corpse with curses.

    These are the only curses that do not show any direct negative effect. The corpse would be used as a vessel to dissolve all of these courses together.

    They would be stored passively within every cell of the body.

    After that was done, the second step is to make the corpse with a special undying curse and make it into an undead creature.

    The third step is to create a cursed formation within the internals of the corpse.

    This formation constantly generates some specific curses with the energy the corpse absorbs from the victims and these formations are operated by the spirits.

    They also give instructions to the undead creature, controlling its actions in a way.

    These spirits are connected to one of the towers that are currently under construction within the n estate.

    There would be a bunch of operators within the tower who would be able to give instructions to these corpses.

    The undead creatures will be loaded with various curse attacks because of the formations within them and they also formations that support their recovery with the help of vitality they can absorb from their victims.

    These creatures are controble, doesn''t know any fear, have curses and the best feature is actually the result of the first refining operation.

    When these creatures fall, because of all the formations messing up or all the limbs arepletely unmoved, the curses that are dissolved within the body will explode.

    If the attacker is within the range, all of these curses will attack them and the spirits that are now strays will attack them to the best of their abilities before they dissipate.

    These are going to be the foot soldiers for the Gaja n in the near future.

    While the corpse collection is working. The other thing that is going on is the beast army preparation. Sam started training the beasts himself. That is the only rxing time he is having and along with that, he also started designing armours for the beasts.

    Things are going extremely well within the n. Of course, this is also garnering more and more attention from the enemies, they are extremely afraid and eager to know what the Gaja n is doing now and since Gail, Gamin and Yuvana are picking one bone at a time within different organizations one after the other, they are getting restless.

    In fact, Sam even got a few corpses that he is nning something special.

    The Gaja n members are doing their best to make sure that the enemies won''t get any information on what they are doing.

    So, even this situation is manageable now.

    But there is one situation that only got worse with time.

    The Sonic cat.

    After the day that the whole bone ash crystal symbiote was removed, the sonic cat became dull. Even though the symbiote is its enemy, it has grown attached to the fighting it could do every day and now it lost it.

    The only exciting time it is having is when Gail visited it over the days.

    But he couldn''t go there every day. It is almost taking a whole day away and with the n''s situation, he is doing the visits less and less.

    He only managed to visit the beast for six times in the fifteen days.

    Now he just returned from his seventh visit and he directly went to Sam.

    "Sonic cat is getting sadder. It is not even interested in fighting today. It almost let me win by itself and only after I called out on it, did it retaliates.

    What do you think is happening?"

    "What else? It is seekingpanionship. It is trying to find a way to entertain itself and keep itself busy. After all, we indeed took the one thing that it could pleasure on every day."

    "Then why did it even let us take it down in the first ce."

    "because the cat knows that the symbiote cannot be contained within that cave and it should go. The probable danger might even have kept the beast on its toes."

    "So, is there anything we can do to make the cat normal again? If it goes like this, there is no point in visiting it."

    "Of course, bring it here or you stay there. Either works."

    "I can''t stay there. But I tried to invite it here. But it seems like it doesn''t want.

    It is very upset about it."

    "Of course, your invitation is meant as a servitude contract. That is what beasts think whenever a cultivator asks them. Rather you need to offer a truepanionship. You need to offer an equal contract."

    "Are you sure it works?"

    "Try it, if it doesn''t you can try something else. Anyway, I only have three things left to give the cat and we need to reserve two of them to tempt it to fight for us in the battle. You only have one charm left. use it wisely.. The rest is in your hands."

 Chapter 1477 - Symbiotic Curses

    <h4>Chapter 1477 - Symbiotic Curses</h4>

    "We will only know after I try," Gail said in a dejected expression.

    Sam just shrugged and didn''t answer. The sonic cating to the Gaja n is actually a very huge factor in how their defence is going to be. Of course, the only two options are great and invincible and with the cat, thetter option would be the more likely one.

    "Whatever your project is with that Crystal Symbiote, it better be worth it," Gail said with a tired sigh.

    "Of course, we already have some results. Do you want to see it?"

    Sam asked with excitement clearly written all over his face.

    Gail nodded and said.

    "Why not?"

    "Okay, then let''s go outside. I want to your participation in this so that you can understand it properly."

    With that, both of them walked out of the room and entered the yard. There arge beast''s corpse wasid down.

    Looking at its cultivation level, Gail was a bit surprised.

    "Did Gamin bring this?"

    "Yes. Your brother, really has a way of his own, doesn''t he? I asked him to bring beasts alive, but it seems like this one pissed him off a bit, be brought the corpse and told me to use it for the corpse refinement."

    "You can indeed do that."

    "Of course, I can, but the beasts'' bodies are way too big and the first step of curse refinement takes a much longer time for them.

    I don''t have that much time to waste."

    Gail nodded and asked.

    "What do you want me to do here?"

    "I want you to circte your energy in the beast''s body and try to resist whatever that is happening to it just like how a beast''s internal energy resists against foreign things entering their body. Can you do that?"

    "I think I can manage that. But of course, it wouldn''t be as effective as the beast resisting itself."

    "Of course, it wouldn''t be. But it will give you an idea."

    Gail walked to the corpse and injected his spiritual energy.

    Sam took out a crystal from his storage. It looked just like the crystal symbiote''s core crystal they caught. But Gail knew that this is not it. This crystal is way too small and it is a lot less shiny than the original.

    Sam injected his own spiritual energy into it and threw it with a bit of ripple style.

    The crystal reacted to the ripple style and it copsed into a powdery state as it reached the beast''s body.

    It fell on the body and all of a sudden, it seeped into the pores and it is nowhere to be seen.

    Gail, who could sense what is happening within the beast''s body was surprised by the sensation he is feeling.

    He knew that there are some changes happening from within the body of the beast, but he doesn''t know what is it. But he tried to resist the changes by using his spiritual energy.

    As he is trying to figure out what is happening, he suddenly heard a crack.

    *CRACK*

    The bones started making cracking sounds and this made him feel a bit stunned. He cannot understand how this happened and how the crystal powder is doing it, but before he knew it, the bones started thinning and they are disappearing bit by bit.

    At the same time, simultaneously there is a crystal-forming in the body of the beast. The bone fragments that are too small to be seen by the naked eye are being eroded from the bones in the beast''s body and they are umting in the crystal.

    Before he knew it, the beast''s body became a bag of flesh along with blood and internal organs. Not a single bone left. Even the skull was not spared and the teeth are also gone.

    Gail didn''t even get enough time to express his surprise when the flesh started disappearing a bit and soon there is a small crystal lump in the ce where the beast used to be and instead of therge body, there is arge patch of new, fresh and lush vegetation growing out of nowhere.

    Gail looked at the whole thing with his eyes wide open. He cannot understand andprehend how this happened.

    Most of its functions are just like how a crystal symbiote reacts. At least how he knows they reacted. But the crystal here is not exactly acting the same as the symbiote.

    It is not actively trying to get to Gail, even though he is nearby.

    He felt that it might be because of the cultivation level difference. So, he directly presented his doubt.

    "No, it is not because of the level difference. It is because the symbiote is not going to act without anymands. See this."

    Sam took out another corpse from the storage and ced it right above the symbiote.

    "The symbiote should have started devouring the corpse. But it is not doing it."

    "Indeed it is not doing it. Why?"

    "Because this is not just not a symbiote anymore. It is a cursed artefact. It is a bone devouring symbiotic curse.

    It is made from the crystal material thates from the symbiote. Currently, it is still locked in the divine dimension fragment and I used the material you collected from the cave.

    This is one of the first products of the material."

    "First? Just how many are you nning?"

    "Imagine the possibilities, Gail. Long-range attacks, short-range assassinations, what can''t we do with it? As long as the person is not knowledgeable about this, they are bound to die. In fact, they can be used as weapons even when they are lying on the ground like that."

    Sam said as he pointed his finger at the corpse of the beast and shot.

    The energy bullet prated through the beast andnded on the crystal with ripple style. It broke down into the powder and entered the corpse.

    The same phenomenon as before repeated itself as the whole bodypletely disappeared within a few minutes.

    The crystal a bit bigger than the previous one appeared in that ce.

    Gail looked at it and felt a bit scared.

    Yes, even he felt a bit scared. The enemies that areing at the Gaja n are in for a world of pain and suffering.

    "You are not as kind as Jyon says are you?"

    "Not really. I said that to her too. I thought she understood that."

    Gail shrugged and said.

    "Anyway, it is a good thing that you are not an enemy. If you are, I would have to put all of my pride aside and find you to kill you. It goes against my principles of killing a young man beneath my level of power. It also goes against my principle to fight for the n so desperately to kill someone that the n themselves made an enemy of.

    But even if I have to go against every other principle that I ced for myself throughout my life, I will definitely kill you."

    "I will take that as apliment," Sam said with a smile and walked in with the crystal.

    Gail was taken aback a bit, but he also smiled and walked in.

    He involuntarily gave out a threat to Sam, because he came to understand how dangerous he can be.

    With the current situation of the n, it would be incredibly damaging if Sam bes an enemy to them. So, he just wanted to make sure Sam also doesn''t take any drastic measures when some kind of discord appears between them.

    But it appeared like Sam is not fazed by the threat.

    Gail suddenly felt refreshed. It is not every day that someone ignores his threat and he felt good about it for some reason.

    Anyway, he looked at the vegetation that was caused by the symbiote for onest time, before he went away to make preparations for the visit back to the Sonic cat.

    The next day, he went to meet the cat. It is just as dull as before and for some reason, it is even ignoring him.

    "Alright, I knew I invited you. But I didn''t rify about it. I didn''t want you to be my servant. I wanted a contract of equals between us.

    Like two friends andpanions fighting side by side."

    The cat looked at him in disdain.

    *MEOW*

    He mewed loudly and went back to taking in the incense.

    "What? We are equals aren''t we?"

    Gail asked with a doubtful expression, the cat shook its head instantly and gestured with its front paws.

    One paw pointed at itself and then ced it on top of the other paw which was used to point at Gail.

    "You are saying, you are better than me?"

    The cat nodded profusely.

    "We are definitely equals."

    Gail insisted.

    But the cat decided to ignore him. It doesn''t have to stoop low to convince Gail. After all, the ass kickings it gave speak for themselves.

    It is clearly stronger and more powerful, why would it be in a contract of servitude and even the contract of equals for that matter?

 Chapter 1478 - God Father

    <h4>Chapter 1478 - God Father</h4>

    Looking at its expressions, Gail felt helpless all of a sudden.

    He doesn''t even know what to do to convince the cat any more.

    "All right, I will be honest with you. I know you don''t like mingling with cultivators, but you can tolerate me, can''t you?"

    The cat nodded without any hesitation.

    "So, hear me out. My n is in deep trouble. More than eighty per cent of us are annihted. A lot of other organizations ganged up and did this to us.

    We are in a perilous stage. We managed to stall the rest of the organizations for a month now, but I don''t know how long we can keep that way.

    I need all the help I can get. That is why I am asking you so much."

    The cat visibly frowned. It looked at Gail to see if he is lying.

    It then turned to look at the mattress and bolster, the massage pir and the incense machine. It looked at Gail as if asking all of these are bribes.

    "There is no point in lying to you. They are indeed bribes in a way. But not to poach you, it is to make ourmunication go a bit better.

    And you cannot deny that it went good after this. You didn''t drop a hairball on me for days."

    The cat looked at him suspiciously and gestured him toe close to it.

    Gail frowned, but he did as he was asked to and it spat a hairball on him before turning around and lying down on the mattress.

    Gail caught the hairball in the middle before looking at the cat helplessly.

    "Come on, don''t be like that. If you want you can leave after my n goes back to its normal state.

    Or you can stick with me. I am not going to stay in my n for long. I will be roaming around in the Grey circle and staying around in the divine graveyard.

    You can apany on many journeys. We can fight with many people of our strength. There are many hidden dangers, trials and tribtions waiting there.

    How long are you going to stay here and gain rust to your joints?

    The only worthy opponent is gone now. I am the only one that coulde and visit you. Even now, I have to divide my time with my n and you.

    It is all bing extremely difficult for me too."

    The cat just turned its head as if it doesn''t care.

    Gail sighed and didn''t bother talking to it anymore. He took out the present that Sam prepared and left.

    The cat looked at therge metal box in front of it and checked it out.

    There is a paw-shaped groove on top of it and as soon as it ced the paw there, the whole box moved rapidly.

    It looked like arge rectangr bathtub. The cat looked at it weirdly for a moment and stepped into it.

    The machine got activated and a series of brushes and massage rollers came out of the walls while the whole body started vibrating it.

    It is also a massager, but much better than the one before and this onees with some of the massage techniques that Sam learned from the elves.

    They are simting the meridians and the joints in a very precise level that the cat felt like sleeping then and there.

    As it got lost in its own pleasure, it looked at the path in which Gail left.

    It felt a little guilty for letting him off like that. But when she looked at all the devices and thought that he only gave them to bribe it, it became stubborn again and enjoyed the massage without any guilt.

    After a few hours.

    Gail arrived at the Gaja n and met with Sam.

    "How did it go?"

    "I don''t know. But I came clean. I just gave out all of the information regarding my situation and didn''t bother to hide anything.

    I directly asked for its help. I will only know if he agreed or not the next time I visit him."

    "You let the massager right?"

    "Of course. What use does that machine have for me? I left it for the cat itself. It might even be enjoying the massage right now as we speak."

    "Alright then. Don''t visit it for a few days. In fact, only go by the end of the month."

    "Why?"

    "You need to show that, even though you have a necessity of the cat, the cat also has some use for you. Even in the contract, you are maintaining a rtionship with it and it is always two-way street."

    You opened the street already. So, let it meet you halfway."

    "Whatever you say. Everything worked until now. I don''t see a reason to suspect you now. There is no point in doing so."

    "It is great that you think so."

    While Sam and Gail are having a conversation regarding a beast that could help their Gaja n, someone else is having a secret chat about the whole situation of the Gaja n somewhere else.

    Far away from the Gaja realm, in a stray realm. Divine league headquarters.

    Divine league members are having a meeting at the moment.

    At the head of the table sat an old man with a white flowing beard. He has his eyes closed and had a big bald head.

    The beard ispletely in contrast with the dark skin he has. But even with that clear sign of old age, he is looking extremely dashing for some reason.

    On either side of the long table sat two different groups of people.

    "What is the situation of the Gaja n?"

    The old man asked in a serene voice.

    On his right hand sat a young man who also had dark skin and a faint resemnce with the old man. But he didn''t look as charismatic. He spoke after clearing his throat.

    "The Gaja n is actually pretty active and passive at the same time. They destroyed the Bain n. Gail himself put some of his principles aside and went on a pretty crazy killing spree.

    But the rest of the organization didn''t make a move after that. Even now, Gail, Gamin and Yuvana are making the lives of the rest of the organizations miserable.

    For some reason, the rest of the organizations are acting passively.

    It seems like they don''t want to be the first ones to face the wrath of the Gaja n. After all, the Bain n wasn''t able to do anything to the Gaja n. There is not a single known casualty."

    "So, they are afraid of a rabid dog biting crazily. Understandable. But killing the dog would have been a better option even at cost of some bites."

    "Of course, it would have been. But they are not trusting each other now. The Draconian tribe has gotten forgiveness from the Gaja n and no one wants to bother with the Star eye sect.

    One organization thatpletely shed all the responsibility and the one that has full responsibility.

    Every organization falls between these two, but some are leaning to the first and the others are to the second."

    "In short, there are all kinds and they cannot find someone of the same kind to trust?"

    "Yes. That might just be the second reason though. The primary one could be the Gaja n killing a lot of higher officials at the tournament venue.

    Gail, Gamin and Yuvana slew at least two Peak stage Astral ne Consummate cultivators from all of the organizations. It is not a small loss to cover and they don''t want to lose anymore."

    "The Gaja n out did itself. They really managed to keep all the organizations in check all the while picking on them. We need to change the situation.

    Letting Gaja n rest like this is the worst thing they could do now."

    "The Gaja n is not resting¡­."

    The young man went on to exin the construction of new things within the city. Of course, they don''t know any details.

    They cannot get them as every person that went in search of clues are dying every day.

    "The situation is not looking good. Why didn''t the Divine league do anything in the past month? Just because I was staying down andying low, you guys have grown soft?"

    "We couldn''t find a proper asion or a situation to deal with the Gaja n. We are having a hard time gauging their strength."

    "Excuses. We don''t need to find asions and situations. We need those four children that belong in the care of our gods. Go and use all of your agents with different organizations and make them use all of their resources to create conflict.

    Within a week the Gaja n should be fighting on all the possible fronts. Every organization it has enmity with should be active.

    Do you understand that?"

    "Yes, Godfather."

    The young man said and the rest of the people who are scarily silent until then also stood up.

    "Yes, Godfather."

    They said in unison.

 Chapter 1479 - Meeting

    <h4>Chapter 1479 - Meeting</h4>

    Three dayster.

    Gail just got back from an expedition to find poisons and went to hand over them to Sam.

    "I don''t know what you are going to do with these poisons, but you better be careful. Even if they don''t kill me, I am still terrified of most of them."

    "Don''t worry. I will be extremely careful with them.

    But I need to ask, where did you even these poisons from? They are very rare."

    "There is a ce nearby Divine Graveyard and ce within the graveyard that thrives with venomous creatures and poisonous vegetation. The most dangerous poisons I know, alwayse from that spot."

    "That''s great then. Please keep theming. I can always find a use for them."

    "Whatever you say. Anyway, I am going back to the cat."

    "Well, it is about time. Don''t be discouraged if it doesn''t want toe through. It might take some more time for a beast like that to ept these things. You can always take a break for a few more days and go back to try your luck."

    "I don''t know Sam. It almost feels like this is a waste of time. The cat is acting way too stubborn. I feel like I should be focusing on something else."

    "Don''t worry. All the benefits you can bring to the n would be worth less than bringing the sonic cat to be your ally in a long term goal.

    You are one of the strongest people in the world that I am aware of and a cat that could kick your ass so many times is something of a force on itself. If you bring that cat, your n has an extra you. Think of it that way."

    "But it is taking too much of my time. I really don''t think the rest of the organizations would be holding back anymore.

    The fear from the Bain n''s destruction goes away. It doesn''t stay long enough to keep them at bay forever.

    And even though we toned down the attacks on the ns a bit, they are still a bit agitated over this."

    "But those attacks are keeping them at bay. Since you are confident enough to attack multiple ns and organizations at the same time, they are hesitant to attack you.

    Luckily for us they cannot find partners until now. We need to maintain this status quo for at least another month.

    After that, even if we go onpletely defensive, we wouldn''t be having any problem."

    "That would be difficult. Because the organizations are already moving."

    Gamin suddenly entered and said.

    The n''s leader is also along with him. Both Gail and Sam frowned.

    The n''s leader took a deep breath and exined.

    "Gamin''s informants found something odd in some of the organizations in thest few days.

    Particrly in the Star eye sect.

    Some elders are making contact with other organizations at a rapid pace. The properties in many of the Star eye sect territories are changing hands.

    They are giving out a lot of their riches and power in exchange for the muscle to deal with us.

    Of course, it is spection, but when I went to one of the locations to find the Grand elder of the star eye sect, Not only could I not find him, I also couldn''t find any other people from the start eye sect there.

    The workers and owners of the ce, changed overnight and they are definitely not rted to the Star eye sect. After some beating, I realized they are a subordinate organization of the Mari n.

    Star eye sect is really paying huge to get these people on their side."

    "But why all of a sudden?"

    Gail asked with a frown.

    He is way too familiar with the Star eye sect to not recognize something is wrong.

    Star eye sect is an organization where selfish intent matter more than anything. They managed to fool more than a dozen organizations just to fulfil their personal agenda of capturing these gifted kids.

    They didn''t care what the consequences would be for the rest of the organizations and they didn''t even think too much about what they would do after they are caught.

    They just proceeded with it.

    For such an organization, to offer their properties and authority just like that, it is something to think about.

    Gail looked at Gamin and was about to say something, but Gamin interrupted.

    "Yuvana wants to investigate this on her own. I will stay in the n. So, you can go to that cat.

    But you better tame it this time. Yuvana has been controlling the urge to make some jokes about the failures of your cat. If you don''t tame it, they are going to explode all at the same time. You know how sharp her tongue could be."

    "Are you sure you can handle it yourself?"

    "Saran is still here. And some of Sam''s things are already ready to go. I want to see how those things work too.

    In fact, I am kind of tempted by the idea of someoneing now. And some beasts we caught, they are also itching to show their frustration on someone else.

    We are not as weak as you think.

    So, go there and finish the task."

    Gail nodded after some hesitation and left.

    He directly went to the cat''s ce and this time, he wanted to stay for a bit longer time than usual.

    Yuvana already left to investigate what is happening with the Star eye sect while Gamin and Saran are prepared to defend any attacks that areing at them.

    Meanwhile, in the city where the Star eye sect''s headquarters is located.

    Within a house in one of the biggest estates there.

    It is the house of a Core elder of the Star eye sect and currently, this person has the power of a grand elder more or less.

    He is having a meeting with a bunch of other people.

    They are all from different sects and organizations.

    He served them all wine by himself as he spoke.

    "The orders from the Divine league arrived and I did all I could with my newfound authority.

    How far did youe with convincing your organizations? Until now only half of you jumped in and the rest are off.

    We cannot have that much disparity when we are attacking the Gaja n.

    I got the news that the orders are directly from the Godfather himself, so we need to make sure that all organizations are joined together on this."

    A young woman chuckled and replied.

    "It is not going to happen. My sect doesn''t want to get in on this. Star eye sect screwed them over a very big time. They lost two Grand elders until now and Gamin beat the crap out of the sect leader and the remaining grand elder.

    The most I can do is manipte a few core elders to get things done here and there. If you need spies, I can get you. But the direct attack on Gaja n? I am sorry. I am out of options in that area."

    The man in charge nodded and said.

    "Alright then, send all of the spies you can and any resources you can also help."

    "Our n is going to agree to this. The business deal is almost done, all the star eye sect needs to do is increase the whole price by a mine. The young master who is signing the deal wants some credit that he increased the price even just a bitpared to the young master of another n who signed the deal.

    As long as you give him that ego boost, the deal is signed."

    A middle-aged man said from the side.

    "I killed a couple of women that the grand elder loved and made it seem like Gaja n did it. I managed to convince him that the reason they died is that he went into hiding in fear of Gail.

    I even publicized the information within the sect. Now every woman within the n is rejecting him. He cannot stand that. He will be joining this, but you need to send a representative from the Sect to ask for help."

    A middle-aged woman chimed in.

    Simrly for the next two hours, everyone gave out an ount of what their situation is.

    The man noted down every possible information that could be used to make the organization sign in the deal.

    After he was done, he went into the Star eye sect and held another meeting there.

    "I managed to obtain some of the information from my sources, as long as we can take out some more money from our pockets and lose more properties we will be able to attract a few more organizations.

    Once they are involved, the Gaja n wouldn''t have any other choice but to be eliminated."

    "We cannot do that. We already sold out forty per cent of our properties. We will lose our footing in arge sect if we do that. Some of our elders might even defect us."

    The sect leader said helplessly.

 Chapter 1480 - Ivin

    <h4>Chapter 1480 - Ivin</h4>

    The sect leader of the Star eye sect is having a hard time.

    Before he could even rejoice by the fact that he managed to gain power as a sect leader this early then he had expected, he was hit with the reality.

    Gail came here as he pleased and created havoc before leaving as he pleased.

    He had to stay on his toes every single second. Apart from that, there is this pressure from the rest of the organizations.

    After the Bain n foolishly got destroyed in the wounded Gaja n''s hands, the rest of the organizations turned to the Star eye sect to take care of the Gaja n.

    They are going back on business deals, severed partnerships, held people hostage.

    A lot of shit hit him at the same moment.

    As he was trying to cope with it, days went past and at the current moment, he looked at the most promising core elder in front of him.

    Core elder Ivin.

    The same man conducted a meeting a few hours ago with a bunch of people from different organizations. Theckey of the divine league.

    Of course, the n leader doesn''t know it.

    He looked at Ivin who is waiting for a reply with a solemn face and thought of all the things that happened within the past few days, three days in particr.

    For some reason, he managed to find out ways to ally with the other organizations. He managed to obtain information regarding what would appease the other organizations and found contacts inside that could convince their higher-ups by hook or crook.

    But in the process, the star eye sect lost forty per cent of their properties within the three days and some of them even included the secret properties that were under the hands of some other elders, senior elders and core elders.

    Some even in the hands of future prospects to be the leader of the sect.

    This guy always knew which key person in what organization can convince the whole organization and also had a very good idea about what that person needed in order to make the deal.

    Within three days, the sect lost so much. But in exchange of course they got contracts and oaths that they wouldn''t attack the star eye sect after the Gaja n''s situation is cleared.

    At first, he was pretty excited when they roped in one n after another. He was really d that he could feel some relief from this.

    But before he could think of further ns, Ivin came up with more and more deals and he signed them up.

    Weirdly enough, whenever he was met with resistance, he always managed to gain the support of enough elders and senior elders to gain the vote and sign the deal.

    Even that was okay to some extent. But things went out of hand. Ivin always had information on all the properties that are under the sect. Even the secret properties held by different elders, and youngsters.

    So, if any organization member that they need to convince needed anything from these secret ces, he always brought it up and put everyone on the spot.

    Some elders lost all kinds of hoarded riches. Some even became penniless because of that.

    Some elders lost the properties that they earned with their blood, sweat and tears. Some didn''t lose anything. At least not yet.

    This caused some serious discord within the organization. If not for the perilous situation in front of them, they would havee to blows.

    In this process, they already lost forty per cent before they even realized it. Now Ivin is asking them to give up even more.

    This is something that shouldn''t happen at any cost.

    Even the star eye sect weakens itself to this extent, even if the other organization do not attack them after the Gaja n''s situation, they would be in too much of an abyss to save themselves.

    They would not have enough resources left to survive.

    Looking at the sect leader''s expression, Ivin is sure that he wouldn''t agree at all. But he has a trick up his sleeve.

    "Elder Dan."

    He spoke and another core elder stood up with a grim face.

    "Sect leader. I have a stray realm under my control and it is actually very resourceful. If I hand that over along with a few mines, we will be able to afford the support of the Reaper sect. This would give us better odds.

    I am willing to sacrifice for the sect."

    "The stray realm is partially owned by the sect. Don''t speak as if you are the one that owns itpletely."

    "I know it is partially owned by the n, but I am the one that discovered and conquered it. I definitely have a right."

    "No, you don''t."

    A dispute started and it went on for twenty minutes and Ivin called out some backup. Before the sect leader could even catch up to what is happening, it was decided that the stray realm and few mines that are under the sect''s control are going to be sold to the reaper n in exchange for their grand elder to participate in the attack against the Gaja n."

    "By the way, sect leader. I spoke to the representatives of the other organizations, they are expecting the attack to begin in the next three days.

    Here are the proposals I have for the rest of the organizations. After a series of tense negotiations, I managed to convince them of these prices.

    Of course, it is going to ce a huge burden on the sect''s finances for some time. But at least we would be having a winning chance.

    Also, you cannot dy the attack for long.

    Otherwise, the other organizations might pull out.

    I will order the divisions to start preparing for the attack."

    Before the sect leader could even speak up and find reasons to object the meeting has ended.

    Ivin went back to his estate and met with the representatives.

    "Reaper n is in. The deal will be signed. Bring the representatives here by tomorrow morning. The rest of the people who got the deals should also bring their representatives by tomorrow evening.

    We are nning the attack right away."

    "Ivin, don''t you think you are moving a bit too fast? I mean, with your behaviour things would be investigated by your sect members. It is bound to happen. Even we are trying to be as subtle as possible.

    But to move these people by tomorrow, is bound to cost us some things that are going to expose our identities.

    Do we really need to do this?"

    "If you want to showcase your loyalty to the divine league, you better do what I told you guys.

    I, as a high-level member of the Divine league, has been a lowly spy for years and even I am not feeling any loss over busting my identity. What right do you guys have to do that?

    I want every one of you to bring your members here by tomorrow.

    By the night of the day after tomorrow, we are going to war and you are also participating. We are going to destroy the Gaja n no matter what and we are capturing those four children and offering them to Godfather.

    Do you understand?"

 Chapter 1481 - Interrogation

    <h4>Chapter 1481 - Interrogation</h4>

    While Ivin is swinging his authority over the face of other Divine league''sckeys, Yuvana arrived in the city.

    She didn''te openly though. She wore a disguise and hid her strength as much as she could before entering the city.

    She went to a restaurant right outside of the sect headquarters to listen in on the gossip that is currently running around within the city. But the only thing she got that is even notable is that many new faces are showing up and some elders are receiving more and more guests.

    Among those elders, Ivin''s name is on top.

    Yuvana made a mental note of all these people and decided to check them out. But before, he roamed around the city, checking if there are any people that she could recognize from the information she had.

    But she couldn''t find any, so she went to check up on these elders. She inquired here and there, particrly the thugs in the slums and got the info on who owns the what estate and got the locations.

    She went to the estates one by one and after checking them all up, she obviously focused on Ivin''s estate.

    She waited a bit away from the estate and when the guards at the gate changed shifts and the previous one is going home, she caught him and held him captive in one of the houses in the slums nearby.

    She put up a concealment formation that could hide the noises and screams before torturing some information out of the guard.

    She learned about how many people are arriving at Ivin and what they looked like.

    She looked through the prior information she had and matched some people based on the features the guard described. She killed the guard after confirming all she can and kept an eye on Ivin''s house for the time being.

    She noticed that the guests that arrived at Ivin''s house are constantly moving back and forth. Even Ivin himself is actually on constant move.

    He is talking with various people that belonged to the sect.

    She also noticed the movements of various departments and sensed the tense atmosphere of war.

    After one day of observation, she confirmed some things.

    Ivin is acting as a bridge between the Star eye sect and other organizations. He is also gathering all of the forces from within the sect and also the forces that areing from other organizations by himself.

    He is clearly gathering these forces to attack the Gaja n and the attack is going to happen very very soon.

    She just needed to confirm what day it would be and picked a perfect target for that.

    Ivin himself.

    The morning of the second day, when Ivin came out of his estate and was on his way to the gathering point of the forces, Yuvana made a move.

    Ivin who was walking on the road with a grin of zeal and excitement suddenly felt something hitting on his neck before he lost consciousness.

    By the time he opened his eyes and came back to his senses, he is in a dark room that he has never seen before. Immobile and in pain. He looked around and panicked.

    "Come out. Who is it that dared to do this to me? Do you even know who I am?"

    "What is the point of bringing you here if I don''t know who you are?"

    Yuvana''s voice came from behind him. He suddenly felt a sense of panic and shock grip his spine. He wanted to turn around and look at her. But he cannot.

    He is almost paralyzed.

    "So, Ivin. How is your newfound authority? Are you having fun controlling the people of so many organizations? How did a person of your status even achieve that?"

    She asked as she came to the front.

    "Yuvana?"

    "Of course it is me. Now answer my question."

    "How dare youe to Star eye sect''s territory? Do you think you would be able to survive after doing this to me without your husband or brother-inw? You have no idea, what you are doing by capturing me like this."

    "I think I do have a faint idea. But for any of those cultivators that gathered here to do anything about this situation, they first need to have an idea that I am even here.

    And from the looks of it, they weren''t able to suspect my presence in thest two days. I don''t think it is going to change that much."

    "You know these people are gathered here and you still captured me? Are you mad?"

    "You have no idea.

    Now, let''s do this the easy way. No matter what case it is, I will be killing you. But if you spill all the information I need, you would be able to sleep peacefully. But if you don''t, you will be experiencing the worst torture that a cultivator can do to another.

    So, you better be truthful."

    "Hahahaha¡­. You are way too na?ve if you think that I am going to tell you anything you need. But I know one thing though.

    Tonight will be the start of the Gaja n''s extinction n.

    All the troops I gathered will trample your n into nothing¡­ AAHHHHHHHHHHH¡­"

    He stopped midway and screamed as he couldn''t take the sudden pain that shot up in his leg.

    "Only answer what I ask of you. Don''t say anything else.

    How did you gather all of these people? What is the specific purpose of you doing this?"

    "It is to destroy the Gaja n."

    "I know that, you idiot. But what is the specific benefit, that you get out of it. I don''t believe that a core elder goes to such lengths just to safeguard the star eye sect.

    Those kinds of things don''t happen in your sect."

    "I don''t have any other goal. I am doing this because of the orders and I am very happy that I am able to do my part in your destruction."

    "Whose orders?"

    Ivin became silent once again and looked at her doubtfully. Yuvana continued.

    "I know for a fact that the current sect leader, don''t have any authority on you. You were not being subtle about it. The whole city is talking about.

    If I am not wrong, you are taking orders from someone else. Who is that person?"

    Ivin just sneered in response and didn''t answer her question.

    "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH¡­."

    Another leg was busted and Ivin screamed on top of his lungs.

    "I am telling you. I am not really a pleasant person. You are going to be in a world of suffering if you don''t answer me."

    "Do your worst bitch. I can take it."

    "Well, that does it."

    "AHHHHHHHHH¡­"

    The house reverberated with screams of agony and pain.

    Yuvana didn''t even have a change of expression as she hurt him continuously.

    After three hours, finally, Ivin opened his mouth and spoke something useful.

    "Alright. Stop it. I will tell you my n."

    "Now that is a good decision."

    "I take orders from Divine league. Godfather is my direct superior."

    "You are Divine league''s spy? You are a fucking Late-stage Consummate cultivator of the astral ne? How is that even possible for you to be a spy of the divine league?"

    "Because I chose to be one. I wanted to destroy the Star eye sect internally. The divine league is the only true subordinate of heavens and gods and the star eye sect that looks at heaven''s secrets and reveals to the mortals shouldn''t exist.

    So, I took it upon myself to do this."

    "Alright, you crazy bastard. Go on."

    "I got orders from Godfather to gather all the forces possible and make an attack of the Gaja n.

    He doesn''t want you guys to rest and lick your wounds. He doesn''t want you to make aeback."

    "And?"

    "I contacted all the spies in the other organizations and used all the information they had on various members to make them sign deals with Star eye sect.

    Now, the star eye sect gathered all of these forces to attack the Gaja n."

    "So, you are leading this attack?"

    "I was, but not anymore."

    "True, you are going to die now. So, you can''t."

    "Not because of that, you bitch. It is because the attack has already started. The forces already moved."

    Yuvana frowned and looked at him.

    "You don''t know this. But I already anticipated an attack of this sort. So, I set up a rule for all of my subordinate spies.

    The forces should be moved immediately if they didn''t receive my word for over an hour and a half. It has been three hours since I made contact with them. So, they must have already been on their way to the Gaja n.

    They must already be within the moving towards the city.

    The worst part is, you cannot even go and give the information to the n because the city is currently going to be under lockdown because of my disappearance and four cultivators of your level are going to stay back.

    At this moment, as we speak, they are searching for you and me."

    *BOOM*

 Chapter 1482 - Spheres

    <h4>Chapter 1482 - Spheres</h4>

    As soon as Ivin finished speaking the roof of the house exploded and came crashing down.

    *BOOM*

    *CRASH*

    Four people entered the house and Yuvana stood straight as she looked at all of them. One of the four picked up Ivin from the rubble and made him stand.

    "The one and only Yuvana, using her famous torture techniques on someone with lesser cultivation? Gaja n really is desperate, isn''t it?"

    One of the old men spoke.

    "Stop with your yapping and get ready to fight. I have to catch up with the rest of your forces and inform the n about it."

    Yuvana said calmly and took out her weapons.

    "I heard that you are this daring. But today, you are going to die."

    "Like hell, you can kill me. The same thing was said to me and my husband when we are surrounded by twenty people. Do you really think four you can do any better than that? All you are is a reduction in the numbers that could have possibly attacked the Gaja n.

    By staying here, you made my husband''s work easier. That''s it."

    As soon as she spoke, she made a move without waiting for them to reply or start.

    The four opponents met her with their own attacks.

    Ivin who is standing at the side spectated the whole fight for the next thirty minutes and he cannot believe what he saw.

    Yuvana who was known to be the weakest of the triopared to Gail and Gamin yed around with the four opponents.

    It is not as much as intentional ying, rather it is her fighting style. The way she approached the fight itself is by toying with them.

    She didn''t let themnd a single attack and she also didn''t go for some big and fancy moves. In fact, no matter how much the four men tried, they couldn''t take the fight outside of the house walls.

    Yuvana controlled the whole fight and she chipped them away bit by bit. She stripped them off, their clothes, dignity and then their flesh bit by bit as they slowly bled to death.

    In this whole process, the most they did to Yuvana is to make her sweat, pant and finally spoil her braid.

    She put her weapons away and started braiding her hair with bloody hands as she looked at the surroundings calmly. She then looked at Ivin and said.

    "The Divine league really overestimates itself, doesn''t it?

    Do you even know what happened within the tournament ground?"

    Ivin involuntarily shook his head.

    "Figures. After all, not many people made out of that ce alive. You bloody idiot.

    I am really pissed off at Divine league for quite some while. This time, they will learn a lesson."

    "You wouldn''t be able to teach the Divine league anything. Do you really think we are the only n the Divine league has?

    This time ten organizations areing with the full force of all stages and that is just from my side. There is something else apart from this and I am sure the Gaja n wouldn''t survive past this."

    "Yeah? You wouldn''t be able to see it, even if that happens. Goodbye."

    With that Ivin died and Yuvana directly went to the Space gate area to take the fastest route to the Gaja n, but to her dismay, all of the space gates are destroyed.

    There is no way they can be operated. They even went as far as locking the wormholes with some formations.

    Yuvana has no choice but to break one of the formations carefully and use the wormhole to go to the next realm. There is not a single realm or big enough to hold an organization that has a direct connection to the Gaja n.

    Even if it does, they wouldn''t have space gates connected since the situation is tense.

    She has to move from one realm to another normally through wormholes and space gates, which will take a longer time.

    "I should have brought the transference tokens for the stray realm."

    She muttered to herself as she started her journey.

    Meanwhile, back at the Gaja n.

    Gamin and n''s leader is discussing something when one of the subordinates came running.

    "Sir, Senior Elder Ma found out about activity in the surroundings. Arge group of people areing towards the city at an extremely fast pace.

    They all seemed to be in formations and they are alling from the front.

    He also said, they seemed to be led by the current sect leader of the Star Eye sect. It might just be the whole army of the Star eye sect and some other organizations."

    Gamin stood up and stretched his body.

    "It seems like we are having a party here."

    The n''s leader was about to get ready, but Gamin stopped him.

    "Don''te forward and fight yet. Stay with the youngsters who can''t participate. They need someone to lean on and since you haven''t fully recovered from that pill usage, you are the better candidate for that."

    "But there are too many.."

    "What is the point of talking numbers here. Do they really want to storm the gate of the Gaja n? Let me see if they have thepetence to cross when I am standing in front of it.

    Anyway, this is also a great time to see how Sam''s new toys are going to work. I am really excited. "

    He then turned towards the subordinate and said.

    "Call Saran and tell him toe towards the front gate of the city."

    The subordinate nodded and left.

    "Is there any way to contact Gail?" The n''s leader asked.

    "There isn''t. But he should be on his way.

    Anyway, as long as there is a problem on your side, give me a signal. Either I or Saran will be there in a second. No matter how small the problem is, just call us.

    Those kids shall not be in their hands no matter what. They are part of the Gaja n and they will receive all the protection at any cost to grow as part of it."

    Gamin took out his de and ran to the front of the city.

    At the same moment, some subordinates went to inform Sam and Giyon about the situation just like how they informed Gamin and the n''s leader.

    Senior Elder Ma sent separate subordinates to inform them about this situation directly.

    Sam got the gist and made his move. He didn''t go to the city wall. He went to the n estate''s gate and took out the telescope he made to look at the peopleing. Giyon and Grivon joined him at that spot and took a look as well.

    "So, what are we doing?"

    "Right now? Nothing. Let the mechanisms do their part first. We only need to worry about them after they enter the city directly.

    Even then we don''t need to step up directly. The subordinates and operators are already in ce with all the readily avable weapons and traps. This is going to be okay."

    "But the army this time is very huge. Larger than the Bain n''s army by many times.

    From the looks of it, there are at least twenty peak stage Astral ne Consummate cultivators. This is way too many. Dad is also absent at this time."

    "But your uncle looks excited for some reason. If he is really that confident let him be. I have ways to give him assistance." Sam said calmly.

    "Really? No offence, but I have been having some doubts in the past few days. You only manufactured one thing properly in the past month and apart from that, there are residual products created from those domes which are mostly for selling.

    I have seen those products myself, they are good, but I doubt they are helpful in such arge scale situation. I am still waiting to see what they can really do."

    "You could have just asked me. Why didn''t you do so? I would have given you a demonstration."

    "Well, you have now opportunity and time to do so. You better not disappoint me."

    "Anyway, I bet you have seen how this works?"

    Sam said as he took out a spherical metal ball that looked like there are cracks all over and the cracks are glowing with blue lightning elemental energy."

    "Yes, I have seen it. Isn''t it the product that you are going to put up for sale? The by-product of those domes?"

    "Yes, it is. You have seen how it worked?"

    "Yes, I did."

    "Well, this is going to be the first mode of response against the attackers that areing."

    As soon as Sam spoke up, at the city wall, a bunch of cannons came out of the walls and started shooting these spheres.

    They are glowing of different colours as they areunched into the air and they left a streak of different colours behind as they near the targetsing forward.

    The marching army didn''t think much of the spheres and kept on moving forward.. But their expressions changed as soon as they saw what the spheres did next.

 Chapter 1483 - Curtain

    <h4>Chapter 1483 - Curtain</h4>

    The spheres reached the highest point they could and their direction changed downwards. But at that exact moment, the cracks on all of them opened up and an energy ripple spread out from each one of them.

    Every ball had a different type of colour because of the elemental energy they held together and that painted a colourful picture.

    But that was not the end of it.

    When the ripples are expanding more and more, they ovepped because there is not much of distance between them in the first ce.

    As soon as the ovep urred, streaks of energy lines spread out of the sphere. And the number of streaks is dependent on how many ripples of spheres did the ovep took ce with.

    The energy lines joined with other spheres through this ovep and the same thing happened in every single sphere.

    Now each sphere has at least three to four lines spreading out of them connecting them to three or four other spheres.

    This created a curtain of elemental energies spread by these spheres and the curtain is extremely dense. It is like arge fine-mesh covering the army marching forward.

    Everyone stopped in their tracks immediately and that included the twenty or so Astral ne peak stage Consummate cultivators. Even they could sense that something big is about to happen with this energy curtain.

    When all the spheres are increasing their speed as they zoomed towards the army, one of the soldiers couldn''t take it anymore and attacked it with an arrow.

    But the arrow that was purely condensed with fire elemental energy was stopped by the curtain a ripple spread across the mesh.

    The fire elemental energy lines within the mesh at one spot brightened up a bit more as they absorbed the elemental energy that was within the arrow.

    "All of you don''t attack. Just defend yourself."

    One of the old men who saw this said out loud. He doesn''t know what would happen if he attacked it and he definitely couldn''t understand what would happen if itnded on them, so he went with the best option he could find, to neutrally defend themselves.

    The spears rapidly fell down and as soon as they are less than a meter away from the people, they exploded.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    A series of explosive sounds urred, but it is not some random explosion. Instead, it is a very powerful and closely contained explosion of energy and it stayed within the curtain mesh made out of energy streak lines.

    The only thing that came out of the explosion is actually mental pieces of the spheres that are propelled by the after-effects of the explosions.

    The old men who are leading the army were stunned.

    They didn''t expect such an impact. There is not much effect on them, but this even explosion of multiple colours that is extremely beautiful to look at is also like a curtain of death on them.

    The cultivators who got stuck in the explosions felt as different elemental energies seeped into their bodies with excruciating pain while destroying the cells and in turn the flesh and bone.

    Their internal organs shook and broke while the remaining intact pieces arepletely corrupted with the elemental energy that is not theirs.

    Even the grand elders took a little brunt of the attack. Their barriers are being eroded with the elemental energy that is running rampant all over.

    Everyone from within the Gaja n is surprised by what they saw.

    "What the hell just happened?"

    Gamin asked with his mouth wide open. Looking at his expression Saran couldn''t help but shake his head.

    The subordinates that are around them are all trying to make sense of it and are hoping that Gamin and Saran knew something. So, Gamin''s tant agreement to not understanding what just happened is a bit troubling.

    He at least could have kept his dignity by keeping his mouth shut.

    The reactions at the n estate''s wall are even more troubling.

    "What fuck just happened? These things are the by-products of theserge domes? What the hell is being made inside?"

    "Something that I have been thinking about for a while. In fact, it is a new experimental project. Since Sivan would being with my own old designs, I wanted to find something that could counter that.

    It is great, isn''t it?"

    Sam said with a smile.

    "That chain reaction is fucking amazing."

    Grivon said with a gulp as he looked at the explosion zone through the telescope. The cannons shot once again and another curtain appeared in the air. Even though each curtain is creating arge expanse, the army is spread over an evenrger area. It only destroyed a small piece of it and even that was notplete destruction.

    Looking at the curtain, one of the old men attacked it directly before it could react.

    The spear he threw cut the curtain into two and the aftereffects of the blow made the two curtains spread into two different directions.

    But this didn''t reduce any damage. The energy from the spear spread into the two smaller meshes and they created massive explosions in the curtains.

    Even though the curtain and spheres are not very close to the army this time, the explosion effect still made them take a lot of brunts and residual force.

    The only thing reduced is the elemental energy corrosion to their bodies.

    Apart from that, the damage really remained the same.

    "Is there no way to get away from this?" Grivon asked. For some reason, he is a bit nervous.

    "There is actually. But I am not telling you this now."

    Sam said with a smile and sat on the wall.

    "You are that calm that they wouldn''t be able to reach here?"

    "Even if they do, there are many things that are waiting for them. It would be a long time for us to attack. Trust me on that one."

    Giyon thought for a moment and sat down. Grivon followed suit and they spectated.

    "So, when are those sphere cannons going to be useless? Only when theye near isn''t it?"

    "Yes. When they are too near, it is way too much of trouble to use the cannons in such close range.

    They will destroy themselves. That is the time when the domes kick in. The other product you thought was useless is going to be of help at that time."

    "I am really looking forward to seeing it after all of this destruction. I just hope it helps uncle and Saran."

    "Just wait and see."

    Sam said leisurely.

    The army marched forward and the old men leading it realized the damage the cannons are doing at the long-range and led the group at full speed.

    Soon, the cannons are useless and they are retracted back into the walls. The operators of the cannons went back into the city and took up their other positions meanwhile, Gamin got ready to jump into the battle.

    At this moment though, amunication device on him got an alert.

    "Hello Gamin, this is Sam."

    "Yeah."

    "How many people can you and Saran handle without any trouble?"

    "Five? Why are you asking?"

    "Try to lure five people forward first on my cue. There is a circr line out of the gate ten meters away."

    "Yes, there is."

    "On my cue make sure the five people are within that line and the rest are behind it."

    "Okay."

    Gamin exined what Sam said and Saran agreed.

    Both of them stepped forward and picked the five people at the forefront. They tackled and the rest of the old men who are in the same league as them tried to march forward. But right when Sam signalled Gamin, things changed.

    The domes that are dormant until then suddenly glowed with different elemental energies and the small metal puppets that looked like a cross between bats and eagles wereunched from those domes.

    As they are shot towards the city walls, the domes activated some of the hidden nodes within the city and arge crystal dome appeared all around the city.

    It is formed with many translucent colours and they are shifting non-stop.

    Just as the dome was being closed, Saran and Gamin ran back from the encirclement and jumped into the dome. Along with them came the five people that they are tackling.

    The rest of the people are out of the dome and they were stunned by its sudden appearance.

    "The dome looks so thin, is it going to work against these people? I mean, it is hard to find formations that work against people of that cultivation."

    Giyon asked back on the city wall.

    "Of course not, maybe it will be able to take three blows at most and it will copse. But the dome is not the thing that is going to hold them all off. It is mostly for the rest of the chump change.. For big dogs, something else is awaiting them."

 Chapter 1484 - Run

    <h4>Chapter 1484 - Run</h4>

    As soon as the dome waspletely formed, the domes changed up a bit a small tower popped up on each one of them.

    The towers are glowing with elemental energy all around them. The puppets that are flying towards the city also started having a small extra glow on top of their heads as soon as the towers appeared.

    They maintained a certain altitude as they prated the barrier dome without any trouble and hovered over the heads of the army.

    The puppets moved in a certain way as some of them circled and some of them moved in very long orbits and some of them are moving up and down.

    The old menpletely ignored them. They couldn''t sense any threat from them and one of them focused on the barrier. He pulled his arm back and threw a punch.

    *BOOM*

    The crystal barrier rippled withrge waves as it tried to negate the blow by distributing the force and energy all over.

    The rest of the old men snorted in disdain at such a barrier. There are even some visible cracks on it. But within this time span, Gamin already killed one of them with a stab to the heart and Saran is already on his way to end another one.

    The old man got ready to destroy the barrier with his next punch, but before he could do it, something else happened within the city, that shook them all.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sound appeared asrge streaks of energy beams emerged from the top of every tower that appeared on the dome. Each tower threw arge streak of energy beam right into the centre of the city.

    All beams merged and created arge ball of energy that is extremely chaotic but barely keeping a bnce.

    The puppets hovering over the army suddenly shot very small metal bullets that are glowing with various patterns towards the old men.

    In fact, they are not even aimed at them directly. They are aimed at a certain spot behind or beside them without posing no threat whatsoever.

    But as soon as these bullets reached their destined spots, therge chaotic sphere reacted. It started shootingrge energy beams and their target is actually these small metallic beams.

    More than a hundred beams were shot at the same time and they all went to one of the bullets that are shot.

    This is the moment that the old men started feeling the threat.

    That is because they are currently in the way of the energy beam and the bullet. For the beam to reach the bullet, it would have to go right through them.

    They immediately prepared their barriers and got ready to take the attacks. The beams passed through the energy dome and some of the energy dispersed. In this process, the energy barrier started strengthening.

    The cracks disappeared and it even appeared a bit stronger than earlier.

    The energy beams passed through the dome and went straight for the old men and some of their other subordinates who are also targeted.

    Their barriers were of no use. As soon as the beamnded on them, they were only able to negate a bit of the energy.

    The barriers acted weirdly after they made contact with the beam. They got this brittleness as they turned to a texture of ice and copsed momentarily before the beams hit the people.

    The old men took the full brunt of the attack and felt like their whole energy cirction system is shaken up a bit.

    They could feel the energy within their body is acting weirdly as well. It became a bit denser than it should actually be and clogged some of the cirction processes, making it extremely painful. All of them took the attack and now they are in no situation to attack.

    Of course, they are also not in any position to die. They are still strong, but there is a flesh wound that weakened them just a bit.

    But the subordinates and small fries that got targeted by the beams are not as lucky. They really got destroyed with just one beam and some of them even exploded into the bloody mist filled with various elemental energies.

    Everyone''s jaw dropped. They didn''t know what is happening. But they do know that whatever that is something that they couldn''t have imagined.

    While in that stunned state, the puppets moved. They shot another set of bullets and they targeted them just like before.

    But this time, the old men tried their best to dodge the energy beamsing at them. Only the puppets just kept on shooting more and more bullets at them one after the other and the maximum beams they managed to dodge are two. Everyone got hit by the time the third wave of beams arrived.

    They realized that these harmless puppets are the ones that caused this and a couple of them destroyed a few.

    But to their dismay, they saw something that they never expected toe across in their lives. When the small puppet exploded, the space jade inside it cracked released a bunch of bullets at the same time thatnded randomly within the army and a bunch of beams, more than five dozen to be precise were shot in that one particr direction.

    This almost made it impossible for them to dodge and one of the old men got riddled. He felt all of his meridians getting clogged.

    Another old man beside him ran over and tried to ease up the density of the energy as he copsed.

    Hundreds of soldiers died instantly.

    Gamin and Saran finished off the five people by now and looked at the whole scene.

    They felt a bit of chill under their spine.

    This beam is clearly not powerful enough to kill these old men. Even though it is powerful, for a Peak stage cultivator like this to die, an energy explosion on the scale of eight spirit stone mines exploding all the same time, would be needed.

    And each one of those mines should be of the highest quality one with billions of spirit stonesing out every harvest.

    That scale of the explosion was impossible for Sam to create any time soon.

    But he changed the quality and nature of energy a bit and used these lesser-powered beams to keep these people at bay.

    If they want to destroy these domes and the sphere from that range, they need to build up arge amount of energy and a few moments of time.

    But no sane person does that in the premises of the Gaja n, particrly when any one of the trios of Gail, Gamin and Yuvana are nearby.

    They will instantly kill them in that one moment.

    They wouldn''t even have to think too much to know that this is the only possible oue.

    If they need to get past that barrier which is obviously weak, they need to continuously dodge these bullets and beams which just seemed impossible because even if they took down the puppets, they are just digging their own graves even deeper.

    The only silver lining for their situation is that these energy beams are not as strong, which is the only reason for them to not die. Even the old man who got hit by a few dozen beams only got some severe flesh wounds and there is a lot of energy clogging going on within his body.

    But this is definitely good enough to halt them for a few minutes.

    Gamin and Saran only needed this much time before they came out of the barrier as they went to pick on their next targets.

    The battle went on and on and these are not the only surprises that the rest of the n saw.

    There are many more. They just couldn''t believe that Sam managed to do all of this within the month.

    Half-a-day has passed before the battle reached into the middle of the city and many more people started falling from the enemy side with very few casualties from the Gaja n''s side.

    All the traps that are set within the city are even more brutal and ruthless.

    And by that time, whatever that is uniting these people was gone.

    They didn''t care what kind of deals they signed. They immediately turned their backs on and started running and the running speed intensified only when they saw something else.

    Yuvana and Gail appeared almost at the same time. But by that time, the old men already abandoned the rest of the people and escaped to save their own lives.

    At least half of them died today and the rest of the small fries realized that it is almost impossible to escape and decided to surrender.

    By sunset.

    Sam, Giyon and Grivon are sitting in Giyon''s yard as they had a drink.

    "This is such a depressing battle. It didn''t evenst one day and the other party escaped. You are indeed a bit too dangerous for a one-man alone."

    "One man alone? Don''t give me all the credit. It is almost impossible to make this in any other organization of a bit lower level."

    <i>(A/N: Hello guys, Surya here. It has been a very long time since I interacted with any of you. I want to say, I had a very rough year and I am currently in the middle of a shitstorm. I bet you can see that because of the decline in the story quality in the past month.</i>

    <i>I am trying to get my shit together in the next few days. It has been a long journey since I started this story.</i>

    <i>I mean it when I say, I am really grateful for people who supported me through the fluctuations of the story. I made many mistakes due to my inexperience while writing this and they are still affecting me. But I managed to bear through it because of the support and those who are still sticking with me. Thank you so much.. I know I have no right to ask this, but I hope you will stick with me and give me another chance to make aeback.)</i>

 Chapter 1485 - Cat Arrived

    <h4>Chapter 1485 - Cat Arrived</h4>

    "You said your organization is big enough. Then you should be able to do it there too. You can take the credit for that." Giyon said as she took a sip of her wine.

    "Not really. The domes and energy beams, cost a lot of spiritual energy. The expense is so huge that it would be hard for any organization to bear it. But the location of your n and the city helped you guys a lot."

    "Our location?"

    "Yeah, you guys don''t know? When I was looking through the very old city blueprints, I found out something. The reason the founder of your n established city here is because of the high avability of various elemental energies in this ce."

    "Of course, we know that."

    "Do you know why the energies are higher in this ce though? It is not just some normal environmental factor. It actually yed a big role in your city''s defence.

    Your city is located on a special spiritual vein anomaly. There are dozen spiritual veins intertwined with each other,pletely unable to be separated.

    They could have been twelve separate mines anywhere else. But here, they can only form one mine and even that cannot produce any spirit stones that are actually useful.

    But the veins still emit various elemental energies, so this ce is good for the early growth of children. He established the city and the n here.

    All I did in the past month is to build the domes that consist of hundreds of formations that could process the energy from within these veins.

    Way too much of is it being wasted."

    "So, the processed energy is being stored in the domes?"

    Grivon asked in surprise.

    "Yes. Those domes can be good cultivation rooms for younger generations."

    "Then what about the puppets and spheres?"

    "Oh, that is my creditpletely. The puppets are designed by me and those bullets are inscribed with a tracking inscription. The domes target that inscription as long as they are within a certain range.

    The idea to use trajectories as a way to deal with the targets is my idea.

    The spheres on the other hand are literally the by-products of energy processing.

    The mixture of so many elemental energies actually conflict with each other, so I need various mediums to extract the energy separately and we are using various metals thatplement various elemental energies.

    In the process, the metal residue is turned into these spheres. It is just a fusion of this big chunk of metal perfectly fused with energy. A bit of instability could cause it to explode and some inscriptions on top of it are good enough to create that mesh.

    They are good aren''t they?"

    "They indeed are. At least for us."

    They clinked their sses and continued drinking.

    "But I must say, the fight is a bit anti-climatic though."

    Grivon said from the side and they nodded.

    "Yeah, apart from the initial crash, the rest of it happened very rapidly. Even after they entered the city, they couldn''t do much damage.

    The energy beams shooting at them from within the city didn''t help them at all.

    And Uncle and my mom came at the perfect time. It is almost like they are looking for them toe so that they can use that chance to escape."

    "Well, as your mom said, this whole partnership mostlysted on the ckmails and coercions. It was not bound tost long from the beginning."

    "But still, we still got the leader of the Star eye sect and many of their top dogs. The sect is going to be finished. Even if we don''t do anything, the other organizations that participated today are going to rip the sect apart to not leave any traces whatsoever."

    "Another top organization, disappearing just like that. Maybe the new era those people talked about has already started. For centuries, attacks of this scale haven''t happened, but now they areing one after another."

    "Well, at least your n did one good thing regarding this. They let go of all of the businesses they don''t immediately need and kept all of their strength within your ce.

    If you had wanted to keep everything you had and even wanted to grab some of the others, you wouldn''t be able to do this.

    Now, the other organizations, don''t have any other choice but to directly knock on your doors. In a way, you are controlling the location of the fight and it is impossible for you guys to not know when the battle urs.

    You will know it at least twenty minutes before.

    Every minute counts.

    And the presence of your parents doesn''t help other organizations.

    Even I am a bit confused on why your parents are so overpoweredpared to the rest of the organizations. You guys are not in the same league at all." Sam said with a sigh.

    "Everyone knows that the Gaja n has three active members within the grey circle. But they don''t know how powerful they are. Every n or organization does have a member or two in the grey circle, but most of them don''t return after seeing the much bigger world out there.

    It is actually the same with our parents. When they are still starting out there, they are nowhere to be seen. They had some really hard times. But as they grew stronger and stronger, they came back more often.

    Now they are the cream of the crop even at that stage, things are different. Theye by more and more."

    "So, is there any other organization just like yours? With the same strength as your parents."

    "Of course, there are a few, but the one nearby and one that matters is only one. Mari n."

    "So, your rivalry doesn''t stop anywhere, I guess."

    "It doesn''t."

    "I wonder where the other people are then. There is no response from them until now."

    "Well, you have seen Sin. He is a weird guy. He only fights with my father asionally. As for the other two weirdos, nobody knows where they are. I wouldn''t be surprised if they hadn''t even heard a thing about what is going on here."

    "Worked out great for you guys.

    Anyway, speaking of powerhouses. Your n just got a new one and I have an appointment fixed with it. So, if you excuse me, I will be on my way there."

    Sam said as he finished his ss and walked away.

    He arrived at the n''s leader''s residence where all of the top dogs are currently meeting with a cat.

    Gail is introducing the sonic cat to n''s leader, Gamin and Yuvana, Saran and other core elders.

    The Sonic cat-sized them all up and looked at them with disregard. The only people it remotely showed any regard to are the Peak stage Astral ne Consummate cultivators.

    The rest are automatically ignored.

    "It took a lot of effort on my part to convince him toe here. So, be careful when you deal with me. He will be roaming around in the n freely and he wouldn''t be following any advice. If you have any problem with him, you guyse to me and say it."

    "What if you are not there? You are moving around a lot recently."

    Saran asked with some hesitation.

    "Well¡­" Gail looked at the cat as if it could answer the question, but of course, it can''t.

    "You can wait for me toe back. Don''t try to deal with him and don''t even try to order him around on your own.

    I will be upfront with you guys. He kicked my ass over and over again. I highly doubt anyone of you wants to be in my position and I highly doubt that you would be able to endure the beating like I did."

    The cat appeared proud when Gail warned them about it. It suddenly felt a bit satisfying. After all, it felt like it deserved all the respect in the world afterpromising for Gail.

    After the introductions were done, Gail walked the cat out and Sam is waiting for them there.

    "It seems like I am right on time." He said as he walked towards them.

    He looked at the snow-white cat and smiled.

    "The sonic cat. In flesh. You really seeded. Not bad."

    Sam said as he looked at the cat and smiled.

    "It better be worth it. Who knew there would be an invasion when I am away."

    "It is not an invasion. They ran away in the middle. If it is an invasion that could be the worst invasion that I ever witnessed."

    Sam said as he turned around the Sonic cat.

    "Your bloodline is quite pure. No wonder you are so active with the crystal symbiote."

    A frown appeared on the cat''s face and looked at Gail.

    "He is the one that made your toys. The massagers, the incense machine. All of them are his creations. He knows quite a lot about you. I didn''t say much in general."

    The cat''s expression eased up a lot and looked at Sam much more normally.

    "Okay, then let''s get you a real nice ce to stay."

    Two men and one beast thus moved.

    All in all, the aftereffects of the attack are very pleasant within the Gaja n. But the same couldn''t be said for other organizations involved and particrly for one organization that created this.. The Divine league.

 Chapter 1486 - Sivans Change

    <h4>Chapter 1486 - Sivan''s Change</h4>

    Within the Divine league.

    The Godfather is looking at all of his subordinates with disdain and anger.

    "How did it fail? More than twenty Peak stage cultivators and they were unable to kill two peak stage cultivators? Is that even a usible thing?"

    "It is Gamin, anything could have been usible. And the group is not really gelled together. Because of your immediate orders, the subordinates used all kinds of tactics that they could pull off to make these peoplee together.

    It ispletely based on mistrust, ckmail and coercion. It is impossible for them to work side by side and just defeat the Gaja n."

    "The number difference is overwhelming. Don''t tell me that the strength of the Grey circle members of ns and organizations increased to such a level in my absence of few years."

    The young man who had a resemnce to the Godfather and sat on the right side of the table coughed a bit and said.

    "Godfather, can we have some alone time? I would like to exin something to you."

    The old man gestured for everyone to leave and the young man finally looked a bit more unrestrained as he spoke.

    "Father, you are spending too much time on the other side and you don''t know many things. So, please keep an open mind and listen to me."

    "Go on."

    "First of all, you did a big mistake by sending all of those people to the Gaja n to die. It is not really a good thing and it is definitely not an intelligent thing.

    But I let you be since you were in no mood for listeningst time.

    But now, I cannot let you be.

    You might make a wrong decision again.

    In the past few years, the situation in the realms changed. The ns and organizations started producing powerhouses. The divine league and the grey circle are not long enough to keep them at bay.

    Among them all, the Mari n and Gaja n are on top of the whole ecosystem. In fact, they might be within the strongest bunch of all the realmsbined.

    It was already bad enough for us to steal kids from that ce, so we plotted something big and took advantage of other organizations'' greed.

    But it backfired big time.

    Now, before we could think of a n, you gave us this nonsensical order, but since I also wanted to see how the Gaja n is doing, I let you proceed.

    Now that I have an idea, let me tell you this.

    Gaja n cannot be dealt with by any of our original and ordinary means.

    Apart from that, there is a new variable in ce.

    This variable made, half of the army lose even before they crossed the city wall."

    He took out a document with Sam''s details in it.

    "He managed to find means topensate Gaja n''sck of numbers. He levelled the ying field for not just the low-level cultivators, but he also made it hard for the high-level cultivators to purely focus on their own fights.

    He is also the one that sabotaged Flit''s sess in taking those children away."

    Godfather frowned and looked through the documents. He frowned more and more and finally said.

    "Someone stole his body?"

    "Yes, Mari n''s young master Sivan did that. We don''t know how he did that and how he seeded. The only thing we know is that Sivan managed to acquire all of Sam''s memories.

    I don''t know how big of a variable he is going to be in future, but he is someone we need to keep our eyes on."

    "Why didn''t you give me all of those details from the start?"

    "Were you in a mood to understand all of this? I heard from your subordinate. You came back only because you wanted to keep a sense of authority. You are here so that you can throw your authority left and right and make us do stuff.

    So, I proceeded with it.

    Now that it was done and your craving is satisfied, then I am presenting you with this.

    Please don''t make any more stupid decisions. We need to be careful in dealing with this."

    "So, how do you suggest we proceed further."

    "I will make contact with Sivan. Sam''s tricks and techniques are one of the huge hindrances and from what I inquired, they are hard to crack. He tends to put some kind of backup ns within the alreadyplicated settings for some possible scenarios.

    So, we need to find someone who understands Sam enough so that we can crack it.

    Anyway, from the looks of it, the technology and research behind it all are already worth a lot."

    "You said a kid from the Mari n has taken his body, so he must also have memories. Arrange a meeting with them. I want to talk to the kid."

    "I am also thinking of suggesting that. That is indeed a great decision to make. I will arrange a meeting. Get ready to go to the Mari n. We will leave in the afternoon."

    Godfather nodded and looked at his son who left. But as soon as he left, his smile changed a bit and he muttered.

    "My son. My son. I will see how long you would be able to y this game."

    Meanwhile.

    In the Mari n.

    Sivan also received a report of the whole battle that urred. He looked at the report and sneered.

    "Who told the n''s leader to send these people to the war? I want to meet him. Take an appointment. Didn''t we already tell him not to send any grand elders and save them from Gail and others?

    Do we need people when Iunch the attack on the Gaja n? Do they even want to win this? Or do they just want to send all of the grand elders to death before I could even finish my n?"

    "Young master. The n''s leader is in no situation to meet you now.

    The grand elder that went there also went secretly. They didn''t actually send that grand elder to war. The n''s leader kept them on the hook and our grand elder should be escaping while they are marching.

    But to get his own benefits, he went into the fight."

    "That old dumb fucking idiot. I don''t care. Tell the n''s leader that I have something important to talk about.

    Tell him that the whole war would be stopped and the whole n would fail if this is not resolved. I need that fucking appointment no matter what. Even use my father''s name if you want to.

    He would be of some fucking use."

    The attendant went and came back after half an hour.

    "Young master. The n''s leader rejected the appointment. It was not even considered for a second. As for using your father''s name, he himself is present in person and rejected it.

    There is no chance for us to get an appointment today. It seems like the whole n is shaken by the new methods the Gaja n is using."

    "Then shouldn''t I be the first person they should be consulting? I am the only one who understands Sam here and that bastard is the one that made these new means. Are they fucking dumb? Did their brains die of old age?"

    "Young master, please don''t be agitated. Things would only get worse if you act impulsively."

    "Of course, they would only get worse. Not for me. But for them. Tell all of my artisans to stop the production. Bring them out and tell them to stay within my n''s quarters.

    Stop sending all of the enhanced armours and weapons. The ghost chimaeras too. Don''t let a single product go out."

    Sivan said proudly. He had a smug look on his face.

    He has nothing to lose in this in short term.

    The n is the one benefitting the most from this exchange. He gives them enhanced weapons and helps them fight the war against the Gaja n and in return, they would help him kill Sam with all of their resources.

    Sivan has over a year to kill Sam, but the Mari n doesn''t have one year to wait it out. Gaja n is not exactly getting into its previous situation slowly as it should.

    They are making a rapideback. Abined attack and a n were destroyed with minimum casualties.

    He would dare make them not meet him.

    But his thoughts were not as confident as time passed. Because, even by evening, he didn''t get any call from the n''s leader.

    He became anxious and right when he was about to make another decision, an attendant arrived.

    "Young Master, the n''s leader has called you. You were requested toe immediately without any dy."

    "I will be there in an hour. Go and tell him." Sivan said with a sneer. He wanted to make the n''s leader wait as well. Since the call came, he became arrogant once again.

    The attendant shook his head at this behaviour from Sivan. He has noticed this arrogant fluctuation in Sivan''s attitude in the past few weeks. The deal that he stuck with the n''s leader is making him stand on a pedestal.

    But that night, it was not time for Sivan to stand on the pedestal.

    Sivan felt pressure from his back and before he knew it, he was knocked down and carried out.

    "I am sorry young master. This is not a normal call. It is an order."

    A man in the ck muttered as he carried Sivan away.

 Chapter 1487 - Deal

    <h4>Chapter 1487 - Deal</h4>

    Sivan opened his eyes groggily and looked around, not understanding what is happening to him.

    He wanted to move hair off of his eyes, but he couldn''t move his arms. Suddenly, the realization of what happened to him, dawned on him as he jerked and tried to get up.

    But he waspletely tied up with all kinds of restrictions.

    "What the fuck?"

    He cursed and looked around. He is in apletely dark and empty room. In fact, there is nothing in the room except for the stone chair he is sitting on. At this moment, the door opened up and the darkness in the room was partially gone.

    Sivan looked at the person entering the door with a tense mind and rxed a bit when he saw the n''s leader.

    "What is happening here? Why am I held like this?"

    "To remind you of your ce. I have been watching for the past few days. You didn''t seem to have noticed this, but you are getting really cocky will of your demands. What would happen, if I took a docile and proper young man and forcefully let him take your body?

    I think I will have a much easier time dealing with him than you."

    "Hmph, do you really think it is that easy? There is not a single person in my cultivation who can match my mental energy. It would be an impossible task."

    "You are pretty confident about yourself. If only I could confirm your words by trying.

    But I don''t have the liberty to do that right now. I have someone that wants to talk to you. Be obedient and talk to them with respect. Alright?"

    Sivan didn''t reply, but the n''s leader didn''t really care that much.

    The light in the room was turned on immediately and through the door, Godfather and his son came in.

    "Sivan, meet the head of the Divine league. He is called the Godfather and this is his son and the right-hand man in the Divine league, Mornd."

    Sivan looked at both of them with a frown.

    The old man, godfather took a turn around Sivan and started observing him keenly. He even touched him a few times to get a better look.

    "Indeed. If the body is not this good, it isn''t worth stealing. I am talking about myself of course. With your previous cripple history, I can understand why you would want a body. But you picked the best one you could get your hands on.

    Congrattions."

    "Thank you."

    "Now, that we got that out our way, let''s talk business.

    I heard that you got a set of memories from Sam''s soul. I want to learn about the formations he came up with at Gaja n."

    "I cannot help you there."

    "Sivan, he is polite in asking you. That doesn''t mean, you have a right to reject him." The n''s leader spoke up.

    "Don''t scare him. Let him talk."

    The old man said casually before asking.

    "Why can''t you help me?"

    "Because I will not be able to find out what and how he made those means or whatever you call them. I might have gained his memories, but the theories he already had in his brain before I took his soul are way too hard for me to evenprehend.

    It would take a lifetime just for me to make sense of any of it. As for my understanding and decoding of what he recently made? That is impossible."

    "Really?"

    "Come on, he is not that dumb. In fact, that bastard is way too smart for his own good. He is definitely not going to use something that is already within his head before he met me. He would have thought of apletely new annoying thing out of nowhere."

    "That makes sense. But you are the one that understands him best at the moment. Are we on the same page here?"

    "Yes, we are."

    "Okay, then. Your n leader said that you have a n to attack the Gaja n. I want to hear about it."

    Sivan frowned and looked at the n leader. Thetter nodded.

    Only then did Sivan start speaking. He might hate the n''s leader to guts, but this is rted to the Mari n, the n of which he is going to be the future head, he is definitely not going to let some differencese in between him and the n''s leader when the situation is serious.

    After exining the n, the godfather nodded.

    "Even though you said, you cannot do much against those new formations and stuff, I still want you to take a look. I need you to think of a way to destroy them all with minimum casualties."

    "I said, I cannot. I am not that smart."

    "This is not a request young man. You better¡­"

    *BAM*

    Before he could finish his words, a guard came crashing into the room as Sin walked in. His aura is a bit chaotic as he looked at the Godfather, Mornd and the n''s leader.

    "It seems like youpletely forgot who I am since I am not being that active." He said as he walked toward the n''s leader slowly.

    The n''s leader felt coldness gripping his heart. He didn''t expect that Sin would be here and he would even know about this meeting.

    "How fucking dare you? You dared to bring my son here. I wonder what you will be doing next."

    Sin muttered as he pressed forward with his energy pressing on the n''s leader.

    Mornd who is standing on the side frowned and said.

    "Sin¡­"

    "Shut the fuck up." He was cut off and Sin removed Sivan''s shackles.

    "Are you alright?"

    But Sivan just brushed off his arm and turned to the Godfather.

    "I want this partnership to go on. We will be defeating the Gaja n together. But the use would be that, no matter what happens, Sam is not going to survive. You can take his soul if you want and gain his technology, but I am the only one who gets to kill him.

    If you agree to that, send your people. I am more than willing to work with you."

    Sin frowned as he looked at his son. He then looked at Mornd and then at the Godfather.

    They also looked at him. They could clearly sense the killing intenting out of him.

    "What Sin? You want to go?" Mornd asked.

    "You are speaking as if you would dare."

    Sin said as he walked close to him. Mornd looked at Sin in the eyes but soon couldn''t meet his gaze. He felt oppressed, weak and powerless for a moment.

    He gritted his teeth and shook his head to get out of the trance.

    "Let''s go Mornd. Our work is done here." The Godfather spoke as he ignored Sinpletely.

    Mornd went past Sin and walked towards the door.

    "n''s leader. I will be staying in touch with you. You better remember the deal properly and don''t try to y the usual Mari n tricks on me."

    With that, they left.

    Sivan was let go and he went back to his own residence.

    "What the hell is wrong with you Sivan? You are cooperating with Divine league now?"

    Sin asked as soon as he entered the room.

    "What? I can''t cooperate with the Divine league? While you can act all chummy with an enemy n member?"

    Sin frowned and said.

    "Divine league is something that you shouldn''t be mingling with."

    "I don''t care what you think. You lost the opportunity to lecture me about these things when I was a kid. You are not going to get it back now, just because you want to.

    I am cooperating with the Divine league no matter what you say.

    I don''t care what you think of them.

    I don''t care if you want to whisper this information into your friends'' ears so that the stupid Gaja n can be saved.

    But in two months, I will be going against the Gaja n with all of my strength and I will kill that bastard Sam and the rest of the Gaja n for trying to protect him."

    With those words, he left.

    Sin''s energy riled up. He has an urge to grab his son and smack some sense into it, but he couldn''t bring himself to do that now. It is already toote to do that now.

    "I don''t know why you were so obsessed with this situation. I am telling you, this is not going to end well. There is a reason why I don''t participate in the disputes between the Gaja n and the Mari n.

    It is nonsensical to get in between.

    If you really want to kill Sam, find another way. Using the hatred between these two ns will only end up triggering something really big that is going to blow up on a massive scale."

    "I don''t care."

    "Your wish then."

    Sin left the room.

    The next day. Afternoon. Gail got a letter and brought it to Sam.

    "Divine league and Mari n. Two months. Let''s see how things go then."

    Sam said with a smile as he looked at Gail.

 Chapter 1488 - Lava Worm

    <h4>Chapter 1488 - Lava Worm</h4>

    One month and fifteen dayster.

    In these forty-five days, many things have changed. Apart from the ns and organizations licking their wounds from the massive failure of an attack on the Gaja n, the Mari n and Gaja n underwent some serious preparations.

    Many people from the Divine league that are usually hidden are also showing up and they moved openly.

    Everyone understood that things are going to get heated once again and this cold period is just the incubation period of the whole thing.

    In these forty-five days, the Mari n moved all of their resources. Many spies that were hiding in the ns moved out and went back with all the resources and information they stole. The same thing happened with the Divine league.

    They also moved out of their holes and went back to the Divine league''s headquarters after years.

    Within the first fifteen days, these movements are at least subtle. The ns and organizations understood something big is happening, but they didn''t know what exactly.

    But after the first fifteen days, the next fifteen were extremely chaotic.

    Gail, Gamin and Yuvana unleashed themselves on the Mari n.

    They didn''t just go after the people this time. In fact, they didn''t even bother to go after the Grand Elders, they just went straight for the resource point.

    Sam who guessed what Sivan might be making toe against the Gaja n, gave the information about what resources, he would be needing in the near future.

    With that information, the trio went on and started destroying one resource point after another.

    They destroyed spirit stone mines, Metal mines, special resource mines, herbs. They didn''t leave anything.

    Of course, the Mari n didn''t stay put. They retaliated. In fact, they retaliated dearly with their own grand elders. They sent people to destroy the resource points of the Gaja n.

    But they were not as sessful as the Gaja n though.

    It is mostly because most of the known resources of the Gaja n were already lost. They are taken over by many other organizations.

    In fact, some are taken over just by the Mari n itself. The rest are all secret resource points that are under Giyon and Grivon mostly which are not even known to the new authorities of the ns.

    It is almost impossible for the Mari n to find them.

    After fifteen days of trials, the Mari n actually lost more of their resource points. Gail, Gamin and Yuvana just increased the intensity of the attack.

    This made the Mari n more and more incensed, so they decided to go with another route. They directly dered an official war on the Gaja n and since they are the ones that initiated the attack, they are openly dering the war.

    And to everyone''s surprise, the Divine league agreed with them and showed their support. They directly asked that the Gaja n should be apologizing to the Mari n and if they do not open up the talks, they will be supporting the Mari n.

    The rest of the organization understood what is happening. They suddenly wanted to go and support the Mari n and the Divine league.

    Even though the Star eye sect gathered around a dozen forces, they are still more reassured if the Mari n and Divine league are the ones that are initiating the attack.

    They wanted to find a side and stick to it. But to their surprise, neither the Mari n nor the Divine league agreed to any of these allegiances. They just rejected them as if they are not even worthy of any mention.

    So, they were curious about what is going to happen.

    In the third batch of fifteen days, they got a glimpse of it.

    The two more Grey circle members of the Mari n. The people that are on par with Gamin and Yuvana arrived at the Mari n at the start of the sh and they shed with Gamin and Yuvana.

    They battled for a day, but the winner was not decided. But from the word that got out, Gamin and Yuvana got the best of the other two since the home ground belonged to the Mari n and they had some advantage of ambush.

    During that battle, one of the resource points and the factory of the Mari n was destroyedpletely.

    This is the enhanced weapon factory, Sivan made with the help of Sam''s designs. One of the valuable assets of the Mari n at the moment right before the war.

    On their way back, because of the anger that Gamin and Yuvana were not able to kill their opponents, they took a three-day detourunched an attack on another grand elder of the Mari n. Nobody knew where they found him, but the man barely managed to escape with his arms chopped off.

    The Mari n retaliated, but the Gaja n is already shelled inside the city and the Mari n doesn''t want prematurely attack, but this time, they managed to find out one of the organizations under the secret control of Giyon.

    They destroyed itpletely.

    Like that, those fifteen days passed.

    Now there are still fifteen days left for the two months time period to be over.

    Sam definitely knows that since they said it is two months, it is not going to be exactly two months. The attacks that happened all this while will just gradually escte until it bes a full-blown war.

    So, he started making the final checks on all the things that are being made.

    Meanwhile, within the Mari n, the atmosphere is the same.

    Sivan and his artisan team are also making the final checks and demonstrations of their weapons. In fact, they are even a step ahead and are ready tounch their first attack.

    Within the stray realm where most of the manufacturing is happening, Sivan held a meeting as they discussed the n for their first attack.

    "The Gaja n already backedpletely up into their city and estate, so there is no point in thinking of attacking any of the other areas, we can directly go after them.

    And I have the perfect thing for the first attacks we are about tounch.

    We are going to use the Lava Worms.

    They arerge scale puppets that could be driven by a few Astral ne transcendent stage cultivators.

    I will not waste your time exining the whole thing. Let me just give you a quick demonstration."

    After that, they walked toward arge snake-like metallic puppet. It looked a bit like a snake and a bit like an earthworm. Many people wearing special suits and breathing devices climbed onto the massive worm and entered it through the vents.

    The vents closed after that and the worm suddenly got activated.

    The head of the worm that looked like a normal earthworm changed a bit and it started drilling into the earth. The worm disappeared before long and they could feel the earth vibrating.

    After some time, the vibrations slowly disappeared. Sivan looked at the Grand elders who are trying to look for the Worm with their massive ranged spiritual sense.

    But they couldn''t.

    "You wouldn''t be able to find it. It will be out of your range and it also merges with the surrounding earth. You wouldn''t be able to differentiate it, unless you focus on the energy difference instead of the massive object itself."

    As he exined, the grand elders nodded in realization and tried to find out. But while it was happening, they recognized something else. A bit far away from them, the earth is changing a bit.

    It started smoking. The earth ispletely drying up and cracks appeared on top of it.

    The vegetation started drying up as well and they died at a rapid pace.

    "The Lava worms convert the spiritual energy of fire element into a crude essence of fire elemental energy and forcefully merge with the soil under the ground.

    They use a special technique to corrupt the soil with fire elemental energy. With a good enough time spent there and a bit of sneaky and regted action, the whole soil will be corrupted with fire elemental energy, turning into a fire elemental energy zone.

    Since the Gaja n is trapped, we will smoke their hole. Let''s make it difficult for them to stay there."

    "Really? Is that it? Is that all this massive Lava worm can do?"

    Sivan just smiled and said.

    "Of course not, this is just the initial demonstration to showcase what would happen at a rapid pace. I already nned the demonstration for a while.

    There is another patch ofnd, that has been infected by anotherva worm for a week now. Let''s go there."

    They went there and Sivan took out amunication token to send a message.

    "Activate."

    As soon as he said that, the grand elders felt the ground go wild, all of a sudden the whole area turned from a normal ce to a burning hell before the soil under their feet started morphing into earthenva golems.

 Chapter 1489 - Unit

    <h4>Chapter 1489 - Unit</h4>

    The golems started forming out of the soil. They looked a bit crude and they are not even that strong golems, but they are many.

    "Please go ahead and destroy a few."

    Sivan asked and one of the grand elders did as he was asked. He started attacking the golems. But they kept oning.

    One, ten, twenty-five, and it only stopped when fifty golems popped up along with arge amount of soil missing.

    And it only stopped because Sivan ordered it to stop.

    The grand elder kept on destroying the golems, but when the soilnded back on the ground and therge holes that are formed with the golem making, it started moulding back into the golem again.

    "As long as the Lava worm is not out of energy or the operators stop making it up, the golems would keep oning. Of course, if they run out of soil until the Lava worm is clearly visible to the outside, then also we cannot produce any golems.

    They may not be powerful, but when you make hundreds and even thousands of them attack the city all at the same time. Particrly an enclosed space which is going to be corroded with fire elemental energy where these golems thrive and they kept oning back up.

    I am sure you can see what kind of effect they could have."

    The grand elders nodded.

    "How many Lava worms do we have."

    "I only managed to make ten of them. But I still think they are enough. I n on sending them to the Gaja n''s city and let them stay underground around it."

    "When are you sending them?"

    "Currently, they are charging at a fire elemental spirit stone mine at one of our branches."

    "You kept them in a mine? Are you nuts? The Gaja n is actually targeting all of our resource points, what if they had destroyed them?"

    "The mine is near my father''s residence and the city that is under his control. I figured they wouldn''t go for him and I am right until now."

    "That city? That''s smart. Your father might not really be willing to do any of this stuff that could help our n, but his name sure does some wonders for us."

    "Yes, I feel the same. I even made sure that the news of that ce being my father''s city was out so that the Gaja n would hold back. It worked for the best.

    They need to charge for a day more and then they can be moved."

    "Is it not possible to charge them remotely?"

    "The Lava worms are made from the design I got from Sam''s memories, in a sense it an unfinished work. The only charging system he ced is through the mines as they need way too much energy."

    "That''s all we can do for now, then. Let them charge and after it is done, inform us. One of us will go along with the operators and let them safely reach thend around the Gaja city."

    "Alright."

    The grand elders are left and only Sivan is left.

    "I will see how you will defend against your own creations."

    Sivan muttered as he gave the orders to his subordinates to send these twova worms left behind for the demonstration to charge.

    He is really looking forward to it.

    Even though he has his own doubts about whether it would work or not, he still has some faith. After all, even if Gail described what things he is making from Sam''s designs, it is only that much.

    He doubted that Sam would be able to predict every possibility on which thing he would be using when. Then there is also the point of resources.

    After all, Sivan still doesn''t know the usage of secret resources under Grivon''s and Giyon''s control.

    He really didn''t believe Sam would be having many resources to counter him. As for the crystal dome and the spherical cannons, he didn''t even care about them.

    The others might not have a clue, but he believed that he has enough means to deal with it.

    He is pretty confident and content with his preparations and he is really looking forward to it.

    But what he doesn''t know is that, at this moment, while he is feeling extremely confident about himself, someone entered one of the Mari n territories.

    In one of the corners of the Mari n''s territory, someone entered the city through a wormhole from a distant ce.

    There are ten people and all of them are wearingrge cloaked dresses, not showing anything beyond their faces.

    They walked into the city and entered one of the restaurants to try and fish for some information.

    "You guys new in town?"

    One of the waiters asked with a smile.

    "Yes." The person who looked like the leader of the group answered.

    "Are you here for the recruitment?"

    "What recruitment?"

    The waiter looked surprised and asked.

    "You guys don''t know? That is what everyone is talking about. Mari n is recruiting soldiers. They dered war on the Gaja n. They are looking for strong people and if they do well, they can join the Mari n as permanent members.

    If their luck is good, they even get to marry ady from the Mari n.

    Everyone ising to the city because of this."

    "Oh? Where is the recruitment happening?"

    "Outside the city, a few miles to the eat, there is arge camp arranged to manage this recruitment. You can go and try your luck there."

    The leader nodded and took out a space jade ring.

    "Thank you for the information."

    The waiter took the ring and was surprised by the amount inside. He wanted to thank the group, but before he could, they already left the table and exited the restaurant.

    The group went out of the city and walked past.

    After a while, they arrived at the camp.

    Outside the camp, there are many people, lined up in five queues in front of five different desks. They joined different queues and waited their turn.

    When they reached their turn, the first thing they had is a surprise. They need to fill out some applications there and the contents and questions of the application are a bit familiar to them.

    They filled out the forms calmly and soon people came for them.

    Each of them is guided to different locations based on the data they gave and there are a series of tests.

    After going through all of them, all ten of them got selected and were given new information and temporary amodation in some barracks within the camp.

    For the rest of the day, they were given various tasks within the campgrounds. They controlled and managed people in different areas and even helped with the application process.

    By night, the whole camp went silent as every one of them was asked to take a rest.

    That night, after everyone inside the camp was sent back to their own tents or their duty posts, the ten people gathered together in the centre of it.

    The leader looked at all ten of them and spoke.

    "This ce is going to be our first mission. We are finishing it tonight."

    The rest of the team nodded.

    The leader tore off the soldier''s uniform on him revealing a shiny red scaly armour. He pressed on the bump at his chest within the armour. The rest of the soldiers also followed as their armour beeped a bit.

    "Recording.

    Fire Unit-1. Team leader reporting.

    Currently on Expedition against Mari n

    Mission 1.

    Camp of Recruitment in Mari n.

    Identified several key figures of the Mari n within Astral ne transcendence and one person who is in the Initial stage of Astral ne Consummation.

    Along with them several newly recruited soldiers of the Mari n were also present. Found several of the Dusk organization methods employed within the recruitment as well as allotment process.

    Gathered some of the samples and currently taking action against the camp."

    He recorded everything and then took out a bunch of puppets from his storage. The soldiers also took out some puppets.

    The puppets flew over as they started recording everything.

    All ten of them activated their armours and took out their weapons.

    Their bodies started emitting mes of different shades of red as they made their move.

    The leader ran towards the nearest barrack and aimed his hands at it.

    A ming charge started building up at his shoulders and a huge ming ball escaped his palms.

    *BOOM*

    The barracks are flooded with red hot mes and the walls started melting immediately.

    Half of the camp saw the glow of the mes while the whole camp heard the vast explosive sound.

    The leader stepped forward into the burning barracks. Inside there are a few people who are burning and some are even dead.

    But there are some people who are struggling to stay alive. He moved towards one of them and threw a punch.

    The mes exploded and made the head explode.

    He threw the corpse away and collected the spatial ring before he moved to a different person.

 Chapter 1490 - Dusk Has Arrived

    <h4>Chapter 1490 - Dusk Has Arrived</h4>

    The leader finished the first barrack and moved to the second one.

    Simr things are happening in different spots.

    But one of the unit members is standing on arge tree with his red metallic bow as he shot arrows.

    They are silent and not shy at all. But as soon as theynded at different spots, the arrows exploded and threw some kind of liquid into the surroundings which then immediately turned into raging mes that looked like they came straight from hell.

    The whole camp that just went peaceful suddenly became an inferno with screams and smells of people burning to death.

    But the Fire unit didn''t show any expression. In fact, they didn''t even show their face. Their face is covered with a mask and they are killing and burning everything alive and dead.

    The camp organizers and the leaders are all alerted by then and started running toward the troublemakers.

    The person in charge of the camp in particr ran toward the leader who is causing the most damage.

    "Who the fuck are you? How dare you attack the Mari n''s camp?"

    The leader of the fire unit didn''t speak. He looked at the leader through his mask and started estimating the strength.

    He is gauging whether he could take him out or not.

    The leader of the camp, on the other hand, is very pissed and immediately made a move. He took out his sword and swung it at the unit leader.

    The unit leader dodged the attack and ran to the side and spoke on hismunication device.

    "Attracted the leader, from the initial attack, looks to be a bit out of my league. Requesting aid."

    "Number 3 reporting. I am nearby,ing to you in two minutes. Can you hold on?" One of his unit members replied.

    "Yes."

    "Number 5 reporting. I will also be in two minutes."

    "Sure. I can handle the situation for the two minutes."

    As soon as themunication was over, the leader turned around and shed with the person in charge of the camp.

    He took out some small marbles and threw them at him.

    The camp in charge dodged them barely, even though he didn''t sense any threat, but he felt weird as soon as they brushed past him.

    *BOOM*

    The marbles turned into some weird powder with some explosion and seeped into his body.

    "ARRRGHH¡­"

    The camp in charge groaned in burning pain loudly as he stopped in his tracks.

    He felt his whole shoulder is literally being roasted over a me.

    The unit leader took his chance and made his own move. A massive fiery snake formed at the tip of his hands and made its way to the camp in charge.

    The camp in charge felt the full brunt of the attack and rolled on the floor as he tried to defend it with a shabby barrier.

    The unit leader turned around and started running afternding that attack. He started throwing small trinkets in his way creating explosions and obstacles for the opponent.

    By the time the camp in charge caught up, the other two unit members also arrived.

    The unit leader stopped running and turned against him. All three of the unit members attacked the camp in charge who was caught off guard by this.

    One hourter.

    The whole campground is burning in mes.

    At the entrance of the campground, the person in charge of the campground was crucified to a cross with his body half burnt and naked.

    He is the only one who has an intact body, the rest of them are all dead.

    They are burned to ashes with nothing left for the world to see, except for their skeletons.

    The unit collected every single of the spatial rings.

    After that, they left arge text in front of the body.

    "Dusk has arrived."

    After writing that, the puppets that are flying around until then came back.

    The unit collected all of them and left the ce.

    While they are doing it, on another corner of the Mari n''s territory in one of Sivan''s direct territories, there is a park that was arranged.

    A lightning unit arrived there and they are currently standing at the centre of it all with arge pir in their hands.

    They put it up in the middle of it before spreading to different corners of the park and cing smaller pirs there.

    After they did that, the leader activated the formation.

    Massive lightning appeared out of nowhere and crashed the whole park.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    There are a series of lightning strikes and before long not a single structure in the park.

    After the destruction was over, they collected the pirs and did a crucifixion, before they left the ce.

    But before leaving, they didn''t forget to leave the same text.

    "Dusk has arrived."

    Simr situations happened in different territories of the Mari n.

    Parks, cities, camps, factories, businesses¡­ A lot of properties of the Mari n were destroyed and the news quickly spread to Sivan.

    The next day, Sivan who was ready to send theva worms away got hit with the reports.

    When he saw themon text in every one of these reports, he saw red.

    He is extremely angry.

    His thoughts immediately went to Sam.

    "You bloody fuckers. Why did I not get the information about Sam''s movements? What the hell are the n and the Divine League doing. What the hell is wrong with them?

    They literally have one fucking job.

    Sam made a move. We lost a lot of resources."

    He immediately ran out to meet with the grand elders while screaming.

    He entered one of their residences and threw the reports to that person''s face.

    "Sam has made a move. Why did I not know about this before?"

    "What do you mean?"

    "Dusk has arrived. That is literally Sam''s line."

    "How is that even possible? Sam is within the Gaja n''s territory. In fact, none of the Gaja n members came out of the territory for a while."

    "That is not possible. Dusk is the name of Sam''s organization."

    As soon as he said that, he realized something.

    "Holy fuck. Sam''s organization. It is Sam''s organization.

    His bastard friends. The three other Orphan bastards."

    "What are you even talking about?"

    "The orphan bastards. Sam has three friends. He gave a piece of his soul to one of these friends before I made an exchange. Since it was in the middle of the process, I didn''t get what he sent them.

    I stupidly ignored the organization until now. Even after I got the memories, I was only thinking of taking over the organization instead of thinking about what they could do.

    Fuck, fuck."

    He immediately ran to the side and started drawing the images of Philip, Watt and Jack. I need these people.

    I need them as soon as possible."

    The grand elder is extremely confused, but he still nodded his head.

    "We are immediately making a move on the Gaja n. Send the people. I will be handing over the Lava worms, they are leaving immediately. I will also use a different set of weapons. There is a demonstration in an hour."

    "Alright."

    The grand elderpletely ignored whatever Sivan did. It is almost like the utter disrespect waspletely negligible.

    Sivan left and led the grand elder to the Lava worms.

    The grand elder leads the people that are going to operate theva worms to the Gaja n''s realm.

    He escorted them to certain locations all by himself using his divine dimension fragment before letting them go deep into the earth with their respective worms.

    The worms are sessfully implemented and they moved towards Gaja city.

    By that night, the worms travelled underground and they stayed in spots from which they could operate at maximum efficiency.

    The Mari n''s grand elder felt pretty satisfied and left.

    But what he doesn''t know is that within a certain radius of the Gaja n, there are few trees that are withering as soon as the worms arrived and as they withered, some of the scouts of the Gaja n immediately broke them and took them to Sam.

    Sam looked at the withered trees and chuckled.

    "He really went forva worms? How pathetic?"

    Giyon looked at the withered trees. They are red in their withered shade and there is a faint trace of fire elemental energy.

    "What is this?"

    "This is called litmus tree. It adapts to the elemental energies in the surroundings and if there is any sudden elemental energy change in the atmosphere in any way, it will wither in a certain way.

    This is the indication of the fire elemental energy and from what your father described,va worms are the only ones that could fit the criteria."

    "Really? Are they good?"

    "They are really good."

    "Then why are you saying it is pathetic?"

    "Well, if I am in Sivan''s position, I would have used Lightning worms or Metal worms instead of Lava worms, they work more effectively against your n and the city."

 Chapter 1491 Occupation

    Chapter 1491 upation¡¡¡¡"So, what are we doing about these Lava worms?"

    "Nothing. Let them be for now."

    Sam said casually and Giyon felt a bit confused.

    "Didn''t you say they are good?"

    "Of course they are, but I don''t know what to do with them for now and it is also hard for us to find the location of all of them in a short time. We would need to make a lot of people out, which is not a suitable situation for us.

    I will think of a proper solution, by the time they be a real threat."

    Sam''s words are still calm. Even though he is saying that he doesn''t know what to do with them, he is pretty confident about dealing with them, when the time eventually arrives.

    While they are chatting, one of the attendants came with a report.

    Sam looked at the report and with just a nce, the words "Dusk has arrived" are clearly visible to him.

    His face turned into one of surprise, delight and finally pride.

    He looked through the reports to check every small detail. And with every detail he read, he felt happier. The grin on his face went bigger and bigger.

    "What the hell are you smiling about?"

    Sam didn''t say anything and just gave the report to her.

    "What? Mari n suffered this much in one day? Particrly these parks? How did someone destroy things in this state? No wonder you are happy."

    "I am indeed happy, but not because of that."

    "So, what is it?"

    "It is my friends. The words Dusk has arrived. It is definitely from my friends."

    "Makes sense."

    "If my guess is right, the Mari n is in for a world of pain for the days toe. They couldn''t havee at a perfect time."

    Sam said with a sigh of relief. Even though he is confident about dealing with the Gaja n''s current plight, extra help is always something to look forward to.

    "So, are we making any contact with them?"

    "No need, they wille to us all by themselves."

    "But the information that you are here within the n is not known by many, it will be hard for them to find out you are here."

    "Let them take their time. It is not particrly necessary for us to meet immediately anyway, they will be here by the time the war ispletely unleashed and that is when you actually need them."

    "I wonder how Sivan is reacting now. I bet he is pretty pissed."

    "Of course, he should be."

    While they are chatting, somewhere within the Mari n''s territory.

    Philip, Watt and Jack are roaming around in a city. They didn''t wear any disguises and they didn''t see any explosions for that matter.

    This is one of the big cities under the Gaja n and it is even controlled by a Middle stage Astral ne consummate cultivator.

    After roaming around the city for a while, they went back to the inn they were staying in.

    After entering the room, someone knocked on the door and it is none other than Night Ghost.

    "So, how did your walk go?"

    "Ours is fine. How did the team''s walk go?"

    "They are reaching their destination. I am just waiting for your cue."

    "Don''t worry, there is no way, the city is full of idiots who don''t know how to identify their enemy roaming around in the city."

    "I am having doubts whether they knew about you guys at all."

    "With that statement we wrote, if that guy doesn''t recognize it is us, then there is no way he could have pulled off changing bodies with Sam."

    Philip said calmly as he looked out of the window. At this moment, some of the city guards are already rounding up the building and people with authority areing over hurriedly.

    "Night Ghost, you and the rest of the team are up. Go ahead and deal with them."

    Philip ordered and Night Ghost nodded beforeplying.

    He walked out of the inn casually, the guards that are rounding up the inn ignored him, they are currently focused on Philip who is standing at the window.

    Night Ghost walked past them and walked towards the estate of the lord of this city.

    Several people who are in Astral ne transcendence made their move and they are all running towards the inn.

    "Philip, Sam and Watt. You are under arrest by the order of young master Sivan. We have orders to capture you, but that doesn''t mean we cannot kill you. You better surrender before things get nasty."

    One of the people in charge yelled.

    Philip just smirked at them and went back into the room to take a seat.

    "How long is it going to take?"

    Watt asked as he stretchedzily.

    "Not too long."

    As soon as he said that, they heard amotion downstairs.

    Sam''s team has made a move.

    Saber Monarch, Five elemental King, Paras, everyone made their move from various rooms of the inn as they jumped out of their windows and attacked the people surrounding them.

    Meanwhile, Night Ghost smoothly walked into the estate of the city lord and captured him.

    "Who¡­ who are you?"

    The city lord asked in fear.

    Currently, he is kneeling on the ground as an invisible ghost pressed him from the back, but the thing he doesn''t know he was hit by a ghost, which made him feel a bit fearful.

    "I am the person whose orders you are going to obey for some time."

    As soon as he said that, the ghosts started working and forcefully made the guy sign a soul contract.

    Meanwhile, near the inn, the team ughtered the officials and people in charge of various departments of the city before they could throw out the next warning.

    Everything this over within a few minutes and at this moment, the city guards and the rest moved.

    Many spectators watched the team kill the people, though the whole force of the city guard ising here.

    But to their surprise, instead ofing here, they actually went to lock the whole city down.

    They blocked all of the gates and activated the city-wide formations.

    Then came the announcement.

    "The city lord has announced a lockdown of the whole city. Until his further notice, no one can leave the city any attempt to do that, shall be punishable."

    The city was thrown into amotion instantly.

    "Seems like things are done, lets''s go to the mansion. We don''t have much time, we need to use this time to deal with the other cities on this."

    Philip said and all three of them followed by the rest of the team went to the city lord''s mansion.

    They met in a hall with the Night Ghost and Philip started exining his n.

    There is a reason why they captured this specific city. That is because the city is exactly in a location from which they could move to a lot of other ces a lot quicker.

    This made it into a business hub.

    In fact, the very reason for the prosperity of this city is because of its location.

    Now, no matter which direction they travel from this spot, within two hours, they are going to reach another property or a city under the Mari n''s name.

    Philip is not going to take advantage of the distance to destroy all of these powers by the end of that day without breaking any sweat and nting some things there.

    "Are you guys ready? You will be splitting up for now. Night Ghost you are staying with me, Jack and Watt.

    Your job is to control the city and ensure that every one that is sent to this ce is allowed inside. The intake process should be as orderly as possible, but it should turn into chaos just in a second.

    Do you understand what I mean?"

    "Yes. I will arrange that."

    "Alright then, we have four target cities and luckily, we have four carriers at the moment. So, divide yourself up into teams and take one carrier before leaving. We don''t have time to waste."

    Philip walked out as soon as the n was done. He took off on a beast into the sky as he waved his hand. The Divine dimension fragment activated as arge carrier appeared in front of him.

    The carrier.

    One of the designs Sam sent to him to use.

    Vidyut and Jw came flying as they took over the carrier.

    It is half as big as the whole city lord''s estate.

    After boarding the carrier both of them issuedmands to the crew that is operating it to make their move toward the city.

    The same thing happened in a few minutes.

    The other members of the team also split themselves up as they took other carriers and flew in different directions. The carriers that looked like they are behemoth beasts made of metal and other materials moved at a speed that they didn''t think was possible.

 Chapter 1492 Evacuation

    Chapter 1492 Evacuation¡¡¡¡From the city that was upied by the trio, all four carriers moved into four different directions. Night Ghost was the only one left behind and the rest of them are all gone.

    The four carriers left in four directions.

    The carriers looked they arerge scale levitating aircraft carriers. They haverge thrusting devices that kept the whole thing floating and there are multiple towers on the top surface of the carrier.

    Inside the operating room, the team members that went to lead the destruction of the cities stayed along with the rest of the operators.

    There are many people who are operating various parts of the carrier. One is the Navigation team, the other one is the Power Supply team, thest one is the weaponry team. They are constantly active.

    There is a passive team, that is mostly focused on repairing any possible damages that could ur and assisting all the other three teams if needed.

    The carrier came attracted a lot of attention as it hovered through the sky and went to that city.

    By the time it came on top of that city, all of the city guards, lord of the city and other officials were alerted. Even the underground leaders and gangs were alerted by their subordinates.

    All of them are even flying in the air on the beasts as they looked at the carrier halting on top of it.

    "Whose doing is this? What is this thing? You are trespassing into the Mari n''s territory, you are not allowed to be here, leave immediately."

    The city lord yelled on the top of his lungs. Five elemental king and Jw looked at him through the screen. Five elemental king took amunication device and spoke into it.

    "We are taking over the city. All of the residents and visitors are advised to leave. You can go to the city that is on the west side, a few hours away from here. But do not stay in this city. Anyone, who stays here within an hour is liable for their death.

    We are not responsible for your lies."

    Five elemental King''s voice reverberated throughout the whole city. Everyone was stunned. Even though this is a cornerstone city under the Mari n''s control, it is still city under Mari n''s control.

    Not anyone could juste over here and say that they want to deal with the city. They are ordering the people here topletely evacuate the city.

    "I don''t care who you are and what made you grow the balls to offend the Mari n like this, but I will tear through this thing and bring you out before killing you."

    As he said that, he made his move.

    He is an Astral ne Initiation cultivator, he extended his hand forward to gather lightning at the end of it. He aimed it straight at the front of the carrier and lunged off of his beast to attack it.

    Five elemental king walked to the weapon team and said.

    "Activate elemental barrier and spatial restriction."

    As soon as he said that, various spots on the carrier''s surface on different sides started glowing.

    Arge barrier with various elemental energies started glowing. Along with that, there is a ripple of spatial energy that came out of the carrier restricting the movement of the city lord.

    The city lord felt his speed getting reduced by a lot. He wasn''t able to reach the target and his blow brushed past the barrier.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sound came as the barrier rippled.

    "Activate elemental cannon and the flight puppets."

    Five elemental king, gave orders while the beast of the city lord caught him before he could fall.

    The carrier made arge mechanical noise and a vent opened up on the bottom of it. A cylindrical cannon that is around fifteen meters long extended out of it.

    After that, another vent opened up on the rear of the carrier with a bunch of puppets flying out of it.

    They moved towards the people that gathered along with the city lord.

    "Don''t hold back. Just fire."

    Five elemental kingmanded.

    "Element of choice, sir?"

    The cannon operator asked.

    "Fire. Let''s go generic today."

    The operator nodded and the cannon was fired. All the flight puppets also started glowing red as they shot energy beams at everyone.

    The main cannon got fired on the city lord while the energy beams are targeting the rest of the entourage.

    *BOOM*

    The energy beam hit the city lord and enveloped himpletely. The beam has around three meters in diameter and not only did it hit the City lord, it even went after the beast that is carrying him.

    The beam went on for three seconds. The beast and the city lord fell down. Crashed into the ground in the city.

    The puppets are also shooting them down one by one. The battle began. Of course, the puppets are not really strong enough to deal with these people in directbat, but there the carrier is not there just for show.

    "The deduction eye."

    Five elemental king ordered again and the operator activated something.

    A cylindrical barrel extended out of the nose of the carrier from which something that looked like an eyeball came out.

    An extra glow appeared on a specific spot over the puppets'' bodies.

    The eyeball kept on moving and shining with various shes.

    The members of the city that tried to attack the puppets suddenly felt shocked. As one of them threw an attack on the puppet to take it down, even before they couldunch the attack, the puppet moved from the trajectory and another puppet from the side attacked the attacker.

    The energy beam shot diverted the attack and it fell on another opponent. The puppet was unscathed.

    In another spot, a puppet that was in the line of an arrow suddenly stopped its thrust devices. It freely fell a bit down to dodge the arrow, before activating again.

    Like this, as they barely took down three puppets, the rest are dodging and firing at them constantly.

    Of course, the puppets are notnding extreme attacks, they are doing gradual damage. umting it bit by bit.

    When a puppet is out of charge, it went back into the vent it came from and it was reced by another puppetpletely.

    The battle went on for hours, but by the end of it, the carrier flew over the air and all of the residents in the city except for the soldiers and officials of the Mari n left the city.

    They went to the city that is currently under the control of the trio.

    The soldiers, officials and other n members of the Mari n are all gathered in the main mansion under the orders of the Five elemental king.

    After they are all bundled together, the carrier flew over them and arge hole appeared on its bottom surface, showcasing a ck crystal surface.

    A ck coloured beam was shot down. It covered the whole mansion. It prated through all of the solid walls and ceiling without any trouble and bathed all of the people and beasts inside with the ck light.

    A scanner opened up in the operator room on which Five elemental king is watching.

    There are several humanoid and beast icons on the scanner indicating the locations and situations of cultivators and beasts within the mansion.

    After all of the icons turned ck. He nodded and the operator pressed a different button. A cylindrical pir was shot out of the carrier which fell in the middle of the mansion''s front yard.

    The pir emitted a ck glow.

    "This is easier than I thought. Just go and deactivate the space gates and we can get away from here."

    Five elemental kingsmanded and the carrier turned around as they travelled back to the first city.

    In the same way, all of the other four cities are also cleared within a few hours and all four carriers arrived at the first city.

    While they are battling and travelling, the trio busied themselves with a different n.

    They used the space gate in the city to send a person from within the city to inform the superior of the city lord they captured, about the situation the city is in.

    After that, they cut off the space gates, not letting anyonee there through the space gates.

    The four cities that are nearest to this city are alsopletely disconnected from their space gates. They are also empty now with no one there to present any information to any person that might arrive.

    They waited until all of the carriers arrived.

    Philip then called out their space gate expert and issued orders.

    "Convert the existing space gates of this city to one-way space gates. Send every person to go where ever they want as long as you can send them.

    Distribute all of the resources we got from the cities to them and apologize for the inconvenience. Do the same for the other people that arrive here from the four cities."

    "But boss, there are tens of thousands of people in the city. It will take a lot of time."

    "So? Just do it. We don''t have anything to do until tomorrow. Before superiors arrive here, tell them, they need to evacuate this ce. If they take the space gate route, it is good, if they don''t, tell them they are liable for their own lives."

 Chapter 1493 Carrier Formation

    Chapter 1493 Carrier Formation¡¡¡¡The mass evacuation didn''t go as simply as Philip ordered. Many of those people started protesting and the people from the other four cities that came here also started doing the same.

    Philip only had one thing to do for that.

    He made the city lord give an announcement.

    "By tomorrow afternoon, this whole city is going to be destroyed and everyone in this city, that includes me, will turn into corpses.

    If you do not get out of here by then, things will not be good for you. You will be responsible for your own deaths."

    The whole city was stunned by that statement. Some of them immediately left. To Philip''s surprise, more than half of them didn''t choose the space gates. They just left the city and picked a route to the Northwest or Southwest.

    Those are the directions that have cities big enough to amodate them and they don''t belong to Mari n either.

    Philip didn''t care much, all he wanted was for them to leave and they are leaving. By night, the city is almost empty.

    Now, he is just waiting for some high-level people from the Mari n toe.

    "You are in for deep trouble. Do you know that?"

    All of a sudden, the city lord spoke up. After he was forcefully made to sign a contract, this is the first time he spoke out of his turn.

    "What? Is it the usual threat? The Mari n is going to kill all of us?"

    "Not just that. I don''t know who you are, but judging from the fact, that your pictures came to us all over the ce means, you are someone that is really hated by Sivan.

    Currently, Sivan has an extremely high position within the n. His authority is almost as same as a Grand elder.

    He is currently a leader in the war against the Gaja n.

    Generally, he shouldn''t have time to deal with guys like you. But he took some time out just to capture you guys.

    That means, he either really hates you or you are a variable in the war.

    Either way, the n would try its best to eliminate you. If my guess is right, then the superior you sent a message to might have actually gone to his superior and informed the whole matter to Sivan and other Grand elders.

    They will not just send a few more middle-stage Astral ne Consummate cultivators. A Grand elder will be visiting.

    Even if it is a bitte, you are going to die and the chances of that happening only increase with every second you stay here."

    "Thanks for the wisdom."

    Philip said casually as he sat down to think of the next steps of the n.

    He started thinking about what they originally nned to do and what the city lord said. He knew that he miscalcted things.

    He thought the superior would be the first one to make the move and he will be okay with the current set of ns. But now, he understood how wrong he is.

    After some thinking, he immediately went to meet Watt and Jack.

    He expressed the things the city lord said and they are also in a bit of a pickle.

    "What if he is just bullshitting?"

    "He might be, but there is a possibility that he is not. If a grand elder reallyes, I am pretty sure, that we wouldn''t be able to stop them with the four carriers that we have. At least not in their current state."

    "So, you want to set up the carrier formation?"

    "Yes."

    "Are you sure? Once thates out, we will lose our first surprise attack on the n''s headquarters. Then we can directly use the towers there. It is not big deal."

    "Alright then, let''s just go with it. We don''t need to worry about things too much then. Are we pumping vitality then?"

    "Let''s check. We can take thebined energy if there is any in thend."

    As soon as they decided on that, they went to order the carrier operators. The carriers that were floating since morningnded for the first time.

    Theynded on four different spots in different directions of the city.

    A bunch of puppets that are structured like wild cats came out of the carriers as they moved around. They started jumping and hopping around as they sniffed in different ces.

    Along with that, a vent opened on the bottom surface of the carriers. Flexible pipes came out of it and drilled themselves into the ground.

    While that is happening on top of the carrier a bunch of new protrusions appeared as they acted as nodes and created massive formations around the city.

    Philip is holding a crystal tablet as he observed the movements of the puppets and the movements of the carrier.

    After some time, he finally marketed some locations and sent the message to the operators of the carriers.

    They acted immediately and the pipes that drilled themselves into the ground started operating. Doing their task.

    "So, what do we have in thend?"

    "There are some faint deposits of various elemental energies here and there. They are going to be useful, for the rest, we are going to use a vitality pump."

    "Are you okay with using it?"

    "Why wouldn''t I be?"

    "You are the one that was hesitant to make it. I was honestly surprised when you said you wanted to attach them to carriers and towers that we made. I didn''t expect that from you."

    "Why do you think I evacuated every one else from the city? I know things might go wrong and we might need to use it. Since we already made it, there is no point in holding it back."

    "That is true."

    As they are speaking, the carriers already started sucking the energy out of the surroundings.

    At this moment, one of the carrier operators contacted Philip and said.

    "Sir, there is an unexplored mine vein to the south a bit."

    "Unexplored? This close to the city?"

    "Yes, sir. But it is way too deep and from the scanning records, the mine appears to be spread vertically instead of horizontally.

    It is going to be a tough thing to me.

    The Mari n seemed to have understood this and built a small cultivation chamber there. They are using the energy of the vein for breakthrough assistance and stuff."

    "Okay then, just send a puppet there and suck its energy as much as you guys can."

    "Yes, sir."

    After those orders, a humanoid puppet came out of one of the carriers. It went straight for the spot where the vein reading was noted.

    After reaching the spot, it turned its body into some kind of pile driver and mmed itself into the ground.

    A visible stream of energy started flowing into it.

    On the back of the pile driver, a transparent crystal bottle could be seen and it is rapidly being filled with liquid energy after it was full, it disappeared and got reced by another empty bottle.

    "Now, all we have to do is wait."

    Philip muttered as he heard the reports.

    While Philip is waiting for the people toe at them, in the Mari n''s headquarters, Sivan is almost breathing fire.

    "I want to capture those bastards. They will have a massive stash of resources and equipment. Some might even be on par with what I made in the past few months.

    We need them alive to acquire them."

    "No, we don''t need them alive for that. As long as they are dead and we got their memories, we can find their location and take them."

    One of the grand elders disputed.

    "Like hell, you can. Do you even know how the dusk organization operates?"

    "How else? Like any other organization."

    "No, it doesn''t. The moment these three are dead, no one other than Sam himself would be able to take that equipment from the organization.

    They would rather die in self-destruction than hand them over to an enemy."

    "Hmph, like hell they would do that. Who doesn''t feel their life is important. I don''t believe someone would sacrifice their life just to save some equipment from enemies'' hands.

    Particrly, after their bosses died."

    "Not everyone is a sick bastard that is born in a high-end n. Not everyone is a piece of garbage that does anything for their benefit. There are some organizations that still operate on trust and loyalty and dusk is one of them.

    The organization is built on maximizing everyone''s potential. The methods gave the people a gift. A fucking gift of realizing and manifesting themselves to what they could really be. I am sure, you will sacrifice the rest of your life span for a chance like that.

    There are thousands of people who got a chance like that in that organization. They will all kill for Sam and they will die for him.

    Even if you manage to find a few sick bastards just like you, there will be one crazy loyal person who will die trying to kill him and you along with destroying the equipment that you so desperately want."

 Chapter 1494 Crystal Shell

    Chapter 1494 Crystal Shell¡¡¡¡"It seems like you are forgetting that you are also a member of this n. The same n you are speaking so ill of."

    The Grand elder spoke through his teeth in anger.

    "Of course, I know I am part of this n. I am not calling myself an exception. But I don''t believe you are either."

    The n leader looked at both of them and felt extremely frustrated.

    On one side is the person who is the Grand Elder. A senior for him in terms of age. A person he deeply respects and has to give some value to.

    On the other side is the most talented prospect in the younger generation. Sivan''s schemes, strategies and ns are best among his peers within their n.

    He is sneaky, and smart and now he is extremely resourceful.

    In fact, the whole war against the Gaja n is because of the resources that this young man provides. The partnership with the Divine league is also because of him.

    He is now ced in a pretty hard situation.

    He took a deep breath and spoke up.

    "Both of you stop for a second."

    Sivan and the Grand Elder matched stares. They are ring at each other with pure hatred.

    The other grand elders are looking at the whole fiasco with either amusement or anger. Either way, a youngster firing against a Grand Elder is something they are really interested in.

    "What do you exactly want Sivan?"

    "We need to capture all three of them. If something happens to them, you can expect hell."

    "Why is that?"

    "You will not believe, even if I exin. But there is one more thing you need to consider for this. The dusk organization is way too big. They have way too many people and they are growing way too fast.

    If something happens to them like this, things would go bad really fast. Capture them and I will make them surrender. The Dusk organization has way too many resources for us to ignore.

    If we kill them, not only do we lose it all, we will also be getting a series of kamikaze attacks."

    The n leader turned to the Grand elder and asked.

    "So, Grand Elder. You need to promise that you will be able to bring them safe and alive to Sivan. Only then can you go."

    "How can I promise that? They are clearly hostile, what if they die in the sh identally?"

    "Then don''t fucking go. Stay here."

    Sivan screamed.

    "Mind your words young man. You might be useful now, but that doesn''t give you the right to let your tongue loose."

    The grand elder tried to pressure Sivan.

    Sivan just looked at him coldly and said.

    "If you have balls, then go ahead and attack me. If you don''t, then stop with your fucking show of force. Me and My dad, might not get along, but I am sure, he will fucking m you to death if you so much asy a finger on me.

    So, shove your fake threats into your ass and get the fuck out of my face."

    Everyone was dumbfounded.

    They didn''t expect this kind of reaction from Sivan.

    Even when Sivan was a cripple and purely hated everyone with any authority in the n, he was never one with nasty words. In fact, he was not a person with so many words.

    But now, he is openly abusing a senior grand elder in front of every single person. This is a next-level insult.

    "What did you say, you little bastard?" The old man shook in anger.

    But Sivan ignored this and said.

    "n leader, I don''t care what you guys think of my behaviour. I have little regard for the opinion of the people here, but I want to get one thing straight. Everything that is rted to Sam has to go by me.

    And his friends need to be captured safely and I don''t believe this grand elder would be able to do that job.

    So, send someone else. Even if you have to send the Chaos brothers, I don''t care. But they must not die and none of their equipment shall go missing."

    The n leader heaved a sigh.

    "The meeting is dismissed. Everyone, get out now."

    Sivan and the grand elder stayed even though everyone else left.

    "I will make the decision regarding this and Grand Elder, you will not be going to this expedition. Instead, I will send my elite squad to do this."

    "Your elite squad leader?"

    "No, only the squad. The squad leader stays with me. I am sure whatever the thing there, a bunch of Late stages Astral ne Consummate cultivators can handle it."

    "Who knows."

    Sivan muttered.

    "Well, you cannot just tell me all kinds of assumptions and ask me to believe you blindly Sivan. I will at least give you the benefit of doubt about the things you described the Dusk.

    But can you sure say, that a bunch of Late stages Astral ne consummate cultivators cannot finish the mission?

    If you are sure, then tell me why?"

    Sivan just shook his head in resignation.

    "I cannot exin, but if you lose these people, don''t me me. But if they die, I will not let them slide."

    With that, Sivan didn''t speak.

    The old grand elder also snorted and left the room.

    After they left, the n leader held his head tight and sent the orders to his elite team.

    "How is the attack on the Gaja n going? How long before Lava worms are activated?" The n''s leader asked Sivan.

    "We can activate any time we want, but if you want to have maximum impact, wait as much as you can. Until then, we need to cause some other damage. To create a distraction."

    "You said, you demonstrated other products to the Grand elders. Is it ready to use?"

    "Yes. It is a consumable one and making it is also a bit tough. If you take away this batch and use it, you will need for a month before you could use another batch."

    "A month? Can you not make it any faster?"

    "Not. It is hard."

    "What do youck? Resources?"

    "No, it is a bit moreplicated than just resources. It is skill and precision. We are not really used to it. Anyway, as long as you send this thing and attack the Gaja n, it will really work wonders."

    "Alright. I will send a party immediately."

    "No, send a grand elder or at least a Late-stage cultivator. Send a single person and provide him with all kinds of means to escape."

    "Okay."

    Sivan also left after that.

    The n''s leader gave orders and a person immediately left the Mari n to go to the Gaja n. After that was done, he went to meet the elite team and give instructions to them.

    He clearly expressed Sivan''s attempt to deal with them and just bring them alive. He stressed the fact that they are not allowed to kill any of the three.

    So, ate-stage Astral ne consummate cultivator with a bunch of equipment and a bunch ofte-stage Astral ne Consummate cultivators left at the same time.

    The cultivator that went to the Gaja n, reached his destination by evening.

    He didn''t go near the city. Instead, he took up camp in a tall mountain miles away from the Gaja n''s city.

    He climbed to the peak of the mountain and used a special concealment device that was given to him by Sivan.

    He then took out the equipment and started assembling it.

    It looked like a missileuncher mounted on a tripod.

    He took out a crystal cylinder that has a pointy end. Through the translucent surface of the cylinder, one could see a very intricatework that is glowing with many glittering points here and there.

    He carefully loaded the shell into the barrel of theuncher.

    He then started aiming it as he looked through the telescope attached to the barrel.

    Now he got a very clear view of the city. He aimed the barrel straight at the main building of the n''s estate.

    He took a deep breath and pulled the trigger.

    *SWISH*

    With a red glow, the cylinder left the barrel and whistled through the air.

    The shooter still looked through the telescope as he observed the shell moving.

    The shell moved at an extreme speed that made it look like a sh. Barely three secondster, it is already near the city and was noticed by the guards stationed at the wall.

    It went past the city walls before they could even let the screams out of their throat and moved towards the main building of the n''s estate.

    But the formation around the estate was activated, and the shell hit the barrier.

    Instead of exploding right there and then, the cylinder stopped and hovered there trying to prate the barrier.

    After two seconds of that, the crystal surface of the shell exploded.

    *BOOM*

    Apart from the explosion, a bunch of glittering coin-sized glowing circles were shot into the surrounding thirty-meter radius.

 Chapter 1495 Cracker

    Chapter 1495 Cracker¡¡¡¡The coin-sized round glowing objects are flying everywhere andnded on different spots.

    Somended on the formation barrier right beside the point of contact and somended on the nearby structures.

    Somended on the people who are walking by and somended on the ground and trees around.

    But almost everything in the thirty-meter radius was hit by these coins and as soon as theynded, they gave out small explosive popping sounds.

    *POP*

    *POP*

    *POP*

    "AAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH¡­."

    The people who got hit by these coins immediately screamed. Everyone from within the n''s estate came out immediately to take a look at what is happening. The explosion is so loud that there are very few people who could have not listened to it.

    The guards who came took a look at the people that got hit by these things.

    One of them got a coin-sized circr red dot on the face and some straight sharp lines of red colour spread all over their face and extended all over the head and then the body as they spread through the neck.

    In the same way, another person had a spot on the hand and the lines spread past the hand and then onto the chest.

    The guards looked at the surroundings and saw that there are red dots here and there. They are extending some red lines randomly, but they are not exactly visible clearly, because of the soil colour.

    The guards carried the injured people away, while some of them left there and investigated.

    The first thing that is clearly noticeable is the dots on the barrier.

    Even the dots on the barrier appeared the same way. A dot is spreading red lines all over the barrier in an extremely rapid pace.

    Sam and Giyon were informed about the incident instantly along with the leaders of the n and the grand elders.

    Meanwhile, the guards stood there as they were really wary about these red dots. As they are looking at them, they saw some changes happening. The first one they saw is in the trees.

    The red lines from the dot spread deep into the trees and before they knew it, it started burning. A lot of fire elemental energy was released from that burning tree and the surrounding guards felt the extreme heat hitting their faces.

    One of them used their water elemental energy to put the fire out, but to their surprise, all it did was create steam all around them. The fire didn''t go out.

    It went on and on raging and after the tree waspletely burned to ashes including the roots, the mes spread to the surrounding earth.

    Even the soil was caught with the mes and started melting.

    All of this happened in a matter of seconds and the same thing started happening with the soil around them and it started burning and melting with a heavy discharge of fire elemental energy.

    The only thing that was not caught on me is the barrier.

    The lines that spread diffused into arge patch of red. A massive amount of fire elemental energy is released into the barrierwork.

    The energy of the barrier and the fire elemental energy started conflicting.

    Meanwhile, the people that are being transported to get medical attention are also struggling.

    "AAAAARGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH¡­.."

    "KILLL MEE. NOWWWW."

    They are screaming for their lives and screaming for their deaths. The guards watched as their flesh and skin turned red, their eyeballs and the skin started burning soon. The ears started bleeding, they started puking blood out of their mouth.

    Their hair started burning and then their clothes.

    Their excessive fat melted down into sweat and then into vapours. The skin cracked and blood seeped out.

    Soon red vapour came out of their flesh as they died and finally their bodies started burning.

    Before the guards could do anything, even their bones started burning up. Leaving nothing but ash behind.

    Sam ran as fast as he can and saw the people burning upon his passing.

    "Fuck."

    He cursed out loud as he ran out to check the barrier situation.

    The whole area in the thirty meters radius is burning up. The only thing that doesn''t have any immediate effect is the barrier, but anyone could see that it is gradually weakening.

    Sam looked around and called the guard captain.

    "Put everyone in the watchtowers with the telescopes. Keep on checking. As long as they see anythinging from any direction, tell them to notify. Make sure that no one stays anywhere near the barrier."

    "Yes, sir."

    "I need a flying beast."

    The guard hesitated before giving his own. Sam flew on the beast and hovered over the red spot on the barrier.

    He still doesn''t have his metal arm, so he could only use his normal arm.

    He covered it with spiritual energy as he ced it on the red patch of the barrier.

    He ced it on the red patch as he started injecting his spiritual energy and stopped the spread of the fire elemental energy.

    He used the energy control to push block the fire elemental energy with his own energy and pushed it out forcefully.

    The barrier fluctuated a bit, but it soon stopped and went back to normal.

    Sam held a ball of red colour being surrounded by a globe of white colour. He took a step back and aimed it into the sky before shooting it.

    *BOOM*

    A massive ming explosion urred.

    By now Gail, Gamin and the n''s leader who were in a meeting also arrived.

    "What happened Sam?"

    "They are using Energy Cracker. I didn''t know he would be able to make it."

    Sam said with a solemn expression.

    "Energy cracker? What kind of thing is it? Did it cause all of this?"

    Gail asked as he looked at the destruction caused in the thirty-meter radius.

    "Yes. We need to activate the crystal dome barrier. It is impossible to defend against this and even if we did, it will only cause more damage to us."

    Sam then turned to the guards and ordered.

    "Tell everyone to stay inside. Nobody is allowed toe out until the further orders are given."

    They nodded and left.

    After ordering and activating the crystal dome, Sam and the rest went back into the n estate.

    Sam went to theb and ordered some things from the artisans. Some of the other important work has been thrown to the backend.

    "What is the Energy Cracker, you were talking about?"

    "It is a weapon that I made. It is used to create certain levels of damage within a restricted space. Its effect is not just limited to cultivators. It works on barriers, formations, formation tes, inscriptions, people, beasts, walls, trees, grass and even in soil.

    In fact, this is not even theplete version of the energy cracker. It was not materializedpletely in my head, that is why I never made it."

    "This destroyed everything within a thirty-meter radius and people that died, didn''t even leave bones behind and this is not even theplete version?"

    "No, it is not. It is energy inefficient. It takes up way too many resources and way too much energy to be made and the skills of the person that makes these things need to be extremely high.

    I am even surprised that they even made these cheap imitations."

    "These are cheap imitations?"

    "Yes."

    "How does this even work? Why is it so powerful enough to impact everything?"

    "The main principle the cracker works on is energy corrosion. Everything in this world can be corroded by elemental energy that the thing doesn''t belong to.

    And this cracker contains pellets of processed, concentrated andpressed energy that was ready to diffuse into any substance that has any form of spiritual energy in it.

    The energy will first be guided along the channels of spiritual energy or any other channel for that matter.

    If it fell on a person, it will take up the spiritual energywork, the circtory system and even the respiratory system if there is a chance.

    The lines ofpressed energy will spread as far as they can before all of it is released in a single second. All of this excessive fire elemental energy diffuses forcefully into the body at the same time.

    They would wish that their hearts dugout instead of this.

    I am really surprised that Sivan even understood this concept, much less make it."

    "How did you even make such a weapon?"

    Gail asked with a very weird expression. Gamin, Giyon and Grivon also had simr expressions. They felt extremely confused and lost.

    They couldn''t understand what kind of thought process even led to that such creation.

    "What is wrong with your head? Why did you think of such a twisted way of killing people?" Gail continued asking as he looked at Sam.

    "Are you really expecting me to answer that question?"

    Sam asked with a frown.

    "No, actually. I am really afraid of listening to your answer. Why don''t we just skip to the part where you tell us how to defend against it."

 Chapter 1496 Bees

    Chapter 1496 Bees¡¡¡¡As they were speaking, before even Sam could reply to the question a guard came into the room and made a report.

    "Sir, there has been a hit on the west side of the crystal dome.

    The barrier in that space fluctuated a bit with the red dots all over, but it is absorbing slowly. But the operators are saying that if it is bombarded at different ces, at the same time, it will create a hole in its operation.

    That time gap can be used to infiltrate the city."

    "Well, that gives a temporary answer to my question. What about a more permanent one?"

    "I will think of something. The best thing you could do now is to capture the person that is shooting these things. I don''t know if they had sent a team with multipleunchers or a single one."

    "How can we find that out?"

    "Shot interval."

    Sam said as he paused and turned to the guard.

    "Notify the operators to maintain the stability of the formation. I want them to time the third and fourth shots. Also, make sure that they mark the direction and the point of contact on the crystal dome.

    I need the measurements to be as precise as possible.

    As long as we get precise about the locations, I can confirm how many shooters are there.

    The location would be a bit difficult though."

    "Don''t worry about it. I and Gamin will scout by ourselves. Just make sure you find a remedy for this cracker.

    If these thingse in a bunch, things would be extremely problematic."

    Gail said and let with his brother.

    Sam immediately went to work. He first noted down the timing and the locations of the first two shots and started estimating a rough distance.

    Before long the third shot came and from the people who are keeping a watch through the telescopes, he managed to guess how long the cracker stayed in the sky after it was visible.

    Sam knew how fast it is and he calcted how far the cracker must havee from and what angle.

    He then estimated the first three locations from which the shot could have been fired and noticed the time difference.

    After the fourth one came, he quickly made some calctions and made spections.

    "There is a good chance that there is the only shooter and they are moving very quickly from one spot to another. But I cannot estimate how many people the shooter is with."

    This is the final spection he came to and gave the answer to Gail and Gamin through themunicationwork.

    Gail and Gamin went on to scout the locations Sam has guessed and managed to find out some ces with traces of people''s activity there.

    There are some traces of a tripod being ced there and impressions left behind because of the recoil of the shot.

    They understood that Sam''s guesses could be right and started looking in different directions.

    But it is very hard for them to track the person by themselves as they moved around. From the distance that was covered in such a short time, they also figured that the opponent is on the same level as them.

    If they really y a game of cat and mouse, it would be hard for them to keep proper track of them.

    They just have to find a way and pull through it though.

    While the Gaja city is being tested by an annoying problem and everyone is working just to make sure that it doesn''t copse their system, something else is happening in the Mari n''s territory.

    Philip, Watt and Jack are waiting are a grand elder to show up based on what the leader of the city said, but the Mari n only sent a team of Late stage Astral ne Consummate cultivators.

    Eight of them to be precise.

    And they didn''t make a move on the captured city directly, instead, they went to the evacuated cities first.

    They separated themselves into four groups of two and decided to investigate the cities.

    But as soon as they arrived there, every one of them realized that it is a mistake immediately.

    And the first pair learned the hardest way.

    When the pair arrived in the city, all they could see is abandoned buildings that arepletely destroyed and the main building which ispletely unscathed.

    The brightly lit ck pir has attracted their attention.

    Both of them are wearing white cloaks and white masks. Their steps are quite like that of a cat as they jumped from one building to another.

    "Why did the team leader want us to investigate these cities? We only need to capture those brats."

    One of them asked the other.

    "He said it is the order from the n''s leader. That brat Sivan has some very huge ims to make about the trio we are about to capture. But he is unwilling to provide any evidence.

    He is so adamant about making sure that the trio doesn''t die.

    But the grand elder is adamant about killing them.

    The n''s leader doesn''t want to be stuck with the wrong side.

    So, now we need to investigate what these brats are really capable of. We need to investigate, the damage they could have caused to this city and form a report.

    From these ims, the n''s leader will form an opinion. If they really have something that is worthy of what Sivan imed, he will pick his side.

    If he doesn''t, he will pick Grand elders and just kill him."

    "Why doesn''t he just stick with the grand elder like he always did?"

    "This time, he is a bit careful because of the things that Sivan is offering. The Divine league''s deal is very precious.

    Also, he doesn''t want Grand elder to get his hands on the equipment these brats have. It is all just a bunch of political hot shit."

    As they were talking they reached the front yard of the main mansion.

    There, they saw the ck pir with a myriad inscription and then tried to scan it with the spiritual sense. Then they started looking at the main mansion. Inside, all they could see are a bunch of corpses allying on the floor, tables and some even in chairs.

    "What the fuck is up with this? Why do they all look like they lost their lives abruptly and some look like they are battered?

    Look at the city lord, his body is half charred."

    "Something is really wrong here."

    "I think it has something to do with that pir. Let''s check it out."

    Both of them went back to the pir and one of the two hesitated before finally touching it.

    As soon as he did that, he realized that they made a mistake.

    A ck barrier appeared around the whole estate and a vent opened on top of the pir.

    The person who touched the pir felt something hit him. But there is no physical damage whatsoever, so he is a bit confused.

    As he was thinking of what is happening, all of a sudden, the vent that opened up started giving out some small metallic flies that looked like bees.

    *BUZZZ*

    The buzzing sound brought them back to their senses and both of them stepped back.

    The flies are numerous and they all zoomed at them.

    Both of them blocked their advance with barriers.

    But as soon as the flies touched the barriers, a series of small explosions started urring on the barrier surface and dark elemental energy is seeping into the barrier and in turn into their energywork.

    With every extra explosion, the speed of the spread kept on increasing.

    "We cannot defend them like this, we need to destroy them."

    One of them yelled and started throwing mes at the bees. They exploded immediately and ck smoke starteding out as it floated up before merging with the barrier.

    The bees are not strong, but they are extremely numerous. There are tens of thousands of bees before they even knew it.

    They started attacking the barrier, but it is durable enough to take some hits.

    And the backside of it is that the bees are relentlessly attacking them while they focused on the barrier.

    But that is not all of it.

    There is one more thing that they didn''t expect.

    A few of the corpses they saw inside areing out of the estate as undead creatures and as soon as they appeared, the bees stopped attacking the two guys and went for those corpses. They directly entered their bodies or injected the bodies.

    The undead creatures immediately had a huge energy boost and they grew stronger and stronger by every second.

    The two elites could sense the increasing energy.

    They decided to make a move before the process could be finished, but as they gathered their energy, they suddenly realized something.

    The whole area is sucking their vitality, bit by bit and they are weakening.

    This only made them quicken their pace of attack.

 Chapter 1497 Painless

    Chapter 1497 Painless¡¡¡¡"Alright, I have had enough."

    One of the two said it out loud as he gritted his teeth.

    Fire elemental energy surrounded his body and as soon as he shot it, the whole barrier was full of red hot mes.

    The Mansion, the ck pir, all of the bees and even the undead. Everything is covered with mes and when it finally settled, all the bees are gone. The undead corpses areying on the floor in mes.

    The mansion is also on fire and half of it disappeared in the form of molten rock.

    The person looked at his partner and said.

    "I am sorry. I cannot hold back. Those bees are fucking annoying."

    The partner looked at him with a sigh. The only thing that is leftpletely intact is, him and the pir because he protected the pir.

    "What the fuck is wrong with you? Do you really think, I wouldn''t be able to do that? We were asked to collect fucking evidence and you almost destroyed everything."

    "Well, you saved the pir, didn''t you? What are youining about?"

    "Fuck you."

    He didn''t even want to talk to his hot-headed partner anymore and pulled out the pir from the ground.

    But as soon as he did that, he felt like he got hit by something and stumbled just for a bit.

    "What''s wrong?"

    His partner asked, but he just shook his head and stored the pir away in his storage.

    "Let''s see if we can salvage these deadbodies, their death is a bit weird, even though you burned them to crisp, we can still try to get something out of it."

    Both of them went to store the burning deadbodies after putting their fire up. They cleaned them up quickly, but when one of them is about to put up thest one, the corpse moved.

    He was caught off guard and the corpse bit deeply into his arm.

    He instinctually punched the corpse in the face and tried to get rid of it.

    But the corpse bit into him so hard that some of his flesh was torn off before it coulde off.

    He became pissed and burned the corpse again until itpletely turned into ashes.

    "What the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you so eager to burn everything down? Are you a fucking arsonist all of a sudden?"

    His partner once again got angry.

    "Come on, man. Look at this. I got bit by that thing. What do you expect me to do?"

    "I don''t even want to argue with you. Let''s get out of here."

    Both of them finished the collection and after some efforts broke the barrier before walking out of the city.

    The man who got his arm bit looked at it and frowned.

    "What happened now?"

    His partner asked.

    "It is just a bit weird. I don''t feel the pain anymore."

    "Maybe it doesn''t hurt as much as you imed it did."

    "That''s not it, I felt the pain before, but it is gradually going off."

    "Whatever. Just ignore it. If I were you, I would be more worried about what that ck substance is on that flesh wound. Losing pain is a good thing, but what is that."

    The partner checked the wound and carefully took the ck substance off.

    "I think is part of those burned lips. I might have been left behind when I punched the corpse."

    "Clean it up and take some medicine. We will go on my beast. You can rest on the way."

    "Sure."

    Both of them climbed onto a beast and made their way toward the captured city.

    As the person who got his flesh bit off took the medicine, he could see the wound closing up. But he is still a bit troubled as he couldn''t feel any pain on the spot. He felt that it is extremely weird.

    Meanwhile, the other pairs are also not really having a good time.

    In one city, they directly went for the pir before they even searched the whole building and after the bees came, one of them used a wind element to create a circting wind barrier that kept the bees at bay while the other stored the pir inside.

    The first one immediately increased the velocity of the wind and forced the bees into the mansion while the currents destroyed some of them.

    The second one started attacking the barrier, trying to destroy the whole thing.

    It didn''t take long for them to break out of that barrier. They boarded their beasts and got ready to take off.

    At this moment, they sensed some really negative energying from the side and before they knew it, a bunch of undead creatures broke through the mansion walls and jumped at the beasts.

    The undead creatures looked weird, they didn''t look normal. Their hair and eyes arepletely ck and some kind of ck vapoured smoke ising out of them.

    The bodies turned grey. Their mouths are emitting some ck goo from the corner.

    They started biting into the beasts and also tried to fight the two partners.

    They retaliated immediately and started attacking the undead creatures.

    "Why the fuck are they so strong?"

    The first one asked.

    "How the fuck am I supposed to know that?"

    The second one retorted as they fought the undead back.

    The first one got bit by one of them while he was fighting, but he realized it didn''t even hurt that much. It barely stung.

    He felt weird, but he didn''t have time to think too much about it and just continued to fight.

    They finished off the undead and got back onto their injured beasts as they went towards the Captured city.

    Simr situations happened in the remaining two ces. Either one or two of those people felt some weird painlessness as they got bit by these creatures.

    They don''t know exactly what happened, but they didn''t have time to care.

    They just directly went to the captured city.

    All of them reached the vicinities of the captured city at the same time.

    But as soon as they entered, they felt extremely shocked.

    The scene that was in front of their eyes, is something that they couldn''t have even imagined in their whole lifetime.

    A few mile radii around the captured city lookedpletely dead. All of the trees and vegetation were withered to debris. The soil became loose and devoid of any moisture that it could have possibly held.

    They couldn''t sense a single spiritual energy particle in the air.

    The first pair that arrived there looked at the situation and didn''t even want to enter that radius.

    "What the fuck is this?

    This is like a desert. But instead of water, it is devoid of spiritual energy.

    Who did such a thing?"

    "The question is, how did they do that? Not who did it. We already know who did it."

    "That''s true. It seems like the fears of the n''s leader are true. If whatever they used to make this happen really fell into Grand Elder''s hands, he wouldn''t be able to sleep for days."

    "Of course, he wouldn''t."

    As they talked, they slowly walked into the area. They didn''t move as fast as before and neither did they use their beasts. They walked into the area and looked at the massive energy barrier dome far away.

    When they reached a spot where they could get a clear view of the city, they could see the carriers in their full view.

    "So, what do we do next?"

    "Wait for the other teams to reach the range of ourmunication. We will only make a move after that."

    They waited there for an hour before they finally got themunication link.

    "Team 1 is here. We have a situation though. We cannot sense any spiritual energy in the surroundings and stay here is a bit draining. The change is not too much, but it is not a good ce to battle."

    "Team 2 is here. We are also in a simr situation."

    "Team 3 reporting. Same situation."

    "Team 4 reporting. Sam situation."

    One of the two members of Team 1 who is currently an acting leader and is responsible for executing all of the orders, spoke up.

    "We need to deal with the city as fast as we can. Did everyone bring their share of evidence?"

    "Yes."

    "Keep it safe. We are going tounch an attack on the four things that are in the four directions of the city. We are going to attack them all at the same time and destroy them.

    Go with full power. Don''t hold back.

    I believe that the four machines are the key here. We are going to destroy it before they could even act."

    "We are good with that. So, when are we making a move?"

    "In three minutes.

    Exactly three minutes and the attacks shouldnd.

    Be careful. You are not to be spotted in between. We cannot let them get a chance to prepare."

 Chapter 1498 Beams

    Chapter 1498 Beams¡¡¡¡All the elite squad members made a move. They are at their top speed as they ran towards the city while charging their full-powered attacks.

    But after one minute, the first pair faced some problems.

    The person who got bit by the undead creature suddenly stopped in his tracks and copsed on the ground as he rolled forward.

    *COUGH* *COUGH*

    He started coughing out blood and his partner has to stop immediately.

    "What happened? Are you alright?"

    "I¡­ I don''t know what is happening?"

    The partner said as he tried to stand up, but he felt his legs go weak and couldn''t gather enough energy to stand up.

    He channelled his spiritual energy to get some more strength, but to his surprise, he cannot even do that.

    He extended his hand and tried to gather some energy into it, then only they saw the ce where the undead creature bit.

    It is ck and looked festered all over.

    "what the fuck?"

    His partner immediately tore up the white robe and removed the mask as he looked at the body. All of the body is covered with ck lines popping up like veins.

    He quickly tried to get a quick scan of how his body is doing, but he was stunned.

    "What the fuck? Your organs. They are dying, How can you not feel anything? You should be screaming in pain."

    "I don''t feel any pain." The injured person said with a frown, but he could feel that he is getting incredibly weaker.

    "How is that even possible? You should be feeling intense pain. This foreign death energy is eating your organs away. This is not possible¡­"

    As he was saying, he suddenly remembered something and said.

    "You cannot feel any pain."

    "What?"

    "That''s what you said. You cannot feel any pain. Something is wrong. The undead bite, I think that is a problem."

    "Why couldn''t I notice anything until now? How can I be painless even after all of this? With our cultivation level, it is impossible for us to not notice something like this."

    "We only care about the anomalies that hurt us. But you would have been at least noticing some kind of disturbances within your body.

    It is impossible for you to ignore such a thing.

    Something is really wrong here."

    As he spoke, he started taking out all kinds of medicines they had and started giving them to his partner.

    The same things are happening in all of the other teams, but the third team''s problems are twofold as both of them were bitten by the undead.

    When they took medicines, they noticed that as the vitality in their bodies increased, the spread of the ck lines has been reduced by a lot.

    The leader of the group contacted the rest to see if they are all in the same situation.

    "We arete-stage Astral ne consummate cultivators. How did such a stupid thing happen to us?"

    The leader asked with gritted teeth. This is embarrassing and humiliating. He cannot stand such a blunder in their team.

    "I think it is a curse, sir."

    "Curse?"

    "Yes, sir. It is a very high powered curse. I read it in some ancient books. It is said to be a curse designed by Goddess Hel is herself. It is a curse that works on the target despite their cultivation level and it can be fused with any other curse.

    I think we are hit by such a curse."

    One of the two from the third team spoke up.

    "So, do you know how to undo this curse?"

    "No, sir. The curse I talked about is a carrier. It fuses with another curse that is responsible for the damage.

    In fact, it is only a thing of myth. I don''t even know how these people managed to do this."

    "Can you diagnose yourself? What are the conditions?"

    "Some kind of vile death energy is infiltrating our bodies and organs. The only thing that can counter is vitality and rest. If there is an abundant amount of spiritual energy from our surroundings, our body''s natural absorption of spiritual energy and its conversion into vitality would have kept it at bay.

    But since we are in a zone with no external source of spiritual energy, the death energy is taking over and draining the life away."

    "So, we need to shift you guys out of this desert zone to make sure that you don''t die?"

    "At least temporarily. We can think of a permanent solution with our healers back in the n. Until then, medicines and a good environment helps."

    "Okay then, everyone listens. Change of ns. We are first going to move our people back out of this desert.

    After that, only three of us would be left.

    The five injured people will be keeping watch outside of the radius. The three of us are handing over our medicine stash to them.

    They will keep themselves alive and keep a watch on possible escape routes.

    Do you understand?"

    "Yes Sir." A clear cut response came from the other side.

    The leader immediately took his partner and started moving out of the zone.

    At this moment, from the carrier that is facing on the side, Philip is standing while watching through a telescope.

    "Seems like our guests really did get hit by the gift we left for them. They are trying to escape, make sure that it is not possible."

    The operators nodded and immediately went back to do their jobs. A cannon popped up from the top of the carrier and aimed at the guy who is carrying his partner away.

    A simr situation happened with the other three carriers as they aimed at the people leaving.

    *BOOM*

    Four cannons fired multicoloured beams. They are mostly glowing white with many strands of green, brown, red and arge strand of blue in the mix.

    The beams were shot and reached their targets within three seconds and the people that are carrying their partners were shocked by the sudden arrival of the cannons.

    They immediately dropped their partners and defended against the beam.

    *BOOM*

    A massive explosion urred as the targets felt their insides churning. The energy that hit them is weird. Apart from the mess of some different elemental energies, there is one thing that felt extremely refreshing.

    So refreshing that they felt like they are dying.

    It is that refreshing.

    They could see all of their vital organs getting overly excited and they started overdoing their jobs. There is excessive production of all kinds of blood cells. Some tumours are formed in various tissues inside and they are beingbated by the existing cells.

    All of this happened within a few seconds and with their defences in full swing.

    At least on three sides these people were able to defend but on one side. The third team that has two of its people injured, had some serious damage because of this.

    Both of them were unable to deal with the beam. One of them got grazed and the other one got hit by it full swing.

    Apart from the elemental corrosion of different elemental energies, the vitality beam hit him. It started suppressing the death energy that is running rampant in his body at first, but before he could feel relieved, he could see the rest of the adverse about.

    His body''s every cell started overworking. Every tissue is over performing and it couldn''t stop.

    Before he knew it, he started spitting up blood from his orifices and fell unconscious with his brain short-circuiting.

    The person who got grazed by the beam felt something else. He got recovered a bit but also took some serious physical damage with elemental energy corrosion. He turned around and started running as he screamed into amunication device.

    "Boss, my partner is down. He is dead."

    The other people heard the news and fell silent. They didn''t expect that one of them would die that day. After all, they are right below the peak of the power within the realms. It is inconceivable for them to die like this.

    They suddenly felt like their n leader''s excessive paranoia was justified. There is no way this kind of weapon wouldn''t intimidate someone.

    They could kill people at their level, there is no saying what else they could do.

    "You run away. Save yourself."

    The leader said and he picked his partner before running away.

    He started running as fast as he can, But after taking a few steps, he already felt another beaming at him.

    "Fuck, that power attack and they don''t even need any time to restore? Just kind of lunatic was able to make something like this thing?"

    He cursed and took out some artefact before using it.

    "You better live buddy. I am sacrificing so much here."

    He muttered to his partner and used it.

    The artefactpletely enveloped them both as the beam was blocked by a massive barrier.

    The barrier took the full brunt of the attack and withstood most of it. Except for some residual force, nothing happened to both of them as they ran away.

 Chapter 1499 Departure

    Chapter 1499 Departure¡¡¡¡The elite team are running for their lives while carrying their partners. Except for the third pair.

    With the second beam that the carriers shot, the rest of the members managed to barely dodge it with all they had, but the remaining person in the third pair was unable to do so and took the brunt of the attack.

    He never knew that vitality could be used as a weapon. He never knew that his bodily functions could be used to kill him.

    By the time the second beam was done with him, he is barely alive.

    The carriers shot the third round of beams and finally, the beams hit someone in the second pair, while the first and fourth sessfully escaped.

    Two members died and the other two are barely alive when this is finally done.

    Philip called for Night Ghost and passed orders to collect all four of these and he did as he was told.

    After gathering them in the city, he examined the bodies of the dead people first. He left Night Ghost to take the souls away, before preparing them for something.

    He took out a very special vest and made the two corpses wear them. The vest has some needles inside that drilled themselves into the corpses as they sucked out the remaining blood, residual spiritual energy and even the deposits of elemental energy that were there because of the beam attack.

    After doing that, Philip then took out a cylinder that is afoot tall with a pipe half in diameter attached to it.

    He connected the pipe to a small duct in the vest before leaving the corpse be.

    He did the same with the other corpse.

    "After the procedure is done, crucify them at the entrance of the mansion."

    "Alright"

    Night ghost nodded.

    Philip was about to walk away but stopped when Night Ghost hesitantly asked something.

    "What about the other two? Do you want me to kill them first?"

    "No, I am reserving a very special thing for them. You don''t need to worry about it."

    "Okay."

    Philip walked away and met with Jack and Watt.

    "Our mission here is almost done. Finish off the other guards and officials from here. Kill them, collect the souls and go with the vest procedure before crucifying them."

    "Do you really want to leave? I mean, those people didn''t even manage to make it to the city. This is a great win, we can go with the momentum. The carriers are also full of energy."

    "I know it is a great thing, but things are not as simple. The only reason this worked is because of the conditions we created. The curse would have beenpletely useless, had they not entered the desert zone created by us.

    Their bodily regeneration and vitality would have kept the death energy at bay.

    Since they already learned the lesson with a huge price to pay, they wouldn''t be doing the same mistake again."

    "But we evacuated the city to do something big, I was really looking forward to it."

    "Don''t worry, we can still leave a very meaningful gift that will use the area of the whole city."

    Watt suddenly got excited when he heard Philip.

    "Are we doing it? Really?"

    "Stop being so excited. People will mistake you for a psychotic freak."

    Jack said and walked away to carry out the tasks.

    "Like I care."

    Watt also left after muttering. But everyone could see his excitement.

    Philip went to the two people that are barely alive. They are restrictedpletely without any treatment.

    He looked at both of them and thought of what to do with them.

    "I can''t believe I am really doing this. I thought I would never get a chance to do so."

    As he said that, he gestured for one of the subordinates to do something.

    The subordinate went to the two captives and started making them wear a vest. This one is different from the previous one though.

    This one has more inscriptions and more restrictions.

    There is also onerge duct on the back.

    "Bring them to carrier 1 and carrier 4. Use all of the remaining energy in those two."

    Philip ordered and the subordinates proceeded.

    They brought them to the carriers. The subordinates pulled out a veryrge pipe from the carrier and connected it to the duct on the vest.

    They ran back away and one of them took a deep breath before pulling down a lever.

    The multicoloured energy that was shot as beams a while ago, now surrounded this pipe as it channelled into the body of the captive.

    The energy is too much. Way too much for even an Astral ne Consummate cultivator.

    The energy channelled and filled up the body forcefully and it took over an hour before it waspletely done.

    But even with all of that excess energy, the body didn''t explode, instead, the whole body seemed to have turned into a fusion body with this multi-coloured energy.

    The vest kept all of the energy locked inside that body.

    "Be careful while moving him. Don''t touch him anywhere other than the vest."

    The person who performed the procedure informed his fellow subordinates. They nodded and carefully picked the guy as they took him to the main mansion, where the crucifixions are happening.

    Meanwhile, Watt busied himself with something else.

    He took out some crystal sticks. They are thin and three feet long. But they looked like they are carved out of some crystal material. It looked beautiful and ornamental.

    Watt excitedly ced a bunch of formation tes in different areas of the city first and activated them all at the same time.

    A weird light appeared all over the city and within these lights, there appeared some glowing spots on the ground.

    Watt moved on the silver wind as he stabbed one rod after another in these glowing spots.

    After making sure that every glowing spot was set up, he took all of the formation tes and went back to meet Philip and Jack.

    "I set up the formation. What about you guys?"

    "Crucifixions are over. The targets that escaped are nowhere to be seen. I think we are good to go."

    "Then, let''s move."

    They immediately took off. They stored three carriers in divine dimension fragments and took one off as they moved away from that city''s spot.

    From far away, the leader of the elite team saw this and gritted his teeth. He wanted to follow them, but he is injured.

    He never expected that he would taste such a humiliating defeat from some juniors. That too, without even being able to put any fight at all.

    This will remain in his head as long as he lives.

    He wanted to go back to the city and check its situation, but he decided not to. He is way too injured and the rest of the teammates are also not feeling that well.

    He decided to retreat immediately with the team.

    By night, the team went back to the Mari n and they reported the situation to the head of the n.

    "So, four of you died and you didn''t even manage to reach the city? Just how powerful is that machine that you are talking about?"

    "The beams are fast sir. Only peak stage Astral ne Consummate cultivators would be able to keep up with that speed. I highly doubt even the spatial elemental users would be able to do it if they are on the same level as me.

    It is almost an instantaneous attack."

    "What else did you find out?"

    The leader presented the corpses, and the ck pirs and also exined the bees, the undead bites, the painless phenomenon, everything that he could think of.

    "I will have the healers examine the bodies of these people. You guys go and rest up. We are in the war, I cannot have you be weak like this."

    "Thank you, sir."

    The leader saluted before leaving.

    The n''s leader has something going on in his mind as he thought of what to do next.

    The weapons that he described just now are really tempting.

    A beam that instantaneous is something he cannot pass up that easily.

    But the kids already left the city. He is kind of regretting not letting his right-hand man make a move earlier.

    Then he would have had those weapons in his direct control.

    Not like the weapons that are under Sivan''s control. Weapons under his direct control.

    He thought for a moment and called for his right-hand man anyway.

    "I want you to go to that city and investigate. From what the previous elite team said, there might be some traps there. I want you to see if they are saying the truth and also find out if you can estimate their next destination.

    I want to capture them. I want all of the weapons in their hands.

    Most importantly, don''t let this news get out, no matter what. All of this must be done as discreetly as possible.

    Do you understand?"

 Chapter 1500 Battle

    Chapter 1500 Battle¡¡¡¡The n leader''s right-hand man bowed down in agreement.

    The n leader looked at his subordinate.

    The subordinate has a bald head and a veryrge and sturdy figure. He ispletely jacked with muscles.

    But his eyes looked dead.

    "You are my trusted subordinate, that is why I am giving you this task. This is very important and precious for me. This will help me stabilize my power and position for the years toe.

    And I want you to find them and capture them. I want you to bring those three along with all of the equipment they have on their hands. I want you to help me achieve my ambition.

    The man nodded and bowed once again, before leaving.

    He went out of the n and used the public wormhole and took all of the public routes that led to the captured city.

    By the time, he arrived there, nothing was left.

    The city is as bare as a carcass feasted by vultures. There is not a single lifeform in the surroundings. Of course, the desert that was described by the elite team has disappeared long ago.

    The spiritual energy started recovering bit by bit after the time the carriers are removed.

    The man entered the city and wanted to investigate it. But as soon as he stepped inside the city, he sensed something.

    He jumped forward and rolled into a house.

    *BOOM*

    A spearnded on his previous location with an explosive sound that shook the surroundings.

    He nkly looked in the direction the spear came from.

    An old man is standing in a house not far away with a smug look on his face.

    "You dumb brute. You are here.

    I know that n leaders wouldn''t be sitting ducks. That greedy bastard. He is not satisfied with the n leader''s position and even craves more power.

    But I won''t let that happen. These kids are going to be mine and the equipment that is in their hands is also mine."

    He is the grand elder that disputed with Sivan oveing to this city.

    He gritted his teeth and took out another spear before lunging forward at the man.

    The man stayed calm and threw a fist at the old man''s spear.

    The airpressed itself into a shield at the edge of the fist before it blocked the spear pointing at him.

    The old man stepped back in a hurry as soon as he felt the pressure of the fist.

    The n leader''s subordinate, on the other hand, didn''t even budge. He still had that nk expression on his face as he made a move.

    He jumped forward with his fist aimed at the old man. The old man blocked it once again with his spear and attempted to stab it.

    The windshield appeared once again, the spear was unable to prate the shield and he was pushed back.

    This time, he also felt the spear vibrating continuously and making his arms go numb.

    The aftershock of the crash destroyed the house nearby and the subordinate only pushed forward without stopping.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    One sh after another, the fist and the spear collided again and again. The shockwaves started destroying the whole area and the houses fell down into rubble.

    The old man felt an overwhelming pressure as he felt the subordinate suppressing him with every move.

    "How can a servant like you be the owner of such great power? You are just supposed to be some dumb brute. How did you be so strong? You low-life."

    He became angrier and threw the spear away, before taking out another spear. This one ispletely ck with green patterns all over it. There are some snake designs on it here and there making it look like arge ck spear made from the bodies of coiled snakes.

    "I will kill you with this. Even if I have to use all of my strength, I will definitely kill you with this."

    The old man said seriously as he bit his tongue and spilt blood on the weapon.

    The green patterns on the spear turned bloodred.

    "Taste this cursed spear, you bloody low life."

    As he said, he gathered all of his energy into the spear and the surroundings turned chaotic. Even the spatial fabric around became tense as he lunged forward and stabbed the man.

    The legs of the old man turned stiff as the muscles were extended to a whole new level. The arm muscles were torn and the robe was torn apart.

    A spiritual energy storm started around him, all of it was concentrated into the spear and then into the tip and finally into the stab.

    The subordinate just stood there as he looked at all of the houses that arepletely destroyed and nothing was left standing within the surroundings.

    Even some of the crystal rods that Watt nted are flying over the air and crashing on the ground.

    *BOOM*

    A huge explosive sound came as the spear made contact with the subordinate. All the debris that hoveredpletely fell down.

    The debris and the rubble settled down.

    When the dust settled though. The old man who had a grin on his face, suddenly felt his whole life turning upside down.

    The subordinate is standing there with the same nk face.

    The spear barely made a nick on him as it entered his chest. It didn''t even go past his muscle fibres. He is as firm as a rock with barely some blood dripping from the chest and some from the mouth.

    The old man who used his strongest attack that destroyed half of the city just from the preparation felt like a little kid who saw the dangers of the world for the first time.

    Before he could even speak, the subordinate pulled his fist backwards and threw a punch straight into the face of the old man.

    *BAM*

    With a sound that felt like he hit a drum, the punchnded and the old man''s jaw broke before he flew through the air and hended far away.

    The subordinate ran after him and threw another punch, sending him flying again.

    This time, the old man tried his best to stand up and ran away from the subordinate into the main estate.

    When he entered through the main gate though, he was stunned.

    He looked at the crucified bodies of people and the two bodies that are tied back to back in front of all of the crucifixes.

    He shook his head toe out of the daze and was about to run inside.

    But before he could do that, the subordinate caught up and threw another punch at the back of the head of the old man.

    *CRACK*

    The skull-cracking sound came as the old man fell forward on the two corpses.

    The subordinate was about to follow him, but as soon as the old man touched the corpses, he felt that something is off.

    The two corpses that are wearing vests and filled with arge amount of energy are now thrown off of a bnce that they are maintaining to keep the loaded power in check.

    Now that they are gone, shit hit the ceiling.

    *BOOM*

    The corpses gave out an initial explosion of energy that created a wave across all of the city. Even the subordinate finally changed his expression after that.

    *BOOM*

    Another explosive ripple came and all of the crystal rods in the city. Some that were left untouched and some that were all over the ce because of the battle also started shining brightly.

    They are so bright that even the man and the old man far away could see as long as there are no obstacles between them on that brightly lit day.

    Before they could make sense, the third explosion came.

    *BOOM*

    The massive explosion covered the whole mansion and the rest of the wave covered the whole city.

    All of the rods that are in the position lit up even brighter while the ones that are not beingpletely destroyed.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    A series of random explosions urred from the rods that are not part of the formation.

    Then.

    *BOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM*

    A massive explosion followed as all of the rods that are in the formation exploded at the same time.

    The chaotic explosion waspletely restricted within the city and it went on for a few seconds before it disappeared.

    When the dust settled, all that was left in the spot of the city was arge crater that is over a few dozen meters deep and at the centre of it allid, two skeletons that are barely recognizable as skeletons.

    They are way too skinny to be normal skeletons. The bones are that worn off.

    One of the skeletons has a massive crack on the back of its skull and the other one has its two fists balled in. The second is also a bit taller than usual and its bones are much thicker than the previous one.

 Chapter 1501 Plaque

    Chapter 1501 que¡¡¡¡Far away from the captured city.

    On the sea. One of the carriers is floating slowly on the water and Philip is standing on top of it as he took in the view.

    Jack came running and reported.

    "The city exploded. The token just went off."

    Philip frowned as he looked at the dim token.

    "Already? They are much faster than we thought."

    "Of course, they are. Such greedy swine. What else can you expect from them."

    "So, what are we waiting for. We need to activate the puppet there and let it do its job."

    "I already did that. The activator puppet just left the carrier."

    "Great. Now, let''s just sit back and go to our next destination. The next surprise for the Mari n wouldn''t take long."

    As they are talking a small bird puppet is flying over the sea towards the shore.

    It flew for a few hours before it finallynded on a tree. After itnded, it raised its head and a small antenna popped out of its mouth sending some kind of signal.

    The signal activated something and around a hundred meters away, within a small rocky crevice, another bird puppet got activated. It flew out of the rocks and quickly flew towards the captured city.

    After it flew for a few hours, it alsonded on a tree and did the same as the first bird. Another bird activated a few meters away and started flying continuing the journey.

    This chain went on for three more birds and finally fifth bird reached the vicinities of the captured city. The bird hovered over therge-scale crater that appeared in the ce of the city and gave out the signal.

    A few hundred meters away, there are a bunch of bird puppets all bunched together and hidden in a valley.

    The puppets activated and then started carving the surrounding rocks at a rapid pace.

    After a few hours, they are done with what they needed to do and all of them together carried arge stone que.

    They brought it to the centre of the crater and nted it right beside the skeletons.

    On the stone que, the three words were carved.

    "DUSK HAS ARRIVED."

    After leaving the que there, the birds flew away before they blew up in the air leaving nothing behind.

    While this is happening, back in the Mari n. The n leader is pacing left and right in his chamber.

    There is a clear streak of nervousness on his face.

    He only stopped when he heard someoneing in without even asking.

    "What happened, husband? Why did you call me here?"

    A woman who seemed to be in her early thirties came inside gracefully as she took a seat.

    "I need your advice."

    "I already told you, I will not be involved in this whole n war and politics."

    "I don''t need you to make strategies for me. I just need a new perspective. An honest one."

    "What is it? Tell me."

    "I sent the Bald man to the captured city to gather evidence and find a trail of the three brats that escaped."

    "The three brats? The ones that Sivan stressed on not doing anything against?"

    "Yes. When I found out how powerful their equipment is, I couldn''t control myself and sent the Bald man. Butter I found out that the Grand elder is also missing from the n. He must have gone there."

    "So, what? Bald man is strong. I am pretty sure, he is stronger than that old bag of bones."

    "Yes, he is. That is what I thought. The most that would happen is the grand elder escaping. But things didn''t go like that.

    I lost the soul link I had with the Bald man a few hours ago.

    Thedy finally showed a change in her facial expressions. All this while, he is calm, and confident and there is a hint of elegance and grace even in her face.

    But when he heard the news, she felt like something horrifying has happened.

    "What the hell do you mean, by you lost the soul link?"

    "I literally mean just that. I lost the link with him."

    "That means, he died."

    "I don''t know that."

    "What is there for you to know? Only death can make your soul link disappear."

    "But I don''t think we should confirm it before we see any evidence."

    "You bloody bastard in denial. He is dead. That is all there is to it. ept that and find the old grand elder who went after him.

    Go and interrogate him to find out any news from him."

    "I thought of that too, but there is no news about the Grand elder. In fact, even the wife of Grand elder is extremely busy and frantic. I got some info from one of their subordinates and he spilt that the Jade life token of the Grand elder broke."

    The expression of the womanpletely changed and she stood up abruptly.

    "You lost a grand elder and your most trusted right-hand man and you are asking your wife for advice leisurely?

    What the fuck is wrong with you? You are at a war with the Gaja n. The GAJA n. You cannot lose people of that strength just like that?

    A junior is working his ass off to strengthen the n so much. The divine league has partnered with you to destroy the enemy that has been on your throat for a century and you lost two of your elites.

    Particrly one of them who will literallyy his life for you.

    What the fuck? Are you so dumb?"

    She scolded him left and right until she could calm down.

    "What do you want me to do?"

    "Go and check the status. Find what exactly happened in the area. Don''t let the news leak out to others before you know what the further status is.

    Keep Sivan busy with whatever he is doing. Give him free rein on attacking the Gaja n if you have to. Don''t let him feel any leisure whatsoever."

    The n leader nodded continuously and immediately went out to do as he was told.

    He sent someone to check the captured city.

    After that, he went to meet Sivan.

    "Sivan, you don''t need to worry about getting approvals and demonstrations for the grand elders. If you find that one of the weapons is going to make hell for the Gaja n. Go and do it."

    Sivan frowned and asked.

    "Why are you being so generous all of a sudden?"

    "I don''t want to let the Gaja n have a breathing space because of our stupid internal decisions. Go with all you got."

    Sivan was still a bit suspicious, but he didn''t care about it too much.

    He just went off and issued a bunch ofmands immediately.

    "Take all of the undead creatures we collected andnd them on the Gaja n''s territory."

    "But they are not going to help us at all."

    The subordinate said with confusion.

    "Of course, they are going. They are going to emit enough dead energy in the surroundingnd to assist our future attacks. Go ahead and do it now.

    Also, equip them all with all of our cursed objects. Don''t leave them at all. If by any chance, any scout falls into these undead creatures, he should at least be hit by a few cursed weapons before dying.

    Send thunder eagle puppet regiment too. They need to attack the domes at regr intervals and escape as soon as they do.

    Tell them to practice all of the formations they were trained in.

    I don''t care if they can really do any damage. But the dome should be swarmed with the attacks.

    I don''t believe whatever energy source the Gaja n has will help themst through all of this and I don''t believe that Sam can maintain this formation for so long."

    While Sivan is sending out orders and massive equipment is moving from the Mari n''s territory, the person that was sent by the Mari n''s leader reached the captured city and he was shocked by what he saw.

    Therge scale crater looked like a valley as it spanned to the area of the city.

    It looked so big andrge that it made him feel terrified to even go to the middle of it.

    But he noticed the stone que and he didn''t have a choice other than to check it.

    After seeing the que, he was stunned.

    The three words stuck in his mind and he came back to the Mari n to report the whole thing to his boss.

    Meanwhile, Philip, Watt and Jack already reached their next destination.

    They didn''t go to any city or vige, instead, they are floating around in the sea and they could see the shore through a telescope.

    There is a beach and a port which ispletely full of people.

    Several people are fishing on the fishing boats.

    Behind the port and the beach, there is arge town that is bustling with people.

    "Our next target. Here we are."

 Chapter 1502 Water Tower

    Chapter 1502 Water Tower¡¡¡¡Philip looked at the bustling shore and took a deep breath of the fresh salty wind of the sea.

    "Activate the camouge."

    He spoke in themunication token. Within a few minutes, the carrier and Philip disappeared from the spot as they merged with the rest of the water and the background.

    Philip looked at the city constantly as watched a translucent barrier cover the whole carrier and him.

    "So, are we really doing this now?"

    Jack asked from the side.

    "Why? You don''t want to?"

    "Why would I not want to? I just really want to see what this thing can do."

    "Really? You are more excited about the water tower? I thought you would be more interested in the de serpent."

    "Of course, I am interested in that. But I am really intrigued with what this water tower can do. I looked into the blueprints and even asked the artisans who made this. I don''t know how effective it is going to be."

    "Well, most of it is based on Sam''s adventures in the Charbhum realm. I am also intrigued about what this could do."

    "So, when are we starting it?"

    "Right now."

    Philip smiled and he spoke in themunication token.

    "Activate the water tower."

    After that, he threw the divine dimension fragment into the water. A few operators jumped into the water with diving equipment and tfish puppets.

    One of them picked up the divine dimension fragment and swam to the seabed.

    After some time, arge blue coloured crystal tower appeared in the middle of the tree.

    The tower looked like it was carved out of dark blue ice. As if a single piece ofrge ice block was sculpted carefully with a single by a single artisan.

    Several vents opened at the bottom section of the tower as several vines that looked like tentacles came out of those ducts and entered the sea bed.

    They dug smoothly as if they are just going through the butter. Arge amount of water elemental energy started moving from the seafloor and the surrounding water into the tower body and it channelled throughout the whole tower constantly.

    After fifteen minutes, a small blob of bright blue coloured energy appeared on top of the tower and floated away.

    The blob moved into the water and floated for a while before it fell to the seafloor.

    A ck rock sea turtle that was on the side swallowed the blob as soon as it saw it.

    A blue glow appeared on its body before it fell asleep with its eye closed.

    Another fifteen minutester, another blob appeared on it before it fell into the seafloor. This time, there is no sea creature that came.

    After two minutes, the blob is covered with another transparent water bubble whichter turned into a bit thicker and darker. The surrounding soil moved away and a small water current circled around the blob continuously.

    Within another fifteen minutes, the ball slowly turned into arge scale humanoid creature that is glowing and covered with a dark wateryer over it.

    The creature turned to the side and looked around for a while before it zoomed through the water.

    It stopped on top of the turtle which opened its eyes. The eyes started glowing and there are some blue patterns on the back of the turtle that also started glowing.

    The turtle and the weird blue creature started swimming towards the shore.

    Philip who is standing on top of the carrier is looking into arge crystal screen that he held in his hand.

    There are two blinking objects that could be clearly seen on them. One with a turtle symbol and the other with a humanoid symbol.

    "So, why did we choose this ce again? An operator said, there is a muchrge city a few hundred miles south from here."

    "Well, this one has an estuary on the side. The river current connects to this and that river leads to another big city which is on the river bank.

    We can take down two things as well as the river route all for ourselves."

    Philip exined to Jack who is also looking at the tablet.

    Jack proceeded to ask more questions about the tower and what it does as more and more spots kept on appearing one after the other.

    At first, the process was slow and only one blob came out every fifteen minutes, but as time passed, the process started speeding up and before they knew it, one blob came out every five minutes.

    The blobs hit the seafloor and some of them are consumed by other sea creatures, like crabs, turtles, sharks and fish.

    But most of them arending on the seafloor and started swimming towards the shore slowly.

    After one hour, Philip and Jack stopped observing the tablet and took out their telescopes to take a look at the shore.

    At this moment, near the shore. At the beach, the turtle that appeared first came straight out of the water.

    The guards of the beach looked at the turtle and immediately made a move on it while rming the rest of the people.

    The turtle which should have been slow didn''t have any of those qualities as it started moving toward the soldiers at a rapid pace.

    It started attacking the guards without any regard for its life.

    As two guards are about to attack the turtle, one of them suddenly had arge water spear dug into his back and died on the spot.

    The water humanoid creature appeared from the water and stood on the beach.

    It extended both of its hands and two water spears were formed out of the ocean water as they shot the second guard who had his hands pierced and the turtle came forward, bit off his head and swallowed it all in one smooth motion.

    The humanoid water creature then aimed the water spears at the people that are rxing on the beach and started attacking them indiscriminately.

    The turtle also ran towards them to eat them up.

    But by now the forces were alerted and they came to confront these creatures.

    The leader of the soldiers looked at the weird water creature and the turtle with a frown.

    "Isn''t that a ck rock Sea turtle? Why is it glowing blue?" He muttered in confusion before he ran forward with a spear of his own.

    He aimed it at the turtle first, while his subordinates went after the humanoid figure by themselves.

    The humanoid water creature didn''t even stand a chance when four to five of them surrounded it. It didn''t even back down though.

    It stayed on the sandy beach as it was surrounded and taken down by the guards as it couldn''t attack back.

    But the guards are having some serious confusion while they are attacking the creature. Their weapons and attacks directly went through the creature and it felt like they are stabbing and hitting a jelly.

    The creature, on the other hand, started slowing down with more hits and the upper dark wateryers werepletely gone. As soon as the inner glowing part of the creature was exposed.

    *BOOM*

    An explosion happened from it and the whole glowing part of it exploded.

    It turned into various droplets of glowing liquid that were sshed sharply in all directions. The guards who are standing fell backwards because of the aftereffect of the explosion and felt a burning sensation on their skin.

    There are several small holes that looked like they are made of pin needles on their skin as some blood seeped out.

    They tried to stand up and get back on their feet, but all of a sudden, they felt their whole body turning cold. The bleeding from the small pin-sized holes stopped and they felt their legs and arms turn heavy.

    They stood up with all of their might as they felt the burning sensation on their bodies.

    Meanwhile, the leader of the ground defeated the turtle, but before he could finish it off, it went back into the sea to the ce where the tower was located.

    As soon as it turned its back though, as the leader was trying to follow the sea turtle, he was stopped as ten more weird creatures made of blobs and water came out of the waves.

    He was stunned by their sudden appearance.

    They are followed by a bunch of crabs that came forward and started attacking.

    "I could use some help guys."

    The leader turned to his subordinates, who are trying their best to join the battle.

    They took all kinds of medicine they could get their hands on and tried to focus on the battle.

    They even managed to fend off one crab along with their boss and moved to some of the creatures.

    But as they were about to make a move, one of them stopped in their tracks and fell off the ground face first.

 Chapter 1503 Red Creature

    Chapter 1503 Red Creature¡¡¡¡The leader looked at the first subordinate fell down.

    He didn''t even know what happened. There are not any notable injuries. There is no bleeding. It is like the man died on the spot without any reason.

    But that is just the start. Another person died right after the first and that one is followed by the third and then the fourth.

    One guard after another, they all fell down.

    Only the leader was left behind, who was surrounded by a bunch of these humanoid water creatures and to his dismay, he is fighting with them in the waves.

    At the spot where no matter how much, he tried to destroy them, the water creatures are using the surrounding water to make aeback.

    Before he knew the guard leader is trapped in the middle of a dozen of these creatures.

    All of them made a move and he is enveloped in arge water bubble, swallowing tons of seawater as he drowned in it.

    The water creatures looked around and noticed that there is no one in the surroundings. They picked up the dead bodies of the people and started going back into the sea.

    They swam back to the tower andid down the dead bodies near the tower on the seafloor.

    As they watched, a few very thin tentacles came out of the tower and impaled into the dead bodies.

    The tentacle that hit the guard leader, started sucking the blood. It is thin and flowing just like a normal person''s blood, but the same thing couldn''t be said to the rest of the guards.

    The tentacle is transparent and if anyone could see it, they would have noticed that the blood is thick and a bit like a translucent slime.

    It is so thick that it is impossible to flow. If not for the strong sucking force of the tentacle, it wouldn''t even be possible for it toe out of the body with that thickness.

    The blood was sucked into the tower.

    A few humanoid creatures, buried the rest of the bodies into the ground on the seafloor, before they swam toward the shore.

    Now, they went for the port instead of the beach.

    While they are making their way there, to the port, everything is bustling even more than usual.

    The port authorities gathered together.

    "We got a report about some weird sea creatures popping at the beach. The beach guards are killed and even their bodies are gone. We need to start investigating. We are activating the emergency protocol.

    Send all of the people on the boats back into the city. We are taking all of the boats and we need to investigate what happened as fast as possible."

    The person in charge of the port ordered his subordinates.

    He is ate-stage transcendent stage cultivator of the Astral ne. Apparently not that strong. Most of his subordinates are in the initial stages and middle stages of the same realm.

    But he is confident about investigating what happened and directed all of his subordinates to go and prepare.

    A group went on to the first ship and started preparing it to set sail as a scouting party.

    But as they were in the middle of preparing the ship.

    *CRASH*

    Four long, think and sharp water streams were shot upwards they pierced through the bottom of the ship and broke through everything on the way until they destroyed the top and broke the whole thing in half.

    The ship started drowning immediately and the guards who fell into the water along with the ship were surrounded by the glowing humanoid water creatures.

    They all attacked them and tried to drown them in the water without giving them any chance to recover.

    The water spears streaked through as frothy water turned bloody. The person in charge of the port was shocked as he looked at the bloody waters, frothing vigorously suddenly calmed down.

    Not even a single dead body floated. All of them were taken away by the creatures.

    "Call the city lord. I cannot handle this problem. This is way out of our league.

    Tell everyone to stay away from the waters. Tell them to move us deeper into thend as possible. Nobody is to stay anywhere near the shore."

    After ordering, he started moving all of the important documents in his office and went to meet the city lord himself.

    By the time, he went there, the news already reached the city lord because of his subordinates.

    "How is the situation there?"

    The city lord asked with a frown.

    "We can''t say. The creatures didn''te out after they attacked the ships. When I wasing here, they have destroyed all kinds of ships, irrespective of their sizes and kinds.

    It seems like they are iming the sea for themselves."

    "Are you sure they are not cultivators?"

    "No. They don''t have a face, eyes, nose or mouth. They arepletely t-faced. They are glowing and the water barrier around them is almost impossible to defeat when they are in the water.

    That is the report I got.

    From what I saw when they are destroying the ships and crew, they can use the water of the sea to their will as long as they are in it.

    They recover pretty quickly too."

    "So, we need to lure them out and kill them."

    "That is the only possibility that I see."

    They discussed various ns based on the information they have.

    For the next few hours, there is no activity from these creatures. They arepletely silent. The city lord took this time to create barricades and arrange soldiers at the edge of the city. He also evacuated the people from the outer circles of the city to stay deeper inside temporarily.

    They waited for four hours. But there is not a single trace of the creatures on the shore.

    Meanwhile, the sea is riddled with these humanoid creatures and several sea creatures that swallowed the blobs.

    There are more than a hundred of these creatures and the speed of the blobsing out changed from one every five minutes to, one every two minutes.

    And its speed kept on increasing with time.

    Apart from that, there is also another change.

    With the input of the corpses and their blood, a small section of the tower turned into bright blood-red from the blue.

    After it became bright enough to stand outpletely even in that dark deep sea, it moved to the top and a red glowing blob came out of the top.

    Itnded on the ground and soon it started turning into the big red glowing humanoid creature. Even the water that came into contact with the creature and became its armour turned red.

    The creature is a bit taller than the rest and it looked way stronger. The rest of the creaturespletely gave way to it as they let it lead the way.

    As dusk arrived, the sea started shining with dozens of these glowing orbs as they made their way to the shore with the red creature in the lead.

    The city lord was stunned when he saw the hundred or so creatures and beastsing onto the shore and gulped down.

    He moved to the front lines andmanded.

    "Archers and other long-range attackers, attack without discrimination. Use your full power. Don''t hold back.

    Closebat shouldn''t be engaged until they are far away from the sea.

    Don''t give them chase or fight them closely when they are near the sea."

    Hemanded as he took out his sword and got ready.

    The ranged attacks were made on the creatures from the barricade, but there is only so much damage the arrows did to the creatures, particrly the red creatures. Even though a lot of attacks were focused on it, nothing happened.

    The only thing they did is slow down the creatures as they ran forward with extreme speed. The beasts in particr are making this very difficult as they too most of the attacks voluntarily.

    By the time, they needed to engage in closebat, less than ten water creatures were dead.

    The city lord held his sword tightly and made his move against the red creature,

    He is a Peak stage transcendent cultivator of the Astral ne.

    But even he is feeling a bit afraid of the red creature when he saw it.

    He started attacking it. The red creature started throwing red coloured water spears. It barely dodged anything and it is certainly not skilled at the battle techniques.

    As they shed, the red creature only cared about one thing which weirded out the city lord.

    And that is touching him constantly.

    The red creature blocked the attacks with its slimy body and focused on touching the body directly.

    For the first few times, he really didn''t understand, what is happening. The only thing he could think of is that the shield on the body slowly drained down in brightness and weakened.

    But before he could get happier because of this situation, he faced something that sent shivers down his spine.

 Chapter 1504 City lords death

    Chapter 1504 City lord''s death¡¡¡¡As the red water creature enveloped the city lord''s arm and he suddenly felt a sharp pain in it.

    It is not a piercing pain of a stab, and definitely not the pain of his flesh torn apart. It is a very different kind of pain that he has never felt.

    There is also something else that made his mood go from solemn to fear.

    Because the pain came from his blood being sucked out of his skin and pores. There is a faint red spotted pattern on it and before his eyes, the red creature recovered at a visible rate.

    "What the fuck is this?"

    He cursed out loud with a shivering voice. The voice was quaking with fear and the subordinates in the surrounding area stopped what they are doing for a second, only to see the red water creature envelop the city and started sucking his blood.

    Except for the face of the city lord, every part of his skin is releasing blood as the red water moved all over his skin.

    He felt like he is being pierced with needles from the inside out.

    He couldn''t even scream out loud as he swallowed the red water and filled his own lungs quickening the whole process.

    The other water creatures immediately, went and destroyed the distracted subordinates and caught hold of their deadbodies as they ran towards the sea.

    "Don''t let them escape. We can''t let them humiliate us like this."

    One of the righteous soldiers screamed and ran towards the water creatures that are escaping with deadbodies.

    That left his back wide open for other creatures and he never came back. In hisst second, all he saw is his fellow soldiers retreating deeper, not willing to get entangled along with him.

    His dead body was also dragged by the rest of the creatures.

    Some creatures died in the battle and exploded. The glowing substance prated into the skins of the soldiers in the surroundings.

    The rest of the creatures that arepletely fine picked a dead body each and ran towards the sea once again and the city lord is also taken away just like that.

    The rest of the people immediately retreated. No one wanted to fight the creatures to death with their leader gone.

    The deputy who is next inmand is also quivering behind the city walls while his superior was taken away.

    He was actually looking forward to the day when his superior died, but that day, he really wished that guy was alive that day. He doesn''t want to face whatever the situation was in front of him.

    The soldiers that retreated inside started approaching the Deputy.

    But he is not responding to them.

    He didn''t know what to do and as the pressure mounted up more and more, he gave out one excuse that he could think of.

    "Since even the city lord couldn''t handle this situation, I am also clueless. I will go and visit the superiors in the city to find out a proper solution for this."

    "How can you leave now, Deputy City lord? Since the city lord is dead, you are the one in charge. I will go and talk with the superiors in the city. You stay and protect the port city."

    An official voiced his objections immediately. He doesn''t want to leave the opportunity to move to a safer ce.

    But that official is not the only one with those kinds of thoughts. There are others too who volunteered with enthusiasm.

    But the deputy who is the strongest obviously didn''t let them have their way.

    He adamantly took on the task and left the city.

    Philip, Jack and Watt are just checking out the blinking images that are appearing on the screen. They didn''t even care about what is happening in the city.

    "So, how many red ones can we get now?"

    "Well, with the corpses they collected freshly, a dozen wouldn''t be a problem."

    "The speed is also increasing. This is going to be a living nightmare."

    "Well, it is just the beginning. There are three more towers left and I am going to nt them now. Let''s see what will happen now."

    "Three more towers, here?" Jack asked with shock.

    "Of course, why would I not use them."

    "The city will be destroyed instantly if you use them all. Isn''t it going to be a waste?"

    "No, it is not. We are going to let the creatures rest. They are going to stay in the sea for a while, let them umte in the sea for a while.

    Let the people from the main citye back before we do anything. Meanwhile, if they grow excess, we can send them somewhere else."

    As Philip said it, the crew already made their move and nted new towers in the surrounding sea and the creatures already started emerging one by one.

    Meanwhile, the Deputy immediately left the city without waiting for the others to object to his journey.

    He didn''t even care what they would think of him. All he wanted was to escape and he went slowly without any trouble. He took his sweet time and reached the city by the next day.

    Inside the city, the city lord met with the Deputy of the port city immediately.

    "What are you here for? I heard that there is some trouble in the port city, shouldn''t you be managing that trouble?"

    "I am here because of the trouble itself. It is not manageable. The city lord diedst night."

    The city lord went silent and asked.

    "The port city lord diedst night?"

    "Yes."

    "Then why didn''t I receive the news immediately?"

    "I¡­ I don''t know how to handle the situation and I had to think it through before I decided toe by myself to inform you about it."

    "What is there to think about? Bloody idiot. Do you know the kind of situation we are in? We are in a war with the Gaja n? Can we even afford to lose people like this? Your city lord is one of the best fighters in his cultivation ne and you lost him just like that?

    He was supposed to lead a special water elemental user team to the Gaja n''s territory. Young master Sivan asked for him."

    The deputy was dumbfounded, he doesn''t even know what to say.

    "I don''t know anything about it sir. The fightst night was very weird and unnatural. We were caught off guard by these weird creatures and the trouble went out of hand when the city lord died.

    I immediately started and came here to inform you."

    "What do you mean immediately started? You would have been here at midnight. You took your sweet time. You bloody coward.

    The worst part is, I still cannot go to Port city now. I will send the guardmander, with you. Go and make sure that you take his instructions and work with him.

    You need to avert whatever this problem is no matter what."

    "Yes, sir."

    The deputy left the room and soon he was met with themander of the city.

    Both of them travelled back at full speed.

    They arrived at the port city by afternoon.

    The city is as peaceful as ever.

    There is not a single sign of attack fromst night as the people already cleaned it up.

    The blue creatures and red creatures didn''t show up again and neither did the sea beasts.

    Themander went to the port where the attack happened by himself as he checked the surroundings.

    He is an Initial stage Consummate cultivator. He is not afraid of whatever killed the city lord, since he heard from the Deputy''s report that it took a lot of effort from the red creature.

    After checking that there are no signs of these creatures, he went back to the city and started questioning people.

    One of the port workers had a rather perfect image of what happened and exined everything to him.

    "So, you are saying that creatures that have a glowing inner structure covered with dark blue gel-like bodies with no faces whatsoever came out of the sea by themselves and attacked everyone randomly before they went back into the city along with the corpses?"

    "Yes, that is exactly what happened?"

    "Are you sure they are not some people in disguise?"

    "I am sure sir. Because the beach guards actually killed one and it exploded in their faces."

    "Are there any other triggers when they came? The environmental conditions?"

    "No, Sir. I cannot think of any. Everything is perfectly normal."

    Themander investigated along these lines, while Philip made the next move.

    The sea in the surroundings is riddled with these blue creatures and now with hismands, they started moving in a different direction.

    They swam to shore where it is connected to the river and entered the explosive stream.

    They slowly started swimming upstream as they made their way through the river that is flowing through the forest.

 Chapter 1505 Thunder eagle set

    Chapter 1505 Thunder eagle set¡¡¡¡Themander stayed in the city for the whole day, but he couldn''t find anything that caught his eye.

    Now he is in the dilemma of going into the sea and investigating it.

    While the things on the trio''s side are going smoothly¡­

    At Gaja n''s city.

    The city''s crystal dome has been active for the past few days. Since the time the Energy crackers made an appearance, not a single moment has passed without the crystal dome formation protecting the city.

    After some more futile efforts, Gail and Gamin figured out that the shooter who is attacking them with an Energy cracker is actually using spatial transference to change locations which is the reason they were not able to narrow him down as they initially thought he is moving normally.

    But after they figured that out, it became easy and they finally managed to catch up with him.

    Of course, as soon as he caught a glimpse of them, the shooter immediately forsook all of the equipment and directly used his escape tactics.

    Even then Gail took off a leg from that guy and he brought back the shooter that was already loaded with a cracker.

    From that point, Sam started examining the cracker a bit and came to a conclusion.

    "They can''t make too many of them. We don''t need to worry too much."

    That is what he said to Gail who was relieved, but also confused.

    "Why can''t they make too many of them?"

    "Imagine if you are forging something in the mes and for you to quench it, you will need all the water in the sea, would you still do it?"

    "Of course not. Who in the right mind will do it?"

    "Currently, Sivan is doing such a thing with the crackers. Even if the seawater is free for him to use, it is still a lot of time and effort just for the quenching.

    Just like that, even if the crackers are useful and dangerous, he needs way too many things and way too many and way too many things to make them.

    We don''t have to worry about it. They are going to be asional threats and I will be able to figure out something that could handle them. I am already halfway through anyway."

    "That is good news. A great start to the day."

    That is what Gail said andter that morning, he realized that he jinxed himself.

    Because that is the day, Sivan got free reign over the war situation with the Gaja n. At the time the leader of the Mari n wanted to divert Sivan''s attention with the Gaja n as a toy.

    Hundreds of undead are unleashed on the Gaja n as they constantly hit the formation constantly.

    They are solely targeting the Crystal dome and all of them are equipped with some kind of cursed weapons.

    Even when they are being destroyed, their remains areying down curses on thend. When Gail saw the whole scene, he felt disgusted.

    The undead bodies are a bit different from normal.

    There is a ck liquid constantlying out of them and this ck liquid has a bunch of disgusting curses injected into it.

    He could imagine what would happen if a normal person enters the field even after all the undead are cleared.

    They would be subjected to hundreds of curses and die a terrible death.

    And even for that to happen, they will need to clear the undead first.

    But they areing constantly. They are never-ending.

    Gail almost wanted to go out himself and destroy all of them, but Sam stopped him from doing that.

    "There are some advantages of random curses in and."

    "But those advantages wouldn''t stand if every soldier that goes out thereter suffers from a curse on their ass."

    "Why do you think I am here? I can make sure that doesn''t happen. You just don''t worry about the undead creatures. They cane."

    "But isn''t it damaging the formation a lot?"

    "No, it is not. Luckily since we are taking the energy from the spiritual veins that have been mostly dormant over the years, it is good enough."

    So, Sam finally managed to convince Gail that there is no need for extreme measures when they are dealing with these undead creatures.

    But that changed soon enough.

    *BAM*

    Particrly when they heard the lightning strikes that came from the top and hit the crystal dome at the topmost point.

    Sam and Gail frowned as they looked at the blue-purple lightning hit the head of the dome and the dome fluctuated.

    Both of them went on to a higher vantage point to get a better view and the lightning kept on striking one after another.

    The formation fluctuated a lot and some of the undead creatures that were blocked by it managed to slip in because of this.

    The soldiers at the start were caught off guard, but soon recovered and killed the undead before the formation went back to its original state.

    Both Sam and Gail are extremely frustrated as they looked at the top of the dome.

    Sam in particr had a bad premonition about this as he muttered something to himself.

    And when the clouds were cleared, he couldn''t help but curse out loud.

    "FUCK."

    Gail frowned when he looked at Sam who was usually calm cursed out like that.

    There are a few people hovering in the air with some kind of weird armours surrounding them. They are all in a formation and lightning strands connected them together as they glided with some wings in that certain formation.

    Some bird puppets that have lightning elements coursing through them also moved along with them.

    They are all in lightning formation.

    Gail frowned as he recognized some of the faces.

    "They are mostly Astral ne Consummate cultivators in the Initial stage. How are they able to do this?"

    He asked out loud.

    "The thunder eagle set."

    Sam said with gritted teeth.

    "The thunder eagle set?"

    "Yes. I didn''t think Sivan would be able to do it. He really does have some seriously skilled people under him. People that are more skilled than the Giyon''s subordinates and the Gaja n''s artisan department.

    How did he even find people like that?"

    "We can think about it after I bring them down."

    Gail said and was about to jump upwards, but Sam stopped him.

    "There is no use."

    As soon as he said that, the people in the formation in the sky made their move. All of them went through the fusion process and shed together as if they became one big lightning entity.

    And they streaked at that same lightning speed and moved far away as they reappeared in the sky a few miles away.

    Gail was surprised.

    "What the fuck is that?"

    "The thunder eagle set. A set that I thought for a special destruction squad.

    This is one of my better creations. It works wonders when the users are really skilled at manipting lightning and can work together."

    "That I can see. But how does it work? How can we defeat that?"

    "The thunder eagle set consists of exoskeletons that would help these people glide in the air individually, but with their lightning fusion and connection they could get as a set, they can glide and hover for much longer than normal.

    And with the skeletons and puppetspletely active, there is a set of formations that I designed that will rain down lightning on their targets in different ways.

    The one you saw is the regr lightning strike that hits on one point.

    But that is not all.

    They have another technique that makes them more annoying than their ability to attack from the sky.

    That is their escaping.

    The thunder eagle setes with some extra special puppets that they can ce at many spots in the surroundings and when they use their escape technique, all of them should be in their fusion forms and are fused together like a single streak of lightning.

    They have real and legitimate lightning speed.

    They move from their starting spot to that puppet''s location and reappear there.

    It is hard even for you to directly catch them when they use that technique."

    "What kind of thought process did you go through when making this? How is that even possible? Merging people in fusion forms to make them act like a single streak of lightning?

    Is that even a proper thought?"

    "Apparently it is, as you can see for yourself. It worked. I am pretty sure, even you would have trouble catching them with that. Do you disagree?"

    Gail didn''t even have an answer for that.

    "As for the thought process, there is not really much. I don''t think of the oue first and then make these things. I am just a creator who thinks of all of the possibilities that could be drawn from a set of resources.

    And then I will find a way to use all of those oues effectively. That is how these are created.

    It is just that, I am cursed."

 Chapter 1506 Another Argument

    Chapter 1506 Another Argument¡¡¡¡Sam and Gail looked at each other in silence for a brief moment, before both of them went away.

    "So, what are we going to do about the Thunder eagle set? It obviously is a problem for us and we don''t know, how many more they have. We need to figure out a way immediately."

    Gail asked in a solemn tone.

    "Don''t worry about it. I know how a thunder eagle set works. It might be a destructive one, but I think I can find a way to diffuse it very quickly."

    "Really?"

    "Yeah, there are some perks of being the creator of some things. I have a solution to every problem I ever created. But currently, it is in a theoretical stage. I need to reverse engineer the working principle of the thunder eagle set a bit before I could make a practical solution feasible.

    Give me two days."

    "Are you sure you can handle this all in such a short time? You are having a hard time as it is. You still need to work on the undead situation, the Lava worm situation and the energy cracker.

    It is going to take a lot out of you."

    "Don''t worry about it.

    All you need to do is to keep a Peak stage Astral ne Consummate cultivator on top of the building and tell them tobat the lightning whenever ites.

    Tell them to asionally create a disturbance big enough, over the sky so that there wouldn''t be any stability

    It will stop them from using some extreme attacks. I will finish something in the next two days and you can rest assured after that."

    Sam went back into theb and this time, he started making rapid calctions and designs. His brain is working in hyper mode and by the end of the night, he already had his very first design needed for the remedy.

    The next morning, the artisans are ready with the first prototype and Sam started performing experiments to see if it works.

    But it failed a few times before he could find any approach or a clue that could help him progress

    After several tinkerings with the prototype for the whole day and many more failed experiments, he finally managed to figure it out by the second day morning and gave the n to Gail.

    "It might be crude and take a lot out of your resources, but this thing definitely works. I assure you."

    After saying that, Sam went back to theb as he worked on preparing for the next things toe.

    Gail looked at the design and gave it to the construction team.

    The design will take at least two more days to finish the construction and meanwhile, they are taking shifts to counter the Thunder eagle set.

    But their attempts showed little results as most of the time the thunder eagle set managed to have a different formation to counter their ns.

    So, the formation took some toll here and there and in process of recovery, the undead always managed to invade.

    In this process, some of the soldiers are stuck with some serious curses which were left for Sam''s spectre who is already preparing for something big to resolve.

    Sam never felt so busy. Even when he was constructing a whole new city back in the Deste realm, he was never this busy.

    While things are going on like this, the news of the Dusk organization''s exploits started entering the Gaja n.

    They still have some informationworks that are based on their connections left outside.

    And the effect of the Dusk organization is the only sce for most of the Gaja n members as they are under constant attack from the Mari n.

    Sam who heard these, couldn''t help but feel proud of his friends. He even wanted to go to Gail and brag straight at his face.

    But he controlled the urge as he focused on the task at hand.

    Since his friends are doing their best to destroy the organization, he cannot fall behind. Particrly when he heard of the disappearance of the captured city, he knew that the trio is ying big.

    So, he went deeper into his work with much more enthusiasm.

    While Sam is hyped up and pumped because of the current situation, Sivan who is Sam''s current archenemy is feeling down in the dumps.

    At this exact moment, he is confronting another grand elder.

    "What the fuck is wrong with you, old geezers? Why the fuck are you guys stopping me? The n''s leader gave me a full authority on the Gaja n attack, so I can do whatever the fuck I want."

    "That is then, this is now. You are not going to use all of your resources at the same time on the Gaja n. Until we figure out what this dusk organization is all about, we are not going against the Gaja n."

    The Grand elder directly refused.

    Both of them didn''t even argue anymore and went directly to the n''s leader.

    "What is it again?"

    He asked with an exhaustive tone. He is indeed very exhausted. With the deaths of two Peak stage Consummate cultivators of Astral ne, he has be cautious of everything.

    He left Sivan to take over the Gaja n attack until the war bes full-blown. That is the only reason he was a bit less stressed.

    But the Dusk organization''s situation is bing more and more chaotic day by day.

    At the moment, the units of dusk organization are popping up at various random spots within the Mari n''s territory and they are destroying whatever they could get their hands on.

    Cities, towns, viges, businesses, mines, and fields, didn''t discriminate as they came, destroyed and went away, before leaving a note.

    Apart from that, the captured city incident is a bit more troublesome. There is not a single trace of any evidence left.

    Now, it has caught up to his neck.

    "n leader, the dusk organization is an enemy Sivan made because he stole the body of their leader.

    So, I believe he must be handling this issue before we proceed with anything against the Gaja n.

    The Gaja n is already in an enclosed state. That is a trapped beast, we can finish it off whenever we want with a full-blown attack.

    Since Sivan has so many reservations regarding the killing of these Dusk organization leaders, let him handle it first before we focus on the Gaja n."

    "What do you mean by that Grand elder? So, the Dusk organization is my enemy and my enemy alone? The body is not the only thing that is stolen from the leader of the Dusk organization, I also stole all the ideas and the designs for the equipment that is currently leading this war.

    Why don''t we stop using thempletely before finishing off the dusk organization then? Anyway, I will focus on the dusk organization first, then you wouldn''t be able to operate the machinery and manage the production.

    I will just shut the whole thing down."

    "There is no need. Handover the operations to another person. Anyone of your peers will do, you finish off the Dusk organization and they will be taking care of the Gaja n. Since it is only keeping them busy, you can draw out a n and arrange everything.

    After you take care of the Dusk organization, you cane back and take over."

    "Oh really? Who has the brains and balls to take over the production from me? Is it going to be your grandson?"

    "If he is the suitable candidate, why not?"

    "That dumb fucker who dives into an orgy every three days and hits on everything that has breasts? Does he even have enough prospects to be considered my peer? Much less operate the whole thing?"

    The old man felt embarrassed. At this moment, a core elder from the side chimed in and said.

    "My daughter will do it fine. Why don''t you give it to her?"

    "First find out who is that bald guy your daughter is doing every week, then you can rmend her to do something else."

    Sivan replied instantly making the elder shut up.

    "My son¡­"

    "That dumb brute who went into the enemy lines just for the sake of it and lost a team of elites in his rescue process?"

    "My brother¡­"

    "That asshole¡­"

    Everyone had suggestions and Sivan had a reply for everything.

    The n leader got sick of it by every second and Sivan also had enough.

    "I am done. I don''t want to talk about it. If you really want me to stop the Dusk organization from destroying your own properties here and there, fine. I will do it. But the price is that I wouldn''t be able to participate in suppressing the Gaja n.

    Gaja n is not a trapped beast, it is cornered beast and you should know better than to be cocky and let the cornered beast have a moment of rity and space for breath.

    I will pounce on you and tear your neck apart.

    At least until this war is over, put your petty ambitions aside and let me do my fucking job."

 Chapter 1507 Water Snakes

    Chapter 1507 Water Snakes¡¡¡¡The argument once again red up.

    Sivan is losing his patience bit by bit like everyone in the n is trying to get a piece of his newfound treasure trove.

    First, the Grand elder disappeared all of a sudden and wanted to steal some of the equipment from the trio.

    But Sivan was sure that nothing good wille out of it. He is really feeling good that the old man disappeared.

    Now, before he could rx, another old man is trying to get a piece of him. He had enough of this.

    He turned to the n''s leader and said.

    "I don''t care what the Dusk organization is doing to the n, but from what I know, they are taking down small targets and the only thing significant they had done until now is the city destruction.

    With the current war that is going on, is it really necessary for us to focus on them too much? I already told you to send someone to capture the three.

    As long as they are captured, everything will calm down.

    I already gave you the solution, it is not my fault that the n is refusing to execute it.

    So, you either do it and stop ming me or you stop ming me at all.

    All of your elders and grand elders are worried about the small momentary loss caused by the Dusk organization, while I am busting my ass to fight against the Gaja n.

    I can only take so much bullshit at a time.

    The Divine league representatives are arriving tomorrow. If the elders and grand elders stay like this, I will bepletely honest with the Divine league. I don''t give a fuck if the partnership goes down the drain.

    But from what I know until now, not only would the partnership go down the drain for me, but I will also be able to get rid of the n''s annoyance.

    I am sure the Divine league needs more of my assistance than the rest of the ns''."

    With that statement, Sivan left the room without caring about everyone''s res.

    The n leader gulped down. He didn''t care much about the threats of Sivan leaving, but he did care about the situation of the Dusk organization.

    The death of the Bald man and the Grand elder is still not revealed to the rest of the n.

    Only the Grand elder''s immediate family and trusted subordinates know that the Grand elder has gone to the captured city.

    And only the n''s leader and his wife know about Bald man''s departure.

    Both parties don''t want the fact that they are trying to get their hands on the equipment from Dusk organization for themselves to be revealed.

    So, both parties became silent in this case and didn''t even dare to reveal it.

    But now that the rest of the Grand elders who are suffering small losses from all of these organizations are not really ready to let this go.

    All they have in their minds are their own interests.

    If only they knew that the Dusk organization is a much bigger threat than they imagined, they would be having some serious trouble.

    He needs to figure out a way to deal with this situation.

    "I will think of a solution for this. Stop pestering him for now."

    The n''s leader coldly gave his piece before he sent off the rest of the elders.

    He really doesn''t want to deal with all of these things at the same time, but when he thought of the reward. The reward of being the person that led the n to destroy their archenemy. The glory and reputation that he could gain from it.

    What he doesn''t know is, that while he is already in a deep pickle, the trouble is getting deeper back into the port city.

    After some more futile searches by themander that came to the port city, he wanted to arrange a party and go into the sea to perform a deeper search.

    But none of the people from the city wanted to do that.

    Theypletely rejected the idea of doing so.

    So, he had to call some of his own subordinates from the main city and after some persuasion convinced a shipowner to apany them into the sea.

    They were all ready to set sail.

    "Alright, let''s go, boss. I am really sick of these people."

    One of the subordinates said to themander.

    "What happened? You are barely here for a few hours."

    "Well, they are the reason I had toe here. I don''t like this city that much. A bunch of cowards."

    "We can''t me them. Who knows what really might have happened to make them have such a traumatic experience.

    I highly doubt every one of them is delusional."

    "I will believe that they are delusional.

    The sea is as calm as it can be, how can anything too dangerouse this close to the shore without the coast guards even finding a single clue?

    If the creatures really dide from the sea, howe no one ever managed to find their existence all these years?

    It doesn''t appear realistic at all."

    "It is hard for the whole city to collude and stay on a single lie, alright. Stop whining and let''s just go."

    Themander said as he issued orders to his subordinates.

    But what they didn''t notice at the time is, in the nearby waters, there is one dark blue creature showing its head out before going back in again as it moved away from the boat and returned to the tower.

    The ship moved into the waters and slowly set sail.

    asionally some of the group members entered the water to check the surroundings.

    But even after half an hour, they didn''t find anything. The situation was peaceful and harmless, which changed all of a sudden when they saw the first blue glowing creatureing their way.

    "Boss, I think I saw one there, it ising. I will go and catch it."

    "No, don''t go. The people said it is very resistant and powerful in the water. Youe out of the water first."

    "No need Boss. It is all alone. I think I can take care of it myself."

    With that, he didn''t care about what themander is saying and swam toward the creature.

    After he swam for a few meters though, he saw something that made his soul shiver.

    Dozens of blue lights appeared in front of him along with a red light.

    All of the water creatures are swimming toward him at a rapid pace.

    He turned around without a second thought and swam to the ship.

    "BOSS. WE NEED¡­.."

    Before he could finish his words, he felt a bunch of water spears going through his back. He felt his breath leave his lungs and water recing itpletely.

    He drowned as blood covered the water and it soon disappeared with the froth as the creatures came to the surface and swam towards the ship.

    Themander saw the whole scene and looked horrified.

    "We are retreating. Try to lead them to the shore. They are way too powerful in the water. I will hold them off a bit."

    The ship started moving to the shore. But the water creatures are obviously much faster and they relentlessly came forward.

    They started attacking the ship and it didn''t take long before the keel was broken and water invaded the ship,

    Even before they are halfway to the shore, they were forced to dive into the water and they had to face the creatures.

    The worst part is as they are swimming forward with everything they got, they realized they were actually surrounded by the creatures from all sides.

    More and more creatures popped up and the whole sea is now brightly lit with blue lights and asional red lights. Even the day''s sunlight cannot cover it up.

    Themander realized that they are stuck. They cannot find any other way to deal with the situation. The only option is to fight as much as they can and try to escape.

    But the efforts turned out to be futile for his subordinates.

    They are unable to do anything against the creatures.

    Even if they managed to attack one and made its barrier disappear, it is not exploding. The glowing part of its body is only going down deeper into the water and it ising back after recovering.

    They are using the water of the surroundings to attack themander and his subordinates.

    The whole area was soon dyed in blood and the deadbodies were brought back to the towers.

    After that was done, the red creatures all gathered together in the water as they stayed in a formation.

    A massive vortex made of water appeared. The vortex grewrger andrger as the water climbed upwards more and more.

    The creatures all raised their hands as they controlled therge volumes of water until it turned into what looked like arge water snake and they all extended their hands towards the shore.

    The water snake zoomed through the top surface of the water towards the shore.

 Chapter 1508 Ruined City

    Chapter 1508 Ruined City¡¡¡¡The people in the city, the guards and even the Deputy who is looking towards the sea from various positions saw the water snakeing at them.

    Everyone of them only had one feeling coursing through their bodies.

    Fear.

    They are afraid of the snake that ising like a blue coloured ray.

    The city formation was instantly activated.

    *BOOM* *SPLASH*

    The snake hit the formation. The water sshed all over the fluctuation formation. There is not a single person in the city that didn''t hear the impact. The water sttered over half of the city like rain.

    The whole city shook and everyone is terrified.

    The officials and the guards all gathered at high vantage points as they looked at the city and the next sight horrified them.

    The water creatures started created vortexes on the sea surface that are turning torge water snakes.

    And this time, there is a slight change.

    The water snakes are glowing. If any of these people were daring enough to go to the sea surface where the whole water snake creation was happening, they would have noticed that the water creatures are pouring out some of their glowing blob energy into the water snakes while creating them.

    Now all of the creatures created these snakes and all of them are glowing. Even the water snake made by the red snake is also glowing with red coloured lines and it is faster than the rest when it was left to rush towards the city.

    *BOOM* *SPLASH*

    The water snake reacted the same way as before, but this time, when the water has this red hue and went it went through the fluctuation formation and fell on the buildings, the water seeped into the building.

    It is not even just normal wetting of the wall.

    The water dropletspletely seeped into the wall. The stones acted like they are made of some sponge or cotton.

    At first, the people didn''t notice anything different. But in the corner of the city, in the slums, one of the worn down building that was also soaked in this water started cracking all of a sudden.

    The stone became corroded the roof fell off without any warning.

    The rest of the blue water snakes also starteding they all acted the same. The water seeped in and started weakening the stone walls and roofs of the buildings and structures.

    The deputy and the officials were shocked.

    After ten direct shots of these water snakes, the formation is gone. It was destroyed. It couldn''t take the constant abuse of this high-pressure water shots.

    After the formations are gone, the first snake that came at the city, sent the chills down people''s spines.

    The city guardmander, who is the only one that had any guts left, used all of his strength and made a move at the iing water snake.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sound urred as a huge sword ray hit the water snake before it coulde into the borders of the wall.

    But as soon as the sh urred, the man was sent straight back into the walls along with the snake and it went directly to hit the administration office of the city.

    *BOOM*

    The water snake destroyed half of the whole estate in an instant.

    The people that are still inside, didn''t even have a chance to experience the pain of this attackpletely before they died.

    Only a few people with a decent cultivation level managed to escape this situation with their lives intact.

    But none of them are ready to take another shot like this.

    They immediately thought of only one thing and one thing alone. Escaping the city.

    The Deputy city lord is in fact the first one to act on this thought and he made a run for it.

    As he and some other people escaped the city, they looked as one snake after another hit the city structures and destroying them.

    After ten shots that are mostly aimed at the city lord''s mansion and the administrative offices along with some high level people''s estates, the creatures took a rest.

    They didn''t attack anymore and the citizens took this window toe out of the city and run towards the main city up the river.

    They didn''t dare stay here anymore.

    At first they are relieved that themander from the main city came to save them.

    But now, that he is also dead, they don''t want to stay in this sea shore city anymore. After a few hours, the deputy city lord and the rest reached the main city and when the city lord saw them, he was stunned.

    "What the fuck are you doing here? Where is mymander?"

    "He died.. He died. The creatures, there are way too many, they are destroying the Port city."

    The deputymander said while panting.

    The city lord frowned and said.

    "What the hell are you talking about?"

    "Yes, themander died. The rest of his team also died. They didn''t even make it out of the sea. After they are dead, the whole city was attacked by these creatures¡­"

    Another official exined everything and the city lord''s face changed with every moment.

    "I need to report this to superiors. I need to see if I can spare any forces. We were asked to gather all of our forces for the war. We are on verge of making a move on the Gaja n."

    "But sir, what about the citizens and all of the resources. And how can we be sure that these creatures wouldn''te for this main city after they are done with the port city? We don''t even know how many they are.

    But from what we saw, there are at least a few hundred of them."

    The city lord didn''t even know what to say for that. After some time, he called his daughter.

    "I want you to use the space gate formation to go and reach the superiors immediately. Take my personal token and ask for their advice in what to do in this current situation.

    Take this deputy city lord. He will do the convincing for you."

    "Yes, father."

    The daughter agreed without any hesitation before she took the deputy city lord away.

    Meanwhile, the city lord looked at the other elders that came running from the city and asked.

    "Why did you alle here? If you are all here, who is defending the city?"

    None of them spoke.

    "Fucking cowards. Your official positions are officially ousted. Now, go and put on the gear and join the ranks of the soldiers. You will be within the first batch of the soldiers sent to the Gaja n."

    He coldly spat, before he left. He then some of his trusted subordinates to see how the citizens of the Port city are doing while he awaited his daughter''s return.

    After two hours, she came back. But without the deputy city lord.

    "Did that cowardly old man find a reason to stay there?"

    "Yes, father."

    "I expected that. What did our superiors say?"

    "They gave us the permission to deal with the cities."

    "Really? Young mastermanded our arrival to the main forces though."

    "It seems like the young master Sivan had a falling out with the grand elder. He wants us to go to the war, but he wants us to dy our arrival for three days. From what the grand elder''s son said, the grand elder wants to teach a lesson to Sivan.

    He wants to show Sivan that not everything is under his control, just because he is a key person in one deal."

    "Petty issues are hindering our n again. Anyway, the matter is important. Gather everyone that has a cultivation of Astral ne Transcendence and higher. Only leave the Deputy City guardmander and the rest of the city guards here.

    We will be taking the rest.

    I want to clear this sea problem as soon as I can."

    "Yes, father."

    The daughter nodded and went away to execute the orders of her father.

    Within two hours, everyone gathered outside of the city and made their way to Port city. On their way, they came across many people that are trying toe to this city from the Port city and the City lord took his time to help them a bit before sending them to the city.

    This dyed their arrival and by the time they came, all they saw is half-ruined city. There are some water creatures here and there that are scouring for the dead bodies.

    Some of the creatures are even hunting in the surrounding area as they took the beasts and brought their bodies back to Port city.

    The city lord immediatelymanded an attack on them. Luckily, there are only a few strays left here and there in the surroundings and the city.

    In the process of killing these creatures, some of his subordinates are injured and took the glowing blue liquid into their bodies.

    Three soldiers died and this time the creatures didn''t take the bodies away as they are not present in the surroundings.

    The city lord gritted his teeth and asked his healers to examine the bodies.

 Chapter 1509 Clash

    Chapter 1509 sh¡¡¡¡The healers took the bodies to the temporary healing area they set up.

    They started dissecting it and right after the first cut was made, they were stunned. Instead of the blood flowing out instantly, it became viscous like a gel.

    It didn''t even seep out of the cut as it should have.

    It didn''t take long for them to understand what the immediate cause of death is.

    The blood is turning into this viscous liquid and the transmission is being stopped. The blood that was within the heart also turned into a gel forcing the heart to stop.

    All the organs are seeped with this gel-like substance.

    The healers gave the details to the city lord.

    "Is there anything you can do to prevent this?"

    "There is not any that we could think. We don''t even know what caused this. Is it a type of potion, poison, curse? whatever it is, we don''t have any clues left behind on the body.

    The hint is that it definitely came from outside and forced itself into the bloodstream through the flesh."

    "We need to find a way, if even killing these creatures takes a toll on our soldiers, then exterminating them would bepletely impossible. We need to think of a way to destroy them without losing people.

    If that is not possible, we need to find a way to lessen the number of people we are going to lose.

    Think of something, get any resource you want from the main city, you have my full authority. I will rmend you to the Grand elder''s city if you do a good job in this."

    The healers nodded and went back to work. Everyone has some kind of theory regarding this, but none of them has a basis to propose it. Now that the city lord gave them full authority, they are looking forward to doing whatever they liked.

    They can test their hypothesis and there are even rewards if things worked out. This is more than what they could ask for.

    They decided to take full advantage of this situation.

    As they tried to figure this out, City lord decided to go a little scouting on his own.

    He searched for any traces of these creatures in the surrounding forests to see if they can catch one and do some examination.

    They might be able to find the cure for this blood gelling process.

    But there is no luck. They searched for the whole day, and only stopped at night. But they were unable to find anything that could help them.

    The city lord was extremely anxious about these creatures, so while he was scouting, he let his people work on some kind of protection for themselves.

    One of them is the metal elemental barrier. From what he heard from the officials of this port city, the water snakes that were being shot by the creatures is corroding the stone, but they didn''t say anything about the metal.

    So, he figured he can count on some kind of metal to resist some of the water snakes if they are shot again.

    He also thought of some n and didn''t let his subordinates create arge scale metal elemental barrier along the whole camp area.

    Instead, he created smaller formations that could be activated at a whim based on their situation.

    He prepared all of the things that he can to save the city from these creatures and awaited their arrival.

    By night, his wish came true.

    The water creatures finally appeared on the surface of the sea once again. Half of them stayed in the water while the other half walked out of it.

    The first half started shooting water snakes and this time, directly at the camp, while the second half attacked the camp directly.

    The city lord looked at the hundreds of creaturesing towards them along with the amphibious sea animals., like turtles and crabs that also joined in.

    He gulped in fear at the sheer number of enemies they have to face. He felt a bit hesitant and reluctant about the whole thing. He clearly understood that the fear of the port city officials and nobles is not there for no reason.

    The battle started and both sides quickly started losing numbers.

    The city lord decided to do a long prone battle and whenever a water snake came out of the sea to hit them, a metal elemental formation created a shield and blocked it.

    The block is a lot different than normal as it focused on diverting the snake instead of blocking itpletely.

    The formation barriers are created in such a way that the water snakes are headed towards the forest and the river without going toward the city.

    For the most part, this worked. But for the red patterned water snakes created by the red creatures, things are not that easy.

    They broke through the metal elemental barrier and made their way to the camp without any resistance whatsoever.

    The city lord felt his heart racing as he fought with the creatures while trying his best to protect himself and his subordinates.

    The battle went on and on. The creatures areing without any end to them and by midnight, the city lord decided that they needed to retreat. Way too many of his forces are dying here and it is a way too high of a price to pay in their current war situation.

    He decided to lead the battle backward as they retreated slowly back.

    After they reached a few hundred meters deep in the forest, the creatures didn''t follow them and instead went back to the sea.

    Even the water snakes also stopped.

    The city lord noticed this and set up a camp in the forest. After that, he sent his daughter back to the Grand elder to inform him about their situation, along with the recorded proof and the proof of the dead bodies and the anomaly of their blood changing into the gel-like substance.

    He sent all of this data back to the Grand elder in hopes of getting some help.

    The daughter left the camp at midnight and she was supposed to be back by the next dawn.

    But to the City lord''s surprise, she is nowhere to be seen.

    After the dawn, the city lord kept on asking the scouts if they have seen her presence, but the answer is always no.

    But midday, he started having a really bad feeling about this.

    "I am going to go back and check my daughter''s situation."

    "City lord, the situation here is already quite dire, without you it would be hard to deal with these creatures. We need your support here. How about you send some of your trustworthy subordinates to check the situation.

    I am sure they will be able to find her"

    "It is not about the trustworthiness of others, If my daughter got dyed at the Grand elder''s ce, then it might have been some serious issue.

    I cannot just sit back here if he is really in trouble. And my subordinates wouldn''t be enough to get her out of it if it is really some trouble in Grand elder''s territory."

    "We know that, but the city¡­"

    "If I am not even sure of my daughter''s safety, what use am I being in charge of so many people. I wouldn''t be able to stay relieved without knowing my daughter''s situation. So, let me just find out how she is doing.

    If it is news that is not pleasant to me and something drastic and irreversible has urred, I will stille back here and assist you.

    All you need to do is, hold on for a few days."

    "If you say so, City lord. But please doe back. We are all depending on you."

    The subordinate said and sent the city lord away.

    The city lord ran past the forest at his top speed as he made his way towards his own city.

    But what he doesn''t know is, as soon as he entered the forest, a small bird on a tree is looking at him and its eyeball followed his position at a rapid pace.

    The image was shown on a crystal screen within the carrier and Philip who was watching this immediately sent an order.

    The water creatures came out of the water and started making their way towards the newly made camp and this time, they are not holding anything back.

    They didn''t move slowly and they didn''t care about the distance between them and the sea anymore. They just zoomed into the forest and the camp as they attacked everyone.

    ¡­.

    The time passed slowly as the city lord quickly moved to the city.

    After a few hours, he can see the vicinities of the city and he halted in his tracks.

    There are tracks of battle everywhere. Not a single ce looked normal. All of the trees are crushed and the soil became loose.

    He had a bad feeling as he sped to the city.

 Chapter 1510 Death

    Chapter 1510 Death¡¡¡¡The city lord was shocked by the sight in front of him.

    He imagined a bunch of scenarios and possibilities for her daughter''s dy, but never did he imagine this scenario.

    The water creatures are standing guard outside of the city and he can see many of them already barged in and they are all lining up the people as they brought them into the estate.

    They killed all of the guards and they are bringing those deadbodies before they threw them into the river.

    As soon as the city lord arrived, they noticed him and surrounded him. The city lord understood that his city has been sacked and his space gate would have been destroyed.

    He genuinely wished that his daughter might have gotten stuck in the grand elder''s ce. He would be relieved as long as he could confirm that the water creatures came here after his daughter went to the grand elder''s ce.

    But he has no way to confirm what happened.

    As he was trying to make sense of the situation, the water creatures already rounded him up. In fact, there are dozens of them standing around him as they zeroed in on him.

    The city lord took his weapon and started fighting.

    He didn''t care whether he was surrounded by dozens or even hundreds of these creatures.

    He wants to find his daughter and move towards the city with all his might.

    He swung his des as he disregarded all of the attacks that areing at him from all the sides.

    He cut through the line of creatures and made his way to the city gate, while he was stabbed with water spears at least 18 times on his back and ten times in his front.

    In this process, he killed a creature with every swing of his sword.

    Themotion attracted the attention of all of the creatures in the city and they all ran towards him. The red and blue didn''t follow any pecking order as they tried to take a shot at him.

    The people and some officials that are currently being led to the city lord''s estate also saw this and ran after the creatures. They wanted to see themotion and also try to find a chance to escape if possible.

    The city lord broke through the city gate as he bled from all of the stab wounds. After some time, the bleeding stopped as the blood turned viscous and didn''te out of the wounds anymore.

    But the man was unstoppable. He killed and killed these creatures and he finally saw some of the officials watching him from the side.

    He looked at them and raised his sword as he waved at them and yelled.

    "WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER?"

    The officials who didn''t want to attract any attention were stunned and they cursed the city lord under their breath.

    But the city lord didn''t care. When he noticed that the officials are trying to escape, he immediately made his way toward them. Even if he is stumbling on the rocks and walls, he disregarded all of it and reached near the officials.

    "Where is my daughter? Is she safe?"

    The officials were stunned by the old man''s persistence, but the creatures are relentlessly attacking him.

    *STAB* *STAB*

    Two creatures stabbed both of the old man''s legs making him copse.

    But he didn''t even flinch as he asked.

    "Is my daughter safe? Where is she?"

    The officials finally came to their senses and one of them spoke.

    "City lord.. that.."

    "She is safe."

    The official replied and finally, the city lord''s face brightened up. Even though it is covered with blood, there is a smile on his face.

    "Really?"

    "Yes. The attack just happened a few hours ago. Your daughter already went to the grand elder''s ce in the space gate formation.

    The creatures destroyed the space gate and she didn''te back at all."

    The old man finally smiled and let go of his sword. He knelt on the floor as the creatures finished him off.

    They stabbed him to death and the creatures then proceeded to carry his body to the river.

    The officials exchanged a look of mncholy as they looked at their city lord go as a dead body.

    They really felt sad for him. He was a righteous man, who treated the rest of the city fairly. He took his responsibilities as a city lord. Even though they felt a momentary sense of anger towards him for calling them out, they only felt guilty after that.

    If there is one person they knew that didn''t deserve this kind of death within the n, then it is the city lord.

    "At least, he died in peace."

    One of the officials said as he looked at his friend.

    "Yes. In peace knowing that his daughter is safe."

    "Why is this happening to us all of a sudden? What are these creatures? Why are they attacking the city like this? Is it another Mari n''s enemy?"

    "Who knows?"

    Both of them were escorted by the creatures to the city lord''s estate, where they sat along with the rest of the citizens. The whole estate is packed with all of the people in the city and even the streets that are directly out of the estate are flooded by them.

    The creatures then destroyed everything else in the city. The structures, walls, formations, didn''t leave anything. They also moved around and destroyed every other resource that is under the control of the city.

    After the destruction wasplete, the creatures left the three words.

    DUSK HAS ARRIVED in the middle of the rubble before they all made their way to the river and went back to the sea.

    The people left behind in the city immediately took the chance to escape from the ce.

    Meanwhile.

    Back at the sea.

    Right after the departure of the city lord, the water creatures already made their move on the camp. Without the leadership of the city lord, everything became easy.

    They immediately killed them.

    They didn''t spare a single elite or the soldier.

    The creatures went back into the sea along with the deadbodies leaving the whole ce empty. The few people that managed to save themselves escape were not pursued.

    The creatures were just called back into the sea.

    Philip looked at the tablet and after making sure that every creature came, he called the crew.

    "We are leaving this ce. Pick all of the towers and pack them. We are going to another sea city under the control of the Mari n."

    The crew immediately followed the orders and the packing began.

    That night, the trio and the rest floated over the carrier until they arepletely away from the whole city. They left the water creatures back and didn''t take them away.

    After the carrier left, Philip pressed something on the tablet and the creatures swam deep into the city.

    There are bundles of crystal sticks that look simr to Watt set up in the captured city.

    But this time, the crystal sticks are way too many. Way more than what they set up in terms of sheer number.

    They ced some randomly in the sea while some of the creatures swam out of the water to ce them within the forest.

    After the whole set-up was finished, they just stayed in the water.

    The next day. In the city that was destroyed. The Grand Elder, the city lord''s daughter and some of the grand elder''s subordinates arrived hurriedly.

    "What the hell happened here?"

    He yelled out loud as he looked at the three words.

    The three words he didn''t want to see.

    He looked at the city lord''s estate and immediately went there to get the news. Some of the officials that are left alive exined the situation. Every soldier and guard gathered for thebined army against the Gaja n has been killed by the creatures and they were taken away into the river and to the sea.

    These people are left behind for some reason.

    The grand elder became furious.

    "How did this happen?"

    "When the city lord went to the port city to help out, this city was left defenceless. The formation was not as effective without the city lord and the rest of his elite force. So, we are stuck here. They entered and destroyed the formations before they took over the city."

    One of the officials said this and the grand elder suddenly felt a thorn in his throat.

    Because he is the one that told the city lord to handle this situation by himself with the forces gathered for the war.

    Because of that all of the forces were dead.

    If the forces have been sent to the war just like the original time, they wouldn''t have died in vain here.

    He then looked at the three words in the rubble and gritted his teeth.

    "We are going to the sea. Right now. I am going to take back the port city and kill everyst one of these creatures. Lead the way."

 Chapter 1511 Disappearance

    Chapter 1511 Disappearance¡¡¡¡The Grand elder is heaving with anger as he ran towards the port city with the city lord''s daughter leading the way to him.

    When the city lord has informed him of this dire situation, he should have sent his subordinates of came here by himself. After all, the army that was gathered is supposed to go to fight against the Gaja n.

    But just to get back at Sivan, he decided to let the army deal with the situation here. In fact, when Sivan asked for these forces, he simply said that they have a local problem that is threatening the safety of their city and wouldn''t be able to send the forces.

    When Sivan felt frustrated due to the dy in ns, he felt satisfied. But now, he lost a lot of soldiers and even two cities and many other resources along with that.

    This is a massive blow.

    Particrly, now that it is revealed the whole thing is done by the Dusk organization, he is even more furious.

    At first, the Dusk organization didn''t do anything to him or his resources, the only reason he brought them up is that many of the elders and core elders are losing a lot of properties and cash cows.

    So, he figured they would be in his support if he brought that up and they did. But it seems like he jinxed himself by unjustly using the name of the Dusk organization when they didn''t do anything to him.

    They came and bit a big chunk of his flesh.

    There is a lot of rage building up inside as he thought these things and he doesn''t even know where he should be directing it to.

    After they reached the port city, at least the spot where the previous port city was, all they saw is signs of battle.

    The water creatures are nowhere to be seen.

    The grand elders looked around and used his keen senses to see if there are any fresh traces left behind and he found a trial.

    He followed to the seashore.

    The rest of his entourage, particrly the people that previously seen what these water creatures can do, didn''t want to go near that.

    The Grand elder didn''t bother with them though.

    He looked at the sea with condescension and rage all mixed into one.

    He stepped forward into the air and was about to go deeper, but at this moment, a vortex formed in the sea and a water snake was shot at him.

    The grand elder smiled in disdain as he mmed his palm in front of him.

    *SPLASH*

    Therge water snake was broken and it sprayed down like rain.

    All of the people on the beach were soaked in water.

    The Grand elder stepped into the air and started moving deeper into the sea. He looked at the sea surface as he watched the water creaturesing to the surface to attack him.

    "Puny creatures. I will destroy you all."

    The old man started throwing palm strikes from the sky and the creatures exploded even in the water. Their regeneration ability which was almost impossible to breach in the water was not even sufficient.

    It cannot keep up with the damage that is happening to the creatures and they are being destroyed.

    After a few palms strike the creatures dove deeper into the water.

    They didn''t stay on the surface.

    The old man smirked and dove down into the water.

    There is a spiritual energy barrier around him as he zoomed into the water. The water was not able to touch him and stayed out of the barrier.

    He went down faster and faster as he attacked the creatures that are trying to get away from him.

    The whole sea was subjected to chaos. The water sshed left and right. There is nothing normal about it.

    The destruction went on and on and all of it suddenly stopped when the old man saw a pir in the middle of the ocean.

    He frowned as he saw all of the creatures trying to reach the pir. A few thoughts crossed his mind, but one thing is for sure. He knew that this pir is somehow rted to these creatures and since they are going for it at such an important time, it might be something helpful to them.

    He didn''t want to let them go like this though.

    He directly went for the pir even before the creatures could reach it and touched it.

    Arge water elemental energy wave came out of the pir and it went past the sea, the beach, the port and even the whole port city.

    All of the people that are waiting for the grand elder''s return, the beasts that are holing up in the forest and even the grass that was left behind in the port city''s ce all felt the wave.

    The grand elder who is nearest to it, of course, sensed it and he suddenly had a bad feeling.

    Before he could make sense of what this wave meant, the crystal rods nted all over the seafloor suddenly started glowing.

    Then only did the old man sense their presence. At the same time, all of the crystal rods out of the sea also started glowing and faint water elemental energy lines. The lines that are very thin and looked likeser pointers started emerging from the crystal rods and they connected each other.

    Arge faint blue colouredserwork appeared and it spanned from within the seafloor to the port city''s surroundings.

    The grand elder immediately made his way to the top of the seafloor, he knew that something is wrong and he doesn''t want to be a victim of whatever incident that is.

    He trusted his gut feeling and left.

    But before he could reach the seafloor, the water creatures reached the pir and they pulled it out.

    The faintserwork brightened up and¡­.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    A series of explosions happened and water elemental energy ran rampant. Arge portion of water from the sea sshed all over the area of explosions and the sshed water reacted with the water elemental energy that is running rampant and riddled everything with holes. The stones walls left behind as debris from the ruined city didn''t survive this.

    The stone turned to dirt and the dirt turned to mud and the mud dissolved into the seawater all in an instant.

    As for the people within this range.

    None of them survived.

    The blood in their bodies reacted to the water elemental energy and tore through their flesh, even before they could react to the explosions in the surroundings.

    The whole flesh turned into a blood spray which disappeared with the rest of the sprayed water.

    By the time the whole thing settled down, the beach, the port and the area of the port city were all gone.

    All that was left is the sea. Except for the infinite amount of water, there is not a single trace ofnd''s existence there.

    The grand elder who was probably nearest to the explosion also didn''t survive. Everyone died.

    No one knew what happened until that evening some of the officials came from the main city to check up on the situation.

    When they came, they were shocked. After all, arge mass ofnd has disappeared and was devoured by the water.

    It is not every day they wille to see a scene like this.

    Of course, they knew the severity of the situation and immediately reported this to the headquarters of the Mari n.

    The news took a few hours to reach the headquarters, but it didn''t even take a few minutes for it to spread all over the headquarters.

    All of the main members and officials that are involved in this war immediately made a move.

    They all flooded the n leader''s office.

    "n''s leader, we heard that this is the job of the Dusk organization. They even killed a Grand elder. We need to take severe action against them."

    "Yes, we cannot let them off."

    "We ignored them for way too long. Now they are getting out of hand. We need to kill them as soon as we can.

    Ignore capturing and trying to get their equipment, if we don''t kill him now, we cannot proceed in the Gaja n''s war."

    Everyone has an opinion and most of their opinions are revolving around the point of killing the trio from the Dusk organization.

    The n''s leader felt anxious.

    Just the news of one Peak stage Astral ne Consummate cultivator has brought this muchmotion to his doorstep.

    He wondered how they will react if they knew the death of two more and it was also done by the dusk organization.

    He didn''t even want to imagine it.

    But there is another pressing matter that made him feel even more anxious.

    He calmed the people down a bit and called his attendant.

    "Has the news reached Sivan''s residence?"

    "I don''t know sir."

    "Find out immediately and make sure themotion doesn''t reach his residence if it already hasn''t."

 Chapter 1512 Avlyn

    Chapter 1512 Avlyn¡¡¡¡The attendant left the room in an instant.

    He went to Sivan''s residence, but it was already toote. The news already reached Sivan''s residence.

    In fact, it reached Sivan even before it reached half of the grand elders.

    Sivan''s expression turned sour immediately and he felt like he was in a pickle. He immediately wanted to get up and go to the n''s leader''s office to learn about the situation well, but he cannot.

    Because currently the representatives of the Divine league are staying in his residence and there is also another person that barged in here without Sivan''s consent.

    It is Sin, Sivan''s father.

    At this moment, all of them are having a meal at a long dining table.

    Sivan took the seat at the head of the table. Six divine league members sat on each side of the table. A total of twelve and all of them are Peak stage cultivators of Astral ne Consummation.

    On the other side, the tail end, Sin sat as he ate the meal silently.

    There is this strange tension in the air. Particrly between Sin and the leader of this ground.

    The leader of the group who sat to the right of Sivan is a tall woman. She is glowing brown skin and even darker brown hair that was tied up in a tight ponytail.

    She is ignoring all of Sivan''s attempts to make any conversation as she red at Sin again and again.

    "So, you still didn''t learn to respect your hosts, have you? Avlyn."

    Sin suddenly spoke and the woman was stuck a bit. The rest of the members of the divine league are either nervously trying to not involve themselves in the exchange or they are looking at the whole thing in amusement.

    "You are the one to talk. You were not even invited here. Why don''t you fuck off first and relieve the host of the duty to kick you out?"

    Avlyn replied coldly.

    *cough* *cough*

    Sivan coughed to diffuse the tension and he red at Sin.

    "Miss Avlyn, this wine is made from a very special recipe and very rare ingredients. It is apletely new technique that has never been used in any of our realms.

    Please try it."

    Avlyn raised her ss indicating for him to pour some as she took in all the extra respect. She brought the ss closer to her nose and smelled the fragrance.

    "That is indeed a great wine. Why don''t you try it Sin? I highly doubt you will be able to experience its taste with your numb skull though."

    "Well, I saved this wine, especially for Miss Avlyn and herpanions."

    Even before Sin could reply, Sivan spoke up. Everyone in the room raised their eyebrows slightly as they looked at Sin and Sivan.

    Avlyn smirked and said.

    "He is your father after all. You can pour a ss for him."

    "There is no need for that."

    Sivan directly rejected without even looking at his father.

    Sin didn''t even bother to speak up and just had the lunch silently.

    "So, it seems like you can''t even win your son''s eptance. Serves you right."

    Sin stopped his fork for a minute but continued on after that.

    Avlyn kept on provoking Sin when Sivan got the news.

    He looked at his father. He knew very well why his father is there.

    He is here to make sure that Sivan doesn''t get into a deeper rtionship with the Divine league. Whenever he feels that things are getting out of line, he wouldn''t hesitate to decapitate these divine league members.

    From what Sivan observed, the divine league members are scared of his father. There is this faint fear that they have even though there are twelve of them together. They are unsure of what would happen if Sin attacked them.

    Except for Avlyn, everyone is scared of Sin.

    And something told Sivan that even Avlyn wouldn''t be able to deal with Sin properly.

    She might be acting all angry and hateful towards him, but he is also not daring to push him too much.

    Sin''s presence alone kept all of them in check and Sivan really wants that. He might be kissing ass now, but that is just to make sure that they let their guard down.

    He has age and inexperience on his side. He would definitely be underestimated. He wants to take advantage of those qualities to make these people lose some of their defences against him.

    The Divine league certainly has some aspirations and from what he knows, it is about the four children. He needs more information on why they are doing what they are doing. He needs to prepare himself for any unexpected surprises.

    All in all, he needs more information.

    But he also doesn''t want to be taken advantage of. That is why he didn''tpletely reject his father''s ce here.

    At this moment though, he doesn''t have enough leisure to think about it.

    The Divine league members are here for a while and they are waiting for the Mari n to start their attack on the Gaja n. It is already dyed because of the Grand elder''s pettiness. He put in a lot of effort to keep the divine league members pleased.

    He kept on giving different demonstrations of all of his equipment, keeping them entertained.

    Now not only are the troops from that grand elder are noting, but also the grand elder is dead.

    He is rapidly thinking of ways to resolve the situation.

    But at this moment, one of the subordinates of the divine league members came in and whispered something in Avlyn''s ears.

    She looked at Sivan and frowned.

    "Young master Sivan, it seems like there is something going on in your n. You are holding back a lot from us. Don''t you want this partnership to go well?"

    "What do you mean, Miss Avlyn?"

    "What is the news about three of your Peak stage Astral ne Consummation stage cultivators are dead. We heard that some organization named the Dusk has been attacking you and they took down three of your powerhouses.

    Don''t you think we should have been informed about it beforehand?"

    "Three?"

    Sivan blurted out in confusion. Sin frowned as he looked at Avlyn. Even he doesn''t know about the information.

    And from her reaction, she is not just bullshitting.

    "I don''t know about this. Let me just confirm it."

    Sivan immediately ran out of the room without even caring to listen to her answer. He ran to the n leader''s residence.

    Unlike the rest of the elders that are waiting outside for n''s leader''s response, he barged into the room directly and asked.

    "What the hell is happening? I heard three of our Astral ne Peak stage consummate cultivators of our n are dead and you kept it from me. What the fuck is wrong with you?"

    "How on earth did you know that?"

    "Is that the question you need to be asking now? I heard it from the divine league''s representative Avlyn. How did she know about that? And how did she know about it before I did? Are you an idiot for keeping this from me?"

    "Young Master Sivan, you are crossing lines here. Be sure to keep it in your mind that you are talking to the leader of the n?"

    "Yeah, yeah. I know. The leader focuses more the politics and position than the n. The indecisive and inconclusive person who makes all of his decisions so that his ass would be safe at the end of the day.

    I am here to tell you that I am proceeding with the attack on the Gaja n. I am not asking your permission. I am informing you."

    "You can''t. We don''t know what the Dusk organization is going to do. We need to deal with them first?"

    "Then you should have said that to me before the Divine league got involved. You said you would handle this when I wanted to go and handle it by myself.

    Now, you can''t do anything to me. The Divine league representatives are here. I cannot stop. They are going to lose faith in us otherwise."

    "At least try to give us some insights on what could have Sam told them to do next."

    "That is the thing, Sam doesn''t have to tell them anything. They are not his subordinates. They are his friends.

    He didn''t order them to destroy the Mari n, he told them to get ready for war and gave them resources.

    They just made it based on his thoughts.

    It is as simple as that."

    "If you understand them so much, leave the Divine league to deal with the Gaja n, you can use your equipment to assist them. Stay back and help us deal with the Dusk organization."

    "That is not going to happen. The sole reason I am fighting against the Gaja n is to deal with Sam. If I can''t go there, there is no point in doing this at all.

    You need to figure this out by yourself.

    Send half of the forces that are gathered with me tomorrow morning.

    Keep the other half and deal with the Dusk yourself."

 Chapter 1513 Attack

    Chapter 1513 Attack¡¡¡¡Sivan didn''t care about what the n leader would think, he just left the room and went back to meet Avlyn and the rest.

    "Miss Avlyn, we are going to attack the Gaja n first thing tomorrow. We are leaving tonight. If you are okay with it."

    "Oh? I thought the forces are still grouping for the Mari n."

    "That force died because of another enemy that is attacking us. Don''t worry about it though. It is useless and makes little difference. The only reason I waited for them is to not upset other factions of the n.

    Now I have had enough of them. All the petty bullshit is something I cannot go through anymore.

    Tonight, half of the Gaja n''s forces are going toe with us and the first thing in the morning, we areunching an attack on the Gaja n directly.

    In their city. We will be setting up a camp outside and use all of my means currently to slowly wear them down. As soon as you find the proper timing, we can destroy them bit by bit.

    All I ask is, I want to kill Sam myself. Are you okay with this?"

    "Of course. We will prepare our troops then."

    "Please do."

    Sin looked at both of them as they proceeded to make decisions.

    "Are you sure you want to leave now Sivan? This is a bit premature and immediate; don''t you think?"

    "I know what I am doing.

    I assume you wouldn''t being with us."

    "Then you assumed correctly. I am noting."

    "You are pathetic. How can you be friends with a person who is part of our archenemy?"

    "Before I answer that, let me ask you something. Why is the Gaja n our archenemy?"

    Sivan was stumped for a moment.

    Sin smiled and said.

    "You never thought of that, have you? Gaja n is your archenemy because your n said so. It is something you shouldn''t tolerate because your n said so, you need to kill them all because your n said so.

    The whole foundation of your anger towards them and the righteous questioning you are putting me through is someone saying that the Gaja n is your enemy.

    If you really want to go against the Gaja n for housing Sam, go ahead, at least that is a proper reason. They helped your real enemy, an enemy you made with your own actions, so you are treating them as your enemy too.

    That is understandable. But thinking you are right just because you are following some ancestral hearsay? Spare me the righteous anger you have.

    Gail and I have gone through things that you don''t even know exist. We are rivals, who respect each other.

    Our goal is to surpass each other, the conflict we havees from that. Not from any enmity we inherited from our ancestors.

    That is something you would never be able to understand. I just hoped you would after you met Sam, but with the current partnership you are in, I believe that I am thinking too much.

    You are hopeless. Your mother spoiled you too much in my absence.

    You are at a different ce. A ce from where bringing you back is impossible. I just hope you won''t regret these decisions now."

    Sin left the room. The disappointment is apparent on his face.

    Avlyn looked at him and frowned. Then she looked at Sivan.

    "What is your problem with your father?"

    "It is nothing."

    "I am asking you nicely kid. So you better answer it. I know he can be an asshole, but for you, his son to hate him this much, that is new."

    "What is so new about it? Anyway, I will tell you if you tell me why you hate him so much."

    "That is not something for you to be concerned about."

    "Same rule applies to you too. My situation with my father is not something for you to be concerned about."

    Avlyn frowned and looked at him in surprise.

    "You really are rumours said. A few minutes ago you were kissing my ass and now that the situation is like this, you are disrespecting me. A chameleon."

    "You think that I am disrespecting you? Wait till you meet the guy that I want to kill you. At least I respect your strength and power, he will not even do that.

    You can just stand in front of him with all your aura running rampant and if he even flinches and bows down his head, I will write down my whole biography if you want to know about it."

    "We will see soon enough don''t we."

    "Yeah, we will."

    The Mari n bustled with the activity until the night when the troops and the people made their move.

    By the next morning, all the gathered forces, made a camp outside of Gaja city a few miles away.

    Sivan looked at the city through the telescopic devices he prepared and he even arranged some for the Divine league members.

    As they looked at the city, they saw the Thunder eagle set just leaving the city after the attack.

    "So, is that the thunder eagle squad you told us about?"

    "Yes, they are currently dealing with the city''s formation. Keeping it working, trying to exhaust the energy as much as they can."

    "That is good. I really want to see what their full strength is though."

    "Then, why don''t we see it immediately."

    Sivan said as he took out amunication device and contacted one of his subordinates. They contacted the Thunder eagle squad to make a move once again.

    At this moment.

    Within the Gaja city.

    Gail is looking at the Gaja n artisans and formation masters setting the equipment for deterring the Thunder eagle set.

    It look a bit longer than what they had expected and it just got ready.

    As the set-up was about to be finished and got ready, an attendant came and informed Gail about the presence of the Mari n''s forces.

    "So, they are finally here? Did you inform Sam and the rest?"

    Gail''s reaction is pretty calm. He didn''t sound anxious in the slightest.

    "Yes, Sir. Other subordinates went to inform them."

    "Good."

    He looked at the set up which had just beenpleted and all of a sudden, the blue and purple lightning crackled in the air.

    "Oh? These guys finally grew a pair and attacked again? I want to see how this goes too. Activate the formation."

    He ordered and the operators immediately activated it.

    As the thunder eagle squad appeared in the sky, they used a formation that they have never used before and this time, the attack was very much lethal. It is more lethal than any other attack they ever used.

    They formed a hexagram in the sky with all of the lightning gatherings at the nodes.

    Sivan and the Divine league members are all watched at it through the telescope.

    They could feel how strong the attack could be even from their current locations.

    As the lightning go ready to strike, all of a sudden, the dome around the city fluctuated on its own a bit and in that one second, silver lightning was shot out of eight different locations in the city.

    All the lightning turned into lightning eagles as they dove to a single point within the sky right below the hexagram and collided together.

    The dome was closed once again and the sliver of lightning created a circr pattern in the sky.

    All of the thunder eagle squad members who are in the middle of the formation suddenly felt a bacsh.

    *BOOM*

    A massive explosion urred as all of their exoskeletons and the formation exploded at the same time.

    Sivan and the Divine league members who saw this were stunned.

    The explosion not only destroyed the squad members, the bacsh even affected some spots within the sky where the retreating tools were set up for the squad.

    "Seems like your n backfired."

    Avlyn said with a smirk.

    Sivan gritted his teeth and didn''t reply to that.

    He took out amunication token and ordered.

    "Send the order to the Lava worm operators. Activate the attack on the Gaja n right now."

    After that, he changed the channel and called for another group of people. Send the Lightning Worms to the nearby mountains. Tell them to activate as soon as possible."

    "Yes, Sir."

    The reply came and everyone left.

    Sivan looked at the Gaja city seriously.

    Avlyn didn''t bother him anymore and just spectated.

    A few minutes passed.

    A bunch of golems came out of the earth with fire elemental energy oozing out of them as they moved towards the Gaja city.

    Some of the golems even popped up in the city, but the operators immediately activated a formation which made the golems inside copse as soon as they formed.

    The golems from outside though are unstoppable.

    They moved to the dome and started attacking them. Along with the undead that is already present, the dome is currently packed at all sides.

 Chapter 1514 Souls

    Chapter 1514 Souls¡¡¡¡The golems are made of the soil that was soaked with the ck cursed blood of the undead creatures that were killed.

    They are now carrying curses.

    Avlyn noticed this and talked to her teammates.

    "This kid is really vicious. The cursed soil. Even the godfather wouldn''t use such a thing to deal with people."

    "Well, that is why Godfather made a deal with this guy. But for that soil to be useful, it needs to go through the dome first.

    Otherwise, it might as well be a normal golem." One of her subordinates replied.

    "Of course that is true. Let''s wait and see what happens."

    As they talked the city also started its counterattack. They shot the spheres out of the cannons from walls at the undead creatures and the golems that numbered dozens.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The explosive energy curtains copsed the golems. But the soil just joined in the ground and turned into golems once again. But this time, the fire elemental energy is not as thriving as before.

    It is a bit duller than the first time.

    While things are like this. Some of the subordinates went to the nearby mountain ranges andunched the lightning worms.

    They are just like the Lava worms, they dug themselves into the ground at the foot of the mountain and climbed to the core of the mountain as they released their energy.

    After a while, the mountains slowly started deforming as they turned into rock golems with lightning elements surging through them.

    They ran towards the city and joined the earth and fire golems to attack the dome.

    The number of golems kept on increasing. Hundreds turned into thousands and they are moving and surrounding the city from all the sides.

    All the city is doing is shooting the cannons. The numbers are reducing but they are once again being refilled.

    The spheres that are being shot are nothing more than just bare distractions that are not going to serve any purpose.

    The time went on and the dome kept on taking hits.

    By night, it started showing slight fluctuations within and Sivan knew that the time for the next attack is not too far away.

    "We willunch the next step of attack in the dawn. Let the formation exhaust more energy."

    Sivan said to the Divine league members as they rxedly looked at the whole situation unfold.

    Meanwhile, inside the city, everyone gathered for a meeting.

    "The golems are increasing in number. By now, I swear I saw a ring valley form around the city a few miles away because of the soil''s absence and the mountains in the surroundings are already bare.

    The Lightning worms or whatever are moving to different mountains to add in more golems. We need to attack back and reduce the numbers. We also need to stop using spheres, they are being wasted.

    Let''s start using the domes within the city and the puppets. They are the only things that can be used now."

    One of the core elders proposed directly.

    "No, we are not using that. We are going to let the golems and undead attack the dome as much as they want.

    The meeting is to exin what the further preparations are going to be. Not to take any of your suggestions. You will only be following orders and suggestions will only be appreciated, if you are asked for them."

    The n leader spoke calmly without a change of expression.

    "Sir, what do you mean by that? So we are just soldiers that are going to follow the orders blindly?"

    One of the old core elders asked in surprise.

    "Yes. That is all you need to do from now on until the whole war is over. If you want to stay a member of the Gaja n."

    "But¡­"

    "I already told you. The suggestions are appreciated only when they were asked. As for criticism, it is not appreciated no matter when it was.

    You first listen to the ns and if you find anything wrong with them, then you can speak up. Or you can ask questions if you don''t understand anything. Otherwise, just shut up and do nothing."

    The n leader was decisive and didn''t give any leeway.

    The whole room turned silent and the n leader called for someone to exin the ns.

    It is actually Grivon who took the job and he exined what they are going to do first.

    After everyone heard it, they couldn''t help but widen their eyes in disbelief.

    "Sir, this is going to be a very daring thing. The chances of failure are too many and if there is even one slight mistake on Sam''s part we would all be in a world of trouble."

    "Well, your job is to prepare how to face that world of trouble if that arises.

    So, our operators who are in charge of activating the undead legion would be on the move if something goes wrong and no matter what happens, the undead legion is going to buy us a lot of time.

    But for it topletely activate, we will need a lot more time. So, the long rage regiment is in charge of buying us that time.

    Gail and Gamin would be deterring the Peak stage powerhouses of the enemies while you do that.

    As for the rest, we need to deal with them ourselves.

    Does anyone have any other doubts?"

    The n''s leader still acted decisively and didn''t let anyone object to the n. Even when he is asking them to voice their doubts, his expression and tone clearly indicated that he is not really going to take any of this nonsense.

    They just nodded and agreed.

    Everyone dispersed and Grivon went to Sam to give the go-ahead.

    Sam who is currently sitting on one of the towers he built within the n''s estate nodded and got ready.

    He looked at Giyon and Grivon before saying.

    "After I get hooked into this, I won''t be able to react to you for the next twelve hours. Follow the instructions for possible scenarios I have already written.

    I think you can handle it if anything out of thates out.

    If you have any doubts just ask me now."

    "Nothing, just be safe. Don''t let your mind go nuts in there."

    Grivon said with a smile.

    "Those are my same words. Just be safe ande back. Your body is waiting right outside of the gate.

    Of course, there are at least twenty Peak stage Consummate cultivators of the Astral ne in between you and that, so I wouldn''t be surprised if you despair and lose your mind.

    I just hope you don''t."

    "There are many things that might throw me into despair. But I am sure this is not one. Anyway, thanks for the concern."

    "Sir, the set-up is ready."

    One of the subordinates interjected as Sam and the siblings are talking.

    "Okay then, I will be back in twelve hours at thetest."

    Sam walked into the room where there is arge circle was drawn. It is full of inscriptions and runes and a dozen people are sitting around that circle.

    In the middle of the circle, Sam sat down with his legs crossed. He took deep breaths slowly as he calmed down.

    After closing his eyes for five minutes, the spectre slowly flew out of the divine dimension fragment and it hovered around Sam.

    "You better not try anything funny. Or you know what will happen."

    Sam muttered and the spectre literally shuddered in the air.

    "Activate the formation."

    Sam muttered again and the people sitting around started the formation.

    The lines and runes on the circle brightened up.

    The spectre went on to attach itself to Sam giving out a faint glow.

    Sam felt extremely lost. He felt detached from the body at the moment.

    From various corners of the tower, several souls started protruding as they entered the formation.

    They are all trying to catch Sam and devour his own soul.

    At this moment, Sam''s soul came out of his body and became visible to the naked eye.

    The spectre that was attached to the body also came out and merged with Sam''s soul.

    Sam''s soul became a bit distorted. The spectre which in itself is abination of many souls is acting up a bit as it managed to attach to Sam in his most vulnerable situation.

    The souls that areing at him to attack suddenly felt shackled within the formation and soon, they started turning into faintpressed orbs that are floating.

    The floating orbs gathered around him and hovered within the formation range.

    The orbs increased as the souls kept on joining the formation.

    Dozens became hundreds and hundreds became thousands.

    As time passed, one could even notice the difference between the sizes of the orbs. The biggest is obviously the souls of higher-level creatures.

    The size of the soul is directly proportional to how powerful it is and what level the cultivator or the beast was when the soul was extracted.

    After all of the orbs were gathered, they all flew away from the formation and then the tower as they moved in different directions all over the city.

    At this exact moment, the dome of the city disappeared.

 Chapter 1515 Take Over

    Chapter 1515 Take Over¡¡¡¡Sivan and the rest of the Divine league members saw as the dome disappeared.

    Smiles appeared on their faces as the golems and undead made their way towards the wall and the city gate.

    Not a single guard of the Gaja n is currently standing outside of the wall. They are all either standing on the wall orpletely on the other side.

    The people on the wall are feeling nervous numerous golems are ready to smash the wall into the pieces.

    But at this moment, the soul orbs that moved out of the tower appeared from within the city and they moved towards different golems. They entered the golems and disappeared there.

    As soon as they did that, the golems stopped moving and stayed still.

    Thergest orbs of all, which are the souls of the strongest creatures, didn''t go to any of the golems. Instead, they moved to different sides outside of the city and entered the ground. They rapidly passed through all theyers of soil and earth.

    They only stopped when they reached the Lava worms. The soul forcefully entered the Lava worm and disappeared there.

    The same thing happened in all of the Lava worms.

    Sivan who is watching all of this suddenly had a bad premonition. Particrly, when he saw that after the soul orbs disappeared, the dome reappeared again.

    He widened his eyes as he tried to calm himself down.

    But Sam didn''t give him the chance.

    Sam who is sitting in the tower with his soul outside is currently frowning. His soul looked a bit distorted and a bunch of strings are extended from it.

    The strings are numerous and small, they looked like hair strands.

    They started brightening up one after another and for every string that lit up, a golem outside the city wall started turning around.

    They are now facing the camp of the Mari n instead of the Gaja city.

    The golems are rapidly turning around and the dome fluctuated a bit as the golems that are within the barrier also came out before going back to defending the city again.

    All of the golems now started marching forward. They also started attacking the undead creatures of the Mari n.

    Sivan and Divine league members saw this. They were shocked.

    Sivan in particr felt his throat run dry at a rapid pace.

    "What the hell is happening?"

    He muttered and immediately took out amunication token.

    "Contact the Lava worm operators. I want to know what is happening. Why are the golemsing at us? Tell them to take control of this shit."

    "Yes, Sir."

    The subordinate contacted the Lava worm operators.

    Meanwhile within the Lava worms underground.

    All of the operators are feeling anxious.

    Because as soon as the orb entered the worm, they lost control of the whole machine. They lost the connection they had with the golems. They lost themand over the Lava worm''s energy discharge.

    They cannot even control its motion.

    "Operators? What is the situation? The Golems are moving in the opposite direction, they areing at the direction of the Mari n''s camp. Take control over them."

    When they heard this, their eyes widened in horror. This could be considered treason. They knew very well what the Mari n would do to them if they didn''t take control of this situation.

    They tried to get the control back, but they cannot.

    "Sir, we cannot operate the Lava worm. The machine ispletely acting on its own. It is already mobile. It is not stationary anymore.

    We don''t know what is happening. We request assistance."

    When the subordinate got this message from one of the Lava worms, he knew that things are going to be troublesome.

    He ran to Sivan and gave him the report on the situation.

    "No this cannot be happening. This shouldn''t be happening. This is impossible."

    As he muttered, he started pacing around. He needs an immediate solution to this problem. But he doesn''t know what to do.

    He doesn''t know exactly what is happening with the golems. He cannot even begin to understand the theoretical concept behind the sudden change of golems and Lava worms, much less turn it around.

    He immediately called the artisans and experts that built the Lava worms and asked for an exnation from them.

    But even they are a bit tongue-tied. They didn''t even know this could be done. All they did is follow a well-drawn blueprint.

    They didn''t do much research and they didn''t reverse engineer the whole thing to gain a better understanding. They wanted to, but they couldn''t because Sivan only needed these things to work.

    Now, he is suffering for his decisions.

    Avlyn and the rest of the Divine league members looked at the golems and sighed.

    "It seems like the n has backfired. The Mari n is going to suffer now."

    "Are we going to make a move?"

    One of her subordinates asked.

    "Unless, it is absolutely necessary, we are not getting out of the camp. Tell Sivan to take care of this by himself. We will not be involving ourselves in this mess until the final stages."

    As they are speaking, the golems that were slowly walking a few seconds ago, started running. They ran at a rapid pace and they even picked up some weapons from the ground. The cursed weapons left behind by the cursed undead.

    "Are they really using weapons? Why do I feel like they became stronger and cleverer after they were taken over by the enemy?"

    Avlyn expressed her surprise and Sivan who just arrived happened to listen to that. He gritted his teeth and asked.

    "There is a problem. I need your help."

    "I am sorry if you are asking us to deal with all of them, that is not happening. You can ask your grand elders to do that."

    "I know you wouldn''t do that. I just want you guys to keep an eye on the ground around the camp. My grand elders will be destroying the golems, if by any chance theva wormse near the surface and the camp, please inform me.

    The grand elders would be too busy destroying the golems, they might miss that out."

    "That we can do."

    Sivan nodded and left the spot. He went to talk to the soldiers and the Grand elders.

    There are some cannons that shoot energy beams. They are being operated by some shooters as they helped the grand elders and shot down the golems.

    Two of the grand elders went out and started usingrge scale attacks as they destroyed the golems.

    But both of their means are just temporary. Theva worms are still operating and the golems are regenerating.

    The grand elders are using arge amount of their energy to destroy a few thousand golems at a time and they are popping back up in a few minutes.

    But of course, with more attacks, the numbers are reducing a bit. After all, their elemental energy has an effect on the soil which is not reacting with the fire elemental energy and theva worm''s connection after being abused constantly.

    Sivan looked at the situation and felt a bit tense. He is looking for the Lava worms. He knew that since the operators lost control, there is no way theva worms would just be sitting ducks.

    Whatever method the other party used might havee up by Sam and he is not a person that takes everything lying down.

    Since he made a move and took over everything in an instant, there is no way, he would stop in this anticlimactic situation.

    As he was thinking, Avlyn stood on the ground and spread her spiritual sense into it.

    Her spiritual energy enhanced the senses as it spread all over the earth and she tried to observe every minute vibration happening in the surroundings.

    Even among all of the noises and vibrations caused by these numerous golems, she is still able to differentiate which is which.

    She put all of her concentration into it to see what these Lava worms would be doing.

    After a few minutes, she finally sensed some vibrations.

    All of the Lava worms are indeed on the move, but not a single one of them ising towards the camp, which surprised her.

    She opened her eyes in surprise.

    She could estimate which way they are going and she wanted to take a look to see if there is anything special about the spot.

    But to her surprise, even the soil is not particrly useful in the ces they are going.

    It is full of dense trees.

    There is no way it would be an ideal ce to create more golems.

    She kept on thinking, but cannot find any appropriate reason.

    After some thought, she decided to give this information to Sivan.

    When Sivan found out the locations where the Lava worms are going to emerge at, even he is feeling a bit confused.

    He couldn''t understand the purpose of Sam to move in such random directions. All of them are away from the camp.

 Chapter 1516 Worms attack

    Chapter 1516 Worms attack¡¡¡¡The four worms moved at their top speed underground.

    Sivan is having a hard time estimating Sam''s thoughts process. Hepletely believed that Sam is the one doing this. Because in his mind, there is no one else skilled enough to figure out a way to control the Lava worms.

    That also made him think of more questions and raised many more doubts.

    Theva worms are actually moving away from within their operating range of the golems. The farther the worms move, the harder it is to control the golems. This gave him a bad feeling.

    As he was thinking, the golems that are constantly raising up again and again, didn''t move towards the camp. The Grand elders stopped and proudly returned to the camp.

    Sivan noticed this and spoke up.

    "What the hell are you doing back inside?"

    "The golems are leaving. We can just leave those things for themselves."

    Sivan frowned as he looked at the golems that are moving away.

    They are moving in all kinds of directions. They are circle around the camp and running away.

    Looking at the directions they are moving in, Sam once again saw the directions the worms are moving in. The bad premonition increased again.

    He went back and talked to the formation masters. He quickly drew something roughly and asked.

    "What happens with this kind of formation? Can you round up the measurements and span and estimate it?"

    "I can try, but it will take a few minutes."

    "Just do it."

    The formation master started drawing some patterns and calcted with the help of his colleagues. Meanwhile, Avlyn came and said something to Sivan.

    "The worms stopped moving. I think they areing up now."

    Sivan looked at the surroundings once again and updated the formation masters with the locations of the worms.

    At this moment, the golems that are spread across the whole span suddenly stopped.

    The worms came out of the ground and their heads faced the camp from all of those sides.

    Sivan and Avlyn saw this and both of them frowned. Three of the Divine league''s group members became alert and noticed something is wrong with the whole scenario.

    All of the golems suddenly started glowing and even the Lava worms did the same. At the mouth of each worm, there is arge ball of pure fire elemental energy gathered and then it is enveloped by another earth elemental energy barrier around it.

    All four of the worms did the same and the golems rolled themselves into the balls and concentrated all of the energy.

    Sam who is sitting inside the tower within the Gaja n''s estate, currently had a faint smile on his face.

    And as soon as that smile appeared, theva worms shot the energy balls out.

    They came out along with waves of elemental energies that hit the golems that are rolled themselves into balls.

    They acted like cannonballs that were shot through the cannons. They were covered with mes that are burning red hot.

    All of them made their way to the camp with extreme force.

    The grand elders immediately jumped to action as they tried to defend the camp.

    Four people from the Divine league also came up and assisted the Grand elders to defend.

    Four energy barriers were created on four sides and the Divine league members jumped into the sky with their weapons brandished. They targeted the bigger energy balls and left the rest of them to the grand elders.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Four energy shes happened and therge balls that came at them like meteors were crushed into debris which spread among the camp.

    The four divine league members felt the impact of the attack and backed down in shock.

    At least they managed to defend against the attack. If they didn''t do that, they are sure that half of the camp would be destroyed.

    The four of them went back to meet Avlyn and asked.

    "Boss, what is up with these things? When Sivan exined and gave demos with these things, he didn''t say he could do this?

    They are only supposed to be some kind of golem makers. Why can they attack like that? What does that even mean? Is Sivan trying to y us by withholding info?"

    "No, it just means, that he might have stolen these things, but only the maker knows how to truly use them."

    Avlyn replied with a smile and by now the camp is already in chaos. The barriers can only stop so many golem cannon balls that came. Some of them fell into the camp and killed some people here and there.

    Some got injured.

    But no matter how, the golems disappeared and the soul orbs came out of them.

    They floated away and went back to the Gaja estate as if they are being called by someone.

    One of the Divine league members saw this and took out something that looked like a crystal jar and jumped high.

    He caught one of the soul orbs in the crystal jar before closing it down.

    The soul orb tried to get out of the jar with everything it had, but it was unable to.

    The person who caught it had a deep frown on his face.

    "What happened Cray?"

    Avlyn asked him.

    "This soul. It is part of a soulwork."

    "What? Did you just say a Soulwork?"

    "Yes, someone made a soulwork in the Gaja estate and they are using it to control these golems. Now that their work is done, they are going back to join the host of the soulwork."

    "But, it shouldn''t be possible to create a soulwork here. Isn''t that what you said?"

    "Yes, I think there is something different about this soulwork too. I can''t put my finger on it. There is definitely no trace of Divine will in this soul. But I can be sure that this is connected with the soulwork."

    "A bunch of mechanical creatures that could cause this much destruction and a soulwork? No wonder the Gaja n is confident in dealing with so many enemies."

    As they were talking, the Grand elders who finished off the destruction of cannon ball golems that came at them, made their move towards theva worms to destroy them.

    For some reason, Sam didn''t move them off immediately.

    "Wait, you don''t need to do that."

    Sivan yelled out loud.

    But the Grand elders didn''t care. They all ran towards the worms as if they would be missing some treasure if they didn''t.

    Avlyn frowned and looked at the worms. There is faint difference in the worms than before. There is a faint glow that was there before and now it is missing.

    "Didn''t Sivan say that the worms are on low charge if they lost the glow? Why would these people go after these things like this if they are not a threat?"

    One of her subordinates asked from the side.

    "Because they are Greedy bastards. That is why. What else is there for them to gain?"

    The four grand elders ran with all they got and the first one to reach his worm indeed had greedy eyes. He ced his hands on the worm as if he is testing it out, but as soon as he extended his hand forward, the worm glowed once again.

    *BOOM*

    The head of the worm exploded.

    "AAAAAARRRRRGGHHHHH¡­"

    The arm of the grand elder was torn apart immediately.

    The remaining three grand elders stopped. They didn''t dare to go forward.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The remaining three also exploded. But the three grand elders were saved because of their cautious behaviour.

    "Greedy bastards indeed."

    Avlyn said calmly.

    As she is thinking, she saw four soul orbs going away from the Fourva worms, they started moving towards the Lightning worms that are within the surrounding Mountain ranges.

    The orbs that previously went back to the estate also went to the Lightning golems that popped up while he was dealing with the fire golems.

    Sivan who watched all of this, felt horror dawn on his mind.

    He immediately called for the people operating the lightning worms.

    "Some orbs areing your way. They are going to take control of the golems. Use the final discharge at the city before that happens."

    "Sir, but using the final discharge is too dangerous. The worms are at very high power. That much bacsh would be impossible for the machine''s core mechanism to take.

    It is too delicate. We would be losing a lot."

    "You just fucking do what I told you to do. If the orbse and take over the worms, you wouldn''t even be having your lives. Just let the worms go to shit. I want the final discharges to be shot at the city. Right now."

    "Yes sir."

    The orbs are flying towards the lightning worms. Sivan looked at them hatefully and cursed.

    "Sam, you bastard. Even if I have to lose all of my resources. I wouldn''t let you win that easily."

 Chapter 1517 Cray

    Chapter 1517 Cray¡¡¡¡The operators of the lightning worms got ready tounch the final discharge. An emergency attack of these worm machines.

    They use all of the stored energy within them and attack as a final attempt.

    The final discharge is actually designed to use when there is only ten per cent or so of the full energy capacity. As the operator said, the worms are actually very close to full capacity. They didn''t even work for a single day after all.

    If they really shoot the discharge now, things wouldn''t go well for the worm. It will be damaged severely and it might even affect the whole mechanism of this worm.

    The soul orbs zoomed through the air as they reached the lightning worm that was about to shoot the attack.

    It is arge energy beam that was formed at the mouth of the worm.

    In thatst second, the souls upied the lightning worms and the mouth of the worm was closed. It was jammed into the ground.

    "This sick bastard."

    Sivan widened his eyes in disbelief. He didn''t expect Sam would be fast enough.

    *BOOM*

    The worms exploded and there arerge craters formed in different directions. The lightning worms were destroyedpletely. The people that are inside are also dead.

    Sivan is burning in rage as he looked at the list of equipment he has on hand. He wants to use something else.

    He desperately wants to get back at Sam.

    But all of a sudden he remembered something. The Lava worms.

    There are many more than just the four. And Sam only used four until now.

    The rest didn''t make an appearance yet. He took out hismunication token to try and contact them, but he couldn''t.

    The connection was cut off. He called one of his subordinates and said.

    "I want you to find out the locations of the rest of the Lava worms. Stay on it, until you get a hit."

    "Yes, sir."

    After he ordered that, he once again focused on the battlefield. Currently, Sam has a few hundred lightning golems under his control. Even though the lightning worms are destroyed that means, when these golems are destroyed, they are not going to be regenerated again.

    Since Sam is controlling them with the souls, he managed to keep them intact and moving.

    The lightning golems are not really moving forward, they are just standing far away from the Sivan''s camp. They stood in between the city and camp.

    Avlyn who is watching the whole thing frowned. She went to meet Cray, the person who recognized the soulwork and asked.

    "Can you deal with this soulwork?"

    "I don''t know. I don''t have much experience in operating one and even less in countering one. As for creating one? That is way beyond anything that I could do.

    On top of that, this is not a regrwork."

    "Can you at least try? See if you can connect to it and counter the other party."

    "Why are you so anxious all of a sudden. We are here to fight for the real battles. These small skirmishes are not going to make any difference at all."

    "I doubt that. Have you seen the explosions of those creatures? Even I am not sure if I would be able to escape unscathed if I was caught off guard.

    We need to neutralize the person that is causing all of this."

    "I will try."

    "Please do. He is just out for a few hours and he has already did this much. I wonder what he will be doingter."

    As they are speaking, all of a sudden, Gail and Gamin came out of the n''s city.

    They are standing outside of the gate and the dome. They stood straight and looked straight at the camp.

    "What are they doing there?"

    Avlyn muttered to herself with a frown. She didn''t expect that Gail and Gamin would make an appearance this soon.

    At this moment, the dome opened up a bit and over a hundred undead creatures came out of the Gaja city.

    They are wearing a set of armour and weapons. They all walked in an orderly manner and all of their walks is the same. They are also being controlled by Sam.

    They joined in the ranks of the golems and now both the golems and the undead formed an orderly battle formation as they slowly moved forward.

    "So, that is why they are here."

    Avlyn muttered in understanding. Sivan looked at the situation and frowned. He also understood why the other powerhouses are outside.

    They are deterring the powerhouses of Sivan''s camp. Now the golems and undead are moving out, Sivan''s camp obviously has to send a response.

    He initially just wanted to send a grand elder to finish it off in one blow. But now he cannot.

    If the grand elders made a move, the other party will also make a move and no grand elder is daring enough to face Gail and Gamin.

    As for directly attacking in a group and finishing off the battle, nobody wants to do that. Nobody knows if the Gaja n has a contingency for escape.

    This battle is not just about winning and losing after all. It is a battle for extermination. If the powerhouse sh and the situation doesn''t favour the Gaja n, they might just leave.

    They cannot just rush to the final course. They need to wear down the Gaja n while they still have hope and by the time they lose hope, the Mari n should destroy their source and means of escape and keep them here.

    Sivan thought for a moment and looked at Divine league members.

    "We are not moving yet. It is going to take more time." Avlyn directly said it.

    "When exactly?"

    "When we find the right moment. When the war is in a really tight situation."

    Sivan just looked at her calmly before moving to the side.

    "Send the earth armour unit. They have the best defence. Tell them to take their time and deal with them slowly. They don''t need to rush."

    Sivan said and the subordinates immediately sent the orders. A hundred soldiers who are in Astral ne transcendence level moved out wearing bulky earth armours and heavy weapons. Most of them are carrying battle-axes, war hammers and Heavy maces.

    They slowly moved forward in their own formation.

    The golems and undead creatures are not really that strong. The aura the strongest undead is giving off is at the middle stage of the transcendent stage, which is not that high, to begin with whenpared to this whole situation of the war.

    While both parties are slowly advancing toward each other, within the Mari n''s camp people are trying their best to heal the people that got hit by the previous cannonball attacks.

    The cannonball attacks are made with golems and those golems are made with soil full of cursed blood of the undead creatures.

    The curses are actually dropped there by Sivan himself.

    Now he is suffering the consequences of his own actions.

    His healers are trying to remove the curses on the few people as fast as they can. Luckily these curses are mostly just causing pain and suffering.

    Instead of killing them which might have been what the soldiers preferred anyway.

    Soon, the earth armour unit and the undead creatures plus golems shed.

    The undead creatures and golems are of course high in numberspared to the earth armour unit, but the earth armour unit has strength in terms of quality. They are real cultivators and they also have high-quality armour and weapons that are actually made with Sam''s designs.

    While things are like that, Sivan ordered some of his subordinates to assist the armour unit.

    Five energy beam cannons were mounted at the entrance of the camp and they aimed at the battlefield.

    They are also using earth elemental energy beams and they started shooting at the undead creatures and golems.

    The battle started and it got heated very soon.

    The undead creatures golems moved in a very orderly fashion.

    Even though they are all separate entities, they moved like they are all part of one creature. Like fingers of a hand.

    It is the work of the soulwork Sam established.

    Six golems and one undead creature teamed up together as they fought each of the armoured unit members.

    While the battle is going on outside, inside the camp, Avlyn and Cray didn''t even stay to spectate.

    Instead, they took up a solitary tent and inside, Cray created an inscribed formation. Even for him, it took over forty-five minutes to draw it and after he did that, he took out some formation gs that are specially designed for specific rituals and ced them at different spots within the inscribed formation.

    After the whole set-up wasplete, he sat in the middle along with the crystal jar as Avlyn spectated.

    The Jar slowly opened itself as Cray silently sat cross-legged and closed his eyes. The soul orb that came out immediately wanted to get back to Sam, but instead, it got trapped in the formation.

 Chapter 1518 Exchange

    Chapter 1518 Exchange¡¡¡¡The soul orb hovered around Cray.

    It struggled to get out of the circle now and then, but it was unable to do so and it ended up revolving around Cray again and again.

    Cray opened his eyes as he looked at the orb and said.

    "That guy is good."

    He muttered with bright eyes.

    Avlyn just calmly looked at him waiting for him work.

    Cray made some hand signs and a bright glowing energy that took the shape of runes came out of his body. He held the energy in the form of a ball and ced it into the formation.

    "But I wonder if he is good enough to ovee this."

    The formation absorbed the runic energy and channelled it into the soul orb. The orb that was clear until then suddenly had runes marked all over it. The formation was cleared.

    The orb flew threw the air and appeared within the city as it passed through the battlefield.

    It went within the range of Sam''splete control and kept on going until it reached the formation.

    When it finally reached the inscribed formation in the middle of which Sam is sitting with his soul almost out of his body, it entered the formation and hit Sam''s soul projection.

    Sam who was sitting with his full focus on controlling the undead, golems and Lightning worms suddenly felt something hit him.

    At this moment, in his mind, there is arge array of perspectives showcased. They are the perceptions of every creature and entity he is currently controlling.

    He felt like he is standing in a nk space with screen hovering all over him and he is looking at all of the screens at the same time.

    He felt like all of the screens are connected to him through a thread and within that space there are some stray orbs that are hovering around.

    One of them hovered away a bit and arge screen opened up from it.

    That is the perception of one of the Lava worms.

    He felt like his mind is connected by a threat to each of these orbs and then in turn to these projections. But at this moment, there is an extra thread that is not just connected to him.

    He focused on that one orb and he noticed the runes around it.

    There is another thread that is connected to someone else on another side.

    Sam frowned and he concentrated on the orb a bit. He caught on to that thread and tried to pry to the other side.

    Cray who is sitting in the camp, frowned and muttered.

    "He is quick too. But also a bit hasty."

    Avlyn''s frown rxed a bit after listening to that.

    Cray started making some more handsigns. At this moment, within the Sam''s headspace where his soul is viewing everything, he envisioned arge tear urring at a corner and someone trying to pry it open.

    He frowned and focused on the tear. He started mending it with his mental energy and it started getting narrower. Within a few seconds, the whole thing was closed.

    There are a dozen or so orbs that are around Sam and they moved up on hismand as they reinforced the boundaries of the space.

    Cray suddenly opened his eyes in his tent as he looked shocked.

    "What happened?"

    Avlyn asked in surprise.

    "He is really good. Way too good for a young man."

    "Young man?"

    "Yeah, it is Sam who is doing it. The soul, I caught a glimpse of it. The soul definitely belonged to the person named Sam. He is operating thiswork and there is a great chance that he created it."

    "Sam created this soulwork? Are you kidding me?"

    "I was skeptical on why the other person didn''t use any divine will in it, now I understand, he doesn''t have any to use at all."

    "Are you sure, he is not just operating thework that someone else created?"

    "I don''t know, but from the looks of it, it is highly likely that he made it by himself. There is also something resisting me from entering the soul space.

    Apart from his own resistance that he is putting up, this is very natural and more powerful too. I don''t know what it is though."

    "Try to open it again. A young man operating a soulwork? Apart from ''them'' nobody has ever done that."

    "''Them''? This is better than ''them''. You will only be able to understand after you see it or experience it. Those normal soulworks are only used by some necromancers to control the undead creatures and some puppet and golem masters to operate their puppets and golems.

    But this one is different. He is operating the golems, puppets and undead all at the same time and look at the number. There are hundreds of them and before this, he controlled more than a thousand.

    He is way better than ''them''."

    Cray said in excitement as he closed his eyes and tried his best to get into the soul space once again just like before.

    But this time, Sam is actually waiting for him on the other side. He knew that he ising this time and he used all of his extra souls to provide extra reinforcement to the boundaries of this soul space.

    "Who is this guy?"

    Sam muttered to himself.

    "How the fuck is he doing this?"

    On the other side Cray also muttered to himself as he tried to pry it open. Apart from the force that is Sam is using to oppose him, there is another force that is trying to stop it.

    He opened his eyes and frowned as he felt the connection with the orb that he sent to Sam.

    Avlyn looked at him askance and he said.

    "There is some trouble. I wanted to suppress my cultivation and enter it sneakily before destroying the space, but it seems like things are not going as well as we want.

    I will try to increase my strength a bit."

    "Why can''t you just use your full strength? Gail and Gamin are outside, we might be able to deal with him like this?"

    "If my next trick doesn''t work, I will do it."

    Avlyn nodded and Cray tried again.

    But this time, Sam who is on the other side focused on the orb that caused this connection. He cannot find anything wrong it, but he could feel that there is another extra thread connected to it.

    After some thought, he attached a ghost chimera to it.

    And at that exact moment, Cray who is trying to pry open the soul space again, suddenly felt the ghost chimera invading his own soul.

    He pulled himself back immediately and opened his eyes.

    Avlyn who is standing right beside him became frustrated.

    "He is a kidpared to you and you were thrown back three times already. Are you kidding me?"

    "Yeah, he is a fucking kid alright. I highly doubt he even knows the concept of soulwork. He just handed over the control of a soul to a ghost chimera. Do you know anyone who would use soulwork like that?"

    "What did you say?"

    "You heard it right. I just got attacked by a Ghost chimera. He is really reckless. It is almost a taboo to use such a thing in a soul battle. Nobody with a sane mind does that. I suddenly don''t want to kill him anymore.

    He has such a potential. It would all be wasted if he dies here now."

    "What the hell are you talking about? He is an enemy to us now. We need to kill him."

    "Well, I don''t want to."

    "Stop screwing around and kill him."

    Avlyn almost lost and wanted to scream.

    Cray sighed and was about to go back to attack. But before he could do that, he suddenly felt a sensation and he sighed.

    "I can''t, he cut the connection off. He destroyed the soul."

    "What?"

    "He decisively cut destroyed the soul forcefully."

    "In the middle of an operating soulwork?" Avlyn asked in shock.

    "Yes."

    "Is he fucking mad?"

    "From the exchange, I have with him. You could say that. He is an insanely mad guy who either doesn''t know what he is doing or is too confident in his skills to give a fuck about the consequences of what he is doing.

    But trust me, if he grows, that would be some seriously good soulmander. He will make those snotty brats quake in their boots."

    "Too bad, we cannot let him live and realize that potential."

 Chapter 1519 Wolves

    Chapter 1519 Wolves¡¡¡¡Avlyn felt frustrated.

    She left the tent and went to meet Sivan.

    "I want you to end this. Capture one of the golems or the undead and bring it while it is still active. I need to find the soul orb within it."

    Sivan frowned and asked.

    "Why do you need that?"

    "To help you kill that person Sam of course. Do you want that?"

    "How is that even possible? Do you think Sam would let such a loose end hang around like this?"

    "From what you said, he is a cocky bastard. Why wouldn''t he do such a thing?"

    "I never said he is a cocky bastard. He is an arrogant bastard who is so confident in his own abilities that he dares to go against anyone and everyone."

    "That sounds cocky to me."

    "He is only considered cocky if he is exaggerating. But he is not."

    "Yeah, I will believe it when I see it. Do you want my help or not? One of my subordinates can hurt his soul, but he needs that soul orb. You need to capture that thing."

    "Alright. I will try."

    "No, not trying. Send more people out there and end this farce. He sent a few hundred of those things and you are ying around with him with a hundred soldiers. What is the point of bringing so many soldiers and equipment if you are not going to use them?"

    "I am saving them."

    "For what?"

    "Apparently you don''t know Sam as I do and you are not really willing to believe whatever my reports said. So, I don''t even want to bother exining myself."

    "Thanks, I don''t have enough tolerance for bullshit anyway. So, you better bring those things in. Send more soldiers right now and tell those shooters to aim properly. I have been observing them for a while and they haven''tnded a single proper hit."

    "Alright, you don''t have to criticize my subordinates. Just deal with your own fucking ones."

    Sivan said coldly before moving away. He called for his subordinates and sent another hundred soldiers with earth armours.

    Meanwhile, Sam who is still in the tower and is dragging out the battle a bit with the golems and undead is thinking of something else.

    He didn''t understand how the other party managed to lock the soul that was under his control and almost invaded his soul space. He created this soul space and the wholework with a different concept.

    He didn''t understand what kind of technique can a person use to get inside another person''s soul space.

    But he is feeling a bit cautious now. From what he could guess, the other party is way too powerful for Sam to deal with.

    He doesn''t want to expose his soul to someone of that strength.

    "I might have to get out of here, before that. I just hope that Sivan takes the bait sooner."

    He thought as he dragged the battle even more.

    All of his golems and undead are ying defensive. They are dragging the battle so much with the advantage of their numbers and they are using the warriors as shields to not get hit by those earth elemental beams.

    He really doesn''t want to withdraw from this soulwork before he did something big.

    As he was thinking, all of a sudden, he noticed the gates of the camp opening. Another group of soldiers arrived.

    They are also wearing the earthen armours and they are equipped with some much better weaponry.

    They joined the fight and started suppressing the golems and undead.

    Sam smiled and said.

    "Thanks for taking the bait. Finally."

    The next moment the golems and the undead moved in a very weird pattern. The undead creatures didn''t try to attack the soldiers, instead, they just tried to stay close to at least two soldiers and a bunch of golems stood around them.

    They started glowing. Earth and fire elemental energies riled up. They are focused on the undead creature which exploded.

    *POOF*

    ck coloured flesh sprayed on the soldiers. They also took the aftershock of the explosions of the golems.

    *POOF*

    *POOF*

    *POOF*

    The undead exploded one after another and the soldiers bathed in ck coloured liquid that made then feel grossed out.

    They cannot tolerate the stench and the cold, creepy feeling that liquid is giving.

    But that became the least of their problems soon.

    They felt a burning sensation all over their bodies and it is getting amplified every second. They felt like their organs are burning up. At the same time, they are feeling like their blood is turned cold.

    That sharp pain of blood-freezing within the veins made them want to tear their skin open and pull them out.

    Sivan looked at them from afar. There are some soldiers who didn''t get attacked by these undead creatures'' blood.

    So, he gritted his teeth and called them through themunication token.

    "Bring them to the camp."

    After that, he turned to the healers and told them to take care.

    "There would be some curses mixed in. Try to purify them. Use every purification technique you know and make sure you eliminate everything.

    They are not that injured, so just make them take some medicine and don''t waste your energy. Just focus on removing the curses."

    "Yes, sir."

    They immediately went on with their tasks.

    "Sam, you annoying bastard. This is all you wanted to do after so much ying around? Am I overestimating you or did you lose your intelligence after you lost your body?"

    He muttered to himself as he thought of any possible schemes that Sam could have had.

    But after some thought, he just didn''t want to think anymore.

    "This bastard might just be cunning enough to do this and not have any meaning behind it. It might just be him trying to make me overthink."

    He said to himself and looked at the Gaja city.

    Gail and Gamin went back in.

    Sivan gritted his teeth and thought of what to do next. He looked at Avlyn who is also mad at him. She wanted a golem or undead to attack Sam''s soul, but now they are all gone.

    He took a deep breath and asked one of his subordinates to do something.

    After a few minutes, eight wolf type puppets appeared out of the camp as they moved toward the city.

    The wolf puppets looked like Raijus. They have this uncanny resemnce to the Raiju and if not for the obvious mechanical elements, they would pass out as real ones.

    The wolves looked around for a moment as they started sniffing on the ground here and there.

    "Now what are these things good at? Pretending to be wolves?"

    "You will know when they do what they are supposed to do."

    The wolves kept on sniffing here and there. It took a long time before they stopped and by the time they did that, they are in various positions around the city.

    After reaching those spots, the wolves stretched their backs and necks upwards as they whistled.

    *HOWL*

    The howls reverberated throughout the area and all of the wolves had their eyes glowing when they heard the howls of others.

    After the eyes of all the wolves were lit up, their heads moved a bit. After they came to a certain angle they, finally stopped moving and the bodies started forming.

    The hind legs transformed into some kind of pile driver and drilled themselves into the ground. After that, the front legs also started getting into the ground but at a different angle.

    The stomach part of the wolves started glowing as they opened their mouths wide and all of them started howling.

    The energy in the surroundings was immediately collected from the legs and the whole body of the wolf before it was channelled in the stomach. Then it was pumped into the head of the wolf before it came out along with the waves of sound.

    The energy waves and sound waves of all the wolves moved around and they shed with each other while they moved toward the city.

    The crystal dome that was already in ce took the vibrations in and suddenly showed a slight fluctuation.

    Sivan smirked and muttered.

    "How the fuck are you going to deal with this? I highly doubt with your condescension you even thought that I am making these things. I doubt you have a counter prepared for this."

    "What if he has?"

    Avlyn asked as she looked at the vibrating dome with intrigue.

    "Even if he has, he would be losing out a lot before he could make it. The only quick method is sending their powerhouses out and Sam is not the only one who has self-destruction wired in."

    Avlyn raised an eyebrow in intrigue and said.

    "This is a great chance. You are not letting this chance go are you?"

    "Of course not. I am not an idiot. I have already nned something."

    He paused and turned to his subordinates before saying.

    "Undead Hiveunchers."

    The subordinate was surprised, but he immediately went to get what Sivan wanted.

 Chapter 1520 Chat

    Chapter 1520 Chat¡¡¡¡Gail, Gamin and the rest all saw the dome fluctuating constantly.

    They couldn''t help but feel a bit nervous.

    Giyon and Grivon are trying to find a way to deal with this and the best they could do is, increase the energy output of the formation to stabilize it which worked temporarily.

    They wanted to take a look at Sam and ask him.

    He said that he would be in for twelve hours. But he stopped using the soulwork a while ago, but he was still stuck inside.

    He didn''te out.

    Gail and Gamin wanted to go and destroy the wolves immediately. But they are hesitating as Sam repeatedly warned them to not do anything drastic and he said that they shouldn''t be moving out randomly just because the circumstances became a bit tense.

    Giyon directly ran into the tower and saw Sam.

    She noticed that he is frowning hard and his body is shivering.

    She wanted to wake him up, but the people who are guarding the formation and operating it stopped her.

    "He is trying to get out and got stuck in the middle. Some force is stopping him froming out. We cannot disturb him now. He has toe back by himself."

    One of the formation masters said that and Giyon became even more anxious. She even forgot about the formation outside for a second.

    At this moment, Sam who is shivering continuously is looking in his soul space.

    Inside the soul space, a young man is standing in front of him with a faint smile.

    He has ck hair with a medium-short stature. He looked lean but sharp. He is none other than Cray.

    "Don''t worry too much Sam. I know you are trying to get out. I will let you leave in a few seconds."

    "Are you the one that tried to enter the soul space before?"

    "Of course, that was me. But you don''t have to worry about me. I am not here to harm you."

    "I would have believed you more if you met me face to face. Not in my soul space."

    "Of course, I would like that too, but it is impossible for me to juste and meet you. There are way too many obstacles and I might die before I reach you. Gail is a real hard son of a bitch to counter."

    "Why are you here? If you are here to kill me just be done with it."

    "Of course, I would have done that if I was here for that. But I am here just to talk. I want to advise you to leave the battlefield. Right now."

    "And why would I do that?"

    "Because you cannot die here. You are way too precious to die here. You have great potential and a whole new world where you can thrive is waiting for you."

    "I will reach it soon enough. This war will not stop me."

    "Really? I can kill you right here, right now. You will be stopped."

    "I doubt that."

    Sam said confidently.

    "Really? What do you think you would be able to do? I am way too stronger than you."

    "We will know as soon as you try."

    "You are bluffing."

    "Then call it."

    "You are treading in a dangerous space here my friend. I like you, that is why I am advising you. Leave this ce and you will be safe. You have a lot of life ahead of you. A life you never even imagined before."

    "Really? I doubt that."

    "Why are you being stubborn?"

    "I am not. I have a promise to keep. And the only reason this war is happening like this is because of me. If I leave now, Sivan will back down. Do you want to stop the war or something?"

    "No, the war will go on. The Divine league is involved. There is no way Sivan would be able to back down now."

    "Then you are wrong about two things."

    "It seems like you need to get a taste of some overwhelming power."

    As he said, Cray extended his hand and the soul space became a bit constrained. Sam felt like his soul is being pulled out of his bodypletely.

    He immediately made a move. The spectre suddenly used all of the stray souls it has collected and flooded them with Cray''s soul image.

    All of the souls that came out were all given full control over themselves and they all merged with Sam''s soul space as they attacked Cray.

    "Parlour trick."

    Cray muttered and he snapped his finger. All of the souls that are attacking him immediately disappeared. But at this moment, he suddenly realized that Sam''s soul is merging with the spectre while the soul space around him is crumbling.

    Cray widened his eyes in disbelief.

    "Are you mad? What the fuck is wrong with you?"

    "I said you cannot kill me. You cannot."

    "But you will be a part of that spectre. You wouldn''t be yourself. It is a spectre made of Ghost chimaera on top of that. You will lose control of yourself if things go wrong."

    "But I will leave this space alive."

    "You are crazy. Do you know that?"

    "I know that I will survive for sure. I might not be able to defeat you. But I will be able to defeat the souls in the spectre since I already defeated them once. I have more chance of living. But would you be unscathed? With your soul being trapped in a copsing soul space while you are trying to leave."

    As he spoke, the space started crumbling.

    "Stop it. Stop it. Don''t harm yourself just to prove a fucking point. I am leaving. You will not have any trouble with me in the rest of the war. Just be careful about Avlyn. For some reason, she is really pissed at you and she wants to kill you."

    "186."

    "What is that?"

    "Her number in the queue. There are at least that many people that are pissed at me enough to kill me. At least the people that I know of. She has a long queue to cross."

    "You are way too cocky. I now know what Sivan is talking about."

    Cray left the space all of a sudden and Sam stopped his fusion with the spectre and his soul space starteding into the shape.

    After ten more minutes.

    In the tower. Sam opened his eyes and took a deep breath. He held his head tightly with his hand. He felt like his head is being constantly hit by a blunt and heavy object.

    "Fucking hell. You are okay. Finally. I was freaking out."

    Giyon yelled and she hugged Sam.

    Sam looked at her and sighed.

    "How is the situation?"

    "How is your situation dumbass? What the hell happened?"

    "I will exinter. First tell me, who is the situation?"

    "You take a look yourself."

    As soon as she said that Sam ran out and looked out. He was dumbfounded by what he saw. The whole area is full of bugs.

    The bugs flying over and most of them are stuck to the grass and the trees as they sucked the vitality out of them.

    "Undead hives?"

    "Is that what those ck objects are called?"

    "Yes. Did Sivan really use these things?"

    Sam asked as he looked at them in disgust.

    "Why? Is there a problem?"

    "They are useless."

    As soon as Sam said that, he snapped his fingers. A small energy ripple urred. The ripple style acted up and the bugs that are flying until then stopped all of a sudden.

    Sam used this chance to destroy them with a single p.

    "It is that easy. As long as they are not supplied with a smooth flow of energy, they will stop. You can just p them in that one moment."

    "That is it?"

    "Yes, I think two ps from your father will destroy them instantly. As for the people who got bit by them, tell them to take a vitality potion or two. They will be fine. They are the most useless things he could use."

    Sam said as he looked at the fluctuating formation.

    "Did he use the wolves?"

    "Yes."

    "And he used the fluctuations to send these stupid things inside? How did I even lose my body against this guy? I feel so ashamed of myself all of a sudden."

    "Mistakes happen sometimes I guess."

    "Anyway, nobody tried to attack the Wolves, did they?"

    "No, my father is thinking of using ranged attacks now."

    "Well, it is a good thing I came in time. Don''t let him attack the things at the moment. We can use this chance for our benefit. Tell them to get the sphere cannons ready. I have a n."

    Giyon hurriedly left to pass on his instructions. Sam walked to the city wall as he looked at the wolves. He couldn''t help but smile slightly.

    He then looked at the camp far away.

    "Thanks for sending these things to me, you idiot."

 Chapter 1521 Crystals

    Chapter 1521 Crystals¡¡¡¡The sphere cannons were prepared at various spots around the city wall.

    Even though they are mostly automatic and are controlled by the spirits that are enchanted to it, Sam still has basic control of them.

    He activated the sphere cannons and moved the barrels a bit so that they would be at a specific angle when they are shooting at the wolves.

    Currently, eight cannons on each side of the wall are aiming at the wolves.

    Sam sat on one side of the wall as he took out an inscription pen and started drawing something on the spheres.

    These are neutral energy spheres and he is drawing inscriptions at a rapid pace. It took more than three minutes toplete one and he had to draw those inscriptions on eight spheres for each wolf.

    It took more than two hours for him to be done with all of them and in these two hours, there are a bunch of undead hives that are shot over.

    Sam looked at these ck beehive-shaped things fly over his head as theynded on the estate. He cannot help but shake his head.

    These undead hives are actually an iplete product of his. They are at a very raw stage and they are not really useful for causing serious damage. He made them with Zoi termites as an inspiration and they are mostly used for sucking the vitality of the living things.

    They might be good at their job, but they are very fragile and weak.

    So weak that he deemed them useless. He can only assume that Sivan might have been fooled by what they could have been and didn''t focus too much on what they are now.

    If he was in Sivan''s ce, as soon as he activated the wolves and made the formation fluctuate, he would have used something like the Energy cracker to bombard the city and the estate.

    That would be the best way to go. But Sivan is using undead hives as if he has nothing else.

    He shook his head and went on to prepare to deal with the wolves.

    Meanwhile, back in the camp.

    In the past few hours, while Sam was working on the spheres that could help him with the situation at hand, the camp is filled with chaos.

    The soldiers that are brought in after the undead creatures exploded in their faces are suffering from excruciating pain.

    The healers kept on using healing spells and all kinds of purification techniques so that they could find a way to ease their pain.

    But the curses are not going anywhere.

    They constantly injected vitality into their bodies to make them feel better, but now the healers are feeling exhausted.

    Particrly in the past hour. They tried their best to suppress the curses, but they ran out of energy by then and left one of the soldiers on an anaesthetic before they went to recover. But what they don''t know is as soon as they left the tent. The soldier''s body started twitching.

    Soon, white crystals started popping out of his body and before anyone could even notice what is happening, he is already consumed by the crystal.

    The other soldier who saw this was stunned. He is one of the few who didn''t get affected by the curses too much and he ran forward.

    He touched the bone structure and yelled.

    "What is happening here? Healers."

    He started yelling out and the healers turned to notice them.

    The healers who noticed this were also stunned and they came running.

    "What happened? How did he be like this all of a sudden?"

    The healer that went to take a rest after putting this guy to sleep was stunned.

    He went on to the crystal and started smashing it up.

    "Sir, what are you doing? What if he gets hurt?"

    "Hurt? He should be alive to get hurt."

    The healer kept on crazily smashing it, but no matter how much he tried to do it, he wasn''t able to find the body of the soldier. In the end, he injured himself and let the shards of the crystal enter his system.

    While everyone is focusing on that soldier. Something else happened somewhere else.

    Another soldier in the corner of the tent also started being consumed with the crystal.

    Then another one and then another one.

    All the healers jumped to the action and one of the soldiers that is standing guard went to inform Sivan about it.

    Sivan came back running in fear as he looked at the tent full of white crystals in ces of the beds.

    He felt terrified by the sight. He cannot wrap his head around the situation and felt anxious.

    "What the fuck happened here?"

    He grabbed the cor of the healer nearby and asked him.

    But the healer didn''t know what is happening. He shivered in fright as he tried to exin himself.

    But another soldier who is sitting on the side also started turning into a crystal. One of the soldiers who is feeling well went and tried to check up on him along with another healer, but they couldn''t help it.

    All they did was have some wounds in the palms. The soldier was swallowed by the crystal.

    The healer and the soldier failed.

    Sivan looked around at the tent as he felt like something weird is happening.

    All of a sudden, he thought of how Sam just sent the undead and golems there to waste some time and explode.

    "I should have known. Why would that cunning bastard, just waste some time out of blue? I really should have known."

    He muttered to himself as he widened his eyes in despair. For some reason, he felt like puking his guts out.

    The pain almost felt physical for him.

    He turned to his subordinate and said.

    "Quarantine this whole thing. I don''t want anyone in or out of this area. All of the soldiers will be quarantined and the healers make sure that you figure out the reason. I don''t care what it takes, but I want a cure for this."

    "Yes, Sir."

    The healers answered meekly.

    Sivan went out and he looked at the Gaja estate angrily. He really felt the urge to destroy them immediately.

    He looked through the list of the equipment, he had and found something that he wanted to use.

    "Call for the Light Chamber formation. Send the Grand elders to arrange the formation themselves. Every node should be put at the same time and they shouldn''t go out unless they are in pairs.

    Take Divine league members'' help."

    He ordered directly. His subordinates ran around as they passed on his orders.

    Meanwhile, back in Gaja city, Sam went to different spots where the canons are located to target the wolves.

    He created a specialmunication hub for the operators and kept in contact with them.

    Before he started the n, he looked at Gail and Gamin, before saying.

    "I want you guys to be quick after this. I need you to find the thing I told you about within a few moments after the wolves are destroyed. I don''t want the inner parts to be damaged and before the other party realizes what is happening, you should bring them to me."

    "Don''t worry. All four of them are moving out. There is not a chance that we will miss this thing."

    "Great then. Let me get this done."

    Sam spoke and took out themunication device.

    "Now shooting teams. Get ready.

    The things that are you tackling currently. The wolves are currently weakening the formation and this constant fluctuation will soon turn into permanent damage. So, I want you guys to deal with it.

    You are going to destroy these devices that are specifically made to deal with the dome that has been saving your n and the city for the past few days.

    For all, all you have to do is, simultaneously shoot the sphere cannons. On every side, all of the cannons needed should be fired at the same time and there shouldn''t even be a fraction of the second disparity.

    If you have that disparity, then you will have some serious trouble, because these wolves are very much connected and if one of them explodes while the other survives, the good one will discharge all of its energy onto the formation.

    Even if it doesn''t destroy too much, it will definitely kill a few people and soldiers that are on one side.

    Your job is to make sure that it doesn''t happen."

    All of the soldiers felt like they have a bigger responsibility than they could bear all of a sudden.

    They don''t want to bear this, they are all getting cold feet.

    "You are chosen for this because you are the best long-range attackers in the whole n. If you cannot do this, no one else can.

    Your n leader agrees to that. I just hope that you are not too much of coward to back down from this."

 Chapter 1522 Core Mechanisms

    Chapter 1522 Core Mechanisms¡¡¡¡The soldiers felt a bit embarrassed as soon as Sam said those words.

    Some of them took deep breaths to calm themselves, some of them gritted their teeth and got ready, and some of them burned with excitement as they aimed the cannons.

    Sam just calmly continued speaking.

    "3

    2

    1

    SHOOT."

    As soon as he said the word shoot, all the shooters pulled the triggers. The cannonsunched spheres at the same time.

    At every shooting spot, eight spheres came out at the same time and when they reached a certain height, one could see them forming a circle in the air.

    The inscriptions are activated on the spheres before they emitted some strings made out of pure energy them.

    The strings connected with one another. All eight of those spheres formed a circle. They just stayed in that circle at the same speed and started rotating.

    As they moved toward the wolf, from within the circle formed an energy mesh. As soon as the sphere was near the wolf and they are about fall off, the energy mesh hit the wolf''s head, followed by its body.

    The energy mesh went through the head and the body and within a fraction of that moment, the wolf''s body went through a massive change.

    The sheer force of that energy mesh destroyed the metallic head and neck of the wolf by distorting every inch of it. It is almost like they were crushed by a massive mountain.

    The neck fell off before the mesh moved to the body and this time since the size of the wolf''s body is bigger, it didn''t look like it was crushed by a single weight, rather it looked like a barbaric brute with infinite strength abused it with a sledgehammer in its weakest spots.

    The whole wolf''s upper body was destroyed within a second. The eight spheresnded on the ground, but they didn''t explode. All of their energy was used in the mesh and they used all of that energy to destroy the wolf''s body.

    All of the wolves were brought down just like this and all of them are down at the same time.

    As the body of the wolf was destroyed, arge metallic cylinder fell from within it.

    It was within the wolf''s body and it is the inner mechanism of the wolf that makes many of its functions possible.

    The core mechanism was also a bit damaged because of the energy mesh, but it is notpletely useless now. In fact, it is very useful.

    "Now."

    Sam looked at Gail and said to him.

    Gail took out his ownmunication device and contacted other Peak stage cultivators. Gamin, Yuvana and the n''s leader.

    All of them moved out at the same time as they went for the mechanisms.

    Sivan and the Divine league members who saw this felt extremely shocked. The wolves are powerful. In fact, they are very strong, but for them to just be destroyed at one proper shot of eight spheres is a bit anti-climatic and disappointing.

    "They are indeed good, but they are this weak?" Avlyn blurted out of curiosity.

    "Of course not. It is just that Sam might have pulled up another trick under his sleeve to deal with them like this.

    That asshole is indeed the creator of these things."

    "So, you got his designs, but couldn''t obtain his intellect."

    Sivan didn''t reply to that.

    He felt exhausted.

    He watched as the peak stage cultivators came out of the city, took the core mechanisms and ran inside. He frowned at this.

    "What are they doing?"

    Avlyn asked once again.

    "I don''t know exactly what they are doing, but from the looks of it, they are bringing back the core mechanism of the wolves. I think it is still intact."

    "What are they going to do with the core mechanisms?"

    "I don''t know, but that destructive bastard made sure that it won''t be damagedpletely when dealing with the wolves. Fuck, we need to stop them."

    Sivan said as he looked at Avlyn.

    "Don''t look at me. I already sent half of my team to do your bidding just now. I highly doubt we will be able to take them on now."

    "If you are not going to attack them, what is the point of you being here?"

    "It is to attack them, but not now. They need to be desperate enough and we cannot let the Gaja n taste failure before the small fries are eliminated. In fact, I am d that we are losing a bit.

    This will make them cocky. Let them be cocky as much as they want. Then I can easily deal with themter."

    "Are you sure this would work? As far as I know, you are all just scared shitless of Gail."

    "We are here aren''t we?"

    "Well, you were there when my father was present too. But none of your team members dared to say a single word. I highly doubt this is going to be any different."

    "You don''t have to doubt it. We are confident and we have a n."

    "It better be good. Even though I lost a few rounds until now, I did manage to do some damage one way or the other. It would be embarrassing if you didn''t even produce any results."

    "Some damage? You barely scratched their surface. I am pretty sure, they still have many tricks up their sleeves."

    "Of course they do. But So do I."

    Sivan said as he looked into the horizon. One of the grand elder teams that left earlier came back running and he couldn''t help but smile.

    "And soon, you will see my next attack. That would be a really great thing. You might want to let your teammates get ready. The peak stage cultivators mighte outside with this and if things go well, they will being out with a lot of confusion and bewilderment. If you want, you can try your luck there."

    "Really? Let''s see then."

    As they are speaking, more and more teams areing out.

    After everyone came back Sivan went into his tent along with a formation master and both of them started working on something. They created a small formation on a table.

    Meanwhile, back in the n, Sam looked at the core mechanisms that are brought to him.

    The core mechanism is mostly a cylindrical shape with some protrusions here and there on the surface. It is as big as arge suitcase.

    Sam picked one of the mechanisms and started twisting some knobs and opening some screws. He dismantled the mechanism with rtive ease and various parts of it soon upied the space around him.

    He lost himself in the zone as he looked at every part of it with a smile that isced with glee.

    "Not bad. This guy really has some good artisans at hand."

    He muttered as he finally came to onest box within the mechanism. He started opening it slowly and finally, he took out a foot-long cylindrical object from within it.

    It has a transparent body made of empty spirit stone material and within that body, there is a very intricate mechanism that is made from very high-quality metal. Each part of the mechanism is filled with hundreds of inscriptions if not more.

    The empty space within the mechanism is filled with liquid spiritual energy. If the mechanism is active, it would be constantly expended while the spiritual energy is constantly pumped from the rest of the mechanism.

    On the two ends of the cylinder, there are two ports. One port connects the rest of the core mechanism to the mechanism of this small cylinder while the other port connects the output energy of this mechanism to the rest of the puppet.

    This is the keyponent for the operation of this puppet. If this is even a bit faulty things will go crazy immediately.

    Sam looked at the mechanism and smiled.

    "What is that?"

    "A new addition to our arsenal. This is one of the most intricate things that I ever designed until now. The puppet is just one of the uses it has. It is notplete yet and is very premature, but I am sure it wille in handy for us now."

    "Great, so, what are we going to do next?"

    "Why hurry, let''s wait and see what the other party does. We are on the defensive, but we still have the upper hand. We don''t have to attack them directly.

    They will lose their resources trying to wear us down."

    "If you think so. All this while we managed to counter them well with minimal losses. But I am sure even Sivan would be feeling a pinch by now."

    "He should be feeling it."

    As both of them were speaking, all of a sudden, the whole city turned extremely bright.

    Sam who is sitting frowned as he looked around. He cannot see anything around him. It is so bright that not only his eyes are hurting, but even while he closed his eyes, he is still feeling the effect of this brightness.

 Chapter 1523 Light Chamber

    Chapter 1523 Light Chamber¡¡¡¡Sam felt like his eyes went blind. He immediately recognized what is happening and what came on to them.

    This is the Light chamber.

    This has a very intricate system that he designed. He is actually very shocked at the moment as he never expected Sivan to seed in making this.

    Most of his assumptions came from what Gail has described what he has seen. Apart from that, Sam estimated the level of artisans that are in the Mari n as the same level as the artisans of the Gaja n.

    That is why he assumed they wouldn''t be able to create this Light Chamber.

    This is a very high-level concept and when someone hears it, they will think that this is a joke.

    Sam tried to calm down as he made sure that his eyes are not being affected by the ring light and talked into themunication token within his hand.

    He opened all of the channels that are connected to the token and spoke,

    "Everyone, who can hear my voice. Don''t panic.

    I am saying it again. Don''t panic.

    No matter what you try, you wouldn''t be able to see what is in front of you, even your spiritual sense would be distorted. You might think that you are stuck in an illusion and you will even see some illusions and hallucinations as the time passes. But I am telling.

    Never ever overreact and attack anything.

    Whenever you are sit down on the floor and use the strongest defensive artefact you have on yourself.

    Surround yourself with the defensive measures and refrain from attacking."

    He closed off themunication with those words.

    He then connected to the Peak stage cultivators of the n.

    "Guys, you are the strongest here and at the moment, you are also the most dangerous people. I want you to stay calm. Like I said to those people.

    Don''t try to attack anything. I don''t know if your strength will be able to ovee this and you will be able to see past these distortions, but no matter what, don''t attack anything.

    Please, stay calm and sit down. Use your defences and don''t counterattack, no matter what attacks areing at you.

    I hope you understand."

    "Yes."

    "Clear. I am staying right here."

    "Fucking hell, alright."

    Various responses came from the other side.

    "Gail, I want you to stay on the line.

    The rest of you, please do not keep yourmunication tokens back in the spatial storage. Hold it tightly in your hand and y with its sharp edge.

    Rub your finger on it constantly."

    After that, he cut off themunication with the rest and talked with Gail.

    "First of all, the situation is worse than it seems.

    Currently, the whole Gaja n estate is covered in light. Unless the people are hidden in apletely closed room in the basement. As long as even a single ray of light could prate into some area, that area is currently filled with light."

    "How is that even possible?"

    "That was my initial reaction when I came up with the concept, but if you are heartless enough, it is possible.

    I suppose Sivan is as heartless as a person can be.

    Anyway, I will exin it to youter, but currently, the light particles and light rays around you are allpletely against you.

    Since they just arrived, it will take some time for them to kick in and do some damage. But please do not attack no matter whates at you."

    "Then what do you want me to do?"

    "Constantly snap your fingers with small ripples of energy. The ripples shouldn''t be powerful enough to destroy anything, but they should still be able to travel far and for long."

    "Why do you want me to do that?"

    "There are very few ways to get out of this light chamber and figure things out. But for any of those things, I need to find out where everything around me is. Your snapping could create a point of reference for both of us.

    I will somehow try to find you."

    "I don''t know how it will be possible, but I will do it. Just tell me what to do and I will do it."

    "Thanks for trusting me."

    "That is all I can do for now."

    Sam took a deep breath and sat down cross-legged.

    He kept his eyes closed and spread his spiritual sense, but he cannot sense anything. All of his surroundings appeared distorted and that included the underground.

    He ispletely blind in any way that he could see.

    He withdrew his spiritual sense and tried to spread it once again after a few minutes. The area appeared even more distorted and he even felt a huge resistance.

    This is to check the rate at which the light chamber is changing to the next step of its attack.

    It is currently going very fast.

    Sam sighed and brought his spectre out.

    One of the very few ways he could think of at the moment is to take the help of his spectre. But he has to wait for the right moment to do that.

    So, he waited and meanwhile, he started using his observation ability.

    Even in the vision of his observation ability, Sam couldn''t see much. Everything around this appeared to be a cluster of small solidified glowing molecules of matter.

    In normal cases, since it is just light, irrespective of it, he should be able to see what is beyond that, but now it is not happening. He can even see the physical manifestation of light particles.

    "Just how did this asshole manage to make this even with the blueprint. Who is the person that constructed these things for him?"

    Sam muttered in frustration.

    Meanwhile back in the camp of the Mari n.

    Sivan is sitting in front of a small formation.

    It has an image of the Gaja n''s estate surrounded by the city.

    He can see the basic structure of the whole city at the moment. A small glow is being projected on all of it as he moved the image as he liked while observing it.

    Avlyn walked into his tent he looked at Sivan in a shock.

    "What happened to Gaja city? Why couldn''t we see it for the past few minutes? It is covered with a very bright light, that is even hurting my eyes from this far away."

    "It is one of the toys Sam designed. The light chamber.

    A very very special device. It should be borderline impossible to create, but he still did it.

    The light chamber is actually a very special device thatbined the aspects of soul necromancy and light elemental maniption."

    "Necromancy and light element? Are you fucking crazy?"

    "That is my initial reaction when I saw this concept in his head, but it is a very magical concept if you think about it.

    Who would think to merge the necromancy and light element?"

    "Of course, it is a magical concept because it is impossible."

    "No, it is not. It just needs a lot of skill and effort and you shouldn''t have a heart of a person. That is all it needs."

    "What do you mean by that?"

    "At the moment, over a hundred thousand souls are currently hovering over the Gaja n''s city. They are merged with the light and are currently dormant.

    They are waiting for mymands to attack in the ways that people wouldn''t even imagine."

    Avlyn didn''t even bother with histter sentence and asked.

    "Did you just say a hundred thousand souls?"

    "Yes.

    The light chamber fuses the souls that are extracted through soul necromancy and merge them with light. It is almost like fusing a soul to a metal, a weapon or a formation te.

    But instead, a bunch of light molecules condensed temporarily into arge sphere would be used as a single entity and the soul would be fused.

    After all of these souls are fused, they are ready to use. They are jammed into continuous rays of the light that are being shot at the city from far away.

    As soon as theynd, their jammed souls will move away from each other and they will spread their molecr structure out as light particles creating a bright light as well as taking over the space in that spot.

    The higher the cultivation level of the soul, therge space it can upy.

    Itpletely brightens up and fills up the space with light.

    Just like that, as long as there is a possibility for immediate entry of a single ray of light, that ce would be injected and ingested with light and souls.

    These souls upy this space and they create this distorted image in the spiritual sense of the others.

    They are good."

    "What kind of twisted mind came up with that?"

    "Well, not mine. But it was only just an idea in Sam''s head. There is no way, he is going to make it or use it.

    It is not his style."

    "Why?"

    "He is not heartless enough and collecting hundred thousand souls is not an easy task."

 Chapter 1524 No Key

    Chapter 1524 No Key¡¡¡¡"Of course, it is hard. Where did you find them though?"

    "We are not having that conversation."

    Sivan replied as he looked at the formation. Currently, the formation on his table is connecting to the souls within the light chamber and in turn to the whole of Gaja city.

    Slowly one small dot after another appeared on the cityyout and each of them has a different size.

    It is the location of all of the living creatures within the city.

    He cannot find out who is standing where, but he can estimate the strength of the person.

    The problem with the light chamber is that it cannot clearly provide the image of the person. The most they could do is estimate the power of the person and the approximate location.

    "So, what are you going to do now?"

    "This distorts the spiritual sense of most people even people of your level. At least for you, you will have a very small space where your spiritual sense wouldn''t be affected and you will have all of your instincts intact.

    But for the rest of the cultivators, this is a living nightmare.

    The first step is to let them sit.

    If they open their eyes, all they would see is a burning re and even if they close their eyes, they wouldn''t be able toe out of it.

    Theck of spiritual sense that they had for decades and for some even centuries, will drive them mad.

    They will look for a way to find something out around them. They will try to adapt to the ce. But they wouldn''t be able to do anything.

    Then, I will make my first move."

    "Since Sam is the one who created this, he would be able to figure this out. He might even have the key for this."

    "Yeah, he does have the key, but there is one problem. The key is with me."

    "What?" Avlyn got shocked.

    "Yeah, he had a key for this, but after I stole his body and resources, I stole that key too. This is one of the things that the key hasn''t been figured out with his intellect and techniques, rather with the resources and artefacts he possessed.

    Now he doesn''t have anything. He has to figure out a way around it."

    "What is that key? I am curious."

    "Too bad, you will never know."

    Sivan replied with a cold smile as he looked at the formation eagerly waiting.

    Meanwhile, back in the city.

    Sam is sitting on the ground as he tried his best to keep calm.

    He extended his observation as far as he can. Even though Sivan''s body has this observation ability that is better than Sam''s body, it is still limited.

    Even with their observation ability, he could barely observe what is beneath the ground. But for the things that are around it, it ispletely impossible.

    But he still kept it so that he could have an additional indication if anyone ising.

    In the past few minutes, he tried to connect as manymunication tokens as he can and told everyone to pass the message that he told them. To stay stable and stationary without moving around

    Apart from that, he is waiting with his spectre out. For the perfect timing.

    But he doesn''t know if this one chance he has would be enough to figure out a way out of this.

    Because, as Sivan said to Avlyn, the only key used to have is currently in the hands of Sivan.

    And that key is the Crystal table within the tower of his divine dimension.

    The crystal table that gives a clear picture-perfect image of everything that is around him is the only way for him to figure out a way out of this situation.

    That is the only thing he thought of when was making it.

    The source of it wouldn''t be easy to track. At least from within.

    And in the current situation, no matter who walks out of the city will be targeted by the Mari n members and will be killed.

    He is continuously brainstorming as he thought of ways to make the one idea he had a sessful one.

    He is currently feeling the vibrations and the sound of the snapping that Gail is doing.

    After a moment, Gail spoke through themunication token.

    "Can I just use a spiritual energy attack that won''t affect anyone else? It will only create chaos in the surroundings."

    "No, it doesn''t work."

    "Why?"

    "There are over a hundred thousand souls around you. In fact, all of the light and everything around is abination of souls.

    They can channel and stabilize the energy most of the time."

    "Then I can just kill them?"

    "What about others within the n? The n infrastructure? The formations? I am pretty sure you are not sure what direction you are facing.

    Can you say for sure that you are in an empty spot?"

    Gail was tongue-tied.

    Even with all of the experience, he couldn''t be sure of it. It almost felt like the world is spinning around and he doesn''t know if there are any other people everywhere that are going to be hurt if he made a move.

    Sam paused and continued.

    "Even if that is the case, things wouldn''t be as simple. They are currently the same as light particles and they have a high sense of energy. As soon as you try to gather energy, they can manipte themselves leaving a light spot. You wouldn''t be able to hit the soul and the attack would just be wasted."

    "How is this even possible? How did you think of making this?"

    "Can I tell you about thatter? I cannot hear another lecture about how weird and insane my inventions are.

    I would like to focus on a way to clear this."

    As he spoke, he suddenly sensed something and rolled to the side on the ground.

    *BOOM*

    Arge explosive sound came from the spot that he was in. He couldn''t see anything in that spot, but he could swear that he felt some fluctuations in the temperature and the wind flow there.

    "What happened?"

    "Illusions are starting up. Try to calm down Giyon and Grivon. Tell them that no matter what kind of hallucinationes to them, they shouldn''t attack.

    They should just stay put."

    "Alright. I will be on it."

    Sam sat up straight again and took a deep breath. He looked into the white space and he can see some of his own nightmaresing up. He knew that he would be subjected to the hallucinations and particrly with all of the traumatic experiences, he has way too many that these souls could take advantage of.

    As he was thinking, an illusion of his past life popped up. When he was just a kid and was being abused.

    It was followed by the image of him being trafficked.

    The image of him being abused within the organization he was sold to.

    All of these areing up one after another.

    He took a deep breath as he knew that things will only get worse. These souls are showing his worst fears and he doesn''t want to fall for them.

    He focused on the spectre andmanded it to connect with his memories.

    The spectre that is actually a ghost chimaera was aption of hundreds of souls itself. All of these memories are shing and Sam is letting them flood into his head.

    As he was absorbing those memories and almost ced himself in those situations, the hallucinations are changing based on them and they are unable to stay and influence him.

    Sam smiled as he focused on the surroundings with his observation ability.

    Currently, most of it''s blocked, but soon he managed to find a small opening.

    "Catch it."

    The spectre stopped the memory transfer process and moved towards a spot. A while glowing soul was absorbed into the spectre.

    "AAAAHHHHH¡­"

    The spectre screaming and Sam can hear that through his mental connection. It is going through the pain even as a soul.

    That is because of the unnaturalbination of the death energy of the spectre and the light energy of the soul.

    Sam connected with the spectre as both of them battled and suppressed the soul.

    He forcefully made it sign an additional contract with the spectre before letting it be absorbedpletely.

    The spectre felt a connection with the formation and in turn, Sam also managed to get the connection. With the ability of the light soul that it just absorbed, the spectre managed to get a slight view of the surroundings.

    Sam heaved a sigh. Even though he cannot get aplete view of things, he is pretty sure that he would be able to manage to pull the rest of the n off.

    This is just the first step, but it went without a hitch.

    As he was thinking, he suddenly felt somethinging at him.

    He took out his staff and created a barrier around him.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive impact threw him off and he saw a spear that almost broke his barrier.

 Chapter 1525 Red light

    Chapter 1525 Red light¡¡¡¡Sivan looked at the smaller remote formation in front of him with a frown.

    He doesn''t know what exactly is happening within the formation, but he didn''t have the expected reaction at the start.

    Even though some people reacted in panic and confusion as he expected, but that is just for a small moment of time.

    But soon it started to tone and most of the members didn''t even panic or cause any chaos.

    He had to wait until the whole formation and the souls of the formation settled down to start the illusions.

    But in process, he noticed a small change within the flickers that indicated the people in the formation.

    One of the dots looked different. It looked like abination of many dots together and he felt like something is weird.

    So, he immediately connected himself to some of the light souls within that area to pry around.

    Even though he still cannot get the visual, he managed to understand that there is indeed a change in that person. Mostly in their soul. While things are like that, Sivan also noticed something else. One of the light souls in that area suddenly changed its behaviour.

    It merged with the soul of the person that is indicating an anomaly.

    He wanted to cut the contract off, but he is not skilled enough to do it without messing up the whole formation, so he has to let it be.

    He also figured that this contract will give him the most urate location and sometimes even hints of what this anomaly can do.

    As for the identity of this anomaly, Sivan is ny percent sure that this is Sam. Even if it is not Sam, it must be someone taking instructions from Sam. But he is inclined to believe that is the former.

    So, he instantly made a decision.

    He is going to target this one person and eliminate any possible threat.

    He started creating hallucinations to that person and then went to direct the hallucinations to the surrounding people in such a way that when they attacked, they will be targeted at Sam.

    Sam who is currently blocking the attacksing from different sides and his new found mediocre vision from the spectre is surprised and impressed at the same time.

    He didn''t expect for Sivan to find out his location this fast and even use the formation''s abilities to start hunting him down.

    Sam tried his best to dodge and block the attacks since he knew where they areing from. His mediocre vision from the spectre and the soul along with the observation ability is making it possible for him to barely survive as he moved along.

    Gail kept on snapping his finger creating this small sound and energy wave. This energy wave is so harmless that the souls don''t react to it.

    Along with the sound and the time it took for him to feel the wave passing through, he can estimate Gail''s approximate location.

    Since Sam cannot pin point his own location with all of this distorted vision and will make it hard for him to figure out the directions, he figured out a way.

    It is simple math, but done in aplicated context.

    First he clearly remembered his initial location when the light chamber was activated and he also know the distance Gail has from him.

    Now he has two reference points.

    Gail''s location will be fixed and wouldn''t change.

    But Sam''s location would.

    He already registered the sound and the time that it will take for the energy wave to hit him when he was at his initial location.

    And now that he is moving around and both the sound and the time changes, he can calcte the approximate his own approximate location at any given moment from these two reference points.

    His mediocre vision helps him with the immediate dangers as he moves forward and the map of the n from his memory helps him to move to the destination that he wants to reach.

    He is currently running towards the the tower that he just came out a few hours ago. He wants to go there and find a way to crack this thing.

    Fifteen minutes has passed, but Sam was unable to reach as there are so many obstaclesing at him. The worst part is he cannot fight back.

    Meanwhile, Sivan looking at the dot moving all over the n while he tried his best to put as many people in his path as he can to make sure that he doesn''t reach whatever destination he wants to reach.

    But after repeated futile attempts, he decided to go big.

    "I don''t know what you are trying to do, but I am done ying around."

    As he said those words, he started tweaking the formation a bit and the glow over the city changed a bit.

    While he is in that process, Avlyn who is watching the whole thing from the side spoke up.

    "You said you were going to do something and something serious will happen a while ago. But I didn''t see any of it. Are you sure you are not bullshitting now too?"

    Sivan frowned and turned to her.

    "What is your problem with me? By any chance are you taking the anger you have on my father at me? Why are you constantly questioning my judgement?"

    Avlyn didn''t say anything for a moment, but after a few seconds of silence she answered.

    "You haven''t done anything to prove yourself until now. After a series of volleys you were unable toe out on top. Can you really me me for not trusting your judgement?"

    "Really? Then why don''t you go and attack the n directly. I would like to see, what you would be able to aplish by then."

    Now Avlyn becamepletely silent she didn''t even have an answer for that. Because that is not a great n.

    Even though there are a dozen of them, she is sure that Gail, Gamin and Yuvana will be able to hold them back while the n escapes.

    Then there is this n leader, the right hand man and the leader of the elite team of the n''s leader and finally Saran too. They cannot be sure of their victory.

    Sivan looked at her expression and smirked.

    "I didn''t think so.

    Unless you have a better idea, don''t you dare question me again. Anyway, the thing you are wishing for will being. Something serious is about to happen."

    As he said that, he made a final tweak in the formation and called someone through themunication device.

    "Alert the Ambush and assassination units. Tell them to go and set up a few meters away from the city. Outside that bright lit zone. Set up in the direction of entrance.

    People will be showing up and you better not let them survive this situation.

    Do you understand?"

    "Yes, Sir."

    "Good, be careful and don''t get cocky."

    As Sivan spoke, something really did change in the city. As the colour of the glow changed a bit, the people inside started feeling something is different.

    Their skin started feeling a bit itchy at the start and soon it is reced by a burning sensation. People of smaller cultivation levels felt like they are being roasted over a me thatpletely enveloped them.

    Sam who is moving around constantly suddenly stopped in his tracks as he tried to swallow the sudden pain that attacked him.

    He immediately started channelling his energy and with his intricate control over it, he created a thick and closeyer all over his skin to protect himself from this light energy.

    "What the fuck is this guy doing?"

    Sam blurted out in surprise. He is borderline shocked by this action.

    This is one of the functions of the formation. But it consumes a lot of energy and puts a lot of toll on the operator. The one hundred thousand souls used offer many advantages, but it is also lot difficult for people to operate.

    It will juice out the mental energy of them.

    This change of the radiation takes a lot. It hurts the people within the formation, but it should always be the final card that he should y with the formation.

    "The more I know about you, the more I think my loss is a shameful thing. You dumb fucking idiot."

    Sam muttered with frustration as he started running again.

    At this moment, Sivan saw the dot moving once again and felt a bit frustrated as well.

    "If you are really Sam, then whates next will sure irritate you."

    As he said that, he started tweaking the formation a bit. Within that yellow glowing area, there is a small red spot that appeared and it fell on one of the dots that is very near the city wall.

    In the city, at the moment, a red light fell on the city guard that is standing on top of the wall.

    "AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH¡­."

    He felt like his skin and blood are burning at the same time. He looked around and moved into the yellow zone immediately.

 Chapter 1526 Kills

    Chapter 1526 Kills¡¡¡¡The City guard jumped into the yellow region, even though it is very irritating and his skin felt like it is being burned, it is way better than the red light that fell on him.

    "Bro, what happened? We were told not to move. Are you alright?"

    Another guard yelled from the side.

    But he didn''t get any response. Because the first guard once again felt the red lighting on to him.

    Even though he couldn''t see anything, for some reason, he could see this red lighting. He ran to the side, but no matter where he ran to, it started popping up there and only one path was left for him to take, which he took directly.

    He didn''t even dare to try and tackle it.

    It is like a cat and mouse game. The mouse is being toyed around by the cat. The guard kept on running as this red light chased him.

    Before he knew it, he fell off the city wall.

    As he was freefalling, he suddenly felt alive. He hit the ground and crashed, before standing up and running again as the light kept oning at him.

    When the light arrived, he is one of the people that is absolutely sure about his position. He stood at his post on the city wall.

    He wanted to get out of there as soon as the light came. After all, the boundary of the light chamber area is not far away from him.

    It only covered a small area around the city. He ran and ran and within three minutes, he suddenly saw the light. He rolled on the ground and came out of the light chamber area.

    Cold air struck his skin as he felt the burning sensation ease up a bit.

    He felt like he could die right then and there. Like he stepped into paradise from the hell.

    He looked at the clear sky and the trees around him. The grass and the soil had never felt before as he felt the breeze.

    But that didn''tst long.

    As hey on the ground and took in the image of the sky and the surroundings¡­.

    *SMASH*

    Arge spear came from the side andnded on his head.

    It smashed his head with lightning energy that destroyed the head and turned it into a paste. He died on the spot.

    "First kill confirmed"

    A young man on the tree spoke up. He is wearing an exoskeleton and armour and talked into themunication device to report to his team.

    At the same time, a few meters away, another guard came out of the light area. But he didn''t fall on the ground, he just arrived out while running, but before he could even stop, the spear drove through his heart and took his body back into the light area.

    "Second Kill confirmed."

    On another side, two guards came out and two spears with fire elemental energy went through them. They burned through their stomachs and tore their bodies into two before theynded and created a zone of fire and incineration in which the bodies started burning into ashes.

    "Third and Fourth kill confirmed."

    Another guard ran out into those mes and was stunned. A spear came from a different side andnded on his throat.

    "Fifth kill confirmed."

    Sivan and Avlyn who are in the camp kept on hearing reports of guards being killed one by one. Within the formation, the number of people started reducing bit by bit. The guards that are near the entrance of the city and the wall are being directed toe out so that they can be ambushed and shot down by people.

    Avlyn was surprised.

    "You didn''t expect this did you?"

    Sivan asked with a smile.

    "Don''t get too cocky. They are chump change, they are not even that big of a deal. In fact, they are the least troublesome people within the whole Gaja n, what is the point of theming out."

    "Before you leave this ce, I will make you admit the impressive nature of this. You are just way too stubborn and jaded."

    Sivan said as he kept on directing guards out. He felt a bit of exhaustion hit him in the middle. For that, he took out a gourd and started sipping it. It is an extreme medicine that he got from the Divine league.

    The medicine could help him recover his mental energy, but even that is not ideal.

    If not for the fact that he cannot think of a better way to deal with the Gaja n, he wouldn''t want to use this. He wants to save this for a special asion when he truly needs this in future.

    Sivan looked at the formation and suddenly, his attention was diverted to the dot that is constantly moving.

    The dot that is indicating its location and movement of Sam.

    He got an idea and smirked.

    The red lights stopped arriving near the wall and were now focused on Sam.

    Sam who is running towards the tower is already frustrated when he felt the red light falling on him.

    "Fucking hell. He is really using it?"

    Sam was so shocked as he endured the burning sensation over him. He jumped to the side and once again started running without wasting any time.

    The red light morphed itself into some kind of ring and tried to block Sam''s path.

    Sam didn''t care though, he jumped into the ring and ran past it even though it kept oning. He increased the density of the energy barrier over the body and ran forward with everything he got.

    The energy barrier can only eliminate so much heat though. It cannotpletely negate it. He just took in the massive burning sensation on his back and ran.

    Within the next ten minutes, he managed to reach his location after a long time.

    "Finally."

    He ran into the tower.

    Even the tower ispletely blinding and the people inside are suffering.

    He ran to the formation.

    The formation that Sivan cannot see.

    Sam went and sat in the middle of the formation. He tried to sense the other operators around the formation and after noticing that they are still there, but not in their positions, he spoke out loud.

    "This is Sam. I want you guys to stay where you are. Don''te near and don''t move at all. I want you guys to sit on the floor where you are."

    The operators were kind of freaked out, but Sam didn''t care.

    "I know that your bodies are hurting and I am sure you want to get out of this blind maze, but if you go out now. You will be dead.

    Dead as you can be."

    They all gulped in nervousness as they sat down without any trouble.

    Sivan looked at the dot that stopped moving and frowned.

    "What the fuck is he doing there. What is inside that tower that made him run like that, even risking his life."

    "Maybe he is not the person you are looking for."

    "How can that be? A person who can make a contract with the soul of the formation and run like this. I don''t believe anyone other than Sam is able to do that."

    "You will be surprised. You never knew that these kinds of things could be created, but he still did that. So, what if there is someone who managed to figure out a way? He might just be a person who went there to meet his family."

    Sivan thought for a moment, he wants to argue a bit, but Avlyn looked at me and asked.

    "Why don''t you try your tricks on someone who is more powerful? Even if that person is weird, he didn''t do anything that could make you lose your cool until now. You are toying with them calmly. Use this time to do something for some really powerful people.

    Try to push him out of the city and kill him."

    Avlyn said as she pointed at one of the dots that is not too far away from the gate.

    The person is actually doing very good. He is moving around a bit, and none of the soldiers around him is moving at all.

    He ispletely standing still and maintaining the situation around him calmly.

    If he goes away, a bunch of troops will also go down with him. On top of that, he is also very powerful. He is at least a middle stage cultivator of Astral ne Consummation.

    Sivan looked at the dot and contemted a bit, before moving the red light onto him.

    At this moment, within the area that he is pointing at, amander is controlling the troops that are going crazy with the glowing light.

    "Come on guys. We need to stay strong. Sir Sam said that he is figuring out a way. So, don''t bow down to the hallucinations and certainly don''t attack yourpanions. Do you hear me?"

    "Yes Sir."

    His subordinates replied to him in unison.

 Chapter 1527 Golems again

    Chapter 1527 Golems again¡¡¡¡The red spot appeared on top of the whole group of people.

    This one isrge enough to cover all of them.

    The leader of the group who is encouraging the subordinates until then, suddenly felt like his soul left his body.

    "AAAAAAARRHHHHHHH¡­"

    "NOOOOOOO¡­.."

    "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAhhhhhhhhhh¡­."

    Screams came from all around him. Even though the effect on him was not that high, he felt pained by the massive screams that they are letting out. He can understand how much pain they must be in to scream like this.

    He wanted to encourage them to pull through but was unable to.

    He looked at the red spot around him which is the only thing he could see and suddenly, he was shocked by the revtion that he could see the red spot. He looked at the yellow area around them and decided to make a move.

    "Troops, right turn. All of you. And forward march."

    He said as he took a right turn and marched forward. The troops who are in incredible pain, gritted their teeth as they all turned to the right and marched forward in an orderly manner.

    Sivan who created therge red spot observed the movements of the dots and felt surprised.

    "Why are they not scattering everywhere? Why are their movements so orderly?"

    He muttered to himself as he moved the red spot over to them to change their direction.

    When the leader saw the spoting from a different direction, he decisively ordered his soldiers to take another turn and marched forward again.

    Like this without even knowing, they came far away from their original post and are very near the entrance. All of the guards near the entrance are gone, the whole space is empty at the moment. The troops marched forward through the entrance.

    Within a few minutes, they are already at the border of the light chamber and continued to march outside.

    When the leader of the troops felt the cold breeze on his face and the normal light around him. He felt like a brand new world opened up to him.

    He marched forward along with his troops and all of them cheered.

    "Finally, we are out of that hell hole. I don''t want to go back again."

    "Yeah, I would rather die than go back in there."

    "Me too. Death is so much better than that torture."

    *SWISH* *STAB*

    A spear flew andnded in the back of the third person and everyone turned silent. Then only they remembered that the outside is not really that safe.

    They also thought of the impossibility of the situation. They are posted at a very specific spot away from the city gate.

    How is it possible for them to coincidentally march from within the estate to the exit the gate?

    In fact, that is what the leader was thinking when one of his subordinates died.

    "Everyone, get ready for battle."

    He immediately called out and when the next spears came, he waved his hands. A massive earthen wall surrounded the troops as the bunch of spears were held back from dealing with his troops.

    He felt the spears stabbing into the wall and estimated the direction from which the attacks areing.

    "Ranged attackers. Get into positions."

    The soldiers who were suffering a few minutes and cheering a few seconds ago are suddenly serious. They got into positions and held their ranged weapons.

    The leader closed his eyes and he opened small gaps in between the wall.

    The soldiers shot their attacks through them.

    ming arrows, water spears, Ice shards, lightning spears. All kinds of ranged attacks came out of that one ce and they flew in the air.

    *BOOM* *BAM* *SPLASH* *BAM*

    Explosive sounds of many levels came as theynded at different spots. The ambush teams that are ced all around the area were stunned. They didn''t expect a counterattack like this.

    After all, until now they managed to kill every person that came out pretty easily.

    That is because everyone that came out is, exhausted, suffering, and went through a lot. But now the leader is quick to think on his feet and take action. He didn''t even give a proper chance to the ambush team.

    But it didn''t matter to the ambush team. Because their team also consisted of something that could deal with that level of the person.

    "We need an Astral ne Middle stage cultivator. As soon as possible."

    One of them spoke on their team''s channel and soon someone came. A robust barbarian man carried a battle hammer as he jumped around.

    He came running and took a huge leap while swinging his hammer downwards on the earthen barrier.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sound that was followed by cracks broke the barrier and the rest of the soldiers were thrown off a bit. The ambush team got ready as they threw the spears at the soldiers once again.

    When the leader was about to protect them again, the barbarian swung his hammer,pletely stopping his process.

    The leader felt a bit overwhelmed as he tried tobat the barbarian while trying to save his soldiers.

    The only silver lining is that the situation is not as bad as he expected it to be. After the initial shock and surprise are gone from the not-so-sessful ambush, the soldiers managed to fend for themselves.

    Now the ambush team doesn''t have many options, other than directbat.

    The battle started and it became intense very soon.

    Even though the leader of the troops did a great job at the start by ying defense and fending off the barbarian, soon he was overwhelmed.

    Because he has been enduring hell inside the light chamber for a long time. He expended a lot of energy trying tobat that heat and burning sensation. In fact, his skin is still hurting from the burns that were caused inside.

    Now, he has tobat against someone who is much stronger than him in terms of pure physical prowess at close range.

    It would be surprising if he didn''t feel overwhelmed.

    But his defense is still very strong, The barbarian soon felt frustrated and decided to change his tactics, he turned to one of the soldiers on the side and swung his hammer at them.

    The leader immediately went to block it.

    The hammer suddenly changed the direction mid-way and it mmed straight at the head of the leader.

    He took the hit directly at its full force and fell to the floor.

    Right when the barbarian was about to finish it off all of a sudden a bunch of golems popped out of the earth.

    The golems pulled the barbarian''s legs forcefully and made him fall to the ground.

    The same thing happened to the other subordinates of the Mari n. The ambush team was ambushed by dozens of golems that came out of nowhere.

    The barbarian swung his legs and fists around as he tried to destroy the golems. It worked. The golems were destroyed with just a single swing. The difference in power is way too much.

    But it didn''t help him. Because the golems just kept oning. Theypletely overwhelmed him with the numbers.

    Before long, the whole area is surrounded by the golems and they all started bashing the opponents one by one.

    The leader of the troops took this chance to recover a bit. He was stunned by what was in front of him. This ispletely unexpected, but the surprise soon turned into delight as he joined the battle. The golems as if they knew he ising made their way and helped him deal with the barbarian directly.

    The barbarian was killed and so was the rest of the ambush team. They were all trapped in the middle of hundreds of golems, even if they want to escape now, it is impossible to do.

    At this moment, Sivan who is already trying to pick the next target for his red spot was suddenly disturbed by a subordinate.

    "Sir, three ambush teams are dead. One of the special soldiers that went forward is also dead. The golems came back and they are surrounding Gaja city. They are creating a circle around it and they are running around randomly as if they are looking for something.''

    Sivan was stunned and ran out of the room. He might have the remote formation in his tent, but that only works when he wants to take a look at the city.

    Everything outside of the light chamber range ispletely invisible in the formation.

    Avlyn also followed him and when they came out, they were stunned by the sigh. The golems are everywhere.

    "What the fuck?"

    Avlyn cursed out loud.

    "It seems like they are using the remainingva worms."

    Sivan said with gritted teeth. He thought of the dot that moved all over and stayed in the tower. He felt that the tower might be the reason, why things are going like this.

    He immediately ran inside and wanted to do something to the person that ran into the tower.

 Chapter 1528 Stalemate

    Chapter 1528 Stalemate¡¡¡¡Sivan ran to the remote formation and started projecting the red light on Sam.

    Sam who is sitting in the formation, felt the burning sensation all over his body. He just gritted his teeth and didn''t even let out a single moan of pain.

    He started sweating profusely and used as much energy as he can to maintain thatyer of barrier he created for his skin.

    He just let the golems go crazy all by themselves for a while as he turned his head up and took in the red light that is falling on him.

    The golems stood like guards to the light chamber and it is no use dragging people out. They will be holding back anyone from the Gaja n thates out.

    The ambush is bound to fail.

    Sam is the only person that Sivan wants to take his anger out on and he is now sure that it is definitely Sam.

    On the other hand, Sam is actually embracing the red light for himself and after a few minutes, suddenly the specter popped out of his body. Along with the specter other souls that Sam is controlling temporarily merged with it.

    The specter started attacking the souls that are within the red light.

    The souls that are actually acting as a medium to create this red light startedbating the specter, but they were unable to resist. The sheer number of souls and the strength of the specter have overwhelmed the souls in the red light.

    All of sudden, Sivan who is controlling the red light on the spot, suddenly lost contact with them.

    This one is different than before. Previously Sam kept the connection with the formation to get a view of it even if it is a mediocre one and he doesn''t want to attack too much attention from Sivan.

    But now, he doesn''t care. He upied a good portion of souls and now these souls spread to every corner of the room. The rest of the souls were forced out of the tower.

    The light returned back in the room and everyone felt relieved.

    Sam heaved a sigh of relief. He felt like he just walked out of arge pit of fire. He was constantly burning up in that light zone.

    Now he can breathe freely and his spiritual sense along with his eyesight is free.

    He looked at the formation masters on the side and asked them to start aiding him with the stability of the formations.

    With their aid, Sam left the control of the souls in the room to them while he changed his focus to the golems and theva worms outside.

    Sivan who is sitting in front of the remote formation was shocked. He didn''t know what happened. He was caught off guard for a moment and before he knew it, he lost contact with the red light he was operating.

    And by the time he came to himself, he lost control over the whole tower and all of the light souls that he still had contact with were thrown outside.

    He didn''t know how it was possible to throw the souls away. After all, the whole advantage of the light chamber is that the souls are not tangible. They are merged with light energy. The literal light is condensed with spiritual energy.

    They can expand and contract as much as they want and apart from that, they can even spread light and alter its radiation to arge range without even changing their sizes. It is almost impossible to identify them because of the sheer number.

    In fact, thinking that they are souls is thest thing anyone would do in a normal situation.

    He is so confused and almost wanted to pull his hair out.

    If Sam saw him, all he would do is give out a smirk.

    The only reason that Sam managed to do this is that he knew how the souls operate within the formation and he knew when to try and make contact with them to take them down.

    He found the perfect time when Sivan projected the red light because. At that moment, the nature of the souls within that red zone is extremely different from normal.

    They cannot just stay merged with the rest of the souls, so in that one moment, Sam found the interval to do what he did.

    He expanded the souls immediately after he took control over them and spread them all over the room forcing the rest of the souls out. He also turned down their luminescence. Now, the room is resembling its normal situation.

    Everyone is relieved.

    As for the formation masters being able to control these souls, all they have to do is, use the connection between the formation, them, and Sam to connect with the souls and provide the energy to keep the other souls out.

    While Sivan is trying to figure this out process and get back it, Sam is focusing outside of the city. He once again went to controlling the Lava worms and the golems.

    He can see everything outside through the eyes of the golems and the worms. As he controlled these things, a Lava worm dug itself out of the earth and its head appeared on the surface.

    One of the golems rolled itself into a ball and sat on the mouth of the worm.

    It aimed at the sky and shot a fire elemental energy beam that shot the ball straight into the air.

    The golem raised in the air as he spread its body after reaching the highest point.

    The golem''s eyes turned around as it looked at the surroundings. Sam is also looking at the surroundings with the golem and he noticed a few light beams being shot from different locations very very far away from the city.

    The golem''s range can''t even see the exact range of the origin of the beams. But Sam got the rough direction in which they are appearing.

    After some thought, he decided to find one of its base points.

    The worm shot out another golem, but this time in a parab. The golem fell far away from the city and there appeared another worm that shot the golem straight up in the sky.

    Sam looked at the beam''s origin spot. Even though it is not exactly a perfect spot, he can at least estimate and pinpoint a location in one way or another.

    While Sam is trying to figure out a way to get back at the situation, Sivan is still struggling on the other side. And added to the struggle, Avlyn came in and spoke.

    "Something is happening outside. The golems are being shot into the sky, you might want to check it."

    "What?"

    Sivan ran out and looked at the golem that was shot into the sky a distance away. He didn''t understand what is happening, but he knew for sure that it is not a random move.

    He was surprised. But he didn''t know how to react to that.

    "What do you want to do now?"

    "I don''t know. As long as the other party doesn''t reach the base points of the light beams, things would be like this.

    But this is a fucking stalemate."

    "So? You are not going to leave it as it is, are you?"

    "Of course not. There is one more thing that I could do with the light chamber before it bes almost useless in the current scenario."

    "What is it?"

    "A final attack with the full intensity of the souls and light energy. I think I will be able to take down the dome if I can figure out the core of the formation."

    "Are you confident in finding it?"

    "Hell no. I want to see if divine league people can help me out with that."

    "No, none of us are that skilled in formations."

    "Then, there is only one choice, I can torture the small fries within. Even if I can''t lead them out of the city, I can still make them go tired and some even dead."

    "Or you can use that strong attack on one of the strongest people there are in the Gaja n and you would be able to deal with one of their powerhouses.

    As long as they are attacked that much, it would be a big blow for the Gaja n.''

    Sivan felt conflicted. Avlyn''s suggestion is not bad. But he doesn''t know how effective the attack of this size is on the Peak stage cultivators. He is sure that it would hurt them, but how harsh? That is the question.

    As he was thinking, Avlyn suddenly seemed to have remembered something and asked.

    "How intense is the light elemental energy that is emitted by the formation?"

    "Very."

    "How pure is it?"

    "As pure as liquid energy. Why are you asking me that?"

    As soon as she heard that, Avlyn ran out to talk with Cray and brought him back.

    Cray looked at Sivan and learned the purity and intensity of the energy.

    He then looked at Avlyn and asked.

    "Are you sure you want me to do this? It will take a lot of energy from the formation."

 Chapter 1529 Preparations

    Chapter 1529 Preparations¡¡¡¡"What is the point of storing the energy of this thing. Currently, the most he can do right now is to torture some people within the city or kill people that didn''t even awaken yet."

    Avlyn answered even before Sivan did.

    Sivan frowned and asked.

    "What are you guys even talking about? What do you really want to do?"

    "Cray is a very good necromancer. Particrly when ites to souls. Since the formation itself is arge bunch of souls, I think he can utilize it to do something to all of the powerhouses in the Gaja city at the same time."

    "What can he do to all of them at the same time? Even creating those red spots here and there with the light almost exhausted my mental energy.

    Using all of those souls at the same time is the same asmitting mental suicide. He might just go brain dead."

    "You don''t have to worry about it. He has his ways to reduce the mental toll on his soul. What do you think? We can make use of this chance to damage the powerhouses and if it permits even the other soldiers in the Gaja n.

    This might just speed up our victory in the whole war."

    Avlyn said in an excited tone.

    Sivan looked at both of them with a frown.

    "Are you sure you want to do this?"

    He asked Cray.

    "I am certainly not the authority on these kinds of souls. Avlyn said that you managed to merge the light elemental energy into the souls and are making them behave like light particles.

    Which should be an impossible feat in my opinion.

    But as long as they are souls, no matter how many, I think I can do something that will benefit us in the long run of the war."

    "A deeper exnation would help. After all, it took a lot out of me to make these things. I don''t believe it is too much of me to ask these things."

    "I don''t know how to exin it to you too deeply without going deep on the necromancy aspect. But I will put it this way.

    The souls within the formation can be used as weapons to directly attack the souls of the people and their physical manifestation of light element would be an added bonus as it would give out a physical element to the attack.

    So, if everything goes well, their souls will be attacked all the while their bodies will be corroded with the light element."

    Sivan chuckled when he heard that.

    "Why do I need you to do that for me? That is the final attack of the light chamber. If the stalemate doesn''t work, all I have to do is let it go crazy and it does this all by itself."

    Avlyn and Cray were stunned a bit, but Cray seemed to have caught on to something and asked.

    "You said you have to let it go crazy."

    "Yes, that is the final discharge of the formation. It won''t work afterward, but it does exactly what you told me you would do with it."

    "Then, you need me so that you don''t have to rebuild the whole formation. I will keep the mechanism of the formation intact and even with my capacity, I cannot go for more than half of the souls.

    You can preserve the remaining half and you can still use the formation after that."

    Sivan is surprised now.

    "Are you sure you can do that? From here? The only connection you are going to have with that formation is this remote formation."

    "That''s plenty."

    Sivan went into deep thought for a few moments and after looking at the city, he agreed.

    "Then go ahead."

    "It will take some time, so I want to keep them busy, is there a way for you to do it?"

    Cray asked.

    "There is. We can both connect to the formation at the same time. I will keep them busy and you work on your side of the things."

    "Works for me."

    After that, both of them connected to the formation and things started to change.

    All of the people within the light zone suddenly saw hallucinations that they have never seen before. All of their surroundings changed and they could see again.

    But not the n grounds and the n area.

    The thing they could see at the moment is actually a scene from the past.

    A perfect picture of one of the traumatic moments of their past and they felt like they are reliving it. Everything is projected with utmost quality and the greatest attention to detail.

    Everyone started to panic and the advice of Sam and others that said them to not attack at all, were all thrown down the drain.

    Of course, not everyone ispletely lost.

    At the moment, Gail contacted Sam.

    "Illusions are acting up again. Did you think of a way out of this situation?"

    "I am thinking. I got a faint idea of what to destroy, but I don''t know how to do it.

    You guys are trapped here. You can get out of the spot and move to different sides to destroy the bases of the light chamber.

    But once you are out of the city, everything will go south. Before youe back, there will be arge-scale attack on the city directly and it is impossible for you to get out without alerting the other party. You need to be very fast if you even want to make a move.

    That is why I am thinking."

    "It is almost like we need to use space gates for this."

    "Not almost, we need to use space gates for it."

    Sam said and suddenly a thought struck his mind.

    "I will contact you right back. Try to control the people in your surroundings. Don''t let them attack too much. We cannot have friendly fire."

    "Easy for you to say. At least for the people within their separate rooms waiting for further orders, things are easier, but for the soldiers that are stationed, it is impossible.

    I am more worried about the domes that are within the city. Are you sure they will be okay?"

    "Don''t worry. There is supposed to be no one within the domes before the light chamber was activated. Assuming that these people are not disobeying the orders, we are fine in that area.

    Anyway, I will call you back. I think I can find a way to get through this."

    Sam then cut the call and contacted Senior Elder Ma.

    "Senior Elder Ma, this is Sam."

    "Yeah, I know. How are you holding up? Is this light hell your creation too?"

    "Yes, but light hell is not the name for it."

    "Really? I don''t think there is a better-suited name. Anyway, I hope you can figure out a way soon. It is hard for me to control over one-third of our troops just like that."

    "One-third?"

    Sam was shocked.

    "Well, I happened to be in the middle of them when this happened. Noticing their panic, I restrained all of them with formations. But it is taking a lot out of me, you better finish this fast."

    Sam''s shock only grew. He didn''t expect that Ma would be able to do something like this. To have a formation that can restrain one-third of the Gaja n''s troops is no small feat.

    Even if the numbers are currently very low.

    Even more surprising fact is that he had those formations at hand. Ready to use.

    But this only made Sam feel like the n will be more usible.

    "I am thinking of a n to stop this. I know a spot where the core of the formation lies, but I need a way to send Gail to that spot and let hime back. We cannot let him stay there for a long time and he needs toe back.

    I need your help in making that happen."

    "What kind of help do you need?"

    "Do you have a way to send him to that spot?"

    "If you can give me a precise location that too within a few miles of the city, it is indeed usible. But the problem is how can I give my tokens to Gail?

    We cannot navigate through this spot."

    "That is true. But what if both of you can move to a different spot?"

    "Where?"

    "A stray dimension.

    Gail has a transference token to Grivon''s stray dimension. He can go there instantly. The problem is that I don''t know if you would be able to make a makeshift token to that dimension immediately."

    "It is hard for me to make it without knowing the key details. The whole problem with the vision and spiritual sense once againe into y."

    "Yeah, but I have a transference token that leads to the stray dimension and I can exin the technical data you need for that. Can you modify one of your tokens into that one and move to the stray dimension?"

 Chapter 1530 Preparations II

    Chapter 1530 Preparations II¡¡¡¡"Making a token just from the description? I can''t just copy the appearance of it. That is not even my regr style.

    Even if I have to craft and replicate a token, I study the mechanics and oue before I make it in my own way.

    What if the original method they used is something that I am not capable of."

    "We don''t have any other choice. But I am sure that you are skilled enough to do it."

    "Well, there is this added difficulty of not being able to see. Who knows what might happen if I messed it up."

    "I am sure you can manage some small explosions.

    Why do I get the feeling that you are stalling?"

    "No, I am just stating my difficulties."

    "How about we discuss that over a ss of wine after this mess is sorted. For now, I want you to work on this."

    "Alright. I will take that offer. But first, give me the location coordinates of the ce that you want to send Gail."

    "Okay¡­

    Sam then started calcting the distance in his mind and approximate coordinates from his spot. Ma felt like it is a bit difficult for him to narrow it down.

    But as they discussed things and calcted them over the call, he was really amused and surprised.

    "You really are good at these calctions, aren''t you? No wonder you are getting these crazy ideas. I never knew a brainiac like you would be so interested in fighting around."

    "I am not interested in fighting as much as I am in being a brainiac."

    "Well, that is a rare quality, particrly when you can make brainiacs work for you with just your brute force. That is how it works in our world."

    "Really? I don''t see anyone making you do their bidding as they please. Barely anyone was able to manage to do that for me as well."

    "Barely? Then someone did manage to do that. I thought you are too proud of that. Who is that capable?"

    "My friends. It is kind of voluntary."

    "That''s surprising."

    "What? Me having friends."

    "Yeah, it is hard to be your friend and control the urge to backstab. The riches, glory, and authority they will get just tond a clean stab on your back.

    A small slip of poison, small sabotage in a formation. I can''t imagine what people will do to be in such a position and what they will want to do after reaching there."

    "Well, they don''t do that for some reason. Sometimes even I am surprised."

    They kept on having a conversation while Ma worked on the token.

    asionally there is a mishap, but nothing major. So, within an hour Senior Elder Ma made a transference token while talking to someone and beingpletely blind in every way possible.

    While he is doing that, in the camp of the Mari n, they are also working on something.

    First, Cray is familiarizing himself with the formation and he is trying his best to make sense of how to connect with these souls without hurting himself.

    Connecting with so many souls at the same time might just break his mind.

    But in process, he realized that the burden is being shared by the formation. Some elements of the formations are allowing him to connect with the souls without feeling the burden of it all instantly.

    "This is genius. Do you know the value of just this part of the formation? People will pay ins and realms for this. Not even millions and billions. It transcends any number of spirit stones you can think of."

    "Yeah, I have been told," Sivan replied.

    "Speaking of which, who made this? Even with a design and neatly drawn blueprint, it is impossible for anyone in the Mari n to create something like this. You will take years to just understand. I don''t believe you managed to find people that could do this anywhere near your n."

    Sivan didn''t reply and just stayed silent.

    Cray just looked at him as if he doesn''t want to take silence or a no for an answer.

    "I am not giving you the answer you want. I have my ways. That is all you need to know."

    Cray frowned and looked at him. But he didn''t probe any further.

    "Well, whoever it is, deal with them carefully. People of that level are not someone that you can handle. At least not like how you dealt with the people until now."

    "Thank you for your advice. How about we go to work now?"

    "Alright. Alright."

    Cray shifted his focus back to the remote formation. After familiarizing it for an hour, he started making ns. While everyone is enveloped with hallucinations within the Gaja n with very few exceptions who arepletely ignoring it, no one noticed some of the light particles gathering at different positions on the top of the city.

    Within that brightly lit yellow light, there are a few spots with white light slowly gathering together.

    The gathering process is very slow and it is taking a lot of time. It is to make sure that they don''t disturb any hallucinations and alert the personnel that could really do them some damage even in this scenario.

    They just didn''t want to push the Gaja n members to pull off a desperate attack.

    Back in the Gaja n.

    After Ma is done with the token that should send Gail to the point where the core of the formation is located, he starts working on the token that could send him to the stray realm.

    "Let''s get started. I think I recovered enough energy from this. Make sure you keep it as technical as before. And be precise. I don''t have a direct visual, so I cannot do it in my style."

    "Of course, what do you think I am going to describe its appearance? I will go through the technical stuff and you do it.

    First, let''s go with the coordinates¡­"

    Once again a long and hard exchange went on with different technical terms on the formations and stuff went on and on for two more hours.

    During these two hours, everyone noticed that there is some change within the whole city.

    The hallucinations toned down. People are relieved and they didn''t feel as much irritation as before.

    "Something is different in the surroundings. The hallucinations are gone."

    Ma said suddenly in the middle.

    Sam frowned and replied.

    "Give me a moment."

    He disconnected the call and connected with Gail.

    "Is there a change in the energy density around you?"

    "Yes, the light elemental energy did reduce. The hallucinations are gone and even people stopped attacking each other. Most of them are exhausted though."

    "How thin is the energy? The level of energy difference, can you gauge it roughly?"

    "A lot. I don''t know about the surrounding areas, but around me, it is very less than the start. Why? Isn''t it a good thing? I thought they are running out of energy in their formation."

    "No, running out of energy is not even a thing here. The souls gather energy better than normal formation enchantments. They are literally the best.

    This might even be the most energy-efficient formation I have ever designed. Something big is happening. I need you to move faster. Just wait for my cue and you leave to the stray realm immediately."

    Sam disconnected the call and immediately went back to talk with Senior Elder Ma.

    "How far have youe with it?"

    "I don''t know. It is hard to see in this ring light."

    "Come on, I don''t have time to joke around. How far have youe?"

    "Almost done. Final step. Why?"

    "I don''t know. Something big might be happening. The energy difference is definitely not for show. I need you to finish it as soon as possible. Contact me after you are done."

    Sam said and disconnected the call before he reactivated the formation and connected with the golems outside. He used the same technique he used before by making the worm shoot the golem out like a cannon into the sky.

    Before he could really fly into the air though¡­

    *SWISH* *BOOM*

    Arge spear whistled through the air and destroyed the golem. It copsed before it could even be seen and the soil fell back.

    Sam was stunned by the sudden change, but he expected such a thing. He shot multiple golems at the same time through multiple golems.

    *SWISH* *SWISH* SWISH* *BOOM*

    There are multiple spears and some explosions in the air before the golems are destroyed. But this time, Sam managed to see something as one golem was saved.

    "Sir, the golems are being shot in the air again. One reached the maximum height and fell off freely after a few attempts."

    Sivan received a report from one of the subordinates.

    Sivan turned to Cray who has his eyes closed and full of focus.

    "You better be ready. They already saw what is happening. We don''t have too much time. If Sam is really the one handling this, which I am very sure of, he might just being up with ns at the moment."

 Chapter 1531 Hayan

    Chapter 1531 Hayan¡¡¡¡Sivan looked at Cray who didn''t even act as he heard him at all.

    "I am talking to you cray. Talk to me. What are you waiting for? I need you to attack as soon as you can."

    Sivan said as he looked at the city.

    There are twelverge spheres of light hovering over the city dome at various spots and beneath it was the massive yellow light that still upied the city.

    But if anyone sees it now, they will definitely notice that the glow has reduced a lot.

    Sivan started panicking with every second and he looked at Cray. He wanted to push him and wake him up.

    But as soon as he extended his arm, he was stopped by Avlyn.

    "What do you think you are doing? He said it is a dangerous process. You can''t disturb him now. A load of fifty thousand souls is too hard for him to bear if you do something stupid."

    "He shouldunch the attack now. He didn''t have a lot of time."

    "I am sure he knows better in the current situation. He knows what to do. So, don''t panic and just rx. If you are so worried. Go and pray to your god that everything should go well without any mishap."

    "I am not a nuthouse like you guys to worship a god for every dispute.

    You better pray that your friend here does what he promised and doesn''t screw it up. Alright?"

    "Keep your mouth in check young man. You don''t know who you are doubting and who are you insulting. I thought you are not some ignorant bratty young master of a n. Don''t prove me wrong."

    "Whatever."

    Sivan just brushed her off and sat on the side. He doesn''t know what is going to happen and if Sam is able to figure something out. But he hoped that Sam didn''t.

    At this moment, Sam who is sitting in the tower contacted Ma again.

    "Are you done?"

    "Yeah. What do you want me to do now?"

    "Do you have a transference token that will bring Gail back to the n grounds?"

    "I have one that could lead him to the Enforcement team building. Why?"

    "Give one of those also to Gail. Alright?"

    "Sure."

    "Okay go to the stray realm now. I will send Gail in a few minutes. I need to brief him on a few things."

    Sam cut the call and called Gail.

    "Okay Gail, all of the preparations are done. I need you to do something though.

    First, you will go to the stray realm and meet Senior Elder Ma there. You will get two transference tokens. One of them is the token for you to go to the approximate location of the ce where the device that projected this light beam on us is set up.

    You need to destroy that as it is part of the core of the formation.

    The second token will bring you back to the Enforcement department of the Gaja n. He will exin what is what is in the stray realm.

    After you reach the destination of the formation core, you might not be able to find it immediately. In fact, the location might be a bit off. I want you to search it quickly ande back as soon as possible."

    "What is the error range? How far off could I appear with respect to that formation core part?"

    "I don''t know. I think two miles plus or minus. I hope you would be able to cover that distance quickly though. And I don''t think you would be having a problem with your expertise in sound and the energy ripplebination.

    Also, it has massive light elemental energy gathered there. So it wouldn''t be that much of a problem for you to do it."

    "Alright. Then what?"

    "After destroying it, I want you toe back to the City instantly. After destroying one part of the core, things still wouldn''t be resolved immediately. Everyone in the city is exhausted.

    We will be in a vulnerable situation.

    On top of that, there are some souls gathered on top of the formation. I don''t know who is doing it, but they are gathered almost half of the souls together.

    If they are able to control them even after the formation core was destroyed, things would be really chaotic.

    They might be trying to pull off some big attack. So I want you to be quick and ready to fight at any moment.

    Do you hear me?"

    "Yes. What about Giyon, Grivon, and all of the others? I need you to go and check up on them I highly doubt they are unscathed with all of this massive damaging situation."

    "I will take care of them. You can count me on it. I know just the way to make them recover. You just focus on this."

    "Alright."

    "You can leave now."

    Sam said and as soon as his words left his mouth, Gail broke the transference token that sent him to the Stray realm.

    There Ma is waiting for him with two transference tokens.

    "This is the token for your destination and this is the token back to the n. You knock yourself out."

    Gail took both of the tokens and said.

    "You go back to the n. There might be an attack soon. So, get ready."

    "Alright."

    Ma didn''t even hesitate before he broke another token and went back to the n.

    Gail took a deep breath as he took out the token and broke it. He disappeared from the stray realm.

    He reappeared far away from the city. Within the mountain range at the foot of a cliff.

    He looked around and pped his hands together with energy.

    *PAK*

    A massive sound came as ripples expanded in all kinds of different directions. The sound wavesced with these energy waves reverberated in the surroundings. The birds and even some beasts ran away and the surrounding trees and rocks vibrated profusely.

    Gail closed his eyes as he took in the reaction vibrationsing from various objects. He was focused to the extreme and all of a sudden, he turned around. There is arge mountain on which his gazended on.

    He stepped into the air and started running at sonic speed.

    *SWISH* *SWISH*

    A whistling sound came as he kicked the air and ran on it while reaching the mountain.

    When he was almost there, all of a sudden he sensed something and changed his direction.

    *SWOOSH*

    An arrow brushed past him and he looked in a direction far away.

    Gailnded on a nearby tall tree as he looked in a certain direction.

    Another arrow came in and this time, Gail just caught it with his bare hands.

    "Come out Hayan," Gail said out loud.

    "It seems like you still remember me. I am ttered."

    A voice came from afar. It is almost impossible to find out who is speaking and from where.

    "I saide out."

    "Of course, I am not going to do that. Do you think I am stupid? I will die if Ie face to face with the Sonic prince."

    "Really? Do you still know that? Then why are you getting in my way?"

    "Of course, it is because I am a member of the Divine league?"

    "Stop kidding. You are a member of the Divine league just for the sake of it. There is not a single thing in your body that epts the Divine league''s principles.

    It is a mutually beneficial rtionship."

    "Of course it is. As a part of that rtionship, I am trying to stop you now."

    "You know it is impossible to do that."

    "Of course, it is impossible for me to stop you all by myself, but it is not impossible for me to stop you just for a while.

    Just until other memberse with the preparations that we left solely for you."

    "Then try your luck."

    As he said that, Gail extended his hands and a massive ball of energy gathered itself at the tip of his index fingers.

    Therge ball of energy is so bright and big that it looked like the sun in the sky.

    With just a mere thought, the ball started shrinking into a smaller size and before they knew it, it turned into the size of a small marble.

    "That looks dangerous. I can''t let you do that now, can I?"

    Hayan said and an arrow swished through the air. But before it could reach Gail, he snapped his finger with the marble in his hands.

    *SNAP*

    The energy in the ball copsed as it propagated through the wind and it only moved to one particr side. Towards the mountain.

    *BOOM*

    It explosively took over the whole area and destroyed everything that is in its path. The trees and rocks turned into nothing but debris. Everything was destroyed.

    But right before the wave hit the mountain, an arrow came out in arge parab and exploded in front of it.

    *BOOM*

 Chapter 1532 Helping others

    Chapter 1532 Helping others¡¡¡¡*BOOM*

    The arrow exploded right in front of the energy wave and it created a massive energy curtain. Both of these shed together and negated each other.

    Gail felt the energy wave, but he didn''t budge.

    "So, the core is indeed inside that mountain."

    "Yes, it is. There is no point in hiding it since I am already here and it is actually a trap."

    "Of course, you would think so. But all I can see is that you just made my job a little harder."

    Gail extended both of his hands and energy riled up in the surroundings.

    Hayan who is hiding somewhere said out loud in a quivering tone.

    "Come fast assholes, I won''t be able to hold him off for too long."

    Meanwhile, back in the Mari n''s camp.

    "What the hell? Who went missing from the city all of a sudden? And a person of that high level?"

    Sivan said it out loud in a panicked state. He almost wanted to connect to the formation to make sure he is not missing anything.

    But Avlyn once again stopped him to not disturb Cray.

    "Whoever it is, if they are really posing an immediate threat, we will know soon enough."

    She said softly and within a few minutes, a subordinate of hers came running in to report.

    "Madam, Gail was reported to be at the core on the west side. Hayan is holding him back for a moment."

    "Gail came out of the city? So it is him that disappeared?" Sivan asked in shock.

    "That is what it seems."

    "Then what is the point of this attack? Even if you slow down the rest of the powerhouses, Gail is enough to make you guys stuff your tails between your legs."

    He said it out loud in frustration.

    Avlyn looked at him coldly.

    "What are you looking at? You guys are pissing your pants while my father is just sweeping a nce at your face. Do you really want me to believe that you are not scared of Gail?

    Even my father doesn''t dare talk down to that guy. "

    "You know a lot of things, but you don''t know when to shut up."

    She raised her hand and almost made a move on Sivan, but one of her subordinates who is also part of the dozen people from Divine league stopped her.

    "There is a reason why you are getting so angry like this boss. He is saying the truth. And we cannot really go against his father.

    You and I both know what will happen if Sin really goes on a rampage and we also know that there is a little chance that we can defeat Gail at all

    That is why we have a n and we need to stick to it. Let''s go. We won''t be getting this chance again and again. We need to make sure that we are there and Gail falls into our trap before he goes crazy angry and destroys everything."

    Avlyn pushed the hand of his subordinate away, but she acknowledged his words and gave a cold look to Sivan.

    She really wanted to smack some sense into him, but she knew if she did that, his father woulde and smack some sense into her.

    "Lucky Bastard."

    Leaving those two words, she left the room along with the rest of the subordinates.

    Cray and Sivan are the only ones in the room and he almost wanted to just push him off of the formation.

    He is really anxious now that Gail is out of the city. Even if they really destroyed the whole city, things wouldn''t be as easy as they nned.

    As long as Gail escapes, they might as well not make any n to destroy this city.

    While Sivan is anxious, back inside the city, Sam is also getting anxious. He didn''t know what happened. It has already been a few minutes since Gail left and there is no change in the formation. This is kind of making him feel a bit anxious.

    He cannot help but overthink things at the moment.

    But he still has to grit his teeth and let Gail handle stuff and move along. He controlled all of the souls around him as he moved around in the formation. The souls acted as a shield from the rest of the souls that are still glowing brightly and not letting them have a proper vision.

    Sam remembered where Giyon, Grivon, and Jyon are ced and ran to their location.

    When he reached Giyon, he is surprisingly holding up better.

    She actually sat on the floor with her eyes closed and in a meditative state. There are some burn marks on her skin and there is a normal barrier around them.

    But she is definitelyposed and clear-headed.

    Sam tried to wake her up, but when reached closer to her, she almost instinctively made a move and went on the defensive.

    Sam sighed and called her.

    "Giyon. It is me, Sam. This is not a hallucination. I am here to fetch you."

    "Sam? What are you doing here?"

    She asked in a surprised tone.

    "Your father is out of the city, he is one of the ways to destroy the formation core. How are you doing?"

    "I am alright."

    "Why didn''t you use your stray dimension token or something? You could have just escaped. What is the point of enduring this?"

    "I don''t know. I thought we would be attacked. What is the point of hiding then? I was just waiting for the enemies toe."

    Sam didn''t answer and that let her enter her divine dimension fragment before he carried that away along with him.

    He went to meet Grivon. He is obviously in a much worse state. But he is also holding up, waiting for the enemy to attack. In fact, he even held his sword in his hands ready to attack anyone thates near him.

    Sam really felt that these siblings are way too stubborn for their own good.

    After throwing him into the divine dimension fragment, he went on to Saran''s estate. That is where Jyon is as well as the four kids.

    As soon as he entered though, he didn''t see anyone else other than Saran''s wife. She is holding a ring in her hand tightly while she endured the burning sensation of light.

    Sam went to meet her.

    "How are you doing?"

    "Sam? Is that you?"

    "Yes, it is me. How are you? Are you alright?"

    "Yes, I am fine. But kids. They almost fainted as soon as the souls came in. I sent them into divine dimension fragments. Jyon is also inside. Can you please check up on them?''

    She said as she blindly extended her hand.

    Sam held her hand and took the ring from her.

    "Okay, but you also need to get into the fragment. You don''t have to worry. I am pretty sure the kids are doing okay."

    Saran''s wife nodded her head and entered the fragment. Sam also entered the fragment, while he let Giyon take care of the surroundings. Even though she is a bit exhausted and injured, he didn''t have much choice. There is no one else in the surroundings.

    Inside the dimension, Sam saw Jyon take care of the children. The children are currently in an extremely exhaustive state. Their bodies are a bit burned and they are feeling extreme pain. But they couldn''t even scream because of theck of energy.

    He gritted his teeth in frustration. There is one feature in the light chamber and that is to not attack any people that didn''t awaken their spiritual core. It is pretty easy for the souls to distinguish. He thought that it is enough to do something like that to keep powerless out of harm.

    But now he knew he is wrong.

    The kids who didn''t have any control of their strength but still have these special constitutions were also picked as awakened and they were attacked.

    Which is obviously too much.

    The only silver lining is that their mother immediately came back to her senses and didn''t lose her cool before throwing them into the dimension fragment.

    Sam checked up on her and immediately took some medicine to treat them.

    Only after they calmed down and went to sleep, was he able to rx. Their mother also came to herself and stopped worrying overly as she gave them a kiss.

    Sam came out and sent Giyon in before he walked out of that spot.

    The formation is still on and he is worried about what woulde from those balls that are created from gathered souls.

    While he is thinking that, all of a sudden, he noticed that there is a fluctuation in the formation. All the bright yellow light haspletely disappeared as if it never existed.

    This made himpletely shocked.

    Because he should have been happy that the light is gone, but the balls of energy on top of the dome didn''t go away. They are still present. That only means the other party is ready to attack which is not good news.

    Sam looked at the situation and muttered.

    "Do it fast Gail."

 Chapter 1533 Powdered Mountain

    Chapter 1533 Powdered Mountain¡¡¡¡Since the yellow light is gone, the powerhouse moved again. When they looked at the ces they found themselves in, they couldn''t help but feel frustrated.

    Sam let the people out of the divine dimension fragments.

    He contacted Gamin, Yuvana, and Saran. The n''s leader went on to calm down the chaos and also make sure that people are healed.

    The team that was outside also started running back.

    Within a few minutes, Sam is in a meeting with the powerhouses.

    "Where is Gail?"

    "He went out to deal with the core of the light chamber formation. But someone is using the formation to do something big. Almost half of the souls from within the formation are currently gathered and they are beingpressed.

    You guys better be careful and ready to tackle them."

    "Alright, anything else?"

    "No. I will take care of the healing process for the rest. I just want you guys to make sure that nothing bad happens to the formation. I will contact the dome operators of all of the domes in the city. We will add an extrayer of protection to the defense barrier dome.

    It won''t hold up of course, but it will just give you some resistance at least."

    "Okay."

    Sam then looked at Saran and said.

    "Your kids and wife are safe. The kids are sleeping for now. But don''t worry. Giyon and Grivon are with them currently."

    "Thank you."

    Saran said, but he didn''t go away. Hepletely trusted Sam now and got ready to tackle the massive balls of energy that are within there.

    Sam then left them with some more instructions as he took out amunication token while walking.

    "Dome operators. Are you all okay? Is anyone really injured?"

    "We are a good boss. We are just a bit exhausted. Both physically and mentally exhausted."

    "Alright then, all of you listen to me now.

    Within the emergency medical supplies, you have been given to take the vials numbered 15 and 18. Do it immediately. I will expel most of the effects from the yellow radiation and also ease your brains a bit.

    Take any potion you have that is useful for mental energy exhaustion.

    If you don''t have any money, borrow from the friend next to you or any other person that is nearby. You can even contact the inventory of the n and get it.

    It is a special order and I already got permission from the n''s leader. Do you understand?"

    "Yes, sir."

    "Do it within two minutes. We don''t have much time. I need you guys to activate sequence 23 in the crystal dome formation."

    "Boss, sequence 23 takes up too much energy from the formation. Are you sure you want to run that up?"

    "Yeah, don''t care about that for now. I want you guys to run it and use dark elemental energy as the core elemental energy. Do you understand?"

    "Yes, Boss."

    "Good, Stay strong."

    As soon as he said those words and cut the call, the soldiers started moving. The operators are on full speed as they quickly injected the vials and started working on the domes.

    They didn''t even bother to wait for the whole thing to take effect.

    Soon Sam ran to a specific ce within the n while talking to Ma on the call.

    "I don''t know what happened with Gail, but it is taking too much time. Do you have any secret formations lined up within the n grounds?"

    "There are some defensive ones, why?"

    "I want you to activate them. All of them."

    "Sure. On it."

    "Also, send all of those people that you stopped from fighting, Make them go around and heal everyone. Many people are injured."

    "I already did that. They are currently on their way."

    "Great."

    "What are you doing currently?"

    "I am going to let our special gueste out. We need all the power we can get. I don''t think it is easy to defeat the next attack if we have any less."

    "Okay then. Looking forward to it."

    Sam cut the call, he also reached his destination. It is one of the towers within the n which also acts as a watch post. He climbed onto it quickly before making some changes on the top.

    The tower shot a bright red light into the sky, like a flier.

    Everyone from within the n and outside the n was surprised by this. The red light shot through the clouds brightly and it is clearly visible from very far away.

    Even Gail who is far away from the city could see it.

    And he immediately reacted. He frowned and looked in different directions around him. Everything in the surroundings is destroyed by the energy explosion.

    There is almost no ce for Hayan to hide except for the mountain that is straight ahead.

    "I didn''t want to use excessive force when dealing with punks like you. But you leave me no choice."

    Gail said coldly and all of a sudden, energy riled up around him. It almost hit the whole area like a storm. The debris and rocks moved around crazily and the energy manifested into visible form as it moved close to his body.

    The surroundings were dried up of spiritual energy as if he vacuumed it to himself.

    But even more energy from within him ising as both of his hands were extended out in the open. Within a few seconds, all of the energy that gathered around him came to his hands and he took a deep breath.

    Hayan who is in the hiding started shooting arrows from different directions. Even though he is only supposed to be in one spot, the arrows even came from Gail''s rear.

    But this time, Gail didn''t bother to defend himself.

    *SLAP*

    A loud pping sound came as both palms met.

    *BOOM*

    An energy ripple came along with a booming sound and everything that is within the surroundings came to a standstill before an energy wave emerged from the hands.

    *GRRRR¡­*

    A rumbling sound came as the massive energy destroyed everything that is within the site. Hayan desperately used all of the arrows he can and this time they didn''te from anywhere else. Hayan popped out of the mountain that he was hiding in and used all of his trump cards.

    But the energy waves instantly swept past him and the mountain he was standing on as it went straight ahead.

    He didn''t feel anything for a moment, but a momentter.

    *BOOM*

    The intense rumbling made the whole mountain copse.

    It didn''t even explode normally. Every molecule of the stony mountain waspletely vibrating as the bond was destroyed between them and it crashed into a bunch of powder.

    Along with that, there is a small and faint spot that turned into a bloody mist that was covered with the rest of the powder and then there is also a small explosion that urred with light elemental energy.

    But all of them were very minutepared to the destruction that was caused by the whole thing.

    The energy wave went past the mountain and destroyed the forest, it almost reached a mile away where Avlyn who is leading her team suddenly stopped in her tracks.

    She took a deep breath and was almost hyperventted.

    "What happened? Why is energy so chaotic?"

    One of her subordinates asked as he looked around.

    "Gail, he already got serious. It is definitely his attack. We need to make our move right now. Quick let''s go."

    They immediately rose to the sky and started running towards the origin of the energy wave. As they ran in the air they saw everything beneath them was destroyed. It looked like a vast wastnd that ispletely destroyed by a typhoon. A mile area of that ispletely inconceivable.

    Gail is currently looking through the powder of the debris of the mountain just to make sure that he didn''t miss anything.

    After making sure that nothing was left intact, he turned to look at the team that came. His eyes are burning with anger and Avlyn had already taken her weapon and got ready to defend herself.

    "I will destroy you all one day. If you survive this war, I wille and knock on the doors of Divine league and drag every one of you out of there by your tongues and tear you apart one by one.

    You better be ready."

    He took out the transference token and moved away.

    Meanwhile, a few moments ago. Back in the n ground.

    After the red light was shot out, on the other side, arge white cat that is currently going through a veryfortable massage in arge water tub made in the middle of a forest looked into the sky.

    Its expression changed to one of anger and frustration. But it came out of the water stretched before disappearing from the spot with a whistling sound.

    It reached the n grounds within a few minutes and entered the estate. Went straight to Sam.

    Sam pointed at the white balls in the sky and said.

    "Get ready to tackle. We need you to take in the impact."

 Chapter 1534 Clash

    Chapter 1534 sh¡¡¡¡The sonic cat looked at the white energy balls in the sky.

    It has noticed them from far away, while it is on the way to the city. But now that it looked closely, all the confusion and frustration on why Sam called it here is gone.

    "Gail is supposed to stop the by destroying the core of the formation that is supporting their souls, but he is being dyed. So, I want your help in dealing it."

    "*MEEEEOW*"

    Sam just shrugged at its cry and just moved away. He knew that the Sonic cat wouldn''t just sit idly on the side. His problem, at least the most part of it is definitely solved.

    All of the powerhouses got ready to tackle it.

    As they are all thinking, all of a sudden, one of the energy balls in the sky moved. In fact it is a bit understatement to call it an energy ball as it is full of souls within. It zoomed to the n grounds like a meteor.

    Its target happened to be Gamin who is standing there with his sword out.

    He smirked as soon as he saw that he is the first target. He gripped his sword tighter and all of the energy in the surroundings suddenly riled up. It all gathered into his hands and then into his sword.

    *CRACK*

    The ball touched the crystal dome and the dome started cracking bit by bit. Gamin leapt into the air and swung his sword. It connected with the energy ball and¡­

    *BOOM*

    A massive explosion of energy happened. The souls that are gathered together started disappearing as they got separated.

    The energy explosion caused the crystal dome formation to crack all over the ce and Gamin who was in the air to cut the thing down, crashed down into the ground with a loud thud.

    He felt his mind go blur as if something had invaded his head while he spat out a mouthful of blood. His arm is shaking and things are blurred. The impact of the energy is so much that even him, a person at the peak of the power in the realms is feeling the shaking.

    He stood up with difficulty as he held the sword and looked at the sky.

    His mind cleared a bit. Some of the souls that are dispersed from therge explosion are trying to surround him and upy his head, but they are dead as soon as he focused on his mental energy and even his whole situation got a little better.

    At this moment, back in the camp Sivan is shaking in excitement.

    He used a telescope to see what happened. He clearly couldn''t see what Gamin has gone through in that short span of time. But he sure saw the sword and the ball shing. Even though the ball lost from the exchange the whole city''s crystal dome is also very damaged.

    He wanted to see something like this and he is very happy that it happened now.

    He is also d that he took the advice of Avlyn and didn''t disturb Cray.

    He turned to look at Cray with enthusiasm to see what he is doing.

    Cray has a big frown on his face and he looked like he is carrying the weight of a mountain. The veins on his forehead bulged and almost looked like they are ready to pop.

    With great difficulty, he made some hand gestures that made another ball move.

    Gamin who is standing there looked at him and jumped into the sky again with the sword. As his sword shed with the ball, all of a sudden, he felt like the burden on his has lessened a lot.

    He turned to the side as Saran came into assist him.

    Both of themnded the blow at the same time and with just the initial impact half of the souls were dispersed but the other half obviously blew up and the two of them hit the ground once again.

    The dome started cracking more and more. Its recovery no matter how amplified it is, is not working as they wanted. They cannot just recover the dome no matter how hard they tried.

    Yuvana is also holding her weapon as she looked at the remaining ten balls.

    She looked at Gamin and got ready to deal with the next one.

    Gamin looked at her with a smile that is covered with blood.

    He is not severely injured, but it is also hard for them to escape unscathed at such arge amount of energy gathering.

    Back in the camp, Cray opened his eyes all of a sudden and cursed under his breath.

    "What happened? Is something wrong?"

    Sivan asked anxiously.

    "They are countering the attacks. I want the attack topletely metamorphosise, but they are cutting down in the middle. I need to find a way to send the attack before they could destroy it."

    "How about yound multiple attacks at the same time?"

    "That is my n as well, but the burden on my body and mind will be too much. I am trying to figure out a way.

    Did Avlyn and others really go after Gail?"

    "Yeah, they went. I highly doubt they will be able to do something though."

    "Of course they wouldn''t be able to. Gail''s reputation is not just there for a show or joke. I really wish he was within the city. If we couldn''t use this to deal with them, I couldn''t see a method to really cause him any damage that could help us defeat him."

    "Who knows? Your team is very confident in themselves."

    "That doesn''t say anything other than them being delusional."

    As he was thinking all of a sudden, he noticed something in the formation.

    A dot in the middle of the city.

    "Did Gail really leave the city?"

    He asked in surprise.

    "Yes, why?"

    Sivan also asked and looked at the formation. A frown appeared on his face too. The dot is big indicating that its power is definitely of higher level.

    In fact it is way too big for them and they are actually a bit scared.

    The problem is, they only knew Gail to have that much power and strength. They didn''t know or rather, they knew for sure that the Gaja n didn''t have anyone with that much power.

    "I am pretty sure that is what your subordinates reported. Gail left the city and appeared near a core."

    "Then he must havee back. There is no way there is another person at the same level in the Gaja n.

    I need to use my full power. We cannot hold back. With Gail also in the mix, we wont be able to deal any damage at all."

    Cray said as he closed his and tried to connect with all of the energy balls.

    Sivan frowned and looked at the dot suspiciously. He doesn''t know whether or not Gail came back, The first case is the best case scenario because they don''t need to worry about someone who is as powerful as Gail being present in Gaja n.

    This will throw their ns and morale into disarray.

    Meanwhile back in the Gaja n, the Sonic cat is looked at the energy balls through the cracked formation as it scratched its own head.

    In fact it is in the exact spot where Cray and Sivan found the dot that indicated a powerful being. They just mistook the sonic cat for Gail''s presence.

    But that confusion made Cray to take the risk that he would have never taken if Gail was not really present in the city.

    He connected with all of the energy balls at the same time and slowly moved them towards the city.

    Even though they are not moving as fast as the previous ones and they are definitely not metamorphosising as fast as before, it is certainly more intimidating and more dangerous.

    Sam was surprised by the sudden change in the attack pattern. He looked at the Sonic cat and said.

    "It is time for you to make a move. Are you sure you can handle this?"

    The cat shook its head as if it is not confident.

    "Then try your best."

    Sam just left those words and looked at the sky.

    He took out themunication token and called Grivon and Giyon.

    "Get ready with your transference tokens. The attack from the enemy is of way too high caliber. If things don''t work out with the defensive measures, we are going to escape. Do you understand?"

    "What happened?"

    Giyon asked in surprise. She was busy taking care of the kids and Saran''s wife that she didn''t care much about the massive explosions outside.

    "No time to exin. Just make sure that things don''t go wrong with the escape if things go wrong with this ce."

    While he was speaking, all of the powerhouses within the n immediately made the move.

    Gamin, Yuvana, Saran, the n''s leader, the leader of the Elite team, and finally the sonic cat.

    All of them made a move at ten of these objects and they attacked simultaneously.

 Chapter 1535 Clash II

    Chapter 1535 sh II¡¡¡¡All the attacks were aimed at the ten energy balls in the air.

    But out of all of those attacks, Sonic cat stood out. It first ran deeper into the estate to find the central point of all these ten balls.

    As it riled its energy up, it looked at the sky and leaped upwards.

    Arge ripple of energy escaped its body with whistling sounds as it spread like arge circr ring.

    It froze after it spread until it covered all of the ten balls and moved upwards along with the cat.

    The ring shed with the ten energy balls before they could even touch the crystal dome. But even with that impact between them, the crystal dome was destroyed just from the sheer aftershock.

    The remaining powerhouses used all of their strength tobat the energy balls.

    Cray who is sitting in the camp felt his veins popping. His nose started bleeding and his face turned red all at the same time.

    His brain felt like it is being pounded by a thousand artisans and their sledgehammers all at the same time. Breathing became harder. The blood cirction of his body is not going on properly.

    His brain function ispletely upied by the attack that the rest of the body is not working properly. His brain is not passingmands to the rest of the organs to make them do their work properly.

    But he just gritted his teeth and went on to push the attack.

    The sh of the ring aided by the attacks of the other powerhouses made the energy balls slowly disperse some of the souls from it.

    They moved toward the people in the n. But the soldiers and elders that are all already beaten down with the light energy until now, brought themselves up as they attacked the stray soulsing at them.

    Almost all of the n is shing with these attacks and only then did they see some chance of destroying it.

    The only problem is the coteral damage that is happening.

    The coteral damage of the crystal dome formation that is. The formation started copsing as the sh continued for a certain amount of time. The operators inside immediately contacted Sam.

    "Boss, the formation is not stable anymore. The crystal dome nodes are going down. We cannot hold it up for now."

    "Let it copse. But don''t disable it until thest minute."

    "Sam decisively answered.

    "But what about the defenseter? We won''t have any other defensive measure if the crystal dome goes away. The other party powerhouses might just directly attack us."

    "You let me worry about it. Currently, all you have to do is make sure that the crystal dome does the best it can in this precarious situation."

    The crystal dome is operated at full power.

    The n continuously pushed the attacks back.

    Cray who is operating the souls from the other side started feeling the burden. The mechanism of the formation within the light chamber is not enough to maintain the attack with just his soul and mental energy anymore.

    The burden is bing too much for him to bear and the fact that he had to use ten attacks all at the same time, is extremely tough in itself.

    Cray''s fingers suddenly moved and a crystal bottle came out of the spatial storage. He opened the bottle slowly with shaky hands a small dark orb appeared out of it.

    The orb wanted to escape immediately. But with just a wave of his hand, some runes activated and made sure that the orb stayed in his hand.

    Cray opened his mouth with the utmost difficulty. As soon as he swallowed that, the veins eased upon his forehead a bit and excessive soul energy surged through his body before entering his head.

    Sivan who is sitting in the room was dumbfounded by the sudden change.

    But he also noticed that the attacks are going against the city with new vigor.

    The sonic cat pushed the attack back as it kicked in the air.

    But the new surge of energy made it hard for him to keep his cool anymore.

    It opened its mouth in frustration and anger as it coldly looked at the ten attacks.

    Energy surged wildly and the powerhouses who are also pushing the attacks back were stunned by this new surge of energy.

    The energy ring started changing bit by bit, but the cat seemed to be going through some very highly stressful change.

    "Is it really necessary? Did ite to this?"

    Sam asked as he looked at the cat. He is reluctant and unwilling to let this go this far. This is way too much of a price and he is sure that Gail will regret it for the rest of their life if Cat went through this step.

    "Please do it, Gail. Do it quick. You won''t be able to forgive yourself."

    Sam muttered and all of a sudden. All of the energy balls in the air disappeared. All the powerhouse felt like they woke up from a dream. The energy balls that are supposed to be there were suddenly gone leaving behind a single energy ripple.

    It shed with the dome and destroyed the formation before it also disappeared.

    The cat immediately stopped the attack andnded on the ground. It felt relieved and the next second it also felt a bit exhausting. It sat on the ground normally as it looked in the direction of the Mari n''s camp calmly.

    The other powerhouses alsonded in disbelief. They didn''t even know what happened. But they are definitely relieved by this sudden progression.

    "Are you all okay?"

    All of a sudden, Sam''smunication token was alerted and Gail''s voice came in.

    Sam came out his surprise and spoke in delight.

    "Yes, we are all okay. We are saved by you. Great job."

    "Sorry for the dy."

    "You were right on time."

    Sam said with excitement as he turned to the cat.

    "Gail is back. Thank you for your contribution. Thank you so much. You can rest for now."

    He turned around and started running while he contacted the operators.

    "All operators of the domes. The crystal dome copsed. From now on we are going offensive. Get the puppets ready. Activate the energy domes. We will beunching an attack soon. Get ready."

    "Yes, Sir."

    He then contacted Ma again.

    "Senior elder Ma, how is the medicine distribution going on?"

    "We covered half of the n. That is good. Please speed it up if you can though. We will be going to offensive now."

    "So, you are finally sick of tackling your own abominations that you call inventions?"

    "In a way, yes."

    "Good, let''s see how your inventions in the Gaja n will fare against the ones that were done before. I am really looking forward to it."

    "I am sure you will be excited by the oue."

    Sam cut the call and contacted the guards on the wall. He started passing orders. Meanwhile, at the same time.

    In the camp of the Mari n.

    Cray was stuck on the spot. His body is not moving and he even stopped breathing. Sivan started panicking as he looked at him. He also looked at the remote formation in front of them and noticed something.

    The formation core is not active.

    He immediately understood what happened.

    Currently, Cray''s soul which is connected to the formation must have taken the bacsh of the attack that was supposed tond on the city.

    He made some changes in the remote formation and immediately kicked Cray on the side.

    Cray flew across the room like a ragdoll. He crashed into the wall and opened his eyes.

    "*COUGH* *COUGH*

    He coughed up blood and could barely see. His eyes and nose started bleeding and h felt dead tired because of the headache.

    He looked at Sivan and didn''t even know what he is doing for now.

    But all of a sudden it hit him and tried to sit up.

    Sivan walked up to him and helped him sit.

    "How are you feeling?"

    "I.. I.."

    "You are saved by the formation mechanism. You shouldn''t have pushed it too far."

    Sivan said as he gave him something to drink before he looked at the remote formation.

    "It seems like your friends have failed. The formation core is destroyed."

    "Of course they did. It is not easy to destroy Gail, but who is that other entity that stopped our the attack. Did you see it?"

    "No, I didn''t it is way too bright to be visible. But that person really did save the Gaja n in a way. We need to be wary now."

    "Of course, we need to be. The massive crystal dome is destroyed though. You canunch your next attack immediately.

    I think you will gain some advantage now."

    "Knowing Sam, I highly doubt it. I might have even prompted that guy to attack.

    He might just go offensive now."

    "Then you can try and use that cunning brain of yours and try to make it advantageous to you."

 Chapter 1536 Golems and Puppets clash

    Chapter 1536 Golems and Puppets sh¡¡¡¡"When ites to brains and deceptions, that guy is better than me as well,"

    Sivan said in amenting tone.

    Cray straightened up a bit and sat against the wall as he looked at Sivan.

    "Why are you giving so much credit to your enemy? I mean, it is a good thing in a way. But I have seen too many people who are fighting against an enemy who is in a much more advantageous position than them, but are still in a rigid denial.

    They always thought they stood a chance of winning and they are superior themselves.

    You are exactly the opposite of them. You already won once at Sam, albeit in an ambush situation. But it is still a victory nheless. Why are you so generous with yourpliments towards him?"

    Sivan looked at Cray and hesitated a bit, but soon he just shook his head and said.

    "They are notplements; they are facts. In this soul exchange process, I got all of his memories. If I had known all of these memories, not evenpletely, just some of them, a small glimpse, I highly doubt I would have made a move on Sam at all."

    "Really? Is he that scary? He didn''t evene across ns like yours until then. You wielded much more power than him."

    "Yeah, I did. But that''s about it. He has this scarily high endurance towards the mishaps and misfortunes that regrly gue him throughout his life."

    "So, you are shaken just by that?"

    "No, I am shaken because I am sure that he won''t be bothered by the trouble I caused him too. He is way too focused on the end goal and doesn''t care how much trouble he is going through at the present.

    Because all he cares about is trying and find a way through the current struggle and in the process he wouldn''t care about the damage he is creating.

    He might not be heartless enough to collect 100,000 souls just to make a formation. But that only applies when he is considering 100,000 innocent people. For 100,000 enemies though, that is not something he would blink an eye while killing.

    He is just a messed-up character with contradicting but clear principles. Some of his principles appear hypocritical to me, but he doesn''t care. He just follows them blindly and stands by them too much.

    The whole conflict between me and him is a mess. I won his body at the start, but that is about it. He destroyed many of my subordinate organizations. Created a mess in the Mari n, now he is fighting a war against my n.

    With this body, I got everything I ever dreamed of, but I couldn''t rest freely for a single day. I even feel like this is all a big mistake sometimes."

    "So, that is why you want to kill him so desperately?"

    "One of the reasons, yes."

    "What are the other reasons then?"

    "The benefits thate from killing him of course. If he dies I get a lot of things."

    "What would that be?"

    Even before Sivan could answer, the group of people that left came back.

    Sivan stood up and walked past them,pletely ignoring them.

    Avlyn frowned as she looked at Cray and ran over to make sure that he is okay.

    "How are you feeling?"

    "Alive. I knew this is risky, but I must say I was saved by the mechanism of the formation."

    "Yeah?"

    "Of course, the only reason that I survived is because of the mechanism. Fifty thousand souls is too much for a head to bear in such a massive attack. I even had to use my soul pill because of this."

    "And?"

    "And I still lost it as soon as the core was destroyed. The formation mechanism is designed with the user''s safety in mind. Sam would have never thought that his enemies would be using it. Otherwise, he would have definitely not made that set up and I am d he did.

    How are things on your side?"

    "It seems like Gail clearly didn''t like the way Hayan annoyed him. He just destroyed the guy in a single attack after some stalling and left using a transference token."

    "Expected. What is the next n?"

    Avlyn turned to Sivan who is standing at the door talking to one of his subordinates.

    He has a deep frown on his face.

    "What happened?"

    "Our next n is decided. It is defense."

    All of them walked out of the tent to take a look far away.

    The whole area is surrounded by the Golems of the Lava worms. The remaining Lava worms arepletely upying the surroundings of the camp.

    But that is not all. The undead creatures are among the golems as they marched forward along with them.

    All of the undead creatures are equipped.

    Along with these creatures. There are a bunch of puppets that are flying out of the city.

    The small puppets that are used for shooting the bullets acted as beacons for attracting the energy beam attacks from the dome formations in the city.

    But their function is a bit different this time.

    They are just here to shoot stuff and nothing else.

    Avlyn looked at the vast number of undead and golemsing at them and was surprised. Her surprise turned into shock when she saw some of the undead creatures which emitted an aura that is extremely dangerous and chaotic.

    "Why are they so powerful?"

    She muttered it out loud and one of her subordinates looked at the creatures and said.

    "They are the bodies of the members of the different ns and organizations. This is surprising. It seems like the Gaja n collected the dead bodies and used them too while they are taking revenge.

    They are all pretty powerful people in their own right."

    "Really? Gaja n did this? I thought this is not their style."

    "Well, it is Sam''s style," Sivan answered before Avlyn''s subordinate responded and took out amunication token.

    "Everyone, get the energy beams and ranged attacks ready. Kill every creature that ising. All of the puppet legions can be engaged.

    Also, use the rest of the energy crackers in the city. Use all threeunchers.

    The liquid energy cell missiles go next¡­"

    He kept on giving out orders and immediately the subordinates started moving. The first thing they did was energy beams were being shot out of the massive cannons they mounted.

    Along with that, the puppets are let out. Both humanoid and beast puppets ran out as they attacked the golems and the undead creatures.

    The puppets have energy des and shot small energy bullets. The battle finally became chaotic. It became chaotic and extremely direct.

    The golems were being destroyed at an extremely fast pace. But they were also being brought back instantly because of the Lava worms.

    While all of this is going on the ground, in the air, the small flying puppets started shooting bullets at the shooters of the energy cannons.

    But they didn''t make it. They looked like normal bullets and they were shot down by the archer guards on the wall.

    The fragments of the bullets are all over the ground among the undead creatures and the golems. Some of them even merged with the soil that is being formed from the golems.

    As the battle progressed the small puppets are being shot down one by one and the bullets that are stored in the space jade and fell all over the ce

    Inside the Gaja city, people on the city wall watched the whole thing turn out.

    The battle is going on closer to the camp. It is way too far away from the city, but they are currently enjoying this.

    The golems and undead even though didn''t have much of an upper hand, they can be sure that they will be able to take a breath for a while.

    Inside the city, Sam is also looking at the battle through his telescope, and in the process, he noticed the movements of people who are setting up tripods in an elevated spot. He frowned and called out to Gail.

    "Are you alright to battle?"

    "Yes. Why?"

    "Energy crackers areing. I want you to intercept them before they reach the vicinity of the city."

    "Ranged attacks?"

    "Yeah, don''t go near them."

    "Alright."

    Gail ran over to the front of the city and stood on the city wall to tackle the energy crackers.

    Sam just watched the scene through his telescope and he waited.

    "So, what is our next move going to be?"

    Giyon asked as she stood beside him and watched the battle through another telescope.

    "I don''t know currently. It depends on Sivan''s next move honestly."

    "Really? You are leaving it to someone else''s decisions?"

    "Of course not. He is a variable. Let him figure out how he is going to bring up the extra trouble to himself. That is the least I can do to him, after all, he has done to me."

 Chapter 1537 Troubles I

    Chapter 1537 Troubles I¡¡¡¡"So are there any spections and guesses on what is going to happen?" Giyon asked Sam as they looked at the battle.

    "I don''t know what kind of steps he will take. But I am pretty sure, whatever it is, he will be out of those puppets soon.

    Then he has to go use the real soldiers and then the real problem will start for him."

    "So, your n is to bulldoze him until he loses his resources."

    "In a way. But I don''t have to put too much effort into it. The Lava worms are enough trouble for them. Meanwhile, I can work on something that can bring them more trouble."

    Sam said as he put down the telescope and took out the core mechanisms of the wolf puppets that they managed to acquire.

    He went to check up on them one more time before giving some orders to the artisans who are constantly working on creating some more puppets.

    "How long do you need to make eight of those things?"

    "It will take two hours sir. Currently, most of us are working on other things, it wouldn''t be easy for us to do this any faster."

    "Alright. Two hours. You can''t take any more time than that."

    "Okay, sir. We will call you after we are done."

    "Yes, please."

    After the call was done, Sam started drawing inscriptions on the core mechanisms. He worked for two hours when the call from the artisans came.

    One of the subordinates was given the task to go and bring the things while Sam kept on working on the inscriptions.

    By the time the things came, he was already done with the inscriptions. He started assembling the parts.

    The things that the artisans make makeshift portable sphere cannons. He brought some of the parts from the sphere cannons that are mounted on the city walls and used them along with the new parts the artisans just made.

    Hebined all of them with the core mechanism to create these portable sphere cannons.

    After that was done, he sent some more subordinates to bring as many spare spheres that are manufactured at the domes as they can currently and ced them in all eight space jades.

    Each of the space jades went into all eight cannons.

    Finally, the cannons are done.

    Sam couldn''t help but smile as he looked at them. They are big and definitely very heavy to carry. But for the cultivators that he is going to use to shoot these things wouldn''t be feeling that heavy with this at all.

    All they would be feeling is the slight inconvenience of the size.

    "What are these things going to do?"

    Giyo was surprised as she looked at him in such a focused and gleeful state.

    "I can demonstrate."

    Sam said with the same wide smile as he aimed one of the cannons at the nearbyrge rock.

    *HUMMMMM* *BOOM*

    A humming sound came as the energy gathered at the cannon. The sphere was shot out with an explosion.

    But that didn''t stop there.

    The wind elemental energy present in the sphere exploded and created massive ripples in all of the directions. Each ripple contained explosive energy and within an instance, the ripples exploded with Void style.

    The whole area turned into arge energy void and then¡­

    *BOOM*

    Another explosion happened, creating that energy void.

    *BOOM*

    The Rockpletely disappeared along with a patch ofnd. The area is corroded with wind elemental energy and dangerous wind currents are attacking the area.

    Giyon was stunned.

    "How did this happen?"

    "The wolf puppets use this mechanism to make their energy use ripple and Void styles as they focus on the city formations. Since their range is big and it is only supported by one mechanism, their attack is not as immediate.

    But they do their jobs as they fail the whole formation at the same time.

    "Now, go and hand over one of these things to your father."

    Sam said as he passed one to Giyon.

    "Really? What will my father need this for? This would be better in the hands of someone weak."

    "Well, he will have less trouble if he used this instead of his own ranged attacks. The energy crackers and therge liquid energy cell explosions are an extremely tough thing to do and if he gets caught up in one, he might even have to take harm for that.

    But this will reduce all of the troubles for him in that case."

    "Alright. What about the rest of them?"

    "They are for the other soldiers that are going to join the battle in a while. The range is pretty far, so as long as they cover half the distance to the battlefield they can fire easily. We are going to send the cultivators first into the battle. On the flying beasts that we gathered."

    "Okay, good luck."

    Sam just nodded and started calling people. Soon, six bird-type beasts all of them in theirte stage of Astral ne Consummation started flying in from outside of the city.

    Theynded around Sam and some middle-stage and Late-stage Astral ne Consummate cultivators started flying on the beasts while carrying the portable cannons.

    They reached a halfway point between them and the battlefield as they started shooting the spheres.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Their targets are all the puppets that are within the area. The Mari n has many puppets. In fact, they didn''t even send all of their puppets out yet. Only half of them are out.

    So, the focus waspletely on them, and in-process even if the undead creatures and golems are destroyed, Sam didn''t care.

    The sudden addition of these cannons immediately caused a rapid reduction in the number of puppets on the field.

    Sivan saw this and panicked a bit. But he couldn''t do much. He can only send in more puppets and think of ways to destroy the beasts and the cannons that are attacking him.

    The only problem is, that Gail is also flying over the battlefield as he intercepted the energy crackers and the Liquid energy missiles.

    With him in the sky, it is futile for them to even try and do any damage to these beasts and the people riding on them.

    "Can you guys do something? If You don''t mind that is? After all, you are here to rx aren''t you?"

    Sivan said sarcastically as he looked at the Divine league members.

    "Gail is angry, we can''t take him on now," Avlyn said decisively.

    "Really? What are you think of doing to him? Talk about a business deal? You are here to fucking kill him. Go and kill him now. Engage, battle, or at least try to defend. He is destroying all of our ranged attacks targeted at the city.

    This is way too fucking devastating."

    "Then tell your grand elders to intercept."

    "If you are not doing anything, that is what I am going to do anyway. But if you are really not doing anything, what the fuck is the meaning of your presence here? To be the glorified spectators of this shit show?"

    "If you like to think of it that way, knock yourselves out."

    Sivan gritted his teeth and looked at Cray who is resting.

    Then he looked at the rest of them and said.

    "You guys didn''t even join the battle, and the two people who joined, one of them is dead and the other one is in no state to battle in the rest of the war.

    So much for your bragging and divine league''s name. You better prove useful, otherwise, I bet you are pretty sure that I am not afraid of any of you.

    I will take it up with you and your superiors and make your life a living hell. Even if I didn''t like my father and hate him to the guts, I am pretty sure I can tolerate him enough to take his help you settle scores with you."

    He said in frustration and went out.

    "Alright, We can''t just let the puppets go to waste continuously. Bring them in. Take the Glider team and the ambush team. Sneak up on the beasts from the side. Tell them to use the small energy pistols to their limit.

    Takedown these beasts as fast as you can."

    "Sir, what if Gail attacks. With him in the sky, it is way too much for us tobat."

    "Don''t worry too much. Gail is a principled man, He won''t break the unspoken rules of the warlike us. He will not attack you.

    You can just go and sh with those people by yourself."

    "Okay, sir. We will make a move immediately."

    "Yes. Do it now."

 Chapter 1538 Troubles II

    Chapter 1538 Troubles II¡¡¡¡Sivan is feeling a bit tense. The glide team and the ambush team left the camp gates.

    As soon as they stepped onto the battlefield. The glide team members who are all wearing a set of armor stood on the ground in an inclined posture.

    On the back of their armor, a pair of copsible wings opened up. The parts of the armor on the leg opened up what looked like mini thrusters as they shot heavilypressed wind cannons.

    *BOOM* *SWOOSH*

    They flew up into the air with a whistling sound and started gliding over the battlefield. Their wings opened up and they wore helmets that covered their faces. The thrusters opened up on the back of the armor as well as the legs as they kept them in the air as much as they can.

    When they started gliding down, the thrusters shotpressed wind cannons again to keep the boost. They are moving toward the beasts at a rapid pace and when they looked at Gail''s look that swept past them, they felt chills run down their spines.

    Meanwhile, the ambush team took a few detours on normal flying beasts as they moved to the secret spots where they want to set up their shooting equipment.

    But Gail didn''t attack. He just aimed the portable cannon at the liquid energy missile that flew from the camp. He shot it down. Not only did the missile explode on top of the battlefield that was on Camp''s side, but the aftereffects also left the people in the camp feeling dread.

    The gliders went past him and felt relieved.

    They focused on the beasts now. There are six beasts flying and on every beast, there is one shooter holding the portable cannon and shooting at the puppets. When the gliding team is surrounding them, they immediately shifted the targets and started attacking them.

    The gliding team on the other hand is very hard to reach. They are agile and dexter as they maneuvered in the air as they owned it.

    They took out some attachments that looked like handguns and started shooting at the beasts.

    The energy pistols shot energy bullets of wind elemental energy. The bullets created explosive wind elemental attacks on the beasts and the shooters which they barely managed to escape.

    Even though both sides are dodging each other''s attacks, Sivan''s problem is temporarily solved.

    The puppets are saved.

    He heaved a sigh of relief and looked at the list of remaining things he had at hand.

    There is not much equipment left. He is done with more than half of them and in particr the light chamber one of the trump cards is removed.

    Now all he does have is the equipment they could use to destroy the city in arge scale. It won''t help much in the field battle. They need to make sure that the Gaja city doesn''t have anything to send and can only defend within the city.

    Only then would these things would be of any use as they need some effort to install.

    If not, they would waste a lot of resources and so much energy will go to waste if they are used in field directly.

    He then turned to the list of the special troops he had.

    "The thunder eagle squad is done for. One of the gliding squads is on the roll. We only have four more of them.

    We still have eight Meteor squads, Six ambush teams while two of them are currently set up to assist the Gliding squad.

    We still have the basic armored troops. Eighteen archer squads. The Earthen armor regiment. The thunder wolf squad, the grasshopper squad, and the Ice hawk squad."

    Sivan listened to his subordinate giving out the names of the squads.

    "Okay, these are all our personal troops. What about the troops given to us by the Mari n.

    We have eight regiments full of them. There are mercenary groups too. Do you want to march them forward?"

    "Yes. We are going to march them first. We cannot let them sit around and consume resources here. Stop sending the puppets. We are going to use these excessive forces first to see what the Gaja n has in store for us."

    "Yes, boss."

    "But wait till the beasts are taken down or the Gliding squad is destroyed."

    Sivan sighed as he looked at the list of remaining resources he had.

    He felt extremely troubled. He doesn''t know how long this war will go on but he knew for sure that the longer this goes on, the more troubling the situation is going to be for him.

    He then looked at the Divine league members and felt even more frustrated. He suddenly felt like these people are useless. If they are really that afraid of Gail, then what is the point of evening here?

    It is not like their presence makes any difference at this point if they are acting like this.

    He doesn''t know what to do. He is really tempted to call the n leader and ask him to send his father so that he would beat some sense into these people. At least his presence will intimidate them enough and then these people will have to think whether they should break the deal they made with Sin''s son or fight Gail.

    Even if they didn''t make a decision, he would still have a show that he felt like he deserved.

    Shaking these thoughts off, he focused back on the battle.

    While he is doing that, back in the Mari n things are getting chaotic.

    The n leader of the Mari n is currently sitting in his vast office.

    Therge office is carved out of a ck stone and in the middle is a ck stone table. It looked cool and intimidating a bit grand as well.

    But there is no such majesty and grandeur in the posture of the n leader. He is sulking in his chair with his hands supporting his face while his elbows are ced on the table.

    He almost wanted to cry.

    His wife is sitting opposite him as she looked at the documents.

    "What the fuck? How did this all happen in two fucking days?"

    She said it out loud with a horrified expression.

    "The Dusk did this. All by themselves. They did it so fast and so precisely.

    All of our cities and towns that are on the seashore are gone and the cities that are on the bank of the rivers of these cities are also done. Most of the forces are deprived of these ces because of the war and they are taken down.

    These weird creatures that are looking blue and red and some kind of gel-like material just moved through the rivers, canals, and any stream and took over a whole that ispletely under our control.

    The is filled with one of the most fertilends. They just upied it whole. Not just that, They are driving the people out of the and to the neighborings through the wormholes and space gates.

    They numbered millions.

    The rest are camping in different forests building viges. They took a lot of time and sacrifice to send these messages to me. They are waiting for me to send forces and free them.

    These creatures are eating thend animals away. For some reason, they are dragging everything away into the sea.

    We don''t know what is happening.

    If that isn''t already enough. There are more troubles.

    Our business is being taken down like crazy. They are eating at the businesses like maggots on a corpse.

    One-third of our businesses are gone. The resource points we hold in those areas, the underground arenas andbs we are running, the fields, and the mines. Everything is being destroyed as we speak.

    If that is not enough, the smaller organizations under the other organizations in the alliance to defeat the Gaja n are adding fuel to the mes.

    They are trying to create trouble for us and are upying whatever is left behind by the dusk organization.

    Things are going really bad. The soldier gathering is stopped midway. I need to send forces to the Gaja city to aid Sivan in his battle."

    "Why? Did he ask for them?"

    "Not at the moment, but before he left, he said that he would need people. He insisted that he needs a lot of soldiers and half of them might just go as fodder in the battle.

    Things are really going bad here."

    "Half of these people are going to die? Do you know just how many people that make? That is way too many people. Way too many.

    You are letting them all die?"

    "What do you want me to do honey? They are mostly mercenaries. We are dealing with the Gaja n. So there is no way I am losing this opportunity over the lives of these people."

    His wife looked at him and asked.

    "Are you really okay with this? This is way too many people dying in a war being led by a kid. This is going to be a great loss of faith and power in the n. We are going to have trouble with the gods."

 Chapter 1539 Plans

    Chapter 1539 ns¡¡¡¡"I don''t care. We have already took the steps. There is no point in bothering about the spilled milk. Anyway, we also made a deal with the Divine league, so they are going to help with our faith.

    Even if they cannot they can be the mediators with the gods."

    "And you are basing that trust on what exactly? On Sivan being a good kid and asking them for help on behalf of the n? Or the Divine league being generous enough to directly offer their help?"

    The n leader didn''t have an answer for that and stayed silent.

    "You idiot. If you are paying this much price, isn''t it a basic sense to check if you are getting something of equal value?

    And the worst part is, you didn''t even factor in how much the Dusk organization is going to impact you with this.

    You told Sivan that you will deal with the dusk organization and send the rest of the troops to the war. But this is not happening any time soon.

    They are everywhere. All over our properties across the realms and we don''t even know how to deal with them.

    Just amazing."

    "I don''t know what to do. Can you just give me some advice and not berate me like this? I am already stressed."

    She sighed after listening to his words and said.

    "I am also frustrated as much as you. You brought all of this trouble onto the can. We are spreading ourselves way too thin here. We won''t be able to deal with our current problems at this rate.

    We need to make some deals to make it easy on ourselves."

    "What do you suggest?"

    "Blood Iron league. You have some contacts in the league right? We can ask them to deal with the dusk organization. Even if it is not possible for them to directly deal with the whole thing, you can at least ask them to take care of some of the properties and kill some of their members.

    We cannot move too many powerful people around as they are prone to be watched and trapped, but Blood Iron league is an unexpected factor."

    "But the rtionship between us and the league is not a pleasant one at the moment. Butler Si who is quite reputable in the circle of Blood Iron league is missing for a few months now.

    Nobody knows where he is and some even say that he is dead.

    They also suffered quite a few losses at the hands of the Gaja n. From then on, they didn''t open a shop for anyone.

    They are closed and locked."

    "Try using your connections from the past. The connections you think didn''t exist. You might think that your n is all that. But we all know the Blood Iron league and Divine league takes the cream of the crop.

    They just don''t work with the organizations directly that is it.

    You can even offer them territory in the form of payback. If the price is right enough even if you don''t use the connections they will still work.

    Do you understand?"

    "Alright, I will try to contact the Blood Iron league. What else can we do?"

    "Contact some of the organizations that are part of the alliance in dealing with the Gaja n. Some organizations are in a really deep pickle.

    The organizations currently don''t know much about Sam and his connections with the Dusk organization and in turn the Dusk''s connection with the current war.

    Just paint them as some kind of new organization trying to spread their wings a bit by using the Mari n''s current precarious situation as a springboard.

    After you paint them like that, offer the other organizations to help you deal with them. Offer them generous payback. You can lose some resource points. As long as they can bring back some lost property, you can even give away fifty percent of it."

    "Alright."

    The n''s head agreed readily. He didn''t even doubt or question his wife''s idea for a second. In fact, it could be said that the very reason he became the head of the n is because of his wife.

    He is not very smart in this kind of role that has too many political schemes and management duties.

    He is good at battle strategies and battling himself, but he was not a suitable candidate to be the head of the n until he married his wife that is.

    She is the brains behind everything that needs a political scheme and a managerial position which he needs help with.

    He is not ashamed to ask her things and she is not bothered with helping him.

    She did it so many times before and she is doing it now also.

    "You can contact the remaining two sects other than the Star eye sects that are involved in the whole alliance thing.

    Since they are the main instigators, they are the ones that have too much to lose if the Gaja n wins.

    You can y it so that the Dusk organization is impacting your war with the Gaja n and you need their help to win. They also lost a lot of properties because of the rest of the organizations and Gail''s flexing his muscles in their territory.

    I also heard that Gamin straight up demolished their morale as he beat up every grand elder he could find.

    They are in a desperate time to find some people to lean on.

    They need some wins to get their heads straight and get back into this game.

    We are going to provide that assistance by offering some of the properties they are going to recover."

    "Okay, I will do that."

    "But that is not enough. Spread false info regarding the war. Don''t make your meeting with the other sects secretive. Spread the rumors that they are helping you out to take care of Sam, not the Gaja n itself."

    "That would never fly. Why would they take care of the young man who yed little part in the whole n?"

    "Just makeup stories. Exaggerate his contribution. Make it so that the sects are now taking revenge on Sam instead of the Gaja n because of the losses they suffered.

    You don''t need it to bepletely logical. You just need to spread the word and the people are going to bend the story in the most believable way they want.

    If the story really works well, the Dusk organization will have to change its focus a bit against the sects. Do you understand where I am going with this?"

    "So, you are not counting on Dusk organization being eliminated by them?"

    "Like hell, it is going to happen. If they can really do that, we could have done it a long time ago. These assholes are going to be tough to kill and even tougher to catch.

    So, we are just going to use these sects as bait and make the Dusk organization focus on them while we proceed with our own damage control and countermeasures. This will buy us some time."

    "Alright."

    The n''s head immediately moved to give the instructions to his subordinates to get in touch with the people he needs to meet. He is also trying to contact the people he had that has connections to the Blood Iron League.

    While the Mari n is also getting into some deep troubles, back in the Gaja n. Sam is working on the portable cannon he kept for himself.

    He is drawing a series of inscriptions for hours as the battle outside went on. Soon, the Mari n is out of their energy crackers. At least they didn''t shoot. But the glider and Ambush team are gaining on them.

    Out of the six shooters one of them is taken down along with the beast as he didn''t shoot it from a proper range and took some aftershock effects from the explosion. That gave the chance for the Gliders to deal with him instantly.

    Luckily, the gliders didn''t manage to take the cannon away with them.

    It just fell off far away from the battle because of an air cannon explosion.

    Sam sent another shooter and a beast to take over the position while he worked on the cannon he has on hand to help them out.

    The portable cannons that work on the core mechanism of the wolf puppets have one major quality.

    They can modify the attacks and the energy within the attacks with the ripple style and void style.

    They can be used for anything. So, Sam decided to use it with the cannon and modify it a bit to help out the shooters in dealing with the gliders.

    After making the necessary modifications to the inscriptions, he took out a new muzzle attachment that he made an artisan create.

    He attached that to therge sphere cannon''s muzzle. Now the end of this muzzle is narrow and much smaller. It definitely doesn''t work for a sphere.

    After he was done with all of this, he stepped onto the city and held the cannon in his hands with a smile.

    "This is going to be fun."

    He muttered as he looked at the gliders and aimed at a specific spot.

 Chapter 1540 Shooting

    Chapter 1540 Shooting¡¡¡¡Sam stood with the cannon his hand as he smiled from ear to ear.

    Giyon and Grivon quickly came running.

    "You are having fun without us?" Grivon asked as he looked at him with a frown.

    "It is not like you guys are going to participate anyway. It is mostly me shooting down and it doesn''t matter if there are spectators or not."

    "Well, we are getting bored. So, doing something like this is fun. Your toys are sucking the joy out of the battle for us."

    "No, they are saving the already scarce offspring of Gaja n. You are wee."

    "Yeah, whatever you can take your credit. So, how about we talk about this cannon in your hands? Why is it different than the others?"

    Giyon asked as she looked at it hungrily. She is very intrigued about the cannon. And since she can see what these things can do, she is even more intrigued by this.

    "Well, if you guys shut up and let me do what I wanted to do, you will see."

    After saying those words, he aimed the cannon at the gliders that are moving around.

    They are like eagles in the sky as they used the thrusters and the wings to maneuver themselves with extreme agility and dexterity.

    It would be hard for a person to move on thend like that and it is impossible to have that much control over the limbs even on normal ground battle.

    But currently they are dancing in the air.

    "That is so cool." Grivon said casually. He really liked how those wings worked and how that armour is supporting them.

    But the next second, he felt some energy gathering beside him. The cannon started glowing as the energy gathered in the chamber.

    *BAM*

    A small explosion was heard as they an energy bullet was shot.

    The energy bullet hit one of the wings of a glider.

    *BOOM*

    The glider who is currently moving with his wings shining and about to cut a beast with wind des suddenly lost his bnce.

    He looked at his left wing.

    Even though there is an explosive sound, actually the wing didn''t breakpletely, instead the energy stuck to the wing and expanded all over it through the ripples and then exploded with the void styles.

    The armour started cracking down and the person crashed down into the ground.

    *AAHHHHH¡­."

    The glider started screaming.

    But soon he started controlling the fall and tried to cushion the impact, but before he could do that, he saw an energy bullet zooming at his face.

    *BAM*

    His screams stopped and the face cracked open with blood. The facial muscles were exposed along with the skull and the void style explosion of the ripples are happening inside the skull cracking it open.

    A Middle-stage Consummate cultivator was crashed into the earth just like that and left arge crater.

    But he didn''t move.

    He couldn''t feel his surroundings. He didn''t see anything. His sense of touch is gone. He vision is gone. His hearing is gone. And finally he felt his whole body going limb and his organs failing one after the other.

    Soon, even the internal pain is gone.

    "Holy shit."

    Grivon said out loud as he looked at the target through the telescope to get a clearer vision.

    "What the fuck is that?"

    "Pure energy and a clean headshot. That''s what it is."

    Sam said as he aimed the cannon at another glider and shot the bullet.

    The gliders already saw one of theirrades falling down and noticed Sam''s presence. The second target already changed directions and moved towards Sam. Since the dome is gone, he became more daring and he is also confident that the soldiers wouldn''t use the wall sphere cannons because their members are there in the range as well.

    The only reason he didn''t go there is because he didn''t want to be a target. But since Sam is attacking and he knew how big of a target is in this whole war, he became a bit tempted and wanted to take his chance.

    But as he moved forward, a few more energy bullets were shot from Sam''s cannon. He avoided two of them cleanly and one of them brushed past him. At least he thought it brushed past him, but it exploded right after it went past his chest.

    *BOOM*

    He was blown to the side and felt his whole body being jerked off. He lost his bnce and he had to focus on his thrusters and the glider wings to get his bnce back.

    But before he could do that.

    *BOOM*

    The bulletnded on his thruster of the leg. The leg exploded along with the thruster and the wind elemental energy mechanism that was used to create that thrust backfired big time and destroyed the leg until the hip.

    The bnce was off again and this time, Samnded another headshot.

    Two of the people were down.

    "Damn, this is fun."

    Giyon said with a smile as she looked at the cultivators who are on par with her and way stronger than Sampletely being destroyed like this.

    "Of course it is."

    Sam said casually as he shot another glider.

    The gliders realized that their real trouble is not from the shooters on the beasts, but from the Sam standing on the freaking wall.

    They didn''t even know how to tackle him. Other than the long range attacks. No matter what they will do will impact them severely.

    They could either fall target for Sam''s shooting, the shooters can shoot them from behind or both. If it is the worst case scenario, they will have even more trouble with them being destroyed by the people from within the n.

    "I want to shoot it."

    Giyon asked all of a sudden and Sam raised an eyebrow.

    "You are not skilled in long range attacks. Aiming and shooting are not your forte."

    "My dad is not that good too, but he is firing well. And I am not really that bad at aiming. Who at our level is actually bad at aiming? Tell me?"

    "Well, in a way it makes sense. But he is your father. You are just you. It could be dangerous if you mess out, do you know that?"

    "I still want to try."

    Sam thought for a moment and fired another shot. He shot down another glider.

    Now, the pressure is gone from the people that are attacking the shooters and only ambush team remaining.

    "Now, can you guys handle the gliders yourselves?"

    Sam asked the shooters.

    "yes, boss. We are good."

    The shooters replied and Sam looked at Giyon.

    "Since you want to try, let''s do it with stationary targets."

    Giyon shrugged and Sam pointed at a direction.

    "There is an ambush team there. They are the ones sneakily attacking the shooters and aiding the gliders. You need to calcte their location and kill them at the same time."

    He said and started tweaking the inscriptions on the cannon a bit.

    "Here, I changed the explosion range a bit more. It is not as concentrated as before, but the probability of you attacking them increases a lot and the damage will also increase more."

    Sam said and handed over the cannon to her.

    Giyon took the cannon and aimed it at the spot Sam pointed at. She looked for a spear to be shot out of that ce and as soon as it did, she aimed at a certain spot and shot.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sound came and arge energy bullet was sent out.

    "How am I able to use energy bullets?"

    "Well, the mechanism does much more than just infusing the ripple and void style. It also gathers the energy. It is mostly for amateurs though. If you are good at gathering energy into the bullet, it will be much more effective."

    As they are casually speaking, the energy bullet reached its destination.

    "BOOM*

    *BOOOOM*

    Two explosions urred.

    One of them is the explosion of energy bullet and a few trees and rocks were blown apart, which is something Sam already expected.

    But what followed that waspletely new to them. It ispletely uncalled for.

    Sam looked at the type of explosion that happened and frowned.

    "What the hell is that?"

    He muttered and looked at it closely with the telescope and frown turned deeper. He immediately took the cannon and started shooting at a different spot.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    A few explosions urred, but unlike before there is no massive explosion. Sam immediately took out hismunication device and contacted n''s leader.

    "I need two squads to make a move. An urgent matter."

    "What is it about?"

    "I need them to go and collect somethings from the ce where the ambush teams of the Mari n are present."

    "Is it really that important? The spots are way too far away from the n grounds."

    "Yeah. If I am not wrong. There is another dangerous thing awaiting in the hands of Sivan. I want to be sure before I could think of any countermeasures."

 Chapter 1541 Squads I

    Chapter 1541 Squads I¡¡¡¡Sam, Giyon, and Grivon went off the wall and ran to meet the n''s leader.

    There the n''s leader is having a small meeting with the Grand elders as they went through the list of the resources they have and how many people they could spare for various tasks.

    The meeting ended by the time Sam reached there and the n''s leader directly asked him.

    "Are you sure this is that important? I know that you are not one to joke around, but we really do have a very small amount of people. We cannot spare them.

    The locations are also a bit far away and very close to the Mari n''s camp. This is going to be a tough one."

    "I know that. But it is indeed necessary. I just saw an explosion happen at one of the ambush points and if it is caused by a substance that I think it is, then all of the cultivators belowte-stage Astral ne Consummate level would be having some serious trouble."

    "What is it that made you this flustered?"

    "Have you ever heard of Elemental energy poisoning?"

    "Yes, I did. Why?"

    "Well, I created something that causes normal spiritual energy poisoning."

    "You are kidding aren''t you? There is no such thing as spiritual energy poisoning. That is what all the people are made of."

    "Well, there is one now. And I am the one who made it. So, I am pretty sure you can trust my words on it."

    "How potent is it?"

    "It is actually a liquid that immediately turns into gas upon contact with external spiritual energy and if the liquid is contained in an extremelypressed container, as soon as it expands, it explodes.

    It will seep into the people very quickly and it will make the spiritual energy denser within the body.

    So, dense that you would feel like lead is flowing through your veins.

    The nature of this spiritual energy is different and it will conflict with the spiritual energy inside the body. The more the poisoned person tries to use their own spiritual energy, the more they will be affected.

    Their muscle fibers, skin tissues, bones, and organs, everything will be infected as it will seep and solidify.

    If it has enough time within the body, the person will not be able to fight or even move. The pain will paralyze them for hours and I am sure you know what can happen in hours.

    It is certainly different from the regr elemental energy poisoning, but I cannot think of a better name other than Spiritual energy poisoning. Of course, there are some simrities like how in both cases the energy seeps into the tissues and corrodesthem.

    But here the spiritual energy does the same just without the presence of the elemental energy."

    "Yeah, I am pretty sure you are dumbing it down for me. Anyway, are you sure that this is what they have in their hands? How sure are you? How dangerous can it get?"

    "It depends on how much they have actually. If they have a small amount, then they can deal with a few dozen people if used properly. I think that is the reason they were given to the ambush team, they wanted to take out some higher-level opponents if they get a chance.

    But if they have a really really huge amount, even the peak stage cultivators would be affected.

    After all, they are notpletely devoid of spiritual energy. They are made of it also, but the amount should be extraordinarily huge."

    "How huge? Can you give something quantifiable?"

    "Something that could create a small pond in your backyard?"

    "That much? How hard is it to make?"

    "Depends on the level of artisans and formation masters in Sivan''s possession and at the moment, I can''t gauge how good they are. They managed to make the light chamber. There is a good chance they might have been able to do this too."

    The n''s leader sighed and replied.

    "Alright, I will send a squad. But what level of the squad do we need?"

    "From what I can see, the Peak stage Consummate cultivators are not going to move with Gail present. Send Gamin and Yuvana to the wall. They will not move."

    As they are speaking, Gail called Sam.

    "Some groups are moving in two different directions. They are wearing brown colored heavy armors and half of them are wearing red and brown colored light armor."

    "Cultivation levels?"

    "Middle-stage Consummation. That is my guess. Maybe ate-stage here and there."

    "Alright. Thank you. Just stay there and keep the Peak stage cultivators in check. As long as they don''t move we can handle it."

    Sam looked at the n''s leader and exined the situation to them.

    "Alright, I will find the best squads and send them."

    "I will be more relieved if you can move Senior Elder Ma. I want him to make a direct move. He will be the best for the operation."

    "Alright, what do they need to do?"

    "Collect all the possessions on the ambush squad on the west. Collect the soil, rock, wood, or even flesh samples from the ambush squad on the east. There is an explosion, I need to test those samples."

    "I don''t know why you need those samples, but I am assuming they are important enough to put the squad at risk."

    "They are important enough for Sivan to send out some of his best soldiers to find them. You tell me."

    "Alright. Alright. I will send the forces."

    While Sam is convincing the n''s leader, back in the camp of the Mari n.

    Sivan is pacing around hastily as he looked at the main subordinates who are in charge of the various squads he had.

    "How did that liquid leave the camp? Who the fuck allowed the Ambush squad to take those things away? Did I give permission to use them?"

    The leader of the Ambush Squads looked glum and bowed his head. He didn''t dare to speak up.

    Sivan is really angry this time.

    "That is one of our trump cards and should only be used when I told you to use it. Didn''t I say these exact same words whenever you were trained to handle them?"

    "Yes, Sir."

    "Then why did they go out of the camp? Why are they out in the open,pletely exposed?"

    "It¡­"

    "Tell me, what is the point of holding back now."

    "The squad members are trying to find a moment of glory. The ambush squad is the least eye-catching squad because of the nature of our operation. They knew that this war is going to be talked about for centuries, so they just got greedy and vain to look for some glory.

    They wanted to see if they can catch a real big fish in the war by chance and if they find it, they don''t want to be underprepared."

    "You do realize that there are a bunch of assumptions and unrealistically hypothetical scenarios in that, right?

    If you idiots can even find a blind spot to hit some big wig, the hit has tond, and then you need to survive to take that glory.

    What the fuck is wrong with you guys? I repeatedly told you before. The only reason you are selected for the Ambush squad is that you are good at stealth. You do well when you are hidden and away from the eyes of the people on the battlefield.

    That is literally your expertise and your glory solely lies in being unrecognized and unidentified on the battlefield.

    Do you guys really want to be remembered and glorified, then do what you are told to do and do it with exceptional efficiency and effectiveness. Then we can talk.

    Pathetic excuse of men."

    Sivan spat coldly and looked at two more people.

    "The earth armored squad and Meteor squad are to find those things at any cost. Also, clean up the whole area on the eastern side. Not a single trace of the explosion should be present."

    "The squads are already on the way. We will be done before you knew it."

    "Don''t count on it too much. I am pretty sure that bastard has seen the explosion. You better get ready to engage whenever you can."

    As he spoke, he looked at Avlyn and the Divine league members.

    "I would appreciate it if one of you goes to retrieve these things."

    "Why don''t you send your grand elders?"

    "Because, once the Peak stage cultivators move, then the other party moves as well. Then my grand elders will definitely die. You at least have a chance."

    "What if we were dealt with Gail? Things would go wrong real soon."

    Sivan sighed and looked at her frustration.

    "Keep seven of the ten people here. Stand in front of the camp and attract Gail''s attention. Then the remaining three can move anywhere. If you are just afraid of him, then I am sure you arefortable engaging Gamin and Yuvana. Aren''t you?"

    "No, Not happening. Time is not right for us to make a move."

 Chapter 1542 Squads II

    Chapter 1542 Squads II¡¡¡¡Back in the Gaja n.

    Sam stood at the top of the wall as he looked at the surroundings with his telescope. The battle between the golems, puppets, the gliders, and the shooters is still going on.

    The glider squad is taking breaks in the middle when the shooters are changing their shifts. It is like there is a tacit understanding between both parties.

    Even though the gliders are managing to damage some of the shooters and the beasts, they are unable to destroy thempletely. At the same time, they are unable to destroy the cannons directly. The beasts just added to their troubles.

    Everything is in a massive stalemate.

    But everyone can see that this longsting battle is turning in favor of the Gaja n. The Golems kept on popping up no matter how many times they are destroyed. The puppets on the other hand aremitting more kills than the golems. But they are going down after the shooters and the golems are ganging upon them.

    The only silver lining for the Mari n''s side is that every time the golems broke they have a lot of time toe back and in this process, the puppet troops are moving forward.

    The battlefield is slowly moving forward towards the Gaja n.

    That is one of the reasons Sivan is trying is sacrificing the puppets a bit. To move the battlefield towards the Gaja n. With the Gliders already putting the pressure on the Shooters and covering the air battlefield near the Gaja n he wants to make sure there is an advantage.

    Meanwhile, the two squads Sam wanted were prepared. He was relieved that Ma is leading one but was surprised by the leader of the second squad.

    It is actually Giyon.

    "What the hell are you doing in this squad?"

    Sam asked with a frown.

    "I am covering the east side. I am collecting the samples that you need."

    "I know that is where you are going and what you are going to do. I just don''t know why you are doing this?"

    "Because you wanted the best Middle-stage Consummate cultivators on it. And I am the best."

    "Yeah, whatever. Are you sure you should be going? You are way too much of an enticing target for them to not attempt capture. They might not kill you in the fear of your father, but they can capture him and make your father useless in the battle."

    "Well, a good thing I have this."

    Giyon said as she took out a mask and wore it.

    "I am more than my father''s daughter. You better remember that."

    Without even waiting for Sam''s reply, she started moving away.

    Sam connected with the two squads on themunication channels and started instructing them about the armors people are wearing.

    Within twenty minutes they reached the vicinity of the target location.

    Giyon stopped her ground and they all took cover.

    "We are here near the location. We can see the st zone. Everything is destroyed in the ce and a giant rock is literally crumbling into the sand right in front of our eyes."

    "Yeah, that is the st zone. I want you to collect every sample that is within the st zone. But before that, you need to make sure that there are no enemies in the vicinity."

    "Alright. I am on it."

    Giyon spoke and gathered some energy into her hand, before snapping her finger.

    An energy ripple was created as it went straight for the surroundings and she could feel the presence of all the solid objects and the energy around them.

    She frowned hard as she tried not to miss anything. But all of a sudden, they sensed tremors underneath them.

    The earth started distorting and protrusions came out of the ground in the form of spikes as they aimed at the vitals of the squad hiding in various spots.

    Everyone jumped from their spots and hung to the trees as they looked at the earthen spikes underneath them.

    But before they could even look for the people who did it, all of a sudden, they sensed something flying over towards them.

    Rocks that are the size of an average human head are flying over with extreme speed as they destroyed the trees that they hanging into.

    They fell down, but the squad reacted quickly enough to cushion their blows. The earthen spikes were destroyed and theynded on solid ground.

    At least that is what they thought.

    "Squad, be alert."

    Giyon yelled as she felt something is wrong. But her warning didn''t change anything. She was dragged into quicksand along with the rest of the squad members. But it wasn''t a rapid pull, which gave them time to make sense of things.

    The squad members took their weapons out.

    Giyon looked straight ahead where a young man in brown and red armor is standing with his arms crossed.

    He had a smile on his face as the rock underneath him protruded upwards in the form of a spike on top of which there is a head-sized rock.

    Hended a spinning kick with fire elemental energy. The rock shot out like a meteor towards Giyon.

    A simr thing happened in various spots of the forest as small meteors came from different directions to all of the squad members.

    Giyon looked at him coldly and extended her hand with spiritual energy at the tip of it.

    *BOOM*

    The palm and the rock crashed together as they turned into fragments. The meteor had no effect whatsoever on them. The squad also deflected it in various ways.

    "What happened?"

    Sam asked from the other side of themunication channel.

    "Ambush. Stuck in a quicksand. Slow, but firm pull."

    Giyon gave a brief description of what is happening.

    "Are you being attacked by meteors?"

    Sam asked as if he is watching it closely.

    "Yes."

    "Don''t block. Dodge. Get out of the quicksand as possible. How good are you with your father''s ripple style?"

    "I am not as delicate. That is why I avoid using it in closebats."

    "Good. Use it through your feet. Don''t hold back."

    Giyon frowned, but she did as she was told.

    As soon as the energy ripples went through the quicksand, the earth trembled and solidified. Even though it happened like that, now as soon as they moved their feet, it broke and they came out.

    "Split into groups of two. Have back to back. Don''t be arge target."

    Sam suggested from themunication line and Giyon passed the orders.

    After they split, Giyon informed Sam about this, but she is not really happy.

    "You can''t really walk us through the whole battle can you?"

    "Of course, I won''t do that even if you ask me. I have a lot of things to do alright.

    But there are some tips that you need to know before you battle it out with them.

    Earthen armors, The one with full brown armors. The weak points are the inner points of the joints. The inner elbow, the inner thigh, the groin, and even the ankles are good targets.

    They work really well in closebat. They will get easily defensive. Try to use wood elemental attacks against them. As long as you let them get affected by the poison grenades that I have given to your squad, you will be able to weaken them a lot.

    The armor takes a lot out of them to operate."

    "That is good to know. What else?"

    "The other group. The meteor squad. They are skilled in the earth element, and fire element, and then they are also warriors. They are only suitable for that armor if they have all three of them."

    "That is going to be a pretty rare bunch."

    "Yes. They will be good if they work together. Anyway, there is one weak point of this armor. The middle of the chest.

    You will see a bump that looks like it is part of the aesthetic design.

    Try to destroy it.

    Even if you are unable topletely destroy it, as long as yound a clear proper blow, they will be having some trouble.

    Their armors won''t be able to support their regr activity if yound that blow well.

    That gives you an interval to deal with them."

    "Alright. Joints and chest. Poison and kills."

    "That is it. Have fun."

    Sam cut the call immediately.

    Giyon spoke with her teammates as they split and ran in pairs and exined the tips Sam gave them.

    After that, she started snapping her fingers as she moved.

    The energy ripples gave her a view of the people that areing at them. There are four people following those two.

    "Two earthen squad members and two meteor squad members. From the four sides. The joints for the former and the chests for thetter.

    Are you ready?"

    Her subordinate nodded and both of them stopped in their tracks instantly.

    Giyon punched the earth with all her might and it started rumbling with energy ripples. An earthen attack that was about to beunched on her was deflected and the earthen armor user was caught off guard as he received some serious bacsh.

 Chapter 1543 Poison

    Chapter 1543 Poison¡¡¡¡The person wearing the earthen armor felt his whole body going still.

    He couldn''t move his limbs. He started falling backward and Giyon didn''t fail to take advantage of that. She lunged forward and disappeared like a sh as she jumped and punched straight in the guy''s neck.

    The neck joint of the armor broke instantly before the energy rippled through the rest of the armor as well as the neck behind it.

    The opponent held his neck in pain as he tried to take deep breaths.

    The remaining three opponents made their move. Two meteors came at Giyon while the remaining Earthen armor user tried to use another earth trap to capture Giyon.

    But her subordinate made a move. He held twin short swords as and shed in the air. The two sword rays tackled the earth armor user and made it back off. Meanwhile, Giyon held the guy by his arm and threw him over her shoulder.

    They interchanged the ces because of this and the opponent fell into the way of the meteors that came at her.

    *BOOM*

    The explosions stuck and the opponent felt like his whole body became ten times heavier.

    He wanted a second to control himself and get back up, but Giyon wasn''t really willing to give him that chance.

    She directly held the arm andnded a kick in the armpit. The joint broke and the arm was exposed, before he could even take in that pain, the arm was pulled offpletely.

    "AHHHHHH¡­."

    He started screaming. The whole surroundings reverberated with his screams of agony. But that is not the end.

    Giyon threw the arm away and knelt down beforending punches on the throat of the opponent,nding hits on the same spot again and again until the throatpletely snapped and he fell dead.

    She looked up to see her subordinate fighting off against the two meteor squad members while still fending off another earth armor person.

    She joined him in the battle and started running after one of the meteor squad members.

    The opponent jumped over the trees as he sted everything around him with burning red hot mes and tried to evade every one of Giyon''s attacks. But soon, he started feeling flustered and overwhelmed as Giyon started catching up to him.

    Before he knew it, the branch he was about tond broke, and Giyon appeared through the zing mes.

    He fell to the ground and created an earthen wall.

    Giyon''s punch went through the hard wall andnded on the chest bump directly.

    The young man felt like his whole body was shaken. Taking this chance, Giyon took out a small ss vial that looked like it was filled with smoke and threw it at him.

    She then turned around and ran toward her teammate.

    Meanwhile, the opponent took in the poisonous gas from the vial and immediately felt like he was being suffocated. His lungs gave in immediately and his blood started turning dense.

    The skin started burning and he could feel his body corroding.

    He started coughing and foaming through his mouth before he fell to his knees.

    Giyon joined with her subordinate and the battle became 2 VS 2.

    It didn''t take more than ten minutes for them topletely destroy their opponents. Giyon killed three of them by herself, while the subordinate only killed one.

    "Madam, why are you overworking yourself? I could have dealt with them myself. You don''t need to stress yourself."

    "I can handle it. I have been idle for too long. I need to find a way to vent and this is the best one that I could find."

    "But your safety. There are way too many lives dependant on you."

    "I am sure everything will be fine. Let''s go help others."

    She didn''t give him the chance and ran towards the other groups.

    Twenty minutester the whole squad of Giyon is standing in the explosion space as if they are trying their best to keep themselves alive.

    There are a bunch of bodies around them, of course, most of them belong to the opponents.

    But there are three people out of which one of them died while the other two are unconscious.

    Giyon frowned as she looked at the squad. One person died and two more are seriously injured. This is not what she nned at all.

    And the reason they are injured like this is that they didn''t listen to the orders properly since they were not part of this team before.

    But she still felt responsible for this.

    She walked to the st zone and started collecting samples.

    "Four of you take them back to the n immediately. Use the medical vial shots immediately. Take mine as well and use whatever it takes to save them.

    You can ask for Sam''s help if things getplicated. Use my name."

    Four of the subordinates saluted and took them away.

    Giyon and her direct subordinates stayed for a few more minutes as they collected all of the samples.

    They went back to the n grounds and Giyon met with Sam directly.

    "How are my subordinates?"

    "They are fine. It is not that serious. I heard that someone died though?"

    "Yes, he was trapped in the traps and was bombarded with the meteors."

    "That is bad. Anyway, where are my samples?"

    "Here. How is the other group doing?"

    "They are not here yet. But from what I learned through themunication channel, Ma is ying on something there.

    We will know soon. You can go and check on your subordinates."

    "Alright. Bye."

    Giyon left. Sam noticed that her mood is gloomy. He just shook his head and went to theb. He already prepared the testing apparatus. He started performing the tests.

    The tests are conducted on the tree material, the soil, the rocks, and even the deadbodies of the beasts that are dead.

    After he was done with all of them, Sam sighed deeply.

    "This is bad. How did this idiot even find people that could concoct this?"

    Sam muttered and went running to the n''s leader.

    But on his way, Senior Elder Ma came along with his people.

    He gave a space jade to Sam and said.

    "That is really a good fight. Your armors are amazing. Do you mind if I take them to my team?"

    "You saved the armors?"

    "Yes. I felt that it is such a pity to destroy them. They are well designed and well crafted. They are good. I didn''t want to waste them.''

    "So, that is why you arete?"

    "Yes."

    "Great. You can keep them. I don''t have any use for them anyway."

    "No use?"

    "The designs are leaked. I am not going to use them for my soldiers."

    Ma shrugged and went to meet the n''s leader.

    Meanwhile, Sam checked the contents of the spatial ring he was given and was stunned.

    Along with arge crystal cylinder there are also a bunch of deadbodies within.

    The deadbodies that are buck naked.

    Sam raised an eyebrow at this. He threw took the crystal cylinders and some other things that are rted to the current situation and threw the spatial rings to the side to one of the subordinates.

    He sent the bodies to the undead tower where they are treated and the curses are added.

    He then walked to the n''s leader where Ma is having a meeting.

    "Sam, I was waiting for you."

    "We are in trouble."

    He took out the crystal cylinder and ced it on the table.

    He then took out a small crystal spear tip that ispletely hollow and ced the bottom and open end on the top of the cylinder. He pressed it in and the hollow tip was full in a second.

    He removed it and injected energy delicately into the tip, before throwing it straight at the wall.

    *BOOM*

    A massive explosion happened, the wall was destroyed and many guards came running in.

    "What the hell is this?"

    The n''s leader asked as he walked to the explosion zone. The wall turned into powder and the energy in that area started bing chaotic.

    "This is the spiritual energy poison I am telling you about. This is going to be trouble. Do you know what will happen if a whole cylinder of it explodes?"

    "It will seriously injure a Peak stage expert.

    "Of course, it will. Because the quality of this product is much more potent than it should be.

    Something is wrong with the Mari n. Either the Mari n is leagues above the rest of the organizations in terms of artisanship and formation mastery or someone really powerful is helping them out.

    It is impossible for a formation master of your n''s level to do this thing."

    "You do know that you are talking about one of the most powerful ns in the realms right?"

    "Yeah, and if you think that the most powerful ns in the realms have the most skilled people at hand in these kinds of things, then you are sorely mistaken."

 Chapter 1544 Tension

    Chapter 1544 Tension¡¡¡¡Sam looked at the cylinder and felt pretty frustrated.

    When he estimated the potency of this liquid, he felt extremely troubled. He knew this is dangerous and already gave a pretty high estimation of the potency of the liquid in Sivan''s hands.

    He must say that the quality of it is not that high. It is not the purest poison he has created.

    Based on its effects on various materials, he is perfectly sure that it is not pure enough. But it is very potent.

    For some reason even with this kind ofpletex in the purity. He can think of the possible theories in which this could be achieved.

    He went into a deep thought and only when he sensed his surroundings did hee back from them.

    "I know that you might be thinking that artisans and the formation masters at your disposal are best. In a way they are. They are skilled enough.

    But the skillset itself is not enough. The theoretical knowledge that they need to process to make this happen and the thought process, the massive intellectual demand that is needed for creating this, is not something that I saw in these ces.

    I haven''t seen a person like that in a while. From the information I have on the Mari n, that too from Sivan''s memories, there is not a single person who can do that.

    Someone else is helping them out.

    Someone else is helping Sivan out.

    We need to be really careful now.

    But before that, we need to find out how many bottles that Sivan has at hand. Countermeasures for this are going to be tough.

    I will give out an order to start the repair of the crystal dome. Activate all of the defensive formations within the n grounds. They should be on all of the time.

    We need to increase the attacking intensity. We cannot let the Mari n get the time to rest or rx. We need to tighten the noose and make them suffocate.

    I am sending in the undead troops."

    "Go ahead. What do we need to about this liquid though?"

    "Well, since they are nice enough to give me this, I will make something really special for them. Just give me an hour. It will be ready."

    "An hour? That is it?"

    "I don''t need a proper equipment and I don''t have too many material requirements for this. I can do all of it by myself with the scrap mental that I have at hand."

    Sam walked out without waiting for their reply and went to theb. On his way, he started giving out orders.

    "Transfer the poison essence into all of the weapons that we prepared for it. From vials, grenades to missiles and sphere cannon shells. Fill them all up. Empty the vat.

    I need the special energy cell undead creatures to be out on field in the next ten minutes. Along with that, let the poison undead and the cursed undead. In that order.

    Also, let the puppets be ready. The dome formation should be ready to turn on any time and also fix the crystal dome. The maximum defence frequency should be active all the time. Do you understand?"

    "Yes, Sir. We are on it."

    "This is the highest level of emergency that you could image. I need everyone to work their best. I don''t need any ck offs. The results would be catastrophic."

    After that was done, he contacted Gail and told him toe in.

    "Stay on the wall andpletely restore your power. I might need your helpter."

    "Is it really troublesome?"

    "Yes, very very troublesome. I cannot stress that enough. The danger is way too much for me to handle it hundred percent."

    "Alright. I am on my way."

    "Gamin, Yuvana, I need both of you to be on the walls as well. Be at your full power."

    "Yes."

    "Saran go to your residence. Take your kids and keep them into the divine dimension fragment along with your wife. Take them to the stray realm and keep them there. Don''t let them stay in the n. It is not that safe here anymore."

    "Is it really necessary?"

    "The stray realm is the only ce that is unexposed to the rest of the world. I have a n. You trusted me until now, you have to trust me one more time. You have to believe me when I say, I won''t let anything happen to those kids no matter what happens."

    "I will send them to the stray realm."

    "Thank you. Stay at the wall after you are done with this."

    Sam then called another subordinate.

    "All of the symbiote weapons should be moved out. Keep them ready. I need them to be ready to use the moment I give you an order. Understood?"

    "Yes, sir."

    "Good. Get ready, we are about to hasten this war."

    Sam went to theb and started working.

    Meanwhile back in the Mari n''s camp.

    Sivan is stressed as he paced around and looked at the people around him. There is no response from the squads he sent out and he saw that Gail already went back. He can figure out that his news was out.

    But he doesn''t know how to act at the moment. He is currently in a very troubling situation.

    He looked at one of the glider squad leaders and nodded.

    "I want you guys to go scouting at the areas. I need a confirmation on the death of our squads."

    "Yes, sir."

    The glider left and he waited for the response.

    After some thought, he stood up and went to talk with hi Grand elders.

    "I want you all to prepare yourself, I might need you guys to start fighting soon. So, better get ready."

    "What about the divine league members?"

    "They will be ready as well. I don''t believe there will be a chance for them to ignore this after the next scenario."

    "Alright."

    He then went back and on the way back, he ordered for the mercenary soldiers they had at hand to march forward.

    He went to Avlyn and said.

    "I don''t care if you guys are ready or not anymore. The battle is about to get heated. I want you to be ready."

    He didn''t even wait for their response and turned around to walk away.

    Avlyn caught up to him and asked.

    "What happened?"

    "There is a special weapon in my hands which will make Sam very very cautious. He found out about that and the situation is about to turn chaotic. I want you guys to be ready to face the situation if it gets too chaotic."

    "So, this weapon will make the peak stage cultivators toe out?"

    "Yes, there is a possibility."

    He walked away after this and stood at the edge of the camp. He looked at the subordinates who are marching forward and shed with the golems along with the puppets.

    He looked into the sky and noticed that the sh between the gliders and shooters is not done. He called for the glider squad.

    "I want you guys to join. Make sure that the shooters are pushed back. You don''t need to kill them or injure them. Just push them back and get your peers back."

    "Yes, sir."

    The squad moved and Sivan ended the stalemate. For some reason, the shooters on the other side also moved backward easily.

    Sivan looked at the marching soldiers and sighed.

    He felt that the whole situation is about to blow up and he is very nervous about it.

    The tension is too high and he didn''t expect the situation to turn out like this, this soon.

    He looked at the setting sun far away and hoped that the war wouldn''t blow up enough to end in this very night.

    While he was looking at the dusk, one of the soldiers who is at the front lines and engaging with the golems suddenly felt something is wrong, his leg felt heavy and painful. He lost senses in his feet and stopped in his tracks.

    A golem that just formed from the ground came up and punched him in the face with theva fist.

    Not only was he injured by the burning fist, he was also infected by the curses that are mixed in the soil.

    "AAAAARHHHHHH¡­."

    He started screaming on top of his lungs. He copsed on the ground and noticed that there is a white crystal substance on the foot.

    The golems killed him and the undead creatures joined in destroying him.

    The white crystal slowly spread and consumed his flesh.

    Another soldier who was about to swing his sword at a golem stopped in the middle as his legs gave in and he had to kneel on the ground.

    The undead came in and stabbed a bone sword into his back. The white crystal started spreading all over him.

    His friend who is on the side came running to help him, but his arm was cut off by an undead creature and it was exposed to the white crystal on his friend''s body.

 Chapter 1545 Wall

    Chapter 1545 Wall¡¡¡¡Sivan looked at his soldiers and frowned.

    He noticed that at the front line the soldiers are falling down one by one abruptly and soon the same scenario is happening in various parts of the group.

    Simply put the advance of the mercenaries stopped within the next twenty minutes as almost every one of them started noticing the white crystals forming out of them.

    Sivan looked at this through the telescope and noticed the presence of white crystals. His heart turned cold.

    He has seen the white crystal before, obviously. The crystal that dealt a huge blow to some of his earth armored guards in the start. The people who are infected by that are currently still quarantined and from what he heard. Every one of them waspletely covered with white crystal.

    Which means they are dead. The healers and researchers who tried to break the crystal and some that even seeded in doing so also turned into crystals while screaming like they were burning in hell.

    Sivan instantly knew that this is bad news.

    But what he doesn''t know is, that this is not going to end. As the mercenaries are running back to the camp to get the medical help they needed, the while crystal propagation has only increased.

    They are falling down before they reached the camp and they are turning into arge block of white crystal right there on the ground.

    In the next ten minutes, there is arge line ofrge white crystals in front of the camp and they are slowly expanding towards the camp as well as away from the camp.

    Not only new blocks are forming every second from the mercenaries'' bodies, but the existing ones are also taking in the bodies of the immobilized undead creatures that fell on the ground from previous rounds of battle. Even though they are not as prone to the crystal symbiote as living beings when their bone is exposed it is easy for the symbiote to deal with it.

    Everyone from the Gaja n and Mari n was surprised.

    All the parties at the wall of the city and the edge of the camp are looking at the crystal wall that is growing out.

    This wall stopped the march of the mercenaries, they cannot move forward and the mercenaries that are at the frontline and are trying to run back were also stuck.

    They could only stand there and try to save themselves as the golems and undead creatures are catching up to them to kill them.

    As they engaged and slowly became exhausted with the neverending swarm of the golems, they are being added to the crystal wall as an additional resource to increase the width and the length of the wall.

    Before long the wall is already 12 feet long. Most of the crystal blocks grew enough to be close and almost merged together into one big block.

    After that happened, as if they were previously ordered, the undead creatures backed off from the wall and stood behind the golems in an orderly manner.

    More undead creatures from the city joined them in the field as they also stood in perfect order.

    The golems moved forward and started attacking the white crystal.

    They are not bombarding it though. They are attacking specific points of the wall constantly and started chipping the white crystal fragments. They merged those small fragments into the soil of their body while making the wall vulnerable.

    Sivan obviously doesn''t know what is happening on the other side. From his vantage point, he can only see the undead creatures lining up and when he focused on the city, he saw the four Peak stage cultivators standing on different spots of the wall with their arms crossed.

    They are ready to battle.

    He looked at the sky that slowly turned dark. It is night.

    For some reason, he felt exhausted and wanted to sleep for a while. He doesn''t know why, but he just wanted toy down on the soft bed and sleep infort.

    He felt overwhelmed by all of this.

    But he cannot just go and sleep in the middle of a war.

    He took a deep breath and called for his subordinates.

    "Use the remaining equipment. The massive animal puppets, Arrow towers, Spearunchers. Just use them all and try to destroy the undead creatures behind the wall along with it.

    Send the glider squads to ce some of the arrow towers and spearunchers near the city in some discreet spots. They will temporarily operate them to distract the city from the main field to defend themselves.

    I hope that would be enough time for you guys here to destroy the undead and this wall.

    Also, make sure that nobody ever gets infected by that weird white crystal. Don''t touch it."

    "Yes, Sir."

    The orders were delivered and everyone made a move. The glider squads moved with some spatial rings as they found some discreet spots around the city.

    They went there and started assembling the equipment.

    Meanwhile, the process at the camp entrance is much simpler.

    There are eight towers that are brought out and they are all ced in different directions. There is arge vertical groove on the front surface of the tower with holes in the middle.

    The operator who is inside the tower started operating it. With just one thought, all the holes are filled with arrows, and with another thought, they were all shot at the wall.

    Most of the arrows went past that crystal wall and are shot at the undead creatures.

    But it doesn''t matter as the undead are also the targets.

    All eight of the towers constantly shot arrows and each tower has different elemental energy assisting them.

    At the same time, some animal puppets walked out of the camp. They are all in different shapes, but they are massive. They are almost twenty feet tall each. They are also pumped with various elemental energies and each puppet needed at least three to four operators to fully function.

    They are throwing energy attacks at the undead.

    Meanwhile, the assembly process ispleted at the gliders'' end and they activated the arrow towers. Apart from that, there are some spearunchers that looked like turrets. But instead of missiles, they areunching six spears at the same time.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Massive explosive sounds started at various spots of the city and the city guards were stunned. But they recovered and started to return fire with the spear cannons.

    They couldn''t aim properly as they cannot pinpoint the location though. But they just bombarded the area which didn''t help that much.

    The exchange of volleys began.

    The whole battlefield once again changed its form.

    First the battlefield was slow and sluggish with very few movements. All that were present are the golems and undead creatures.

    Now, it became so dynamic. Both sides are slowly stopping the holding back and hiding their hands.

    They are just baring their fangs at each other.

    Time passed as Sam came out of theb with a smile on his face.

    His small project is sessful and when he looked at the situation on the battlefield, it is just like he expected. The crystal dome is still undergoing repair and they have to go with the normal secondary defensive formations inside which are barely doing anything to the arrows and the spearsing at them.

    He looked at the arrow towers and animal puppets trying to destroy the wall and the undead creatures.

    He observed the golems that are solely focused on attacking different spots of the wall and are absorbing the white crystal fragments.

    "Well, this seems to be enough. The wall is ready and the golems are in position. We will proceed with the rest."

    He spoke in amunication token and the operators in the soul tower made their move.

    Theva worms that are supposed to underground suddenlye up to the surface while the undead creatures marched backward a bit.

    Within the space between the undead creatures and the wall, theva worms emerged. The earth and fire elemental energy gathered at the head of the worm as they aimed it at the golems that are standing in a formation right behind the wall.

    Sivan frowned and ordered the defense of the camp.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    All of the Lava worms released their final discharge and targeted the golems directly. The golems that turned into cannonballs sted through the wall.

    The wall broke into millions of tiny pieces and the impact of the explosion threw those fragments along with the golems themselves.

    It is like arge storm that hit the camp. The tents started blowing up and the white shards of the crystal along with the cannonballs mixed with soil and dust clouded the whole camp.

    Sivan widened his eyes in horror as he took out a special artifact that created arge energy barrier around him.

    Everyone activated their defensive measures within the camp and tried their best to save themselves from the impact.

 Chapter 1546 Sending troops

    Chapter 1546 Sending troops¡¡¡¡*Cough* *Cough*

    Sivan coughed profusely as he tried to look into his surroundings. One of the tents fell off on him. Itpletely tangled around him.

    He tried to push it away, but he couldn''t do it after a several tries and in frustration, he started burning it way.

    The whole tent caught in mes and was destroyedpletely before he managed to stand up. His whole body is covered in dust.

    He felt cloudy and tried to think of what happened. Everything around him is dark. It is already night.

    Then it suddenly hit him about what happened. He remembered the dust, the soil, rocks and then finally the white crystals and then suddenly the whole thing about him being the war with Sam and Gaja n.

    He then remembered what these white crystals can do and he immediately sat on the ground as he used the observation ability.

    He looked through every cell of his body and finally noticed something.

    There are a few fragments of white crystal within his lungs and then there are a bunch of small shards stuck here and there.

    He looked through his blood stream and noticed that these fragments are trying to reach his bones and marrow.

    He knew that this is a bad thing.

    He immediately used his water elemental energy and blocked the blood flowpletely. He felt suffocated. His heart felt clogged as it tried to pump the blood. But he didn''t care.

    He just used his observation ability and use his palm to cut the arm off and also removed a slice of flesh on his leg to remove the shards that are stuck there.

    But now the real problem came. He didn''t have enough guts to perform a surgery in his own lungs.

    He removed his coat and the shirt he was wearing. There are small holes on the chest and after some consideration, he slowly opened the wound up before he carefully used his arm to activate partial metal elemental fusion.

    His fingers turned into two sharp forceps and he carefully went for the shards that are trying to move around.

    While he is doing it, he suddenly heard loud rumbling sound. He looked ahead only to find out a bunch of undead creatures running towards the camp. That is arge hoard. They are equipped with different kinds of equipment and ughtered the mercenaries that are closest to them.

    Sivan felt chills running down his spine. He looked around and found the Grand elders and the Divine league members brushing off the dust all over them and walking forward. He wanted to ask them to make a move.

    The undead creatures are way too many. But at this moment, he saw that the four Peak stage members of the Gaja n are stepping in the air at different locations as they looked at them.

    It is clearly a stance.

    If the peak stage cultivators from this side are involved, then obviously the otherside can also involve themselves.

    Sivan hurriedly used the forceps to pick out the fragments.

    He didn''t want to waste any more time. The stakes are too high.

    The lungs are injured because of his rash operations, but he hurriedly healed himself with all he got and stood up.

    He took hismunication tokens and tried to gather people back.

    But when he got a clear view of the number of undead creatures, he couldn''t help but gulp.

    "Just how many people did they kill and turn into undead?"

    "At least the whole Bain n."

    Avlyn said as she stood beside him.

    Sivan was frightened by her presence and jumped on the spot.

    "What the hell are you doing? If you want to scare the crap out of someone, why don''t you try your hand at some of those people? The four people that are hovering in the air? I am sure that would be more useful."

    "Enough with your whining. I came to give you some advice.

    Use any of the resources that you have in terms of puppets and other stuff that are helping you with the battle now.

    The Gaja n seemed to have really gone crazy with the current situation. They are not holding back and they are going all out.

    You need to defend yourself.

    Unless it is the trump card, don''t save anything in your hands. Just use them to destroy these undead creatures.

    "You can do that yourself, can''t you? I am pretty sure you can deal with all of them with a couple of attacks."

    "Of course, I am sure of it, but there is a chance that those four will engage."

    "How many times are you going to give the same excuse? I have two dozen peak stage cultivators and they are all afraid of four people, do you really think that makes any sense? That is the worst excuse that I have ever heard."

    "Well, even if you think that we are trying to escape from this, what will you do if they indiscriminately destroy your weapons? The puppets, those arrow towers?

    The reason we are not engaging in this is because, Gail is a man who ys by the rules and he is currently ying by some unspoken rules.

    One of them is that neither of the powerhouses can involve themselves with the machinery and essories of the battle.

    Like the undead, golems and the puppets that are going through. If we engage, with them, they will engage with ours as well."

    "Bullshit, he blocked the energy crackers, what are you going to say about that?"

    "We also engaged with the golems before that and we also blocked the major attacks on the camp ground from those Lava worms. Their power is too much and threatening even to people of our level, so it is reasonable to intervene."

    "Really? You are now finding excuses for the enemies to keep yourself on some highground. Fucking bullshit."

    Sivan spat on the floor and walked away with gritted teeth. He would much rathermand his troops and engage in the battle than listen to this bullshit anymore.

    The camp is inplete chaos. Thest attack made by the Lava worms destroyed every tent and many people were pushed to the ground and the attacks from the fire and earth element along with the white crystal are already showing the effects.

    There is not a single thing in the situation that made him feel safe and sound about the war.

    "Everyone gather around. Check your bodies and look for white crystal shards. I don''t care how strong you guys are. You need to check your bodies and everyone who has a shard on their bodies, move to the rear of the camp.

    Everyone who doesn''t have any shards on them, move forward.

    No matter what squad you are, assemble with your teammates and attack the undead creatures. I want you guys to go past them and attack the city.

    Operators of the major equipment use it at full power. Do not hold back even for a moment.

    The arrow towers, animal puppets, the glider squad, the cannons, whatever weapon you are using, I don''t care. Attack the Gaja n and destroy everything that is in your sight."

    While Sivan is doing everything he has in his power to deal with the situation, Sam is also making his move.

    "Are all the undead creatures out?"

    "Yes sir. The basic legions are all gone. The armed, the poisoned ones, the cursed carriers, the crystal equipped undead creatures and even the specially armed ones too.

    There is not a single thing that was left out."

    "Except for the High level undead creatures. I want you to leave those too."

    "Sir, but they are all powerful enough to rival Initial and Middle stage Consummate cultivators and the top ones are even on par with the Late stage consummate cultivators. Are you sure you want to send them?"

    "Yes, not only am I sending them, I also have something that needs to be sent along with them. Get the undead ready.

    Where are the poison weapons?"

    "We have them ready."

    "Send them to all of the cultivators that are going to join the fightter.

    Also, use the poison spheres in the cannons. Load and be ready. Tonight, it is going to be a bloodbath."

    "Yes, sir."

    He contacted the dome operators.

    "Is the dome ready?"

    "The defense repair is a bit troubling. The bacsh from the light chamber is making it hard for us. But we already stocked the puppets."

    "Alright send them all out. Don''t hold back."

    "Yes, Sir."

    The undead creatures are released. The city kept on sending every single undead creatures.

    The soldiers from the Mari n are fighting the undead creatures.

    They noticed the three major types of undead creatures that they could identify in the current situation and reported to Sivan through themunication channels.

    Sivan was dumbfounded as he listened to the reports.

    "Did you say it right?"

    "Yes, Sir. My friend just got stabbed by an undead creature and death energy loaded his body through those bone swords and turned him into a corpse within a second.

    The bone swords started glowing with the sucked-out vitality.

    The same thing is happening with all the undead that has bone weapons."

 Chapter 1547 Long Drawn Battle

    Chapter 1547 Long Drawn Battle¡¡¡¡Sivan was shocked when he heard the description of the undead creatures.

    It could be said that he has a fair knowledge of the undead creatures from Sam''s memories. And in fact, he can find some simrities to the undead creatures from those memories.

    But he cannot exactly figure out what these undead creatures are. What kind of creatures they are? How advanced they are in the undead hierarchy. He cannot identify that.

    And if there is only one kind of new undead creature, he would have been able to swallow it. But the descriptions he got are extremely confusing and terrifying.

    "An undead creature was being hit by a soldier constantly, but it is constantly emitting ck smoke which consumed the soldier who is currently crazy and seemed to be in intense pain.

    He is acting as if he is hallucinating and attacking the same team members.

    "A soldier killed an undead creature, but the ck liquid that came out of the undead right before it exploded was sttered on it.

    He seemed to have been exposed to the curses and the poison. His body is corroding at a rapid pace and his vitals are dropping by every second.

    Oh, he is also being consumed by the white crystal. We need orders on how to tackle these things."

    Sivan was overwhelmed by this.

    These three kinds of undead creatures are something that he didn''t know. He started going through the information he had in his head. There are some features that are matching, but he cannot find the exact one to find out how to deal with them.

    Sivan didn''t have any orders or advice to give except for letting them use every card he had. And that is all he did.

    But as he observed the battle, he noticed that his mercenary soldiers are falling too fast. He could onlymand his special troops to join the battle and reduce the wastage of soldiers.

    He needs mercenary soldiers to barge into the Gaja n and engage the n forces directly.

    They need to be there to exhaust the energy of the other party and then give a slight advantage to their own elite subordinates.

    That also didn''t change much. So, he had to run to Cray who is currently resting. For some reason, he trusted this guy more than Avlyn and he also liked talking to him.

    He believed that he might help him out. Even if not directly, he can help him by sharing some knowledge.

    He ran towards him and exined the characteristics of the undead creatures.

    Cray was surprised and almost wanted toe out to watch them himself.

    But his teammates stopped him.

    "I need to see those things, guys. That is way too abnormal for me to ignore."

    "Well, you don''t need to. The kid is right and he is saying the truth. There are indeed such weird undead creatures outside. We cannot identify, but we didn''t care much. They are undead creatures at the end of the day.

    As long as these idiotic mercenaries can find a way to avoid the trapsced within the undead creature''s bodies, they will bepletely fine.

    They are just idiots that is why they are losing."

    "So, there are indeed variants of the advanced skeletal, cursed, and poison undead?"

    "Yes, I think so."

    Cray looked at Sivan asked.

    "You do know what I am talking about right?"

    "Yes, I understand. Based on Sam''s memories, there is some special undead created by some of the high-level necromancers. Some of them focus too much on one category of undead and develop them and some of them are these skeletal, Poison, and cursed undead creatures.

    But even those descriptions don''t match the current undead that is running rampant.

    They are way too problematic and abnormal. I cannot find a way to counter them. The only way is to get into a direct battle with them and the long-range attacks. But they can only help us get past so far."

    "Sam didn''t have the remedy for this in his memories? You can tell me the creation process then. I will try to figure out a way."

    "No, that is not possible. I think he made these creatures from the scratch in the Gaja n. He didn''t even have any design n or even idea regarding them before."

    "I thought he was quite skilled in necromancy."

    "Yes, he is. But that is not his main object of focus. He just dabbles in many things and necromancy is a very tiny part of his dabbling."

    "Then, we can''t do anything more. If you can capture a few and bring them here, I can try and figure out a weak point. But that is impossible given the current circumstances. Because before I might figure it out, you will already be in a very perilous situation.

    If you cannot do that, try to get me a recording of the undead creatures, I will try to help you out."

    Sivan nodded and went to bring back footage ten minutester.

    Cray looked through the footage and was surprised.

    "I have a few theories, but they are not enough. It seems like all the undead creatures are loaded with curses.

    They are unnaturally strong.

    The bone weapon enhancement might be the partial usage of the bone enhancement curse which is used to normally reduce the agility of the targets.

    The targets'' bones are solidified to the extreme and they will not be able to move their joints.

    It could be a variant of that curse or it might be apletely new curse altogether.

    As for the poison and corrosion one, I don''t think you need any help there. It is impossible to just normally counter them with regr means. Because the poison is custom-made.

    I can immediately say it for sure and I also think it isced with the essence of many poisonous concoctions. You can either kill them one by one or you kill them all, you have to pay a price if it is from the short-range.

    As for the cursed undead, they are pretty normal. As long you are sure that you can find a way to get rid of the curses, you can attack them. I don''t know what is up with the white crystal thing though, but even the curses part is pretty tough.

    You won''t be able to deal with it that easily. You will need a lot of effort and time to find out what the curses are and find a counter for those curses. Do you understand what I am saying?"

    "So, pretty much give up on it?"

    "Yes."

    "But they are way too many losses already and they will only keep on increasing if I let things go on like this."

    "There is no other way. You can either use some kind of tricks that are left up in your sleeve or you can just let the mercenaries deal with them."

    "Alright. Thank you for your advice."

    Sivan walked out of the tent with gritted teeth as he felt extremely conflicted and troubled.

    After some consideration, he immediately took out themunication token and gave out orders. Send all the puppets to the front end. Even the animal puppets and the normal puppets. Gliders and the Ambush team assist the puppets and kill the undead creatures.

    The rest of the mercenaries stay behind the puppets and assist. Save your lives and preserve your energy as much as you guys can."

    "Sir, but the undead are spread too much and too deep. This is going to be hard."

    "Try your best. The elites joined the battle, so they will be assisting you. The puppets will be going all out. Use them as shields if you want to. But I need as many soldiers as possible to destroy the Gaja n."

    While he is giving out orders, meanwhile another batch of undead creatures came out of the Gaja n.

    But they are special.

    Unlike the undead that is spread across the battlefield, these undead creatures don''t just belong to one specific category. Instead, they belong to all three categories and they are made from the corpses of very high-level cultivators.

    They zoomed into the battlefield as they ran past the current conflicts.

    They are aiming straight for the Mari n''s camp and they ran at the full speed.

    As soon as the Mari n members who are battling observed their speed, they became panicked.

    Some elites from the earth armor group tried to block them, but they were all crushed in just one moment.

    The speed and strength were obviously beyond them and the information was quickly shared back to the main camp which was in the middle of reorganizing.

    Sivan heard the news and immediately called for the elites of thete-stage Consummate stage to engage them.

    They are currently not participating in the battle as they don''t want to waste their time on the undead creatures before they went to the city.

    But now undead creatures of their level showed up, there is no point in holding back anymore.

 Chapter 1548 Explosive attacks

    Chapter 1548 Explosive attacks¡¡¡¡There are over two dozen undead creatures that almost reached the campgrounds.

    Sivan let all of histe-stage cultivators go out to deal with them.

    The battle started immediately and he was relieved to find out that the undead creatures are overwhelmed easily by his subordinates.

    Since that dust storm Sam has created with the Lava worms, this is the best news that he heard.

    The only bad thing is that the undead creatures behaved like they have a brain of their own. They are not engaging directly and brainlessly. Rather they are cautiously fighting the opponents and most of the time they are dodging all of the lethal attacks that could disable their joints and stop their movement.

    They are ying too much defense and are dragging the battle into a long one.

    Which he obviously didn''t like.

    But he can only do so much. He assumed themand and started directing his soldiers, the puppets, and all the operators that are making sure that they don''t lose this massive battle.

    Because by the end of this sh with the undead, the winner will be able to take the first step forward and crash into the other party''s territory.

    It is one of the decisive battles that could turn the tide of the whole war.

    Sam also assumed themand on the other side while the operators are repairing the dome barrier formation.

    They startedmanding their side of the troops and tools and now are directly involved in the battle.

    Time passed slowly, but the changes are also happening rapidly.

    First, Sam decided to make the undead creatures go into a formation to deal with the elite troops. Since his main focus was to reduce the numbers of the other side he mostly yed defensive with the elites and went past them to attack the mercenaries.

    But this made the undead creatures suffer some attacks and lose their mobility advantage in the process.

    Sivan thought won after that and let the mercenaries lure them deeper into the group before letting them attack.

    Only to realize he made a big mistake.

    As soon as the undead are surrounded by the soldiers who are attacking them constantly that too with a fair distance enough to not be affected by the curses and poisonous liquidsing off of their bodies, they suddenly started glowing.

    "Idiot."

    Sam muttered as hemanded the spirits he enchanted within the bodies of those undead creatures.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Three explosions urred one after another from three undead creatures. The soldiers in the surroundings were directly affected and got injured. Along with that, there are a bunch of small white crystal shards that were shot at another bunch of soldiers and made them go unconscious.

    The crystals immediately started consuming them at a visible pace.

    Sivan was stunned and caught off guard. He really thought his team managed to score one on Sam''s undead group, but he realized he was yed off.

    So, he became cautious in other spaces.

    The whole thing turned into a big chess match.

    In one move, Sam managed to kill eight other mercenaries and one of the elites.

    But Sivan managed to destroy a dozen undead creatures out of which four of them passed their curses to another elite.

    Sam then brought down three gliders with the help of the undead and used them to crash some more mercenaries.

    He was met with the destruction of another dozen undead creatures, but all of their curses and poisons arepletely useless.

    Sam destroyed the arrow towers by sacrificing two undead creatures. In the process he also made all of the operators turn into white crystals.

    The best part is, that he made some strong undead creatures to pick the crystallized people and threw them at thete-stage cultivators to slow them down.

    They were barely distracted, but the high-level undead managed to find a window tond some curses on those people.

    "What the hell is going on here?"

    Grivon who sat beside Sam on the wall of the city asked Giyon in a whisper.

    "They are battling. The full-scale head-on battle. No sneak attacks, no heavy schemes, and formations. They are trying to run down each other''s forces."

    "So, we are winning, right? I mean, the forces are thinning down for the other side. We are only losing undead."

    "Of course, you would think so, you idiot."

    Giyon said as she yfully pped him on the back of his head.

    "What else? The battle is still taking ce mostly near the camp, not the city. The undead creatures are being destroyed, but they are also taking down the puppets and mercenaries. I say we are at a pretty good advantage."

    "Really? Look through the telescope and tell me how many people are still there within the campgrounds?"

    Grivon did as he was told and he looked through the telescope.

    "They are still reorganizing and it seems like they are being prepared. But they are a few hundred?"

    "Yes, then tell me how many undead creatures do we have left?"

    "Not that many. I think we sent all of them into the field. There are only some really special ones left."

    "Of course, apart from that, how many people do we have left in terms of forces."

    "Not that many."

    Grivon finally understood.

    "Why are you constantly being a kid? I thought you wanted to be the n''s leader. Start looking past the current situation and what is going to happen if things are going the same way they are now.

    You need to be able to estimate all the variables and in turn, estimate what is going to happen in the future too. Do you understand me?"

    "Yes."

    "You are a smart guy. You managed to estimate Sam''s location and saved him before Sivan could touch him.

    This means you had the foresight to know that Sam is important enough for Sivan to go through so much trouble and he will be useful.

    Try to use intuition more. Just don''t look at the things that are right in front of your eyes. I am sure you will do great if you do that."

    "So, why am I getting this lecture at this moment?"

    "Because after the war, I will be spending little time with you. I have somethings to do and I might not be able to meet you like this."

    "When did you make this decision?"

    "A few days ago."

    Grivon wanted to ask more questions but Giyon turned serious and looked at the battlefield.

    Because as the time is going on, the Mari n''s soldiers are getting an upper hand. The white crystals are consuming the mercenaries because of the attacks from the suicidal attacks from the undead creatures.

    But that can only do so much for them.

    The undead creatures are losing the lead they had until now and Sam suddenly stopped fighting with the mercenaries and the soldiers.

    They started attacking the puppets, cannons, and machines to reduce their numbers.

    As for the high-level undead creatures, they took down a few people, but in the process, a few of them became immobile and fell right there in the middle of battle.

    Sivan thought there would be some traps set up inside of them, so he made one of the subordinates inspect them carefully.

    But still, he didn''t bring them into the camp. He just left them in the field and took some videos to send to Cray.

    It is almost dawn as the battle went on.

    The undead creatures are reduced by half while the forces of Sivan were also the same. But he lost some elites along with most of the mercenaries. So, he could say that his quantity might have reduced but the quality remained almost the same.

    At this moment, Sam suddenly got a call.

    "Sir, the dome formation is repaired. The barrier is going to work and we managed to make the tweaks you suggested. The hardness is going to be improved by a bit."

    "Great. Keep me informed of the changes and keep the puppets as I have told you before."

    "Yes, Sir."

    "Thank you for your efforts. Rest and change the shifts with another batch of operators."

    "Alright, sir. Thank you so much."

    Sam stood up from the wall and looked at the undead creatures.

    The high-level undead creatures are still battling. But their energy is almost at the end. So, he made his final move with the current undead creatures.

    All of a sudden, the undead creatures that were moving carefully until then ran to the troops and all of their bodies started glowing.

    They didn''t even bother to attack.

    They justtched on to the soldiers and bit into them, before glowing brightly to explode.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    One explosion after another the undead creatures sprayed poisonous fumes, ck cursed gases, curses, and white crystals at the soldiers.

    Even the high-level undead creatures are on the same track. They jumped at the elites and started glowing.

    But one of them is especially different as ittched on to the person who is the strongest of the bunch and started glowing with a different color.

    *BOOOOM*

 Chapter 1549 March

    Chapter 1549 March¡¡¡¡Sivan looked at the crazy undead that are exploding themselves whiletching on to his soldiers.

    He frowned and startedmanding his subordinates to watch out.

    But then he saw the high-level undeadtching on histe-stage cultivators.

    That battle is the closest to the camp. The strongest of undeadtching on to the strongest of thete-stage consummate cultivators before using some kind of different explosion, the camp was shaken.

    *BOOOOOM*

    The massive explosion created an aftershock that send the weaker people to their knees and the spiritual energy around the area was chaotic.

    The explosion urred very close to the entrance of the campground and it ispletely filled with fog that came out of the explosion.

    Sam looked at it from the city and sighed.

    With this, the n is going well until now. He didn''t mess up any steps. Even though there are some difficult times where he almost screwed it up, he pulled through.

    He felt a bit relieved now.

    But Sivan who is on the other side of this whole situation felt like shit.

    He was actually blown away and crashed into the ground because of the explosion. But the real shock came in when he had to get back up and see what exactly happened.

    Looking at the fog that was in the ce of the explosion, he didn''t even know what kind of explosion it was. He knew for sure that it is not the ordinary energy cell explosion or the liquid energy explosion as he has seen it many times before in Sam''s memories and his own experiments.

    This is definitely a new one. But he cannot think or make sense of it.

    He walked a bit closer to take a look. He looked through the soil and the rocks on the side and felt shocked.

    The aftereffects of the whole explosion are very simr to the explosion of the spirit poison. He felt terrified and looked at the horizon towards the city.

    The spirit poison is way too much of a destructive weapon, that is why he didn''t use it from the start. It is one of his final trump cards. Unless he ran out of all of the other means he could think of, he didn''t want to use it.

    But Sam just sent some back and attacked him with it a few hours after stealing it.

    He is frightened by such a bold move.

    And from the way the explosion happened, he doesn''t know how Sam modified the poison and did this. But this is clearly more effective and efficient.

    As he was trying to make sense of the situation, he started getting reports through hismunication token.

    Many people are dead. But the undead ispletely finished and there are still a lot of elite soldiers and mercenaries left in Sivan''s camp.

    Along with that, the soldiers that were given to him by the n, the grand elders, some of the soldiers that came from the Divine league, and the Divine league members, of them are enough for him to make a move.

    "Pull back everyone and gather near the camp. Don''te in though. The fog is dangerous, we don''t know what kind of effects it has on us. So, assemble there. I will be sending people with medicine to help you heal and recover your strength."

    After giving that order, he went into a newly ced ten and sat down to think this through.

    He wanted some peace and quiet to make a proper decision regarding this.

    But it is impossible to be at peace in a war.

    As soon as he sat down a subordinate came running in with some bad news.

    Sivan ran out of the ten and five minutester, he is standing in another tent with two grand elders lying on two beds.

    They are in excruciating pain and half of their bodies are covered with white crystal which is spreading at a very slow but visibly noticeable pace.

    "When did this happen?"

    "We don''t know sir. They were fine after thatrge attack from golems and the worms, but all of a sudden they fell into this situation.

    We cannot figure out what this crystal is and in the general case it is absorbing people too quickly, but since these grand elders managed to resist it for a bit, we can finally see how the changes are going.

    It is absorbing the bones first then blood and finally the flesh. We don''t know how to stop it though. Even the vitality is doing little and death elemental energy is only fuelling it."

    "Keep on trying. Are they going to be okay? How is their resistance holding up?"

    "Frankly speaking, they are better off dead. They are just using too much effort and willpower to resist it. As the things are currently, it is basically useless for them to suffer through this.

    This is apletely torturous way for them to die. Nothing else."

    "Just try your best. As long as they are not giving up, you shouldn''t either."

    Sivan looked at the old men and sighed. He really wished he didn''t lose such important people at such a time. The grand elders are way too valuable for him to lose them for such an unknown cause.

    He sighed and left the tent as he thought of what to do.

    The undead creatures are gone. Their equipment of his is also gone. Now the Gaja city is wide open with nothing but a formation. Even people on the city walls are also invisible through the telescope.

    If his instinct is right, all he has to do is go and fight it out with them. But he is a bit afraid.

    Sam already started using the spirit poison. He definitely has more than what Sam has, but he is very afraid to use it.

    He couldn''t help but think of the consequences of this thing when it was misused. This is the first time he had a weapon so deadly that he is too scared to even use it.

    But the loss of two grand elders is really tempting.

    While he is thinking, the reports on the troops came in. He lost a lot of them and even the surviving members are suffering from a lot of curses and poison, some of them even showed signs of white crystal consumption.

    He suffered more losses than he estimated which made him feel the pinch.

    He wanted to know what the Gaja n''s move or more precisely what Sam''s next move is going to be. But he cannot figure that out. It is almost impossible for him to guess what Sam''s next move is.

    In the battles that he went through except for the overly detailed preparation and execution, there is nothing that is simr to Sam''s usual style. It is almost like Sam went out of his way to create things that Sivan cannot understand just from possessing Sam''s memory.

    He felt his face burning in humiliation. This is the worst thing that could have happened to him. When he got all of Sam''s memories, he felt like he can rule the world. The vast knowledge, the inventions that he could use in the future. The techniques, the forces that are hidden. He has way too many things that he can enjoy, develop and conquer with those memories.

    But now he understood what Sam is trying to say with these battles. He might be able to acquire all the benefits that these memories could offer, but there is one thing he wouldn''t be able to get. The mind that originally possessed those memories.

    He might have gotten the creations, but he cannot possess the mind that created them. He is just a thief that got lucky.

    That is how he felt now.

    He brought more soldiers, and more resources, but still he was the one who suffered a major loss.

    He felt frustrated.

    And the reports that kept oning didn''t help him either.

    The frustration resulted in anger and he got sick of this whole situation. He stood up and took deep breaths as he ordered his troops.

    "All troops march forward. We are surrounding the city."

    As soon as he said that, there is argemotion within the campgrounds, all of the soldiers found a different way around the fog that is still covering the camp entrance as they went forward to stand in the battle formation.

    Sivan also wore the ck feather coat and stood on the Harbinger while carrying the executioner de in his hands as he tantly led the troops slowly.

    Therge horde of soldiers is moving towards the city at a very normal walking pace Sam watched all of this through the telescope and soon he can see them clearly with naked eye.

    After they are within the visible range, he just smiled and ordered the ranged attacks from the sphere cannons as well as the special treats he prepared for them.

    Along with the energy curtain of the sphere cannon, there are long green trails that are moving in the air.

 Chapter 1550 Engage

    Chapter 1550 Engage¡¡¡¡Sivan took at the massive energy curtain falling towards them and gave out a signal.

    A bunch of soldiers that are ced in various positions of the formation started moving around and took out some small bird puppets that flew towards the energy curtain that ising at them.

    The birds reached the curtain when it is still a good distance away and started throwing energy ripples into the surroundings.

    All the energy ripples propagated at a rapid pace.

    The energy lines that formed the curtains became unstable and the curtain connection was gone. The energy spheres became normal energy spheres.

    The augmentation in the explosion is gone because of the absence of the curtain connection.

    Now they are just normal explosives. But they are still dangerous.

    Dangerous to the point that they created dents in the formation that the Mari n is walking forward in.

    The Peak stage Consummate cultivators that are following the troops from behind closely monitored the movements.

    They looked at the peak stage cultivators of the Gaja n that are standing in various positions on the wall.

    Even though small fries are currently fighting, the tension between these peak stage cultivators is somehow gathering more attention from most of the soldiers.

    In fact, they are more afraid of getting caught in the battle with these powerhouses than dying on the battlefield.

    So, they are extremely anxious and cautious about it.

    While that is there, the second most eye-catching thing is the poison bombs that are dropping on them. Sivan is the only one who ispletely unbothered about the poison harming him. Sam''s body has its perks after all.

    But he is still bothered by the high level of struggle his soldiers are going through.

    He needs them to barge into the city and battles it out with the soldiers

    Still, he didn''t dare stop or slow down.

    He just ordered them to defend themselves and move forward.

    They just pushed through and endured all the damage that is caused by the poison and the explosions.

    Some of the soldiers died, some of them are injured, but most of them are safe. Of course, some of them are partially affected by poison as well. But they took some high dosage of medicine and just took it in the stride as they moved forward.

    In fact, instead of slowing down, they increased their speed after they reached the range of sphere cannons.

    Sam looked at all of this and issued amand.

    "The first batch of the troops, ready to intercept. But before that, release the beast legions in three minutes."

    "Yes, Sir."

    After three minutes, the n gates opened up and arge horde of beasts was released. By then Mari n already reached the barrier and they all started attacking it.

    Regr attacks are not really doing much, but the peak stage cultivators started intervening here.

    They broke the barrier in the five hits in which the beast horde reached the soldiers and cultivators, while the dome formation within the city is activated.

    Therge energy sphere appeared in the middle of the city and it started creating a massivemotion.

    All of the bird-type puppets were released.

    They are so many and they moved in groups that they almost gave a sense that a cloud covered the sky when they are flying over the troops.

    Sivan who is on the harbinger looked at Sam who is standing on the wall of the city. He swung the executioner sword at the bird-type beasts that areing at him as he tried to make his way toward Sam.

    The battle became intense again.

    After the beasts started entangling the enemies, the bird-type puppets started shooting the targeting bullets that are attracting the energy beam attacks from the sphere in the city.

    They acted like sniper attacks and even if some people managed to dodge them, the beam attacks are acting as good killers as well as disruptors of the formation.

    Sam looked at the battles going on and took a deep breath.

    "Are the first batch of troops ready?"

    "Yes, they are."

    Sam frowned as he heard a familiar voice.

    "Giyon? Why are you answering this?"

    "Because she took over a squad in the first group?"

    "Grivon? What the fuck are you doing out there? You are one of the lowest level cultivators within this whole battle. You might just die out there. Do you understand that?"

    "Of course, I do. But that doesn''t mean anything."

    "What the fuck is wrong with you guys? You do know that you have better things to do than dive firsthand into the battle right? I get it that you want to prove yourselves, but you are needed tomand and guide your subordinates.

    That has arge impact here."

    "Well, we are sitting too idle and cannot find another way to have some fun. So, we are going. Don''t worry, we will be listening to all of yourmands. Don''t need to hold back."

    Sam sighed. He looked at Gail who is standing far away and wanted to contact him and ask him to convince them. But after some thought, he decided against it.

    He cannot just control everyone''s decisions. Particrly in his current situation. He had a mutually beneficial rtionship with them. He cannot step too much out of the line.

    But on second thought, he still contacted him.

    "Grivon and Giyon are going as part of the first batch of soldiers, you might want to keep an eye on them."

    Gail frowned and cut the call before calling Giyon. Sam looked at him and he could immediately tell that he is having some heating conversation with her.

    So, he left them to it.

    He shifted his focus back to the battle and looked for the perfect timing.

    Only after five minutes when the troops from the Mari n are adjusting to the energy beam attacks and the beasts, Sam called the subordinates.

    "The first batch. Go."

    The gate opened up again and all of them left immediately. The battlefield had already be very chaotic.

    Giyon who entered the battle felt extremely excited.

    "Grivon, you better stay with my squad. You being here is already dangerous enough. So, if you leave my squad, I am going to call Uncle Gamin and he will bring you back."

    "Stop threatening me with my Dad, I am not a little kid."

    "Of course you are. You act like one."

    As she spoke, she leaped forward and engaged with an earth elemental armor user. Grivon stuck close to her and acted as support to her subordinates who are dealing with other soldiers.

    Giyon broke the neck of the armored soldier and moved past him as she attacked another meteor squad member.

    Grivon who is on the weaker side mostly stayed as support and used poison to target the stronger enemies, but also tried to take care of the mercenaries around.

    When the troops of the Mari n are once again getting used to the situation, Sam finally released something else. His specter and all the souls the specter is holding in it.

    The souls are attacking individually instead of possessing any puppets or golems they are solely there for direct attacks on the stronger opponents which will distract them and leave a chance for the soldiers of the Gaja n to defeat them.

    The battle progressed. The shooters also joined in with soon the elders also partaking in the whole thing.

    The Mari n has more members, but the Gaja n''s extra preparations with the energy beams are very useful in creating a bnce.

    Sam kept a clear eye on Giyon and Grivon on that chaotic battlefield, while he looked at them.

    There is another batch of the soldiers waiting to join and he would be joining the battle then. But before that, he has to make sure that Giyon and Grivon shouldn''t be recognized by the Mari n.

    They are way too many sensitive targets to be recognized.

    But as soon as he thought of this, he felt like he jinxed the whole thing.

    Because at this exact moment, Grivon who was weak and ying in the big leagues was targeted by two elites and a few mercenaries.

    The elites immediately caught him and blocked off Giyon''s squad while the mercenaries wanted to kill him as his poison is being too much of a pain in the ass.

    He tried his best to escape and use his escape transference token, but he was caught off guard and couldn''t move.

    Giyon immediately made her move and attacked the elites.

    Her punch was met by another woman who is wearing the earth armor. She had perfect fusion and morphed her body into quick sand like texture as she sucked the fists into her body.

    Giyon was stunned and used her ripple energy to get out of it. But the opponent is quick enough to move to the side and held Giyon''s arm in a lock making her be caught off guard.

 Chapter 1551 Attack

    Chapter 1551 Attack¡¡¡¡Giyon struggled to move, but the opponent is just as strong as her and both of them started wrestling.

    The opponent seemed to have a special constitution of earth elements. Her body acted like quicksand and particrly when she is in full fusion mode, not only was she able to manipte her body as she liked, she can even use that flexibility to throw off most of Giyon''s ripple energy attacks with proper timing.

    Giyon panicked. Not only was her brother in trouble, but now she was in too. She also tried to reach out and crush her escape token, but she was unable to do as the sand covered her palms and she was held in a deadlock.

    Gail and Gamin who saw all of this from the wall also panicked.

    They were about to make a move, but Sam''s voice appeared in theirmunication tokens.

    "Don''t move. I will hand this."

    Sam said as he took out his cannon. He started loading it with his spiritual energy as he aimed at the group.

    This time, the energy he loaded is a very small amountpared to the previous shots he took. The people are in a very close range and it is very easy for him to hurt Giyon and Grivon if the attack is too powerful.

    It has to be concentrated and precise.

    So, he carefully aimed andpressed the energy to modify the bullet to a short and precise shot.

    *BOOM*

    A slight explosion shot the bullet and it went straight into the head of one of the persons that held Grivon.

    He loaded another bullet and shot it at Giyon''s opponent.

    *BOOM*

    The Bullet was shot and hit the head of the opponent. But to his surprise, the opponent didn''t release Giyon. In fact, she acted as nothing happened to her.

    The head exploded into a bunch of sand grains and it turned back to its original shape just in a moment.

    Sam frowned, but he wasn''t that flustered. He just shot another bullet and this time; it is a very close call as it almost brushed past Giyon''s face.

    "You better be careful Sam."

    Gail warned Sam.

    "Don''t worry. Trust me with this. You just don''t make a move. Or you will alert the wrong eyes. They were still not recognized. You make a move and they will be."

    "Alright."

    Sam kept on shooting three more times, but the opponent was way too stubborn and strong to let go.

    She kept on trying to break Giyon''s limbs.

    At this moment, Sivan who is leading the soldiers saw Sam shooting at the same spot for a while and felt suspicious.

    He then looked at the wall. Particrly towards Gail and Gamin who are also looking at the same spot.

    He picked a telescope to observe their facial expressions.

    Sam observed this and frowned. He immediately changed his aim and started shooting at different soldiers from the Mari n.

    "Gail, Gamin, you guys turn around. Look at different ces. You are giving yourself away."

    They instantly looked in different directions. But Sivan who is looking at them still felt a bit suspicious. He looked at Sam for the next two minutes and when he noticed that he is still shooting randomly, he became a bit rxed.

    But that rxation onlysted for two minutes. Right when he was about to join the battle again, he changed his mind and ordered.

    "Someone important is battling in that area. Aim a portable energy beam cannon at that spot and shoot. One with therge area of destruction."

    "But Sir, our soldiers¡­"

    "Don''t worry about them. If my hunch is right, nothing will happen to them."

    "Sir, risking it based on a hunch¡­"

    "Just do as I say. Don''t question my orders."

    Sivan said coldly brushing off his subordinates'' worries.

    The subordinate followed the orders and arge cannon was aimed at the spot where Giyon and Grivon are struggling.

    Sam changed his aim back to that spot and started shooting the woman.

    Finally, after changing the frequency of the ripple energy within his attacks, he managed to make one that will affect the woman''s whole body making her lose the hold she had on Giyon.

    But the moment he shot that bullet, Gail who noticed the cannon prematurely made the move.

    "GAIL. Don''t do that."

    Sam said in hismunication channel, but Gail is already on the field.

    The bullet hit the Woman and she lost her grip on Giyon.

    But in the process, Giyon''s disguise ispletely gone. Sivan looked at Gail''s response and then Giyon''s face.

    "Gail is running towards his daughter. To save her from the cannon attack."

    Sivan said it in themunication channel reserved for the Divine league members.

    Avlyn who has been watching the battle carefully, suddenly jerked up and replied.

    "Don''t stop the attack. Go on with it."

    "You are making a move?"

    "Yes, this is the perfect timing I was asking you about for so long."

    As she spoke, she cut the channel off and called her subordinates.

    "Get your weapons ready and hold the tokens on you all the time. This is the moment we have been waiting for all this while."

    As she spoke, along with her five more peak stage cultivators made their move and all of them are running towards Giyon at the same time.

    Sivan who saw this immediately ordered all of the soldiers in that area to move away.

    Grivon who was still struggling a bit was suddenly left alone along with a few of other Giyon''s subordinates.

    Only Giyon was still struggling with the opponent, but the surrounding area was emptied within a few seconds.

    The cannon was charged and was about to be attacked.

    Sivan eagerly waited, but all of a sudden¡­

    *BOOM*

    A bullet was shot and the energy cannon exploded right before the trigger was pulled.

    The soldier operating the cannon and another dozen or so around were all dead and a few dozen were severely injured.

    Sivan widened his eyes in disbelief and looked at Sam hatefully.

    Gail who was running suddenly rxed.

    "Why are you behaving like an idiot? I told you to trust me. You also Gamin, keeping your fucking sword back in."

    Gamin who is standing on the wall had his sword in his hand. In fact, even Yuvana had one and is about to make a move, but when they heard Sam''s voice, they immediately stored them away.

    Gail sighed in relief. But then he noticed that the peak stage cultivators are still making a move.

    Avlyn looked at Gail and didn''t want to lose the opportunity, so she gritted her teeth and called her subordinates.

    "I don''t care anymore. Don''t stop the attack. We are going with this and we are seeing through this."

    As she said, she raised her hand, the surrounding dust gathered into small spherical bullets around her and within a moment hundreds of them were formed and all of them were shot at that one spot.

    Gail, who stopped until then, suddenly made a move once again.

    He was shocked and his heart was filled with trepidation.

    "YOU FUCKING BITCH."

    Sivan yelled at top of his lungs as he looked at the situation.

    This is the worst thing that could happen to him now.

    The unspoken rules are there for a reason.

    They exist to keep some form of morality in these unnecessarily stupid and cruel wars that are causing so much bloodshed.

    If powerhouses on both sides keep on killing the weaklings from the other side, things will not be peaceful anymore. All that will be left are corpses.

    He panicked and looked at the remaining powerhouses that still stood on the wall of the Gaja city.

    He hoped that they will not make a move no matter what.

    If they did, then he will be in deep trouble. His soldiers, his ambitions, everything will be gone, because it will be impossible for him to gather what he did today, once again if he loses all the manpower of his own and his ns.

    As hundreds of thoughts are running through his mind, his soldiers, elders, and Grand elders also understood the implications of this and all of them stopped battling for a moment.

    This caused some of them to take the full brunt of attacks of the Energy beams from the sphere, but even then the battles were stopped between the cultivators and beasts.

    They all halted and looked at this one scene.

    Gail who was shocked reacted fast enough. His body turned into a glowing ray as he went through a Spiritual energy fusion and he jumped straight towards his daughter.

    He reached the spot even before the bullets reached the ce and hugged Giyon.

    Arge energy barrier appeared around him instantly. It covered Giyon, Grivon, and other subordinates around, but before it couldpletely surround them without any gaps, the bullets reached them.

    Some of the subordinates who are too far away died on the spot.

    *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

    The bullets hit the barrier with explosive noises and it shook while almost causing a dust storm.

 Chapter 1552 Blood Tokens

    Chapter 1552 Blood Tokens¡¡¡¡Sam pped his forehead. He felt extremely frustrated with the current situation.

    He called Gamin and Yuvana again and asked.

    "Is he going to be okay?"

    "Don''t worry, that attack won''t be able to leave a mark on him. But this can''t be said for the rest. The subordinates must have surely suffered. I am a bit worried about Grivon too."

    Gamin''s voice sounded anxious. Sam looked toward him and he is holding Yuvana in his arms as he tried tofort her emotions. Her sword aura is raging. Anyone who can see her at the moment, felt like an invisible sword is hanging around their neck.

    Sivan looked at this and felt surprised. All of a sudden, he had a thought pass through his mind and he widened his eyes in shock and horror.

    "Please, don''t be there. Please don''t be there."

    He started muttering as he looked at the spot as waited for the dust to settle.

    But before that could happen, energy rippled cleared the dust away and arge energy barrier was visible. It wasn''t able to cover everyone and even the people that are at the edge of the barrier suffered some attacks from it.

    Gail looked at his daughter and asked in a whisper.

    "Are you okay, Giyon?"

    Giyon felt like her heart is pounding out of her chest.

    She is sure that the attack ising to get her directly. She is very sure that she would have died right then and there the attack even brushed past her.

    This is one of the moments, that she came closest to death.

    Then the next most horror thing hit her. She looked around and muttered.

    "Grivon. Dad, Grivon."

    Her eyes started tearing up as she looked around. Gail came back to his senses and looked around. He knew that he covered Grivon with the barrier, but he doesn''t know if it is enough though.

    So, he looked around and found Grivon on the ground at one of the corners of the barrier. He was shocked and ran to him immediately.

    Because that is not the corner where Grivon initially stood. He flew over and crashed into that one because he was at that edge of the barrier.

    Luckily, he just fainted.

    Gail quickly checked him and sighed.

    "Yuvana, Gamin. Grivon is alright. He has some internal injuries, but they are mostly due to the aftershock of the attack. He is just unconscious. So calm down."

    Yuvana indeed calmed down as soon as she heard those words in themunication channel. But her threatening aura didn''t go away, she just looked at the whole army of the Mari n with a sweeping nce.

    Her eyes stayed on Sivan for a while more and then looked back at the spot where all of this is happening.

    She particrly looked at Avlyn who is currentlymanding other five of her teammates.

    They all zoomed towards the barrier and their arms started glowing.

    They jabbed the barrier from different sides with their glowing arms and it was broken pretty quickly.

    "Giyon, leave the ce with the transference token. Now."

    Giyon knew better than to argue back and made her move. She disappeared from the spot and reappeared in the stray realm. There, a team caught hold of her and gave her the required medical assistance.

    Gail looked at the rest of the subordinates who can walk and gestured for them to go away.

    They all ran to the different sides and people who are important enough to have a transference token, left using that. The peak stage cultivators didn''t really care much about them.

    One of them reached Gail faster and swung his sword at him.

    Gail didn''t even look at him as he picked up Grivon and moved to the side.

    The sword sliced through the air and left arge crater on the ground. Gail sidestepped again to avoid a spear that wasing at him.

    He held Grivon closer and turned aroundpletely to avoid the tailwind of the spear strike not affecting him.

    Yuvana who is standing on top of the wall was extremely frustrated. She wanted to jump off ande running so many times, but Gamin stopped her.

    "Don''t be impulsive."

    Sivan who is watching this, clearly understood what is going on. He knew who that person is and why he is being carried by Gail himself.

    He is clearly Grivon and this made his legs shiver. He heard of stories about Gamin and Yuvana. Even though a lot of people in the Grey circle don''t know much about the private lives of the couple, particrly their child, Grivon, he knows.

    Because they are from rival ns, there is not much info hidden between them about how frequent their shes are at all the levels including the Grey circle.

    He knew how Grivon is constantly spoiled by his parents. They are obsessively protective. He was jealous of him at a point in time even though Sivan literally had, more power, authority, and influence in his hands.

    They are not exactly peaceful people and soft persimmons. The only reason they are ignored sometimes, particrly in terms of power and strength is that they are standing beside a monstrous person like Gail.

    Their strength is literally second only to Gail and a few other people that could be counted on one palm.

    Now both of them are pissed. He is surprised that they already held back like this. He is very tempted to escape. But at this moment, he is praying that the Gaja n''s high morals wille into y.

    He made some assumptions that the only reason Yuvana is holding back is that Grivon might also be okay.

    So, he wished that nothing more will happen to him. Even if that means that Gail escapes from the six people rounding him up.

    He looked at the battle with anticipation and anxiety that felt like never before.

    But right after that moment, he realized that all of his hopes are for naught. Because he noticed that Avlyn and her subordinates who missed all of their attacks in the past few minutes are suddenly changing their tactic.

    "Attack the kid. We can''t let him and this chance go."

    As soon as he ordered the sword, spear, and the ranged ming attacks along with earth elemental traps, all of them targeted Grivon in Gail''s hands, instead of Gail himself.

    In the past few minutes, Gail tried to break past the six of them with a lot of effort, but they are not letting him. Whether he tried to run on thend or in the air, used diversions and feints, they managed to keep him there.

    He still stayed within that circle. And he couldn''t be reckless with Grivon''s presence in his hands. In fact, that might be the only reason he is still stuck in the encirclement.

    But now that these people are attacking Grivon instead of him, he became mad.

    He extended his hand that is covered with partial fusion and blocked the sword strike before pushing it to let the spear stab in that palm. He walked through the air and twisted the arm of the spear.

    He mmed his leg on the shoulder of the opponent and used the impact to jump high into the air.

    The opponents followed him and started attacking. Gail faced downwards and used the impact in the air to fall faster. Hended on the ground and took out a transference token before cing it in Grivon''s hand.

    He let the opponents freefall a bitter than him. One of the opponents made some handsigns as crimson red mes conjured around his palms. Gail''s eyes widened in disbelief as he immediately turned around to block the mes with his own body while making sure that Grivon is not exposed to any of it.

    He then injected a small amount of energy into Grivon''s body. Grivon felt the prick in his meridians and his heart.

    "AAHHHH¡­."

    He woke up abruptly.

    Gail broke the token in his hand and sent Grivon away.

    Grivon was suddenly woken up with pain and exhaustion and felt the transference token pull him away.

    He reappeared in the stray dimension with confusion and pain written all over his face.

    Luckily Giyon was already there and she hugged him to calm him down.

    Meanwhile back on the battlefield, there is a barrier around Gail, but the crimson mes that touched it surprisingly managed to prate through it. The mended on Gail''s back, but he moved quickly enough to not take the full brunt of the attack.

    He removed the robe instantly and threw it away.

    There is a sizeable burn mark on his back. He took out a vial and gulped down. He looked at the six of them and said coldly.

    "You brought the Divine Blood Tokens? Seems like the Divine league is not holding back anything."

    "Of course, when dealing with the Almighty Gail, there is no way we can hold back."

    "Yeah, just one thing wrong with those divine blood tokens, you should have used them on a kid. Particrly when that kid has the parents and an uncle who loves him too much and also knows how cruel and torturous those tokens can be."

 Chapter 1553 Angry Parents

    Chapter 1553 Angry Parents¡¡¡¡Gail said as he shook his hands slightly.

    Two knuckle dusters appeared on those fists. When the six of them are about to brace themselves for the attack that wasing, Gail used his arms to do a cross arm block. He even went as far as creating a barrier in front of him.

    They were surprised and confused at the same time, but the next second they sensed something and looked in one particr direction.

    Yuvana and Gamin are in the sky as they swung their des.

    *KEEEN*

    The de keening sounded like someone''s soul is being dragged out of their body. The six of them felt like their live hase to an end at that very moment and even forgot to block themselves for a moment.

    The de rays made their way towards them and they all blocked the attacks.

    They understood why Gail blocked instead of making a move. Followed by the de rays, Gamin and Yuvana jumped forward into the encirclement and stood there waiting for the dust to settle.

    "Brother, you go back to the wall and stand guard there. We will handle this."

    Gamin said in a cold tone. He looked at the guy who threw those crimson mes at Grivon. His eyes spewed killing intent. But that is not even the most fearful thing that they are experiencing at the moment.

    Yuvana looked at all three of them like they are her prey. She looked like a wild predator with utmost strength and ruthless hunger.

    "How dare you? How fucking dare you attack my son? You even dared to bring Blood tokens and attack him with that?

    I will kill you all. I will fucking kill you all right here and then make a visit to the Divine league. I will exterminate everyone of your kin. Anyone who has any kind of rtionship with you will die. "

    She muttered in a very low tone as she swung her de at the opponent.

    Gail sighed as he looked at them. He knew that both of them are extremely angry. There is no way, they would be able to control themselves anymore.

    He looked at the six and shook his head, before leaping into the sky.

    The group didn''t want to let him go though, but this time Gamin and Yuvana''s presence hindered four of them while Gail punched two of them in the faces as they moved towards him.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The punches threw them into the ground and createdrge craters on the ground. They felt like their souls are knocked out of their bodies and pulled back into them again and they felt all of that in one second.

    Gail stepped in the air as he ran towards the war. The burn mark on his back is healing slowly.

    While he is making his way to the wall, Sivan is shaking in his boots. He doesn''t know what to do at the moment. He doesn''t know if the Grand elders would be able to do anything to Gail who is going back.

    But when he looked at them, he can understand that they would rather not make a move.

    Apart from that, he is at least relieved that Yuvana and Gamin didn''t just go for a random rampage over the soldiers in anger. They directed it to the Divine league members so, he quickly thought of next steps to go along with the battle.

    He noticed the positions on the city wall.

    With both Gamin and Yuvana leaving their position, there is a definite spot with no guards whatsoever. So, there is a chance for them to attack

    As long as a side of the wall waspletely destroyed, Sivan can find a way to attack within the city and cause some massive chaos.

    He was thinking of various scenarios, when he suddenly got a call from some of the Divine league members that are yet t make a move.

    "This is the chance, make half of your grand elders to join the battle with Avlyn and the rest. Tell them to assist with ranged attacks."

    "My grand elders?"

    "Yes. We need to attract attention from at least another peak stage cultivator. Gail is about to stand guard on the wall, but we cannot let him have that. We already missed one shot at him. Before he recoverspletely and gets back at us, we need to create another opportunity."

    "Will it be possible? I think he will be onplete guard at the moment."

    "It is possible. As long as we can use this chance properly."

    Sivan gritted his teeth and decided to go along with this n. He called for four of his grand elders and asked the to make a move.

    All four of them are mid-ranged attackers and they went straight for Gamin and Yuvana who are in a deadlock with the opponents.

    When they saw, fire, wind, water and once again fire element attacks from all four sidesing at them with extreme limits, they were a bit surprised and go caught off guard.

    Fighting against Avlyn and her team is already hard enough, now fighting against the other four is going to be a big pain the ass.

    Yuvana shed with the swords man and the spear user along with a fire user from the original six.

    The fire user is her target, but the swordsman and the spear user are getting in her way constantly. She is so pissed to even take them seriously, but when she noticed some extra candidates are trying to butt in, she was enraged once again.

    She lunged towards the swordsman and caught a hold of his sword strike with her bear hand.

    There is a slight sh on her palm and bleeding started. But she managed to catch the hold of that sword. Meanwhile the spear user stabbed with his spear from the rear.

    She forcefully changed her position and even went as far as dragging the swordsman along with him.

    The spear brushed past her side. She used the chance to raise the arm and catch the spear with her armpit.

    She caught it almost at the middle and held it pretty perfectly with the armpit.

    She held the spear like that and swiftly turned her de to hold it back hand and used the left hand which still held the de of the opponent to pull the opponent towards herself.

    The sword handle hit the opponent in the neck and she borrowed the momentum to slide over the spear shaft and stabbed the opponent who is behind her.

    The sword went straight through the armor and lodged itself into the abdomen of the spear user.

    He gritted his teeth and looked at her hatefully.

    Yuvana kicked the sword user on the leg to make him fall on his knees before kicking him on the face and making him fly in the air.

    She then turned around and held the sword tightly as she looked at the spear user dead in the eyes.

    He tried to pull the spear back and take a few step backs, but Yuvana didn''t let that happen, instead she started channelling energy into her sword and kept up with his movements as she twisted the de a bit.

    The spear user got scared as he felt his innards turning and twisting before bing a few pieces of flesh.

    He took out the blood token hurriedly and attached it to the spear that was still stuck in Yuvana''s hands.

    A crimson red streak flew across the spear and Yuvana let go of it before it could touch her.

    The swordsman who was kicked away also took out the token and attached it to the sword to attack her.

    Yuvana blocked that sword with hers and pushed him away before stepping the air and somersaulting to the rear of the spear user.

    She shed her sword downwards only for it to be blocked by the spear.

    But this time, it was notpletely blocked. All of a sudden, her energy became extremely fluid. The sword slipped across the spear and she managed tond the sh on the leg of the opponent.

    "HISSS¡­"

    The opponent hissed in pain and took a step back.

    Yuvana whonded on a crouching position agilely lunged forward and stabbed on the same wound. She then forcefully stood up with the sword still stuck in his calf muscle.

    She tore the whole calf and then cut through his thigh. Because of the loss of bnce, he fell to the side and the sword cut through the thigh dismembering the leg.

    The whole thing is gruesome as Yuvana was covered in blood, but she didn''t care.

    He turned around and shed the opponent who fell on the ground on his other leg. She hacked the leg bit by bit until it waspletely gone and then went on to deal with his arms. While torturously dismembering him, the swordsman came running with that red streak sword, she turned around just in time to block it.

    But just the aftershock of it sent waves to the surroundings and a dozen or so trees were stuck down on the side.

 Chapter 1554 Bait

    Chapter 1554 Bait¡¡¡¡The red streak slightly crept onto Yuvana''s sword and made her palm go numb.

    If not for the fact that she instantly withdrew it, she would have even had a serious cut on her hand.

    She looked at that red streak hatefully and spat on the ground. She swung the de at the opponent who blocked. Her sword slid across the opponent''s as she turned around to let out arge sword ray into the air.

    The sword ray moved in the form of a curve and it sliced through two ming streaks one normal red and another one crimson.

    The mes were deflected as she turned around and blocked the sword strike again.

    She was pushed back because of the unpreparedness of the block, but she took advantage of it and sliced the spear user on the floor vertically.

    The cut started from the lower abdomen and ended at the throat. He slowly bled to death.

    While Yuvana is dancing around with three more opponents, Gamin is not having an easier time, in fact, he has a much harder time on the other side.

    With the new opponents mainly targeting him along with Avlyn and the other two divine league members, he felt a bit overwhelmed in a way.

    Because just like how these people used Grivon to make Gail hold back, they are using Yuvana to not let him use his full power.

    Yuvana is currently going through a rageful moment because of her son. There is no way she could think straight and guard herself against all of the attacks from all sides.

    These three people are the stronger three members of the grouppared to the ones that are attacking Yuvana.

    So, Gamin has to calm himself down and manage them while his wife dealt with the person that attacked their son directly.

    Since they are targeting her, he needs to focus on blocking the attacks as well as making sure that he doesn''t get the brunt of it. In the process, it is a bit hard for them to go and fight directly to kill them.

    The addition of the grand elders that came is an extra added pressure.

    While things are already like this, Sivan who is already nervous reluctantly sent the remaining half of the grand elders to a different side of the wall. They are attacking the wall where Saran and the Elite team leader are stationed.

    Now only Gail is left on the wall while the n''s leader is staying within the n grounds as he took care of the rest of the operations inside. He is supervising the healing of the injured soldiers and also keeps track of the battle records while reassuring the weak and powerless within the n.

    Gail became conflicted.

    He doesn''t know if he should move from his post and get involved in the battle. Because once he does, the remaining people from the Divine league are going to get an edge over them. They will be able to find a weak spot within the city''s wall where they could break in and wreak havoc.

    As he was thinking, the hidden members of the divine league actually already made a move. They started attacking from long range at Saran and the Elite team leader.

    Even though the two of them are surprisingly handling the opponents well, they are still outnumbered. The long-range attacks are just an additional frustration and might even be their ticket to loss.

    He couldn''t hold back anymore and was about to make a move, but at this moment, Sam contacted him.

    "Don''t make that move. They want to drag you out. I think you also noticed the fight. They are definitely trying to drag it out."

    "Of course, I can see that too. But what can I do? This is definitely a losing situation no matter how you look at it. They manage to finish our people off first or they drag it out and make us lose energy, what is the point of me staying here?"

    "I am not saying that you shouldn''t be involved, but I don''t think you should directly get involved in the battle."

    "Do you have any other choice though?"

    "I am thinking. We can either call out n''s leader out and let him join in the battle or need to figure out a way where you don''t have to move from your spot and be ready to engage any time you want."

    "That is going to be a big problem. It is not that easy. My specialty is definitely not long-range. Even if I can attack them from far, it will also go wide and the energy wouldn''t be used efficiently."

    Sam looked at Gamin and Yuvana. There while Gamin is holding all three of them back, Yuvana is taking her sweet time dissecting people one after another. After the spear user was done, she shifted to the swordsman. She cut his tendons off and then moved to debone the flesh directly.

    "Are Gamin and Yuvana holding back?"

    "A bit. Yes."

    "Then give me a few seconds. I will see if we can turn this whole thing back at them."

    After that Sam contacted Gamin who is in the middle of the battle.

    "Why are you holding back?"

    "Yuvana won''t calm down if she cannot take her sweet time with the opponents. Not after what they did to Grivon.

    And Avlyn is not exactly week. She is really strong and it is hard for me to keep away from her. Finally those stupid Blood tokens. They are really really annoying. I cannot let it hit me."

    "Okay, try to finish it off. They are trying to make Gail make a move once again. They might lure them into a trap. So, you need to finish those people off immediately ande back to the wall.

    Even if you are not able to kill them all, at least breakthrough ande here."

    "I will finish this. I am just afraid, I will be out of energy and another emergency wille."

    "We will deal with them as theye. Don''t waste too much of your time on it."

    "Okay then. I am on it."

    Gamin''s battle style changed instantly and he started fighting a bit recklessly, the first thing he did is slipping past them and go to the corpse of the spear user.

    He kicked the spear up in the air and shed his sword on it. The token that was stuck to it came off and he started injecting his spiritual energy into the tip of the de.

    He shed the token with the tip and it was aimed at Avlyn.

    "You sick bastard."

    Avlyn screamed and immediately activated all of the hand signs in a rapid way before mming them on the ground.

    The sword ray cut through the token like butter and went past it. But when it came to the other side, it turned to the darkest crimson red one could imagine and shed through the earthen wall.

    The other two opponents also used all kinds of defensive measures. But the sh destroyed all of them and went straight ahead. It took everything just to block it.

    Gamin didn''t even wait to look at the aftereffects of his attack and just made his move on the other opponents. His targets were the grand elders that are attacking his wife.

    As soon as he took that pressure off of her, Yuvana killed the swordsman and moved to the guy who is using the token to shoot out crimson mes.

    Avlyn who was crashed because of the sword strike had a sh on her chest and the blood is spewing out.

    She looked at Gamin who took down the grand elder like a grown man schooling a little kid. It was so easy that no one would ever believe that it is the battle between the peak stage cultivators.

    "We underestimated these guys'' strength too much. They are stronger than we thought they are. Way stronger."

    She muttered to herself and looked at the surroundings. She nced at the battle between grand elders and the Elite team leader and Saran.

    She then looked at Gail who is still standing on the wall with a slight frown.

    She called her hidden teammates.

    "Why are you guys not making your move?"

    "Gail is noting out. We cannot attack him directly. We need to make sure that he is distractedpletely before we make a move."

    "That is not going to happen. He knows that we are trying that now that we failed once. We just need to be direct." Avlyn said in a frustrated tone.

    "No, we just need to make sure that even he knows that are nning this, he has no choice but to go through this. That is all we need and that is all we are going to do."

    "Really? Because we might have a hard time with Gamin and Yuvana here. I am hit with a Divine blood token attack and it is a pretty clean cut.

    I don''t have too much time."

    "Don''t worry, if Gail doesn''t take this bait in the next ten seconds, I will proceed with something that will force him. But for that, I need you to keep Gamin and Yuvanapletely upied. Not a single chance toe out and help Gail out."

    "Consider it done."

 Chapter 1555 Cat call

    Chapter 1555 Cat call¡¡¡¡Gail noticed that Gamin is not holding back anymore and rxed a bit.

    But his expression of relief changed to that of anxiety, immediately.

    Avlyn who was just hit by the attack squarely on her chest even with all of the defenses took two tokens out of the storage. She held them with her palm as she made hand signs.

    Upon looking at her, the subordinates acted as if they already knew what to do and with a lot of effort, they made Gamin and Yuvana stand close to each other.

    As soon as they did that, Avlyn mmed her palms into the ground. Four walls appeared out of the earth and surrounded the couple. The walls are crimson red in color but they are sure made of soil and rock.

    Gamin and Yuvana were caught off guard.

    Avlyn''s subordinates made a move and stuck their blood tokens on the walls at various spots.

    The wall became darker and darker in the crimson tone.

    Within thatrge space inside the walls, Gamin and Yuvana became cautious as they looked around. Earthen spikes starteding out of the wall with red streaks and they started blocking them with all they got.

    While things are like this with them, on the other side where Elite team leader and Saran are fighting with the Grand elders of the Mari n, the fight became serious. The grand elders are not looking for dragging the fight anymore.

    Even though this helped Saran and the Elite team leader to have a proper battle andnd some blows, they are also feeling a bit overwhelmed by the opponents going all out.

    Gail and Sam are once again conflicted.

    Sam is already thinking of ways to help Gail out of this situation, but all of a sudden this turned way too serious.

    While things are like this, something else happened that made Gail curse under his breath.

    Arge streak of lightning appeared in the sky as high above one of the Divine league members arrived.

    He stood in the air as water and lightning elemental energy gathered around him.

    He held two divine blood tokens in his hands as he raised both of them up in the sky. Dark Crimson clouds gathered as they started rumbling with lightning energy.

    *RUMBLE*

    The sound made Gail cautious.

    He had a bad feeling about this and he soon realized that his suspicions are right. Because the person who created those clouds started expanding and it expanded all over the battlefield, particrly at the spots where the Gaja n''s soldiers are currently stationed.

    Sam who saw all of this felt frustrated.

    He knew that things are going out of hand.

    This guy from Divine league is obviously trying to force Gail out. Now he went as far as using all of the Gaja n''s forces as bait to pull him out

    After all, if Gail doesn''t make a move, the soldiers will die, but if he does make a move, he would be forced into battle.

    All of the posts on the wall would be emptied leaving itpletely unattended.

    They are just fastening the battle.

    Sam didn''t even know how to react to this for a second.

    "Sam, I need to intervene, otherwise things wouldn''t be good."

    Gail said those words and his arms started glowing. He took a deep breath and leaped into the air as he directly aimed at the person who is about to attack the soldiers.

    Sam gritted his teeth andmanded the troops.

    "Everyone goes all out. Take this chance and attack every single soldier of the Gaja n. All bets are off.

    Shoot down the bird puppets and let the bullets rain down on the Mari n''s troops.

    Also, let out the crystal symbiote bullets and shoot them from the rear.

    I want the Mari n''s troops to be annihted right now."

    The ordinary soldiers who were still as they watched the battles between the powerhouses suddenly made a move.

    While they are making a move, Sammanded something else.

    "Cultivators inte-stage, don''t hold back, you can target any opponent. You don''t need to follow any rules now."

    "But Sir."

    "I told you not to care. All soldiers move into your formations and defend themselves against the stronger opponents. Use all of the poison vials as you like and kill people weaker than you even if they are of lower cultivation stage.

    Mari n certainly doesn''t care about the decorum, so we are not doing that either.

    I will take the responsibility if anythinges."

    As soon as his words left his mouth, the soldiers hesitated a bit. They don''t want to start an indiscriminate killing. It ispletely against their principles and they have slight respect for the enemy soldiers.

    Of course, some people don''t have any principle or obligation of that sort, so they started destroying the mercenaries first.

    Sivan who was still lost in his own thought process was stunned.

    He doesn''t know how to react immediately.

    Since his side of forces started, he really did expect some powerful retaliation. But after he noticed that even Yuvana controlled herself enough to not do anything to the soldiers. For a moment, even though it has passed.

    Now he realized he couldn''t have been more wrong.

    He looked at Sam who ismanding and cursed. He was lost in the whole powerhouse battles and ignored the situation on the ground.

    But Sam took this chance to make a move.

    This caused some serious losses within the first ten seconds.

    Sam took out his cannon and started aiming at the targets, particrly the elites, and whenever there is a bird puppet that is shooting the bullets that attract the energy beam attacks from the sphere above the Mari n''s troops, he shot them down.

    Along with that, he threw poison and white crystal fragments as he liked.

    He started sniping one main target after another.

    Meanwhile, as soon as Gail left the post, the Divine league member made the crimson clouds gather together. Along with arge water current that came out of it that looked like crimson blood a crimson lightning bolt also came at Gail from the sky.

    He turned in the air and his knuckle duster started glowing with energy formting into a giant fist.

    It shed with lightning and the ripples that appeared because of the sh sent the water away in the form of droplets.

    Gail was a bit anxious about this and warned.

    "Don''t let the water touch you."

    His warning was not useful though, because everyone is in middle of a battle, there is not much they can do about it.

    They can only suffer.

    As the crimson water rained down on the soldiers continuously, they felt like their souls are being seared over mes.

    The water gave this weird burning effect to their blood that they wanted to cut off the portion of their flesh on which the water hasnded.

    It was that painful.

    Looking at Gail''s distracted face, the divine league member made his move. Gail reacted at thest moment and defended against it, but still took the brunt of the force and was pushed back.

    He suddenly felt a sense of crisising from his rear. A few divine league members who were hidden started attacking with the crimson spears.

    Gail resisted the momentum with all he got and barely managed to dodge them. But the spears went away and lodged themselves into the wall.

    The wall started cracking as crimson energy started spreading over and over.

    "What the fuck is happening? Why is everything going sideways?"

    Sam muttered to himself as he looked at the surroundings. All of the Divine league members starteding out and they are moving toward Gail.

    Avlyn looked at this scenario and smirked.

    "Kill every one of them. We don''t need to spare anyone. All of the Gaja n''s kin should die today."

    Her orders reverberated in the ears of every Divine league member and the Mari n''s soldier members. They all started attacking.

    Sam sighed and turned around to yell.

    "Oii, Cat. It is time for you to make an entrance. Shit is going sideways here."

    His words reverberated throughout the n.

    A snow-white streak suddenly came from within the n and it went straight for the divine league member who was about to enter the n through the broken wall.

    The streak caught him and both of them crashed into the ground as they wrestled.

    The Sonic cat disappeared from the spot after the attack letting the man get up again, but before he could do that, the streak came again and he felt arge w mark on his back. Blood started oozing out.

    Looking at this situation, another divine league member came to help him. But that turned out to be a big mistake.

    Gail is not really that cornered with the current situation and now that the pressure reduced, even more, he gained the upper hand.

 Chapter 1556 Retreat

    Chapter 1556 Retreat¡¡¡¡The Sonic cat moved like a light beam with a streaking noise as it scratched the opponentyer byyer.

    Soon his bones are exposed and then they also broke with insidesing out until the personpletely died.

    Everyone in the Divine league was stunned. They looked at this neer in stunning silence. They didn''t expect a beast of that level is within the Gaja n.

    But while they are still in shock the person that came to help thepanion stopped in his tracks.

    He turned around to see Gail beating the crap out of three other opponents. He is currently standing in the middle of three as he dodged their attacks and punched the crap out of their faces.

    Teeth flew and facial skin ripped apart as it flew in the form of fragments along with the blood.

    Gail''s body is covered with blood sprayed by his opponents and he is looking extremely angry. It is almost like he is trying to take out all of his anger on these people.

    Sam also noticed this and he kind of understood why he is so angry.

    These people wanted to use his daughter and nephew and then the whole army as their bait. This is going to be a troublesome thing.

    Gail wanted to go ahead and kill them all on the spot, but at this moment, Sam contacted him.

    "Saran and the elite team leader are having some hard times. You need to help them out."

    Gail who was about tond a punch on the face of the opponent who is still standing and suddenly made a move. He jumped through the encirclement and helped Saran and the Elite team leader who was slightly injured.

    The Grand elders didn''t even dare to stay there for a second before they left.

    Gail let the two rest and turned to Gamin and Yuvana.

    Currently, all five divine league members are trying to attack Gamin and Yuvana who are blocked by those crimson walls.

    Gail wanted to run and help them out, but he suddenly sensed a massive change. The three opponents who he left there standing took out these blood tokens and got ready to attack.

    The sonic cat who finished its opponents looked at Gail and both of them blocked the massive crimson spear attacks that were thrown at the city directly.

    The crimson spears projected huge crimson images and zoomed towards the city.

    Gail and the Sonic catunched their own attacks at them which are also projected into therge size.

    The sh of the spears and the attacks happened.

    *BOOM*

    Massive ripples spread across the area and the walls around broke apart.

    Some of the soldiers couldn''t take it and copse on the spot.

    The damage is too much.

    While things are like this, Sam noticed something else on the other side. Gamin and Yuvana who were stuck inside the walls for so long started gathering energy.

    With his energy vision, he could see that there is almost a sword storm brewing within the walls.

    Avlyn who felt this didn''t want to let this chance go. She looked at her subordinates and nodded.

    All of them gathered their best attacks and shot them at the tokens that they stuck to the wall.

    *BOOM*

    Arge explosive sound urred and at the same moment, the sword storm destroyed the walls.

    The divine league members were literally blown away by the impact. In the middle of it all, Gamin and Yuvana are standing while panting.

    A storm of dust and sword rays flew around and destroyed the surroundings. Many soldiers who are unlucky enough to take the aftershocks of it fell to the ground to their deaths.

    Sam looked at the chaotic battlefield in frustration.

    Everything went out of control within just a few minutes.

    The Divine league members just had to go all out at this exact moment, making everything difficult for him.

    The battles among the ordinary soldiers were stopped once again. Sivan and Sam looked at each other once again and both of them ordered the same thing at the same time.

    "Retreat."

    The battle has be too chaotic. Even though they can continue, the peak stage cultivators are going neck to neck. They don''t know if the battle will continue between them or not, either way, they need to regroup and work on a different strategy.

    But as soon as their orders were made, the peak stage cultivators also had the same ns. They also started running away from the battlefield.

    Gail and the Sonic cat stood up again as they spat some blood.

    They are panting slightly and they are clearly not in a pleasant and calm mood.

    Saran and the Elite team leader are injured a bit.

    The worst part is Gamin and Yuvana.

    Both of them are standing in the middle of that dust storm that barely settled.

    Avlyn wanted to take this chance and make a move, but she sensed the approaching presence of Cat and Gail that made her retreat with the rest of her team members.

    Gail and Cat went over to bring back Yuvana and Gamin.

    They entered the city through the cracks in the wall.

    Meanwhile, Sam who is standing on top of the wall is not ready to let this go yet.

    He took out a few very special bird puppets. Four in particr and let them fly towards the leaving Peak stage cultivators.

    They are not moving too fast. The puppets managed to catch up to them a bit, but they are not aiming their bullets at them directly. They just tried to maintain the distance between themselves.

    Among them, one divine league member who is too injured to keep up the same pace as others and not injured enough to be carried out is at the end of the group.

    Sam let the puppet that targeted that one person hovers and called the rest of them back.

    He then took the cannon and aimed it at the puppet.

    The first one is a shot so precise that it barely destroyed the puppet and let the bullets freefall.

    The energy beams were shot from the sphere at that one spot and they all targeted the peak stage cultivator who is running.

    But as the beams hit him, they also destroyed the bullets and among those bullets, there is one that is not just there for honing the beams from the sphere, instead, it is made of a different material that broke open and a humanoid figure came out of it.

    The humanoid figure moved with all the dexterity it could muster andtched on to the target.

    The energy beamsnded on the figure and the target.

    "ARRGGGGHHH¡­"

    The target screamed and tried to defend himself. In fact, he almost seeded. But before he could get away, the energy beams thatnded on the body of the humanoid creature made it glow brightly.

    *BOOM*

    Arge explosion urred. The spiritual energy fog covered everything in the surroundings and out of it came the divine league member crawling out.

    The energy lines appeared all over his body and almost all of his lower body is mangled in the explosion.

    The explosion range is very small and the impact is also very low, but its definitely effective now as the guy who is already severely injured couldn''t hold on to it for long.

    His teammates wanted toe back and help her, but they looked at the puppets that are hovering over them. Even though Sam pulled back most of the puppets, the ones that still exist are making them afraid. After all, there is no way for them to know which one is a real puppet with the undead creature inside them.

    And while they hesitated, their teammate died.

    After that was done, Sam focused on sniping people around Sivan.

    He didn''t aim at Sivan who witnessed the killing of the Divine league member.

    After all, it is still Sam''s body and it won''t help him much to kill him in that body. Sam is sure that it would also be a terrible waste since he is sure that the feather coat will be strong enough to protect Sivan and the other artifacts will do the rest.

    On top of that, Harbinger can really dodge

    Sam just focused on targeting the people around Sivan.

    He sniped a dozen of them before they went out of the range and to the camp.

    While they are escaping, the energy beams that are shot from the sphere already did some serious damage to them.

    Sam recalled all the soldiers after that and reactivated the dome barrier.

    He made the medical team and the soldiers that are still fit to start the treatment process. Since they already made most of the vials beforehand and every soldier is equipped with them, they can be used to treat the most basic injuries.

    Unless there is aplex surgical method is required, the medical personnel doesn''t need to bother themselves with most of the things here which increased the treatment speed.

 Chapter 1557 Losses

    Chapter 1557 Losses¡¡¡¡While all the soldiers are being treated, Sam and Gail are currently standing in a room with four beds upied by Gamin, Yuvana, Saran, and the Elite team leader.

    Gamin and Yuvana are injured severely. They are also pretty exhausted. Their wounds are also not healing as fast as they should.

    Compared to them Saran and the Elite team leader are pretty well off.

    "I told you guys not to jump in rashly. Look at what happened now?"

    Gail said in a reprimanding tone.

    "Who knew those bastards will have so many Divine Blood tokens? We were caught off guard. Anyway, I am pretty sure we are the winners of that exchange anyway."

    Gamin said as he gulped down another potion.

    Gail shook his head in resignation and Yuvana didn''t even bother to speak.

    "What are these Divine Blood tokens exactly? Are they reason for the wounds do not heal quickly?"

    Sam asked.

    "Divine Blood Tokens are made from the Blood Essence of Divine ne beings. They contain the special energy that only belongs to the Divine stage beings and when used in conjunction with normal spiritual energy attacks they really work wonders.

    That special energy will be mixed with the attack and it will cause a lot more damage.

    It is extremely torturous as the blood of those beingspletely corrupts and overwhelms every cell of normal beings.

    Some of the Peak stage Astral ne Consummate cultivators use these to train so that they can have a chance to break through to Divine ne.

    They try to absorb the Essence from this blood to make their body get used to that new Divine energy they are going to get.

    But the more they use it, the lesser their growth curve would be. They might be able to break through to the Divine ne a bit easier, but they would be sacrificing some of their potentials in the process and their Divine energy wouldn''t be as poor.

    Most people like us, don''t use it for that reason and that is why our bodies are not used to this. This causes some serious damage.

    It is an extremely expensive thing. I didn''t expect them to make a move using a whole lot of these things. We were really caught off guard."

    "So, how are these two going to be?"

    Sam said as he pointed at Yuvana and Gamin.

    Both of them have so many bruises all over their body. In fact, too many of them, and all of them have this crimson red hue.

    They are definitely injuries that are attached with that essence or whatever that is.

    "They will need a few days to get rid of thempletely. Even my injuries and Cat will need some time too."

    Gail said with a sigh.

    "Well, at least we really did a number on the Divine league members. A couple of them are dead, so there is little they can do at the moment since the rest of them are also seriously injured."

    "Tsk. Cowards. They escaped in the nick of the time. Or I would have killed all of them instantly."

    Yuvana said as she looked out of the window.

    Sam shook his head and walked out of the room with Gail.

    "We don''t know the exact situation on the other side. So, we cannot let our guards down. Gamin and Yuvana are not fit for the battle for some time. The other two can be healed at least. I will call in the n''s leader to take charge and I will put up the special undead creatures that are left at different positions on the wall.

    I cannot think of anything else for now.

    For any of the further ns, we need the information on how the situation is on another side.

    Our forces also suffered a bit. The only silver lining is that there are not as many deaths as they are on another side.

    We didn''t lose too many in terms of numbers.

    The worst part about that is most deaths are caused by the battles of the peak stage cultivators.

    I want you guys to tone down a bit."

    "I wasn''t able to do much in the situation before. If we hadn''t interfered the loss of life would be way too much. "

    "I get it. But try to divert the battles to empty space next time.

    Anyway, please go and recover as fast as you can. Currently, the war is stopped. We need to do as much damage control as we can and recover as much manpower as we can."

    "Alright."

    Gail nodded and went back inside.

    Meanwhile back in the Mari n''s quarters, a different kind of meeting is happening.

    Sivan looked at Avlyn and the group and spat on the floor.

    "How fucking dare you? How dare you put my forces in jeopardy?

    You dared to break the unspoken rules of the war?

    I would have lost every single soldier I had under my control."

    "Why are you freaking out? Gail and his brother are way too prideful to stoop as low as us."

    "Yeah? Really? That bastard Sam is not. He might be prideful, but he always pays back in dear. He ordered the subordinates to kill indiscriminately. I lost thirty percent of my forces just from that massacre.

    And your fight in the middle of soldiers killed another ten percent.

    Another ten percent are dead from the beasts and the energy beams.

    I lost half of the forces in one proper exchange with them and if I calcte the loss of each expert that is equipped with special equipment which could only be operated by them, then the losses are way too much.

    The one time you actually made a move, you made the situation a purgatory. You don''t know how much loss you have cost me."

    "Stop whining. You brat."

    Avlyn said through her gritted teeth. But as soon as she did, almost a dozen wounds opened up on her body as she spat out some blood.

    "There is not a single thing you did right today and you are trying to show your domination on me."

    Sivan yelled back and looked at the group crazily.

    Not a single divine league member is in a fighting state at the moment. They are all injured, exhausted and some people are almost unconscious.

    "You better figure this out. I don''t want to lose another bunch of my soldiers and waste my resources just because of your stupid and cowardly schemes."

    "Who do you think you are calling a coward, you little brat?"

    One of the subordinates of Divine league yelled as he tried to recover therge sh on his abdomen.

    "Compared to your opponents, you are nothing but cowards. You had to use two kids hostage, then you had to stoop to using soldiers as hostages and on top of that, you ganged up and used all kinds of petty tricks or whatever those divine blood tokens are up to.

    You are but pieces of ipetent shit that are trying to prove that you are stronger and more important than you actually are.

    I know I am a roguish bastard that I use all kinds of underlying trickspletely underhanded that is only suitable for the scum of the scum on thisnd and even I wouldn''t just use my soldiers as you did.

    You shameless and ssless cunts."

    Sivan left after ranting for a while.

    After that, there is a long silence within the room.

    Avlyn took three potions before she was able to stand up and walk. She looked at her subordinates and said.

    "There is not a single thing that went ording to our problem

    We lost too much. Some of us died. Only six of us can even recover and fight. The rest are wasted.

    The grand elders of the Mari n are also seriously injured.

    The tactics that were used until now are gone. We cannot use them again.

    We are shifting to n B."

    "n B? Are you sure Avlyn? Things are not going to be easy with that. The Divine league will be stretched thin.

    You cannot go back after we go with that. It will be an all-out between Gail and us. The people that are already looking at the Divine league like hungry beasts are going to jump in.

    We will be starting a realm war."

    Cray stepped in and asked.

    "But we have no other choice. The estimation of strength on Gamin and Yuvana was way off and there is another peak stage creature.

    The worst of all. That bastard Sam. Wepletely ignored him until now, but he killed one of us, even though he justnded the final blow.

    We are in some deep trouble with this situation. If we back down now, we would be giving Gail a chance to recover and hunt us down individually."

    "Alright, if you think so. But you need to talk with Godfather yourself."

    "I will do it. You don''t have to worry about it."

 Chapter 1558 Reinforcements

    Chapter 1558 Reinforcements¡¡¡¡"I don''t have anything to worry about Avlyn. But you should start worrying. You already crossed a hundred lines today. If the other party decides to do so, then you are dead meat.

    Particrly, if they get a hint that you are about to start a realm war right at their doorstep. It is not like you don''t know how Gail operates.

    You have tasted it first-hand. I just hope that you haven''t forgotten the lesson you learned that day."

    Cray left the room after he said those words.

    His tone is full of disappointment and exhaustion.

    Avlyn clenched her fists in anger. She gritted her teeth as he looked at Cray''s back. She wanted to say something. But she couldn''t bring herself to.

    She clearly remembered the day that she was taught a lesson, and that is one of the reasons that she couldn''t bring herself to let this go.

    Even if she was remembered as the hical and immoral wench of this war, she decided to go ahead with her ruthless ns.

    She will do anything and everything to get back at them.

    While she is drowning in her own thoughts, Sivan who appeared at the healing barracks looked at his subordinates.

    He contemted what he said to Avlyn and shook his head. The way he behaved ispletely out of character.

    He never really cared for people''s lives. As long as they serve his ambition, he would do anything and everything to achieve that.

    But recently he has been acting up. He is getting way too angry about things that didn''t matter before. He started caring about things that he had never done before. This is making him feel conflicted.

    As he was thinking, all of a sudden, someone arrived at the camp.

    An attendant came running to Sivan and informed him.

    Sivan was really surprised when he heard the news.

    He walked and met with the person. He is a member of the n leader''s Elite team and he came with a scroll and a recording crystal.

    Sivan opened them both to get the message from the n''s leader and he was shocked by the news. He finally had a smile on his face with it and he went back running to Avlyn.

    "We are getting reinforcements."

    He said it out loud gathering everyone''s attention.

    Avlyn frowned in askance.

    "The Mari n is sending the remaining forces. It seems like the Dusk organization is currently being handled. They are not an immediate threat. So, the forces that were put on reserve just in case areing. Except for the bare minimum forces that need to be there for the basic security of the n, everyone else is arriving at the battlefield by tomorrow.

    This is great news.

    With the blows we havended on the Gaja n, they obviously cannot recover too much. So, we can deal with them as we like.

    I think we can win this thing. Since the peak stage cultivators on the other side are also injured. With the grand elders that are currentlying to us, we can definitely hold them back before you recover.

    And since the grand elders are constantly attacking, the other parties won''t have any time to recover.

    I believe this is a great opportunity, you can still deal with the peak stage cultivators. What do you guys say?"

    Sivan said excitedly.

    The Divine league members exchanged looks. This is really exciting news.

    As long as the Peak stage cultivators thate here know what they are doing, they can certainly stay safe while still making sure that Gail, Gamin, and the rest don''t have any time left to recover to their top condition.

    Meanwhile, they can recover and attack them after.

    The best part is, that they don''t have to start their n B at the moment. They don''t have to start a realm war just to win against one n anymore.

    So, they are extremely relieved by the scenario.

    Meanwhile, in the Mari n''s main city.

    The n leader and his wife are sitting in the office once again. But he is not as tense and broken down as before.

    He looked put together and he is a lot calmer.

    "Thank you so much. Because of you, I was able to manage this situation. I never expected that the Blood Iron league and other organizations involving themselves could change the situation like this.

    The Dusk organization almost disappeared as if they never existed.

    Did you anticipate this reaction?"

    He asked his wife enthusiastically.

    "No, not at all. I expected a severe payback. I expected some chaos in other powers and possibly even for the Blood Iron league, but this is obviously more suitable for our current scenario.

    As long as Dusk organization doesn''t act up, we have an upper hand. At least for the moment, it doesn''t matter if they arepletely destroyed or if they are justying low.

    It will all be the same to us."

    "That is true. But Are you sure we should be sending all of our forces to the Gaja n''s side?"

    "Isn''t that what you wanted? You are the one who suggested we do so, why are you asking me this again?"

    "I know I asked for this, but I kind of expected some kind of bacsh from you. Some resistance. But you immediately agreed. Why is that?"

    "I felt like this is the proper time for you to send your forces. I happen to agree with your reasoning that is it.

    The Dusk organization disappeared for the time being. I heard they suffered some severe losses at the hands of others. This only shows that the only reason they won over us time and again, is because of the information they had on us beforehand.

    They just know us too damn well.

    Now that the opponents changed for them, they have to disappear for some time.

    If you take this time and defeat the Gaja n within a short period, then you can have your forces back before the Dusk Organization could recover from this blow."

    "Thank you."

    "Don''t mention it."

    She just smiled slightly and they went through the documents.

    As they were speaking, the forces already started moving to appear in the Gaja city.

    The next day, right after sunrise.

    Sam who is standing on top of the wall looked at the horizon through the telescope and frowned hard.

    He knew that they are in trouble as soon as he saw it.

    All the forces from the Mari n arrived and they are moving to the camp.

    He immediately jumped off the wall to go and meet Gail and the n''s leader.

    He exined the situation to them and everyone was shocked.

    The n''s leader felt a slight sense of despair.

    "How are we going to tackle this? There are way too many soldiers that areing. We barely managed to even the ying field with a lot of effort. What will happen to us with these extra forces?"

    "I don''t know. But we need to make a decision.

    The fate of the Gaja n depends on it. So you better take your time and make this decision only after considering all the factors. The time is not your friend, but try to stretch it as much as you can.

    You can either decide to stay and fight back or you can just move to the stray realm along with the rest and stay there.

    Even though it might be discovered by someone after they start taking over the territory, you will still be able to save yourselves and the rest of your n for some time.

    But fighting them is even riskier. You have way too much to lose and way too many people to defeat.

    Everyone will understand why lost and why you went away into hiding.

    So, don''t feel embarrassed to make that decision if that is what you want."

    Sam stood up and walked out. He let the n members decide what they want to do with the scenario.

    He might have arge agenda behind the whole war. He might need his body, but he cannot ask a n to risk itsplete survival over his situation.

    He can get his bodyter.

    He just waited for the answer. But to his surprise, he didn''t have to wait for long. He was called in within a few minutes.

    "We are fighting."

    "Are you sure you want to do this?" Sam asked in a surprised tone.

    He did expect the raise of this scenario, but not with such a short amount of time.

    "There is no point in hiding. We will be discovered sooner orter and even if we didn''t, it will be difficult to restore the n once again if we are inplete hiding.

    It is better to fight now."

    "If you think so. Then, we need to make the first move."

    "First move, shouldn''t we be waiting for them to make a move. We are the weaker party here."

    "Of course we are, so they won''t see using with our attacks first."

 Chapter 1559 Trump cards

    Chapter 1559 Trump cards¡¡¡¡"What are we going to do then?"

    The n''s leader asked.

    Without even knowing everyone kind of left all themand over the battle to Sam.

    They are asking for his opinion on everything and they are leaving every major decision to him. Even the soldiers and other subordinates in the n started calling him boss. He became the temporary leader of the whole thing.

    "I have a n. I need to talk to Ma about this though.

    It will rely a lot on his hands and his stamina."

    "Go ahead. We will oversee the recovery of all the injured soldiers. We need to prepare for the battle as fast as we can."

    "Okay, I will take my leave then."

    Sam left the meeting and went to meet Senior Elder Ma.

    "How much energy does it take for you to operate simultaneous one-sided space gates that have a transportation capacity of just a small amount of matter to different spots?"

    "What do you mean by different spots?"

    "Within an area, I want you to be able to send the things I want to any point I want."

    "Depends on how far it is. If it is within the range of n, then it is easy."

    "Not within the range of the n. You need to reach the premises of the Mari n''s camp."

    "It is not that far away, but a constant shuffle? Why? I can just make some transference tokens that could transfer things and mark the nodal point on top of the camp. You can rain things through them.

    Or I can make half a dozen one-sided space gates and throw the tokens through it. It is as easy as that."

    "That is not enough. Even though that constitutes what I am nning for the primary damage, I have a secondary n in line and I want the constantly shuffling channels that you could ess through one single point here.

    In fact, you must be able to ess multiple channels at the same time and all of them at the end.

    Can you get it done?"

    "It is a bit challenging for sure. But I think I can give it a try."

    "I am sorry, but I need a definite answer and I need it to be done within an hour."

    "An hour? That is a hell of a lot challenging. Why don''t you give me fifteen minutes and let me see if it works? I have a theory that could work and make this happen and if it does."

    "That I can spare. Thank you."

    "No problem. See you in fifteen minutes then."

    Sam nodded and left. He contacted the people who are operating the tower where Poison essence is being collected.

    "Unload the cores of the towers."

    As soon as his words were heard, the operators stopped their work and looked in horror.

    "Sir, do you mean all of them?"

    "Yes, all eight of the cores. I need all of them to be removed and ready. They shouldn''t be damaged and they should bepletely scot-free. We are going to take out our trump cards."

    "Yes, Sir."

    The operators gulped involuntarily as they went to work.

    Sam also sighed as he walked towards the soul tower that he used to control various objects around. He let Spectre call back all the spirits there are and in fact, all of them went to the battlefield where hundreds of deadbodies are lurking around.

    Sam controlled the souls and started making undead creatures of the deadbodies. Some worked and some even had intact souls, but some of them also didn''t work.

    The undead creatures included the Mari n forces, the Gaja n forces, and the beasts. Sam didn''t care if it is disrespectful to the n members that fought beside them.

    Currently, the stakes are really high and he didn''t want to lose any sort of advantage they could have.

    Mari n members obviously spectated as the undead creatures entered the Gaja city.

    Sam sent them to the undead refining tower, to refine them.

    While he let the Spectre handle the process of refining, he went to Ma again to ask about what he wanted.

    "It is going to work. I can a bunch of space tunnels to different points, but it will start with one single tunnel on this end and it will be branching out like awork by the time it reaches the camp area.

    Does that work for you?"

    "That actually works better for me. I want you to do this immediately. Will you be able to do it in an hour?"

    "I will do you one better. I can finish it within forty minutes. Since the basic framework and prototype are already done."

    Ma said as she showed some formation to Sam.

    The formation is actually the test formation that Ma made to check the theory.

    "Since I was testing it and the time is short, I went with arge prototype that could be converted for the main task."

    "Thank you. That is a great thing.

    Can you operate this from right here?"

    "Yeah, this is fine."

    "Okay, then. I will send you the weapons you need to send using this system. I will devise a scroll with all the attack sequences. Take your subordinates'' help if you need to, but remember the sequences.

    Activate each sequence as I ask you to.

    And within the scroll, you will get the points to which you need to connect from here to the camp area.

    Some are near and some are far. The farthest is the center of the camp though. So, I think you can manage."

    "That I can do. How many channels do you need?"

    "How many can you make?"

    "With my current capacity, I think I can operate twenty-four at the same time if I won''t activate them."

    "That is plenty. Even though the space channels are primary for the operation to seed. I think the weapons will do the rest. Please go ahead with the construction."

    After that Sam gave the rest of the instructions and requirements before leaving the room.

    He then went to the Poison tower.

    There eight formations are activated in front of the tower and within each formation, there is a rhombohedral crystal that is almost five feet tall. They are floating within the formations and they emitted a dark green light along with dark green poisonous fumes...

    Sam looked at the cores and then at the operators.

    "Your job here is done. I hope that you got a new understanding of poison control now after working here. Even though you worked, hard, you need to go and join the rest of the forces. There are someponents of the tower that you might find useful inbat.

    Like the essence condensers, the fume creators, or whatever you feel is useful. You can take them with you and they are yours for the life.

    You can use them inbat as you like. I hope you survive the war."

    "Thank you, sir."

    All of them saluted him and went away.

    They all had special uniforms, but nobody wanted to remove them and change them to normal soldier uniforms.

    They are very proud of the work they had done in the past few days. So, they are really insistent about keeping this identity as a part of this group.

    Sam waved his hand and all of the crystals along with the small formation tes that are responsible for these formations flew into the Divine dimension fragment.

    He then moved to the undead refining ce.

    "Are you done with the refining process?"

    Sam asked the operators.

    "Yes, sir. We just need a few minutes."

    "Do it fast. Finish it as soon as you can."

    Sam waited for ten more minutes before all of the undead creatures were refined and transported back to the frontlines.

    He then instructed the operators the same thing as he did with the poison tower operators.

    "Remove the cores. All sixteen of them."

    The operators were scared. The reaction is actually a bit more severe than the previous one.

    "Sir, but the cores, why do you want to separate them? They are extremely unstable and dangerous. They can create a lot of damage."

    "Yeah, they can create a lot of damage and even I really didn''t want to use them. But we don''t have another choice now, do we? Just remove them ording to the basic instructions."

    "Okay, sir."

    "Don''t damage them. Not even a scratch. As you said, it is very dangerous."

    "Yes, Sir."

    As Sam waited, the subordinates carefully dismantled the cores from the tower and ced them in formations made by formation tes.

    Just like how he did with the previous cores of poison tower. He did the same with these things. They were all sent to the divine dimension fragments.

    After that was done, Sam went to a separate ce where the crystal Symbiote was being made.

    He went there and collected all the crystal symbiote fragments. They are numbered in thousands. He ced all of them in separate spatial storage.

    He collected all of the things he needed and went to meet Ma.

 Chapter 1560 Rifts

    Chapter 1560 Rifts¡¡¡¡Senior Elder Ma already finished the device and waited for Sam toe.

    It is basically arge formation surrounded by a bunch of smaller formations. He sat in the central big one and operated the rest from there.

    Sam gave all the things that he collected from various spots along with a scroll.

    "Familiarize with all of the numbers and codes. I want you to follow them carefully and precisely. A single mishap and we can kiss this war goodbye."

    "Alright."

    As they were talking, both of them got a call.

    "The enemies are showing movement. They are entering into a formation. The elites and peak stage cultivators areing as well. They might make a move at any moment."

    Sam and Ma exchanged a nce and the former said.

    "The timing couldn''t have been more perfect."

    "I will be going. Stay in touch. Don''t focus on any other connection."

    "Alright."

    Sam went to the wall instantly and within a few minutes, he could see that the people are already getting into formations to march towards the Gaja city.

    When he noticed where they are grouping up, he couldn''t help but smile.

    "Ma, Channel number 20, Attack pattern three."

    "Alright."

    Senior Ma closed his eyes and focused as a small formation on his side started glowing and with just a wave of his hand, a bunch of objects flew from one of the spatial rings and went straight into that formation.

    They disappeared from the spot.

    At the camp of the Mari n.

    Sivan is guiding the forces out and made them stand in formation right outside the campgrounds.

    He is taking the statistics of the groups before marching into the battle. But right when he was about tomand them to step forward, he felt some fluctuations in the air.

    Since he is moving around on Harbinger at a certain altitude he was the first person to notice it.

    While he was confused, a spatial energy wave appeared out of thin air followed by arge horizontal hole.

    A bunch of poison grenades that are made of very delicate ss crystals started raining down from the hole.

    They all fell on soldiers who are standing in a formation along with a bunch of small white crystal fragments all over the ce.

    The soldiers who were ready to start the battle suddenly took the onught of poison and the white crystal fragments which they couldn''t even see.

    Sivan immediately covered himself with an energy shield. Even though he will not be affected by the poison, he is sure that the crystal fragments will deal some lethal damage to him.

    In fact, if he is careless, he might even die right there.

    After the initial shock, he started ordering his subordinates to move. But he was conflicted, on whether he should make them move forward or backwards. After some thought, he gritted his teeth and turned to the Grand elders that just arrived.

    They are looking at the fiasco waiting for Sivan''s orders.

    "Can you deal with that spatial rift?"

    One of the grand elders raised their hands and the space started constricting. But before he could act on it, the spatial rift was closed by itself.

    Sivan went back to the soldiers on the ground to take a look at them. Some of the soldiers who are quick enough to react on time managed to cover themselvespletely. Most of the soldiers that are not too quick, but at least have enough sense to react fast after the initial poison touch, managed to save themselves with slight damage.

    But there is one particr group of people. It cannot be said that they arepletely slow, it could only be said they are not fast enough.

    And they cannot be considered a small group because of their sheer number, but they are also not arge grouppared to the whole area.

    They took the full brunt of the poisons and the white crystal shards.

    They arepletely taken down. They are currently rolling on the ground and suffering as the white crystal shards entered their bodies trying to consume them.

    Because of the poison''s reaction to their bodies and the excruciating pain that is masking the effects of the white crystal as well as the excessive energy consumption to control the pain of the poison, the white crystal is easily upying the whole body.

    Even before Sivan could ry his next orders, some of the people already started turning into white crystals at a visible pace.

    Sivan gritted his teeth and ryed his orders.

    "Everyone, move away from the people who are affected with white crystals. We are marching forward. All of your run in the formation. We are going to take the city down.

    Grand elders, you need to keep an eye on any of these surprise attacks.

    Do not interfere with anything else. Your job is literally protecting us from massive attacks like this and dealing with the peak stage cultivators of the enemy.

    As I mentioned before. You don''t need to try and defeat them. Because that is absolutely impossible. The only thing you need to do is rattle them. Annoy them. They are already injured so just make sure that they don''t have time to recover.

    I think you already know the situation here. The Divine league members already pissed them off. If you don''t want all of the n forces to be annihted, do not and I mean do not ever make a move against the enemy soldiers."

    All the grand elders nodded and they took their positions in the formation as they all ran forward.

    Meanwhile, Sivan turned to the camp and ordered the soldiers that are in the process of recovery.

    "Bring the soldiers that are not infected by the white crystals into the camp. Heal them and try to recover them."

    "Yes, Sir."

    The soldiers moved and everyone did their tasks.

    Sam looked at it through the telescope and within the next three minutes, he spoke with Ma again.

    "Channel 19. Attack sequence 7"

    Another spatial rift opened above the soldiers and this time a bunch of ss vials were dropped. But instead of poison, they are filled with some ck coloured liquid. It is one of the liquid curses that are prepared.

    For some reason as soon as they left the rift, they shattered while they are still in mid-air and the ck liquid was sprayed all over the people.

    The grand elders made a move and tried to shield them from it. In fact, they even seeded for the most part. But Sam didn''t seem to care about the missed attack.

    Instead, he called for another attack sequence.

    From within the rift, white shattered crystals started raining down. They are so small they almost appeared like dust.

    They are even being swayed by a small breeze.

    The grand elders also defended against it to the best of their abilities. This caused the formation to slow down and created some disorder within them, but not many people were even affected.

    But what they don''t know is as they crossed that area of thend, the white powder that fell on the soil soaked within the ck liquid started acting weirdly. A very faint transparent smoke started appearing from it and there are very small white crystal fragments that looked like coarse soil grains everywhere.

    The soldiers and the armies moved forward and Sam also started ordering various attacks from different channels and every time the attacks are normal.

    Sometimes they are just pure liquid energy cells exploding. Sometimes they are special poisonous grenades. Sometimes they are cursed liquids and sometimes they are undead creatures.

    But all of them are definitely causing some loss and frustration among the soldiers. Even though not a lot of soldiers died in the whole process, a lot of them had their energy sapped from this, even though the grand elders helped them defend most of the time.

    This only stopped after they reached the range of sphere cannons. And upon reaching them, they have the cannons to deal with and then soon the energy sphere from the domes started acting up.

    It shot energy beams as hundreds of puppets flew over and shot bullets at various soldiers and even grand elders sometimes.

    The grand elders wanted to deal with the sphere directly. They wanted to enter the city directly. But Gail and the Sonic cat are standing on top of the wall. It is almost like they are challenging them and daring them to give it a try.

    The grand elders are of course a bit insulted, but they didn''t dare directly engage with them. Anyway, they only need to follow orders. So, they started attacking the walls of the city and some infrastructure.

    They didn''t try to stretch themselves too much and attack the spheres or domes of the city as they know for sure it will damage some normal soldiers and the rules can go to hell after that.

    Gail and the Sonic cat are thus under the guard duty as they defended against the attacks of the grand elders from various sides.

 Chapter 1561 Clash with Sivan

    Chapter 1561 sh with Sivan¡¡¡¡Gail panted as he ran across the wall and leapt into the air before punching out.

    Arge fist conjured with pure spiritual energy sted through the air as it punched a grand elder who is already running away.

    Since he was already walking to the different side, he managed to use the barrier he created at the point of impact to crash into the ground and escape vital damage.

    Gail wanted to follow up and finish him off. But that didn''t happen. He couldn''t do that no matter what. Because another grand elder tried to attack from the side and it is a woman that is causing the most trouble to him in this whole scenario.

    Most of her attacks are stealthy. There are no signs of it whatsoever no matter how much he tried and he could only see them at thest minute.

    They are attacks of the earth element and he is trying to shake off the nodes at the edge of the city which Gail is taking so much effort to save with all he got.

    Things have been like this for over an hour.

    Sonic cat is also dealing with the same situation on the other side. All of the grand elders are on perfect sync. One person attacks an open spot on the wall and another person attacks Gail or sonic cat at the same time.

    They have to dodge their attack and also block the attack against the city. Before they could pursue the attacker, another attack will beunched by a different persona and they have to move around and block those attacks.

    It is like a never-ending process.

    But the more time passed, the more nervous the grand elders are getting.

    Because their n is to just make Gail and the cat exhausted and let other peak stage cultivatorse and take their ce.

    But no matter how much they tried, they are unable to do that. Gail and Sonic cat almost acted like they have unlimited energy.

    Not a single attack went past them and not a single moment where they left faltered.

    They were also not injured at all.

    This made the grand elders scared shitless.

    While the peak stage cultivators are keeping the situation at this stalemate, the regr soldiers are fighting like crazy.

    This time the energy beams from the sphere are at full power and they are also more consistent than ever.

    They are attacking the soldiers constantly and Sam didn''t shy away while using all kinds of poison weapons. Grenades, poison spheres through the spear cannons, poison vials and ranged attacks from the wall.

    Along with that, the cursed undead creatures, and the cursed liquid attacks, Sam managed to keep this one hour in check with just those things and he has also been very generous with the white crystal shards he used.

    He managed to convert at least a hundred soldiers intoplete white crystals and then he exploded and broke those white crystals so that they will attack other people around.

    But now, most of the undead creatures are gone. Sam even used liquid energy cells trapped inside the remaining ones and exploded in traps making the soldiers suffer severe losses.

    Sivan was actually surprised by how generous Sam is with his attacks.

    It is almost like he doesn''t care anymore.

    He has two spections as he thought about this. One of them is that Sam doesn''t care anymore and is going all out with a proper n and the second one is that the Gaja n knows that they are fucked and they are just using up everything they have in their hands.

    Either way, it is bad news for him.

    Whether the Gaja n is losing and they are dumping everything or they have the n, Sivan is going to suffer some severe consequences.

    "What is your next n? My soldiers are dying here?" Sivan asked Avlyn.

    "We don''t need to care much about the soldiers. You can y that battle as you like. We only need to care about the peak stage cultivators for now. Alright, but you better inform me, when you want to fight the peak stage cultivators.

    I don''t want to use up all of my soldiers."

    "Of course, we don''t want those pain in the asses when we areunching an attack either. They are just going to be in our way."

    "But there is one problem. What if they escape in this situation?"

    "We already blocked off all of the exits of the space gates from the Gaja n. Even the other sides of those wormholes are blocked. We also managed to clear a bunch of stray realms from the memories of the people we killed.

    I would say there are not many exit points for the Gaja n. Anyway, we already made some arrangements to know if they are escaping."

    "Whatever. As long as you have everything under your control. So, when do you want me to bring my soldiers back? I think Sam is about to send the soldiers of Gaja n again. My side even though has more numbers is also suffering more losses."

    "Fifteen minutes more and tell your grand elders to use everything they have. Tell them to not bother to store even a tiny bit of energy. They can exhaust themselvespletely."

    "That will put them in danger."

    "Then use your escape transference tokens. The ones that you linked up to the camp here."

    Sivan frowned upon hearing this. He didn''t even speak.

    Avlyn just continued.

    "One of my colleagues just looked at a buried pir under the campgrounds right in your tent. I mean, it is pretty stealthy. Whatever technique you used to make it blend in and appear as the soil is really great, but the spatial fluctuations, you didn''t mask properly.

    So, use those tokens and send the Peak stage cultivators away. I am pretty sure you don''t have any other uses for them.

    And don''t worry, I will not call you out on the fact that With all the righteous bullshit you spewed about yourself not wanting your soldiers to die and all that shit, you kept an escape n out just for you.

    It is not weird at all."

    Avlyn cut the call immediately.

    Sam soon sent all of the soldiers from within the Gaja n. Surprisingly, he didn''t keep anyone else in the city.

    He went all out without leaving any spares. This is almost like a final showdown.

    Sam also jumped down the wall and joined the battle. Of course, he currently stationed himself at the edge of the wall with the cannon aimed at the enemies as he sniped and provided cover for many people more efficiently.

    But he is also ready to get into a hand to handbat if needed.

    Sivan who saw this was very tempted to go against Sam and fight it out with him.

    As he was hesitating, he looked at his own self now. He loved the current body he is in. He is not crippled. It has myriad elemental energies. He is immune to poison and is dexterous, agile, strong and tall. A perfect warrior body.

    He has treasures like a coat made of Golden crow feathers and the hoverboard under his feet that made him fly all over like wind.

    Along with all of that, all the things that he gained because of the knowledge inside his current head.

    He really didn''t want to lose it out and looking at Sam still standing there with that crippled body with the same unwavering confidence and strength made him feel like a failure.

    "Are you guys sure that this is going to be the final attack?"

    He once again contacted Avlyn just to confirm.

    "Yes. I am pretty sure. Because once Gail and that stupid cat are exhausted, it will be pretty hard for any of them to step up with the Divine blood tokens we have at our hands. We can directly barge in to the city and deal with them."

    "Okay, then I will also settle my business by then."

    As soon as he said that, harbinger dashed through the crowd and made its way towards Sam.

    Wind des circled around the board as they aimed at Sam who is standing there with his cannon shooting a bunch of soldiers.

    He noticed Sivaning toward him, but he didn''t bother too much with them.

    He even gave a passing nce and went back to dealing with the soldiers.

    Sivan got angry and swung the wind des at Sam, but to his surprise, just when they were about to be released, the harbinger acted on its own as it diverted the wind des to the ball.

    Sam smirked at this. He looked at Sivan''s confusion and aimed the cannon at him.

    The harbinger saved him before he could react.

    Sivan once again started attacking Sam with the wind des from the harbinger, but they are diverted.

    Sam shook his head and said.

    "Don''t bother you dumb fuck. Harbinger won''t let you attack me. It is just you and me now. You can just store it away so that I can use itter."

 Chapter 1562 Clash with Sivan II

    Chapter 1562 sh with Sivan II¡¡¡¡Sivan looked at Sam hatefully and tried it again. But Harbinger is indeed resisting and throwing the wind des off.

    "Don''t you get it? It cannot harm the soul that it was connected to, you idiot. The spirit that was generated in that board is way too smart. It is carrying you on pretty well even though you don''t know how to ride that board properly isn''t it?

    You got all that knowledge from my soul. Put it to some use dumbass."

    "Don''t look down on me. You bastard."

    Sivan said as he leaped down from the harbinger. He stored the board away and took out the executioner sword.

    He started swinging it at Sam. Sam blocked the sword with the reaper sword.

    He only has one proper leg and one peg leg. As for arms, he only had one, but he still managed to keep up with Sivan who is obviously not very skilled at using the sword like Sam.

    As they shed and Sam yed along, Sivan noticed that something is wrong with the sword.

    "They also have spirits. Don''t tell you don''t know that."

    Sam said sarcastically. Even though weapon spirits are much more simple and they are not as smart as the one in harbinger and the feather coat, they still offer some resistance when they are attacking the soul they are linked to.

    Currently, weapons epted Sivan''s soul that merged with Sam''s dormant soul. But there is a connection with Sam''s soul too. So, they are extremely resistant tonding lethal blows on Sam.

    In fact, Sam already noticed this when he shed with Sivanst time. That is how he managed to take back reaper''s sword pretty easily.

    It was not working ording to Sivan''s wishes and Sam''s superior skills easily allowed him to take the sword away.

    Now as both swords are shing again, they could both feel the resistance. But Sam is not worried about it. Even if the reaper sword is not really allowing him to kill and attack Sivan lethally, he can still y it around.

    Sivan who got pissed off by this though immediately changed weapons. He took out the shadow sword.

    Sam blocked the sh as he saw Sivan activate partial shadow fusion.

    "How are you doing?" Sam asked with a smile.

    The shadow sword suddenly started glowing and it threw Sivan off to the back. He felt like his arms are being cut apart by something.

    This even canceled his partial shadow fusion and stunned him on the spot.

    "You are not really worthy to use shadow sword against me. Don''t even try it."

    Sam said casually before taking a step back. He stored the reaper sword away and said.

    "let''s settle this normally. There is no use in keeping those weapons."

    Sivan looked at him hatefully, but still stored his weapon away before making a move.

    His body turned to a glowing blue and then into slight purple. He is using water elemental fusion along with the poison.

    "Good thinking. You didn''t go for direct firepower. That is unexpected. It seems like you have some brain cells after all."

    Sam said calmly as stood still and waited for Sivan to attack.

    Sivan extended his arms and tworge water spears that are colored with purple poison were shot out of them.

    Sam just stood there and let the water spearse at him. An energy shield appeared in front of him at thest moment and diverted the water spears.

    But before they could be deflectedpletely, the spears copsedpletely and sshed all over the shield.

    Sam didn''t react at first, but even after two seconds, the water didn''t go away. Then only he noticed that the water ispletely epassing the energy shield because of Sivan''s control and trying to bypass it.

    Sam didn''t let it happen though. The energy barrier expanded all over and covered him like a sphere. The water tried to enter but wasn''t able to.

    Sivan lunged forward and threw a punch with void style.

    The punch filled with water elemental energy spread across the barrier and exploded.

    *BOOM*

    The barrier cracked and broke open, but Sam already jumped backward and escaped the impact. Not just that, he directly threw an energy bullet at Sivan who reacted quick enough to intercept it with arge water sphere.

    The water sshed and rained down. Sam had to cover himself with the energy barrier again to avoid the poison seeping into his body.

    Sivan took this chance to throw a water sphere at Sam, which was blocked again.

    The battle continued. Sivan focused on the poison too much and wanted to make Sam suffer with it, but Sam didn''t bother too much with the attacking and focused on blocking most of the time.

    And whenever he got the chance he threw energy bullets which were intercepted by the water sphere.

    While the battle is going on like this, the whole area around them started changing. The water that contained potent hydra poison destroyed the vegetation around them and the soil started corroding because of it.

    The other people are avoiding the ce like a gue.

    They looked at the two main characters of this war.

    Even though it is a war between the Gaja n and the Mari n, it is also a war between Sivan and Sam. They are also part of the trigger that this war is happening.

    Sivan threw a bunch of water spears at Sam and went straight after them tond a punch on Sam''s barrier.

    The spears were blocked and Sam was ready to block the punch as well, but before he could do that, he was caught off guard by the earth under his feet.

    Sivan''s body turned from the purple water to that earth element.

    The soil under him turned into quicksand and swallowed his foot along with the peg leg.

    Sam was surprised by this, but he was also impressed.

    This is actually his own move. He used it a lot of times in closebat and to think he fell victim to it is rather amusing.

    But he didn''t worry. He just stood still and blocked Sivan''s punch before shooting an energy bullet at a close range.

    Sivan dodged it and let it go past him before making his move. He grabbed Sam''s hand and pulled him closer to hold him in a chokehold.

    Sam resisted of course, but he felt that something else is happening under his feet. He suddenly sensed something at his feet and before he could realize it, a vine coiled out and wrapped around his normal leg and the peg leg.

    Thorns popped up and dug into Sam''s leg.

    He instantly reacted and used an energy beam attack from his mouth at Sivan who stepped back immediately.

    Then he used ripple energy to disturb the quicksand effect before kicking himself out of it. He rolled back to the ground and used his observation ability to check his own leg.

    When he realized that there is no poison he sighed in relief and then looked at Sivan in disappointment.

    Sivan couldn''t even stand that disappointing look and immediately made a move.

    Earthen spikes came up behind Sam as Sivan attacked him from the front. An energy wall appeared behind Sam stopping the spikes from attacking him while he tackled Sivan''s punch.

    He caught it with his own palm and used the force to bend Sivan''s arm at the elbow joint making the distance closer.

    Then energy solidified around Sam''s peg leg as he took that support and his right leg went straight ahead to deal a blow behind Sivan''s knee, making his footing unstable.

    Sam then used the chance to twist Sivan''s arm while he is falling downwards and used that to hold Sivan in a chokehold before pinning him to the ground.

    But Sivan didn''t panic. Instead, he simply released himself from earth elemental fusion and shifted to the metal before creating spikes from his back.

    Sam felt the changes in the energy and understood things wouldn''t go well.

    But he was already prepared, instead of directly leaving, he injected a small strand of energy into the back of Sivan and exploded it with ripple energy.

    Sivan''s fusion process was disrupted, but the impact is a little higher than Sam expected, which made the hand take some recoil loosening his grip.

    Sivan took the chance and made his move. He first escaped and threw another punch at Sam''s peg leg with void style.

    The leg exploded and Sam was thrown off.

    "The void style is pretty cool Sam. I must really thank you for teaching me this. Even though you didn''t teach it to me directly, your body is pretty used to it and constant reying of the memories of how you destroyed yourself while practicing it, really helped.

    You are an excellent teacher for a bastard.

    After all, as a bastard, all the lessons in your life should have been taught by some pricks who beat the crap out of you, for someone like you to have such an amazing teaching affinity. It is rare, isn''t it?"

 Chapter 1563 Tied Beasts

    Chapter 1563 Tied Beasts¡¡¡¡Sam looked at Sivan coldly.

    Anger is bubbling inside his heart. He wanted to strangle Sivan''s neck right at the moment. He has to use a lot of self-control to suppress the urge of making a rash move.

    He sat up and waved his hand to get the staff from the storage. He used that to stand up. Now he only has one leg and one arm. The peg leg is also gone, but he is not at all worried as he held the staff with one hand and leaned on it to get the support.

    Sivan looked at him with a smirk. He believed that he would be able to beat Sam easily in the current state. Because he is sure that he cannot pull off anything in that crippled body if is in Sam''s shoes.

    Sam took a deep breath as he looked at Sivan changing his body once again. It changed from a metal element to a fire element. Golden mes enveloped him as he looked at Sam who just stood there.

    "Since you won''t be able to jump around as you did previously, let''s finish this quickly."

    As he spoke, his lungs started expanding as he took in deep breaths. The surrounding energy is being sucked in as he aimed at Sam.

    It is one of the Golden Sun crow''s bloodline techniques. Sam tapped the staff on the ground and arge sphere made of pure energy enveloped him and a few feet radius around him.

    The sphere started expanding as newyers overyers of spiritual energy started upying it.

    He constantly reinforced the barrier as he waited for the impact toe.

    *BOOM*

    Arge streak of golden mes surrounded him and the barrier.

    Sam felt the heat reaching his face even though there is a few feet gap between him and the mes. He also felt that it is really hard to maintain the barrier as it is.

    But he gritted his teeth and tried his best.

    That trial onlysted for a minute though. The barrier almost reacted like metal being melted over the mes. When Sam noticed this, he immediately thought of something and made the barrier disperse into energy ripples away from him and made them explode through void style.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    A series of explosions happened as the mes dispersed one by one.

    Sam just stood there and still didn''t move. Another sphere formed around him even before Sivan could get ahold of himself from the dispersed bloodline attack.

    Sam calmly stared at him while creating a small energy orb within the sphere.

    The orb looked like a normal energy bullet, but a lot denser and it was much more stable. The orb flew out of the barrier like it was prating a soap bubble.

    Sivan was ready to defend himself, but instead of going for him, the orb just flew past him into the air and hovered there.

    Sivan frowned and was looking at the orb, but the next moment, he had to focus on Sam again, because he got ready with a bunch of energy bullets that are being shot from the end of the staff.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    A series of explosions happened and Sivan used the light elemental fusion to dodge them. He then looked at Sam again and wanted to use another bloodline art.

    He could see that Sam is panting a bit and with the energy vision, he can see that Sam''s energy is not as abundant as before.

    So, he wanted to exhaust Sam with the bloodline arts.

    If Sam had heard these thoughts, he would have definitely scoffed. Because no matter how much of an overwhelming advantage Sam has over his opponent, he definitely wouldn''t use bloodline arts left and right which would exhaust his energy.

    That is in stupid.

    And he is right. Even though Sivan justified these thoughts as his way of exhausting Sam and using his abundant energy to his advantage, the real reason is he just wanted to show off against Sam.

    He wanted to show Sam that his invincible body ispletely under Sivan''s control and there is nothing Sam can do about it while being attacked by the best attacks possible by this body.

    He wanted to show Sam that he can do whatever he wants with the body. He wanted to make him feel jealous.

    He changed the fusion element and started attacking Sam with different elemental energy first.

    The lightning elemental energy.

    He is covered with silver lightning as he punched the spherical barrier.

    The barrier vibrated with every punch and fluctuated. Sam let himnd those barrage of hits and he tried his best to hold the barrier up.

    When it was about to break, he once again let the energy of the barrier ripple away and explodes at the same time.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    A series of explosions urred once again. But this time Sivan managed to react quickly enough to not be caught off guard because of that and jumped backward out of the st zone.

    He then activated another bloodline art. His windpipepressed itself as he looked at the sky and howled like a wolf.

    *HOWWWLL*

    With a single howl, arge bolt of silver lightning shot off from his body into the sky and created a massive cloud from which a bunch of lightning bolts was shot toward Sam.

    Sivan looked at Sam to see if he had nailed the timing.

    Since he took the first attack on Sam exploding the barrier and there is a small interval he noticed in creating the first barrier and creating the second one, he wanted to use that small interval to kill Sam and bombard him with the attacks.

    But he was disappointed with the results.

    Sam used the energy barrier shields he made for Grivon''s business.

    He used a bunch of them at the same time while making the barrier with his own staff and he also shot a bunch of energy bullets at the lightning that ising at him.

    Sivan is frustrated and confused at the same time.

    The bloodline attacks are the strongest attacks there are. They are very powerful for people of the same level to even consider blocking. But Sam is managing to block it every time. He couldn''t help but feel confused.

    He looked at the sky and howled again making the lightning strike Sam again, before closing his eyes in that gap and letting his consciousness go into the Divine dimension.

    Within the Divine dimension, in the fields of different elemental energies. The beasts are currently tied up.

    All of them. Yanwu, Sky, Mia, Raiju, Forrest Bear, the shadow mouse, and even the Void hopper, are all tied up within different elemental energy zones that are notpatible with them.

    Yanwu is currently tied in the ice elemental energy zone.

    Sivan did this after he got the major portion of Sam''s memories. Within those things, there are details regarding the Myriad Beast bloodline cultivation technique that Sam''s body is cultivating. The details that he got made him realize that Yanwu and the rest of the beasts have a contract of equality with him.

    But he also realized that their lives are pretty much tied together. Beasts are too much in love with Sam and the only reason that they are even tolerating the contract currently is because they are sure that Sam will be back and also the familiarity they are gaining with Sivan as he absorbed Sam''s soul bit by bit.

    There is something else that led him to tie these beasts up though.

    As the beasts felt the familiarity increasing with Sam and particrly when they realized there is only a small portion of the soul fragment that he couldn''t absorb and it will be dissolved as soon as he killed Sam, they wanted tomit suicide to weaken him.

    Even though he might not be killed by it, a good portion of his soul will be damaged. They wanted to weaken him with the battle with Sam and they also made a collective n that if by any chance Sivan wins the battle, the very next moment, they will all kill themselves in a collective suicide which will make Sivan die as well.

    This is to make sure that they won''t end up in Sivan''s control.

    They don''t want to be his beasts. They don''t want to be in a contract with them. They are very adamant about this situation.

    Because as soon as Sivan absorbs thest part of the soul, they will be unable to distinguish between Sivan and Sam, in fact, they might not even be different people. They would bepletely bound by the contract.

    So, because of this Sivan immediately tied them up as soon as he realized. He is waiting for the soul to be fully merged and so that he can release them.

    He used the Divine dimension''s powers. Since the person who owns that dimension is like a literal god there and can control anything, he tied them all up and asionally tried to squeeze out some info from them.

 Chapter 1564 Bloodline Arts

    Chapter 1564 Bloodline Arts¡¡¡¡Sivan''s consciousness reached Yanwu who is chained up by the Divine dimension in the icy mountains.

    [What do you want you prick?]

    Yanwu crowed angrily.

    "I want to know why the bloodline attacks are being defended by Sam."

    [You are fighting with him already? So, I can finally be free from this cold ce.]

    "You tell me what I want to know, then I will let the cold go from your body right now."

    [I am not going to tell you anything. I would rather die. Anyway, I don''t know anything rted to that to begin with. So, no point in asking me.]

    "I highly doubt that. From the memories, I clearly know that you are the one who has the most knowledge about this cultivation technique. You definitely have something rted to this. Your sole job for the first fifteen years of life without any cultivation is to prepare to assist Sam with the knowledge.

    You tell me now."

    [You dumb bastard. The bloodline attacks are being blocked by Sam. How would I know what he is thinking? Because of his soul is out of the body and the dormant soul''s presence in this body, we are unable tomunicate.

    Can''t you even understand that logic?

    As for knowing whether he is blocking it because of being linked to the body with the small fragment of his soul? I don''t know.]

    "I won''t take that for an answer. Does the soul connect to have an effect or not?"

    Yanwu just stayed silent without answering. He ispletely tired of this bullshit.

    "If you don''t tell me now, I will torture that Void Hopper."

    [You can''t do anything to the little guy. He is way too fast for you. At least pick a better target if you want to threaten me.]

    "Of course I know I can''t do much to him even in this Divine dimension, because of his weird unique situation.

    But this time I am going big with him. I cannot deal with the rest of the beasts as they would be too adamant and wouldn''t break because of Sam''s presence right outside.

    Which I assume is already shared by you to them through the connection you guys have.

    But you do know that I can emotionally torture that Void hopper right?

    I have all the memories of Sam being tortured by the world. He had a tough childhood. You all treated that void hopper very tenderly as it was just a kid and didn''t let it experience all of this.

    I will forcefully inject every harsh memory Sam ever had into his head and see if the Void hopper will change its mentality.

    [YOU BASTARD] Yanwu crowed crazily as it looked at Sivan.

    "Anyway, what will happen if I send the torturing image to Sam? Will he be able to keep his cool after¡­"

    [No.]

    "What do you mean, no?"

    [Sam is not dealing with the bloodline attacks because of the soul connection. He is doing it all on his own.]

    "Why is it so hard to believe you?"

    [Think whatever you want. But lying is an act that ispletely beneath my pride. Don''t you dare insult it.]

    "Okay then, tell me why he is able to deal with the bloodline arts."

    [I don''t know the exact reason. But from what I have seen before when my tribe members sparred with each other or seriously fought, they used to attack each other with bloodline arts, but others always managed to find a way to block it.

    And most of the blocks are made, not with sheer power but rather with their knowledge of the art itself.

    Every bloodline art has some weaknesses within it. As long as one knows the weak points and knows how to use them, one can just escape them. Sam must be doing it.]

    "Was that too hard, you dumb crow?"

    Sivan''s consciousness went back to his body. He looked at Sam who is still struggling with the lightning strikes from the sky.

    The barrier is about to crack once again.

    Sivan activated energy vision to take a look at the barrier at the moment and saw something amazing.

    The barrier''s energy right before it broke became a bit unstable, but it is divided into parts. All of those parts of energy created ripples as they moved towards the sky.

    They traveled in a weird path that as the ripples touched the lightning at a certain point, the bolts are disappearing instantly with their energy dispersed and finally the energy hit the clouds and dispersed.

    During the whole process, Sivan saw what is happening at the basic level.

    In simple words, Sam is just attacking the bloodline art with high precision at its weakest points. The points where if attacked the attack could disperse.

    He was already surprised by the sheer power each bloodline art carried. Now to think that there is someone who can deal with such a powerful attack without breaking a sweat, he felt insignificant once again.

    He instantly shook those thoughts off of his head and made his move. He understood that Sam is dealing with these bloodline arts because he knows them like the back of his hand.

    But there are some arts that he obviously doesn''t know and he can utilize that to his own benefit.

    As he was thinking that, he also noticed Sam is panting slightly. He is clearly exhausting his energy at a faster pace because of his defense against the bloodline arts.

    He suddenly had a few thoughts in his mind and he is very tempted to test them out.

    In this excitement, what Sivan failed to notice is that apart from the first orb Sam created which is hovering around there are two more orbs that appeared out of nowhere.

    They are also hovering around in the air without attracting much attention.

    Sivan just focused on changing the elemental fusion again. The silver lightning disappeared and the body started emitting both earth and metal elemental energies. After they changed bodies, the next bloodline that Sivan activated is of Dia when he reached the peak stage of transcendence in the Astral ne.

    And this happened to be something that Sam has no idea about. Even if he has a slight idea about what the bloodline art is, that is only from the point of view of Dia herself.

    Sam definitely never tried this before and he is also sure that Sam would have no idea on how the attack wille from a human''s body.

    Sivan''s currently went through thebined fusion of metal and earth elements.

    He looked at Sam with a smile.

    Sam still has that spherical barrier around as he shot some energy bullets at Sivan.

    A few rock fragments rose from the soil around and they shot straight ahead at the energy bullets, intercepting them.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Amidst the series of explosions, Sivan closed his eyes and started gathering earth elemental energy into his palms. The energypressed itself into severalyers over his palm and after gathering enough of it, he mmed the two palms to the ground.

    The earth elemental energy exploded and spread all across the ground surrounding Sam.

    Cracks appeared and massive pieces of rock and soil came out of the ground leavingrge pits.

    Sivan still had his eyes closed.

    Sam looked at the rocks surrounding him and had a bad feeling about this. He not only reinforced his barrier once again, he also created a bunch of energy bullets that are shot in different directions.

    The rocks and the soil that is hovering all over were hit by the energy bullets and exploded, but there is not much of a change in the situation because, the blocks of rocks and soil are reinforced with earth elemental energy and even after they are hit by the energy bullets, they just broke into some smaller pieces.

    They didn''t just disappear into thin air or copse back onto the ground.

    Sivan smirked at Sam''s useless attack and proceeded with the attack.

    All of a sudden, Sam felt like a massive amount of crushing force pressing him onto the ground.

    Because he is holding the staff with only one hand and bncing the body that has only one leg with it, he slipped and fell onto his knee before he could use the staff and stay still again.

    But it was already toote. He felt the gravitational force attracting all of the rocks and soil blocks around him. As they moved towards him, they started glowing with earth elemental energy and came at him with full force.

    Sam gritted his teeth as he tried to reinforce the barrier even more.

    But he realized soon that is mostly futile.

    *BANG*

    All the rocks hit the sphere at the same time and Sam could see the cracks appearing instantly.

    Fighting against the force pulling him to the ground along with the force that is pushing these rocks to him, is extremely tough. Sam almost felt like his whole head is about to explode as he tried his best to defend himself.

 Chapter 1565 Metal Spikes

    Chapter 1565 Metal Spikes¡¡¡¡Sivan looked at Sam struggling to keep the barrier intact.

    This gave him weird pleasure. The pleasure that he craved more and more.

    So as Sam struggled with the earthpletely covering him from all sides, Sivan made another motion just like before and mmed the earth once again.

    This time, even more rocks and blocks of soil starteding toward the sphere. The force increased and the barrier almost broke, no matter how much Sam reinforced it. After some thought, he took a deep breath and changed the energy within the barrier with the repel style.

    The energy tried to slip the rocks away into different directions and in fact, it worked for a bit, but as soon as they went off track a bit, they turned back and mmed against Sam once again.

    The gravitational pull was focused on Sam and he became a direct victim of that. In a desperate attempt, Sam used the ripple and void stylebined to release as many energy waves as he can to destroy as many rocks as he possibly can.

    *BOOM* *CRASH*

    The explosion urred with the rocks crashing into each other with Sam in the middle. Sivan kept on controlling the pull as he made the crushing force increase with every passing second.

    Sam felt suffocated in the middle and soon he started feeling sharp spikes popping up from the rocks and the soil that is constricting him.

    It seems like Sivan wanted to just skewer him without any chance to fight back. Of course, Sam didn''t n to just stay there and be pierced like this.

    The middle section of the staff opened as arge energy beam was shot out of it.

    Arge hole opened in the middle of the rock and it exploded.

    The severe explosion even impacted Sam who has locked in the middle also, but he didn''t care about that and just focused on getting out.

    As soon as the explosion urred, the rocks were thrown off because of the force. Sam used this chance to just slip off from the gaps along with his staff.

    He then mmed the staff on the ground creating another massive ripple and explosion at the same time and jumped away using the recoil.

    The rocks and soil crashed together once again.

    Sam rolled on the ground before finally stopping and standing up. He panted like crazy. He didn''t expect that Sivan could get used to his body this much.

    This is definitely unexpected and unnatural in a way. Even he had to take some time to adapt to the bloodline arts. For Sivan to get used to them and be this fluid about using them, is definitely something that caught him off guard.

    He became extra cautious as he looked at Sivan.

    He cannot let it slip by.

    Sivan watched as the attack crashed into itself and negated itself.

    He stopped the attack and looked at Sam who already prepared another barrier. Along with the barrier, there are two more orbs that flew into the air which he also noticed.

    By now there are five orbs that attracted his attention. Once again, before he could take action a myriad of energy bullets came at him.

    Sivan dodged them with ease and blocked the rest with earth elements as he asked.

    "Is it really the only thing you are left with?

    With these bullets and the crippled body, you really thought you could take me down? Just how much do you underestimate me?"

    As he spoke, metal elemental energy started spreading across his body as spikes appeared from various parts.

    Elbows, knees, and particrly the back.

    The metal spikes just protruded out until they are very thin before they separated themselves from his body and hovered around him.

    The spikes kept on multiplying with every second as Sivan looked at Sam casually.

    At the same time, all of the weapons in the few dozen-meter radii started moving. The weapons and armor that were with the dead bodies on the battlefield.

    They all moved towards Sivan. The armors tore themselves apart as they turned into a bunch of sharp shards of metal as they revolved around.

    Sam looked at the whole thing in confusion. His energy vision is clearly showing that the metal energy is attracting them, but it is also linking them all together within an invisible force.

    It didn''t take a lot of thought to figure out that it is maic force. But he couldn''t understand why Sivan is collecting all of these all of a sudden when he was going with the flow of bloodline arts.

    Dia''s bloodline arts are of two kinds. One is the earth element one, which Sivan just used the other one is metal element one which is actually a veryplicated one and is mostly rted to the flesh-eating habit of the Mare.

    It actually focuses on the blood of the target. The iron within the blood is targeted by the intense and delicate maic force. The limbs, organs, and other parts within the body are forcefully torn apart and minced into a paste.

    That is how that skill actually works. So, he is very confused about what Sivan is doing.

    But Sam took this chance of Sivan preparing to make his own preparations. He created three more orbs that flew away from him while he reinforced the barrier like crazy.

    Since he got a few more minutes, he decided to prepare for Dia''s bloodline attack.

    He created eight small spheres of energy that areyered upon his already existing barrier and created a small formation that created continuous ripples. This is to remove the maic force effect that might be directed toward him.

    Even if it can''t negate, Sam is sure that it can reduce it by arge amount.

    While he is thinking like that, Sivan finally made his move.

    All of these sharp metallic objects started roaming around his sphere and circled Sam.

    They kept on hovering while moving around slightly.

    Sam became cautious, but he still kept on creating more and more orbs. And as he made them continuously, the time consumption is reducing with every attempt. This made it much easier for him to do this while still observing Sivan''s movements.

    Sivan''s body once again started glowing metal elemental energy and Sam finally felt the effect on his barriers.

    He could feel that the blood inside his body is being riled up because of the maic force. Even though some of it is being toned down from the formation, it is still not working as he wanted it to be.

    He gritted his teeth and tried his best to use his energy to resist that. He even went as far as closing his eyes to have better concentration.

    Sivan smirked at this and all of a sudden made a move with the sharp objects. They all started gathering metal elemental energy at their tip as they shot towards the sphere.

    Sam looked at those and expected them toe at him like that. So, he tapped the staff on the ground and the outermostyer of the barrier dispersed into energy ripples to stop their advance.

    But to his surprise, the pointy ends of the sharp metal objects prated through the ripples and advanced forward.

    Sam immediately made the ripples explode after watching this, but he was toote. Some weapons already made their way to the barriers.

    When they stabbed themselves into the barrier, Sam felt the energy moving away from that point. The formation around the barrier started fluctuating. Sam looked at Sivan hatefully as he instantly dispersed the whole barrier and jumped away with the help of the explosive recoil.

    While he was still in the air, the metal spikes starteding at him which Sam blocked with energy bullets.

    Hended on the ground clumsily as he panted heavily.

    Buy now there are ten orbs in the air and Sam is still making them.

    Sivan who is watching and observing them, finally couldn''t ignore them anymore.

    He looked at them and thought hard about what could Sam be thinking, but he couldn''t imagine anything.

    Even though he got all of the memories from Sam, there is one thing he couldn''t figure out. The thought process.

    He could never understand what Sam is thinking in any situation. Because for every situation, it is almost like Sam''s thought process is tailor-made to resolve that one situation.

    Nothing more, nothing less.

    Just that one particr situation.

    And it ispletely changed for a different situation.

    With all of those memories and incidents, Sivan only understood one thing.

    Sam''s thought process for solving anything is to only use the variables that he has at hand at that moment. It doesn''t depend on any fixed objects or techniques or even people.

    He only deals with variable factors at that time and calctes things.

    This made Sivan look at other variables that might affect their fight. But he couldn''t think of anything.

 Chapter 1566 Orbs

    Chapter 1566 Orbs¡¡¡¡While Sivan is thinking about what Sam could be doing next, Sam is also thinking about what Sivan would be throwing next.

    He felt a slight stabbing pain in his leg and he is sure why it ising. One of the metal shards was not blockedpletely and it stabbed his leg.

    He could feel the warm blood slowly dripping down.

    Sam is already having trouble with the movement because of the massive handicap he had. Now even the one leg he had is damaged slightly. The situation is only getting worse.

    Even while thinking that, Sam didn''t stop making the orbs.

    He just took advantage of the time that he got because of Sivan''s slight confusion.

    But it didn''tst long. As he was creating one orb after another, Sivan came back to his senses, and instead of attacking Sam, he finally focused on the energy orbs.

    He withdrew the elemental fusion and shot a fireball at the nearest orb. But Sam just made the energy ball move away from that spot. He didn''t let it get hit.

    Apart from that, he even shot a few energy bullets at Sivan which made his focus shift back to Sam, albeit for a moment.

    Sivan knew that Sam is not creating these orbs for no reason. There is definitely something important going on with them. But he just couldn''t understand what it is.

    After a few tries of different attacks, his futile attempts to mess with the energy orbs finally stopped. He looked at Sam who is slightly exhausted and said hatefully.

    "Do what you want with them. You need to be alive and capable of using them for whatever you are nning to do. I will kill you before that and will see if your dead body can use them."

    He lunged forward and threw a punch with void style at Sam.

    Sam activated an energy barrier and blocked the punch. He took the recoil of the explosion and jumped backward trying not to get the full brunt of that explosion.

    But Sivan didn''t stop, in fact, he sped up and reached the spot where Sivan was about tond and threw a roundhouse kick to Sam''s face.

    Sam barely blocked with the staff covered with an energy shield, but still took the major part of the force as he crashed into the ground on the side.

    Sam never felt so weak in his life.

    He suddenly felt like he should have taken the n''s leader''s offer to get the new mechanical limbs, even if they are going to be mediocre.

    It could be said that he became too cocky and thought that Sivan wouldn''t be this good with his body. But now there is no time for regrets. All he can do is see through this with whatever he has at hand.

    He shot energy bullets at Sivan who ising at him from different directions. They are the best means to stop Sivan.

    Sam noticed that he is trying to imitate his movements from the memory. Which made it easier for him. As time passed, he managed to grasp the movements and anticipated them which made it easier for him to block them or even stop them with energy bullets.

    The battle went on like that and Sam is stuck in the defensive. Of course, he is still making energy orbs and Sivan is asionally using the bloodline arts.

    The whole area turned into a chaotic mess because of their battle and Sam kept on hopping around and surrounding himself with barriers throughout.

    After a few minutes, he finally stopped.

    He panted heavily as he wiped the sweat off of his forehead.

    He has several injuries all over his body. Burns, shes, stabs, there are all kinds of injuries. But he started smiling instead of feeling the pain.

    He looked at Sivan who is walking toward him with a smirk on his face.

    "What are you smiling at, you bastard? Did you finallye to terms with your stupid fate?"

    Sivan asked arrogantly. He finally felt like he really lived after a long time. All this while even with the new body, new memories, new authority, and the new riches he obtained, he didn''t feel alive, because they belonged to someone else.

    There was still a chance that someone else would just take them away.

    He was insecure and felt inadequate to hold them. But in thest few months, he managed to master so much of this body. He should really thank his lucky stars for that.

    "I nevere into terms with my fate. I always fight it."

    "Fate is decided by the heavens and from your memories, they never favored you much. What is the point of fighting it again and again? It is your fate to end up like this. Defeated, lost, exhausted, and dead."

    Sivan said as he started light elemental fusion. His body turned into a golden light mass. He decided to activate the second bloodline art of the Golden sun crow.

    "Since you are going to die now, let me just use the golden sun crow''s bloodline that you have used so much in this life.

    Don''t worry though. I will take your ce and take great care of your beasts and I will also take your ce in the game that was created by the gods and achieve the results that you wanted and much more.

    Once again, thank you for leaving everything to me."

    As he spoke, his body emitted massive light rays to the surroundings destroying everything in their path. But as soon as they spread out, he forcefullypressed them all to the front and aimed them at Sam.

    At this moment, Sam used the energy barrier once again and this time he almost used up all of his energy and used an energy bullet and explosion and jump from the line of fire.

    But the light beam just kept on following him as he moved from one spot to another clumsily.

    After dodging it so much, Sam finally felt his leg give in, so he turned to the side and used the staff to shoot out arge energy beam to directly intercept the attack.

    *BOOM*

    The energy beam exploded and most of the effectiveness of the light beam is gone as it came at Sam crazily.

    Sam took the light beam that hit him squarely on the chest and crashed to the ground while spitting out blood.

    His body ispletely corroded with the light elemental energy and he felt like he is burning up. It is almost like he is being cooked alive.

    The dust settled and Sivan looked at Sam with walking toward him.

    "Why are you so persistent Sam, give in."

    Sivan said as he aimed another light beam at Sam ready to shoot.

    "Don''t."

    Sam said out loud.

    Sivan frowned and stopped for a moment.

    "What? You have something to say now?"

    "No to you, you asshole. I am talking to someone else."

    Sam said as he showed hismunication token. Sivan frowned and looked around. He saw that Giyon is currently standing on the wall and is ready to make a move on him.

    He frowned and before he could react, all the orbs that Sam controlled until now suddenly came and surrounded him.

    Sivan looked at the orbs and then at Sam.

    "Do you really think you can do something with them in your current state?"

    "You can find that out yourself."

    "Too bad, you don''t have the time."

    Sivan shot the light beam, but the orbs that are hovering over him suddenly created a barrier around Sivan trapping the light beam inside. It was deflected and sent back directly at Sivan who caught it with his hand by instinct.

    He was stunned by what he saw.

    The barrier feltpletely unfamiliar and yet eerily dangerous to him. Sam sat up with the help of his staff and leaned against the rock.

    He spat out the blood that seeped into his mouth and he looked at Sivan.

    "It is my turn, you wannabe prick."

    As he said those words orbs started moving once again, but the barrier didn''t disappear, instead it started twisting itself and trying to trap Sivan like a nket coiling around him all over.

    Sivan started swinging his arms around and tried to destroy the energy coils that areing at him.

    But his punches felt like they are hitting clouds. He couldn''t even feel any impact. He shifted to ripple and void style immediately to see if he could do any damage.

    The energy coil was broken with the punch, but to his surprise, it reformed again.

    Sivan felt confused and afraid.

    As he tried to get out of this, one of the fabrics of the coiled energy brushed past his palm.

    "HISSSSS."

    Sivan hissed in pain with gritted teeth. He could see the blood dripping from the palm. The flesh was cleanly removed from the spot and it is so clean that it looked like someone carved it with a very sharp knife.

 Chapter 1567 Escape

    Chapter 1567 Escape¡¡¡¡Sivan instantly activated the space element. He wanted to use the spatial blink to escape from the spot.

    But as soon as he activated the element, he suddenly felt that something is wrong. The energy orbs disconnected the coils and went back to keeping a barrier around him.

    And the very next moment right when the blink was about to be activated, energy needles came out of the orbs and stabbed Sivan in various spots.

    The spatial energy stopped in the middle. His blinking was halted and he was stuck in that ce. Sivan was shocked instantly. He looked at Sam in horror and used his observation ability on himself.

    The needles are puncturing him at the meridian points that leaked the spatial energy out of his body making it impossible for him to use the blink.

    The needles went back and the orbs once again created those coils of energy that started harassing Sivan again.

    Sivan desperately started throwing me attacks, lightning attacks, and metal attacks, he even tried to cut the coils off with the sword and saber, but it didn''t work out.

    The coils acted like they are made of some extremely stic fabric, it is almost impossible for him to tear it in an instant, and even if he managed to break it somehow, it is just regenerating.

    The coils started sanding off of his skin at every spot possible. If not for the feather coat being there, his whole body would have been yed by now.

    Sivan thought of something and immediately activated fire elemental fusion. His body turned into a mass of golden mes and even the feather coat reacted well with that as the ck feathers turned into golden color.

    As the coils went past his exposed parts now, it didn''t cause as much pain, but it is still affecting his fusion body.

    He wanted to manipte the body into a small ball of mes and escape through the gaps. But as soon as the transformation started, the orbs once again created a barrier and a bunch of needles are shot out of them.

    All the needles once again stabbed him at various points over his body. The needles are thin enough to ignore the feather coat and go in through the gaps. And Sam is quick enough to not let the coat''s spirit reduce the gaps forcefully and managed to prate into his body.

    The needles started creating energy ripples consistently. This made Sivan feel a different kind of pain he never experienced. And the whole experience is like a me being extinguished. Before he could even try to make sense of what is happening, he felt his fire elemental fusion disappearingpletely.

    He is back to normal and the pain only continued to be harsher and more severe.

    Sam looked at Sivan who is struggling and sighed.

    This time this is a sigh of relief.

    This is over. He won.

    Sivan looked at Sam who is clearly not cautious anymore and became angrier. He wanted to scream, but he couldn''t. Because a needle is focused on the throat and it is sending the energy ripples which makes it impossible for him to let out a single sound.

    Sam looked at Sivan with a smile. It is a smile or intrigue.

    He wants to see Sivan''s genuine reaction regarding all of this. He wanted to see if he will despair or feel angry or if it will self-disappointment.

    But the first reaction he got is actually confusion. It almost feels like Sivan is unable toprehend the fact that he lost.

    And Sam could actually understand his confusion. It is impossible for someone who has had the upper hand since the start of the battle to end up in a situation like this as soon as Sam took the initiative.

    It is almost like he has been yed since the start.

    But that wouldn''t exactly be urate.

    Sam stood up with the help of the staff and spoke.

    "You really did great Sivan. You acted better than I could have ever imagined. All the information I got from your soul only made me see you as a scheming person whosepetence lies in manipting and using others.

    But today, I am really convinced. You are a worthy foe. You managed to find a way to create things that I never thought you could, you managed to master the techniques that I never thought you would even understand.

    And you even managed to utilize back-to-back bloodline arts. That is very impressive.

    You even tried to think things from my shoes while dealing with me, that is much more impressive.

    But there is one thing you didn''t ount for. I know that body better than you. I know its strengths and I know its weaknesses.

    You might think that it is invincible among my peers and it is true, but only when I am the one utilizing it.

    And since I know how to utilize it, I just need to think about how to stop it. And right now I just did it.

    No matter what kind of damage you make to that body, I can absolutely recover it after I take it back from you. So, do your worst and try to struggle as much as possible. But do remember that this is your defeat."

    Sam''s words felt like swords slicing him to his bone. Sivan felt embarrassment, anger, despair, and rage all mixed together.

    He wanted to escape, but he cannot bring himself to move around at all.

    He felt like a trapped animal.

    At this moment, he heard something from hismunication token.

    "Sivan, you need to withdraw the troops. We are about to make our move."

    Sivan heard this and wanted to reply, but the sound didn''te out of his throat. His words are stuck.

    Sam walked forward and the needles from the orbs started prating the flesh more and more. Sivan started bleeding profusely and he felt like he is about to lose consciousness.

    But at this moment, Sam sensed an immense danger which made him escape instantly.

    *BOOM*

    A massive explosive mended somewhere near them and all that hit the two of them is the aftershock, but even that appeared tyrannical and destructive. Sam felt like his life was being sucked out of him and crashed into a rock. He even made a massive shield in front of him with what was left of his power, but he couldn''t help but feel like he was being crushed.

    Sivan was also broken out of the barrier made of orbs and crashed into the ground. He felt his bones being crushed and the blood still draining out of his body.

    He is barely conscious. But he didn''t dare let this chance go. He instantly took out a transference token and activated it.

    While he was transferring, he turned to the soldiers and yelled with all of the energy he was left with.

    "ALL OF YOU RETREAT TO THE CAMP. RIGHT NOW."

    He disappeared from the spot and all the team leaders the soldiers started leading their troops back to the camp.

    None of them dared to ck off and they even acted instantly to the point of leaving some enemies that are on verge of death without killing them.

    Sam came back to his senses and looked into the horizon from where the attack came.

    A grand elder from the Mari n is the one that attacked him.

    It is an old man hovering in the air looking at Sam coldly. But at this moment, a fist came from behind him and went through his heart. He is dead in an instant.

    Gail threw the old man''s body and looked at the Sonic cat. The cat nodded and went after the other people within the grand elder group as they are escaping.

    Gail made his way to Sam and carried him towards the wall.

    Sam took out hismunication token while he is still on Gail''s shoulder to contact senior elder Ma.

    "Use the final attack sequences in the exact order. The enemies are retreating right now."

    "Alright."

    "After that, use the contingency n 8."

    "Really? n 8?"

    "Yes. It is necessary. Sivan is out. If he is the person I know he is, then he is going to use that one weapon out of spite. So, you need to use that n."

    "Then, I will inform everyone. You called the n''s leader."

    "Sure."

    Sam cut the line and contacted the n''s leader.

    "Sivan escaped. Activate Contingency n 8."

    "Alright. Activating it immediately."

    Unlike Ma, the n leader didn''t ask any more questions.

    He just immediately passed orders and before Sam even reached the wall, every single one of the soldiers already got a notification from their superiors. They all started running into the city and they all moved to different corners.

    Sam was left on the wall for a moment as he looked into the horizon towards the camp.

    "I am not going to let you go.

    This shall be the final confrontation with all our cards on the table. Let''s see who wins this war."

 Chapter 1568 Escape

    Chapter 1568 Escape¡¡¡¡Sivan instantly activated the space element. He wanted to use the spatial blink to escape from the spot.

    But as soon as he activated the element, he suddenly felt that something is wrong. The energy orbs disconnected the coils and went back to keeping a barrier around him.

    And the very next moment right when the blink was about to be activated, energy needles came out of the orbs and stabbed Sivan in various spots.

    The spatial energy stopped in the middle. His blinking was halted and he was stuck in that ce. Sivan was shocked instantly. He looked at Sam in horror and used his observation ability on himself.

    The needles are puncturing him at the meridian points that leaked the spatial energy out of his body making it impossible for him to use the blink.

    The needles went back and the orbs once again created those coils of energy that started harassing Sivan again.

    Sivan desperately started throwing me attacks, lightning attacks, and metal attacks, he even tried to cut the coils off with the sword and saber, but it didn''t work out.

    The coils acted like they are made of some extremely stic fabric, it is almost impossible for him to tear it in an instant, and even if he managed to break it somehow, it is just regenerating.

    The coils started sanding off of his skin at every spot possible. If not for the feather coat being there, his whole body would have been yed by now.

    Sivan thought of something and immediately activated fire elemental fusion. His body turned into a mass of golden mes and even the feather coat reacted well with that as the ck feathers turned into golden color.

    As the coils went past his exposed parts now, it didn''t cause as much pain, but it is still affecting his fusion body.

    He wanted to manipte the body into a small ball of mes and escape through the gaps. But as soon as the transformation started, the orbs once again created a barrier and a bunch of needles are shot out of them.

    All the needles once again stabbed him at various points over his body. The needles are thin enough to ignore the feather coat and go in through the gaps. And Sam is quick enough to not let the coat''s spirit reduce the gaps forcefully and managed to prate into his body.

    The needles started creating energy ripples consistently. This made Sivan feel a different kind of pain he never experienced. And the whole experience is like a me being extinguished. Before he could even try to make sense of what is happening, he felt his fire elemental fusion disappearingpletely.

    He is back to normal and the pain only continued to be harsher and more severe.

    Sam looked at Sivan who is struggling and sighed.

    This time this is a sigh of relief.

    This is over. He won.

    Sivan looked at Sam who is clearly not cautious anymore and became angrier. He wanted to scream, but he couldn''t. Because a needle is focused on the throat and it is sending the energy ripples which makes it impossible for him to let out a single sound.

    Sam looked at Sivan with a smile. It is a smile or intrigue.

    He wants to see Sivan''s genuine reaction regarding all of this. He wanted to see if he will despair or feel angry or if it will self-disappointment.

    But the first reaction he got is actually confusion. It almost feels like Sivan is unable toprehend the fact that he lost.

    And Sam could actually understand his confusion. It is impossible for someone who has had the upper hand since the start of the battle to end up in a situation like this as soon as Sam took the initiative.

    It is almost like he has been yed since the start.

    But that wouldn''t exactly be urate.

    Sam stood up with the help of the staff and spoke.

    "You really did great Sivan. You acted better than I could have ever imagined. All the information I got from your soul only made me see you as a scheming person whosepetence lies in manipting and using others.

    But today, I am really convinced. You are a worthy foe. You managed to find a way to create things that I never thought you could, you managed to master the techniques that I never thought you would even understand.

    And you even managed to utilize back-to-back bloodline arts. That is very impressive.

    You even tried to think things from my shoes while dealing with me, that is much more impressive.

    But there is one thing you didn''t ount for. I know that body better than you. I know its strengths and I know its weaknesses.

    You might think that it is invincible among my peers and it is true, but only when I am the one utilizing it.

    And since I know how to utilize it, I just need to think about how to stop it. And right now I just did it.

    No matter what kind of damage you make to that body, I can absolutely recover it after I take it back from you. So, do your worst and try to struggle as much as possible. But do remember that this is your defeat."

    Sam''s words felt like swords slicing him to his bone. Sivan felt embarrassment, anger, despair, and rage all mixed together.

    He wanted to escape, but he cannot bring himself to move around at all.

    He felt like a trapped animal.

    At this moment, he heard something from hismunication token.

    "Sivan, you need to withdraw the troops. We are about to make our move."

    Sivan heard this and wanted to reply, but the sound didn''te out of his throat. His words are stuck.

    Sam walked forward and the needles from the orbs started prating the flesh more and more. Sivan started bleeding profusely and he felt like he is about to lose consciousness.

    But at this moment, Sam sensed an immense danger which made him escape instantly.

    *BOOM*

    A massive explosive mended somewhere near them and all that hit the two of them is the aftershock, but even that appeared tyrannical and destructive. Sam felt like his life was being sucked out of him and crashed into a rock. He even made a massive shield in front of him with what was left of his power, but he couldn''t help but feel like he was being crushed.

    Sivan was also broken out of the barrier made of orbs and crashed into the ground. He felt his bones being crushed and the blood still draining out of his body.

    He is barely conscious. But he didn''t dare let this chance go. He instantly took out a transference token and activated it.

    While he was transferring, he turned to the soldiers and yelled with all of the energy he was left with.

    "ALL OF YOU RETREAT TO THE CAMP. RIGHT NOW."

    He disappeared from the spot and all the team leaders the soldiers started leading their troops back to the camp.

    None of them dared to ck off and they even acted instantly to the point of leaving some enemies that are on verge of death without killing them.

    Sam came back to his senses and looked into the horizon from where the attack came.

    A grand elder from the Mari n is the one that attacked him.

    It is an old man hovering in the air looking at Sam coldly. But at this moment, a fist came from behind him and went through his heart. He is dead in an instant.

    Gail threw the old man''s body and looked at the Sonic cat. The cat nodded and went after the other people within the grand elder group as they are escaping.

    Gail made his way to Sam and carried him towards the wall.

    Sam took out hismunication token while he is still on Gail''s shoulder to contact senior elder Ma.

    "Use the final attack sequences in the exact order. The enemies are retreating right now."

    "Alright."

    "After that, use the contingency n 8."

    "Really? n 8?"

    "Yes. It is necessary. Sivan is out. If he is the person I know he is, then he is going to use that one weapon out of spite. So, you need to use that n."

    "Then, I will inform everyone. You called the n''s leader."

    "Sure."

    Sam cut the line and contacted the n''s leader.

    "Sivan escaped. Activate Contingency n 8."

    "Alright. Activating it immediately."

    Unlike Ma, the n leader didn''t ask any more questions.

    He just immediately passed orders and before Sam even reached the wall, every single one of the soldiers already got a notification from their superiors. They all started running into the city and they all moved to different corners.

    Sam was left on the wall for a moment as he looked into the horizon towards the camp.

    "I am not going to let you go.

    This shall be the final confrontation with all our cards on the table. Let''s see who wins this war."

 Chapter 1569 Attack

    Chapter 1569 Attack¡¡¡¡The soldiers of the Mari n along with the Grand elders retreated.

    The grand elders guarded the rear as they are worried that the sphere cannons and energy beams will be attacking them. More than that, they are worried that a peak stage cultivator from the Gaja n will attack them.

    After all, one of the grand elders just broke the unspoken rules again.

    He attacked Sam to release Sivan.

    The only silver lining for that situation is that the Grand elder knew that his attack would be too much and there is a chance that Sivan might also die, and toned it down.

    This helped Sam escape with some injuries.

    But still an attack is an attack nevertheless.

    Even though the grand elders of the Mari n are extremely reluctant to make such a move, they just couldn''t let Sivan die. He is way too valuable as an asset to the n for them to let him die in the battlefield.

    So, they are extremely cautious, as they awaited the consequences of their actions.

    But the consequences didn''te in the way that they thought they would. As they are moving forward a rift appeared in the space above the soldiers and arge crystal came out.

    It is the rhombohedral poison crystal. One of the cores of the poison tower.

    It fell freely towards the soldiers and one of the grand elders tried to attack it and destroy it before that could happen.

    But that is his biggest mistake. Even before he couldnd the blow, just the wind pressure that was created by that attack made the crystal unstable and made it explode.

    *BOOM*

    Arge green poisonous cloud covered the grand elders who are walking in the air as well as the soldiers below them. Some of the injured soldiers instantly fell to the ground. The poison just seeped into their body and they couldn''t even resist it.

    It is so potent and powerful.

    Even the soldiers who arepletely unscathed fell victim. They felt like their lungs were set on fire as they ran forward to be out of that zone.

    As for Grand elders, the effect is not as severe as the rest of the soldiers, but it is extremely potent an they also felt the effects of it.

    But even if they felt the effects of it, they don''t have any choice other than moving forward.

    As soon as they covered few more meters, the situation changed again. Another rift opened in theair and this time a dark ck crystal with ck fumes dropped from it.

    Another grand elder decided to take the lead and blocked the crystal with an energy barrier, but to his back luck, the crystal exploded as soon as it met with the barrier and even broke it downpletely.

    The ck smoke spread amongst all the soldiers and the Grand elders as they felt the curses spreading through all of them. They felt like their blood is burning and the bones are being subjected to immense heat.

    Their flesh felt like it is being pricked by millions of needles all at the same time.

    But that is not the end. The rift didn''t close and two special undead creatures dropped from it. The undead creatures directly went for the grand elders while glowing with weird energy.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Massive explosions urred as the grand elders took the full force of it. Two grand elders fell from the sky instantly and as they hit the ground white crystals started spreading from their wounds.

    Another grand elder took the lead and led them soldiers to move forward even though more than half of them are suffering severely. But as they moved forward, the ground felt weird. They couldn''t put their finger on it.

    But soon they managed to point it out.

    It is the white crystal shards on the ground. They just stabbed themselves into their feet and started spreading in their legs. Of course, not all of them are that unlucky.

    The unluckiest ones are the ones that are already injured and are heavily affected by the poison. Their bodies'' natural resistance has decreased by a lot and they are in an extremely weakened state which led the immediate growth of the white crystal.

    It didn''t even take that much time before it made them unable to move.

    The group could only move forward though.

    As they moved closer to the camp, the attacks kept on increasing. The rifts opened and either the undead with special explosions or the crystals are popping out making it impossible for them to escape unscathed.

    While the Mari n''s troops are suffering more than they did in the entire warbined, Sivan who arrived at the Mari n is also currently struggling.

    At this moment, he has multiple fractures and too many physical injuries that are bleeding profusely. He has way too many injuries and it is even hard for him to breath properly.

    He took out some potions and pills as he swallowed them. It hurt his throat to do it, but he forced them down and let them do their work.

    He stayed on the ground for over ten minutes, before he could even breath properly. At least the pain is somewhat bearable now.

    He took some more medicine and used his light elemental energy as well as the natural regeneration to increase his recovery speed.

    He toiled and struggled on the floor for a few minutes, before he could even stand up properly. After finally standing up, he looked around the room.

    This is the special tent that Avlyn was talking about. Apart from the hidden pir under the ground that acted as a beacon for his transference, there are some other pieces of equipment around the tent that are specially prepared for this moment. He was about to activate them.

    But at this moment, Avlyn and her team members came in.

    "You are back? It seems like you are beaten ck and blue. Your soldiers are suffering. Do you have any n to save them?"

    Sivan looked surprised. He walked out and used a telescope to take a look. He felt troubled. There is only one way he could think of and he was going to use it anyway. But the destruction it causes is making hesitate a bit.

    "Are you guys going to make your move? You said you are about to make a move right?"

    "Of course we are doing it. But our spatial elemental user said that the current attacks might be traps of Gaja n. Waiting for your forces to retreat is actually helpful."

    "Bastards, you are using my soldiers as bait again?"

    "We have to do what we have to do. Anyway, if you have no n, then let theme. We will take our sweet time while dealing with them. Since Gail and Sonic cat are exhausted, we still have a good chance of dealing with them.

    Thanks for your help."

    With that, the Divine league members left.

    Sivan gritted his teeth in anger and with all of the pent up injuries he had, his body couldn''t take it and spat out a mouthful of blood.

    "You bastards. How dare you use me and my soldiers like this. Divine league, my father told me not to trust you guys and you have proven his words right time and again. There is no way I will let you guys win though.

    You came for something from Gaja n, I will destroy that. I will destroy all of the Gaja n and wouldn''t let you have anything."

    After he spoke, he went on to assemble the equipment.

    They are six turrets that are aimed at the sky and all of them are pointing towards the Gaja city. They are ced in certain positions creating a hexagon. Sivan started loading them with the crystal cylinders full of spiritual energy poison.

    After loading them, he sat down in the middle of the formation and closed his eyes. He prepared the turrets to shoot.

    He would have felt better if they can be shot in an instant. But too bad, his strength is not there yet. He is too weak to activate it instantly in his current state.

    His troops are nearing the camp while he is preparing for the attack.

    But at the same time, Senior Elder Ma is also doing something else. He took out onest space jade and smiled.

    "To think that you will put the most dangerous weapon in a mere space jade. You have no fear whatsoever."

    He smiled as he directed the space jade to the formation nearby. He carefully operated the space jade remotely as it threw out small missiles out of it one by one that hovered over the formation.

    As he was doing it, he looked at his subordinates.

    "Is the evacuation done?"

    "It is almost done sir. Ny percent of soldiers are done. All the n members are gone. The kids are moved to the stray dimension."

    "That is good. You guys also start your process. I need the timing to be perfect. Not a single person should be hurt in this exchange. Do you understand?"

    "Yes, Sir."

 Chapter 1570 Final Move

    Chapter 1570 Final Move¡¡¡¡Ma closed his eyes as one by one his subordinates all left the room. He took a deep breath before sending the missiles into the formation that is connected to another spatial rift.

    By now the soldiers and the grand elders almost reached the camp and this is the perfect timing to attack.

    At the same moment, Sivan also made a move and the six turretsunched six attacks at the same time.

    As soon as they came out, they are connected with an energy thread and formed a single hexagon in the air as they moved towards the city in the parabolic path.

    Sam who is standing on the wall saw this and immediately made a call.

    "We have ten seconds. Everyone one leave.

    Elder Ma, make the final move."

    After that he took a transference token and crushed it. Not just him, many of the core fighters did the same as him and used the transference tokens to disappear from the wall and the city.

    By the time the hexagon reached the city, everyone is gone. Senior Elder Ma who is sitting in the formation is thest one to leave the city.

    He crushed the token and disappeared from the spot. He reappeared again at apletely different ce other than the rest of the citizens.

    He appeared in a mountain range far away from the city. After he reached that spot, he took out a telescope and looked at the city.

    At this exact moment, in the camp of Mari n, Avlyn who is about to lead their teammates was surprised by the news her subordinate gave her.

    "Boss, it seems like a massive usage of spatial gates has urred. They arepletely dormant until now. It is almost like they are created just now instantly. People might be escaping from the Gaja n."

    "Escaping? Really? We need to make a move instantly then. We cannot let them all disappear just like that."

    "Yes, but the attack¡­"

    He said as he pointed at the hexagon that reached the top of the city.

    As they spectated, the hexagon suddenly expanded and arge web of energy threads is created in the middle of it. The energy became extremely unstable as all of the spiritual energy poison spread across the city and when the web is enough to cover the whole estate and the energy residue spread enough to cover almost all of the city within just a few minutes, it exploded.

    *BOOOM*

    The peak stage cultivators in the Mari n could feel the aftershock of the explosion. The earth quaked and they could even sense the massive fluctuation of energy that was a result of this explosion from this far away.

    "How is that possible?"

    Avlyn was shocked by this, but at this moment, her subordinate who reported the spatial gate usage warned her again.

    "Boss, a rift is opening again. And this one is different. The space is not stable. I think it is better if we move out now."

    Avlyn nodded andmanded her subordinates to leave the camp, but right when they were about to leave, something else happened.

    The spatial rifts appeared at three more spots within the camp grounds and all of them are formed a small formation but this one is not solely based on energy, rather it is based on the spatial turbulence that expanded all four of them.

    And from those four holes came down over a dozen missiles that Senior Elder Ma sent into the tunnel.

    As if that is not enough, some kind of explosive force came out of those spatial holes and it appeared to be very simr to the explosion that urred over the city.

    The peak stage cultivators immediately recognized that and there is some other person who recognized it too, in fact he recognized it even better and it is much more urate.

    "Fucking hell."

    Sivan cursed as he looked into the sky above his camp. His subordinates barely managed to retreat to the camp and something like this appeared over his head. He is sure that this is going to difficult.

    He wanted to contact the divine league members, but Avlyn rejected the connection. He walked out of the tent only to see the Divine league members leaving the camp grounds.

    Sivan thought for a moment and after some conflicting thoughts he finally gritted his teeth and made a harsh decision. He took out a different transference token and used it. As it worked and his body was covered with spatial energy, he looked at the soldiers who halted in their tracks whole still being exhausted.

    The missiles were all connected while they glowed furiously and they all zoomed down into the camp.

    *BOOM*

    The explosion this time is different from the one on the city, because this one made the spiritual energy poison ripple to the surroundings and every ripple once again exploded separately and all of this happened in a weird formation in a controlled manner.

    This is derived from Sam''s past controlled explosion experiments.

    Even the peak stage cultivators who escaped the camp with their extreme speed were not exempt from the feeling of helplessness that came from the effects of the explosion.

    They felt like they are weak and have no strength to resist. But they did with all of their means and even then they were blown away.

    As for the soldiers that are already severely injured and are suffering from the attacks throughout their path, they cannot even think of dodging, blocking or even surviving the attack.

    Even the grand elders are caught in the explosion and they were swept under the waves and waves of explosions.

    The two explosions are done. The dust settled on both sides. Exactly at the mid point between the both explosions, there are a bunch of people that are coughing profusely.

    Avlyn stood up with a lot of difficulty as she looked at both sites in horror. The camp ispletely gone and everything within the surroundings turned intoplete waste. She could feel the spiritual energy poison residuepletely.

    There is not a single thing in that ce that looked normal. All the vegetation is gone. Rocks are gone, people are gone and there are not even skeletons left behind.

    Meanwhile, on the city''s side, the situation is simr. But there are at least signs of city structure and construction.

    The structures are extremely corroded, and they are copsing just by a passing wind.

    She looked at her subordinates. They are barely alive and some of them are even dead.

    "Boss¡­ Boss. Are you alright?"

    Cray who is on the side asked her in a weak voice. From the looks of it, he looked least damaged of them all.

    "Are you alright Cray?"

    "Divine energy. It saved me from this. But I used up almost all of it. I can barely survive if I go back to that ce. This explosion definitely hindered my progress for months if not a couple of years."

    "You are alive, that is enough for now. Isn''t it? But it seems like it ended in a massive mutual destruction. Do you think anyone could have escaped?"

    Avlyn asked.

    But as soon as she asked that question, she felt somethinging from afar. At first it was not clear with all of that in her vision, but soon she managed to see it clearly. It is Gamin and and Yuvanaing as they ran through the wind.

    They are dashing towards them at an incredible speed.

    Not just them, when they looked to the side, they saw Gail and Sonic cat along with the n''s leadering at them following right behind Gamin and Yuvana.

    They are shocked.

    They didn''t expect that all of the elite to not just survive, they just seemed to escaped from the explosionpletely.

    "So, all of this effort for nothing? All this explosion did is kill our targets and the other weaklings of the Gaja n?

    No, it can''t be."

    She turned to the subordinate who informed her of the spatial fluctuations to ask him something, but he ispletely unconscious.

    "Boss, we need to escape."

    "Escape to where? All our transference tokens are linked to Divine league. Do you think God father will let us live if we go back like this? We lost too much and too many people. We are going to be in big trouble. I might as well die right here."

    "I have a ce to escape. Come with me."

    "You leave now Cray. I shouldn''t have dragged you guys in to this in the first ce. Particrly, you. You are reluctant toe here since the start. I am really sorry. Now please leave. I will hold them back."

    "But Boss¡­"

    "I told you to leave. Think of it as my dying wish. It is my fate to die here. Too bad, I really wanted to see our growth in the Divine realms. I thought I would have gotten there with the help of these kids.

    What a pity. At least stay alive and live my dreams too."

    With that, even before Cray could try to convince her, Avlyn jumped away to face the enemies who she has no chance of defeating.

 Chapter 1571 Arrest

    Chapter 1571 Arrest¡¡¡¡Cray wanted to stop her, but when he looked at his own situation and the surroundings, he sighed and took out a transference token.

    "I will pray for your peace. I just hope you will make better decisions in your next life."

    He crushed the token and disappeared from the spot.

    Avlyn stepped into the air and looked at her subordinates.

    "We don''t need to sacrifice any more lives. It would be better if you go back to the Divine league. Since I am the leader of the whole operation."

    "What are you saying, Boss? We are not going to make it out alive even if we go back to the League. Godfather and his son are going to kill us no matter what. We might as well die fighting the fighters in the world than die in the hands of our ungrateful bosses."

    Avlyn smiled and looked at the subordinates.

    "Let''s go together then."

    Even though she said that she just stood there without any movement. She just waited along with her subordinates for Gail and the rest toe.

    When their opponents finally came. She didn''t even bother to stay in the air and just stood there on the ground.

    "All this destruction, just for four children? Is your godfather even thinking properly anymore? Is it really worth it to lose so many elites of the league?"

    Gail asked with amenting tone.

    "Is your n safe?"

    "Yes, they are."

    "I figured that much after seeing how rxed you are with the whole thing. You would havee swinging if things went sideways."

    "Well, we listened to someone''s advice and prepared well. So, here we are. Apart from the basic casualties in the war, we didn''t lose much."

    "I am sure you lost way more than that since the start of this fiasco. Anyway, before I die, can you tell me something?"

    "Sure. What do you want to know?"

    "What kind of rtionship did you and Sin have? I cannot wrap my head around it."

    "Why do you want to know?"

    "Just my curiosity. Our past altercation started with me helping Sin. I did it so that he could gain an advantage on you and kill you. I can understand that you are angry at me, but why was he angry at me?

    Not only did he help you out in that situation, he even came to me almost taking my head off. If not for the fact that I went to the Divine league and had the protection from the rest of the members, I would have died that day.

    You guys obviously fight each other religiously, your ns are archenemies for centuries. Why did he rescue you?"

    "We are not enemies. We are rivals. It is as simple as that. Whatever we have, including the hatred between each other, it is strictly between us. We don''t like anyone else getting involved in this and that includes our ns.

    You are at most an acquaintance at that time. So, it doesn''t make sense for you to interfere in our situation. You have no right nor authority. So, he became angry. That is all there is to it."

    Avlyn nodded in understanding. Gail looked at Gamin and Yuvana who are waiting for the chance to kill her.

    After all, she did use Grivon and almost killed him. There is no way these overprotective parents are ever going to let that slide.

    Not in this lifetime.

    Gamin and Yuvana jumped into the group and everything went like a one-sided massacre. It is easier than cutting grass in a field.

    After dealing with the situation. All of them took a look at the surroundings.

    They finally had a chance to take this all in.

    The whole area is currently brimming with unstable spiritual energy. Even they can feel the disturbance because of it.

    They took out some transference tokens and broke them.

    All of them disappeared from the spot and reappeared in the Stray dimension of Grivon.

    There Sam is already waiting for them with a new peg leg attached to him.

    "I hope everything went ording to the n?"

    Sam asked calmly.

    "Yes, everything is good. All of our enemies are dead. But are you sure that Sivan escaped the ce?"

    "Yes. He will definitely not be staying there after escaping the battlefield. Not after seeing the missilesing out of the spatial rift."

    "You better be right. Otherwise, you will lose your body."

    "I am right. I know it. He wouldn''t dare lose his body. He is way too greedy and selfish to sacrifice himself, right after he got that body. He has too many things he wants from this world to leave all of this behind."

    "Then what are we going to do now?"

    "We are going to Mari n. The fastest way possible for us. Can you guys recover on the way?"

    "Yes."

    Everyone replied in unison, except for the n''s leader and Saran.

    "I will stay with my kids for a while. I am sure you can handle it without me."

    Saran said and left after they agreed.

    "I will go and confirm the safety of all the n members and the citizens. I also don''t think you need me to do this."

    "Sure."

    With that, Sam and the four peak stage cultivators. Gail, Gamin, Yuvana, and the leader of the Elite team all started moving towards the Mari n.

    Of course, Giyon and Grivon joined them adamantly.

    While they started their journey, back to the Mari n''s territory. Within the estate of the Mari n, in Sivan''s personal mansion, in the underground basement, a metallic pir started glowing before Sivan appeared in the room and crashed into the ground.

    "Fucking bastards. Fucking Bastards. I need to kill them all. I will definitely find you guys one day and kill you all."

    He said as he clumsily tried to stand up. But for some reason, he couldn''t find his footing. He felt clumsy and exhausted. Like he is some kind of newborn deer. He slipped and fell again and again.

    And finally, he gave up standing. He just crashed into the ground and dragged himself to lean against a wall.

    He hurriedly took out a token from the divine dimension''s storage and crushed it. After three seconds, he took out two more tokens that are simr to the first and crushed them too.

    He just leaned into the wall once again without any regard. He felt like he could use a nap and he is ready to do so. But there is only one problem.

    Someone directly barged into the basement. Sivan abruptly opened his eyes and looked at the elite team of the n''s leadering in.

    "It seems like you came back without the troops young master. Are theying after you? Or are they gone somewhere?"

    Sivan was in a daze. He didn''t expect that his presence would be noticed here this quickly.

    "Well, you don''t have to tell us that. You just need to say it to the n''s leader. Let''s just hope that you have a proper exnation for him at least."

    They both just dragged him out.

    Sivan shook his head and instantly took out a token from the storage. It is a transference token, but before he could use it one of the soldiers just caught hold of his arm and broke it.

    "I know you would be trying something like this. Please don''t do anything unnecessary. I don''t want to keep on breaking the limbs.

    I enjoy it so much since you have been constantly bossing us around for the past few days. But the n''s leader wants you alive and in a good condition. Which is a drag in my opinion. But I will spare you as long as you don''t do anything funny."

    Both of them dragged Sivan to the n''s leader''s office and threw him on the ground.

    "Good day. Sivan. How are you feeling? Seems like you had a good battle. Why didn''t you tell me you are returning though? With all the achievements you have, it is natural for me to make arge-scale grand event out of your return.

    Don''t you think so? But it seems like we are missing something. Yeah, the army. The army I gave you. Where the hell is it?"

    The n''s leader''s voice is extremely calm and jovial. But his eyes said something else. He is really angry and pissed even though he doesn''t know what exactly happened there.

    But Sivan''s ck and blue beaten state didn''t hide a lot. He could imagine what the result is. But the only thing he wants to know is how bad the situation is and how much did the n suffer.

    Sivan didn''t want to reply.

    Because if what he thought or understood is even partially true, things are extremely far off from being ideal and he doesn''t want to be the bearer of the bad news. At least, not before he could find a way out.

 Chapter 1572 Surrounded

    Chapter 1572 Surrounded¡¡¡¡Sivan looked at the n''s leader without speaking anything.

    And the more he maintained the silence, the more anxious the n''s leader has be.

    "Lock him up. Use all kinds of shackles that we have at our hand and break him up in my private cell. Also send someone to investigate the situation in the Gaja city. I want to get as many details as possible."

    "Yes, Sir."

    The soldiers answered.

    "You better hope, things are not as bad as I think there Sivan, otherwise, you will be in for a world of torture. I highly doubt, even your father will be able to save you from this."

    Sivan was taken away.

    He was silent throughout the whole conversation. But his mind was racing continuously. He cannot thinking of anyway out of this. Unless the tokens that he crushed in the basement. He just wished that it worked.

    Otherwise, he wouldn''t be able to survive this ordeal.

    Just like how the n''s leader said, even Sin wouldn''t be able to save him from the situation. His father is a person who takes ountability for everyone of his actions and assumes that everyone should be doing the same.

    If he knows about the massive destruction he caused for the n, he might just kill him directly.

    He was thrown into the prison and he was shackled by every shackle known to the Mari n throughout the history.

    It is impossible for him to get out. At least with the energy he was left with, it is impossible.

    The n''s leader is extremely tense.

    He is not ready to take any sort of bad news at the moment. He has too much on his te already.

    As he was thinking, someone came to him with a bunch of reports. He looked at them and said.

    "Really? They ran through them this fast? How did they even manage to do pull this off? Even our forces will take days if not weeks for this."

    "We don''t know how sir. But there is a major destruction suffered by all of our allied powers. We don''t even know where they are currently hiding. But by this exact moment, they have eighteens across five realms under their control.

    They are either upied by weird creatures or all of the powerhouses that are suitable to rule it are dead with the wormholespletely locked away by the Dusk organization.

    All of them belonged to us or the people we made deals with.

    Currently, envoys from various organizations are making their way towards the Mari n trying to get an exnation from this."

    "What about the League of Blood Iron? What are they doing?"

    "Five people from the league are dead in the hands of Dusk organization. For some reason, after that everyone stopped. In fact, from the information I managed to obtain, the acting president of the league actually gave an order topletely halt all the operations against the Dusk organization."

    "Really? How reliable is this information?"

    "Very, we almost never had wrong information about the league from this person."

    "Is there any more bad news? I don''t even know what to do. There is just too much going on here. Now that bastard Sivan hase back all alone using his transference token.

    I sent people to investigate it, but things are not looking good. I have feeling it will be extremely bad news. Otherwise, why would that guy Sivane back here?"

    As he was speaking, suddenly someone barged into the room.

    The n leader was shocked and almost freaked out. He looked at the person and was ready to throw a barrage of curses at them, but his voice didn''te out. He couldn''t bring himself to say anything at all.

    Because it Sin. The one person who is stronger than him in terms of raw power and intelligence.

    He didn''t dare to talk to back to him, much less yelling at him foring in.

    "Sivan is here?"

    Sin asked directly without wasting any time.

    The n''s leader was stumped. He didn''t know that Sin already got the news. He was really hoping that it would slip by since Sin has been in istion for a few days.

    "He came back. But he was kept in an arrest. He didn''t return with any of the troops. He came by himself."

    The n''s leader spoke through gritted teeth. He is afraid of Sin, but he does have authority and the right to arrest Sivan for this.

    Sin looked at him intently for a few moments before he left the room. He didn''t even say anything. The n''s leader was initially worried that Sin might just go and free Sivan, but to his relief, the subordinates reported that Sin is going back to his quarters.

    He was relieved.

    But that sense of relief onlysted for ten seconds.

    Because he suddenly sensed something and immediately ran out of the room into the estate.

    Sin is also standing out open in the estate and the remaining grand elders who are just there as contingency also came out.

    They all looked into the sky with a frown.

    Within few seconds, something changed in the sky and arge tower appeared.

    Philip, Watt and Jack are standing outside the tower together as they looked at the Mari n.

    This is the Sky tower one of the key things that they made just for dealing with Mari n.

    Philip looked at the peak stage cultivators and talked into hismunication token.

    "Deactivate stealth for all of the carriers."

    As soon as his orders were passed half a dozen carriers appeared on top of the n grounds.

    "Release the puppets."

    Dozens of flying puppets came out of the carriers. They all looked like bird type puppets. Along with them, from within the tower that they are standing on, a dozen humanoid puppets appeared. They are all wind elemental puppets.

    Each of them is at least eight feet tall and they looked like some knights that arepletely covered in ted armor.

    They have thrusters on the rear and on the legs. They also have very thin wings that are almost translucent.

    People from the Mari n looked at all of this and felt shocked. They didn''t expect an attack at this moment. Particrly not at their headquarters.

    Since the Dusk organization has not been attacking them and ispletely upied with dealing with the Mari n''s allies, they sent all of their troops of the Gaja n.

    They are sure that they will finish the war and have their troops back and dusk organization would be dealt by their allies.

    But now they are stuck like this.

    Before the n''s leader could give out any orders, the carriers moved. They all spread to different directions in a sh andnded outside of the n''s grounds. Arge barrier was formed around the estate instantly with the formation connecting all of the six carriers.

    Vitality cannons popped out of the heads of the carriers as they aimed the n estate from six sides.

    "The carriers I took are full with Vitality. I sucked everything in thest threes dry. You can just go crazy with it. Don''t hold back." Watt said to Philip.

    "Same here."

    "You guys are really good. Even I did the same thing.

    But we cannot just shoot them down. We need to see if Sivan is here or not. What if Sam''s body gets destroyed here?"

    "Isn''t Sivan supposed to be in the war? Why would he be here?"

    "Are you really asking that question? Knowing Sam, he would have already sent that guy packing."

    They all talked while the vitality cannons loaded. They are clearly ready to shoot.

    Sin who is the most powerful person in the Mari n could sense the power each cannon holds and his frown only deepened because of that.

    He cannot help but feel a bit threatened. And if even he is feeling threatened, there is no hope for the n to survive if things go wrong.

    He stepped into the air to get a bit closer to the tower and the trio.

    "Are you guys from the Dusk organization?"

    He asked them directly.

    Philip looked at him for a moment before answering.

    "Yes. Isn''t it obvious? Are you rted to Sivan?"

    "He is my son."

    "Good, this makes things easier. Is he in the n estate right now?"

    "Why do you ask?"

    "Isn''t that also obvious? I am pretty sure you know the reason we are here. We need to take the body that he brought back and also kind of destroy the Mari n in the process."

    "Mari n stood for more than a millennia, do you really think you can just destroy it like that?"

    "I mean, we rooted out all of your main businesses and branches across the realms. All that is left is some chump-change external members here and there.

    So, I would say yes. It is possible to destroy you guys just like that."

 Chapter 1573 Tower

    Chapter 1573 Tower¡¡¡¡Sin went silent for a moment.

    He didn''t know what to say. The trio is way too confident. They didn''t even have a sliver of fear in them. Just from one look and he can say that they wholeheartedly believe they can take down the Mari n.

    "I hope you won''t regret your decision. Because I will be fighting back with all I have."

    "We won''t expect anything less. Anyway, we also need to check how this thing does against a real powerhouse.

    So, please do.

    But before you start anything, tell me, is Sivan inside the n estate or not."

    Sin frowned and thought for a moment before answering.

    "He isn''t."

    "Good, then. We don''t need to hold back."

    As soon as he said that, the vitality cannons on the carriers shot at the n estate.

    The n looked like it is currently trapped under a shell and is being attacked with these cannons while being trapped.

    The barrier of the n'' estate activated instantly and defended against the cannons which turned out to be futile as it was destroyed within two seconds.

    The cannon just shot through the barrier like it was nothing and the beams fell into various structures of the estate.

    Some elders and even the two remaining grand elders stepped forward to defend against the beams, but in turn they just fell victim for it.

    They could feel the extreme surge in vitality of their body. At first, they felt it is okay, but the change happened in fraction of seconds and it made them feel the most pain they have ever felt in their lives.

    Even the grand elders couldn''t take it and had to use all of their strength and will to stand up again.

    Sin was stunned when he looked at this. He looked at the trio one more time before he disappeared in a sh. He ran towards one of the carriers to destroy them.

    But just when he was about to raise his hand andnd a strike, he felt some other kind of energy surging from behind.

    A massive beam ising at him from behind and he had to turn around and block it.

    He was shocked when he was literally pushed back by this beam, but with a lot of effort, he managed to block and deflect the beam.

    He looked at the tower in the air in shock. It shot that beam. He doesn''t know how it did that without making him realize until thest moment, but definitely shot that beam and it is very dangerous.

    As he was thinking of quick ways to counter it, the tower started moving. At first it appeared at the front side of the n estate, now it floated a bit higher and also came to the centre of the n estate.

    The whole tower started glowing as ayer of energy started condensing around the tower''s surface.

    Sin made a move and ran towards the tower to deal with it first. He has a feeling that even if the cannons are dangerous, they are not as dangerous as the tower itself.

    While he was getting there, the puppets that trio left on the n started making their move. They started attacking everyone with any spiritual energy signature on their body.

    As long as it is strong enough toe under their radar, they are attacking them.

    The humanoid puppets directly went after the elders and they sessfully managed to hold their ground when doing that. In fact the elders are being overwhelmed slightly.

    Sin felt the pressure. He looked at the n''s leader who also joined the fight. He is the only one strong enough to hold back the cannon attacks. But even he is having some trouble there.

    This made Sin hurry toward the tower and finish it off quickly, but the tower has its own defensive measure. From the top of the tower arge beam that is simr to the one that they previous shot at Sin came out and targeted him.

    Sin once again had to block with all he has to throw it off and move forward. But they didn''t stop.

    The beams kept oning and they are quick enough to keep up with Sin''s reaction time.

    They not just travelling quickly, they are also being shot quickly. It is almost like there is no recharge time between each shot.

    And in a way he is right. It is because the trio preloaded these shots ready to fire at any instant just in case. Now they areing in handy.

    While the tower is charging for a bigger attack, these attacks kept Sin at bay. He cannot near them and he didn''t have time to attack them directly from afar. The worst part is, he doesn''t have any other choice than block and deflect the attacks to the barrier.

    Because if he dodges them, the attacks willnd on the n grounds. He could sense how powerful they are since he blocked them constantly.

    There is no way, the destruction caused by these attacks would be anywhere near minimal. It would be massive.

    Two minutes went by like this and the tower ispletely charged for its main attack.

    Currently it is floating in the air and is collinear to the mid point of the estate. That is where the attack is supposed tond.

    The energy that is covering the tower is converged into a single point as all of it was transmitted to the bottom of the tower.

    The energy gathered into a small stick, the size of a finger. It is densely condensed and is ready to be thrown.

    Philip looked at Sin who is still actively blocking the attacks and ordered.

    "Attack now."

    The operators did so that very instant.

    The small stick was simply dropped off of the tower and it fell towards the n''s estate.

    Sin looked at it from his position and even he can feel the energy it held. He is sure that no matter what it is, it is dangerous and will destroy at least half of the n.

    He gritted his teeth and looked at the energy beam that wasing at him.

    His body is covered with spiritual energy as he activated partial fusion. He quickly shot as massive energy attack at the beaming at him.

    They shed and the beam was deflected.

    Meanwhile, Sin didn''t stay for the next beam and disappeared in a sh. He is so fast that he literally appeared like a streak of glowing light and as he moved the partial fusion changed into aplete fusion.

    He appeared right below the falling stick whose falling speed increased by a lot because of the gravity and with the increased speed, the energy has be extremely chaotic.

    Sin looked at the small sticking at him and gulped hard before intercepting it.

    *BOOM*

    A massive explosion urred in mid-air. It spread across the sky above the estate and the people below them clearly felt the pressure. The explosion is so potent to the point the barrier created by the carriers to trap the Mari n members disappeared.

    It couldn''t hold on for the impact.

    Sin who met the attack directly felt like his soul is being sucked out of his body as he was hit back into the ground.

    *CRASH*

    He left arge crater around him. His fusion has long been canceled and his felt like all of his bones are ready to break at any moment.

    He couldn''t help but feel shocked and horrified.

    This is the first time in a long while that he felt this injured and the one that did this much damage is actually a machine.

    It is very hard to digest that fact. It is way too difficult for him to think that a machine could catch up to the strength he diligently built over decades of battles and training.

    And the worst part is, he can see the tower condensing energy again.

    This made him feel exhausted and he almost wanted to despair. But he gritted his teeth and stood up. He activated fusion once again and jumped towards the tower.

    This time though, he didn''t bother himself with the energy beams this time. Since he knew what power the main attack could hold, he is not really concerned about the damage these beams can do.

    At least from what he saw until now, he can guess that they won''t have massive impact over arge area, but the tower''s main attack is different.

    He could feel the chaotic urge of the energy to spread while contacting with it.

    He needs to stop before the attack is loaded.

    The trio who are still standing at the entrance of the tower were surprised. They didn''t expect that Sin would be this powerful. From their calction an average peak stage cultivator of Astral ne Consummation wouldn''t be able to carry on the battle even if they managed to dodge it.

    "Master is right. This guy is an absolute monster."

    Jack said as he looked at Sin.

 Chapter 1574 Reunion

    Chapter 1574 Reunion¡¡¡¡Sin''s fists are condensed with all the energy he had as he moved towards the tower.

    The beams were continuously shot at him at a rapid pace, but he either dodged them enough to brush past them or just used his fists to push through them.

    It is almost like his strength multiplied by many times in just an instant.

    "Emergency puppets."

    Philip spoke calmly into themunication device.

    A bunch of puppets were released from the tower as they all went to intercept Sin. Of course they didn''t fight with him, it will be futile, all they did is selfdestrcut when they are near him to cause disruptions in his path.

    But even that didn''t work out that well.

    Philip realized that it will be really hard to deal with him at the moment and made a decision.

    "Everyone, retreat the tower."

    The operators worked on moving the tower and for a massive structure, it moved really fast. But as if Sin has anticipated this, he extended one of his arms. The energy was shot out the arm in the form of chains.

    The chains spread too far and wide as theypletely covered the tower. They enveloped itpletely and dragged the tower toward Sin who pulled his other arm back.

    He is ready to throw the punch with all of his energy.

    Philip, Jack and Watt frowned. They didn''t expect that Sin is this powerful and determined. They can clearly see his injuries. They are way too severe for him to make such a big move.

    There is no way she should be able to move like this, but he is still moving. They didn''t expect this at all. It is almost like an anomaly in nature.

    "Escape. Everyone, evacuate the tower."

    Philip issued themand instantly and everyone started taking out their transference tokens and crushed them.

    These tokens are not of long range they are just there to let them escape from the tower to a specific distance so that they would be out of the st zone.

    The st zone thates from the destruction of the tower.

    But to their surprise, their tokens didn''t work.

    Philip widened his eyes in horror and so did the other two. They looked at the chains that are constricting the tower and understood what is happening. These chains are constricting the spatial nodes.

    They looked at Sin. The trio quickly came to a decision even without any discussion.

    "Every operator on board. We have a situation here. The space is restricted by the chains on the tower. The attacker is too powerful. We are going to die. So, activate self-des¡­"

    *BOOM*

    Right before he could finish, he saw somethinging from the side. A streak of glowing spiritual energy shot towards Sin who is about to destroy the tower.

    The streak shed with him and took him away into the surroundings.

    The chains disappeared the transference tokens that were just crushed got activated and a bunch of operators reappeared outside the estate at a fair distance away.

    The trio were stunned. But soon they saw a few more streaksing towards them. They stopped right in front of the tower.

    They are Gamin, Yuvana and the Elite team leader. And they are carrying, Grivon, Giyon and Sam.

    Samnded at the tform at the entrance of the tower and stood in front of his friends.

    He had a smile on his face as he looked at them and the tower.

    "Not bad. You guys didn''t ck off. You even made the Sky tower."

    The trio were stunned for a moment. They didn''t expect Sam''s appearance here.

    After a few seconds, they lunged forward and all four of them are in a group hug.

    Giyon and Grivon alsonded on the tform as they looked at the tower. Then they looked at the estate. The aftereffects of the explosion that was caused by the stick are still visible.

    Even though it was blocked by Sin in the middle, the explosion still wrecked a lot of structures in the n. There is a lot of rubble and a lot of n members are in shock because of that.

    Both of them exchanged a nce. Gamin, Yuvana and Elite team leader jumped on to the ground as they confronted the n''s leader and the grand elders. They didn''t attack, but their presence stopped the Mari n members from making a move.

    The operatorspletely stopped the actions of carriers and the puppets. Everything came to a standstill.

    "What the hell are you doing with the sky tower anyway? Are you nning on destroying the whole n? Sivan is still here. I would have lost my body."

    Sam said with a smile as he looked at them.

    "Sivan is here? But his father said¡­"

    Philip trailed off as he understood what happened.

    "I heard too many great things about him, that I kinda believed what he said without thinking much. Damn, I need to be careful."

    Philip said as he bit his tongue.

    Jack on the other hand focused on something else.

    "Who took that person away though? Sin is very strong. Are they going to be okay?"

    "Don''t worry. If there is anyone who can handle Sin, it is that person."

    Giyon said with a smile and extended her hand.

    "I am Giyon. Nice to meet you."

    Philip shook her hand while Watt closed in on Sam and whispered something.

    Sam used the staff to hit him on the toes.

    "Ahh¡­ You could have just said no. This over rejection is causing me more doubts."

    Sam looked at him coldly as if warning him to say another word.

    Grivon looked at the trio and introduced himself after his sister.

    His eyes are glued to them. Sam noticed this and asked.

    "What''s the matter?"

    "Their attire¡­"

    Grivon pointed at the coats the trio are wearing.

    "What about it?"

    "They are made of meteorite sand. And his sword also."

    Grivon said in amazed tone as he pointed at Jack''s sword.

    "So?"

    "They all have spirits."

    "Yeah, they do. What are you on about?"

    "Meteorite sand needs over a decade to generate a spirit if you don''t enchant them. When did you even make them?"

    "When we are in Mortal ne cultivation. It is a really long time ago."

    "But you said you are from a very small. If that is true, how did you get get your hands on meteorite sand at such a ce. This doesn''t make any sense."

    *PAK*

    Grivon went on asking questions and only stopped when a pnded on the back of his head.

    Giyon looked at him coldly and said.

    "Can you stop bbering so much? They met after a long time and all you can do is interrupt them with stupid questions?"

    "Oh, I am sorry."

    "Don''t worry about it. It is fine to be curious."

    Philip said with a smile and he turned to Sam.

    "I can''t believe you made two friends while you are away. Seems like there is hope for you after all."

    Sam frowned and asked.

    "What do you mean by that?"

    "Well, I thought with your behaviour you would be spending your time with couple of puppets or undead. Who knew you would end up with people? It seems like you still remembered that you are a person.

    That is the only good thing that came out of this whole fiasco."

    Sam didn''t even know what to say to that. He is indeed a bit cold to people and cannot reject it.

    Giyon and Grivon looked at him weirdly.

    Sam just brushed it off and said.

    "I still can''t believe you made Sky tower. Do you really n on destroying the whole n in one move?"

    "That was the initial n, but who knew someone can actually block the attack like that."

    "You guys really went all out.

    Anyway let''s not waste your efforts and go and get my body."

    "Do we really need to do that instantly? I think this is the only time we could get to beat the crap out of you. Since you are a cripple and all. We won''t get another chance if you get that body back."

    Philip said with a grin. Watt and Jack both nodded as if they are agreeing with his words.

    Sam looked at them coldly and said.

    "I am injured. So, can''t fight. I hate this body. Let''s just go. No time for sparring."

    "Who said anything about sparring?"

    Philip said as he cracked his knuckles.

    "Is it really okay? Aren''t they friends? Why are they acting so scarily? As if they are trying to seek revenge."

    Grivon whispered to Giyon.

    Giyon couldn''t help but shake her head in smile.

    Sam backed down a bit and gathered his energy into the staff.

    "Bring it on. I will beat some sense into you. It doesn''t matter what body I am in."

    He also said with a cold smile.

    While the trio are proceeding, he paused and said.

    "But do remember, after this I am still going to get my body and I will be returning to Deste with you soon enough. I might even be taking a break and staying with you guys."

    The trio stopped.

    "We have no time to waste. Let''s go get your body."

    Philip immediately turned around and started ordering his subordinates.

 Chapter 1575 Provoking

    Chapter 1575 Provoking¡¡¡¡Sam, the trio, and the siblings.

    All of them got off the tower and they went into the estate. The first person they went to meet is the n''s leader.

    "So, where is Sivan?"

    Sam asked casually as if he is just taking a walk in the park and asking someone for directions. He is very cool and calm about the whole situation.

    The n''s leader wanted to just keep his mouth shut. But Gamin''s sword at the edge of this throat didn''t really give him that option.

    He could only speak up.

    "He is in the basement of the Main mansion. He is imprisoned in my private cell. But it would be troublesome if you go. There are twenty traps and almost eighty shackles added to him. You need the keys to getting to him."

    "So, where are they?"

    "I will tell you if you promise the safety of the youngsters of the n. People who are still within the early stages of their awakening. People who are just scouring the mortal ne.

    Unawakened, powerless, weak, and innocent. I want you to leave them all alone and I will give you the keys."

    "You do know that I have a high chance of breaking through them right? The traps and shackles you ced there, are not going to be that hard. The most that could happen is that it is time-consuming."

    "Yes, right. I heard about you and I have seen the prowess of the things you make. I am sure you will be able to do what you im. But before you reach them, I will kill Sivan. You won''t even get a single piece of your body left.

    Just make me that promise. Let my people go.

    We have killed too many people over this bullshit already. I don''t want any more lives on my conscience before I die. Particrly not the ones that have neither the power, authority or influence over the decisions that caused this shit storm in the first ce."

    Sam looked at Gamin.

    "Don''t look at me. I can''t make this decision for you."

    "What would you have done, just tell me that?"

    "I will just kill the person and destroy the root cause of the problem."

    "What about the possible roots that could create problems in the future?"

    "The future is not now. So, I won''t bother with it."

    Sam smiled and turned to the n''s leader.

    "Okay, here is the deal. I will not kill your innocent people. But I will kill everyone that is in thete-stage of Astral ne Initiation and higher. You cannot change my mind on that one.

    As for the rest, I give you my word that I won''t beying a finger on them.

    But I cannot guarantee about Gaja n''s decision. I will definitely put a good word in for you and tell them my opinion to leave them alone. The final decision is in their hands and I will not take any actions to stop them."

    "That is good enough. I am sure they will consider your words. And the Gaja n has been way more honorable than us anyway. They will definitely cut the weaklings some ck."

    The n''s leader took out a token and threw it to Sam before exining where the location of the basement is and where they could find Sivan.

    All of them walked there and Sam used the token to deactivate all of the traps before walking into the cell where Sivan is locked.

    Sivan looked at the entrance of the cell hopefully as he heard the footsteps.

    "Are you finally here? I have been waiting for a long time. Please take me away from here. Or else I will die."

    He yelled at the entrance.

    "Damn, it seems like you are really hopeful. Who are you waiting for?"

    Sam spoke as he opened the door.

    Sivan''s eyes widened in horror.

    Looking at his face, Sam could guess that Sivan is indeed expecting someone. And he highly doubted that it is Sin.

    "What are you staring at? This is the face you have lived with for the most part of your life. I am still waiting for an answer."

    "Y.. You¡­."

    "Whatever, let''s just finish the body transformation again. I am sure I will be able to find that info after I get my body back.

    As for you, let''s see if you will survive the whole process at all."

    Sam deactivated most of the shackles that kept Sivan immobile. He left the ones that blocked off his energy and dragged him out of the prison and to the main room of the Mari n''s mansion.

    "Isn''t your dream to be the head of the Mari n? Then this would have been your court. Since you are not going to achieve it, let''s put a stop to them right here. At least that might offer some relief to your soul after it undergoes the torture of dealing with my dormant soul again."

    Sam calmly spoke as he let out the specter.

    The specter released all of the extra souls that moved around and started creating the formation that is required for the transformation.

    "My father is not going to let you off. You better let me go at this moment. He will spare your life. If you make a move on me and do this forcefully, he will destroy all of your Dusk organization.

    He is as strong as Gail. I am sure you know what happens if someone like that hides and attacks yourrge organization.

    You are the experts, so you definitely know how that ends up.

    Reconsider this and join hands with me. I know people that know more about this world than you do. I will join you guys. With your intelligence and skillsbined with theirs, we can achieve great things."

    "Toote for a business deal Sivan. You made it personal the day we met. Maybe if you had asked me nicely and proposed a proper deal on that day, we could have had a chance to work. But now, not even in your dreams."

    Sam said softly as he examined each step of the formation.

    He paused for a bit before continuing.

    "As for your father, you don''t have to try to convince me about the danger he poses. But I would rather face those consequences than be imprisoned in your body and continue living like this."

    "So, even you felt sick of that body, huh? I can understand. I lived with it my whole life and even I cannot love it, how would you love it when you lived with a body like this."

    Sivan said in a very depressing tone.

    He became weak and all the struggle seemed pointless.

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "It seems like you really didn''t learn much from my memories. It is not about whether I like it or not, Sivan. It is the fact that it doesn''t belong to me.

    This body is not mine. It is yours, to begin with, and the one you are in, it is mine.

    You have no right to ever take that away and force this upon me.

    I am just taking what is mine."

    "Whatever you say. You bastard.

    But what about the gods that took your life and forced it on you again after you chose to die."

    Sam stopped what he is doing and looked at Sivan coldly.

    "What are you looking at? It is not like I am going to live for long. I don''t have to keep my mouth in check. I can call you whatever you want."

    The trio also looked at Sivan coldly when they heard his words.

    "You better speak carefully."

    Watt warned directly.

    Sivan turned to him and said.

    "What are you going to do? Use your cards to y my skin? I dare you to do so. Anyway, I should have just agreed with the n''s n of killing you three bastards too.

    I just thought this bigger bastard will go berserk and put a dent in my ns. If I had known I would end up like this, I would just have killed at least one of your three.

    Since all four of you are bastards with no one else but each other, that would have really been a great influence on your already shitty lives."

    He kept going on and on.

    Philip was about to make a move, but Sam stopped him.

    Instead, he walked over and dragged Sivan into the formation circle before he sat in another one.

    "It won''t work, Sivan."

    Sivan looked at Sam''s smile and his eyes widened in horror. He wanted to get rid of the shackles and struggle for just a little bit. But he couldn''t.

    He gritted his teeth and spoke.

    "So, you are finally epting your bastard birth? You should have done that a long time ago and killed yourself while you were at it.

    I wonder how you are even breathing in this world. If I were you and got thrown away by my parents; I would have killed myself a long time ago."

    "I already told you Sivan. I won''t work."

    That is all Sam said, no matter how much Sivan cursed and the process of the soul exchange began.

 Chapter 1576 Return

    Chapter 1576 Return¡¡¡¡While Sam is proceeding with the process, a few hundred meters away from the city.

    There is arge crater that is almost the size of arge mansion.

    In the middle of it Sin stood with his injured body. His arm is broken and he could feel blood seeping out of many of his injuries.

    He is inplete pain all over. In front of him stood Gail who looked at Sin with a depressed expression.

    Both of them are in bad mood.

    Sin wanted to walk, talk or do anything, but he couldn''t find any energy within his body.

    For the past few minutes, he just stood there like this and that is all he could do.

    But he really wanted to speak up. As for taking the medicine, he is so drained that he couldn''t even take his own medicine out of the spatial ring. After trying to speak a few times, he dropped to the ground.

    Gail lunged toward him and caught him before he hit the groundpletely. He took out some medicine and fed him.

    It stopped the excessive bleeding and eased some of Sin''s pain which made it a bit bearable for him.

    "It seems like the Mari n lostpletely." That is the first thing he said as soon as he found the voice in his throat.

    "Yes, unfortunately for you."

    "So, that means, is Sam already here? To take back his body."

    "Yes."

    "To take my son''s life back?"

    "Yes."

    Gail said in a calm tone. He looked at Sin''s conflicting expression. He cannot find words to ease Sin''s pain. Because he was never put in such a situation before. It would be aplete lie if he ever said that he can understand the pain and torment that Sin is going through at the moment.

    So, he kept his mouth shut and just patted his back.

    "What happened to the soldiers, elders, grand elders? The ones that came to attack your n."

    "Dead."

    "What? Dead? All of them? There are thousands of soldiers. You didn''t even take any prisoners? How can all of them be dead?"

    "Not just them, everyone is dead. The Divine league members, your grand elders, elders. Except for Sivan no one that came to the expedition survived.

    Everyone died on the battlefield."

    "How could that even happen? Did you make a move on soldiers?"

    Sin asked almost in an angry and disappointed tone.

    "What the hell are you saying? Why would I make a move on soldiers? It was all Sam''s doing. In fact, your son is not any less either. He was about to kill us all as well. The only reason we survived is that Sam already expected something like this and made preparations.

    Currently, the whole Gaja city disappeared from the terrain."

    "The whole city?"

    "Yes, the structure, buildings, the n estate, everything turned to dust, and your son caused it. Luckily most of us are safe and survived.

    We didn''t want to use thosest attacks though. It was truly ast resort since your son decided to use it. We don''t really have much choice left."

    "Why are you exining yourself? Since the n started a war, we should have already expected this result.

    But to lose all of the soldiers at the same time. That is something.

    I thought we are at the peak of the power in the current realms, but it seems like I am mistaken. A kid is climbing up the ranks with his brain. Today I almost died. Can you imagine that? The people that could have killed me are three brats that are younger than my son.

    Even the age of all three of thembined, wouldn''t even be one-third of my age and all it took was them to give onemand.

    What has this world be?"

    Sin sighed as heid down on the earth.

    "About your son¡­"

    "Leave it, Gail. I am trying not to think about it.

    I tried my best to be a good father to him. Even though I was not allowed to be a part of his life growing up, when I got the chance, I really tried my best to be a better father and tried to set him on the right path.

    But he was already rotten by then. He is way beyond repair. I exhausted every means I can think of. Care, love, anger, punishment, no matter what I used he didn''t change.

    Hemitted one evil act after another and I had to clean up his mess as I couldn''t help but me it on myself for not being a better father.

    I can''t do that anymore.

    Let him face the consequences of his actions.

    When more than ny percent of the n is dead because of him, there is no need for him to stay alive.

    I cannot clean up after him this time. I will not do that.

    But, I do have one favor to ask."

    "What is it?"

    "The n members. Mortals, non-cultivators. What about them? Can you spare them for me?"

    Gail stayed silent for a moment and said.

    "Generally, I would have said it is the decision of the n''s leader. Since it is the n war. But I think Sam will also have a say in it. I will rmend sparing them to both of them. Apart from that, there is really not much that I could do."

    "That is enough. I am sure they will heed your words."

    "Let''s hope so."

    "Let''s go back."

    Gail supported Sin as both of them walked to the Mari n grounds.

    Back in the n grounds.

    Sam is finishing the procedures as the Spectres supported it.

    The trio stood guard andmanded the subordinates to loot the things from the Mari n. Since Sam decided to spare the mortal ne cultivators and weaklings, they left them alone.

    But he didn''t say anything about the resources, knowledge, treasures, and the rest of the loot from deadbodies.

    They decided to round it all up along with the information on the secret assets of the elders and grand elders left behind so that they could loot them allter as well.

    Since their goal of finding Sam and taking revenge on the Mari n is finished, they are now on the way to making as much profit as possible.

    Even though the business functions went well within the past year or so, they still spent a lot of effort on all of these machines and equipment.

    They need to make the most out of it. Of course, they already made many times from all of the loot they gained from the Mari n until now. The allies that interfered in the middle also gave a lot, but it never hurts to have more.

    As they are doing this, they also kept an eye on Sam.

    Meanwhile, Sam is currently floating in a soul space.

    There he could see his soul floating around in the vast void and Sivan''s soul right in front of him. He could feel his soul splitting into two.

    And the main one left Sivan''s crippled body towards Sam''s original body. And within the space, it is the area where Sivan''s soul is huddled into a ball is currently at.

    The procedure split his soul into two and Sam''s soul dragged one of those towards him.

    But while this exchange is in process, all of a sudden, three ghost chimeras that are roaming around the formations entered Sam''s consciousness upon hismand.

    The ghost chimeras are forcefully merged into the soul replica that Sam left behind in Sivan''s crippled body.

    The exchange of souls ispleted.

    Sam finally felt like he reached home. His soul and body are the perfect matches.

    The procedure is finished.

    Sam opened his eyes and took a deep breath.

    He felt a slight headache and there is obviously some difort within his body, but he can feel it.

    He is back in his body.

    The first thing he did ism jump up to his feet and do a somersault on the spot.

    "I am finally back."

    He said with a sigh of relief. But also quickly made his soul start observing Sivan''s dormant soul within his consciousness. He didn''t want to waste any time on that.

    There are too many questions that he needs answers to and this dormant soul holds a lot of those answers.

    Sivan also opened his eyes. But he is obviously not excited like Sam. He touched the stumps on his arm and leg and sighed. His eyes started tearing up as he choked on his sobs.

    He felt so useless and hopeless at the moment. That he didn''t even want to do anything. Not even stand up. Not even put the effort to sit up.

    His body copsed to the ground as he wept continuously.

    Sam walked towards him slowly and took out the executioner''s sword.

    "Feels right."

    He swung the sword the other arm of Sivan was cut. The arm with the divine dimension fragment. He took that and threw it to Watt who is standing beside him.

    "Time to say goodbye, Sivan.

    You failed in your attempt to get what''s mine. But I will give you props. You are a worthy enemy. I will remember you forever."

 Chapter 1577 Guys with Braids

    Chapter 1577 Guys with Braids¡¡¡¡Sam held the executioner''s sword and was about to swing it and end Sivan''s life, but all of a sudden he sensed something.

    He turned to the side and swung the sword in apletely different direction.

    A sword ray powered by the corrosive energy of the Hydra spirit cut through the wind and shed with something.

    Arge energy de was revealed in the air. It appeared out of blue with no disturbance whatsoever.

    Philip, Jack, and Watt also made their move as they dodged and attacked somewhere in different corners. Their attacks shed with energy des that popped out of thin air.

    All four of them gathered as they looked around carefully. Sam activated energy vision to maximum effectiveness and looked around. He swung his de at a very unsuspecting corner of the room.

    The sword ray crashed with an invisible barrier that was destroyed and a person was finally revealed.

    A young man who is very lean stood as he leaned against the pir in the room. He has a very tall stature and a delicateplexion. With braided long ck hair.

    Sam looked at him coldly.

    The young man looked at Sam with a smile.

    "It seems like arete. I thought Sivan would have handled himself for a while, but we really did overestimate him. Don''t you think so, Brother Gold?"

    He spoke calmly. Sam locked in on him and looked coldly. Judging by the cultivation, the young man is clearly stronger than him. But he can still hold his ground if he tried since the other party is only at the initial stage of Astral ne Consummation.

    What really bothered him is not the strength, but rather the trick with which they hid.

    He pointed his sword at the young man while he extended his other arm to a different corner of the room.

    Spatial energy converged at the end of his palm into a small ball of spatial energy and was shot to that one corner.

    *BOOM*

    The spatial energynded on another invisible barrier and a myriad of small spatial rends are created everywhere sucking the air and the surroundings within.

    Another young man who barely dodged the attack jumped off and came out.

    He also has long braided hair, but this one is golden blonde.

    "Brother Silver, you might as welle out, now. He is really good at fishing us out. There is no point in hiding."

    Brother gold called out loud and from another corner and a young man walked out from another invisible barrier.

    This one has Silver hair braided.

    The one with the Golden hair has the highest cultivation among the three. Middle-stage of Astral ne Consummation.

    The remaining two are in the Initial stage only.

    "Who are you guys?"

    Sam asked cautiously. He and the trio are all ready to get into the fight, even though their power levels arepletely different.

    At this moment, Giyon and Grivon ran inside.

    "What''s happening here?"

    Giyon yelled as she looked at the three people that shouldn''t be there.

    "You.. what are you guys doing here?"

    She asked in a surprised tone.

    "Nice to meet you Giyon. It has been a very long time since we met. But too bad, we can''t catch up. We need to leave."

    Brother Gold said and he turned to Sam with a smile.

    "We also want to stay here and chat with you. We are really fascinated by the things you have done until now and are looking forward to your future growth. But currently, we need to go. So, let''s meet in the future.

    Now, if you let Sivan go, we need to take him away."

    "He is not going anywhere. He is going to die here today."

    Sam said calmly as he pointed his sword at Sivan, but the guys in the ck hair made their move.

    He zoomed past Sam and tacked Sivan.

    Sam was stunned by that movement. He wasn''t able to react in time.

    But he certainly managed to get a glimpse of what happened. A dome was created by the spiritual energy around the young man and assisted him to move faster.

    When he ran, it is almost like even the spiritual energy is trying to remove all kinds of resistance in his path. Even the friction from the air in the surroundings was eliminated.

    The young man caught Sivan and held him over his shoulder.

    He once again used his movement technique and was about to go past Sam and reach Brother Gold.

    But to his surprise, Sam''s sword moved and the movement technique was interrupted in the middle. He had to stop himself from falling forward and jump to avoid the attack.

    Sivan had alreadye back to his senses and was horrified when he saw this.

    "Whoever you are. You are not allowed to take him today. He is my prey, my enemy. He is going to die in my hands."

    Sam was about to make a move, but this time Brother Gold used a simr movement technique and dragged both Brother ck and Sivan away.

    This time, Sam wasn''t even able to catch the movement with his eye.

    "You might not know us now, Sam. But it won''t be long before we get to know each other. I hope you will provide enough entertainment for us when the time arrives. But for now, we are leaving with Sivan, whether you want it or not.

    So, don''t fight us on it and we can leave on our own ways on good terms."

    "I don''t care what purpose he serves you. But he is my prey and I won''t stop trying to kill him."

    "Well, you can try. But it won''t be possible. And if youe and find us because of him, we will be more than wee. If you can find us that is."

    With those words, the three of them took out three tokens and crushed them.

    Sam gathered his spatial energy to stop them from going away, but one of them threw out a small paper crane which flew towards him and disrupted the energy gathering process, almost causing Sam to have a bacsh.

    He was stunned by such an action.

    But he quickly came back to his senses and gritted his teeth. He looked at Sivan who is still in the hands of Brother ck.

    Sivan is smiling at Sam. A smile of hope and relief.

    Sam gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. Sivan''s expression changed as he felt something wrong within his mind. Before he could express it, he was enveloped with spatial energy and disappeared from the spot along with the other three.

    Sam frowned as he looked at the paper crane that fell at his feet.

    This one small paper crane managed to stop his spatial energy attackpletely. It not only nullified it but also made him experience an almostplete bacsh.

    He turned to look at Giyon who still seemed to be in a state of surprise.

    "Do you know who they are? I can''t believe that they managed to enter this roompletely hiding their presence. It shouldn''t have been possible, but they still did it."

    Sam asked and this made Giyon finallye back to their senses.

    "They are part of an organization, that is a part of Grey circle.

    The youngsterspletely grew up in the Grey circle in a way. But for the past few years, they are pretty dormant and only roamed around various realms to gain some experience. I never expected that they are already back."

    "What organization do they belong to?"

    "It is mostly called the Divine Formation Mountain in the Grey circle. I highly doubt you have ever heard of it."

    As soon as those words were spoken, Sam was stunned. He looked at the trio who are also stunned.

    Because they clearly knew of this name. Sam is extremely familiar with this name. Because the organization is tied up to the game.

    It is one of thest three organizations. An organization that is right below the Mari n in the list that was given to him.

    "These three people belong to that organization?"

    "Yes, it seems like you have heard to it. Which is surprising. The Divine Formation Mountain is actually not a really big organization. It is very small. There is only one master of the mountain. The three disciples and two dozen stewards or subordinates.

    That is it.

    They don''t have much personnel and they have very small territory in their hands. One of the two dozen subordinates controls the territory with a bunch of his own subordinates and collects taxes which will go to the mountain.

    The master of the mountain is one of the few people that the father admires and respects. It is not because he is powerful in direct confrontation, but rather the means and resourcefulness.

    In a way, it could be said, you are a lot like him. Most of the achievements of the Divine Formation mountaine from their intelligence and integration of the skills and expertise in different areas merged into theirbat.

    To think that Sivan has a connection with them is more surprising than their return itself."

 Chapter 1578 Back to Desolate

    Chapter 1578 Back to Deste¡¡¡¡Sam paced in the mansion with a disappointed expression.

    The peak stage cultivators were all busy, so they weren''t able to intervene, but to think that someone managed to escape their sensespletely and entered the mansion and even hid while attacking.

    That is very dangerous in itself.

    He decided to examine the spots they appeared in and started doing so while he waited for the Gaja n and his friends to wrap it up with the Mari n.

    His revenge is mostly with Sivan and it is not happening any time soon. So, all he can do is wait at the moment.

    So, while Sam is examining what these three braided men did, somewhere far away.

    On a mountain that is located in the middle of the forest andpletely surrounded by a weird barrier that didn''t let anyone else get a clear view from the outside, there is arge mansion within.

    Within that mansion in a room that isrge enough to amodate a battle arena, the three braided men appeared along with Sivan.

    The three of themnded properly on their feet as they sighed. But Sivan copsed to the ground. But the three of them didn''t react and just thought it is due to Sivan''sck of another leg and waited for him to get up.

    "We really shouldn''t be doing spatial transference for this long distance. My dead is getting all dizzy." Brother ck said in an irritated tone.

    "Why are you whining about it? It is just a bit rougher than a space gate." Brother Silver retorted.

    All three of them are walking away from the spot but realized that Sivan is not getting up.

    They frowned and went back to him to examine.

    "Don''t tell me he is dead after we went through all of this." Brother ck said in an anxious tone.

    "No, he is still breathing. He is unconscious."

    "Is it because of the blood loss? Or is he in shock from this transference too?"

    "I don''t think either of them is the reason. He still has a decent amount of energy left in his body. He literally didn''t fight back after getting into this body to use any energy.

    As for the blood loss, you can see it for yourselves. The body''s natural regeneration is fast enough to stop the bleeding."

    "Then if it''s not both of them, don''t tell me he fainted because of the happiness of being rescued by us."

    "Only one way to find out." Brother gold said and ced his hand over Sivan''s head. He started making different signs with his one hand as energy circted out of his hand into Sivan''s body.

    It started circting along with the natural energy cirction of Sivan as if it is conscious. It didn''t let the natural and instinctual defense mechanism of the body resist the energy flow.

    After circting the energy a few times, Brother gold spoke up.

    "There is nothing wrong with the body. He ispletely fine."

    "Then that only means one thing. The soul."

    Brother Silver said as he ced his hand on Sivan''s head.

    He looked into the air as his eyes started glowing with a weird light.

    His soul left his body and he found himself in a weird empty soul space.

    It is the soul space of Sivan.

    When he looked around, he was shocked and didn''t even know what to think. In that empty space, all he could see is fragments of the soul everywhere and in the middle of these fragments, Sivan''s soul is in the middle of all of these fragments.

    But one look and he could tell that is notplete. It is ripped apart in many spots. It was like a person is injured in many ces, except instead of blood, a bunch of soul fragments that are as small as sand grains are floating around them.

    Brother Silver came back to himself as he looked at his two fellow disciples.

    "The situation is very serious. His soul is almost destroyed. There are too many injuries to it. It is ripped apart. And I cannot find Sam''s soul anywhere. The dormant soul that should have been there after the transfer process is not there.

    Instead, the soul space is full of many soul fragments.

    It is definitely his doing."

    "It seems like we are in really deep trouble. The only reason we brought him here is his memories, what is the point of keeping him if we can''t extract them." Brother ck said with obvious frustration.

    "How about we kill him and perform soul extraction? We can get the memories from it."

    "No, we can''t. The soul is too damaged, unless it is recovered properly and all of the fragments are joined properly, we won''t get those memories from that soul after the extraction.

    We need to heal him properly and mend his soul before we can even do that."

    "That will take a lot of time though. The soul is way too damaged."

    "We can only wait. Who knows, we can even manage to bait that guy named Sam and lure him here with this guy. If he is dead, then Sam won''te."

    While the three of them are talking about what happened to Sivan and how to proceed further, back in the Mari n''s mansion, Sam finished up his examination.

    He dug under the floor of the Mari n''s mansion. Particrly in the parts where the three guys arrived and he noticed that there are some small markers.

    From those markers, he examined and was surprised to see the intricate work that went into the arrangement that let these guys enter the Mari n estate.

    Sam went on to examine and found out the connection between these markers in the mansion to the space gate formation that was within Sivan''s personal mansion.

    "These guys are really good. That is a very intricate space gate formation and the usage of transference function is perfect."

    Sam muttered to himself and went back to the mansion where all the people gathered. Now that the Mari n is finished off, Sam and the others could go back.

    They first decided to go back to the Gaja n, where Sam could settle all of the things for now.

    He needs to go back to Deste. He felt so entrapped all these days because of the body he was in.

    Now he needs to be free, for that he needs to go back to the Deste.

    They all went back to the Gaja n. Or to the stray realm where most of the Gaja n is currently at.

    Sam stayed there for the next four days and worked on a city blueprint. He already has a n before. Most of it is an improvement over the n they already made. It is based on the domes that are powered by the intricate natural elemental energy veins under the citynd.

    Of course, Sam also gave them instructions on how to repair thatnd that was almost destroyed because of the spiritual energy poison.

    Apart from doing that, he also did something else in these four days and one of the first things is to go and meet the beasts.

    He got infuriated as soon as he took a peek into the divine dimension. All the beasts are forcefully trapped inside and they are extremely weak and tortured.

    As soon as the beasts sensed Sam who freed them with just one thought, they all ran over to his location in the Divine dimension.

    Sam hugged each beast as tears welled up in his eyes.

    "I am sorry guys. I shouldn''t have let you suffer like this. It is my fault. I will never let this happen again."

    After he handed over the blueprint and the instructions he got ready to go back to the Deste.

    The rest of the Dusk organization already made a move. Only he and the trio are left.

    But the day he was about to leave, three unexpected guests tagged along.

    Giyon, Grivon, and Jyon, three of them stood at the entrance of Sam''s lodging.

    "What are you guys doing here?"

    "We areing with you, to the deste."

    "Deste? Why?"

    "Just to see, how your ce is. You bragged about it so much, I want to see how good it is."

    Grivon replied with a grin.

    "Okay then. Your wish."

    "Do I need to bring some of my subordinates? The journey would be long right? We can never be more careful." Giyon asked.

    "We don''t need that. The journey is not as long. It will be over before you know it."

    Philip said with a smile and looked at Sam.

    "Take it out, man. I have missed it a lot."

    Sam shrugged and looked through the items that are stacked on the second floor of the divine dimension tower.

    He took out the Dimensional Drifter and activated it.

    "What is that?"

    "Our means of transportation. Get on."

    Sam said with a smile as he set the coordinates for the Deste."

 Chapter 1579 Hospitality

    Chapter 1579 Hospitality¡¡¡¡The whole group disappeared from the Gaja n''s estate and reappeared at Deste.

    They arrived on top of the tower in Sam''s city.

    Grivon, Giyon, and Jyon, all looked at the massive city that was in front of them and was surprised. They couldn''t believe Sam has a device that could get him everywhere, but the city itself was more surprising to them than that.

    There are tall buildings that are of different shapes. It is the kind of city, they saw before.

    A bunch of puppets is flying around within the city. Sam looked at them in and raised an eyebrow.

    "Patrol puppets? When did you implement them?"

    "How do you know they are patrolling puppets?"

    Philip asked instead of answering.

    Sam looked at him as if it was obvious which made Philip answer.

    "It is one of the kids'' ideas. They designed the puppet based on some kind of flight system you put up in the library. It is perfect. The energy schematics are also good and they are also made of some new alloy they came up with¡­

    Philip started exining as they slowly walked down the stairs.

    Sam listened to it with a smile.

    It is not like he never thought of the patrol puppets. It actually a very old idea in his opinion. He just never bothered to design such small things in great detail. His basic goal was a basic surveince system when he designed the city and he achieved that.

    Any improvements could be done with time and the growth of the people they are training and the results are bearing fruit continuously and consistently.

    And it seems like within the time that he disappeared and gave all of the hidden ideas to the trio, the development of the whole organization picked up a rapid pace.

    He could identify a lot of changes. Even though the basicyout and the design of the city remained the same, the levels of the formations have been improved. One look and Sam could see that if the previous formations could kill a Consummate stage cultivator of Mortal ne, the current changes can clearly kill a transcendent stage cultivator of Astral ne.

    Which is very drastic in itself.

    The siblings looked at the tower''s interior in awe.

    All of them first went to Sam''s room since the siblings wanted to see every part of the building. Then they were escorted to view the rest of the building and finally into the city to some special guest lodgings.

    "You stay there for now and enjoy the hospitality, I wille and meet you guys after a while and you can see whatever you want."

    "You better treat us good. I am not going to hold back." Grivon said with a grin and Sam just nodded.

    "Don''t hold back. They will assign some attendants to you and you can ask them whatever you want."

    Philip said as he called for some attendants to escort them to the lodgings.

    The siblings are getting surprised every step of the way. The first thing is the roads, the street lights, and the basic infrastructure with the park benches and other stuff.

    The harmony between the businesses and the residents is another thing.

    Even though the Gaja city and even the n itself have many races within them, the diversity of the races in the city is a bit shocking to them.

    They even met some races that they have only heard of.

    Apart from that, the railway system is something they were shocked and interested in. But they couldn''t go to that right away. All they could do is take a glimpse from far away.

    The next shock came from the hospitality itself. When they were all taken to the building and the rooms, they were taken aback by the different machines in the room.

    There is a special air conditioning device that works with the wind, water, and fire elemental energies. The light elemental energy devices that manipte the lighting in the room, the bed that warms up, the special bathrooms, and the plumbing system.

    Everything.

    Apart from that, the food that came to them, and the rxing massage services that are provided, they really enjoyed their time in their rooms.

    If that is not enough, they were also given some virtual projection devices which have several videos of thepetitions between the academy students and otherpetitions that are conducted by the Dusk organization over the years.

    They are all kept for their entertainment.

    While the siblings are enjoying their stay, Sam went on to check the developments the trio made.

    The first thing he did is, meet the fighting units. The fire units, lightning units, wind units, and de units.

    He went through the profiles of the people briefly and checked the resources that were used to do this.

    This is obviously not the first thing that Sam wanted to do after he came here. He wanted to spend some time with his friends, but the trio are pretty adamant about him checking these things while they left to deal with something.

    So, after the units, Sam checked the carrier production, the tower production, and finally the rest of the measures that the trio took to help him.

    He went through the resources that are used in the process and the whole n.

    As he looked through all of that, he couldn''t help but feel proud and content. His friends have everything they need in this organization. If they had left Sam be, they could have enjoyed all of this by themselves.

    If they had joined hands with Sivan, they could easily kill Sam with everything he gave to them.

    Then, they would have had arge empire for them to rule. Massive amount of resources, people, territory, authority, and inventions. They could have had every luxury known in the realms, but they used all of this time and energy to help him escape.

    He spent most of his past life feeling lonely, this might just be the time that he felt that he is far from lonely.

    He has everything he needed right here. And they just might be these three friends.

    Upon their request, he also looked through the business decisions, the territory expansions, and everything that was done in the past year.

    He was on it until the evening.

    Only then was he left alone to do whatever he wanted and the trio finally showed up.

    "Don''t tell me, you guys want me to go through some more shit. I don''t know why you are showing me all of this, but I am not checking any more data or reports."

    "Alright, you don''t have to. Let''s go and meet your new friends. They are stuck in their rooms all day long."

    "Okay, where are we going now?"

    "To a restaurant. Mackey closed the kitchen to the customers today. He is giving us a special meal. He is really looking forward to getting your opinion on this. We also went high and low to get some very special ingredients from all over the new domains we conquered.

    Let''s enjoy it for ourselves tonight."

    "You made me spend all the day with paperwork to just do this?"

    "Of course not just that. We needed to make some preparations for tomorrow. Since your friends are here as guests, we cannot just let them have a normal experience can we?"

    "Then what is the point of hiding it from me?"

    "Why are you asking so many questions? It is not like looking at those numbers is not something you take pleasure in. You literally love doing that shit. Anyway, let''s go for dinner."

    "Assholes."

    Sam cursed them as all four of them went to the restaurant. The three siblings were also invited.

    "So, how is your stay, is everything alright?"

    Sam asked as soon as he saw them.

    "Sam, is this really how you live your life here?" Grivon asked with a very confused expression

    "Live how?"

    "The massages, thepetition videos, the food, the room. Is this really how things go around here?"

    "Of course, not all the people in the city can afford those things. The basic tools in the room are mostly avable, but the massages and food are different things.

    But pretty much everyone can afford something good. They might not get daily massages and of the same kind you got, but even a normal citizen should be able to get something good within their price range."

    Philip is the one who answered even before Sam could.

    "Every normal citizen?"

    "Yeah, every household within Sam''s city can afford something good. Since we opened the city, not a single household everined too much. Of course, they have their problems, but that is in the process of their growth and improvement.

    But not for the basic survival."

    "Yourpetitions are really good. But there are manypetitions that are not based onbats. Is there any reason for that?" Giyon asked.

    "It is basically, to check other qualities that are necessary for a cultivator that is pursuing any field.

    We figured that apetition format will help them better since healthy rivalry makes them strive harder. We saw really great results."

    Watt answered before Sam could speak and while Mackey started bringing dishes.

 Chapter 1580 Showing Off

    Chapter 1580 Showing Off¡¡¡¡The dinner was amazing.

    Sam really ate a lot of new food that day. Unsurprisingly, the siblings tried some of them before, but with Mackey''s skills, they found a whole new taste for these already familiar ingredients.

    "If food is like this, I will have three meals every single day," Grivon said as he patted his satisfied stomach.

    The rest of them just smiled. Even if Giyon and Jyon didn''t say it, they also felt the same. At their power level, food is thest thing thates to their mind most of the time. They only eat when they need to discuss something for a long time or for a celebration.

    Only after Sam arrived at the Gaja n with his recipes did they start eating frequently. But now with Mackey''s cooking, things arepletely different. They really want to eat three meals a day every day without missing a single chance.

    After the meal is done, the siblings once again went to the quarters they were arranged to rest for the night while Sam after a long time wanted to sleep in his own bed after a long time.

    "We have a big day nned at the dawn. We need to show all of the dusk organization to your friends, so get ready by dawn."

    "Okay, whatever."

    Sam went back to his room and fell on his bed.

    This is one of the things that was rarely used in his room. But that night he slept like a baby.

    The next morning, he was woken up by his friends at dawn and he had to get ready. They directly went to the ce where the siblings are staying. After meeting them, Philip started exining.

    "Since you want to see the whole Dusk organization, we will take you to all of the important ces. We will start with the tower once again.

    The has the surveince system of the city and from there we will go to the factory area where a bunch of factories is set up, then we can go to the city''s spa and then the school and research departments in the city.

    That is all you need to see in the city, we will proceed after we are done with that."

    The siblings nodded and they are very excited about the whole thing. Like he said they went to the tower to check the surveince first and on the way, they also took a look at themunicationwork system that is connected throughout the whole continent.

    "You really made this? Amunicationwork for the whole continent?"

    Giyon was shocked. Even though Grivon and Jyon were also surprised, Giyon was really shocked for some reason.

    "Why?"

    "We are trying to create arger areamunication system for a while. But we are unable to do so."

    "We?"

    "I have some partners within the Grey circle. I am way too young and weak to survive alone in the Grey circle for long, so I have a band of people that are led by a friend of mine. We are trying to connect our territory with a propermunicationwork, but it was really hard and you are telling me you connected the whole continent ages ago?"

    "Yeah. We were also shocked at that time, but we got used to it by now."

    Watt brushed it off with a smile.

    They proceeded with the tour. They were taken to the factory area, where most of themon products of the city are manufactured. The grenade factory, the puppet factory, and the normal weapon factory.

    Even though the assembly lines, the worker shifts, and the whole operational structure werepletely new to them.

    But there is an even more surprising thing that they witnessed.

    Wherever Sam went, the respect shown was new to them.

    Of course, they have their own territories, and their own subordinates and sometimes even they get respected in the Gaja city when they are roaming around, but this is different.

    They noticed that the parents with toddlers are pointing at Sam and his friends and proudly saying something.

    They noticed the businessmen and merchants who are busy stopping all they are doing toe and greet him and even those greetings are heartful. The siblings can really see it.

    When they went past the quarters of the factory employees, every single of them came out to greet Sam and his friends and some of them even invited them to their house for a meal.

    It is a very new feeling to them.

    It is not just respect for fear and authority. It is the respect that waspletely earned and people gave wholeheartedly.

    This is new to them.

    Sam''s friends looked at each other while grinning.

    They then went to the school, where a whole new experience is waiting for them. The school system with various departments is also new to them. They never thought a school like this even exists.

    Jyon almost fainted when she learned that there is a whole separate department for music and there are even research teams for studying various applications of different instruments in different fields.

    She couldn''t get enough of it and when she saw dozens of kids practicing various instruments diligently, she couldn''t take it anymore and started ying her flute for a while with them.

    Giyon and Grivon are obviously more interested in thebat departments and the Artisan departments.

    The patent system is also something they couldn''t wrap their head around.

    Finally, the trio arranged a small tournament for them to spectate and Sam''s direct students, the ten disciples he took in are participating in it.

    When they looked at Sam, they all became cheerful.

    Sam looked at their cultivation and was surprised.

    "They grew really fast. Are their foundations okay? They are not rushing are they?"

    "Of course not. They are perfectly fine. Their energy control is even better than Watt''s."

    Jack said from the side.

    Watt frowned and looked at him coldly.

    "What the fuck do you mean by that? I am the guy with the best control out of all three. Have you forgotten my card tricks? Do you want to get a taste of it more?"

    "The shy tricks that have no other use than showing off? Maybe Sam''s new friends might want to watch it. They might be entertained. Why don''t you do it?"

    "Yeah? Then get your sword ready. We can go right now."

    Their argument went on and on, but they didn''t start going to blows.

    They are just bickering casually.

    They spent a lot of time as they roamed around various departments after the tournament was over. They ended up going for lunch after that and then finally it was some free time.

    "So, where do you want to go next? We have a Navy base in one of the nearest areas and there is another factory area where some of our other products are manufactured on the. Which one do you want to visit first?"

    "Navy base?"

    Giyon was confused by this term.

    "Yeah, a base for manufacturing all of the Marine equipment, training our special forces that are good with the water element. They also do research, but it is solely focused on the marine and water elemental equipment."

    "Okay, then let''s go there first," Giyon said with excitement. Grivon and Jyon didn''t object.

    "So, how are we going? Space gate?"

    "No. We could use that if you want. But I guess you can experience a different transportation system for now?"

    "Don''t tell me. We are going on a train?"

    "Train? It will take way too long.

    Sam, take out your hovercar. We will follow on the boards."

    "Car? What is that?" Siblings are obviously confused.

    Sam just smiled and agreed.

    He took out the hovercar and let the siblings board it before moving. The trio followed them on the hoverboards.

    The Siblings were stunned again.

    The trio seemed to be satisfied by their reactions.

    Sam just shook his head as he sighed.

    This has been one big show-off. For some reason, the trio is constantly trying to show off all the great things about the Dusk.

    He doesn''t know why they are doing it. But they are really enjoying this.

    They soon went to the Navy base, where ships are being manufactured along with other marine equipment. Including the tfish puppets, the underwater excavation machine, the harpoon guns, and other stuff.

    The special training field is set up in the ocean for water elemental users. A smallpetition was set up once again to entertain the siblings.

    After that, they were taken to another spot with the space gate. To the former Usain sect area which is currently a factory ground for the Dusk organization.

    For the rest of the day, they just visited different spots on the, and siblings are constantly hit with surprises.

    The trio is obviously the most delighted of all.

    Sam just didn''t think much about anything and just went on with whatever they wanted him to do.

    He suddenly felt peaceful after all of the fighting and killing that went through to get his own body back. At least at the moment, he felt like he deserved that normal break.

 Chapter 1581 Relation

    Chapter 1581 Rtion¡¡¡¡For the next few days, Sam roamed around various branches of the Dusk organization along with his friends and the three Gaja n siblings.

    He didn''t object to whatever the trio suggested. They went to all kinds of entertainment spots that the Dusk organization has along with all kinds of research ces, demonstration grounds, academies,petitions, and even some expeditions.

    Dusk organization''s mining techniques, construction techniques, and transportation techniques of them are demonstrated for the siblings.

    For some reason trio kept on feeling gleeful about every situation that made the siblings feel shocked.

    "No wonder you are underwhelmed by everything Gaja n and Mari n have. You are indeed holding a massive treasure trove here and it is just improving with every passing moment."

    Giyon said as she took a sip of some special fruit juice.

    "Underwhelmed? More like disappointed. I thought the top organizations of these realms would have something more than just a normal structure of a n.

    I don''t see any difference between your n and a n that I found on this deste. Do you understand how bad that is?

    Except for the power difference, you are all the same. In fact, we didn''t even use any other tactic to defeat the Mari n. All we did is increase the power scale of our attacks to match their power scale.

    These three just went with the same blueprint that we used to defeat a very low-level organization. They went after the branches and small figures first. Attracted the attention of the key figures and some powerhouses. Dealt with them when they are alone and separated from the rest of the n.

    Then finally went after the n in a singlerge and exhaustive attempt.

    All of it is as simple as that."

    Sam said without holding back.

    The three siblings went into deep thought. They got a gist of what the trio did to Mari n and how they suffered which indirectly eased up the pressure on them for the war.

    Now that Sam put it so bluntly, they can see how their n is also very simr and could have been taken down if followed the same blueprint.

    "The only variable you guys have are the powerhouses that thrive in a grey circle. If they are not there, it will be way too easy.

    Since your n is going through restructuring, it is better for you guys to eliminate these obvious ws.

    Especially you Giyon, since you are trying to establish your own organization, try to improve themunicative structure within it.

    Make it a single collective entity and also make sure that every element of that entity is equally valued, but not overvalued.

    Except for your headquarters, no other resource point should be holding too many eggs. If it does, try to spread it out and bnce it.

    And even if there are too many baskets and there is not much value in each of them individually, as long as one of them is attacked or destroyed, make sure that they can be aided and rectified as quickly and as effectively as possible."

    Sam exined as he cut the meat on his te.

    They are currently having dinner in the Naga Loka. In the beach resort that Sam owned here. Since their power levels are obviously way higher than the realm''s poison level, they can casually roam around in this ce at this point.

    Giyon and Grivon went into deep thought. Jyon on the other hand is enjoying the beauty of the resort that is made of crystal bamboo of different colors.

    Naga Loka itself is a very beautiful ce, to begin with, and with the addition of such beautiful construction, it might just be one of the most beautiful ces she has ever visited.

    After they finished dinner, they waited for the dessert to arrive while talking.

    "So, Sam. How long are you nning to stay here? I heard from my mom and dad that you promised them something and even Senior Elder Ma has something that he needs from you. You need to visit the Gaja n again right?"

    "Of course, I will stay for a few more days though. It is not like I am going to waste too much time traveling.

    I will also be delivering the promises to your parents and Ma as well.

    But there are obviously some things I need to take care of here.

    If you guys want to go, I can drop you off. Otherwise, you can stay here with me until I return."

    "I don''t have any problem staying here for a while." Grivon agreed immediately.

    "I am also staying. I don''t have anything to do back home at the moment. They still need to do the basic setup for the city. I can just stay here. I want to observe your organizational structure carefully. Particrly, your academic system."

    "I also want to stay."

    "Do as you like then."

    After finishing their mealpletely, they went back to Deste. That evening after everyone retired to their own rooms, Sam took a deep breath and looked at his wrist screen.

    In the past year that he was stuck in a different body, the other yers are actually working on destroying the organizations.

    Even though they did feel bad about Sam being stuck in such a situation, they also tried their best to simply finish as much as they can, while Sam is still stuck in the body and the trio are stuck in finding and helping Sam out.

    Of course, Sam''s team worked hand in hand with Arkiv while taking down some of these organizations. In fact, his subordinates already contacted Arkiv and he would be visiting Deste soon to give Sam his share of the resources and the heirlooms within this process.

    When he looked at the list of the organizations, he couldn''t help but feel surprised.

    There are actually only two organizations left in thest three. The third one which was finished is the Mari n and it is actually on top of the list. The second one is the Divine Formation Mountain which is located within the Grey circle areas.

    The third organization is somewhere very far away from the Gaja n, Mari n, or even the Grey circle.

    If all the realm locations are considered as ces on a globe, then the Gaja n and Mari n are located at one point on the globe while this organization could even be located at the exact opposite point on the other side of the globe.

    It is that far away.

    They are not even in the grey circle and even Giyon adamantly said that she never heard of the organization''s name in the grey circle.

    Sam also confirmed their location through the coordinates he got in the Dimensional Drifter.

    Now the Divine formation mountain and this organization are the only things left for him on the list.

    Apart from that, there is something else Sam is worried about.

    Whereabouts of Dayus.

    The one guy that he hated more than Sivan. In fact, in a way, Sam didn''t hate Sivan much. There is of course anger for stealing what is his, but for Dayus it is pure hatred.

    No matter how many differences they had, the yers always dealt with it by themselves. They tried not to involve outsiders and underhanded means to deal with each other.

    That was the decorum they kept for years and Dayus just broke itpletely. He repeatedly tried to set Sam up and literally made trouble for Sam.

    There is no way Sam could let that go. He was hoping that Dayus would be present at the Mari n''s headquarters, but there wasn''t.

    Now there is only one way to find out and that is from Sivan''s memories. In thest few days, even though he is enjoying his time, he didn''t stop attacking the dormant soul of Sivan.

    Since he is already familiar with the whole thing and he has the assistance of the specter that is much stronger than before, it is going much faster. He is already done halfway through and since most of the memories are something that he already had, digesting it was also easier.

    Now he is at the final stage of absorbing that soul.

    He closed the wrist screen and started attacking the soul. Within an hour he was done and he absorbed all of the information that he needed.

    He got all of the info about the Divine Formation mountain and the three men that came from there and also a rough situation of Dayus.

    The three men are not just rted to Sivan in a normal way, it turned out that they are rted to Sam as well.

    In fact, their rtion to Sam is the reason why they got acquainted with Sivan.

    They are the ones that trapped Saber Monarch and Vidyuth who are released by Sam.

    These are mysterious people that created the Maze formation and the Mountain Prison and Sam sessfully broke them apart.

 Chapter 1582 Arkivs Visit

    Chapter 1582 Arkiv''s Visit¡¡¡¡Sam was really surprised upon this revtion.

    He didn''t expect that these three young men would be connected to him this way.

    He actually got the liquid energy process by decoding their original work. The three formations they left down in the lower realms by trapping Saber Monarch and Vidyut as well as the formation that was made in that cialnds to create a massive patch of the warm region, three of them are decoded by Sam.

    He broke the first two and modified thest one to his own vition. These three formations are some kinds of challenges to the world by these three guys and Sam won all of those challenges.

    Not just won, he even stole their ideas to improve his own research.

    What he doesn''t know is that they learned about Sam as soon as he messed with their work. They learned about his whereabouts, what he is doing and how he is climbing one realm after another as he made name for himself.

    They kept a close eye on his journey and after Sam was trapped by Sivan and lost his body, they got a bit interested.

    They started looking into Sivan and learned the details about this soul transfer process before reaching out to him.

    They are very much interested in Sam''s ideas and thought processes along with all of the inventions he had at hand.

    They approached Sivan who is trying to figure out a way to make the ideas from Sam''s memories work.

    The Mari n obviously didn''t have a single capable person that could make this work, so Sivan was in a perilous situation. There is nothing worse than having a treasure trove right under his feet, but not being able to enjoy it.

    In that time, they contacted Sivan and all three of them are the reason why Sivan was even able to create all of this equipment.

    Not just the equipment. They are the ones who helped him understand the Void style and ripple style, they created the Spiritual energy poison. They are involved in the creation of armors and puppets.

    They basically prepared Sivan and his army for this war. Sivan, Mari n, and the Divine league might be the reason why this war happened, but these three are the reason why this war progressed as it did.

    If they were not present, Sam would have dealt with the Mari n much more effectively. The war would have ended even before the Mari n could have any chance to fight back at all.

    They would have been decimated. Except for Sin''s existence, there is not a single thing that could have threatened them with the way things are.

    Sam dissolved all of these memories and opened his eyes.

    This is a reallyplicated situation. He thought Sivan might have had some other connection with these three men.

    Even though he thought his inventions might have been the reason for this connection, he still felt it is primarily connected with Sivan itself.

    But now it seems like he got it all wrong.

    He is the main target of this whole thing and these people are trying to get the full set of his memories. That is because Sivan might be an idiot when ites to technical things, things that need creativity and impable intellect, but he is cunning as a fox.

    He didn''t dare reveal everything he got from Sam''s memories, hepletely kept it in check and only revealed things that he has an immediate interest in and also things he thought would be done faster.

    He also made a deal with these three men who clearly have means beyond anything Sivan and Mari n could have, in case of shit went sideways.

    Shit indeed went sideways and he tried to call them out. Too bad, Sam already reached out before they could do anything and cornered Sivan.

    Even though Sivan was taken away, Sam is not really worried. He knew exactly what he did. To make sure that Sivan doesn''t have a thought process of his own, he exploded his dormant soul that was left in Sivan''s body.

    If his estimation is right, Sivan would be in aa and his soul should be shredded. Even if the three men killed Sivan right at the moment, they wouldn''t get any information.

    Sam is really worried about the information reaching these three guys.

    Even with Sivan, there are limitations with what he could do, since he doesn''t have enough expertise with the technicalities and theories needed to make these ideas practical and functional.

    But these three guys are different. They are very skilled. In fact way too skilled that Sam felt some sense of rivalry for the first time because of them.

    If they get all of this info, the things they could do will exceed any imaginations anyone ever had even within the grey circle.

    They could either create something that is way too beyond this world or destroy something that makes way too much of an imbnce to the world.

    Either way, he doesn''t want someone else using his ideas to do such things.

    He doesn''t want to indirectly be the reason for such a massive impact.

    So, he has to figure out a way to find them out and deal with them. The only problem is that they won''t be easy targets.

    The same blueprint Sam used against all the other organizations wouldn''t work on these people. They are a very small organization. They are not spread too much, they have very few members and they have their own fair share of tricks up their sleeves just like Sam.

    But he cannot do anything immediately.

    So, he could only wait for a while.

    He went to rest for the day after that was done.

    The next day, Sam met Arkiv.

    "How are you doing? I heard you stirred up quite some shit even when you lost your body and resources. You can never sit still, can you?"

    "What do you expect? Do you want me to take it lying down?"

    "Nah, that doesn''t sound like you. Stirring up trouble is on par with your character. Anyway, I am d you are okay.

    The other yers really became a pain in the ass for me. They are constantly trying to guilt-trip me for using your resources when I was dealing with the organizations."

    "Who cares? I bet even you didn''t care that much about it. You are justining here about the sake of it. How did it go through? Did you face any problems?"

    "Not really, it is all good. In a way, your absence made this a bit more fun amongst ourselves, but the yers worked really hard to lessen the gap between you and them.

    They really thought this is the only chance they had to level the ying field a bit."

    "So, did they seed?"

    "To an extent, yes. A lot of them even managed to gather some teams, just like you did. Noah and Kumar in particr. I don''t know what organization they are a part of, but they have a really elite team.

    I think they are going to be tough to tackle even with your regr tricks."

    "Well, because of the circumstances, some new things are made by the dusk here. I am sure I can handle them well enough no matter the situation now. The ying field will be uneven again.

    At least until we are dealing with this organization."

    "You already took the Mari n, is there any chance that you are going to back off from these organizations?"

    Arkiv asked.

    Sam was confused and asked.

    "Why is that?"

    "I mean, I am not particrly against you participating, it is just that we are all in the same boat, there is no point in thepetition this much is there?

    It would indeed be better if the ying field is a bit even. If you let go of these organizations, the other yers would have a chance.

    With you widening the gap constantly, you are not just increasing the pressure, they are unable to keep up with thepetition because of theck of resources. Just be a bit lenient this time."

    "You are right.

    But I cannot let go of the Divine Formation Mountain. I have something personal to settle with them."

    "So the other organization is free for all?"

    "Sure. I won''t evene to those premises if that is what you would like."

    "That would be great. I will inform other yers when I go back. As for the Divine Formation mountain, I will tell them the situation, and we will see what would happen. I think they will understand."

    "Even if they don''t I can''t do much about it. It is not like I can just stop this enmity with the organization."

    "Alright, alright. Don''t need to get so serious. But why do you have so many enemies? Give it a rest man. Just don''t piss off too many people. Why do you do that yourself?"

 Chapter 1583 Back to Gaja

    Chapter 1583 Back to Gaja¡¡¡¡After meeting with Arkiv, Sam spent some time with him and went back to work mode.

    Even though he really liked this small break he took and felt that he deserved it, he knew he cannot continue like this for long.

    This time the enemy is a bit trickier than before. This is probably the first time that he has to worry about the quality and the intellect of the enemy, instead of their raw strength.

    He decided to get as much information on them as possible before deciding on his strategy.

    But before that, he has to finish up things in deste and get back to the Gaja n. There are some promises he needed to fulfill there.

    So, he assigned all the tasks to the trio and his subordinates. Even though the trio did a great job in his absence, the massive spending on the equipment created still put a strain on the finances and messed up some ns for organizational growth.

    Since they also got some loot from various organizations that covered these losses, he needs to figure out a way to make up for the missing time in this growth process, allocating these extra resources.

    While dealing with this problem, he also started designing something. The designs for the vehicles, that Gamin and Yuvana asked for.

    They didn''t want some fancy flying machine, in fact, they wanted a rough vehicle for the rough terrains they usually travel in.

    He cannot think of much other than Motorcycles.

    In his previous life Motor cycle has been one of the best releases from the work and stress he umted with his role and responsibilities. They are fast, and free, and based on the rider could be dangerous also.

    He wanted to design those things and give them to the couple. The addition of their de usage just like how he implemented sword energy usage in Jack''s hoverboard, will make it much more suitable for them.

    So, he spent half of the time designing that while the other half was spent on organizational development.

    He spent a bit more than a week doing that.

    After that was done, he was finally ready to go back.

    This time the trio wanted to tag along though.

    "I will take you guys with me. I do need your help to deal with these guys, but not at the moment. You guys stay put and deal with the organizational matters first.

    I will go there and gather the information needed for now. We know way too little about the enemy and the main problem is that the person we are dealing with is not just these three guys. We need to be careful about the teacher of these three and the subordinates they have under them.

    When they are that strict in the selection process, there is no way they could have let some random people be their subordinates, I will spend some time studying all of these factors ande pick you guys up before I leave.

    Meanwhile, assign the teams to Arkiv. Let him take them to the other organization that we are not participating in.

    There is no use of them here, at least at the moment."

    The trio looked at each other. They are a bit reluctant, but they agreed.

    But before Sam left, Jack took out a red-colored metallic token and gave it to Sam.

    Sam looked at the token in surprise. It is simr to another token that he has seen in the past. The token of the people from the league of blood iron.

    "Take this token and use your blood on it when you are in the Gaja n''s territory, you will get a nice surprise.

    We thought we would surprise you by ourselves after we go there. But since you are leaving earlier, this will help you.

    "Is it rted to the League of Blood Iron?"

    "It kinda is."

    "Don''t tell me, you destroyed it," Sam asked in a surprised tone.

    "Do you really think we had that much time? And even if we want to, we cannot destroy that. In fact, after learning about this surprise, even you would be reluctant to do so. Just go and check it out."

    Sam shrugged and put the token in the storage.

    He went to meet the siblings so that they can leave.

    "I really don''t want to leave this ce. This is really a nice ce to stay and enjoy." Grivon said in a dejected tone.

    "It''s not like you cannote back. You cane back whenever you like. Just meet one of the managers and he will arrange the stay for you."

    "Yeah, but the journey is so tedious. It is not like I carry around that slick transportation device as you do."

    "Then don''te. You are the one who is already missing the ce before we even left."

    Sam just brushed him off and took out the Dimensional drifter. He took the three of them and arrived at the Gaja n grounds.

    The first thing that greeted their eyes is the city that is under construction. All of the earth elemental users are being guided by the artisans and the formation masters as they constructed every part of the city.

    Since it is a city linked with intricate formations, it is impossible for them to not construct all of the elements simultaneously so there are no mishapster.

    They met with the n''s leader, Gail, Gamin, and Yuvana.

    Sam handed over the motorcycle designs to them.

    "Will these people even be able to make these things?"

    Gamin asked as he looked at the designs in awe.

    Sam even gave a recording crystal with a virtual demonstration of what the final product will look like.

    The couple ispletely smitten with these designs. They liked it so much.

    "I could make them myself, but I think my cultivation level would be a bit of a problem here. For you, we will need a metal like a meteorite sand that gets stronger with the exposure to spiritual energy, and metal that could handle that speed when you are using these things will be hard for me to forge.

    Even with all the enhancements that I could make, it will still be difficult for me.

    A metal that is not that strong will be easier, but you won''t be able to use it for a long time. A really long time.

    So, as long as you can find a decent artisan that can build this, I will coordinate with them to see to it that the final product is of decent quality without any hups."

    The couple nodded in excitement. They didn''t even lift their eyes up from the blueprint and went over to the side to take a look at the demo video again.

    After that Sam met with Senior Elder Ma.

    "Here to repay your debts?"

    He asked Sam with a faint smile.

    "Yeah. Tell me what do you want?"

    "A discussion would be nice. I have been doing some reallyplicated research recently, I want your take on it."

    "That is it?"

    "That''s enough. It is no use getting something physical or materialistic from you. I have no use for them. Your knowledge is your most valuable asset anyway, I would rather have a chunk of that one."

    "I will be staying here for a few days, so we can discuss as much as you want."

    "That would be great. I have something to do now anyway, so let''s talkter."

    Sam left and went back to meet Gail.

    Previously Gail was busy with his own work, so Sam had to wait.

    Now he got some time to discuss.

    "You need info on Divine Formation Mountain?"

    "Yes."

    "Are you sure you want an enmity with them?"

    "Yes, I do. They took Sivan away. Currently, they cannot do much even if they perform soul extraction on Sivan, but that won''tst long.

    They will figure out a way to get all of those memories and I don''t want that to happen."

    "But they are in the grey circle. In fact, the leader of that mountain is a key yer. He cannot be underestimated at all. The worst part is, that he doesn''t even need many subordinates and territories, because people who have those things directlye and help him voluntarily.

    Half of the grey circle is trying to kiss his ass. You will be in some real trouble."

    "I can understand that, but it is impossible for me to back down. I need to get as much info on them as possible.

    I cannot just let them be. The memories are way too crucial."

    "If you wish to know, I can tell you all that I know of."

    "That would be great. We can talk when you are free. You can handle your work. I can wait for a while."

    Gail nodded and went back to deal with his own work.

    Meanwhile, Sam went back to his residence and took out the red-colored token Jack gave him. He put a few drops of his blood on it to see what will happen.

 Chapter 1584 Surprise

    Chapter 1584 Surprise¡¡¡¡The token started glowing, which didn''t surprise Sam much.

    But the next thing did. There is a projection that came out of it. It isprised of many runes that are formed of bright red light.

    Sam looked through these patterns and instantly understood what they were signifying. It is an energy cirction pattern through which he could ess the stone for its real purpose.

    He did exactly as the runes instructed and Sam felt like his mind entered some kind of new space. He found himself floating in a vast empty red space. He couldn''t see anything else other than deep red.

    As he was thinking about what the hell is happening and why he was there, he felt another presence.

    He turned around to find a person who he is familiar with.

    "You? What are you doing here? This is the surprise, those three told me about?"

    Sam indeed felt surprised, because that is thest person he expected to see there. It is the Demon soul swordsman. Jack''s teacher.

    "You seem disappointed, kid. What are you expecting? Some really beautiful woman?"

    "I wouldn''t be surprised if it was really a woman. Those assholes are trying to set me up for a long time. But you, what the hell are you doing here, and what is this space?"

    "This is a portable soul space. It is pretty high-level stuff. You will know when you reach the ces that you are going to in the future.

    As for who I am, I am the current leader of the League of Blood Iron."

    Sam didn''t even reply. He just looked at the old man for a moment and took a really deep breath before saying.

    "What?"

    "I said, I am the leader of the league of Blood Iron. And I apologize for the league''s attempts on your life. The bounty on your head was ced before I tookplete control over the league. As soon as I took over, I removed that and put you on the off-limit list.

    That is why the attempts stopped."

    "I thought they are scared because we dealt with everyone that came at me."

    "Scared of what? Like your puny tricks are going to stop all of the league members."

    "Not particrly me, I know that my tricks never cause fear unless they directly see it. I think Gail, Gamin, and Yuvana, that presence helped a lot."

    "Oh trust me, unlike Divine league, League of Blood Iron mostly attracts assassins. They would have tried other ways, even if you had their protection. I stopped them froming at you."

    "Okay, if you are the leader of this league, why did you even bother with Five Great sects? That is such a low-level powerpared to this spot."

    "Well, it is a long story. Simply put, the League of Blood Iron was established by me and my friends who wanted to reign in the tyranny of the organizations a bit. If an autonomous organization with high-level assassins is not exactly a good thing.

    Of the three, one of them is a Demon Soul swordsman, the other one is a Demon Shadow Swordsman, the owner of the original shadow sword and the final one is actually a healer.

    He is my teacher at the Vardar.

    He betrayed us and started working for organizations, so we killed him, but his teachings are passed to the Vardar who managed to stay alive because of his connections with the organizations and all the other favors he called in.

    My friend died a slow death after Vardar''s teacher used some kind of poison in theirst battle. Then I left the league after making sure things are running as they should.

    The shadow sword became extremely hard to control, I wasn''t able to make it ept me, the only person who managed to at least control it a bit is actually Murali.

    But that guy was also not really capable of fully reigning it in. For some reason, it ended up in your hands and we met here.

    After you told me that the Vardar is getting involved in this whole shit show of controlling organizations across the realms, I came back to see how bad the things are here.

    I took over the reign and beat the league back into order."

    "That is a really long story.

    Anyway, it is nice to meet you. I think I will stick around in this area for a bit, so we might meet in person."

    "I came to tell you that only. We need to meet in person. There is something I found while looking through the old documents of the League. They are preserved in a special space here which I just noticed.

    I think they will be helpful. They are some special traps created by my friend. And they use shadow elemental energy.

    You will love it."

    "That would be great. I will definitelye and visit you. But when should I do that?"

    "Three days. I will send someone to pick you up in three days. Be ready by then."

    "Alright. I also need your help with something. Since you are a big shot, I am sure you will be able to help with what I am about to do next."

    "Sure. We can talk when you get here."

    "Thanks. Now, if you are kind enough to tell me how to get out of this ce, I will take my leave."

    "Just think and you will find the way.''

    Sam did as he was told and he saw another pattern of runes that showed him how to get out of the space.

    He came back to his body and Sam took a deep breath.

    "The experience is good, but it is better to not use these things again for a while. Losing the feeling of my own body is not really a good one. Not after all the days, I spent without it."

    Sam muttered to himself as he went out.

    Gail is free now and it is a good time to get as much information as he can.

    While Sam is on his way to get some information on his new enemies, the enemies are not sitting idle.

    They are currently trying their best to retrieve information on Sam as well. The information that couldn''t be obtained from enquiring and speaking to others. The information only lies within Sam''s mind and couldn''t be found anywhere else.

    Of course, except Sivan who is currently lyingatose in the middle of a formation.

    All three young men started cing some nodes and drawing inscriptions at different spots.

    "Do you think this formation method will work? I still think we need to find an expert in souls. We can make them mend this faster."

    "So, you want to go to a necromancer? Do you know how dangerous that is? We cannot let them get any of this info. This should stick with our mountain itself."

    "But still, it will take forever to master these techniques. We cannot do a lot with our neutral energy techniques. To channel them to work for necromancy and any soul-rted techniques is almost impossible at our current level.

    We would need to create a massive formation that could act as an aid and catalyst for it." Brother Gold said with a sigh.

    "I have a certain level of affinity with the soul. We will first do this test run and then make arger formation even if it takes the whole mountain''s area. I am not letting you guys let someone else be involved in this thing.

    We can make things that are obviously not of our elemental affinities. We can fix things that shouldn''t be fixed at all. So, I am making sure that we are doing this by ourselves, without any external involvement."

    The other two fellow disciples arepletely out of options. They didn''t know what to do about their stubborn brother. They could just go with his ns for now.

    They finished the formation quickly and activated it.

    Sivan''s body started glowing with spiritual energy and in the middle of that glow, someone strands of spiritual energy moved from various sections of the formation. They looked like small strings that are flowing.

    The energy strings all moved towards Sivan, they crawled over and entered the be as if they are essing his sea of consciousness.

    And in fact, they are doing it. They essed his soul space.

    Brother Silver closed his eyes and started making some hand signs.

    He connected with Sivan''s damaged soul space and inside he saw the strings moving around different soul fragments.

    The strings looked like they are so many when they are outside in physical space, but here, they looked very small. They looked insignificant as they could barely cover one small fragment of the damaged soul.

    These strings moved on their own and also moved the soul fragment to the main part of the soul. When they neared it, the strings acted as if they are sewing the small fragment to the bigger fragment.

 Chapter 1585 Info

    Chapter 1585 Info¡¡¡¡Brother Silver looked at the small soul fragment being mended back. The fragment is so small that it wouldn''t make any difference in Sivan''s current situation.

    But he is really ecstatic.

    The only problem is that ecstasy onlysted for a few moments. The threads that are coiling around the soul fragment and kind of stitching, exploded all of a sudden and destroyed the fragment.

    The already small piece almost turned into small particles and dispersed everywhere.

    Brother Silver''s consciousness was also kicked out of the soul space. He looked at his two brothers and sighed dejectedly.

    "This one failed. We need to work on a new form."

    "It is not tooter, Brother Silver. We can still include a healer or a necromancer. Even though your fears are not too farfetched, we still have many trustworthy people that owe us some massive favors.

    We can still handle it with almost no secrets revealed."

    Brother Gold said trying to convince his brother.

    "They are not ours, to begin with. We are stealing these memories from someone else. There is no need for us to go through all of this drama. So, what if some memories leaked out? We can still handle it very well."

    Brother Silver looked at him coldly.

    "Do you really think that less of these things?

    Based on Sivan''s mentality, there is no way he said everything to us. And definitely, the most important andplicated parts of the memories are definitely left out.

    Imagine, the scraps that Sivan wanted us to help him make, the ones that are meant to be instant victory could be this good, this dangerous. What do you think, the memories hold?

    A few days ago, master told us to think of expanding the legacy of the Divine Formation Mountain. There is no way we could let this chance go.

    Combining those ideas, theories, and techniques with our own concepts, teachings, and techniques, we can pioneer a new era with them.

    A new era of learning and implementation that was never there before. We have to hold on to it. Not a single clue should get out about this situation.

    We have to figure this out ourselves and make it ours."

    "What you are saying is true, but there is no way we can gain much from doing things like this. There has never been a case of a soul being damaged this much.

    There has never been a case of a person surviving after their soul is damaged like this.

    Even this body exchange technique is barely practical. Sivan and Sam''s scenario is already a veryrge anomaly, we need to start the research from the scratch and we don''t even have any text subjects.

    The only person we can experiment with is in a very delicate situation.

    You have to think logically.

    If you really want to talk about the mountain''s legacy and master''s legacy, then start with the first one.

    Always take every decision logically. That is what he taught us."

    Brother Gold went on an outburst with an exhausted expression.

    "Don''t tell me about master''s teachings. If you really care about what the fame of Divine Formation Mountain should be once we start expanding, then you would be acting just like me. We are not doing this with other people''s involvement."

    With those words, he just left the ce.

    Brother Gold and Brother ck exchanged nces, they knew it is almost impossible to convince him. So, they can only follow along.

    Back at Gaja n.

    Sam and Gail are drinking some wine. Since Sam got all of his resources back, he now has some incredible Heavenly wine to drink.

    He shared it with Gail who seemed to have fallen in love with it.

    "You want to go after the Divine formation mountain and need information. My advice is still the same. Don''t mess with them."

    "You know that is not an option at all. So, why don''t you just go with it?"

    "Alright. I just wanted to give it onest try.

    Before you get to know the Divine formation mountain itself, I mean the personnel there and what you should be careful of, there are some things you need to that outside of the Divine Formation Mountain.

    They are rted to the external connections that the mountain has.

    First of all, the Divine formation mountain is an organization within the grey circle and it is some sort of a neutral force.

    Obviously, there are strictly in the grey circle area, where there is not much of a normal civilization and ordered society.

    And within that, there are some groups. There are forces with rivalries and some forces that are absolute evil and some forces that are fair and proper.

    But there are some forces that are extremely neutral. They don''t have any particr enmity with other forces and they don''t get involved between the factions in the circle.

    Divine formation mountain is one such organization. They offer services to everyone and if two organizations sh and they want the services of the mountain, they can bid for it. Whoever wins the auction with a higher price, gets that.

    And there is a tacit understanding that the losing party should not take personal revenge against the mountain.

    It is not like they can do it. But it is a general rule.

    As for the winners, they are not just decided by some marypensation, the auctions could be anything.

    For example, a life.

    An organization promising that they would assassinate a person based on the mountain''s request.

    Some kind of favors by these organizations. Anything that is deemed valuable for the mountain, they can take the offer and decide on the winner.

    The decision is solely based on the mountain.

    And from what I heard, the mountain has around eight to ten dozen favors from organizations of all sizes.

    That is just the external help. Some favors are small enough for the mountain to use those people as some thugs, a reserve of some valuable resource that they might need at some point and some are big enough to even an organization put in an effort, I mean the maximum effort to try and kill me.

    I am saying this so that you would get a better picture of the situation.

    With just this external help, you will have a really hard time dealing with the mountain."

    "Okay, now that the external help is gone, what about the internal things?

    Any wed people? The people that I could take advantage of?"

    "There is limited scope for that.

    The organization has very few people, to begin with. The people are of a quality not there to just fill some numbers. That I am sure of. Very sure of it.

    Anyway, I can''t tell you any weaknesses that I am aware of, but there are six people other than the master and the disciples on the mountain.

    But there are six subordinates that you need to be aware of. The rest of the subordinates are a piece of cake for you at the moment.

    These six are powerful enough to make it on their own within the grey circle areas, but they chose to be the subordinates of the mountain willingly.

    As long as you deal with these six, the rest of the subordinates don''t even matter. No matter how strong they are, they are never going to be as good as these six people.

    Once these six are defeated, you can say you have entered into a proper state of rivalry with the mountain."

    "That is good to know.

    Is there any more info that I should know about these six people?"

    "Oh, there is a lot. You better get ready, this is going to be a long night."

    "I am all ears. Go ahead."

    "The first one¡­"

    Gail went on with the information for a few hours. Even though Sam is surprised that Gail could get this much information about some subordinates, he was really d that he did that.

    He noted down every point that needs special attention or something that he could use to make his work easier. The more information he got, the more confident he became about figuring out a way to destroy the enemy.

    After he was done about the six subordinates, Gail then shifted the topic to the disciples.

    "The disciples are a bit weird. The three of them are the only ones the master of the tower ever took in and they are extremely talented with a lot of potentials.

    But I think their constitutions of theirs make them even more special.

    They have this natural affinity with energy that even trumps my own. It is almost like every particle of energy in the surroundings is speaking to them. Trying tomunicate with them about how it wants to be manipted.

    No matter what kind of environment they are in, and no matter what kind of elemental energy it is, they always had an upper hand in terms of energy control which is not such a great thing for opponents.

    They are almost invincible amongst their peers.

 Chapter 1586 Mysterious master of the Mountain

    Chapter 1586 Mysterious master of the Mountain¡¡¡¡"Their affinity is that high? What elements do they use?"

    "Yes it is that high. As for elements, nobody knows any answer for that. Their attacks are mostly either physical in closebat or energy attacks like you were doing while you are in Sivan''s body.

    Of course, it is not exactly like yours, theirs are a bit too different. Even their movement techniques, defending techniques, in a way their control is one of a kind. I wouldn''t say it is the best method I have ever seen, but it is definitely the best method for them.

    They have this synergy and when all three of them are together, it is like looking at an art. They don''t have a solid attacking method while they are fighting, at least not the direct attacks.

    They have decent closebat expertise, but they rarely opt to it. It is just to buy themselves some time to make preparations when they are caught off guard.

    Actually, they never let someone get that close to them. They fight with all kinds of tricks and trinkets they would have prepared priorly.

    And the preparations are seamless and sometimes they even seem endless. They always find a way no matter how many people attack them.

    I think you guys are going to be great rivals. The expertise in many fields, the knowledge and the tricks you guys could pull, that would be a fight I would like to spectate."

    "We will see what we can do there. Now, let''s talk about the master of the Divine Formation Mountain. The main character of this situation.

    If I could get some more information about him. That would be really great."

    "Of course, it would be, but there is not much you can learn about him from me.

    First of all, nobody knows his name. At least not me and anyone that I am on good terms with. We all call him Mountain Master and he is actually popr with that name within the circle.

    He looks like a normal man. He doesn''t have that majesty of being a reputed individual within the grey circle.

    In fact he rarely shows his face.

    It has been years since he was spotted out of that mountain. Even the people who are buying the favours from him wouldn''t be able to meet him. He is that hard to catch.

    His subordinates just do all of his tasks, including conducting auctions, meeting with clients and even collecting the dues.

    All we know about him for sure is that he is strong, he has many tricks up his sleeve, he has connections like no other person in the grey circle, he is filthy rich and nobody wants to be his enemy.

    Of course, he is also a peak stage cultivator which is obvious."

    "That''s it? That is all the information you have on him?"

    "Yes. He has been in the grey circle far before me. And after I entered this is the only that I learned about him. Over the years, his reputation only grew stronger, but not much is revealed."

    "If you don''t really know anything about it, why are you so sure that he is so strong?"

    "It is because that I don''t know anything about him that I believe he is strong. During my time in the grey circle, I have seen many people trying to get close to him and some people trying to kill him.

    But neither group ended up good.

    The first group of people had a massive bacsh to their reputation. Everything that Divine Formation Mountain deals with is actually a business transaction.

    If you want to make friends with me, you just have to make enough transactions. And the friendship would only be initiated by the mountain. Not the other way around.

    As for the people that belonged to the second category, the ones that wanted to kill anyone from the mountain, they disappeared like ghosts.

    There are no traces of battles, no clues regarding any pursuits, they just disappeared.

    Along with them, the people who wanted to snoop around for more information on them, trying to find their secrets, poaching the subordinates, they are also dead, but they died more openly.

    They are so good at protecting their own info that I believe the mountain master is that strong. If it is this hard to just get some information, how hard do you think it is to kill him?"

    "But you have some solid information on the subordinates. How did you manage that without getting into trouble?"

    "Who said that I was not in trouble? In fact, I gained this info through the trouble. I battled with all six of them at some point in my time in Grey circle. While I was climbing the cultivation levels, I was a bit of a battle maniac. I went after everyone that could improve my skill. I didn''t care about wins or losses, I just wanted to fight crazily.

    I battled with these six multiple times."

    "So, you guys are friends?"

    "Not by a long shot. They hate me with sheer passion. I beat the crap out of them so many times, that I almost destroyed their reputation.

    Many people thought that their reputation is not worth it. But too bad that some organization wanted to pull one over them and got brutally ughtered. Thus, restoring their reputation back."

    "So, that is how you got that. Now that you are stronger than them and literally at the level of their own boss, have you tried fighting with the Mountain Master?"

    "Yes, I did. But there is no positive oue. I tried visiting him, tried to make some deals, but no. He was not interested in any of this."

    "Why is that? He is that uninterested in challenging someone like you? With all the reputation you have, I highly doubt anyone wouldn''t want a win over you. He should be dying to fight you. At least after all the beating you gave his subordinates, he should at least try to erase that shame away."

    "I thought so too. But he thinks otherwise."

    "So, is that all? This is all I need to know about them."

    "This all I can tell you about them."

    "I bet this would be helpful. Thanks."

    "No problem. But be careful. When you stir chaos in the grey circle, it doesn''t end well. It is an area with utmost vtility. There are no particr set of rules. They change in every territory and they don''t exist in a ce that is no one''s territory.

    I know you can handle yourself pretty well, but you are going in there prematurely. You could grow some and try your hand there, but I believe that is not a usible option.

    So, be as prepared as you can be.

    Just don''t get into trouble."

    "Alright, thanks for the advice.

    Anyway, I wanted to ask you about someone else."

    "Who?"

    "Do you know a person named Demon soul swordsman?"

    Gail was stunned by that name.

    "How do you know that person?"

    "Do you remember Jack? My friend. Demon soul swordsman is his teacher. I have met him a long time ago, before I came anywhere near Mari n and Gaja n.

    Do you happen to know about him?"

    "Come on, who in the Grey circle doesn''t know about Demon soul swordsman? He is a legend there. But by the time I rose to prominence in the Grey circle, he already left. All I ever heard of are the stories about him.

    You actually met him? That is incredible."

    Gail almost started acting like a Fan-boy.

    "You are this excited? That is surprising. I didn''t expect this reaction."

    "What do you know? You should see Gamin''s reaction. He loves Demon Soul swordsman."

    "Since you know about him, then you should know that was the founder of the league of Blood Iron?"

    "Yes, he was. We heard that league went to shit after he left."

    "Well, he is back. And he is actually the one whopletely removed the bounty on my head. I am going to meet him in three days.

    He said he has something for me."

    "That is amazing. Can Ie along? Gamin and I, both actually. Do you think we would be a bother?"

    "Not really. I don''t think he will mind it that much. But just to be safe, I will ask him tomorrow and see what he says."

    "That would be great."

    "Alright then, just wanted to know how big he was before he became a boring old man and from your reaction, he must have been huge. We will talk tomorrow. I need to digest all you have given and need to make proper ns."

    "Go ahead. Bye."

    Both of them went their separate ways.

    Sam went back to theb and started noting down the details on the six subordinates. He wanted to first target them, just like Gail suggested.

    After he dealt with these six people, then he will go after the Mountain Master. But for that to happen as smoothly as he wants, he needs to think of a proper approach to take.

 Chapter 1587 A gift

    Chapter 1587 A gift¡¡¡¡Three days passed.

    Sam mostly stayed within theb at that time. He brainstormed the ns to deal with the six subordinates and to a certain extent, he managed toe up with some tricks that he could use.

    He had very little contact with the Gaja n members outside theb. Even the siblings just came to theb to hang out with him. But of course, he contacted Demon Soul swordsman again.

    To ask if Gail coulde. The old man agreed without any resistance. But Sam wanted to resist when someone else asked toe.

    Gamin and Yuvana cornered him to ask the old man once again, to let theme with him too. Sam didn''t even know what to say at that time.

    He was caught off guard and no matter how much he tried, he couldn''t get out of it. So, all he could do is call the old man once again and ask his permission.

    "I don''t have a problem even if you bring the whole Gaja n."

    Even the old man was done by that time and Sam just decided to tag along with whoeveres next. Luckily for him, no one else tried and he was left alone.

    After these three days though, Sam finally met with someone who came here to take him and others along with him.

    It is a man in dark-cloaked robes and a walking stick. He walked slowly to the meeting spot outside the premises of Gaja city.

    "Nice to meet you, Mr. Sam. I will be your guide to the Blood Iron league''s headquarters. Please 0follow me.

    On our way, if you have anything you need, whether you want to take some rest, want to hunt or eat something, all you have to do is inform me and I shall arrange it for you."

    "Thank you."

    "It is my task to make your journey as convenient as possible. No need to thank me for that. Would you like to start right away?"

    "Yes, please."

    "Then let''s go."

    The person was very polite and calm. He constantly asked Sam whether he isfortable with the journey or not and tried to facilitate everything Sam might need to have afortable journey.

    As for the three overly powerful people that tagged along, they didn''t get the same treatment.

    Half of the time, the man directly ignored the existence of these three people. He didn''t talk to them, didn''t ask them to follow him, and didn''t even make any eye contact. But the three of them ignored all these and just followed.

    They are way too excited to meet Demon Soul swordsman to care about these minor details.

    After a few hours of a journey through hidden space gates that connected different realms, they finally arrived at the headquarters of the Blood Iron league.

    Demon Soul swordsman waited at the entrance and weed Sam.

    "Finally, you are here."

    He greeted Sam with a smile and then looked at the three people that came along with him.

    "The infamous powerhouses of Gaja n. Gail, Gamin and Yuvana. Nice to meet you. I have heard a lot about you.

    And it seems like the rumors and sayings don''t do justice to your presence.

    Come on in."

    "It is such an honor to meet you, Sir. I have heard so many stories about you."

    Gail said with a smile. Sam knows that smile all too well.

    Gail is currently ecstatic that he has been approved and acknowledged by his idol. He turned to look at the couple and found the same smile on their face too their smiles and too broad and they are in too much shock to even talk to the old man.

    "You had quite the name here, didn''t you?"

    Sam asked the old man casually.

    "I kinda did have a great name back then. Now that I am out of the scene for so long, I am surprised people still remembered me."

    "Maybe you stirred up too much trouble at that time."

    "That is true."

    As they made small talk, the old man led Sam to a certain ce within the league.

    "Here is a meeting gift for you. I am sure you are looking for this person."

    They opened the door and inside the four of them saw someone they are familiar with. It is Butler Si, Sivan''s most trusted aide.

    Sam was taken aback.

    He almost forgot about the Butler for a while when he was dealing with the Mari n and Sivan, but when he was looking through the memories, he got reminded of the Butler again.

    Butler Si is the most loyal subordinate Sivan could ever even ask for. He gets things done. He makes Sivan''s life a million times easier. In fact, one of the reasons that Sivan lost this quickly, is because of Butler Si''s absence.

    He didn''t want Butler Si toe after Sam in the name of revenge. A person this loyal can do some serious damage.

    It is a point of concern and he was about to put up a search party for this guy. But now he doesn''t have to go through the effort.

    As he was thinking, the old man spoke.

    "The snake bitch tried to catch him with a lot of effort. But he made perfect use of his space element and acted as a slippery eel. But we came across one day and I caught him after learning his identity.

    I kept him here since you are already busy with the war yourself. I didn''t want to add an extrabel.

    If you want to kill him, you can do it or if you want to leave him, you can do that too. But I am sure he is not much of a problem for you at the moment."

    "Thank you so much. That is one headache gone."

    "Great then. We can keep him here, for now, you can visit him before you leave, you will have enough time to make a decision."

    "That would be great. Thank you so much."

    "Let''s go and have something to eat. I personally went hunting something. You will like it."

    "I also have something you like."

    Sam took out the heavenly wine gourd and showed it to the Old man.

    Both of them went to the dining room along with the other three who arepletely silent.

    At least until they reached the table. After making some small talk, the three of them got familiar with the old man and they started bombarding him with questions.

    They acted like restless kids as they asked about various battles the old man has previously participated in.

    Sam almost felt ignored. Even though he doesn''t crave attention, it is kinda weird for him to be ignored, since he is the one who even brought them here.

    But he didn''t care much.

    After a very long meal, they finally gave the old man a break.

    "I would like to spend some time alone with Sam if you don''t mind." The old man asked directly and the three of them didn''t even dare to voice their opinion, they apologized for intruding and left.

    "Seems like your namemands enough authority. To think that I would see these three behaving this well."

    "Perks of being old I guess. The more I hear them, the more I realize that I am way too old and the world seemed to have just left me behind. So many things have changed."

    "Well, not that many. For example, people haven''t changed. That is for sure."

    "Anyway, before I show you what I wanted to show you, why don''t you tell me what you wanted to know?"

    "Right, I want to ask you about the Divine formation mountain."

    As soon as those words left his mouth, the old man''s expression changed. He frowned and asked Sam.

    "Why do you need to know about them?"

    "Because they kinda are behind Sivan''s disappearance? They just took him from right under the nose."

    "The disciples took Sivan away?"

    "Yes."

    "And they have Mountain Master''s orders to do this?"

    "I don''t know. Probably not, because this happened because of the personal rivalry in a way. Why?"

    "If it is Mountain master himself, I would advice you to stop the pursuit right now, but since it is the kids, there might be a chance."

    "Chance to do what? Mediation? I am not interested in that."

    "Why?"

    "They know too much already. Even the information they are holding against me will cause me great trouble if it was leaked to the rest of the world.

    I don''t want that looming over my head."

    "But if you sh with them, you will have to sh with the Mountain Master. He is a dangerous person. You might not want that in your current state."

    "As I said, I don''t have any choice. That is why I need information."

    "Alright, let''s see. What do you know until now?"

    Sam went on to say everything Gail said to him a few days ago.

    "You really did have a lot of info. There is nothing much that I could add to it. In fact, you are well informed about the subordinates than I.

    But I can tell you more about the mountain master."

 Chapter 1588 Mountain Masters Mystery

    Chapter 1588 Mountain Master''s Mystery¡¡¡¡"That is the information I am most interested in. Even Gail didn''t have any info about the Mountain master."

    "I can imagine why. That fellow has always been a very secretive person. He never wanted his name to be too popr."

    "For a man who doesn''t want to be popr, he sure has a lot of poprity."

    "Who says he doesn''t want to be popr? He just doesn''t want his name to be known, but he craves attention and poprity.

    It is just that his vanity in this category is way past normal to the point that he wants to be so popr and powerful that not knowing his name shouldn''t even be a concern for the people to fear and respect him."

    "What kind of stupid vanity is that?"

    "He is entric.

    You would be hearing that he is very humble, serene, and calm. Never ever believe that.

    If anything, he is quite opposite of all of those things. He is proud and vain. He has an unending and insane amount of love for his vainglory. He appears calm. But a wrinkle on his robe makes him go crazy.

    He has a serene expression on his face, but a single unpleasant thing that might even overhear will make him want to kill the person who said that.

    He is a crazy psychopath. Nothing more than that."

    Sam was stunned.

    This is a first. All this while, he heard a lot of things about the Mountain master from Gail, but not a single one of them goes with the words that the old man is saying.

    "Are you pulling my leg, old man?"

    "Why would I do that? Do you think I am one of your friends? Why would I pull your leg for no reason?"

    "Then what you are saying doesn''t make sense at all. The image this mountain master has is mysterious, and powerful, he is a creature beyond a normal person''smon sense. That is what even Gail said.

    How does anything you make any sense in that way?"

    "I thought you are a calm and smart kid. Why are you acting like an ignorant brat?"

    "Instead of scolding me, why don''t you try exining it?"

    "Of course, scolding doesn''te in the way of exining this stuff.

    The reason Gail and others don''t know about this situation is, that aftermitting the deed, the mountain master always cleaned the evidence with the blood of the witnesses. He always had people that did his dirty work.

    He never leaves any trace of his presence and he never does anything that would show his involvement."

    "Then how do you know so much about him?"

    "Because I have seen while he grew. I have seen his journey until he became the person that has enough power to erase his dirty past.

    He has one of the bloodiest pasts in history and now he is the saintly person that no one knows anything about.

    Probably there are ghosts roaming around Divine Graveyard currently cursing him for all the deeds he did.

    And do you know what the worst part about it is? Even if hundreds of people heard of these stories, no one connects them to the Mountain master.

    Because there is no way they could ever connect the filthy name of the person to a being that is respected by the realms."

    Sam stayed silent for a while.

    "What? Having second thoughts?" The old man asked.

    "No, feeling relieved."

    "What part of this information makes you relieved?"

    "The fact that I have information makes me relieved. I don''t know if my friends told you this about me. But I believe that as long as there is enough information and the knowledge of how to use it, then nothing is impossible.

    Particrly, when it concerns people and things that are made by people. Nothing is impossible.

    Even if it is destroying a person that is feared and respected by millions."

    "You really do believe that, don''t you?"

    "Of course, I do. How do you think I survived and grew until now? There is no reward if I don''t go after the enemy out of my league. Not to brag, but I neverpeted with my peers. Because I always trusted my preparations."

    "Well, with all those bad habits, you need to at least have one good habit, and being prepared is one of the better ones.

    Great."

    "Anyway, you continue with whatever you know about this guy. I want to know every little detail about him. The food he ate, the women he was after, the things he is ashamed of, the things he was proud of, his fetishes, tastes, strengths, weaknesses, humor, and cravings. Whatever you can think of, just tell me."

    "Why do you want to know so much? You want to make a biography of him or something?"

    Old muttered, but he still patiently exined everything Sam wanted to know.

    They spent time just talking since the evening before they were done.

    "That is all I know, even if you squeeze my brain dry, you won''t find anything else."

    "That is enough. More than enough. Luckily you were here, otherwise, I would have had a lot more trouble than necessary to deal with this guy.

    Now my work is half done."

    "I still think it is better to contact me directly. There is no point in making an enemy out of him. I will mediate the deal if you want me to."

    "No need. Apart from this enmity, there is some other deal I would have to make with them."

    "Don''t tell me you have that organization in your weird list."

    "Yeah, I have that one."

    "So you are after the Bone horn he has in his possession?"

    "Yeah, the Bone horn."

    "That is a great treasure. You won''t be able to get it unless you kill that guy."

    "Well, then I will kill that guy and get it.

    Anyway, enough of this bullshit. Tell me something about the secrets you left behind. I want to know what he did with the shadow element."

    "I am not showing it to you today."

    "Why?"

    "For you to see those notes, you need to do one thing before that."

    "What would that be?"

    "Solve a puzzle. A puzzle was left behind by my friend. As long as you do that, you will be able to get all the notes you want."

    "Okay, what is it?"

    The old man took out a dark-colored cube and gave it to Sam.

    It is in dark ck color with a faint purple hue. It is full of shadow energy.

    But that is not what surprised Sam. He kinda expected it. The thing that surprised him is the structure of the cube.

    It actually looked like a Rubix cube. Same structure, but no colors. Instead, there are myriad patterns on each section of the cube. And instead of standard 3X3, it is 6X6.

    He threw that to Sam and told him.

    "Inject your spiritual energy into it and then check it with your spiritual sense."

    Sam nodded and did as he was told.

    He instantly opened his eyes and was stunned. He saw something like this before. There is a familiar yet unfamiliar feeling from what he felt inside and there is a myriad of thoughts running in his head and even more guesses followed by it.

    "You would have seen a small lump of shadow energy inside, right?"

    "Yes."

    "That energy is unstable. There is a myriad of formations you can create with the runic patterns on the six sides of the cube.

    In the current state, the cube is keeping the lump stable. If you use the patterns and make some shadow elemental formations on different sides of the cube, then you will be changing the nature of the lump.

    Sometimes, it will spread out and corrode your body. Sometimes, it will try to ess the shadow realm and drag you into it.

    Sometimes, it works like arge-scale strangtion entity. Like that, there are thousands of possible oues.

    But sometimes, there are also some positive oues. Some of them are, the energy being stable while the cube opens up by itself. If you can take that energy stably outside, without using your energy maniption tricks, and close the cube back, then you will win.

    I won''t set a time limit, but you better do it as fast as you can.

    I bet my friend would be disappointed if I had given out his legacy to someone who barely passed. I would also be embarrassed to know that my disciple has a friend like you who couldn''t even finish a challenge like this."

    Sam didn''t even bother with this low-level taunt. He just took the cube and focused on it. He tried using the observation technique. But for the first time, even that didn''t work.

    He was shocked. He never expected that someone would even guard something against the observation energy. In fact, he didn''t even know that there is a possible restriction for observation technique.

    The interest in the cube just rose splendidly.

 Chapter 1589 Unsolvable

    Chapter 1589 Unsolvable¡¡¡¡Sam just walked out of the room they were sitting in and arrived at therge backyard of Old man''s estate.

    It is peaceful and there is not a single lifeform insight.

    He looked at therge empty space and thought for a moment before he waved his hand and let the beasts out.

    They were trapped for so long because of Sivan, so he has been trying to find time to let them out as much as he can.

    Since he is going to stay here for a while, he decided he might as well let them loose.

    As they are ying around like kids, Sam focused on the cub.

    The first thing he wanted to do is figure out if this cube is just like a Rubix cube even when ites to the solution. So, he examined all of the rune patterns on each block to see any simrities between the patterns that would go for one side to create a proper inscription.

    Even though it is the simplest solution anyone could think of, sometimes, the simplest solution is the right solution.

    After figuring out the patterns with certain simrities and making sure that there are six types of patterns that would form an inscription on the six different sides, he started solving it.

    Sam never worked on a 6X6 cube. Even though puzzles are fun, he was never really a person who explored the normal puzzles that are popr in the world. But it didn''t take too long for him to figure out how to solve this.

    And as he started moving the patterns to their respective sides, he started seeing the inscriptionsing into the picture.

    Along with that change, he also noticed another major change and that is the energy flow within the cube. Whenever he turned one of the faces of the cube, the energy inside reacted. It started bing chaotic as if it is trying to find a way to escape.

    Luckily for Sam, nothing of the sort happened as there are no anomalies until then. And the more he progressed towards the current goal of moving the same patterns to the same side, the more confident he became since there are no massive changes in the cube.

    But right when he was on thest line of solving the puzzle, suddenly some chaotic shadow elemental energye out of the cube.

    The energy is so eerie and dangerous that Sam started sweating instantly. He didn''t know what to do. The energy came out of the cube in the form of ck smoke which seeped into his body.

    Sam instinctually activated shadow elemental fusion.

    The smoke started invading his body and even when he had the fusion, he still felt the pain. It is like the pure raw energy inside the smoke is trying to upy his body. He gritted his teeth and tried his best to endure it.

    He looked at the cube and still decided to try and finish thest line.

    But as he tried to turn the face, he could sense the energy fluctuations bing chaotic. Sam hurriedly activated the energy vision and he was stunned.

    Under the guise of the ck smoke, the energy mass inside the cube is slowly trying to slip out and not just slipping out, it is acting like some kind of live slimy creature that wants to devour him.

    Sam instantly stopped turning it that way. He started messing up the cube again as even he felt the excessive shadow elemental energy invading his body is way too painful and torturous.

    "So, the simplest one is not the right one, I should have guessed."

    He muttered to himself and started thinking of different ways.

    The first method that came to his mind is to try and see how many proper inscriptions he could make with all of these patterns. But when he thought of the number of possibilities based on the order of these inscriptions and how many iterations he would have to go through, he felt his throat run dry.

    That would be an impossible task to do so. It will literally take years for him to go through every iteration there is.

    He held the cube in his hands as he carefully examined it. This is just like a normal cube puzzle, but the only problem is that he cannot identify the ''colors'' of the cube. As long as he has the colors he would be able to solve the cube pretty easily.

    But identifying them is the problem.

    As he was thinking, he took a deep breath and decided to just work on it as it is.

    He didn''t want to waste too much time thinking this time. He just wanted to do it and solve it as ites.

    As he tried randombinations, he let his thoughts wander. For the whole night, he didn''t move from the spot he sat on and just stayed there. The beasts ran around and enjoyed the outside air for a while.

    After that, they sat near Sam as he constantly messed around with the cube.

    Time passed slowly and the next morning, the old man and the three powerhouses from the Gaja n came out to see Sam still working on the cube.

    He appeared so concentrated and lost in it.

    They didn''t disturb him and let him be. But by evening, Gail was concerned and went to ask the old man.

    "Is it going to be alright? He is way too into it, isn''t he?"

    "Don''t worry, it is going to be okay."

    "Why is that puzzle so difficult though? Do you think he will be able to seed?"

    "I don''t know. He might or might not."

    "Even you are not sure about his sess?"

    "Yeah, if sess meanspletely solving the puzzle then I don''t know. But if all he needs is to pass the test, then I am sure he will."

    "So, solving the puzzle is not the test?"

    "No, enduring the shadow elemental energy is. The leakage of the shadow elemental energy along with the rest of the traps and a long exposure for all of these harmful things, that is the actual test."

    "So, is it impossible for anyone to solve that puzzle?"

    "I don''t know. Maybe the person who created it can do it. I have never seen anyone else solving it. No one ever came close."

    "Then why did you tell him to solve the puzzle instead of telling him what the actual test is?"

    "Just for the sake of it. I wanted to see how long he will endure. If just say he needs to endure for a fixed amount of time, he might just pull it off through sheer grit.

    I don''t want that. Anyone can do that. I want to know exactly how long he is going to keep up."

    "Then what if he doesn''t give up and just endure it as ites?"

    "That is not impossible. Every person should feel exhausted at some point. The constant pain is not something that could be ovee just through the sheer grit."

    "We will see then. I am also curious now.

    But since it is going to take a long time anyway. Do you want to spar a bit?"

    Gail asked with a slight grin.

    The old man looked at him and chuckled.

    "You are still in your prime and you can''t control that rush for the challenge. I miss those old days. But I don''t think I will be a match for you. You want me to be that big of a challenge."

    "I doubt that."

    Gail said as his grin widened.

    "Your mouth says one thing and your expression says otherwise. Why are you feeling so proud, just because you got somepliments from a has-been like me."

    "Go find some challenge from your peers."

    "Please, sir. It would be an honor to spar with you. You will also be bored for a long time with Sam going at it."

    After some thought, the old man sighed and agreed.

    "Alright. But I am not going to go easy on you. Don''t you darein to me if I really beat you up?"

    "But you just said you are not my match."

    "That is because I wanted to avoid fighting you. Don''t tell me you really believed that."

    "I mean, you alreadyplimented, there is no use in taking it back."

    They started bickering and arguing as they walked to an empty space within the Blood Iron League estate.

    Gamin and Yuvana exchanged a nce and immediately ran after them to spectate and if they could, they want to get a chance to spar too.

    Sam was left there along with the beasts who looked at him silently without disturbing him.

    He just kept on going at the cube without caring for anything else in the world.

    Hundreds of calctions are going on in his head at the same time as he tried different ways to figure out the best iteration of this cube.

 Chapter 1590 Bleeding arms

    Chapter 1590 Bleeding arms¡¡¡¡The next day.

    Sam still didn''t get up from the spot and he has the heavenly wine gourd on the side.

    He still kept on shifting the cube. But now his body is in partial shadow elemental fusion and his eyes are glowing with shadow energy as well.

    He is using a variant of his energy vision. He enhanced it with shadow elemental energy so it would more sensitive to the shadow energy. Particrly the lump in the cube that is fluctuating with every change in the cube patterns.

    Sam just turned the cube on a whim. He just observed the energy flow of the cube carefully with his energy vision. Soon he got a hang of this observation and also started to understand what the pattern on each section is doing when energy is flowing from inside of it.

    He is currently looking at each section like an individual machine. A machine that gives out a certain output when the energy enters it in one state.

    So all he needs to do to solve this whole cube mechanism is to figure out what kind of nature or state should the energy reach so that the cube''s lock would be gone and the lump would be stable.

    After thinking up till this point, Sam suddenly had new ideas.

    Since he cannot just leave this up to iterations, he decided to eliminate some of the options he had and decided to reverse engineer the whole thing.

    He started randomly moving the cube to create different patterns as he observed the change in the energy lump.

    He took mental notes of all the results he could possibly get at that time. After he understood what kind of state the lump should be constantly in for him to sessfully unlock the cube, he then started thinking of iterations to do so.

    He cannot just magically resolve this whole thing. But he could see that he is getting somewhere.

    At least as he eliminated one possibility after another, the number of possibilities is bing lesser.

    The only problem is the side effects of every wrong iteration he did. The lump kept on chaotically attacking him with every turn. He couldn''t just endure it no matter how much he tried. The full elemental fusion with shadow energy is taking too much energy out of him.

    Even though it helped him reduce the pain of the invading energy, he still has to use the same amount of energy as he did for the partial fusion to eliminate it.

    The only difference is that the partial fusion is a lot more painful to endure the shadow elemental energy that was invading him.

    But he didn''t care. He just endured the pain as he proceeded with it.

    So, currently, Sam is maintaining his partial fusion, injecting the energy into the cube so that he study and understand each runic pattern on every section of the cube, expelling the foreign energy that is hurting him and on top of all of that, he is calcting dozens of iterations at a time in his head.

    And he did this without a change in expression. The only time he slightly diverted his attention from the cube is when he had to take a sip of heavenly wine.

    The next day.

    This is already the third day and by now, the beasts are a bit concerned. It is not abnormal for Sam to get lost while studying something. He did that many times and it is considered a very normal urrence by now.

    But the problem is just fixated on this one thing and didn''t even bother to move.

    There are no crazy thoughts that used toe out loud. There are no crazy experiments that Sam used to do, there are simtions, andrge scrolls with calctions he did by hand.

    They are all used to watching this, but now that everything is happening inside Sam''s head, they couldn''t help but be confirmed.

    If not for Gail''s repeated insistence, they would have just beaten Sam back to his senses. They were that worried about him.

    But Sam seemed to have not noticed any of these changes. He just sat there, unmoving like a rock as if he is the only person left in the world.

    The only silver lining to the situation is that Sam started muttering something by that evening. He is slowly talking about some principles, calctions, and energy flow.

    If anyone saw him now they would think he has gone crazy, but the beasts are actually relieved. This means, Sam is just in his usual research mode and there is some progress happening. Just staying silent about what bothered them.

    The next day.

    When the powerhouses came back to see Sam, they were dumbfounded. Because they could see that Sam''s arms are bleeding. There are some deep cuts here and there on his arm as a bunch of very thick dark strands came out of the cube.

    They looked like hair strands in a way, but they are clearly not. They are from the lump within the cube.

    Demon soul swordsman looked at Sam and felt surprised. He is also a bit concerned. Looking at him, Gail also got a bit confused and went to ask him.

    "What happened, sir? Is something wrong? Will Sam be alright?"

    "He is alright. For now at least.

    But as for what happened, even I don''t know. I have messed around with that cube for a while, and I have seen my friend do that all the time, but I have seen the lump extend out like this and damage the person who is using the cube.

    This is the first."

    "So, this was not supposed to happen?"

    "No."

    "Then maybe, he is on verge of solving it."

    "Have you seen the puddle of blood at his feet? Do you really think he is on verge of solving it?"

    Gail didn''t know what to say about that.

    "So, how long does he need to endure the pain."

    "From a pure time point of view, he needs to stay for another day. But his pain is obviously more than what a normal person would suffer by now. If I have a choice, I will consider this a pass."

    "What do you mean, if you have a choice? You conducted the test. You can just consider this a pass."

    "I can''t. The cube has a very special mechanism. Particrly for this test. It only calctes time and unless the cube has been in his hands for enough time, it won''t consider it as a pass. Unless the cube passes, there is nothing I could do."

    "The cube should pass him?"

    "Yeah, it doesn''t calcte the pain, just the duration. So, it is impossible for me to intervene and pass him now."

    "Is there no other choice?"

    "There is. Making him give up. Do you think it will work?"

    Gail looked at Sam and sighed as he shook his head.

    There is no way Sam would just give up after this. He is just working way too hard with this and just from his expression, anyone could guess that is way too involved in this situation.

    That sheer involvement is something that he cannot wrap his head around. Because he was never obsessed with something so much.

    He could only watch and see how things go.

    That night, everyone went back to rest or cultivate. Sam is just sitting there even then and is still working on it.

    At this moment, the corrosion of this external shadow elemental energy started spreading into his body and there are lines dark enough to be visible even on top of his body that is under partial shadow elemental fusion.

    Sam''s eyes are wide open as he endured the pain and looked at the cube.

    Currently, he is not rotating any side of the cube, rather he is just looking at the cube as he rotated it in his hands.

    The lump is extremely chaotic. It is almost on the verge of breaking out of the cube and the most interesting part is, that there is not a singleplete inscription on any side of the cube. All the faces are currently just lumped with runic patterns that don''t make any sense and the energy flowing through them is just being neutralized and expelled out of it.

    Sam smiled after confirming this.

    Because the only time something like this happened is when the cube was given to him.

    Except for that, the whole cube always had at least one inscription on any of its sides. But now they are all gone and the patterns are not in the same position as they were in when the cube was given to him.

    He quickly calcted a few things and started writing them down with his finger on the floor. He just manipted the shadow a bit and carved it on the stone floor. He created something that looked like a flow chart that covered the whole area he was sitting in and he focused on the first one as he started moving the cube ording to it.

 Chapter 1591 Solved

    Chapter 1591 Solved¡¡¡¡Each section that has been written down is like a runic algorithm.

    All the calctions are mostly based on the runic patterns and Sam started rotating the cube ording to the first algorithm.

    The lump of shadow elemental energy started raging over and a vast amount of spiritual energy in the surroundings gathered at the cube.

    It is being absorbed into the cube at a rapid pace and Sam could see that it is turning into shadow elemental energy with his energy vision.

    The converted energy is being consumed by the lump as it tried to expand its size. It is hard to believe that it is just a lump of energy at this point.

    Sam felt his arms hurting as the number of shadow tentacles increased with every passing second and attacked him.

    The bleeding increased and Sam could even sense that each tentacle is trying to inject shadow elemental energy into his body. The energy is extremely corrosive. Sam couldn''t take it anymore and activatedplete shadow elemental fusion.

    But even now the pain didn''t vanish wholly. The energy entering his body is being rejected and is still causing Sam a lot of pain.

    Sam sighed and move to the second section. He endured the pain and rotated the cube based on the second section.

    The shadow elemental energy which is already being constantly emitted out of the cube not just increased, but also started spreading to different spots around him.

    All of the shadows that are cast by the faint moonlight that night suddenly seemed to have changed their nature and some humanoid figures popped up out of them.

    These figures started moving toward Sam, but they didn''te too close the beasts around Sam reacted quick enough topletely destroy them within a few seconds.

    But still, just to be alright he even called out his own shadow undead creatures.

    All of these humanoid shadows that popped out of nowhere are not enough to cross these defenses and disturb him.

    But they were enough to cause enough disturbance to alert all the powerhouses in the estate.

    Demon soul swordsman was the first one toe out running.

    He was horrified when he looked at the humanoid creatures attacking Sam and his beasts. Even though they are unable to do anything to Sam, he was extremely pissed.

    After all, no matter what, even if Sam is a junior, he was still invited as a guest. And in his opinion, Guests should be shown the ultimate courtesy and respect.

    He wanted to scream and kill the person that is responsible for this.

    He looked at the overly flowing blood on the ground and thought that Sam was attacked. But luckily, he came back to his senses.

    The beasts easily handle the shadows while the undead is barely even moving.

    Sam ignored all of thismotion and kept on working. Within the minute or two, the remaining powerhouses also came and saw Sam''s state.

    Time passed.

    Slowly Sam kept on using patterns that he noted down on the ground and with thepletion of every single one of thosebinations, the shadow elemental energy is increasing.

    The powerhouses started getting worried.

    "Is he really going to be okay? You never said that the cube has this chaotic abomination inside. This is way too dangerous. His body is being corroded and consumed by the shadow elemental energy.

    I think we should stop him."

    Gail immediately asked the Demon soul swordsman.

    The old man didn''t bother with Gail or his outburst. He was amazed beyond belief as different types of reactions urred.

    He felt nostalgic and proud at the same time.

    Until Sam finished half of the sections in the notes he has written on the ground, things went on like this.

    By now Sam ispletely coiled up with these shadow tentacles and one could see how hard he is struggling to maintain his energy. He had to keep taking the heavenly wine.

    At this point, Demon Soul swordsman came back to his senses. His feeling of nostalgia is gone. Sam is suffering too much.

    He almost wanted to step up and stop Sam from doing it. As he contemted that action, all of a sudden, something happened.

    At that moment, Sam who was suffering unimaginable torture smiled. A smile that looked peaceful and proud at the same time.

    He rotated a side of the cube and as he was doing it, he felt a sharp pain rushing through his whole body. All of the shadow tentacles turned extremely with sharp points that are prating into his flesh.

    They are trying to tear apart and destroy the elemental body of Sam. They are trying to hinder him from making that turn on the cube.

    But Sam still kept the smile on his face as it slowly turned into a grin. He forcefully moved the side of the cube and in that instant, the energy changed. The tentacles that are drilling into Sam''s body were pulled back into the cube.

    Sam''s pain was reduced by half in just a second and the surrounding shadow elemental energy and the energy absorption from the lump were reduced by half.

    Every spectator was shocked at that moment.

    Sam''s grin widened as he proceeded to rotate the cube ording to a different section he had written. Everyone can see that the lump of shadow elemental energy is actually acting rageful at the moment.

    The tentacles are rapidly attacking Sam with dozens of stabs in a single second. The humanoid shadows that appeared from the shadows of various objects are all acting crazily as they went after Sam.

    But they were all blocked by the beasts and Gail who was standing on the side even gave them a hand here and there when there are too many shadows.

    Within a few seconds, Sam finished the next section and once again the energy was reduced by half. The tentacles became even shorted and now they can''t even stab Sam anywhere else other than his forearm.

    This pattern went on and on and after an hour or so, the tentacles are gone and the lump''s absorption rate of spiritual energy has been reduced hundreds of times.

    It is barely holding at the moment and the only reason its presence is still noted is that it still tried to corrode Sam even after all of that.

    Sam took a deep breath as he started rotating the faces of the cube again this time, he is extremely slow with every movement and they could see that there is a lot of change in the behavior of the lump with every one of those movements.

    And with every movement, the cube started glowing. Particrly some patterns on random sections of the cube. They started glowing with neutral energy as if the shadow elemental energy is being eliminated from the cube itself.

    One move after another, one section after another. Sam was focused to the extreme as he recalcted every move in his head.

    And after a long time. He made the final move.

    *CLICK*

    A clicking sound came from the cube as all of the patterns lit up at the same time. A white glow came out of the cube and followed by it came the thick and dense ck smoke.

    The smoke converged into a ball right in front of Sam.

    He looked at me calmly. He is very familiar with it by now. So, there is no way he couldn''t recognize it.

    It is the lump of energy within the cube. The lump that tortured him for the past few days. As the lump formed in front of him, Sam felt a sense of relief andid down on the ground. He deactivated his fusion and stretched his body a bit as he drank some heavenly wine.

    The wounds started healing slowly and with the absence of the drilling by the tentacles, things went smoothly for him.

    He justid down there and looked at the lump of energy. It is trying to absorb energy from the surroundings again.

    Sam''s instincts told him that he should wait, so he decided to do that.

    Meanwhile, the powerhouses are confused. Gail looked at Demon''s soul swordsman and asked.

    "What is happening here?"

    Demon soul swordsman on the other hand is stunned with his eyes and mouth wide open. It is almost like his jaw literally dropped.

    "How is this possible?"

    He muttered to himself and Gail who is standing next to him had to shake him so that he could get back to his senses.

    "What exactly are you talking about?"

    "The cube. The solution. It finally happened. It is finally solved. I need to check something first."

    As he spoke, Demon''s soul swordsman ran back into the estate and went into the basement.

    There is a dark room inside which he lit up with some light elemental equipment.

    On the wall of this dark room, there is arge hexagram with runic patterns, and at the center of those patterns lies arge groove in which a ss cube was ced.

    He carefully took that ss cube and ran back up to the spot where Sam was.

 Chapter 1592 Legacy

    Chapter 1592 Legacy¡¡¡¡Sam looked at therge lump of shadow elemental energy in front of him with confused eyes.

    The cube still stayed in his hand and now there is no resistance to his observation ability now.

    The cube is obviously hollow. The space inside, where the lump used to be is currently empty. And now that the cube is devoid of that energy, it is not glowing at all.

    It looked like it was made of stone. A in old stone. He tried to inject the energy to activate the cube, but it didn''t work. The mechanism is in such a way that, it could only be activated from the inside.

    He was really interested in the cube. But the full examination had to wait because he has to focus on this lump of energy.

    At this moment, an old man came back with the ss cube and the lump finally reacted.

    It started glowing with ck light. The ss cube in the demon soul''s swordsman''s hand also started glowing and the cube that looked transparent without anything inside contained something.

    It is a while glowing orb.

    It opened up and the orb rapidly shed towards the ck lump. Both of them are two flexible masses of energy, at least felt like two flexible masses of energy merged together.

    Everyone in the room was surprised and only after a few seconds, did both of those energiespletely merged together to reveal a small humanoid figure.

    Sam looked at that figure and felt like he saw him somewhere. But he couldn''t put a finger on it.

    "Hello, you must be the person that unlocked me from the Shadow cube.

    Let me do some introductions.

    I am Prakthas. You might not have heard of it, as it is not that popr. I was quite well known for som other name and its Demon Shadow swordsman.

    I don''t know how long has it been since I died.

    I might not have enough energy to sustain this projection for a long time. So, I will just go straight to the point.

    Congrattions. You have finally andpletely inherited my legacy. When I learned that I was dying slowly but surely, I wanted to leave my legacy behind. But I also wanted to make sure that someone worthy of it came to pick it up.

    I might sound narcissistic, but I believe in my legacy and love it way too much to leave it in the hands of some talentless prick, whocks character and perseverance. So, I made an almost impossible puzzle to solve.

    Unless theypletely solve it, they won''t be able to get the full legacy. The people who only know how to endure something that they can''t solve. They can only get my swordsmanship.

    Their will and grit to endure will be very useful for training and honing their swordsmanship.

    But there is another part of the legacy, which is not exactly known to the world. The legacy of my creations. I am no artisan, but that didn''t stop me from making things I wanted.

    Just from the looks of the cube you just solved, you should be able to understand what I mean.

    After inheriting myplete legacy, grow it, learn it, and y with it.

    You can do whatever you want with it. If you are an assassin, use my skills to kill people. If you are a builder or a creator, make iterations over and over again. Throw my concepts into the trash if you think they are not suitable now or in the future.

    Work with them, develop them, improve them, disprove them. My legacy doesn''t consist of massive riches, it doesn''t have highly valuable techniques, and there are no treasures and weapons. All I have is the knowledge I gained over the years, an experience that I acquired by conducting various experiments, and the results that I gained along with it.

    Even though I was never really popr for these things as my battle prowess overshadowed everything else that I had, this is what I was most proud of.

    This is the quality of mine that I loved and admired. The greatest skill in swordsman and the greatest sword under heaven could neverpare to this.

    I hope it will be useful to you and you will pass it on to someone else who is as worthy as you.

    Thank you in advance."

    The fragment acted like it was a prerecorded message. There was no conversation. It was just a one-sided talk and it turned into a sh of light before it entered Sam''s forehead.

    The orb and the lump both disappeared into thin air as if they never existed.

    The cube was still there though.

    Sam who felt the soul fragment entering his head, suddenly felt a sharp pain shooting down his head, and with all the stress he went through in the past few days, he couldn''t help but faint on the spot.

    The beasts that were standing there suddenly got riled up as they all reached Sam. All of them trying to see if he is okay.

    Demon soul swordsman walked forward and the beasts reluctantly had to give way for him.

    "Don''t worry. He is alright. He is just tired. He will be fine after he wakes up."

    The beasts acknowledged him slightly as he carried Sam into the estate and let himy down on a bed and sleep.

    He came out with a smile on his face. Gail could literally see tears welling up in the old man''s eyes.

    "Is that the fragment of Demon shadow swordsman? Is that real?"

    "As real as it can be. Right before he died, he made me cut his soul. First, his soul fragment that has all of the swordsman and battle experiences. The second one is the research he did with the shadow element.

    The cube was made by the shadow elemental research he had done over decades. It was almost impossible to solve. But Sam did it.

    I have been trying to find a sessor for him and almost gave up. After so many years, I decided that it is better to just pass on his swordsmanship which was in the ss cube to someone.

    I tested many people, but not a single one of them managed to endure this for three days. Much less solve it.

    But Sam did.

    He endured it and solved it. That is really unexpected. Even for me.

    But I am d that his legacy is being passed over. All this while, even the prick that betrayed us managed to pass down his legacy, while my friend didn''t get to do so. Now it is fulfilled. I am just way too happy right now."

    The old man almost started crying.

    Gail and the other two didn''t know what to say. They just left the old man to be alone.

    That night, Sam slept like a baby. He didn''t wake up until the next day.

    He groggily walked out of the room and the beasts that are waiting for him finally felt relieved. Sam sent them back into the divine dimension after ying with them and went to meet the old man.

    "You are awake. Finally. How are you feeling?"

    "Still a bit fatigued. But I think I am fine. Where are the other three?"

    "They went out for a while. They will be back in a few minutes."

    "Thank you for giving me this opportunity. Your friend is indeed a genius. To create such a thing is no small feat and to think that all of this went away unnoticed by anyone. What a shame."

    "I also feel the same, but he didn''t feel that way. He just did the research for his own personal pleasure. He did wish that someone acknowledged it, but his swordsmanship is just way too good. It cannot be overshadowed by anything.

    And his battle prowess is something that people could only dream of."

    "Is he really that good?"

    "You got his experiences, why don''t you take a look at them?"

    "I want to know your opinion."

    "For me, his battling looked like a dance. It was fluid, appeared right in front of the eyes, but was intangible. It couldn''t be caught, held, or imprisoned. It could be manipted into anything and everything.

    It is more fluid than water itself.

    There are not many things I envy. But his swordsmanship is something that even brings me some envy.

    That is why the shadow sword has such a stubborn spirit. Itspatibility with the demon shadow swordsman is otherworldly.

    It never believed that there would be another swordsman that could match Prakth in versatility and strength.

    And in a way it is right. Even if someone could reach his level, there is no way they could be a match for what he already aplished.

    It is one of a kind, there is never going to be a second.

    At least that is my thought until now. But since you managed to impress both the sword and the swordsman, maybe, just maybe you might have a tiny chance of doing this.

 Chapter 1593 Experimenting with Cube

    Chapter 1593 Experimenting with Cube¡¡¡¡ Sam stayed for two more days within the estate before he decided to leave.

    "So, what are you going to do? Rebuild the league?"

    Sam asked the old man.

    "Yes, I need to make this reach its former glory. Then I will hand it over to Jack before I retire into the Grey circle."

    "Will Jack really take this though?''

    "That is your job to let him take this."

    "I won''t have any objections of course. But you do know that Jack wouldn''t just shift to this ce right? I think he will ask to merge the league with the Dusk organization. Are you sure you want to do that?"

    "Well, two out of three founders passed their legacy to you and Jack. Maybe it is destined that the legacy is going to be passed to two friends like this.

    If you really think that it will help, just merge the organization. I am pretty sure even if the operational structure changes because of that, you will at least uphold what our goal is."

    "Thank you for your trust."

    Sam bowed to him slightly, before he and the rest of the powerhouses left the league. They went back to the Gaja n.

    "So, how did the trip go?"

    Giyon and Grivon once again came directly to him with questions.

    "It went well. I got a lot of information that I will need in the near future and I also gained something really cool."

    "What is that? Show us."

    Grivon asked with excitement.

    "For starters, I got better at controlling my shadow elemental energy. I can now manipte my own shadow really well."

    Sam said as he activated shadow elemental fusion once again and manipted his shadow around a bit.

    "Is that it?" Grivon was underwhelmed by that performance and appeared disappointed.

    "Not really, there is a lot more, but it will take some time for me to show it to you. So, you have to wait.

    Anyway, how far has the constructione? Is everything going well?"

    Sam sessfully diverted the topic.

    For the next week, he once again holed up in theb. But this time, instead of just working on ns to deal with these subordinates of the Mountain Master, he also started digesting the research shadow monarch gave him.

    As the Demon soul swordsman said, Sam was really impressed by the swordy, but the research intrigued him even more. Even though it is mostly rted to the shadow element, there are some interesting concepts.

    The first concept that interested Sam is how the lump stayed in the cube and acted as this perpetual energy source as it can absorb energy from outside.

    The reason it was so interesting is that Sam has used this concept himself before. It was simr what he used when creating a light chamber. The souls are merged with light elements and then became light itself.

    But instead of light element, here the shadow energy was used and it was merged with the souls.

    The soul fragment continuously attracted the energy and it then sent it to the cube.

    Sam thought, he was the only one that thought of this weird method, but now that he saw it, he was surprised and excited.

    He also thought of using this method with different elements, but he never got the chance to test it out. Now that he learned shadow element is also sessful, it will save him a lot of time.

    The second concept that intrigued him is the cube itself.

    The cube is a very unique design concept for inscriptions and formations. He has seen many kinds of formation tes and formation carriers until now. In fact, even he made a lot of formations that are very unconventional and inscribed them in many unconventional means in unconventional ces.

    But this cube concept is on a whole other level.

    It is a very intricate and detailed formation n and the variants that Prakth even thought of are mindblowing.

    Sam looked through them and wanted to test each one of them himself. He started with the most basic concept behind these cubes.

    Each section of the cube is inscribed with a set of runes and whenever the cube sections are moved, they are obviously going to be a part of a new set of patterns. If these new sets of patterns form an inscription, then it could be activated from the energy within the cube.

    And if all six faces that are constantly dynamic can have inscriptions, they can perform six things at the same time. And if all six of these inscriptions are six inscribed formations, then they could be aplex formations.

    They could be attack inscriptions and they cannd six attacks at the same time.

    Sam wanted to test this a bit and started making a basic 3X3 cube.

    Even though he is going for the simplest patterns, it is hard to figure outplex patterns like these. All the six faces have to be linked and when they are changed, even the changing patterns have to be linked.

    And in both cases, they should be easy to make with the same set of sections. This is going to be difficult.

    So, Sam decided that he would only use two functions for this cube. He picked a basic fireball inscription as well as a basic incineration technique inscription that just spews a jet of mes.

    Both of them are very simr in nature and even the inscriptions are not that different. He started creating a bunch of inscription drawings on the scroll first to see if he can really manage to merge them both.

    There is a small framework that Prakth left behind on how to calcte and differentiate the runic inscriptions on the sections and arrange them.

    He followed the framework step by step and started inscribing the pattern on the cube.

    This time, he didn''t even want to make it veryplicated.

    First, he just inscribed the patterns and shuffled the cube a bit before all of the patterns turned to be fireball inscriptions.

    He put up a small liquid energy cell in the hollow section of the cube and it was enchanted with a spirit. As soon as he finished the patterns, he threw it into the air.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sound came as six fireballs were shot in six different directions.

    He then took the cube again and started shuffling it until all four sides have the incineration patterns which also worked and then he started trying to have a few faces with the fireball pattern and the remaining with the incineration pattern.

    This went pretty easily, but he had to take a lot of time to carefully understand and perform each step. Except for the long time it took, it is really not thatplicated, because of the simplicity of the inscriptions he picked.

    This cube is obviously useless now. Even acolyte stage cultivators in his school back at home can do better than this and doing so many calctions in his head and taking so much time for six fireballs is idiotic.

    Currently, he is doing this just to get used to this.

    Sam, then started putting on a bit moreplicated inscriptions.

    He kept going on like that as he crafted a bunch of cubes and kept on experimenting. He stayed like that for a few more days, while overseeing the construction and after he was done with most of his work in city construction, he decided to go back to Deste.

    "Why are you leaving so early? You can stay for a while. The city''s construction is just getting to the interesting part. Don''t you want to see the testing of each feature we are implementing?

    The formations, the attack systems, that would be really fun." Grivon asked.

    "I am the one who designed them. Do you think I don''t know how they will function?" Sam retorted before taking out his dimensional drifter.

    "I don''t know when we will meet again, good luck with your city and the progress. I already left behind a lot of blueprints for your development.

    Grivon you got a clean te on the Gaja n. Build it up like a proper sessor of the n. I am really looking forward to the way you are going to grow up.

    As for you Giyon. I want to see what kind of organization you will be establishing. So, at least for them, I will definitelye back."

    "Why are you talking as if we are not going to meet again? It is not like you are leaving permanently. You are just going to deal with someone, aren''t you?" Giyon sneered.

    "Well, my journey doesn''t stop after I defeat him. It is still a long way for me to stop and I don''t know if I would be able to meet you much.

    This might just be a goodbye. So, I wanted to do it properly."

    "I am sure you wille back. If anyone can destroy that Mountain master, then it would be you. Juste back after you are done there."

 Chapter 1594 First Target

    Chapter 1594 First Target¡¡¡¡Sam went back to the deste.

    His friends are waiting for him. By the time he met them, they are ready to move and already assigned all of the tasks to the respected personnel. In fact, at this point, they don''t have much to do.

    Over the years, they have been training people very meticulously and at this point, the organization could just run by itself.

    Even the innovation side of things is not that bad. Of course, it is not as good as it was when Sam lead the whole invention and innovation side, but the students are improving and they churned out some really good researchers and creators in the past few years.

    They didn''t have as much trouble as they assigned people.

    Sam was really content with this.

    "So, are you guys ready to go now? I found the ce that we need to go first."

    "Before we go, we would like to do something."

    "What is it?"

    "Take us to the Gaja n."

    Sam frowned when he heard that.

    "Why do you want to go to the Gaja n?"

    "Why? We are establishing a trade rtionship with them."

    "Since when was this decision made?" Sam asked in surprise.

    "When you were in the Gaja n. All three of us unanimously made a decision. So, you have to agree."

    "When did this whole thing be a vote?"

    "Since now. We are going to establish a proper trading agreement with them"

    "Why though? Give me a reason. Even though I didn''t have any restrictions on trade rtions, I do have a right to know, don''t I?"

    "Actually, we should be asking, why you didn''t approve a trade already. It is so unlike you. You got a massive organization that is regrowing as we speak. This is their most desperate time. This is one of the best business deals you could make and by the time we expand dusk enough to reach the realms, we would already have enough influence there to support ourselves."

    "I wanted to leave the Gaja n out of it for now. I wanted to see how those siblings will grow. That is it. But I still helped them a lot. If they really utilize what I have left behind for them properly, they will have some marvelous growth ahead of them."

    "So, that is the reason. But I still think we need to make an agreement with them."

    Philip insisted even after Sam''s words.

    Sam is confused. Why are you so insistent? That is so unlike you."

    "I don''t know. I kinda feel like we could enjoy thepany of the Gaja n."

    Sam thought for a moment and suddenly smiled.

    "Don''t tell you liked someone? Who is it? It has to be Giyon. But do you know she is like fifty years older than us? I mean, age doesn''t matter much with our cultivation level¡­"

    "Shut up. What the fuck are you talking about?" Philip stopped Sam before he could go on. Sam smirked and looked at Philip''s reaction.

    Philip was sweating bullets. He is not panicked, it is pure fear.

    "What are you so afraid of?"

    "What else? Don''t tell me you talked this nonsense with Giyon?"

    "Why would I do that?"

    "Good. I am afraid she will kill me. She is a way too strong dude. Anyway, all of the nonsense is just that, pure nonsense. I feel it is better to continuously foster a good rtionship with the Gaja n.

    Since you already took in students and we are rapidly growing our cultivation and spread way too far, it would be not long before operational duties of the organization falls into your students'' hands.

    The Gaja n takes a few decades to go back to its former glory of having arge number of powerhouses. So, if we foster a rtionship now and aid them in their growth process for a while, by the time your students take over, they will have some backing andwork.

    Just think of the Gaja n as our intermediary to get connections with the higher-level organizations."

    "Do we really need to think that far into the future? I mean, it is not that we are going to die any time soon and they are my students, I am pretty sure they want to be independent."

    "Well, being independent doesn''t mean they can''t inherit your organization. They are officially your sessors whether they want it or not. It is kind of their responsibility and I am sure they won''t want to let the organization their teacher establish go without a leader."

    "Whatever. If you really think that it''s a good thing, just go ahead with it. I am not going to stop you. But just make sure that you are not helping those siblings too much. A helping hand is fine, but don''t make themzy.

    Let them struggle a bit."

    "You are literally the only person that wants your friends to struggle."

    "It is for their own sake. Let them struggle a bit. It is bad enough that everyone gets affected by the enemies I make, so the least I could do is to help them make some progress."

    "Alright, we will proceed with the ns our way. Take me and a space gate team there. We will establish the route and we can leave after that."

    Sam shrugged and did as he was told. He took Philip and the space gate team.

    The Gaja n obviously felt excited about this. They didn''t dare reject cooperation with the Dusk organization.

    That is way too valuable for them to miss.

    Sam didn''t participate in the dealings. He didn''t even go to meet the siblings. He just apanied Philip to the n''s leader and stayed outside the room.

    After the agreement was reached which was already pretty fast, the space gate team stayed there to build a space gate, while Sam took Philip away and went back to Dusk.

    After giving some more orders, they are finally ready to go on their endeavor. Dealing the Divine Formation Mountain.

    And their initial small goal is to destroy one of the six subordinates.

    Their first target.

    A very interesting one and he ranks third in terms of strength among all six people. He is neither the strongest nor definitely nowhere near the weakest.

    Ate-stage Consummate cultivator of Astral ne.

    The reason Sam is so interested in this person is that he is a person with both wood elements and light elements and on top of that, he is also a warrior mage.

    His constitution is not exactly a special one. He is just a dual elemental warrior mage, but thebination of these elements makes him a special target.

    He is the default healer of the whole Mountain. All of the other subordinates, and the disciplese for him to get healed.

    He is also the lead on their poison research and people even say that he is on the same level as the Vardar in many medical-rted fields.

    Sam wants to deal with him first because of that. But that is not the only reason. He is also kind of an easy target because of his character.

    From what Gail said, he is a very prideful person and he is so full of himself because of his ability to heal others his battle tactics are also very powerful and reckless. His special elementalbination offers him a regeneration ability which makes him fearless. He is also an expert in formations which he oftenbines with healing abilities and poison abilities making him a well-rounded person in this cultivation world.

    He has a reputation of his own to improve his faith and has some really good connections because of the healing assignments he asionally epts from some powerful people.

    On top of all of these qualities, he is a bit of a gambler. He likes to put wagers on the challenges he makes with people and he is always known to honor them. At least in public.

    But every time he loses a challenge, he uses any means to find out why he lost and not only does it make him go crazy to correct it, but he also goes after the person who won over him secretly to kill them.

    As long as he doesn''t kill them or he wasn''t convincedpletely he cannot kill them, he will lose his mind.

    He bes a psychopath on edge and literally goes crazy. He bes sensitive about everything that goes around him and feels like everything is targeted at him.

    The character is actually very simr to what the Demon Soul swordsman described the Mountain Master.

    Sam wants to make use of this guy. They are not really going to kill him immediately, but they are definitely going to deal with him in such a way that he will create the necessary chaos to disturb the rest of the Divine formation mountain and people affiliated with them.

    Sam and the trio got into a dimensional drifter and disappeared from the deste once again. This time, it is time for another adventure and now they are doing it like how they did in old times.

    Only four of them.

 Chapter 1595 Behavioral Change

    Chapter 1595 Behavioral Change¡¡¡¡"Sam are you sure, you want to deal with this guy with only four us?"

    Philip asked as all four of them are walking in a forest.

    It is very dense and they are walking a certain direction vigntly. It has been a while since they were this vignt.

    They are currently within a n that is part of grey circle.

    Within Grey circle, there are very few territories. Somes areplete wild zones without any signs of civilization or establishments and somes barely have a couple of cities.

    Even those cities are not exactly proper establishments where people aim to reside permanently, they are just there to act as group headquarters of some small organizations and as exchange and trading points for people within the grey circle.

    Now they are searching for one such ce. The only clear coordinates Sam got are for the and there are only three such cities or trade points on this where their first target might appear.

    So, they are currently travelling there.

    As for Philip''s question¡­

    "I think we are enough. And this will be fun. Just the four of us, like at the start of our journey in Deste."

    "I am really d about all of that, but still don''t you think not using your team is a bit of a shame. I mean, Night Ghost got really stronger. Saber Monarch, Vidyut and Paras are also very close. They will be really useful in such a powerful ce."

    "Nope, let them help with the organization. I think their journey with me might just be done. At least when dealing with the Divine Formation Mountain, they are not going to be involved as much even if they are involved in the first ce."

    "Why?"

    "It is because of their presence beside me that I got toocent about things and I fell in the hands of Sivan.

    Of course, I am not ming them, but I was relying on them too much. Since we were going to desert city at that time and there was supposed to be no one stronger than Night Ghost, I was prettyx with my preparations.

    I didn''t disguise, I didn''t hide my steps, I didn''t even take measures to have some contingencies.

    So, I learned the consequences hard way and I want to stay on the edge for a while."

    "But to this extent? Even the beasts that are roam around in these forests are either same level as you or stronger.

    We are even weaker than you. We could barely be considered anything in these realms and you are bringing us to take down one of the powerhouses in this realm. I don''t think this is an appropriate n."

    "Well, it is toote, you should have thought of that before you decided to dive headfirst into this as soon as I asked.

    You should have asked all of these questions and considered all of these before you just tagged us along in the Dimensional Drifter."

    "I didn''t think this through at that time."

    "Whatever, just tag along and do your part. You won''t be doing much anyway. Treat this as a vacation. Most of the time we are going to hunt some stronger beasts and have some fun.

    As for destroying these targets, we at least don''t need anyone''s help when dealing with this guy. So, don''t worry about it at all."

    "If you say so. But still how far is the city exactly? Do you have any idea?"

    "I don''t know. We need to reach the mountain in that direction first and from there we can find something that leads to the city."

    They walked in the forest a few hours before they reached the mountain. On their way, they acted extremely vigntly. Sam actually used crystal table in his every step to avoid the beasts and some times even people that are roaming around.

    They used all kinds of things to hide their presence from their basic senses including the spiritual sense to move as stealthily as possible.

    It is working and the most important advantage they have is that even if they are identally under someone''s senses, the other party wouldn''t believe it.

    There is no way people like them, particrly the trio would be roaming around in the forests of this this freely.

    Sam carefully avoided every possible confrontation with people and beasts before reaching the mountain sessfully.

    While doing so, he managed to observe what kind of creatures are living in this wilderness, both the flora and fauna and got an understanding of what kind of resources could be avable in the surroundings.

    Resources that could be used for both his short term goals like dealing with the Divine Formation Mountain and the long term goals like growth of his organization.

    He was as thorough as possible and got some important data.

    After visiting the mountain, Sam just directly estimated the coordinates to the top and used the dimensional drifter to transfer all of them.

    From that spot, they looked in all the directions and Sam finally pointed at one spot.

    "See that river stream far away? That leads us to one of the cities. Gail told me that there are three major river streams three continents of this small and every single stream passes by one of the three cities.

    We can just follow it and we will get there."

    "But how do you know to follow this upstream or downstream?"

    "Simple, we camp here for a while and let our water creatures decide where the city is."

    "Water creatures?"

    "Yeah, the creatures you guys unleashed on a bunch of Mari n territories. One of the batches even took up a whole that was used as farming ground by the n.

    I let the subordinates get a few for me.

    If it was a normal time, we could have explored the ce ourselves, but we won''t be able to do that now. We need to make sure that we stay safe only battle tactically when necessary. So, for now let''s rest here and wait for them toe back." Sam replied.

    Sam estimated the location of the river and used the dimensional drifter again. He dropped over two dozen water creatures in the stream. Half of them swam upstream and other half swam downstream.

    The water creatures can disguise themselves very well in the water, so not many people will notice them and even the other water animals that are staying won''t normally attack them. They can pretty much survive on their own when they are in water, so he is not worried.

    Sam felt that it is better to camp within a hollow cavity of the mountain and took them back immediately.

    They waited for a few days before some of the creatures returned. They swam the stream up to the sea and they didn''t see any other establishments and there is not even much of cultivator activity.

    So there is only one other route. The upstream.

    The team came out and started moving along the river path carefully. Of course they didn''t stay too close for that. They just made sure that the stream is within Sam''s crystal table''s range and moved carefully.

    After two days, they are still nowhere near the city. But they came to their first proper halt. Sam saw some traces of a beast and decided to stop there. He checked all of the surroundings and smiled.

    "Boys, we have our first prey ready. We are going hunting."

    "Hunting? What kind of beast is it?"

    "A Boar. But an Astral ne consummate stage boar. Of course it is in its Initiation, so you don''t have to worry too much."

    "Sam, tell me you have gone nuts." Philip directly retorted.

    Sam looked at him with a frown.

    "We are barely at thete stage of transcendent realm. You know how hard it is to fight an Astral ne Consummate stage beast. It will be a fucking nightmare.

    And even you are peak stage of transcendence only."

    "Since when did you be such a weak ass bum? I thought you were the more daring one."

    Sam said with a frown as if he is talking with utmost seriousness.

    Philip looked at him coldly and asked.

    "How dare you say that?"

    "We literally grew together Philip. We have been constantly punching above our level all this while. We always fought people stronger than me.

    Fuck, Watt was kidnapped by a Nascent stage cultivator when we were barely at Great realm stage. Don''t tell me you forgot all of that. Is the power difference more dangerous at that time than now?

    What are you being constantly afraid of? It is almost like you have softened. What happened to you? Why are you being like this?"

    Sam asked with all the seriousness.

    Philip who stood there coldly and was about to retort suddenly stopped.

    Watt and Jack also looked at Philip waiting for him to answer.

    They also noticed this change, but they didn''t want to call it out. In their minds, they are equals, at least the trio, they will be there for each other and try to understand each other, but they cannot put each other down, just because of a hunch.

    But with Sam, it''s different.

 Chapter 1596 Boar Hunting

    Chapter 1596 Boar Hunting¡¡¡¡Philip wanted to retort.

    But he didn''t have a proper answer. When Sam said it out loud, even he cannot deny the fact that he is indeed acting that way. Still, he doesn''t want to admit it.

    He wanted to be stubborn and deny everything.

    Only if he had the strength.

    Without giving any chance for Philip to think of some random bullshit story to cover this up, Sam started speaking again.

    "I know you are scared that something like before might happen again. But this is not the way to go. We cannot shield ourselves from every danger thates at us.

    We cannot just go on with trying to find an easier way out. As I said, this experience only increased my vignce and my approach to the dangers that we will face in the future will change. But I am sure that it won''t include running away and finding excuses to escape.

    That is not a good practice.

    Now, do you want toe with us to hunt the Boar or not? It will really help you in your cultivation."

    Philip stayed silent for a moment and just nodded.

    "Alright. That''s more like it. First, we are going to weaken it, to get it to our level, and then we will slowly chip its strength down.

    Don''t tell me that you cked while I was away. Show me what you have and don''t disappoint me."

    "Same goes for you. You are away from that body for so long that I think that even we might kick your ass if we gang up now." Jack said as he took out the ck Meteorite sword."

    Sam smirked and made his move. He jumped to the tallest tree nearby and climbed it to the top as he looked into the horizon. After checking various spots, he nodded and contacted the trio throughmunication token.

    "All three of you, hide in a triangr formation around this tree. Don''t make your move prematurely. I will lure that Boar here and you attack after you get a signal from me."

    "Alright."

    The trio went to hide in three different trees around the tree that Sam was on.

    Sam took out his bow and five arrows that have some special tips. He looked in the direction where the beast is at.

    There is arge ck-colored Boar on the horizon and it seemed to have been grazing on some weird grass.

    Sam nocked an arrow and shot it at the boar.

    The ck boar that was grazing seemed to have sensed the danger before the arrow stuck and an energy barrier came out of nowhere. The arrow hit the barrier and exploded.

    *BOOM*

    The explosion is fierce with spiritual energy liquid. But it is not exactlyrge. It only exploded in a very small space since Sam put up a very small amount of liquid in the arrow tip. The barrier broke down¡­

    *SWISH*

    Boar heard some more whistling sound before it coulde back to its senses and an arrow managed to brush past its hind leg.

    It didn''t injure the hind legpletely but when it was going past it, the arrow exploded.

    *BOOM*

    *ROAR*

    The Boar roared to the sky as it looked in the direction of Sam and started running angrily. Its hind leg has an injury. The flesh was torn apart and a portion of it is missing.

    It is bleeding profusely.

    But the boar didn''t care as it ran towards them.

    Sam shot the third arrow at that moment and this time, the Boar didn''t react. Because the arrow was shot into the sky at a spot and it exploded before it could even reach the boar.

    But as it exploded arge ssh of ck cursed liquid urred. The Boar was caught off guard as it took the full brunt of the ssh.

    It felt like the body burning with an extremely painful sensation and the worst part is obviously the wound on its hind leg.

    It couldn''t see it, but the flesh actually started rotting in that particr area.

    Sam held on to the remaining two arrows and said.

    "The Boar is injured and cursed. I think you guys can manage from here. When it reaches twenty meters away from us, Philip will attack first.

    Use your best-ranged attack. Don''t hold back at all and don''t need to target anything sensitive. You just need to target a leg."

    "Alright. I am on it."

    "Jack and Watt, both of you get ready with your attacks. Whether Philio''s attack fails or not, you shouldnd your next blow right after his attack is dispersed. Don''t miss it. Because no matter what happens, with Philip''s attack, there would be an opening in the barrier of the boar.

    And if yound your attacks at that exact time on the legs, you will have a better chance at dealing with the beast."

    "Okay."

    "Alright."

    When the Boar is at a considerable distance, Sam suddenly stopped concealing his presence and aimed his arrow at it once again. This time it is a normal arrow as it was just shot with pure spiritual energy.

    The Boar blocked it pretty easily and roared at him before charging with an increased speed.

    Meanwhile, Philip is gathering energy with his attack which the Boar seemed to have sensed as soon as it reached the twenty-meter mark. It instinctually activated a barrier.

    Philip who is hiding in a tree could be clearly seen now as mes and rocks moved around crazily. The whole tree was destroyed. He activated partial fusion as the ming rocks revolved at a high speed.

    They are so fast that they could only be seen as some red shes in the air and the Boar felt a bit tense as sit made its barrier denser.

    Sam didn''t want to lose its attention and shot his fifth arrow. This one has thergest amount of spiritual energy liquid inside making it most lethal.

    The Boar seemed to have sensed this and changed its direction of movement to dodge it. Which sessfully happened as the arrownded to the side.

    *BOOM*

    Even though the Boar took some force from the explosion, almost everything was blocked by the barrier.

    But the Boar didn''t feel safe, instead, it became even more vignt as it sensed danger.

    Philip who was gathering the energy and rotating these ming rocks stopped in his tracks and mmed his arms into the ground.

    *BAM*

    It sound like thunder pped in the sky as he mmed his palms. The rotating rocks suddenly zoomed into the ground as they disappeared. Philip closed his eyes and all of a sudden, the surrounding temperature started increasing.

    Not from the wind or the sun, they could clearly sense that it is from the earth. The soil lost all of the moisture within seconds and the grass rapidly dried out as if everything is being sapped out of them.

    Even the trees lost their lushness before they rapidly dried out bit by bit.

    The Boar appeared confused. It could sense the danger, but its senses are confusing it as it looked in all the different directions.

    It could sense danger from all the directions, but he couldn''t see anything or feel anything. And it didn''t believe that danger could being for it from all directions.

    It couldn''t make sense of a situation just based on the instincts and even though it is very powerful it is useless when it doesn''t have anything to attack for.

    After some thought the Boar went crazy and started stomping its legs. Each stomp created an energy wave that destroyed the surroundings. Everything within a certain radius was uprooted and even the earth cracked.

    Only at that moment, did it notice something from onside.

    Arge red rock that is covered with mes is moving at it from underground and after looking at it, the boar finally started focusing on it as it tried to defend itself.

    But what it didn''t notice is that its senses are right when they picked up the danger from all of the sides. When the Boar started focusing on this one rock that wasing at it, what it didn''t notice is five more rocks areing from different sides.

    All of them are focused on that one hind leg that was already injured and they popped up just a few feet away from it only they did Boar see them and it also noticed something else. The rocks are actually notrge. Therge size is just an illusion created by arge amount of earth and fire elemental energy clubbed together.

    It is just a coincidence.

    But the Boar couldn''t do anything about that information it just got. The five rocks targeted the boar''s leg.

    The barrier is still intact so, the first tree rocks didn''t do much and the fourth rock on which the Boar was initially concentrated was also destroyed by the barrier, by the fifth one the barrier was destroyed and itnded on the leg with some residual power.

    But thest onended and clean hit on that leg.

    *BOOM*

 Chapter 1597 Merchant Group

    Chapter 1597 Merchant Group¡¡¡¡*BOOM*

    *ROAR*

    The explosion made the Boar roar in agony. The pain and frustration could be clearly seen its eyes. It looked at Philip coldly and almost forgot about Sam''s presence. It wanted to make a move, but it could sense that the hind leg is severely damaged.

    It cannot just move around now.

    "Oy, you better save me, that attack took almost all of my energy."

    Philip yelled at Sam in themunication channel.

    "Don''t worry. It will be fine."

    As Sam replied, Jack and Watt made a move. They directly went after the legs of the boar.

    A bunch of cards flying around with wind des directly went after the legs followed by the sword rays.

    The Boar which was already caught off guard by the explosion and was about to charge at Philip took a few hits before it came back to its senses and protected itself.

    Only a few attacksnded, but some of them went for that one particr hind leg and the remaining went for the rest of the legs, making the boar a bit unstable on its limbs.

    Sam took a bunch of normal arrows. He didn''t take out the liquid energy ones and started shooting the Boar. But he used his spatial element along with the energy maniption techniques he learned while he was in Sivan''s body.

    The strategy is simple. Philip is the bait and when the Boar is running towards him, Watt and Jack are attacking the Boar from the rear while Sam is attacking with arrows from the top.

    He is responsible for making sure that the Boar doesn''t reach Philip, while Watt and Jack has a responsibility of diverting its attention.

    The Boar obviously has to shift the focus to someone else. Either Watt or Jack.

    When Watt was targeted, Sam and Jack assisted in changing the direction and the diverting its attetntion.

    Philip wasn''t able to do much. He was just a bait most of the time.

    Time passed slowly as all four them kept a fair distance away from this creature.

    They are nicking its energy and strength bit by bit and the curse is also doing its part. Soon, the Boar didn''t have any strength left to move and stood on the spot. It wanted to scream to the sky in agony, but before it could do that, all of them attacked it at the neck to finish it off.

    In three more minutes, the Boar died on the spot.

    Sam jumped off of the tree and hastily picked up the Boar into his storage

    "Come on, let''s go. Its not safe here anymore."

    He took out the dimensional drifter and all of them left that spot in an instant. They appeared a few dozen kilometres away from that spot.

    After checking the surroundings, Sam set up a camp there and took out the Boar. He purified the curse first and removed all and any of the rotten part, before preparing it carefully.

    All four of them soon started feasting on it. They replenished their energy and could see the slight improvement in their cultivation, even if it is so minute that it is negligible, they still felt it.

    After the content meal, they rested for a while and left the spot resuming their journey. For the next three days, this is their itinerary.

    They started the day with slowly moving forward, hunted a couple of beasts that are not too strong for them. Ate them to their hearts'' content and finally move on. But they made sure to rest at nights.

    They didn''t want to move at night.

    They didn''t use hoverboards or beasts. They carefully walked while watching every step.

    Only after these three days, did they finallye near the location they wanted toe. One of the three cities.

    The city doesn''t have any particr name, they are jumbered City 1,City 2 and City 3.

    From the looks of it they arrived near city 2.

    "City 2.

    Our n is simple.

    Our target moves around these cities on every weak. He epts challenges, gives out medicine and treatment.

    He is pretty generous in a way in all of his good deeds.

    It to maintain the perfect clear image they built up for the Divine Formation Mountain.

    This is our step by step n."

    Sam said as he took out a scroll and he walked everyone through the n.

    "Don''t you think it is a bit too risky?"

    "Well it is. But these exchange points are also safe points. In a way this ce is an indirect territory of the Divine Formation Mountain.

    Everyone can kill each other or anything else on the, wholeheartedly, but they are not allowed to act rashly and cause anymotion in the city.

    Also, there are no space gates here. With the danger and voltality of the nature in mind, they decided it is better not to connect the cities with an easy ess.

    So, even if we go crazy over at one spot, we don''t have to worry too much about it.

    Anyway, we need to hide our cultivations very carefully. If anyone finds out our true cultivation, they will ughter our asses and loot everything we have.

    They don''t even care about the status and background. This is Grey circle after all. Think of all of the people here as a bunch of low-life criminals that have great strength by chance."

    "Are you sure you want to execute this n, while our target is not here?"

    "Yeah. I am very sure of that."

    "Then I don''t have any more questions. Let''s go and bait that guy."

    All four of them used the best cloaking equipment they have topletely hide their strengths and faces. They didn''t leave a single clue in terms of appearance as they entered the city.

    And luckily, it seems like a very normal thing inside the city. There are many people using various means to cover their cultivation up.

    Sam and the trio didn''t even stand out in this ce.

    First, as usual, they went to a bar to see if they can find any information. After some great deal of spending in the afternoon, they indeed got some valuable information.

    For the next three days, their target won''t being to this ce. They have three days to perfectly execute their n.

    And they also got some information on where they could find some assets to their n.

    At the Trade square.

    It is arge building at the centre of the whole city where all the people post notices for missions. That is also the ce where the majority of the trade in the city happens. It is like an open market fair.

    Sam and the trio went there directly and looked for one particr group.

    "Need a fire elemental mage. Astral ne Consummation Initial stage. For hunting, Tri-elemental Porcupines."

    "Need a Warrior skilled in closebat. Hunting Gold fisted ape."

    ¡­

    Many people are yelling as they stood around the building at various spots. Of course, Sam and the trio ignored all of them and walked into the building. Here it is not as chaotic as outside and the whole building seemed to have different stores.

    They walked around for a while and stopped at one of the stores.

    Even the store keeper inside is wearing cloak with his face covered.

    They walked in.

    "Wee to Chaos Merchant Group.

    What kind of service do you want? Post a mission? Join a Mission? Buy or Sell items?"

    "Post a Mission. I would like a mission with a full team conjured with only Chaos Merchant group members. All of them should be at Initial stage of Astral ne Consummation."

    "Okay, what would the mission be?"

    "To hunt the next of Vermillion Hawks at the cliff nearby."

    The shopkeeper looked at Sam for a moment as he paused writing.

    "You want to hunt the whole nest?"

    "Yes. I would like everything inside the nest. The beasts, the eggs and all the resources they hoard."

    "That costs a lot. There is a major risk factor involved and the only reason nobody ever thought of hunting it down is that there is no guarantee it will seed and if they didn''t seed, the losses outweigh gains by a veryrge margin."

    "I understand, but I have some tricks up my sleeve. The majority of the battle would be done by the mercenary group. Me and my friends will provide support without interfering with the activity.

    I will pay 1.5 times the regr market price."

    The shop keeper once again paused and looked at Sam again.

    "So, you want a premium service? That is possible. But you have to pay half of it in advance.

    How would you like to pay? Resources, herbs, medince, metals, weapons, artifacts, blueprints, techniques, we will take all kinds of things here."

    "How about spirit stones?"

    The shopkeeper was taken aback."

    "You want to pay all of that huge amount in spirit stones?"

    "Yes. I want to pay all of it in spirit stones."

 Chapter 1598 Medicine

    Chapter 1598 Medicine¡¡¡¡The shopkeeper was beyond shocked.

    At their cultivation level, any menial transaction involved dozens of billions and with the requirements, Sam mentioned just now, the price reaches hundreds of billions.

    Nobody wants to have that much of spiritual stones, because the energy from spiritual stones can do little to nothing to them at their level and they also need to have unlimited patience to go through all of those stones.

    But still, they are the hard currency. They can be exchanged for anything and everything.

    "Okay, if you arefortable with paying with spirit stones, then do so by all means. Fifty percent now, please."

    The shopkeeper continued with the transaction and Sam took out the spatial ring and handed it to him.

    The shopkeeper briefly nced through it for a couple of minutes before he started drafting the contract. After entering all of the details that Sam wanted they finally signed it and that too in presence of a Gandharva where they took the oath.

    It is kind of amon practice here. Since there is not much of a structural jurisdiction in this ce, they have to resort to different ways, and having a Gandharva oath to be the witness of their contract is one of the mostmon ones.

    Both parties wouldn''t want to betray each other if mother nature itself is directly after them as a consequence.

    So, after the contract was signed, Sam and the trio were taken to a special waiting room, where they waited for the team members to gather.

    They were served with some refreshing wine and snacks made of some rare delicacies avable in the surroundings.

    They waited for over twenty-five minutes and the team was gathered.

    It is a team of twelve people all at the Initial stage of Astral ne Consummation.

    The Vermillion Hawk nest also has over a dozen Astral ne Consummate stage Initial beasts, but Sam is perfectly sure that this would be enough to deal with these beasts.

    But there are some modifications in the contracts since the shopkeeper didn''t want to risk losing their men.

    And of them is for three middle-stage Astral ne cultivators of the Consummate stage to apany them.

    They won''t participate in the battle unless there is a definite danger to the group and if the situation leads to their interference then Sam has to pay for their fee too.

    Even though these birds are pricey, they are not worth it for three middle-stage cultivators to attack. They are only suitable for people who are breaking through most of the time.

    And since there is little to no organizational culture within the Grey circle, there are not many people who desire these birds unless they are looking for one to make it their ride.

    So, unless Sam is willing to pay an exorbitant amount of money in case they needed a backup for surprising events, they are not really into taking this mission.

    Sam didn''t refute or renegotiate, he directly agreed to all of their terms.

    The shop keeper was extremely skeptical about this. Rightfully so.

    The three middle-stage cultivators also felt that Sam''s confidence is unfounded.

    They all went out to the hunt without any dy.

    Sam assumed themand and started guiding people to attack after they reached the vicinities. Of course, the three experts that came are standing by. While the trio is in charge of shooting some guns. Even if they are not exactly the sharpest shooters, Sam only needed an approximatending.

    So, whenever a Hawk tried to take one of the team members, it was shot down from various directions with a lot of paralytic poison inside.

    The hawks slowly stopped moving. The team of mercenaries who came for one of the most annoying battles in the world was dumbfounded.

    Vermillion hawks are one of the most stubborn and lethal creatures. They are so nimble in the air and the speed ispletely off the charts. They prepared for a long battle, traps, and all kinds of other stupid stuff. But they were not needed. Their preparations are pretty much useless.

    Even the leader of the Hawks that was at middle-stage was slowly taken down by the bullets that the trio shot and the attacks Sam guided the group to make.

    They simply won the battle by evening and are not the way to go back to the city.

    When they were about to reach the city, Sam suddenly stopped them a few hundred meters away from the gate.

    "What do you need? I think our services are over with the death of Vermillion Hawks. Why did you stop them?"

    It is one of the middle-stage cultivators who spoke coldly as he looked at Sam.

    "It is not a task. I was contemting whether I should do this at all or not. But I am really impressed with your performance today, so I will gift you with these things."

    As he spoke, he took a few injectors, but they are different. They are not the kind that looked like guns, rather these are only six inches long. They are as big as a pen.

    All they have to do is injected that into their bloodstream.

    At first, the group members obviously refused, but Sam insisted.

    "Even if you don''t want it, just keep it so that you can help out your friends or family members if they need it."

    That is what he said and made them take it. One of them who was injured was really curious.

    He just injected it into his arm and all of a sudden, he felt some kind of weird energy that he is not aware of until now coursed through his veins, and before he knew it, we already started gathering requests.

    The person who took the shot was stunned.

    He didn''t expect such an instantaneous result. He looked at= Sam in shock.

    "How is that possible? What happened to me just now?"

    "It is a healing medicine we are developing recently. It is actually pretty useful as the results are instantaneous and it works for injuries, poisons, and curses. At least most of them."

    "Are you selling it? If you are, then our merchant group is the nicest ce for you to do so.

    You can really get a great deal and our boss has connections with a lot of people across the Grey circle. Your product will definitely make people queue up to buy it."

    One of them directly pitched the idea to give the supply to the merchant group. But Sam''s message was clear. He is not negotiating this right now and the healing medicine for one shot is all they could get at the moment.

    They just went to the shop where Sam finished the closing procedures of their agreement and paid everything he needed to pay.

    "Pleasure doing business with you. I hope you got what you wanted from this trip."

    "Not everything. Bu that is still okay."

    Sam replied with a smile casually and took off.

    As soon as he left, the shopkeeper hurriedly ran deeper into the shop as he went to check the effectiveness of the medicine himself.

    If it is really that good. There is no way he is going to let Sam go.

 Chapter 1599 Boss

    Chapter 1599 Boss¡¡¡¡The shopkeeper took a few shots of medicine from the team as he tested them on himself and on others to see if there are any side effects.

    As soon as he realized there are none and the healing effect is indeed that good.

    He even checked it against the Poison and curses and the more he tested the more the team members felt aggrieved. They are losing one shot after another for the tests when they could use it in a very perilous battle situation that could even save their life.

    They didn''t want to waste it.

    But the shopkeeper was pretty insistent on testing it out again and again.

    Some of them even steeled their hearts and dared to ask him to spare some shots. But he fumed back at them like a dragon spitting fire.

    "What the hell do you guys need this for? I am testing them, aren''t I? I have to check if they are all worth it before I make a business decision and if they are really worthy, do you really think I will not reward you guys enough?

    Why are you all being misers with just these few shots?

    Now, all of you. Give me everything you have."

    He forcefully took every shot they had and kicked them all out.

    He went on to perform more tests before he came to a conclusion. He needs to find Sam and make a business deal with him.

    But even before that, he needs to find their boss and give the message. That healing that is better than anything they have ever created has hit the grey circle.

    And he did exactly that.

    He went into a different room where arge formation was inscribed on the floor. He sat in the middle of it before activating it.

    It is arge-scalemunication channel that connects various ces on the.

    He connected with someone through it.

    "This better be important. If you are disturbing me for something trivial, then I will fucking kill you."

    "No, sir. This is definitely not trivial. This is very important in fact."

    "What is it?"

    "A group of young men came to our shop today and took a dozen Initial stage Astral ne Consummation cultivators.

    They hunted down the Vermilion Hawk nest nearby.

    In the process, our group members got injured and the leader of the young men gave out some medical shots that could be injected into their bodies."

    "Somebody gave us medical shots. That''s funny." The other voice chuckled as if the person found this amusing.

    "Actually Sir, it is not. Because the medicine that he gave us is extremely potent and it is instantaneous. It only took three seconds for it to work and heal the woundspletely. It is so potent and multifunctional that it can be used for wounds, poisons, and curses.

    It is actually the best instant medication I have ever seen."

    "You can''t say those words lightly. You do know what I can do to you if your words are proven wrong right?"

    "Yes, Sir. But I did my homework. I took all of the shots from the team and tested everything myself. Poisons, cuts, bruises, and even minor fractures and curses. Almost everything could be cured as long as it is not too lethal and critical.

    I am sure that this is the best instant medication that has ever appeared on our and in the realm."

    "Then, tell me that you know how to contact the person that created this. Because as you already know, on this and in this realm. There should be no other person that defeats us in a medical field."

    "Yes, sir. I have left a tracker spirit with him."

    "That''s good. At least you used your brain properly this time. Do you have any other information on this guy? Do you think he is rted to that bastard Vardar?"

    "Unfortunately, no sir. We don''t have any information on him. He deliberately hid his identity and it seems like the means he used are of pretty high quality. I wasn''t even able to see his face beyond that cloak even with our formations.

    He definitely has some deep background or excellent skill to have something like that in his possession. As for his rtionship with the Vardar. We cannot say for sure sir. But there is a possibility that he might be rted to him."

    "Keep an eye on him. Try to buy the manufacturing method off of him. If he is the one that made this, then make him sign a Gandharva oath that he would never be using this method after he sold it to us."

    "But Sir, I think it is better to reach a proper cooperation instead of doing something so drastic."

    "What did I hear my dear shopkeeper? Is that adviceing from you on how to handle my business?"

    The shopkeeper felt his throat run dry. This is one of the problems with his boss and he instinctually crossed the line without even knowing.

    He gulped nervously and tried to remedy the situation.

    "Boss, what I mean is that guy would be more beneficial to you if he works for you. You can take away the product but you can''t take away his mind. As long as he is under you, he can make new products that are beneficial to you.

    In that case, you can also keep better control of him and make sure that he doesn''t gather more attention than necessary. You can monitor and influence his growth in the way you want and need."

    The Boss stayed silent for a moment and replied.

    "That sounds reasonable. We will give your method a shot.

    I will being in two days. So, track the guy meanwhile and make a conversation with him. Try to make him agree to the deal. You can use my name if you want.

    As long as he agrees to the conditions you just mentioned without any resistance, then it is okay. Otherwise, just kill him and take the methods off of his soul."

    "Can I allow him any conditions sir?"

    "As long as they are not major or too demanding, you can grant him some ck. But not too much. Otherwise, you will have to bear the brunt of it."

    "Yes, sir. I will keep that in mind."

    The connection was cut and the shopkeeper finally heaved a sigh of relief. He has been panicking the whole time he was talking to his Boss.

    He doesn''t know how his boss would react as his mood is pretty unpredictable.

    "For such a guy to be known as some saintly being. Just how stupid is the world that we are living in right now."

    He sighed and stood up to carry out the tasks that his boss told him to do.

    Meanwhile, within the city in another corner. Sam and the trio took residence in a property that he just bought.

    They are currently sitting down as Sam waved his hand in the air.

    A small sphere of dark elemental energy enveloped something that looking a puff of smoke and he started ying with it.

    "What is that? Why are you ying with bubbles like a kid?"

    Philip asked as he looked at it curiously.

    "It is not a bubble. The one inside is a spirit ced on us by that shopkeeper. It seems like he wants to track us."

    "So, the bait worked?"

    "Of course, it would. I already told you, the boss of that shopkeeper or more urately, our current target is a massive egomaniac. He wouldn''t let someone else roam around in his own territory with a product better than his in his own field of expertise.

    He would rather die than let something like that happen."

    "So, what if theye in aggressively? After all, if he is that much of a maniac, he might not even reach for a business deal as you wanted.

    He might juste for a fight and try to take this force."

    "That is a possibility and I am prepared for it."

    "How?"

    "Making a run for it. That is ate-stage guy, without massive preparations and the Sky tower, there is no way we could beat him at the moment. So, if there is any sign of danger or aggression, we leave this ce without a second thought.

    But I do believe that there is a chance of them offering a deal."

    "Why do you think so?"

    Even though the Boss is a maniac like this, his business is still running properly. That means someone is there to make some rational decisions. If that someone convinces him then we would have a chance."

    "Let''s hope so. If we run away on our first mission after we met again, that would be an embarrassing story for the future."

    As he was thinking, Sam suddenly sensed something and said.

    "Maybe, your hopes dide true, someone ising to us and it seems like they areing in peace."

 Chapter 1600 Challenge

    Chapter 1600 Challenge¡¡¡¡Sam stood up and walked to the entrance.

    He looked at the shopkeeper who just arrived at his residence and smiled.

    "I thought the transaction wasplete. Is there any error? I am pretty sure the Gandharva oath would have left me alone if that was the case."

    "Of course the earlier transaction was canceled. I am here on a different business here."

    "Business? What business could it be? Do you want to buy the Vermilion Hawks from me?" Sam asked as if he is really surprised.

    "Can we discuss this over a meal? We have a restaurant that is owned by our group. The chef there is excellent."

    "Sure, I can do that. Let me just tell my friends about it though."

    "Okay, I will wait here."

    Sam walked in and came back after two minutes.

    "Let''s go."

    They both walked leisurely and reached a restaurant. They were taken to a private booth. The shopkeeper ordered the best dishes there and waited calmly until the order came.

    He only spoke after they started eating.

    "Do you n on selling your medicine shots?"

    "Selling? I don''t have a particr n, the selling and stuff are mostly done by my organization. Why? Do you want to buy some? If you tell me how many you want, I can think about it. If it is not arge amount, I can think of a way for you to get some."

    "No, no. I am not talking about a few shots." The shopkeeper smiled awkwardly. He doesn''t even know what to say to Sam''s enthusiastic and considerate reply.

    "Not a few shots? Do you want too many? I can only manage around a thousand or so. If you want more than that, you have to contact my organization directly."

    "No, we are not looking for a trade deal for medicine shots. We are looking to buy off the design and manufacturing method of the medicine shot. Including the mechanism of the injector and the medical form.

    Everything."

    Sam suddenly stopped eating and looked at the shopkeeper.

    "I am really sorry. It seems like you are wasting your time. It is not possible. I can''t give it to you."

    "Why? Is it because of the organization you talked about? If you don''t have enough authority to make a decision, you can just introduce me to someone who can make a decision."

    "Well, actually I am the one who can make that decision, but still this trade is not possible."

    "Why?"

    "For starters, if I sell this to you. I mean a big IF, I am sure you don''t want us to make the same product, right?"

    "That¡­."

    "I guess I am right. Of course, a product that unique can only be made by one organization. And I can''t approve that, because I already approved my own organization to manufacture them. They are well on their way to mass production."

    "Mass production? How big is your output?"

    "At least fifty thousand units a day."

    The shopkeeper took a massive breath as he tried to calm down.

    "How are you guys producing that much?"

    "As a merchant, you should know better than anyone that you cannot reveal your trade secrets out in the open. That is very unnatural and impolite of you to ask me that question."

    "I apologize.

    But can you reconsider this offer? If possible, not only would we buy off the products you have developed until now and even if there is any special equipment and personnel you must have prepared for this.

    We will bear all of the costs and a profit for you on top of that."

    "Mr. Shopkeeper, don''t you think you are promising sun, moon, and stars to me? Do you even know what kind of development costs we incurred in the development of this product? Do you think it was easy?

    Do you know how many test subjects died in the process?

    Do you know how long our organization had to suffer because of the losses incurred by the research time we could have spent on this? Do you even have enough capital to do that?"

    "Of course. I am not just the shopkeeper for that one shop. Currently, I am the most trusted aide of the ruler of thesends.

    You must have heard of the name Saint since you havee here, right? He is my direct boss and he wants to buy this from you."

    "Oh, Saint? He is actually your Boss?"

    "Yes. Please consider selling this to us. I am sure my Boss would like to coborate with you in the long term if you do this."

    Sam stayed silent for a moment and replied.

    "I am sorry. But I can''t do that."

    "Why?"

    "This all seems a bit fishy to me.

    Why is your Boss, who is known as the greatest healer in thesends, trying to buy something off of me like this? And that too, to take away all of my rights to produce them. Even his nickname is Saint, but why does it seem like an idea of a regr money-grubbing merchant?

    As for the long-term coboration, I don''t really have any particr interest in doing it. Because, from what I can see, I don''t have anything to learn from your Saint. Clearly, I made medicine that even he couldn''t make.

    So, even if we could coborate, I will be on the losing end, constantly."

    Hearing those words, the atmosphere turned tense.

    The Shopkeeper stopped eating and looked at Sam with a solemn expression.

    "You cannot make a im like that. Saint has been the mostpetent healer thisnd has ever seen and he maintained that position over the years. You don''t have the right to im that you are a better healer than him and you cannot gain anything by coborating with him.

    That is nothing short of provocation."

    "I stand by my words. I wholeheartedly believe that there is not much your boss could offer me.

    What are the things he does have?

    Spirit stones? I have a lot of them.

    Resources? I don''t have a shortage of them.

    Background and Strength? We might not be as famous as the Divine formation mountain, but our strength is nothing less than theirs.

    Medical expertise and knowledge? I don''t know how Saint became known to be such a great healer, but I am pretty sure I have better expertise than him in terms of healing and pharmaceutics.

    The medicine shot you have in your possession is a real-life example. I made that from a scratch and it works so well that even your boss wants to make the money off of it.

    You tell me, what do you think he has to offer me?"

    The Shopkeeper became stumped. He didn''t know what to say. He started moving his mouth, but no sound came out. He ispletely lost.

    "But I can''t have someone just doubt my expertise like this. Do you want me to prove it to you? I can do that.

    Let''s have apetition. Apetition that covers all kinds of healing. Just me and your Boss will deal with it in a civilized manner. As long as I win, he needs to admit that he is not the Saint people call him to be and just a merchant who is trying to make some money off of his fame and poprity.

    And if I lose, then not only will forfeit the rights for the medical injector, I will also give you blueprints for these special instruments I developed in the past few months."

    As Sam said, he gave out three scrolls, that had basic description and functionality of three more healing products."

    When the Shopkeeper saw this, he suddenly raised his hand and waved it.

    "What are you doing?"

    "Oh, nothing. It is something that I do when I get excited. That''s it."

    The shopkeeper looked through the designs and nodded.

    "I will inform my boss and get back to you after he made a decision."

    "That would be great. I will stay in the same residence."

    "Thank you."

    Both of them departed. The shopkeeper looked at Sam who leisurely walked away as if there is not a thing in this world that could bother him.

    But what he doesn''t know is that at this moment, Sam is gulping down hard and sighing right after.

    "That would have gone nasty really fast."

    He muttered as he went back to the residence. The situation was very dire at that moment because when the shopkeeper raised his hand, it is not just to show his excitement, it is to stop some of the troops that were about to barge in and take care of Sam.

    Sam noticed them. Even though they are stronger than him and they are very stealthy, they cannot hide from the crystal table, so he found them and immediately improvised.

    As soon as he reached his residence, he waved his hands and his friends came out of the Divine dimension.

    "It seems like you were pretty shaken. Why are you so nervous?"

 Chapter 1601 Saint

    Chapter 1601 Saint¡¡¡¡"Sam being nervous. This is a rare asion. I think we should remember this day forever and celebrate it every year."

    Philip started making fun of Sam.

    Sam just scoffed and paid no heed to him.

    "That guy really led me into a trap. I became nervous because, right before I extended the challenge, I realized that the trap is not as small I initially thought."

    "Really? How big is it?"

    "Everyone in that restaurant is their person. Waiters, chefs, cleaners, managers, customers, and even pedestrians walking outside the restaurant. Everyone in the vicinity is their person and all of them got ready to attack.

    I have literally seen their auras raising with my energy vision and I saw the other people outside of my visible range getting ready to make a move.

    The shopkeeper came here to finish me off if things went wrong. Good thing he is a bit, rational person. As soon as he learned that there is a peaceful solution to resolve this, he immediately backed down.

    If they had alle at me, it would have been difficult for me to find a way to activate the Dimensional Drifter. I would have had to use drastic measures that could have revealed my identity.

    We can''t have that happen at this early stage of this n."

    Sam didn''t bother him and they just waited in their residence. Two more days. That is all he needs to spend waiting for their first target.

    It is not a long time. He just spent these two days fidgeting with the cube a bit and they are gone before he noticed.

    Two dayster, on the day they were supposed to meet, Sam put the cube aside and is waiting for the people toe and get him.

    But while he was waiting, what he doesn''t know is that the shopkeeper and the rest of the subordinates are all struggling for their lives at that moment.

    They are all currently kneeling down in an estate with one man standing in front of all of them. The man has a lean figure and his hair is faintly green in color. Even his skin is not exactly fair or dark. It is like a very light shade of teal.

    Nobody knows what race he belongs to and nobody knows who his parents are and why he possessed such a unique ability and appearance. But everybody knows him by the name ''Saint''.

    The only thing is that the subordinates under him know that he is far from the nickname or rather the vain title that people have given him.

    He loves the fame and the drunken feeling it gives him. He embraces his vanity and lives his life based on the fame and belief that people have on him.

    "Do you guys even know who I am? I am the Saint. The greatest healer of thisnd and are you telling me that I have topete with a nobody who doesn''t even dare to show his face directly? Are you insane?

    I shouldn''t have let you handle this from the start. I should have used my contacts directly without leaving everything to some ipetent fools like you."

    "But sir, because I handled this incident like this, you gained much more valuable information. From what that person said, his family is actually powerful. Just as powerful as the Divine formation mountain and the only reason we didn''t hear about him is because of theirck of interest in fame.

    If my guess is right, he definitely came across this ce to train and gain valuable experience.

    If by any chance the family kept a tracker on him which is almost impossible to not do, we will be in big trouble.

    Unless we create huge chaos to destroy everything along with him. We need to kill him and everyone who came in contact with him and even then it wouldn''t have been possible.

    But now his arrogance not only revealed some other tools he had at hand that could be useful to us, but we can also avoid every possible repercussion that follows this.

    All we have to do is make the challenge public and make him swear a Gandharva oath.

    With your skills, there is no way you would lose. You will win and gain a lot of attention from the people in the surroundings.

    Even if the people behind that guye down after this, we can directly say that this is part of the agreement that was made by that guy.

    It would be his arrogance that''s med instead of us."

    Saint who is projecting all of his aura on his subordinates, eased a bit and smiled.

    "I will forgive you for this one time. Go and make him sign a contract publicly. You know what, just make him agree to sign the contract. We can sign it in the middle of all of the audience.

    One of you go and announce the news about this challenge, just omit the details of the wager from his side, just make it so that the other party is just challenging me to make some trouble and I am not even taking it to heart.

    Instead, I am generous enough to ept his in and boring challenge just out of my benevolence.

    This is the perfect narrative. Spin it so that everyone knows my greatness."

    The shopkeepers and the rest of the subordinates are disgusted by his shameless mongering for fame. But they didn''t dare voice those opinions. They just did as they were told.

    The shopkeeper who was the mediator for this from the start went to Sam. He was really worried, about what he might have to pull just to make Sam agree to these conditions, but he was surprised when everything went smoothly.

    Sam didn''t even bother to reject or resist them. He didn''t even bother to raise some of his own conditions. He just agreed directly.

    It made him feel weird.

    But the Shopkeeper took Sam to the arena that Saint has arranged.

    There Saint waited on the stage and Sam who is still cloaked walked casually.

    "Show me your face.

    I want you to see what someone as ignorant as you looks like."

    Saint arrogantly said.

    Sam removed the cloak, but his face is not fully shown. His face is covered with a half mask. It covered the upper half of his face while the lower half is revealed.

    "What is it? Are you that much of a coward to not even dare to show your face?"

    "If you want to see it, defeat me first. Not anyone is eligible to take a look at it. Particrly not some vain money-grubbers who are obsessed about the fleeting moments of satisfaction thate from people recognizing you superficially."

    "How dare you?"

    "This piece of shit. Who is he to talk about saint like that?"

    "Saint, please kill this bastard. Kill him, kill him now."

    "Right Kill him. Who does he even think he is to challenge you?"

    Everyone started screaming curses. Sam turned to look at the crowd and his gazended on the guy that called him bastard instinctually.

    His eyes are filled with killing intent and since the guy is at the very front of the crowd, he could clearly feel it. He immediately shut his mouth and so did the people surrounding him.

    Sam looked at the Saint and said.

    "You said you wanted to us go through a Gandharva oath. Let''s do it. But before that, let''s state our conditions."

    "Sure. You can do it."

    "If I win, you will admit that you are not the saintly being you are painting out to be. Tell the world that you are just as selfish as them if not worse.

    Tell them that this fame is only for your vanity and you are focused on getting the mary gains that are apanied with the fame¡­."

    Sam paused for a moment and walked in closer to him as he whispered.

    "Also admit that you never cared about these people and your saint title is just a mere joke."

    "How dare you say it like that?"

    "What insolence?" Sam let the audience casually digest the info and spoke after that.

    "Finally, you have to remove your Saint title permanently. That is no name and you are no saint. Once I prove the selfish piece of shit you are, then the whole popce of this city and the rest of the world, and will definitely know about it.

    "Childish Brat.

    II think you wille to know what is the difference between you and a real expert."

    "If that really happens, but before that, let''s make an oath."

    Both parties stood up face to face with a Gandharva that can arrow out the oath in the middle.

    They once again told the rules out loud and signed the oath immediately.

    He gave out the basic precautions on what happens when one of them breaks the oath. After that was done they are ready for thepetition.

 Chapter 1602 Broken Bones

    Chapter 1602 Broken Bones¡¡¡¡There are three rounds to thepetition.

    First one is healing someone with massiveminuted fractures. Both Sam and Saint has a volunteer of their own and they willingly had their legs broken just for thepetition.

    Sam was pretty surprised by this. But this is the power of Saint''s reputation. Just the fact that he wanted topete with someone to prove is credibility, made the citizens to go ahead and do something like this.

    Both the volunteers are initial stage transcendent cultivators of Astral ne.

    Sam checked the legs of his patient and was surprised.

    "How did you even agree with this? You know that your life would go to hell if you don''t repair them properly right?"

    Sam said in surprised as he use observation ability on the legs. Each leg has been broken at at least three spots and there are several bone fragments that are lodged into muscle tissue.

    Some shards prated through the flesh and are visible outside with heavy bleeding.

    Both legs are almost in a simr state.

    Saint started performing his treatment, he is first using his wood elemental energy to set the bones back. In fact he is using some kind of special vine that extended from his fingers to collect and hold the bones together.

    He gave the guy a shot of high dose of anesthasia.

    He extended his palm and Light elemental energy gathered at it. He used the palm as a de as he cut through the flesh and cut the leg open. He started bleeding but Sam used his water elemental energy to control the blood flow while using the other palm to fix the bones.

    He is doing it a rapid pace and Saint who has been carefully using the vine just to remove the shards and ce them all back together was a bit surprised.

    If he wants to he could have just cut the leg and tried to regrow it. But he wouldn''t be able to do that anytime soon and it would take a lot of energy out of him. He also has to conserve energy for the other two rounds.

    So, he used this intricate technique he came up by himself.

    The beauty of this technique is that it can be used even in the middle of a battlefield, while running around.

    Only he, the healer needs to have a clear understanding of the fracture and everything will be perfectly fine.

    But he didn''t expect Sam to do it this fast, that too with a surgical method. He knows how hard it is to control the blood loss, handling anesthasia for the patients. It is almost impossible for a person to do it all alone. Even for him. But it seems like the opponent he looked down upon is doing it perfectly well.

    He became a bit anxious and increased the pace of his treatment.

    Meanwhile, Sam didn''t mind or pay any heed to Saint. He just focused on the surgery. It didn''t take long. He finished setting up one leg in just a few minutes, before he moved on the second.

    Remove the shards, cut the leg open, control the blood flow, arrange the bone and heal. That is all Sam needed to do and within a few minutes he was done.

    He thought he is fast, but then he looked at Saint who is also done exactly at the same moment.

    Sam didn''t like it. Neither did Saint. They could feel the intensity of thepetition burning in their eyes.

    Then came the judging time. Obviously they cannot have someonee and judge. Even if they asked someone to do that, there is no way they would juste there and judge Saint''s work.

    That could just lead to making Saint an enemy for life. So, the only way they could find if it worked or not is to let the patients use their legs and see how they feel.

    They also took Gandharva Oaths saying that they will only speak truth regarding the matter. It is to ensure fairness of thepetition.

    The patients walked to the front of the stage and started battling. They are both warriors and they focused on the kicks. To see if there are any difference. But from the looks of it, there is none whatsoever.

    They are both doing fine. So, it was a tie.

    The two patients went off the stage to a resting area arranged specifically for them.

    "Not bad, you managed to tie with me in this round. Seems like you have some substance after all."

    Sam didn''t even bother to reply. He just sipped some wine to recover a bit and waited for his next patient.

    The second round began soon enough and this time. Themutative fractures are on the ribs. The rib cages was broken at many spots and there are some severe lung piercings. On top of that, it seems like the person is subjected to some kind of curse.

    Sam is really surprised that people let this happen to them voluntarily.

    It is very dangerous. At least the first patients might fail to walk properly if the surgery ever failed, but this time, if things go sideways, they will literally die.

    They will drown in their blood and die just like that.

    Sam sighed and started the treatment. This time, he is a bit more careful. First he created arge barrier around them so that there is no interference from even the air in the surroundings.

    The lungs are way too sensitive for him to let some variable to be involved.

    He covered his palms with light elemental energy and started performing the surgery. The first thing he did is of course diffuse the curse. Even though he couldn''t identify the curse instantly, he could use some techniques that could cure a bunch of curses even if they are different.

    He removed the curse in an instant and went on to cut open the chest of the patient after giving them some anesthasia.

    This time, he used water and wind elements to stop the bleeding and also to supply oxygen to the blood through the damaged lungs while healing them simultaneously.

    Saint saw Sam and frowned. He thought he was mistaken before when Sam used water element to control the bleeding on legs. But now he is sure. He is indeed using water element.

    This surprised him because, even if someone is skilled in water element, they would never dare to use it in a surgery to control the bloodflow.

    That is way too dangerous and even a slight disturbance will cause massive loss.

    To think that Sam not used the water element, but he is using it himself while simultaneously performing the surgery. This made Saint nervous. He couldn''t help but feel a bit small and anxious.

    He shook his head to stop his brain from wandering in these thoughts and focused on the surgery.

    The surgery this time is obviously way harder than the previous one. And coincidentally, they both finished at the same time again.

    Once again, the patients who healed were given some medicine to recover their energy and physical strength to battle.

    The battle went on for a few minutes and there are no side effects from the surgeries. Both of them went to the resting area while panting heavily.

    Sam''s patient went back to normal after a few minutes, but Saint''s patient is still panting and it doesn''t seem like it would go away any time soon.

    "What happened to you?"

    "I think I went overboard. My breathing is a bit unstable. But I think I am getting better."

    The attendant who heard this answer was stunned. He looked at Sam''s patient and asked.

    "How are you feeling?"

    "I am perfectly fine. It is almost like I didn''t even have this surgery in the first ce. I feel like how I used to feel before the injuries."

    This made the attendant dumbfounded. He ran to his superior and exined his findings who then went to meet the shopkeeper to exin this.

    Shopkeeper was shocked and then the shock turned into sadness.

    "It is good that we stopped them sooner. I wonder what would have happened if we let this discovery unfold in front of the audience.''

    He muttered to himself and told everyone to keep quiet about it. He looked at Sam and sighed.

    This is unfair, luckily they didn''t mention anything rted to this scenario in the oath, otherwise shit would have gone sideways really fast.

    He then looked at the third batch of patients. The finalpetition.

    "I just hope that this one also ends in a tie if it doesn''t end in our win. I don''t want to deal with the consequences if we lose."

    "Boss, do you think we should¡­"

    *PAK*

    He pped his subordinate on the head as he solemnly said.

    "Don''t even think about it. Do you really want to stoop to that level? And Gandharva Oath is no joke. At least until now, we yed within the rules, but if it goes past that, we will be dead as rocks."

 Chapter 1603 Complex target

    Chapter 1603 Complex target¡¡¡¡Sam and the Saint both started taking a break.

    They are waiting for their third target.

    While waiting, Sam tried to concentrate on recovering his spiritual energy as much as possible. By now everyone must have noticed his cultivation level. Even if they didn''t they will be having doubts.

    So, he has to make sure that their doubts remain doubts. If a real Peak stage transcendence cultivator of the Astral ne did the same healing as he did, there is no way they would be able to recover as fast as Saint.

    But Sam can at least show off that he did since his normal energy level is already way higher than a normal cultivator of the same level.

    He needs to keep his identity and strength as mysterious as possible so these people will stay away from him. At least before they could confirm anything.

    After a few minutes, the third volunteer was brought up. But this time, they are heavily injured in all four of their limbs and even their spine seemed to have been attacked.

    They have flesh wounds all over and Sam could literally see the flesh festering with curses as they were being brought to the stage.

    He looked at them with pity. He didn''t want to torture anyone like this. Particrly the people who has nothing to do with his situation. There is not even a single good reason he could think of to make them suffer like this.

    As he was thinking of healing his volunteer quickly and be done with it, the attendant blocked him. Sam was a bit confused. But soon the attendant took a vial of some weird liquid. The attendant for the other volunteer also did the same.

    At the same moment, the vial was emptied into their mouths.

    Sam frowned and look like the skin of the people just changed into a different color at a visible pace.

    "You don''t expect the final round to be so simple, do you? This one is difficult. They are now taking in the poison that was made from the essence of eighteen poisonous herbs. They are extremely potent.

    But don''t worry. Even I don''t know what exactly the mixture and concoction are. Just like you, I was also left in the dark.

    Now all you have to do is heal the person. But do remember, if you don''t cure the poison within the next fifteen minutes, the poison will act up, and based on the density of it still inside, it could lead to some severe repercussions. Anywhere between organ failure to immediate death.

    So, do be careful."

    Saint said those words and moved to his patient.

    Sam looked at his own patient and gritted his teeth. The patient is suffering. The fractures, curses and poison are all too much for him.

    He just wanted to proceed with the treatment in a normal way, but as soon as he thought of the suffering this guy is going through because of his personal agenda, he felt a bit guilty.

    "That is why I don''t like to be a healer."

    He said as he activated his wood and light elemental energy at the same time. The saint was shocked. He didn''t expect these two elements from Sam.

    Then he recalled, how Sam used water elements also and frowned. It is rare to see people with more than two elements, but it is not super rare, but to have water, light, and wood is some weirdbination, that he never knew existed.

    As he was thinking that, Sam closed his eyes and small vines started extending from his fingers, and then his whole arm was dispersed into very thing vines as it wrapped around the patient.

    The vines coiled around him and formed a cocoon within just a minute.

    Afterpletely wrapping the cocoon around the patient, he closed his eyes and activated his observation ability while controlling his wood element to create thorns from the vines that dove deeper into the meridians of the patient.

    At this moment, Sam took a deep breath. The vines are currently rearranging the bones as the light elemental energy healed them while taking care of the curses.

    As all of the ailments are being slowly healed Sam felt his energy being expended at a rapid pace. He is being drained. But that is not all. His frown got deeper as he tried to forcefully use water elemental energy while he was still using the fusion.

    He gritted his teeth and used all of his mental energy to tap into the water element. The fusion body resists other elements. It is already bad enough that is using the dual elemental fusion which in itself is a rarity.

    There is no way, he could do this without hurting himself. But he still decided to go on and do it anyway.

    After much effort and almost hurting his soul he finally managed to tap into the water elemental energy and there is one specific reason for that.

    He wanted to control the flow of the blood. If possible, he would have preferred to use his vampire side to just suck the blood out of the person while regenerating the blood. Like he did in the Charbhum realm.

    But now he cannot. Because of Sivan''s constant consumption of blood, his body is kind of used to it and is in a pretty addictive stage. It is already hard enough for him to not be tempted by the bleeding wounds and the dripping blood.

    He is afraid that before he got any control over his bodypletely, by any chance if a single drop of blood was tasted, it might resort to its own means and instincts might take over.

    For that reason, he has to take the hard way.

    Now he is slowly controlling the blood flow into the vines and then purifying the poison in every single blood cell.

    The whole process onlysted ten minutes. As Sam finished up the final touches, he couldn''t handle the fusion anymore and stopped. He just gave one final check to the patient before sighing.

    The patient is perfectly fine. He woke him up and sat down on the chair as he gulped down Heavenly wine.

    Meanwhile, everyone else in the surroundings is stunned.

    the spectators, the attendants, and finally Saint, every one of them is stunned.

    They couldn''t even wrap their head around this whole process. Saint came back to his senses as he listed to the patient''s cry for help. He is looking at Sam with respectful eyes. A gaze of pleading and request.

    He is certainly asking Sam to take care of him.

    Sam wanted to step in and help too, but he doesn''t have enough energy and Saint is still treating.

    Thepetition came to an add n just a few moments.

    Saint who already lost, wanted to fling his patient away before the treatment was evenplete. But too bad he made the whole fiasco public and now has to care about his public image.

    Sam took this to his advantage as he smirked at him.

    "Now, that I won the challenge, admit it."

    "Admit what?"

    "Don''t go back on your word. You have a reputation to maintain. While nobody even knows of my presence here. So, please see through the deal."

    "You are a better doctor and healer."

    "Not just that. Deliver everything you promised. Admit that you are trying to steal these people''s money without even getting any returns from them.

    You are at most a swindler if not a straight-on cheater.

    All the riches and prpsperity you have and you are still like this. What kind of person lives a life like that? I can never really understand a person like you.

    I can understand pride. But it is beyond that. I can understand ego, but you are way past that. Your life is definitely not bad at all. I know a thousand people who want your life and they would dly kill you for it.

    But it seems like it is not enough.

    Today, I will tear down that mask and shield you put and this will be the beginning of his destiny crumbling into nothing."

    "How dare you? This is your n all along?"

    Saint asked Sam who didn''t reply.

    "Tell me, you bastard. Tell me that this is your all n along, you bastard."

    "Even if it is, what are you going to do about it? All you can do is see through it, because you made a Gandharva oath."

 Chapter 1604 Bomb

    Chapter 1604 Bomb¡¡¡¡Sam''s words infuriated Saint. There is no way he could lie down and take it.

    But the Gandharva oath is not something that even the Saint dared to go against. So, he gritted his teeth and looked at Sam.

    "You better take the oath back right now. Otherwise, you won''t be able to leave this ce alive even if I admitted by originality.

    I built all of my reputation and status with a lot of effort. There is no way, I could let that go without you paying a price."

    "That''s not how it works. You will tell them, what you need to tell them and I will leave this ce alive and kicking. There won''t be a single change in those chains of events. You better keep that in mind."

    "Are you not backing out of this?"

    "Why would I? I won. Fair and square."

    "This is no winning if it means making an enemy out of me, you idiot."

    Sam just smirked and looked at him with condescension.

    "I thought you are just some kind of conman who makes money over the fame of being a so-called Saint. Now I understand, you are not even that. You are just a piece of shit who can''t even stand up on his words."

    Saint became angrier. The aura changed and the pressure was focused on Sam directly.

    But Sam didn''t budge. He just smiled while the Shop keeper intervened.

    "Sir, you cannot attack him now. ording to the oath, we cannot attack him until all the terms of the wager arepleted. If you really want to kill make a move on him, you should first hold up your end of the deal."

    Saint looked at Sam coldly with killing intent in his eyes. He looked at the public who already seemed to have gotten a gist of it.

    Saint knew that his reputation was as wless as well-crafted armor and finally got a chink. So, at this point, there is no way he could remedy it. He decided to just go along with it. Now, all he wants to do is kill Sam.

    "I admit, that the challenge originated from the fact that I wanted to take something away from this guy. I wanted to take away some medicinal innovation he came up with so that I could be its sole owner and make money using my name as Saint.

    Not just this. I have been using my title and good image as a way a exploit you and gain authority over you. I have gained my riches,work, and influence all because of your ignorance.

    In reality, I am no saint. I am aplete piece of shit that takes what I want and do what I want¡­"

    He went on rambling and exposing himself. He then turned to look at Sam.

    He is ready to kill Sam now that his end of the bargain was done.

    But the moment he looked at Sam, he was shocked.

    "What the fuck? Where do you think you are going, you bastard? I need to kill you."

    He extended his hand and the stage was covered with arge tree vine that popped up from under it. But Sam who is standing on the stage, smirked as he activated the Dimensional Drifter.

    He and his three friends are surrounded by spatial energy.

    "Goodbye loser."

    "Wait, you spineless bastard."

    "Don''t worry. I will definitelye back and I will kill you to my heart''s content. You pissed me off too much."

    As Sam disappeared, he threw something out at thest moment.

    Arge cylinder filled with clear white liquid was left in the middle of the vine.

    Saint frowned as he looked at the clear cylinder. It is a very familiar thing for him as he saw it way too many times before. Their master, the person who they serve is actually very famous for utilizing these things.

    But the liquid is a bit different.

    He walked forward to see. Since it is simr to what his master uses, he didn''t think just a container would be dangerous as it is mostly used as an energy node.

    But as he got closer, his instincts warned him to step away from it. It is dangerous. But before he could do anything, it exploded.

    *BOOM*

    The spectators of the stage were stunned and most of them at the front are blown away by the impact. But the people on the stage, on the other hand, faced something entirely different.

    At least luckily, the patients were not there. Thest set of patients was taken away when the Saint started losing it and there are only a few attendants, the shopkeeper and Saint himself.

    Half of them died instantly and Saint who was closest to the explosion took the full brunt of it. He felt like his insides were shaken up as the spiritual energy invaded his system.

    The spiritual energy poison is acting up and is corroding his body.

    He felt a soul-searing pain shoot through every cell of his body and wanted to scream. But he couldn''t do that. Because even his throat was affected by this poison.

    He fell off the destroyed stage as he started rolling around and trying to breathe.

    Meanwhile, Sam appeared somewhere else along with his friends.

    "So, are we going back and finishing him off now?"

    "No, we aren''t. He shouldn''t be killed so soon. We have to take our sweet time for this actually."

    "Really? Why is that? I am sure that poison bomb will really make him weak at the moment."

    "Yes, it would be. But that is not exactly my n for this. As I told you. We are going to use this against the whole Divine formation mountain."

    "But I thought you are going to feed something to him after this spiritual energy bomb. Isn''t this time for us to go and keep watch on him. That is what I actually meant. Let''s keep a watch on him and make a move as soon as he was left alone."

    "You don''t need to worry about that. We just need to wait for a while. It will take at least a day for this to work its wonders and after that, we can find his location and then use the special poison.

    After that, all we have to do is let him recover like normal."

    "So, let''s wait while hunting then."

    All four of them went hunting.

    Meanwhile back at Saint''s ce, things are obviously not good looking and smooth sailing.

    Some of the attendants far away are immediately alerted. They reacted in an instant and took their boss to the residence as they called some other healers that are under them.

    They didn''t even spare any expense as almost everyone whether they are in research or basic healing job or even if they solely focused on pill making and potion making, halted their business positions and came to take a look.

    But no one was able to identify what Saint is suffering from. He slowly lost hope as everyone is out of ideas about what is going on.

    They are unable to locate what kind of effects the spiritual energy does on the body. They couldn''t understand what the base of this poison is.

    They could only collect some samples and do the research. But from the looks of the painful decision, they doubted that this guy would even live for that long for the research to beplete.

    But there is nothing they could do at that point.

    Meanwhile, Saint is not resting either. Even with his situation as it was, he still tried to focus his energy as he observed his body himself.

    Even if he doesn''t have any of the overpowered observation skills like Sam and Sivan, he is a healer after all and he developed his own skillset to examine a person properly.

    But the results didn''t seem optimistic. No matter how he looked at it, all he can see is dense spiritual energy invading his body at various levels. Each organ system is corroded by this spiritual energy in a different way.

    They don''t know what kind of poison base someone used to do that. But he definitely didn''t detect any kind of poison he knew of.

    And even though Saint is a fucking sociopath who feeds on attention and admiration which he only gained with his fa?ade, he is still a very skilled healer. The only thing hecked is innovation in creating something of his own.

    But he is very skilled in healing and diagnosing others and he is very supportive of his own diagnosis. They cannot see what the exact substance that made Saint like this and how it could be cured waspletely unknown.

    He couldn''t help but sweat profusely. He wanted to get up and do some research of his own, but he wasn''t able to do that. Because he slowly lost consciousness.

 Chapter 1605 Smith

    Chapter 1605 Smith¡¡¡¡Saint felt like he is being cooked alive.

    Every cell of his body is burning. He didn''t know what is happening. Even though he felt the pain when the spiritual energy poison invaded his body, this time it is very different.

    His instincts are prompting him to open his eyes and wake up. But his body is not listening to his mind.

    At this exact moment, there is a specter in Saint''s room. After all of the healers, pill makers, and potion makers went to do some research, even the attendants couldn''t do anything to alleviate the pain.

    The pain killers they usually sell didn''t work and they didn''t want to use the meridianwork to reduce the pain as there are too many anomalies in his body''s energy cirction.

    So, they didn''t dare mess with him and left him alone to sleep.

    As for close friends or people that care about him? They don''t exist. The selfish and vain life that Saint sought out until then, didn''t let him even have one loyal friend or subordinate.

    In fact, there is a slight hint of hope on every subordinate''s face within the castle. Nobody knows if it is to see their boss recover, but from the looks of it, it is most likely not and might even be theplete opposite.

    So, Sam''s specter had an easier time sneaking into the mansion and even the room of this person along with some help from Sam.

    Along with that, a couple of shadow mice also sneaked in.

    The specter started casting some kind of soul maniption on the unconscious Saint to make him slip into a deeper trance within his mind, while the shadow mice injected a few shots into his body.

    The shots are not actually of normal medicine. The medicinal essence is mixed with a bunch of liquid energy and each vial contained liquid energy of a different kind and different state.

    One vial has more active energy than the other and some other vial has almost dormant liquid energy which is almost the same as a dormant spirit stone.

    After injecting these shots, the shadow mice and the specter escaped the mansion just the way entered.

    Time passed slowly, and as the healers checked up on him, asionally, they started noticing some slight changes within. The body seemed to have been trying to fight back and absorb the energy poison within his body.

    Even though it is harmful at the moment, at the end of the day, it is indeed pure spiritual energy, and his body which has been deprived of any external energy absorption since the explosion, it is trying to adapt itself and absorb this excess energy, process it, and make it it''s own.

    It is even the instinctual reaction.

    What no one else noticed is that there are some other energies that are being absorbed along with this because of the medicinal shots the shadow mice injected.

    Currently, Saint''s body is being modified a bit and this will help Sam in dealing with him and the rest of the mountain.

    Two days passed and by the end of the second day, Sam injected thest batch of medicine he reserved for this guy.

    "Okay, we are done here. He will be able to wake up soon. We can just leave for now. Let''s hunt more and we could make our move on the second target."

    "So, this is the extent we are dealing with him. I am looking forward to seeing what his reaction would be after he finds out what you did to his body.''

    "Even I want to see it, but it doesn''t matter if we can''t look at his immediate reaction. Because as far as I am concerned his reaction would remain constant for the rest of remaining short life.

    Anyway, let''s go to the next target. This one would be a bit easier as he is an artisan and an artifact maker. And the person with the most positive or should I say least negative character profile."

    "So, the sixth in the list. The Smith."

    Jack said as he looked at the report Sam made about this person.

    This guy is quite interesting. Even more interesting than Saint. Because the only reason that he joined the Divine formation mountain is because of his love for artisanal creations. He was told to be a well-rounded artisan and his specialty is to create equipment for squads and teams for different asions.

    The equipment includes task-specific shields, weapons, armors, special trap diffusing gadgets, trapping gadgets, capturing gadgets, sometimes killing artifacts, and defensive artifacts too. He tailor-makes everything to fit with the user, enemy, and environment.

    Manyrge-scale organizations within the realms are fond of him and he is also the most neutral person in the whole organization.

    He doesn''t care if somerge organizationse to ask for his services, he will still take a small job as long as it came before thatrge order.

    He always strictly adhered to the firste first serve and there is also the secrecy. Even if two energy organizations came and asked him to make equipment, he will do it.

    But he will only do it based on the information that the organizations gave him, he would never let the information from one side bleed to the other side and he never let the personal info he had on the impact his creations.

    He earns a lot of money for the mountain and for the formation assistance to his creations, he either works with the three disciples or the mountain master himself sometimes. Of course only when they are tooplicated.

    Otherwise, he has a decent enough team with him.

    Sam decided something special for this guy. Even though Smith is actually not that aversive of a character, he is still on the enemy side and Sam has to fight him no matter what.

    So, he figured it might as well be now thanter, and also he is one of the few that can possibly go against Sam and his tricks and he might even be the person behind figuring out some of his mechanisms.

    After all, no matter how skilled the three disciples are, their main expertise lies in the formations andplexity of those formations, they are not as skilled when ites to the mechanical processes that are being aided by these formations and how they came to be in the first ce.

    But Smith can do that.

    Now that the healer''s support has been dealt with, it is about time that Sam deal with the guy who could support the equipment ande up with defensive measures.

    And he even has a perfect n for that.

    They arrived at a different where Smith is based on. This time, the city was not as hard to find. It is a pure mechanical city as there are a lot of puppets roaming around. Even the constructions are made with metal mostly and they have some neat functions.

    The whole city is full of artifacts. Even the buildings, shops, and even the city gates are like that.

    "Time to put some of my skills to test. Let''s see how this works out for us."

    Sam said as he walked to the main building along with his friends.

    "Sam, do you really think this is going to work? Isn''t this way too obvious?"

    "Yeah, it is. That is why no one thinks that we will attack this ce with such an obvious trap. And don''t talk so casually. We are strangers here. Did you forget that? I just escorted you because I met you guys on the way and you were lost.

    Stick to the story if anyone asks.

    We are also here to ce separate assignments by ourselves."

    "Alright, but isn''t it natural for some people to strike a friendship on the journey."

    "Yeah, slight friendship. Not to the point that they discuss ns of secret attacks on an enemy in the enemy territory itself."

    Philip just didn''t want to bother Sam anymore.

    "Why do you always have to suck the joy out of everything?"

    "Look who is talking. You were the one that acted like you had a big spear up your ass when Sam was not here."

    Watt said from the side.

    "You fucker, I will kick your ass if you bring that up again."

    "Bring it on, let''s see if I will kick yours before you cannd a move."

    Jack just shook his head with a smile while Sam sighed slightly.

    They stood in a long queue and waited to ce their assignments and finally, their time came after a long time.

    The first person to go is Sam.

    There is a person who is noting down something on a scroll sitting at a table.

    He turned to Sam and smiled.

    "Hello, wee. How can I help you?"

    "I came across an artifact and I would like some help in unlocking it."

    "Please take a seat and give me more details."

 Chapter 1606 Traps

    Chapter 1606 Traps¡¡¡¡Sam took out arge metal sphere and ced it on the table.

    It looked to be the size of a football.

    The employee took a look at it and then turned to Sam.

    "I found this in one of the underwater sea graveyards. From the runes I found, it is stated that this is a mechanical puzzle lock and inside it has a special blood essence of a mystical sea creature. I have tried my best to unlock it, but I was unable to find the right pattern.

    I would like to avail your services to unlock this."

    "Are you willing to give out the details of the ruins?"

    "Actually, I don''t know much about it. But I found some of the stone ques there and here they are."

    Sam took out a bunch of stone ques and gave them to the attendant.

    The person looked through them and noted down every detail.

    "Are you willing to leave these ques along with the object? It would be better if you do so, since they might hold some knowledge that could help us in unlocking this."

    "Yes. I am willing to do so."

    "Then, that is perfect. What kind of package do you want to take?"

    "I will take the highest package. A direct deal with the Smith."

    As soon as he heard those words, the employee stopped for a moment and looked at Sam.

    "Are you sure you want that sir? This might be a really valuable item, but the cost for a direct deal with the Smith is not going to be small. You might even suffer some losses."

    "I don''t mind. It is not that I am doubting the credibility of your organization, but this is way too valuable for me, I can only take these measures so that nothing would happen to it."

    "Alright, sir. We will proceed with the rest of the transaction. You can keep your things for now and you will be able to meet with Smith this afternoon and finalize the deal."

    "Thank you so much."

    With that Sam left the room and didn''t even take a look at the rest of his friends.

    The trio also didn''t go right after Sam came in, they let others go in and they went in middle asionally to not to raise any suspicions. After all four of them registered their assignments, they waited for the deal to be signed by Smith and coincidentally all four of them along with a couple of other people were all gathered together to meet with Smith and close the deals.

    They were all assigned to the same room as they waited.

    Soon a man with long brown hair walked in. He is not tall and neither did he have some massive built. He is short and his hair is messy.

    There is no sign of grace elegance and majesty assigned with the name of Smith in his bodynguage or his dressing.

    He is actually wearing a special apron that seemed to have been made with special leather. It is an apron ck smiths wear at a furnace.

    Sam was really intrigued by his appearance and sighed.

    "Too bad you are on the wrong side. Otherwise, we might have gotten along."

    He muttered to himself.

    Smith took his seat and looked at the list in his hands.

    "Metal sphere with the blood essence of sea creatures."

    He said it out loud and everyone exchanged confused nces.

    Sam raised his hands and the Smith spoke.

    "Pleasee forward and finish the oath."

    Sam walked forward as he looked at the Gandharva attendant who came to be the overseer of the oath.

    "Why do you guys not take any names and personal details?"

    "Many people thate here often requested me to keep their identities and arrivals a secret. So, I figured I would reduce my hassle by not caring about them at all.

    Since it a Gandharva Oath that we are following, as long as we directly agree, there is no need for some named contract.

    Do you have any problem with that? I am sure we can work something out if you do so."

    "No, this works better for me actually. I am just curious."

    Smith nodded and went on the finish the oath. Sam felt a sense of pity. Just from the way he looked and the way he talked, he knew for sure that this guy is more concerned of his job and work than the title and fame.

    He is aplete opposite of their previous target. The Saint.

    But too bad, something worse is going to happen to this guy and it wouldn''t end well.

    Sam and his friends left and went hunting once again. While waiting for things to happen.

    Just like Sam, the other three also presented some kind of weird mechanisms. One of them had a cube that won''t open.

    Another one has some kind of defensive artifact that looks like a metallic and thestly a metallic cylinder that is around two feet long with three inch diameter.

    All of them are sent to respective departments based on the elemental energies they are giving off of. So, when Sam and his friends are hunting, a bunch of people are messing with these four mechanisms that Sam himself designed.

    He evenid out some systematic but tricky puzzles in the ques, scrolls, parchments and books along with these mechanisms.

    They are keys to unlock it, but they are hard decode.

    The four mechanisms started at the bottom level of the pyramid as they moved along the hierarchy of the organization.

    Within three days all four objects ended up at Smith''s table.

    He looked at the details and the attempts taken by all of the staff and was surprised.

    "Interesting. Four objects of equal difficulty, all came at the same time. Are they perhaps rted?"

    He muttered to himself as he started making working on the sphere. He went through the stone ques with the runes and then the notes of his staff.

    He started tinkering with it.

    As he messed around, his frown became deeper and deeper with time. It is almost like he is seeing something that shouldn''t exist.

    He kept on using different tools and technique and made a bunch of calctions everywhere as he finally managed to open up the sphere a bit.

    There is a small ss sphere inside with a very high level of water elemental energy along with a very venomous aura.

    "The Blood essence of a mystical sea creature. It seems like it is indeed a valuable item. Good for him."

    He ced sphere on the table as he moved on to the cube.

    Sam deliberately made sure that all of them are not made in the same style. They arepletely different mechanisms and there is not a hint of simrity between them.

    Smith didn''t suspect anything and just worked on it. After a few hours, the second also opened up.

    He couldn''t help but note down a few points once again.

    "These mechanisms are interesting. I need to study them a bit more. I should ask the attendants to buy these mechanisms from the customers. I can learn a lot from them."

    He muttered to himself constantly as he moved on to the third and the fourth.

    When all four of the objects are out, he looked at them all together with a sense of achievement.

    The first one is the ss sphere inside the metal sphere. The second one is a metal sphere inside the metal cube. The cylinder revealed some kind of metallic mechanism that sees it could open more and the final one is the mesh.

    He looked at all four of them as he admired his handiwork, but at this moment, he sensed something. All four objects started glowing and shaking and before he knew it, the mesh opened up and covered him entirely. It acted like a cloak surrounding a person and while it was like that , the mechanism that came out of cylinder opened up.

    It opened up into a long metallic centipede that is as tall as a person and attached to his spine. The mesh rolled over the centipede tightly as the legs started digging into the spine.

    Smith came back to his senses and he started using his fire element. He didn''t feel any pain. Only surprise that something like this happened.

    But as soon as the mesh and the centipede started heating up, the ss sphere and the metal sphere on the table started glowing. The ss ball was thrown at him as the water elemental energy seeped into his body along with the venomous energy it contained.

    His fire elemental energy was slightly shaken for a moment as he wanted to try and resist. But finally the sphere exploded.

    *BOOM*

    The small metal sphere that came out of the cube exploded and a bunch of small energy pellets of ice elemental energy was targeted at him.

    The pellets that are actually used in an energy cracker were used in this trap.

 Chapter 1607 Threat

    Chapter 1607 Threat¡¡¡¡Smith wanted to move, but he couldn''t.

    He felt the literal piercing cold going through his body. The excruciating pain made it difficult for him to breathe.

    The ice elemental energy started merging with the water elemental energy that already has a high amount of venomous substance. The worst part is the metal that held him tightly and the centipede that stuck to his spine.

    It is spewing lightning elemental energy and it is being injected along his spine into his body through the centipede legs.

    The pain is too much for him to bear as it is, and now the lightning elemental energy is making it impossible for him to utilize his body and energy. He is paralyzed and he hit the floor.

    At this moment, an attendant who was standing outside came running in and was shocked to see what was happening in front of him.

    He ran towards Smith and tried to help him out.

    "Sir, what happened to you? Sir, can you hear me? Are you okay?"

    He was very anxious as he tried to undo the, but...

    *ZAP*

    As soon as he touched the, he felt like he was hit by a lightning bolt and was flung back. He couldn''t feel half of his body. His speaking was impaired temporarily.

    But he tried his to best to bring himself together and called for help in hismunication token.

    Within the next five minutes, almost a dozen people came to the room and helped Smith. They tried to use different medicine, but there is no use. The healers are useless as well.

    All they can do is carry him to his bed carefully while making sure that there is no damage to his body.

    Smith''s direct subordinate who handles most of the business also came running and after examining his situation, he felt anxious.

    "What is the situation? How did he react to medicine and your treatment?"

    He directly asked the healers.

    "There is no response. His body is suddenly invaded with ice elemental energy and some kind of weird poison essence and it is affecting him on a cellr level. The lightning trap that was on his spine is the most tricky.

    Its lightning element is being supported and enhanced by the ice element in his body. His muscles are paralyzed. He cannot move and even breathing is difficult.

    He is going through some extreme torture as we speak. If you ask me, this is way out of my league. I wouldn''t be able to solve this situation in a decade much less do it immediately.

    So, I think it is better if you can reach out to Saint. He is the only person who remotely has any chance of treating Smith."

    After giving his insight, the doctor left.

    The deputy of Smith gritted his teeth. He knew that Saint might be able to help him, but that doesn''t mean, it is going to be easy. With the way, Saint behaves and operates, it is going to be tough to get him to cooperate.

    And there is no way he is going to do that at a small price. But at this moment, they don''t have any other choice.

    They have to take Smith there.

    He looked at Smith one more time. He called for a few of the attendants to bring some kind of weird invention that Smith had made before.

    It helps with levitating a person or an object easily and a person can relocate the target without any change in its state of it.

    "Who knows the things you made are to be used on you like this? I will find and kill that bastard before you recover. So, don''t die on me."

    They moved Smith slowly towards the space gate that could let them get out of this.

    While they are doing that, the Deputy of Smith got some news.

    "Sir, I don''t know if you heard about it. But I don''t know if Saint will help us at the moment."

    "Why?"

    "Saint has been defeated by someone in an open challenge and he was forced to admit his nasty character in front of the whole city. He wanted to kill the guy right after he fulfilled the oath, but not only did that guy escape, he left behind some kind of explosive that made Saint stick to a bed for a few days.

    The news is that he recovered and is still in a bad mood as he searched for the person who did him like that. But we don''t know for sure."

    Deputy frowned upon listening to this.

    "Do you have more details on the situation?"

    "Yes, sir."

    The subordinate kept on exining the whole scenario and all of a sudden, Deputy felt something is wrong.

    "Do you think that a group of four people came at us with four traps that are obviously linked right after they made a move on Saint? I doubt this is a coincidence and if it is, then there couldn''t be a bigger coincidence in this world.

    Don''t worry about Saint, I will handle that asshole. As long as he recovered, he doesn''t have a choice other than healing Smith. I will make sure of it."

    Deputy left along with Smith to Saint''s ce.

    After a while.

    At Saint''s ce.

    Deputy is sitting across from Saint who seemed to have gotten weaker for some reason. The usual arrogance and the false grace he paints himself with are nowhere to be seen. He is still cocky, but this time, it is apparent that he is trying to force it.

    "I heard you got attacked, Saint."

    "So?"

    "I have a reason to doubt that Smith is also attacked by the same group. So, if you heal Smith and take out those weird mechanisms that are trapping him, we might be able to find some clues in the process."

    "Do you think you can handle the price? I won''t be cheap. And even if you can afford it, I am not really in the mood to heal someone right now.

    So, get out ande backter."

    "That''s not how it works. You and Smith, both are high-level subordinates of Divine Formation Mountain. It is almost a necessity for you to help each other.

    So, I am telling you once again to reconsider."

    "I did. And my answer still remains the same. If you really are interested in curing him desperately, go and find Vardar or better yet, the person who you think attacked you."

    Deputy frowned in displeasure. The resistance is way more than he imagined.

    "Why are you not considering the consequences of this? If you don''t help Smith now, you will lose your trust in other subordinates. Can you really afford that?"

    "That''s none of your business."

    "Alright then, I didn''t want to resort to this, but you are way too stubborn for your own good. So, don''t me me.

    If you don''t heal Smith now, I will deliver this news to the Divine formation mountain, requesting help.

    And I will explicitly stress the fact that your attack and our attack are linked. I want to see if the disciples will forcefully take over the investigation of it. I want to see how you will keep your reputation intact.

    Anyway, you of all people know why the subordinates fight so rigorously and eliminate all challenges thate at them.

    It is because you are only worth as much as your reputation in the organization. If you lose too much and had the disciples and mountain master wipe your ass, you will fall out of their favor.

    I won''t care if Smith''s reputation is impacted. Because unlike you, his glory is not fake or a fa?ade. He is skilled and his key role is not to fight against people.

    The only reason he was attacked is because of the traps that were ced at his work. So, I highly doubt the Mountain master will have a different perspective of him just with this.

    But your situation is far from that.

    You cannot do anything about the fact that you are defeated in your own forte. You were humiliated, your reputation is gone and that person even put you on a bed for a couple of days.

    The damage is already done and you need to remedy it, by repairing your situation.

    If you don''t heal Smith, I will rip that situation way too much that there is noing back for you."

    "You do know that threatening me is not a good idea in this situation right? You came here to ask for my help, you bastard."

    "It doesn''t matter now. Does it? As long as I get what I want, I will use any means necessary. Particrly when it is rted to Smith.

    So, don''t bother trying to bluff your way out of this, and don''t even think that I am bluffing.

    If you don''t start healing Smith right now, I will tear you apart."

    Saint became silent as he looked at the Deputy coldly.

    "Let him stay here ande back in three days."

    Saint left after those words.

 Chapter 1608 Recovered

    Chapter 1608 Recovered¡¡¡¡Smith''s deputy left after he got a positive answer from Saint.

    He had a relieved expression as he walked out of the door. But as soon as he went, Saint''s frustration as burst out. He couldn''t take it anymore and destroyed all of the furniture inside his room.

    "You sick bastard. How dare you threaten me like this? I will make you payback ten fold for this. Measlyckey of a fellow subordinates that is beneath me in the ranking is already challenging me, just because I lost one challenge? This shouldn''t happen.

    I will restore my glory once again and then I will skin you alive."

    He spoke to himself as he paced around. His chest is heaving up and down with anger.

    He had this pent up frustration that he wanted to take on at someone. But he couldn''t. Because at this moment, he needs a cool head and also focus on something that is extremely important.

    More important than even healing smith and that is healing himself.

    Even though after a couple of days Saint recovered pretty much and looked normal, he is far from normal at this moment.

    He sat on the floor and closed his eyes once again as he looked at the insides of his body.

    All of his internal organs along with the blood are all infected. He could senses some dense energying of all these organs. But it would have been fine if it was just energy. There is some kind of extreme vitality that he could feel from it.

    This vitality is clearly not his. It belonged to different organisms and this organism currently made him nothing more than a normal warrior.

    That''s right. At this moment, he currently lost all of his elemental energy. He cannot use his wood elemental energy and light elemental energy. All that is left is his physical strength.

    Even though that still makes him strong, he is known to people not because he is strong. He is known because he can heal. He can heal the worst of the diseases, goriest of the wounds and the vilest of the poisons.

    Being strong is nothing more than an added essory to him. He never needed to use his strength for a long a time. All he had to do is say a word and dozens of powerful people fought on his behalf and all of urred not because of his strength, because of his skills.

    All the reputation he built, all the fawning he experienced and all the arrogance he umted came from that ability.

    Now his ability was taken away from him. The very basis of his fa?ade was stripped away and without it, he felt like nothing.

    After recovering, that is the first thing he noticed. After he realized that he doesn''t have his elemental energies anymore, he did everything in his power to examine his own situation.

    In fact, even as he waited some of his subordinates are conductingrge range of tests. Usually, he would have done those tests all by himself, but theck of elemental energy doesn''t even let him do that.

    After a few minutes, he got the results of tests and his face drooped even lower.

    "Perform advance levelled tests. If you have to use every healer in the organization just perform these tests, just use them.

    I need the tests by tomorrow night."

    "Yes, Sir."

    He gave out the orders and his subordinates carried out without any resistance or even a hint of confusion or questions.

    They just went away.

    After they left, Saint just sat in the room For the remaining day he just stayed there waiting for the results and after that he finally fell into despair.

    In these two days, he tried many things. He drank all kinds of potions and took in all kinds of pills. But there is no change in his body.

    The vitality of whatever organism inside his body is increasing like crazy and he could feel minute but negligible changes within his body. His fingers are asionally going numb, with his skin losing the sense of touch sometimes.

    All of this is making him feel troubled to the extreme.

    He knew that something is happening to his body, but he doesn''t know what exactly that is.

    And the worst part is, he is no willing to let anyone else know about his current situation, even if it costs him his life. It is way too sensitive for him to just bare his weakness like that.

    He was confident that in two days, he will be able to find out what''s happening to his body and figure out a way to repair it.

    But even that didn''t go as nned.

    He is now lost. On top of all of this shit he has to deal with, in fear of the Deputy''s threats, he agreed to treat Smith which is not going to happen anytime soon now.

    The Deputy wille the next day and there is no way, this is going to end well, if he didn''t do something.

    As he thought until that part, he decided to just check up on Smith. Even if he doesn''t have his elemental energies, his experience couldn''t be taken away from him. He still has enough knowledge about the medicine and healing that he might be able to guide one of his assistants to do something about Smith''s condition.

    And luckily when he checked up on Smith''s condition, he felt relieved.

    The centipede that was stuck to the spine is the major problem here and he is sure that as long as he removes that, the ice elemental energy and the poison could be managed.

    Even the natural resistance of Smith because of his cultivation would be able to handle it for a few days.

    So, as soon as he figured that out, he started a surgery. Of course, his assistant was the one doing most of the healing work, he just used the tools to cut open the flesh and remove the centipede as he dissected its legs one by one with his energy.

    He decided to disconnect the connection between the mechanism inside the centipede''s body to its legs and remove the legs one by one after that. Which actually worked.

    But what he didn''t notice is that as soon as he cut a leg of the centipede, he started a discharge of very small amount, that ispletely noticeable and negligible has entered the spine. It is very clear and very minute that it is hard to notice even if this guy used observation ability.

    It is that minute and negligeable. But not for long.

    After he finished the surgery, he left the rest to his assistant to finish the healing process.

    "I know you bitches are not skilled in treating elemental energy corrosion, but you can at least reduce it to the minimum.

    As for the poison, try to reduce its effects and expel as much as you can. Then tell the Deputy that it is a variant even we haven''t seen which is actually true.

    Tell him that Smith will be fine and I am still recovering and cannot go through with the rest of the treatment."

    "Yes, Sir."

    With those words, Saint left.

    The next day, the deputy came and took a look at Smith''s condition. The was gone and so did the centipede.

    His skin turned back to aplexion closer to normal and the traces of ice elemental energies were reduced a bit.

    The assistant told Deputy exactly what Saint wanted him to tell.

    "At least he kept his word. Thank him on my behalf and he can except the premium payment from our organization. I will send a business manager and you can tell him what you need as payment. As long as he doesn''t go overboard, we will agree without any negotiation."

    "Thank you."

    "When is he going to wake up?"

    "His natural resistance and energy is building up, so he will be up in a while."

    "That is great to know. We will leave after he wakes up."

    "Please take your time."

    With that the assistant left and the Deputy stayed beside Smith. Just like the assistant told him, Smith woke up after a few minutes.

    "Smith, are you alright?"

    "What happened? Where am I?"

    "We are at Saint''s ce. It seems like someone tried to attack you with some traps. We came here to heal you."

    "Traps?" Smith suddenly remembered what happened to him and stood up abruptly in the process, he felt a sharp pain in his spine.

    "They did surgery to your spine. So, please be careful. Don''t stress yourself too much."

    "Did you find out who they are and why they are after me?"

    "We don''t know yet. But a few days ago, Saint was also attacked. We don''t know if it is coincidental or if they are rted, but Saint was done very badly. His reputation was destroyed and he is still recovering from the attack."

    "Saint is recovering? Who made the best healer in the realms like that?"

 Chapter 1609 Exchange

    Chapter 1609 Exchange¡¡¡¡"We don''t know yet.

    But there is a possibility that the party that attacked Saint attacked us as well. The person who dealt with Saint has three morepanions and the traps that are targeted at you are also four.

    So, this cannot be a pure coincidence." The Deputy answered.

    "Doesn''t that mean, that their target is not us, but the Divine formation mountain instead?"

    "Yes. That''s why I am thinking of reporting the matter to the mountain."

    "No. Not yet. We need to do our part first. Once the disciples take over and the master knows about it, things won''t end well.

    In this issue, I agree with Saint. We need to try and resolve this situation by ourselves."

    "But if the party is targeting the Divine formation mountain, doesn''t it make sense for us to inform them? The Mountain master and the disciples can only handle so much.

    Particrly with this party''s skills, we need to be extra careful.

    One of them defeated Saint in a healing challenge and left behind something that caused an explosion. Some people even said it looked just like a liquid cylinder that the Divine formation mountain uses.

    As for the traps, you should know what happened yourself. They are dangerous. And the reason is the same as why the Divine formation mountain is dangerous in the first ce."

    "Don''t worry about it. Even though what you said is true, we still have to figure out a way to deal with this situation ourselves.

    There is a reason why all of the subordinates of Divine formation mountain work this hard just to be in his favor. You wouldn''t understand, even if I exin it to you now, but just know that, the moment this news goes to the mountain, we have hell to pay.

    Let''s get of this ce first. We need to investigate the situation in our ce beforeing back here and discuss with Saint.

    It is better to cooperate if the perpetrator is indeed the same group."

    "Alright, let''s go."

    With that, both of them left Saint''s ce and went back to their own ce.

    There Smith went back to the ce where the traps were set off. He examined the mechanisms once again and looked for any traces and clues that could give a hint of any information.

    But he is clueless. The elemental energies are way too diverse for him to estimate the elemental affinity and the power of each energy is also different to estimate the level of cultivation.

    The manufacturing style is something that he has never seen in any realms he has visited. This is also troublesome.

    Even after a couple of days of investigation, he couldn''t find anything. The only thing he is sure of is that the other party is resourceful and there is a technique simr to that of energy liquifying process that Mountain uses.

    He found the traces of the technique from the metal sphere from which the ice elemental energy pellets were shot at him.

    So, if he matches this up with the liquid energy cylinder that exploded on the stage and damaged Saint, then the group matches up.

    Even though it appeared a bit far fetched, there is no way he could ignore this.

    He took the evidence and walked out of the room. He felt a bit tired and stretched his body.

    "Arrgh¡­"

    He groaned in pain and instinctually tried to reach out of his back.

    His spine was shot with a very sharp pain that came out of nowhere. He felt like something is seriously wrong. But after moving around for a while, the pain disappeared which reassured him a bit.

    He went to meet his deputy and asked.

    "Make preparations for us to go and meet Saint. We need to get as much info as possible. At our current stage, we can barely connect these two incidents. So, lets hope we can find any other concrete clue there or at least a cluepletely disregarding our thoughts and opinions.

    Either way, we will get some conclusion and move on to the next step in finding these people."

    "If you say so."

    Both of them went back to Saint''s ce. But the sight that greeted them is shocking.

    All the lines of people that Saint used to have in front of his estate were gone. It is almost deserted. It is already surprising that Saint just stayed at one ce for so long.

    The reason he doesn''t do that usually is because of the nuisance thates with the people who wants his favour.

    But because of the circumstances, Saint has to stay here. But they still expected lines with hundreds of people waiting for his time.

    The scene here ispletely opposite. It is deserted to the point that some people who lived there are nowhere to seen.

    As they were thinking about all these things, an attendant visited and guided them to the ce where Saint was waiting for them.

    "What happened to you? Why are there no people around this ce?"

    "I cleared them all. I wanted to find a way to deal with these bastards. But the citizens in the surroundings and the people thate to visit are being a distractions. I told them all to disturbing me so that I could have some peaceful time as well"

    "Have you found any clues about the people that attacked you?"

    "The attacker is only one person. The remaining three are passive beyond belief. They didn''t speak, didn''t do anything. In fact, there was barely any participation. They looked so unbothered.

    They didn''t even bother to cheer him up when hundreds of people are discouraging him and calling him names.

    And finally he has at least three elemental affinities that I know of.

    He can use, light, wood and water elemental energies. Does that count as a clue?"

    "Do you know any info on the other three? The elemental affinity?"

    "I don''t know. Why?"

 Chapter 1610 Third Target

    Chapter 1610 Third Target¡¡¡¡"You must have already known that attacks made on me are of different elemental affinities than you.

    The onlymon thing is the water elemental energy, but that could have just been from the blood essence. There is no need for a water elemental user amongst them to attack me with blood essence of a sea creature.

    The rest are ice and lightning.

    I just want to be sure if one of the other three might have possessed this elemental energy." Smith exined to Saint.

    "No, I don''t have any information regarding them. The only reason that I remember the main guy is because of thepetition.

    Otherwise I wouldn''t have paid enough attention to them to remember any detail about them."

    Smith nodded as if that was true. Saint is indeed a person like that.

    "Okay then, how are you feeling? Your subordinates said you were still recovering a few days ago."

    "I am fine. I am the one who cured you, so don''t bother trying to help me now. I am perfectly alright."

    "I am just¡­"

    "I already told you. I am perfectly fine. As for the investigation, if you are here to ask me to cooperate with you, I am not doing that. I am calling in every favor that I have and I will catch them by myself."

    "But if you move that many people, the mountain master might know about this matter before its resolved."

    "I don''t care. I will catch them. As long as these bastards are within the and the surroundings, they will be caught, no matter what nook or cranny they are hiding in."

    "Saint, this is not like any other time. This is very serious. We need to be extremely careful in the way we are dealing with this.

    I hope you understand that.

    Let''s cooperate.

    I already have my men gather everyone who came in contact with the suspects. I might get some information in an hour or two. Why don''t you do the same. I am pretty sure if wepile our data together, we will get some valuable information."

    "I said, I don''t want to cooperate. Get lost from here. Or I will kill you.

    How many time do I need to make myself clear? I don''t want to work with you and I will catch these perpetrators alone. Now fuck off."

    With that, Saint didn''t even bother to stay anymore. He just stood up and left.

    Smith is very confused. He knew that Saint would be hard to deal with, but this on apletely different level.

    He doesn''t know why Saint is behaving like this. But he knew that there is no point in sticking here anymore.

    He left along with his deputy and went back to his own ce.

    His subordinates already lined up everyone that came into contact with Sam and his friends. Even though it was difficult finding them, they did find a lot of people.

    Smith talked to everyone of them personally and afterpiling everything, he got some information.

    "One of them is a swordsman and another one is a wind elemental user and they came from North west."

    He muttered to himself as he wrote down every detail he could get.

    The information regarding their affinities came from one of the bystanders who overheard Watt and Jack arguing.

    As for the direction they came in, it is obtained from the guard of the city gate.

    Smith sent his deputy along with some of his subordinates to investigate in the Northwestern direction.

    They checked every detail with scrutiny, even though it would be next to impossible to find any clues in a forest that has so much activity after this many days.

    But they didn''t give up.

    That was the only lead they had until now.

    Meanwhile back at Saint''s ce.

    Inside the private room of Saint.

    He is currentlyying on the bed writhing in pain.

    *HMMM¡­"

    He bit into arge piece of leather as he tried to control his painful screams.

    He was lying still and he didn''t even turn from side to side. He acted as if his back is stuck to bed like that and even when he had the urge to move around, he controlled it with all he got.

    While his arms are lying still as if they belonged to a corpse.

    "Mmmf¡­" He kept on groaning for a while before he finally opened his mouth and spit the leather to the side. He took a deep breath and moved his arms.

    The bed under him is soaked in sweat. He couldn''t help but feel a sense of anxiety and horror engulfing himpletely.

    He hesitantly used his diagnosis skill to check up on his arms and his face turned uglier with every second.

    The muscle tissue of his arms is rotting from inside. No matter what he tried, he couldn''t stop and the effect is not just on the muscle tissue. It extended to his finger bones which seemed to have been hollowed out.

    The pain is immeasurable. But it ising at irregr intervals catching him off guard.

    That is one of the major reasons that he didn''t agree to work with Smith. Even he knows that things would go faster if he worked with Smith.

    But he also doesn''t want to expose his new found weakness to anyone. He is sure that the moment this newse out, the mountain master will dispose him off.

    There is no way he could let that happen.

    He has to find these people by himself and even if ites at the cost of using every favor he got until now, he wouldn''t hesitate to do so.

    As things are like this here, back at Smith''s ce, they are not any better.

    At least he is not groaning in pain, but Smith has been running around talking and delegating tasks to people. They are trying to find every minute clue they could get. But there are none until now.

    All they found out was that there is a battlefield nearby the city in Northwest and it seems like the local beast that used to run that small area was dead for a few days and even though the battle field is very small and happened way too many days ago,

    But they did manage to find some traces of lightning and wood elemental energy.

    Smith went to the spot and started investigating.

    "This beast is not that power. It is barely at Initial stage of Astral ne consummation. It should have been a piece of cake if they are really strong.

    But here it seems like the battle went on for quite a while. There are restraints from wood elemental energy. Restraints and traps with earth elemental energy. Lightning burn marks are everywhere in the surroundings.

    There are also some traces of sword shes. Due to theck of energy traces they couldn''t differentiate it, but he could see a different set of shes on the trees which could have been the wind element.

    "There is a high chance that this scene caused by the perpetrators. But this means, they are only at peak stage of transcendence to Initial stage of Consummation.

    And if they are really that weak and still managed to get this far, then his approach has to change.

    He went back to the city and decided on act on his hunch. All the city was closed and everyone was shocked to find out that Smith is doing a search for some culprits who dared to set some traps here in Smith''s ce.

    This is something unfathomable to them. They do know that Smith has disappeared for a couple of days, but they didn''t expect such a reason.

    After closing the city down, Smith started examining each and every person that matches the description of the four people.

    They are all of same height. Around six feet. So, he started testing everyone who is six feet tall with a special device that could determine their elemental affinity.

    Even if they are hiding affinity normally, it would still be visible as soon as they used some blood to test themselves.

    Ten minutester. A few miles away from the city.

    "This guy is good. If we didn''t move away and stayed there, things would have turned nasty. He could have even identified us." Sam said as he looked at the shadow mouse in his palm.

    "Come on, Sam. We wasted enough time already. What are we going to do next?"

    "Going for our third target of course and this person is the fifth among the subordinates. Since things are going exactly as we predicted with both Saint and Smith.

    We will now bring out this vtile variable in to this mess and see how it turns out."

    "Okay then, let''s go. It has been some time since we hunted too. Let''s go and do that on our way."

    "Of course that is a given. And also get ready to move around a lot. Because after the third targetes into y, we need to confuse the living hell out of them. So, we need to move around a lot.

    Do you understand?"

 Chapter 1611 Toying

    Chapter 1611 Toying¡¡¡¡Two dayster.

    A city on apletely different.

    Sam and his friends are walking together in a street and entered a restaurant.

    They sat in a private booth while Sam let out all of his shadow mice and specter to get some information from the surrounding talks.

    "You didn''t tell us what kind of guy this third target is."

    "Arrogant and jealous."

    "Just like the first one then."

    "Not exactly. This guy is not jealous of outsiders. He is specialized inbat and he is really good at it. The only reason he ranked fifth is because of his cultivation level. But he still believes he should have been ranked third.

    And he believes that the only reason he ranked lower is that the Mountain master didn''t acknowledge him because of the bias. In his opinion, the mountain master values thework Saint created with his skills and nature of the job than this guy''s effort at keeping their enemies in check.

    He runs all the expeditions for the resources the mountain master and the three disciples need. He fights everyone thates at them. But he feels unappreciated for his effort and he mes his fellow subordinates for it."

    "So, he is jealous of his ownpanions. What about the rest of the world? Does he not get jealous if someone beats the crap out of him inbat?"

    "No. He epts it, swallows it, learns from it, and improves. He is only jealous of his fellow subordinates, which is actually a really good thing for us."

    "What are we going to do now?"

    "Just as we nned. First, we need to gain his attention. For that, I have an idea. As you already noticed, there is an arena in the city. The favorite pastime of this guy is to check out the arena for interesting fights.

    And everyone tries to get his attention through these arena fights, because of the rewards he gives out. Sometimes, he even invites people to the expeditions he leads for the Divine formation mountain.

    So, we are entering the arena and caused enoughmotion to make him interested in our performance. When we get a chance to meet him, we are going to execute the rest of the n."

    "Are we going there separately or together?"

    "Of course, we are going separately. We will try to attract his attention by ourselves and whoever gets the first chance at meeting him, will execute the n.

    Anyway, there is not much we need to do in this ce. We don''t need to risk our lives or set some traps as we did with the other two.

    This is going to be easy."

    With that, all four of them finished the meal and waited for the shadow mice and the specter to get the information they needed.

    They got the info on who is currently trending in the arena at different cultivation levels. If they target famous people that are on the same level as them, things will be a lot easier.

    After getting the details, they all left the restaurant and went to the arena to register separately.

    Philip managed to get the first fight and luckily his opponent is one of the more prominent ones.

    He entered therge arena filled with cheers from the audience.

    The opponent is half-naked with his upper bodypletely bare. He held twin sabers in his hands as he looked at Philip.

    "A first-timer."

    "Yeah."

    Philip nodded as he took in the whole celebratory atmosphere of this ce.

    "Why are you wearing a mask in an arena? If you are here, then that means it is for the fame. So, what is the point of wearing the mask? Remove it."

    The opponent said casually as he held one of the sabers on his shoulder.

    "No need. I amfortable this way."

    "Your wish. It is not like you are going to get what you want anyway. It is your bad luck to fall in the same pool as me for the first time.

    Your first time might just be the roughest time in this arena."

    As he spoke, he lunged forward with his twin sabers.

    Philip extended his hand and metal elemental energy surged into it. His arms turned to metal and it extended to be arge shield that blocked the two saber strikes.

    *CLANG* *CLANG*

    He didn''t even move from that spot. He just stayed there as if nothing happened. He still looked around the arena as if he is curious about the crowd''s behavior.

    "This feels nostalgic. It has been a while since I was in an arena. Maybe I should participate more back at home."

    He muttered to himself as he constantly blocked the saber strikes that areing at him.

    He is quick on his feet and he didn''t even use any of his fire elemental energy. He just danced around with his metal shield up as he gracefully blocked every saber strike.

    The crowd that was cheering for his opponent slowly calmed down. At first, they thought, Philip was unable to attack, but as time passed, they realized they couldn''t be any more wrong. Philip is ying in the arena.

    He is controlling his opponent like he is ying with a toy.

    After ten minutes of this disy. The opponent understood that he is being yed around. Which of course he didn''t like. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn''t find a proper opening.

    He stood still as he started thinking of a way to go past that shield.

    "Don''t tell me you are done. I am just getting started."

    "You bast¡­"

    Before the opponent could even finish that sentence, Philip lunged forward. The shield that stuck to his arm until now, suddenly changed into arge metallic spike as he jammed it straight into his abdomen.

    "ARRGHH¡­"

    The opponent screamed in pain as he tried to get himself out of the situation. But before that, Philip just raised his arm along with the guy into the air as he waved him around.

    "You were saying something?"

    "You¡­"

    Philip just swung him around and threw him to the other corner of the arena.

    "You didn''t finish saying it."

    Philip said as he looked at him from far away.

    The referee went to check on the opponent and after noticing that he definitely fainted, he ended the match with Philip''s win.

    Philip went out of the arena with the audience''s cheers.

    "Do you really have to do that? You could have cut him some ck."

    "Well, it is not like I have a choice. I have to fall in the eyes of the boss here. So, this is the least I could do.

    If that guy was a bit stronger, I would have done much more that."

    "Yeah, if he was a bit stronger, all you could have done is get your ass kicked and it is technically doing much more than what you have done."

    Watt said from the side.

    "What did you say, you punk? You want another beating?"

    "Another? I don''t remember getting one in the first ce."

    "Of course, you won''t. I beat you so much, that you repressed it so deep after that. Let me just remind you."

    Philip and Watt started bickering out of nowhere. Sam pped his forehead and said.

    "We are still in disguises you fools."

    He then turned to Jack whose fight was up next.

    Without many surprises, Jack won the fight very easily. He didn''t even take much time to deal with his opponent. Unlike Philip who toyed around with the opponent, Jack was straightforward and respectful.

    "A swordsman is a swordsman after all."

    Watt said with a slight smile.

    "Oh, you like that behavior so much? Are you going to follow that?"

    "Nope. I am not a swordsman."

    Watt grinned as he went to the arena for his fight.

    The opponent faced the worst nightmare of his light that day in the arena.

    If Philip could be considered overboard for toying with his opponent like that, then Watt is on another level.

    He first acted as if he is weak and directly let his opponent have free shots. At least that is what it looked like, but Watt used wind elemental explosions tounch himself away from the spot every time a hit was about tond.

    To put it simply, not a single attacknded when the opponent thought, hended every single hit.

    As if that is not enough, when Watt started attacking back, he attacked with very minute moves. He didn''t go for a critical hit, instead, he went on to dismantle him.

    He made his legs go immobile and then went on to move to his arms which finally made him faint in pain.

    "Damn, you. Psychopath. Why did you do that to him?"

    Philip couldn''t hold back and yell.

    "The same reason as you did. To get more attention. You hear the crowd?"

 Chapter 1612 No move

    Chapter 1612 No move¡¡¡¡Sam just shook his head and walked out into the arena.

    "So, what do you guys think he will do? Toy around?" Philip asked.

    "Maybe. But the question is to what extent?" Watt asked curiously.

    All three of them exchanged a nce and spoke in unison.

    "Wager?"

    "Okay, two years of train duty back at home. My bet is that he will flex a few of his cool moves and his energy efficiency without breaking a sweat and toy with the opponent." Watt said confidently.

    "I will say, he will also act like a psycho like you did." Philip added his prediction.

    "One move. I think he will finish it in one move." Jack added.

    "Really? One move? You are really going with that?"

    "I think he will just go with some extravagant one move that will be so shy and cocky. Like a deration."

    "Let''s see."

    The three of them waited eagerly.

    Sam just casually walked into the arena with both of his hands in his pocket.

    He looked unbothered. Even though people can''t see his face, his bodynguage said it all. He cannot give two shits about this whole thing.

    His opponent came forward and he is wearing some gauntlets. He seemed to be a person who is skilled at hand to handbat.

    He looked at Sam''s demeanour and frowned.

    "It seems like you are very rxed about this. Are you that confident that you can win?"

    The opponent asked as he looked at Sam coldly.

    Sam didn''t speak anything. He was just looking at his opponent with intense disregard. He didn''t care about what the other party said. He just stood there.

    "I hope you don''t regret that attitude."

    As he spoke, the opponent lunged forward and aimed the fist straight at Sam''s face.

    The fist is covered with spiritual energy. It manifested into arge fist that came at Sam with full force. The surrounding spiritual energy was riled up and all of it was focused on Sam.

    All the audience stopped cheering as they eagerly watched. But right before Sam was about to get hit, all of a sudden, the fist stopped.

    It stopped right in front of his face. The spiritual energy was dissipated. The opponent also stopped and his expression changed.

    He wanted to push forward, but he couldn''t. Then he tried to pull back, but he couldn''t do that either. He was just stuck there as if some invisible force is holding him there.

    As if that is not enough, he started feeling a very sharp sense of pain his arm which slowly extended to the rest of his body.

    It spread evenly causing a lot of pain and before he could even groan and scream, his voice was gone and he fainted on the spot.

    The crowd was dumbfounded. Even though so much has happened in that one particr instant, the audience doesn''t know that.

    Sam has controlled the spiritual energy in the body of his opponent. It is very subtle and along with the spiritual energy inside the body, he controlled the external energy also to stop him in his tracks.

    And then he made the other party faint with simple energy maniption. Sam discovered these attack methods when he was in Sivan''s body.

    He couldn''t do much in that crippled body, so that opened new doors in his thought process.

    The referee came to the opponent and after noticing that he really fainted, he dered Sam as winner.

    Sam came back to the room while the crowd was discussing what had happened.

    Sam didn''t even make a move. He didn''t even flinch. Nobody saw his armse out of his pocket. He just stood there and his opponent fainted.

    This is not an everyday urrence.

    Sam walked back to his friends and said.

    "All three of your lost. So, all of you go and do train duty for six years."

    They were even more shocked and didn''t even know what to say.

    "What the hell? How did you know about the bet?"

    Sam just smiled at Philip was outraged and a shadow mouse climbed on to his shoulder.

    "There is no privacy for us. This is vition of basic human decency."

    "Yeah, whatever. You losers. From now on, keep your mouths shut and not careless make useless wagers. Otherwise, I will make sure that all three of you will lose."

    Sam then looked at Jack and said.

    "These two really changed you a lot, didn''t they?"

    Jack smiled in embarrassment. Since the start, he was obviously a lot more put together than the other two, who just likes to goof around a lot. But recently he started not just enabling their shenanigans, he even yed along with them continuously. This ispletely unlike him.

    That is why Sam pointed that out.

    Sam just smiled and didn''t bother them anymore.

    They all decided to get out this ce to eat something. For them, that day''s battles are over.

    While they are trying to rx, the whole city was lit with the fire of rumours. Everyone is talking about Sam. The guy who defeated his opponent without even making a move.

    As if that is not enough, some of the attendants in the arena asked the opponent who lost about what happened. And the answer was also spread.

    "I felt like I wasmanded and held by some kind of superior force, which made me unable to move my fist any further."

    Hearing those words, someone said that is bullshit and this is just some stunt at making Sam popr. They arepletely ready to believe that they can truly defeat Sam and started throwing challenges around.

    "Fucking hell. Why did you be so known in the city all of a sudden?"

    "Of course, I would be. I defeated a person without even making a move. How could they not be interested?"

    "So, are you sure you can meet the boss here with that?"

    "No actually. I am sure we need to go through more battles."

 Chapter 1613 Attention

    Chapter 1613 Attention¡¡¡¡The fights went on.

    For the next three days, Sam and the trio just went on with their battles.

    After the first day, all of them had three fights a day for the next three days, which made a total of ten matches each. Which is actually pretty significant as they are considered kind of regr fighters in the city arena.

    In these three days, they already created a reputation for themselves. Particrly Sam.

    He never spoke to anyone. Neither in the arena nor in the restaurant or any other ce within the city.

    All this while, he walked into the arena with his hands in his pockets, stood there without a change of expression, and took his opponents down without a single move. That is all he did. No fight, no battle, not even a fancy move.

    The other three also consistently followed their own fighting style that they established at their first battle.

    Of course, as the news spread and they became popr, it also reached the attention of the person they care for in the first ce.

    The boss of the ce. The team decided to refer to him as the Muscle. Because that is what he is of Divine formation Mountain.

    Muscle heard of the four neers that are causing waves in the arena and on the fourth day, he decided to see it for himself.

    So, he started pitching some special matches for the four. He picked some of his best fighters within the cultivation level the team is ying at and made them fight.

    To his surprise, the team managed to keep the fighting style as it is even in that difficult situation. The one thing that surprised him, even more, is that Sam still managed to stand still no matter what kind of attacks came at him.

    So after the first matches of the fourth day are over, Muscle was amused and interested. It could be said half of the mission has been aplished with that.

    Muscle went into his office during break time and called for a small meeting with his special team.

    "So, what do you guys think? The four neers. What do you think about them?"

    The team members are all wearing special attire. The fabric is ck with a purple hue and there is a bloody aura emanating from all of them.

    One of the women who stood at the front of the team raised her hand and spoke.

    "I like the style of the wind elemental user. The guy who is toying with his opponents is like that. He has the personality of the apex predator. A predator that is not just sure that the prey will fall, but a predator that is so confident that it could let its prey y as much as it wants just to bring its hopes down.

    I like that quality.

    If you are nning an expedition, I will take him on my team."

    "You like him that much?"

    "If not for the fact that we are not recruiting, I will take him directly into my team permanently. I am even thinking of asking your permission. You just put this meeting, making things easier."

    "Damn, I didn''t think you liked him that much. He is not bad. So if you really want to, you can try and poach him. But I doubt he will join as a permanent squad member."

    "I like the guy with metal elemental energy." A guy was sat at the corner of the room and spoke."

    "I figured as much."

    Muscle nodded with a smile and looked at another guy who sat on the chair with his sword in his arms.

    "I assume you want to fight that swordsman."

    The young man nodded in affirmation.

    "I am surprised that none of you mentioned the fourth guy. The guy with no moves."

    "I don''t understand him and that scares me a little bit."

    The woman who spoke first said it directly. Her expression revealed that she is genuinely confused.

    The others also agreed with her point.

    "I think that is what makes him most interesting.

    I want one of the team members who are at the same level as him to fight him.

    Try to bring out what it looks like if he makes a move. I want to see the full extent of his battle."

    "So, what will you do if you did that? Are you going to poach him?"

    "I don''t know. But I will definitely have a chat with him. He is really an interesting fighter that ever set foot in that arena and I am looking forward to meeting him.

    "I will do it."

    One of the guys who has been silent all along raised his hands and spoke.

    His voice sounded a bit eery and cold.

    Muscle smiled and said.

    "Are you sure you want to do this? I mean, you never fought in the arena no matter how many times we have asked you."

    "I wasn''t interested before. But now, I am."

    "Why the change of heart all of a sudden?"

    "For this guy, I don''t have to hold back."

    They all just exchanged a nce and Muscle shrugged it off.

    "Alright, you can have a go. I think you will be a suitable opponent for him too.

    So, we will arrange this match this afternoon. Then the rest of the guys, who is fighting with who. Of course, the swordsman is reserved for our in-house swordsman. So, you guys only have two more slots to fight for."

    For the next few moments, the room turned chaotic.

    That evening, Sam and his friends came back to the arena for their second fight of the day.

    Watt got his first and went into the arena.

    The person that came to fight him is a woman. Not the same woman that wanted to poach him, but a woman who bore an uncanny resemnce to that one.

    She looked at Watt coldly and said.

    "You can put on quite a show. But let me see if you are really as good as people believe you to be."

    "I doubt you will be able to bring that much out of me."

    "You dare look down on me? Is it because I am a woman?"

    Watt rolled his eyes at her words.

    "I don''t know where you came from. But we are cultivators, it doesn''t matter if you are a woman or a man. As long as you can kickass, you are better. Anyway, some of the women that I know are people that I am truly scared of."

    Watt said as he remembered his wife, then Sirona and them some other women he had met within the academy, and even Giyon and shook his head. He continued.

    "I just think you are weak. It has nothing to do with your gender."

    The woman growled and lunged forward with her sword.

    Watt threw a wind de at her and dodged the sword attack.

    The wind de and the sword shed. The wind de split as if it was made of some solid material, and half of it went to a different side.

    Watt who was standing on the side turned around before taking out a pack of metal cards. He swung them hard in the air. Wind des enveloped each card as they flew inrge curves.

    "Idiot, why waste your energy on the attacks that are not even aimed at me? Half of those cards are a waste. You just want to showboat."

    The opponent spoke in a condescending tone.

    But Watt just smiled.

    The cards really did move in different curves as they sliced through the wind. The opponent dodged multiple attacks while blocking a few as she moved to different spots. She is sure that half of the cards arepletely out of trajectory, so she didn''t care much for them.

    But all of this happened in just an instant and within this instant, something else happened. The wind de that was split and the half that went to a different side shed with four cards.

    The cards slid on the wind de as if it is some kind of physical object and sliced towards the opponent. The wind de acted like guideways as they went to hit the opponent when she least expected it.

    She had to take a hard turn and dodge the cards with the utmost difficulty.

    Watt smiled and said.

    "You are good. But if you think that doing showy tricks is all I can do, then you are in for some serious wake-up call. And if you think you can defeat me with that attitude ofcency, then you will die right here."

    "You bast¡­"

    Watt threw another bunch of cards at her.

    At the same time, another set of wind des flew in different directions. The cards were hit and shot towards her with utmost speed and uracy.

    The opponent couldn''t even finish her words before she had to get in position to dodge and block the attacks. But no matter how fast she was, she couldn''t dodge all of them.

 Chapter 1614 Special Battles

    Chapter 1614 Special Battles¡¡¡¡The cards flew everywhere. They were like falcons manifested out of pure wind elemental energy as they shed the opponent from all directions.

    A bracelet on the opponent''s hands started glowing and a barrier enveloped her.

    The cards hit the barrier and were destroyed on the spot. When the dust settled, Watt took out another pack of cards and got ready to make his move again. But the referee raised his hand and dered him as the winner.

    He was a bit surprised as the opponent is still standing, but the referee didn''t even bother exining before dering his win once again and signaling him to leave the arena.

    Watt looked at the opponent onest time and the woman also looked at him coldly. But along with that hostility, there is a sense of fear, which she couldn''t hide.

    Watt shrugged this off and went away.

    "It seems like we are already noticed by the upper echelons here. Some special opponents areing."

    "What''s so special about her? You defeated her pretty smoothly. I would say she is average at best."

    "The only reason I beat her smoothly is because of our fighting style. We won''t let the opponent have the freedom to make their own moves. That is the only reason we always win.

    This is one is cocky and arrogant. Add some ignorance to the mix and this is the perfect product of it. She just let her guard downpletely.

    But anyway, you be careful. If my guess is right, you will also meet some difficult opponents."

    "Well, even if you can handle it, I am sure I won''t have any problem. I won''t even break a sweat."

    Philip said as he walked into the arena.

    "This asshole. I hope he gets his ass kicked."

    Watt said grudgingly.

    Jack and Sam chuckled at his words. There is no way that Watt ever means those words. But they are still amused by how he would feel if Philip really gets his ass kicked.

    The reaction would be amazing and they are already sure what would happen when Philip wins. He is going to rub this on Watt''s face.

    This is like an everyday thing to them at this point, but they still can''t help but feel amused by it.

    Philip''s opponent is another guy with a metal element.

    He is wearing the same attire. ck robes with a purple hue.

    He looked at Philip and said.

    "I have seen your previous matches. I really admire the way you control your metal elemental energy. It is very precise, clean, and elegant."

    "Thank you."

    "I hope to see what else you can do though. Because if you have already shown all you can do, then there is no way, you would be able to beat me."

    As he spoke, his two fists turned into metal and some small but sharp spikes appeared on them.

    He looked at Philip with a smile before he made a move.

    Philip took a step to the side and turned on his feelings as he blocked the first punch and countered the second.

    The metal fist hit the opponent squarely in the face.

    *BANG*

    The metal shing sound came as the opponent''s face turned metal as well. He looked so unbothered about the punch to his face as he tried to step back and take on Philip once again.

    The battle went on swiftly and it soon turned into a boxing match.

    Of course, it is not exactly a proper boxing match. They exchanged fists but sometimes the fists turned intorge spikes all of a sudden and some other times, they turned intorge hammerheads that were about to hit the opponent in the head.

    Another time they turned into sharp ax heads that almost shed the slices off of the opponent''s flesh.

    They just turned into different forms upon the whims and wishes of the wielders.

    The battle started gaining more and more cheers from the audience.

    Soon both of them couldn''t keep on dodging the attacks and had to resort to blocking mostly. Both of them started to defend themselves. The body parts are changed to metal elements asionally as they blocked the opponent''s attacks.

    The battle was pretty neck to neck and went on for fifteen minutes. Everyone thought that it would end up a draw, but after another five minutes, things became a bit unbnced.

    The battle slowly started moving in Philip''s favor.

    They noticed that Philip''s opponent albeit being as strong as Philip doesn''t have the same endurance.

    The opponent is really not used to manipting energy into that many different forms and shapes all the while trying to make sure they are not killed by an idental hit. This isplicated and difficult to do. Particrly, maintaining a certain level of energy while doing this continuously is not really something easy to pull off.

    While for Philip, this is second nature. He is a dual elemental user. In fact, not just metal, he can even add the fire elemental energy into the attacking patterns and finish this off even faster. It is that easy for him.

    But he just wanted to y along with his opponent. Giving them hope that they are equals and cutting them down while making them realize that this hope is nothing but a false one.

    He wanted to hammer it down with this match.

    While the opponent is getting tired by every passing second, Sam ispletely unfazed and unwavering. He maintained his strength and usage of energy constant as the battle slowly progressed further.

    Within the next ten minutes, the opponent took five clean hits without being unable to dodge, and another five minutes after that, the opponent took six more hits and that led to a chain reaction in the next two minutes in which they took every single hit that Philip has thrown.

    The battle became singlehanded. Philip won the battle and he is barely panting.

    "You made me work more than I thought I would need to. Good job. I hope we can fight again."

    Philip said as hended his final blow on the chin of the opponent making him faint before he left the arena.

    "Lame."

    Watt said as soon as Philip stepped inside the room.

    "I won''t care for your stupid opinion."

    Philip retorted.

    "But you did take longer than expected and you did break more than just some sweat. You are literally panting and half of your energy was emptied out. This is definitely not one of your best battles.

    At least not ording to your standards." Jack said calmly as if he is just saying something normal.

    But in fact, he is trying to fuel the mes. It worked wonders as Watt grinned as he held on to that line.

    "Did you hear that, you asshole? You are pathetic. You can''t even meet your own standards, much less meet mine. Loser."

    "What the fuck did you just say? Do you want to go right now? I will kick your ass to deste."

    "Yeah, yeah. I believe you. With your tank half empty, I dare you to even try."

    As the bickering started Jack chuckled silently. He looked at Sam who is smiling helplessly.

    He just shrugged as if he couldn''t help himself and left the room to go to the arena.

    There another person in the same ck and purple uniform stood with a sword.

    Jack walked with a serious expression.

    He could sense the sharp sword intent from his opponent.

    As he stood there with his hand on the hilt of ck meteorite sand, Jack waited for his opponent to make the first move.

    "Your sword. I like it."

    The opponent spoke calmly.

    "I like yours as well. It was well made."

    "Thank you. Let''s have a good fight. It has been a while since I met a pure swordsman."

    "Alright."

    Jack drew his sword and the opponent did the same as well.

    His opponent uses a rapier that Jack rarely saw in the past few days. But he was really excited as he felt his opponent''s sword energy.

    They shed.

    The battle is a battle of pure swordsmen. They forgot about the crowd, showboating,petition, and the arena.

    All they had in mind at that moment is to show that their swordsmanship is better than the other party. They wanted toe out as the better swordsman out of the two and they are ready to give it they''re all.

    The crowd that was expecting a normal exciting battle first went cold. Their initial moves are too nd. They just did some fencing as they tried to reach each other. This is not what the crowd wanted. They wanted a fierce battle that risked the lives of the participants in a very high-profile way.

    The problem is, even though the two swordsmen are battling in such a circumstance, they are not shy and the crowd is not smart enough to distinguish that. Except for a select few.

    But this situation onlysted for a few seconds as the bnce broke.

 Chapter 1615 Special Battles II

    Chapter 1615 Special Battles II¡¡¡¡Fifteen minutester.

    Jack stood there panting like crazy. He held the sword tightly as he looked at his opponent sharply.

    The other party is also in the same situation, but that guy is anting harder and there are a couple of shes on his body. His robes were torn in those ces as there were some small cuts on his flesh at the exact same spot.

    Jack lunged forward as he stabbed the opponent.

    The other party tried to block it, but Jack kicked the ground at thest moment right before the two des met. He tilted his body just so slightly. The ck meteorite sword''s tip slid over the body of the other party''s de as he moved forward and nicked the hands of the opponent.

    The opponent felt the concentrated sword aura attacking his arms and he almost lost the grip of his sword.

    But with a lot of effort, he managed to hold on to it, even though he started bleeding profusely. Jack once again stopped as he locked eyes with the opponent. The ck meteorite sword gave out a very chaotic but controlled sword aura.

    The opponent felt the aura and sighed.

    He changed his position and stood normally.

    "I surrender."

    The crowd cheered immediately.

    For the past fifteen minutes, the exchanges were like this. As soon as the bnce broke, Jack gained a slight upper hand. He wanted to maintain that and push forward while the opponent wanted to bring the bnce back. Their moves are still not shy and eye-catching, but these quick one-move exchanges really attracted the crowd and their attention.

    Jack also heaved a sigh of relief. He respectfully thanked his opponent for a great fight and went back to his friends.

    "Damn, you almost got your ass kicked didn''t you?" Philip provoked with a grin.

    "Yes, I did. But I was confident that the probability is not very high." Jack answered calmly, without showing any signs of frustration or anger. This made Philip tongue-tied. He wanted to get revenge on Jack for fueling the previous argument with Watt.

    But when the other party decides to ignore the provocations there is no point in him continuing these arguments.

    It would be no fun whatsoever.

    "See? That''s how you deal with this problem child."

    Sam said to Watt before he walked into the arena.

    "Oii, who are you calling a child? Huh?"

    Philip almost yelled out loud. But Watt caught him and stopped him from doing that.

    "You stupid, it is already bad that we are behaving as if we knew each other. The n was to pretend like we don''t know each other at all. But with your shenanigans, we already couldn''t do that.

    Just don''t give them the image that we are close friends."

    "Yeah, yeah. Cut me some ck alright. Look at that guy, not even respecting his elders."

    "Elder? Who is that?"

    Watt looked around in confusion.

    "What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Of course, I am talking about me. I am a few months older than him."

    "Yeah, and he practically raised you. You stupid brat. Stop trying to pull that stupid age card again and again."

    The bickering once again began.

    Meanwhile, Sam moved out into the arena in the same fashion as before. He had his hands in his pocket as he looked at the opponent who is waiting for him.

    Unlike the previous three opponents, this guy didn''t speak with Sam. He just waited there for the match to begin and as soon as the referee gave the signal, he made his move.

    He lunged forward as his body turned into a shadow. He disappeared from his spot and reappeared behind Sam.

    The punch almostnded on Sam''s nape, but right before it could, an energy barrier stopped it for him. But the opponent didn''t stop there. He disappeared again and again as he appeared at different spots, throwing all kinds of attacks on Sam.

    But all Sam did was block the attacks with an energy barrier, he didn''t even make a move to dodge the attacks.

    After a dozen or so moves, the opponent stopped and looked at Sam keenly.

    Sam also looked at him to understand his opponent''s next move. It has been a while since he saw someone use shadow element this good. The twin sisters in his team are really good at it, but they used the space element in conjunction with the shadow element which is notpletely the same.

    But this guy is using pure shadow which is something that Sam really liked doing himself.

    The only problem he noticed is that the fighting style is not exactly optimum. If Sam actually moved instead of not keeping this aloof appearance and posture, he would have caught the other party multiple times.

    But that could also be a trap by the other party, trying to tempt him to make a move. Whatever the case, there are a bunch of openings.

    He is really tempted to catch one and beat the crap out of this guy, but for that, all the images he had built up until now will be gone. So, he is thinking of a better way to fight this person.

    As he was thinking, he suddenly sensed something from behind even though the opponent ising from the front. He frowned and a small invisible ripple of energy emerged from his body.

    It extended in all directions. The opponent felt it and his momentumpsed. Sam diverted his senses to his rear and he noticed a shadowing at him.

    Shadow necromancy. He shook his head slightly as he saw the shadow''s momentum get toned down by the ripple as well.

    The opponent regained momentum as he tried to move forward and hit Sam. But once again an energy barrier blocked the attack. The exact moment, that punchnded, the shadow that was behind Sam suddenly exploded.

    *BOOM*

    The shadow that was about to make a move just exploded into a puff of ck smoke.

    The opponent was stunned. Sam looked him right in the eyes. They are cold and calcting. This was the first time Sam showed any expression against his opponent in this arena.

    The opponent stepped back and made some hand signs.

    His shadow spread around widely and a bunch of shadow undead came out of it. Sam looked at him calmly as the undead surrounded him from all sides and the opponent came directly from the front.

    The energy around his body was spread to arge radius as he created a solid barrier. This is the first time Sam''s defense was even visible to the naked eye. So the crowd was really left in awe.

    This is the first time someone pushed Sam to this level, so they are clearly surprised.

    The undead creatures ran forward along with the necromancer as they aimed to finish off Sam quickly.

    They are prepared to break down the barrierpletely, but as they touched the barrier, all they felt is some very high resistance as if they are moving against a very forceful current of water. They didn''t feel anything else.

    Their punches just went through after they faced some resistance and the momentum was reduced.

    But as they wereing through the barrier slowly, Sam manipted the surrounding energy. He created very small energy bullets around him as he shot them at the undead creatures.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Even though the explosions are not exactly powerful, they created a lot of fuss as they destroyed the shadow undead.

    The whole barrier is filled with ck smoke. The opponent was about tond a strike on Sam but was unable to. He felt like some kind of chain locked him up in that one spot as he tried to move forward and his senses suddenly blurred.

    A small explosion urred right at his feet making his legs take the full brunt of an energy bullet''s explosion.

    The barrier was opened, and the ck smoke was cleared. The opponent crashed to the ground with his leg in pain.

    He couldn''t believe what had happened. He thought he would at least make Sam move. At least a little bit.

    But all of his shadow undead are crippled just like that. Even if he wants to maintain them, the problem is, that he wouldn''t have too much energy left.

    He would be sitting ducks if Sam really made a move at that point.

    While the opponent is thinking about how to proceed, Sam is also thinking something simr.

    The number of undead the other party used is way too many. They are far more than what Sam usually used. And to explore them all at once with energy bullets is no small matter. He is definitely not in Sivan''s body at the moment to have done that easily.

    Currently, he is in his own body and even if the energy control is good in this one, it is definitely not better than that of Sivan''s body. Making energy bullets and using them all at once is still a bit much for him.

    But to keep up that image, he had done so.

    Now, he is thinking of giving that image up. This is thest attack he couldnd while staying still. If the opponent stilles at him, he decided to make a move normally.

 Chapter 1616 Muscle

    Chapter 1616 Muscle¡¡¡¡There is a massive silence in the arena. The crowd stopped cheering. They arepletely silent.

    It is so anticlimactic. That is why nobody wanted to even make a sound.

    The opponent in front of Sam, who is yet to receive a critical hit is standing there with his hand raised as he surrendered.

    All he had was a wound on his leg. Apart from that everything ispletely normal, but he directly surrendered which baffled not just Sam, but even the rest of the audience.

    Muscle who has been watching the match smiled wryly as he looked at the situation. He kind of expected this situation when he noticed how easily Sam countered all the moves thrown at him. He was still, confident and more importantly still didn''t reveal any of his other moves.

    His subordinate is a person who calctes every move carefully. And he never tried to value his pride too much to win a battle when is unsure that there is a chance of winning.

    Sam is way too strong and has way too many cards hidden in the subordinate''s opinion, so he just quit the match, before things got serious.

    Sam was really surprised by this development. He was really thinking of ways to maintain his image while still winning the fight. He is even thinking of using some of his elements to do that. But it seems like all of his brainpower was wasted.

    The opponent seemed to have thought more than him and left the match.

    Anyway, this made Sam''s life easier as he went back to the room.

    Watt already went and asked the management if they had third matches that day, but the answer was negative. Even though they don''t have any matches, they were still asked to stay though.

    They understood what that meant. They are finally going to meet their third target. Muscle might want to meet them.

    They were directed to a special room where they were told to wait.

    The room isrge. It could house at least a hundred people. It is that huge and as they waited a bunch of people came in.

    They were all in ck uniforms that have a purple hue. The same uniform the team''s opponents wore.

    Sam looked at them with a frown. He could see that many of them are looking at them with slight hostility. The remaining members are looking at them with mixed expressions.

    He obviously didn''t like this. He stepped forward as he matched their gaze with a sweeping nce. He got ready for a confrontation. Because almost all of the subordinates are of simr cultivation level and even the few that are stronger than him are only at the initial stage of the Astral ne consummate stage.

    He didn''t believe that he will lose if shit hit the fan. He could kill more than half of them with his team and all four of them can escape easily without any critical damage or injuries.

    They can do it easily.

    But his thoughts were halted when someone else came into the room. It is the person they are trying to meet from the start. The third target. Muscle.

    "Don''t need to think too much. These are all of my subordinates. They are just a bit mad that all four of you beat the crap out of them.

    That''s it.

    You can rx. You are here as my guests. I promise you that as long as you are within this city as my guests, no harm shall befall you."

    "It is easy to say words," Philip said casually.

    Muscle smiled at these words instead of getting angry.

    "You can count on my words, my friend. I value them more than my life. So, they have their worth and you can trust me."

    All four of them took their seats, while Muscle sat across them.

    "So, are four of you friends?"

    "We became friends after we came here."

    "Oh? I have seen arena creating archenemies, this is the first time I saw it creating friends."

    "When there is no challenge orpetition in our sight, what can we do? We can just talk with people on the same wavelength.

    I must say, the reputation of your arena is just that, a mere reputation. Completely undeserving and unttering. It is just so-so." Watt said casually as if he is some kind of bigshot wasting his time in some backwater ce.

    Muscle just grinned again.

    "Of course, your opinion ispletely true. From your perspective. After all, the difficulty is the most rtive thing.

    It is easy for you, but tough for the rest that came. Anyway, one of my squads wants to recruit you. Do you want to join?"

    "No."

    Watt rejected directly.

    Muscle looked at the remaining three and asked.

    "Any of you guys? All four of you have offers from different teams. You can join if you want to."

    "I am not interested. I am not here to get recruited."

    Sam spoke for the first time.

    "So, you are here for something specific?"

    "Yes. I would like to have a match with you. Constraint your cultivation level to mine and we can fight. I want to see if I can win against you."

    Everyone in the room was shocked. They didn''t expect something like this from Sam. Even the trio was a bit surprised. They knew that they will find a way to stay close to the Muscle for a few days and break the news to him, but to think that Sam would ask something like this.

    This ispletely out of their expectations.

    "What would I get if I fight with you? If you lose, it would be an expected thing. Nobody would credit me for it. They will credit the natural order of things. But if by some minuscule possibility, you win, then I will be made fun of.

    This is a lose-lose situation."

    "Then how about to wager. A wager that makes it worth it for you.:

    "What is it?"

    "If I lose, I will join one of your teams."

    "Then what if I lose?"

    "We can decide that after that. Are you in?"

    Muscle thought for a moment and said.

    "Sure, why not? It is not a bad idea. I want to see how good you are by myself and it has been a while since I fought someone interesting. I will do it. Then what will you get if you win."

    "Protection."

    "Protection?"

    "Yes, I want you to use your strength and all of the strength of you can muster through your manpower, to protect me and the other three. No matter what happens, what kind of situation it is. You shouldn''t back off."

    "Really? Do you need that kind of promise? Just what kind of enemies did you make?"

    "Enemies that are going to die soon."

    "I need details of the enemies. What region do they belong to?"

    "This region only."

    "This region? Then there is no way anyone could ever do anything to you if you are under my protection. But why the other three? I thought you became friends here only."

    "We have somemon enemies. It works for us if we stay here together under your protection."

    "Alright. Deal."

    "Do you want to do this in the arena?"

    "No need. This is not for exhibition. It is our personal match. We can just fight on my training grounds. Do you want to sign an oath before that? Just for your assurance?"

    "If you want me to. Then sure. I would like that."

    They went on to sign the Gandharva oath and Sam looked at Muscle with a smile. The n went smoother than he thought. The other party''s pride made him unable to see such a simple trap that even some middle school kids back on earth could have seen from a mile away.

    And here a person like this is ruling a realm andmanding the authority over the life and death of so many people.

    He shook his head with a sigh as they walked towards the training grounds.

    Muscle removed his upper robe and stood there with his bare chest. He looked at Sam who just stood there. But this time, his hands are not in his pants. He took out staff and held it on his shoulder.

    All of Muscle''s subordinates were surprised. They didn''t expect such a thing from Sam. They all thought Sam must be some kind of mage with a weird constitution. But for him to take out staff is definitely a surprise.

    "A staff? Never would have thought you to be a warrior."

    Sam just shrugged and lunged forward. His whole body turned silver as he activated partial lightning elemental fusion. He dashed towards his opponents while filling the whole area with lightning crackling.

    He mmed his feet at one spot right before Muscle got ready to counter. He was high in the air as he aimed his fall while swinging down the staff.

    *BAM*

    The explosive lightning and the staff stuck Muscle in his arms as he tried to block the attack. Arge silver sh covered everyone''s vision.

 Chapter 1617 Vs Muscle

    Chapter 1617 Vs Muscle¡¡¡¡The silver shes of lightning cleared out.

    Everyone saw Sam standing on the ground with a small crater under his feet. Muscle also stood there.

    His arms are blocking the staff and he had a slight smile on his face. There is a muchrger crater under his feet.

    "You are good. With how still you were in your previous matches, I thought you are a mage. But it seems like you are more of a warrior. That attack is really good. I like it."

    Sam didn''t reply and just looked at him calmly. He tried to push the staff harder to suppress Muscle, but he wasn''t able to do anything. Muscle just threw his arms away and Sam felt an intense force throwing him off the ground.

    He somersaulted backward before mming his staff into the ground and holding himself in ce.

    As he tried to bnce himself in the spot, Muscle already lunged forward and got ready to throw a punch.

    Sam jumped up with the support of the staff and gathered lightning to his feet tond a two-legged kick to Muscle''s face.

    Muscle who almost ran straight into Sam''s feet because of the momentum, tried his best to control the momentum and halted in his tracks.

    As if he had already anticipated this, the lightning gathered at Sam''s feet was shot straight at Muscle''s face.

    He flinched and stepped back. Samnded on his feet and pulled the staff out of the ground as he continuously mmed it on Muscle''s head.

    Of course, Muscle blocked it with his arms, but each strike pushed him back a little.

    The subordinates of Muscle were shocked to see this. Even though they didn''t see muscle fighting someone in a suppressed state, they definitely saw him fight people on the same level. But no one managed to push him back like this, except for one person.

    And Sam became the second.

    They assumed Sam was good, but now its not just good or even great. That seems like levels below Sam''s strength. They wouldn''t have expected a scenario like this at the start of the battle in a million years.

    As for why they are so surprised, it is because Muscle has a weird tendency of dominating the fight at the start. Particrly when he is fighting with something on the line. He never backs down at the start of the fight.

    He always starts it aggressively and then ys around carefully for a while before finishing off the opponent spectacrly. It is his blueprint for fighting with people. It is so evident that everyone knows about it.

    Even the people in the city surrounding them knows about it. Anyone on the street can vouch for it.

    But for him to beaten back at the start of the fight is apletely new thing and a surprising thing for them.

    Sam on the other hand actually knew about this. That is why he took such an aggressive start at a very strong opponent.

    In general, he would have taken a much milder approach and picked his opponent apart. After all, his motto is to be efficient.

    But his current actions arepletely against it.

    He is fighting aggressively and his goal is to dominate Muscle. Not just win against him barely. He wants to defeat him in his own forte. A mixture of brute force with minimal but refined technique.

    He will do that and will use all of his elemental energies if necessary to do that.

    The battle went on for a while with Samnding blows on Muscle''s head which is barely being blocked by his arms.

    As it almost entered a stalemate-like situation, Sam kicked on the ground with earth elemental energy.

    A trap formed right under the feet of Muscle and took him by surprise.

    The trap was not made to hold him on the spot though, it actually just tripped him a bit and then the earth pushed him a bit upwards. His arms that were over his head and were ready to catch the attacksing at him missed the mark.

    Muscle hurriedly moved his head to the side and the staffnded on his shoulder.

    *BAM*

    The lightning shed once again and made everyone blinded for a moment.

    Muscle groaned in pain as she stepped backwards to be out of Sam''s attack range, but as if he already anticipated this, another earth trap appeared there and this one is designed to capture his legpletely.

    Sam swung the staff from the side, aiming for the head.

    Muscle blocked it with his hands once again and threw a punch at Sam at the same time. Sam dodged it to the side and swung the staff again. This time, Muscle focused on blocking it, but the staff changed its direction at thest moment.

    It directly went to the muscle''s trapped leg.

    Muscle gritted his teeth and hurriedly used all of his strength to break through the trap and used the same leg that has all the built-up momentum to kick the staff.

    Sam was blown back a bit from the force that came from the leg. The kick was too strong and forceful. But he wasn''t injured. He bnced himself pretty well and blocked another attack that came from Muscle.

    He continued with the battle.

    The blows became fiercer. The subordinates who are witnessing the battle are being riled up with excitement. They are amazed by how well, Sam has been handling this and how easily Muscle is able to counter to everything.

    Another five minutes of this.

    Sam jumped into the air as he tried tond an overhead hit on Muscle''s head. This time, the staff is a bit different from the previous one. In mid-air, Sam swapped it with another one in his storage.

    Muscle didn''t pay too much heed to that change as he got ready to block the attack. But right when they were about to make contact, the lightning disappeared and metal energy enveloped Sam.

    The staff suddenly changed its shape. The staff''s body turned into thin strips of metal. They are like flexible swords all joined together.

    de aura surged through Sam''s body as he swung it downwards harder.

    The sharp edges of dozens of metal strips dug themselves into Muscle''s arm. Some strips are even stuck in the arm. Wind energy surged through the strips as Sam pull them out. Muscle fibers were torn apart with just a single pull and blood scattered everywhere.

    Sam stored the weapon back in the storage before taking out arge battle ax.

    Even before Muscle can rx, Sam already made a move with the ax.

    Arge sh of spiritual energy went from the ax as he swung it towards Muscle.

    Muscle blocked it. But in the process opened up his already existing wounds.

    The bleeding increased.

    Before he coulde back to it, Sam swung the ax again. The attacknded perfectly without any mishaps this time. The ax dug itself in the flesh and almost off the hand and the shoulder clean.

    At first, the match started with both of them exchanging blows. But now it became a bit one-sided. Sam has a solid attack pattern. But that was tailor-made for this situation only. So, Muscle has boasted such prowess. is getting thrashed at the moment.

    The surprise turned into shock and then shock turned into disbelief.

    But after another three minutes. All of a sudden, Sam''s ax was blocked cleanly. There is not even a hint of a scratch. He pushed the ax backward.

    "You are good. Better than I thought. But if this is all you have, then it would be impossible for you to defeat me."

    As he spoke, Sam watched as wounds quickly started healing on Muscle''s body.

    "There is a reason why I was able to stay at the top for so long. It is not that difficult to injure me, but the problem is making my injuries affect me is the real challenge.

    You did a great job demonstrating your strength like this, but too bad it is going to end up a failure. Get ready to be part of my team from now on."

    Sam who stood there in front of him, was surprised. After all, self-regeneration is a very rare skill. Even among the healers, there are very few people who recover this quickly.

    Muscle''s strength went way ahead of the charts in Sam''s mind. And after the initial surprise, his face gave out a very faint but definite smile.

    It might be difficult to damage Muscle significantly because of the regenerations, but that doesn''t mean, it is not going to be fun. In fact, this is a very thrilling experience for Sam.

    To beat such a person who can wield such power is going to be much more fun. Particrly if that person is way above you in terms of skill set and physical strength etc.

    This is not just fun for Sam, even for the audience who are witnessing the fight.

    "Things just got way better. This is very interesting. Very interesting indeed."

 Chapter 1618 Reveal

    Chapter 1618 Reveal¡¡¡¡Sam activatedplete metal elemental fusion as he lunged forward.

    Muscle also lunged forward and it became a slugfest.

    Both of them threw punches at an incredible pace. They didn''t care about defense anymore and started hitting each other recklessly. It looked like two street thugs fighting with no regard.

    But if one observed closely, they could see that there is a certain finesse to their techniques.

    Muscle''s every punch is being targeted only at specific spots on Sam''s body. He is targeting the shoulders, the ribs, and the liver most of the time and if it is not possible to go for them, he is going for the chest, specifically near the heart.

    His punches never missed those specific parts. Of course, Sam managed to see through that, and his metal elemental fusion body is trying its best to guard himself against the situation. But still, Muscle continued on like that.

    Meanwhile, Sam is using apletely different approach. He is currently using ripple style to make the energy control of Muscle go astray.

    Muscle is precise, strong, and fast. Sam wanted to disrupt his precision first. The strong momentum he is building up will be messed up and leave a lot of openings to Sam as long as he is not precise and his flow of actions were disrupted.

    He is taking advantage of these openings and started using metal spikes that are extending from his arms to attack his opponent.

    Along with that, what Muscle noticed is that every time Sam punched him, there is a weird sensation in his body.

    The ripple style is actually distributing his metal elemental energy along with disrupting the energy flow of Muscle.

    Muscle doesn''t know what exactly is happening with the metal energy, but he could sense that it wouldn''t be any good.

    The only reason, he didn''t stop and deal with it instantly is because Sam is letting his hits connect most of the time and this made him believe that he will be able to defeat Sam before anything serious happens.

    But after two minutes, he realized something is wrong. As he was about to punch Sam in the shoulder, he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his own shoulder.

    He stopped moving his arm. This pain is much more than Sam''s punches or kicks. It was internal. He quickly let his spiritual sense go wild to take a peek at his own shoulder. Meanwhile, he tried to hold Sam off a bit with his other arm.

    But Sam didn''t even bother to attack him directly. Instead, he slightly extended his hand and pulled in thin air.

    Muscle felt some piercing pain in various parts of his body. He couldn''t make sense of it. The pain is too immense for him to focus on the spiritual energy to understand what is happening.

    But after much effort, he looked through it and was surprised to see what was in there. He had a dozen small metal pieces that seemed to be in the shape of a rhombohedron and each edge and point of that piece is extremely sharp.

    They are currently spinning rapidly while moving around within the body. They are destroying the muscle fibers slowly. But that is not what scared him. As they are spinning a weird attractive force came from the pieces and the blood is being attracted to them.

    In a way, Sam is currently changing the flow of his blood within his body while simultaneously trying to destroy the muscle and bone.

    Muscle was terrified by this. He couldn''t think of a possible technique that could do this. Having metal pieces that could kill him but are being controlled by someone else while they are still in his body. This is scenario is not pleasant for anyone.

    Muscle tried to charge his energy and expel these things but Sam just smiled and controlled the metal pieces. They sent out small ripples of energy from their location and they disrupted the charging energying at them.

    Muscle was shocked. He looked at Sam in amazement and horror at the same time. He tried a couple more times before he couldn''t take it. All of a sudden energy surged through his body. His cultivation limit was broken. Sam lost control over the metal piecespletely.

    He was pushed back by the force of energy. The trio got worried. They wanted to move towards Sam so that they could all escape together. But Sam waved his hand and stopped them.

    He knew that situation might turn dangerous. But that is the case if it is anyone else they are facing. But the person in front of them is muscle. So, he is confident that he can handle this situation.

    Muscle stomped his feet hard and the dust-covered up everything. When it was cleared, he is standing there panting as he looked at his body.

    He looked at Sam coldly. But within just a few moments, that cold look turned to a smile.

    "You are good. You are the second person who defeated me this fast at the same level."

    "Yeah, I know. I heard that Gail was the first."

    "Oh? You know Gail?"

    "We are pretty close actually. I am mostly friends with his daughter and nephew though."

    "You are friends with Giyon?" A woman spoke up. She is the same person who wanted to recruit Watt. She walked towards Sam and asked coldly.

    "You are friends with Giyon?"

    "Yeah. I am. Is that a problem for you?"

    Before she could speak, Muscle raised an eyebrow and gestured for her to get back.

    He looked at Sam and said.

    "So, you won. Now is it okay for you to tell me what you need the protection from?"

    "Of course. Actually, I will tell you a lot more than that."

    "Let''s start with who I am."

    Sam then removed his mask and spoke.

    "I don''t know if you have heard of me. But my name is Sam and these three are my friends. Watt, Jack, and Philip."

    Muscle shook Sam''s hand with a smile. But one of the subordinates lost of their smile as he ran towards Muscle and whispered something into his ears.

    Muscle''s body froze a bit and he looked at Sam.

    "You are¡­"

    "d that at least you know of it. The protection I need from is the rest of the Divine formation Mountain. And my enemies are the three disciples of the Mountain master. I hope you do remember your promise."

    As soon as Sam said those words, the whole room turned silent. The trio looked at each other with wry smiles. This is actually part of their pre-discussed n. But they are still a bit taken aback. After all, who will reveal their own identity right in the middle of their enemy''s core circle?

    That is literal suicide. But Sam figured this is the best path.

    After the initial shock was worn out, all the other subordinates in the room got ready to make a move. But Sam whipped out his copy of the contract and said.

    "The oath you have sworn. Don''t tell me, you are going to relinquish it now?"

    As soon as those words came out, everyone halted in their tracks.

    Muscle was stunned and didn''t know what to say. He took a deep breath and said.

    "I don''t know what your enmity with the three young masters is. Can you tell me?"

    "Of course. They interfere in my battle with someone else and took that enemy away. I need to find that enemy and kill him."

    "So, there is no other sh?"

    "No."

    "Your enmity only extends until young masters. Not the mountain master?"

    "I have nevere in contact with mountain master and I don''t believe that I have done anything that could upset him."

    "Then, fine. As long as you stay in my ce, you are my guest and as per the discussed duration you shall be under my protection."

    "Thank you. Anyway, I have something else to say to you."

    "What is it?"

    "Your two colleagues. Saint and Smith are currently suffering from something critical. It must have festered quite a bit by now, so they are in their weakest states without many of their abilities. And I caused it."

    "What? Saint and Smith are injured?"

    "I won''t say they are injured. But something simr. They think they are recovering, but the thing is, it is impossible unless I save them myself."

    "Saint is a great healer. I am sure he can figure that out himself."

    "Well, it is true in a general case. But this time, Saint wouldn''t think that there is a problem with his body. At least he wouldn''t be able to look for the problem in the right ce and cannot take the right approach.

    He will suffer from not thinking straight. And Smith wouldn''t even recognize that he had a problem until it is toote. Which is right about now as we speak.

    So, your colleagues are in a pickle and they are desperate to find a cure."

    "Why are you telling me all of this?"

    "One of the reasons is that your boss, the Mountain master doesn''t know of it yet."

 Chapter 1619 Muscles Plan

    Chapter 1619 Muscle''s n¡¡¡¡"How can Mountain master doesn''t know about it? They must have already reported you guys."

    "Like hell, they would. Do you really think, everyone is as righteous as you? They are scared shitless that they will be tortured by your master if he knows that they are defeated like this."

    Saint is already hard-pressed to find them because his defeat was public. I not only defeated him in a healerpetition, but I also managed to kick his ass with a small parlor trick of mine.

    The word must have already spread here. He might even be shaking in his legs as we speak. He won''t be able to hide it for long.

    And he is currently useless at this point since he cannot heal at all. He is just an overgrown brat at this point. He might be nning his escape at this point.

    Which he also should have realized is impossible at this point of time."

    Muscle frowned. He didn''t like Saint one bit. In fact, he might be happy if Saint died right now. Because he fought Saint countless times and kicked his ass. He worked like a mule for the sake of the organization.

    But he is always underappreciated. On top of that, Saint, who has this reputation of being saintly is secretely an asshole.

    His true nature was never revealed, but he is the one Muscle hate''s the most as he is always righteous. On the other hand, Saint is an asshole, grumpy, greedy and every other word that could be of simr meaning.

    He is a deceptive person who makes everyone believe that he is something that he is actually not.

    And for a person like that to be ranked higher than him and valued higher than him, praised higher than him is something he cannot swallow.

    He has been a mule for the Mountain master for so long.

    He neverined about the work he had to. He neverined about the tasks he has to aplish. He has always delivered whenever he has to. But this made them take him for granted.

    He could never me the Mountain master for this though, so he med the rest of the candidates that deemed themselves as more useful than him. He wanted to get back at them. He couldn''t find a chance until now though.

    But now he got a chance.

    He couldn''t get a better chance than this. Particrly when ites to Saint.

    All he has to do is let the truth spread as far and wide as he can and make it so that people from different ces know about this.

    This will hit Saint where it hurts the most.

    There is nothing that works better than losing a reputation to a person like Saint.

    His obsession is way too high and his position is heavily linked with his reputation.

    "You told me this to help me out?"

    Muscle asked Sam.

    "Not really. I told you this to help myself."

    "What goal do you have that you need this kind of help?"

    "You will know soon enough. Anyway, ording to our deal, you can''t kill me and you have to protect me and my friends.

    I will take full advantage of this situation and throw some random facts that will tempt you. Whether you act on it or not, ispletely up to you.

    But from now on, you will get as many opportunities as you want to screw over your peers and I will sit back and watch if you are going to take advantage of that."

    With those words, Sam paused and asked.

    "Who is arranging our amodations? It would be great if it is a bit morefortable. We have been through too many forests these days, I am craving a nap in a soft bed."

    Muscle shook his head and sighed before he gestured to one of his attendants to deal with the amodation situation.

    Sam and the trio left.

    Muscle looked at his subordinates and asked.

    "It seems like you all got something to say? Why are you hesitating? Just speak your mind."

    "Are you sure this is a good idea? If what he said is the truth and he really is an enemy to the three young masters, things might just blow way out of proportion. We are going to be in big trouble if things go sideways.

    In fact, if his presence here is known all of your peers wille running to take him and his friends down. Even if it is just to kiss the ass of the three young masters.

    I don''t think it is good for us to stay in the middle of all of this."

    "Well, you have a point. So the first precautionary measure to not let shit go sideways is to make sure this news doesn''t leave this room.

    We are going to keep his and his friends'' existence aplete secret.

    And after that, I need your advice on dealing with Saint.

    Do you think we should take advantage of this situation and drown him? Particrly if we inform his situation to the Mountain Master directly, things will really tilt in our favor."

    "But is the risk worth the reward? If what he is saying ends up being false, we will be in deep trouble.

    Even if it is true, we might be suspected of urately knowing what is going on with Saint. How are you going to prevent that?"

    "I have a n for that¡­."

    Muscle started exining all the details of your n and the subordinates felt shocked.

    "Isn''t it too risky?"

    "That much risk is bearable. We need to do that. Anyway, since Sam is with us at the moment, let''s take full advantage of this situation."

    "But how are we going to deal with him after that?"

    "We will see what we can do when it is needed. Currently, everything is perfectly good. We can''t lose the chance."

    "If you say so. You are the boss. But I am worried if it will bite us in the back."

    Muscle didn''t reply and they proceeded with the n.

    He immediately left the room and went to meet Sam.

    "This is faster than I expected. You are not as indecisive as people said."

    "You are expecting me?"

    "Of course, it is hard not to. Anyway, tell me what do you want?"

    "I need some help with the n I am about to execute. I want my subordinates to enter a semi-ill state. They should appear injured or sick but they shouldn''t suffer any real harm. But Saint shouldn''t be able to discover this.

    It would be better if it appears like something he could cure, but only he could cure instead of his subordinates."

    "So, you are trying to make Saint rat himself out by making sure that he cannot cure your subordinates, even though he should have been easily able to. You are using that as evidence to rat him out and make him fall out of your Mountain master''s favor.

    Not bad."

    "That''s basically it. Do you have something like that?"

    "Yes, I do. What do I get in return though?"

    "What do you want?"

    "How about some information?"

    "About what?"

    "I want to know if my enemy, the person that was taken away by your three young masters is doing okay. I need him to be in full health when I cut his neck off.

    He must be severely injured because of the small gift I left behind. I want to know how far the recovery process has gotten."

    "That is impossible. There is no way, the young masters are going to reveal that information to me."

    "Well, figure out a way. I will pay you upfront anyway. Even if you don''t do it, nothing much is going to happen to you in this n. But for the next n, you might not get my full cooperation."

    "What makes you think that there is going to be the next n?"

    "If there is a first, there is going to be a second. It is the nature of things."

    "Well, your understanding of things around here is not sound yet. So, don''t be surprised, if you turned out to be wrong. Anyway, I will try my best to get what you asked for. But I can''t make any promises."

    "Alright."

    After that, Sam took out something from his storage and gave it to Muscle.

    "Use this and you will get what you need."

    Muscle thanked him once again and left the room.

    After a couple of hours, the muscle used a secret space gate formation in his estate along with a few of his subordinates and left the.

    He went to Saint''s area and requested an immediate audience with him.

    "Sir, Saint is not feeling well. Is it okay for you toe back at ater time?"

    Muscle took out a few badges and ced them on the table.

    "I am invoking my special privilege today as a fellow subordinate of Divine Formation Mountain. My subordinates need urgent care. Tell him toe immediately."

 Chapter 1620 Mutated poison

    Chapter 1620 Mutated poison¡¡¡¡The subordinate of Saint who came to greet Muscle was stunned.

    This is on top of the shock that came with Muscle''s visit.

    Muscle is a person who is very stubborn and stayed very true to his words. He hates Saint''s guts and nobody is unaware of that. He made sure that everyone whoes into contact with him from within the organization understood that.

    For that reason, Muscle never even bothered toe and get healed by the hands of Saint. Every fellow subordinate gets a special token from Saint because of the rule from Mountain master.

    When that token is used, Saint has toe and heal no matter what. No price taken, no charge, no excuses.

    That token could be used on themselves or any other people they wish to us it on.

    Muscle who has never visited Saint to get healed, has a ton of tokens left. And it seems like he is utilizing some of them at the same time. Which is actually a really bad news to Saint.

    Now, Saint has no probable cause to reject this. In fact even if he had a probable cause, he has to suck it up and heal these people here.

    But Saint can''t heal them at all.

    "May I know what the problem is?"

    "They were sent on a mission as part of their training and they all got infected by some weird poison. I don''t know the details, but it seems like a special mutated fruit. They brought the seed of the fruit, the fruits are all gone.

    We even have some roots and leaves if you would like that."

    The subordinate didn''t know what to say, but he tried to calm himself down and asked.

    "Can you give me the samples, I will assign people to do the research."

    "I am not doing it. I will only hand this over to Saint and tell him to get his ass out here. Do you really think these tokens are a joke? I can go andin to Mountain master even if he more than ten minuteste without a probable cause.

    Do you know what happens if I do that?"

    "Please don''t be angry, Sir. As I said Saint is recovering at the moment."

    "What is he recovering from? Being too full of himself? I don''t believe he is going to get rid of that disease any time soon.

    If you don''t bring him here within the next two minutes, I will go in and grab him by his neck.

    Unlike your boss, I actually like my subordinates and I am willing to do anything for them."

    "P¡­ Please wait Sir."

    The subordinate gulped nervously as he mustered enough energy to say this sentence out loud.

    He ran inside and went to meet with Saint.

    *knock* *knock*

    He knocked on the door nervously.

    At this moment, inside the room, Saint is lying on a bed. He looked weak. Even though there is no significant difference, if one observed keenly, they would know that he lost some weight.

    His eyes are way too lifeless and it seemed like he has been crying for a long time.

    When he heard the knocking sound, he couldn''t help but feel a bit frustrated.

    "Who the fuck is it?"

    "Sir, something came up."

    "I told you to not disturb me. Do you want to die that badly?"

    "Sir, Muscle came here and he brought the Saint tokens, I can''t do anything in this situation. He is threatening toe in and drag you out if you don''t show up. Pleasee and visit him."

    Saint sat up abruptly in shock.

    He ran to the door and kicked it off.

    *BAM*

    The subordinate who is standing on the other side crashed into the wall along with the door. This is one person that he doesn''t want to see at the moment. It is almost right up there meeting with the mountain master and his disciples.

    Muscle is one of thest few people he wouldn''t want to tell his situation about.

    Saint picked his subordinate up and asked.

    "Is what you said truth? Did he reallye here with the tokens? Why?"

    "It seems like his subordinates are poisoned by some weird mutated fruit, he brought some samples of the trees.

    His subordinates are currently still standing. But they are deteriorating as we speak. Things might get serious with time. So, he is in kind of a hurry."

    "Why the fuck is this happening now?"

    *BAM*

    Saint muttered as he mmed the subordinate into the ground. The fault with the situation, definitely didn''t lie with the subordinate, but unfortunately he is the one that got punished.

    He fainted on the spot with some serious injuries.

    Saint who came to his senses a bit, looked at the scene and sighed, he looked around and called some attendants.

    "Take this idiot to get some treatment and send him back quickly to the reception. I am going there now. Make sure he is not seen by anyone else. Particrly that Muscle."

    "Yes sir."

    The attendant replied before taking the subordinate away.

    Saint tried to calm himself down and slowly walked to the main area.

    There Muscle is standing along with around ten of his subordinates.

    "Long time no see, Saint. How long are you nning on letting us wait here? I even came with these stupid tokens that you often brag about so much.

    Another minute I would have gone directly to the Mountain master."

    "It is just a couple of minutes, what are you threatening me for? Why did you call me here? Your subordinates'' situation doesn''t seem that bad now does it?

    Your regr healers might have already found a way to cure them if you hadn''t dragged these poor bastards here. Now get lost. You can even save some of these tokens."

    Saint turned around and was about to talk away.

    "Thirteen healers. That''s how many people I have met before I came to you. Nobody managed to figure out the reason.

    We don''t have the fruit. All we have is the seed and then some roots and leaves.

    There is not even a tree left behind there because these idiots thought they shouldn''t let others benefit since they couldn''t take the tree from there.

    They destroyed it.

    Anyway, you are the only guy who has enough reputation for me to entrust my subordinates.

    I am even using these stupid tokens to make you work. If you don''t cure them now, I will kill you. I am not even kidding. If you don''t even try with everything you have got, I will break your fucking neck with a single strike."

    Saint halted in his tracks. He didn''t turn around and look at Muscle. But his body became tense and he involuntarily touched his neck in fear of what would happen if Muscle gets pissed at the moment."

    "I will cure them, but it will take some time."

    "I don''t care. But they should be ready within a week. That''s your deadline. I don''t know why a big shot like you who always brags about it asked for time before even diagnosing the situation. You are even avoiding to heal them. Is there anything you are not telling Saint?"

    "Stop with your nonsense and get the fuck out of here. I will get your subordinates back to you in one week.

    You better keep that attitude in check the next time you ask for my favor."

    "Favor? Who is asking for a favor you fucking prick. This is your duty. You owe this to me."

    Muscle waved the token and walked away after bidding farewell to his subordinates.

    Saint looked at the tokens on the table and then at the subordinates. He gritted his teeth in anger. He wanted to kill someone so badly at that moment.

    But he cannot.

    All he can do is suck it up and do his job.

    He looked at his subordinates and spoke.

    "Go and get all of the healers and researchers. I want everything rted to this poison uncovered as soon as possible. Not a single detail should be missed and every subordinate that came here with it, should go as good as new.

    Do you understand?"

    "Yes, sir."

    The subordinate went and informed of Saint''s orders,

    The healers and researchers immediately started the tests. They didn''t ck off since Saint was so serious about this and when they learned the situation about Muscle, they became even more careful.

    They knew that falling into Muscle''s hands at the moment is the worst thing that could happen to their boss.

    But after the next three days of constant work, there are no results whatsoever. They couldn''t figure out what kind of mutated fruit that is since there is nothing left of it. The leaves and roots can only get them so far.

    They didn''t even begin to understand what kind of mutation this tree has gone through and what changes urred. Particrly, not before they could learn are characteristics of the tree before they mutated.

 Chapter 1621 Broken

    Chapter 1621 Broken¡¡¡¡On the fourth day.

    Saint walked around theb with a bunch of documents in his hands. He has been looking through them for a while. But there is no use.

    There are no results that could be useful. They tried to match the properties of the mutated tree with all kinds of other trees they knew of, but none of them are matching.

    They even checked the seed based on its size, shape and other properties. But they couldn''t find a single tree in their books that could match with this.

    After all, no matter how big and powerful an organization is they don''t have awork as vast as Sam. He can literally find two species of people that have never heard of each other and don''t know of each other''s existence.

    As for the nts and herbs, he could say he literally changed some ecosystems by bringing in new species of flora to it.

    So, his organization has a muchrge database and inventory of the herbs and fruits. The mutation has been artificially done in thebs of dusk organization. He is pretty sure that as long as these people don''t know about three different type of trees that grow in three different corners of these vast realms, then there is no way they could ever find a cure for it.

    Maybe, they could if they have time to grow this tree out and experiment on people slowly. But the one thing Saint cannot have at this moment is time.

    That day he felt like that death has been staring it him from afar. Stalking him like a predator eyeing a prey.

    He couldn''t shake of that feeling no matter how hard he tried. He wanted to get rid of it, but it has been way too difficult for him to even avoiding those thoughts.

    He cannot drown himself in work because he is useless and on top of that, his physical condition is deteriorating. Breathing is bing a tedious task.

    There are certain points where he wanted to take a nap and never wake up from it.

    And on fifth day, he was trying to pull off somest straws. He started using different kinds of existing antidotes and mixed them up to see if they will work on the poison in the subordinates'' body.

    But it didn''t do anything at all. In fact, some of them even became worse.

    On sixth day, he finally lost all the hope. He started destroying everything in his surroundings. He destroyed twobs and half of his estate was crumbled.

    Many of his attendants were either severely injured or dead. He even went as far as thinking of ways to escape, but then he realized what kind of person his boss truly is and abandoned the idea instantly.

    He knew there is no escape for him.

    On the seventh day, Muscle finally revisited.

    "What happened? What did you do until now? Why are my subordinates unwell? It seems like your reputation is all that, just some stupid underserving reputation."

    "I can''t cure them."

    "What did you say?"

    "I can''t cure them, because I am useless at this point. I lost my elemental energy usage. My body is deteriorating from inside. All of my muscles are rotting away and my meridians are being clogged as we speak.

    I am useless now.

    Just kill me and be done with it."

    "What? Why would I need to do that. I will report this matter to the Mountain Master and he will take care of this." Muscle said in a surprised tone.

    He was expecting this guy to break. But Saint seemed to havepletely lost all hope. He wants saint to be done for, but not to this extent.

    He expected some more resistance from him. The Saint should deny all of this and still put on a front, then Muscle would have used the Mountain master to deal with this.

    But now that Saint himself has given up, there is not much he can do.

    He cannot have a clean revenge now.

    "If you want to tell him. Go tell him. I have no hope left anyway. I am going to die. So, whether you kill me or tell the boss, doesn''t make much difference to me."

    With that, Muscle reluctantly left along with his subordinates.

    On his way, he did his best to poprize the situation of Saint and let everyone know.

    After that, he sent a message to the Divine formation mountain so that they will take care of Saint before he went back to his own ce.

    There Sam gave the antidote and even treated the side effects that came from the wrong treatment of the Saint.

    "So how did your n go?"

    "I think it went well. But it went too well that Saint broke down."

    "That''s too bad. I would have enjoyed if he had put up more resistance."

    Sam said as he finished treating thest subordinate.

    "Anyway, the offer stays the same. If you don''t get me what I want, then you can forget about asking me for help."

    "I didn''t even get a chance to visit the Divine formation mountain. How do you expect me to get anything?

    Anyway, I might not need your help at all."

    "Don''t be so sure of it."

    As they were speaking one of the subordinates who just left came back running in a hurry.

    "What happened?"

    "A young master came from the Divine formation mountain. He came here to see you."

    Muscle was shocked. He looked at Sam before he ran out of the room and went to the main hall.

    Brother ck is standing there with his hands crossed as he looked around.

    Muscle knelt before him on one knee as he asked.

    "Divine formation mountain''s subordinate reporting to young master."

    "I heard you went to look for Saint. And you even sent a report. Brother Gold went there to take a look, but I also want to hear what the situation is from your mouth.

    So, exin everything in detail since the start."

    "Young master. I just went to Saint because of the poison that was consumed by my subordinates identally. At first I went to all kinds of healers around since I don''t like Saint, but after they all gave up, I can only visit him.

    Since we have our own enmity of sorts, I knew he wouldn''t be too keen on treating them, so I used the tokens I umted over time to force him to treat them.

    But after the week I realized a few things.

    Apparently, Saint has been attacked by a group of four a few days ago and he was also defeated in a healing battle on top of receiving an injury.

    The injury was so serious that Saint lost his elemental ability usage and he said with his own words that his body is rotting from inside.

    And confirming to this, one of the healers that I visited before managed to concoct a cure for the poison. It turned to be not so difficult.

    So, I believed it when Saint couldn''t heal my subordinates after a taking a week.

    As soon as I learned about this, I sent a letter to the Divine formation mountain."

    "Hmm, all of that adds up. But there are a few questions that I want to ask you."

    "Please, young master."

    "From what we know about the four people that attacked the Saint, the main person happened to be a great healer.

    And then we got a report saying that Smith was also attacked by four people. Even though we are not sure that they are the same four people, the mechanisms used were very intricate.

    Brother Silver is there as we speak. But just from the description we received it is not that easy to make.

    And finally, we heard that there are four more individuals that came to your arena.

    Four strong fighters who swept through your opponents. One of them used metal elemental energy, another used wind and cards, someone used cards and thest one used something no one knows.

    I heard that they even beat the crap out of your special subordinates and you have had a private meeting with them.

    From all three incidents we can narrow down the group of four to a certain group which is currently hostile to use three brothers.

    So, I want you to bepletely honest with me.

    Where did that four people go? What did you learn about them?"

    "I learned that the person in charge of the four can use multiple elements and all four of them are friends. They didn''te individually as they imed.

    I offered them to join my team just like usual and they rejected me straight to my face.

    That is all that happened. There is nothing else that I could tell you."

    "Is that really all?"

    "Yes, young master."

    "I hope you are not colluding with that guy just to take revenge on your fellow subordinates. I agree that they have been suppressing you, but that doesn''t give you a right to coborate with those people that came."

 Chapter 1622 Doubt

    Chapter 1622 Doubt¡¡¡¡"I definitely won''t do that young master."

    "Really? But why is it so hard for me to believe you?"

    Muscle was stunned by his words. He is already shit scared that this young master might check Sam and his friends. But now hearing these words is just adding to his worries.

    "Why are you suspecting me young master?"

    But at least he kept his cool for the appearance sake.

    "The person we are talking about is someone I investigated very closely and from the way he operates, it doesn''t make sense for him to juste to your ce and not do anything before he left.

    Do you what would have been more believable?

    Him attacking you and even killing you. Him destroying your arena and your business. Him creating a conflict between you and another subordinate. Him destroying your subordinates'' lives in a seconds and finally you cooperating with him and trying to screw over the organization.

    He is intelligent, resourceful and devious."

    "Young master. You are insulting my honor. My loyalty is not that cheap."

    "Of course I know it is not cheap, but it is not like he cannot afford to buy it.

    Have you ever heard the phrase ''Make a deal with the Devil''? He is the manifestation of that. He can entice any type of person. Loyal, greedy, envious, vengeful whatever you name it, he can make them do his bidding.

    And he has the resources to do it. So, that is how things y out with him. I won''t be surprised if you are in a contract with him and lying through your teeth about it.

    In fact that is far more believable thing than whatever you are currently saying."

    Muscle was shocked beyond believe. He didn''t expect that the young master will be so spot on with his deduction. He couldn''t think of anything that he could say at the moment.

    So, he remained silent for a few moments.

    "What happened? Why are you not speaking? Did I hit the nail in the head?"

    "Y..Young master, it is nothing like that. I am just aggrieved by how little the young master trusts me."

    Muscle said in a very gloomy tone.

    Brother ck frowned.

    "Young master. I have been nothing but loyal to the Divine formation mountain. Even if you say the others are suppressing me, at the end of the day, young masters and the master are the ones who have real authority.

    You just let them trample over me just because they are healers, artisans and formation masters. You let them have more authority than me. Their contributions were more valued than me.

    I have never objected it. I strived harder. I spilled my own blood and killed innocent and guilty as you asked me to without any questions.

    Even after all of this, the first reaction of young master after I reported a situation is to question my loyalty. I don''t know what to do to make you trust me anymore."

    Brother ck looked at him straight for a while before he walked away.

    "Just keep an eye out for his presence. Tell me if you find anything suspicious. It is unlikely for him to ask you to betray us with the stupidly loyal reputation you have.

    So, he must have had some other ns. You better be careful or you will end up like Saint."

    "I will do as young master instructed."

    Brother ck left after that. Muscle and his subordinates didn''t move from their spots for a long while after the young master left before they even made a small movement.

    "Boss, you said nothing wille to us as long as we keep quiet, but this guy seems to be way too dangerous for that kind of thinking.

    We need to get full context from him. Why would young master connect the dots directly to these four people as soon as something happened?

    He seems to be way too dangerous."

    Muscle didn''t even reply and ran to Sam''s room once again. There the trio are also sitting along with Sam as they feasted on some food and wine.

    "Who the fuck are you exactly? What kind of enmity do you have with the young masters? Why did he connect the incident to you even though there are not many concrete leads? Just what did drag me into?"

    "Come on, if you ask so many questions how can he answer them? You need to give him some time to answer them back." Philip saidzily.

    Sam looked at Muscle with a smile and said.

    "Well, let''s just say I am a worthy adversary."

    "An adversary who makes their balls shiver? If those assholes are not scared shitless they wouldn''t have just rushed into investigating the incident as soon as they found a small inkling connecting you to this."

    "Should I feel ttered for that? Anyway, I will take that as aplement. If you want theplete story, I can tell you that."

    "Spill it."

    Sam casually narrated the whole story on how things came to this point.

    "You.. You are the reason for Mari n''s fall?"

    "Of course, I thought the Grey circle has a very wide informationwork, why did you not know about this?"

    "I know about this. I have heard about your name too. But I just didn''t believe it. With Gail, Gamin and Yuvana there, who would believe that a brat like you did this?"

    "Well, its your fault for not believing it. But that''s the gist of my story. Now I am looking for Sivan."

    "Why? You already destroyed his soul. Even you are doubting that it could be restored in the others'' hands. So, why are you still like this? Is that not revenge enough?"

    "Well, I won''t be satisfied until I confirm that kill. And that will only happen when I take that head off of his neck with my own hands. Particrly with my swords. For some reason their spirits are crazy angry at him for trying to take possession of them. They need some of his blood."

    "You crazy ba¡­." *BOOM*

    Muscle''s voice stopped in the middle as he was about to say something. The explosion came as a shock. And the formation of the estate started fluctuating dangerously.

    "I wouldn''t finish that word if I were you." Watt spoke coldly. He looked at Muscle with killing intent. Sam also became silent as he closed his eyes and calmed down. He is much calmer than before this. But it seems like his friends are not.

    Philip also held a bunch of small tokens and got ready to crush. Jack held his sword as he looked at the entrance while his other hand is filled with tokens.

    "What the fuck just happened?" Muscle asked in anger.

    "We just nted some small gifts around. They are actually in very good ces like the formation nodes and with every token we crush we can make the formation fluctuate just like this.

    If timed properly, we can do a lot more than that actually. Do you want to see that?"

    Muscle wanted to say something, but Sam interrupted before that.

    "Keep those away guys. I am alright."

    The trio is pretty reluctant to do that, but after looking at his serious expression they did as they were told.

    "I would like it if you don''t use certain terms to describe me. It is hard for me to keep my emotions in check and it seems like my friends don''t like it either. It would be better if we can maintain the decorum.

    Anyway, you are already bound with the oath. So, there is no use for you to react like this. And with the things I am about to do, you will be forced to take my help. So, if you take my help before that, things would be a lot easier."

    "What do you mean by that? What are you going to do?"

    "You will see soon enough. Don''t worry. If you want to know more, get me what I asked for. Intel on my target."

    Muscle didn''t even know what to say for that. All he could do is strom out of the room to n for what might happen next.

    Meanwhile, in Saint''s residence.

    Brother Gold sat in a chair with his legs crossed and asked.

    "So, that is all? The best healer in the realms lost his temper and red up revealing his true nature right after a few words of provocation and a loss that you couldn''t stomach?

    Do you know what kind of blunder you did just because you can''t stand being beaten and are way too petty?

    The enemy we have is like an apex predator. One sign of weakness and he takes us all like swallowing a midnight snack.

    You left not just some chink in the armor. Rather you didn''t wear it and are carrying it in your hands unable to move. I don''t know what he is going to do next, but my strong belief is that you just triggered an opportunity for a very dangerous guy who might have already entered our territories.

    Idiot."

 Chapter 1623 Discussion

    Chapter 1623 Discussion¡¡¡¡"I apologize for my stupidity young master."

    Saint said in a very low tone.

    "Do you really think an apology is going to cut it?"

    "I know it doesn''t young master. Imitted a grave mistake and it can only bepensated with my death."

    "Good that you have some self-awareness. Just end yourself now and put us all out of this stupid misery."

    "Yes, young master."

    Saint closed his eyes and took a deep breath. All of a sudden, his aggrieved eyes turned to something different. Now it seemed like he became crazy with anger and burning resentment.

    All of his spiritual energy acted up as it converged to a single point. It is concentrated at one particr point. Brother gold frowned and had a bad feeling.

    Saint leaped forward and held Brother gold''s hands abruptly before saying.

    "I know I am going to die, young master. But to suggest my death so easily after I served you all these years so loyally, don''t you think you are being way too cold towards me? That''s why I can''t just die normally.

    I will take you with me to set an example."

    Brother Gold widened his eyes in disbelief. He took out a de and cut his arm instantly.

    Saint tried to move forward and capture him again, but since he was in the middle of self-destructing himself he wasn''t able to do that.

    Brother gold kicked his legs off and moved backward before he activated a transference token and disappeared from the room.

    *BOOM*

    In a massive explosion of energy, Saint''s body turned into a bloody mist.

    And followed by that, the whole room was destroyed.

    Brother gold appeared outside the estate with only one arm. He gritted his teeth in anger as he looked around. All of the Saint''s subordinates are shocked by his state and they wanted to run toward him to help.

    But the look Brother gold gave them stopped them all in their tracks. They didn''t dare take a step forward.

    "You sick bastard. How dare you bring me to this state? I hope you rot in hell with your soul stuck there."

    He took out another token and crushed it. This time the energy took a longer time to envelop him and take him away from that spot because the distance is obviously way too long.

    While things are going like this on Gold''s end, Brother Silver had apletely different scenario. His conversation with Smith is much friendlier and there is much less talk of killing and dying.

    "So, Smith. You know I like you a lot. You are my favorite among all of the subordinates. I can kind of understand why you hid this stuff from me, but that still doesn''t excuse you, man.

    You should have told us as soon as you had an attack.

    I mean, it is true that the master might think you are bing a bit useless. But it is not the first time something like this happened to you. You can always find a way to get your position back.

    But now that you have dyed, not only does your ability is being doubted, but also your loyalty is being questioned.

    Isn''t that a much more troubling thing than normal? This will be much harder for you to redeem from as well. This is going to be a much more troublesome situation. You know that right?"

    Brother Silver said slowly. His face is full of sadness andment.

    "I apologize young master. But all I wanted was to figure out the situation by myself before reporting it to you. I don''t have any other intentions."

    "I know that. But it will be hard to convince my brothers. Do me a favor and give me those mechanisms that attacked you. That will save us a lot of trouble."

    "Yes, young master."

    Smith did as he was told without batting an eye.

    "Anyway, that is all for now. Don''t stop your investigation. But we will also our own thing. Let''s share results if we have any.

    That person that came at you with these, is not a normal guy.

    As for your deteriorating physical condition, let''s try and see if Vardar can do anything. From what we knew Saint is fucked. So, there is not much we can do.

    Vardar owes me a favor and even though he went into hiding for some reason, we might be able to figure out his location. Let''s see if he can fix you. Until then, be careful and try your best to survive."

    "Yes, Young master. I will do as you instructed."

    "That''s great. See youter."

    Brother Silver took out a token and left the ce.

    He reappeared at the Divine Formation mountain. In a small meeting room where all three of them usually gathered.

    Brother ck and Brother Gold are already there. There is also something else present apart from them. Arge ss container that is filled with runes. Brother gold ced his arm inside and it started growing slowly.

    "Fuck, I hate this process. It''s like a million locusts are biting my flesh."

    "But instead of biting your flesh, the flesh is actually being generated here. So, stop your whining.

    Anyway, didn''t you go to meet Saint? Why are you injured? Don''t tell me, Sam fucked you up."

    "Like hell he did. It would have been better if I met Sam at least and this happened in his hands. But this didn''t happen like that. That bastard Saint tried to kill me along with him and I escaped by losing my arm."

    "Hahahaha¡­"

    Brother silver startedughing out loud.

    Brother ck also didn''t control himself.

    "Whatever. What are the reports? Let''s get this over with so that we can have some free time for ourselves. I need one small break before we deep dive into these experiments. I am sure with the presence of our newest enemy, Sam we are not going to get any rest anytime soon."

    "That''s true. From all the information we had of him, he is fucking relentless to say the least. We don''t know how to approach him at all though. I really do wish, we don''t have to fight him any time soon. It would be great if we can coborate actually."

    Brother ck said with a sigh.

    "That is not an option. If we really want to have our legacy stand out, we have to eliminate thepetition. Not just him, we have to take over his Dusk organization. We either have to merge it with our organization or eliminate it altogether.

    His memories and his ideas are what we need but that doesn''t mean, we can leave the rest of the things he built. His organization and his academies are way too full of his knowledge we need to take care of that too."

    Brother Silver said decisively.

    "Are you sure you want to proceed with that?

    I am sure without Sam and his friends, the organization will copse by itself. It will implode without proper guidance and support. So, we don''t have to get our hands dirty if you ask me."

    "Nope, we are destroying that organization no matter what and we are doing it with our own hands. We are not even using the subordinates this time."

    "Alright, alright. We can talk about thatter. As I said finish with your reports so that I can go back and have some alone time."

    They spoke about their reports and that is followed by a significant amount of silent time.

    "So, what do you guys think he is going to do now? I honestly don''t know. If he is going to go after the other subordinates then who is he going after. It seems like he didn''t follow a pattern now, I can''t predict it.

    But if he is going after Muscle himself, how is going to approach it? It has been a long time since he appeared in the arena. ording to the way he operates, there is no way he would wait this long if he is really his target.

    What do you think he is going to do?"

    Brother ck directly voiced his helplessness in the situation.

    "I don''t know either. All I can think of is to inform the rest of the subordinates and also call in some of the favors we have and then make them put their people to keep an eye on.

    We need some outsider perspective since Sam could have investigated our subordinates and would have prepared against them.

    Let''s just alert all the possible targets and see what he does. We might be able to find a pattern after his next attack."

    "Okay, let''s proceed with that. And also Brother Gold, you need to finish off your rest early. We can''t have you resting for a long time. Mind you."

    "Of course, of course. I am not going to waste a lot of time. It is just that I need to clear my mind. I can''t think of anything creative if I am just so stumped like this every day, you know."

    "I know, I know. Please don''t start with this again. See you in two days. I will arrange things rted to Sam''s situation."

 Chapter 1624 Attacks

    Chapter 1624 Attacks¡¡¡¡For the next two days, all three brothers took rest. After assigning the tasks to some of the people that owed them favours, they cut off contact with the outside world as well as within themselves and stayed isted for a while.

    But as they did that, Sam got busy. He and his friends used the dimensional drifter to take some small trips not just these two days, they did that in the seven days that Muscle was busy trying to screw Saint over.

    And in these two days, the final results of those trips finally showed.

    The results are of course not good for the Divine Formation Mountain. Because the rest of the remaining top 6 subordinates'' bases exploded.

    The remaining three people were targeted by Sam and his friends. They set up some liquid energy cells everywhere and just sted their bases.

    They didn''t bother to see if they can really kill some people. They just wanted to create enoughmotion and there is one particr thing that everyone took note of.

    "DUSK IS HERE"

    The three words appeared on all the three bases that were attacked.

    They revealed their identities and didn''t hold them back and these things all happened at the same time.

    As soon as the young masters came out of their short break, the news reached their ears. They couldn''t believe this.

    "What the fuck is happening now? Why did he make such a move and to time all the attacks to happen simultaneously, just how much of the dusk organization was deployed?"

    Brother ck asked as he almost pulled his hair out.

    "I know you are thinking out loud, but can you shut the fuck up? We don''t have any answers to the questions and we have no way of knowing them. So it is fucking frustrating to hear your whining."

    "Alright, what are we going to do now?"

    "Of course analyze this fucking situation. Why did he attack all three of these people together and he even revealed that it is them who did it.

    But when he attacked the first two, he was pretty much discreet. In fact, too discreet to the point that we didn''t know until two of them are almost dead. I heard that Smith''s condition is not good and I can''t contact Vardar for some reason.

    I called in a dozen favours. All from the most proficient intelligence organizations inside and outside of the grey circle. But there is not a single news about him.

    This is all way too chaotic." Brother Gold said as he noted down everything on arge board.

    "The one thing that is bugging me is, why was Muscle left alone.

    To be fair he should also be one of the primary targets. He is strong. He is the second strongest in terms of pure and raw fighting ability amongst the six, but he was left alone, while the others were all attacked?

    Even Saint who is the weakest when ites to fighting ability was targeted.

    This is definitely not a coincidence. I think something is weird here."

    Brother Silver said as he took the pen from Brother gold and added the notes on the board.

    Brother ck thought of all the big talk that Muscle gave and then suddenly spoke up.

    "At first I thought, he was really aggrieved when he made all of that big talk. But now that I think about it, he has been suppressed and taken for granted for a long time. Then why the hell is he talking so big and bringing up grievances all of a sudden?

    I got fooled by his words and didn''t even bother to do a thorough investigation. Maybe he is trying too hard all of a sudden to hide something?"

    He felt like he really caught on to something.

    "Whatever the reason might be, we need to get full answers. What do we do? Go and search it ourselves?"

    "Why do we need to do that? Let''s just use the three subordinates that are attacked. We need to focus on Sivan. We don''t have much time with Sam present. So, let''s just use the three who were just attacked and make them do the investigations and interrogations if necessary."

    "Alright, I will send the orders."

    With that the orders were sent to the three subordinate that were attacked.

    Meanwhile, at Muscle''s ce, he ran to Sam''s room.

    After all, he also got the information and he was shit scared as soon as he heard about the three words left behind.

    "How the fuck did you do that? Why did you do that? Are you trying to create a shit storm for me?"

    He yelled at Sam as soon as he came in. His face turned red in anger and he almost puked blood when he noticed that Sam is sitting on the chair with his legs on the tablezily as he flipped through a notebook while yawning."

    "Why are you yelling like that? You could have just asked normally. How did you pull that off?"

    "Pull what off? The attacks? I do have my means to get out of here make these small things happen."

    "But you were under constant surveince and from the reports, you never left the room most of the time. How is it possible that you managed to do this now?"

    "I already told you, I have my means. And on top of that, your surveince is just a namesake at best. My students back at my organization could figure ways to beat it.

    You better change them or you will be screwed sooner ofter.

    Anyway, it could only be consideredter as I already attracted some hard times for you."

    "Why did you do this?"

    "I want to see a show. Since your young masters are so cocky enough to steal my prey from right under my nose, I need to show them that what they are so cocky about is actually not worth much at all.

    They are so arrogant because of the borrowed power they got from their authority as the young masters, the shitheads of this massive organization in grey circle.

    Their master''s name and the strength of you, the subordinates made them act in whatever way they wanted. There is no way I could let that go.

    So I am destroying whatever that gave them that cocky nature."

    "So, you are nning to kill all of the subordinates? Including me?"

    "No, Muscle. I am pretty sure I am not going to kill you. In fact, I didn''t kill Saint also. I only made him useless, and he was dead because your organization cannot ept uselessness even though he was probably one of the most useful people that worked for the organization until now with utmost loyalty.

    You might be killed by the organization you are so proud of. You might be killed by Gandharva oath if you handle me poorly. But I won''t kill you at all."

    "You¡­"

    "I won''t deliberately reveal my presence here. I won''t deliberately hide it either. If my guess is not wrong, then your young masters will be after you for some time. So, if you want to save yourself, you will have to hide me.

    As long you stick with the oath and want to move around, I will do as you say. I will hide in a ce you suggest, I will do everything you specifically instruct me to do to not get caught.

    But if I still get caught, then there is nothing much we can do. You will have to face the consequences."

    "You nned this from the beginning."

    "Of course I did. Why would I want to stay at your ce if it weren''t for that? You are a subordinate to my enemies. Do you think I want to be your friend or something?"

    "I will definitely get back at you for this. Even though I am bound by the oath now as soon as the oath ends, I will kill you and your friends by myself."

    "Please, do so by all means. I don''t mind. But the problem is you might change your mind before that happens. In fact, I am sure you will change your mind before the oath was passed."

    "We will wait and see then."

    That night no one rted to the Divine Formation Mountain was able to get some rest.

    They all had one thing in their minds. To find out the people that attacked the three subordinates and the three subordinates themselves are very intent of finding Sam as they are extremely pissed at the moment.

    They lived their lives to the fullest as they stayed at the top of the food chain in the surrounding realms. But Sam''s one attack made them lose their dignity.

    They are lost with anger as they couldn''t even find a proper direction to vent. So, as soon as they got instructions from the young masters. They immediately made their move. They didn''t want to dy and for this, they were even willing to work together.

    A shit storm awaited Muscle.

 Chapter 1625 Another contract

    Chapter 1625 Another contract¡¡¡¡The very next day.

    Muscle who was trying his best to rest his mind, didn''t get a chance to do so, because the three remaining subordinates of the top six, graced him with their presence.

    He was shocked and scared at the time. He was already scared since he knew if anyone connects the dots to him, his life would be turned upside down in just one day. But to think the three people who have power to do so will show up the next day the thought came to his mind, is something he cannot even wrap his head around.

    He mustered all of his courage and went to greet them.

    "Hello, why are you all here? That too all of you came at the same time?"

    "You must have already heard about the situation. We were attacked and someone from an organization called DUSK did that.

    From what young masters told us, it is the organization of a foe they made recently."

    "I have heard about it."

    "Well, the problem is, Dusk is probably the one that attacked the Saint and the Smith as well. Now all three of us are attacked. On the other hand, you were spared. Even though they visited you first.

    This raised the suspicions of young master and of course wepletely believe that they are not suspicions but rather the truth.

    Why would a person who attacked five out of six people of the top six and leave you alone? That too, when he visited you earlier than us. That doesn''t make any sense, does it?"

    "Are you using me of colluding with him?"

    "We are not using you; we are actually saying that you are colluding otherwise you will have an exnation for why he didn''t attack you."

    "Don''t mind me for being stupid, but can you fucking exin, how am I supposed to know the thoughts of the person who didn''t attack me?

    Do you think I am a fucking mind reader or a seer? I don''t know why he didn''t attack me. Maybe its because I appeared less of a pussy than you three, that is why he attacked all three of you at the same time."

    Muscle said calmly. His voice is not showing any anxiety that he is being consumed with and it is definitely not showing any anger. It is almost like he is done with all of these usations.

    "What the fuck did you just say to me now?"

    One of the three red up.

    "Okay, I am going to tell you straight. The person who attacked your organization is named Sam.

    He visited me, yes. He disguised himself as someone who wanted to gain some fame in arena and joined along with his friends. He kicked some serious ass, but that is all he did.

    I invited him to join my team without knowing who he was, but rejected the offer. I only knew it was him after the young masters told me.

    I told the story to young masters already and I just told you the same thing again. I don''t give a shit if you guys believe me or not. But just know that I don''t give a shit and also be careful when you use me of this next time. Because I might not be able to control myself.

    I will beat the crap out of all three of you, even if I have to lose an arm and a leg."

    With that he stormed off the room.

    All three of them were dumbfounded and exchanged nces.

    "Why is his reaction like this?"

    One of the three asked in a confused tone. They expected apletely different reaction to be honest. Even if Muscle ispletely innocent, they didn''t expect him to be this strong and confident. After all, even a suspicion of young master is a dangerous thing for them.

    But Muscle is so confident and calm that they didn''t know how to react.

    They would have believed it more if he was yelling and cursing, or shivering in fright. That would have been a very expected reaction. Now they don''t even know how to react to this.

    After some discussion though, they decided to stay back and investigate anyway. Even if they are doubting that Muscle might be really have any connections with Sam because of how confident he is, the young masters told them to investigate, so they might as well do it.

    So, they decided to make themselves at home to the annoyance of Muscle.

    "I don''t think your bluff worked to the extent you wanted it to. I mean, it is a good bluff, but did you really think that would have kept them in check?" Sam asked Muscle who is currently chugging down wine."

    "Of course, I know it wouldn''t work. All I wanted to do is nt a seed of doubt in their minds. Now even they are doubting their earlier ims. In a way my bluff worked. Of course it would have been a lot better if they really fucked off.

    But I don''t think I can expect too much now, can I?"

    "Yeah, that is understandable. So, what do you want to us to do? The way things are going, we are bound to be caught if we stay in the same ce."

    "Of course you are not staying here. I am going to smuggle you out of this ce."

    "Smuggle us out? No that is not happening. Once we are out of your estate we are no longer your guests, then you will get to kill us. We are not letting you do that?"

    Philip hurriedly interjected.

    "Whatever he said." Watt also chimed in.

    "You guys are fucking kidding me right? Anyway, why are you guys butting in? Aren''t you just some extras in this shit? Let him make the decision damn it.

    I can''t have you in my house no matter what. If you get caught, I am going to fucking die. Do you not understand that?"

    Sam shrugged and said.

    "I mean, they do have a valid point. There is a chance that you might kill us right after taking us out of your estate. We would prefer to stay here."

    "How about this? I will write up another oath that I will not attack you no matter what after I leave you out of the estate. Just escape from here. Within the next few months, I will not touch a single strand of your hair if you don''te in contact with me.

    How does that sound?"

    "That doesn''t sound like a bad deal? What do you guys say?" Sam asked his friends.

    "If you are okay with it, then we are okay with it. But you better draft the contract properly. Otherwise he might find some loopholes."

    "Like what? Like telling your location to the other three. After all, even though he said he wouldn''t attack us, doesn''t mean he cannot tell the details to someone who can attack us."

    "That is a fair point, isn''t it Muscle." Sam asked as if he is genuinely conflicted.

    "You brats, can you just draft a contract and be done with it? I am fucking done with you guys."

    "Come on, don''t be like that. Treat us like your friends and be a bit more tolerant. We did bond over destroying amon enemy. We could be consideredrades in arms at least."

    "No, we are not. We are definitely not. Asking your help and taking down Saint with that, is the biggest fucking mistake I have ever done.

    If I just let Saint be and let him die a bitter all by himself, I would have had a much better life in the past few days.

    I wouldn''t have caught the attention of the young master. I wouldn''t have been stuck with these fuckersing to my home and keeping an eye on me.

    I would have had some peace."

    "Alright, alright. Don''t be so hard on yourself. I will draft a contract and you can sign it."

    "Do it quick. At the rate they are investigating, they will be here in a hour to search this ce. I want you to leave within that hour."

    "Alright. I am drafting it as fast as I can, can you not be so eager to throw us out?" Sam said as he started writing the contract.

    When he was finally done, there were only thirty minutes of estimated time left.

    "What do you think? I was very thorough with it."

    Muscle basically skimmed through the contract and he was shocked.

    "Why is it written in such a way? Why does it say that we are friends and shit?"

    "Come on, I consider you a friend since you helped me leave a chink of the three young masters. Is it really that much of a bad thing?"

    "Whatever. I will just fucking sign. Let me get that Gandharva."

    "That would be great. Thank you."

    Within a few moments, Muscle is back with Gandharva and they signed the contract with an oath.

 Chapter 1626 Death

    Chapter 1626 Death¡¡¡¡The Contract was finally signed.

    Muscle finally heaved a sigh of relief. He sent the Gandharava off and took out his divine dimension fragment.

    "Get inside."

    "So, this is your so called smuggling us out? How boring? I thought you could do something original and different." Philip said with a tone ofment. He closed his eyes and shook his head slightly as if he is really disappointed.

    "Come in, you little shits. I don''t have the whole fucking day."

    "Alright, alright. Guys let''s go. He might die if we torture him anymore. Lets go." Sam said with a smile.

    They went into the divine dimension fragment one after another before Muscle took them out of the estate. But what he didn''t notice is that as soon as he left, a shadow mice slowly took something out of its jade ring and ced it on the table along with a recording crystal.

    It them followed Muscle to get out the estate.

    Sam and his friends were dropped off in the forest outside the estate.

    "Are you sure you can leave from here on, without anyone else noticing?"

    "Yes. We have our own tricks up our sleeves. Anyway, it was nice working with you Muscle. If you need any help in the future, just contact me.

    I can help you with anything in this world."

    "The only help I need from you is for you to fuck off from here and never show your face again. If you meet me after the contract period is over, I will kill you myself."

    "That would make you feel good, doesn''t it? Too bad, we will never know how good though."

    Sam turned around and left with his friends.

    Muscle also left the ce and went back to the estate.

    But as soon as he entered the estate, he felt that the atmosphere is strange. All of the subordinates who should have been busy with various tasks are currently standing still as they gathered in the main hall.

    Inside the main hall, the three subordinates that came to investigate are standing while looking at the video from a recording crystal.

    Muscle was confused, but only until he heard the conversation that was being yed in that recording crystal.

    He was shocked to say the least.

    His feet were rooted to the ground and he was unable to even breath for a moment. He couldn''t help but look around at the faces of his subordinates.

    They are all equally terrified just like him. He wanted to find at least one face, to see the culprit. But there is not a single normal face in the crowd. His three peers are staring at him coldly. With anger and hate burning up.

    Those are the only faces that could be considered normal at this moment.

    Because the video is of the conversation between him and Sam about the second contract that they just signed a few minutes ago.

    As for why he is looking for the culprit, he doesn''t want to believe that he was tricked by Sam. But from the looks of it that is true.

    He would have felt better if one of his subordinates betrayed him in the hopes of jumping ship. Because he was so sure that he will never be outyed by Sam and with that confidence, he went ahead and built a cooperation with him.

    But now he made a fool out of himself and the rest of the Divine formation Mountain.

    The three of his peers took out their weapons and stepped towards him.

    "With all the strong and mighty words, it seems like this is all your loyalty amounted to. No wonder you were suppressed in the organization. It was necessary. It seems like young masters and Master already knew of your rat like nature.

    You bastard."

    One of them spoke as they threw their spear at Muscle.

    Muscle dodged the spear and caught it mid-air before saying.

    "Everyone here knows whether they suppressed in fear of betrayal or if I betrayed them with the frustration of suppression. You don''t need to create new definitions of my character."

    "You dare refute it."

    "There is nothing that I would not dare to do at this moment. Since it hase to this, my death is inevitable. I might as well die fighting. I will destroy as much of the Divine formation mountain as I can.

    And I will start with killing all three of you."

    With those words, he turned to the rest of his subordinates.

    "I dragged you guys into this. I have tried my best to nurture you all into your independent selves. Some of your seniors left my wing and settled down in various areas in and out of the grey circle.

    Leave this ce and use my personal space gate to get out of here. I will stop these guys while you escape. Live your lives peacefully.

    I am sure these guys won''t bother wasting time searching for some normal subordinates. So, you should be safe."

    Hearing those words, the subordinates all bowed down their heads. Some of them are unwilling to die, but they are also hesitant to get away. Some of them didn''t hesitate and ran away instantly after bowing to Muscle.

    Some of them took out their weapons and got ready to attack the subordinates of Muscle''s peers.

    But everyone made their decisions pretty quickly and soon fight broke out.

    Sam and his friends are sitting on arge tree in the forest away from the estate as they used telescopes to take a look at Muscle''s mansion.

    "Some of them are escaping. But they are a lot less than I thought. I assumed more people would escape."

    "Guess there are some loyal people under Muscle too. But too bad, they are all going to die anyway."

    As they spoke, the mansion crumbled down a bit and finally they all got a much better view to the inside of the mansion.

    Muscle is single-handedly fighting against three more people.

    The battle went on fiercely as all people are grinding at each other with killing intent.

    Sam and the trio watched as the whole mansion was destroyed while everyone was fighting. Even though it was fierce, it didn''tst too long.

    First of all, Muscle waspletely suicidal. He didn''t care about how much damage he was taking. His moves are rash and critical.

    The three opponents were really shocked by that disy. Before they knew it, all three of them were critically injured in one way or the other before they managed to control Muscle.

    They cut off his leg and made his arms unusable, before he stopped fighting.

    "Crazy bastard."

    One of three spat as he kicked him from the side.

    But Muscle still had a smile on his face. He didn''t look disappointed, he didn''t feel that he lost either.

    He just felt a bit mncholic over the deaths of his subordinates, but weirdly he felt at peace that he has such loyal subordinates which just meant that he didn''t take the wrong path. Half of his subordinates remained without any trouble whatsoever.

    He heaved a sigh as he got ready to lose his life.

    But at this moment, right before his opponents couldnd their finishing blow, they all felt a type of energy fluctuation from all around.

    They tried toprehend where itsing from, but they couldn''t.

    "HAHAHAHAAH¡­"

    Muscle startedughing out loud.

    "What the fuck is happening you bastard? What is this energy fluctuation? Why are youughing?"

    "You didn''t win, you assholes. That is why I amughing.

    The person who won is the one behind all of this.

    That bastard Sam. He won over everyone of us. You are all going to die, right here right now."

    "What?"

    Energy suddenly started fluctuating dynamically. The surroundings became chaotic and a small sized energy storm urred.

    Right before¡­

    *BOOM*

    Massive energy explosion enveloped everyone within the mansion.

    People felt the energy eroding their flesh and blood until it reached their bone. When the explosion as over, all that was left is arge patch of tnd with not even bones left behind.

    Sam looked at it and nodded.

    "This type of controlled explosion is working well. We should use it more often. It seems like the damage is going on molecr level. There are not even any bones left even though opponents are stronger.

    But the nodes and the energy required are way too much."

    "Yeah, and setting up is not easy. Thework is tooplicated." Philip chimed in from the side.

    "You are justzy." Watt cut Philip''s words off.

    And then the bickering started.

    All four of themughed and left as they bickered.

    Without even a single sign of the fact that they just killed almost a hundred people and more than half of them don''t know why they are dying and most of them don''t know how they died at all.

    They are acting as if everything is natural. Of course, the real impact urred somewhere else. The people who should be really affected are affected.

 Chapter 1627 Gap

    Chapter 1627 Gap¡¡¡¡The news reached the Divine Formation Mountain.

    Even though Muscle, Smith, Saint, and the rest of the subordinates have their own subordinates and organization of sorts, they don''t fall under the Divine formation mountain officially.

    They are just there to make the original subordinates'' life easier.

    So, the Divine Formation Mountain barely has any subordinates and out of them the top 6 are now useless.

    Saint died, Smith can''t do anything anymore and the remaining four died on the same day in a massive trap after they exhausted each other.

    This is the biggest blow the Divine Formation Mountain could have at any point of time. The three young masters who were in the middle of working on restoring Sivan, when they got the news and as soon as they did, they stopped everything they were working on and rushed to Muscle''s ce to take a look at what happened.

    "What the fuck really happened here?"

    That is the first thought that popped into their minds when they saw therge tnd.

    Thend is so t and the soil is so loose that anyone would have thought that someone is trying to farm something there. The soil is perfect for seeding.

    The whole thing made everyone feel a bit disturbed and distraught. There are no answers for them to find. The ce is cleared of all the spiritual energy explosion''s signs and traces. It appeared perfectly normal.

    "Just how was he able to do this? To clear off a mansion full of servants and four people who are inte-stage of the Astral ne Consummation stage. How is this even feasible. When he barely hit the peak of Astral ne Transcendence.

    This doesn''t make any sense.

    Even for us, to achieve something like this, we need months if not years of preparations. How do we face him now?"

    Brother ck said as he clenched his fists and gritted his teeth. The whole thing is a mess. They cannot possibly find any clues from this ce, which led their investigation to a roadblock.

    "Let''s go back."

    Brother Silver said in a gloomy tone.

    "Are we not going to look for them?"

    "No, we are going to go back and report this to the Master. We will let him deal with the investigation part, while we work on recovering Sivan. Let''s call in some of the Master''s favors. We will use them to repair his soul faster.

    We cannotg behind anymore.

    If Master himself gets involved, we can obviously rx a bit about Sam. He will take care of it on his own. We need to get Sivan''s memories as soon as possible. If Sam had nned even more of his shitty schemes, then there might be a chance his next target might be Sivan.

    So, let''s proceed with this n and finish it up as fast as we can."

    Brother Silver exined and he didn''t even bother to hear their reply before taking out his transference token and leaving the ce. Brother Gold and Brother ck exchange a nce and sighed before they left as well.

    After they arrived at the Divine Formation Mountain, they went to the peak where their workspace and residences are. Within thatrge building, there is one room that ispletely isted from the rest.

    They went to that room and knocked on the door.

    "Come in."

    An old but firm voice came from inside.

    All three of them walked in and knelt down on the ground.

    "Greetings Master." All three of them greeted their master in unison.

    Opposite to them, an old man sat on the ground. He had brown hair with a few grey strands here and there. The hair is long and a lot of it is ced like arge heap on the ground.

    His upper body is bare. His body is lean, but not very muscr. He looked like a normal person who just didn''t move for ages.

    He is dirty, a bit grimy and the whole ce stank.

    "What brings you here?"

    He asked calmly.

    Brother Silver looked at the other two before exining the whole situation.

    "So, you coveted the knowledge of someone else and tried to obtain it by stealing his prey. Now that certain someone is attacking our subordinates. Not just attacking he seeded in killing five of our subordinates while crippling one.

    You want me to call in favors to clean him up while you will steal the knowledge.

    Is that the whole situation? Did I recite it properly?"

    All three of them didn''t dare reply.

    They just stayed with their heads down without even a sound.

    "Fine, I don''t know what have seen in that guy''s knowledge that you crave it so much. But you already made a move and there is no taking back. I will punish you ording to the rules, but before that, I need to save you first.

    The only problem is Gail is involved in this shit.

    We need to be careful."

    "Why does Master need to be careful of that person? I am sure you can handle him."

    Brother ck spoke.

    "Idiot. You don''t know the height of the heavens and depths of hell. That man, Gail is someone you cannot even fathom. So, don''t go around throwing random ims about me being able to handle him.

    The only reason he wasn''t able to reach me is because of my formations and the way I hid. But if you really piss him off and he risks it all, things will get really messy.

    So, be careful from now on. Don''t go around provoking people that you have no business provoking."

    "You wouldn''t say this if you had seen what his knowledge holds master.

    To perfect our legacy, I think that is what wecked for so long. His thought process and innovative idea."

    "Perfecting my legacy? Who are you brat to do that? Just because you called me master, do you think you have a right to perfect my legacy?

    Brat. Get lost."

    With that the three disciples left the room. The Mountain master also stood up as he started contacting people that can get these things done.

    For the next few days, many people reached out to help Mountain master with the task of find out Sam''s location.

    But all of their resukts ended up showing nothing.

    Sam is nowhere to be seen anywhere in the grey circle for the whole time. Nobody knows where he is gone. Of course, he knows it and his friends know it as well.

    "Why are you here again?"

    Philip asked as he leisurely basked under the sun in the resort of Naga Loka.

    "We are waiting. If my guess is not wrong, I am sure they will be searching for us all over the Grey circle. But we won''t be there. Let them search. Let them dig up as much information as they can. But it won''t be of no use. We will let them go dry for a while."

    "But won''t they hasten the progress of recovering Sivan? That will be a problem."

    "It is not going to be that much of a problem. If they are hastening it, then they are bound to make some mistakes. That''s how things work. So, let them make a mistake. I will fondly wait for it."

    "What if they didn''t make any mistake?"

    "Then it''s fine. Anyway, since we already destroyed the key yers of the organization, there is not much they can do in terms of the whole organization. They are temporarily crippled in a way.

    So, we can just proceed with the original n and deal with the mountain master and his disciples. Nothing will change by that much."

    "What you are saying makes sense? But what if things don''t along the way? Do you have any escape ns?"

    "What else? Drag you into the divine dimension and then use spatial transference. That is all there is to it."

    "So, the good old escape. That''s fine."

    For the next few days, they waited there. They didn''t do anything. No hunting, no practicing, no cultivation. They just basked under the sun, surfed, and ate everything they wanted.

    Meanwhile, grey circle was riddled with people who are looking for Sam''s whereabouts and the more he stayed on the down low, the more people got interested.

    This also got them some ideas on how to make some efforts to attract and gain some money if they really need it.

    But after these few days, Sam and the trio finally went back.

    That is exactly the day the three young masters finally had some progress on healing Sivan''s soul.

    And also that day, the people are so exhausted from the whole search regarding Sam that they didn''t look for him anymore.

    Then Sam finally had some peace along with his friends even within the grey circle.

    After that, was the time for investigation. Sam is waiting to know the results of what the young masters did with Sivan. But he cannot get any insights into the progress.

 Chapter 1628 Training

    Chapter 1628 Training¡¡¡¡Sam and his friends roamed around as they hunted and practiced.

    All of them are looking for ways to increase their strength and breakthrough.

    Sam is trying to break through to the Astral ne Consummation. As for the remaining three, they are trying to reach the peak first.

    It will be hard the fight against the three young masters much less the old man that is above all of them if they at least didn''t have this much strength.

    The three young masters are already in the consummate stage and it will be hard even if the trio reached the peak stage.

    But Sam has something else in mind. He wanted to try a very different trinket that he prepared especially for a situation like this.

    And he is going to use one of the tools that he hasn''t used for a really long time.

    After one week of roaming around, they finally camped at a spot and all four of them attempted a breakthrough at the same time.

    The breakthrough didn''t take long. With the excessive energy of high-level beasts they are taking in, it was smooth sailing to say the least.

    Now, that they are done with this, the next challenge is the real one.

    "So, how are you going to attack the Divine formation mountain? You didn''t exin this in the n until now."

    Philip as he ced a gourd of some special wine on the campfire to warm it up slightly. The light is slightly cold and the campfire is warm. Even though they couldn''t be affected by these sensations too much because of their level, it felt pretty rxing for some reason.

    "I said I have been working on something and it seems like there are finally some results. I just want to test it out on you guys before we can proceed."

    "What are we waiting for? Let''s try it out then."

    "Not now, let''s wait until morning."

    That night they just spent most of the time rxing. For the first time in a while, Sam is feeling a bit anxious. Because this time, the opponents are tricky and powerful in a different way. He was like that and that is how he defeated all of his enemies until now.

    He found their weaknesses; he used the technology to find a way to bypass all of the differences in terms of strength. He yed around with their emotions and lured them into traps that they cannot escape.

    He made them feel despair by wearing them out bit by bit. But now the situation is different. His opponents are also used to doing all the tricks he did just now.

    On top of that, the mountain master who is already way too powerful than him is also used to doing these tricks.

    From what the Demon Soul swordsman said, he is one of the trickiest individuals and his tricks and methods might even be more pathetic than Sam''s own.

    There is no way that Sam could not feel anxious after listening to that. It is almost a natural thing to feel that way.

    That is why, he wants to find a way to level his ying field and for that, he found a way to use some of his newly learned tricks on some of the oldest equipment that he got from the Pce of Inheritance.

    If this works out, then there is a great chance that he would be able to deal with the Divine formation mountain without any losses. But if it fails, even if he escapes, he might have to bear some consequences.

    That night, he kept on tinkering with something, and the next day, they were ready for testing.

    Sam is wearing a pair of gloves as he stood in front of Philip. He didn''t suppress his cultivation to Philip''s level and both of them started fighting.

    Sam doesn''t know exactly what the fighting style of the three young masters is, but he is sure that is different from a normal cultivator from what little he saw back at the Mari n.

    So, he is trying to replicate what they did and how he would have done things if he fought like them. Philip felt overwhelmed soon. Of course, it is not as overbearing as if Sam fought with his own fighting style, but still, the difference in the power and the way Sam adapted to this new way made it hard for him to stand for long.

    He tried his best to endure it though.

    After a while when Sampletely gained upper hand, with just a thought, the gloves he wore started glowing with a weird glow. The spiritual energy riled up with spatial elements mixed in it and Samnded a proper palm strike on Philip''s chest.

    It is not exactly powerful, but itnded cleanly without any chance of deflecting.

    Philip suddenly felt the energy enveloping himpletely and before he knew it, he was sucked by a force.

    Sam who was standing there also disappeared as if it is on cue as the second glove on the other hand also glowed just like the first one.

    Watt and Jack were stunned as they didn''t expect this to happen. They looked around anxiously. But they couldn''t find both of them.

    After ten minutes, both Sam and Philip came back to the same ce they disappeared. Philip who was already overpowered felt exhausted as he dropped to his knees.

    *PANT*

    *PANT*

    "How the fuck did you do that? I haven''t seen you use that thing for so long that I almost forgot its existence, but to think that the moment you start using it again, you are using it for something like this?

    You are insane.

    How did this transfer even work?"

    Philip was shocked.

    Even with all the things he witnessed that are created by Sam right in front of him, this ispletely different.

    No matter what Sam did, there is one thing he was unable to do. That is to mess with the trinkets that were given to him by the gods through the pce of inheritance. It is not that he never thought of it, but it was very difficult for him to do so.

    One could say it was near impossible with his strength and expertise.

    But now, it seems like he finally started doing that also. He opened a new door with the way he works now.

    Jack and Watt exchanged a nce. Just like Philip, they also saw way too many things that should have been impossible but were still created by Sam. So, for them to see Philip this surprised over something, they don''t know how to react.

    "What did you see exactly? Or did your brain finally give up after taking too many hits to your head?"

    Watt asked curiously.

    "You can see it for yourself, you silver pig."

    "Who are you calling a pig? You dumb metal frog."

    Watt and Philip bickered as they exchanged spots.

    Sam once again fought against Watt. The battle was one-sided and soon both of them disappeared again.

    When they came back, Watt also had a stunning look. Of course, his reaction is not as intense as Philip''s.

    In fact, along with the shock, there is a lot of excitement in those eyes.

    "Oh my god. You finally did it. I was wondering when you are going to do it. You finally did it."

    He hugged Sam in excitement. Sam smiled and said.

    "You are way too excited for a guy who just go his ass kicked."

    "It''s not the first time that I got my ass-kicked. What''s new about it?"

    Watt just brushed off thement and then let Jack take the spot. Jack had a much calmer reaction than the other two.

    Philip looked at the two of them and freaked out.

    "Why the fuck are your reactions so different than mine? How can that happen? Why are you not freaked out as I did? Don''t you understand how massive this is? Even if the changes and tinkering he did were small, they are the start of something massive.

    Are you not understanding it? Did you guys go dumb?"

    "Nope, you are the dumb one here. That is why you are overreacting to such a small thing. All we did is add an additionalyer to the passageway."

    Sam casually said and went hunting something.

    Philip didn''t even know what to say.

    "You guys need to train with these things. Or you would be in some really big trouble. I will be your sparring partner for the next few days, you need to be able to use this on the stronger opponents.

    I don''t know how strong the young masters exactly are, but I am pretty sure, it is impossible for you guys to defeat them with the level difference.

    And remember, I am not gonna go easy on you. Get ready to get your ass-kicked."

    All three of them exchanged a nce and shrugged. It has been a while since they trained with Sam. They are kind of looking forward to it.

 Chapter 1629 Help

    Chapter 1629 Help¡¡¡¡While the friends are training and goofing around in their camp. Another week passed by.

    But in this week, Sam constantly received thetest news with the help of shadow mice and the spectres from the nearest city.

    He was looking out for the information about the Divine Formation Mountain''s movements. He learned that the search parties were cancelled, but there is a passive search going on around.

    Along with that, the news came out that the Mountain Master himself is looking for them and all the favors he pulled turned out to be useless.

    So, in the past week in a way the searches increased as everyone is interested in gaining the Mountain Master''s favour. In fact, the original organizations that ran the search parties also increased their efforts.

    They are afraid that they will lose the favour of this Mountain master. After all, they put too much effort and too many resources into it. It is not something they can lose at the moment.

    But this time, Sam didn''t worry. He is confident that he can hide for a few days in the Grey circle even if all of the circle is searching for him.

    Evenst time, the only reason he left along with his friends is because he wanted to rx before things really get serious and also he doesn''t want to put a lot of effort in hiding since their only requirement was to not get caught.

    So, leaving was better particrly when he can do that in an instant.

    Now, it is necessary for them to stay here and learn the important news.

    So, the whole week, he learned how different people are searching for him and his friends in various ways. But there is one news on thest day of the week, that he very much didn''t feel okay with.

    It is actually more of a message than the news and the message is from the Mountain Master to Sam.

    "The person that the Mountain master''s disciples brought here and was in thea has been recovering.

    Since Sam and his friends are here to deal with this guy, then cane and try if they are reallypetent."

    That is the gist of the message and Sam heard it.

    "Do you think this is a trap?"

    "It is not just a trap, it is a tant invitation into a trap. This is going to be really troublesome if we just dive into it headfirst."

    "So, what are we going to do?"

    "We are going to reach the Divine formation mountain, set up some of our traps and then finally go and deal with the Mountain Master and his disciples.

    "It would be hard to get into the Mounain range though.

    After all, there is a lot of attention focused on that area. Many people areing in and going as if there is nothing else in their path."

    "Well, that actually ys to over advantage."

    "So, we are taking up good old-fashioned infiltration? Do you think that works?"

    "Well it is not a hundred percent there yet. But it soon will be.

    Anyway, remember everything I said to you guys until now and remember the things that you learned in the past week. This is going to be the toughest job yet and we might need at least three disguises by the time it was finished.

    We are not going to operate on the Mountain range for more that three hours beforeing out of it through the transference token.

    If the transference token was applied after you got caught, and you cannot warp out of the capture, then there is a second thing you use. It is actually a blue pill, but I don''t know exactly what pills stand for what.

    But when you use it, your body will release a discharge of spiritual energy that creates something that will destroy the surrounding spiritual barriers for an instant."

    "So, we need to time that precisely. This is going to be hard."

    "Of course, it is going to be, but at least it gives you a chance to really escape from situations. And if the shit really hits the ceiling and there is no other way, you can only resort to the emergency means I told you about.

    But do remember that it is going to dangerous if you are even a secondte, but there is a great chance that it will work properly."

    "Alright, we get it. Stop nagging us so much." Philip yawned.

    Sam just shook his head and said.

    "Just be careful."

    They discussed some more of their ns and finally made their move.

    They directly went to the surrounding forests of the Divine formation Mountain and started scouting that mountain range.

    As expected there are many people who are visiting the Divine formation Mountain because of various reasons.

    One of them is of course to catch Sam and his friends. They want to get as many details as they can. And the secondary reason is also rted to the first one. If people that areing for the first reason are some influential families, ns or organizations, there are some other people who areing in hopes of being recruited by some of these organizations.

    They know for sure that catching Sam and his friends is an achievement that they cannot even dream to have. There is no way, they could just snatch this from the rest of the organziations, so instead of trying to achieve the impossible, they would rather join some and make a significant contribution in the process and finally gain some favour from these organizations.

    So the mountain range is bustling.

    Sam and his friends wore their first set of disguises. They are dressed up like some kind of creatures that is bred by multiple races. They didn''t go for the main area of the mountain, but there are some people that are specially employed by the mountain master that are scouting all of the mountain range.

    These people belong to some kind of hidden mercenary organization. No one knows exactly what organization that is, but people call it Night and all of their people dress in thick dark ck.

    No matter who or what they are doing as long as they feel that people are suspicious, they can directly capture them and bring them to the Divine formation mountain.

    The first part of Sam''s n is obviously scouting and when they did that, they noticed that most of the Night members are actually staying around the formation nodes that he identified.

    The Divine formation mountain obviously has many formations. There is even a barrier that restricts transference tokens from taking people out of the mountain range, and there are a dozen other formations that serve many different purposes.

    Sam identified as many as he can and scouted the ces with the nodes. But the presence of the Night members might hinder their next n.

    After three hours of scouting all of them came out of the range and met at their meeting point.

    "So, I am sure you guys have seen the Night members. What do you think? Does anyone of your scouting locations have an opening?" Sam asked his team.

    "No. Not a single one."

    "Same here."

    "Same for me too."

    "My situation is worse. I have double the security in every one of my points. We need to be careful with this."

    "So, what''s the n?"

    "Distraction. We need to distract the Night members and make them move from the nodes."

    "That''s easy, all we have to do is create somemotion near the node areas and things would be fine."

    "Its not that simple. Remember that our opponent is just as smart as us and they know how we think. Because they are also simr to us in many ways and approaches. They will find that out easily. As soon as we create amotion at the nodes, the first thing they will examine is around the nodes to see if we messed with them."

    "Then what do we do?"

    "What else? We will create amotion, but in a different way. But for that, we need someone strong and crazy with the guts to deal with the Night members."

    Sam smiled and took out the dimensional drifter.

    He wanted to deal with this matter on his own along with his friends, but with the way things are going, he need some help from back home.

    So, he went back to bring some of his team members.

    Night Ghost, Saber Monarch, Five Elemental King, Paras, and Vidyut.

    He brought all five of them.

    "I knew you would need me, Sam. Everyone thought you ditched us, of course, it makes sense that you ditch others, how can you ditch me. I am your most capable subordinate."

    Sabre Monarch said as he put his hand arm over Sam''s shoulder and said with a cheeky grin.

    "You are just at the middle stage of Consummate after all this time? I am already at the Initial stage. In a year I am sure I will kick your ass. What''s the point of having you around then?"

    The cheeky grin froze.

 Chapter 1630 Riot

    Chapter 1630 Riot¡¡¡¡Sabre Monarch looked pale and defeated at Sam''s words.

    Sam looked at the rest of the teammates and said.

    "I know that I told you all that you could work for me for a decade. But most of it came to an end way faster than that. And for now I just wanted to deal with the stuff on my own. It is not that you are not useful anymore, it is just that you are way too useful that I became a bitzy and didn''t n for things properly.

    So, I hope you understand didn''t take this to heart."

    Night Ghost just smiled and said.

    "Don''t worry Sam. We can understand. We have all being in that ce before. The rest of the teammates are disappointed though. Particrly the twin sisters. You should treat us to a nice meal next time."

    "Of course, that''s a given."

    Sam started exining his n to them and all of them listened carefully to get a proper understanding of what their roles were.

    After everyone understood what they need to do, they got into the disguises. Of course Sam and the trio didn''t use the previous ones. They used apletely new set and Sam had to make a different set for the teammates.

    The teammates went first while Sam and the trio followedter.

    They went near their respective nodes once again and just made their individual camps as if they are staying there. This is amon urrence within the whole mountain range.

    And even the Night members didn''t feel that its weird because there are many people who camped close to them since they felt like it gives them ayer of additional security.

    But of course, they didn''t know that this is done for apletely different reason.

    After they camped, the team members finally came. They moved in different directions within the mountain range. Only in one directly only Night Ghost and Vidyut went there together.

    Nobody suspected them, and no one thought of them as someone special.

    The opinion was only good for a few moments though. Because as soon as they reached a certain spot, Night Ghost turned around and punched Vidyut in the face.

    Vidyut who stood there until then, suddenly flew threw the air as he crashed into the trees nearby. Everyone around them stopped in their tracks and were stunned by the scene.

    "What did you call me you bastard? Who do you think you are?"

    Night Ghost yelled as he started walking towards Vidyut.

    Vidyut wiped the blood off of his mouth and spat some on the floor before enveloping his body with purple lightning.

    "How dare you, you sick filthy piece of shit. You dare attack me? I will kill you today."

    He took out his bow and started shooting arrows at Night Ghost.

    Five arrows left with lightning surrounding them.

    Night Ghost deflected all of the arrows and lunged at Vidyut with a punch.

    Vidyut took a step back and defended himself with a barrier as the force of the punch came at him. He kept on shooting arrows and the whole ce turned into a battle field. As things are like that, the Night members became a bit cautious. They were ready to stop the battle and two of them made the first move.

    One of them went to meet the Night Ghost and the other went to stop Vidyut. They tried to block their attacks, but all they managed to do was deflect them, which caused the attacks to be targeted atpletely different spots.

    Three people who are just watching the show from the sidelines were attacked and they obviously became furious.

    But they noticed that it''s the fault of the Night members, so they tried to endure it and just brush it off.

    The only problem is Night Ghost and Vidyut didn''t stop after that. They kept on going with the battle.

    The Night members were surprised. They didn''t expect that something like this would happen. Just the reputation of Night was enough to stop these people in a normal case, but even Night Ghost and Vidyut didn''t care about that reputation, they should have cared about the Divine formation mountain and the Mountain master that hired them.

    Too bad, they wouldn''t know that Night Ghost and Vidyut are not here to kiss Mountain Master''s ass rather they are here to assist the group that wants to kick his ass.

    Soon the battle turned intense and within a few minutes, the Night members were severely injured because of the attacks and in process they also injured a half a dozen other people who are spectating.

    The rest of the Night members in the surroundings started making their move. When Night Ghost and Vidyut saw them, both of them stopped fighting for a moment and looked at them coldly.

    "What do you bastards want? Huh? What the fuck is the matter with you? Can''t you see I am trying to beat some sense into this sick bastard?"

    Night Ghost crazily yelled as he punched the nearest Night members.

    Vidyut also looked at them and shot one of the members.

    "I will kill you all if you dare interfere."

    The battle became intense and instead of fighting each other, they started fighting the Night members. Of course they are bound of miss some attacks ''identally'' and hit other people around making them join the fight as well.

    Night Ghost and Vidyut quickly garnered arge number of enemies, which made them start running and moving around a lot making the battlefield bigger so that they will have enough space to take care of themselves.

    And in process, Night Ghost roamed to a different spot from before with more than a couple of dozen people following him and ''identally'' attacked a person who is sitting on a rock while polishing his sabre.

    Sabre Monarch looked at Night Ghost and Night members who attacked him and yelled out loud.

    "YOU SONS OF BITCHES. I WILL SKIN YOU ALL ALIVE."

    He jumped into the battle and one of his sabre strikes killed two Night members at the same time while it was blocked by Night Ghost.

    "You fucker. How dare you attack me?"

    Night Ghost riled up once again and Sabre Monarch also joined the battle just like that.

    Meanwhile Vidyut appeared at a spot with another couple of dozen people following him and one of his arrows and two of Night members'' attacks ''identally''nded on a person who is grinding his axe on a whetstone.

    "ASSHOLES. HOW DARE YOU ATTACK ME?"

    Paras jumped right into the battle and attacked them.

    The battles grew intense and many people are attacking each other for no goddamn reason. It is just that idental attacks happened again and again and soon a guy who can use Five elemental energies at the same time jumped in to the battle.

    The Night members couldn''t handle the situation as it became too big and they had to dispatch everyone at their disposal just to manage the situation properly.

    Finally Sam and the trio got the chance toe out of their own camp and ess the nodes.

    Sam already prepared something really special for these situations and distributed them among his friends.

    They ced all of the traps in the exact positions he notified in the next twenty minutes.

    They went out the formation after that. The Night members finally managed calm the situation down as all the instigators of the battle are exhausted and escaped to not get caught.

    They just went on to reorganize everything and the leader of the Night members went to report to the Mountain Master of the Divine Formation Mountain.

    "So, a riot was started and how did it end?"

    Mountain master asked calmly.

    "They almost killed themselves my lord. One of them even burned through their life force to escape. I could feel the vitality being burned out of his body."

    "So, you are sure that they are seriously fighting and are aiming to kill each other?"

    "Yes, Sir."

    "How many people had died because of this?"

    "Thirty-eight sir. At least that is what we knew of. We don''t know if there are any other people that died. We are still searching all the corners the battle has spread to."

    "Check the nodes once again. It is too much of a coincidence that something like this has happened. Verify every spot the battle has spread to and see if there is any suspicious or unrted thing was left behind."

    "Yes, Sir. We will do as you instructed."

    With that the Night member left.

    The Mountain master was still a bit doubtful, so he called for his disciples.

    "How long do you need topletely recover Sivan?"

    "It is almost done Master. We will be able to see the concrete results by tomorrow. Most of his soul will be reattached by then."

    "Okay then, one of you move out and check the key nodes of the formations for a while before going back to the healing process. I just want to be sure that everything is okay."

 Chapter 1631 Puppets

    Chapter 1631 Puppets¡¡¡¡Sam, his friends, and the teammates all gathered back at the meeting spot.

    "Do you need us to do anything else, Sam? I think it is better for us to stay here. The other party has way too many people and their strengths are not less. They are way too many and way too strong for you to handle them."

    "No need for now. If I have another hup I wille and get you guys, but for now, it is better for you to leave. I am pretty sure your students might be waiting for you there. I hope you like your new jobs."

    "Of course, I have some really interesting bratsing to me for saber techniques. I can now understand why you constantly go back to your academies and you are so crazy about opening schools left and right.

    Teaching those brats and watching them grow is such a satisfying feeling."

    Sam just shook his head and sent them off.

    While Sam was gone, these people started teaching students while helping Arkiv out. They liked the educational style of the Dusk organization and they are thinking of opening up elite schools that focus on just one particr skill.

    Night Ghost wants to open an academy solely focused on using dark elemental energy with soul necromancy and ghost cultivation.

    Sabre Monarch wants to open an academy that solely focuses on saber techniques.

    It would be the cream of the crop that gets into it.

    Sam is not against it and since they are having a lot of free time after Arkiv sent them back recently, they are doing it out of their own will. It will all benefit the Dusk at the end of the day.

    Anyway, that''s a matter of another time.

    Back to the n.

    After sending them away, Sam and his friends waited for a while. Sam already let small insect puppets, shadow mice, and the ghosts in the Mountain range at least have some surveince.

    Of course, he didn''t leave too many because there is a great chance that the Mountain Master might be able to find them out with all the formations that are present there.

    But still, it will be very difficult if he didn''t have any information from the Mountain range.

    So, he waited for a few hours and got some info.

    And one of them is that Brother ck, one of the three disciples is making rounds around the Mountain as he visited various node points.

    He has checked them carefully.

    When Sam learned of this, he was not really surprised or anxious, rather he was very amused and intrigued. He is waiting for what they are going to do.

    Sam is not stupid. He knew that he is dealing with a bunch of people who are as smart as him in terms of technical knowledge behind formations and spiritual energy, if not smarter.

    There is a great chance that all of the things they set up might be found out, but he is prepared for that oue too.

    He is now only waiting for what the other party would do.

    But to his disappointment, the other party was veryx about this search. It seems like Brother ck is in a hurry which made them to use a very crude method that is way too easy for Sam''s setup to avoid.

    It is a technique that uses the formation''s energy cirction to scan the surroundings and within the formation.

    Brother ck who has ess to most of the formations in the Mountain range used this method to scan the surroundings of the nodes.

    If Sam had known that this guy would be choosing this kind of method, he would have had a much more rxing time when setting up traps. He is even slightly disappointed that none of his traps were found at all.

    "This might go a lot more boring than I initially thought. This asshole didn''t even spare some time to do this. Does he really think I wouldn''te this early? Or is he in such a rush that he could let some potential threats that I left behind are not worth his time and effort at the moment?"

    Sam muttered to himself as he stood up and walked around for a while. This is so disappointing to the point that it is almost unbelievable. He even felt like thisx behavior might even be a trap to lure him in.

    But after some thought, he shook his head off these thoughts and waited. The next step of the n would be done the next day and only if by then the other party didn''t discover these things, then he can be sure that they are not going to discover them at all and he can confidently proceed forward.

    He waited for the night along with his friends.

    But the next morning the news that came out of the Mountain range surprised Sam a bit.

    It is about how the progress on healing Sivan has been tremendous and they seeded in piecing his soul together. All they have to do now is to wait for the Sivan to wake up.

    When Sam heard this, he knew for sure that this is announced just to lure him. But he also knew that he cannot ignore it.

    The very reason, he rushed and hurried so much is because he is afraid that people from the Divine Formation Mountain will use his skills and knowledge to bring forth destruction that shouldn''t even exist.

    This is not something he can let happen.

    The consequences of that would be dire. Just by scratching the surface of his ideas, Sivan almost managed to destroy the Gaja n. Who knows what these crazy psychos would do? Particrly, after listening to the stories about the Mountain Master, Sam is very sure that he shouldn''t let this happen no matter what.

    So, he checked the traps once again and after making sure that there is no chance whatsoever, he decided to make a move.

    He moved the camp near to the mountain range and set up the crystal table in a hidden cave.

    "Alright, let the fun begin. All three of you better be ready. This is going to be the toughest and most exciting battle you have ever had."

    As Sam spoke, he extended his hand to the side and dozens of puppets flew out of his divine dimension to the exit of the cave before they flew towards the Mountain range.

    It didn''t take long for people to take notice of the puppets as many of them are of bird type and they are all moving without using any stealth techniques. They went straight towards the mountains and particrly the main mountain area where the Divine formation mountain resided.

    As if they are trying to just barge through the formations around.

    The news quickly traveled to the Mountain master and the disciples.

    "What the fuck? This bastard finally showed up? I am almost thinking that he might have given up after learning that our master is getting involved."

    Brother ck said with a grin.

    "Of course, didn''t you learn anything about him from all the information that we gathered? There is no way a person like that is going to stay put without doing anything.

    All his life he has been punching way out of his league. He is so confident and cocky because of it. Rightfully so, but he is not going to stop and think that he won''t be able to do it this time around."

    "So, let''s see what he has up his sleeve. There is no use if his aim is to stop us from getting information from Sivan''s soul. It is just a matter of a couple of hours before we could do that and I am sure he won''t be able to reach us in that time."

    As the three disciples were discussing what would Sam do, the puppets charged at the formations and started shooting energy beams everywhere.

    The barriers were activated and the people inside the formation were pretty scared. They didn''t know what is happening, but they knew it was nothing good.

    The Night members also got pretty nervous as they saw the energy fluctuations that are spreading all over the formations.

    But when they noticed that even the continuous beams are not doing anything to them, they felt a bit relieved.

    Only to realize a few momentster that the relief is just fleeting. Sam used the crystal table as he witnessed everything before touching some spots. The spots that are precisely near the nodes of the formations.

    In just a few seconds, the energy fluctuations of the formations became chaotic and apse in the barrier appeared. That momentarypse let all of the puppets inside and the energy beams that were being shot made contact with the people on the ground.

    The Night members were targeted and one after another they started falling.

    The puppets started a rampage within the barrier and it is mostly focused on three particr spots within the range.

 Chapter 1632 Luring the Young Masters

    Chapter 1632 Luring the Young Masters¡¡¡¡There are three spots that Sam is targeting at the moment and all three of them have some critical nodes for many formations of the Divine Formation Mountain.

    And all three of these spots are way too far away from one another. So, if something really bad happens to them all at the same time, there is not enough manpower with enough knowledge to deal with it.

    So, the young masters who are in the main mansion trying to witness all of the chaos Sam is about to bring will have to make a move whether they want to or not.

    He will force them toe and deal with the situation.

    As if on cue, as soon as he thought to this point the puppets started attacking the nodes. Along with that, the special traps Sam set up werepletely activated.

    The trap he set up is actually very small but it worked really well. He used the energy pellets andpressed them into a very small space. Now with just a single tap on the crystal table. They unlocked themselves and spread into the surroundings.

    The surrounding area which is acting as a node was affected by this. The energy of the pellets spread rapidly and since the nodes themselves are conducting a lot of energy at a very rapid but fluid pace, so the spread of the energy was quicker and swifter.

    The formation started fluctuating once again. But this time the fluctuations are the way too severe. Within no timerge energy lines of various elements started spreading on different corners of the formations.

    The Night members who were already dealing with the puppets barely noticed this and sent the news to the main mansion.

    When the three disciples heard of this, they couldn''t help but feel dumbfounded. The energy pellets, made a cracker with them and helped Sivanunch an attack at the Gaja n.

    Now, the first thing that Sam did when he started attacking them is to use the same pellets they used in the cracker.

    The only problem is that the formations are not exactly vital for the Gaja n. Even though they reduced a lot of casualties and efforts, the Gaja n''s main force is still its powerhouse. On the other hand, for the Divine Formation Mountain, the main force is the formations.

    They don''t have loyal manpower, they don''t have hundreds of foot soldiers, and all they have are the formations that do the jobs that men should have normally done in a n or an organization.

    They are responsible for security, scouting, patrolling, healing, guarding, and even making sure that there is no major imbnce in the ecosystem within the mountain range.

    If the formations are gone, Divine Formation Mountain will lose a lot of resources that were spent on them as well as a lot more to rebuild them. Who knows what they might lose while trying to rebuild them?

    They quickly came to a decision even before their master ordered them.

    "We need to get out there and fix the nodes."

    "And this is definitely a fucking trap."

    "Of course, it is. Do you think we are the only ones who can lure him here with the traps? He can lure us out as well. You have been underestimating him too much for your own good.

    But even if it is a trap, we have to go. We need to stabilize the formations as soon as possible. We need to make this as clean as we can.

    Because of the attacks of Sam on our main subordinates, the rivals that are still coveting master''s reputation will definitely not let this chance go."

    With that, all three of them moved from the main mansion and spread to the three different directions.

    Meanwhile, the Mountain Master is spectating all of this from his room. He looked at his three disciples moving out and the puppets attacking different ces and even on top of that, the energy lines that appeared on the formations through the pellets.

    He is watching all of this in a special formation on his table like he is watching a movie.

    He is very rxed despite the fact that his home is being attacked. It is almost like he didn''t believe that anything serious would happen to him.

    Sam also just looked at what is happening and when he saw the three young masters finally make a move, he started controlling the puppets.

    The puppets that targeted the Night members alone are now targeting the young masters, but they didn''t swarm them. Only a few puppets too the ones that are being passed by the young masters when they are moving are the only ones attacking them.

    But that doesn''t mean, the young masters are fine. They have to fight these puppets off to make sure that they are not identally getting hurt by those energy beams. They will be a nuisance when they try to repair the formation nodes, so it is necessary to clear them as fast as they can.

    They didn''t waste too much of their energy. They have a great number of trinkets in their hands and they seemed like they are breezing past the puppets without any effort.

    Sam didn''t care though. He watched as the puppets fell off after being hit with various attacks. The Night members are also slowly getting used to it. All he did was just extend his hand once again and release even more puppets.

    Dozens of puppets once again flew out and entered the battlefield.

    After twenty minutes, the young masters almost simultaneously arrived at their destination.

    Sam once again started controlling the puppets.

    All the surrounding puppets moved and gathered above the young master as they created arge formation.

    The elemental energies riled up in the sky and now the puppets didbination attacks on the young masters as they tried to identify the problem with the nodes.

    They are not exactly proficient with removing the effects of the energy pellets. They might have made them before, but they never bothered to figure out a way to neutralize them. The only thing that made them feel confident in their impable energy control.

    The Night members assisted the young masters in the battle as they tried to take on the puppets in formations while the young masters focused on the nodes.

    All three ces are appeared to be the same. Everything is going well as nned.

    The young masters examined the nodes in the next fifteen minutes and figured out what the problem is, but they are not sure how long it will take for them to solve it.

    They didn''t know if the Night members will be able to hold back.

    "Call your backup members. It will take some time. Don''t conserve your manpower. Outnumber them and overpower them."

    Brother Silver ordered immediately and passed the order to the other areas too.

    "You bloody coward. I want to see what you will do after we dealt with your puppets and your stupid trap."

    He muttered to himself as he started working on the node.

    "They seemed to have identified the nodes already. The repair might not take long. Do you think we need to start now?"

    "No hurries. Let them do the work. If they don''t even finish the repair as fast as I assumed they would do, I might have to change our ns. Even if they do it on time, I am pretty sure you guys can move fast enough to reach them."

    The trio just shrugged and stayed there. They are very eager to test out their new prowess of course, but there is no way they could just dive in without Sam''s permission. They could only wait and see.

    Sam just kept on sending his puppets meanwhile to make sure the young masters are annoyed enough.

    Soon all of the Night members arrived and they are defending the puppets making it easier for the young masters.

    The young masters finally got to focus on the repairpletely and when they did, they felt a sudden energy waveing in from the surrounding area.

    They noticed that the energy lines that are spreading across the formation are about to dpress and explode.

    "Fucking hell. We need to work faster. Anybody got any ideas?"

    Brother ck yelled into themunication token connected with his brothers.

    "I have one, try using the master''s signature technique."

    "That? Are you sure that is going to work? It might work in a normal case, even if the energy lines appeared on a metal or even a person, but now, the energy in the nodes is too conductive and there is no natural resistance that could aid us.

    We will be having a lot of trouble if we make the energy in nodes chaotic. Things would go sideways easily."

    "Don''t worry about it. You just need tobine it with the extreme maniption."

    Brother Silver pitched in all of a sudden.

    "Then we will be fucking exhausted."

 Chapter 1633 Invisible hits

    Chapter 1633 Invisible hits¡¡¡¡"Brother ck. Unless you have a better n. Don''t you fucking speak again.

    Your criticism might have been encouraged when we are working, but not there. I will fucking kill you if you shut down an idea if you have no better n."

    "So, you want me to shut the fuck up and follow whatever you say?"

    "Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. We are proceeding with the n. Even if we exhaust ourselves, this is the best we can do right now.

    We can use the special transfer tokens if things go down south.

    But that would be the worst-case scenario. So, don''t worry about the energy conservation and go ahead."

    All three of them couldn''t do anything else anyway, so they ced their hands on the nodes and started using their abilities.

    First, they focused all of their energy and spiritual sense on the node. They used an ability very close to the observation ability Sam has and then used another ability that is simr to the maniption ability.

    Of course, the maniption ability is not exactly the same and it is not as precise as Sam''s. They are now trying to suck the foreign energy that came because of the pellets and collect in a small chamber that is made out of their own pure spiritual energy.

    As they are doing it Sam watched it in amusement.

    "See, now we know they are worth your time. Get ready to move. I will also make my move." Sam said as he ced the crystal table away and took off on his hoverboard. The trio also took off on their hoverboards.

    But they didn''t go in the same direction as Sam.

    Sam went higher and higher in the mountain range and only stopped at the peak of a mountain that is very close to the mountain where the main mansion of the Divine Formation Mountain was ced.

    He looked at the Main mansion with a telescope and took a deep breath before he went into his divine dimension.

    Inside within the vast grounds of the dimension, one of the carriers was ced. And it is covered with various formations.

    There are at least ten different types of domes that are surrounding it. Sam didn''t focus on any of them though.

    Instead, he ced his palm on the ground under the carrier and closed his eyes.

    After using the observation ability and spreading it as deep as he can, he opened his eyes and a sigh of relief escaped his mouth.

    "This should be enough."

    He muttered to himself as he deactivated the formations around the carrier.

    The carrier is one of his main weapons in the battle and for that to work properly, he obviously had to prepare well.

    So, he created a special area within the divine dimension. He filled the ground with excessive light elemental energy along with the blood that was filled with high vitality. Along with that, he even went as far as to nt thousands of highly vital herbs that are growing in the divine dimension in that area.

    They were ready to harvest when he nted them, but now there is not a single sign of those herbs. They are just mixed along with the dead grass and he can''t even differentiate which is which.

    Everything went well with the preparations and now Sam has to make sure they don''t go to waste. He came out of the dimension and stood on the peak as he examined the surroundings.

    While he is doing that.

    The trio leisurely went to their three spots where their opponents are waiting. By the time they reached their respective areas, all three of them connected through amunication channel.

    "What''s the loser going to do?" Philip asked as he looked at the young master who is a bit far away.

    "A decade of train duty. Noins, no changes." Watt said firmly.

    "It seems like you like the train duty so much." Jack replied and all three of them chuckled.

    "Let''s go guys. Let''s not waste any time."

    With that, all three of them reached their top speeds on their hoverboards and reached the spots where young masters are currently working at.

    "Hello, ck-haired brainiac. Nice to meet you once again."

    Philip greeted his opponent very nicely with a bit warm smile on his face. Of course, Brother ck doesn''t have all of that. He didn''t expect Philip''s arrival.

    He can understand why his brothers wanted to go with the current n. Because they are sure that Sam wouldn''t make a move directly.

    That is not his style. He will scout, and create as many problems as he can before finally showing his face. But all of a sudden, all three of his friends arrived right when they are in the middle of dealing with this formation.

    They are fucking exhausted. There is no way, they could take advantage of their superior cultivation at this point.

    "Night members¡­"

    Brother ck was about to call the Night members, but at this moment, all the puppets that are attacking from high up moved. They all moved downwards as they zoomed past everything and targeted the night members.

    The puppets started exploding one by one as they came close to the Night members.

    The young master was stunned. He was trying to concentrate on the node even with all of this chaos, but with the explosions happening right next to him, he couldn''t hold it anymore.

    The energy that he was sucking, went back into the node and bombarded.

    This caused the node to be unstable which in turn made the whole formation disappear from that side.

    Not just that, even the other two nodes were alsopletely destroyed. They are not working at all. All the effort they put in, the exhaustion they umted. All of it was gone in an instant.

    They didn''t expect this.

    As if on cue, as soon as the formation disappeared, the trio made their move. They moved on their hoverboards andnded right next to these young masters and initiated the battles.

    Philip jumped onto the ground like a cannonball with his bodypletely covered in metal while mes enveloped him.

    *BOOM*

    The explosion blew the young master a bit and he fell to the side. Philip took this to his advantage and didn''t even hesitate to close the distance despite their difference in cultivation levels. In fact, he desired closebat.

    But right when he was about to take a mount position on the young master. Philip felt like he was stuck in a stream of a dense liquid.

    The resistance for him to move forward increased hundreds of times and even with all the strength behind the movement, he is barely walking.

    He tried to take a step back and think of another way, but even that movement was resisted.

    He looked at Brother ck, who is panting and heaving with an extended hand.

    Philip extended his hand forward and activated fire elemental fusion as he started spewing red hot mes.

    The resistance that hindered Philip also started hindering the mes, but for some reason, it is loosening up bit by bit.

    The only problem is that the young master is taking in potions like he is drinking water to increase his strength.

    But Philip was not in a hurry, he just sted the mes with higher density every second that making him look like a furnace with all the mes being resisted in that small space.

    The young master who is resisting the mes with his spiritual energy could feel the intensity of it. The spiritual energy he is controlling is bing a bit unstable because of all the heat and fire and soon he realized, he cannot keep it up for long.

    Since he also recovered a bit of his energy, he confidently let it go.

    The mes were suddenly released and they were shot directly at Brother ck.

    Brother ck blocked the attack and moved a bit backward before he made his move again.

    But this time, Philip didn''t feel any resistance to moving forward, rather he felt like a massive cannonball hit him in the gut.

    The worst part is he didn''t even fly away, instead he felt the same impact on his back and he levitated for a good five seconds as both forces held him up before falling to his knees.

    The young master slowly stepped forward as Philip stood up and punched in the air.

    Philip once again felt an invisible forceing at him, but he couldn''t exactly feel the exact position. So, mmed his feet to the ground and surrounded himself with metal walls.

    *BANG*

    A protrusion appeared on the wall that was right in front of him.

    He heaved a sigh of relief, but before it was done another protrusion came from the back, another from the right, from the left, and before he knew it, the walls are being smashed from all sides.

 Chapter 1634 Void

    Chapter 1634 Void¡¡¡¡Philip jumped out of the metal walls before he was crushed.

    But when he was in the air, he was hit with that invisible energy once again. He spat out some blood before he crashed to the ground.

    Brother ck walked to Philip casually and said.

    "I thought you were something since you are so close Sam, but it seems like you are just so-so. Where did you get the confidence that you can take me on? Even in my exhausted state, you are no match for me.

    Do you really think that the differences in the cultivation levels are just for show?"

    Philip didn''t reply and slowly stood up. Brother ck extended his hand and tried to crush him to the ground, but as if he had expected this already, Philip moved to the side.

    *BAM*

    The hitnded squarely on the ground, leaving a perfect circr impression on the soil.

    Philip closed his eyes and took deep breaths.

    Brother ck frowned and looked at him. He was confused as to how Philip dodged it.

    He made a move once again, but Philip was not hit. He dodged this attack and even shot a fireball at him.

    "It can''t be. How is that even possible for a person with lower cultivation?"

    He muttered to himself in disbelief.

    Brother ck is very confident about his own abilities because unless someone is of a higher level than his own in terms of cultivation, it''s not possible for them to ''see'' his attacks. Even the spiritual senses are useless in a situation like this.

    They cannot catch the energying from him with their senses.

    Even for people who are at the same cultivation level as him, it is a big problem. But for Philip who has a lower level of cultivation than him to do this, he was shocked, to say the least, and even the word shocked is an understatement.

    As he was lost in the daze for a moment, Philip lunged forward with mes shooting all around his body as he closed the gap between them.

    The metal fist covered in mesnded right on the chin of the young master.

    Brother ck came back to his senses with the hit, but before he could fight back, Philip caught his hand and startednding hits on the ribs from the side.

    The sharp metal protrusions and spikes that came from his fist. Theynded straight on the ribs and liver as Philip constantly punched him. His hits are rapid. He hit him until even his own hand started hurting at the shoulder because of the constant movement.

    All of this happened in an instant.

    Brother ck pulled himself together and pushed Philp away. But that exact moment, Philip grabbed a hold of his hand, and the gloves he was wearing started glowing.

    Brother ck felt arge suction force around him and in an instant, both of them disappeared.

    Meanwhile.

    On Watt''s side.

    He is fighting against Brother Silver.

    By the time Philip already disappeared with the young master, Watt is still on his hoverboard as he threw over a hundred cards and all of them are being manipted by the wind.

    Brother Silver is trying his best to defend them.

    The individual attacks of the card are not really that powerful for him, but every card that Watt released at the moment is a trap card and they can be activated any time Watt desired.

    And as soon as Watt managed tond one hit, it is leading to a chain reaction as one card after another followed.

    The young master wasn''t able to block the attacks until a good amount of themnded on him. Even if the damage is minute, it is umting very well.

    Brother Silver looked at Watt and said.

    "You bastards really are persistent and annoying. I didn''t want to use this since I am low on energy, but you asked for it."

    All of sudden, spiritual energy gathered under his feet as he jumped into the air like he was shot from a rocket.

    He whistled through the wind and reached Watt in an instant, catching him a bit off guard.

    But even if Watt wasn''t ready, his hoverboard was. The hoverboard moved on its own and dodged the young master''s attack.

    Watt heaved a sigh of relief, but that onlysted for a moment. The young master didn''tnd on the ground after the jump.

    Instead, he kicked the air and with arge explosive sound, he changed his direction towards Watt.

    This time Watt prepared himself and cards flew out towards the young master.

    The young master punched forward creating a wave of energy that blocked the cards in their tracks. The impact didn''t stop there and reached Watt. This time even the board wasn''t quick enough.

    Watt took the impact straight to his body but used the hoverboard to reduce the impact as he moved along with it.

    But that was not enough, the young master constantly kicked the air as he moved around punching Watt from different sides.

    After he noticed that the Silver wind is keeping Watt stable no matter how much he tried, he attacked the board directly while feigning an attack on Watt.

    Watt finally fell off the board. Silver wind zoomed through the wind as it tried to catch Watt, but the young master was faster than him.

    He held Watt by the throat as he increased his speed to crash to the ground.

    But right when they were about to crash, both of them disappeared from the spot.

    At the same time on Jack''s end.

    Jack is standing there while tightly holding his sword.

    He is injured all over. Brother Gold ran straight towards him. Ayer of energy was consolidated around him as he hit Jack directly.

    Jack wanted to defend himself with his sword, but the sword slipped as soon as it met the energyyer.

    He gritted his teeth and tried to calm down as much as he can.

    "I must say, you are really skilled. But you are just way too weaker than me. I really wish we could have fought on equal terms in a proper fight."

    Jack just stood there adamantly as he calmed himself down. His breathing slowly rxed and his aura started changing. Slowly the spiritual energy around him turned sharper and even his breath sounded like the keening of the sword.

    "Is it a new trick?"

    Brother Gold said under his breath. He frowned and contemted. Because even his energy is on the low side. He can''t y around much longer. The only reason he yed around until now is to see if Sam wille out if he tortured his friend.

    But it doesn''t seem like it''s gonna happen any time soon.

    So, he decided to finish it off and return to the main mansion to recover.

    He once again dashed towards Jack and he didn''t even bother to be wary of the sword strike. Jack still had his eyes closed as he swung his sword at the young master.

    He swung it early and didn''t bother to make physical contact.

    The sword ray was shot out and it smoothly went through the young master as well. This shocked him. He didn''t expect the sword ray to go past the barrier, to begin with, but for it to go past him as well, was shocking.

    The even more shocking thing is that he couldn''t feel any physical injury. Nothing on him was cut.

    That feeling onlysted for a couple of minutes though, because he felt like something was cut, but not physically, rather in his soul.

    "AARRGHHHH¡­."

    He groaned in pain as he stopped in his tracks. He could feel the sharp pain in his soul and in his mind as if some of his nerves are being forcefully torn apart.

    Jack opened his eyes and took advantage of this situation by swinging the sword at the young master''s throat.

    The sword obviously didn''t meet the throat, the young master forced himself to stand up and block the sword attack.

    He couldn''t get back to his sensepletely and was unable to defend himself. The shnded squarely on the chest.

    The young master felt humiliated. A person who is weaker than him by so much was able to leave such a sh on his body. He never felt more humiliated than this and he is sure for some reason that it won''t get any worse than this.

    He lunged forward all of a sudden,pletely ignoring Jack''s sword which lodged itself slightly into his flesh.

    He held Jack by his throat and looked at him coldly.

    As if he is expecting this, Jack just smirked before both of them disappeared.

    Jack and the young master appeared in a dark space. Brother gold looked into the infinite void around them and felt extremely tense.

    "Where the fuck am I? How am I here?"

    He yelled out loud just to attract everyone that might be nearby.

 Chapter 1635 Disciples died

    Chapter 1635 Disciples died¡¡¡¡Brother Gold looked around in the void.

    No matter how much he racked his brain, there is no way, he could figure out where they are.

    Only when he looked under his feet he managed to spot something.

    It seemed like they are floating in the air at a certain height above from what looked like an area ofnd that is also floating in the void. And that area of thend looked like arge chessboard.

    "Where the fuck are we?"

    He muttered as he looked at Jack.

    "A special ce that was modified just for your visit."

    Jack replied calmly.

    Brother Gold was pissed by the unclear answer and he got ready to attack again. Jack didn''t care though. He just stood there with his sword.

    Brother Gold rushed at him with that weird spiritual energy barrier again and Jack swung his sword, the sword ray went past the barrier and cut the young master in the chest.

    "ARGHH.."

    Brother Gold groaned in pain as he stopped in his tracks. He was dumbstruck. He couldn''t think straight anymore. He cannot wrap his head around the fact that he was really hit by Jack who a few moments ago, was on verge of losing.

    As he was thinking, then only he realized that something is off with his body. He checked himself again realized that there are some invisible shackles ced on his cultivation level. At this moment, he is on the same level as Jack.

    The realized made his face turn pale.

    "How did you do this? What kind of trick are you ying, you sick bastards?"

    He yelled at Jack and made his move once again. Jack swung his sword and blocked every one of his moves and even managed tond some severe shes as a counter attack.

    Before he knew it, Brother Gold is standing while panting as his right hand is pressing on his left shoulder to stop the bleeding. His whole body is filled with cuts. He is bleeding from at least twenty-five wounds.

    But those wounds are not really hurting that muchpared to two other things.

    One of them is his pride. For him to be brought to this situation by a man who is at least a couple of decades younger than him, who barely entered the grey circle and worst of all a person with much lower cultivation level.

    The second one is his soul.

    He can feel the cuts in his soul. Every single cut he has on his body, he could feel that on his soul as well. He doesn''t know how that was possible. He cannot think of another person that can do that within the whole grey circle.

    "How is this even possible?"

    "You being stuck here? You being defeated? What possibility are you talking about?"

    "The soul. How can you attack my soul with a sword sh?"

    "Because I am a good student?" Jack answered with a smile and shed his sword once again. This time, he cut off an arm and a leg of brother gold and then held him by his throat.

    Both of them disappeared once again and they reappeared at the node where they were initially fighting in the first ce.

    Brother gold got his cultivation back, but his arm and leg are still nowhere to be seen.

    Jack nodded as if he is confirming something and ced his sword on the neck Brother Gold.

    "Leave me. Leave me alone. You will regret it if you kill me.

    Do you really think you can just cut my neck and leave this ce alive? My master is on this mountain. He will fucking kill you."

    Brother Gold threatened, Jack stayed silent. Taking this as Jack being afraid, the young master continued spitting out threats. But they stopped when Jack opened his mouth.

    "Where is he?"

    Jack asked calmly.

    "What?"

    "Where is your master?"

    Brother Gold didn''t know what to say.

    "I have been holding my sword on your neck for five minutes now. Your master that''s staying on this mountain, is very powerful. I am pretty sure he can make it in five minutes to this ce and with his strength he can pinch me to death like I am an ant.

    So, where is he now? Why is he not here?"

    Brother Gold became silent. He wanted to say something, but he couldn''t bring out any words. He also started asking the questions. Where is his master?

    "As for your question. Do I dare cut your throat and leave this ce?

    Damn right I will. I don''t give a fuck who your backer is, who you are born to and who taught you. You might be the reincarnation of a god for all I care.

    As long as you are in our way, in my friend''s way, there is no one and nothing in this world that I don''t dare cut."

    Those are thest words brother gold heard before his head fell off of his neck.

    By now the formation was gone and Jack took a transference token to leave the ce after collecting the dead body of Brother Gold.

    Meanwhile on the other two sides, the situations are simr.

    Watt and Brother Silver reappeared on the spot. Watt is standing there with a bunch of injuries. His lower lip was crushed a bit and half of his face was swollen. He is bleeding from his ear.

    He is pretty battered, but the person opposite to him, Brother Silver. He looked like he was mauled by a bear.

    His whole body is filled with cuts and tears. He is bleeding all over and when hended, he couldn''t even find strength to stand up. He couldn''t even lift his arms. His tendons were cut. He also seemed like he lost his mind.

    Watt threw four more cards and all four of them flew with wind des as they cut the neck continuously. Before long, the head fell off on the ground.

    Watt collected the body and used the transference token to leave.

    At Philip''s ce. When both of them reappeared, Philip''s hand is already inside Brother ck''s heart.

    He removed it and took the body before he left.

    The three young masters that were known to be the most troublesome bunch in the grey circle. Who roamed around the grey circle while offending people left and right without a single care for consequences were dead just like that.

    And they died in the hands of someone that barely entered the grey circle.

    This is going to be a great gossip material for the rest of the world.

    As for what their master is doing at this moment.

    No one can even imagine it.

    He is just sitting there leisurely in his room while still looking at what''s happening through that formation.

    He saw all three of disciples dying with his own eyes.

    "That''s a really interesting toy. Where did the three of them disappear to? Did they try to even the battlefield?"

    He muttered to himself as he looked at the formation curiously. There is not a single trace of sadness or anger disyed on his face.

    "Is it the glove that made this happen? That''s a really clever move. But where are they transporting them to? I really want to see that.

    Why don''t youe out and shed some light on this young man? I would like to know more about this trick of yours."

    He spoke theter sentences out loud. Sam into the room through the front door.

    "Sam, is it? It has been a while since I saw someone that smart. You are really good. Why don''t you be my disciple? I heard you have multiple elemental energies. It would be great if you can utilize them to maximum potential."

    "I am the reason that three of your disciples that you groomed for decades died just like that. You are asking me to be your disciple. I would have understood if you wanted to kill me. But this¡­"

    "They are weak. With all the grooming they got from the best resources, best authority, the favors, the backing, all of them could only get them this far. They couldn''t even utilize what I taught them to a full extent.

    It is a disgrace for me and it is good that they are dead. In fact, I might even have to thank you. That is why I am offering you this option.

    I will even take in your three other friends if you want me to. I don''t have a problem with that. They might not be official disciples, but being under the wing of Divine Formation Mountain, is great a thing for their growth."

    "The answer is no. Don''t waste too much of your time dwelling on that."

    "Then there is only one other option. To kill you right now."

    "That is actually the better option of the both from the start. But the problem is, you won''t be able to do that no matter how much you want to."

    "Really? Why? Because, what you sent here is a projection?"

    "Yes, that''s one of the reasons, but there is another one as well. If you want to know about that, you can take the token inside this device."

 Chapter 1636 To the Chessboard

    Chapter 1636 To the Chessboard¡¡¡¡''Sam'' disappeared from the spot.

    And a metal bug that''s the size of a fist was flying there. Mountain Master waved his hand and the spiritual energy in the whole acted up. The bug that was far away was dragged towards him.

    There is no invisible force that did it, just the spiritual energy present in the atmosphere made it happen. After catching hold of the bug, he crushed it slightly.

    In the middle of the bug''s body, there is a token with some special inscriptions. He took a look at the token his eyes glowed a little.

    "Interesting inscription technique. The level of sophistication is really hard to attain. Indeed, he is much better than the three that just died.

    Too bad he doesn''t recognize the value of my offer and is still adamant on making me an enemy. He would have had a great life ahead."

    With that, he injected his energy into the token and disappeared from the spot.

    When he reappeared, he looked around and saw that he is standing inside a dark void. But unlike his disciples, he is not floating on top of some space.

    He is actually standing on the chessboard.

    "Where am I?"

    "Is this the ce that you brought those three morons before they died?"

    He asked out loud, even though he cannot see Sam.

    Soon Sam appeared on the opposite side of the board and replied.

    "Yes, but not exactly to the same spot as you. They received some special treatment."

    "Wonder what that is?"

    Sam stayed silent without saying anything. The special treatment he was talking about is the three young masters floating in the air while fighting the trio. Sam knew that leveling up the ying field with the young masters is going to be an ardent task.

    That''s why he tried his best to create the gloves that he gave the trio and he even dared to tinker with the chess board that was given to him by Karthikeya.

    He wanted to leverage the advantage of the chessboard which is to level the ying field to the cultivation level of the weaker person of the two. But the problem with the chessboard, is the physical damage that they take in here on the board wouldn''t be reflected on their original self.

    So, if Sam had directly sent the people the trio must have had to y chess with them over a few dozen times before their mental strength is worn off and then bring them out while they are still in shock and finish them off.

    This is of course not a feasible n in his opinion as it wastes too much of his time.

    So, he created an instant solution for this. He tinkered with the chessboard to create a semi-independent space within the space of the board. When they used the gloves, they are brought into those spaces.

    He leveraged the feature of leveling the ying field but restricted the chess game and the absence of physical damage.

    Even though killing them wouldn''t be possible as from based on his experiments, trying to really kill them is bringing the people back to life.

    He doesn''t know how that mechanism is working as he cannot dismantle and scrutinize everything in the chessboard, so he made it so that they can defeat them here and bring them back before killing them.

    In this way, they don''t have to waste their time trying to deal with them. They can just kill people as they liked.

    As for why Sam didn''t use the same technique, it''s because it won''t work when the level difference is way too much.

    One of the key requirements that should be met is that the gloves are activated at the same moment and both parties should be in physical contact.

    There is no way in hell that Sam would be able to pull that off.

    So, he decided to just bring him here.

    "What are we doing here?"

    Mountain Master looked around the chessboard curiously as he asked.

    "We are going to fight of course."

    "That''s why my cultivation is not on its original level. Was it restricted to make this fight a fair one?"

    "Yes."

    "This is a really convenient device. But something tells me that''s not all there is to it. A chessboard of this size, I wonder what the pieces will look like."

    Sam just waved his hand and the pieces came onto the board.

    "Want to start this off?"

    "Why not?"

    Mountain master moved his pawn and Sam did the same, Mountain master got to kill Sam''s pawn, but he felt the weird suction force that dragged him away from the spot.

    He saw himself in the void on arge piece ofnd that was floating in that void.

    He couldn''t understand what happened, but he could feel that his cultivation is even lower than what it initially was and before he knew it, he felt a sense of danger from behind. He made his move and wanted to defend himself.

    But before he could do that, a blood-red sword de sliced through his neck and thest thing he saw is his headless body as his head fell off it.

    Mountain master felt the darkness envelop him before he reappeared at the main chess board.

    *PANT*

    *PANT*

    He panted heavily as he looked around. He is soaked in sweat. He didn''t have a single shred of that grace and sense of superiority that he had a few moments ago.

    "Don''t tell you are done already."

    Sam asked from the other side.

    "What the fuck happened? What did you do to me? That dream, no felt way too real to be considered a dream. What is this ce?"

    This time his voice is shaking a little bit. He is definitely not as nonchnt as before.

    Sam smiled as he thought of something.

    The main reason that Sam nned this chessboard even if he knew that killing the Mountain Master is impossible here, is because of the advice given to him by the Demon-Soul swordsman. Apart from exining the character of this person, he also got a shit load of characteristics that he could exploit.

    And this is one of his attempts to do so.

    Sam wants to take advantage of some of the bad traits that this guy has and it turns out that excessive pride is not the only bad trait he has.

    Sam didn''t give him the time to process all of this, he made his move with the pawn and asked the mountain master to make his own move.

    "I am not doing that until you tell me what the fuck is happening here."

    "Make your damn movie, you slimy rodent."

    Sam muttered slightly and all of a sudden, the Mountain master took a deep breath. He had bloodshot eyes and he gritted his teeth with such vigor that even Sam felt some pain just from looking at it from afar.

    "What the fuck is wrong with you? Make your move."

    "I will make my move. Don''t you worry? I will make my move."

    He did make his move and soon, their pawns met each other once again.

    As soon as they did that, they reappeared in the empty space once again. This time the mountain master is a bit vignt and looked around just to make sure that he wouldn''t die like before.

    He prepared a barrier around him to meet any surprise attacks.

    At this moment, Sam who appeared on the other side ran towards him and leaped into the air while driving down with an ax kick.

    The Mountain master got ready to make his own move as he was sure that the barrier will hold Sam a bit.

    But to his surprise, the kick came with such a force that the barrier shattered with mere contact, and the kick proceeded tond on his head.

    Mountain Master barely blocked the kick with his hands, but the void style kicked in at the contact, making his arms break and bleed.

    Samnded before swiftly making his move. He swept the mountain master''s feet a kick andnded a kick on the chest after he fell down.

    Mountain Master was stunned. He never thought he would have trouble with keeping up with someone in a battle. Particrly when they are fighting on equal terms.

    It has been a long time since he was in a battle and it almost seemed like a new thing to him for a second.

    He doesn''t know how Sam managed to be this fast. But he knew for sure that he going to suffer if he doesn''t figure out a way to defeat Sam.

    The only problem is that most of the Mountain Master''s expertise lies in the battles where he could use his tricks, which is not exactly possible here because of Sam''s attacks. Everything is way too straightforward here.

    As he was thinking, Sam''s kicknded on his head exploding it.

 Chapter 1637 Dragged Battle

    Chapter 1637 Dragged Battle¡¡¡¡Mountain Master came back to his senses on the chessboard.

    He once again started panting. He looked at Sam who is standing on the opposite side with pure horror. He couldn''t wrap his head around this feeling. No matter how he thought about it, he is definitely dying, but he ising back to life again.

    "What the fuck is this, you bastard?" He couldn''t help but curse out loud at Sam.

    The initial grace he had when he offered Sam to be his disciple. The pride that he had when he boasted about his authority and abilities. The aloof disregard that he had when he watched his disappointing disciple died.

    None of them are present.

    Sam looked at his expression and couldn''t feel more familiar. He has seen that expression way too often. In his previous life, this life, he has seen it in so many people.

    It is the expression given by the people that value their life way too much. The expression that is given by the selfish, greedy, and self-absorbed individuals that use and manipte others for their own gain, when faced with a certain horror of the consequences of their actions.

    The most disgusting kind of people. Of course, in a way Sam is very simr to these types of people. He basks in his authority and ability. He takes advantage of people and maniptes them for his own gain.

    He makes them into idiots, disdains them, and disregards their lives like it was nothing more than a waste of existence. But there is one primary difference between him and people like the Mountain Master.

    He always expects the consequences and he is able to ept them as they were. But guys like the Mountain Master, are way too afraid and cowardly to do that.

    Even though Mountain Master is afraid, he still found the courage to talk to Sam.

    "I need to get out of here. You better let me out now, or you will regret it."

    "Beat me in this match and you will be able to get out of here."

    "I am not going to y around with you, you bastard. I told you to let me go now."

    "This is the only way for you to go out. Beat me and you are free."

    "You¡­" Mountain master gritted his teeth and extended his hand. He wanted to attack Sam, but to his surprise, he wasn''t able to attack him.

    "What the fuck is happening?"

    "I already told you. The only way out is to beat me, or you might as well just whine and moan like you are doing right now. You filthy rodent."

    His words irked the Mountain Master and he steeled his heart for a moment before moving his other pawn.

    His anger shadowed his pain and horror for a moment and he decided to y further.

    But that onlysted for a few moments, he was enveloped with fear when Sam came on to him like a wild beast when they fought again.

    This time, Sam didn''t hold back. He knew that as time passes and the more times the Mountain master dies andes back, the more he will get used to it.

    Even if he is not used to the constant dying part of it, he will definitely get used to preparing himself and bracing for impact as soon as they entered thebat space.

    So, Sam is also increasing his aggressiveness as well as his fighting style with every battle just to make sure that he wouldn''t lose the advantage of the surprise factor.

    He also switched up to different weapons while dealing with the Mountain master.

    Sam advanced as he dealt with four pawns by barely moving two pawns. One of his pawns reached the bishop.

    For the first time, the Mountain master felt he had some power left. Because in the process, Sam''s pawn moved forward and fought some battles. The battles might be one-sided, but he also expended a lot of his own energy to deal with the defense of the Mountain master.

    Just because he managed to break them with one or two attacks, doesn''t mean, he managed to do it easily. He had to spend a lot of his energy on precise and powerful attacks to achieve that.

    So, since his body has limited energy left, at least for that one particr pawn and the Mountain master finally got more power on his hand, he managed to use his abilities.

    He extended his arm toward Sam and pulled towards him. The invisible spiritual energy enveloped Sam and tried to drag him. But Sam discharged some of his own energy into the surroundings and used void style.

    A small series of tiny explosions loosened the grip of spiritual energy.

    But the Mountain master kept on doing the same thing again and again.

    Finally, by the time Sam closed in the distance without falling under the control of the mountain master, he sensed something weird around him.

    Before he knew it, he is trapped inside a formation. An energy barrier surrounded him. He wanted to break out of it, but in just a moment, he felt the energy surrounding him turning chaotic and¡­

    *BOOM*

    The energy exploded and the whole explosion was controlled and contained within that barrier maximizing the damage to Sam.

    When the Mountain master released the barrier, Sam''s body was mutted and there is barely any life left in him.

    Mountain master looked at him coldly and decided to torture him.

    "How dare you bastard, try to y these tricks on me?

    What did you call me before? Rodent? Call me that again. I dare you."

    He tried to maximize Sam''s pain, but he was shocked when Sam suddenly lunged forward with all he got andnded a single hit on the Mountain Master, before fainting and dying.

    They were sent back to the chessboard.

    Sam started taking deep breaths as he tried to calm down a bit.

    His reaction is obviously not as bad as the Mountain Master. He had yed this game way too many times for him to react like that. But of course, he is a bit rattled. There is no oveing it.

    Mountain Master noticed this. He was so consumed by the feeling of death that he panted like crazy. His heart raced to its limit while his mind waspletely clouded. But all Sam needed was a couple of deep breaths and he is perfectly fine.

    This made him feel even more irritated.

    He made his move and the bishop that just finished one of Sam''s pawns moved to take out another. Once again, Sam wasn''t able to deal with him, but he stillnded a couple of critical hits on the Mountain master and he could feel the health draining.

    Mountain Master finally felt a bit confident though, he felt that at the same level, he is no match for Sam with his aggressive nature and his unpredictable style, but if he is a tad bit stronger than Sam in terms of cultivation, then he has an upper hand.

    It is because of his unique constitution or something else, but that''s how things are going on.

    He figured that he should use his big pieces mostly while using the pawns to drain Sam out as much as he can.

    Finally, he had something that resembles a n.

    But what he almost forgot is that Sam also has the bigger pieces and they arepletely intact.

    And for the first time, Sam moved his Knight to attack the bishop.

    To give the Mountain Master a wake-up call and bring him back to reality.

    The power has evened out and Sam even has an upper hand because he has a beast that is apanying him. He chose Raiju for this one and both he and the wolf started picking Mountain Master apart.

    They used lightning elemental fusion as they attacked the opponent from different sides. All Mountain Master could see were the streaks of lightning attacking him from all sides and he barely even managed tond any hit on the duo.

    By the time, hended a single clean hit on Sam and tried to get a hold of him, the beast came from behind and tore his arm apart.

    It was torn right at the shoulder even so far as removing the flesh until it reached the shoulder de.

    "ARRGGHHHH¡­"

    He cried his heart out in pain. Sam wanted to use this chance to deal with him and finish him off, but Mountain Master suddenly looked cruelly at Sam before he gritted his teeth and held on to Sam by his clothes.

    The energy in the surroundings riled up. Sam became vignt and his first instinct is to kick Raiju out of the way.

    The wolf was out of the range when¡­ *BOOM* The mountain master exploded.

    Sam also died along with the explosion.

    He looked at Mountain Master intently as soon as they arrived back on the board.

 Chapter 1638 Multiple personalities

    Chapter 1638 Multiple personalities¡¡¡¡Sam looked at the Mountain Master carefully.

    He felt like something is wrong with him. His behavior in the battle right now ispletely abnormal. After the first death, the mountain master acted like something serious had happened. He showed the ssic signs of a self-absorbed individual who values his life way too much.

    But there is this anger that he has whenever he was called a rodent. He is almost as angry as Sam when he was called a bastard.

    He disregarded the consequence of the torturous feeling he gets when he dies.

    Sam can even understand that. In fact, the usage of the term rodent is because Demon Soul swordsman told Sam that the Mountain Master will be pissed off because of this.

    It is because in the past, the Mountain Master used to dig around the ground to set up traps to capture and kill his enemies. Just like how a rodent, particrly a rat or a bandicoot digs around in the ground and rocks.

    That is part of his dirtyundry.

    Sam''s thought was to rile him up so that he can take advantage of him.

    This is expected.

    But when he thought about the crazy suicidal move that was made by this guy in thest battle, he felt that something is weird.

    The look, the actions, and the whole demeanor seemed to be of a person that is definitely not the Mountain Master. He remembered the Demon Soul swordsman''s description of the Mountain Master. It says that he is not really a normal guy and acts very extreme when he is cornered.

    But this is way more than just acting extreme. That suicidal move is not justing from being pushed to the corner. After all, he definitely knew that he is not going to really die in that battle, he will just experience the feeling of death ande back to the board.

    Sam''s thoughts ran wild. He has a few theories that are popping in his head, but he has to verify them bit by bit in the next uing battles.

    For the next few moves, both of them avoided going tobat. Sam observed Mountain Master''s behavior in this time frame.

    It gradually changed. From being in the panicked stage at the start as an after-effect of experiencing the feeling of death, it slowly changed to a slightly calm person.

    These few moves led up to arge setup of possible chain reactions and Sam suddenly decided to take it tobat.

    Now, no matter who wins or loses, the next few moves can all lead up to constant battles.

    Sam decided to analyze how he will react in these next few battles.

    In the first battle, once again, Sam won easily as pawns. It is almost like with that limited cultivation, the Mountain master is unable to do much at all. His energy attacks are not enough to deal with Sam.

    He just panicked and became angry when Sam called him rodent. But in the next battle in which Sam went against a bishop with his pawn, his demeanor changed once again.

    The Mountain Master picked on Sam bit by bit. He started making Sam suffer through different kinds of pain as he torturously made him endure different attacks that are focused on particr parts of his body.

    This is also a bit expected, except the transition is a bit too fast. There is no gradual change in his behavior. It is a bit too sudden. After that battle was over, it is once again battle as equals with Sam''s bishop against Mountain Master''s bishop.

    Unlike how they werepletely outmatched when both of them were pawns, the Mountain Master presented a bit ofpetition when both of them are bishops.

    Sam understood one thing from this.

    Most of the moves and attacks from the Mountain Master are dependent on his cultivation level. He cannot perform most of his techniques that are effective in this level of battle unless he has a certain level of energy that is directly rted to the cultivation.

    As for the change of character, Sam also noticed that only when Sam toyed with the Mountain Master using his superior skill and technique did that weird suicidal and maniacal side is popping up.

    He wanted to test the hypothesis even more, and that only reinforced his belief.

    "This asshole has multiple personalities."

    Sam muttered to himself as he just finished anotherbat.

    That is the conclusion he came to. Mountain Master has multiple personalities. One of them is weak and cowardly, one is tricky and cunning, one is sadistic with a massive superiorityplex, one is rageful and insecure about his tricky and cunning personality, and finally, the overly prideful and angry suicidal personality.

    Of course, the basic personality of the Mountain Master that is known to the whole world, the mysterious intellectual personality that hides all of this other shit is also there.

    One can have all these emotions and it is even possible for someone to feel all of them one by one with changing situations, but the change to be as radical as this guy. Most of these changes are based on the level of strength that this guy has in various situations and this might be the first time that he has gone up and down in power like now.

    Of course, there is also a rtive factor of his power whenpared to Sam in various types ofbats.

    As a pawn, he is weak and helpless, but as a bishop, rook, or knight, he is powerfulpared to Sam''s pawn and a decent equalpared to Sam''s bishop, rook, and knight.

    They didn''t go to the queen and king part yet, so Sam wouldn''t know how he would react, but he can estimate that it could be simr to the one that he had when they are battling as bishop, rook, and knight.

    When he jumped on to the nextbat he didn''t fight. Instead, he just stood there and looked at the Mountain Master calmly.

    When Mountain Master tried to attack him, Sam focused on proper defense without speaking or doing anything.

    Mountain Master didn''t manage to do must. Sam''s defense is impable. It is like a game of skeet shooting. He is hitting every target that is flying toward him.

    And as time passed on, Sam slowly observed the shift of personalities in just onebat.

    When Sam was passive at the start, the Mountain Master enjoyed himself as he tried to push him around. Later when he realized that he couldn''t do much and Sam provoked him with the word rodent here and then, he became rageful.

    After that, Sam became a bit more active as he crushed the attacks that came at him, instead of just defending them casually. This made him a bit maniacal as he tried to perform some suicidal attacks.

    At that moment, Sam used extreme attacks and started dominating him. The personality immediately shifted to a personality that is cowardly and weak.

    Sam finished the battle off and went back to the board.

    He looked at the Mountain Master with intrigue. This is the first time he came across someone like this. He has met some people with multiple personalities in his previous life. But here in this world, it is even rarer.

    Because the souls are strengthened with their cultivation, he has barely seen any people with unique mental states.

    For someone this unique to exist, Sam couldn''t help but feel interested. It is almost like he found a really good test subject.

    His researcher mindset is kicking in.

    But he shook those thoughts off of his head instantly. He knew that he cannot keep the Mountain Master alive.

    Even if he is idiotic enough to enter the chess board directly without caring much as he was so full of himself, Sam has no thoughts of keeping him here. A man of this capacity and this level of intellectual capacity is an enemy Sam cannot have.

    And with this personality situation, Sam highly doubts if he could even suppress all of these personalities and make him submissive.

    On top of that, there is another warning from the Demon Soul Swordsman to not ever trust the Mountain Master even with a soul contract.

    The rumor is that this guy can even find a way to break the soul contract with his tricks. Sam doesn''t know how, but Demon Soul Swordsman believes in it, so Sam just eliminated the thoughts of research and then focused on dealing with this guy.

    In the nextbat.

    His demeanor changed. Killing intent surged out of his body as he took out the Shadow sword while both shadow and space elements are flowing throughout his body. He disappeared from the spot and reappeared right behind the Mountain Master.

    Mountain Master got ready with a decent barrier. The sh was deflected a bit, but the spatial and shadow energy managed to leave a slight nick on his back with the energy corrupting the wound a bit.

 Chapter 1639: Final Battle

    <h4>Chapter 1639: Final Battle</h4>

    Mountain Master felt extreme pain that he never felt before.

    It is like each cell of the flesh at that one particr point is trying to separate from the rest. He couldn''t think of a better way to describe it. And in this process, Sam managed tond another sh and disappeared from that spot.

    He reappeared in the front and stabbed forward into the gut.

    Spiritual energy became dense and caught hold of the de. Sam gritted his teeth and pushed forward as if he is just cutting through some hard substance.

    The spiritual energy almost became visible and it was torn apart before the sword stabbed the Mountain Master in the gut.

    Sam shed it to the side and let the shadow and spatial energies rampage. He didn''t care about the expense of energy and he didn''t care much about defending himself. His attacks are of full power and strength that is just focused on killing the opponent faster.

    Sam disappeared and reappeared on the left side. When a much more condensed barrier appeared on that side, he shed with ripple style and void stylebined. The barrier copsed quickly and the Mountain master had to take on the residual attacks.

    He took a few steps back only to get stabbed from the back in his chest and with a mere thought, Sam destroyed his heart with the rampaging energy.

    Thebat is over and they returned to the main board.

    Sam didn''t even let the information process as he took his chance and made a move on the board.

    He didn''t care if the other party is ready or not. Obviously, since they are literally enemies.

    The battle went on like the previous one mostly. The Mountain Master died within a few minutes as Sam used the space and shadow energy once again.

    He decided that he will just use the same style until the Mountain Master will at least show some kind of hint that he could counter this form.

    But it didn''t happen as he went through a few morebats.

    Sam realized that as long as he doesn''t sumb to the prepared traps of the Mountain Master and didn''t give him enough time to prepare in the midst ofbat, it is really not that difficult to deal with him on the same level.

    And the fact that he causes use different elements and also the void style, ripple style, and repel style to counter any of the tricks that could have stumped any other person, is an added bonus.

    The battles went on and on and before the Mountain Master knew it, he is down to a severely damaged Queen that could onlyst against a pawn at this point and the king.

    Sam also lost a lot of his own pieces. Even though he won so manybats, whenever a piece is weakened to the extreme, the mountain master''s suicidal character is acting up and he is taking both of them down in a way.

    But Sam didn''t really mind much as he really is looking forward to the King Vs King fight.

    So, he recklessly attacked and now he is also down to a pawn a half-beaten Queen, and the King.

    The Pawn attacked the Queen. The Queen barely won with a little shred of health left.

    Sam then used his own Queen against the Queen of the Mountain Master.

    The battle didn''tst long, because as soon as Sam neared the guy, he directly made his energy go vtile and self-destructed, killing himself and Sam barely alive.

    Sam didn''t care. His queen now only has very little health which means the King Vs King fight is inevitable as long as he got rid of it.

    So, he attacked the King with his Queen.

    He didn''t even bother to put up much of a fight.

    As usual, the Mountain Master used the weird technique to drag Sam towards him. Sam didn''t resist this time and let it be. The Mountain master''s sadistic personality acted up as if he wanted to torture Sam. With just a few waves of his hand, Sam felt like he is stuck in arge box.

    Soon, he felt like the walls of the box are closing in on him. The walls are invisible normally, but not with his energy vision. He can see the walls that areing into crushing him.

    The load on his body gradually increased. But Sam just gritted his teeth and looked at the Mountain Master dead in the eye. He spread all of his spiritual energy into the box and used his maniption ability.

    When the Mountain Master felt the spiritual energy that invaded him, he was shocked. He started defending against it, instead of trying to crush Sam.

    Sam who is inside the box, felt slightly relieved as the load reduced and started releasing all of his energy as he used the maniption ability to destabilize the energy in the walls.

    The Mountain Master had a bad feeling and wanted to escape, but Sam decided to self-destruct making it impossible for him to leave.

    And this self-destruction is different. Instead of letting the spiritual energy stay inside his body while he did that, hepletely spread it out. He forcefully squeezed out everyst hint of spiritual energy and which almost made him die on the spot before exploding it that guy''s face.

    Mountain Master took the full brunt of the explosion. The explosion of the spiritual energy left behind by Sam along with the explosions of his own energy box that he created.

    He did take a lot of measures that he could take in that short amount of time to defend himself.

    But he still took some serious damage.

    Both of them came back to the board.

    Now all that is left are the king and the king.

    Of course, the Mountain Master''s king is damaged while Sam''s king ispletely intact. The battle will be the final one and Sam is sure that he will definitely win.

    The only problem is that he doesn''t know how long it will take. The Mountain Master is definitely not soft and he could see with the current cultivation level that is allowed which is the Initial stage of Consummate level, his fighting style also changed a bit.

    The King''s battle began as his mind was filled with different thoughts.

    They were both pulled into thebat zone and Sam got ready with the dual elemental fusion and the shadow sword.

    But right before he could make a move, he already felt a slight sense of threat from around him. He activated energy vision and barely dodged an attack.

    It is an invisible energy de and it brushed past his cheek. But what surprised him even more is that he could feel that his original flesh has been cut even though he is in a fusion state.

    Normally when someone is in a full fusion state, their body acts just like that element and even though the original body gets tired along with it, the injuries won''t exactlynd on the body until the fusion is gone.

    But Sam feels that his original body is being cut and his energy is also drained a lot.

    He looked at the Mountain Master in surprise.

    "You pesky bastard. I should have killed you a lot sooner. I should have killed you and your friends by involving myself in this way before my disciples did.

    You arrogant shithead. How dare you make me go through this hell? You have seen way too many of my secrets. There is no way I am going to let you live after this is over."

    "Secrets?"

    Sam could guess what they are. The Mountain Master''s cultivation technique. Otherwise, there is no way Sam could exin the weird progression in his battle prowess.

    As pawns, both of them are limited to the middle stage of Astral ne Transcendence and in that stage, Mountain master is pathetically weak. In the Late and Peak stages of Astral ne transcendence, he is a bit stronger.

    He is able to hold his own against Sam a bit.

    But in the current stage, the Astral ne Consummate stage, he is really strong. An attack that Sam couldn''t even fathom. If not for the Mountain master''s sadistic tendencies, he could have killed the Queen piece of Sam instantly.

    "My weakness, my inability to fight properly, my techniques that are restrained and way too dependant on my cultivation level. Do you even know the things I have done to hide these from the world?

    I killed entire ns, to keep the word froming out. I made races go extinct just to make sure that there is no word about it.

    I have destroyed countless lives to erase my dirty past of mine just to be the perfect being I am known to be.

    And you, a noname bastard came to steal all of this away from me. I will not let you go. I will torture you for years before slowly taking your life away."

 Chapter 1640: Boring Battle

    <h4>Chapter 1640: Boring Battle</h4>

    Sam felt like a million daggers are pointed at him.

    He looked around with his energy vision and his feeling couldn''t be more right. The spiritual energy that is still invisible is condensed into hundreds of des that are all zooming towards Sam.

    He disappeared from the spot and reappeared mid-air as he tried to close the distance, but he was suddenly blocked by an energy wall and the energy des that were aimed at his previous position changed directions before they came at him once again.

    Sam swung his sword with condensed spatial energy that created small rift mid-air and it was assisted with the ripple style.

    The spatial energy rippled through the air and created a temporary curtain that blocked the energy des.

    But while the back was guarded, the Mountain Master attacked from the front, or more precisely from the bottom.

    Through Sam''s energy vision arge circle started glowing under his feet and the two ends of the circle rose up like the mouth of a beast with teeth protruding from either side.

    If the mouth is closed, the lower half of his body will be gone.

    Sam kicked on the ground and disappeared from the spot, the mouth was dispersed with the ripples that came from his movement.

    But this time Sam didn''t transfer himself to a different spot. Instead, he just dashed through the space using his elemental energies. This left a trail of spatial and shadow energy rippling in the surroundings.

    This made the Mountain Master unable to use his energy maniption as he liked. The energy des he was about to conjure to deal with Sam weren''t formed.

    They all dispersed before the process isplete and the Mountain master also received a sword sh aimed at his face. The sword is blocked by an invisible energy. Sam wanted to push through it, but the energy enveloped in such a way that it acted like a snake and crawled across to de towards Sam''s hands.

    Sam used void style as he released some energy through his sword.

    The Mountain master leaped back to avoid it, while Sam disappeared right before the energy explosion.

    Sam reappeared at a spot, only for his foot to be stuck by something. It is also like a snake coiling around his leg and trying to make him fall down. He kicked the leg forcefully on the ground to get rid of the restraints and moved to the side.

    A surge of energy des met him which he intercepted with his sword.

    Slowly, Sam was pushed to the defensive. The usage of Shadow and Space elements together in a perfect fusion is something that he uses when speed is his priority. It is hard for most people to be his opponents when he is like that.

    This is the first time he found that even in this form he could be pushed back this much.

    Mountain Master is getting used to the timing and controlling this fusion form.

    After five more minutes, Sam who just dodged around a dozen des suddenly felt something brushing past his back and leaned forward only to be caught by something like a.

    The energy condensed into a held him and arge mesh formed around him bit by bit as eachyer kept on adding on to the original. And when Sam is trying to disappear from the spot, the spatial and shadow energy is being targeted with the energy strands as they exploded and made it impossible for him to move away.

    Sam was impressed. He felt restrained and frustrated for a bit, but he is definitely impressed. It is definitely the most mixed feeling he ever felt.

    As he was thinking of a way to get out of the situation, he noticed something else.

    The energy in the surroundings is not just condensing into the strands, it is also condensing into something else. Of course, it all happening in an invisible state and the only way for him to see it is through his energy vision.

    He watched as energy condensed into orbs of different sizes and are staying still at different positions within the wholebat zone.

    He could easily guess what the other party is nning to do. He is trying to create a formation that could kill Sam.

    "I am caught in your restraints, but you still can''t kill me. I resort to tricks too, but for a person who is on the same level as I am? I don''t bother with them that much."

    He muttered to himself lightly. The Mountain Master is too busy weaving the formation.

    Sam gritted his teeth and deactivated the fusion. His body which was dark and gloomy until then, turned back to normal.

    He started condensing energy around him to get rid of the restraints, but it seems like the Mountain master is already prepared. Small strands of energy are exploding slowly making it impossible for Sam''s energy to condense.

    Sam even tried to get rid of the restraints with the energy maniption, but even that didn''t happen. The control of the Mountain Master over the energy is so impable that as soon as Sam''s energy interfered in it, the restraint structure is changing into somethingpletely different.

    Just as strong, but definitely different.

    "I didn''t want to use these things, but I guess there is no point in holding back now."

    He muttered to himself once again and made a move. His whole body started glowing with a golden light.

    The glow didn''t stop there. It expanded more and more. And from the golden body, light beams were shot in different directions. The mesh and the didn''t manage to stop them as the light beams were shot from within the gaps and every one of them targeted the orbs around Sam.

    The formation that was just about to start went off and the Mountain Master was shocked by the sudden change. He wanted to restrain Sam''s energy, but before he could do that, he had to start dodging the attacks that areing at him.

    Sam''s body slowly started changing color as soon as the mesh was removed from him. The mesh went away and he started attacking the Mountain Master with light beams. He didn''t even move from the spot.

    The Mountain Master started blocking the light beams with the energy des. But his speed is not enough. The dynamic of the battle is changing way too quickly. A few minutes ago, Sam was on the defensive now it changedpletely.

    Sam couldn''t help but think that this might be the most boring and nd battle he had in a long time.

    The other party has a very unique skillset and even more unique mindset, but he is not really an opponent that Sam is enjoying battling. It felt like a massive waste of time.

    He doesn''t want to continue this anymore. He just wants to finish this up and go away. He wants a break from this stupid shit.

    As he thought to that point. He suddenly stopped in his track and made a different move. His fusion changed slightly as along with the golden light, his body is covered with golden mes as well.

    He started breathing deeply as he filled his lungs with the golden mes.

    As if this is the chance that he had been waiting for, the Mountain Master made his move. He once again restrained Sam. But this time, instead of a mesh or a, he created an energy prison out of thin air that didn''t even give him any space to move his arms even in the slightest.

    It is almost like he is fit into a coffin that is two sizes smaller than him and he was dragged near so that the Mountain master could have better control over the situation.

    But Sam didn''t care at all. He just stood there in that energy coffin as he started taking in a lot of air. His lungs expanded to no limit and before the Mountain Master could even figure out what was happening, Sam used the Golden Sun crow''s bloodline technique.

    *BOOM*

    The explosive golden mes sted at the Mountain Master. He was stunned by the sudden attack. He was thinking that he would be able to deal with Sam if he just restrained him. He had the info that Sam could use various elements, but since he didn''t use many of them until now, he almost forgot about it.

    He tried to defend against the mes at thest second. But there is little he could do with it.

    The energy coffin around Sam was released. He deactivated the fusion and started spatial elemental fusion again. He disappeared from the spot and reappeared right in the middle of the mes.

    He caught hold of the Mountain Master and stabbed him in the chest.

    "I don''t know where you got all of this reputation from. I guess if you are not given any time to prepare you are pretty easy to deal with. I feel like I wasted too much time nning to deal with you.

    Anyway, this is the end for now."

    Sam finished him off on the spot and pped a token on his forehead before he disappeared from the spot.

    The chess match was over which also brought one of the most useless battles Sam had to an end at the same time.

 Chapter 1641: Pathetic Death

    <h4>Chapter 1641: Pathetic Death</h4>

    Sam disappeared from the chess board.

    While the Mountain Master fainted as he entered one of the special spaces in the void where the trio brought the three young masters. Sam didn''t go there of course.

    As for how it is possible now, from outside to that space, Sam''s cultivation level and the mountain master''s level are worlds apart, but from the board to the space, their levels are same. Sam didn''t know whether it would work out or not.

    But luckily it did.

    The Mountain Master stayed there unconscious for fifteen minutes beforeing to himself. He was shocked at the start and didn''t know where he was and why he was there.

    But after some time, everything came back to him. He looked around trying to find a way out.

    Meanwhile, Sam reappeared back at their gathering point.

    "So, how did the battle go?"

    That is the first thing that they asked as soon as he came.

    "It is not good. It is one of the ndest battles ever. All the reputation he gained is because of his tricks and the chessboard kind of eliminated everything. When we are on an even field, it is not even a challenge."

    "But mine went well. His disciples are really good."

    "Mine too."

    "Mine too."

    They are all grinning as if they won one over him. Sam just shook his head and exined the interesting part of it.

    "He is just a crazy guy."

    "Really? How crazy is he? Crazier than you?" Philip asked casually as he started drinking.

    "In a way, yes.

    I think even you guys would do good in a one-on-one battle with him. His style was very simple. He catches you, restrains you, and finally deals with you with somerge formation. If not for thoserge formations that need some time for him to set up, he doesn''t have a decent attacking method that could damage us.

    And his strength and techniques are way too dependent on the cultivation level. It would have been a better battle if we are fighting on the real field while operating with subordinates. But in an equal one-on-one spontaneous battle, he is nothing much."

    "So, what are we going to do next?"

    "What else is there to do? We just need to wait for him to finish himself off. If my guess is right, he must be freaking out with all of the dying memories haunting him.

    Let them torment him for a while in that space and when hees out, he will finish off the task by himself. Anyway, did you get the heirloom?"

    "Yeah, it is good that the three pieces are in the control of the young masters. We just finished assembling it."

    Sam looked at therge metal disc that has there clear sections.

    It is filled with runes and when Sam ced his hands on it and injected his spiritual energy, a small projection of the surroundings appeared.

    It is like a miniature crystal table, but of course, it doesn''t serve the same purpose. Instead, this thing is a simtor. Sam started thinking about something with his hands still on it and some orbs appeared inside the projection at various spots and a formation was soon created.

    The formation inside is simted and it showed exactly how the formation would be if it was made the exact same way in the actual size around them.

    This is a really cool tool. One of the most useful heirlooms there is. But Sam really doesn''t need it much.

    His own Divine Dimension is the best for simtion and his own simtor that he made back in Gaja n is also way superior.

    But this could be exchanged for a shit load of resources from the gods.

    Apart from that, there are a bunch of other things that they gained. The divine dimension fragments that are on the three young masters. Their massive troves of treasures, their research, and all of that shit.

    "What is the situation on the Mountain?"

    "The Night members are still there waiting for the Mountain Master. They don''t know what is happening. Most of the outsiders left. They don''t want to be implicated in the deaths of the three young masters.

    So, they hurriedly escaped. As for the rest of the misceneous subordinates like attendants, I think they were also told to leave the ce."

    "So, all that''s left is for that guy toe back. Isn''t it?"

    While Sam and his friends are discussing something like this, inside the chess board''s void, the Mountain Master is trying to figure out a way. But there is nothing in front of him to work with and there is only one token in his hand that was stuck to his forehead.

    When he tried to mess with the token, he started getting some weird memories of being killed in chess over and over again.

    The memories that made him terrified. He wanted to give that up, but after a fewyers of decoding, he noticed that the token has a transference inscription on it. But it is locked with several other inscriptions which he has to decode.

    This is also part of Sam''s n. As he was trying to decode oneyer after another, he started feeling a sense of dread as he recalled all the dying moments in the chessboard. They freaked him out. Made him afraid and anxious.

    He couldn''t stand that feeling and tried to finish it faster. But when he acted like that, he is making errors and for every error, he is going through the memories once again.

    It is a curse of illusion that brings up the shittiest memories the target has. It is actually a very basic curse and in a normal situation, this guy would have easily ovee them.

    But now the situation is different. He is already shaken and he is not thinking right. He is falling for the curses again and again.

    As time passed, he is getting closer to essing the token and more. After over an hour, he is finally there.

    "You cocky bastard. I will definitely kill you. The moment, I am out of here. I will dedicate every second of my life to destroying you and everything that matters to you. Just wait. You bastard."

    He muttered to himself as he injected his spiritual energy into the token.

    He disappeared from the spot and reappeared back in the mansion from where he originally came into the board.

    As he arrived there. He suddenly felt his powering back.

    "That bastard. How dare he make me remember my past with that suppression. The days that l lived like a rodent. He almost made me relive them. I need to torture him until he begs for death himself."

    As he was thinking along those lines, suddenly he sensed a surge of energy approaching him.

    He didn''t even have time to think or gather his energy. Arge energy beam that is glowing in white color swept past a section of the mansion in smithereens. The beam attacked the ce continuously. After exactly three minutes, when the beam has been cleared, there is a humanoid figure standing in the middle of the crater that was formed.

    The figure is distorted. All of the hair was gone. There is not a single spot on his body with any hair. The robes were gone. He is standing there naked.

    But his body is not normal. The whole body is distorted in a weird way.

    He looked into the horizon.

    A carrier has aimed its cannon at his spot from far away. He didn''t know what that carrier is. He cannot recognize it, but he knew for sure that it is the reason for this situation.

    He wanted to say something, he was angry, frustrated, weak, and desperate all at the same time. He tried to yell out Sam''s name and curse his ancestors, he wanted to threaten everyone with his name and reputation, and he tried to call for help from the people that owed him favors.

    He wanted to do it all, but he couldn''t.

    He cannot speak.

    Even his other senses are slowly going numb.

    He could feel himself going weaker with every second.

    By the end of this rollercoaster of emotions, he even wanted to beg Sam to let him live, but he couldn''t.

    Because, before he could even contemte and execute the said action, he already felt the death approaching in the form of another beam.

    And as if it is on cue, he sensed a very familiar feeling around him and before he knew it, the formations that are around the mansion were activated.

    He could feel all of the energying toward him. He looked to the sky onest time, knowing that his time is up.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    A series of explosions urred as all the formations around him exploded while the beam was also shot at him from afar.

    Just like that, one of the most feared members of the Grey circle died a pathetic death after a pathetic battle.

 Chapter 1642: Woke up

    <h4>Chapter 1642: Woke up</h4>

    The next day.

    Sam and his friends are sitting together in their camp. There is a separate tent that is guarded by some formations.

    The energy is all gathering towards one point and that point, the center of the tent is where Sivan''s body isid down.

    He is still alive. He didn''t recoverpletely. Even though his soul is put together, he still needs some time to recover and Sam put this formation up to elerate that.

    While Sivan is recuperating, Sam is doing some major calctions on the side. He is calcting about the new weapon that just killed the Mountain Master. He obviously made some tweaks to the regr carrier to achieve that destruction.

    Only recently did the carriers have an attack power that could barely injure people of that level. Now just two shots managed to kill him.

    Of course, there is a lot of influence on the bad experience that Mountain Master went through on the chess board behind achieving this sess. But that doesn''t mean the cannon''s prowess is any less important.

    Sam altered the usage of vital energy the cannon absorbs to fire this and this worked wonders. The beam obviously became a bit more targeted than before, but it also became more powerful.

    The energy became denser and more chaotic. He just noted down all of his observations to make some necessary tweaks.

    "I still can''t believe that you made it that destructive without even changing much from the original design. Why did you even give us the original one if this is that good?"

    "This is just an improvement on the original one and as I said before, it is something I came up with right before we came here."

    "I don''t buy it." Philip is adamant.

    The other two don''t know what Philip wants to gain from this pointless argument, but they didn''t interfere and just watched the show. Sam is also a bit tongue-tied. Philip is just straight out rejecting whatever Sam said, without even a proper reason.

    "Just tell me what you want to do and we will do it. You don''t need to deliberately make it that I did something wrong."

    "You said it. You better not take it back."

    Sam sighed and just shook his head. Philip is getting more and more childish by the day.

    While they are talking casually, Sam sensed something and put away his tools.

    Meanwhile inside the tent.

    Sivan felt like he was struggling in the deep sea.

    He was deep. In fact, he was way too deep and he couldn''t even see a single strand of light anywhere.

    It felt like he is almost drowning. But he desperately tried to swing out of it.

    When he finally saw some light and reached the surface, just when he thought he is done with suffering like that under the immense pressure of the sea, he suddenly felt restrained.

    As soon as he reached the surface, he felt like he is a fish trying to escape the of a fisherman. When he came to his senses, the first thing he saw made him feel like the deep sea is a much better situation.

    ''What the hell?''

    Sivan felt like he is still stuck in a nightmare. He couldn''t remember anything prior to this moment. But that state onlysted for a few moments. Slowly one memory after another came to his mind.

    First, it started with him taking over Sam''s body. Then the war with the Gaja n. Escaping wth the three young masters.

    When the mind finally cleared what stood in front of him Sam and his friends.

    They are standing at the entrance of the tent as if they are watching some show in amusement.

    Of course, when they saw his reactions as soon as he came back to his senses it was indeed amusing.

    "Long time, no see. Sivan."

    "What do you want? Do you really think you will be able to leave this ce safe and sound if you managed to kidnap me from the young masters? They will kill you.

    I might not be their friend. But for now, I am their property and you would be delusional if you think you can survive after stealing something that belonged to the young master."

    "You caught up pretty quickly, didn''t you? You are indeed clever. But too bad, you don''t use that on the things that matter.

    If you were smart enough not to listen to what that stupid Dayus has told you and kept your hands to yourself, you might have lived for a few more months if not years."

    Sam spoke calmly.

    Sivan didn''t y along though.

    He took a deep breath and yelled.

    "Sam, do you really think a guy who likes you, particrly in your current situation should be wasting like this? I can''t understand how you can be so leisurely and how you managed to contact me. You need to save your ass now.

    Leave me alone now and leave this ce. Then you will have some chance to live for a few more days."

    Sam just smiled and didn''t say anything. After some rambling, Sivan finally came back to his senses. He observed Sam and his friends and noticed that they are not a bit worried. Not even a single bit or the slightest trace of anxiety was shown on their faces.

    "You are really amusing subject Sivan. At first, you came to me and stole my body. You were so cocky but when you are in anxious danger, you are way toopliant as you directly went and begged for help.

    But too bad, the delusions of me dying are not going to be fulfilled. Because the three young masters that you are so counting on are dead. My friends here killed them.

    I also took a step forward and went to kill the Mountain Master.

    I seeded. But the whole thing is so unsatisfying. That was the worst battle I have ever fought. I just hope that since you came to yourself, You will be able to make it so that I can finally feel satisfied with killing someone.

 Chapter 1643: Suicide

    <h4>Chapter 1643: Suicide</h4>

    Sivan felt like the whole world is copsing.

    He almost fainted out of shock when he heard Sam''s words. He cannot believe the fact that the young masters who can make the leader of the Mari n piss his pants are dead like this.

    They are dead and even the mountain master who is the sole reason for the status of these young masters is also dead. This is an impossible situation in his opinion. There is no way a person can do something like this. Particrly not his enemy, not the one person that he wants dead.

    He wished that Sam is lying.

    As soon as this thought came, it didn''t take long for his mind to cling on to it.

    "You are lying. There is no way you can kill them. You might be able to kill the young masters. But you wouldn''t be able to survive after that. The Mountain master is known to be vengeful. Even if he doesn''t make a move, there are dozens of people who will kill to just to get a chance to sell him a favour.

    You are lying. You just want to freak me out."

    "My existence here is enough to freak you out. Do you think I need to make up an borate story to do that?"

    As he spoke, he waved his hand, three deadbodies fell on the floor.

    Sivan was stunned as he looked at them. The three young masters that died are here. There is no way he could have ever even imagined this type of situation.

    He couldn''t speak. He was shocked out of his wits and lost all sense of his surroundings.

    *SNAP*

    Sam snapped his fingers and brought him back to his senses.

    "So, shall we get started? I am really fucking pissed about you. So I will take my sweet time dealing with your pathetic life."

    Sivan''s eyes widened in disbelief. He didn''t even know what to say at this point. His mind worked rapidly as he thought of any possibility that could let him live. But none came to his mind. It ispletely nk.

    He started pping himself on the back of his head as if he is trying to make his brain work.

    "My Father." He suddenly remembered and yelled out loud.

    "What about your father?" Sam asked with a smile.

    "Leave me alone. My father will take revenge on you otherwise."

    "I don''t think so."

    "You don''t know him. He might appear like he is disappointed in me. But he loves me a lot. He always ends up cleaning my mess. So, there is no way he could just let it be if someone kills me.

    My father might not have the same mysterious background like the Mountain Master, but he is pretty powerful.

    Even Gain cannot beat him. So, you better make your decision carefully."

    Sam stopped and thought deeply. He looked like he is really thinking deeply about something important. As if he is considering Sivan''s threat.

    Sivan prayed to every god that existed in that one minute silence hoping that by some sheer miracle Sam will just consider his threat and back down.

    But Sam just grinned all of a sudden and pped straight across the face.

    *PAK*

    "Even if your fatheres here and requests me to let you go. You are not going anywhere. You are going to die today no matter what."

    "Don''t you have any fear?"

    "No, I don''t. The father you took for granted for so long finally snapped. He told Gail, directly that he is done with you. The moment you joined hands with the Divine league was the time that you lost the support of your father.

    It seems like he finally epted you for the adult you are. You are currently responsible all of your decisions and you took so many bad ones that you are going to regret it now. Imagine a regret of hundred life times. You will consume it all at the same time."

    Sivan couldn''t take it anymore. He panted heavily before fainting on the spot.

    Sam chuckled and pped him on the face with a faint hint of spiritual energy.

    *PAK*

    Sivan woke up in shock and looked at Sam. His eyes started tearing up. He wanted weep like a child. The very fact that all of this happened because of his greed. The body that he so desired since he was a child has brought him this much suffering.

    He lost his status as one of the most prominent ns that every existed across the realms. Even the n was destroyed because of that. He had to run away like a rat and take refugee at someone else''s ce.

    He knew the moment he took young master''s help, there is no going back at all. He would have lived his life like a ve that too if he managed to convince them that he is still useful beyond just Sam''s memories.

    But he would be alive. He is confident that once he manages to be a subordinate in the Divine Formation Mountain, he would have been able to use his mind to get back Sam one day or another.

    Those were the thoughts when he escaped alive. But now, before he could even feel that sense of safety, he was dragged back into despair.

    He looked at Sam and bowed down his head while pleading.

    "Please. I know you won''t find it in your heart to forgive me. It is impossible for you to let me go. So, kill me faster. Just finish it off and let me be done with it. I don''t want to live anymore."

    "You are way too weak. This is not even that fun. Let''s see. What would you do, if I tell you that I can let you live? I will give you a chance. A proper chance so that you can live for the rest of your life. Do you want to take it?"

    "No. Just kill me. I just want to die."

    Sam sighed as he looked at Sivan. He really did want to torture Sivan a bit. At least mentally. With all the suffering he has been through after changing bodies, there is no way he could let Sivan go that easily.

    But when he looked at Sivan''s pathetic disy, he couldn''t even bring himself to enjoy this.

    He threw a small liquid energy cell and a token.

    "Just kill yourself and die. I don''t even have a taste to kill you now. You pathetic trash. To think that I lost my body to the likes of you. A person who gives up when the situation is truly dire. I am disgusted at myself.

    I never hated myself more than this."

    He walked out along with his friends after leaving those words behind.

    Sivan looked at the liquid energy cell and the token. He knows what to do because of Sam''s memories, he doesn''t need any instructions.

    After contemting just for a few moments, he took the energy cell and forcefully swallowed it whole. It didn''t go through the throatpletely. Half of it was still in the mouth. It is extremely ufortable as he gagged.

    But he endured it and looked at the token in his hand. He tried to take a deep breath, before crushing the token.

    *BOOM*

    Sivan''s head exploded along with half of his upperbody.

    The whole ten along with the formations were destroyed.

    Sam didn''t even turn back to take a look.

    Sivan the enemy that was wholeheartedly wanted to kill died of suicide.

    "We are leaving this ce. Let''s go and loot everything under these three young masters'' control. The people under the Divine Formation Mountain will make a move and absorb them if we dy it anymore.

    We will got to a different ce and hunt."

    They did exactly that for the next two days. On the third day, Sam who finally had a bit of a clear mind started thinking.

    With this, this long task of defeating organizations will be done. The rest of the yers are fighting for the second organization and from the looks of it, there is no way they won''t finish it off.

    So, he wants to know what they are going to do.

    He has half a mind to use the dimensional drifter and go to the Star bird realm where the Avatars theckeys of these gods stay. But he changed his mind. It is not like they willply just because he asked. The Avatars can be brainlessly devout sometimes.

    He thought of different possibilities on what they might have to do. But he couldn''t.

    So, all he could do is wait for a while. Of course, he is not wasting his time, just because he is waiting. He started messing around with the cubes once again.

    He still hasn''t made much progress on that front. Of course, that is not enough to keep his chaotic mind upied. So, he decided to make something really dangerous for the uing tasks that he might undertake.

    Something he didn''t want to create for some obvious reasons of its mass destructive abilities, but he just wants to be a bit willful for now. Anyway, he felt like he would need that if he really wants to survive wherever they are going next.

 Chapter 1644: Familiar Face

    <h4>Chapter 1644: Familiar Face</h4>

    A few days passed.

    Sam stayed deste. He focused on teaching his students while working on his research and experimentation. He learned a lot of things in the past year.

    Even though it is a bad thing that his body got stolen and he got stuck in a cripple''s body, he learned a lot from that too.

    He had to utilize the spiritual energy in ways he couldn''t have thought of before. Even though Sam''s original body didn''t have the same level of affinity with neutral energy as Sivan''s original body, he could still utilize some of his learnings from the experience.

    And that showed some really great results in the research and experiments he has been conducting.

    While he was living his life in rtive peace, something happened on a morning.

    When he was in the middle of giving some closebat lessons to the students, all of a sudden his wrist started glowing. Sam frowned at first and his cautiousness kicked in. He almost wanted to cut the arm off, but that thought didn''t evenst for half a second.

    Because the glow is from the spot where the wrist screen is supposed to be. The glow increased gradually as it enveloped his body.

    "Go and tell the trio not to panic. Tell them that I left for something rted to those gods." Sam instructed his students on what to do as he felt some kind of force sucking him into the void.

    After going through a weird feeling of transference, he opened his eyes in the middle of arge hall. It is arge hall with a small dais in the middle. But there are no walls. He could see the floor extended into the horizons and disappearing in the darkness.

    As he was looking around, sensed something as he turned around.

    It is a familiar face.

    "Hello, long time no see."

    Sam greeted them lightly.

    Kumar, who just arrived out of nowhere was still confused when he heard Sam''s greeting and almost shrieked in fright. Only after looking at Sam did he heave a sigh of relief.

    "Damn. Why are you scaring me like this?"

    "What can I do if you are such a scaredy-cat?"

    "Who are you calling a scaredy-cat? Huh?" Kumar refuted weakly. Both of them exchanged augh before someone else arrived.

    It is Noah and before long Arkiv also arrived followed by other yers.

    Dayus camest of the group and everyone looked at him with hostile gazes. Sam of course is included. He wanted to kill Dayus so badly for a while now, but this guy is like a slippery loach. He just couldn''t catch him.

    He thought he would be able to deal with him when he dealt with the Mari n, but Dayus was not there at that time. The three young masters managed to bail him out of Sivan''s grip in exchange for their services.

    After getting as much information about Sam as possible, they let Dayus leave. If he was trapped there, Dayus would have been dead by now. Even that didn''t happen.

    Sam is really tempted to deal with this guy right then and there.

    But before that, he got curious.

    "Why are you all being like this?"

    He asked the other yers.

    "We were in the middle of dealing with thest organization and this asshole once again sold us out to the leader of the organization to infiltrate inside. They almost caught us. In fact, Noah and I got caught by a young master there and almost got imprisoned.

    But during transport to the city, Arkiv intercepted and set us free. Otherwise, we would have been dead by now.

    "Oh? A lot of exciting things happened in my absence then."

    "Not really that exciting. Anyway, how did your expedition go? Ours was a disaster. The Peak stage Consummate cultivator was not easy to deal with. We have to use all the resources we gathered in ourst expedition to deal with this one guy.

    The preparation itself exhausted us and took more than a month and executed everything to lead him into that perfect trap, we had to bust our asses."

    Sam thought back to his expedition to the Divine Formation Mountain and shook his head.

    Except for using the Chessboard, they didn''t even do that much. The Mountain Master is fucking stupid that he made it even easier for Sam.

    He didn''t want to say this though. He had a feeling that these people will hold a grudge against him.

    "Almost same. It was very tough."

    That''s all he said.

    As they were making small talk about killing people more powerful than them, they sensed something else in the room.

    On the dais, someone''s projection appeared. It is a face that they are actually familiar with. But they are not exactly fond of it. Particrly, Sam.

    It is none other than Hel. The Norse goddess of Hell.

    Hel smiled coldly as she looked at all of the yers.

    "Long time no see, yers."

    None of the yers greeted her back. They just stood there and looked at her coldly.

    "Expected as much.

    Anyway, even I am not that fond of you either. If not for the fact that I made an agreement prior to meeting your pathetic selves, I wouldn''t havee here.

    I am here to announce thepletion of your current tasks as well as the beginning of your next tasks.

    Officially, you have destroyed all of the organizations that we listed out and you have procured enough resources from us. Ideally, you should have only finished this task when you werete-stages of Astral ne Consummation.

    At least that is what the initial estimate is. But for some reason, you finished this off way before reaching that level. Even I am a bit impressed."

    "Yeah, that''s what we wanted to do. Impress you."

    Arkiv spoke sarcastically from the side.

    Hel threw him a re which Arkiv didn''t give a damn about as she continued.

    "As I said, it would have been ideal if you were inte-stage for the next task to be announced directly. But since you are in your current stage, we have to change things up a bit.

    So, before the next task begins, you will have some free time to increase your cultivation level.

    Reach the Peak-stage of Astral ne Consummation and you can start your next task. You must have done something simr in the past, but this time some things changed.

    One of them is that you don''t have a specific time limit and the next task is not going to start at the same time for everyone.

    Whoever reaches the required cultivation level first, will get to start it as soon as they reached it.

    But the deadline remains the same for every one of you. If you are failed to finish the task by the time of the deadline or meet some conditions that will make you fail in the middle, you are going to meet a fate that is very simr to death.

    So, you better prepare yourself, and the sooner you start, the more time you will have to finish the task, and trust me, time is the most important resource that you could ask for in this task."

    "Can you get into the actual details of the task?"

    Sam interrupted her and asked directly.

    Hel looked at him with hatred. She didn''t let go of the grudge yet and she is not going to do that anytime soon.

    "You won''t be told any details about this task before you meet the requirements. So, you better shut the fuck up and listen to whatever I have to say so that you won''t die in vain after you start the task."

    Sam looked at her with disdain and replied.

    "So, all you wanted to say is that we need to reach the peak stage of Astral ne Consummation to start the next task, and even though the finishing deadline is the same for everyone they can start as soon as they meet the requirements.

    The details of the task will be revealed after we meet those requirements."

    "Yes, that is basically it."

    "Then why the fuck can''t you say it as I did. What is with all the fucking build-up? You might enjoy this game, but I don''t give two fucks about it.

    So, if you are done with what you wanted to say, let us leave this ce. Don''t waste my fucking time."

    The room turned silent for a moment and before they knew it. Everyone felt the energy surging from all sides.

    Hel''s face turned red in anger as she lost control of her own energy.

    All the yers felt the pressure. They felt like they are being crushed by a supreme force. But none of them caved in. Most of them red at Hel for doing this.

    They have interacted with gods so much that they really lost all the awe and respect they had at the start.

    And the times they fought with the god and managed to deal some serious blows now and then made them fear even less.

    So, this show of strength only made them more disgusted instead of afraid.

 Chapter 1645: A way out

    <h4>Chapter 1645: A way out</h4>

    Hel didn''t like the look the yers are giving her.

    It insulted her status as a god and she started raising the pressure. He didn''t give a shit about thepetition now. She is nowpletely focused on dealing with these yers as if they are her archenemies.

    yers didn''t budge though. Of course not all of them are like that.

    For example, Dayus. He caved in after two minutes and just started begging for his life as he scolded Sam''s impudence along with the rest of the yers'' ignorance to ever even thinking of defying her like this.

    Of course, Hel didn''t give a crap about one prideless punk. Rather she is irked by the rest of the yers even more after watching this disy. Because she got reminded of what she has forgotten a long time.

    She was reminded of how the yers should have treated her, which didn''t happen since Sam''s incident. Her anger is obviously reflected on the yers. The yers also had enough of this and were ready to attack.

    They didn''t know if her presence here is real, but since she can effect them with this pressure, they might have a chance of disrupting it. As for the difference of strength, they didn''t care much. It would be fine as long as they cannd a hit.

    But right before they made a move, they sensed different energies appearing out of nowhere and enveloping the yers. Sam felt some kind of weird energy that he has never seen before which surprised him.

    It circled around and allievated the pressure that hew as feeling just a moment ago.

    Simr things happened to the rest of the yers, except for two people.

    Dayus and Arkiv.

    Sam frowned at this. He moved towards Arkiv to see what happened and tried to use his own energy to shield him. He wasn''t able to negate the whole pressure, but he did relieve it a bit.

    As he was thinking of why this happened, a few more projections appeared on the dais.

    "What did I tell you Hel? Not to mess up this normal announcement. But you went and did it anyway. I should reallye and visit your territory again. Don''t I?"

    Gambler''s voice was heard loud and clear. He appeared right next to Hel and she appeared to be freaked out.

    Sam could feel that the energy that saved him belonged to Gambler. He looked at Karthikeya, Sun Wukong and rest of the gods that are rted to the other yers. They all stood there with their energies shielding their respective yers.

    Hou Yi and Zeus are the only exceptions. They didn''t shield their yers.

    Sam could understand why Hou Yi did it. Arkiv fell out with him after the stunt pulled by Hou Yi during the Pce of Inheritance. But Sam didn''t understand why Zeus didn''t do that. After all, unlike Arkiv, Dayus religiously followed whatever Zeus wanted him to follow.

    In fact, he believed Dayus'' behavior is very simr to that of Zeus.

    As he thought to this point, he got a faint idea on why Zeus behaved like this.

    Dayus who felt the full pressure of Hel for quite a while looked miserable. But he didn''t get up even after Hel''s pressure was gone. Because Zeus started pressuring him and looking at him acting like that, even Hou Yi started doing the same.

    Sam who was blocking Arkiv looked at Hou Yi coldly and helped Arkiv shield the energy. Kumar and Noah also joined in assisting them which made it easier for Arkiv to go through the pain while Dayus endured it all on his own.

    Looking at this scene Gamble chuckled slightly as he waved his hand.

    "Stop this nonsense. We are here to guide our yers for thest time in a while. Are you sure you want to waste all of that like this? Try to put it to some good use, alright."

    As he spoke, he waved his hand.

    He disappeared along with Sam from the spot and both of them appeared in an isted space with a table and two chairs on either side of it.

    Gambler took a seat on one side and gestured Sam to do the same.

    "So, what is that you want to guide me in?"

    Sam asked directly.

    "How are you doing? We can talk businesster. Tell me how your experience has been? I mean staying in another body and all, it must definitely be something unique and once in a life time experience. So, you should tell me how you felt about that."

    "I have nothing to say about that. My body was stolen and I was locked in a crippled body. I utilized it to the best of my ability and got my body back. There is nothing more to it."

    "Really? Such a unique experience and that is all you can think of? Can you be a little more open to me. After all, we are linked to each other whether you like it or not and even though you are ying for my pleasure, your welfare is of some importance to me."

    "If you want to care for me, finish this interaction as soon as possible and let me go from here. I don''t really want to spend my time here. My friends are waiting for me."

    "Yeah, your friends. How are they doing? From the looks of it, you guys are all having some really good time. I am honestly jealous of your situation a bit.

    Boozing, roaming around in beaches, hundreds of subordinates making billions every day. You are living some really great life. I doubt you will be disappointed if you stay like this forever. With your cultivation level and the way you are going at it, you will be able to live for at least a couple of thousand of years.

    What do you think? Do you want to stop here and live your life like this?"

    "Is it a real offer or is this another one of your useless talks?"

    "As real as it can be. I am asking you seriously. Sam, will you stop now if you are given a choice. I and the other gods will not bother you anymore if you wish to stop here. All the things that you have built, all the achievements you have, the life you have made yourself, none of them will be disturbed.

    You will be safe, happy and free. You can live your life as you wanted without any restrictions, obligations and particrly any necessity to fulfil certain tasks at all. You will be a free man.

    You don''t have to feel like a puppet and y the game that you were ying since the day you came here. Will you take this chance or not?"

    "Why are you offering me this?"

    "Is that all you have to ask? There is not even a change of expression. Are you not even a little bit excited? Isn''t it what you always wanted? To be free of everything. You will have all the freedom you want."

    "Just answer my question." Sam asked with a deadpan expression. There is not even a single twitch in his facial muscles when Gambler asked this.

    "Okay, as you wish.

    This offer is me giving you a way out. The next rounds of thispetition are going to be really messy and dangerous and the moment you leave this ce, thepetition will start.

    Hel might have said that you wouldn''t be doing next task until you reach the peak stage of Astral ne consummation, but that doesn''t mean thepetition has stopped.

    The only thing that stopped is the pre-determined and tailored tasks. You will bepetiting with each other and to a great extent."

    "Don''t beat around the bush. Just tell me what it is. I have no patience for this bullshit."

    "Alright, as you wish.

    At this point of the game all of the gods are giving their candidate a way out, because in the next task, there is a great chance that all of you will die and if by any chance that any one of you survived, theter the person staysin the test, the harsher it will be for them.

    The level of struggle each person has to go through will be immense to the point that you will really wish you were just dead instead of going through all of this.

    Even though we kind of forced our hand in this situation, you guys still entertained us to a great deal. Going through all of the torture we have put you through, we really do wish to give you a way out after this.

    One ticket to get out of this loop once and for all. You will be free, truly free devoid all of our influence over you."

    Sam stayed silent for exactly ten seconds.

    "If that is all about this free ticket, can we move on to the details of the next task? Is there any information you can give me about it?"

 Chapter 1646: Request

    <h4>Chapter 1646: Request</h4>

    "You are really not fazed by this offer?" Gambler asked seriously.

    "No. All I want to know is if you have any information about the nextpetition."

    "Okay then. If you really want to be like that, then I can''t do anything about it. It is your choice at the end of the day. As for the next task, there is not much that I can tell you at the moment. One thing I can tell you is that try to reach the requirements for the next task in 6 years.

    After the task starts for you, don''t try to run for the first ce, but beingst is also not rmended. Within the deadline try to endure as much as possible beforeing out. Because whatever you are going to gain in that time period will be helpful for your future. The longer you stay in, the chances of gaining will be more."

    "Is that all you can say? There is no context about the information. It is way too vague."

    "It might be vague, but that is the what I can tell you right now. But do remember these words, they will really help you after thepetition starts and you will also understand what I meant by them, after you get more details."

    "If that is all, I would like to go back."

    "Yes, you can go back now. Anyway, since I revealed this info you are going to be part of the task. You cannot back out now. You are trapped for your life and even your soul is trapped in your death."

    "Yeah, I already know that. I guess that is how I ended up here in the first ce."

    "In a way you are right. But I suggest that you remember my words. I insist. You can leave now. Goodbye. Also beware of your teammates. In a way, the lesser contestants that are in the next task, the better."

    Sam disappeared from the spot after that conversation is over and he went back to the spot he disappeared from.

    His students are gone. His three friends came there and are waiting for him while still giving orders to the rest of the subordinates to deal with things.

    They are sure that Sam would reappear here only and even if they couldn''t be sure about it, there is not much they can do about it.

    They could only hope that hees back here.

    Sam came back making their hopee true.

    "Where did you go?"

    "To meet the Gambler. It is about the next task."

    "So, what is it? Do you need any help for that?"

    "Not really. All we need to do is make it to the peak stage of the Astral ne Consummation and we will be good."

    "That''s it? But it will take a lot of time right?"

    "Of course, it will take a n awful lot of time. WE need to make it in six years though. So, get ready for some long ass grind. A grind for six long years. It is a hard thing to aplish, but you do know that doesn''t matter one bit."

    "Okay, if you finish the preparations, then we can go ahead."

    "No, this time you are finishing up the major preparations. I am going to roam around and interact with some of our new friends."

    "You are going to the Gaja n?"

    "Yeah, I will be there for a week. I need to ask Gail some questions and also I will go and meet Demon Soul Swordsman. They are the people with extensiveworks in the Grey circle, I will try and get some information if possible."

    "Okay then. I wanted to ask, do you think Grivon and Giyon would want to join in for the training?"

    Philip asked all of a sudden.

    "Why do you ask?"

    "Just for the sake of it. I like them. I would like to interact with them more."

    "If you are thinking of anything weird, I will fucking kill you."

    "Yeah, yeah. Make some believable threats. You will kill yourself before you can even think of killing me. Dumbass."

    Philip disappeared as soon as he said those words, to avoid a beating from Sam.

    Sam just shook his head and left to Gaja n immediately.

    He didn''t want waste anytime.

    He met with Gail and directly shot his questions.

    "I would like to know if there is any major event happening in six years. Anything major. Anything that would make an impact that is on a level enough to affect the grey circle."

    "In six years?"

    "Yes."

    "Nothing strikes me at that specific time period. Why do you ask?"

    "Something rted to my stupidpetition. I would like to know as much information about it as possible. Most of the time when the gods created tasks, they made it so that it would impact realms atrge.

    Until now, we destroyed a lot of organizations that shook realms of various levels.

    This type of task only came with gradual increment in the difficulty throughout thepetition.

    I believe the next one will impact the Grey circle next. If there is a way to know what might happen in the next six years, who do you think might know it?"

    "You want a seer?"

    "Nope. I am not a fan of Seers and their abilities."

    "Why?"

    "They believe fate is absolute and from what I understood they gain the ability to look into the fate by bowing to it. I don''t believe in that. I would like to meet someone who can predict or even know about what would happen.

    With a credible source or proof of information."

    "I heard about someone like that actually. But they are not from my generation. They are from the generation of the Demon Soul Swordsman. I don''t know if they know each other. But he is the only guy that would have any remote possibility of knowing that old man."

    "Thank you. I nned on meeting Demon Soul Swordsman myself anyway. I will ask him then."

    "That''s great. But I wanted to visit you myself actually. It is a good thing that you are here."

    "Okay, tell me what do you want?"

    "I am leaving the n in a few months. Not just me, even Gamin and Yuvana are leaving. Now the n will only be left with three Peak stage cultivators and Saran just started out recently. Things will go bad if peoplee up with some plots to take them down.

    I need you to try and take care of this ce while we are gone. The three of the might not be able to amount much in a full on fight, but your presence and strategies, will help. I talked to the n leader and he will give you fullmand over all of the forces of the n.

    I will do anything for you. It is just that I don''t know when I will return of if I even return or not. And I cannot leave this opportunity as it is way too rare. So, I need your help with this. I will do anything you want me to do."

    "Don''t worry. Gaja n and Dusk are business partners, we can do this much."

    "Thank you."

    "But where are going exactly?"

    "To the Divine Realms."

    "Divine Realms?"

    Sam asked in a surprised tone.

    "Yes, there is aplete void domain that seperates our realms from the Divine realms. Rumor has it that only Divine league has ess to those realms and the reason being those realms are actually being upied by Deities and gods.

    So, they only gave them this chance because they are avid believers.

    But there is a natural wormhole that has been locked in the divine graveyard and recently it has been unlocked because it was worn down with time.

    So, we are entering it now."

    "Why do you want to enter it? Just to explore?"

    "There is no growth in these realms. Astral ne Peak, it might be grand, but it is hard for us toe this far and just stay still after we knew that there is a much vaster world waiting for us. This is a chance for us to improve by a lot, so there is no way we can lose it.

    I am sure you can understand our situation. That ce is going to open doors for us for a new stage of cultivation and we will be once again thrown to the bottom of the pyramids given a chance to raise again.

    This is an opportunity that might not strike again."

    "All the best for endeavor then."

    Sam smiled and wished him the best before he left. He went to meet the Demon Soul swordsman.

    But he had to wait for a while in the Blood Iron league as the old man was a bit busy. And he kept on thinking about the Divine realms. After all, Sam had heard of these realms a long time ago from Yanwu.

    In fact, that was the main purpose of Yanwu. To guide Sam in those realms and because of this talk, he is very tempted.

 Chapter 1647: Six Years

    <h4>Chapter 1647: Six Years</h4>

    The very thought of leaving his current situation and move to Divine realms is something that intrigued Sam to no end.

    But with the way things operate here, all he can do is just suck it up and move along with the rest of the situation. As he was thinking and grinding his teeth against the rules of thepetition, Demon Soul Swordsman finally made his appearance.

    "It hasn''t been that long since you left this ce. Why are you here already after defeating a really tough opponent? You should have stayed there at home and rxed a bit."

    "I was nning to do that. But I don''t have a choice. I need to start working right away. I am here for that reason only."

    "What do you want?"

    "Is there any event that is going to happen in the next six years? It should be big and important enough to even impact the Grey circle. Do you know anything about it?"

    "Six years? That is way too far away for me to care too much about it, so I don''t have any ready-made info on that. But as far as I know there is nothing of that sorts. Why do you ask?"

    Sam went on exin his spections and said.

    "I asked Gail about it and he said that there is someone from your generation of Grey circle members that has a possibility of knowing what is going to happen. Do you know who he is?"

    "Did he say anything specific about that person?"

    Demon Soul Swordsman asked with a frown.

    "Nothing much. Just that only you have a chance of knowing that person. That is it."

    Demon Soul Swordsman nodded and said.

    "Then there is indeed an old man like that. But I highly doubt we would be able to find him any time soon and even if by any chance you find his approximate location, you would still be unable to meet him.

    He only meets people that he wants to meet. He is way too entric. I suggest that you don''t hope much."

    "I would appreciate it, if you try to find him. I would really like some information about that. It is rted to the next task that the gods are giving us. I don''t want to dive in without knowing as much information about it as possible."

    "Why are those cunts not revealing information prior to the task? They have the thought to tell you about it six years before, then why leave you guys hanging with this half assed information?"

    "I don''t know. I wish I could find that answer too."

    "Anyway, I will try to get the information you need. I will keep in touch with you."

    "If you don''t mind, you can contact the dusk directly. I don''t know where I would be for the next few years. I will be moving around. Boys are alsoing with me to train. So, we might not have a single location that we would stay at.

    But we will definitely back to Deste once in a while just to check some things out.

    So, if you can leave the info at our headquarters that would be great.

    There is a space gate connecting Gaja n to the Dusk, so you can use that."

    "Sure thing. I will do that then. All the best for your training. You cane for me to get any help anytime you want."

    Sam went back to the Deste after meeting Giyon, Grivon and Jyon onest time. Even though he was not very keen on it, he still asked them if they want to join in on the training since Philip wanted it.

    He was sure that they wouldn''t agree, but to his surprise, they are very eager. Not just Giyon and Grivon, but even Jyon was ready.

    "I thought you were not interested inbat and strength."

    "No, but I am interested in freedom and in this world, strength gives us freedom. Don''t you agree?"

    "Of course, it is surprising that you agree with this philosophy."

    Sam just cut the conversation off like that and left. When they reached the deste the trio is pretty excited. Six years of long ass training. They knew that Sam is not going to go easy on them, but they also know that growth is going to be rapid.

    They are very much looking forward to it and with the addition of three more people into the mix, they couldn''t feel more excited about this.

    As soon as Sam came, he started drafting up a training n. But it is not for a long time, just a full packed training schedule for the three months. He decided that he would draft up another one after those three months.

    And in those three months, the three siblings understood a whole different side of Sam.

    He trained like a maniac. The constraints he put on himself while battling various creatures across the realms, the targets he set for himself, are scary.

    His schedule is three times harder than the siblings and twice as harder as the trio''s.

    But what surprised them even more is the trio''s zeal to out do themselves. Thepetition within the three of them is so intense that the siblings thought they woulde to blows any moment.

    That didn''t happen, but it looked like a very clear possibility.

    Soon they realized that Sam and trio might even be closer than the siblings themselves. They have such clear trust within themselves that made them feel a bit ashamed.

    And in these three months, they saw Sam training until he fainted without a worry. All because his friends are around him. He didn''t dare to even take some rest back at Gaja n, even though they repeatedly assured his safety.

    A guy who is so paranoid and thinks way too much about the possible problems and creates all kinds of backup ns, didn''t think twice before fainting in the middle of a forest that has beasts that could kill them any moment.

    The first three months went by in a sh and Sam came up with a new training n for another three months, which is obviously much tougher and exhaustive.

    And soon this turned into a pattern.

    Every three months, they came back to deste and created a training n before they went away and came back after another three months.

    There is not much rest and of course in the middle of it all, there are some enemies that Sam had to deal with.

    Just like Gail predicted, there are some powers that came after the Gaja n and they are pretty adamant.

    Some of the organizations are even after Saran''s children once again and they wholeheartedly believed that they will make it big as long as Gail, Gamin and Yuvana are not present here.

    They trusted that they will get lucky and capture those kids.

    But no matter how much they tried, Sam didn''t let that happen.

    In just one year, he killed over three hundred people who came for the kids and one of them is a n that is just below the power of Gaja n.

    It is one of the n that sided with the Mari n and asked for truce when Gaja n rose in power again, but it seems like the departure of the three powerhouses made them grow some balls.

    Of course, Sam cut them all off immediately, but it wasn''t enough scare everyone. The people that are trying just kept on increasing.

    But Sam didn''tin, he just used that as a training opportunity as well.

    And slowly, these six years have passed.

    In these six years, they killed hundreds of people if not thousands, destroyed dozens of organizations, increased in cultivation levels crazily. Went across the realms to find rare treasures and resources, expanded the Dusk organization into a few dozen new realms, conquered previously existing powers that shed with him.

    The expansion of Dusk was on its full swing and particrly when one member after another from Sam''s team also trained like terrorists and reached peak stage, the strength of the Dusk went through the roof.

    Since they already started it, the manufacturing of carriers, water towers, and sky towers became a norm. Of course, they didn''t use them. They were just deployed to act as detrimental objects for the enemies.

    Along with that, there is another thing that has rapid progress and that is Sam''s research.

    His research into the cube technology that was left behind by the Demon Shadow Swordsman and the creation of a very special weapon that he himself was researching, and on top of all that, thebination of both.

    By the end of six years, he was pretty satisfied with the results he had. He reached the target cultivation level, his friends reached the target level right after that, the siblings got closer to Dusk, and the Gaja n was safe along with the kids.

    He must say that they aplished a lot.

    The only unsatisfactory thing is somethingpletely external that is controlled by the people who don''t take a hint and he decided to deal with that as soon as possible.

 Chapter 1648: Trapped

    <h4>Chapter 1648: Trapped</h4>

    Godfather.

    The person who governs the Divine League. A person with absolute authority in the Divine League to the point that he can forcefully veto any decision that is made by the rest of the league members.

    He is someone who visits Divine Realms as he pleases. The rumor that the Divine league has ess to the Divine realms ispletely true and this old man is the only one who can ess it and take some people along with him.

    And currently, he is trying to ess that passageway along with a couple of other people.

    They are anxious, standing there like idiots. Fidgeting with a token like a scared and petrified person fidgeting with a key to their house unable to open no matter how much they tried.

    The old man''s legs are shaking as he looked into the horizon.

    "Why the fuck is this not working? What do we need to do to get out of here?"

    The Godfather cursed as he looked at the token in his hand. One of his subordinates is crouching on the ground as he hastily drew something with his spiritual energy.

    All of a sudden, he stopped in his tracks and spoke.

    "We can''t get out."

    Godfather stopped and looked at his subordinate with rage and despair appearing on his face. It looked like his face is struggling between screaming and weeping.

    "What the fuck did you just say?"

    "We can''t get out of this ce. No matter how hard you try, it is impossible to get out of this ce. Because we are inside the mostplicated spatial lock I have ever seen."

    As soon as he spoke a slight wave of energy just went past through the surroundings and all of a sudden, arge dome with spatial energy surrounded the whole area.

    It spread so far and wide that it enveloped the whole region around them.

    Everyone under the formation is staring at it in despair. There are more than a hundred people in the surroundings right now and all of them are feeling trapped.

    The formation emitted such an aura that appeared impossible to prate. This is the core area of the Divine league and on a normal day, half of these people here would have died to stay in this ce for a little longer.

    Some would have sacrificed anything just to stay here permanently.

    But right now, all they want is to leave this ce. They didn''t dare to stay here for another second. All of them started attacking the formation at various spots like crazy.

    But there is no use.

    As they are being thrown deeper into despair with every passing second, they saw something outside the dome. Some carriers arrived and surrounded them from all sides.

    Looking at the charging energy cannons, the godfather panicked before he made a move.]

    He took out a bunch of weird tokens and crushed them one by one. The subordinates who are around him were confused and didn''t even understand what they were doing.

    By the time they reacted, they saw a very special crystal barrier surrounding the spatial barrier around them.

    "What is that? Is that another barrier made by them?"

    One of the subordinates asked in shock. The person who managed to figure out and reveal the spatial lock formation frowned and looked at the Godfather.

    "What did you do? How do we have a formation like this?"

    The rest of the subordinates looked at the Godfather in shock. They didn''t expect that he is the one who made this barrier.

    Before they could even get an answer from him though, all of the subordinates suddenly felt someone invisible force sucking the energy out of them and the crystal barrier that the God father created is being strengthened by it.

    They are all petrified. Their faces turned pale and they started sweating profusely. But that is not the end of it. After a few seconds the energy being sucked out of them reduced gradually, but they could feel some invisible bond being formed between them and the formation.

    "God father, what are you doing to us? Why are you doing this? Let us go, we can all try our best to escape."

    One of them screamed their lungs out as they felt the slight sense despair enveloping them. They don''t know what the formation is doing to them, but they had a vague idea that its not anything good.

    Soon the screams from all the subordinates started increasing. The Godfather looked them in a panicked state and said.

    "From now on, your lives are tied to the formation. You might not have remembered this, but this was a part of the contract that you signed with the Divine league. Now the strength of the formation is proportional to the collective strength of all of you.

    Nobody would be able to enter this as long as you are strong enough.

    So, from now on stop attacking the spatial lock needlessly and stand your ground. Our priority right now is not escaping, rather enduringenough to not die in the enemy''s hands."

    Hearing his words all of them turned silent and in a few seconds, half of them fell onto their knees. They are weeping their eyes out and the other half are outraged. But the end result is the same for the two halves, despair.

    Why such desperation? Because there is not a single formation in the Divine league that managed to stop the enemy froming at them.

    They almost felt like the years of research and tonnes of resources that went into creating those formations are aplete waste.

    They don''t believe in the current formation also. And from what the godfather told them, their lives are linked to the formation, so they are going to die if the formation is broken.

    As they were despairing, up in the sky, Sam is inside a carrier along with his friends.

    "Shoot."

    Hemanded and all cannons shot at the same time. The energy beams were shot at the formation, but to Sam''s surprise, there is no difference whatsoever. The formation remained there without a scratch.

    The subordinates of the Divine league below were shocked, but only this time did the shock lead to some hope instead of despair.

    Sam looks at this scenario on various screens. He didn''t like that look of hope on their faces, so he decided to erase it.

    "Next target dome. Every cannon aim at the target."

    The cannons on all the carriers moved. They all aimed at one spot. The dome of the crystal formation.

    "Fire."

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The cannons shot out with explosive bursts of energy and all of themnded on the one weak spot of the formation. The Dome.

    As the Divine league members are watching this, they felt some sense of fear gripping their hearts, but at the same time, they also hoped that there is a tiny chance that the cannons are just wasting their energy and the formation will save them.

    After a minute of continuous firing, a small crack appeared on the formation. At that moment, the energy being sucked from the divine league subordinates increased and no one even resisted.

    The beam and the reparation of the formation collided.

    Sam is looking at that hoping that the formation will break, while the subordinates did the exact opposite.

    The sh went on for minutes but it was still a stalemate.

    Sam frowned and took out a token.

    "I will go and finish this myself."

    As he spoke, he crushed the token and the trio exchanged a nce before they sighed.

    They know what is going to happen. They might have all been on the same level, but in the past six years, Sam''s growth was in multiple aspects. In fact, they pitied the members of the Divine league. Dying under the energy beams of the cannon is a much better way to die.

    Godfather looked at the crack and frowned. Generally, the formation would have blocked the spatial transfer as well. But now that there is a crack, he is afraid that something might happen as his fears dide true when he felt a small spatial fluctuation far away from his spot.

    Sam appeared in his ck attire and stood there with a cold expression on his face.

    All of the Divine league subordinates looked at him in shock, anger, and slight fear.

    The cannons stopped and the formation was repaired.

    Everyone exchanged a nce thinking about what to do.

    Godfather looked at them and yelled.

    "EVERYONE CHARGE TOGETHER. KILL HIM NOW."

    The subordinates didn''t move though. In the past six years, they were behind many attacks that happened to the Gaja n. They enticed, threatened, and cajoled many organizations and people to attack the Gaja n, so that they can obtain the kids.

    So, they know about Sam. They researched him and tried toe up with various strategies that could counter his own.

    They know what he is capable of and now knowing that he is in the same level of cultivation as them, they didn''t dare make a move."

 Chapter 1649: Slaughter House

    <h4>Chapter 1649: ughter House</h4>

    Sam looked straight ahead.

    There are more than hundred people in front of him, but his eyes were locked on a person who is standing behind all of these people. The God father.

    He didn''t care about the people in between, all he wants is to reach the God father and finish this fight.

    Looking at Sam''s focus on him, the God father became anxious and the inaction from his subordinates irked him.

    "I didn''t want to use this. But since you decided to not listen to my orders, there is no other way."

    He muttered slightly and only a few of the subordinates that are close to him heard this. They frowned as they didn''t understand what he meant. But the next second the frowns are gone.

    God father crushed a token and all of the subordinates suddenly became expressionless. They lost all the anger, sadness, fear and anxiety on their faces. They are dead like robots. Even the man who discovered the spatial lock turned into a person like that.

    Of course there are some other people that are still normal. They are the external members of the Divine league.

    They are not bound by this token, but the God father has another way to make them fight.

    "If any of you refuses to step forward and stop Sam. I will kill you myself. If you fight, there might be a chance that you can survive, but if you don''t, you are definitely going to die.

    The people that became dead faced robots aimed at their weapons on people that are not.

    They got scared and didn''t know what to do for a second, but there is always a guy who reacts on impulse.

    He attacked the one that targeted him and ran away from the spot as if he had a route to escape. But there is none.

    The God father smiled. This is the perfect time for something like this to happen. One of the deadfaced subordinates went after him and killed the guy trying to escape.

    This made everyone feel the fear and made them take their weapons out getting ready to fight Sam.

    Sam smiled at this.

    All these people are very powerful. They haverge influence across realms. All of them are ruling more than one realm at least. But now they are all trapped in this dome and cannot do anything but follow orders.

    That too, because they are influenced by such an old trick in the book.

    He just smiled as he looked at the charging enemies and took out a staff.

    This one is not the staff that he used before. It is a brand new one, he made recently. It is one of the by products of his research and experimentations he just finished recently.

    When he held the staff, it started glowing slightly. But the glow is not just on the surface, every grain of the metal the staff is made of, is glowing.

    The granr glow is way different that normal glow thates from the energy enveloping the staff.

    The normal spiritual energy changed to the golden fire elemental energy. Sam mmed the staff on the ground and arge circr imprint appeared on the ground. It spread with cracks as fire elemental energy spread rapidly, before it exploded.

    The expansion of the energy is simr to the expansion of the energy through the energy pellets. The energy explosion urred because of the imbnce just like it is within a normal energy explosion.

    Sam leaped high in the air and mmed the staff once again, but this time, itnded on the head of an opponent while breaking through the energy barrier they created around themselves.

    With a small explosion, golden lines spread all over the flesh of the opponent. Even before the spread stopped, Sam jumped away from the spot without wasting any time.

    He jumped to the next opponent and the previous one just exploded in golden mes. When the dust settled half of the body was gone. It was a gory scene.

    Sam didn''t even bother to take a look back as he attacked the other opponents.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    One explosion at a time. He started taking down one opponent after another like they are nothing.

    Godfather who saw this, shivering in his boots. He knew that Sam is strong, but this type of strength is unexpected. It is not something he anticipated.

    He once again started trying to get out of the ce with the token. Of course which is already established as an impossible task to do.

    By now, he is just trying it out in desperation. He looked at the formations above his head and questioned himself.

    It took a lot of resources and even the members themselves for them to make a formation like that. But Sam managed to put up a spatial lock that could lock dozens of Peak stage cultivators up and they didn''t even know when it was set up.

    In a million years, God father would have never thought that he could be trapped in a formation that he couldn''t break not matter how hard he tried.

    It is unfathomable.

    But not only was he forced to experience this but a person who can kill him is running right towards hi. And he is doing so by making corpses of some of the strongest people of the realm around.

    This is not a fight. This is Sam''s ughter house and it seems like he is intent of killing every single living thing inside.

    Within the next ten minutes, Sam reached the old man.

    He walked slowly now as he took each step with his sweet time. He looked calm andposed. He looked at Godfather expressionlessly. But that didn''t go well on the face that is drenched in blood.

    Sam looked like he was dyed in read. A bit of rage would have been better, but that ice cold expression made the old man quiver uncontrobly.

    Sam looked at him calmly.

    "I repeatedly sent you a message to not toe after the kids. But you kept on doing it anyway. Now ite to this. Because of your stubbornness, hundreds of people died and right now, leaders of more than a couple of dozen realms are dead.

    You created this much chaos just to get your hands on some kids that are not yours."

    God father looked around and he didn''t even know what to say. It is not like he was not present in such a battlefield before. He saw gorier scenes, but this is the first time he was a victim. A weak helpless and apletely useless victim.

    "Don''t push it on me. I am not the reason for this. You are the one who caused this. You are the one that created this much bloodshed. Don''t make me the bad guy. Just ept it you monster. It is just four kids. Do you really have to go this far?

    And they are not even rted to you?"

    Sam chuckled and didn''t even bother to answer that question. He just swung his staff andnded a hit on the old man''s neck.

    The old man was sent flying and before he couldnd, Sam reappeared beside him and the staff handed on his head.

    The head exploded while in mid-air as the body crashed into the ground.

    *BOOM*

    Just like that, the Divine League was done. It ispletely finished.

    Sam let the specter out to start the soul absorption process. The spatial lock is gone the formation of the Divine league is long gone as all the members died.

    He used his own spatial energy and blinked into the carrier from where he came from.

    He went into the divine dimension to clean himself up.

    Within the next five minutes, everything is done and they all left to Gaja n while the rest of the troops went back to the deste.

    When he reached the Gaja n, the leader is waiting for his return along with the siblings.

    "I still can''t believe that after you disappeared for a while, you wille back with this new cultivation levels. How did you even grow this fast? Even your parents took a long timepared to you."

    Giyon and Grivon exchanged a nce and just shrugged. They really don''t want to get into this, because Sam''s training is something that they don''t want to remember again and again.

    It might have given great results, but the experience was not really a pleasant one.

    The n leader just asked it casually, he was not really expecting an answer.

    Samnded at their front gate.

    "Are you guys done here?"

    "Yeah, everyone is dead, what about you?"

    "The Divine League is no more. I suggest you explore the Divine league''s grounds. You can take my carrier. And very soon there is going to be a realm war. I have a list of organizations that will be needing some really dirty trinkets to win this. You might want to keep an eye on them and utilize the situation to your benefit."

 Chapter 1650: Going to Hell

    <h4>Chapter 1650: Going to Hell</h4>

    Sam gave the list to the n''s leader and walked in along with his friends.

    By now, Sam and his friends are like honorary members of the Gaja n. All they arecking is ast name and for that reason, there are many elders trying to fix up their daughters with them. Even the youngdies are awfully eager to be with them.

    Of course, Sam rejected all the advances and the trio is also trying its best to not to get too annoyed at this.

    Luckily, Giyon has enough power to throw them all away with just a re, so whenever she is with them at least, the groups are not trying hard to throw their daughters at them.

    After entering the n and resting for a while, Sam gathered his friends for a meeting and this time the siblings are included as well.

    "Almost all enemies of Gaja n are gone. There is only a couple of them left and you all know who that is."

    "The Hairy Savage and his father."

    "That is true. But from the information I got from the Demon Soul Swordsman, both of them are not active for a while. They are not even present on their mountain.

    So, It could be that we can rx or we can also be paranoid about this.

    One thing I suggest is that since they need the kids, we openly create a situation that seemed like Saran and his family is leaving the n.

    We can make them appear at a few realms here and there and create an illusion that are traveling around to keep the kids safe."

    The siblings frowned as they heard his n.

    "Why do we need to do that now? Isn''t everything alright currently?" Grivon asked in confusion.

    "Yeah, but I don''t know what will happen after I leave. You must have forgotten. It has already been six years since we started this. I need to leave for my task.

    And I am telling this now because, from what I learned from other yers, once you ept the task, you cannot return even to say goodbyes.

    I witnessed it myself from a couple of other yers who left a month ago. So, once I ept the task, there is noing back. That is why I am telling you guys these things.

    I am sure you can handle yourself for the most part, but the Hairy Savage and his father of a different level, it is better to not get into a full-on fight with them. You either have to wait for me or your parents to be here if you want to do that.

    But from the looks of it your parents are noting back any time soon."

    "We get it. So, any ideas on where you would be?"

    "I don''t know. But for some reason, Gambler told me to join six yearster. I thought there could be some massive event happening at that time. But there is none. There is also no information from that supposedly knowledgeable old man.

    I can only give up on knowing more about it and leaving this ce. I cannot dy it anymore. I am actually three dayste than the rmended time."

    "So, what are we going to do?"

    Philip asked as he took a sip of his wine.

    "The three of you are going to enter the Divine Realms."

    Everyone was shocked.

    "What? Divine realms? Without you?"

    "Yes. I don''t know where I am going, but I am sure that it is something rted to Divine Realms, I am already at the peak of what the current world can offer.

    Even if it isn''t, there is going to be a time for me to enter that realm.

    You guys go ahead and get everything ready for me."

    The three of them once again exchanged nces, but this time, they are smiling. Grinning from ear to ear.

    "Don''t even think about it. You are notpeting this time."

    The grins are gone.

    "What does it matter to you? All you need is for us to be there. We will do it however we want."

    "That is a new ce and I might not even be there. If you startpeting like usual and mess things up, I won''t be there to manage it.

    And you guys are getting way toopetitive nowadays, what if someone else tries to take advantage of it?"

    "It is not like we are that easy to fool. We can manage ourselves."

    "Not happening."

    And thus the bickering began.

    The siblings were a bit dumbfounded no matter how many times they have seen this.

    After a session of that, Sam finally caved in.

    "Do what you want. But I won''t tolerate if you guys are doing something stupid by the time I get back. Keep yourselves in check."

    Then they talked about all the preparations that are needed before Sam leaves the ce.

    They went back to Deste after arranging everything for Saran and his family. The kids are staying in Deste at Dusk, where the Old Beast is going to take care of them.

    Sam still couldn''t estimate what the strength of the Old Beast is, but he is sure that no matter what happens, The Hairy Savage or his father cannot do shit when the family is his protection.

    Of course, they are going toe out and travel randomly here and there to mislead the enemies, but overall, they are going to be kept safe by the Old Beast.

    After that was done, Sam went to meet his students who are already at the Peak stage of the Consummate stage. Of course Mortal ne.

    Their growth is fast. Way faster than Sam''s own. He gave them some goals on what they should do next and finally prepared to leave.

    All he had to do is just activate the wrist screen once again and contact Ling Tian.

    He noticed this from a few people that left before. Dayus actually left six months ago. Noah and Kumar left a month ago.

    Sam did tell them that the six-year mark is a good one, but they went on anyway. Arkiv is still not there at the cultivation level, so is waiting.

    As for the rest of them, Sam doesn''t know as they are not really in contact with them.

    Sam once again felt the same feeling he had when Hel summoned him along with the rest of the yers.

    Ling Tian appeared in front of him.

    "You are finally here. Your friends already started their tasks. I was thinking that you willg behind."

    "Can we just skip right to the task?"

    "Alright. Alright. Don''t get hasty. You will have all the time in the world for a while.

    Before we go deep into details, let me exin where you are going to be until the task is finished."

    "Where would that be?"

    "Hell."

    "What?"

    Sam was shocked. He almost felt like he heard it wrong.

    "You heard me right. You are going to stay in the hell until the task is finished. At least for most of the time. In between, you will be let out into Divine realms once in a while to finish some other tasks."

    "What do you mean by staying hell though? I don''t understand."

    "Well, before we go into that, let me exin something to you.

    From the Astral ne to the Divine ne of cultivation, there are two ways you can reach it. The first one is through faith. Most people choose that.

    But the second way is cleansing. A method that is not often chosen by many people, because most of them die while doing this. But do keep in mind that you will be really strong if you opt for that and seed at the end of it."

    "I already know that."

    "Come on, let me finish.

    There is also a known third way, the hybrid method between two. People basically choose one primary method and then they will use the second one as a secondary one to increase a bit of their strength.

    This is also kind of popr, particrly among the rich brats in the Divine Realms.

    Currently, one of the goals in these tasks is to break through to the Divine Realm and you are going to do that in a very different way and a way that was not used in a very very long time is not just this but any other world.

    It is a mixture of not just cleansing and faith, but there is a hidden method that was not even known to many people for centuries.

    And for this method, you are going to stay in the literal hell.

    The hell that you know of. Hell, that is where the souls gather to cleanse their sin before they go through reincarnation again.

    And you are going to do that in almost istion without any contact with the rest of your fellow yers, but of course, you will be knowing the progress of other yers.

    So, before I go into more details, let me congratte you for being one of the very few who is entering hell as a living human being."

 Chapter 1651: Towers

    <h4>Chapter 1651: Towers</h4>

    "I am going to hell as a living being and you are not kidding. This just got a lot more interesting."

    "Why do you think, Hel came to introduce the task? Last time you were brought into that space, she just didn''te to intimidate you, she actually left a mark on your soul. So that it would stay intact within the hell without leaving your body."

    Sam frowned up on hearing this.

    Another person, that too a person that he hates with passion messing with his soul is not something he isfortable with. He closed his eyes and started looking for the mark on his soul.

    "Don''t even bother trying to find it. You won''t be able to do that. Do you really think that a God who is almost at the top of the whole foodchain even among the other gods leaves a mark that a mere Astral ne cultivator can identify?

    It is impossible to do so.

    Anyway, don''t worry, it won''t cause you any harm. It is personally vetted by Gambler himself. He took extra care of making sure that it ispletely fine because of your history with her.

    It is perfectly safe and everything is done with the constraints and the rules set up by the remaining gods.

    Also the gods whose candidates were already eliminated out of the game are acting as the overseers of thepetition now and they are extremely strict."

    "I am pretty sure, there are rules in ce when Hou Yi took over Arkiv, and Hel acted as her own yers. I don''t believe in a set of rules that are broken multiple times.

    I highly doubt these gods will ever think ofpletely obeying these orders."

    "I can understand your point. But all I can say is that you don''t have to worry about it. Anyway, let me exin what you need to do next and for that, we need to go to hell."

    With that he snapped his fingers, both of them disappeared from the spot.

    They reappeared in a vast ce. It is dark and the only light ising from the dark redva that is glowing on the ground around them.

    He noticed that there is arge pir in the middle of area.

    Ling Tian looked around and at the pir, before he spoke with a smile.

    "This seven-feet pir is key to the task. It is the key to start, continue the task and even finish the task. Let''s take a look."

    Both of them walked closer to it.

    Sam looked at the majestic pir. Even though it is just seven feet tall. It looked like it could support the whole world on top of it.

    He wanted to instinctually touch it and raised his hand.

    "Nope, you can''t touch it yet. If you touch it, the task will automatically start." Ling Tian stopped him.

    Sam stopped and waited for more details.

    "In this task, as I said, you will be using a very new method to breakthrough to the Divine Realm. Not just breakthrough, this is the ce where you reach the Peak of the Divine Realm.

    The method we are using involves three things, Faith of people in you, the Sin you have umted and finally the corruption of hell while you tame your sin.

    You are going to temper, your body and soul with these three aspects and breakthrough in each step.

    Your faith is the factor that is mostly decided by now. If you want to increase it anymore, the only method is for you to utilize the time you are going to be outside of this hell to finish some more tasks in the middle.

    And the second thing the sin you have umted.

    Generally, that is the cleansing part, where people fight the effects of their sin through cultivation. But for you case, you are going to literally fight your sins. And every life you took, every ce you destroyed, all the suffering you have caused, no matter how minor or major it is, it will be counted as your sin.

    You will have a chance to fight all of them. The more sin you cleanse, the higher chance you have to be stronger with each level. Of course, you can leave some of your sin unattended, but there are some other consequences for that, which you will learn about some other time.

    The final part, the corruption from hell.

    Whenever you fight some of your sin, you will be absorbing some energy from hell. Think of it as an energy that corrupts your soul bytching on to it.

    If you can process it, you will be strengthened, but if you can''t, your soul will be slowly merged with the hell and its surroundings, making you a permanent part of it."

    "What are the consequences of leaving the sin without taming it?"

    "I will tell you after I exin the pir and what you need to do with it."

    "Alright."

    "You need to ce your hand on the pir, it will calcte and manifest your sin into a tower. All you have to do is clear the tower as much as you want.

    You want to see how your peers did it and how their towers manifested before to get an idea?"

    "Yeah, why not?"

    Ling Tian waved his hands and a virtual screen appeared in front of them. The first screen is of Dayus who came first into this realm. When he touched the pir a streak of ck smoke came out of the pir from all sides.

    The smoke manifested into various silhouettes. Silhouettes of animals, humans, elves, Barbarians etc. There are a bunch of different races that manifested and these flew to different sides.

    Soon a tower started manifesting around him.

    The screen zoomed out and soon Sam saw arge tower with around a two dozen floors was formed.

    The silhouettes flew to different floors of the towers and settled there.

    The screen changed and then came Noah''s tower.

    This time it is bigger and the creatures are different.

    Kumar''s is also different.

    "Every tower is different. They don''t have any simrity other than how they are formed. Each level of tower is not ssified based on the number or time of the sinmitted. Rather they are formed based on the level of suffering you inflicted on them.

    The level of sin will be what makes them fall into ce and each floor of the tower is its own world.

    Its vastness depends on the level of sins you havemitted.

    Simply put, the number and the level of sins will decide how many floors do you have on the tower, how vast each floor is and how powerful each sin is.

    And the sins are not just from this world. You will be having them from your previous world as well. So, you will be facing a lot more sins that your peers I guess."

    "A lot more in an understatement.

    So, are you going to tell me what happens if I don''t tame all the sin? They seemed to have taken the shape of the creatures, so what is going to happen?"

    "The more time the sins are left untamed, the more consciousness they will gain. They will start of as pure hatred or agony, but they will process it and soon thoughts will start forming.

    They will look for other sins, consume them and manifest themselves into beings and finally they will leverage the hell''s corruption and turn into various demons.

    That is who the first demons were formed and as more and more gods that are currently in the positions of power and ruling used this method, the demons started growing.

    One of the reasons that this method is forbidden is because of that. New sub species among the demon race wereing up everyday. And some times the people who challenged will be consumed and they will also turn into demons."

    "So, all the demons are formed like this?"

    "Not all of them. Some of them are created naturally. It is a much longer story and we don''t have time for that.

    Anyway, until youe across your next task, it is better if you focus on your tower. Of course it is not like you have any other choice. You are going to stay here and you are going to fight these things."

    "So, should I touch it now?"

    "Yes, please. I am looking forward yours and in fact so are your peers."

    "The other yers are watching?"

    "Yes. You can actually watch each other''s progress also if you allow each other. Just like how you watched their tower formation, now they will also witness yours."

    Sam just shrugged and ced his hand on the pir.

    He felt like an invisible and intangible force, invaded his mind. That force pulled all of his memories outside and connected the soul with a different force that seemed to have ability to see anything and everything.

    Sam felt like he connected with the whole universe.

 Chapter 1652: Tower Formation

    <h4>Chapter 1652: Tower Formation</h4>

    Sam closed his eyes as he felt the connection.

    He lost himself in that connection and let it take the reign of his soul. That overwhelming power still made him feel safe and sound without any sense of danger whatsoever. While Sam is getting lost in that feeling, the rest of the yers and Ling Tian witness the formation of the tower.

    The ck smoke formed. It surrounded a much vaster area than any of the previous towers.

    The smoke turned into the silhouettes of normal humans, children, and adults. One silhouette after another appeared out of nowhere.

    Two, four, eight, sixteen¡­. a hundred.

    Not just human silhouettes. Soon silhouettes of hens and roosters, ducks, goats, pigeons, rats, wolves, foxes, bears, and crocodiles. A lot of animals that only existed back on earth appeared.

    The first floor of the tower was formed. All of the silhouettes entered that. The second floor soon formed and a few hundred human silhouettes appeared.

    The sheer number made the other yers and Ling Tian feel surprised. They also killed thousands of people, but none of them had this many in the very first floors.

    They are expecting something grand, but this way too much even for their expectations.

    While they are contemting on how huge the tower will be at this rate, the third floor came followed by hundreds of people & animals, kept on increasing. Then came fourth floor, followed by fifth, sixth, seventh¡­ tenth¡­ fifteenth¡­twentieth.

    Finally, it stopped a bit.

    Everyone was shocked. Twenty floors and all they saw were silhouettes of humans and animals. Normal animals. Not the beasts here. That means, everything that they have seen until now is from their previous life of Sam.

    For other candidates, there are more than twenty floors at least, but that is thebination of the two lifetimes. And the first life didn''t even have that many lives. There are only a few hundred people and that is for Dayus.

    Noah and Kumar didn''t even have that many lives behind them.

    There is no way they would have ever imagined that Sam could have killed this many people in his first life. As they are shocked about that for a moment, they realized how many people he must have killed in this life.

    Even the count they vaguely know is way too huge. The Usain sect, thunder god temple, the wars he waged when united the western continent. The people he killed within the empire. People he killed when he destroyed the organizations, it could be said that Sam had made most enemies and he also killed most people.

    And the suffering he caused, is also no less. Of course, he made a lot of lives better. Expanded his organization like crazy, but the lives he took are not any less.

    The floors continued.

    Twenty-first, Twenty-fourth, Twenty-eighth, thirty-second, thirty-fifth, thirty-eight, forty-fifth, fiftieth, fifth sixth, it went on and on. Finally, they only stopped when it hit seventy-second.

    Seventy-two floors.

    Every floor is twice as big as theirs and they have filled with hundreds of people if not thousands and tens of thousands. With so many sins manifested in such forms, they cannot even imagine how long it will take to clear them all.

    Sam opened his eyes.

    He is currently on the ground floor of the tower. Standing beside the pir with his eyes open as he started the majestic room around him.

    The pir changed a bit.

    At first, it was just a seven feet tall pir that has no aesthetic appeal. But now it is supporting such arge tower. It obviously grew in size and there are three grooves across the length of the tower.

    One of the grooves started filling up. It is filled with bright blue light. After the groove was filled, it started spreading to the rest of the pir and before he knew it, one-third of the pir is glowing

    And the glow is not just superficial. It is on a granr level.

    Sam is perplexed as he couldn''t understand what this light is. It is definitely not energy. He could easily sense it if it was.

    It almost looked like a normal light without any gimmick. But even the spiritual energy thates from normal light is not showing when he used energy vision.

    Looking at Sam''s confusion, Ling Tian chuckled and said.

    "Don''t worry. It is no fault of your abilities. The blue line you are seeing is faith. That is an indicator.

    The remaining two grooves are actually the indicators of sin taming and corruption absorption.

    Your faith is overflowing that is why the pir is glowing like that. The indicators are made in such a way that they can hold much more than what an average yer can gain. Even if an average yer fill each groove to seventy percent, they would have enough strength to be an excellent Divine stage cultivator and would be able to stand at the peak of Divine ne cultivators when they reach the peak.

    I must say, even I am surprised a lot by your faith. It is almost on part with a decently ranked god. Not a single Divine ne cultivator would be able to fight you in that regard."

    "Thanks for thepliment. Luckily, all the things I have done at least yielded some results. It would have been a waste otherwise."

    "Really? In what form or shape is your current empire a failure? I would have loved to have that much under my control when I was bing a Divine ne cultivator.

    Don''t y the modest game. It doesn''t really y well with the other yers."

    "I don''t need them to be my fans and I will judge my aplishments based on my own standards. There is not much I can do if that makes some salty bitches cry over me."

    "Okay, okay. No need to be that serious. Anyway, I told you what you should know. The only thing to let you know right now is that your towers are built in the neutral areas of hell.

    And Hell is basically divided into various domains. Your area is currently closed to Hel''s domain. She is the person in charge of hell from the Norse Gods'' side and she is also part of the game. So, I guess I don''t need to tell you why she became in charge.

    Anyway, that woman is going to be a pain in the ass if she tries to be one because of your history. So, I would suggest that you don''t give her as many chances.

    One way for your to help yourself in this situation is not roam around in the neutral domain of the hell too much.

    That area has no governance whatsoever, so when you are out of the tower, things might get a bit wild.

    Apart from that, there is actually zero advice I can give you. You can figure out the rest pretty much on your own as you start the task.

    The further tasks will be known as you continue."

    Sam nodded and Ling Tian disappeared with a goodbye after he said everything he needed to say. Sam was finally rxed after that.

    He looked at the Pir and ced his hand on it. He closed his eyes and wished to be on the floor.

    The first floor of the Pir.

    Sam looked in the surroundings. It is vast. He could see vague structures of buildings on the horizon, so he decided that he can start somewhere.

    But on his way through, he finally spotted something that made him remember some of the things he did when he was a really little kid and did some things that a person shouldn''t do no matter how you are angered.

 Chapter 1653: First Floor

    <h4>Chapter 1653: First Floor</h4>

    Inside the first floor of the tower.

    Sam''s emotions are in turmoil. He couldn''t fathom witnessing the faces that he wanted to forget for so long.

    These faces are part of his dark history. He didn''t want to see them again. That is the part of his life that he is not confident in facing.

    And to think that they came to haunt him in the very first floor. He couldn''t help but feel a sense of anxiety when he thought of what could be in the remaining floors. This is indeed a really tough challenge.

    Sam looked at a young man.

    The young man looked lean and strong. He is taller than most people. He had dark skin. He looked like a normal person. But there is one key differentiation between him and a normal person. His eyes are ck.

    The whole eyeball is ck in color and there is only the pupil which is white in color.

    He is the guy that made Sam beg in the streets, the guy Sam ratted out to a trafficking organization.

    The guy had died because of Sam and the pain and agony that was visible on his face when he died, was present. And Sam could sense the strength of a Peak stage Astral ne cultivator from him.

    It is pure neutral spiritual energy and it seems like it is bnced between the warrior type and the mage type. It is not a direct Mage-Warrior type that is for sure.

    As soon as he saw Sam standing there, he started running towards him. With the anger apparent in his face.

    Sam made a move and punched him in the face. The young man didn''t stop though. He didn''t show any fear or any hesitation when taking that punch. He acted like a rageful idiot who doesn''t have any thought process.

    There is no tactic, or technique in the way he fought, he just took the hit head-on with brute force and suffered all of the damage.

    Sam dodged the next few attacks and kept on attacking him from different directions. There is no way he can deal with the current situation easily.

    But soon it became annoying because he saw two middle-aged people. One man and a woman started running towards him.

    Their mouths are secreting some saliva that is ck in color along with ck eyes that are simr to the first young man.

    There is no way Sam could ever forget these faces.

    These faces haunted a good portion of his past life. The first two lives he has ever taken with his own hands without even knowing. These are the two national-level artists that he killed with the poison. The two artists sexually exploited him when he was eight years old.

    The woman looked at Sam in resentment and spat on him.

    The ck saliva that came out of her mouth looked like a water ball. Sam barely dodged it and it hit the Young man that was near Sam.

    The ck-colored Saliva started emitting some dark smoke as the flesh on the young man started melting.

    The young man started healing the wounds at a rapid pace. The regeneration speed is actually higher than Sam''s. He was surprised, but that didn''t stop him from continuing the attacks. The middle-aged man also started spitting the ck poisonous corrosive saliva.

    The attacks are strong, they are pretty decent in timing as well. But they are not really battling with a particr strategy in mind. They are just randomly attacking Sam with the intention to hurt him.

    So, it was pretty easy for Sam to control the battle. The only problem is that they are strong enough to not die by just one hit from Sam.

    They can take some damage and they are capable of recovering with their regeneration abilities. This made the situation a bit tricky for them.

    So, he decided to take advantage of the saliva that is being shot at him constantly. First, he started grappling with the young man and used him as a meat shield for the saliva attacks.

    While regenerating the defense and the speed of the opponents is being reduced by a lot.

    So, Sam has a really easy time dealing with more damage while carrying the young man as a meat shield. He used that technique to close the distance between him and the other opponents.

    He then mmed the young man into the middle-aged man.

    It is almost like he used a semi-flexible tree branch to hit someone. The middle-aged man skid on the ground for a minute, before he stopped at a spot. Sam turned around and threw the young man against thedy before he zoomed towards the middle-aged man.

    He reached in a sh and started beating the crap out of the middle-aged man. He took a full mount position andnded the barrage of attacks. He simply punched the middle-aged man out of any possible shape.

    With a punch, the jaw of the middle-aged man flew in the air andnded far away. By the time the remaining two opponents came to him, Sam tore the head off of the middle-aged man.

    He threw his head to the side and right before he was about to get up and move to the remaining two opponents, he felt a sense of energy that didn''t belong to him.

    This weird energy is dark, dense, and powerful. The energy fit him I the face and he felt a slight sense of sharp pain that he never really felt before.

    He closed his eyes to observe where this came from and then remembered what the instructions were. This is the energy from the corruption of hell. As he was thinking, he also found that there is some other invisible energy merged with that corruption.

    It is the cleansed sin that you carried for these people.

    Sam just took a couple of seconds before he went back to killing these guys. He just mmed the shit of the opponents and killed them within no time.

    Of course, the grand disy of attacks attracted some strangers. The strangers are of course the dead people that are nearby.

    He killed a couple of them and got a vague idea of how to deal with them. So, he just dived into the fights.

    After the initial experience of the power and the effects of the corruption, he became much freer in space. He increased, his speed and strength as he actively sought the opponents instead of just waiting for the ones that are there for him.

    He didn''t know how long he fought, but there are dozens of dead bodies all over the ce. The surroundings looked like they are some kind of suburbs withrge houses. Sam started raiding one home after another, but after he went on with over a dozen houses, he finally hit a roadblock.

    The pain that came from the corruption suddenly shot through the roof. The sin he has been cleansing also seemed to have hit a certain limit. He almost felt like his body is exploding.

    And this happened when Sam is actually standing in front of a person who is wearing a standard Indian police uniform, Khakis.

    Not only does he have a uniform, he even has a cap on his head with a brown leather belt and a holster attached to it.

    When the police officer saw Sam, he turned around and took out a gun from the holster.

    Sam was surprised that the other party has a weapon. As if that wasn''t enough, the police officer started gathering some weird energy from different parts of his body. Sam could even see the cirction openly.

    Only then did he notice that the police officer has been shot dead. There are at least thirty bullet wounds on his body, but since there was no blood on the uniform, Sam didn''t bother with the tears.

    The energy is being pumped towards the gun from these bullet wounds.

    When the gun loaded in just a second, the police officer pulled the trigger.

    *BOOM*

    At first, Sam didn''t think much of it. After all, it is not his first time facing guns, in fact, he did that when he was just a kid in his past life. There is no way, this could shake him.

    But their opinion changed as soon as he was hit with the pain of the corruption as well as he saw the bullet that came out of the gun. It is like the explosion of a hand grenade ispressed into a one-inch cube and the cube traveled at supersonic speed to release itself at a certain point.

    Sam attempted to dodge it, but the bullet already reached his side and exploded there.

    He still has his feather coat on, which helped him out in dealing with the explosion, but he was thrown away to the side like a ragdoll.

 Chapter 1654: Police Officer

    <h4>Chapter 1654: Police Officer</h4>

    *BOOM*

    Before Sam could even properly get up, another explosion urred beside him. This time, instead of dodging he relied on using a defensive barrier.

    Which didn''t work as well as he wanted it to work, but still it didn''t throw him off far away.

    He looked at the police officer with a frown. He doesn''t know who that person is. For the people he killed until now, he is sure who they are and why they have such resentment towards him.

    But this person is someone Sam doesn''t even know. He is pretty sure that he didn''t die by Sam''s hands.

    So, he is very confused on why this guy appeared in his tower.

    He doesn''t have any time to waste on contemtion. So, he threw the thoughts to the back of his mind and got ready to fight back. Only after he stood up and started circting his energy did Sam understand that it is not a usible thing to do.

    He cannot fight back for now. He noticed that ck lines are appearing on his body. They are spreading along the veins. He couldn''t circte his spiritual energy normally. In fact, even absorbing the spiritual energy in the surroundings became a problem.

    Sam could only grit his teeth and wave his hands. Harbinger came out.

    He jumped onto the Harbinger and let the spirit take control of the board. Instead of Sam attacking, the board just attacked its own with Sam''smands.

    The board hovered over the area as wind des and wind energy explosions ran rampage. Sam keenly observed the police officer to see how he would react. But to his surprise, not a single scratch could be seen on him.

    All the police officer did was aim the gun at different spots and gather energy from different gun wounds.

    Each wound gave him a different type of energy. When he used a wound on his leg, the bullet''s energy is sharp, confined, and precise. It is more like an energy beam.

    When he used the one from the back, the energy explosion has a ripple effect and spread far and wide.

    A wound from the chest gave him the normalrge explosion that threw Sam off at the start.

    A wound from the arm gave the flexibility to the attacks and the police officer managed to change the trajectory of the bullet.

    Just like this, there are different attacks that the police officer can do with all of his wounds, and sometimes he can evenbine two or more wounds to create an explosion of various qualities.

    If not for the speed of Harbinger, Sam felt like he would have a really hard time with this. The corruption is spreading rapidly and he is barely able to control it while fighting.

    After he tackled the police officer for a while, he finally understood that it would be hard for him to defeat this person if he is struggling with the ck energy.

    So, he needs to find a way to clear this corruption and get back to the fight.

    As soon as he thought up to that point, a bunch of images shed in his mind. It is the method to remove corruption. It seems to be one of the things the gods imprinted in his mind while putting down a seal on his soul.

    He now naturally knew how to do it, even though he didn''t do any of it before.

    He looked into the surroundings to find a spot to start the process. He is in an area that looked like suburbs.

    And he looked at a certain spot that looked like an empty area far away. He zoomed the harbinger towards that ce.

    The police officer followed him for a while. The speed which should have been almost impossible for a person of that level was seen in that police officer. But as soon as Sam went out of that suburb area, he stopped chasing.

    He shot at Sam a few times, which were dodged by the harbinger, but Sam managed to escape.

    The police officer looked at Sam coldly, before walking back into the suburbs.

    Meanwhile, Sam moved towards what looked like fields. There are no houses in the vicinity except for one barn. The rest of the area ispletely filled with fields.

    Sam knew that there is a great chance that the barn has some people that might want to take care of him, so he decided tond in the fields with a considerable distance between him and the barn.

    Afternding, he let harbinger take care of him, while he sat there trying to channel the corrupt energy. It is impossible for him to directly observe this without going back to the pir. But once he goes back to the pir. But going back to the pir and returning back to the tower is going to be a hassle.

    At least Sam wants to explore the first floorpletely before he went back to the pir.

    So, there is a remedy for his situation. All he has to do is suppress the corrupt energy into the center of his body and perform a seal with hand signs so that it will stick there without affecting the rest of his body.

    Of course, there are some possible side effects and many ways it could go wrong. It is safer to go back to the pir and process the corrupt energy there, but Sam decided to take the risk. If things go well, he will go back to that ce only after the first floor is cleared.

    While Sam is meditating and performing some hand signs, far away from him near the barn, arge white rat came out of the barn. It has the same ck eyes. But its body is different from a regr rat. It almost looked like the rat has taken steroids and worked out for years.

    It ran into the fields towards Sam, followed by dozens of rats that have simr but also different variations in their bodies. Some looked lean and they are fast as bullets, some managed to bite through everything in their way, they are not even bothering to move around some rocks in the field, they are just biting through them.

    Some rats are moving underground as if they are fish in the water. The list could go on.

    And followed by those dozens of rats are actually a few dogs. They are not many, a little over half a dozen. One of them is a pitbull, another one is a husky, and the remaining looked like they are just stray dogs.

    Of course, their eyes are ck and they have massive fangs. Their ws also grew bigger and they looked like savage beasts that could tear something apart at any given moment.

    Sam who is sitting in the middle of the field tried his best to suppress the corrupt energy. All the ck lines slowly started going back and they gathered I his abdomen.

    He quickly made a few hand signs and right when he was about to make a move, he felt a sense of danger.

    The harbinger made its move. Arge wind de cut through the fields and went straight ahead at the rat that appeared nearby.

    They lunged forward instead of dodging. Its teeth started glowing with weird energy as it bit into the wind de.

    The tangible wind de was broken in half as the rat bit through it.

    The harbinger didn''t stop. Energy beams and wind des were shot at the rats like crazy. The whole ce turned into a chaotic mess. Sam frowned, but he didn''t dare stop the process now. He knew for sure that he would have hell to pay if he is disturbed at the moment.

    He made the final three signs and suppressed the energy.

    He opened his eyes and looked at the harbinger. He took out his new staff, the one with the granr energy conduction, and went to assist the board.

    A rat that came directly out of the ground jumped at him. He swung the staff directly at the rat''s head. The head is crushed into the ground. Sam applied pressure and wanted topletely crush the head into the past.

    But to his surprise, the rat just dug through the group in a sh and disappeared from that spot. It came out instantly and tried to bite Sam in the leg.

    Sam stomped at it to let it go. The rat once again dug into another hole and disappeared. Sam felt frustrated, because right when he was about to deal with this one annoying rat, another rat came out of nowhere.

    He swung the staff at its head. This time the force threw the rat far away making it crash into a tree. The rat made a hole in the tree before it crashed into the ground behind it. It looked at Sam crazily before it disappeared from the spot. Sam of course didn''t notice and started fighting with the remaining fights.

 Chapter 1655: Testing

    <h4>Chapter 1655: Testing</h4>

    Sam noticed that the defense of the rats is too much and before he could even deal with them, the dogs already caught up.

    He gritted his teeth and shook his head.

    "If even the first floor is this tough, I wonder what the remaining floors would be like. And to think I would be having a hard time facing a bunch of rats and dogs. This is embarrassing."

    He made a few hand signs as his shadow started moving.

    He used the shadow necromancy to release his shadow undead. Their shapes are manipted to spread on the ground far and wide.

    At the same time, he also used the earth''s elemental energy to crush the space under his feet. The rats that are moving under his feet suddenly felt the pressure of the earth. All the openings they created were now filled withrge spikes.

    The rats weren''t stabbed though. Their skin was so tough that they were just pushed to the other edge of the hole. They were being crushed, and after so much effort, their internal organs started feeling the pressure, but their skin wasn''t damaged in the slightest.

    Sam finally managed to kill a couple of rats like that while crushing the earth. As for the rest, when they tried to jump around Sam tried to slither and slip around. As theynded in the shadows, they were caught in their ce.

    "Good thing I learned this shadow maniption. These little shits. Just how annoying can they be."

    As he was thinking, he caught hold of a dog and put it in a headlock. He used the energy observation and maniption technique to powder its neck.

    The dog died on the spot before Sam extended his hand. A bunch of energy gathered at his fingertips into a few energy bullets. They were shot at the rats that were caught. The shadows'' tentacles forced open the rats'' mouths as the energy bullets went inside and exploded.

    The rats turned into a bunch of meat paste before they disappeared.

    Sam heaved a sigh as he retrieved his shadows. He didn''t expect such a challenge from this ce. This is actually one of the most annoying battles he has been in.

    Before he could be d that this is over, he noticed that a horde of rats ising toward him.

    "Fucking hell."

    He muttered to himself as he got on the harbinger and flew away into the sky. He didn''t want to get into a direct confrontation with these things. They are way too tenacious for such little creatures.

    He could only focus on contemting different methods to kill these little fellows as fast as possible. But while he was thinking, he had to dodge some wind des that came out of nowhere.

    *SWOOSH*

    The whistling sound of the des going right past him made him vignt once again and he looked around. He saw a bunch of chickensing from the direction of the barn. Being shocked would be an understatement for what Sam felt at that moment.

    He barely wrapped his head around the fact that the rats became this strong, now there are some chickens that areing from the barn that can throw a really dangerous wind de from almost 1000 meters away.

    As if that is not enough, they can glide pretty well. Even though the chickens originally cannot fly, it seems like the hell gave them the ability to glide a lot more than they actually should be capable of.

    Now came another twist. As Sam dodged the wind des something else came along. The roosters started screaming at him and the sonic waves hit Sam disturbing his bnce a bit.

    Sam used an energy barrier to block them before he shot a fireball at the birds. Which was simply destroyed by the sonic waves. They didn''t even bother to dodge the golden mes that came at them.

    Sam couldn''t help but roll his eyes at this situation. These creatures are so tenacious in terms of their physical endurance. He didn''t even have this much trouble when he was dealing with Divine League.

    He gritted his teeth and moved towards the chickens on the harbinger. These ranged attacks are going to be more troublesome than the rats. The staff started glowing with spatial energy as he swung it at the nearest chicken.

    The concentrated spatial energy exploded with the void style. It almost happened in slow motion as the surrounding energy gathered into small energy pellets because of the staff. These energy pellets collided together once again and created a massive explosion in an instant.

    The chicken that was hit in the head, exploded on the spot.

    The pieces that came out of the explosion crashed into the surroundings, creating smaller explosions wherever theynded. One of those piecesnded on the nearest chicken which was gliding and also crashed into the ground.

    Of course, it didn''t die.

    Sam checked the staff and shook his head.

    "I could kill a dozen guys with this energy. Even the humans that I fought on this floor were easier. I wonder what''s the difference and why this is happening."

    He muttered to himself and proceeded to fight.

    As he was floating in the air and fighting the chickens and the rats, he noticed something else. He looked at the barn and there are a bunch of chickensing out of it once again followed by a bunch of rats.

    He frowned and looked at the already crowded area.

    "Fuck it."

    As he spoke, he extended his hand forward. An energy barrier was formed and small energy spheres gathered all around him. He closed his eyes and controlled the spheres. They spread around the rats that are on the ground.

    A formation was created and a controlled explosion was on the way.

    *BOOM*

    Half of the rats died and Sam moved forward with another formation, but this time in the middle of the air as he destroyed a few chickens.

    He then moved towards the barn as he let the remaining injured chickens follow him along with the rats.

    He got a look at the barn. It isrge. Maybe thergest one he has ever seen. He has never seen such a big barn in either of his lives.

    And there are two entries for that barn. One of them is letting out chickens that are flying toward him while the other entrance is letting out rats.

    He doesn''t know how many going toe out. But it doesn''t seem like a small amount. It is almost never-ending.

    He contemted for a bit and turned around before leaving the area. After he reached a certain distance out of the field, the chickens stopped following him and went back.

    Sam hovered there in the air as he sat down on the harbinger while contemting. He took out a scroll and started mapping whatever he found until now.

    He managed to clear a few areas at the start. But the remaining two areas he visited after that, one with the police officer and the other with the barn and the creatures are going to take some time as he needs to figure out a proper countermeasure for them.

    After mapping that out, he only has two more areas to explore and the first floor would bepletely explored. Of course, he does need to kill all of these things. But at least he will get some breathing space until he finished the whole exploration.

    He can also figure out if this terrain and the area offer anything that he could take advantage of while dealing with these things.

    After some thought, he proceeded with the n and hovered around on the harbinger as he moved to a different area.

    This one is a lot better. The people are stronger and he came across some cats as well, but they are not as tough as the rats and hens, and they are nowhere near the policeman in the uniform.

    He dealt with the people there easily within the day. He spared his energy without any consideration. All he did is sit back and recover while thinking of ways to deal with the creatures.

    He finished off thest remaining area as well before finallying back to the barn area.

    First, he captured one of the chickens and one of the rats with much effort and brought them out of the barn area.

    As soon as they are out, the creatures struggled like they were being tortured by some kind of curse. They are screeching and screaming. But they didn''t die at all.

    Sam took them back to the area and they finally stopped struggling. They even got their strength back.

    After that, he went back to the barn area and once again captured a couple of these creatures before going back to the sub-urban area. He dropped these creatures in front of the police officer. To his expectations, the policeman fired a couple of shots at the rats and the chickens and they died.

    The corruption energy was attributed to Sam.

 Chapter 1656: Spatial Tear

    <h4>Chapter 1656: Spatial Tear</h4>

    The next day.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    A series of explosions hit the suburban area as Sam hovered around on the harbinger. The police officer kept on shooting him as Sam leisurely dodged each one of those bullets.

    He just slipped past a yard and lodged arge liquid energy container while doing that.

    The police officer jumped on to the top of the house as he shot at Sam.

    *BOOM*

    Sam smoothly slipped away while lodging another container in some other spot. The police officer followed him as he leaped off of the building.

    *CRASH*

    The roof of the house shattered as he leaped through the air and shot consecutively at Sam who is dodging all of these attacks. Sam kept on dodging the attacks while cing the liquid energy containers here and there.

    After cing all of them, he increased the altitude to do a final check before leaving the area. The police officer followed him, but had to stop when Sam left the suburb area.

    The police officer looked around. There is a hint of frustration in his actions. He kicked the pebble on the ground to the side and aimed the gun at the nearby house.

    *BOOM*

    The house exploded into the pieces.

    The police officer then looked at the surroundings and his eyesnded on the liquid energy containers. He looked at the containers that Sam left behind and went near one of them.

    Sam who is moving away saw this from afar and was very tempted to explode it immediately, but he had to control the urge, before flew to the barn area. The rats and the chickens are still harmoniously waiting for him.

    And the number increased by multiple times. Sam took out arge cannon and supported it on his shoulder. He loaded the cannon with a container and shot it at one of the corners of the barn.

    The chickens and rats noticed him, but he is at an altitude that makes it impossible for them to reach him.

    "If only these things are weak, I could have taken you all down from here leisurely." He muttered to himself before he shot another container at a different spot.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    One container after anothernded around the barn based on how Sam calcted. In the next ten minutes, he finished setting up the formation andunched the final container at the centre.

    The surroundings started trembling as the spatial energy rumbled. Arge tear appeared in the space as all the chickens and rats were sucked into thatrge tear.

    Meanwhile, on the other side of the area. In the sub urban area, the police officer who is checking the containers around, felt the tremble of spatial energy. As he tried to touch the container, he felt a slight bacsh that threw him off.

    The formation acted up and arge tear appeared on this side as well. He looked at the chickens and the rats that are falling from the sky.

    He frowned and took out his pistol before shooting the creatures one by one.

    The creatures are already screeching and screaming with the pain that came from this ce not being theirs. One of the things Sam noticed is that the farther away they are from their original spot, the more pain they are experiencing.

    So, things became easier. But of course, the police officer is not having a good time.

    Even though the rats and the chickens are having such a terrible time with a lot of pain and weakness, they are in hundreds in numbers. They are relentless. And the police officer is not able to shoot faster. There is a certain limit to his speed.

    His explosion is strong enough to blow up at least two creatures at a time, but that is not enough to clear more than a couple of hundred creatures instantly.

    While the creatures and the police officer are duking out with each other. Sam hovered around the barn for a moment, before he directly went in through the entrance.

    The barn is basically empty. There is just arge empty room with a bunch of chickens and it is connected to anotherrge empty room with a bunch of rats.

    They were all asleep by the time Sam arrived, and woke up after he did. The whole room turned chaotic and they started attacking Sam from all the sides. Sam stood at the connecting point of both the rooms and defended himself with the barrier.

    He kept the energy barrier intact and used the hoverboard to get out of the barn. The creatures that followed him were sucked in by the spatial tear directly.

    Meanwhile, Sam took out his cannon as he shot around the barn. His n is to destroy the whole barn in a single shot. When the formation was finally set, arge energy storm originated from the middle of it.

    The storm with wind and spatial energybined slowly started destroying the barn. Board after board, tile after tile everything came off easily.

    Slowly, the barn was torn apart and the storm directed everything into the spatial tear nearby.

    The police officer on the other side started feeling the pinch. The creatures are already troublesome enough, but now Sam added this extra storm to the mix.

    After making sure that the barn will cease to exist and no more creatures wille out of it, Sam also dove into the portal to go to the other side. He looked at the battle between the police officer and the creatures.

    He took out his own hand guns and loaded them with some new bullets that are a result of his new research. They are part of the same batch as the staff that Sam is using now. But these things are a lot more powerful.

    "I didn''t want to use these things right away. But we don''t seem to have a choice. Let''s finish this off as soon as possible."

    He aimed his gun and shot at the nearest chicken.

    The bullet also has a granr texture. Each grain is glowing with golden fire elemental energy. When it reached the target, the grains of the bullet broke apart and spread out a bit into a sphere of one foot diameter.

    The golden energy linked each grain and at the centre of the sphere a smaller sphere of energy originated which attracted the spread-out granr pieces to the centre.

    *BOOM*

    The golden mes exploded. The chicken that was caught in the explosion. The feathers and the flesh burned off. The explosion then blew off the rest of the pieces. The surrounding creatures were blown off with some serious burn injuries.

    Sam then shot another creature and then another. The police officer noticed what Sam is doing. He frowned in frustration. He wanted to deal with Sam and aimed the gun at him, but before it could happen, a rat leaped into the air and bit the police officer.

    He shook the rat off and shot it at point ck range. The rat''s head blew off.

    Before he could go back to Sam, another rat came and attacked him. So, he decided that all he has to do was deal with these creatures first and then move to Sam.

    So, both shooters started dealing with the creatures. They are already weak enough with the pain that they are going through so they are basically target practice.

    For the next fifteen minutes, they cleared out almost all the creatures nearby. The rest of them are injured and in no condition to fight anymore.

    Samnded on the ground finally and looked at the police officer. He held his gun aimed straight at Sam without even blinking.

    Sam did the same and they shot at each other.

    Both bullets shed and they negated each other.

    Sam raised an eyebrow in surprise. He had a few close calls with these bullets, but he never felt the full power of it. Only when his own bullets were negated did he understand how powerful this guy is.

    Sam didn''t even want to test and see if he would be able to win against the guy with just one gun. He didn''t want to waste his time and test himself or anything. He would just find out whatever it is the best way to deal with him.

    He took out another one of his hand gun and used the two of them shoot at the opponent at the same time. He didn''t care if it is fair or not. All he needs is a win.

    The gun fight became intense after this.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The explosions raised mayhem. The police officer is very good with this kind of fight. He managed to use the rest of the houses and the surroundings to his advantage. In fact, Sam could feel that the skill is on par with some of very high level fighters he met in his past life.

    But too bad, he cannot hold on for long.

    Sam shot eight times in a row. The police officer couldn''t keep up, particrly when the bullets followed the same path again and again.

    The bullet hit the police officer on the shoulder.

 Chapter 1657: First Floor cleared

    <h4>Chapter 1657: First Floor cleared</h4>

    Once the left shoulder of the police man was gone, the rest became easy.

    Sam just bombarded the opponent with dozens of bullets and managed to defeat him. The police officer looked at Sam with the same anger.

    For some reason, Sam felt that this anger is actually not simr to the anger of other creatures that he fought, whether they are humans or not, most of their rage is instinctual. Their anger is not sane or controlled.

    It is pure resentment that they had towards Sam. But in case of this policeman, he appeared a lot more sane. A bit clearheaded. This is also a bit confusing to him.

    Sam didn''t know what is going on with it, but he looked forward to digging deeper and know the reason behind it.

    He aimed the gun at the police man''s head and spoke.

    "I don''t know where we came across. I certainly don''t remember ever killing you. But I do hope that I know why I killed you. Your skills are impressive."

    Muttering to himself, he pulled the trigger.

    *BOOM*

    The corruption energy entered Sam and all of a sudden, the whole area started glowing. The glow passed away pretty quickly though. Now the ck energy in the whole area went down. The area became a bit normal and natural in color and aura.

    Sam was also shifted to the pir without any prompt whatsoever. He could feel the corrupt energy get into his whole body.

    He didn''t suppress it now, instead he put his hand on the pir and the ck corrupt energy started spreading into the pir. Even the energy sphere that formed in his abdomen also did the same.

    At least that is what he thought, but the next moment he noticed something else. The energy is notpletely going into the pir. Only the corruption part of it and the sin part of it is going there. It is as if the remaining energy is filtered from the corruption and sin.

    The filtered energy is being absorbed by Sam''s body passively without him doing anything at all.

    The groove on the pir started raising a bit.

    While this is happening in Sam''s body, something else happened in his mind, which he wouldn''t have predicted in a thousand years.

    He started seeing the memories of the people and the creatures he just finished off. Not all of their memories before they died, rather just the memory of their resentment toward him.

    Most of the time, Sam was not surprised with the memories that shed in his head.

    What he looked forward to and what surprised him were the memories of the animals. The answer was simple though, the resentment from the chickens came because, Sam killed them. To eat. The resentment from the rats is because of theb experiments he has conducted on them.

    Which is also kind of justifiable.

    As for their extreme powers, Sam got sort of ''answer'' from the hell when he thought about it with his hand against the pir. It is just an external thought that popped in his mind.

    The powers of the dead creatures that appear in these hell towers, depend on how they died and what the final thoughts they had in their minds, when they died.

    The powers of those rats are because of some mutations they went through when Sam tested them in different ways, the powers of the middle-aged sexual predator couple are from the poison they ingested through their mouths.

    The powers of the chickens are the funniest ones. They got those powers, because they wished that they could fly away when they were being caught and they wished they could slice the people up just like how they were being sliced. Thebination led to the creation of these wind des.

    He couldn''t help but chuckle at this.

    He knew that this is a serious issue and he can imagine what other weird powers these creatures are going to get, but he couldn''t help himself.

    Finally, his thoughtsnded on one person he is curious about.

    The Police officer.

    As soon as he noticed those thoughts, he was shocked. Now he finally recognized who this police officer is.

    He never saw his face in the past life, but he is one police officer that Sam had his hopes when he was being trafficked out of India. He has never seen his face and he barely remembered his name. But he was famous at that time.

    He had a reputation of not letting any bad practice go on within his jurisdiction and Sam with great difficulty sent a message to this person when he was just eight years old.

    Right when he was being sold out by his art teacher to people from the organization he was part of.

    And the cause of this resentment baffled him.

    The police officer held such resentment against Sam because, the oneint Sam gave ruined his life. It turned it upside down.

    Because of the secret hiddenint, the police officer apparently went on to investigate the traffickers, but the organization is way too big and way too powerful for one officer to do anything.

    His superiors who were on the payroll of the traffickers ratted him out. His family died, he was framed and then he was taken out by his own peers. All the gun shot wounds came from his colleagues only.

    In this whole process, he wished that he never got thatint. He resented the person that gave him thatint and of course that is Sam.

    Sam couldn''t wrap his head around this logic. He was just an eight year old boy. All he did was write a letter and send it to the police station, in hopes that he would be saved.

    But the police officer started resenting that very boy who he should have saved when things went too far against his family.

    The worst part is, the officer who was daring and bold, didn''t even have guts to hate the perpetrators themselves by the time they were done with him.

    Sam was disappointed to say the least. Of course, there is also confusion and bewilderment along with it.

    But disappointment was what clouded him for a short while.

    After he shook those feelings off for a moment, he finally started contemting. He officially cleared the first floor after almost a week of efforts. Now, he needs to absorb all the information he could get here and move to the next floor with prepared mindset.

    Some things, he ispletely sure of, like with every passing floor, he is going to get stronger, which is the most obvious one.

    There is no fixed pattern for the people and creatures that he might encounter in each floor. They are noting chronologically. Because there are some people that he encountered on the first that belonged to the time when he became a teenage assassin, there are also some people that he came across when became much older.

    So, the amount of suffering they have gone through might be one of the factors that decided what floor they would be on. But he cannot fathom a chicken suffering the same level as the police officer who was emotionally and physically tortured before being killed.

    Then came his third spection and this is something that he is not really sure of.

    He can exin this in two ways. First one is that there is a range of suffering within which the first floor falls under and within that range, the lowest will gain smaller power and the highest will gainrger power.

    The second method is that there is a possibility that the animals that he has eaten or experimented on, might be clustered together and ced here based on the collective suffering. Of course even in this case the range exists.

    He needs to check more floors before he cane to any conclusion of course.

    There are a few more things, Sam started thinking about and one of them is the strength of the creatures.

    No matter, whether they are people or rats and chickens, they are unbelievably strong. They are way too strong to the point that Sam would have to constantly unleash his full-powered attacks if he has to get rid of them by himself without using any of his inventions.

    Even in the case of the other yers who are his peers, he cannot imagine them being able to defeat their counterparts without using Blood arts.

    And even if the first floor is that difficult, he cannot imagine how drastic the change would be when he goes to the second floor.

    Then he finally started noting down something regarding the corruption. Within this first floor, he went through quite a few phases with the corruption affecting his body. One phase is being within apletely controble limit.

    Then it became uncontroble, making him experience extreme pain, then the suppressed state, and finally the relieved state. Based on this, he made quite a few observations.

 Chapter 1658: Second Floor

    <h4>Chapter 1658: Second Floor</h4>

    When the corruption is in the start stage and slowly grew with time, he could feel a faint burning sensation in his energywork.

    All of his meridians were being refined by this energy. When he was full of corrupt energy, the refining went to the point of literally burning his energywork. He felt injured and weak. The pain constantly distracted him.

    So, all he could do was suppress it.

    When he suppressed it, the burning pain reduced by a lot, but he could feel that his energywork was still under pressure because of it as his own energy needs to suppress the corrupt energy.

    When he finally released it into the pir, he could feel that his body changed a bit. Not only did his meridianwork was tempered, but the more he kept the energy in a suppressed state, the more his blood and muscle fibers also being slowly treated with it.

    Of course, there is a sense of exhaustion after he finally lets this energy go, but as he slowly recovered, he also saw an increase in his physical strength.

    This made him feel content. This is another one of the benefits in this scenario. This is also going to help him in long term.

    He then looked at the entrance that leads to the second floor. He doesn''t know if he wants to visit that floor immediately. The strength of the first floor itself is very bad, there is no way, he would be able to finish off the second floor scot-free.

    And also, he doesn''t have very small ammo like the single-use bullets that have only one purpose of just killing the other person. Even the weakest bullet under Sam can create an explosion that could affect a decent-sized area.

    The explosion is always concentrated. But it still affects its surroundings.

    After thinking for a while, he finally came to one conclusion.

    He needs to enter the second floor, even if he is unable to deal with the hell that would be presented to him there, he will have that extra time in which the corruption can temper his body and bones.

    So, he took the leap of faith, but only decided to move exactly one dayter, so that he can rx, recover and also get ready for what is about to hit his face.

    The next day.

    Sam appeared on the second floor of the tower.

    When he entered the second floor, the first thing that came to my mind.

    "WOW."

    Even Sam who rarely expressed normal series of emotions no matter what couldn''t help but let out this amazing sigh.

    He stood on a cliff and looked at one of the most beautiful sights he has ever seen. From above that cliff, he can see the forest expanding far away and on the other side of the forest, he saw arge mountain range that has a huge waterfall.

    This is the first time, he has ever seen such a big waterfall. It is so huge that Sam could faintly hear the sound of the waterfall from his position.

    As he slowly took in the whole scene, he suddenly felt a sense of threat and looked around. He instinctually turned on energy vision as he looked around.

    At first nce there is nothing, but after he increased the intensity of the energy vision a little bit, he managed to see.

    It is the presence of the Bees.

    Some small bees that are just a little bitrger than a normal bee on earth are flying towards him.

    They should have buzzed, but they didn''t. they arepletely silent. Except for the sound of the forest and the waterfall he is faintly hearing, there is not a single sound from the bees.

    Even the energy waves caused by it are very small that he barely noticed them.

    He activated his energy barrier just in case and it turned out to be the right decision because as soon as the barrier was formed, it was hit by a bunch of small stingers.

    Not only did theynd on it, they also managed to stick inside the barrier as if it is made of some soft wood and they are some nails shot from a nail gun.

    Sam is confused and surprised by how sharp the stingers are. He was tempted to take a closer look, but before he knew it¡­

    *BOOM*

    The stingers exploded, at the same time. The red hot mes that have a slight corrosive effect spread across the surroundings, and even the barrier that he was holding was crackedpletely. It barely stood there.

    And itpletely broke after another round of stingers from the bees.

    Sam could only jump forward and dodge the attack before creating another barrier. He rolled on the ground with that barrier around him and managed to escape both the explosion and the stingers.

    He extended his hand and the golden mes shot out toward the bees.

    Then Sam did something so miraculous that he never it is possible for the bees.

    The golden mes that almost reached the bees, seemed to have been deflected by those small vibrating wings.

    Sam was surprised once again. He didn''t even know how to deal with this.

    As he was thinking, he jumped down the cliff and started going down.

    "There is no point in thinking. It will only stress me out. I might as well do first and thinkter."

    As he rapidly climbed off of the cliff, when he reached a certain altitude, he moved on to the harbinger and then only he noticed how high the cliff really is.

    And he couldn''t understand how the bees managed to make that far away.

    While he was contemting that, he noticed that the bees stopped following him, but something else started.

    He saw some birds that looked like pigeons.

    The first thought that came to Sam''s mind is that it would be delicious if cooked well.

    But the next actions of those pigeons made him realize that he is still in hell. The pigeons opened their mouths and started screaming. Just the scream itself is a sonic attack and for some reason, they can also release mes as if that is not enough.

    The sonic waves distributed the chaotic mes evenly and they spread all over the cliff walls.

    Sam was even more surprised when he noticed that the whole mountain is on fire.

    The rocks, grass, trees, and even the soul. Everything that is part of the cliff started burning as if it is made of paper.

    Sam took out his guns and started shooting the pigeons down.

    He went down the cliff and finally touched the solidnd that is not hundreds of meters high above normal ground level.

    He looked at the fascinating beauty of therge trees that made him feel small and tiny. He touched one tree and all of a sudden, he sensed a movement nearby.

    *HISS*

    A snake came out of nowhere and started coiling around Sam''s hand. The snake didn''t wait for long before it took a goodrge bit.

    The flesh of course wasn''t torn apart. But the fangs carefully injected a bunch of venom into his body.

    "Good thing, I am immune. This poison is very different."

    He muttered to himself and looked at the snake that is hissing away.

    He stomped his leg on the ground. A small earthen barrierpletely surrounded the snake. Before it could try to escape, the barrier soon grew some spikes and they were all focused on the snake before they moved in.

    The snake that was supposed to die, didn''t. It just stayed there with all of the spikes lodged into the leather. The attack itself is aplicated one as they all targeted the vital points that Sam remembered at least.

    But it is impossible to prate.

    Sam waved his hands and the earthen barrier turned its shape once again. This time, it is not just the surrounding barrier prison, rather this time, it was locked inpletely from all sides, from the top and the bottom as well.

    The snake was trapped and Sam decided to capture it and test it to his heart''s content to see if there is really anything that he could use against the rest of the creatures on the second floor and the third floor.

    Sam camped there wondering how the was caught up in all of this. And then he remembered that this life wasn''t his choice, but the choice to be here was definitely his. He was offered a drink and an invitation.

    With a chance to even get out the fuck out of this ce. But he still chose this. Which seemed kind of stupid when he came across the pigeons and the chickens that are almost as strong as him and they are still in their small bodies without much change.

    Sam quickly left to take care of the snake. He just sat there and started his experiments. Most of them are not as usual, just like how everything around them is weird.

 Chapter 1659: Crossbows

    <h4>Chapter 1659: Crossbows</h4>

    Sam used his energy vision to scan the surroundings a bit and after confirming that there is nothing else around except this snake, he sat down a bit and started examining it.

    There are a few things, that he was surprised about.

    The first one is that he wasn''t able to sense the presence of this snake when it tried to attack him.

    The second one is that this snake has more sanity than even some people on the first floor. It didn''t just rashly attack without any consequences. It was sure that Sam would die after injecting that lethal dose of poison.

    This is why, it caught him by surprise, before making that move.

    Of course, then there is that tough leather skin that couldn''t be pierced with normal spikes. And this time, even crushing didn''t work, because this thing is pretty flexible. It managed to survive somehow.

    The only silver lining is that it doesn''t have much direct attack power, particrly after it bit him. The poison might just be the most lethal and even the only attack the snake has, so it kind of lost all of its attacking power.

    Sam did some toughness tests and flexibility tests on the snake as he waited to see if its poisones back.

    And it didn''t take long for that to happen. Within the next twenty minutes, the snake regained its poison and got ready to bite Sam again.

    But of course, this time it didn''t have that chance.

    Now for the final test, Sam wanted to test the lethality of the dose of this poison. He looked into the sky and saw the pigeons are still hovering in that certain spot. He took off on harbinger to attract the flock.

    The first pigeon that saw him, didn''t even hesitate to just dash toward him. Sam aimed the snake straight at the pigeon and let it take the bite.

    The pigeon that was full of vigor and strength, suddenly turned ck before it fell crashing down on the ground.

    It only took a fraction of a second for the poison to work and it worked perfectly.

    The pigeon that needed Sam''s special bullets to die, was dead with just one snake bite. Of course, these snake bites are not going to be a steady long-term weapon.

    It is also not fast enough. But he can use this to farm some lethal poison that he could use. After all, when he consumes the poison, his hydra bloodline can enhance it. It would be a waste not to use this to a full extent.

    Sam took out his gun and shot a bunch of pigeons before he hovered down. He doesn''t have any n to deal with these birds for now at least, and the same goes for the bees.

    He would rather focus on thend for now and then move to the air.

    Luckily, he also has a small area, where he could stay a bit less vignt. He doesn''t know why this space was empty without any other creatures apart from the snake, but that works for him.

    Now, he started mapping the area.

    When he was on top of the cliff, Sam has a vague understanding of how big the whole forest is, so he divided it into different sections which he would explore one by one.

    The first section is the one straight ahead.

    An area that could be his base when he finished off everything in there and is connected to the three remaining areas.

    This would make things really easier for him in many ways.

    Now, he activated shadow fusion as he went deeper into the forest.

    Even though he already expected it, the massive trees made him feel tiny here. Some trees are so big that the roots are as tall as him. He felt so insignificant in front of it for some reason.

    But not all of them are that huge. As he went deeper, he saw quite a few rtively smaller trees.

    As he explored the area bit by bit, Sam stopped in his tracks.

    *SWOOSH*

    A crossbow bolt went past him and hit a tree behind.

    The bolt right went to through the tree by splitting it into two vertical halves, before it hit another tree behind it.

    Even before the tree crashed, Sam disappeared from the spot with a puff of ck smoke. He reappeared right behind a tree but disappeared within the next second.

    A crossbow bolt split that tree apart and destroyed another tree behind it. Sam reappeared on the same spot this time and looked at the damage caused by the bolts.

    His energy vision is at the highest intensity as he looked around. But he wasn''t able to find anyone. No one is hiding behind the trees, no one is hiding within the branches. Everything appeared clean. In fact, way too clean. There is not single trace of energy fluctuations around.

    Even though the bolts areing in constantly.

    Sam took out his reaper sword and shed the crossbow bolt.

    He was stunned when he was unable to cut it in half. He was barely able to deflect it and a small shard of that bolt was the only thing he was able to cut off.

    The bolt lodged into the ground and there are some cracks on the surrounding earth.

    Sam didn''t have time to inspect what happened. He barely dodged another bolt and hid behind a rock this time.

    They are even able to catch up with harbinger''s speed as well as his movements with shadow fusion. They are using crossbow bolts and they are extremely good at hiding themselves.

    Sam could think of a few people that fall under that category.

    A group actually. A group he has ughtered during his training period within the organization.

    This brought some really cruel memories back to Sam.

    The imprints this group left in his mind are special. Because they left an impression when Sam is way weaker than him as well as an impression when Sam is way too stronger than him.

    Both of these impressions are unique in their own right.

    As he was thinking back to these memories, he heard some loud crashing sound.

    *BAM*

    *BAM*

    *BAM*

    The rock he was hiding behind is vibrating as one bolt after another lodged into it from the other side.

    He moved away from the rock.

    *CRASH*

    The rock crumbled into small pieces before it crashed into the ground because of all the repeated hitting.

    Sam who moved to the side, was greeted with another crossbow bolt. But this time, he confidently blocked it with the sword. The sword strike sent the bolt to the side.

    *BANG*

    *BANG*

    *BANG*

    There is a constant shing noise as the sword met each and every one of those bolts that came at him.

    He just hovered there and focused on just defending. He even undid his shadow elemental fusion and met them with his normal speed.

    *BANG*

    *BANG*

    Two attacks.

    *BANG*

    *BANG*

    Four attacks.

    *BANG*

    *BANG*

    Ten attacks.

    *BANG*

    *BANG*

    Twenty attacks.

    They kept oning without any break. But Sam didn''t panic. There is a method that he used do defeat these people before and he is very sure that it is going to work again.

    Even with all the enhancements, they must have gotten with the way they died, Sam is very sure that he would be able to defeat them just like how he did the first time.

    As the number of bolts increased, soon the trajectory of the bolts became constant.

    The shooters are not moving much. They stuck to the same ce and started shooting rapidly instead of using any other tricks.

    Since Sam is not moving away, they decided to focus on speed and quantity instead of tricks shots that will just put more stress on their minds.

    Sam smiled as he noticed this.

    He slightly channeled wind energy to his energy vision to take a look at the bolts that areing at him. The bolts are very stealthy. The energy fluctuations are undetectable for some reason.

    But the wind around it is definitely moving and Sam decided to focus on that instead of the bolts themselves. As he noticed the ripples of the winds, he got a faint idea of the probable location of the shooters.

    Now that he knew where they are, things are going to be a lot easier.

    Spatial energy surrounded Sam as the smile turned into a grin.

    He disappeared from the spot and a bunch of bolts hit the trees and rocks behind him.

    The next moment, the bolts stoppeding.

    Sam reappeared on a tree branch far away. He swung the reaper sword to his right.

    The sword shed through the tree trunk.

    *SLASH*

    Blood sshed out as an arm and a chunk of some other flesh came off along with the tree trunk.

    He jumped off from the branch the next moment. A crossbow bolt went past the spot Sam was standing in and hit the tree trunk through the sh Sam made.

    The bolt lodged into the chest of a person who was hiding there.

 Chapter 1660: Cross bow squad

    <h4>Chapter 1660: Cross bow squad</h4>

    Samnded on a different tree.

    The grin on his face didn''t fade. In fact, it widened.

    "Cocky Idiots. Even in hell, you are still the same."

    He muttered to himself as he disappeared from the spot. Eight bolts went past the spot he was in. He reappeared at a new spot and shed another trunk.

    This time, the head fell off along with a part of the tree. The volume of the bolts was reduced by a lot when Sam jumped to the next spot and shed another person.

    Once three heads were down, it became fairly easier for him. Sam kept on jumping from one tree to another as he killed people.

    The heads rolled down, one by one. Soon, all the reaper sword has is blood and there is an empty patch in the middle of the forest. The area is riddled with cut-down trees, broken rocks, and of course pieces of corpses.

    Sam observed the effects of corruption as he looked at the corpses.

    They are part of his training in the organization.

    When Sam was about to finally graduate into his own independent assassin when he was twelve, these people are the final test for him to pass.

    These are some senior assassins within the organization and they do not take some mercenary jobs, they also take on training the new graduates.

    The final test is to survive their onught and try to assassinate them back. And if the counterattack works or if the team thinks that it will work the other person would pass.

    Because of Sam''s status, he was put forth to take this test early. Generally, the threshold for this is sixteen. For some reason, these guys felt that they were being insulted as a twelve year old was asked to take this test.

    So, they decided to take this out on Sam.

    The first time Sam attempted this test, his whole body was riddled with holes from the crossbow bolts. His arms, legs, his back, in fact even his buttocks had around six bolts lodged into them.

    It was because some of these guys were trying to bet who hits Sam''s anus first.

    But of course, all of them missed it and because of the bet they lost, they took out their anger on Sam even more.

    Sam almost bled to death that night.

    These people have a unique fighting style which made it hard for Sam to take revenge.

    By some miracle, he recovered within a couple of months. Onlyter did he realize that it is not really much of a miracle, rather than the sadistic nature of these team members.

    They only gave him flesh wounds with their weaker bolts to take pleasure in ying around with Sam.

    But Sam himself had his own ns. He studied their fighting style. For starters, he wasn''t injured that much in the second round. He only got one injury and he waspletely fine.

    After that was done, the tests went on.

    Sam kept on improving.

    The main advantage of these guys is that they are stealthy. Nobody ever managed to find their exact location when they attacked.

    They are extremely stealthy, they are precise and their choice of weapon limits the range to which they are good at.

    So, they are not really snipers, rather they are a shooting squad that uses crossbows and knows how to fight using the terrain from a decently long range.

    They prey on the target bit by bit. Making them weaker, slower, and finally taking their lives.

    But their biggest mistake is constantly letting Sam go so that he coulde back and entertain them more.

    Soon, Sam became skilled enough to catch these guys. He managed to defeat them after dozens of tries. Once he figured out a way to not get injured within that formation used by these people, he started trying out the test like once a week and within a few months, he had it in his grasp.

    The pattern is that these people try to corner the target to one spot and they will bombard them with their trick shots and speed and make it impossible to recover.

    They will kill them right there.

    So, Sam focused on defending himself with a sword and first figured out their locations. Just like how he did now.

    Then there is this drawback they have because of the stealth. Theypromised on their movement because of their stealth. Their positions are fairly fixed.

    With their fixed situation, Sam could pinpoint their locations. When he was a kid and did this in real life, he had to use some really old tricks in the book to get to them and take them one by one.

    When Sam was done with each one of these team members, he showed them what the hell on earth would taste like.

    He broke their bones, ripped the tongues out, and the eyes were gouged out.

    That is why he had such asting impression on them. He almost killed himself when he was a kid for challenging them in open.

    But now Sam schooled them beyond belief.

    Even in this present scenario, Sam did the same.

    He first narrowed down their locations, they took down what he felt like are the key opponents and then took over the rest pretty easily.

    The crossbow squad that used to enjoy the misery of the candidates they failed, died in a test taken by a twelve year old.

    That was one of the most tragic things to happen in the organization, because of the amount Sam made the organization lose as they invested a lot

    in the squad. The assassinations would have gotten some really great cash, but Sam ruined it for themunity. He even made a bunch of enemies because of that.

    As he imagined how his situation was when he met these people, Sam finished up the cleaning process.

    He then sat in that area to think about the next step.

    He doesn''t have any threats lying around. The forest patch is cleared. No more new people areing when he was sitting there.

    There are no creatures as well. Sam had a breathing space where he could kick back a bit.

    After a few minutes of brainstorming, he picked an interested direction. Sam took it because the main camp he is establishing would be a lot closer from this ce if this direction and from the details fixed up like this a bit.

    But it also has a certain level of danger.

 Chapter 1661: Bear

    <h4>Chapter 1661: Bear</h4>

    Sam is still within the first area of the forest.

    Even though he killed a bunch of people here, they didn''t cover the whole first part of it. They covered arge part of it, but there is still some area left for him to explore.

    And he went to the right. Even though he didn''t know what is awaiting him there, upying that area will make it easier for the base camp or whatever he is building.

    Only after he went there did he understand that it might not be one of his smartest decisions. Because there are a bunch of monkeys awaiting his arrival.

    As soon as he appeared within their zone, they jumped off of their hiding ces within the trees and started attacking him.

    Their teeth and ws became sharper and harder to the point that one of the monkeys''s caught the reaper''s sword with its mouth and he was shing at that time.

    He didn''t understand how these creatures are this strong. He wondered what would happen if he let them grow and unleashed them into the world. With enough time, they might change the hierarchy of power within the wilderness of the realms.

    And he is sure of it not just because of the teeth and the ws, there is something else that baffled him.

    As he shed his sword to cut down a monkey, it was blocked by its bare flesh.

    *CLANG*

    That''s the sound he heard when hended a proper sh on the monkey. There is some sort of exoskeleton that is covered with the fur on these monkeys. It is so strong that Sam almost wanted to tear open the skin of the monkey to see what exactly is underneath it.

    But of course, he cannot do that yet. He has to kill them first.

    Sam activated metal energy fusion and once again threw a sh at the nearest monkey. The sword finally prated through the exoskeleton.

    Of course, he didn''t manage to reach the innards of the creature, but he did sh open a skeleton and the monkey started bleeding.

    Once he got the opening, he didn''t even waste a second taking advantage of that. He finished that off with three more shes on the same spot. Finally, the monkey fell down.

    By that time, three more monkeys already reached him from the back. He had to disappear from the spot and attack them.

    After a grueling twenty minutes, he managed to deal with these monkeys with a lot of effort. He examined their armors for a while before he moved on. The next creatures are even weirder. They are deers.

    They have a weird glow going on in their antlers. They managed to shoot energy beams from them. These energy beams are almost simr to the energy beams Sam usually uses.

    When he tried to defeat these deers from long range, they always managed to shoot whatever attack ising with the help of those energy beams.

    They are fast, agile, and extremely precise. No matter what he threw at them, they are taking it pretty neatly.

    He had a simr problem with the Crossbow squad. They are good with defending long-range. No matter whatever theye across they would be able to deal with them easily. Even in the past life, he had to narrow them down to a single ce before making a move after reducing the distance.

    Even now he did the same, using the space element to blink from one spot to another. The same thing went for the deer.

    He blinked and shed the deer one by one bit by bit. Of course, it is impossible for him to kill them instantly. As soon as he blinked and appeared near a deer, another one in the herd started attacking him.

    With the precision they had, they managed to almost hit him in every attempt.

    If the spatial blink is not fast enough, he would have been severely injured. So, Sam started to focus on wearing the deer down bit by bit. Instead of going to vitals, he was content enough to hit some normal spot.

    He focused on cumtive damage instead of one-shot kills.

    Sam''s ck silhouette was the only thing visible to the deer that gathered into arge group in the patch of the forests.

    As his figure appeared at random spots within the herd with energy beams flying around everywhere, one deer after another copsed due to the excessive bleeding, cut tendons, severed limbs, etc.

    Soon, the whole area appeared gory with the blood dying on all the grass in the surroundings and lifeless deer corpses all over the ce.

    He went on to examine their bodies. Then he noticed something. All the deer are not the same. Over a couple of dozen of them belonged to normal deer kind from the earth, but the remaining are slightly off.

    He has a feeling that they are normal deer, but their body structure is quite different from regr ones.

    He just stored a couple of corpses to examine themter on and focused on moving forward. Now there is only one small area left before hepletely cleared the first part of the map.

    The ce would then be his base. The base he would be using to deal with all the creatures that are present in the remaining three parts of the map.

    He went to thatst remaining area and met with a bunch of different snakes. Snakes of different lengths, abilities, and species.

    Almost all of them are stronger than the snake Sam initially caught when he entered the second floor. He collected the poisonous snakes and started consuming their poison as well, as he improved his arsenal.

    He collected all the secreted poison into different containers.

    After a while, the first area of the map ispletely under his control. He hovered around for a while, examining the terrain and the trees. After that, he started setting up his next n.

    First, he made a few changes to the terrain. The trees, rocks, the earth. He created argely empty field in the middle. He then ced a bunch of formations in different areas.

    He made preparations for an entire day. But it was still not over. It was just the foundation for the next step of the n.

    But before that, he has to go and visit the remaining three parts of the map.

    He went to the one on the left. The second part of the map.

    This area has a lot more vines and the density of trees is a lot lesser whenpared to the first part of the map.

    As Sam walked in further, he came across a bear.

    A bear walked towards him while growling. There is arge scar on its face and it looked extra menacing.

    Sam recognized the bear instantly. It is one of the creatures he was forced to fight when he was a teen. It was a cage match and only one of them could get out. Of course, it is not an ordinary cage match. The cage is as big as a mansion and there are a lot of things he could use at that time.

    The match was a grueling one. In fact, the bear gave some of the most menacing scars Sam had on his body in the past life. He almost died that day.

    He thought that he woulde across this bear once again after he finished the first floor, but he didn''t expect that it would be this soon.

    Sam carefully stood on the spot as he observed the bear.

    The fangs and ws are obviously strengthened. Apart from that, the fur of the bear looked extra lustrous. It is almost glowing which also caught his attention.

    He looked for any other possible changes with energy vision. But there is nothing he could see. He took out the reaper sword and got ready to make a move.

    As if sensing the intention, the bear lunged forward. It jumped straight at him with all the strength it had.

    *ROAR*

    It roared and swung its front ws at Sam''s chest.

    Sam took a step back and moved to the side. He got ready to sh the bear from the side.

    But as the swordnded on the fur, not only was he unable to pierce through the flesh, the de even slipped away. Even before he could digest the surprise, the bear turned to the side and attack Sam.

    He had to use the energy barrier and took the brunt force of the attack. The barrier broke and he was sent flying a bit.

    Sam used the shadow element to disappear in a puff of ck smoke and reappeared in Bear''s shadow.

    The bear didn''t act surprised. It just turned to bite Sam, which he was barely able to block with his sword.

    The sword perfectly lodged itself in between the teeth of the upper jaw as he tried to push the bear back and he noticed the wing from the side.

 Chapter 1662: Killing the Bear

    <h4>Chapter 1662: Killing the Bear</h4>

    Sam ducked the w and moved inwards. He tried to get the sword deeper into the mouth while he moved deeper into the bear''s area.

    He controlled the sword with one hand while he hit the shoulder joints of the bear. It is like infighting in boxing. Trying to get into the personal space of the opponent and making it impossible for them to attack.

    That is the only way for Sam to have a chance. Luckily, he is a cultivator now, and he has enough physical strength to match a bear if not more than what''s needed. When he first fought it, he didn''t have any of that.

    He had to use a lot of tricks. But of course, he used this infighting technique even then, but with a different set of weapons and skillset.

    He wore down the bear using all kinds of tricks before he managed to get in that zone and kill it.

    Luckily for him, now he doesn''t have to do all that and go through so much trouble.

    As he struggled a bit, Sam finally got into the proper position he wanted. He used the void style with the sword and the de vibrated a bit before it hit the teeth.

    The teeth were shaken and the bear was stunned. The sword moves forward and hit the bear on the top of its mouth. Sam left the sword there and let the spirit take over while he physically went under it.

    The bear that was swinging its ws caught hold of the sword with both of its paws and pulled it out forcefully. It was smart enough to know that letting a sword that is controlled by a spirit so close to its mouth is not an ideal scenario.

    So, it acted immediately and pulled it out.

    Meanwhile, Sam is almost hugging the belly of the bear. The bear threw the sword to the side and felt Sam''s presence. In an instant, the bear hugged Sam and started crushing them. But that is not all, the fur on its body turned into extremely sharp needles.

    The needles directly pierced at Sam from all directions. The bear almost curled into ball around him. Of course, it cannot cover his whole body, but Sam was pushed to the ground and the bear covered as much body as it could.

    Sam felt the stabbing pain in his back. The needles came in through the gaps of the feather coat. The needles stabbed into him. The spirit of the feather coat immediately closed up making it harder for the needles to stop a bit. Sam who was thinking of handling this with physical strength, stopped in his tracks.

    The golden mes erupted. The Bear about instinctually got out of the grip. But Sam activated his earth element. The surrounding ground morphed as it protruded out before it caught the bear on the back from the sides. IT basicallypressed and suppressed the back into that small space.

    Sam is feeling a pinch of what is happening of course. He had to hold his breath. But he is really making some serious damage.

    *ROAR* *ROAR*

    The bear struggled with all its might and was trying to get out of the lock. Sam pushed it back of course.

    As the heat of the mes increased, the struggle of the bear increased and at one point, the bear has broken the lock and escaped. It rolled to the side and tried to put out the fire in the most appropriate way possible, but rolling on the ground in the dirt

    Of course, it didn''t workpletely. The golden mes are no joke. But the slight reduction of pain was enough for the bear to turn the rest of the pain into anger and frustration as it lunged at Sam who was about to stand up as well.

    It didn''t care about any of its injuries and just wanted to destroy him. Sam struggled to defend himself. Surprisingly when he met the blows of the ws with the blows of his own, he was pushed back.

    Or in this case, he was crashed into the ground even harder.

    The bear took the chance and started smashing Sam.

    He has to manipte the earth quickly and started defending the blows that areing at him rapidly. As the earthen blocks took most of the brunt, he created an energy barrier to add an extrayer of protection.

    "How the fuck is that even possible? How is its strength greater than mine?"

    Sam muttered to himself in shock and frustration. He has been cultivating for years and in those years, he was always the best in within his cultivation level. There were times when he whopped the ass of the people who were stronger than him.

    But now, a bear who has the same level as cultivation of him is actually dealing him some heavy blows.

    *BAM*

    *GRRRR*

    *BAM*

    The bear started growling as it hit the barrier again and again. It didn''t even bother if it could hit Sam or not. It just bashed on the barrier continuously. Sam gritted his teeth and thought of how to proceed with this.

    He took a deep breath and activated metal elemental fusion before he jumped right up. He went past the barrier and met the swing on the w with his punch. The spiked fist was stuck back by the w and Sam was thrown away.

    "So, the long range it is."

    Sam muttered and started throwing golden mes. The bear is agile enough to dodge most of the attacks, but of course, there were always a couple of hits that he couldnd.

    He shifted to wind des, lightning, shadow necromancy, etc. None of them worked. He even tried the spatial blink with wearing the bear down. Soon they realized that it is impossible to do that smash directly.

    The only thing he can think of that might even chance of working is the spatial energy.

    But he doesn''t know the close quarters will favor him for the nth time.

    Soon, he was overpowered once again and he has to find a way to get out of this deadlock.

    After much thought, Sam decided to just fight back seriously. Of course, there is not much he can at this point. Except for the bloodline arts he doesn''t see any other attack working to achieve goal.

    So, he got ready. But while he was preparing, he was once again pushed onto his back.

    Sam was under the barrier and started thinking about how he could make the situation better. He exteneded his hand and started gathering energy.

    He felt pretty exhausted from all of the battle. Not just physically, but mentally as well. He just wants to finish it off now.

    So, at the end of the extended hand, there is a lot of energy gathered to one single point. All the gathered energy is chaotic with one move.

    *BOOM*

    The explosion blew the barrier away and the bear that was constantly growling was sted off to the side.

    Sam walked to the bear and finished it off. He was panting hard and couldn''t help but feel a bit content for getting through this. He didn''t expect that one energy beam could do this much damage in such a close range.

    As he was thinking about it. He noticed something entirely different.

 Chapter 1663: Wolves

    <h4>Chapter 1663: Wolves</h4>

    Sam ran in the woods like crazy.

    He jumped around the trees covering the forest. He even used the shadow element to increase his speed to the maximum. He really wished he could use the space element right now. But it was not possible.

    Because the things that are following him right now are very sensitive to the spatial element for some reason.

    No matter what spot he picked and he blinked to, the creatures are catching up to it. The shadow element is the best shot he has for now, unless, and of course, he brings up the light element. If this shadow element is not useful, that is all he has for now.

    As for the creatures that are chasing him, they are wolves.

    They are definitely not all same, they are different kinds of wolves. Some of them are even created inbs in his past life, to bring back some extinct species. But currently, all these wolves formed a single pack and they are all hunting down Sam.

    It seems like their senses are heightened beyond imagination. To the point they are being able to sense his location whenever he is using spatial blink.

    The spatial blink covers a lot of distance, but it is not immediate enough. Between one blink to another, he has to wait for three seconds at least.

    But the wolves are catching up to him in an instant. He should be able to move immediately. So, he picked this element. The shadow element is flexible enough for him to dodge instantly at any attacks that mighte at him.

    The wolves all seemed to have been blessed with the wind element. As they are running around trying to catch Sam, the wind surrounding them started cutting down the grass and the trees.

    It is like a hurricane concentrated into a sh.

    He looked at the dozens of wolvesing at him and took out his hand gun.

    *BANG*

    *BANG*

    The bullets exploded at the targets, but the wolves escaped. Not even barely, they arepletely out of the st zone.

    "Why can''t I find beasts like you for my organization? Instead, you are in hell trying to torture me."

    Sam muttered to himself as he halted in his tracks. He has no hopes on tiring them out. He has been running for over half an hour and they didn''t show any signs of stopping until now. They are not running out of energy.

    He could only grit his teeth and face them head-on. Of course, that doesn''t mean, he is actually thinking of brute forcing it. He figured out a method to deal with them.

    First, he shifted back to the spatial element once again. He blinked from the spot.

    The wolves also stopped and changed their direction as they pounced towards a spot while throwing some hard wind des. Sam appeared on the spot and had to defend against the wind des with an energy barrier.

    The barrier didn''t hold the attacks perfectly, but it did buy him some time. A wolf already reached him which he made a move against. Spatial energy gathered at the tip of his fingers as he shot an energy beam at the wolf that opened its mouth at him to take a bit.

    The beam was shot right into the mouth.

    The wolf of course died as it took the full brunt of the attack with its innards. But Sam was bitten by another wolf on the side.

    But when it was biting, his body changed a bit. He has activated partial poison fusion and he used the poison he gathered from the snakes here along with the hydra poison.

    The wolf took a bite, but it wasn''t able to tear it apart. Sam''s flesh is also tough after all. He wrestled with the wolf to get out of the bite while defending against other wolves.

    Meanwhile, the poison secreted is being released into the wolf that bit him. It is a bit dangerous as he needs to take a certain brunt of the attack for this method to work, but it is working at least.

    The wolf soon saw the effects of the poison and Sam used the spatial blink to disappear from the spot.

    Three minutes, one wolf bit his arm, two wolves. That is the current exchange he had.

    And that is the only working exchange until now at least.

    The injury recovered quickly as he used light elemental energy to keep on dodging the attacks that areing at him.

    Sam kept on fighting the wolves in this manner and he felt lucky that there are no other creatures within his surroundings.

    And while he is doing that, in the other areas of hell, the other yers are also fighting to clear the tower floors.

    The few candidates who came before Sam already finished their first floors just like him and they are fighting in their second floors as well.

    There are some people that came after Sam and they are also almost done with the first floor.

    Everyone had different types of challenges, different opponents, and different experiences on the first floor of the tower.

    But there is one thing inmon for all of them though. They all hate this whole experience in hell.

    The person who is monitoring this is enjoying it though and ironically it is Hel who is doing that.

    At this moment, she is sitting along with the rest of the gods as they watched the endeavors of all the yers.

    They are all amused and entertained by this. Even the gods that lost their candidates are among them and they are even more entertained.

    Zeus looked at the rest of the gods with a nk face and said.

    "I propose that we start the first task as soon as all the yers clear their first floor. They got used to the operation of the hell and the tower. So, it is time for them to get introduced to the tasks as well.

    Also, getting a break from the hell''s corruption and suppression on them at the early stage could be useful for them."

    "I think it is a bit too soon. We can wait for some more time. Our initial idea was to put the task when everyone finished their first two floors. That way, they will also have simr power levels. Thepetition would also be on even grounds." Kartikeya replied.

    "As you have already seen, every person has a different number of floors in their towers. It was never an even ground. You also know that the towers are basically farming grounds. The strength that they can increase through these towers ispletely dependent on the people themselves.

    It is not going to be fair and equalpetition. So, I don''t see any point in keeping that bnce at the start." Zeus retorted without any expression.

    "I don''t understand. Why are you so eager to let thispetition begin? Is it because your candidate is in the lead and he has gained the most strength from the tower until now?

    You just want to make him take a lead in the score while he still has the chance." Sun Wukong picked his ear as hezily spoke.

    Zeus looked at him coldly, but there is no reaction from Sun Wukong at all.

    But as the re intensified, he spoke.

    "What are you looking at? Do you want to have a go right now? I am not Hou Yi, to be intimidated by you that easily."

    Hou Yi who sat on the side without any intention of participating in the conversation couldn''t help but grit his teeth.

    Zeus frowned and his aura changed slightly. But he restrained it pretty quickly and looked away.

    "That is good. It is not like I am one of your wives, to be intimidated by such re and aura."

    "One of these days, I will lodge my spear into your monkey face. You better keep your damn mouth shut."

    "Yeah, I already told you. I am not one of your wives. I know you really like stabbing. You stabbed everything that is female with your penis. Half of Olympus'' poption is the result of your ''stabbing'' only. So you better keep your habit in check."

    Zeus gritted his teeth. He wanted to fight Sun Wukong there and then, but he knew that the consequences are not something he can bear currently.

    He shook his head and came back to the topic at hand.

    "As I told you guys. Thepetition is not going to be even no matter what. So, we are going to put up the first task right away. As soon as everyone cleared the first floor of their towers."

    Zeus adamantly stuck to his case.

    Hel who has been sitting on the side spoke up.

    "In a way, what Zeus said is actually as fair as this could be. The strength each yer could draw from their own tower is different and also the strength each yer could draw from each floor is also different.

    If you really want the first task to be fair, it is better to do it now. I am inplete support of this idea."

 Chapter 1664: Meeting

    <h4>Chapter 1664: Meeting</h4>

    "Seems like you got some support Zeus. Did you guys discuss this beforehand?" Sun Wukong of course didn''t leave Hel behind.

    "It''s because my thought actually makes sense. You dumb monkey head."

    "Yeah, sure. You are saying that because the woman who thought it was smart to rig a game that''s being yed by a dozen gods who are all at the top of the food chain, validated your idea. That is really smart of you.

    Fucking idiot."

    Zeus, clenched his fists and was really tempted to throw them at Sun Wukong''s face, but he controlled himself pretty well.

    "If you have a valid objection, then bring it forward. Otherwise, just shut the fuck up and let us make the decisions."

    "Alright. I don''t particrly have a problem with this. If you want to pit those kids against each other this fast, then do so by all means. I don''t really give a fuck. But just say it as it is. Say that you want to pit them early so that your fucking yer might get a head start with a win when thepetition is still easy.

    That is all you have to say. Why beat around the bush so much?"

    "I already told you. Don''t make those wild allegations. You might regret itter."

    "Yeah, yeah. You and who else ising to make me regret that? Just let me know. I am using a new solution for polishing my staff and I need to know how much I am going to need to clean my staff off the blood marks.

    The blood marks from beating the shit out of you people."

    Sun Wukong retorted nonchntly.

    As they are bickering, The Gambler hand enough and broke the constant bickering.

    "Shut the fuck up. Both of you. I am fine with whatever you decide. My vote goes for both of your proposals. You want to start the task, let''s do it. As far as I am concerned, no matter when this thing starts, my candidate is going to win.

    Because he is always at a headstart."

    His words silenced everyone. They all looked at him with nk expressions.

    "Do you really need to throw that at our face, dude? You are a god for fuck''s sake. You could have just been a bit more humble." Sun Wukong said casually.

    "Yeah, whatever. The rest of you guys, just vote on what you think of this proposal and vote. I don''t want to waste any more time here. I have things to do."

    "Oh? You are working on something new?" Sun Wukong asked.

    "Well, my yer is going to reach the realms of gods soon enough. I need to prepare a ce for him to rule."

    "A new ce? What do you mean? Don''t tell e it is what I am thinking. It would be crazy."

    "Well, it is what you are thinking. Why do you think I tamed the Void dragon? It to make the initial process easier."

    "So, you are preparing for a realm war of gods and you are announcing it directly in front of all the gods from various factions? Are you crazy?"

    "Maybe I am. It is not like I am scared of you guys. Maybe it is about time you know about this. You need to prepare after all. I might find a new purpose for all the troops you have been collection from all the people that are worshipping you over the centuries.

    Anyway, you make your decision and just let me know. I am sure all the yers can handle that shit. And if are doing this, you might as well, just send them to the task now. You don''t need to wait for them to clear the first floor of the tower."

    With that, he immediately left the room as if it is nothing important..

    Hel looked at the whole scene with amusement. The rest of the gods are feeling a bit odd though. They heard what Sun Wukong and Gambler talked about.

    A war is something they didn''t have for dozens of centuries. Even the troops they gathered are for regr skirmishes and to manage their territories, explore new territories and just maintain their status as a powerful people.

    It is like a cold war. Just to show off to other gods that they have the best troops, they have the best soldiers, they have the best generals.

    They even put up somepetitions now and then and wager on them.

    But now Gambler told them that he is going to start a war real soon to upy the territory of some other god. This is not new that they could digest easily.

    Hel is the only one rxed for some reason.

    "We can think about other stuffter. I need to know if you want to start the task now orter. If you ask me, take Gamblers advice and do it now. From what I can see, this is the best time you can do it, particrly if you want to give Sam a bad start.

    This is the only time you will have that chance."

    Kartikeya and Sun Wukong didn''t like this. Some of the gods are neutral. But there are some who are interested in this.

    Hel knew they were interested and continued.

    "I have been observing the towers since the start. Sam is behaving just like he always did. He is maxing out on the corruption before even suppressing it and he is storing the corruption in his body.

    You do know what will happen if a person suppressing the hell''s corruptiones out of the hell and stays in the living world for a while. The corruption is going to act up. His performance will be rock bottom.

    You can just take this chance and a lucky candidate will get the first victory in the series of these events. If I were you, I wouldn''t let this chance go."

    "You really think so?" Hou Yi asked.

    "Of course, in fact, he is currently battling with a pack of wolves in a suicidal way. As you have seen. If you pick a proper time, he will be high on active corruption within his body and also injured.

    I also saw the list of limitations you are pulling for this task, so it is going to be a really good situation to put him in. Don''t think too much and go with it."

    "For a goddess who rules a good chunk of hell, you are awfully petty," Kartikeya muttered.

    The bickering was about start once again, but Zeus interrupted and proposed a start of the vote.

    The gods who lost their candidates also get to vote and with that majority, they voted that they should start the task immediately. Not even waiting until the first floors of all the towers are cleared.

    Immediately, without any dy whatsoever.

    They really took Hel''s advice and decided to target Sam.

    "So, are we going to pick lots to decide whose candidate gets to be on defense?"

    "No, no lots. We are going to put Sam on defense since Gambler left the meeting in the middle irresponsibly."

    "What kind of bullshit is that?"

    Sun Wukong asked with a frown.

    "Well, it is not bullshit. Generally, we would have presented a case and nominated different candidates, and mentioned why they should be on defense. The god in charge of that candidate will get to make a case against that.

    But since Gambler is not here, he won''t get to make a case and by default, he is going to lose. Sam is on defense by default."

    Hel said and clicked something on a virtual screen in front of her.

    Sam''s image appeared and the word defense appeared right beside his image along with the task details.

    "You are going to be in so much trouble. Gambler is in a mood for war, he might just start that with you."

    "Yeah, it seems like you have forgotten that the rule between a celestial realm and hell-realm is not that easy."

    "He does have a void dragon. It is going to make it easy for him. Even slightly."

    "Let him try. I will be on defense at that time and let him wear himself out. No matter how good he is, hell is my terrain and I have a natural advantage regarding corruption. As long as I don''t get out with my troops, I have nothing to lose."

    Hel then casually started assigning the roles to the rest of the yers at random.

    "So, six people on offense and one person on defense. I will go and exin the task details to the candidates. Good luck to all of you."

    Hel disappeared from the spot.

    She reappeared in her realm within hell.

    "We are going to have a lot of fun from now on Sam. I want to see how you will react after you are put in this position. With how much you hate being left behind, you are going to get a bunch of handicaps in this round. Let me enjoy your misery."

 Chapter 1665: Limitations

    <h4>Chapter 1665: Limitations</h4>

    Sam is currently sitting in the forest on top of a tree with his legs crossed.

    He is suppressing all the corruption his body has absorbed since he started fighting in the second floor of the tower. Just like how Hel predicted, it is all maxed out. He needs to suppress it all before he can proceed further.

    And he is also in the middle of hunting the wolves. They are tenacious. Sam thought he would be having an easier time if he defeated one wolf after another.

    But as he proceeded further, he noticed that it is bing harder. The wolves are getting more vignt. They are going a bit defensive and they are bing more dangerous.

    He has to fight harder and n more to get closer to the wolves now.

    He got bitten way too much when he caught thest wolf he killed. The corruption is also making it harder for him to recover. That is why, he focused on the corruption first, so that the recovery will be easy.

    He sat on the top of the tree and the hepletely erased his scent with a formation to mislead the wolves. They are also on defence, so he doesn''t have to worry too much.

    As he was meditating to suppress, he suddenly felt a suction force. He disappeared from the spot and he was brought to an empty space. He hurriedly opened his eyes and stood up. He took out his hand guns and got ready to fight.

    Those are the things that put least stress on his body, so that is what he chose. He rxed a bit, when he saw some other yers along with him.

    Arkiv who appeared next to him is also injured a bit. Sam goes for Noah and Kumar who are panting heavily. Kumar''s spear is dripping blood. It is apparent that he was in the middle of a fight and was dragged here.

    They were about to speak, before Hel appeared.

    "Hello, everyone. Wee to your first task.

    I know you must be expecting this to be a bitter. In fact, originally we thought to have the first task after you broke through to the Divine ne Cultivation. But unfortunately for you, we changed your mind.

    We figured that it is better for you to get some experience while you are all weak and almost on equal grounds.

    So, you are wee.

    Now, I don''t want to waste too much of time on you guys. Let''s just get to the point.

    With this first task, you will be officially entering the Divine realms. Of course, you are going to enter the lowest one of them. People with your power level of Peak stage Astral ne still mean something there.

    The strongest people there barely broke through Divine ne of cultivation. In the Divine ne of cultivation, they are at the bottom of the hierarchy.

    Of course, it would have been better if you could control some Divine Energy at least, but it would take some time. Best of luck with your efforts.

    Before I announce the details of the task, I would like to tell you some rules.

    Within this task, you have two types of roles. One of them is defense and the rest of them are offence.

    One person among you is going to take the defensive role and they will be ying against the remaining six candidates.

    Since the risk is higher for the person who is on defense, they are going to get double the reward.

    There are some restrictions ced on all of you. One of them is, whatever your current state is, you are going to participate like that for the rest of the task.

    The most you can do is recover your energy to yourplete state. Your body wouldn''t be able to recover from any injury, fatigue or pain that it is currently in. Whatever corruption you have on your body is going to stay like that.

    Even the suppressed one.

    You will not be able to use all of your arsenal as well. You will be given a choice to select very few weapons that you have in your possession and you have to stick to them for the rest of the task.

    The weapons that you have will be evaluated by a system specifically designed for yourpetition. It will evaluate the weapons and it will try to find a bnce between all of you in terms of weapons and equipment.

    You can make weapons if you can. But the limitation is that you should at least be able to design the

    Even your storage is going to be limited. You cannot extend your storage by acquiring storage equipment from outside. You have to stick to the ones you are arranged with. Of course, you can carry as much stuff as you can on your body, if they are not weapons of course.

    You cannot rely on formations too much. The person on defense has much more leeway in this regard. Your individual allowance will be discussed with you.

    None of you can use Divine Dimensions or Divine Dimension fragments. You cannot use the Divine weapons you got from the Pce of Inheritance.

    You will get the full detailster on when you are sent to the ce. There are some minor restrictions left.

    As for the task itself, before exining it, let''s go through how the reward system works.

    Basically, you are not going to gain anything special for finishing the task, even the loot that you can collect from the task is going to be limited to your storage. The weapons, formations or anything else that you might acquire cannot be used.

    You can use some wealth that you acquired, but there is going to be a limitation on that too. That ismon for all the tasks.

    And when you clear a task sessfully, you are going to gain a badge.

    The badges will be assigned with a numerical value. That is going to be your score. Of course, the number of badges you earned throughout the wholepetition is also going to count.

    Apart from the task clear badges, there are going to be some special badges in the middle for meeting hidden requirements.

    You are going to be eliminated throughout the contest. For every elimination round, the person with the least number of badges will be targeted. They will have to challenge another yer. The challenge is going to be randomly selected.

    But most of them are going to be one vs one battle in a certain terrain, that would be discussed when the timees.

    Do you have any questions?"

    "Why didn''t you tell us about the elimination before? You only told us that we needed to clear the towers. There is no other information about that." Sam asked.

    "You were also told that everything from now on is out of your control. If you areining about this, then you shouldn''t havee here. Your gods already have you a chance to get out of this. From now on, there are no fixed rules. You are going to face a lot of spontaneous situations.

    So, just shut the fuck up and follow it. You don''t have any choice now."

    Sam didn''t reply to her. His looked at his own body. His situation is extremely dire. He is injured. One of his arms is bitten by the wolf. Some muscle fibers have beenpletely torn apart.

    Then there is corruption. He was in the middle of suppressing it, but he couldn''t do it. It ispletely running rampant in his body. He is fatigued, exhausted and aching all over.

    Most of the limitations are going to deprive him a lot. If he had all of his arsenal at his disposal, he would have been able topensate with them for these injuries. But now, he cannot do that also.

    For the first time, he is thinking that there is a chance that he wouldn''t be able to win the task in thispetition.

    As if that is not enough, there is a chance that he might fall into a defense. If that happens, he would be in twice the trouble.

    At that perfect moment, Hel felt the need to reveal the details about their roles.

    "Sam, you are the lucky person who gets to be on defense now. And ording to the restrictions, you would only be able to use your reaper sword and one of your hand guns. Even for that hand gun you can only use ten bullets.

    Anything more than that is illegal.

    You will be sent to an area near an organization. An organization that worships me actually. One of their core members will be blessed by me today with a healing technique.

    A unique healing technique that uses dark elemental energy instead of light elemental energy. It a special use case for curses and it can be modified to kill people. It is one of the best techniques that I have ever created.

    Your task is to make sure that technique doesn''t fall into others'' hands.

 Chapter 1666 Brig

    Chapter 1666 Brig¡¡¡¡Sam frowned as he looked at the details that appeared on a virtual screen in front of him.

    Hel''s narration only irritated him more.

    He doesn''t know why, but it is very frustrating. But he cannot just stop listening to it. Hel went on.

    "There are going to be many people who will try to get their hands on this technique. They might be the people from within the organization, or people from some other organizations.

    But you have to make sure that for the time of the task, the technique wouldn''t fall into anyone''s hands. You are going to lose if anyone else even gets a part of that technique out of that person.

    It cannot be stolen from him, copied from him or tortured out of him. You get the point. You basically have to infiltrate into his organization, meet the person, earn his trust and make sure he keeps his trap shut.

    Good luck with that.

    With your current condition, I think you need it a lot."

    Hel paused and gave him a slight smile. Sam shook his head and didn''t bother to reply and just went over the details of the organization.

    Meanwhile Hel continued to talk with the other candidates.

    "The remaining six of you. You are going to be dropped off in six different organizations within the same regions. The six organizations are worshipping the gods within the game. The gods will inform these organizations about the technique that I am going to release.

    They will have ns about acquiring it. So, your task is to join the organizations, earn their trust, help them acquire technique.

    No matter how much your contribution is there to it, as long as your organization wins the technique, you will win a badge.

    And there is not just going to be one winner. The first person to get it will get a badge with higher score. There is a possibility for all six of the teams to obtain it. The badge will remain the same, only the score will be increased.

    As for Sam, the score of your badge will depend on how many organization you are going to stop from getting this technique. And since you have an unfair disadvantage against six opponents, you will get double the total score you have.

    You have the details of your organizations on your screen, along with a basic exnation of the scene revolving around all these organizations.

    Since this is the first task, the first person to get a badge will be given a special badge. And also their score in the first task will be doubled. Those are the details.

    You have fifteen minutes in this ce to recover as much energy as you can and you will be leaving after that.

    "There is no time to prepare?"

    Dayus asked in surprise. He is very pleased until now. He was in the middle of clearing his second floor and he was also taking a break. He is in perfect shape except for the slight corruption.

    Compared to the rest of the candidates, he is perfectly fine and he can win this with his eyes closed. All he needs is some extra preparation just to make sure that his opponents are going to mess this up. If he has some preparation time to think of a n, he is pretty sure that he will win this.

    While Dayus is thinking of how to win this without any preparation, the other yers are running wild with their own thoughts. They don''t know how to react to this.

    Particrly Kumar and Noah who were in the middle of battles and were dragged here. If they can, they would have pped the shit of Hel for doing this.

    Sam sat crosslegged and started recovering his energy slowly. He cannot afford to think about other yers. He is in a very dangerous situation right now. He is injured, his body is corrupt with the hell''s energy and he is put on defense.

    He cannot use harbinger, his feather coat, his executioner sword, his hand guns, energy cannons, energy beams and even formations.

    He is with a major handicap. He highly doubts that the double points and extra badge are worth the trouble he is going to go through.

    With those thoughts running in his mind, he felt the suction force again along with the rest of the yers. He reappeared in a forest on a rock.

    He looked around. It is an empty patch without any living thing in his sight. He looked at his finger. There is a storage ring on it and he doesn''t even know how it came there. Inside the ring, he found his sword, his hand gun, ten bullets and the rest of the space is filled with spirit stones. Which are not exactly much.

    At one point Sam is sure that he spent more on a single meal. He is t broke. He felt poorer than when he appeared at Lava rock vige. Then he barely had a dozen or so spirit stones. He felt richer at that time that he is now.

    Along with those things, he also got some information in his head. The location he is currently in, the route to the organization he needs to visit, the information on the person who is getting the technique.

    There is also a bit of information that was not revealed before. He cannot use his beasts. For some reason, he felt that there is some emphasis on it. He looked around in the surroundings. He has some extra clothing in that limited storage. He tore off one of the robes and bandaged the wound on his arms.

    He then slowly started walking towards the city where the organization is settled. While doing he went through the other task details once again.

    The time limit is seven days and there is an invisible timer in his head and it is already running.

    The person who he is meeting is actually considered a middle-aged man. He has a daughter who is a full blown adult and even considered one of the prettiest women in the whole region. The guy is named Brig and his daughter is Yana.

    Brig has some really great reputation in that area. He is the best person with curses. He can make them, remove them, he even created some of his own curses. He is a force to be reckoned with.

    He is a nightmare to the rest of the rival organizations in the surroundings. Not just for his fighting prowess and the curse ability, because he is also a great teacher. He trained some great students. They are part of the organization he is currently in and they have some mean reputation as well.

    Over the years, many people from the other organizations in the surroundings. There are many people who wanted to be his students too. But almost all of his students stayed in the organization, there are very few people who he trained and left without joining the organization. But still, they are considered honorary members of sorts and help the organization out whenever their teacher asks for it.

    Now a days there is a third scenario that is happening constantly that is rted to the old man. That is peopleing to him and asking his daughter''s hand for marriage. In fact, the six organizations, are constantly sending the prospective candidates to woo her.

    Brig didn''t want to go through all the shit with these suitors and left the decision to his daughter. Yana is currently trying to pick one suitor and one of the main things she put out there is that she doesn''t care for the status of these six guys and she is open for anyone to try and woo her.

    This gave some courage for a bunch of guys in the region. Anyone with a notable status, notable talent in the dark elemental energy and anyone with a shred of ambition and greed came to try their luck.

    They all have their own intentions. But one thing inmon is that they all want to get the advantage of being the son-inw of Brig.

    From all of this information, Sam understood a few things. The target is a very well known person. He is a peak stage Astral ne cultivator and he can utilize Divine energy, on the verge of breakthrough to the Divine ne cultivation.

    Most of the suitors are in middle andte stage of Astral ne Consummate.

    There are a lot of people revolving around Brig and Yana. It is not going to easy to deal with all of them.

    This also gave the other yers another advantage. They can use the suitors as an excuse to make their way near Brig and Yana. With the news of the technique being released reaching to the other ns, they are going to be aggressive with the wooing approach while trying some other methods behind their backs.

    He has a lot to n. But a lot less time and a lot fewer resources than he wants.

 Chapter 1667 Information

    Chapter 1667 Information¡¡¡¡Sam felt a bit overwhelmed thinking about all of this.

    On top of that, he started feeling the raging hell''s corruption in his body. He could feel the energy running rampant and hurting every single cell in his body. Every body part suddenly became painful to extreme.

    They also became very sensitive.

    In fact, as he is walking, his body is hurting with every step and his feet felt like they are being pierced by a thousand hot knives at the same time.

    He gritted his teeth and endured the pain as he slowly reached the city, even though it would have taken much lesser time if he used his spiritual energy.

    But he didn''t do that, because he didn''t want to find out what will happen, if he uses his energy with all the corruption running rampant. With the way things are, he only wants to use the energy whenever it is absolutely needed, which he assumed is going to be a lot.

    By the time Sam reached the city, it has already been a couple of hours since he came and the challenge started.

    And as soon as he arrived, he saw that the whole city is in chaos. Everyone is running around. Except for some regr citizens and some shopkeepers, most people are running toward the most luxurious estate in the city.

    The estate of Sura n. The ce where Sam needs to go and find a way to get in touch with the star of that n Brig. He doesn''t know how he can do that though. He needs to get more information before he can do that.

    He slowly made his way towards the inn to see if he can fish any information out of a waiter. But when he estimated the costs, he knew that he wouldn''t be able to afford the price for the information.

    He can barely order a meal. For a waiter to give out the information, Sam needs to appear a bit wealthy, carefree, and powerful. And that image onlyes when Sam can order a table full of food and be able to leave a generous tip.

    With his current state, it is impossible.

    But he still wanted to try his luck. He wanted to see if there is any inn where he doesn''t have to spend much money but could still get some info.

    There are basically two options for that. An inn with too many people that it would be impossible for people to not slip some info, or an inn that is way too cheap. His preference was thetter one, which seemed to be an impossible thing to find.

    So, he moved to the former one.

    He went to the inn that was closest to the estate. The restaurant of the inn is bustling with the crowd. There are many people who went in and came back with a disappointed expression. Sam got in. He walked around a couple of times as if he is trying to sneak in as soon as the seat is avable. But he couldn''t find any.

    He came out and along with some basic info.

    One of the pieces of information that could help him is that the n has gathered for an emergency meeting. Every n member in the surroundings of the city has rushed for this meeting and it was announced two hours ago.

    He has a feeling that this is rted to the technique and the task. The second piece of information is the reason that all the people gathered here is also to gather info.

    They want to know what the emergency meeting is about. Apparently, the Sura n has different types of energy meetings. They are categorized based on how they are handled and how secret they should be and how important they are.

    The meeting that was announced right now is a very important one, but it doesn''t need utmost secrecy, it is good news and there is a possibility that they might announce this after the meeting is over.

    When these kinds of announcements are made, even if people don''t get all the information, there is always something they could get from the people that exit the n immediately. Particrly the young masters.

    If the announcement is about some task, treasure, war, expedition etc, the young masters will need some extra personnel, the n might recruit some new members, and these kinds of offers might just fly in.

    So, for that reason, people don''t want to miss the opportunity. They juste first and try to upy the nearest ce for the estate.

    The only reason they are not blocking the road and the front gate of the estate is because the n made very strict rules about it.

    Sam pieced this all together from just a couple of rounds around the restaurant. He understood one thing from this. As long as the information is top secret, he can get almost anything he wants to know, based on these people''s reactions.

    Thest piece of information that helps him at the moment was the information regarding the gathering spot for theteers and the poor people who cannot afford the restaurant and other establishments around the estate.

    It is an alleyway right beside the road leading to the estate. They stay there and swoop into the main road as soon as the young masterse out.

    Sam went to that spot as soon as he learned and tried to find some people who might just slip some information to him.

    He scouted the location of the whole alleyway before he went to a corner. There is a guy who seemed to be in histe teens standing with a sword in his hands. He is extremely nervous and looked around all the time.

    He is fidgeting his fingers over the sword handle. He is trying to calm down and might have thought that his sword helps in that.

    Sam could sense a very refined sword aura from him. He could also see that the sword is a work of art.

    He walked towards him casually. But his body is emitted a faint sword aura that is refined, pure and sharp to the extreme.

    The young man noticed Sam instantly and was dumbstruck for a while.

    Sam looked at the young man and the sword.

    "Nice sword."

    Sam said casually and stood beside the young man.

    "Th,, Thank you."

    Sam nodded without saying anything.

    "It seems like you are interested in swords, do you have one yourself?"

    The young man asked. His nervousness has died down a lot. He looked a bit calmer and more natural.

    "I am pretty sure, you know the answer to that. Sam said as he waved his hand and took out Reaper."

    The young man looked at the reaper sword in awe. Not just him, there are a few people in the surroundings who came to take a look at it.

    "Oh my god. Is that blood iron and meteorite sand? Where did you get your hands on those? They are very rare and expensive to afford.

    Are you one of the six n members?"

    The young man''s voice went really down to the point that it seemed like he doesn''t want anyone else to hear it.

    Sam smiled and shook his head.

    "No, no. I am just a wandering cultivator. I came here to rest for a few days, but it seems like the town is going through somemotion. So, I just stopped by to get some info. At first I went to the inn near Sura estate. But it was full and I came here after I heard someone saying that many people gather here."

    "Oh, so you are new to all of this? You don''t know about the Sura n traditions?"

    "Sura n traditions?"

    "Yes, the n has a very rich history. The tradition of the n is that no matter what new thing they are doing, starting new businesses, expeditions, hunting, war, or anything else that impacts the n, the rule is for the n to send out the youngsters to take the lead and finish the tasks to make the Sura n''s name proud.

    All of the youngsters need to find some people that are needed for the task. They havemon core teams of course but based on the terrain, speed, and risk of the mission, they always hire some external people.

    The reason why people hold on in the inn is that there is more than likely a chance that most of the youngsters are there.

    The youngsters are likely to go there to clear their minds and get some chance to meet some new people who might be helpful.

    The second ground is the ce we are right now. The ce where people get ess to the main road. They will look at the path taken by the youngsters and guess where they might be heading.

    After getting some idea about that, people will try to fix some appointments and butter them up."

 Chapter 1668 Kach

    Chapter 1668 Kach¡¡¡¡"So, you are also here to figure out where some of these young masters are going and butter them up?"

    "Yes, but my goal is different. I am actually here to take something one of the young masters owes me."

    "A young master of the Sura n owes you? That is news. Can I ask what it is? If you don''t mind sharing of course."

    "No problem. It is not big deal. There is a small conflict between the young master and my n. It was partially my n member''s fault as they behaved a bit out of line. They should have treated him ordingly when he visited us.

    But we are located deep in the woods and we don''t have much interaction with the rest of the world. The young master should have exined his identity well.

    The dispute went overboard and the young master used his subordinates to overpower the n before taking a sword from us. I am here to apologize to the young master and get the sword back. That sword has been in our n for generations. It was the sword our founder used to establish our n.

    It is something we worship and it should only be wielded by a member of our n."

    Sam didn''t speak for a second. He looked at the young man who had a nervous smile at the start. There is a sense of purity in his face that didn''t match the refined sword aura he had.

    With the sword aura that was definitely built by endless practice and numerous battles, there is no way this guy is a nervous young man and along with his cultivation, there is no way that this guy let a young master of the n walk all over his n.

    When someone is this pure with his mind and this good with battle, he would kill anything and everything thates at the things that he truly loves if pushes to shove."

    "Were you not there when this incident happened?"

    "No, unfortunately, I was out training some of the kids from the n. If I were there, I wouldn''t have let this happen. I would have just apologized to him then and there and resolved the issue."

    "Yeah, I am sure you would have done that."

    "Where are my manners? I forgot to introduce myself. I am Kach. Nice to meet you."

    "Nice to meet you too. I am Sam. May I know which young master it is that you have to talk with?"

    "The Ninth young master of the n. Thetest student of Brig. He is also a Dark elemental swordsman. I can understand why he took our sword."

    Sam couldn''t help but smile. It seems like even with all the drawbacks he had, he still has some luck left.

    The person he spotted is linked to Brig. Even though it is a long and far-fetched way. He is sure that there is a chance that he would be able to get in touch with Brig.

    As far as he is concerned that is going to be a tough and time-consuming part at the start. He needs to infiltrate and meet the guy one way or the other. Now, if he sticks to this guy, there is a chance that he could easily meet him.

    It might be a rocky start based on how this situation goes. But at least he will have a starting point.

    As they waited, some people starteding out of the estate. The young masters exited the gates one by one along with their entourage.

    And as they passed by the gathering points, the people from the entourage started yelling something.

    "We are looking for a Healer. Anyone who is an all-rounded healer. Comfortable with poisons, injuries both internal and external, curses and infections. Meet us at the young master''s guest house."

    This is the announcement made by one of the subordinates of the third young master.

    "We are looking for a curse specialist."

    Another young master''s subordinate made an announcement.

    The announcements are even done in the alleyway Sam is waiting in.

    With every passing announcement and bunch of people immediately left and followed the young masters right away.

    Sam didn''t expect this kind of scene. Even when Kach was exining this, he was very skeptical. After all, with all the experiences he gathered across the realms, he has never seen a city full of people trying to beckeys of one n.

    Not a single n gathered this much active attention from so many bootlickers at the same time.

    He couldn''t help but feel amused by all of this.

    As the time passed, the entourage of the ninth young master finally came. The young master is riding on a horse-type beast. The horse is not really much bigger than a normal horse, just a tadrger. Sam recognized the horse right away.

    It is the Blood Demon Horse. A very high grade one. The rest of the subordinates also followed with different horse-type creatures. But they are all not that higher grade in terms of bloodlines.

    They made announcements as they passed by and when they reached the alleyway, Kach immediately made a move.

    He didn''t battle of course. He just went and stopped the entourage.

    "Ninth Young master. Kach from Meadow n greets you. I would like a few minutes of your time."

    He introduced himself loudly catching the attention of everyone around them. The subordinates, the people who want to bootlick the young master, and the people who are just waiting for a scene, are all looking at this.

    Ninth young master looked at Kach and frowned. The name Meadow n brought an unpleasant expression to his face. That is a bad memory he doesn''t want to revisit.

    But he has to keep his dignity as a young master.

    "If you have anything that you want to talk about, reach out to me through the proper channel. You cannot just interrupt us like this."

    "I am sorry, young master, but I have been trying to reach out to you through proper channels for a month now. But it seems like your subordinates are not doing their jobs properly. I was unable to meet you no matter how hard I tried.

    I hope you can understand why it came to this."

    Everyone became silent. It is a perfect definition of the pin drop silence. Except for the growling of the horses.

    Sam crossed his arms and stood there calmly as he watched the scene.

    "There must have been a mistake. Manager, what do you have to say about this?"

    The ninth young master asked one of his subordinates. I will investigate as soon as possible, young master. It hasn''te to my notice yet. I will also schedule an appointment with Sir Kach this evening."

    "I hope you are okay with it."

    "No need for an appointment young master. I am here to apologize to you. So it is better if I do this in public."

    As Kach spoke, he knelt on the ground, while he offered his sword up with both of his hands. The most servile manner a proud swordsman could behave.

    Ninth young master was stunned.

    "This is the first sword forged with theva from the Western Volcano. The sword is made of Dark Adamantine, a perfect metal for dark elemental swordsmen like you. It has manifested a spirit naturally and has seen countless battles.

    When you visited my n a few weeks ago, you had a slight scuffle with my n members. I understand that my n members might have crossed a line with you. In the scuffle, you have brought back our heirloom which is justifiable since we caused your anger.

    I apologize to you on my n''s behalf now and I would like it if you can be forgiving enough to give our sword back and in return please take my sword as a token of my apology.

    For generations, the heirloom has been passed on from one n head to another and it is our duty to protect it as a homage to our ancestor''s sacrifices.

    Please, find the kindness in your heart to ept this."

    Kach bowed his head and offered his sword.

    Sam is a bit surprised, but he is also impressed. It is hard for a person who dedicated his life to a single art to bow like this. Particrly, a swordsman giving out his sword like this.

    It has been a while since Sam came across a person like this. But when he looked at the Ninth young master on the horse, he didn''t have the same feeling.

    Because he came across the people like the Ninth young master all the time.

    "I don''t know what you are talking about. I have never visited the Meadow n. In fact, I barely heard of you guys. I think you are mistaken. I am not the only Ninth young master in the surrounding cities. It must have been someone from another n.

    Please verify who it is. But since Meadow n''s forestes under our territory, I will assist you in any way I can. Please make an appointment for that though. If you don''t mind. I have to leave now."

 Chapter 1669 Battle

    Chapter 1669 Battle¡¡¡¡Sam was not surprised by the reply.

    He has expected thispletely. In fact, this is the most generic reply he could think of. The behavior, the fake smile, the diplomatic attitude, everything is expected of a young master.

    He looked at Kach to see how he would react.

    The young man still had that humble smile on his face.

    "Ninth young master. You might have forgotten, but exactly three weeks and four days ago, you visited the Meadow n.

    One of our youngsters who has been practicing nearby has caught your eye and when you tried to make some conversation, he made some snide remarks. You wanted to punish him, but he retaliated.

    Which is indeed a bit out of line.

    The dispute escted and you were angered because of the situation and brought the heirloom along with you. I have confirmed the story again and again and I even saw the memories of the person who started the dispute.

    So, I am sure that it was you who visited the Meadow n.

    I can understand why you might have forgotten it though. Meadow n is indeed not one of the major powers and we stay secluded. So, there is a chance that you might have forgotten about us. It is understandable.

    But please return the sword.

    I have a responsibility to bring that sword back to the n as its guardian."

    The manager whispered something to the ninth young master.

    The young master looked at Kach and said.

    "So, you are the Guardian of the Meadow n. From what I know, the n guardian is a core member of the n and responsible for the security of the n leader and the reputation of the n.

    That means you must be careful with the ims you make. If you bring a disaster because of your idental mistakes like using someone of something that they didn''t do. So, please be careful and for any other help, make an appointment as I said."

    As soon as he said these words, he prompted his horse to move forward.

    Kach stood up and his aura changed a bit. The horse looked at him and sensed something is wrong which made it halt in its tracks.

    Kach put his sword and the sheath back on his hip. He lost the servile attitude he had before.

    Sam smiled and looked at the Ninth young master.

    "You can only y for so long with a nice guy. I wonder howrge this is going to blow up. Would you be able to handle it?"

    He muttered to himself and waited for the show to go on.

    "Ninth young master. I heard your reputation. Being a talented star of the Sura n, with a blessed and resourceful life, you are the student of Brig one of the most talented and reputed people in the whole realm.

    That is why, I bowed my head, surrendered my sword and pleaded you with absolute humility. But you, denying that the incident ever happened, makes me question your reputation. The fact that you stooped so low as to threaten me just reinforces that doubt.

    I hope you can give our sword back. I am telling that I will not be leaving this ce without sword and I will take it by hook or crook. Whatever means necessary."

    He held the hilt of his sword and looked at the young master in eyes when he finished that sentence.

    His aura changed, His face became nk. There is no hint of smile that was there a second ago.

    The sword aura is raging, but in a controlled way.

    "How dare you threaten the young master?"

    There went the idiot of the group. The idiot that is always in a group. He impulsively made a move to fight with, Kach.

    Kach drew his sword. The dark ck de created a sword ray that went for the neck of the opponent. But it disappeared right before it made contact.

    "This is a warning, sir. Don''t attack me. Or I will be forced to make a move as well."

    His voice became colder and he held the sword in an attack stance. The surrounding air turned.

    Ninth young master looked at the surroundings. Everyone is staring at him while whispering among themselves. He felt humiliated. It is embarrassing. By now he believed that everyone of them thought that he did whatever kach imed he did.

    Even if that is true, he is obviously not going to admit it. The things he did at the Meadow n are not something he is proud of. And most of it happened because of his pride anyway.

    Actually, the way Kach approached this whole issue gave him a lot of face and a proper way out. All he had to do is gracefully say that he epted the apology and the Meadow n is off the hook and return the sword.

    He would be viewed as generous and kind. And might even have had a chance to recruit a good subordinate. Just from the looks of it and sampling that aura, Ninth young master clearly knows that this guy is really good.

    Sam looked at the changing colors of the young master''s face and smiled. He knew the situation would turn out this way. These young masters always make the stupidest decisions because of their pride.

    As if proving his point, the ninth young master ordered his subordinates.

    "Call the city guards. Arrest him."

    One of his subordinates called for the city guards while the rest of the subordinates made their move. Finally, it is time for Kach to reveal his cultivationpletely.

    The peak stage cultivation of Astral ne Consummate level and there is a hint of energy that Sam vaguely experienced before. The energy that he sensed when he was fighting the Divine league members. The Divine energy.

    The person in the peak stage of Astral ne Consummate stage would get to sense the Divine energy bit by bit and when they finally and the amount of Divine energy their current body can handle before they broke through kind of indicates the potential and the strength they will have in the Divine ne of cultivation.

    When Sam sensed the Divine energy of this person, he felt overwhelmed in a way. He came across Divine energy when the divine league tried to infiltrate and damage his soulwork.

    Even Gail has activated some of his Divine energy, but this one is pure, denser and more powerful.

    Ninth young master''s face changed. He never expected that a n who he pissed off at random has an expert at such level. That is very close to his teacher''s strength. Now he is really regretting not taking the easy way out.

    An expert of such level would have a high position in anyrge n, if he wants. For such a person to be on his knees and begging him was already a great thing. Compared to the stupid pride of the Young master, it is way too much of a step down and now he is sure that things are going to get out of hand.

    Kach held his sword and pointed it at the young master.

    "I would like to avoid a fight if I have to. Please cooperate and give me my sword back. We can put this behind. I will apologize for my impudence and leave."

    Ninth young master contemted for a moment and wanted to take the deal. He just got epted as the student of the Brig. There is a lot at stake. He doesn''t want to risk it for a sword. Even though the sword itself is quite special in many ways.

    As he was thinking, someone already made a move making thisst chance go away.

    One of his subordinates got down from his horse and attacked Kach.

    "I already told you. I don''t want a fight. But you are adamant about this. I am not going to stop until I am done with whatever I am tasked with."

    Kach stabbed at the opponent. The sword seemed to have ignored the attack that came at him and directly went for the kill. The opponent is killed and Kach didn''t stop there. He jumped forward with no intention of stopping.

    Ninth young master''s manager got off the horse and blocked the attack along with four more subordinates. The four subordinates and the manager are all at the peak stage. The manager even had a hint of divine energy.

    All five of them surrounded Kach as they attacked together.

    Kach blocked their attacks and went on a bit defensive. He is stronger than five of them individually and if their teamwork isn''t so good, then he would have already won.

    At least that is what Sam saw from the side.

    But still Kach is handling himself pretty well.

    Ninth young master was horrified as the battle went on. More and more people are gathered around and soon the city guards he called also joined into watch.

 Chapter 1670: Help

    <h4>Chapter 1670: Help</h4>

    Kach was very confident until the City guards came.

    He was also holding back a bit. But once they came, he didn''t bother holding back anymore. His divine energy riled up and he shed at the manager that came at him and it seemed like it is a special move.

    Sam looked at the sh in surprise as it cut through the air leaving a ck line behind and by the time it reached the manager, the ck line spread into darkness.

    The surroundings seemed to have dimmed a little. The light at the immediate surroundings of the ck line was devoured by it as the darkyer spread.

    The darkness then manifested into a sharp sword that followed the sword ray and stabbed at the manager.

    The manager looked at the dark sword that came it and felt the death gripping his throat. He could almost see his grim reaper following behind that sword to take his soul away.

    He was lost in that daze and was about to die.

    Everyone stopped their breaths for a second as they looked at the manager. They all thought he is going to die. Even the other subordinates didn''t attack. The spectators all held their breath in and looked at this with amazement.

    They never knew that a person who could perform a move like that, a person who could wield power like that is within this region. And a person who doesn''t even have any fame.

    The more Kach revealed his abilities, the more surprise people became about how he begged Ninth young master. With this strength, he could directly fix an appointment with the n leader of the Sura n and get this settled.

    But he was humble and polite enough to give the Ninth young master so much respect, which he obviously didn''t deserve.

    As all of these thoughts passed in everyone''s mind, nobody moved. Except for one person.

    *BOOM*

    When everyone though that the sword will pierce through the neck of the manager, some external force came out of nowhere and stopped it.

    Sam and Kach looked at the city guards who just arrived.

    The only person who made a move and didn''t stop in awe after looking at Kach''s attack.

    The force destroyed the sword.

    Kach held his sword and looked at the city guard.

    Ninth young master also came out of his daze and looked at the City guards that came.

    "Fucking hell."

    He couldn''t help but curse at his bad luck. The city guard squad that came is the one squad that he wish that didn''te. Because the squad is under the payroll of a different young master. And both of them happened to hate each other''s guts.

    He is sure that any chance of this dispute being resolved peacefully has gone out of the window.

    As he thought this, the city guard squad captain yelled out loud.

    "HOW DARE YOU CHALLENGE THE AUTHORITY OF SURA CLAN AND ITS YOUNG MASTER? HOW DARE YOU START A FIGHT IN THE CITY. I DEMAND YOU SURRENDER ON THE AUTHORITY OF THE CITY GUARD AND THE SURA CLAN.

    OR GET READY TO FACE YOUR DEATH."

    The squad captain''s voice resounded around. The rest of the city guards stood beside him with their hands crossed. They are all looking at the whole scene with amusement.

    They are confident and from the looks of it quite powerful. As for how powerful they are, one can judge from the expressions of the people around.

    The leader himself is a peak stage expert with divine energy, while the subordinates also seemed to mostly peak stage with some of them beingte stage.

    Sam thought that peak stage cultivators would be somewhat umon even if they are not too rare. But they are way too many. He came across too many people within a few hours.

    Kach looked at the City guards coldly. Any trace of humility and respect he had was gone. He is enraged. But even that rage is refined and suppressed. He is cold and calm. Which means he is dangerous.

    The battle became intense. Sam watched as the dark sword rays flew everywhere and cut down the opponents one by one. First the small fries were eliminated. The city guards are obviously unable to protect those small time subordinates.

    But soon Kach started feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the people ganging up on him. Particrly two opponents with peak stage cultivation and divine energy.

    And all the extra subordinates are not exactly pleasant for his eye.

    Squad captain and Manager started cooperating to subdue Kach.

    But Kach himself is a tough opponent and he started caring less and less with each passing second making him a bit hard to deal with.

    "Squad, eight wall prison." The squad captain spoke all of a sudden and all of the squad members changed their movements. They all ran away from Kach and reached eight specific spots. Some spots are upied by just one person while others have been upied by multiple people. But all in all, they gathered in eight points.

    They all held their weapons while making some weird handsigns and stabbed them into the ground. Everything happened in a sh while the manager and the squad captain kept Kach busy.

    de rays formed from the eight points and created walls around a certain area. Within that area, the manager, squad captain and Kach were stuck.

    The de rays moved continuously maintaining the wall as it is. And from it came a de aura that surrounded Kach and tried to suppress him. Even the air within the formation became sharper and Kach already felt the difference.

    The spiritual energy within that area seems to bepletely out of control. It seemed like it directly went under the control of the de aura creating the formation.

    When Kach swung his sword, the sword ray didn''t form as densely as before and it definitely didn''t pack the same power.

    On the other hand the swords of the manager and the Squad captain became powerful.

    "Seems like this guy needs to take out some of his hidden cards, otherwise, things wouldn''t be good."

    Sam muttered to himself and as if he is on cue, Kach stopped his movements. An energy barrier formed around him as he looked at his opponents.

    "I didn''t want to use this technique. You brought this up on yourself. You should have just given my sword and I would have already been on my way back home. Why do you need to make this worse than it actually is?"

    He spoke out loud looking at the Ninth young master.

    His body slowly started blowing with dark energy. He activated Partial dark energy fusion and this dark elemental energy also surrounded the sword.

    The sword seemed to have grown in size a bit as the dark elemental energy raged uncontrobly.

    "Dark Sword Arts, Wielder of Death."

    He muttered as he swung his sword.

    It is just a casual sh, but it contained the power that even made Sam vignt that far away. The sword ray is manifested out of pure death energy. The surroundings seemed to have been sucked out life.

    The rocks on the ground deteriorated into sand, the grass on the side was dead in a second, people in the surroundings felt like their breaths are being taken away from them.

    The two opponents of course also felt something on a whole different level. Both of them took out tokens and broke them.

    Arge energy barrier formed around them and they managed to block it. The barriers are brokenpletely and they were barely able to stay unscathed.

    Kach didn''t stop there though, he lunged forward and started fighting back. He became aggressive, with the ck sword. He looked like the death has manifested into human form and started dancing in front everyone.

    The two opponents who suppressed him until then were suppressed themselves.

    The spectators were d that they stopped for the show. The city guard squad and the personal security team of a young master are both being dealt with a noname guy who doesn''t have any fame to his name.

    They knew that whatever the oue that day is, this whole thing is going to blow up into arge matter that is going to be talked for a long time. This is going to be a ck mark in the history of the n.

    Meanwhile, the news started spreading. People started gathering more and more. Soon it reached another squad that made its way. Ninth young master looked at them and finally heaved a sigh of relief.

    A squad that ispletely neutral without any influence from any politics. He ran to them and asked for help.

    "Captain, the matter is blowing up too much. Too many people have died. Please stop this. You don''t need to arrest that person. Just suppress them first. Make them stop fighting. Please."

    "That cannot be, young master. We need to arrest him. No matter what the reason he started this, we need to arrest him and investigate the matter. I understand that your reputation is at stake here, but rules are rules.

    Squad, suppress them all and arrest the person who is causing a ruckus."

 Chapter 1671: Shackles

    <h4>Chapter 1671: Shackles</h4>

    Looking at the new squad that arrived, the three people that are stuck in the formation had different expressions.

    The squad captain inside is very happy. Particrly, when he saw the neutral squad that stick to the rules as if they have a massive stick up their asses. This means, they are not going to favor the young master''s wishes and will definitely lock up Kach.

    And in trying to do so, themotion is going to re up even more, which is exactly what he was tasked to do by the young master he is following.

    The manager on the other hand, felt a bit troubled. Even though he started fighting with Kach, he knew that the situation is not in their favor even if they won. The fiasco happened way too publicly and the other young masters are going to use this to their advantage.

    As for Kach, he didn''t like it of course. He is already using one of his hidden cards with the technique he is using. If possible he doesn''t want to use more. But the new addition of these opponents is going to make that difficult.

    The new squad captain, made a move along with his subordinates. They are all holding spears in their hands and they all took a medium ranged positions from the formation.

    Looking at this Kach felt urgency to finish the fight he was in.

    "Bastards, I will not let you off for making me use this."

    As he spoke, the death energy surrounding him and the sword. With a single sh in the air, the energy gathered into hundreds of des and created a de storm around. The des sucked the life out of everything.

    Manager and the squad captain tried their best to protect themselves with all they have got. The formation that was created with the de rays of the squad met with the des of death energy.

    During the sh, the subordinates felt like their vitality is being sucked over.

    Even the spectators on the side could feel the vitality drain from their body, even though it is very slight. In fact, it would be more urate to say that the vitality is being shaved off by the de instead of drained.

    The barrier soon broke open and half of the squad members fainted. The manager and the squad captain, felt their legs go weak.

    The new squad captain looked at the whole scenario while waiting to order his subordinates to make a move.

    When he saw the barrier breaking down and Kach getting ready to make another move, he took out amunication and spoke in it.

    "Captain of Ninth Squad, I want you and the manager to hold the opponent back for thirty seconds. We are preparing Infinite spear cage. We are going to subdue him right now. We cannot let him perform another move like that."

    The squad captain who is fighting alongside the manager heard this and informed the manager about it.

    "30 Seconds."

    That is all he said. The manager caught on to it and made a move.

    The two of them tried to stop Kach from making another move simr to thest one.

    "Squad, Infinite Spear cage. Subdue the opponent and arrest him."

    The squad responded with their movements. They didn''t waste a single second and got into position. They all aimed their spears at Kach who is already being upied by the manager and squad captain.

    He gritted his teeth and channelled his energy. The partial fusion becameplete. The dark elemental energy became dense. The death energy run rampant.

    "I am losing patience now."

    Kach spoke up as he raised his sword to sh it down. Manager and the squad captain exchanged a nce, they know that they will die if they let him finish it, so they didn''t dare hold anything back.

    Both of them took out some potions and drank it immediately before crushing a couple of tokens directed at Kach.

    Two energy barriers formed around Kach along with some shackles conjured out of energy. While doing that, the shackles connected him with the ground around and the connections in such a way that they created a formation.

    The shackles sucked the energy from Kach and gathered it at the formation nodes. Kach felt drained for a moment.

    The Squad captain and the Manager, heaved a sigh.

    "We should have done this sooner. This bastard is way too strong."

    The Squad captain spoke as he signalled for the new squad captain to take action while he instructed his subordinates to open the de formation up a little. The gap created is enough for the spear cage to take full effect.

    The new squad captain threw his spear out and as if on the cue, the rest of the squad did the same as well.

    Kach finally felt that he is in a pinch. Even though he was careful from the start, he just didn''t think that these n members would have something like these shackles up their sleeves.

    He would have never guessed that he would be stuck with something like this. The spears reached the area and they created a myriad of spears that conjured from the energy and started building a cage around.

    Everyone heaved a sigh. The spectators, the squad members, the Ninth young master and even Sam.

    Of course, everyone has different reasons, including Sam.

    The spectators sighed because the show is over, the squad members sighed because this is finally over, the Ninth young master sighed because he doesn''t know what is awaiting him and Sam sighed because¡­

    As the spears are conjuring into a cage, Kach felt his energy being sealed. He tried to fight back with all he got. But there is no use, the shackles and cage seemed to be a perfectbination against him. Particrly, when he already spent so much of his energy.

    But he didn''t want to give up. His energy raged and he started bleeding from his mouth. He forced himself as the shackles slowly shook.

    "YOU BETTER SURRENDER. YOU ARE GOING TO HARM YOURSELF. THE CONSEQUENCES COULD BE PERMANENT."

    The new squad captain yelled.

    But Kach didn''t listen.

    "AAAHHHHHHHH¡­."

    He yelled out loud as he tried to get out of the shackles and the cage.

    The old squad captain and the manager who are nearest to him, felt the death energy waves and dark elemental energy wavesing out of Kach.

    They are chaotic, turbulent and dominating. They felt suppressed, in daze.

    They didn''t even know how to react. Their brains started working.

    The new squad captain looked at this scene in awe.

    A few meter radius around Kach ispletely destroyed. It is as if the death energy is consuming everything and anything around him.

    The shackles started cracking while the spears started vibrating. The New squad captain of course didn''t like this, so he made a move. He took out a spear and aimed straight at Kach.

    The spear. It cut through the wind with a whistling noise. IT is aimed straight at Kach who finally felt a sense of despai. He gritted his teeth, closed his eyes and braced for the impact.

    *BOOM*

    A huge explosive sound came. But to everyone''s surprise it didn''te from direct contact between Kach and the spear, instead it is the contact between, spear and the sword that made this noise.

    When the dust settled, Sam was standing with his sword. He looked down instead of the opponent''s face.

    Kach was shocked. But it didn''tst long, he le his energy rage up and managed to break the shackles.

    The spear cage was also gone in the explosion that was created. The manager and the squad captain were thrown away from the explosion.

    "Who the hell are you?"

    Ninth young master asked directly.

    He doesn''t know why Sam got involved in this. It is an obvious decision to stay put without getting involved.

    "Why are you doing this?"

    Kach asked directly.

    "To help you of course. You are the one person standing against the big bad bully. And I kind of like you, we could be great friends. For that to happen, you must win here first

    So, don''t worry."

    "How can I not? I appreciate your concern and participation, but the situation wouldn''t end well.

    These officials are mongrels. They are selfish and self absorbed. Even these young masters, particrly the ninth one. He is not going to let this go, you understand that right?"

    "Yes, I understood it. Don''t treat like me an idiot. I know what the consequences and I know what I would need to ovee them. Anyway, they areing, Who do you want to take care of? The new squad or the old squard?"

    "Whatever you arefortable with." Kach answer while catching his breath.

    "New captain and his crew. You can deal with the other two as fast you can. After all, you are the one who dealt with them from the start. Finish it fast though, I don''t want to go through the whole hassle gain."

 Chapter 1672: Blink

    <h4>Chapter 1672: Blink</h4>

    Sam stepped forward toward the new captain.

    "Do you know what you are doing? Messing with us, equal to making the whole Sura n your enemy. Do you really want to do that?"

    The squad captain''s voice was calm. Even though, Sam broke the Spear cage with a single move, he is not fazed by it. He is not angry too. He is just calm and collected.

    The rest of the squad members came forward as they are looked at Sam vigntly. They don''t have the same calm, their captain possessed.

    "As I said, I like that guy. And I am pretty sure I don''t give a fuck about Sura n''s status. So, no problem making you my enemy as well. So, don''t waste your time thinking about stuff like that."

    The captain looked at Sam carefully. He even squinted his eyes as a frown appeared on his face.

    "You even have an injury, which is refusing to heal. You body is filled with some kind of weird aura. You seem to be in so much pain. Why are you even doing this? Even if that person is your friend, there is no point in risking your life like this.

    Just leave, I will let this go. And we are not killing your friend, we are just arresting for the disturbance he caused. As for how this dispute started and if his ims are true, we will investigate it with utmost impartiality and objectivity.

    If what he said is true, not only we will leave him alone, he will also bepensated fairly for his losses and suffering."

    "That sounds so long-winded. How about we just settle this the old-fashioned and easy way. We will fight and blow this matter up until someone authoritativees. How about that?"

    "If someone authoritativees in, all you can do is die regretfully. That is if you go past me. With that injured body of yours, no chance and it seems like you don''t even have any Divine energy. Just let this go and live."

    Sam didn''t speak anymore. He just swung his sword and moved forward.

    Every movement he made is hurting his whole body. The corruption seemed to have gotten stronger. It is much more turbulent and it is wrecking his body.

    It is almost like pain is traveling like vibrations. Even the breeze hitting him is lightly hurting him. He is actually tempted to wreck all of his pain receptors so that he wouldn''t feel that anymore.

    But the pain is not just physical, it is mental and spiritual. There is no point in eliminating the physical pain.

    He just has to grit through it and fight.

    As for whether he could eliminate the City guard captain or not, even he doesn''t know. But that is not his goal in any way. His goal ispletely different and this squad captain ys a significant role in that.

    And that role doesn''t change whether he dies or not.

    Of course, the squad captain didn''t make a move.

    "Just subdue him and arrest him. Don''t kill him."

    He just ordered his subordinates to do this and wanted to go after Kach. In his opinion, Kach is obviously the bigger threat here, and in a way he is right. Sam is way too injured to be the major threat.

    But that doesn''t mean, he can just be ignored. As the subordinates were about to make a move and capture Sam, he disappeared from the spot.

    He used spatial elements and went to intercept the Squad captain, which is not much of a sess, the captain predicted Sam''s destination location because of the spatial energy fluctuations and he made a move.

    Sam barely blocked the attack. The spear strike was very powerful and forceful.

    The barrier created enough recoil for Sam to be thrown away.

    And Sam actually let his body move in that direction and he flew away like a ball thrown away. With his barrier, he actually is within a ball that''s being thrown away.

    Instead of feeling glum or ying with the ball, Sam made conjured both his shadow elemental energy and space elemental energy into the sword.

    Even though it is not as effective without the Shadow sword, it still worked. Sam used his trajectory to cut arge deep gash in space.

    The shadow elemental energy burst out of it and it started spreading. The immediate surroundings of the crack were actually covered with ckness.

    The crack is way too wide and it spread way too far. The biggest consequence is of course the squad member who was standing there, got effected by the sudden burst of shadow energy as well as Sam''s shadow undead.

    The whole squad was caught off guard.

    They didn''t expect such a move from Sam.

    Before they could make sense of it, Sam disappeared again and reappeared near the captain. The captain once again instinctually blocked the attack and countered. Sam used force to redirect himself as he left arge gash in the air.

    The captain was perplexed because of this. This second sh also took another teammate. But this doesn''t seem efficient.

    If all Sam wants to do is immobilize the squad members like this, he would be better off directly using his abilities to do that. There is no point in blinking towards him and then using this repulsion force to make a move at the others.

    But Sam continued doing that.

    With every move, his body became more painful. He felt more pain with every attack. He wanted to scream in pain, but he couldn''t. He could only endure it and continue on this charade.

    Kach is having a rtively easier time on the side and he noticed Sam''s situation also. He wanted toe and help, but for that, he needs to finish off his opponents faster. With them on his ass, there is no way, he would be able to help Sam.

    He is worried that Sam might get seriously injured or even die.

    But as the battle went on, he realized that he underestimated him too much.

    Sam only used shadow and spatial elements. He attacked the captain most of the time. By now the captain smartened up and didn''t send Sam away with his defense. But he realized that it is not in his hands.

    Whenever he tried to capture Sam instead of just blocking or deflecting him, he started getting injured.

    Sam left gashes on his arms and chest. They are small, but they are corrupted with spatial and shadow energy that is infused around the wounds, making them impossible to heal, at least for the moment.

    He knew that the only way is to deflect Sam and then there are their attempts to capture Sam with their formations.

    It is almost like Sam could see the formations before they could even be established. He always picked the perfect spot to create a rift to the shadow realm making it impossible for the formation to be finished.

    And Sam''s undead is using these rifts to the best of their abilities as they took away some squad members from one rift and left them at the other.

    This made the squad members, take in the corruption of the shadow energy.

    This corruption made it impossible for the squad to fight anymore.

    The ninth young master is feeling scared when he saw this. Two squads are mobilized and if the problem isn''t solved by then, an elder will being.

    And depending on the faction that elder belongs to, this whole fiasco could be very tiny or it could be very destructive.

    He prayed that he this would just blow off. In fact, he literally prayed with his eyes closed and arms joined.

    Kach is almost done with his two opponents. When he finally saw that, Sam made his finishing move. The move that will decide how his n is going to work out.

    He blinked from his spot and the Squad captain put his guard up, he got ready with his spear and when he felt spatial fluctuations nearby, he threw his spear with all his might.

    The spear pierced through a dark figure which he assumed would be Sam.

    But to his surprise, that ck figure disappeared in a puff of ck smoke.

    As he was thinking about what happened, he heard a loud gasp from the crowd all over.

    His senses came back and when he looked around, he was stunned.

    Sam is standing right behind the young master.

    The ninth young master is shitting his pants as he felt the tip of the sword on his throat.

    Sam yawned as he spoke.

    "Now, do you think holding the ninth young master hostage will bring someone authoritative?"

    "No need for that extra mile, your presence and the fact that you are alive until now is enough to call for an authoritative person. An elder would being in a minute. So, it is not toote to surrender now."

    "I wonder how much of a power difference between you and an Elder is and I also wonder what the power difference between you and the elder that I want to meet. There is only one way to find out."

    Sam smiled and he pierced through the skin of the ninth young master.

 Chapter 1673: Brig

    <h4>Chapter 1673: Brig</h4>

    "AHHHHHHHHHH¡­."

    The ninth young master screamed at the top of his lungs. He screamed so loud that the whole area turned silent and even Kach and his two opponents stopped moving.

    Then only they noticed that Sam is holding a sword on the ninth young master''s neck and there is blood dripping slightly from it.

    The wound is not big. In fact, it is negligibly small.

    Now they are surprised, why this guy is even crying out this loud with such a small gash.

    It didn''t take long for them to understand the reason though. Because the wound turned ck and the ckness started spreading through the skin, to the rest of his body.

    The manager ran toward the young master, leaving Kach and the old squad captain alone. Kach didn''t waste this chance and cut off the old captains limbs. One hand and one leg. He fell to the ground.

    Kach caught up to Manager in the next instant and shed on his back.

    A deep wound appeared on the manager''s back. But he didn''t stop, he didn''t retaliate. He just ran towards the young master and took out a token hurriedly.

    "Sir Brig, Ninth young master was in a battle with someone and is severely injured. He fainted and dark and death energies are rampaging his body. Two squads are eliminated. I request youe here as the Elder who needs to handle this matter.

    Please. Young master needs you."

    He cried and wept as he exined the situation to Brig.

    Sam who is casually standing there, walked away from the young master and tapped his legs on the ground after reaching a certain point.

    The earth turned into a chair. He rxedly sat on the chair and tapped his foot on the ground once again. Another chair was formed. He invited Kach toe and sit there as well.

    The manager has no will to fight and the second squad captain, couldn''t even wrap his head around the current situation.

    Kach heaved a sigh and sat on the chair.

    "Why did you do this? You really didn''t have to do this, you know? This was my problem, now it extended to be yours"

    "Really?"

    "Yes, I would have just cut his arm off and ran. I already migrated my n away, so I can just get into somece hiding for a while.

    But you? Don''t you a have a life? All we had was a rtionship of fifteen minutes, out of which more than half of it was gone in silence. You shouldn''t be doing this. You are kind and pure, people will take advantage of you."

    "Yeah, sure. That is what they think of me. Kind and pure."

    Sam couldn''t help but think of the times when he was purely violent.

    "So, what is the n now?"

    "We will wait for Brig toe."

    "Is that what you are aiming for since the start? Yeah, kind of. That guy is the only ticket out for us and if you want to get your sword back, he is the best shot at making that happen."

    "Why do you want to meet Brig though? If you are looking for a favor or some business, I am pretty sure, this is not the right approach for that. He is not really that much of a kind man."

    "I know. But don''t worry. He won''t even dare to harm us. I have something up my sleeve."

    "You better have."

    Both of them sat down without a care in the world as they waited.

    Soon, they felt an aura trying to suppress them.

    But they didn''t faze that much. After all, they are also peak stage experts. Sam might not have divine energy yet, but his mind is too strong to waver from some pressure.

    They looked into a distance. A man who seemed to be in histe twenties is running in the air as he made his way.

    Hended right next to the Ninth young master. He had a worried look on his face as he diagnosed him.

    His aura is still locked on Sam and Kach. He is aware of who caused this and from his expression, it is apparent that he is not going to let this go that easily.

    Sam just smiled and spoke up.

    "One hundred curses. All of the different forms and different styles. All fused together. That''s what effecting your student.

    He is going to die. Slowly and painfully. No matter what you try with your original methods, he won''t survive."

    Sam''s voice silenced the whole crowd once again. Even Kach was stunned. It is one thing for Sam to attack Ninth''s young master. But to put him through the suffering of one hundred curses. And to think that everyone thought that the young master is a Wuss for crying out loud for just a small scratch.

    "It seems like you have a death wish."

    Brig spoke and looked at Sam.

    "Of course not. I am pretty sure you not going to kill me, because in a regr scenario if you even have any possibility of curing him, your only is to get a hundred curses from me.

    And for that, you either need to kill me and absorb my soul to get the info or you need to ask me nicely.

    You know damn well that the first option is not going to work. Because your city guard captain can vouch that I am a pain in the ass and escape easily. As for the second, well it depends."

    "There is a third option, I can beat the shit out of you and make you say it."

    "There is indeed a third option, but I am sure that is not it. It is a different one and something rted to the meeting you just had with your goddess Hel.

    You can try that special technique and he will live. Anyway, I am sure it is a good time to experiment with that new technique. With the added pressure of saving your student, you will also be extra careful about it increasing the chances of sess."

    The city guards are all perplexed.

    Only Brig had a stunned expression on his face. He definitely understood what Sam was talking about. Because he just came from the ceremony. He just took that technique a few hours ago and he was still studying it.

    He was right on the verge of demonstrating the technique to the rest of the core members when he got the news that Ninth young master was injured. He came running while leaving the whole core members of the n hanging.

    "How do you know about the technique?"

    He asked in shock.

    "I know a lot more about it than you think. The technique that you might have just gotten your hands on. And not just me, all six of your rival organizations know about it.

    I can go into detail, but I presume that you won''t really like it if I do that in public."

    Brig came out of his momentary daze.

    He looked around and his gaze finally stopped at the city guard squad captain. Send everyone away. Bring those two to my private estate."

    With that, he took his student and leaped into the air to his private estate.

    The squad captain looked at Sam and Kach. Even without any prompt, they stood up from their spot and moved.

    Five minutester, Sam and Kach are inside the private estate. They were told to sit down in a room while they waited for Brig.

    They waited for fifteen minutes before someone ran into the room.

    Both Sam and Kach were confused by the presence of this person. It was not Brig that came, it is actually a beautiful youngdy.

    And just from how she looked Sam could guess who she is. It is Yana. The beauty of the Sura n.

    She looked at both Kach and Sam for a moment and asked.

    "Which one of you beat up the Ninth young master?"

    Sam and Kach exchanged a nce before Sam raised his hand.

    She grabbed their hand and shook it heavily.

    "Thank you so much."

    Sam was stunned. He didn''t expect such a reaction at all. She is the cousin of the said ninth young master after all. Who would expect such a reaction from her?

    Before Sam could even speak, she shifted her attention to Kach.

    "So, you must be the one that made all the fuss about your n. That asshole must have definitely done it. You should have just beaten him up and taken your sword back. You have the strength for it."

    Kach just smiled wryly and didn''t even speak.

    Soon, Brig came back and spoke to Sam.

    "Now, you better speak what I want to know. You are in a very perilous situation and I am in no mood to entertain your antics. If you don''t give me a proper answer, I will just kill you and get the answers myself."

 Chapter 1674: Rejection

    <h4>Chapter 1674: Rejection</h4>

    Sam just smiled at the threat and spoke.

    "Don''t worry. I don''t like beating around the bush either. If not for the fact that it is hard to meet you, I wouldn''t have caused all of this fuss. Also the time is pretty tight."

    "So, tell me. How do you know about the technique? Why do the other organizations know about it? It is a secret that even most of the Sura n doesn''t know. Even some core members were kept in dark."

    "Well, let''s say that the goddess Hel herself told me. As for the rest of the ns, while the goddess appeared in your n and imparted the technique to you, the gods that are being worshipped by other ns also met them and gave the information about the technique.

    And there are other people like me, precisely six people who don''t belong in this area of the realm that came here to assist those six ns to gain the technique in your hands."

    "Then, you are also here for that?" Brig''s aura changed for a moment.

    "Hold your horses. I am here to help you out actually. To put it simply, the other six people I told you about were given a task to steal your technique, while I was given a task to protect you and your technique away from them.

    That is the situation. So, in a way I am on your side."

    "Am I supposed to thank you now?"

    "No need for such formalities, you can do that after I am done with the task."

    "Why should I trust you?"

    "You don''t need to trust me, you can just contact your spies in other ns. Just contact them and ask them if someone came to meet them. Ask them if they are making anyrge moments.

    You should probably know who would be moving from that n if they want to take that technique away from you, ask them if they are moving or not.

    I am pretty sure you can confirm it."

    Brig thought for a few minutes and spoke.

    "You are going to be in my custody before I confirm it. You better pray that whatever you told me is the truth. Or you can only wish that you are dead."

    "Well, you better confirm it fast. I need to talk to you about what kind of people we are facing before I could figure out a strategy to deal with them."

    "Even if what you said is true, what makes you think that I would trust you with the task?"

    "I don''t know. The fact that I am your best shot at it, might be a little factor."

    Brig didn''t reply to him and turned to Kach.

    "How are you guys rted anyway? I heard you are from the Meadow n. I am pretty sure this guy wouldn''t be able toe across Meadow n."

    "We are not rted in anyway. We only got to know each other here. Before this, we areplete strangers."

    "So, he just basically used you to get to me. You better watch your back."

    "At least, he only used me when I needed his help too. Your student on the other hand, used our n''s heirloom as a symbol to his pride. It is much more hurtful and disgusting than whatever Sam did."

    Brig''s face turned red in embarrassment.

    He didn''t want to breach that topic if possible. His original intentions were to just brush this off by giving the sword back along with somepensation.

    As much as he hated his student''s actions, he cannot do much about them. He still has to save his ass and he also has to preserve his own reputation. He might not have any desires of conqueringnds and gaining authority, but the reputation that is direct representation of his character cannot be stained.

    But Kach didn''t bother putting up any pretenses. He tore everything apart.

    "It is a misunderstanding and ignorance on my student''s part. I will make him apologize and give you your sword back. I will also personally owe the meadow n a favor. What do you think? Can we consider this matter resolved?"

    "No, if your student has given me the sword the very moment I asked him, I would have concluded the matter. But too bad. He had to blow the whole matter up.

    I want him to admit what he did publicly and he has to apologize to our ancestor''s graves for the sin hemitted."

    Brig frowned as he looked at him coldly.

    "It must be hard for the high and mighty Brig to be rejected like this, but I am not backing out of this. I already embarrassed myself and swallowed all the me, to give your student a way out. But he took it for granted.

    I did all of that because of my respect towards you. But now even that is gone. So, don''t expect any leeway from me."

    "Do you know what you are doing? You are making an enemy out of my father?"

    Yana said from the side.

    "Yes, I am indeed making an enemy out of your father. Both him and I know that I am not exactly an easy opponent. All I have to do is escape from this ce and stay in the dark.

    Meadow n is not the only n with members and youngsters that are easy to bully. Even Sura n has them and they are spread too far and too wide.

    That makes you guys a bigger target. If anything you should be worried about making me your enemy. If this is not resolved. I will escape this ce and I will kill every prospect that Ie across.

    None of the members will be able to breakthrough past the middle stage of Astral ne Consummation. So, you think before you make a decision."

    Yana opened her mouth wide open in shock. She wanted to say something, but she was unable to do so. She was too shocked to speak.

    On the other hand, Brig''s expression turned colder. But he forced himself to calm down. He knew what Kach said is true. If whatever the city guard captain reported is true, then there is no way, he would be able prevent whatever Kach mentioned if theypletely fall out. Things will bepletely out of his hand.

    He could only grit his teeth and leave the room. He couldn''t even get happy for the new technique he received and he already has to deal with two big assholes that are being a pain in his own ass.

 Chapter 1675: Falcons

    <h4>Chapter 1675: Falcons</h4>

    Yana looked at both Kach and Sam as if they arepletely insane.

    Never in her life did she expect that there would be two guys who will oppose her father like that.

    Even the leader of the n who is far more powerful than her father didn''t dare to do that. Ever.

    Even the Grand elders respect him so much, that they will ask for his permission before entering his office.

    But here two guys who are obviously weaker than her father are opposing him so directly that she became speechless.

    Sam and Kach exchanged a nce as Yana sized them up.

    She took a seat opposite to them and didn''t speak for a while.

    After some time, Kach couldn''t take it anymore. Her constant staring made him feel ufortable.

    "Excuse me, Miss. Do you need anything?"

    "Not really, I am just curious."

    "About what?"

    "What if my father kills both of you? I mean, you might have the means to escape, but you just revealed your intentions, so my father can now take preventive measures and not let you guys escape.

    Didn''t you just expose the one critical part of your n? Why did you do that?"

    Sam chuckled at her question.

    Yana frowned. She felt that Sam is looking down on her a bit.

    "You have a problem with my question?"

    "Yes, of course. It seems like your thinking is too straightforward. No wonder so many guys felt like you are the fastest route to your father.

    It is too easy to fool people like you."

    She became angry, even Kach looked at Sam weirdly.

    But Sam didn''t care, he just continued on with his words.

    "Do you really think that your father is that stupid? Do you think he will just listen to our words and take them at face value before making preparations to prevent whatever we said we would do?

    He is not an idiot. The very fact that we sat here and said those words, means that we are confident that no matter what preparations he made, we will be able to leave this ce.

    If someone is revealing their n directly to you, it usually means, that no matter what kind of obstacles you can create, they are confident that they can leave.

    Why are you so ignorant?"

    Yana frowned.

    "I don''t like you as much anymore. Do you need to be such a dick? I was starting to like you."

    "Trust me, making you like me is not my goal here and in fact, I would appreciate it if you didn''t like me.

    With all the stupidpetition that''s going to court you, I don''t even want to be anywhere near you. I would rather not deal with a bunch of brainless morons."

    "Do you mean only brainless morons will court me?"

    "You said it, not me."

    Sam shrugged it off.

    Kach looked at the whole fiasco and spoke.

    "Sam, leave her alone. Miss Yana, please don''t mind his attitude, but what he said initially is true.

    When someone confidently says that they have the means to escape, we must consider all possibilities and one of the most likely ones is that they don''t care what kind of problems we throw at them, they can still escape.

    With the additional proof of battles we had since morning, it is much easier for us to convince your father.

    As for the courting part, I am sure for a person as beautiful and talented as you, there must be some really good suitors pining for your love."

    Yana appeared a bit pleased.

    Sam just shook his head, while Kach and Yana chatted.

    He is a bit anxious about how the other yers are doing. He is in the worst shape among all the yers. And he is at a disadvantage. He was lucky enough to find Kach and this situation.

    He is sure that this advantage won''tst long though. He wants to see how the whole situation will progress and it didn''t take long for him to see the first signs of it.

    One of the young masters of the six ns, let''s n one''s young master came to visit Yana.

    And he didn''t even bother to wait for her to meet personally. Instead, he came with some grand gesture.

    An attendant came running inside to inform them about his arrival.

    Yana looked out of the window of the building, and Kach and Sam did the same.

    They all saw a young man walking in front and is followed by some rhino beasts that are dragging arge object that was on wheels.

    It looked like arge box covered with a massive cloth.

    It is almost as tall as two palm trees and who knows how wide it is?

    Sam felt a beastly aura from within.

    The n1 young master looked at Yana who was looking through the window and smiled.

    "Miss Yana. I am here today to proim my love to you once again. I heard that you are looking for Infinite Dark Falcons.

    And your wish is mymand. So, here I am with what you desired."

    He took off therge cloth covering it.

    The object is actually a cage and within it were tworge Infinite Dark Falcons and along with them are some baby Falcons that seemed to have just hatched.

    "I brought you a whole family of Infinite Dark Falcons. There are five babies that just hatched. So, you can train them as you like."

    Yana was shocked as she looked at the scene. Kach and Sam on the other hand frowned.

    Because all Yana could see is the beasts that she desired so far, but Sam and Kach who are much more familiar with the beasts than these people saw some anomaly within the Falcons.

    They are dull. Their eyes are lifeless as if they are unconscious.

    "Those Bastards drugged them."

    Kach said with gritted teeth.

    Sam was a bit surprised. He knew that something was off, but for Kach to immediately realize it and even recognize the possible reason is a bit surprising.

    "It is a really torturous drug. How dare they do this to them? The Infinite Dark falcons. They are very hard to win over and they are very prideful to just bow to people.

    That is why it is difficult for people to have them as pets.

    Maybe that is why this princess wanted to have them. But if they really capture a beast like this and put it on drugs to keep it calm, for the rest of their lives they need to be put under.

    Because once the drug wears off, the beast will be awakened with multiplied anger. This bes a never-ending cycle.

    In a way, those tworge beasts are no longer of any use. They are just being used to keep the children in control while they were put under the drugs.

    This is a cruel thing to do for such peaceful beasts."

    Sam shook his head in disappointment.

    Yana who was initially shocked lost all of that pleasant surprise and looked at the beasts in pity and horror.

    "I hope you are satisfied with the gift."

    Sam muttered and looked at the n1 young master.

    "Anyway, these beasts are not easy to locate or capture. How did he get to do that? Even for arge n like this, to capture two of the beasts along with their children is something way too expensive. The price would be in lives.

    So, how did he get his hands on these creatures?"

    Kach asked from the side.

    "Yes, even my father had to n a lot before even considering capturing these beasts. The resources that are needed are way too many, even the n''s treasury is going to feel a pinch.

    To think that n 1 let him use these beasts for courting. I never knew I was valued so much."

    Yana answered his question.

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "I thought I was narcissistic. What''s valuable is your father''spanionship and I have an inkling of an idea on why this guy managed to get these creatures."

    As he spoke, he pushed Kach onto Yana suddenly.

    Both of them were taken aback and Kach forcefully turned to a side. Yana lost her bnce and Kach had no choice but to grab her by her waist.

    The whole scene was visible through the window from the outside. n1 young master saw this and frowned.

    Yana blushed as she felt Kach''s grip on her waist. Even Kach felt shy as he pulled her up.

    "Are you alright miss?"

    "Yes." Yana bowed her head slightly as she blushed shyly.

    Sam looked at n1 young master and shook his head in pity. As if he is pitying for his wasted effort.

    The n1 young master is of course more pissed than ever.

    As if that is not enough, Sam moved his fingers a bit, and the air in the room shifted. A tiny minuscule air cannon hit her behind her knees.

    She stumbled forward and at the same time, she lost her breath as bit as Sam took the air around her away.

    Her face was flustered as she took deep breaths.

    Kach once again didn''t have a choice other than catching her.

 Chapter 1676: Bet

    <h4>Chapter 1676: Bet</h4>

    Kach red at Sam.

    "What is wrong with you, dude? Why are you doing this?"

    "Just to have some fun. Don''t worry about it. And it seems like you are notpletely ufortable about it."

    He said as he looked Yana who just stayed in his embrace without standing up.

    Kach just red at Sam, who raised his hands and said.

    "Okay, okay. Don''t look at me like that. I will stop and turn around. I won''t even look at her. Okay."

    Sam turned around and just stood there with a smile on his face.

    The whole scene looked differently to the rest of the people spectating it from outside though.

    To them, it looked like Kach hugged Yana at first and she was flustered at the start, but then she initiated the hug in front all those spectators.

    Kach looked at Sam angrily because he is kind of hindering their privacy and Sam turned around and moved away.

    That is what it looked like for the n1 young master. Just one look at the expression on his face, Sam clearly understood that his attempt is aplete sess.

    "Who is that bastard? How dare he touch Miss Yana?"

    n1 young master asked his subordinate beside him.

    "I don''t know young master. Just give me a moment."

    The subordinate talked some of his own subordinates and got the info.

    "He is the person who attacked the Ninth young master and his subordinates. He is from the Meadow n, which is a secluded organization devoid of any contact with the rest of the world.

    They solely sustain with the resources that came from the nature. The only time theye out is when they are of certain age and ready to marry.

    Theye out to find love and bring their partner back to the Meadow n."

    Listening to this, n1 young master was furious. His face turned red in anger and his aura fluctuated like crazy. Even Kach and Sam who were on the first floor felt this.

    Sam was surprised.

    He knew that his n worked, but he didn''t know it worked to this extent.

    "Damn, this guy is way more sensitive than I thought. What is wrong with him?"

    While Sam didn''t understand, Kach managed to join the dots.

    "I know what is wrong with him. He must have known that I am from Meadow n."

    "So? Are your ns arch-enemies or something?"

    "No, not really. But I think they will be from now on, because of you."

    Kach then proceeded to exin about the weird rule of their n.

    Hearing this rule, Yana blushed even more.

    She got lost in her own world.

    ''I just thought of using this small incident to trigger than young master. But it seems like she really likes this guy. Well, if that''s the case, that''s only more beneficial to me."

    Sam thought as he looked at the n1 young master.

    "Miss Yana, do you still want these falcons? I am sure you heard what Kach said. Are you sure you want to keep these beasts by those cruel means?"

    Yana shook her head immediately.

    "Not a chance. I didn''t know that Falcons are subdued by such a cruel method, otherwise, I would have not even asked my father about those beasts."

    "That''s good then. I will help you reject them then."

    "Wait¡­" She wanted to stop Sam, but he already made his move.

    "Oyy, Miss Yana doesn''t want the falcons. She took Young master Kach''s advice and rejected them. So, you can take those back and fuck off."

    Sam''s voice resounded through the estate as everyone was shocked. They are in a stunned silence.

    "Took his advice and rejected me?" n1 young master frowned and muttered to himself. He took out his sword and looked at Sam angrily.

    Sam raised his aura and looked back at him.

    "What? You want to go at it? I will school and your whole entourage by myself. You spineless asshole."

    Sam''s words infuriated the young master even more. He would have wanted to kill Sam and ordered so if he wasn''t in Sura n and particrly at Brig''s estate.

    "Miss Yana, are his words really yours? Are you rejecting the gift that I got to you with so much effort just like that? Particrly, because of the advice from a nobody?

    How is that fair?"

    "I¡­"

    She was about speak up, but Sam interrupted her again.

    "What part of FUCK OFF did you not understand? Just fuck off. Using your family''s strength to get these beasts that too with such vile means. I wonder any woman will ever fall for you, if you do things like that."

    "How dare you talk about my family means as vile? This is equivalent to sullying our reputation."

    "Taming a beast using such a torturous drug. How is that not vile. If you that much of a man, why don''t you tame it normally and gift it to her. Then we can talk."

    "That is the only way to tame these falcons you bastard."

    The young master yelled. He kept the courtesy until now, but now he lost it.

    Sam who was about to reply stopped. The word that shouldn''t havee ase.

    His aura changed and killing intent radiated. It surrounded the whole room.

    Kach and Yana were stunned. But Kach came out of his daze quickly while Yana turned pale in fear.

    Kach held Yana and covered her from getting effected by this killing intent. There is no way a person as pure as her would be able to endure that type of refined but dangerous killing intent.

    "Is that so? What will you do if I tame the beast without that drug? You must have the antidote for that drug right? Give it to them, then I will show you how its done."

    "What if you can''t? Do you really think you can just bluff your way out because you are in this ce? Make a proper wager and sign a soul contract.

    Then we will talk."

    "That''s perfect. I was about suggest that."

    Sam jumped out of the window as he spoke and he started signing a soul contract.

    "Sign it. If I lose, I will grant you one wish. No matter what it is. Even if you ask me to kill Brig right here, I will do that. If you want me to get you and Yana married, I will do that.

    But if I win, I need you to answer five questions for me. Answers should bepletely honest. Not a single lie or partial truths are valid.

    Do you agree to this bet?"

    "Who is afraid of who, let''s do it."

    The young master didn''t even think before he signed.

    Because no matter who Sam is, he is sure that he wouldn''t be able to do anything about the beast. Much less tame it.

    He even whispered something in the ears of his subordinate who is extremely reluctant about the whole contract.

    "Are you sure you want to do this young master? If things go wrong, we are in Brig''s estate. He wouldn''t let us go easily."

    "It doesn''t matter. That bastard is a peak stage expert. There is no way things will go out of hand."

    "But¡­"

    "Don''t worry about it and do as you were told. It seems like I have been too lenient to my subordinates. Now even you are lecturing me."

    The subordinate shook his head an sighed before he released the cage and let the beasts out.

    They are weak and powerless. The subordinates fed the medicine to them and immediately vacated the surroundings.

    The falcons closed their eyes and soon they started exhaling deeply. They looked at the surroundings and their eyesnded on the n1 young master.

    After all, he is the one that brought them here.

    But before they could move towards him, Sam stood there in between them.

    The falcons noticed his presence and when they sensed his killing intent, they became a bit hesitant. But after a moment, both of the crowed to the sky before jumping up and flying away.

    Sam didn''t even move. He just looked at the two gigantic birds fly high.

    "What the fuck are you doing letting them go? Do you know what will happen if they go berserk in the city? You are the one who is going to take responsibility if something bad happens."

    The n1 young master spoke with gritted teeth.

    "Shut the fuck up. You imbecile. Just because they rarely fight, do you think those beasts are going to escape that easily? With all the torture you put them through, they won''t leave before killing you."

    As he spoke, the beasts turned around and like two ck meteors they flew down towards the n1 young master.

    Sam''s body is surrounded by wind elemental energy and two wings popped up from behind his back.

    The killing intent mixed with Sky sovereign roc''s bloodline aura attacked surrounded him as he flew high into the sky intercepting the two beastsing down.

 Chapter 1677: Questions

    <h4>Chapter 1677: Questions</h4>

    Everyone was shocked. Never did anyone expect that Sam belonged to a race that has wings on its backs.

    They thought he is just a normal human. But to their surprise, he is not.

    But technically, he doesn''t belong to any particr race at this point. With the number of bloodlines in his body and including the vampire gics, he should be considered apletely new race.

    As for the beastly aura that ising from him. The Roc''s aura along with the killing intent.

    Very few people in the surroundings picked it up and even among them, even fewer people recognized it. Kach is one of the few.

    He was shocked. He looked at Sam as he flew into the sky and stopped the falcons in their tracks. As they were surrounded by his aura, they didn''t dare make a move.

    They just hovered there and looked at him as if they are waiting for hismand.

    After all, the bloodline of Sky sovereign Roc in undisputed among all bird-type beasts. Even among other beasts, there are very few that are on equal footing with it.

    These two falcons are nowhere near that level and they recognized it.

    They crowed at Sam as if asking what they ought to do.

    Sam extended his hands and gestured for them to get down.

    They did as he told them to and peacefullynded on the ground. They didn''t have that menacing aura anymore. They are peaceful, calm, and even a bit afraid.

    Samnded on the ground along with them. His wings disappeared. He walked towards them and tapped their heads as they bowed to him.

    "Its done. Now, let''s talk about the questions that I want to ask."

    Sam spoke as he red at the young master.

    It just happened in two minutes.

    Within two minutes, the birds were tamed. Of course, it couldn''t be considered taming, more like subduing them. But still, they became obedient to him and they will do whatever he says.

    Everyone is shocked. Kach is the only one who made sense of this situation. What baffled him most is the presence of a beastly auraing from Sam instead of the taming itself.

    If the beastly aura is present, then this taming speed is natural. It is almost like a naturalw.

    While everyone was stunned including the young master in question, Brig came running as he locked his aura on Sam.

    Sam looked at him calmly and spoke.

    "Before you make a move, just give me a few moments. I have something to show you. I don''t know what information you might have gotten in this short while, but the information that''lle out of this guy''s mouth will be enough to prove my im."

    Sam pointed his hand at the young master.

    Brig frowned and looked around.

    "What''s the situation here? What happened?"

    Sam smiled and exined what happened.

    "So, now this guy owes me some truths. I will ask five questions and you will know what I said is true."

    Brig looked at his subordinates and spoke.

    "Bring him in."

    The n1 young master was carried inside by the subordinates. He wanted to resist, he wanted to use his n''s name, but it didn''t work.

    Brig didn''t give a rat''s ass about the background and threats.

    Inside the room on the first floor.

    Sam sat in front of the young master and spoke.

    "First question. Why did your family invest in capturing these falcons all of a sudden, when they didn''t do so before, just to court miss Yana? What changed?"

    n1 young master didn''t want to speak. He wanted to resist to the best of his abilities. But it was all for naught. The soul contracted acted up and he had to open his mouth.

    "ording to what my n said, the situation has changed. It is essential for us to create a rtionship with Brig. And it has been proven that Miss Yana is the only way to get close to Brig.

    So, the n decided that there is no point in sparing an expense."

    Speaking up to this point, the young master tried to resist. But he was unable to do that. He could feel his soul trying to tear itself apart as he tried to resist the urge to speak and he gave in.

    "The n said that Brig is going to gain something extraordinary and he will be a power to reckon with. Whoever has whatever he is gaining will be the core of a very powerful group.

    So, the n is nning to either get close to Brig to establish the rtionship and as part of it, they made me do this. They deployed everyone and captured the Falcons within an hour. It helped that we are already watching the falcons and wanted to use it as a trump card to win over Yana and we deployed it right away."

    "How does your n know that he is going to gain something extraordinary?" Sam asked.

    "From what I learned, they got this information from the god we worship. So, there is no doubt in the credibility of this information."

    "What is your contingency n if this doesn''t work?"

    "We gained information that n2 and n3 are also going to make their move today to court Yana. If Yana doesn''t ept me, my n is to make sure that there is a conflict between Brig and those two n young masters."

    "What is your n to do that?"

    "Kidnap Yana and the two young masters and create a scene that looked like the two young masters got together and nned the kidnap. Then make it look like they kidnapped her for the technique.

    That way, all of them will fall out. We are then nning to take advantage of the chaos."

    "How are you nning to do that?"

    "I don''t know what the exact n is after that. There is not a single hint about it in the information given to me."

    "Final question. Do you really like Yana? Why are trying so hard to court her?"

    "I don''t really have any feelings for her. She is not really that talented. Apart from her looks and her father, she has nothing else to offer.

    That most she could ever be is a political pawn in a marriage. Even the mistress I have is much more useful than her."

    Sam looked at Yana who listened to this with a smile.

    He doesn''t know why he did that. He just wanted to mess around with her a bit, because of how cheeky her behavior is.

    He felt like she could use some reality check like this once in a while.

    Sam then looked at Brig, whose face is dark with anger and embarrassment.

    "Now, do you believe my words? Trust me, if not for the fact that I have an obligation to save your ass and keep you from losing the technique, I wouldn''t have cared less about your n and your status.

    There is nothing to gain for me and there is not much your n can even offer or entice me with.

    So, you can shove your fear to the side.

    Now, let''s discuss the details about these six ns so that I can create a proper n for you."

    "Just because your information is true, doesn''t mean your prowess matches that information.

    We will figure this out ourselves. But you can join our discussion. We still don''t know what your true intentions are and what you are hiding from us.

    But at least for now, I will keep you near me. But before we proceed to that.

    He turned to the young master.

    "I still have some questions to ask you. What are the ns for n 2 and n 3? I am sure you don''t need a stupid bet and a soul contract from me to give me an answer for that, right?"

    The young master gulped in nervousness. He knew that he screwed up big time as soon as Sam won the bet. Now, all he can do is think of a way to minimize the damage.

    And one way to do that is to reduce Brig''s anger towards his n and divert it to others. Maybe he can try to find a way to even benefit from this.

    So, he sang like a little bird. Hepletely revealed all the details he knew about the ns of n 2 and n 3 without hiding anything.

    Hearing those ns, Sam couldn''t help but chuckle.

    "I have a suggestion. Keep the news of the young master''s situation hidden. Keep all the witnesses under lockdown for now.

    We need to reveal the information that this young master failed, but we don''t need to let them know all the details. In that way, they will be much more confident with their approach."

    Brig wanted to retort, but he also knew that is actually a good n. Once all the details are known, particrly the small misunderstanding between Kach and Yana, Sam created, things will not go as smoothly as they are now.

 Chapter 1678: Rest

    <h4>Chapter 1678: Rest</h4>

    One hourter.

    Sam is sitting inside a n''s meeting room within the estate.

    Brig is sitting right beside him. Kach and Yana were also there. Apart from them, there is the n''s leader, the elders and some other core members, including themander of the City guard.

    "So, the information is confirmed. What do you want to do next Brig?"

    The n leader asked.

    "From the information that kid gave me, the other two ns are going to make an attempt today itself. We need to make use of it and get some information from them as well.

    I alerted the spies in other ns, but there is not much information from them for now.

    I am waiting on it.

    We need to see how the six ns are approaching this matter, before we decide on how to proceed."

    "As I said, I would like some information on people of the other ns. All the core members and any members that are not core members, but can still get in touch with the core group of the n would be great."

    Sam suddenly spoke up in the middle.

    "I already told you. You wouldn''t be able to get any details. I still do not trust you."

    "Okay. But the problem is if all you know is the details about the ns and the n members, then you won''t be able to win this thing. Because there are six people that came from the same ce as I am.

    They are smart, resourceful and done things that you wouldn''t even able to imagine. The achievements they have will put any of their peers that are in your n to shame.

    I bet even you, the person who is renowned in this realm, wouldn''t have done half the stuff they had done when you were their age and their power level."

    "Hmph, it is easy to speak. Anybody can spout nonsense. It is very easy.

    Show us some proof and then we will talk."

    One of the Elders spoke.

    Sam shook his head and said.

    "Honestly, I don''t really care enough to talk for hours and try to prove my point.

    I am sure whatever you are nning is going to be a waste. You will just contact me after that.

    The only free advice I have is that, the three ns that are not approaching through Yana will approach through apletely unexpected means and their approach might even be dyed a bit.

    Try to tap into the spies of those ns. Try to find out if they came into contact with these kinds of people."

    Sam spoke out and took out a document.

    The document has a detailed description of other yers. They are not detailed enough to give out theplete overview of the yers, but there is some descriptive information.

    Their basic physical features, their elemental affinities, their weapons etc.

    Apart from that, there is not other information that could be taken advantage of.

    "This is the only advice I am going to give today. After this, even if youe with all the history and present information of all six ns, you wouldn''t be able to get any advice from me.

    All you will get is this.

    If you can show me the ce you arranged for me to stay, I will be d. I think I will take rest for now."

    "You are not going anywhere. You are staying with me. You are going to stick around no matter where I go."

    "I will rather not take the effort. You can trust me that I am not going to leave anywhere. And anyway, I am pretty sure that you are not going to go anywhere any time soon. You are going to stay here and discuss ns.

    Thwarting two proposals from those hopless young masters will keep you busy.

    If I have to guess, the other three ns might have also gotten information from somewhere about these proposals and they will see how these things are going before they sit back and n.

    You can actually take a breather for now."

    As if contemting something, Brig stayed silent for a few minutes before agreeing to Sam.

    He just sent him to an empty room within his estate along with an attendant.

    There is a formation around the estate and it will inform as soon as Sam leaves his room. Even the spatial transference was blocked by that formation, so Sam has to leave the estate before he could escape.

    Sam didn''t care much about it.

    He really did want to take some rest.

    The corruption is wrecking havoc in his body and he needs some rest.

    Heid down on the bed to take care of himself. Since he is not in hell, it is extremely hard for him to suppress the corruption. For some reason, the corruption was easier to tame, when it was in the environment surrounded by hell.

    Here, in this rtively pure environment, the corruption is running rampant.

    That is illogical and he cannotprehend why it is happening like that.

    Now, he has to figure out a way to suppress the energy here. The pain is going to be a problem in long term.

    But there are no results even after a few hours. And Sam felt a bit exhausted because these fruitless trials. He finally heaved a sigh and decided to take a nap.

    He woke up after a few hours.

    "That was some good nap. It could have been better if I wasn''t hurting though. Fucking hell. Those assholes picked the perfect time to screw with me.

    Let me find out who did this and I will kick their ass barefeet."

    As he muttered to himself while stretchingzily, Sam sensed someoneing to him. He watched as Brig, Yana and Kach all three of theming running towards him.

    "Kach? What the hell are you still doing here? I thought you would have left. Isn''t you issue still unresolved? Don''t tell me this old man just blindly supported his student and is not giving your sword back."

    "No, my issue is resolved. I can leave with Brig''s student. But I am staying back for a while."

    "Why? Did you fall in love with this spoiled girl?"

    "I am staying here for you. I need to talk to you about something and also I still need to repay you for helping out with those city guards.

    I always repay my debts."

    "That''s better than falling in love. Anyway, why are you guys here?"

    "The attempts from n2 and n 3 have arrived and they are just as shy as the falcons."

    "d they are here. What else?"

    "Yeah, but that is not all. Your guess is off a bit. From the information we gathered, one of the ns is making arger move today.

    They areing for a head-on confrontation and they are openly trying to steal the item. We don''t know how they are going approach this with such a peculiar condition.

    "That''s surprising. But did you investigate about some youngstersing there"

    "Yes and the person is matching one of the appearance you described. For some reason, he didn''t have to create any fuss like you did. He gained easy ess into the n and he interacted with the core members.

    He managed to convince them to move for an attack today itself. We still don''t know what he said to make them do this, but the attack might happen in a few hours."

    Sam looked at the description they are point out and then smiled.

    It is actually Dayus.

    "Of all people, he is the first one trying. I can imagine why though."

    "He is alsoing along with them. This might be a chance for you to prove yourself. Prove to me that you and this guy know each other and you are also not working together.

    Then I will believe you."

    "Really? You will never change do you. I already told you, I am not going to prove myself anymore.

    The things will unveil themselves.

    In fact, if you are really curious about knowing who I am, capture one of the people that came to attack you today and ask them why they are attacking right away.

    Of course, capture a guy who will have some inside information and ask them.

    They will tell you, that after gaining the trust and the n agreeing to take the suggestions of the new guy, the first advice they got from is that someone ising to help you to make sure that your technique preserved properly.

    And the longer time that someone, a.k.a me has, the harder it will be to get the technique away, so they have to take advantage and attack as fast as possible.

    That way, not only this new person will not be a hindrance, he will also be able to help us, since he will create some doubts and divisions within the n."

    If they didn''t give the reason along those lines, I will give all the answers about me as you want."

 Chapter 1679: First day

    <h4>Chapter 1679: First day</h4>

    Sam just left those words and didn''t even care about the reaction of Brig.

    He justid down again and tried to rest his eyes once again.

    Sam really didn''t care much at this point. At least not for that day. If he thinks this through, all he has to do isst for a week and this is only the first day.

    He is pretty sure that no matter what the yers are trying to do, it is impossible for them to take the technique away. Particrly, after Sam gave such a warning and proof to Brig. He is going to be extra careful and he is not going to get out of the n unless the situation demands.

    He will definitely pull through this day at least.

    So, all Sam has to do is rx and let the time and situations themselves resolve this guy''s trust problems. Anyway, Sam understood why he has that attitude though. There is no way in hell he would believe someone that came out of blue and told him that someone ising there to steal the technique that he just got his hands on.

    If Sam was in his position, he would have reacted with much more drastic measures.

    In fact, he expected some physical retaliation and prepared to defend himself. It went pretty smoothly in his opinion.

    Brig didn''t know how to react to this behavior. He stood there for a moment and decided to leave.

    He looked at Yana and Kach.

    "I am staying. I need to talk to him about something."

    Kach spoke and Yana who was quite interested in the two strangers also said she would stay behind. Brig didn''t like the idea of that, but when he thought of what kind of people these two are, he decided to leave it be.

    Anyway, it is his own estate. He knew that these people are not stupid enough to pull something off right under his nose.

    "You want to talk about something?" Sam asked Kach with a smile.

    "Yeah, about your wings and beastly aura. That too, if you are okay with it. I can understand if you don''t feel like talking about it though."

    "No problem. Tell me what you want to know?"

    "That aura. It seems like you have a bestial bloodline."

    "Yeah, I do have one. But isn''t it prettymon? Many people have bloodline descended from beasts."

    "No, yours is way too different. It is way too pure. Way tooplete. You are not human, are you? I mean, you are not just a human with a bloodline. It is almost like you are that beast itself."

    "You are pretty perceptive. Yeah. In a way, what you are saying is true. But if you want details on how I am like this, I am afraid I cannot reveal much."

    "I won''t pry. I just wanted to confirm it."

    "Anyway, why don''t you leave to your n? I am pretty sure they are worried about you. If you dy anymore, you might make them feel scared. They might assume the worst. After all, big ns like these have very few lines that they cannot cross."

    Yana looked at him coldly and snorted.

    "I am sure you know. The bigger a family grows, the more despicable they be, and the longer it survives, the more skeletons they have in their closets. I am sure, I don''t have to tell you that." Sam just continued without stopping.

    "I know. But my issue is resolved. And if pushes to shove, I will just remove all the limiters I put on myself. If I let losepletely, I might lose some things, but I am sure I will be able to escape. But then it will be this n that has to look out for me."

    "If you are confident, then it is fine. But I just don''t want you to get caught up in this stupid mess."

    "Speaking of mess, I wanted to ask you. What is happening with your mission? Why are you guys who arepletely irrelevant to this realm, trying to interfere in this power struggle?

    The bnce between these six organizations is going to break at this rate and you will be right in the middle of it. No offense, but without an organization backing you and nowhere near touching Divine ne cultivation, this is practically suicide.

    I wouldn''t want to be you in a situation like this."

    "For starters, it is not by choice.

    I mean it is by choice in a way, but the other option is worse than this. I havee too far in this path and have to see through some things, so I can only choose this way.

    As for the other people, that got involved, even they are in same boat as me. We don''t have much choice. Some people are ying around with us and forcing us into situations like these.

    This is not the first time this happened and this is not going to be thest time."

    Sam answered and then looked at Yana.

    "What are you doing here?"

    "What do you mean? This is my father''s house. I can stay wherever I want."

    "Don''t you have any manners? Is everyone from big ns as obsessive as you? Can''t you give me some privacy? You even bothered us in the office."

    "What do you mean by that? You are the one who stirred up trouble there. You don''t have any shame at all. How dare you me this all on me?"

    "Yeah, yeah. Whatever. If you want to stay here, get some food and wine. I am hungry. At least be useful."

    "You¡­"

    She wanted to curse him out, but Sam ignored her and went on to talk with Kach.

    Kach looked at her apologetically which seemed to have appeased her a bit.

    Sam chuckled at this.

    Yana called one of the attendants and called for some food and wine which Sam enjoyed in glee while he talked with Kach.

    Time passed slowly and in a few hours, they heard some chaos going on outside the building. Sam knew what it was.

    "It seems like the attack came. I hope it is not as boring as the explosive sounds we are getting."

    Yana was a bit scared when she heard all of this.

    "Don''t worry too much. The idiot that pulled all these people for war, doesn''t have anything that could make people scared. He doesn''t have enough time to n this out and I am pretty sure he doesn''t know that your father knew about the n and is ready to wee them.

    The worst-case scenario is that your father will be slightly injured, some infrastructure and manpower loss, and they will all escape in defeat. Your father''s death is far from happening in this battle."

    "Don''t you want to go and confront that person that came along with you? You might be able to prove that what you are saying is true. This could be an advantage."

    "If her father listened to me even a bit, then I would have done it. But now that doesn''t work. I am going to finish the feast, kickback, and sleep for the night.

    And I am pretty sure, that the asshole wille looking for me. He wants nothing more than killing me?"

    "I thought you were on the same boat. Then why does he want to sink you?"

    "He thinks he is my rival. But he is just a pathetic attention-seeking brat who doesn''t know what he is doing in the name of power and authority."

    "So, an ambitious vain guy. Pretty typical."

    "Of course, it is pretty typical. Anyway, just don''t go out. Just stay here until the attack is exhausted and they leave this ce.

    Drinking in peace is really good. You can join me if you want."

    Sam extended his vine gourd and offered him some drink. This is not the wine gourd, Sam usually keeps around. Rather, this is the drink Yana got from them.

    "Just who the hell are you guys?"

    Yana interrupted.

    Both of them looked at her with frowns on their faces.

    "One of youes here and asks the young master to apologize, after airing their dirtyundry out in the open. Another one is even crazier.

    You guys feel like you belong to a different race of species." She continued

    "Don''t tell me, you have never seen a person who doesn''t give a shit about you, your father, and your family."

    "I didn''t."

    "That only means you are stuck in this ce like a frog at the bottom of a well. Just get out of this city once and hide your identity, you will not get even ten percent of the respect and attention you have here."

    Yana just snorted at Sam''s words.

    Just like that, the evening passed with the three of them having a conversation while they listened to the explosive sounds of the attack. By night, Sam went back to sleep once again. Kach stayed in the room next to Sam for the night.

 Chapter 1680: Test

    <h4>Chapter 1680: Test</h4>

    The next morning.

    Sam sat in the backyard of Brig''s estate. He had fruit juice in front of him as he looked at the warm sun in the sky.

    He took in the fresh smell of grass as he took deep breaths every second.

    "This is great. You guys really lucked out with the location here."

    He turned to look at Brig, Yana, and Kach.

    Kach also took some fruit and smiled.

    "You should visit the Meadow n sometime. The view there is amazing. You will have the best time there if you really like being in nature."

    "Then I will definitely visit. Not any time soon though."

    Brig looked at the two youngsters talking. His face is dark with anger.

    Last night, it waste when the battle finally ended and he sent all of the enemies packing back to their n.

    "If you are done with your stupid small talk, I would like to talk to you about something."

    "I mean, I really don''t want to ruin my breakfast time. Can you wait for a moment? I will be done fast."

    "I am talking something serious here. And I also heard you ate a lot yesterday, so what is the point of eating again? It is not like you are going to die if you skip a meal."

    "Yeah, yeah. Just carry on. What happenedst night? Did you get any information at all?"

    "Yes. We did. We captured some of the key members yesterday because we were prepared and when we asked them, they told us the exact reason you told us they would.

    They attacked so hastily because they were sure you wouldn''t have made much progress with us and we wouldn''t have known about the current scenario.

    It seems like considering your opinion is worth something. We need to discuss this matter in more detail.

    What do you know about these extra people? The person that you identified yesterday, has actually increased their chances of winning drastically. He turned out to be an excellentmander and a great master at battle formations.

    His strategies made half of the city into a battlefield. If we hadn''t taken the measures beforehand, things would have been extremely tragic. Particrly the lives of themoners. We would have lost a lot of them.

    If the rest of the people that came are also as troublesome as him, then we need to rethink the situationpletely.

    For that, we need you to give us all the details about them."

    "I am sorry. I am not giving you any details about them. Much less all the details. We might have our differences, but we have our own code. If you really want my help, then let''s do things my way. Get me the details of other ns and I will give you a strategy that will work perfectly well.

    If you cannot do that, then we can proceed as how we did yesterday. I will give you some tips based on the bits and pieces of info you are bringing me and you can try to defend yourself.

    It is just that my way, we will be trying our best to make sure that the war wouldn''te to us. But in your way, we will just handle the war as it is."

    "You said they are your rivals and you will be leaving after a week. Wouldn''t it be better if you just give us the info? You will also get rid of thepetition this way."

    "I don''t need these methods to win apetition. Even if we are rivals, we just went through a lot together. I don''t even want to exin myself to you. Just know that you won''t get anything from me. I am your best shot here. I don''t know what else I need to do to convince you."

    "Be honest."

    "I cannot be more honest. I could have fooled you with half-assed info long ago. All I needed to do was add some mystery into this and manipte you guys a bit, you would sit me done and worshipped me.

    And here I am trying to fend off your doubts one by one."

    Brig didn''t know what to say to that. He has to agree with what Sam said. He would have definitely taken advantage of the situation. He would have never taken such a direct approach as Sam did.

    Except for the point through which he approached him, everything else is direct and crisp. He didn''t beat around the bush and he didn''t try to hide his intentions.

    After thinking for some time, he looked at Sam and said.

    "I will give you some information. About n4 and n5. The two ns didn''t make any move. Neither positive nor negative. We will get the information on them by this evening. We will get a basic idea of what they are doing.

    Analyze the data I give you By evening, let''s meet and discuss a n to counter the n we have and you have. Is that okay? If you do well, I will give you the rest of the info. This is the final test.

    You should also understand my situation. A guyes out of nowhere and says that he will help me save the technique from stealing, the same technique that I just got hours ago. How is that even trustworthy?"

    "I can understand that a bit. Sure. Share the data with me. I will give you a n by tonight. Try to be as detailed as possible though and share even the minor details. The details which you guys usually think are insignificant might be really important."

    "Details like what?"

    "Two men loving the same women. A smitten young girl. An old me that was forced apart because of familial circumstances. Insecurities of a young master, an elder''s embarrassing situation. Any detail will help."

    "Why do you want to know all that crap?"

    "Crap? You don''t know what kind of things I was able to aplish with this kind of information. I once destroyed a whole organization by making my subordinate have sex with a prostitute that was favored by the young master of the n.

    He saw it in the afternoon and the organization was destroyed by night.

    All of you guys are so used to using your brute force, that you forgot what a brain is really capable of. If you have enough info and know how to process it, there are a few things you cannot aplish.

    Anyway, justpile the info and send it to me. Meanwhile, I would finish my food."

    Sam finished his breakfast.

    After an hour, he got a bunch of scrolls.

    A lot of them.

    He took them up and studied as he munched on snacks and wine. He really enjoyed the day, without holding back. It is still the second day and there are no visible signs of any of the yers making a move. So, he has some rtive leisure time.

    While Sam is preparing for what''s toe, somewhere else within the realm.

    n 4 and n 5.

    The two neighboring ns are still waiting their time to make a move. They still didn''t know what kind of stand they should take. Their gods sure told them to make the technique theirs, but they are not sure if they are capable of it.

    And even if they did, they don''t think it would be an easy task to keep the technique safe. They are all contemting what the other ns would be doing and from what they learned from the first three ns, they are sure that sending their youngsters is a no-go.

    While they are like this, the two yers assigned to these ns visited them by the end of the first day.

    They didn''t take the chaotic approach like Sam and they didn''t take that mysteriously easy way like Dayus. They took a simple and direct way.

    They approached the core members of the n after investigating for more than half a day and put their proposal up revealing as much information as they can.

    And by now, both of these yers are currently talking to the core members of the ns, trying to convince them.

    Inside n 4, Noah is sitting in the meeting room in front of all of their core members.

    "I know it is hard to believe me. But you should know that I don''t have any bad intentions toward your n. I can sign a soul contract with you.

    And I think it is better if you guys tied up n 5 and obtained this technique together. That way, the chances are high. As you might have known the other four ns are also trying to get this technique and we know for a fact that they are not going to put up an easy fight.

    I already exined the rest of the n and how I will proceed with this. So, if you agree, I will meet with the n5 and set up a partnership."

 Chapter 1681: Cooperation

    <h4>Chapter 1681: Cooperation</h4>

    Noah cleared the deal with her n, while Kumar also did the same.

    By the evening of the second day, both of them met in a secluded spot between both of the ns along with the representatives from the respective ns.

    "This is the n. We are going to target the Sura n from two sides. One party is in charge of taking care their business, another party is in charge of taking care of their resource points.

    We will not assign the tasks separately to a single n. Rather, both ns will provide people, both Noah and I are going to assign members to the teams and appoint leaders based on the information we got.

    This way, you wouldn''t have to fear that one n is going to hoard all the resources they got from a single point.

    Also, our main focus is the businesses and resource points that are under the control of Brig''s students.

    The only reason we are attacking the remaining businesses and resource points is to divert some of the forces of the Sura n.

    And as you already know, they used quite some resources to fight off the n 6''s premature attack. So, we have that for an advantage.

    We are going to pressure his students and try to kidnap them with every attack.

    That too, if they are present there."

    "What do you mean if they are present there? Even though he likes his students, they are living outside, because they need to grow themselves. Even if he anticipated the attack, he wouldn''t be anticipating that his students are being targeted."

    One of the n members spoke.

    "Generally, that would be the case. But the situation is different.

    Just like how we arrived at your n to help you steal the technique, there is another guy that went to Sura n to do help him save the technique from you guys.

    And it is not an exaggeration to say that whatever we do, he can do it better and faster. He is just that good."

    "Then we might as well go and try to get him on our side instead of working with you."

    Another one of the n members said with a sneer.

    "It would indeed be a better option, if you can bring him to your side. But you have the same chance to directly convincing Brig to handover the technique as convincing this guy toe work with you.

    Both are nigh impossible.

    Even we don''t know how exactly that guy''s thought process works, but one thing we are sure is that he will think of every possibility.

    So, attacking Brig''s students might just be one of the first thoughts that pops up in his mind."

    "Then, why are we still doing this?"

    "Because, we have limited options. The Sura n is not going to make it easy for you and a direct war is something I assume you would like to avoid at the start.

    We are going to make the most obvious moves now, but our trick is that we are going to hide our identities and do it. We are not going to reveal who did it. And if possible we are going to throw the me on the n1, n 2 and n3.

    Pick a n that is most likely do this and create the scene as if they did it.

    We are going to stir the storm behind the scenes and reap rewards when all the parties are vulnerable."

    "This is way tooplicated. Why don''t we just wait out for now? The other four ns already shot at the Sura n.

    So, if we just sit this one out and let them do the fighting, we can swoop in and deal the final blow. We will split the rewards and continue the war with the new technique."

    "You don''t have such a long time. We only have six days.

    Within these six days we need to finish the task and be done with it."

    "Why only six days? We can take a slow approach."

    "Because after six days, Brig will have some contingencies set up that are arranged by the goddess he is worshiping. The same goddess that bestowed the technique to him.

    So, if you are confident in taking care of that, then you can take your time.

    And we won''t be staying here after these six days. No matter what the progress is, we will be leaving this ce.

    I hope you understand that.

    That is why, we are trying to elerate the dispute. We will destroy the businesses, resource points and attempt kidnap at multiple asions. The only thing we don''t do is reveal our identities.

    We should not leave obvious and easy clues. They should be indirect,plicated, but should be urately pointing them to the targeted n.

    That is why, we need to pick a n that both of you are familiar with and also have a lot of information on.

    If you can pick one like that, then we are good to go."

    The n representatives both exchanged a look.

    All seven major ns here have some differences. They have some friction. But there are obviously some ns that do not have that much of bad blood.

    They don''t hate each other to guts.

    And obviously there are some ns that they hate to their guts. Coincidentally, both n4 and n5 hate one n passionately.

    "n1." Both representatives spoke at the same time.

    Noah and Kumar exchanged a nce in surprise.

    "It seems like you found themon ground pretty quick."

    "Well, there is not muchpetition obviously. If you have brought any two ns, there is a good chance that n 1 would be their choice."

    "That''s actually good for us. Makes things easier.

    There is something else that we need to agree on. A base of operations. All the people that are involved in this situation should be operating from this ce only.

    We not operating from either of the n grounds. We are going to run this as a joint operation. All the achievments, gains, battle records, ns, strategies, everything is going to be transparent.

    You wouldn''t be able to leave to your n until the operation ends. You are going to stay here, move from here andeback here.

    If you are okay with that, we can proceed."

    "Why is that?"

    "We don''t want you guys to have all this stupid politics influencing the whole mission. We are here to win and we are going to do that by hook or crook.

    If you want that technique and much more from the Sura n, you have to follow our words to the tee and keep your individual benefits behind it.

    For the time we are staying here, all the profits will not be divided based on the ns. We are going to share them based on the contributions of the teams and the teams can decide on how they split the stuff.

    As for the rest, you can do whatever the fuck you want after we left.

    Does that sound good?"

    The n representatives thought for a while. They didn''t know if they arefortable with this, but after some contemtion, they agreed to this.

    "This went smoother than we thought. Thank you for this. Now, let''s pick the teams."

    The deal was sealed.

    Back at Sura n.

    Sam threw a scroll onto the table. It opened up on the table and it waspletely drawn with different ns.

    "As you can see, this is the detailed n that we have for dealing with the two ns n3 and n4.

    Please ask me any doubts you might have."

    "You came up with a n already? You didn''t get the full information."

    "It doesn''t matter. I can do a lot with the information that I have at my hands."

    "Then I hope yours works well. Because we don''t really have much information from my side.

    All we know is there are two people that came to the ns. One woman and a man.

    Both of them match the descriptions you gave us and they got close to the core members. They took a rtively milder approach and they from what we learned, they went outside with some members.

    Apart from that, there are no other movements from both of those ns.

    Sam looked at the matching descriptions. Noah and Kumar.

    "Oh, this is going to be interesting. Are their approaches same?"

    "Yes, almost. But I thought that is typically how you guys approach except for you. Because the guy attacked with n 6 yesterday, also had a rtively minor approach just like this."

    "It doesn''t matter. I don''t know what exactly are they nning. But there is a slight possibility that they are working together. That will not hinder our n though. We are going to continue with what I proposed. So, let''s get this party started.

    I want you to send a group of people to execute the first step of n."

 Chapter 1682: Sculptor

    <h4>Chapter 1682: Sculptor</h4>

    The meeting was over within a few minutes.

    A few messages flew out of the n and reached people that are near the n4 and n5.

    The tasks for that night are few.

    One of them is to target a city that is right in between the n 4 and n 3.

    The city is very small and it was solely constructed to mize on a very special patch of forest adjacent to it. It could be said to be in joint control of the both ns as both nsbined together hired some people to run the city.

    Of course, they sent their own youngsters to increase their influence over there. No matter how clean the partnership is, these ns that are so used to trying to one up on another, cannot just live there peacefully.

    And this obviously sparked some intense rivalry.

    So, in this one particr city, there are two women, both of same age, with almost same level of beauty and familial status. They are like the absolute counterparts in the ns. Their authority, power, influence and even wealth is almost same.

    Neither of them has one up against the other for years. They tried, but it was just impossible because as soon as one of them got one win over the other, even before it could be digested, the other party evened it without any problem that too within a day or two.

    The rivalry didn''t just begin with this generation. For generations that this ce existed, every single time, the rivalry stagnated there but it was extremely vtile and resulted in many fights between the ns.

    So, Sam thought of a way to utilize the rivalry to his own advantage.

    The first thing they did that night is to start a small fight between the two parties. With the troops they had, the bars are extremely active. And then a bar fight started.

    The most obvious way. Even though they are extremely normal instance to happen, this time, with Sam''s proper guidance, things are a bit more vtile than usual.

    After some initial nd fight, the Sura n people just went straight ahead and secretly attacked both the groups leading them to each other.

    They ignited the fight too much to the point by the dawn next day, a few people died and a lot more are injured.

    They kept on fighting one another.

    Meanwhile, Sam worked for a few hours in the night while prepared a set of instructions for the next step of the n.

    And in this step, he needs to do something really crazy. He got his hands on one of the most precious gemstones that are in the size of twice the human being and started sculpting it with his sword. He sculpted a beautiful woman. It is one of the two targets they had.

    Apart from sculpting her in a very profound and poetic way, he also carved a few lines of poetry on the back of it.

    The next morning, by dawn, in the middle of the city, the statue that was sculpted by Sam appeared along with the carved poetry.

    The statue belonged to thedy from n 3. Along with the statueid a dozen or so troops ofdy from n4.

    They all died in the same way. A knife through the heart and even the knife wound is a bit unique. Sam made sure that they look like sculptor knife wounds.

    There are clear instructions on how they should be done.

    Along with those bodies, there was a scroll left behind with a few words.

    "These guys tried to harm my heart which is you. So I harmed theirs."

    He didn''t even bother to put up much effort into that. It is a cheesy, stupid andpletely meaningless line, but he still threw it to her face.

    Thedy from n 3 came to see this at sunrise and was shocked. Her face turned in embarrassment as she read the poem behind the statue. The clean and perfectly sculpted statue also of course made her go crazy.

    She felt some tingling feelings in her head as she looked at it again and again. She was smitten instantly.

    Meanwhile, thedy from n 4 got jealous. Because while this looked like a message tody from n 3, this is also a message to her. A message that is telling her to stay away from her rival.

    This is of course something she couldn''t swallow. The loss of troops is incentive enough for her to deal with this in an extreme way. With utmost retaliation that she could possibly muster.

    The fact that these dead troops served as some kind of love message from some hidden guy to the one woman she hates more than anything in this world, just added a shit load of fuel to an already

    She decided to retaliate and called the troops that are avable to her. Most of them are spread out in the surrounding forest and made their way there.

    While gathering the troops, she already sent people to destroy the stupid statue.

    "I don''t care what you do. But the statue shouldn''t exist. Destroy it now. No matter how you do it, I don''t care. All I want is that statue to be gonepletely."

    The orders were easy to give, but the execution became a big pain in the ass for the subordinates. The n 3dy seemed to have expected this reaction and sent her core team to guard the statue.

    Which made it impossible for the n4dy''s team.

    After the first failure to even attempt, the n4dy also sent her core team. This caused a small-scale war in the middle of the streets.

    The sh didn''t go for long. They pulled back and the statue was left safely.

    The battles went on forte afternoon as thedies started gathering troops like crazy demons that are trying to invade thend of the weak and dying.

 Chapter 1683: Perfect plans

    <h4>Chapter 1683: Perfect ns</h4>

    The whole city was thrown into chaos as thedies gathered troops and raged battles on one another.

    The women didn''t care what kind of losses they are causing and they certainly don''t know what kind of trouble they are about to bring to their ns.

    But as the time passed, another incident happened within a few hours.

    The statue was finally destroyed.

    Thedy from n 4 was a bit perplexed because none of her close troops did this. They are all busy shing with their counterparts in n 3 troops.

    But thedy from n 3 thought this is definitely the work of thatdy from n 4. So, she ordered her subordinates to go all out. She even went as far as calling the n for some reinforcements.

    The n members were surprised to see such a mess in just one day. Just the day before, things are peaceful in the city. Except for the regr rivalry, there is nothing else going on there.

    But within a day, actually half a day, the whole city turned upside down and all the bnce was broken.

    They obviously didn''t send any troops. They just sent a message stating that thedy from n 3 should calm down and stop the battle, before she gets into some trouble, not just from outsiders but the n as well.

    The rejection is something thedy didn''t expect. At least not from her father. She believed even if the n canceled on it, her father wouldn''t.

    But to her surprise, even her father rejected it. She didn''t like this development. Her troops are going all out in the battle which didn''t leave her with any reserves. If something happens to her troops, she would be defenseless and will have to flee.

    This makes her lose the generational rivalry that was always a tie.

    She couldn''t face her n with that.

    While she was contemting, what she doesn''t know is, that the elite troops of thedy from n 4 are being destroyed. All of them are ambushed and assassinated and by sunset, Thedy from n4 was only left with her personal bodyguards.

    Now its her turn to send a message to her n. Her father reacted differently.

    They believed that n 3 must have sent some very high-level experts and killed their troops off.

    So, the father didn''t like this development and made a move on his own. And he happened to be one of the high-level elders within the n, ying a role in the n hatched by Noah and Kumar.

    At the base of n4 and n 5 coborative operation.

    "Where is the elder? I thought he was supposed to be here by now?" Noah asked in confusion.

    "He didn''te. The n sent a message stating that an emergency came up on his daughter and he went there to solve it."

    "Emergency? What kind of emergency? What the hell happened?" Noah asked.

    The elder from the n exined the situation.

    "Fucking hell. I told you to report anything that is out of the blue. So, when almost a war is starting out there with your n, why didn''t you tell me about it?"

    "Because it is honestly not a big deal. This rivalry is going on for generations. It happens asionally."

    "But one of your core elders is leaving in the middle of such an important operation. I don''t believe it is not a big deal anymore.

    And for fuck''s sake, just when I thought the n is going smoothly, something like this happened."

    He pulled his hair a bit and looked at Noah.

    "Do you think this has something to do with Sam?"

    "I don''t know. But it is a likely possibility. I had my doubts when our n went smoothly without any trouble. The Sura n is way too passive while we are destroying their businesses. We did manage to kidnap some of their subordinates and threw the me to n1.

    But their retaliation is way too mild. Who sends an envoy message when some of their people are kidnapped? That too in such a delicate situation?"

    "Sam is up to his tricks again. We need to figure out what he is thinking and before that, we need to figure out a way to execute the next step of the n. The core elder is needed to kidnap the next person."

    After some discussion, Noah and Kumar adamantly stated that the elder should be back which made the n members go back to fetch him.

    But only after they went there did they learn that the problem has blown too big.

    The elder that went there is no situation toe back.

    Because thedy from n 3 went missing. She was kidnapped out of the blue and her father was informed immediately. This time her father who originally rejected to even sending his troops joined in the battle.

    So, the battle that started as a quarrel between two spoiled brats dragged two core elders from two ns and they started fighting.

    By that night, Sam got the update and he smiled as he looked at the room full of dumbfounded people.

    "Did you see that? I hope I have proved myself enough to make you stop asking all those stupid questions."

    He spoke to Brig as he took a sip of some exotic wine.

    "Thank you. I will take it over from now on."

    "What are you going to do?"

    "Execute the rest of your n that''s focused on that area. You can take charge of the remaining areas that are progressing."

    Sam nodded as he checked the reportsing from other areas. He obviously had simr ns lined up for other areas.

    In one ce, n 2 and n 1 are shing without even knowing that they are fighting each other. It is happening discreetly as the two secret forces of the n are targeting and fighting each other.

    These two secret forces are hidden tomit assassinations on behalf of their ns. But the nature of these organizations is that they arepletely hidden from even other members of the n. Even some core members are ignorant about it.

    Sam doesn''t even know how Brig managed to gain this information. And from what Brig told him, there are a bunch of other organizations just like this working for other ns. It is just that they don''t know about them.

    Brig was in the middle of investigating these organizations when the whole fiasco with the technique started. If he had more time, he might have had that information also.

    Anyway, when Sam came across these two assassination organizations, he got an idea. A verymon but efficient idea.

    He put up bounties on members from other ns within the area.

    The only thing is that he put up bounties in both the organizations and there is always one specific requirement. The organization member should bring the head of the target. So, when both the organizations are targeting just one target at the same time, things went horribly wrong.

    And there are some times, Sam ced the bounties on both n 1 and n 2 members. The ignorance andck of involvement of these organizations helped. Apart from the stupid fight between thosedies, this is the second most progressive thing.

    People from within the ns are panicking because of this development. n 6 is licking its wounds. n 1 and n 2 are in trouble. n 3 and n 4 are also in trouble. Now all that is left is n 5.

    For this Sam didn''t have many ns except for defending them normally. Because n 5 is going to bet the scapegoat that they are going to use. They are going to be the fall guys for all the deaths they are causing.

    The only n that ispletely devoid of any damage while the whole thing is in chaos. Sam is going to set up the Sura n in such a way that by the end of the week, they would appear as if nothing has ever happened to them.

    Of course apart from the attack from n 6.

    Sam is really looking forward to seeing the faces of the rest of the yers when he finishes the task with flying colors.

    "This is much easier than expected. I wonder what these guys are thinking. Why did they not evenpete properly?"

    He muttered to himself as he went through the ns once again before sending someone to get something to eat.

    Meanwhile, things are not really looking that well for Dayus, the self-proimed rival of Sam. He is currently on the n grounds of n 6 along with the elders and the n leader.

    "You said, it would be the easiest time to do this. But I lost half of the elites that the n has nurtured and gained a reputation of being the biggest loser in my n history. You better have some damn good exnation for this."

 Chapter 1684: Wait

    <h4>Chapter 1684: Wait</h4>

    "I didn''t lie to you. That was the easiest time. But it just happened that Brig is tougher than I anticipated. I underestimated him, which by the way is the result of your wrongful information."

    "Do you really think, you can weasel yourself out of this situation? You are going to take responsibility for this. Or, you will die."

    "Yeah, like that is going to happen. Why don''t you ask your god, if they are going to agree with this?"

    Before he could even reply, as soon as Dayus spoke those words, the god''s statue within the n hall glowed. The god is not really a popr one, but Dayus knew who he is. Because when he had a meeting with Zeus before he went to hell, he met this god.

    He knew he is going to be in this n for this task. It is rigged since the start. But to think that he will lose even then. He really felt embarrassed.

    The god looked at the n leader and said.

    "You need to let him go. I don''t care what happens with the technique, but the young man should be unscathed by the end of these seven days. That is your task. I will reward you ordingly for that.

    Try to get that technique and you will get extra rewards. But if therees a time when this young man is in danger that threatens his life. Do you understand that?"

    "Why are you making us do this? We worshipped you with all our hearts. We never did anything wrong. We abided by all your rules. Then you introduced this guy to us and threw us off like this.

    We lost so much because of this and now you are saying that we should be protecting the person who brought us to this situation. Is this how you treat your worshippers?"

    "There is no room for discussion. This is the final decision. Do as you are told."

    Dayus smiled. The n leader of course didn''t. He is angry and frustrated.

    He felt a bit sad when he noticed that Zeus is not the one controlling this organization. The remaining six ns are actually being looked after by some powerful gods, that are either in the game or by the gods that are of simr level.

    But this one organization is managed by some underling of Zeus. He was obviously disappointed, but he is now relieved for that. Because he can do whatever he wanted. The underling of Zeus is not going to take any action against Dayus, and the underlings of those underlings don''t have balls to deal with him.

    This is the perfect ce where he could swing his authority around.

    The only downside is that the force of this n is really not enough to get the technique. Not whilepetiting with the rest of the ns.

    So, all he can do is make the best out of this bad situation.

    And the best solution he can think of is, even if he cannot get his hands on the technique, he could get his hands on Sam. Even if he cannot kill him, he has to deal him a critical blow. A blow hard enough to make him go crippled. Physically or emotionally.

    So, he started hatching a n. All he has to do is wait for the right time. The final day.

    The final day when everyone gets desperate and make a move on Sam and Brig. That is the perfect time for him.

    Meanwhile, back at the Sura n.

    Sun rise, fourth day.

    Sam is once again looking at the results of his work. He was really impressed by how perfectly the Sura n is operating. They are perfectly dealing with the whole situation as they followed his instructions.

    Once he got Brig''s approval, the rest of the n didn''t dare show their disapproval in anyway or form. They obeyed everything without any questions no matter how ridiculous the request is.

    He really felt satisified. These people are definitely not as good as his own subordinates, but they are much better any other organizations he interacted with before.

    And the results are perfect indication of this.

    The dispute between those twodies is escted. Thedies arepletely out of the picture and it became a n-level fight.

    They didn''t even care much about the technique anymore. They almost withdrew from the race. If not for the fact they spared some troops to try and n for the technique along with the yers, Sam would havepletely rxed by now.

    But still the yers are feeling a bit conflicted. They even felt that at this rate, they might as well have tried it by themselves. In that way, at least they would have had the satisfaction of giving it their all before losing.

    And if luck works out, they might even get it.

    Of course, they knew thinking about that is of no use at this point. So, all they can do is try to figure something out in the remaining few days.

    Then there is n1 and n2. They don''t even have much conflict going on. But they lost a lot of people behind the scenes.

    They don''t even know how to react for this. They wanted to retaliate against the Sura n. But they cannot. Everytime they tried, their people are being assassinated.

    Finally, n5 was the only one left and now is the time for Sam to implement the next step of the n.

    The fourth day went on without much change in the situation and that night people moved away from the Sura n. They spread all over the region.

    The next morning, n 5 started sensing some trouble. Overnight there are tracks left behind that showed n5''s involvement in the conflict that started the war between n3 and n4.

    Then there is evidence connecting them to the assassinations of the n1 and n2.

    Of course, many people thought that they are being framed. But they couldn''t help but have some suspicions.

    Even though yers knew that this might be Sam''s idea and it is right up his alley, they didn''t bother to listen to them. They knew that the technique is important, but the defense of Sura n is not easy to deal with.

    And the pride is not there just for the show. The pride of these people just because they are born into some n. It wouldn''t really let them just let this go.

    They thought that n5 did this to try and get to n 1. With the added hopes they had because of the war with n6, they might even be eager to try their luck.

    That is what they thought and yers know that this is a bunch of bullshit.

    But there is no way they could convince them. The most they could do is only to wait for thest day.

    So, the time slowly breezed by.

    While the situation is like this with the yers and their tasks, there is one more significant thing that piqued Sam''s interest.

    Kach and Yana.

    While Sam is dealing with the ns with the oldest tricks in the book, these two had created quite a repo.

    Yana seemed to have taken quite a liking to him. They went out to roam across the city and the surroundings, they went for dinners and yana spent most of her time with him.

    "So, what exactly is happening with them? Did your daughter, finally came back to her senses and found a proper guy?"

    "Maybe, maybe not. What do you this about the guy?

    "He is younger than me, but he is stronger than me."

    "I am not talking about it like that. What do you really think about him?"

    "He is an adamant guy, he controls himself pretty well. He has that much strength, but he knew his limits. He is a really great guy. If you really want to marry your daughter and him, you can do it hundred percent. "

 Chapter 1685: The Last day

    <h4>Chapter 1685: The Last day</h4>

    Brig was surprised by Sam''s answer.

    "Marry my daughter to him? You really have a high opinion of him."

    "Of course, I do. He is honorable, humble, has strict moral code for himself. He also doesn''t do stupid shit like the young masters of your ns do. He is a perfect guy.

    I would be his friend and not just friend for the sake of it. A proper friendship with asting rtionship."

    Brig nodded his head and went into a deep thought.

    Kach and Yana don''t know that Sam and Brig are actually discussing their rtionship.

    The two youngsters who took a liking to each other were lost in their own worlds for a while. But every day, Kach started and finished his day with the same question.

    "What do you want me to do?" That is the only question he had for Sam every day.

    He always confirmed that Sam doesn''t have any task for him before doing anything else. One of the reasons, why Sam had a great impression of him.

    Just like that, days passed.

    After the fourth day, the shes became a bit intense. The ns that started their own battles and wars are rising the stakes with every passing hour and of course, Sura n is also pretty much drawn in.

    n 2 and n 3 , the two ns that didn''tpletely break off the decorum with Sura n in particr even tried forge a partnership with them on several asions. And because of what Sam did, instead of being the single and sole victim against six ns, Sura n became a normal yer in this whole mess.

    yers are having a hard time. They cannot find enough man power to execute the ns against Brig.

    By the night of fifth day, they all came to a conclusion after tasting different types of failure.

    That is to escte the war.

    Yes, that is the solution they came to after striving so hard and failing so many of their ns.

    Noah and Kumar also expressed this as soon as they came to the conclusion.

    "What the hell is wrong with you guys? Even though I had my doubts initially, your ns are mostly practical. If not for the powerful counters devised by them as if they already know what''s about to happen are the only reason for this.

    I still have some good impression of you. Don''t let that get to your heads and destroy your reputation."

    "This is not just a desperate attempt to get things done. Rather this is actually the most feasible solution that we can think of now.

    If our guess is right, the rest of the ns could also only do the same. Even they don''t want to, once the both of your ns did that, the rest will have to follow suit.

    The war should now be in happening in such a way that all the troops and core members of the organization should be busy to the core.

    Even Brig who was in the protection in the n grounds until now, should be unable to risk hisck of involvement.

    Only then will we be able to drag him out and catch him in action. The only time that we will get a chance to deal with him.

    And trust me, if we know the other yers as much as we think we know, there is no way they are not going to think the same. They will be proposing the same thing to the other n heads. They are going to do the same thing.

    Think carefully and make this decision."

    "Are you sure? The stakes are going to be high. We don''t really want to stake all of the resources for a single technique. The probability of getting it is also not really that high.

    I personally really like you both. Just join n 4 and stay with us. We could grow together." One of the core elders from n 4 spoke.

    "There is no need. If they really want to join, they can join our n too. They are more than wee there." An elder from n 5 retorted.

    "Can you guys please stop discussing this? WE already told you. It is impossible for us to join not just you, any other organization for that matter. By this time, day after tomorrow, we will be gone. We might not even meet again in the future.

    So any talks of join the organization are futile to say the least.

    Anyway, just discuss this and let us know."

    Simr conversations are happening everywhere else, except for Sura n and the n 6. Sam was clear that he will not be a part of this organization and the n 6 didn''t even push an offer forward.

    But onemon point in conversation is an all out war.

    That night, hundreds of soldiers from different organizations were moved. Everyone waited for the dawn carefully and when the dawn finally arrived, a war happened.

    The war is in a scale that thend hasn''t seen in centuries. The number of people is not actually that huge, but the strength of people and what they represent is insane.

    The yers who have seen many things in many ces were also shocked. The number of Astral ne Consummate cultivators is huge to the say the least and a lot of them are just a little more than foot soldiers in this war.

    The realm is filled with battle cries and weepingmoners who are afraid when the war will catch up to them.

    Within a day, cities disappeared, resource points were destroyed. Hundreds of people died, authorities and reigns alteredpletely within the realm.

    Except for the n leaders, everyone else joined the battle.

    Obviously Sura n got more heat than the rest of the organizations, even though the danger has lessened quite a bit, Brig is still the point of focus for this bloodbath.

    So, all organizations more or less wanted to wear down the Sura n a bit.

    Of course, the defensive measures didn''t really make it easier for them.

    But by the end of sixth day, when everyone is ounting for the losses they suffered in that day, they noticed that the Sura n has the least.

    This hit everyone by surprise. They didn''t expect this at all.

    "What the hell is happened?" This is the reaction from anyone who heard this news.

    As for this happened, the answer is actually the thing that started this whole shit storm. The technique that he obtained from Hel.

    Brig decided to make full use of this and now he is a dark elemental user that can heal.

    When the n heads learned about this, they couldn''t help but salivate a bit. Even though they are a bit skeptical and reluctant about this whole n initially, after looking at this data, they all wanted the technique.

    Now, they felt like the losses they encountered a bit justified. They didn''t feel the same pinch.

    So, they informed the troops at the front line and the yers were delighted to hear this.

    "Alright, the moment of truth will be at dawn tomorrow morning. Thest day we have in this realm and thest day for this stage of thepetition. Let''s hope all of our hard work counts.''

    Noah said to Kumar.

    "Maybe, it will be. Sam is extremely injured and obviously, he is corrupted with hell''s energy. You and I barely have any corruption on us, but it still hurt like hell. What do you think is happening within in body? He will be in endless pain. This is the only time, we might get his ass in this way."

    "We can''t trust that. That guy is tough.

    Meanwhile back at Sura n.

    What Noah guessed is true. Sam is tough. At that exact moment, he is actually trying to suppress the hell''s corruption a bit.

    "How are you feeling? Are you sure you can go through this?"

    "Yes, it is fine. I have been through much worse than this. So, you don''t have to worry about me. "

    Brig said as he looked at Sam.

    "So, you are going to leave after you are done with the task."

    "Yes.

    "Why don''t you join in with us"

    "You already know the answer to this."

    Sam rejected the offer once again and got his focus on work.

    That night. Everything was smooth and calm. But irreparable changes are about to happen that will leave everyone a new person.

 Chapter 1686: Lost Sense

    <h4>Chapter 1686: Lost Sense</h4>

    As Sam finished speaking, Kach once again became vignt.

    "What happened?" Sam asked.

    "Someone is approaching," Kach replied.

    Sam was confused. Because he couldn''t sense anyone''s presence. Looking at his expression, Kach frowned and said.

    "Someone was approaching from North East and they are very close by. They just hid in the emptied mansion right outside the estate."

    Sam looked there in surprise. Because that is within the range of his spiritual sense. He should have been able to pick that up easily. But he wasn''t able to do that. He tried to focus on that one particr area.

    And his frown deepened. His forehead has never been so wrinkled before. He closed his eyes and started putting all the mental energy that he could muster into his spiritual sense and it was concentrated to focus on only that mansion.

    But he wasn''t able to. As he gritted his teeth and tried to push harder, he suddenly felt someone tapping on his back.

    "Hey, dude. You are going to pop your vein. Stop pushing yourself like that. Your aura is changing way too dynamically and it is making that weird dangerous aura inside you more active."

    "More active?"

    "Yes, the more you are currently focusing on your spiritual energy, the more that dangerous and weirdly foreign aura is fluctuating. It is to the point it is acting like a parasite that was served with its favorite nutrient.

    It is consuming your spiritual energy like crazy and the worst part is, that you are focused on what is going on outside that you are unable to see what''s happening inside your body for that short time.

    What is happening to you? You were like a senile and diseased old man nearing his head,pared to the person you were a week ago.

    What is wrong with you? Do you need to see a healer? Or do you want to go to Brig? That weird healing curse might help you with whatever the shit you are going through."

    Sam didn''t speak for a moment and just tried to focus on his body and mind for a second. He sensed what''s happening and understood that whatever the hell Kach spoke now is true.

    "Hey Sam, Please go to Brig and tell him to take a look. That weird dangerous aura is a lot simr to a parasitic curse that I came across. This one is a lot less dormant, slow, gradual, and different in its core naturepared to that. But the symptoms and the method of the bad things happening within your body are actually, very simr.

    You mentioned that the new healing method can be used to cure any sort of curse. This might help you out a bit. Even if it doesn''t work, at least you would have known something about this."

    "Thank you for your concern. But not knowing is not the actual problem. I actually have the knowledge about whatever that''s affecting. The only problem is that I never got a chance to learn about its full capabilities and was ignorant about what''s currently happening in m¡­."

    "Many people are approaching. Sam, there are many peopleing to the n gates from different sides and the leaders of the group who are at the forefront are making their way here.

    Come with me. I will take you to a safe space. You can figure out whatever''s happening thereter."

    As Sam was speaking, Kach suddenly stopped and spoke to him.

    Sam frowned and looked around. His spiritual energy is unable to scan for long distances. He used energy vision instead. Even though it hurt his eyes, optical nerves, and even his brain so much with just one such move, he still looked around.

    He was shocked, to say the least. He was dumbfounded.

    He could see the people moving toward him and the energy fluctuations are something he is very familiar with. They are all the yers he has been interacting with his whole freaking life.

    He knew very well. And he is sure that their stealth is not as powerful as to blind his spiritual sense and even the yers can pull it off somehow. Sam is confident in his own skill to know that the rest of the group wouldn''t be able to do that.

    His spiritual sense has dulled. It became so inoperable to the point he couldn''t even notice the energy fluctuations that are not even hidden.

    It is a new low for him. He became vignt. Paranoia kicked in. Cold sweat ran down behind his back.

    The teams that are following the yers dispersed when they reached the premises of the mansion and they started attacking the members of the Sura n.

    Only yers moved forward. Arkiv who left in a different direction stopped at a certain spot. He stood on a high vantage point and waited with his arms crossed. He let the rest of the yers duke it out just like he initially promised.

    Meanwhile, the people that hid in the vacant mansion are still not moving, except for one person. Another yer. It is none other than Dayus. He came with a lot of people and everyone has high-level stealth equipment.

    But it is not strong enough topletely hide their presence. It seems to mostly focus on hiding their cultivation level.

    Sam didn''t think much of their stealth though. He is fully focused on the fact that his spiritual sense is crippled and from the looks of it, it''s going down every moment.

    The corruption from hell is affecting him more than he thought. While things are already bad in that way, they just kept on getting worse in other ways.

    The attacks became intense. And following Dayus, the rest of the group he has with him also came out.

    They spread out. But not as much as the rest of the groups.

    Soon all the yers, including Dayus and except Arkiv are standing around Sam and Kach.

    "Sorry, Sam. But I guess Arkiv revealed the information before. You and Dayus are going to be targeted. Of course, Dayus is going to be the first target and you the second.

    So, if you are okay, even though you didn''t agree to the previous deal, I would like to offer it again once again.

    He is a pain in the ass for all of us. I am sure you want to kill him more than anyone else here."

    Noah said with a smile.

    "Why is everyone asking as if I couldn''t find a chance to kill Dayus before? Do you really think if I had wanted him dead, he would have been alive until now? Just stop it and get on with your n. And I have a feeling that you are proposing this just so that I could tire myself out and you guys can just deal with me much easier."

    "That''s part of the n. But most of it is because that asshole is way too tricky and doesn''t y by our code. You are the most efficient percent to handle his bullshit."

    "ttered. But not enough for me to make a move. You can deal with that by yourselves."

    Sam replied and turned to Kach.

    "I think you should go and help your future father-inw. The number of people these guys brought is nothing to scoff at. He will need you."

    "But what about you? Are you sure you will be okay with this?"

    "No problem. I can count on the rest of the yers. If they really do break their word, they should be sure that I die today. They know what the consequences are going to be like if I survive by any chance."

    The rest of the yers heard these words. They just shook their heads and turned to Dayus.

    "Really? You guys are going to gang up on me? And here I am thinking that I will slide away from this first round and spare all of you some mercy. My original target was only that asshole. But now, you are all in for some real punishment.

    It''s a good thing that I prepared for this."

    Kach was about to leave when the people hidden in the mansion made their move. They all zoomed towards their location and they spread out to tackle the yers. Only two of the group members ran towards Sam and Kach along with Dayus.

    Everyone is stunned.

    They thought the ambush was set up for the Sura n members. Turns out it is not even an ambush.

    Sam took out his sword and blocked Dayus'' lightning spear. He slid on the ceiling as he wobbled.

    He gritted his teeth as he looked at Dayus. This is humiliating. He could have handled Dayus with one hand if he was in his original shape. But now, he couldn''t even block him properly.

    Before he could even sink in that embarrassment. Something else happened. He felt the energy fluctuationsing from both sides. Two people who are at least as strong as him if not stronger are attacking him.

 Chapter 1687: Lure

    <h4>Chapter 1687: Lure</h4>

    Sam gathered all of his energy to create a shield. But someone is one step ahead of him and luckily it is his ally.

    Kach who was about to leave obviously stopped in his tracks when the situation escted to this. He instantly came to Sam''s side and blocked the two attacks that came at him. One with his body and another with his sword.

    He looked at both of the opponents inplete disguise and spoke.

    "Who the hell are you guys?"

    Kach asked in confusion. All six ns are currently either attacking each other or attacking the Sura n. At least that is what they initially predicted based on their movements. But from the looks of these two people attacking Sam, things don''t seem like that.

    Because both of them are using a faint amount of Divine energy. People who can use that in these ns are not supposed to be sent to deal with these yers. The rest of their troops will be left in a vulnerable situation.

    Dayus took out some weird token and threw it at Kach before lunging towards Sam.

    Kach sensed some dangerous aura from it and dodged it instinctually.

    Two of Kach''s opponents split apart and one of them joined Dayus in attacking Sam.

    Kach dodged the token that came at him. But he realized he misunderstood what that token could actually do. A cage made of pure spiritual energy popped out of nowhere and tried to envelop him.

    He barely managed to deflect it a bit and only his left arm was caught inside.

    The cage copsed like a. But it only made it more troublesome as it became flexible and tired to drag kach inside.

    The opponent of course didn''t want to let this opportunity go and attacked from the side.

    Kach had to defend the attack and focus on it, instead of the that was dragging him in.

    Meanwhile, Dayus and the other opponent are targeting Sam who has yet to regain his bnce.

    Which surprised everyone on the spot. Except for Dayus. He smiled as if he knew this would happen.

    Sam blocked another volley of attacks and this time, he couldn''t keep himself standing, and fell off the building.

    Dayus jumped off and pressed on with his attacks. He aimed the spear at Sam''s face. It is blocked with an energy field. Sam barely managed to hold himself as hey on the floor,

    Dayus smiled at it and said.

    "You can''t really show off when you feel you forgot how to stand. Can you?"

    Sam is surprised and skeptical. He kind of attributed his loss of sense of bnce to the corruption along with the loss of spiritual sense. But from the looks of it, Dayus might have been the reason his bnce is gone.

    At least he might have known this would happen.

    He wanted to ask for answers. But he knew that was not going to happen. So, he focused on getting away from the situation. So, as Dayus applied pressure on the energy field with the spear, all of a sudden, the earth split up under Sam and swallowed him.

    He disappeared from the spot and was spat out a few dozen meters away.

    He turned around and started running.

    Dayus and the opponent were about to run when Noah intercepted them. Her opponents seemed to have been going through some confusion as they started attacking each other with vines coiled all over them.

    Dayus blocked her attack and scolded her.

    "Get the fuck out of my way. You ignorant fool."

    Noah just got angrier and attacked him even more. The other person in disguise who was initially running after Sam came back to help Dayus. But the other yers also started getting out of the deadlock from these people.

    "For fuck''s sake. I knew these idiots are not strong enough." Dayus spoke as he crushed a token. Arge light shed on the spot and acted as a signal. Within the surroundings of the city and even in the fore

    st outside, everyone from n 6 looked at the sh and stopped whatever they are doing in the middle before they made ran towards that one spot.

    The people that are disguised and were battling with the yers took out their disguises and it also seemed like they lifted some kind of limiters on themselves. They became more powerful or one could say, they revealed their true powers.

    If anyone of the other n members were here, they would have recognized all of these people.

    They are all core members of n6. They are the cream of the crop elite and now all of them are here to attack the yers instead of trying to defend their own n in the war.

    Sam didn''t care about any of this though, he just ran out of the estate towards the woods.

    Dayus made the n 6 members attack the yers once again.

    "Idiots. It is because of Sam that we are unable to get ahead in thispetition. He made this thing unfair. I am making this fair now. I am doing a favor. How stupid do you have to be to not recognize this?

    And I am letting you keep this first round of thepetition on top of that.

    Thank meter. You ungrateful pricks."

    He left those words and ran after Sam.

    Kach wanted to follow after him, but Dayus turned around and ordered the two people that attacked Sam earlier.

    "Keep that guy in check. Kill him if you have you. Whatever it takes. He shouldn''t interfere with my fight. Finish it off ande to me quickly. I need to kill that guy today no matter what. While he is still weak and pathetic.

    Once he recovers, he will be the worst nightmare for all of us together."

    Dayus ran like his life depended on it. By that time, Sam already reached the woods and he is jumping over the trees.

    He is using the shadow element as he moved fluidly in his partial fusion.

    He knows he is weak at the moment. He doesn''t have the aid of his formations, he is hurt and the corruption is festering.

    His spiritual sense is weak and every time he is trying to use spiritual energy, he is hurting himself. He knew better than just feeding his ego and going against a tough opponent. Particrly when they have help.

    He needs to make the terrain, the way the battle flows, and even the way the opponent reacts to his advantage.

    And one more thing he is sure of is, that Dayus doesn''t give a fuck about this firstpetition, he is solely aiming to kill Sam.

    Sam looked in the surroundings and made his way towards arge tree in the front that is full of vines. The vines are full of thorns that have a faint metal sheen. He slowed down a bit and took a deep breath before he ran towards that tree.

    The vines of the tree are expanded and covered a lot of ground in the surroundings. He tried to spread his spiritual energy through the vines and used his observation ability on the surrounding area.

    But to his disappointment, even the range he could spread the energy has been reduced. He could only sigh and think of a different method. Before he could do that, he saw a streak of purple lightning making its way towards him.

    "Here hees."

    Sam muttered as he saw Dayus nearing with every second. This might be the first time that Dayus was ever closer to bing faster than Sam and Dayus is pleased about it. Even before he reached the position Sam is standing, he kicked on a tree and jumped high into the air, before throwing the spear with all of his might.

    Sam took a deep breath and made his own move. He canceled the shadow elemental fusion and started using wood elements on the tree.

    The vines that are spread into the surroundings all acted up. They came out of the ground and weaved together in an instant as they created a web that acted as a shield against the spear.

    The spear tackled the web and the lightning spread across it. The tree and the v

    ines are being burned to a crisp by the lightning, but at least the attack was stopped and the spear was stuck in the web.

    Dayus was about to make a move to get his spear back, but Sam was one step ahead of him. He jumped off the tree and into the web right before the lightning was consumedpletely and caught the spear.

    He jumped back onto the tree and turned around to run away.

    Dayus is pissed. He looked at Sam hatefully and got ready to attack him. He jumped off of the tree he was standing on and made his way to Sam.

    Sam started running in a different direction, but not before making onest move using that burnt tree.

 Chapter 1688: Hole

    Chapter 1688: Hole

    As Dayus lunged towards him, Sam kicked hard on the burnt tree.

    That one kick broke the tree into dozens of pieces that are coupled with sharp wind elemental energy that came at Dayus at the same time.

    Dayus had to stop in his tracks to block the attack, which gave Sam a very tiny headstart. He used the shadow element to slip in between the trees within the woods. He is like a slippery loach in the water.

    After defending himself against the attacks, which are not really that strong, but not weak either, Dayus pursued Sam once again.

    "What happened, you cocky bastard? The great Sam is actually running away from me. Where did the crazy asshole that constantly picked fights go? Come and face me, you coward."

    Sam didn''t respond. To keep up with his speed, Dayus had to use his partial lightning fusion. It increased his speed and reaction time, but it made it hard for me to be as agile as Sam.

    They are straight sprints, after all, so he is having a bit of a hard time within the forest as Sam used the terrain to his advantage.

    Looking at Dayus'' provocation, Sam didn''t respond with his words.

    Dayus only got angrier and tried to provoke him even more. After two minutes, Sam finally slowed down a bit.

    Dayus wanted to get ready to tackle any attack that mighte. He thought Sam would be up for direct confrontation. After all, he is banking on Sam''s pride to be hurt by the repeated taunting he has done until now.

    But Sam didn''t do that. He slid to the ground and kicked on the roots of a tree nearby. The kick wasced with a wind de. The tree fell leaned to the side as it was about to fall down. Sam jumped into the air andnded another kick on its trunk.

    Dayus thought the attack would be the same as before. An attack with fragments and wind desbined and he instinctually used an energy shield to defend himself. But that didn''t happen. He just used the falling tree as his support to change his direction.

    He used one full boost to disappear into a dense patch of the woods.

    "Fuck."

    Dayus cursed and ran after him once again. He used his spiritual sense to find out where Sam''s location exactly is.

    Sam made that unnecessary. Even though he disappeared in the patch for a moment, he didn''t hide for long.

    The trees started moving the next minute he entered the patch. He used his wood elemental energy to control them. A handful of vines shot up from within them as they attacked Dayus.

    Dayus didn''t bother much with them. He easily dodged them as he tried to pin point Sam''s location based on the movement of these vines and his spiritual sense.

    As soon as he entered the patch, the movement of the trees was gone. They became still again and everything turned eerily silent.

    Sam stood at one location without moving anywhere. Dayus located him easily and arrived there.

    He wanted to get his spear back first, but Sam just stood there with the spear in his hand and dodged the lightning attacks that came at him. The trees that are stagnant moved on their own and blocked all the lightning attacks one by one.

    They are reinforced with a bit of wood elemental energy and they are not turning into apletely burned crisp with just one attack. Sam moved around and blocked any attack Dayus threw at him with the help of these trees.

    This made Dayus understand that there is no way, he would be able to get to Sam at this rate and he has to find a way to close the distance. The ranged attacks will not do much damage in this terrain.

    Or the other option is to make the whole area disappear. Which is not ex

    actly something he is willing to waste his energy on at the moment.

    So, he decided to close in on the distance and moved with his lightning partial fusion.

    Sam had very close shaves with him as he dodged those attacks. Dayus started destroying one tree after another with every attack, even if he is unable to defeat Sam directly. He knew that Sam could only y around in this patch as long as it was intact.

    But what he didn''t expect it, after he destroyed three trees that are in the middle of the whole patch and created a small ce from where he could observe everything, Sam suddenly opened his wings and flew off from the spot.

    Dayus wanted to chase him, but all the trees enveloped him as they tried to trap him right there.

    Sam flew in the air and turned around. He held Dayus'' spear and used his own lightning energy. The Silver lightning crackled and the spear absorbed it very well. Its innate nature to absorb the lightning energy is impable.

    He overloaded the spear with his lightning energy as he threw it at Dayus who was tackling the vines, roots, and branches of the trees.

    He unleashed full fusion and broke the restraints before he kicked the ground and was about to jump. But at that exact moment, the earth went limp. The hard ground under him turned into a flesh lump of soft soil that dragged his feet inside. He was stuck there when the spear came at him.

    "Fucking bastard."

    He muttered to himself as he looked at the silver lightning surrounding the spear hit him. He madest ditch effort with the energy barrier, but there is not much use.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosive sound, the barrier broke and the rest of the surrounding patch of the forest was burnt to crisp.

    When the smoke cleared, Dayus stood there on his knees with his armorpletely tattered. He spat out a mouthful of blood and took the spear out of his shoulder.

    He stood up and leaped into the air as he tried to keep up with Sam.

    Sam just flew straight into the air as he increased the distance between them and then changed his direction beforending somewhere far away in the forest. Dayus stood on top of a tree and looked at Sam hatefully.

    "I would be damned if I don''t kill you today. You slick bastard."

    He muttered to himself and gathered his energy in the spear. He aimed it straight at Sam as he moved towards the ground and threw it.

    *BOOM*

    The spear wasuched with the extreme explosion of purple lighting and it destroyed everything that is within its path. All the trees and other vegetation within its path have been charred ck.

    Sam looked at the approaching spear. His only options were to either block it or stop in his tracks, dodging it. But he picked the first one because he just got an insane idea.

    He took out the reaper sword and concentrated to his fullest to inject spatial element and shadow elements into it.

    He shed the sword vertically as he closed down his wings and increased his speed on top of the freefall.

    Arge gash appeared in the space and a spatial tear connecting to the shadow world opened up. The spear that contained an insane amount of lightning elemental energy was sucked into that gash. Sam and Dayus both got stunned for a moment.

    *BOOM*

    There is arge explosive sounding out of that gash which made everyone stumped. But they were more shocked by the fact this n worked. Sam has never used the shadow world like this. The spear is obviously very valuable and it even possesses a spirit. Sam doesn''t know what happens to the things that go

    into that ce, but at that moment, he understood that they won''t reallye back.

    Dayus tried to get his spear back by summoning it. He was counting on the spirit to use the lightning energy and fly out of the crack. But it didn''t work. The crack just swallowed the whole spear and it slowly started closing.

    Dayus almost extended his hand into the crack, which is obviously stupid and he stopped after he felt the turbulent spatial currents and the rampaging shadow energy.

    Sam slightly chuckled as the energy around him went rampant. He didn''t bother going back to the hole in the space and just went on with their life. He just turned around and moved away.

 Chapter 1689: Honesty

    Chapter 1689: HonestyDayus is pissed. He didn''t like the way Sam fooled him.

    This is the biggest humiliation he could ask for at the moment. Particrly, when he remembered how injured Sam is and how weak he was at the moment.

    This should have been easily finished. He couldn''t believe that not only Sam is ying around with him, but he is also doing so with such ease. It almost seemed effortless.

    He felt like a fool. Rightfully so. What kind of person loses a his weapon when fighting like this, except for a fool.

    He stopped in his tracks and didn''t even dare to move at all for a moment. Sam took this chance and once again started running away. He must say that he is enjoying this a bit. He knew that he doesn''t have enough energy or power to defeat Dayus head on.

    He has too much of a handicap. So, there is very little he could do. But with the trickery which he hadn''t used in a long time, he could do a lot more. All he has to do is put his pride aside a bit and be a bit more shameless.

    He started running deeper into the woods, to see if he can find another spot toy down a different trap.

    And within a few minutes, he noticed something and smiled. As he was preparing, Dayus is doing something else.

    He just stood there with gritted teeth as he started contemting about various things. All of them are about Sam of course. And whatever thought he had, all of them ended up at the same thing.

    A question.

    "Can I kill Sam or not?"

    This question is the final conclusion for all the doubts raising in his head and no matter what kind of scenario he is imagining, he couldn''t confidently say that he could kill Sam. This is him being brutally honest with himself.

    All this while, he knew that is not as strong as he imed himself to be and he knew deep down that he is not as strong as Sam, but he was too prideful and butt hurt to ept that fact. Now that he faced the truth, he thought of another thing. Since he cannot kill Sam by himself, he will just let go of all his shame and fake pride to deal with him.

    He took out amunication token and spoke through it.

    "Remove the limiter on yourself. Come and aid me to defeat Sam. You need to catch and kill him."

    He could hear some battling sounds from the other side.

    "I told you to stop the battle ande here. I want you to hunt Sam."

    "I am noting."

    "What did you say?"

    "It is already beneath me toe and fight with a youngster like this. It is against the rules andpletely against my bottom line. Now, you want me to go and kill a youngster, who is already injured and has done nothing to me? You can dream on.

    If you want to take this out on my n, then by all means, knock yourself out. But there is no way, I am going to satisfy your whims on this."

    Dayus is frustrated by this answer. He didn''t want to hear this now. This is thest thing he want.

    "Okay then. You deal with the guy there. Alone. Send the person helping you our here to me. You can do that at least. If you don''t do that, I am not just going to threaten you. I will deal with you in the worst way possible.

    I might not be able to do anything to you directly. But your god will do whatever I want him to do. I am sure you don''t want that."

    There was a faint silence from the other side and after a moment, a sigh was heard.

    "Alright."

    Dayus smiled and looked at the direction Sam has left and slowly started walking there. He is no hurry. Because he knows that it is going to be his victory as long as he acted shameless enough.

    At this moment, back at the estate. Kach looked as one of the two opponents he is fighting just finished talking into amunication with a sigh.

    He frowned.

    Even though he got a faint idea of what this guy is talking, he didn''t hear what the person from the otherside is saying so he didn''t have full context of things.

    But the next moment, he didn''t even have time to think about these things. Because, the man suddenly raised his power. He is overflowing with energy and not just the spiritual energy, but divine energy as well.

    Kach clearly knew this level of power can only be wielded by a person who in on verge of breaking through to Divine ne. They are just a push away, which is above Kach''s current level at least in terms of cultivation.

    If that is not surprise enough, the second opponent he is facing also showed a simr level. But this person didn''t focus on Kach anymore and moved towards woods, where Sam escaped to.

    Kach wanted to intercept, but the first opponent blocked him.

    "I apologize. I am embarrassed to even do this. But my hands are tied. I cannot let you go and help your friend."

    "Who the fuck are you? There is no way a person like you has leisure enough y with side characters like us. Not when everyone else is dying to get their hands on the technique, which I believe will be impossible to gain after tonight.

    Why are you wasting your time on us?"

    "As I told you, we didn''t have much choice. If given one, we would also obviously choose to fight for the technique, or staying back at my n would have been a much better choice thaning to fight you.

    The only thing, I am going to promise you is that I am not going to kill you. I will also not seriously injure you. So, you can be free of any such fear."

    "Should I be thanking you for this?"

    Kach replied sarcastically as he swung his sword. Death energy toiled around his de as he made his move fiercely.

    Both of their forces shed and Kach managed to hold his ground. He would have been a bit proud of himself if it was a normal scenario. But currently, he is in one of the most difficult situations. He wasn''t able to intercept the other opponent who went after Sam.

    He gritted his teeth in frustration. But there is little he could do no matter how frustrated he is.

    Meanwhile, Sam is a bit surprised as he noticed that Dayus is not pursuing him anymore. Instead, after a couple of minutes, he saw a purple lightning being shot into the sky from Dayus'' location.

    Sam frowned in confusion. A lot of questions arose in his mind and soon he came to draw some spections. There is only one reason to shoot something so shy like that. It is to draw attention and show his location.

    This is obviously a bad news for him.

    He looked at the surroundings which he wanted to use for his advantage in his next exchange with Dayus. Now he is unsure if this will be optimal ce for him.

    As he was thinking, he noticed that a purple lightning spear ising towards him. Just from his basic energy vision, he could see that the spear is unable to hold the power of that attack. It is crumbling before it could reach his position.

    But the attack is still dangerous. Even though a lot of energy is being dissipated because of the poor weapon, the attacks themselves are still a bit lethal considering Sam''s health. He dodged the attack and hid in between the rocks as he waited for Dayus toe near him.

    But all that came are the lightning spears, one faster than the previous one.

    Meanwhile, within the next two minutes, the person in disguise came and met with Dayus.

    Dayus threw another spear at Sam''s location and spoke.

    "That bastard is hiding there. Don''t let your guard down. No one knows what kind of traps that rat bastard has set up."

    The other party just snorted.

    "What''s with that attitude? It seems like you don''t really understand your position here? Show some respect?"

    "You can make me do all kinds of despicable things. Because today is not mine or my n''s day. But no matter what you try, you can never make us respect you. You are calling your opponent a bastard. But from what we can see, he is a man much better than you.

    He is injured, outnumbered and overpowered with much more powerful opponents. You should have been able to match him yourself, but you are still taking our aid, but he is fighting by himself. I respect him more than I respect you.

    So, if you want some respect. You better shut the fuck up and earn it."

 Chapter 1690: Relentless Traps

    Chapter 1690: Relentless TrapsDayus wanted to retort.

    But he knew better than to argue with the truth.

    He just cared about the fact that this guy is attacking Sam. That is enough for him at the moment. As for the rest of the petty revenge, he can take it after he was done with Sam.

    So, he moved along with the n6 member.

    Both of them made their way to the spot Sam was hiding in and they kept on attacking on their way. Sam hid behind the rocks and didn''t change his position. The most he to try and endure the after effects of the attacks thatnded near him.

    He didn''t want to take even a single attack head on. So, when Dayus and the n member neared him, he already took his chance and disappeared from the spot.

    Instead of ck smoke or some spatial energy fluctuations, he disappeared with a lot of dirt and dust in the ce.

    Dayus and the n member reached the spot. Both of themnded a kick on the huge rock, which exploded into debris.

    Sam is nowhere to be seen. Of course, they didn''t just trust their eyes. They spread their spiritual energy instantly to check out the surroundings.

    Dayus focused on all the hiding spots, including the ground. But he was unable to find Sam. Still, he didn''t believe that Sam left without any trace. So, he started attacking the surroundings with lightning.

    "Stop it. At least fight properly. What is the point of wasting your energy like this?"

    The n member spoke as he looked in the surroundings carefully.

    "Just shut the fuck up and do as you are told. Attack the ground. He is bound to be in there."

    As he finished words, they suddenly felt some tremors and before they knew it, the whole area turned into a quicksand.

    "I told you, you fucking idiot. He always has something up his sleeves."

    Both of them were about to jump up and escape, but a bunch of vines popped out of nowhere and caught a hold of them. The vines dragged them deeper into the quicksand.

    Dayus and the n member, tried to get rid of the vines. Only they couldn''t easily do it as the vines has some kind of sticky substance making them extremely annoyed. The next move made them more than annoyed though.

    Small openings appeared within the quicksand surface as poisonous gas escaped from it. The purple gas made both of them feel the sting on their skin.

    "When did he have the time to concoct such a gas? It appears freshly secreted." To Dayus surprise, the n member spoke curiously about the poison.

    That guy doesn''t seem to be worried about the gas, rather he was genuinely curious about where the poison came from. As for how he knew it was secreted freshly, nobody could care less at that moment.

    "Why do you think, I told you to be careful? We need to catch him soon. Or we would be facing an endless string of traps as the time progresses"

    Dayus used his lightning energy as he tried to escape from the quicksand. After a lot of struggle, his legs finally came out. The n member also freed himself. But in this short time frame, they consumed a lot of poisonous gas.

    They didn''t die of course. But they did feel the stinging feeling all over their skin as well as their respiratory system.

    Sam who escaped the spot a long time ago, left them another confusion.

    He let his shadow undead out and made them dig tunnels away from the quicksand while he escaped in one of the tunnels himself. He is also using shadow elemental fusion while he is doing that. He also radiated a hint of death energy, just to imitate the aura of the shadow undead.

    Both Dayus and the n members were once again confused.

    Dayus could only take out his spears once again. He started throwing them at one target after another.

    It took almost ten shots before he managed to estimate Sam''s direction.

    By that time, Sam left them in the dust.

    He came out of the ground as soon as Dayus identified his location.

    He deactivated thepletely shadow fusion and reced with partial shadow and partial spatial fusion. The reaper sword keened as he started randomly swinging it. The sword des flew around as he cut the spatial fabric just enough to leave it at a delicate spot.

    Some of the cuts intertwined, but they didn''t breakpletely. After dancing with his sword for a while, until Dayus and the n member are within his sight, he finally made his move once again. He aimed his hand at both of them as spatial energy gathered around it.

    The energy turned into an orb, which he shot directly at them.

    The n member took the lead and intercepted the orb with his sword ray.

    *BOOM*

    An explosion urred which didn''t faze both of them. They just moved forward. But they halted in their tracks, when they felt the odd energy fluctuations. Then only they noticed the delicate cuts in the spatial fabric.

    They rippled crazily before tearing open. The shadow energy crept out of the cracks as they spread rapidly in every direction.

    Dayus and the n member weren''t quick enough to dodge it. So, they had to take some turbulence head on, before they got out of that dangerous area.

    They started panting as they looked at Sam who suddenly flew into the air as he moved in a densely packed patch of woods.

    "What the hell is up with this guy? Is he not tired at all? How is he able to use all kinds of traps in such a small time span?"

    "I told you. He is a rat bastard. That is all he is good at."

    "Sounds like sour grapes to me. That right there, is a fucking skill. I am jealous of that and you should be too."

    As they bickered and followed Sam, an hour passed as they met with a bunch of different traps, that made them feel exhausted. Sam acted relentlessly as he used the surroundings to the best of his abilities. None of his attacks are fatal.

    Most of them are designed to annoy the other party and make them consume as much time as possible. He is simply dragging the time out so that he could win the game.

    Dayus also noticed this since the start. But he believed that he would be able to overpower Sam since the other party is not at his best.

    Sam who halted in his tracks after noticing that his pursuers also stopped, sarted inspecting his current state. He used a lot of his energy. His body is hurting everywhere and he is losing his spiritual sensepletely.

    But he still has more than half a day to go through to win this first round of thepetition. If that is not enough, he still has Dayus and his ridiculously powerful partner on his tail to take his life.

    This is the worst situation he could be in.

    And to top it off, he cannot use formations or his inventions to save himself.

    He took a deep breath and took out one invention he could use to defend himself. Although limited, it is still within the limits of his tool ess.

    The handgun.

    He can use ten bullets from this handgun. He didn''t use a single one of them yet. He looked at Dayus and his partner who are discussing something and came to a decision.

    Since this is also thest day, he might as well use all of it. And since Dayus is so eager to get a fight, he might as well give it.

    But not before setting up onest trap, that will give him a slight upperhand.

    So, Sam finally moved after some contemtion.

    Meanwhile, Dayus and the n members are in some serious discussion.

    "I want you to use your trump card."

    "Are you fucking mad? Do you know how much energy it takes from me to use that? And do you know how dangerous it can get? I can wield the power of an Actual Divine ne user with that. Even if it is just for one move. That is an overkill to use even amongst my peers.

    There is no way, I am using this against someone who is already fighting an unfair battle."

    "Where is all of this righteousnessing from? All you have to do is follow my orders. Anyway, the other party is very very strong. Not just physically, but intellectually as well.

    If you ask me, this fight is more than fair.

    Just do as I say."

    "Not happening. I am not attacking him with that much power."

    "Okay then. I don''t want to argue. This is my ultimatum.

    You can either capture him and kill him within the next ten minutes, or you use your trump card on him. Otherwise, I will see through the promise I made to you, which you all assumed to be a bluff.

    I won''t ask you anything again. I will just proceed along with the results of your choice."

 Chapter 1691: Counter attack

    Chapter 1691: Counter attackThe n member didn''t speak anything. He just looked at Dayus angrily.

    He has been hearing this threat for a long time and he is very much tempted to tell him to do it if he dares. But if Dayus really sees through this threat, he would regret it for the rest of his life.

    Even if the possibility of that happening is less than one percent, he would still not take the risk. So, all he could do is grit his teeth and move grudgingly.

    "If we fall in another trap and the other party finds a way to escapepletely unscathed and we are injured, then I will use my trump card.

    Is that okay?"

    "Sure. But if I were you, I will just get ready. There is no way, we are not falling for the next trap."

    "Let''s hope that doesn''t happen. I honestly don''t want to kill that guy. Your rivalry is none of my business in any way."

    "It is now your business. Or I would do what I told you I would do. So, you better take it seriously and stop taking stupid shots at me. If what you said is anywhere near truth, then your life is in my hands."

    "Stop threatening me so much, you sick bastard. I might just fuck it all up and take it out on you. There is a chance that I can fuck all the consequences and only care about dealing with you at the moment."

    With those words, he lunged forward to close distance between him and Sam.

    Dayus just smiled. It felt good to control someone this much, but he is also a slightly wary of thest threat, which is why, he didn''t go on any further with the banter.

    Sam noticed that they areing to him. He got ready with hisst trap. He is a bit exhausted setting up. Since he cannot use the formations, all the traps he set up were done through his energy only.

    For the quicksand, he spread all of his energy into the rock and made sure everything is ready for him to use the quicksand move in an instant. He also spread his energy to the vines and he also held onto the air pockets filled with poisonous gas.

    He did all three of those activities at the same time for one trap. But for the currently trap, things are going to go next level.

    All of his senses are upied as he spread his energy all over the ce. But in the most intricate way possible.

    Now, all he has to do is wait and execute it at a perfect moment to get some results. The only problem is that it would have been better if his head is not hurting like hell.

    While he is enduring the pain, the two opponents finally arrived near him.

    Sam took a deep breath as his lungs expanded. His body is covered in golden mes as he applied fire elemental fusion. As he breathed out, golden mes enveloped the surroundings.

    Dayus and the n member easily blocked them without any hassle. Except for the heat slightly effecting their eyes, there is no damage whatsoever.

    But that was just the start. As if on cue with the mes, a lot of holes appeared on ground, released high pressure winds, causing mes to act like a typhoon. The mes are now being assisted with the wind.

    They stopped in their tracks to avoid the poison and mes. The earth turned into golems as it captured both of them from behind. Before they could break them off, the golems started sprouting vines as they captured both of them.

    The vines had a metal sheen. The vines looked and felt more like metal ropes. As if on cue, just when they were about to break them off and almost got out of it, the space around them acted weird. They couldn''t move their body no matter how much they tried.

    "What the fuck is happening?"

    The n member was stunned. He was never attacked with this many elements at the same time. Fire, wind, poison, space, wood and metal. Everything is attacking them at the same time. Even though none of them are lethal, there are in a situation where they cannot escape if something lethal really happens to them.

    They couldn''t stay calm.

    Dayus didn''t dare wait any longer. He circted his lightning energy and activated full fusion. He brute forced himself out of one strangtion after another. He broke past the spatial lock first and tried to get rid of the metal vines.

    His luck didn''t allow him to get out of the situation that easily. The vines started sucking the excessive lightning energy out of his fusion.

    Sam used his own lightning energy to manipte and control the lightning energy emitting out of Dayus, reducing his strength.

    The n member who followed Dayus, started raising his aura. His spiritual energy acted crazily as it turned sharper. His sword sense is at its limit and the limitations on him were being released.

    Sam noticed this and decided to make his move.

    Right when both of his opponents were finally about to release themselves, Sam jumped out of the ming typhoon.

    The n member was the first to get out of the shackles and stopped Sam''s kick that was aimed at him.

    He felt like he tackled the charge of a wild beast.

    "You are strong, smart, and resourceful. We could have been friends. If you weren''t injured, I would have enjoyed a really nice duel with you. But too bad, we cannot."

    "Stop talking nonsense and get away from him, you idiot."

    Dayus screamed on top of his lungs.

    Sam took a step back and threw another kick at the n member. This time, he was met with a sword instead of a simple block.

    Sam changed his leg with partial metal fusion and proceeded with the kick. The de and the metal leg shed and sparks flew around.

    At this moment, Sam suddenly ducked. Dayus'' spear went past him as it brushed against his hair.

    Dayus who finally managed to break through from his restrictions didn''t want to let this chance go. Sam finally started fighting and stopped running away.

    There is no way, he could let this chance go away.

    "Seems like you finally stopped being a coward. But how long can you even handle both of us. With your injury and your corrosion with corruption, you are done for."

    Dayus spoke coldly as he kept on attacking.

    Sam already took out his reaper sword as he fought with them crazily. The only silver lining is that the surroundings are filled with his elemental energies. He could manipte the environment to his own use and fight back.

    But the problem is just like Dayus said. He is very hurt and his body is currently in shambles. His senses are dulling even more as he expended more and more of his energy.

    Dayus and the n member slowly started gaining upperhand.

    As the fight progressed, they became more and more sure that they would be able to win.

    The thought just nted itself in Dayus'' mind. But he didn''t feel good as the time progressed, instead he felt bad. He had a really really bad feeling.

    Sam is not the person who will fight a losing battle. There is no way, he could just sit back and let Dayus as he wanted.

    While those thoughts are running rampant in his head, the n member managed to get a hold of Sam. Both of their swords fell out of their hands and now their arms are interlocked.

    The n member shifted his weight and got Sam in a submissive position on the ground.

    "You are good. But you are too weak at the moment. You won''t be able to get rid of me that easily."

    As he spoke, he turned the lock into an arm bar and tried to break Sam''s arm.

    Dayus was in daze for a moment. The thoughts in his head are running crazily. His instincts are screaming like hell. He couldn''t shake off his feeling. It is to the point, he couldn''t feel a single hint of relief when Sam is literally caught in that arm bar.

    "Dayus, are you going to help me or not? I can''t hold this guy for long."

    The n member spoke as he tried to put more pressure on Sam''s arm injury.

    "He won''te that easily. I am sure of that."

    Sam spoke through his gritted teeth.

    "Why are you so sure?"

    "Because, he knows me better than you. And he also knows that there is no way in hell that I would let you catch a hold of me like this. Its that simple."

    As he spoke, all of a sudden, his handgun appeared in his locked arm. He aimed the muzzle at the n member''s chest and fired.

    *BOOM*

 Chapter 1692: Lost

    Chapter 1692: Lost*BOOM*

    The explosion got Sam out of his daze.

    The big hole in his chest made the n member faint though. It was ripped open and the rib cage could be clearly seen.

    Blood gushed out like crazy. The n member who was energetic just a moment ago, couldn''t even breathe properly. Hepletely lost consciousness and just stayed there limp.

    Dayus was shocked. He was rooted to the ground for a moment and before he could even realize it, Sam rolled on the ground and used the n member as a shield and fired another shot at Dayus.

    This made Dayus finally react to the situation and he blocked the attack with his lightning. It didn''t work though.

    The bullet went past the lightning and hit him on the shoulder.

    *BOOM*

    Surprisingly, even Sam used the lightning element. So, the explosion isced with silver lightning and blew Dayus away.

    As he tried to stabilize himself, he was shocked to see Sam directly jumping through the explosion and trying to reach out to him.

    The explosion made Sam''s whole body rocked due to the explosion. He spat out some blood and then it is even slightly ck in color. But he didn''t stop. He lunged at Dayus and caught hold of him.

    He intertwined his injured arm through Dayus'' and held the cor forcefully.

    He extended his leg and kicked Dayus'' inner thigh, making him lose his bnce. Then he kneed him in the stomach. Dayus lost his breath for a moment. Sam took this chance to forcefully take him down and mounted him from the top.

    Now he started giving headbutts, only he hasplete metal elemental fusion.

    Dayus started bleeding from his forehead. He felt his head spinning. Sam also felt his head hurt, but he didn''t stop there.

    He started raining punches down on Dayus, but this time, he is using void style and spatial elements together. Dayus felt his fusion body getting destroyed bit by bit.

    And the spatial element is stopping his bodily functions. The blood and the organs became stagnant as if they are locked there. Sam''s attacks soon stopped.

    He became weak and it is apparent in his eyes.

    His physique has hit the limit.

    "So, that is why you are acting crazily. You are on yourst legs." Dayus spoke through the pain. But his eyes are filled with delight. He was never happier than now. He couldn''t help but grin ear to ear foolishly as blood trickled down his mouth.

    "Now that you are exhausted, it seems like we can exchange our roles. Now I will be the hunter and you will be the prey. I will y with your life as I take it away.

    All the humiliation I suffered is going to be gone now."

    Dayus tried to recover quickly. He wanted to get out of Sam''s hold and finish this off. But to his surprise, Sam is also smiling.

    "Idiot. With the amount of hatred you have for me, I thought you would at least know me a bit more than the rest. But you are just as stupid as I initially thought."

    Sam''s voice is low and barely audible. But that didn''t stop from making Dayus feel cold sweat running down his back.

    Sam took out his gun once again. The limp hand that was on Dayus''s chest without any movement held that gun. He couldn''t even find the strength to aim the gun properly. So, he just aimed it wherever.

    "You crazy bastard. If you attack this closely, you will also get caught in the explosion."

    "Of course, I would. But I won''t die. As long as I am alive, it''s good. But you, on the other hand, we never know what''s going to happen to you."

    *BOOM*

    Dayus defended himself with all of his energy, but a hole appeared on his chest to the shoulder area. The bullet turned everything there into shreds.

    The flesh was ripped apart and the spatial energy ran rampant as it took more and more of the flesh away. But Sam''s arm muscles were torn apart a bit because of the recoil and being so close to the explosion.

    This didn''t stop him though. He proceeded to attack more.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    He shot two more times. Dayus lost his armpletely and the spatial energy is corroding his heart and exposed lungs.

    Sam was blown away by him. He looked at the two opponents who are also on the ground. Then he noticed that there is some twitching on n members'' arms. Within a few seconds, the n leader opened his eyes.

    Sam didn''t want to risk it. He slowly moved his handgun and shot him.

    The bullet hit the n member in his abdomen and Sam''s arm waspletely destroyed. His resistance against corruption ispletely gone. He is weak and bleeding from all over the body.

    He started losing consciousness. But at that moment, an instinct kicked in making him struggle to stay awake. He looked in a specific direction and saw someone walking through the air. Sam could feel the killing intent from miles away.

    He knew that whoever that ising here to kill him.

    But he couldn''t stay awake. He couldn''t take out the wine to heal himself. He cannot heal himself with his energy. He is losing his consciousness rapidly and by the time, he was able to vaguely see the silhouette of the person, he fainted.

    He knew that he is going to die. He just wished that he is conscious when he did so.

    He is a bit regretful about not being able to meet his friends for onest time. And if they are present now, there is no way he would have died at all. He could have easily won this round.

    Now he is losing his life.

    There are just so many things he has yet to do in this life. He didn''t find out why he was forced toe here. He didn''t find out why he is part of this stupid game. He didn''t find out answers to a lot of these questions.

    There are also so many ns he had. So many things he wanted to make. So many things he wanted to teach and so much legacy he could have created. He would have been able to show this world what could have been truly done with all the resources.

    There is just so much awaiting him.

    As those thoughts came into his head, he couldn''t help but smile.

    "At least I could say I am going out at the top. I am the best among my peers in whatever I have done until now. It is an achievement enough for me I guess. It''s just too bad that I could have done more."

    He muttered to himself as he fainted while looking at the vague figure.

    He lost himself inplete darkness.

    ¡­

    Sam saw some faint light within that darkness.

    His eyes felt heavy. His whole body is hurting. He felt the hard surface that heid down on. He tried to lift his arm to rub his eyes. But he was unable to do so. He couldn''t feel both of his arms. It almost felt like he doesn''t have any arms at all.

    He opened his eyes and saw the trees and the clear blue sky through the gaps between them.

    It took a while for him toe back to his senses. The shock hit him and he wanted to get up abruptly. But all he was able to do was get hit by the searing pain in his back.

    "What the fuck happened? I am alive?"

    Sam thought to himself as he tried to look around. The corruption didn''t let him though. His senses are just as dull as before.

    "You are finally awake."

    Sam heard a familiar voice. He tried to turn around to look at them. But he wasn''t able to.

    "Don''t stress yourself too much. I aming."

    Arkiv stood up and walked to Sam''s line of sight.

    "What happened? Why am I still alive?"

    "Seems like you are almost disappointed."

    "Just tell me what happened. I am pretty sure that someone came to kill me. Don''t tell me, you managed to save me. You are not strong enough for that."

    "Can you be a little less blunt? I know I am not strong enough for that. The person that came at you is of Divine ne cultivation and he was really pissed.

    The only reason you are still alive is because of your new friend. He is the one who saved you. He bought you enough time for the Divine ne cultivators to react. He is being treated there."

    Arkiv pointed in a certain direction. Once again Sam tried to move, but he wasn''t able to.

    Arkiv realized his mistake and helped Sam up.

    "Sorry for the treatment though. We couldn''t really arrange a proper setup for you at the moment. The n grounds are still in chaos because of the war."

    "Is the challenge over?"

    "Yeah, in a way. You lost."

 Chapter 1693: Visit

    Chapter 1693: Visit"You lost"

    Those words sounded very foreign to Sam.

    He couldn''t help but chuckle wryly.

    "How long do we have for the deadline?"

    He asked.

    "A few hours. Why? I told you, you already lost. We kind of got a collective win. The only people who didn''t get anything are you and Dayus."

    "All of you worked together? That''s surprising. I thought you will be fighting between yourselves."

    "You wouldn''t like that, wouldn''t you? But too bad that didn''t happen. We came to an understanding. But we should really thank you. This whole thing became easier because of you only."

    "Are you trying to piss me off?"

    "I am telling you the truth. It is because of you, Dayus made some really stupid mistakes and that led this whole scenario to be so easy."

    "What happened?"

    "The people that Dayus brought along are the core members of the n 6. And even the Divine ne member of the n, the n head also participated.

    The person that teamed up with Dayus directly and attacked you is actually Brig''s peer. They are rivals in a sense. He should have been fighting with Brig on the front lines.

    The n head fought Kach.

    You managed to corner your opponent so much and evennded your gunshots at such close range. The soul of that guy seemed to have been connected with the leader of n 6. This made him go crazy ande at you to kill you.

    Until then, both of them are holding back.

    They didn''t really want to fight you. They were ckmailed by Dayus. So, they tried their best to hold back. In a way, that is the reason you managed to deal with that n member.

    Once the n leader lost it, he stopped holding back and came at you.

    Kach who was holding on his own was so shocked. But he still came to your rescue. He managed to take three hits from that guy before he showed any sign of weakness.

    But that was enough. Right before he fainted, the n leader of the Sura n already reached this ce. It seems like sensed the energy of this person. The sh came to a halt. But within all of this, Brig''s daughter was caught. Since neither you nor kach was not here, she became an easy target for us.

    We managed to catch her easily and ckmailed Brig into giving up the technique.

    This must have been your first loss, isn''t it?"

    Arkiv said with a smile.

    Sam didn''t speak. He looked at the sky peacefully. It has indeed been a long time since he lost. He almost forgot that losing was an option because of his constant wins.

    He couldn''t help but smile a bit.

    "Too bad. I liked Brig. Now he lost his only advantage against the others. He deserves that technique."

    "you don''t have to worry about that. Even though we ckmailed him, we only made him give out a part of the technique. We know that you promised him that you will save his technique from getting stolen.

    If not for Dayus''s cunning n, you would have seeded too. You helped us a lot previously, so we decided to cut you some ck."

    "Really? So considerate. Thank you so much."

    "I don''t know if you are being sarcastic or not. But I will ept that thanks. Anyway, all of us will get the points and the badges. I don''t know if what we did is right, but this is going to help us in the future.

    Sorry for your loss."

    "I didn''t lose somepanions or friends. You don''t need to feel that sorry for me. This is just some stupidpetition. I am sure I can cover that in the future though. It is just that the circumstances are not in my favor this time.

    It is way too much of a handicap for me."

    "Seems like someone is looking for excuses. Didn''t expect that from you buddy?"

    "They are not excuses if they are absolutely true. What happened to Dayus by the way?"

    "Unfortunately he is alive. The n 6''s leader took him away.

    The n leader gave some really expensive elixir to save him from death''s door. We were really disappointed."

    "You guys really left him to die?"

    "It is already regretful that we don''t get a chance to kill him ourselves. It would have been okay if he is dead at least. You should have finished off the job man, why would you leave it off in the middle?"

    Arkiv appeared really regretful.

    "What the hell is wrong with you? I am almost dead here and you are questioning my performance? I thought we were friends."

    Sam smiled and teased him.

    As they were bickering and chuckling, the other yers joined in. Except for Donner of course. He is still fearful of Sam. He didn''t dare mingle that closely with the rest of the yers. But no matter what kind of collective n theye up with, he is the easiest to convince.

    It is almost like he is trying to make amends.

    "Since the task is over, can we at least heal ourselvespletely?"

    "Not possible. We tried. And corruption is running rampant. Everyone is feeling battered. I don''t know how you are feeling, your corruption is the highest among us after all. Are you feeling okay?"

    "I don''t know. My bones are hurting, my muscles are sore and my spiritual sense ispletely fucked up. Let''s just hope that I am okay.

    I never knew that I would be looking forward to going to hell like this. Can you carry me to a room or something? I would like to get some proper sleep before I leave. My head is hurting too much."

    "The great Sam is finally feeling vulnerable. This is a day to remember. Your friends must have been here to witness this."

    "Yeah, and you think you would have been able to win if they were here. Just get me out of here."

    Sam was taken to the n grounds. Everyone is extremely busy with the war, so there is not much Sam can do at the moment. He cannot even talk to anyone.

    And he is not even looking forward to interacting with anyone. He just went into a deep sleep after he hit the bed.

    Time passed. Sam is ignorant of all the chaos that urred outside. The chaos that he was indirectly and partially responsible for.

    After a few hours, Sam felt like his whole body is burning. He woke up in a hurry and looked around. He is back in hell. He couldn''t help but sigh.

    He could have said goodbye to the people there. Kach, Brig, and the rest of the yers. As he was thinking about it, he was suddenly greeted by an announcement.

    "You lost the first round. No points, no badges. You are at thest of the current yer list. The restrictions are lifted. You can heal yourself and deal with your corruption."

    The voice belonged to Hel. Sam sighed as he took out his wine and started drinking. He has been waiting for this moment for a long time. As he chugged the wine, he felt his body revitalizing. His cells felt like they came to life. The corruption that has been running rampant slowly went down.

    He finally managed to get a hold of it as he slowly started suppressing it.

    While he was about to start feeling a sense of relief, he also sensed something else. Something powerful is approaching from a different side which made him vignt.

    When he turned to take a look, he saw all the creatures on the second floor of the tower, the ce he is currently at all running toward him.

    There are humanoid creatures, and beasts and the animals that turned into weird creatures of hell are all charging at him.

    Sam cursed under his breath. But he didn''t dwell on it for the moment. He just wanted to escape that ce while recovering. He is sure that after he gets his full power, he will be able to tackle anything.

    And with the frustration he built up in the past few days, he would be a whole different beast when fighting these creatures.

    He just focused on dodging and healing.

    Meanwhile, far away across the realms. Hel had a visitor.

    Zeus stood in front of her as he looked at the surroundings of her mansion.

    "What are you doing here?"

    She asked directly.

    "I came here to make another deal."

    "I am not making them anymore."

    "My candidate didn''t get the benefits he was promised. I need to make the deal."

    "All I promised is to provide a scenario for your candidate to get a better score. It is not my fault that you picked an idiot who doesn''t even know how to take advantage of the situation. So, don''t ask me about the deal.

    You deal with it yourself."

 Chapter 1694: Deal

    Chapter 1694: DealZeus looked at Hel with a frown.

    He obviously didn''t like what he was being told. There is no way his prideful nature will let him take this bullshit.

    Hel looked at his unhappiness, but couldn''t give two shits about it. He might be unhappy, but what she said is the truth. She doesn''t have to actually care about what he is feeling. She already did him a lot favors and he wasn''t able to do anything with his bad choice of a yer.

    "I don''t care what we agreed up on before. I want you to do one more thing to deal with Sam and you will do it no matter the cost. You understand me?"

    Zeus spoke in a cold tone.

    Hel looked at him calmly and said.

    "Zeus, for a prideful piece of shit, you just take your words back way too much. Do you know that?"

    "You better listen to what I say and do what I want Hel, otherwise you wont be able to bear the consequences. So, work with me while I am still being nice."

    "Don''t try to get all superior with me Zeus. We were perfectly clear on our terms when we made the deal. You were clearly happy with them too. I delivered everything I promised. But you didn''t do the same.

    You failed to kill Sam. Now he is back in the game.

    Good luck making him fall for the same shit again."

    "I need you to manipte the towers for him."

    Hel who was about to give a piece of her mind to Zeus stopped and looked at him as if she is looking at an idiot.

    "Please tell me I heard you wrong."

    "No, you need to manipte the tower difficulty. I don''t care what you will do. But the difficulty should be off the charts.

    You can say that he won''t fall for the same shit twice. But he should fall again and we need to make sure of that."

    "Have you lost your mind while fucking half of the Olympus? You want me to disrupt the dynamic of thispetition and that too by manipting the tower? Do you think it will just fly by? Gambler will really start a full fledged war.

    He is going to tear open the void and will create a war where the people from celestial realms can directly attack each other.

    Not in a regr realm war where we agree on terms and fight it out. A realm sh between realms. Do you even remember what the consequences were when that previously happened? Gods died. Literal GODS, that should have lived for eternity died just like that.

    I don''t want to be on the other end of Gambler''s craziness."

    "You believe every word he says? He is bluffing. Do you think other gods in the game are going to just sit back and watch?"

    "I am not strong enough to deal with him, Hou Yi is a waste in front of him. Only people who have any real chance to deal with him are actually you, Karthikeya, and Sun Wukong. At least that is what I believe.

    Sun Wukong doesn''t give a fuck as long as things are entertaining to him. That too we are the ones who are messing with Sam constantly even after Gambler warned us. Karthikeya has way too big of a moral campus. So, there is that. Who else is going to fight that lunatic? You? Alone? Are you going to fight the Void dragon and all the beasts he is rearing as his underlings?

    Good luck with that."

    As she was speaking, Zeus didn''t even bother to reply. Instead, he took out something and ced it in front of her.

    It is a disc that seemed to be made out of dark ck rock. A small hint of ck smoke ising out of it.

    The surrounding grass started dying out and the area is filled with death energy.

    Hel got stunned.

    "Is it what I think it is?"

    "Yes it is."

    "How do you have it?"

    "I am the leader of the Olympus. Don''t ever ask those stupid questions. I can have whatever I want in Olympus and this thing is no exception."

    "Yeah, yeah. I know. You don''t need to show that off. Are you sure there is not going to be any problem with this disc? I don''t want Hades to be on my ass after this."

    "He won''t. Because he doesn''t know I have this and as long as you don''t do something stupid, he won''t know that you have this either.

    So keep it on the down-low."

    "If you are giving this out. Then the request must be huge as well. I am kind of scared to ept it. Let me hear the terms first."

    "I want you to speed up the evolution time in Sam''s towers. The creatures that are spawned because of his sins should all be rapidly evolving.

    What you said is right. There is no way, he will fall for the same trap. Sam would be taking all kinds of measures to make sure that he won''t be affected by the corruption next time.

    But I don''t want that. Even if he doesn''t die, I want to make sure that the handicap he had because of his loss will not be wasted."

    "Increase the evolution speed? Are you nuts? He is about to pass 2nd floor. He is already way ahead of other candidates in those terms. He is being watched by a lot of people. Both the gods and other yers. There is no way we can hide that from them."

    "You can figure that out yourselves. That is your problem. But I told you what I wanted to tell you. So, if you really want this disc as much as I think you want it. Solve this problem and let me know."

    With that, he took the disc and disappeared from that spot.

    He was dumbfounded. The offer is tempting. All she has to do is make Sam suffer, which is not exactly something she is unwilling to do. She might even enjoy it a lot. But there is a great chance that she would be unable to take whates from the Gambler.

    He is a maniac and lunatic. She doesn''t know if she can bear those consequences.

    But when she remembered the disc and what she could do with it¡­ the temptation is way too alluring.

    As she was thinking, all of a sudden she remembered something.

    She called her subordinates.

    "I have a task for you and you only have two days to finish it.

    I heard that at one point Gambler released some special tokens. A token holder can ask Gambler to grant any wish. They were specifically released only in Gambler''s turf. I need you guys to find who still holds those tokens.

    Find someone and buy as many as can.

    No, no. Not as many as you can. Buy everything that is still in cirction. You have to two days to finish this and get back to me. If the task is dyed or if you fail to finish it, you are all going to be trapped in the cursed soulke.

    Do you guys understand?"

    "Yes, Madam."

    Everyone left the ce.

    Two days went away in a sh.

    Everyone came back. Some people had tokens in their hands. Some people didn''t. But there are only five of those in total. Way less than what she expected.

    "I am sure there must be more than five tokens in cirction. There is no way there are only five. You fucking failed at your task."

    She took the tokens and waved her hand.

    The whole group disappeared. They were all pushed into the cursed soulke that Hel mentioned previously. Their souls were subjected to torture that they never even dared to imagine.

    Hel didn''t even care about what was happening to them. She just looked at those tokens and held them tightly.

    She gritted her teeth and took out a differentmunication token.

    "I agree with your n. Come here. We can discuss the remaining details and proceed further."

    "I will be right there."

    Zeus arrived within a few minutes. He took out the disc and handed it over to Hel.

    "I can''t promise you too much. Definitely not as much as you expect. I will give Dayus a slight advantage.

    His body will not be affected by the corruption as the others. Even though that will reduce the body tempering speed, he can clear more towers than the others in the same time frame. The tempering he misses in the quality can be covered with the quantity.

    As for Sam, as you said, I will increase the evolutionary speed. But I will decide the pace of it. You have no involvement.

    As soon as there is even a slight suspicion from other gods and yers, I will not continue with it. I will stop it and all the me should be carried by you.

    We are good to go if you agree to all of these terms."

 Chapter 1695: Bear

    Chapter 1695: BearZeus thought for a while and nodded his head.

    They shook on the deal and both of them went on their own ways.

    Back in Hell. Sam is currently in the second floor of the tower. He looked at the final opponent he had in front of him.

    Now that he explored all of the second floor and dealt with every opponent possible, only this one creature is left before he could leave this ce and reach the third floor.

    In the past two days, while Hel is looking for those tokens, Sam was busy plowing through his opponents on this floor. After the horrible experience he had at the Sura n, he understood one thing.

    He shouldn''t hold back anymore. He has to push himself further and make sure that his condition has not deteriorated to the point that he cannot use his full powers.

    So, Sam put up fixed intervals to suppress the corruption in his body. As for theck of tempering because of this early suppression, he had thought of some other way that he could use.

    Before he could try that, he needs to deal with thisst opponent.

    It is actually a bear.

    A bear that he hunted by himself as part of his training. The bear is the toughest opponent he had faced that year.

    Currently, the bear is twice its original size. Its eyes are bloodshot. The fangs and ws are of course much more lethal. Unlike most of the opponents he faced, this beast didn''t have any additional ability like poison or some other thing.

    All it had is an upgrade in its raw power. Just its aura is intimidating to him.

    Sam held his bow and looked at the beast from far away. He took out a special arrow and aimed at it.

    The arrow whistled through the air and left the bow.

    The bear who is just walking around looked in Sam''s direction and grunted.

    It mmed its w on the ground and roared.

    *ROAR* *BAM*

    The earth shattered and created a shock wave of spiritual energy. The wave destroyed the arrow in its tracks.

    The bear looked at the poison that spilled from the arrow and sniffed it. Its gaze turned towards Sam who still stood far away.

    Bear made a move and lunged toward him.

    With every single step, it crossed dozens of meters. In a blink of an eye, it is just a few yards away from Sam.

    Sam came back to his senses and started running. He put the bow away and took out the sword. He took the executioner instead of the reaper.

    He used the wind element to boost his agility as he moved around in the area trying to take advantage of the bear''srge figure.

    No matter how agile the bear is, the forest''s trees and rocks, simply put its terrain is going to leave some troubles for its huge figure. Sam is adamant about taking advantage of that.

    But he noticed that the huge body is really not much of a disadvantage for the bear. The energy wavesing out of its body are strong enough to destroy the trees in their way and turn into debris.

    Sam kept on running for a while.

    The bear didn''t leave him alone and just ran after him while throwing its ws.

    Energy rays didn''te out of the ws, but the sheer force is wrecking chaos in the surroundings.

    The trees are being destroyed. Cracks appeared everywhere.

    If not for the fact that this is not a real ce and the creature is not a real one, he would have thought that the whole scenario is real. He wouldn''t have even stopped to think if by any chance fake.

    After running around for a while, they finally arrived at the spot Sam wanted them to arrive at. He stopped in his tracks and turned around. He lunged at the bear, which caught the beast off guard a bit.

    The bear didn''t think for long though. It threw its w at Sam.

    Sam swung his sword and tried to cut through the shockwaveing from that w. He utilized spatial energy and the ripple style to aplish that.

    The mild application of the spatial energy and the ripple style just barely created spatial ripples with the sword strike.

    It is just enough to throw away all of the unwanted noise as well as some people''s physical presence.

    Sam didn''t know if it will work for disrupting the ear, but it did.

    Even though its attacks were blocked, the bear didn''t even flinch for a moment.

    It just roared powerfully and attacked Sam once again.

    This time, Sam smiled and stomped his leg on the ground.

    The earth rumbled a bit and three spikes came out of the ground. They went straight to the belly of the bear.

    The Bear sensed the danger and tried to jump away from the spot.

    Sam didn''t let it though. He is already mid-air with the sword in his hand.

    He shed the bear that came up.

    The sh barely left a mark on the Bear''s thick flesh. But the force made the massive creature crash to the ground.

    One of the spikes that popped up previously brushed past the bear slightly at its belly.

    A small nick appeared on that part.

    The bear which waspletely unscathed from the swording from the top was injured by something as simple as an earthen spoke on its belly.

    Apart from the obvious reason for the difference in toughness, there is one more reason for this to happen.

    The material of the ground.

    The reason Sam brought the beast here before engaging is to take advantage of the material in the ground. It is a type of rock that has strength that couldpare to a very high-level metal that could be used to make some high-ss weapons.

    Sam knew the bear is stronger than him, so he decided to use the surroundings to the best of his ability to take it down. And the strong stone in the ground is just one of the many measures he took.

 Chapter 1696: Change

    Chapter 1696: Change*ROAR*

    Amidst the roars of the bear. Sam jumped onto a tree nearby.

    The bear felt the injury on its belly and looked at Sam angrily.

    Sam met its eyes calmly. His n is working well so far. The bear might have had enough strength to rival some really high-level beasts. But it doesn''t have the necessary intellect to use that strength well.

    It is too crude.

    He can easily take it for a ride and deal with it. The only problem is the time it would take to slowly destroy it bit by bit.

    *ROAR*

    Halting his thoughts, the bear attacked the tree he was standing on.

    *CRASH*

    He jumped to a different tree while shing the bear. The sword rayced with wind elements hit the bear on the back. But it didn''t try to pierce through it or cut through it.

    Rather the sword ray moved tangentially to the bear''s body. It brushed past it while cutting off some fur.

    If one looked closely, one would be able to notice that there is a very slight gash that cut off a negligibly thinyer of hiding along with the fur.

    Sam noticed it and smile. He looked at the bear charging at him and threw a spear with his left hand. The spear lodged itself into the ground. It was neither near the bear nor it was in its path. The bear didn''t even bother with that spear.

    But as soon as the spearnded, the ground shook a bit. A streak of earthen spikes emerged from that point. They hit the bear from the side and some spikes were particrly targeting on its belly from under it.

    The bear halted in its tracks and jumped to the side. Sam took this chance once again and sliced on the same spot as before. The sh is once again tangential just like before.

    He didn''t aim to cut the flesh off directly. Just another very thinyer of it was cut off. Theyer was like a thin and delicate flower petal.

    Sam jumped off onto a different tree and waited for the bear to stabilize itself. It looked at Sam fiercely. Its eyes are bloodshot. He could sense its thirst for his blood from far away.

    This time, it also wisened up a bit and didn''t run towards him. Instead, it jumped straight from its spot to his location.

    Sam smiled as if he had anticipated it.

    The tree he was standing at suddenly moved. The branches that lookedpletely normal were shot out and tried to catch the bear in mid-air.

    His spiritual energy traveled through the tree. Wooden spikes came out and tried to trap the bear within the branches.

    *ROAR*

    The bear roared in frustration as it mmed its ws on the branches and the trunk.

    The spikes weren''t able to pierce it. But the branches started coiling around making it irritable. They tried to restrict its motion.

    Sam of course didn''t leave this chance. Once again he shaved off anotheryer of flesh on the back of the bear.

    And this time, along with taking away that smallyer, he also left some purple marks on the bear at that spot.

    The purple mark is a kind of poison.

    For the next few moves, the poison kept growing as he kept shaving the flesh. He seeded for the six moves.

    In these six moves, he used the trees, earth, and the surrounding rocks to his advantage as he made the bear either get caught in some silly trap for a moment or halt in its tracks as it got off guard by some sudden attack.

    Either way, he left a significant mark on the back of the bear. The whole patch of flesh that was exposed turned purple.

    When Samnded the next attack after that though, the bear is not as angry as before. It is not as frustrating. It just tried to follow Sam''s movement.

    Samnded on a tree and smiled a bit. His n is working. The poison he left behind on the back of the bear in that patch of exposed flesh is actually to make its flesh numb. To make it lose its sense of pain.

    He doesn''t know if it works as most of the creatures here are purely driven by instinct and they don''t really care much about the pain. Whether it is present or absent is irrelevant to them.

    The only purpose it served for the bear is to irritate it constantly. It bes pissed off knowing that Sam is touching it and attacking it as he liked while it was unable to do anything about that.

    Sam''s goal is precisely that.

    So, when he noticed that the bear didn''t react when he attacked the poisoned patch of flesh, he felt a bit relieved.

    He decided to go for the next phase of the n and for that, he needs tond three more proper hits on the same spot before cing something there.

    So, he led the bear to three more traps. In the first two, he simply and sessfullynded the hits. The bear started bleedings slightly. Just when he was about tond the third attack though, the bear that was supposed to be stuck in the trap suddenly made apletely unpredictable move.

    Instead of trying to break free of the trap like it usually did when it fell into them, it let the trap irritate it, while it forcefully let its body get damaged a bit and tried to roll around.

    It rolled around exposing a part of its belly to Sam. But one of its ws which was the only free one brushed past him.

    Sam was thrown away and crashed into a tree. He stopped himself from being thrownpletely off bnce. But it was toote.

    The bear forcefully broke through the trap. And to Sam''s surprise, it attacked the particrly weak point which granted the bear an easy release. It escaped the trap with almost no injuries and dashed towards him.

    It smashed into Sam and charged him through the tree before it crashed him into anotherrge rock beside them.

    *BAM* *CRASH*

    The rock is smashed into pieces. Sam tried to get away from that spot, but he wasn''t able to. The bear took the momentary chance to bite into him.

    Sam reacted quickly enough to activate his metal elemental fusion making it impossible for the bear to bite him. And from the suction he is feeling from its mouth, he is sure that the bear is trying to tear him and swallow him.

    If he turns into anything soft now, there is no doubt the bear will suck him in. But he definitely cannot stay in that mouth also. He needs to get out of there immediately.

    But no matter how much pressure he applied on the bear''s jaw, it didn''t budge.

    Instead, it started crashing Sam into the surroundings.

    "Fuck it. I will just finish you off."

    Sam muttered and he started gathering energy. But not outside or in his arms. Instead, he gathered the energy in the gap he created inside the mouth of the bear. He gathered the fire elemental energy. The golden concentrated ming ball was created. Just when he was about tounch it though, the bear suddenly spat him out and left the spot.

    *BOOM*

    The energy ball brushed past the bear''s fur. It left arge burning mark on its hide before it went past it and exploded.

    He left arge crater by ident.

    The Bear looked at the crater and then at Sam vigntly.

    Sam frowned when he saw Bear''s reaction. This shouldn''t be happening. This is not supposed to happen.

    The creatures on the second floor, shouldn''t have this kind of vignce. The creatures here are still supposed to fight based on their instincts. It is already surprising enough that the beast came out of the trap like that.

    If going by instincts, it should have gone for the traps, instead of going for Sam, since Sam''s attack didn''t seem like much since the start.

    But it went after him by forcefully dealing with the trap. Now it acted like this. There is no way this is a simple coincidence.

    One more thing that bothered him is the sudden transition. He is a hundred percent sure that the bear was initially attacking purely based on his instincts. It just became like that out of nowhere.

    As these thoughts flooded through his brain. The bear slowly stepped back and looked at Sam cautiously. It didn''t roar or growl. IT becamepletely silent. This just solidified Sam''s beliefs.

    Something has changed in this bear all of a sudden.

    He thew that thought to the back of his mind the next moment. He knew he cannot afford to lose focus now. So he decided to focus on thister after he defeated the bear.

 Chapter 1697: New method

    Chapter 1697: New methodSam stood up hurriedly and stepped back to increase the distance between him and the Bear.

    At first, he wanted to take care of the bear slowly to observe while conserving his energy. The Bear is clearly stronger than him, so he didn''t want to use up all of his energy at the start and suddenly get caught by it because of his wrong estimations.

    He would still like to do that. But he doesn''t know how long he would be able to do that in his current state.

    He is slightly injured. Compared to him, the bear''s injury is less critical. He needs to find a way to finish the battle quickly.

    The only reason, his tactic of dealing with the bear slowly might even work is because the bear was running purely on instincts. But now that the advantage is clearly taken away, there is no way, he could continue the tactic.

    The only problem is that he might exhaust himself and Hel might put him at a disadvantage like she did in the previous round.

    He just hoped that he is not that unlucky to be done in for the same trick twice in a row.

    He raised his aura and took out his spear. The silver lightning crackled as he threw the spear at the bear with all his strength.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sound came when Sam threw the spear. His surroundings are swept with a small shock wave. The trees shook and dust clouds formed.

    The spear left arge crater in its path as it reached the bear in a fraction of a second.

    *ROAR*

    The bear stood up on its hind legs and threw its ws at theing spear. Taking it head-on.

    The ws formed energy rays that hit the spear. The sh stopped the spear and the energy rays shaped like ws in mid-air.

    Bear took this chance and escaped from that spot. The spear destroyed the ws andnded at the spot the bear was previously in.

    *BOOM*

    Arge silver lightning explosion covered that spot. The bear that just escaped wasn''tpletely unscathed. It took in the aftershock and felt the lightning slow down its muscles a bit.

    The bear looked around to find Sam. But with the dust cloud as his cover, he let his shadow undead out. He utilized shadow fusion and let his aura match the one that was given out by the undead creatures.

    The bear got confused as it caught all different auras that are simr to its opponent and didn''t know which one it should go after.

    All undead including Sam, charged at the bear as they attacked. Sam even went as far as distributing his weapons to the humanoid undead creatures to confuse the bear even more.

    If the bear is running on instinct, it would have just attacked the nearest undead to it first and then moved on to the next. It wouldn''t have cared much if it was just Sam. It started thinking of a way to go and get Sam without wasting much of its energy.

    But of course, when the undead neared it, it finally made its move. And unlike before, it didn''t blindly charge forward. Rather, it first dodged the nearest shadow and tried to get out of the encirclement from the undead.

    It acted carefully without any of beastly instincts.

    Sam felt more and more sure that something is wrong with this bear.

    But he didn''t have time to focus on that at the moment.

    The undead moved up on his orders. They changed their direction and followed the bear. But after covering a few yards, they disappeared in a puff of ck smoke.

    The bear that was about tounch its attack on the creatures, was stunned for a moment and vigntly looked around.

    Sam also disappeared in a puff of ck smoke as he used the shadows along with the undead to attack the bear.

    The bear is standing an open ground which is devoid of any other shadows other than its own. But that was enough for Sam to close the distance.

    He used the shadow as a medium and arrived near the bear.

    He attacked the bear with his sword.

    The bear barely managed to dodge it before itunched its own attack. The w went through a puff of ck smoke. Sam already disappeared before he could get hit.

    *ROAR*

    The bear roared in frustration. And to add to that frustration, a bunch of small protrusions appeared around it. The rocks stuck out of the ground randomly and they are creating a bunch of shadows in that area.

    Sam and the undead creatures started running amok. They appeared near the bear while leveraging the small shadows besides the rocks. They threw their attacks at the bear from all directions. But most of them are focused on the small patch Sam left.

    Most attacks thatnded on the rest of its body were bounced off easily. The bear didn''t even feel the pinch. But the small patch on its back which isced with poison was attacked repeatedly. It started bleeding slowly.

    But the bear didn''t feel anything at that time as well.

    Soon, the bear finally got used to the speed of the attacks and threw its ws into the surroundings. The ws destroyed the rocks and razed them to the ground. All the shadows were gone and the undead popped out of nowhere.

    The bear lunged at them as it threw repeated attacks.

    Sam escaped from the spot. He jumped up in the air. Shadow fusion turned to wind elemental fusion. Wings popped on his back as he flew high into the sky.

    He put his sword away and took out his bow.

    Now that he already hit the bear so many times and the bleeding increased with every second, he decided to wear the bear down with these arrows and finish it off.

    It also became easier since Sam also has a clear target on the bear''s body. The bleeding hole on its back. With every arrow he shot, the bleeding intensified. And every arrow isced with turbulent and sharp wind energy.

    So arrows not just attacked the hole, rather they created a hole and expanded it bit by bit as they made the bear bleed more and more.

    Soon, the bear started slowing down.

    Sam took this chance and started using lightning along with his wind element.

    The lightning arrows hit the bear and paralyzed it.

    Finally bear was unable to move. So, Sam shifted fire element to finish it off.

    The arrow is filled with fire elemental energy. Golden mes erupted. Sam poured as much energy as he possibly can and shot the arrow directly at the bear.

    The golden mes enveloped the creature and its surroundings.

    The bear wanted to move, but it couldn''t. All it could do is burn in the golden mes as it took it all. Its fur burned and soon it is followed by burning flesh. Soon the bear died and then only Sam managed to heave a sigh of relief.

    Hended on the ground. He wanted to examine the burning body of the bear a bit. But the corruption hit him and the new corruption gathered by the bear joined him. He is full and he is sent back to the pir.

    Sam heaved a sigh once again. Now it is time to experiment with the method he thought of. The method he wanted to temper his body while not having to store it inside his body.

    And the answer he came up with is pretty direct and idiotic even. Since he cannot store it inside his body, all he has to do is store it inside the ce where it belongs. The pir.

    To get the most out of the corruption without spending the actual time required, Sam decided to use his unique physique and put it to the test.

    Instead of going for the quantity in terms of time, Sam decided to go for the quality. So, in the past few days, while he was still fighting, he made some calctions. He estimated what kind of effect the tempering brings to his muscles and organs before he started analyzing how can he achieve the final results of tempering using the corruption energy to achieve the desired effects.

    After making millions of calctions at least, he felt like he had stumbled on the solution. All he has to do is use the corruption energy to enhance his muscle fibers. While simultaneously trying to heal himself. His muscles are subjected to endless destruction. And there is another catch. He is not just using the energy that is inside his body. He decided to look for the energy outside of his body.

    Then he thought of the pir.

    First, he wanted to try out one thing. He wanted to see if he can move the energy from the pir directly. And it didn''t take long for him to get the answer.

 Chapter 1698: Thoughts

    Chapter 1698: ThoughtsSam ced his hands and tried to connect the corruption energy inside his body to the energy inside the pir.

    All he had to do is let the energy inside his body flow to the pir. Just when the pir was about to suck itpletely, he controlled it and dragged the energy from the pir into his body forcefully.

    The energy travelled thorugh one hand and ravaged through his body.

    All his muscle fibers are subjected to the extreme treatment of this energy. They are being torn apart while Sam''s vampire body leveraged the death energy around in this hell''s environment to heal the torn fibers.

    His body is at the extreme limit of destroying itself while rebuilding itself. Every muscle fiber was deconstructed and reconstructed at least a dozen times in a second.

    He sucked in all of the energy from the pir and slowly started circting it through his body before he sent it back into the pir through his other hand.

    The whole process felt like Sam has been tortured with the harshest methods for a thousand times, but everything had happened in just one moment.

    He didn''t stop though. He did the three times and by the end of it, his skin is covered with a thick bloody substance. It smelled grimy and looked dirty. And Sam felt like his muscle mass has reduced by a bit.

    But he felt slightly more agile and flexible. Strong too of course. Except his whole body is hurting with every breath he took.

    He didn''t know the aftereffects would be like this. His body did go through the tempering process in a short time and since the changes are so sudden, he could even feel them instantly. But the pain through the process and after it is horrible.

    The only silver lining is that it is just pain. Nothing else. It is just the muscles being sore. He could endure it easily and he could function very well. There is no actual injury that could hinder his movements and attacks.

    He smiled in content. Now, he can just collect all the corrupt energy and store it in the pir whenever he wants. He can be as immediate as possible too and he can go through the tempering process within just a few minutes, whenever he wants.

    Whenever he enters a new floor, he can first do a scout and get an idea on what type of monsters and how much corruption he has to take in. With that he can n and schedule his refinement sessions so that he will in a decent shape no matter when Hel takes him out.

    He looked at the ceiling with a smile.

    Hel who is spectating the whole thing from her own residence couldn''t help but feel that Sam is smiling at her. It felt like he is mocking her.

    But when she recalled the torturous situation that Sam has experienced and then the torturous session that he has put himself through, she couldn''t help but feel a bit anxious about the decision he made.

    She followed through with what Zeus has suggested and now she has to live with it.

    The sudden change in the bear''s behavior is because of that reason.

    Generally, it will take a long time before the creatures in the towers evolve their intelligence.

    But for Sam, it happened in his second floor only. Even if it is at thest moment, it is still very dangerous. His difficultypared to the rest of his peers, increased exponentially.

    Of course, he will also get equally valuable benefits from this, but this is unfair. Sam already have more floors than anyone else.

    He would have to get out of this hell before the time limit passes while he tries to take advantage of his more floors. But now there is this added difficulty.

    If Gambler takes this seriously, she knew things wouldn''t end well.

    But the disc is too much of a prize that she has been craving for a while. So, she couldn''t bring herself to give it up. She took a risk and went on with the decision.

    Now when she thought back to what she did and what Zeus must have expected from this, she couldn''t help but smile wryly.

    Whatever Zeus might have expected from this, is noting to fruition. She knew of this for sure.

    She felt like Zeus just paid an invaluable price to make it so that Sam has more advantages than any other yer in the game.

    The only disadvantage he might have is time and if they the gods learned anything about Sam until now is that his intellect is good enough to reduce this advantage by arge degree if notpletely eliminate it.

    She couldn''t help but feel a bit anxious about what will happen to the rest of the candidates.

    While Hel is thinking of the consequences, there are two more people who are doing the same.

    One of them is Sam.

    After he finished the refining process, he sat there near the pir in meditation. He is currently thinking of what might have happened with the bear and what he should be expecting from now on.

    ''The only thing I could do is explore the third floor and see if the creatures are getting smarter. No matter what the answer is, it doesn''t change the direction I am going to take.

    The only problem is that the time taken to scout is going to increase a lot.

    Maybe, I should think of a solution that would let me finish scanning the ce faster.

    Parameters should be the dividing the floor based on area, type of creatures present in an area, their number, collective strength, intelligence, lethality. I need to be able to create a technique that could measure all of these parameters.

    And without any unnecessary machinery and equipment. This could be a bit tough. But if all this can be achieved by a person directly without a need for any other equipment, this could be a very useful technique in real life also¡­''

    Sam''s thoughts ran wild as he got more and more ideas in his head. He couldn''t control himself and started thinking of possibilities in his head.

    Meanwhile, somewhere far away.

    Gambler is looking at the whole fiasco through his screen.

    Even though Sam wasn''t speaking his thoughts out loud, he seemed to have understood what Sam is thinking.

    "This fellow is going to make something interesting again. What do you think it would be Ling Tian?"

    "I am not smart enough to guess it sir."

    "Come on, you are no fun. Just like Sam. Why are you both of you such stuck up people.

    Anyway, I want to ask your opinion on something. For the stunt, Hel pulled. What do you think should be thepensation?"

    "I think it should be decided based on what she got from Zeus, Sir.

    Hel clearly knew of your prowess. In fact, she might be the only few who is close to being urate about your strength. But for her to still make this decision, the price Zeus paid must have been invaluable to her. So, if I have to make a decision, then I would say, we should find out what the price is and then take at least half of it."

    "Half of it? What if it is way too valuable? Do you think Sam can handle the half of it?"

    "I am sure he can find a workaround and also find a good use for it."

    "Yeah, he might just do that. So, why don''t we pay a visit to Hel?''''

    "We can sir. But before we go, there is something you should know. She has acquired a bunch of your special tokens."

    "Oh? That''s surprising. This woman started using her brain for a change. But still, she does know that there are some conditions associated with those tokens right? She might hoard all of them together, but that doesn''t grant herplete immunity."

    "Yes it doesn''t. But her n is to reduce the damage as much as possible. If she uses all of those tokens and give out somepensation, then she doesn''t have to give up too much and escape from this."

    "Oh? She indeed became smart. But does she really think that I would be that straightforward? She has another thinging.

    Sam is not going to die any time soon. So, lets beat her at her own stupid game. Let''s wait. I will give you the spectating right for this game. Note down every disadvantage Sam is facingpared to the rest of the yers.

    Compile a whole report. Try to pull out as many disadvantages as possible with unbeatable logic. When it was made, not just Hel, Odin should have to pawn his Gungnir off for a few days to repay the debt even with all of those tokens in existence.

    Let''s shake up the Norse before Sames here."

    "Sir, you do know that if you really give half of it to Sam, you will make whole of Norse his enemy right?"

    "Will I? It can''t be helped though. That is only fitting for the stage I am preparing for him."

 Chapter 1699: Third Floor

    Chapter 1699: Third FloorSam entered the third floor.

    He is standing in front of an entrance to a small town located in the middle of a forest. At least that is what he assumed based on the surroundings and what he could see. For some reason, neither his spiritual senses nor his energy vision is going past the gate of the town.

    All he has is his pure naked vision.

    Sam observed the surroundings. He walked around the town walls for a while without going in.

    The surroundings felt familiar to him. He couldn''t put a finger on where he saw this ce and how he must havee across something. But he is very sure that he has seen this ce before in his past life.

    He wanted to explore the forest before he could get into the town.

    But he wasn''t able to. There is not much space around the town that he could explore. There is an invisible barrier blocking him and something told him that the third floor is all cramped into that one town.

    He thought for a bit more time before deciding to pry into the town.

    It would have been better if there is a way for him to check what is inside the town before he could get inside. But he cannot enter it.

    He even went as far as trying to use his wings and shadows to see if he could get a glimpse of what is happening inside. But he couldn''t.

    His vision was blocked. The shadows are unable to enter. He couldn''t even enter into the town through air for some reason.

    All he can do is enter through the main gate.

    After some thought, he just decided to go with it.

    He held the reaper sword in his hand before slowly pushing the main gate. He was shocked by the view in front of him. He finally understood why this ce felt so familiar. It is a town established in one of the training inds in his previous life.

    The ind was designed by the organization, solely to train a certain group of people. It is called the Lion hunter tribe.

    It is not really a tribe as the name implies. The people inside are not exactly rted. Not all of them at least. But all of them went through the same training regimen. They are a group of specially trained soldiers.

    Hired guns specialized in hunting big shots. Most of their hit list includesmanders of different armies, leaders of mercenary groups, CEOs, and politicians.

    They don''t just specialize in the assassination. All of them are really good at hand-to-handbat. Tracking people, causing chaos. Laying traps and hunting people down in one vs many settings is their particr forte.

    As for why the whole town appeared in his third floor, there is a reason for that.

    He ughtered the whole town. All by himself. This is actually one of the first establishments he destroyed when he decided to go rogue against his own organization. He directly invaded the town and killed everyst one of them.

    Most of them were still trainees at that time, but he didn''t spare them too. He just took every life that existed in the town.

    One of the memories he would rather not revisit. And that is not just because he killed them all, but rather he is one of the core trainers of the tribe.

    He is one of the people responsible for the creation of this whole training program. And he killed them all.

    He couldn''t help but constantly recall the thought of killing them.

    As he was thinking about that, he saw the town is changing a bit. Some sentry towers appeared in different positions. A group of people with rifles appeared on them along with the towers.

    Sam waved his hand and blocked theing bullets with an energy shield. He stored the sword away and took out his handguns.

    He aimed at the structure of the sentry tower.

    *BOOM*

    The golden mes ran rampant as they burned the whole structure down within a moment. The tower copsed. The watchers who were shooting Sam also copsed along with it.

    But they didn''t die. They walked out of the golden mes and rolled on the ground, trying to put the mes down. Sam even recognized the faces of those people. Their actions are extremely precise and trained.

    They are following the exact instructions they received in training. They put out the mes while shooting at Sam.

    There is not a change in their expression. They just stood up and charged at Sam with their guns as if the burnt flesh on their bodies is nothing significant.

    The energy shield is still on. The bullets are causing faint fluctuations on the barrier, but it is still perfectly alright. His bullets on the other hand reached their targets without any problem.

    Within no time, the watchers from the first tower are dead.

    Sam aimed the guns at the other towers. He didn''t proceed further from that spot and just shot them down one by one. While dealing with the watchers, Sam estimated these people''s behavior. He wanted to know how they are operating rtive to their original selves. And from the looks of it, they are not really doing that good.

    The original watchers wouldn''t have just charged directly at him after they fell off the tower. They would have put off the mes and first found a cover while sending one of their members to the middle of the town.

    To inform the higher-ups so that they will take all the measures. As for why send one person at least directly to them instead of informing through the radios, it is so that the person could give out a description more urately.

    Here instead of that, they just blindly charged. They didn''t take cover, they didn''t take the time to analyze the situation much.

    But since he is alone, that could have been the reason for their misjudgement.

    They didn''t know what Sam''s strength is. In their opinion, he is just a single person. So, they charged at him blindly. Sam felt a bit relieved.

    If all the people in the town just came with their full intelligence, things wouldn''t be good. They are skilled, powerful, and most of all fearless.

    They have zero regards for lives, including their own. If they really came with all of their skills, intelligence and memories, added with the extra strength thates from this hell spawning, Sam will have some real trouble when dealing with them.

    At least, he managed to deal with the watchers and the towers very quickly. There is a gap between him and the rest of the town at the moment. He doesn''t know if there are any modern gadgets like the radio or othermunication equipment.

    But it is most likely that they are not here. So, his arrival wouldn''t have been informed to the rest.

    He stood there and took a deep breath before letting out his shadow undead.

    All shadow undead spread to different spots of the town. He decided to try one the new techniques that he decided to create to inspect the floors.

    And this one utilizes his shadow undead.

    Except for two rest of the undead are far away.

    They all took up different ces before standing still.

    Sam closed his eyes and sat on the floor. He let his consciousness contact one of the undead creatures. Dark elemental energy spread from the undead creature. It spread to its limit and covered a lot of ground. Sam tried to use their observation ability through the undead creature.

    Even though it was extremely troublesome, he still managed to connect a bit. The observation ability is not as detailed and precise when he used it with his own body. Rather all he got is a faint and broad map.

    He could see different people staying in different houses in the town. Some are resting, some are working out and some are maintaining their weapons. Their actions are robotic and monotonous.

    Sam waited for two minutes and there was no change. He shifted his consciousness to a different undead and did the same.

    This method is good for mapping. But it is limited to necromancers, that too mostly for shadow necromancers.

    He made a mental note to find a different alternative.

    Meanwhile, from the middle of the town, some people started making a move. They didn''t talk or scream. They all acted as if some program in their head is triggered and they are some machines executing that program monotonously.

    They are moving towards Sam and they fell under his radar when he is scanning the area with an undead.

    Looking at them, Sam immediately understood what is happening. They are the first wave of Lion hunters.

    When someone attacks the Lion hunter tribe, ording to the protocol, the soldiers shouldn''te out of their house, instead, a full armed team will be deployed first to get an understanding of the level of crisis.

    This rule is made to prevent any unnecessary losses.

 Chapter 1700: First Wave

    Chapter 1700: First WaveThe first wave of lion hunters engages with whatever threates to their town. They don''t have a choice.

    Based on how they fare against the threat, the rest of the town reacts. If the otherside is overwhelming, the second wave with a muchrger force intervenes and the rest of the soldiers are to start making preparations.

    Preparations are for two scenarios. One of them is to tackle the enemies that areing at them and another one is to create a destruction n and escape from that spot.

    But if they are consciously following that n, they should at least be preparing right now. They didn''t show any emotions. They are just robotically doing the same monotonous activity they are doing until now.

    Only the first wave of lion hunters arrived with some ferocity.

    The two undead creatures that stayed back with Sam made a move on these soldiers.

    There are twenty-five of them. And all of them are on the same level as Sam. So, it is obviously going to be a difficult fight, even if Sam is fully involved. So, the undead creatures were no match for them.

    But the undead are not responsible for killing them directly. Their goal is to stall them and try to injure them if possible. And for that, they started using all sorts of tricks. They disappeared into a puff of smoke whenever someone attacked. They reappeared the soldiers and justnded a very small attack out of nowhere.

    The attacks are aimed at the back of the soldiers'' knees or on their arms when they are about to shoot.

    Even with that, Sam is not really able to kill them. The shadow undead is being destroyed as they got caught one time or the other. But they are of course being regenerated, which is taking Sam''s energy a lot.

    But it is still going ording to Sam''s n.

    While he tried to figure out a different iteration for the scanning technique he is currently using, he is also trying to understand the lethality of these bullets.

    When he was being attacked with the handguns, the bullets are unable to prate through the energy barrier. The barrier barely fluctuated. Just from what he could see, he should be simultaneously attacked with over a few dozen bullets.

    All of those bullets shouldnd on the barrier at the same time and they should all cover a certain area for it to work.

    But the bullets from the assault rifles are a bit different. Their attack power from one volley of their shots is enough to destroy the barrier. Sam had to recreate the barrier for every attack.

    These things are not the most shocking for him though. He received the most shock when he was attacked by the grenades and the snipers.

    The sniper bullets are so precise and concentrated that they prated through the barrier. A hole appeared in the barrier instead ofpletely breaking.

    The rest of the barrier ispletely intact and only one clean and precise hole is formed.

    Sam almost got caught off guard. His shadow undead appeared as a ck puff and blocked the bullet before getting destroyed.

    Sam felt the pinch as the energy left his body to regenerate the undead creature. The sniper bullets are stilling through.

    So, the undead not only has to deal with the people that areing at him from the front, they also have to sacrifice themselves to block these sniper bullets.

    Sam thought he could endure it until he finished the scan of the surroundings. But only when theyunched their first grenade did he understand how wrong he is.

    *BOOM*

    Sam''s barrier was blown away and so was he.

    From within the dust cloud of the explosion, Sam slowly got up with an aching body. If not for the fact that he blocked the attack at thest moment, he would have been toast. He is pretty sure he would have gotten some severe internal injuries.

    The next moment, he disappeared into a puff of smoke and reappeared at the rear of the soldiers.

    A sniper bullet went through the head of his afterimage.

    Sam took out his own handguns and shot rapidly at the soldiers from the back.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    It was neither as fast nor as concentrated as the assault rifles in their hands. But they worked. A few people died on the spot immediately.

    *BOOM*

    On top of that Sam concentrated on some specific targets. The grenade holders. He just shot on the grenades to increase the damage.

    When a grenade exploded, the soldiers are smart enough to react immediately. But at least three people are dying on the spot while the rest of the surrounding people are being injured severely.

    He took full advantage of the situation to the maximum. In two minutes, he disappeared from the spot again and reappeared at a different ce.

    He just went on with the barrage of bullets.

    A sniper bullet once again hit the afterimage he left behind.

    As Sam killed the people that are after him, he realized one thing. The regr shooters are not really that dangerous. Both in terms of defense and offense, they are much worse if they arepared to the police officer he faced on the previous floor.

    The police officer''s gun is much more lethal. He was precise, his defense is almost impossible to prate.

    But here these guys are being easily taken down as long as Sam managed to get out of their firing range.

    As log as he can dodge the bullets, he can even kill a person who is wielding an assault rifle with just a single shot.

    This is extremely surprising.

    As he thought about that, he spected that might be the reason because these people are just the very first enemies he faced in the third floor. They are just as strong as the watchers that were on the towers.

    They are clearly smarter and they are not running purely on instincts like the police officer.

    Currently, the only opponents that are as strong as the police officer or even a bit stronger might be the snipers.

    It is not just their lethality. Sam wasn''t even able to find them. His shadow undead that abandoned the scanning of the ce is currently looking for the snipers that are firing at Sam.

    He estimated their locations based on the direction the bullets came from, but he is always falling short of knowing their urate location.

    By the time Shadow''s undead went there, the snipers are disappearing.

    But that is not exactly a disadvantage for Sam. He might have to exhaust more energy at the moment, but while he is dealing with the rest of the town, the current scenario is considered an added bonus.

    Because the difficulty of whoever came to attack is measured by the time they took to deal with the first wave. In a way, the first wave is just a suicidal measuring scale.

    So, if Sam takes a long time to deal with the first wave, then the difficulty of the next waves will not be as high. This will give him more breathing space when fighting with them.

    He let the shadow undead try and pursue the snipers while he dealt with the ground battle. The only problem is that he is consuming too much energy this way.

    He could also feel the corruption energy seeping into his body.

    It is denser and more powerful as well whenpared to what he got on the second floor.

    But he is not worried. Because he already had a small game n in his mind that will let him have a bit smoother time when dealing with the rest of the town.

    So, he just focused on dragging the battle while dealing with the first wave of soldiers. After the few grenade explosions he caused, they wised up and decided to stay away from each other. They spread out used the houses for their cover.

    Sam didn''t mind that. He let them drag the battle out and in the process, started collecting the weapons that fell from the people that died.

    He wasn''t able to acquire the pistol from the police officer. Mostly because he dealt with him in such a high profile but indirect manner.

    But now he was able to acquire these guns, so he wants to see if he can use them for his own good.

    He caught a few assault rifles and then some more handguns to see how they function. He reced his weapons with these and continued the fight.

    He is surprised by how precise the design of the weapons is. The energy effect that came from these bullets is also caused by a very intricate inscription on the inner mechanism.

    If Sam had to design a gun in this world to sell to the masses, then this would be it. He doubts that he could do a better job than this. This one has lethality, but it is not as drastic as Sam''s personal guns. It is perfect for selling it on the scale.

 Chapter 1701: Meeting Zeus

    Chapter 1701: Meeting ZeusThe battle went on for more than an hour. Sam slowly dealt with the people on the ground.

    He then shifted his focus to the snipers who are hiding on the rooftops of the houses.

    They are perfectly utilizing the terrain to their advantage. Sam guessed that they might have been given a buff that amplified their already dangerous stealthy abilities. From what he knew there are three snipers hiding from him. Now that all the ground forces are gone, all he has to do is hunt all three people.

    Sam is able to dodge the bullets, but he was unable to find their locations because of his position. His energy vision is not exactly helpful. The energy wavesing from the houses and people within are also acting as a hindrance for him.

    So, after some thought, he decided to pick a different approach.

    He activated wind elemental fusion and flew into the sky. He looked down on the roofs of the houses and smiled.

    Now there is no disturbance. Even if the snipers are really good, they cannot ovee this simple obstacle. It is as simple as that.

    Sam took out his handguns and started shooting down at them.

    And snipers themselves revealed their locations even though they had some camouge buffs. They are hard-programmed to try and kill Sam. They are smart enough to hide, but they are not cunning and intelligent enough to just retreat and hide their location and report the matter to the other people inside.

    Sam is of course going to take advantage of that.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Bullets rained down on the town with explosions. The snipers started moving around, trying to find a cover. One of them died in the first volley of Sam''s attacks. The other two went on to the streets as they used the cover of houses to try and attack Sam once again.

    But this time, they lost their location advantagepletely. All they are doing is make Sam bomb at the town at different locations. He destroyed a lot of infrastructure and some people even died before they could even resist.

    And in process of hunting these two snipers, Sam also understood something else. When the hell''s tower is simting something based on real events and even if the creatures are granted some intelligence, it is not exactly as clear and proper as the real incident.

    For example, Sam is sure that if the incident were to happen in the real world, the Lion Hunter Tribe would have reacted a bit differently. First, they will still send the first wave and they will wait for the first wave to be annihted before they make any decision.

    But they would be constantly observing Sam. They wouldn''t just sit back and let the first wave die in vain.

    And if the snipers were really cornered in such a situation, they would have just escaped back and let themander know what kind of enemy they are facing.

    Then there is the scenario where the shelters are being bombed. If the opponent is strong enough to bomb the shelters randomly while fighting the first wave, themanders are not going to just sit around.

    Even some experienced Lion hunters inside the shelters wouldn''t just stand by. That rule only applies to them, if they are safe and sound with minimal damage. Once things are past that, there is no way, they will take this lying down.

    They would have retaliated immediately.

    But now they are just staying back as if there is nothing they could do. No, that is not even an urate description. They are just acting as if they are objects in their surroundings. Not like creatures that are there to kill him.

    Sam started analyzing their behavior and his head is filled with some thoughts.

    When thisrge scenario is nned, it seemed like whatever brain or the origin of this creation that was in y took the overall scenario into ount and took the most generic and step-by-step approach.

    It didn''t take individual behaviors into ount. He doesn''t know how this dynamic works. Because until now, the individual creatures all had their own behavioral patterns inherited from them.

    But now all of that is gone.

    As these thoughts flooded his mind, Sam finished off the two snipers. As soon as the corruption hit his body, he noticed some energy fluctuationsing from different corners of the town. He could understand what was happening.

    Some of the creatures are finallying out as per the exact protocol. The first wave took a decent time. So, the second wave is going toe now and it wouldn''t be very strong. It would be strong of course, but not to the point that it will put extreme stress on him.

    It would be manageable.

    But still, Sam didn''t start the fight. Instead, he disappeared from the spot. He went to the stone pir and decided to deposit the corruption energy.

    Hel saw the whole thing and sighed.

    "There is no way Zeus'' n is going to work this way. Sam is going to be very careful. All he did is deal with this first wave and he already went to the pir. If my guess is right, he will directly go to the pir again right before he even finishes the second wave.

    This stupid guy just lost a shit load of fortune and his n is ruined even before they revealed it out in the open.

    And he has to face the wrath of that stupid Gambler.

    Zeus is fucked."

    Hel muttered to herself and decided to inform about the situation to Zeus directly.

    She didn''t dy once the thought popped into her head. She directly went to meet with Zeus and exined what she observed.

    Zeus thought for a moment and sighed.

    "This is the first time I had to think this much when dealing with a Mortal. Why is this bastard who is not even a descendant of an Olympian god troubling me this much."

    "You and your stupid Olympian pride. Can you fucking hold it in, while I am here? You might think it is all powerful and shit, but all we can see as outsiders is an incestuous family of debauch people.

    So, shut the fuck up and tell me what you want to do."

    *RUMBLE*

    Lightning crackled in the sky as Zeus looked at Hel.

    Hel didn''t care much about his anger. She knew her words angered him. In fact, that is one of the main reasons, the Olympian gods are not respected as much. They are only getting any respect because of Zeus and their other gods'' overwhelming power.

    "You better talk carefully to me Hel. If you insult Olympia once again, I will start a realm war before Gambler could start anything."

    "Yeah, yeah. You and I both know, that half of your threats are nothing but empty words."

    Zeus calmed down before he spoke.

    "Don''t worry about the situation with Sam. Even if he has absolute control over the tower and the floors, he wouldn''t be able to deal with what I am nning next.

    You need to go and implement the next round right after everyone clears the third floor of the hell tower.

    This task is something I specifically designed to contribute to Sam''s already drawback. The headstart he gave to the rest because of our forceful measures will stay just like that."

    "Are you sure you want to push the other gods to this extent? It is not really a good thing, you know. They might support it to a certain extent. But they also know that Gambler is a dastardly guy who bolds even a minor grudge."

    "Whatever. I am sure this will go smoothly.

    I can make sure that there will be no suspicions, but Sam will definitely be targeted in the next round and will carry an even heavier drawbackpared to the rest of the yers.

    So, don''t worry and continue with whatever games you are ying."

    "Alright, I will do that. I just wanted to let you know about the situation.

    "Just keep on studying whatever he is doing."

    "I will do that of course. I have no other option. Just letting you know another thing. Gambler didn''t react even after seeing all of this happen.

    So, I will be careful if I were you. Make some arrangements to deal with whatever consequences that mighte to your doorstep because of him."

    "What is he going to do? Do you think I am you? I don''t need to worry about him knocking on my door. He doesn''t have the guts to do so."

    "You would love to believe that, don''t you? Even with the bonus you get from the realm of Olympia, you shouldn''t act this cocky. Indra thought the same and he swallowed a bitter pill a long time ago.

    The gambler went and threatened Indra right in his home. He even tore a hole in space and let his void dragon in. Right above Indra''s castle. Why do you act as if you forgot about it?"

    Hel just stood up as she shook her head and left.

 Chapter 1702: Next Task

    Chapter 1702: Next Task*BOOM*

    A few days passed.

    Sam is currently standing on top of a pir in the middle of the town. He is defending himself with an energy barrier as he used the reaper sword to cut down the enemy bulletsing from every side.

    He didn''t even have a change in expression as he let everyone rain him down with bullets.

    In the past few days, he has taken down the town bit by bit. He didn''t care much about trying to do it in a single streak. He also didn''t care about finishing this off in a single sitting.

    Whenever he felt like the corruption has hit him and is anywhere near the limit, he just went back to the pirs, even if he is the middle of a fight.

    He knew that safety should be his highest priority. Since Hel is making his life more and more unreasonable.

    And most of his spections about the Lion Hunter Tribe are true. So, he didn''t have much trouble dealing with them at all. The only problem is the time taken. It has taken a lot longer than he originally expected.

    He finished off the boss. Themander of the Lion hunter tribe with his sword struck and all of a sudden, the whole town started rumbling.

    *GRRR*

    It is almost like a beast is growling from under the ground.

    Ignoring the weird sounding from there, Sam jumped up into the air and disappeared. He reappeared at the pir and injected the corruption into it.

    Hel who is spectating the whole thing shook her head and hurriedly waved her hand.

    Sam felt a familiar force as he smiled.

    His body still has the corruption that came from killing themander. Hel''s timing is surprisingly remarkable. Because Sam knew that this is the most amount of corruption he is going to umte because of the extra bonus he got from Boss.

    His new way of dealing things is obviously not going to let him umte more than this.

    So, she picked the best time she could.

    Sam once again appeared in an empty space.

    "Why did you call us so soon?"

    Some yers directlyined. The more they interacted with these gods and Hel, the less reverence and respect they had for them. And as their power increased, even the self-restraints in the way they speak are going away.

    They are now evenining about the things they don''t like.

    Hel didn''t care about theirints. She just looked at their states and shook her head.

    Unlike before, Sam is nowhere near being the worst candidate among the yers. He doesn''t have the highest level of corruption and he is definitely not the most exhausted.

    She sighed and closed her eyes for a moment.

    For the next minute, her face twitched asionally and a frown that deepened every second appeared on her face.

    yers didn''t understand her sudden reaction. But they didn''t care much. They are being toyed with anyway, so there is no point in trying to know the details. Particrly when they are sure that they won''t know a thing even if they ask.

    Hel opened her eyes and sighed deeply. She looked at Sam for a moment and shook her head.

    "I hope your ass survives this one."

    She muttered to herself andter spoke loudly.

    "Attention my dear yers. Wee to your second challenge. This time, it is going to be a bit different from the first one."

    Because, not only will you be unable to use your weapons, trinkets and other artifacts you have. You will also be unable to use your own bodies.

    For this round, only your souls will go and they will be ced in the bodies of other people. The bodies will be chosen in a way that they will at least be slightlypatible to your affinities."

    Everyone was stunned. They didn''t expect such an announcement at all. They are all thinking of how to deal with this second round with all the corruption they umted in their bodies. Sam nnoticed that everyone has a lot of corruption pent up in their bodies. In the first round, apart from Sam, no one is in such a sorry state.

    And every yer understood that one of the main reasons Sam lost is because of this corruption only. So, they are kind of ecstatic when they learned their bodies are not going to be part of this round.

    "Don''t get too happy yet. Even if your bodies are not going to be a part of this round, the corruption attached to your soul will be with you. But I must say it is a lot, lot better than going out with these bodies.

    Anyway, let me exin the remaining task to you.

    The location of this round is going to be a battlefield in a realm far away.

    It is kind of an isted realm. It has no contact with the surrounding realms and except for a select few, no one even knows about the existence of other realms. They believe that theirs is the only world.

    And currently, a world war is happening there.

    And coincidentally, they also have seven key candidates fighting there that arepatible with your cultivation level as well as your affinities.

    You will be forcefully sent to upy their bodies.

    And you will be there in a week.

    This time since the whole scenario itself is difficult, we didn''t make it hard for the actual task part.

    The task is for you guys to take over a certain area.

    It is an area centered exactly in the middle of all the camps and it is currently upied by beasts, some wandering criminals, and bandit camps. Whoever takes over that area will have the best chance to win the battles in the surrounding areas.

    Of course, it isrge enough for only one side to swallow it whole, so the person who upies thergest part wins.

    One condition is that apart from the basic hand-to-handbat and movement techniques, you cannot use any other skills. That includes energy attacks, your personal trump cards, formation techniques that you learned in your body, weapon-making skills.

    There will be one skill from the owner of the original body that would be chosen and you are forced to master the skill and use it for your task."

    At this moment, Sam raised his hand.

    "What if I can use my other skills with the skill you gave me as a base?"

    "What do you mean?"

    "If you have given me swordsmanship as my skill, I can make a formation with the sword rays in an instant with my movements. I won''t be using any formation nodes, gs, or even inscriptions. It will be purely the sword rays that came out of my sword strikes."

    Hel thought for a moment and said.

    "If you can really do that, then fine. Do it as much as you like."

    "Thank you."

    Sam smiled and didn''t speak any further.

    Hel looked at the rest and asked.

    "Does anybody else have any other questions?"

    "You are awfully tolerant today."

    Arkiv suddenly spoke up from the side.

    "What?"

    Hel asked in a surprised tone.

    "I remember thest mission briefing. You were so irritated and conceited. But now, you are patient and tolerant of everything going on around here. This is too much for me to take in."

    The other yers also nodded as they also noticed this.

    Sam is also surprised by this. But he just felt that it is not something that he should mull over at the moment.

    Hel didn''t answer him. But she knew why she subconsciously behaved like that. It is because she is sure that Gambler will make some big move on her and she wants to do as much damage control as possible.

    Even though she is helping out Zeus with his stupid n now, she felt like Sam would survive this and even get an upper hand in this. And she also believed that this would be thest time she does this. So, she is being a bit careful with her attitude without even knowing.

    But she doesn''t have to exin this to yers. All she did is exin the remaining rules.

    "So, you will be staying in that body for seven days. The three yers that have thergestnd upation will gain the badges.

    The rest will not. And the badge score will depend on how muchnd you upied.

    Also there are some hidden badges that will only be awarded by triggering some hidden conditions. So, you might want to put your efforts and go above and beyond to achieve everything you deem important and necessary in this battle.

    When you enter the body, you will be given the memories of the original person. Everything will be imprinted into your soul and you will also be given a gist of the situation at the time and the behavioral characteristics of the person.

    So, you need to act ordingly and proceed further.

    That is all I have to say.

    All the best."

 Chapter 1703: Disabled

    Chapter 1703: DisabledAll the yers digested the information Hel gave. Unlike before she was considerate enough to let them sink it all in.

    "Okay, you can go now."

    With a wave of her hand, all the yers'' bodies copsed right there and then.

    ¡­

    Sam felt like he is being sucked by an undefeatable and indomitable force out of nowhere. He felt like he is traveling through a very different and unique world. He could see a bunch of orbs floating around in a really dark space.

    But every orb felt alive. Like every single one of them is a life of its own.

    He moved at a speed that made all the orbs look like they are streaks of light in a dark space.

    But as he moved, he felt like he is also another orb and soon he noticed that he is dashing towards a certain orb.

    He collided with that orb and felt like he is wrestling with some other power.

    Before he knew it, it seemed like the other power sumbed to him.

    *SPLASH*

    Sam suddenly felt a ssh of water on his face. He opened his eyes and all he could see is a ceiling that seemed to have been made of rugged thick leather.

    He looked around in shock. He isying on the floor and all he could where people''s legs that are standing on either side of him.

    After the initial shock, only Sam realized that the water on his face is unusually warm and then the smell finally hit him.

    The shock on his face turned to anger and he looked at the people around him.

    It is urine. The urine of a Beast no less.

    As he was about to open his mouth and showcase his anger, he felt a leging straight to his face.

    "You bastard. What are you ring for?"

    He felt the kick straight on his face. No matter how much he tried, he wasn''t able to move.

    The kick was not forceful though. It was not meant to hurt him, rather it was meant to humiliate him. But it did bring him back to his senses and he tried to get up immediately.

    Only that he couldn''t. His upper body sat up, but his lower body couldn''t. Because he doesn''t have much of his lower body. His legs are not there. All he had left of the legs are some stubs at his thighs.

    Sam went into shock again. He couldn''t make sense of what is happening around and why he doesn''t have any legs. At this moment, all of a sudden a wave of memories hit his soul. It hurt a little. But he got a gist of what is happening.

    And his face paled for a moment.

    As strong as his mentality, even Sam couldn''t take the ridiculousness of this situation.

    The thing is, he is one of the key figures in the war. With his cultivation at Peak of Astral ne. He went into enemy lines many times and piled on so many merits that all of his peers are both afraid and jealous of him.

    And the day before, he was called for an urgent mission. They got ambushed and left behind to save the rest. He resolved himself to die but survived. Only to lose his legs in the process though.

    As Sam went through the memories, the first that came to his mind is the fact that how the young man wasn''t healed properly in time. If he was healed as soon as he was attacked and brought, his legs would have been intact.

    But it wasn''t done. He was unconscious and all he got was first aid his legs were gone.

    Not even the toxins and other infectious matter were removed. He had to amputate his legs by the time the healer came once again.

    And dered that the body''s owner cannot regrow his legs ever again.

    Of course, just like any other organization, Sam also has some serious enemies in his own and they didn''t fail to take advantage of his perilous situation. And among them, the most hateful of them all is currently standing in front of him with a container full of beast urine.

    "Oi, Brice. What the fuck are you dazed for? You still haven''t answered my question. Why were you ring? It is not like the people in this tent are the ones responsible for you losing your legs.

    It is your stupid decision to get stuck in there while trying to be a hero. Instead of directlying to me and reporting the situation, you have the audacity to sleep till now.

    That is why I brought here and woke up you.

    Now, tell me. Why did you do this selfishly? You have to know that your body is not yours. It is the n''s property in this state of war. Who gave the right to destroy it like this?"

    Sam looked up as he listened to the rant of another guy.

    He is young and tall. He has very narrow eyes, but a square face. But he looked strong. They are definitely of the same cultivation level. And he emitted an aura that is befitting of a person that killed hundreds of people. He is reeking the stench of the battlefield.

    One thing Sam is sure about is that this guy is definitely not some pushover young master who is relying on just the situation and making other''s life miserable.

    Sam got more details. This guy''s name is ne. Brice and ne are of the same generation and rivals in the n. But currently, ne has slightly higher authority in the war because his team got more kills at the start and he was promoted to a higher rank.

    Brice on the other hand fell behind a bit short in terms of merit. But thest battle should not have only overturned that, he should have left ne behind in the dust.

    This is something everyone in the camp knew. And that is the reason ne is trying to so hard to pin this as Brice''s recklessness.

    If he can prove that Brice acted up like this because of his greed over his personal merit and rewards. ne can appeal that Brice is acting without any concern towards the n as he is one of the key factors in the war and didn''t bother to take care of himself properly.

    It is like knowing that a weapon is a key to war, but someone recklessly uses it for their personal gain while they are already in the war, without caring if it could be usedter on or not.

    Sam shook his head as he sighed.

    He couldn''t help but feel sorry for Brice, but he is also kind of impressed by his decisiveness of ne.

    If he really proves Brice''s actions, then he would win, but it is not that one-sided. It is going to be hard. After all, Brice is known to be a loyal subordinate. His loyalty to the n is so unshakable that even ne''s reputation is notparable to it.

    But to ne to still go with this n, he must be really confident or really determined.

    As Sam is thinking of all this, he suddenly dodged to the side.

    ne''s kick grazed past him.

    "I am ordering you as your superior. Answer me."

    Sam didn''t bother with him though. He just calmly looked for some more information. The information about what the affinity of this guy is like and what skills he can use.

    He got the information as soon as he thought about it and it was followed by a pleasant surprise and a horrible shock.

    The surprise is the constitution of this guy''s body.

    This guy has a constitution that is almost as rare as Sam. It is a very special warrior-mage constitution and his spiritual core has the ability to bepatible with any element.

    As long as the person can understand and gain insight into the basicws of elements in nature and have enough mental strength, they could wield any element.

    To be precise, they can modify their spiritual energy into any elemental energy. It is very simr to Sam''s conversion ability. But unlike Sam''s core which could inherently absorb different elemental energies through the cultivation technique, this body can only do the conversion.

    And the requirements to properly wield it are way too high. The mental load a person has to bear to wield it is extremely strenuous. This limits the number of elements a person can master.

    But for a person like Sam, who has wielded so many elements over the years, this is a perfectlypatible body.

    Then the horrible shock he has to digest is the skill that he could use.

    Within his consciousness, he could see all the skills that are floating on some virtual screens. All the skills that this person mastered.

    Sam is actually impressed by the skillset.

    There is archery, swordsmanship, movement techniques, formations techniques, and inscriptions. He is a decent all-rounder.

    But of all those skills, the one that he got is Weaving

 Chapter 1704: Weaver

    Chapter 1704: WeaverWeaving

    Weaving is the skill that Sam got out of all the skills that this guy mastered.

    A bunch of memories flooded his head again.

    Brice''s hobby. Brice has a rtively rough childhood. His father was also a core figure of the n and died defending it. Because of that loss, their standing in the n has reduced by a lot.

    He has to fight for resources and deal with the oppression from other elders who are scared of his talent surpassing their own offspring. Simply put, regr influential and powerful family nonsense. Nothing much.

    And to endure all of this shit, he sought to weaving. A skill he learned from frail mother who tried everything in her power to shield him and from the n''s oppression. In a way, if not for her, this guy would have long ended up in a ditch somewhere.

    After so much effort and sacrifice this guy improved for his mom''s sake. He took so many difficult decisions. Killed people he didn''t want to kill, fought with people he didn''t want to fight. And weaving was sort of like a meditation for him.

    He even carried a loom around in his storage and every night, he spends a lot of time on it.

    Of course with all the time he spent, he became really good at it. It could be said, that''s the skill he mastered the most.

    In a way, it could be said that Sam was given the skill with highest mastery. But in his current state, he couldn''t see much use for this.

    As he was thinking of what to do and assessing his situation, ine looked at him in anger as he exuded killing intent.

    Sam finally looked at the young man and the surroundings. He paid attention to his own situation.

    "How dare you?"

    ine asked in a low voice. Even though he has been asking the same question again and again since the start, this time it felt different.

    "How dare you act like this? First, you did something in the mission that is clearly against the orders which led to the massive fuck up. Because of that massive fuckup, instead ofing back to the camp, you tried to increase your glory and stayed back.

    You fucked up even more and lost your legs like this.

    In a critical state of war, with no consideration to your n members you as one of the key factors injured yourselves to this extent.

    And as I ask for exnation in a much informal setting with respect to your achievements until now, you dare be unresponsive like this?

    Okay then, from now on, let us take the hard path.

    You are going to be court martialled.

    I will call up on the two reservemanders from the main camp to act as judges. You will go through the trial like any other soldier thatmitted a crime and you will receive punishment as such. It will take a couple of hours for people from the main camp to arrive.

    Until then, you are dismissed.

    Guards, take Brice back to his tent. And make sure he doesn''t leave anywhere or escape.

    He is the highest priority criminal in our camp currently."

    He left the room after passing those orders. A couple of guards came over and lifted Sam and took him to Brice''s tent.

    Sam is still a bit dazed. It is one thing for him to be dazed as soon as he arrived in this body. He though it was just the aftereffect of the sudden shift of his soul. But now only he realized, even this body is slightly lethargic.

    When he dodged the kick that came it him, he noticed that the body felt a bit heavier than it should.

    As he was thinking of it, he noticed a half-eaten bowl of soup in the tent. Right beside his bed. It gave out a scent of medicinal herbs. He got curious and decided to take a sip.

    Only after he did, did he realize what''s wrong with the body. It is the after effect of the medicine. The medicinalbination is not exactly a mystery to Sam. He could easily guess what its purpose is and why Brice drank it.

    It doesn''t even have any other side effects and actually good for him. The only problem is that it has slight anaesthetic effect. It will numb his mind and body down a bit and it seems like brice drank it right before he was summoned to this discussion.

    If he was a bit more awake, maybe then he would have answered something and got out of the trial. But now he is trapped in some scheme.

    Sam sighed and thought of what to do next. If possible, he would like to regain his legs, but the grace period to get them back is over. At his level, if he really wants to get them back, he shouldn''t have healed the wounds in the first ce. And once the wounds are healed and the body''s cirction is used to the new situation, it is almost impossible to get them back.

    If he wants it now, he needs an above average divine ne cultivator to do the healing which is impossible in his current state.

    As he was thinking, he was abouty down and rx. But at this moment, he noticed that someone approached the tent.

    The guards are trying to convince him to get away, but that person is adamant about it. Sam frowned as he tried to look at the situation with his spiritual sense.

    But the guards already gave up and let hime in.

    "Salute Captain."

    The person came in and saluted to Sam.

    Sam nodded in return. He recognized this person. He is the vice-captain of the team that was under Brice.

    After the incident, he took over the team and even got promoted to the captain''s spot in Brice''s stead.

    "Seems like you are the captain now. You might want to change the greeting."

    "I am sorry Captain. I refused to take the position. But I was¡­"

    "Don''t need to exin yourself. I am currently unfit to lead the team anyway. It is better that you took over. It is better than handing the team I built with so much effort to someone who doesn''t understand you guys.

    Anyway, I hope my situation is not effecting you guys too much."

    "About that, that is what I wanted to talk to you about.

    Everyone of our team have been getting offers from theckeys of other young masters. Particrly theckeys of young master ine. They are not even asking for aplete change of team. They are asking to absorb the whole team into their faction and they are trying to individually buy off people from our side."

    "Oh really? They already made their move?"

    "Yes. While you were unconscious, we tried to get you to treatment. But ine''s people stopped us. They took over your treatment n and in the guise of interrogating us, they separated the whole team.

    I was made an offer stating that three people from our side already agreed to this.

 Chapter 1705: Disturbance

    <h4>Chapter 1705: Disturbance</h4>

    "Three people already agreed?" Sam is a bit surprised. The team Brice assembled is really remarkable.

    He kind of took a simr tactic to Sam.

    Pick up, orphans. Even though he might not have done it with the same intention as Sam, Brice was friendly with these orphans and practically grew up with more than half of the team. He is directly responsible for training them since they were kids.

    So, loyalty is something he expected by default.

    "They might be ying tricks."

    Sam said after some thought. He thought further and felt like it could be an obvious trick to fluster this guy and Brice.

    "I thought the same at the first captain. But things don''t seem as simple as that. I investigated the incident and it seems like the formation we have set up has been rigged. Someone messed with the energy flow of the formation."

    "What?" Sam asked as he thought back to Brice''s memories. He is surprised upon noticing what kind of formation it was.

    "Only one person activated the formation and since it is a pre-constructed formation based on formation discs, how is it possible for the energy flow to be messed up? Only two people can do it, the one who inscribed the formation disc or the one who set up the formation using the disc."

    Sam muttered to himself.

    "Yes, captain. There is also another thing. The medicine you have taken before you went to meet ine. It shouldn''t have been served to you at all. Even though it heals you, we received instructions from the camp healer that it shouldn''t be given to you before you meet young master ine.

    We were told that you would feel dazed, numb, and clumsy. But someone from our team gave it to you even after that warning."

    Sam''s frown got deeper. For some reason, he could feel a little hurt by this. It seems like he is being slightly affected by the emotions of the body''s owner.

    He thought for a moment and sighed.

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    "Honestly, I am too tired to deal with this right now. Just leave it as it is for now. We will deal with it after the court martial is over. And for now, I need to take some rest."

    Sam sighed.

    The subordinate looked at Sam in pity as he left.

    After that guy left, Sam finally started looking at his temporary body seriously. The first thing he did is clean the urine off of his face.

    And for that, he manipted the energy to create water elemental energy.

    The conversion process is a bit tedious and stressful on his body, but it wasn''t that bad.

    After washing his face, he finallyid down and processed his thoughts.

    Honestly, he didn''t want to be bothered with schemes and plots at this point. He has been working his ass off in Hell and in front of that intense physical and mental torture, all of this seemed to be child''s y.

    He has no interest in dealing with this stupid scheme and stuff. He is currently bothered by only two things, the way to utilize his skill to get out of this mess and ine.

    Sam is pissed at the fact that the asshole poured piss on his face.

    No matter how much he consoled himself that it was aimed at Brice, he wasn''t able to control his urge to beat the crap out of that guy. But he has to because it will be much easier for him if he is calm and peaceful instead of doing something as stupid as creating a conflict with this guy.

    All he has to do is go to that area and upy it. He doesn''t even have to really hold the territory for long, as long as the other yers are not able to invade the territory for a while, it will be his win.

    So, he closed his eyes and meditated as he tried to figure out how the energy cirction in this body works.

    After an hour or so, he finally understood how and has a basic understanding of it.

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    Afterward, he then started examining the most important thing. The weaving skill. It could be said that Sam knows a bit about weaving. But he is nowhere near as skilled a Brice. After going through the memories and trusting the muscle memory of the body, he took out the loom and set it up.

    He took out some silk that was in Brice''s storage before he started weaving. For the first hour, he couldn''t do anything. He constantly got stuck and the loom was jammed again and again. He could only fix and retry.

    After another hour of struggle, he finally managed to get a gist of how to work with it and became half decent at weaving a fabric.

    Of course, most of it is still thanks to the muscle memory of the body and the memories of the body''s owner.

    He kept on practicing but this time, he started injecting spiritual energy into each thread while weaving. This is the only thing Sam was able to do without any hups. It is thanks to his precise control that he practiced over years with so much effort.

    And to his surprise, weaving actually became easier as he was able to urately control the silk threads when they are enveloped with energy.

    He slowly started weaving the fabric and by evening he finally entered a zone. He just kept on weaving while his energy enveloped every single thread of the fabric. He is absorbing energy from the surroundings and put it into threads as he kept on weaving a veryrge fabric.

    The energy in the threads stayed intact just like that. It didn''t disperse and it didn''t fall apart. It stayed just like that as if the fabric is fully made of energy.

    As Sam thought to this point, he suddenly got a very interesting idea. An idea that never crossed his mind. The researcher inside his head started screaming. He wanted to test something out immediately.

    But at this moment, someone barged in. His concentration was gone. The fabric that he made with so much effort exploded into a bunch of small threads because of the energy disturbance. Sam angrily looked at the person who came in.

    "Get the fuck out of here." Sam didn''t even hold back as screamed.

    "What the fuck? Did you dare to scream at me like this? You fucking cripple?"

    Sam looked at the blonde young man. The young man is much younger than Brice and ine. Everything about him, his hair, clothes, bodynguage, everything is screaming only one word, ''COCKY''.

    He is fucking arrogant.

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    And on top of it all, there is one more thing that made him act this way. This guy is ine''sckey. The closestckey and he always wanted to take down Brice.

    Sam would have normally let this go since he already decided to stay put and didn''t want to make a mess. But disturbing him while he is on verge of doing something that fascinated him, there is no way, he could take it.

    Fuck thepetition, fuck the gods, the epiphany he had at that moment, that one moment is not going toe back. Even after he figures out what he thought of,ter on, this moment is gone and nothing in this world will be able to outweigh that.

    Looking at Sam''s silence this cocky guy mistook it for silence.

    "What the fuck are you doing? Do you think that just because the trial got dyed a bit, you are safe? Do you really think you are back to being the young master of the n? You are nothing but an entitled cripple at the moment.

    So suck it up and start moving."

    Sam didn''t budge. He just held the loom and tried to get that feeling back.

    He didn''t want to lose that feeling that easily. He knew he is going to figure out something. A new innovation. A new skill. A new door that could lead to possibilities that he wants to explore very much. He doesn''t want to lose all of that just like that.

    He tried, but it didn''t work. All of that work was for naught. He looked at the young man in front of him.

    Cocky-guy already made his way towards Sam and dragged him by his arm.

    "I told you to get the fuck out of here. You better make your way towards the main tent. You are being court-martialled and this is a fucking order."

    As he spoke, a bunch of people already surrounded Sam.

    They are all Astral ne Consummate cultivators. Some of them are in the peak stage and some of them arete stage.

    Sam controlled his urge to go berserk and started using his hands to move forward. The whole group that is currently ine''sckeys are all sneering at his actions.

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    Sam had a frown on his face as he moved forward. He is just getting pissed more and more. What he doesn''t know is, things are just getting started.

 Chapter 1706: Court Martial

    <h4>Chapter 1706: Court Martial</h4>

    Sam is currently in the middle of the main tent.

    Even though it is called a tent. It is very majestic. It is adjacent to a mountain that is partially under the tent. The mountain''s side was carved in such a way that arge tform was created. The tform is at least twelve feet above the ground with stairs right before the center seat.

    The person who sat in the center seat is ine. The currentmander of the camp and also the person directly in charge of Brice''s case.

    On either side of him, some people sat down. Sam recognized them from Brice''s memory. They are judges from the main camp. But one look and Sam could guess, they are on ine''s side.

    The whole court-martial is just a front to destroy Brice and his future. And Sam doesn''t really care much about it. He liked Brice, but that is it. Nothing more nothing less, there is no way Sam is going to waste his time on this.

    His only goal is to finish the task as soon as possible and get the fuck away from this ce. He could really get back to his body right now and fight in hellpared to staying in Brice''s body right now.

    And on top of that, he is pretty pissed about the disturbance. He only has one thought in his mind.

    He will go through this court-martial without making a scene. He will endure whatever punishment is put on him. He will take his time while fulfilling the punishment. He will have some peace and quiet while doing it.

    He would get some time to think of a n to finish the task and fuck off from here.

    That is all he has to do. That is all he is going to do.

    Sam is pretty adamant about this.

    "Brice, what do you have to say about the crimes you havemitted? Do you have any remorse?"

    "I don''t have anything to say. Do whatever you want."

    "Whatever I want? It is as if you are saying that I am doing this on purpose."

    "I don''t really care if you are doing this on purpose or not. All I said is I am not going to say anything about anything in this situation. If you think I am guilty, just punish me as you see fit. If you don''t think that I am not, and I have to fight in the war once again, just give me some orders.

    I don''t have any energy or patience to deal with this."

    "Really? Patience? You are talking about Patience and energy to deal with this? Do you really think this is the attitude you should be taking after all the shit you have done?"

    All of a sudden, everyone turned to one particr corner in the room. The cocky guy who disturbed Sam earlier is standing there.

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    His face is burning with righteous anger.

    Sam frowned and looked at ine without responding to him. He is already pissed at him. If he is pushed even a bit more, Sam is sure that he would lose it and do something that will create a huge mess.

    So, he pushed his urge down and stayed put.

    ine looked at Brice with a frown. As if he is dissatisfied with something. This made Sam curious. This should be ine''s ideal scenario.

    Brice is not resisting at all. He is just there epting all the punishment that could be bestowed upon him. In fact, Sam is even willing to just ept if the other gives out the death penalty. He doesn''t have any thoughts of resisting at all.

    But ine seems to be dissatisfied.

    It is almost as if he is expecting Brice to resist.

    And if Sam could read ine''s thoughts, he would be surprised by how on point he was.

    ine is indeed disappointed about Sam''s or rather Brice''spliance with the situation. He wanted Brice to resist. He wanted Brice to fight back, defy the punishment and scream with righteous anger.

    He wanted Brice to fight back with everything he got.

    There are two reasons for it.

    Brice''s resistance will be favorable to him. He will be able to use any outbursts that Brice might have to improve his own situation and increase his punishment.

    The second reason is a bit more personal.

    Brice is the only rival he had since he was a kid. The rivalry is one of the reasons that kept him on a edge. That fuelled his improvement. He admired Brice and his tenacity despite all the drawbacks and suffering he had to go through.

    He is sure that if their circumstances were different if both of them were ordinarymoners, or if both of them were born to the same parents, they would have definitely had a better rtionship. They would have been as close as brothers.

    They would have had each other backs, they would have had adventures together. And Brice actually tried to make this happen.

    That made ine angry. He always wished that Brice is just as cold-hearted as him. Just as calcting as him.

    But he is not like that. That made him angrier. From then on, the only thing that he liked about Brice is his unyielding fighting spirit. Now Brice is epting everything like a wimp. This obviously made him furious.

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    He is tempted to beat the crap out of Brice right at that moment.

    "Everyone below the rank of a vice-captain. Leave the tent right now."

    ine ordered.

    Everyone left without making a sound.

    "Do you know why I sent everyone away?"

    "I don''t care."

    "You should. Because that is thest favor I am doing to you for the achievements you had made for the n.

    I am giving you thest chance. Admit to your crime."

    "I already told you. I don''t really care. If you deem me guilty then I am guilty. Just give out the punishment and send me away."

    "So are you admitting that youmitted the crime?"

    Sam stayed silent for a moment and he was about to just admit and be done with it. But at this moment, the cocky guy suddenly came forward and spoke up.

    "Commander ine, I don''t understand why you are acting like this? Why do you want to spare his dignity? He is a traitor to the n if you ask me. You have to treat him as such.

    Why would you care about his face in front of the soldiers?

    If he is really feeling like shit, then he deserves to feel like it."

    The cocky guy went on and on.

    Sam frowned at this. He didn''t like this guy to begin with and he just kept on pushing his buttons.

    "I don''t remember telling you to speak up. Why are you talking all of a sudden?''

    ine said coldly.

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    "I am talking as a reputable soldier that is loyal to the n. Brice has no regard for our situation in the war. We have already been struggling so much with other ns. And he is in this state at this situation. What kind of response would do that?

    You must punish him severely. He should be given the death penalty."

    ine didn''t react. He looked at Brice as if he is expecting some reaction. But there is nothing except for a frown.

    ine thought of something and spoke.

    "You are acting out too much Vice-captain. It seems like the recent praises have gone to your head. Even yesterday, you acted out of line and pulled that urine stunt. What do you think you are doing?"

    Sam finally had an expression on his face.

    He looked at the cocky guy coldly.

    "What do you mean out of linemander? A criminal dared to sleep in the middle of his interrogation. You were being soft on him.

    I don''t like it at all. If you were your normal self, you would have been killed for such an action. But you were lenient asking for the healer to check him.

    My actions are the only appropriate ones at that time. But you just interfered and took that off of my hands in the middle. That is very unlike you.

    If you are being fair, I need you to prove it to me. Treat him like you do to everyone else. If you don''t, I will have to act out to make things fair."

    The cocky guy kept on talking and he became angrier with every word.

    "Enough. You are crossing your limits again."

    ine said calmly.

    This only made the young man angrier. He took out the gourd of beast urine once again and said.

    "Commander ine, I hope you will act fair this time around. Or I will start from where I left off yesterday."

    Sam frowned as he looked at ine and the cocky guy back and forth.

    He could sense that something is wrong and his brain is rapidly thinking of reasons as he spected why this is happening.

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 Chapter 1707: Retaliate

    <h4>Chapter 1707: Retaliate</h4>

    Before Sam could even process those spections, the cocky young man already started swinging the urine gourd towards Sam''s head.

    Sam looked at ine and the other guards, no one seemed to have any intention to stop. ine even looked like he wanted that to happen.

    But Sam is not really in the mood for a urine shower.

    He pushed his arms on the ground and slid the side to escape.

    When the young man was about to change the direction his hand is moving in, Sam already caught a hold of it and pulled him downwards. He shifted his weight and tried to pin the hand down to get rid of the gourd.

    The cocky young man was mmed because of Sam''s sudden motion which made him feel a bit embarrassed. And to cover that embarrassment, he couldn''t help but look at Sam angrily and whisper.

    "You bloody cripple. Even after your legs are gone, you still don''t change do you? How dare you even think that you are worthy of young master ine''s rival. After all the nning I did to kill you, you escaped with your legs gone.

    Just when I thought at least young master''s n seeded, he is still showing so much mercy to a low life bastard like you.

    I really wish I could kill you right here."

    Even though he just whispered, a lot of people in the surroundings heard it clearly. Sam is sure that even ine could have heard it faintly.

    So, everyone is shocked.

    Sam on the other hand was not as angry, but he felt a bit frustrated. He doesn''t want to be tangled in Brice''s mess. That was why, he was just ready to ept the punishment. But the situation is way tooplex.

    As Sam slipped into these thoughts, the cocky guy got out of the lock and threw the gourd at Sam.

    Sam instinctually, tried to use the energy shield.

    But it failed to activate and he remembered that he couldn''t use any other techniques. He didn''t just expect that even the energy shield one of the basics of almost all cultivators can be considered a special technique of its own.

    The gourd hit him and it broke open.

    To Sam''s dismay, the gourd is not a normal one. It is a spatial storage device for fluids. There is a lot more urine inside it than it should have.

    Sam is drenched.

    He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The pungent smell of urine came off of him.

    People started giggling on the side. The cocky young man stood up with a stupid grin on his face.

    Sam gritted his teeth and took another deep breath before muttering.

    "I wanted to go away silently. But fuck it."

    As soon as he spoke, he raised both of his fists and mmed them into the ground. The spiritual energy converted into earth elemental energy as it spread towards cocky young man.

    Before he could realize what is happening, the ground split open and his legs dropped into the cracks.

    He is almost down to his knees which is not that much taller than Sam''s current height.

    When the cocky young man tried to get out of the cracks, Sam already leaped towards him with a punch.

    *BAM*

    An explosive sound came as Sam''s punchnded on the arms of the young man. It should have hit the face, but the young man was fast enough to block his face with his arms.

    The punch didn''t have any styled techniques or any refined energy flow, it didn''t even have any elemental energy infused within. All it had is sheer brute force and the cocky young man felt like his arm was hit by a charging beast.

    Before he could react, he was greeted with another punch.

    *BAM*

    *CRACK*

    He could feel a crack in his arm before he fell backwards. But at least, he was out of the cracks on the ground.

    But Sam didn''t let him recover, he is already on top of him in a mount position. His arms are covered with earth elemental energy and turned to rocks.

    *BAM*

    *BAM*

    *BAM*

    *BAM*

    One punch after anothernded on the young man''s handsome face. Whenever he tried to circte his energy, Sam''s hit made him lose his focus.

    Each punch contained such for that he felt like his brain went shut for a brief moment beforeing back. It is almost like he fainted for a couple of seconds and all of his bodily functions stopped.

    Sam pounded his face. Bone broke, and he bled from every part of his face possible. Teeth fell out and some even went into the throat.

    "Just because I was staying silent, do you think you can do whatever you want?"

    Sam turned to ine as he spoke.

    Nobody knows if he is talking to ine of if he is talking to the cocky young man, but all of them had a hunch that it is directed for both of them.

    "How dare you act up in a court martial?"

    Some of the guards reacted and started moving.

    Sam didn''t stop hitting the young man, he just kept on punching even though the young man fainted.

    Only when the guards came to pull him off, did he react.

    Right when the soldier held him, he leaped to the side and caught a hold of the leg of the guard. He used his weight to push the soldier down and moved to sit on the chest.

    Of course, while he tried to do that, he started punching the guard on the ribs and the side of the chest. Breaking ribs with every punch.

    The guard still held his spear and used its shaft to try and push Sam away by his chest.

    But used one of his hands to hold the spear down. He used all of his strength to push it on to his chest, before using his elbow to pound on the guard''s chest. The armor was pierced in no time.

    This time the pounding didn''tst long, other guards started jumping on Sam trying to attack him and save theirrade.

    One of them held Sam by his neck from behind and tried to drag him back while two more people went to check theirrade.

    Sam gritted his teeth and forcefully hit the other party on the crotch with the back of his head.

    The opponent fell down on his back along with Sam.

    Sam flipped over and took the mount position again. Once again the pounding began.

    There are very few people in the tent at the moment since ine told them to leave. And very few of them are guards. Only very important guards have a ce there.

    As for the rest, they are captains and vice captains of other squads. They didn''t dare rashly move. They are beware of taking a misstep. Even though Brice might have fallen from his pedestal, he is still in a higher position than most of them as he is a direct descendant of the n.

    They didn''t dare take action against him rashly and after looking at how Sam is handling the guards, they are even more unsure of it.

    Sam is not acting like a young man who lost most of his future prospects because he lost his legs. He is aggressive, precise, and ruthless.

    Just the way he crushed the crotch of the guard with the back of his head, sent shivers through the spines of most of them.

    ine looked at the whole scenario with a frown.

    He is happy that Sam finally reacted. But the reaction is a bit different than he expected. He did expect that he would fight back, but he didn''t expect him to win the upper hand this overwhelmingly. And even the fighting style is a bit different.

    Brice used to be very strategic when ites to fights. He never really made the first move unless he is absolutely sure that he would win.

    Most of the time, he let the opponent attack and used to tire them out before making a move.

    And in his current situation, he should be sticking to that even more. But he is aggressive like a wild beast. He is letting his anger do things. He is way too confident as if he doesn''t give a fuck about how the fight is going to turn out at all.

    Sam bashed the skulls of all the four guards that came. Just like how it was a bit hard for Sam to fight them without his legs, the guards are also a bit caught off guard by the unconventional attacks that areing at them.

    "Brice, do you even know what you are doing? This is a court martial."

    One of the judges finally spoke.

    Sam looked at the judge and said.

    "Why the fuck didn''t you speak up earlier then? If it is a court-martial, then just fucking pass the judgment. I already told you, I don''t have anything to say. Just finish this whole farce and be done with it.

    Pathetic scoundrels."

 Chapter 1708: Retaliation II

    <h4>Chapter 1708: Retaliation II</h4>

    The judge became furious the moment Sam spoke like that.

    After all, even though he is not the strongest of the bunch, he became a judge because of a reason. He is a person three generations ahead of Sam.

    He is one of the oldest people of the n. For Sam to call them scoundrels to their faces, it is an extreme act of disrespect.

    "How dare you talk to me like that? You fucking bastard.

    We should have kicked you out the moment your father is dead. A fatherless bastard is indeed rude, without any manners or character. That slut of a mother must have been the reason that you became like this."

    Everyone in the room turned dead silent.

    Even ine looked at the judge in shock. He didn''t expect the judge to speak out like this.

    Captains and Vice captains looked at the judge with their eyes widened in surprise. The people who were groaning on the ground also couldn''t help but hold their groans in their throats.

    Sam coldly looked at the Judge.

    His aura changed. The killing intenting from his body is beyond reason or measure.

    He dragged his body with the help of his arms as he slowly moved towards the tform in the front.

    No one spoke for a short while. Even the Judge realized in this time frame that what he said might have crossed a line.

    He has been a judge for far too long. He is even two generations older than the current n head.

    He was respected very much by everyone in the n. It seems like it has gotten to his head and he stayed on the top for far too long.

    He has spoke whatever he wanted all this while and nobody bothered to object to him. So, as soon as Sam said that one word, he couldn''t hold himself back and just spoke whatever he thought out loud.

    Only when he felt Sam''s or rather Brice''s killing intent did he realize what kind of blunder he has done.

    He remembered some previous cases that Brice was involved in.

    Brice was not the goody two shoes. Even though his reputation is such outside the n since he was known to go above and beyond for the sake of the n, within the n''s internal circle, his reputation is shit.

    He is known to be polite and calm in most cases, except for one. Any case that is rted to his mother.

    Anyone that ever shamed his mother was all taught a lesson by him. He broke their limbs, he bashed the skulls of his peers, and he even went as far as rip the crotch off of one of his elders when they tried something funny with his mother.

    And in every one of those cases, Brice was summoned to the Judgement hall and this Judge presided over a bunch of those.

    Whenever he saw the victim, he couldn''t help but feel sorry for them, no matter what kind of crime theymitted. Brice was that brutal.

    Now that he remembered all of them and also his cultivation level which was lower than Brice''s by a notch, he understood that things are not going to be easy for him.

    As Sam slowly dragged himself to the tform, ine just stayed silent.

    He didn''t speak, he didn''t stop and he didn''t even show any other reaction after that initial shock.

    And Sam himself looked through the thoughts of Brice. The memories that haunted the owner of his body went through Sam''s mind.

    Sam''s own anger is enough for him to react crazily when someonemented about him like this. And merging with Brice''s thoughts, his anger is overflowing.

    He is rageful.

    Before he knew it, his brain is clouded with desire for venegeance. He doesn''t want anything other than killing the old man that spoke out loud like that.

    "What are you doing? Go back and stand in your spot. You are going through a trial."

    The Judge screamed once again.

    "No, my trial is on a break for now. Whatever happens now is your trial. Get ready for it."

    As he spoke, Sam pushed the ground with his arms and leaped on to the stairs.

    "Guards, guards. Everyone stop him. Stop him froming up. It is a direct order."

    The judge screamed.

    The guards who went out, came back in. the captains and vice captains who were standing on the side all made a move together.

    They decided to stop Brice or rather Sam so that things won''t go to the point of no return.

    If a judge dies here, things wouldn''t go down well with some simple trials and punishments.

    Heads will roll. The whole military structure of the n will be shaken and they are in the middle of a war on top of that. There is no way, they would be able to handle all of this.

    So, they all made a move to stop Sam.

    Sam didn''t even turn back and just moved forward. As he climbed one stair after another, the nearest captian already reached him and tried to grab a hold of him from the rear.

    He learned from the guard who got his crotch crushed. So, he kept a distance.

    "Captain Brice, please calm down. We can resolve this issueter. We are in a middle of a war. We cannot have this kind of issue at our hands."

    He tried to reason with Sam.

    But of course, it didn''t work.

    Sam caught hold of the man''s arm and started crushing it with brute force.

    In response, the man frowned and groaned. His arm glowed with orange mes and he tried to escape Sam''s grip.

    Sam on the other hand didn''t care if his arm is burning.

    He forcefully pulled the arm forward and threw the captain over his shoulder. The throw was done to a side and the head of the captain crashed into the ground below the stairs.

    The other vice captains also made their move. They didn''t dare to attack Sam with some fatal moves, al they could do is either get close to him and tried to stop him with physical force or attack him with long range and elements just enough to wear him down.

    But everyone that came close to Sam was unable to stop him. He broke their hands, crushed their ribs, and whenever he was in a bind, he forcefully got out of it, even at the cost of hurting himself.

    The old judge was stunned at the rapid turn of events. Within two minutes so many things happened. Nobody expected Brice to be that strong. And nobody expected how reckless he is. He took a bunch of attacks that came at him without caring. He dodged them barely enough to not attack himself.

    He reached the top of the tform. ine stood up and looked at Sam.

    But there is no reaction from him.

    Sam turned to look at the old judge.

    There is not much space between them. He mmed his fists on the tform and leaped into the air. The impactunched him high into the air.

    The old man raised hisnd and blue lightning was thrown at Sam.

    Sam wasn''t able to maneuver himself much in mid-air, and the energy shield is something he cannot use.

    He just let the lightning hit him. But instead of just crashing down from the impact, his body conducted the lightning and let it pass through him. The fusion of lightning elements at thest moment, he was able to reduce the impact, even though it hurt him a lot.

    He fell right at the old man. He caught hold of the old man by his cor and punched him on the neck with his other hand from the side.

    The old man gasped for air.

    "Leave me. Get off me. You bastard."

    The old man tried to pull Sam away.

    One of the captains reached the tform and tried to do the same.

    When other judges were about to interfere, ine gestured for them to stop.

    The captain tried to pull Sam off of the judge, while another captain reached out to the rear of the old man and tried to pull him away from that side.

    Sam didn''t want to lose his grip, he used his second arm also and caught hold of the old man tightly.

    And when the force pulling him off increased, he used the spiritual energy at his fingertips to dig into the flesh of the old man. He kept a hold of the old man tightly.

    Sam was being constantly pulled off, but all it did is tear the flesh off of the old man bit by bit.

    The only good thing is that he wasn''t able to attack the old man actively. But when the force increased and his grip was reduced by a lot, Sam couldn''t hold back and bit the old man on the neck.

 Chapter 1709: Valley of Seven Passages

    <h4>Chapter 1709: Valley of Seven Passages</h4>

    Ten minutester.

    Sam sat on the floor and the old man who is on verge of death is lying beside him. A chunk of flesh is missing on his neck.

    The flesh on the back of the old man was torn apart. He is barely breathing.

    The other captains and vice captains who wanted to stop Sam are now standing as far away from him as possible to not to be his next victim.

    Sam''s body is riddled with wounds and he is panting heavily.

    ine looked at Sam with surprise and confusion. He knew that Brice would act up when his buttons are pushed, but this is beyond what he imagined.

    After a few moments, he shook his head off of these thoughts. Whatever Sam did is extremely beneficial to him at the moment, so there is no need for him waste his time and mull over useless thoughts. He can save those forter.

    "Everyone get down. We are now going to pass judgement on Captain Brice."

    All the captains and vice captains thanked ine in their hearts before leaving.

    ine looked at Brice with a smirk and said.

    "Brice, you have injured yourself in pursuit of glory, disregarding your importance for winning this war.

    You have refused to plead guilty and stubbornly stuck to the thought that you are right.

    You have acted up in the middle of a court martial and even attacked a judge over a minor disagreement in your views.

    You are to be banished to the Valley of Seven Passages. You and the people who acted as your aplice in your initial brash actions are to leave this tonight itself and go there.

    Depending on the Judge''s condition after the treatment, the rest of your punishment will be decided.

    You can leave now."

    After ten minutes.

    Sam is inside his tent once again. He was given some healing potions. But he is still soaked in blood.

    He is a bit surprised by ine''s actions.

    After the judgement, Sam clearly understood ine''s goal. All he wanted from Brice was to create amotion big enough so that he could justify the punishment of sending him to the Valley of Seven Passages.

    As for the forced and unnatural aggressive moment Brice had there with the judge and the other captains and vice captains, it is mere allowed so that there is an incident that ine could point out to, when he needed it.

    He can easily manipte and twist the words to fit whatever narrative he wants as long as the final result is what he wanted.

    The only variable that ine wouldn''t know is that Sam actually wants to go to the Valley.

    Because that is the name of the task location. At least the name given to the task location by Brice''s n members.

    There was a moment of regret for Sam when he was done dealing with that old man. In that moment of rity he regretted making such a rash move.

    But now he is d. If he knew that the punishment would be him going to the ce that he needs to go, he would haveplied a lot more faster. He would have just started beating the crap out of people way before than he did now.

    Anyway, he was d that things worked out the way he wanted.

    He checked the spatial storage of Brice to see if he could use anything. Apart from the loom there is nothing much he could use. Of course, there are some potions and pills that could help him a bit for his recovery and health.

    But there is not much he could with the weapons and other stuff.

    Sam really hoped, he at least had his forging skill to use. He would have made some legs and used them to move around. In fact, if these restrictions let him carve some wood, that would have been good enough as well.

    He could use the peg legs and some crutches to walk around a bit more freely.

    But when he tried to carve the wooden table he had in the tent, he was so clumsy and stupid to the point that not a single proper cut was made on the table no matter how much he tried.

    It is almost like he became dumb in a sense.

    He felt frustrated and all he could was take out the loom and do something with it. He decided to weave for a while before he was sent to the Valley.

    After a long time, he once again fell into a trance. He didn''t know he will reach the same state as before, but he is in a really good position as he explored the intricacies of energy in the thread form as kept on weaving the fabric.

    Soon, it is almost mid night before people came for him.

    "Captain Brice, your team has been assembled and you are to be deployed right away. You cannote back until further notice and the rest of your punishment has been determined."

    One of the guards came and informed.

    Brice dragged himself out of the tent. His vice captain, or the current captain of his former team is waiting along with three more people.

    "You four are my aplices? What criteria did they use to determine that?"

    Sam asked casually as he moved forward.

    "The people who didn''t ept their terms and deals are your aplices, captain. That is it."

    "Hmm, not too bad of a criteria then. At least they are straight forward to an extent.

    Anyway, how are we going to leave this ce? Don''t tell me, I have to walk until then. I am not in a mood for it and I don''t think I have to exin the reason why, right?"

    "Of course not young master. They let us use the space gate to the nearest base of the Valley and from there, they arranged a beast cart to take us."

    The Vice captain spoke again.

    "Thank you Vice. Since we are five people, there is no need to be so uptight and formal. Be a bit more casual and at the valley do whatever you want in normal time. You just need to act when I need you. Otherwise, you are free to focus on yourself."

    Sam said as they made their way to the gate silently.

    After using the space gate, they arrived at the base camp nearest to the valley.

    "So, the high and mighty captain Brice, finally fell a victim to the shitty politics."

    As soon as they arrived at the camp, Sam and the others were received by the camp''s person in charge.

    Memories went through Sam''s mind and he recognized who the other party is. Captain Wolf and he is the captain of the Grey wolf squad of the n.

    The Grey wolf squad, the only squad that ispletely devoid of any political affiliations with the n. They are fierce warriors that only care about their job. Fighting and defending the n.

    They don''t give a shit about the des or the authority of the n and they don''t support any of the young masters or elders. But that is one of the reasons, they grew to a point that they have utmost credibility and authority in the n''s military. Even the n head has to take their opinions into consideration before they made any major decision.

    If the squad supports a single young master, then it is almost guaranteed that they will be the next head.

    They are that influential and powerful.

    And currently there are only two young masters they acknowledge. Young master ine and young master Brice.

    Sam is getting more and more impressed with Brice''s track record in the military as he met these people. Even though he has the memories, he didn''t really go through them thoroughly.

    "Nice to meet you too Captain wolf."

    "I told you to relinquish your title as the young master and join my squad. You would have established great many deeds here and you would have been a perfect captain candidate after me.

    You could have retired early and be an elder of the n afterwards. Why do you have to go through all the suffering? An honest man like you is not suitable for the stupid politics. Now look at you, all the potential being wasted."

    Sam smiled wryly.

    He must say that''s the best proposal the original Brice could have gotten. But what can he do. He cannot change the decisions of the body''s original owner.

    "Anyway, it is all in the past. I heard you are serving the sentence in the Valley of Seven passages. That ce is fucking dangerous. So, try to be careful and stay safe. The only thing I can promise you is, when you apply for reinforcement with proper cause and proof, we will arrive there without any dy.

    Of course, everything has to go through proper procedure.

    Also, no bastard cane and get you from this side of the camp. Nobody can cross us and scheme against you. So, all the best."

 Chapter 1710: Perimeter

    Chapter 1710: PerimeterNext morning.

    Sam is sitting on a cart that is being dragged by some panther-type beasts.

    This is the beast cart arranged by the wolf squad to send him to the valley. His subordinates or rather his ''aplices'' are sitting alongside him.

    The Grey wolf squad let them stay there for the night and arranged their journey at dawn so that they could get adequate rest.

    Sam was really grateful for that as he got a few hours of Weaving done.

    Even at this moment, as they are traveling, he is ying with the energy threads in between his fingers.

    He is trying to see what he can do with these energy threads, what he could do with a fabric of thread that he could control through his loom. He is really looking forward to it. Even more than winning the task, he felt like a new door opens up to him once he realizes these skills.

    Within a few minutes, they reached arge mountain with a tunnel entrance.

    "You need to pass through that tunnel. Then you will reach the Valley. This is one of the seven passages leading to the valley.

    Even though it is called a valley, it is a massive area surrounded by mountains. It is as big as three cities and it is ruled by all kinds of strong beasts. Even our squad will have a hard time if they want to survive there.

    So, be careful and don''t go around causing yourself the trouble. Focus on surviving.

    And also, the captain told me to share this intel with you.

    Young masters of the other six ns are alsoing here. But their purpose is different. They are here to conquer this area so that they can take over the valley and use the remaining six passages to deal with the other ns.

    As you can understand this is a strategic point. We think that Captain ine left this ce in your hands, hoping that you will die in the hands of other ns. Even by any chance you manage to survive this, you will be taking the me for letting such a vital strategic ce go to the other ns.

    You already have so many cases on you. So, it will be detrimental to you going forward. So, please be careful and try to hold your ground around the passage for a while.

    Wolf squad has been trying to get the right to open a base in the valley for a long time. And this time we are not going to stop until the n approves. So, you have to hold on until wee here. Understood?"

    Sam looked at the Vice-captain of the Grey wolf squad who apanied them.

    "Don''t you think you are being too biased toward me? You guys will be in trouble if word goes out."

    "Who has balls big enough to trouble us? Let them say what they want. No matter what the report says, we know that you lost your legs fighting for the n. You should have been rewarded. But instead, you are being toyed around with because of these shitty politics.

    Captain got so furious that he wanted to bash ine in the face. He had to control his urge because of the war situation. He might just do it after things calm down a bit.

    Just be careful. It would be a pity for a guy like you to die with just this. All of our squad believes that you will make aeback even in your condition."

    "Thank you for your trust. And I will keep what you said in mind. Thank you so much."

    The vice-captain of the wolf squad left after that.

    Vice, Sam''s current subordinate took out a wheelchair and helped Sam get on it.

    Sam used his hands to ride it into the passage followed by four of his subordinates.

    Vice, is obviously the vice-captain. The remaining three are Erb, Rec, and Rib.

    Even though their names are weird, it is because of their situation as orphans as kids. They are really good inbat thought. In fact, that might be the reason they were too stubborn to ept the deal like the rest of his squad.

    After they reached a certain distance within the passage, it wentpletely dark. They used their spiritual sense to stay vignt and move forward.

    They came across some beasts in the middle. They were also of Astral ne, but much lower in terms of cultivationpared to them. So, they were easily dealt with.

    After traveling for almost two hours, they finally saw the other end of the tunnel.

    But as soon as they came out of the tunnel, they were greeted with a loud roar.

    *ROAR*

    Vice lunged forward as he covered Sam and attacked the w that came at them.

    It is arge beast that looked like a liger. mes areing out of its fur and at the point of impact of the w and Vice''s spear, a ming storm was created.

    The remaining three people immediately came forward and covered Sam up to shield him.

    Sam just sat there without doing anything.

    But he was surprised to see a beast like this here. One must say that very few people have the same level of knowledge as him regarding beasts. But this is one that he couldn''t identify. The only thing he managed to identify about it is that it looked like a Liger.

    A crossbreed between a Lion and a tiger. But apart from that, he couldn''t figure out what type of lion crossed with what type of tiger to create this.

    He must say that the beast is in a league of its own though.

    It is powerful, and skilled and its instincts are off the charts.

    There is no information about that even in the memories of Brice. This is definitely one of the hybrids that haven''t been identified and added to the book yet.

    The team cooperated well as they fought with the beast.

    Sam thought of something and said.

    "Don''t defend me. Go and fight it directly. I can handle myself."

    As he spoke, Sam pushed himself down onto the ground and took out his loom.

    The team was surprised, but they were not in a position to be distracted. The beast is literally on the same level as them, but it is still handling three people on a proper equal footing. One mistake and they will be its meal of the day.

    As they are fighting, Sam set up the loom and closed his eyes. He took a deep breath and started weaving.

    The weaving started.

    The fabric slowly formed as Sam rapidly operated the loom. And the spiritual energy that enveloped every part of the fabric thread by thread isced with fire elemental energy.

    The fabric formed and took shape within no time. Even though it looked slow, within the next two minutes there is a square foot of fabric and he controlled the energy of the fabric to make it float.

    The loom and the threads attached to the fabric and the loom acted as a medium as he carefully controlled the energy concentration.

    He changed the energy and concentrate it in different positions of the fabric. Within a moment.

    *BOOM*

    Arge fiery explosive bullet was shot out of the fabric as it was blown into pieces. The bullet hit the liger on the side and made it crash into the forest.

    The team members were shocked.

    They didn''t expect that Sam would be providing backup like this. But the surprise is a pleasant one. So, they are delighted with this as they continue to fight.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The explosions kept oning and before they knew it the Liger was down.

    "What kind of technique is that captain? I haven''t seen that before."

    Vice ran to Sam and asked.

    Sam kept his loom away inside the storage before he opened his eyes.

    "I don''t have legs, I need topensate for it with something else. So, I am exploring options. Anyway, don''t waste any time. The beast here is dead. Scout the area and lure any of the beasts here one by one. We will create a perimeter around this point and create our base camp right at the entrance of the passage.

    That is our first task and it should be done by the afternoon. Understood?"

    "Yes, Sir."

    All four of them saluted and went on to do their tasks. There are indeed some beasts left over in the surroundings. So, they lured them one by one and finished them off at the entrance. After some time, they made sure that there are no more beasts in the area before they set up a perimeter.

    They stripped the beasts'' corpses of anything edible and useful. They used the rest of the carcasses to create the barricade around.

    After finishing the barricade, they settled down and one of the team members who had a fire element started cooking some fresh meat they just farmed from these beasts.

 Chapter 1711: Plan

    Chapter 1711: n"Do you guys have any information on who ising from the other six ns?"

    Sam asked as he munched on the meat.

    "No young master. But there are very few options for the other ns to send. So, it wouldn''t be hard for us to find. But we are not at any base right now, so it would be a bit troublesome.

    Maybe we could go back to the Grey wolf base and get some info."

    "No need. Don''t go to the Grey wolf base unless I tell you to and certainly don''t go for some reason as petty as this.

    Anyway, we don''t have to worry about who ising from the other side any time soon.

    We have a certain goal in mind. And the first of them all is to scout the surroundings.

    Explore every single part of it. All the beasts that are there, all the herbs, that are part of it, you should be aware of every single thing about the terrain here. One person for each section. Divide the area and Explore as much as you can."

    "Okay, Sir. But what about you sir? We need to ce someone here to keep an eye on you. We cannot leave you unattended in your current situation."

    "Don''t worry about me. I am also going to go for the exploration. Just do as you are told."

    "Sir, but¡­"

    "I told you. I am also going for exploration. So, just start as soon as you are done. Don''t make me repeat myself. I am pretty pissed about everything and I have limited patience."

    The three of them looked at Sam with confused expressions. They couldn''t understand the way Sam is speaking to them. His behavior has changed. The change is so drastic that they would have mistaken him for another person.

    Sam noticed that his behavior doesn''t align with the behavior of Brice, but he didn''t care. One day is already up since he came here. He only has six more days. So, he has to finish the task as soon as possible.

    Unlike him, the rest of the yers will being here with support. Even if they didn''t get into the bodies of the young masters that areing, he is sure that they will find a way to be part of the entourage of the young masters.

    They are going to be here sooner orter and if his guess is right, they definitely will have full bodies.

    Sam neither has the time nor manpower to conquer enoughnd. Of course, it would be a general case. But he always has a way around these things and even now, he is going to find one. But for starters, it is better for whatever manpower he has to go and scout the area so things would get started.

    After their meal, they immediately made their move.

    Sam pushed himself in his wheelchair. The terrain is obviously notfortable, but he still managed to get by.

    He spread his spiritual sense wide open as he tried to scout as much area as possible.

    While he is doing that, he is also mulling over what kind of beasts he wille across.

    The Liger actually triggered some curiosity in his head. It is not every day that hees across such a unique variant hybrid creature.

    After that, while having his meal, Sam skimmed through Brice''s memories one more time to find out more about the situation of this realm.

    Since this is an isted world, there are many unique pieces of information that caught Sam''s eye. One of them is obviously their knowledge of formations and inscriptions. They are limited to a certain school of thought. This can be said about the rest of the arts too.

    There is very limited knowledge and research that happened within the realm.

    And then, there is information he gathered about the resources here.

    This information shocked Sam.

    This realm is full of valuable minerals. Whether they are metals suitable for weapons or rocks suitable for construction, this ce has everything.

    And this rich resourceful terrain also has unique vegetation which led the whole world to have a very unique flora and fauna that evolved over time.

    There are some unique beasts in Brice''s memories that Sam was not exactly aware of. As for this Liger, even Brice doesn''t know anything about it.

    It is a whole new species. Sam examined the body after they killed it, but he wasn''t able to identify the parent beasts of this hybrid. It was that unique.

    In a way, in Sam''s opinion, this is one of the biggest treasure troves he has evere across. The realm doesn''t have any other connection to the rest of the world. The only way out is that they hit the Divine ne cultivation and tear open the void before they leave this ce.

    But it is hard for them toe back.

    So the strongest peaks at the peak of the Astral ne and the tiny gap between that peak and the start of the Divine ne cultivation.

    By sheer luck, Sam is here.

    In this treasure trove and to his bad luck he didn''te here with his real body. He came here like a soul and Sam couldn''t use any of the skills he had umted from his original body. The only good thing is that he is resourceful enough to think of a way out.

    He decided that he will gather every possible resource thisnd has to offer. And he will start by marking down whatever resources that this valley has to offer.

    One of the reasons the ns coveted this ce is because the valley is one of the resource-rich areas.

    He believes that this would be the biggest p in the face of Hel who made him go through this plight. He will conquer this whole ce. Not just for the task. He will invade this ce with the Dusk organization and establish a connection with the outside world.

    He will colonize the ce and share these people''s faith in the gods that are involved in this round of thepetition.

    He will p them in their and whatever he gets from here, he will use it against the gods. He will use every singlest resource he gets here will be used against the gods and will aid in their destruction.

 Chapter 1712: Explore

    Chapter 1712: ExploreSam moved on his wheelchair and moved to the spot that he was supposed to scout. The first thing he did is try to check the ground for any minerals.

    He might not have any ess to the myriad of skills he painfully gathered over the years. But there is one thing the gods cannot take away from him no matter how much they tried.

    It is his knowledge.

    Sam might not be able to use energy vision, observation and such, but he sure as can observe with his own two eyes. He can use the knowledge from all the things he studied and figure out what he want the old fashioned way.

    He checked the samples of earth and used his spiritual sense to the maximum as he observed the nature of the soil.

    There are no mineral traces around. But the soil is filled with a lot of wood elemental energy. Sam went ahead and checked the surrounding vegetation to see if he wille across something interesting.

    And within a few minutes, he came across a patch of trees. The trees are exceptionally ck. Their trunk, bark, branches and even the leaves and roots are thick dark ck.

    They are sticking out like a sore thumb in the middle of this lush green vegetation.

    Sam tried to break a low hanging branch that he could reach. But it didn''t break easily. He has to put a lot of effort and use his spiritual energy and he could barely break one branch. And it was an extremely nasty break.

    Sam is surprised by the wood material. It is extremely strong and dextrous. Its stic limit is way too high for wood.

    It has both high tensile strength andpressive strength. Even its shear strength is not bad.

    ''This will make a good bow. I wonder why no one bothered to check this out until now. Even Brice didn''t have any memory of a material like this.''

    He thought to himself and pretty soon, he got the answer he was looking for.

    As he is examining the ck wood, the earth trembled a bit before arge hole appeared under the wheel chair.

    *CRASH*

    A snake popped out of the ground and crashed into the wheelchair.

    Sam was thrown off and the wheel chair was broken.

    He hit a branch on the top and fell on the ground. Arge snake with dark ck scales bared its fangs at Sam.

    It is oozing wood elemental and Earth elemental energy.

    Sam is surprised by its appearance. Because it is another beast that he never came across.

    "To think I get to see two new beasts back to back."

    He muttered to himself and sat upright. He got ready tobat the beast.

    He once again skimmed thorugh Brice''s memories to confirm if he saw the beast before or not. And there is nothing of that sorts. It is indeed a new beast.

    The Closest simrity it has is to a ck Scaled Viper. But it is a beast of Dark element and Venom. The only simrity is the appearance.

    Sam injected his spiritual energy into his arms as he got ready to right.

    He is at a clear disadvantage. The beast is big in size. It is highly agile and flexible. Meanwhile, Sam''s movements are hindered to a great extent. He cannot wield any weapons too. All he has is the weaving skill.

    Since he cannot even use Loom in situations like these, he has to stick to normal hand weaving with tapestry needles.

    There is nothing else. But at least, those needles will act as a weapon since they are made of a very high quality material. Sam didn''t bring out the needles directly though.

    He is thinking of how to use these needles to the maximum efficiency while he waited for the snake to the make the first move.

    The snake expanded its mouth of the maximum and tried to swallow Sam as a whole.

    Sam mmed the earth with his fists and used the recoil to move to the side. He caught the snake''s head while he was in mid-air. He circled both of his arms around it and held it in a choke hold.

    Since his arms are not long enough to cover the whole neck of the snake, he could exert more pressure and try to crush it.

    The snake started struggling. It swung its neck violently and tried to get rid of Sam. It crashed into the trees, and rocks in the surroundings, but Sam didn''t let go. He tried to get used to its movement and after he finally did, two tapestry needles appeared in his hands.

    He closed his eyes and shifted all of his focus to the needles. The energy turned into threads and soon, they threads from both needles intertwined.

    The link between two needles became thicker and stronger. Within a few moments, Sam controlled the energy threads to shorten a bit, but he didn''t leg on the both ends.

    He reinforced the arms with extra spiritual energy. As the thread tightened, the grip around the neck of the snake tightened. And as the two palms slowly got closer, the snake felt its neck getting crushed more and more.

    Sam didn''t want to kill this beast, if it allows him to. So, when the snake stopped struggling in itsst breath. He let go of the grip. The snake crashed into the ground.

    Sam collected the samples of the roots of the tree with ck wood and the samples of the soil around it. The snake was left there unconscious. Sam tried to identify the tendons it had to cut them down and made it unable to move.

    He stored the samples in the storage ring and scouted the remaining part of the area.

    There is nothing else other than some smallmon beasts. Sam killed those beasts without and brough the deadbodies back along with him.

    As for the snake, he left it there only and went back to their base camp.

    "I cleared my area. All the beasts are gone. Extend the perimeter there. Also, I drew some blueprints of the formations. Rec use your dark elemental energy and the corpses toy down those formations. Do not use normal gs and nodes."

    Everyone was dumbfounded.

    "But, Captain. You said, we are only scouting."

    "Yes, you guys are only scouting. That doesn''t apply to me. Anyway, there is a snake that I subdued and crippled in that area. Bring that back safely. Don''t heal it and don''t give it a chance to escape. Don''t kill it.

    I want it alive.

    Bring it to the base camp first and proceed with the rest of the tasks. But before all of that, give me aplete report of your scouting."

    "But Cap.."

    "Shut up and do what I say. I already told you. My situation is quite different from before. So, I am pretty pissed at everything and anything that could annoy me. For the next week, just do what I say. We are going to conquer this ce as much as we can. We are going to upy most part of the valley before by the end of the week.

    Do you understand?"

    Sam didn''t get any response which made him frown.

    "DO YOU UNDERSTAND?"

    He screamed at them and all four of them shivered for a moment before they saluted.

    "YES, SIR."

    "Good, now start with your reports and fuck off."

    Sam said as he sat down.

    The reports were done within no time.

    "I will deal with these three four ces one by one.

    While I work on the first one, the four of you finish the tasks I gave you. By the time I am done there, Vice,e and meet me at the second spot, the remaining three go back and start scouting new areas. When we are done with the remaining three, the four of your once again deal with the clean up and formation set ups.

    Do you guys understand?"

    "Yes, Sir."

    They left to finish the tasks Sam gave.

    Three Hours passed and Sam found a couple of herbs and another new beast.

    He captured the beast forcefully and collected the samples of the herbs. And they also collected a good chunk ofnd in that time.

    At least they took over one-twelfth of the total valley which is already a great headstartpared to others.

    From what the Grey wolf squad told them, the young masters will most likely visit that night or the next morning by thetest.

    Even if they visited that night and set up the camp and other stuff, they won''t be conquering much of the ce. The progress would be minimal. So, Sam doesn''t have to worry too much and if they progress just like this through the whole night, he will have a much more significant headstart that could counter the man power other people have.

    But he cannot move by himself that night like he did until then. So, he drew up the ns for his team to move around, while he nned to do something else.

 Chapter 1713: Blankets

    Chapter 1713: nketsSam sent the team away after a break.

    Meanwhile, he sat down in the centre of the base at a certain spot.

    He took out a bunch of scrolls and spread them on the ground. All of thembined created a map of the areas they have already explored and Sam started drawing the formations he made the team members put up.

    Even though Sam noticed that he cannot ce the formations himself and appear to be making dumb mistakes when he used normal nodes or any other material as nodes for that matter, he also figured that if he used his subordinates as the builders of the formation and all he did is draw the formation on a paper, there is no problem.

    All his skills disappeared. His arms are magically bing clumsy when he is setting up a normal formation, but the knowledge is not disappearing.

    He can utilize his knowledge but not skills.

    This actually didn''t take much from him in this aspect.

    The saying Knowledge is Power didn''te for no reason.

    Knowledge is indeed power. When it is possessed by the right person. Not every tom dick and harry can use this power well. But luckily Sam is not a Tom, neither Dick nor a Harry.

    After drawing all the formations on the scrolls, he made some calctions on the side. After that, he took out a loom while the scrolls are stillid down.

    He started weaving. But this he didn''t have threads on the loom. He is weaving with pure energy.

    The energy became visible as it is slowly injected into the loom and one could see it being divided, spread and turned into a bunch of energy threads which is turning into an energy fabric.

    The process is slow. But the fabric is very neatly woven and cleanly constructed. It floated slightly above the ground level and it spread around Sam.

    Since Sam could control the energy that came out of the loom, he is able to spread it evenly without any destabilization of the energy. If a person could see the scene now, they would be seeing arge fine nket slowly expanding over the whole area.

    Within an hour, Sam covered the whole base camp and covered up until the perimeter.

    Then came the real challenge.

    Now the nket is spread. The energy is stable at the moment. But that is only because Sam is connected to the nket with the loom.

    He has to three things before he could remove the loom.

    First one, he has to keep the nket existent and stable even after he removes the loom.

    The second thing is that after he connects the nket to the formation, he has to leave an opening so that he can connect to the nketter on and work with the formation through the nket.

    The final thing is that he should make sure that his allies and him are not effected by the nket while he should be able to use it when the enemies are here and he should be able to manipte the strings of the fabric as he liked afterwards.

    There is also an additional task which gives him some easier time when he is connecting this nket to the next one.

    Since this is the first area he is doing this, Sam had to spend some time here.

    But after spending some time there, he got a hang of it and moved to the second area.

    The process went on for the whole night and he only stopped by the time of sunset. In this time, he made nkets of pure spiritual energy, different elemental energies and even nkets that have multiple elemental energies.

    The subordinates came with a bunch of beasts they captured along with the samples of soil and vegetation they collected.

    They also got the reports of the new formations they set up.

    "Boss, from the estimation given to us by our n, we already took over one-eighth of the valley.

    Out of which a little more than half waspletely set with the formations and you also marked your second visit that you madest night.

    We already set up a basic perimeter and nted some formation discs around the remaining area that is surrounding the first area. So no matter whoes into that territory we will be notified.

    I think we should be a lot more careful now. Since people from other ns might be here. If they set up their basecamps, they will also start exploring now. And if we divide the whole valley into seven equal parts and divide them for different ns, we already almost explored all thend under our n.

    We do another rapid expansion like we didst night, we will be moving into the territory of other young masters."

    "Hmm, dividing the territory is a good idea. Even assigning to other n young masters is also a good idea. Since it will be much easier to remember the territories.

    But that doesn''t mean, we are going to sit back and rx. Why the fuck do you think I have been preparing so much.

    We will indeed slow down the process. But not by much. We will move in a simr way. The only difference is the area sections we made before are no longer the same. We are going to pick a much smaller section. You also have to be a bit more discreet in setting up the formations.

    For that, you will be burying the beast bones and use the buried objects are nodes. These nodes cannot be visible to the rest.

    That is the basic gist of it. Do you understand? If you have any questions, this is the moment for you ask."

    "But Cap¡­"

    Vice was about start his usual dialogue and this time all he needed was a re from Sam to shut up.

    "Just do as you are told. If you encounter any subordinates from other ns, don''t try to engage. If they are lower level than you, just capture them and bring them here to the base camp.

    If they are of equal level, do one proper sneak attack and escape immediately. Don''t try to kill them, don''t try to confirm if they are killed or if your sneak attack has propernded, don''t try to see if you can capture them.

    Justunch a proper sneak attack and escape immediately to the base camp.

    Just see if they are following you and if they are use the special code I taught you to give signal to the rest of your team members and me. Even if they whole camp is tailing you, your job is to safely return to the Perimeter number 2.

    I will handle the rest.

    And one thing to remember. If you know for sure that the person you encountered is stronger than you, leave.

    Those are the rules that you are not allowed to disobey no matter the cost.

    It is an order for you guys toe back here. So, be careful."

    "Okay, Sir."

    "Leave now."

    Sam sent them away and started dealing with more calction and such. He is sure that the situation is very hard to handle. The new method that he is using is also not proven to be local or normal. He is looking forward to it, but what will be the consequence.

 Chapter 1714: Team with a Map

    Chapter 1714: Team with a MapSam sighed as he moved to start with his nketing once again.

    He figured that he will weave for a few more hours before going back to the beasts and dealing with them. While weaving though, his thoughts couldn''t help but wander around.

    Even though Sam is focused on this task too much and acting all pissed off, he is really impressed by the loyalty and actions of the group members.

    Brice wasn''t able to do much about keeping his team intact when shit hit the fan. Maybe, he wasn''t able to showcase how important his team is to him directly. But the people that understood him are truly loyal.

    If Sam was in their ce, once their boss acted like an asshole, he would definitely suspect something is wrong.

    But Sam couldn''t do much about his behavior. He knew that these four people are loyal to Brice no matter what, so he instead of trying to act like Brice and taking his time to convince them, he decided to just take a much more aggressive approach in making them do the tasks for the start.

    At least things are moving fast because of this just like he wanted.

    He sat there weaving for a few hours and went back to the base camp. The team also returned.

    "Captain, we didn''t encounter the other troops, our expansion is going well so far. But we did see some traces of the beasts moving away. It seems like the young master that has a passage opposite to us hase. The beasts areing mostly from that direction."

    "Good job with the observation. Let the beastse. I am nning on something in the outerareas. It would be a lot different than before.

    So, for now just let me know what these beasts that came running from those areas are doing. I need a detailed report about them.

    We are on it, young master. We already prepared a report about some of the beasts that we came across by chance. We will be finishing off the rest."

    "Good. The n for dealing with the other troops won''t change. If youe across them, only capture them alive if you are sure they are certainly weaker than you. Proceed with the rest just like I instructed you before."

    "Yes, young master."

    After they are gone, Sam went to the captured beasts at the base.

    These beasts are still injured andpletely shackled. Sam wanted to see if he could use a soul contract. Luckily it seems like it is not considered a skill that should be blocked. He cannot use any of this beast taming and contracts rted to that though.

    Soul Contract would be bound through the spiritual energy signature of the soul of the two parties. If, he made the beast sign the contract, it would be just as effective as signing a beast contract with it.

    And since it would be linked to Sam''s soul, even after making a contract through this body, the snake would be connected to his soul. So, when hees back to this realm with his real body, he would already have some beastpanions waiting for him here to act as his aides.

    But to establish a soul contract, he must make the beast obey himpletely without using any of his usual beast-taming skills. This would be difficult as the only way left for him is to use the brute force method.

    Submitting the beast through crude strength and making it forcefully obey him.

    But that is not exactly Sam''s way of doing things. When he thought of maybe using Beast tongue, he realized that Hel blocked that too. For some reason, speaking a differentnguage turned out of be a skill.

    He could only count on seeing and letting their soulsmunicate first. Because, Sam is sure that his soul is also modified to be the fusion of his beasts and himself because of his cultivation. Maybe he would be able get past the barrier of these beasts and make them follow him willingly.

    So, until afternoon, he started doing that.

    Meanwhile, on the other side of the valley, a team muchrger than that is under the control of Sam set up their camp.

    A young man has over four dozen soldiers all at the various stages of Astral ne, gathered together as they set up the perimeter and their base camp.

    Out of all of them, one young man who is obviously not the leader, held hung a bow on his back as he jumped from one tree to another making his way away from the camp.

    He channeled his spiritual energy into his eyes as he looked into the horizon.

    "I will be damned. This guy has pretty good abilities. I wish I had this eye bloodline. It seems like this body is prettypatible for archery. I wonder what others got."

    It is none other than Arkiv. He got into the body of a young man who is a very close aide of the young master that came from one of the ns. He didn''t get a chance to be the person inmand, but he is not far off as he is second inmand.

    He started exploring deep into the forest so that he could figure out which parts of this ce are easier to conquer.

    Since thepetition is about thergest piece ofnd a person could conquer, he decided to go with an approach where he would conquer the areas within the surroundings separately. He would make the soldiers hold down these areas which will also make it harder for other teams to track and crack open.

    He doesn''t know if he has a higher chance to winpared to others, but he is sure that he could at least put up a good fight and not rank too low.

    Meanwhile, on a different end, someone else is also in a simr situation. They are also second inmand, but they are not as okay with it as Arkiv. In fact, they are pretty pissed.

    It is none other than Dayus.

    He is currently standing beside a young woman who is the person inmand. She has a map at hand as sheid it down on a table within a tent. Surrounded by all of her key subordinates in leadership positions, she has a troop of over a hundred and twenty soldiers.

    If the other yers saw this, they would be cursing the gods and Hel like it was their born duty to do so.

    Because this is thergest group of people a yer has at their disposal. And to top it off, the map is an added bonus.

    The youngdy inmand looked at the map and said.

    "All the other young masters must be here. I heard that Brice is also dispatched here."

    "As soon as she spoke, everyone was stunned."

    "They really sent Brice here? I thought he would be in themand center somewhere. After losing his legs, I thought their n would be focusing on utilizing his brain to the maximum. Why would they keep sending him to this shit hole."

    The person in charge of the scouting team spoke.

    Thedy nodded and said.

    "I thought the same. But it seems like ine is finally preparing for thest showdown of young masters in their n. It is a bit early, but the people of their caliber, you cannot say it is not expected.

    Anyway, we have two tasks at the moment, one is obviously to gain as muchnd as possible within this cannon. The other is to try and poach Brice. If that is not possible, at least try to strike an alliance with him."

    Once again everyone is shocked.

    "Strike an alliance with him? Poach him? Boss, are you feeling alright? You do know that Brice is the young master of the n right? He is even in next in line. ine might have an advantage. But that doesn''t mean Brice''s future is over.

    I bet that ine is not ready to lose a mind like Brice just to be the next head. After he achieves that, he will use all of his strength to protect Brice and keep him beside him. He is that talented.

    Poaching him is almost impossible. We would have a better chance of conquering the whole of the valley by ourselves."

    "Well, if I didn''t know that he is humiliated by getting beast urine poured all over his face, I would have thought the same. He is in his most vulnerable state. If there is any chance of poaching it, this is it.

    And anyway, luckily we also have a map of this territory charted by some of our troops. They covered one-fourth of the valley, we have an upper hand. ording to their estimation, this is the direction where Brice will most likely be and that is within the one-fourth of the charted territory.

    Let''s conquer thisnd faster and meet him."

 Chapter 1715: Hilda

    Chapter 1715: HildaThe youngdy''s name is Hilda. She wore full body armor that is shining so brightly that a person miles away could see it.

    Dayus looked at her and cursed under his breath.

    He didn''t like her one bit. From the memories he got from the original owner of the body, he learned of her stories and why she dared to wear that shining golden armor.

    She started wearing that as soon as she hit thete stage of the Astral ne Consummate Stage. From that day onwards, she became strong enough to be invulnerable against any assassination that could happen from a long range.

    So, it is like a deration of her courage. Challenge for the world toe and kill her if they dared to do so. If they have thepetence to do so.

    As a petty and small man, there is no way he could like a person like her. A person so arrogant and confident in herself because of the abilities she strived hard to get.

    The only thing he liked in the whole situation is the map. A map that was created by a lot of explorers. They put a lot of effort in this.

    "Hilda, I would like to talk to you alone."

    Dayus asked as he looked at the rest of the candidates with a sense of disdain.

    "What is it? I am pretty sure you can talk whatever you want to talk about here. There is nothing that you need to talk to me about that''s personal."

    Hilda is pretty aversive to Dayus. The original owner of the body and her didn''t have a very pleasant rtionship. At least for some time. Before they got along well. But the guy wanted more and wanted to marry her for her status and power.

    Once those intentions were known, she kept him at arms bay.

    Normally, she would have granted a private audience for him, but now, there is no chance that is happening.

    "I think we just need to prioritize on building our control in this valley.

    The initial stages of upation is pretty important and we need to make sure that our foundation is as solid as it could get. The war over the control of the valley is going to continue for a long time in the fure and we will beying the groundwork for that.

    What is the point of trying to poach some washed-up and crippled young master from another n. It would be nothing more than a waste of our time and resources."

    "The probability of a long war is the very reason that I am trying to strike an alliance with Brice. He has a mind for it. In a long-standing war, none of the young masters are going to be a match for him. Even the elder members of the ns will have trouble matching their wits in a war.

    If he can be poached in exchange for some resources and time, I would very well spend that happily.

    You are second inmand of the troops here. You should be well aware of that. Don''t make me repeat such obvious things? Anyway, our troops are going to move and you are taking the lead to the second scouting team.

    Even if we have the map, that is not enough for us to be assured about the beasts'' locations and their strength. We need to scout everything again. But it won''t be as hard as the first one.

    So, keep up with the primary scout team and finish the task as soon as possible."

    Hilda didn''t even give them a chance to Dayus to voice his opinions. She simply treated him like a robot that needs to obey her orders. In a way, that is literally his job, but Dayus doesn''t have the self-awareness for that.

    He could only grit his teeth and think of ways to get the upper hand and authority over the troops.

    On the other sides, the situations of the remaining yers are definitely not as good as Dayus. No one else had a map and none of them surely had same level of troops.

    But they all had better facilitiespared to Sam and they started their expansion.

    Everyone has a certain level of authority and they acted as aggressively as they could do within the bounds of that authority.

    That is already the second day, so everyone is extra aggressive in their approach.

    By evening, they more or less upied a small area of thend.

    Meanwhile, back at the base camp.

    By sunset.

    Sam heaved a sigh as he looked at therge ck snake. He smiled slightly as he looked at the big stubborn beast. He has strived so hard to try andmunicate with the snake. Since the snake is of that level of cultivation, it certainly understood what Sam said.

    But it still took a lot of time, before he made it through the thick scaly head of the creature and convince it to try and make a contract with Sam.

    And once he cracked one, the remaining beasts followed through pretty easily.

    After finishing that, Sam assigned the beasts to his team members. They will be participating in defending the area. But of course, they have a whole different task that they need to do after his task here is done.

    This time when the team members came back, they came back with a guest. They captured someone from a different team.

    "So, you are from the north-west. What''s the speciality of your young master. What are his skills?"

    "Captain, his young master has lightning elemental affinity. He is a warrior mage with greatbat ability. But he is not exactly known for hismand ability. He is not really leader material."

    The answer came from Vice.

    Sam just stayed silent as he looked at the young man while thinking who could have taken that young master''s ce.

    Dayus and Donner, are the only lightning element users among the yers.

    "What weapon does your young master use usually?"

    The captive was a bit frightened by Sam and didn''t know what to do. But when he saw the killing intent enveloping him, all he could do was answer in fright.

    "S¡­ Sword."

    "So, did he recently change his weapon or something? Did he showcase any new habit or behavior? No matter how small it is, I would like to know.

    If you tell me that, there is a good chance that you will be alive after I am done here. Or, I would just kill you and capture another one of your teammates. Maybe I will get my answers from them."

    The captive doesn''t know what to say. He could only think deeply to see if he noticed anything. But he couldn''t think of any noticeable changes.

    It''s because his interaction is very less with the young master. He is just a lower-level soldier. He barelyes across the young master. Anything that he might have noticed is very superficial and no matter which yer took over that body, they wouldn''t be stupid enough to make an obvious change in the basic bodynguage.

    Two minutes in and Sam knew there is not much use to the soldier. He thought of whether to dispose of him or to use him for some other purpose. He couldn''t make an immediate decision as he got multiple ideas.

    "Just keep him imprisoned for a while. We can deal with himter on.

    Anyway, just continue with the n. We will see the results by tonight and decide on how to proceed by tomorrow. Meanwhile, let me weave for a while.

    But do not forget. The most important rule. You should be alive. I don''t care if you lead those soldiers straight to the center of the base. As long as you are alive, it is considered a win even if they attack the base with all of their troops."

    "Yes, Captain."

    They left and Sam went back to weaving and this time, he started weaving real nkets that arebined with the energy nkets. Objects on their own.

    He looked at the departing soldiers and hoped they woulde back alive as he set up the loom if there is one thing that Sam doesn''t wish to happen in this task is the death of Brice''s soldiers.

    He took over Brice''s body and apparently the loyalty of Brice''s subordinates along with it. He believed that it is his basic obligation to keep them all alive and keep this body in the same shape as he obtained it.

    Time passed as Sam worked with the loom. He created fabrics with different elemental energies. nkets are of different shapes and sizes. As he created therge pile by evening, he started folding them and rolling them into different shapes before storing them in the spatial ring.

    Within this time, the soldiers brought two more people in.

    They didn''t attack anyone yet. But one of the two soldiers that came is actually a bit useful.

 Chapter 1716: Spy

    Chapter 1716: Spy"So, your young master is a spear user. A pure warrior."

    "Yes, Sir."

    The soldier directly revealed info without any pressure from Sam. It is almost like he is way too eager to answer Sam''s questions.

    "Or are there any other spear users among you guys?"

    "No, Sir. In fact, spear users are very rare in our n. Our young master is the only one who went for a staff-type weapon instead of a de-type weapon. In fact, he is the odd one out of the current generation."

    "So, it''s easy to distinguish. Did you notice any changes in your young master''s behavior?"

    "Yes, Sir. He became a lot calmer and moreposed all of a sudden. It is almost as if he is a whole different person. Usually, he is rash and does things without thinking. Always angry at even the slightest things.

    He was righteous and honorable, but that always made him lose in a battle of wit and cunning amongst his peers."

    "You seem awfully talkative and way too generous for a guy who got busted. Are you supposed to be saying all these things to an enemy like this? Ever heard of loyalty?"

    Sam asked sarcastically.

    "Don''t question my loyalty, sir. I am very much loyal to my master. It is just that the young master I am apanying at the moment is not really my master. In fact, my task was to sabotage the chances of the young master seeding in conquering any part of the valley. So, I am doing that by giving you all the information.

    In fact, I noticed the traces of your activity a bit. That is why, I was roaming around there, trying to find someone. Since you already made so much progress, you seemed to be the most likely candidate that could help us take down the young master."

    "So, are you alone in the young master''s camp? Or do you have more people in there trying to deal with him?"

    "Except for the close aides. Four people to be exact, everyone else in my young master''s camp is a spy. Some are here to make detailed reports of what is going on, so they will follow the young master''s orders all the same.

    But the rest are here to either sabotage or kill the young master here directly. But everyone has a different mission and method in mind. I felt this method makes more sense.

    I will do whatever you want me to do. Let me work with you until this whole fiasco ends. Once the young master realizes that he has zero chance to conquer this, I will immediately leave. You can even exchange me for some ransom from my original master.

    I hope you can consider this young master Brice."

    Brice was really surprised by the proposal. He couldn''t help but feel extremely lucky all of a sudden. In a way, this is beyond luck. Without much trouble, he got a voluntary spy in another yer''s camp.

    Of course, as soon as he realized that this is too good to be true, he immediately doubted this guy''s motives.

    What if this guy is just spewing bullshit so that he can escape?

    That question popped in his head.

    As if he knew that, the soldier spoke.

    "I can sign a soul contract with you. I know you cannot trust me, but the soul contract will. You can put whatever uses you want. All I need is that you will let me go safely without any threat to my life from you or your camp."

    Sam raised his eyebrow and was really intrigued by this guy.

    "Okay then. I will give you a chance.

    Describe the fabric of your tent. What kind of cloth are you guys using?"

    The soldier was stunned. Even Sam''s team. They didn''t expect Sam to ask this. But when they thought of what he did with the loom when they fought against the liger, they became a bite excited.

    The soldier was still perplexed when he carefully exined the details of the fabric of the tent.

    Sam started weaving.

    This time, he was faster, way cleaner, and way more precise than he did thest time. Before long he had a bunch ofrge cloth pieces in his hand.

    Sam gave them to the soldier and said.

    "I don''t know how you will do it. But all you have to do isy down these fabrics as tents. You can either rece the existing ones or you cany them down on the existing tents. And if the cement of the tents you have given as well as the formationyout that you believe was ced in your camp, then I will get some signal as soon as you finish setting this up."

    "That''s it? That is all I have to do?"

    "Yeah. As soon as you finish that task, I will know that you mean business. Of course, you need to sign the contract."

    "Alright. I will do it."

    The soldier enthusiastically signed the contract, took the tents, and left.

    "So, who among you is stealthy enough to follow him? I don''t want you to follow him to the camp, just see what route he is taking. See if he is meeting with someone. Someone from a different camp maybe.

    Try to find out something interesting that you think we can use against them.

    The rest of you. Do the same thing you have been doing until the next morning. Our goal is to upy as muchnd of the valley as possible."

    Sam sent them away. That night also focused on capturing beasts, capturing people. Just when Sam thought it would be uneventful, Vice made the first move on someone. He doesn''t know which camp the person is from, but he attacked a person who is walking alone and that person is seriously injured.

    "I contemted whether I should capture him, young master. But I adhered t your orders and didn''t act on my emotions. I injured him and ran."

    "Good. He will be alive for a while right?"

    "Yes, young master. I already saw some peopleing to him when I was escaping. So, I think they might have seen meing in this direction.

    We might have to prepare for arrival."

    "Which direction are theying from?"

    "West."

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "That is actually a very interesting area to touch. I am sure they will love the wee.

    Okay now, you guys go and operate in different directions. Vice, you apany us, we are going to the west side and wee our special guests."

    "Young master, I think it is better if we all go there together. We have very limited manpower. It is better for us to stick together. We cannot risk it."

    "It is not going to be a risk, Vice. I have woven a proper n. So, we can be prepared for situations like this. It is very easy. I am sure you will love what you are going to see there. So, don''t worry too much. And I am sure if shit goes sideways, you are more than strong and fast enough to take me and escape.

    Also, the beasts are with us. It will be fun."

    Vice didn''t know what to say, but all he could do is follow Sam.

    He pushed Sam''s wheelchair as they moved to the west side.

    The outer circle that only has formations is not where they are going. They arrived and stopped at the area where they set up Sam''s woven energy nkets along with the formations. As soon as they cross the area with only formations, they will be engaging the enemies here.

    Sam got off the wheelchair and crawled to the center of the setup. He gestured for Vice is sit down at one corner.

    "You can sit there and wait. As I told you, you will love what you are going to see next."

    Sam let his spiritual energy spread into the formation once.

    Something that looked like a bright wireframe shed. Vice looked at the wireframe and felt shocked. It is not because he understood what it is. He didn''t understand shit.

    But he knew that it is something he could never understand.

    And he is sure that Brice was never that good with these kinds of things. For as far as he knew, Brice never did anything rted to formations and inscriptions. He was not a creator. He was amander, leader, and strategist, but not a creator or a formation master.

    He knew of this drawback himself. That is why he constantly tried to remember and by heart as many formations as he could. So that he could have at least some formations at his disposal in a serious situation.

    But in thest two days, he gave a lot of formation blueprints, and then there is this wireframe that just shed out of nowhere.

    The attacks that came from weaving the fabrics. Everything is way too much for me to even fathom.

 Chapter 1717: Waves of Flames

    <h4>Chapter 1717: Waves of mes</h4>

    Sam injected his energy a bit more into the nket before he took out his tapestry needles. He connected the needles to the formation.

    Soon, both Sam and Vice noticed the people from that side are already on their way. They seemed to have tripped a couple of traps Sam set up. But they are not really thatplicated or dangerous. So, they came past them really easily.

    But of course, they had to spend some energy, get on very slight but irritating injuries and finally feel extremely frustrated.

    After they cross it, they are now in front of Sam. All of them were out and exposed in thisrge open area they prepared.

    And just from the look of it, there are twenty people. It is arge team.

    "It seems like they have a lot of troops."

    Sam muttered and looked for a guy who resembled the leader of the troops.

    He took a quick look into the memories of Brice and realized that this guy is actually quite a bit famous. He is the righthand man of the young mistress of one of the ns. He is an Ice elemental user and he has quite a few victories under his belt.

    "This is such a great coincidence. A battle with a perfect counter. Let''s see how it goes."

    Sam muttered and he checked the tapestry needles onest time.

    Meanwhile, the leader on the otherside also Sam. He didn''t expect that Brice would be here, but the even more surprising thing is that Brice is there along with just one more person.

    He gestured his subordinates to stop them from advancing any further. He could sense that there is no one else in the surroundings from a basic scan.

    They might have been hiding with high-level stealth.

    And the fact that Brice is standing in the middle of the open field like a wellid bait is making him question if there are some people really hiding to snipe them out.

    Even though they got the info that there are not many people on Brice''s team, he started questioning everything. He is very doubtful and cautious.

    Sam who is waiting in the middle of the field, got a bit impatient.

    "What is it, buddy? Are youing or not? How long do you want me to wait here for?"

    The leader felt even more suspicious.

    Sam seemed to have understood what he was thinking and sighed.

    "Alright, alright. I will clear your doubts."

    As he finished speaking, he mmed his hands with the needles. The fire elemental energy spread through the nket in different directions.

    The energy spread and went through some metamorphosis before it converged at the nodes of the formation.

    The mes gathered at the nodes and¡­

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    ming explosions spread to all directions except for the direction that the opponents were in and of course the direction that Vice was standing in.

    The surrounding forest caught on the me as everything and anything in the way started burning to cinders.

    There is not a single living organism present in those mes. The leader was surprised by Brice''s move. He widened his eyes and opened his mouth in extreme disbelief.

    The rest of his team might not be aware of Brice and his abilities, but he is very keen and knowledgeable about it. To see Brice use such a unique method made him rethink all the information he had.

    As he was thinking, he looked around for onest time and thought about the attack. The attack is solely dependent on the formation and it is made by Brice only through the formation. He made some quick calctions and gave amand.

    "Everyone, be careful. We are going to enter the formation. Activate the anti-formation discs. If we capture Brice, we will be getting a hold over his part of the territory in this valley as well. The contributions and rewards will be huge.

    We are going there in a Trident formation. I will lead the middle, the other two teams attack him from the side.

    As for Vice, our Vice-captain can handle him easily. Be careful, there is a reason why I remember his name. And make sure to keep him in check, even if you cannot defeat him. He is way too loyal to Brice and if he gets out while we are capturing Brice, he will be a rabid dog.

    I don''t want to lose any troops."

    The leader moved his forces.

    Sam looked at the obvious trident formation. The leader is obviously leading through the middle, straight ahead with six more people. And the remaining two fronts have six members each. A total of neen and the Vice-captain who is going for Vice.

    Vice met his opponent with the sword as he looked at Brice, he couldn''t help but feel a bit anxious. He was almost ready to take out themunication device to call his colleagues.

    But Sam spoke out loud.

    "Don''t call them. I already told you the n. Just let me have some fun alright."

    As he spoke, he looked at the opponent leader with a grin and his face.

    Fire elemental energy went through his body. The mes surrounded him and held him up in the air, slightly levitating. His whole body is being carried by fire elemental energy. The needles he is holding are also surrounded by mes and took the shape of rope as it is connected to the rest of the energy nket Samid down before.

    The energy fabric around him is glowing with mes waiting for Sam''s movements to activate them.

    He shook both of his hands up and down and arge firewall appeared around him. A few arrows shot by the opponents from all three sides were burned to a crisp before they could reach him. And the next moment, he swung both of those arms once again.

    The mes moved along the nket like waves as they hit the three groups of opponents.

    The ming wave was met with an ice wall in the middle, while the other people tried to block it in some other way. The ice wall was then converted into multiple ice spears and was thrown at Sam.

    The attacks are also backed by spear strikes, arrows, and many more.

    They are moving very slowly since they believed that they are in the middle of Brice''s formation. And the attacks are like volleys.

    Sam is blocking the projectile attacks and he threw the me waves that made their advance even slower. The fight is extremely boring.

    Both parties thought so. Vice stopped getting worried at this point. But only until the opponents made it through halfway.

    "Finally, couldn''t you be any slower?"

    Sam muttered to himself as he swung both of his arms. Three fireballs flew away from him as they destroyed three spears that wereing at him.

    "Now let''s see how you fare against this."

    Sam''s energy rose to the peak. His whole body entered the fire elemental fusion. His altitude increased as the grin on his face widened.

    The nket started glowing with fire elemental energy. After the initial red glow, the fibers of the fabric changed in a way that left gaps exactly where the people stood.

    The red glow lightened up the whole area and in that darkness, it created quite a view.

    Everyone in the scene was surprised by this sudden change. Particrly the energy captain. He didn''t expect such a development. He couldn''t even fathom what is happening. While he is trying to wrap his head around this, Sam started spreading his mes.

    The streak of fire spread across the fibers and fabric as it went in different directions. The individual streaks went straight at the opponents. The neen streaks were continuous and all of them had to block.

    The remaining streaks on the other hand went in different directions as they traveled across the fabric and hit the formation nodes.

    These streaks converged together andbined into moreplex and powerful streaks of me.

    The concentration intensified so much that the color of the me changedpletely. It has a different shade of red.

    Just when the opponents are shocked and pressured by the ming streaks, to the point that the captain who is using his ice ball is not even able to keep the streak at bay with its heat, the new and more powerful streak came to them on the fabric from the nodes.

    All of this happened within a split second before they could even understand what is happening.

    The me streaks were, of course, continuous and then there are some more stray streaks that escaped in this second wave as well and all of these streaks are gathered in three nodes.

    The color changed to almost crimson. And these three streaks hit the three people in the lead of this trident attack.

    The captain and the other two people.

    "FUCK"

    The captain quickly created arge thick ice wall that looked apletely different shade of blue to block the attack. But the remaining two were unable to do that.

 Chapter 1718: Killing the Vice Captain

    <h4>Chapter 1718: Killing the Vice Captain</h4>

    The whole area is filled with a red glow.

    The streaks of mes continued for more than ten seconds. The me patterns created quite a view from the top.

    But that is not the major purpose of it of course. Out of the three heads of the tridents, two are taken down. They were blown away by the mes and crashed into different spots.

    Those two streaks went in two different directions and hit the nodes before they changed direction and went toward the captain in the lead.

    The captain who is defending from the other streaks, looked at theming at him and gritted his teeth. One of the reasons, he didn''t just dodge until now is not to break the formation. After all, the charge was majorly dependent on his defense.

    The middle is also the main charging force.

    If they all dodge at that moment, their formation will be gone. The slow advance they made until then is going to waste and they will all be separated which removes their collective strength.

    But now, he doesn''t have much choice at the moment.

    "Break the formation, defend yourself."

    He reluctantly ordered.

    All the subordinates broke the formation and threw their attacks at Sam randomly.

    Once again, Sam blocked the attacks with the mes. The fireballs hit intercepted the attacks very simply.

    The streaks on the other hand were redirected to the nodes since people are not blocking them again.

    They moved much faster.

    The captain wanted to close in the distance, but within the next half a second, two new streaks of mes hit him from two different sides and both of them are of extreme intensity.

    He was targeted and kept in check, while the rest of the streaks, didn''t go for the soldiers, instead, they went for the nodes and converged.

    The subordinates took this chance to attack Sam and cover the distance.

    But all of that is in vain. They were easily blocked and when they tried to go for closebat, their attacks were intercepted by Sam''s fireballs.

    Not a single attack came close to him and as for the foolish people who wanted closebat, they could only wish to even touch Sam, much less hit him.

    And meanwhile, in a fraction of a second, all the other streaks that are not holding the captain off, converged into a single streak. A blood-colored ming streak went straight for the soldier at the back.

    The ranged attacker is constantly shooting arrows at him.

    The blood-red mes went straight through him leaving behind a crisp ck dead body. As soon as the body hit the ground, it copsed into ashes leaving behind a brittle skeleton with bone ash.

    The red streak of me didn''t stop there, it went to a different node, where it stopped right there. The opponents arepletely scared. Scared shitless was never a truer term.

    The captain in charge understood that the situation is not in his favor. He wielded his sword and he swung it with all his strength. An icy sh went through the whole area straight toward Sam.

    The sh left behind a blizzard in the surroundings. The thick green forest looked like it was hit by a tundra.

    Only tost for a moment though. The red-hot mes zed as they made ice not just melt but evaporate within a moment. The captain wielded a power that could erase the traces of a whole city under theyers of ice, but it felt insignificant in front of the mes that enveloped him from every fibre of the energy nket Samid around him.

    He jumped into the air to close the distance and he did so in an instant as he reached Sam.

    The de of the sword almost met Sam, only to be intercepted by the tapestry needle Sam was holding.

    The sh between a ming needle and a frozen sword. The sword might have won if it a matter of pure brute strength. But it couldn''t be that easy. The needle has something other than brute force. It has the uncanny trickery Sam possessed.

    The streaks of me that went away from the captain when he moved suddenly hit a node and converged before they caught the threads that are connected to the needle.

    They moved along those threads and the captain''s sword along with the captain was met with the full force of that attack.

    The captain was blown away. All that was left of the handsome blue armor on his body was just a patch of half-molten metal that stuck to his chest.

    He gritted his teeth and forcefully ripped that away as he looked at Sam in horror. Before he could swallow the shock and help his subordinates, the ming streaks kept on doing their job.

    One enemy after another started turning into a crisply burnt skeleton surrounded by a pile of ash. And before the captain could even think of escaping, Sam already changed his attention to him. The captain is now the target and all the streaks that were spread into different directions all joined up and this time, not a node.

    Instead, they joined in the hands of Sam.

    Sam pointed both of his needles at the captain and said.

    "Thank you for your time. You did a really good job helping me understand the extent of what my new knowledge can amount to.

    It is very interesting and eye-opening. I will never forget your help."

    As he finished speaking, the mes appeared at the end of the needles. They arepressed into extremely small sized beads of mes and were shot at the captain.

    The beadsnded on the young man. And they exploded his body into nothing.

    And thest thing that Sam saw in the glow of those ming beads is the young man''s faint smile.

    He sighed and turned to Vice.

    "Now that that''s out of the way, let''s get out of here."

    Vice stabbed his sword into the vice-captain of the other side and looked at Sam. He was also shocked, but not more than the enemies of course.

    "All your worries are for nothing. I told you, I will be fine. It''s fun isn''t it?"

    Brice took out the wheelchair and slowly got on it.

    Vice hurriedly ran over and helped him out with moving while he asked.

    "Are you really the same young master Brice?"

    Sam just smiled and didn''t answer.

    "When did you learn all of this young master? I honestly thought weaving is your normal hobby. Everyone knows that you only did it because it is something your mother taught you. Who would have ever thought that there is something so dangerous and sinister behind it."

    "Whoa, sinister? Really?"

    "I am sorry Captain. I always viewed Weaving as a skill that revolves around delicate artistry and refined aesthetics. So, when you used it for killing so many people like that, I involuntarily called it sinister. I apologize."

    "Trust me Vice, when you know how to do it, the art of killing is just as beautiful and delicate as the art of weaving. It is just that you have neither done it enough nor seen it enough. You wouldn''t understand that. Let''s just go back and see what our friends did back at the base.

    But after this incident, it is evident that we might have to keep an eye on this particr direction. The young mistress of that n will being for us."

    "From what I knew, the young mistress of that n is a very cunning and cowardly young master. She is blessed in terms of constitution and strength, but shecks any skill or talent inbat matters.

    Her constitution is wasted on her. And this opinion is held by a lot of people. She is not even that good atmanding. Her greatest strength is actually the Vice-captain that you just blew into nothing."

    "Well, you will be surprised."

    "What do you mean?"

    "I don''t really know what kind of opinion, I mean the most urate opinion you had of the youngdy. But currently, I am telling you, the youngdy that we are going to face is not someone you should dismiss that easily.

    She would be a menace even if she doesn''t have any constitution supporting her, but now you are saying she is gifted with the constitution, we cannot ask for a worse situation."

    "Why do you say that, Captain? You barely even know the woman. What made you say this?"

    "There are some things I cannot exin to you Vice. Wait for a few days and I will tell you."

    "Okay, Captain. But let''s go first. You must have been spent. We need to recover as much as we can. But this is indeed a great start for us. We have the upper hand in both territories and the attacks against our opponents. This will serve really well for us."

    "Yeah, it should."

 Chapter 1719: Attack

    <h4>Chapter 1719: Attack</h4>

    Sam and Vice went back to the base.

    After some time, the remaining subordinates came back after finishing their tasks at hand to take a break.

    Sam was left alone while the rest listened to what Vice had to say about what Sam did. They were all equally shocked. But Sam noticed that they were also extremely proud for some reason. It is almost as if they are content that their leader is that powerful.

    They also seemed genuinely happy, that their leader, who is a cripple and should have already been on verge of despair not only fine but also stayed just as powerful if not more.

    He could understand it easily because their intentions and thoughts are so pure.

    Sam suddenly missed his friends. He sighed and muttered.

    "You might have had a bad pick at the rest of your traitor members, but the ones that stayed loyal to you are one of a kind. You are one lucky guy." He doesn''t know if Brice could hear these words, but Sam just felt like saying it to the original owner of the body.

    That night went uneventfully.

    The group didn''t encounter any people and they are slowly encroaching into the territories of other ns. They are doing it so discreetly, but they are expanding at a steady and stable pace.

    By third day morning, Sam already has quite a number of beasts at his disposal which reduced the disparity he had in the number of his subordinates. Beasts that listen to his orders perfectly without a sign of disobedience.

    One must say, this is a better deal than having to face a bunch of spies and traitors in the team.

    The next morning. Right at dawn, the team once again moved out. Everything went normal until noon, but from then, Sam noticed that people trespassed their upied territory at more than one point.

    From three different directions, people entered his territory. One is of course the west. Afterst night''s incident, Sam would be surprised if the other yer didn''t retaliate.

    And he is very sure that the other yer is actually Noah. In his opinion, there is no way she would just sit back and think that long.

    Last night, Sam didn''t leave a single witness and the whole area just looked like it was charred. Noah would have been thinking about what might have happened and would have sent someone to investigate. But from the looks of it, only one person came.

    At least ording to the formation.

    As for the other two directions, two scout teams came one from each. They didn''te at the same time though.

    When he calcted the timing, Sam understood one thing. They tailed the subordinates who were slowly setting up the formations. And they didn''t even close in on him as it would alert them.

    Sam doesn''t know what they had done in that area. But his formations are undisturbed. He would know if they were messed with. And they would have informed him if there was another formation set up at that ce.

    None of these two things happened, which means, they just came and went.

    This also means he has to be prepared. These people will slowlye and attack him.

    And out of three, the ce he was worried about most is actually the west.

    The direction from which Noah would being. All the yers might be skilled. But when ites to wit and intellect, he definitely believed that Noah trumped the rest of the yers.

    She can read people, strategize and understand the loopholes and traps better than most. And he is sure that she might have already guessed that it is Sam that''s in Brice''s body. It is not even that difficult to guess.

    Brice is the most disadvantageous of all. It is only natural for Sam to be ced inside him by the way this game is being biased against him.

    And the person that came from that side, is also most likely Noah. In this case, just by looking at his formation set up, she would know that Sam is here.

    Even though he understood that he doesn''t know how she will react. He knows for sure that if it is Donner or Arkiv, they will try to avoid fighting him. If it is Akhil, he would just go straight ahead and fight with Sam. Kumar will be kind of neutral. He will try to analyze the situation and see if he can even stand against Sam.

    If he feels like he can, then he will make a move.

    So, in the current scenario, even he might not attack Sam until he learns the true might of their formations.

    Dayus is also predictable. Once he confirms Sam''s location, he will try to do a full-force attack to defeat him. And just like the previous time, if he is once again blessed with extra perks, then there is no way he would stop.

    But Noah, it is a bit difficult for Sam to predict. He doesn''t know how she will react, particrly when she lost so many people in just one night.

    He has to be ready for all the possibilities, the only problem is, with Noah, he couldn''t know all of the possibilities, no matter how much he tried.

    All he can do is prepare as much as he can.

    Whilst making those preparations, the only thing Sam is actually d about is the spy soldier that they caught.

    He is pretty sure that it is Kumar''s camp the soldier is from. And if he is right about Kumar''s capabilities, then he must have understood that there are too many spies in the camp.

    And if that is not enough, the spy that Sam sent actually managed to set up all the fabric he was given as part of the tents.

    Exactly, just like Sam had asked him to.

    He did that as soon as he reached the camp. Even though Sam was happy with those actions, he is still a bit worried that the fabric won''t stay in ce for long enough time. But by now, it is good enough and he decided that it is about time, he made use of that.

    So, that afternoon, after he made some formation arrangements, he gathered his subordinates.

    "We are going to stop expanding for now. We spread into every other territory more than just a bit. We even showed some of our prowess to one of them.

    Now, it is time for us to be a bit more aggressive. Let''s make some big moves. This is the third day. And by the end of this day, I want a territory of one of the other young masterspletely under my control."

    "What is the n captain?"

    Vice asked with a serious face. All four of them are payingplete attention.

    "Of course, we are starting with the spot that we currently have an active spy on. It''s the easiest one out of them all. And the set up he made will be greatly beneficial to us.

    And in the first step of taking that ce over, I want you guys to do something for me."

    "Anything you say, Captain."

    "Good, I want you guys to attack their camp with the help of some beasts. Take four bird-type beasts that we have under our control and attack the tents there. And do it with these."

    Sam took out four spears. They are very normal. As normal as they could get. There are no inscriptions whatsoever. Then he took out four pieces of cloth and tied them to the shafts of the spears. Now they became gs.

    "I am sure you guys know how to throw a spear right?"

    "Yes, boss."

    "Leave the main ten and the other medium tents. I want you guys to attack the sub tents of his soldiers. The four sub-tents are on the outer perimeter of the camp. Throw the spears with the shiest moves you can and make sure theynd on the tents. They have to pierce through the tent fabrics no matter what.

    You understand?"

    "Yes, Boss."

    The four people took off on the birds immediately.

    Sam looked at them and smiled.

    "Sorry, Kumar. You have to take this brunt. No hard feelings."

    Within a few minutes, the birds cruised through the air as they made their way to the other side of the valley. They arrived above the camp.

    There are a lot of tents set up. It is much more vast than Sam''s camp. Troops are overflowing. The only problem is that a lot of them are spies working for others. With Kumar''s level, he would have noticed that a long ago and might have been trying to find a way around it.

    But too bad, he cannot do that now.

    Vice and the rest of the team locked onto the tents and got ready to throw the spears.

    *SWOOSH*

    The spears whistled through the air and theynded on the tents without much effort. Of course, while doing that the four of them already revealed their locations, but they didn''t care much. They just threw the spears and left.

 Chapter 1720: Team up

    Chapter 1720: Team upKumar came out of his tent as he looked at the four birds flying high in the sky. They cast a veryrge shadow on them.

    Even though the people put on the watch saw them, they didn''t report it.

    Of course, he knew why that happened. They didn''t want to identally help their young master in any way. He cursed the spies and the owner of the original body for being so oblivious. Now he is in jeopardy because of that guy''s careless nature andck of awareness.

    He should have been a bit more observant.

    As these thoughts ran through his mind, the four tents exploded.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Four simultaneous explosions rocked the surrounding area. The explosions are also not normal, even the slightest bit. After the initial energy release, there is a small energy storm at each tent and they stayed like that for minutes as they attacked the surrounding members at random.

    The soil in the surroundings and the vegetation started getting affected by different elemental energies.

    Fire, ice, metal, and wind.

    Four energy storms created energy corrosion in all the objects in the surroundings. As soon as he sensed the energy creeping out, Kumar instantly understood who did it.

    "Fuck you, Sam. Do you have to do me in like this?" He muttered to himself and yelled out.

    "Get the fuck away from those areas. Don''t get in contact with those surroundings for a while. You will get yourself killed if you are careless."

    For the first time ever, the soldiers heeded his orders without thinking about how to double-cross him from the side.

    When the explosion happened, the team members are already far away and the shy explosions were clearly visible from far away.

    If there are any external scouts within the vicinity of Kumar''s territory, they would have noticed it and the damage caused by it.

    Every one of these scouts immediately left and reported it to their bosses,

    As for the ones who caused it, they went bank with the news of their sessful attack.

    "Okay now, just sit back and rx. Stay alert to face the uing chaos."

    "Are we going to wait now? I thought we are going to double down andplete the attack." Vice was surprised and asked his doubts.

    "No need for us to do that. Let the actions y out naturally. We will attack when it is actually needed and more effective. Currently, if we weaken them too much, some other people might benefit from that more than us."

    "Okay, Captain. We will wait."

    "Great. Also, if you like any of these beasts, pick and try to get to know them. Try to make friends with them without using any contracts whatsoever. If you are lucky enough, you will get a goodpanion."

    Everyone became excited.

    "Really? Captain, these beasts are pretty strong and powerful. Are you really going to give them up like that?"

    "Well, I am giving them to you guys. Not to some random people. Keep them and they will increase yourbat strength. It is going to keep you safe.

    Be on your top shape by the way. And stay safe. As I told you, I don''t care if you mess up a little bit, but you are not going to die no matter what you say. You understand?"

    "Yes, Sir."

    They all went to prepare for what''s toe.

    Meanwhile, the news already reached the other young masters, which means other yers.

    And the first one to react to this is actually Noah.

    She is obviously the young mistress that is currently on the west side of Sam''s territory. As soon as she got the news, she came out of her tent while giving orders to the now second inmand.

    "Prepare your forces. Go onplete defensive, but be ready tounch an attack any moment I tell you to. Await my orders.

    I am leaving to meet someone and I will be back by an evening at thetest. If I don''t make it, move to that direction and attack that territory."

    She pointed in the direction she was heading, the direction where Kumar''s base is. She got on the bird-type beast and flew off.

    Within a few minutes, she is already at the other end. She got off the bird. As soon as the scouts noticed her presence, they notified Kumar this time around. But when he found out who ising, he gave orders not to intercept.

    Even though this surprised them, when shended casually and started a friendly conversation with Kumar, they were surprised even more.

    "Didn''t think you would being this time. The situation is not really good. I hate it." Kumar said in a frustrated tone.

    "Well, from the looks of it, you are going to have a big problem. Seems like Sam pulled a fast one over you too."

    "Does that mean, you also tasted some of his meds?"

    "Of course, I did. He killed twenty of my men. All of them are elite, and one of them is my most capable deputy. He would have been a great asset in holding the territory down."

    "So, Sam is dealt with disadvantageous cards again, but he is still screwing us like this? I can''t believe that guy. Does he have anything normal about him?"

    "Can we not talk about that now? That only makes my head hurt. That is the question that''s bothering me for decades.

    Anyway, there must be a reason for Sam to make the shy attack. My best guess is that he is trying to make you a bit weak and is announcing it to the rest of the territories. He wants other yers to attack you."

    "He could have just attacked me himself, right?

    Those spears he let his subordinates throw are not ordinary. They are extremely potent. And I lost dozens of people for just four of them.

    Even I will have to struggle like hell to defend against one since I have most of my useful abilities locked up."

    "He doesn''t stop, does he? I wonder what kind of ability did he get to do that much damage in such a short amount of time.

    By the way, did I mention to you that the ce where he killed my subordinates is actually one-third deep into my own territory?"

    "He upied that much into your territory? One-fifth of mine showed traces of some formations, but I don''t know how deep is he. The situation is pretty rough."

    "Well, right now your base is the target. And from my guess, Dayus and Akhil are going to react. Dayus in particr. He will understand that Sam did this better than anyone of us. He will easily get the direction from where Sam attacked.

    There is no way he won''t be taking advantage of this and with the deep-rooted festering grudge that asshole holds against Sam, I am pretty sure he wille here first thinking that Sam is going to attack your base once again.

    He is smart and stupid at the same time. Akhil will just join in for fun.

    Arkiv who would have figured this whole thing wille here to join hands with Sam and get a share of somend tond the second ce.

    The only one who might be sitting on the side is the good old Donner.

    So, what do you think we should do?"

    "Can you stop fucking showing off your fucking brain for once? I know that I am dumb. But you don''t have to remind me of that all the time."

    Kumar sat down and took out a jar of wine for her. Noah sat beside him and took a sip.

    "So, what is your n?" She asked once again

    "Shouldn''t I be the one asking you that question? You should be here with a n already. Right?"

    "Let''s team up. Like always. I will get my forces toe down here and we canbine, set up the defense, and fight back at all of them."

    "It won''t be enough time for us to do that. And most of my camp is full of spies and snitches. They won''t listen to my orders, whatsoever. I am not that strong on top of it. All I got is the stupid and insignificant spear skill this n has.

    It is just half-decent at best. I could have bested this skill when I was sixteen years old back on Deste. This is fucking insane, to say the least."

    "What the fuck are you whining about now? I bet Sam didn''t get a singlebat skill and from what I know about the information from the n, he didn''t even have a proper crew. Hell, he didn''t even have legs.

    And look at what he did. He fucking demolished half of your camp and made you whine like a little boy. I love you, but trust me, dude, you need to learn a lot from that asshole."

    "Whatever." Kumar sulked as he grabbed the wine jar from her.

 Chapter 1721: Desperate Proposal

    Chapter 1721: Desperate ProposalNoah left Kumar''s camp after exining her n to her.

    On her way back to the cam, she took out something like a re gun and shot it even higher into the sky.

    The soldiers at her base saw the orange-colored explosion in the sky. They immediately made their move without a second of dy and marched in the direction of Kumar''s base.

    The other camps also saw this, but of course, they didn''t know what it is. But what they knew is that some of them are marching to Kumar''s base.

    Just like how Noah exined the situation to Kumar, the other yers reacted. They reacted just like he portrayed them.

    Dayus believed that Sam would be attacking that base and he managed to convince the leader to send a single unit. But this unit contained both him and the leader. The best part of that unit is before Noah could even meet her own troops, Dayus made his way toward his camp with the troops.

    Kumar was caught off guard.

    An even more surprising thing is, Donner who was thought to stay on the sidelines actually made his move. He came with his troops almost the same time as Dayus was here.

    But he didn''t attack, he just stayed there as if he is really a spectator.

    Kumar looked at the troops and didn''t know what to do. His soldiers are not his soldiers. Every one of them is looking for a way to backstab him and is trying to gain as much from his defeat as possible.

    And he could only think of one idea. He gathered all of his troops and made an announcement.

    "Listen well, all of you.

    I know you are not loyal to me. I know every one of you belongs to a different faction in the n.

    To be honest, I don''t fucking care who you serve. I don''t care who you want to be loyal to. But for the next three days, you will be fighting my war. You need to work with me.

    I want all of you to group yourselves into the factions that you originally belong to and work together to fight.

    Whatever group that has the highest kills and contributions to this war, I will surrender to the original master of that group. I will give up control over my troops, I will be the right-hand man of that master. I will support them in the conquest of the n leader position.

    If you know me, you know what my word is worth. I know I am not apetent leader or amander. I never wanted to be one. Except for my position in the n kept on forcing me to try.

    But now, I understand that I am not suitable and I am no longer fighting for it. I want you guys to fight for me now so that I don''t die here and our n doesn''t lose the property of thisnd. So, if you don''t fight with me and for me now, we will lose the valley and our resources.

    If you do fight, one of your masters will get to im thisnd as a piece of their legacy.

    If you don''t do that. For the first time ever, I will abandon the battlefield and leave. I will go back to the n and assassinate each and every master of yours.

    You do know that I am more than capable of that with my prowess. And when I do that, I will be the only person left for the position of sessor.

    I will win that race.

    So, if you want me out of there, fight for me here."

    Kumar''s second-inmand was stunned by his words. He didn''t know that something like this would be Kumar''s decision. It didn''t sit well with the original body''s owner. But they are reckless and straightforward which goes well with the owner''s actions.

    All the spies were stunned.

    They didn''t expect Kumar to call him out on them. But they knew very well, the original owner of the body is a reckless madman that sticks to whatever the fuck he says.

    So, they have to make a quick decision whether to trust him or not.

    While they are doing that, Dayus didn''t wait for their decision and just attacks.

    He let the troops go and made them attack different areas.

    Meanwhile, the spy boy that helped Sam found a way to get out of the camp. He headed directly to Sam''s camp, to pass on the information he got from Kumar and the current situation.

    "Sir, this is the situation, we are being attacked from the two fronts and the young master has given this twisted order. What do you think is going to happen now?"

    "Well, whatever happens, doesn''t matter. No matter what course of action takes ce there, it will end up in my favor. All I have to do is wait for the evening and I will be having the rest of the territories served on aplicated but very decorated tter.

    And I will enjoy feasting on it.

    I suggest you stay here and if possible you can try and get some of your people intoing here and stay safe. You can witness how I pick this valley apart."

    Sam replied with a smile and went back into his tent. He felt a bit relieved when he saw his ns are going smoothly.

    But of course, not all the people who knew of his ns are feeling the same. There are some people in particr, that are not exactly people that are displeased about this. The Gods.

    All the gods are as usual spectating the whole thing unfold.

    Zeus in particr observed this over and over. Not even leaving a single second of it out.

    "This Idiotic bastard. I have given him every advantage there is. But he is still unable to do anything against this Sam. Why did I even pick up this guy as my yer? I should have gone for a different realm."

    He mmed his hands on the table as he looked at the visuals of Dayus mindlessly leading his troops to attack just like Sam wanted. This is the most idiotic thing he can do right now.

    He did everything in his power to give every advantage to Dayus while creating every obstacle for Sam. He cannot just stand the fact, that all of those efforts are wasted.

    There is no way, he could let that happen. He believed wholeheartedly that if Sam is left behind with no badges this time too, he will not be able to catch up at all.

    He will be left behind with a massive blow to his progress. But his yer doesn''t seem to be capable of letting that happen at this moment.

    He cursed himself openly as he thought of a way to rectify it. Even if he has to pay a higher price, he needs to leave Sam behind. He needs to make sure that Sam loses in this round, even at the risk of some bacsh from other gods.

    As he thought to this point, he disappeared from his spot.

    He reappeared at Hel''s ce once again and asked.

    "I need you to let Dayus know of Sam''s n. He cannot just fall for this."

    "What do you mean? Do you want to intercept in the middle of the game to help your yer cheat? That is madness. The other gods will haunt me for millennia. I am not doing that. That piece from the chariot you gave me is nowhere near enough and no other price would give me enough incentive to do that."

    "I want you to do this and you are doing it. How about a day in Hades? Will that satisfy you?"

    "What did you say?"

    "You heard me. I will make Hades let you into his territory. For one day, you will have full ess. How about that?"

    "You are going to give that up, just to teach a young man a lesson? Just to win a petty game designed by gods to satiate their boredom caused by their immortality? Do you understand, how ridiculous this idea is?"

    "You just have to do what I tell you to."

    "I don''t know if the trade-off is worth it."

    "Make it two days. Anything more than that will be impossible. So, do what I tell you to now. Or you will lose this offer. And when Gambleres to you to get an answer for the past help you have given me, I will not stand by you."

    "Really? You are going with that? Those threats won''t work that well on me.

    I will do it for three days. Three days in Hades, with full ess."

    "Done. Arrange mymunication now."

    "It will take some time. I will see you in an hour."

    "You better not dy it more than that. I need you to keep your word."

    With that he left.

 Chapter 1722: Dayus Proposal

    <h4>Chapter 1722: Dayus'' Proposal</h4>

    After an hour, Hel went to Zeus'' ce to give him a token.

    "Three days in Hades. Don''t you dare forget that."

    "Of course. Do you think I am someone that forgets their promises?"

    "It is not the first time you would have done it. Everyone knows that you are many things Zeus, but an honorable guy? No. So, don''t bullshit me and do whatever you want to do with this. Beware though. You do know what Gambler is capable of. And the very fact that he has not reacted even though we have done so much shit is actually really scary to me.

    So, don''t mess with this too much.

    This token will grant you five minutes. You should be able to finish whatever you want to tell him in that duration."

    "That is more than enough. Let''s hope that dumbass can understand what I am going to tell him."

    With that, he took the token and proceeded to use it while Hel went back.

    Meanwhile, back in the valley.

    Dayus is looking at the battle formation drawn on a scroll in the makeshift tent they have established.

    His troops are currently fighting against the troops of Kumar in a slow battle of attrition. Kumar''s forces are on the defensive and they yed like that. Since Donner is also waiting on the other side, they didn''t want to take any risk.

    Dayus is also very cautious with his forces as he didn''t want to lose too many before he confronted Sam, whom he believed will be arriving in this area anytime soon.

    All of a sudden, he felt like he cked. His subconscious appeared in a different space and in front of him came Zeus'' silhouette.

    Dayus immediately wanted to fall on his knees and offer his prayers, but his subconscious didn''t have any shape or form that he could control. He is just there.

    "You worthless piece of garbage." Zeus started with his greeting.

    Dayus didn''t even dare to rebuke for thatment. He just shut his mouth and gulped hard in fear.

    Zeus tried to suppress his anger and slowly spoke.

    "Do you know how much effort I have put in to give you this chance and you are wasting it. Anyway, I don''t have much time so listen to this carefully. Do you understand me?"

    With that, he started exining his n.

    As expected within the five minutes, he disappeared and Dayus is back to his operation with his troops. He didn''t know what to say or how to react immediately, but he did know there is a massive change of ns in order.

    Slowly, time passed and it is already evening and by that time, some people that are part of the spy''s team came to Sam''s camp for the temporary refugee he offered. As for why they came thatte, it is the spy boy who arranged for them toe at some intervals one by one.

    This way, nobody will notice that a bunch of them are gone and suspect them and Sam could also get more and more information about the camp''s state.

    So, when thest person came, Sam had a talk with him to see how things are and he must say that he was very surprised by that conversation.

    Dayus is not acting as recklessly as Sam wanted. He preserved a lot of his forces and in fact he used most of them to drive more than half of Kumar''s forces to the direction of Sam''s camp.

    He is using that to intercept Sam.

    And even more surprising is that his managed to strike a deal with Donner. Sam doesn''t know what the deal is exactly. But he is curious to know what it is, since Donner who tried so hard not to be considered Dayus'' true ally for years willingly made a deal.

    "What the hell are they up to?"

    Sam muttered to himself not understanding what to do.

    The only good news among them is that, Noah''s presence. She came a couple of hours ago and she is helping Kumar''s troops, but not too much.

    All she did was help Kumar reduce his casualties. She is the only variable that Dayus didn''t expect. In a way he expected her presence, but he didn''t expect her approach. The situation is not exactly in anyone''s favor.

    The only thing out of Sam''s calctions is that this bnce actually preserved Kumar''s base.

    In his opinion, people should have stormed his base and upied the territory. Then Sam would create maximum damage as the final party that arrived.

    It would have been majestic to say the least. But still, it is not that bad.

    What he doesn''t know is, coincidentally after thest spy that was on Sam''s side left the base, Dayus sent envoys to other yers for a meeting. By now, he managed to take control of the troops from the hands of the youngdy who is actually in charge.

    No one knows what he had done and how he was able to take over the control so easily. But it worked.

    The envoy response is not exactly enthusiastic, but it is definitely positive. Because, along with the envoy, he sent a message that indicated that their survival will be guaranteed for the next day without any fighting.

    Even though yers didn''t like cooperating with Dayus, they knew that he cane up with some cunning ns. They at least wanted to hear him out, because there is another condition he attached. He wouldn''t ask for their cooperation in actually fighting Sam.

    He will fight Sam with his own troops, without any real time battle support from the other groups. So, they are much more curious about what he nned.

    And when they finally met him and he exined the n, they were really surprised.

    "You just want us to stay our hand without battling at all, until Sames. That is all you want from us? Is that it?"

    "Yes."

    "You really don''t need anything else from us?"

    "Not when it concerns Sam. We can fight ourselves as much as we want from tomorrow. But now, I want you guys to stay your hand. Don''t attack each other. Sam wille here by night and I would like to fight him."

    "I wonder if your brain is dying bit by bit as you get your ass kicked by Sam time and again. Why would you want to go after him in every challenge? You know that he is better than you, better than all of us. Might even be better than all of usbined. Have you ever thought of epting the truth?"

    Noah said matter of factly.

    "What truth? Didn''t you see him lose in the previous challenge?"

    "Are you really saying that with a fucking straight face? He got yed. All the disadvantages were attached to him. He was targeted. And we all know who the fuck did that. You were yed all the good cards.

    Even we feel bad for taking advantage of him. And you are saying with a straight face that he lost? He controlled all of us with that injured body and torturous pain. I wonder how far he would have kicked your ass if he half as healthy as you were.

    Idiot."

    Noah didn''t hold her tongue back. Kumar tried to control hisughter. Akhil didn''t give a shit and justughed out loud.

    Arkiv is not even there.

    He doesn''t even care of Dayus'' status as a fellow yer. He might be the one to broker peace most of the time or establish cooperation between the yers, but assisting Dayus in any way or form is something he wouldn''t do even if he has to fight against all the other yers.

    And they all know why. So, they are not surprised.

    "I am not here to get lectured by you. If it is a fight that you seek, you can have one. Don''t you dare run your mouth off like this."

    "Whatever. Noah just rolled her eyes and didn''t bother to talk anymore.

    "Unless Arkiv steps in and aids Sam, I will handle things smoothly. I just as that you stay your hand for this night. I know I am in a disadvantageous position as you guys always like to gang up on me.

    But I ask you this favor as a fellow yer."

    "You are speaking as if you have not earned that discrimination. You backstabbed us as your fellow yers multiple times. Cut that pitiful bullshit.

    Anyway, we will agree to your terms if the price is right."

    "What do you want?"

    Noah smirked and rubbed her palms. There is a glint in her eyes that made Dayus almost regret the decision he made. But when he thought of Zeus and his warning, he couldn''t help but shudder a bit and grit through this.

    Noah and Kumar happily fleeced him along with other yers and sat back to watch the show. They do have some doubts on whether Sam woulde or not. That didn''t stop them from fleecing though.

 Chapter 1723: Gauging

    <h4>Chapter 1723: Gauging</h4>

    When all the yers agreed to his proposal with arge payment, Dayus finally heaved a slight sigh of relief.

    Just a little bit though. He is still nervous about whether his n will work or not.

    Because the whole premise is based on Sam''s qualities and convictions which are something Dayus never managed to wrap his head around.

    And no one can me him for that confusion. Sam is indeed an entric man on that front. He always had a very unique code of conduct that he follows.

    He kills people whenever they are on his way, he didn''t care if they are young, old, sad, enraged or in deep emotional distress. As long as they mess with him, he will directly kill them.

    And he doesn''t make the first move most of the time. All the conquests he had been through, except for the people who provoked him, he always tried to finish that in a peaceful way.

    As if that ever works. Anyone who has grown a brain knows that peace never works in this world. Everything is decided through strength, violence, and skill. In this world with strength and cultivation as a core, there is nothing like a negotiation between weak and strong.

    After all, negotiation is only possible between equals.

    As Dayus thought more about Sam, he started realizing a few things too.

    It is a fact that Sam alwayspeted with people that are not equal to him. He only fought with people that are stronger than him in authority, strength, and status. That is the reason why most of his proposals ended up with battles and fights and ultimately something that shed a lot of blood.

    And he always won.

    He always came out on top.

    The thoughts that started with ridiculing Sam and his actions ended up making Dayus feel infuriated rather than making him feel strong and confident, he felt embarrassed. He felt small and petty.

    He gritted his teeth and waited for Sam toe.

    Meanwhile.

    Sam looked at the beautiful sunset and called for his subordinates.

    "Let''s go guys. We have some attacks tounch."

    "Captain, we have been trying to get some information from that camp, but there is actually something I am worried about."

    Vice approached and said.

    "What do you mean?"

    "There is nothing we could see that indicated there is any serious battle going on there. We saw some struggle. Some traces of individualbat, but there is no indication of arge-scale battle. Everything seemed too calm and stable."

    "So, you think that they didn''t sh and just waited there?"

    "The situation seemed like that could be the actual case."

    "It might be, but it doesn''t matter. Let''s just go and see for ourselves. If they didn''t attack each other until now, we will trigger them to attack. Tonight, all our war is going to start within these territories and we are going to create it no matter what.

    So, let''s go and this time. Let''s go bynd. I am not in the mood for a flight."

    He called for the beasts and they made their way toward Kumar''s camp.

    As per the agreement, Kumar retreated to the deepest parts of the camp along with his troops evenly and tightly creating a perfect defensivework around the camp.

    The same could be said for the other yers.

    But Dayus on the other hand took an approach of a much more offensive formation and it was also bold. Because the formation is ced in the direction of Sam''s camp. And for that to happen, he has to give up his original base camp that has a retreat path back to his territory''s original base.

    And of course, Kumar and Noah are not stupid enough to let that chance go. Noah moved half of her soldiers in that direction and set up ambushes for Dayus'' troops if they choose to retreat.

    She also colluded with Kumar and cut a deal with Akhil to send some of his troops to this direction. They joined hands andid down a trap for Dayus. No matter what happens, they knew that Dayus is going to lose all of his troops today and he will definitely lose the game.

    Sam arrived while sitting on top of a wolf-type beast. The rest of the soldiers are also following on a simr set. They are from the small park Sam and his subordinates captured.

    When they arrived at a good enough distance, they already noticed the presence of the initial ambush teams set up in the forest.

    Also, Sam and his subordinates were also clearly noticed by the others.

    News quickly went to Dayus and he ordered.

    "Attack everyone. Ranged. No one gets close to them unless you are prepared to die. I will be arriving there and keeping him as far away from my tent as possible. Do you understand?"

    He gave his orders. But he didn''t as he said in the call. Instead, he stayed in his ce. As for why he said it like that, the original team leader also has many questions regarding that. But she gaveplete control to Dayus for now and decided not to ask any.

    Soon, she didn''t even need any questions. She already understood what Dayus is thinking, which is exactly not suited to her tastes.

    Sam was attacked.

    Spears, arrows, and swords rays came at him from different directions. From far away. No one dared toe too close, but he is swarmed with attacks.

    Sam didn''t make a move, instead, he let his subordinates and beasts deal with these attacks. As for defense, all he had is a thick fabric covering his whole body. He moved slowly and carefully as he used the agility of the wolf to its maximum advantage.

    He didn''t close the distance as fast as he would like to, but he did move forward and he did so with no sense of emergency at all. He is moving safely.

    The soldiers started dying one after the other and some information was being passed by the troops as it reached Dayus''s ears.

    He started noting down the way people died and how Sam is attacking.

    Even though it is hard to predict the way Sam behaves, as most of his actions and reactions are based on the opponent''s actions, to begin with, there is one factor that could be considered amon identifier in all of this.

    It is that he sticks with the theme. Whenever he fights someone, his fighting style is tailored for them. He will stick with the style throughout the fight unless and of course, it is absolutely necessary.

    And he is using these soldiers to gauge and understand what the fighting style this time is.

 Chapter 1724: Scroll Holders

    <h4>Chapter 1724: Scroll Holders</h4>

    Sam increased his speed gradually.

    The people from Dayus'' side are falling pretty quickly as time went on and Dayus is still not making his move.

    He kept on getting reports which he started noting down.

    Only around twenty to thirty minutester, did Dayus get up and showed any signs of making any move. By now, thedy in charge of the base got scared. Almost one-third of her soldiers are done in by just five people. It is not exactly a good number no matter how they see it and all they got out of it is, how these five people are killing them.

    She was about intercept Dayus, but he didn''t care about her anxiety at all. She got a bit scared looking at his face which is too eager and excited for someone who just lost one-third of their forces.

    She wanted to stop the operation and take control of her troops once again.

    "Spears that are exploding with extremely turbulent elemental energies," Dayus spoke calmly and he couldn''t help but chuckle.

    "How cocky of you Sam to pick spears when you are facing me, a genuine spear user? Is it your way of looking down on me? You sick bastard."

    He muttered to himself before passing down new orders.

    Everyone, go on theplete defensive, the main camp forces made the move. They areing to aid you. The opponents are tough, but they are very small in number.

    You can deal with them if you follow my instructions properly."

    After that, he deployed the initial team of elites to intercept Sam and his team.

    The introduction of this team and some traps halted Sam''s team for a moment.

    After they were sent, Dayus walked among the gathered soldiers. He checked what they are capable of and how useful they are in this attack. After weighing these options, he finally picked a few people and called them inside a tent to have a private conversation.

    "I want you guys to do something for me. Actually, it is not exactly for me, but for your young mistress. If you manage to do it, then you will be able to help her destroy the most dangerous enemy of all the other young masters.

    But you might have to sacrifice a limb or two because of that and there will be some residual effects. Even if you recover your limbspletely, they won''t receive the previous function.

    Your meridians will be damaged. Your bone structure will undergo permanent deformation. That is not just in your limbs, even among your ribs and spine too.

    Your muscle fibers will be disfigured permanently with a minute amount of corrosion left. And these are the known side effects. I don''t know the unknown ones as they differ from person to person based on their gics.

    I am asking you for the first andst time. If you want to let your young mistress win, if you want to do that, just do what I tell you to do and take this risk. If you don''t feel like it, you can leave. You don''t need to take any risk and I will not be the one to release this news to the young mistress or anyone else.

    Your contributions will be noted. You will be granted with an Elder title if you go through with this and this title will be hereditary.

    You have three minutes to make this decision."

    "You don''t need to ask us, sir. We are soldiers. You can just order us around."

    "Thank you. You are a true soldier. You can go out for now and wait for the orders."

    One of the soldiers agreed immediately and left.

    There was some hesitation in some of them and they didn''t agree, but Dayus got his required number.

    He sent the rest away and called the people who agreed back into the tent. He took out a brush and started drawing something on a scroll.

    As he started drawing this inscription, if one bothered to clearly notice what is happening, one could see that the light in his eyes changed. It almost seemed like he is possessed by someone and his movements although precise appear a bit robotic and automatic.

    The inscription was made in one single-stroke drawing.

    Only after hepleted with one did his eyes go back to normal and Dayus passed the scroll to one of the soldiers.

    He went to the next one and did the same. He continued on until he finished all of the inscriptions, one for each soldier.

    When the soldiers finally got one each, he ordered them to do something and sent them away.

    "I hope this one works Zeus, if it doesn''t, then I will be big trouble of losing this round. Everyone else fucking surrounded me. I will be a fish on the chopping block."

    If only other yers heard this, they would have asked one thing.

    "Who says, you are already not one?"

    After all, Dayus put himself in such a situation with all of his sides open for other yers while he focused so much on messing with Sam.

    The soldiers all went to meet with the advance team that was currently in a stalemate with Sam and his team.

    They are trying their best to hold him off and keep Sam in check.

    "Your help is on the way, just make sure that Brice and his subordinates stay at the same spot. They should be upied with their hands full. All they should be able to do is act on their instincts. Do you understand?"

    And when these selected soldiers went to the point where soldiers are engaging with Sam''s team, they are holding them back just like Dayus wanted. The selected soldiers with scrolls, let''s just call them to scroll holders, spread in the field just like how Dayus instructed them and the first of them made their move.

    He spread his me elemental energy into the scroll while it is still closed.

    The scroll burned a bit with orange mes and then it is surrounded by purple mes.

    The purple mes spread back into the holder''s body and one could visibly notice that the spiritual energy from the core and even the body parts is running dry along with the vitality.

    His eyes looked a bit lifeless andpletely drained for a moment. And with every moment the purple me just burned brighter and brighter. After the scroll holder was almost sucked out of everything, the scroll started burning intensely as the purple me converged back into it.

    And soon, the inscription inside changed a bit as the purple me slowly turned to lightning while the scroll burned to ashes with those sparks.

    The lightning gathered at the palm of the scroll holder as he lunged forward at one of Sam''s teammates who is fighting Dayus'' subordinates while still on the wolf.

    At this exact moment, Sam suddenly turned around. He was shocked to sense the energy that is now hanging on the palm of the holder.

    The reason is it is partially divine energy and another reason is that he could feel the aura from that energy is very familiar to the aura he felt before.

    He felt that when he was fighting in the pce of inheritance, the pce of inheritance of Zeus.

    He could never mistake it because all of Zeus'' subordinates emitted a simr aura irrespective of their race and cultivation, but of course, their aura is much more pure, much more refined, and much more dangerouspared to this.

    Even more than the Divine energy, that aura surprised Sam. If it was a normal fight, Sam wouldn''t have minded it much as Dayus is indeed Zeus'' representative and it wouldn''t be weird for him to wield such a skill.

    But in this round, all of their skills are blocked. Even the skills they could use are the skills that the owners of the bodies already have. So, ording to the rules, this shouldn''t be possible.

    This made Sam very pissed. He is okay with the gods bending the rules, even if he is angry, he could ept the fact that they are doing that within the rules and wait his time to get the payback.

    But now, he is not willing to stay that patient. This is truly crossing the line. He wanted to grab Hel by his neck and drown her in a river.

    Right now though, he has to figure out a way to make sure that attack doesn''t hit his subordinate. Because Sam is a hundred percent sure that the attack will definitely kill the subordinate.

    Both body and soul.

    He took out the spear that was tied up with a fabric and threw it toward his subordinate.

    His aim was way off. It was not majestic, not precise, it is not even that forceful. It didn''t show any skill whatsoever. But itnded right beside the wolf before it exploded.

    *BOOM*

 Chapter 1725: Dayus Attack

    <h4>Chapter 1725: Dayus'' Attack</h4>

    The explosion that was created from the spear threw the wolf and the subordinate sitting on it to th side.

    Both of them are injured, but luckily they managed to dodge the spear that came from the scroll holder.

    The purple spear went past them and deeper into the woods.

    Itnded on a tree.

    *BOOM*

    The explosion full of purple lightning. It is almost like a million lightning strikes arebined together andnded at a single point in a single moment.

    The whole area turned to dust. It is a disasterpressed and left to run rampant in a very small pocket of space.

    Sam and the other soldiers felt the after effects of the explosion from there. Their fight was disrupted a bit.

    He looked at the subordinate that fell off the wolf stand up. He managed to heave a sigh of relief and said.

    "Take the wolf and leave the ce. The rest of you, retreat. Assist your injured friends. The priority still remains the same.

    Stay alive at all costs. I don''t want anyone of your to die."

    "But Captain, what about you?" Vice asked as he looked at the charging scroll holders. Everyone is glowing with that purple light. It is way too shy for anyone to not notice it.

    "Don''t question my orders now. You guys start retreating, I will cover for you."

    "But..."

    "WE HAVE NO TIME."

    Sam yelled in frustration. He really liked these guys for their loyalty, but sometimes it is way too much of a hassle for him to get them to do the things that are required. They are way too stuck up and he doesn''t have enough time to convince them that everyone decision he is making is made for a reason.

    They at least heeded his frustrated yelling.

    Dayus closed his eyes as he heard the live reporting from his subordinates.

    Sam covered the retreat as he threw the gs at the chasing party randomly. A lot of thoughts are running through his mind.

    It is already a bit surprising for him that everyone stalled their attacks, but he could still understand it, as yers are always wary of him and took measures everytime. But if that is not enough, the first group he met belonged to Dayus.

    There is no way, in a normal scenario would Dayus be able to by pass Kumar''s forces that easily to set up a camp here.

    The rest of the yers wouldn''t let him. When ites to dealing with Dayus, there are way more united than in any other scenario. But he still managed to get here.

    If this is not enough Dayus has this extra skill that shouldn''t be present here. He is very pissed right now. If someone could feel his emotions, they would be scared. They would be shitting their pants right now.

    It is as if a raging volcanic eruption was condensed andpressed into the size of a cannon ball. He is that pissed.

    Dayus gets to use his skill while he even fucking can''t aim a fucking spear properly.

    He looked at the sky as the wolf ran at its maximum speed. It is a great decision for them toe on the wolves. They are familiar with the terrain and they are much faster than any of them. Even Sam would have some trouble if he didn''t use his elemental fusions to race it.

    The soldiers are having a hard time keeping up.

    Sam took a deep breath as he looked at their territory. The border is not that far away. Which means, the running time almost over.

    He looked back to see how many people are stilling after him. How many people are still at his tail. There are not too many. But all the strong elites including the scroll holders that could barely keep up with the wolves areing.

    They might as well be some of the strongest under Dayus.

    As soon as they entered his territory, Sam let his teammates escaped and took the central position in the formation by himself.

    The needles appeared in his hand and the whole area sparkled with blue lighting.

    Dayus is still getting the live updates from them and when he heard that there is a whole area with blue lightning, as well as Sam just standing in the middle of it while he let his teammates retreat, he felt like that would be the time for him to make a move.

    He immediately left his tent and ran with lightning elemental fusion.

    Meanwhile, Sam engaged with all of the scroll holders and other elites.

    Just like how it worked with the mes, the formation once again worked the same with lightning and here every hit is much more destructive.

    Most of the time the mes destroyed and turned everything into ashes, but here mostly, every single lightning strike burned them to crisp before sting their body into very small pieces.

    Of course, for some reason the scroll holders are much stronger than others. But one thing about them is that Sam doesn''t have to fight them to kill them.

    They are making it easier for him with their attacks.

    One of the scroll holders used the scroll. It is burned into ashes as a single lightning spear attacked Sam who is in a stationary position for a while.

    He used a lightning shield barrier to the stop the spear.

    *BAM* *BAM*

    A massive explosive collision between the two lightnings.

    Sam instantly felt his instincts scream to his mind. His body instinctually activated the lightning elemental fusion to the maximum limit. The purple spear dispersed a bit into the blue lightning barrier and then into the formation.

    Most of it is assimted as he painfully circted it, but the problem came with the very faint hint of divine energy inside the spear attack. The energy went straight into his body, as if it is ravaging it.

    Sam tried to scan his own body. He never wished for the observation ability more. He could feel the blood seeping out of his pores. It is murky, thick and dense. It is almost like he is being squeezed out of get that out of his pores forcefully, but of course, it is the other way around. It is being forced out from inside.

    He forcefully pushed through the pain and redirected this divine lightning back out of his body. His fusion that turned to partial fusion with all the blood that ising out him, once again slowly turned to full fusion.

    The lightning went through him back into the formation.

    It went straight to a different scroll holder who got ready to attack.

    *BOOM*

    The lightning explosion made the guy die out instantly right after he released the spear. But the spear missed the aim and went far into the forest.

    The aftermath of the explosion actually killed the first scroll holder who was right beside the second scroll holder.

    So, two of them are down and Sam had some divine energy added to his lightning attacks as he destroyed the rest one by one.

    He took some more spear blows and he gritted through them as expected. Even though he went through some severe torture and he felt like he is being suppressed and getting tired, he is also taking the remaining people down pretty easily.

    Soon, the subordinates died one by one and he sat on the ground dead tired.

    The residual effects of the Divine energy in his body made him feel like he weight a ton.

    He barely managed to grab himself onto the wheel chair, before he let the wolf out once again.

    With the support of wheel chair he threw himself on the back of the wolf.

    The wolf couldn''t run as fast as before, because Sam would be thrown off, so he is a bit slow.

    But still it didn''t take long for him to get to his camp.

    Only he didn''t feel any relief when he arrived there. His heart is gripped with horror. He looked as Dayus stood there with his spear and purple lightning surrounding him.

    Sam''s subordinates are trying their best to defend his attacks. All the wolves are dead and the subordinates are on theirst legs.

    Dayus sensed Sam''s presence and smiled at him, before he took off into the air. He stepped on the air while he threw the spear at one of the subordinates before he ran away.

    "DODGE IT."

    Sam yelled on top of his lungs, he didn''t have any energy to make a move.

    All he could do that ask his wolf to stop the attack and luckily it did. Right when the spear was about to lodge itself into the subordinate, he was tackled by the wolf to crash into the ground on the side.

    The spear went past both the person and the beast. Sam heaved a sigh of relief, but only before he could really feel that relief, another spear came out of nowhere and went straight through Vice''s chest.

 Chapter 1726: Patience

    Chapter 1726: PatienceSam saw as Vice stood there with the spear in his chest.

    He gritted his teeth and gathered all the energy he could possibly gather and crawled towards him. The remaining subordinates all jumped toward Vice.

    Dayus who is standing far away in the air looked at Vice and Sam, with a smirk on his face as he ran away.

    "The n worked."

    He muttered to himself as he nced at Sam onest time. He could see that Sam is shaken. He is rattled. At first he was skeptical about the n that Zeus suggested. But now, he felt like this is something that could work.

    Zeus who was watching the game since the start, thought that it would be great to deal with Sam this way. He noticed that Sam is putting all of his focus on keeping Brice''s subordinates alive. He constantly emphasized to them that it is important for them to live.

    This made him feel like that it''s a great opportunity. When someone nned so much about something, even a small disruption will shake their mentality.

    That is what he thought and he wanted to do exactly that.

    Particly, Zeus believed that since Sam is already in a dire state without his legs. He will feel like everything ispletely against him and he is fighting against the whole world.

    Added guilt from losing a team member, which happened definitely because of Sam, after all it is a personal grudge between Sam and Dayus. The altter wouldn''t have done something like this for any other yer.

    He took all the risk and paid so much just to deal with Sam.

    Zeus wanted all of this to pile up on Sam''s mind, so that he could be dealt with easily. In a way it worked.

    Sam is rattled.

    He didn''t know how to react to the situation for a moment. It took a couple of minutes for him toe back to his senses and let the other teammates carry Vice into the core of the camp.

    Within the tent, he was ced on a table.

    Sam turned to his subordinates and said.

    "Take my wolf and go to the squad camp. They told us that they would do us any favor as long as I asked. So, tell them to send the best healer they have in the camp.

    And also tell them that I don''t have time for an egoistical healer. Tell him that I want someone who listens to every word I say for the next couple of days."

    The subordinate didn''t argue, in fact he didn''t even bother to acknowledge. All he did was take a wolf and leave the camp in the direction of the squad''s camp, in the top speed.

    Meanwhile, Sam let Vicey down on the table. With the subordinates'' help he destroyed the spear on both the ends of the wound.

    Now only the metal piece of the shaft was left inside. The problem is, it is not filling the woundspletely, so the blood is overflowing from the sides.

    Sam doesn''t have any healing skills. All he had is this stupid weaving skill. He only tried to master it in a way so that he could attack and defend. But he never thought of using it for healing. He didn''t know that things will work or not.

    But he didn''t have much time to think. He scanned Vice''s body to the best of his ability. The spear went through the lungs an it even nicked the heart a bit on the edge.

    The blood is drowning him. Sam knew that he has to deal with this immediately, otherwise, Vice would die right here. Another problem is that Vice is exhausted with his energy spent on fighting, so his natural regeneration is not kicking in.

    Sam took a few deep breaths to calm himself down as he thought of a way to keep him alive.

    From what he knew the squad''s healer is extremely powerful. He is very skilled and experienced. So, he will be able to save Vice as long as Vice didn''t die or slip into a critical state before he arrives.

    It will take at most a couple of hours for that guy toe here. So, he just have to keep Vice alive and in a good enough condition so that the healer can do his job.

    And now, he has to find a way to for that happen with only some weaving skill.

    One thing off the list is that he is using light element. One of the elements that he used for the longest time. The second thing, he has to use the element like the threads and make it so that it will preserve the vitality of the heart.

    After he thought for a moment, he made his move.

    The light elemental energy spread out of the fingers in the form of strings. Sam closed his eyes as he used the very thin light threads stitch the nick on the heart and stop the bleeding, of course as soon as he removed the spear piece.

    He pumped the blood our forcefully before he stitched the lungs and the chest.

    He made sure that the vitality is stable and the wounds gradually healed.

    Sam who is already exhausted felt that he could easily heal Vice, but the problem is that he doesn''t have any energy and even his physical strength hit a rockbottom to the point that he can barely stay conscious. All he wanted at the moment is to sleep in a soft bed if possible.

    But he has to grit his teeth and endure.

    It was a true test to his mentality after a long time. He started bleeding through his nose and he felt more and more drained at every second.

    He doesn''t know how long he can endure it. But he endured it. He gritted his teeth and felt exhausted more than ever. And by the time he lost consciousness, all he heard are the faint sounds of a wolf running towards them.

    Sam finally heaved a sigh and fainted.

    When he finally woke up, it is almost dawn. He is out for hours and all of his teammates except Vice are standing there.

    "What happened to Vice?"

    That is the first question that came out of his mouth.

    "He is not feeling that well. You did a great job trying to keep his vitality intact. But the problem is that you didn''t notice the poison on the spear. A few traces of it were left inside the lung tissue. It is very hard topletely remove it.

    It seeped too much into the body, so it will take some time for me to cure him. But at least he will live, it is just a matter of time for him toe to his senses."

    The healer answered the question.

    Sam heaved a sigh of relief once again and turned to him.

    "Thank you foring to aid us. I am really grateful. I don''t know how to repay you."

    "Please don''t say that. I noticed that there are some weird formations in ce. It seems like all of the fight has not left you. And from the looks of it, you upied arge area. If you need any help, I can report to the captain. I am sure we can spare some soldiers now. Holding down this much territory and even taking down at least a couple of entrances of other ns, will be a great addition to our military."

    "I know that. But you don''t have to worry.

    I have decided that I will finish this thing today. After I am through with this, you might need a month of two to get the valley back to its past shape. But I assure you that other ns will not be here.

    I will handover the whole valley and the method to make it better to the squad. You can stay here and take a look if you want or you can leave."

    "What are you talking about?"

    "Nothing Sir, It is just that right now, I am really really pissed and I am going to take it out on the valley and other young masters from different ns. I ran out of patience to do this in a restrained and proper method."

    The healer is a bit confused. But he didn''t know what to say. All he could realize in that moment is that he knew for sure that he should stay there and take a look at what is about to unfold.

    "Are you sure it will be done by tomorrow morning?"

    "Yes. I am not just sure. It will be done by tomorrow morning. The valley will belong to our n and the Grey wolf squad will be in charge of this ce.

    You can trust me on that."

    "It would be more assuring if you could give more details. But thank you. I will stay back and see. Just in case, I will inform the squad members right away. They might send some emergency backup."

    "Sure. Whatever you want to do."

 Chapter 1727: Message

    Chapter 1727: MessageSam got out of bed and jumped to start the work.

    He sat at his loom at the center of the core formation and started weaving. The subordinates didn''t know what to do. But they saw an energy nket covering the already existing one and it started extending outwards gradually into different sections.

    "I want you guys to go on the bird-type beasts. Take flight at the highest altitude possible and I want you to drop down these gs randomly in other territories.

    You don''t have to follow any particr pattern, but make sure that they are not too far away from each other. Don''t let them clubbed together. But drop at least a hundred of them at different spots in other territories.

    Leave the one that we visitedst night to thest. Do the rest first. Do it fast, do it precisely and stay the fuck alive.

    Do you understand?"

    "Yes."

    They didn''t ask any questions, they didn''t project any doubts. For some reason, they felt that Sam is in no mood to answer any questions or clear any of their doubts. They started following his instructions as they took the spears that are now gs with a fabric hanging around them.

    The teammates dropped one g after another in other territories and since everyone is holed up back in Kumar''s territory leaving behind only a small number of troops to defend themselves, the work has been easy.

    Of course, not all gsnded the way Sam wanted them to, but enough of them did. He did take the margin of error into consideration when he made them throw those gs.

    Meanwhile, he started working on something else. He sat on the core of the main formation and kept on weaving. The new energy nket extended out of the first formation and it spread to different directions uniformly.

    It connected itself with the other energy nkets and formations Sam had set up and kept on extending to the all sides out of his territory. Soon, the nkets started reaching the gs that were nailed in different territories.

    When the energy thread reached the g pole, the g started glowing as if it is triggered by the presence of this energy, it let out a small formation from the fabric.

    The threads intertwined with the formation and used it as a node to spread farther.

    Sam had his eyes closed as he used the spreading threads and the energy gathered through these nodes and formations from the surroundings, to spread the threads farther along with his spiritual sense.

    This is an idea that he came up with on a whim. In fact, this is actually one of the first ideas that he came up with.

    Using the nature of the threads and fabric to spread as far as he can. And the following chain of ideas are not exactly his first choice even though they are his first thoughts.

    He had to tone them down a bit to create the formations that he created. But now as he mentioned before that he lost his patience like never before, he didn''t care. He decided to go with his first thoughts and he is doing exactly that right now.

    Sam didn''t even open his eyes until afternoon and he only did that for a few minutes, before closing them again.

    In the middle, he gave a little jolt to the energy nkets which made them glow a bit and at that moment, the subordinates who are flying around saw arge part of the valley light up. It is mesmerizing for them, but also dangerous.

    They couldn''t even think of something that they couldpare this to. They couldn''t wrap their head around it.

    Sam only stopped by evening.

    He got back in his wheelchair for a while and he moved to different corners of the core formation.

    He added a few gs there before he went back to the core of the formation.

    The healer came to him at that time.

    "It is already evening, are you sure you are up for what you said? By tomorrow morning? From what I can see, you spent so much time preparing, it will be hard to finish it off by morning."

    "You wouldn''t say that if you understand exactly what I prepared. I suggest that you stay back in the main tent along with the subordinates. Things are going to be chaotic."

    After that, Sam called for his subordinates.

    "I want you guys to go to that camp and throw the spears down with these scrolls attached to them. I want these messages delivered. And make sure that you stay alive."

    "Yes Sir."

    "What is the most important thing?"

    "Staying Alive sir."

    "That''s right. If one of your dies, I will capture your soul and torment it for as long as I live. Remember that."

    He went back to make the preparations and the subordinates went to deliver the letters. Since all camps are within Kumar''s area, they dropped the spears with scrolls there randomly and went back.

    When the yers got the scrolls, they are already in a tense situation. In fact it could be considered a very tense situation. Dayus after sending the soldiers after Sam and dealing that blow, he immediately holed up in a defense.

    Turns out the inscriptions are not the only ones that were given to Dayus, he also got an impable formation that works with using soldiers as nodes. Not like a battle formation, instead the vitality and spiritual cores of the soldiers as nodes.

    The defensive formation destroys people on both sides. Dayus didn''t have to worry about destroying his own subordinates and he also doesn''t worry about destroying other soldiers, but the rest of the yers don''t feel the same way.

    They have a conscience unlike Dayus.

    So, they are in a very tense stalemate. A fight could break out any moment.

    At that moment, they received the scrolls from Sam. It is a message.

    "I have been patient my fellow yers. As you all know, I have been dealt the wrong hand since the start of these stupid games and I was okay with it most of the time. Because, it only effected me, but now Zeus and Hel have crossed a line.

    So, I need to make an example out of it.

    Obviously, I cannot go against those gods at the moment directly. All I can do is take some measures that would teach them a lesson indirectly.

    And the gods that are sponsoring you are the only way I could think of.

    As of this moment, consider this round ofpetition be over. A few minutes after you read the letter, I am about make my move. The valley will go through arge scale change that will make staying here a living hell to you and your soldiers.

    I am warning you out of courtesy. Take your troops and leave this ce. Because within no time, I cannot guarantee anyone''s lives.

    Also, I don''t know what kind of deal you have made with Dayus, but I suggest that you do something about it. I want Dayus and his soldiers to be trapped inside the valley. I don''t want you guys to give him a clear escape.

    I would appreciate it if you do that, but I won''t mind if you decide otherwise. Just keep that in mind, that I am the one who is asking."

    The letter ended right there.

    The yers didn''t know what is happening, but a few of them got together. Arkiv, Akhil, Kumar, and Noah.

    "So, what do you guys think about this situation? Do you guys think that Sam finally lost it?"

    "He might have. But I don''t think I am going to take the chance. I will retreat from my side." Akhil is the first to make the decision followed by Arkiv.

    Both of them left.

    Noah and Kumar on the other hand are thinking what might have happened with Sam and since Sam mentioned about this little help, they decided to take it up on themselves to help out the friend.

    So, they went to meet Dayus, who is actually desperate to meet them. Donner left the ce without a second thought. But he didn''t retreat entirely, he went back to his previous base camp and he saw the gs on his way out.

    He had half a mind to remove them on the way back, but he didn''t. He went back to the camp and got ready to retreat back into the tunnel at the first sight of Sam''s actions.

    Dayus, Noah, and Kumar met up.

    "So, what are you guys doing? I know Sam mentioned something about not letting me leave, but we cut a deal in this round. Even if you cannot work together with me, you can at least let me go through it.

    I will not attack, you will not attack me. Just let me walk away."

 Chapter 1728: Dayus Realization

    <h4>Chapter 1728: Dayus'' Realization</h4>

    "Dayus, what did you do exactly to piss off Sam so much?"

    Noah asked with a cheeky smile.

    Dayus didn''t know what to say. But he didn''t dare reveal that he cheated.

    "What else can there be? He is just being a sore loser."

    Kumar and Noah chuckled.

    "Come on Dayus, who are we kidding? All of us know that he is way better loser than you are a winner. Just tell us what you did exactly. Otherwise, you are not going anywhere. I will take pissing you off over pissing Sam off any day. So, you better spill the beans now."

    "There is nothing to tell. I don''t know why that bastard is angry. Alright. Now get the fuck out of my way."

    Both Noah and Kumar frowned. This reaction of Dayus only made them all the more assured that something is indeed wrong.

    They wanted to more details, but from the look of is Dayus is not going to give any. They exchanged a nce and silently left without extending the conversation.

    Kumar and Noah went back to their camps and ordered their people to retreat, but instead of the beast carriages they used when they came here, they are all leaving by foot. As for the beast carriages, they are abandoned along with the beasts that were dragging them.

    There is a reason for doing that and Dayus found out why, when he got the news that they are retreating.

    He felt ecstatic and wanted to escape. But to his surprise, all the abandoned beasts are out of his camp. And it was not just Noah and Kumar who did it, even Arkiv did the same. And he even went a step further to leave behind some traps.

    Some traps that are made up of a bunch of bows and arrows. All aimed at Dayus'' camp and his path of retreat. After the yers left with their subordinates, they all sent a message to Sam using a beast, saying that they left and he can do whatever he wants.

    And when Sam got thest letter from Donner, he made his move. He sat in the core of the formation. On the ground and he held the tapestry needles. He took a deep breath and looked at the sky.

    "I am pretty sure you can hear what I saying Hel, so listen carefully. I am done with all of the shit that you have put me through since the start of this challenge, and I would like to make a statement against it.

    Of course, you wouldn''t be taking my words seriously. No matter how many times I gave you the run for your money.

    So, right now what I am about to do serves as a sneak peak at what more that I can do and will be doing in the future. And I have a few demands that I want you to uphold after this if you don''t want me to do what I can do.

    Keep your eyes open."

    As soon as he spoke, spiritual energy roared in his surroundings like a tornado. His eyes started glowing with spiritual energy. The energy branched out and connected with the nkets and the formations.

    The nkets started appearing. The energy rapidly spread as all the nkets and formations lit up. If one saw the formation from the sky, one would be in for an amazing sight. The nkets and the formations are so bright that it looked like some modernser show in the middle of a forest.

    It took four minutes for the whole valley to glow up with the nkets, threads, and the formations that are connected to them.

    Dayus and his subordinates are all stuck. Before they could dissolve their formation, the beasts all bombarded them from all sides. Before they could even fend them off and run to retreat, they were hit by the traps.

    Their retreat is slowed down and when they saw the whole forest around them glowing up with all the concentrated energy threads that surrounded them from different angles, they felt chills down their spine. Particrly Dayus.

    The rest doesn''t know who Sam is and what he can do if he is really pissed. But he knows. He witnessed the destruction, the mayhem, the chaos he could create when he goes unhinged.

    He just didn''t expect Sam would do something so drastic. The only thing he thought was that Sam is already in a pinch since he doesn''t have any badges from the first one and he also had so many setbacks in the second challenge.

    Little does he know, Sam is not like Dayus.

    He is anything but like Dayus. He has had enough.

    Sam took a deep breath once again. And when he exhaled, a puff of spiritual energy came out of his mouth like smoke.

    "Here goes nothing."

    Sam started moving his hands. The tapestry needles are connected with multiple energy threads. The threads that spread across the nkets all over the forest started intertwining. Each zone has different elemental energies and the first reactions are obviously at the zones near him.

    The area with fire elemental energy, the ce where Sam dealt with Noah''s subordinates is the first one to react.

    All the vegetation in the area, including every single de of grass, started burning. Whether they are dry or full of life, every single piece of vegetation started burning. The whole area glowed with fiery orange.

    The fire is so fierce and full of rigor that the vegetation didn''t evenst two seconds before everything turned into ashes. Soon, the rocks that are on the surface started melting, and the gravel on the ground also started melting.

    The whole area turned into a pool ofva.

    The heat seemed to have directlye from the purgatory itself. Every elemental energy in the area, whether it is wooden, earthen, water, or wind, of them turned into fire elemental energy. Even the natural neutral spiritual energy turned into fire elemental energy.

    The space itself seemed to have turned into a zone of fire.

    Next, the lightning area where Sam kicked Dayus'' subordinates'' asses.

    The vegetation, rocks and all the other disintegrated. The spiritual energy that is holding the bonds of the grains of every single thing turned into blue lightning.

    The same thing happened in an adjacent area. The wind''s elemental energy tore apart everything. All it has is grains of particles flying around like a tornado.

    The dust storm looked like the manifestation of death itself.

    As one area after another turned into zones of mayhem and death, Dayus and his subordinates could feel their doom approaching them.

    The whole thick dark forest and the beasts that resided in it, all of them became nothing. The squeals of the mighty beasts could be heard as death swallowed them. Even their carcasses were not intact. They turned into grains of flesh and bone and disappeared with the rest of the chaos Sam created.

    Before they knew it, death surrounded them. They saw lightinge from one side, a sandstorm from the other, fieryvaing as a tsunami. Dayus looked at all of these and felt powerless.

    An Astral ne cultivator at his peak stage can make a city disappear with a swing of his spear, he can destroy a in a day if he so much as wills to do it. His mere presence with no restraints will cripple an entire generation of mortals.

    But he felt like a little child that day.

    A powerless, mortal child in front of god''s punishment that was cast as a judgment on him.

    He has shed with Sam many times. He tried to pull some random tricks, he had a lot of petty tricks up his sleeve the whole time. He tried to sabotage Sam. He tried to kill Sam. He felt jealous of Sam.

    He always believed Sam is not better than him. He felt like he is just a step behind and he would easily catch up if he gets one proper opportunity and some luck that benefits him.

    But that day as the lightning storm came at him, he could feel his heart and mind screaming at him.

    The blue lightning that day turned into Sam''s face.

    All this while, he felt like he is alive because Sam was unable to kill him, he though he was alive and well because he is Sam''s rival and enemy that Sam couldn''t easily defeat.

    But that day, at that point, in that exact moment, he understood one thing. All this while, he has been living under Sam''s mercy.

    He is at Sam''s disposal. His life and death are not in his control. Just like how Zeus had control over his life and death, Sam had that too. Sam hadplete control over the life and death of Dayus all this while.

    And maybe just a mere thought of Sam''s might have killed him. To think that Sam didn''t even bother to have that thought all this while, just gave him an idea of how pathetic and little his life meant to Sam.

    His whole existence felt so small, so negligible.

 Chapter 1729: Demand

    <h4>Chapter 1729: Demand</h4>

    Sam could feel every bit of energy within the valley.

    He could feel every single particle of spiritual energy flying around and taking everything that is alive.

    He felt one member after another of Dayus''s subordinates and even the body that was hosting Dayus was currently being destroyed. Not even a single trace of their bodies or lives was left behind.

    In a few minutes, everything shed. All the zones started spreading out more and more out of their boundaries and shed with others.

    The shes made the valley distort. The elemental energies that arepatible caused a new type of disaster and the elemental energies that are nopatible created a different kind of disaster. But one thing is for sure, everything in the valley, every inch of it has changed.

    The chaotic storm made the ce unsuitable any sort of life form and over all of this, only one patch of the area, the one patch that was Sam''s base is the only one with any vegetation left.

    The grey wolf squad healer looked at this and started shivering. He fell to sit on the floor as he drenched in his own sweat. He looked at Sam''s back and felt like he is looking at the manifestation of death itself.

    Even from far away, he could feel the power of the elemental energy storms Sam has created. And in his eyes, it is not Sam, it is Brice who had done this.

    The Brice he knew is a person who has been wronged by the n time and again. The n elders always took the side of Brice''s rivals over his, just because he didn''t have a good backing.

    Now he is afraid, since he saw what Brice did to the people that just came at him in a battle, then what could he do to the n that has been unfair to him time and again.

    He felt that Brice had finally lost it.

    Sam controlled the storm to stay outside the basecamp and opened his eyes. He nted the tapestry needles in the ground and looked at Brice''s subordinates and the Grey hound members.

    "I will write down a special method. A few formation blue prints, a set of inscriptions and arrays that would help you stabilize the storms in this valley.

    You can follow the map and instructions.

    The valley has a lot of natural spiritual energy, but it has been absorbed by a bunch of weeds and useless vegetation, now it has been cleared.

    Once you follow my instructions, the valley and its zones will be revitalized with the same elemental energy as the storm that they are suffering.

    The whole valley will be a ce with multiple elements all bnced together. You can cultivate all kinds of rare herbs here. You can even use the neutral zone here as a farm for the beasts. Particrly, the beasts that I have collected.

    They grow on these neutral crops and herbs very well. They will provide a great force for the n.

    Anyway, you will have all the instructions from me. You don''t have to worry about the valley anymore.

    Now, can you guys leave me alone. I have some thoughts to organize."

    Everyone left the spot without a second thought. They didn''t even wait for a second. In fact, they are looking forward to leaving the spot and the only thing that stopped them is their fear of Brice.

    They didn''t know if he will be angry and divert a bit of the destruction towards them.

    As they left, Sam sat on his wheelchair and looked up in the sky.

    "I know you are watching Hel. What you just saw is the tip of an iceberg. Thepetition is officially over. The whole valley is mine and the duration is just halfway.

    Whatever badges you have, should all be awarded to me. You don''t have a choice.

    And before you close this round off and send me back to hell, I have some demands and the first of them is that youe down here. Appear before me, in any shape or form so that we can have a conversation.

    I will give you the rest of my demandster.

    You might be thinking, why you should listen to me, but if you don''t do that, I will be doing the same thing, I will be repeating the same behavior in the remaining rounds.

    I will destroy the wholepetition, not giving any other yer a fair shot. The whole thing will go down the drain.

    So, the remaining gods should decide if they are willing to let their yers be treated like this. The only way for them to not be treated is for Hel toe and meet me.

    You decide. You have until the end of this round ofpetition."

    Sam didn''t speak loudly. He just spoke in his normal tone. But he is sure that the gods are listening to every word he said and he couldn''t be more right.

    At that exact moment, Hel is looking at the screen. She looked at Sam''s face. Or rather Brice''s face.

    She felt like that face didn''t suit Sam. It felt so inferior and unsuitable for a person like Sam. She couldn''t be more right.

    And the scene of Sam destroying the whole valley and everyone within in just a couple of minutes kept on reying in her head. Her back is covered in cold sweat. She involuntarily started gulping.

    She has been immortal for so long. She has been a god that ruled over one of thergest territories of hell. She is so strong and powerful that she didn''t even remember thest she sweat like that.

    But Sam, who is decades if not centuries away from attaining her level of strength made her feel afraid. She felt small for some reason.

    She shook her head and came out of the shock. She knew that Sam would follow through with whatever he said if she didn''t make a decision now.

    But before she could grant her request she needs to conduct a meeting. The only thing is that she is way too slow. The other gods are already on their way to conduct the said meeting. In fact they all gathered before they messaged Hel toe and meet them.

    She disappeared from her spot.

    A few realms away.

    Hel appeared on a seat at a round table.

    Everyone is dead silent.

    Even the gods that started out at the game but got eliminated because of their yers'' death came along. They are all looking at the situation with glee.

    Of course they are not as cheeky as Gambler himself. He is grinning like an idiot as he looked at a screen again and again.

    He saw the elemental energy storms destroying the valley from different angles.

    "To think he did all of this from weaving. Hel, I need you to make things tough for him more and more. I want to see what kind of weird things he will pull out."

    He is the first one to speak and those are his first words. The rest of the room turned silent.

    Particrly, people who had their yers still in the game and out of them Zeus had the worst expression.

    Because he is the one that brought this to all of the gods. And he is not na?ve enough to believe that they don''t know anything about it. He is sure that they are in clear of what exactly happened and who is responsible for it.

    The only reason they are stopping without making any fuss is to not burn the bridgespletely.

    "What do you guys want me to do?"

    Hel asked without responding to Gambler''s snide remark.

    "You have to meet him. I would do the same if I was in his position. I would have done it a lot earlier though."

    Sun Wukong spoke as he chugged a gourd full of wine.

    "But don''t you think, this will set a precedent for the other yers."

    Indra spoke trying to resist. It is because he doesn''t have to worry about his own yer. He doesn''t have a yer in the game. So, he is all up for making a mess out of the whole game. He is willing to enjoy the show from the side lines.

    The gambler didn''t speak. He just kept on reying the scene with that unnatural smile.

    "What do you think Gambler?"

    Hel asked him.

    "I don''t care much. It is not like you are doing everything asking me. It is always your choice. So, make your choice again this time."

    "Go and meet him. You made so many moves against him already. This is the least you can." Karthikeya also supported before leaving the meeting.

    He didn''t want to continue the fiasco anymore.

    Hel understood that the decision is not going to vary much for the rest of the gods. So, she made her move.

    She decided to meet with Sam, the very next day.

 Chapter 1730: Message

    <h4>Chapter 1730: Message</h4>

    "You acted quicker than I thought."

    Sam said with a smile as he looked at the small hovering figure of Hel.

    He is currently inside his tent. This is the next morning after the destruction he caused. He was left alone as he was taking rest and the first thing that greeted him as soon as he opened his eyes is Hel''s small hovering figure that looked like a game character.

    "You really have bigger balls than I thought. How dare you threaten the gods that could kill you anytime they want. Do you really think so highly of yourselves?"

    "You are here, aren''t you? Anyway, I think I already made it clear about how little your status as gods means to me, when I tortured you when you came as Beryl.

    Do I need to remind you again?"

    Hel gritted her teeth in frustration as she looked at Sam. She didn''t have any propereback for that.

    She knew that Sam might just be the only person in existence that came into contact with this many gods and managed to attract their attention either their affection and interest or their ire. All the gods that encountered Sam in pces of inheritance either love him or hate him.

    Most of the time, there is no in-between.

    "Tell me why you called me here."

    "I want you to do me a favor. I want to leave a message and some information to Brice before I leave and I want you to make it possible."

    "Is that it?"

    "Not, of course not. I want to know why Dayus got his hands on his original techniques. How is that possible? If the rules don''t have any significance, why bother with so many rules and restrictions to me while that piece of shit gets all the perks.

    I would like an exnation."

    "Are you really impudent enough to question me directly?"

    Hel asked in a serious tone.

    Sam didn''t even bother to take her seriously. He is clearly not in the mood to go back and forth. He just wanted to get the message across that he wouldn''t tolerate the bullshit anymore.

    "I don''t really care if the odds are stacked against me. In fact, I wee it.

    It is one of the greatest forms ofpliments a person can get. After all, gods like you that are ruling over realms and species have to think of such an underhanded way to deal with me. I couldn''t ask for better proof of mypetence.

    But my tolerance only sticks when those odds just affect me. They shouldn''t affect the people around me.

    Once they do, things will go just like this. I will flip the whole table and no yer will have anypetition to participate in.

    Give this message to the gods and tell them to think twice before they make another move.

    Also, there is another thing. I will not just stop messing with thepetition if this repeats itself. You guys need the faith from your followers and I will make it the mission of the Dusk organization to destroy every single organization under all of the gods.

    I will ughter ns and sects, young and old alike. Innocent or guilty. I will cover every single one of them with a nket of death and will make them know that they are subjected to this torture because of the gods they so worshipped for generations."

    Hel''s eyes widened as she looked at Sam in shock.

    "Are you fucking insane? Do you think you can get away with threatening a god like that?"

    Sam felt pressure all over his body. But he didn''t back down. His expression got colder as he met Hel''s gaze.

    "Try me. I know for a fact that you cannot kill me without Gambler''s consent.

    And you should know better if you think that I cannot deliver what I just said. You witnessed the whole process I have gone through over the years. The effort I put to develop and what it has be now.

    Do you want to take the chance that I wouldn''t destroy your organization?"

    Hel increased the pressure even more. But she didn''t dare to push him further. One look at his eyes and she knew that Sam is speaking the truth. He is not messing around. He will do exactly what he said.

    She couldn''t help but think of the days when Sam is patient with everything. He must have been a pain in the ass, but he always steered clear of hurting people that have nothing to do with him.

    He never attacked someone out of spite just for the sake of it.

    For the first time, he said that he will destroy every organization under the gods and she can clearly see that he is speaking the truth.

    He is not just bluffing to get his way. He fully intends to kill.

    She couldn''t help but think if they did the right thing by pushing him too much like this. She felt like Zeus is going to regret every choice he made in the past few rounds.

    "I understand. But there is not much I can do. And I don''t have too much control over the game. I put up the rounds based on the discussions.

    My yer is not here, so I look for my own benefits. If you really want to take it out on someone you can take it out on the god that messed with you. I can give you the names if you want."

    "There is no need for that. I know who did what. It is not that hard to figure out. You gods might think you are above mortal emotions, but you disy them the most. Bloody hypocrites."

    "Whatever. Is there anything else?"

    "Nothing. Do let me drop the message though."

    "You can do it. You can leave behind a trace of your soul to this body. Brice will take over once you are gone. So, he can take a look at that soul fragment and get the memories directly."

    "Thank you. Please ry my message to the rest of the gods. They better be careful. I am not kidding and I ran out of all the patience that I could muster."

    Hel disappeared without letting Sam finish his words.

    Sam didn''t bother much with that behavior. He knows that this woman will be pissed for a long time along with the rest of the gods. And that is exactly what he wants.

    He wants to see if these gods will grow a brain and leave him alone or if they would be foolish enough to provoke him again.

    He closed his eyes and started gathering thoughts and information that he wants to leave behind for Brice.

    For some reason, thepetition was not dered over, even though the whole valley is essentially his own at this point.

    But he had to stay there until the end of the duration of this round.

    This only added to his benefit though. Because he can leave a longer message with much more information for Brice.

    By the end of the seventh day, Sam left a final message along with all thepiled information for Brice before he was taken away by Hel back to hell.

    When Brice came back to his own body, a series of memories hit him along with a lot ofplicated and unfamiliar information.

    He instantly understood what happened and to make him get an even clearer picture, Sam''s message hit him atst.

    "Hello Brice, I am Sam. The person who upied his body for the past seven days.

    You have been through a lot with losing your legs and most of your once-loyal team. And to be dragged into this matter that ispletely unrted to you is unfair, to say the least.

    Because of a game, some stupid cunts are ying, and your subordinates almost died. I am partly responsible.

    So whatever I am leaving to you, take it aspensation on my part. But there is something else I want to tell you.

    You are too good for your n. You are apetent and responsible young man who has honor and respect for whatever you are fighting for. But your n doesn''t reciprocate it no matter how much you sacrifice for them.

    You even lost your limbs and you were immediately discarded.

    Now that they saw what I did in your body which they think you did by yourself, you will be desired again. Your n members are that fickle.

    So, I advise you to leave your n. Shift all of your forces to this valley. I left a method to control the elemental storms in the valley. You can use these methods to control storms and arrange a natural defensive barrier from all seven ns.

    They cannot do much no matter what they tried and how they tried.

    Build yourself and your forces. Use whatever information I have left to build your strength and one day, an organization called Dusk organization will arrive in this realm. That is the way for you to contact me.

    We can join hands and grow further. If you don''t want to do that, you can ignore my message, but can still take whatever I left you and help your n.

    But do think before you take that decision. Is your n really worth it?"

 Chapter 1731: Next Competition

    <h4>Chapter 1731: Next Competition</h4>

    Brice went through all the information left behind by Sam.

    There are techniques, knowledge rted to formations, all the research and tricks Sam uncovered with the weaving, weapon blueprints, formation blueprints, inscription techniques, beast rearing techniques, farming techniques, Sam left a lot.

    But one thing that caught Brice''s attention is the special prosthetic blueprint that Sam let behind.

    The prosthetic legs, specially designed to fit Brice''s constitution. Sam designed it and let the young man have them so that he could walk and operate like before.

    Brice felt a sense of relief and he couldn''t help but shed a few tears.

    He didn''t know how to lead his life without his legs. He had invested way too much into his battle techniques andbat prowess for him to just go on with a life without legs.

    But when he looked at the visuals within his mind. The visuals Sam had left for him, made him feel hope again. Even before he could drown in despair, he already got caught in the hope Sam created for him.

    He called for his subordinates.

    They were a bit taken aback. They could see a faint difference between Brice now and the day before.

    "Go back to the capital and bring your families and loved ones along with you. All people who you can entrust your life with. Get them here, from now on this valley is our home."

    "Young master, even if he gained victory here, you are not going to be posted. The others will definitely try to steal credit. They are not going to let you take control over the valley."

    "The valley is not theirs to decide. It is mine. It is ours. We decide who stays here and I decide that we stay here."

    The subordinates are surprised, but they followed his orders just as he said.

    Meanwhile, Sam went back to hell. He went back to his floor and started fighting the creatures once more.

    He went back into the old routine of fighting and attracting corruption.

    Back to the Gods, Hel is rxing in her realm.

    She still couldn''t believe that she agreed to Sam''s demands. She is a goddess. She controls Hell. There is no way, he should have that kind of control over her.

    She knew there are a million reasons to do so. But she felt like all of them are excuses. By no means a mortal should be able to threaten a god. But Sam did that and seeded.

    She shook her head off those thoughts and decided to not mess with thepetition anymore.

    She is definitely not going to make things even by giving Sam some advantage next time, but she is also not going to make his life difficult anymore.

    The other gods were also surprised by the audacity Sam disyed.

    Of course, the gods that liked him were more intrigued and impressed than angered. But that day every god got a wake-up call and a warning that Sam shouldn''t be disturbed too much.

    If Gambler is not there, most of them would have opted to kill Sam directly. That would make their life and the game a lot easier than it is currently.

    But the mere presence of Gambler made them remove any thoughts of making it unfair.

    Sam didn''t know this, but he didn''t care much about it as well.

    He just spent days hunting the creatures that are manifested from his past.

    And as the days passed time for the nextpetition also came.

    In thest one, Sam bagged every single badge there is. He upied the most area in the valley, he upied the whole valley, he defeated all the others single-handedly, and he finished the task long before the specified duration.

    He met a bunch of hidden requirements winning four badges for hidden achievements on top of the two normal badges for winning.

    Not only did he finish the task like it was nothing, he even covered the deficit he had from the first round. As for the other yers, they were left far behind, they couldn''t help but grimace at the fact

    So, everyone is looking forward to the third round.

    That included Sam.

    He might not begging behind them anymore, that doesn''t mean he wants to let the gap reduce. He will keep on increasing the gap as the time passes. He will win this round with such absolute results thatpeting with him shouldn''t even cross their minds.

    So, he stayed prepared.

    At this moment, Sam is sitting in front of the pir as he refined his body again and again. After a few minutes, he let the energy into the pir and rxed. His body felt revitalized.

    He took a deep breath as he put all of his focus on his spiritual core. In the middle of his ss-like spirit core, in between all of the elements, there is a new form of energy. It is very smallpared to the whole pool of spiritual energy he had there.

    But this small bit of energy is much more powerful and much more dangerous than all of that spiritual energy.

    It is Divine energy.

    The first strand of Divine energy that Sam felt.

    He didn''t break through of course, but there is a limit to the amount of spiritual energy his body can contain and there is a limit to the physical strength that his body can obtain and tolerate. And in the middle of this process, he managed to hit the limit.

    He just finished the seventh floor of the tower. Which is not that much whenpared to the sheer size of his tower. But it took him a long time.

    In fact, Sam lost his sense of time in the process. He doesn''t know how long exactly has it been. But he is sure it must have been over three to four months.

    He didn''t know exactly how long. But at one point he stopped caring.

    He managed to gain the first strand of Divine energy in the process and he kept on refining it along with refining his body with corruption energy. It became purer by the day.

    As he is exploring this Divine Energy, he felt the familiar suction force pulling him away.

    He appeared in the familiar space. The empty space where Hel always exins thepetition.

    The yers looked at Sam as he appeared in his seating position. His upper body is bare. He looked peaceful and seemed to be in perfect condition.

    Other yers wanted to talk with him. They still couldn''t forget the nightmare Sam created in the previous round.

    But Hel didn''t give them a chance.

    "Hello, yers.

    Now time for the third round.

    And sincest time, one of you has behaved a bit out of hand. It seems like you yers are forgetting your ce. You are mortals that we picked to y around with. You are nothing more than ythings, toys and you shouldn''t have any pride or ego to challenge and demand us.

    But one of you crossed that line.

    So, now all of you are going to suffer. Since there have beenints about the game being unfair. I will fairly punish every one of you.

    Thepetition this time is pretty simple.

    All of you will be thrown into different arenas. You will be diators there. Each arena will be spectated by a dozen or so Divine ne Cultivators that are on verge of bing gods. We called them Demi-Gods.

    These Demi-Gods are way too powerful. They can kill you in a snap if they want to.

    But thanks to my kindness I didn''t allow it.

    Instead, they will be sending their faithful soldiers to fight with you.

    Your job is to take one fight after another in whatever order they decide.

    The only thing is the difficulty of your second enemy will depend on how good you are in your first fight.

    By default, the difficulty of the next fight will increase by 10 percent. But the extra difficulty will be added based on how you do in your previous fight.

    For example, if you are almost unscathed in the first fight and be in 98 percent of your top condition, the next fight which is normally more difficult, to begin with will increase its difficulty by 9.8 percent.

    So, the next fight''s difficulty will be set with an extra 19.8 percent difficulty.

    If youe out unscathed in a fight, your next fight will be set at 20 percent increased difficulty.

    You will fight until you cannot fight anymore. And the difficulty will keep onpounding just like that.

    Of course, the person with the most wins is going to be the winner and this time, only one of you is going to get a badge and only one badge at that.

    The demigods will be witnessing and also arranging their own subordinates. They get to talk to you and ce bets on you, but they won''t be able to do anything directly to you.

    But in their eyes, you are nothing but a ve, a diator that is fighting for their amusement. A toy. So, expect the treatment a toy deserves.

 Chapter 1732: One Kick

    <h4>Chapter 1732: One Kick</h4>

    Sam looked at Hel coldly.

    "Seems like you haven''t learned your lesson."

    As soon as those words left his mouth, he felt the pressure mounting on him, but he didn''t lower his gaze. He just stood there. Not willing to back down.

    "You will learn your lesson today. That moment of strength and greatness you had before. The only reason you didn''t get punished immediately is that I wanted to show you how much control we have on your life.

    If we wish so, you can revel in that greatness or we can nip it in the bud and torture you as we like.

    So, now you are going to suffer like a ve and the toy you are."

    With a wave of her hand, Sam disappeared from the spot.

    He reappeared in an empty colosseum. All the stands are full. They all wore some extremely luxurious robes and they are all silent.

    One look at their attire, Sam could guess what faction they belonged to. They are wearing something that looked like ancient Greek costumes. They belong to Olympus.

    As for their aura, Sam couldn''t feel anything. He couldn''t sense any kind of energy from them.

    But he is not foolish enough to assume that they are weak.

    All the Olympian Demigods started sizing up Sam. The colosseum is not noisy at all. They all had these arrogant expressions on their faces as if they are beneath speaking up.

    They just looked at Sam as if he was an object.

    Meamwhile, Sam got the information about the restrictions they will be having.

    He cannot use any elemental skills. This round is all about purebat. He can use his cold weapons like swords, staff, spear, bow and arrow etc. But he cannot use any ranged energy attacks, like his energy bullets, energy explosions.

    He cannot use his void style, ripple style and repel style.

    He cannot use harbinger, handguns, sniper rifle, and such.

    He cannot use his grenades, special formation discs, energy liquid, Energy capsules, and many more.

    He is just a brute with weapons to fight.

    But Sam is not worried. In fact, he is very pleased with the arrangement. The only problem right now is that he is half-naked.

    His upper body is bare. He didn''t wear his feather coat when he was refining his body just now. He came just like that.

    Even though he is pretty careful and vignt when fighting, being exposed like this is no good.

    He would prefer if he had that extrayer of protection.

    But he is not exactly worried too much.

    He just looked at the demigods waiting for them to throw their first contestant at him.

    After a long time, he is feeling his full power. Except for the elemental energy restriction, his spiritual energy reservoirs are full and his physical condition is at its best. There is nothing toin.

    He can finally let loose.

    Meanwhile, among the demigods that are witnessing the scene, the one at the forefront looked at Sam with his hands folded across his chest.

    There is a look of disdain andplete hostility on his face.

    He didn''t like Sam and it wouldn''t take a genius to figure it out. Just from his expression and bodynguage, one could see how much he dislikes Sam. There is even a hint of disgust in that gaze.

    Sam met his gaze soon and looked amused.

    He didn''t even know this guy and he is already hating Sam.

    There is only one possibility why that happened and that is because he was told to hate Sam.

    "For all the Demigods of Olympus here, I propose a small game with our new toy. Care to hear it?"

    He opened his mouth and everyone turned to look at him.

    Sam looked at him with a raised eyebrow. He knew that he is the new toy that was being referred to.

    He wanted to see what the other party has nned.

    And he didn''t have to wait for long before he got to hear it.

    "From what I heard, this new toy fancies himself as someonepetent and today, we get to test hispetence to its limits.

    We y ording to the standard rules. We will be sending our subordinates in an order based on the lots we drew.

    And whoever subordinate makes this toy, kneels and admits his inferiority, makes him experience most pain will be given a special reward of their choice from my personal armory."

    "Young master Flos. You cannot just give out promises like that.

    Are you sure you won''t regret itter? The value of items in your personal armory is no joke. You might cry over It for a millennia after losing it."

    "This time, I don''t mind. I am thinking of it as a gift for my fellow Demigods of Olympus. I know everyone is looking for a way to get their hands on one of that weapon.

    But I can''t give one to each one of you. So, this is my way of making up for it a bit."

    "Whatever you say. Just don''t go back on your words."

    One of the Demigods in an opposite row spoke up. He is wearing a blue robe and he started to look way too eager for his own good.

    "Just because you are the first person to send their subordinate, doesn''t automatically mean, you are going to win this lot. Don''t be too eager."

    Another Demi-God replied.

    Sam looked at the man who is way too eager and smiled. He didn''t speak anything as he heard their conversation and just stood there rxed.

    Soon, the door opened up on the side as his first opponent came.

    And Sam wasn''t disappointed.

    "First Fight.

    Elric the Stone Giant With three hundred wins and twenty losses, versus Sam, zero wins and zero losses."

    A robotic feminine voice sounded in the arena.

    Sam smiled and looked at his opponent.

    As the name implied. He is a Giant. Not just in size, but in the race as well. Sam saw a giant in Zeus'' pce of inheritance and this one is bigger than thest one.

    This guy is at least five times as big as Sam.

    And the head of the hammer that he wielded is almost the same size as a motorcycle.

    Sam looked at him and couldn''t help but feel amused.

    He is very tiny in front of him.

    "You are the bug I need to squash. Let''s make it painless."

    The Giant spoke and wielded his armor. Even though it is that huge and heavy, it is still fast.

    The giant might not be that fast, but it is more than Sam expected from such a huge creature.

    The sheer force from the hammer put so much pressure on Sam that he could feel it in his bones. He could feel his spine tightening as if he is bearing some massive load, just from that swing.

    *BAM*

    The hitnded. Sam and the Giant are covered with a dust cloud. It cleared within a second though and everyone was surprised by what is in front of them.

    Sam is standing there as if nothing happened. He blocked the hammer blow with his bare hands and he didn''t even buckle a tiny bit to negate all that force.

    The Giant felt as if he hit apletely immovable and indestructible. His arms are shaking and he could feel the tremors of the reaction all over his body.

    He could feel it in his muscles and bones.

    And this feeling is very familiar to him. He felt it somewhere before and that incident has been a cause of his nightmares ever since.

    He pulled his thoughts together and raised his hammer tond another blow.

    As the hammer went up, Sam jumped along with it, he caught the staff of the hammer and spun around it gracefully.

    He stepped on the hammer head that was going up and jumped straight toward the head of the giant. He spun in the air and the spiritual energy gathered at his foot whichnded straight on the head of the giant with a hook kick.

    The giant felt the spiritual energy entering his head along with the impact. He felt his brain wobble fiercely. The surroundings spun.

    Blood started seeping out of his eyes, nose, mouth, and even ears.

    He lost all of his motor functions and couldn''t bnce therge hammer. He fell on his back with a heavy thud while Samnded on his feet.

    Everything happened in just a sh.

    The Demigods all looked at Sam in shock as they noticed the life seep out of the Giant''s body with their own eyes.

    The fighting record of the Giant clearly indicates that he is a strong fighter. He clearly is a great warrior. But for him to go down in one fight. That too when there is no trace of an external injury left on his body, this is something they didn''t expect.

    Sam stretched a bit as if he didn''t just kill one of the most prized fighters in just one kick

 Chapter 1733: Sams Big Words

    <h4>Chapter 1733: Sam''s Big Words</h4>

    Demigods all stared at Sam with a frown.

    This is the first time, they took any real interest at Sam. After all, in their own words, he is but a toy to them. He is nothing more than a ything. So, they didn''t care much about his appearance or prowess.

    Even the reward the Demigod at the front promised, made them focus little on this guy.

    But now, they cannot just ignore him anymore.

    Sam finished his stretching and spoke.

    "I don''t know who gave you the information about me. From your attitudes, whatever you have heard, you probably didn''t believe, or the person who gave you the information didn''t give you the full information.

    But let me tell you a few things about me.

    I have a very good memory.

    I never forget a thing. I might throw useless and insignificant things to the back of my mind, but they are never truly forgotten.

    My memory is good that I even remember the face of every person that I killed so far.

    The next thing I want to tell you is that I always punch above my league.

    I killed my first Nascent stage enemy when I was at the Great realm.

    I killed my first Transcendent stage enemy when I was in the Grand realm.

    I killed my first Consummate stage enemy when I was in the Nascent stage.

    I killed my first Astral ne cultivator when I was still a mortal.

    And I have killed countless Peak stage Astral ne cultivators when I was still in Astral ne Initiation.

    And now I am at the peak stage of the Astral ne and I even felt my first strand of Divine energy just a couple of days ago.

    Now that I remember all of your faces and you are basically at Peak of Divine ne of cultivation, I believe it wouldn''t be too long before I take heads of each and every one of you.

    So, before you run your filthy mouths, you better remember that."

    Sam paused for a moment and looked at the Demi god who offered a prize for his head.

    "And finally, any piece of shit, you thinks they can get my head for a price or a prize, should know this. There is no such thing as a truly fair fight with me, when the conditions are fair, it is unfair to my opponents, when conditions are unfair, it is deadly to my opponents.

    I have never lost a fight on equal grounds. No matter how many enemies they are, the numbers won''t matter. So, if you really want to even put a challenge, send the best you got and send them all at once.

    I will finish them off quickly and leave this ce.

    But if you insist on sticking to these stupid rules and send one person after another, wasting my time, I will torture my opponents to the extreme.

    I will give them the utmost pain in the shortest time possible.

    I will make them wish they have lived their worst nightmares instead of fighting me and I will make them crave death than enduring me.

    So, the decision is up to you.

    Knowing all that I have told you now, you better adjust your behavior and behave.

    Or wait for the consequences."

    Sam finished speaking and just stood there calmly.

    The Demigods looked at him with different expressions, the weakminded of them all are obviously pissed. They wanted to get up and scream and if not for the presence of their peers, Sam is sure that they would have done it.

    The second type are the ones that are radiating with killing intent. They are all bite and no bark kind of guys, the exact opposite to the first type. They are also angry, but it is because they genuinely felt insulted.

    Not because of any insecurity they had.

    The third category were the people who were amused.

    They are intrigued by the way Sam dared to speak to them and in their minds, they still treated Sam like a toy.

    Sam didn''t mind their behavior. He couldn''t care less about what they think. In fact, he wouldn''t have even bothered to spew all these threats if they were just like any other people he encountered in his different levels of thispetition.

    But these people are directly linked to the gods and Hel herself said that they are here to amuse themselves at the expense of Sam and the yers. So, they have to pay the price and he has to send a message to the gods that whatever he said in the previous round is not a joke. There is a price to pay for ignoring his words.

    And that price must be paid, even if the other party is a god or the devil.

    The person who put a price of Sam''s head belonged to the third category.

    "I would like you show me. I would like to see if you can deliver in on your promise.

    Show me that you can really make the opponents experience the utmost pain in the shortest time.

    And the next opponent is my subordinate, so I would like to see it even more."

    As he spoke, the gate opened once again and the next person entered.

    This man looked jacked. He is six and a half feet tall and he had this bloodthirsty aura surrounding him.

    He had a spear in his hands as he walked forward slowly.

    He looked at Sam like he was looking at his archenemy.

    Sam wanted to wait for that weird feminine robotic voice to announce the name. But the Demi-God snapped his fingers making it stop.

    "Since every opponent is the same to you, there is no need for any introduction." Is what he said to justify his actions?

    Sam didn''t mind. It will be too much of a waste for him to use his brain power to remember all these names anyway. He would prefer it this way.

    As the opponent came to him slowly, Sam chose not to be passive. He took kicked the shaft of the heavy hammer and broke it.

    He left the head on the ground and took the staff as he spun it a bit before running toward his opponent.

    His opponent decided to meet Sam with a simr speed.

    As both of them shed their weapons, Sam ducked low. He bent so low that his face almost touched the sand. He could inhale the sand grains if he took a deep breath.

    At that posture, he slid between the legs of the opponent and went to his back. Before the opponent could realize it, he stood up and pulled the staff up, hitting the opponent on the genitals.

    As if that is not enough, he kicked the opponent on the back making him fall with his face first.

    He then once again used the staff to smash him all over the back across his spine, shattering it bit by bit.

    The opponent could feel his spine turn into a thousand pieces with every passing second.

    He felt pain beyond physical limits. He felt like a soul and will copse with every hit.

    He is one of the best fighters in the arena and Sam is now beating him up like he is a child and it is not just to humiliate him. Humiliating is just an added bonus.

    Sam is truly trying to destroy him as a whole. He can never think of the possibility of his body returning to normal after the beating he just took.

    As if that was not enough, Sam finally stabbed the staff in the back, exactly at the ce where the spine is supposed to be.

    The staff went into the back without any resistance, since the bone is all shattered.

    He then diagonally pushed the staff into the back towards the neck.

    Sam then raised the staff with the man hanging on it like a dead limp animal before stabbing the other end to the ground.

    The man couldn''t move his arms or legs, all of his limbs fell limp and his spine is gone. So, he could not even twist himself off of the staff, he felt all the blood leaking from that hole in the staff as it slowly dripped across the staff and seeped into the ground.

    He looked at Sam and said in a weak voice.

    "Please, kill me."

    Sam dusted his hands and jumped suddenly beforending an ax kick on the forehead of the man.

    The body dug itself deeper into the staff and the sharp end came out of his mouth ending man''s life in an instant.

    The Demigods looked at the scene and gulped. And it is not even figuratively. Sam could hear the loud collective gulping sound.

    Never in a hundred years, they would have expected something like this in this arena.

    And this ce is somewhere theye to enjoy the most gruesome shit done to people by each other. But what Sam did surpass anything they have ever witnessed.

    Just watching it appeared like torture for the audience, they wouldn''t even imagine themselves being in the shoes of the victim.

 Chapter 1734: Nightmare

    <h4>Chapter 1734: Nightmare</h4>

    Sam just looked at the Demigods with an uninterested look.

    There is not a single shred of change in his facial expression even though he killed the opponent with such cruelty.

    "Next opponent please. You can get lost in your dazeter."

    As soon as he spoke those words, one of the Demigods came out of the daze faster than the rest and snapped his fingers. The gate opened and a new opponent came in.

    This one had long hair.

    And Sam got ideas as he looked at the long wavy hair. He couldn''t help but get creative.

    This guy didn''t act like the others, he had this honorable and polite demeanour, but Sam didn''t reciprocate it.

    He just made the first move.

    The young man tried to defend himself with his sword, but he didn''t even know what happened before he found himself being held by his long hair while being dragged towards therge hammerhead that was left behind by the Giant.

    *BAM*

    The head was mmed against the giant stone hammer head.

    He felt the world spinning around him. Blood dripped out of his nose and he lost his sense of hearing. All he could hear is the loud beeping sound.

    When his eyes finally recovered, he saw Sam holding his hair while sitting on the hammer head in a squatting position.

    He pulled the hair once again and mmed the head on the hammer head.

    *BAM*

    *BAM*

    *BAM*

    The hits are not hard enough to crack the skull open with just one shot, but they are not soft enough for the young man to recover immediately.

    He got hit so many times that he felt limp all over. All of the bones in his face are cracked. They are destroyed.

    And soon, the fragments of these bones areing out of the face, and not long after the brain matter started leaking, killing the young man.

    "That took longer than I thought. That''s some nice thick skull you got there.

    NEXT!"

    He yelled out loud bringing the Demi-Gods out of their daze.

    They finally felt a bit shaken. After all, they didn''t expect Sam''s strength to be like this. Just like Sam expected they indeed got a briefing. But all they knew is, he can use a lot of elements and he is now being deprived of it.

    They were told to break him. Toy with him.

    But here, things are all happening in reverse.

    They are being toyed with and they can''t physically do anything about it. There is nothing more frustrating than that.

    And they almost doubted their senses when they noticed Sam''s cultivation level.

    They didn''t dare believe that someone on the same level can destroy opponents who are virtually equal to him in terms of spiritual energy and strength.

    It shouldn''t have been possible and they reckon they wouldn''t be able to do it like what Sam did. They wouldn''t be able to fight like how Sam is doing.

    He is way too rxed to be in the arena at the same time as these trained and tested fighters that came across hundreds of battles and won.

    They are dangerous. If they were to be put in a battlefield, they would kill dozens if not hundreds and Sam is treating them like little children when dealing with them. This scared them a lot.

    The fights went on.

    One candidate after another, Sam kept on killing them in the most humiliating and gruesome way he can think of.

    And every death only took some time, because he wanted those deaths to take some time.

    Sam behaved like an absolute psychopath as he derived a weird technique for every opponent that came.

    The Demi gods saw the Arena turn into a very unique graveyard. They saw the deadbodies that are deboned with Sam''s bare hands hanging from staves and spears like they are some gs.

    Then there are some bodies that were dissected with their limbs and guts separated from the rest of the body.

    There are some who were toyed with after they were blinded of their senses. The Demigods didn''t even understand how Sam made them literally blind by killing their eyes. After all, they still should have been able to use their spiritual sense.

    But in his presence, they weren''t able to do that.

    He used some trick to make them go truly blind and deaf. They cannot hear, they cannot see, it felt like they are trapped in absolute darkness.

    And in the next two hours, Sam broke open the skulls of people, yed their skin while fighting with them, broke their limbs, deboned, and used those bones to kill the rest.

    Tore open their chests and ripped their hearts out while they are still alive and breathing. He has acted like the ultimate barbaric nightmare.

    The nightmare that never ends.

    He could see the next contestants visibly shaken as they came in and saw the destruction and death Sam left behind in the arena.

    The sand is soaked with blood. The whole arena is littered with nted staves, spears, swords, broken bones, and guts.

    It is a gruesome scene and in the middle of it all, Sam stood with his whole body from head to toe, soaked with blood. He looked like a true psychopath that likes to bathe in the blood of his victims.

    But Sam is unfazed. He just looked at the Demigods coldly and shouted.

    "NEXT!"

    He is almost uninjured. Most of these opponents were unable to leave a mark on him. Few came close, but the damage was negligible and they died just as easily as the rest of their peers. Before they could think of a way to even pin down Sam and attack him, they were destroyed.

    The leader of the Demigods, the one that put a bounty on Sam''s head with one of the weapons in his treasure trove looked at Sam with burning resentment. But he didn''t let it show in his facial expressions or bodynguage.

    But both he and Sam knew that he hates Sam''s guts to the core.

    He took a deep breath and looked at Sam as he spoke.

    "Since you feel like this is not up to challenge and you even asked us to send all of our contestants at the same time, I hope you don''t mind if I do it now. Don''t say it is unfair afterward."

    "Are you kidding me? Just send them all. I still have a lot of energy left, I don''t even know what to do with it. It is almost like I am fighting with some old dead trees now. I am even doubting if these guys really are diators.

    Or the standard of the Olympus must just be this."

    As Sam spoke, the leader of the Demigods got even angrier and snapped his fingers.

    *SNAP*

    The walls of the colosseum on one side opened up and arge legion of soldiers starteding from there.

    They looked remarkably like humans. But each and every one of them is seven feet tall and they are built like they are crafted from flesh-colored stone.

    Sam never saw a muscle definition like this before.

    "Meet my Titan legion. Two hundred of my elite soldiers. That is going to be your final test."

    Sam looked at them with his eyes widened a bit.

    All the Demi gods finally felt a bit at ease, but that feeling immediately turned into a sense of embarrassment. After all, they are feeling good about themselves about the fact that Sam got a tiny bit scared or rather surprised by their forces, but they had to use one of their elite legions to do that.

    It is embarrassing to even think that they managed to produce such behavior from within them.

    Sam didn''t care about it though. His sense of surprise has gone.

    And obviously, he didn''t feel the surprise because he was afraid of it.

    He was actually thinking of giving out a finishing touch before he leaves this ce and the size and the looks of the titans just gave him the perfect idea for that finishing touch. He will make it so that these Demigods will never forget him until the end.

    The demigods thought that Sam would at least go on a bit defensive or even take a vignt stance when they saw his initial reaction.

    But to their surprise, he made the first move instead.

    He dashed forward as he kicked a spear that was on the ground. It flew into his hands as he leaped forward towards the Titan that was at the front and foremost.

    He swung his staff to smash it in the head of the Titan who blocked the attack with ease with his ax.

    Sam didn''t even blink before he let go of the staff and took out the reaper sword. He stabbed straight into the shoulder of the titan while he made his descent.

    When another titan was about to attack him from the side, he tore open the shoulder of the first titan as he forcefully removed the reaper and blocked the greatsword that wasing at him.

 Chapter 1735: Warning

    <h4>Chapter 1735: Warning</h4>

    The great sword that is many timesrger than Reaper was cut in half as if it was a stick of butter.

    Before the titan could even digest that shock and surprise, the blood red de of the reaper sliced through his arms and his chest.

    He could feel the life leaving his body along with his blood.

    "All that muscle, what is it for?"

    Sam muttered as he turned around and kicked another guy that is trying to surround him and attack him from the back.

    He stopped ying defensive. Even though he tried to block as many attacks as possible to the best of his abilities, when they did barely manage to cross those defensive measures andnd that attack, it barely made a mark on Sam.

    He let them attack him. He didn''t care much.

    The demigods and the titans did think that finally Sam had some weakness and the numbers are taking a toll on him.

    But there is one oddity that made them think that it might not be the case. Every time, Sam killed someone or he made enough damage to someone to the point they are on verge of their death, he dragged them out of the crowd and threw them into the middle of the arena.

    And he did that so with no resistance whatsoever and it made them feel like he is not having much trouble with the people here.

    Sam just piled the bodies in the middle and went back into the wave of titans. He killed one, brought one and threw them once again before going back.

    The titans who were known to be some of the greatest warriors there is, felt a spine-chilling fear as they saw the pile getting bigger.

    Sam is soaked with blood. His hair is dripping with the blood of his victims. He took the attacks from titans who understood their fate and went all out. But he didn''t even change his expression. It is cold, and arrogant, the arrogance that made the titans feel small.

    It is almost like Sam is proud by the fact that it takes two hundred strong to even injure him properly and every time a titan almost made ast-ditch effort with everything they got to kill him, all they can do is leave a noticeable scar on Sam, he smirked at them with that arrogance.

    The Titans were filled with shame, and that shame consumed them.

    And there is nothing much that could be said about the Demigods, the ones who are incharge of making this whole farce up.

    They saw Sam dismantling their best fighters, killing like their lives aren''t worth living. His behavior as if he is punishing them for wasting the life force of this universe and being unable to retaliate in face of such impudence. All of this made thempletely helpless.

    And their faces only brightened for a brief moment, when four titans sacrificed themselves to destroy the function of one of Sam''s hands and they are a bit ecstatic by the fact that it is the arm with which Sam wielded the reaper.

    But to their dismay, Sam didn''t even care, he just threw his il arm around like it was not even his and caught the sword with his remaining hand.

    He continued the massacre and piling.

    Soon, some of the demigods who are not reallypletely involved with high stakes in his fiasco, got curious about why Sam is piling.

    And one of them made some handsigns while biting their finger. That drop of blood glowed and then it transferred to their eyes as if they are seeing something that shouldn''t be seen.

    The glow from the eyes disappeared as that person looked at Sam is surprise. He turned to the demi god that sat next to him and said.

    "If you don''t want to cough out blood from anger, tell your brother to order those titans to retreat. If you don''t, you are going to regret it. An insult you couldn''t bear will stare straight at your face."

    "What are you talking about? That bastard has to die here today. Even if all the titans have to die, that bastard shouldn''t be alive."

    The person in the next seat obviously didn''t listen.

    The first demi-god just shook his head. He had seen what is going to happen in a while and he is sure none of these Demi gods are going to like this. But he is sure of one thing, even though if Sam technically dies here, the demigods will only feel more frustrated instead of empowered.

    They won''t feel a single shred of satisfaction because Sam is not really going to die here and not just that, he will leave something behind that will make these guys throw up blood in anger.

    He just sat there and looked at Sam''s performance.

    As the bodies piled up soon they took a shape after a while. There are only a dozen or so Titans left and Sam lost a lot of blood himself. His movement has obviously gone slow. But he looked like a savage that is going on a rampage.

    As he is weakening a bit by bit and felt his head going dizzy, the titans are also dwindling much faster. And the pile is taking a very specific shape. By the time only one titan was left, all the Demigods stood up as they yelled.

    "Don''t let him finish that."

    "Don''t you dare, you sick bastard? We will not let you insult our honor like this."

    Sam is trying to keep all of his focus on his final target, to finish whatever he started. And this demigod''s cries helped him. He became much more focused as his dizzy head cleared up a bit with a hint of anger surging to his head.

    He gritted his teeth as he held the sword tightly with his left arm. His right arm is not moving. The tendons on his legs were cut, and his back was open with multiple wounds.

    His lips are crushed and his nose is broken, some of his toes are smashed into pieces.

    Saying he is injured is a severe understatement.

    The Demigod looked at the Titan who is covering even though Sam is that injured. Titan didn''t even take half as much damage as Sam.

    But he is shivering in fright and when the reaper came for him, he didn''t even defend himself. He threw his weapon away and let his life leave and the Demigods could bet that they had seen a faint glimmer of relief in the face of that dying titan.

    Sam carried the titan with his left arm while holding the reaper with his teeth.

    He bit the handle so hard that his gums started to bleed with all the pounding he took. He dragged therge titan''s body as he slowly climbed the heap he created.

    The Demigods got mad and almost all of them extended their hands.

    "You lowly bastard, we order you, to stop your acts right now or you pay dearly."

    "You pathetic bastard, how dare you, act impudent in front of us, you better hope we wouldn''t catch you alive."

    "I will throw you in hades and torture you while you are alive."

    Everyone started cursing Sam. This only made him more determined though.

    The Demigod leader, the one who sent the two hundred titans looked at Sam coldly and shouted.

    "STOP RIGHT THERE."

    Sam didn''t heed his words.

    "I TOLD YOU TO STOP."

    He then extended his hand and threw a lightning spear at Sam.

    The spear tore through the space and went to hit Sam, but right before it could make contact, it deflected.

    Sam couldn''t do anything to stop it and he realized, he didn''t need to do anything to stop it.

    An invisible barrier appeared and stopped the spear in its tracks. But the spear just followed Sam along that barrier as he moved and tried to pierce through it.

    The rest of the demigods also joined in as they attacked with various moves. All of them ranged attacks and Sam could feel the divine energy overflowing from each one of them. He bit on the reaper''s handle even more as he climbed the pile one step at a time.

    As the attacks increased though, he felt an invisible pressure mounting up on him. This made him feel extremely tired and felt like he is carrying mountains on his back.

    But still he didn''t give up, he put his all into his legs as he climbed bit by bit.

    And by the time his whole body felt like it was being crushed under the pressure, he forcefully pulled the Titan''s body upwards and made it stand on top of the pile.

    He then let go of himself. He fell of the pile freely under the pressure and hit the ground hard with a thud.

    The demigods looked at the pile and the single titan standing on top of it.

    It is a middle finger.

    The corpses are arranged into a palm that''s giving a giant middle finger to all of them.

    That''s what Sam did with all those titans.

    As he felt the pressure weighing on his chest, Sam just smiled as he spat out blood from his mouth.

    "You inbred swine of Olympus, you dared to call me a bastard and low life, you dared to break the rules and attack me directly, you dared treat me like a toy and a piece of entertainment. Now I hope you are fucking entertained.

    And I hope you find all your entertainment before Ie back and visit you guys which won''t be too long.

    The way I am going to treat you, the things I am going to do to you, the heinous creatures sealed in the deepest levels of Hades will shiver in fright upon the mere mention of it.

    Mark my words."

    His voice is loud and clear as his body slowly disappeared and right before he did, he could see a faint image of Hel appearing in the sky and waving her hand. All the Divine energy attacks of the Demigods are sent back to them. Attacking them then and there.

    Making them all cough blood.

 Chapter 1736: Hels Warning

    <h4>Chapter 1736: Hel''s Warning</h4>

    Sam came back to the empty space along with the rest of the yers.

    Everyone is in a bad shape and every one of them has their weapons on the side. None of them are even in a condition to stand up.

    But when they looked at Sam, they couldn''t help but shake their head and heave a sigh. Ever since their trials through hell have begun, Sam is being served the worst hand.

    Even Dayus who always got the advantage felt that it is too much. Just from the looks of it, they could see that Sam must have gone through more bodies than them and the difference is definitely not a small number.

    They all felt weird energying to them and their injuries are slowly disappearing.

    Sam also felt this pleasant energy healing his wounds. He could feel the small scars on his fingers getting mended and the scars disappeared.

    He frowned and said.

    "Scars."

    Hel looked at him with a frown.

    "What?"

    "Leave the scars behind."

    "What? Do you think that will give you a macho look or do you think your enemies will be intimidated by that? All that amounts to is you being a weirdo."

    Sam didn''t even bother to answer that, he just looked at her coldly and after a few seconds of contemtion, he felt the healing again and this time, the scars were left behind. Hel took it up on herself to heal his face back to normal though.

    But all the scars on his body are left behind.

    Sam was satisfied with it. He looked at Hel and asked.

    "What do I get for the misbehavior of those demigods?"

    "Why would you get anything? They will get punished."

    "The game became unfair to me."

    "For thest two minutes."

    "It is still my game. I am a man who adheres to rules, even though I am just a mere mortal from mortal realms. It seems like the higher the strength and authority of a god, the lower their standards regarding these things.

    Whatever then. Fuck off."

    "You better mind your words. Challenging the whole of Olympus like that is the most idiotic a Demigod can do, much less a guy who is years if not decades away from being a Demigod. I thought you were known for your intelligence.

    Idiot."

    "I do mind my words. I speak very carefully. Because, unlike you gods, my words are worth something. They have a weight that makes me feel ountable and responsible for everything I say.

    So, you don''t have to give me that advice.

    And as I said, you can fuck off as soon as you give out the rewards.

    I am pretty sure I killed every fucking opponent there could be in my case. It is my win and by overwhelming difference."

    He nced at the other yers.

    They are a bit frustrated. They need these wins for their future growth. Even though they don''t know to what extent these badges and points wille in handy in the future, they are sure that they will definitelye in handy at one point in time.

    So, they are obviously frustrated to lose like this consecutively and that too the point difference between the yers means, the difference in what they are to gain in the future through this will be faster.

    They cannot afford that. Except for Sam, every one of them is on somewhat at the same level and the difference between them and Sam at least in terms of cultivation level was not too big.

    That too because Sam has to gather enough resources to keep his friends growing at the same pace as the yers. They don''t want that difference to grow too big.

    They looked at Hel and Arkiv spoke.

    "I would like to ry a message to the rest of the gods."

    "Yes, what is it?"

    "Tell them to get their act together and make the game fair. Don''t make everything tough for him and don''t target him like this.

    If you really want the game to exist that is.

    He is not some normal pawn on their chessboard. He is a special piece that belongs to a whole different game and he has enough strength fucking burn the whole board.

    So, take it easy. I am sure the rest of the yers also agree with me on this."

    The yers indeed agreed.

    They got whatever mediocre rewards they could get and everyone dispersed. After they left, Hel''s cold and uncaring look turned into one that of frustration.

    "Damn pesky brats. Do you think I don''t want to end this? I went too far now I don''t even have a chance to turn back. You have to suffer a bit more, there is no turning back now."

    She muttered to herself and right when she was about to disappear, she thought of something and snapped her fingers.

    The yers who were sent back to their respective towers suddenly heard a message.

    "The next round will be exactly six months from now. To the second. So, be prepared."

    Sam thought for a moment and felt a little happy about this. Now that he knew the exact time, as long he doesn''t lose the track of time like before, he could be much well prepared.

    The other yers also heard this obviously and this time, they all had determined expressions.

    Sam has been targeted since the start, which is by no means fair. But they are suffering in the middle. If there is another task that just goes like this, they will fall back way too much.

    At least in thest one, they were able to have a chance to clear the task with decent results. They cannot guarantee with Sam''s madness the same thing will be possible in the next round too.

    So, they have to make a hard choice here and prepare for the worst of the scenarios, they have to be in top condition in body and mind and they have to keep on training with Hell''s Corruption.

    This is going to be tough.

    And this is not just limited to the yers.

    Meanwhile, back in one of Olympus'' Divine realms, all the Demigods that participated in treating Sam like a diator gathered.

    They are all on their knees. They didn''t have a single arrogance on their faces.

    Zeus''s virtual projection is floating in front of them.

    "Are you insulting the Olympus or the status of demigods? How dare you attack a person when you are ordered by me exclusively to not attack him? I even told you to not attack him. I deliberately instructed you not to attack that person. But you did it anyway.

    All the gods are now pointing at Olympus andughing at me.

    Do you have any idea how much humiliation I have suffered?

    I also told you not to deliberately pick a fight with him, I even told you that he will provoke you and pick a fight with you and I also told you that he can back his talk up. That is also why I told you not to pick a fight.

    Now, you picked a fight with him, got so easily provoked that you broke the rules of thepetition, and threw away all things that I told you to do.

    And even lost your cool.

    It seems like you all need to be punished.

    Your ceremony will be postponed for five years."

    The demigods didn''t even know what to say. Their faces are filled with horror. Zeus sent them away even before they could digest the news.

    Meanwhile back at Zeus'' ce he opened his eyes and looked at Hel.

    "What the hell happened in this battle? Care to exin?"

    "What is there to exin? It happened just like all the other times. Sam is targeted because he talks too much and your subordinates like to brag too much. Is there even anything new?

    I am so used to it to the point it is a routine for me at this point.

    "I am not kidding. Tell me, what happened exactly? I didn''t ask for you to ce Sam in Olympus and what is with the selection of Demigods? They are all the nobility under Olympus.

    They belong to the Divine realms that are connected to the Celestial realms of Olympus. Some of them have the gods'' blood running through their veins. It is almost like you wanted someone to get on Sam''s nerves and wanted Sam to retaliate like this."

    Hel just shrugged him off and said.

    "I don''t care what you think. But it is pure coincidence. The only reason I picked these Demi gods, is because they are easier to find if I search for them in your direct connected realms. I am not going to look through thousands of people to pick them.

    Your lesser gods rmended them and I took them.

    It is not my fault if all of your demi gods have giant egos that arepletely baseless.

    Just keep them in line more and it will do you good.

    And just hope that next time Sam doesn''t fall into one of your territories. He seems really pissed and even though I think it is really entertaining if he really does fall in your territory, I still think with the nature of the next task, it will trigger him way too much.

    It is not good for the rest of the yers."

 Chapter 1737: Friend

    <h4>Chapter 1737: Friend</h4>

    Six months passed by like they were nothing.

    The yers spent all of their time in Hell. Killing the creatures that are manifested from their own sins of the past.

    Sam is getting used to facing them more and more and he also got used to finding out what kind of powers they might have and what kind of weaknesses will tag along with those powers. He can easily take care of most of the opponents and for the free tricky ones, he started having much easier time that he is supposed to.

    Hel who is spectating all of this, obviously didn''t like it.

    But she didn''t do anything. There are not abrupt increases in difficulty and there are no extra obstacles are ced in front of him.

    He just went through the training and he cleared floors at a rapid pace. While the other yers just crossed a benchmark of fifteen floors, Sam is already at his twenty-third.

    But of course, this difference means little at the moment, because he has a lot more floors than the other yers, so he has to find a way to speed up the process even more.

    At this moment, Sam is once again meditating but this time, he is properly dressed as well and he is in his best condition. His body ispletely devoid of corrupt energy and refinement is also done.

    In fact, he even had a lot of rest.

    He is in the best condition possible with a bit of increased divine energy in his body.

    As he awaited to be taken away and thrown into the grey space, he felt the familiar suction.

    He reappeared in the grey space along with the yers. They all looked to be in their perfect condition as well. Hel looked at them and smiled.

    "Everyone of you took the knowledge of knowing the time of the task and used it for the advantage. You are all in perfect condition.

    Maybe that is to be expected, I guess.

    There is one thing that I want to mention to you though. Even if you are in this perfect condition, I wonder if it would even help you in the next task. This time, the yers don''t get involved in each other''s tasks.

    And this time, you are also going to be seeing some of your loved ones. The arrangements are made a long time ago.

    Don''t take this too personally. The recent developments and grudges don''t have anything to do with the territories, people, and the gods that might be rted to this ce. So, I suggest none of you take this personally and start holding new grudges."

    Sam frowned at this.

    "What do you mean, our loved ones are involved?"

    Hel didn''t answer and just sent them away.

    Sam clenched his fists as he disappeared from the spot, he reappeared in an open grassin.

    He doesn''t have any restrictions on his body, energy and strength. He has all of his weapons and he could even ess almost all of his weapons except for the ones that use liquid energy and liquid energy capsules.

    There are not many restrictions at all. Compared to the previous scenarios, this is actually very liberal and he indeed has full strength.

    This didn''t make him happy though. The only reason he didn''t have inherent restrictions through the game rules might be because the game itself requires him to be like that. Then the task would be extremely dangerous.

    Thinking of the part where Hel said that his loved ones are involved, he felt extremely anxious.

    He looked around and he could see a city far away.

    He wanted to move in that direction, but before he could even channel his energy, he got a message in his head.

    "You are advised to stay there instead of leaving. You have twenty-three minutes and thirty-eight seconds for one of your close ones, someone really important to you is going toe and meet you in an opportune way.

    They don''t know you are here and they don''t know why you are here.

    You can leave the ce you want to. In fact leaving the spot and searching the nearest city that you could see, might even help you. Gathering information as fast as you can and as much as you can, might even go a long way.

    Decide based on what you want to do. As you can see most of your powers are not restricted. And in fact, you will have a lot more liberty in the way you can finish the task.

    You will know more details as you proceed with it.

    The whole task is decided on various parameters.

    And as mentioned, you will know more details as you proceed with it."

    Sam looked at the surroundings and thought of what to do. Both cases have its advantages, but he doesn''t have to actually pick between both of them.

    The shadow undead came out of his shadow and spread to different directions. Half of them went to the city and the other half are examining the surrounding areas of the city. As for his immediate surroundings, he decided to check them out with his soul from the specter.

    He even let out the beasts immediately just in case. At this point he doesn''t care if he captures the attention, in fact he would really like to catch some more attention from others.

    He has to find out who is involved in the trouble and even though his overwhelming presence might actually attract some attention from others and might even blow up the whole thing, he will find out faster and then can solve it faster.

    He even let the beasts spread out just in case. After all, if someone is indeed closer to him, they will be able to see his beasts and recognize them instantly.

    Sam sat and took a few steps around to observe the immediate surroundings. He focused mostly on flora, fauna and soil types.

    Meanwhile, after a few minutes have passed he noticed something.

    Sky came over to him andnded near him.

    [I think I saw Jack over in the city]

    "Jack is here?"

    Sam is surprised.

    [I think it is him. But I don''t know for sure. It seems like he is trying to hide his identity. But the aura felt familiar and the sword was just like the ck meteorite sword. He saw me too, I attracted quite some attention from the city and the city guards.

    In fact, those guards areing this way.

    I figured that person might follow me if it is really Jack]

    "That''s true. Let''s wait for others then. I can see the shadows moving around in the city."

    Sam closed his eyes and got some information from the shadows."

    "Indeed, you really pulled a stunt over that city. Almost everyone is talking about you. But it is also a good thing, shadows are having an easier time finding information. They already got info on the basic structure of the city and stuff."

    Soon, Yanwu, Raiju, Dia, and other beasts started showing up one after another.

    [Ape found something in the forest behind the city. He wants you toe and check it out.]

    Yanwu said as soon as he arrived.

    "What is it?"

    [It is something that is emitting a pure sword aura. And it has traces of gods in it as far as I can tell. Ape noticed that the surroundings are a bit weird and he is investigating. He is saying that someone from Dusk might havee there.

    So, I came back to report.]

    "Okay then, do one thing, you go back and assist Ape. Take another one to help you guys out. Since it is a forest, Bear might be helpful with the wood element and you can take Dia also if you want. She can help with investigating the terrain.

    There are five more minutes before the time to meet. So, let''s see if that really happens."

    Yanwu and the beasts left. They didn''t seem to find anyone powerful enough to stop them or endanger them in the surroundings and Sam got confident when he got a basic understanding of the power structure in the city.

    As he spoke, Sky looked at the city and took a spin in the air beforeing back and reporting to Sam.

    Sam heaved a sigh as he looked into that direction. He injected his spiritual energy into his eyes along with the eye technique. He could now clearly see what is happening there.

    The familiar face of his friend Jack is not something that he could easily forget.

    He is relieved to see that he is doing okay.

    He is currently moving on his hoverboard and there are a bunch of people following him on beasts.

    In terms of pure speed, Jack''s might be the slowest board of the four, and these beasts are no pushovers. They are really keeping up.

    "Okay guys, I am sure you want to help him out. Don''t you?"

    [Of course, it has been way too long for us to get out. It is time to let loose a little.]

    Sky zoomed in the air as wind elemental energy wreaked havoc in the surroundings.

    Jack who is having a very slight problem with the people that are chasing him, smirked as he looked at the sky and when the gigantic bird reached them, Jack said only one thing.

    "Don''t kill them. Help me chase them away. Scare those beasts first."

 Chapter 1738: Habi

    <h4>Chapter 1738: Habi</h4>

    Following Sky, the rest of the beasts also reached them within no time.

    The people that are following Jack are actually not that powerful. If Jack wanted to, he could have easily killed them. Even the beasts know that and they felt that even the people following him know that.

    But they are still arrogant enough to go against him and chase after him as if he is the one at disadvantage. Sam didn''t understand why Jack is tolerating him.

    The people chasing didn''t worry too much though. They just kept oning, only after the beasts came in and scared the crap out of their beasts did the chasers understand they might have attracted the wrong crowd of beasts.

    So, they turned their tail and ran.

    Jack followed Sky and the other beasts as they came to Sam, who is standing there. Jack got off the hoverboard and slowly came to Sam.

    "Its really you, isn''t it? After a long time. It''s really you."

    Sam looked at his friend''s face. It is full of tiredness, and exhaustion. It is almost like he is carrying arge burden that he doesn''t know how to carry or even let go. His eyes are almost watering.

    He slowly hugged Sam leaning all of his weight. Sam gently hugged him back.

    "I am here. We can do this, whatever it is."

    Sam felt rage bubbling up as he felt the tears slowlying out of his friend''s eyes. There is no way, he could remain calm. He felt angry. He felt like a volcano ready to erupt.

    There is not a single thing in this world that would stop him from taking care of this. He looked into the sky and thought in his heart.

    The gods are going to pay for this.

    His friend never cried, never broke down, even when he is hunting down the people that killed his father, when he was powerless against them he didn''t even show a hint of sorrow. Instead, he gritted his teeth and kept going on.

    He worked on building his strength.

    He is a textbook tough guy.

    He was unfazed by all of the shit that he went through. But something in this city has brought him down to his knees making him shed tears. He has to run away from some weaklings that he could have killed in his sleep.

    "What happened Jack?"

    Sam asked in a concerned tone.

    "Habi. It''s Habi. He is in trouble. We need to go."

    Jack said hurriedly as he wiped his tears off.

    Sam frowned.

    Habi is his student. The one with the unique meridianwork and the de affinity.

    Sky immediately let both of them on his back as they went in the direction Jack pointed at. It is actually a bit in the same direction where Yanwu, ape, and other beasts are working to look for the traces of people from Dusk.

    But it is not the exact direction, there is a deviation in the route.

    They arrived at a waterfall beneath which a cave is hidden. Inside that cave, Habi isying on a bed along with a bunch of dusk organization members. They are all best of the healing department. They are checking his vitals, constantly performing some tests, they are trying to keep the young man alive.

    When they saw Sam, they all felt relieved and gave him the way.

    Sam didn''t care about their greetings or whatnot, he just went to the side of the bed to check on Habi.

    Habi''s skin turned a shade of weird green and purple.

    "Poison?"

    He asked in surprise.

    "Yes."

    He used the observation ability to check the condition. The whole body ispletely infected with poison. All the internal organs, the blood, the marrow. Everything is tainted with poison and when he went deeper with observation, he could feel that they are not just tainted.

    The poison seemed to be a bit sentient and it seemed to have be a part of the body. It is trying to rece the cells of Habi''s body. Currently, his body has be a battlefield, between the poison that is slowly killing his cells and the healthy cells that are being reproduced topensate for the loss.

    He is suffering way too much.

    Sam went on to check Habi''s soul just in case. Most of the time, people might actually lose their souls because of the eroded will. The constant abuse of the body is not something anyone could bear.

    As he checked his soul though, Sam was in for a rude surprise.

    The poison that is destroying the body is actually also affecting the soul and his soul is fighting back. He could sense a lot of emotionsing out of the soul. And none of them are positive. There is sorrow, infinite sadness, rage, and disappointment. A Sense of being betrayed. He is unwilling to sumb to that poison.

    It is trying to take his life away but his pride, his will is not letting him sumb to it.

    Sam didn''t know the exact type of poison that affected him, but it is in way too deep for him to interfere without knowing. He has to be careful with his approach and he cannot be too radical.

    At this point, even dialysis cannot cure him. He immediately went through the treatment process and all the medication that was used and understood the current condition. He even understood why the poison is behaving the way it is.

    He then went to Jack and asked.

    "What happened?"

    That is the only thing he asked. He has a lot of questions bugging him, but he knew his friend will answer all of them without even answering.

    "I don''t know if you got a chance to look around, but this area is being ruled by someone who just broke through the divine ne. And this whole realm actually is pretty new to the Divine realm rulers as after many generations finally a few of them broke through at the same time around a year ago.

    So, they are pretty new to the Divine realm party.

    And around six months ago, we entered this realm to expand our organization. I am incharge of this area and I was doing just fine. Then in one of the corners of this forest only, I found a very interesting cave while I was leading the mineral exploration team.

    The cave has engravings left behind by someone who is very proficient in swords and there are a bunch of other people''s engravings along with the sword, there are saber engravings countering the sword engravings. It is extremely powerful.

    Even I gained a lot of insights from it. I got the kid here so that he could learn something.

    The problem came when I failed to keep the ce hidden for a long time. In fact, I decided that it is better to let the local powers know of this ce so that it could benefit for us in establishing in our business smoothly.

    It was all going well. Only when Habi and his porcupine are getting stronger at an incredible rate every day, he caught someone''s eye.

    The city is being ruled by a n and one of the young mistresses of the nid her eyes on him. They fell in love, they were so smitten. I didn''t even have the heart to be harsh at that. He was really really happy.

    But I don''t know what exactly happened. Two weeks go, he gave the beast to her to help her with an expedition while he was waiting. Three dayster, he went to the city all by himself and I don''t know what went down, he was handed over to me by the city guards along with a statement.

    Only they can acquire the antidote required to free him of this poison and they are threatening me to not to try anything funny.

    I tried to use force. I strong-armed all of their business. All of their informationworks, financial resources, and natural resources were all cut off. Not a single city from other areas is willing to do business with them.

    All of their n members had to be evacuated from the sword cave I found. They are basically holed up. But I wasn''t able to take drastic measures against them because that girl and the beast might still be in their hands and they are kind of hinting at that.

    This kid is already poisoned like this and he is barely staying alive. The healers of dusk have to use a lot weird ways to keep him alive.

    I don''t know what to do. I feel like I brought this all on him. He is just a good kid from the deste who is studying diligently to get better. To be better.

    Why did I have to drag him into this stupid mess? I feel so helpless."

    Sam sighed as he looked at Jack. His friend is taking too much load. No one in his ce should be feeling this kind of burden.

    He meant well, but somewhere along shit just went sideways.

    "Don''t worry I am here and I already have a few answers that I need. Now I will handle it in our own style. Let''s see what this n can really do."

 Chapter 1739: Retaliation

    <h4>Chapter 1739: Retaliation</h4>

    Sam''s shadows came back with all the information they could get and so did the beasts.

    And they came with some fresh information from the shadows. It is about the people that chased Jack. They are obviously the n members and most of them are in their Astral ne transcendence and initial and middle stages of Consummation.

    Jack is almost at the peak, these people are not even a challenge for him. The only reason they were even able to do that to him, is because he couldn''t think of any other scenario than holding back.

    Now with the newly added info that Sam and Jack got, they got a fair understanding of the power level and what the next move of these people is going to be.

    They actually want to capture both Jack and then their ultimate goal is to capture Habi. It seems like it is also very urgent to capture Habi.

    The people that followed Jack were all scolded and are being punished.

    "So, you just escaped from their trap? What did they tell you to lure you in?" He asked Jack.

    "They said they want some product designs in exchange for the antidote. So, I took some from the design department and went there. I was ready to give up a few designs to save Habi first. But it seems like they wanted to capture me.

    The trap is a bit sophisticated, but it didn''tst more than three sword strikes.

    I escaped. I was actually on verge of killing them. I really wanted to. But Habi''s beast and the girl are both in their hands."

    Sam didn''t say anything for a moment. He only spoke after he reorganized his thoughts and said.

    "The day Habi went back into the city, I think something happened there. When I looked into his soul, he is actually in extreme rage and it is fueled by betrayal.

    Who is close enough to invoke such rage through a betrayal? If it is not someone from the Dusk organization who even has such power?

    I can specte, but from what you said, that spection cannot be real at all. The second thing is the beast. The connection between him and the porcupine has been getting stronger. It is actually not that umon thing, but in the two times I checked his soul, I already saw some minute difference.

    It seems like they aremunicating even in that state. So, they must not be too far away.

    The kid is in thete stage of Astral ne initiation. But his soul is actually way stronger than it should be for that level.

    As for the poison itself. I think the nature of it is to get in conflict with the cells within his body and soul before killing him slowly. But he survived, because of his strong will and unique body.

    The dusk members managed to find a way to keep him alive by alleviating the conflict a bit.

    This made the poison amodate within the body. But it is temporary, it will sooner orter affect him one way or the other.

    Since I am here, you can forget about the problem of the antidote, I will figure out a way to deal with the poison. You get aggressive with the investigation.

    Try to find out what happened to the porcupine and the girl. Try to get as much information on her as you can. I got a basic understanding on how this n works, but I need more detailed info.

    If we can get that detailed info, it will help."

    "I think we have a lot of information on them already. Check it out, if you need anything more, just let me know, I will get it.

    Now that you are here, I will show them what happens, when someone messes with Dusk."

    Jack left on his hoverboard.

    And he took out a very special object from the storage.

    "I am going to use this, you don''t have any problem right?"

    As he was about to leave the area, he turned around and showed the object to Sam and asked.

    "Go ahead and do what you want. And don''t forget to give them a strong message."

    "Trust me I won''t."

    Sam didn''t worry about the n anymore. He directly went to Habi to take care of the situation. There is nothing important to him at this point other than saving his student and for that there is an immediate solution he thought of.

    To make the change the healers made a permanent one. If Habi''s body goes through the change and permanently epts the poison as a part of it, then not only would it save him, it might even benefit him in the long run.

    And at this point, it is not that difficult for Sam to finish the procedure. The only thing he needs to do at the moment is to find a way to identify the nature of the poison and how he can safely assimte it through the soul and the body without affecting him.

    It wouldn''t take long to do that with his newfound divine energy. Every single one of his spiritual core abilities, observation, modification, etc are amplified by thousands of times when he injected the divine energy into them.

    So, he is going to use that on the test samples that the healers collected from Habi. While he stayed on that, he waited for the information toe.

    Hours passed and Sam began his procedure. The initial part is to stabilize the organs, blood and marrow, and everything else that got assimted with the poison so that there is no conflict throughout the procedure.

    And while he concocted something with Mia''s venom that could help with the assimtion and injected it into Habi''s body, he got the results he needed.

    As Jack said the n only got into power over a year ago. At least the power they are disying right now. And there is something interesting about this n that he noticed.

    The women.

    The women of the n are mostly just used for political marriage and stuff.

    They are not given any power or authority. In all the information that they gathered, there is not a single mention of a female elder, a female n leader in the history of involvement of women in anything that really matters.

    Except for two women of course.

    There used to be one woman in the n who actually fortified the finances of the whole n. She is responsible for the financial growth of the n which gives them more than sixty percent of their current ie.

    She left the n after she set up that system and nobody knows where she went.

    And after generations, there is another woman that surfaced in this strictly patriarchal system of this n.

    That person happened to be the youngdy that stole Habi''s heart.

    She has the drive. But she didn''t have enough strength or ability to actually aplish anything. She didn''t have the financial acumen to create a business empire like her predecessor, she didn''t have enough cultivation talent topletely ovee all of her rivals in the n.

    She is good at many things, but just not good enough to excel at a level that makes everyone else jealous or makes the ne out of their strict ways.

    She is not even half as good as thedy that set up the business. She is just average and when hepares her to the other kids in the Dusk organization, she is much less than average. She didn''t identify her strengths, didn''t identify her weaknesses, and didn''t find a proper way to maximize her potential.

    She just goes with the flow and constantlyins that she is not getting any results.

    Personally, Sam didn''t have a great impression of her, but he held off the judgment because Habi liked her.

    He looked through the rest of the information and one thing caught his attention.

    The n worships Zeus himself. The lightning god of Olympus.

    And he is the reason that these people managed to get one person to break through.

    This made Sam extremely angry. This is another one of the ploys of these gods. They are extremely irritating to the point that Sam felt like killing them every time he thought of them. He thought things will be limited to just him. Now his friends and even his students are getting involved, there is no way, he can stay tolerant of this anymore.

    But before that, he has to finish saving his student.

    After that, he will leave a remarkable message to the gods and their minions through these organizations.

    He changed his attire and started the surgery. Mia acted as his assistant as she had the best poison control.

    She made the perfect assistant.

    After he finished the surgery, he waited for Jack toe which didn''t take much longer.

    "So, you left them a message?"

    "Yeah, you fixed the kid?"

    "Yes, he is going to wake up by tomorrow morning. And he will be apletely new person. Now, we can all focus on giving this n a great present."

    <strong></strong>

 Chapter 1740: Giving a Sword

    <h4>Chapter 1740: Giving a Sword</h4>

    Jack and Sam shared a drink that night.

    They didn''t speak. They didn''t chat. They just drank in silence as they enjoyed the peaceful night breeze in the forest.

    The next morning, Habi woke up and the first thing he saw is Sam. He is shocked. Not that he is alive, not that he woke up, but rather he saw Sam. As long as Sam''s presence there can be exined, the rest of the questions will be answered themselves.

    Once he digested the information that Sam is here, he felt ashamed. He felt embarrassed.

    He rolled off the bed and knelt on the floor. He touched his forehead to the ground and spoke.

    "I apologize teacher. I am unfit to be your student. Not only did I get betrayed, I brought great shame to you as your student by letting myself get cheated by a woman who used love as an excuse."

    He is sobbing as he spoke. Sam felt a prick in his heart. He felt a sharp pain as he looked at his student. He knew that something like this might happen. He had doubts as soon as he went through the information.

    He knelt down and made Habi look him in the eyes. He wiped the tears off and spoke.

    "Whatever happened, we can talkter. There are very few things that you can do that would make ashamed of you to be my student.

    I want you to check your body and get familiar with it. I have taken the liberty to make some changes without asking you. You will get to know that from now on. You will be apletely different person in terms of abilities.

    And I have reason to believe that your new body is going to suit your current emotions a lot more.

    Once you are done there, we can talk. Okay?"

    Sam tapped him on the shoulder and made him get up. He left his student alone and went to meet Jack

    "She betrayed him. That girl that he liked. The porcupine must be still with them."

    "Why did she do that?"

    "I don''t know, let''s hope that hees out and exins it to us. It is a very funny situation though, the fact that you were trying to not go all out so that she won''t be effected, meanwhile she might just be the person that brought this all up on him. The fucking irony."

    They sat out and waited for Habi and he didn''t take that long.

    When hees out, Jack is surprised to look at him. His face is full of shame and embarrassment. He is disappointed in himself.

    But then there is another type of emotion that is emitted in his aura. He is feeling angry. There is a mountain of killing intent being emitted from his body.

    He wants to kill someone. He wants to kill them so badly.

    That ferocious killing intent is something that they carried when they were of Habi''s age. But at that time, they were taking on the world with enemies all around.

    Sam''s students have everything they had and more except for the killing intent.

    But one betrayal from a woman seemed to have changed that a lot.

    Sam looked at him and smiled.

    "So, what is it that you want to tell me?"

    "That woman, Rani. She wanted to get an important ce in her n. In her opinion, her father is a biased guy who only cares about his son and her mother is not any different. She believed that the only reason she is not seeding is because of her parents.

    At first I thought the same, I bought into her lies. We got close and she even got close to the porcupine. I was so blinded.

    One day, she said she had an expedition. She is afraid that her brothers are going to kill her. So, I gave her the porcupine as I couldn''t apany her. And she never came back with the porcupine.

    At first, I could feel the connection e had, but I couldn''t sense the location. Soon though I managed to find out the location. It is in the city.

    When I went there, the porcupine is being held. Tortured. They are trying to use some weird formation to reverse our soul connection and make the porcupine break the bond.

    At first, I thought she was not in on it, because she was held in her room. I thought she was forced to hand over the porcupine. I was stupid enough to go and rescue her.

    I almost seeded since I picked a perfect time. The elders were unable to respond immediately and the youngsters are all the only challenge which isn''t much, to begin with. I easily reached her and got ready to get her out.

    But I never knew she would be the one injecting me with something that made me faint.

    They tried to make me relinquish the bond with the beast. They must have understood that our bond is special and my death will only make it worse. So, they somehow brought this weird poison that will help with this.

    I don''t know how it works and I don''t know the exact details, but this will cut our bond without harming the porcupine.

    This will allow them to take over the porcupine easily without any trouble. That is their n. But we somehow managed to survive all of this and here I am standing in front of you like this. Like an absolute failure.

    I am really sorry teacher."

    Sam smiled and rubbed their hair of Habi.

    "Is that why you are so angry? Because you are betrayed by a woman you liked so much?"

    "Not just that teacher, I am angry at myself for letting myself be betrayed by a girl like that. I am your student, this type of betrayal shouldn''t have been possible.

    How can someone cheat me like this? It is an insult to your name and I have brought that insult myself. The other party didn''t even have to try too much."

    Sam just kept on smiling and replied.

    "It is not that big of a sin to fall in love with a person like that. Sometimes it is inevitable that you put your trust in the wrong person. Particrly at your age, when you are seeking a person to share your life with and someonees to your face with all the qualities that you need in a life partner. It is absolutely natural for you to let your guard down.

    If you want to be angry, be angry that you were unable to see iting, be angry that yourpanion that stays with you in life and death, your beast was stolen from you because of this, be angry that yourpanion is suffering from this. Be angry that your heart is broken.

    Don''t be angry thinking that you let me down somehow.

    Also, channel that anger in the right direction.

    These n people did something to you that is unforgivable. But out of all of that, you have a blessing in disguise. Can you show me what you can do with that new body of yours?"

    Habi nodded and moved to the nearest tree. He punched the tree from far away.

    A spiritual energy de condensed and attacked the tree like a whip. A small cut appeared on its trunk. From that cut, the tree started rotting. It is withering at a rapid pace.

    Habi turned around and kicked a stone. This time also the kick didn''t touch it, instead, a de attacked the stone, and that too just a graze. But from that small cut, the rock started melting.

    Jack looked at this and was shocked.

    "Did you really make the poison part of him?"

    "Not only is it a part of him, it changed the nature of his bodypletely. From now on, even his spiritual energy is poisonous to others."

    "That is too much."

    "Well, it doesn''t end there."

    Sam walked to Habi and took out the executioner''s sword. He held it with both hands and extended it towards the young man.

    "Here take it."

    Habi widened his eyes in disbelief.

    "It is your sword, teacher. I can never. Please I cannot ept it, I am unworthy."

    "Of course, that is why I am giving you a chance to prove you are worthy. Just because I said, it is natural to be betrayed like this, doesn''t mean, it is okay for someone toe and mess with my student.

    Since we have a full story, we don''t have to worry about anything else. And we need to get your beast back. So, I am giving you a chance to prove yourself. Jack and I will not touch anyone below the Middle-stage of Astral ne Pretranscendence stage cultivators. They are all your job to clean and I heard that your girlfriend also falls into that category.

    Put that excessive anger to good use and finish the job. If you do that, then this sword is yours.

    <strong></strong>

 Chapter 1741: Attack the Clan

    <h4>Chapter 1741: Attack the n</h4>

    Habi looked at the executioner sword with a nervous gaze.

    He knows what this sword represents. He knows the story behind that sword. The sword was made from the blood of Sam''s enemies.

    Not just any enemies. The three hundred members of a n took away a person that was under Sam''s wing.

    Basically, it was crafted as a message for everyone to see what will happen if someone that belongs to Sam is touched.

    The current scenario is not that far off. Habi''s onlypanion, the onepanion that he could absolutely trust and share with anything in this life was taken away from him and this is an opportunity for him to deal with this.

    He knelt down and epted the sword with both hands.

    "I will not let you down, teacher."

    Sam smiled in satisfaction. He turned and took Jack away from that spot.

    "You are really giving executioner away? That sword has been with you forever."

    "Well, it has to go sooner orter. I love these weapons, but there is no point in holding on to them forever. They have to be passed along with the Dusk organization sooner orter. And regretfully, I am not using executioner as much as I want to anyway.

    It will find better use in that kid''s hands."

    "Whatever you say, so can I have reaper?"

    Sam raised an eyebrow and looked at him.

    "If you want, you can try and take it. But you have put a ck meteorite on stake. I am sure he could use a betterpany."

    "Don''t covet my sword. I only have one unlike you. I am not as fickle as you. I am faithful and devoted."

    "Then be like that, why do you want my reaper anyway?"

    As they are bickering, Habi is feeling the full brunt of the Executioner sword. After all, it has a very strong spirit and if Habi couldn''t even convince the spirit, then there is no point in giving him that weapon.

    But Sam is confident. If the will he saw yesterday from the young man is true, then there is no way he would lose to the executioner sword.

    And the boy indeed didn''t betray his expectations. After half an hour, he opened his eyes with a wide smile on his face.

    "Okay kid, if you are ready, we can go and greet the n. My hands are feeling a bit itchy."

    Sam''s yell made hime back to his senses and all three of them went to greet the n that put Habi through all of this. And they are not going by the foot of course, they are moving on beasts. Sam and Habi sat on Sky while Jack sat on Yanwu, the rest of the beasts that are traveling by foot.

    Even Void hopper is participating in this.

    "Anyway, all of you guys, be careful. Void hopper you are responsible for making sure that none of the Divine ne cultivator attacks will fall on ourpanions. You are the only one who has the ability to do that.

    And based on that requirement, everyone keeps pumping their Divine energy back to the little one to execute those attacks. Understood?"

    Sam just got a mental message that they understood everything.

    Sky and Yanwu are the first to reach the location. The sky above the n grounds. Both Jack and he exchanged a nce.

    "Okay kid, I am leaving. Sky, drop him off slowly at the location of his peers. I am sure he has an idea of where it is. We will deal with the big dogs."

    Both Jack and Sam jumped off from there. They took their swords out as spiritual energy is being channeled to them.

    Both of them had a smile on their face as they swung it towards the main mansion of the n theynded with a loud bang.

    *BAM*

    *KEEN* *KEEN*

    *CRASH*

    They left tworge craters in the middle of n grounds. The two sword rays gave out arge keening sword before they sliced through the mansion''s formation and then arge part of the mansion.

    The mansion copsed in the rubble. All the elders and the n leader are all trying toe out of the rubble angrily.

    They are already pissed at the message that Jack left themst night and they are still trying to figure out how to counter that. Now, someone dared to attack them from head on. This is intolerable.

    When they came to their senses and saw two people standing in front of them, one of them being the person they are pursuing for a long time, they became extremely angry.

    "I don''t know who you are or why you came here. But since you are helping him, you are our enemy. I will kill you and feed you to our beasts."

    One of the elders pointed his finger at Sam and spoke.

    Sam lunged forward without any wait as he swung his sword. His first swing cut the arm that was pointed towards him and the second swing cut open the torso of the elder in an upward swing.

    Before the elder''s body could touch the ground, the third swing cut his head off in a smooth motion killing him.

    Sam didn''t stop there though. A lot of spiritual energy gathered at the tip of his foot as he kicked the head.

    The energy disappeared as if it was injected into the head which flew off. It went towards the spot where most elders gathered and when itnded there.

    *BOOM*

    It exploded along with a massive energy explosion.

    The elders were blown away.

    By now, the dust from the rubblepletely settled and Jack also took down an elder.

    The n leader looked at both of them standing there and felt extremely angry.

    "Two Astral ne brats, dare toe here and challenge me?"

    He angrily channeled his Divine energy.

    Sam''s face is full of excitement, he has been waiting for this day, to challenge someone with Divine energy, not just someone with Divine energy but someone that genuinely broke through to the Divine ne.

    But the next minute, he was hit with disappointment. He could sense the Divine energy within that guy''s body and honestly it is not much.

    He even thought that his senses are fooling him and channeled a tad bit of Divine energy of his own into the eye technique.

    The energy eye can now see the flow of Divine energy clearly and the disappointment only grew.

    The divine energy in the other person''s body is basically just a tad bit more than what Sam has in his body.

    It is not even that big of a difference. It is not even double. The only thing is that the other party can channel it freely across his body because he already broke through. He can freely wield it.

    Unlike, Sam who will have a much harder time using the energy to its full potential. This is the first time he came across a person who broke through to Divine ne. So, he expected a lot actually.

    And the ones who can wield the Divine energy even when they are not Divine ne cultivators that he came across, Gail, Yuvana, and Gamin for example are already way too badass with their strength.

    So, he must say his disappointment hit a new low with all of this.

    When the n leader used his Divine energy to channel a lightning attack that came straight for Sam, he didn''t even move.

    Right before the lightning could even reach him, the space in the path of the lightning got severely distorted. It was torn apart in multiple directions throwing the small area intoplete turmoil. The lightning strike lost more than half of its power and the rest of it was thrown somewhere far off the original trajectory.

    "This is going to be way easier than I thought."

    Sam nodded at Jack and when they were about to make a move, the beasts already joined in.

    When the n members unleashed their own beasts, it worked against them because those creatures refused to go against the natural predators that are staring at them.

    The n buildings are raging to the ground and battles started at many fronts.

    But there is one front where the battle is about to begin.

    It is at the ce where the porcupine is currently held captive.

    Habi is standing in front of a tower.

    This is the training quarters for all the youngsters of the n and this is also the ce where the captives below a certain level are held.

    The whole concept is that they are using their kids'' sadistic tendencies to break the prisoners down. Unfortunately, Habi''s porcupine is also held there.

    He could feel his pain through their connection at that very moment and his eyes couldn''t help but water a bit.

    By now, the youngsters inside already saw themotion in the core area of their n, and they wanted toe out and check it out. But to their dismay, the emergency protective formation of the tower was activated making them unable to escape.

    <strong></strong>

 Chapter 1742: Dance

    <h4>Chapter 1742: Dance</h4>

    Sky looked at the tower and then at Habi.

    He tried to poke at the formation. But he couldn''t destroy it instantly.

    Habi touched it and was able to walk through it though. He looked at Sky and said.

    "It seems like a cultivation restriction. I will be fine. You can go ahead, please. Thank you so much for bringing me here." He bowed to sky.

    Even though Sky is a beast, he is a senior of the Dusk organization. All of Sam''s beasts are actually part of the hierarchy and are noted to have the same status as Sam''s friends. It is already great enough that he managed to get a ride on Sky even if it is just for a few minutes. It felt like an honor.

    Sky looked at the tower onest time and nodded at Habi before leaving.

    Habi entered the tower without any restrictions. As soon as he entered the first floor a lot of low-level members of the n, the people who are considered low-level even among the youngsters are actually standing there.

    It is their protocol. The weakest n members act as fodder as they will be the ones to first tackle iing troops. Habi looked at them as he held the executioner de in his hands.

    "Where is Rani?"

    The youngsters didn''t answer him.

    "How is this guy still alive? Isnt he supposed to be dead? Why didn''t the poison work?"

    "n leader even said that it is directly from the gods. There shouldn''t be any problem with it. But why is this guy still alive? And how did hee into the n grounds?"

    Habi looked at them speaking and asked one more time.

    "Where is Rani?"

    "Like we are going to tell you, you should have just died silently you bastard."

    The guy made a move and Habi didn''t bother asking anymore questions. He directly made his move as well. The executioner sword glowed with a weird purple and green hue as he sliced through the opponent''s de and the flesh. He took the arm off of that guy and the next moment, the rest of the body is being corrupted with poison from that cut.

    Habi felt like a whole new person as he looked at the body rotting at a rapid pace. The poison seemed to be affecting, the body, blood, mind, and even the spiritual energy.

    He felt like this newfound power has increased his strength by a lot and when he looked at his victim copsing in a matter of seconds, he didn''t feel any joy or pity for him.

    Rather he felt more turmoil. His thirst for the blood of these people, the blood of these n members just kept on increasing as he looked at how powerless they are.

    Because he felt more humiliated. To think that he was toyed by someone who is that powerless and useless against his de. To think he is humiliated beyond belief in the hands of someone so weak under his de is something that he couldn''t digest easily.

    It made him angrier with every breath he took and he wanted to stop these people from breathing.

    At that moment, the fodder of the n saw Habi dance through them with his sword. Even when the whole room of people is sliced down, it seemed like it happened in one single motion. It is like the most graceful dance they have ever witnessed and they died after witnessing it.

    The floor was cleaned off within a few minutes. Only a couple of people managed to escape and went up to inform others.

    On the higher floors, many people are still in their quarters, some gathered together to wait out whatever emergency came on to them.

    Habi knocked on each of these doors and kept on killing them. He only asked them one question before killing them off. Only have one question.

    "Where is Rani?"

    And almost every time there is no answer. They just died.

    As he went through one floor after another, he slowly reached the top floor.

    Outside of the room, there are two people acting as guards. Those two are actually the fodder from the ground floor.

    When Habi arrived with the sword in his hand, blood slightly dripping from its edge, he looked like the manifestation of death itself.

    His whole body is reeking of blood with some of it sshed all over his face and body.

    "I feel that my buddy is inside, I take it that Rani is also inside. You could have answered this since the start and saved over a hundred lives. Why bother inflicting so much pain on your own kin."

    With one smooth motion, a sword ray cut off the heads of the two guards while slicing the door horizontally at the same time.

    The wooden door started rotting, and within a couple of seconds, it copsedpletely.

    Inside the room, there are ten people standing. One of them is the woman who Habi couldn''t forget in thest few days while enduring that torture.

    In the middle of all of it, there is the porcupine. Tied up, injured, bleeding.

    He felt heartbroken. The small beast that is not even as big as an adult human is tied up hanging in the air with all four limbs tied up.

    Everyone looked at Habi and felt the killing intent he is carrying along.

    He ignored thempletely and walked towards the beast.

    "I am sorry buddy. I was blinded. I shouldn''t have let you go with her. Because of me, you are suffering so much."

    He swung his de to cut the chains off.

    "What the fuck do you think you are doing here?"

    One of the young masters yelled.

    They didn''t understand how Habi managed toe back, but there is no way they could let him just take this beast away. This is what they are striving for, for so long.

    Rani looked at Habi, who is just ignoring them. The beast was freed finally and he is about to store it away in his beast pouch.

    "Kill him. We can''t let the beast getaway. That will change the fate of our n. We need that beast no matter the cost."

    But right before she could even finish her words, Habi already made his move.

    *KEEN*

    The sword keenly filled the air as it went straight through the heart of his first target.

    He twisted the de and pulled it back. The young master copsed to the ground as his body started rotting away. He didn''t lose momentum and started killing other members as well.

    One strike, one life. He once again danced with the de and killed nine of the ten in an instant.

    Only Rani is standing there in the room.

    She looked at Habi with an aggrieved expression.

    "Why?"

    She asked in a sobbing tone.

    "What do you mean why?"

    "If you had really loved me, you should have just let me be. You could have just given up the beast. Why can''t you do that for me? Why is a beast so important to you than the person you loved?

    Is that all just talk?"

    Habi raised his eyebrow a bit as he walked towards her.

    "Are you really asking me this question, Rani? You tried to kill me with a deadly poison. All for the sake of my beast? A beast that grew up with me like my brother. The beast I entrusted your life to. But you tried to use him as a stepping stone to fulfill your fantasies.

    Why did you do that? I truly loved you, you know. I loved you very much. I loved you with all of my heart."

    *STAB*

    Habi felt a knife going through his abdomen. But this time, he is a bit prepared and didn''t let it impregnate himpletely.

    He stopped as soon as it hit the outeryers of his skin.

    "You never change do you."

    Rani looked at him while crying tears.

    "I deserve this. Just because I am a woman, shouldn''t I have any ambitions? Why did these bastards, my brothers have everything handed to them? Why should I have to work harder than anyone else? Why?

    Even you, the person who said will give up their life to me, just backstabbed me for the sake of a stupid beast.

    Can''t you understand? That beast could have changed my life. I could have been something. My life could have meant something. Why do you im that you love me, but are determined to take this away from me? Why?

    Why can''t you give it up? Why can''t you just stay dead and leave the beast for me? Why do you have toe back from death''s door to stomp on my dreams."

    She tried to stab him again as she went off the rails with her words.

    But Habi didn''t let that happen again. He twisted their arm a bit and let the knife out of her hand.

    He stabbed the sword on the floor while he gripped her hair forcefully and pulled it closer to his face.

    He looked at her crying eyes and felt a small tinge of pain in his heart.

    <strong></strong>

 Chapter 1743: Declaration

    Chapter 1743: DerationAt the core area of the n.

    Sam and Jack are standing among the rubble with their swords. Large piles of bodies are on either side of them.

    "It seems like I beat you this time. It is rare. I better cherish it."

    Jack said as he pointed at the piles.

    "What do you mean, you won? We need to calcte the quality, not quantity. I killed people with higher cultivation levels."

    "Why does cultivation level matter when you can kill the two levels of people with the same effort and energy? They are practically the same person to kill. So, they should count as the same."

    "Whatever you say."

    "I never took you for a sore loser. It is a good thing that you don''t lose so much. It will just make it much harder to bear if you are like this all the time."

    As they are bickering, the n leader is in the middle of the rubble on his knees as he looked at them in despair.

    He is a Divine ne cultivator, he shouldn''t be in this kind of situation. But right now, he is exhausted. He didn''t have any strength left. Not just physically, even his spiritual core is drained. His divine energy is gone.

    It could be said that Sam had a walk in the park dealing with this guy.

    He didn''t pose any challenge at all. His strength is barely higher than Sam and it was easily taken care of with Sam''s strength in numbers with his beasts and Jack, his tricks and his way of fighting by analyzing weaknesses.

    This is not even as tough as the second challenge in his opinion, since all he had to do is directly attack everyone here. It is way too easypared to the other challenges he faced.

    He looked at the n head and said.

    "I don''t know exactly what you are, but it is very hard for him to believe that you are a Divine ne cultivator. The creatures I fight in hell are stronger than you."

    "What do you mean? What do you mean creatures you fight in hell?"

    "It doesn''t matter. You don''t need to know about it. All I can say is, I am pretty sure you are duped by your god."

    Sam swung his sword and cut his head off.

    Both him and Jack walked towards the tower after collecting the loot and memories.

    They arrived to see if Habi is finished yet or not.

    When they arrived at the tower, they first thought it would be destroyed, but it is still intact.

    "It seems like your student is a lot milder than us. I am pretty sure we would have destroyed the tower first."

    "Of course, we would have, even if we deliberately didn''t, our way of fighting is just showing off our strength, in a way we are just braggarts. I am d my students are a bit more humble. It might help them when they takeover dusk."

    As they are talking, they arrived at the tower entrance, where Habi stood. But when they saw another woman standing beside him, they were surprised.

    Sam frowned as he didn''t feelfortable about her presence. If she is here for the reason he is thinking she is, then his initial opinion about Habi should be changed. It would mean that he is wrong.

    "What is she still doing here? I thought you would have killed her by now?"

    Jack asked without holding back. Unlike Sam, he is a lot more blunt.

    Habi looked at Sam and walked toward him.

    "Teacher, this is the woman that betrayed me, she kidnapped by buddy and tortured him along with all of her peers. She is saying that I didn''t love enough and whatever love I showed her is not true. She is ming me for not just giving up my beast and letting her have the glory she craved so much.

    She is saying that it is my responsibility as her loved on to help her achieve her goals.

    Do you think she is saying the truth?"

    "It doesn''t matter what I think about it Habi, what matters is if you feel the same way she does."

    Habi looked at the woman. His eyes are teary. It is clear that he loved her very much. He walked towards her and looked her in the eyes. After taking one more look at Sam, he took out the executioner de and swung it at her neck.

    With a clean slice her neck was cut off.

    She looked at him in shock. She believed that Habi had considered her sorrow and thought she would be given a second chance, being killed like this isst thing she expected.

    She held the throat as the blood spurted out continuously. There is no way, she could have expected this.

    Sam finally smiled at this. He went forward and hugged his student.

    "I know you are hurting now. But this is better than the regret and guilt that you would have had to carry if you had given her a second chance.

    Most people in love make that mistake. They constantly give second chances to the people they love and they believe that they deserve it.

    And at the end of the day, they constantly betray you once again. Once they let you down, it is hard for them to meet your expectations.

    She took your words, love and affection for granted and tortured the onepanion who stays with you in life and death.

    She couldn''t afford the same loyalty as a beast, so it is not worth it for you to get hurt again by her. Just go back to Dusk and rx for a while. Take your fellow students on a trip. Celebrate the new changes in your body, brag about the new sword you got from me.

    All of you just stop being serious and just act like some rich brats. I am sure I have enough wealth for you to afford it."

    Habi cried for a while and finally let Sam go. The Dusk organization members took him and left.

    Jack stayed back to talk with Sam.

    "I don''t know when I will be called back, so I need you to record something for me. I want you to broadcast it among all of the Dusk organization. Every corner of the Dusk organization, every single member of the organization from executives, soldiers, to the lowest level attendants, everyone should get this news."

    "Alright, let me just set up."

    After a while, they set up a ce for recording and Sam stood there. He took a deep breath and spoke.

    "Hello, members of Dusk organization.

    I am Sam. You must have heard about me.

    You might not have met me much since I don''t get myself involved in the organization too much, which kind of makes a bad leader. But when I established Dusk organization, Iid down a foundation precisely because of the scenario like this.

    I knew that I wouldn''t be able to involve myself too much, so I created a system where a new generation of executives and various talents emerge from the organization with time. And I am d to know it is working.

    Now, Dusk organization is one of the biggest organizations there is.

    And today, I am here to make a deration.

    I dere, Olympus or anyone affiliated with Olympus as the archenemies of Dusk organization. A passive goal of Dusk organization is now to expand and conquer every territory owned by the followers of the Olympian gods.

    From today onwards, we have a purpose to destroy their faith, upy theirnds and resources and if it is not possible destroy theirnds and resources.

    Everyone who is willingly spreading the faith of Olympus and their gods are our enemies. Wage war against any organization that is serving any Olympian god.

    Tackle them with businesses, cripple their finances, bring them down with duels and twisted agreements. It doesn''t matter what method you use, bring them down and take over their positons and resources.

    All the loot you gain from the members or dead members of these organizations is users. Only organizational wealth has to be submitted to the organization and even in that, there will be a part of it for you as a reward.

    Don''t hold back and don''t show any mercy.

    If there are indeed any weak or innocent people that are just involved in this because the leader of their families and weak was coerced into it, then redirect them to Dusk.

    Put their energies under control and add them to the civilian sections. Iste them and send them to the resource points that are not in direct contact with the rest of the organization.

    Observe them, put them through the truth and honesty verification protocols and after they are cleared for everything, join them into our society under a few years of observation and finally set them free.

    This a war. War against Dusk and Olympus and I dered it not because I am looking for glory, I dered it not because I am craving for wealth, I dered it not because I am looking for fame.

    I dered it because I had enough of the arrogance of these gods and their minions. Time and again I had turned a blind eye, I had been captured, tortured and tested by them again and again. But now, they became arrogant enough to go after my friends, my organization and my students.

    My patience had hit its limit.

    So now, we are retaliating to show what happens when someone messes with Dusk."

 Chapter 1744: Stubborn Brat

    Chapter 1744: Stubborn BratJack recorded everything Sam has spoken.

    "So, we are going to war. Everyone in the Dusk will be beyond excited."

    "Why? Are they craving war that much? I thought ourbat divisions are having a hard enough time with all the aggressive expansion we are doing." Sam replied with a smile.

    "Nah, it is not enough. Because of your regtions, everyone is having a healthy work-life bnce, most of them are spending their spare time in training, so people are turning out more skilled than we initially thought.

    Particrly the batches of students from our schools. The initial batches of students are all breaking through Astral ne. We might have more Astral ne cultivators than any other organization that ever existed.

    Even nonbat divisions are looking for more actions. People in the design and invention divisions are looking for new use cases. They are tired to being deployed for maintenance work.

    And there are over a thousand patented weapons and weaponized systems that are waiting to be used. I think all the divisions are going to be in for a good celebration when they hear this. Not a single person will feel bad about this.

    I think the main problem is to properly assign everyone so that they will get equal action.

    Anyway, are you sure, you cannote and visit our friends? We don''t know when you will be avable."

    "I can''t. I am pretty sure my movements are restricted to this very small region. I am still bound by the rules of this stupid game. I cannot just break free."

    "Then, why don''t you stay here for a while? I will bring them both. Even some of your other students. Some of them are still back at Deste, I can use the space gates and they will be here in no time."

    "Not a bad idea. I will¡­"

    Sam was about to finish his words, but he was sucked away. He reappeared in the gray empty space. Hel is standing there. No other yer is present there.

    Sam was surprised and he frowned.

    "What happened? Why am I the only one here?"

    "Because your challenge ispleted and I need some alone time with you to drill some sense into that thick skill of yours."

    Hel said in a very stern tone.

    Sam''s frown deepened as he looked at her.

    "There is not a single thing in this world that you are worthy of teaching me."

    "I am not teaching you, bloody idiot. This is a fucking advice.

    Stop provoking the gods and just stay put. y the game like any other yer and act like the bloody mortal you are.

    I am telling you, this is purely friendly advice for you."

    "We are not friends Hel and I don''t need your advice."

    "I am telling you, you are treading on thin ice. You are not going to be okay with whatever consequences are going toe your way.

    What do you think Olympus is? Do you know how many gods they have? It is one of the biggest Celestial groups. They have thergest number of gods and some of the strongest too.

    The faith they collectively umte is enough to feed a few small celestial groups. Not just quantity, but even the quality of the gods, their strength and power is no joke.

    And the faith of the people they gather is one of the reasons they are in that position. You just foolishly threatened to destroy the foundation of that faith. Until now, Zeus is the only one mad at you, with your decision, every god in Olympus is going to be mad at you.

    Now the rest of Olympus is going to help Zeus in making your life miserable from the next round of challenges. You are going to suffer terribly. You idiot."

    "I don''t give a fuck."

    Sam is not backing down no matter what Hel said. He didn''t like Hel to begin with and there was not a single time, he had a good impression of her. She tried to rig the game by participating herself, she tried to put Sam at a disadvantage every time.

    It is actually a miracle that he tried to control himself so much. Of course, not being powerful enough to kill her is one of the reasons, but still. Nowadays, he is even about to lose it. It is very hard for him to control himself already.

    Hel looked at him with a furious expression. She is beyond angry. She snapped her fingers in that anger.

    Sam felt a weird energy wrapped around him. He felt powerless beyond belief.

    He felt sharp energy tunneling through his veins and it came out through his muscle fibers like a very thin sharp thread before it went along to connect with the energy that is outside of him.

    There is a weird tension. Sam stopped moving in his tracks. He felt like if he moved even a single millimeter, every single fiber will be torn apart. He will bleed and his meridians will be destroyed. It will be hard for him to heal at all.

    He looked at Hel coldly. Even after this precarious situation, he ced himself in, he didn''t care that he could be killed. He is so angry and pissed off, he felt like a stubborn brat. Unable to give in even though the odds are seriously stacked against him.

    Hel looked at Sam and said.

    "Now try and scream like you were doing just now. Your face will be torn apart the moment you speak.

    Do you get how powerless you are now? Do you get how useless your anger and pride are?

    You are an insignificant creature. You are going to die. The only reason for your survival is that you are remotely entertaining. Do you understand? What should I do so that some sense would be driven into that stubborn mind of yours?

    Just because you disrespected his yer, Zeus made your life miserable. And when you are disregarding his authority, he made you a ything to his demigods. You disrespected his demigods and challenged them once again, you threatened them.

    He caught a hold of your student and put him through physical and emotional hell. Now you are dering a war against Olympus because of that.

    Do you think Zeus, the undefeated and undisputed lord of all the powerful gods in Olympus, will just stay back and let you horse around?

    You pathetic bastard. Get somemon sense.

    Next time, they will kill all of your students. Will that be good for you? All the efforts you put in the organization you have built from the scratch, it will be burned to ashes, will you be satisfied then?"

    Sam who stood still suddenly moved. He started bleeding all over. His feather coat was torn apart, his back muscles were torn to shreds. His arms, legs, and even face was torn.

    He didn''t even groan as he forcefully made himself free from the restrictions.

    Hel was horrified by this.

    "Try me. Try and touch my students and see what happens. All this while, I have been tolerant of everything that has happened around me, everything I have been put through.

    I have been tolerating this for far too long. Try and push my buttons again and see what happens.

    Touch a hair on my students and see what I will do.

    Damn this game and damn the consequences. I will stop caring about lives innocent and guilty, I will make your hell look like a paradise for all those people that fed the gods with faith. Mark my fucking words.

    Sam fell down as his tendons got severed. He is bleeding like crazy. He could feel his head going dizzy.

    Hel looked at him and gulped down nervously. Without even knowing she started shaking.

    The trick she used to restrict Sam is actually a torture technique in Hell. Some souls thate to hell are obviously captured and restricted here to be punished for their sins. They are the souls that the reincarnation system has damned because of the sin they carry.

    And they are an opportunity for the wardens of hell to gain some energy from hell. Helping them cleanse their sins by torturing them as punishment rewards the wardens. It is a reward only celestials and people on the path of celestials can ess.

    Hel used that kind of technique on Sam. Of course, she toned it down. The effect of the technique still pains the soul itself. Not just the body.

    She knew Demigods who will stay still for decades trying to not get hurt by it. But to think Sam just destroyed his whole body just to give that answerback.

    The stubbornness scared the crap out of her. She realized that just because of some benefits, she has started walking on a path of no return. She desperately wants this to stop, but the other variables are beyond her control.

    She thought, the only variable in her influence, Sam would be her best shot.

    But today, it is confirmed that he might be the worst shot she could have.

 Chapter 1745: Meetings

    Chapter 1745: MeetingsSam woke up with drowsy eyes.

    He ispletely healed. He didn''t feel any traces of what happened to his body. Even his soul is feelingpletely healthy.

    He is currently at his pir.

    He took a deep breath and calmed his mind. His feather coat is still damaged. After calming his mind, he went on repair that then and there. As he repaired it, he could feel the spirit of the coat weeping a bit. It seems like it has been damaged.

    Hel was not kind enough to repair the coat''s spirit.

    Sam was a bit heartbroken for it. The expression of pain which didn''t evene when he was challenging one of the cruellest gods of hell, is apparent on his face when he saw the state of his invention.

    He took a deep breath after he finished the repair before diving into hell once again. He will have to endure the onught of these creatures and carry on until the next task he is going to face.

    While Sam is going on with his life, Hel held a meeting with the rest of the gods.

    "I am thinking of bringing in the external gods into the game."

    All the gods looked at her puzzlingly.

    Aren''t external gods supposed toe in the middle stages?"

    "What middle stages, whatte stages? Everything is same now. The pace the yers are going, we won''t be able to finish off all the stages before they finish off the floors. We don''t even know how long they will take to finish off the towers, but I am sure it is way less than what we expdct.

    I am pretty sure they are going to finish it within the next three years at thetest."

    "You are way too confident in them. Anyway, I like that you are confident about it. I don''t have any objections in bringing them soon. It is not that much of a big deal."

    Sunwukong is the first to agree. He didn''t have much objection to the whole thing to begin with. As long as he is entertained and the rules are followed when these changes are made, he is fine with it.

    "Anyway, I hope that you are not doing this to target the kid once again."

    Sun Wukong said as he looked at Hel who was about to heave a sigh.

    Hel''s face stiffened a bit.

    Then she shook her head wryly.

    The very reason she is bringing in the external gods is to avoid pissing Sam off too much. She knew that if the tests keep on going with the gods that are only involved in the game, then she would be forced to mess with Sam again and again.

    He is on verge of his sanity and she doesn''t want anymore damage. If he keeps on messing the game up, then the remaining gods will target her and assign me to her for the loss of the remaining yers.

    She didn''t want to deal with this headache for a while. That is why she is calling the external gods.

    If only she could kill Sam right away, she would be able to get rid of all the headaches, but too bad, she couldn''t do that.

    After some discussion, all the gods agreed. Gambler of course stayed silent until thest minute and said.

    "It doesn''t matter. We all know Sam is gonna win. So, it doesn''t matter."

    That carefree attitude is enough to piss off everyone.

    If possible a lot of gods would like this game to end. But at the start of the game, Gambler was clever enough to make them agree that no matter what happens, no matter what circumstances arise, they will see the game to its end.

    If not for that, they would have loved to just finish this game off, since they understood that Sam is an unfairpetition. But in more ways than one, it is still entertaining to see other yers trying everything they can to just catch up to Sam, even though they are failing.

    "So, when is the next round going to start?"

    "Maybe in another six months. That is good enough time I guess."

    The gods'' meeting ended quickly. Meanwhile, somewhere else some mortals are holding a meeting that will shake these gods that are above them.

    Deste.

    Inside Sam''s tower. Philip, Jack, and Watt are looking at Sam''s video on arge projection. At the same time, the video is being broadcasted all over the Deste and everywhere else in the Dusk organization.

    So, at that exact moment, every Dusk organization branch across dozens of realms is looking at the same video and listening to Sam''s deration of war.

    "I guess we are going to war then. I am going to prepare the Fire and Metal Battle Scout units and Battle Units.

    I will send a message to the rest of thebat units as well. Let''s get started.

    Philip didn''t even ask any more questions. He didn''t ask how Sam is doing and he didn''t go too much into details about the incident that happened. He didn''t sit there and specte what might have driven Sam to make such a decision.

    He just blindly agreed with whatever Sam said and got ready to prepare for the war.

    Watt stood up and said.

    "Alright then, I will go and get the info on organizations loyal to Olympus from our information branch."

    "I will go prepare tactician teams, formation teams, etc. I will also take care of the battle gear that we might need. I bet the Inventors are looking forward to this day."

    All three of them left the room.

    Meanwhile, the executives of Deste all looked at the video and started looking for things to do. All of them immediately dove into preparation without questioning the consequences. The same sentiment has been reflected in every single person that belonged to Dusk.

    In fact, within the next hour, a bunch of people ran to Dusk''s administration office in Sam''s city to volunteer for the war. They are residents of Sam''s city.

    Even the students within the academies across the realms are looking forward to it.

    And one particr batch of students is more into it than the others.

    Sam''s students are also currently holding a meeting.

    They are all looking at Habi and the recording he showed them.

    "So, the teacher just dered war and you are saying that he told us to take a break and rx like some rich brats?"

    Ratri looked with an incredulous expression. She didn''t have the same haggard look. She is far from it. She is a beautiful youngdy now and very cheerypared to the nervous wreck she usually was.

    Habi nodded.

    "How can he say that? If he is going to war, how can we stay out of it as his students? I want to go to war. I want to fight. I will kill all of those Olympus guys. I will destroy the whole thing. I will devour¡­*mmph*"

    She swung her fists around as she threw a tantrum. Madhu closed her mouth.

    Ratri tried to resist, but then only did she notice that the atmosphere in the room is too serious. Everyone is looking at Habi with solemn expressions.

    "So, the teacher is starting a war with all of the organizations that follow Olympus and that is just a deration of war with Olympus. All of this just because they tried to kill you?"

    Arvi asked as she clenched her fists.

    Habi nodded.

    Ratri is still a bit confused.

    Kasi looked at her and sighed.

    "I told you to study up a bit. Why are you like this?"

    "What do you mean?"

    "How can you not know this? It is in the library''s section about Gods and their workings. It is in the exclusive section. The one that was built solely for us, Students of Sam, and a few special cases.

    Those books are there solely for us to read.

    Anyway, Olympus is simply a kingdom of gods if you could say so and every core member of that ce is a god that is so powerful even among the rest of their peers. They are the best of the best, to say the least.

    Dering a war against Olympus and destroying all the organizations that belief in the gods of Olympus is a direct attack on these gods.

    Because if these followers die, the umted faith will be less, and a bit of the gods'' power will be reduced.

    And the teacher is not a god. At least not yet. He is far from it. Even if he eventually reaches that realm in a few decades, at this moment, he is so weak.

    And he is fighting these gods at this moment, to get revenge for one of his students. And a student that is so foolish to almost lose the first-ever gift the teacher gave in such a pathetic manner."

    Thest sentence was aimed at Habi. Everyone is of course angered by the fact that Habi became so smitten by the woman and gave up such an important thing.

    But they couldn''t just grind him after he came back from death. Still, snide remarks are a go.

    Though the students are currently focusing on the bigger issue. What should their role be in this war? Since one of them is the reason for the war and their teacher took such a great risk, they all felt a responsibility to participate in this.

 Chapter 1746: Cube

    Chapter 1746: CubeThe next day after the meetings are held.

    All of Sam''s students left deste at the break of dawn. They used their special privilege as Sam''s students to leave the ce through the space gates.

    By the time Watt, Jack and the Philip realized that they are gone, they already crossed three realms. The trio didn''t get an urate idea of where they are going, they have to wait and see where the next check point is and estimate where they are going.

    "Do you think they are going after the Olympus organizations?" Watt spected.

    "What else could they be doing? They must have understood that we will restrict their activities in the war. So, they just took the initiative in it."

    "Are we letting them leave like this?"

    "Well, someone is following them. So, we don''t have to worry too much."

    Philip said as he looked at the log data of the space gates.

    "Who is after them?"

    "Who else? Sirona. She must have noticed their movements better than us. She has a log exactly one hourter than that of the students. She is at every space gate that they are travelling through.

    She has a better grasp of these students than us anyway, I think we can leave them to her. We can proceed with the rest of the ns as we initially thought."

    "Oh boy, I hope these kids don''t do anything stupid. Handling her is a nightmare."

    "Why? Did I miss something here? I think I don''t know what you are talking about." Jack said in a confused tone.

    "The thing is when Sam first left on his trips after taking in the students, he put her incharge of their studies.

    She kind of took the role of their guardian. They are shit scared of her for some reason. She never really did anything to hurt them. She didn''t even scold them once as far as I know, but she really scares the crap out of them. I don''t think kids have been that nervous when they first met Sam."

    Philip said as he looked at the crystal tab for more information.

    Jack is surprised.

    "Howe I didn''t know anything about it? I am spending time with those kids as much as both of you guys. Howe you know this extra information?"

    "I don''t know it. I only know that she takes care of some of their lessons, but I don''t know the kids are scared of her."

    Watt said casually.

    "Well I know it. But she is very protective of them. Since she can hold herself on her own, we don''t need to worry too much about the kids.

    Rather we can proceed with our n. The first target of them all. The organizations that we ssified as the Nodal Organizations.

    Shall we split up and do all three of them at the same time or shall we just on work on each of them together."

    Philip asked as he took out a cigar. The other two looked at him with confused expressions.

    "What is that?"

    "It is something you smoke. It is made by one of the kids in Pharmacy department."

    He spoke and put it in his mouth before lighting it up.

    "This made with a lot of extremely high quality processed herbs of different elemental energies. Mine has fire and metal of course.

    When you smoke it up like this, you get absorb the herbs'' qualities into your lungs where it interacts with the oxygen that is supplied to the rest of your body through the blood. Long term use of it helps with the fusion and affinity of elements.

    There is a different set for every element and level of cultivation.

    Yours are also ready and the design department even made a tool that helps you with lighting it up. You should really check them out. I love them."

    "Really, they made some for us? Where are they?" Watt immediately took out hismunication device to check up on them.

    Jack just looked at their ns and said.

    "Okay, we are going to do the first few things together. Then we will split up. It will give them some impact and it will also be a bit more fun for us."

    After discussing a few more things, they immediately made a move. The trio took a few of Dragon Hawk members as well as some people who can manage the administration and operations from Deste to their first target.

    They arrived on a with a branch of Dusk already there. In fact, their first target is one of the rivals that Dusk organization ispletely crushing for a while.

    This organization operates a bunch of academies on the and their strongest person is only at Late Stage of Astral ne Transcendence. It is not a bigpetition for them. They could easily destroy them.

    But the thing is the trio decided to do something more.

    Their target is one of the organizations that has a lot of subisidies and every one of them is actually an organization under Olympus. They pray to the gods of Olympus and the trio decided to destroy the faith.

    Their end goal is not just to destroy organizations under Olympus, rather destroy the faith of the people under the Olympuspletely. Not only does this reduce the faith energy these gods are gaining, there will also be an example set so that new followers don''t join in. The faith energy wouldn''t increase or recover anymore.

    The trio didn''t even care much and barged into the city. At the centre of the city right before the headquarters of this organization, all three of them stood back to back.

    Three young men looking rxed as they could as they lit their cigars up.

    "I really like this lighter. I think the me is hot enough to cut through a high grade metal. Even the metals that we use for weapons for Astral ne cultivators."

    Watt said as he yed with the lighter in his hand. The me is produced by a liquid energy capsule inside. The design is really exquisite.

    "I gotta say, these cigars are really good. I can feel the wind elemental energy in my lungs."

    As they are speaking, they already gathered the attention of a bunch of people.

    Looking at them, Philip decided to start. He gathered his spiritual energy in his throat and started screaming on top of his lungs.

    "People of the City and the loyal followers of Dark Lightning Organization. We three that you see here are from Dusk organization and we recently had a bone to pick with the gods that you guys worship. The Gods of Olympus and particrly Zeus the one who you devout yourself so much.

    And your devotion kind of gives those gods the power they have, so you guys are the reason for some of our troubles. We have to deal with you guys if we want to deal with those gods. Think of yourself as coteral damage if you will.

    So, I want you guys to get rid of that faith you have for them.

    Of course we are going to help you with that.

    In the next few days, the city and the surroundings of the city approximately to a radius of 250 miles will be stuck with a famine.

    I don''t want to get into too many details. But all I can tell you is you can pray to your gods all you want, but they will note. In fact, they wouldn''t even care that you are living or dying or how much you are suffering.

    We prefer to not take any of your lives. But if ites to this, we won''t really care. So, I apologize for your suffering.

    You can beg the Dark lightning organization, but they won''t be able to help you. Because we are going to destroy any efforts they make.

    And if you want to take refuge you cane and meet us in the south. You wille across the Dusk organization and you can register there.

    We will provide refuge for you and let you live a safe life that is on par with your current life if it is not the better."

    As Philip went on and on, Jack took out the sword and swung it at someone who ising at them.

    The sword stuck through the man that came at them. Sliced him in the half. The surrounding people who already gathered around the three them for a long time were stunned beyond belief. Because they just saw a person who they knew to be one of the strongest people to die in just one strike with no resistance whatsoever.

    Meanwhile Watt took out arge cube from his storage and put in the centre of that area. There is a small groove in the middle of it. He took out a rod that fit perfectly inside that groove.

    The cube started glowing, before the earth beneath it split up and a bit and the cube disappeared into it. The ground closed down after that as if nothing happened.

    With that cube, the war against Olympus has started

 Chapter 1747: Aging

    Chapter 1747: AgingThe trio just walked out of the city unscathed.

    But on their way, they killed as many people as they came. After a while, the organization members did get some sense and didn''te forward to fight them.

    The trio just went to the nearest branch to await the results.

    They just sat there without doing much. They just nned for their next target which is going to be much more simr and in fact easier than this.

    The cube that was nted in the middle of the city started spreading out different elemental energies. Fire, death, and earth are elemental energies all together.

    The elemental fire energy has the highest level of concentration than the rest of the energies. Thispletely evaporated all the moisture in the surroundings.

    The vegetation started drying up. The grass, the shrubs, and even therge trees everything got affected. Coupled with the death energy, they all died out very quickly. The earth''s elemental energypletely loosened the soil into loose sand.

    By next morning, everything in the city and surroundings turned into a desert. The houses started deteriorating even the great mansion, the headquarters of the dark lightning was worn off.

    It started copsing by the next day evening. The effects didn''t even stick there, by night it spread to everywhere around within the range. The next two hundred and fifty miles slowly started turning into a desert.

    The cultivators and the citizens were not affected on the first day, but the second day morning things are different.

    The Citizens who are still within the very early stages of the Mortal ne of Cultivation are the first ones to be effected. They felt like the surrounding spiritual energy has be scarce.

    They couldn''t absorb enough to sustain themselves. They felt exhausted and tired, particrly kids who just recently awakened and just gotten used to the spiritual energy are feeling the most trouble.

    As for the people who didn''t awaken at all, their bodies are not exactly strong or equipped enough to take on the effects of this. They have to consume water and food which they need more to take on the adverse effects of the weather changes.

    The parents of those kids are the first to cave in. They didn''t know what to do and went straight to the Dark Lightning organization asking them for a solution.

    On the third day, things are worse. The kids who didn''t awaken started feeling the effects of this even more. Particrly the death energy. They couldn''t stay awake and fell into aatose state.

    They felt like their lives are being sucked of their bodies which is exactly what is happening.

    The vegetation not just got destroyed, it turned to nothing more than dust and just got mixed up with the sand in the surroundings.

    The buildings are the same. They just turned into sand and got mixed up in the sand. The city looked like some ruins discovered by an archaeological group back on earth. That too a ruin in the city.

    The Dark lightning members immediately called for Zeus. They used the ritual to summon Zeus and the leader of the organization sat on his knees as he looked at the god with very little andst bit of hope he could muster.

    "Lord, someone from the Dusk organization hase. They destroyed the city and its surroundings. All the vegetation has died. Kids are ina, and cultivators are getting affected. The death energy is running rampant over the area.

    The surrounding area of the city approximately 200 miles has turned into a desert with no spiritual energy. The only safe ce is past this radius but they all belong to rival organizations.

    We are going to die out if you don''t help us. If we try, I and my family could escape this, but we cannot let the people that trusted us to suffer like this.

    The people who trusted us and started worshipping you. Please help us."

    Zeus looked at the leader of the organization with a frown. It took some time for him to even process the whole thing. He couldn''t fathom the fact that Sam really made a move and the first target is actually an organization directly under him.

    He looked at another elder on the side and asked.

    "Give me the details. What exactly happened?"

    The Elder went on to exin the incident from start to finish. Zeus closed his eyes for a moment before sighing.

    "Go and find the cause of this. The cube you said they buried. Try to take it out and bring it here. I will send someone from a superior organization to you. They will handle this."

    The elders agreed and went to get the cube. But they weren''t even able to touch the cube. They were caught in some attack that channeled the death energy into them.

    Their spiritual energy was eaten away along with their vitality as they aged at a rapid pace. The people apanied in the operation saw one of their elders who looked like a middle-aged man at the best turn into an old man, lose his teeth, get all wrinkly, gain a hunch and finally fall forward to his death.

    All in a matter of minutes. The more physical contact he had with the cube the faster he aged.

    One of thepanions knocked out the other person who made contact with the cube.

    That man who became old was flung to the side. His cultivation remained the same, but his whole body and everything inside, including the spiritual core and the meridians deteriorated because of it.

    Even his soul seemed to have aged along with the rest of his body. But as soon as his contact with the cube was cut off, he was safe.

    But his age didn''t go back to normal. So, it is fair to say he is not exactly saved.

    The leader of the organization himself wanted to try his hand at the cube, but he wasn''t able to.

    He tried to contact Zeus again, but he wasn''t able to do that either. On the fourth day, the help that Zeus said wille arrived meanwhile the first refugee arrived at the Dusk organization''s branch.

 Chapter 1748: Vynk

    Chapter 1748: VynkPhilip met with the first refugee that came there.

    He is kind of surprised by the person he saw. It is a young boy. He didn''t even awaken yet. It is practically impossible for a kid like him toe there. After all, even though the vegetation is gone, the beasts are still there within the radius around the city.

    These beasts are currently starving since most of them gain vitality from eating their prey.

    The more the death energy sucks their energy out. The more dangerous they will be. They must have already started eating each other and for a young boy to make his way this far that too in just a few days. It is an impossible task.

    "Who are you kid? How did you get here?"

    Philip asked as he looked around. He ordered some of the Dusk members to scout the surrounding areas.

    "I am Vynk. I came here by myself as a refugee."

    "You came here alone?"

    "Yes. When you said you will offer refugee to the people thate to you, I tried to hitch a ride to this ce from different merchants. I hitched a ride from a few people and was dropped a dozen miles away from this spot yesterday."

    "You didn''t even awaken. Why would you risk that? You could have been sold off as a ve."

    "I know good people from bad people. I know every merchant that came to the Dark Lightning city and I know who to trust and who not to trust. I spent most of my time acting as cup bearer for rich merchants in the Luxury inn of that city.

    So, I asked some of their help to get here."

    "What about your parents?"

    "Dead."

    "So, you are an orphan?"

    "Yes. I am. One of the rare ones that survived. Generally, all the orphans are taken away by Dark Lightning Organization to somewhere else. I managed to get lucky."

    Philip is surprised. He is kind of impressed by the kid and how decisive he is. He couldn''t understand what to call this kid''s nature. Whether he is smart, mature or sharp. But he is really impressive. That part is all he knows.

    "Why would youe this far? I thought one of the rules to be a resident of the city and the rest of Dark Lightning Organization''s territory is actually be a devout follower of Zeus.

    Don''t they have somews up there?"

    "They do. But not every rule is sessfully established everywhere. There is always a loophole."

    Philip couldn''t help but take another look at the kid once again. He is a teenage boy with tanned skin and extremely dark brown hair. He had a well-built body for his age. His bodynguage shows that he is confident and straightforward.

    Philip liked him at first nce."

    "So, why did youe this far? If you knew the merchants as you said, you could have gone to any other territories and survived. Since you are familiar with thends and people, you would have a much easier time there.

    We are practically aliens to you guys. You shouldn''t be trusting us more than them."

    "Unfortunately, I do trust you guys more than the rest of the cities. All the cities in this and in this realm area actually ruled by some religious nuts.

    I believe people. Not so much in gods."

    "But we are the ones that are destroying your homes. We are doing it just because of the faith you provide your gods. Don''t you think it is unfair?"

    "It might be, but what it isn''t?

    Anyway, I did everything I could to survive since I was a kid. I don''t care what you do to this or this realm. Even if you turn everyone into a corpse and then into undead to make your own undead army, I will be fine.

    As long as I survive. That is all that matters."

    "You are cold-hearted for a kid." Philip said in a soft tone.

    Vynk didn''t know what to say about that. He felt a tinge of regret creeping up his heart. He felt like maybe being too honest might have cost him entry into Dusk.

    But Philip''s next words eased his mind."

    "I like it.

    You are just about to awaken, your mind is clear and you went through a lot and surprisingly you don''t know how on the point you are about the current situation and what is going to happen next.

    Anyway, wee to Dusk. Since you are a kid, you will have some special privileges. Particrly as an orphan.

    Choose between them and I think you will make the right choice anyway. My subordinate will guide you.

    See youter."

    Philip just left after that and a member of Dragon Hawk tribe took the kid away.

    "Is he the boss?"

    Vynk asked as he looked at Philip''s back.

    "He kind of is, but he is not the ultimate boss. There is a person above him."

    "Is he the person they mentioned when they are dering war?"

    "Yeah."

    "Where is he? Why is he not here?"

    "From what I know, he is stuck in a ce somewhere. From a ce, he couldn''t just break out. But he will be back soon."

    "Why do these three still follow that person, if he could be caught by someone that easily. These three seem strong enough. They could start on their own. They could even take over this organization."

    Dragon Hawk member looked at Vynk like he was an idiot.

    "Kid, don''t speak about them like that. Trust me, Philip might be able to tolerate some of your weird quirks and Jack is patient enough to not lift his sword at a kid.

    But Watt will bang your head on a stone until you forget your own name.

    From what I heard about you, you have a twisted worldview. I get why you are like that. You were alone since you were a kid, you had to be constantly on guard and you don''t trust anyone. You care more about your survival than anything else in the world.

    The four bosses, are kind of like you. They didn''t have anyone in the world. But they had each other since they were almost your age. They stuck together through so much.

    They built a lot together and saved millions of lives by establishing Dusk. Particrly orphans like you.

    And we all love them for it.

    Trust, loyalty, and kinship, might be unfamiliar to you. But if you want to be a part of Dusk, you will have to nurture those qualities and I am sure, when you train here, you will know exactly what I am talking about."

    Vynk just looked at the Dragon Hawk member as he babbled on.

    He then thought back to the announcement Philip made.

    One of the reasons, he came to Dusk is because of that announcement. If someone is selfish enough to kill everyone in a city innocent and guilty, just to get their desired results, he felt that they might be as cold-hearted as them.

    But now he kind of have a feeling that they are all hypocrites. Talks of honorable things like loyalty and stuff are definitely not the first thing thates to his mind when he thinks of a person. Particrly if that person is currentlymitting genocide.

    For the first time in a while, Vynk felt confused.

    He is skeptical and curious about what Dusk is going to be like and how it is going to change him.

    And when that thought came to his mind, he knew that he is going to learn something new from there on. But what he doesn''t know is that the exact time that thought came to him is the birth time of one of many legends the Dusk has created.

    But this one stands out even among them. The legend of Vynk. Also known as the Blood Iron Hound of Dusk. Trained by one of the founding members, Philip himself.

    A legend that stands behind one of Sam''s legendary students, Habi the Venomous de Dancer. But that is a story for another time.

    Right now, after Vynk was absorbed into Dusk. There was a new spreading back in the Dark Lightning City about the first refugee leaving that ce.

    That soon prompted a second, a third, and a fourth refugee to seek out Dusk. They are all people who were at the bottom of the pyramid. They figured that at the rate things are going, even if Dark Lightning found a solution, it might be toote for them.

    So, they abandoned their faith and went to seek Dusk. The people that caused their misery and opened their eyes.

    And of course, that is just the beginning of the long train of refugees that followed them.

    On their way, someone people couldn''t make it. They copsed and gave up. But to their surprise, Dusk actually sent some help to fetch these refugees. So, the fact that they are the cause of this misery in pursuit of their petty revenge, was forgotten.

 Chapter 1749: Osiris

    Chapter 1749: OsirisA few monthster.

    Sam once again lost track of time.

    And this time, it is because he had to conquer a very special ce within the tower. But hepleted half of the tower.

    That is the only numerical data he had in his mind regarding his stay in this tower.

    He just finished his corruption cirction. Once again his body was clean before he disappeared by that unique pulling force. He sighed as he reappeared at that gray area again.

    Sam looked at Hel who has an exhausted look on her face.

    This is a new look. They never saw her like this. But the yers didn''t care.

    They waited for their next task so that they could get back to finishing their towers. They know that they have enough time to finish off the towers, but they also knew that the faster they finish this off, the better it is for them.

    They don''t want to stay in hell for too long.

    But no matter how long they waited, the task didn''te.

    Before they could ask though, they felt a different forceing into that Grey space.

    With a sh, a tall man stood right beside Hel. All the yers looked at him curiously.

    He is a little taller than six feet. Long legs and partially exposed upper body. But the most distinctive features are his green skin, big and clear eyes, the crown on his head, and finally the weird beard.

    "Osiris?"

    Sam muttered in confusion. Clear surprise was apparent on his face. He hase across so many gods of different mythologies from back on earth, but he is still surprised when a god from apletely different mythology, particrly one of the oldest cultures has appeared in front of him.

    Osiris looked at Sam with that emotionless serene face.

    "You are the one from earth I suppose."

    Osiris Muttered before looking at Hel.

    "I will take it over from here. You can leave."

    "I am counting on you. Thank you for agreeing on this."

    "No problem. I gave you my word. So, it is my responsibility to do this."

    Hel nodded once again and left.

    Osiris looked at the yers and said.

    "Hello. I am Osiris. Some people call me the God of Death and some people worship me as the God of Life. The thing is I am both the ruler of the underworld and the ruler of life in the celestial world.

    You can address me with whatever title suits your preference.

    Anyway, I am here to take over for the next task you are going to finish in this game. I know that all of you have been subjected to a lot of things without your consent.

    If given a choice I wouldn''t have taken this up. But I have given my word and I have to finish this responsibility.

    I hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive me."

    Osiris bowed his head slightly before continuing.

    "On to the point at hand. I can promise you that I will be fair to every one of you. I will not hold any bias towards or against anyone.

    You can at least expect that from me.

    And for the task, I will give you the briefing myself. Let''s go.

    As he waved his hand, all the yers disappeared and reappeared somewhere else.

    Sam couldn''t help but wonder if all the gods could use something like teleportation. Everyone is able to just to move the yers as they wished.

    His thoughts came back from wandering as he looked at the city in front of him. Currently, he is hovering over the city along with the other yers.

    The city looked normal. It is not exactly bustling. But it must be because the sun is not that high yet. It is a little bitter than sunrise. The morning is still cool and warm at the same time.

    "This city is currently full of people that I have to punish. They are the worst criminals gathered from many of the territories ruled by my followers.

    You will be fighting with them from sunrise to sunset.

    As for the remaining time, you will be fighting with something else. I can''t show the real thing to you, but it will look like this."

    *SNAP*

    He snapped his fingers and the surroundings turned dark. The city in front of them also changed, but that change shocked them.

    The city that looked normal and decently prosperous suddenly turned into a ruin and the ruin is filled with undead creatures, specters, wraiths, ghosts, liches, and shadow undead. Sam hasn''t seen this many undead together since his visit to the realm of the undead.

    *SNAP*

    Osiris snapped his finger once again and the vision was gone. The city is back to normal.

    The city is a special toy created specifically for this test. It would have had more additions if we were doing this at the originally agreed time. But this is the current version.

    Thepetition itself is very simple. You have to fight these people and kill them. Each person is set with a certain number of points and the one who gains the most points by the end of this task wins.

    There are some conditions though.

    First one is the yers cannot use any of the recovery methods. The spiritual energy reserve you have in your body at the start of this challenge is not rechargeable. Once you use all of that energy, you will be considered out of the game.

    If all yers are out, the task is over.

    And by chance, if the yers managed to clear the city off of all of the targets, in both day and night of course, then the task is over at that moment as well.

    The final condition is something that you should very vary of.

    The difficulty of the night more on each day actually depends on how well you perform on the day mode.

    The undead creatures I left behind are of special kind. A lot of my followers did a lot of research on necromancy and elemental energy, elemental spirits before they managed to make this possible.

    And I twisted it a bit before utilizing it here.

    So, the condition is that whatever attacks the yers use in the day mode, whether they are your warrior skills,bat techniques, traps, elemental skills including long range, short range, group attacks, orplete fusions, everything will be recorded and absorbed by the city and they will be transferred to the undead creatures at night.

    So, if one of you uses a fire elemental fusion at the daytime to kill one target in the day mode, then one target at nighttime will definitely use fire elemental fusion to fight with you.

    And this applies to weapons as well.

    I guess that you have some really special weapons in your hands, so be careful when you use them. Even if they areplicated or some spirit weapons are given to you by some gods, the formation might not be able to clearly duplicate it, but it will give out a twisted variant of it.

    It will be decently powerful enough to give you some serious damage and trouble.

    Be careful about using them.

    As I said before, I will be absolutely fair and just in thispetition. If anyone of you tries to go against the rules or seek help from any of the gods that are acting as the backers in the middle by whatever means, I will take you and trap you in the underworld.

    Trust me, it won''t be confined and controlled like the one you are experiencing. You would bepeting to survive to not disappear along with the heinous of souls that ever entered hell.

    In a way, I respect you all for whatever you have aplished until now. So, don''t lose that respect.

    And there will be a reward for all of you for being put through all of this. Based on your performance, I will grant a few of your requests. Of course, it might be just one request or a dozen requests based on what you are asking.

    And there will be some restrictions to what level of tasks I could aplish.

    Anyway, we can discuss more it after the whole thing is over. I hope you can perform to the best of your abilities. See youter."

    With that Osiris disappeared from that spot. The yers were also teleported to different parts of the city.

    They all appeared in different corners. And as soon as they appeared, they already sense hostility from their surroundings.

    The criminals that are arrested in this city are nowhere near restricted like actual prisoners. They are extremely free and they even have a decent of equipment with armor and weapons. They seem healthy.

    They are not deprived of anything.

    There is certainly no advantage for the yers to be had.

    And it seems like their location has been instantly given to the prisoners, so all the surrounding prisoners already started running to the yers.

 Chapter 1750: Spear Throwing

    Chapter 1750: Spear ThrowingThe first thing Sam did is not attack the people that came at him.

    Instead, he swiftly activated his earthen wall and surrounded himself with it. He made the wall sturdy enough to not let a single attack pass through.

    He is being attacked from all the sides by various attacks, but all of them are in vain.

    Not just Sam every other yer also did the same.

    They all went into a defensive position immediately and protected themselves from the attacks.

    Even though the rules of this task are pretty straightforward, things are not as easy as they seem.

    In this game, yers are spread all over the ce and the person with the highest kills wins. And to reach that goal, a yer could do two things.

    One is to make it easier for him to kill more people and the other is to make it difficult for the other yers to kill.

    With the way the whole game is set up, a yer can do both of them. Apart from that, there are a bunch of variables including the transition between the night and day mode thate into y.

    So, without analyzing the city and their opponents a bit, it would be foolish for a yer to just blindly go and start killing. If Sam is just there alone and his task is to kill these people, he would have gone into a frenzy.

    But the presence of other yers alone is enough to make him think twice.

    After exactly three minutes, the earthen wall surrounding Sam suddenly opened up and turned into a bunch ofrge spikes. They are all powered by ming explosions as they made their way in different directions.

    Everyone nearby was caught off guard by such an attack and all the aggressors had to take a step back. The ones that couldn''t and were too close to him got hit squarely and suffered some damage.

    Of course, that was not enough to kill anyone.

    But that bought enough time for Sam to make his next move. Within a sh, he went through a wind elemental fusion and popped his wings out. The fusion was deactivated and Sam flew straight into the sky.

    He floated in sky right above the center of the city. He hovered there as his wings pped. He activated his eye technique as he used Roc''s bloodline ability to enhance his eyes even more.

    He looked around as he tried to find other yers'' positions and it seems like based on the game''s settings, all the yers appeared in a rtively open space. After marking everyone''s position mentally, Sam''s attention was caught by Dayus.

    He is feeling a bit yful at the moment.

    All this while Dayus continuously exploited the game rules along with the god that was supporting him and tried to y Sam.

    This only stopped now, because it was Osiris who is supervising the task. Sam believed that when the regr gods are back in, the bias would continue.

    After all, no matter how many chances he gave, Zeus just kept on going with his stubborn interference.

    With the war going on between Dusk and Olympus, Sam is pretty sure that he would be faced with many more underhanded tactics.

    So, he figured that he would strike first since he now has neutral ground. He will y within the rules and throw Dayus to the bottom of the yers'' ranking.

    Sam took out a spear as he injected his spiritual energy into it and threw it.

    At this moment, Dayus is also using a defensive technique to hold back all the attackers. Unlike Sam though, he didn''t have a technique to fly away.

    So, he just used an attack to disperse them and tried to move away. To get into a much more favorable position.

    He was about to kill one of the attackers to create that opening to slip away. But before he could use his spear to make the attack, Sam''s spear whistled through the air and sted through the head of that attacker.

    Dayus had to jump to the side to dodge the spear after it passed straight through that head.

    Before he could realize what even happened there, he saw another spear making him away to the area. It almost brushed past him before it went straight through the head of another criminal. The criminal.

    Before the third spear could even touch the ground, the third spear already came and nailed another person to the ground. This is the time when Dayus finally came out of his stupor. He looked at Sam who is hovering over the city.

    Sam smirked at him and threw two more spears. Killing two more people. By now, the criminals, who are the targets also noticed Sam. They tried to dodge the attacks and went after Dayus who is already using the chance to slip like a loach.

    But of course, someone else tried to attack him.

    Sam kept on attacking the targets though. He just took one target with every spear and when one of the targets had enough and tried to attack Sam from there with a spear throw, Dayus took the chance to attack that target meanwhile Sam dodged and caught the spear that came at him.

    The targets almost thought that Sam and Dayus are working together and got angry.

    As for the people from Sam''s original ce, they were pissed because Sam managed to just give them a slip and go into the air. They wanted to attack him. So, the projectile weapons along with some long-range elemental attacks.

    The attacks came from everywhere. Sam swiftly dodged most of them. He avoided defending the attacks directly. He didn''t even block the attack. Not even once. But he didn''t shift to the focus his attacks on the targets from his side.

    He only attacked people from Dayus''s side.

    Dayus could feel that he is not being pressured by the attackers at all, but the only problem is that he is losing points. The targets albeitpletely troublesome are also extremely valuable. If Sam takes away all of his points, he would have to encroach on the territories of other yers.

    He is already gaining enough animosity from the other yers.

    There is no way he would want to gain more heat. But Sam''s actions are forcing him to do that.

    By now, Sam''s presence in the sky already gained the attention of other yers. They are surprised, but it didn''t make them stop and think. Whatever Sam is doing is exactly what they would expect Sam would do.

    Sam was on a dodging spree and killing spree at the same time. And after repeatedly seeing that there is no other way to attack Sam from their current locations, without going all out.

    So, after a few minutes, a lot of attacks were gone.

    While Sam is killing people that are actively trying to hunt Dayus, he noticed something else regarding the city. There are a lot of people that didn''te out of their houses. In fact, most people in the city are actually inside their houses right now.

    And from what he could guess, they are a lot more powerful than the people that are outside. It kind of felt like the town that Sam confronted back in hell.

    But here people are actually observing the fights. They just didn''t make a move at the moment. They are observing. And when he noticed that Dayus is actually running out of opponents and is getting some breathing space while searching for different, targets to meet, Sam decided to make the people from these housese out.

    His first pick is the house that is right next to the alley from where Dayus is hiding and making his n.

    A spearnded on the house and destroyed it.

    *BAM* *CRASH*

    The spear is followed by another. But this time, Sam didn''t hear or see any crash or copse of the building.

    The dust settled and Sam saw three people in that house. Out of three one of them caught the spear and from the looks of it, they didn''t need much effort to do that. It was pretty easy.

    They looked at Sam and almostpletely ignored Dayus.

    Sam smiled and took two more spears as he threw them.

    The other two somersaulted as they caught the spearsing at them andnded ring angrily at Sam.

    Dayus who is standing on the side felt pissed. He couldn''t help but take the ignorance of these people as a form of disrespect.

    He took out his own spear and looked at the three.

    "You seem to have forgotten that I am here."

    He said and charged at them.

    One of the three turned around and blocked Dayus'' attack while the other two focused their attacks on Sam.

    They threw their spears at Sam and they are cloaked with fire elemental energy.

    Sam caught both of the spears without even so much as a flinch on his face.

 Chapter 1751: Transition

    Chapter 1751: TransitionSam held the two spears in his hands as he looked at the two targets.

    These people are obviously much more skilled than the first few he killed so easily. But just from a nce, Sam could tell that they are not actually that strong.

    As the two are trying to taunt Sam into attacking them with proud and smug looks on their faces, theirpanion on the back was already suppressed by Dayus in just a few seconds and was stabbed in the stomach with a spear.

    But before he could die, Sam threw one of the two spears at the head of that guy stealing the kill.

    Dayus furiously looked at Sam and took out a normal spear before throwing it at Sam.

    The spear had purple lightning wrapped around it as it made its way through the air and made its way to Sam.

    Sam threw the second spear in his hand at the target instead of blocking the oneing at him.

    He dodged to the side and caught hold of the spear. And instead of forcefully grabbing it and stopping its momentum, he flew along with the spear. He used his body weight and force to make the spear make a U-turn in the air and added his own momentum with his own lightning energy as he targeted the second person among the three.

    *BOOM*

    The target initially tried to catch the spear like he previously did, but as the spear neared him, he understood his own limitations which made him dodge it, only it was toote before he made that decision.

    So, while Dayus killed the third guy among the three, the second guy also died in Sam''s hands.

    Dayus finally got the breathing space he wanted. He red at Sam angrily.

    If he could, he wanted to just go to Sam and attack him with all he got, but he knew better than that. He knew that he would get his ass kicked in more than one way if he went and did that and he knew that he would be losing out a lot in points.

    Even though the second one is already happening, he truly cared that the first one doesn''t happen.

    All he could do is grit his teeth and bear with it to find a way out.

    So, he looked around at the houses nearby and ran into one of them.

    Sam raised an eyebrow and took out a spear as he threw it into that house.

    But at this moment, he noticed all the targets that are out on the street from his own area are gathered together as they threw their ranged attacks once again.

    And this time, they are all working together. This made Sam unable to focus solely on Dayus'' targets. He had to shift his focus back to the people from his side.

    As he started taking them out one by one, he realized some things. People out in the open that are ready to pounce on them since the start are small fries. There is not a single ounce of difficulty when he killed them.

    They are as easy as plucking flowers.

    But people from within the houses are much stronger. And they are noting unless the houses are destroyed and Sam assumed that they mighte out if the surrounding small fries are taken out.

    Meanwhile, the remaining yers already noticed what Sam is doing, they are relieved that they are not the ones being targeted.

    And while killing them, they understood what exactly is happening with the strength of these people.

    The small fries are indeed much easier to take and another observation they made is that the bigger the house the more the numbers and the more the strength of people.

    They initially wanted to fight in a way so that they could take on the opponents in the order of their strength, but soon they realized the people inside are not just going to sit around and wait.

    The only reason they are waiting inside is not just because they are in the positions assigned to them, but also because they wanted to take their time and find the right opportunity.

    So, when some of the yers are suddenly attacked by the targets, they got a bit troubled by the sudden increase in their usage of energy.

    They cannot replenish their energy, so they have to be careful. But everything here seems to be trying to make them spend more and more energy.

    Time passed. And all this while, Sam just stayed in the sky as he killed as many targets as possible. By the end of the day, he didn''t spend too much of his energy. At leastpared to the rest of the yers.

    Because the wings are now essentially a part of his own body. Just like walking with his legs, these wings do spend some energy and of course more than walking, but it is not exactly too much of an expense.

    And the spear throws didn''t cost him too much energy either. They are mostly normal attacks and he used most of his physical strength most of the time than spiritual energy.

    He tried to preserve as much energy as he can. Particrly, before the first transition from day to night.

    As the sun slowly set. Sam stopped the attacks. Even the other yers went on the defensive and didn''t attack anyone else. They even took high and rtively isted spots.

    The sunset.

    And as the darkness enveloped the whole city, the ruins took their shape. The spots that the yers were standing on were actually the only spots that didn''t change after the transition.

    They noticed these spots when Osiris was giving an exnation. They observed and used that to ease themselves into the transition.

    Sam and the yers are anticipating a bunch of attacks from different kinds of undead as soon as the transition happened. But instead, the ruins were calm. As calm as they could be.

    For five minutes, Sam had experienced a state ofplete silence in a long time. It is so calm and peaceful that he could almost hear his thoughts along with his wings pping.

    And unfortunately, it onlysted five minutes. As if there was a trigger, dozens and dozens of undead started raising from the ground.

    And to everyone''s dismay, they saw something strange.

    Over forty-five undead creatures that came out of the ground suddenly grew wings over their backs and flew into the sky.

    The exact number of the targets that Sam has killed in the day mode of the city.

 Chapter 1752: Observing the Night Mode

    Chapter 1752: Observing the Night ModeThe undead creatures popped up with those wings and they held two spears in their hands.

    As they charged toward Sam, he closed off his wings andnded on the ground. He stored the spears back in his storage and just looked at the sky while defending himself with another earthen wall.

    The undead creatures nearby walked toward him and started attacking the defensive barrier. And to Sam''s surprise, the attacks are not just purely physical.

    These creatures used the same technique Sam used to create an opening when he flew into the sky. Earthen spikes are being shot at him from different sides. This made him surprised as well as a bit confused.

    Because as far as Sam knew, there is not a single death that happened through these earthen spikes and he used it only once.

    From what he understood initially, the undead creatures that were killed with a certain attack will be the onesing back with the same attacks. Like what happened with the undead creatures that now had wings.

    The earthen spikes are something that he didn''t think of.

    But this first night here, all he wanted to do is an experiment. He wanted to see how this transition and the undead creatures work. So, he didn''t bother too much and just made mental observations.

    As he looked at the undead creatures flying over in the sky and started throwing spears all over, he couldn''t help but feel impressed and intrigued by how well-devised this whole thing is.

    He is on verge of the Divine ne of cultivation and as far as he knows, as long as he crossed past the Divine ne of Cultivation, he would be reaching the Celestial ne. The ne is considered as attaining Godhood.

    So, if all that is standing is one ne of cultivation, the distinction of what one could do with that difference is truly astounding.

    He couldn''t help but think of what kind of possibilities that are awaiting him when he reached that level.

    Sam didn''t dare to dwell on these thoughts though. He will know the answers to those questions when the timees and he is sure that now is definitely not the time to explore that thought process.

    While Sam is lost in his thoughts and making observations on how this night mode is going, the rest of the yers are all cursing Sam with all their hearts.

    Like Sam, they also made a few observations. One of them is that the undead creatures that came at them have the characteristics of the targets that they killed in the day mode. So, they could say that they are being attacked by the undead counterparts of the targets they killed.

    These undead creatures areing at them with the attacks they used in the day mode. This is something that they could understand.

    But the problem with the creatures that Sam killed is that they are covering a lot more territory through the air.

    They are attacking from such a high vantage point and just like how Sam killed people in different areas, these creatures attacked different yers.

    These additional attacks from the air are pressurizing them.

    Of course, Dayus took most of that pressure. Because most of those creatures are from Dayus'' side and they are focusing on the target within that area. And Dayus happened to be the only target there.

    The yers were able to handle thend targets pretty easily, but dealing with the airborne targets while dealing with thend targets is difficult.

    Of course, not to all of them.

    Arkiv is actually having a pretty good time with his bow and arrow. He positioned himself in a way so that he could fight long-range withnd targets also, so he is pretty good at dealing with airborne targets as well.

    After observing for a while, Sam also took out his bow and arrow and killed the airborne.

    As time passed, the yers realized one thing, the night mode is actually not as difficult as the day mode. The normal undead creatures are much easier to deal with than the targets in the day mode.

    The only problem they are facing is that their attacks are being used against them which is obviously very frustrating. After all, no one ever thinks about counter-moves against their own moves. It takes a bit of time for them to adjust.

    Sam also made some extra observations.

    The number of targets that got hit by these attacks in the day mode is the exact number of undead that are going to have these special powers in the night mode.

    And the location the target got hit is where the undead with these special powers are spawning.

    These two observations are enough to make Sam grin.

    He knew that all the yers are special. Everyone has their own specialization and everyone has their own secret trump cards. They might not be as good as his, but they are not bad whenpared to any other cultivator on the same level as them.

    In fact, they are miles above.

    And all the yers are more or less capable to survive for days without any recovery in their energy. They would be able to finish this whole thing off by properly nning it.

    Of course, even if Sam didn''t intervene in their process, he would be able to win. But his goal is not just to win, but to win with the highest score he could get.

    The disparity between first ce and second ce should be so huge that it should beughable to even keep him in this stupidpetition.

    As for why he is doing it, it is not because he has anything against the other yers. Rather than what he went through when Zeus and Hel are trying to make his life miserable when he got the chance, he should cash in as many points as he could and get ahead in thepetition.

    And if the side effect is suppressing the other yers a bit, all he can do is say sorry and hope that they could understand his situation.

    And he is sure they would. After all, Sam has been pretty considerate with them and if ites to the point where he has to bother them a bit to achieve his goal to piss and fight the gods off, then so be it.

    He smiled calmly as a n formted in his mind.

    Meanwhile, somewhere else in a faraway world.

    Sam''s students are currently in a city.

    It is also nighttime there and they just entered the city''s most happening restaurant. A restaurant that is quite known for its festivities and entertainment.

    And since this city also happened to be the headquarters of the organization that rules that, it is kind of like a capital bustling with people.

    Within that restaurant, their group hasn''t even caught that much attention even with their diverse andrge group. In fact, thoserge groups are pretty muchmon there.

    They sat at a table catered for their group and they could see simr tables filled with a lot of people like this.

    Habi looked around as he took small sips of his wine.

    "This wine is not good."

    He muttered slowly as his eyesnded on one of the nearby tables.

    "Of course, no other wine will taste good if youpare it to Sia''s wine. And if youpare it to our teacher''s wine, water will have a better chance this wine."

    One of the other students spoke.

    But Habi didn''t reply and looked at the table with squinted eyes.

    Arvi looked at him and said.

    "What are you looking at?"

    "That table is full of the rich young masters from the organization. Every one of them is either the next in line for some key position or the offspring of some high-level assholes. In fact, the one at the end of the table is the son of the leader of this organization.

    If we attack them, we could kill them and be done with them." It is the perfect way to start a conflict. Killing these people will destroy the emotional stability of the elders. We can kill them easily."

    Everyone looked at Habi with concern.

    "Habi, calm down. You have been getting too violenttely." Vron said from the side.

    "I am not getting violent. I am in war mode. All of these are our enemies, why are you being like this? Don''t tell me, big bad Vron has gone soft."

    Habi said as he gulped down the wine.

    Vron just chuckled and didn''t react to it.

    "Just be careful. We always have been following what our teacher taught us. We need to do the groundwork and prepare before we proceed forward facing our enemies.

    You being like this kind of goes against it."

    "Well, it doesn''t matter. The teacher also said that we should act like some rich brats for a while and most rich brats we met all picked a fight with no or negligible reasons.

    So, I want to be like that for a while."

    Habi answered and everyone was stumped for words. But at this moment, before they could even reply they noticed something. The people from the young master table are actually looking towards them.

    To be precise, they are looking at the girls at the table and none of Sam''s students liked it.

 Chapter 1753: Choke

    Chapter 1753: ChokeThe young master at the head of the table in particr looked at Arvi.

    Arvi also looked at him with a frown as she used her shawl to cover her exposed arms. She has been subjected to most abuse in the group and she is very sensitive to those kinds of looks. She doesn''t like people staring at her like that.

    The young master stood up and walked to their table.

    He snapped his fingers and a waitress came running towards him.

    "Bring me the Red Charm." The Waitress nodded and hurriedly ran away.

    "Do you guys know what Red Charm is?"

    The young master asked the students.

    They all looked at the Crystal bottle that waitress brought in a few seconds and the young master continued not minding their silence.

    "It''s the most expensive you might have ever seen. It will cost a fortune. There are a merchant groups on this that would have to sell all of their assets just to get a wat of this wine.

    I am gifting you a bottle since you apanied this fine youngdy here."

    He said as he looked at Arvi. Everyone looked at him with a frown as they looked at him.

    Habi looked at the crystal bottle, took the bottle into his hands and took a small whiff of it.

    The young master looked at him smugly, awaiting his amazing response.

    But instead, he saw Habi''s look of disgust.

    "Damn, this smells like beast piss. This is basically red colored beast''s piss. Who would sell all of their assets just for this sewage?"

    He said as he mmed the crystal bottle on the ground. The whole restaurant has gone silent. Everyone looked at him in shock. The waiters and the other staff of the restaurant in particr looked at the broken bottle in horror.

    Habi on the other hand just took out a wine from Dusk from his storage and started pouring it to his friends.

    "I am pretty sure you guys are sick of this piss you are drinking until now. Let''s change. I can''t take it anymore."

    He popped open the cork of the gourd as he poured the wine. The smell whiffed through the whole restaurant as everyone took a deep breath to savor it.

    This is the most fragrant wine in whole of Dusk organization. One of Sia''s creations and it is made from a fruit that was specially bred under a very strict set of restrictions.

    The manure it got, the watering, and other additives added when it was germinating. The whole regiment is a nightmare for the farmers working on it. But the fruit itself is worth it and the wine made from it is on a next level.

    Merchants from realms fight to get batches of it and of course as students of Sam himself, they have special privileges.

    "Good thing you brought this, that red charm or whatever that is, just its smell has hurt my taste buds. I want to cleanse it with this."

    Arvi said casually as she extended her cup.

    The young master felt humiliated and he red at the manager. The manager ran forward and started yelling at the Students.

    "You? Do you guys know what you are doing? How dare to break a precious bottle of red charm? Do you think you can afford it? Don''t think you will be off the hook easily, even if you managed to sell your lives and paid for the wine bottle, you have to pay for the misdemeanor and arrogance you showed towards our restaurant."

    "Really? Who the fuck is going to make us do that? Don''t tell me, it would be you and the guards that are hiding behind that door leading to the kitchen. And it is certainly not the youngdy disguised as a waitress. The skirt is doing nothing to hide your dagger.

    Or is that the manager who is obviously unable to control his blood lust with enough finesse to disguise himself as a normal restaurant employee? Who the fuck is going to make us pay?

    It is certainly not any of them I pointed out."

    Habi kept on pushing it as he sipped his wine.

    Kasi looked at him coldly and said.

    "Habi, stop it. We are not here to fight. Not now."

    He has been silent the whole time and this is the first time he has spoken.

    The young master looked at Kasi. Obviously, Kasi is bigger than the rest of the students because of his gics and his Astral Soul Constitution gave him a very peculiar aura. Particrly his eyes looked like they could see through anything.

    It is almost like they can look through the soul.

    The young master looked at him and a smug smile appeared on his face.

    "Seems like someone at least knows their limits here. Bunch of bumpkins". He then looked at Arvi and was about to say something more, but Kasi shot him a re that made him take a step back.

    It felt like his body was deprived of his soul for a moment.

    "What the fuck are you looking at you bastard?" The young master spoke up instantly while backing off.

    Everyone looked at him coldly. That word is kind of a sensitive thing in Dusk. Most people in Sam''s city avoid it like gue. Because the tales of Sam that were spread across the for years always had one thing inmon.

    Never call Sam a bastard or there will be hell to pay.

    The students inherited a simr sentiment.

    The young master looked at them and when his gaze met with Arvi''s ice-cold eyes, he frowned and felt butt hurt.

    "What the fuck are you looking at bitch? Do you even know who I am? I am the next-in-line sessor of this organization, I could ruin your lives in a snap."

    Habi almost held the Executioner and was ready to slit his throat, but Kasi and Arvi stopped him

    "Let''s get out of here."

    Kasi said as he threw a spatial ring to the manager.

    "That should suffice for the bill. The wine and more."

    They turned around and walked towards the entrance.

    The young masters'' table mates already came to his side to watch the spectacle. Some of them are already whispering. After all, the young master came to this table to aplish something and he bragged about it before he even tried it out.

    So, he followed the group outside along with the rest of the young masters and yelled at them.

    "Hey, wait right there. Do you think, you can just walk away like that?"

    The students are getting annoyed every second. They really wanted to p the shit out of him.

    Kasi looked at him as she spoke to his friends.

    "Guys, we are not doing anything now. We will move ording to the n. Let''s leave."

    Before he could even finish his words, the young master pped and a bunch of Giants appeared. They all wore full body armor and their weapons are well crafted. They are strong and powerful. They looked like great warriors.

    "Get them."

    The young master said the Giants were about to make a move and while they are moving forward, the young master gestured to the leader pointing at Arvi.

    The leader of the Giants understood what is happening and gestured for hispanions to wait so that he could move forward and grab Arvi.

    As he was about to grab her by her arm, Kasi came forward and swooped in.

    His stature is naturally huge, but he is definitely not as big as a giant. But his strength is a match. In fact more than a match in many ways.

    He pushed the arm back and said.

    "Get lost before I choose otherwise. This is thest chance."

    "You humor me, kid."

    The captain of the giants didn''t back down and just pushed forward. He didn''t back off or make another move, he just stood there trying to move forward. Arvi didn''t even move. She just stood there silently while Kasi also didn''t change his position and pushed the arm back.

    It is a battle of stubbornness and strength.

    Kasi didn''t even frown as he pushed the guy''s arm back slowly. His muscles didn''t even look strained. He kept on pushing back slowly.

    The giant looked flustered and used his second hand to push back. Kasi took a deep breath and said.

    "Guys, don''t make a move. I will handle this."

    As he said, he just pushed the giant''s hands back. But this time, he had a death grip on those hands as his spiritual energy entered into the arms.

    He forcefully, made the arms move as he wanted. Now the giant got scared and tried to use his arms normally. But he couldn''t do anything. All he could do is watch fearfully as Kasi made his arms go to the Giant''s throat and make his fingers move to squeeze in his own neck.

    The rest of the Giants were stunned for a moment before they tried to take down Kasi. They attacked from the rear to make him let go. But he is unmoving.

    He just stood there like an unmoving mountain. At that moment as the hammers and axes are being mmed at him, Kasi stood taller than any giant present there.

 Chapter 1754: Spree

    Chapter 1754: SpreeKasi just looked into the Giant''s eyes coldly.

    He could see his soul literally squeezing out of his body as the giant choked himself with his own hands.

    As for the attacks that are falling on him from all sides, they are not even leaving a scratch. For that to happen, they have to go past the very thin invisible energy armor that Kasi created around his body.

    As everyone watched, the Giant who struggled to control his own hands died just like that. His body fell limp and Kasi let it fall, while he captured the soul leaving his body andpressed into a very small orb before throwing it into a ring on his other finger.

    He then looked at the remaining Giants that are attacking him. They all came back to their senses and when they saw his eyes, they felt like they are against a creature that they shouldn''t even think of opposing.

    Also they finally their attention fell on the rest of the students.

    They are all standing there bored. Vron is trying to control Habi who is holding the handle of the Executioner sword ready to unsheathe it. He is ready to go crazy.

    Young master who ordered the attack is also shocked. He looked at the group and gestured the giants to attack them. He also turned to the rest of the young masters who are also equally scared.

    They all did only one thing. Take out theirmunication devices and call for their guards from the organization.

    Kasi saw all of this and sighed.

    He looked at Habi and the rest and said.

    "Okay, go on. There is no point in stopping now."

    Vron stopped holding Habi back.

    Arvi who is closest to the giants and also the first one to be targeted extended her hands as the Giants once again made their move.

    But they are stuck with an light energy barrier. Particrly one of them waspletely enveloped by this energy barrier. She extended her arm just like that and a very thickser beam was shot out of her hand.

    Within two seconds, the upper half of the giant disappeared what''s left of him is his waist and the legs with the cut so clean and perfect that the guts are also sliced cleans and the edges are seared sealing all the blood flow.

    She didn''t kill the rest though. She maintained the barrier for her friends to make a move providing them the opening time.

    Habi is the first one jump into the middle of the Giants. He danced with his sword once again. Giants fell as the poison rotted their whole bodies within seconds. The rest of the students didn''t do any worse.

    Giants are killed within a minute and a half.

    Habi is absolutely disappointed. He turned to the young masters ready to jump over and start again, but to his delight, the people these young masters called already arrived.

    He grinned as he shook the de to throw off the residual blood. His instinct from using his previous des. Butpletely useless here as Executioner has absorbed all of it within seconds.

    He jumped straight toward the groups that areing.

    The students were a bitte. Kasi didn''t even bother to move. Instead, he collected the souls of the Giants and other dead bodies that are falling with every passing second.

    After a few moments, even the other students stopped. Habi just kept on moving forward with the kills. He is on an absolute rampage.

    The young masters finally realized that they are against some beasts and when they tried to escape, they realized that there are actually some real beasts.

    Students'' beasts popped out of nowhere and blocked the young masters'' retreatpletely.

    As they saw Habi killing these people crazily. The rest of the students felt a bit concerned.

    "What the hell happened to him? He seems¡­ so angry."

    Arvi said as she looked at him. There is not a single emotion on his face, but to her, all of his actions, every swing of his sword that is connected with that graceful chain of movements. Out of all of it, all she could see was anger.

    The anger that is fueling his blood thirst.

    In a way, today''s conflict could have been easily resolved.

    This is not the first like something like this happened. It has happened many times and they always found a way to get out of it. Usually, Kasi took the lead in these situations to give them a show of power while making the rest of the students stay back to have a clean way out.

    It is not easy for them to endure. Particrly, when they could swarm most of their enemies. If they get a few more people from Dusk, they could sweep the whole ce with no contest.

    But they always valued what Sam taught them and kept everything in a controlled and calm manner. Habi for some reason has be like this for some reason.

    His anger and blood thirst is increasing day by day.

    Kasi knew very well that when the Giants got involved and the young masters called for backup, things wouldn''t remain the same.

    So, he just let them loose. But after a few minutes, only Habi is the one killing them. Within twenty minutes, Habi is standing with the young masters on their knees. The back up dead bodies are all on the streets dyeing red.

    By now the elders are already here. The grand elders and all the core fighters of the organization also joined in. Even the leader of the organization is present. Habi looked at them coldly as he wiped off the blood on his face.

    The leader of the organization looked at Habi standing there just a few inches away from his son and yelled.

    "How dare you act so insolently in our territory? Do you think you can get away with this? If you value your life, you better leave my son right now. Or I will kill you in the most painful way possible."

    Listening to those words, Habi took a step back. The leader felt that his words worked and wanted to move forward to save his son, but even before he could take his first step, Habi spun in the air 360 degrees. His right leg brushed past the throat of the young master, sliced his neck off, and separated his head.

    As the head slipped off of the neck, Habi''s left leg kicked it off straight into the young master''s father''s hands.

    All in one fluid motion.

    The leader caught the head involuntarily and before he coulde out of that shock, Habi ran towards the Elders that are behind the leader and continued the killing spree.

 Chapter 1755: Approach

    Chapter 1755: ApproachWhile Sam''s students are going crazy with their exploits.

    Back at the city where the task is going on.

    The yers breezed through the first night mode. Sam got enough data from this easy round.

    By the next morning, the yers also got a hang of the city''syout and it seems like there were some prior agreements in ce as some of them joined together.

    Arkiv didn''te for Sam this time. But Sam didn''t mind. In fact, he is d that Arkiv is not getting involved so that as Sam''s friend he won''t get into too much mess. Even though Arkiv had a totally different reason.

    He doesn''t want to hold back Sam. He knew that Sam is nning big things against these gods and he doesn''t want to be the one to cause Sam to falter in any way.

    So, Arkiv made a deal with Akhil for some slight coboration.

    Noah and Kumar as usual got together to work. Dayus and Donner are not coborating of course, eve if the former wanted it, thetter is against it. Donner still has that slight stigma. He felt that the other yers wouldn''t wee his presence anywhere near them.

    So, he is still alone. Sam of course is also alone.

    The next morning. He hid in a house as soon as the city transformed into day mode. He ambushed the three targets within the house and cleaned them off easily.

    Now, he sat there and started making new ns. He has two more things that he wanted to test out and he is thinking of the best way to do it. After some thought, he felt that the most obvious way is the simplest way.

    He kept track of the targets trying to find him with his eye technique and when he spotted a small fry at a corner near the house he was staying, he came out of the room with his wings on his back.

    He caught hold of the target and flew away in the direction of Dayus'' region within the city.

    He dropped the guy in that region. He took out his bow and arrow and shot the target as soon as hended with his feet on the ground.

    The arrow pierced through the shoulder before exploding with mes.

    *BOOM*

    The target died with half of his bodypletely destroyed.

    Sam just went back to his own area and closed off his wings. This time he sneaked around the region and targeted the small fry first. And he did so in a discreet manner. He used his sneaking skills without any form of elemental energy and killed them off by snapping their necks.

    Barehanded, no weapons, and no elemental energy skills. He wanted to see what kind of undead will spawn for this.

    He also used this chance to reduce the number of targets in his region by a veryrge margin. The small fries are obviously the highest in number, so he figured he would kill all of that very day.

    And he almost seeded. When dusk is nearing only five of them were left and two of them are very close to them. Sam caught one of the and threw him off into the air while holding his neck.

    The neck snapped and the body flew through the air in a parab before itnded in the region of another yer.

    He marked the ce where that guynded and finally, he took a break in the house that he hid in the morning.

    As the time passed and the sunset, three undead spawned within the house and they had daggers in their arms. It is exactly how Sam killed the people in that house. With a dagger.

    They came at him trying closebat, which is easy for Sam. He killed them off and then took out his handguns. One thing Sam noticed and also very obvious about the rules is that they can fight the undead creatures however they want.

    They don''t have to be wary of anything. Only when they are fighting in the day mode, do the weapons and techniques affect them in the night mode. But it doesn''t work in the opposite.

    So, Sam figured out a better method. He can use his handguns and his bullets. Most of the damage caused by the handgun bullets is from the bullets themselves. The only energy he needs to use these bullets is the energy to shoot which is minimal, to say the least.

    He came out of destroyed the small fry undead creatures one by one and then took a high vantage point to take a look at the situation in other regions. His eyes are focused on the spot where he dropped that one target in Dayus'' region.

    At that spot, there is no undead that flew into the sky with a bow and arrow in its hands and it is targeting Dayus from the sky.

    Each arrow is exploding as soon as it hit something.

    Sam nodded and smiled in understanding before he moved his attention to somewhere else. It is the ce where he threw the dead body after essentially killing it in his own region. He wanted to see if doing this works.

    But from what he saw, it didn''t. Because he went to the spot where he actually killed that target and when he saw an undead there, he went in and got caught by himself.

    The undead creature tried to throw Sam away by his neck to snap it in mid-air. Which is exactly how he killed it.

    It didn''t work of course. He destroyed the undead and made another mental note.

    Now he has everything he needs about how to use this city and the rules to the maximum. The second night mode went on as Sam once again destroyed all of the small fry undead creatures. He used his guns to their full advantage.

    The second night mode has passed.

    The day mode started and this time, Sam actually came across other yers. They came looking for Sam in secret as they avoided fights with the rest of the people.

    Sam looked at them and smiled.

    "Don''t tell me, you guys came to talk about a partnership."

    "Nope, we just wanted to ask if you, if it is okay if we tried to screw you over a little bit."

    Sam was confused by that statement.

    Noah and Kumar sighed as she spoke.

    "Sam, we know that you are being pressured and we know that we shouldn''t even be thinking this. But after some thought, I think you will agree with our point of view.

    Whether we like it or not, we are dropped in this game. We have to y no matter what. I don''t know what the gods have nned, and we don''t know what exactly they want, but I am sure you would agree, for us to find out, we need to be in a better position in the game they are making us y.

    I know things are different with you. They are trying to fuck with you too much. They made it personal over and over again and you need to make a statement. For that, use all your means and do whatever you want.

    But we just want you to understand if we try our best to keep our scores high."

    "Keeping up your scores, by resisting my moves as well as making some moves against my ns to get these massively high scores."

    Sam said with a smile.

    "Yes. We don''t want you to take this personally. But when we look at it, these points we get obviously mean something. They factor in this in the futu¡­"

    "It''s fine." Sam cut her off and spoke with a smile.

    Noah and Kumar are a bit surprised.

    Sam continued.

    "I know that things are difficult, to begin with, and my feud with the gods only makes all of this more intense. There is no way, all of you could just sit back and suffer. I want you guys to fight to the full extent.

    If you want to fight for more points and if you can do that by resisting and stealing a few my points, go ahead and do it. No hard feelings.

    I canpletely understand."

    "Thank you so much. And we are going to start it from within the hour. If you don''t mind."

    "By all means."

    The two of them left the ce.

    Sam shook his head with a smile. He knew this day woulde sooner orter. But he will keep on doing what he is doing. He will always st through thepetition to get more points than any other yer and he wouldn''t me them for trying to resist it if they wish to do so.

    But he thought it would take a bit more time for them to do so.

    Still, he is very d they came to him. Because he had some more tricks up his sleeve when he realized this situation will pop up sooner orter.

 Chapter 1756: Map

    Chapter 1756: MapOn the third morning.

    Sam took out his bow once again. But this time, the arrows he used are a bit different. They are arrows with very intricate formationsid on them.

    Sam didn''t even use his own spiritual energy that much to power the arrows. He just used his special bow that uses the environmental spiritual energy to boost the arrows as well as trigger the formations on it.

    And when the arrow reached a certain distance the formation inscribed on it is trigged. As soon as that happened, arge elemental energy started from the arrow''s tip and fell on to the surroundings.

    The buildings and infrastructure is destroyed. No matter what is in its way, the trees, rocks, streets, houses, and buildings, all took the damage.

    Sam is not using a precise method to attack these people, instead, he started bombing all of them with this weird wide-ranged attack.

    The yers didn''t understand what he is doing at the start. Particrly when they noticed the damage the arrows are actually doing. It is not much.

    It took at least three attacks for the arrows to critically damage one of the targets and at least one more for them to die. That is so unlike Sam who likes to finish off things quickly once he started it.

    But some of them understood.

    Particrly Noah and Kumar.

    The rest of the yers just used the transition factors between the day mode and night mode to make it easier for themselves.

    But Sam is doing it to make it difficult for others. Noah and Kumar instantly understood what he is doing.

    So, they made a n of their own.

    Sam is killing people in other regions than his own. Meanwhile, Noah and Kumar sneaked out of their own regions and started attacking Sam''s region. Noah used her wood elemental energy to catch hold of the targets while Kumar killed them off with his spear.

    And their primary chosen targets are the people that are trying to get near Sam. In a way, they are raking in points while stopping the targets disturbing Sam from gaining his.

    Of course, that is what it looks like at the first sight at least.

    As Sam destroyed almost half of the city slowly and killed arge bunch of targets, time passed and it is night mode once again and this time, he didn''t really care if things are not going well or not. Until evening he just focused on covering as much area as he can.

    For the first time, a lot of targets are trying to hide for their lives instead of attacking the yers actively. This gave yers an interval to attack some of the targets with much less pressure than they usually had.

    Arkiv and Akhil who are not exactly the strategic kind of the bunch actually felt that Sam''s actions might have helped them a bit in the morning.

    Of course, they also killed the targets with the leastplicated and most obvious techniques, so they figured in the night mode, the undead that appeared around them will be easier to deal with.

    Only as soon as the night mode came, they realized how wrong they are.

    Sam moved away from his vantage point as soon as the night mode started and he startedying down a formation.

    The undead creatures started spawning within no time. And one-third of the undead creatures spawned that night actually appeared with a bow and arge quiver of arrows.

    They aimed the arrows toward the yers within their areas and started shooting. Unlike how Sam just bombarded the arrows randomly, the undead creatures are a bit more focused on targeting the yers.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The city started shaking with the explosions.

    The yers looked around and felt flustered as they had to hide a bit to reduce the chances of getting hit by these wide-range attacks.

    "For fuck''s sake. Is this why he agreed so easily? Why would he unleash something like this on us?" Kumar said as he defended against the arrows that are falling nearby.

    He is a bit angry. But it is not exactly because of the strength behind these attacks. If he had to face these attacks in a regr scenario, he would wipe the floor with these undead creatures easily. But the problem now is that he has to conserve his energy.

    The ranged attacks don''t work on these creatures as the arrows provide a pretty decent cover even if they are not particrly aimed to provide that defense.

    So, the yers have to block these arrows before reaching them and finishing the undead off. Which consumes a lot of their energy.

    That is why Kumar is a bit pissed. He never expected that Sam would have this kind of trick up his sleeve. He definitely believed Sam could do something like this, but he didn''t expect he would.

    "Wouldn''t Sam also lose a lot of energy like this? I mean, he has more energy reserves than us, but I highly doubt it will be enough to make him expend this much." Kumar asked Noah.

    "Sometimes, I think you are just in stupid. Do you honestly believe that Sam would make this kind of move if he doesn''t have a way to defend against these attacks more efficiently?"

    Noah cursed as she used some vines to drop some seeds in different directions.

    Meanwhile, back in Sam''s area.

    He is currently in the middle of a formation. When an arrow ising at him with an open elemental energy, the formation is simply dissolving the next and the arrow became nothing but a projectile that is easy to dodge.

    He took out his sniper rifle and started taking off the undead archers that are shooting those arrows. He is saving his energy and finishing off the undead while the rest of the yers are expending tons of their reserves.

    As he is enjoying the smooth situation he created himself while raking in the points, Sam suddenly sensed something. He felt something invading the formation lines, but it is not an arrow or any other ranged attack.

    They are vines.

    As he realized this and started bing cautious, he noticed that a bunch of undead creatures surrounded his formation sneakily. They all held spears and vines are spreading from their feet as they tried to restrain Sam.

    Sam looked at the spear technique and the vine technique. He instantly knew who it was that made it possible. He is really impressed.

    The vines entangled his legs and the spears were shot at him.

    Sam changed his sniper to his handgun and shot at the spears flying at him.

    Meanwhile, he used his fire elemental to burn off the vines that areing at him.

    He was sneaking carefully until then, but now the fire element and the explosions that are happening within his vicinity attracted all the undead creatures in the surroundings. The archers that are mostly focused on other yers are suddenly focusing on Sam himself.

    "Great job, guys."

    Sam muttered as he dealt with the creaturesing at him and the night mode slowly passed.

    As the transition happened slowly, Sam took the chance to recalcte his energy levels. Right now, he is at three-fifths of his reserves. It should have been more than that, butst night''s attacks from Noah and Kumar actually threw him off to backfoot a bit.

    And then he started calcting the number of targets left.

    The previous day he killed most of the small fries in all regions. There are only a few dozen people left but they are all strong. Even for yers, it would take some time and a few more moves than just a simple straightforward attack to deal with them.

    After a thorough calction and some scouting with his eye technique, Sam estimated that there are around 84 people left.

    He didn''t know exactly the energy levels of other yers, but he believed it is not that much.

    So, he started thinking of how to use these 84 targets to maximum efficiency. If divided equally, each yer gets 12 targets. Of course, it is not going to be a fair distribution, every yer tries to get more targets than the twelves.

    After thinking for a moment, Sam smirked and started creating a bunch of maps within his divine dimension. Six maps of the city and the locations of all the targets.

    He noticed that these targets are not exactly rash and stupid enough to just move around and get killed. So, he believed they would cover a very concentrated location to try and take down yers when theye to them.

    So, the map is actually very useful.

    After mapping them down, Sam used some of his puppets to send these maps to these yers.

    The locations of all eighty-four targets are avable to everyone. He also sent a message.

    "From what I can see on the surface, these are thest eighty-four. I don''t know the exact points you guys umted, but I am guessing mine is way beyond any one of you. So, here is thest chance for you guys to make a move.

    If it helps, I will not make a move for the next twenty minutes."

 Chapter 1757: Intervention

    Chapter 1757: InterventionAfter Sam sent that message, all the yers halted their actions for a moment.

    They all became a bit wary and didn''t dare to make their moves immediately. Thest eighty-four are obviously strong candidates. They are already a bit cautious about fighting with them. They also knew that Sam is trying to make their life a bit difficult based on what happened the previous day.

    What scared them, even more, is that Sam knew all of their locations.

    This also implied that Sam has a way to track their movements. So, they are not sure if they should go ahead and take his tip to take these targets while knowing that he could catch them

    They don''t know what Sam is going to do with this knowledge of their locations and movements.

    They got a bit scared and that is exactly what Sam wanted.

    He wanted to see who will make the first move and if no one did and they just waited, the better it is for him.

    From his calctions, just like how there are not many targets left in the day, there are not many left in the night mode as well. The only thing he needs to figure out yet is if the dead bodies from the day mode are being added as undead in the night mode.

    And this urate measurement of killings will give him the data he needs.

    Ten minutes passed as Sam kept observing the movements of the yers and the targets.

    And the first yer to make a move is Dayus.

    Sam smirked as he got the information from his puppets. He instantly made his puppets move to get a better view of what is happening.

    Dayus went to the nearest target. He ran at his top speed without the fusion that he could possibly gain. The purple lightning crackled as he skid on the road. He stood firmly and threw the spear with all the strength he could muster.

    A lot of energy has been expended.

    The spear went through the target with a crackling and whistling sound.

    The target fell dead.

    Dayus smiled in delight as he looked at the dead target. Now his points increased by a significant amount at that.

    But he didn''t make his move immediately. He wanted to make sure that he didn''t fall into any of Sam''s traps. So, he tried to look for the puppets around him. When he did find out, he wanted to see what exactly that puppet do.

    But minutes slowly passed but there is no movement from the puppets. He went as far as staying put for the next five minutes.

    Meanwhile, the remaining yers are still in a skeptical situation. They didn''t want to make a move even after they realized that one of them had attacked.

    From the sound and the shes that they saw, it was not even that hard to figure out who did it.

    While they are contemting, Dayus made a move once again. But to his discontent, he had to find the new locations of the targets. They moved because of this attack.

    He started running around in the city sneakily with his spear. When he reached close enough, he halted in his tracks as his feet skid on the road. Purple lightning surrounded his body as he took his spear and aimed at the target.

    One of the targets is alone and very much istedpared to the rest of the targets.

    As he threw the spear with full force, it made a crackling sound through the air and reached the target with an extreme speed.

    Dayus expended a lot of energy on this attack.

    Since Sam knew their locations and can track their movements, he afraid that Sam might steal their kills and even make use of very random and hard to defend attacks, which will make the night mode an unbearable time.

    So, he wanted to be quick, and even if he spent much more energy than he should on this.

    When he saw the spear inching towards the target at that speed, he is sure that he would be able to get this target.

    He couldn''t help but smile. With his petty brain, he took this as a tiny victory. A very tiny victory over Sam.

    But before he could even finish that grin, a light beam came out of nowhere.

    The light beam hit the spear. The spear obviously wasn''t destroyedpletely, but there is a slight deformation made on the tip and this made the trajectory of the spear alter every so slightly.

    The spear went through the shoulder of the target, taking the whole shoulder away and while putting the rest of the body in a paralytic situation. The target felt his heart stop for a moment and then was about to fall to his knees.

    But even before he could hit the ground and in fact even before the spear could pass through the body, the puppet shot another light beam. This light beam went straight to the head.

    The target fell dead.

    Dayus was stunned. He didn''t expect this intervention. He looked at the dead body and then at the puppet. He thought he made it in time. But his twenty minutes are over.

    He didn''t believe that a spear hit that he believed would even make Sam flinch and think twice before intervening directly could be redirected and yed with, just like that. By a mere puppet no less.

    He couldn''t even find out if the target was killed by the puppet itself or if his spear did manage to take that life.

    The attacks seemed to have been done in a very precise manner.

    The timing is out of this world.

    He gritted his teeth and kicked the stone beside him. It is kicked into the wall directly. The house nearby got destroyed.

    Some of the yers managed to hear the explosive sound that came from the spear throw.

    When they understood this, they didn''t want to back out too much and made their move.

    Donner is first and then it is followed by Akhil and Arkiv. Even Noah and Kumar didn''t take too much time.

    Meanwhile, Sam smiled at their decisions.

    He knew they would do that.

    Everyone is thinking that Sam is a bit unpredictable at the moment. Even Noah and Kumar who seemed to have a better understanding of Sam and his tactics thought so. Particrly, when they met him and told him that they will try to steal points from him in the game.

    They just thought Sam wouldn''t afford the courtesy of giving them that leeway. They assumed it would be a trap.

    But too bad, they judged Sam by their own standards.

    He indeed meant what he said. But too bad for them, they didn''t take the step to attack. Even though he half expected that Dayus would take the first move, he still didn''t expect that level of caution from that guy. It is not exactly Dayus'' strongest forte.

    All of it doesn''t matter now though. The time he gave is already up and now it is his freaking time.

 Chapter 1758: Stealing

    Chapter 1758: StealingAs Sam noticed every yer moving, he made the puppets follow them.

    He steered puppets seamlessly. Even though he is controlling more than a few dozen of his own puppets, he is still keeping up with every yer''s movement.

    Noah and Kumar as usual made their move together. They targeted a group of three targets. Noah''s vines attacked the three from different sides. A batch of vines caught them by their feet and sped forward to hold their arms down.

    Another batch of vines climbed up around them in the air and created a cage. The three of them were caught off guard and couldn''t get out of it instantly.

    As they struggled to get out, one of the vines gave out a spike filled with poison. It stabbed one of them in the spine killing them. The remaining two managed to find a weak spot and tore open the cage.

    Only to see two spears zooming toward their faces.

    They could feel the pressure from the attacks. They knew they are going to die right there.

    When the spear tips are almost at their faces, when they started feeling the sharp energy emitting from the energy around those spears, they suddenly lost the strength in their legs.

    They didn''t even fall on his knees or fall forward, they fell backward. The spears barely missed them and went through the remaining part of the vine cage.

    Noah and Kumar were stunned. They didn''t expect this sudden change.

    The targets might not have known what exactly happened there, but they know it. When the spears were about to kill them, the puppets came from either side and shot the light beams at the back of the targets'' legs.

    The shorts are so precise that they fell backward. Just like how Sam wanted.

    As the targets hit the ground, the puppets, already started floating over their face and shot light beams into their eyes.

    Not just one, within half a second, over six beams were shot.

    The brains were drilled with holes through those eyes.

    They are dead.

    Noah and Kumar cursed in frustration. They knew these three targets are the easiest of the bunch, so they wanted to farm them before they move on to the tougher targets.

    But Sam killed that idea by stealing their kill.

    They are not the only victims though.

    Donner sneaked up on one of the targets. He jumped onto the target from the roof of the house. But before he could even reach the target, Sam''s puppet arrived and shot a light beam at the arm of the target.

    The target took the hit and moved to the side.

    The hammer didn''t strike the young man on the head. But it hit him on the shoulder. The bones broke from the shoulder, spine, and even the legs. The impact from that attack is enough to almost kill that person.

    The key phrase is almost.

    As the target fell, Sam''s puppet once again shot and killed the target.

    Akhil and Arkiv are also working together. But unlike Noah and Kumar, these two have a very normal and straightforward strategy.

    Akhil is more hands-on with his staff as he went and tackled the target directly. Meanwhile, Arkiv is attacking them from long range with his archery.

    Since the start of their cooperation, they have been fighting like this. Arkiv would take one kill and Akhil will take the next one.

    Akhil just used his unique fighting style to distract the target while Arkiv used his most simple archery techniques to weaken the target slowly.

    They didn''t expend much energy.

    They mostly used their out-of-the-world physical strength with minimal spiritual energy just enough to make some damage and slowly chipped the targets'' strength away.

    They opted for the same strategy now, but too bad, the remaining targets are much stronger. But still, they held the upper hand. The only drawback is that they are spending too much time.

    Sam didn''t even have to use the puppets as he did with others. Just when Akhil and Arkiv used so much of their strength to wear the target down. Sam''s puppet just came and shot the target to death before they moved away.

    Sam didn''t move that much. He just shifted positions while avoiding the targets within his area. Meanwhile, he just enjoyed stealing the kills from other yers. But the ease with which he caught the first few targets didn''tst long.

    The targets are tough ones. Thest remaining few. So, they are also making their move.

    Sam observed them carefully and there are a few that caught his eye. One of them is a young man who had an extremely disfigured face.

    The face looked like it was burned on the ming grill. Like some kind of juicy meat.

    His wounds seem very recent.

    As Sam observed him through the puppet, he saw a projectileing from that man''s hands and hitting the puppet. It is destroyed. After the first one, Sam noticed that many more puppets are going down within that area.

    Of course, after he saw this man''s actions, he obviously tried to save the puppets to the best of his ability.

    He started observing that guy from a rtively long range.

    He must say that he was really impressed. This guy is fast and agile. And he has a pretty good sense of his surroundings. He moved around the streets like he was a fish in water. Every move of his is not only showing his familiarity with this ce but how rxed he is in this environment.

    There is not a hint of nervousness in his movements. Even though he is a target that''s being hunted by seven yers. If the kill count of all seven yers adds up, it could fill up a continent.

    They are all skilled and dangerous and if anything these targets might have learned in thest few days is just that.

    But to think even in such a situation, he would be that carefree and daring, Sam would have tried to recruit him after checking his background a bit if he met this guy in another scenario.

    But right now, it is too bad that he has to be killed.

    He is not the only one that Sam has got his eyes on.

    There are two more candidates and this two are working together.

    They are not at ease at all. They are extremely cautious. They also noticed the puppets, but they are not capable enough to defeat them. But they are skilled enough to avoid them at least.

    Looking at their movements, Sam got curious and attacked them with the puppets, but they managed to anticipate it and dodged the attacks. They are also avoiding the yers carefully while hiding themselves.

    At this point, the first target and these two seemed to have been doing the same thing. They are avoiding the yers and try to be safe from the puppets.

    Sam is really impressed by these three people and if his estimation of the rest of the targets is good, then these three mightst longer than the rest of them. And he would be able to use them to create a great ending for this game.

    For the next few days, he started stealing the targets one by one. The yers couldn''t help but feel frustrated. After the first three steals from each of the yers, they didn''t dare make a move once again.

    They didn''t know how to proceed forward.

    They tried destroying his puppets. But soon they realized it is nothing more than a waste of their energy.

    Sam just sat there and waited for the time to pass. He didn''t attack the targets for a while.

    Only after he noticed that the yers'' activity haspletely stopped, his puppets swarmed toward the targets.

    The puppets swarmed and slowly narrowed the targets as they shot them with light beams. From that moment onwards, each target is attacked with at least over a dozen light beams at the same time when they are dead.

    Sam made sure of that.

    After he took down a few of the targets, something else happened.

    The yers noticed this and felt a bit anxious, they thought Sam would just sweep everything away.

    So, almost as if they were taught to think the same, they all got the same idea.

    All six of them went in different ways after the puppets. They followed the puppets that are slowly taking down the targets and just like how Sam did, they also tried to steal the kill and even seeded.

    Sam smiled when he noticed this.

    The yers at least showed some effort. But too bad, it is alreadyte. By the end of the day, only a dozen people were left.

    Thest twelve managed to defend against Sam''s puppets as well as the yers'' onught. But the only they survived is because Sam didn''t want to kill them.

    They are left for the next day''s day mode.

    But right now, it is time for him to enjoy the night mode. Along with the night mode he also has to enjoy the results of all the preparations he made in the day mode.

 Chapter 1759: Another Day

    Chapter 1759: Another DayThe sunset.

    It is night mode now.

    The yers are all a bit nervous. Because of a couple of kills they got in the day more are achieved with some of their strongest shots. If the undead creaturese with those moves, they will probably be in a bit of trouble.

    Noah and Kumar set up a defensive dome of vines as they waited near one of the deadbodies.

    As the night mode started, the dead body disappeared.

    In that spot, An undead appeared from within the ground. The day-mode target was one of the two targets they managed to kill by themselves without any of Sam''s interference.

    And when that undead creature appeared, both of them are shocked, to say the least. Because the creature appeared along with a bunch of vines extending from its feet, while a spear appeared in this arm.

    This undead target came at the two of them with the vines and the spear at the same time.

    Noah even took her time to count the vines that came at her as Kumar defended them. She noticed that no matter what is happening, the number of vines is not exactly increasing or decreasing. Even if Kumar is destroying one of the vines, it is regenerating. As for the length, it is infinite. It is just increasing no matter how the yers moved.

    The battle could end easily. The only problem is they would need to use a lot of their energy, and expend a lot of it if they want this to be over faster.

    And the problem right now is obvious.

    For some reason, the undead managed to even copy some of their own moves and implement them while fighting. Which is just an added headache.

    But that is not the end of it.

    As they are trying to find a window to deal with the one creature they had at hand, they felt a sense of threat.

    Both Noah and Kumar jumped to the side.

    Two light beams flew right threw the spots they were in before. They looked over and saw two puppets flying over along with an undead closely following them. They were stunned.

    This is the worst that could happen and this is the worst-case scenario they imagined.

    Just like how Osiris exined how the city will copy their weapons, the puppets were also copied. They remembered that Sam killed one of the targets with two puppets and this undead is the result of one of them.

    From the looks of it, the attacks of the puppets are also simr to the real ones Sam had.

    "Fucking hell. Sam better treat me to some damn good wine of his after all of this is over. I won''t let him get away with it."

    Kumar muttered as blocked a light beaming at him.

    They are embroiled with two undead creatures and two puppets.

    Even though they are in a tough situation, things are much worse for some of the yers. Particrly, Dayus.

    While Noah and Kumar are cursing just foring across a creature with two puppets and a creature with their spear and vines, Dayus is looking at something that is on a whole different level.

    In level of him, an undead creature is standing with a spear in its hand.

    It has purple lightning that has a much darker shadepared to his own, revolved all over its body and the spear. As if that wasn''t enough, there are over half a dozen puppets adding support to this creature.

    This is one of Sam''s kill steals.

    When Dayus was fighting with a target, Sam interfered with six puppets and killed the target.

    Now Dayus is facing the undead resultant of that.

    He felt terrified as he looked at the opponents.

    This is the worst thing that could have happened to him at the moment. At least that is what he thought until he saw another undead creaturee and this one came with over eight puppets.

    He is surrounded by puppets and undead creatures.

    Not just him, even the rest of the yers are facing simr situations. That included Sam as well of course. But he is not exactly worried. He is using his own puppets to fight the puppets that came with the undead creatures.

    But before he unleashed any attacks, he made a slight modification to his own puppets.

    The puppets with their default settings, which he used this morning, are actually programmed to recognize humans. Even though he is steering them when he attacked or researched the cityyout and such, when they are in auto mode, they are only used for attacking people.

    So, the puppets that came with the night mode will be focusing solely on Sam and the rest of the yers. His own puppets will not effect.

    And Sam has a way of misleading these night-mode puppets that is the reason he modified his own.

    His modified puppets started projecting images of the yers. This lured the puppets away from the undead creatures and made it easier for Sam to destroy them. Both undead creatures and the puppets within his region are gone.

    None left.

    He then focused on the yers and how they are doing.

    He has no intentions of interfering whatsoever. He just looked at the yers through his puppets and just witnessed as they exhausted their energy bit by bit.

    This night, he doesn''t even have to do anything anymore. He sat back and rxed while the yers suffered bit by bit.

    They knew that they might not have much energy left after the next day mode. Which means, they won''t get past the next night no matter what they do.

    Some of them might even just exhaust themselvespletely in the next-day mode itself. So, almost every one of them had one thought in their minds and that is to make sure that they can reap as many points in this night mode itself.

    There are a decent amount of neutral undead left and this special undead that came with abilities and puppets is consuming their time and energy. So, they decided to make use of this to some extent and put their incredible skillset to full use.

    They carefully navigated the fight so that they can move around and kill as many neutral undead as possible.

    Sam was a bit impressed by this decision. This might be the most conscious and careful decision they made in this round.

    He didn''t even bother to hinder them. He just waited for the day mode toe.

    And since he is enjoying himself by witnessing all these fights, it didn''t even feel like he waited for long.

    As the sun slowly rose, almost all of the city was cleared. The yers might have had some difficulty, but they did kill all the puppets and the undead with abilities and they also almost cleaned out the neutral undead.

    There is only a handful of them left.

    They all felt a bit relieved as the city slowly transitioned. Sincest night, this is the only time they had to take a breather. Of course, they knew that this won''t be long. So, they decided to enjoy it to the best of the maximum extent.

    The only problem is that it didn''tst as long as they wanted it to.

    The sun finally rose in the sky and the transition isplete. The Day mode started.

    The yers became vignt. Not about the targets. But about Sam''s tricky moves. They wanted to see if Sam would steal their kills once again or whatever he might have nned.

    They didn''t find anything for a while. But soon they didn''t have a chance to sit down and ponder about Sam''s thoughts.

    The targets that are remaining actually took the initiative this time and unlike the yers, they actually have aligned interests, so it was easier for them to team up.

    Except for the main three that Sam marked down, the remaining targets all gathered together to team up. And while the yers were thinking about Sam and warily examining the surroundings, the targets surrounded Donner.

    Donner looked at the bunch of targets that blocked all of his escape routes. He gritted his teeth and took out his hammer.

    "Fuck it. I am done."

    He didn''t care about preserving energy anymore and his whole body is filled with blue lightning.

    He lunged forward and aimed at the first target''s head.

    He is not pulling his punches anymore. He decided to give up. Whatever score he gets, he will get. He will just let loose with thest bit of energy he is left with.

    The first attacknded, but not on the head, but on the shoulder. The target narrowly dodged it and avoided the killing blow. But even the attack on the shoulder is devastating enough for him to hit the ground.

    His body is paralyzed with lightning. He couldn''t even move.

    Donner wanted to finish him off with the next blow. But too bad, the other targets are not intent on making it easy for him.

 Chapter 1760: Team Play

    Chapter 1760: Team yDonner managed to take out one target and severely injured another one before his energy was exhausted.

    He has the bare minimum left in his spiritual core. He used that to defend against the remaining targets and decided to quit. He disappeared from the city.

    "yer Donner has chosen to quit."

    Osiris'' voice was heard by every other yer and the remaining targets. Sam didn''t bother too much about it. He knew something like this ising and when the remaining yers heard this, they gritted their teeth and strengthened their resolve.

    They wouldn''t be able to do much, no matter what the result of this day mode, and since one of the yers left, they won''t be the first ones to give up anymore.

    So, now everyone is getting thoughts of going all out with whatever energy they have left.

    Particrly, the ones who expended more energy than anyone else.

    Dayus is at the bottom of the list if the yers are ranked right now in terms of energy levels they have. He has been harassed most by Sam and he had to spend more energy. In fact, many yers thought that he would be the first one to give up.

    But Donner beat him to it.

    Dayus knew that he wouldn''t be able to survive the night mode even if he miraculously went past the Day mode. After some contemting, he suddenly had a thought. No matter what happens, he won''t score well in this round ofpetition.

    Sam stole too many of his targets since the start.

    All of Sam''s experiments that needed killing the targets were done in Dayus'' region. So, he is at the bottom of the score list. There is no point in trying to remedy that situation.

    He also believed that Sam would be the only active yer in the Night mode, so he decided to take a lesson or two from Sam and went all out.

    He spared his energy until he saw the location of the group of targets gathered together.

    He threw a spear with all his energy. He even went as far as to use his Blood art. He is surrounded by blood-colored armor and held a blood spear that is covered with purple lightningpletely.

    One spear strike from him killed a target in an instant, but that only applied to the first target. The remaining targets took the chance to attack him from the sides.

    Dayus'' energy went crazy as the purple lightning attracted the attention of all the yers. After some hesitation, except for Sam, the remaining yers decided to go in that direction.

    They were surprised by how Dayus is going crazy. He killed four targets before his energy is exhausted. He chose to quit.

    Before he disappeared, he looked at the rest of the yers and said.

    "If you want to reduce Sam''s final score, forget about preserving your energy and go all out. The more targets you kill with your ultimate moves, the more powerful the undead will be in the night mode. Sam wouldn''t be able to deal with all of them.

    Even if he has more energy to expend, he did spend a significant amount in thest few days.

    Don''t be idiots and think this through."

    His words made the yers rethink their strategy.

    They are indeed a bit troubled about the fact that they wouldn''t be able to survive past the day mode. And since points for each target and undead vary based on their level of difficulty, they are sure that Sam is going to score a significant chunk in the night mode.

    They didn''t want him to widen the gap that much.

    All of them exchanged looks before they turned to look at the gathered targets. Apart from the three targets that Sam has marked, the rest of them are all here.

    They are all looking at the yers with vignt gazes. After all, it is not easy for them to survive in the past few days. They might be strong, but they know that yers are stronger. The restrictions of the yers were also told to them, so they have a pretty good judgment on what yers are truly capable of.

    They are a bit scared that all of the yers will gang up and attack them.

    Sam looked at the situation through his puppets and smiled. He has some idea of what is about to happen next and he is looking forward to seeing it. Because it is one of his estimated scenarios, everything is still going on ording to his n.

    Everything is still in his control.

    Just like the targets thought, all the yers reached a tacit agreement even without discussing it. They all made their move.

    Targets gritted their teeth and even they went all out. They also knew that they are going to die. So, they are not going to hold back anymore. There is no point to it after all.

    But the yers didn''t use the blood arts. They are just fighting together, which is good enough for them to overpower the targets easily.

    Sam watched as the targets were being killed one by one. But he also noticed something else.

    The three marked targets are looking at the yers while hiding. They didn''t participate in the battle, but from the looks of it, they are ready to jump into the battle at any moment. Sam can even predict exactly what kind of moment it would be.

    But he also decided that he wouldn''t give the three of them that chance.

    So, he sent his puppets toward the battle.

    When the yers saw it, they became vignt, but to their surprise, Sam didn''t interfere in the battle too much. He didn''t even kill a single target there. All he did is use the puppets to help the yers. He only aimed at the limbs or the attacks that wereing at them.

    He didn''t even use any lethal moves. The puppets are barely supported. Nothing more than that.

    This made their life easier and they preserved a lot of energy because of that. And in a way, Sam knew that is what everyone wanted.

    They didn''t exactly take Dayus'' advice to heart. They thought about it, but they tacitly decided to take another route.

    All they want to do is work together to preserve as much energy as they could while finishing off these targets.

    After all, no matter who it is among the yers, in their current situations, they wouldn''t be able to take on all of the targets at once. So, the team ys made sense.

    Now they will defeat these targets and when the night mode arrives, they will once again work together to take down as many undead as possible before they are done. This way, they will reduce a lot of chances of Sam getting a huge advantage in scores over them.

    The n actually makes sense. They will grow collectively, even if they have to share their points, but at least, Sam wouldn''t be able to widen the gap too much.

    But what they don''t know is Sam is not exactly counting on the number of people he killed to increase the points. As he always did, he focused more on quality than quantity.

    That is actually the only reason, why he let the yers have so many kills. After all, if he wanted to, he has a dozen different types of puppets and formations that could have helped him deal with the city by the second day itself.

    But he wouldn''t be able to hide what he was doing from the yers which would have prompted them to go all out, making his points less.

    So, he had created a bit drawn-out strategy, to increase his chances of gaining more points in both quality and quantity. He had already done a lot on the quantity side, now he is focusing on quality more.

    As the targets went down one after the other, the yers are also feeling some physical fatigue. They need to take a breather. There are only three targets left in the group.

    At that moment, the three hidden yers seemed to have sensed the fatigue that yers are facing and also sensed that they rxed a bit, after all, there is no real threat there.

    As if they aremunicating, they made a move at the same time. At that exact moment, Sam also made his move.

    He first alerted the yers with his puppets making the surprise attack useless.

    And then used his spatial element to appear on the battlefield within a second.

    His arrival was duly noticed by everyone there. Before they could even realize what is happening, Sam made his move. His body is surrounded by a golden light. He activated his light elemental fusion. And then he turned toser mode.

    He zoomed toward the first target and went through him. Leaving a hole in that guy''s chest and killing him at the same time.

 Chapter 1761: Chase

    Chapter 1761: ChaseThe yers were stunned.

    They didn''t expect Sam to make such a move. The light elemental fusion is something they are familiar with. Some of them even saw him using theser mode before. They knew how energy-consuming it is.

    They also know how dangerous it is.

    If Sam kills the targets with thatser mode, that means, the undead creatures wille with thisser mode in the night mode.

    Particrly when they noticed how Sam killed the target, they are sure of it.

    He didn''t attack the target normally. He didn''t shoot light beams, instead, he used the characteristics of the fusion to turn himself into theser beam and used his whole body to kill the target.

    They knew what this means.

    Before they coulde out of their stupor, Sam already killed the second target in the same way.

    "Stop staring and try to stop him. If that asshole finishes them off, we got no chance at night mode."

    Noah yelled at Kumar getting back out of his daze.

    "Asshole? That hurts Noah. Is this how you talk about me behind my back?"

    Sam''s voice was heard, but he already finished off the third target, before he even finished that sentence. He even redirected toward the three marked targets.

    The two that acted as a team are his initial targets. They didn''t know how to react when Sam finished off the three targets, but they are mindful enough to immediately turn on their defensive methods topletely block themselves from any external attacks.

    They covered themselves with an earth elemental wall.

    When Sam in hisser mode, hit the wall, he was surprised that he didn''t just put a hole through it. He didn''t care too much though, he tried to continuously focus his energy on just one point to create a way.

    But of course, what he didn''t expect is that the two targets didn''t wait there to figure out a counter against Sam, which is the decision that would have been taken by a majority of people. Instead, they made a hole through the ground and used earth elemental fusion to escape from that spot.

    Sam was caught off guard because as soon as they moved away, the strength of the wall was reduced by a huge margin. He made a hole in no time.

    Everything happened in an instant.

    Sam used his eye technique and spotted the two of them. He was about to change direction and go after them, but instead, he was met with a barrage of vines that are trying to stop him from moving.

    Sam looked at Noah and shook his head.

    "Come on, you are smarter than that."

    Sam said as he zoomed toward the targets. The vines didn''t even hold him for a fraction of a second. As he hit the soil, Kumar''s spear made its way towards him, only to be cut across its length with Sam''sser.

    Sam followed the two targets from the surface, meanwhile the third and final target already escaped from the yers'' vision and spiritual sense once again. He didn''t bother joining the fight. Because he knows, he wouldn''t be able to survive.

    After all, he is themon enemy of everyone there. He would be killed in an instant by all the yers.

    Noah didn''t run after Sam, instead, she looked at the rest and divided the tasks.

    Kumar and Arkiv, follow me. We will go after Sam. Akhil you go after thest target. Finish him off as fast as possible.

    Most of the targets are killed by us and we still have some energy left. Teaming up saved us a lot of trouble. So, let''s try to take advantage of this.

    If Sam gets to the night mode with a decent amount of energy, he will outss us once again. So, we have two options. One, make sure that Sam doesn''t increase the difficulty of the night mode anymore. Threeser mode targets are more than enough.

    Two, we need to exhaust all of Sam''s energy even to the extent of using all of our energy, so that none of us goes to Night mode in a decent shape.

    Got it?"

    All of them just nodded and made their moves.

    Akhil went after the final target that escaped.

    Noah, Kumar, and Akhil started making their move.

    Sam is now in his partial light fusion mode. He is still faster than them by a decent margin. The only problem is that the movement techniques of the two people are a bit weird. He is actually surprised that these people didn''t use it from the start.

    They are changing their position within the ground. It is almost like they are part of the earth and the earth itself shifting its position by itself.

    If they used it much more discreetly, it would be a great sneaking technique.

    Sam couldn''t attack them with light mode attacks from the surface directly. Whenever he tuned the attack with enough range to put a hole through the ground and reach them, they are shifting their position in a fraction of a second.

    Sam felt a bit frustrated and checked his energy level.

    His consumptionpared to other people is negligible. He still has half of his capacity left in his body. He could easily expend his energy, as long as he didn''t go overboard.

    But staying in light elemental fusion would be one of the stupidest things he could do.

    The energy consumption is too much.

    So, he decided to change his strategy.

    He saw that Noah and Kumar are trying to reduce the distance and stop Sam.

    He halted in his tracks and let his body free fall into the ground and right when he was about to hit the ground, he activated earth elemental fusion.

    The targets underground are noticing what is happening on the surface with their own technique and when they saw Sam is falling, they made a move.

    Arge mouth opened up in the ground. All of it looked like a big earth monster and its goal is to crush Sam.

    But as soon as he made contact, he already finished the fusion and Sam disappeared into the body of the earthen monster.

    Noah, Kumar and Arkiv stopped in their tracks in surprise.

    They didn''t expect such a move from Sam. They almost forgot Sam''s elemental affinities and what he could do with them if he really wished to do so. Every time Sam battled, he usually picked an element that is most suitable for the scenario and stuck with it.

    He rarely shifted between different elements.

    Unless there are some variables, he always came out on top with just a few of his moves from a single element. So, after getting used to it so much, they didn''t think that Sam would be shifting to a different element all of a sudden.

    As they were stuck not knowing what to do, Sam is transferring through the ground like fish in water. He once again is on the tail of the two targets.

    They stuck together as they moved even faster. Sam also increased his speed.

    He is using a somewhat simr technique to the two targets, but the concept ispletely different. But the end result is same.

    Meanwhile, Noah thought for a moment and decided to try a different move.

    She took out a couple ofmunication devices and gave them to Noah and Arkiv. You guys go, I will guide you from here.

    She sat down on the ground and activated her wood elemental fusions. She closed her eyes and went into a meditative state. The vines came out of her body and prated the ground. They started growing into the ground reaching the depths like snakes.

    They spread at a rapid space covering arge area within a second.

    Noah can sense what is happening in the ground through these vines. Her n is to use this technique and guide these two.

    But she was surprised for a moment when she noticed that the two targets are not exactly running away from here. They are just dodging Sam but still stuck to a certain perimeter, not leaving out of it.

    This helped Noah even more and decided to make it even difficult for them.

    Her vines are filled with a very corrosive poison and she set up some traps in different areas within the ground. The surrounding earth is bing corrosive and soon Sam and the targets realized that someone is trying to block them by creating a poisonous route.

    Of course, Sam and the yers knew that the poison won''t work on him. It would be thest thing that shoulde to any one''s mind if they are trying to harm Sam.

    But they knew for sure that as long as the targets are stuck within the perimeter, Sam would stay there too.

    The targets became a bit cautious after noticing this. They tried to forcefully exit the perimeter, but they were met with Noah''s unique attacks out of nowhere.

 Chapter 1762: Final target

    Chapter 1762: Final targetThe poison Noah deposited didn''t just act as some deterrent. When the targets are nearing it, a bunch of vines popped out of them and went after the targets.

    This made them go back and stick within the perimeter.

    After noticing that her deterrent moves are working. Noah rxed a bit and reduced the number of vines circling the perimeter to just three.

    She spent a lot of energy in this move and he is almost nearing herst legs.

    That is why she reduced the vines and now she can extend her time a bit more.

    She started pointing the direction to both Noah and Arkiv.

    Spears and arrows are making their way toward certain points. The force of these attacks is adjusted so that they will reach the appropriate depth within the ground to reach the targets.

    But not a single attack connected no matter what they did.

    Sam and the targets are skilled enough to defend themselves within the ground.

    But they still managed to make it hard for Sam to catch the targets. Right when he was about to catch these targets, an explosive spear or an arrow appeared making him dodge or block the attack. Either way, the targets are finding a gap to escape.

    Sam thought of something and was about to change his approach, but before he could do that, he noticed that the attacks stopped from above.

    He spread out his spiritual energy to check what is happening and he was surprised to say the least.

    At this moment, the final marked target actually sneaked up on the three yers and attacked Arkiv from behind.

    Arkiv wasn''t able to sense his presence until he was almost hit, but he managed to react in time to block the attack at thest moment.

    Kumar noticed this and threw his spear toward the target.

    Sam didn''t expect that the target wille and attack the yers at this moment.

    He spread his senses a bit more and noticed that Akhil just arrived in a ragged state.

    "This fucker. If only I could use my full strength. I would have fucking killed you."

    He spoke out loud as he used all of his remaining energy to finish off the marked target.

    Sam chuckled in amusement, but the two targets that are on the ground thought he was absent-minded and made a move against him.

    The earth around them started manipting itself into a structure. Within a moment Sam noticed that the soil on top of him was gone and a cylindrical tunnel to the top was created, before he could make sense of what is happening, he felt the gravitational force acting in reverse around him.

    He wasunched through the tunnel to the surface.

    He was caught off guard a bit, but he braced himself and got ready tounch a counter, but while he was still in that tunnel, all of a sudden sharp spike popped out of the tunnel walls, leaving a few physical injuries on his chest.

    His coat managed to block the rest, but his exposed chest was filled with gashes.

    But that is not all. He noticed that arge snake made of soil and rocks followed him through that tunnel and when he was shot into the air, it followed and crashed into him with a spike on top of its head.

    Sam barely managed to dodge it and caught hold of that spike,nding on top of the snake''s head.

    The snake head, morphed itself into a tube opening, through which Sam fell.

    A weird suction force caught hold of him, as he slid through the snake''s body. Following him was arge gush of extremely sharp but coarse sand which was made by disintegrating the surrounding rocks.

    The coarse and sharp sand moved faster than Sam.

    Once again, his exposed chest faced the abrasion of it.

    Everything is happening at a rapid pace. All of this happened within just a second and a half.

    The sand grains, even umted within the injuries he suffered on the chest. They tore apart the flesh even more and even tried to prate his bloodstream.

    Sam was being thrown around and was surprised and impressed at the same time. This is an impable usage of earth''s elemental energy and gravitational force.

    Sam was being yed around like a ball.

    But while he was being sandsted within the snake''s body, he stabilized himself. He got rid of the earth elemental fusion.

    Meanwhile, the two targets manipted the snake''s body and created a loop through which Sam is currently revolving along with the coarse sand.

    They are trying to exhaust and confuse him a bit after a few more rotations, the snake body as once again manipted so that one end was closed and appeared near the two targets and the remaining open end was aimed at a small formation of the second target set up.

    The formation is abination of the gravitational force, aimed to rip Sam apart.

    The sandsting would have opened multiple wounds on Sam''s body and the gravitational force will forcefully rip those wounds and make them as big as possible. The sand that seeped into the injuries will also be manipted by this formation which makes the tearing of the body much easier.

    They waited for their n to work.

    But to their surprise, nothing came from within that snake''s body.

    The sand also seemed to have disappeared. They could still sense Sam, but he somehow felt a bit different from them.

    Before they could react to what is happening, they saw that golden mes are erupting from the open end of it surprising them.

    The surprise didn''t even end, before the closed end of the body turned red hot, and molten and a st of golden mes came straight at them.

    Sam is using his fire elemental fusion and making his body an inferno. The raging inferno waspressed into a singr cylindrical attack with the help of the snake''s body and was directly aimed at the targets.

    The targets faced the full brunt of the golden inferno. They couldn''t even put up a defense as they felt their flesh burning offpletely.

    The mes are strong enough to be visible to the surface.

    They knew that things are over once they sensed that energy.

    Sam felt a bit down as he used more energy than he wanted to, but he still has enough to finish the day and night in style.

    He came back to the surface to witness quite an amusing scene. Akhil is gone, but he seemed to have left a really strong attack on the Marked target.

    There is arge bruise on the bare upper body of the target and one look is enough for Sam to guess that it is made from the staff attack.

    But that guy is not critically injured. He just had some trouble moving his left hand because of the injury, but his movement hasn''t been hindered.

    Even for Noah and the remaining two yersbined, he is a pain in the ass.

    He managed to move around like fish in the water and used his dagger to cleanly slice off any attacks Noah is making with her vines.

    Sam could see that for yers to have an edge over him, they should at their general capacity in terms of energy. With all the restrictions ced on them, they wouldn''t be able to do much. And Sam''s sudden me attack and his appearance, made the yers a bit distracted, giving that guy a very slight edge.

    As soon as Sam arrived, the target wanted to escape. But Sam didn''t want to waste any more time. He activated spatial fusion and disappeared from that spot, he reappeared right in the path of the young man, deactivated fusion, and activated shadow fusion.

    When the target tried to divert and escape Sam, he was caught by the expanded shadow of Sam, which enveloped himpletely and quickly devoured his life force.

    The target forcefully escaped the grip, but he wasn''t able topletely get rid of it, Sam coiled around him in his shadow form and step by step destroyed his meridians and killed him.

    The yers arrived at the spot and sighed.

    They looked at Sam in annoyance.

    Sam stood back and looked at them with a smile after deactivating the fusion.

    "Why do you have to do this? Even you have to lose so much energy. I bet you don''t have much left. You will face quite a bit of trouble in the night mode. Now we all cannot get the points. Are you fucking happy?"

    Noah started scolding him.

    "We will know when the night mode starts. You guys can stay back if you want. Even though you are all on yourst legs, it doesn''t matter. I will just fight them and you can spectate."

    "Yeah, sure. Undead creatures with those light elemental bodies and shadow elemental bodies are enough to even make you exhausted. I would like to see how you are going to tackle them."

    "Well, unlike you, I learned the hard way to always find counterattacks for my own moves. That is going toe in handy now."

 Chapter 1763: Last Night Mode

    Chapter 1763: Last Night ModeSam and the yers just sat there on the ground as they waited for the time to pass.

    The final night mode is about to begin.

    The yers are a bit confused about why Sam did such a thing. They know for sure that this Night node is going to be much more difficultpared to all the night modes they experienced until now.

    And they are in no shape to fight it. They believed even for Sam it will be extremely difficult. They get it that Sam wants some extra points so he increased the difficulty on his own.

    But they think Sam pushed it to the extreme and dug himself deeper into a hole at the moment.

    Even if they are in their top shape, they know that dealing withser mode, light fusion and shadow fusion is very tough, particrly the kind Sam uses. They are derived from the blood lines of the best of the best.

    They are kind of scared about what kind of monsters these undead creatures would be.

    While the yers are waiting, Sam did something else.

    After taking some rest, he went ahead and started checking out the city with his observation ability. He used the observation ability to the full extent. He even borrowed the mental strength of all his specters to maximize its ability.

    Only after putting that much effort did he manage to see something within that formation.

    Even though this whole fight has been a new experience, Sam would be stupid if he didn''t take the opportunity to learn from this.

    A formation that would transition on this level. Literally, between night and day. Whatever it is, and however it is working, it is something beyond Sam''s level at this point. He should be able to figure out how this thing works.

    Even if he gained very few insights, he should be able to make something out of it.

    So, while the yers are trying to think of a way to make sense of how they would make something out of thest night mode, Sam is studying. He went as far as taking notes and doing calctions.

    With his mind being that busy, time passed without even knowing.

    Sun started setting.

    Sam was excited by the learnings he had. The things this formation showed him, even at this level he couldn''t fathom.

    He always felt that he is moving closer and closer to the highest level of power. But if there is someone out there who is not at the highest level but still could create something like this, then he has ways to go.

    He has challenges that he has yet to explore.

    He felt bad that the avenues are closing down soon. His organization and the power that the organization wielded became so big that things just happen even him without moving a finger. But now, he has something to look forward to and this formation might just be the starting step.

    As he got ready to finish this battle off with this newfound excitement, Noah walked to Sam and asked.

    "How were you able to predict all our actions this time?"

    "Because you guys are smart."

    Sam answered without even a pause as he adjusted the feather coat a bit.

    "What do you mean?" She asked in confusion. She still couldn''t understand how Sam managed to trick them all into doing his bidding. She couldn''t understand how she fell into his trap, as she was the only one who could see through his actions most of the time.

    "You guys are smart. So, I know you will notice how I am behaving recently. I am angry and rageful. And I am enduring so much waiting for an opportunity like this.

    I was also a bit unhinged from the past couple of challenges.

    The only problem is, you guys wanted to be too smart.

    You wanted to be as smart as I am and tried to think like me. But too bad, our brains are not of the same capacity. I know that you will estimate my mental state and provide a scenario where your estimations appear to be confirmed.

    And we know how it all turned out.

    All of you are on yourst legs. I still have around one-fourth of my energy left. The best part, this is thest round and I know exactly how many creatures are going toe and how they are going to attack me.

    It is that simple."

    "So, you bet everything on us reacting to this?"

    "No, I didn''t bet. I know that you are going to do this. You have consistently proven to me that you will never believe me a hundred percent no matter what I offered.

    And the better the offer sounds to you, the more cautious you are about it.

    My words¡­ just take them seriously from now on Noah. Stop thinking about what I am trying to get by offering good deals to you guys. I don''t need deception to deal with you guys. That is beneath me.

    In fact, it is a bit insulting for you to think I will stoop to that level in apetition where my win is guaranteed.

    Anyway, the sun has set. Just sit back and enjoy the show.

    I will show the ways that I have never ever fought before."

    As he finished his sentence, the city started transitioning.

    After it went to night mode, Noah contemted as she went back to the rest of the yers. She started thinking about what Sam said and couldn''t help but introspect. Meanwhile, Sam stood on his hoverboard and took a high-altitude position to take a look at how things are going on.

    He looked in three different directions.

    From one side, he saw three bright glowing spots appear. Where three undead inser mode stand. It is not as bright as Sam''s own, but it is right up there.

    And then there are two zing spots in a different ce. They are from the earth element users that Sam has killed.

    And finally, thest one. The shadow fusion undead which he actually couldn''t see.

    Sam is not surprised because of that though. He already moved far away from the spot where he killed thatst target. He knew the threat this shadow undead possessed with most of Sam''s capabilities drilled into it.

    But he is not afraid, just cautious.

    He looked at the threesers that are the first to make their move.

    They crossed the distance in less than a second before they arrived in front of his face. But Sam already estimated this. Harbinger disappeared into his storage, while he reappeared in a different spot in the air because of his spatial blink.

    He is fast and efficient.

    He didn''t wait for even a moment before he disappeared from there and reappeared at a different spot.

    Usually, thisser should be as fast as light, but it is not exactly possible. Because even Sam never really tried to push his light elemental fusion to travel at the actual speed of light and he even toned down his speed a bit when he is killing the undead.

    And theser fusion is almost exclusive to him. Very few people in the whole universe would be able to use it even if they have it.

    So, the formation will have a much harder time creating a replica that has the same attack level as Sam and it is showing.

    It is giving him enough time for Sam to use his blink.

    Sam kept on disappearing and reappearing in different spots, but he never touched the ground and he didn''t move over arge area. His movements are limited to a very specific part of the city.

    At the start, the actions of the threesers are pretty much the same. So, it isn''t difficult for him to dodge thosesers. But with every major and sudden blink he did, he managed to throw the movement of thesesers a bit async.

    For the next two minutes, Sam just kept on dodging. As for the two fiery undead and the shadow undead, thetter didn''t show any action.

    The fiery undead, on the other hand, arrived and tried to join the fray, but with Sam''s speed, they don''t have any impact. He also noticed that they are throwing concentrated fire infernos in a cylindrical and focused way.

    Only their timing is off by a long shot as of now with Spatial blink making Sam extremely mobile.

    As thesers continued on, Sam noticed that two of they are kind of in sync, they are parallel and together almost. But the third one is astray.

    All of a sudden, Sam suddenly reappeared from the area he was covering before. Not just anywhere though, he deliberately appeared in a direction that is closer to the strayedser.

    So, that one moved a bit faster than the rest.

    But as Sam appeared, he took out his handgun before disappearing with it again.

 Chapter 1764: Results

    Chapter 1764: ResultsSam held his gun and aimed at the undeadser. When the yers thought he is gonna shoot, he didn''t.

    He just smirked and disappeared from the spot once again. He reappeared at a different spot and shot.

    At that exact moment, theser changed its way and it intercepted the energy bullet directly.

    *BOOM*

    The energy bullet exploded with light elemental energy. The energy explosion happened in the exact path theser is taking. The light energy explosion, dissipated half of theser the very instant. The undead might have been able to turn into thisser.

    But it doesn''t know a fuck about keeping it stable.

    Keeping theser mode stable when the light energy fluctuations are happening is the hardest thing possible.

    So, all Sam had to do is make it unstable which is as easy as eating cake for him.

    The firstser was struck down easily. After the first bullet, it became much slower and Sam even had time to disrupt the other twosers.

    "Fucking hell. How is he doing that?"

    Kumar asked as he looked at him.

    "Timing. He has the perfect timing. He is beating the speed of thesesers with that."

    Noah answered from the side.

    As she did, she suddenly sensed something and made a move.

    Arge dark figure appeared out of nowhere trying to attack her. Kumar reacted faster than her and made a move. It is the shadow undead. In itsplete shadow form, using Sam''s own techniques.

    The difficulty is just on a whole different level.

    The yers all spread out a bit as they surrounded the shadow figure. Their senses are on all-time high sensitive as they kept a close eye on it.

    Meanwhile.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Three explosions sounded from Sam. The three explosions of the light elemental energy and by now thesers halted in their spots with half of their glowpletely gone. Now it can''t even be considered a proper fusion at all.

    Now they are just sitting targets. Sam shot other three shots and destroyed the undead.

    He noticed that by now the yers are busy with the shadow undead. So, he shifted his focus to find out what the fire undead are doing. But to his surprise, they are not on the surface.

    He used the eye technique.

    He looked around and found the ce they are in. Underground. He is surprised because unlike what he expected, the creatures didn''t just have the fire elemental energy. They also have the earth elemental energy and to his surprise, all of a sudden eight earthen pipes came out of the ground.

    The pipes let out dangerous golden mes.

    Sam jumped into the air and used his energy barrier to block those mes.

    His body slowly changed as he activated water elemental fusion. The water went through the barrier and entered the pipes. Flooding inside. The undead creatures once again tried using the same technique as if they were alive.

    They are using the earth to dodge the attacks.

    But this time, Sam didn''t have the intention of letting them y for long. Hended on the ground and stopped his fusion.

    He sat cross-legged on the ground as earth elemental energy escaped his body. The energy spread to the surrounding area including the ce the creatures are currently in. The volume of the earth is spread with his spiritual energy, even though it is very thin.

    He used gravitational maniption. Apart from the small area of the ground that he sat on, the rest of the ground broke apart. It started turning into loose soil and the reversal of the gravitation field made it fly into the air.

    Within no time, Sam is sitting on a long vertical pir in the middle of arge pit. In that pit, the two creatures appeared.

    They are trying to escape toward the walls of the pit, but the gravitational force is strong enough for them to be unable to move.

    They started throwing mes at Sam out of desperation. But at that moment, the soil that is floating over in the sky moved and created a barrier around Sam.

    The mes are unable to do anything to him.

    The soil turned into tworge spikes of earth as they are aimed at the two creatures.

    Sam didn''t even open his eyes before the spikes went through them. Even though they have earth elemental abilities, there is nothing they could do. The gravitational lock ced on them didn''t let them move an inch and they are unable to resist the onught of that attack.

    They are gone. Nailed to the ground not even being able to resist.

    Sam is done with the fights very quickly. To the point that the yers are even shocked a bit.

    And Noah felt that Sam is definitely right. He fought like he never did before. The skills were all one shot one kill kind of thing. He never used them in fights before. He always prioritized his energy efficiency.

    He never cared if the attacks are majestic, he never cared if they had cool-sounding names, he never cared if they are fancy. All he cared about was killing other people in the most efficient way.

    But today, he didn''t give a shit about energy. He didn''t care how much he has to expend his energy. Because this is thest night mode. After the battle, he would be safe and sound. He doesn''t have any threats to be worried about.

    He will be thrown into the grey space.

    He decided to take this chance to show off. To show off something that yers immediately understood as Sam made his move on the shadow undead.

    His body slowly transformed into his own shadow. The ck aura oozed out of him like some smoke. The shadow looked at Sam, it almost looked like it carried the anger from the target that was killed in the day mode.

    It targeted Sam and came at him.

    Sam also spread out his own shadow fusion body.

    Both shadows are now in a formless form and shapeless shame. Both of them shed. Like the two serpentsbating, they are shing together as they are tried to overpower each other.

    They tried to absorb the energy of each other toe out on top of this encounter. Sam grinned inside his head. He liked this.

    He let himselfpletely lose. He doesn''t have to care about the consequences. He doesn''t have to care about the aftermath.

    The shadows shed as the energy slowly dissuaded bit by bit.

    yers watched him in awe. They slowly understood something that Sam had never explicitly shown off before. Something he hasn''te out and said out loud.

    All this while they thought Sam''s talents lie in his thinking, his intellect, and his patience. The inventions he had are an added bonus that made everything easy. On top of it all, there is incrediblebat strength and IQ.

    But from the very careful measures he had always taken, they always thought that he is not invincible, there is a vulnerability that he always tried to cover up, and that is what they thought.

    There is a weakness that he wanted to protect and hid from others. Even when Sam gave them some fair conditions out of consideration so that they won''t have to go crazily above and beyond all the time, they all thought it is to make sure that everything is under his control.

    But right now they knew, even without all of the crazy stuff he could pull, all of the amazing strategies and inventions he could fish out, Sam is still miles above them.

    The moves that he showed in the day mode and night mode, clearly proved that he could have ended this whole thing anytime he wanted. The only reason he dragged this long, is because he wanted to.

    As they thought this, something struck their mind. Maybe, Sam never bothered to hide it. Maybe they just drew this out of nowhere to feel better about themselves. Dozens of thoughts crossed their minds.

    While the sh of those thoughts, the shadows shed crazily and after a head-on battle, Sam stood in the middle of the aftermath with a smile on his face. The shadow undead was destroyed.

    And the very next moment, All the yers disappeared from there.

    They reappeared in the sky once again. With all of their energy restored. Osiris looked at all the seven yers and his gaze stopped at Sam.

    "I am really surprised by all of your performance. You are all stronger than any of your peers from anywhere in the universe. Even the greatest factions under me cannot produce people as strong as you in your cultivation range.

    Great job.

    As for the scores, I don''t want to reveal them to you, but I will give out the results in a different way. Thest three, Dayus, Donner, and Akhil, will get one wish each from me.

    Arkiv gets two wishes.

    Kumar and Noah get three wishes and Sam¡­

    Sam gets nine wishes. That is the value of your contributions in clearing this city.

 Chapter 1765: Wishes

    Chapter 1765: WishesSam is not one bit surprised by the results.

    He had a straight face as he looked at Osiris. The number nine is somewhat unexpected, but it clearly indicated how much he outssed everyone. Osiris started taking them one by one away. After around twenty minutes, Sam''s turn hase.

    "So, how are you feeling now? I hope this round is to your satisfaction?"

    Osiris asked as both of them sat down in an empty room.

    Sam looked around curiously, he didn''t even notice what has happened, he was just taken away directly and even before he could make sense of it, he is already sitting in the chair with Osiris asking this question.

    "I am fine. It''s a greatpetition. I like that formation a lot."

    "Yeah, I heard that you are very fond of creating this stuff. Would you like the blueprint of that formation?"

    "What is it gonna cost?"

    "Around five wishes."

    Sam smiled and shook his head.

    "No need. I can build that on my own in a couple of years. There is no need to waste this amazing opportunity on something that I will eventually gain."

    "A couple of years is way too far away. You will be able to spend your time on something much more productive. What are you going to do with nine wishes anyway, it is not like you arecking anything. You have the resources you need, people that are handling all your worldly affairs, the only thing you might not earn right now is time."

    "Well, I got my divine dimension, that will speed up my research process a bit. Even then, the process of exploring it and reiterating by myself is going to be very unique learning experience. I wouldn''t miss that.

    The benefits that I gain and the things that I will be able to invent as by products while I unravel each and every mystery behind that. That would be fascinating experience that I don''t want to spoil."

    "You sure are pretty confident, when you don''t even know how to make the formation. Do you even know what level of cultivation you should have to do that?"

    "I don''t. But that is all part of the fun. As for if I could possibly do it, yes I can. You can carve that word in stone if you want to."

    "Interesting. Anyway, let''s go on with your nine wishes. You can wish for anything and everything, but if it is something that shouldn''t be given to you ording to yourpetition rules, or something that will be beyond your current state of cultivation and everything I deemed outrageous and overboard will not be awarde.

    So, think carefully and tell me what is it that you want."

    "I don''t want to use four of them now. Is it possible for me to ask of it when we meet in the future?"

    "Do you think we will meet again?"

    "Yes."

    "Why would you want to store the wishes? Your life at the bottom most point right now. Suffering in hell, day after day confronting all your sins big and small, which are going stronger every second that you are spending here.

    I am the god of life and god of death. There are many things you could ask me, that would make your life easier in hell.

    Your friends all asked me some way to deal with the corruption. Even the people with one wish. And there are many more things that you could ask of me. To make your life easier, efficient."

    "I don''t need that. But I am curious why you are trying to so hard to make me spend all of those wishes. Why are you in such a hurry?"

    Osiris didn''t speak.

    Sam continued.

    "I will make things easier for you. One of the wishes is for you to give me a chance to make the other four wishes at a different point of time in the future."

    "Granted. But the wishes shouldn''t exceed in valuepared to now."

    "Don''t worry. It won''t.

    Now that five wishes are out of the way, let''s see how we can use the remaining four. I want you to take me to different ces.

    First one, to Deste."

    Osiris raised an eyebrow in intrigue.

    "To Deste? Why? Are you craving to go back home after suffering so much?"

    "No. I need to talk to my friends and see how they are doing. My force is in war against Olympus. I need to see how they are progressing. Why? Is it against the rules?"

    "No, they only said that I can''t let you guys escape, they didn''t say anything about letting you speak with your friends for a while. Let''s go. I am curious about what you want to talk as well."

    Osiris waved his hands and Sam reappeared in Deste. Particrly in the Tempest Valley. He looked at the Old Beast with a smile.

    Old Beast suddenly stood up in that lightning storm.

    *HOWL*

    He looked towards the sky and howled in full vigor. The silver lightning disappeared in a sh. This is the first time Sam saw the Old Beast in his full form. Without any lightning obstructing him.

    Old Beast looked at Sam and then at Osiris with a vignt gaze.

    "What are you doing here Osiris? Why are you here with the kid?"

    Osiris chuckled at the sheer hostility and said.

    "I am not here to trouble. I never knew that a Divine creature like yourself will voluntarily stay in this even after you managed to get out of the shackles. And to think that you would be friend of a mere human? Things have changed. Did you soften up on your imprisonment?"

    Old Beast growled at those words as its aura changed.

    Sam suddenly felt suffocated. The surrounding space seemed to have been twisted as some silver sparks appeared in the air.

    "Come on now, the will be destroyed if you growl anymore. I am sure you like this ce and I mean no hostility here. I am here to bring Sam here since he wanted to talk to you."

    Sam finally managed to get a breath. He looked at the Old Beast and said.

    "You are holding a lot of your strength back."

    "It doesn''t matter. What are you doing here? I thought you are going to be in hell for a while."

    "I will be. I found a loophole and came back. I don''t have a lot of time."

    "Go ahead, what do you want?"

    "You must have known about the war, right? I just got an upper position in thepetition once again, I destroyed Dayus so badly that our score disparity is almost 10 times. I will talk to those three also, but I just wanted to give you some heads up."

    "About what?"

    "I don''t know what it is. But I am sure Zeus would do something. Even if it is not Zeus the other Olympians are going to attack. I don''t know what those mad fuckers will do. Just take care of things here.

    Deste is the core of all the operations and most people are being reliant on us. They are weak. You will be thest line of defense here. Whatever happens on this, make sure that people won''t die.

    I am counting on your wisdom. Guide those three when things go sideways. From my experience, in a way war no matter how much you prepare, things always go sideways."

    "You don''t need to say that all to me. I will handle everything. You can go ahead and finish your littlepetition."

    "Thank you."

    Old Beast looked at Osiris and said.

    "That kid is my kin. If you don''t mind, let those gods know about that. He is my kin."

    The old beast turned around and the lightning in the valley resumed as Osiris and Sam disappeared.

    In a realm far away in a conference room.

    Currently, the trio is holding a meeting as they are discussing something.

    "I suggest we use the dark element this time. We haven''t used that since the start of the war. That is the best way to showcase the true terror of what we can do." Watt suggested

    "But that will be too torturous to them. The dark element setup is hard for us to control besides the space element. We won''t be able to easily adjust it to the city level. I don''t mind people dying, but it doesn''t have to be so violent. And the problem with the surroundings is also too big.

    The whole city is covered with fertilends. We cannot just let go of that treasure trove. We can actually open a sub-branch of our pharmaceutical wing here. It is that good for herbs."

    Philip said as he looked at the chart. They have been discussing this for a while now.

    "Idiots, all you have to do is reduce the liquid in the dark energy capsules that are inside the device. Just do some basic calctions and you can figure that out in five minutes. What the hell are you all fussing so much about."

    The trio froze as they heard Sam''s voice.

 Chapter 1767: Meeting with a God

    Chapter 1767: Meeting with a GodAfter ten minutes, Sam talked to his students once again before deciding to leave with Osiris.

    "So, what about thest wish? Do you have anyone else to talk to?"

    "Of course, I want to talk to Zeus."

    Osiris stopped in his tracks. He didn''t even know what to think. He has been a god for a long time and he has seen things that are unfathomable for any living creature. But this is the first time he has seen something like this.

    Olympus is famous for ying with mortals.

    In fact, the gods send Divine bodies to fool around with the mortal women here and then their wives y around with the bastards that are born out of that intercourse.

    Of course, there are also mortals they find interesting or someone they found annoying like Sam. They make them go through hell while living.

    He has heard of stories of mortals killing themselves. In fact, he met those souls in hell. But never had he heard of a mortal who is getting on Olympians'' nerves and still wanted to talk to the most arrogant piece of shit of them all.

    "I didn''t hear you wrong did I? you want to meet Zeus? Gods are much scarier than you think. In fact, Mortals will die in their presence. I am using my Divine body to be here right now. Or this would have done in a second."

    "It''s fine. I am sure can find a way around it. I just need to have a face-to-face conversation with that guy."

    "Why?"

    "Just my way of doing things. When I am at war with someone I like to talk to them before I go all out."

    "Everyone of them?"

    "No, only the ones that I really enjoy destroying."

    "Let me get this straight, you are going against one of the mighty gods to ever exist and you started a war when you are nowhere near his level of power with one organization that is under your name¡ªrisking all the things you built along with the lives of yourpanions and followers.

    And now you want to go and talk to him face to face so that you can tell him that you will destroy him.

    Even though I am a god, I am doubting my hearing Sam."

    Osiris is usually calm and collected. Even now his voice is like that, but he definitely lost hisposure.

    "Well, it is no big deal. I have the circumstances on my side. So, of course, I am going to take advantage of that. If you now take me and let me meet him, we will be done with this.

    I have a hell to go back to and I want to finish off as many creatures as possible before someone maniptes the tower and the creatures again."

    Osiris sighed and snapped his fingers.

    Sam disappeared from that spot. Osiris waited for a second before he disappeared again.

    They reappeared on a mountain. Arge mountain with a big cloud hovering on top of it.

    Sam felt a bit suffocated and his body felt extremely heavy, but his Raiju bloodline felt at home. His lightning energy became active as it could be. He wanted to activate lightning fusion right then and there.

    But he also had a feeling that if he did that, his remaining bloodlines will be affected.

    "Don''t give in. I don''t know much about your cultivation, but I am sure when multiple bloodlines are in you and one is reacting with the divine energy of a god, you shouldn''t let it take control. Redistribute your energy properly and keep it stable."

    Sam nodded and slowly started controlling his energy. He circted it over and over and even though excess lighting energy is bubbling up, he converted it into different elemental energies.

    Now he is in an extremely delicate state. Even though his body''s energy is building up, he keeps it stable by dividing it into different elemental energies and making them circte while slowly expelling it bit by bit.

    It needed a lot of his concentration.

    "You are doing good."

    Osiris said clearly impressed.

    Sam looked at the mountain as he observed things. It looked like a very ordinary mountain. Not a single thing looked like it is special. Even the trees and grass around them looked like they are just normal vegetation from back on earth.

    Except for therge-scale suffocation, he is feeling right now, he felt that he is back on earth.

    "This is a god''s domain. It will feel like that. Mortals are not supposed to be here. I am using my power to block you from getting any harm. So, be careful."

    They are actually on a pathway toward the top.

    "So, we go this way?"

    Sam asked as he pointed out.

    Osiris nodded and they started walking.

    But even before they took a few steps, the clouds started rumbling and lightning crackled.

    Osiris looked at the sky and said.

    "Seems like he has noticed our presence."

    Even before he could finish that sentence, the lightning struck right before them and Zeus appeared there.

    Sam looked at the big old man with a smile.

    "Nice to see you again."

    Zeus ignored Sam. His cold gaze is directed at Osiris.

    "What are you doing Osiris? Bringing a mortal and that too this vermin to my domain? Are you trying to start a war with me?"

    Osiris raised an eyebrow and said in a calm voice.

    "I am just following my end of the agreement. This is the wish he asked for. He wanted toe here and meet you. So, I brought him."

    "Not anyone can juste and meet me."

    Zeus said as he looked at Sam. Some invisible pressure came onto Sam, but Osiris'' power shielded him from it.

    Still, he could feel the hostility and the sheer power behind it.

    "Not anyone can start with the king of Olympus as well. But he did. So, I figured it is okay for him to meet you once."

    Osiris answered in Sam''s stead.

    "War? I could kill him with half a thought, do you really think he can start a war with me?"

    "I already started one. In case you didn''t notice."

    Zeus looked at Sam who spoke up. His gaze is hostile and he really wanted to kill Sam.

    Sam just chuckled and said.

    "You know, I originally wanted to have a different kind of meeting with you. I always thought one day I will get to your level, invade your territory and bully you as a teenage does to his weaker peers. I wanted to y around until that giant ego of yours waspletely shattered.

    But after the past few months, I decided otherwise. I am losing patience day by day and I want nothing more than tear down that smug empire of yours."

    *RUMBLE*

    Lightning crackled in the clouds.

    "Don''t try to be angry so much. You cannot dog shit at this moment. If you can you would have killed me as soon as I appeared here.

    But you didn''t. So, I am sure you wouldn''t be able to directly kill me, even if you wish it will all of your arrogance

    So, tone it down and listen to me¡­"

    "You listen to me, you little worthless mortal bastard. You are nothing but a ything that one of the gods picked. And you are lucky that the god that picked you has some interest in you.

    That is the only saving grace that is keeping you alive.

    And the moment, that saving grace disappears, your soul will rot in Hades. I will personally get off of my throne and take the duty of torturing. And I am going take pleasure in it for an eternity."

    "That sounds like something you have thought of for a long time but weren''t able to do anything about.

    Good luck with that.

    I am not going to say what I am going to do to you. Because my friends are handling that. But I know how the results appear after I am done with you.

    Your followers will be gone. I don''t know exactly how many realms are there. But in all the realms that I could ess through the Dimensional Drifter, I will uproot any belief people have about Olympus.

    In every realm I and my organization targets you, no one will ever think of worshiping an Olympian god for millennia.

    I will destroy your power that built your legends, I will destroy the glory that''s built up on those legends, I will destroy the faith that''s built up on that glory and I will destroy your moral character that''s built up on this faith and I will destroy your kingly position based on that character and I will destroy you who is so full of that kingly position.

    And when I do that. I will look you right in the eyes.

    And you will think, why is Sam reacting like this over such a small petty quarrel that you had? And then you will regret why you even had that small quarrel.

    So, by the next time we meet, if I don''t make all of these statementse true, I will bind my soul to Hades myself making it my duty to provide you the pleasure of my misery."

 Chapter 1766: Meeting Students

    Chapter 1766: Meeting StudentsThe trio is currently sitting in front of Sam as they all drank wine together.

    "So, you managed to kick the asses of the other yers and got wishes from one of the most powerful gods and used it toe and meet us?"

    Philip asked with a weird expression.

    "Sounds about right."

    Sam nodded casually.

    "You fucking idiot. I thought you were supposed to be the smart one. Why would you waste your wishes on something like this, you retard." Philip stood up and almost pped Sam across the face.

    But then he realized all the beatings he took when he tried it in the past and came to a conclusion. He shouldn''t hit Sam after he came from hell to see them, he is a good friend.

    He is also sure that it is definitely not because he is afraid of the beatings.

    "It doesn''t matter. There is nothing materialistic in this world that these gods can give me that I cannot get on my own. It might take some time, but we are capable enough to gain that ourselves. So, don''t think too much about it, and let it be.

    Anyway, I came here to warn you guys. I am going a bit off rails on thepetition, so the gods will try to retaliate on this front.

    I want you to shift your focus to the informationworks of the organizations. Cut of theirmunication and information channels.

    I don''t need to give you more details, but make sure you covered all the bases. Don''t underestimate them.

    The gods will stoop to no end to take even some petty revenge. So, always have a contingency ready. Even if you slow down in the war, that is fine, I don''t want any casualties on our end. If a machine can do the task instead of a person, let the machine do it, no matter how expensive it is."

    "Got it. Anything else?"

    "Nothing. Just be careful. Don''t be idiots. I want all of you scott-free when Ie back from Hell."

    They just nodded.

    "Sam, I think you have to go and talk to your students."

    "I was about to actually. But what happened? Is it something rted to Habi?"

    Sam asked with a frown.

    "Yes. Sirona is currently monitoring them. Since the start of the war, they went on their own way. They are dealing with organizations at their level. But the problem is they are all angry and Habi more than others.

    Sirona said that he is killing crazily. He is extremely violent and out of control. Even Kasi was unable to hold him back sometimes.

    Even when the students are sparring between themselves, he is not harming the others, but he is always looking to make a final move that would end the duel. He is not focused on learning like before. Instead, he is so focused on revenge.

    I think he will lose it if you don''t talk to him."

    Sam sighed when he heard this. He knew that there is a possibility something like this will happen. He has experienced this himself before.

    When he finally learned to fight back in his past life, the organization cadets that bullied him constantly all suffered greatly. In fact, every cadet that ever fell into any type ofpetition with him has suffered in Sam''s hands.

    He took his anger out on them.

    All the anger he umted when he faced all the humiliation, he let it show on them. It is not a great time for him. Even though he felt powerful and liberated, it is also the time when he showcased one of his worst qualities.

    He stopped learning in that short period of time, he stopped exploring things, he stopped using intellect for anything other than killing and hurting others.

    In his opinion, Habi might be a great warrior, but he is also a great artist. An artist of des. Sam always felt proud of the fact, even though Habi started out wanting to be a warrior, he learned to appreciate the finesse of the fighting arts.

    He learned to appreciate the usage of different de weapons. He understood everything rted to them, their making, usage, and representation. All of this only helped him be a better warrior.

    But now, he is just bing a killer. Only being a killer is something Sam would never wish up on anyone except for a select few. And none of his students fall into that category.

    He said goodbye to his friends and went to look for Habi.

    He disappeared from the spot along with Osiris. They arrived in the city currently the students are residing in.

    They appeared outside the inn that the students are in.

    Their sudden appearance out of nowhere cause a slight stir and Osiris'' appearance attracted way too many eyes, but Sam didn''t care. He just spread his spiritual sense and looked for his students.

    When he saw them on the top floor of the inn, he frowned.

    "These Olympian fuckers, they always do this."

    Osiris smiled and asked.

    "Are you worried?"

    "No, that guy''s level might be higher, but he made the mistake of choosing my students. You might not know this, but I always punched way above my league, and my students are no different. And when they are together, they are invincible against someone like that guy."

    Sam said proudly with a smile on his face. Osiris smiled. He has observed Sam for a while in thest round.

    He was indeed surprised by how incredulous Sam''s methods are and how powerful he ispared to his peers. He can bet that the other yers are very powerful. It is hard to findpetition for them in any realm. But Sam outssed them by a fair bit.

    And to see that this person is not devoid of normal joy is somewhat refreshing. He lived through eons and he has seen many geniuses that are detached from normality and brought their own ruin. They couldn''t carry their gifts long enough to reach their full potential.

    This normal touch is great for Sam.

    As he was thinking, he noticed Sam frowning.

    Even before he could confirm, Sam already used his spatial element to disappear from the spot. Osiris followed him.

    Both of them appeared in the top floor of the room at the same time. The top floor is actually a veryrge empty space. It is like a training hall in which Sam''s students were originally training. Everyone of them are sweating bullets and they are not using their usual armor.

    They are in their training clothes and they are currently surrounding a middle aged man who has two levels of cultivation above them.

    Sam and Osiris appeared and the first thing they saw is Habi rushing forward with Executioner sword.

    The opponent is not backing down, in fact he had a smile as he tried to take Habi''s head off, and even if that missed, he had something else nned. His second hand which is covered by his stance is currently aiming something else at another student of Sam''s.

    Right at this moment, Sam snapped his fingers. Both the opponent and Habi froze in space.

    They can still see and hear what is happening, they can even use their spiritual sense, they just couldn''t move. Habi is frozen mid air while the opponent stayed rooted on the spot.

    Sam looked at Habi and the students seriously.

    The students were stunned. They didn''t expect Sam to be here.

    "Teacher."

    They immediately knelt on the ground and greeted him.

    Sam gestured for them stand up and looked at Habi.

    Habi looked at Sam and when he noticed a helpless and disappointed expression on his teacher''s face, he felt his heart ache. It felt like someone stabbed a million times. He cannot take that. He could take his teacher''s anger over the disappointment.

    Sam sighed once again and ced his hand on Habi''s cheek. His mental energy shook a bit as he used his soul to transfer all of his memories to Habi.

    Memories of this life and the past life.

    He is indeed disappointed, but not in Habi. He is disappointed in himself. He is disappointed that he is notpetent enough to leave his student out of the mess created by these gods.

    He is disappointed that after his student was left in that mess, he was not there to save him from this abyss of emotions. And that disappointment is followed by anger.

    Habi looked through Sam''s memories. The pain, suffering, anger, helplessness, the emotions tormented Sam, and the emotionless Sam became cold. The person who couldn''t see the meaning of life.

    But was forced to live and when he found the meaning, it was taken away.

    Habi felt that his pain is unique. He was betrayed. He gave his heart and gave away the beastpanion that is half of his life and he felt unquantifiable anger towards the person who did that.

    But just killing that person was not enough.

    Because he was angry at himself for not being able to get out of the situation, he was angry for bing a fool. When hepared his pain to Sam, it felt like nothing and to him at least he had his friends trying to help him.

    But for Sam, no one was there to help him and he drowned in an abyss.

    Habi started tearing up.

    "What you did is wrong. You should never ever put someone else in danger just because you are angry at yourself and wanted to absolve yourself of it.

    Your fellow students, they are the most loyal people you could trust. They want the best for you, but you constantly ignored their advice. If they wanted to, they could crush you absolutely, but their love for you stopped them and you are taking it for granted.

    Sam spoke as he took the Executioner''s sword into his hand. He tapped the sword at a few spots on the handle and the de.

    He ced it back in Habi''s hand once again and all of a sudden it lost some lustre.

    "This is your punishment. Unless you atone for yourself, you cannot ess the full power of this sword''s spirit.

    Now, get back to your formation and fight properly with your members."

    He pushed him slightly. Habi went into the formation with his fellow students.

    Sam snapped his fingers and the opponent looked at him. He is scared of Sam. His legs shook.

    "Don''t worry. You are not my prey. You are theirs."

    Sam stood on the sidelines as he watched his students slice and dice the opponent.

 Chapter 1768: Zeus Reaction

    Chapter 1768: Zeus'' ReactionZeus felt suffocated.

    His rage is bubbling up from his heart. The surroundings reflected that feeling.

    Sam felt as if this godly energy tried to suffocate and suppress him. His lightning element is riled up to the extreme and he had to close his eyes to concentrate on using his body as a medium for this excessive energy.

    Osiris frowned and kept on using his own power to shield Sam.

    "Zeus, don''t you dare vite our agreement. And from what I heard the ward was picked by Gambler. Do you really think you can get away with this? There are consequences for your anger. Reign yourself in or I will be here with my real body."

    Zeus finally stopped. Sam felt the intense pressure alleviate a bit. He felt exhausted. But there is a faint smile on his face.

    "Your days are numbered. Now get out of this ce."

    Osiris took Sam away instantly. They reappeared at an open space that seemed pretty simr to the grey space that Hel always took them to.

    "What were you thinking? You could have died in there. I thought you were supposed to be the smart one. Why would you provoke one of the most powerful gods just for the sake of it. What did you gain from this stupid act?"

    "Information and an edge over Zeus.

    I know that going there is a gamble, but I literally wanted to test the limits. Going to war with Olympus is not something that any mortal can do, so I wanted to test how much leeway do I have and how much do I have before things might get really bad.

    Now, Zeus who hates me so badly and had that huge butthurt ego, cannot do anything to me until the game is over. Even if Ie face to face and spit on him, he cannot do shit.

    That means, until this game is over I am free to act however I want.

    And another important news is that he is scared of Gambler. He didn''t even dare to intimidate me properly just by the mention of Gambler''s name.

    If what you said is true, if he really can kill me with a thought, he should have been able to intimidate and suffocate me to near death without much trouble, even if he cannot kill that should be within the eptable range.

    But he didn''t. He took his time. He gradually increased the pressure.

    This tells me that he is not willing to take the risk of harming me even in that raged state.

    I have way too much pull right now. I can literally go crazy, but the moment I am out of this game, I also need to find a perfect cover that shields me from Zeus.

    There are some added benefits of course, if I am right about Zeus'' character which I am absolutely sure of, he will now issue an order to all of the gods in Olympus. He will tell them to alert all of the organizations that follow them and tell them to go after Dusk.

    And trust me if one thinks Dusk''s offence is powerful, that means they haven''t seen our defensive measures yet. It is much easier for my people to find out and destroy these organizations.

    And finally, I just wanted to piss him off.

    I bet I achieved all of it."

    Osiris was stunned for a moment.

    He looked at Sam and said.

    "Do you know how big of a gamble that is?"

    "Of course, I know this is not a joke. If Zeus can really kill me without caring about Gambler''s situation, I am sure he would have killed me now. Which also means I wouldn''t have had a chance at this war.

    Sooner orter, he will be pissed enough toe and kill me directly while the game and the war are going on.

    It would be better for me to be dead early thanter in that case. That way, my friends, students, and subordinates will be a bit saferpared to now there wouldn''t be too much loss of life across the realms.

    But now, things changed. This war will be recorded in the history of every realm. A mortal army charging at the gods. I am pretty excited."

    Osiris felt amazed by Sam''s confidence and excitement. A mortal army fighting against gods. Particrly Olympian gods.

    It is not like it hasn''t happened before, but it never happened on this scale and at this level. The mortals were on verge of breaking through and bing gods and there is at least one or two gods leading them.

    But here a young man who didn''t even hit the level of divinity went ahead and started a war. Granted there are a bunch of circumstances that are in his favor. But it is still a task that should have been impossible to achieve.

    Sam was sent back to the hell after that. He just dove deep into the tower after that. But this time, he had a very special moment when he entered. His energy is still riled up from his visit to the God''s domain.

    So, he had a lot of energy to expend which he did wantonly in killing in the creatures.

    His excitement just increased as he killed these creatures while thinking of where this war will lead him.

    Meanwhile, back in Zeus'' domain, all the Olympian gods gathered.

    "Why did you call us here?"

    One of them asked their king.

    "Everyone in your organizations should now focus on one thing. Exterminate Dusk organization. It belongs to a person called Sam and it is spread amongst various realms. Go ahead and destroy it. I will give them rewards for every small achievement.

    I will give them a herb for killing a person. I will give them a cultivation method if they kill a unit, I will give them a ce in my personal army if they kill a high-level executive, and I will upgrade their tribe if they destroy a settlement.

    If they kill one of Sam''s friends, I will raise their potential to a Divine level and increase their cultivation by myself.

    Tell them to be on this task, the very instant."

    Zeus is angry, the gods didn''t know what to say. They knew how willful Zeus is, so they didn''t even bother trying to convince him. They didn''t even ask for more details. They just went along with his craziness and went to order his organizations.

    Back at the frontlines of the dusk organization. Every branch that already locked on to a branch of organizationing from Olympus noticed that all of these organizations are making their move.

    They became excited and rash. And this made every member of the Dusk organization smile.

    An enemy that is mindless and greedy. It is their perfect target. In fact, it is more like target practice for them.

    Because Dusk organization also incentivizes their efforts, but more than incentivization, these members with unwavering loyalty craved to be a more intricate part of the organization. So, they are not working for rewards, they are working to be recognized for who they are and how they could help the organization.

    They have this unity that couldn''t be found in their enemies who are greedy to get the most aplishments to improve their own positions.

    Sam was not there to see it, but if he did, he will just smile like the rest of his organization.

    Meanwhile, these actions that should have been insignificant actually caused quite a bit of stir in the realms of gods.

    Everyone significant knew what Zeus has done and they also came to know what Sam has done. This invoked many feelings in different gods.

    Some are amazed, some are shocked, some were amused and some thought it is ridiculous.

    Some are even excited, but one person is just proud.

    Gambler is currently in a meeting with the rest of the gods and he didn''t bring up anything rted to how Zeus'' actions are against the rules. He acted as if nothing had happened.

    "So, who is going to be the next external god thates to y the game? I like these external tasks now. Osiris did a great job with that city. It is very interesting."

    Gambler asked excitedly.

    Everyone else just looked at them as if he is a madman. After all, they thought Gambler would give Zeus a warning of some sort. But there is nothing.

    Hel just sighed and spoke.

    "There are two candidates that are ready to participate in the next one and both of them have unique tasks in mind. But none of them are considered gods in a traditional sense."

    "Why?"

    "Because the faith of theirmunities marked them with different names."

    "Oh, I can estimate who it could be. That is interesting."

    "I don''t agree with this." Zeus objected.

    "Why?"

    "There is a reason why the faiths and subjects marked them with different names. These people are everything that stands against our godly system. We shouldn''t let them participate in something that we gods agreed upon."

 Chapter 1769: Too Many

    Chapter 1769: Too Many"Really Zeus, you are saying that of all people? There was a point your subordinates hated you to the core. Now you are saying that the words some blind mortals matter?"

    One of the gods spoke up.

    Even among gods, there are different types. Most of these gods at the table gained their strength with their cultivation as well as an infinite amount of faith from their followers. But there are some gods who are just as powerful as them.

    But they didn''t rely on faith. Still, they are on the same level as these gods. In a way, Gambler falls under the same category. His faith is negligiblepared to his strength from cultivation. Of course, nobody knows how strong he is.

    There are some other gods at the table whose faith ys a role in their strength, but even if the faith is all gone, their positions wouldn''t change much. They might have some temporary trouble, but as a bigger picture, they are still gods of that level.

    That is why they didn''t care much about the celestial beings with their unorthodox methods.

    At their levels, it is none of their business to judge some other god.

    Zeus bringing it up itself is a very weird thing.

    "I don''t care what you think Zeus. Thepetitions are my task and I will do it however I want. Only when I ask your opinion Can you voice it?"

    He didn''t hold back. She shot him down immediately. Everyone was stunned. Why would she act like this all of a sudden?

    The change of attitude in Hel made everyone feel a bit surprised.

    She didn''t care about their surprise and just spoke.

    "Out of the two, I told them to reach a tacit agreement between themselves and we will pick one.

    Anyway, the nextpetition is six months away now. It doesn''t concern us too much in any scenario. So, I am just giving a normal heads-up."

    Zeus didn''t even think of anything and just stayed put. Gods left one by one after the meeting and when Hel is about to leave, Zeus blocked her.

    "It seems like you are getting cocky Hel. You haven''t been cooperating with me for a while. You are not listening to my opinions and instructions and now you are doing that publicly. It seems like you are getting ahead of yourself."

    He looked at him coldly and said.

    "Why? Is it a new feeling to you?"

    "Hel, there is a reason why gods don''t mess with me that easily. It is not a great situation to be in if you be my enemy."

    "Really? Seems like the situation has changed. A mortal came to your home and threatened you to your face. You couldn''t do jack shit about it. Why are you trying to unt your power at me."

    Zeus became angry. He ground his teeth in rage.

    "What did you say?"

    "Zeus, you know you are powerful, but you are not as powerful as you think. You are in a state where you couldn''t make a move no matter how much you try. So, just let it be and suck it up.

    If you really want to make a move on me, go ahead and do it. I am no pushover. You know my strength very well. I can fight with you for years before you could even gain any upper hand over me.

    But before you decide on it, I dare you to reign in that mortal that spat on your face in your own domain.

    If you can''t even scare a mortal with your power. Don''t bother trying to scare me with it.

    Get lost."

    He felt relieved when she said this. She knew that because of her pettiness and hatred towards Sam, she worked with Zeus. But only after a few days, she understood that she made a mistake. She shouldn''t have worked with Zeus. Now she already made many moves that she wishes she could take back.

    She came to know many things the other gods are ignorant of.

    She is more concerned about those things than satiating Zeus'' ego. When she knew that Sam did what he did, she realized that things are about to get heated and she doesn''t have to care about what Zeus thought.

    Now his reputation among gods has taken a huge hit. He is now a loser who was threatened by a mortal and couldn''t do anything about it.

    No matter how many excuses he has about it. That is the situation.

    Nobody respects him anymore. Hel left Zeus alone and went back to Hell. She has to monitor the yers'' progress.

    Zeus went back to his domain and crazily issuedmands to his followers.

    Meanwhile, without anymands, the trio is operating the dusk organization in the most efficient way possible.

    They became great leaders as they led the war from the forefront.

    Their tactics are simple.

    First, they locked down an organization under Olympus. Because of Zeus''s new orders, the people are actively seeking the Dusk organization.

    So, after analyzing the terrain thoroughly and getting a gauge of the location, they released the news that they are from the Dusk organization.

    They position themselves in a way that is suitable for them.

    The organizations sent their people to go after them. Of course, after the scouting and examining, the next step for them is to obviouslyy down proper traps. The Dusk organization manipted the organizations into falling into obvious traps.

    Getting exposed to their already existing enemy organizations and sometimes making them pick fights with new people makingpletely new enemies out of nowhere.

    After the Dusk organization dragged that down for a few days and fought a battle, some of their agents will go to their target''s headquarters to cut offmunication and finish off the reserves left back there.

    Confusion, fear, maniption, destruction of their businesses, trust, and of course their faith.

    Throughout every step the dusk took, there is one thing inmon, they always let the rest of the people and the rest of the realm know that they are attacking because of the atrocities of the Olympian gods.

    They portrayed themselves as people who are at war with Olympus and their followers and they are not willing to let this go even if that Olympian god themselveses down and apologizes.

    The people don''t know the exact reason why the war started.

    But they had a feeling that whatever the gods or the Olympian follower''s gods, it must not have been a good thing for an organization like Dusk to appear out of nowhere and attack them.

    And of course, the trio worked very hard to give out a rtively positive outlook about dusk.

    While the war is still going on, Dusk already started academies in the realm and also made connections with other powers through their business channels. They outsource the factory productions after they sold the designs for manufacturing some products.

    The organizations that benefited from Dusk obviously sided with them. They helped them destroy the religious beliefs of the Olympians.

    This made the whole operation go smoothly.

    Every day, reigns change across the realms and most of them are victories of Dusk. There is an asional setback here and there. But even at that time, there are very few deaths or casualties. Whenever they hit a steel te, the first thing the Dusk organization did was go defensive.

    To protect themselves from losing too much.

    They made sure that they are not wasting too much of their resources and just left behind a huge trap with some highly explosive trap formations that cause elemental chaos.

    They are like ghosts.

    Days passed just like this.

    As the dusk went through the Olympus like they are hot knives cutting through the butter. Sam also did the same with the tower and the creatures inside.

    He killed them instantly and for some reason for the first month or so, he only used his lightning element. He got a very good understanding of elemental energy and started using it in a much more versatile manner.

    Of course, he took the principles he obtained from there to train other elements. After a long time, Sam underwent properbat training in hell. He was curious and unlike before, he just didn''t focus on obtaining enough corruption energy and tempering his body.

    Instead, he focused on improving his new strength.

    Hebined the new principles he learned with the previous moves and attacks he already had and created a whole new form of battling.

    He even decided that he would use these techniques instead of weapons or any other technique in the nextpetition.

    But he felt a bit conflicted as soon as he finished researching it.

    After all, he has too many methods to fight. He barely uses all the elemental energies he umted. Just a couple of elements and he ising out on top. Apart from that, there is hand-to-handbat and multiple weapon proficiency and then there are void style, ripple style, and repel style.

    Recently gained weaving and then there is the current method that could actually fuse with every other technique that he has.

    He doesn''t know what to do with all of them.

 Chapter 1770: Not a god

    Chapter 1770: Not a godSam is currently sitting with his legs crossed in the middle of hell.

    On the current floor, he is on, there is only one creature left. It is actually a creature formed in the shape of a human being. The Emperor of Orion. One of the first key people Sam defeated in Deste.

    The person that became the first stepping stone in creating Sam''s legacy as a ruling authority in Deste. The one defeat that gave him a chance to put his current base of operations.

    Sam sat there as he waited to get out. He is ying around with wind elemental energy from the ce that he is currently in.

    Only his fingers are moving right now.

    The wind around the king is moved in a very particr motion. It is just a single concentrated wind that is moving like a live snake. Various areas of that single current is hitting the king from different sides as it moved around.

    Sam is controlling it in a way that as the king is trying to reach Sam to kill him, the current is blocking his motions. No matter what the king is trying to do, he is standing with a circle that Sam has drawn around him.

    There is a single token made of stone with some runes ced on the King. Whenever he tried to use his lightning energy, it is being absorbed by that stone token.

    Sam just moved his fingers as if he is drumming his fingers for a tune. The wind current is like a living snake which gave him an idea.

    The wind slowly condensed much more before the image of snake appered. The wind snake is now controlling the king.

    In a way, this is not actually something new. Any person with good enough control would be able to do that. But what any person will miss at a first nce is that Sam is not just controlling wind elemental energy to create this snake.

    Infact, at this exact moment, the energy in his body is not being consumed. Except for the part of the energy that he used to make the snake appear, he is at full capacity. He is able to control that energy directly without any change in his energy capacity.

    This is not usually possible with him. It is impossible to keep the energy intact after ites out of the body for a long time. It is a norm that when people use their energy to attack someone, they need to feed energy to it constantly to keep it intact.

    But not only is Sam keeping it intact, the snake is now gradually getting bigger.

    He activated his energy vision as he looked at the snake while doing that. He could see the energy particles that are around the snake and in the surroundings the snake is moving, the energy is slowly being gathered.

    The snake is getting bigger and even at that moment, the energy in his body ispletely stable. Not a single grain of it is being consumed.

    He smiled as he controlled the king and when he suddenly felt that suction energy on his body, he snapped his fingers.

    He disappeared from the spot, but from that snap, a small golden spark was created. A me propagated. The golden me burned through the air in a snake like pattern, before it actually lit up the wind snake that was still move.

    The wind snake turned into snake of golden mes.

    It burned down the King in an instant.

    And even for this, Sam didn''t have to spend any energy.

    He converted the atmosphere spiritual energy at his fingers into fire elemental energy using his spiritual core. And that conversion is of a very small amount.

    But with that as a leverage and his new technique he gained from the formation of the previouspetition, he managed to convert everything into this golden me.

    While the king''s body was burned to ashes, Sam appeared in the grey space.

    Hel as usually stood there. She looked at Sam with a frown. And this time she is not doing it because of all the shit he usually stirs up. She already knew all the things that the dusk is doing.

    Even when Sam is here isted from the rest of the world Dusk is not stopping at all. The momentum is so widespread to the point, even as gods they are scared.

    They have never seen an organization that can rise up like the Dusk did. And all it took was just one visit from Sam.

    She couldn''t even imagine what Sam would have done if he is the one leading the Dusk.

    The casualties that are urring right now, regimes that are changing everyday, systems that are being copsed overnight, if all these people, literally millions of people, heard that all of this happened because of one man''s will.

    One man''s malice towards a god. She couldn''t even digest that fact.

    But that is not what is making her frown at the moment.

    She is frowning because of what Sam did just now back in the tower. The technique that he used to kill the king.

    She kind of felt that Sam is doing something that he shouldn''t be able to at his current state. She just couldn''t put her finger on it.

    She felt like Sam is tapping on a territory that should have been unchartered by so many people.

    She could only shake that feeling off and let thepetition continue.

    "This time, the person that ising to conduct yourpetition is not exactly epted as god. In fact, the faith group of his is so niche to the point the faith energy is negligible.

    He is one of the strongest creatures I have ever encountered and now I am announcing him like this is because he fucking vain.

    Introducing Lucifer the Devil.

    As soon as she spoke. A young man appeared beside her in ck smoke. He is handsome. It is to the point that handsome word appeared to be a little understatement when describing him. He had that regal presence.

    The one befitting of a ruler. But there is this wildness added to it.

    The one befitting a rebel.

    "I am not going to be involved in thepetition until this guy is done with you. If this guy offers you anything, be careful before you ept it. Your lives are not enough repay some of his favors. One thing he doesn''t do is lie, but you would be surprised to know how many fell victim to him even with that noble honesty.

    Be careful."

    Hel disappeared immediately.

    "Well, that''s bummer. She could have stayed and enjoyed the party. I am not beneath sharing my joy."

    The young man spoke with a smile.

    He looked at all seven yers with that smile.

    "How do you do kids? I heard a lot about you. I must say your presence deserves the boasts in your reputation. Stunning really.

    I am looking forward to our time well spent together. And I once again regret not trying hard enough to be epted by these snobbish gods that forbade from ying in this game.

    Can you image that? These self-proimed noble beings are not even broad hearted enough to include me, the best game yer in a game as exciting as this.

    But I hope to get as much in this short time frame as possible.

    So, going right to the point, for this round, I will not just assign you amon collective task. Instead, I have two deals for each and every one of you. Every individual has two tailor made choices. So, you will decide your challenge based on your pure luck.

    And you can thrive in that challenge based on yourpetence and some morality here and there.

    So, let''s start with discussing these. I will begin with Noah. Meanwhile the rest of you can wait."

    Lucifer''s voice sounded in that empty space. It felt so harmonic, pure and attractive.

    Sam shook his head out of the slight daze he was in.

    He doesn''t know if he is impressed, but throwing someone into such deep daze with just a few words is actually a hard task.

    Lucifer disappeared along with Noah within a few minutes he came back. But Noah disappeared. He did the same with the rest of the yers one by one.

    Sam was calledst. But he wasn''t taken away, since no one is here, he just stood there without any yers.

    Sam felt that the fair games might have been over by now as he looked Lucifer.

    "Sam, the yer hand picked by the Gamble himself impressive. I am awaiting your performance. Because it was praised too much by too many people at this point.

    I am d I got a chance now.

    By the way, I was told to rity to you that I am going to be fair to you. You don''t have to worry about any cheating. In fact, I am going to leave you a choice between two very bad options. So, pick one."

    Lucifer extended his hand with two envelopes.

 Chapter 1771: Woman

    Chapter 1771: WomanSam looked at the envelopes. One of them is red and another one is ck.

    "What is in them?"

    "Two tasks. You see, I am a bit of a game lover. I find joy in a proper game like no one else.

    So, I created a very special game for you kids this time. And this game has many variables. I will exin it to you after you choose one of these two tasks.

    The first task, the red envelope is a Compound mission of Escort and Assassination. Your task is to be someone''s bodyguard for a while and kill everyone thates after that person. Remember, you cannot leave anyone thates to kill your target of protection.

    The second task, is apound mission of Assassination and Escort. You have to definitely kill someone and you should escort some people."

    "Who should I protect and who should I kill?"

    "In both cases, there is onemon thing. You would be escorting some whiny brats and you would be killing the people who are after those whiny brats."

    I am not going to reveal any other information. All I will tell you is that the ck envelope has a higher risk of you dying, but the potential number of points you could gain from both the missions is same.

    I offered simr missions to your fellow yers and they didn''t even think twice before taking the red envelope."

    Sam thought for a moment and asked.

    "What is your choice?"

    "My choice?"

    "What mission do you want me to take?"

    "Interesting, no one asked me that question."

    "I did. So?"

    "I will prefer that you take the ck envelope. If what I heard about you is true, the

    Sam looked at the envelope curiously. He tried to pry it open, but all of a sudden he felt a piece of information entering his mind. He looked at Lucifer in shock. He wanted to speak up, but he was sucked out by a force and disappeared from the spot.

    "This should be interesting."

    Lucifer smiled as he disappeared as well.

    Sam reappeared in a ck tunnel. The tunnel seemed to be deep in some cave ruins. All he could see is darkness with his naked eye.

    But at this moment, he couldn''t care less about it. All he is thinking right now is the information that came to his head.

    It turned out that the mission is not as direct as Lucifer told.

    There are too manyyers to it and Sam felt kind of cheated when he thought about all of thoseyers.

    He opened the envelope and used took a look at it. Even in that darkness, he didn''t even need to use his spiritual sense the letter had that effect.

    There are just two sentences on it.

    "Find the woman buried deep inside the caves and unseal her. She is essential for the rest of your mission."

    Sam sighed and looked around.

    He waved his hand a bunch of insect puppets flew out of his storage. The puppets are going to do the hard work for her. All he has to do is wait while thinking about the game.

    From the information, he received the missions given to each and every yer are different. There is no ovep at all. But there is a chance for that ovep to happen and if things go south things will lead to yers trying to kill each other.

    Of course, with the current dynamic of the yers, unless it is Dayus, it is very unlikely for death to even happen.

    But even if the yers held back, the number of people and forces that are actually involved in this whole shitstorm is way too many.

    There is no explicit timeline too, so it is hard to know when the mission will be over.

    The worst part is that Sam doesn''t know what exactly the cause of the shit storm is.

    The only thing that he got from the message from this envelope is that currently there are almost 18 organizations that are involved with many gods and are now fighting each other while trying to snatch something from theirmon target.

    And themon target itself is not a single or small entity.

    There are seven organizations that also belong to different gods. One of the organizations actually belonged to Zeus.

    Another organization that solely worships Hera. Zeus'' wife and sister.

    These incestuous gods are actually deeply involved in whatever is happening.

    Then, there is one organization worshipping Loki, another one worshipping some more gods that Sam really didn''t know about.

    They seemed to be gods like Gambler. They exist in this world, but he never heard of them back on earth.

    These seven gods gave out abined boon to these seven organizations and the other eighteen organizations'' gods gave them the tip on this boon. Telling them to gain whatever that came out of that boon.

    Apparently, this boon will tip the power scales very much if it realized its full potential.

    But Sam already felt like the power scale has been destroyed.

    A war between twenty-five individual organizations all with their own selfish agendas. This is not going end well for any party that is involved.

    And for some reason, this woman is connected to all of this.

    Sam doesn''t know how yet, but he knows that there is a connection.

    As Sam is contemting things, he felt a signal from one of his puppets. He used shadow fusion to move swiftly through the tunnels and arrived at the location in a few seconds.

    Sam is surprised by what he saw. There is arge stone door that is guarded by a few guards.

    And his spiritual sense is unable to tear through the door. Even his energy vision is a bit off because the energy emitted by the door is too dense. He could barely make out some silhouettes behind the door, but he couldn''t see exactly what it is.

    He didn''t worry too much. He disappeared into the shadows and appeared behind one of the guards.

    *BAM*

    One hit to the back of the head and the guard fainted. The remaining guards are alerted, and Sam moved swiftly to finish them off one by one. He didn''t kill any. He just made them faint.

    Of course, before he could finish all of them, people inside were already alterted.

    As the door was about to open, Sam disappeared once again and he hid a bit far away while looking at the entrance.

    Four people came out of the door anxiously. Sam used this chance to take a look at what is inside his spiritual sense.

    He saw a woman lying on the ground. She is covered in some ragged clothes, her whole body seemed messy and she is extremely weak and unconscious.

    There are two more men in the room, one is sitting beside her as he is what seemed like examining her.

    The other man just looked at the man and the woman coldly.

    There is another thing Sam noticed.

    A statue.

    A veryrge statue of the celestial being that he just met.

    Lucifer is in his winged form. He was surprised, but not too much.

    Sam understood that the woman inside is the person that lucifer talked about. But he doesn''t know if these people are hostile or not.

    The door closed within that short interval and the formation on it seemed to have increased in intensity.

    Sam thought for a moment and decided to just barge in. If they are hostile he could kill them, if they are not he could see if he could use them. After all, none of them is stronger than him in terms of cultivation level.

    Which means all of them are weaklings.

    He disappeared from the spot and reappeared at the stone door.

    The four guards that came out and are looking around in frenzy noticed this.

    Sam looked at them calmly while extending his hand to the door.

    His spiritual energy spread across the door before he destabilized the formation as the guards ran toward him.

    *BOOM*

    The explosion sent the guards flying away. They are injured and unconscious.

    Meanwhile, Sam just walked through and looked at the three people inside.

    The person who was standing on the side took out a sword and looked at Sam.

    "Who the fuck are you?"

    His words and eyes areced with killing intent.

    The man who was examining the woman suddenly stood up and yelled.

    "You said, no one knows that this bitch is alive, that is why I came to help you. Now, what is happening?"

    "Even I don''t know who it is. I will deal with him. You get back to working on healing her. That whore is of no use to us if she isn''t healed."

    Sam sighed as he looked at them.

    Just from that one exchange, he understood what is happening. These people are definitely not friendly.

    He can just kill them. Things are a lot simpler now.

 Chapter 1772: Divine Woman

    Chapter 1772: Divine WomanTwo minutester.

    Sam sat on a stone protrusion that he created in the middle of the room. He looked at the two men kneeling in front of him. The woman is still lying on the floorpletely unconscious.

    Sam wanted to kill these people, but when Sam overpowered them within a second, they became subservient. But Sam could tell that it is all an act. They are afraid of him, that is true, but they are definitely not submitting to him.

    He wanted to just kill them. But the initial thought went away. Sam didn''t want to dispose of them directly. Even though he could get the required info after killing them, he just wanted to use them as a card when dealing with this woman.

    So, all Sam did was suppress them quickly and try to get some info out of them.

    "We were ordered to kill her by someone. Her cultivation ispletely sealed.

    We just wanted to save her and get some money from her. That is all."

    Sam didn''t speak for a moment and asked.

    "What do you know about this ce? Is this yours?"

    "No. This is the altar of Satan. Very few peoplee here. People believe that when someone sacrifices something worthy enough in this ce, Lucifer the Devil will satisfy one of their wishes. He never appeared himself, but stories say that he sent someone in his stead to solve those problems,

    For the past decade, this ce was sealed by some of the neighboring powers. They abolished the worship of Lucifer. So, we thought this is the best ce to hide."

    "How did you get in if this is sealed?"

    "There is one secret passage into the tunnels from the valley. A stream goes through this tunnel. We just used that and came here."

    Sam nodded and walked towards the woman.

    He ced his hand on her head and slowly started injecting his spiritual energy. He used his observation ability to check what happened to her.

    The first thing he noticed is obviously the seal that these people mentioned.

    Just like they said, her body is indeed sealed. And a seal is ced on the Spiritual core as well.

    But that is not even the most shocking thing he encountered.

    He saw something that made him feel a bit disturbed. Her body is internal bleeding and the ce where she is bleeding is actually the ce where a uterus is supposed to be.

    Her uterus has been cruelly and forcefully removed. The worst part of it all is when Sam injected his energy to try to heal her, he realized that the people actually made it so that the Uterus cannot grow back.

    They sealed the wound by partially healing it and it seems like it has been a long time since the severance has urred. It is impossible to remove that at this point of time.

    Sam didn''t like this situation one bit. He immediately stopped bleeding and started performing surgery. While he is doing that, his shadows held the two men in their ce.

    After over an hour, Sam finished the surgery and healed all her ailments, except he didn''t manage to heal her uterus.

    He felt a bit disappointed. He felt a bit angry too for some reason. He might not know the full story, but he sure as hell knows that whatever happened is a nowhere near eptable thing.

    Sam fed her some medicine after the surgery is done and as the three men watched she slowly woke up. She still didn''t have much energy left, but she is not going to die of these injuries. All she needs is some time to recover.

    The first thing she saw is Sam''s stoic face and she became instantly nervous.

    She tried to get up and run, but her legs didn''t cooperate. Because her cultivation is still sealed, her body is not recovering at the pace that it should have.

    Sam helped her sit down properly. But as soon as he touched her, she screamed.

    "LET GO!!!"

    Sam froze on the spot and he felt some weird energy trying to hold him in his ce. It is a very familiar feeling, but it is so faint and so weak that if Sam isn''t so observant, he wouldn''t have even bothered to notice it.

    But when he understood what kind of energy it is, he was shocked.

    "I am sorry if I made you nervous. But I am here on someone''s behalf to meet you."

    Sam took out an envelope and gave it to her.

    She didn''t want to touch it, but Sam said calmly.

    "If I wanted to kill you or do anything else, I could do it with a snap of my fingers. I don''t need to have some borate n to do so."

    He pushed the envelope forward. That woman finally took the envelope and as soon as she touched it, she fell into some kind of daze for a moment.

    After two minutes, she looked at Lucifer''s statue and smiled. Her smile is filled with self-pity.

    Sam didn''t say anything and let her take her own time.

    But after five minutes, she looked at the two men that brought her here and said to Sam.

    "We can talk now. But can you kill those two? Only then will I be able to talk to you. I cannot stand their presence."

    Sam didn''t even look at them. The shadows slit their throats before they could even speak. He has no use for them.

    She finally heaved a sigh of relief as she spoke.

    "My name is Maya. If you want to understand my story, you need to understand my constitution. I have Pseudo Divine Constitution. It means¡­"

    "You are born to a couple of Divine Cultivators who are at their prime and you were born with a special body which hosts the Divine energy that shouldn''t exist in Mortal Bodies.

    Your physique is better than anyone of your peers and you have inherent senses that are better than most creatures. And on top of it all, you are able to perceive and sense Divine energy as well as Celestial energy without any effort.

    This makes you a living detector for the Divine energy resources that are very rare and almost impossible to find."

    Sam finished her sentence, saving her the trouble of exining herself.

    Maya was a bit surprised, but she nodded and said.

    "Yes, that is the gist of it. But what you might not know is that even among the very few who possessed this constitution, I am in a different league. It is to the point every cell of my body possess some Divine energy."

    "So?"

    "This made me much more attractive to the gods. I followed multiple religions and prayed for multiple gods, based on the beliefs of my mother, father, and my mentor.

    And all these godsbined gave me a gift. They enhanced my constitution and purified my soul. I am closer to the holy beings more than any other creature at my level."

    "I don''t know if that is something to brag about. So, what happened after you got this blessing."

    "Well, it turned out that is not a blessing for me. It is for the seven organizations that are following the seven gods I prayed to. The gods told these seven organizations about a very secret hidden benefit that my body possesses.

    A benefit people didn''t really think of.

    So, the seven organizations that were initially trying to poach me, stopped that and ganged up together to do something else. Then only I realized that the secret these gods mentioned is actually in my womb.

    I was forcefully shared by these seven organizations and over the past seven years, I have given birth to seven children. Every child was conceived by me when I was forcefully taken by the geniuses of these seven forces.

    Now they all have a child with a variant of Pseudo Divine Constitution. I was a breeding object for them and they took all of my seven children away from me.

    And every time they consummated with me, they felt their bodies purified bit by bit. It was addictive. I was vilified every chance they got. I prayed for all the seven gods all my life, and I got to talk to them more than anyone else I knew. But during these seven years, they never bothered to any one of my pleas.

    After the seven powers each had a child, now it is time for them to get rid of me before the neighboring powers came looking for me. So, they sealed my cultivation, removed my uterus, and then sentenced me to death.

    But one of the people who mated with me didn''t want me to die. So, he assigned these idiots to the task of killing as a guise and take me away to hide somewhere.

    But these two guys got greedy and had their own ns. They took me to this abandoned ce and tried to heal me to have their own benefits.

    When I lost consciousness I looked at that statue. Lucifer, the Devil goes against everything I was ever taught since I was a kid and prayed for once.

    And it seems like after I was abandoned by all of the gods, the Devil epted me into his embrace. You are now here.

 Chapter 1773: Recruitment

    Chapter 1773: RecruitmentSam looked at her and sighed.

    Maya really did go through a lot and just like he imagined, the situation is something he really hated.

    Right now, his heart is boiling with inexplicable rage. He is trying his best to control it. Sam is a cynic and he never held anything in this world in high regard. Very few people''s problems were his concern.

    And he was never a hero or a rescuer for the weak. He never tried to be one and he is sure that he wouldn''t be one in the future.

    Everything he had done until now was always for personal gain. He was very sure of that and always made sure the other people understood it.

    The only thing people still do deals with him is that he was always fair. He never tried to rip people off and he never bothered to pull the wool over one''s eyes. It was beneath him.

    But in this stone cold-hearted life of his, he only had soft spot for a few things. Orphans and children and that extended to the helpless mothers a bit. Right now, the woman in front checked all the boxes if he took all of her children into the ount.

    He knew how nuts the religious people usually are. For a woman who practically grew up worshipping gods and getting their blessings, he can understand how much she has to suffer to give that up and start worshipping the Devil.

    In his previous life, he never knew who his mother was, it was a lifelong pursuit and even when he had all the power in the world, he was unable to find her. But here, seven children are being separated from their mother and he has the power to stop it.

    He just felt like he should do it. Coincidentally, it seems like it is the task as well.

    He sat in front of her and said.

    "What do you want me to do? What do you need?"

    She looked at Sam and said.

    "I don''t know why the Devil answered by calls, and I don''t know why he sent me. But you are myst hope.

    Please save my kids. I don''t want them to be grown as tools for these ns. They will be fought over by dozens of organizations. They will be fighting for their lives every second. I don''t want them to have that life.

    I don''t care whether I live or die, but I don''t want them to experience the cruelties like I did. Please save them."

    She knelt on the floor as she pleaded.

    Sam touched her head and helped her sit up.

    He wanted to wipe her tears off, but he stopped himself from doing it and told.

    "I will."

    Those are the only two words he spoke. He didn''t say anything else. He went to the corpses and absorbed their memories before walking out of the door. The guards that were unconscious were all killed as he absorbed their memories as well.

    Then he went back in and looked at her as he contemted on how to proceed. From the memories of the dead, he is sure whatever she is saying is true.

    He also now understood what the boon is and what exactly lucifer meant by the guarding and assassination missions.

    This woman''s life is in danger. At least one person outside of this cave knows that she is alive. Father of one of her seven children must be now panicking not knowing where she is and must have already started searching.

    This means, sooner orter other people will also know this as well.

    This will increase the risk to her life, which Sam should minimize. And then, he has to kill at least a few people before getting those kids and bringing them back here.

    All of this should happen when twenty-five organizations that are almost on the same level are fighting together.

    Each organization has at least one Divine ne cultivator. This means, there are twenty-five Divine ne cultivators watching over the whole thing.

    This is a veryplicated and difficult mission.

    But he didn''t want to dy this much longer. He needs to start somewhere and he felt that the first order of business is to reduce her risk.

    He walked towards her slowly and spoke.

    "I will undo your seal now. Even though your body is physically very weak, it will still recover. Unfortunately, recovering your uterus will take a lot longer and I might not even be capable of it. It seems like Divine ne cultivator caused that.

    My divine energy is neither adequate nor potent enough to undo it.

    But you will recover your strength slowly."

    As he extended his hand, she let her guard down.

    Sam closed his eyes and gradually unlocked the seal bit by bit. For some reason, he trusted the woman. He felt that her tears as a mother are not false. Even if he is fooled, he could live with it afterward, but at the moment, he trusted her and unlocked her powers.

    On top of it all, the seal is not even that sophisticated. The seal ced on Marian was way more powerful andplicated.

    Sam set her free as she slowly recovered her energy.

    "You can settle down first. I will go out and investigate the situation from the information I have. You can give me the rest of the detailster and we wille up with a n."

    She thanked him and almost wanted to ask if he could really do this.

    She can see that Sam is powerful, but she can also see that he is not a Divine ne cultivator. There is a limit to his power.

    Sam didn''t see her dilemma, he just went outside using the stream that went through the caves.

    He took off on harbinger cutting through the wind as he made his way towards the target.

    The first step in this whole process is to minimize the life threat. So, the first target is actually the fourth father. Father of the fourth kid. His name is Chasin. Luckily, he is also the nearest to them. Only three cities away.

    Sam went to the nearest city that is also under the control of Chasin''s organization.

    It didn''t even take an hour for him to be there. Sam did his usual thing. He went to a bar and ordered a drink as he listened to the conversations around him.

    Of course, he also let out his specter and shadows to do a thorough search and find out any useful information.

    One thing he immediately understood is that the organization is recruiting. They are being targeted by two organizations.

    Currently, this city is one of the closest to the main headquarters of their organization, it is currently full of people that are trying to make it big and people that are trying to get some information.

    Sam stayed there for a few hours as he kept on drinking. He is trying to see if he could find any inkling of opportunity.

    At this moment a waitress came to him with his next drink and asked.

    "Are you here to join the army of the young master?"

    Sam looked at her in confusion.

    "Young master Chasin is actually trying to recruit youngsters of your age. They should be at Astral ne cultivation.

    But it has be hard for the young master to screen every tom dick and harry. You seem like a great guy, so I don''t want you to waste your time here. If you want to try your luck, you can go the Myriad inn, that is where the recruiters are staying.

    Of course, the threshold to get a room is very high."

    "Why are you giving me this information?"

    Sam asked with a raised eyebrow. Thedy blushed a bit and just took the empty ss before it went away.

    "Well, that is a first."

    Sam chugged the drink and paid the bill. He also left arge tip for the waitress before making his way to the Myriad inn.

    There are a lot of people gathered outside of the inn. At the entrance, there is a young man standing with a long sword in his hands.

    After some snooping, Sam understood what is happening.

    Anyone who wants to enter the inn a person has to meet three criteria.

    The first one is to be ofte-stage Astral ne cultivation at least.

    The second one is to defeat the young man standing in the front.

    The third one is that they have to be rich enough to pay for one month''s stay as a deposit.

    Only after meeting these three could one make it in.

    It seems like the information that Sam thought that the waitress secretly slipped is not that big of a secret.

    A lot of people here seemed to know it, but everyone acted as if they don''t know it. They must have also gotten a tip just like he did.

    Sam went through the crowd and went to challenge.

 Chapter 1774: Mission from Targets

    Chapter 1774: Mission from TargetsSam stepped forward and issued the challenge.

    The young man took out his long sword and rushed forward.

    Sam slowly tapped on the ground and he disappeared from the opponent''s line of sight. Before he could realize it, he is already hit with a stunning kick on the side of his head. He was done for.

    He fell on the floor face unconsciously.

    Sam walked inside without caring much. He threw a spatial ring with the payment and walked into the inn.

    The inn manager was stunned by the development. He went to check on his candidate.

    The young man woke up in a daze and he seemed to have forgotten why he was in there in the first ce. Sam''s hit is just precise enough to make him sleep.

    The manager immediately ran inside to a room within the inn. He knocked on the door and said in a very low voice.

    "A young man appeared and defeated our target in just one hit."

    A paper slip came from under the door which the manager picked up and left.

    Meanwhile, an attendant escorted Sam to his room where he settled down for now. He spread his spiritual sense deliberately without hiding as if he wanted to look at every single room within the inn. Many people are of course offended by that.

    But they are also a bit vary. They didn''t want to provoke someone mindlessly. Particrly when that someone is so bold enough to provoke everyone else like this.

    Meanwhile, one shadow after another started returning to Sam as he waited.

    He got some of the information he required.

    It turned out, the waitress didn''t explicitly slip this information because she liked him. It is because there is someone in the bar who is monitoring all the youngsters and then instructed the waitress whenever someone caught his eye.

    Sam felt a bit amused by this mindless and unnecessarily tedious procedure. Chasin and his organization seemed to be scared that someone they didn''t want will enter their forces in their vulnerable time.

    Sam never really understood why these people even recruit mercenaries in the first ce. In a state of war, it is always best to use their most loyal forces. There is no point in having this extra manpower that could just be bought with some money.

    As he was thinking about this after a few hours, someone came to meet him.

    It is the manager of the inn.

    "Hello, sir. I am here on behalf of the Young master Chasin''s right-hand man. Captain Ross.

    From what we know, you might be interested in joining young master Chasin''s forces. Is that true?"

    Sam looked at him calmly and nodded.

    "That is great to know. But as you might know, there are a lot of enemies of the young masters that want to take advantage of this current situation. We might be in dire need of strong men like you, but we cannot expose ourselves that easily.

    So, Captain Ross gave you a task.

    If you aplish it, not only would you be given a permanent position as an associate of young master Chasin, but you will also be given a town for you to rule.

    Please consider this."

    He gave a scroll to Sam and left.

    Sam looked through the scroll and chuckled.

    The scroll has details of the mission along with a picture of a person. Sam''s mission is to basically take the head of a youngster from one of the Chasin''s enemy forces.

    There are even some details regarding the kid''s location.

    Sam shook his head and sighed. This is tedious and idiotic.

    He just left the inn immediately and got out of the city while collecting all of his specters and shadows. He gathered enough info which he went through while going to the required location.

    The whole city is currently filled with Chasin''s forces and they are trying to recruit new people into their forces.

    One of the specter souls managed to get some information from Captain Ross and his team directly.

    They were discussing Sam, they also discussed their current predicament. It turned out, Chasin is actually not recruiting people as forces for his organization.

    Instead, he is trying to use them to find out the whereabouts of Maya and the people that kidnapped her. Just like Sam expected, he is indeed focusing on finding Maya.

    And this is the perfect opportunity.

    Sam arrived at the location within half an hour. Which is actually very long. This location is near the second city that Sam wanted to visit initially. But anyway, now he doesn''t even need to focus on scouting that much.

    He thought for a moment and opened his dimensional drifter. He used it to arrive back in the cave.

    Maya who is meditating already recovered half of her spiritual energy, but she is still weak because of mental and physical fatigue.

    She was alerted by Sam''s presence.

    Sam just nodded at her and went to collect the corpses of the men that he had killed. Before he was about to leave, he turned to Maya and thought of something.

    He took out a spatial ring and a pair of fresh clothes for her.

    "Can you change into these and give me your clothes? Also, your spatial ring and if possible, I would like your hair and some of your blood too."

    Maya was stumped. She didn''t even know what to say about that. But Sam didn''t n on exining much. He just asked her to trust him.

    Maya hesitated before going into a corner and changing quickly. She also cut a bit of her hair. The hair that was initially reaching her knees is now cut to her shoulders.

    Sam took the long hair and some of her blood along with her clothes and the spatial ring.

    He used the dimensional drifter again to go back.

    While traveling here, he figured something out that will help him divert Chasin''s attention away for a bit.

    So, he decided to implement the n without any dy.

    Sam went to the destined location and spread out his insect puppets to look for the target. The target is not that strong. Even with all of his entourage, it wouldn''t take much effort for Sam to deal with him.

    He located their base of operations immediately and reached there.

    Sam''s appearance was direct and from the front. He didn''t bother hiding his own presence too much. He just arrived there as if he is going for a walk.

    When these people saw him, they were a bit shocked. But soon they all gathered in front of him and initiated the confrontation.

    Sam looked at the target who is at the back of the whole crowd.

    "You know, if you really want to be a good leader, you should be at the front of your group. Not at the rear."

    "Who the fuck are you? What are you doing here?"

    "Captain Ross, the right hand man of the Chasin group sent me here. To take your head."

    Everyone frowned. They became cautious. No guy with a sane mind will announce their arrival like this unless they are extremely confident in what they are doing.

    Sam raised his aura without even waiting for their reply.

    He is using wind elemental energy. His spiritual energy condensed in the form of a bird. It is almost a replication of the Roc. It densely condensed together with his own spiritual energy and Sam took a deep breath as he moved his fingers.

    The roc started flying around in the air as it cut through the surroundings. As the bird started moving, his energy from his body is not being consumed anymore.

    Instead, the spiritual energy and the wind at the surroundings started responding to the changes. It gathered around the bird projection making it grow bigger. Along with that another bird projection appeared beside it.

    It is also growing rapidly almost matching the size of the first one.

    And not a single or drop of his own spiritual energy is being affected.

    The birds zoomed toward the group in front and cut the throats of two people.

    All Sam did is move his fingers and as he is doing, he could feel the mental strain a bit, and also there is a weird strain on his spiritual core.

    This is part of the new techniques that he developed from the learning of Osiris'' city formation.

    Even though this doesn''t seem like much, this is the foundational principle of what he is nning to do next and he is right now trying to practice and strengthen the foundation.

    What is happening is Sam is trying to utilize the external spiritual energy without using any of his own. Of course, apart from the initial expense.

    He is using his mental strength and used the initial spiritual energy that formed the attack as a medium tomunicate with the surrounding spiritual energy.

    And he is making that external spiritual energy resonate with the spiritual energy attack to make it act as he wanted to.

    As he kept on doing that. The two wind birds turned to four in no time and they turned to eight in just two minutes.

    Only Sam started having a very slight headache. But the task didn''t take long for him to aplish and soon only the target is alive. The rest of the group is dead.

 Chapter 1775: Mysterious Powerful guy

    Chapter 1775: Mysterious Powerful guySam looked at the young man nonchntly.

    "Who are you? Who do you work for?"

    "I know you don''t work for Ross. Chasin doesn''t have enough capital to hire someone like you."

    "You are right, he doesn''t. This is kind of a voluntary situation."

    "Let me go. I will pay whatever he offered you."

    "Are you stupid? You just said that he cannot afford me and I said I am doing this voluntarily. What made you think that you can fucking buy me?"

    Sam said as he closed his fist. All the wind birds that are flying around, zoomed towards the target and shed at the centre of his abdomen. This caused a concentrated mini-tornado of winddes to ur in that small area, destroying himpletely.

    Sam just looked at him and in the surroundings. He picked one of the female corpses and used the spectre''s ability to suck thest remaining vitality from the very core of the body.

    The body started withering quicker than it should.

    The energy that was sucked out of the body made the skin go dry. The flesh is dried out and the skin is sticking to the bones. The hair fell off.

    Sam took out the blood he got from Maya and started injecting into dried-out dead body. Of course, it didn''t really make the body that different. Sam is just trying to cover some bases with this. First, the body ispletely unrecognizable and the traces of the blood and hair he just attached will give the scent and some aura.

    Sam destroyed the uterus of the deadbody and finally Sam closed his eyes and drew a very small inscription on the back of the deadbody. It dissolved into the spine and it started creating a very slight resonation.

    The formation that imitated the faint residual aura of Maya.

    He stored the prepared corpse and then went on to collect the corpses of the whole group. He used the dimensional drifter to go back to meet Captain Ross'' subordinate. He directly walked through the front door of the inn and met with the manager.

    "Tell them, the mission is done."

    That is all he said. He just went back to his room waiting for the call.

    Soon the manager came back running to his room.

    "Sir, Captain Ross is calling you."

    "Lead the way."

    Sam didn''t care much about the manager''s reaction. The manager is shocked out of his wits. He didn''t expect that Sam woulde back in less than an hour and say that the mission is done. It is obviously not believable.

    But if it is, then in his eyes, Sam''s range increased by a thousandfold.

    Sam walked to Captain Ross'' team.

    Inside the room, there are ten people are sitting at different corners of the room. In the middle of it all stood a man behind a table. He had an aura of authority and arrogance.

    "This manager said that you finished the mission. I don''t believe it. Are you really that good? Do you know the consequences of lying to me?"

    Sam just sighed and waved his hand. A bunch of corpses piled up one after another.

    And out of all of them, only two corpses caught that guy''s eyes.

    The corpse of the target of course. Then there is the corpse that Sam himself prepared.

    Currently, that corpse has the spatial ring, attire, and hair of a Maya. The aura is also faintly simr to Maya''s own aura.

    Captain Ross obviously saw her before and when he sensed her presence, he felt like he fell into a dream. This is not something he expected.

    "Whose corpse is this?"

    He asked directly pointing at it.

    "I don''t really know. It is like that by the time I reached there. It seems like there is some weird ritual going on and she is in the middle of an inscription circle. I just brought it back. I kind of feel like she is rted to you guys. Otherwise, there is no reason for them to kill her in such a cruel way."

    "You¡­ Youe with me. We are going to meet Young master Chasin."

    Sam raised an eyebrow.

    This is going way smoother than it should.

    Sam didn''t even feel any pressure until now.

    Within two hours, they directly went to meet the young master Chasin.

    Sam got a good look at him. From the strength point of you, his instincts are telling him that Chasin is pretty decent for his level.

    But he is still weak. His aura or demeanor are that of a great warrior or a killer. He is rtively mild in that sense. As Sam evaluated him, Ross already filled in the details.

    Chasin held his blond hair in shock as he looked at Sam once again. He tried to pry and check Sam''s cultivation level, but he wasn''t able to do so, which made him a bit surprised.

    "May I know who you are and what your objective here is? A person of your power should definitely notck opportunities to work like a normal mercenary."

    "True. I just got bored as I was traveling. I heard that there is some excitement going on here. 25 organizations fighting each other. A good warzone. I don''t really care who I fight for. Your location is the nearest for me, so you got lucky."

    Everyone in the room got shocked.

    Almost all the personnel in the room are either loyal subordinates andpanions of Chasin or some elderly from the n that support him.

    This must be their base of operations for thisrge-scale war.

    Sam looked around as he tried to find any trace of a child.

    It seemed like he was being a bit too obvious.

    "Are you searching for something?"

    Sam stayed silent for half a second and spoke.

    "No. I am just gauging how long it will take to kill all of you if I want to do so."

    Sam''s reply brought another cold silence to the room. Chasin shook his head to get out of the daze and looked at Sam. He felt like he got a jackpot. He felt like this is what he is looking for and Sam''s presence is going to solidify his position in the war.

    "Sir, I will be straightforward with you. I want to enlist your service. Since you want war, you can fight my war on my behalf. Just tell me what you need for that."

    "I don''t mind fighting your war. But I need you to be honest with me. Why the fuck are twenty-five organizations fighting for little kids? What is so special about them?"

    Sam asked so nonchntly as if he couldn''t really see the point to it.

    "How do you know that?"

    Chasin suddenly became vignt.

    "Flea bugs in the next realm know this information. What do you think? Twenty-five organizations are openly fighting. Do you think information is hidden? At this point, there are almost no secrets. So, if you give me an answer, I might support you all the way.

    And don''t try to brush me off. You can not afford me with your worth. So, when you are prepared to answer, you can contact me. Meanwhile, I will be off. I am hungry."

    Sam said as he rubbed his stomach and left the room.

    One of Chasin''s subordinates, a direct bodyguard wanted to make a move.

    "Stop¡­"

    Before he could finish the sentence, a wind de cut the arm he extended out. Sam didn''t even try to turn around or talk. He is stillzily rubbing his belly and the arm is cut off.

    "Goodbye."

    That is all he said as he reached the door.

    Sam disappeared but his image is stuck in their minds. Just like that, within a day, Sam already ced himself as some mysterious powerful guy in the minds of some stupids who started a war that is way beyond their scale.

 Chapter 1776: Deal

    Chapter 1776: DealSam went back to the cave.

    Maya is meditating when he got there and she opened her eyes as soon as she sensed her presence. She looked at Sam and her eyes glowed a bit.

    Sam looked at her with a frown and asked.

    "What are you doing?"

    "I am looking into you."

    She said in a very calm tone and soon the glow disappeared. Sam didn''t feel good about the action.

    "You have a Divine aura enveloping you. It is not yours. It is almost like you have been in the presence of god. Which shouldn''t be possible."

    She spoke in a confused and surprised tone. It is almost like she is lost in a maze not knowing where she should go.

    Sam looked at her and he is also a bit surprised. He knew that her body is special. But even in the material provided by Gambler, there is not much info about this. Her body is so rare and so abnormal to the point, the gods themselves don''t know exactly how it is formed. At least that is what he assumed.

    But the fact that she could say that Sam has been in presence of gods is very shocking to him. It is something that revealed something about him without him trying to.

    Sam didn''t answer that and spoke.

    "Let''s talk. I made contact with Chasin.

    I wasn''t able to see your kid though. I want to know more about these people before I make my next move."

    Maya was stunned. She didn''t even know what to say for a moment and the fact that her question hasn''t been answered didn''t even strike her mind for the moment.

    "You came into contact with Chasin?"

    Maya stood up in anxiety.

    "Yes."

    "What happened? How did you get in touch with him so fast?"

    She started asking questions. There is a sense of vignce in her voice. She started having a very slight suspicion that Sam was already connected with Chasin and the whole issue. But when she remembered the message she got in her mind when she touched the envelope, it disappeared.

    "I have my ways. Your blood, clothes, and hair helped a lot though. Anyway, currently, we are in a semi-contractual situation where I have a slight upper hand because he needs me more than I need him.

    I already established that situation. So, if you give me more information about him, it will help me a lot."

    "I don''t really know that much about them. I came to this realm as a pilgrimage after the disappearance of my parents."

    "Disappearance?"

    "They went to explore apletely new realm and never returned back."

    "A new realm?"

    "Yes, a new realm''s spatial wormhole has been connected to our realm. The realm is closed from the rest of the world and the civilizations inside are in contact with only the other civilizations within that realm. They had no outer contact.

    But after some time, the wormhole has been closed. They never came back."

    Sam became curious about this. He already came across one of the closed realms once. The ce where he learned the weaving.

    But he didn''t have time to explore this line of inquiry.

    "Anyway, even if you havee here on a pilgrimage, you should have been in contact with these people even though you were forced. No matter how small the detail is, let me know."

    ''The most information you could get from me, is their daily routine, eating habits, and some information on their temper. Mostly personal information of the men that raped me to conceive. I won''t know much about the organizational information.

    I can tell you all I know. But I don''t think it would be useful."

    Sam couldn''t help but chuckle at the information.

    "Oh, you don''t know what that information could be used for. Just tell me all you know. In fact, we can take one person at a time. Focus all you can and give me all the information you have on Chasin.

    From his appearance to his sleeping habits, I would want to know. Don''t leave out any detail."

    Maya went silent for a minute and spoke.

    "Chasin is the most talented kid in their organization. At least that is what I heard. But he didn''t have enough influence or support, because his father is dead. Even to use me, he had topete with all kinds of political ploys and crush the rest of his peers in his generation with overwhelming strength.

    It seems like when it came to me, the n''s ancestor came out of his seclusion and held thepetition in which Chasin seeded.

    And I learned all of it because he constantly rambled about this. He whines a lot and he constantly thinks that life is unfair to him.

    He is ambitious and he has a lot of strength, but he doesn''t have the intelligence. He has too many people that he recruited that do the bidding for him.

    He wears a very special kinds of clothes extracted from special silk and he eats a lot. Even when it is not needed, he craves delicacies.

    That is all I know about him."

    Sam heard everything and nodded.

    "That is a lot and I am sure it is very useful. Where do you think the kid is at this point?"

    "I don''t know. But if I have to guess, the child might be in their n headquarters."

    "So, he tried to keep you alive. Why is that?"

    "I don''t know that either. But I am assuming for physical pleasure."

    Sam nodded and waited for a moment before asking.

    "How is your battle prowess?"

    Maya didn''t know how to answer that. After some thought she replied.

    "My cultivation level is decent, which you already know, but among my peers, I don''t think I will fare that well. I can take care of arge margin of my peers, but if a skilled person makes a move, it will be very difficult for me to deal with them."

    "So, your constitution doesn''t have any special advantages in battle?"

    "I don''t know if it counts, but I can actually wield multiple elements. My core doesn''t have a single significant affinity to elements. Instead, it is almost like I canmunicate with different elemental energies in nature to fight for me."

    "You can control multiple elements?"

    This is another surprise to Sam. He closed his eyes and thought of something. If she could do that, then that means, her body is not exactly normal. Her body is definitely not part of any constitutions that he knows of.

    "Can you show me an example? I want to see how good your ability is."

    "Yes, but it is not actually a great ability for a long battle. It drains too much of my energy."

    As she spoke, she closed her eyes. Energy surged and a dark red me appeared all around her. Followed by arge earthen wall that appeared behind her.

    Sam is looking at it with his energy vision and he could see what is happening.

    As she said, he cannot see her spiritual energy transforming into these attacks. These attacks are actually forming out of thin air from the energy of the environment itself.

    This is much more effortless than Sam''s newfound technique using energy resonance, but there is one thing Sam observed. Her energy is being consumed even though it is not directly rted to the attacks.

    Instead, it is being consumed by her body itself. It is almost like it is burning and he could sense that her soul is reacting to that energy. It is almost like the soul is taking the energy as fuel and ismanding the nature

    This is certainly not possible for Sam to do. He can barely let his soul and mental energy connect with the environment and make it resonate the way he wants.

    Many theories started formting in his head.

    At this moment, Sam suddenly sensed something.

    Lucifer''s statue glowed at the moment and the time seemed to have stopped.

    "Hello Sam, how are you doing? I hope you liked the task I gave you."

    "It hasn''t even been an hour since I started the task. Why are you asking me this? What do you want?"

    Sam asked in annoyance.

    Lucifer chuckled and said.

    "It seems like you are interested in knowing more about her body, so I came here to give a deal."

    "A deal?"

    "Yes, don''t you know? Granting favors and wishes is actually my thing. I like doing that for people.

    So, I have a deal for you. Bring one of the children by tomorrow and I will let you know what is so special about her body. Do you want to take this deal?"

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "Sure. Why not?"

    "Good. See you tomorrow then."

    Lucifer disappeared from the spot and time resumed.

    "I will take my leave. You take rest and recover."

    Sam said to Maya and left.

 Chapter 1777: Assassination

    Chapter 1777: AssassinationSam arrived back in the city. He went straight to the bar.

    He already knew that the bar staff works under Chasin, so he thought of something and took out one of the beasts from the Divine dimension.

    By now, there is a world of its own within and most of the beasts he is rearing are not even for battle. They are just for his consumption.

    He took arge fish-type beast and ced it on the counter.

    "Tell your chef to cook this one for me. I want it to be spicy."

    He paused and thought of something before he took out a jar of wine.

    "Tell him to use this in the cooking. If he does it well, I will reward him with another jar of this wine."

    He behaved as if he owned the ce. But the bar staff are not even the slightest bit offended. Chasin already passed orders to inform him whenever Sam arrives at the bar.

    In fact, he wanted to talk to Sam immediately after he left, but Sam disappeared and Chasin has no means to contact him directly. He only prayed that Sam would appear as soon as possible and he indeed did.

    A waitress came to Sam.

    "Sir, we reserved our VIP booth for you. Captain Ross has stated that we should provide you with the best service possible. Please let me escort you to your booth. Your food will be served there."

    Sam smiled and followed the waitress.

    He arrived at the booth and waited for twenty minutes before a delicious fragrance hit his nose. Therge fish that was cooked perfectly came to him. And as if it was on cue, Captain Ross also arrived at along with another cloaked person.

    Sam looked at him and smiled.

    "Didn''t think you woulde this fast."

    The person in cloak revealed himself. It is none other than the young master Chasin.

    Chasin is stunned for a moment. He didn''t even notice Sam''s statement as he locked his eyes on the fish.

    "Come join me."

    Sam said with a smile and Captain Ross nudged Chasin.

    Both of them Sam down and Chasin spoke.

    "Sir, I will be honest with you. I am not at a liberty to share all of the information regarding this war. But all I can tell you is that the seven ns in this region recently obtained some treasures. They can increase our strength significantly in theing years.

    The remaining organizations cannot stand this and are trying to fight it out with us. That is the reason for the war. As for what the treasure is, I cannot share the information as it involves a lot of our n secrets.

    I will really appreciate your help and I can guarantee that I canpensate you to the best of my ability."

    Sam just chuckled.

    He is actually a bit skeptical about this whole n working at the start. He knew that thesting impression he will give out as a mysterious person will definitely help, but after learning what Chasin''s situation from Maya, he is sure this would work.

    In an organization that is constantly undermining authority, it is already a miracle that he has these few elders under him. Sam is sure that there should be some powerful Peak stage Astral ne cultivators within the n that is being led by a Divine ne cultivator.

    Even if that Divine ne cultivator is just an Initial stage one.

    So, right now Sam''s strength is something that Chasin desperately needs. Sam decided to use it to his full extent.

    As Sam stayed silent, Chasin kept on getting distracted by the fragrant fish smell.

    Sam noticed this and smiled.

    "We can talkter. Let''s eat. I got this fish from a different realm. You wouldn''t find it anywhere here. So, taste it."

    Chasin didn''t even hesitate before he took a bite. He closed his eyes and savored it with all his heart.

    Captain Ross is a little bit embarrassed. Their desire of Chasin to eat food like this is somewhat unnatural. A person at his level of cultivation should at least have some self-control. But this guy is so addicted to eating food that even in this situation he is focused more on fish than Sam.

    Sam nodded at this.

    This is exactly what he wanted to test out.

    For Maya to even say that this guy is very into delicacies, for a person like Maya who is in the worst situation of her life, it is very natural for her to forget a lot of insignificant things. That is why Sam thought that any information given by her would be significant no matter how minor it appeared to be.

    And his guess is right.

    This guy is a food junkie.

    It is to the point even when he was raping a woman, the woman actually took note of this.

    "Okay, since you are being honest with me, I will fight for you. But before that, I need to know some more details."

    "Please ask away."

    "Who are the rivals that you have within your family and who are the allies? I need to know these details so that I can keep an eye on who is approaching me and what intentions. Usually, I don''t really like being involved in political things.

    So, if someone approaches with these bullshit offers, I won''t be taking it lightly."

    Chasin and Captain Ross exchanged a nce. They didn''t know how to react for now. Even though Chasin hated the guts of his own n members, he didn''t really feelfortable about giving out all the details regarding his rivals within the n to an outsider.

    Sam noticed their hesitation and smiled.

    "Okay then, I can understand why you are ufortable, then give me an assistant that is aware of your n''s situation, if someone approaches with me some agenda, he should be here to warn me. Does that work for you?"

    Chasin is still a bit confused. After all, if Sam is really going to fight for him and keep his word in doing so, why is there a need for him to interact with people with the agenda?

    All Sam said is that is going to be bothered by this bullshit.

    "Trust me, you definitely want to keep me informed about this. If someone from your allies pesters me I will just give them a warning and let them off. But if it is not someone from your allies, then there is something else waiting for them.

    I am not a person with a good temper."

    Chasin hesitated a bit, but Captain Ross signaled something to him and he nodded.

    "Okay, I will assign one of my bodyguards to be with you, he will let you know the details if someone approaches you."

    Sam nodded and said.

    "Okay then, I would like to get into action instantly. Is there somewhere you need me to be right now?"

    "Yes, the person you just killed, has a brother. He is a real threat to me if I consider the peers of this rival organization. He also ys a very critical role in the war strategy. He has many mercenaries that are currently working under him.

    My n is to assassinate him and take the control of these mercenary forces. After all, these people only want to get paid.

    But of course, for that, we need to establish a proper connection with these groups. So, Captain Ross will follow you on this mission. If you can infiltrate and assassinate that young man and capture the assistant of the young man, Captain Ross will take over from there.

    We will establish a meeting with the leaders of the mercenary forces and hire them ourselves.

    The only catch in this is that the assassination has to be as silent as possible.

    If no one knows that these mercenaries already switched sides and are working for us, then the other organization would still be in a delusion that they are their force. They will be much more open and vulnerable which will be a great opportunity."

    "Okay then, give me more details and I will finish it off."

    Captain Ross took out a scroll and gave it to Sam...

    "Where is he now?"

    "We don''t know the exact location, but the information is that his men already moved to the city nearby. That is one of the cities that are still in our control, but the underground operations are under the control of a neutral and independent party.

    It seems like he is trying to establish a connection with the leader of that force.

    So, we might be able to find a lead if we investigate there.

    "How far is this city?"

    "If we take our ck Eagle, we can reach there in twenty minutes."

    "Let''s go then. Just give me the information on these underground forces on the way. We will use them to find out the lead that we are looking for."

 Chapter 1778: Gather Info

    Chapter 1778: Gather InfoSam sat along with Captain Ross and Chasin as they traveled on the back of arge eagle.

    It is fast, but not as fast as Sam was ustomed to traveling. It could even be considered slow in the eyes of Sky and Yanwu.

    After around twenty minutes, they could finally the city''s vicinities. Sam frowned and asked.

    "Don''t you think you guys are moving too close? What if they spot us?"

    Before Chasin could answer, they already saw a couple of birds flying from the other side.

    Sam didn''t even know what to say. It almost felt like he jinxed it. Chasinnded his eagle immediately into the woods and all three of them started running away from the city.

    "They are your n members right?"

    "Yes, the red sparrow guard. They are our n warriors. But we are not sure if they are loyal to me. My presence in the city will be a bit troublesome if they are loyal to one of my cousins or other elders that don''t like me."

    "Then why did you fly that openly?"

    Sam asked as he tried to find a way to get to the city without being spotted. Now that they already saw them, they are bound to scout the areas a bit. Particrly when the whole atmosphere is so heated with war.

    "Okay, let''s separate for now and meet at the entrance of the city. Let''s not get caught. If you guys can disguise, do it. If you can''t, I will move in alone and we can meet in the city."

    "Alright."

    Sam left the too of them. He turned into a shadow and disappeared. Within a few minutes, he is already at the entrance of the city. He waited for a while before Chasin and Ross arrived in their disguises.

    All three of them entered the city carefully.

    Meanwhile, the surveince in the sky has increased by two times in this short time frame.

    Sam knew that things are way more serious than they are appearing. Right now, everything seemed like there is still some peace left. But underneath, it is way too much chaos and peace is almost non-existent.

    The first they did is of course go to the slums and get into the bar where most of the thugs gather.

    Sam once again let his shadows and ghosts do the deed for him. He left them to gather any clues. But this time, he didn''t let them move all over the city, instead, he concentrated all of them strictly on that street.

    ording to Chasin, this is the ce where theckeys of this underground force gather to do everything.

    Eat, drink, sleep around and discuss business.

    So, he let the shadows and ghosts find as much information here as possible. As long as they found any name or a person that has a higher rank in the organization that has enough strength to talk to the leader of it, then he can take things from there.

    They waited in that bar for over an hour and Sam already has some good news.

    One of the semi-core figures of the organization essed a hidden room where he met the core person.

    "Do you know who Laya is?"

    Sam asked Chasin and Ross.

    "Yes, the second inmand and wife of the underground force. How do you know that name?"

    "I just got some info. We got really lucky here. Laya actually issued orders to look out for any suspicious people that enter the city at this moment. She also issued an order to find out if there is any change in the governmental activity.

    It seems like they are holding a high-profile secret meeting. The lower ranks of the organization were just given the order.

    It is a good thing, we came at this time and we sneaked in without being spotted. We would have alerted them if we really came on the bird openly.

    I already put a tail on a person named Grin. He might give us some more information soon.

    Anyway, do you have any info on where these meetings are held? I am sure that the government has enough knowledge on the underground to co-exist like this."

    "We might have. I need to check with the local authorities. Then the information of my presence might leak here."

    "Don''t bother then. They might not even hold the meetings there anyway. I am just concerned about covering all the bases.

    Let''s just hope that the tail on Grin will hit something."

    Chasin and Ross exchanged a nce. Sam is making them nervous.

    After all, it is kind of hard for them to believe that Sam never even visited this ce and he already knows the names of Laya and Grin.

    It is unbelievable in every sense. This is making their suspicions raise again. They even wanted to voice out their opinions and there is even a thought of backing out.

    But Sam didn''t care. If he wanted to kill them, he would have killed them already. In fact, that would be the most straightforward way for him to obtain the first child.

    He could kill this guy, capture his memories, find out where the kid is and then devise a n ording to that.

    But he knew in the long term, working with this guy brings out more benefits. He could use him as a front to deal with some of the targets that he would need to deal with in the future and he can also be there inside and fuel the war to rage more and move in his direction.

    By night if he really couldn''t find any positive leads from here, he would definitely take some drastic measures.

    As he was thinking, he suddenly sensed something else. The guy named Grin seemed to have different orders and he is moving toward the entrance of the city.

    This made Sam feel a bit troubled. He hoped that this guy would be at the meeting and he would provide a direct lead to the mercenary team.

    But he seemed to be going outside of the city.

    Sam didn''t want to miss this chance. He only has until the next day to finish the task and get that information from Lucifer. There is no way, he is going to let that chance go, so he decided to improvise.

    "Stay here. I will be back."

    He told both of them and ran out of the bar. Then he turned into a shadow and slipped through the streets before reaching the city gate.

    He came out of the city and waited for Grin toe out.

    Meanwhile, Chasin became a bit restless. Everything Sam did is getting on his nerves and increasing his anxiety. He couldn''t sit still and decided to try and make some sense of what is happening.

    He sent Ross to secretly pull in one of their members within the city authority.

    Back at the city gate, Sam looked as Grin took off on a vulture.

    His guess is right, this guy is going somewhere else.

    Sam took out his harbinger and went after him. It didn''t take long for him to catch up and Grin who noticed this, stopped and turned around to confront Sam directly.

    "Who are you? Why are you tailing me?"

    Sam just smiled and said.

    "I need some information and I would like it if you can give it to me."

    "You didn''t answer my first question. Who are you?"

    "My name is Sam. Now, I know you won''t just give the info just because I asked you to, so let''s make it easier for both of us, because I am tight on time.

    One way to go is that you can sell the information to me if you are in that business. I can pay you whatever you ask and we can go on our ways as if we have never met.

    But don''t try to cheat me. I will know if you are lying.

    The second method is that I kill you and take the info from your soul. Which one do you prefer?"

    Grin frowned and looked at Sam coldly.

    "I don''t care who you are anymore. One thing I know is you are a fucking retard. I chose neither of those options. Since you came to me for info, you might have slight idea of who I am. So, get the fuck out of my way and learn more about me.

    You will at least be alive."

    As soon as he spoke, Sam made his move. Grin couldn''t even blink before Sam already made his way toward him and sliced his neck.

    Grin widened his eyes and tried to use his hands to close his neck.

    "As I said, I am tight on time."

    Sam just said that and gave a swift turn. The Vulture''s head came off followed by its crash.

    Within the next few minutes, Grin just died in the ce and Sam used soul extraction to get the required info.

    After absorbing the information, he felt relieved that he didn''t let this guy go. Because he is going on a reallyrge mission that would have taken forever to be finished.

    But now, he has some new and useful information that he can now use to speed things up a bit.

    As he made his way to the city, he processed all the information and couldn''t help but chuckle. He just realized how stupid Chasin really is.

    This guy doesn''t even know the situation in his backyard.

 Chapter 1779: Fall out

    Chapter 1779: Fall outSam hurriedly came back to the city to meet with Ross and Chasin.

    But by the time he went to the bar, there is another that was just leaving their table.

    Sam frowned and asked.

    "Who is that?"

    Chasin gulped and said.

    "We managed to find one of our spies within the city. We contacted him to see if we can get any help. He ys the role of a corrupt officer here, so he has some ties with the underground organization."

    Sam''s frown only deepened upon hearing this.

    "How deep is his role in this city? How tight is his connection with the underground?"

    "He has a pretty decent rank. But more than that, he can manage a bunch of his higher-ups smoothly. So, the Grin you mentioned actually has some contact with him."

    Sam sighed in exasperation at this.

    "Did you not here when I told you guys to fucking stay put here? Why would you go out of the way and call that guy? I said I am getting the info. Why would you do this?"

    Sam felt like this guy is aplete idiot. No wonder even with the best talent his peers are crushing him with politics.

    "Why? What is wrong with getting some info from my informants?"

    "Because he is not your informant. We need to get out of this city, if you don''t want to gather any attention.

    The informant you mentioned is not your guy and even the underground organization is not neutral. It actually belongs to your cousin Shijin. They are operating based on his fucking orders. I just got the info straight from Grin, every one of the ''moles'' that are supposedly working for other young masters in the city are all actually agents ced by their underground organization.

    Just get the fuck out of the city right now. I will handle this.

    As he spoke, Sam suddenly disappeared from the spot. He used the spatial element to reappear out of the restaurant and then used the shadow element to move around in the streets. He didn''t even bother to hide his powers.

    The specters and the shadows that are spread were all called over to find this man as he moved towards one particr direction.

    To the ce where Grin usually met with these informants to get the information.

    He didn''t really see the face of this guy and of course, that guy is also covering himself with a very well-designed cloak. Without focusing on it, he couldn''t have seen his face.

    He also felt like he should have let one of the shadows follow that guy right after the situation.

    It would have been much easier to kill him then.

    But at least, he knows where the destination is going to be.

    It didn''t take long for Sam to reach that location. It is actually an inn in an unusual part of the city. It is mostly a residential area which is not really a ce where inns usually are.

    He stood in front of the inn and then only he noticed something. He felt like someone is watching him and it is not just from a single direction. There are a bunch of people focused on him.

    He frowned not knowing what this attention is for. But before he could try and understand what is happening, the target he came looking for arrived at the spot.

    The target is also pretty agitated. He looked around and then noticed Sam. His eyes widened as he became vignt.

    Sam frowned at this. The other seemed to have recognized him already.

    He didn''t hesitate anymore. His body glowed with golden light and activated the light elemental fusion. He went straight through the chest of the target leaving a gaping hole.

    He reappeared behind him and used soul extraction to get the memories of this guy. At this moment, he sensed an intense amount of killing intent swarming him from different sides.

    All the people that focused on him before are dashing towards him wildly.

    Sam activated the space element and disappeared from the spot. He appeared at the end of the street. By now almost five people arrived at the spot that he was previously in.

    He took out his bow and closed his eyes as his energy moved in a certain way throughout his body. One could directly see from outside as the energy moved like a wave and entered the arrow slowly.

    Before they turned around and ran towards him, Sam shot the arrow.

    As the arrow made its way, the golden mes around it started to create four more golden sparks in the air and soon four more golden ming arrows appeared out of thin air as they shot the five people.

    The golden mes started burning them. The streets are filled with their screams as they tried to put it out.

    By now everyone in the street had already shifted their focus to Sam and the five burning men.

    Sam turned into shadow mode once again as he made his way to the city gate where Chasin and Ross are waiting.

    He didn''t even bother to wait or maintain discretion as he directlynded before Chasin.

    When Chasin looked at Sam, he noticed that his expression is not so good. He frowned and felt his heart racing in trepidation.

    As soon as Sam said that his informant is just someckey to the underground organization, he knew the ramifications of what he did.

    "S¡­"

    Before he could even open his mouth, Sam already caught him by his throat and raised him off the ground.

    Ross was stunned and wanted to stop Sam. But he felt the killing intent drowning him. For a second he felt like he is being drowned in the sea of blood. He could almost feel his lungs being filled with blood.

    He shook himself out of the daze as he looked at Sam in shock. Then only he noticed that he already fell on the ground. He is shaken just from the killing intent.

    And that is not even focused on him.

    Sam looked at Chasin, who looked he is about to foam out of his mouth, and said.

    "How fucking dare you? All of your life could be sold and you still cannot afford my help. It is my pure generosity that I tried to help you and you dared to dig holes behind me? Who do you think you are, fucking worm.

    I am telling you right now. From this moment onwards, you and I are enemies. I will let you go now. But the next time I see you, you are going die. I don''t care if you are the young master Chasin that received the divine blessing.

    I don''t care if you are the greatest genius of your n.

    All of your ancestors wouldn''t be able to stop me from taking your pathetic life."

    *BAM*

    As he spoke, he mmed him hard on the ground.

    Chasin felt like his whole body is shook. Cracks appeared on the ground and he is pretty sure at least a dozen of his bones are cracked. Sam walked back into the city as if nothing happened and arrived at the same bar where he previously sat with Chasin.

    When he first visited the ce, he didn''t get any attention.

    He just looked like another person in the mix.

    But now, everyone is looking at him. He observed the news spreading like wildfire within the city through his shadows and souls.

    Particrly, the news among the circle of criminals.

    Sam sat there openly as he chugged one jar of wine after another.

    Meanwhile, Ross immediately carried his young master and decided to move. He knew that once the news is out, there is no way they could be safe here.

    The city guards who saw the wholemotion might have already ryed the information to the authorities and all the authorities are very loyal to Shijin.

    Within no time, just like how Ross and Sam expected the information has passed through the authorities and the thugs as well.

    Sam still stayed in the bar for over an hour.

    Even though he just looked like an irritable guy drinking his anger away, he is extremely calm. He was indeed frustrated because of Chasin''s naivety.

    But that is just it. That small frustration is not enough to make him go crazy. He is too smart to make such a rookie mistake.

    The reason why he acted that way is that while killing the informant and the five people he thought of something.

    He has a very short time limit to get one of the kids and he needs a very quick way to do that. Working with Chasin will indeed give him many more benefits in the future, but Chasin is indeed very suspicious of Sam.

    It is to the point that he actually asked his informant about Sam and even described him to great detail to confirm that the information hasn''t seen Sam anywhere in the city before.

    He even revealed some of their n which made the informant reveal the details to the rest of his colleagues in the underground circle.

    That is why Sam was instantly recognized and he was targeted.

    When Sam realized this, he decided to y this to his advantage. After all, there is an old saying ''Enemy of my Enemy is a friend''.

    Even though Sam didn''t believe in that sentiment, he is sure as hell going to take full advantage of it.

 Chapter 1780: Shijin

    Chapter 1780: ShijinAfter that one hour, Sam also started thinking about contingencies.

    If things really don''t y out as he expected in the new half an hour, he decided to do something else.

    But he didn''t have to do that. Because someone walked through that door in that one hour and the whole bar was emptied immediately.

    A young man who is wearing a cloak walked towards Sam and behind that young stood a man and a woman.

    The young man sat beside Sam and snapped his fingers. The waitress ran over with a jar of the most expensive wine. He poured one ss for himself and another for Sam before he spoke.

    Sam didn''t take the ss and looked at him.

    "I don''t take free drinks."

    "Don''t think of it as a free drink. Think of it as a part of our negotiation."

    "I don''t negotiate with strangers either."

    "But you did with my idiot brother Chasin."

    "So, you are Shijin?" Sam asked as if he is a bit surprised, he then looked at the two people behind Shijin and asked in a confused tone.

    "But¡­"

    "But what am I doing with the leaders of the underground organization? They are a controlled opposition that I created myself.

    You know, I never really cared much about this city and its people. All I wanted was its revenue, but I wanted all of the revenue, both white and ck, good and bad. So, this is the best method to do that.

    Now that your doubt is cleared. Why don''t you clear one of my doubts? What is a guy like you, an expert like you doing with my idiotic brother?"

    "I just wanted to fight and he said he will provide the venue. That is it."

    Shijin is taken aback.

    "Really?"

    "Yes. That is all there is to it. It is just a chance encounter. Ross offered me a mission to assassinate someone, that guy is supposed to be a young master. I went there expecting a fight, but he is dead in minutes.

    Chasin then offered a proper fight for me, but before that, he turned out to be a weasel."

    "Pfft¡­" Shijin burst outughing.

    "My brother. Chasin. You are indeed stupider than I thought.

    So, that guy managed to get his hands on you in one day and even managed to get rid of you in just a few hours and he couldn''t make you do anything substantial?

    That is actually for my good I guess. Now, this happened to be my chance encounter."

    Sam didn''t say anything.

    "How about you fight for me then? From what you saw, you must have already known that I am smarter and I wouldn''t be stupid like him. Why don''t you fight for me? In fact, you don''t even have to fight for me for the whole war.

    I just need you for a week and I promise you that I will give you the fight of your life."

    "Fight of my life? I hardly doubt anyone below Divine ne can do that. I have been looking for that for months. I don''t trust you anymore than I trust your stupid brother."

    "Of course, I expect nothing less. That is why, I will prove it to you that you can get the fight of your life."

    "Before discussing any further, I want to ask a few things."

    "Please."

    "What is this stupid war exactly about?"

    "Why do you want to know?" Shijin asked with interest.

    "If you want me to give you a chance to make me trust you, being honest with me will be a good start."

    "Fine. They are fighting for a bunch of kids. Who are supposed to be divine talents? My brother had a baby with a Divine oracle and so did the young masters from the remaining 6 ns.

    Now the other eighteen ns are trying to get their hands on these babies.

    Surely you are not interested in those kids now are you?"

    Sam didn''t even bother to answer. He leaned back into his seat and thought for a moment. He acted as if he couldn''t care less about the situation.

    "Are you interested in those kids?"

    "Of course, I am. I have a n and in fact, after my meeting with you is over, I am about to implement a big part of that n. In fact, if you agree with me now, you can get your first big fight there."

    Sam frowned and thought for a moment.

    "Why don''t you make a soul contract? I don''t want to deal with another weasel."

    Shijin just smiled and finished the soul contract. He has that smile on his face and internally he is thinking only one thing.

    ''Muscle heads are the best.''

    Yes, in his mind Sam is just a muscle head.

    A person who has not other ambition other than just looking for the next guy to beat. Shijin wholly believed that talent is being wasted on those people.

    But at least, they are na?ve enough to be used by him, so he can swallow the pill.

    He felt pretty smug about that. If only he knew, if only he knew who Sam is¡­

    "Okay let''s go. You will have your first fight today."

    Sam walked out with those people.

    He couldn''t help but shake his head at how ridiculous this whole thing is. In just a few hours, he killed a bunch of people, got in touch with one of the key targets, joined forces, fell out, and joined forces with a different person.

    The fact that he appeared in a hot warzone is a big plus. Otherwise, this will never happen in a regr scenario.

    It would take days for these people to trust someone like Sam who has so much power and just came out of nowhere. That is why even now they are trying to use Sam just for this war. In their eyes, he nothing more than another mercenary they are hiring.

    But Sam has bigger ns in his mind. Even though he didn''t follow a rigid process this time and is ying by ear, improvising every bit of it, he still felt like he is going in the right direction.

    Soon, Sam Shijin and two leaders of the underground forces are all on the back of another eagle as they flew in a certain direction.

    Sam is pretty surprised by this.

    There are two significant things in the direction they are traveling. One is the headquarters of Chasin and Shijin''s ns. The other one is the meeting spot for the current meeting with mercenaries and when the bird slowly startednding, Sam is surprised to find out that they are actually going to the meeting spot.

    He knew that the meeting between the leader of the underground and the mercenaries is happening right here. Because of Grin''s memories.

    But he didn''t expect that Shijin himself is participating in this meeting. He thought he is still ying from behind the scenes.

    Sam followed Shijin into the cave where the meeting is happening at.

    A group of people are gathered at the stone table.

    They are the mercenary leader and his subordinates.

    Sam sat there silently and waited for them to discuss business.

    After some pleasantries, the mercenary leader started the actual conversation.

    "I didn''t expect the underground forces of your city are also yours. I am surprised you still came to this discussion though."

    "Why?"

    "You do know that this discussion is about destroying your n, right? As part of that, the underground organization is supposed to cause riots in the three cities. Forcing your n to send out the forces.

    At the same time, my boss, the one that hired me will make his father attack one of your secret grounds. Your father must move.

    That is going to be the time when we go and capture the kid in your hand."

    "Why are you saying your n is out in the open?" Shijin asked with the same smile.

    "Why are you still here even after knowing that we are trying to harm you? That is the same reason. We are just mercenaries, there are no personal feelings involved, since the operation is not done and you still don''t hold a grudge, then we can discuss business.

    Since I have a feeling that our interests are aligned."

    "You are right. Our interests are indeed aligned. I am here to tell you that you can actually proceed with the n. In fact, I will even put some of my best people on this job to help you. But I need your boss to also join in the cooperation and the kid will stay with me instead of your boss."

    "That is not going to work. The kid is the only thing worth in this."

    "Of course, it is true. But our n is not the only one that has a kid like that. Our friends, the Magman n also has a kid just like this.

    So, I have a proposal for you to forward to your boss. The Magman n and my n will get into a cooperate. In fact, a marital alliance.

    I will marry his sister and he can marry mine. We will forge our bonds with marriage. I will work with you guys to create a situation where the kid from my family will be under my control and the kid from the Magman family will be under your boss, Adin''s control.

    Does that sound like a good deal for you?"

 Chapter 1781 - 1781 Invading the Clan

    1781 Invading the n

    Sam just sat there as he heard the ns.

    He didn¡¯t expect that there is such an borate y going behind the scenes. He knew that things are a bit chaotic, but Shijin actually did something great. Heid out such an borate scheme to not only get custody of the child in his own n and also get into a rtionship with another n that will gain custody.

    In a way, he is destroying his own rivals in his n, establishing himself as the next in line. He is destroying a rival n and converting another rival n into a deep ally solidifying the position.

    In all the chaos that is going on, he didn¡¯t miss the opportunity.

    And Sam is also happened to be great at using circumstances for his own benefit.

    Wheels started turning his head as the conversations still went on.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know if we can proceed with the attack this night itself. I need to ask my employer and get his opinion.¡±

    The mercenary leader said.

    Shijin smiled once again.

    .....

    ¡°Come on, I highly doubt that talking to a person hidden in the next room is going to be that difficult. You can just talk to him now and give me an answer.

    Of course, if he doesn¡¯t feel shy, he cane out and directly talk to me.¡±

    The room went silent for a moment after he spoke.

    Sam is surprised.

    He knew that there is someone hidden. But he didn¡¯t know that it is the person in charge on the other side. Things are just getting more interesting by every second.

    Because of Shijin¡¯s straightforward call out the other party didn¡¯t hide anymore.

    ¡°You are as smart and resourceful as ever Shijin.¡±

    ¡°How are you doing Karn?¡±

    Shijin asked with a smile.

    ¡°Not too great after my n is ruined by you.¡±

    ¡°I gave you a much better n now didn¡¯t I?¡±

    ¡°We can¡¯t be sure of it now, can we? How are you sure that your father will definitely move out of your n when a Divine ne cultivator attacks one of your cities?¡±

    ¡°Because this unknown Divine ne cultivator is going to attack a very particr area of the city. And that area happened to be the ce where my father¡¯s love is staying along with their daughter.

    She is his true love and he loves that daughter more than his own life. I already have my men acting as my father¡¯s men observing her. They will immediately send a message to my father about the attack. He will definitely move.

    He might have not revealed the child because of his responsibilities as the n head. But he has proven more than once that if the dayes when he has to choose between the n and the girl, he will choose thetter.

    The n will work a hundred percent.¡±

    Sam looked at Shijin and he is a bit impressed. This is a guy who knows the value of information. He has all the information he needs and he knows how to use it. If Sam is not here as a variable, this is a pretty viable n.

    Karn thought for a moment and decided to go through with it. But he had a condition.

    ¡°I want you to draw up a soul contract that you will follow with the n of helping me get the kid from the Magman n even if it means you have to wage a war against them.¡±

    ¡°Sure. I hate that n anyway.¡±

    ¡°And what about the loot from the Magman n? I am pretty sure, you will not want to end the discussion today without discussing that part.¡±

    ¡°You know me so well Karn, that is one of the reasons that I am surprised, you originally thought of such a stupid n.¡±

    Shijin chuckled as he took out a document.

    Karn¡¯s face turned red as he looked at the document. There is a detailed n of attack on the Magman n and there is also a detailed distribution n of all the resources.

    ¡°Come on, this is not a fair deal. You are getting over seventy percent in every part of the n. You are taking too much.¡±

    ¡°It is more than fair. In half of the resource points and revenue generators of the Magman n, I am only asking for seventy percent of the wealth umted until now, I gave some of the territories to your directly.

    Apart from that initial payment, you will have control over revenue for the rest of your life. I didn¡¯t even ask for a share in that.¡±

    ¡°Even then, why would you get such a big initial payment.¡±

    ¡°Because I am fucking strategizing. I am the one creating the ns for this and for that, I have to use all the information that I have gathered until now. Do you know how much I have invested into gathering this intel?¡±

    ¡°Still, you will get fifty-five percent, that is it.¡±

    ¡°Nope. I don¡¯t want any discussion on this. Let¡¯s settle this in an old-fashioned way. Your fighter vs my fighter. If you win, we will go with fifty-five, if I win, we will go with seventy. Deal?¡±

    Karn immediately shook Shijin¡¯s hand.

    Shijin then looked at Sam.

    ¡°First of the fights that I promised. Don¡¯t disappoint me though.¡±

    Sam nodded and stood.

    He walked to the empty area in the front and calmly stared at the people.

    The mercenary leader stood up and went to stand in front of Sam.

    ¡°You seem new in this area. Are you a merc from outside?¡±

    Sam shook his head.

    ¡°I am not a merc. Anyway, let¡¯s get this over with.¡±

    ¡°You are going to regret this fight buddy.¡±

    The mercenary spoke and took out arge saber.

    Sam looked at it calmly.

    The opponents swung the saber vertically. Sam didn¡¯t even bother to show any moment. But when the saber was about to strike him, he disappeared from the spot. The leader was stunned and before he could realize it, he felt a strong impact on his left ear and he fainted.

    After five minutes, the mercenary leader woke up in a daze. He didn¡¯t even understand what is happening.

    Sam is back in his seat as he sipped some wine that karn took out.

    Karn looked at the mercenary head and said.

    ¡°Get up, stop embarrassing me even more. Calling yourself mercenary king and all. What kind of king will get knocked down in one kick?¡±

    Shijin also had a troubled expression on his face.

    ¡°Why are you so strong?¡±

    He asked Sam as he looked at him. He thought he would be able to easily satisfy Sam¡¯s condition, but it seems like it would be too difficult.

    Sam is also a bit disappointed. There is barely any resistance from the people on the same level here. Even though his cultivation level is the same as that of the merc king, the fight is indeed over in one move. The other party didn¡¯t even anticipate Sam¡¯s move.

    He kind of missed the challenge he faced back in hell. Those fights are brutal. Even beasts posed a threat there.

    As he is thinking, the discussions were over and the n proceeded further.

    Everything seemed to have been going in one smooth lubricated motion ns moved faster than they expected and before he knew it, Sam is already in front of the city of Chasin¡¯s n.

    He is ready to enter. The kid is just an hour away from him at thetest.

    Shijin looked at Sam and said.

    ¡°I know the previous fight isn¡¯t much. But the next one is going to be challenging. The other party you are going to face is a person with half his foot in a Divine ne. He is truly invincible below the Divine ne.

    That is the talk around here. So, it would be a great fight for you.¡±

    ¡°I hope it is not as disappointing.¡±

    Sam said as he looked at the merc king on the side.

    Soon, the attacks were made. The forces from the city are moving out to other cities. There is a reason why they are spending so much force to defend these cities. If they are taken by enemies, they will be used as bases of operations to take down Chasin¡¯s n.

    Sam waited and waited for a while before he got his signal. The head of the n is finally away.

    He didn¡¯t waste any time and activated his shadow fusion.

    ¡°Meet me at the entrance of the n.¡±

    He said to the merc king and disappeared.

    Within two minutes, Sam is already in front of the gate. He didn¡¯t bother hiding his aura or disguising his face. He boldly enter the n as if he owned the ce and his presence already triggered some response from within the n.

    The guards reported his presence to the authorities and soon the person that Sam is supposed to fight already heard of it.

    It is the second inmand of the n and the person Shijin talked about. Sam¡¯s mission now is to fight this guy and defeat him. And Shijin explicitly stated that Sam shouldn¡¯t kill him at any cost. That is one of the reasons Merc king is also here.

    It is hard to defeat somebody into submission than kill them. So, he is here to help Sam tame this wild target.

    .....

 Chapter 1782 - 1782 Unique Fighting Style

    1782 Unique Fighting Style

    Sam didn¡¯t wait there for long.

    Merc king came to him within a few minutes. So, Sam and he started walking into the n grounds slowly. Some guards who couldn¡¯t fathom their strength came at them hoping to stall them. Of course, they are all taken down in a matter of seconds.

    Followed by the guards even the n membersing to take down the two intruders only to fail.

    Sam is walking as if he already knew the in and out of the n. He is taking a route that Shijin already revealed and he made his way to the room kid is locked in.

    When he reached the corridor in front of that room though, someone is standing there with their hands crossed.

    Sam sized him up and recognized that this is the guy that Shijin talked about.

    ¡°Whoever you are, get lost right now. I am bound to the n grounds and this room. So, I won¡¯t chase after you and kill you, if you escape right now.

    If you are too stubborn to do that and stille at me, I will kill you in the most painful and gruesome way you can imagine.¡±

    Sam shook his head.

    .....

    ¡°Why is everyone I am facing always have something like this to say? Anyway, let¡¯s get out of here. I don¡¯t want to harm the kid inside. We won¡¯t be able to fight to our fullest here.¡±

    As he spoke, he jumped out of the corridor and into the open area at the front.

    The old man hesitated a bit. He looked at the Merc King that is still standing in the corridor.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, he won¡¯t touch the kid. If even takes a step forward from that spot, I will kill him myself.¡±

    Merc King frowned. He looked at Sam in surprise and wanted to ask if his mind is alright. If they could find a way to take the kid away without having to deal with too much resistance, they should take it. After all, their final goal is the kid.

    He doesn¡¯t know if Sam is just saying that to reassure the old man, but he didn¡¯t dare to take that chance. He knew that if Sam really wanted to kill him, he would die on the spot.

    The old man looked at Merc King for a moment and jumped out of the corridor.

    For some reason, he felt like he could trust Sam¡¯s words and got prepared to fight him.

    As soon as he got ready, he didn¡¯t wait anymore. He disappeared from the spot and appeared in front of Sam in a sh. He threw a straight punch to sam¡¯s face.

    Sam caught the fist that came at him and he seeded in stopping it, but he was surprised because the force that came from the fist didn¡¯t stop with just that. It started flowing through his body and it tried to disrupt his energy cirction.

    This is actually one of the oldest tricks Sam came across in this world. But he hasn¡¯t seen it since he leveled up. It is indeed a fine technique honed to perfection. If Sam¡¯s energy control is not at his level, even if it was slightly worse, he would have fallen for that hit.

    The old man is also a little surprised, but he didn¡¯t show it on his face and didn¡¯t stop his onught.

    He started throwing rapid punches.

    Sam started using both of his hands to block them and every punch has that residual force that tried to disrupt his energy. His control is good enough to stop it though. He managed to hold out better than he expected.

    But soon, the old man started using his legs.

    Sam who got used to the pattern a bit, suddenly saw the leging at him.

    He used his arm to block the leg once again. This time the force came at a very different angle. It is not exactly powerful, but it is concentrated and the motion of that force is also a bit different than before.

    If the punches tried to resist energy cirction, the kick tried to cut off the stream immediately. Sam still kept on blocking as he saw the punches and kicks flying at him. He didn¡¯t use his elemental energy though.

    He just used his physical prowess to see what this old man can do.

    Within another two minutes of blocking, the fighting style changed a bit. Sam blocked a punch from the old man who followed up with another punch. But this time when he tried to block it, the old man slipped to the side and caught hold of Sam by his arm.

    He threw him over and tried to throw Sam over on the ground.

    Sam didn¡¯t fall through. He mmed his legs and managed to regain bnce. But from the impact on the legs, he could feel the disruptive energy wavesing off. Even the old man¡¯s throws and ms are very aligned with his technique.

    This technique is very simr to the ripple style, but this is more concentrated and the force is not just moving in a ripple and wave fashion.

    If not for his delicate control, Sam might have already been defeated. As the fight went on, Sam kept on getting this energy movement and the disrupting force all over his body. The Old man is a bit frustrated as he looked at Sam¡¯s movements.

    Sam might look like he has been on the losing end. But in fact, he is perfectlyposed and everything is within his control all this time. He didn¡¯t get injured one time.

    He did take the punches, but Sam is negating all the blows seamlessly.

    Old man gritted his teeth and took a deep breath.

    ¡°You are good. Not a lot of opponents ever held this long.¡±

    ¡°Thank you. You are not so bad either. But if this is all you can do, this wouldn¡¯t be much of a fight.¡±

    ¡°Really? As far as I can see you haven¡¯tnded a single hit.¡±

    As he spoke, he lunged forward andnded a punch again. Sam blocked the punch once again, but this time, he felt something else other than the force that he felt before.

    The palm that caught the punch took all the force and energy of the hit. And this time, Sam wasn¡¯t even able to negate the force or redirect it. The energy and force went directly into the palm muscles.

    The energy tried to hurt the muscle fibers at the cellr level. Sam felt immense pain in his palm. The pain that emerged from deep within. He could feel that some of his muscle fibers are torn apart.

    The old man didn¡¯t want to waste Sam¡¯s daze. He took full advantage of it and threw the second punch.

    Sam took the punch in his shoulder. The feathered coat didn¡¯t do anything to resist the energy. To be precise it didn¡¯t work. The force of the punch went through the coat and directly hit the shoulder muscles. Even the outer skin ispletely fine.

    Only after a few seconds, did a bruisee up on the palm and the shoulder where he took the hit.

    Sam immediately changed his fighting style as well. The next kick that came, he blocked it with a metal element fused hand. But to his surprise, the damage he took actually increased.

    He groaned in pain as he looked at his arm. He had to remove the fusion and he could feel that the insides of his arm are bleeding. The bruise became darker and darker.

    ¡°Seems like you won¡¯t be able tond that hit after all. I won¡¯t hold back anymore and finish this off.¡±

    The old man¡¯s body is covered with spiritual energy. His speed increased by fourfold. Sam could still see him, but even his speed is not enough to match that. Of course, only his normal speed. If he has to match it, then he would have to use partial fusion.

    This guy is scary.

    Speed is most likely his best form. His fighting style is designed to dissect the opponents bit by bit and take control. Mentally and physically injuring them and taking them down with umted damage.

    His energy control is impable and his physical control is beyond artistic. Hisbat prowess is genuinely impressive and admirable.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but smile at this.

    Of course, since the start, he hasn¡¯t given his all. He is just curious to see how the strongest beneath the Divine ne will do and he got a pretty good gauge of the strength.

    The old man didn¡¯t like it when he saw Sam¡¯s smile. He is throwing a barrage of punches from all directions. Sam shouldn¡¯t be smiling right now, but he is doing exactly that. This made him feel a bit vignt and also made him push even harder.

    Only in the next two seconds, no matter what kind of attack he threw, he couldn¡¯tnd it.

    Sam also stopped moving back. He just halted in his tracks, standing there like a pir. Except for his arms, nothing moved. He is leisurely blocking all of his moves.

    The old man felt a bad feeling creeping into his heart.

 Chapter 1783 - 1783 Plan Executed

    1783 n Executed

    The old man became increasingly nervous with every passing second.

    Sam stood there unfazed no matter how many punches came at him. Of course, even if it appeared like that, he is actually in a zone where his mind is running at the highest pace possible.

    The old man¡¯s technique is indeed very delicate and precise. It is very dangerous as well. It is very hard to dodge it because the old man is fast. Way too fast for any of his peers to match. And no matter how hard they tried to block these hits they are going to fail because the attacks are going to do their damage anyway.

    It is one of the perfect techniques that couldpletely ignore the defense of an opponent.

    And it is working better against the elemental attacks as Sam already noticed. All in all it is one good technique. Sam is actually tempted to learn it himself to see what he can do with it.

    But he already recognized the ws that could help him take it down.

    Unfortunately for the old man, Sam is equally fast. He is also pretty good with his speed and he managed to track the old man¡¯s movements. Even if he wasn¡¯t able to dodge in his normal neutral state, he is still able to map them and capture the movement.

    And the old man¡¯s technique only does damage when it connects and it needs precise and delicate control over energy and muscles.

    So, all Sam has to do is disrupt it very slightly. When a punch ising, all he did is track the trajectory, and intercept it at the elbow or forearm. He used the repel style to dispel the energy and also change the direction of the punch very lightly.

    .....

    The punch¡¯s speed is gone down and it is going in a direction Sam wanted it to, so now it is pretty easy to defend.

    But of course, it is only possible because of Sam¡¯s unique skillset. If it is someone else even if it is some other yer, they would have to take out their trump cards just to deal with this old man.

    As Sam slowly gained control of the fight, all of a sudden a shadow appeared behind the old man. One of Sam¡¯s shadow undead.

    The old man didn¡¯t even flinch as he turned just a bit and kicked the undead out of existence. But that was enough for Sam to make his own move. A kick came with Void style and ripple style in unison as itnded on the arm of the old man.

    The muscles tore open. But Sam is actually surprised. With the power output he nned, the damage should have made the old man¡¯s arm fall off, but he managed to negate a lot of the energy output. Sam followed it with another hit, only this time, he didn¡¯t manage to hit.

    The kick was stopped by the other party¡¯s punches.

    Sam stepped back and dodged the attack. He once again went into the passive position of defending. Of course, this time the old man¡¯s speed reduced quite a bit.

    Once again, another shadow appeared behind the old man.

    This time, he hesitated, but Sam didn¡¯t have to do anything, he just let the shadow attack the old man who couldn¡¯t resist anymore and destroyed it and in the process, he received another attack.

    Once again, he only managed tond one attack.

    The battle turned into a battle of perseverance for the old man. Sam has a higher energy capacity, he already figured out the trick to defeating the old man, even if he only managed to deal one blow for every two minutes, his blow is sure tond, and with every blow, the old man is weakening.

    And within twelve minutes, the old man is now bleeding from all his limbs, his speed reduced significantly.

    Sam shook his hands that are hurting a bit and said.

    ¡°This might be the most shameless battle I ever fought. To defeat you I didn¡¯t need to use all of my arsenals, but I couldn¡¯t be as straightforward as I want to be. You are indeed a tough nut to crack.¡±

    ¡°There is nothing shameless about using the w you found to win a battle. You didn¡¯t do anything wrong.¡±

    The old man said in a weak voice as he sighed.

    He didn¡¯t attack anymore and looked at Sam.

    ¡°Just finish me off.¡±

    ¡°I heard that you are best under Divine ne. Why are you not conjuring the Divine energy you might umte? Even if it is not enough to break through I am sure you have some umted Divine energy.¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t have it.¡±

    Sam frowned.

    ¡°Why?¡±

    ¡°My spiritual core was tampered with. It was tampered by my n head, my master to make sure that I stay on this ne forever. I will never be able to umte Divine energy.¡±

    Sam sighed as he heard this.

    ¡°Your technique? Did you make it?¡±

    ¡°Yes.¡±

    ¡°I admire it. Apart from those ws, there is nothing wrong with it. Unless it is a person like me, no one else would be able to defeat it.¡±

    ¡°Thank you for your praise. But it is still wed.¡±

    ¡°I will make it perfect. Trust me.¡±

    With those words, Sam took out his sword and stabbed it into the heart of the old man.

    He then used his specter to collect the memories of the old man.

    Merc king stood there nervously. It has been more than twenty minutes since the whole operation started. They need to cut their time tight. He immediately ran towards the door as soon as the battle is over.

    Inside, a child is sleeping soundly oblivious of what is happening outside. The child is around one year old, still an infant. This must be the sixth child she had.

    Merc king ran ahead and picked up the child and came out with the child.

    Sam stood at the door and extended his hand.

    Merc hesitated before giving the child to Sam. He used his observation ability to check up on the child. There is indeed a little difference in the child¡¯s cell structurepared to a normal child. It is a little girl.

    Sam smiled as he looked at the peaceful sleeping face of the girl.

    His mission is almost a sess.

    At this moment, Shijin came running with a de in his hands.

    ¡°I dealt with Chasin¡­¡±

    He was about to speak and then looked at the dead body of the old man. He widened his eyes and looked at Sam.

    ¡°I told you not to kill that old man, why did you do it?¡± He then turned to Merc King and asked.

    ¡°What the fuck are you doing while he is killing him? I told you to stop him.¡±

    Merc shivered in his shoes, he clearly remembered the instructions, but he didn¡¯t dare to even bring it up when Sam and the old man are fighting. The fight visually looked underwhelming but he is experienced enough to know that the fight is actually beyond his means.

    If he even spoke a word, he would definitely die. He just decided to throw Sam all the me and he also didn¡¯t want to just enter the room until the old man is dead. With that old man¡¯s ability, he wouldn¡¯t be able to rest well if the other party is not dead. Subduing is not good enough.

    Sam didn¡¯t really care much about that guy¡¯s rambling.

    He just looked at the kid and stood there.

    ¡°Sam, you are supposed to be at the square at this point. Move it. I wille and join you guys and we will y out the rest of the n.¡±

    Sam didn¡¯t speak for a moment and just stared at the child. After a few seconds, he took a deep breath and nodded. Let¡¯s go.

    Sam ran towards the square of the n. The open space of the n grounds is where the final phase of the n is going to happen.

    He appeared there in the most eye-catching way possible. He set everything on the fire in his way.

    The golden mes burned everything and anything to the ground.

    This made Shijin a bit surprised. He didn¡¯t know of Sam¡¯s fire element after all. He didn¡¯t expect this. He wanted to ask what Sam is nning, but in this short frame of the n, he shouldn¡¯t meet with him.

    As soon as Sam arrived at the square all the forces of the n gathered there as Shijin directly called for them.

    ¡°Intruder, hand over the kid and surrender now. You might have a chance to live. Or you will die a most gruesome death.¡±

    Shijin spoke righteously and he made a slight gesture.

    Sam nodded and made his move. He protected the kid and unleashed his shadow undead. The undead went after the groups of people and they started randomly killing. At least it appeared random. But he is actually killing everyone that is not part of Shijin¡¯s faction.

    Time passed in a blink of an eye and Sam sensed a presence. At this moment, he made a move and some of the specter souls started attacking a group of people. Shijin is stunned. This move is also not part of their n.

    He looked up and saw his father the n head appear.

    Sam took out a scroll and disappeared from the spot even before the n head made any more.

    Shijin finally heaved a sigh of relief. Apart from a few improvizations from Sam, everything went well.

    He had a serious expression on his face, but inside he is excited with joy.

 Chapter 1784 - 1784 Shijinâ€™s Shock

    1784 Shijin¡¯s Shock

    The whole of Shijin¡¯s n is in utter silence.

    The n leader hovered in the air as he looked at the n¡¯s state.

    Everything is a mess. There are many dead bodies on the ground which made him angry. But what made him most furious is the fact that the child was taken away right in front of his eyes.

    And the worst part is that the person who took the child away is actually not even a Divine ne cultivator.

    ¡°I want the whole city to be in lockdown. Investigate. There is no way this person has entered the city without leaving any traces. He might even have had some activity along with hispanions. Try to find out any relevant information. I want results in an hour.¡±

    He didn¡¯t bother to look at his sons and left.

    He went into a dark room and took a very specialmunication token. He injected some of his Divine energy into it and soon he managed to connect with multiple people on different ends.

    ¡°The child from my n is kidnapped. If none of you are involved, prove that you are not. If I find any traces of your involvement in this though, I will hunt everyst one of your descendants from the shadows including the treasured children.

    My n can be damned for all I care, but I will make sure that your ns will also go down with me without any future heirs.¡±

    .....

    He didn¡¯t even bother to wait for their reply and cut themunication off.

    Everything moved fast. Shijin first went back to his residence andughed out loud to express his joy only after that did he join the rest of the n. He took the initiative as he directed the n¡¯s forces to do various tasks in the hopes of finding Sam and the child.

    He even managed to find some clues that are rted to Sam and the Merc King. Of course, at least it appeared like that in the eyes of the n members. In reality, it is just a prenned plot.

    Looking at his results the n leader let him lead the operation to find the kid. Since his trusted aide is also dead and Chasin is also on verge of death, there is no one else other than Shijin in his eyes that could be up to the task.

    Shijin is beyond ecstatic at this point and he took his trusted aides before leaving the n grounds that midnight. After moving far away from the n and making sure that no one followed him, he made his move. He took out a teleportation scroll and got away from there.

    He reappeared in the middle of a cave and he turned around with a wide smile on his face.

    The same smile that froze the next second. In front of him, Merc King¡¯s body is on the ground lifeless and headless.

    Blood sttered everywhere along with the brain matter. It almost seemed like the head exploded directly on that spot. Sam and the child are nowhere to be seen.

    ording to their n, Sam and the merc king will escape to this ce and in here the cave prevents the outgoing spatial travel. At least it was supposed to.

    But that kind of mechanism is child¡¯s y in Sam¡¯s eyes.

    He used this n to his advantage and smoothly took the baby out. Now, after reaching this ce, he killed the Merc king and used his dimensional drifter to move back to the cave to meet Maya.

    ¡°FUCK YOU SAM!!!!¡±

    Shijin yelled at the top of his lungs as his voice reverberated within the cave walls.

    Meanwhile, back in the cave.

    ¡°Thank you, Sam.¡±

    Maya thanked Sam for the twentieth time as she held her child in her arms. Tears are streaming down her face. She couldn¡¯t control herself. Sam smiled faintly as he looked at her.

    ¡°Don¡¯t thank me yet. There are still more children of yours out there and I will get every single of them to you.¡±

    Maya looked at Sam gratefully. She didn¡¯t know how Sam did it, but he managed to get into the core of the n and get her child directly. But she knew that it is not going to be easy the next time. Since the other ns might have already heard the news of one kidnapping, there is no way they wouldn¡¯t take any preventive measures this time.

    Sam sat down and looked like he is meditating. But in reality, he is doing two things. One is digesting some information and the second one is waiting for two things. The reward from lucifer and then the chain reaction for the things that he already nted in Shijin¡¯s n.

    It is about time they take effect.

    Shijin is very frustrated as he came back to his n grounds. But when he reached there, he was met with another shock. A bunch of elders is waiting for him and they arrested him as soon as he set foot on the n grounds.

    He looked at them in shock as they dragged him to the n head¡¯s chambers.

    ¡°Shijin, it seems like I really underestimated you, my son. To think that you would dare to plot against the n? How dare you?¡±

    The n head looked at Shijin with killing intent. Shijin was stunned. He didn¡¯t expect to be caught and the first thing that came to his mind was the thought of where he might have gone wrong. He thought the n is wless.

    Then he thought of the only variable that actually made the sess a hundred percent, but also caused this failure.

    Sam.

    He couldn¡¯t help but want to grit his teeth, but he still wanted to y dumb. He didn¡¯t want to give himself away. From his understanding of his father, if there is concrete evidence, he would have been killed by now.

    But from the looks of it, there might not be such evidence. He is still alive. Which means he still has a chance to redeem himself from this.

    He was about to say something, but his father beat him to it.

    ¡°I must say I am really impressed by your n. But if you had used this brain to plot at only other ns, then I would have been more impressed.

    So, now I am going to punish you. The child from our n is going to stay in our n only. Now, your job is to take over the child from the Magman n just like you nned, but instead of giving that child away to someone another n, you will find a way to keep it here in our n.

    Also the marriage alliance you proposed should also go through without any trouble.

    If you cannot do this, you will still hand over the n¡¯s child back to the n while you will be exiled with your cultivation sealed.

    I need the child to be back here in three hours. Now get lost.¡±

    The elders threw Shijin out of the chambers.

    Shijin is lost. He didn¡¯t know what even happened here.

    He didn¡¯t understand how the n leader actually learned of the whole n.

    If he knew how it happened he would vomit blood. It is all part of Sam¡¯s n. At the final moment before he used the scroll, he actually threw some souls to attack some of the n members. His goal was not to kill them or injure them.

    They are just attached to the souls of those people. So, when the necromancers of Shijin¡¯s n managed to catch hold of them and absorb the souls to save them, they got some memories, and in the memories of those souls, the whole discussion between Shijin and Karn while discussing the n was revealed.

    Now the n leader thought that the n yed out wlessly, so he is asking Shijin to give him the results.

    What he didn¡¯t know is that Sam has left Shijin without any repercussions and the reason for that is, Shijin was way in over his head and he only gave out a use about his side of the deal in the soul contract. There is nothing attached to Sam.

    He believed so much that Sam is just a muscle head and now he is paying the price.

    He didn¡¯t know what to do as he looked at the horizon.

    He started specting wildly. He tried to understand what might have been Sam¡¯s motive, but he could barely think of anything.

    At this moment, back in the cave, Sam finally decided to make his next move. Before he could do that time froze again and Lucifer appeared.

    ¡°Seems you like you havepleted the task. Congrattions.¡±

    ¡°Thank you so much.¡±

    ¡°Now, let me give the information that I promised you.¡±

    ¡°Yes, Please.¡±

    Sam closed his eyes and weed the information from Lucifer. When he absorbed it all, he is shocked beyond belief.

    He looked at Maya who is also frozen with time in shock. Not a lot of things could surprise Sam to this level.

    ¡°Is this true?¡± He asked lucifer just to confirm.

    ¡°Of course it is, do you think I will kid around with you? She is a means for gods to interfere with this world. A mere pawn. But she worships them like no other. I love the irony of it.¡±

 Chapter 1785 - 1785 Familiar Face

    1785 Familiar Face

    Lucifer disappeared after his end of the deal.

    Sam looked at Maya who is still looking at her child. The answers he got from Lucifer are too surprising. He shook his head and sighed before taking out his reaper and shing his own shoulder.

    A deep gash appeared damaging his feather coat and cutting off the flesh on his shoulder.

    Maya was shocked.

    ¡°Sam? What happened?¡±

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about this. This is for the next step of the n.¡±

    As he spoke he disappeared.

    This is just a couple of hours after midnight. It would be great if he could get some rest. But the weakness will y out great for the next phase of the n.

    He used the dimensional drifter to appear at the meeting point where Karn and Shijin are supposed to meet after Shijin settled things at the n.

    .....

    When he arrived there Karn is waiting anxiously along with some of his n members.

    Karn looked at Sam and was shocked.

    ¡°What happened?¡± Karn asked anxiously.

    He saw Sam¡¯s strength himself. In his opinion, it is hard for anyone below Divine ne to injure him this badly. Even for the people in his n that are strongest below Divine ne, things will not be easy if Sam decided to show off his strength.

    To see Sam in this state made him have an extremely bad feeling.

    ¡°I got betrayed and so are you guys.¡±

    He said as he sat down and took some healing potions.

    ¡°Betrayed?¡±

    ¡°Shijin¡¯s n. He is trying to use us to take the me. His father already got the information regarding the n so he shifted the whole me onto me and you.

    He will probably take forces from his n and say we colluded together to take the child away.¡±

    ¡°What? How can he do that? We don¡¯t have a child. Does he think that I am that easy to fool?¡±

    Sam didn¡¯t even know what to say to that for a moment. This guy indeed appeared like a fool. He didn¡¯t notice it before because he constantly went on with Shijin¡¯s n and Sam assumed that he might be more intelligent.

    But his guess is wrong.

    ¡°Yeah, there is a problem. He will just use that as an excuse.¡±

    ¡°But the soul contract¡­¡±

    ¡°Are you sure there are no ways to bypass it? There might have been some wordy there. Anyway, I don¡¯t have too much time to discuss this shit. I need to get the fuck out of this ce. Shijin¡¯s father might being after me.

    I won¡¯t be holding off a Divine ne cultivator. You better be careful.¡±

    As he spoke, he turned around to run.

    ¡°Wait, Sam.¡±

    Karn called out anxiously.

    Sam stopped and looked at him with a frown.

    ¡°Stick with me. Let¡¯s go back to my n and report this. We need to borrow our n¡¯s strength to fight this. Otherwise, we wouldn¡¯t be able to resist Shijin¡¯s n.¡±

    ¡°Do you think your n will help you? You destroyed your n¡¯s n and tried to cooperate with Shijin on your own. It would be a surprise if you are not kicked out and if I am not wrong, they might actually contact your n first before they make an actual move.

    After all, a direct open war between your ns is nothing to scoff at. They would try to avoid any unnecessary deaths if they want. I don¡¯t want to stay in a ce with so many uncertainties. I already got the fight I wanted.

    I am out of here.¡±

    With this, Sam didn¡¯t wait for him anymore and left. When he arrived, he came in sneakily, but when he left, Sam didn¡¯t even bother to hide. He ran out openly.

    They are currently in a city so he was seen by everyone and his shy open movements with his shadow ability were seen by many people.

    Sam is counting on these people seeing him. And his n is now set in motion.

    After leaving that ce, Sam got on the harbinger and moved at full speed to go to the Magman n¡¯s territory.

    The nearest n to Shijin¡¯s n. This is his next target and since these people are within the ns of Shijin and Karn, they might actually have some ws. He arrived at the nearest city in the madman¡¯s territory and joined an inn.

    He used the Dimensional drifter to return to Maya and get some information on the next target.

    ¡°So, the next target is the Magman n. Who should I focus on there?¡±

    Maya just put her child to sleep and sat with Sam to answer his questions.

    ¡°Magman n is actually the weakest of the bunch. They have the smallest territory and they have the smallest number of forces. Their n head is also known to be the weakest of all the seven ns. But he is still stronger than some of the heads in the eighteen external ns.

    If I am not wrong, the head must have the child under his control. Unlike Chasin¡¯s n, here the head wouldn¡¯t even leave the child alone.¡±

    ¡°Why is that?¡±

    ¡°Magman n¡¯s leader is obsessed with improving the base talent of their descendants. In fact, he strongly believes that his weakness is because of his talent and I have to agree. He is very hardworking and diligent. He is a very good swordsman and his skill is second to none.

    So, after he established the n, he went above and beyond to capture men and women from different races. He tried to bring out the best descendants possible.

    And even after the children were born, he would give them the best nourishment that he could afford.

    I don¡¯t know too many details about this, but from what I heard, he actually made two of the women who just bore the children exchange the babies for a few days. He told them to breastfeed. One of them is an elf and another one is a Mermaid.

    He is trying all sorts of weird things to increase the foundation of the children.

    In fact, that is thest ce that I was at. It took a lot of effort for Chasin to get me from their hands. Only because of the weird nature of this Magman n¡¯s head, the rest of the ns thought that he would keep me alive in the name of nourishing the kid secretly.

    But they wanted me dead as soon as possible. Which is why Chasin got the opportunity.¡±

    ¡°Who is the father of the child there?¡± Sam asked with a frown. He can vaguely guess what kind of person the Magman¡¯s n head is.

    He is a whore for glory. If one day someone gives him a surefire opportunity that his n would be glorious and all he has to do is castrate himself, he would chop his own balls off before the sentence is finished.

    Dealing with this kind of person is extremely difficult.

    ¡°The father of the child is the son of the n head. He could be considered the most talented person ever born in the Magman n, but he still falls short of Chasin and others. He must be in the n headquarters as well.

    He is also looking after the child just like his father.

    I am not in a position to say this, but even though Magman is a bit weaker, it will be very difficult for you to deal with them right now. It is better if you pick another target.¡±

    ¡°No need. I will proceed with them. Anyway, which city is their headquarters in? if their activity is that less, there is no point in me staying in some other city in their territory.

    I will directly go to their headquarters.¡±

    Maya gave the location of their headquarters.

    Sam went back to the inn. He let the ghosts get all the information they can and then started travelling to a different direction.

    It has been a day since he came here and he already got a hold of one child. This could be considered a huge win. But he didn¡¯t want to waste any momentum. He needs to get this victory streak going.

    But he didn¡¯t know how.

    He reached the magman city the headquarters of the magman n and joined an inn.

    He reorganized whatever limited information he got and decided to scout around for a while. His souls and undead once again spread around. But within a few minutes, he is actually met with a surprise.

    It is not the enemy, nor is it the target. But a familiar face.

    Kumar is in the same inn as him.

    Sam didn¡¯t expect this. He immediately let the shadow undead that was near Kumar leave that ce and follow him from afar.

    The yers are very aware of Sam¡¯s methods, if by any chance the shadow undead was discovered, Sam¡¯s presence will definitely be known.

    He cannot let that happen. As for contacting Kumar directly, that is not going to happen. Sam already experienced that yers will have conflicting missions. In case of that, he shouldn¡¯t reveal his position.

    As he is thinking, Kumar left the inn and made his way to the Magman n. Sam thought for a moment and let the shadow undead follow him while he also followed him from far away.

 Chapter 1786 - 1786 Kumarâ€™s Deal

    1786 Kumar¡¯s Deal

    Sam followed him. But he made sure that he kept his distance.

    Kumar is way too familiar with Sam, if he was discovered then things might turn in a direction he didn¡¯t want them to. There is one thing he is sure of. Kumar must be visiting the Magman n because of his task.

    And he managed to get the information for that task, he will get a lot of information about Magman as well.

    Kumar was stopped at the gate of the n by the guards.

    They spoke something and the guard went inside. Sam thought of something and let the shadow follow the guard.

    He would have done this anyway, but he would have had all the guards marked to get the information inside.

    But now, he has a marked guard that will definitely have some valuable information. Kumar waited patiently outside and so did Sam.

    After around ten minutes, the guard came back and said something to Kumar. This made his eyes light up as Kumar was escorted inside.

    The shadow came back to Sam to ry the information.

    .....

    A smile crept on his face as he understood what is happening.

    One more time, things are kind of falling in his favor. It seems like Kumar¡¯s mission is kind of rted to Sam¡¯s mission. Kumar went to meet with the young master Baryn right now who happened to be Sam¡¯s next target.

    He doesn¡¯t know what method Kumar used to get a meeting with him so fast, but whatever it is, Sam will be able to make use of it to get close to this target.

    While Sam is thinking of ways to make use of this situation, inside the Magman n grounds.

    Kumar is sitting across from Baryn in a room.

    Baryn coldly looked at Kumar and said.

    ¡°Before you speak, let me tell you one thing. Your life will depend on what you speak and how you speak to me. The matter you brought up is not something a single person like you can afford to y around with.¡±

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry. I know what I am dealing with here and fully knowing the strength of your n, I can assure you, the im I made will surely happen.¡±

    ¡°No, before even discussing the im, let me ask you a question. How do you know about the child in my n?¡±

    ¡°It is not exactly a well-kept secret. With twenty-five ns grinding at each other. It is almost a given that some information will leak out.¡±

    ¡°Now, who is it that is going to take my child away from my n?¡±

    ¡°I cannot give you full details without reaching amitment. All I can tell you is that the person that might be targeting you is very smart. Smarter than any person you evere across. He is resourceful enough to buy off your n a dozen times over and on top of it all, his abilities to kill and destroy are second to none.

    In fact, anyone who came across him wouldn¡¯t dare to im the first ce if he ims that he is second at killing someone.¡±

    ¡°Really? Howe I never heard of a person like that? What kind of cultivation does he have?¡±

    ¡°Same as me.¡±

    ¡°So, I am supposed to believe that an Astral ne Cultivator is going to kill me and the rest of my n including my father before kidnapping our n¡¯s kid. Tell me, my friend. Doesn¡¯t that sound ridiculous?¡±

    ¡°Not when we are talking about the person that I mentioned right now.¡±

    Baryn chuckled and he revealed a hint of killing intent.

    Kumar just smiled and he released his own aura. He focused all of his killing intent on Baryn. This made thetter a bit shocked.

    After all, Kumar is currently in the middle of the Magman n. It would be nothing short of suicidal for him to attack Baryn right now.

    ¡°I know what you are thinking. But trust me, if you make a move on me, not only will I kill you, I will also escape this ce unscathed.

    Not even all of your n¡¯s defense and even your fatherbined would be able to stop me from escaping.

    In fact, I am confident that if properly nned, I would be able to take away the child from your n and you wouldn¡¯t be able to do shit to me. But even I wouldn¡¯t dream of taking a jar of wine from the hands of the person I mentioned.

    Think carefully about my proposal. You have two hours. I will be waiting in the inn outside.¡±

    Kumar stood up and was about to leave the room. But a middle-aged man already appeared at the entrance.

    The man looked at Kumar and said.

    ¡°Where do you think you are going, young friend? You are not thinking that you can leave after threatening my nephew right in the middle of my n, are you?¡±

    The middle-aged man is very strong. He is also at the peak of the Astral ne.

    Kumar smiled and turned to Baryn.

    ¡°This is perfect. You will know what you are dealing with here.¡±

    As he spoke, the middle-aged man made his move. He took out a sword and tried to cut Kumar.

    But Kumar didn¡¯t even turn around and extended his hand before stopping the swing of the sword with just two fingers.

    The sword de was stuck in between those two fingers and the middle-aged man wasn¡¯t even able to take it out no matter how much he tried.

    ¡°You guys are dealing with something way out of your league. You might think twenty-five ns fighting together for seven children is a big deal. Imagine a single guy trampling over these twenty-five ns without even getting a scratch on his body.

    That is the scale of things right now. You would be pretty stupid to ignore my proposal.¡±

    As he said, he used another hand to jab at the middle-aged man.

    The strike sent the man flying while his sword was still left in Kumar¡¯s hands.

    The man went through the entrances and flew across the corridor he wasunched horizontally through a cannon and hit the wall all the way across.

    Kumar yed with the sword as he walked and stabbed it in the hallway before walking out of the n.

    Baryn didn¡¯te out of his daze for over ten minutes.

    Sam followed Kumar back to the inn and this time, he used a very different method to spy on him. This also belonged to the new technique he developed.

    He is going to use the insect puppets that he regrly uses to spy on people. But this time it is not going to do it in a straightforward manner.

    Sam tinkered with the formations of the inn. There is a central formation that is connected to the individual formations of each room. These formations eliminate all the sounding from a room to preserve their privacy.

    With Sam¡¯s tinkering, the formation in Kumar¡¯s room is going to act a little bit differently. The insect puppet that he released, didn¡¯t go out of its way to spy on Kumar, instead, Sam controlled it remotely and spread the consciousness of the puppet to connect with the room formation externally.

    Now the formation will work just like usual, but Sam would be able to listen to whatever conversation that is happening inside that room through that puppet.

    Of course, it will take a lot of him to do that. But Kumar is very aware of Sam¡¯s usual methods. There is no way, it would go unnoticed if Sam actually used his regr methods here.

    In fact, Sam is also wary of using this method too. But he guessed that Kumar wouldn¡¯t be too vignt to micromanage and suspect everything at this moment. After all, this mission only started the day before.

    Sam closed his eyes and put all of his focus on Kumar. Only after an hour and a half did he find something.

    He heard a voice from Kumar¡¯s room.

    ¡°Sir, the young master from Magman n came to visit you.¡± An attendant came and informed Kumar.

    ¡°Tell him toe here.¡±

    As if on cue, the attendant has pushed away and Baryn stepped into the room.

    ¡°I am already here. I considered your proposal and I want to discuss it further.¡±

    ¡°Sure. What do you want to discuss?¡±

    ¡°What is the name of the person that you are mentioning constantly.¡±

    ¡°I am not going to reveal the name until the cooperation is sealed.¡±

    ¡°Sure. But you should reveal as soon as we reach an agreement.¡±

    ¡°Okay. What else do you want to ask?¡±

    ¡°I have a lot of questions¡­¡±

    Sam heard as the young master bbered on and on with a bunch of questions big and small. Kumar sighed but answered all of them carefully. Only after all of this did they finallye to an agreement.¡±

    ¡°The person I am talking about is called Sam.¡±

    ¡°How do you know that he is going toe for us? And why are you willing to help us regarding this matter?¡±

    ¡°It was a mission assigned to me by my master. He is from a higher realm and he is also a follower of God Loki. He obtained information that Sam ising after the children your ns are keeping and he asked me toe and make sure the child doesn¡¯t leave the n.¡±

    ¡°It is hard to take your word for it. How about we sign a soul contract?¡±

    ¡°Of course, I have no objections to that. In fact, I was about to suggest one myself.¡±

 Chapter 1787 - 1787 Searching Sam

    1787 Searching Sam

    Sam listened in silently as Kumar and Baryn signed a soul contract.

    From the discussion, he could guess that Kumar¡¯s mission is to make sure that the child stays safe and within the hands of Magman n. Which is contradictory to Sam¡¯s own mission. This means they are going to sh.

    Sam started thinking about how to proceed with this.

    One way to go about this is to fight the battle head-on. The defense in Magman n about these children is already very tight.

    From what Maya said, even Baryn might be barely eligible to see his own child. If his guess is right, Sam would have to sh with the n head of the magman n to safely escort the kid out. But after second thought, he took head-on sh out of the question.

    He really might need to sh head-on. But it would be better to choose the location and time of the sh wisely.

    He needs to make sure that he has all the advantages in the world if he is going to sh with them.

    But to draw out such a conclusion from this, he needs to think of a way.

    First, he let a shadow follow Baryn back.

    .....

    Kumar is still left in the inn. They made an arrangement and Kumar will be taken to the n grounds as an official bodyguard of the child and the young master that evening. At least until that point there will be no leads from Kumar.

    Sam decided to follow Baryn to get any more information if he could. If things don¡¯t really work out and he didn¡¯t get any relevant info, he will use a very crude and straightforward technique to tip the scale in his favor.

    While Sam is tailing Baryn, thetter is making some moves. First, he called his most trusted aide.

    ¡°We got the news that the Chasin¡¯s kid was taken away. See if a guy named Sam is involved in this. I want to get all the information. Make sure that you identify any familiar face or any trace that links to any external influence. I want the information in the next three hours.

    Use every single one of our spies.¡±

    After that, he went into the n grounds and started making a few preparations. One of them is to prepare a residence for Kumar. He ced that right in between his father¡¯s ce and the ce where the Kid is staying.

    This way, Kumar could be easily monitored.

    After arranging that, he did a few of his tasks as the n¡¯s young master and finally he went to meet the child and his father at the same time.

    In the child¡¯s residence, currently, the child is being breastfed by an Ice elf. It is a bit surprising because there is no settlement of Ice elves in that realm or the realms adjacent to them.

    The old man is using a special formation to make sure that the kid is able to digest the milk without freezing to death on the spot.

    ¡°Father, is this really okay? I can understand being fed by neutral elves with wood element, but ice elves have too much ice elemental energy. Would the child be having any adverse effects?¡±

    ¡°No. I already did my research. Even though many people say that kids are born with their innate talent and elemental affinity, from what I learned, affinity can be controlled. Based on what elements they came into contact with since they are kids, their affinities will also be triggered.

    Breastfeeding is one of the great ways to contact different elemental energies at a very intricate level.

    A muscle head like you wouldn¡¯t understand this. Let me handle this by myself.¡±

    Baryn didn¡¯t reply to that and just sighed. He then thought for a moment and spoke.

    ¡°I got the deal signed by that outsider named Kumar, I arranged his residence just as you suggested, I will bring him back after this meeting is over.¡±

    ¡°Good.¡±

    ¡°I also sent people to investigate this guy named Sam. I don¡¯t really know if we are going to get in concrete info, but until now all the reports we received don¡¯t have anything on him.¡±

    ¡°It¡¯s fine, keep on searching. I don¡¯t believe it is a coincidence that a talented and capable person came looking for us saying that the child is going to be kidnapped right after one of the children has gone missing.

    There should be an anomaly here. Make sure that you leave no stone unturned.¡±

    ¡°Yes, father.¡±

    ¡°Also, start looking for that person named Sam in our cities. If what Kumar said is true, there is a chance that he might appear here also. After all, we are the closest target after thest one. There is a high probability that he is here.

    Get his feature description from Kumar or an image will be good and start searching for him. Don¡¯t do it openly though. As soon as he arrives in our territory we should know instantly.

    Understood?¡±

    ¡°Yes, father. I will be on it immediately.¡±

    Baryn left and went back to Kumar. Sam¡¯s shadow came back with all the collected information.

    Sam isn¡¯t really surprised by the measures taken by them. They are within his scope of estimation. He is d that he knew about the information regarding their search though. Sam immediately started disguising himself.

    First, he took off his ck attire and reced it with some tan and brown clothing. He then used a face mask which is full of special inscriptions that gave out an illusion of apletely different face.

    Sam is now apletely different person.

    In fact, he used his spatial ability to get out of the inn ande back in his disguise before taking a new room. Since he already openly came here as Sam, he decided to use that to stir up the pot a bit.

    He waited in his new room and soon Kumar was taken away by Baryn to the n grounds. After that, Sam let his shadows and ghosts loose. Baryn already gave instructions to everyone to search for Sam, so he used shadows and ghosts to mark everyone inside thatwork.

 Chapter 1788 - 1788 Direct Channel

    1788 Direct Channel

    Sam felt like this day is going very slowly.

    Maybe the day before has been too productive, now waiting around and taking this one step at a time is not really making him feelfortable. He tried to get all the information about the marked targets real-time and soon he finally managed to pick one that is suitable for the next step of his n.

    This guy is in charge of searching for Sam in restaurants, inns, and other simr establishments.

    Currently, that guy is in the middle of a bar giving instructions to his subordinates. Sam thought for a moment and went to the bar.

    After the target gave all the instructions that he needed to give, he came out and started drinking at the bar counter.

    Sam went and sat beside him.

    He took a sip of the wine and spat it out.

    ¡°Shit. What kind of wine is this? This is way too bad.¡±

    He looked at the bartender furiously. Of course, the bartender didn¡¯t like that statement. He looked at Sam coldly and said.

    .....

    ¡°if you don¡¯t like the wine then get the fuck out. This is the best wine in the city, even the members from the Magman ne here and drink. Are you saying that you have a better taste than them?¡±

    Sam frowned and took out a jar of wine before mming it on the table. He opened the jar and let the aroma spread all over the bar.

    Everyone was stunned for a moment as they were taken in by that great aroma.

    ¡°I am used to drinking wine like this. Of course, yours taste like piss to me.¡±

    As he said, he poured the wine in a ss and slid it to the bartender. Then he poured another ss of it and then moved it to the target beside him

    ¡°Sir, you look like a man of refined taste. Why don¡¯t you taste my wine and his and tell me which one is better.¡±

    Hearing Sam¡¯s words, the target finally came out of the daze. He is the closest to wine jar. So, he got affected by the aroma the most. He reached out the ss in that dazed state and took a sip.

    He closed his eyes and enjoyed that feeling.

    The wine is indeed many times better than the wine sold in the bar. Even the bar tender has to agree to that point. He looked at Sam and asked.

    ¡°Where did you get this wine?¡±

    ¡°Get it? I made it. You see I am a brewer. I like making different liquors and exploring various tastes. I came here when I heard rumors that Magman n has great taste in wines and the city might have some really great spirits.

    But the rumors are wrong after all. I should have known.¡±

    Sam stood up and turned to leave. Everyone could see that his face is full of disappointment.

    The bartender immediately hopped off of the counter to stop Sam from leaving.

    ¡°Sir. Please stay for a moment. The rumors are indeed true. The magman n and the whole territory are indeed lovers of great liquor. But the problem is that we don¡¯t have great vegetation and resources to brew great wine.

    You must have already noticed that from my surroundings.¡±

    Sam seemed to have remembered something and said.

    ¡°Yes indeed. I was wondering how the city could have great wine if there is nothing in the forests and surroundings. That is how it is. If we take that into consideration then your wine should be considered not bad.¡±

    Sam muttered as if he was thinking something.

    The bartender is trying to think of ways to make Sam sell the secrets of his wine. The reason is pretty simple before the Magman n was established, the head of the Magman n used to be a brute. He was mercenary, a sellsword, and did all kinds of dirty deeds.

    He is a fanatic about drinking and he drinks a shit ton.

    This information is kind of open to everyone but it was never considered a significant piece of info. Except the bartenders and merchants didn¡¯t think so.

    Anyone who wants to curry favor with this former brute will use this method. Of course, the favor couldn¡¯t be too much. If the limit is to have better favorability as a business establishment then it is fine.

    The best for these people is that even the descendants of the Magman n head are also very much drunkards like their father. They all have their favorite ce and these young masters attract arge crowd increasing the bar¡¯s business.

    This bartender is essentially trying to improve his business.

    But of course, there is someone else in the room with much grander ambitions. He took a step forward and talked to Sam.

    ¡°Sir, your wine is indeed better. I would like to talk to you about something in secret. Shall we got to my private booth?¡±

    Sam frowned and didn¡¯t want to talk with either of them. Then only the target whipped his token as an employee of Magman n. He even allowed to the bartender toe to the booth and finally, Sam relented.

    When they entered the booth, the target spoke.

    ¡°As I said, I work with the Magman n and I must say, sir, you are a bit misinformed. The Magman n is indeed famous for their liquor-drinking habit. But the production quality is only so-so.

    From what I can see, you have a great treasure in your hands. I think we can reach some sort of coboration here.¡±

    ¡°Coboration? What kind?¡±

    ¡°I have many connections in this city. And I and this bartender are good friends. Three of us can coborate together and set up a bar. You can supply us with recipes and the cultivation method. The bartender will be in charge of brewing and sales meanwhile I will take care of cultivating the required resources.

    We will split the profit in three ways. All three of us can benefit from this.¡±

    ¡°But, I am not really looking to settle down at the moment. I am a wanderer. I go around the world to explore different liquors. I don¡¯t want to tie myself down.¡±

    ¡°Of course, I am sure you have a lot to explore. You can treat this ce as a second home. Magman n has a lot of influence and you might have already known about the n head¡¯s obsession with different races.

    I can get you a spot on his exploration team. You would be able to move around.¡±

    ¡°And all of this for what?¡±

    Sam asked skeptically.

    ¡°I want your most extraordinary that you will not be willing to sell no matter what. And I want it a jar per month.¡±

    ¡°Most extraordinary wine?¡±

    ¡°I am sure you have a wine like that. I would like it if you can give me a jar every month.¡±

    Sam started thinking, but inside he is actually smiling. The n is going smoothly. This is not really a big deal.

    This is just to establish a direct connection with Baryn. A channel that will be least suspicious. And he is going to use this channel to stir the pot.

    ¡°I don¡¯t have any objection to this. But I have one slight problem.¡±

 Chapter 1789 - 1789 Kumarâ€™s Net

    1789 Kumar¡¯s Net

    When the target heard this, he became extremely delighted.

    Having a problem means that he can use this opportunity to solve it and curry some favor.

    ¡°What is it? Let me know. I will try my best to solve it. There are not many things in the city that could trouble me.¡±

    ¡°Well, I just came to the city and it seems like I have already offended someone. That guy also has a very vast collection of wines and he is enjoying them by himself. I wanted to have an exchange. In fact, his wine collection is far superior to mine. He gave me a bottle as goodwill and didn¡¯t take mine.

    I got offended a bit and tried to buy that method off of him.

    He became pissed and warned me that he would kill me if Ie across.¡±

    The target was stunned and so was the bartender. A wine superior to this and someone was so insulted that he wanted to kill this guy just for asking to buy it?

    ¡°Who is that person?¡±

    The target asked in confusion.

    .....

    ¡°He is staying in Magman inn. He is wearing all ck. ck feather coat. He had a cold aura around him. He looked like he could kill someone with just a gaze. He is tall, somewhat good looking¡­¡±

    As he went on with describing, the target¡¯s face changed a dozen times over.

    ¡°Wait, does he look like this?¡± he asked as he showed the picture of Sam.

    Sam looked at his own picture and nodded.

    ¡°Yes. Why do you have a picture of him? Are you guys¡­¡±

    Before he could speak, the target stood up and said.

    ¡°he is a wanted man. Thank you so much for giving me this information. This helps me a lot. I owe you a huge favor. Right now, I think it is better for you to stay somewhere else. Magman inn might be in some chaos.¡±

    The target thought for a moment and called one of his subordinates. He then called one of his subordinates.

    ¡°This person is an esteemed guest of mine. Take him to my residence beside the n grounds. Tell everyone to not disturb him.¡±

    Sam¡¯s eyes lit up in excitement when he heard this. A house right beside the n grounds. It is almost like circumstances are begging him to spy on the n.

    The subordinate respectfully escorted Sam to the residence while the target went running to the inn to search for Sam.

    When he reached the inn, he directly went to the manager and asked.

    ¡°Did you see the guy in this picture? Did hee to this inn?¡±

    The manager saw this and was frightened a bit. He recognized the target and Sam both. Sam seemed like a mysterious powerhouse by the way he carried himself, so he treated him with respect. And the target is known to be Baryn¡¯sckey.

    So, he acted even more respectfully and answered.

    ¡°Yes, sir. This person booked a room here this morning. He didn¡¯te out as far as we know. So, he should still be there.¡±

    ¡°Good. Check if he is in the room first. He is a wanted man by the Magman n. There should be no mistakes. You cannot afford to mess this up. Got it?¡±

    ¡°Yes, sir.¡±

    ¡°I will go and bring Young master Baryn here. You better be careful with this.¡±

    With that, the target ran back to the n grounds and met with Baryn.

    He didn¡¯t reveal the liquor deal he made with disguised Sam. Instead, he just said that he came across a passerby and got a clue. He went to the inn and asked the manager. He got a positive reply.

    That is all he said.

    Baryn stood up in surprise. He immediately called for Kumar.

    Kumar heard the whole story and asked.

    ¡°Are you sure?¡±

    ¡°Yes. The manager of the inn is currently waiting there. I think we should investigate.¡±

    Kumar nodded and left with Baryn to take a look. They spoke with the inn manager who only said one thing when they arrived.

    ¡°He is missing. He is not in his room.¡±

    When they heard that, Kumar sighed and said.

    ¡°He might have already gotten a hold that we are looking for him. I told you to do it as discreetly as possible.¡±

    ¡°How discreet can we be? We didn¡¯t even issue a public notice. Apart from the direct subordinates of the Magman n no one else has seen his picture or knows the fact that we are looking for him. There is no way he could have known. And the manager said that he just came this morning.

    It is impossible for him to know.¡±

    The target said.

    Kumar looked at him and didn¡¯t say anything for a moment. He turned to the manager and asked.

    ¡°I have been here since morning. Is there any chance that he could have heard any conversation in my room?¡±

    ¡°No sir. We have an isted formation for concealment in each room and it is connected to the central formation. If the room¡¯s formation is tampered with we will know it in the central formation.¡±

    Kumar shook his head and said.

    ¡°you guys wouldn¡¯t even know if he changed the whole formation directly. Do a thorough check and see if the formation ispletely alright. Let me know as soon as possible. Which room is he in? Take me there.¡±

    The manager went to check on the formation while an attendant escorted Kumar to Sam¡¯s room.

    He looked around and then tried to find out any possible way to his own room. But there aren¡¯t any. He is wondering if Sam had heard his conversation with baryn and then decided to leave this ce. Or if he had some bigger n.

    He didn¡¯t find any evidence, but he still cannot rule out that possibility.

    Kumar turned to Baryn and said.

    ¡°We cannot be sure if Sam learned about us or not. But let us assume the worst-case scenario and he heard us. We cannot predict what he will exactly do. But it would be a way to ess as much information as possible.

    I need a formation and inscription master who is good with necromancy and dark elemental energy immediately.

    I need them to do something.

    Activate every single one of your subordinates within the city. Direct or not. We need every set of eyes that we can afford.

    If possible try to limit the number of people roaming around in the city.

    Sam should either be found out or scared away by us. Any oue other than these two is not desirable.

    Go back to your father and tell him to stay with the kid all the time. Throughout the day. Under no circumstance, he should leave the kid¡¯s side.

    Seal the n grounds. No one should go out or go in until further notice. Tell your father to scan the whole n grounds with his spiritual sense. The things to look for are shadow undead, ghosts, specters, insects, and bugs that are out of ce. Anything that is reflecting some dark elemental energy and weird metallic creatures.

    Get to it immediately.

    Meanwhile, I will cast a so big that Sam should be found out no matter where he is hidden.¡±

 Chapter 1790 - 1790 Battle traces

    1790 Battle traces

    Sam didn¡¯t know what Kumar has nned.

    At least not for the next thirty minutes. Because within the next thirty minutes, Sam saw with his shadows and ghosts that the whole city is in chaos.

    A lot of people are running around. Every inn and bar has been raided by the Magman n members.

    And after another thirty minutes, the magman n members were given something. A token with some inscriptions. As soon as they injected some energy into it. An energy radar appeared.

    The token is used to discover death energy, dark elemental energy, and shadow energy. All three energies that are needed to drive Sam¡¯s soul are ghosts, specters, shadow undead and even the puppets.

    The men of the Magman n were asked to inject their energy into the tokens constantly.

    In fact, a couple of Sam¡¯s souls were caught because of this method in the first few minutes.

    Sam was stunned and finally got a hold of what the situation is.

    Kumar is currently searching high and low for Sam and he is using all kinds of tricks and techniques to stop Sam from gaining any information. He basically cut off all of Sam¡¯s usual techniques which are usually focused on following people and eavesdropping on the conversations.

    .....

    While Sam tried to recall all of his shadow undead and ghosts, more and more of them were discovered and caught of destroyed.

    The head of Magman n already heard of the news and the preparation his son is making up on the advice of Kumar.

    When he heard that some people really did manage toe across some of the ghosts and had to gang up just to kill a couple of them, he became vignt. He also became more epting of Kumar and his words.

    This is kind of bad news for Sam.

    If Kumar has some friction with the Magman n, then things would be easier. But now that they are getting along and the Magman n are not stupid enough to ignore Kumar¡¯s advice, things are going to be extremely difficult.

    But Sam felt like he still has the upper hand.

    The other party doesn¡¯t know exactly if Sam is here or not. They also don¡¯t know how much information Sam has about them.

    Meanwhile, Sam knew exactly how they found out about him, because he is the one that gave them that information.

    Now, he knows exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it.

    It is basically him making his opponent reveal all of their moves even before the actual game has started. He already visualized everything the opponent is going to do and now he can think of ways to counter it.

    And the first thing on that list of tasks is to find a way to gain information from the Magman n. His usual methods are gone.

    But there is still one channel open.

    As Sam is thinking, the channel itself has walked into the room.

    The target. The target subordinate of Baryn arrived in front of him.

    ¡°Hello, friend. I hope you are doing well here.¡±

    The target asked Sam.

    Sam nodded and asked.

    ¡°What is happening outside? I have seen that many guards are moving around as if they are searching for someone.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, the guy who threatened to kill you is a wanted person of highest level. We are looking for his whereabouts. You gave us some huge help. If we hadn¡¯t known that he is hiding, we wouldn¡¯t know what he could have done.¡±

    ¡°That guy is such a big deal? What is the enmity between Magman and them?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t know the details, but the n head issued the orders himself. So, he is a pretty big deal. This also means, we need to dy our partnership a bit.

    Also, the city is on a curfew, so you won¡¯t be able to leave the city anytime soon. I suggest you make yourselffortable here. I will be working on this case for some time.¡±

    ¡°Maybe, I can help you somehow?¡±

    ¡°Hahaha, thanks for saying it. But it is fine. Our Magman n is no pushover. I think we will be able to find him ourselves in no time.¡±

    ¡°Well, if you are okay with it then fine. But from what I saw, he is eating a very particr kind of snake meat with his wine. And I saw the snake in the woods east of the city. It seems like he has cooked the snake in the forest itself.

    Maybe you might find some clues there.¡±

    The target thought for a moment and nodded.

    ¡°Thank you. I don¡¯t know how valuable this information is, but I will ry it to my superior.¡±

    The target ran out of his residence and made his way to the young master. He wanted to ry this information as well, but he is unable to think of a way to do so without revealing the information about his new business partner.

    After some thought, he didn¡¯t bother thinking too much and decided to just send a team directly. Anyway, there are ns going on to do some scouting in the forests, and he decided to just rece some of the scouts with his own team members.

    He didn¡¯t overthink after this idea and let it run.

    And to his surprise, just after half an hour of sending his team, he already got some results. His team brought back some clues and information.

    When he got the info, he immediately ran back to Baryn.

    ¡°Sir, we found some traces in the forest.¡±

    Kumar and Baryn learned the info and immediately went to the forest. There they saw what looked like a battlefield.

    It seemed like two powerful people were fighting there. There are some traces of blood, and some aftermath of fire-based and lightning-based attacks.

    There are some trees that fell down and seemed to have got cut with precise wind des. Moreover, there is some beastly aura there that attracted Kumar the most.

    ¡°I think he is here. The blood and the attacks all seem like his own doing and the beastly aura. It is definitely him who did this. But who is he fighting with? And how did we miss if he is fighting this close to the city?¡±

 Chapter 1791 - 1791 Globe

    1791 Globe

    Kumar is confused.

    The battle marks are very authentic. The attacks, the aftermath, the debris, and even the burn marks left behind on the far away trees. Everything seemed legit.

    But once again the question boils down to how did they miss something like this if it is happening so close to the city. Also after some careful inspection, he realized that he couldn¡¯t figure out anything rted to Sam¡¯s opponent.

    After all, the other party should have been using some method, element or weapon. Something to fight with Sam. But there is not even a discernable footprint.

    The elemental energy that was floating around there felt like it all belonged to Sam.

    Kumar felt like this might just be something Sam left behind just to confuse them. And of course, once that thought came to mind, it is hard to let it go. Particrly when he thought of how Sam usually does things.

    But also one thing that bugged him is that all of Sam¡¯s movements that were left behind seemed like they are indeed part of the battle. So, now it is either that Sam is battling some Phantom that didn¡¯t leave anything behind.

    Or it is just Sam trying to mislead them?

    With those thoughts in mind, Kumar went back to the city. He tightened the defense. It is to the point, he took money out of his own pocket to hire the mercs and even contacted the underground people within the city.

    .....

    He paid them to work for him for the next few days.

    Sam decided to just sit back and think of ways to y around with Kumar and as a part of it, he started creating fake battlefields around the city. And every spot in the forest is simr to a spot where Sam usually hides.

    ¡°It seems like he is being tailed by someone. Why is he not escaping though?¡±

    Baryn asked as he looked at the battlefield. The marks left behind indicated that Sam is moving away from that ce while battling someone.

    ¡°No. He will not go. He needs to get that kid no matter what. As for battling with someone. For some reason I am having a hard time believing that.¡± Kumar said and he thought for a moment before passing an order.

    ¡°Tell everyone tob the surroundings. The battle marks here are very fresh. The battle didn¡¯t even happen that long ago and since he is moving around anyway, stretch the whole man power a bit thin and let themb the forest a bit.

    They don¡¯t really need to attack him or confront him. Tell them to find out if anything is here. Even if there is a small pebble in the immediate surroundings within three metre radius around the city. I want to know.¡±

    Kumar became a bit paranoid and wanted to resolve his suspicions immediately.

    Meanwhile, back in his temporary but cozy home, Sam is chilling a bit as he looked at the n grounds directly through the window.

    He really picked the right target as this ce happened to be one of the few where there is no search is going on right now.

    He observed the n grounds with his eye technique.

    The game turned out a bit exciting to him. It is like a game of chess. Right now Kumar and him are fighting with their minds even though they haven¡¯te face to face.

    Both of them know that the other party is trying to make them lose and they are trying to push back so the other party wouldn¡¯t be able to do what they want to do.

    And he is getting first-hand information on how the people in the city that are looking for him are moving around. This makes things much more easier. Now Sam already got the info that everyone is moving out tob the forest.

    So, he decided to give a gift to Kumar.

    He took out a formation disc and started injecting some energy into it while carving an inscription on it. He put all of his concentration as he directly carving an inscription on it. After more than two hours, he is finally done and at the final step, his focus increased to the maximum as he injected some of his divine energy into it.

    At this moment, Sam¡¯s divine energy is not even one-tenth of a Divine ne cultivator that was in the very beginning of the Divine ne.

    And even in that small amount, he used a very tiny portion as it takes a bit of time to recover back.

    After creating that formation disc, he didn¡¯t wait anymore and just let it be taken away by one of his puppets. The formation disc was gently ced outside of the n grounds. Outside the wall where there is a slight gap since most of the manpower is gone.

    The formation was activated and the show has began.

    The energy started gathering around the formation disc as it created sphere of fire elemental energy from it.

    If one looked at it, one will just think someone has created a formation disc that is used to convert normal spiritual energy into fire elemental energy.

    But in reality, this could do so much more than that.

    As the formation outside is working, the energy within the n grounds started changing a little bit. All of a sudden, in the northeast corner of the n grounds a small orange ball of fire elemental energy started gathering together just like it did with the disc.

    But this one is almost thrice asrge as the sphere outside.

    One of the patrolling guards noticed this and immediately ran over to inform their superiors.

    When the immediate superior came and saw this, he was also shocked.

    The energy gathered there is not doing anything in particr, but it is getting bigger and bigger with every passing second.

    The news soon reached the head of the n.

    Since Kumar and Baryn who are handling the tasks are now away from that ce and are inside the forest, the n head is the only person who should be reported about this.

    When the n head heard about this, he felt a bit suspicious. After all, he just learned about how Kumar wanted to search the forest and took the personnel away from the n grounds and now some weird phenomenon is happening.

    ¡°Go and call the first elder to me.¡±

    The guard left and returned with the first elder.

    ¡°What do you need brother?¡±

    The first elder is also an old man and he looked very simr to the n head. They are brothers.

    ¡°Something is happening in the n grounds. I cannot trust anyone else on this. So, I want you to go and figure out what is happening.¡±

    The first elder nodded and left the room.

    He didn¡¯t ask for any details. He just blindly followed whatever his brother asked him to do.

    Soon, he arrived at therge orange globe of fire elements and was stunned for a moment. As soon as he started moving towards this sphere, he sensed its presence. He guessed what it would like visually, but he was still shocked when he actually saw it.

    At that moment, therge orange-colored fire elemental globe has a radius of over 8 feet. It is huge to say the least. Now it is standing tall at almost 16 feet and that is not counting the gap between it and the ground as it is floating in the air.

    He immediately scanned the globe and then the surroundings to see if he could understand how it is happening. His mind went to look for people who he thought might be trying to hide. He took out his sword and got ready to fight.

    He raised his aura to the maximum. At that exact moment, he sensed something else from the globe and his eyes widened in horror.

    He took out amunication token and called his brother.

    ¡°You need to be here. You need to eliminate this.¡±

    ¡°What happened?¡±

    ¡°Juste.¡±

    He put off the token and started probing the globe with his own spiritual energy.

    ¡°Evacuate everyone from the surroundings. If this thing explodes anyone with a certain radius cannot survive.¡±

    The guards ran away while the n head started making his way there. He could immediately sense the threat the globe possessed from far away. He frowned thinking how such a thing even happened in the middle of his n grounds.

    And he also understood why his brother is so scared. The globe is emitting Divine energy and it is moving around in a chaotic fashion.

    He sped up and was about to reach the location in just half a second. But at that moment.

    *BOOM*

    The explosion happened. The Divine energy and spiritual energy ran rampant.

    The first elder used all of his strength and stabbed the sword into the ground. It created a shield of energy as it tried to enclose the explosion.

    But he is overpowered immediately. The n head tried to hold the explosion and created an energy barrier with his divine energy.

 Chapter 1792 - 1792 Confusion

    1792 Confusion

    Magman n¡¯s leader used his divine energy to create a shield andpress the explosion to the best of his ability.

    But to his dismay, his brother is already effected.

    After some effort, he finally managed to negate the explosion. He ran to his brother to see if he is okay. Right now, the first elder¡¯s body is corroded with the fire elemental energy. It is very hard for someone to do that to a cultivator at Peak of Astral ne.

    Divine energy is indeed a lot more dangerous for people below Divine ne.

    He tried to inject his own divine energy to neutralize. But it didn¡¯t work really well. He cannot force all of that fire elemental energy out just like that.

    He called for some guards.

    ¡°Take him to the healers. Tell them to reduce the burn wounds first and slowly treat him to lose the energy corrosion.¡±

    The guards left with the first elder. Meanwhile, the n leader looked around.

    He suppressed the explosion to its limit. Now, that small area became a veryplicated and suppressed fire zone with the chaotic fire elemental energy running rampant.

    .....

    He closed his eyes and started scanning the surroundings as he yelled.

    ¡°How dare a Divine ne Cultivator sneak up on our n like this? If you have gutse and face me?¡±

    He scanned the surroundings and his senses finallynded on a particr spot outside the n walls.

    He jumped into the air and went there straight. There he finally saw something.

    There is a small area where another ball of this chaotic fire elemental zone has appeared. It is the ce where Sam left the formation.

    The n head went there to take a look and understand what is happening there and when he finally did, he was surprised.

    The explosion range is small here, but the damage is exactly the same. It is almost like the scaled down version of the same explosion happened here. He didn¡¯t know what really made this happen, but he can be sure that both of them are connected.

    Another thing he is sure of is that it is done by a Divine ne cultivator.

    He ordered the guards to call for Kumar and Baryn.

    After over ten minutes within a meeting room in the magman n.

    ¡°What the hell is going on here? Kumar, you said that someone who is on par with you, which means a person at the peak of Astral ne ising here to get the child. But now a Divine ne cultivator¡¯s attack fell on my house.¡±

    ¡°Are you sure it is a Divine ne cultivator¡¯s attack?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I am very sure. Even if you guys can handle some Divine energy, the amount required for the attack is way too much. It will be impossible for an Astral ne cultivator to control so much energy. And as far as I know, none of the family heads that are currently contending have this kind of fire elemental energy.

    So, whoever it is, it is someone from outside the current circle.¡±

    Kumar held his head in frustration. Everything seemed so messed up. He is sure that Sam is here somewhere. And then there are these battle tracks. Before they couldb it the surroundings, something like this happened at home.

    They don¡¯t even know which lead to follow and what to believe.

    While they are thinking, a guard barged in and said.

    ¡°Sir, one of the teams reported that there is a battle going on in the forest. They recorded just a little bit of it.¡±

    Kumar stood up abruptly and left the room.

    ¡°I will be right back.¡±

    He took off at his top speed and left the city to get to that ce. When he reached that spot, the battle is nowhere to be seen. All he could see is another vague aftermath.

    The guards that spotted the area managed to capture a little part of the video and they showed it to Kumar.

    When he saw that video, he was stunned for a momemt.

    Sam looked like he is fighting something there. He is hurt a bit. He looked frustrated and exhausted. But there is nothing in front of him.

    The only reason the guards even thought that it is a fight and not someone crazily swining their fists around is because they could see Sam being hit and flying around like crazy.

    It is almost like the opponent is treating Sam is like a training dummy. He is having a hard time fighting back even though he used all of his elements. This is the first time, he saw Sam in such a defensive position.

    He saw Sam kicking Hou Yi¡¯s ass in a straight fight when they are on the same level. He has seen him do things that are impossible to fathom, but now he is seeing Sam getting his ass kicked like he was little kid.

    And he cannot even see the opponent.

    The video is very short. It is only there for a few seconds. But just from that very short content, he could see that Sam is indeed fighting with someone.

    He went back to the n grounds immediately and showed the video to the n leader.

    ¡°It does seem like he is fighting someone. It seems natural.¡±

    The n leader said with a frown.

    Kumar then took out the map and then marked all the spots Sam appeared at.

    ¡°He is approaching the city, from different directions and every time he came to a certain radius he is being stopped.¡± Kumar said to the father and son duo.

    ¡°So, he is indeeding, are you saying that someone is stopping him froming here?¡±

    ¡°Maybe. But if Sam really wants to enter the city, he has many ways to do so. He has enough means to sneak into the city without alerting anyone.¡±

    ¡°Then why is he not using them?¡±

    ¡°My bet is that he cannot use them right now. Whatever it is that¡¯s stopping Sam from entering the city physically, might also be something that is stopping him from using his usual methods.¡±

    ¡°Someone is helping us with this?¡±

    Baryn asked in confusion.

    Even the n leader felt a bit skeptical and said.

    ¡°Or maybe, someone is stopping him since they might have their own n to deal with us. As you said, your friend is pretty capable and they might be worried that he might ruin their n.¡± Magman n leader tried to make sense of this situation.

    ¡°Then why did he even get out in the first ce? He already entered the city. What forced him to get out of this ce? And what is stopping him from entering again?¡±

    As they are discussing all of a sudden a few more reports came in.

    One of them is that there is another fight happening and this time, in a different direction.

    Another report is that there is a huge lightning ball forming at a corner of the city and this one isrger than before. Wayrger.

    The n head immediately ran out and flew into the sky. He could see it in the corner of the city. He went there and used his own Divine energy to suppress it.

    Meanwhile Kumar took this chance to go to the spot where the fight was being reported from. He saw Sam just running off after he got hit. But this time, he is not just running as if someone is tailing him. He just ran off after seeing that someone ising there.

    ¡°WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING HERE?¡± Kumar kicked a stone on the ground and screamed in anger.

    He saw in the sky where the lightning ball is falling down on to the city¡¯s formation while the n leader is defending against it. It is not exactly taking a lot of effort for him. But it is just way too big of an explosion that is happening for a span of time.

    This is taking him a lot of time.

    Kumar ran back once again and looked at the situation. He tried to keep everything in ce to see if he can understand what is happening. The n leader came back as well and he is also very much frustrated just like the rest.

    But even he couldn¡¯t put a finger on it.

    ¡°Someone is doing something and we don¡¯t who and what.¡± He turned to Kumar and asked.

    ¡°What do you suggest? If it weren¡¯t for you, I wouldn¡¯t have gotten any idea that something like this is happening. What do you suggest we do?¡±

    ¡°These attacks that are happening. At least we are sure that Sam cannot get in. Think of a way to block the kid from being taken away by a person at your level, even if you are not beside the kid. If these attackse again, you should be able to defend them.

    I will try to get in touch with Sam and get some information. Who ever that is doing this, Sam must have some idea about them.¡±

 Chapter 1793 - 1793 Finally Meet

    1793 Finally Meet

    Both the n leader and Baryn looked at Kumar in confusion.

    ¡°You can get information from him?¡±

    ¡°I can try. We don¡¯t have any enmity. It is just that we have different goals and they are shing. We don¡¯t have enough enmity to kill each other. So, it is still possible.¡±

    ¡°But how are you going to contact him?¡±

    ¡°We just need to be open about it. I will set up a meeting point out in the forest.¡±

    ¡°Are you sure?¡±

    ¡°We have an unspoken code. We will do favors to each other, whenever we can. I will talk to him. You think of a way to stop a Divine ne cultivator to take your baby away from you.¡±

    ¡°You can be sure of that. I am setting up a formation around the house. A divine ne cultivator has to open it up to get in to it. The transference scrolls, spatial blinks and most of the spatial transference cannot do anything to that formation.

    And if someone touches the formation, I will know.¡±

    .....

    ¡°It doesn¡¯t matter if he know about it. What if the formation is not enough to keep them out for long and you are busy dealing with these massive attacks?¡±

    ¡°I have a n for that too. I activated all of our special formations. Most of the attacks with that level of Divine energy will be gone. They will be defended with the formation. I will only step up if the formation cannot take the energy anymore or if the attack is too big for the formation.¡±

    ¡°That is good.¡±

    Kumar spread the word among the city and even the surrounding cities stating that he wanted to talk to Sam. He told a location in the forest for Sam toe and meet him. He waited for Sam.

    He just hoped that the n leader will be able to hold off against whatever it is that they are fighting against.

    Meanwhile, Sam got the news faster than Kumar had hoped. But he couldn¡¯t help but smile as soon as he heard it.

    ¡°Things are a lot easier when you know how the other party reacts exactly to whatever you do. Kumar. Thank you so much, man. I do owe you a favor for this.¡±

    As Sam muttered to himself he took out his inscription pen. He started carving the formation discs one after another. And this time, he has the divine energy going through it the whole time.

    He didn¡¯t even try to spare too much of his Divine energy into making these formations. Time passed slowly as he worked on the formations.

    It is already night by the time he is done with it and that is also the time he removed his disguisepletely. It is about time for him to leave the city, with the kid in his hand of course.

    He used the dimensional drifter and disappeared from the spot.

    He reappeared outside the forest in front of Kumar.

    Kumar is sitting there on a tree stump as he looked around waiting. When he saw Sam, he is surprised for a moment, but he chuckled.

    ¡°Hello Sam. Nice to see you.¡±

    ¡°I would say the same, but it is not as nice anymore since I have been seeing you for the past couple of days. You are not that pleasing to the eyes.¡±

    Sam said as he walked forward and raised an earthen rock and sat on it.

    ¡°So, how is your mission going? I am assuming it is to protect the children from being taken away.¡±

    Sam asked casually.

    ¡°I guess yours is to take the child away. Who should you take the child away to?¡±

    ¡°I would rather keep it a secret. You know how I am about information. You still didn¡¯t answer my question though. How is your mission?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t know. I need your help a bit with it. I feel like there is someone other than you is interfering in this and I want to know who and how to stop them.¡±

    ¡°Why would I do that? The more people stirring up the water, the better for me isn¡¯t it? It will give me more variables to y around with.¡±

    ¡°Come on Sam, if you are really capable of taking away the kid, you would have done it already. It has been a couple of days since you came to this ce. You are being stopped by someone or something. I believe that the power you are fighting against and the power that is fighting against me are the same.

    Let¡¯s help each other out. Once we get rid of the external parties, we can duke it out.¡±

    Sam looked at him and sighed.

    ¡°I am really sorry my friend.¡±

    As he waved his hand. A bunch of metal puppets came out and flew away with the formation discs.

    Kumar frowned and looked at Sam.

    ¡°What do you mean? Why are you apologizing?¡±

    ¡°Because I didn¡¯t y fair this time. I couldn¡¯t help myself.¡±

    ¡°What did you do?¡±

    Kumar asked as he felt chills run down his spine.

    The puppets took off faster and they startednding the formation discs at different spots around the cities. Small globes of different elemental energies started appearing around the city and they all started triggering reactions on the formation of the city.

    Kumar immediately understood what is happening.

    ¡°That is your doing? How are you able to do that?¡±

    ¡°A new trick I picked up. From the formation of that city that we have been in? You remember the Osiris task didn¡¯t you?¡±

    ¡°That formation?¡±

    ¡°It is something called resonance. But a very overblown and overpowered version. It can just amplify a lot of things. Anyway, it is very hard for me to exin. But what is about to happen is not going to be clean.¡±

    As they spoke, the whole city¡¯s formation as put under immense stress. It is stressed enough to bepletely strained. It is destroyed in the next second. The n leader already came out and tried his best to stop all of these energy globes from going into the city.

    At this exact moment, Sam took out his dimensional drifter and disappeared. He arrived right in the middle of the n grounds. Right in front of the house of the n head. Where the child was kept.

    He looked at the formation and tried to use the dimensional drifter to cross it. But to his surprise, he wasn¡¯t able to. He thought for a moment and injected whatever Divine energy left in his body into the dimensional drifter and finally it worked.

    He directly entered the house and stood in front of the child who is sleeping peacefully in the crib. There are a bunch of women who are resting in different rooms within the house and one of them is there keeping watch on the kid.

    Sam didn¡¯t even take much effort to deal with her and caught hold of the child.

    He used the dimensional drifter again and reappeared in the forest. He sat in front of Kumar once again.

    ¡°How did you do it?¡±

    Kumar asked in defeat. He knew that it would be pointless to try at this point, so he decided to just give it up.

    ¡°Things are a lot easier since there are no restrictions on me directly. I can use my dimensional drifter.¡±

    ¡°That is not what I am asking. How did you do the whole thing? How are you able to make this happen? We didn¡¯t fight, hell we didn¡¯t evene face-to-face with each other. But you still defeated me. How?¡±

    Kumar¡¯s voice sounded very down. He never felt so defeated.

    ¡°It took a lot of thinking.

    I came to the city and saw that you got in touch with the young master. So, I figured it is better to utilize that point. I picked a target and used that guy to score a residence and used the same guy to feed you information.

    I let you know that I am in the city. Then I created scenarios. Scenarios of me fighting an invisible enemy. I made you believe that I cannot enter the city and then I also made you believe that someone else made me unable to enter the city.

    Since you felt like my threat ispletely minimized and there is arger threat ahead in your mind, you didn¡¯t take me seriously. So, finally, things are where they are right now.

    It was a very exhausting operation.¡±

    ¡°I got yed. Aren¡¯t I?¡±

    ¡°If you want to put it that way. Yes. That is pretty much it. But I can give you something to smoothly escape from this.¡±

    ¡°What would that be?¡±

    ¡°You can me this on two different ns.¡± Sam took out the recording and gave it to him. It is the recording of the meeting between Shijin and Karn.

    ¡°Give this to them and you will be able to gain some credibility you wouldn¡¯t be able to get too much suspicion at least. And the attacks will also be med on those ns.¡±

    ¡°Thanks.¡±

    Sam nodded and stood up to take his leave.

    ¡°Bye Kumar. See youter.¡±

 Chapter 1794 - 1794 Aftermath

    1794 Aftermath

    Kumar just kept on staring at the rock Sam sat on.

    He couldn¡¯t help but lose himself in a daze. The things that Sam did that day, he couldn¡¯t even wrap his head around it.

    He knew that Sam is in a different league than him and the rest of the yers. But to think that the difference is this big. Sam didn¡¯t evene face to face with him. He didn¡¯t even hit him once, he didn¡¯t even touch him once, he didn¡¯t even confront him.

    But he still managed to make Kumar do what he wanted, think what he wanted, say what he wanted, and y what he wanted.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel the chills running down his pain.

    That¡¯s when another reality hit him.

    Sam has not just ying with him. He yed with a Divine ne cultivator and with a technique that has never been seen before, he managed to keep the Divine ne cultivator cautious and upied enough for Sam to just go in and take away the kid.

    Right under the nose of that Divine ne cultivator. This is nothing short of a miracle for him. As far as he knows, none of the yers are capable of doing anything simr. Nothing they can aplish will ever be close to any of the things Sam did in these two days.

    He doesn¡¯t know if Sam realizes how much he is growing and what kind of capabilities he holding. But he felt like all the achievements that Sam had all these years, are just barely on the surface. The real depth of what he can do will only be achieved in the future.

    .....

    Meanwhile, Sam is not thinking as much as Kumar.

    He never really bothered to gauge his overall strength, and he also never reallypared himself with any other yers or peers. All he ever did is learn new things and improve his skill set so that he can be prepared for every scenario he can imagine.

    Right now, all he is thinking about is how Maya is kissing her youngest child.

    ¡°The kid has been on a weird diet of breast milk over the days. Do you mind if I check the condition a bit?¡±

    ¡°Of course.¡±

    Maya didn¡¯t even hesitate before handing over the kid.

    Sam checked her a bit and injected his own spiritual energy to get rid of the residual energy remnants.

    ¡°It is not necessary to make the kid go through this horrendous process right now. They have plenty of opportunities to realize their true potential.

    Just let them enjoy their childhood a bit.¡±

    Maya nodded and just rocked her child trying to let it sleep.

    Sam sat down and meditated for a while. He expended all of his Divine Energy. It is the first time he did that. It will take a bit of time for him to recover all of it back and he figured it is better to keep his distance from direct action a bit.

    He decided to take the night off and move the next morning.

    Back at Magman city.

    Kumar went back to the city in the same daze. He looked at the n leader and then at the young master before giving the recording to them.

    ¡°It is two of your rival ns that did that. Take a look at this.¡±

    The n leader frowned and took the video. When he was done with it, his face turned red in anger. He looked at Baryn andmanded.

    ¡°Ready the forces. We are going to war. Do they really think I am a fucking pushover? I will kill them all if that is what it takes to save the child.¡±

    Kumar didn¡¯t really care about those loud derations. He turned to the n leader and spoke.

    ¡°I am leaving. My mission failed. I need to get out of here.¡±

    ¡°Where are you going?¡±

    ¡°My friend is a couple of cities away. I will meet her and go back home after she is done with her work.¡±

    He didn¡¯t bother to talk anymore and turned away. He took out a beast from a beast pocket and then took off to meet Noah.

    After around half an hour, he reached the city Noah is in.

    She also scored a residence within the city and the whole city is currently on a defensive mode.

    Her job is also to save the kid and she actually has an easier situationpared to Kumar. When she saw Kumar, she couldn¡¯t help but have a sinking feeling in his heart.

    ¡°What happened? Why are you here already?¡±

    ¡°I lost. Sam took the child away?¡±

    ¡°Already? It has only been a couple of days though.¡±

    ¡°Yes, but he managed to take two children away. He is using the war to his maximum advantage.¡±

    ¡°How is this possible?¡± Noah is stunned, to say the least.

    ¡°He picked up some new tricks and this time, it is fitting well with all of his existing tricks, amplifying them to a great extent. Right now, I think he is stronger than ever and he doesn¡¯t even realize how strong he is.¡±

    ¡°How strong is he? Don¡¯t tell me he dueled a Divine ne cultivator and won. I don¡¯t think I will be able to take it if it¡¯s real.¡±

    ¡°No, Noah. Whatever I experienced. It is far more powerful than that.

    I was defeated by Sam and he didn¡¯t even have to look me in the eyes to do that. He made me dance in his palm and almost made me hand over the child for him to take. I couldn¡¯t have been able to stop him no matter how I think about it.

    It is almost like all this while, he is holding back.¡±

    ¡°I mean, he is holding back a bit and he is already known to use his tricks first and kickster. Why are you so shook this time?¡±

    ¡°You don¡¯t understand Noah. You will know when you see it. For some reason, I feel like we are not ying with a peer anymore. He is different now. I never really understood the significance of the things he was learning.

    Even if he is strong and powerful and even if all of those tricks he used were resourceful and made things easy for him, this time when I see the effects of all these thingsbined together.

    Today, he just made an energy-gathering formation that explodes and he injected a bit of divine energy into it.

    But that is not the key part of it. His formation managed to create an amplified version of the explosion within the city. It bypassed all of the security formations and all kinds of defense established by the city.

    What if he can amplify every kind of destruction he created all this while?¡±

    ¡°Don¡¯t overthink it, Kumar. Take some rest. I could use your help right now since you know what Sam is going to do. Let¡¯s go. I am sure we can handle him a bit if we work together.¡±

    Kumar nodded and went to help her.

    While Sam and Kumar are resting for the night, the three ns they got involved with have be restless.

    Right now, Shijin is on thin ice. He got the news that Sam¡¯s presence has appeared in Magman city.

    Karn on the other hand is also in trouble with his n. But he was forgiven since he had the best interests on n in his mind. The n quickly supported him and now they are on their ns to deal with Shijin and his n.

    Shijin¡¯s father though started having doubts since Shijin is not showing any progress.

    Sooner orter he is going to be on Shijin¡¯s back.

    But the whole thing just lit up when the Magman n¡¯s leader openly dered that he ising to deal with Shijin and Karn unless they handover the child back.

    Overnight, the war that has been going on behind the scenes hase to light. Particrly the Magman n¡¯s leader is very much a maniac. He came with his sword and is ready to fight anyone and everyone.

    The remaining ns that are focusing on this situation and are involved in the war became cautious.

    They understood that the variables are too many and any small trigger could make their n into the Next Magman n.

    Everyone is specting. Shijin¡¯s father imed that their n¡¯s child disappeared and now Magman n¡¯s child disappeared.

    If both of these ims are true, they know for a fact that some big moves are being done.

    Of course, out of all the remaining twenty-two ns, not everyone has the luxury to sit aside and focus on this topic.

    Because one of the seven ns that had the child is currently defending against three other ns. These three ns actually teamed up and are now working together, because of their longstanding rtionship.

    And this ce is where two of the yers are also shing against each other. One tries to help one of the three ns to get the child and the other tries to save the child.

 Chapter 1795 - 1795 Show something

    1795 Show something

    Dayus is in the middle of a meeting.

    Meeting a n that he is currently helping with obtaining the baby. This is actually more than a n. It is a sect of some sort that is led by a very small n. The Blood Wolf Faction is what they call themselves.

    He managed to get a seat at the table. But unlike Kumar and Noah, he didn¡¯t manage to gain their trustpletely.

    In fact, the reason they gave him a seat is to keep a good eye on him.

    He is being watched by the head of the faction closely. He is pretty frustrated because of that.

    Meanwhile, his opponent is Arkiv. He joined the opposite party, the union of the three ns. He joined there as a mercenary. Since he has the advantage with the three ns, he is now taking it a bit easy.

    All he is doing is gaining achievements one after another and rxedly getting into the good graces of thebined forces. Now he is leading a team that is on the front lines of the attacks.

    His n is to rake in enough to achieve so that he could be part of the team that goes to capture the kid. ording to the mission, he doesn¡¯t need to be the one actually to hold the child and hand it over, he just needs to contribute in making sure that it happens.

    It is the easiest task.

    .....

    The meeting is over even before Dayus could speak up and he couldn¡¯t help but curse under his breath.

    ¡°These idiots. They don¡¯t even know what kind of situation they are in. What should I do for them to get some sense of these things?¡±

    Dayus is having his usual egoplex going on.

    Back in the cave.

    Sam finally came out of his meditation. He is rxed and ready for the next challenge.

    ¡°So, who is our next target? How about we got for the next closest one?¡±

    Sam asked Maya who is bathing her children.

    ¡°If you are going for the next closest family, then I don¡¯t really know much about them. All I can tell you is that they are religious.

    They are devouts of Olympus and Zeus. They believe that Zeus put them in this world as his messenger and their duty solely revolve around propagating Olympus and its beliefs.¡±

    Sam chuckled when he heard this.

    Religion is one of the most amusing things to him. In this life and thest. A good religious belief brings structure, routine, morality, and good behavior to a person. That makes them functional with a proper ethical bottom line and then there is a different kind of religious belief.

    A religious belief that is used as a shield to get a moral high ground to conceal their hypocrisy.

    He has a feeling that the family he is going to meet falls into the second category.

    As he was about to ask a few questions, Sam suddenly felt the time freeze once again.

    He frowned and looked at Lucifer who appeared out of thin air.

    ¡°What do you want again? You want to make another deal?¡±

    ¡°Nope. This time, I came here to grant you a favor.¡±

    ¡°A favor?¡±

    ¡°No, favor is not the right word. I came here to tell you or rather show you something.¡±

    He waved his hand and a screen appeared in front of Sam. Inside the screen, he saw a few familiar faces. The faces usually put a smile on his face, but now they made him frown in anger.

    Those are the faces of his students and right now they are all tied up. Bloodied faces and there are a bunch of young men and women surrounding them.

    They are bashing the crap out of his students. His students are outnumbered.

    One of the young men who is doing a number of Kasi¡¯s face spoke.

    ¡°You bastards killed eighteen of our elders, two n leaders, and four grand elders. It took over twenty-three cultivators all stronger than you, toy down the ambush and capture you. Out of twenty-three, seven are dead and three are severely injured.

    You should be really proud.

    But I am going to make you suffer for all of this.¡±

    The room is rtively dark and damp. All the students are tied up to chairs and the young men and women are taking turns beating them up.

    One of the young men is ying around with Executioner Sword.

    Habi looked at him coldly and when that person is about to wield that sword he coldly spoke.

    ¡°Try to wield it and I will fucking gut you.¡±

    His words made everyone stop in the room for a second. It became dead silent.

    The man looked at Habi and his state.

    He is beaten up a lot. His face looks barely recognizable. Out of all the students he is beaten up a lot. Almost all of his bones are broken.

    Anyone could guess why he is like that. He caused the most damage to the other party. He killed and destroyed people as if he was pulling weeds out of a field.

    He killed more than all of his peers.

    And still, his eyes looked like he could kill a dozen more as long as one of his hands is free.

    The man with the sword walked forward as he held the executioner¡¯s sword and pointed at Habi.

    ¡°So, who made this sword? He is a great artisan I must tell you. It was beautifully crafted.¡±

    Habi looked at him without answering.

    ¡°Do you know that all three of our ns are famous for artisanship? We are gods in weapon making and I am still impressed by this craftsmanship. Even in this room, we have some of the greatest weapon makers in the world.

    And I still want to meet this guy. I want to hire him to be an external member of my n.

    So, let¡¯s cut a deal. I will grant you a quick and easy death. Tell me where I can find this guy.¡±

    ¡°Hahaha¡­¡±

    ¡°Hahahaha¡­.¡±

    ¡°Pfft¡­¡±

    All of Sam¡¯s students startedughing their hearts out. They felt like they heard the biggest joke of their lives.

    ¡°Why the fuck are youughing?¡±

    The man asked angrily.

    ¡°Of course, they are going tough. Your words areughable.¡±

    Suddenly a female voice was heard.

    Sirona walked in with a crystal tablet in her hand. She is looking at the footage as she walked over leisurely.

    All the youngsters got vignt and looked at her.

    ¡°Who the fuck are you? Why are you here?¡±

    ¡°To take the kids back of course.¡±

    She looked around once and her eyesnded on the kids.

    ¡°I told you guys to be careful, didn¡¯t I? Why would you just fall into such an obvious trap? Your teacher is so great at traps and even the Dusk organization¡¯s wholebat operations run like that. And to think that you would fall for such an obvious little trap?

    After this, go back and grind your basics once again. No more war for you until you pass the test.¡±

    She didn¡¯t even care that the kids are tied up and they are in the middle of enemies.

    The youngster who is holding the executioners walked forward and asked.

    ¡°Who are you? Are they your students?¡±

    ¡°I am Sirona. Researcher and Teacher Dusk organization. And no, they are not my students. I teach them sometimes, but their teacher is a different person.¡±

    ¡°So, Sirona. Do we look like some pushovers to you and whatever this Dusk organization is? Do you really think you can juste here and take them away?

    For the things those guys did, we are going to make them, you, and all of your Dusk organization pay.

    We also heard a little bit about their teacher from our priests. Isn¡¯t he someone named Sam or something? We will definitely kill him too. So, it is better if you surrender right now and stop this charade. It¡¯s insulting.¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t mean to be insulting. But I am going to take them away. As for killing their teacher, it is even moreughable than what you previously said.¡±

    ¡°Oh really, why is that? What is so special about him?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t know how to put it in words. He has too many specialties. But since you are an artisan yourself, let me put it this way.

    Do you have something in your creations, the best one of them all? The one you put everything you have and you made it just so that you can? Just to show off to the best of your ability? Not just because you have to do it, but because you want to do it. To perform, to create something that represents everything great about your ability.¡±

    ¡°Of course I do. Everybody does.¡±

    ¡°Then Sam is just that. When the universe is creating all these creatures, one time it decided to show off and it made Sam.¡±

    As she spoke, she clicked something on the tab.

    *BOOM*

    .....

 Chapter 1796 - 1796 Leverage

    1796 Leverage

    *BOOM*

    The explosion broke the walls of the building. The whole room is exposed. Sirona stood there as she fiddled with the tablet and the room is surrounded by a bunch of puppets.

    The youngsters who were torturing the students a while ago were scared shitless and stood there silently.

    ¡°Secure the kids. Kill the rest.¡±

    She gave the order to the puppets. But at this exact moment, she sensed something and her facial expressions changed.

    ¡°Activate Defensive formation 18. Power output Maximum.¡±

    She looked into the sky and the puppets formed a formation around the building creating arge dome of energy.

    Arge ming inferno hit the formation and at that exact moment¡­

    The video was abruptly cut.

    .....

    Sam became anxious and looked at Lucifer angrily.

    ¡°When did this happen?¡±

    ¡°It is happening as we speak.¡±

    ¡°I need to know what¡¯s happening right now. How are my students? How is Sirona?¡±

    Lucifer didn¡¯t speak. He just stared at him with a smile and after a moment he spoke.

    ¡°This is actually a trapid out by Olympian gods. Since they saw how ferociously your students are dealing with their forces one by one, they prompted some of their powerful organizations to gang up and fight against your students.

    The average cultivation level of these people is way more than that of your students. But they managed to kill a lot of people. They almost eradicated these organizations.

    But of course, these people are ganging up and have no intentions of ying fair. They caught your students and the following scene ensued.

    You seemed to be a really good teacher. Your students are strong.¡±

    ¡°I asked you what¡¯s happening now. Who arrived there?

    ¡°Come on Sam, you and I both know that I am not going to reveal that information just like that. I already revealed a lot of information. But I must tell you, that inferno is definitely not the end of that scene.

    I hope your students and friend will be careful. After all, as you must have already experienced many times, the Olympians don¡¯t y fair.¡±

    Lucifer disappeared from that spot and time went back to normal.

    Sam is frustrated. He doesn¡¯t know what happened there. He trusted in Sirona. But as Lucifer said, it is still unclear. The Olympians do not y fair. As his anxiety kept on brewing, it slowly started making its way to anger.

    He needs to do something to ensure their safety. If he is unsure of their safety, he wouldn¡¯t be able to sit still. After all, the war is started by him. He cannot carry the death of his own students on his conscience.

    As his thoughts started running amok, he took a deep breath and tried to calm down. He knows very well that Lucifer is expecting this reaction from him.

    But even if he understood that it is hard to control himself at this moment.

    ¡°Sam, are you okay?¡±

    Maya is a bit surprised by Sam¡¯s sudden reaction.

    Sam looked at her and said.

    ¡°Can you tell me more about this organization of Zeus¡¯ devouts? I will make them my next target. We will get your next child this very same day.¡±

    ¡°That would be some trouble. That is what I wanted to say to you before. This one out of seven is much more recluse than the rest. Even though it is the nearest, you won¡¯t find much activity or resistance towards them.

    From what I can see, you took advantage of the war and managed to gain upperhand all this while. But from what little I know about them, they have very few enemies and they might be the strongest of the seven organizations.

    If I am right, there shouldn¡¯t be any organizations actively targeting them at this current moment. It will be difficult for you.¡±

    Sam nodded.

    He went out immediately to get some information. After a couple of hours, the thing he noticed is that the next city is reinforced to its teeth and he saw the familiar face he saw the day before.

    Kumar is in the city. Just from that, he could understand that the city is being guarded by Noah.

    Sam felt that the situation is a bit weird. After all, it is an Olympian organization. But Dayus who was constantly paired with the Olympian organizations was not ced here. Instead, a pretty neutral yer is ced.

    But Sam didn¡¯t think too much. He left the city and brainstormed. He needs to find a way to get some leverage over Olympus and send a message to them and he needs to do it fast.

    He believed that even in the worst-case scenario, Sirona could hold on for a very long time. He has a rough idea on what kind of weaponry she could control at her current strength and it would be enough to hold off even a peak-stage Astral ne cultivator for a really long time.

    So it might give him a few hours at most.

    In these few hours, even if he defeated the organization and managed to get in touch with Olympian gods and Zeus through some ritual, all he would be able to do is hold a conversation. He wouldn¡¯t have enough leverage to make them stop this madness.

    As he thought to this point, he remembered the only leverage that he could use at this moment.

    Pride.

    The Pride of Zeus.

    Zeus is vain and he cannot lose face no matter what. He cannot ept any sort of defeat. Particrly, in hands of Sam.

    Sam immediately took off on Harbinger and this time, he didn¡¯t hold back. He traveled at the maximum speed possible and this left a tailwind that destroyed the terrain.

    He managed to reach his destination within a few minutes.

    He arrived at Shijin¡¯s hiding location. Shijin was idiotic enough to reveal these ces to Sam and now Sam decided to use him.

    When Shijin saw Sam, he was furious.

    ¡°How dare you¡­¡±

    He wanted to yell at Sam, but his words were abruptly cut.

    Sam held him by his throat and spoke.

    ¡°I don¡¯t have any patience to y around with you. I want you to do something for me and if you do that, I will guarantee that you will live well, even if your own father wants to kill you.

    If you don¡¯t agree to that, I will kill you right now and get what I want every day. But the only difference is that it will take me more time to kill every single person rted to you to achieve that.

    So, do we have a deal now or not?¡±

 Chapter 1797 - 1797 Arrival

    1797 Arrival

    Shijin couldn¡¯t breathe.

    But when he looked at Sam¡¯s eyes, he understood that he is talking to a very different person. The Sam he met previously is just a character being yed. Right now, Sam is different. He is unfathomably angry.

    Shijin nodded his head in fear.

    He looked at Sam and was about to ask him something, but that gaze made him stop.

    ¡°I want to find out about the location of the few people. They are all linked to the war that is going on right now and their presence would be new. It has only been three days since they arrived, but they are all gaining decent pull within this war.

    Here are their names.

    Tap into all of your informationworks. I don¡¯t care what you have to do. You have forty minutes exactly. Contact everyone you need to and get me the information. For every minute you dy the result, I will torture you for a minute.

    And trust me, my torture will make a minute feel like an hour if not a day.

    So be prepared.

    .....

    Shijin looked at Sam¡¯s face and he knew that he isn¡¯t messing around. He didn¡¯t even bother to nod in reply and sprung to action.

    Sam sat down crosslegged and started taking deep breaths as he meditated.

    He is trying his best to calm down.

    This is the first he has been this anxious in years. For forty minutes he sat there with dozens of thoughts going through his mind.

    Soon Shijin came back running with the details Sam needed.

    Sam help the paper in his hand and went out of the hideout. He didn¡¯t even care about Shijin anymore. He took out his harbinger and once again started moving at maximum speed. Leaving behind arge gash in the earth.

    His presence is loud and shy and once again he moved in a straight line. He didn¡¯t care if he crossed over the forests orkes or if he has to blow through the mountains. Whatever came in his way was destroyed and he only had his destination in his mind.

    Meanwhile.

    Dayus is currently in a bind. The n that he was ced is, definitely not a great n to be in at the moment. They are not the believers of Olympus that Dayus always spent time with in everypetition.

    Instead, these people are hardheaded fools who only understand brute force.

    He is with a bunch of muscle heads, unable to convince them to take his approach. And of course, his gigantic ego has a y in this whole scenario of course.

    But right now, he is in a situation where he couldn¡¯t change it in his favor, even if he put his ego aside.

    Because he got a message that the three ns joined forces are going to make a final move. They took some random excuse and the war that has been secretly going on, now becamepletely direct and out in the open.

    Dayus knows very well what Arkiv is capable of. Even if the ns were not really in his favor, he would at least have had some loyal subordinates because of Zeus¡¯ rmendations. He doesn¡¯t even have that now and he is feeling useless.

    Meanwhile, Arkiv is getting popr by killing the members of the n he is supporting, in fact, Arkiv¡¯s sole presence catalyzed the whole war and the three joint forces are now attacking in the open.

    There could be an attack at any given moment.

    Right now, his suggestion is to let the child and his father escape. He didn¡¯t care about the honor of the n and he definitely didn¡¯t care if all of them are willing to die protecting their home. For him to finish this task with flying colors, he needs the child to be safe with his father¡¯s family.

    But no matter what he tried, he was unable to convince the stupid father to make a move.

    And right now, he is in the middle of another futile attempt.

    ¡°Why are you not listening to me? From your sources, the attack could arrive in just two hours. The three ns are not messing around. Why are you so stubborn? This kid¡¯s presence might make your n reach new heights in the future. But for that the kid has to be alive and the kid has to know that this n is their home.

    You need to survive.¡±

    The young master looked at Dayus coldly.

    Dayus didn¡¯t even know what to say when he looked at that stare.

    ¡°You see Dayus, I have been wondering. Since you came here, you have been constantly talking about saving the kid, protecting the kid, and all of that.

    You even said that as long as you are not here, the kid will be taken away by someone.

    But you are here and still, someone ising to take the kid away.

    And when shit went sideways, your n of action is to escape this ce. Why should I not assume that you are trying to separate the kid from the n grounds to take advantage of this chaos and trying to take the kid away by yourselves?

    After all, I am way weaker than you. There is no denying that.

    I don¡¯t know where you came from. I don¡¯t know what your motive is. Do you really think, I will just blindly trust and follow all of your ideas? Do I look like an idiot to you?¡±

    The young master left the room to prepare for war.

    Dayus didn¡¯t even know what to say. After all, he is not really a friend of rational thinking. He is an obnoxious entitled brat after all.

    He just believed that the young master should trust his words. What¡¯s with trust and all that other nonsense?

    He sighed and then muttered.

    ¡°It is good that Sam is not the one opposite to me. If he is, then I would be in much bigger trouble than I already have.

    From the info we got, he just dealt with the Magman n. So, he is still a bit far away. There are a bunch of other ns in between.

    But still, that bastard wants to fish in muddy waters. Before he makes his presence known in this ce, I might as well kidnap the father and the child from here.¡±

    He thought out loud and even got ready to carry out his n. But at that exact moment, something happened.

    Some guards ran over and gave some news to him.

    ¡°Something ising from the west. We don¡¯t really know what exactly ising, but it is cutting through the forest and destroying everything in its path. It ising towards city at an unfathomable speed.¡±

 Chapter 1798 - 1798 Crash and Hit

    1798 Crash and Hit

    Dayus immediately left the n grounds and stood on top of the wall of the city. He looked into the horizon at the west side.

    Within a minute, he could already see a ck dot appearing out of thin air at an extreme speed.

    It didn¡¯t even take a moment for him to notice who it is.

    Sam could also see dayus and his vision is a dozen times clearer than Dayus. His face turned colder and the wind elemental energy around him changed a bit. Slowly, silver sparks started appearing around him.

    The destruction that he is leaving behind with his travel just increased to a new level. The lightning charred everything in his path. The n leader immediately activated the defense formation.

    Dayus became vignt and took his spear out. Got ready to defend themselves. Of course, he didn¡¯t stay there, he ran towards the n grounds and met with the father and child once again.

    ¡°That guy that¡¯sing right now is bad news. Let¡¯s get away from here. Even I won¡¯t be able to stop him right now. Your father would also have a hard time. So, let¡¯s get out of here.¡±

    The young master looked at Dayus in disdain. He didn¡¯t even bother to refute whatever he is saying.

    He just sat there and tried to take care of the formations there to add extra protection to his child.

    .....

    ¡°At least turn on all of the formations. Make the defense maximum.¡±

    ¡°The defense is already maximum. It is the best defense you could hope for within the seven ns.¡±

    ¡°Fuck it. This is all the defense you could muster? This formation will be done in a minute at most.¡±

    Dayus said in a frustrated tone. He didn¡¯t know what to do. He has half a mind to just kidnap the father and child and be done with it.

    At this moment, the formation already started fluctuating. Dayus walked into the balcony to take a look.

    A dark cloud started forming on top of Sam and it is brewing with silver lightning. Now he is just around a hundred meters away from the formation of the city. Just the rumbling of the lightning already started making the formation blink.

    Sam took out the spear he got from Zeus¡¯ pce of inheritance. He raised the spear to the sky and his body started with the lightning elemental fusion.

    The silver lightning struck from the cloud into the spear-like stream. He pulled his hand to the maximum and threw it at the formation. The lightning from the cloud disappeared and the cloud itself dissolved into the air.

    The silver lightning around the spear became dense and condensed as it hit the formation.

    The formation didn¡¯t even flicker, it just copsed with an explosion.

    The city walls crashed.

    *BOOM*

    *CRASH*

    The spear made its way through the city and Sam followed it closely. Itnded on the formation of the n grounds and then it broke through the walls, the buildings, and residences.

    Dayus and the young master saw the spearing toward them and they could also see Sam following it.

    The building copsed and the young master lunged toward his child. He protected the child with all his energy.

    Dayus took his own spear and threw it at Sam¡¯s spear. He shed with the biggest strike he could muster at the moment and finally, the attack was a bit neutralized.

    But just the aftershock of that sh turned the whole building into rubble. Dayus widened his eyes in disbelief. He looked at Sam in shock. He never thought that Sam could be this powerful. He can be sure that if he used all of his strength, to the point that he is drained, he might be able to pull off an attack like this.

    The only problem here is that Sam doesn¡¯t look drained.

    He caught hold of the spear that flew off from the aftermath and threw it once again, this time it is a little restrained.

    Dayus took out another spear to block the attack. He tried his best to deflect it and he fell on his butt just from that.

    When the dust settled, the young master of the n fell forward with the child still in his hands. His child was safe though, but he fainted.

    Sam didn¡¯t even look at the child. His eyes are locked on Dayus.

    Looking at Sam¡¯s cold gaze, he felt a chill in his spine. He thought that Sam came for the child, but from the looks of it that is not the case.

    ¡°I need you for a short while. Your time in this task is over.¡±

    Sam said and he reached out his hand to grab Dayus,

    Dayus used elemental fusion to turn around and tried to run away.

    But before he took a few steps, he felt like he hit a wall. Sam is already in front of him and he held him by his throat.

    He also turned towards the child. He waved his hand and the wind gently carried the child to them. He checked the child to see if there are any injuries or any damage. And luckily, nothing happened. The child just went into a bit of a shock.

    At this moment, Sam suddenly felt a sense of threat. He stored the spear away and took out his reaper sword.

    Dayus finally saw some hope.

    They felt the presence of the n leader. The Divine ne cultivator.

    Sam looked ced the child on the ground and turned to Dayus.

    ¡°Protect the kid.¡±

    And then he jumped into the air. The reaper sword glowed with divine energy as heunched himself toward the uing attack.

    The n leader made a move. A ming sword strike was making its way toward Sam which he met with his own sword.

    As Sam made a spin in the air and met with the sword strike, he was pushed back and hended right next to Dayus.

    He didn¡¯t look weak, and neither did he look damaged. He looked just the same. Dayus is once again stunned. He didn¡¯t even know how to wrap his head around Sam being so strong. But before he could make sense, he saw another sword strikeing, but this time, Sam didn¡¯t sh with it.

    Because by the time hended the Dimensional drifter is already in his hand and he used it to grab Dayus and the kid to disappear from there.

 Chapter 1799: Ritual

    Chapter 1799: RitualThe n leader looked into the surroundings in frustration.

    Sam''s arrival caught him off guard. He didn''t expect that whatever that ising will directly enter his n grounds like that.

    Sam just came, hit, took, and left.

    The n leader was too busy activating the formations and controlling them, that he didn''t even have a chance toe here. Everything happened in two minutes. Fast is a massive understatement.

    Meanwhile, Sam reappeared far away from the city in the cave.

    Maya was stunned when she looked at Sam''s state.

    He didn''t look damaged or injured, but he looked a bit tired and haggard.

    He threw Dayus to the side and brought the child to her.

    "Here is the third child. This time, I was a bit reckless, can you check up on the child once again?"

    Sam said while panting. It might have looked like he blocked the attack with no effort, but it took everything out of him. Fighting head on with a Divine n cultivator is nowhere near child''s y.

    Maya looked at Dayus and asked.

    "Who is that guy?"

    "A guy tasked with keeping your child with the father and a guy who is going to do a really huge favor for me."

    Sam walked towards Dayus and sat in front of him.

    He is a bit exhausted and needs to recover a bit. But he doesn''t have too much time. He took out liquid energy cylinders and started absorbing energy from them crazily.

    "So, Dayus. Your god Zeus and the rest of the Olympians are once again ying dirty. I don''t really care that much if they are trying to use traps and tricks, but they are constantly going after my students with cultivators way out of their league.

    Since it is war, I will just give it a pass. But I can''t really let my students die, now can I?

    So, you are going to help me stop the gods and all theirckeys from killing my students and my dear friend. If you so much as make a wrong move, I will fucking torture you throughout the rest of the task.

    I will target you in every uing mission. I won''t give a fuck about the game anymore and I will start ying a game of cat and mouse with you. I will make squeal like a little girl in pain every time I get my hands on you and you know as well as I that I will get my hands on you whenever I want, however, I want."

    "What do you want with me?"

    "Just stay put and do as I say. Everything, to the teeth. Do you understand?"

    Dayus didn''t say anything and just stayed silent.

    Sam didn''t care about how he is going to react. Because he is going to force Dayus to do whatever he wants him to do.

    Sam stood up after he recovered some of his energy and turned to Maya.

    "I want to find an organization close to this ce. An organization that follows any Olympian god. It would be great if Zeus is the one they are worshipping. You were the Divine Lady that worshipped the gods. Tell me where to find them."

    Maya didn''t even ask what does she want them for. But she directly went into deep thought and gave her a location.

    "It is a very small organization. I don''t know if it would be helpful though."

    "Can they perform the ritual to contact Zeus?"

    "Yes. They can."

    "Then that is good enough. Thank you. Can you tell me the rough location?"

    Maya gave him the exact location.

    Sam took Dayus and took the dimensional drifter to take Dayus to that ce.

    He arrived in front of the n. He looked at the guards and said.

    "I need you to bring the head of your n right here right now. Or I will force my way into your n and it will not be pretty."

    The guards didn''t know what to say for a moment. But Sam''s aura told them that they should do whatever he told them to do. So, they left and informed their n head, who came running as he also sensed Sam''s aura from far away.

    "I need to use your praying room. I need to perform a ritual to talk with Zeus. In exchange, I will give you a formation blueprint that will protect your n from even fifty peak Astral ne cultivators ganged up on you.

    Don''t ask me for any details. Don''t ask me any questions. All I need to know is whether you agree or not. But do remember that, I will go to the prayer room one way or the other. You understand?"

    The n head is smart. He didn''t really think too much and just took the deal directly.

    Sam was led to the temple. He dragged Dayus into the room and got ready to perform the ritual.

    "Do you really think, Zeus, will just let go of a chance to hurt you"

    "You don''t think he will?"

    "No, at least not for me. He doesn''t care much about me. In fact, he hates you more than he cares about me. He would rather see me killed than see you get away with being safe.

    I thought you are smart. You should understand that."

    "No Dayus, you are just dumb to understand the basic nature of the god that is babysitting you all this while. He doesn''t really care about you, but he cares about his own name and pride. You are unfortunately falling short of all of his expectations.

    But still, you are what he wants if he doesn''t want to drop out in the middle of this stupid game and he believes that he has a chance to make aeback as long as you are alive.

    That is the only reason that actually kept you alive. To help me manipte the god''s behavior and it just happened to be the day that youe in handy."

    Sam spoke and started the ritual. But at this exact moment, the statue of Zeus in the middle of the temple, glowed as if the ritual seeded, but the next second, it has broken.

 Chapter 1800 - 1800 Deal with the Devil

    1800 Deal with the Devil

    Sam looked at the statue that is now in ruins.

    He is stunned. He couldn¡¯t understand what is happening. He looked at the priest and asked.

    ¡°What happened?¡±

    The priest is fearful as he could sense Sam¡¯s aura is very deadly at the moment.

    ¡°I¡­ I don¡¯t know. This has never happened before.¡±

    ¡°Are there no records about this kind of scenario?¡±

    ¡°N.. No never happened.¡±

    Sam looked frustrated. He doesn¡¯t know how these statue things work, but one thing he is sure is that the statue is the only medium that could call up on Zeus and without any medium, it is impossible to get in touch with any god.

    He took a deep breath and asked.

    .....

    ¡°Is there another Olympian organization nearby?¡±

    ¡°Yes, there is to the north. You would be able to reach there in half an hour.¡±

    ¡°That¡¯s good to know. Thank you.¡±

    Sam walked out the n grounds and dragged Dayus along with him. He cut the traveling time in half with the harbinger. For the first time, Dayus experienced what it feels like to be hung upside down in the air while traveling at supersonic speed.

    He felt like a rag stuck to a flying beast. Fluttering like crazy.

    He pleaded Sam to let him go many times. But he wasn¡¯t able to convince him of course. After a few attempts, he refrained from asking. And he didn¡¯t even dare to use threats. He knows for sure that Sam is on the edge. He might taste something really bitter if he pissed him off even more.

    Just presence is now enough to make him feel afraid.

    Sam reached the next n and went into the temple. He did the ritual again. But to his surprise, this statue also copsed.

    Dayus is also shocked. If one statue copsing is considered to be a coincidence, the second one cannot be brushed off just like that.

    Sam knew that something is happening here making him unable to contact the Olympian gods. He sat down crosslegged and tried to organize his thoughts.

    He took a few deep breaths and finally opened his eyes.

    ¡°Lucifer. I need to talk to you. Come out now.¡±

    His voice is calm, cold and determined.

    Time stopped. Dayus looked around in shock as Lucifer appeared in front of them. That charming smile still evident on his face.

    He looked at Sam and Dayus and spoke.

    ¡°How can I help you?¡±

    ¡°An answer would be nice. Why am I unable to contact the gods?¡±

    ¡°Oh, I forgot to mention, but I assumed you already knew, it is impossible to contact any gods involved in the game unless some very special circumstances arise.¡±

    ¡°What is considered to be a special circumstance?¡±

    Sam asked in a very calm tone. The temperature of his tone seemed to have gone colder.

    ¡°At least not this.¡±

    Sam looked at Lucifer without saying anything for a moment. He now understood what Lucifer was doing. He now understood the character of the devil why Lucifer is considered one.

    In more ways than one, he is very much better than most of the gods. Particrly, he never really hid his true nature. He didn¡¯t really hide behind a false fa?ade.

    It is just that the way he acted, it is very hard for a normal person to understand his true personality.

    The ways speak, the way interacts, everything is a game for him. He uses all of his words, thoughts and actions as moves in this game. And the goal of the game is to satiate his amusement. Putting people in different scenarios and trying to see if their true nature will re up or not.

    And if it does what is their true nature?

    Now Sam is thrown into a pickle. He doesn¡¯t know how his students and Sirona are doing. If he didn¡¯t know their situation, he would have smoothly gone through this round ofpetition, without much resistance.

    And he is ying it so smoothly with no regard to the consequences. Now Lucifer added something into the mix. Something that will mess up the ns even more to see a much better show.

    That might be the only reason he did this to Sam. Now Sam is in a situation where he has to ask for Lucifer¡¯s help. There is no other way out. And lucifer made sure that Sam would have to ask for his help by not revealing that he cannot contact other gods.

    He made sure to say that only after Sam wasted time.

    ¡°What do you want?¡±

    Sam directly asked.

    Lucifer smiled and said.

    ¡°I can give you the information about the situation of your students and your friend. I can even help you resolve whatever problem they are facing. But in return, I would like you to do something for me.¡±

    ¡°What would that be? How long can you ensure the safety of my students and my friend?¡±

    ¡°That is up for negotiation. It depends on what you can do for me?¡±

    ¡°What do you want me to do then? Just tell me.¡±

    ¡°I want you to do something spectacr in this round. Make me entertained. If you agree to this deal, I will protect your students until this mission is over and depending on how spectacr your performance is I will extend the protection to your students.¡±

    ¡°Extend? How long? Will you extend until this whole game¡¯s fiasco is over?¡±

    ¡°Depends on how well you perform. Yes. I might even protect them all the way until you be a god yourself.¡±

    ¡°What are the conditions?¡±

    ¡°There are not many. Only one. From now onwards, every three hours, the location of Maya will be delivered to the heads of all the twenty-five families involved in this war. And they will also know how many kids are there in Maya¡¯s hands.

    Of course, to make it more interesting, I will make it so that not all of them will get the information. Every three hours a batch of five families will get the info and after three hours, the second batch will get the information.

    I want to see how these ns will react and how it will impact you.

    And how will y all of this out of course, I am going to give new missions to other yers as well.¡±

    ¡°Why are you doing this?¡±

    Sam asked calmly.

    ¡°Come on, you must have already understood why I am doing this. It¡¯s because the game is getting boring. From my original estimation, you should have taken at least three days to get one child. But you already have three in your possession.

    And from the looks of it, you will have the other four within no time.

    So, I wanted to make it more fun. More engaging and a lot less boring.

    There is no other reason apart from that.¡±

    Sam chuckled at this.

    ¡°All to satisfy your amusement. You are not that different from other gods.¡±

    ¡°I am very different. I might be doing this for my amusement just like them. But I don¡¯t hide behind some high ground and think that I am doing this as a favor for you.

    I am telling you to your face that I am doing this for my own amusement and I am not lying or manipting you in any form.

    I am saying as it is and you can ept or reject it.¡±

    Sam just smirked at this.

    ¡°I will ept the deal. But show me proof that the students are okay.¡±

    ¡°Of course, it is a given.¡±

    Lucifer waved his hand and showed the screen. He could see that Sirona and the kids are cornered, they are using everything in their power to block the powerful opponents. Sam could easily guess why they are so cornered.

    Because there are over half a dozen peak-stage Astral ne cultivators trying to deal with her.

    And the region they are currently in, the strongest is supposed to be the Late stage of Astral ne¡¯s consummate cultivator. Sirona is at the middle stage of Astral ne Consummation.

    She underestimated the situation a bit and didn¡¯t bring out the ultimate cards with her.

    She is being outssed and outnumbered at the same time and he is sure if the kids weren¡¯t there, she would have fled the situation easily.

    As he assessed the situation, all of a sudden three more people emerged from the shadows and instantly killed two of the six attackers. It was in one swift action. They are dead just like that and the remaining three were next to follow.

    Sam nodded and then turned to Lucifer.

    ¡°I ept the deal. However, I want to know if you are up for another condition from my side.¡±

    ¡°Come on Sam. Don¡¯t tell me, you are backing down now.¡±

    ¡°Of course, I am not that stupid. Since you want to be amused and entertained, my condition will actually appeal to you.¡±

    ¡°Now I am interested. Sure, I am open to such suggestions. What do you have in mind?¡±

 Chapter 1801 - 1801 Presentation

    1801 Presentation

    Sam and Lucifer discussed a few details.

    ¡°You sure are gutsier than I imagined. I really like it.¡±

    Lucifer said with a smile before he disappeared from that spot. The deal that Sam discussed and the condition he added are both very enticing to him. Of course, he doesn¡¯t get much out of it. All he would get is entertainment.

    But that is more than enough.

    After Lucifer disappeared, Sam looked at Dayus who was in the corner. He looked at Sam dreadfully. It seems like since he is also a yer, Lucifer didn¡¯t freeze him up with the rest of the surroundings. So, he heard everything that both Sam and Lucifer discussed.

    ¡°Are you mad? Do you know what you have done? Do you really think that you are such an invincible person?¡±

    Sam didn¡¯t reply to his question, the instant he coldly smiled and said.

    ¡°Your task ends here. You cannot participate in this task anymore. The best course of action right now for you is to give up and leave.¡±

    Dayus gritted his teeth in anger.

    .....

    ¡°I don¡¯t want to leave.

    You can just let me go from here and I will fight my own battle. I can understand that you were angry and anxious because your students were in danger. That is the reason, I didn¡¯t resist. But now, it¡¯s all resolved. Let¡¯s go our separate ways.¡±

    ¡°Dayus, when did you grow a pair? You didn¡¯t resist because you already knew my situation? Do I look like a fucking idiot to you?

    You and I both know you couldn¡¯t have jack shit even if you resisted. That is the reason why you were put. Just shut your trap and leave. Or I will y with so hard that you will cry whenever you remember my name.¡±

    Dayus is unwilling. He didn¡¯t want to leave. But looking at Sam¡¯s expression, he knew that he didn¡¯t have much of a chance.

    ¡°Okay, I will leave.¡±

    He was about to take out a token that could let him give up. At least that is what Sam thought he is doing, but the very next moment, Dayus took out a transference token to escape. He felt the spatial energy envelop him.

    He almost disappeared from the spot. That familiar darkness blinded even his eyes, but when he opened his eyes again, he was shocked.

    He is still in the same temple.

    Sam looked at him with his arms crossed.

    ¡°It is my mistake to give you a chance. I know you will pull off something like this.¡±

    Sam took out a seal and ced it on him. Resistance was futile. After cing him under control. Once again Sam dragged him out as he did before. He went to Lucifer¡¯s cave where Maya is waiting and threw Dayus to a corner.

    ¡°Maya, things have changed a bit. Our location will be revealed to the n heads in a while. We will be constantly moving from now on. We will not be staying in the same ce.¡±

    ¡°Are we moving away now?¡±

    Maya asked in a worried tone. She didn¡¯t doubt Sam¡¯s words. She is actually surprised that the ns didn¡¯t already find out their location.

    ¡°No. Not immediately. There are still three hours before they know about our location and it will take around an hour for them to figure out a way in because I sealed the previous routepletely. So, we still have four hours here and let me leave them a present here.

    From now on, it would be much more straightforward and all our war. I will start with some offense myself.¡±

    As he spoke, he turned to Dayus.

    ¡°We are going to leave him here along with the final presentation. Stay away from him. When he is desperate he can stoop to any level.¡±

    Maya nodded and went as far away from Dayus as possible.

    She even looked at him cautiously as she huddled with her kids. It is almost like Dayus is the kidnapper and he is forcefully keeping Maya and her children there.

    Sam meanwhile moved around the cave tunnels. Not only did he move around and set up some traps a lot of his puppets were assigned to set up the traps. For three hours, he set up so many formations at a rapid pace.

    At that moment, Sam suddenly got a thought injected into his head out of nowhere.

    The news of their location is revealed and conveniently out of the five ns that the news went to, four of them are the ns that Sam already messed with.

    Shijin¡¯s n, Karn¡¯s n, Magman n, and finally the n that Dayus was protecting. All of them were there.

    Sam couldn¡¯t help but smile at this.

    The next step of the n was formted in his mind. He took out an inscription pen and started drawing in the cave. After half an hour he is done. In the middle cave, there is a small circle now. It could barely fit one person.

    Sam dragged Dayus there and made him lie down in that circle. He wanted to turn around and leave, but Dayus angrily called him.

    ¡°Sam, you better let go of me. This time I was caught off guard and you managed to capture me. Since you can¡¯t kill me now, it is better to make amends. I can forget this matter has ever happened.

    If not, after we are done here, I will tear down your organization. I might not be a match for you in the fight, but what about Philip, do you think I can¡¯t defeat him? What about Jack and Watt? What about all the soldiers and fighters working for you thinking that you are some sort of saint?

    Just like how you are ruining the Olympian faith in different realms, I will ruin in your name. Let¡¯s see if your subordinates will be able to stand that test of loyalty.¡±

    Sam frowned and looked at Dayus.

    He felt like Dayus¡¯ brain cells were reduced by arge margin now. After all, this is the worst time for Dayus to spit out any of these curses. He should have just begged Sam to release him or he should have just bided his time and escaped.

    ¡°Are you an idiot? Don¡¯t tell me, hanging off my hoverboard made you stupid.¡±

    Dayus¡¯ face turned red in anger.

    ¡°Who are you calling stupid? I have thought things over, the worst you can do to me right now is beat me up. I will definitely live to see it another day. So, why should I really be scared? You are going to torture me? I could just escape by giving up this round and I can once again take it out on your subordinates.

    I won¡¯t even fucking care. I will be on the run. You might be able to catch most of the people if you put your mind to it, but don¡¯t forget that I am also a yer.¡±

    Sam looked at Dayus and took a deep breath before a cruel glint appeared in his eyes.

    ¡°Just what do you think of yourselves Dayus? As I said before, the only reason you are alive today is that I wanted to use you like the pawn you are. How dare you threaten me like this.

    Just where does your pridee from?

    I beat the crap out of your so many times. I came out as a winner in every trap you set up. I am currently a war with the gods that are behind you. Do you even understand the concept of that? My forces are erasing the faith of your gods, which is one of their major sources of strength.

    Just what do you have that made you think that we are on terms where you could threaten me? Just tell me.¡±

    Sam slowly walked towards him as he spoke.

    Dayus is a bit scared. He suddenly regretted threatening Sam, he should have just asked Sam to remove the restriction so that he could quit.

    But when he realized that his only option seemed to be quitting and when he saw Sam directly making a deal with the devil himself just to save his students, he felt that he could use it.

    After all, he is also a yer and he felt that Sam would be at least a bit wary of him.

    But what he didn¡¯t understand is, the only thing Sam is wary of is the annoyance Dayus usually brings with his dirty y.

    Most of the time he is caught off guard by Dayus because Sam didn¡¯t really have enough free time to keep Dayus and his ploys in mind. In his eyes, they are annoying and time-consuming but not at all difficult to deal with.

    ¡°you know I would have just left you here and minded my own business, but your annoying threat reminded me of something.

    I am still pissed at Olympian gods and you are actually Zeus¡¯ representative. If Zeus can send people that are dozens of times stronger to fight my students, then it wouldn¡¯t be that unfair if a person of the same cultivation level takes the anger out on you does it?¡±

    Sam said and he raised his index finger which glowed withser light. He grinned viciously and started writing on Dayus¡¯ chest.

 Chapter 1802 - 1802 Trap

    1802 Trap

    Time passed away quickly.

    Sam finished with Dayus and he prepared the Dimensional drifter for him, Maya, and the rest of the kids to leave the ce. He gave one look at the cave entrance and smiled before he left with all of them.

    Meanwhile, deep within the tunnels connecting to the caves, there are a bunch of cultivators from different ns all roaming around. They all entered from different directions and since there is no urate pathway, they have to make one of their own.

    Of course, after they entered the tunnels, it is their task to navigate through thisplex structure and find out the proper location for Sam and Maya.

    The fact that they know the exact location is a plus and it made it a little bit easier for them to find this path.

    The forces they deployed are no joke, they are high in strength and high in numbers and at every turning and crossroads, they split up and kept on searching. Of course, they also made sure that the other ns that came to know the location will not take the same path as them.

    They have to defend against them also.

    Everyone is vignt and they are moving pretty quickly.

    Soon after around thirty minutester, the whole tunnel paths are filled with different people from these five ns. There are even some shes here and there.

    .....

    But one of them also managed to find out the entrance to the cave and when he entered the cave, the scene in front of him surprised him.

    Maya is not there as he expected. Instead, only Dayus is inside. He is tied to a stone pir and his upper body is bare. On his muscr chest, there are two words imprinted.

    ¡°SAM¡¯S BITCH¡±

    The person who entered the cave was surprised as he looked at it, he looked around to see if he can find out anything.

    At that time, a thought entered his mind.

    ¡®Maya, her children, and their guardian escaped the ce around an hour ago.¡¯

    This made him feel disappointed. They should have moved faster. He thought.

    But even before the thought materialized fully in his head, the cave started glowing. The runes found out that this person entered and they fully detected their presence and were unlucky for him and the rest of the cultivators, that is the trigger.

    The whole cave started glowing and Dayus¡¯ restraints finally came off. He took out a token in an instant and broke it. He gave up on thispetition. But the young man who entered saw Dayus¡¯ face and body burning incessantly in this bright light.

    He is scared for a second, but of course, after Dayus disappeared, his fear was redirected to the actual thing that could harm him. The light in the cave.

    His body slowly started burning away and soon the blood started turning into vapor. He didn¡¯t even have a chance to resist at all. Even the spiritual energy barrier is not working against this light.

    The light soon started spreading out of the cave and went through all the pathways connected to it. Even though it is light, it behaved like a water stream.

    It twisted and turned like the water would in thisplex structure of cave tunnels and reached the end of all the entrances.

    The n leaders of the five ns are actually standing outside of these entrances and they sensed that something is extremely wrong when these light rays came out.

    They could sense a vague hint of Divine energy within the light.

    Before they could make sense of it, inside the cave every member of the n that entered started burning and evaporating.

    Just like that, Sam destroyed one-third forces of all five ns and the five n masters witnessed it.

    They immediately ran into the cave as soon as the light dissipated and then walked through the tunnels, all they could see were the skeletons left behind by their subordinates.

    They are glistening as if they are polished. There is not even a trace of dust or ash much less some blood.

    They didn¡¯t even what to think of it, but before long, they all received some thoughts in their head.

    ¡°The guardian of Maya escaped with her and her children more than an hour ago. He set up a trap to kill all the people that entered the tunnels. You have lost this exchange.¡±

    The n leaders became grim. They didn¡¯t expect such a thing. When they got a message from their gods about the location of Maya, they were stunned and excited. Particrly the ns that lost the children right under their noses.

    So, when they learned that maya found a guardian who kidnapped the children from them and took them back to her, they were incensed and decided to take the opportunity.

    They even took one-third of their forces from the front lines of the battles to get here and now they lost all of their forces, and didn¡¯t even manage to take a glimpse of the children.

    Meanwhile, somewhere far away in the woods, Sam and Maya are near ake with the kids.

    He sat at the bank of theke as he closed his eyes.

    There is one feature of the formations he left behind. It counts the number of casualties within the tunnels and when he learned the final number, he couldn¡¯t help but feel a bit surprised.

    ¡°That is a veryrge number, I must say.¡±

    He muttered as he fell into another deep thought. It is about the lethality of the formation he has set up. The trap he set up has two purposes, one of them is of course to kill all the invaders, but another one is to find out the lethality of the formation itself.

    Because Sam used his recent learnings in the formation. The usage of resonance and amplification. It took a lot of his mental energy, his divine energy, and of course spiritual energy to deal with this. But they are all recoverable.

    This means this is not thest time he would be able to use this method.

    The thing that he is most concerned about is the actual level of damage he could do with it.

    The amplification felt like a cheat to him. It almost seemed unnatural and he didn¡¯t expect this principal would even work based on what he learned from the Osiris¡¯ formation.

    Basically, what Osiris has done is create a formation that records the energy structure of the attacks made by yers when they killed the targets in the day mode.

    In night mode, the formation used that energy structure to make the spiritual energy within the city resonate and create the same exact attacks.

    Of course, it is not exactly urate, but it is close enough.

    So, Sam has been trying to do the same with the technique, and at the start, he only used it with his body as a medium. He is making the natural spiritual energy around him resonate with his attacks and imitate its energy structure creating an identical attack.

    And now, he added his calctive mind to the equation.

    With the mathematical grasp he had, it is a piece of cake for him to visualize the same attack on a muchrger scale.

    Simply put, if he can create a special wind de of ten inches with a certain amount of energy, he can easily calcte and visualize what this special wind de would need to be if it should be made into one of ten feet.

    He can calcte the energy structure, energy requirement, and the factors that might influence its scbility of it, all of them in an instant. He had done the same with a lot of formations before. Now he is using the mental power of souls in a formation to help him spread consciousness andmand the natural spiritual energy to imitate an attack on arge scale than it should be. With a higher amount of energy, he created this.

    The cave incident is actually one of the higher-level tests he conducted until now. Even the attack on the Magman n¡¯s formation is considered lower than this.

    He couldn¡¯t help but sigh. He finally understood the extent of his current strength. He just wished that he could go back to the Dusk organization and implement this in their weapon systems, particrly the weapon systems around the cities.

    The defenses and offense of the dusk organization will be invincible. If only he could go back once.

    He shook his head in silence and then turned to Maya.

    She is currently in a tent with a formation concealing her from Sam. She is breastfeeding her youngest child.

    ¡°Let me know when you are done. Let¡¯s get out of here. We don¡¯t have much time. If my guess is right, we only have a couple of hours before our location is revealed once again and in that time, not only do we need to reach our next destination, we even need to make some preparations.¡±

    ¡°I am almost done. Where are we going anyway?¡±

    ¡°To the Magman city.¡±

    Sam said with a smile.

 Chapter 1803 - 1803 Stirring Trouble

    1803 Stirring Trouble

    Maya was stunned.

    She hurriedly fixed her dress and came out of the tent.

    ¡°Are you sure? We are going to the magman n?¡±

    She is indeed shocked. Until now, Sam¡¯s involvement in this whole thing is not revealedpletely. So, he still had some leeway with moving around and causing trouble in different cities.

    But the situation now is different. Lucifer revealing that Maya has a guardian is one thing, the troublesome part is the fact that Sam caused too muchmotion as he moved around on Harbinger when he kidnapped Dayus.

    He was way too high profile. There is no way, people haven¡¯t noticed his actions. Particrly, when he was kidnapping Dayus and threatening Shijin, he was extremely open and just the marks he left behind with Harbinger are very apparent to anyone.

    Right now, many ns are looking into the situation trying to guess who this person is. One thing they are sure of is that this person is not exactly a part of the seven ns that had the children.

    And every n knows that he doesn¡¯t belong to their n.

    This external variable and the power it showed is not something they could look lightly up on after all. So, they are all extremely vignt.

    .....

    It wouldn¡¯t take long before they connected this external variable to be the guardian of Maya and her children.

    This small pocket time he has before they realize that he is that external variable, Sam could make them more and more confused.

    He decided on the Magman n because of this.

    The Magman n wouldn¡¯t be expecting this and neither would the rest of the ns that came looking for him in the cave.

    Sam didn¡¯t need to convince Maya too much. By now, she is trusting himpletely. So, after little to no persuasion, she left with him to the Magman city. Here, Sam is very well known, so he had to disguise himself a bit.

    The city is currently in lockdown and not a single inn is epting any customers and the people who already joined the inn are actually not allowed to leave either.

    So, when Sam arrived in the city through the Dimensional drifter, he didn¡¯t cause too muchmotion. He arrived in his old room in the inn where he stayed before.

    That inn would be thest ce the Magman n would search for him.

    He didn¡¯t do anything there for a while, he just let Maya and the children rx and he just waited for the time to pass. Of course, he sent the souls and shadows out to do some scouting while he is waiting.

    And soon, the time for the next reveal arrived.

    Five more ns got the news and the first three lost the location information. Sam even saw the n leader of the Magman n arriving with only two people following him since the rest are all dead.

    Sam is actually amused by the next five ns that knew his current location.

    All five of them are rtively close to the Magman n. It wouldn¡¯t take more than an hour to hour and a half for them to arrive there and three of them are the ns that didn¡¯t have a kid at all. The other two ns still have a kid each.

    One of them is the Olympian organization that is being guarded by Noah, the same organization that is almost in seclusion with the rest of the world and the remaining one is an organization with a child and no yer is guarding it.

    Sam knew for sure that the Olympian city is not going to make a move. If he knew Noah as well as he thought and with the presence of Kumar beside her, they are smart enough to figure out that the guardian is him and pissing him off will be detrimental to them.

    They should hope that Sam wouldn¡¯t hit him too hard, so they are not going to think of ways to attack him.

    The three ns that didn¡¯t have a child are definitely going toe. Even if they have to join forces together, they are going to arrive at this city and they might even arrive almost at the same time.

    As for the fifth n that already has a child, it is still unclear whether they would arrive or not.

    But Sam didn¡¯t really care too much. Whether it is the three forces, four forces are all of the five forces arrived here, he would be able to achieve the goal he wanted in the Magman city.

    And within an hour, his expectations were met when he saw that three different forces surrounded the Magman city. They are stationed at a distance away and the leaders of the n sent envoys to the magman city.

    The Magman city is in high alert to begin with so the city lord who just arrived in a gloomy mood after losing so many subordinates was furious when he heard this.

    He directly received the three envoys.

    Three of these envoys are actually the young masters of the respective ns.

    ¡°What are you guys doing here?¡±

    ¡°Magman n head, we received news that Maya is within your city? We also received news that she already managed to obtain three of her children back including the child she had with your son.

    May we know if it is true?¡±

    Magman n head was shocked when he heard this.

    ¡°What the fuck are you saying? This isplete nonsense. How can Maya be alive? She is long dead.¡±

    He reacted furiously, but in his heads, the gears are running. He knew for a fact that Maya is alive and their information about her children ispletely urate. He also believed that Maya might really be in the city.

    But he doesn¡¯t know why or how she is here.

    ¡®Their gods must have revealed this info to them. I need to be careful.¡¯

    He thought of himself and spoke.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know who spouted this bullshit with you. But Maya, that woman has already died. You can go and meet that barbaric brute and find out where her remains are if you are interested.

    My n¡¯s child is indeed missing, but it is one of the bastards of other ns that stole our child from us. I am going to find and kill them myself. Now, I suggest your ns retreat from my city.

    Or, I won¡¯t respond in kind.

    Even if I am not as powerful as your three nsbined, it is my home turf, and defending is much easier for me here rather than you attacking me.¡±

    He said those and left decisively.

    Meanwhile, the three young masters just exchanged a nce and left on their own way.

    After they left, the Magman n leader went back to his residence and paced around anxiously. He didn¡¯t understand how the situation turned out. But he is inclined to believe that Maya is there along with the guardian.

    And he also felt that Sam might be that person since Kumar mentioned that Sam had ways to enter the city without alerting anyone.

    So, now he is thinking of how to utilize this situation to his advantage.

    From his previous experience at the cave, he is a bit frightened about what Sam would do. He is ruthless and resourceful and he almost lost one-third of his subordinates.

    When his train of thought came to this, he became alert. If setting up traps and causing some violence is within Sam¡¯s character, then based on the previous experience his city would be the ce where the trap would be set.

    This made him vignt.

    He couldn¡¯t risk his whole city being crashed just like that. So, he sent orders to search for Sam. Of course, not openly. If the other ns noticed that he is openly moving, there is no way they would just let him be.

    They will definitely think that he is preparing to fight them and will start a fight.

    But what he didn¡¯t expect is at this exact moment, some news has traveled to Shijin. The news is that three ns are camping out of Magman city and the reason for that camping is the presence of Maya and her kids in the city.

    Shijin¡¯s informationwork is as active as it could be and when he received this news, he immediately ryed it to his father. He still had some redeeming qualities that made his father tolerate his existence in the n.

    And this information gathering is one of the major ones.

    The n also knows that the Magman n also received the news of Maya and the guardian being in the cave.

    So, a thought crossed his mind.

    What if, just what if the Magman n leader managed to find Sam and Maya along with the kids and took them away?

    Once this thought crossed his mind, he couldn¡¯t let it go. He immediately left the ce and this time, he only took a few elite forces focusing on quality instead of quantity.

    As soon as his father left, Shijin heaved a sigh hoping this would gain him some points. But at this moment, he received another piece of news from his informationwork which made him frown.

 Chapter 1804 - 1804 Search

    1804 Search

    Shijin¡¯s father reached Magman city soon.

    Unlike the other three n masters that sent envoys into the city, he didn¡¯t bother trying to keep any decorum. He directly tried to barge in through the front gate.

    Only the Magman n leader got the news immediately and came to the gate to stop him.

    ¡°What is the meaning of this?¡±

    ¡°Get Maya out right now. And the child of my n. I know they are with you.¡±

    ¡°What the fuck are you talking about? I don¡¯t have Maya or children with me.¡±

    ¡°Quit your acting. Do you think I am a fucking idiot? I know you also got the information about Maya¡¯s location before. My n members are dead because of that weird divine light and the next thing I know I get the news that Maya and the kids are in your city.

    I don¡¯t think I am mistaken here.¡±

    Magman n leader gritted his teeth exasperatedly. This is exactly what he feared would happen and it did.

    .....

    He knew that once the news reaches out that Maya is in his city, particrly to the other four n leaders who lost the forces in that cave, they wouldn¡¯t hold up and to his dismay, the news first went to the most of unreasonable and unruly guy of the bunch.

    But that is not all, while he is arguing with this annoying man, three more people came along with some of their elites.

    The three other n heads.

    They joined in on the fun.

    At this moment, Sam who is sitting in the inn casually is looking at arge crystal screen as the whole scene yed out.

    Maya also looked at it and is dumbfounded.

    ¡°What is happening? Why are they all here?¡±

    She is a bit nervous. After all, some of the n heads that are outside are the reason that she had to suffer for so long.

    ¡°Well, I am ying the game luciferid out for us. It¡¯s just that I am really good at ying these kinds of games and I have a lot of experience.¡±

    ¡°Are we going to be okay?¡±

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about it. Right now, if we are really caught here, the one who suffers the most is the Magman n leader.

    He cannot really exin how we entered the city and unless he does that, no one is going to believe that he is not the one who dragged us into this.¡±

    Sam said as he took out some juice from the storage and gave it to Maya.

    ¡°Sit down and rx. We have plenty of time now.¡±

    ¡°But I thought we need to move every three hours.¡±

    ¡°Not necessarily. We would have to move every three hours after a while, but in this instance, we are going to stay. This would be fun to watch, so don¡¯t miss out. Just let your children rest and watch this.¡±

    Sam said with a smile and then he took out some of the virtual projectors and let them show some of the animations of atoms and other stuff which looks cool to the eye.

    The kids that are awake are staring at them in fascination.

    After that, he took out two Blood scales that he got from Nagas a lot of time ago. He hasn¡¯t used these blood scales in a really long time. In fact, he has piles of great weapons that he didn¡¯t get to use at all.

    ¡°Maybe, I need to give some of those to my students next time. They are just moping around in my storage.¡±

    He muttered as he started carving some inscriptions on the scales while watching the show y out outside of the city.

    Time seemed to have vanished as he took in the hrious scenes.

    The n leaders are all trying to get into the Magman city, but they didn¡¯t want to force themselves in.

    After all, they are not exactly sure about the situation and they are very sure that even a little spark here might ignite a full-blown war.

    So, they are all arguing like little children in the yground.

    And luckily for the Magman n leader, he is not being one-sided here. Of course, that doesn¡¯t mean people are supporting him, it is just that these n leaders don¡¯t really get along well.

    They are throwing shade at each other.

    But internally Magman n leader is burning up. He just hoped that Sam and Maya would disappear from the city as soon as possible. Little did he know Sam didn¡¯t want to do that at all.

    He just sat back and kept on carving inscriptions on the two scales.

    Time passed and soon the three hours is up. The location of Sam and Maya is going to be revealed to the next set of n leaders.

    At this moment in different areas within the, a new set of n leaders got the news about Sam and Maya¡¯s location.

    An hourter.

    The magman n leader is still feeling a bit conflicted. He is not willing to let these people into his city and just by seeing how adamant they are, he has to let them in. After some thought, he came to a conclusion.

    Sam and Maya are currently runaways, even though they might have appeared here to cause him trouble, at the core they wouldn¡¯t dare to be captured by the n leaders. It would bepletely against their n.

    So, to get rid of these n leaders, he could only take a gamble. He turned to the n leaders and spoke.

    ¡°You guys are all powerful, so you should understand why I don¡¯t want you toe inside. But since you are all suspecting me, I can take your trusted members in. The formation will still be active and you are going to stay out of the city.

    If you are okay with that, then I can take your people in.¡±

    ¡°Okay then. I don¡¯t have a problem with that.¡±

    ¡°I am okay with that too.¡±

    ¡°Sure.¡±

    The n leaders agreed readily because they believed that the Magman n leader wouldn¡¯t be stupid enough to do anything to their n members.

    Magman n leader took a deep breath and was about to take them in. But at that moment, a few peoplended from their flying beasts.

    The n leader felt his headache. This is a new batch of ns that came just now and not a single one of them have a child. They are all desperate in the war at the moment.

    Sam looked at the scene and smiled.

    At this moment, there are exactly a dozen blood scales in front of him. He took out a few more things six puppets from his storage and attached a blood scale to each of them. The puppets then flew away from the inn in stealth mode.

    He then took out a seventh puppet and started making some modifications to it.

    ¡°Get ready Maya, keep the kids close, we are about to leave the city soon.¡±

    Maya took the virtual projector away and started readying the kids. Sam looked at the Magman n leader and led the subordinates of the other n members to look for them in the city.

    At this moment, these n leaders even let their spies be exposed from within the city.

    When the subordinates wanted to go into the inn and search, the Magman n leader spoke up.

    ¡°This is the one ce that the guardian wouldn¡¯t be in. This is where he was spotted first. So, even if he came here, it would be stupid of him toe back and stay here.¡±

    ¡°No offense n leader, but we have to check it ourselves.¡±

    The subordinates didn¡¯t listen and decided to see for themselves. They talked to the manager and told him to deactivate all of the formations so that they could have an easier time sensing it. The whole inn was thoroughly searched.

    But there is no one there.

    Magman n leader heaved a sigh of relief. Even though he knew for sure that Sam wouldn¡¯t be here, he still felt that there might be a minute possibility. He didn¡¯t even want to give a chance to the possible reverse psychology.

    The search went on. After some persuasion from the n leader, they agreed up split up a bit and the search was a bit faster.

    The only good thing is that the city is in lockdown and most of the ces are empty, so they didn¡¯t have to search too much there.

    Within an hour, they are already near the headquarters of the n.

    By now, the Magman n leader felt a bit relieved. He knew that Sam is fearless, but he felt that no matter how daring he is, he wouldn¡¯t go as far as hiding in the n grounds directly.

    That would be too much and too easy for people to spot him. He hoped that his spections are true and took the group in and as they searched one ce after another and there are no results, the n leader felt a bit assured and relieved.

 Chapter 1805 - 1805 Stalemate

    1805 Stalemate

    Finally, only the personal residence of the Magman n leader is left and he confidently opened the door for the subordinates toe in and check.

    Within no time, only one room is left to check and when everyone came to look at it. By this point, the subordinates really didn¡¯t believe that Sam and Maya are in the city. They didn¡¯t have the confidence of their n leaders from the start, to begin with.

    They just obeyed answers. After all, in their opinion, who would be stupid enough to keep such a valuable asset like Maya and even more valuable assets like her kids in their home and let the news leak out?

    But they are not disappointed. They are actually very enthusiastic because they managed to get a lot of info about the Magman n which they can use in the future for their own benefit.

    Now, they just wanted to get thisst room over with and disappear from this ce.

    Magman n leader heaved a sigh of relief and finally opened the door and he froze on ce.

    The subordinates frowned at his behavior. After all, he is perfectly alright a moment before and suddenly he is acting like this, they took the liberty to peek into the room and the sight shocked them.

    At this moment, Sam is standing in the middle of a formation and beside him, Maya and her children are sitting with distressed and panicked expressions.

    This is the same formation the Magman n leader used to protect the child and the same formation Sam managed to bypass by using the Dimensional drifter.

    .....

    ¡°Sir, you have finallye. We are worried sick. Please tell me that the other n leader is left. I would like to finish our deal and leave this ce. As promised, I got you two more children from different ns, if you can tell me where my sister is imprisoned, I will take my leave.¡±

    Sam¡¯s voice sounded extremely worried and said. It is almost like he is bearing the pressure of the whole world all by himself.

    The subordinates were shocked as soon as they heard this, but their shock is nowhere near the shock the Magman n leader is facing at the moment.

    Before he coulde to his senses, Sam took out a token and crushed it.

    A bunch of spiritual energy attacks and the attacks on the souls were aimed at all the subordinates that are standing at the door.

    The attacks are so powerful that they prated the thick and defensive walls and doors of the room before they hit the targets.

    Finally, the Magman n leader came back to his senses as he looked at Sam in horror.

    ¡°FUCK.¡±

    He cursed under his breath as he looked at the subordinates. They are all rolling on the ground screaming in agony. He looked at Sam and yelled.

    ¡°Tell me, how to save them. You sick bastard.¡±

    He yelled and looked around for something.

    Sam frowned at this.

    ¡°Fuck you.¡±

    He muttered and crushed another token. A few subordinates died on the spot as their orifices gave out blood.

    The n leader is stunned. He looked around and tried to calm himself down. He looked at the youngsters who are still alive and then at Sam who held another token.

    ¡°Don¡¯t you dare use that? I will fucking kill you.¡±

    Sam just smiled and didn¡¯t reply. Finally, the n leader tried to calm down and took out a token himself. He crushed it without hesitation. The formation around Sam started fluctuating.

    Meanwhile¡­

    Back at the city gate. The n leaders abruptly stood up as soon as Sam crushed the second token and they didn¡¯t bother to put up any decorum anymore. They took off from their spots and surrounded the city, trying to enter from different directions.

    They all tried to destroy the formation.

    Magman n leader already noticed this and he hoped that Sam would be released from the formation before they arrived here. At least, he would have some leverage and once the n leaders killed Sam and read his memories, they will know that he doesn¡¯t have any involvement in this.

    He is very eager and expectant when the formation around Sam fluctuated. But his face turned pale when he noticed that the fluctuations disappeared and the formation went back to normal.

    Sam smiled and he took a step back before waving his hands.

    Six blood scales appeared in front of him along with a small flying puppet to which Sam made some modifications in.

    He aimed the gun at one of the blood scales. The n leader could feel the energy that is building up inside the gun. He could sense some divine energy within. Golden mes burst out as Sam shot.

    *BOOM*

    The explosive golden mes turned into a very small and concentrated bird before it flew towards the scale.

    The n leader instinctually took a defensive stance, but nothing happened. The attack which he felt is very powerful, suddenly disappeared as soon as it hit the scale.

    At this exact moment, the n leader sensed that the formation has just been broken and the other n leaders barged into the city.

    Shijin¡¯s father came into the city and jumped over the city wall and got ready to move toward the n grounds. But at this exact moment, he sensed something.

    A small metallic bird that he never saw dropped a red colored thin object in front of him. Before he could understand what that is¡­

    *BOOM*

    A massive explosion happened arge bird made of golden mes came out of the scale and the explosion threw the scale away to the far. The impact almost made it travel through half of the city before its momentum showed any signs of stopping.

    The golden ming bird burning with mes of Divine energy was shot directly at Shijin¡¯s father and he took the full brunt of that attack.

    He managed to take his sword and defend himself at the veryst minute, but he wasn¡¯t able topletely negate it.

    ¡°ARGH¡­¡±

    He felt the pain as the mes burnt his armor and clothes and made their way to the outeryers of his flesh.

    He broke through the city wall and fell out of the city.

    The explosion is so loud that everyone in the city including Sam and Magman n leader heard it.

    Sam chuckled and said.

    ¡°I observed one thing throughout all of my endeavors. The more powerful a person bes, the less vignt they are about small things. And irrespective of the race this is amon thing among all the cultivators.¡±

    As he spoke, he shot another bullet onto a different scale.

    This time, the bullet turned into an explosive lightning wolf. Therge lightning wolf arrived in front of another n leader who took the full brunt of the attack and stood there paralyzed.

    The next attacks followed soon after and within no time, Samnded all six attacks on six different n leaders. He appeared to be a little exhausted. But he still has some energy left.

    The six scales are still floating in front of him and he tapped on the bird puppet beside him. Its belly opened up dropping six scales.

    These scales are the first six that were used tond the attacks.

    When the attacks are triggered through them, they will be thrown away from the impact and they will disappear after they are done and reappear in the puppet using spatial transference.

    Sam examined the scales a bit and sighed.

    These blood scales are weak. Way too weak to endure this. They are only good for one shot, which means that Sam is all out.

    He looked at the n leader who is trying to destroy the formation crazily, but Sam shook his head and took out the Dimensional drifter.

    ¡°If you are unable to escape, then you are going to die. Which means, you are going to hell. It¡¯s not really a nice ce. So, all the best.¡±

    He disappeared along with Maya and the kids.

    The Magman n leader looked at the spot in horror and the formation finally disappeared. Never in his life would he have thought that the formation he set up would be the reason for his death.

    He fell to his knees in despair.

    At this exact moment, the n leaders, both injured and uninjured arrived at the n grounds and every one of them is furious.

    If the previous spection still left them with some doubts, now they are sure as hell that this guy has something to do with Maya and Sam, and when they entered the first they did is sense the spatial fluctuations left behind and at the same time a token that fell before the n leader.

    One of the n leaders destroyed the token immediately, but before he could make a move against the Magman n leader another n leader stopped him.

    ¡°If you think you can take him all by yourself, then you are mistaken.¡±

    And just like that, everything came to a stalemate.

 Chapter 1806: Preparing for Next Reveal

    Chapter 1806: Preparing for Next RevealSam stood at the bank of a stream as he watched the water flow gently.

    He could see the fish swimming along the stream. It is peaceful and calm. He took in the breeze with a very peaceful expression.

    Maya is under a tree nearby as her kids yed around. She looked at Sam and wanted to ask something. But looking at his peaceful expression, she didn''t want to disturb him. She kind of felt guilty as Sam is in a constant fighting mode since she met him and she is the reason that he is fighting.

    Even though she knew that there is some twisted deal between Sam and Lucifer which is the reason for him to agree to this, she has a feeling that even if Lucifer is not in the equation, Sam would have still helped her if they crossed paths.

    At this moment, Sam suddenly turned his head and looked at her.

    She smiled casually and turned to her kids.

    "Do you have something to ask? No questions about how it was a close call for us. After all, I did put you in front of one of our captors."

    "It is true that I was afraid, but more than that fear, I got an impression of a different thing."

    "What would that be?"

    "Even when you put me in such a dangerous position, nothing happened to me. They could not do anything to me even when I was just two feet away.

    That gave me strength and belief more than fear.

    Thank you for that."

    Sam just shrugged at that response. It is better that she is more daring. So, he can make ns without worrying too much.

    At the moment, he already triggered arge-scale war within the ns. All this while, these people are careful and the big guys, to be precise the n leaders didn''t really start fighting. But with Sam''s interference, he is sure that the first n leader will die soon and will soon be followed by more n leaders as well.

    Once it starts, it won''t stop anymore.

    This is just the beginning of a very vast chaos that Sam has nned for them.

    After another ten minutes, Sam took Maya and the kids to a nearby city and left them there. There is still an hour or so before the next reveal happens and he has to figure out something.

    The whole concept of making his location known every three hours is to make Sam unable to n properly.

    After all, when dealing with the first two ns, he took his time, did his scouting and properly made his preparations to deal with all the possible scenarios and three hours time is not enough for him to do all of this.

    That is why, he decided to use this to his advantage.

    Until now, fifteen ns got his location and ten more ns are left out of which the five are going to have the next reveal.

    From the basic information, he has at hand, all ten of these ns are a bit far away and out of them three ns are currently in an alliance. So, if Lucifer yed a trick and only revealed his location to one of these three ns and assumed that their rtionship and alliance is solid, then he would have three ns after him.

    So, if yed right in a single reveal, Sam will attract seven ns and it is possible that he could attract six more ns in the reveal after that.

    Putting that aside, right now Sam wanted to use this chaos to get the next child as soon as possible. Right now, he has three children in his hands and the toughest to obtain at the moment is in the Olympian organization.

    Sam had already decided to leave that for thest.

    That means, he has three more children to catch and he needs to use his next reveal to the maximum efficiency.

    He needs to stir up trouble in the right ce and the right time.

    As first step, he decided to learn some information about what happened in Magman city after he left.

    He went to the nearby city and talked to some merchants casually and finally got some information.

    Magman n leader is abducted by three ns that formed an impromptu alliance and in the process, they injured the rest of the n leaders a little bit.

    One who is injured the most is Shijin''s father. He is a reckless person, to begin with. So, when things didn''t go his way, he just went crazy and acted stupid. Things went sideways and he had to escape.

    Sam got the info on these three n leaders and he also got an idea of who initiated and led the alliance from a merchant who actually escaped the Magman city as soon as the n fell.

    With this new information, Sam decided to n his next steps. He went back to Maya and said.

    "We are going to follow a strategy simr to the first one. We are going to enter another city, but this time, the city doesn''t belong to a n that captured you.

    Instead, they are one of the ns that are trying to get your child from other ns.

    So, things would be a little different. But we have to be just as careful.

    Maya nodded and got ready to move. Sam took out his dimensional drifter and went to the nearest location to his next destination.

    There he went out into the woods and tamed a flying beast before reaching the closest possible distance to the next city.

    He went into the city alone in a disguise, took a room in the most luxurious inn, and finally used a dimensional drifter to bring Maya and her children into the room.

    He couldn''t help but shake his head as he thought of how much he is using the dimensional drifter.

    It''s a great device that could allow people to transverse dimensions and he is using it to bypass formations and surveince.

    There is not much time left. So, he didn''t bother to move out himself, instead, he let his usual soul and shadow search get some information.

    Meanwhile within the same city, inside the n grounds of Sam''s next target.

    Three n leaders that managed to abduct the Magman n leader are currently staring at their captive.

    Magman n leader didn''t bother hiding anything and spilled all the information.

    n leader 1 looked at him strangely and said.

    "So, you are saying that a youngster came to you and said that he is there to help you protect that kid and you are sure that he did his best, but someone still stole your child?"

    "Yes and as I said it is a guy named Sam. Kumar already showed us what Sam looks like and right before he escaped, I actually saw him. He is the one who has thedy and the kids."

    n leaders exchanged a nce and n leader 2 spoke up.

    "Come on, do you really think that we will believe whatever stories you make up? A person at the peak of Astral ne might be powerful and just like you said, let''s assume that he is the strongest Astral ne cultivator to ever exist.

    Even then, do you really believe that he can fight with Divine ne cultivators? You are even saying that he would be able to deal such blows to us the n leaders? You tell me, is any of this believable?"

    Magman n leader gritted his teeth and didn''t know what to say.

    He doesn''t know if what he is saying is aplete truth. After all, it is indeed a bit of exaggeration to say that Sam dealt such blows to different n leaders when they entered the city.

    There is a possibility that the other party might have had some background and some people might be acting behind the scenes.

    But he wanted to keep those spections to himself. He decided to insist on this and after some time, the n leaders went as far as getting a soul contract signed with a use that the Magman n leader will only speak the truth.

    Only then did they believe what he said and now they are all in a dilemma.

    n leader 3 looked at the two of them and asked.

    "What should we do next?"

    "First of all, the immediate task is very simple." n leader 1 said and turned to the Magman n leader.

    "Your task is done, my friend. Time to say goodbye."

    He didn''t hesitate and stabbed his spear straight into the heart of the old man.

    The Magman n leader just died. But right when he was about to breathe hisst, he used thest bit of his strength to destroy his own soul.

    That is the reason they got the information first. They knew that if they didn''t capture the soul fast enough, he would detonate it.

    "Now that that''s out of the way, let''s move to the serious business. We need to assume that Sam is a dangerous opponent and find a way to capture him. If what the Magman n leader said is the truth apart from the kids, the device he is using to move around is a very valuable treasure. We need to get our hands on it."

 Chapter 1807: Clause

    Chapter 1807: useAs the three n masters discussed their lofty ambitions of obtaining the kids, Maya, and even the treasures Sam held, time quickly passed and the next reveal happened.

    This time, Sam didn''t make too many preparations. If his guess is right, the three n leaders will get the required information from the Magman n leader and they will be prepared for what''s toe.

    He decided to take it one step at a time

    It didn''t take long for him to confirm his guess.

    The new reveal happened and just like what he spected, the news was sent to one of the three allied forces. So, a total of seven ns came and knocked on the walls of the city.

    As soon as the scouts of n leader 1 learned of this information, he immediately made preparations. Like the Magman n leader, he didn''t make them wait outside. Instead, he sent the envoys himself and received them properly.

    He arranged some temporary residence for them within the n grounds andter invited all of them for a meeting.

    "I know why you people are here. All of us want the same things. The woman, the children, and the guardian. So, I will be straight with you.

    I don''t know how urate the information about the guardian being in our city is. But if the guardian and Maya are really here, I won''t object to you guys in any way, but I suggest that we all reach an agreement before we resort to anything drastic."

    n leader 1 is polite, firm, and resolute. He didn''t show any signs of weakness, nor did he show any signs of arrogance. But his intentions couldn''t be clearer. He wants to resolve this as peacefully as possible.

    Even though everyone there knows that it is nothing more than a pipedream to resolve this peacefully, he is trying his best to reduce all the losses.

    "I know it would be hard to swallow the bitter pill ofpromise, but here is my suggestion. Until we confirm their location and presence in the city, as well as the capture, was smoothly processed, we will not be talking about who gets to keep the children.

    So, before finding them and capturing them, we are all allies.

    The important thing in this coboration is that no one should be trying to dig any holes for others. I know it is hard to follow, but you have toply. I and my friends are all on the same page, so we will be able to cooperate.

    Our alliance is rock solid. I am sure we cannot say the same for you guys. If pushes to shove I will not hesitate to resort to a conversation of strength instead of words.

    So, all of you have to follow the rules and if one doesn''t follow these two simple rules, they can get out now. If we find out that one of you vited them in the middle of our mission, don''t me me for being ruthless.

    We can proceed with the further discussion if you are okay with it. Otherwise, feel free to leave the city."

    Heid all the rules he wanted them to follow in front of them and now it is their decision.

    A lot of them hesitated. Even though a few people put up a united front, they are driven by benefits. They have a lot of plots in their minds.

    The only exception is another allied force of three ns.

    They are the only ones who had an unwavering stance and if it reallyes to blows, they are the only threat the n leader felt like it could be hard to deal with.

    "How do we believe that you are going toply with the rules that you justid out?"

    "I don''t know what will convince you guys to trust me. But for starters, I think this will help¡­"

    He revealed all the information he got from the Magman n leader.

    "Why are you telling us all of this? Why aren''t you resisting?"

    One of the n leaders asked in confusion. After all, nobody wants to share their benefits.

    "If I really resisted, the best case scenario is that my resistance will work out and you will be fended off, I will find these people and manage to hold on to them.

    But I don''t work with the best-case scenario in mind. I estimated the worst-case scenario and I am trying to make sure it doesn''t happen and in the process, I will minimize my losses and achieve the best that I can.

    I am not blind nor am I arrogant enough to assume that I could get the best out of every situation.

    You might want to keep that in mind if any one of you wants to double-cross me. As I said, I always assume the worst and prepare for it. That applies to this situation also.

    We will leave you guys to your privacy. You can discuss among yourselves for a while and if you all agree, we can start our search directly from our n grounds and proceed outwards. Meanwhile, I am locking the city and I am keeping all the security personnel outside the walls to seal off their escape routes.

    I am also putting a spatial lock formation as well. So, don''t be rmed if any of you used a transference scroll and it didn''t work."

    The three n leaders left the room and the discussion continued.

    n leader 1 ordered the other two n leaders to lock the city down.

    Sam who is in the inn didn''t know what happened within the city. But when he noticed that the n leaders not only didn''t resist the other n leaders and even invited them to the city, he knew that things are going to be very different.

    Soon he noticed that the city is in lockdown. The spatial lock formation has also not gone unnoticed. But Sam isn''t worried about this. A dimensional drifter is not some everyday artifact. A spatial lock is nothing to it.

    In fact, even without that, Sam would have been still able to get out of that spatial lock as long as he wished to do so.

    But that would defeat his purpose. Escape should only be done at thest minute after he managed to utilize everything this scenario has to offer.

    As he waited, soon all the soldiers of the three ns surrounded the city and also kept a close eye on every nook and cranny inside the city.

    Sam thought for a moment and decided to take some action. He turned to Maya and said.

    "You guys stay here. Iid down a formation in the room if anyone ising towards the room, you would be able to see it and you can use this token to contact me.

    As long as they are thirty feet away from the room, contact me instantly."

    Maya nodded, but she is still a bit nervous. Sam has been away multiple times, but he has never been away when they are in the middle of their enemy''s territory.

    Sam set up the formation and left the room.

    He reappeared in an empty street. There are some guards roaming here and there, but Sam hid from them and started drawing some inscriptions on buildings. This time, he is faster than when he did it on the scales as he has more space and he doesn''t have topress and everything.

    After he is done there, he moved to a different location and a different wall. He didn''t stay too long in the city streets making these preparations and went back.

    He left and went back to the inn where Maya is waiting.

    Sam then let out some of his puppets. He has to be careful with the surveince of the city.

    But he is not really satisfied with this and thought of something. He went back to the rules of the game that he obtained from Lucifer when he finally met Maya.

    The rules came to him from the ck envelope.

    He went through line by line carefully to see if he could find any loophole and when he came to one particr line, he pped his forehead in exasperation.

    That line is.

    ''You can use all the means at your disposal to win.''

    All this while, he has been following the same rules as he did before. He is so used to it that he didn''t bother to check when Lucifer specifically presented with a set of rules.

    There was nothing like that in thepetition before and Lucifer has also been sneaky with this.

    He didn''t say it out loud and rather gave a written statement that too in a very fine print in a letter that most yers wouldn''t even bother to read.

    Sam smiled cheekily and tried something.

    A crystal appeared in front of him.

    He couldn''t help himself and looked at the ceiling as he burst intoughter.

    Maya didn''t know what is happening.

    "Sam?"

    She looked at him with a concerned gaze.

    "Don''t worry. I just realized that things have just be a lot more interesting."

    As he spoke, he activated the crystal table. With his cultivation level, he can see far beyond this city, but right now his city is enough and he saw all the n leaders that belonged to this city, as well as the other cities,e out of the n grounds.

 Chapter 1808: Hypothesis

    Chapter 1808: HypothesisMaya looked at the crystal table with her mouth wide open.

    Meanwhile, Sam looked like an excited child.

    It has been a really long time since he managed to use all of his cheats in a battle. Particrly in a battle where his wits worked more than his strength, he would have really loved if he had this crystal table at his disposal to use.

    But now it is not toote.

    This couldn''t havee at a more opportune time.

    As he looked at different n leadersing out of the n grounds, Sam recalled all of his puppets that were out for surveince. Now, he doesn''t need anything like a puppet outside.

    He can look at it from his room without any bother.

    At the entrance of the n grounds.

    n leader 1 managed to strike a proper deal with all of these n leaders and is now leading them. There are a total of ten n leaders which means Ten divine ne cultivators.

    Apart from them, there are almost thirty Peak stage Astral ne cultivators that could be considered strongest under the Divine ne.

    The true elites of the realms in the surroundings.

    Of course, there are even a bunch of people who are at the peak stage andte stage of Astral ne Consummation. They are not worth mentioning. All they might be able to do is be some extra set of eyes to find Sam or Maya.

    n leader 1 looked at them and said.

    "We are going to split as we have agreed before. We will be proceeding as nned. We are going to divide the whole city into sixty segments.

    We are forming ten groups, so each group is responsible for sixty segments.

    My external city formation has been reinforced with a very innovative formation one of my n members recently made.

    It keeps track of the number of life forms with a certain life force within the city.

    When I activated the formation, it already registered the life force and if there is a fluctuation in it, we will all be immediately notified.

    Not only that, the formation will also try to track the direction in which the person could have disappeared as long as they didn''t go too far away from the city in a single transfer.

    So, unless they move away hundreds of miles away from the city in single transference, we will know which direction they went.

    Then we will take one-way spatial transference formations to move in that direction.

    Apart from that, don''t forget to spend adequate time in each segment. As I mentioned, every brick should be searched thoroughly don''t forget to ce the formation discs all in ce.

    So, if they want to escape to the ces that we already searched, we will be informed.

    Now, does everyone understand the rules?"

    Everyone just nodded and made their move.

    n leader 1 is really meticulous. When he realized how Sam tricked the Magman n leader, he took all kinds of measures to ensure that the same wouldn''t happen to him.

    Of course, Sam couldn''t hear what is happening, all he could see is that the ten n leaders separated with their subordinates closely following them behind.

    They each went to a different area and started searching every nook and cranny. They didn''t even leave, the men women and children within the houses.

    They went as far as doing cavity searches in some ces. Of course, they are at least mindful enough to let female subordinates deal with women and children.

    Sam shook his head at this meticulousness and of course, the one thing that attracted his attention the most are the formation discs that were beingid out.

    He frowned at this and curiously zoomed in on the crystal table.

    If his cultivation was still at the beginning of the Astral ne, then he would have had some problems, but now, with his cultivation level almost reaching the Divine ne, he has much more power to examine the formation disc in detail directly from his position just through the crystal table.

    He started studying the energy patterns of the formation disc and quickly created a simtion within the second floor of the Divine dimension tower. He couldn''t help but sigh in satisfaction as he did so.

    He ran a simtion and realized what the formation disc would do.

    He smiled and looked at n leader 1''s projection on the crystal table.

    "You are really good."

    Sam couldn''t help but praise him, but instantly he made a move. He disappeared from the spot and reappeared at an empty segment which isn''t being searched. He took out a formation disc of his own and hid it with an illusion formation around it.

    Unlike the n leaders, he didn''t ce it on the ground, instead, he ced it on a tiled roof. The illusion just covered it up. It is not a high-level illusion, but very few people would think outside the box to check every tile on a roof.

    Next, he disappeared from that spot and went to another empty segment cing another disc.

    While the elders swiftly moved through their first set of segments, Sam is already done with visiting the rest and cing the formation discs and he even went back to the inn.

    Maya just saw this with awe.

    While Sam is gone, she was able to watch his actions through the crystal table.

    Now that she is seeing it in a three-dimensional view from far away, she could see what he is doing.

    Sam is just too daring in her opinion.

    Just a few hundred meters away there is a Divine ne cultivator searching for him and he is dancing around cing formations here and there.

    Now that he came back, he just waited for the others to take his bait.

    Everything has beenid down by him.

    Now, he needs to make use of these preparations and see what he can do with these ten n leaders.

    When one of the n leaders came to the area where Sam and Maya are staying, Sam simply took out a divine dimension fragment and sent Maya and the kids inside. He also stored the crystal table away and wore a disguise.

    He also changed his aurapletely.

    Sam''s aura has always been neutral. But now he is emitting an earth elemental aura and his life force seemed to be fluctuating.

    When the n leader in charge of this area saw this, he didn''t care much. He just thought that some severely injured man is recovering there. After all, the inn is known for its safety and protection.

    But at that moment, the formation around the city has activated. The formation would keep track of the life force of the city.

    n leader 1 immediately got alerted. He went to the spot from where the formation has sent an alert to see which direction the targets went. But to his surprise, there is no record of it.

    In fact, there is no record of them leaving the city.

    He first thought that the formation is not working, but he shook his head immediately. He paid a great deal for such a formation even though the purpose of it is not really that useful. It was actually a variant they quickly whipped up from a much higher-level formation.

    It shouldn''t be wrong.

    As he thought to this point, he came across another conclusion.

    The other party might have used some special spatial means to seal their presence off from the formation. It could be a divine dimension fragment or even some powerful formation.

    Either way, things are not as simple anymore.

    As he thought of this, he pondered on how to proceed.

    Meanwhile, Samid down a formation in his room and let out Maya and the kids back.

    The formation fluctuated again and the initial record was overridden.

    "It seems like it is most likely a formation since they weren''t just hiding away. It might need a lot of resources, I must confirm this somehow."

    He muttered and went in as he tried to perform some iterations.

    He gathered all the elders into a conference call throughmunication tokens and they spoke.

    n leader 1 gave his hypothesis and he asked others to reveal the exact locations and their actions to find out exactly what triggered the others to use this technique.

 Chapter 1809 - 1809 New Visitors

    1809 New Visitors

    Sam didn¡¯t know what n leader 1 is talking about.

    But he is not really worried about it.

    There are only limited actions a person could take as a counter to Sam¡¯s approach. There is no need for him to worry as long as the actions of the n leader fall under those categories.

    He can navigate through all of this.

    While the n leaders stopped their search and started reporting to n leader 1, Sam started making his next move.

    He appeared in one of the segments where the n leaders already ced a formation.

    As soon as he appeared there, the formation is triggered. The n leader nearby stopped with the report and immediately made his move.

    ¡°He is within my territory. Join me quickly.¡±

    It didn¡¯t take long for the n leader toe to the area where Sam was in, but Sam already disappeared before he could see.

    .....

    Sam came back to the room and looked at the confused n leader through the projection and smiled.

    He then activated one of the formation discs he ced. This disc is also ced in a segment adjacent to the first one he visited.

    The formation revealed a projection of Sam. A pure hologram and it projected Sam jumping from one building to another. While the formation is active, Sam used the dimensional drifter to appear in the same segment as the hologram, triggering the rm.

    When the n leader in charge of the segment heard this, he immediately became alert. The first thing that appeared in his sight though is actually the holographic projection of Sam.

    Meanwhile, Sam carefully concealed himself and set up another inscription in an empty alleyway within the same segment.

    He disappeared after he is done and reappeared in the room. He turned off the formation disc.

    He repeated the same thing again and again.

    He activated a formation before he appeared in a segment, triggered the rm and when the other party is confused with the hologram, Sam justid down the inscription in a corner of the same segment.

    Even n leader 1 who was calm and collected until now was driven crazy by this.

    He didn¡¯t understand what Sam is doing. All he is doing is just making the n leaders run around a bit. As for destroying everything in a segment as soon as Sam appeared, it ispletely out of their question.

    n leader 1 explicitly stated that no matter what happens, there shouldn¡¯t be any loss of life of the citizens. He is very particr about this.

    Of course, the other n leaders would have liked it if they didn¡¯t have to care about them. They would have just destroyed the whole segment with a wide-range attack. Then things would have been simpler.

    Even if Sam is not dead, they would still injure him, increasing their chances of capture.

    Meanwhile, the three-hour time limit is over.

    But Sam didn¡¯t change the location once again. He just stayed there waiting for the rest of the n leaders toe.

    With this cycle, all the twenty-five n leaders would have had a single chance to capture Sam and Maya, because they managed to get their locations. After another three hours, a new fresh random set of five n leaders will get the information once again.

    At this moment, Sam couldn¡¯t help but think of what Lucifer is thinking about this.

    The very reason that Lucifer put this three-hour notification to the n leaders is to increase Sam¡¯s difficulty.

    After all, three hours is limited. He cannot do much in three hours if he really wants to fight against a Divine ne cultivator. He needs some preparations.

    So, Sam should have less time nning and more time worrying about his safety. But now things are getting easier and easier.

    He doesn¡¯t really have to worry about many things at the moment. He can just use this notification to his advantage and make the Divine ne cultivators fight each other.

    The first n even yielded great sess. Magman n leader died sessfully. This means, his strategy is working and now with the improved strategy, Sam is going to yield many more results.

    As Sam kept on using the same move of appearing in some random ce, cing a formation disc, and diverting the attention of the Divine ne cultivators, the n leaders finally had enough.

    They all started pushing n leader 1 to evacuate the citizens and after that much pressure, he couldn¡¯t do much.

    He immediately ordered the citizens to evacuate and retreat into the n grounds.

    He even sent away some of the weaker guard members. While he is directing that, the other three n alliance members came looking for n leader 1.

    ¡°We got the news of Sam¡¯s location that he is in this city.¡±

    n leader 1 frowned and said.

    ¡°Of course, I know that you got the news.¡±

    ¡°No, that¡¯s not what I meant. We got the news again, a few minutes ago.¡±

    ¡°What do you mean? Why would you get the news again?¡±

    ¡°We don¡¯t know. But we feel like there might be a pattern here. What happened when you got the news? Did you get any relevant information from Magman?¡±

    n leader 1 frowned and thought for a moment and he suddenly realized something.

    ¡°Magman n leader and four other n leaders also got the news just like we did, but they got the news way before we did and they were ambushed by Sam in the abandoned cave tunnels.

    From the calction, it is approximately three hours before we got the news.¡±

    ¡°So, how long is it before we got the news?¡±

    ¡°I think you guys got it just after three hours we got and now almost three hourster, you guys got the news again. And the judging by how many people got the news at the time¡­¡±

    n leader 1 realized the pattern, but more questions came instead of answers. After all, they are getting the news from the gods they worship.

    They are confused about why all of their gods that belonged topletely different religions are working in the same pattern. This made him feel like something is a bit fishy. But one thing he understood is that ording to the pattern, he will get some more visitors.

    So, he decided to speed up the evacuation process.

    Sam didn¡¯t wait while they are doing this, instead, he kept on repeating the same thing again and again. Within thirty minutes, he managed to repeat the action fifteen times and he didn¡¯t stop there. As for evacuating the inn, no one bothered to do that.

    Same with the buildings very close to the n grounds¡¯ entrance.

    Even the n leaders believed, they will catch Sam easily if he is there since at least two n leaders are present in the area all the time.

    Meanwhile, the new batch of n leaders already arrived.

    There are only three of them of course. Now there are a total of thirteen n leaders in one ce.

    n leader 1 used his tongue to make them agree to join in the whole thing. While these negotiations are happening, Sam didn¡¯t trigger a single rm, which kind of made all the existing n leaders a bit suspicious.

    The three new n leaders of course didn¡¯t really care that much as they didn¡¯t experience Sam¡¯s cat-and-mouse y.

    ¡°With your presence here, things would be much simpler. We are just about to take the hard approach right now. You are going to be assigned some segments. Whenever an rm is triggered because of Sam¡¯s presence, attack without hesitation.

    The only precaution you need to take is to make sure that he doesn¡¯t die on the spot.¡±

    n leader 1 sent the new three n leaders to different segments and of course, he let a n leader each apany them.

    He thought that since they were directly making a big move, it would be easy to capture Sam.

    But little did he know, Sam is actually waiting for this exact moment and his attention is focused on the projection in his room.

    He looked as if one of the old n leaders is bringing one of the new n leaders to a segment that he already rigged with multiple inscriptions.

    Sam looked at Maya who is also keenly observing what is happening.

    She watched as Sam crazily jumped back and forth. She didn¡¯t understand what he was doing. But judging from the expression right now, she could fairly say that Sam is finally about to do something that she might understand.

    Sam smiled and said.

    ¡°This is going to be fun.¡±

    As he said, he shot an energy beam straight into the projection, triggering one of the inscriptions that heid down in the segment.

    At that exact moment, in the city segment, he targeted, the old n leader is exining how the rm works to the new n leader.

    The new n leader is attentively listening to it. But all of a sudden, he felt a sense of dread creeping up his heart.

 Chapter 1810: Make them Clash

    Chapter 1810: Make them shmes zed through.

    They manifested into arge inferno with roaring noises and all of this is directed at the new n leader that was just listening to the rming arrangments.

    The full brunt attack hit him from the rear and he crashed into the house nearby.

    Of course, the attack range is too big, the crashed building soon started burning down and started melting.

    The n leader that was exining the situation to his new counterpart is shocked. He didn''t expect such a scenario all of a sudden.

    As the mes destroyed everything within their site for a brief moment, they died down.

    The n leader who got attacked came out of the crashed and burn debris of the building and looked at his peer angrily.

    "You better have a damn good exnation. What is the meaning of this?"

    "I don''t know my friend. You must trust me."

    "Shut the fuck up. Do you really think you are that trustworthy? How dare you guys try to sneak attack on me? Do you really think I am a pushover.?"

    As he spoke, he took out a sword.

    "Just listen¡­"

    "Shut up, I am gonna fucking kill you."

    "But.."

    "I said shut the fuck up."

    "BUT THE FLAMES ARE UP YOUR ASS AGAIN."

    *BOOM*

    Another me attack hit the neer before he could even wield his sword. But as the mes died down and hepletely got rid of them, he didn''t even speak anything and jumped on the old timer n leader with his sword.

    Just like that, the battle started.

    In a simr way, the other two neer n leaders were attacked just like that and they also dove into battle.

    After all, they still held some slight suspicion when n leader 1 is so generous and easygoing. Going as far as inviting them to capture Sam.

    But now as soon as they were attacked, they felt betrayed and fooled. So, they didn''t bother listening to any more exnations and started fighting.

    n leader 1 who just thought that the extra help and extreme measure of destroying the city will help them catch easily, was dumbstruck as soon as the attacks came in.

    He rushed over to one of the spots and let his two friends go to the remaining two.

    When he reached the spot he was rushing towards, he was dumbfounded by what he saw.

    The two n leaders are fighting crazily as they destroyed everything in their sight. They are so angry at each other to the point that they behaved like mortal enemies.

    He immediately wanted to go and stop the fight. But as soon as he took a step forward a sword ray shot out of nowhere and made him stop.

    The sword ray is not aimed at him though. It is aimed at the neer n leader who is fighting crazily.

    The sword left a deep gash on his back as he was already attacked there by his opponent. He turned around and all he saw is n leader 1 standing there.

    "You bloody fuckers. How dare you take me for a fool? I will not let this slide."

    As he spoke, he immediately used some of his trump card moves. He swung his sword and attacked both his opponent and the n leader 1.

    Both of them had to take the attack because of how fast it was and could only hope to defend it with all of their strength. Only after they managed to deflect it, they turned around to see the n leader fleeing.

    A simr thing happened in the other two areas. So, the three new n leaders that just came in ''escaped'' from the ''trap'' that was set up for them by n leader 1 and the rest of the n leaders in the city.

    And of course, when they are escaping, the formations around the city obviously came in their way.

    "They are going to break it."

    n leader 1 Muttered under his breath as his expression turned ugly. He would very much like to stop them, unlock the formation, and make them leave the city. But he is sure as hell that these three wouldn''t bother listening to one word of his, much less, stopping and letting him send them off.

    As he watched, the formation was broken open and three of them fled in different directions.

    n leader 1 sighed as he looked at the situation.

    His thoughts ran rapidly and after a short while, he went to the center of the city and called up all the n leaders.

    Meanwhile, the rm is still triggering constantly, but this time, he didn''t care.

    "The city is rigged. There are some inscriptions or formations set up that started the attacks against the three n leaders that just fled.

    Sam is much more tricky to deal with than we initially thought. We need to be careful."

    He paused a bit and then spoke.

    "Lets evacuate the buildings near the n grounds and when you are doing that investigate every single one of them. Don''t bother about invading their privacy. Completely scan them from top to bottom.

    Ask them to remove their disguises if they have any."

    He paused and took out amunication token to send out a message to his subordinates. The subordinates came out of the n grounds and once again surrounded the city.

    Then he activated some formations that were not used before.

    "These are advanced spatial locks. All the spatial nodes within the city will be locked for a while, no matter what device, artifact, or formation he uses, without the node ess, they will not be able to travel using space. But this formation is temporary. So, we need to finish this off quickly.

    So, I will order my n members to do the same search for the people that are already inside.

    I will find this guy and personally kill him myself."

    n leader 1 obviously became enraged. Rightfully so. After all, Sam just beat him at his own game.

    n leader 1 originally thought that he would be able to capture Sam with his strategic mind rather than his strength. In his opinion, in this particr scenario, his strength is an added variable that helps him positively.

    He strongly believed that his tactics would have been enough.

    But too bad, he is facing Sam."

    While the n leader locked the space, the rms finally stopped triggering.

    At this moment, Sam is speaking to Maya in a very impressed tone.

    "This guy became decisive. He is searching for every single person in the city and he doesn''t care about damage or reputation anymore. He even locked the space nodes. He is cing all of his cards on the table."

    Maya looked at him and didn''t know what to even say.

    Sam looked at her and smiled.

    "No matter where we are in the city, he would be able to find us with this approach.

    Too bad for him though. We are not in the city anymore."

    He chuckled as he plucked a fruit off of the tree that he is sitting next to.

    Currently, Sam is sitting along with Maya and the kids in the nearby woods and he is looking at the whole scenario yed out in the city through the crystal table.

    As soon as the three n leaders broke the formations around the city, he left with Maya and the kids. From the n since the start, he already understood how this n leader 1 behaves. He is smart and calctive and just by what is revealed, there is no way, this guy is going to let Sam stay hidden after that.

    He is going to try his best to get Sam out no matter the cost and just like how Sam assumed he did exactly the same.

    He escaped and now he is watching the show rxedly.

    "Are you sure we should stay here? Don''t you think it is a bit dangerous? There are too many n leaders around."

    "Don''t worry about it. We still have one move left to make and after we make it, let''s go and get some of your children. Two of them if possible."

    "Two?"

    "In fact, we can even gun for three."

    Maya looked at him incredulously. Sam just smiled and waited.

    "Just wait for a while. There should be someoneing back to this city."

    "Coming back? We are waiting for someone?"

    "Yeah, the three n leaders that just left. They are going toe back with some reinforcements.

    If my guess is not wrong, the news about her location would have been revealed to every other n leader out of this city and a lot of them might be making their way here upon being prompted by three guys.

    We can see some interesting shes."

    "How are you so sure they are going to sh?"

    "Simple. We are going to make them."

 Chapter 1811: Increase the Conflict

    Chapter 1811: Increase the ConflictMaya didn''t really understand, how Sam is going to do this.

    When she remembered what happened until now, she understood that Sam has a great chance at doing this. But there is one aspect of this whole thing that she didn''t understand.

    These people are n leaders.

    All of them are divine ne cultivators and they all have amon goal. To capture Maya and her children.

    But even in all of that, the fact that they are fighting each other is very surprising to her to say the least. She really wanted to ask Sam how he managed to pull that off.

    Sam would have justughed if he heard that.

    Actually, the logic is pretty simple. At this moment, when the children are still up for grabs, these people might have neutral ground, but this is also the time when they are hoping for the rest of their peers to die.

    Even if they try to act cordial or try to suppress their desire, that is their true nature.

    In an ideal scenario, they would love if the n leaders all worked together to find Sam, making their jobs simpler and in process, all of their rivals would die of some cause and by the end of it all, they woulde out as ultimate winners with maximum gains.

    The only problem right now is that these people don''t really have a proper reason to directly strike each other.

    For example, in the case of the Magman n leader, they all held each other back because once someone just gives it up and starts an attack, the rest will take a look and decide which side has a higher chance of winning and which side will get them more benefits.

    They will pick a side and the chaos will grow bigger. They take advantage and fish in those muddy waters.

    Nobody wanted to be the stepping stone of it. And of course, there are cases of hidden rivalries and old scores between them already. It would just be too chaotic for them.

    And all of this tension only needs a very very small trigger to break.

    Which is Sam doing?

    So, whenever a trigger like this urs, the inherent thoughts of these people wont let them think too much into the situation. They are having a go at each other and Sam is moving around raising more conflicts peacefully.

    Right now, it is time for him to raise a bigger one.

    Within no time, a bunch of other n leaders arrived at this spot.

    These n leaders mostly belong to the very first batch of n leaders that got Sam and Maya''s information.

    The three n leaders that fled came together with them and now they are all rallying against the n leaders inside the city who are stressfully searching for Sam.

    When n leader 1 saw the scene of these n leaders approaching, he felt his heart sink. He might be strong and smart, but when things are going out of his control every given second, it is hard for him to fight against this many opponents even with the advantage of the numbers.

    He is trying to think of words that could appease these people. Something that could let him have some breathing space to reorganize himself.

    But at this moment, something happened.

    Sam who is sitting in the forest leisurely eating fruit, let his energy shoot out into the crystal table. The energy beams are like coiled earthworms. They are way too many and they moved in different directions.

    Over half a dozen inscriptions were activated.

    They are all aimed outside of the city though.

    So, all the attacks are aimed at the n leaders that came which made n leader 1 once again dumbfounded.

    He wanted to stop at least one attack from going out and running to the wall. But not only was he unable to make it in time. It actually backfired.

    When the n leaders saw n leader 1 on the city walls while the attacksnded on them, made them crazy.

    These small triggers made them shed all of their cordiality and made a move.

    They are not really willing to go to death battles with the other n leaders of course, but they are not going to back down without making the other party eat some losses, in that way, they will have much more progress in weakening their enemies and they will get an upper hand in the negotiation.

    They made their move and Sam who saw this didn''t hesitate to make his own next move.

    As soon as they neared the city wall, n leader 1 already got his reinforcement. This hindered the external n leaders to initiate a conversation. Too bad, they cannot have that conversation though.

    The energy beams coiled around on the crystal table as they triggered every single inscription Sam left in the city.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The whole city started shaking. The lightning attacks, the me attacks, all of them mixed with the wind storms and tornados. It is like all the natural disastersbined together and they are stuck at the same exact moment.

    The new n leaders were shocked by this and their eyes brightened immediately.

    Meanwhile, the city walls copsed and so did the houses, and all the formations and inscriptions that are attached to the structures are gone.

    Except for the n grounds, everything else in the city has gone down.

    When the dust settled, n leader 1 felt that something is extremely wrong. He didn''t have a single scratch on him. He stood there, tall and proud without a single change in his body.

    The new n leaders'' eyes brightened and made their way towards the injured n leaders. They didn''t dare to miss this amazing chance in front of them.

    The old n leaders are of course notpletely injured. And when they saw the first n leader standing there without even so much as a scratch, they are absolutely outraged.

 Chapter 1812: Increase the Conflict II

    Chapter 1812: Increase the Conflict IIIn just a moment everything changed.

    n leader 1 felt extremely exasperated. He knew he is a pickle right now. On one side there are a bunch of n leaders that are trying to get an edge on him and now even his allies are against him.

    There is no way, he is getting out of this situation. He is going to face the heat from both sides and he should find a chance to escape.

    Sam looked at the whole scene from the table and then packed it away.

    "We are moving."

    "Where to?" Maya asked in confusion.

    "As I said before. To get your children. And this time, you can stay out in the open. Standing in front of everyone as you take your child with your own arms."

    As Sam said, he took out the dimensional drifter and moved to their next location.

    Of course, he cannot directly get to the city as he hadn''t marked the node before. But he got to the closest point and took out the hover car before taking Maya and her kids along with him.

    He reached the city in no time.

    The formations are active. Since the n leader left the city, he made sure that is locked securely. But it didn''t matter. Sam and the hovercar disappeared outside and reappeared inside.

    Then, Sam came out of the car and got on to the harbinger meanwhile, he helped Maya up and made her stand on the hover car along with her youngest child in her arms while the other two sat inside the car as they looked at the city through the windows, feeling the slight breeze.

    It is very fascinating to them.

    Sam hovered over Harbinger and smiled.

    "You can be here, the car will bring you closer to the city and your child as we advance forward. Be careful not to slip though."

    Maya looked nervous. Not about slipping.

    "Sam, is this really okay? I mean, this is very dangerous. What if they hold me hostage?"

    Sam smiled and said.

    "Trust me. There is a higher chance of falling asleep while standing up than them reaching to you and holding you hostage."

    As he said, he moved a bit forward and stood at the center of the city. By now the city guards who are already on high alert already noticed Sam and Hovercar''s presence.

    "Who are you? What are you doing here?"

    One of the city guards came over on a flying beast and asked.

    "Who are you?"

    "I am called Sam. Contact whoever is in charge right now and tell them. In exactly two minutes I am going to start breaking into the n grounds. I will destroy every formation that is blocking me and kill every person thates into my way until I find Maya''s child.

    Of course, they could avoid it by handing the child over directly. But even I prefer the first method. Everything is pretty restrictive in thest few days and I need to stretch myself a bit."

    The city guard frowned and wanted to make a move. But to his surprise, he felt like he is trapped in a transparent cage that could barely fit him in.

    Sam looked at him and said with a smile.

    "Don''t waste time with your silly efforts. Just go and do what I told you to do. My hands are itching a bit."

    Sam said as he stretched his arms a bit and looked at the guard with a smirk.

    The guard couldn''t help but shudder. Sam is not even trying, but he blocked him from moving entirely. Not even a finger could be moved.

    Only when he tried to turn back and run away did he manage to move freely? He flew towards the n grounds at the maximum speed all the while taking nces at Sam.

    Meanwhile, Sam looked at his receding back and thought of an idea.

    He extended his fingers like a gun, like how kids do to y around.

    Except for him, a very concentrated ball of energy is hanging at his fingertips.

    As the guard moved farther and farther, the ball started glowing brighter and brighter.

    Just when the guard was about to take his token out to enter through the formation, a beam of energy shot right past him and hit the formation.

    The formation broke in a sh.

    The guard turned around to look at Sam who is concentrating the second ball of energy. He became scared shitless and hurried to see his superiors.

    Meanwhile, after two minutes, when Sam didn''t see anyoneing, he started making his way to the n grounds. When the guards wanted to stop him, they flew and crashed into the roads with just the tailwind of the harbinger.

    They are not moving anymore.

    As he went past the gate, the walls of the n grounds broke and got crushed. The guards soon tried to block him, but all he had to do is make a hard turn for them to be blown away by the tailwind of the harbinger.

    The guards are at ate stage of Astral ne at best and Sam is at the peak for months suppressing and constraining his energy. He is way too powerful for them. In fact, they might as well be in Mortal ne.

    When he finally saw some of the young masters and the eldersing, he got a bit serious. He took out his staff and got ready to attack them.

    But to his surprise, the person in charge already ran forward and stopped the others to move forward.

    "I don''t want to fight. Let''s just talk."

    He yelled at Sam and stayed at what he felt like it was a safe distance.

    "There is nothing to talk."

    "I know about you. Sam. The guy the n leader is searching for. I don''t know why or how you came here. But I warn you, if you so much as do swing your staff identally, the n leader will have your head.

    And if you know what is better for you, you will leave Maya and her kids right here with us and run away."

    Sam held the staff tightly and spoke with a cold smile.

    "For once I thought I woulde across some sensible person in a position of authority and status. But I guess I am wrong.

    Anyway, I am not interested in your proposal and I am not interested in talking to you either.

    A bunch of vermin trying to use a woman as a breeding machine and forcing the child to grow up brainwashed and as a ve to your n names?

    I would rather cut my own head off than talk deals with you. The only reason I even gave you guys a chance is to give you a benefit of the doubt. Assuming that not all of you are pieces of shit. But I am wrong."

    Sam''s staff glowed with silver lightning as he started swinging.

    *BOOM*

 Chapter 1813 - 1813 Massacres

    1813 Massacres

    The Next Day.

    The fight of the n leaders was over. It should be considered as one of the most significant fights in the history of this realm. Because that day, four n leaders died in the battlefield and the city they fought in was not onlypletely destroyed, the battle extended to everywhere in the surroundings.

    One of them killed a n leader that has a child in their possession. And luckily for him, the battle happened a bit away from the city.

    Before the other n leaders could realize what happened, he took the corpse of his opponent and escaped from that spot.

    He directly went to the city of his dead opponent. To im the child as his reward.

    But when he arrived at the spot, he was dumbfounded to the point that he felt like he is stuck by lightning.

    He hovered in the air as he looked at therge scale destruction in front of him.

    All the citizens are currently looking at the destroyed n and some people that are a bit daring are searching around to scavenge any valuables off of deadbodies.

    The n is destroyed. It is to the point there is not a living soul that belonged to the n left. All the buildings are gone. The ground is a mess. It is almost it grew its own sentience and decided to grow some fangs to tear apart all the n members.

    .....

    It looked like that because there are a bunch of the n members hanging as corpses at the ends of the earthen spikes.

    Then there is a space that is charred to the extreme. There are a bunch of skeletons rooted to the ground and they are also charredpletely. Not a single thing on their body survived, including their flesh.

    And when he looked around, he found a bunch of things like pills, robes, armor, weapons etc lying all around them and of course they are also damaged beyond repair.

    The n leader understood what happened.

    The spatial storages have been broken and everything inside has spilled and fell directly under the attack zone.

    He gulped nervously and turned to another zone that made him soak in cold sweat.

    Ava pool.

    In the middle of the n grounds there is a Lava pool that is still kind of active. The fire elemental energy is apparent and judging by the scene he could guess that this is purely the result of a battle.

    Around the Lava pool, there are a bunch of trees and they are hanging some skeletons upside down inside the pool.

    If these are all not enough the thing that attracted him the most are the headless corpses. One clean cut. The corpses and heads are so close to each other to the point it seems they just gently fell of their heads after they are detached.

    All in all, the scene is a disaster.

    It is like a manifestation of disaster. He couldn¡¯t help but shudder in fright as he looked at the gruesome deaths around him,

    And in the middle of it all, there is arge stone p standing vertically. Three words were written on it.

    ¡°SAM WAS HERE.¡±

    He shook his fear and immediately turned around and left.

    This is the n ground that Sam has visited the day before. Nothing was left of that n. He didn¡¯t know whether the n leader has actually died or not. But he already made the move and destroyed everything about that n.

    If the n leader is really alive, Sam didn¡¯t really care.

    He wanted to show a proper message to these n leaders that are recklessly chasing after him every time the location has been revealed. Now they should think twice before they could do that.

    And that is not the only ce he left as an example.

    There is actually another n that is left in a simr state.

    The day before, Sam destroyed these two ns and go the children from them.

    Now, he has five children and there are only two more to take.

    Thest one is of course a special course that he left for thest. A grand finish for the whole fiasco.

    That day, the news of Sam destroying two ns spread like wild fire. And out of those two, only one of the n leaders died. The other one is injured severely, but he is still alive. When he came back to take a look at the massacre left behind, he swore revenge on Sam.

    He promised to high heavens, that he would kill Sam with his own hands and wouldn¡¯t rest until then. He even went away and madly searched for Sam trying to find out any clues.

    But of course, he couldn¡¯t find any. All he found was Sam¡¯s location once again and just like before, he was unable to catch him.

    Sam manipted and yed around with these n leaders like they are little kids.

    He yed them around. Made them run, made them hide, made them fight each other, made them cautious. Made it so that they had to make alliances and betray them.

    Things went along like this in the next couple of days.

    On the third day at noon. Sam stood on top of a dune as he took in the warm sun.

    ¡°This ce is extremely good. The weather is perfect throughout the day. This is great for a pic don¡¯t you think?¡±

    Sam asked as he looked at Maya who is standing below the dune.

    She looked at Sam while holding a child in her hands. Meanwhile, the rest of the kids are currently inside one of the divine dimension fragments mostly taking nap and one of them ying with the virtual projection.

    Maya looked at her child in her hands with tears welling up in her eyes. It is her sixth child. She is so lost in holding her child in her arms after so long, she didn¡¯t even bother with the smell of blood, burnt flesh, and all the death around her.

    The sixth child was procured with the same tactics Sam used before. He looked around and watched the destruction he caused.

    The number of people who died in this n is more than the first two. Since the n leaders learned that Sam is killing more and more people, they gathered all of their forces to guard their home.

    But this time, it only resulted in the deaths of more people.

    At this moment, he turned towards a pile of rubble. A young man broke through the rubble. He held a staff in his hand and all of his body ispletely covered in wounds.

    Sam looked at him and smiled.

    ¡°I hope you didn¡¯t get your ass beat too bad. Can you walk?¡±

    Akhil looked at Sam and sighed.

    ¡°Why the fuck are you so strong all of a sudden? What is happening in your hell?¡±

    ¡°Why is everyone saying that? I almost got my ass kicked back in hell. I feel like my strength is growing very linearly.¡±

    ¡°Of course you are going to fucking say that. Weirdo. I am leaving. Take care of that child. I don¡¯t think they can stay here for long, they might have to move out of the realm. After all, with one more child the task will be over. It will be troublesome after we leave.¡±

    With that Akhil left without waiting for Sam¡¯s reply.

 Chapter 1814 - 1814 Finale Starts

    1814 Finale Starts

    Sam and Maya are currently in the forest.

    They are resting.

    Now six kids are currently with Maya.

    Sam is thinking on how to arrange a safe exit for her and the kids after he got thest one. But right now, he is waiting for the next immediate thing that is about to happen.

    Thest kid is in that Olympian force which is actually far more powerful than the rest of the forces involved.

    In all the years there has not been in a single instance where a force attacked this Olympian n and managed to get out of there alive. They won every war they have been in. They are the overlords of this realm.

    They make the rules and in fact, in the war of these twenty-five ns, they are the least affected. It is almost to the point that there are only six children that everyone is fighting for. The one child ispletely within the hands of that one organization.

    If that is not enough for Sam to deal with, he has the rest of the organizations all trying to get a piece of him.

    It is to the point that a lot of those organizations don¡¯t care about Maya and the kids. They care more about getting a hit on Sam.

    .....

    He made them feel so desperate and useless. And of course, the ns that were destroyed root and stem without anyone left except for the n leaders.

    They hit the rock bottom in their lives while they are still at the peak of their power. They don¡¯t know what to do and all of them swore revenge on Sam. Since they don¡¯t have anything left to lose, they are pursuing revenge with all of their hearts.

    At this point, the n leaders are still getting Sam¡¯s location and every one of them is praying that the location wouldn¡¯t be within their city.

    Sam is perfectly hiding, they don¡¯t have the formations that could track him immediately. He is perfectly fine with slipping through holes.

    But now that some people just want to kill him with everything they have. If Sam appeared in their city, these crazed n leaders will just go berserk to destroy the formations and infiltrate the city. They are extremely unstable.

    In fact, Sam used this situation to his advantage already and managed to destroy one of the organizations so with this borrowed power from the people who wants to kill him more than anyone in the world.

    Sam is the person with the highest threat to life within this realm, but he is the one walking most freely. Better than anyone else, he is enjoying this freedom like he owned the whole realm. He is walking around and killing people like he owned the ce.

    The only problem right now is that all the enmity and aggression he incited in these n leaders might blow up in the finale that he is waiting for now.

    ording to the deal he made with Lucifer. In the deal with the devil, he needs to entertain Lucifer in the way he wanted.

    And with Sam¡¯s negotiations, they have a use or more like a y that he already drafted properly and Sam has to y his part and give out a spectacr ending.

    He is waiting for that announcement to happen.

    He just sat there and enjoyed the breeze in the woods.

    ¡°What are we going to do next?¡± Maya asked nervously. She is also aware of how powerful thest organization is. She cannot bring herself to ask Sam to stop because the child that was inside that city is not something she can just let go of.

    But she also doesn¡¯t have the heart to ask Sam to walk into that organization. Particrly, when every n leader is now targeting him more than her.

    She clearly understood his position. Right now, the active searches for Sam are also gone. All the n leaders are currently focusing on the Olympian city where herst child is. They know that Sam is going to be there and they don¡¯t want to miss the opportunity to kill him.

    With all the help that Sam gave her, she cannot find it in her heart to tell Sam to do this.

    Sam seemed to have seen through her thoughts and said.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about it.

    I have been in many situations like this before. It¡¯s just the power scale is different.

    I always came out on top. I always lived and I survived, and moved on to a new situation. A new problem, new enemies, new scale of war.¡±

    ¡°But there are almost twenty n leaders trying to kill you and they all know the one ce you are going to go. How are you going toe out of this situation?¡±

    ¡°Well, I have a n, I might be able to pull it off. Let¡¯s just see. But before that, we need to figure out an exit n for you.¡±

    ¡°Exit n?¡±

    ¡°You really don¡¯t think that you can live here after all of this is over right? I will disappear soon after I hand over your kids. I will not be able to deter these people from you for a long time.¡±

    ¡°Then what should I do?¡±

    ¡°I have a ce where you can go with your kids. It will be far away. Very far away from here. If you take wormholes from one ce to another without stopping I think it will take years for you to reach this ce.

    That too if you can find it.

    That ce is something I built. I am sure you will be safe there.¡±

    ¡°Is it your home?¡±

    ¡°Home? It might be.¡±

    As Sam spoke, he suddenly had a thought injected into his head.

    He looked into the sky and spoke.

    ¡°The Finale has begun. Come with me, let¡¯s go.¡±

    Sam sent her and the kids into a divine dimension fragment before he went took the dimensional drifter to go to thest stop in this journey.

    The Olympian city.

    As soon as he arrived there, a few more people arrived one after another out of thin air.

    They are the rest of the yers. Except for Dayus of course. The rest of them are all here.

    Time stopped and Lucifer arrived.

    ¡°Hello, kids. Nice to see you all again.¡±

    Noticing that there is no response from the yers, he continued.

    ¡°It has been a great game until now. I really enjoyed myself. But too bad the game is dominated by utterly a single person.

    So, I want to give you all one final chance. Everyone except you Noah. You can just stick with your role for now. After all, you are very much passive in the whole thing and you didn¡¯t have to do anything.

    The remaining four people.

    You have two choices, one is to be with you and the other is to be against Sam in thisst challenge.

    Sam¡¯s task is to take down the organization in front of you. Including the n leader of the organization. Noah you are still going to try and help the organization, of course, you can forfeit if you want to.

    Out of four yers, only two of you get to stay with Sam and the other two have to y the other side and we are going to draw lots for it.

    As for the rest of the n leaders around the city, they will be blocked by me for the next three after the challenge officially begins.

    Sam cannot leave this city until he finishes the task even if it takes more than three hours, so the n leaders wille in and have a party.

    Of course, he can forfeit, but once he does that, Maya and her children will be left back for every one of the n leaders to pick on.¡±

 Chapter 1815 - 1815 Fight

    1815 Fight

    All the yers couldn¡¯t help but take a cold breath when they heard all the rules.

    This is indeed a very tough round.

    They looked at Sam not knowing what to say to him. This test is really unfair to him. Even though they felt that they are experiencing unfair treatment since the start as they went against Sam himself, they still felt bad.

    But Noah gritted her teeth and firmed her resolve.

    ¡°Sorry, but I am not going to go easy on you.¡±

    She turned around and left without staying for a moment.

    Kumar also nodded at Sam and turned around to follow Noah. His attitude is obvious.

    Donner wanted to stay with Sam, but when he looked at Sam¡¯s expression, he understood that he is not really wee. He thought for a moment and sighed before forfeiting.

    It has been ages since the altercation between him and Sam, but a tear appear amongst the yers at that time that it hasn¡¯t healed yet.

    .....

    The yers do include him in some conversations that are rted to everyone¡¯s survival and the tasks, but none of them wille forward to initiate a friendly gesture towards him and neither do they receive one if he extended.

    There is actually no hatred or anything behind this attitude, it started with hatred and some enmity, but soon it waned, but the habit as a result stayed.

    He has lost all hopes of proper reconciliation.

    As for Akhil and Arkiv, they stayed back on Sam¡¯s side.

    ¡°Are you sure you want to stay? Noah and Kumar aside, there are way too many peak Astral ne cultivators in the organization. Are you sure you can handle yourself?¡±

    ¡°Come on man, let us in on the action a bit. You overshadowed uspletely since the start. At least leave us the crumbs in that.

    Anyway, don¡¯t you think you are looking down on us way too much with you assumptions? We might not be as strong as you, but we are quite capable.¡±

    Arkiv said as if he was wronged severely.

    ¡°Suit yourself.¡±

    Sam looked at Lucifer who is still standing in the air.

    ¡°Since the teams are done, let¡¯s start thest round of this amazing task. I would like to witness something amazing, so please don¡¯t hold back.¡±

    With that Lucifer disappeared.

    Inside the n grounds, Noah looked at the n leader and the elders.

    ¡°n leader, shouldn¡¯t make a move against anyone until thest moment. As you have seen there is a formation outside and it will open up in three hours. All the n leaders wille inside then.

    Sam only has that much time.

    You might want to go ahead and kill him, but that would be a bad idea. We don¡¯t really know what kind of trump cards he might have and if by any chance he could damage you, things wouldn¡¯t be good for us.

    So, all of your forces, the elders, mercenaries, n members, will go, of course men and my friend here will also go.

    I want half of your elders focusing on Sam and us two will also do the same.

    The remaining half will go ahead and target the other two friends Sam has beside him.

    But not at the start.

    First, the mercenaries are going to go.

    Tell them to maintain a perimeter. Attack with all of their defenses on. Don¡¯t go past the perimeter and only long range attacks. After three attacks, tell them to use their ultimate techniques.

    The n leader watched as Noah took over. Shemanded everyone and no one dared to disobey or resist her authority.

    The mercenaries were instantly deployed. All of them carried some heavy wood shields. One look, Sam, Akhil and Arkiv couldn¡¯t help but exchange a nce.

    The shields are definitely made by Noah.

    Sam activated his energy vision and he could see the shields emitting a lot of vitality along with spiritual energy.

    It not only acts as a defense, it is also a healing aid as well as energy replenishment device.

    Sam looked as the mercenaries stopped and took shelter behind the residences and corners.

    Arkiv tapped his foot on the ground as he looked at the people getting in positions. He took out his bow and said to Sam.

    ¡°Give me some height.¡±

    Sam snapped his fingers without turning back, arge earthen pir immediately appeared under Arkiv¡¯s feet as he was slowly taken upwards.

    Akhil looked at Sam and said.

    ¡°If you don¡¯t mind, I will be going in. I am assuming you don¡¯t have anything nned for now.¡±

    ¡°Nope. You can be on your own. We don¡¯t need to cooperate until the threat is too big. You can go crazy until then.¡±

    ¡°Thanks.¡±

    Akhil smiled and there is a hint of savagery behind those eyes as he whipped out his staff. The spiritual energy had a thick golden hue as it revolved around him and he started dashing towards the permitter of mercenaries.

    ¡°Boss, one of the targets is approaching the perimeter while the other has taken the height. The third person didn¡¯t show any movements until now.¡±

    The third person they are referring to is of course Sam.

    ¡°Start the first wave of attacks. Ranged. Triple strike, each attack should target one of the three targets and everyone should target them.¡±

    Before the instructions could even be heard, Arkiv took his stance and shot an arrow.

    The spiritual energy whistled as it went towards one of the mercenaries at the front of the line.

    He hurriedly raised the wooden shield to block it. The formation on the shield activated as it created a forcefield of spiritual energy. Sam is surprised as he saw the forcefield shed with the arrow.

    The mercenary was also surprised, but he felt like a huge weight has been lifted off of his shoulders. Just when he thought the arrow would be deflected after it hit the forcefield, he was surprised to see the arrow standing there proudly as if it was stuck on a soft wooden target.

    Arkiv snapped his fingers as he smiled.

    *BOOM*

    The arrow exploded with the surrounding spiritual energy turning chaotic. The shield broke and the impact sent the mercenary along with his formation into a disarray.

    Sam looked at Arkiv and said.

    ¡°You seemed to have picked up some of my tricks.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, like you are the inventor of an exploding arrow. Way to be a credit hog Sam.¡±

    As he spoke, he shot another arrow, this time into the disarrayed troops. The target wasn¡¯t able to react in time to use the shield and activate its formation. The arrow pierced through the wood and then through the chest before it came out from the other side of the body and hit the ground.

    ¡°They aren¡¯t much in terms of pure physical defense with no formations. A decent attack from me is piercing it. The formation will just add to the chaos.¡±

    He told Sam.

    Akhil who is running at a moderate pace was about to reach the mercenaries and at this exact moment, the attacks from all the mercenaries appeared.

    There are more than a hundred mercenaries standing guard in the surroundings, now all of themunched three attacks back to back and they are all targeted Sam and his friends.

    Each one of them is facing over three hundred attacks right now this instant.

    Akhil didn¡¯t even care, he just swung his staff with that golden flow.

    The staff mmed on the wooden shield that was activated with the formation. The force field is destroyed. Akhil just jumped right into the mercenaries ignoring the attacks that areing at him.

    Of course, the attacks didn¡¯t really manage to hit him. Before they could, they were being deflected by the staff.

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother to work as much as his two peers, he stomped his foot on the ground, an energy shield covered him from all sides and it started emitting ripples of energy with the ripples style.

    As the attacks fell into the range of the ripples, they are simply disintegrated.

    While the attacks are being taken care, Sam suddenly thought of something and decided to make a move.

    He took out a liquid energy capsule. Arge one. That was the biggest size he had and for a while as he hadn¡¯t made any of the energy capsule for a long time,

    He activated the capsule before throwing. The capsule flew through the sky as itnded directly in the middle of a mercenary formation.

    ¡°BOOM*

    Another massive explosion.

    The formation is nowhere to be seen.

    Sam¡¯s shield didn¡¯t even blink as he took out another capsule, this one is a smaller one, but more concentrated.

    The capsule exploded and it was followed by another capsule. Soon the mercenaries are dying like flies.

 Chapter 1816 - 1816 Weak Mercs

    1816 Weak Mercs

    The n leaders and Noah watched as Sam threw the energy capsules like he is throwing rocks. Even if every capsule is not killing everyone that it hit, its severely injuring them.

    Their injuries are not letting them fight normally which is enough to cause their death easily in this battle field.

    Akhil is going through these people like a hot knife through butter.

    He is not stopping, not even properly defending.

    Sam could see all the openings in his from a mile away.

    But none of the mercenaries grew the balls big enough to take advantage of these openings when they looked at that menacing grin he had on his face. Its almost like he is enjoying killing everyone with just a swing of his staff.

    And in fact he is. The ass beating he got from Sam before this, made him feel extremely down on the dumps. Now he got a proper chance to take his anger on someone.

    As for Arkiv, it is almost like he is having a walk in his park. None of the attacks even made near him. He is doing multiple shots at the same time and he is defending and attacking with just his arrows.

    Noah and Kumar looked at this and they almost wanted to m their faces.

    .....

    They knew these mercenaries wouldn¡¯t do much damage. The only thing they wanted from them is to make the trio exhaust as much energy as possible. But to their dismay, these people are not even doing that.

    ¡°Just tell them to use all of their energy pull back. They wont be any use at all. Tell them to just release all of their trump cards at once. I willpensate them for it.¡±

    Noah said in exasperation before turning to one of the elders.

    ¡°Where did you even get these people? They are too bad. I thought your realm is advanced, but you guys look like pampered babies in front of the lower realms.

    Sam had better challenge when he was younger, fighting Acolytes and Novices.¡±

    Her directly onught of words made the elder a bit ashamed.

    He is the one in charge of recruiting and only he knew why the quality of the mercenaries is bad. The only reason he got the mercenaries is to appease Noah and Kumar and since they are paying quite a good sum, he took the opportunitiy to just swallow some money.

    He took the leftover mercenaries after all the ns finished their hiring at a cheaper cost and just stol some money from thepensation.

    Noah looked at his face and seemed to have guessed what he had done. She didn¡¯t bother with now though. With Sam, Arkiv and Akhil charging at them, it would be a suicide mission if she cared about things like this.

    She looked at the mercenaries as they prepared their trump cards and started the attacks.

    For the first time, Akhil retreated.

    As he saw attacks of multiple elementsing towards him, his muscles bulged with the golden spiritual energy coursing around him. The earth around him cracked with just his presence and with even a minute moment of his hand and the staff, the cracks kept on getting bigger.

    He stomped on the ground andunched himself vertically into the air.

    Sam looked at him and he could feel the energy around Akhil being moulded into the form of arge ape holding a staff and the ape is mimicking the exact moments Akhil is making.

    He spun his staff as he crashed towards the ground the with swing.

    The attacks that areing towards him were directly crashed against and dispersed. He then mmed the staff on the ground. Therge energy staff carried by the energy ape alsonded.

    *BOOM*

    The explosive crash created arge crater which ran towards the n grounds and hit the formation.

    On its way, the crater killed more than two dozen mercenaries that are in its path along with multiple houses and buildings blowing them away.

    Even mercenaries standing a bit far away from the impact took the aftershock and fell on the ground swaying uncontrobly.

    Akhil swung his staff again with that same grin and looked at the mercenaries scattered around.

    He looked towards the n grounds and spoke loudly.

    ¡°COME ON NOAH, PUT UP SOME FIGHT AT LEAST.¡±

    While he is yelling, Noah didn¡¯t miss it, but she could only roll her eyes as she is focused on What Arkiv and Sam are doing.

    Arkiv took out what looked like a special arrow and pulled his bow to the extreme. Even that bow that is of a top notch quality creeked like its made out of some second rate wood.

    The surrounding energy all came to life as it hurriedly gathered itself around the arrow. It is almost like each spiritual energy particle is racing towards the arrow trying to be first and all of a sudden, the energy gathered seemed to have disappeared as it went into the tip.

    Arkiv with a very faint smile, let the arrow.

    *WHOOSH*

    The arrow whistled through the air as it made its way towards the attacksing at him. It seemed to have created a forcefield around it as it cut through the wind and deflected or dispersed the attacks that came in its path, before itnded directly in the back oxf one of the mercenaries.

    The energy wave exploded out of his body and made its way through the crowd before destroying thend, houses and people in that particr radius.

    Sam¡¯s move is not as shy.

    He just pped his hands as the attacks neared him and as if the surrounding energy has received amand, it acted on its own and most of the attacks that came towards him were just deflected and some of them are even repelled to different sides causing the mercenaries to take the brunt.

    Noah and Kumar looked at the whole scene, but they didn¡¯t seem that surprised.

    The same didn¡¯t go for the rest of the n members though.

    They are surprised beyond their wildest imaginations. They didn¡¯t expect that the trio will not only repel all the attacks, they even did that so seamlessly. After all, they are not just some normal attacks, they are trump cards of all of these mercenaries.

    ¡°Why are they so abnormally strong?¡±

    The n leader asked Noah and Kumar.

    Both of them exchanged a nce and didn¡¯t even know what to say for that.

    They know that they are strong and except for Sam¡¯s strength, the other two yers¡¯ strength is actually within their expectations.

    In fact, the thing that surprised them the most is the fact the people in this realm are way too weak. The people who are at the same level as them are practically not as half as strong as the yers. The disparity is way too much.

    Noah and Kumar didn¡¯t bother answering that question.

    Noah shook her head and ordered.

    ¡°Tell your young masters and n elders to go. Only ranged attacks and always pull back into defense. Don¡¯t get into a direct fight. And also make the ranged attacks from within the n grounds. Don¡¯t let theme near the formation.

    Meanwhile tell the mercenaries to recharge, They need to get out of here after a while and do the same thing they did until now.¡±

    ¡°Is that really necessary? They barely did any damage. It is almostughable.¡±

    ¡°I know that too. But whatever exhaustion we can bring onto Sam, we need to do it. Even if it is just a small grain.¡±

    ¡°Why bother with all of this? Why don¡¯t I just go and kill them? The disparity between the Divine ne cultivators and Astral ne cultivators is way toorge. You wouldn¡¯t be able to fathom it.¡±

    The n leader proposed.

    Noah sighed and said as she pointed at Sam on the screen.

    ¡°If it is not that guy right there, I would have loved to let you take care of this. But unfortunately, that creature is our opponent.¡±

    ¡°So?¡±

    ¡°So, we need to be careful. I have never seen him go into a fight that he isn¡¯t absolutely sure about winning. It is not an exaggeration to say that he won every single fight he ever picked.

    And I am pretty sure, he never picked a fight with someone weaker than him. He always punched above his level and he always won with absolute advantage.

    Even with all the preparations, I am sure we wont be able to kill him today. He will just escape if he wants to.

    So, the best course of action is exhaust his energy before letting him face you. At that time, when you put enough pressure on his partially exhausted state, he will lose.¡±

    Noah said in all seriousness.

    The n members were a bit skeptical though.

    ¡°How strong is hepared to you two?¡±

    The n leader asked. He is sure of Noah and Kumar¡¯s strength. To earn their trust, they were tested and he is very sure of their strength.¡±

    ¡°We don¡¯t really know. Because as far as I know, we never really pushed him to his limit. I am guessing you might grant me that sight of him fighting at his limit.¡±

    Kumar said.

    As the n members are mulling over the words, Sam, Arkiv and Akhil are moving towards the n. But of course, they are now dealing with the new waves of attacks that are being dealt by the young masters and the elders.

 Chapter 1817 - 1817 Weird Roots

    1817 Weird Roots

    Sam took out a spear and threw it at the formation.

    But it was actually shot down by the attacks that areing forward.

    Even though this spear strike is not as powerful as the arrow that Arkiv previously shot, he is still very surprised.

    If it was the mercenaries from before, there is no way in hell they would be able to beat Sam¡¯s attack,

    Arkiv and Akhil are also a bit surprised.

    Akhil is not very keen on ranged attacks, but every swing of his staff could create an energy ray that could perform just as much damage as his close-ranged attack.

    But the only problem is for some reason, the young masters and the elders are coordinated well and their attacks are far more powerful than they expected.

    The trio exchanged a nce and Sam nodded at Arkiv.

    Arkiv took a deep breath and started shooting arrows crazily.

    .....

    He shot arrows at the different attacksing towards them and each arrow has a different level of strength. He gradually shot the arrows with increasing strength to gauge the attacks thate at them.

    Surprisingly many of the arrows that he shows were destroyed by the attacks. Sam and Akhil had to defend a lot of them in their close range and dodge a lot.

    When one of the arrows finally defended against the attack, Sam sighed.

    Akhil just grinned at this, while Sam just shrugged.

    It doesn¡¯t matter if their strength exponentially increased from the previous wave, they could still win.

    The only problem is that he identified a pattern in the attacks that areing.

    They are not scattered like before they are extremely coordinated. They are also boosting each other with thebinedpatible elements.

    Fire elemental attacks and arrows are always being boosted by wind elemental attacks.

    The earth elemental attacks areing from underground like traps making the trio to be quick on their feet. Then there are the wood elemental attacks which Sam felt like they are the most troublesome.

    They are being hidden through the earth elemental attacks and are trying to sneak up on them from different sides.

    But still, after defying the annoyance, the trio still managed to move a few steps forward albeit very slowly.

    Only after moving halfway through did they understand, that¡¯s not all Noah has nned.

    All of a sudden, Sam sensed some movement from the rear.

    Arge number of roots followed by a lot vines started growing all over the city. In every direction that Sam could see, he could see the roots, vines, and trees growing in an instant.

    Within a second a half, he couldn¡¯t see anything other than these roots and vines.

    The vines and trees are attacking them from all sides. Arkiv and Akhil are the first to move. They used some of their solid moves that are on par with the monkey image strike and the condensed energy arrow that they used to send the mercenaries away.

    But to everyone¡¯s surprise, the vines and roots all absorbed the attacks. They just disappeared as if they never even made.

    Even Sam is surprised by this.

    ¡°Attack again.¡±

    He activated energy vision to make sure that he could understand whats happening.

    The attacks were made.

    Sam watched intently with his eyes glowing, what he saw shocked him even more.

    The energy in the vines and the roots moved in unison as morphed the structure of the roots and vines to absorb the energy into it and pass it on to the next root or vine. The energy of the attack is then moved to the next root, the next root and the next.

    Before they knew it, it is going far away like it has fallen into the abyss.

    For some reason, not only Sam¡¯s spiritual sense could prate the roots and reach the edge of the city, even the energy vision failed to do so.

    He couldn¡¯t help but take a deep breath.

    He waved his hands to send a tongue of golden mes to hit the trees and they reacted the same. As Sam observed the process once again, he is surprised to notice one thing.

    ¡°This thing is not actually that dangerous, rather it is just designed to consume our energy crazily. If we put in enough energy I think we might break it. At least if I am hundred spot on about its purpose.¡±

    ¡°Why are you not spot on? For some reason I really miss your narcissism now. Please brag about how easily you take this apart.¡±

    Arkiv said with a helpless expression.

    ¡°It is not that I don¡¯t want to try. But the structure of these woods inplicated. It needn¡¯t be thisplicated if all it has to do is do what it is doing right now.

    So, there are two possibilities.

    Noah might be trying to waste my time by giving thatplicated structure so for us to decode it and destroy it fast, we would consume a lot of energy. The other reason might be that it has an hidden function that I am unable to see, because the energy vision is not exactly prating through the roots like I want it to.

    If I see what is happening with that energy then I might be able to figure out a better strategy.

    Until then what I can tell you is, the roots are indeed taking damage from our attacks, but almost ny percent of the attack percent is being negated by absorption and only ten percent damage is being done.

    Even that ten percent damage is being healed gradually as it is draing a massive vitality strean from the ground.

    I am assuming it is from the surrounding woods.

    So, to put it shorty, this is a huge energy drain.

    Noah just wants us to waste our energy and time so that we would have no choice but to forfeit the task.¡±

    ¡°When did she be so smart?¡±

    Akhil asked in confusion.

    He really believed that Noah is not that smarter.

    ¡°She was always like this. You are the idiotic one. With your muscle-headed attitude. This is called true strategic mind. You might want to pick a thing or two.¡±

    Arkiv roasted from the side.

    Akhil didn¡¯t care for that, he just looked at Sam and spoke.

    ¡°Find a way to deal with this man. I don¡¯t really care what it is and how powerful it is and how much of our energy is wasted. I want a solution.

    I am itching for a fight for a long time. I need to beat a few people¡¯s asses right way.

    So, just tell me what I need to do.¡±

    ¡°I think I can figure something out. Just give me a second.¡±

    As Sam said, he sat down on the ground and started meditating with his eyes closed. In reality, he is actually making many simtions within the Divine dimension¡¯s second floor and at the same time, he is diverting his attention to the third floor.

    ¡°Attack it once again.¡±

    He muttered and went to the third floor to check on the crystal table.

    When Arkiv shot an arrow, the arrow itself was thrown back while the energy was absorbed by the roots and was slowly dispersed away.

    Sam didn¡¯t really have a way to peek deeply into the root structure of the roots. If it is just a formation, then he would be able to check everything, from energy structure to the level of uracy of the formation.

    But right now, this root is a living creature and Sam is not at a level where he could peek through their internal structures through the crystal table.

    He could only guess what is happening through the other changes.

    ¡°Attack once again.¡±

    Sam kept on looking at the root as he tried to understand what is happening in the direction the attack went. After a few more attacks, Sam finally saw something. At the edge of the city, right at its formation of it, he could see that there are some fluctuations happening with the formation whenever an attack was thrown.

    And when he looked deeper with a few more shots at the same line, he managed to identify something by peering into the formation a bit.

    This fomraiton is actually the city¡¯s not the one that Luciferid out and this formation is acting as a tool to disperse the energy that came from the attacks. The only problem is that this energy is not being dispersed outside.

    As soon as the energy from the roots went straight to the formation, it is dispersing towards the roots once again.

    Only this time, Sam managed to see some changes. The nt seemed like it is absorbing a very minute portion of the energy.

    Most of it is being dispersed to the environment, but just a tiny portion is being sessfully absorbed.

    ¡°What are you doing with the extra energy absorption?¡±

    Sam wondered since it doesn¡¯t help the woods full of wood elemental energy and it doesn¡¯t help much as the vines are not really an attacking object.

    Sam went into deep thought, but shook his head off of those thoughts and is now looking to break it.

 Chapter 1818 - 1818 Cleared Path

    1818 Cleared Path

    He thought for a few more minutes and took out a bunch of energy capsules.

    All of them are full of death elemental energy. He didn¡¯t hold back and brought out all the reserves he had.

    ¡°Both of you, keep on hitting on the spot. Even if the roots directly distribute the energy themselves, we would still be able to damage exactly one point.

    I want to test it out.¡±

    The other two didn¡¯t object and started attacking a single point one after another. As soon as the staff strike and the arrow were released, Sam threw the death energy capsule at that same point.

    The roots sessfully managed to distribute the staff strike outside, but before the structure could recover, the arrow strike was also needed to be absorbed, which put too much pressure on that one point, the damage in the roots increased by a lot.

    And finally, even before that could work, Sam threw the death energy capsules. The explosion of death energy is basically a vitality drain.

    The distribution by then is already very small since the roots are trying to recover, but the death energy is absorbing all the vitality neutralizing itself.

    So, by the time all the remnants of the death energy explosion are gone, the roots are far from being healedpletely.

    .....

    And at that exact moment, Akhil continued with his other attack.

    Noah who is controlling the vines was stunned for a moment and cursed under her breath.

    She knew that these roots wouldn¡¯t cause deathly harm to the yers. In fact, if possible she didn¡¯t want to resort to any deathly means to stop the yers. But it just so happened that even such a behemoth of a trap is not exactly troubling Sam that much.

    She couldn¡¯t shake his head and control the roots a bit more differently.

    No, she started directly all the vitality to the point where all the attacks arending. She ignored the vitality distribution in the remaining areas, making them a bit stagnant.

    Sam smiled at this and muttered.

    ¡°I know you would do that.¡±

    He didn¡¯t hesitate and all of his shadow undead came out of his shadow as they moved to different directions and started hacking the roots at a rapid pace.

    Noah was caught off guard by this, before she could redirect the vitality, Sam threw almost half a dozen death energy capsules at that one targeted point forcing a drain to appear once again.

    Now if Noah ignored that one point and forcefully directly vitality to the rest of the roots, that one point will crack open and if she doesn¡¯t, the rest of the roots might distribute and disperse the hacking of the shadows, the only problem is they won¡¯t heal like normal.

    Noah was in a dilemma and had to make a decision.

    She gritted her teeth and hoped that Shadows are not powerful enough topletely cripple the roots there and the roots are strong enough to endure for a while.

    Sam turned to Arkiv and said.

    ¡°How fast can you shoot?¡±

    ¡°Faster than you can imagine.¡±

    ¡°Prove it.¡±

    Arkiv shrugged and started shooting arrows in all directions meanwhile only Akhil and Sam are focusing on the targeted point.

    Within minutes, Sam managed to increase the stress on the roots and almost turned the tide.

    Almost¡­

    Noah took a deep breath, as she sensed the level of stress the roots are going through.

    ¡°These assholes.¡±

    She cursed the trio and Kumar knew that she is very frustrated.

    ¡°So, are you going to do that?¡±

    ¡°What choice do I have? That is the only way to stop them.¡±

    She turned to the n members and passed a different order.

    ¡°Attack the roots from the outside. It would disperse the attacks to the inside and hit those three. You need to be faster than Arkiv.¡±

    ¡°Wouldn¡¯t that create a sh between the attacks?¡±

    n leader asked curiously. He understood the concept of the vines a bit after witnessing what it did just now.

    Noah looked at him and asked something else instead.

    ¡°Are you not angry that Iid such arge trap without your consent? You are more concerned about the sh?¡±

    ¡°Results are all that matters. I would be furious if you fail to stop that kid even after doing all of that.¡±

    Noah nodded and said.

    ¡°They would indeed sh, but the sh is not actually a bad thing. You will see what will happen if the energy is forcefully dispersed in the middle of the roots.¡±

    ¡°Okay then.¡±

    Just like the n leader said, the shes indeed started happening as the elders and other n members attacked the roots from outside.

    Sam who is looking at the whole thing from the crystal table is surprised by two things.

    One is the speed of Arkiv. He shot so fast that not a single attack made its way through. If Sam didn¡¯t have the crystal table, he wouldn¡¯t even know that the attacks are being made from opposite ends.

    The second thing is that the energy explosions are happening in the middle of the roots and he was able to see them through the crystal table.

    Only to his surprise, the exploded energy is once again seeping into the vines and roots.

    He didn¡¯t know what kind of reaction is happening within the vines which made him a bit cautious.

    But he still continued with the attacks as usual, he even finally saw the first crack in the roots.

    In the direction of the n grounds the roots at the center were dead as the vitality surge couldn¡¯t tackle the drain created by the death energy. This made the roots involuntarily absorb the death energy and soon they fell.

    One of Sam¡¯s shadows shed the roots and now there is an opening with much more area of contact with the roots.

    Sam decided to use it to his fullest as he threw death energy capsules once again. He will definitely destroy these roots bit by bit.

    But only his process has to be stopped as he sensed something.

    A vine came out of nowhere like a sharp whip and cut through the air behind him.

    He barely dodged it and looked at the spot it came from.

    An opening appeared in the vines there and a humanoid tree came out of there with vines as arms and extremely sharp as they tried to hack Sam.

    Sam is surprised, to say the least. He didn¡¯t expect the vines to suddenly be offensive.

    He saw not just one, but more and more humanoid treesing out from different directions. Some of them even took Arkiv¡¯s arrows and are still moving forward.

    And their powers are also varying. Some of them are attacking purely physically some of them have elemental attacks.

    Fire, lightning, shadow energy, metal, earth, water, ice. All kinds of attacks are being delivered by these weird creatures and this made Sam feel a bit of trepidation. It is not that he is not confident at winning. But looking at the current scenario, it is impossible to not waste energy while dealing with it.

    His shadow undead went from hacking the roots to fighting these humanoids. It is not easy to deal with them, but they are not a proper match for the undead and were dealt with easily.

    But Sam¡¯s progress slowed down a lot.

    ¡°This is going to take a lot out of us and a lot of time at that.¡±

    Akhil said with a frown.

    ¡°I have a n. Just finish half of it at one point. I can take it from there.¡±

    ¡°Alright.¡±

    Arkiv and Akhil started their new moves. The energy output from each attack increased significantly. He didn¡¯t care much about energy conservation at this point. They knew that it would take a lot of energy, but it is not exactly enough topletely empty their tanks.

    Time passed.

    More than an hourter, Sam finally saw the opening he needed.

    The roots in the direction of the n grounds were destroyed halfway through. He is also able to see what is happening there.

    The sh of energies resulted in the absorption of it and this energy is actually creating extra growth on the roots creating these tree humanoids that are making their way toward Sam and the rest.

    After Sam reached that spot, he stood up and let his soul out. The souls started getting attached to the roots as well as the humanoids. Instantly they wrestled with Noah¡¯s mental energy to gain control over this.

    Since the area of contact isrger, Sam managed to upy arge portion of the roots good enough to lead them on a path to the n grounds.

    He didn¡¯t hold back, but he is sure that in a long term, his soul wouldn¡¯t be a match for Noah. As a yer, her mental strength is nothing to scoff at. The only thing that he could take advantage of is the fact that he managed to catch her off guard.

    As the wrestle for control went on, Sam took advantage and attacked the vines. They cannot draw vitality, they cannot absorb the energy, this is a perfect time.

    Akhil and Arkiv followed as they finally cleared a path out of these roots.

 Chapter 1819 - 1819 Final Battle

    1819 Final Battle

    Sam, Arkiv and Akhil walked out and now they are in front of the n grounds.

    Noah and Kumar walked out of the n grounds followed by all the elders and young masters.

    ¡°Take care of the other two. We will deal with Sam.¡±

    The elders and young masters did as they were told.

    Akhil and Arkiv nodded at Sam before they led the fight to the side. The vines and roots slowly disappeared as the whole city plunged into chaos.

    Sam looked at the two of them and asked.

    ¡°Where is the n leader and the father of the child? Don¡¯t tell me they are hiding inside.¡±

    ¡°Not hiding, they are biding their time. Its almost two housrs since you started and I am sure we can drag out the time even more.¡±

    ¡°Why are you doing this guys? I understand that there is the task, contest and all, but is it really much more important than letting the kids and the mother unite again?

    .....

    I don¡¯t want to resort to extreme measures to do this.¡±

    ¡°Who said that we are going let the kids and the mother suffer under these people? Even if I win, I still have a n set in ce to deal with the issue. Not only will they be saved, they will also be safely transported to a far away ce to live.

    I might be a bitch, Sam. But not a heartless one.¡±

    Noah said with a yful smile.

    Sam also returned the smile. But he didn¡¯t reply.

    He took out a staff and swung it around a bit.

    ¡°This clearly brings back some memories. Are you sure the result will not be the same as thest time? Do you guys really want to do this again?¡±

    Sam asked as if he is a doctor asking repeated consent for a risky procedure.

    Noah and Kumar of course didn¡¯t like the tone and just showed their eptance through their actions. But unlike before they just didn¡¯t prepare normally, they directly used their Blood Arts.

    Both of them are covered in the blood armor and Kumar swung his blood spear.

    The surroundings that just cleared up are once again covered with Blood red trees as Noah disappeared into them.

    Sam looked at Kumar with the smirk still apparent on his face.

    He thought that Kumar is going tounch an attack.

    ¡°Not like that Sam. I am not gonna do the same mistake I did thest time. This is going to be different.¡±

    With those words, Noah also disappeared into the woods like he was never there before.

    Sam raised an eyebrow as he looked at this. He activated partial fusion as golden mes enveloped his body.

    He spun the staff around charring all the vegetation within the radius of the staff. Of course, he didn¡¯t expect to hit anything. He just stood as the mes burned everything in his immediate surroundings.

    ¡°Now what?¡±

    Sam asked and all of a sudden a dozen wooden spears came at him from all directions.

    Those wooden spears are followed by a bunch ofrge-scale attacks from the vines, a massive trap under his feet as the vines tried to climb and coil all over him, some blood-red fruits that had some corrosive liquid that tried to stop his cirction of spiritual energy.

    All of them came at Sam at the same time. Noah and Kumar are not wasting any energy. They directly started at their full strength and even the first attack didn¡¯t disappoint Sam.

    But Sam just chuckled and said in a very low tone.

    ¡°Guys, by now you should already know something about me. Once I surpass a hurdle, there is no way that hurdle can block me again. Even if that hurdle evolves a thousand times over, it will still be beneath me.

    Yourbo might be good. But I already beat it, that means, I will always beat it.¡±

    Therge golden mes turned around as he burned every spear, every vine, and every fruit that tried to attack him. The mes spread even more as he started destroying the whole forest bit by bit.

    The whole city was so defensive, protected, and prosperous. But now within a few hours, it is brought to the worst possible state it could have been.

    All the infrastructure is gone. Hundreds of people died.

    The n that stood as the strongest is down to itsst knees.

    After half an hour, Sam stood in the middle of the city panting heavily. His body is full of zing smoke so are the surroundings.

    The ground is charred ck. If one didn¡¯t know any better one would think the ck color is the natural color of the soil. It looked like a dark ck sand desert.

    Noah and Kumar fell down as they panted heavily. They are weak and exhausted. They couldn¡¯t even pull up a bit more strength to even stand up.

    Sam looked at them with the same smirk on his face.

    ¡°Convinced now?¡±

    Noah and Kumar wanted to curse out loud, but they didn¡¯t want to be sour losers.

    At this moment, Arkiv ad Akhil is still fighting.

    Sam was about to call them out, but at that moment, he had to stop in his tracks. Not just him, even the battles happening on the side had to stop in their tracks.

    All of them turned towards the n grounds as a middled aged man, tall, dark muscr to the extreme, came out of the gate.

    ¡°n leader is here.¡±

    Noah said to Sam as she stood up with the most difficulty.

    Kumar used his spear to stand up and asked.

    ¡°Are you sure you will be fine? If this is all about the kids, we already made arrangements, we can take the kids and Maya away safely. Just give up man. Don¡¯t go against a Divine ne cultivator and risk your life.¡±

    Kumar said it out of pure concern.

    Noah just stayed silent, but the concern is directly apparent on her face.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry guys. I think I can handle myself.¡±

    Sam said as he waved his hand. A wine gourd appeared in his hand as he started chugging it wildly. His body started recovering bit by bit. There is not much damage to begin with.

    But he spent too much energy and time. He is going to need every bit of his strength to deal with the person that ising out.

    Sam put the staff away and stretched out a bit as he looked at the n leadering out.

    Akhil and Arkiv felt like they were being locked on and they didn¡¯t want to continue with their ughter. But then, they are already halfway done anyway. It is not like they caused any less damage to the n. They already shook the foundations.

    The n leader stopped a few feet away from Sam.

    He is a very tall man, he is taller than Sam by a few inches. His arms are long, they almost reached his knees.

    He is well-built, and his legs are long, sharp, and muscr enough.

    Sam looked at it from top to bottom and said.

    ¡°You are born to be a fighter, aren¡¯t you? You have the perfect muscle and bone structure to be a melee fighter.¡±

    The n leader raised an eyebrow as he looked at Sam.

    ¡°You are still in the mood to give outpliments like this?¡±

    ¡°Its just an observation. It is not apliment. I rarelypliment people for the things they are born with.¡±

    Sam stored his wine gourd away as he cracked his fingers one more time.

    ¡°But I mustpliment you. You are one impressive guy, I must tell you. There is no one I even remotely heard of that could what you did as an Astral ne cultivator.¡±

    ¡°You are not done seeing yet. So, reserve yourpliments for some other time. But on the second thought, you might want to get them out now, because in the next thrity minutes, you will be dead.¡±

    Noah and Kumar who are walking away turned back and looked at Sam as if he was kidding.

    It is one thing for Sam to want to fight like this, even if they know that Sam tried to recover, they are sure that he is not at his full energy capacity. And he has been battling for two and a half hours straight, the mental strain is no joke with all the energy usage.

    At least, they knew they won¡¯t be able to pull it off.

    Of course, they reserved their judgment and didn¡¯t gauge Sam by that and walked away.

    Sam took out the reaper sword immediately and his body started glowing the golden light. He activated light elemental fusion right from the start as he got ready to make one of the big moves.

    He didn¡¯t want to hold back at all.

    He turned into a light beam and zoomed toward the n leader.

    The yers looked at it with anticipation. In a fraction of a second, the light beam reached the n leader and he was about to grab it.

    But the light suddenly became flexible like a snake, slipped past the fingers, and made a u-turn before aiming at the leader¡¯s back.

    Everyone was stunned once again, thinking that Sam is the only guy who could pull this move. But right when the beam and the de were about to make contact with the skin..

    *BOOM*

    An explosive impact urred.

    The golden glow created a sh and when the light cleared, Sam is hanging by his neck in the hand of the n leader.

    .....

    He is off the ground and the breath left his throat.

 Chapter 1820 - 1820 Vs The Clan leader

    1820 Vs The n leader

    Sam felt his body leaving the partial fusion state.

    The light elemental energy scattered away as his internal energy cirction was messed up for a bit because of the impact.

    The n leader looked at Sam coldly, but the next second he revealed a surprised expression on his face. Because Sam didn¡¯t reveal any expression. He is not shocked, he is not pained, he is not even a bit rattled.

    He is just calm and his face didn¡¯t betray any emotion that he might be feeling inside.

    Taking advantage of that very fleeing momentary daze of the n leader, Sam tried to stab him with the reaper sword. The spiritual energy violently circted around the de as he tried to prate the defense.

    The n leader reacted swiftly and pulled Sam over to the side and used his other arm to block Sam¡¯s sword by catching his hand.

    Now Sam has a clear view of the n leader¡¯s right side face and the temple. The n leader is holding Sam by his throat with his right hand while blocking the sword and the arm with his right.

    He looked at Sam coldly through a side-eyed nce as he slowly increased the pressure on the sword-holding arm.

    The yers who are spectating the fight could feel the pain just from watching. The Divine ne cultivator essentially has a stronger physique and it didn¡¯t take much effort for him to break the arm and try to crush the bone.

    .....

    But Sam didn¡¯t let go of the sword, instead, he circted his energy even more into the arm as if it is trying to break free. As the n leader focused on trying to dissipate the energy further, Sam made another move.

    His free left hand brought out a handgun from his storage and he directly shot at the leader¡¯s temple from such a short range.

    *BOOM*

    The leader was stunned as he took the shot head-on. Due to the impact, he had to let go of Sam, who didn¡¯t waste a moment to disappear from that spot and create some distance between them.

    Sam looked at his crushed arm and started healing himself. He let his vampire side go crazy as he tried to heal as fast as possible. Luckily, the n leader seemed to have been in a mood to inflict some pain on Sam or he would have had to face a lethal blow at such a close range, which would have made damage that much harder to recover.

    The energy sh cleared out and the n leader looked at Sam coldly.

    Now he had a big mangled piece off of his face. Sam could even see part of the bones inside.

    This energy bullet would have killed a person of Astral ne cultivation from far away, but that bullet could only do this much damage to the n leader.

    The most it did seems to piss off this person even more.

    Sam¡¯s arm almostpletely recovered and he held his sword tightly. He put the gun away and looked at the opponent carefully.

    ¡°You are in this situation already and you are still dancing around.

    At first, I wanted to make you slowly understand how big of a mistake you made by thinking that you can take on a Divine ne cultivator.

    But screw that. I will kill you and be done with you.¡±

    He cracked his fingers and was about to lunge toward Sam. But at that exact moment, Sam who is already on the edge suddenly used a spatial blink and disappeared from their face.

    By the time hepletely disappeared, the n leader already reached that spot. He just missed it by hair¡¯s breadth.

    He would have been caught if he had dyed his escape even just by one millisecond. But the n leader didn¡¯t feel disappointed, he just turned around and extended his hand before making a pulling motion in the air.

    The spiritual energy materialized into a rope that seemed to have caught something in the void, even before Sam reappeared from his spatial blink, the spiritual energy rope is already there and caught hold of him as soon as he appeared.

    He didn¡¯t even know what hit him for a moment as he pulled towards the n leader, who readied his fist with Divine energy and threw a punch at Sam.

    Sam widened his eyes in disbelief for the first time. His thoughts ran amok in his head. As the fist grew bigger and bigger in his vision, Sam swapped the reaper with the shadow sword. He used the pushback from a small energy bullet that he shot out of his feet to change the direction of the rope¡¯s movement, he mobilized a very tiny amount of spiritual energy to sh.

    *SWOOSH*

    The air whistled as the shadow sword shed toward the opponent¡¯s arm. Everyone thought that Sam was about to sh the arm, but they didn¡¯t have any hopes of the hitnding.

    And to their expectations, the sword was easily dodged by the old man and he was about to hit Sam with an uppercut.

    At that moment, the shadow sword glowed and Sam suddenly turned into the shadow fusion form. He disappeared and dissolved into the shadow of the n leader and within that shadow, it looked like Sam¡¯s shadow has shed the shadow of the n leader.

    The n leader¡¯s momentum was halted abruptly as he lost control of his arm for a moment and it froze in ce, meanwhile, the rest of the body still continued to move forward with the force of the punch.

    This created an awkward imbnce in his step and Sam didn¡¯t intend to let this chance go.

    Shadow energy condensed in the sword as another minuscule amount of Divine energy mixed within as he shed the back of the n leader.

    The sword shed through the armor and the robes and left a wound on the left side back of the n leader.

    Sam tried to disappear into a puff of smoke and create some distance, but before he could do it, the n leader already regained his bnce turned around, and threw a punch straight to Sam¡¯s chest.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosive sound, Sam felt his corbone crack as he flew for over a dozen of meters and crashed into the ground like a crater.

    The n leader felt a sharp pain in his back. The wound is infested with shadow energy and his natural energy is not enough to counter that. The shadow energy is also infused with Divine energy, so he has to use his own Divine energy to cleanse it.

    But just because he already figured out what the problem is, doesn¡¯t mean he was able to solve it immediately.

    Sam who crashed into the ground stood up while groaning a bit. His eyes are still cold and there is no change in his expression as he disappeared from that spot again.

    He used a spatial blink and reappeared behind the n leader ready to throw another sh.

    When the n leader turned around to counter, Sam¡¯s body glowed with golden light as he turned to a light beam before shing another divine energy-infused attack on the n leader¡¯s back.

    *BOOM*

    Of course, as soon as hended the attack, he was met with another solid punch.

    But this time, the n leader didn¡¯t let him get away that easily.

    He pulled Sam towards him with the spiritual energy rope and threw another punch.

    Sam put the sword away and used a punch of his own to hit the n leader on his forearm. His aim was to deflect the punch a bit and he did seed.

    The only problem is, he felt his arm go numb in the process.

    The n leader on the other hand, used the momentum of the deflected punch to spin around and gave a spinning elbow straight to Sam¡¯s face.

    *BAM*

    *CRACK*

    Everyone could hear the cracking sound of Sam¡¯s nose. He flew into the air and almost crashed into the ground.

    Almost.

    The n leader once again used that spiritual rope technique and pulled him back up.

    Sam felt his whole body float and then fall towards the n leader who got ready with another big punch.

    His eyes are still as cold as ever, and even though he is bleeding from his nose and mouth, he still looked as alert and sharp as when he started.

    As he fell towards the n leader, he balled himself up and used his elemental wind energy to change the trajectory a bit.

    Just when the n leader tried to re-position himself tond another proper punch, Sam opened up his body again, spun in the air, and like a snake he coiled around the n leader¡¯s arm and then onto the back.

    Before the n leader could even make sense of the situation, a w appeared on Sam¡¯s palm. He condensed another small amount of divine energy and infused the hydra poison within as he jammed it into the already existing wound.

    The shadow energy and light energy are already wreaking havoc in that small area, but Sam managed tond another decent blow and this time, the poison that is concocted by consumption of a myriad of the most dangerous poisons Sam ever came across was used on it.

    The n leader felt a stinging pain as the poison seeped into his muscle fibers.

    He grabbed Sam by his cor and mmed him into the ground.

    *BAM*

 Chapter 1821 - 1821 Vs the Clan leader II

    1821 Vs the n leader II

    *BAM*

    *THUD*

    Sam was smashed on to the ground so hard, that he bounced back and fell again. There are huge cracks spread out like spider web on the charred ground.

    The n leader looked at Sam with intense killing intent as he felt the poison seeping into his body.

    Even though the Shadow energy and the Light energy are causing same level of pain, the pain itself felt different. He knew the pain of elemental corrosion and since the Divine energy of it is not that much, his own Divine energy could counter it bit.

    The process might be painful, but he can anticipate what kind of pain it is.

    But the situation with this poison is different. The poison is attacking each muscle fibre and it is being fueled by the Divine Energy.

    He wanted to kill Sam right there and then and he raised his leg to stomp on him.

    Sam disappeared from the spot and reappeared a bit far away.

    .....

    But he didn¡¯t even stand up, he stillid down on the ground as he coughed out some blood. He felt as if all of his internal organs were shaken and when he looked at the n leader ring at him with that animosity, he blinked once again from his spot and disappeared.

    The n leader felt the spatial fluctuations around him and turned around to grab Sam with his spiritual energy rope and he indeed caught him and dragged with to hit him with a strong kick. But he frowned as soon as he made contact.

    The thing that he caught is not Sam, rather one of his shadow undead and he also saw the shadow having a formation disc strapped to it.

    The n leader felt spatial fluctuations a few meters away from him.

    Sam reappeared there.

    He is still injured and he looked shaken, but his eyes were unwavering. He took out a metal coin and tossed it into the air before shooting it with his gun.

    *BOOM*

    The n leader felt the explosion of intense fire elemental energy happens right under his foot. The invasive and corrosive fire elemental energy invaded his foot like crazy and he felt the trace of Divine elemental energy.

    It didn¡¯t injure him critically though. As soon as the explosion hit, he immediately turned around and moved in a certain direction. He used the spiritual rope and once again caught another shadow undead that appeared out of nowhere.

    But unlike before he is cautious enough to notice that it is a shadow undead and didn¡¯t just blindly attack it.

    He even carefully took a look to see if there are any formation discs strapped to it.

    At this moment, he sensed two more fluctuations of space around him. He pinned the shadow undead under his foot before he used the spiritual energy rope once again tounch another attack.

    He caught both figures that came out of the two spatial cracks and this time, one of them is indeed Sam.

    He decisively let got off the shadow undead, not even taking the time to deal with them and punched Sam in the face once again.

    Everyone could even see the Divine energy manifested in the punch. Sam used both of his arms and another minuscule amount of Divine energy to try to roll the punch of over his arms upon impact.

    Sam was once again sent flying, his arms are broken and he rolled on the ground as he crashed like a crater once again. He used the shadow element to disappear instantly as he dodged another rope.

    At this exact moment, the two shadow undead, the one under the n leader¡¯s foot and the one behind the n leader made a move.

    The undead under the foot just enveloped itself around him as if it is trying to seep into his flesh.

    The explosive divine power circted through his leg and the shadow undead scattered into thin air.

    Meanwhile, the shadow undeading from the rear was hit by his punch and was destroyed just like the first one.

    Sam disappeared once again. He is nowhere to be seen.

    The n leader crazily spread his divine senses but he wasn¡¯t able to pick up Sam¡¯s location.

    He is frustrated and it¡¯s itching to kill Sam right now. As for focusing on his wound, he knew for a fact that Sam woulde out of nowhere if he focuses on his wound right now. And he didn¡¯t want to take Sam lightly at this point.

    As a Divine ne cultivator, he should have been able to kill Sam with just his first attack.

    But Sam just proved that he could take some real beating.

    ¡°How did he survive until now?¡±

    Kumar muttered under his breath. He is really surprised by this fight.

    But his shock iscklusterpared to what the elders of the n are feeling right now.

    The yers didn¡¯t actuallye into contact with many Divine ne cultivators. In fact, this is the first mission where they actively came and interacted with such existences.

    But these elders and the rest have been here their whole lives. They revered the existence in Divine ne and the different should definitely not be as small as the one between the n leader and Sam.

    If it is a normal situation, a reasonable situation would be Sam dying after the first punch, but he is really taking a beating, but he is stilling back.

    While the rest of them are spectating, Sam suddenly appeared far away and he stood on the harbinger. He held his chest where a few bones are broken and looked at the n leader who already spotted him.

    ¡°The difference is way too big. I guess I should just go with the final move.¡±

    He muttered under his breath and his body started glowing with golden light once again.

    The n leader leaped through the air and levitated as he flew towards Sam.

    Sam turned around and used the light elemental energy to fuel the Harbinger and dodged.

    For the next minute or so, Sam tried to maneuver himself to dodge and escape n leader¡¯s chase, but the n leader is slowly gaining speed and timing from Sam.

    The cultivators around were unable to capture the scene with their eyes. They are having a hard time following the fight.

    But Sam kept the fight to a very closed space and soon the n leader finally managed to get a hold of him.

    He used the spiritual rope technique when Sam made a hard turn. The rope caught hold of his body and the harbinger slipped away from under his feet.

    Sam used the light elemental body to his advantage and tried to escape from the grasp, so the n leader had to bring in his second arm to trap him a bit more tightly and pulled him.

    His fists emanate a lot of divine energy. This time, he is not holding back. All this while whenever he threw an attack, he assumed it would be enough to kill Sam. After all, Sam is only an Astral ne cultivator.

    But right now, the situation is a bit different than he expected. So, he decided to go all out.

    He is now fighting Sam as if he is fighting a Divine ne cultivator as well.

    Sam could sense the Divine energy in the fist and he is not ready to take it head on.

    The golden lighting on his body turned into golden mes as he took a very very veryrge breath.

    Bloodline art of Golden Sun Crow mixed with a portion of Divine energy Sam has conjured until now, he breathed the golden mes from the maximum capacity of his lungs as the arm that ising at him.

    That¡¯s right, he didn¡¯t focus on the whole body of the n leader, instead, he focused andpressed the attack only aiming at theing fist.

    The force of the attack, burned the spiritual energy rope and the n leader was shocked out of his wits.

    He sensed a threat from the mes and tried to block it with his punch.

    *BOOM*

    The explosive impact sent Sam away as he crashed into the ground once again, but this time he stood up hurriedly and took off on the harbinger once again. The n leader meanwhile, felt the scorching heat enter the arm trying to wreak havoc in every part of it.

    He looked like a kid caught on fire when ying with matches as he took a step back he suddenly sensed something else.

    The Harbinger that was moving alone before is zooming at him with maximum speed and when it reached his vicinity, it dropped all the poisonous gases it held in a single push.

    sam didn¡¯t feel the need to use the poison scarcely, he used all of it right then and there and got ready for to next attack.

    His body glowed with golden light as he ran towards the n leader while shooting the light beams and at this moment, from far away, the harbinger started shooting small formation discs in the path of these light beams.

    The amplifying formations and the light beams met with the amplified light beams making their way toward the n leader.

 Chapter 1822 - 1822 Vs The Clan Leader III

    1822 Vs The n Leader III

    The n leader felt the poison seeping into his body from the wound and from the skin.

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel stunned as he saw a poison at Astral ne level doing this much damage to him. He could feel the faint paralyzing effect on his muscles, the blood thinning, the corrosion on the skin as well as the faint attack on his internal organs.

    He used his Divine energy without any convictions to suppress the poison and clear it out of his system and in the process, he pped his hands together.

    *CLAP*

    The massive shockwave scattered the gaseous poisons away from his immediate surroundings and he used his Divine energy to create a thin barrier that kept the poison away.

    He looked at Sam in frustration.

    This is officially the worst fight he has been in.

    And he is not the only one feeling it. Sam is feeling it as well.

    This is the worst fight he has been in. The gap in strength is too much and he felt like a ram goat hitting its horns against the mountain.

    .....

    The result of that scenario no matter how many times it is simted is that the goats will die with their skull split open.

    But this time, the goat should break the mountain.

    He has been trying to find the openings since the start, but it has been hard, the punches are way too strong for him and his Divine energy capacity is not much. He has to use it extremely conservatively.

    It could be said that the three hits hended on that one spot on his back might have already drawn a lot of his luck out. The weak point on the left side back of the n leader is now created and he needs to find a way to maximize its advantage.

    Luckily, the bloodline art of the golden sun crow alsonded on his left hand, so the whole of left side is Sam¡¯s target right now.

    He shot the light beams crazily and tried to make every shot an amplified shot.

    The n leader looked at Sam coldly and got ready with his spiritual rope technique. This time, he is not hurried as Sam himself ising directly towards him.

    When Sam reached the desired distance, he himself turned into arge golden light beam before heunched himself toward the n leader.

    It almost looked like a spatial transfer from that ce.

    Only he got caught. The n leader caught Sam and was about tond that full forced hit, but at this moment, he sensed something and turned around.

    The harbinger is moving at full speed and is throwing a lot of formation discs towards the n leader.

    He sneered and used Sam¡¯s body as a meat shield. The formation tes stuck to Sam¡¯s back and he couldn¡¯t help but smile at this.

    ¡°Thank you.¡±

    Sam¡¯s body glowed brighter as the golden light burst through the grip of the n leader.

    He turned himself into a ball and the second bloodline art of the Golden Sun crow is activated.

    The sr light emitted from Sam went through the amplification of the formations discs and covered the surroundings.

    The n leader activated his divine energy shield, but he is a tad bit toote. He felt like his flesh is burning as he took the heat of the attack and the worst part of the pain is in the wound on his back.

    The light cleared within a couple of minutes and Sam stood there panting.

    The n leader stood straight with some burn wounds and looked at Sam hatefully.

    ¡°Slippery Loach. I am going to kill you today no matter what.¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t have time to wait all day. Let¡¯s speed up the process a bit.¡±

    As he spoke, Sam activated space elemental fusion. Not a partial fusion. Rather aplete space elemental fusion.

    Sam had never really used this much in battle. Except for escaping the trap set up by Sivan, Sam didn¡¯t use this because of its massive consumption of energy.

    But the battle right now is a very disappointing one so far. He felt clumsy and unable to put on the best performance. The regr methods are not meeting his expectations.

    He has to use the final draw if he has any chance to winning.

    Sam disappeared from the spot and reappeared right next to the n leader. His arm is covered with a trace of Divine energy as he aimed to punch at the wound on the n leader¡¯s back.

    The n leader dodged and punched out.

    The punch almost grazed past Sam as he blinked once again, he reappeared mid-air in a weird angle and his fist is still being aimed at the wound and this time itnded.

    The n leader felt a burning pain, but that¡¯s just beginning.

    *BOOM*

    An explosion urred as the void style was activated up on impact. The muscle fibers were torn apart and the n leader jerked forward, his knees almost buckled. The spatial energy that exploded on the wound is creating chaos as the spatial corrosion spread.

    Sam didn¡¯t waste any more time, he disappeared from spot and reappeared to the front of the n leader who just leaned forward, he punched out again, aiming at the chin.

    The n leader used his arm to block the fist and even broke it.

    *CRACK*

    Sam winced in pain a bit and before the n leader could proceed further, he disappeared once again, but this time he didn¡¯t reappear far away, just a few inches above vertically.

    The spatial fusion turned to lightning fusion. The silver lightning energy condensed into his left leg as Sam channeled the bloodline energy once again along with a sliver of divine energy.

    By now half of his reserves were gone, as for the n leader, he is not even one-fifth done.

    Sam¡¯s kicknded on the chin of the n leader pushing back a bit and the lightning went into the sky.

    This is the bloodline art of the Raiju. The Lightning howl.

    As the lightning hit the sky, the clouds appeared and in an instant, a muchrger lightning with more purity and density than the one Samunched hasnded on his still standing feet and he dropped an ax kick right on the face of the n leader.

    *BOOM* *CRACK*

    The sound of the explosion as well as the bones being cracked was heard.

    The n leader was hit hard and he felt his whole body go numb with the lighting. He could even feel his heart stopping for a moment and his breathing turned hard.

    The cirction of his energy was disturbed and his nose broke open.

    But he didn¡¯t just take the attack. He caught hold of Sam¡¯s foot and used his own divine energy as he twisted it.

    *CRACK*

    ¡°Argh¡­¡±

    Sam groaned in pain as his leg was broken. He immediately used the spatial blink once again, escaping from the hands of the n leader and keeping some distance.

    He stood there with one of his legs limp and his right forearm is also broken a bit.

    Two of the four limbs are gone. Maybe the right arm mightnd another hit.

    Sam gritted his teeth and became relentless. He lunged forward and disappeared once again. He came back at the rear of the n leader, spatial fusion disappeared and his body is turned wood elemental fusion. He used a root that grew rapidly out of the ground as leverage andnded a spinning kick.

    The n leader blocked it and took a step back.

    Sam took advantage of it and used his bloodline attack on Forest bear.

    The n leader also took this chance and threw a full-strength punch.

    Sam¡¯s body turned into a vine tree as vines grew out of it and took the shape of arge bear. Not just him, but the surroundings are also filled with roots and vines as they all turned into a bunch of bears.

    The n leadernded the punch squarely on the chest of the bear that was turned from Sam.

    *BAM*

    Sam took the full brunt of the force. But the bloodline attack continued.

    The bears all took a bite of the n leader and from their teeth, very small vines started spreading into the flesh as they tried to root themselves there.

    ¡°ARRR¡­¡±

    The n leader roared crazily as he tore everything apart.

    ¡°Fucking bastard¡±

    Hended a front kick on Sam¡¯s bear form.

    The bear flew into the air as it crashed into the ground, the vines disappeared and from the middle, Sam rose while panting heavily.

    He is bleeding from his mouth, his right handpletely went limp, and so is his leg. The chest bones are cracked even more.

    He looked at the n leader and smirked.

    The n leader is not in a good state either. The back wound opened up even more. One of the bears bit there and there are a lot of very small vines that looked like des of grass upying the wound.

    The vines are all over his body also. He felt a weird feeling gushing over his body.

    But that is not all, the lightning energy still wrecked havoc in his insides while the back wound is bleeding and corroding more and more.

    For an Astral ne cultivator, Sam really did quite a number of this guy. The only problem, Sam¡¯s injuries are way too worse.

    He is unable to breathe properly and he has to spit blood every five seconds as the bleeding is too intense. He held his right hand over the chest as he checked it the rib cage ispletely broken.

    The n leader looked at Sam and calmly started walking forward, this time he no longer gave Sam any initiative and made his first move.

    .....

 Chapter 1823 - 1823 Alone

    1823 Alone

    The n leader punched out at full force.

    Sam used his spatial energy to dodge the punch barely, but it still grazed him on his shoulder, making the joint crack.

    He slipped and slid under the arm and threw a kick of his own into the armpit of the n leader. The void style activated as a spatial energy explosion urred right under the armpit of the n leader.

    ¡°Argh¡­¡±

    The n leader growled a bit, but he already turned around and threw a punch at Sam who blinked from the spot and disappeared from there. But before he is gone, the shockwave of the punch already hit him.

    When he reappeared behind the n leader, he spat out a mouthful of blood and was unable to continue with the attack he nned. The n leader turned around andunched another punch to Sam¡¯s chest before he could evennd from the spatial blink.

    *BAM*

    Sam took the punch to his chest and he flew in the air with a beautiful arm the blood spilled from his mouth creating a trail on the way.

    But he wasn¡¯t even allowed to hit the ground as he was caught by the spiritual robe and pulled back forcefully.

    .....

    On the way, his body changed from spatial fusion to lightning fusion. He gritted his teeth and the lightning energy surged into his palm.

    The n leader was swift and decisive, he didn¡¯t want Sam to use the technique he used just before. He is still feeling the effect of lightning. His body is not as nimble as before. He punched Sam once again in the stomach trying to disperse the energy umted.

    But the attack wasn¡¯t as clean as before.

    Sam blocked the punch with some Divine energy concentrated on the point of impact.

    At that moment, the n leader felt a stabbing pain on his shoulder.

    Sam is holding the Divine Lightning Saber that came from Indra through the Pce of Inheritance. Half of the saber is stuck in the n leader¡¯s shoulder as the lightning surges into his bloodstream.

    He could clearly sense the attack through his body.

    This is another bloodline attack from Raiju.

    This is called Lightning Fang and usually, this is done through the bite. The beast will inject its fangs into the enemy¡¯s bloodstream and the lightning will target the internal organs through the bloodstream. Instead of carrying oxygen, the blood will now carry lightning all over the body.

    The n leader felt like his whole body froze for a moment, but he gritted his teeth and forcefully moved to hit Sam.

    Sam disappeared from the spot and this time, he managed to not take the hit. He reappeared at the rear of the n leader, his body turned to the metal as the maic storm brewed within, all of which is concentrated on his leg.

    He dropped a hammer kick on the saber handle that was still stuck inside the n leader.

    By now, the n leader turned around, as he absorbed the kick on the saber.

    The saber dug deeper and the cut almost reached the wound he had on the back.

    But the n leader didn¡¯t care about that anymore, he grabbed Sam¡¯s leg and broke it before mming Sam on the floor forcefully.

    *BAM*

    Sam felt his whole back hurting crazily. He forcefully tried to change the fusion back to space element, but the n leader disrupted the energy flow destroying his first two attempts as he kept on bashing Sam to the ground.

    *BAM*

    *BAM*

    The ground cracked and the cracks only spread wider and wider with every hit.

    The yers couldn¡¯t help but wince as they looked at the horrible bashing Sam is taking.

    ¡°When have we ever seen him like this?¡±

    Noah muttered under her breath.

    To them, Sam was always the guy that came out on top no matter what the opponent did.

    ¡°It¡¯s all because of the timeframe. If he was given more, he would have killed the n leader by now. He didn¡¯t have time to prepare. As soon as he entered the city, the task started.¡±

    Kumar spoke.

    The rest of the yers agreed.

    ¡°But still, his endurance is beyond my expectations.

    Every hit of the Divine ne cultivator could destroy cities and Sam is taking those concentrated attacks with his body as an Astral ne cultivator. Just how much stronger did he grow? We are going through the same training regiment as him, aren¡¯t we?¡±

    Akhil asked curiously.

    Among the group, he is the most familiar with closebat that uses brute force. Even Kumar relies mostly on his spear skill and he fights medium-range and long-range as well. But Akhil is more familiar with brute and straightforward close-range melee.

    More than the other yers, he can see what Sam is taking on clearly.

    As they are speaking, Sam finally managed to escape from the grip and appeared far away.

    By now, both his legs are done in and he can barely stand on them.

    He could faintly gauge some cracks on his back.

    ¡°Are you a fucking roach in your past life? Why are not dying, you bastard?¡±

    The n leader roared in frustration. He is pretty sure that he could have killed a peer by now much less a guy who is a realm lower than him.

    He never saw someone disregard the difference between Astral ne and Divine ne and survive this long.

    Even though Sam looked nothing like survival.

    His face is swollen, he is covered in blood, and even his feather coat is damaged viciously. His arms and legs are broken and he can barely stand. His back and spine are full of cracks.

    He looked like he could die anytime.

    The n leader ced his hands on the saber stuck on his back and forcefully removed it.

    Blood spurted out and he could barely move his left arm.

    ¡°You should still feel proud of yourself, this is as far as an Astral ne cultivator could get, particrly when they are alone.¡±

    Sam¡¯s body is limp and almost ready to copse. But he still has some energy left and he is actively regenerating, although not fast enough.

    He gritted his teeth and activated wind elemental fusion. The wind appeared on his back and he turned off the fusion again.

    He is now floating just a foot above the ground.

    The n leader was stunned for a moment and so was the spectators.

    Sam is not using the wings for anybat. He doesn¡¯t want to go onto aerialbat at all, because the n leader as a divine ne cultivator can actually levitate freely. Sam wouldn¡¯t get the leverage he gets on the ground.

    The n leader frowned and he didn¡¯t want to Sam to y any more tricks. He is already feeling disgraced to suffer to such an extent.

    He shed forward and caught hold of Sam by his throat.

    ¡°You still have a move up your sleeve. But what can you do now? I won¡¯t let you get away. I am sure, you don¡¯t have any strength left to pull another trick.¡±

    As he spoke, divine energy surged out of his hand and entered Sam¡¯s body as he tried to wreck Sampletely.

    He used his divine senses to see why exactly Sam is so strong and everyone could see Sam¡¯s pain as if his every cell is being attacked at the same time.

    As he observed more and more, he felt that Sam¡¯s body is indeed weird. His expression turned to that of surprise and then to immense shock.

    ¡°What kind of abomination are you?¡± The n leader said in astonishment.

    Sam smiled with his bloody mouth and all of a sudden he spoke.

    ¡°You know what, I kind of agree with what you said. This is as far as I can go alone.¡±

    The n leader frowned. He just stayed silent and raised his other hand as he proceeded to jab into Sam¡¯s chest to finish him off.

    ¡°But unfortunately for you, I am not alone.

    Sam¡¯s wings pped as a ring slid down his finger.

    The wind des hit the ring far away in the distance and the next moment, Sam activated fire elemental fusion and turned into a ming body.

    The n leader suddenly felt a sense of threat and turned around.

    The jab missed Sam¡¯s heart just by a bit, but he didn¡¯t care about that, he turned to look at the ring and he wanted to use the spiritual energy rope to drag it back.

    But before he could do that, he saw a huge and majestic bird with a golden birde out of it as its activating its own golden me fusion.

    *CAWW*

    Yanwu crowed in anger as it looked at Sam and locked onto the n leader. He noticed that Sam is already in fire elemental fusion and didn¡¯t hesitate.

    Blood Line Art.

    Yanwu¡¯s lungs expanded to the maximum and golden mes exited his mouth as theyunched at the n leader with a huge crow.

    *CAWWWWWW¡±

 Chapter 1824 - 1824 Not Alone

    1824 Not Alone

    Yanwu¡¯s golden mes enveloped the n leader.

    He felt like all of his cells are absorbing these chaotic golden mes into them. As if the mes are being injected forcefully.

    Sam meanwhile, felt like he is bathing in a warm andfortable hot spring. As is his wounds are soothing.

    The n leader let him go.

    At this moment, without anyone noticing, a small ck shadow appeared out of the ring that fell on the ground along a dark grey sh.

    The grey sh enveloped the ring and made it disappear, meanwhile, the shadow made its way toward Sam.

    The shadow enveloped Sam and brought him far away.

    He turned off the fire fusion and looked at the shadow mouse. Its body is not that big, he could see how angry the tiny blob is. He couldn¡¯t help but chuckle.

    The mouse disappeared in a puff of smoke and reappeared behind the n leader who is defending the golden mes. He punched and tried to dissipate the mes and in reality it worked, only a little. The me streak is relentless and only after two more minutes did Yanwu stop.

    .....

    Meanwhile, everyone in the surroundings was shocked. Particrly the yers. They haven¡¯t see Sam¡¯s beasts in a long time they almost forgot. Then they remembered something else.

    ¡°Wait, isn¡¯t this against the rules?¡±

    Kumar asked in surprise.

    Noah closed her eyes and tried to remember something.

    ¡°It is not for this task.¡±

    She muttered with a frown.

    ¡°What do you mean?¡±

    ¡°Lucifer gave out a list of rules which we didn¡¯t bother to read. It stated for this task, we can use all our means with no restrictions.

    That restriction didn¡¯t matter to us from the start as it is obviously focused to take Sam down, but since its lifted for this task, I guess he will turn the tables around.¡±

    ¡°But he better do it fast. There are only a few minutes left. If he doesn¡¯t finish by then, the formation will open up. There are more than twenty Divine ne cultivators waiting to tear him apart.¡±

    Noah heard this and frowned.

    She whispered something to Kumar and both of them got ready to do something.

    At this moment, the shadow mouse attached itself to the n leader and used the shadow transverse as soon as Yanwu¡¯s attack ended.

    And Yanwu also descended slowly towards Sam.

    His eyes welled as he looked at Sam¡¯s state. Due to these repetitive tasks and the Hell training, they didn¡¯t have a chance to interact much. Although the beasts themselves are training inside the Divine dimension, their longing to meet Sam increased every day.

    And to see Sam in this state after a long time, there is no way they could digest this rage.

    Everyone watched as the n leader disappear and was swallowed by the shadow.

    They were wondering where left, at that moment space tore open through a shadow and the n leader was thrown out. He was stupefied to say the least. He immediately covered his body with Divine energy and inspected himself.

    He clearly remembers the scenes in between the shadow transverse.

    ¡°Shadow World?¡± He muttered in absolute horror. He felt his whole being corroded by the shadow energy. He started expelling it with his Divine energy and soon ck smoke started emitting from his body.

    The only problem is it will take a long time topletely expel it and he didn¡¯t have time or energy to finish it off right now.

    He looked at Yanwu and narrowed his eyes. He wanted to use arge-scale attack, the only problem is a lot of his elders and disciples will die if he punched out now and his enemies might even go scot-free since the attack will not be concentrated enough.

    The only relief is that Yanwu is also only at the peak of the Astral ne.

    ¡°I need to close the distance and finish it off in one strike. Even if I can¡¯t kill it, I need to incapacitate it. But how did this bastard get a mythical beast like this? Maybe..¡±

    He started thinking, but then he realized that he was swallowed into the shadow world, he looked around vigntly as he spread his senses to find the culprit, but he found something else.

    Spatial fluctuations came over under his feet and a portal was torn open, he fell without any control and the portal opened once again in mid-air several dozen feet in the sky.

    He immediately activated his Divine energy to stay afloat, and he sensed somethinging from the top of him.

    Arge streak of silver lightning appeared out of thin air and when he looked closely he saw Raiju jumping at him with lightning concentrated on his fangs as he dug it straight into the left shoulder of the n leader.

    The lightning injected is much more concentrated when Sam attacks and it is much more precise because of the usage of real fangs.

    The blood technique of Raiju.

    The n leader wanted to capture Raiju, but to his surprise, a ring fell on the beast and it disappeared.

    He noticed that this ring is the same one Sam threw at the start.

    He used a spiritual energy rope to pull the ring towards him, but halfway through, he saw anotherrge majestic birde out of it and the wings of the bird destroyed the rope before it came at him in full speed.

    Before he could block the attack, the wing de of Sky shed the left arm,pletely cutting it off.

    The n leader turned around angrily and roared.

    ¡°YOU FILTHY BEAST¡±

    He wanted to drag it and kill it with his remaining hand, but before he could do that, a portal opened with arge spatial fluctuations and Sky disappeared from there.

    Not just that as the portal closed the aftershock shook him and with his lost bnce and two more spatial fluctuations that happened around him, he started free-falling from there. Before he could regain bnce, he felt a huge force pulling him downwards and at the same time, the dark soil of the earth solidified to the extreme and turned into spikes.

    He tried to float away, but he couldn¡¯t control his body as much as he liked, and with an extreme effort he only managed to dodge slightly, but as he crashed down, one of the spikes made a decent gash on his abdomen and as hended feet fist on the ground, he sprained one of his legs.

    A Divine ne cultivator sprained his leg.

    But that is not all, a portal opened beside him and a horse came out.

    Dia turned around swiftly and raised his hind legs together. Blood Line art that uses maic power.

    It is usually a stomp that will target the iron in the blood of the target, but Dia is targeting the attack directly on the body of the enemy to increase the effect.

    As both the hoovesnded on his chest, coupled with Dia¡¯s gravity maniption, he flew away like a broken kite.

    As he flew away, he was caught by some vines and roots that appeared out of nowhere and all of them to the shape of a bear, among them, there is one real bear in the middle.

    All the bears bit the n leader at the exact same time spreading the wood elemental energy into him. Small vines like grass grew on the n leader and they are sucking the vitality out of him.

    The Forest bear left the n leader stuck in the roots and ran away through a portal.

    The n leader with much effort tore the roots apart, but he noticed one horrible thing. The vines that grew out of the stump on his left shoulder where his arm was cut off were so much faster.

    The roots are using the escaping vitality through the bleeding and are consuming him bit by bit.

    The n leader looked clumsy as he tried to take a few steps away from the roots.

    His face is filled with horror. He could feel his vitality seeping away and inside his body, the lightning energy and maic energy are fuelling each other as they wreaked havoc. His divine energy is still busy expelling the shadow energy and now he has to deal with all of this.

    He looked around vigntly. He is scared now. All this while he is just frustrated when he is fighting Sam alone, but now he is genuinely scared. He tried his best to get rid of this weird energy inside his body.

    But at this moment, there is another spatial fluctuation around him and this time, arge beast didn¡¯te, instead, a very small insect that¡¯s the size of his fist came out.

    He was confused for a moment, but the next second, the void hopper turned into a sh and hit him on the chest, and disappeared.

    The n leader didn¡¯t feel any damage and was only confused by this, but then only realized, he cannot move at all.

    He is stuck in ce and at this moment, he sensed another spatial fluctuation.

    Nine snake heads came out of the portal followed by arge body.

    Mia stuck all of her fangs from nine heads hatefully into the n leader¡¯s body as she released all the poison she could.

    The n leader felt like his life is being sucked away as all the poisons started taking effect on him, he almost cked out for a second and lost vision for a minute. By the time he opened his eyes, he could feel that his body has turnedpletely purple, internal organs are burning and he couldn¡¯t feel his own skin and he is seeing all kinds of hallucinations around him.

 Chapter 1825 - 1825 Final Move

    1825 Final Move

    Mia retreated as soon as she injected all the poison.

    The n leader used his Divine senses to look around to observe and see if anything is happening.

    He saw all the beasts that just attacked him without even giving him time to breathe standing at a fair distance away.

    He then saw Sam sitting under a tree with his legs and body broken. He is sure that if he couldnd one more hit on Sam, he could kill him. But right now the beasts that brought him to this state, are all there to protect Sam.

    He doesn¡¯t have enough confidence to deal with Sam, but he remembered something else.

    ¡°Three hours. They are almost up.¡±

    He painfully moved his head to look at the formation around the city, in three hours the formation will be opened and the beasts wouldn¡¯t be able to save Sam. Sam is going to die.

    There are only a couple of minutes left for the time limit to be up and if he could escape, the beasts wouldn¡¯t have a chance to chase after him. He felt like this is his best shot to escape.

    He charged all of his left over spiritual energy and started burning his own life essence as he gained a burst of energy and tried to escape.

    .....

    ¡°So close.¡±

    The yers clenched their fists as they looked at the scene.

    They all looked at Sam and they are stunned by what they saw, space fluctuated as reaper sword appeared in Sam¡¯s mouth. He held the sword by its hand with his mouth and he disappeared from the spot.

    A portal opened in his sky right above the n leader and he saw bloodied Sam appear with the sword in his mouth.

    Sam burned all of his energy and used his wings to spin in the air, the sword shed at the throat of the n leader directly slicing his head off.

    The head slid off of the neck and the body crashed into the ground.

    At the same time, Sam¡¯s body went limp as he glided and fell.

    Sky flew over and caught him right before he hit the ground andnded safely.

    Everyone was shocked by this sudden development. Nobody expected that Sam would such a sudden move at thest second.

    Noah was the first one toe out of her daze and she immediately ran over to Sam along with Kumar.

    ¡°Activate our backup n.¡±

    She said anxiously as she looked at the fluctuating formation around the city, the n leaders are about toe forward and take over the city.

    She made some hand signs and mmed her hands on the ground.

    The whole city turned into a giant forest in an instant asrge trees grew over everywhere. The trees formed a giant dome and as the n leaders outside saw the forest grow they observed something else as well.

    All the trees and wildlife in the surrounding hundred mile radius started withering away.

    The beasts, trees, grass and even the fish in the water, everything started losing its vitality and within a few seconds, the whole area outside the city is devoid of any vegetation of life.

    The trees then arched into arge dome that surrounded the whole city.

    She then started taking out a bunch of transference scrolls.

    Noah, Sam, and the other yers all took the transference scrolls and she even handed them over to Sam¡¯s beasts.

    They all tore the scrolls and disappeared from there.

    But as soon as they disappeared a bunch of roots gathered together and created a few humanoid structures in the middle of the forest where they previously were.

    Soon, these humanoids became the exact replica of Sam, Noah, and other yers and they even emitted the same aura.

    Meanwhile, the whole gang appeared inside a cave a few miles away from the city where a proper spatial transfer formation was set up.

    While Kumar prepared to activate it, Noah fed Sam some medicine.

    All the beasts looked at Sam with water welling up in their eyes.

    She sighed as he looked at him. This might be the worst state she has seen him in.

    His body is severely damaged. There might not be a single bone intact without breaking. His internal organs are damaged as well. He is internally bleeding. The only saving grace is he is regenerating albeit slowly.

    All she is hoping now is to stop the bleeding and give him medicine to replenish his energy.

    Soon the formation was ready and all of them left to a much farther ce.

    Only after arriving there did they heave a sigh.

    ¡°What about the kid though?¡±

    Arkiv asked on their way and Noah gestured to her divine dimension fragment.

    ¡°I already swapped the kid the first chance I got. That is why I was confident that I could escape the kid even if Sam lost. Luckily he didn¡¯t lose and managed to finish it in time.

    If he had lost, I don¡¯t know how long the wooden dome would have held so many divine ne cultivators.¡±

    It is a good thing that Noah worried about that. It is not long.

    A few minutes after they disappeared, one of the Divine ne cultivators managed to burn through the wooden dome, and in the process he even killed a lot of citizens and n members.

    At this moment, Noah lets the child out of the fragment and ces him beside Sam who is recovering. She knew since the final task of Sam is rted to the child, once the child is with Sam, it would be over.

    But to her surprise, that didn¡¯t work.

    At this moment, the void hopper went back into the divine dimension and brought the heavenly wine out.

    Noah¡¯s eyes lit up as she made Sam drink it. And finally, after a few minutes, he woke up.

    His bones are healing, but they are still fractured, but at least he is conscious and alive.

    Sam looked at the child in front of him and looked at Noah who exined the situation, he thanked her before grabbing the child and disappearing into the divine dimension fragment that Sam used to ce Maya and her other kids.

    When he arrived inside the Divine dimension fragment, he is shocked by the scene in front of him.

    Inside there is a projection of Lucifer and a virtual screen in front of Maya.

    Three hours earlier.

    As soon as the fight started, Lucifer arrived in front of Maya in this Divine Dimension fragment and asked if she wanted to see the final showdown Sam is going to go through to get her child.

    When she nodded, he made this screen appear and made her watch the whole fight.

    From the point when Sam and other people faced the mercenaries, the disciples and elders, the fight with the yers, and finally the fight with the n leader.

    She was shocked so many times and got pained whenever she saw Sam getting beaten the crap out of him.

    Now as soon as Sam appeared, she saw him with tearful eyes. The kids don¡¯t know what their mom is crying about, they all tried to calm her down. But this only made her cry more.

    Lucifer looked at Sam and winked before he left.

    Sam didn¡¯t know what is happening, but he doesn¡¯t have the energy to calm the mother and the kids down, he just handed over the final kid to Maya and said.

    ¡°Here, I fulfilled my promise to you. All of your kids are here with you.¡±

    His voice is weak and he still looked bloodied. Maya wept harder as she hugged her child.

    Sam disappeared from the fragment and so was Maya and the kids, everyone came outside and finally Sam and the other yers heard the message in their minds indicating that the task is over.

    But they were given a few hours to tie up the loose ends here.

    This is clearly a grace period given to Sam.

    He heaved a sigh of relief and first decided to clean up and of course, he had to catch up with the beasts.

    Two hourster at a nearbyke, Sam is sitting along with the beasts as they all ate together. Sam really missed them and he really wished he doesn¡¯t have to put them away once again.

    So, he decided to take as much time as possible.

    At this moment, Maya came over to him.

    She bowed to Sam and the beasts and said.

    ¡°I thank you will of my heart, I don¡¯t know how I can express my gratitude. This is a debt that I cannot repay.¡±

    Sam shook his head and said.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about it. As you know it is a task from Lucifer. I had to do it.¡±

    He paused and handed a letter over to her along with a recording crystal and continued

    Anyway, in a few hours, I will send you to my ce. There, my friends will be in charge. If you meet them and give them these two things, they will arrange everything for you and your kids.

    You can live peacefully there until your kids grow up. Later on, if you want to leave after a decade or so, you can leave. But I suggest you stay there for the time being.¡±

    Maya took those things with both of her hands respectfully.

    ¡°And there is one more thing. I learned a little bit about your condition from Lucifer and I know the cause of all the problems you are facing.

    If you want to know about it, I can tell you now.¡±

    Maya froze and then nodded.

    .....

 Chapter 1826 - 1826 Send to Desolate

    1826 Send to Deste

    ¡°You already know that Divine ne cultivators are so much stronger than the Astral ne cultivators is because they canmand their elementalws right?¡±

    Sam started exining and Maya nodded.

    ¡°They have bettermand over those powers and even pure warriors have bettermand over solidifying the spiritual energy and their Divine energy when they are fighting.

    But the difference between the Divine ne cultivators and the people above them that are considered as gods is that the gods be one with nature.

    They will assimte themselves as part of nature and thenmand a part of it.

    In fact, if they used their celestial powers, even a lightning god canmand the fire element, of course, he would never be as strong as a fire god with the fire element and he will never reach the same level of proficiency with fire element as a lightning god.

    And to perform a decent attack, he would have to use over a hundred times his energypared to doing the same level of attack with lightning energy.

    This is possible because he is going tomand nature to do the fire elemental attack for him.

    That is why as the god grow stronger, they can do more and more things beyond the scope of their elemental strength. And as their energy increases theirmand over nature increases bit by bit and whenever they wished for something, the nature will try to amodate it as long as their soul and body can bear the price and whatever they wished for is possible without defying thews of nature, creation and spiritual energy.¡±

    .....

    Maya felt a bit confused, but he understood the general concept of what Sam is saying.

    ¡°As for you, your body is a special scenario that is created by nature. Even as a mortal, you have a certainmand over nature. Your ability to use vast amounts of spiritual energy to use different elemental attacks is a result of that.

    The only difference is when the gods were mortals, they wouldn¡¯t be able to use their normal spiritual energy to achieve the same results as you did. They need their celestial energy.

    But in your case, the spiritual energy in your body is able to activate this behavior because of your unique body.

    That is why, these people tried to conceive children with you.

    Because, whether forced or not, a body¡¯s instinctual reaction that urs in your very cells when someone is in the middle of intercourse is to create new life. To conceive and create a child.

    So, the nature has taken your and the man¡¯s wishes whenever you are conceived to create a child within the limits of the power you canmand.

    I think that is why, the children you had with different people are born with the different constitutions that match their fathers.

    They are gifted children of nature.¡±

    Maya widened her eyes disbelief. She couldn¡¯t believe that something like that is even possible.

    ¡°As for why they know about this, it is the gods you worship so much. They sold you out as a gift for their followers.

    In fact, they might have created you collectively as a gift in the first ce. I am sorry to be the bearer of this news.¡±

    Sam really felt bad for her.

    She wasn¡¯t asked to be born like that and she didn¡¯t ask for those powers, but because of those she fell victim for such a gruesome crime.

    Maya¡¯s eyes welled up in tears. This time Sam didn¡¯t stop her, he left her to grieve a bit. After all, she made it her whole life¡¯s goal to be a servant of god, but the gods betrayed her.

    Even if Lucifer the Devil wanted to be entertained by her antics, at least he put Sam here to help her. He treated her way better than the gods she worshipped.

    Sam looked at her and sighed.

    ¡°I will leave you to get some peace. We might have to part ways in a couple of hours. Let me go and make preparations.¡±

    Sam walked away with the beasts.

    Maya looked at Sam¡¯s receding back and closed her eyes and spoke internally with her hands sped together.

    ¡°Mother Nature, I don¡¯t know if you can hear me.

    But if what Sam said is right and you are trying to amodate my wishes, I beg you now with all the power that was bestowed upon me by you.

    The man that saved me, the man that gave relief to my kids, and the man that saved me and my children from damnation. Whatever he wishes from this world, whatever he desires from this world, and whatever he pursues to achieve, he shall get it.

    Even if gods and devils stand in his way.

    Gods must be in and Devils must be destroyed.

    He shall ovee every obstacle that he would ever face.

    I will not crave vengeance on the gods that toyed with me, I will not crave vengeance on the n leaders that vilified me. But I will crave the victory of this one man that stood against all of them for me.

    This is the wish of a grateful mother and I hope you can amodate it.¡±

    Tears streamed as he knelt down and as if nature had heard her wish, the clear sky clouded just for a moment and rumbled with lightning. The trees and grass shook vibrantly and the breeze seemed to have carried her tears away.

    Sam looked at the sky with a frown.

    Just then, he felt like someone started watching him. As if he was being observed by some power. But the feeling is so fleeting that it onlysted for a moment.

    An hourter.

    Sam finished preparing the space gate and let Maya and the kids wear special robes that he prepared.

    ¡°The distance is way toorge. You might be able to take it, but the kids might have some trouble, these robes will help them.

    As soon as you get there, show the letter to whoever is monitoring the space gate. They can confirm my aura and spiritual signature. They will escort you safely to meet my friends and even my students.

    You give this recording crystal to them and they will arrange the rest.

    As I said, you can have your peace there. You don¡¯t have to worry about the growth of your kids. Everything will be taken care of.¡±

    ¡°Thank you,¡± Maya said in a very low tone.

    Sam nodded with a smile and activated the formation.

    The yers watched this with smiles on their faces.

    They didn¡¯t know what they were getting into when the task started, but when they realized the whole story, none of them are really willing to do this wholeheartedly.

    In fact, not just Noah, even other yers made simr ns just in case Sam lost.

    They never had any intention to let the kids be in the n leaders¡¯ hands.

    Everyone except Dayus of course. That guy is beyond saving.

    Sam activated the formation and sent Maya and the kids away.

    Finally, the yers got the notification saying that the task has beenpleted and they are taken away back to the grey space.

    Lucifer and Hel are standing there waiting for them.

    Hel had a gloomy expression on her face as she looked at Sam coldly. This guy won big time once again.

    Lucifer looked at all of them and said with a smile.

    ¡°It is a great show to watch. I am really entertained.

    Sam and Noah. You two in particr put on a great show.

    As per the deal I suggested, I will give you the rewards that are promised¡­¡±

    Lucifer proceeded to give the rewards to everyone except for Sam.

    Because of the deal they made in the middle, their reward contract has also changed a lot.

    ¡°Do you want to cash in your favors now orter?¡±

    Lucifer asked Sam with a smile.

    ¡°Not now. I am sure we wille face to face at one time. I will cash in those favors at that time.¡±

    ¡°I heard you made a simr deal with Osiris. A god of life and death and a ruler of hell, you are picking some big names to owe you some favors. You have a lot of leverage that its dangerous. Good luck and see you soon.¡±

    Lucifer disappeared with that.

    Hel didn¡¯t say anything and threw them back to hell.

    The yers didn¡¯t waste time and went on to deal with the creatures in hell.

    Meanwhile, back in Deste.

    Maya arrived with her kids at a space gate.

    A guard responsible for handling the space gates came in as he was surprised by an unknown person and some kids.

    But he didn¡¯t recklessly do anything. He asked her who she is and where she came from.

    Maya took out the letter and handed it to him.

    The person opened the letter and was surprised.

    There is a device that is attached to the walls of the room which vibrated as soon as the letter was opened. He immediately saluted Maya and said.

    ¡°Please wait in the waiting room. We will inform the bosses about your arrival. They wille here personally.¡±

 Chapter 1827 - 1827 Final Task

    1827 Final Task

    The news traveled fast.

    Currently, Jack, Philip, and Watt are all at Deste.

    They are lecturing Sam¡¯s students since they just went through a serious threat.

    ¡°I told you guys to be careful. It¡¯s great that Sam managed to pull some trick off at thest moment. Or you would have died along with Sirona trying to protect you. Do you think Sam would have been able to bear it?

    He will lose his fucking mind.¡±

    Watt yelled at the students and they couldn¡¯t do anything.

    ¡°Uncle Watt. Your kid is right there. I don¡¯t think you should swear.¡±

    Vron said with a smile.

    ¡°Shut up. It¡¯s better for them to listen to curses rather than learn from you a lot. Do you want me to hold you responsible if he grows up and bes like you?¡±

    .....

    Watt¡¯s face is trembling from all the scolding. It has been a few days since the students came back, but the trio is way too far away from this ce and they only got back now as soon as they heard the kids are in trouble.

    ¡°You are all going to go through the hell of a training phase. I will put you through it. Understand?¡±

    All the students nodded in a hurry.

    At this moment, Jack received a note from a guard.

    He is stunned for a moment and passed the note to the other two.

    Philip read through it and said.

    ¡°Seems like we have a special guest.¡±

    He then turned to the kids and spoke.

    ¡°You guys rest first. We wille back. This is not over. You are forbidden from going anywhere out of deste without our permission.¡±

    All three of them left and went to meet Maya and the kids.

    When Maya saw the three, she instantly recognized them. Not because she has seen their faces before, but because the coats they wore are of the same style as what Sam wore.

    Philip met her with a smile and greeted them.

    ¡°Nice to meet you, Miss Maya. I am Philip, Sam¡¯s friend. This is Watt and this is Jack.¡±

    Maya nodded at them awkwardly and pulled out the recording crystal and gave it to them.

    Philip took it and ced it away.

    ¡°First let us get you settled. We can talk about other thingster.¡±

    ¡°Are you not going to take a look at that? I mean, that¡¯s where the message is for you guys.¡±

    She said in a very low tone. Her cultivation is decent and on par with the trio. But with her kids here, she is still a bit nervous. She wanted everything to be safe and she couldn¡¯t feel safe until the trio saw the message.

    Philip seemed to have understood what she was thinking and said.

    ¡°If that makes you feel assured, they sure.¡±

    He took out the recording crystal and yed.

    ¡°She is someone with that I crossed paths in thetest task. She got seven kids and she had a pretty rough time. There are more than twenty Divine ne cultivators in the initial stage with forces that are way too big and all of them tried to bully her and the kids.

    I even made them enemies in the process by the way.

    Anyway, give her the best residence possible. Let her rest and take care of the kids. You can show her the school for the eldest ones and provide her with the best resources so she could take care of them peacefully.

    As for the realm, I added the coordinates at the back of the recording crystal. You guys know what to do.

    Take care guys.

    Also, tell my students that they are in for some really bad punishment once I get back. But make sure they don¡¯t lose their confidence because of what happened.

    Goodbye.¡±

    The recording ended.

    ¡°There it is. Let¡¯s go.¡±

    Philip said and he even carried two of her kids.

    Jack and Watt did the same and they started ying with the kids on their way.

    Maya is surprised a bit by their reaction. Sam didn¡¯t exin many things. He didn¡¯t go into detail on how she was being targeted. All he said is that she is being bullied and revealed that he made some new enemies that are so powerful.

    But they didn¡¯t blink twice.

    Soon, they got Maya settled in a big house near ake.

    ¡°This ce is peaceful. We will assign a few staff members to take care of you. Whatever you feel like eating let them know. If you are confused, you can ask them for menus. We have a vast chain of restaurants spanning across realms.

    You can taste all kinds of delicacies.

    Meanwhile, you cane and take a tour of the ce to understand where you are going to stay for a while.¡±

    The trio took her on a tour.

    Maya is amazed by all the novel things she saw here. They even took her to a meal and at that time, she couldn¡¯t help but ask.

    ¡°Do you not have any questions?¡±

    ¡°About what?¡±

    ¡°The enmity? It is over twenty divine ne cultivators and you guys don¡¯t even have one in your ranks. Isn¡¯t it too much of a risk for you guys? All because of Sam¡¯s decisions.¡±

    Philip just chuckled and said.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about it. It¡¯s quite normal for us. It is not a big deal.¡±

    ¡°Normal?¡±

    ¡°We have always been like this. Always fighting with bigger guys. You are staying here from now on. You will get used to it.¡±

    They are carefree. They didn¡¯t care who Sam messed with and they don¡¯t need many answers. Sam¡¯s enemies are their enemies.

    Maya roamed around the deste along with the trio for a while and she even heard some of the orders Philip has passed down.

    ¡°We got a new enemy now. Send some scouts to check out the situation. Make sure they do not engage with anyone there.¡±

    He already decided to send people to get a hold of all the possible information there.

    After a whole day of the tour, Maya finally rxed. She felt safe and reassured.

    And just like that, days passed.

    Meanwhile, the yers are going through hell.

    Days went by weeks went by and months went by.

    Each floor of the tower is being cleared one by one.

    Soon, everyone finished off their towers. But none of them finished it off and left. Because in between the tower clearing, they were of course put to different tasks and Sam managed to win a lot of them.

    Some of them he lost and some he gave up willingly so that his friends would win. But in between all of them, everyone came to a pact that none of them are going to leave the towers and hell before others and that brought them all to a halt at thest floors as they waited for everyone else to finish.

    And now they are being deployed to finish their final tasks.

    Hel looked at them in the grey space and smiled.

    ¡°You guys havee a long way. But you are not close to the end yet. There is a major shift in your status after you finish this final task.

    It ismendable that all of you kept your word and stayed together to not exit the dungeons. But it would make little difference.

    The training you have gone through is vastly different from the rest of your peers. Even among you, some had a higher number of floors and some have a lower, and even on those floors some of you have less difficultypared to others.

    The results are actually undeniable in some cases.

    Anyway, thest task is pretty straightforward.

    You will be ced in a forest along with a lot of other people that are ready to die and ready to kill.

    Each of you will be given a map of the whole forest. As soon as you enter the forest, you will be given a target. You need to kill that target within a certain time limit.

    You can track that target¡¯s whereabouts on your map.

    For every sessful target, you kill you will gain positive points. If the target is weaker than you or the same strength as you, you will get one point, stronger than you, you will get two points, and vastly stronger than you, you will get three points.

    Of course, if you cannot finish the target within the time limit, you will be given negative points, but this time the scoring is a bit different. If the target is vastly stronger than you, you will get one negative point, a tad bit stronger than you, you will get negative two points, and if they are weaker than you or the same strength as you will get negative three points.

    These are kill points, but there is a different kinds of points in this game.

    Evasion and Counter Kill points.

    .....

    Because when you are targeting someone, you will also be a target of someone else.

    For every sessful evasion you have, no matter the other party¡¯s strength you will get an evasive point. And if your counter kills, the point system is the same as the regr kill point system. The only thing is you won¡¯t get negative points from this.

    Any questions?¡±

    ¡°How many people are there in the forest?¡±

    ¡°I am not revealing that. But do know that only ten people will survive this and there are a bunch of Divine ne cultivators inside. You should try your best to survive.

    By the way, one more use is that you cannot under no circumstances break through to Divine ne while you are in there.¡±

    Everyone exchanged a nce in frustration.

 Chapter 1828 - 1828 Factions

    1828 Factions

    The yers disappeared from the grey space and are randomly dropped in different spots of the forest.

    Sam looked around and sighed.

    He is kind of sick of these tasks. In the past few months, he had to fight people stronger than him, scheme, work with other yers to work against them, try to maneuver traps, save people, kill people. He had done so many things that he is now sick of it.

    But at least now, the task is a bit more straightforward.

    The only problem is that he doesn¡¯t know who he is going to kill. The only reason he had is that they are going to end up in his list.

    As he thought up to this point, a virtual screen appeared over his wrist. He looked at it and noticed that the whole forest map is visible there and within that, his location is marked as a green mark.

    At that moment, a beep sound was heard with a red mark appearing on the map.

    He clicked on the red map and it showed a few things, the face of the target, their cultivation strength as well as a time that is counting down from fifteen minutes.

    ¡°Peak of Astral ne, One mile away and fifteen minutes.¡±

    .....

    Sam muttered and he disappeared in a puff of ck smoke as he used the shadow element.

    Meanwhile a mile away.

    A middle-aged man is looking at his own screen as he pointed out his target.

    ¡°This is great. Only half a mile away. Maybe I can take a shot from here.¡±

    He looked at his surroundings and is very much in glee. He is in the middle of a thick forest with veryrge trees, which provides him perfect vantage point to the target he has for a proper spear strike.

    He checked out the map and finalized the position of the other party. For some reason that guy is not moving, so he didn¡¯t want to waste his time.

    He picked out his spear and applied some poison just in case and got onto a tree as he aimed it at the target.

    At this moment, a ck shadow appeared out of nowhere and before he could realize it, a kicknded on the back of his neck and the leg just went through the neck without stopping there.

    Sam kicked his head off literally.

    He then kicked the tree along with the recoil, he kicked on the head.

    The head glowed with dark elemental energy as it moved through the forest like a cannonball. In a sh, it traveled hundreds of meters and hit a tree.

    At the spot where it hit, a humanoid shape came out and a person was revealed.

    A person is in camouge hiding in the tree and he happened to be the person targeting Sam.

    The head exploded with a bunch of curses attached to it. The curses hit the person and killed him within a second.

    Samnded on the ground softly as he adjusted his coat. He looked at the screen and there are two points added, one to the kill and another to the counter kill.

    The screen shed before a new target is shown. This time also the target is of the same strength as him.

    He picked up the spear that his first target dropped off. Fire elemental energy encircled the spear as he aimed it at a certain distance.

    The spear flew threw the thick forest as the golden mes shily burned through it.

    It is almost was liked a meteor strike.

    Far away a woman is in the middle of a fierce battle with her target. Both of them sensed the spearing towards them and visually they could see the forest fiercely burning.

    Both of them broke the fight and barely managed to dodge the spear.

    ¡°Which sick fucker is this?¡±

    The woman looked towards the burning forest through which Sam just walked in casually.

    ¡°I think I am a bit rusty with the throws. How could I miss that?¡±

    Sam said in a mncholic tone.

    The woman and her target looked at Sam and both of them exchanged a nce.

    ¡°Which faction do you belong to? I have never seen you before. You are not even at the entrance ceremony.¡±

    Sam looked stunned for a moment.

    But he didn¡¯t speak.

    The woman sized him up a bit and spoke.

    ¡°I don¡¯t care which faction you belong to anyway, but you better ask your faction seniors if it is a good idea to antagonize me. Just because you got me as a target, how dare you even think of attacking me?

    You fucking low life.¡±

    Sam frowned as he looked at her. He doesn¡¯t know what the exact situation is, but now he definitely understood that there is way more to this than just the final task.

    These gods seemed to have thrown them somewhere they don¡¯t really belong.

    ¡°I should have taken the memories of the previous target. Maybe I can do it now.¡±

    He muttered slightly as he looked at the woman in the front.

    ¡°Thanks for the information.¡±

    He turned into partial shadow fusion and covered the distance between them in a sh before he caught hold of her by her throat and¡­ snapped it.

    *CRACK*

    His specter moved and caught hold of the soul that was escaping and absorbed all the memories.

    The woman¡¯s target was horrified when he saw the scene.

    ¡°Do you know who you killed?¡±

    Sam closed his eyes as he got the information he needed.

    ¡°I know now.¡±

    He spoke and just looked at the screen. For his next target, he only has three minutes.

    ¡°Assholes.¡±

    He muttered under his breath running in a different direction.

    While Sam and the other yers are killing people, somewhere near this vast forest inside a city, there is a grand formation projecting everything that is happening inside the forest.

    Around the projection, there are a bunch of people sitting on some grand stages looking at the projection.

    Among them, there is one woman who is looking coldly at the projection and her eyes are stuck on the scene where Sam¡¯s previous target was lying down dead.

    ¡°Who is that bastard? Where did hee from? I want to know everything about him. Which faction does he belong to? Which city did hee from? The name of his grandfather¡¯s second mistress. Everything.¡±

    The assistant beside that woman nodded and left to find out more details.

    Not just her, but some of the other people who are sitting just like she did the same thing as they talked to their own assistants.

    But after ten minutes in which time Sam finished a kill and a counter-kill, the assistants came back and reported to their respective masters.

    ¡°Madam, there is no information in the entries. Nothing came up about him no matter how much we searched. It is almost like he miraculously ended up inside the forest.¡±

    ¡°How is that possible? Did you search properly? How can someone just enter the forest of the factionpetition just like that?¡±

    ¡°Not just that Madam, just to rify, we did the candidate check with the formation, it seems there are seven people who didn¡¯t register with any faction that ended up inside this formation.

    We don¡¯t know where they came from and how they came here. But not only did they juste indirectly, they are also connected to our targeting system.

    They are getting our candidates as targets and they are also being targeted by others. They are just like any other candidates.¡±

    ¡°How are they just like any other candidates? Didn¡¯t you see? They killed one of our seeds. Even if she didn¡¯t end up in the top ten, she would have been pretty close and she would have quit as we nned.

    We lost a seeded candidate with such potential.

    Find out how they came here and send the other faction masters this message. I want to capture them first since my disciple is the one that died in their hands.¡±

    ¡°Okay, Madam.¡±

    The assistant left and went to meet with the other people on the remaining stages, she passed the messages to their assistants and soon everyone in the important seats got the message that she sent.

    Meanwhile, they are also looking into the matter of these peopleing out of nowhere.

    Back in the forest oblivious to the fact that these people are looking into him, Sam is looking deep into the memories of the targets he killed and also came across the faces of the people outside.

    Soon, he figured out all the information that gave him a proper idea of what kind of situation he is in.

    And as soon as the realization hit him, he sat down on the spot and looked at the sky.

    ¡°You bloody fuckers. I should have guessed that you will not be as straightforward as you said you would be.¡±

 Chapter 1829 - 1829 Unknown Competition

    1829 Unknown Competition

    Sam immediately let out his specters and souls along with his shadow undead out to spread as far as they can so that he could figure out the locations of the other yers.

    After some time, he did have a faint idea of where they are.

    So, he took out a few recording crystals and recorded all the information he got.

    He is the only one who had the means to obtain information through a soul search, so he is the only one that could provide the info.

    Except for Dayus, he sent the info to everyone else.

    Even if it appears a bit petty, Sam really didn¡¯t care. He didn¡¯t like the guy so he didn¡¯t bother giving the extra info out.

    When the yers received the information about their current situation they were dumbfounded.

    The thing right now all seven yers are actually dropped in the middle of apetition that they arepletely unrted to.

    It is apetition between a bunch ofrge factions of a veryrge alliance and the leaders of these factions are at the Divine ne of Transcendent cultivation. They rule over a bunch of Divine Realms and they are holding thispetition which is their tradition to divide some resources.

    .....

    So basically, yers just invaded this tradition and they are in a position where they could influence the benefits of some really really powerful people that they cannot have any problems with at the moment.

    All the yers felt sour when they heard of this.

    They don¡¯t really know what is awaiting them after this task is over. Their run in hell is over, that is for sure and they are going to wait for the next stage of thepetition which is going to be a pain in the ass anyway.

    At this point, they just wished that there are not going to have to deal with the people that they are going to antagonize in the next few hours.

    After sharing the news, Sam just dove back into the killing game. It didn¡¯t take much effort at all as he went through his peers. Even though they are noted as people with the same strength as him, in reality for Sam they might as well be at the Initial stage of Astral ne consummation. It is easy, to say the least.

    He used his skillset to the extreme as he moved from one spot to another and took one life and the next.

    By now, the rest of the yers are also doing the same.

    They ran through the roaster like they are fighting against little kids. One death after another, they ended lives of many prodigies.

    After killing the woman, Sam started absorbing the memories of every soul that he got in his hit list afterwards.

    Soon, he started getting more and more info from this.

    There are exactly seven factions in this alliance and every one of them is led by a Divine ne Transcendent Cultivator. Three of them are at the Peak Stage of Divine ne Transcendence and four are at Late stage of Transcendence.

    They are very powerful.

    But above them, there is another power these people report to. A sect that is led by a Divine ne Consummate cultivator. Sam doesn¡¯t exactly know what level the exact cultivation of that person is, but it way more than anything Sam could handle at the moment.

    Along with this alliance which is called the Seven Star Alliance, there are over five more alliances that have simr strength and are also under this sect.

    The Sect is called the Sr Sect.

    He didn¡¯t manage to gain much knowledge about the Sr sect, but one thing he definitely knows is that the Sr sect is at war at the moment and they are calling in the people from all of their subordinate powers.

    Right now, even thispetition is to divide up the resources and also get a slot at some sacred ce where these people can go forst-minute training.

    After looking through the whole information, Sam understood one thing. After this, if the yers were to be left here in this forest, they would be skinned alive and that would be them getting the easiest way out.

    And as he learned more and more information about this, he felt more and more concerned.

    After all, the gods definitely don¡¯t need to use a venue like this to conduct a test to the yers. Particrly if all they want is some straightforward kill test.

    After all, he is pretty sure that Osiris¡¯ city formation is much moreplicated than whatever is going on in this forest with these kill and counterkill games.

    They collect the worst of the worst killers across a million realms and put them together in a realm solely created just for this killing game.

    Just from the fighting pattern and the formations used, Sam could easily tell this arrangement is mediocre at best. His juniors at Deste could do a better job.

    So, he felt like there is some hidden agenda behind this and he is trying to figure that out.

    Only the problem is that he doesn¡¯t have enough information or ess to what is outside this ce to figure that out.

    Now, he is just stuck with ying this game like the gods wanted him to.

    As Sam contemted killing people, he finally got a challenging target.

    ¡°Two hundred meters away, Divine ne Initiation Initial Stage cultivator.

    A person who recently broke through to Divine ne.¡±

    Sam muttered as he looked forward. He could actually see his target looking at him. It is a man who looked to be in early thirties and he wore a scarlet robe with red hot mes on the edge of his hands.

    He seems to be a mage.

    Sam looked at him and sighed, he cannot break through to Divine ne yet. But from the task where he rescued Maya and her kids, he already has experience battling one.

    And his current strength is way beyond that time. He is kind of tempted to try his hand out. The only reservation he had is that one of the main reasons he managed to winst time is because the opponent is a pure warrior with ranged attacks.

    And if he used the physical attacks for long-range, a lot of its intensity is going to be lost in the attack, which would help Sam recover easily. It became a slugfest with a lot of skill demands from each other.

    Sam brought back his thoughts to the current situation.

    The target is looking back at him with a frown and it seemed like he realized something. Sam just turned around and started walking away. He opened his screen once again and looked around as he is trying to figure out the exact direction his new target is in turned into a ck shadow before leaving in a different direction.

    The young man who is his actual target of Sam didn¡¯t think much and turned around to meet his next target.

    But at this exact moment¡­

    *SWOOSH*

    An arrow came out of nowhere. He could sense the ice elemental energy densely condensed into the arrow tip.

    He extended his hand and threw a streak of scarlet mes at it.

    As soon as the arrow hit the mes, it is almost like some trigger mechanism is activated, a streak of ice elemental energy emanated from it and shed with the mes.

    It is almost like arge blizzard is concentrated into a single cylindrical column like an energy beam and hit the mes.

    The blizzard and the mes canceled each other.

    *swoosh*

    Another arrow came from a different direction this time.

    The target blocked it again and said.

    ¡°Who the fuck is it? Come and face me directly you coward.¡±

    *SWOOSH*

    *SWOOSH*

    *SWOOSH*

    Three arrows came from the same direction and he used a very wide area attack to defend against them.

    *SWOOSH*

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam didn¡¯t stop shooting the ice elemental arrows and soon the surrounding woods are burning down like they caught on a forest fire.

    The target just wanted to eliminate everything in front of him. There are two reservations. One is that there is a trace of divine energy in the arrows, which means there is a chance the other party is a divine ne cultivator and then two, the arrows are noting from a single direction.

    One moment they areing from ahead and the next moment, they areing from his rear. It is almost like the target is everywhere that he wants to be.

    His spread his senses for several hundred-meter radii, but he wasn¡¯t able to catch a glimpse of Sam.

    He became frustrated as time passed.

    As he was thinking all of this, all of a sudden, five arrows came in five different directions.

    He created arge ming arc that surrounded him and he blocked all of them. But the next moment, he felt like his whole body is paralyzed and before he knew it, he sensed some threating from the back, but he wasn¡¯t able to move.

    And just like a sword went through his back.

    Sam didn¡¯t waste his time and channeled the chaotic spatial energy along with the void style and ripple style with a bit of resonance and let the energy raise the chaos within the target¡¯s body in such a small time frame.

 Chapter 1830 - 1830 Weird Woman

    1830 Weird Woman

    Sam didn¡¯t waste any time.

    As soon as he aplished the task, he used the spatial blink to disappear from that spot.

    The target turned around and looked at Sam crazily. He was stunned. He didn¡¯t expect that the guy that walked away just a few minutes ago happened to be one targeting him and that too when that guy is not even a Divine ne cultivator.

    He channeled his energy ready to deal with him, but he felt like his meridians are giving.

    Spatial energy rippled through his blood and bones and every ripple is exploding crazily. As it spread, the rest of the spots in his body some even external resonated as they created these exploding spatial energy ripples.

    One of his legs gave in and he had a hard time breathing as his lungs got punctured severely. Even his heartbeat was abnormal soon he felt like all the organs and systems within his body are separated and he fainted on the spot.

    Sam didn¡¯t dare to let this chance go, he appeared out of thin air and shed on his neck, chopping his head off with a strike filled with Divine energy.

    One Divine ne cultivator down.

    Sam panted heavily and heaved a sigh as he confirmed that his target is definitely dead.

    .....

    He absorbed the soul to get more information out of him before he left.

    He used a lot of energy for this bout. He didn¡¯t want to go toe to toe with a Divine ne cultivator again. Instead, he wanted to use the element of surprise and some tricks to finish him off before the actual fight even started and he did exactly that.

    First, he disappeared from that guy as if both of them doesn¡¯t have anything to do with the other.

    Next, Sam went ahead and used his archery to throw some shots. Each shot is actually pretty powerful enough to at least hurt a Divine ne cultivator a bit.

    As he was doing these shots moving with spatial elements Sam used a trick with some of his puppets. Like the ones he used before as spatial nodes temporarily, he left puppets in different spots while moving around, and soon, he hid in the shadow,pletely merged with it as he shot at one of the puppets.

    The puppet sent the arrow with spatial transference to apletely different direction and threw those shots at the target.

    Just like that, the target believed that someone is attacking him from all directions by actually being present there.

    After that is done, Sam slowly closed in the distance while he is still in the shadows, and for the final move, he released five powerful arrows and made a leap before taking that stab.

    It is pretty underhanded in more than one sense. But this is a killing game, not a spectator fight like it was with the n leader that he killed for Lucifer.

    After that kill was done, Sam tried his best to recover as much as he can before he moved to the next target.

    While Sam managed to kill and punch a bit higher than his current level, the other yers are not exactly doing bad either.

    They just went through their own targets just like Sam did even if they are stronger than them. They used their own set of tricks that they concocted to take them down.

    All of this is being witnessed by not just the faction leaders all who want to kill Sam and the rest of the yers, but by the gods as well.

    ¡°So, is this your big n Hel? To throw them into such apetition? They are really being antagonized by these faction leaders. I must say, it is not that bad.¡±

    Indra said with a smile on his face.

    ¡°Well, what can we do? These fellows suddenly decided to be united. I clearly stated at the start of the hellpetition that the first person toe out would get certain benefits in thepetitionpared to the rest.

    But they didn¡¯t even seem swayed in the slightest, they just waited and all of them came together.

    So, I need to look for other methods to create the tension that we would have gotten from our original n.¡±

    ¡°Well, I guess this is working. So, what are you going to do after this?¡±

    ¡°Just wait and see. But I have a perfect way to merge this into our nextpetition and make them active as soon as they step on the field without any pause.¡±

    ¡°That¡¯s good to know. But before that, is the exchange system ready for the yers? The things that they could exchange for the points they gained in this hell run?¡±

    ¡°Yes, it is ready. As long as they survive this, then we are good to go.¡±

    ¡°Survive this? Hel, they are breezing through this. What is there to survive?¡± One of the gods asked in a confused tone.

    ¡°Well, there is a twist in thepetition and the stakes have been pretty safe in thepetition for a long while. Let¡¯s put them on the edge and see if anybody dies.¡±

    He said with a cold smile.

    Meanwhile, thepetition went on and soon there are only a few people left in the forest. Some of them are at the Middle stage of Divine ne Initiation. Sam doesn¡¯t know exactly how many of them there are, but he knew that there is more than one.

    Because he came across one in search of his target and two because at the moment he is facing one of them as he became that person¡¯s target.

    ¡°It is surprising to see that an unknown nobody managed to survive this long in thispetition. You must have been pretty lucky or you must have been some hidden card of some other faction. Because I have never heard of you.¡±

    Sam didn¡¯t reply as he looked at the woman in front of him.

    There are a bunch of vines floating around her and they seemed to havee from the back of her body from the looks of it. She is not even walking, these vines acted like some extra limbs and carried her around.

    He could sense the dangerous aura being emanated from her and he didn¡¯t hesitate before using spatial blink and disappearing from there.

    He appeared almost a mile away from her in the forest and kept on running in a different direction as he wanted to use some diversion before using blink again.

    But at that moment, Sam sensed something.

    A branch seemed to havee to life as it pped him.

    Sam barely dodged it and burned the branch with his golden mes.

    The surrounding woods started burning and in the second, he saw the woman that is targeting him appear in front of his eyes.

    Sam is stunned.

    He used a spatial blink toe this far, but this woman managed to match his distance even though it is just a tad bitte, she still managed toe this far and caught up with him.

    His vignce raised to the peak. He didn¡¯t feelfortable at all.

    He used the blink once again and disappeared from that spot.

    He reappeared in a different part of the forest.

    ¡°You cannot escape me. Just give up.¡±

    The woman appeared behind him and said in a whisper.

    Sam had chills run down his spine as he looked at her coldly before leaving once again.

    ¡°I told you, you cannot escape me. Either give up right now or I will kill you.¡±

    Sam didn¡¯t even look back this time as he heard these words. He cursed under his breath and realized that he doesn¡¯t have a chance to escape.

    But a lot of questions appeared in his mind.

    How is this woman able to track him down so fast?

    He is sure that she is not using a spatial transfer. He would have sensed it. If that is not the case, then what is?

    Sam went into deep thought and he disappeared from the spot, but unlike before, he didn¡¯t immediately reappear somewhere in the woods.

    Instead, he reappeared in mid-air in the sky and if one looked closely, one will notice that a ck shadow is enveloping him.

    Sam disappeared once again.

    But this time, he didn¡¯t reappear immediately. There is a gap.

    The woman who targeted Sam frowned when she saw this.

    ¡°Where did he go? I can¡¯t track him.¡±

    She muttered in confusion.

    She would have known as soon as Sam appeared in the forest anywhere. But he didn¡¯t

    So, she couldn¡¯t help but feel that something is wrong. She closed her eyes and started searching everywhere.

    After two minutes, she sensed a fluctuation.

    And at the spot that the fluctuation appeared, the trees and vines coiled together and in an instant, the woman seemed to have appeared out of thin air. The vegetation created an exact replica of her and for some reason, she seemed to be able tomunicate through it.

 Chapter 1831 - 1831 Next Phase

    1831 Next Phase

    Sam observed as the clone formed behind his shadow undead.

    He slowly descended with the help of wind element as he looked at this and right when he was about to drop, he activated wind elemental fusion and let his wings out before canceling the fusion form.

    He didn¡¯t understand what exactly this skill is, but one thing he knew is that this woman is using the vegetation to create clones of herself and all the vegetation seemed to obey hermands.

    Her consciousness ispletely interlinked to the forest.

    This is a terrifying ability to take in the current setting and to his dismay the other party is way too stronger than him.

    If they at least of equal strength, Sam would have just dared to defend and investigate a bit more because for that he needs to be in contact with the ground and in turn forest.

    But right now, that is nothing short of suicidal.

    Luckily, Sam doesn¡¯t have to kill her right now. He has an option of just blocking her until the time set is over. He just hoped that it is not too long as he hovered in the air.

    The woman meanwhile looked at Sam flying in the air and was stunned.

    .....

    ¡°You are a clever little ferret aren¡¯t you? But still I need to kill you. Let¡¯s see how long you can keep this up.¡±

    As she muttered, arge tree started growing in a spot not too far away from Sam.

    As he noticed far away from him a lot of vegetation had died away. He doesn¡¯t even need his energy vision to know that its vitality of it is being used to grow this tree.

    This kind of reminded him of one of Noah¡¯s abilities.

    He is a bit delighted now.

    Because the tree that grew is almost matching his current altitude and because of barrier restriction, he cannot move that much away from his current spot.

    But the trees cannot be grown in more numbers. Because even if the forest is vast it is still finite and if this woman grew more trees like this to fight with him, then her greatest weapon in thepetition, being able to spy and notice every single one within the territory easily, will be gone.

    There is no way she would do that just to gain one meager kill point thates from killing Sam.

    But he still has to be cautious.

    As he looked at therge tree, he noticed that it started growing some cylindrical barrels that looked like cannons and soon, therge cannon started shooting fruits into the air.

    The fruits exploded as soon as they reached a certain distance and Sam noticed that it is some kind of corrosive poison.

    He smiled as he looked at it.

    Any poison is inferior to him. In fact, this poison is kind of beneficial to him.

    Not only did he actively absorb it, but he also activated partial fire elemental fusion.

    Golden mes surrounded him and with every p of his wings, the mes raged. The tree caught on fire pretty quickly and the woman started healing the tree with the vitality from the forest.

    Meanwhile, the cannon started shooting other kids of fruits too. Apart from the poison, there are some kind of weird wood puppets that are formed from vines and leaves that looked like bees.

    They came out of the fruits and they attacked Sam from all sides.

    Sam moved in the sky fluidly as he attacked these bees with his fireballs.

    Not only did he attack them, he set them on fire and then threw them into the forest.

    Different parts of the forest started burning with golden mes.

    The woman or her clone that Sam is looking at frowned as she saw this.

    Even though she is a Divine ne cultivator, me attacks on the forest are not something she could stop.

    After all, she is using the forest as her tool, only if it is reinforced by her Divine energy could the mes bepletely ineffective and even she doesn¡¯t have that much Divine energy.

    As she was thinking of ways to deal with Sam, he suddenly took out his bow and arrow, he flew away from the tree and aimed at a certain point before shooting it.

    The arrow lodged into a person who is in the middle of a fight and exploded with the golden mes.

    He killed a target.

    When the woman noticed this, she is infuriated.

    She is stronger than Sam by a far margin and not only was she unable to kill Sam right now, he is even killing his own targets leisurely.

    She wanted to deal with him at all costs, but as Sam saw that there are changes happening in the tree, he shifted the partial fusion from the me to light and disappeared from there, he reappeared on a different spot far away where his new target is actually located.

    He once again used his bow and arrow to shoot his target from the sky.

    The woman was dumbfounded. If she used some of her hidden cards, she could handle Sam, but the problem is the cost-to-benefit ratio didn¡¯t seem that effective.

    She immediately retreated and didn¡¯t bother following Sam. She gave up on him and rested to recover her energy.

    Meanwhile, Sam didn¡¯te back down for a while. Instead, he tried to scout for the yers and gave the information to them.

    This time it is the information about the woman.

    The yers became alert and made preparations immediately.

    The time slowly passed and Sam didn¡¯t face many problems. When that woman that previously targeted him became his target, he directly ignored the challenge.

    He might be able to burn the whole forest down to force her out. But while he is burning the forest, sooner orter she will notice and start fighting him back.

    Things wouldn¡¯t be as simple anymore if that really happened.

    He just waited his time out and gave up on the target. Even if he lost a point it is not that much of a big deal.

    Time passed slowly and Sam didn¡¯t get back down on the ground for the rest of thepetition. Even if he became an open target in the sky, it is still better than walking around in a trap. The whole forest is a trap right now and he is not used to having his surroundings so out of control.

    So, he just decided to fly everywhere until thepetition came to an end.

    And after a few hours, thepetition indeed came to an end. The ten people who are left in the forest are revealed.

    The first three spots are upied by three Divine ne cultivators and one of them is the woman, Sam encountered. The remaining seven are the yers.

    Sam didn¡¯t even bother with what rank he had. He justnded on the ground and looked around trying to figure a way out. But before he could do that, he already felt some spatial energy enveloping him.

    He immediately thought of using his own spatial energy, but it didn¡¯t work. He even thought of using the Dimensional drifter, but he couldn¡¯t ess it.

    Soon, he along with the remaining people within the forest disappeared and they were transferred to a stage.

    Sam looked around and saw an image he just recently be familiar with. The faction masters of the Seven Star faction are all staring at him.

    The rest of the faction members are emanating killing intent directed at Sam and the other yers.

    The three Divine ne cultivators looked at this reaction and frowned.

    It is pretty normal to get these looks after one of thepetitions. But it wouldn¡¯t be from all the seven factions because at least one of the factions would be a big winner with more than one person in the top ten.

    That kind of offsets some of the major losses that they might have suffered. But to think all seven factions are pissed, they couldn¡¯t wrap their head around it.

    And then they understood another thing, their respective faction members are not there and all seven yers arepletely unknown parties to them.

    Sam and the yers felt the auras of all these people locked onto them.

    They are in very deep danger. Sam¡¯s thoughts ran wildly. No matter how much he tried he couldn¡¯t ess his own dimensional drifter. He could only pick up some weapons. He couldn¡¯t bring out the beasts either.

    He looked at the rest of the yers. All of them exchanged a nce.

    ¡°Who are you guys? From the looks of it, you all definitely know each other. Where did youe from? Who asked you to interfere in ourpetition.¡±

    Sam didn¡¯t answer. He just stayed silent and looked around. He is trying to get as much information about the surroundings as possible.

    At that moment, a voice sounded in all of the yers¡¯ minds.

    ¡°Now the next phase of the final task. Since you all sessfully made it out of the forest, now try to make it out of the current situation and reach the ce that is imprinted in your minds.¡±

    Sam and the other yers got a location in their heads. They could sense in which direction they have to move, even though they didn¡¯t know this ce.

 Chapter 1832 - 1832 Bullshitting I

    1832 Bullshitting I

    Sam and the other yers are currently in a panicked state.

    If the opponents are just Divine ne Initiation cultivators, then it would be fine. But they are of Divine ne Transcendence. It is almost impossible for them to escape.

    Sam still had a chance.

    He could use his spatial transference or his shadow transference to disappear from there. In fact, with shadow transference, he could even pinpoint the location and leave directly.

    But the problem is with the rest of the yers. They will die if things went sideways. Particrly as soon as Sam makes his move, they would be done for.

    At that moment, he sneakily made a different move. A few wisps of souls with some information flew into their heads. They are barely noticeable. But the faction leaders seemed to have noticed this. One of them looked at him and asked.

    ¡°What the hell are you doing? You better answer our questions or I will kill you and extract your souls to do that.¡±

    Sam took a deep breath and finally spoke.

    ¡°That would be a bad idea, sir. Not only will you lose all the information, you will also lose all the favor you have umted over the years.¡±

    .....

    The faction leaders were stunned.

    ¡°Favor? Whose favor?¡±

    ¡°Zeus.¡±

    Sam said calmly. If he is nervous in any way, it is definitely not showing on his face.

    As soon as he said the word Zeus, the whole area turned silent. Nobody dared to even breathe loudly.

    Looking at the silence, Sam continued.

    ¡°Me and my friends here are sent directly by Zeus himself. We are the soldiers of his Army. Your faction and Sr sect are loyally sending soldiers to the Olympian army over the generations, so since your sect itself is going to war with a rival sect, Zeus sent us personally to help you out.¡±

    The faction leaders frowned. They don¡¯t know if Sam is bullshitting or not. But their initial thought is that he is.

    After all, they all worship Zeus, it wouldn¡¯t take a genius to try and use that name to sway them.

    At this moment, Sam took out a spear and held it forward.

    ¡°I know you would be doubtful, but I am sure with your cultivations you can recognize this spear. You can also check the auras around me and my friends, you will be able to recognize the aura of gods.¡±

    Everyone¡¯s attentionnded on the spear and they are stunned.

    ¡°Replica of Zeus¡¯ spear?¡±

    One of the faction leaders immediately recognized.

    Sam didn¡¯t show any change of expression, but inside he heaved a huge sigh of relief.

    This is the spear he got a prize for clearing Zeus¡¯ Pce of Inheritance.

    This is actually a very powerful Divine treasure that grows with time and the owner, but he didn¡¯t care too much about it since he had way too many weapons in his hands.

    But now it can be put to good use.

    These people are devout believers of Olympus.

    So, first, he decided to make them believe that he had some connection with Zeus.

    As for why he dared to do that, he noticed that there is some resistance from the faction leaders about killing them directly, then he thought hard and found a possibility.

    The reason they didn¡¯t kill the yers directly is that they are doubtful about the yers¡¯ background since they not only invaded their traditional contest, they did very slickly. They didn¡¯t damage anything and they assimted with thepetition casually.

    Their kill point system is hacked and the yers are directly connected to it.

    For them, the kill point system connected to the forest is way too big of a treasure. It is almost their sacrednd that is used to train their students.

    So, someone to hack into it so smoothly, they obviously believed them to be more powerful.

    This made them hold their hand without killing Sam and the others and Sam wanted to y around this point.

    And it worked.

    The faction leaders confirmed that it is indeed replica of Zeus¡¯ spear and there are indeed traces of a very concentrated aura of celestial energy around Sam and the rest.

    That is the energy that came from being in contact with Hel before.

    The faction leaders are still a bit doubtful though.

    Sam just looked at them seriously after putting the spear away.

    ¡°We are here on behalf of Zeus to help you guys in the uing war.

    Your alliance and other alliances that are working under the Sr sect and even the sr sect itself have sent many quality soldiers to the army. Their contributionsbined are worthy of Zeus¡¯ grace.

    And since you all know, Zeus has many enemies and they are trying to cut down the sources of power for Zeus¡¯ army.

    And these enemies are interfering with the sect war that you are going to participate in on behalf of the sr sect. Their target is to eliminate any and all of the loyal supporters and sources of soldiers for the Zeus army in this war.

    Since there is an external force trying to deal with you, Zeus felt that it is necessary to help you defend against that external threat.

    And we are here to prepare you to face those threats.¡±

    The yers were dumbfounded as they heard Sam speak. They understood as soon as they heard the announcement in their heads that they are fucked and they are most likely dead.

    But then they got the wisps of information from Sam. Even Dayus got it. Sam didn¡¯t have a chance to discriminate now and they got the script. They just have to follow along no matter what Sam says. Now they are stunned by his idea.

    ¡°If God Zeus values us so much, why didn¡¯t he send whatever method to resist this through statues? He rarely epts our summoning and calls.¡±

    One of the faction leaders who is more doubtful than the others asked.

    Sam just chuckled at this.

    ¡°With all due respect, even Zeus gave this method to you directly, you wouldn¡¯t be able to learn about it.¡±

    There is a deafening silence in the crowd and everyone turned angry. They are furious. Sam didn¡¯t give them a chance to react and picked out something from his Divine Dimension. It is a vine.

    He ced that vine inside the ground. He used his earth element to bury it and then the wood element to grow it out.

    The vine started growing at an incredible pace.

    ¡°The enemies are using something like this. A special vine created by their botanical studies.

    Right now, I don¡¯t have a sample of theirs since it is hard to preserve after cutting a small part, but I am going to replicate the effects with my version of the vine.

    Once this vine invades the vegetation of your surroundings, it will start spreading its consciousness to the rest of the vegetation.

    And soon, it will start consuming it.

    It grows stronger and stronger with time without you guys even knowing.

    For the next step, I would need a volunteer.¡±

    The faction leaders exchanged a nce and sent a peak stage Astral ne cultivator forward.

    ¡°Thank you.

    After the vine grows strong andrge enough, it will start attacking other creatures. Creatures other than the vegetation.¡±

    As he spoke the vegetation immediately spread toward the volunteer and the thorns started sucking the vitality out of him. Before he knew some vines started growing out of his body.

    Sam cut it off immediately and healed the guy.

    ¡°What I showed is just a demonstration. Do you know what will happen if the real thinges over? It can upy a forest in three seconds, devour a forest in a minute and then spread to the surrounding establishments and kill all the beasts, humans, cultivators, or whatever living breathing thing you can think of.

    The more life it takes the stronger it bes.

    By the time it reaches you guys, it will be strong enough to take down the sect leader, much less some people in a faction.

    On top of that, there are more than twenty variants of this vine.

    One of the vines can absorb the vitality and produce pods out of which some humanoid puppets wille out.

    And there are pod producers that give elemental powers to these humanoids.

    There are vines that could produce hallucinogens. Some could directly upy a cultivator and turn them into their puppet.

    There are many more and I am sure what I know is not all of them.

    If I am not here, you guys would be dead and you wouldn¡¯t even know how it happened.¡±

    Everyone turned silent. They felt chills run down their spine.

    And at this moment, Sam saw them wavering and he didn¡¯t waste to hit the iron while it¡¯s hot.

    He took a step back and waved his hand. A virtual reality projector appeared out of nowhere and put on the helmet.

    ¡°This is the footage of one of thes where one of the variants of this vine is tested.¡±

    He then showed the footage of the undead realm being devoured by the vine that Sam used there.

    But there are some changes. All the cultivation levels in that footage and the faces of the yers are morphed.

    .....

 Chapter 1833 - 1833 Bullshitting II

    1833 Bullshitting II

    The virtual reality projection is much more visually realisticpared to a recording crystal and it is also very detailed.

    The only thing these people don¡¯t know is that it can project people¡¯s imaginations and thoughts if they modified the device enough and Sam took advantage of that as he projected his version of events.

    The faction leaders took on cold breaths as they felt the depth of the situation.

    Sam felt a bit relieved when they saw their reactions. He quickly put the device away and said.

    ¡°The method to restrict these vines is very difficult, even if it was told to you guys through the statue summoning, you wouldn¡¯t have been able to grasp it. That is why, we are here.

    Also, we have a side task. To create a training center for your prodigies.¡±

    ¡°Training centers?¡±

    ¡°Yes. Your alliance and the sr sect are indeed providing very talented people, but they are too rough around the edges and it is taking a lot of time to make them into refined soldiers that could make some real contributions.

    So, we are going to build a training centre that will let you train your talents at a very young age in the most sophisticated of methods carefully.

    .....

    You can see the qualitative changes of your faction members from the day 1.

    Trust me, you guys wouldn¡¯t even be able to imagine the first thing about this training centre and the benefits it will bring.¡±

    Sam said matter of factly.

    The faction leaders¡¯ thoughts are now in chaos. They exchanged a nce and understood each other intentions. If whatever Sam said is true, then they really lucked out and they are really willing to believe what he said as truth.

    But no matter what they have to discuss things before they make a decision.

    One of the faction leaders stood up and said.

    ¡°We would need to discuss this more. I hope you guys can stay here for a while before wee to a conclusion on the matter.¡±

    With that, Sam and the yers were escorted to a specially prepared mansion.

    In that mansion, there is no one else except the yers. But there is one Divine ne Pretranscendence cultivator keeping an eye on them.

    Only after everyone left them alone, did yers heave a sigh of relief.

    ¡°Quick thinking, dude. Thank you.¡±

    Akhil said as he took out a wine jar and started chugging it.

    Arkiv also gave Sam a thumbs up.

    Noah and Kumar are also grateful, but they are extremely nervous. Even Donner expressed his gratitude.

    Dayus looked at Sam in a ugly manner. If it was any other yer, he might have thanked them too, but it is Sam who saved him. It left a sour taste in his mouth.

    ¡°You dragged us into this, you better have a way to see this to the end.¡±

    Sam looked at him coldly and said.

    ¡°Listen you stupid head, I could have escaped this ce easily. I have two bloodline arts that could have just brought me out of that ce before those faction leaders could even react.

    The only reason I had chosen this roundabout way is that you guys are all with me.

    So, shut the fuck up unless I tell you to open your mouth.¡±

    Dayus gritted his teeth and looked at him begrudgingly.

    Sam looked at the rest of the yers and said.

    ¡°First of all, Noah and I are going to act as the personnel responsible for fighting against the vine. The n is to show them a blueprint of a formation that is made of specially gically modified trees that could devour these vines and grow.

    Not only will they grow, but they will also give out some fruits that would benefit the cultivation of these cultivators.

    The more energy absorbed by a tree the higher the level of fruit it will bear.

    The rest of you are going to be in charge of the training center that I talked about.¡±

    ¡°Why the fuck are we doing all of this? Your bluff worked, can¡¯t you think of a way to bluff yourself away from them? As long as we reach that location, it would be fine, right?¡±

    Akhil asked in frustration.

    ¡°It is a bit moreplicated than that. We need to make them believe if we really want to get out of this ce and without showing some results, we wouldn¡¯t be able to do it.

    As for that location you mentioned, it is actually at the end of this continent and everything past that is an ocean which after we cross will reach another continent.

    From the memories of a Divine ne cultivator I killed in thepetition, the other continent past the sea is hostile territory. If we directly try to bluff our way there, we would easily get caught. They are already suspicious of us, if they suspect that we came from an enemy continent, we are screwed.¡±

    ¡°But if we do everything you told us to do right now, wouldn¡¯t it waste a lot of time?¡±

    ¡°Time is the least of our concerns right now, we don¡¯t really have any time limit on our current tasks. We will just die by the thoughts of those people. We cannot act rashly.¡±

    While Sam and the yers are discussing, the faction leaders also discuss among themselves.

    ¡°What do you guys think? Are they telling the truth?¡±

    ¡°We don¡¯t know that. I still have my doubts. If Zeus really wanted to send help and assumed that we really can¡¯t understand the methods, just like that guy said, he could have just sent them normally.

    Clearly, they can hack into our system, so there is no way they couldn¡¯t have just sent them to our main door.¡±

    ¡°Even I have doubts about it. Why couldn¡¯t he have just sent them directly to our main gate and then just sent the message through the statues? It would have been much easier.¡±

    ¡°Why don¡¯t we just do the statue summoning and ask Zeus himself?¡±

    One of them suggested.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know, we already tried to do the statue summoning before thepetition, but Zeus didn¡¯t respond for some reason. But I guess we can try once again.¡±

    The faction leaders agreed and went to the nearest temple of Zeus to perform the ritual so that they couldmunicate with him.

    But no matter how much they tried, they were unable to contact Zeus.

    Sam also wished that it wouldn¡¯t happen. He is really worried that if Zeus out of his pettiness, revealed the n, then they would be caught.

    If it really happens, then they would be in some real trouble.

    While in the mansion, Sam tried all kinds of things. He tried to put the yers in one of his divine dimension fragments so that he could spatial transference and get away.

    But it didn¡¯t work.

    The rules of the game seemed to have blocked that choice.

    He cannot use his dimensional drifter, he cannot use spatial transference through the divine dimension fragment.

    Then he thought about a few more things.

    They could build a one-sided spatial gate to the location and escape. But currently, they are inplete observation.

    Sam used sound-canceling formations to make sure that they didn¡¯t hear anything, but they are still seeing everything.

    It would be difficult and they need to find a way to sneakily make it.

    Sam wanted to just make some spatial transference scroll that is locked onto an exact coordinate location. This seemed like a much more feasible idea, so he felt like he might be able to do this.

    But even for that, he might need some privacy and some information on the spatial coordinates.

    As he is brainstorming to think of a way out, a person came and informed them.

    ¡°Faction leaders are calling you. Please follow me.¡±

    Sam and the yers went there and soon they are in a hall in front of all the faction leaders.

    ¡°We tried to contact Zeus, but are unable to contact him through the statue ritual. Can you guys tell me why that is?¡±

    Sam is a bit surprised but also relieved by this. If this is true, then he can actually use this to bullshit a bit more and escape the situation once again.

    Sam frowned and acted as if he is thinking something.

    ¡°Can I perform the ritual once?¡±

    Sam asked and the faction leaders were a bit surprised, they expected many answers from Sam, but this is not something they expected.

    ¡°Why?¡±

    ¡°There might be a possibility on why you were unable to contact him, but I can only confirm after I perform a special ritual.¡±

    Faction leaders exchanged a nce and let Sam do it.

    Sam went in and performed a ritual. It is indeed different from the one they used to do. But actually, it is not exactly a special ritual. Instead, it is a ritual done by some other force that worshipped Zeus.

    There is indeed no reaction from Zeus and Sam felt relieved.

 Chapter 1834 - 1834 Obstacles

    1834 Obstacles

    Sam looked at the faction leaders with a very solemn face.

    The faction leaders felt like something is wrong and one of them couldn¡¯t hold it and asked straight out.

    ¡°What happened?¡±

    ¡°God¡¯s interference. Another god is interfering with the statue summoning ritual. Zeus cannot talk to you for a while. It seems like the target on your backs is bigger than I thought.

    Maybe this can also be considered as the testament to the Seven Star alliance¡¯s strength and soldiers.¡±

    Sam did not miss the chance to gas in some false praises here and there. The faction leaders felt their hearts run cold, but they all stood straight and proudly at the same time.

    They really bought into all the crap that Sam said about them being excellent. One thing about the cultivators particrly the ones in the authority over arge territory is that they are a bunch of people that believed in themselves to the point that it¡¯s almost a joke.

    No, not almost. It is a joke. They are so full of themselves that they start to believe their own crap about being invincible within their territory and since someone is praising them within their territory and about how they are so powerful in producing people for their Gods¡¯ army, they are so full of it.

    The more Sam spoke to them, the more they believed him.

    .....

    After some more discussion, they finally agreed to let Sam build the formation and the training center.

    As soon as the agreement was made, Sam directly asked for one thing.

    ¡°I want the map of all of your territory. I need the terrain details, the elemental energy concentrations, the locations of the mines and their veins, the vegetation details, distance from the sea. I need all the details.

    I am not just going to build one formation, it will be many, and no matter from which part the other party might invade you, you will be able to repel them, absorb the energy the vines collected and make fruits, and create a pretty good resource for you and your proteges.

    The training center will be handled by some of the other guys on my team.

    We are going to build seven training centers in seven different locations. Basically one for each star and each training center specializes in a different aspect.

    This is to make sure that all of you are codependent on each other and no one just hoards the best part.¡±

    The faction leaders are a bit reluctant to give out so much sensitive information about their own territories, but after Sam showed some sample design blueprints, they are stunned. He even showed them some virtual projections and they were convinced more and more.

    That day, by evening not only was Sam supplied with all of the details that are needed, but he was also even introduced to a bunch of youngsters and mid-level officials of different factions.

    He was told that they are arranged to help him, but Sam knew that it is otherwise. All these people are targeting him and the other yers with different agendas.

    The youngsters are sent to strike friendships and romantic rtionships, the mid-level officials are sent to suck up and join forces and curry favor.

    They are all trying to get something out of them.

    And Sam let them y around like that.

    That night within the mansion all the pestering flies have left. Samid out a map and marked a spot.

    ¡°From my estimation, this is the spot that we need to be at.¡±

    The mark is actually in the middle of the ocean, not at the border like they expected it to be.

    ¡°We don¡¯t exactly what is there, but there must be some kind ofnd mass there that is not mapped or there might even be a temporaryndmass there.

    But we will find out once we get near there. But the problem is all the faction leaders are kind of against us going there. In fact, it wouldn¡¯t even be considered as the territory of these n leaders. It should be considered as some external part of the sr sect.

    The people guarding the coast are not just from the Seven Star Alliance, there are some from the Sr sect and some auxiliary or backup personnel from the other alliances.

    The ocean breeds a lot of amphibious creatures that are being used as a way to target the Sr sect¡¯s territory. The enemies on the other side, drive these creatures here like crazy and they try to invade thisnd.

    Apart from that, the enemies also leave a lot of fugitives and criminals from their side on thisnd. In fact, those criminals thatmit the most heinous crimes, like performing rituals with some very dark techniques are particrly given some power boots before they are sent on to thisnd.

    They don¡¯t know how they make their way, but they always end up here somehow. There are indeed some space gates connected to the other continent, but they are strictly controlled and there are some measures the sr sect has taken that put Sam in a bit of trouble.

    ¡°The major problem for us is that we might not be able to use any sort of spatial transference to go to that area.

    The only ce where the spatial transference between thatnd and thisnd is the coastal area. Apart from that, the rest of the areas arepletely blocked.¡±

    The yers were stunned.

    ¡°The whole of Sr Sect¡¯s territory is as big as a continent, how can the sect keep such a tight leash?¡±

    ¡°Well, it is pretty simple. Zeus is the fucking reason for that. He and the Olympians granted these people¡¯s wish by giving out some special towers.¡±

    Sam said as he pointed at a specific tower in a certain direction. It is actually the same square where they appeared as soon as they were delivered out of thepetition.

    There is a grey tower which Sam initially ignored because he didn¡¯t feel anything special about it. But he never knew that it is so good that even his senses weren¡¯t able to catch it.

    ¡°That tower right there is actually nted all over the continent. Not just in the sr sect, but in the other sect territories as well.

    As well as spatial transportation by any means is done in the direction of the continent no matter how long or short, the nearest tower will get a ping.

    They will immediately get the coordinates from where the transfer is happening and where to as well. It will even invade the spatial coordinates and get the spiritual signature of that person and mark it on the tower.

    The news will reach the sect in charge in seconds and they have a station set up to get all the details the station can actually provide a transference scroll set to travel to and fro to the destination location.

    If I use my spatial blink to move more than a mile from this ce, the tower is going to get a ping a guy from the sr sect will be on my ass.

    The same thing happens when someonees from the direction of the continent to this continent.

    Once some transfer happens on this side of the coast, things will go sideways once again.

    Even the criminals that are sent into the continent are sent into the forests of the coast and the forces at the coast must try and find them before they just invade into the cities.

    They even fail a lot.

    Anyway, that¡¯s beside the point, the thing that is stopping me the most is that we are not exactly sure of the coordinates of the ce that we need to be at and we are also not sure that we would be safe as soon as we reach it.

    It will be a tough call. Even if I make a transference scroll, a guy way more powerful than us will follow us there. So, I suggest we go there manually.¡±

    ¡°How are we going to do that? From theyout they have given us, we are permitted to move within those limits, the closest we can get to that point is almost fifty miles away from the coastal city, one of the defending bases of the coastline.

    From there, the coast is another thirty miles or so and we don¡¯t know how far the location is from there.

    And these people are going to be on our tale throughout the construction. How are we going to do this?¡±

    Noah looked as she marked a spot.

    ¡°Well, I thought about that. Since the gods are ying this game, I kind of want to take advantage of this. I am going to stir up a lot of trouble in this area and then find us a proper way to escape.¡±

    Akhil stood up and said.

    ¡°Just tell me what is the fucking n? What is with all the exnation?¡±

 Chapter 1835 Measures

    Chapter 1835 Measures

    The next day morning, Sam and Noah moved as nned. They started establishing some special formations in all the areas that they are allowed in.

    As long as the area has some surrounding forests, they didn''t hesitate andid down the formations. As for designing, Sam didn''t need much effort. He already has the basic design from the vine in the Undead realm.

    He just needed to reprogram the gics so that they would consume other elemental energies as well as life.

    It is not much of a problem as for the tree design that would absorb these vinester, Noah would do it.

    They started nting the formations as well as seeds.

    Sam used his puppets to the extreme. Particrly the small insect puppets that are made to spy and made them nt the vine seeds everywhere possible. Of course, they are still unable to do much near the coastal city, but for the next three days, they covered all the territory they could.

    In these three days the trees grew bit by bit and soon they are just like any other normal trees, but they are all part of a formation.

    As if on cue, on the fourth day, one of the alliance members managed to ''find'' one of the vines deep in the forest.

    They found it based on the hints Sam gave about their appearance.

    And thus the people had to hold a meeting to discuss it.

    "Sam, what you said was true. The vines are there, what should we do now?"

    "Don''t worry about it, the formations are already in ce. The primary force to resist is ready, we only need wait while improving bit by bit, so that we can face it with much more vigor.

    I suggest we fuel the trees a bit more before theye into contact with the vines directly. That way, we would be able to gain most out of it. The fuel will also be converted into the fruits that you could useter."

    Sam just kept on bullshitting and the faction leaders started doing whatever they want at this moment.

    Meanwhile the remaining yers are guiding the tower constructions in the alliance strongholds. On the fourth day the first tower was constructed.

    The faction leaders were very skeptical about the tower because the construction was so fast. But it was done so fast, because the formation ns and the construction design and even some techniques were given by Sam.

    He gave them away easily, because they are very basic in his territory.

    In deste and other areas that Dusk was in, these towers wouldn''t even make the cut to be used as trial constructions for practice.

    But for these people, the tower functions are extremely novel and new. They also appeared efficient.

    The first tower is actually based on some simtionbat experience.

    There are a bunch of puppets in each floor and each floor simtes a level of difficulty with the puppets and the environment. It is a very basic design. The only tough thing about it is since it is used to increase thebat experience, the cultivators will have their cultivation restricted to the mortal level and the puppets fill fight them at the same.

    They will have to fight puppets with skills rather than power and the difficulty of the puppets increased based on the attacks they can deliver at these people.

    The people tried the tower and they were stunned by what they say. They couldn''t believe what these puppets can do and then they also realized something else.

    The puppets are learning from these people and they are trying to replicate some of the moves, particrly in the closebat.

    After trying that out, the expectations for the next tower were on the rise.

    Three more days passed and Sam finally started making the next moves on the n, the seven "This is indeed a great resource. Too bad, this is going to be finite though. The vines cannot keeping for this.

    towers were constructed and the seven star alliance is drunk on all the new things they obtained. The vines are upying the forests.

    The beasts are dying rapidly and a lot of forest area has turned into deand.

    The vines started spreading around.

    But soon their advance stopped as soon as they entered the formation area of the seven star alliance.

    The trees grew even more.

    At this moment, one of the faction leaders of the seven star alliance is looking at one of the trees that grew. Their eyes arepletely stuck on the tree.

    The vines that spread across hundreds of meters are actually being devoured by the tree. There are a bunch of wooden humanoids that are made of wood but are spitting fire everywhere. These mes are also being devoured by the tree.

    As the absorption rate increased, the tree is constantly changing its shape and form. Soon, the fruits appeared.

    Just when the tree is full of fruits, the faction leader couldn''t help himself and walked towards it. Even though the surroundings are full of vines, he just walked in. The vines didn''t even touch him.

    He plucked a fruit and bit into it.

    Pure fire elemental energy surged into his body. He hasn''t seen such pure energy outside of someone''s body.

    Luckily, he is also a fire element user and the fruit is beneficial to him. Even though the benefits are not too significant, he still absorbed the energy as it came. He felt so refreshed.

    "This is indeed a great resource. Too bad, this is going to be finite though. The vines cannot keeping for this.

    But from the looks of it, we might be able to change the input into the trees and get different outputs. I should talk to Sam and Noah."

    He spoke to himself and collected all the trees before he left.

    The tree kept on absorbing the energy.

    Simr situations are happening all over seven star alliance territory.

    Meanwhile, back in yers'' residence.

    "So, we created some very good resources and training environments for these guys. What is next?"

    Arkiv asked sarcastically.

    "I am going to make the next move, you guys are not needed for it. After that we just need to wait for a short while and we can escape."

    "What is going to be?"

    "I am going create some decoys. I am going to use the oldest trick in the book to the point that it would almost seemughable."

    For the next few days, Sam just kept on creating some spatial transference scroll.

    Meanwhile, the news of the gains the seven star alliance gained spread all over the sr sect area.

    The people of the sr sect obviously had some spies that sent the news over and soon the people from the sr sect as soon as they realized that the results are good.

    Now that they knew a tasty and juicy pie hasnded in one of their subordinate territories, they wanted a piece of it. So, the news of the sr sect officialsing to the town has arrived.

    The faction leaders fell into a pickle and finally as if their behinds were set on fire, they all came back to meet Sam and the yers.

    "The sr sect head already got the news about. He is sending some officials in the name of some kind of inspection, but from what we know, he is definitely sending them to get the benefits.

    He wouldn''t be very pleased about the fact that Zeus favors seven star alliance and not the Sr sect.

    We think that you might be in trouble if they try to seek you out."

    "I can understand. Tell them just this.

    We are not here to cater to Sr sect''s needs and there is no way, we are going to work for him for either money or force.

    If he tries to do something to us and try to force us out to do something, then we would be taking some measures that might not work well for you guys and escape."

    The faction leaders frowned.

    They don''t know what Sam meant by Drastic measures, but they really have a bad feeling about this.

 Chapter 1836 Envoy

    Chapter 1836 Envoy

    After the meeting with the faction leaders, Sam directly went back to the mansion and called over all the yers.

    He looked at the youngsters and elders that are following the yers and shook his head.

    "All of you, get out of here please."

    He directly said it to their face. His voice is also cold and the elders and the youngsters were stunned. All these days, Sam was very friendly. Even though he was serious when working, he always talked to them with a smile and even tolerated a lot of their antics with a diplomatic smile.

    This is the first time they have seen him act like this

    Of course, some young masters didn''t like this. Many of them are jealous of Sam and the other yers, particrly the people who are on the same level as him.

    But they know, the yers outss them by several leagues in a properbat situation.

    So, they couldn''t do much.

    "What do you mean by that?"

    One of them asked with a frown.

    Sam looked at him coldly and said.

    "Whatever it is, your faction leaders will exin it to you. Now Please get out, I have things to discuss with my team members and it is not your business. I can appreciate some privacy."

    The youngsters were about to rebuke when one of the elders stopped them.

    "I don''t know what happened, but please let us know if we can help you anyway. Now, we will leave you to your discussion."

    The elder acted sensible and took everyone away.

    After they left, Sam boldly used a concealment formation on the whole mansion,pletely blocking the Divine ne Pre-transcendence cultivator''s surveince.

    The yers are a bit startled by this and they only felt a little bit at ease, when Sam finally smiled after using the concealment formation.

    "Seems like your n went well."

    Arkiv said with a sigh of relief.

    "Yes. I sessfully attracted some greedy heads from the Sr Sect. Now they are going toe here and they are going to be our way out of here."

    "How is that?"

    "Before I exin, I need all of you guys to trap a bit of your spiritual energy and your spiritual signature in these formation discs. Exhaust yourself of all your energy. Fill as many discs as possible."

    He threw a few spatial rings to the yers that are filled with formation discs.

    "All of our energy? You do know how much energy we hold right? That would be hundreds if not thousands of these formation discs."

    Dayus said in displeasure. It would take a lot of time to expel that much energy in such small quantities. And they have to fill it inside the formation discs and seal it with their spiritual signature. It is little more than annoying grunt work.

    He is not really willing to do that.

    "Do you know how many inscriptions I have had to do in secret in the past few days? I would have loved to see them kill your ass right here, but I had to save you and do that grunt work for you also.

    So, if I tell you to fill in these formation discs, then you only have to say ''Is that enough?'' Or, I can just kill you right here and thenter use my brain to find a usible reason for your death to fool everyone else.

    How about that? Do you want to try that approach? Just like you wished, you wouldn''t need to do this grunt work at all."

    Dayus grimaced as soon as Sam finished speaking.

    He just took the spatial ring and left to start the process.

    Meanwhile, Sam got started on working on some puppets. These puppets are not powerful. They are of very basic humanoid structure and they are made of what Sam could only consider as scrap metal and mechanism.

    And the whole puppet is actually being made automatically by his production unit.

    As the puppets came out one by one, he started inscribing something onto them and stored them back in his storage.

    While they are working on this, the people from the Sr sect arrived and the seven-star alliance faction leaders held a meeting.

    "Envoy Fog, why did sr sect send such a grand entourage with you? One might misunderstand that you are here to purge uspletely."

    One of the faction leaders said half-jokingly.

    Envoy only smirked at this. He didn''t even deny it and just looked at the Envoy as if he is saying he would do that if necessary.

    After some awkward silence, he finally spoke.

    "I heard that the Seven Star alliance got some good things? Shouldn''t you be sharing that with the Sr sect? After all the benefits you have gained over the years from the alliances you shared with the sr sect and its other subsidiaries, don''t you think keeping these benefits to yourself appears a bit selfish?"

    He directly opened with such a statement.

    The faction leaders were dumbfounded. They didn''t expect such a direct verbal attack. They thought that they would have some back and forth, but there isn''t.

    The sr sect already saw the results and they decided to go all out.

    In the meeting room, the Envoy took the head chair and spoke.

    "I would like to meet the seven people that you have with you right now. We would be investigating their origin and taking over their custody. We need to understand their intentions to give out all these things. This is way too suspicious."

    The faction leaders frowned.

    "Envoy Fog, with all due respect to you, these people are messengers of the god Zeus, it is not exactly a good thing to test his grace like this."

    "They said they are people sent by gods and you bought it? I am not going to buy it and so is the sect head, we are going to take them away whether you like it or not. All the things that they have created should be put on hold and shouldn''t be used.

    The experts that came with me will evaluate them before allowing you to use them.

    The seven-star alliance is a big part of the sr sect and are loyal follower. We cannot let anything happen to you guys. So, bear with it. If the resultse out alright, not only will the seven-star alliance get to use them, they will also give a higher quotapared to the rest of the sr sect and subsidiary alliances."

 Chapter 1837 Disappear

    Chapter 1837 Disappear

    Envoy Fog didn''t even give the faction leaders any chance to respond.

    He just gave an ultimatum and his subordinates even started to move. The faction leaders wanted to resist and if it was any other Envoy, they would have actually done it. But the one who came is Fog.

    They could only curse under their breaths and just hope that things wouldn''t go too far.

    They still remembered Sam''s words.

    In their eyes, Sam and his team practically created miracles, so they truly believed that Sam would take drastic measures when these people made their move.

    As the sr sect members moved to Sam''s mansion following the Envoy, Sam already got the message of the verdict.

    Akhil held out amunication token and they can listen to one of the youngdies of the faction delivering the news.

    Sam looked at Akhil and said.

    "You are fast."

    "I am good too," Akhil replied. In just a few days he has already made one of the girls fall head over heels for him. And actually, that girl is the most cunning of them all. She was most ambitious and approached Akhil on her ord since he looked like a brute.

    Akhil sensed this and in just a week or so, she forgot all about her ambitions. She just wants to be with Akhil now.

    She directly gave the news without the need to ask.

    Sam shook his head with a smile. He immediately took action.

    He took out seven scrolls from his storage. He gave one each to the yers.

    "When I give amand, the scroll will glow. You can just use the scroll at that time. We will appear in the forest near the coast. We will all be appearing at the same spot. Don''t fucking move around until all seven of us are gathered together."

    Sam looked at Dayus as he said thest sentence. Everyone understood who it was directed at, without Sam saying it. Dayus is the only guy who is likely to abandon the n midway if he saw a way out for himself.

    Dayus didn''t reply and just ignored it.

    Sam waved his hand at this moment and the whole mansion is filled with humanoid puppets. He sat down cross-legged on the floor and closed his eyes. His spiritual energy spread all over the mansion and enveloped all the puppets.

    At this moment, a bunch of scrolls flew out of his storage towards the puppets. Every puppet is attached with one scroll each.

    After the instation is done, he walked out of the mansion to stand at the entrance.

    Soon, he saw some peopleing towards the mansion. They had apletely different attirepared to the seven-star alliance and they are being followed by the seven-star alliance faction leaders.

    Envoy Fog looked at Sam with a smile.

    "Are you the people God Zeus sent to help the Sr sect?"

    Sam looked at him calmly and spoke.

    "Not the Sr Sect, only seven-star alliance."

    "You must have been mistaken, young sir. Seven Star Alliance is part of the Sr Sect. Whatever we have gained is partly theirs and whatever they have gained is ours. So, you are here to help the Sr Sect and I think it would be much more beneficial and efficient for your mission if you can follow me back to the Sr Sect.

    Our sect leader would like to talk to you and you can perform your miracles much better under him."

    "Under him? Even the Demi-Gods that work directly under Zeus don''t dare tomand me like this and you dare say that I should work under your sect leader? Who do you think you are?"

    Sam''s tone is arrogant beyond belief as if he had suffered the greatest humiliation known to man.

    Envoy Fog frowned.

    He didn''t like Sam''s attitude, but he didn''t show it in his words.

    "I am sorry, you seemed to have misunderstood my intention. I meant to say that the sr sect leader would be a better person to provide you with direction when you are in his territory. Your goal to enhance the defenses as well as the training of the sr sect members will be much more efficient and fulfilling if you do so."

    "I already told you numerous times, I only came here for the Seven Star alliance and the Sr sect cannot interfere in my or my team''s affairs. Don''t you understand that?"

    Envoy fog frowned.

    He looked at Sam and said.

    "Young sir, I understand that you are unable to contact god Zeus and were unable to confirm properly, making the mistake of staying in the Seven Star alliance. If you continue on like this, you will be punished if you go back.

    I am trying to help you, so please don''t me me for what I am about to do next."

    His aura raised and Sam frowned.

    He raised his hand and dropped a recording crystal on the ground before disappearing from the spot.

    He reappeared in the mansion and at the same time all the puppets started glowing.

    The puppets disappeared and the exact moment the scrolls in yers'' hands started glowing. Sam disappeared along with the rest of the yers and puppets.

    At this moment, Envoy Fog was stunned.

    He could sense the massive spatial fluctuations inside the mansion and he coldly sneered.

    "Do you think you can escape us that easily?"

    He immediately ran to the tower and noticed that it indeed got pinged. He took amunication device and contacted someone from the Sr Sect.

    "You must have already gotten the ping about the spatial transfer just now. Just send me the coordinates and the transference scrolls needed, I am chasing them."

    Meanwhile, on the other side of the call.

    A young man is sitting inside arge grey tower.

    There is a glowing virtual screen in front of him and he stared at it with his mouth so wide open as if he watching a miracle.

    "E¡­. Elder Fog, I am sorry. I don''t think I can do that."

    "What are you talking about?" Envoy Fog said in a disgruntled tone.

    "Th.. There are multiple pings at the same time. I don''t know which location I should send you."

    "Multiple pings? All from the Seven Star alliance?"

    "Yes sir."

    "They must have split up. Just send me one of them and send the remaining to other Elders. Tell them to capture these people immediately."

    "I don''t think it is possible to send an elder to every location sir."

    "Did you lose your mind? Why can''t you talk properly?"

    "I am sorry sir. There are thousands of pings. All the personnel in charge of keeping the spatial transference watch have been alerted. Even the members of different alliances have been automatically alerted by the system and they all made a move.

    All the sect personnel already got pings by the system directly, they are receiving the transference scrolls as we speak.

    At this moment, the sect is empty. We even have to use the inner disciples of the sect to verify this. The sect master is alerted and right now the system is issuing a possible rebellion warning. You must have also gotten a ping.

    Since you are in the seven-star alliance, it must be a possible investigation mission."

    As soon as he spoke, Envoy Fog felt his token vibrate. He is dumbfounded.

    Meanwhile, the youngster in the tower looked at the screen without so much as blinking. There are thousands of dots on the screen and they are showing locations all over the continent.

    There is a drawback to the system given to keep an eye on spatial transference. The system acts autonomously and it sends the transference scroll directly to the people of the sect or the nearest authority that could verify the information.

    So, all the sect members received the mission to investigate and before the sect leader could identify the abnormality, most of the people already moved.

    Meanwhile back at the Seven-star alliance, one of the elders came running to the faction leaders and Envoy Fog.

    "Sir, it seems like Sam''s team have only traveled to the next town. One of the elders that went there to check the ping reported seeing them. He is chasing them as speak."

    Envoy Fog asked for more details and took off flying at his maximum speed.

    When he arrived at the location he is dumbfounded by what he saw.

    Sam and his team are just captured by the Elder, but as soon as Envoy arrived¡­

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Seven simultaneous explosions urred.

    They watched as some metallic parts flew across their faces. They caught seven puppets.

    Envoy Fog''s shock only intensified. Not only were the puppets exactly like the seven yers, even their spiritual signatures are the same.

    It is extremely difficult for anyone to notice that they are not cultivators unless they met them in close contact.

    "Fuck."

    Fog cursed under his breath as he looked at the metal scraps.

    Not just him, Sam''s reaction was derived from several sr sect members and alliance members that day.

 Chapter 1838 - 1838 War Game

    1838 War Game

    At this moment, in the forest near the coastal area.

    A lot of people are moving around as they scavenged through the forest. They are people from the seven star alliance, sr sect and other alliances under them. The whole forest is a mess.

    One of the elders of the seven star alliance is also there and he seemed to have spotted something in the forest.

    ¡°There is a group here. I am going in to check.¡±

    He yelled at his group before he jumped off of a tree. He looked at the yers in front of him. He is very familiar with the faces of Sam and the rest of the yers by now and he looked at the same faces in front of him.

    But he is not sure if they are real. He just aimed his hand and threw out a wind de.

    The de cleanly cut through the seven yers and their faces and bodies disappeared. In their ce there are a bunch of scrappy metal puppets that are destroyed by the windde.

    ¡°Another false set.¡±

    He yelled in frustration.

    .....

    The reason there are so many people in this forest is because, thergest chunk of the puppets that Sam sent actuallynded in various areas of the coastal forest. They not onlynd here, they even spread far and wide as if they are really escaping.

    Just this elder actually came across over half a dozen sets of puppets.

    He just left.

    But as soon as he left to a fair distance away, a faint shadow seemed to have came out of one of the puppets and it zoomed towards the other six puppets as if it is collecting something.

    Soon, the shadow disappeared from there and reappeared in a different location. Out of thin air, a new set of seven puppets appeared and they all moved towards a certain direction in unison.

    They direction they are going is actually, the coast, the sea.

    On their way, another elder found the puppets and destroyed them. After he left, the same thing repeated again. Another set of puppet emerged and all of them started walking towards the coast.

    This repeated until they reached the sea.

    After they arrived at the sea, the puppets disappeared and in their ce, all seven yers appeared.

    Sam looked at the rest of the yers and smiled.

    ¡°I think we can handle the rest from here, right?¡±

    The rest of the yers couldn¡¯t help but smile. They really managed to get here without anyone noticing. There is no one in the surroundings because this is one area that didn¡¯t have any ping.

    If Sam was in the sect leaders¡¯ ce he would have definitely suspected why this one area didn¡¯t have any ping.

    But these people didn¡¯t because they are sure that Sam and the yers wouldn¡¯t just go to the enemynd, even if they wanted to get away.

    He took advantage of that and arrived here.

    ¡°From now on, you are all by yourself. I am going to take my leave.¡±

    Sam said and whipped out Harbinger before he soared towards the sea.

    The yers all looked at each other.

    ¡°Bye guys, see you at the location.¡±

    Akhil said as he waved hisnd, arge turtle appeared out of nowhere and appeared in the sea. The turtle is sorge that Akhilfortably sat in its mouth and it swam away in the water.

    The rest of the yers started taking out their own means and made their move.

    Meanwhile, within the coastal forest, something that no one noticed is happening. From the scrap metals of these puppets, dozens of seeds fell all over.

    The seeds spread almost the entire forest because of the explosions and they quickly seeped into the soil as if they have a consciousness of their own.

    And within a few minutes, they started sprouting and they started sucking the vitality from their surroundings. Until they grew their roots properly, everything within a few meters around them became barren.

    Then, the roots dug deeper and deeper as they started absorbing the vitality from the soil. But the spread didn¡¯t stop.

    The roots kept on moving and if one noticed they would understand that the direction they are moving is towards the sea.

    At the same time, the vine itself is not staying idle. It is growing at an incredibly fast pace as it mixed with the vegetation and soon it started devouring the beasts, big and small within the surroundings.

    The same thing is happening everywhere in the forest silently.

    But none of them noticed.

    Meanwhile, Sam felt the cool ocean breeze hit his face as he made his way to the location. He is not at this maximum speed, but he is still faster than everyone of the yers.

    After a few minutes, he arrived at the location. But he was surprised to see that there is nothing there. It is just the sea. The vast blue sea. There is nondmass in the sight. Even with his enhanced sight of an Astral ne cultivator, he couldn¡¯t see anything in the horizon.

    As he waited there, soon Akhil arrived. He stood on top of the turtle and looked at Sam.

    ¡°What is this? Why is there nothing here?¡±

    Sam just shrugged and shook his head. Even he doesn¡¯t know.

    They waited and soon the remaining yers arrived one by one. After everyone arrived as if they triggered something, the water started rumbling.

    A huge vortex appeared and soon andmass the size of a house started ascending from underneath the water.

    Sam is surprised. Because, when he arrived here, he obviously checked under the water. He didn¡¯t ignore such a deliberate spot. But he didn¡¯t sense anything at all.

    But thisndmass appeared out of nowhere.

    After examining the mass from the air, Samnded on it first.

    The other yers followed.

    After they allnded, there a voice appeared in their heads.

    ¡°Congrattions on clearing the Hell training. You are now going to be moved to the next round of this game.

    Now you are going to y the game of war. All the best.¡±

    As the voice rung in their heads, they disappeared from thendmass. It¡¯s a space gate and it took them away from there.

    The next moment, all the yers appeared in what seemed like arge room dungeon. The stone walls are full of moss as water dripped down. They all felt a sense of serenity in there.

    The room is massive. So massive, that Sam is sure that a small size vige could be put in there.

    But that massive room is also not something that attracted their gaze. It was the water fall on the other side of the room and what the water is falling on that captured their attention.

    There is a massive statue of Kartikeya on that side.

    And the water is falling on it with such force that they could feel the vibrations from that far even without their senses enhanced.

    The water looked like it is trying to challenge the statues existence there.

    As for the statue itself, it looked like it could take on not just the waterfall but everything else in this world. There is a sense of rigid stability being disyed.

    As they got lost in the beauty of the scene, the time froze and Kartikeya¡¯s projection appeared out of nowhere and stood in front of them with a smile.

    ¡°Hello kids. Long time no see.

    Congrattions on your Hell training. Not a lot of people can endure ande out on top. But you did. Good job.¡±

    The yers looked at him in surprise, but it is also kind of expected after they saw the statue.

    Kartikeya didn¡¯t mind their silence and spoke with a smile on his face.

    ¡°You must have already heard the announcement saying, the next round of the game is a war game.

    You are going to participate in four different types of war and your participation and achievements in these wars will allow you to advance further.

    From today onwards, you can consider your battle training as officially over. At least the training provided from the gods.

    And throughout the war game, your movements are not restricted and there are no power restrictions and there are no travel restrictions and the final goal of this war game round is this.¡±

    He waved his hand and a bunch of projections appeared. Each one has a mountain range and there are a total of twelve.

    ¡°These are the Demi God academies. You might not know anything about them now. But everyone within the Divine ne would dream of attending there. You will no more details in the future.

    These Demi God academies are established by the twelve gods that are part of the game. You can only be a student in one academy, but you can receive honorary status from the other academies if you wished to do so.

    Anyway, you will know when you get there. They are still far away.

    Now let¡¯s talk about the immediate challenge you have to face.¡±

 Chapter 1839 - 1839 To the City

    1839 To the City

    Kartikeya waved his hands.

    A different screen appeared in front of the yers. It looked like a map. But not any map, it is a realm map and some dots are blinking at different locations in differents.

    ¡°The realm you are currently in actually has believers of different gods and they all fight. In fact, even believers of the same religion but different gods, fight each other frequently.

    It is not an exaggeration to say that this is one of the most chaotic realms out there.

    And the blinking dots on the map are all locations that are currently in the middle of a war. And there might be a new war breaking out every day.

    So, your current task is, be a part of these wars. It doesn¡¯t matter if you are going to fight in just one war or multiple wars, but in this realm you have to be part of war and you need to achieve a certain set of achievements and fulfil some conditions to go to the next level of the war game.

    First condition is that you need to be a proper soldier of at least one of the forces. Not a mercenary for hire and certainly not some hidden helper. You need to be a proper soldier at least in one instance.

    Second condition is that you need to fight alongside some troops as a soldier under some leadership authority and receive acknowledge of at least 1500 people that consider you a genuine ally. They should be confident enough in you to just give you a task and forget about it.

    Third condition is that you need to be receive one of the highest honors from any of the armies that you might be part of. The reward should be given to you by the highest, second highest or the third highest authority of the force you are fighting for.

    .....

    Be sure that Seven star alliance is not considered a separate force in itself, Sr sect is. You have to keep that in mind.

    Fourth Condition, you have to gain approval of your superiors and peers and lead a team that focuses on assassinations. It shouldn¡¯t be a head on confrontation of the battlefield. Rather, it should be covert and critical assassination of targets. You need to carryout at least three.

    Fifth Condition, you have to act as a leader and lead soldiers to upy at least sixty percent of a vassalnd under your enemies.

    Your contribution should be at least fifty percent in the upation.

    Sixth Condition, Kill at least three thousand people with your hands. Using formations and other tricks won¡¯t count. They have to die directly under your attack or your weapon.

    Final condition, your cultivation should not be more than the Middle stage of Divine ne Initiation by the time you are done with all of this.

    You can move amongst the realm and try to target different wars, you can achieve all the contributions at a single ce or you can do it in multiple ces. But all the conditions must be fulfilled.

    Once you finish these tasks, you will be able to move to the next stage of the war game.

    It doesn¡¯t matter if you finish it in one day or if you finish it in one year, you have to finish it there is no restriction of all the yers finishing it.

    You can use all the means under your disposal. No restrictions nothing.

    But if you fail fulfil the conditions or if you break the condition by breaking past the middle stage of Initiation, you will be out of the game and be punished by death.

    Any questions?¡±

    The yers all took a deep breath as they digested the information. It is pretty straightforward. They are now some stray soldiers here. They can pick a side, they fight, they kill, they make a name for themselves and then bounce.

    That is all they have to do.

    ¡°Since there are no questions, you can go ahead. As I said, the first one to finish the conditions will get to go to the next round. That means you will have more time to y in theter rounds. So, be quick about this.¡±

    He disappeared.

    Sam and the yers exchanged a nce. They didn¡¯t expect this development, but they also felt a sense of freedom. During the hell round, they had a really really hard time. But now finally, they have some free reign. They can proceed and approach the task however they want.

    They can even choose the sides.

    Sam looked at them and said.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know about you guys, but I am going to the Dark Sea Sect. They are the direct opponents of the Sr Sect and I don¡¯t like the sr sect just because of their affiliation with Zeus.

    I don¡¯t even care what gods the Dark Sea Sect worships.¡±

    The other yers looked at each other.

    ¡°Since we are done with the task where we needed to work together, we are done here. I would like to make my own decision.¡±

    Dayus said those words and left without so much as a thanks. Sam didn¡¯t really care. He just smiled as he left.

    He has already done everything he needed to do with Dayus.

    ¡°What about you guys?¡±

    ¡°I am not going to be part of this war. From the map, there is another war on the other side of the world. I will go take part in that. Can you hitch me a ride through space gate?¡± Arkiv said directly.

    ¡°Are you sure?¡± Sam asked.

    ¡°Of course. If you are in this war, it would be hard for me to get some contributions. You are going to take a huge chunk of that pie. I am not going topete with you.¡±

    When the remaining yers heard this, they also decided it is not really worth it topete with Sam for a share in the same area.

    So, they immediately made a decision to move away from there.

    Sam offered one way transference scrolls and sent them all away by that evening.

    By night, he is the only one in thatrge room and he looked at massive statue that seemed to have been there just to disrupt the waterfall. The waterfall seemed like it is trying to destroy the statue.

    He disappeared from the spot.

    He reappeared in a forest not far away. The vegetation is thick. So thick, that the sunlight is barelying in.

    He took off on harbinger as he tried to reach the nearby city. It is time to gather some intel and this time, he doesn¡¯t have to hold back. He has all the things at his disposal, all the tricks, all the toys and all the beasts.

 Chapter 1840 - 1840 Bartender

    1840 Bartender

    Sam arrived in the nearest city within twenty minutes.

    He didn¡¯t hide himself and he didn¡¯t hide the harbinger. He came into the city as if he owned it. He didn¡¯t even hide his aura.

    He let his cultivation show off.

    He went to the richest bar there is and sat at the bar counter. He ced a spatial ring on top of it as he asked the bartender.

    ¡°Get me your finest drink and food.¡±

    Everyone looked at him calmly. Even the waiters from other tables froze at his words. The bartender looked at him and asked.

    ¡°Are you sure? You might be new here. But our finest food and drink are not cheap.¡±

    Sam looked at him with a smile.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry. I can afford it.¡±

    .....

    ¡°You must think carefully. It will cost you a mine just for one bottle and one te.¡±

    Sam raised an eyebrow and said.

    ¡°Its fine. I can afford it.¡±

    Sam pointed at the spatial ring.

    Bartender checked the contents inside and he raised an eyebrow in surprise.

    ¡°You sure can.¡±

    He brough the wine and the food after about an hour. Sam tasted it and felt like it is not really that bad, but it is not really worth the hype either. The best thing about is the recovery aspect about it.

    Anyone who is injured will definitely get some massive help from this.

    As he ate, Sam asked some questions to the bartender.

    ¡°So, can you tell me a bit more about the Dark Sea Sect?¡±

    ¡°The Sect? What do you want to know?¡±

    ¡°Anything about the sect is fine.¡±

    ¡°Well, the Dark Sea Sect is basically the ruler of the continent and they have branch offices that handle the administrations in different ces. The area you are currently in is governed by White Sand Coast Branch. I am sure you don¡¯t need me to tell why it is.¡±

    Sam chuckled and replied.

    ¡°Of course, you don¡¯t have to. So, who is in charge of the White Sand Coast. What kind of person is that guy?¡±

    ¡°Well, he is actually considered the next in line to be the sect leader. He is one of the contenders of the sect as far as I know. He is a fair guy. He treats us well, He took over a couple of decades ago and he established a bunch ofws that kind of granted us a rtively safe environment.¡±

    ¡°Really?¡±

    ¡°Yes. In fact, the cities in the White Sand Coast are the safest cities all over the.¡±

    ¡°Seems like you have been all over the.¡±

    ¡°Yeah man, I have been the Three Sun Continent that¡¯s on the other side of the sea. That ce is barbariouspared to this. Then there is the Northern Ice Continent. That is not really open to outsiders.

    Dark Sea Continent, is basically a haven for all kinds of people to prosper. They also open trade routes to others and other realms.¡±

    ¡°That is great to know. Anyway.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, not just that. The person in charge of the White Sand Coast is called Ervin. He has been selected as a soldier of the god and went to serve in God¡¯s divine army. He seemed to have made great achievements there.

    He came back with a lot of resources as his rewards. One of them is actually a system. Like how the Tri Sun continent has the spatial transfer detection system, the White Sand Coast has a system our own. But this is to ensure public safety.

    Every city, town and even a vige, as long as it is considered an official administrative establishment of the Dark Sea Sect, they have a special formation.

    They pick on all the life forms within the formation and if one of them suddenly dies, the rm will be triggered within the guards and the official person in charge¡¯s location. They will be able to identify on what location the life was gone and who are all the people there at that time.

    They also mark the energy signatures that might have caused the deaths.

    The establishment will go on a lockdown immediately and the person in charge has every right to investigate.

    With just this alone, the cities in the White Sand Coast became some of the most peaceful establishments.

    Any dispute anyone has with anyone can be resolved in two ways, one of them to is to take them to a court where the whole trial will be recorded and sent directly to the headquarters of the White Sand Coast, or they can take the dispute to the arena.

    Tickets will be sold for the fights and they can agree on a set of rules and conditions to settle the dispute.

    The revenue collected from these fights arepletely used for development of the city of town they are taking ce in.

    There is even a betting system.¡±

    The bartender went on and on as Sam asked different questions. That night, Sam went to the richest inn and took some rest.

    The next day, he came to the bar once again and ordered another serving before he started talking up with the bartender.

    He is lucky the that bartender knows almost everything about the White Sand Coast¡¯s general situation. The people in charge, the power dynamic, the people that he can and cannot piss off, etc.

    So, Sam slowly started getting the information that he needed. By the end of the second day, he asked a question.

    ¡°I want to talk to Ervin, do you think it is possible?¡±

    The Bartender stopped what he was doing and went into some thought.

    ¡°It will be too hard. It might vary on the requirement though.¡±

    ¡°I need to discuss a coboration with him.¡±

    ¡°That would be nigh impossible. I had a very rich friend who came from a different that came to talk about a coboration with Ervin, but he didn¡¯t even get a proper appointment for a long time.

    Ervin is busy and most of the people that came for a coboration are all trying to mooch off of his resources that he brought from Divine Army.

    There are mostly person deals, so he doesn¡¯t really wee any unsolicited business offers.¡±

    ¡°Then why don¡¯t you solicit me?¡±

    The bartender looked at Sam with an amused expression.

    ¡°What makes you think I can do that?¡±

    ¡°You seem to know an awful lot for a bartender, I just took a wild shot.¡±

    Bartender sighed as he wiped the nonexistent stains on the table.

    ¡°Well, your shot wasn¡¯t that far off. If it is a couple of years ago, I might have a chance to, but not anymore. Anyway, what makes you think I will solicit you even if I can. Even though you are great to talk to, that doesn¡¯t mean, I trust you enough to do that.¡±

    ¡°As I said, it is a wildshot. Anyway, I don¡¯t think I can get a soliciting. Is there any other way to get to talk to him?¡±

    ¡°No, a normal appointment. If you were in Dark Sea Sect headquarters, you might have had a better chance with bribing. The sect members will do anything for money and sell out an appointment with Ervin easily.

    But here the subordinates of Ervin are pretty loyal. So, it is not going to be easy.¡±

    ¡°Alright. I will think of something else.¡±

    Sam sighed as he left. He didn¡¯t really like the situation he is in, but he knew that it wouldn¡¯t even take a couple of days to change it.

    As he walked away, a ck shadow came out of nowhere and climbed on to his shoulder.

    He extended his hand and the shadow moved to his palm revealed the shadow mouse.

    It waved its front limb and a scroll came out.

    [I got it Sam.]

    Sam smiled as he took the scroll.

    ¡°Great job. Good to have you back buddy.¡±

    He let the shadow mouse go out once again as he opened the scroll while walking to the inn.

    The scroll is list of all the crimes and the criminal procedure that takes ce once someonemits a crime. He must say that the whole thing is pretty much detailed and structured well. He hasn¡¯t seen such a proper structure since he came here from earth.

    He looked through the whole thing and his gazended on one particr crime.

    He went to the bar the next day once again and looked at the Bartender.

    ¡°Can you tell me who is the richest and most influential merchant in this whole city?¡±

    ¡°That would be the Darin from the Naval Armory. Their organization is specialized in crafting the customizable armors for people. They are really great and they have some pretty deep connections with all of their branches spread across the continent.¡±

    ¡°That¡¯s great. Thank you.¡±

    He finished his usual order and went to the Naval Armory.

    He went to the receptionist and asked.

    ¡°Can I meeting with Mr Darin, I have a business deal for him that he would very interested in.¡±

    The receptionist nodded and went into call Darin, while Sam looked at various expensive armors put out for disy.

    .....

 Chapter 1841 - 1841 Robbery

    1841 Robbery

    Soon, Sam is in a private room within the Naval Armory. He looked at Darin and said.

    ¡°What is the best armor that has ever been produced by Naval Armory?¡±

    Sam asked as he sipped some kind of tea that was served to him.

    Darin didn¡¯t think much and said.

    ¡°It is the Adamantine Flood Dragon Scale Armor. I am sure you can guess what the main material is.¡±

    Sam just nodded and said.

    ¡°I want to ce a bulk order of that armor.¡±

    *psst*

    Darin spat out the tea and looked at Sam as if he is a lunatic.

    .....

    ¡°Bulk order of the scale armor?¡±

    ¡°Yes. I want to ce a bulk order on your best-of-the-best armor. I need a thousand armors and I need them in the next week, can you finish that order?¡±

    Sam said as he ced a spatial ring on the table.

    Darin was still suspicious when he looked at the contents and only after he saw, he was stunned.

    ¡°This is the downpayment. From the price of scale armors, it should be about thirty percent of the order price. Is that enough?¡±

    Darin gulped and nodded crazily.

    ¡°Sir Sam, we will be honored to take up on this order.¡±

    Sam stood up and said.

    ¡°I will be staying in the Royal Inn. You can just find me there.¡±

    He turned around to walk towards the exit, but suddenly stopped and turned back.

    ¡°Oh by the way, do you know any other shop that sells high quality products like you? It doesn¡¯t have to be armors or weapons, anything is fine.¡±

    Darin didn¡¯t understand why Sam is asking, but he thought for a moment and said.

    ¡°There is a friend of mine, who is in charge of an Inscription makingpany. They are specialized in creating custom inscription scrolls or custom inscription jobs for weapons and armors. They can actually create a full defensive inscription scroll that could block an attack from a Peak Stage Divine ne Pre-transcendent cultivator.¡±

    ¡°Perfect, can you give me their address, I would like to make a deal with them too.¡±

    Darin widened his eyes in disbelief, but he did give the address. If this big shot is really going to spend that much money, it is indeed better to let his friend benefit from it.

    So, after he gave the address, he contacted his friend and gave him the news.

    Sam went there and bulk ordered their best product.

    The same thing happened all over the city that day and the next day, Sam didn¡¯t evene out of his room in the inn. He just stayed there. All these people were trying to keep an eye on him, but with the nature of the inn, they didn¡¯t let these people disturb Sam.

    But what they don¡¯t know is, Sam is not in the city the next day, he went to the next city and even in that city, he did the same. He bulkordered the best products the city has to offer.

    He moved around and did the same in the next week.

    By the end of the week, he went to the first city he arrived at and went to meet Darin and the rest of the people in the bar.

    The Bartender recognized all of them and he also recognized Sam. He was stunned to see all of them together.

    ¡°I heard that there is a mad money man throwing around the money and ordering a bunch of high end products. I didn¡¯t expect it was you. How about you bulk order my wine and food too?¡±

    He asked with a grin.

    Sam also smiled and said.

    ¡°Why not? Give everyone in the bar a set of your best wine and food.¡±

    With that he threw a spatial ring. The bartender was stunned. He looked at the contents and indeed the money is more than enough to serve the whole bar.

    He hesitated for a while, but after Sam insisted, he did exactly that. The merchants that came looked at this scene and they are very much excited about this whole thing. They really liked this kind of big spending people and the way Sam acted, he didn¡¯t even look like he values money even a little bit.

    So, they wanted to see if they can fish out more deals out of him.

    Sam and the group of merchants sat at the biggest table in the centre of the bar.

    He looked at all of them with a smile and extended his hands.

    ¡°Can I check the goods first?¡±

    They all ced their spatial rings on the table. Sam started taking out different things and started testing them out. Of course, he is not testing out each and every one of them. That would be way too time consuming and impractical.

    He held the spatial rings as he looked at all of them and said.

    ¡°They are all look good. You really delivered on the promise. Great job.¡±

    Everyone smiled and they anticipated for Sam¡¯s payment, but at this moment his smiled went wider and he said.

    ¡°But I am sorry, unfortunately I don¡¯t want to deliver on my end of the deal.¡±

    With that, he disappeared from the spot along with the Spatial rings that are in his possession.

    The merchants were stunned. One of them was vignt enough to react and he immediately yelled.

    ¡°Quick, let¡¯s catch him.¡±

    He immediately ran out of the bar and called for his subordinates.

    Sam reappeared a couple of streets away from the bar. The reason being a restriction ced on the city to prevent these kinds of situations. A robber or a murderer shouldn¡¯t have a chance to just use some spatial device and escape easily.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care much about this. He definitely has more things at his disposal to escape. He took out harbinger and in the most eye catching way, he went through the main gate of the city and in the direction of the second city.

    ¡°What the fuck, why is he so fast? What kind of device is it?¡±

    One of the merchants asked as he held his forehead.

    ¡°Let¡¯s go and inform the city lord. I cannot lose out on this money. I spent way too much on those products.¡±

    The merchants all agreed and they went to the city lord.

    Since the city lord, knew that Sam already left the city, he didn¡¯t bother ordering a lockdown. He immediately circted Sam¡¯s image to the nearby cities and arge scale search party wasunched.

    Sam arrived in the second city and in the richest bar of the city, he sat along with a bunch of merchants.

    ¡°Bartender, a serving of your best wine and best food for everyone in the bar.¡±

    He ordered food and looked at the merchants.

    ¡°So, can I check the goods first¡­¡±

    Before the news has even travelled, Sam arrived here and robbed the second and third cities. But he didn¡¯t go to the fourth one. Because from what the bartender told, there is no way the news wouldn¡¯t have travelled that far.

    But he did arrive at the fourth city in a disguise and stayed in an inn.

    The next day, something happened. Sam watched as his poster was spread all over the city. All the guards are on high alert.

    The only problem is that his disguise is impable, it will take a lot of time for these people to catch him.

    Meanwhile, news of this incident quickly reached the two ces Sam wanted it to reach. The White Sand Coast headquarters and the Dark Sea Sect Headquarters.

    The reason why the news reached so far is because the people that were duped by Sam are all people who had roots in higher ces. Their main headquarters and families are all near the headquarters of the Dark Sea Sect.

    In fact, some of the owners are direct members of the Dark Sea Sect.

    So, knowing that Sam robbed valuable items caused them to feel a stinging pain in a ce they would rather not mention.

    Three days after the robbery, a message came to Ervin who is in the White Sand Coast headquarters.

    He looked at the message again and again with a frown.

    ¡°Who the fuck is this guy? How can someone be so brazen and conduct such a high profile robbery?¡±

    He couldn¡¯t help but feel dissatisfied. After all, they are preparing for a war with the other continent, this kind of headache is thest thing he needed on his te. But the request came from a dozen or so important figures and a few of them are elders, so he had to take this seriously.

    He turned to his assistant and said.

    ¡°Just use the identification system that we have and search for him. Both the built in detection systems of the city as well as the mobile detection devices can be used.

    Anyway, we are sending our soldiers out to scout the whole area of the White Sand Coast, to see if there are any traps set up by the Tri Sun continent, they can do this as well.

    Within the next two days, just capture him and get him to me. I will personally judge this case and be done with it.

 Chapter 1842 Trial

    Chapter 1842 Trial

    The next two days, Sam was on constant run on Harbinger.

    He moved from city to city and everywhere he went he was immediately discovered. But it is not just within the cities, even when he was travelling, he was being detected.

    But he didn''t feel distressed at this situation. Instead he just smiled.

    "It seems like it is about time, to make the next move."

    As he muttered to himself, Sam started travelling once again and this time, he didn''t take any stops, he already had a location in mind.

    That night, he appeared at the White Sand City, the headquarters of the White Sand Coast.

    As soon as he arrived in the city, he triggered the surveince system. Because, he didn''t use a disguise, and he didn''t even hide his aura. He walked into the city like he owned the damn ce.

    At this moment, Ervin is taking some rest after a long meeting.

    "Sir, we picked on the signal of Sam that we are searching for."

    "Why are you reporting this to me? We have picked his location a bunch of times, but we were unable to catch him. Just report to the nearest squad."

    "No, sir. This time the situation is a bit different, he is actually in the White Sand city."

    Ervin was dumbfounded.

    "What are you talking? He really came to White Sand city? A guy who is capable of duping so many people, don''t tell me he is an idiot? Why would anyone in his positione to White Sand City?"

    "Our team has already gone to capture him sir. They blocked the aerial travel and closed down the city with a formation. The spatial lock is in ce anyway."

    "Good bring that guy over and contact all the people that were effected by this. I am sure they are all in the city anyway."

    "Yes sir. Even if we don''t contact them, I think they will arrive on their own. They must have already gotten the news."

    "Its fine then. Save yourselves some trouble."

    Sam who is walking in the streets was soon surrounded by the guards. He just raised his hands and said.

    "I surrender."

    Everyone is stunned.

    By now, Sam has be quite popr in the circle of guards and soldiers. The number of times he escaped from people is insane. In fact, he even managed to escape from Divine ne Pretranscendent cultivators.

    They didn''t even understand why he chose surrender at this moment.

    But they cuffed him up and brought them directly to meet Ervin.

    A few minutester.

    Erivin sat on his seat as he looked at Sam coldly.

    Just now the people that all had their money stolen from Sam arrived.

    "Are you new to the White Sand Coast?"

    Ervin asked.

    Sam nodded and said.

    "I am actually new to your."

    "New to the? I have already checked, your signature has not been in the external logs of the worm holes or the space gates. How did you arrive here?"

    "There are many other ways to get in here. I don''t want to discuss about that right now. I might tell youter."

    "Anyway, no matter how you came here, you have abide by the rules of the White Sand Coast. You have stolen from these people and the amount is not small. It is almost equivalent to one fifth of the annual administration budget of the whole Dark Sea Sect."

    "I didn''t know it was that much. Not too bad."

    Sam obviously didn''t show any signs that he cared about this situation. For him this is not a big deal.

    "Do you know the punishment for this?"

    "Yes, three decades of imprisonment with sealed cultivation, of course all my wealth will be confiscated."

    Ervin frowned.

    "You know the punishment but you stillmitted a crime?"

    "Well, there is another thing I have noticed within yourws. In case of crimes like robbery, if the victims choose to let go of the grievance and can receive a settlement with the thief, the thief can be let go with a fine."

    The room turned silent. Sam didn''t wait for anyone to respond and dropped the rings that are on his hand.

    He then turned to the merchants and said.

    "I apologize for making you guys worry and run around. I did for a selfish desire of mine. I would still like to buy your goods and that too at 1.5 times the price. And if you can let go of this case, I can give two times the price and also some very very special gifts that wouldn''t be able to refuse."

    The merchants frowned. They really don''t want to trust Sam again. After all, they made them look like fools as they gave in to the greed once.

    Sam smiled and continued.

    "Mr Ervin, you can check the contents of the rings. The special gifts I mentioned are also inside. You can offer them this. I am sure they would benefit more the gifts than me being in the prison."

    One of the attendants took the spatial rings and gave them to Ervin.

    When Ervin looked at the contents, he is dumbfounded to say the least. He didn''t expect the contents would be so rich and grand.

    Sam didn''t just put some massive heaps of spirit stones in there. There are precious metals, weapons, herbs and fruits, all kinds of resources. Then there are some blueprints.

    Ervin tookout the blueprints and was once again dumbfounded. He looked at the merchants and only one thought came to his mind.

    "There is no way in hell these guys would press charges."

    He exined what they are getting and just like he thought, they didn''t press charges, they even thanked Sam after. In fact, Darin even joked.

    "Sam, if you really feel like robbing once again, please pick me. If you are going to give our this sort ofpensation every time, you can rob me every week."

    Sam just smiled at this and his cuffs were taken off.

    But he was not dismissed yet. He looked at Ervin and said.

    "It seems like you might have already guess my intentions?"

    "Not all of it, but one thing I can guess is that you did this meet me?"

    "Yeah, I want to make a deal with you. But a bartender told me that you wouldn''t be easy to contact. So, I have to take some drastic actions."

    "But the price is way too much isn''t it? Even if you have massive resources at your hands, it is still a waste. Even I am feeling a little envious of your wealth."

    "Don''t worry about it. All I have is money and making it is very easy for me."

    "Anyway, lets not waste our time with this useless talk. What do you want?"

    "I want an official soldier position under the ranks of Dark Sea Sect."

    As soon as the words came out, everyone looked at Sam as if he is a crazy person. If not for the fact that he managed to make the whole White Sand Coast frustrated by his antics, they would have thought he is a retard as well.

    "A soldier position? Are you joking?"

    "No. I will be honest with you. I have to settle some scores with the Sr Sect on the other side and I want to contribute to the war. But currently I don''t have my crew with me and I need some people who have good enough resources and man power.

    We can help each other."

    "Why should I trust you? You could even be a spy from the Sr Sect?"

    "Really? Do you really think Sr sect can even afford to spend this much on a spy? If you don''t really believe me, you can test me out, put me in a team with some of your best people. I am not even a Divine ne cultivator. You can send a bunch of Divine ne cultivators with me.

    They just have to be strong enough to defeat the leaders on the Coast line of the Sr Sect on the other side of the sea. I will create the opening you need."

    "Opening? Do you really think it is that easy to take down the coast? We couldn''t prate through the defense for a long time. We could only choose an alternative long winded route for a long time.

    The natural geography and the resources are in their favor. The beasts in the forests of the coast in particr, they form a natural defense line for the Sr Sect, how can you guarantee the victory."

    "Well, because I came back from the Sr Sect area. Particrly through that coast. I have left some things there and they will be able to deal with them easily. The beasts and the wildlife you talk about are going to be gone.

    I can even give you demonstration if you want."

    Ervin looked at Sam calmly. There is no emotion on his face.

 Chapter 1843 Demonstration

    Chapter 1843 Demonstration

    "I will give you a chance. At least, your actions say that you are a smart and capable guy.

    But it doesn''t mean I trust you."

    "No problem."

    As Sam said, he threw out a spatial ring towards him.

    Ervin caught it with a frown and looked at the contents inside. He was shocked. These are all the goods that Sam has bought from these merchants. The armors, the scrolls, formations, everything is actually top notch in the Dark Sea Continent.

    "Take this is as a price for giving me this shot."

    Ervin looked at Sam as if he is a mad man.

    "You do know how much these are worth right? That is not a small amount."

    "Of course, but as I said, money doesn''t matter that much to me. It is way too easy to earn and even easier to spend. Anyway, these goods are decent, but they are not really up to my standard. Even if I save them and give them to my people, they would think I lost my mind."

    Sam just said casually and he turned around and looked at the attendant.

    "Can you guide me to an enclosed forest? Preferably with a lot of wildlife that you don''t care about."

    Attendant looked at Ervin who just nodded.

    After an hour, they are in an enclosed forest, standing on top of a beast.

    Sam threw a bunch of seeds and used his wind elemental energy to spread them all over. He didn''t stop there, he took out a bunch of wood elemental energy capsules and broke them. He didn''t destabilize them, he just broke them and started throwing them around.

    The pure liquid wood elemental energy started raining down on the seeds that just fell and already started growing and this time, the growth is much more rapid with the addition of wood elemental energy.

    As Sam kept on supplying this excess energy, Ervin looked at the forest in surprise, he is surprised by the growth rate of these vines. But what surprised him, even more, is the fact that after Sam stopped supplying the wood elemental energy, the vines grew crazy.

    They started absorbing everything in the surroundings. The thick forest started withering at a visible the vines have be and the more powerful their attacks were against the cultivators.

    They just stood there for a couple of hours as they saw the cultivators being consumed.

    rate.

    As if that is not enough, the vines spread even faster before they started attacking the beasts within the forest. The vines prated to the beasts and started consuming their energy as well. What is surprising is that Sam soon found out that there are a bunch of cultivators inside.

    "Are you sure you want to keep the cultivators in? They wouldn''t be able to take it based on their cultivation strength. They are just Divine ne Initiation cultivators, and it seems like they are only at the initial stage."

    "It''s fine. They are on death row."

    Ervin just said without even looking at him. His eyes arepletely locked on to the vines that are consuming everything.

    At first, the cultivators still managed to fight off these vines, and Ervin felt that it could only take weaker people, but soon he realized, the more forest and wildlife was consumed, the more powerful the vines have be and the more powerful their attacks were against the cultivators.

    They just stood there for a couple of hours as they saw the cultivators being consumed.

    Ervin thought of something and asked.

    "Can they even take down a Divine ne Pre-transcendent cultivator?"

    "Technically they can. But as you know the disparity between the Divine ne Initiation and Divine ne Pre-transcendence is no joke.

    Currently, the vine only absorbed over a dozen Divine ne Initiation cultivators at Initial Stage. With the current energy and strength they have, they can deal with half a dozen Middle Stage cultivators openly even if they fought back. But if there are more of them, it would have to work sneakily taking them one by one and reducing their numbers.

    And as long as it can improve the energy within, it can keep on going. But the requirement to hit a Divine ne-Pretranscendent cultivator is not going to be small."

    "And it is smart enough to do all of that on its own?"

    "Not really. It is not exactly smart in a regr sense. It is its survival instinct. It is parasitic by nature and it purely sustains based on the vitality of other creatures there is an outlet as you can see in the fruits on the vines.

    So, the vines can only sustain for so long without energy and soon the energy will be slowly converted into fruits before it died down."

    "What can these fruits do?"

    "Well, they are a different kind of danger. The fruits of this vine are basically poison. And it is not ordinary poison, it is a poison of vitality. If you want to know, you can give it to a Divine ne Initiation cultivator of the Initial stage.

    It seems like you have a lot of death row inmates, so I am sure you don''tck any test subjects. You will something great.

    But of course, you should be careful only to test that in a field like this."

    "How long is this vine going tost at this rate?"

    "Since I cut off its spread to outside of the enclosed forest, it cannot look for any prey, so it would be converted into a bunch of fruits and withered mess in just around three to four hours."

    "That fast?"

    "Well, this is an improvement over a few iterations. It is one of my organization''s students who came up with this. Anyway, do you believe me now? I know why you guys are unable to prate through the sea coast.

    Even though there are a lot of experts, they are still something that could be handled with numbers from your side. I know that your main problemes from that forest.

    When I came threw that, I noticed that the trees of the forest were weird and they seemed like they were nted in a certain way. It is a formation. It is a defensive formation that takes in the energy of the wholendmass. It even took the energy from the undersea mines. It is just that not a lot of people know about this."

    Ervin is stunned. He knew about the formation, but just as Sam said, a lot of people don''t know about it. They are extremely ignorant, to say the least. This formation is also very mysterious since it was one of the things that were given by Zeus to those sects.

    "So, your n is to nt these seeds and destroy the vegetation and clear the coastline? Is that it?"

    "No, currently I n to just go there and wait for a bit, cause some disturbance, kill everyone, and collect some fruits. I already nted the seeds a long time ago."

    Ervin is stunned. He looked at Sam and asked.

    "How long?"

    "More than a week. But don''t worry, the vines there are of a very special kind. They are extremely slow growing, but they are much more resilient and they are programmed to do a different tasks.

    If my guess is right, they should move to the next stage of their task by now and if I dare say, this is the best time for you guys tounch an attack.

    As long as you can send some experts that could weaken the experts there and keep them inside the forest, we can kill them all and the coast would be clear, you can even use these vines as a defensive line for your temporary base there and you don''t have to worry about losing its energy since a lot of the energy will being from the water elemental vines under the sea."

    Ervin''s gaze started burning as he looked at Sam. He is still suspicious of him. After all, Dark Sea Sect is the only ce that could connect to others and other realms. The remaining two continents are kind of closed off.

    If Sam hade from outside, he should have known. But he didn''t know him. Then the only usible way for Sam to exist here is by being a native of the.

    But neither did Sam''s way of speaking, dressing, or fighting indicate any familiarity with the surroundings.

    So, he had some belief in Sam''s story and if it ispletely true, then he could only say that he had managed to obtain a gold mine.

    He asked Sam.

    "What do you want?"

    "As I said, I only need to be an official soldier, with proper soldier status of the Dark Sea Sect. I will fight in your war with the Tri Sun Continent and particrly the sr sect. To be precise, I can help you guys kill more than three thousand people with my own hands, upy one of their vassal territories that are being led by a Divine ne Initiation cultivator with the help of a team, and try to gain some very high ranking achievements in your sect.

    That is what I want."

 Chapter 1844 - 1844 White Sand Guard

    1844 White Sand Guard

    Sam and Ervin just stared at each other.

    There are no words between them. There is no interaction, they just stared at each other trying to see through them as much as they can. But neither of them are showing a single weakness.

    ¡°You are officially part of the White Sand Guard. It is a special force directly under mymand and they have the authority over every other force under the White Sand Coastal region. However, you will not have any real authority.

    Your first mission as a soldier is to take the guard with you to the coastal area and take it down.

    The White Sand Guard definitely has enough strength to injure every single person within the coastal guard of the Tri Sun Continent.¡±

    Sam nodded and soon he was escorted by someone to a residence, where he was given a new set of clothes, a badge, and a specialmunication token.

    He changed into the clothes before he left the residence. Soon, another attendant came and escorted him back into the headquarters. This time, he was taken to the back of the building where there is a small training ground.

    There are a bunch of people wearing simr attires standing in a formation. In front of them stood Ervin with a serious expression.

    When Sam arrived, he pointed towards him and spoke.

    .....

    ¡°This is the person that I told you, guys, about. He will be following you to the coastal area. I already showed you the demonstration video. A simr situation should be happening there. You only need to tackle the stronger opponents on the coastline.

    The rest will be taken care of him.

    If things are not what they seemed to be and there is any foul y detected. Kill this guy immediately rush back.¡±

    Sam chuckled at this. This is obviously not just some empty threat and Ervin is not afraid to make it right in front of his eyes.

    Ervin left after that and the rest of the members looked at Sam and their gazes changed. The captain looked at him calmly, meanwhile, there is one guy who had a tant look of rage and disdain stered all over his face.

    Sam ignored his gaze and looked at the team. There are forty members in total. The weakest are the Divine ne Initiation Cultivators, there are a total of fifteen, and five of them are in the Initial Stage of Divine ne Initiation.

    This is kind of a surprise to Sam as he thought the Elite Kill squad would just be full of some powerful people. But it seemed like it is a well-bnced squad.

    As he is looking at the team, trying to understand whatever he could from their expressions, the captain spoke.

    ¡°To be honest, we don¡¯t really approve of you. The White Sand Guard has a very strict requirement and that is for a person to be at Divine ne Initiation to join and they will leave after they hit the limits of Divine ne Pre-transcendence.

    Your presence here in itself ispletely against the rules and we heard that used some kind of underhanded ways to buy yourself this position.

    We don¡¯t know what kind of situation you put Ervin in to make him do this, but that doesn¡¯t really gel well with my team.

    So, you better remove any hopes of bing a proper member here. And let¡¯s keep everything on a need-to-know basis.¡±

    Sam nodded and replied.

    ¡°Works for me.¡±

    ¡°Good, then follow us.¡±

    The captain then waved his hand. Arge Eagle appeared and he got on it before flying. The rest of the team got simr eagles and flew. The guy who showed the most emotion towards Sam, the guy who is also the weakest of the bunch was thest to leave because he stood back to taunt Sam.¡±

    ¡°Since you managed to worm your way into our team, then you should also have a way to worm yourself to the Coastal line. Try to keep up, if you were left behind, I might mistake you for being foul and kill you right there.¡±

    He flew away as well.

    Sam looked at him and shook his head. He didn¡¯t really care much about the provocation, but rather he knew that this guy would constantly push Sam¡¯s buttons the more he let him go. So, Sam has to knock down every one of his tries so that this farce would end faster.

    As the team started flying away, Sam didn¡¯t fly, instead, he started running.

    Thest guy is still looking at Sam and when he saw him running he is stunned, he called out to his team members and pointed out what Sam is doing.

    ¡°Guys, look at this idiot. Is he thinking of running all the way there? Is he an idiot?¡± He started cackling along with his teammates. But at this moment, they suddenly saw arge surge of wind elemental energy under Sam¡¯s feet.

    *BOOM*

    The explosion windunched Sam into the air as he zoomed towards the soldiers at the back of the formation of the eagles.

    The captain and the rest of the senior members of the team looked back at themotion and were stunned.

    Sam¡¯s body is surging with energy and it almost looked like he is jumping to attack the soldiers that are making fun of him.

    The soldier who provoked Sam looked at this advance and didn¡¯t know what Sam is aiming at, but a thought shed in his mind and he took out a sword and shed it toward Sam.

    Sam frowned at this attack. It has a hint of Divine energy and it came directly at him.

    His gaze turned cold.

    *BOOM*

    Another wind energy explosion happened under his feet and his trajectory changed, he somersaulted over the soldier team and came to the forefront with that momentum, and within no time, he is already in front of the captain, at the lead.

    And as he descended, harbinger appeared under his feet, and without even turning around, he looked at the captain and said.

    ¡°Please keep up, if you slow down, I might actually think that you are ying foul and trying to betray Ervin.¡±

    As soon as he spoke, Harbinger shot out.

    The tailwind left the rest of the team in dust, even though they are at a rtively high altitude.

    The captain frowned and his calm mood changed. He looked at the soldier that attacked and asked coldly.

    ¡°Reani, what are you trying to do by attacking him? Didn¡¯t you hear Ervin¡¯s orders or are you too full of yourself to follow them properly?¡±

    Reani gulped. He didn¡¯t expect that Sam would be quick and capable enough to dodge his attack. After all, Sam is just an Astral ne cultivator and Reani has been that cultivator a few months ago.

    He is pretty sure that he wouldn¡¯t have been able to dodge that attack. So, he just judged Sam by those standards.

    The captain turned around as he saw Sam far away, he is moving at an extreme speed.

    He also instructed his eagle to catch up and soon all of them are moving at an extreme speed. They swiftly crossed the city, then arge forest passed through a bunch of towns and viges. But they were all stunned throughout this journey.

    Sam has been way too far away from them. He is still within their visible range, but he was in the lead and he maintained that gap consistently throughout.

    Harbinger is fast. Its main function is just to travel and it doesn¡¯t have any other metabolic activity and it doesn¡¯t have to recover like the eagles. As long as there is enough energy and the material is durable enough.

    Sam waited for a minute after they reached the sea. He looked at them and said.

    ¡°It seems like you guys are really not sincere enough, keeping such a distance away,ing so slowly. Don¡¯t tell me, you are being forced to do this?¡±

    Captain frowned and said.

    ¡°You better talk carefully. Words can¡¯t be taken back.¡±

    ¡°Wow, it is better that you know this. So, teach this to your fucking subordinates.¡±

    Everyone was stunned as Sam still spoke with that smile and there is an underlying coldness in his voice.

    Before the team could react, he turned around and continued.

    ¡°Keep up this time. We are almost there and I don¡¯t want this to fail because you guys are too slow.¡±

    As he zoomed forward, this time he let the rest of the team tag along.

    As they moved, the soldiers at the back looked at Reani weirdly. Sam dropped the same words that Reani said to this. Indirectly the humiliation of their captain has been brought up by Reani and just from the looks of the vice-captain and the rest of the seniors, he understood that they didn¡¯t like this action of his.

    He wanted to redeem himself, as they were thinking, they are finally near the coastal area and when they looked at the forest, everyone is dumbfounded.

 Chapter 1845 - 1845 Dead Forest

    1845 Dead Forest

    When the White Sand Guard looked at the forest in front of them, they were shocked to say the least.

    In fact, Shocked is rather an understatement.

    Every one of them has been to this ce before. Dark Sea Sect hasunched many attacks, both under the radar and above the radar on this ce.

    Even though the Dark Sea Sect didn¡¯t break through this coastal line, it is still their favorite ce to attack because the forces of the sr sect are very alert and on edge to protect this.

    So, whenever Dark Sea Sect attacks another ce and wants to attract some forces away from the Sr Sect, then they would send some troops here.

    The battles here happen not so frequently, but they are fierce and this gave them many merits.

    The forest in front of them is one of the great obstacles they faced time and again.

    But when they looked at the forest now, they couldn¡¯t rte it to the forest they knew previously.

    The whole forest ispletely filled with various vines and the trees are covered as well.

    .....

    The vines are very simr to what Sam showed in the demonstration, but they are slightly different.

    Apart from the appearance, another difference is that the vines are not actively absorbing the trees, even though they covered them like crazy.

    But they couldn¡¯t sense the presence of a single beast there.

    Sam cracked his fingers and took out a crystal tablet. He looked at the situation in the deeper areas of the forest through the crystal table.

    He nodded in satisfaction.

    This vine is actually modified to serve Sam¡¯s purpose. Even though they look at a lot of energy from the forest, it is not significant enough topletely wither the forest away.

    Instead, they are currently gaining a lot of energy from the underwater elemental energy vines, they have spread deep into it.

    The vines acted like regr creepers and go onto every single tree within the forest.

    The only thing they devoured are the beasts, at least that is what the coast guards of the Sr sect and seven-star alliance thought.

    The day Sam left, the vines started growing and soon they spread all over.

    The soldiers reported it back immediately.

    Seven Star alliance faction leaders immediately talked to Envoy Fog about the situation. They told them exactly what Sam told them.

    In their eyes, the vines are the primary weapons of their enemies and they need Sam¡¯s trees desperately. Luckily, even though Sam had left, they still have some spare seeds.

    They hurriedly nted the seeds inside and outside the forest to absorb the vines.

    And just like that for the past few days, the vines kept on growing and the trees kept on absorbing them while providing the fruits.

    Envoy Fog squeezed the information out of the Seven Star alliance faction leaders regarding these fruits and in return, he ¡®graciously¡¯ gave them ten percent of the harvest.

    In the past few days, the vines kept on giving out these fruits and their yield is very very high to the point, the harvest had to be carried every hour and each tree gave over four dozen fruits every hour.

    The energy of the fruit benefited their cultivation greatly and everyone in the sect started taking it.

    There are currently a few Divine ne Pre-transcendent cultivators organizing the forest while a few more Pre-transcendent cultivators are organizing the transport of these through a space gate.

    Thend that was so against the space gates is now actively using it.

    Since this is wartime, they are all trying their best to improve every single territory under them.

    In fact, they even captured beasts from different regions and different elemental energies as they fed the vines.

    This brought some different elemental fruits as well.

    As Sam observed the growth of the vines, the presence of White Sand Guard already attracted the attention of the existing Divine ne Pre-transcendent cultivators.

    They ran through the forest and took some elevated positions as they gazed at the White Sand Guard.

    ¡°If it isn¡¯t the White Sand Guard, it seems like they came to face another defeat.¡±

    The person who is wearing the Sr Sect¡¯s robe spoke arrogantly, but he didn¡¯te out of the forest.

    They knew that the forest is one of the great defenses if the other party wants to enter the forest, they have to use spatial transference, but they would be immediately discovered and many people from Sr Sect will appear just to keep them there permanently.

    And of course, that is not all the forest is capable of, there is more and that is the reason for these people¡¯s courage.

    They are trying to taunt them.

    Sam just chuckled at this and clicked on the tab.

    The elder in the sr sects¡¯ attire recognized him immediately and was stunned. Before he could speak again though, he hurriedly leaped to the side.

    A vine was about to creep over his body, but what he didn¡¯t know is that he jumped from one vine to another one.

    He struggled crazily as he saw all of his subordinates that are hurriedly harvesting the fruits were all being caught.

    The Pre-transcendent cultivators that are responsible for sorting and transport, sensed this weird movement within the forest and immediately hurried over.

    They were dumbfounded to see that theserge vines hurriedly absorbed by every tree in the forest.

    They are very thick, way too thickpared to what Sam showed in the demo because for a week they have been consuming a lot of energy from the mines directly.

    If they didn¡¯t grow well, nothing in the world will.

    The White Sand Guard saw as their low-level opponents of theirs were being devoured by the vines and Sam¡¯s trees that were nted within the forest by the Sr Sect were giving out arge number of fruits.

    It is to the point, the fruits fell off the branches and formed some small heaps.

    The Elder from the Sr Sect managed to get rid of the vines holding him and flew high into the air.

    ¡°You guys are up. I am sure, you can handle some aerial battle.¡±

    The White Sand Guard came back to senses, the Captain made his move as he fought with the Elder. The Vice-captain and a couple of other senior members also didn¡¯t waste any time.

    As soon as the other Divine ne-Pre-transcendent cultivators came from within the forest, they started engaging them.

    They were outnumbered, but they are not really afraid, because their goal is to not have an all-out battle.

    Rather, they just have to make them retreat into the forest.

    While they are engaging in the air, Sam just sat leisurely on the harbinger as he operated a crystal tablet.

    He could see the structure of the vine and its growth rate through it.

    It is growing at a speed visible to the naked eye. The whole forest was devoured in no time. Obviously, a lot of trees within this forest are very special.

    Otherwise, they couldn¡¯t be used as nodes for a powerful formation like that.

    The vines absorbed all of that power and soon the low-level members started falling, it took some time for the vine to subdue a Divine ne Initiation cultivator, but it far less time to take down the second and even lesser time to take down the third.

    It just went on like that very easily.

    As the members fell one by one, the vines grewrger.

    Sam used the tablet to stop the trees from absorbing the vine energy and producing fruits and he made the vines focus their strength on the high-level elites battling in the sky.

    The captain noticed this and kicked his opponent back into the now-dead forest.

    The vines entangled his legs as he tried to fly out and they even found a wound on his leg which they directly prated to enter his bloodstream.

    In just a split second, the elder could feel a chunk of energy escaping from his leg.

    Even White Sand Guard Captain noticed this and he made his move, he took out a bunch of pikes from his storage and started throwing them at the Elder.

    The elder was stunned, he chopped the vine that coiled to his leg and tried to dodge the pikes, one of them hit him in the leg and slowed him down just for a moment.

    The vines immediately came after him and now that there are two injuries as entry points, they started attacking him there.

    Soon, the elder couldn¡¯t hold anymore as a pike managed to hit his chest.

    He fell into the forest and was soon devoured by the vines.

    This caused the rest of the vines to strengthen and the remaining White Sand Guard started having a much easier time with their opponents.

    Before they knew it, they swept the whole group of people, and the forest is rendered useless.

    Now they only have to clean up the residual force.

    Finally, the low-level members of the White Sand Guard had a task.

    Meanwhile, Sam also made a move, but he didn¡¯t attack anyone, instead, he went on to collect the fruits.

    There are currently two types of fruits, the fruits that came from the trees that absorbed energy from vines and some fruits that just grew to the vines directly.

    He collected the fruits on the vines and put them in his storage, meanwhile, he threw the fruits from the trees into a couple of storage rings and threw them away into the dead forest.

 Chapter 1846 Plan

    Chapter 1846 n

    The white Sand guard watched his movements and one of them asked.

    "Why are you leaving those fruits to them? It seems like they are really important. Why would you leave them with the resources?"

    "They are not really good for them. It is a very gimmicky trap that Iid for them, if someone eats them enough even if it is a Middle Stage Divine ne Pretranscendent cultivator, they would be in trouble."

    The Guards were stunned once again. They didn''t expect such an answer from Sam.

    After they sorted everything out, Guard Captain took out hismunication token to contact the nearest force to start the attack. Ervin already nned for what to do if Sam''s n is true and seeded and now that it did, he didn''t hesitate to start the invasion.

    Now the war truly started.

    The news spread like wildfire and this time instead of taking flight, they took the space gates.

    "Why did few fly if we had Space gates?" Sam asked in confusion.

    And when the captain gave a look, he immediately understood. These guys didn''t trust him.

    Sam just shrugged and went back to the base. After reaching the headquarters, they met with Ervin who is already waiting for them.

    "Good job on the mission. It seems like you didn''t lie to us."

    "Of course, I didn''t," Sam replied with a faint smile.

    "So, what is your next n? You said you want to lead a team and conquer a vassal area under the Sr sect."

    "That can wait a bit. I will stick with the White Sand Guard for now. You can give them any mission you would like, I won''t get in their way."

    Ervin thought for a moment and nodded.

    He then turned to the White Sand Guard, and when the captain also nodded, it was settled.

    They started discussing some war strategies. The Dark Sea Sect got the news that the White Sand Coast finally managed to break through the coastal line and now they have a sessful entry into the Tri Sun Continent.

    They are now invading the Sr Sect area and to be precise, the territory of the Seven Star Alliance is their target.

    They immediately started the war on the other fronts.

    Both of the continents are connected by andmass, but that connection was not with the Sr Sect area, instead, it is one of the remaining two sects.

    They started war from that front and now they wouldn''t have enough forces to send reinforcements to this side.

    The two continents were thrown into chaos in just one day.

    Meanwhile, one of the reasons of this chaos, Sam is listening in on the battle ns of the White Sand Guard.

    Ervin''s n is to destroy one of the subordinate territories of the Seven Star Alliance. It is not a big territory, but it has great strategic significance for them.

    It is a forest city in the middle of this Green Bamboo faction.

    Sam clearly remember who this ce belonged to. It is the only female faction leader in the Seven Star alliance, the first person that wanted to kill Sam and also the first person that put more effort in using her disciples to seduce Samter on.

    And this particr city, has six towns around it and everything between is covered in forests. This city is like the headquarters of the Green Bamboo Faction.

    "The White Sand guard will attack one of the towns at the rear of the city. It is the most difficult one as well as the one that is not exactly on our way there.

    The attack will be least expected there.

    So, you are going to attack them and upy that town.

    Meanwhile, I will send the Flood Dragon Squad, Sea Snake Squad, ck Turtle Squad, Octopus Squad, and Sea Hawk Squad to deal with the rest of the towns.

    Of course, they won''t be able to deal with all of them at the same time and there is a great chance that the faction leader might appear in of these ces all of a sudden, so White Sand Guard Captain, That is their n and they went into more detail, they are even looking at Sam to see how he is going to react.

    it is your job to make sure that she doesn''t appear.

    So, your attack on the Rear town should be very discreet and then you have to go ahead and tackle the faction leader in the Forest City.

    I know you will have a tough fight, but you only have to stall her while the rest of the squads deal with the town.

    Once we capture the forest city and the six towns, it will be our main base for further invasion.

    From there on, we will the strategic location of this forest and defend it from other factions while clearing up the cities and towns between the coast and the forest city.

    That is their n and they went into more detail, they are even looking at Sam to see how he is going to react.

    After seeing that he didn''t show any expression, Ervin asked directly.

    "What do you think about this n?"

    "It doesn''t work."

    He answered straight up.

    Everyone is stunned. The youngest and weakest of the White Sand Guard are actually ready to fight immediately, but Sam didn''t care and just continued.

    "You guys arecking in a lot of new information. The Forest City is not as easy as you think right now. There are a lot of major changes there that affected the whole area under the Green Bamboo Faction. The power and manpower distribution that you predicted is a thing of the past.

    If my guess is right, all the Pre-transcendent cultivators of the Green Bamboo faction are currently within the Forest City.

    In fact, there could be a lot more Divine ne Pre-transcendent cultivators from other factions and even from Sr Sect too.

    Apart from them, all the prodigious talents in Astral ne Peak as well as Initiation of Divine ne will also be there."

    Everyone was stunned.

    "How are you so sure of that?"

    "Because there are new towers set up in all of the Seven factions in the alliance. These seven towers are for training and ording to the timing, the next seven days would be the special training period of the Green Bamboo Faction.

    The special training period is a special phase of the tower that is beneficial like a crash course for youngsters.

    So, they would be bringing them here and of course, with your invasion, the factions are not just going to send them here directly.

    I don''t know how you are confident to block the Dive ne Transcendent Faction leader, but you must have something up your sleeves, but even with that, you wouldn''t be able to hold all of these people that easily.

    At least not with the White Sand Guard alone."

    Sam paused and looked at them.

    They all looked at him with a frown.

    "How do you know all of this?"

    "I am the one who built the tower and not just that, I made a bunch of other preparations too. So, I can add something to your n and you will be good to go. Trust me, you might even be able to take down the Forest City with almost no casualties."

    "Okay, what is the n then?"

    "First of all, we are going to take down this city."

    Sam pointed at a certain area on the map. It is the midpoint between Forest city and the coastal area.

    It is one of the bases of the Green Bamboo faction and right now, one of the bases for the Seven Star alliance as they are fighting against the invaders.

    We need to take it and should do it discreetly. This ce is also the information exchange point and using the spatial arrays there, we can create a lot of diversion tactics¡­

    Sam went on to exin the n in detail but he left some parts out. The White Sand Guard insisted that he reveal them fully, but he didn''t.

    He just hid some of the cases and instead insisted that they trust himpletely.

    After exining the n, they are all surprised as well as a bit excited.

    "Are you sure that everything you didn''t want to exin will still work out the way you told us? Can we trust you on that?"

    "Of course, you already saw what I did with the vines, I opened the coast for you.

    So, you can trust me on this too.

    I can break open the Green Bamboo faction to you guys and by end of tomorrow, you can upy their headquarters."

    Ervin went into deep thought, this is way too tempting for him. If Sam''s n works out as he said it would, then there would be a lot fewer casualties and they can save a lot of time too.

    As he was thinking, Sam spoke once again.

    "There is one more thing though. After the traps are set and the whole n is set in motion, I will be on the front line to fight with the foot soldiers who are of the same rank as me."

    Ervin looked at him for a moment and finally nodded.

 Chapter 1847 Red Dots

    Chapter 1847 Red Dots

    That evening, Sam and the group moved once again.

    This time, they used a space gate to the nearest border at the sea and flew over the sea to reach the newly upied coast.

    Sam was impressed by how well-prepared the whole group was. They avoided the vines in the forest and just went past that to set up their base.

    As they are passing through it, Guard Captain turned to Sam and asked.

    "Can we use these vines as a defensive line in front of the base? I mean, can they be used in such a way that only the opponents will be attacked, but the rest of us wouldn''t be?"

    Sam smiled and replied.

    "It is possible to do that, but it will take a lot of time and research for me to produce results. If it was a couple of months before the war, then I could have done something, but right now it is not a feasible n.

    But it can indeed be used as a trap set up at the defensive line. We can also nt them in all the forest areas that might be in the path between the Forest City and this coast. If other party uses those areas to sneak their way, then it would be much better, for us."

    "So, what is the procedure? Will it take a long time?"

    "Nope, you don''t have to worry about it. It is much easier than you think. Just give me a couple of minutes."

    Sam said as he opened his tablet once again, this time there is a map of the Forest City area projecting on it.

    "It won''t be that difficult. Anyway, it will depend on who is positioned there and if my guess is right and the people I think are positioned there, it is an easy victory."

    There are a bunch of red dots at various areas within the map. He thought for a moment and clicked on a few red dots before saying.

    "Luckily, some of my previous preparations are still intact and functioning, you don''t have to worry about it. We only need to set up a trap line in front of the base, and for that, all they have to do is drop some seeds."

    Sam said as he passed over a spatial ring.

    The Guard captain took the ring and went over to meet the person in charge of this base.

    "What is the situation here? Are there any moments from the enemies?"

    "Some scouts went deep into the territory and they indeed saw some changes, there are arge group of people gathering at the Forest City, but for some reason, they are not showing any signs of attack.

    Instead, it seemed like they are trying to fortify their defenses.

    Even the towns around them are currently manned by a bunch of powerful people, if they are really going on the defensive, it will be a tough and long fight for us."

    Themander in charge exined the situation to the Guard Captain, who in turn came back to his team to exin the situation to them.

    "Seems like everything is going well until now. So, tell themander that we will wreck the city at the midpoint and they can immediately sweep through the ce. We need to cut their information."

    "But it is going to be easy?"

    "It won''t be that difficult. Anyway, it will depend on who is positioned there and if my guess is right and the people I think are positioned there, it is an easy victory."

    After giving out the orders, the White House Guard moved.

    This time, they took the road, of course, Sam still got on his hoverboard. It doesn''t matter if it is in the sky or a few feet above the ground, with the current power output, Harbinger can do anything.

    The White Sand Guard really got jealous.

    The vice-captain looked at the Harbinger with hungry eyes.

    "How did you make this?"

    He directly asked Sam.

    "You don''t really expect me to tell you that, do you? It is my transportation method, you can''t really ask for such sensitive information outright."

    "Know, I just wanted to know if you could make some for the White Sand Guard? This kind of elite device is really suitable for the Elite Squad like us."

    "Nope, this is one of my creations that is absolutely not for sale. Particrly mine, it is one of its kind."

    "Everything has price, young man. Just let me know how much and what you want."

    As soon as the Vice-captain said it, he immediately felt that he said something wrong as he remembered how much Sam paid to just get into the White Sand Guard.

    Sam smiled and said.

    "Trust me, you guys are not ready for this or any other vehicles that I could make. If you want we can do business with some defensive formations, some puppets or something. If you insist on a vehicle, there is one that is for sale, but even that and all of its variants are mostly beneficial for Naval wars and battles.

    Let me know if you are interested."

    Sam said inly and ignored then for the rest of the journey. He just kept on looking at the crystal table. The map on it is constantly changing and there are arge number of red dots on it.

    Soon, they reached the area around the Middle City, which they wanted to take down.

    Sam swiped a few times on the tablet and soon theyout of the city appeared on it. There are a bunch of red dots all over theyout.

    And when the Guard captain saw this, he was stunned. Because he felt kind of familiar with the positioning of the dots and then realization struck him.

    "Are those the positions of the soldiers and fighters of the opponent?"

    Sam smiled and nodded.

    Sam zoomed in a bit and they noticed that there is a difference in these dotspared to the other dots they saw while they were traveling. These ones looked a littlerger and a little more like a polygon with many edges.

    "These are indeed the positions of all the forces within the city. The whole defensive formation of their personnel.

    Seems, like there are two Divine ne Pre-transcendent experts and they are blocking this ce with arge formation. Just give me one more second."

    Sam closed his eyes and sent his consciousness to the crystal table.

    The crystal table projected the whole of the city and all the people within, including the formations, hidden defensive traps, and everything that they needed to know. He could even see people making love inside.

    After absorbing all the intel and recognizing a lot of faces, Sam said.

    "There are 16 formations that we need to deal with. Four of them are outermost defensive formations, which are very strong, then there is the formation of archers that are standing on these walls.

    They are connected to a bunch of low-level soldiers who are sitting in a formation under the city. They can draw power from nature and fuel these archers with excessive powers. Their attack power might even double or triple.

    Then there are four defensive formations inside the city around the main building.

    The remaining are all trap formations within and outside the city.

    Sam started making the formations on the tablet and then he went on to mark some names beside the red dots.

    The White Sand Guards felt like their brains are not working anymore. In the short time they have been with Sam, they just got too many surprises one after another.

    If that is not enough, Sam said something else that made them lose their minds.

    "I can create chaos that willpletely mess up the formations. I understand their structure and I know what will happen when tweaked at the right moment.

    Then, I want you to alert the Experts with some of your strongest attacks aimed at them. It will be one hit one kill.

    Do you guys want to go along with it."

    Everyone exchanged a nce.

    Sam is talking as if they are about to snatch candy from a child.

    Looking at their disbelieving expressions, Sam said.

    "Fine, here is a demonstration."

    He just clicked on a few of the red dots on the tablet.

    The guards looked at the city expecting something to happen.

    Sam looked as if they are idiots.

    "Wait for ten minutes, if my guess is right, the walls will break down."

    As he spoke, he got off of the harbinger and sat on a tree, and tried to rx a little with his back against the trunk.

    The White Sand Guard decided to wait.

    Meanwhile, under the city in a well-protected and guarded bunker, there are a bunch of people sitting together as they constantly monitored a set of formation gs.

    There are eighteen of these bunkers and they are in charge of keeping and maintaining the city-guarding formation in ce.

    A couple of minutes after Sam clicked on his tab, one of the soldiers who is checking the energy output of the formation, suddenly froze in the middle of the process and the energy that is being channeled to the formation was messed up.

 Chapter 1848 - 1848 Cleared City

    1848 Cleared City

    The rest of the squad immediately came to check on this person.

    They didn¡¯t understand why he is behaving like that all of a sudden. They tried to use their spiritual energy to check him, but they were unable to do so. And externally, he looked like a piece of dead wood. There is no reaction from his cells no matter what they did, his body stiffened.

    His blood seemed to have been stuck and then it felt it started flowing in reverse direction.

    In fact, that is actually true. What they couldn¡¯t see inside that person¡¯s body is that a few vines spread out from the stomach. These vines are extremely strong, even though the body is resisting them, they are unfazed and unaffected.

    The vines spread to the heart and other internal organs and pierced into before they started sucking on the vitality. The vine at the heart in particr ispletely sucking back the blood that just came out of it.

    The spiritual energy from the core sensed this and started sending the energy to these organs, in fact after a short while, it cut off some supply to the brain, it only let the brain have enough energy to survive while the rest is being distributed to the organs.

    But it is only entering a bottomless bucket.

    Before long, the vines sucked up everything inside and only left the skeleton and the flesh as they spread out of the body.

    The people that are touching the body to examine it were shocked and one of them already got caught, meanwhile, another person in a different bunker also froze on the spot while distributing the energy.

    .....

    Soon, the energy from the external formation got messed up. The White Sand group immediately made their move. They wanted to ask how Sam did it, but the questions can wait, while the opportunity cannot.

    At this moment, as soon as the captain and the vice-captain revealed their auras the people hidden within the mansion in the middle came out to face them.

    Sam casually looked at the tablet and clicked on a bunch of red dots leisurely. He acted as if he is just ying a game.

    All over the city, many people froze in their actions and soon they started getting absorbed by the vines. The formations started disappearing one after another and soldiers started disappearing one after another.

    When Guard Captain threw a full-fledged attack with his spear, the opponent that was ready to dodge, suddenly stiffened up in the middle causing him to take the hit head-on. The spear cut off his left shoulder while the guard captain made another move.

    The spear shot through this person once more and he plopped onto the ground like a broken kite. After that, the vines starteding out of the body to the guard captain¡¯s surprise and the enemy is soon dead.

    The vines started spreading around to capture other people within the mansion.

    A simr thing happened to the opponent the Vice-captain is facing.

    When the vice captain¡¯s opponent finally fell, they saw a spectacr scene in the city.

    Many vines emerged from different corners. From under the earth, from within the walls of houses, mansions and other buildings etc. The vines this time are much stronger and each vine is giving off different elemental energy vibrations as they spread wildly.

    The whole city was soon thrown into chaos.

    Since it is now a military base, there are obviously no civilians inside, it is full of mercenaries that are hired by the Seven Star Alliance and members of the alliance and sect.

    The White Sand Guard didn¡¯t waste the chance that was provided to them. They lunged to make their move amidst their chaos. And Sam is no exception. While the senior members of the guard jumped to fight their peers, Sam jumped to fight his.

    Except, the peers of the senior members are mostly infected with the vines and they are easy to deal with, but most of Sam¡¯s opponents are foot soldiers are not really infected with the vines, they are also at the outskirts of the city from the start and are not really effected that much.

    So, Sam dived into it directly.

    ording to the conditionsid out by Kartikeye, Sam didn¡¯t use any weapons or elemental energies, he jumped in unarmed and his first kicknded squarely on the chin of his opponent,pletely ripping the other party¡¯s head off of their neck.

    He took the momentum forward and jumped on to the next target. A punch to the throat went through it and killed him on the spot.

    One hit one kill. Sam ran through his peers as if they are Mortal ne cultivators. He didn¡¯t care how many they came and how fast they came, but he dealt with them all the same.

    But there are not many of them as he wanted. There are only around five hundred and out of them he was only able to fight a hundred and fifty or so, the rest fled after they saw his domineering move forward and escaped since most of them are mercenaries.

    Of course, they were unable to, they were caught by vines mostly and Sam managed to hunt a couple of dozen of them.

    The whole thing went too smoothly.

    The archers, formation operators, the ambush squads, none of the soldiers were spared. The whole thing looked like a massacre.

    The white Sand Guard had never really had a victory this easy and they have had some spectacr victories before.

    After everyone is dead, the Guard captain sent a couple of his subordinates to spread the news. Theirmunication lines are not established well and certainly not this deep into the continent, so the subordinates went to the nearest location from which they could send messages through theirmunication token.

    Meanwhile, the rest of the guards decided to clean up the city.

    ¡°The vines soon stopped growing and gave out some fruits as they started withering. There is one fruit for one person killed by the vine.

    Sam plucked the fruits carefully, particrly the fruits that are created by the dead bodies of Divine ne Pre-transcendent cultivators.

    Looking at the fruits that Sam is collecting the White Sand Guard became curious. But Sam didn¡¯t bother exining to them.

    After all, it involves revealing a lot of his capabilities. The fruits that these guys consumed from the trees in their territory might have looked like some elixirs, but in reality, they are just some seeds. And if a person consumes more fruits, the seeds will fuse within the body forming muchrger and more potent energy seeds.

    These seeds also act as bugs that Sam could track with his crystal tablet, as long as he is within a certain range, he can identify their locations, and bybining the map andyout, he can identify these people¡¯s locations on the map.

    So, when he saw that there are so many people who consumed the fruits stationed in this city, Sam didn¡¯t dare to lose the opportunity, he activated the energy seeds that seeped deep into the bodies.

    They assimted as part of the bodies and as soon as they are activated, the vines started consuming the bodies from the inside out.

    The energy is gone, the organs are dead and finally, the person himself left this world, without even knowing what exactly is happening to them.

    The city was swept clean and Sam also managed to clear a bit for his target of 3000 kills.

    White Sand Guard tried to pry some more information from Sam to see what exactly these fruits are and how he managed to kill all of them so easily, but they got nothing.

    They cleaned up the city and upied it. They took over the formations and set up the defenses, meanwhile, Sam started activating some more red dots on the tablet. These red dots are not actually the cultivators that consumed the fruits, instead, they are the seeds they are some stray seeds in the wilderness.

    When Sam used the clone puppets that looked like him and the yers to spread across the continent, the puppets were pumped with all kinds of vine seeds. So, when they were destroyed, the seeds were spread all over the ce.

    Of course, Sam could track these seeds too.

    Now he started activating all the seeds around the city they just captured and left only one path open and that path is for the forces of Dark Sea Sect to reach this ce.

    He informed Sam about the situation to them.

    Sam went on to check some of the formations of the city. There is argemunication formation that is designed tomunicate directly with the headquarters of Sr Sect.

    He created a cloned the face of the person in charge hear and made a puppet that looked exactly like him to send a message to the headquarters.

 Chapter 1849 - 1849 Messages

    1849 Messages

    When the White Sand Guard heard about the fact that Sam sent a message to the headquarters of the Sr sect, they were stunned, to say the least.

    ¡°Why would you do something like that? We might have been able to get a smooth victory because of your tricks, but that doesn¡¯t mean, we can underestimate the Sr Sect.

    Even if it is just one of the three main powers, its strength far exceeds the White Sand Coast. The Dark Sea Sect didn¡¯t allocate enough power to this area to sh with the full power of the Sr Sect at the moment.¡±

    Even the Guard captain appeared flustered for the first time.

    Sam shook his head and showed a video recording of the message he sent and they were stunned.

    The message is obviously sent by the puppet clone he made of the person in charge here and the gist of the message is this.

    ¡°The White Sand Coast has settled down and stopped its advance as the path to their base is currently covered with these demonic vines that are attacking the cultivators. Unless the powerhouses are willing to fly through for a long distance as open targets, they are unable to do much about this and even in aerial battles, the vines are going to be a great hindrance.¡±

    And along with the statements, there is a video attached to the message. The video is the aerial view of vines that surrounded the city and a bit of extended footage on how it covered the rest of the area as well.

    The guard members immediately understood the significance of the message.

    .....

    The clone created by Sam is impable, it is hard to figure out that is a fake unless they saw it directly. Through the message transmission, it is impossible to figure it out. Then the added footage of the surroundings is going to add a certain level of validation to the message.

    The guard captain wanted to ask some questions, but before he could do that, themunication formation received a message.

    Sam controlled the puppet to check it out.

    He is surprised by the person on the other side of the message. It is one of the faction leaders of the Seven Star alliance.

    ¡°Commander, can you confirm that the advances of the White Sand Guard and The Dark Sea Sect have stopped because of the vines?

    Because, as you already know, the envoys said that the Dark Sea Sect is behind the spread of these vines in the territory. So, how could they be hindered by the presence of these vines.¡±

    When the White Sand Guard heard this message, they widened their eyes in disbelief and Sam just chuckled.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, your send doesn¡¯t have anything to do with the vines. It is just a misbelief they have.¡±

    ¡°You know that this would be their response?¡±

    ¡°Of course, I do. I am one of the envoys they are talking about.¡±

    Sam spoke with a smirk and then made the puppet reply to the message.

    ¡°Yes sir. As you know I have closely worked with the envoys and even cleared some of the vines in the surrounding areas before. But these vines seemed different. Their aura is not the same as the ones that we encountered before.

    From the reports of the scouts, it seemed like the forces of the Dark Sea Sect are equally surprised by the presence of the vines.

    At first, they tried to use some kinds of tokens to try and march forward from within the vine-filled area and it actually worked a little bit.

    The vines seemed to have been struggling against the token holders. But after some time, the vines attacked them and killed a lot of low-level soldiers. It dealt a severe blow to their forces.

    So, I am thinking these vines might not be part of the Dark Sea Sect¡¯s plot, but might be a gift from the Envoys.¡±

    The video was sent and Sam started making some other preparations.

    ¡°Can you spare me a couple of corpses you collected from the people that died here? Also some uniforms of the Dark Sea Sect soldiers.¡±

    Sam asked the guard captain.

    Even now the White Sand Guard are puzzled and didn¡¯t understand what Sam is trying to do, but they are still obliged to his demands.

    So, while waiting for the next message, Sam created a couple of puppets that looked like the dead bodies of the Seven Star faction members.

    Apart from them, he started disguising the corpses of the seven-star faction members to that of Dark Sea Sect members.

    He changed their faces with some inscriptions and then used the clothes of Dark Sea Sect soldiers.

    After that, he went out to the vines with his crystal tablet and the items he prepared as he started taking some videos.

    First, he threw the puppets that looked like the members of the Seven Star faction into the vines. The vines are not doing anything.

    Then, he threw the disguised corpses into the midst, the vines attacked the corpses like crazy. Of course, in the video the corpses didn¡¯t look like corpses. From the people watching it, they are defenseless soldiers who couldn¡¯t fight back and only get consumed by the vines.

    After the video was over, Sam just waited.

    Soon, another message came over from the other side.

    ¡°Do you have proof?¡±

    ¡°Of course, I do. I have investigated it thoroughly and here are some results.¡± Sam replied back and sent the video he took.

    He grinned as he did that.

    Seven Star Alliance truly believed that Sam and the other yers are envoys sent from Zeus, with all the benefits they gained they are very grateful and trusting towards them.

    Sam decided to use it to the fullest.

    Even after waiting for a while, there is no message from the other side and Sam just smiled wildly. He looked at the White Sand Guard and said.

    ¡°It seems like my n is going to work. So, let¡¯s just wait for the Dark Sea Sect members to arrive here, before we proceed forward.¡±

    They didn¡¯t know what to say. Sam walked past them and suddenly seemed to have remembered something and said.

    ¡°Oh, I will be going to the area behind the mansion to cultivate, please don¡¯te there. I am on verge of a breakthrough and I don¡¯t like revealing some details of my cultivation to you guys. It is better to keep that boundary and please don¡¯t make me lose my trust in you.¡±

    With those words, he walked away.

    He ced arge concealment formation in the empty area behind the mansion and waved his hands.

    Yanwu and the other beasts came out and they all looked at Sam happily.

    ¡°Finally guys, we are free. No more restrictions for a while and we can go crazy. Let¡¯s break through first.¡±

    As Sam said, he started taking out some Divine dimension fragments. In his quests throughout the hell training, he managed to obtain a ton of them. In fact he has way too many at this point and of course, Sam didn¡¯t let them go to waste.

    At his current cultivation level, spirit stones didn¡¯t provide too much direct benefit. The absorption rate from them is way too slow as he had to absorb hundreds of millions of spirit stones worth of energy to see any progress.

    So, he tinkered with one of the projects he previously dabbled in. When he was destroying organizations with his teams, he created something with the Divine Dimension fragments that could replenish energy for his team members.

    These fragments have the same principles. They all contain vast amounts of energy from the spirit stones and it is converted into liquid form right now, Sam really doesn¡¯t have to do much. He just had to throw the spirit stones into the formation mechanisms he set up inside and the energy is deposited into arge pool in the middle of the Divine dimension fragment.

    Now as heid down the divine dimension fragments as the nodes for a formation, the energy from these pools is gathered around Sam and the beasts as they absorbed it hungrily.

    In a way, Sam has gotten some extra training because he can be active in hell, while the beasts lie dormant in the divine dimension.

    So, the first order of business during his breakthrough is that he needs to bnce the level of energy between himself and the beasts.

    After they have an equivalent level of energy and he distributed the effects of corruption refinement in hell with the beasts, then he would be ready for the breakthrough.

    He cannot wait to enter the Divine ne of cultivation.

    After all, he has been on the verge of a breakthrough for a really long time and he couldn¡¯t hold back any longer.

    The beasts and Sam started cultivating and luckily the formation setup didn¡¯t cause any changes in the surrounding environment as he is not absorbing energy from outside.

    But this actually caught the eye of the White Sand Guard.

    They were all astral ne cultivators before and they all went through a breakthrough.

    They know for a fact that the surrounding energy will be affected by arge margin for the breakthrough, but they didn¡¯t sense a single fluctuation. They are really curious about what is happening.

 Chapter 1850 - 1850 Breakthrough

    1850 Breakthrough

    All kinds of elemental energies were drawn from the divine dimension fragments as Sam absorbed it.

    A link formed between him and the beasts soon and they started sharing the energy with Sam as the node in between. After more than an hour in that state, Sam along with all the beasts slowly started levitating in the air. Just a few feet from the ground.

    At that moment, the spiritual energy Sam is dragging stopped transmitting, instead it started condensing in his body.

    All his beast blood lines reacted and all the bloodline essences condensed together around his heart. Sam felt a bit ufortable, but his instincts said that he should just let it be. Spiritual energy that is being condensed in his body became smaller and smaller until it became the size of a baseball.

    The energy condensed to the point that it looked like a solid polished rock.

    The blood line essences started revolving around his rock and one after another started attracting the condensed energy from the orb.

    The energy enveloped the bloodline essences like cocoons. At this moment, there is a phenomenon in the sky. The clouds formed a whirlpool as some kind of divine light descended on Sam at the same time, the surroundings seemed to have been consumed by death as all the vitality escaped and created a deathly still aura.

    The Divine light and the Deathly aura both condensed into his body, bit by bit.

    Meanwhile, the White Sand Guard members suppressed their curiosity and tried to ignore Sam and his breakthrough.

    .....

    But the next movement, when they saw the phenomenon of the clouds and all the vitality within the city escaping away, they felt chills run down their spine.

    White Sand Guard Captain looked at the sky with disbelief apparent in his eyes.

    The vice captain also came to him and asked in a very low voice.

    ¡°Is that¡­ a faith phenomenon?¡±

    ¡°Y¡­Yes..¡±

    ¡°How did he gather this much faith?¡± The vice captain asked in a shivering tone. Everyone who became a Divine ne cultivator will have a little bit of faith. At least a very tiny bit and it will cause some reaction with the sky.

    But they never saw this level of faith reaction, even when people are breaking through to Divine ne Transcendent realm. It is almost an impossible phenomenon in their eyes.

    At the same time, back in deste.

    Sam¡¯s statue has been erect in many ces along with the statues of his friends. A bunch of people are looking at the statue in the centre of the city. It started vibrating with the nature as it started glowing slightly.

    In the same way, statues in various spots within the deste are vibrating. Everyone sent messages back to the city, but they didn¡¯t notice anything abnormal. All the systems are working fine.

    Far away from deste. Tundra Realm.

    Ice elves that interacted with Sam and the words ¡®SAM WAS HERE¡¯ started vibrating with spiritual energy. In the same way, every tribe Sam has every visited, fought with and destroyed, and everywhere that he left the words, ¡®SAM WAS HERE¡¯ the words started vibrating.

    Back here, Sam experienced a weird feeling in his head. It is almost like he could sense the feelings of a lot of people at the same time. There is a feeling of admiration towards him, a feeling of affection, a feeling of love, even a feeling of hatred could be felt.

    He felt overwhelmed for a second, but a part of the condensed energy diffused into the soul making it more stable.

    The faith energy started coiling around cocoon forming anotheryer and then the deathly aura that is all over the city also started doing the same. Now, Sam felt pure agony, pain and soul searing hatred.

    As both types of feelings, positive and negative invaded his mind and soul. The sh of these two feelings caused him to suffocate a bit.

    Bothyers tried to gain upperhand but the condensed energy tried to forcefully fuse both of them together.

    The amount of energy is way too muchpared to a regr Divine ne Initiation cultivator and even though Sam¡¯s body and soul are ten times more sturdier than a normal cultivator, he felt like he wouldn¡¯t be able to bear it all.

    But at this moment, the bloodline essences started fusing together with these energy cocoons. The remaining condensed energy at his spiritual core suddenly split into currents as each one hit a cocoon before spilling out of Sam¡¯s body.

    Each current has a different color and they flew towards a different beast.

    Golden color for Yanwu, faint green for Sky, Aqua blue and purple for Mia, ck for Shadow mouse, Dark green for Forrest Bear, a mixture of brown and metallic blue for Dia, Silver for Raiju, Dark grey for Void Hopper.

    The condensed energy started entering their bodies and created a connection. This connection shared the load that Sam¡¯s body and soul is bearing until a moment ago. Now, he feltfortable like never before.

    The heavenly light and the deathly aura slowly disappeared while cocoons in Sam¡¯s body solidified a bit. But they are still mostly made up of intangible energy, but there is a faint solidification.

    The same thing happened to the beasts, the streaks of energy entered their body and tempered their bodies and souls before condensing at their hearts.

    The energy condensed a little bit.

    Finally, Sam opened his eyes and felt the energy in his body.

    As he circted his energy, he felt more alive than ever and stronger than ever.

    He tried to trigger the faint solidified energy in the middle of the cocoons. It is the Divine energy. His reserves are muchrger than any Divine ne Initiation cultivator at Initial stage ever existed.

    He summoned a faint streak of divine energy and the surrounding spiritual energy reacted wildly. It acted sentient for a second and Sam could sense a faint hint of subservience from it. The energy started gather around him making him float.

    Rather than float, it would be more urate to say that the spiritual energy is carrying his body.

    He smirked as he looked at the beasts.

    ¡°I am really sorry. I really wish that we could spend some time openly. But right now, we are in no position to do that. Let me finish this war and from the next stage, we can roam around openly and not bother about anything.

    I promise I will let you guys lose like never before.¡±

    The beasts didn¡¯t mind and entered the Divine dimension once again.

    Sam took the formations away and walked to the front of the mansion to meet the White Sand Guard.

    Everyone looked at him weirdly. Some of them are suspicious, some of them are curious, and some of them are wary, but Sam didn¡¯t care. The connection with them will onlyst until he finished his missions. There is not much in this that interested him.

    Maybe, the Sr Sect that worships Olympians gods could be something that he could focus on, that too if it survives after the onught of the Dark Sea Sect.

    The Guard captain looked at Sam deeply. He has way too many questions at this point but he held himself back from asking.

    ¡°There is no message from the headquarters yet. What do you want us to do?¡±

    ¡°Where are the forces of Dark Sea Sect? How far have theye?¡±

    ¡°They are getting close. They are chasing all the forces of Seven Star Alliance and the Sr Sect to this city just like you told them to do.

    We have already spotted a few groups reaching this ce.¡±

    ¡°Wonderful, then let¡¯s prepare for some ambushes. I also need to test my new strength. We will distract these fleeing groups from the vines with our attacks.

    They shouldn¡¯t have time to think about why these weird vines are everywhere. Also, keep some of your low-level members to keep engaging with these people if they contact them.¡±

    ¡°Alright.¡±

    The White Sand Guard arranged for whatever Sam ordered and a small group of them deployed.

    Sam still used his harbinger, but the others didn¡¯t bring their beasts. They are all using flying by themselves.

    They concealed their auras and used the forest cover to approach the first group of enemies that areing towards the city.

    When they arrived at the range, the group came to a halt and are indeed contacting the city.

    ¡°The city said that there is nothing wrong with the vines and they are a gift from the envoy. A defensive weapon that works against enemies. I think we are good to go.¡±

    One of the group members said.

    ¡°Are you sure¡­¡±

    Before his peer could ask questions, the white sand guardunched an attack.

    Sam zoomed towards a person of the same cultivation on his harbinger and jabbed him with his hand.

    The palm directly went through the heart, cleanly breaking it into two pieces.

 Chapter 1851 - 1851 Changes in Tower

    1851 Changes in Tower

    Sam took his arm back and moved on to the next opponent.

    He walked through like a hot knife through butter. He didn¡¯t face any resistance at all. Sam is all too familiar with this feeling. Most of the time, he was way too powerful for his peers of the same cultivation level.

    He has been experiencing this since he was living in a very low-level realm like deste.

    He also believed that he would experience some difficulty and resistance as he climbed through the realms and cultivation levels. But to his surprise, it never changed and from the looks of it, it is highly unlikely to change at this point.

    But he is looking forward to the day that it does.

    The ambush was sessful, their goal was not to kill everyone. Even though the White Sand Guard is perfectly capable of doing it and is actually willing to do it, Sam told them otherwise.

    They let the opponents escape to the city.

    ¡°Why are you letting them go? We could have finished them off?¡±

    ¡°There are my precious resources, why would I let them go to waste?¡±

    .....

    The white sand guard felt weird when the looked at Sam¡¯s chill smile. To see people like they are nothing more than things and resources is kind of hard even for them. After all, even if they kill them like they are nothing, they are treated as living beings.

    Sam looked at them and said.

    ¡°Can you guys stop giving me these looks? I don¡¯t really care what you think about me, but you guys are pretty distracting and knocking my efficiency down bit by bit. So, please if you have something to say, then say it, if you don¡¯t then just mind your business.¡±

    He moved on with the task at hand.

    The opponents that escaped got caught by the vines and since everyone is pretty much injured by the ambush, the vines didn¡¯t have much trouble at all. They just consumed everyone and soon started giving out fruits.

    Sam went to collect those fruits, before spotting another group of people that areing to the city, before dealing with them.

    The same process repeated for almost a dozen times and soon messages from the Dark Sea Sect forces starteding.

    The messages are about clearing the cities and towns there and one location after another is falling into Dark Sea Sect¡¯s hands. But the headquarters of the Sr Sect and the Seven Star alliance ispletely oblivious to the loss of their territory.

    In their opinion, the Dark Sea Sect is still stationed at the coast where they are trying to defend the beach they upied.

    The main reason that the Seven Star Alliance is not actively attacking is that they are focused on the tower trails in Forest City.

    After counting all the fruits collected, they are over a hundred of them.

    Some of the fruits are small and their energy content is also not much. But some of them are big and they are full of spiritual and divine energy.

    Based on the person the vines absorbed the fruit¡¯s energy content will be decided.

    It could have been better if he got more fruits, but unfortunately, he doesn¡¯t have too much time in the current state.

    He sat alone and started brainstorming on what to do.

    ¡°I thought, I could keep it for a bitter in the war, but it seems like I should use it now to allow the other n to move seamlessly.¡±

    He muttered to himself and came to the main mansion.

    He was about to tell something to the White Sand Guards when a message came from the headquarters.

    They are asking about the status of the city and how the situation of the Dark Sea Sect forces.

    Sam sent a reply back and this time the clone puppet appeared to be extremely cheerful and excited.

    ¡°The situation of the Dark Sea sect forces is extremely dire.

    The vines that they have used to deal with us have been sessfully countered by the seeds provided by the Envoy and also the vines that are friendlier to use are appearing randomly at several ces at the opportune moments.

    White Sand Guard tried to ambush many of our forces, but they were attacked by the vines and were repelled back.

    Currently, we have a really good situation going on here.¡±

    ¡°That is great to know. Based on your reports, Sr Sect is willing to trust more about Envoys and they also want to send some people to our tower in the forest city for training. They would treat it as Seven Star Alliance¡¯s contribution points.

    Your reports yed a key role in this. Keep it up.¡± A message came back and it is from one of the faction leaders of the seven-star alliance.

    When Sam heard the message, his eyes lit up immediately. This is the ideal scenario for his next n. He thought utilizing this n would be a bit of a waste, but he is really fortunate.

    He turned to the Guard captain and said.

    ¡°I have a n and this one will surely weaken the forces of the Sr Sect and the Seven Star alliance by a lot.¡±

    ¡°What should we do?¡±

    The captain asked directly.

    Sam has contributed way too much to this war. In fact, all of the achievements on this coastal front are mainly because of him. If it was not for him, it would take weeks if not months for them to conquer this much area and they would have lost a lot of people too.

    By now, Sam might as well be the impromptu leader of the guard temporarily. They are following orders closely without rejecting anything.

    ¡°Tell the other fronts where Sr Sect is participating in the war to increase the pressure a bit. The Sr sect should be at a pinch, even if they are not, they should at least feel a little pressured and anxious about the war progress.

    They don¡¯t have to do it on arge scale. One day, that is all I am asking.¡±

    ¡°Are you sure this will help? Even if Ervin has some pull in Dark Sea Sect because of your achievements until now, ordering other factions to increase pressure will be difficult. There would be a huge price to pay and there is the problem of losing some men.¡±

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, the pressure doesn¡¯t have to be a frontal attack. If you can bluff them, then you can feel free to do so, all I want is for the Sr Sect to feel the need to focus on other fronts.

    Right now, without presence here, they are rxed and even held hope for resisting us on this front, so we need to take advantage of that.¡±

    ¡°Alright, I will trust you and give out the message, but I don¡¯t know how if they will do it or not.¡±

    ¡°I will give them a slight reason to, so don¡¯t worry about it.¡±

    As Sam spoke, he immediately sat cross-legged on the ground. His energy circted and the shadow energy enveloped him.

    His consciousness left his body and seeped into the shadow world.

    Within this dark shadow world, Sam¡¯s shadow which is holding his consciousness down is moving in a certain direction.

    It is to the forest city.

    The shadow reached the tower he built in the forest city and as soon as it did, a conscious shadow from the tower responded.

    Sam¡¯s shadow came back to him and he started taking deep breaths as he panted heavily.

    He didn¡¯t know if he would be able to do it, but luckily, the forest city is not far away and the distance here and the shadow world is almost the same.

    Using the shadows as a medium, he let his consciousness travel to that tower to trigger something that was kept hidden.

    At this moment, in Forest City.

    The faction leader is talking to someone from the headquarters about the situation in the tower.

    ¡°The training is going well. The trials are the same and the tower didn¡¯t show any problems until now. It seems like the envoys didn¡¯t take offense to their hearts. But too bad, what kind of changes would they have brought in this war if they were not offended?

    The Sr Sect is getting more and more outrageous. We lost on such great things because of their stupid greed.¡±

    Obviously, the person on the other end is also a member of the Seven Star alliance, in fact, he is the same faction leader that talked to Sam.

    After he got the news that the envoys helped with those vines and blocked the advance of the Dark Sea Sect, he delivered the news to different faction leaders.

    They were worried that the envoys would be angry and take the privileges of the towers away, but from the looks of it, none of it happened.

    But at this moment, the Green Bamboo faction leader suddenly stood up as she looked out of the window.

    The magnificent tower started emitting arge bright light out of nowhere and arge mechanical sound of heavy objects moving could be heard throughout the city

 Chapter 1852 - 1852 New Training

    1852 New Training

    Green Bamboo Faction

    Forest City

    The tower change was seen and heard by everyone within the city. In fact, even the beasts in the surrounding forests of the city also felt these changes. After a few minutes, the sound and the light from the tower finally stopped.

    By now, the faction leader already visited the tower and the candidates within the tower were thrown out by now.

    After the tower changes are finished, they all noticed that the new tower is a lot more different than the ones before. At this moment, a projection of Sam appeared out of the tower¡¯s entrance.

    ¡°Hello members of Seven Star Alliance. The fact that you are seeing this projection means, the Seven Star alliance must be in a state of war or the situation might even be more serious than that.

    These circumstances triggered the towers¡¯ hidden mechanism.

    From now, the towers unlocked very advanced training modules. They are amplified versions of the previous training modules and they are also unique in their own way.

    They are not only designed to let the trainees enhance their personal skills, they can also learn new skills. The tower in green bamboo faction was designed to providebat skills using the environment as well as small teams to their benefit.

    .....

    Now, not only would they be experiencing these environmental factors effecting theirbat ability, they would also be able to temporarily merge with the souls of some cultivators who had some of the bestbat experiences when they were alive.

    Because of this the trainees will experience what they had experienced in different scenarios and will be able to learn a lot faster.

    The only problem is they will be needing a lot more mental energy than before and it would take a toll on them. To subsidize that, I have created a separate room that has formations to enhance and soothe their souls.

    But this whole things costs a lot of spirit stones to operate.

    It might even deficit your war budget. The best way to operate it though is to connect an energy mine to the tower through formations. It wouldn¡¯t matter what elemental energy the mine has, it would work naturally.

    I hope you can win over the war.

    Another thing I want to tell you is, that since my projection here, that means I am not here. At the moment of this recording I don¡¯t know what might have happened, but whatever it is, as long as the seven star alliance is not directly involved, I will never hold you ountable for it.

    Thank you so much. All the best.¡±

    With that Sam¡¯s projection disappeared.

    The faction leader of the Green Bamboo Faction looked at the tower with her mouth wide open.

    Not just her, the situation in the remaining factions is also the same. All the towers were activated and everyone is staring at them dumbfoundedly after they saw Sam¡¯s messages.

    And then came the guilt.

    These faction leaders are usually shrewd and they did unspeakable things for their personal gain many times. But every since Sam came over, in their opinion he has been nothing but loyal. He always kept on giving them.

    He never took anything back from them.

    He helped them in every way possible and all of this because they are loyals followers of Zeus. This is the grace of their god and it seems like as the god¡¯s envoy even Sam inherited that.

    They regretted not backing Sam up when Sr Sect has tried to push Sam and the yers so much.

    Now even after Sam left, he is still helping them.

    As the faction leaders digested the news, it travelled to the headquarters of the Sr Sect really fast. When the Sect leader heard this, he immediately sent out an order.

    ¡°Let the members of the Seven star alliance test out the new effects of the towers and give out a detailed report. If it really gives out that many gains in this time of war, we can take advantage of it and fight against our enemies.

    The Seven Star alliance will be rewarded with sufficient resources and will be granted a level independency from the Sr Sect in the future.¡±

    The order passed through quickly.

    The seven star alliance made a move. Even if the Sr sect didn¡¯t tell them, they are already prepared to send their members and to their delight, this time the training tower not only worked for the low level prodigies, it is even useful for rtively high level cultivators inte stage or even the peak stage of Divine ne Initiation.

    The alliance immediately sent out orders to all their fronts and one came to Sam also.

    ¡°All forces must focus on defense, do not actively engage with the Dark Sea Sect forces. Unless and of course if it is absolutely necessary for you guys to fight, do not engage. Even if you suffer small losses it will be fine.

    But do not be the reason to increase the heat of the war.¡±

    When Sam received this message, he couldn¡¯t help but grin foolishly. This is the perfect scenario he imagined.

    Now the whole of Seven Star alliance is being manipted by him and in turn even the sr sect is being effected because of their greed.

    Meanwhile, ording to what Sam requested the pressure on other fronts increased a bit. The Sr sect is actually contemting whether they should trust Sampletely at this point. They are still a bit skeptical about this big fat pie that just fell out of the sky.

    But when they noticed the new found pressure on their forces and how aggressive the Dark Sea Sect has suddenly be, the sect members didn¡¯t have enough time to care about this.

    That is one of the reasons they left the testing to the Seven star alliance members.

    ¡°Now all we have to do is wait. You can let the people high up know that they can withdraw pressure any time they want now.¡±

    Sam went to the White Sand Guard captain and informed him of thetest developments.

    After that, he went to one of the rooms as he started setting up a formation with dark elemental energy. This formation is actually one of the things he picked up from one of the hell quests.

    It will help him stay in touch with all of the spectres and ghosts that he made a contract with as long as they are within a certain distance.

    Of course, it has some limitations, so he is using the amplification formation tricks he picked up and now he can get in touch with the souls he contracted within the area of Seven Star alliance.

    Of course, it is not a proper contact. He cannot just have a chat with them, but he can sense their state much more clearly.

    After setting up the formation, he just sat in the middle of it and waited.

    Meanwhile, back in the forest city.

    Green Bamboo faction sent the first batch of people inside to train.

    One of the people who went there is the woman Sam encountered back in the tournament when he and the other yers were suddenly thrown into this realm.

    The woman is at the Middle Stage of Divine ne Initiation and has a weird constitution that lets her upy and use the whole forest as her tool. She is very powerful and one of the highly talented people within the Green Bamboo faction.

    She entered the tower and started facing the first trial. She is surrounded in a barrennd with no sign of vitality in sight. There is not a single de of grass and the whole ground seemed have been sucked out of life.

    She tried to spread her energy which also seemed extremely difficult. She threw in some seeds to the ground, but even before she could grow them, the death energy started eating it up.

    For the first time in a long while she felt powerless and the feeling only deepened when she saw a swordsman appearing out of nowhere swinging the sword wildly.

    She was killed in a second.

    But instead of getting kicked out of the tower, she reappeared in the desert again, but this time, she felt like her hands and legs are not in her own control.

    Her spiritual energy ran wildly and activated elemental fusion. She turned into a wooden tree and now the roots created under her feet started spreading into the ground.

    A field of spiritual energy in the surroundings was created and it waspletely under her control. Now before the swordsman could make a move, she attacked with the vinesshing.

    The fight course changed and she won in due time.

    Now, she was kicked back to the ground floor where she stood dumbfounded.

    When she fought for a second time, she could feel being connected to a different soul which started operating her body and fought instead of her.

    Now those experiences are imprinted on her brain and a lot of new insights were gained.

 Chapter 1853 Next Phase

    Chapter 1853 Next Phase

    A simr thing happened in every tower and to every single trainee that entered the tower.

    Dozens of people trained for a couple of hours before they were kicked out. They almost felt like they are brand new people when they came out of the tower again. The new techniques that were imprinted in their heads are all they could think about.

    So, as soon as they came out, the faction members tried to send them back in, but after realizing that they cannot do that, the candidates who finished a round of training in the towers were sent to the front lines.

    And most of the time, they are distributed towards the other fronts where the pressure is maximized and since in their opinion the pressure on the coastal side is far too less, they didn''t bother sending anyone there for the time being.

    Meanwhile, back in Sam''s room, he is still sitting the middle of the formation and his mind his hovering in the soul world.

    When the young woman who can control the whole forest learned a new technique, a soul lit up within the soul world and at the same time, an orb appeared within the formation.

    As the technique was imprinted carefully in the head of the woman, a tendril appeared on that orb. Simrly, a lot of orbs appeared one after another and with every connection and technique imprint the orb made, there is a tendril.

    Sometimes, a single orb had multiple tendrils because they connected to multiple people who happened to have simr attributes.

    These are indication of his spectres being active and making some changes in the minds of these people.

    They are leaving a part of themselves in the minds of these trainees.

    But the trainees themselves don''t even realize what level of mistake are theymitting. Letting their prodigies and main forces'' minds be manipted by unknown specters and letting a part of these specters to remain in their heads, that is nothing more than asking for a long drawn-out mental suicide.

    Anyway, it wouldn''t be long before they actually realize what had happened.

    The situation in the current city was extremely calm. Soon, the forces from the Dark Sea Sect arrived at the city and the White Sand Guard including Sam managed handed it over to them.

    Due to the nature of the war, the city was long evacuated and every single resident happened to be a soldier or mercenaries that worked for the Sr Sect.

    So, they didn''t have to do much to take over the city. They just need to kill all the soldiers, which they did with extreme ease.

    The status quo was established.

    Even though the Dark Sea Sect members who are on the high of this easy victory wanted to march forward while they are still carrying the momentum and the seven-star alliance went into a passive state, White Sand Guard didn''t allow them.

    They are waiting for Sam''s next move.

    In just few days, Sam already became some sort of de facto leader of the group. Even if he doesn''t have a position and nobody explicitly said it, he is the one giving out the orders and the rest of the White Sand guard are just following him obediently.

    Including and especially the captain of the Guard.

    Everything Sam has instructed them has gone way too smoothly. Too smooth to the point that he doubted that this could be a dream.

    These vines have a perverted set of abilities that made him shiver in fright but at the same time, made their job a thousand times easier. He doesn''t know what exactly Sam is fully capable of and what kind of n he had.

    But the ns he threw casually are already this effective, so if he is putting this much effort and kept on waiting, then this n could only be much more dangerous, and efficient.

    At least he hoped so.

    Time passed, it has already been seven days.

    In these seven days, the Seven Star alliance is on a constant rise. The people that finished their first round of training in the new towers showed impable performance at the frontlines. Among their peers, they had the most contributions.

    As soon as the sr sect found this situation, they made their move. They sent their people to the towers to get trained. They didn''t hesitate to pay a high price and promise a lot of resources and authority to the Seven Star alliance.

    Even they started believing that Zeus might indeed favor he seven star alliance and they didn''t dare to recklessly take a forceful approach and upy the towers.

    So, many people are entering the tower and the orbs in Sam''s are full of tendrils. Each orb has hundreds of tendrils. And by third day some of the first batch trainees came back for a second round.

    And they were able to enter.

    Whenever something like that happened, they managed to gain more insights and new techniques while the imprints became stronger.

    The tendrils rted to these trainees grew thicker and they almost looked like a tentacle. As time passed, and deeper the imprints went, the thicker the tendrils became.

    On the fifth day, Sam saw the start of the results he wanted to see.

    One of the tendrils on an orb grew too big that the orb looked like a cylinder and slowly the tendril split up bing an orb in itself this orb has a slightly fainter lightpared to the parent one and it also has doesn''t have any tendrils extending from it.

    This second orb is connected to its parent orb with a very small energy string indicating its origin.

    As time passed, new orbs starteding and the more the trainees entered the more time they are able to spend in the tower.

    On the seventh day, some of the trainees saw so much qualitative improvement in their fighting prowess that even some normal soldiers have be elites within their respective cultivation range and they are ying at the front lines.

    On the seventh day, Sam finally came out of the room.

    Guard captain immediately ran to him and said.

    "What do we do next?"

    Sam looked at the usuallyposed captain and said.

    "Why are you in such a hurry? You seem flustered?"

    "I am facing a lot of pressure right now. I am appointed as themander in this front, but the forces of the Dark Sea sect are led by some influential people and they are not really willing to wait for long. Even though your contributions are highest until the current level of conquest, these people are hungrily trying to im it as their credit.

    Of course, it would be too tant and obvious if they just tried to do it without any participation. So, they are trying to advance forward. Their n is to make some contributions and then push you back to the sidelines.

    I stopped them so that they won''t disrupt your ns. But it is getting harder with time."

    Sam chuckled at this.

    "I understand. But I hope you can stop them for another week."

    "Another week?"

    "Yes, my n is finallying to fruition. Iid down the perfect bait and everyone is biting it. If you can stop them for another week, the n will go smoothly."

    "Can you speed it up? Or can we find any other alternative?"

    Sam shook his head and smiled wryly.

    "Do you really think it is that easy? Actually, you are worrying about one week, but do you know I hadid down a lot of groundwork weeks ago while staying in the Seven Star alliance? You don''t know the time, effort, and level of research it took to establish it properly.

    If it is disrupted, the loss would be unimaginable. In fact, the losses cannot even be quantified in a number of spirit stones.

    So, please hold for another week.

    I promise you, after this week, you can have the Seven Star alliance on a silver tter. You can just eat them alive and a lot of Sr Sect elites would be down in the dumps.

    You will thank me after this week."

    The Guard captain appeared troubled. By now he started trusting Sam more. But the problem with the remainingmanders is as real as it could get.

    He gritted his teeth and said.

    "There is one way, that I know would work. It will buy some time and after that time you will also have enough authority to handle these situations well."

    "What would that be?"

    "I will talk to Ervin and make you the actingmander of this ce."

    Sam felt dumbfounded.

    "How would that help the situation? You are only going to make me more trouble. All thesemanders eager to take credit will just take it out on me."

    "Yes, that would be the situation at the start. But this will arouse a discussion back in the core of the Dark Sea Sect and various factions will start looking into you. Ervin will hide your background and thesemanders will have to stay their hand before they could find out about your information.

    At the same time, you will be able to execute your n sessfully and you will gain enough authority for the next round of attacks."

    "If you think it works, then so be it. I would have to move around a bit in the next few days. So, you have to cover for me a bit."

    With those words, Sam left the city on the harbinger.

 Chapter 1854 Ready for War

    Chapter 1854 Ready for War

    The next day.

    Forest City.

    Green Bamboo faction.

    The faction leader looked at the new report of all her factions members'' performance. She had a wide grin on her face.

    "It seems like we are doing great everywhere. I think it is about time we call them back and start advancing on the shorefront. Once we get the sea coast back, we will have a great contribution under our belts."

    "That n seems feasible. But what do you think we should say when the Sr Sect asks for a reason? The very fact that they tried to divide all of our forces and sent them to different ces screams that they are trying to prevent this."

    "I have a n.

    I got in touch with an elder from the Sr Sect. His faction obviously had many juniors and even though he had a great position within the sect, his juniors are not that good.

    If we can make a deal with him, we might be able to get our members back to this ce.

    From the reports out of all the seven factions, our green bamboo obviously had better results on the front lines, so we need to capture that lead. If only the green bamboo faction solely manages to send the White Sand Guard away, imagine the level of contribution we will have.

    That could be the first step of breaking away from the Seven Star alliance and bing our own power. Green Bamboo Sect. My dreams finally have a chance ofing true."

    The faction leader was lost in her thoughts as desire burned in her eyes.

    At this moment, hermunication token rang as she got a ping from the tower. It is about a spatial transference and to her surprise the location is actually the tower itself.

    She hurriedly ran over and by the time she reached there, there are already a bunch of people gathered around.

    At the entrance of the tower, there is a heap of fruits. All of them of the wood elements and on top of that heap, there is onerge fruit glistening with divine energy.

    As soon as the faction leader''s eyesnded on those fruits, her heart started racing. She immediately reached out to check that fruit and when she touched it a series of images shed in her head along with a voice.

    It is of Sam.

    Sam is standing as he looked into the horizon and he ryed a message.

    "I managed to cultivate these with great effort and they came at a price that even I cannot scoff at. But I believe they would be put to good use by you and you can use them to reach new heights in this war."

    The message was over and the faction leader felt like her heart almost stopped with excitement. She has never been so overwhelmed with joy.

    She immediately stored the fruits away and left the tower. She went back to her private office and only her closest and most trustworthy confidant was allowed to enter.

    She ced the heap of fruits on the table. A lot of them fell off as the table is not big enough. She looked at them and then at her confidant.

    She held one of the fruits in her hands and used her spiritual sense to check them.

    "We need to speed up the process. Immediately.

    Call for all of our faction members. We need to use these fruits and distribute to our factions before the Sr Sect tries to take away all of them."

    "But, don''t you think the Sr sect will retaliate if we use all of them by ourselves, particrly when we don''t inform them? They could even use that as an excuse to deal with us."

    The faction leader fell into deep thought and said.

    "Let me contact that elder. I will use him as a shield. If I voluntarily give a piece of this pie to him, then he should help us fend off the rest of the sect.

    Also, contact our spies in other factions. We need to spread the rumors about these fruits as soon as possible. The rumors should be saying that the other factions got a higher number of fruits. You know what to do right? I don''t need to spell it out for you."

    "Yes, leader. I will do as you instructed."

    Things moved fast.

    The faction leader personally called one faction member after another and started distributing the fruits based on their level. She put out a share separately for the sr sect''s elder and called him toe hurriedly.

    The sr sect head came the same day and when he heard the deal proposed by the faction leader he readily agreed. He didn''t even ask for a better price or try to sound out what kind of gains the faction leader has since she is willing to give up so much.

    Even the faction leader felt that something is very odd, but that guy only gave out one reason as he sensed her doubt.

    "This is an investment. There is a reason why those envoys are favoring you and I want to cooperate with the chosen ones of the god. I believe in the long term I won''t lose out."

    Basically, he is also brainwashed by Sam''s bullshit.

    leader made sure that everyone got at least one round of training within the tower.

    The troops are being rallied.

    Now the elder went back to the sr sect the same day and by night he created a ruckus. The faction leader doesn''t know what he did exactly, but all of their members were sent back immediately and the Green Bamboo faction even got a subtle order to ''scout'' the shores.

    Basically, they are given a green light to take some action and who knows, there might be some trouble when ''scouting'' and it might just dissolve into an all-out war.

    That is what she wanted.

    By the next evening, all the Green Bamboo faction members are gathered and the fruits Sam sent are actually pretty much enough for all the core members of the faction. Apart from that the faction leader made sure that everyone got at least one round of training within the tower.

    The troops are being rallied.

    After a couple of days, the green bamboo faction decided to make its move.

    While they are doing this, the remaining factions are not really staying idle. They had their own ns. Two of them did the same thing as the Green Bamboo faction. They tied up with a different elder in the sr sect and managed to gather their forces to distribute the force.

    One of them was caught in the trap of sr sect, but the faction leader used the benefits to sell himself out and get a Junior elder position within the sect. So, now the seven-star alliance is down to a six-star alliance.

    The sr sect managed to squeeze in some more benefits from the remaining factions.

    The whole of the Seven-star alliance didn''t fight for almost seven days, but they are more chaotic than any battlefield could ever be and they decided to raise more chaos after these seven days.

    On the eighth day, the green bamboo faction was ready to attack and the faction leader is wearing her armor and started discussing the battle n.

    At this moment, Sam also returned to the city.

    When he met the captain, he asked about the situation and he was relieved that their n actually worked.

    Sam is the official interimmander of this front and he can order around the troops as much as he wanted.

    Sam nodded in satisfaction and went to the room he set up. Meanwhile. The news of his arrival already reached a bunch of other big wigs in the camp and they all swarmed to his room to get an audience with him. But they were all blocked away by the rest of the captain.

    Sam didn''t care about them, instead, he looked at thergework of orbs in the room. Right now the orbs are not neutral-white colored anymore. Instead, they are all of different colors. Some of them are green, some are red and some are blue. There are a bunch of colors and the whole room looked like some kind of weird fungus is spreading crazily.

    He looked at this and smirked.

    Only after inspecting everything did hee out.

    He looked at all themanders and captains waiting for him and then Sam said.

    "We are going to attack the Green Bamboo faction. We are taking down the forest city by tomorrow. You can kill everyone except for the Divine ne Initiation cultivators in the initial stage."

    Everyone is dumbfounded. They all looked at Sam as if he was an idiot and when someone was about to oppose, Sam raised his hand and said.

    "I am not going to exin too much. I already made some preparations so that you will have a better idea of what is about to happen. So, just take a look at these crystal tablets and you will understand what the current situation of the faction is."

    With that Sam passed a bunch of crystal tablets while he went back to the room.

    The tablets automatically activated and they all saw a bird''s eye view of the forest city. All the troops of the green bamboo faction are currently stationed there and then there is the view of all the towns around.

    The troops are stationed there too.

    The forest city and green bamboo faction are all ready for the war.

 Chapter 1855 - 1855 On a Silver Platter

    1855 On a Silver tter

    Anyone who has a certainmanding authority over troops is holding a crystal tablet and looking at the screen.

    The formation of the six towns and one city is visible. All troops are getting ready. It seems like the Green Bamboo faction is thinking of attacking them from different directions. In a way they are right.

    From what Sam observed, the six towns are not just designed to provide defense for the city, they also have six hidden paths all aimed at different locations around in the Green Bamboo faction. Even the six towns are connected with hidden paths.

    But that is not important now.

    As the captains looked at the screens, they soon noticed an anomaly.

    Sam stood inside the room and took out a hand gun. This time, there are no energy bullets or some bullets of extreme damage, instead the bullets are very normal. The only thing different is they are infused with his spiritual energy signature.

    He aimed at one of the orbs that looked like evolved fungus spores and shot.

    *BANG*

    The bullet went through the orb and the orb turned into a puff of very small particles that looked like balls of cotton.

    .....

    And these small particles moved toward the other orbs that are connected to this orb with the energy thread.

    Now these new orbs slowly started deforming before they exploded in a puff and a new bunch of particles are moving along the energy threads to the next batch of orbs.

    A chain reaction started soon.

    Meanwhile, in the screens, the captains saw a weird scene.

    A person in one of the six towns suddenly froze in the middle of the road and the next moment, he just turned around and punched one of hispanions in the face.

    Thepanion flew threw the air andnded in a house.

    ¡°Oy, what the fuck is wrong with you? Why did you attack me all of a sudden?¡±

    Thepanion asked angrily, but the guy didn¡¯t stop. He started running forward as spiritual energy gathered at his fists.

    Thepanion started throwing some fireballs around, but the guy moved with some weird footwork and managed to dodge all the attacks in a hair¡¯s breadth beforending another punch.

    Thepanion finally lost and started fighting back seriously.

    In the next minute, before the captain could digest the first fight, a second erupted, but in apletely different town.

    Two people at different corners of the towns attacked the soldiers around them.

    One of them is a supervisor who was exining stuff to the scouts. But he started attacking them in the middle and before he knew it, the scouts also started attacking him back. They were at the wall of the town which was crumbled immediately.

    The second is actually a person in charge of checking the town formation and it was busted as soon as he lost it and started attacking uncontrobly.

    Sam came out of the room and said.

    ¡°In the next few hours, not just the green bamboo faction, many people around the sr sect, particrly the younger generation until the Peak Stage of Divine ne Initiation will lose it and these riots will break out all over the territory.

    Since they make up for arge amount of the force and the actual deciding factors of the war, I am sure, this is the right time for you guys to make a move.

    And there is one condition. Capture everyone who is at Initial Stage of Divine ne Initiation and group them up based on their elemental affinity.

    Don¡¯t you dare kill any of them and if they are about to die, save them and capture them. I am sure with all of the chaos going on, you can do that easily. And also, don¡¯t destroy any dead bodies, keep them all together, of course, group them based on elemental affinities.

    I have a lot to do with them.

    Also, send a notice to Ervin, telling them that is a favor I am asking from the Dark Sea Sect in exchange for creating this situation all over the territory of the Sr Sect.

    Collect the deadbodies and give them to me. If they do, I can give you guys the gic blueprint of making this special vine that you guys saw.¡±

    White Sand Guard captain widened his eyes as he heard everything Sam said. With every passing word, he felt a buzz go through his mind. He couldn¡¯t help but feel terrified.

    All that Sam did was very subtle. He could just imagine, if Sam was the enemy of Dark Seat Sect and if he just joined the sect normally and spent a year time there doing some sect missions, he will haveplete ess to all of the Dark Sea Continent. He would be able to use these vines just as skillfully and the Dark Sea Sect will go down into chaos easily.

    Even if by chance the sect survived, the foundations would shake and weaken.

    He felt a chill down his spine.

    ¡°Please inform me after you are done with these things. If possible spare the Divine ne Initiation initial stage cultivators in other territories of the Sr Sect and the other two sects as well. Of course, the deadbodies are given.

    Just let me know what Ervin and the sect thinks about this deal.¡±

    With that Sam went into a different room and started writing something as he made some calctions. Even though he practically ced the whole of Sr Sect on a silver tter, it would still some time for them to deal with itpletely.

    So, he could take some time and focus on things that would make life easier in the future.

    At this moment, the captains came back to their senses and made their moves. They ran out of the house and immediately sent messages to their respective factions. They need to make sure that these vines will benefit their faction more.

    And for that, they have to make a move. But on second thought even if the vines wouldn¡¯t fall into their hands, they should find a way to build a rtionship with Sam and get some other benefits out of him.

    Anyone who could make things like those vines will not just be having a single invention.

    They all sent messages and also started mobilizing their troops. There is no way for them to miss this opportunity and there is no need for them to receive any explicit orders. Currently, if the situation progresses just like how Sam showed, then even if arge group of mercenaries swarmed without any formations and tactics they can take on the Sr Sect.

    There is no need for him to direct them and give out tactical orders.

    And just like that, the end of the war just began.

    Sam didn¡¯t know or rather didn¡¯t care what kind of fuse he lit up. Because of his actions a lot of extremely high-power people were moved.

    Hidden forces came into y, elites became footsoldiers and fell as quickly as autumn leaves.

    Every city is slowly turning into a graveyard.

    Meanwhile, he only cared about Forest city.

    After the six towns were taken down, Sam joined the battle and participated in taking down Forest city. After taking it down, he still had hismander position and now it solidified, and everyone started following his orders. Now the Dark Sea Sect sent more forces from the seaside and they took the forest city as a base to make a move toward the rest of the Seven Star alliance.

    Things went smoothly and Sam saw some of the tasks set is cleared. He got acknowledgment and credit and he acted as a leader the upancy of the Seven Star alliance might just be done by his hands by the way things are going.

    So, he sent people to different ces to take down cities and bases while he stayed back at the Forest City.

    Now the six towns have be prisons for the Initial Stage of Divine ne Initiation Cultivators. Even though the Green faction is not that big, it still has several hundred of these cultivators. For a lot of people that is the peak they can reach, so there are a lot of washed-up old men in that stage and they are all hauled to these towns based on their elements.

    And even in town, there are some sections dividing them into different elements.

    Sam leisurely went to one of the sections where a hundred people are waiting anxiously.

    He looked at them and said.

    ¡°I am giving you guys a chance to leave this ce alive. All you have to do is kill me. No matter who manages to do that, all of you get to live. So, make your move.¡±

    As soon as he said those words, hundreds of eyes were locked on to him. But he just smiled and closed off the section while cracking his knuckles.

    One of the members already ran towards him to make a move.

    Sam dodged the punch to the side and swung his hand.

    It went through the flesh like it was going through butter and a dead bodyy on the ground in a second.

 Chapter 1856 - 1856 Fruits

    1856 Fruits

    Two hourster.

    Sam stood in the middle of the section as he looked at the corpses around him. He is drenched in blood. But he couldn¡¯t help but feel that is too easy.

    He didn¡¯t use a single element. He didn¡¯t use any weapon. He was fighting barehanded, but he still ran through all of them. There was no resistance. The only reason it took this long is that these guys are good at running and hiding from their attacks in this vast urban area.

    Since Sam couldn¡¯t use any of his weapons or elements, it took some time for him to catch them and deal with them.

    As he looked at the corpses he shook his head and took out a seed. This seed is unlike the seeds that he used for vines. This one is the same size as a quail egg.

    He looked at the corpse nearby.

    There is a huge gaping tear on the stomach with his guts spilled out. Sam nonchntly threw the seed into that stomach and left the ce.

    By the time he left the ce a sapling appeared out of the body and turned into a tree with lush green leaves. Soon, the tree extended a bunch of vines that spread around and started consuming the corpses.

    The process is a bit slowerpared to the vines, but it was much more thorough. Even the bones aren¡¯t being spared in this case, in fact even the blood marks of the rubble aren¡¯t being spared.

    .....

    After Sam left the section, he went to a different section.

    This time it is a ce with bunch of corpses piled up together.

    From the looks of it, they are all Wood elemental users and there are different piles based on their cultivation levels.

    Sam took out a few seeds and went to different piles before throwing them into the bodies.

    Several trees started growing from them. Once again, the absorption process started slowly.

    After checking on the trees for a bit, he moved to the second section with the prisoners.

    This time the whole area is filled with fire elemental users.

    ¡°Kill me and all of you can get away.¡±

    Sam gave out the announcement as he pounced on to the group.

    Another two hourster, the section was cleared out and a different tree was growing.

    For the next two days, that is what Sam did in the six towns as well as the Forest City.

    All the captains were of course very much interested in what he is doing, but they didn¡¯t try to get any answers.

    Particrly when they looked at the trees and vines.

    They all knew that Sam could do wonders with those vines, so they didn¡¯t find it too surprising. It is just that they didn¡¯t know what the purpose is for Sam to use the vines on the corpses.

    Meanwhile, on the third day a bunch of new troops arrived at the forest city and the guard captain gave a brief introduction to Sam.

    They are the elite squad of the Dark Sea Sect and their direct superior is the Sect leader.

    They only interact with him and only take orders from him.

    They are sent here to specifically to use the Forest City as the base to put an end to the Sr Sect in this chaotic situation.

    As for why Forest City, they were tasked to meet Sam here.

    After they arrived, a private meeting was arranged with Sam.

    ¡°I am guessing your presence here means, my proposal was considered seriously.¡±

    Sam asked as he opened a wine jar.

    The elite guard captain epted the ss of wine, but the rest of his subordinates who are standing behind him didn¡¯t do so. They just stood there like lifeless statues.

    ¡°Yes, Mr. Sam. Our sect leader is interested in buying the procedure to create these vines. The only thing we need to know is the way to resolve it too. If you can do that, we can proceed with the coboration.

    Of course, there are still some conditions that we need to discuss, but they are secondary.¡±

    Sam didn¡¯t think much.

    ¡°Of course, I though the remedy is a given. After all, why would you sell a lock to someone without the key.¡±

    The elite captain was surprised.

    He didn¡¯t expect that. After all, someone who has as much leverage as Sam would definitely be able to negotiate for more benefits. It is the norm. He came prepared for a very nasty tug of war in negotiations.

    But things are going to way too smoothly.

    He came back to his senses and started with some minor conditions.

    ¡°Do you think you can freely say what your purpose with the corpses and the low level cultivators is? Why are you asking them to be separated?¡±

    ¡°The corpses are for an experiment with a new breed of trees. They are not part of the vine package by the way.

    As for low level cultivators, they are for my battle experience.

    I am trying to find some challenges, but the low level cultivators here in the forest city didn¡¯t do much to help me. So, it is getting a bit troublesome. Please do gather as many as possible. Whether they are from the sect or mercenaries, I will take on them all.¡±

    Elite captain was stunned again.

    But he didn¡¯t stay in daze for long and instead continued with the conditions.

    Which are not much to begin with.

    The things that Sam thought should be naturally given along with the blue print are being seen as different entities by the Dark Sea Sect.

    It seems like they have been duped a lot through the soul contracts.

    But Sam didn¡¯t care much.

    The big part of sess in the current n is because Sam was trusted by the Seven Star Alliance. If someone else has to do the same things as him, they would need an ample amount of time to execute it properly.

    And then there is actual making of seeds. Just because someone knows a recipe doesn¡¯t mean they would be able to cook an exquisite dish.

    Sam could blindly sell these things. He is pretty sure that Dusk might have even made some better version of these things.

    After some negotiation, everything was signed. Sam gave the blue prints and sample seeds for all kinds of vines used in these battles.

    In exchange, Sam received a deed. Apart from the corpses and cultivators, this is the extra reward he is going to get. This is deed of and in the Dark Sea Continent.

    Thend is big enough to build a couple of cities.

    It is an undeveloped forestnd and there are a bunch of mountains that could have some ores.

    Sam didn¡¯t care too much about it. He is not particrly interested in this or this realm. The expansion of Dusk must have been fast enough to catch enoughnds.

    After all, he is sure that if the standard of the people all over the realms is like this, Dusk will have an easy time dealing with the rest of the organizations. He is also confident in the trio¡¯s and others¡¯ cultivation strength.

    He wouldn¡¯t be surprised if there are a couple of Divine ne cultivators, when he contacted them back.

    Anyway, after the deal was done here, Sam just tagged along with the elite unit.

    He started moving to different areas of the seven-star alliance where the corpses and cultivators are being held for Sam to deal with.

    He moved from one spot to another and kept on killing. His kill count increased rapidly and by the time he was done with the Seven Star Alliance, he already finished the kill target.

    And when the whole Seven Star Alliance was brought down, he finished themander target as well.

    Sam thought things would be difficult, but here they went too smoothly.

    Except for the initial scenario where he wasunched into Seven Star alliance territory, he managed to breeze through the rest of it easily.

    In the next few days, he finished all the conditions and finally got ready to leave to the next realm.

    But of course, there is one thing he still has to do and for that he has to take some rounds around the territory as well.

    Because everywhere he stopped, he let the corpses be eaten by the new trees that he made with the seeds.

    By now, they must have borne fruit.

    His first stop is of course the Forest City and the six towns. He kept the first batch of trees there.

    When he reaches the first section, the whole area is covered with tree vines, and to the tree, there is only one fruit.

    But it is huge. It is almost as huge as arge watermelon.

    He plucked the fruit and the tree along with the rootspletely disappeared. It turned to debris and with a small breeze, everything blew away into the rest of the rubble.

    He just went to the next section where more fruits awaited him.

    Luckily, these guys are not stupid enough to take the fruits for themselves. Or, they would have been in some deep shit.

 Chapter 1857 Choice

    1857 Choice

    Sam collected the fruits. They are of different sizes of course.

    The smallest ones are the size of arge watermelon and thergest ones are almost the size of a seven-year-old child.

    He also got fruits of different elemental energies. He stored all of them safely within the divine dimension. After that, he closed all the deals with the Dark Sea Sect, before deciding to ascend to the next stage of this war game.

    From what Kartikeya said, they need to finish three war games before reaching the Demi-God Academies. He is done with one of them rtively smoothly.

    Before he decided to leave, he wanted to contact the other yers at least Arkiv, Kumar and Noah but he was unable to locate them within the.

    But he was unable to do so. He even took the Dark Sea Sect''s help, but they seemed to have disappeared from the and went to a different within the same realm to deal with their tasks.

    He didn''t bother anymore and decided to just go with the next step.

    He went back to the hidden cave where Kartikeya came looking for them and clicked on his wrist screen.

    The surroundings greyed out before the familiar silhouette appeared in front of them.

    Kartikeya looked at Sam and smiled.

    "You did better than I thought. You are way too fast. Your friends are not even halfway through the task and even they are faster than what we expected from them."

    Sam just smiled and said.

    "Well, even before the task was announced I was ready to sucker punch the Sr Sect since they worship Olympus, so it kind of helped me.

    In a way, it is cheating. But I guess you can call it luck as well."

    "I mean, it is not like you knew the task beforehand. So it doesn''t matter. Anyway, since you are the first one toe here, I can give you the second task, but before that I will also give you a special privilege."

    "Oh, I like being privileged," Sam said jokingly.

    Kartikeya just shook his head with a smile slightly and said.

    "There are seven options that you could choose for your next round."

    As he said this, he waved his hand and seven holographic screens appeared in front of Sam. He read through them and went into deep thought.

    "You could pick one of them for yourself and you can pick one for one of the other yers."

    Sam was surprised by this.

    The contents of the seven screens are seven different sets of conditions to clear the second level in this war game. Some of them are difficult and some of them are rtively easy to satisfy and some of them would be exceptionally different for some yers.

    That is why he was surprised by such a privilege.

    "If you had told us about this at the start, I am pretty sure other yers would have tried their best to finish their task."

    "I doubt they wille faster than you though."

    "You do know that you still have your own yer in the game right? Your constant cheering and support for me are very heartwarming, but if you are biased against your own yer, that would be really bad.

    He would be heartbroken."

    Kartikeya just chuckled at this. He knew that Sam is just joking.

    "So, do you have your pick?"

    Sam shook his head. This is the first time he is very much troubled. Along with the set of conditions that they need to fulfill to advance, there is also some information about what kind of conditions they would be thrown into.

    The next one is actually aary war.

    To put it simply, one of thes that stayed isted until now seemed to have opened up its wormholes to the rest of the realm which has three dominating powers. They are all invading the at the same time.

    The wormholes are connected at many spots within the and the local forces are now in deep trouble as they are fighting against the iing enemies. They are outnumbered and they also got caught by surprise.

    And to Sam''s surprise, the defending race is full of humans while the invading races are not. One of them is a demonic race, one of them is a giant race and finally, thest one is a race of lycans.

    Threepletely different races against one race.

    Sam knew for sure that this one is a lot more chaotic than the sect war.

    And the seven options that he had. That is an added bonus.

    Sam always manipting things and right now, he can even manipte thepetition and the yers themselves. He is not going to let this one go.

    He grinned and finally made a choice.

    "I am going to pick this one."

    Sam picked his choice.

    Kartikeya was surprised. Not because it is the difficult one, but because Sam actually picked the most direct and straightforward one.

    The only condition it has is that he needs to participate in the defense of the and kill 10,000 invaders of the same level, 2000 invaders level higher.

    The numbers are scarypared to the previous target. But this time, theary war is not called that just for the sake of it. Threes are invading one.

    So, he has three races to choose from and luckily for him, the three races themselves have a lot of forces. It is going to be a buffet for him and an even more fortunate thing is that one of the races, the Lycans are worshippers of Hel while the Giants obviously worship Olympus.

    There is no way, he is not going to pick this.

    But even with these massive conditions, the remaining six are actually much moreplicated.

    Sam looked at them and pointed at thest one before saying.

    "I would like to give that one to Dayus."

    Kartikeya nodded as he looked at the option. He couldn''t help but smile at it. Just imagining what Zeus'' face would look like after this, is hrious in more than one way.

    Because the option Sam picked for Dayus is that he needs to work for humans and against the three races, but the problem is he needs to infiltrate the three races and get valid intel from all three of them, before giving it to the main factions of humans that are directly opposing them and kill a certain number of targets of all three races, of the same cultivation level and above and the worst part is he also needs to get amander position. In his leadership, his troops shouldn''t have more than 10% death rate.

    Sam would have really liked to pick this mission for himself. He has over a hundred ways to approach it and it would have been a good puzzle. But he knew how many handouts Dayus got and it has always been unfair for the other yers, for the first time he would like to see what Dayus would do without any handouts and he gets the short end of the stick.

 Chapter 1858 Planetary War

    Chapter 1858ary War

    Kartikeya finalized Sam''s selection and sent him away to the he was supposed to be at.

    He is really looking forward to confronting Zeus and watching him stifle his anger.

    He disappeared after that.

    Sam felt the suction force from a wormhole that appeared out of nowhere. Before long he disappeared from the spot and reappeared in a forest. There is arge stone statue in front of him once again.

    It is a statue of Kartikeya but this time, instead of a waterfall it is covered with lot of vines and there are even some nts growing from within the cracks of that statue.

    It is an old one and it hasn''t been visited by anyone for a really long time. Just like the previous statue.

    Sam is a bit amused by this situation. After all, from his knowledge Kartikeya is actually a very popr and fair god. He was worshipped well and he was known to take care of his worshippers. In fact, he has never seen any other god within the game have statues of this size.

    Judging by the altars around these statues it is apparent that the rituals used to be amon thing around here. But why are they abandoned?

    In his previous task, he has done some research about the gods worshiped in Dark Sea Sect, but there is no mention of Kartikeya anywhere.

    It is almost as if all of his followers disappeared into thin air one day.

    He is certainly curious and would like more details. But right now is not the time for that.

    The first thing he did is open up the dimensional drifter to check his current location. He is far away, like really far away from home. He believed that if he used an interdimensional space gate from deste to here, it would cost at least annual output five to ten spirit stone mines.

    It is way too expensive.

    He marked the coordinate of the temple that he is currently in, he decided to use this as his base of operations for now.

    After that, he left out the beasts.

    Yanwu and the rest appeared. He looked at them and took out a bunch ofrge fruits.

    The fruits that he made using the corpses of Sr Sect members. He only took out the smallest fruits out of them though.

    He also luckily had all the elements he needed and gave those fruits to the beasts. Two each.

    Yanwu had two fire element ones, Sky two wind, beasts like Mia who has both water and poison got one of each.

    Dia got one earth fruit and one metal fruit.

    The beasts looked at the fruits and consumed them hurriedly.

    he has been taking a step back to allow the rest of the yers to catch up.

    It was fine until now because Sam really didn''t have any benefits for moving forward faster. And he These fruits are the condensed essence of different elemental energies of Divine ne cultivators, they absolutely beneficial for their cultivation. Sam decided to take advantage of the current situation to the maximum.

    From the way things are, he decided that it is about time that he stopped holding back. All this while, he has been taking a step back to allow the rest of the yers to catch up.

    It was fine until now because Sam really didn''t have any benefits for moving forward faster. And he needed all the other yers to cause enough chaos so that he could have easier time in the tasks.

    It was a mutually beneficial situation.

    But now, finishing fast had benefits.

    Of course, he is not heartless enough to leave them all in the dirt. But he is not generous enough to just hold back and wait.

    So, he decided to slow himself down just a little bit by taking his time to cultivate the beasts. It will also increase his strength while giving some time for the rest of the yers to catchup.

    He would stop holding back but will still give those yers some leeway. From what he can understand they are getting closer to the gods with every task they are doing and if his guess is right, there might be a situation where the yers might against each other openly.

    Then Sam wouldn''t be able to hold back even if he wanted to. He just hoped that he could figure out a solution for that to not happen.

    Five yers already died out of twelve and he tried his best to make sure that all seven remain as long as possible.

    Shaking these thoughts off of his head, Sam started making preparations.

    The beasts all took in the fruits and it is time for them to digest. And there is a perfect way of doing it.

    Battle.

    He let them stay in the area forest area for now beforeying down a concealment formation around and left the ce.

    He used the hoverboard to quickly get out of the forest and within an hour found the nearest settlement.

    He was stunned by the sight in front of him.

    There is a broken down city where humans are all in an extremely tense atmosphere.

    Half of the city wall was destroyed and the formation was barely hanging. Many formation masters are trying to repair that formation.

    Some people are moving corpses out of the rubble. There are both corpses of humans and another species.

    Lycans. They are in their true form. They just looked like werewolves described in movies. They are tall, fierce and strong and even after they are dead for some time they are still emitting that bloodthirst.

    Sam walked towards the gate and soon he felt a lot of gazes locked in on him.

    He froze on the spot and raised his hands.

    "I am a human. Not an invader. There is no need to be alert like this."

    As soon as he spoke those words a few people came out of the city. The strongest among them is inte stage of Divine ne Initiation. Which is pretty low considering the scale of war.

    He is a young man who is riddled with wounds. He carried a scimitar with his chest bare and walked with a fierce look. He is fresh out of a battle.

    "Who are you?"

    The man asked Sam, his battle aura is locked in.

    Sam just smiled and said.

    "I am Sam. I am a free cultivator with no affiliation to any organization. I would like to join the war here."

    "Free cultivator? Then how did you find this ce? The paths for this area are all blocked. There is no way for you to just appear out of thin air. Even the space gates are blocked with some special means. How did you get here then?"

    Sam frowned at this, he didn''t expect things to be like this. But he is not worried.

    "My residence is actually deep inside the forest. I don''t live in any city or town and rarelye outside. I only had one friend in the outside world who helps me with some stuff. He informed me about the war, so I came out to join."

    The young man''s frown deepened.

    "You live in forbidden forest?"

    Sam was stunned, but he didn''t let it show on his face and said.

    "Yes."

    Not only the young man, the rest of the people are also surprised by his answer.

    "The forbidden forest is the ce where the lycans came from and you are saying you live there. You clearly understand why we have trouble trusting you. And also, Lycans do have human forms."

    As soon as he said those words, everyone surrounded Sam.

    Sam sighed at this.

    He really jumped the gun. He should have just stuck to his old ways and took his time getting enough info about the scenario.

    He was just worried that looking at the state of the city, they wouldn''t be able to hold out for long and would be dead if he took his sweet time getting the information.

    Sam sighed and said.

    "You know, I don''t really mind taking my time to prove it you. But from what I can understand, your situation is dire.

    You were just attacked and from the looks of it, it is neither the first one and it certainly wouldn''t be thest one.

    Give me a chance and I will help you. You can understand based on my actions whether you can trust me or not."

    "I will¡­" Before the young man could speak, someone yelled from on top of the city wall.

    "Young Master. Lycans are spotted they areing from the south. We need to hurry."

    The young man turned to a man beside him and said.

    "Keep an eye on him. Don''t let him leave your sight."

    With those orders he ran away with the rest of his team. It seems this wave of attacks areing from a different side.

    Sam frowned as he looked at the one guy who was left to keep a hold of him.

    He is at Middle Stage of Divine ne Initiation. One level higher than Sam.

    Sam looked at him and asked.

    "Why is there another wave of attacks right away, from the looks of it, you guys just got attacked not long ago."

    "That is none of your business for now. Until you are cleared as an ally, don''t bother trying to get any information out of us."

 Chapter 1859 From two sides

    1859 From two sides

    Sam did as he was told.

    He just stayed put as he looked at the battle far away.

    He used one of his shadow undead and sent it to the battlefield so that he could have better vision whenever needed. Sam was actually surprised by what he saw.

    The Lycans are huge in number and there are two Late Stage Divine ne Initiation cultivators. The young master who came to interrogate Sam is taking both of them on at the same time.

    His pretty strong and both the Lycans have nothing on him.

    But the rest of the Lycans are acting pretty fierce. They are not even bothering to defend properly and directly went into their true forms and attacked humans with all they got.

    It looked like a suicide attack.

    The young man who is there to guard Sam seemed to have realized something from the energy fluctuations.

    "What the fuck are you doing?"

    He asked Sam and got ready to make a move.

    But Sam looked at him and said.

    "You guys are in trouble. An attack ising from the west side. Another huge wave. You need some personnel there."

    As soon as Sam said those words, the young man turned to the west side of the city and saw arge fireball attacking the formation.

    He was stunned and took out amunication token.

    "Attack from the left side of the city. Attack from the left side of the city. There are way too many lycans. You need to redirect some of the forces there."

    "What is the status, how many are there? What level is the person leading the force?"

    Three questions came as a reply and the young man was stunned.

    Sam sighed and said.

    "Five Middle Stage Divine ne Initiation Cultivators.

    No Late Stage or Higher. Hundreds of Initial Stage Divine ne Initiation Lycans areing. Mostly fire element ones and there are a bunch of earth element ones."

    "How the fuck do you know this?"

    Sam didn''t even bother to answer this.

    "Just answer them. I think that takes more priority."

    The young man sent the answers and then turned to Sam. He pointed his de at Sam''s chin and asked.

    "How the fuck do you know this?"

    "I obviously have my ways. Why would I reveal something like that to you? I am already being kind enough to give you this information."

    "You better say it, or I will cut your head off."

    "Buddy, you have a lot of heads to cut now. From the looks of it, your forces are not really in shape to defend the west side wall as well and those lycans are acting suicidal. If you don''t go there and hold down at least two of the five Middle Stage Divine ne Initiation Lycans, that side formation will open up.

    For some reason, they are hell-bent on getting into the city, even if it costs their lives. If I were you, I would point my sword there."

    Sam said as he casually moved the de and pointed it toward the west wall.

    The young man gritted his teeth and contacted someone to get the update.

    "Situation is dire. The South wall is flooded and all forces are engaged. We cannot afford to hold back now. All the personnel who are resting should also appear at the West wall immediately.

    I repeat, all the personnel whether injured or resting, report to the west wall and defend the city immediately."

    "I told you, you are needed there."

    The young man looked at Sam and hesitated a bit before decisively leaving.

    "You better stay right. Don''t you dare make a move."

    Sam just raised his hands without saying anything.

    The young man ran at his maximum speed and soon arrived at the formation. He started attacking the lycans who are crazily attacking the formations so that they could get in.

    Sam sat on the harbinger as he levitated in the air while watching the show.

    The situation on the west side is bing dire. But from the south, there is no way they could pull any forces right now. If they try to pull any forces, they would just break through the formation and enter the city.

    If they have to survive, then they might have to make some necessary sacrifices here. That is what Sam believed.

    And even if they did so, they might not be able to preserve all of the city, they might have to take a step back. Unless and of course, there is someone that could bnce the situation on the west side.

    He just stood there for twenty minutes and watched the battle go down and soon the west side is crumbling.

    "We need reinforcements. We cannot take this attack anymore. In the Initial Stage Divine ne Initiation cultivators are too many. We cannot take this onught anymore."

    The young man who was supposed to hold Sam back spoke in hismunication token. But there is no response for a while and after that silence, a very feeble voice came back.

    "I don''t think we can do this anymore. Even if I move one soldier from the South, it will crumble and even if I don''t do that, the West will fall down. What should we do?"

    The ws of Lycan that are enveloped with mes were ready to take his neck off, at this moment.

    21:35

    Listening to those words, the young man lost hope. His posture went down and he looked down on the ground under his feet, not knowing what to do.

    The enemy took advantage of his situation and tried to strike back.

    The ws of Lycan that are enveloped with mes were ready to take his neck off, at this moment.

    *BANG*

    *BOOM*

    An explosion of fire element urred at the neck of the lycan that came and he flew to the side.

    His neck tore open with a lot of blood gushing out. The fire elemental Divine energy acted chaotic and messed up the lycans fire elemental energy.

    The young man came out of his stupor and looked towards Sam who is slowlying towards him on the harbinger with a sniper rifle in his hands.

    "Divine energy bullets are much better than I thought."

    He muttered to himself as he loaded another bullet in the gun. The young man reacted quick enough and finished the Middle stage Lycan that almost killed him.

    Sam turned towards therge battlefield beyond the formation where they all almost finished off the Initial Stage Divine ne Initiation cultivators are barely holding up.

    Sam aimed his rifle and aimed at the head of a Lycan that was about to kill a human.

    *BANG*

    The Lycan barely managed to sense the iing attack and moved to the side. The problem is the bullet still hit on its soldier and the elemental energy chaos it created, even affected the Lycan''s spine, making it halt in its tracks.

    It senses are messed up. At this exact moment, Sam took the opportunity and shot it in the head.

    He didn''t wait for this young man to just yell at him or try to stop him, but Sam just kept on shooting one lycan after another as he tried to reduce the pressure on the humans.

    He would have opted for another type of attack, but the humans and these lycans are too close and any of Sam''s attacks without the control of this gun would kill them too.

    As soon as he helped out the humans that are in dire states, he put the gun away and zoomed over into the crowd on the harbinger.

    He took out the reaper sword and went on a rampage.

    A Lycan came at him, a Lycan died. Two lycans came at him, and two lycans died.

    Every swing of his sword took at least one life. It was like he is fighting with someone of a lower level.

    And since he is on a constant move, the Lycans that are in the air are having the worst trouble of them all.

    Obviously, they are not as fast in the air while levitating with their divine energy as they are on the ground. They would have been extremely quick on their feet if they were fighting on the ground and they might have had at least some resistance.

    But they don''t have that privilege now. One body after another fell off the sky and their ns of attacking the formation died down immediately.

    The young man was dumbfounded. He didn''t expect such a performance from Sam. He just ran through these lycans they are nothing and he is surprised that the presence of one man could bring such a drastic change in a matter of minutes.

    Meanwhile, the Lycans also changed their focus to Sam. His ck coat and harbinger along with the blood-red sword are way too eye-catching. They shifted their focus to him and even the middle-stage Divine ne Initiation cultivators wanted to make a move as they noticed their subordinates aren''t able to hold him.

    But of course, the human counterparts at least put a stand and stopped them, letting Sam go on a rampage.

 Chapter 1860 Lycans retreat

    Chapter 1860 Lycan''s retreat

    Sam kept on killing the lycans.

    But he didn''t feel anything. It is almost like he is harvesting a stagnant crop. He halted for a moment as he saw the waves of Lycans stilling with everything they have.

    It seemed endless and if not for his enhanced vision, he would have actually thought so.

    He had metal spikes on his palms as he stabbed a lycan and then used the metal element to increase the spikes to hit the heart and brains of it, killing it in a second.

    "This shouldn''t be it. It shouldn''t be this easy."

    He muttered to himself as he looked at one of the middle-stage Divine ne Initiation Lycans that is assisting their peers to suppress their counterparts on the human side.

    He left his shadow undead out to fight the Lycans of his own level, while he took to the sky.

    He aimed his hands at the Middle Stage Lycan and shot a ball of golden mes.

    At this moment, the Lycan that was targeted sensed a danger on its back and reacted by instinct. He dodged and turned to Sam is utter shock.

    "You fucking dare toe after me?" The Lycan howled and jumped toward Sam while brandishing his ws. Magma spewed out of those ws and arge amount of me and earth elemental energy was gathered behind those limbs as he swung them at Sam.

    Sam didn''t dodge, instead, he lunged forward, closing the distance and blocked the swinging from the side with his left forearm, and then caught the second w with his left palm.

    He used the momentum of the Lycan to turn around and throw him off the shoulder. Since both of them are in the air levitating, this move wouldn''t mean much. After all, the Lycan could just get back his bnce before he could even reach the ground.

    But of course, Sam would be an idiot if he didn''t understand that.

    As soon as he threw the Lycan off the shoulder, a concentrated jet of mes was shot out of the fingers of his right hand and hit the Lycan squarely on the chest.

    The Lycan wasn''t able to get his bnce back and zoomed toward the ground while being shot by a continuous jet of mes.

    *BOOM*

    Lycan hit the ground. But Sam didn''t stop the mes, he just frowned and shot continuously in hopes of just burning the Lycan to the ground, but after a few seconds, he finally saw some resistance.

    Lycan stood up on the ground as he raised both of his ws. An energy barrier condensed into an earthen disc that blocked the golden mes.

    His fur is burned off and the front side of his body is pretty deformed with burn marks. He is a fire elemental being himself, but still, the element he had an affinity with, had hurt him like this.

    He growled angrily as he looked at Sam in the air, who is still shooting the mes.

    He kicked on the ground and using the earthen shield made his way to Sam through the golden mes.

    Sam was nonchnt about the approach.

    He saw that the Lycan shifted the shield to one arm and used the other to throw a w at him.

    When the Lycan was close enough, Sam stopped shooting the mes, the right hand was pulled back and it turned into a stone as he punched at the shield.

    The immense force met the shielding with incredible momentum.

    *CRACK*

    The shield broke into pieces before the Lycan was sent down like a meteor. He created arge crate in the ground.

    Sam didn''t hesitate and took the chance to throw another jet of golden mes. This time however the Lycan reacted fast enough and dodged the mes.

    He hurriedly stepped into the air and closed the distance between them. On his way, he threw the ws crazily sending ming magma at Sam from different angles.

    Sam used his right hand to block and deflect the attacks. When the Lycan came close enough he caught hold of the w, twisted it by force, andnded a sidekick to the stomach.

    Lycan felt his ribs cracking before he hurriedly activated fusion to get rid of Sam. mes burst out of his ws. The jet of red-hot mes surrounded Sam and his grip loosened just a little bit.

    The Lycan thought he had an advantage and didn''t hesitate to shoot mes with increased intensity. He wanted to burn Sam to ashes.

    Only after a few seconds did he notice that Sam''s ck feather coat is glowing with golden light. He sensed that not only were his mes ineffective, they are being devoured easily.

    *CRACK*

    Sam twisted the arm and broke it. He raised his knee, which glowed with metallic luster along with a metal spike, which was driven straight into the abdomen.

    The Lycan hardened the abdomen at thest moment with partial earthen fusion, which might have been effective if it was just a physical attack.

    Too bad, Sam used void style.

    *BAM*

    *CRACK*

    The stone cracked open and the fusion was canceled. The guts almost spilled out along with a lot of blood.

    Sam knee kicked on the same spot once again. But this time, as soon as the legnded, the spikes grew out rapidly attacking the guts. The spike came out from the other side.

    Sam exhaled a bit and let the Lycan free fall and shot a jet of golden mes and this time, the Lycan didn''t really have as much resistance as before.

    He tried to block with the earthen shield while free-falling. But the jet of mes just continuously burned down his energy and soon the shield was molten, making him the direct target.

    Within a minute, the Lycan died.

    Sam then turned to look at the Initial Stage Divine ne Initiation Cultivators that are still attacking the formation recklessly. He could see the formation fluctuating. But he is actually surprised a bit by how sturdy it is.

    After all, full-power blows of hundred of Lycans is not something that could be absorbed that easily. This formation is of pretty high quality.

    But this onught will certainly deprive it of energy even if it can endure.

    He turned to look at the Lycans that are justing even though there are hundreds of dead bodies sprawled on the ground. They are just stepping on their dead kin as if they are stepping on mud. They are not showing any respect or concern.

    It is like they would rather die than not enter the city.

    Sam didn''t understand why though. But he has enough time to wonder about that.

    He levitated in the air and his divine energy surged.

    Golden mes enveloped him as the feather coat glowed with a golden light. Soon, he is in a perfect fire elemental fusion and the surrounding spiritual energy started resonating with his Divine Energy.

    His lungs expanded to the maximum as he inhaled.

    Bloodline energy surged and the orb of bloodline energy that is near his heart, glowed and connected with the Divine energy adding an extra re. Sam could feel that the intensity of the mes has increased.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosive sound, golden fire shot out of his mouth and it covered the whole sky and ground like a golden curtain.

    The mes spread for more than hundred and fifty meters in a second and still kept going forward.

    All the humans were shocked when they saw this. They stopped in their tracks and even the Lycans that are engaging with them couldn''t bring themselves to attack him.

    They are dumbfounded and just stared at Sam.

    The Bloodline art juststed for ten seconds, and even though the fire stoppeding out of Sam''s mouth, the area it covered is still burning vigorously.

    Everyone present could hear the wails of burning Lycans as they writhed in pain.

    The Lycans that were out of the st range looked in horror as they saw the golden mes right in front of them.

    Even though the mes are not intense enough to burn them now, they didn''t dare to step forward.

    They looked at the golden figure floating in the air looking at them coldly. Even from that far, just from Sam''s demeanor, they could feel his intense disregard for their lives.

    And as Sam focused on them for just five seconds, the first Lycan among this suicidal batch took a step back.

    It is not the fear of death that made them feel like it. Rather, it is the fear of an insignificant and useless death that made them feel lost.

    They didn''t want such a death and involuntarily one after another they started taking steps back.

    The Middle Stage Divine ne Initiation Lycans looked at Sam in horror and when he shifted his gaze to them, they scurried away just like their counterparts.

    Just like that, the West side of the city is secured, and as soon as Sam turned around the humans cheered.

 Chapter 1861 Hostage

    Chapter 1861 Hostage

    Back inside the city.

    Once the west side waspletely stabilized, soon the human forces from here went on and joined the fight in the south.

    The Lycans had to retreat immediately. It seems like they also got the news about the West Side and they are gone.

    In the middle of the city, all the injured humans were being gathered while the dead bodies of the Lycans were being collected as well.

    Sam stood there casually as he observed everything. The healers of the human side are doing a decent job too, but they don''t have infinite energy, meanwhile, the injured seemed to be of infinite amount. Sam was contemting if he should help them out or not.

    At this moment, the leader of the whole camp. The young man at Late Stage Divine ne Initiation that was about to interrogate Sam appeared.

    He is panting heavily and his spiritual energy is a bit chaotic. He is a bit exhausted.

    If there is another attack, he might have to overexert himself just to defend the city once again.

    He looked at Sam with aplicated gaze and said.

    "Thank you for saving the city."

    With that, he bowed.

    Sam looked at him and did nothing to stop him. But thepanions of the young man did. They hurriedly raised him and said.

    "Young master, there is no need to bow for him. If he hade sooner then there would have been a lot fewer casualties. As a human, he held his hand until now and indirectly killed many people."

    Sam looked at the man who spoke. He is a lot younger than the young master here and he seems to be in the Middle Stage of Divine ne Initiation.

    Sam knew that there would be these kinds of people, but he didn''t expect one at the front lines like this. After all, these nitpicking, self-righteous idiots are the first ones to run away and find excuses to hide. If not for the impossibility, they would rather go back into their mother''s wombs and preach righteous bullshit, than actuallye forward and fight.

    Sam sized him up with a faint smile

    The young master red at the young man and turned to Sam before introducing himself.

    "My name is Jate. May I know your name?"

    "Sam" Both of them shook hands.

    "We appreciate your help now and I hope that you don''t take offense from our friction earlier and continue to help us."

    "Of course. But before that, may I know what the situation is? I know I live in seclusion, but I am pretty sure that the strength of neither Lycans nor you should be limited to your cultivation level right?"

    Jate chuckled a bit and said.

    "Of course not. But this is the current situation right now. We are supposed to block this city because of the fertilend that it has. There is also a special legacy temple under the mansion of the city lord.

    It was a blessing from god and it helps humans train theirbat ability and cultivation level. Sometimes there are trials that will give out special cultivation techniques,bat techniques, formation designs, weapons what not.

    If Lycans take over that ce and make this city their base, then things would be dire.

    The sneaked up on the city and they brought in their armies. The humans managed to deal with the leaders of the army that came. But some of the higher-level Lycans already started making their way here and they are higher in number.

    If they surround the city, defeat would be certain. The formation here is already damaged and it is not equipped to deal with high-level attacks.

    So, high-level cultivators from our side went to intercept and they are currently blocking their paths.

    The only one right now is the Lycan army which ising from all three sides. The forbidden forest is the only thing that has yet to be upied by them and you came from there."

    "So, the weak are tasked to defend the city, while the strong are fight elsewhere to keep the bnce. But are you sure even if you defend the city sessfully, there would be a chance for the high-level cultivators to turn things around?"

    "We don''t know, we can only hope they do.

    Right now, we are still following the unspoken rules of war. Once the high-level cultivators are gone, there is no way they are going to hold those rules up here.

    They will either enve us or they would kill us off directly. If worstes to worst, thetter option might be our best scenario."

    Sam just nodded and looked around.

    "The city is shambles. The formation is barely holding up. Your injured are increasing with every wave and it seems like they outnumber you by twenty to one.

    Things will just get worse with time.

    Your healers are gassing out on top of that. They cannot keep healing everyone like this. The energy drain is one thing, what apanies that energy drain is the mental drain.

    I must say things are not looking well for you."

    A lot of people frowned in anger at Sam''s assessment. He justid all of their shorings out. It is definitely a blow to morale. They really wanted to bash this guy up.

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "I can help you guys out a bit. It is just that I am having some trouble thinking where to start."

    "What can you help us with? You are already showed a great deal with thebat outside."

    "Oh that? That is nothing. If you want to have a chance of survival, then you need to have better defenses for the city.

    I will tell you, how to fix that. But there is one thing I am curious about."

    "What is it?"

    "Why are those Lycans, willing to die like that?"

    "What do you mean? It is a fucking war. Of course, they are going to die."

    One of the young men replied at a seemingly meaningless question. At least that is what they understood. But Sam looked at Jate and asked.

    "You know what I mean. Why are they so suicidal? No matter how I look at it, they are in a better position. They can easily wear you guys out in a week or so and they won''t even have one-fourth of the current casualties.

    They don''t need to do such suicidal attacks. And honestly, yourbat ability is not that much. You wouldn''t be able to hold a candle for them."

    "Hmph, they might have better physiques, but they are just beasts in humanoid form."

    One of the young men retorted.

    Sam looked at him as if he was an idiot.

    "Lycans are a race born to hunt and fight. Battling is in their DNA and they are much more patient than a human could ever be.

    Please don''t tell me, you guys are really smarter than them. Their instinct is enough to destroy your strategy."

    Everyone shut up. There is a deafening silence as Sam looked at them and he slowly opened his mouth.

    "If my guess is right and it most probably is, there is something important in this city that Lycans wanted to capture or retrieve. That is why they are sending themselves to death.

    Tell me, what it is and it will help me prepare better."

    As soon as Sam finished his words, several auras are locked in.

    Jate looked at him with a frown.

    He had many conflicting thoughts before saying.

    "We are holding a hostage. During the first attack, one of the Lycan royalty who is only in Divine ne Initiation is injured and we captured him. Now, these Lycans have gone crazy and they areing at us like there is no tomorrow.

    We tried tomunicate, but it is not working. It seems like they would rather die with their royalty here or die trying to save him rather than take a step back and negotiate."

    Sam looked at them and shook his head.

    "You guys were na?ve when you did that.

    Do you really think a battling race such as theirs would justpromise like that? Particrly when you are in a weak situation like this? You might have had a better time if you had killed the royalty before.

    You just pissed them off so much that even if you kill him now, they wouldn''t bother anymore. They will not rest until they rage you to the ground."

    Sam sighed as he looked at them.

    Everyone was silent. They also understood this at the moment.

    Sam clicked his tongue and said.

    "Okay, enough of this, let''s get started.

    But there is one condition for me to help you guys."

    "What is it?"

    "I need all the Lycan corpses. Jate, you look like a guy with some status, so I want you to use all of your influence and power to get me as many corpses of Lycans as possible. In fact, if you can get some other races'' corpses, that would be great too.

    So, basically, I won''t take any payment or reward for my contribution, all I need are corpses."

    Everyone was stumped once again.

 Chapter 1862 Helping Hand

    Chapter 1862 Helping Hand

    Sam''s weird request to use corpses as currency was epted.

    After all, they have nothing but corpses of these Lycans. They kept a few for some research, but right now they don''t want to waste their time to dump or destroy them. So, they threw them in spatial rings.

    Sam got his hands on them as soon as the deal was made.

    He also went on a slight show off mode after that.

    First thing he did was dump a load of Wood elemental and light elemental liquid capsules.

    He carved a few inscriptions on the stone tables being used for treating the patients, carved up a few slots that would fit these capsules perfectly. It is a makeshift super healing table. The healers can just use the energy from the capsules without being constantly strained.

    The table itself has a formation that would work on some minor injuries, so the addition of these capsules made it much more efficient.

    After the healing situation is taken care of, Sam went to put up defensive lines around the city.

    He didn''t have much time of course, the city is way too big and for him to reinforce it properly, it would almost take a day.

    So, he can only add to whatever that is already there. First, he tweaked the main formation around the city. He gave some additional changes for the formation masters to make to maximize the defense. While they are working on it, he decided to make his own defensive measures.

    Luckily, there are some ready made solutions that he could easily use.

    He nted some formation pirs that are charged with liquid energy capsules. They are basicallyrge scale formation discs, but the energy wouldn''t be absorbed from the surroundings.

    The functioning energy will be supplied from the energy capsules and each pir covers a certain area around.

    So, for someone to deal with it, they have to go through the formation and destroy the formation pir itself. But the formation pir can project dozens if not hundreds of formations based on its functions and these formations could be of many kinds.

    Defensive, offensive, support.

    These could y arge role in the wars. As it is easy to install and easy to remove for the owner of it and it could be carried along.

    If a squad is fighting another group in a small area, they can just nt the formation pir there. The area of influence would be covered and the formations could help them fight these enemies.

    Of course, it is mostly useful for people in Mortal ne and Astral ne. It is not that much useful for people in Divine ne as they can levitate.

    They could just simply fly away from the area of influence if it is not a restriction formation.

    And anyway, Sam''s n is not to use it for restricting the enemies, rather to provide an auxilry support for the ground.

    Sam made everyone nt these formation pirs and he started operating them through the crystal table. The formations were activated. At the same time, Sam started setting up the seeds of some trees a bit far away from the city.

    As soon as the formations activated, everyone in the city noticed something. Each formation covers a certain area of influence, a few dozen meters in diameter and there is a certain distance between each pir leaving some hopes that are under no influence of formations.

    But as soon as the formations were activated, everyone noticed the death energy seeping out of the ground, from both within the formations and outside the formations.

    All the death energy seemed chaotic and dangerous.

    When the formations were full of this thick concentrated death energy, the towers started resonating with each other and each other projected a spectre.

    The spectres started absorbing the death energy as they rapidly grew.

    As if that is not enough, Sam made another change to the formation pirs through the crystal table.

    The formation changed slightly and all the spiritual energy in the surroundings started converting into death energy. It is the amplifying effect.

    The effects of formations started ovepping and all the three sides of the city are covered with a nket of death energy that seemed to be neverending.

    There are multiple domes and all of them seemed to have been merged together as they grew. The spectres became dangerous enough to send a chill down the young master Jate''s back.

    He didn''t see such a cruel and vicious aura before.

    As they were all staring at it in awe, all of a sudden the formations disappeared along with the spectres.

    Jate was dumbfounded. He looked at Sam and asked.

    "What happened?"

    "I hid it. Do you really think Lycans woulde knocking if they saw something like this? They would be more cautious."

    Then a bunch of trees slowly grew out within that area from the seeds Sam nted.

    "I suppose that it would be difficult for you to sort out these corpses and give them to me. So, I made some preparations."

    After that was done, Sam collected the soul from a few Lycan corpses and got some information about the Lycan.

    Then, he used the dimensional drifter and went back to the forest area where Kartikeya''s statue was present.

    He decided to arrange a space node there. Now, he called out both Yanwu and Dia.

    "I got some information from the Lycans about theirs. I will be sending you guys to the Lycan territories. Of course, the strongest person in those territories would be at Middle-Stage of Divine ne initiation. They shouldn''t be a problem for you guys at all.

    Sam then took out some anklets for both the beasts.

    "These things have everything you need. You have already consumed the fruits, there is the next batch of fruits that you need to take inside and there are some seeds and most importantly, the transference tokens that you would need.

    You need to participate in activebat to deal with these people, so refrain from using the seeds as long as the ying field is levelled.

    Once higher level cultivators are involved, just drop the seeds and return with the transference tokens.

    And most important of all, I need you guys toe back to me alive."

    Both beasts agreed and they are actually pretty excited.

    They didn''t exactly have a choice until now and most of the journey of Sam, they are cooped up inside the Divine dimension. Now Sam is letting them roam free a bit.

    "Be careful though, you guys need to make sure that you are not caught. We are not in the lower realms anymore. The people here might recognize you and covet you guys."

    The beasts were too ted to even bother answering him.

    Sam took the dimension drifter and sent them to separate locations in the Lycan.

    Since it is Hel''s territory, Sam didn''t have to worry about consequences too much.

    And they are already in the war and he took the human side, there is no need for him to worry about attacking them as well.

    With that Yanwu and Dia are gone. Their targets are a Lycan tribe that specializes in fire element and a Lycan tribe that specializes in earth element.

    If they want to, they can directly eat the lycans. After all, they are beasts and eating is definitely the best to way to gain enough energy.

    And if theye across lycans that are not of the elements they could use, they can store them in the space jade and keep them forter.

    Sam went back to the city after he let the beasts go.

    The remaining beasts still have to wait for their turn though. He needs to find a suitable ce for them to be active in.

    By the time he came back, the scouts have spotted the arrival of Lycans from all the three sides.

    "Two sides are being led by Late-Stage Divine ne Initiation Lycans. Since, I am the only one that could match their cultivation, they are trying to fight me from both sides.

    The problem with this scenario is, if by any chance I take a backfoot and get absolutely dominated by one of them, the other can disregard the rules and go crazy against the rest."

    Sam nodded and agreed, but he is not exactly worried.

    The formation is reinforced and these guys cannot just barge into the city.

    Of course, the suicidal charge of the rest of the Lycans is still going on.

    With Sam''s help there are some Middle-Stage Divine ne Initiation cultivators that recovered. If they take advantage of the formation, they can hold them up.

    Meanwhile, Sam is also in charge of a some Middle-Stage divine ne initiation cultivators. While they reach the stalemate, he will create openings to kill those Lycans so that the number can even out.

    Once the number evened out a bit, things will be easier.

    As for Initial Stage Divine ne Initiation Lycans, their only threat is that they might damage the formation with their suicidal charge and Sam has many ways to stop them.

 Chapter 1863 Massacre

    Chapter 1863 Massacre

    Lycans reached the area over the formations.

    The humans got ready to attack. Everyone is levitating. No one is fighting from the ground.

    The low-level lycans just ran towards the formation and they are maniacally attacking the formation. Sam went to the south side this time. The ce where Jate is fighting.

    That is the ce where the fewer Initial Stage Divine ne Initiation cultivators from the human side are present. Sam himself took the position of dealing with these guys as well as the Middle stage Divine ne Initiation Lycan he was assigned to.

    Sam took out the reaper sword and took off the Harbinger as he set out. His first focus was on the first line of attackers. With a swing of his sword, he made heads roll. The dead lycans fell into the air.

    And the next second, the Lycans were stunned.

    Because the deadbodies that fell started disappearing slowly. It is almost like they are dissolving into the ground.

    Sam didn''t hesitate to take the change and started attacking the Lycans.

    After creating a small bracket of space within their offensive line, he activated partial fire elemental fusion and sted off a bunch of Lycans.

    This time, he didn''t use the same intensity as he did before on the west side, but it has enough to make them fall down from their levitation. He didn''t even kill them directly he only made them fall down into the formation.

    Now the Lycans saw even these people got ''dissolved'' into the ground.

    After making the first batch go down, he shifted his attention to the Middle Stage Lycan he was assigned to.

    "Just how fucking arrogant are you to fight against a Lycan above your level? I will drink your blood for this offense."

    The Lycan snarled coldly and made a move against Sam.

    Sam''s fusion form changed. He let the harbinger go and activated wind elemental fusion as he got the wings out.

    The Lycan that came at him was met with a myriad of wind des with every p of Sam''s wings.

    Lycan activated his own fusion form. The fire elemental fusion and he tried to use the sts of fire to change is trajectory rapidly to deal with Sam.

    Just like that, a chase ensued in the sky. Sam agilely maneuvered in the sky as he threw the wind des around. The wind des are not exactlyrge or lethal. Even the concentrated energy is not that high. But the wind des are numerous.

    In every second, over a dozen wind des areing off of the wings.

    The Lycan looked like a burning meteorite as he tried to catch Sam. But the barrage of wind des are making him go crazy.

    Sam looked at his opponent in amusement. This guy is obviously very skilled in aerial battles. This is definitely not his first time.

    As this thought crossed his mind, he wanted to test something.

    He stopped in his tracks all of a sudden and both of his winds started glowing and tworge wind des wereunched at the guy while Sam also moved along with them.

    The Lycan used his fists to block the wind des and deflected them. But the energy is too high and the wind des gave him a sense of danger. He was pushed back and Sam is already near him.

    Sam made a grand move as he closed on, the wings gave out a loud gust creating a tornado there for a moment and when he was about toplete the rotation, the wings closed off. By now he sneaked from under as the Lycan lost his bnce started rotating along with the wind.

    And he saw Sam''s palming at his face.

    The palm was like a knife as wind energy surged chaotically.

    *BOOM*

    Arge fiery explosion happened in the sky as he tried to dodge.

    When the mes cleared off, Sam is floating in the air and the Lycan was backed off several feet. He lost his fusion form and there is arge gash on his face that extended towards his chest. He bled profusely.

    He looked at Sam with gritted teeth.

    "Fucking Bastard."

    Sam raised his eyebrow and said.

    "I would have yed along dude. You should have kept your mouth shut. Now you have gone and done it."

    Sam activated full wind elemental fusion and he disappeared in a sh. The Lycan also activated the fire elemental fusion and he threw a giant jet of mes towards Sam.

    Sam made a twisting movement in the air and the jet of mes seemed to have been enveloped by the wind and their direction changedpletely before they dispersed.

    Before the Lycan could realize what happened, he is stuck in a tornado.

    The wind grew so chaotic that soon the fire elemental fusoon of the Lycan was gonepletely.

    It disappeared and he started losing control of himself. The wind turned sharper and sharper and it became a bit abrasive. With every rotation of the tornado, ayer of flesh is being chipped off of the Lycan.

    The fur is gone, the fleece is gone, the upperyer of the skin is gone and soon blood came out. With every second ayer of the ws is being shaved off. Soon, the eyes, nose and ears are gone.

    He wanted to scream to the heavens so that he could die and this pain would go away.

    But he could. He couldn''t even breath much less speak out.

    All he could do is iprehensible noises.

    Sam looked at the tornado from outside as he controlled it with his hands. He moved the tornado to the middle of the Lycan army and soon he started using his resonance and amplification technique.

    The energy in the surroundings started resonating and four more tornados appeared. The Lycans were terrified as the low-level cultivators started getting into the tornados. The tornados turned bloody. Blood mist rotated along with the women and everyone who witnessed was terrified beyond words.

    Whether it is the Initial stage Lycans that got caught in the tornado, or when the middle stage Lycans who were lucky enough to not get caught in the tornado and thete-stage ones that are far away from them.

    They are all terrified. And more terrifying than the tornados is facial expression of Sam, which looked emotionless.

    With his hand extended he took hundreds of lives without a flinch and didn''t even leave a bone behind.

    If only they had seen what Sam had done on West side, they would have been less surprised. After all, massacring is not a new concept for Sam.

    Just like that, the attack on the formation on the south side are gone in an instant.

    Jate suddenly grinned after he came out of the daze. The tornados are powerful and Late Stage cultivators would also have a tough time getting out of them. They wouldn''t die and they wouldn''t be critically harmed, but they would have lost some bnce.

    The Late Stage cultivator on the south side had to go and disrupt these tornados to save his army and this disrupted their original pincer attack.

    Jate took this chance and didn''t hold back. He went to the East Side and where another Late Stage Lycan is waiting to make a move and yed him with a single move.

    The war took a turn just like that.

    Sam went back into the city after he finished his massacre. He tapped his face and tried to calm down. He is definitely not as explosive as before when someone called him a bastard, but he did be a lot colder.

    He doesn''t know if it is a good thing or a bad thing.

    Because previously once that explosive anger came, he wouldn''t be as smart, he would just go on a crazy maniacal spree. This leaves a lot of openings and he can only maintain that state before his logic and reason kicks in.

    But now, there is no such rage bout. His insane anger and the sane intellect are merging together and he has feeling that it might create more destruction that if he just went on a maniac episode.

    He looked at the battlefield and sighed. He just hoped that the world wouldn''t give him more chances to test the theory. It would be too harmful for this world. It wouldn''t if it knows any better.

    Sam took a step back after that attack.

    No soldier on human side objected or asked anything more off of him.

    Particrly, when they saw the true might and the purpose of the formation pirs in a very short while.

    If what Sam did made the fear for their life. Then what these formations made them have nightmares for the rest of their lives. Many of them vowed that they would never ever go against anyone who practices soul necromancy.

 Chapter 1864 - 1864 To the Giants

    1864 To the Giants

    Sam went back and sat in the resting area

    He leisurely took out a jar of wine as he tried to rx, at this moment, the formation pirs are fully activated.

    Jate killed the guy at the rear and he didn¡¯t want to miss this chance to finish this battle once and for all.

    ¡°Let¡¯s go and finish this. Do not hold back now. Go all out. The city is ours and we are going to keep it no matter what.¡±

    Jatemanded and the soldiers raged forward.

    Meanwhile, Jate¡¯s opponent just stopped the tornados Sam unleashed on his soldiers. He looked at Jate and the rest of the humans as he gritted his teeth.

    ¡°Everyone, we need to get the prince no matter what. March with me and kill this vermin. Today, we are going to capture this city or die trying.¡±

    The Lycans are pumped up. There were never really afraid to die, but for the first time Sam made them feel helpless and powerless which is worse than death in their eyes. But their leader¡¯s motivation is enough for them to get back on track.

    The leader of the Lycan troops, looked at Sam from far away.

    .....

    Sam is literally sitting out in the open in seat that looked like lounge chair with his legs crossed while drinking wine. His expression is absolutely cold and indifferent. From the moment he stepped in, it is his war. He had harder time deciding breakfast than thinking of ns deal with this war.

    The leader really wanted to kill Sam. He knew if he managed to breakthrough the formation and killed Sam in front of his troops, the morale will raise.

    But his opponent and him are equally matched.

    At least that is what he thought. What he didn¡¯t know is, Sam was not there just to increase the morale of humans, he is there to annihte the lycans.

    The next moment, the leader of Lycan troops felt a sense of threat like never before. He hurriedly turned around and shed. But to his surprise there is nothing in front.

    All he could see is that the excited Lycan troops suddenly fell silent and the leader felt a cold chill on his neck.

    A Spectre that looked disfigured, just like a monster that could haunt people in their nightmares, is floating behind him. The spectre doesn¡¯t even have legs, the tail of it is connected to the formation pir below.

    The Spectre opened its mouth and dug into the Leader.

    ¡°Argghh¡­¡±

    He felt the sharp pain of fangs going deep into his flesh. But no blood spilled out. Because the actual bit was taken out of his soul. The Spectre didn¡¯t wait on him, it slipped away after taking that one bite.

    The Lycan leader felt his vitality slipping away. He felt dizzy and exhausted. His body is full of energy, but his mind is not. He gritted his teeth and tried to stay awake and aware.

    But the next scene shocked him more and more.

    The Lycans that are all in the formation and ready to make the final charge fell into chaos.

    One Spectre after another came from the formation pirs. They came from below, took a bite off the soul and slipped away. the leader was able to endure it because of his cultivation.

    But the rest of the lycans are not as powerful.

    He saw as the Spectres imed the lives of one lycan after another.

    He looked at the ground, it looked normal. Even his spiritual sense is unable to see anything.

    ¡°AHHHHHH¡­.¡±

    He screamed and threw arge fireball at the ground. The formations created by the formation pirs rippled as they tried to deflect the energy of the fireball. And in that brief sh of the moment, he saw a horrifying scene.

    The deadbodies of Lycans that fell into that dark swarm of death energy are being consumed by the spectres.

    Of course, the flesh is not actually being consumed by the spectres, rather they are capturing and sucking the soul out of their bodies while the roots that came from the trees sucked the blood, flesh and bone of the corpses.

    But either way, he couldn¡¯t see the roots from there because of the death energy and it looked like the deadbodies are being sucked away. He is soaked in sweat. He never knew that a man could be this afraid.

    And it didn¡¯t take long for him to realize that a man shouldn¡¯t be this afraid in the middle of a war.

    While he is distracted, Jate came forward and jammed his sword into the Lycan leader.

    He dodged, but the de still went through his shoulder.

    Jate didn¡¯t hesitate and forcefully pulled the sword sideways and tore a piece of flesh directly. The Lycan leader came back to his senses and charged forward aiming to fight desperately. He had no hopes of leaving this ce alive anyway.

    But the problem, he is not destined for some great battle before he dies either.

    A spectre came from the rear and took another bit off of his soul. He swung his sword at it and destroyed it, but this gave Jate a great opening and stabbed him once again.

    The battle continued in the most unfair way one could imagine.

    Whenever the Lycan leader came forward to attack, he was blocked by a spectre, distracted by a spectre and attacked by a spectre.

    Whenever Jate missed an opening and was about to receive a blow, the spectre took the attack with full swing. But the Lycan leader didn¡¯t have such luxury. He was stabbed, bit, shed and finally he fell on to the ground like a broken kite and just like the rest of the Lycan kin, he dissolved into the ground.

    Once the heads of the battle were cut off, the rest went on rtively well.

    Some of the Lycans wanted to escape, but Sam didn¡¯t let that happen. As soon as he spotted some Lycans retreating, the spectres¡¯ job only became to make sure not a single Lycan escapes.

    The Lycans came in too deep and the formation is spread too far for any spectre to miss an fleeing Lycan.

    Just the like that, the battle that has been troubling Jate and his subordinates for such a long time was finished by Sam¡¯s interference.

    Thest leg of the battle went on for a whole day. The city is cleared and the news has been sent to the seniors who are blocking the High level Lycans froming here.

    Now that the city has stabilized, they can now focus on defending it better.

    Sam drew out a blueprint and gave it to Jate.

    ¡°This will help you stabilize the defense of the city. If you manage to sessfully implement this formation with abundant energy, you can use minimum number of cultivators to maximize your defense against higher number of enemies.¡±

    ¡°Would you help us with the construction then?¡±

    Jate asked hopefully. He is also from a noble household so he is very much interested in friendship with Sam.

    If what Sam gave them worked and this area is stabilized, then he would be leaving thing ce and will be deployed to a new region.

    Having someone like Sam by his side, will help him gain more merits. Of course, saving humans is what he is striving for now, but it wouldn¡¯t hurt for anyone to gain some more merits.

    ¡°No, I won¡¯t be staying here anymore.

    The situation is rtively stable. You guys should be able to finish the rest now. The pressure on the city is gone, so you can repair the previously damaged formation as well. With my formation as well as the formation pirs I left behind, things will go rather smoothly.

    Anyway, I wille back to get the corpses.

    Just collect the corpses from all your regions and bring them here, as per our agreement. I wille and collect them whenever I am free.¡±

    ¡°So, where are going to go now?¡±

    ¡°The next chaotic region nearby.¡±

    Sam just smiled and left the city on harbinger. After reaching a certain distance, he used the dimensional drifter and disappeared from there.

    He went in a certain direction away from the city.

    He doesn¡¯t have much use with the prince that is currently being held hostage. He acquired almost eight hundred kills in this area which is a good haul. He also gained a bunch of fruits of fire and earth element.

    That is also a great enough haul.

    He collected some of the spectres from the formation pirs and reced them with some new and a bit weaker ones.

    Now, all he has to do is repeat the same thing again in different city.

    He did exactly that.

    He reached the nearest city and this time used the rmendation and acknowledge for Jate to gain the trust much faster. He simply assimted himself with the city¡¯s soldiers and participated in defense.

    And he also found a few ces that are suitable for his beasts as he moved from city to city. Just like that two months went by.

    Sam participated in the defense of 5 cities and came across Lycans of all kinds of elememts. He managed to kill some Lycan nobles and gained enough knowledge of Lycan to send all his beasts over there to gain as many rewards as possible.

    The only problem is his direct kills are not as many as he wanted.

    Currently, he only has a little over 3000 kills at his hand. But on the other hand, they only came from Lycans.

    Now, he decided to move to a different race.

    The Giants.

 Chapter 1865 - 1865 Lycan Research

    1865 Lycan Research

    At this moment, Sam is currently sitting in a forest.

    In an open space as he did some calctions on arge stone wall. He used his finger to control the energy and various equations are falling on the wall. Meanwhile, on the side a few formation discs are projecting images of Lycans.

    They are images of different Lycans. Different elemental affinities, various talents and different constitutions.

    Lycans are one of the races very close to beasts. They have very close gics with Beastmen but they are not exactly beast men either.

    They are different and even though Sam came across some Lycans and werepeople in his journey to here, he never came across purebred Lycans like these. So, of course, he would be intrigued to research a bit.

    Right now, he is researching the transformability of Lycans. From their humanoid form to the true form.

    Of course, there are a bunch of other races like Nagas and some Demons that have different forms, even mermen and Sirens that are currently part of Dusk¡¯s vast establishments have the transformations.

    But the transformations of Lycans is whole another level.

    In the other creatures, even though the transformation happens, there is no real change in their internal structure. Their primary organs, the energy cores, the circtory and nervous systems, all remain the same.

    .....

    But for Lycans, they all change, it is like instead of the external body itself, the whole being is evolving and devolving with every transformation.

    He wanted to understand the science behind this transformation and see if he can apply it to any of his other inventions.

    It is an interesting subject.

    As he was ying around with the equations and the images, he stopped and called out.

    ¡°There is no point in hiding and seeing what I am doing. And the recording crystal in your hand would be useless too. No matter who you show it to, all they could do is scratch their heads.¡±

    As soon as he spoke, someone came from the shadows of the forest and stood behind him.

    It is a young man with long dark hair. He gave out a very dark and shady aura and he had a devilish grin on his face.

    His upper body is bare and it is jacked. He looked like a sculpture carved out of marble stone with his very while skinplexion and the contrast between his white frame and dark aura is very eye-catching.

    He put the recording stone away and looked at the calctions.

    ¡°Interesting. You are weaker than me in cultivation, but you can still spot me when I use my shadow merge. You are really talented.¡±

    Sam didn¡¯t bother replying. He just focused on the calctions in front of him.

    ¡°What is this?¡±

    The young man asked.

    ¡°Research. On Lycans.¡±

    The young man seemed interested, but no matter how much he tried he couldn¡¯t make heads and tails of the equations, but he was fascinated by the holographic images.

    ¡°Are these internal structures of lycans?¡±

    He asked as he looked at a projection of the circtory system.

    ¡°Yes, in its true form.¡±

    Then the young man moved to the full Lycan image and said.

    ¡°Wow, these Lycans seem interesting. The Bastard Jate really lucked out Having to deal with these Lycans. They seem like great opponents to deal with.¡±

    ¡°Yes, they are.¡±

    Sam finally put the equations to rest and asked.

    ¡°So, what are you here for? How long are you guys going to keep me here?¡±

    ¡°Well, you did have a lot of rmendation letters for you, but you know the person in charge here is a tough son of a bitch.¡±

    ¡°He is your brother.¡±

    ¡°Don¡¯t sweat on the small stuff. Anyway, my brother is very scared that you will steal his credit, so of course he is going to keep you at bay.¡±

    ¡°But he is in Late Stage, while I am in Initial Stage. We are not even fighting in the same ss.¡±

    ¡°Of course, of course. But still, my brother is a credit hog and glory whore.¡±

    ¡°He is still your brother.¡±

    ¡°Anyway, amander is going toe. We are going to move to the area Giants had already upied.

    An area that has five cities and twelve viges. We need to capture it back. The area is full of valuable resources. From spirit stone mines, high level Divine ores, medicinal fields to the most important, the five cities have legacies of the humans that used to stay there.

    They were caught off guard and the whole area is wiped out.

    We learned that the Giants captured a lot of nobility andmoners there to breed and develop Demi Giants that could inherit these legacies since they can only be done through human bloodline.

    I will introduce you to thismander. Our task it to breakthrough into the Giant upied territory. It would be a muchrger scale invasion this time, but it would be done through smaller squads.

    Even if my brother opposes this time, themander will have to ept you with the rmendation letters.

    After all, there are some young masters contacting themander and a senior even scolded him for being so arrogant and cocky. My brother is in trouble now. Hehe.¡±

    Sam didn¡¯t bother with him anymore. He put away the holographs and was about to go for a hunt and eat something, but at this moment, the young man¡¯smunication token beeped.

    ¡°Mitra, bring that Guy same over. Our newmander is here. Your brother is already meeting with him.¡±

    ¡°Perfect time. Let¡¯s go.¡±

    Sam followed Mitra as both of them left the forest.

    This Mitra is of the same stature as Jate. Both of them are Late Stage Divine ne Initiation cultivators. The social status of both is also simr.

    But for Mitra, there is an elder brother who is also of the same status and strength, but because of that guy¡¯s age and this guy¡¯szy attitude, the brother had a higher rank in military.

    And he has been stalling Sam¡¯s involvement in this war.

    Sam already understood the status here. Out of the three races that invaded this, the Giants are doing the most damage, followed by Lycans.

    The Giants managed to upy arge territory and that too a valuable territory.

    So, he is looking forward to the fight here as there are more giants. He could just fill up a lot of his quota.

    Mitra and Sam arrived at the camp. Many people are whispering as they saw them.

    ¡°Come on everyone. How about we shut the fuck up if we don¡¯t have anything to say out loud.¡±

    Mitra said in a loud voice which silenced everyone¡¯s words.

    Sam sighed as he looked at this.

    If not for the fact that this is the camp that is dealing with the Giant-upied territory, he would have avoided this. This ce is so full of politics even at a time like this.

    There are about four factions fighting internally while trying to acquire thend and the legacies.

    Now that these five legacies opened up for grabs, these four factions are trying to gain these legacies for themselves and this made Sam very frustrated.

    He has been around for over a few days and he has seen over a dozen missions sabotaged for these politics. If he is on the Giants¡¯ side at this moment, he could just set this whole camp on fire.

    It¡¯s like dried grass waiting for a burning match. It will just burn to ashes.

    Soon, they reached a building that is the current headquarters for operations.

    Inside, another young man that looked very simr to Mitra is standing in front of a middle-aged man who had a bald head.

    Both of them were discussing something and they halted as soon as Sam and Mitra entered.

    ¡°Oyy, Uncle. Nice to meet you. It has been a while since west met. How have you been?¡±

    The bald man frowned and then sighed.

    ¡°Mitra, I am here on official duty. You should call me Commander. I am not your uncle here.¡±

    ¡°Okay, Uncle. Here, this is the guy named Sam. The one that my brother has been blocking with all of his heart.

    He must have whined about it to you already. What did he say?¡±

    Themander looked at Mitra¡¯s brother and said.

    ¡°So, Rodra. Is this guy you were talking about?¡±

    Rodra just nodded.

    Commander looked at Sam and said.

    ¡°I am already getting an earful from a lot of people on the Western front. I have a senior brother there and he sang high praises for you.

    You seemed to have a great standing on the western front and your achievements in killing Lycans are very high. Why did youe here?¡±

    ¡°I am interested in killing Giants now.¡±

    ¡°Why is that?¡±

    ¡°Simple, I am going to fight on the fronts that are least efficient and least effective. This time it just happened to be your territory and Giants happened to be a reason for that.

    .....

    I like a challenge.¡±

    The room turned silent. Sam just called all of them inefficient and ineffective. Rodra¡¯s veins bulged in anger.

 Chapter 1866 - 1866 Surrounded

    1866 Surrounded

    ¡°How dare you?¡±

    Rodra asked as he looked at Sam angrily.

    Sam just looked at him and calmly said.

    ¡°The Giants¡¯ territory has stopped attacking for such a long time. It is obvious that they are trying to stabilize their defense.

    This is the perfect opportunity for you guys to attack. I have seen almost twenty-four failed missions. Missions that could have been done by a pure brute with no brain, failed in the hands of your ¡®efficient¡¯ soldiers.

    If these people are under my force¡­ No, I can¡¯t even imagine a scenario people like this would be under my force. I would have wiped them clean or just dismantled my force and lived a life of hermit.¡±

    The whole room turned silent. And some of the people inmanding positions looked at Mitra who just shrugged. The fact that the twenty four missions failed is known to everyone there.

    But no one dared to point that out or put the me of it on anyone. Because all those missions are aplished by different factions and every time the opposing faction sabotaged it one way or the other.

    It is indeed a disgraceful thing.

    .....

    In fact some of themanding leaders are opposed to Sam, because he has connections to the western frontier and they don¡¯t want their dirtyundry exposed.

    ¡°What the fuck do you know about handling a force? Do you think a hundred percent sess rate is expected of an army? There are many factors in y here. How can a brute who has no experience understand that?¡± Rodra rebuked angrily.

    Sam looked Rodra as if he is an idiot. Just those few sentences alone made him understand what kind of person Rodra is.

    Not only is he a credit hog, he is not someone who looks at a bigger picture. Because he didn¡¯t even study Sam¡¯s record properly.

    If he had, the word brute would have been thest thing that he could think of.

    If Rodra knew Sam¡¯s thoughts, he would have been stunned silent. Because Sam is right, he never saw Sam¡¯s full report. All he did was look at Sam¡¯s kill count and came to this conclusion.

    Sam looked at themander and said.

    ¡°My presence here is purely voluntary. Since you talked with your senior brother, you know my capabilities and the price to use it.

    I don¡¯t care about your internal politics or your war merits. Even if you make me honorary head of your organization or king of your country, I won¡¯t give two shits about it.

    So, just let me know if you want to give me a team, if you can¡¯t then let me take the individual assignments and missions you leave out to the mercs.

    Either way is fine for me.¡±

    Sam didn¡¯t speak after that. He just looked at themander waiting for his answer.

    Themander sighed and said.

    ¡°Alright, we are nning the infiltration of the Giant upied territory from many fronts. And our goal is to take the legacies back on by one.

    All the Giants are pure-blooded and they have an ability to increase their size for a certain amount of time. And their energy level, as well as strength, are increasing exponentially along with their size in that short span of time.

    So, even the Giants at Divine ne Initiation Initial Stage are able to fight against Middle Stage and Late Stage

    Some Peak Divine ne Initiation Giants are even capable of fighting against Divine ne Pre-transcendent cultivators. It is very hard for us to deal with them.

    ording to Ancient records, the legacies that are currently upied by the Giants have tests left behind by some ancestors. As long as someone enters the legacy grounds and passes all the tests, they could be the owner of the legacy.

    And they would haveplete control over the legacy ground.

    Even Divine ne Transcendent Cultivators wouldn¡¯t be able to do anything.

    Right now, Divine ne Transcendent cultivators are the leaders on both sides of the war. So, they cannot spare a lot of them.

    The n is for humans to enter these five legacies and upy the legacy grounds after iming ownership through the tests.

    That is the initial stage of the n. Once we seed¡­¡±

    Themander kept on going with the n and Sam nodded more and more as he heard.

    The n is quite solid and it is indeed designed properly with a lot of factors in mind. Of course, it is obviously not perfect, but it is still better than just sending people to death.

    He went through the ns and finally Sam¡¯s role was given.

    ¡°You and Mitra are going to form a two man team. Your job is create chaos and provide proper distraction for the rest of the forces.

    Our first target is the Fire city. Even though we are going to attack from all five sides, the fire city is our primary target.

    Between Fire city and Water city, there are three viges that are upied by Giants of Late Stage Divine ne Initiation Giants. We don¡¯t know exactly how many of them are there, but there are more than three.

    Apart from that, there are a bunch of camps established in the surrounding areas of those viges to acquire and explore the forests and resource points. They are trying to use their technology to fortify the area.

    You have to create chaos there and attract attention from the Fire City. They should be solely focused on you while we press on sneakily and take over the city.

    You will be rewarded like you asked. You will gain all the corpses that are obtained from the battles on all fronts, based on your performance.¡±

    Sam looked at Mitra who is grinning and said.

    ¡°Can I go alone? Why should I take this guy along with me?¡±

    ¡°There is a limit to one¡¯s ignorancemander. An Initial stage Divine ne Initiation cultivator is looking down on a Late Stage Divine ne Initiation Cultivator. Is there anything more ridiculous than this?

    Why are we even tolerating this guy?¡±

    Rodra once again spoke up.

    Sam stood and said to Mitra.

    ¡°Just follow along. I would rather have you talk shit rather than hear the whiny little bitches moaning as if there is a phantom burning pain in their assholes. I can¡¯t deal with shit like this.¡±

    Sam walked off and he didn¡¯t even nce at Rodra.

    After Sam and Mitra left, the remaining members were all assigned various tasks as they discussed further ns.

    Rodra was assigned in one of the attack squads of the fire city.

    Aftering out, Sam looked at Mitra and asked.

    ¡°Tell me, you have a beast that you can use.¡±

    ¡°Of course, I do.¡±

    Sam nodded and took out Harbinger before moving in the direction they need to go.

    Mitra hurriedly followed him.

    As they went on, Sam leisurely stood on Harbinger while making some calctions. After they reached a certain distance, he turned to Mitra and said.

    ¡°I narrowed down a location. We are going there first.¡±

    He took out the dimensional drifter and both of them disappeared.

    Mitra was stunned as he looked at the drifter.

    ¡°Yo, can you give me one of those, it is very handy.¡±

    Sam looked at him and said.

    ¡°Even all of yourbined cannot afford to rent for a couple of days. Be content that you are taking a ride in it.¡±

    ¡°Come on, you said you are a smart guy right? Why don¡¯t make one of those?¡±

    Sam didn¡¯t even know what to say, he just sighed and let me be.

    But at this moment, they sensed something at the periphery of their senses.

    And they were found out too.

    ¡°Two humans spotted. They are mine.¡±

    A giant with fire elemental energy yelled and arge jet of mes came out of nowhere.

    The whole forest burned down.

    When the mes went away, Sam and Mitra are standing there calmly as they looked at the Giants that are far away.

    Two and a half meter tall Giants. Over twenty-five of them are all looking at Sam and Mitra.

    ¡°Eight of them are Middle Stage Divine ne Initiation Giants, the rest are Initial Stage. How do you think we should go? Do you think it would be against unspoken rules if I attack them?¡±

    Mitra asked with a smile.

    Sam shook his head and took out a staff.

    ¡°I thought you were a sword user.¡±

    ¡°Even I thought you were a fist user. But who knows you use your Saliva more.¡±

    The Giant that burned the forest looked at the two with bright eyes.

    ¡°Oy, there is a Late Stage Divine ne Initiation Cultivator among the two. The one who gets to take his life wins. Only thest hit counts. So, no bitching.¡±

    As he moved along with the remaining seven Middle Stage Giants.

    They ignored Sampletely and he looked at the Seventeen Giants that are focused on him.

    .....

 Chapter 1867 - 1867 New Technique

    1867 New Technique

    Sam looked at the Giants.

    All of them had wide grins on their faces and with their massive mouths and lips, it looked even weirder.

    He didn¡¯t wait for them to make a move and lunged forward. He swung his staff. Energy circted with void style.

    The Giant that was picked by Sam seemed to be enjoying this. He was excited because Sam ising at him and met the staff with his punch. The staffnded on the knuckles.

    *BOOM*

    The explosive sound came as a small spurt of blood mist appeared at the point of contact. But Sam is surprised. Even though it is not a full-powered attack, it is still not half-assed. It is a decent move. He is sure that an average cultivator would have had their hand broken.

    But here the wound is purely superficial.

    He could even feel the spiritual energy reaction when it¡¯s healing the wound.

    The Giant grinned even more and lunged forward. His movements didn¡¯t have any technique behind them. The fighting is crude and barbaric. But powerful.

    .....

    Sam never felt such pressure from pure Physical strength from a same-level cultivator. Even Kumar who is mostly focused on his physical strength didn¡¯t have this much chaotic and barbaric force.

    He became serious and swung his staff to meet the fist with his own strike.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sound came and blew the surrounding dust to all over. Both of them took a step back. As the opponent charged forward, Sam sensed a threat from the rear and jumped to the side.

    Another Giant Smashed in the same spot Sam was in. The attack wasced with thick fire elemental energy. The ground turned into ava pit with just a single punch.

    Sam didn¡¯t even have time to wait for a little bit.

    He had to jump high into the air to dodge another attack that came at him from the side.

    The Giants are barbarically attacking him without any formation or nning. A few giants jumped up to attack him. They are using fists without care.

    The whole are is filled with mes.

    Sam looked at Mitra¡¯s situation which is about the same.

    These giants are hot-headed to their core.

    Sam¡¯s body changed. He activated partial fusion with the lightning element. Energy circted in void style as he spun his staff.

    Silver lightning shes as the staffnded on the head of a Giant.

    *BAM*

    *BOOM*

    *CRASH*

    The Giant fell on to the ground like a meteor. Leaving arge crater. When the dust settled, one could see that the Giant is spasming like crazy. His fire elemental energy is messed up to its limit. He went out of control.

    But this move, left Sam a bit open for a Giant.

    A punchnded and threw him to the ground.

    Sam didn¡¯t even flinch. He took the hit and even used that force to speed himself up as he reached the Giant that fell on the ground. Lightning charged in his staff andnded on the head of the Giant.

    The Giant¡¯s head was split open.

    *BAM*

    Sam turned around hit a fisting at the back of his head with his staff. This time the fist didn¡¯t just break or bleed, it turned into a bloody mist.

    Even at the risk of getting caught by an attack, he finished off that Giant with another staff attack.

    Two Giants were done in the first thirty seconds.

    All of a sudden as if they are on cue all the Giants stepped back and didn¡¯t charge forward blindly. They looked at their two fallenrades and one of them said.

    ¡°Seems like we came across a strong one. Let¡¯s get serious and kill him off before he could do any more damage.¡±

    As soon as he spoke, Sam felt the surrounding energy surge. Giants are sucking the spiritual energy and their auras filled with Divine Energy roared.

    Giants started growing in size. They became twice their normal size in just a second. Sam of course had no interest of waiting until all of them fully transform.

    He charged at the Giant that was closest to him and stabbed his staff straight in its stomach.

    Lightning surged and the Giant¡¯s body ispletely enveloped with the silver electric currents.

    The Giant which was in the middle of the transformation was caught in that shock. Sam activated his observation ability as the cells of all giants are being simted by this electric current.

    He noticed how each and every cell, the blood, the internal organs, and muscle tissue all reacted to the electric shock while they are in the middle of transforming.

    Of course, it didn¡¯tst long.

    *BOOM*

    The body exploded in a bloody mist because of this excess stimtion. A huge cloud of blood surrounded Sam and the Giants.

    Before the mist could even clear, Sam turned around and blocked an attack from the Giant. He didn¡¯t take any damage, but to his surprise, he flew a few meters. As he tried to regain his bnce, he met with a ming punch to his back.

    Once again, he managed to block the attack. The elemental effects arepletely negated. But he was still thrown far away.

    He charged the lightning energy and used that speed to regain his bnce. He made sure that he wouldn¡¯t reach the actual distance that he should reach from that impact.

    A Giant¡¯s fist barely brushed past his back.

    He noticed that not only Giants¡¯ speed increase, their strength almost tripled. It is indeed as the reports said. The Giants are almost crossing a level with this kind of strength.

    So, now he is facing almost fifteen Middle Stage Divine ne Initiation cultivators at the same time.

    He took a deep breath as he blocked an attack and smiled.

    This is the perfect situation to check the new fighting style that he conceptualized a few months ago.

    Sam activated shadow fusion. Shadow energy as well as death energy surged in his body as he moved around. He stopped blocking the attacks and just focused on dodging them. The Giants that managed to catch up with Sam just a few seconds before felt like they are in shallow waters trying to catch a slippery loach.

    They couldn¡¯t catch him. Even without Sam attacking, he made the Giants look like they are kids ying tag with an agile cat.

    As he moved around for over a minute, he reached the back of the giant. His Divine energy through the staff, along with the spiritual energy, the ripple style and the void style were bothbined and all of it isbined with the death energy.

    Thisplex cocktail attacknded on the Giant¡¯s back squarely and cleanly.

    *BooM*

    The Giant felt like a small explosion urred on its body ad he fell forward. He could feel the ripple style carrying thebination of Death element with the Divine energy and Spiritual energy and it spread threw his flesh before it exploded with Void Style.

    The Giant Spat out a few mouthfuls of blood before stabilizing. But everyone could see that he is not truly stable. His vitality is being eaten by the death energy.

    He tried to circte the Divine energy to control the damage being done to the body. But the next second, to the surprise of him and the rest of the giants in the surroundings, all of a sudden the energy within the giant¡¯s body went out of his control. The surrounding energy surged into him uncontrobly.

    Soonrge ripples appeared on his body.

    People can see that his flesh is rippling ording to those energy ripples. The very next moment the ripples fully extended and covered the surface of all of his body¡­

    *BOOM*

    He exploded into the bloody mist with chaotic death energy taking his original ce.

    The Giants all widened their eyes in disbelief.

    They all saw Sam¡¯s attack. It is powerful, but it is nowhere near as powerful as the damage that was done in front of them.

    After all, the energy Sam actually put into the attack could be clearly seen. But this much of a reaction ispletely out of possibility.

    Only Sam had a smile on his face as he disappeared in a puff of ck smoke and reappeared behind another Giant who is still in shock.

    The Staffnded once again.

 Chapter 1868 - 1868 Plan

    1868 n

    Ten minutester.

    Sam is standing in the middle of arge crater. He is surrounded by chaotic death energy and the whole area is painted with blood that was caused by a bunch of explosions that urred because of the exploding Giants.

    He deactivated his fusion as he observed the aftermath of his actions.

    He is surprised by this level of damage. Even though he simted it before many times, a direct application is still very surprising for him.

    This is a new fighting style that he wanted to test out for a while.

    This is based on the principles of resonance and amplification that he has been experimenting for some time. The core principle of the technique is pretty simple and direct.

    When he made an attack with death energy, void style and ripple stylebined along with some divine energy, the damage for that attack would just be normal.

    But after the attack hasnded and done its job, the energy in the surroundings would have already picked up the resonance from it. And the entity that helps with capturing the sequence and function of that attack is the body of the victim.

    The muscles and cells in the body of the victim who took the attack act as a reference for the amplification and the damage multplies in the matter of a second. The best part of about this attack, is that its very stealthy.

    .....

    Unless they knew about the attack before, a person wouldn¡¯t be able to understand or guess what is happening to their body all of a sudden, just when they thought the attack has passed away.

    The attack is very effective, particrly if he is fighting people at higher level.

    Meanwhile, Mitra is also done with the opponents at his end. He came over and looked at Sam.

    ¡°I thought you wanted corpses. Why did you beat them up like that? There is not even a bone here.¡±

    Sam didn¡¯t answer him and just got lost in some thought.

    ¡°Let¡¯s get out of here. Even if thismotion didn¡¯t alert anyone, with these people gone, someone will notice.¡±

    Sam collected the corpses after peforming a soul absorption before they left in a specifc direction.

    ¡°There is a camp a few miles away from here. The strongest is a Late-Stage Divine ne Initiation Giant. It seems like Giants are trying to start production in all of the resource points. There is a very high level spirit stone mine that belongs to the Fire City.

    Another piece of new is that they are trying to hurry up for some reason we don¡¯t know. They want to finish this as soon as possible. These guys don¡¯t know exactly what the hurry is. Or we could have had that information too.¡±

    ¡°How about we raid the camp? Maybe that will let us know the answers?¡± Mitra suggested as they moved slowly through the forest.

    Sam though for a moment and said.

    ¡°I have a n in mind. But I need some more information about what these Giants are nning and looking for.

    It is weird that they hurriedly upied such arge territory and instead of using the momentum and their element of surprise to their advantage, they took a step back and started stabilizing it.

    I am sure they are expecting something here.

    If we can find details about it, I am sure we can draft a proper n that will ease our process.¡±

    ¡°Are you sure? We are only two people here? We are pretty powerful. I am sure you can handle yourself in the current level of battle. Why don¡¯t we just drag a battle with the camp and slowly wear them out.¡±

    Mitra suggested as he stretched his bodyzily.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    ¡°It is inefficient. It will take a very long time and the output could only be produced after a really long time. And the longer the waiting time for result the more variables will appear.

    We need to make it as fast and as smooth as possible¡±

    ¡°So much nonsense? Why do you want to hurt yourself thinking so much?¡±

    Sam just shook his head and let him go. As they walked further, finally they spotted some Giants.

    ¡°This is a temporary rendezvous point for the Giants that came out for exploration. The ones we fought are part of this exnation team. The person in charge here might be able to give us some more answers.

    We are going to capture him.¡±

    Mitra stood on a tree and looked at the Giants.

    ¡°Okay, there are about three dozen members here. Most of them are at Initial Stage of Divine ne initiation. There are a bunch of middle stages as well.

    They are about the same size as the team we just fought. I think we can breakthrough pretty easily.¡±

    Mitra got ready to attack.

    ¡°Wait. I don¡¯t want brute force through this. We don¡¯t need to alert the enemies. The camp ground is pretty close from here and the camp itself is not far from the nearest vige.

    There is no reason to cause too much chaos here. We just need to get information out of the leader here.¡±

    ¡°How are you going to do it? Ask him nicely?¡±

    Sam sighed and said.

    ¡°I now understand why your brother is in amanding position.¡±

    ¡°Oh? You do? Why is that?¡±

    ¡°Because unlike you, he uses his brain cells. Just stay put and follow my lead. I don¡¯t want to exin each and every detail to you. It wastes too much of my time.¡±

    Mitra looked at Sam with a frown and said.

    ¡°Come on, I am not that dumb. I just don¡¯t want to waste my mind thinking so much nonsense, when things could be solved directly.

    And what is with that attitude? All you need to do is exin things to me a little bit. It is not like you are losing a lot of time. I mean, what better thing can you establish in such a short time?¡±

    ¡°Trust me, you would be shocked to know what my brain could think up in the time it takes for me to exin everything to you. Let¡¯s wait for a while. I have some of mypanions out.

    We will gather the required info and once night strikes, we will strike as well.¡±

    Time passed.

    After sun set, a bunch of shadows quietly escaped the rendezvous point and came to Sam.

    They are his shadow mice.

    They quickly gave out all the info they acquired.

    Sam immediately went to Mitra and exined the situation and they decided to make their move.

    ¡°You understood the n right? No Chaos, no battle. It should go very smooth.¡±

    Mitra nodded and took a deep breath.

    At this moment, in this temporary rendezvous point. There is a main tent in which the leader of this exploration team is currently surrounded by a bunch of other giants.

    ¡°All the teams, that left has sent the required reports, except for the three teams. Until now, we didn¡¯t find a single clue of the thing that we are looking for.¡±

    ¡°Boss, are we sure we are looking at the right spot? I mean, the mine is not even close to this ce. We are way too far away.¡±

    ¡°The mine is just a natural indicator of the thing that we are looking for.

    Our young master has a reliable source mentioning that it could be found around this area. We have to find it before anyone else. Particrly we cannot let other tribes find it before us. Now¡­.¡±

    The meeting went on for a while and the leader sent everyone away. He closed the tent and activated a formation before closing his eyes and went into a deep thought. He is almost in a meditative state. But at this moment, a faint spatial fluctuation urred at one of the corners of the room.

    Mitra appeared out of nowhere and before the leader could make any noise or even turn aroundpletely, he disappeared like a shadow and reappeared behind the leader.

    A single hit to the neck made the leader faint. Then, he took out a token and crushed it. The leader and Mitra both disappeared and reappeared in the forest.

    ¡°I thought there is a spatial barrier set around here, you were able to bypass it that easily? I thought it would take time.¡±

    Mitra asked Sam with an impressed look.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    ¡°It took less time than it would take if I have to exin that process to you. That formation is pretty easy to beat.¡±

    ¡°Really? For some reason, our forces are getting stumped by the formationid down by Giants. How are you able to do it so easily?¡±

    ¡°It¡¯s because you guys learn the formations through a different approach than I do.¡±

    ¡°Oh, what is that approach?¡±

    ¡°Do you know formations?¡±

    ¡°No, I am just curious about what you know.¡±

    ¡°¡­¡±

 Chapter 1869 Fire Heart

    1869 Fire Heart

    Sam, Mitra and their new captive.

    All three of them disappeared from outside of the rendezvous point.

    "So, what now? Are we going to interrogate him? What are we going to do?"

    "He is fairly strong and he has a decent level of strength. I am thinking of using him for something. But for that, we need to get some information.

    From all the info that I already gathered with mypanions, the only thing I can confirm is that they are here on the orders of the young master. The person who is most likely in charge of the nearby camp.

    They are searching for something and this area is its most probable location. Based on their conversation they are searching this item based on some traces rted to a mine. To proceed further with the n, we need to know what exactly are they searching for and how important it is. Finally, we need to know who else is searching for it."

    "Why do you need so many details? It is a waste of time? Don''t you think if we just win the war, we can just extract the memories with that little trick of yours? Things will be lot lessplicated."

    Sam sighed once again. He didn''t even bother replying.

    Soon they reached a cave.

    "I need you to make sure that he is unconscious We need to break his mind and we need all the information without killing him. "

    "I am not good with torture. I can''t control my strength. I will end up killing him."

    "Don''t worry about it. I have a way. Anyway, he is not going to see who we are. Just let me make some preparations first. It wouldn''t take long."

    With that, Sam startedying out a formation and a bunch of inscriptions wereid down at a rapid pace. A stone chair was also arranged and finally, he took out a helmet.

    He ced the leader on the chair and then ced the helmet on his head, before activating the formations.

    The formation is created topletely distort all the senses of the leader. Right now, he wouldn''t even know if someone were to piss on his face. His sense of pain, sense of touch, smell and sight are taken away. Even his spiritual senses are gone.

    Only his sense of hearing is left. He cannot even speak actually.

    Soon, Sam started operating the simtion machine. It is an improvement to the previous version. He activated a minor inscription on the chair giving out a small pulse.

    The guy woke up immediately.

    He wanted to yell out loud. But nothing came out of his mouth. No matter which direction he turned his head, he couldn''t see anything but darkness. Then only he realized that he couldn''t move either. He felt like some very powerful force is suspending him in a void.

    "Hello, my dear friend."

    At this moment an etherealmanding voice appeared out of nowhere. It is actually Sam''s voice but it was tuned in a certain way.

    ''Who are you?''

    That is what the captive wanted to ask, but the words didn''te out.

    Meanwhile, outside the formation, on arge screen, these words appeared.

    Sam smiled at this and spoke.

    "You might be wondering who I am. I am open to tell you about me, but for that you need to answer a few questions of mine."

    ''You better leave me now or you will regret it for the rest of your life. I will kill you in the most gruesome way possible¡­''

    A bunch of curses appeared on the screen. The other guy was unable to voice it out no matter how much he tried.

    "Anyway, it is still early for our conversation. You can rest for a while. I wille back to you in a few minutes. Meanwhile get used to the current situation you are in."

    Sam shut themunication down.

    Meanwhile, the captive is feeling anxious. He couldn''t understand what is happening around him. He tried to use his spiritual energy and divine energy. But that didn''t work as well.

    He wanted to check his own condition with his senses. Still no use. He tried to take deep breaths and calm down.

    "Okay, let''s leave him be until morning. You stay here keep an eye out. Don''t cause anymotion and don''t do anything stupid." Sam said and got ready to head out once again.

    "Wait, wait. What do you mean? Why do you want me to stay like this until morning? Until a couple of hours ago, you were whining about how we don''t have time and we have to do this shit immediately.

    But now we have time? That too until morning?

    Didn''t you say that you would get back to him in a few minutes?"

    "It is part of the n. For this to work, we need to mentally break him down. But we cannot use torture, abuse or force to make him do it. We cannot kill him. But we still need that information.

    This is the best way possible."

    "How is this the best way?"

    "Listen, I don''t really have enough patience to exin every minor action of mine to you. It is hard for me to focus and work like that. Please leave it alone."

    With that, Sam didn''t even bother waiting for his reply. He took off on the harbinger immediately.

    He went around to get an idea about the actions of this exploration team. Even though the team leader is in charge of the operation, he is not getting live updates of the progress from his teams.

    That information could be helpful.

    Also, if he could get some behavioral points of different squads in the team that he could take advantage of, the rest of the n would go a lot smoother.

    The whole night he spent his time looking around in the forest.

    Meawhile, the absence of the leader has been noted by the rest of the exploration team. At least the people at rendezvous point noticed his disappearance very quickly and they started panicking.

    News went to the base camp where the young master who is in charge of the whole operation was staying.

    An exploration team captain is a direct subordinate of the young master. So, he felt that something went wrong. After all, a Middle stage Divine ne Initiation cultivator disappearing without so much as a sound is something hard to imagine for them.

    The only possibility they could immediately think of is that it is done by a cultivator of a higher level which means the higher level giants of their rival tribes have gotten involved.

    He fell into a dilemma. Not many people know that he is searching for a specific thing within that area. Even people from his own tribe are kept in the dark since he has rivals there too.

    He already had an inkling that the water tribe was on to something and now his team leader disappeared all of a sudden. He doesn''t know how to proceed forward. All he could do was send people to search for this team leader.

    Sam came across many of these search parties overnight.

    The next morning.

    Sam came back to the cave.

    "You didn''t disturb him right?"

    He asked Mitra doubtfully. Mitra felt a bit insulted for some reason, but he just shook his head.

    Sam then connected to the formation again and spoke.

    "Hello my dear friend.

    I hope you already got adjusted to the situation now? Shall we talk?"

    As soon as those words were heard, the image on the screen changed.

    In that image, the captive is imagining himself being in the middle of arge void and a string of words appeared out of nowhere.

    ''Who the hell is he? Why did he hold me captive for so long? What about the operations of the camp?"

    These questions kept on repeating themselves as they appeared and clouded his mind.

    "Don''t stress yourself so much. It has only been few minutes. Why are you overthinking things and making everythingplicated for yourself?"

    ''Only few minutes?''

    The captive was dumbfounded. His heart almost stopped. In the void where he couldn''t sense any time and had no concept of his surroundings. He could have sworn that he spent more than a few hours in that void.

    But now, someone just said that it has only been a few minutes.

    His brain went into a panic mode immediately. Many chaotic thoughts are being yed in his head.

    Sam smiled and asked.

    "So, let''s start with an easy question. What were you searching for with that useless team of yours?"

    And the screen changed. A few words appeared.

    "Fire Heart."

    Along with the words an image a giant sitting on a luxurious chair with a very serious and condescending expression appeared.

    As soon as Sam saw those words, he couldn''t help but smile widely.

    Just from those words half of the problem is easily solved. He could easily deduce many things from this.

 Chapter 1870 Confused Leader

    1870 Confused Leader

    Fire Heart.

    It is an elemental resource that is very rare. So rare to the point that even the vast territory the Dusk organization covered didn''t produce one such resource.

    Of course, there is a good reason for that.

    The environmental factors needed for producing a Fire heart itself are veryplicated, on top of that there should be some series of coincidences that should happen. From Sam''s research, the only way for a Fire heart to appear as if a god decides to put one.

    Once a fire heart appears in a region, the surrounding areas would be rich in fire elemental resources.

    Spirit stones of fire elemental energy, Metals that have affinity with fire energy, herbs with fire energy. The flora and fauna in the surroundings will mutate. New species will soon emerge from that environment.

    It is a very valuable resource.

    But its greatest benefites out when it was processed and utilized properly.

    If the fire heart is properly refined, the major benefit that it gives out is a sacrednd that would create an environment beneficial even for the Divine ne cultivators.

    And the second benefit is that the Fire heart has a consciousness. Cultivators can form a connection with the fire heart through this consciousness by gaining its approval. Once they gain that approval, their hearts will resonate and evolve.

    Their affinity with fire will increase, their blood itself will be full of natural fire elemental energy. Their fusion time will increase by arge margin. Their natural state would be very close to the fusion state. Then even in the future their affinity and resonance with the fire elemental energy in environment will be much higher.

    This gives out a collective benefit to amunity of fire element users.

    Of course, there is a way for a single person or a single life form to benefit from this also. It is by absorbing the fire heart into their body. This is a bit dangerous and it can only happen when the cultivation level of a life form is high enough.

    The natural energy of their body should be the same or higher than the Fire heart''s energy.

    Sam doesn''t know how powerful the fire heart that is present in this area. But no matter how powerful it is, he is sure that there is no on the that could use it better than him.

    He asked a few more questions and then made the captive faint again.

    "So, what is the situation now? All I understood from the situation is that the Fire Giants are looking for Fire heart and the water giants are also active in the area."

    "Yeah, that sounds about right. But I think the water giants are only there to upy and swallow some territory of the Fire Giants.

    And it seems like the enmity between the fire and water giants is way too deeper than just fighting for some territory. I also got some extra information that would help us further."

    "Okay, what do you want me to do?"

    "Keep him unconscious while I do something to him."

    With that, Sam stripped the captive and made a brand on his back.

    After that, he started drawing some inscriptions on the head of the guy.

    Mitra was surprised by such an action. He never came across such an inscription being done one some other person.

    If only Mitra actually understood what Sam is doing, he would have fainted from the overload of information.

    The inscription too more than three hours which is considered very long considering Sam''s current level of strength and understanding of the art of inscriptions.

    After everything was done, all Sam did was take the guy away and ced him near the rendezvous point.

    Then he and Mitra sat back and waited for the reaction for their preparations.

    After half an hour.

    One of the search parties found the Captive who is lying conscious in the middle of the forest. They immediately took the guy to the rendezvous point.

    The vice leader of the exploration team contacted the young master.

    "Young master, we found the Leader. He is lying unconscious. But he didn''t have any other injuries. He is unscathed and full of energy even."

    "Keep them there in the tent. Make sure that he doesn''t disappear like before. Keep your eyes on him at all times. Do you understand?"

    "Yes, Young master."

    "I aming. Don''t fuck this up."

    With that, the Vice leader along with a few more people that are leading the squads all sat inside the tent while they saw their leader sleeping like a baby.

    Five minutes after that. The leader suddenly woke up and looked around in shock.

    "Where am I? What is happening?"

    Vice leader frowned as he looked at the frenzied expression of the leader.

    "Leader, what do you mean? You are right in the middle of our rendezvous. This is your tent. Are you feeling alright?"

    "No, this is not my tent. Where the fuck am I? Who the fuck are you? I told you already. You better let me go, right now. Or you will regret it for the rest of your life.

    You don''t know the people behind me."

    Everyone was dumbfounded by the behavior.

    "He seems to be out of his mind. What is happening? Do you think we should restrain him?"

    "I think it is better to just talk to him and calm him down. He just seemed too confused and lost. We don''t want to trigger some kind of adverse reaction."

    The squad members discussed and all of these were heard by the Leader.

    He was thrown into a frenzy as he looked around randomly while shouting threats.

    The members were surprised and confused. But if they knew what the leader is currently experiencing, they would have been able to understand.

    Right now, the leader couldn''t see anything just like the time when Sam put him in that weird void state.

    He is going through a simr experience this time. The only difference is that this time, this guy''s spiritual sense is notpletely removed. Sam just modified the way he would perceive the spiritual sense a bit.

    In that frenzy, the leader managed to figure out that he could use his own energy again.

    "I knew it. You bloody fucker. You cannot hold me captive for long. I will kill you now."

    His energy raged.

    mes flew everywhere around him and the whole ten burned down to ashes in an instant.

    Everyone started defending themselves from the mes.

    Their auras raged and angry expressions appeared on their faces. Rightfully so, they are pissed. They search parties that received the news and came back looked at the scene and jumped in to help.

    13:38

    But then only the whole team realized just how powerful their leader is.

    looked at their leader and one of them yelled.

    "Leader, you better refrain yourselves. Otherwise, don''t me us for retaliating."

    At this moment, the mes around the leader indeed died down and his mind is in a chaotic mess.

    His spiritual senses were activated all of a sudden. After a long time. He could pick up the spiritual energies and auras of all of his subordinates. The only problem is that he didn''t recognize these energies and auras.

    Instead, he actually mistook them for something else. All the fire elemental energy is feeling like water elemental energy to him.

    All the auras that are very familiar to him, are now feeling like they arepletely unfamiliar.

    If his senses were normal, he would have understood that he is in the middle of his own camp along with his subordinates, and he would have calmed down in an instant.

    But now all he could sense is that he is in the middle of his own camp, but he is surrounded by his enemies from the Water Giant tribe. And warning bells rang in his head.

    His rendezvous point for the exploration team has been taken away by the water giants, which could only mean, his subordinates were attacked and were either killed or chased away.

    He couldn''t take it.

    Just when the subordinates thought he calmed down. His aura changed and his body expanded. He activated gigantification and used his full power tounch an attack. Nothing could stop him and he is also not interested in anything stopping him.

    He aimed his fiery fist at the nearest subordinate and killed him in one hit.

    "He has gone crazy. Attack him. Restrain him."

    The vice leader yelled and the whole group retaliated.

    The whole camp was a mess. All the subordinates that were outside the tent previously and all the search parties that received the news and came back looked at the scene and jumped in to help.

    But then only the whole team realized just how powerful their leader is.

    He singlehandedlyunched judgment on them.

    At this moment, outside the camp a bit far away. Sam and Mitra are looking at the scene through a crystal tablet.

    Mitra looked at the scene with his mouth wide open. Meanwhile, Sam is making some notes on a book.

    "What the fuck did you do? How did you even do it?"

 Chapter 1871 Young Master

    1871 Young Master

    The whole rendezvous point is burning in mes.

    The leader of the exploration team didn''t hold back. He is in his true giant form as he rained hellfire on them. He even activated fire elemental fusion.

    Sam and Mitra looked at the video intently.

    Sam in particr is taking note of every single thing that is happening in the video. He has gained a lot of insights from the Lycans'' bodies. So, he is interested in the Giants as well. In front of his eyes, the exploration team is dismantled bit by bit by their very own leader.

    Mitra is even more surprised. If Sam''s devious technique is not shocking enough, the strengths shown by the Giant team''s leader is on another level.

    He couldn''t believe that he managed to catch this guy off guard and capture him.

    And then he circled back to being shocked about how Sam managed to manipte this guy into going on a rampage against his own subordinates.

    This whole thing is terrifying.

    "Say, Sam. Hypothetically. Just hypothetically. Would you be able to fry my brain just like that and make me go against my own camp?"

    Sam looked at him and asked.

    "Are you sure, you want to know the answer to that question?"

    "Yes."

    "I am pretty sure I can do that. But the technique is not perfected yet. It is a new technique that I came up with. If I apply it as it is now, there are bound to be a lot of side effects."

    "What kind?"

    Mitra asked seriously.

    Sam looked at him and then pointed at the screen.

    The team leader who was going on a rampage without any care suddenly halted in his tracks. He has overdrawn a lot of his energy and it is hurting his internal system.

    The team members took this chance and made a move against him.

    After taking a couple of hits, the leader seemed to have gone berserk. His eyes lost the previous puny amount of sanity and he acted like an uncontroble zombie. He didn''t care about the damage to the body anymore and gave it his all.

    He started burning his soul, bloodline and life force as he took the lives of hispanions with every single move.

    Mitra understood immediately. This leader is going to die and he is going to burn a lot of Giants along with him.

    "This kind."

    Sam said calmly and just recorded the required data.

    As they watched the video, soon the rampage came to an end.

    As if on cue, when the mes are dying down, the young master of the Fire Giants came along with his personal convoy.

    He looked at the scene with his eyes wide open in shock. He looked at one of the Vice leaders who is one of the very few that survived and asked.

    "What the fuck happened here?"

    Vice leader exined the whole situation.

    "Where is his dead body?"

    The young master went there and checked the body. The first thing he noticed is the inscription on his forehead. He turned to the person beside him and said.

    "Bring our best inscription master and check what inscription that is."

    Then they turned the body around and saw therge brand mark of the Water Tribe''s nobility.

    The young master''s aura raged rampantly as he looked at that brand.

    He calmed down instantly and ryed his instructions.

    "Check the authenticity of that brand. It looks like the Giant Subordinate Brand. If it is authentic, then it only means we were one-upped by them.

    There is still a chance that a third party is at y here.

    Either way, find out all the information that you can."

    He then paused for a moment and said.

    "Change the camp''s location to here. From now on this is my base of operations. I want all of my forces in this area and everything from the small rock to a dead leaf should be examined here.

    We are not to rest until we find out who the real culprit behind this is."

    "Yes, Young master."

    Everybody saluted him and made their move.

    Sam and Mitra looked at the whole thing through the video and both of them exchanged a nce.

    "We need to get in touch with the main camp of humans. Find out how far their attack preparations havee."

    "Don''t worry. A call is scheduled for tomorrow at dawn, we will get all the required information. Meanwhile, what do you think we should do?"

    Sam didn''t answer immediately and just looked at the video. All the deadbodies are being cleaned up. He looked at the person who is in charge of disposing of them and saw that he collected all the bodies to cremate themter.

    "We are going to capture that guy. I need those bodies. There is no way in hell I am giving them up."

    Sam said resolutely.

    Mitra looked at the target and nodded. The cremation is being done a bit away from the camp and only a small team was kept in charge of it.

    "Why don''t we capture that whole team and do the thing you did with the leader of the exploration team? I want to see what will happen if four of them go berserk instead of one?"

    Sam looked at him and asked.

    "Are you sure, you want that? I thought you are more into direct head-on fighting?"

    "I am a brute. But I am not stupid?"

    "You are not. You could have fooled me."

    Mitra wanted to curse at him, but he controlled himself and said.

    "Alright, let''s just leave the situation as it is. We will know the status of the invasion tomorrow morning. We can decide what to do based on that.

    Anyway, you are good ating up with these kinds of ns. I am sure you can handle whatever it is that''s thrown at our faces.

    By the way, do you know anything more about fire heart or whatever that is called?"

    Sam looked at him and stayed silent.

    After all, the fire heart is an important resource. It is way too rare for Sam to just give it up like that. So, he hid the information from Mitra. They might get along. But its not to the level where he would give up on his own benefits.

    "Leave it. All the spoils you can collect are yours. We will wait until tomorrow and proceed after the call."

    With that, the night went on uneventfully.

    Except for kidnapping the team that went to cremate the bodies, the duo didn''t do anything else.

    Meanwhile, the camp is being shifted and everyone had a lot of work on their hands. These four missing people were not recognized at all.

    The next morning at dawn. Mitra and Sam got on a call with the main forces.

    "The invasion has started. Currently probing attacks are being done on all five cities. We took down a bunch of scout teams of the Giants. The attacks are heating up and we sessfully captured their attention.

    How is your situation?"

    The report came.

    Mitra exined the gist. He didn''t give out any information about the fire heart. All he said is that the Fire Giants are looking for something and they are having some tension with the Water Giants.

    "Try to find out what they are looking for. These five cities have been locked away from the rest of the humans for such a long time. This is a great chance to upy it.

    Our n is taking the initiative in this unified front. So, we are bound to get more benefits and we deserve it.

    If you find what that resource is and why they are searching for it that intently, we might be able to benefit."

    Sam didn''t say anything. The call went on and he finally spoke to giving out a conclusion.

    "We are near the young master of the fire giant''s camp.

    We are in the upper hand here as they don''t know about our presence and their attention is diverted to the Water Giant Tribe.

    We are sure that we can create a perfect distraction as long with the help of this young master. From the information we obtained, this young master has a very high status within their tribe, and his safety will affect the tribe in a significant manner.

    So, let us know when you decide to press forward.

    We willunch a decisive attack on the young master and divert the forces of the Fire Giant Tribe.

    I am sure my mission will bepleted because of that."

    The other party nodded. After discussing some minor details, everyone went on their own way.

    Mitra and Sam decided that it is better to take it slow for now.

    They asionally took out some stray giants that are separated from their teams and Sam only used water elements and brute force to deal with them. Giving off the impression that water giants are the ones dealing with them.

    Apart from that, Sam also kept an eye on some of the higher performers under the Young master.

    These high performers are holding some leadership positions and following them gave Sam a very interesting lead.

 Chapter 1872 Trap

    1872 Trap

    The interesting lead is Water Giants.

    Just like how the fire giants are trying to establish themselves in and around the fire city, the water giants are also trying to do the same with the Water city. The interesting part is of course the intersection of the territory.

    Both cities share a bit ofmon territory and both sides want to take thatmon ground to themselves with no intention of sharing.

    The humans who owned the territory before were harmonious and they didn''t bother with the trivial details like that.

    But the Giants are not like that.

    They already had a lot of friction before Sam even put his fingers in this mess.

    But his recent endeavors of destroying the exploration team as well as killing a lot of giants with water elements and Brute force definitely made the fire giants angry.

    So, because of that some of the high performers under the young master noticed his displeasure and decided to take this chance to get back at the Water Giants.

    In that process, they started mobilizing their forces to scout, n and target some of the water giants.

    Sam with his snooping around managed to get a hint of this.

    Two squad leaders under the Fire Giant Young master teamed up together to kidnap a young master from the Water Tribe. Water Giant young master has the same official status of the Fire Giant Young master.

    But their capabilities and standing in their respective tribes are different by arge margin. The Fire Giant young master is capable as well as ambitious. But the Water Giant young master is not on par with him.

    Of course, the father of Water Giant young master is still trying to push him further and make himpete with the fire giant young master. Just to make sure that the standing of his lineage wouldn''t end in their tribe.

    Sam doesn''t know what the two squad leaders are trying to achieve by getting this young master. But whatever it is, Sam wanted to make use of it and devised a n that will set up a perfect fuse for him.

    As soon as he gets the signal from the Fire Giant Tribe, he would set off that fuse.

    As part of that n, he just let the squad leaders proceed with whatever they wanted to do. That way, he could just build on whatever they wanted to do. He would be free from a lot of hard work.

    Meanwhile, Sam looked for the Fire Heart and unlike the Giants, he is not clueless on how to find it.

    In fact, the Giants are notpletely clueless. The geographical indicators of a Fire heart are pretty strict, but they are not that hard to identify. The hardest part might be pinpointing the exact location after identifying all the indicators.

    Of course, not for Sam.

    The first thing Sam searched for is the nearest resource point and with the knowledge from the Giants, he killed it was a piece of cake.

    He didn''t have to put in much effort to do that. He came across a mine that produces an ore with a fire affinity. Sam collected some samples from the mine and did some tests. These tests are to determine the affinity as well as the purity of the ore in its natural form.

    Based on that, he started looking for the location of the core of the mine. It would be hard with even a Divine ne Cultivator''s sense. Particrly when a mine was created from multiple veins like the one Sam came across.

    But Sam used his most basic natural ability that came with his spiritual core and his body.

    The observation ability.

    He went deep into the mines and used his observation ability. He ignored all the secondary veins of the mine and soon reached the exact core.

    From there, he calcted the core''s distance from the surface. After pinpointing that location, Sam came back to the surface and searched for a different resource point.

    A fertile field that has the best productivity when ites to growing nts.

    This one is a bit trickier than before. But after a couple of days of searching, he managed to find that too. He marked that location too.

    Then a three-dimensional holographic map started being generated on the second floor of the tower.

    There are two elements currently. One is the core of the vine and the other one is the center of the fertile field.

    He scaled the simtions down and created a smaller-sized replica.

    Now, he started mapping some coordinates from these two points as a reference. He created a circle and started searching within the circle based on the information he got from the Giants.

    He marked twenty four resource points. Core of each resource point is at a different location underneath the ground. And after mapping out all of these cores, he calcted the position that could most likely be the location of the fire heart.

    It is just a bit advanced geometry for him.

    Sam looked at Mitra who is looking bored.

    "So, what are we doing today? Looking for another mine that is upied by the fire giants? I am bored man. I got news that my brother is killing these giants left and right at the front line. I want to have some fun too."

    Sam just casually asked.

    "So, what is the status at the frontline? Shall we do our thing? Do they need the distraction yet?"

    "I don''t know. But from thetest report, we might have to do that tomorrow or day after. What are we doing? Sending the captured giants into berserk mode and then into their camp? I like that. If we create enough chaos we can definitely deal with the young master too."

    "I have a better n now. And the timing is just right."

    As they are speaking, Mitra''smunication token started vibrating.

    He picked up the call and it onlysted for a minute.

    "We got a go-ahead. We need to create a distraction within a couple of days."

    "Good. Let''s go then."

    "Where?"

    "To deliver something. On the way, let''s capture a couple of the Fire Giants."

    They took off. On their way, just like Sam said, they ambushed a fire Giant team from one of the groups that Sam already marked before.

    After that was done, he went to thebined territory of water and fire giants. Themon territory is the ce where both factions are secretly shing at the moment and that is also the territory where the young master of the Water giant was targeted by the fire giant squads.

    Sam went to the location of both the squad leaders that are plotting to capture the water giant young master.

    At that location in a cave.

    "So, how are we proceeding further? We are wasting a lot of time. the more time we waste here, the less time we will have to find out the location of whatever young master is looking for."

    One of the squad leaders said in frustration. Even within the faction of the young master, there are a bunch of sub-factions. Everyone is out for their own benefit.

    And right now, the small faction of these two squad leaders is a lot behindpared to other factions. At least they are trying hard to find the fire heart, but these two guys are just on to the young master of the water tribe.

    Because they resigned themselves that the fire heart the young master was looking for didn''t exist.

    "Just a little longer. The scouts will know as soon as the Water Giant''s young master makes a move. Then we move as well."

    *THUD*

    As they are discussing, they all heard a loud thud far away. They spread their senses immediately and saw a scene that made their eyes wide open.

    They immediately ran to that spot.

    In the middle of the forest, there is arge crater in which a fire giant is lying down lifeless.

    He has a bunch of injuries on his body.

    Both of them flew down. They are anxious because they recognized this man. He is one of the scouts.

    "What the fuck happened to him?"

    One of the squad leaders asked as he looked around while the other one examined the dead body.

    "Water element. Crushed organs. It looks like a person from a young master''s team. His personal squad has a fighting style that usually causes this."

    Both squad leaders gritted their teeth. Soon after they examined the body, they found something inside the fire giant. A recording crystal. It is not even in his stomach. It seems like he tried swallowing the recording crystal but it was stuck in the middle of his throat.

    Even though the two squad leaders didn''t like it, they cut him open and took the recording crystal out.

    They hesitated a bit before looking at the contents.

    Both of them are surprised, but then a look of determination and excitement followed. What they didn''t know is that at that exact moment, they fell for a trap that would be impossible for them to even understand.

 Chapter 1873: Plan Successful

    Chapter 1873: n SessfulThe two Fire Giant Squad leaders immediately made their move.

    They took their squads and started moving a bit deeper into the territory of Water Giants. The contents of the recording crystal are of a meeting. A meeting between the Fire Giant young master and his crew. In the video, they talked about the location of the Fire heart and how they are going to get it under the nose of the Fire Giant young master.

    Now, the two squad leaders found this to be a great opportunity.

    Not only could they take out the Water Giant young master, they could also get the Fire Heart.

    They are pumped.

    They moved through the forest sneakily, because they have to cross the territories of other Fire Giant Squads.

    While the two squads are on the move.

    On the side of the Water Giant young master.

    A recording crystalnded on his table and this one was found in the hands of the other Fire Giant that Sam killed in their territory.

    They are watching the contents of this crystal and they are shocked.

    The water giant young master looked at his crew and spoke.

    "So, the fire giant young master is searching for this thing called Fire Heart and now, we know their location.

    Shall we go and give the info to my brother?"

    The crew all looked at each other shook their heads.

    "Young master. This is your chance to get some contributions in. Why give it to your brother? We know the location and from the recording, they are taking a very small crew. We have a better idea."

    The leader of his crew spoke in an exasperated tone.

    The crew this young master has doesn''t actually belong to him. It belongs to his father who dumped them on this kid, so that he would gain something with their help.

    But to no avail. This guy is dumb and a coward.

    Such an opportunity fell into his hands, and he is thinking of handing it over to someone else.

    "So, what is your n team leader?"

    The young man scratched his head and asked dejectedly.

    The discussion began and after over an hourter, the crew along with the rest of the members. They all travelled sneakily to a certain location.

    Meanwhile, Sam and Mitra arrived at the location of the Fire heart. They just hid while Sam search for the exact position of the Fire heart and waited for all the fish to swarm into this area.

    Time passed. Over three hourster.

    They spotted the first group.

    The Fire Giant Squads arrived. They spread out and hid their presence while they waited for their prey.

    After another twenty minutes or so.

    The water giant young master came as well.

    "What are we doing now, team leader?"

    The young master asked.

    But the crew leader had a frown on his face and he didn''t answer. He gestured for the young master to be silent as he took out arge hammer from his storage ring. The rest of the people are also silently took out their weapons. The whole crew had heavy weapons.

    War hammers, Battle Axes and so on.

    The young master became vignt as well and took out his Broad sword.

    At this moment, the Fire Giant Squads were on their guard. They didn''t expect the water giant crew would be able to sense their presence that easily. They were very confident in their concealment abilities.

    The two squad leaders exchanged a nce and decided to make the first move. Since they are being discovered, it is better to have the first move advantage.

    The element of surprise is the only thing they could count on to get an early upperhand in the battle.

    mes raged and the two squad leaders attacked the crew.

    The water giants spotted them and got ready to defend.

    It didn''t take long for the battle to get intense. Soon the giants started falling. The water giants albeit smaller in number are dominating the fight with a slight edge. Their teamwork is much better and they are extremely destructive.

    Meanwhile, what both of them didn''t notice is not far away from them, Sam is looking at the whole fight through screens. He is recording all of it.

    Just when the water giants were about to get ahead of the fire giants andpletely kill them off, something else happened.

    A new group of fire giants appeared out of nowhere.

    Mitra looked at them and was shocked.

    "Aren''t they direct subordinates of the Fire Giant young master?"

    He asked in utter disbelief and then looked at Sam.

    Sam just stayed silent. There is not a single fluctuation on his face.

    "Sam, do you know he woulde? How are we going to carry out our n? How are we going to steal the fire heart now?"

    Sam still didn''t answer the question, instead he just looked at him and said

    "Don''t panic. It is not over yet."

    The new group of Fire Giants are indeed the direct subordinates of the Fire Giant young master. But the Fire Giant young master himself didn''t move. He is organizing his troops right now back at the camp.

    Because the headquarters at the Fire city sent them a message stating that the humans are pressing forward and they might need more troops to deal with him.

    But at the same time, he got a clue to the location of the Fire Heart.

    He wanted to go there badly. But the envoy sent by the Fire City doesn''t belong to the same faction as him. So, he has to take a step back and let his trusted followers act on his behalf.

    Sam observed the newers of the battle and clicked his tongue.

    "The biggest fish didn''te. But its fine. We can deal with it."

    As he spoke, he waved his hand. A few giants fell off from the divine dimension fragment.

    They all had inscriptions on their foreheads. As if they are madmen they all ran towards the battlefield as soon as they opened their eyes. When the Water Giant tribe saw that more Fire Giants areing, they started to think that it might be a trap and they are already looking for ways to escape.

    But the next moment, one of the newly joined fire giants hurled his massive battle axe on to the direct subordinate of the fire giant young master.

    *BAM*

    The explosive hitnded squarely on his back and it brought upon a defeaning silence for a couple of moments after the axended.

    Of course, that is not all. Another fire giant that has the inscriptions made a move on a different Fire Giant.

    The whole battle turned into chaos.

    Just when the fire giants are bing vignt of the neers, they saw a couple of them attacking the water Giants.

    As the chaos was built up, Sam concentrated on the Water Giant young master.

    This guy is truly not meant to be on the battlefield. The giant race is known for their battle intent and this guy didn''t have any of it.

    He has been trying to dodge the attacks and stuck on defense. In fact some of the water giant crew have been trying to create an opening so that he could escape.

    After the young master reached a certain position, Sam turned to Mitra.

    "I want you to make you move as soon as I give you a signal. You remember our n, right?"

    "Yes, of course."

    Sam made his move. He disappeared and reappeared on a different side of the forest. He let out another giant with inscriptions. This one ran to the battlefield and stuck the fire giants crazily and this crazy giant created the opening required for the water giant young master to get out of the formation.

    He immediately ran to the forest and tried to use a transference scroll to escape.

    Only to realize that the space was locked. He hurriedly ran and crossed hundreds of meters in an instant. But the next second, he felt his vision blurred.

    Mitra knocked the guy out.

    Sam and Mitra disappeared from there and reappeared rtively far away.

    At the same time, back on the battlefield all the fire giants with inscriptions came to a standstill. Their energies reaction chaotically and the inscriptions started glowing. Their eyes became hollow and everyone else realized what is happening.

    It is toote though.

    All the divine energy gathered up in their cores and they all self-destructed.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Simultaneous explosions in the battlefield.

    The whole forest area seemed to have been stuck by an apocalyptic explosion. Many of the water giants and the fire giants were dead and some that barely survived would be for long because everyone is stuck by Divine Fire elemental corrosion.

    Their bodies are barely functioning.

    One hourter, the effects of the explosion subsidized very slightly and Sam came back there.

    The whole area looked like a burning purgatory.

    Sam extended his hand while hovering over the air. The earthen spikes rose and killed the giants that are on verge of death. At the same time, the earth at the centre of the crater was moved away revealing a glowing beating orb of orange mes.

 Chapter 1874: Battle Ignites

    Chapter 1874: Battle IgnitesThe Fire Heart.

    Sam looked at therge orb with a smile. The only reason resemnce it had to an actual heart is that it is also beating like an actual heart. The rhythm of it just felt like an actual heartbeat.

    He dove into the crater and touched the fire heart.

    His palm skin seared slightly. Instead of feeling hurt, he smiled. It indicates how pure the fire elemental energy in this fire heart is. Sam''s natural resistance to the elements is very high because of his bloodline to think even he wouldn''t be able topletely resist, this is a first for him.

    With a wave of his hand, the whole fire heart disappeared along with arge chunk of earth from under his foot. The crater was doubled in size at least.

    Sam disappeared without any dy.

    Meanwhile, the fire heart was ced in an empty divine dimension fragment. The dimension fragment didn''t have any natural elemental affinity.

    As soon as therge chunk of earth along with the fire heart was dropped inside, it is surrounded by arge amount of pure fire elemental energy. Sam just observed the changes that are urring slowly while waiting for the rest of the n to progress.

    Right now, he is sending two recording crystals to two different ces.

    One to the camp of the fire giant young master and another to the camp of the water giant young master.

    While he is sending the recording crystals, he got the news from the frontline.

    The humans have pressed further toward the Fire city and the resistance is increasing. So, this is the perfect time to do whatever Sam wanted to do and he did it.

    The recording crystals reached both camps.

    The Fire giant young master who saw the contents, walked out silently and got onto a small hill nearby. He looked at the sky with gritted teeth and clenched fists. The recording crystal is obviously manipted a bit.

    Most of it was real. All the battles, the shes, and most of the deaths, the only part that was added extra is that it appeared like the water giant young master actually took the Fire heart and fled while the rest of his team covered his retreat.

    As the young master looked at the sky trying to stifle his anger, his most trusted subordinate came forward and tried to talk to him. But the young master didn''t want that. Instead, he just spoke.

    "I have tried to gain this fire heart for decades. I tried searching far and wide. I have held back my own prowess so that others would eye it. I have bowed my head to lesser, I have paved the way to weaker, and all of that was in vain.

    The fire heart, it was stolen by a fucking wimp that will probably wet his pants if he hears the number of people I killed. He brought a team, to within my territory and he dug up the fire heart under the nose of my men and killed every one of them while sacrificing his own soldiers.

    He stole Fire heart and escaped alive.

    Even a wimp like that managed to act with such ferociousness and decisiveness. But what about me?

    I could have conquered all of the Fire tribes'' younger generation by now. I would have risen as a candidate to be the Prime Chieftain of all the giants if I had just barely tried.

    But here I am, appointed as a fucking leader of some exploration and assimtion team.

    Did I take the wrong approach, my friend?"

    He turned to his subordinate with that question.

    His subordinate bowed his head and sighed before saying.

    "Maybe you are wrong, or maybe you are right. I am not as wise as you to know the answer. But I am very sure that it is right for you to make your move now.

    Show the world what you are truly capable of. It is about time, the rest of the Giants saw, what a true prodigy looks like."

    "I guess you are right my friend."

    He paused and took a deep breath before saying.

    "Prepare all the troops, we are marching right towards the Water Giant tribe. To that wimp''s direct territory. ughter everything that obstructs you. No detours, no setbacks. We will only stop until I see the head of that little wimp at my feet."

    "Yes, Sir."

    The orders were passed.

    Every single person that followed the Fire Giant''s young master was moved. As long as they are in this, they were moved. It didn''t matter if they were just a foot soldier, a spy in a rival''s camp or a secret soldierying in wait.

    All of them were called out and they are all assembled. They wore a very different armor than the regr Fire Giant army''s uniform. When the Fire Giants at the headquarters learned of this sudden movement they were dumbfounded

    The guy in charge is an elder and he knew that this young master is a verypetent man. It is just that both of them are not from the same faction, so he just kept on eye on him. That is also one of the reasons, the fire giant young master was that secretive about fire heart.

    The elder thought for a long while about why the Fire Giant''s young master is acting up, but he couldn''t find the answer.

    But he thought of one thing. To use his authority.

    He sent an order stating that the Fire Giant''s young master should bring all of his forces to the frontlines and defend against the pressing attacks of the humans. But the fire giant young master burned the letter without opening it.

    Instead, he pointed to the direction of the Water City and said.

    "March."

    His voice was clear andmanding. It resonated with the battle spirit of all his soldiers.

    At this moment, at the camp of the Water Giants.

    Themander-in-charge looked at the contents of the video and panicked.

    The contents showcased that the Water Giant young master was kidnapped and it happened while he was in a fight with Fire Giants over something called the fire heart.

    He didn''t care what fire heart was, but he definitely cared about the kid that was kidnapped.

    The problem is they don''t have a clue either about his location or his possible status. There is no way they could let this kid die here. Otherwise, the very powerful father will intervene and screw everyone over.

    The water giant tribe immediately sent a bunch of envoys to the fire giant tribe.

    The fire giant tribe received envoys within minutes. The highest-level Giants moved at their top speed without any thought and they arrived at various camps and even the headquarters of the Fire Giants.

    When they received the news of this, they understood what the possible motto of the fire giant young master could be for him to move against the Water Giant tribe.

    But they really cannot confirm or deny if the young master of the Water tribe is safe. This non-answer made the water giant tribe angry. But they still didn''t want to go for an all-out war. They decided to send an envoy directly to the fire giant young master.

    The only problem is, the envoy wasn''t heard.

    He was beheaded.

    He didn''t even get a chance to say a single word.

    But the word of his beheading reached the Water Giant Tribe.

    The older brother of the young master of the Water tribe. The one guy who is truly worthy of being a rival of the young master of the fire tribe took this chance to make a move.

    Just like that, the war between the Fire tribe and the Water tribe has ignited. After all, the water tribe is not just going to sit back and attack just the fire tribe''s young master.

    They attacked from all fronts.

    Now, the fire giant tribe has to defend against the humans that areing from the front at the Fire City and also defend against the water tribe that ising from the back at their various camps and exploration sites.

    Two intense war fronts and they don''t even know that two humans, were the reason for this to escte to this range.

    Sam took a picture of the frontlines at the sh between the water tribe and the fire tribe before sending it to themander of the humans. Mitra''s uncle.

    "Here is what I promised. The Fire tribe is weakened by half. If you cannot take this chance and take over fire city. You are not worthy of my services."

    The message was sent.

    Mitra looked at Sam and said.

    "Do you understand what you just did?"

    "I clearly do. I orchestrated it. What is not there to understand?"

    "No, that''s not what I mean. Do you understand the impact of it?"

    "Impact? What could there be? Your war will be over a bit faster? Your people will die a little less? Anything else?"

    "Why are you saying it so lightly? That is hundreds or even thousands of lives?"

    Sam looked at him with an exasperated expression. What would the right words be at this time?

 Chapter 1875: Water Giant Tribe

    Chapter 1875: Water Giant TribeThe next few days, Sam and Mitra leisurely traveled and scouted the area around water city.

    They took notes about the Water Giant tribe. They are a lot more aggressive than the Fire Giants because of the obvious pressure the Fire Giants are facing. Within the chaos, they just fished around and concentrated on capturing some water giants here and there.

    "So, why are we doing this again? This is not our mission. We are supposed to wait for our orders."

    Mitra asked as he knocked down a giant and carried him to their temporary hideout.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "Why do you keep on asking so many questions?"

    "I am a curious person."

    "And I am a silent person. So, please explore your curiosity with no or fewer words."

    "Alright, if you say so. Back to the question, why are we capturing them?"

    Sam sighed and just shook his head. He resigned to his fate and said.

    "Okay, it is basic strategy. We used the Water Giant tribe to fight the fire giant tribe, so currently the water giant tribe is pretty divided. The humans are fighting the Water Giant tribe from their front too.

    Even if the human attacks are not exactly strong at the moment, it is still there.

    If we start working on the Water Giants now, by the time we are done with the Fire Giants here, we can immediately move to finish off Water Giants.

    Apart from that, I need to search for something as well."

    "Searching for what?"

    This time Sam didn''t speak. He just controlled the puppets that are flying around capturing theyout. He has been on this for some time. Just like when he searched for the Fire heart, he is doing a thorough search of all theyouts.

    But unlike before he is doing a very thorough andprehensive observation and analysis of the whole area. The trees, nts, grass, soil, the beasts.

    He didn''t leave anything out.

    Since he only needed to wait for the next mission announcement, he took his sweet time doing it.

    Seven days passed just like that.

    The duo went deep into the area of Water Giants and almost reached the Water City.

    Sam is also well into his research and almost reached his goals.

    At that time, the humanmander made contact with Mitra.

    "The mission for the Fire City capture is going to be a sess. The Fire Giants are exhausted, they lost a lot of their people and they are facing pressure from Water Giants as well.

    They are holed up in the Fire City. They are only focusing on their defense now.

    We like this current status quo.

    Once we finish them offpletely we would be shing against Water Giants who wouldn''t be willing to let go of the chance to take over the Fire Giants'' territory.

    So, you guys should focus on Water Giants.

    Unlike before, you don''t need to wait for a specific time to create chaos. As long as you create a big incident, the attack from the humans towards the Water City will increase and we will push them from the side of Fire City.

    We will take them off in a pincer attack.

    Just let us know when you cause a big enoughmotion."

    That was the message.

    Mitra was surprised once again. By this point, Sam doubted many times, if this guy is really worthy of being a young master. After all, his thinking is way too shallow and it is almost like he doesn''t know anything rted to strategy and tricks.

    He is surprised by every little thing and he is very much lost if Sam does somethingplicated.

    He sighed at the state of his teammate.

    "At least he is strong."

    Sam muttered and they left to deal with the Water Giant tribe.

    This time, since the information gathering is done, Sam already had a n in mind. The Water Giant tribe also had multiple factions, but they are a bit more unitedpared to the fire giant tribe. It would be hard to break it apart.

    It might take some time and a step-by-step proper procedure for Sam to do it.

    "So, who are we targeting first?"

    "A squad that we marked before. They are our primary targets."

    "Okay, what is the n?"

    "You attack the leaders, I will attack the minions. Brute force and Fire element that is it. But don''t kill them, just leave a way out for them to escape."

    "Sure. Let''s go."

    Just like that, they moved to the squad they were targeting and ambushed them. Sam took one of the hammersying around in his storage as he bashed the crap out of the water giants.

    And just like they nned, the water giants were only allowed to escape in one specific route. But as they escaped, they were met with a water giant that is from a different squad.

    "Tenth Squad leader? What are you doing here? Anyway, it is good that you are here. We need reinforcements. Some humans have infiltrated the territory. They are causing chaos¡­."

    This is what the leader of the target squad said as soon as the newly appeared water giant.

    Too bad, in his excitement he failed to notice the massive inscription on his forehead and the eyes.

    The giant attacked without even blinking. The squad that was already beaten to half death was killed off by this giant and after killing them, he fell off unconscious right there.

    Exactly twenty minutester, the Tenth Squad came to that spot. They got some clues about the location of their squad leader who went missing a day ago.

    When they arrived, all they saw is their bossying down unconscious, obviously exhausted from battle and the other squad that died.

    They didn''t understand the situation, but the whole thing is suspicious. And when they inspected their squad leader, they didn''t find any anomalies. The inscription ink disappeared on its own.

    The deadbodies and the squad leader were taken away by the squad to the nearest camp.

    They wanted to extract the memories from the souls to get some info, but the souls were already extracted and there are no clues. The squad leader was ced on arrest while receiving treatment to recover.

    Simr incidents kept on happening on that day at different areas within the Water Giant territory.

    The squad leaders are attacking other squads and are killing them. There are no traces left behind and the only clues they could barely find are that there is a lot of fire elemental attacks that happened in the nearby areas.

    At first they didn''t think much of it. They just thought, the squad might have been shing against the Fire Giants nearby with their war going at a full swing. But now they are having second thoughts.

    Soon, all the captured giants are taken to the Fire City directly.

    They were imprisoned and as soon as they gained consciousness, they started protesting.

    After all, thest thing they remembered is being cked out after they spotted something suspicious. When they were alone in the forest, they felt an impact on their heads and they lost consciousness. From that point onwards, they didn''t remember anything.

    For all they knew, they were captured by their own people.

    They started arguing.

    The whole water tribe''s upper circle is puzzled with this. They couldn''t just take heavy measures on these people. All they could do is keep them in house arrest while they investigated on what exactly happened.

    But no matter what lead they discover, they are hitting a dead end.

    While things are going on like this, two dayster the water tribe held a meeting to figure out a conclusion for this whole fiasco. After all, the humans are also closing in from the front and the rear.

    "How about we send all of the captured to the front lines? If they are loyal to us, they wouldn''t mind going there since they are part of our troops, if they are disloyal, we would find them out."

    This suggestion was brought up in the meeting and it was soon met with eptance.

    All the captured squad leaders were given the order. They would be sent to the frontlines, along with their squads. Their job is to charge ahead into the human camps.

    The squad leaders were very delighted when they heard this. They were ready to fight, they are not ready to swallow suspicions and usations. They would take the former overtter any time of the day.

    But right before the squad leaders were deployed, after they fully got equipped, the inscriptions appeared on their foreheads. Their eyes were lost in daze.

    They turned to theirpanions and then towards the city and they attacked.

    The water giant tribe that was much more stable than the fire giant tribe was now just as unstable. As soon as the n was implemented, Sam sent the information back to the human camp. The attack on the fire city was immediately concluded and the pincer attack on the water city started.

    While that was happening, Sam went to pick something and awaited orders. Although, he could guess what he would have to do.

 Chapter 1876: Other Hearts

    Chapter 1876: Other HeartsSam is standing on top of a huge cliff as he looked forward.

    There is arge cliff with a bunch of streamsing from different directions all joining into a waterfall as it fell into the valley. He took a deep breath before he jumped right into it. Mitra sat on the cliff as he looked at Sam while eating some snacks.

    They are very free in thest two days.

    After they set the Water Giant Tribe on fire from the inside, the human campunched the pincer attack. Now the war between the Water Giants and humans is going in a full swing. So, before they could get the next orders, Sam brought him here to search for something.

    Mitra looked into the valley as Sam slowly disappeared into the fog that was created by the rushing waterfalls.

    Under the valley, Samnded in therge water body that is way too big to be called ake. He activated water fusion and moved seamlessly deeper and deeper.

    After reaching the bed of theke he cleared the soil away and soon he reached a glowing blue colored orb.

    The orb looked exactly like the fire heart, except it is full of water elemental energy.

    Sam smiled and waved his hand.

    Arge chunk of the soil disappeared along with the water heart into a divine dimension fragment.Sam swam out and flew to the top of the cliff.

    "So, did you find what you wanted?" Mitra asked. He is really bored. In thest two days, Sam was in his own world. He didn''t entertain Mitra''s bbering much and most of the time, didn''t even bother to answer his questions.

    Even now he just nodded as Sam dried himself off.

    "Are you going to show me what it is?"

    "Nope."

    "Why is that?"

    "It is none of your business. That is why."

    Sam brushed him off as he thought of his next move. The presence of water heart didn''te too much as a surprise to him. Because as soon as he learned about the presence of fire heart and the rest of the history of these five cities, he felt that it is highly likely that something like this would be here.

    After all, these five cities are of equal standing, in terms of strength and authority. They don''t have edge over one another. He then studied the resources they have under them. They are of same level. So, he figured that there could be an equivalent of fire heart in other territories as well and his guess is right.

    The water territory has the Water heart. It is the exact same as Fire heart, except with water element.

    Just from this, he is now sure that the other three cities have something simr in their territories too. Three more hearts of three different elements. Apart from the kill count that he needs to satisfy to move to the next stage, this is one of the things that Sam decided to do. To collect all these elemental hearts and use it to boost his own strength.

    And all of this is none of Mitra''s business just like he said.

    "Alright, I can''t take this silence. You don''t need to tell me what you were looking for. Tell me, where we are going next? Are we going to prepare for our next mission? Did you anticipate what we are going to do next like you did before?"

    "Sure. We can prepare for our next mission."

    "So, what would that be? The Earth City and the Earth Giants?"

    "Yeah, they are going to be a part of it. But they are not going to be the only ones we are going to focus on. By now, the remaining three cities will understand the motive of the human camp.

    They wouldn''t just sit back and wait for us to create chaos before giving a chance for humans to upy the territory."

    "Then, how are we going to proceed?"

    "We are going to take a simr approach, but this time we need to give up on some borate internal conflicts and schemes. We are still going to cause distractions, but this time we won''t need to pretend like before.

    The Giants will understand directly that the humans are the ones messing with them."

    "I still don''t understand what we are supposed to do."

    "Simple, the main camp will attack head on, while we create chaos in the giants'' territory from the rear. We will carry out assassinations, interrupt their intel, kill a few soldiers here and there to mess with their formations, destroy their defenses etc.

    I am pretty sure a few more units will be deployed by yourmander to do the exact same."

    "Damn, here I thought of enjoying some moreid back time. As much as it terrifies me, I really like it when you use the giants to destroy themselves. I would hate to not see that."

    "Who said, you are not going to see it? I said, the giants will understand that we are the ones doing this and wouldn''t take the bait of internal conflicts, but that doesn''t mean, they are smart enough to undo my traps.

    Even if there is no internal conflict, I will make sure it will lead to the internal destruction. Anyway, lets go. This time it is going to be more fun than before."

    "More fun? Why?"

    "Because I am going to get my hands dirty a bit."

    Sam jumped up and Harbinger appeared under his feet. Mitra hurriedly ran after him as he tried to keep up. They moved towards the Earth Giant territory. The nearest territory for both Water City and Fire City.

    While they are moving there, a meeting is being held within the depths of the Earth City.

    Commander of Earth Giants is sitting along with the Commanders of Wind Giants and Tree Giants.

    "The humans dealt with both Fire Giants and Water Giants, we are next. I suggest that we team up."

    "Straight to the point stone head. What do you suggest we do?" Tree Giantmander asked.

    "I got some information that before both camps were taken, there are signs of internal conflicts. The Fire Giants were attacked by Water Giants when they were being pressured by the humans.

    It all seemed way too coincidential. I feel like there is some ploy."

    "What kind of ploy do you think there is? It is not like humans can disguise as Giants. We are not lycans or demons with their wimpy bodies that could imitated easily. It is nigh impossible for humans to disguise as Giants."

    "Disguise might be the only thing you can think of that could cause this. But you must understand that is not the only way for someone to deal with an organization internally. There are many ways to do it.

    And one of it might be the difference in opinion."

    "What do you mean?"

    "You do know that when we infiltrated this, there is a certain tribe of Giants that didn''t like this idea."

    As soon as those words left his mouth, the remaining two exchanged a nce.

    "Are you saying the Great Giants are behind this?"

    "It is a possibility. After all, Great Giants was the original giant tribe that ruled over our realm. Isn''t it a perfect scenario for them to weaken the remaining tribes before taking them over? What if they joined forces with the humans here?"

    "That is absurd. Not a single member of the Great Giants made their way here."

    "That is what we know. But what if they have their members that infiltrated us long ago?"

    "That is a lot of what ifs you are talking about. It is hard for us to confirm this situation."

    The discussion went on and on.

    But after some time, an attendant barged in. If only a few of Sam''s has seen this, they would know that the giants are fucked up.

    "Sir, some water giants are outside the city. They are destroying the formation. They areing from different directions too."

    The earth giantmander hurriedly ran out followed by the remainingmanders.

    At the edge of the city, the water giants withrge inscriptions on their foreheads are attacking the city wall. A bunch of Earth Giant corpses are all over the ce.

    "Stop them. Check the surroundings and find out the person behind this. They must not be far away. Don''t hesitate, kill them. They are no longer our allies."

    Themander gave the orders while he spread his divine sense out towards the forest. He wanted to check and find out who sent these Giants here.

    While he is thinking that, all of a sudden he noticed the energy fluctuations.

    All the water giants that are tackling the formation from different sides suddenly gave out the energy fluctuations. The divine energy gathered in their cores chaotically. Themander realized what that is, they are self destructing.

 Chapter 1877: Petty Revenge

    Chapter 1877: Petty Revenge*BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Simultaneous explosions urred around the city wall.

    A lot of giants died with those explosions, but that is not the biggest damage the earth city took. Instead, the biggest loss is the formation that was immediately destroyed along with those giants.

    And that is not all.

    The position of these giants when they were destroyed, yed another role in this whole fiasco. A formation appeared outside of the city walls with the giants'' explosions as nodes.

    *BOOM*

    A shockwave of water elemental energy shook the whole city. Spiritual energy condensed into water as it pierced through the structures like thin needles. Needles, but millions of them.

    All the structures within the city were attacked at the same moment. Dozens of giants turned into giant pin cushions. Only the needles didn''t stick. They went through their bodies, before dissolving into normal water.

    Earth Giants known for their sturdy body and their strong defense fell into puddles of their own blood in seconds. The Earth Giantmander looked at his subordinates''s deadbodies and took in a breath of cold air.

    He looked around angrily. The remaining subordinates spread throughout the forest as they searched for the culprit.

    "Don''te back until you find some traces. If they left by foot, find their tracks, they should have at least one. If they left by air, spot them. If they used some spatial transport, find the fluctuations. I want them found now."

    All the earth giants moved.

    The Earth Giant Commander is decisive and he ordered people around with precisemands.

    At this moment, within the forest a couple of miles away from the city.

    Sam and Mitra are sitting on the trees side by side.

    Sam held a metal bullet in his hand. He yed around with it as he looked at the Earth Giants moving around.

    "What is that thing in your hands?"

    Mitra as usual ran his mouth. Sam looked at the bullet and had an amused expression on his face.

    "This? It''s a thing used to kill people."

    "Is it like a dart or something? I have never seen such a fat and thick dart. How destructive is it?"

    "More destructive than your attacks."

    Mitra frowned and looked at Sam.

    "What are you looking at?" Sam asked as he looked at his expression.

    "Looking at you to finish your joke."

    "I am not kidding. This this is much more lethal than you could imagine."

    "I am not gonna take this lying down. You better prove it."

    "Sure thing. I am more than happy to enlighten you. How about we make a bet?"

    "What bet?"

    "Assuming that you are fighting to death, how many people can kill before the Earth Giant Commander catches up to you?"

    Mitra went into a deep thought as he looked at the city as well as the tablet screen in his hands. With his constant questions, Sam couldn''t bear it anymore and gave him a tablet to check the surroundings.

    "I can easily kill four dozen giants before they could catch me."

    Sam nodded and said.

    "Okay then, I will not move away from this tree and I will not use anything other than the weapon that is used tounch these things. I will kill forty-eight people and will only move after I achieve that goal.

    Are you up for it?"

    "Okay, what do you want to bet?"

    "How about this, the loser will have to stay silent for one whole day. Exactly twenty-four hours."

    Mitra''s face turned ck as he looked at Sam.

    "Hey, isn''t it another way of saying that I am annoying you with my words? What do you mean by that? Are my words that unbearable? I thought we were good friends."

    "Are you game or not? Don''t be a whiny baby."

    "Alright, I am in. But if I win, I want you to answer every single question I ask for twenty four hours."

    "Deal."

    Sam spoke and he took out the sniper rifle. He leaned against therge trunk of the tree while he supported himself by kicking against the branch. He held the sniper rifle and aimed at an earth giant that is far away from the city, but still within the rifle range.

    Within that forest, silently a bullet was shot.

    Mitra was able to see the shot moving because he was nearby. There is no other indication, both visually or audibly.

    The bullet zoomed through the air. It pierced through the leaves that came in its way, before it lodged itself into the head of a Giant.

    *CRUSH*

    The head exploded before the giant could even realize what is happening.

    "That is one."

    Sam said as he looked at the dumbfounded Mitra. Even though he had to hide his senses to not alert his enemies and the thick forest blocked his vision, he could still see the scene through the tablet.

    The death of the earth giant was so silent to the point even the remaining giants nearby thought that he exploded on his own. Sam didn''t even wait for Mitra toe out of his shock.

    "Two"

    "Three"

    "Four"

    "Five"

    One Giant dead per second.

    Five Giants died before one of the giants had the mind to open hismunication token.

    *CRUSH*

    Only as soon as he did, his head exploded.

    Finally, the giants realized that the heads are not exploding on their own, but the projectiles areing from somewhere.

    The Giants immediately activated earthen walls before they took out theirmunication tokens and called for reinforcements.

    *CRASH* *CRUSH*

    The bullet crashed through a wall and killed another giant.

    "Eight"

    "Nine."

    "Ten."

    "Eleven"

    "Twelve"

    One-fourth of the target ispleted before the news about the inexplicable deaths was sent to the Commander.

    Sam looked at Mitra and smiled.

    Mitra had his mouth wide open. He had seen many assassins in his lifetime. He has seen assassins specialized in long-range attacks. Mages, Archers, he has seen people using poison, undead, souls, shadows. But he never saw this kind of weapon.

    And there is a reason why Sam showed this to Mitra.

    He has been very annoyed over the days with Mitra''s questions, so now he decided to take some silly revenge by making him more curious and not letting him ask any questions.

    "Thirteen"

    "Fourteen."

    It wouldn''t even take that long to do that anyway.

 Chapter 1878: Double or Nothing

    Chapter 1878: Double or Nothing"Twenty-five"

    "Twenty-Six"

    Sam kept on counting as one giant after another fell.

    Themander is having a hard time to figure where the attacks areing from. Some spected that it is a curse, but some giants did see some projectile hitting theirpanions, so they dismissed the idea.

    One of them even tried to catch one with their own hand, which turned out to a be a stupid decision. The bullet exploded in their hand it was gone.

    Sam just continued shooting them down.

    After he hit thirty, he took a short break. He looked at Mitra and smiled.

    "What are you smiling at? What kind of stupid machine is that? It is taking the joy out of a battle."

    "What? You search for pleasure in a battle?"

    "There is pleasure in a battle. Particrly in a head on confrontation. Even if it appeared unfair, at least in thest moment of death, we can say that we gave it our all. Same goes for the opponent, but the abomination you are using takes that away from everyone involved."

    "Unlike you, I don''t find pleasure in war. I find pleasure at my home and I pursue destruction in war. Maybe a challenge now and then. Anyway, a bet is a bet. I only have 18 more targets to go."

    "Then you should hurry up. Themander is calling everyone back towards the city. Its seems like he is going to make a move himself. You better be careful."

    "No worries. As I said a challenge asionally is good."

    "If you are that much into challenges, how about I give you one? Double or nothing?"

    "Are you sure? I have a knack for winning things. In fact, if you knew my history, a bet is thest thing that woulde to your mind."

    "Stop with your bbering. Are you in or not?"

    "I am in."

    "Then the remaining eighteen targets, take down people that are higher level than you. I noticed that all the people you took down are of the same level as you. Divine ne Initiation Initial Stage. Take down people from middle stage. Then we can double the wager."

    Sam just smiled and aimed the rifle.

    *BANG* *BANG*

    "Thirty One"

    "Thirty Two."

    Mitra just opened his mouth wide open as he looked at the two targets that fell. They are retreating towards the city based on theirmander''s orders and they were killed.

    Sam just kept on shooting, but after three more kills, the troops are way too near the city.

    Themander who is floating in the sky outside of the city around carefully.

    Sam knew that there is a great chance that themander will spot him if he just kept on killing from the same spot.

    He still has thirteen more kills.

    He looked at the targets. Some of them are inside the city, but since the formation is done in, there is no point in hiding in the city.

    The Commander took a deep breath and said.

    "Myriad Stone Giant Formation."

    As soon as his words came out, all the giants got into a defensive formation. Stones rose from the ground and a structure that almost looked like a fortress appeared in front of the city. All the giant troops are behind that, including the Commander.

    Sam looked at the formation and raised an eyebrow.

    He shot at a spot.

    *BANG* *DING*

    The bullet only managed to make a small dent on the stone wall. And Sam suddenly felt a gaze pass through his spot. Luckily, he didn''t shoot straight a head and instead aimed at one of the corners of the structure.

    So, themander was still not clear of his location.

    "The defense is working. Strengthen the walls and keep on changing the positions."

    Then he took out amunication token and called for someone.

    Three giants that are wearing a special uniform arrived.

    "Search the whole forest. Find the perpetrator."

    The order was passed and the three of them suddenly dissolved into the earth.

    Meanwhile, Mitra had a grin on his face.

    "Seems like your attacks are not working anymore. What are you nning to do?"

    "Come on, you really think that is the only attack I have? Grow up dude. After seeing all the things I have done, you thought, I am only capable of that much."

    Sam clicked a button on the rifle.

    It started glowing very faintly.

    He then activated energy vision, but he was surprised to see that he was unable to see through the stone wall.

    But he is not discouraged. After all, he has more than one means to watch over people.

    He closed his eyes and looked at the crystal table.

    "Oy, why are you closing his eyes? Are you giving up?"

    "Can you shut up?"

    "Why should I? I should only shut after you won the bet, not before."

    Sam didn''t say anything and just aimed his rifle.

    *BANG*

    A bullet shot through the air, whistled as it cut through the wind currently and it shed with the stone wall.

    But the stone wall didn''t burst open. The bullet has concentrated wind elemental energy and it is spiralling as it travelled through the air. As soon as it hit the stone wall, it drilled through the structure and hit the target right on the head.

    *BANG* *CRUSH*

    The head of the giant exploded. But the stone structure didn''t disappear.

    Themander became furious. Even with a formation like this, someone managed to kill their subordinates. This is inexcusable.

    He didn''t care anymore and spread his senses to their maximum limit.

    "I will see where you can hide."

    Sam reduced his presence to the bare minimum. Apart from his formation working on full swing trying to hide his presence, his body slowly turned into that of wood. Wood elemental fusion and he fused himself with the tree.

    But he knew that he if fired some shots the other party would be able to catch him. But he decided that it is about time he acted a bit daringly.

    "Mitra, have you ever heard of a term called rapid fire?"

    "Isn''t it when some shoots arrows rapidly? Every archer does that."

    "I will show you my version then."

    *BANG* *BANG*

    *BANG* *BANG*

    *BANG* *BANG*

    *BANG* *BANG*

    *BANG* *BANG*

    Ten shots fired one after another all of them aimed at the stone structure at different spots.

    Themander whose divine sense was at its maximum instantly noticed when bullets entered his sensory range. But even at his level, he couldn''t stop them.

    *CRASH*

    The stone was copsed as all the bullets drilled into it one after another, almost at the same time. Ten giants became dead bodies in less than a second.

    And themander finally locked down in the direction Sam is standing in.

    Sam just smiled as he noticed his gaze.

    "We are in trouble Sam. Let''s get out. I can''t kill thatmander."

    "Come on, there is still some time before the bet."

    "Themander will take three seconds, before he spots you and kills you. We are not that far away."

    "Three seconds. It is more than plenty."

    Sam waved his hand and three bullets appeared. He put two of them in his mouth while he inserted the third one in the rifle.

    "I only need to hit two more targets after all."

    Sam aimed the rifle straight at themander who started making his way towards him.

    Mitra looked at him and widened his eyes in disbelief.

    "Oy, are you fucking crazy? You are aimining at themander."

    Sam just smiled and shot.

    *BAANG*

    A massive explosive sound came as the bullet shot out of the rifle.

    As it made its way towards themander, the surrounding trees became distorted with the wind elemental energy. The whole area looked like a very highly concentrated tornado hit a specific straight line.

    Themander who saw the bulleting at him frowned. He could feel a very slight sense of danger, but the bullet also gave him the direction in which the perpetrator is.

    His body turned into a stone as he activated fusion and started moving forward.

    *BAM*

    The bullet made an impact and then only themander understood the significance of it.

    The explosive wind elemental energy is not just spiritual energy, it is divine energy and the divine energy is almost in its purest form.

    Blood spurted out as themander was thrown backward.

    Mitra''s jaw almost hit the ground. He looked at Sam and then at themander. He didn''t understand how such an explosive energy came out of such a small bullet and then only he noticed the bullets in Sam''s mouth.

    They are a bit different from the bullets he previously showed.

    These are transparent and there is some liquid within them. The liquid is filled to the brim that it looked like a metal one.

    Sam picked another bullet from his mouth and aimed at themander once again.

    *BOOM*

    The explosive bullet cut through the air and appeared in front of themander in the fraction of a second.

    But this time, he didn''t dare to take it head on. He dodged, only to realize that behind him is the city and a lot of his subordinates.

 Chapter 1879: Free Reign

    Chapter 1879: Free Reign*BOOM*

    The Earth Giant Commander turned around to see arge explosion happen.

    Unlike the bullet that hit him, this one is not as concentrated, but thatck of concentration gave it an area effect. He watched as over a dozen giants including some of their elite being ripped into shreds.

    He gritted his teeth and charged towards Sam.

    He could finally see him directly.

    Sam on the other hand only had that smirk on his face.

    He loaded the third bullet and aimed at themander.

    This made themander halt in his tracks for a moment.

    The next moment, themander felt like he has suffered the greatest humiliation of his life. A mere human made him hesitate and stop in his tracks.

    Meanwhile, Sam felt extremely satisfied with that reaction. That''s what he was expecting anyway.

    Of course, Mitra also had an obvious reaction. His mouth hasn''t closed in the past couple of seconds and it wouldn''t close now.

    Sam didn''t shoot themander, instead he aimed the gun randomly at the ground.

    At least that is what it appeared like.

    But only after the bulletnded did themander and Mitra understand that it is anything but random.

    *BOOM*

    A huge explosion of wind energy took away arge chunk of soil and among that soil, a body of giant is floating around while it is being ripped apart bit by bit.

    It is one of the three giants tasked to find out Sam''s location.

    After that, Sam and Viswa disappeared from the spot.

    Themander arrived right after that. Even if he could feel the fluctuations of the spatial energy and even if by a massive luck he managed to calcte the urate location to where the spatial transfer led them to, he is hesitant about pursuing Sam and Mitra.

    His back is soaked in sweat as he retreated back and took a count of the casualties.

    He turned to the Tree Giant Commander and Wind Giant Commander who are looking at the whole scene while their backs soaked in sweat as well.

    "I believe we have some things to discuss after this. Are you up for it now?"

    Earth Giant Commander asked coldly.

    The other two nodded nervously. Whatever caused the current situation, they are not really ready to face it directly themselves.

    Sam''s actions were like a wake up call to them.

    After the whole area was cleaned up a new formation was being arranged around the city.

    "So, what do you guys think? You have seen what that guy is capable of. That weapon is a bit weird. It isunching the projectiles, but I think the projectiles themselves are weird enough."

    Earth Giant spoke heavily. He felt exhausted all of a sudden.

    "I don''t know what to think of it. Do you think, humans have a bunch of people handling those kinds of weapons? If it is true, then there is no way we could sessfully defend the territory we upied. At least not with the current manpower we have.

    We might need to ask for reinforcements from the main tribes."

    "Yeah, sure like that is possible. We already stretched our man power thin by bringing so many forces.

    If our tribes be any weaker in the home ground, then we will be handing ourselves to the Great Giant tribe.

    Also, I got the news that our tribes are dealing with some beast problem."

    "Beast problem?"

    "Yeah, all the beasts in the wilderness are acting up. It seems like a very high level bloodline beast appeared in our and they are controlling the beasts and rallying them up against the Giants.

    Nobody knows how they appeared all of a sudden.

    And the worst part is, the beasts are risking their lives to take the corpses of the giants away."

    "Taking their bodies? Are those beasts addicted on Giants'' corpses? That would indeed be dangerous. What are the tribes doing?"

    "We don''t know yet. Those beasts are fucking smart. The attacks are only happening in weaker areas. They are capturing the stray squads and the youngsters. They are not targeting the cities. Thergest settlement they went are after some camp grounds set up by the tribes."

    "Anyway, leave it. This is not what we need to think right now. We need to find a way to deal with that guy. Please feel free to say something rted to do that instead of some fucking nonsense."

    While themanders are discussing Sam, he is standing in front of Mitra far away with the sniper rifle in his hands.

    "So, I think I won. I killed more people than forty eight, so feel free to stay silent for a bit longer time."

    Mitra looked at him like a kid who was being bullied and said in a dissatisfied tone.

    "There is no need for that. You are the one who killed extra people. I didn''t ask you for it. So, it is your problem."

    "Alright, two days. No questions, no annoyance. I guess I will be content with what I earned."

    "Hmph."

    Mitra just crossed his hands as he stood there. Clearly discontent with the current situation.

    "Anyway, contact the camp and tell them about the situation. The Earth city is defenseless at the moment, and the remaining two cities don''t have theirmanders there.

    They could either choose to attack the Earth city or one of the other two cities.

    Based on their decision we make our move."

    Mitra was about to say something but stopped.

    "What is it?"

    "I have a question. I don''t know if I should ask it or not."

    "Is it rted to what our next move is going to be?"

    "Yes, I don''t understand the n."

    Sam shook his head and said.

    "As long as you don''t try to get some answers and intricate details of the n, it is fine.

    As for the n, it is simple. If they are going to attack the Earth City, we will provide support in a certain way and it would be us attacking the Wind City and Wood City.

    We can''t have themanders ganging up on the human forces.

    And if the camp chose one of the other cities, first we will aid them in taking down some defenses and spreading their forces for the camp to have much easier time. After the initial push, we will go back to the remaining two cities and make sure themanders stick around."

    "Alright, just give me a second."

    Mitra went to the side and ryed the message Sam gave him.

    Meanwhile, Sam just closed his eyes and reyed the damage the bullets had done. The bullets are made out of liquid divine energy.

    As soon as Sam got enough divine energy, he started experimenting with it. He couldn''t forget the benefits he gained from the liquid spiritual energy, so of course he had to try it and the results didn''t disappoint him.

    The only problem is, each bullet actually took up a lot of divine energy. If started out with a full tank and emptied itpletely, he would be able to get out enough energy to create one bullet.

    It is a huge expense but the returns are worth it.

    He is contemting on how to better use those bullets. After all, it would take a whole day for his Divine energy to fully recover, right now it is all well and good since he doesn''t need to act that much.

    Also, if he could store the Divine energy in liquid form, it will be beneficial to keep it as a backup in case he needs to recover quickly.

    There are all kinds of factors that he needs to consider.

    While he is lost in his own mind, Mitra came back.

    "I don''t know if it is a good news or bad news."

    "What is it?"

    "The main camp gave us the free reign, just like you said, they are sending in some squads into the territory. The squads'' job is to operate in between the three cities and create as much trouble to them as possible.

    All squads are being led by a bunch of prodigies from different factions. It is kind of apetition.

    So, we can do whatever we want, but we need to im our achievements properly."

    "Huh, is this part of your brother''s n? Why are you so dull?"

    "It might be my brother''s n. Only he and the faction that is supporting him has this kind of influence to change ns in thest moment.

    Also, all the other squads have more than seven people in it. But we are only two people and we are also considered a squad. It is an unfair starting point."

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "I don''t why you are taking that much offense from this. In my opinion they gave you apliment."

    "Whatpliment?"

    "They are thinking that both of them are equal to a seven member squad. Our individual worth is more. Even a bunch of enemies or rivals treat with so much worth, what is the point of rejecting it? Just embrace it and move on."

 Chapter 1880: Good Old Trick

    Chapter 1880: Good Old TrickSam and Mitra are sitting on the bank of ake.

    He set up his barbeque kit and started cooking some venison that he just hunted. He even brought out some very rare spices and herb mixtures that made the meat taste otherworldly. In a way, that is the right word to describe it as those herbs are literally from another world.

    "So, what are we going to do? Ever since I said we have free reign, you have been way too rxed.

    It is almost like you are on a pic."

    "Well, I am on a pic. Since there is no urgency from the camp side, why would I rush myself? I gave you guys a great performance until now. I believe I genuinely deserve a break."

    "Come on Sam, you cannot just mess around like that. The war is about to reach the boiling point. Who knows what will happen? And my brother would steal all the credit."

    Sam chuckled at that.

    "Your brother is a life time too early to steal credit for my doings. Anyway, just rx, do you think I am the only external variable in this war?"

    "What do you mean external variable? I thought you were some kind of hermit living in forest."

    Sam shrugged and said.

    "Okay then, just think of it like this. I am not the only hermit that is participating in the war. There are some others and they are all humans and if my guess is right, they should already be ying active part in the war."

    Mitra is still confused.

    "Anyway, don''t think too much about it. I know what I am doing. Let''s just sit back and rx for a couple of days while my creations andpanions help us gather a lot of information. Until then, have this delicious meat and wine before shutting the hell up."

    It has already been two days since the day of their bet.

    These two days Sam really did have an amazing time. The silence with no questions was delightful. That is why, he decided to go on a picinic mode and enjoy this time.

    But an hour ago, the forty eight hour time limit was over and this guy finally opened his mouth and started asking questions. But it is not as bad as before which made Sam be in the pleasant mood still.

    As they were eating, a bunch of shadows, souls and a lot of puppets are currently moving around the three cities of the giants.

    The next few days, Sam and Mitra are moving freely as they hunted most of the time and just gathered information. The teams from the human camp already started making their move and they are all desperately trying their best to get as much credit as possible.

    In a week, Sam managed to get all the information he need about these squads and their activities as well.

    On top of that, he gained information about something significant.

    The presence of another yer. It seems like the second yer finally moved to the task.

    As for how Sam knew of it, it is through studying the tasks and analyzing the surroundings.

    This area is definitely not the only area upied by the giants, but it is the biggest area. Apart from these five cities, the giants are active on two fronts and the alliance created to deal with the giants was operating on those two fronts as well.

    In the past few days, Sam made Mitra gather as much information on those two fronts as possible and he finally found clues of a second yer.

    He doesn''t know who it is exactly, but he knew it isn''t Dayus. As for why he is sure there is yer, it is because of the mission objective.

    One of the missions stated that the yer should act on behalf of the Giants and go against the humans. They are in charge of capturing certain cities under Giants'' hands and they are in charge of certain kill count as well.

    From the information Mitra gained, there are traces of somerge scale assassinations on human sides while the Giants are attacking these certain cities making their stance weaker.

    "I want your people to investigate the deaths, if possible tell them to send a video recording of the scene and send it to us."

    "Why? Is it because of another hermit you said?"

    "Yeah. And based on that hermit, we can make a grand n. You want credit right? I will bury you in credit until you can''t breath. You will feel like you are literally drowning in water. So, get ready."

    "What will we do until the informationes out? Are we going to wait?"

    "Of course not, I have a kill count to cover. There is no way I am waiting. Let''s just go and start killing some giants. By the time we are done, you should be known as Mitra the Giant yer."

    Sam and Mitra then moved together.

    They went to a certain spot in the forest up on Sam''s lead.

    "Let''s set up an ambush here."

    "Yeah, our target is tree giants. You hand the close quarters and I will cover you from far away. Don''t ask anymore questions and just wait for them toe."

    Mitra nodded and hid.

    Meanwhile, Sam went on to a tree far away and looked to a certain spot. Based on thetest information he got from a puppet, there is a human squad operating nearby. And there is an exploration team of Tree giants nearby.

    If Sam wanted to take them down, it will take days of preparation since there is no rival giant tribe right under their noses.

    The human squad has been circling the exploration team and avoiding them with great efforts, they are trying to damage this Tree Giant camp to gain some massive credit as a single squad.

    Of course, Sam decided to use these human squad members and save himself days of trouble.

    He disappeared from the tree he was in and reappeared at a different spot. He took out the sniper rifle and changed the storage device used as the magazine. The new one has some special bullets that he kept this specific purpose.

    From his position and his puppets, he could get a view of the human squad as well as the exploration team.

    He is in the perfect ce to ignite the spark that will soon turn into a wild fire.

    In that silent forest a shot was fired silently.

    No sound came, but the bullet went towards the exploration camp and right when it reached the outermost tent, the bullet exploded a bit.

    *BOOM*

    mes rose out of it and burned the tent along with the Giants in it.

    The tree giants in the tent hurriedly came out and tried to put the fire out.

    But at this moment a humanoid figure wearing some type of unform appeared out of nowhere and swung a de at that giant.

    The giant''s arm was cut off.

    The rest of the camp was immediately alerted. Two more people appeared out of nowhere and threw their des at them.

    Once in a while a random fire ball, water spear and lightning bolts appeared and attacked the Giants.

    After a few exchanges over half a dozen Giants are dead while the humans ran away in a certain direction.

    "Capture them."

    The giants started the pursuit.

    Meanwhile, back at the human squad camp, they already sensed themotion that was happening at the Giant''s camp. They became alert.

    All of a sudden, one of the members sensed a gigantic frame appear a bit away from their camp. The gigantic figure raised its hands and a bunch of vines appeared to capture the guy who spotted the giant.

    The trees around went crazy and started capturing one human after another. They started struggling only for more and more vines toe forward.

    They are more annoying than troublesome.

    Sam yed on both sides. Shooting his rifle and both the humanoid figures and the giants yed their role perfectly.

    It is actually a very old strategy. The giants are in pursuit of the humanoid figures that are moving towards the human squad. Meanwhile, the humans are stuck right there with the vines.

    After a few minutes, the humans were surprised to see that all the vines disappeared. But only to see that they are surrounded by the giants.

    The humans are outnumbered by the Tree giants by a lot and they only had one thought.

    "Escape."

    The human squad left and they only had one path.

    Sam disappeared from his spot and went to a different spot. Then contacted Mitra.

    "They areing, ignore the human squad and deal with the Giants."

    Within five minutes, Mitra saw a bunch of humans appear. They are battling with the tree giants. Both sides are pretty beat up. While the humans are trying to run away, the giants who have the wood element and the forest on their side have an upper hand.

    Mitra didn''t hesitate. He smirked and shook his head before jumping directly into the frenzy.

 Chapter 1881: Transfer

    Chapter 1881: TransferMitra is strong.

    His battle prowess is unparalleled among his peers and that is one of the main reasons, his brother always tried to suppress him.

    Mitra didn''t take long to equalize the floor. The human squad was first surprised by Mitra''s presence, but then they were delighted. At the same time, Sam provided the cover with his sniper from the rear.

    So, the field evened out pretty quickly.

    After twenty minutes of hard battle, human squad and Mitra are the only ones standing there. There are a few casualties on human squad side, but it was still great that they managed to earn victory against such arge giant team.

    "Thank you so much. You were or great help."

    The squad leader immediately came to Mitra and expressed his gratitude.

    "We should thank your squad mate too. I heard he was resourceful, but I never knew that he could provide such perfect cover from long range. He might have had more kills than anyone in the squad."

    One of the squad members said as he looked at the giants with no heads.

    Sam took the lion''s share of the exploration team.

    "What about the escaped giants? Are we pursuing them?"

    Another squad member raised a question.

    "No, my teammate will take care of it. Don''t worry about it. Who knows? He might have already killed them." Mitra said with a smile.

    "That''s great. Thanks once again."

    The squad wanted to meet Sam and express gratitude to him too. But Mitra managed to brush them off and disappeared into the forest.

    He met with Sam at a predetermined meeting spot.

    "Did you take care of the giants that were escaping?"

    "No, I let them go."

    Mitra was shocked.

    "Why on earth would you do that? Why would you let them go? They are going to call reinforcements and it wouldn''t be a small attack. We took down a whole exploration team. They are going retaliate in kind.

    A lot of human squads in the vicinity will be screwed."

    Sam looked at him with a raised eyebrow and asked.

    "You guys are in war. What the hell do you expect? Anyway, even if the reinforcementse we already know their destination, isn''t it a good thing? We can take advantage of them to our heart''s content."

    "But it is very risky. Too many people woulde and¡­"

    "Dude, will you rx a bit? More people means more targets. The Giants will be on aggressive and anyway, who said we are going to take most of the heat? There are a bunch of human squads around the area. Why are we going to be the targets when we are the ones who has most mobility.

    We can escape from here any time we want.

    Your peers can''t do that."

    Mitra didn''t know what to say. He paused and took a deep breath before asking.

    "Don''t you think it is too much? All the human squads will be in danger."

    Sam rolled his eyes. It is not something he does usually, but this guy made him do that.

    "Just what are you thinking Mitra? I don''t understand. What do you guys expect in a war? Do you not understand the concept of it or are you such an immature brat that has yet to see the ways of the world?

    The final goal of every soldier in this war should be to kill the Giants and send them back packing. What is it with you guys? Mixing all the politics in it?

    The way your squads are operating, it would be months before the war moves any further. The giants are currently in the fear of unknown. They don''t understand how we destroyed the Fire and Water Giants.

    They don''t understand how we even injured the Commander of the Earth Giants, without even revealing our faces.

    And do you know what people do in fear? They give big reactions for smallest things. They make mistakes in anxiety. That is the best time to act.

    I thought thepetition would make your squads go crazy.

    But nope, none of that could be seen.

    All I have seen until now is a bunch of squads trying to keep tabs on each other while keeping tabs on the enemy. While enemy is being on the defensive.

    If we hadn''t made use the squad right now, when this squad eventually attacked, there are two other squads ready to take advantage of them.

    This is all fucking bullshit man.

    Just get over it and fight with me. Or you can just go back and stay put. Even if you guys have enough time to y around this when the war is on high tide, I don''t. I need to get out of this shit hole as soon as possible."

    Mitra stayed silent as Sam walked away.

    Sam really didn''t like this side of Mitra.

    That guy was all in when Sam screwed over two giant tribes by scheming. But once his peers are involved, he is getting all hesitant.

    In a way, he can understand the patriotic behavior that led to that. But still, it is very annoying when it is clear that these don''t reciprocate the goodwill Mitra has.

    He is fine with honorable people, but he is not fine with na?ve people. Na?ve people get others killed.

    Mitra followed Sam silently.

    He is pretty much carefree, the only thing he is serious about is his duty. Even though he yed around a lot. Whenever it was time to do his part, he always delivered. To think that he has to use his fellow peers aplish his tasks is a bit troublesome for him.

    But he followed Sam over and when he was given a tablet that showed the activities of his peers, he felt even more disheartened.

    None of them are making a move.

    Since Sam''s activities, the three giant cities are very cautious and defensive. This made them form into veryrge groups or they wouldn''t evene out of the cities. After all, Sam even managed to destroy the city formation.

    They couldn''t be more sure about their security.

    Because of this, all humans are now passive without doing anything.

    Now he understood what Sam actually meant.

    He started justifying the situation to himself.

    And just like that the duo moved around and caused conflicts between giants and humans.

    First, they stayed back and waited for the Tree Giants toe. When they discovered the disappearance of the giants, they were a bit hesitant to act. But ''coincidentally'' they managed to find the tracks of human squads in three different directions.

    And those tracks indicated a rough number of people that moved in each direction.

    So, they gained some more confidence and motioned their elites that are capable of moving sneakily.

    They trailed the human squads and after confirming that they are not discovered and estimating the strength of these squads they mobilized the forces to assassinate them.

    Just when they were about tounch a massive sneak attack, they were ''suddenly'' discovered.

    The humans always realized in thest minute about the presence of the giants and they started engaging. Of course, humans were obviously on the backfoot because the other party came prepared.

    And to save the day, Mitra appeared while Sam covered from the hidden position.

    Simr things happened in the Wind Giant Tribes territory and the Earth Giant tribe territory.

    The duo moved around flexibly and caused chaos everywhere.

    Meanwhile Sam also kept on calcting the locations of the remaining three hearts.

    In the next week, he managed to not only dig out the three hearts, but he also managed to increase the kill count by hundreds. He killed more than half of the giants that were dead in thest seven days which is a very significant amount.

    "Fucking hell. I have a lot more to do before I could hit the ten thousand target. I wonder if there is a spot where I could farm these guys in arge scale."

    "What? Ten thousand target?"

    Mitra asked as overheard Sam wondering out loud.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "I have a target, I need to kill ten thousand enemies in total. And two thousand enemies of higher level."

    He looked at Sam with his mouth wide open.

    "What kind of sick freak are you? You want to kill ten thousand people? Who ces a target like that?"

    "I do. Get the fuck out of here if you don''t like it."

    Mitra just grinned and didn''t say anything. His hesitation and high ground onlysted for a few days. He ispletely free of that guilt now.

    "Anyway, if you want to have arge number of people, then the next news might be for you. As you asked I gathered the status from the other fronts where Giants are active.

    It seems like the giants are riding a massive wave of luck. The humans are being defeated repeatedly. All their tricks are being revealed and they are all falling into the Giants'' traps.

    Since we already did all we could here, the person in charge is asking if we would like to go there."

    "Seems like your brother is acting up again. We stole a lot of credit from everyone. It would be impossible for anyone to surpass us, so they are trying to get rid of us from here to lessen the gap.

    That''s cool. Tell them, we will go there. If the giants are that active, then that means I can kill as many as I want."

 Chapter 1882: Western Front

    Chapter 1882: Western FrontTwo dayster.

    Sam and Mitra are standing on a cliff as they watched into the horizon.

    They are looking at the operating area of their next missions. They are transferred and they weren''t even given a proper brief. They could whatever they want as long as they could stop the invasion of the giants even a little bit.

    Right now, in this area the activity of the giants is way too much. They are attacking it from the two fronts. The third side is the sea and the fourth side is a wastnd that has yet to be properly explored and developed.

    Sam and Mitra are standing in that fourth direction as they looked at the warzone.

    One could say that this is the most active warzone when ites to the giants in this.

    The five cities might have more influence of giants since they captured and upied a vast territory. Ut the bloodshed happening there, even now after two factions were destroyed and three factions were thrown in chaos is nowhere near the bloodshed happening here.

    And all of this is being caused by three giant tribes that are working perfectly well.

    The Lightning Giants, the Metal Giants and finally the Chaos Giants.

    They Chaos Giants are not exactly a tribe that has a single elemental affinity and it is not on par with other tribes when ites to history.

    It was more recently established, but still has enough power to stand along with the rest.

    And these three giant tribes have this unwavering alliance for some reason and they are getting great results.

    They dealt some serious blow to the human territories.

    They isted this territory from the rest. If humans want to send reinforcements, they either have to attack the giants from their rear or use spatial transfer toe to the aid of the humans in the middle.

    But it is almost impossible to mobilizerge amount of forces to do either of these.

    Once they mobilize, other fronts will be weaker. Even the humans at five cities will have a tough time.

    Humans made a big mistake when they are managing their forces. Because they didn''t take a factor into consideration. Of course, no one can me them. Because the factor itself ispletely unknown to them.

    If they knew that this factor existed, they would have made at least some efforts to resist against it.

    And that factor is another yer.

    Sam looked at the terrain in front of him and waved his hand.

    Hundreds of puppets left along with more than hundred shadows. Shadow mice are now in charge of everything that is rted to gathering information. They are the best in that regard.

    "Let''s go to our new reporting area and meet our new superior. I would like to know what they are trying to do from their own mouths."

    Sam and Mitra went to the camp after that.

    The situation of the camp is pretty bad. There are a lot of injured soldiers and the soldiers that are active are being overly used. Their resources are being exhausted. Of course, the main camp is trying to send as much assistance as possible.

    But they couldn''t do much.

    After talking to themander Sam and Mitra went to the nearestke for another barbeque.

    He waited for the shadow mice to get some basic info.

    He finished meal by the time information came. Sam sat on the bank with his feet inside the water. There is a smile on his face as he went through the information.

    Mitra looked at him and asked.

    "Why do you have that pleasant smile? Is there a good news?"

    "Not good news perse. But some of my expectations are real. From the information we got from the camp and the information I gathered, I am sure who is the person that is making the war lean towards the Giants."

    "What? You know? Who is it?"

    "You could say, it''s a friend of mine."

    Mitra was shocked. His aura raged as he looked at Sam. Of course, his anger is not directed at him. But he is still pretty angry.

    "Why is a friend of yours trying to destroy humans?"

    "The same reason that I am trying to help humans. There is nothing much to it and there is definitely nothing personal."

    "What¡­"

    "Stop with the useless questions. We need to make a move. Pick a target, east or west? Which side do you want to deal with first?"

    "I think the west side would be better. The eastern city was taken over already. The giants are consolidating the new territory. Even though they are active and offensive, it is not as much as the western front.

    If we are careless, the western city would be taken down by the Western Front."

    "That''s true. Let''s go then. We will go to the western front."

    For the next two days, Sam spent all of his time scouting and whenever he did, he made use of all of his shadow mice to focus on a very small concentrated area. Within these two days he already prepared a n to move forward.

    "Alright, on the western front, the Chaos Giants are most active when fighting with humans. They are acting as a vanguard. The Lightning Giants are second and are acting as the driving force when a decisive battle is emerging.

    Finally, the Metal giants are just giving support and are focusing on establishing proper defense.

    The human side on the other hand are onplete defensive, they are trying to cope with the constant attacks of the Chaos Giants"

    Sam muttered as he created a projection of the western battlefield.

    "I already understand all of this. What are we going to do moving forward? Just tell me that. Looking at the state here, I am itching for a battle."

    "Don''t worry, my friend. As I said, I already have a n. But for that, we need the help of some human squads."

    "Their help?"

    "Yeah, I will give you a batch of special trinkets that I made, tell each and every squad to carry them. At least three to four per a regr squad of twenty-four people. And whenever they face with a special situation in the forest that they are working around in.

    Whenever their squad encounters a trouble, whether if they are attacked by the beasts or if they fell into an intricate vine trap, or if they are infected by some seriously powerful natural poison or an infectous disease, tell them to take out the pills within the gadget and swallow them before activating it.

    That is all they have to do. And I will run the remaining game."

    As Sam spoke to Mitra, he sent another batch of shadow mice and puppets within the western forest. This time, they are not investigating, instead they are throwing in some very small seeds that are being merged within the soil and small shoots of grass grew from it.

    After that, he gave a few spatial rings to Mitra before sending him to the main human camp.

    "Now that we are here, lets reduce the kill count as much as possible. And lets see how well I will do when I am ying in the same field as that person.

    Let me see how far you have truly improve in that hell."

    He muttered to himself as he waved his hand. Another batch of puppets went. But these are much more smaller than the smallest puppets of Dusk. They are just like bugs that are natural. The biggest one is only as big as an egg.

    And these things didn''t enter the forest, instead they are headed towards the main camp of the giants.

    "Let''s y, my dear friend."

    Sam muttered as he waited for Mitra toe back. This time, the battle is going to be interesting and in fact it actually started.

 Chapter 1883: Stuck with Trees

    Chapter 1883: Stuck with TreesSam finished all of his necessary preparations.

    Throughout the preparations, he made sure that his presence is as low as possible. He didn''t want to stand out too much and he didn''t exactly that. Now it is time to act.

    Right now, at this moment within the forests on the western front.

    A squad of humans are being deployed. Themander in charge is giving them a mission brief.

    "Four days, One of our de squads has disappeared in the forest. They were sent on an assassination mission. We even received and confirmed the news that the target of the assassination was dead.

    The mission was sessful, but the squad itself has disappeared during their return.

    We tried searching for them, but we were unable to get an info about their whereabouts. There is not a single trace that they moved through the designated path. But they definitely did if they aplished the mission.

    We thought the possibility that they might have been killed, but their life tokens are not broken, which means they are certainly alive.

    An hour ago, we got a rescue signal from them. They used the emergencymunication system that would only give us their rough coordinates instead of the normalmunication.

    It seems like they are stuck in some sticky situation. So, you guys need to leave immediately and assist them. You are the elites specialized in rescue operations, so I hope I see the results by the end of the day."

    The squad all saluted, too the mission brief and entered the forest.

    After half an hour, they reached the area the rescue signal came from. It is not an urate and exact location after all.

    "We need to keep on search properly from here. Don''t leave even the tiniest of anomalies you find out. Giants might have already gotten to them once again, but that is the worst case scenario and if it did indeed happen, we have to find the ce where they were taken to."

    The leader was sharp and on to the point as he quickly delegated some tasks to the team.

    "Boss, what about the trinkets given to us?"

    "What trinkets?"

    "The cubes that were given to us by Mitra. We were supposed to take the pills and activate it, we don''t have one for each other after all. If we are split ording to your rules, then wouldn''t we have problem distributing the pills."

    "Ah, those stupid boxes. I don''t think we need to worry about them, but just in case let''s just distribute the pills now. The people who are holding the boxes, don''t take the whole thing seriously. Mitra is one guy and I heard he has one teammate that doesn''t even belong any faction.

    There is only so much they can do. Let''s just go with our n.

    If you really encounter an emergency, try to deal with it or contact the remaining team members, only if you have a chance you can try to use that box."

    They spread out, the trees are way too dense there and they are having a hard time navigating through them. Of course, they are not stupid enough to cut them and create a massive disturbance to attract the giants.

    Time passed, it has been more than twenty minutes.

    One of the trio that was separated from the team looked in their designated area and sat downfor a break as they analyzed.

    "We couldn''t find a single clue. There are no traces of footprints, the trees are all looking undisturbed, even the fallen leaves are looking just untouched. It is almost perfect."

    "Yeah, the only weird thing I see is that there are no beasts. After all a couple of trees are fruit trees that could attract some beasts at least, even if they are of very low level, but there are no traces of those beasts."

    "If there are no traces, then how did the fruits disappear though? I didn''t see a single one?"

    "Come on guys, really? Are we talking about fruits and trees right now? We need to think about the squad. Since we finished our area quickly, lets go back and report to the leader, we can proceed with the next step of the n."

    With that, all three of them started walking back in the path they came.

    Twenty minutes passed, they are still walking.

    Thirty minutes, still walking.

    Forty minutes, still walking.

    "What the fuck is happening? We are not reaching the rendezvous no matter how much we travelled?"

    "Don''t tell, we are lost? We are Divine ne cultivators for gods sake."

    They threw the vignce out of their windows before spreading their senses to the maximum. They could sense that the location of their rendezvous is just a couple of hundred meters a head. They should reach within a couple of minutes, even if they just walked casually.

    They kept their spiritual senses locked on to that location and started walking. But no matter how much they walked, ording to their spiritual senses, the distance between them is not decreasing at all.

    Soon, the horror dawned on them. They are lost, or rather they are trapped.

    They immediately took out their weapons and started cutting the trees down.

    They didn''t walk through the path that they came in and instead made a new pathpletely with their des as they cut through the forest.

    But after a couple of minutes, they lost the direction. When they turned around to go back in the newly created path, they were dumbfounded. The trees are back there. There is not a single cut down tree that they could see.

    One of them who put the tree trunks in the storage looked inside. The trunks are still there, which means it is definitely not an illusion. They are indeed moving, but they are still not moving.

    They unleashed their powers, they destroyed everything within a hundred meter radius with a single attack, but all they managed to do is create arge circle and at a visible pace, one tree after another grew in that area and locked them.

    They tried to fly up and run away, but the branches locked them off. The same trees that they managed to cut off instantly, didn''t even budge as they tried to destroy the branches.

    Soon, some wooden spikes flew off and stabbed a few of them as they tried very much to get out of the area.

    After another ten minutes, all three of them are lying on the floor with their limbs pierced, their energy exhausted.

    "Fucking hell, what is happening?"

    One of them cursed as they tried to find a way out.

    They tried to use theirmunication token, but they couldn''t send out a message. It is blocked.

    They tried to use their formation discs, inscription scrolls and even transference tokens, but nothing is working.

    The more they struggled, the more they despaired.

    Simr situation happened to the rest of the members. The whole squad with twenty four people divided into eight teams, all of them are trapped in the forest. They don''t know their own location and they don''t know if they can even escape.

    They are lost both physically and mentally.

    At this moment, all of a sudden their divine senses riled up. They could sense someone approaching them. Someone ising to their location. And they are giants.

    Three giants are running towards them in a crazed pace.

    "This is the way, I can sense them. They are in that location and they are injured. Let''s go."

    One of the giants screamed and called out to their members.

    Soon they all arrived at the location to the almost lifeless humans, who are injured and exhausted.

    "The nature is truly in our favor. To think that we keep on getting these human bastards like this. How many squads has it been?"

    "I don''t know the squads, but judging from the captives and the body count we have, it is more than a thousand by now. And that is just by our team. Imagine what the other teams are doing right now?"

    As they muttered they took out some restraints nning to capture the humans.

    "Guys, we can''t let them capture us. We need to do something."

    "What the fuck can we even do? We tried every fucking thing we have."

    They started discussing openly and looking at their futile struggle, the giants even slowed down and waited. The ridicule they have for these humans is insane.

    "Not everything. Take the pills."

    One of them decisively said and swallowed a pill.

    The remaining two also nodded and took the pills.

    And one of them took out a cube and pressed on a button on one of the edges.

    "Hope this thing works."

    "What the fuck is that? Let''s capture them."

    The giants made a move, but the next moment, the cube hovered and spun in the air as it gave off a grey energy.

    The energy spread wildly around and effected everything that is living. The trees, grass, giants, everything except for the humans that swallowed the pill.

    A hundred metre radius circle was created once again and this time, the trees withered away and turned into debris.

 Chapter 1884: Useless Meeting

    Chapter 1884: Useless MeetingThe small cube rotated so fast, it appeared like a sphere.

    The death energy ran rampant. The three giants literally felt like their life is being sucked out of their bodies. It is true because their vitality is being seeped away by the turbulent death energy.

    The humans finally became hopeful.

    And at that moment, to solidify that hope, the cube gave out some spatial fluctuations and two humans appeared out of nowhere.

    Sam and Mitra stood in the middle of the death energy storm and looked at the surroundings.

    "Perfect timing."

    Sam said as he held the cube. It stopped spinning as soon as he touched it. The next moment, he took out the reaper sword and finished off the three giants. He then looked at the three humans who are still injured.

    "You guys are in no state to continue. You can use the transference scrolls to get back to the camp."

    "We tried, but they are not working."

    *SNAP*

    Sam snapped his fingers and said.

    "They will work now. You can try."

    The three of them were a bit doubtful, but they still took the transference scroll and used it. They disappeared and reappeared in the camp. Looking at the three people who couldn''t even stand up, appear in the middle of the healing area, the crew hurriedly came forward and started treating them.

    An officer came to them to get the report within a minute and they reported the whole scenario.

    Of course, the credit for their rescue and killing the giants fell on Sam and Mitra.

    They thought that these cubes and pills are just for show, but only after they used did they understand how valuable they were.

    They tried everything at their disposal but they were unable to get out of the forest. But that cube and the pills gave them a way out. They felt grateful for themselves as well as Sam and Mitra.

    Meanwhile, back in the forest, Sam and Mitra stood in the middle of the clear area the cube created.

    It is filled with death energy.

    Sam snapped his fingers and the death energy stopped running rampant. It almost fell on to the ground like raindrops and disappeared.

    Slowly, the trees and the vegetation started growing. It is not as fast as before, but it is still very fast.

    If the three humans that were just rescued saw this, their trauma might be triggered, but they would have noticed that the vegetation is not exactly the same anymore.

    Sam and Mitra disappeared from there before the forest could lock them in.

    "So, how was it? Easy, isn''t it?" Sam asked as they appeared at their safepoint.

    "It is indeed very easy. To the point that it is disappointing."

    "Yeah, I know I took out the three of them, but as I said, I need the kill count. So, I would like some priority."

    "Well, I am sure, we will be after somerge groups. I would like to see how you are going to monopolize all the giants then."

    "Oh trust me, my friend. I can monopolize no matter how giants are there. You haven''t see half of the tricks that I have up my sleeve. You will definitely regret it, if you try topete with me like that."

    As they bickered, Sam got another signal. Both of them left to rescue another team.

    For the next thirty minutes, Sam and Mitra rescued the whole squad and safely got them back to the camp. The news of how they were stuck in the forest and how the only measure that worked is the cube, spread like wildfire.

    Everyone started to cherish the cubes.

    Of course, on top of that, everyone got some new information and this triggered a meeting in the camp. This time both Sam and Mitra were invited.

    Themander in charge took the head chair and exined.

    "Until now, we didn''t know what exactly is happening with the disappearance of the squads. The ones that went missing in the forest numbered in hundreds, we knew that a few of them are dead, but the rest of them are still alive, but we don''t know the whereabouts.

    The only squad that returned gave us some new information.

    The problem is not with the giants in the forest. Rather it is with the forest itself.

    For some reason, the forest is creating these mazes that are making our squads locked.

    Of course, this could be a trick of the giants. They might be the ones that are using some method to control the forest and its vegetation. Whether it is true or not, the forest is currently a dangerous ce to us and it is the most advantageous location for the giants."

    "So, what should we do? Do we just let the giants crossover and fight with them at the edge of our camp?"

    "No, that would be way too stupid of us. Giants might be close ranged fighters, but that doesn''t mean, they are incapable of long range attacks. They could just use the forest as their cover and attack us from long range."

    "Then, maybe we can focus on our long range defense. We can just attack the giants in the forest through long range.

    I heard that newbie here have some methods to get live surveince of the forest. Maybe he can show some of his prowess in that area and spot the giants while we do the long range attacks."

    One of them stood up and proposed as he pointed at Sam.

    Sam didn''t look bothered at all. In fact, he appeared too unbothered to even react to this conversation.

    Themander thought for a moment and felt that this might be a good idea. Even if they couldn''tpletely kill of the giants, they could at least try to damage them a bit. And they do have specialized long range attackers on their side.

    "Sam, what do you think of this? Can you do it?"

    Themander asked.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "I can do it."

    "Then, we can proceed forward¡­" The guy who proposed the idea was about to continue, but Sam cut him.

    "Excuse me, I said I can do it, but I didn''t say if I will do it. It is better to hold your horses."

    Everyone turned to him with a frown.

    Themander is also displeased by his response.

    "What do you mean by that? Why wouldn''t you be doing it?"

    "Aside from the fact that it won''t work, I absolutely don''t want to."

    "How can you say that it won''t work? You can''t just yap as you want, just because you have some achievements under your belt. You should be able to back up the words you say."

    Sam looked at him and sighed. He stood up and said.

    "I only attended the meeting, because Mitra wanted me to. You guys seemed to have forgotten something. I am not an active soldier under you. I came here under Deputation because you guys are doing such a ''great'' job in this ce.

    And one of the primary conditions for my presence here is that I cannot be ordered around by you. I would be reporting to themander-in-chief, but even he has no right tomand me.

    If you guys are only discussing this, then I will take my leave."

    He stood up and was about to walk away.

    "How can you be so self-centred when we are facing a crisis that could lead to our extinction?"

    "Yeah, speak for yourself. During the time I have been working against the giants, I have seen more infighting than the fight with the giants.

    Even right now, in this room, as you speak of your ideals, three factions are scheming against each other, to get more credit and all three of you are nning to send in a request to me so that I could rescue your squad members first if a crisis arises.

    Personally, I am only here to kill the giants and I understand the situation of the forest better than any of you, I don''t have any reason to y house with you guys. Don''t drag me into this."

    "Guards."

    One of the members made the guards block Sam''s way.

    "I have all kinds of suspicions against you from the start.

    Nobody knew the situation of the forest since there was no information we gained from the previous squads, but you were already able to guess what it is and even gave us a countermeasure.

    You are reluctant to share your surveince means to us.

    You are also opposing and resisting the cooperation to fight against the giants.

    Your origin is unknown and you just appeared out of thin air.

    Why should I believe that you are not a traitor of humanity?"

    Sam sighed and looked at the idiot who raised this question. He then turned to Mitra.

    "Just exin to that fool. I don''t want to lose my brain cells by doing that."

    He then turned to themander and said."

    "Your forces are not united and you are up against not just the giants, but a hidden enemy that uses their brain better than all of your captains and Eldersbined.

    That forest as a whole is a weapon against you and if you think you can just bypass it with simple long-range attacks and some defensive measures, then you are sorely mistaken.

    If you want to hear my opinion, I would wee you for a conversation, but not along with these fools.

    Bye."

    Read Author''s Note:

    To have a 1-on-1 call with me the author, checkout this link: https://lets.ketchup.live/join/XxQ1Grrds

 Chapter 1885: Raiding a Hideout

    Sam left the room and soon he got another signal from a cube.

    Another group of humans are in trouble. He used the spatial element to disappear from there. Meanwhile, Mitra stayed back in the meeting.

    "What the fuck is that bastard thinking? Who does he think he is? Acting like he is all that?"

    One of them clearly exined their discontent.

    "If you guys really have something to talk, let''s talk, but if you don''t, please let me go as well. The giants are formidable enemies and Sam really enjoys killing them. I am participating in this war with the hope of contributing to humans, and with him taking all of it, I won''t be able to do that."

    Mitra said as he stretched his hands.

    Mitra is already known as the carefree young master that doesn''t give two shits to the people. So, when he talked like that, no one was surprised.

    The meeting went on after his rebuke. Everyone stayed on topic as they suggested various things, but everyone has onemon point.

    They wall want to use one or the other of Sam''s techniques.

    Some after his surveince, some are after his information gathering, some are after the cubes he gave out and some after the pills, some even came after the Dimensional drifter thinking as if they could manufacture it themselves.

    And they all used the same excuse. Since Sam is a human, in these desperate times, he should be ready to give up some of his things. He cannot just selfishly hoard all of his wealth.

    Mitra couldn''t bear it any more.

    "Fuck off, all of you."

    He showed his middle finger and came out of the room. He looked around the camp and looked a specific tent. He directly went there and caught a hold of a young man by his throat, before dragging him away to a secluded corner.

    "I am going to ask you one question and one question only. You better answer is properly, or I would shove an Iron spike in your ''you know where''."

    The young man already had a timid expression to begin with, as soon as he heard those words, he immediately ced both of his hands on his buttocks.

    "Ask.. Ask away."

    "Why are all the captains and leaders asking for Sam''s things when they shouldn''t even know that he is in possession of such things?"

    "Y.. Your brother contacted and gave out all the information. He said that you gave the information in your reports from your time at the Five Cities, so he gave away the information from those reports and asked everyone to reap all of those things from him.

    He didn''t even want anything in exchange."

    "And all of you fuckers just agreed to this?"

    Mitra threw the guy away and walked to his tent.

    From the guards, he learned that Sam went to rescue another squad and this time, he managed to rescue more than thirty people alone. He even killed more than forty giants on his own. And from these giants, he managed to gather some specific information.

    The information about the whereabouts of the missing human squads.

    After going through the memories of a few people, he got a better idea of the situation. These giants knew that the forest is helping them, but they don''t know why or how. They just knew that whenever the humans are in the forest, they are being trapped and the giants are even being directed by the forest to those specific locations.

    That is why, they used these special ns.

    They captured a few squads and gathered their tokens that could send the rescue signals. At some points that they are confident in, they are showing those rescue signals, attracting a lot more people from the humans.

    The forest is capturing them.

    Then the giants are going there either to kill them or capture them.

    The cycle is repeating itself and it seems like even the forest that is helping them is understanding their ns and it didn''t just directly trap the squads that came for the rescue.

    They are only trapped after they reached the spot where the rescue signal came from.

    Sam smirked at this information.

    As for the captured people, they were held at different hiding spots of the giants. These humans are actually being used to gather information, as bait and of course, even getting ess to some of the resource points of the humans.

    One of the main reasons the defenses opened up on both the western and eastern fronts is because these people couldn''t take the torture of the giants and constantly gave away their secrets and ns.

    This is indeed a clever tactic.

    The only w is that the giants are too blindly reliant on the forest. They didn''t know how this fortune fell on theirps and they didn''t know who is controlling behind the scenes, but they just wanted to enjoy its benefits and they are extremely trusting of it.

    What if, it turns around and bites them in the back?

    They never bothered to think to that point and Sam would be a fool if he didn''t take advantage of that and everyone knows he is far from being a fool.

    He locked on to the hideout where the humans are hidden. He decided to first poke some holes into these Giant nests.

    He went back to the camp and informed Mitra about his findings.

    "Let''s not report it to the camp. We will just go by ourselves and rescue the humans. The whole camp is fucking against us at this point." Mitra replied and got ready to leave.

    "Seems like I missed an amusing meeting."

    Mitra didn''t even bother to reply, he just came out of the tent and got on his beast to make his move.

    "Alright, let''s go."

    Both of them traveled through the forest first. Some of the captains felt a bit suspicious about their movements. All this while, Sam and Mitra traveled using spatial energy. They never walked into the camp normally.

    So, they are a bit curious and decided to tail them.

    Only, it is easy to think of it but very hard to implement.

    Sam easily lost them and went to the hiding spot.

    The hiding spot is actually far away from the forest they are in.

    The Giants'' main camp is beyond the forest and the hiding spot is beyond that main camp. It is in a rocky terrain deep inside a cave.

    "Forty-Five Giants to kill and sixty humans to rescue. What is the n?" Mitra asked as he looked at the crystal tablet.

    "No, we put in so much effort to get to this hiding spot, there is no way I am just going to kill forty-five giants and be done with it. I have a very special n. Let''s do that. And the first step is that I need a distraction.

    Go ahead and attract some aggression from them."

    Mitra nodded and left his hiding instantly.

    He flew into the air and gathered divine energy into his fist, before punching the air towards the cave.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosive sound, the cave''s roof was sted open as a bunch of giants were revealed. They all looked at Mitra and immediately activated their true forms.

    The level of the captured humans in this hiding camp is pretty low and for that reason, the level of the giants is also not that high.

    They are stronger than their captors, but they are definitely not stronger than Mitra.

    But of course, Mitra also didn''t kill them all. He is already tired of Samining about his kill count, he decided to just let him kill these people.

    All the giants came out and fought with Mitra. Various elements shed across the sky, meanwhile, Sam activated his shadow fusion and merged into the shadows as he approached all the captured humans.

    He fed them some pills and released their restraints.

    He even ced a lot of formation discs all over the area.

    "I am done."

    He sent a message to Mitra after ten minutes.

    Mitra went from full defensive to slightly offensive and copsed a bunch of giants to the ground.

    Sam took the chance and started his killing spree as he moved around on the harbinger.

    Only one giant was spared among the whole group.

    The rest were all taken away and Sam even absorbed their memories.

    He looked at the giant in front of him. He is part of the Chaos giant tribe.

    Of course, his actual elements are fire and earth. A prettymonbination. But his giant bloodline is actually not that poor.

    Sam looked at him carefully for a second and asked.

    "Is the rescue signal for help sent to your camp?"

    "No, it all happened too fast and at first, we thought we had a chance. Tables turned too quickly."

    Sam took out the reaper sword and put it on the giant''s throat.

    "I know you value your life more than your faction or tribe, so contact the rescue team and tell them exactly what I tell you to. If there is even a single letter extra or a single word less, I will torture your soul until even Hades is afraid of epting it in."

 Chapter 1886: New Setup

    Twenty minutester.

    A team of more than thirty giants and all of them at the same level as Mitra are currently rushing towards the hideout that Sam just raided.

    When they saw the hideout from far away, they were stunned.

    Because that didn''t look like a hideout that was raided, rather it looked like a reinforced prison just from the outside.

    The whole are is brimming with formations and there are a bunch of guards with weapons and inscription scrolls ready to take on anyone thates. The cave looked unscathed.

    The only problem is that the guards that are roaming around the cave are not exactly giants. They are humans. There are more than forty humans in various positions. Some moving and some standing still as they defended the hideout.

    And the weapons the humans held are also looking very different. They looked like spears, but the spear head is not sharp, it had a hole on top of it.

    They are all walking around and their auras are extremely deceiving. They couldn''t even estimate it.

    "What the fuck is this? How did our hide out be like this? This is unbelievable."

    "I know. How the fuck these human bastards bypass us and deal with this hideout they had to cross our camp otherwise, they would have to travel fo miles in the forest. The forest should have snapped them if they went in that route."

    "But it seems like their lineup is way too powerful right now. I have nevere across this type of squad in the information we had about the humans. They are new. I think it is better if we go back and evaluate the situation beforeing back."

    "Maybe we can test them out? It would be better to get some info before we discuss how to deal with them."

    "Alright, let''s go then. Let''s attack them from all sides instead of just from the front. We will get a better evaluation of them."

    They discussed and agreed on it before they moved forward. They surrounded the area from different sides andunched their charge.

    As soon as the giants came into the sight, all the humans holding these weird staves stopped in their tracks and turned towards the demon closest to them.

    They aimed the holes in the tips of the staves towards the giants while the tail of the staff is ced on their foot.

    Energy gathered at that hole in the tip and beams shot out.

    *BOOM* Even though there are multiple beams being shot out, all of them gave out a single sound as their timing is way too in sync. All the hitsnded on the giants at the same time. They are all of different elements.

    Some are of fire, some are of ice and some are of lightning.

    The Giants all came to a halt, they felt like their heart is being crushed with this massive and forceful influx of energy into their body. Each of their cells are being attacked.

    The giants didn''t even dare to move another step, but that doesn''t mean the humans are going to just leave it at that. Another volley of attacks shot at the giants. The flesh tore open this time. They are forced to activate their true forms.

    For the third volley, all the humans shot neutral energy beams of elemental energies, but this time the attacks are much more powerful than usual, in fact they are multiple times threatening than the previous attacks. Even when the giants were about to attack.

    The giants copsed on the spot. They are not dead, but they are barely alive.

    For some reason, the humans didn''t attack, they just left the giants like that. Out of all the giants, the leader who is the strongest is the only one could barely move and he definitely didn''t have any thoughts of attacking anymore.

    He looked at a few of his subordinates and spoke.

    "Can anyone move?"

    Very few people replied.

    "We need to leave this ce, we need to go and inform the main camp and bring back more reinforcements. It is absolutely disastrous to have such a force behind our backs. We need to clear them asap."

    "We cannot move, but for some reason they are not attacking, we will try to move to a safe distance for now and try to survive. Captain, if you can go back, please do."

    "I have a couple of pills that could help me recover a bit. It would be enough to go bac to the camp.

    Try to recover as much as you can. Don''t sleep on your pills. Being alive is more important."

    Soon the message spread among the giants and they fell back. They didn''t dare to be in the attacking range, at least they thought they are out of it.

    They became defensive, used all of their defensive measures and tried to recover as much as they could.

    Meanwhile the captain left the group with all his might and ran towards the main camp.

    At this moment, within the cave hidden deep inside, there is arge vertical pit dug in the middle.

    Deep inside that pit, Sam sat in front of Mitra.

    Mitra is connected to some weird equipment with a helmet. There is arge globe in the middle of both of them. The globe looked to be made of crystal, but instead it is made of the powder of the empty spirit stones.

    He is channeling his energy into that globe.

    "I told you to stop. We need those giants alive."

    Sam interrupted him and Mitra stopped immediately.

    He opened his eyes and looked at Sam.

    "Just what the hell did you do? What is this thing?"

    "This is a new technique I wanted to try and it worked perfectly."

    "That is not what I am asking? How is this thing even possible? Isn''t it against nature?"

    "Dude, if something is against nature, it wouldn''t exist. Do you know the price a person has to make something that is against the nature?"

    "I mean¡­"

    "I don''t want to exin it to you. It will take too much of my time and energy."

    Sam sighed and just gave up on exining anything to Mitra.

    The whole set up is based on the resonance and amplification.

    The globe in the middle absorbs the attack a person makes. A formation is set up in the surroundings and within the formation, there are some nodal points set up. When someone attacks the globe, all the nodal points act as the resonance points.

    They resonate with the attacks and amplify them before shooting them out.

    As for the resonance points, the humans that are seen outside are not actually humans. They are deceptive puppets Sam made and these puppets carried the resonance points. When they used the staves like that, the circuit ispleted and they are ready to shoot.

    They cannot perform many feats as of now and they can only attack stationarily.

    The only problem with this set up is that the formations take up too much strain of energy cirction. When the attacks are resonating and are amplified, they are way too unstable. When Sam did it manually, his mental energy acts as a decisive factor and since his will power is strong and his calctions are fast and precise, he can analyze the instability and counter it.

    But the same couldn''t be said when it was purely done through the formation.

    The instability is too vtile. The energy in turn is very dangerous. Even when the formation is loaded up with a bunch of spectres and souls to establish the control, they are being consumed. Also even the formation itself is unable to handle the amount of energy that is being processed.

    Sam wanted to add some extra mechanisms to sink the load, but if that happens he would have to divide the mental load on the souls of the formation.

    Anyway, at least these problems can be resolved and even if they aren''t he can just use it as a replenishable weapon. Like the souls would be the ammo required to deal with this and Dusk is killing a lot of living beings everyday.

    It is not too much trouble.

    But there is another problem which he has to resolve. The energy problem.

    Resonance and amplification works in a very direct way. It takes the surrounding atmospheric energy to create the attacks. Of course, we can say that the nature''s energy is not something Sam can just calcte, but energy in a region could be depleted pretty quickly and for the energy to return, it should absorb from the surrounding regions and even out a bit.

    That process is a bit slower than the speed of attacks.

    Anyway, Sam has a pretty good testing ground right now.

    He went out and checked the formations, repaired the strained parts, replenished the souls. After that, he added more resonance points, more formations and more set up to attack arge group that is about toe now.

 Chapter 1887: Elite Squad

    One hourter.

    A massive meeting is being held in the Giants camp.

    The captain of the giant squad that Sam let go is sitting on a chair. He looked pale and he couldn''t move his limbs. He is barely able to sit up there.

    In front of him is a long table and all the important members of Lightning Giants, Chaos Giants and Metal Giants that are working on the western front are there.

    As soon as the captain came back with injuries that made him look half dead, he called for this meeting. At least in this aspect, the giants are far better than humans. They didn''t hesitate or belittle him. They just called for a meeting.

    Now the giant captain exined all that he saw.

    "You are saying that there is a mini-stronghold of humans right behind our asses and they created it after capturing our own hideout?"

    "Yes."

    "But you guys reacted immediately after you got a call that there is an attack happening there. Even if you took the maximum time, you would have been there in thirty minutes. How can someone build a stronghold in those thirty minutes?

    It just doesn''t make sense."

    "I know, but it is there and we can''t do anything even if it doesn''t make sense. So, we might as well stop thinking about how it was there and instead think about how to remove it from there.

    We already saw a reduction in the number of humans entering the forest. It seems like they figured out that the forest is favoring us somehow.

    Now we have them right behind our back.

    Instead of us sandwiching the humans from the eastern and western fronts, our group is being sandwiched between them. We need to deal with this stronghold first."

    "So, how are we going to do it, the information provided by the captain is barely enough. They have special weapons and different attacking methods. That is all he said."

    "I also said that it is almost impossible to dodge with our speed. Because the attacks are that fast." The captain intervened in the middle.

    "How can there be such attacks? Any attack could be dodged with proper timing."

    "Of course, but it couldn''t be done like that with our regr soldiers. Only a few elites would be able to dodge it. Also we need tounch attacks from a pretty long range if we cannot close in quickly enough.

    The formations are something that I have never seen before. They are very strangle to look at.

    And unlike most formations they are not just visible when they are attacked. They are openly visible all the time. I had a bad feeling."

    "So, do you think we have to learn to how to deal with those formations first?"

    "We don''t have that much time. There are around thirty giants fighting for their lives over there. We need to rescue them."

    "But we cannot just rush in blindly."

    The discussion became heated. Everyone had an opinion. The onlymon thing is that all of them want tounch an attack. But some of them want to take it slow, some of them want to deal with it immediately and some wants to ignore the Stronghold first and increase their attack on the human camp.

    After a long distance, they decided to send an elite squad.

    A squad full of members that are the cream of the crop. A thirty-member squad once again. But these guys are at least ten times more powerfulpared to the previous squad if onepares theirbined power thates from their coordination.

    They were immediately deployed.

    "Don''t worry captain, the Elite Squad is the Elite Squad for a reason."

    "I can understand. But I couldn''t help but wonder, we were down on our dumps just with three attacks and there is no way in hell that there are only three attacks in their arsenal.

    If my guess is right, my squad would have been either captured or they are on verge of dying."

    "Either way we will get our revenge."

    "Yeah, but I cannot help but think. We are sending an elite squad to save a normal squad that went in there. But what would we have to send to rescue the elite squad if things went to shit?"

    The captain asked, but there is no reply from the other person.

    Meanwhile.

    Sam had already extended the formation. The thirty giants that thought that they were out of the energy range actually fell under the detection range of the new formation. They could feel the eyes on them.

    Sam swiftly collected them, tied them up and ced them right at the entrance of the cave.

    As if to show off his hunt.

    He is waiting for whoeveres to get them out if they can.

    When the elite squad reached the area, they were surprised what they saw. The area that the formations upied is wayrger than what the captain described and the number of humans guarding it with those staves are also many more.

    "Is the information wrong?"

    One of the members asked the Elite Captain.

    "Either that, or the humans just expanded the stronghold in this short time. Anyway we need to be careful.

    I have a n of approach.

    Long range attackers will cover our approach. I will lead the charge. Their attacks are fast, but it doesn''t mean we cannot counter them. Long range attackers,municate with us as soon as you sense a fluctuation.

    Your job is to just focus your divine senses on them and inform us about every tiny fluctuation.

    No matter how small it is. Even if our approach to them is slow, we must not get attacked."

    "Alright."

    Everyone got into the position.

    A persons spiritual sense evolves to arge extent when they are in Divine ne. In fact, they could even cover it past cities and regions too. But that doesn''t mean they will always do it.

    Once a person''s Divine sense intersects with another person who is of same cultivation or higher, it is very easy to detect. Their location will be given away pretty easily. That is why, Divine ne cultivators reign in their senses. Instead of focusing on arge area, their focus is concentrated on a small area which gives them a much more detailed vision of the surroundings.

    Quality over quantity.

    But right now, the giants who are focused on long range attacks are breaking that norm. They are using their divine senses and spreading them to the stronghold.

    Even at the risk of revealing their locations, they are going to focus on the stronghold and whenever a ''human'' attacks they are going to know that they are being attacked and they would take some measures.

    The giants charged towards the formations and the ranged attackers kept their senses turned on.

    After the giants reached a certain distance away from the formations, the ''human''s that are closest to them, came to a halt. The spears were aimed and the energy beams were about to be shot.

    "DODGE."

    The ranged giants yelled.

    The giants that were charging immediately ducked and rolled on the ground to the side.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sound came as the energy beams missed their targets, albeit barely. But they still managed to escape the attacks.

    Sam who is sitting the pit looked at the crystal tablet with an amused expression.

    Mitra is the one who is currently firing the shots.

    For him this felt like a videogame. So, he is taking his time enjoying it.

    Meanwhile, Sam made some calctions based on the movements of the elite squad.

    The second volley of the attacks also missed spectacrly, but Sam didn''t feel even a bit down. He tapped Mitra and said.

    "Get off of it, I will do it."

    Mitra frustratingly took off the helmet and gave it to Sam. He wanted to deal with the giants, but he wasn''t able to.

    Sam got equipped and got ready. Unlike Mitra, he has way better control and he is much smarter with the way he attacks.

    "Energy fluctuation. Dodge."

    The ranged giants once again gave the signal as soon as they sensed the energy signal. But at that moment, right when the attacks were about to leave the tip of the staff, they moved, just a little bit.

    The attacks didn''t move in the original direction.

    All fire elemental energy beams were redirected just enough and this time, theynded cleanly on the giants.

    *BOOM*

    The whole area turned into a sea of mes with the attack.

    The giants were stunned.

    Not just because the attacks were redirected, it is because every giant in the charge dodged a bit differently. Some rolled to the right, some rolled to the left, some stepped back and some jumped up.

    For Sam to hit all of them at the same time precisely means he needs to control all the puppets at the same time and he needs to make sure that each puppet has redirected the attack in a different angle to hit the targets.

 Chapter 1888: Final Charge at the Stronghold

    Sam''s control shook the n of the giants. They are unable to proceed further.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    One after another the energy beams that were shot almost had a hundred percent hit rate. The charging giants had an exceptionally hard time to react. As for ranged giants, they practically felt useless.

    Even if their timing is perfect and the charging giants dodged with veryrge movements, the hits are stilling at them.

    They could only grit their teeth and wait.

    The only problem is that Sam''s hits are not as strong. If they are just as strong as Mitra''s hits, then he would have already killed all of them.

    After some time, the captain couldn''t take it anymore.

    He contacted the ranged team and gave new set of instructions.

    The ranged giants immediately created their own set up.

    *WHOOSH* *WHOOSH*

    Arrows that are almost as big as spears were shot from them. They tore through air and reached the formation in no time.

    *BOOM*

    A big explosion urred as they shed with the formation. The whole area a shook as all the arrowsnded at the same time.

    Sam looked at the attacksing towards them and smiled. All of a sudden, the ''humans'' that are guarding the stronghold from the other direction also moved to the front and this time, they aimed at the ranged giants instead of the charging giants.

    *BOOM*

    Just like that the final hope the giants held was gone.

    After testing it a few times, Sam didn''t waste any time and finished them off. He killed half of them, captured the other half, and dumped them in the circle in the middle. He made one of them send a message.

    "We lost. We were captured. Please save us."

    That is the whole message and within just ten minutes, this message prompted a meeting in the Giants'' camp.

    "What the hell is happening? How can a stronghold prepare in less than an hour have that much power? Even the elite unit is taken down? How is that even remotely possible?"

    One of the elders asked in exasperation.

    "That is not the point. What do you think will happen, if those people started marching on us from the rear? We would be in big trouble. There is also not much forest left behind us to help us with the charge.

    We would be helpless."

    "So, what do you suggest?"

    "Let''s attack. The charge from humans, on the front reduced. They might have figured out that the forest is their enemy too, but that gives us an advantage. They wouldn''t be able to attack us before figuring out what the forest held in store for them.

    I am pretty sure that is why they are attacking us from rear.

    Right now, they are unable to build into a full scale camp. We can take advantage of this and deal with them. Let''s go with full force."

    Once this suggestion came up, there are not many opposers. Even the ones that opposed it had a hard timebating the point with a reasonable alternative. The giants decided tounch a full scale attack on the rear.

    When Sam saw the movement through his surveince, he couldn''t help but chuckle at this.

    "The n is finallying to fruition. This is great. I think we can leave and go to the Eastern front after this."

    "Are the giants falling into the trap?"

    "They fell into the trap. They are moving more than half of the forces tounch a full-scale attack. I guess they are hoping topletely destroy us before we could grow any more than we already have."

    Mitra wanted to ask some questions, but Sam cut him off and said.

    "Please don''t ask anything, I am sure you will be a lot more excited when you see this by yourselves."

    "Alright, if you say so."

    Sam and Mitra both got ready. Mitra had one important task to aplish in the next wave of attacks and that is to use two transference scrolls at the same time with impable timing.

    Because, once he misses the timing, Sam would most likely die.

    One hourter.

    Sam and Mitra are looking at their respective crystal tablets. They can see that an army of giants are swarming towards them. They gathered a fair distance away and they could see the giants that are trapped in the middle.

    They must have thought that they are out of attack range based on their reports.

    Sam didn''t mind that though. Because they are going to move forward in a short while anyway.

    He came out of the hole and arrived near the captured group of giants. He picked the leader of the elite squad. The one with the highest level of Divine energy.

    He was about to take him away when he remembered something.

    He raised his right hand and a projection of his hand appeared. It isrge. Large and bright enough to be seen from miles away in the morning sunlight.

    The hand morphed into an image of a middle finger and it is aimed at the giant army that is slowly surrounding the stronghold.

    They were furious. With their pride, they are easy to provoke. But Sam didn''t expect that it would work that well. All of them started attacking instantly.

    Sam looked at them andughed as he disappeared with the Elite Team captain.

    He made him stand up in the pit while he took out a cylinder.

    "What is this thing?"

    "Something I am working on recently."

    The cylinder is very small and it has various sections on it that move independently. And all of these sections have various inscription patterns.

    He clicked a button on the face of the cylinder and it started hovering above the sphere that is connected to the formation outside.

    The circr sections started moving. As they moved, they aligned together and created arge fire elemental attack.

    All the puppets outside shot the fire attacks at the giants.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Since there is arge swarm of giants, it is almost impossible for those attacks to miss.

    The sections still kept on moving, with a different alignment, a different fire elemental attack came out. This time, the attack is not a pure fireball, instead it is a jet of fire, and myriad of ming jets were shot out from the puppets.

    The cylinder kept on changing.

    Another shot, this time the attack is a lightning bolt.

    Followed by wind-de tornados.

    Followed by lightning bolts.

    Followed by Ice storms.

    Followed by Light beams.

    The attacks kept on rolling and Sam didn''t even have to make a move.

    Mitra watched all of this happen with his mouth wide open.

    He looked at Sam and then at the cylinder alternatively and said.

    "What the fuck is this? Are you nning on building killing machines?"

    "I can''t help it."

    "Do you know, just by selling these machines, you can umte enough wealth to make a realm jealous and you can build so many times that no one would want to mess with you, even if they try to kill each other?

    You can just live a leisurely life while cultivating.

    I cannot believe that you lived as a hermit in a forest."

    Sam almostughed out loud at this.

    "Come on Mitra. You still don''t think that I belong to your do you?"

    "You are not?"

    "No, I am from a different ce. I only came here for this war."

    "I knew it, you are some kind of killer psycho that craves war, aren''t you?"

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "That is a very big statement to throw at a guy who can build the killer machines that could tten your."

    "So why are you here?"

    "I am on a mission. To help you guys with the invaders."

    "Who sent you on that mission?"

    "That is something you don''t need to know. It is way too big of a rabbit hole for you to carelessly dive into. It is better if you don''t know too much.

    Anyway, are you ready? We need to be careful with what is about toe. The cylinder is about to be done."

    "Alright. I am good. Let''s go."

    Sam waited as the cylinder finished the attacks. He took it off and made the Elite Giant float above the sphere.

    He closed his eyes and the divine energy spread into the Giant''s body. The energy became chaotic. The giant felt this foreign energy invading his body, but he couldn''t do anything. The shackles on him are not letting him have any control of his own energy.

    Right now, Sam is making him unstable just like how he did with a spirit stone.

    The energy inside the giant became vtile with every passing second.

    When the giant army outside the stronghold noticed that the ''humans'' are not attacking, they immediately charged in.

    But after two minutes.

    The Elite giant was ready to explode.

    "Now."

    Sam signaled and Mitra immediately and used the two transference scrolls. Sam and Mitra disappeared, while the giant''s divine energy exploded as a whole along with his body.

 Chapter 1889: Meeting Finally

    *BOOM*

    The body of the Elite Giant exploded. But that explosion was not heard to anyone, in fact that explosion barely created any sound at all. It didn''t even escape that pit.

    Because the explosive energy was absorbed by the spherepletely. The sphere started glowing with vtile fluctuations and at the same time, the human puppets that were not moving for a few moments, started glowing once again.

    The staves glowed. The holes in the heads of those staves are glowing even brighter. The skin and the illusion that made the puppets look like they are humans disappeared in an instant. The skeletal structure of the metallic puppets could be clearly seen.

    All of its defensive formations were activated in a single second and ny percent of them are destroyed because of the energy output.

    *BOOM*

    The puppets shot out the explosive beams. All of the puppets were destroyed just from the recoil of the shot.

    As for the targets themselves¡­

    The giants felt the threat for their lives. Never in a million years they would have imagined that such an attack would be targeted at them. They were still okay with the powerful beams that came before, but this time, at every spot this beamnded, a massive explosion equivalent of self destruction of an Elite Giant happened.

    And with over more than one hundred shots like that spreading over such a small area, it didn''t take long before the whole surroundings turned into an apocalyptic space.

    Sam and Mitra are far away from that area. They are actually in the sky, with Sam on his hoverboard while Mitra standing on his beast as they looked down. From that position the explosion looked like a small dot.

    But Mitra could see the intensity of the destruction that this explosion caused.

    The earth shook. Half the has felt the tremors from that earthquake and that included the camp of the giants. In fact, they even felt the wave of energy that was caused by that gigantic explosion since they are not that far away.

    Many of them saw the bright explosive disy from the camp directly.

    They were shook.

    Themander in charge got messages from several giants.

    "Commander, all the tokens of our group are crushed they are all dead."

    "Commander, my squad was taken out. Is it because of the explosion."

    "Commander.."

    "Commander¡­"

    Same message but in different ways came to him at the same time.

    Themander felt like his soul left his body. He didn''t expect such a massive loss in this war.

    He lost half of his troops. The western front ispletely weak now. After all, the remaining half of the troops cannot hold much against the rest of the human camp. Not when the human camp is focusing highly on the western front.

    The only sce that he has in this scenario is the forest. The forest is still on their side.

    Meanwhile, Sam and Mitra didn''t waste much of their time and went to the human camp.

    "We have dealt with half of the army on the western front. The giant''s camp on the west is now very much in a troublesome state. They don''t have enough manpower to go against you."

    Sam just gave those words to themander in charge. Then he turned to Mitra and said.

    "You give the remaining details. I need to go and rx a bit."

    He left the tent without waiting for anyone else''s reply and went back to his assigned tent. Heid down on the bed and stretched his bodyzily as he truly tried to rx.

    Mitra gave out the details in the meeting room.

    Of course, not all the details about how they dealt with them, just that they dealt with them. The number of giants that were killed by them and other stuff.

    "How did you guys do it? You kind of skipped over it."

    "It is not for me to say. That guy did it."

    "Alone? By himself?"

    "Yes."

    "You must have seen it by his side? Don''t tell me, you had your fucking eyes closed the whole time. What weapon does he have that he can deal with so many people at the same time?"

    "As I said, it is not for me to say. If you really want to know, you can go ahead and ask him. In fact, even though I have seen it with my own eyes, I can''t even begin to understand what happened there."

    The elders tried to pressure him and get him to release some more details. But Mitra didn''t budge.

    "Sam has a suggestion for you guys."

    "What is it?"

    "He said that we should focus all of our efforts on the Eastern side for now."

    "Eastern side? I know that based on the situation it looks like we should focus there, but the problem is the forest on the eastern side is much more vast and dense. We confirmed that we are facing the same issue there as we are facing on the western side.

    It might be hard for us to deal with them particrly with the rear still upied by the giants.

    I think we need to deal with the giants on the western front. That way, we could expand to the rear and have more breathing space to fight with the eastern side."

    Themander in chief said after some thinking.

    "I know that you will think that way. But to defeat people on either side, the forest should be dealt with and Sam said he will be able to do that if you focus on the Eastern front."

    "And how is he going to do that?"

    "Once again, it is not for me to say. Just fight a battle of attrition on the Eastern Side. Try to destroy the forest, give the giants some trouble. Just leave the western side alone.

    Anyway, those guys wouldn''t make a move with that many people lost."

    With that, Mitra left.

    After that, both Sam and Mitra left the camp and went to the western forest.

    "So, what is our n next?"

    "I left some things in the soil all over the western side, including the giant''s camp. It is time to put them to use again."

    "Is it going to be another giant machine and formation that creates destruction?"

    "No, not exactly. This time we are going much more natural."

    "How?"

    "You will see."

    Sam and Mitra walked to the edge of the forest.

    He gathered wood elemental divine energy at his finger tips and snapped his fingers.

    *SNAP*

    The energy moved in a wave and hit the whole forest. It is not much and there is no way in hell that it could destroy anything. But the wave of wood elemental energy created a small reaction throughout the forest.

    Many glowing dots appeared in the whole forest. Grass started shooting out and soon they turned into vines.

    The vines spread towards the nearest trees. The trees started glowing with wood elemental energy and their color seemed to have changed. They looked almost same as before the vines intersected with them, but there is a very unnoticeable different in the color of its leaves.

    Sam closed his eyes as he felt the whole transformation happen.

    "It is happening. Let''s get in."

    Sam said as he walked forward. The trees started bending to the side, clearing the way for him. Mitra was stunned as he looked at the sudden change.

    They walked to the middle of the forest where the vines coiled together to create two chairs. Sam sat on onefortably, while Mitra felt a bit troubled. He is still afraid of these forests based on how they managed to corner so many humans.

    "Don''t worry. For now the forest is mine. Nothing will happen to you."

    Mitra hesitantly sat down.

    Sam poured some vine for both of them.

    "How are you doing? It hasn''t been that long, but it feels like a long time."

    Sam suddenly spoke. Mitra looked around in confusion.

    At that moment, a vine not too far away from them coiled and turned in to a face of a woman, Mitra didn''t recognize. But Sam sure did.

    "Not too bad, until you showed up. Asshole."

    Noah cursed coldly.

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "Come on, you were doing great. I remember seeing your mission, I am pretty sure you are way over three fourth of the mission target. You wouldn''t have a hard time finishing it even with my interference."

    "Of course, I won''t have a hard time, but it will waste a lot of my time. Why do you have to do this?"

    "My mission is a bit straightforward, but it is a game of numbers. If I want to achieve it, I kind of have to disrupt every battlefield on the. Couldn''t help it."

    "It seems like you are doing well then. You fucked up the whole western front that I painstakingly worked on. What is your next n? And who is that guy? His mouth is wide open for way too long."

 Chapter 1890: Compromise

    "This guy is Mitra, the prodigy and elite of the human camp on this."

    Sam introduced Mitra to Noah and then turned to him.

    "That is Noah, a friend from back home."

    Mitra finally came to his senses and his aura raged.

    "She is the one controlling the forest?"

    "Yeah." Sam answered calmly.

    He got ready to attack her, but the vines of the chair coiled all over his body and bound him.

    "Don''t make any unnecessary moves. It would be hard for me to save you if she is really hell bent on killing you. Even if she forgives you on my ount, there is a guy called Kumar who will shove a spear up your ass.

    I would have a hard time stopping him because the whole situation will be so amusing for me."

    Mitra looked at Sam coldly.

    He is really not in a mood to joke around. He is very angry.

    "Sam, she killed our people."

    Sam looked at him and sighed.

    "I should have known that you would be like this. I know she killed your people. But just sit back and listen for now. Because she is the key to stop this useless massacre on your side.

    Do you want listen in or not?"

    "If she is your friend and on the same level, I can just kill her and the massacre will end on its own."

    "Yeah sure. Just a quick question, how are you nning to do that?

    That face is not her real body, you don''t even know where her real body is. Even if use all your might and destroy the forest, she would have already escaped by them. And she will start the whole thing in a new forest and more people will continue to die.

    That too assuming that you would be able to do anything to that forest.

    Just listen to me. I am starting to think, bringing you here is a fucking mistake."

    Mitra finally calmed down, but he still couldn''t stop ring at Noah.

    Noah on the other hand chuckled as she looked at Sam.

    "It seems like you like this guy. I have never seen you so impatient. Even Philip wouldn''t have made you exin yourself this much."

    "Of course, he wouldn''t. He would just do whatever I tell him to. That guy will just annoy me for the sake of it, not because he couldn''t follow what I tell him to do.

    Anyway, if what I know is true, your final goal of the mission is not exactly to kill humans, right? It should be helping giants upy the territory of humans and the major part of it should be here."

    "Yeah, you got that right."

    "Based on my estimation, you already gained a lot of territory here, just from the eastern front. I think you can move to a different ce now."

    "But you would just take it back as soon as I left."

    "That is none of your business. You mission is only to get the territory, not to keep it safe. Keeping it safe is the giants'' job. If someone justes along and takes it away from them, it is their problem."

    "So, you just want me to leave from here? What if your spection is wrong?"

    "That is what my next n is about. First, withdraw all of your influence from the western front forest. I will take over and attack the giants on the west. I will take the territory back and hand it over to humans.

    You can check on your mission status and see if it is reduced from your progress and if it did, we can go for a different solution."

    Noah was silent for a while.

    "You are fucking annoying. Why don''t you just mind your own business instead of meddling with mine? Because of you, my mission is going to be dyed for who knows how long. You owe me for this."

    "Alright, alright, I owe you for this."

    "So, what exactly is your mission? Is it just kill count?"

    "Yeah."

    "Oh, I thought you would take that mission of information exchange between the four races. Being a double agent for both invaders and defenders. I thought that would be more to your style."

    "Nah, I gave it to someone else."

    "Who?"

    "Dayus."

    "Pfft¡­ Hahahah¡­"

    Noah startedughing and didn''t stop for three minutes.

    "I really want to see his face right now. Do you think they are here?"

    "I don''t know. From the information I gathered you are the only one that came after I am done."

    "Anyway, contact me after you are done here. If what you said, works I will just leave from this ce and go to the five cities.

    But as I said, it is very tough over there because of all the shit you stirred. It will take a lot of time."

    "You are way head of others. You might even finish this mission before me. With your stupid ability, it is almost cheating."

    "You are the one to talk. Bye."

    Noah left after that.

    Mitra finally couldn''t hold back and was about to run his mouth at Sam, but Sam already beat him to it.

    "Mitra, I know that you are patriotic and all that, but let me tell you something, do you know why this war was even happening? Why was your which was isted from the others for such a long time, suddenly have so many wormholes allowing the invaders toe here?

    How did invaders find out at the same time? After all, there are three races and they live separately. It is not like they are all that cordial with each other?

    Have you ever even thought about it?"

    Mitra was stumped. Of course, he thought about it, but when he realized he can''t figure out the answer, he let it go. It didn''t even take five minutes for him to do that.

    "This war is all a game for someone high up. The gods that you worship so dearly, have used you guys as pawns in their game.

    And when I say game, I am not being metaphorical, I am beingpletely honest, this is all just a game and Noah and I are the yers in it, and we are not the only ones.

    You are getting angry at her for killing you guys, but in a way, for her you are all just numbers. After all, even your god doesn''t care about you and used you all up entertainment, why would we care? Partcrly, when our lives are being held hostage by the same gods?

    No matter how angry you are at her, you will not be able to take any revenge. Even if you get a chance, you will fail.

    You are a great guy and you are loyal too. That is why I am showing you the ugly and the true side of this war."

    "So, when you said you are on a mission, it is a mission of killing the invaders?"

    "Yes, all I have to do is kill a certain number of invaders to pass."

    "So, you are not here to help us out?"

    "No, that is not my goal. My goal was to kill the invaders and it would be fulfilled faster if I tied up with the armies of this. That is all I have done.

    Of course, in the process I did help you guys fight the invaders. I guess it is an added bonus for you."

    "How can I trust what you say? Why would the gods that we worshipped all our lives, the same gods that looked after us for so long do something like this? Why should I take your words over the gods."

    "That is up to you. But I haven''t lied to you until now.

    The only lie I have ever told you is that I live in a forest like a hermit. Instead, I live in a city that is built solely to cater my needs and likes.

    Anyway, it is up to you, if you want stick around, if you want to go back to the camp and tell them what you have seen here, that is fine by me too. But this is the only way for you to stop the useless deaths of your camp members in this area.

    Noah is going to listen to me, and only me. It would take a few lifetimes for you guys to go against her."

    Mitra didn''t know what to say, he just slumped into the chair and started thinking.

    Meanwhile, Sam sat in his chair and made his move.

    First thing he did is, grow the forest on the other side of the giant camp.

    The giants were shocked when they saw the rapid growth of the trees. They would be surrounded by the forest at this point.

    They held a meeting once again.

    "What do you think this means? What should we do?"

 Chapter 1891: To the Demons

    "I think we should just stay here. Forest has always been protecting us after all.

    This might be the forest trying to aid us because we lost a lot of people all of a sudden."

    One of them said their opinion. He had a hopeful look on his face, but his voice is not that confident. After all, getting confined by something like that is not exactly a good feeling.

    And the bad feelings he and the rest of the giants felt came true, when the forest started indiscriminatingly attacking the people in the camp. All the troops started battling the trees, but just like how humans were helpless against them, the giants were also helpless against these trees.

    They felt cornered and exhausted and as the battle went on until the evening, not a single person was left with enough energy tounch an attack.

    Sam and Mitra just walked into camp to deal with them.

    Just like that, the western front was cleared and the humans were back to being in charge there.

    That night, Sam got a message delivered to him by Noah.

    ''The n worked very well. It didn''t have any problem. I am moving to the five cities. You can take care of the Eastern Front now.''

    Those are the contents of the message.

    Sam smiled at this. This will save him a lot of time.

    "Tell the camp to finish organizing the western front. They can upy and fortify their defenses there. We are moving to the eastern front from now on."

    "What are we going to do on the eastern front?"

    "We are not going to drag it out. I spent enough time dealing with Giants, I am about to move to the Demon side of the war. So, we will just finish off the eastern front immediately. I don''t have many things to test here.

    Once I am done with the war, I have a shit ton of things to experiment with. I have a lot of new research ideas."

    "Alright. Let''s get this over with. I need a break from this war."

    Mitra said and got on his beast.

    Sam just shrugged and followed him. After the meeting with Noah, Mitra is not exactly in the best of his moods.

    He didn''t have any reason to not believe in Sam. After all, Sam has been straight with him since day 1. But to think that the gods they worshipped and believed wholeheartedly in would just use them like some pawns is something he is unable to digest.

    All of a sudden, the whole war seemed pointless and when he thought of all the humans that died in front of him. Trying to protect their honor, territory and glory, and to this all of this is not worth anything to the gods that they worshipped all their lives, is unsettling to say the least.

    Sam understood his situation.

    So, he didn''t pressure him too much.

    He also felt like he shouldn''t have opened it all up to Mitra when he saw him, but in his opinion bitter truth is better than a sweet lie.

    After all, if someone is really putting their life on a line, it is better to know what they are giving up their life for and make that decision.

    Sam moved to the eastern front and this time, he didn''t bother ying cat and mouse. The eastern front is a lot more advantageous to the giants than the western front, so he had to kill a few people in the front lines, to hinder their advance a bit.

    Then for the next day, Sam spread some very dangerous traps with the new technique that he used on the western front.

    Of course, the eastern front that was already on the backfoot since the time they learned about the attack on the western front and itsplete extermination, was caught off guard by this.

    They should have expected that something like this would happen, but they were still a few stepsgging behind.

    They could brace for the impact.

    Sam''s attacks were a lot more aggressive as conquered the front lines bit by bit and pushed forwards the camp on the Eastern Front.

    While things are like that, the Giants are unable to understand what the hell is happening.

    They didn''t know why their western front disappeared all of a sudden and they certainly didn''t understand what is causing losses.

    But before they knew it, after creating all that chaos Sam already went to their rear.

    The next thing they knew, attacks are falling off of their camp from all the directions. Sam didn''t use most of his normal tricks. All he did was using his puppets and new amplification techniques.

    Mitra watched with his mouth wide open as Sam didn''t even have to face a single giant directly face to face and fight with them.

    In thefort of his cave, Samunched an attack that is so big and so disastrous that the main leader of the Giant''s invasion that was initially at the five cities had toe back here to defend against them.

    Unless that overwhelming level of force was involved, they are unable to block his attacks.

    Sam used his crystal tablet to control everything. It is almost like he is ying a video game. He just let himself lose and let the world around him see the destruction he could cause.

    Sam was done with the Giants on the third day and he got ready to leave the area and go to the Demons side.

    "Why are rushing it all of a sudden? If you had this power, you could have finished this war as soon as you came here? Why did you goof around so much and now you are willing to show your hand?"

    "It is pretty simple actually. I just wanted to test myself at the start and I had a lot of time before the fellow yers came here to do their missions.

    Now, I came across Noah and I have seen her mission progress. She is on my heels. I need to widen the gap."

    "Just how many yers are there?"

    "Seven including myself."

    "And all their missions include messing with this war."

    "Of course, as I said, the whole war was created just to give us these missions."

    "I suddenly have a slight urge to kill you. But I know I shouldn''t me you for this."

    "You can try, I don''t mind. But do remember, that the bacsh is going to be absolute menace.

    Anyway, I need to keep the lead between me and the rest of the yers. I don''t know exactly when they are going to be here and when they are going to catch up, but I need to get out of here as soon as possible."

    "I already gave a rmendation to you. When you go to the humans on the South side, you can meet the guy named Lunic. He has the same status as me. He should be able to give you the information needed on the demons."

    "Thank you for doing that. But I don''t know if I am going to join the army again. The first two times, I joined is because I need the corpses of the giants, Lycans and the demons. It would be a lot easier for you guys to collect them from all the battlefields and it would give me a lot of numbers.

    But now that I am in a rush, I will do the work by myself first. I will just go ahead and hunt the Demons.

    The only thing I might need help with is that the army can the y the role of distractors while I do the harvesting of lives.

    Still, I will meet him and figure the stuff out.

    Thanks for yourpany.

    As much as you stupid mouth gets on my nerves, I really enjoyed my stay with you. Just talk less and you would be great."

    "You talk more and you would have more friends."

    "I already have all the friends I need. Good Bye."

    Sam took off immediately.

    He reached the location that was previously mentioned and he met with Lunic, his contact in the camp against the Demons.

    "Hello, I heard a lot about you from Mitra, even the people facing Lycans have nothing but praises for you. It is really nice meeting you."

    "Nice to meet you too, Lunic."

    "I will be honest with you, there would be some trouble for me to get you in as the member of our camp. We already got the information from the other two camps. You are stealing too much credit.

    As much as the whole war is a disaster and I strongly agree that the credit must not be the primary thing for the humans to focus about, but the problem is, our camp is having it a bit easierpared to the other two camps.

    So, everyone is very much focused on the credit and you being here, is an obstacle to a lot of people."

    Sam just smiled and took out his handgun. He aimed at a certain person standing a bit away from both of them.

    "He is your personal guard?"

    "Yes, a good friend too."

    *BANG*

    A bullet flew right through the forehead of the guy, Lunic''s aura raged and he was ready to attack Sam, but the next second, he saw his guard''s body glowing and then transforming. A humanoid figure was revealed, but it is nowhere near human.

    It gas grey skinned body and looked an awful lot like a man.

    "As far as I am concerned Lunic, your camp is on verge of copse. You don''t even know the full extent of the capabilities of what you are facing here.

    You might know this already, but the demons you are facing are Shape Shifters and have invaded your camp deeper than you can even imagine."

 Chapter 1892: Stirring the Pot

    Sam''s disy stunned Lunic.

    He didn''t even get a chance to fully digest the situation before Sam continued speaking.

    "Look, even I have never dealt with Shapeshifters before. It is hard, particrly when they can imitate your aura, spiritual energy, and even cultivation techniques for a small extent when they have a high level of cultivation and bloodline purity.

    But what I have is a good eyes and good nose.

    Not even the whole camp and even your leader would be able to spot a really high-level shapeshifting demon that is right in front of him.

    In fact, he might have even interacted with a few without even knowing until now.

    I am not going to help you fight off these creatures and I need only one thing from you guys.

    You can help me if you want, but if you don''t want anything to do with me, just don''t get in my way. I will be killing the demons and once I am done with Demons to a certain number, I will just leave. That is the deal I am willing to make.

    In return, I want the demon corpses."

    "I heard that you are requesting for corpses on all fronts. We even shipped arge batch to the Lycans'' side when you were there. Why do you them all for?"

    "I have my uses. I would not like to disclose that information. Are you up for the deal? If you are, please let me know as soon as possible. I am going to start working either way.

    But if we are working together, at least you would have an idea on what is going on and where you should put your heads."

    Sam didn''t wait for his reply, he just left.

    He dove into the forest, but on the way, he turned around and shot another guard that came with Lunic. That guy also fell and transformed into a demon, to his original form.

    Lunic looked at the demons thatid down and gulped hard. This is very scary.

    In the past few days, he has been indulging all his secrets, battle ns, strategies to get more credit, all of these important things within his guard.

    If that guy has sessfully sent the information to his camp, he could only imagine what kind of cmity he has brought up on himself.

    Meanwhile, Sam just casually traveled through the forest. His puppets and shadow mice are working at a pace that was never seen before. He is getting information updated to him at real-time. He is very focused and all he could think of is how to finish this off faster.

    As soon as he got the notice that a squad is nearby, he didn''t hesitate and took a turn.

    He scouted a bit, then took up a vantage point and aimed his sniper rifle.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG* *BOOM*

    For the people on his level or just one level higher, he doesn''t have to worry. He can just kill them with one bullet, for people stronger than that, all he needed was a bullet that has an explosive effect of the Divine energy.

    A squad was taken care of just like that twenty minutes.

    He collected the bodies, gathered information from their memories and used their emergency help signal to call for people.

    He set up a formation trap that uses the amplification and resonance effect.

    He hid and when a few more demons came there, he just used another destabilized divine energy bullet on the formation.

    *BOOM*

    The new squad was notpletely dead, but a lot of them are and the remaining few were injured severely to the point a ten year old could kill them.

    Sam came forward once again and killed them off, cleaned the bodies and sent multiple emergency signal. This time, he sent the signal from half of the squad members''munication tokens.

    Just to increase the state of emergency and make the camp feel a bit more anxious.

    This time, the camp didn''t immediately send another squad after them, instead a meeting was held and they discussed what might be happening. They came to a decision to send an elite squad but not immediately.

    Instead, messages were sent to their spies on the human camp.

    Luckily, Sam already killed the demons disguised as humans beside Lunic and thus his presence is not yet known to the rest of the camp.

    Lunic is also smart enough to not just go ahead and publicize the matter. So, the remaining spies didn''t get the information.

    One of the spies that is currently holding a leadership position within the camp, led the squad to the area where the emergency signale from.

    Sam was very much surprised.

    He recognized the leader to be a demon immediately. He thought for a moment as to think what could be the reason that demons sent this guy here, but the next second he understood.

    Before they could evenpletely surround the trap area Sam set up, the Elite Squad of the demons attacked this squad led by this guy.

    They killed a couple of human soldiers and captured the rest of them along with the demon spy.

    Now they are all prisoners.

    While Sam was still hidden, his shadow mouse gathered some information.

    The Elite Squad captain of the Demons, contacted the human camp from themunication tokens of the Humans. His message is very simple.

    "Your trainee squad of the young masters is currently captured."

    They didn''t give out any other message. They just took the soldiers and hid.

    Sam was surprised. It seems like the demonic spy not just infiltrated the area, but he also managed to get into the position of a squad that is solely designed to babysit and teach the young masters of the human camp.

    Now that squad is in the hands of the demons.

    A meeting was held in the human camp this time.

    The people who had their sons in that squad, immediately demanded the whole meeting to investigate what happened and how their sons were dragged into this.

    The spies from the side egged everyone on to get the information out. Basically, they want to know the information about who attacked their squads and who sent the emergency signals. It seems like they didn''t take the bait a second time.

    Lunic was surprised. He knew for a fact that there is no order or a mission to attack in the area where the attack actually happened. He suddenly remembered Sam and felt that he is the most likely suspect for this.

    When he saw the enthusiasm of so many people to reveal and abort whatever mission that was going on there, he shook his head in exhaustion.

    The meeting went on for a long time, but before they could evene to a conclusion a new message came to one of the elders.

    "Father, someone came to our rescue, the demons are dead, but they already sent emergency signals, please send someone to save us. This guy is not listening to our demands."

    One of the spoiled brats that was captured sent a message like this.

    Sam made a move while these people are in a serious discussion about whether they should save their own kids.

    He just attacked the squad and finished them off one by one. It is just that he couldn''t just kill them with a single move like before.

    He let the kids go and told them to fuck off the camp. But they demanded that he escorted them.

    He really wanted to kick their asses, but he controlled his urge and let them. But the problem is, the way he led these brats is actually not the direction of the human camp. They went deeper into the forest and at the same time a message was sent to the higher leaders of the demon camp about how these kids are in the forest right now.

    He also made sure that he mentioned about their exact status to them.

    Now, the demon camp is once again riled up. When a squad came to attack, Sam protected the kids from the dark, but he made sure that they are all split up. He used the chance to send their locations to the camp and lured more people out.

    He also sent the message to the human camp stating that the kids tried to run off in different directions during an ambush and right now a bunch of them are captured by different demon factions.

    The whole thing became a mess.

    Sam''s actions lured out more and more demons from the camps and he used that as leverage to not only kill the demons but also to derive more action from the human camp.

    In just one day, the war that was not so active became as active as an erupting volcano and Sam reaped lives like he is a farmer harvesting wheat.

    The demons lost one after another and that was just the beginning. For the next week, Sam used every trick in his book to deal with them and showed them what despair is like.

 Chapter 1893: Against Nature

    Three dayster.

    Sam is hovering in the sky on harbinger as he looked at the destruction he has caused. Right now, the demon camp is being raided by the humans. But these humans are unable to find a demon that could put up a fight with them.

    He crippled a lot of the demons and killed even more of them.

    He looked at the wrist screen. He only needs one kill to leave this and move on to the next mission.

    He aimed his sniper and killed a demon, before turning around and disappearing in thin air.

    He reappeared at the forest where he first appeared on the. As he appeared there, he saw another spatial fluctuation. He was surprised by it and looked at the spot.

    Dayus just appeared and he was shocked to see Sam. He immediately got into a fighting stance and his lightning energy raged.

    "Hold your horses dude. I don''t have any intention of kicking your ass now."

    Sam said as he sent signals for all the beasts. Now that the mission isplete, it is time to leave and the beasts that were in thes of the three races are nowing back.

    "What the fuck are you doing here? What are you nning?"

    Dayus asked as he looked at Sam vigntly. Sam is confused for a second before he realized what Dayus is saying.

    "You don''t believe that I am waiting for you here, are you? Get over yourself dude. I am not that focused on you."

    Dayus is still vignt, he didn''t want to believe Sam. But Sam just shook his head and said.

    "I could kick your ass in my sleep while still dreaming about my next invention. Why would I have toy in ambush?"

    "Then why the fuck are you here? You should be in the middle of the mission."

    Sam didn''t answer.

    With a spatial fluctuation, Yanuw appeared. He looked at Dayus and locked his aura on him.

    "Okay okay,e on. Just leave him be."

    Sam said with a smile and just sent him into the divine dimension.

    Dayus wanted to say something, but he was interfered by the beastsing one after another.

    After everyone came back, Sam smiled and looked at Dayus.

    "That''s why I am here. This is my rendezvous. And if I were you, I wouldn''t waste any time and get the fuck out of this ce to finish the mission as soon as possible."

    As he said, a light beam covered Sam and took him away from that spot. Sam grinned and showed his middle finger to Dayus before disappearing.

    Then only did Dayus understand what Sam was doing there.

    He finished his mission here.

    He was horrified by this more than the thought of Sam ambushing him. He is already pissed that he is one of thest people to finish the first mission and proceed to the second mission. Now, Sam even managed to go to the third mission while he just got to the second.

    This made him feel terrified and exasperated at the same time.

    Meanwhile.

    Sam appeared in an empty room. Karthikeya is standing there once again.

    "You are slower than I thought."

    Karthikeya greeted Sam with a smile.

    "I didn''t know you had such great expectations of me."

    "Of course, you singlehandedly messed up the whole game. Because of you, we had to change the n multiple times. Do you know, the game progress is almost a decade faster than the estimated time?"

    "I guess I am doing quite well then."

    "Anyway, great job with the second mission. Youpleted it wlessly. I don''t have anything to say about that. But may I ask? Why did you collect so many corpses of these three species?

    I know you like researching and stuff, by why do you need so many of those corpses? It goes way beyond what is required for research."

    Sam didn''t speak for a moment and just looked at Karthikeya.

    "It is fine if you don''t want to tell me, I was just curious that is all."

    "It is hard to exin. I think it will be better for you to witness what I am going to do with them after a while. It would be a pleasant surprise to everyone that is in the know of the situation."

    "Looking forward to it. Now, shall we talk about your reward for finishing first again before talking about the third mission."

    "That would be great. What is the reward?"

    "You can decide what it is. Just ask me what you want, as long as its worth doesn''t exceed my expectations, I will give it to you."

    "Good to know. I would like Elemental hearts."

    Karthikeya was stumped.

    "You really are full of surprises aren''t you? You already have five elemental hearts. Those things were not even meant to be rted to your mission, but you still extracted them anyway, now you are asking for more?"

    "I have more than five beasts. I need one for each of them."

    Karthikeya thought for a moment and said.

    "I can give you elemental hearts, but not many. The reward can only afford you two of them. If you want them, then they are yours."

    "That is fine. I will dly ept."

    "Then, on to your third mission. This time, you wouldn''t have a significant advantagepared to the rest of the participants even though you came first.

    Because the mission for the third mission is same for everyone of the yers. And ordingly the mission would be impossible toplete with perfection. So, your rewards will be multiplied based on the ranking you achieved in the second mission.

    You are the first of the seven people.

    So, your reward from the third mission will be multiplied by seven times. That is the benefit you get for your third mission."

    Karthikeya paused just in case Sam had any questions, but he didn''t. So, he continued.

    "As for the third mission, it wouldn''t be war within a, nor would it be a war between differents, it is also not a war within realms, which it should have originally been.

    But rather, it is war with the nature."

    Sam was stunned.

    "War with nature?"

    "It is notpletely nature perse, but rather it is against the gods.

    You will be sent to a where people are going to be judged by gods and face their wrath. There are sevens and each will be handled by different group of gods.

    And these gods will create ten disasters to the people in that using the forces of nature. A lot of people are going to die and your job is to interfere in it and try your best to save as many people as you can."

    Sam''s mouth was wide open.

    "You are not kidding me right? You want me to battle against the forces of nature? And how would I even know what kind of disasters will strike when?

    This is going to be a very tough challenge."

    Sam said as he went into a deep thought. His brain is operating at a terrifyingly high speed as he got a grip on himself.

    "Don''t think too much. Of course, since you are fighting the natural forces as your enemies, we have to give at least some information.

    So, you will get the information on where the disaster will strike and when it will strike. But you wouldn''t get the information on what the disaster will be.

    You have to fight against it. Of course, you wouldn''t be able to seed a hundred percent as the disaster area and size itself would be very broad. After the ten disasters are over, your mission will be finished."

    After exining a few minor details, Sam was transported to the next location.

    He appeared within a ruined temple.

    He looked at Karthikeya''s statue once again. This one is a bit tattered and ragged. It is standing the test of time and has worn out a lotpared to the previous two.

    He came out of the temple and all he could see is an old city was inplete ruins. Unlike before, it seems like the temple is not some hidden one. Here it is right in the middle of the city but the only thing is the city is destroyed.

    Sam took off on the harbinger as he tried to get out of this ce.

    He already got a vision of where the first disaster is going to be.

    He didn''t find any obstacles and reached the destination in a short while.

    It is a very well built city and it has a lot of trade going on. As soon as Sam arrived there, he could almost guess, what the disaster is going to be rted to.

    Because the city is on a sea shore. The beach is practically connected to the city without any walls or barricades.

    Sam sighed as he looked at this before flying towards the city.

 Chapter 1894: Young Master Makar

    Sam entered the city and looked around.

    As usual, he sent the shadow mice around to get a sniff at the things that are happening around him. At the same time, he checked out various bars and restaurants throughout the day. He must say that he is a bit disappointed with the city itself.

    The base defense of the city is not remarkable in any way.

    He reckoned that a student from his academy would be able to design a formation better than this.

    It is not that the quality or theplexity of the formation is bad, but the purpose of the formation itself is not that great. Sam could think of a million ways to bypass the formationpletely to achieve the goals he wanted.

    Judging by the looks of it, things will not be easy with this ce.

    He could only grit his teeth and continue.

    In fact, Karthikeya already warned him about this ce. He gave a brief introduction on how the level of technology and the basic power hierarchy of the operates on this.

    After all, the first disaster wouldn''t take long to appear and the rest will follow pretty quickly. Sam wouldn''t have enough time to gather the necessary information to react.

    But the situation here is worse than he had initially imagined.

    Of course, even with a situation like this, there is a reason why he picked this ce.

    The natural disasters of this round are caused by gods and this is chosen by the Olympus as their yground.

    So, there is no way, Sam would let this chance to go to tear a new one in the ns of Olympus.

    That is why, these guys got lucky.

    Particrly, when Sam thought of the options that he actually gave up on, these people are way too lucky to have him.

    Sam got the information he needed and decided to approach someone with good enough authority. After contemting for a while, he narrowed down to a young master of the ruling authority of the city.

    It is controlled by a n and that n''s next in line young master seemed like a safe choice.

    That guy is very greedy and he is always trying to solidify his position and make sure that there is nopetition from his brothers and cousins. Sam easily found out where that guy is with the shadow mice.

    He is currently entertaining some guests within the best restaurant of the city.

    They are here to discuss a trade deal.

    Sam decided to use the most basic method to gather his attention.

    He went to one of the costliest private rooms and said just one thing to the waiter.

    "I want all of your costly liquor and food. Send that to every table and every private room and keep on sending it until you arepletely out of your stock."

    The waiter was stunned. He didn''t even know what to say. But he is smart enough to not ridicule Sam directly. Even if it is unlikely that someone could afford that much, but if by any miniscule chance that they did, things would be very bad for him.

    So, he decided to just silently go to their manager and told him about the order.

    Within five minutes, the manager to came to Sam''s room.

    Sam smiled and said.

    "Nice to meet you. You must be the manager."

    "Yes Sir. I heard that you ced a huge order."

    "Yeah of course."

    "I am afraid, that we might need the payment upfront for this Sir. It is way too big for us to serve first and take the paymentter."

    "Oh, Ipletely understand."

    Sam just took out a spatial ring and tossed it to him.

    The manager looked into the ring and was delighted when he saw the heaps and heaps of spirit stones. On top of all those heaps, he saw something that confused him a bit.

    A crystal jar.

    "That is a small gift from my side. Have a taste ande back. I am sure you would like it."

    The manager smiled and walked out of the room. He is still confused and with that confusion, he took out the jar and took a sip. He was shocked. He didn''t even waste a second to go back and see Sam.

    "This is amazing¡­."

    Just like that, Sam managed to hold a conversation about the wine and it obviously led to the owner asking Sam to sell it. Sam of course is willing to do that, but he doesn''t need money.

    "I don''t need money. As you can see, it is just a number to me."

    "Then what do you need?"

    The manager asked.

    "I need a meeting, with the young master of the Makar n. Not just any young master, but the next in line young master that has enough authority to make high level decisions."

    The manager was initially a bit worried when Sam said he doesn''t need money, but now he was ecstatic. He might not be able to do a lot of things, but getting a meeting with that young master is something he can do easily.

    That is also one of the reasons Sam picked this restaurant. Shadow mice picked up the fact that this guy is a bit connected to the young master and he is offering the service to connect meetings with various young masters of the n to someone when the mice caught the whiff of it.

    The manager grinned wildly and made the deal.

    Sam sighed in relief. Spirit stones is not a factor for him. He can just give up as many as he can. And the recipe for a wine is even less important. The Dusk doesn''tck this one thing and it is not going to take away from the money making ability of Dusk.

    An hourter.

    Sam is sitting inside the meeting room along with the young master.

    "Nice to meet you. My name is Sam."

    "Hello, Nice to meet you too. You can called Makar Junior. I heard that you paid quite a price just to get a meeting with me. What is it that you are after?"

    "I have something to sell, I was wondering if you are into buying it."

    "Sell something to me? I might have a reputation of a big spender Sam, but I don''t buy just anything that stares in my face.

    If it is anything less than the wine recipe that you gave out, I might not even be interested in a conversation about it, much less buying."

    "Of course, I can understand. But I am sure, whatever that I am giving to you will be much more valuable than the recipe."

    "So, what is it?"

    "A formation."

    Sam said as he took out a mini holographic projection formation that created an image of the city.

    "This is the current model of the city. Don''t get me wrong, the defense of the city is actually quite strong, but I believe it can be stronger.

    If my guess is not wrong, the formation of the city is made to use the vast amount of water elemental energy thates out of the sea. And it instead of purely blocking the attacks, the formation is designed to deflect the attacks.

    But I have a way to enhance the defense even better."

    Sam paused an waved his hand, a few more nodes appeared on the virtual projection and Sam''s new formation model was created.

    It is clearly visible and Sam started demonstrating all the weak points of the previous formation and the benefits of the new formation that could overe the aforementioned drawbacks.

    "That is amazing. I will dly take it. But I don''t think it will be implemented any time soon. In fact, it would be better if I keep this with myself. After I be the n head, I will definitely implement it."

    Sam sighed and said.

    "Young master Makar, I will be straight with you. I am not in short of money. All I want you to do is implement this formation and I will give it to you for free. But I want you to implement it right now.

    The work should literally start in matter of minutes. I will even help you set it up."

    "Come on Sam. You really don''t think that I would just implement just like that right? We have many things to consider before I can do that.

    First, I don''t have the authority and second even if I do have it, what is the point of making such a hasty change? The formation that was around the city for such a long time has worked well until now.

    You know the mentality of people right? Why fix something that is not broken?"

    Sam sighed. He knew that something like this might happen.

    "Thanks for the meeting."

    He packed the formation up and got ready to leave.

    "Oh Sam, where are you going?"

    "Since there is no deal, there is no point in me staying here. I have many urgent tasks to do."

 Chapter 1895: Working Together

    Sam looked at Makar Junior and he knew instantly that things are not going the way he wanted.

    It would have been a lot easier if all Sam had to do was kill this guy along with the rest of the city. Because for that, he doesn''t need the consent or cooperation of the target. But now he is here to save this asshole and for that, Sam needs his cooperation.

    "What do you want?"

    "I want that formation you are holding and the device you used to show me that formation, the recipe that you are holding and all the other magical things that you have in your hand. I need everything."

    Sam cursed himself for choosing this approach.

    This approach worked fabulously whenever he tried to kill someone. Of all the times it could have failed, it failed now.

    Sam looked at the young master and said.

    "See, I came here for a specific purpose, since it is not achieved I am leaving. But keep this in mind, in exactly three days, the whole city is going to face a disaster and I came here to prevent that.

    With your greedy ass, I am sure I won''t be able to do this in a proper way.

    So, I have to use some hard measures.

    I suggest you don''t concern yourself with what I am about to do in the next three days. You won''t be able to afford the price."

    Sam disappeared after he finished his piece.

    He has no intention of sitting back and trying to convince this guy. All he can do is think of a way to protect this ce. He reappeared in the forest and took a look at the city once again. Since it is on the seashore, he is sure that the disaster would be rted to the sea.

    The city might just drown directly, or a tsunami might hit the city. Those are the two obvious ways. But in this world, those are not the only kind of disasters that could destroy cities and civilizations.

    Or it could be a massive earthquake. With the world full of cultivators, a normal earthquake wouldn''t do much, so that could be thrown out of the window

    And, the city is adjacent to a forest too, and judging by the environment the strength of these beasts is nothing to scoff at. So, it could be a beast tide.

    Of course, then there is a chance ofbined attacksing at the city.

    Sam had to think of a contingency for all of them.

    If he had the cooperation of the city, then he would have more manpower for construction which will save him a lot of effort. But right now, he would have to squeeze himself dry until thest minute.

    The only silver lining is that the disaster is certainly not some cultivatorsing and attacking the city. Karthikeya stressed on that it would not happen. Sam decided to take a harder route, but in this case that might be the easier route.

    He sent out the insect puppets to get a better understanding of the surroundings. He already had a rough idea. After some careful examination, he found out some things that he could use to his benefit.

    Then a n slowly formted.

    The first thing he needs to do is make sure that people are stuck in the city itself. If they are spread out of the city, then Sam would have much more trouble protecting them. He has to make sure that everyone stays within the boundary of the city.

    Sam sighed and decided to use a very nasty method to do that.

    After formting a n for that, he thought of the next step, closing the city off with formation. The formation should have defensive measures to block a tsunami. If it is a tsunami that happened back on earth, then it would actually be very easy to deal with here.

    But Sam is not na?ve enough to think that would be it.

    He is sure the tsunami would be enhance with a lot of water elemental energy and since it is being controlled by the gods, the attack would much more concentrated.

    He needs to make the formation durable for both blunt attacks and sharp and concentrated attacks. The pressure of course is one of the major things that he needs to worry about.

    "If only I could convince them."

    Sam wondered if he should go back and try to talk it out with the n leader instead of the young master. But he changed his mind after half an hour.

    Shadow mice brought him the news that Sam has already be a wanted man. In fact, the news was even sent to the surrounding cities, viges and towns. He became the most wanted person of the region and the reason is that he assaulted the next in heir of the Makar n.

    The n is willing to offer any favor as a reward if they capture him.

    Sam sighed at this move.

    These guys are greedy beyond redemption.

    He just decided to go the harsh way.

    The next moment, he let the Forrest Bear out of the Divine dimension.

    "Change theyout of the forest like this."

    Sam sent an image he had in mind so that the bear could use it as a blueprint.

    The Bear nodded and left running into the forest.

    Then Sam called for Mia and Dia.

    "You two need to change the terrain''s state. It should be slow and gradual. Just change the state of the soil in general, the effects should be reflected by tomorrow at dawn."

    Mia and Dia both left into the forest as well.

    Sam then called for all the shadow mice and specters.

    "After Mia and Diay down the foundation, all of your work together on the secondyer. It should be shy and confusing, they should be overwhelmed."

    Then he pulled out Void hopper.

    "You little guy are in charge of blocking the space. Don''t goof around now. I need you to aplish the most among all the beasts. You will be in some serious punishment if you don''t do it. Understood."

    Void hopper didn''t even bother to reply to Sam, it just happily disappeared since it got freedom after a long time.

    "You should be more strict with him."

    Sam said as he looked at Yanwu that just appeared outside.

    [How is that my job? Clearly you are the one who should be doing it.]

    "I need you and Sky to be with me. You have an important task. We would make a n to deal with whateveres spontaneously."

    [Alright. What about Raiju and the Ape?]

    "Oh, they have job too."

    Sam called both of them and said.

    "I want you to go ahead and control the beasts in the forest. No matter what happens they should not attack the city. Even if they go crazy and start a beast tide, they should still be travelling away from the city. Not towards it."

    The wolf and ape looked at each other before running into the forest.

    "It has been a while since we worked like this. This is great."

    Sam said as he stretched with a smile. He took off on harbinger along with Yanwu and Sky and went towards the mountain. They decided to practice something just in case.

    Meanwhile in the forest.

    All the beasts are a bit riled up because of the presence of new auras. All of their bloodlines felt intimidated.

    Forest bear caused the mostmotion within the forest. First, he started to destroy a lot of trees, creating arge arc around the city. Of course, it is not close to the city, it is a bit deep into the forest.

    After destroying these trees, the bear started growing the trees in a certain way. In a particr order and formation that Sam has given him. While Forest bear is doing that, Dia and Mia are working on the terrain.

    Everything between the circle and the city is going to their area. Dia''s job is to make the earth loose and malleable while creating all kinds of deadly traps. Of course with the Forest Bear and Mia''s help, the traps would be much more lethal.

    After that, Mia would be responsible for using water and poison to make the soil poisonous. She is going to slowly seep the poison into the terrainpletely.

    Finally, on top of all that, the shadow energy and death energy that could corrupt everyone easily is going to be added on the top.

    They are all working in sync. Apart from the ideas Sam had, they are capable of adding their own touch to the situation. So, there is no need for Sam to worry about it at all.

    While they are working on all of this, Sam practiced with Yanwu and Sky for a while. All three of them almost destroyed the mountain. After a while, he left the two of them to practice by themselves and went to start structuring the formation.

 Chapter 1896: Sandhya

    Themotion caused by the beasts and Sam was clearly noticed by the people in the city.

    Many of the guards were dispatched to check what is happening. But to their surprise, no one was able to move past a certain distance from the city. All the merchants and travelers were also stopped. No one was able to move.

    Even if someone strong managed to take a few steps forward, they felt like they are walking through mercury and their blood and bones have increased in weight by a couple of hundred times.

    The city is effectively sealed in a way.

    Of course, the strongest person is actually not of very high cultivation. They are barely two levels away from Sam''s current cultivation. If he wants he could just kill the whole city very easily.

    Unless the leaders of the ns cane down, there is no one who could make their way out of the spatial lock, and even if they cane, they wouldn''t try toe.

    Just like Sam thought the leader of the n was very nervous.

    At that time, a shadow mouse made its way to the residence of the n leader and left a letter on his bed.

    When the n leader found out the letter, he felt a chill go down his spine. The very fact that a person just came and went from his room scared the crap out of him. He nervously looked through the letter and was even more surprised.

    "In a couple of days, your city will face a disaster and I am here to save you guys. Do not try to leave the perimeter of the city. Even if you try, you wouldn''t be able to do it at the moment. You must have already experienced the spatial lock.

    I request your cooperation.

    I genuinely wish that none of the city members will die."

    The letter''s contents scared the guy even more. He clearly remembered what Makar Junior told him that morning. He immediately called him for a meeting and showed him the letter.

    "So, you think this is that bastard''s work?" Makar Junior asked his father.

    His father nodded and said.

    "It is most likely thing. After all, he used the exact same words in this letter. Do you think he is telling the truth?"

    "What do you mean telling the truth? He is definitely bluffing to get some great price for those formations. Don''t you remember what we did when we visited a of a lower level? We used the exact same tactic.

    We used their fear to our benefit and upied the whole and exploited its resources. This bastard is trying to do the same." Makar Juniorpletely denied any possibility of Sam speaking the truth.

    If Sam heard these words, he would have just chuckled and said one sentence.

    People really do judge others by their own standards.

    The n leader felt a bit suffocated by all of these major changes happening. He gritted his teeth and said.

    "I think we need to use that token."

    Makar Junior immediately stood up and said.

    "There is no way, we are doing that. That token is mine. Only I get to benefit from it. Even if you are my father, there is no way I am letting you use it."

    The n leader looked at his son and coldly snorted.

    "Who do you think you are talking to? The very fact that the token ended up in your hands is because of me. Don''t you forget that."

    "Shut the fuck up. Who do you think you are talking to? If not for the fact that you are such an asshole, I would have had my mother by my side and Makar n would have had a great opportunity of expanding because of me.

    But you just had to show your worthless ego. You drove my mom away and this token is the only thing she left for me.

    I should have been the heir of all her power and authority, but now all I was left with were three stupid favors and I already used up two of them. There is no way I am letting you use up thest one."

    "What if the disaster is real? That bastard actually locked our city. People at your level are barely able to get into the spatial lock zone. We couldn''t even see what is on the other side of the zone at the moment.

    What do you think will happen if things progress like this?

    Even if your motheres and tries to help you with that third token, how much help can she possibly do? But if she enables you to capture this bastard you would have enough tricks and treats up your sleeve. You already said that he has things that will bring in a lot of money."

    The argument went on and on.

    If only Sam heard half the sentences they said, maybe he would have killed them off immediately.

    The usage of the B-word is way too liberal here.

    The father and son kept on arguing and finally, the father managed to convince his son.

    Makar Junior took out a token and nervously crushed it. A glowing humanoid figure appeared and an ethereal voice was heard.

    "Message."

    Junior carefully exined the whole situation and the humanoid figure disappeared. It bypassed the spatial lock and the zone Sam created around it and traveled through the horizon like a shooting star.

    Sam looked at this light beam and frowned.

    But he didn''t stop it.

    If it passed the spatial lock without triggering anything, it is most definitely not a Physical object. So, there is no need for him to bother about it too much.

    He went to the forest area and started erecting metallic pirs at various spots. Particrly at the end zones. He slowly started working on the formation.

    This is going to be ayered formation and he is going to use the energy from the energy-rich zones within the vicinity.

    There is ake deep inside the forest that has rich water elemental energy and there is a mountain that is the house of some beasts that has rich earth elemental energy. They are not mines, but natural hubs of spiritual energy.

    Sam drew power from ces like this and powered up the formation pirs. Apart from that, he also used up arge amount of liquid spiritual energy capsules.

    On each pir, he has to draw a myriad of inscriptions.

    Just like that inscribed pirs,yered formations, concentrated energy capsules,pound formations, andplex mechanisms. The specters. This is a formation that took up a lot of his own resources.

    He didn''t even spend this much when he was killing a city full of people.

    While Sam is working hard along with his beasts and the puppets, the shooting star reached a mountainous region far away from the city.

    Deep within the mountain, there is a small stone temple, ady was meditating in front of a god''s statue.

    The god is none other than Karthikeya.

    The shooting star hit her head and entered deep into her mind.

    She opened his eyes with a frown on her peaceful face.

    She stood up and came out of that dark room. She wore blue-colored long robes and had long hair that was tied up into arge bun on her head.

    "Sandhya."

    She called out in a very low but clear voice.

    A woman wearing blue-colored battle clothes came out of nowhere. She looked way younger than the woman wearing long robes, but their facial features are very simr.

    "Yes, Mother."

    "I got a message from your brother. It seems like they are facing some trouble. At least that is what they think so. I want you to go there and investigate it. Take our Elite Squad with you and utilize any assistance you need from the powers of the.

    Don''t hesitate.

    But also don''t blindly charge at the person that your brother isining about.

    These are the contents of the message that he sent me."

    She waved her hand and a spark flew out of her finger before it entered Sandhya''s mind.

    She absorbed the message and its contents before nodding.

    "Okay, Mother. I will handle the situation."

    "If what that person said was to be the truth, then invite him to the temple. Also, announce your departure before you go. It is a deal between us and the rest of the forces on the that we will not interfere.

    The three favors to your father are the only exceptions and for that, we need to throw the announcement before we leave the mountain.

    Don''t get into unnecessary conflicts as well.

    Understood?"

    "Yes, Mother. I will handle everything carefully."

    "Finally, try not to kill your father and brother. With this favor, we are done with them for good."

    This time Sandhya didn''t answer anything.

    Thedy sighed and walked back into the dark room to continue to meditate.

    Sandhya turned around and gathered her squad before sending out the announcement about her departure.

 Chapter 1897: Blocked Path

    Sandhya came down from the mountain along with her squad and she was already greeted by a young man who is wearing a luxurious robe.

    He also has a bunch of guards around him.

    "Lady Sandhya, we heard that you areing down the mountain to visit Makar''s territory to solve a problem. If you don''t mind, I would like to apany you as I am going there myself. We could help each other if needed."

    Sandhya looked at me with a hint of disdain in her eyes.

    This guy is the young master of Bali territory.

    The territory is very adjacent to the mountain. They are the first to move of course and she knew why he is there. And she also knew that this guy is not the only one that is going to be a bother to her.

    And most of all she knows why they are all going to be on her beck and call. Kissing her toes.

    Because she is the next heir of the Mountain temple. The one power that reigns over all of the and the realm that the is in. Her mother is the current head of that temple.

    Usually, the kids of the Mountain temple particrly women don''t marry or have any rtionships with the rest of the powers. The woman usually picks someone from the level of their power from a different realm.

    Whether they are marrying into their family or if that guy is marrying into the temple. But that is the norm.

    But in the previous generation. Sandhya''s mother broke the norm. Because she doesn''t have to fulfill the role of the heir as she had a brother. But because of Sandhya''s mother''s decision their family broke apart, one thing led to another, and Sandhya''s uncle died because of it.

    Now, Sandhya''s mother divorced the Makar family''s head and came back to the temple. Took the ce of the head while she was still pregnant with Sandhya.

    Sandhya and her father barely ever interacted.

    Of course, there is a reason for that.

    The only reason Makar managed to marry Sandhya''s mother is through deception and he was greedy for her power. So, when Sandhya realized it, she doesn''t want any contact him. When she realized her brother was not that different either, he was also ignored by her.

    Another reason she hates her father is that all these youngsters are after her because of the precedent he set. He is the reason for the only ck mark in the history of the temple and she would have killed him long ago if not for her mother stopping her.

    She cursed in her mind as he let the young master follow her.

    They didn''t move urgently. They actually took beast carriages as they traveled by road. And the entourage just kept on growing.

    One city after another, over eight young masters joined the convoy as they traveled together to Makar City.

    By the time they got there, it is already the next morning and they were stunned to see that the original route that was created within the forest was actually blocked with trees.

    One of the young masters who is riding a horse beast immediately came to Sandhya''s cart and said.

    "Lady Sandhya, I will check it out and see what is happening. Maybe the news that the Makar family gave is about this."

    "Thanks."

    She replied without any emotion on her face. She barely cared.

    The young master went forward with his soldiers and said.

    "Just destroy the trees and reopen the path. If someone is blocking it, they woulde by themselves."

    The guards nodded and destroyed the trees in an instant. The young master turned to the rest of the group and said.

    "Since there is no movement I will just go in and check out what is happening. If there is nothing we can just open the path and go to the Makar City."

    None of the other people objected and he just kept on cutting the path down. As he did it slowly and steadily, he walked for ten minutes. He felt like he is almost there and soon he was right as soon as cut down a few more trees, a path appeared in front of him.

    He walked out with glee. The only problem is that the grin froze as soon as he looked ahead. His guards were shocked too.

    The young master and his guards are all behind the whole convoy. They just made a whole circle and appeared behind the convoy.

    Sandhya noticed them the very second and widened her eyes in disbelief.

    She got off the carriage and walked to them.

    "What happened?"

    The young master was embarrassed and flustered.

    "W.. we went straight ahead and cut the trees. We were opening the path. But before we knew we are here and¡­"

    He turned around and the path he came from was already closed down.

    The rest of the young masters also heard this and they gulped in nervousness.

    This is spooky.

    They never experienced anything like this.

    Sandhya got on top of her carriage and looked at the forest with her eyes narrowed. She raised her hand and a tornado of water conjured at her fingertips.

    It raised tall and wide and it could be seen clearly from a mile away.

    And with a single thought, it was shot towards the forest. The water jet hit the trees and destroyed everything in front of them.

    But after the water destroyed around three hundred meters of trees, all of a sudden the trees grew like crazy. They tripled and quadrupled in their size as they blocked the water froming.

    The Forest Bear just stood behind the trees that just grew.

    The water was deflected and by the time it was all cleared, the emptied forest was already full of trees once again. The grass is back, the vines are back and all the trees are back. It is almost like nothing has happened there.

    Sandhya frowned. She raised her hand once again and wanted to attack once again. But at this moment, Sam''s voice was heard from all sides.

    "Hello, Miss. My name is Sam. I don''t know why you are here and what you are doing here. But I do know that Makars are expecting some help from someone.

    And if you and your entourage are that someone, please turn around and leave. For the next two days, the entry and exit to Makar city is closed. After two days, the path will be reopened and you can do your business as usual."

    "Why don''t youe and say it our face, you bastard."

    The young master that was tricked by Sam yelled as he held the sword.

    There was a silence for a moment and the young master yelled again.

    "What? You are scared now? You better open the path and surrender now. Or you will be fuck¡­."

    Before he could finish his piece, a massive pit emerged under his feet. He was dragged down by the vines that came from that pit it was closed.

    Sandhya and the guards jumped there immediately.

    But they werete

    They searched around. They spread their senses to the maximum, but they couldn''t just find him. Exactly three minutester, the trees on one side cleared up and the young master came out from there.

    He was ragged. His hair stood up because of the electric shocks, his bones were broken by the vines, he is purple with the poison, his body is corroded with shadow energy, half of the skin was burned.

    And on top of all that, there are more than a dozen cuts bleeding out.

    The young master was thrown in front of Sandhya.

    "The poison will leave his system in an hour, it is not lethal. But at this hour, he will not be able to heal. You cannot heal him with anything. Potions, pills, a healer.

    Just wait, heal, and leave. He will live and the rest of you will do as well."

    "What is this? Is your specialty hitting people from hidden spots? Why don''t youe face to face like he said? Or why don''t you try and take me away like you did to him?"

    A loud chuckle was heard.

    Sam couldn''t help himself.

    "Miss, I know it might be hard to believe, but I am not the one who dragged him away and he wasn''t taken away because of the provocation. He is just running his mouth too loosely and my friends couldn''t handle it.

    And trust me, if I had taken him away, your tone would have changed a few times over. Please leave, while I am still being nice."

    Sandhya frowned. The confidence and calm in Sam''s voice made her a bit hesitant. Usually, she would have just charged wherever she wanted in this. This is the very first time, she encountered a situation like this.

 Chapter 1898: Cooperation

    There is a deafening silence for a short while before Sandhya spoke up.

    "I am Sandhya, even though I don''t like to admit it, the Makar n''s leader is my father. So, I have an obligation to help him. I heard from his message that you said there is a disaster that is going to hit Makar city and you are here to save them.

    But in the process, you tried to sell them a formation, so they felt a bit suspicious about it.

    And rightfully so, if someonees and ims that there is a disaster and they can only provide the solution, you ought to be a bit suspicious."

    Sam stayed silent for a moment at this new information. He replied.

    "While most of what you said is true, the order of the information is extremely incorrect.

    I didn''t approach them with the information about the disaster, I directly approached them with the formation that could increase their odds of safety. I was ready to sell it for a cheap price and the only condition I had was that the formation has to be installed immediately.

    But your brother, Makar Junior got greedy and wanted the formation without fulfilling my condition.

    Now you are saying that he is suspicious of me?"

    Sandhya sighed as soon as she heard this.

    Even though Makar Junior is rted to her by blood, she is more willing to believe Sam''s words, because it is something that Makar would do. She thought for a couple of minutes and said.

    "Alright, let''s make a deal.

    I have enough authority on the and over the Makar n right now to make any critical decision. Since you said the disaster is going to happen in the next two days, then so be it, you don''t even have to prove it.

    I will even cooperate with you to alleviate the disaster.

    But by any chance if the disaster doesn''te. You must brace yourself for the wrath of the Mountain Temple."

    Sam was a bit stumped by her suggestion.

    He already resolved to himself that this is going to be a tough situation. But to his surprise, this woman made it easy for him. Sam is still constructing and reinforcing the formation, so he could indeed use some help.

    It felt weird to do all the grunt work by himself.

    As for whether he could trust them or not, Sam is not a bit worried.

    The zone he created for himself around the city is in hisplete control. Unless they want to experience a living hell, they wouldn''t be stupid enough to do anything like trying to stab him in the back.

    "Do you speak for all the young masters and their followers here?" Sam asked.

    "Why? Are you scared that we would do something?"

    One of the young masters asked as he couldn''t contain himself. Seeing that Sam talked instead of just dealing with them, he thought Sam was intimidated.

    Sam didn''t say anything, but just a vinended on the shoulder of the young master and he shrieked in terror as he jumped up.

    "What the fuck?"

    He cursed himself as the vine retreated.

    "I speak for them too. They followed me here and if they want to do that they would obey my rules and if they don''t do that they can go on their own way." Sandhya said,pletely ignoring the young masters.

    "Good to know. Wee."

    As Sam spoke, a path cleared out in the forest and the whole entourage soon led to arge empty patch where Sam is sitting leisurely while grilling some meat and drinking some wine.

    Forest Bear is sitting near him as it feasted on some special honey-based food that Sam concocted.

    The gigantic beast attracted the attention of the group.

    Sandhya gestured her guards to stay before she walked up to Sam.

    Sam stood up at this and the young masters are already ring at him.

    Sam ignored all of them and just smiled as he looked at Sandhya.

    "Nice to meet you. My name is Sam."

    "Sandhya."

    "Haven''t heard that name in a long time. It was prettymon in my hometown."

    The young men red at Sam fiercely. They clearly thought he was flirting with her.

    Sandhya ignored what Sam said as well as what these young men are doing, she directly asked.

    "So, what kind of disaster is going to hit the Makar n?"

    "I don''t know to be exact, but if my guess is right it should being from the sea. I have been keeping an eye on the beasts in the surroundings they are all moving in the opposite direction of the Sea, their instincts are urate most of the time."

    "Why are you so sure that a disaster would strike here?"

    "Because someone told me. And that person is way too reliable for me to just ignore."

    "Anyway, as I said I am going to help with the defense of the city, so tell me what we need to do."

    "I am building a formation that could resist all kinds of scenarios. A tsunami, an earthquake, a beast tide and even some other weird phenomenon that I could think of.

    After examining the whole terrain inside out, the tsunami is the most likely one and the second probability would be the copse of the city from under the ground. My formation should help with most of it."

    "So, can we see the blueprint?"

    "Of course, I would like to know how many people are going to involve themselves in the construction and reinforcement. Also, it would be better if I know the elemental affinities. So, that I can assign the tasks."

    "I am a water element user. I am a decent formation master as well. I have two people in my guards who are proficient in formations, one of them doesn''t have elemental affinity but the other has wood element affinity."

    "That is great.

    So, I am building aplex formation with multipleyers joined together. There are actually three formations that need to be infused with water elemental energy and two with wood elemental energy on the to-do list.

    Here is the full blueprint."

    Sam showed a small projection device that showed the blueprint.

    All the green highlighted parts are the ones that are already constructed, the yellow parts are to be constructed and the red parts mean you should leave them alone.

    I have already marked the areas where you are supposed to make the formations. The detailed blueprints for these formations are also in the same device, The buttons on the bottom can help you operate it.

    There is also a spirit infused in the device, so it will guide you through the operation.

    Just one thing though.

    The wood element formations need a lot of energy and control. The bear wille and help you guys out. He won''te in your way and you don''t get on his wrong side, everything thing should work just fine."

    Sandhya was dumbfounded.

    "That beast can do formations?" Even before she could ask, one of the young masters asked.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "That beast is smarter than a lot of people here. And it can do a lot of things that you can''t imagine. Don''t worry about its performance."

    Before Sam could even say anything else, someone already raised their hand and said out loud.

    "I would like to participate, I am good with inscriptions and formations."

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "Sure,e and grab some tasks then. Thanks for your help."

    More and more people starteding forward. Of course, they are all young masters, the guards, and entourage didn''t speak a word. They just followed their young master''s orders.

    Even if some of the young masters don''t know shit, they took advantage of their guards knowing something and imed credit for it.

    Sam didn''t care much about it. The situation is a bit dire for him and it doesn''t matter how these guys do it, as long as they help him finish this up, then he is good with it. He only had the mission on his mind.

    Sam went on to mind his own business after assigning the work, but everyone else had their minds blown. Including Sandhya who was actually quite aloof, she almost wanted to run back to Sam and ask him a load of questions.

    Even though the blueprint is very detailed and she could construct it, she knew that a lot of theories are beyond her understanding. The young masters who are knowledgeable also felt the same.

    While things are like this, the news about this situation reached Makar City.

    "What the fuck? Sandhya and entourage are helping that bastard? They are buying into his con? What the fuck is wrong with him? Is she even my real sister? How can she be so fucking stupid?"

    He yelled at his father who delivered the news.

 Chapter 1899: Annoying

    That day went by just like that.

    Everyone was busy. Sometimes the young masters came around and tried to test Sam out a bit. But he didn''t bother with them. He was way too focused on the formations. Only at midnight or so, Sam finally rxed and decided to have another meal.

    He set up his grilling equipment and got ready. At that moment, the young masters and the rest also wanted to take some rest and they were enticed by the fragranceing from Sam''s side.

    Some are contemting asking him for some food in exchange for money.

    But soon they were spooked a bit.

    Two huge figures appeared in the sky andnded on the ground raising a wave of dust.

    Sam didn''t even flinch, he just created a barrier around him and the grill as he gestured for Yanwu and Sky toe and eat.

    "Go and deliver to the rest after you are done. How is the practice going?"

    Ignoring the shocked gazes of everyone Sam just kept on talking with the beasts while feasting along with them. They were all in awe at the two majestic beasts that are dining there casually as if they are on a pic.

    Sandhya on the other hand was stunned when she saw the two majestic birds. Unlike the others she knew more about the realms outside of their own. For all these young masters here, the realm is the only world. They don''t know what the remaining world has to offer and what is out there.

    But the Mountain Temple has different level of knowledge and awareness. She knew about these beasts. She had read about the gods and the godly beasts so many times. She unconsciously walked towards Sam.

    "Please don''t disturb us. If you want some food, I will send it you, it has been a while since me and my friends had some time for ourselves."

    Sam said decisively.

    "Is that a Golden Sun Crow? And that is a Sky sovereign Roc?"

    Sam raised an eyebrow as he looked at her. He was surprised that she knew of these beasts. He expected that once he came to realms where Divine ne cultivators are prevalent, the beasts would be recognized.

    But this realm is an isted one. There is no connection with other realms.

    "They are, aren''t they?"

    "You tamed them?"

    Sam looked at her and said.

    "Don''t say tamed. As I said, they are my friends. I am not a beast tamer."

    "What do you mean friends? They are contracted to you, that means you are their owner. How did you do it? Where are you from? Do you know what level of bloodline they have? They are at the peak of this world."

    "I live with them. I am sure I know what our rtionship is better than you do. And for the same reason, I know how powerful they are.

    As I said, I don''t want you to disturb our time. I am already very pissed off that I have to work this hard to save some asshole and his city after he tried to rob me.

    You are his sister, so I don''t have that great of a rtionship with you. And I am not liking those greedy eyes over my friends. So, back off and we won''t have a problem."

    Sam''s tone is polite, but words, not so much.

    The young masters who heard the exchange immediately came forward. One of them pointed his finger at Sam and said angrily.

    "How dare you speak to her like that? Who the fuck do you think you are?"

    Sam looked at him with a frown. But he didn''t say anything.

    The remaining young masters also chimed in.

    "It is your honor that she took interest in your beasts. Why the fuck are acting so high and mighty?"

    Sam almost wanted to beat the crap out of these annoying brats.

    He looked at Sandhya and said.

    "As I said before, this territory is mine until the disaster is over. Whether you like it or not. And in my territory I will be as I like.

    I told Miss Sandhya respectfully many times to note near me and mind her own business, even that is fine because it is bearable. I don''t really give a shit about her opinion on me and my beasts.

    And I couldn''t care less about all your trying to kiss her toes. But don''t you dare try to use me as your stepping stones. Usually, from the ce I am at, I wouldn''t even bat an eye at you. Even my hate and disdain is way too much recognition for you guys.

    But I am pretty pissed off now and I will beat the crap out of anyone and everyone that disturbs me. Get lost before I lose it."

    Sam was really ready to throw hands at these people.

    He really is in a good mood because of the time he is spending with the beasts. The only problem is that he is pretty frustrated that he picked this out of pettiness against the Olympus and got stuck with wrong crowd.

    This disturbance on top of it all is thest thing he needs right now.

    But all wishes won''te true.

    At this exact moment, an annoying voice hit everyone''s ears.

    "I knew it. You fucking Bastard. How fucking dare you try to im the territory under Makar n?"

    Sam frowned and looked at Makar Junior who is standing in front of him. He was stunned by his presence. The city is under blockade and there is the danger zone of poison, shadow ring between the city and this area.

    The ess to that are is very limited. Only Sam and the Forest bear who can control the trees have it.

    Sam looked at the puppet that escorted Makar Junior and turned to Forest Bear.

    "What did you do?"

    Forest Bear who sat on his bum with a jar of honey in his hand scratched his head and grinned nervously.

    Sam understood immediately. This guy acted pitifully at the puppet that couldmunicate with the forest bear. God knows how he managed to get the information that he couldmunicate with the puppet, but Sam could specte.

    Anyway, he acted pitiful and the honest and kind bear just let him in. Now this guy is screaming at Sam, calling him one thing he shouldn''t even do.

    Sam could feel the anger brewing inside the beasts. Sam might have developed a tolerance, but the beasts don''t have such misgivings, they would fuck up everyone that is against Sam.

    Sandhya who kept on observing the beasts noticed their reaction. They are all currently locked on Makar Junior and that guy doesn''t even have the self awareness that he could be dragged away any second.

    "See my dear sister? This fucker is trying to im thend here. He has a n. He would hold the whole city hostage with these weird formations. He might even create the disaster that he is speaking of and squeeze the money out of us.

    Trust me I know of this.

    Now, not only are you not stopping him, you are even helping him. What would Mom think of this?"

    Sandhya looked at him coldly which made the Junior back down a little.

    Sam sighed jumped on Harbinger.

    "Let''s just get out of here. I can''t take this bullshit."

    All beasts levitated. Since they are of Divine ne, even beasts that are used tond can do that. They all moved in a certain direction before disappearing into the forest.

    "Stop right there, you bastard. Where do you think you are going?"

    Makar Junior was about chase him, but as soon as he levitated, he was stuck down by an invisible force that pressured him into the ground. He left an impression of himself on the soil.

    Sandhya didn''t say anything and just looked in the direction of Sam. There is a hint of fascination and interest in her eyes.

    Many young masters of course didn''t like this. One of them came forward and asked her in a low voice.

    "Lady Sandhya, what are these beasts that you were talking about? Are they really that precious?"

    "Precious? It is beyond that. The blood essence of that golden sun crow has purest of fire and light elemental energies and if even a drop of that essence was used, an Astral ne fire elemental beast would evolve both in terms of bloodline and strength.

    Its potential will double at least."

    "Are you serious? It is that powerful? Then how did it end up in the hands of that punk? Do you think he is just that lucky?"

    Sandhya didn''t answer this time. She just looked into the horizon.

    After a couple of hours, Sam came back and started the work again. The rest of the people also did the same. Due to Sandhya''s orders, no one bothered Sam anymore.

    But she bothered him more than anyone else, particrly when she made amotion everytime she saw a Sam''s beast. Raiju, golden ape, the shadow mice, Mia and Dia.

    Sam is actually shocked that she knew so much about these beasts.

 Chapter 1900: Disaster Hit

    Sam tried his best to ignore Sandhya as time for the disaster came close.

    The next day, he busied himself with all the work that he can do. Even though the formation wasplete, he didn''t dare rx. He constantly added more and more reinforcements to the formations. He even made sure that the puppets are in charge of examining the formation every second.

    Beasts are doing their duties so that the people from Makar city won''t be foolish enough toe out of the city.

    In fact because of Makar Junior''s abrupt appearance his and not returning back to the city, Makar senior had his heart dropped.

    He forcefully sent a bunch of people out of the city and made them resist and push through the zone. Apart from the spatial pressure, soon they were stung by the poison and the shadow elemental energy corrosion before they were sent back to the city.

    Everything is going smoothly.

    Even the young masters behaved better.

    At least that is what Sam thought.

    But at midnight, it is only few hours before the disaster and Sam is a bit anxious. He is hovering all over the sky as he looked in the surroundings. Yanwu and Sky are also on aerial patrol.

    Raiju and Ape are going through the forest as they tried to control the beasts. They are getting more and more out of order. Some beasts already left the ce and migrated this actually caused a lot of chaos in other cities.

    But some beasts that are too attached to the forest, but could still sense the danger that wasing at them, they are acting up.

    Even the suppression of Raiju and the ape is being a bit troublesome.

    At this moment, in the corner of the forest, Makar Junior and another young master are sitting along with the entourage.

    "I finished concocting the powder. I think we can proceed with the n."

    "Do you think our forces are enough to deal with the beasts? And what if the other young masters also wanted to get involved? After all, everyone wants my sister here, what would happen if you managed to get ahead of with this?

    Particrly when the fight drags out, it wouldn''t be pretty."

    "That is why, I am changing the n. Let''s just blow this whole thing up. Let''s drag every one of the young masters in to this.

    That asshole is definitely not a normal person. He is special and he has a lot of tricks. Unless everyone unites, we wouldn''t be able to have a hundred percent shot at dealing with him.

    Once everything is done, Sandhya will get the beasts, but of course she will see who made the most contribution in getting them and they will have better shot.

    Since you are going to participating and you are not in thepetition, you are going to support me. I will end up the winner anyway."

    Makar Junior''s eyes brightened and said.

    "That is great. If you get it on with her, then don''t forget me. You ought to repay me for this."

    "Come on, you are putting the cart before the horse. Don''t think too far ahead and stay in the moment. First, we need to gather these people first. Let''s go and work on our targets."

    Sam didn''t know that these guys are concocting something like this.

    Within an hour, these two managed to easily convince the rest and they decided to take on beast each. Their first target is the Ape. For some reason, the ape looked like the easiest target to them. Ape is not exactly violent openly.

    Its bodynguage and behavior patterns are pretty confusing if one looks at it. The ape likes to drink wine, handles the food with sophistication and gentleness.

    Even when handling the beasts, the ape was ssy to say the least.

    The only problem is that these kid didn''t see what this ape could do when it is really angry and it wouldn''t take long for them to find out.

    After twenty more minutes, Sam looked into the horizon towards the sea and he was surprised. He activated his energy vision and he could see that the water elemental energy concentration on the sea is rising rapidly.

    He could guess without using much of his brain, this is the start of the disaster.

    It is going to hit them soon.

    He got ready and gave out a voicemand.

    "Formation activate. Full on defensive mode."

    As he spoke those words, the formation around the city a part of the forest werepletely activated. They are not some invisible formations, they are looking bright and clear with all the holographic inscription symbols that are made of pure energy could also be seen.

    All kinds of elements are working in harmony. Everyone inside the formation were stunned. That included the people inside the city. They have never seen anything like this before.

    One of the guard captains couldn''t hold back his curiosity and attacked the formation. He even used one of his most powerful attacks and was shocked to see that there is not even an energy fluctuation within the formation barrier.

    Sam came to know about the attack immediately, but he didn''t even bother defending against it or attacking the guard captain.

    He just stood there on his board in the sky as he looked towards the sea. The concentrated energy is obviously no joke.

    And soon, the water slowly started raising into a wave. Sam looked at it and was a bit surprised. The wave is huge and it''s length could definitely cover the whole city and its height is also building up slowly, but it would only cover the city and the forest that is very immediate to it.

    The rest of the area, anything past the immediately surroundings of the vicinity wouldn''t be attacked directly by the wave.

    Of course, the damage would be done there as well as they would suffer the immediate after impact effects.

    Sam and everyone else could clear hear the crushing sound of the wave that ising towards them. He couldn''t help but feel a bit anxious. The sound along with his enhanced hearing somehow made it impossible for him not feel anxious.

    But the next second, all of his anxiety is gone.

    The beasts that are currently on different duties all stopped working and looked at a certain direction.

    Sandhya is actually levitating nearby. She is only a few yards away from Sam and she also looked at therge waveing towards them. Her water elemental energy riled up a bit as it resonated slightly with the ocean''s energy.

    Even in that fascinated state, she couldn''t help but notice the sudden departure of Sam. He zoomed off on harbinger in the certain direction. Not just him, even the other beasts created arge uproar as the turned to that direction.

    Roars and crows could be heard from everywhere.

    Within no time Sam arrived at the ce the ape is.

    Right now, the ape is surrounded by arge, a veryrge group of beasts and all of their eyes are bloodred.

    They are attacking the ape viciously and two young masters along with Makar Junior are watching the show with grins on their faces.

    Sam gritted his teeth as he looked at them going against the ape.

    The Ape on the other hand is not seriously injured. But there are some bruises and bloody wounds on his body.

    He is using those fists to put holes through the beasts without hesitation. All this while the ape is very careful with his actions. After all, the beasts had done nothing wrong. They are just in the wrong ce at a wrong time. So, he made sure that he didn''t drive them out of the forest and instead made them part of it and created a safe spot for them.

    Sam didn''t mind. Ape can finish the work off and can do whatever it wanted. Sam was happy to spend money or resources needed and here both were not needed.

    But now the ape is in the berserk mode. The beasts are dying and with every death the three humans felt like they were achieving something from their wildest dreams.

    The only problem is Sam has already seen this.

    "HOW DARE YOU?" Sam asked through gritted teeth and loud voice that heard throughout the forest."

    Sandhya just arrived in time to listen to those words and by the time Sam finished the sentence¡­

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sound reverberated throughout the forest, but it is not from inside. The wave hit the formation. The water hit the formation again and again as a rumbling sound was heard round and clear.

    Sandhya looked at the three guys and the ape and felt like she should pour hotva.

    *BOOM*

    Another reverberating situation. But this time instead of noise, a deafening silence was heard.

    Sam charged forward to the three young masters and caught two of them in no time.

    "It is fucking Go Time."

 Chapter 1901: Morphing Water

    Sam''s killing intent is at its peak.

    He charged forward and is indeed ready to kill the three of them and he is ready to do it in a single punch. But as the punch was about tond, a huge talonnded on his fist.

    Sam looked at Yanwu who is now in a smaller form and is currently standing on top of Sam''s fist.

    "Let go Yanwu, I will kill these fuckers today."

    [How many are you going to kill? Not just these three, but every single of the young masters tried this stunt on all of us. Are you going to kill all of them?]

    Sam''s eyes be colder. By now all the beasts are here and they are all holding the beaten-down young masters who are terrified. Some even pissed in their pants.

    All the guards are also terrified, they were about to make a move to save their young masters, but the trees and vines within the formation are all under Forest Bear''s control and it is safe to say that he learned a lot from witnessing what Noah did in the previous mission.

    Simply put, none of them managed to get close to the beasts much less save their young masters.

    "Fucking hell!"

    Sam yelled and took out the reaper sword. The spirit of the sword roared and the whole area is covered with thick scent of blood.

    [Come on, Sam calm down.]

    Yanwu audibly sighed as he said Sam. The rest of them cannot understand what Yanwu is saying, but they can understand that Yanwu is the one defending them. Even if it is not to theirprehension, they are still feeling great that they are being saved.

    "Let''s just forget about the mission. If these pathetic vermin even tried toy their hands on you, there is no reason for them to exist. Let me just kill them and we can think of a way."

    [What about the mission? Are you sure that all the natural disasters are going to happen only on this sea shore? What if their territories are under the effect? They definitely won''t cooperate after you killed their young masters.

    And I am sure they will wage a war on you. If you keep on killing them, your mission numbers will go down.

    It has been a long time since we worked closely on something, we all wish to finish this mission as close to perfection as possible.

    If some people die naturally or with their own conflicts, so be it. But don''t kill them yourself.]

    Sam gritted his teeth and put his sword away.

    "I won''t kill them."

    As soon as those words left his mouth, Yanwu flew into the sky and took its original form.

    Sam then charged further and stood in front of the three young masters.

    "You want my beasts? You want my friends? Fine, take them. But kill me before you do it.

    I will ept a duel. Pick whatever weapon you want to us. I will use the same. Pick whatever element you want to use, I will use the same. And I will assure you that I will not kill you and you can even fight in the group.

    If you can kill me, you can take my life away, but if I defeat you, I will still let you go alive.

    I will be in this for quite a while, you can try it whenever, wherever you want.

    But if I so much as sense that you try toy your hands on my beasts, then I might not kill you, but I can make sure that you wish you were dead.

    And at that time, there will be millions of citizens and thousands of your n members will join you in your suffering to keep youpany.

    Mind it before you make your move."

    Sam spat on the ground.

    Makar Junior who finally got back to his senses gritted his teeth as the spitnded right before his foot.

    "How fucking dare you? You dare behave like that with me? Do you know who I am? You fucking bastard?"

    Everyone looked at him as if he is a fucking idiot. Just a second ago, Sam almost made them stop breathing with the killing intent. They didn''t want to believe it, but they felt like he is way stronger even though they are on the same level.

    Some of them felt like it might be the effect of the formation. But still, it is very dangerous to provoke Sam at this moment.

    Sam really wanted to beat that guy''s face in. But at this moment¡­

    *BAM* *BAM* BAM*

    Thunderous noise erupted from the formation as the waves became much more turbulent that before.

    And there is a rhythm to those hits. The timing has changed.

    Sam closed his eyes and merged his perception with the formation. He could see exactly what is happening outside and how the formation is experiencing the stress of these waves.

    He was stunned by what he saw.

    The surroundings arepletely filled with water just as he predicted. It is almost like the sea hase forward a few kilometers.

    And apart from the waves that are bluntly crashing against the formation there are some massive serpents that are purely made of water are raising from the water as they crashed at various points of the formation.

    The serpents'' attacks are very concentrated and they are filled with water elemental energy. The outermostyer of the formation actually felt some fluctuations with the impacts that are urring bit by bit.

    The formation is still holding up pretty well. But Sam felt that this wouldn''t be the end. If water can take one form, then it can turn into another form.

    As soon as that thought came to his mind, the water morphed as if it has a consciousness of its own.

    Apart from the water serpents, exactly four water dragons rose from within and these are much more flexible as well as lethal.

    *BAM*

    The first dragon stuck and there is an actual visible fluctuation on the formation. Sam who is connected to the formation frowned. The energy concentration from one of the nodes has been reduced. The defense dimininshed at least a little bit to say the least.

    Sam''s eyes turned cold.

    "Apart from Sky and Yanwu, Everyone else connect with the formation and take your position. If anyone tries to mess with the formation from inside kill them. Always keep on depositing the energy and operate your sections carefully."

    All the beasts disappeared. They left immediately.

    At that moment, ayer of spatial energy has appeared around the formation and created a gap between the water and the formation. As the water dragons and water serpents hit again and again, the spatial barrier weakened bit by bit.

    But still, the main formation was not stuck.

    While that happened, around the formation various spots lit up. Lightning energy, water energy, wood energy, earth and metal energy riled up.

    The energy was drawn from the reservoirs Sam has set up before. As it gathered around it turned into mist and condensed into the water.

    The water serpents and dragons suddenly slowed down. These different energies that merged with the water seemed to have reached a very stable state and they are slowly resisting the water elemental energy that is responsible for the attacks.

    As time passed the water dragons and serpents slowed down more and more.

    This massive battle of energies and forces of nature are clearly witnessed by the young masters inside the formation. Shock is an understatement. The whole thing seemed out of the world to all of them.

    Never had they experienced this disaster, but they knew that whatever they might experience if it is of this scale, they would have died already and they wouldn''t even know if they would die from the impact of the water or they would die by drowning to death.

    But Sam isbating the whole thing by himself. And there is not a change in his expression apart from that cold look. It is like he could take on everything and anything.

    As soon as their thoughts came to this point, another change urred within the water.

    A few kilometers away in the sea, the water started gathering up and a humanoid figure rose. The humanoid figure is asrge as a mountain and it looked majestic.

    The humanoid figure has a clear muscr structure defined on it and there is arge crown shape on the head.

    The thing that stood out the most is actually the glow in the eyes.

    Those eyes locked onto the city. But Sam felt like those eyes are trying to see through Sam himself.

    As if that is not intimidating enough, arge trident purely condensed of water appeared in the hand of that humanoid figure and more than a dozen water dragons rose up behind him.

 Chapter 1902: God of Sea

    The sight of the humanoid figure and the water dragons far away in the sea.

    It is indeed a great visual to look at. Everyone in the city came to a standstill. They were already shocked beyond relief when they saw the disaster strike. The massive snakes and dragons are also enough to make them lose the color in their faces.

    But now, this humanoid figure that looked like it belonged to a god struck fear like never before. They never realized that they could feel this much awe at something that came to kill them.

    "We are done for. We are done for."

    Makar Junior started muttering and soon this sentiment spread like wildfire. Because even from far away, they could feel the pressure of this being and they could feel it more clearly than the rest because they are all of higher strength.

    The young masters all copsed.

    Even the beatings from the beasts didn''t do this to them, but a gaze at this made them lose all hope.

    Everyone tried to take out their transference scrolls to escape, but they couldn''t. Not a single scroll worked.

    "OYY SAM. Deactivate the formation. I need to get away from here."

    One of the young masters yelled and as if he set some fuse everyone else started asking for the same. Theypletely believed that Sam is the one who made them stuck in this formation. He is the one who blocked the spatial escape for them.

    So, all the fear they held for him is gone in an instant and they want nothing more than to save their lives.

    Sam didn''t say anything. He just stood in the air as he looked at the iing figures.

    Sandhya was rtively calmerpared to the rest. All this while she kept on observing what Sam is doing and he was calm. Way calmer than she thought he would be.

    He stood there and looked at these figures as if he anticipated them.

    And when that humanoid figure appeared, she felt a familiar sensation that she had definitely experienced before. She instantly realized that the pressure from the humanoid figure is not just because of the strength.

    Even though she is sure that the figure is much stronger than she is. The excessive pressure is because of the inferiority of her own and that of the other young masters.

    The pressure she felt is very simr to the pressure of a god. Unlike most people on this, she had felt the pressure of the god much more clearly because of her status and role.

    Of course, knowing this information didn''t help her one bit. She is still anxious inside. She had a n. The moment the formation is destroyed, she would use the highest-grade transference scroll to escape.

    Only that gave her some assurance that she will live.

    But at that moment, she wanted to see what Sam felt like and the expression on his face shocked her.

    She almost rubbed her eyes to make sure that she didn''t see it wrong.

    As the humanoid figure and the numerous dragons came forward to attack the formation, Sam''s face became more and more excited.

    Yes, there is sheer excitement on his face.

    There is not a hint of fear, not a hint of anxiety and there is not a hint of doubt, pure unadulterated excitement.

    It didn''t take long for the humanoid figure to close the distance.

    The water dragons joined their predecessors to attack the formation while the humanoid raised its trident.

    The water elemental energy condensed at the tip as it got ready to throw the trident. When the humanoid stretched the massive hand and threw the spear, Sam disappeared from the spot.

    Sandhya was stunned and she immediately levitated.

    She could see the trident making its way straight to the formation. It is zooming in and her throat went dry.

    Only after one second, Sam who was in the formation appeared outside of it and he extended his palm with his own water elemental energy as he blocked the trident that wasing at him.

    His palm created arge water palm that is almost a few dozen times bigger than himself. That palm blocked the water trident. One would expect that they would both copse. But that didn''t happen instantly.

    Instead, as both entities shed, time seemed to have frozen for a minute. The palm and the trident matched with equal force as they tried to push the other down.

    Both forces shed for over a minute before both of them disappeared in a huge ssh.

    Sam stood there in the air. Unfazed as he looked at the humanoid figure.

    "How dare a mere human try to defend against God''s judgment?"

    The humanoid figure spoke all of a sudden in a loud voice. It reverberated throughout the seas as well as the city. Everyone was dumbfounded. That day they are feeling too many shocks. Even if they are cultivators, they might die of heart attacks at this rate.

    "Who are you? Poseidon?" Sam asked calmly. He looked tiny in front of that humanoid. Like how man an ant looks in front of a human.

    Theparison is very very unsettling. No one who saw the scene with their own eyes, felt like Sam is the smaller one there. He looked at the humanoid as if he is talking to a kid who he is going to school.

    "You know of my name? Are you perhaps the ''yer'' Zeus mentioned? So, you are here to block me from doing what I wanted to do?"

    Poseidon spoke as he locked his aura onto Sam.

    Sam didn''t move or even flinch, he just looked at the humanoid figure.

    Of course, it is definitely not the real Poseidon. Sam is sure that one breath from him might destroy this if he willed to do so. This humanoid figure might as well be a very very extremely tiny manifestation of his will.

    "Indeed, I am the yer Zeus spoke of. I am sure he spoke of my name before many many times."

    "Why would the king of gods bother to remember the name of some human vermin? Kid, you are way in over your head. Of course, I should have understood that since you are trying to actually block ME and my punishment on this human vermin."

    Sam sighed and said.

    "Well, too bad. I am not going to move aside. And whether you have heard of my name or not, you will be hearing it after you go back to Olympus and bitch about me to your brother."

    "How fucking dare you?"

    Poseidon manifested another trident and stabbed Sam with it.

    Sam had both of his hands in his pockets as he looked up. A huge water barrier appeared in front of him as he blocked the trident mid-air.

    It is nowhere near his head. It is at least a hundred feet above him and Sam stopped it at that.

    "This is going to be interesting. You are the second god, that I am fighting. On a level yfield of course."

    "You fought a god and you are alive? You are really good at lying."

    "I don''t need to lie. You can go back and ask Hou Yi, how his butt is doing from the explosion and invasion. I am sure he will answer the whole thing to the best of his ability."

    As Sam spoke, he casually raised his hand and threw arge energy bomb at the water dragon that was trying to destroy the formation.

    *BOOM*

    The energy bomb exploded and so did the water dragon. But the problem is, the dragon recovered pretty quickly because of the water, on the other hand, Sam''s energy bullet didn''t.

    "You cannot defeat me. And you are going to die for foolishly believing that you could."

    Poseidon said as he struck one more time.

    At this moment, Sam once again smiled and said.

    "Maybe you are right. I cannot defeat you. Alone that is. But I am not alone."

    As soon as Sam spoke, Poseidon sensed somethinging and he changed the trajectory of the trident. Arge golden fireball hit the trident and it evaporated in an instant.

    Yanwu came out of nowhere and started hovering behind Sam.

    Its eyes locked on Poseidon as if he is looking at dinner.

    "A golden sun crow?"

    Poseidon looked at them with intrigue.

    He raised his hands and all the creatures rose up. Along with that, over two dozen new creatures rose up from the water and the attack on the formation was to its maximum bearing capacity.

    "That is a great formation. You made me use more energy than I should have."

    As soon as he said that, Sam could see that a form of pitch-ck energy surround Poseidon. He first thought it is some kind of dangerous thing, but he frowned as he noticed that it reduced the godly aura that came from the Poseidon a little bit.

    Of course, he is just as menacing and his killing pressure didn''t decrease. In fact, those senses increased, only the godly aura was diminished a bit.

 Chapter 1903: Steam

    Sam was intrigued by that ck-colored energy.

    But he is in no position to be wondering about things like that.

    As he looked at the water creatures and Poseidon all attacking together, he could see the fluctuations in the formation. People inside felt like they are about to die. They could see that the intensity of the attacks is not something the formation can bear anymore.

    Sam also noticed that the glow of the formation was reduced by arge margin. The beasts are also at their limit as they are trying to make sure that the formation wouldn''t copse.

    Sam needs to alleviate some pressure off of them.

    And he didn''t hesitate anymore.

    "Yanwu."

    As soon as he called out, Yanwu spread his wings and descended a bit so that Sam couldnd on his back before ascending high.

    Now with Yanwu''s size, Sam looked like an opponent, visually.

    "Sky. Be in your position."

    Sam said as he activated the bloodline energy of the golden sun crown.

    "Yanwu, you are fire and I am light."

    [Done.]

    Yanwu acknowledged as he also activated golden fire fusion. Sam on the other hand activated his light elemental fusion.

    Once the fusion of both parties isplete, Sam yelled once again.

    "MIA."

    The next moment more than three dozen water pirs rose from the water and they morphed into circr discs in the air. There are all angled above Sam, above than Sky, and wave above in the air.

    The sunlight fell on them and condensed bit by bit. They are like massive magnifying sses. As soon as they were ced, Sam extended his hands and shot dozens of light beams towards these water-magnifying sses

    These beams dispersed into the water and transformed into runic symbols. The sunlight that was concentrated previously was already hot enough to light up forests on fire, but the beams that came out of those ''sses'' at the moment had so much energy and heat in them, that as soon as theynded, the water started evaporating.

    Poseidon was stumped as he looked at this phenomenon.

    He immediately raised his trident and wanted to kill off Sam.

    But the next moment, he was faced with another problem.

    Yanwu burned like the sun as the golden mes ran rampant. He didn''t care about controlling or directing them, he just let the mes go wild as they liked.

    Because controlling and concentrating them is the job of Sky, who is pping his wings vigorously.

    The wind currents are so precise and so forceful at the same time, that the mes danced to their tune.

    This might be the first time all the audiences witness that a fire element have this much upper hand over a water element.

    And most of them don''t even know that the water element belonged to a being that rules over all the water in the world.

    Right now, Sam and his friends are against the Sea god himself and they are fighting in the domain of the Sea god. Sam lowered his head a bit and looked at Poseidon while the magnifying sses are being changed to a certain angle.

    "You foolish and arrogant gods. You are so full of yourselves that you never bother to check up on the basic things that could go against you. You are the sea god aren''t you? Today, I will destroy you right here, right now and if it means, I have to evaporate the whole sea, so be it."

    As soon as Sam spoke, the light beams that are falling on some other ces are immediately directed towards his own body.

    Sam''s light elemental fusion body is now collected to numerous light energy beams that are falling on his back. He took off of Yanwu''s back and levitated.

    The light beams followed.

    Now he doesn''t need to raise his hands anymore and the magnifying sses are even adjusting their angles automatically. Sam extended his hands forward and aimed at a water dragon nearby while looking at Poseidon.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive light beam was shot and the moment it was shot, the water dragon evaporated into thin air along with a huge portion of water.

    The volume of water that disappeared is so high and it happened so suddenly that the flow of the water changed for a moment to fill in the deficit. This basically created a hole in the pattern of attacks done by these water creatures.

    "Come on now. God of Seas, Poseidon. Let''s fight."

    Sam said as he extended both of his hands and shot at Poseidon with a grin on his face.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The light beams were shot. Poseidon was only able to dodge one of them while the other grazed past his left hand. A part of his left hand was evaporated and then arge portion of water behind Poseidon was gone as well.

    Once again, the water flow changed a bit because of the sudden disappearance.

    Poseidon wanted to kill someone right then and there just to relieve the pressure on his gritted teeth as he looked at how cockily Sam is shooting.

    Meanwhile, Yanwu''s fire looked like it is on fire.

    The level of heat and energy it generated ran rampant and soon all those mes manifested into the shape of golden crows and these massive golden crows started attacking the dragons that are attacking the formation.

    Steam rose like crazy. The whole area becamepletely invisible as the steam covered it. Of course, it is no obstacle to the cultivators. And soon even that wouldn''t be a problem.

    Because in that crazy space, a new wind current appeared from the wings of sky.

    The wind current suddenly collected all the steam and created a giant steam tornado-like pir at the middle of the formation dome as the pir rotated and the steam slowly condensed into the water with all the extra energy content.

    Sky and Mia worked together as they used that highly energy-filled steam to attack the water dragons and defend against their attacks on the dome.

    Even though, so many amazing things are happening, everyone''s attention istched on to Sam and Poseidon''s fight.

    Poseidon is not using any fancy skills. His trident technique is very much straightforward and just overwhelmingly powerful, but not one attacknded on Sam and he evaporated it every time it came near him.

    Poseidon gritted his teeth and wanted to raise another gigantic wave to destroy Sam, but the ck energy surrounding him blocked his power toe out and he could only fight in that state.

    "Did you hit your limit?"

    "As long as the Sea and water exist in the surroundings, there is no way I would ever hit my limit."

    Sam smiled at the words.

    "Then let''s make that happen. Let''s make it so that you would hit your limit."

    "You cannot. You are barely able to defend against me. The best shot you have is to defend until the disaster time is over which is a little less than an hour.

    In that time, I will find a crack in your defense and I will swallow this city."

    "Too bad. I don''t n on waiting until the whole hour is up."

    As Sam spoke, the light energy raged. Sam''s fusion body''s size increased by four times. Even though he is still way smaller than the humanoid figure, it is still a lot more intimidating than before.

    Sam didn''t even extend his hands. He looked to the sky with utmost concentration and the next moment, he disappeared from the spot.

    He shot like a light beam he is and he reappeared right in front of Poseidon''s chest.

    Poseidon was flustered at this and he mmed at Sam.

    But Sam dodged it and made Poseidon''s hitnd on his own chest.

    *BAM* *SPLASH*

    Arge explosive ssh appeared on the chest and Sam took advantage of that crack and invaded Poseidon''s body and he stopped holding back.

    Therge body of light inside the gigantic body of water started glowing ferociously. Sam looked like he is the sun himself and Poseidon''s body started bubbling up along with the water around him and the water surrounding them. Sam is using his Golden Sun crow bloodline attack rted to his light elemental energy.

    The golden mes from Yanwu raged as he took a deep breath andunched the me-breathing bloodline attack.

    Yanwu just kept on making sure that the steam just didn''t cloud up high in the sky while fanning the mes.

    The whole area was stunned silent. Only the sound of water steaming and evaporating could be heard and amongst those loud sounds, there is one voice that was heard.

    "YOU VENOMOUS BASTARD. THE DAY I SEE YOU IS GOING TO BE THE DAY I KILL YOU. OR I SHALL NOT BE THE GOD OF SEA ANYMORE."

    Poseidon screamed on the top of his lungs as he evaporated into thin air.

    When that body fully disappeared and Sam is sure that there is no water in his immediate surroundings, he finally rxed. He let himself fall. Yanwu and Sky are the same, and so is Mia.

    But the remaining beasts hurried up as they ran out of the formation and caught Sam and the other beasts.

    The steam disappeared and the water settled down.

    All that is left is the formation that is flickering a bit along with the city, which waspletely protected from the God of Sea''s wrath.

 Chapter 1904: Relaxation

    Ten minutester.

    Sam is sitting in the middle of the camp along with the beasts that are exhausted as well. He took out some Divine energy capsules and absorbed the energy while supplying some to the beasts. He is recovering at a visible rate and while he is doing that, the beasts that are still alright are on guard as they vigntly looked at the young masters.

    But at this moment, the young masters are still too shocked.

    Even though Sam is in such a weak condition they didn''t want to attack him.

    Except for one.

    Makar Junior who treats his life so dearly was the first one toe out of the shock. Because of all the things that he did to Sam, he is sure that Sam is going to kill him sooner orter.

    Having such a powerful enemy is not something he could digest.

    He immediately stepped forward with his sword.

    Raiju who is in the lead looked at him menacingly and growled.

    "I am here to challenge Sam. Since he said that he would ept any challenge at any moment, I hope he doesn''t back out now."

    Sam who heard this chuckled slightly. He is still pretty tired and since he is distributing energy to the beats, he is not at his full capacity at the moment. But he still came forward and looked at Makar Junior.

    "I knew that one of you assholes would pull stunt like this. But I didn''t expect one toe forward this soon." Sam said nonchntly.

    "Can you be anymore shameless? He just defended your home against an undefeatable enemy? What kind of a man are you?" Sandhya looked at Makar Junior with a new level of disgust.

    Makar Junior looked at the rest of the young masters who are also looking at him with disdain. It would be a lie if they say they are not tempted by such an opportunity, but they didn''t act on it because of their dignity.

    "So, how do you want to fight?"

    Sam asked casually.

    "I will use my sword, but you are not allowed to use any weapon. You can only use your hands to attack and you cannot use any of your elements."

    Sam raised and eyebrow and said.

    "You seem to have an awful lot of requirements. So be it. It doesn''t matter anyway."

    As he spoke, Sam shook his hands a bit. He loosened them up and let them fall down limp. He is not even holding them to fight, except for his legs and spine, he let go of his arms as if they are just mere attachments to the body.

    He moved his hip a bit and as if the sleeves are left hanging the arms iled around.

    Everyone was weirded out by such actions. Even Makar Junior couldn''t understand it.

    "What the fuck are you doing?"

    "Just fight. What does it mean to you? As long as I am not using any other attack."

    Makar Junior gritted his teeth and charged with his sword. Sam smoothly dodged the attack. His arms are still limp, but as soon as he made a forcefully twisting motion, the arms flew up like whips and the palmnded on Makar Junior''s face.

    *PAK*

    Everyone heard a very loud and crisp sound of the p.

    Makar Junior''s face nted into the ground. The right cheek which took the p was swollen beyond belief and blood escaped his mouth. Three teeth fell off.

    Sam looked at his hand and was impressed by himself. It is just a trick that he saw on an animated show once in his previous life. He wanted to see if he could embarrass this guy with it and it is working fine.

    "Come on now. Don''t tell me that is all you have. I still want to p the shit out of you for a few times at least. Get up."

    Makar Junior tried to charge forward, but his legs are not moving. His instincts are screaming not to go forward and his cowardly mind is taking over. He knew that he should be stepping forward, but his body is not letting him do that.

    "One p and your base instincts triggered. Not bad. I thought you are useless crap, but at least you are trainable with some negative reinforcement."

    "You¡­"

    "Open your mouth and I will pull all of your teeth out. If you want to say something, say it after you at least fight me properly. I can tolerate idiots, I can''t tolerate cowards who talk a big game."

    Sam just shook his hand and left.

    He wanted to deal with him a bit more. Maybe a couple of more hits would have been much more satisfying.

    Sam just left and met with the beasts.

    "I didn''t get the information about the next disaster, so we can rest until then. So, guys rx and catch whatever prey you want to eat. I am in mood to cook today."

    He talked to the beasts and they just decided to rx.

    The young masters and Sandhya wanted to talk to him about this. The disaster is very dangerous. If this cannot be called disaster they don''t know what will. But this only raised more questions for them.

    Sam seemed to be familiar with the humanoid figure and Sandhya even heard the name Poseidon. So, she is way more curious that the rest. But Sam is already giving a cold and distant aura. It is clear that he doesn''t want to interact with them at all.

    Sam set up his grill as the beasts went for hunt. A lot of the surrounding forest is actually filled with a lot of sea food at the moment. Everything outside the formation was covered in water after all. Mia is actually looking forward to having a very huge feast because of all the beasts and fish she caught.

    As Sam started cooking one item after another cheerfully, no one could have guessed that he just fought against a disaster caused by god.

    But while he is in the middle of it, Makar Senior came running from the city. Since the disaster is over, Sam lifted all the restrictions of the formations. He even deactivated the zone he created.

    So, now they are all free to move.

    Makar Senior came running to Sam with a polite stance.

    "Hello, I am the n leader of the Makar n. I am here to offer my sincere gratitude for helping us through this disaster."

    Sam just looked at him with a fleeting nce.

    He doesn''t care about this guy anymore. From his investigation, he already realized what kind of person this guy is. He is someone that Sam doesn''t want to be associated with. And now that he already managed to prove himself about the first disaster, the rest of the people will just have to follow no matter what.

    They cannot deny his ims and would have toply with whatever measures that he wants to take. Unless that areplete idiots that want to kill themselves.

    Seeing no response from Sam, Makar Senior could only smile wryly. A single person managed to defeat the disaster that they couldn''t even fathom, he is far from trying to keep his pride.

    "I know that things haven''t been good with us from the star. But I want to remedy the situation. Please, tell me how we can reconcile."

    "There is nothing to reconcile for. I am only going to stay temporarily in this. I am not nning to being part of this ce or its power dynamic. I am only here to solve the problems thate with uing disasters.

    And I am sure the disaster that should have attacked you has already been resolved. So, we won''t even cross paths with each other."

    "But still¡­"

    "Honestly, I don''t have a good impression of your son. He is the exact person that I tend to stay away from at all costs. So, please don''t pressure me into epting a friendship that wouldn''tst."

    "I know that my son is not a great person, but he is just an ambitious person. If you can be big hearted and forgive him once.. please just give him a chance, he would be of great help to you."

    Sam looked at him and chuckled.

    "Forgive?"

    Sam asked with a smirk on his face. He was really amused. He took a sip from his wine ss and said.

    "You don''t know my history. I have annihted ns that are far bigger than you for offences far smaller that your son''s. Please, just take him away and don''t try to get in touch with me."

    The n leader didn''t know what to say for that. He doesn''t know what his son did, but he left the ce for now and went to meet his son.

    After he heard what happened, he almost lost it and beat the crap out of him.

 Chapter 1905: Priestess

    Sam spent the whole day rxing.

    He and the beasts had a real feast and they acted as if the rest of the people are not even there. Sandhya wanted to talk to him desperately. After all, her mother asked her to bring Sam to the mountain if there really is a disaster.

    But she couldn''t find a breaking point.

    By night, she could only bring herself to forcefully break their enjoyment.

    "Sam I need to speak to you about something important?"

    "Can it wait?"

    "No."

    "Sure, go ahead."

    "My mother is the head of the Mountain Temple. She holds the most power in all of this. She told me to bring you to the mountain temple as a guest if a disaster really urred here."

    Sam stayed silent for a moment and asked.

    "Is she powerful enough to gather the ns and arrange a meeting of sorts?"

    "More than powerful. Even I can do that."

    "Sure then. We can go right away. If that is okay."

    "Okay, okay More than okay." Sandhya was ecstatic when she got a positive reply.

    "Guys, we are going to her ce. Let''s go."

    The beasts immediately got up and ready. Sam didn''t use the dimensional drifter. He got up on the back of the Sky as all the beasts decided to fly there. Since other beasts also can fly along with the birds from now on, they want to experience this traveling.

    The entourage is also mostlyprised of Divine ne cultivators, so everyone decided to fly.

    As they travelled in the night sky Sam took out his flute and started ying. He is a bit happy. Beasts were locked in the tower for way too long, it is about time theye out and y like this. He just felt relieved and free as he moved in that night sky.

    The beasts were all cheerful as well.

    After travelling for a while, they arrived at the Mountain temple. Sam and the beasts were invited respectfully, the young masters not so much, but they were delighted to just be able to step into the temple.

    They all arrived at the main hall, where Sandhya''s mother was already waiting for them.

    She looked at Sam who is in the lead. The beasts were left outside the main hall, but she still saw them.

    She stepped forward and extended her hand.

    "Hello, nice to meet you. I am the Priestess of the Mountain Temple. You can address me as the Priestess."

    "Hello, I am Sam."

    "Thank you for sessfully defending against the disaster of Makar n.

    The Makar n definitely owes you a lot." She said casually before guiding Sam to take a seat. She also took her seat and continued the conversation. She ignored the rest of the young masters and didn''t even bother to talk to her daughter.

    "If you don''t mind, may I know how you came to know about this disaster and why you are helping the people of this?"

    "It is definitely not out of some noble desire. I am here on a mission. The person who gave that mission to me gave that information about the disasters and I am here to defend against them. My mission is to save as many lives as possible and with every life that was taken away during my time here, my reward will be reduced.

    That is why, these brats are alive by the way."

    Sam said as he looked at the young masters.

    Now they understood why Sam stopped when he did.

    They gulped nervously and thanked the person who issued the mission.

    "Is it possible for you to reveal the person who gave you this mission?"

    Sam smiled and said.

    "I can, it is just that I don''t know if you will believe me."

    "Try me."

    "Your god, Karthikeya."

    Sam said with a smile as he looked an engraving of Karthikeya on the wall.

    Since it is his temple, there are bound to be engravings of his on the walls. As soon as he entered that is the first thing he noticed.

    "Oh, didn''t expect that." Priestess was calmer than Sam thought she would be. She is very epting of the situation.

    "It is good that you believed so easily. It would have been a real pain to convince you that I am telling the truth. It is most thankless task to do.

    But I think it is about to change after I met these kids."

    Sam once again took a jab at the young masters.

    "So, why did you give you this mission?"

    Sam inhaled with a smile and said.

    "I don''t think I can tell you that. It is better left unsaid. All you need to do is, Karthikeya sent a very capable man here to help you all with this scenario."

    "Alright, I understand. So, is this the end of the disaster?"

    "Yeah, the end of the first one, in a few days the second one will start."

    "How many are they?"

    "Ten in total. Before you ask, what they are, I don''t know either. At least I don''t know it yet. I will get the information of the next immediate disaster and I would only have two days time.

    Even then I wouldn''t know what disaster it is, only where the disaster is going to strike."

    "But you still made a pretty good guess with the first disaster."

    "Come on, anyone with half a brain can do it. The city is beside the sea. It couldn''t get any more obvious and easy than that."

    "That''s true in a way."

    The conversation was pretty straightforward. Sam really liked this woman more than her daughter. Priestess ispletely straightforward without any bullshit.

    "If you don''t mind me asking, what is the story behind the beasts? They are all of very high bloodlines and they are all with you. In fact, I am actually sensing an aura very simr to those beasts on you too which is very surprising to be honest."

    "Well, it is a long story and goes back decades. Even if it is written into a book it might take more than 3 million words to say it."

    "Then I shouldn''t have asked. Its fine.

    I would like to suggest a proposal to you."

    "I am all ears."

    "Since you are here to help the people of our, we should obviously help ourselves by helping you. I would send invitations to all the major ns so that you can talk to them tomorrow. They would be here by dawn.

    I certainly don''t know what kind of preparations you would need, but you can tell us your requirements and we will try toply as much as possible. Sandhya will be apanying you along the journey during all of these disasters.

    When you are on the move, she will act as amunication point between you and me."

    "Are you sure Sandhya is necessary? Is there any other way for us to be in touch?"

    Sam asked without hesitation.

    "Why? Is her ability not up to par? She is very decent with formations and since that seemed to be one of your major methods to deal with the disasters, I am sure she would be of help."

    "Of course, her ability is decent enough, I wouldn''t dare take that away from her, but she is a bit annoying and while you are at it, you can get rid of these brats too."

    "We can talk about that in tomorrow''s meeting. Tonight, let''s have a small banquet. Think of it as me treating you for the disaster you have alleviated."

    "That would be my pleasure. Also, can you tell your temple people to not to eye my beasts like that? It is rather ufortable for them. I had the same problem with Sandhya by the way."

    "Forgive me for not teaching my people properly. I will make sure to correct their behavior."

    The conversation was then shifted to the dinner table. It was just some small talk. But Priestess knew what to ask and what not to ask. She didn''t just bother him unnecessarily and she didn''t try to brown-nose him either.

    It was a pleasant talk between two adults. He finally felt like he is talking to someone with some brain cells.

    That night went on just like that. Sam went into the mountains enjoying the scenery while ying the flute.

    He is not disturbed by Sandhya or any other young masters.

    Meanwhile, Priestess went deeper into the temple where Karthikeya''s statue is and sat in front of it before performing a ritual to summon him.

    Karthikeya''s silhouette appeared and he spoke with a smile.

    "It seems like you have met the guy that came there. He is good isn''t he?"

    "What is happening? Why didn''t you warn me about the disasters?"

    "It is not my ce to do so."

    "But it is your ce to send him on a mission to save us?"

    Her tone is very casual even though she is speaking to a god. Almost as if they are friends.

 Chapter 1906: Meeting with Clan heads

    "Come on, I am just looking out for you guys. You know what the people of your did." Karthikeya said with a smile.

    "Of course, I know. But the people who did that are not alive."

    "But they had an agreement with the gods and they broke it, now their descendants are facing the consequences. I wouldn''t have actually cared for them if not for the fact that this is your home. I forcefully included it in the mission that I was supposed to give Sam.

    Just because of saving you, I had to go high and low to find outs simr to yours.

    I had to bargain a lot with other gods just to create this scenario."

    Priestess stayed silent for a moment and said.

    "Thank you so much. But you don''t have to do that. Someone has to pay for the things the people of thismitted. It better be their descendants than a single young man like Sam who came all by himself."

    "Oh, he is not just any young man. You don''t have to worry about him. He is very capable of handling himself."

    "It is whether or not he is capable Karthikeya. It is whether or not he should do it. The ancestors of this did horrible things to give their descendants a chance. And it was written in annals of history that this will meet these disasters sooner orter.

    Maybe if the gods got their anger out now, the prophecy would be finished. The future generations will have a chance to prosper.

    What the if these gods hold arger grudge than before?"

    "No, it is not up to you to decide that."

    "It is up to you then?"

    "I am a god after all. I get to do some things and I am sure with Sam''s interventions gods wouldn''t bother with the like yours. He might just receive all the hatred that they originally held for your."

    "That is all the more reason to not let him carry this.

    Have you seen his eyes? Such young child, he has already carried and suffered enough. Why should he bear the consequences for the sins of these people? And all for what? So that you could make sure my home will not wrecked?

    As a god how can you be so selfish?"

    Karthikeya didn''t say anything for a second.

    "Why do I not get to be selfish? You are one of the very few who admired me with a pure heart. You are one of the few who had shown purest of faith, by questioning me, by challenging me, by being my friend. Not just as some blind follower, if I cannot do this much, what is the point of my existence?

    If it means that I could protect the home of such faith, I wouldn''t hesitate to destroy a world of saints nor would I hesitate to protect and of devils."

    Priestess closed her eyes and didn''t know what to say to that.

    After a few seconds she replied.

    "But that child, his soul¡­ I could see it through his eyes. The torment, the pain, the anguish, the loneliness. Does he need to bear more than he already has?"

    "I understand. This might be the harshest decision I have made in my life.

    But the only reason I chose him is that he is the only person that stood out in my eyes after you. The very first time I met him, I yed my game of chess with him and right in the middle of that game, I realized that one day, I will meet him.

    I will see eye to eye with him.

    I will share a ss of wine with him.

    I will y a game of chess with him.

    And I will host him as my guest and I wouldn''t be able to hold myself back from drawing my spear to test myself against him. On an equal foot. On a fair battlefield.

    He ignited all these feelings in me in one meeting. So, when I made that decision I made it with absolute trust that he would be able to ovee it and I would be able to apologize to him face to face and he has a big enough heart to understand why I did what I did and ept me as his friend."

    "It is rare to see you praise someone this much. You might want to do that with your brother some time. He would be delighted." Priestess replied with a smile.

    "You are talking to my Big brother again? Why are you guys getting along? I thought both of us are friends."

    "Its because your brother is easier to get along with and he knows more than just battle strategies and war cries. He is well read, well spoken and over all a better person to broaden my horizons.

    All you are is a muscle head with a spear for a brain."

    The serious discussion suddenly turned into a banter that continued for the whole night.

    The next morning, a meeting was held within the temple. It was like a business conference.

    Before Sam could join the meeting, Priestess decided to talk to them and exined the purpose of Sam, she also reminded people of the curse they had, the cause of the disasters and also why it is important for Sam to be here.

    She also presented Sam''s conditions before calling Sam to the meeting.

    "I already exined everything. All you have to say is what is required from these people and they will make the arrangements."

    "I don''t exactly know what the next disaster is and where it is going to happen. So, I wouldn''t know what I would need.

    But for starters, I would like ess to your best formation masters. I don''t care they are criminals rotting in your dungeons or they are some hidden hermits. As long as you can give me ess to your best formation masters, artisans and inscription experts, it would be great help to me.

    And of course, please keep your youngsters and heirs away from me.

    I am not interested in making friends and your kids already made a very bad first impression. That wouldn''t easily change. So, please keep them away as much as possible.

    Because if they so much as look the wrong away at me, I might lose it."

    Priestess smiled as she looked at Sam.

    "I am sorry Sam. I don''t think we can fulfill thest condition."

    Sam frowned and asked.

    "Why?"

    "I know you would be able to work better without them, but they should be along with you to learn a valuable lesson." Then the priestess went to say the story about the curse the had and why the disaster happened. She even gave some info about how Karthikeya is kind of using Sam.

    The story is actually pretty simple.

    The overall level of the is actually low. There was a point where there are not even Astral ne cultivators. This is much like Deste with no potential whatsoever.

    So, the Olympian gods who were the chosen religious symbols ignored this.

    But identally someone managed to slip out of this and realized how weak they. They came back and used some dirty measures to raise their potential. They are the pioneers and founders of the current ns.

    Learning this the Olympian gods are not happy with those dirty deeds, because it damaged a lot of their faith power. The ns were given a way out and they have to meet certain conditions to make sure their survival wouldn''t be taken away.

    But the ns didn''t meet those requirements and now they are trying to destroy the with these ten disasters based on the agreement they originally had.

    Priestess wanted to show the younger generations what the consequences of their ancestors'' actions were. So she is against Sam not allowing them.

    "Please do me this favor so that I can educate the future generations well."

    Sam sighed.

    He can understand her perspective and it is hard to reject someone who gave such a good first impression. He really liked her.

    "Alright, but I have a few things that I need to make sure that everyone here understands before they could work with me."

    "Okay, please proceed."

    "First and foremost. Never ever, touch my beasts. They are my friends and for them I would happily kill every living creature on this with a huge smile on my face.

    Second, your young masters are very much into Miss Sandhya and first interacted with me because of her. I don''t care if they are hitting on her or not, but I care if that pursuit hinders my goals. So, if they ck off, they would be sent back home.

    Third, my words and my words alone hold absolute authority when I am defending against a disaster. I don''t want anyone''s input unless I ask for it. That doesn''t mean I am not open to feedback, I am, but you have to prove yourself to me before trying to make my change my thought process.

    Finally, there is a story from my homnd I would like to tell you before we proceed forward¡­.

 Chapter 1907: Piper

    Sam gave a sweeping nce at the whole audience before he started reciting the story.

    "There was once a world where there is no such thing as cultivation. There is no such thing as eternal life. People are all mortals and they rely on agriculture for their food needs.

    They store grain for months so that they could survive.

    But at one point of time, some rats sniffed the grains out and decided to invade. A huge hoard of rats attacked the vige. They are eating grain like crazy and they are reproducing like there is no tomorrow.

    The viges were scared shitless.

    They couldn''t find enough poison to kill all of them and they couldn''t find enough energy to beat them.

    They are helpless and then came a man who ys an instrument called Bagpipes. He is a Piper, a musician who ys bagpipes. He told the vigers, ''I can help you with the rats. My music is so good that I can make the rats go into trance and make them follow me out of the vige.

    I will just lead them to the river and make them drown there. Of course, I would need some payment for that.''

    The vigers were ecstatic. They thought that it was a blessing and they let him do it.

    The piper made his move.

    He yed the pipes and every single rat in the whole vige followed him out. He yed the pipes for a whole day and led them into the river far away from the vige. All the rats just drowned themselves in the river as they lost themselves in the ecstasy of the music.

    The piper went back to the vige and asked them to pay.

    But the vigers who already lost a lot of grain to the rats became greedy and selfish. They didn''t want to pay him and defaulted. After all, he is one man.

    The piper warned them. ''I will get my payment one way or the other. And you won''t like the other way.''

    But the greedy humans didn''t listen. Do you know what happened next?"

    Sam paused and asked the crowd. None of them responded.

    "Piper made them pay in a very harsh way.

    Vigers only saw that Piper used his power to save the vige so they thought it is only good enough to save the vige. But Piper knew what he can do with his music.

    He travelled the vigers in the surroundings as he yed his pipes, he travelled to every human establishment and even every forest around the vige as he yed for days and lured every single rat in that ce and finally he came to the vige.

    He lured all the rats into the vige and this time the number is many more than what they originally hand. He brought up on a gue on that vige and not a single person survived much less grains.

    The vigers who enjoyed the power of music when its saved them, didn''t realize that it had the power to destroy them all along and provoked it."

    Sam looked at all of them with a smile. He is very leisurely telling this story as if he didn''t observe the sweat covering the body of every single person in the room. They are shaken to their cores. Even Priestess raised an eyebrow as she looked at Sam.

    His bodynguage is very rxed. He sat in the chair as if he owned the ce. With one of his legs over the other and a wine ss twirling in his hand. He didn''t even look at the audience properly.

    "I hope you all understand what I am trying to say. This rules I said before are my payment and just because I am here to save you, don''t think I am a nice young man that you could try to manipte.

    You better pay this piper handsomely. Or he would make you pay one way or the other and you wouldn''t like the other way."

    Sam just stood up stretched and walked out.

    Priestess looked at the whole group and said.

    "I hope you remember those words. It is a really great story after all."

    Priestess also left.

    That day, the n leaders went back and started making preparations. Since Sam didn''t get any vision about the disaster yet, they have some time.

    Sam was given a tour for the day and at night, they had dinner once again. But this time, it is only Priestess, Sandhya and Sam. Except for the two gods at the entrance of the room.

    Priestess looked at Sam and asked.

    "I hope you like the food. I prepared it myself."

    "It is delicious. Thank you. But you shouldn''t have done it. I don''t think I can afford such hospitality."

    "It is the least I can do for you since you are saving my home here."

    "As I said, it is not a noble conquest. I am on a mission here. If the mission was to kill all of you, I would have done that with the same amount of dedication."

    "I guess you are right. But right now you are here to save us. We don''t have to think and talk in what ifs."

    "Thanks.

    Anyway, I wanted to ask. Why would the ancestors of this do something stupid as make a deal with Zeus and Olympus? What is the goal exactly? When I look around, there is nothing special here. The people that are considered geniuses here, I don''t see anything that is worthy of the trade off."

    Sandhya was stunned by these words.

    "Really? The base level rose from Mortal ne to Divine ne. They took the trade off so that they could pursue the path of immortality. They are closer to that goal more than ever."

    "Hahahaha¡­"

    Samughed out loud. He didn''t hold back. Priestess looked at him with intrigue.

    "What are youughing at? Isn''t it the dream of every cultivator to be an immortal? I think the pioneers are rather strong and daring to take that trade." Sandhya said in confusion.

    Sam shook his head and said.

    "What do you think immortality is? A person living with infinite lifespan?"

    "What else? The stronger their strength the longer their life span, the closer they are to the immortality."

    Sam shook his head once again and didn''t say anything. He just ate his food silently.

    "What? Is it not true?"

    "Let me ask you something. The guard at the entrance, he is a Divine ne cultivator and he is one stage higher than me. Doesn''t that mean, he is closer to immortality than me?"

    "Yes, of course."

    "So, let''s say I stopped all the disasters, but I am still of the same cultivation and I died right after that. My cultivation will just be Initial Stage Divine ne Initiation. But he has a higher chance of increasing cultivation level and he is going to increase his cultivation. ording to you he is closer to the immortality even then."

    "Of course, you are not even alive in that case. How are you going topete with him?"

    "I might be dead, but a memory of mine will be remembered forever. That is how I am going topete.

    In a thousand years, even if that guy is alive all he would be remembered is as the guard of this temple or a warrior of this temple a believer as this temple. What else is he going to be remembered as?

    But me, I would be the savior of this. In a thousand years, you go and ask a child on the street why this exists, he will say that a god hase and saved the world, or he would say a devil was paid some money to fight the disasters, or he would say that Sam was here and he fought every disaster that came at this.

    Whether my story was truthfully passed down or not, I will be alive in them. I will be remembered in them. As long as this exists, this remembers that it exists because of me.

    In my opinion, a man''s immortality is going to be remembered by his legacy, not his lifespan.

    And my legacy is so big that I have immortalized every single one of the enemies that I acknowledged. In the world where I interacted with them, their names will always be associated with mine. We will be spoken in the same sentence and every world I interacted with will remember by name, I made sure of that."

    Sandhya is confused by Sam''sments.

    "Aren''t you bragging a little too much? History can be changed you know. It is the one who lives that writes it. Who knows your name could even be eliminated in history. How would your legacy exist then?"

    "My legacy will exist in the mind of the one who tried to erase it and whenever he sees the new history that he reced mine with, he will think of me. Simply put my way of looking at immortality is way different than yours.

    At least, I never desired the infinite lifespan that you spoke of."

 Chapter 1908: Ruby City

    That night went off with Sandhya lost in confusion.

    All this while she pursued cultivation to increase her strength as much as she can. To gain that lifespan to live until the end of time. But it seems so shallow all of a sudden.

    She wanted to talk more about this with Sam, but the next day, Sam is not in a mood for doing any talking.

    "We have to move. The next disaster ising in three days and that ce is called Ruby City."

    That is the news that Sam gave first thing in the morning to the Priestess.

    "Perfect timing, all the n leaders are already back with the crew. I think you can be sure of what the disaster is going to be too."

    "Is there a very distinct feature there?"

    "Yeah, the Ruby city is right next to a Volcanic region. There are more than five to six active volcanoes very close to the city."

    Sam nodded at that. It is kind of obvious. But of course, Sam could only venture a guess that the Volcanoes are going to be involved in the disaster, it is still not clear whether the volcanoes are simply going to erupt or another godly figure is going to popup out of nowhere along with a very conscious Lava appearing in some dragon forms or something.

    It is very likely of course.

    "Okay then, I will leave now. Thank you."

    As he was about to leave, Priestess asked.

    "The thing you said about Immortality. Do you really not desire the infinite lifespan? Do you really not desire the godhood that gives you the power to decide the fate of many?"

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "What is so desirable in godhood? I have power to decide the fate and destiny in my hands now and I am literally doing that now. And I am not doing that with the energy of faith these gods umted over time.

    I am doing that with my mind.

    The power that ispletely under my control. The me that I am now, my current state is always more appealing than the godhood."

    With those words he left.

    Priestess went to the prayer room and performed the ritual.

    "That kid, is indeed very interesting¡­" She went on to speak about what they talked about the immortality etc.

    "Wow, you guys are having so much fun. I am not surprised that you like him. But I never thought that you would connect with him like this. What about it?" Karthikeya asked in an intrigued tone.

    "Nothing much. I just wanted to see what kind of toll the life has taken on him. As I said, he has carried way too much burden."

    Meanwhile, Sam and the young masters along with their entourage. They arrived at the Ruby City where the Ruby n runs things. The n leader weed them warmly and he is very amodating.

    "I will do my own investigation first. You guys just prepare the report on all the resource points that are around the city. The flora and fauna of the forests etc. If there are any special features about the volcanoes, let me know."

    With that, Sam took off on harbinger along with the beasts. For half a day, he was only stuck with investigation. After that, he had a meeting with his beasts and the young masters.

    "So, there are few things that I noticed. The mines around this ce are very rich in ores. Very high quality metal. The flora and fauna are not that significant. The volcanoes of course are very important. I noticed that even though the fire elemental energy is way too high and concentrated, there are no elemental stone mines.

    The energy is full concentrated within the Lava.

    But one thing I noticed is that this ce is not just rich in fire energy. The earth and metal energy is also rich. In fact, these three energies are bncing each other so much that the mines didn''t appear.

    I know it is confusing to understand, but that is the easiest exnation that I could give you."

    "So, what are we going to do? Do the same as you did with Makar city? Build a massive formation around?"

    "We have to do that. But we cannot do just that. I have some ns anyway. First you guys get started on the formation. It is very simr to the formation before, so your young masters might have a good understanding of this.

    You guys will lead the masters you have brought and work on the external formation. Meanwhile, I will do some preparations within the city."

    People were given tasks and they are working on them very quickly. No one is really stupid enough to fool around or ck off.

    Meanwhile, Sam is walking around the city with Dia and a Yanwu within the city. As he walked he had the observation ability on every second.

    He left some deep markings on more than a hundred spots within the streets and houses within the city. After markings are done, he went to the n head.

    "First, you need to move all the people into the main mansion. I am going to set up a very special formation around your estate. It will be five times stronger than the external formation. I might have to change a bunch of things with the structure.

    But trust me, you are going to love it. Your enemies would have to work for five lifetimes to crack it and go past it. Unless and of course, they get their hands on the blueprints."

    "No problem. Please do whatever you want to do."

    Sam didn''t let the chance go. He went ahead and decided to work on the formations. He worked on the mansion the whole afternoon and through the night until the next afternoon.

    "It has taken a lot of time, I hope it will work well."

    He muttered to himself and then moved to the city.

    "Now we are going to work on the city marks. It is going to be really troublesome. Get ready Dia, I think you need to y a crazy role with this one."

    Sam went ahead and sat down while inscribing a bunch of puppets while Dia walked around the city and started metal and earth pirs at every single mark theyid down on. The pirs are actually taking a long time. Dia took more than a few minutes to build one pir.

    Sam had to go into the second floor of the tower to speed up the process of the inscription design so that he could have some time to help Dia.

    He did exactly the same. By that night, he got on working with the pirs and started carving some inscribing on those pirs too. He finished everything by the night of third day. It took a lot out of him to do so, but he finally managed toplete it.

    That night he gathered everyone and said.

    "The preparations is done. I don''t need you guys for now. If you want to leave you can leave. Or if you want to watch the whole thing happen, just go into the main mansion and watch. But when the disaster if you are going toe out, you are going to die.

    You will not be able to survive this disaster if you don''t follow my instructions to the tee. Keep that in mind."

    Everyone ran into the mansion even before Sam could finish his sentence.

    Not a single person wants to leave the ce and of course they don''t want to get caught up in the situation of the disaster as well.

    After everyone is gone, Sam picked a roof top in the middle of the city and sat there on a recliner chair. The beasts are also at various spots either on the roof or just on the street. They just waited there for the disaster to strike.

    It didn''t take long though.

    After a few hours.

    Within the city on a normal corner of the city, a very inconspicuous at that, the earth started heating up. The soil became red hot very soon and before long a very small hole appeared and Lava started leaking out of it.

    Smoke came up as theva leaked. The soil slowly morphed along with theva as it turned into a humanoid figure. A golem that is size of a full grown human appeared. That is not the only one that came though.

    In many corners of the city, that is exactly what happened. In fact, even within the estate that was isted.

    Sam who is rxing on the roof opened his eyes and said.

    "They are here.

    Sky and Ape, you guys are in charge of the estate formation, whateveres inside, destroy them. Go crazy. It is your ground, if any guyes in your way, just kill them."

    Sky and Ape dashed to the estate and entered the formation. Ape leaped into the air and threw a punch straight to the golem''s head and crushed it with a single hit.

 Chapter 1909: Cyclops

    All the golems that were aiming at the humans within the estate were met with wind des.

    Sky didn''t focus on ending with a single hit, instead he focused on making sure that not a single human would be injured, while the ape was tasked with dealing the finishing blows. Meanwhile within the city, the numbers of golems are awfully high.

    They are at least thirty to forty times the number within the estate.

    Sam waved his hand and a bunch of puppets appeared within the city. A lot of them and they all ran to attack the golems that came. Beasts joined the puppets and an all out war has begun just like that. But the golems just kept on spawning, they seemed endless.

    Compared to that, the spawn rate in the estate is also at least twenty times lowpared to outside.

    The puppets Sam summoned became the main attack force within the city. But they are very weak. The only advantage the puppets hadpared to the golems is that they are way too many puppets. Sam had so many of them that he could make one fight and throw another one away, but he would still have outnumbered the golems by two times.

    But due to their rtively weaker bodies, they are unable to put up a proper fight with the golems. At least four puppets are needed to take one golem and by the end of that fight, at least two and half puppets are ending up as lump of molten metal.

    Sam who prioritizes a lot on efficiency has actually decided to put up a fight like this.

    Meanwhile on the golems side, once they were destroyed they are also turning into moltenva and when the puppets are melting down to liquid metal, both are merging together. After a minute or so, theva is solidifying a bit, creating a brand new golem in ce of the previous one.

    And now these golems didn''t just have the raw materials of the soil and the minerals those soils possessed, instead the metals that Sam used to make the puppets are also being part of the new bodies.

    Now, the golems are much harder to deal with. They are stronger and more flexible. But the puppets are beasts are relentless.

    "Go on. Until the next phase of these creatures start, we are going to use any other measures."

    Sam told all the beasts and they conserved their energy much more strictly.

    Sam kept an eye on the crystal table as he made sure that everything is in his control. Soon, at one corner of the city, he noticed something else. The hole that was leakingva there expanded a bit more. Lava spurted out and overflowed into the surrondings.

    All the buildings around them were destroyed. They are all molten, turned into liquid and all the liquid soon morphed into a golem that is twice asrge as the ones before. They turned into giant creatures with arge single eye on its head.

    Cyclops.

    Sam immediately got an idea of who the god causing this disaster is. He kept on observing the surroundings and noticed several more leakages happened within city and more and more cyclops are appearing. Unlike the golems, these are much more destructive and lethal.

    The puppets didn''t evenst for a few moments under the attacks of cyclops.

    Much less four, even twelve to sixteen puppets are easily destroyed before a Cyclops was brought down. And of course just like golems, these cyclops are also regenerating with the metal of the puppets added to their new bodies.

    The whole city is swarmed. All the buildings are done for and destroyed. Except for the building Sam is standing on, the whole city is filled with Lava and more and more golems are appearing.

    Except for the estate of course. There are ten cyclops at most there. The two beasts are having a pretty easy time dealing with the whole thing.

    Sam looked around and muttered.

    "I guess this is as good theckeys gonna get. Might as well make our move."

    He turned to Dia and yelled.

    "DIA, Its all up to you now."

    *NEIGH*

    Dia neighed loudly and started making rounds around the city. With every stomp of her hooves pirs rose within the streets of the city. Everywhere Sam made a mark, a pir rose. And as soon as they rose, Dia started emitting a maic field from her body with the metal element.

    The pirs started resonating with it and they emitted a maic force as well.

    A golem that was in the middle of pounding a puppet immediately stopped in its tracks. It shook like a patient and before long it fell down and broke down into different parts.

    It turned into molten metal once again, merged into Lava. But now it didn''t merge back into forming another golem. Instead theva is also reacting top maic field making it stay in that molten state.

    One golem after another started falling down and soon even the Cyclops started slowed down

    At this moment, Sam noticed something else.

    The golems and Cyclops started appearing outside of the city. They are surrounding the city from all sides and are charging fiercely.

    "City formation maic field activate."

    The next moment another muchrger maic field appeared around the city and it ispletely targeting the external golems and Cyclops.

    Just like that most of the threats at the moment are neutralized and Sam didn''t even have to make a move. Just like how it worked out in the Makar city, he didn''t have to make a move for a long time. But of course, he soon had to do that.

    And just as he thought, the volcanoes around the city started rumbling. The puffing smoke raised by a lot. All the volcanoes erupted at the same moment.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    All the volcanoes erupted, including thergest one. Lava spurted out and many magma rocks were shot out by these volcanoes. They rained down towards the city and the surroundings and as soon as they hit the ground, they morphed into a different type of golems. They are not that big just like the golems that came before, they are very close to human size.

    "Instead of sheer force, this disaster is focusing on numbers and destruction in smaller portions."

    Sam made an observation as he looked at the volcanoes. At this moment, he could sense massive fluctuations within the cores of the volcanoes. He could feel the magma morphing and assuming a humanoid form. Of course, these forms are muchrger almost asrge as the volcano itself.

    The beasts and the puppets started fighting the new type of golems that appeared. Meanwhile, Sam solely focused on the new changes within the volcano. The whole process took more than three minutes.

    As everyone witnessed the scene, they felt like their souls left their bodies.

    Out of every volcano, massive humanoid figures rose up. They are all cyclops and they had giant hammers within their hands they climbed out of the volcanoes. They are taller than the massive city walls. In fact, the city walls only as tall as their hips.

    The swung their hammers on the formation without any dy.

    The formation of course didn''t budge that easily.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    The sound of it seemed like a hammer is being banged on an anvil. The noise reverberated throughout the horizons and it wouldn''t be surprising if people in a far away city heard that noise.

    Sam activated the wind elemental fusion and spread his wings before deactivating the fusion again. After that, he activated metal elemental fusion and flew into the sky.

    At that moment, all the shadow mice in Sam''s possession were being led by the Shadow mouse that had a contract with Sam.

    They all jumped into action along with Void hopper. Throughout the city many spatial tears connecting to the shadow world appeared out of nowhere. Sam''s puppets and his shadow undead jumped into action.

    Their sole purpose is make the golems disappear. Reduce their numbers as much as possible and they are very much delighted to throw them into the shadow world.

    The numbers are reducing very much and this caused the giant cyclops that are beating the formation go into frenzy.

    "Speed up guys, we need to make the final boss appear and it is only possible if there is a drastic change in the number ofckeys, we cannot waste any more time."

    As he spoke zoomed towards one of the giant Cyclops. His fist glowed with metal elemental energy. Void style and ripple style are activated to the fullest and the punchnded squarely on the face of the Cyclops.

    For some reason, the punch was silent, it didn''t evoke any noises and there is no immediate explosive sound or reaction from the Cyclops.

    Instead, it stopped in its tracks as if it was frozen in ce like a statue.

 Chapter 1910: Hammer Strikes

    Within the body of Cyclops.

    A wave of metal energy travelled through every atom of that body. Even though it is molded and solidified with magma, it is essentially a golem. And that golem''s atoms were all effected by this metal energy which morphed into a type of maic force.

    The ripple style fueled the spread of this force and every metallic molecule within the golem turned into a ma. And the maic force of all these temporary maics is of same nature, which made them repel each other.

    The molecules broke down bit by bit, but all of it happened so fast, that it looked like it broke down at the same instant and when the molecules are breaking down, the resultant force was fuelled by the void style and minute explosions happened in arge number.

    Just like that, within a second, the giant Cyclops copsed into very tiny pieces. It didn''t even explode or anything. Its like a lego object broke down into small lego pieces right where it was standing.

    Sam stepped back and looked at the giant that just turned into nothing but arge mass of magma. He is very impressed with the trick that he tried. It will only work with the metal things of course, but it is still a good thing.

    He didn''t waste his time at all and moved to the next target.

    Just one hit and a Cyclops fell down. And they are not joining back easily because of the residual maic force.

    While Sam is on the second target, one of the Cyclops started gathering energy into its hammer andunched a concentrated attack at a single point on the formation. Sam finally saw the formation fluctuating.

    Followed by that Cyclops a bunch of other Cyclops are also doing the same. Concentrated and precise attacks allnding on a single point of the formation that is enough for the formation to fluctuate like it is a disco light.

    At that moment, Sam contacted the beasts.

    "Come on, up the game."

    The number of golems attacking already lessened by a lot because of the shadow world. Now, the beasts had some breathing space. Yanwu was the first toe out and he opted a very interesting strategy.

    Yanwu''s major attacks are of fire element and it wouldn''t be much effective when ites to the Cyclops like that. Of course, he would still win, but he wouldn''t be as efficient and finish it off quickly.

    He decided to opt for physical alteractions along with fire control. As Yanwu attacked with his talons, he controlled the fire energy within the cyclops as he made the object drain the energy quickly.

    Meanwhile, the remaining beasts just fought with their forte. Except for Forest Bear that was left in the city to control of the hoard of small golems and throw them all into the dimension, the rest are all dealing with Cyclops.

    And that exact moment, the main volcano finally burst open once again. This time, it didn''t just erupt normally. Instead, Sam sensed that all the fire elemental energy within the magma was being drained out.

    The energy drain is so high that by the time it was done, the volcano will be dormant it would take centuries for it to recover the same level of energy again.

    All of this energy is concentrated and gathered into a certain amount of the magma.

    Another humanoid figure appeared out of the volcano. Arge human figure that has muscles that looked like they were carved out of mountains, held a hammer that is used for forging instead of battling.

    The humanoid figure stepped out of the volcano and its focus was locked on Sam instantly.

    Sam who is about to tackle the next Cyclops noticed the figure and smiled.

    He dashed forward and punched at the arm of the Cyclops. The arm copsed like it was made of mud and Sam caught a hold of the hammer.

    The hammer is veryrge, almost asrge as a house and Sam is holding with just his grip. Of course it is notfortable to hold.

    "You must be Sam."

    Therge figure spoke.

    "I am guessing you are Hephaestus?"

    "Yes Indeed. I have heard a lot about you from my father and recently from my uncle."

    "Zeus and Poseidon? At least you are more informed than your uncle is."

    "You are indeed as arrogant as they said. Don''t you think you are being too impudent in the presence of a god?"

    "Gods couldn''t submit me on an even ground, you should understand how hard it is for me to bow my head just based on the status alone."

    "Then let me change that."

    Hephaestus mmed his hammer down on to Sam. He didn''t even bother with destroying the city at this point. Judging by the current progress, unless Sam is dead or incapacitated, there is no way they could even prate the city.

    It would be a futile attempt. So, he decided to just deal with Sam first and then the city would be a piece of cake.

    But what he didn''t expect is that resistance Sam offered individually is nothing to scoff at. Sam let the hammer drop. It stood tall with its head on the floor and the handle standing straight like a pir.

    Sam stood on top of the handle as he awaited the blow that came at him. His mental element raged and he threw a punch. The maic punch that he threw to destroy the Cyclops.

    *BANG*

    The metallic sound reverberated in the surroundings, but to Sam''s surprise the hammer was notpletely destroyed. The maic force didn''t prate throughout the hammer, it only entered a very small portion and only that small portion was destroyed.

    The rest of the hammer was still intact.

    Sam was stunned.

    "Okay, lets try this."

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    The hammer and the fist shed continously the shockwaves spread throughout of the surroundings. The mountains were being damaged just from those shockwaves.

    After a few exchanges Hephaestus stopped and looked at Sam.

    "Your technique; it is very intriguing. You are a smart man."

    "Thank you for thepliment and you are an odd ball in the Olympus."

    "Is that apliment?"

    "I don''t know, I am sure it is not a curse word."

    "Let''s finish this. You are interesting, but no one that goes against Olympus can live."

    "What a coincidence, no one that pisses me off lives either."

    Sam waved his hand and a device that he hasn''t used in a very long time appeared in his hands.

    Thunder Prison.

    This is one of the most overpowered possessions he had for a while. To the point whenever he uses it, things always end up going way easier than they are supposed to and to Sam''s delight it is versatile beyond belief.

    The thunder prison expanded and it changed shape. It attached to his hand. A giant metallic hand appeared, that is attached to his own hand and being controlled him. Lightning energy surged as Sam used that arm to catch a hold of the hammer that he got from the Cyclops.

    His metal energy and lightning energy worked in unison as he raised the battle hammer.

    Hephaestus also raised his hammer as fire and metal energy surged.

    *BANG*

    Two hammers shed against each. Sam who is not even one tenth the size of Hephaestus'' figure is standing in the air pushing further while Hephaestus is alsobating forward.

    Even though only one strike was done and it looked like they are just pushing hammers, the sh of energies underneath would have killed someone a dozen times over. Sam didn''t back down at all.

    Each wave of energy he is receiving with that maic force is being amplified with the electric force generated by the lightning energy.

    "You are strong alright. Try pushing this."

    As Sam said a wave of energy entered the hammer. This time, the force isn''t distributed all over the surface of the hammer head. Instead it is only focused on a very small point. All the force was distributed in an area of a square inch.

    *BOOM*

    A miniature explosion urred and pushed Hephaestus'' hammer back. Hephaestus was stunned. He took a step back andnded another attack.

    The hammers shed once again.

    Hephaestus was unable to break past Sam''s attacks. Every time he thought he figured out Sam''s attacks, the force was being redirected to a different point. Even when the hammers met face to face, Hephaestus'' hammer was being deflected in a very weird angle.

    And with every hit, the hammer is damaging bit by bit, like it was being randomly chiseled away.

    After taking more than a couple of dozen hits, Hephaestus was being pushed back. He looked at Sam and made a decision.

    All of his energy suddenly surged. Fire that made his body increased in intensity like never before. The intensity is so high to the point the color almost reached white. His hammer got repaired instantly.

 Chapter 1911: Statues

    Hephaestus''s aura changed significantly.

    "You might be the only human in the history of time that made me fight like this. And I am still unsure whether I would beat you. If you survive today, I wish we could meet in person one day in the future."

    As he spoke, his hammer came smashing down. Sam tried to meet with the attack with a strike of his own.

    *BOOM*

    But this time, his usage of force didn''t really work out. As soon as the hammers met, Sam felt fire energy and metal energy invading his hammer and before he could react and counter, the hammer already broke down into several pieces.

    He looked at Hephaestus in surprise. He hid the thunder prison back in his storage and barely dodged the next swing that came at him.

    *BOOM*

    The swingnded on the formation behind him. The formation fluctuation like crazy. Sam felt like there is a great chance the formation wouldn''t even make it if it takes five more of those hits continuously.

    He looked at Hephaestus and as he tried to close in the distance a little bit, he could already feel that oppressive aura bearing pressure on him.

    Sam gritted his teeth and sent a mental message to Dia.

    Dia who just dealt with a Cyclops ran through the air while neighing.

    Sam hid his wings back and mounted Dia as he looked at Hephaestus. He took reaper out and let the spirit act a bit wilder than usual. He still had metal elemental fusion and so did Dia.

    "Let''s go conquer this guy. Or he might just beat the crap out of the formation."

    The hammer swing came crashing down.

    *WHOOSH*

    *BOOM*

    Another hitnded on the formation of the city.

    Sam and Dia dodged and thennded on the upper surface of the hammer. When Hephaestus raised his hammer, Dia jumped off the surface and directlynded on his arm.

    The maic force burst out of both Sam and Dia and Sam concentrated all of his force into the reaper sword while Dia concentrated all of hers into her hooves.

    *NEIGH*

    Dia neighed and started running with every stomp, cracks appeared on Hephaestus'' skin who was dumbfounded by this development. He hurriedly shook his hand off, but Dia looked like she is operating on apletely different gravitational field.

    And as she ran across the arm, everyone could see that the whole arm is breaking down bit by bit with the cracks appeared out of nowhere and then fire elemental energy leaked out of that arm.

    Hephaestus gritted his teeth and held the hammer with his other hand before he swung his arm as forcefully as he can.

    But to his surprise, not only did Dia and Sam are unfazed, his arm dropped a bunch of its pieces away. Theynded on the formation, but he noticed that he is losing mobility on his arm.

    Before he couldprehend what is happening, Sam and Dia are already on his shoulder and Dia took a single leap straight to his head.

    "I should have done this from the start."

    Sam said as metal energy surged.

    Blood Line Art of Dia using metal element. Maic Storm.

    He channeled the art through his sword and stabbed the sword into the crown of the head. At the same time, Dia used the same attack but through her hooves.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sound rose as cracks appeared all over Hephaestus'' body and the maic force manifested visibly. Hephaestus'' body froze on the spot as the cracks deepened. The raging volcanos quieted down and everything became silent. The golems froze on the spot like statues.

    Sam looked at the massive status under him and didn''t have the heart to destroy it. It looked beautiful for some reason. He and Dia retracted their maic force and got off of it.

    The disaster is over.

    Sam didn''t wait for long. He collected his puppets and together with his beasts, he decided to leave right away.

    The Ruby n leader of course asked him to stay, but Sam didn''t want. Up on further insistence, he decided to have a drink before leaving with the rest of the young masters. Since the young masters are tasked with cleaning the city up, Sam would have to wait for a while anyway.

    He waited with the Ruby n leader and some young masters.

    "Young master Sam.."

    "Please don''t call me that. You can just call me Sam. I don''t really like the term young master."

    Sam immediately cut him off as soon as he heard it.

    Everyone was intrigued.

    "May I know why?"

    "I don''t know. Maybe a lot of people that I don''t like are associated with the term. I don''t have a particr reason, but it is not abel that I am very fond of. And I like my name. You can call me that. Don''t worry, I won''t take it as a sign of disrespect just because you called me my name without any stupid titles."

    "Then I won''t stand on ceremony. Forgive me for being bold, are you looking for a marriage partner? I know it might seem like I am trying to cling to your thigh, in a way you are not wrong. But I would like to further our rtionship and if you are interested we can discuss a marriage proposal."

    All the young masters from other ns froze for a second. They didn''t expect the Ruby n leader to be this bold. He didn''t even mask his desire with some fancy shenanigans, he was straightforward without beating around the bush.

    "You are pretty straightforward."

    "There is no point trying to run circles around a person like you. I figured it might even leave a bad impression. I decided toy my intentions bare. If you reciprocate my approach, I will be happy, even if you didn''t, we can still have this amicable yet professional rtionship."

    "Well, sorry to disappoint you. But I am not looking for marriage and I doubt it will change any time soon."

    "If you don''t mind me asking, is it a matter of status? You look like you belong to a veryrge power."

    "I do belong to arge power, but I didn''t inherit it. I built myself. And I don''t need to depend on love of a woman to add to my status.

    As I said, I am just not looking for a partner it is as simple as that. And even if I did, the things I look for in a woman arepletely different and Status wouldn''t even be thest one on the list."

    After some time, the group left.

    The Ruby n leader looked at therge statue of the Hephaestus and the small statues of the golems all over the city. The small statues were collected and are now in his possession, he is sure that some young masters sneaked a couple of the to give them to their n, but he didn''t mind.

    He called for artisans of his n and said.

    "Let''s repair that statue of Hephaestus. Reinforce it to the best of the ability, fill up the cracks, but make sure that they are still visible and if possible let''s create a statue of Sam and his horse on top. Recreating the situation.

    This is going to be part of the history of our city."

    He is very excited. The formation that Sam made was not removed. He was really impressed and desired that formation.

    But he is also worried, Sam would take it away, but he was actually surprised by Sam''s reaction.

    "I can''t be bothered."

    He left such a world-ss formation back because he cannot be bothered to dismantle it.

    Just from the looks of the young masters, he is sure that every one of them would have dly did the dismantling for him, but it is not their ce since Sam couldn''t be bothered.

    Now Ruby City has that extrayer of defense that could be very hard to prate.

    Sam went back to the mountain temple with the beasts.

    "You guys said, you wanted to check something out right? Go ahead. Don''t get into trouble though."

    He let the beasts do whatever they wanted to do before he entered the temple.

    Priestess is waiting for him.

    "This disaster ended faster than I thought. Congrattions."

    "Thank you. Even I felt like it ended faster than the one before. The first time, I was very confused as there is no reference point to work on, but now I have a better idea and made preparations ording to that."

    "That is good to know. That means the next disaster would be much more smooth sailing."

    "I hope so. I am sure I will try to make it happen like that. But if it happens or not, is a different thing altogether."

    "Alright, I hope you have an appetite. Let''s have a meal and talk."

    "Thank you."

    Sandhya who was beside them felt so invisible at the moment.

 Chapter 1912: Beautiful City

    After the meal is over, Sam was left alone.

    He used too much of his brain power, at least that is what Priestess thought and told him to rest. She made sure none of the ns would go around and bother him. After witnessing the disasters, the ns are all feeling anxious.

    Everyone wanted to find a way to make Sam visit their n sooner and start working on the defense.

    They wanted to see if they can bribe him. They even wanted to offer up their youngdies and not even as marriage partners.

    Priestess was disgusted by their behavior and she was adamant about not letting them disturb him.

    "He will only interact with you when he knows about the next disaster, until then you are not allowed to talk to him or pester him. Let his rest properly."

    She was strict, cold and unyielding. This made everyone stay put.

    After they left, Sandhya and Priestess sat down to y some chess.

    "Mother, don''t you think my brain should also get some rest? Why are making me y chess?"

    "My problem is that you are not even using your brain enough. Until you beat me in at least one game, you are not getting any rest. As I said, I am still going easy on you."

    Sandhya resigned to her fate and just kept on ying. This is their daily routine. As long as Sandhya is on the mountain, she has to y chess with her mother every day.

    "Mother, I need to ask you something."

    "Go ahead."

    "Why are you caring for Sam so much? Do you like him?"

    "Yeah, I like him a bit." Priestess answered casually.

    "But don''t you think your age difference is a bit too high?"

    Priestess stopped her move mid air and looked at her daughter with a weird expression, then she extended her hand and gave a forehead flick.

    "AHHH¡­ Why are you hitting me like this?"

    "If you were a bit younger, I would have spanked you silly. What kind of thoughts are running your head. Do you not know any other ''like'' other than that?"

    "I mean, you only ever cooked for your father and Makar n''s head, so when I saw that you cooked for him, I just.."

    "Let your mind seep into your gutter, is that it?"

    Sandhya pouted and just stared at the chessboard.

    "He is a kid. He shouldn''t be much older than you. Why would I have romantic feelings for a child? You must be out of your mind. Maybe I should kick you out of the temple for a while and let you roam around.

    Staying in one ce must have created mould in that head of yours."

    "Then why are you caring for him? It is so unlike you."

    "If you activate your bloodline ability you will understand. Karthikeya said that the kid has been away from him home for a long time. He has been on one mission after another for years and he has been roaming around the worlds.

    I just wanted to make him feel a bitfortable while he is helping us."

    "If you say so.

    But I am really shocked by everything he does. Hisbat ability is one thing, but his ability with formations and inscriptions are something else. I think he created so many of his own unique forme for inscriptions that I have never even seen that many inscriptions before.

    At first when he gave us the blueprint of his designs directly, I felt like he is a bit desperate. After all, his formations are so refined and powerful, who would give away such thing? But when I looked through the blueprint I felt like I am an idiot.

    I don''t understand half of it. I was able to build certain portions of the formations based on the instructions he left, but when I tried to understand and derive the rest of the construction method, I came up with nothing.

    It is impossible.

    It is way head of the technology within our.

    And when I saw him leaving the formations after the disasters are over, I almost felt like I lost my own money over there.

    The most intriguing thing of all, the beasts. How could the godly beasts like themselves submit to a normal human?"

    "What makes you think he is normal though? You yourself said all the great things he showed you, but why are you assuming that he is normal? Just because he is a human?"

    "I mean, us humans are not exactly a race with many perks right? At least that is what the history says."

    "It seems like you forgot very important parts of the human history. You are indeed correct that humans are a race that didn''t have many perks, but what humans have is hidden potential that is driven by their will.

    The boy received the blessing of a god and became immortal at the age of sixteen. An emperor turned sage that made the king of heavens tremble. A warrior-sage that wiped out 21 civilizations alone. A man who defeated a demon king that made the king of gods look like a child.

    All of those humans, what do you think they have inmon? Unadulterated ambition, sheer will that defies human nature, and will power always manifested into strength. I feel like Sam is that kind of person."

    The mother-daughter pair kept on chatting while ying chess.

    Meanwhile, Sam had a very rxed time. Just like the priestess promised, he was allowed to rest well. He roamed around the mountains even stumbled across a hidden waterfall.

    He couldn''t help but feel a bit at peace because of the beauty and serenity of the nature. He yed music and rxed.

    Of course, it didn''tst long, on the second day of his rest, he was given a new vision about the third disaster.

    It is going to happen at the Forest City.

    Sam immediately made his move with the young masters. On his way, he went through the information of the Forest city presented by the temple officials.

    The Forest city is actually very close to the Mountains they were staying at, so it didn''t take very long for them to go there.

    Sam was a bit confused when he saw the city thought. It is a city, but it is unlike any city he has ever seen before. The city waspletely built within the forest and even the city itself felt like a forest.

    The whole area is covered in giant trees and there are some houses that are even built on those trees. Sam felt like he is in a fairytalend of treehouses.

    He met with the n leader.

    "Hello, thank you for visiting us and thanks in advance for helping us."

    "You are wee. I like your city. I must say this is one of the most unique cities I have ever seen."

    "Thank you, I am sure my ancestors who built the city will be very satisfied with your praise."

    "So, from the reports that I gained, the forest for a few square kilometers around you, is all of your territory and it is a haven for the beasts. Is that true?"

    "Yes. The forest has multiple springs with very unique abilities. But themon ability among them is the fertility rate. The beasts have a better chance of giving birth to an offspring of a higher bloodline purity.

    Their reproduction rate is also very high.

    In fact, this forest holds the highest poption density of beasts in the whole."

    Sam nodded in understanding.

    "Then the trees? The wood element seems to be running rampant here."

    "Of course, the wood element is very high. To the point there are some ces where the energy is physically visible. Some springs that I mentioned even have liquified energy merged with them."

    "This is indeed a great ce. And you guys managed to coexist in this ce without destroying and damaging it much. You have my respect."

    "Thank you.

    Can you guess what kind of disaster might strike this ce?"

    "It is going to be an Olympian god of course and it is going to be rted to the surroundings. I do have some spections in mind, but your uniqueyout is giving me some doubts as well as ideas.

    Let me explore the area for half a day. I need to make sure that I can defend against all the possible scenarios."

    "Please let us know how we can assist you."

    "My beasts are already on the task. Please tell your hunters to be wary of them. I might be here to save you guys, but my beasts are my absolute bottom line. Make sure you don''t hurt them."

    "Of course, all the people from our n are informed."

    "That is good to know.

    The only problem is I like your city and the surroundings way too much, let''s hope that it wouldn''t be destroyed."

 Chapter 1913: Beast Tide

    Sam as usual went ahead with the investigation.

    Everything about this city is very different. Unlike the other cities, this one didn''t have a definite shape of a circle, ellipse or a square. Instead it is very uneven.

    The city walls are not constructed out of some special earthen stones that are massive. Instead, arge number of trees are grown in a pattern around the city and each tree has a fixed distance. Between these trees as nodes, they built a wooden wall of decent size.

    Of course, this wooden wall and the formation of the trees gave them adequate defense against the beasts.

    Sam is really impressed by how much they kept the nature intact.

    But that gives him a lot of trouble when the disaster strikes.

    In the second disaster, at the ruby city, theva has been flowing beneath city through small currents. That already gave him a lot of trouble. He has to design the external defense as well as the internal defense.

    Now, the trees and vegetation that are part of this city are a very integral and crucial part. If the disaster is rted to those trees, then it would be a piece of cake to kill everyone within the city.

    He has to be very strategic about uing disaster.

    But he decided on one thing though. Bear''s position.

    Sam talked to Forest bear about the n.

    "You are going to sit in the middle of the city control every single piece of vegetation that is within the city and its immediate vicinity. You don''t need to go past the ten meter radius outside of the city."

    [I can control further though.]

    "I know you can. But I want the quality over quantity. I want your utmost control over the vegetation in that designated area. It should be to the point that even if Noahes and wrestles with you for the control over the vegetation, she shouldn''t even be able to gain 10% control over a small de of grass."

    [I will do it.]

    Forest bear immediately ran into the city without hesitation. The people inside the forest were stunned by the sudden charge of the beast, but they were already informed about the possible scenario like this.

    Forest bear took his position and his wood elemental energy spread.

    Sam then sent Raiju, Sky and Ape outside to get an understanding of the beasts here.

    Mia is in charge of getting an understanding of the springs within the forest. Dia, Hopper and Yanwu have special tasks.

    "Hopper we are going to work closely this time. I need to set up a special spatial barrier. It don''t need to be continuously active, it can be active for some time and go on a dormant mode before reactivating again.

    But as long as it is active, it should provide me with derived effect. This is what the barrier should do."

    Sam them transmitted the image he had in mind.

    Hopper nodded and jumped into the second floor of the Divine dimension. He went there to simte the spatial powers it has to achieve the desired result.

    While Hopper is busy with that, Sam turned to Dia and Yanwu.

    "We are going tobine your powers. I want to make sure that the current city structure is preserved as much as possible and even if the forest itself turns out to be a disaster we need to make sure that the whole forest is not destroyed.

    So, the best course of action is for us to be on defensive. Our defense must be absolute. Not a single attack must be allowed to prate through us, which is impossible. So, we are going to give our best to achieve that.

    And with that near absolute defense, we will defeat the god thates with the disaster to finish it off. Once the god is done, our job would be done as well."

    [What should we do?]

    "Both you and Yanwu create a zone around the city. It should expand for at least five hundred meter radius around the city. It is arge area¡­"

    Sam went on to exin the n. After everything is done, he went on to work on the base defensive formation. He already gave the tasks to the young masters and the masters that came with them. But this time, Sam had to work on this much harder than all the times before.

    The formation shape is a bit uneven. Sam did get permission from the n leader to cut some trees off around the city, but Sam was absolutely against it.

    Some of these trees are ten times older than him. It is okay to cut off a few branches off, but the very presence of these trees and the energy they are gathering are the reasons why thend is flourishing so much.

    Sam is all about development and progress but not at this cost. He just took it as a challenge, he would destroy the next disaster and repel back and he wouldn''t destroy a single tree in the process.

    If the disaster itself makes any damage to the trees, he would even fight and defend it.

    By evening, Sam already made a lot of progress on the formation at that time Ape returned back with some news.

    [The beasts are very peaceful at the moment, but it seems slightly unnatural. Their territorialism seemed to have disappeared. Even a tiger is not responding when I made a mess in its territory. It is very unlike them.]

    Even Sam was surprised when he heard this.

    The tigers are indeed one of the most territorial creatures and the more powerful their bloodline is the more territorial they are. They wouldn''t just let another high level creature just enter their territory and make a mess there.

    "Keep an eye and try to see if you guys can redirect the beasts. It doesn''t matter which direction, but try to take them as far away from the city as possible."

    [We will try and see.]

    After that Sam went back to work on the formation.

    This time he was very handson and it is not just some formation that could be finished with man power. He was extremely precise with everything he did.

    Time went by just like that. The night before the disaster Sam was finally done with the formation. At least it satisfied the image in his mind. But he still felt like that it wouldn''t be enough. He just kept on feeling that it would be hard to deal with the disaster without damaging the forest.

    But of course, he couldn''t do much about that feeling since he doesn''t know what the disaster. All he could do is wait for the disaster toe while he added some minor reinforcements on the formations.

    Time passed.

    Soon it is time for the disaster to strike. But Sam was surprised when he didn''t see any changes within the city and the immediate vicinity.

    He was confused. Even the crystal table didn''t show any signs, but at that moment Ape, Sky and Raiju sent messages one after another through their mental connection.

    [Beasts are running rampant. They mutated suddenly and they are charging at the city all of a sudden.]

    This is the gist of all three of them.

    When Sam told Ape to redirect the beasts away from the city, they did as he told them to do. The beasts were also verypliant. Even the beasts that are a bit stronger than them just bowed down to the bloodline and moved away.

    Themon thing they noticed is that all these beasts seemed to have be very soft. This made Sam feel that''s something is definitely off, but he couldn''t put a finger on it.

    All he could is tell his beasts to keep an eye on them.

    He even got a message that all the beasts are basically in the rest mode the night before, but now all the beasts are mutated all of a sudden and they are charging towards the city.

    "They are not responding to the bloodline suppression?"

    [No, it is like their minds arepletely gone and taken over by someone. They are like undead creatures, it is just that they didn''t lose any of their vitality or strength.]

    "You three attack them. It would be impossible for you guys to stop all of them, but try to reduce the number as much as possible. We will take care of them when they reach the city."

    The beastsplied and they started hunting the beasts that are running towards the city.

    But at this moment, one of the young masters got a message. He hurriedly came to Sam and told him.

    "I got a news from outside the Forest city''s territory. The beasts that belong to other nearby cities and establishments, or beasts that belong to a different territory are all acting up. They broke their shackles, contracts and all of them are running to Forest City at their top speed.

    They could enter the forest any time."

 Chapter 1914: Never-Ending Swarm

    A beast tide has started and it is not justing from one direction.

    It ising from all the directions and the range is far beyond the forest that they are currently in. Sam felt a bit frustrated with this. Currently all of his beasts are under different tasks. So, this means, he can only use his puppets, undead and spectres to deal with the beasts outside the forest.

    In fact, he did exactly that.

    There are a lot of puppets that he hadn''t used in a while. He even set out the puppet legions that had used before. These puppets are equipped with energy cannons. The only problem is they don''t have much against the Divine ne beasts.

    But he did have other means. Since thend at the border of the forest is extremely fertile too, he can use some vines as ayer of defense.

    He decided to send some seeds along with the beasts

    "Sir, there are a lot of personnel out of the forest at the moment. They might be able to help with the hoarding from outside. Fighting against these beasts is pretty straight forward after all."

    The Forest City n leader said to Sam.

    Sam thought for a moment and nodded.

    "Tell your personnel to make their move. Assist the puppets and undead creatures to deal with the beasts. Some of my puppets have special means. Tell them to not interfere with any anomalies."

    This time Sam didn''t hesitate to take help.

    Once the beast tide was being handled outside of the forest boundaries, Sam focused on the beasts within the forest. They are still charging towards the formation and in the next five minutes, he could finally see the beastsing.

    "Yanwu, Dia. You guys are up. Hopper, help them out."

    Sam gave out orders as he himself took out his sniper rifle while hovering on the harbinger.

    The earth within the five hundred meters around the city was being controlled by Dia. The whole area is one big trap. Hopper increased the density of space making it hard for them to move.

    The earthen traps were activated. The pits appeared and they dragged the beasts into them with gravitational force.

    Within the pits, the openings were closed off immediately and Yanwu let out the golden mes while Dia increased the pressure by controlling the gravitational force within. They are almost creating a high pressure furnace where the beasts are being treated like some metal.

    Of course, even with Dia and Yanwu''s level of control and hopper''s speed reduction, it is impossible topletely stop all these beasts.

    That is where Sam''s sniper came into handy. He tried to aim for the vitals and if he is not confident that one shot is enough to kill the beasts, he just made sure their movements is taken away, so that Dia and Yanwu can finish them off.

    Ape, Raiju and Sky also joined in the frenzy, they are in charge of direct close contact battle. Of course, they are smart enough to take advantage of the traps.

    So, Ape is just punching the living day lights out of the beast first, enough to make it go stun for a moment and then break the legs of those beasts before letting it fall into the ground.

    The beast falls into the trap and it dies inside.

    Raiju is having a much easier time with his speed. He is using his ws and maw to decapitate the movement of the beasts and just made them bleed out and paralyze with the lightning element. Its done after just two moves.

    The beast would be ready for the pits.

    Yanwu is mostly dealing with the beasts in the sky. Since he is very outnumbered, his job is to just make sure the beasts are not having an easy time while flying. Whenever they did, Sky made them lose bnce and momentum.

    Ape or Raiju took the chance tounch a pincer attack on it along with Sky and subjected them to the pits.

    The whole battle is well coordinated, with Sam handling the long range gracefully.

    Even though the whole city was overwhelmed a bit when they saw the sheer amount of beasts that areing at them, they finally had a sense of relief.

    The onught went on.

    Five minutes,

    Ten minutes,

    Half an hour,

    One hour,

    One and half hour,

    Two hours,

    Three hours.

    By now, Sam, the beasts and everyone in the city were already shocked. They didn''t expect that the beast tide wouldst this long. Every beast in the forest ising at them and they areing at them relentlessly.

    The more surprising thing is that the disaster figure, the god that makes an appearance hasn''t made an appearance yet. By now, he was already done with his second disaster before, but now the beasts are stilling forward and from the looks of it, there is no sign of them stopping.

    "Shadow mice. You are up."

    Sammanded and all the shadow mice started moving around. They are carrying some tokens within their storage rings and they stuck those tokens to the burned dead bodies in the pits.

    As soon as they attached the tokens, undead energy released and the dead beasts turned into undead. They rose from the ground along with their shadows as well.

    The undead are linked to the shadow mice that used the tokens and now Sam had a mini army of undead beasts to help with the never ending swarm of the beastsing at him.

    The load on Sam and the beasts reduced by a lot.

    He even called for a few archers to do some precise long range attacks to ease the pressure further so that he could recover. Since it is taking such a long time, he could only guess that whenever the disasteres, things are not going to be easy for him.

    The beast hoardsted untilte afternoon. Even after that the beasts areing, but they are not as much trouble.

    But now some new problems arose.

    Forest Bear is the first one to react as Sam felt the pressure on the mind of the Forest Bear through their mental connection. So, he immediately ran towards him and asked.

    "What happened?"

    [Someone is trying to take control over the trees. Some sort of sentience is being granted to all the big trees within the city.]

    The bear responded and Sam became vignt.

    "Are you able to tackle it?"

    [Don''t worry. You can count me on this. Every tree in the city is mine for now. No power can take it.]

    Sam nodded and activated energy vision.

    No matter how mystical a phenomenon is, Sam is sure that there is going be energy involved in it. He tried to see if he can find the energy signature for this weird phenomenon.

    At first, he wasn''t able to. But after some time, he changed the energy vision a bit. Instead of trying to track every and any form of energy, he modified the technique to only track divine energy and this time, there are some results.

    He could see some sort of mist falling down from the sky above the city. Of course it is not the real mist, rather the state of the energy looked like some sort of soothing and thin mist. And this mist ispletely limited to the city only. Even the weird shape of the city was followed by the falling mist.

    The mist seeped into the trees, both big and small. Sam could see the Bear''s energy wrestling with this energy to control the trees when he used his observation ability on one of them. The bear has an upper hand and after around half an hour of this struggle, the bear finally managed to expel all of this energy away.

    At that moment, Sam saw that the energy stopped raining down on the city and it dispersed towards the forest.

    The energy rain started falling within the immediate surroundings of the city. The radius in which Hopped had the most influence at the moment.

    Sam didn''t do anything about this at the moment, he just ordered Hopper to keep an eye on the space. Anything that happens within that space should be stopped and deal with by hopper.

    The energy seeped into the trees around the city and this time, there is nothing that could stop this energy.

    Sam watched as the tree transformed a bit slightly. The trees indeed got sentience and they started moving. There is even a faint appearance of grotesque facial features on the trees and a vine that appeared on every single one of them.

    One of the branches changed its shape into a bow and the vine acted like the bow string. Another branch grew straight and long like an arrow and it was automatically nocked on the string before it was aimed at the city.

    There is not even that much distance, Sam could actually feel the aura of the arrow and its attack power from where he is standing.

 Chapter 1915: Dragged On Battle

    *SWOOSH*

    Therge wooden arrow made its way through the air andnded on the formation.

    The arrow shed against the formation and shattered into a million pieces. The formation didn''t even fluctuate. Sam just looked at the trees without any reaction.

    He could have easily shot down the arrow, but he wanted to see the extent of these attacks and their effects on the formation. He was surprised and intrigued. The formation didn''t fluctuate but the impact is nothing to scoff at.

    It would cause serious damage if a cultivator of his level was hit by it.

    More arrows came from different trees, Sam still let them hit the formation. Nothing happened. There is no change and the people inside the city felt a sense of safety because of this. At this moment, Sam noticed something else.

    He saw that there is something happening to the first tree that''s hot the arrow.

    Wood elemental energy gathered at the tip of the arrow and a fruit appeared. The arrow was shot and itnded on the formation.

    *BOOM*

    An explosion happened. It is not exactly a ming explosion, rather the wood elemental energy exploded a bit and ayer of corrosive energy wastched on to the formation. Sam activated his Energy vision to take a look at the formation.

    The new energy is trying to invade the formation''s energy structure and destroy it bit by bit. The only problem is Sam''s formation is a bit too strong and it would be a pipe dream to say the least to just defeat it with one such fruit.

    Of course, Sam is also not na?ve enough to think that only one such attack woulde.

    His increased the energy density within the formation and let it handle the rest. The corrosive energy that was trying to invade has been forcefully expelled. The formation is still intact. Probably the only bad thing there is the energy consumption increased a little bit.

    Sam took out his hand guns and started shooting down the arrows that came at them. Right now, the number of arrows is still manageable. He doesn''t need to bring out any hidden cards.

    While doing that, he also kept an eye on the forest so that he could check out the state of the mist that is changing these trees like this.

    Just like he expected, after giving sentience to all the trees within the fifty meter radius outside the city, the mist expanded further and started doing the same to the other trees.

    "Hopper, I will handle this for now. Just make sure that nothinges past me and attacks the formation. I would like to see if I can handle all of these with my guns alone."

    Hopper agreed silently.

    Sam got into action.

    He stood on harbinger and his guns were zing. This looked like a weird version of shooting practice. As he sted one arrow after another, after some time, there are a whole bunch of shards all over the ground near the city.

    Another hour passed just like that and Sam finally started panting a little bit with slight sweat on his forehead.

    He could sense that the mist expanded a lot. The arrows areing from far away. From more than a couple of miles away and he also noticed that the farther the tree is from the formation, the stronger the attack.

    Sam even had to use multiple shots to just destroy the momentum of the arrows.

    After another half an hour or so, the whole forest''s trees are all sentient and now they are all attacking the formation at the same time.

    Finally, Sam couldn''t hold on.

    No matter how fast he can shoot, he is unable to keep up with each and every one of the attacks. So, many of the arrows went past his shooting range and were about to hit the formation.

    But at that moment, there is a massive spatial fluctuation around the formation.

    All the arrows that were just about to hit the formation slowed down and in an instant, the space around them was twisted a bit. The arrows were torn to shreds because of that spatial turbulence.

    Not a single arrow managed to touch the formation.

    Its hoppers doing. Around the formation a fabric of space waspletely under Hopper''s control and this is one of the methods that Sam decided to go with to ensure that the forest wouldn''t be damaged.

    The spatial tears didn''t disappear immediately. They stayed there as the space is slowly mending together by itself. So, when the next volley of arrows arrived the spatial tears themselves acted as a defense.

    The arrows are finally neutralized. Of course, this is not going to be a permanent solution. Hopper would run out of energy just like anyone else. Things wouldn''t go well, if he goes on with it for a long time.

    Sam just hoped that the god''s form will appear as soon as possible. The disaster could be brought to and end once the god is dealt with.

    Time passed, the whole thing turned out to be a battle of attrition. Yanwu, Dia and the others got some rest for now, but the same couldn''t be said for Hopper and Sam.

    They arebating against the arrows and they noticed as the time passed the number of arrows are increasing. He almost felt like the god is trying to just drain him out and deal with him in a single blow.

    In a way, he is not right.

    Only after the sun set and the moon rose did Sam finally see some change in the forest. Not too far away from the city, there is a small patch with rtively less density of trees. And within that small area, there is a nt that grew out.

    The growth was very rapid and Sam didn''t miss it. He is already keeping an eye out for any anomaly within the area.

    As the nt grew, it turned into arge tree. Before he knew it the tree grewrger andrger before it morphed into a humanoid female form.

    Sam looked at the massive figure and sighed.

    "Finally."

    He still has half of his energy left and he is recovering rapidly. It is about time, the god came.

    But as soon as the god arrived, she snapped her fingers and a wave of wood elemental energy hit the whole forest. The trees that were already sentient and are shooting arrows, grew a bitrger.

    A weird runic inscription appeared on all of them and it glowed like a neon light in the dark night. The trees nocked the arrows and shot. Even those arrows are glowing. They looked like shooting stars, only they are all aimed at the city.

    Sam had a bad feeling as soon as he watched those arrows.

    "Hopper, Dia, Sky. Resist."

    That is all Sam had said while he himself used light elemental fusion and shot dozens ofser beams from his body as he aimed at theing arrows.

    Dia used earthen walls to block a bunch of arrows herself, while Sky tried to slow down and helped Hopper with the arrows. This time, the spatial tears required for destroying these arrows were high in number and they are also much denser.

    But even with that much effort, one arrow exactly managed slip past them and hit the formation.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosive sound, a glowing mist of wood elemental energy seeped into the formation and even before the formation could expel all of that energy, within a small patch on that formation a thinyer was worn out.

    Sam was stunned by the increase in damage.

    He is hurriedly thinking of different ways to tackle this. After all, there are around a thousand trees shooting at them, it is not going to end well, if they didn''t negate it properly.

    But at that moment, Sam got a mental message from Forest Bear.

    He was surprised by a bit and then smiled.

    The next moment, all the trees within the city started glowing. At first the n leader went into panic mode. He is the one who is observing every single detail about the fight that is happening outside, sow when he saw the trees inside glowing, his heart almost dropped to his pants.

    "Don''t worry. It is not the enemy."

    Only after Sam those words did he rx.

    The next volley of arrows wereing from the trees outside and at this moment, the trees inside the city also changed. Each tree shot multiple arrows into different directions.

    The only difference is the arrows that the trees from the city are much thinner and sharper. They didn''t have fruits that are exploding, instead the arrows themselves exploded as soon as they shed with the enemy arrows.

    Of course those arrows themselves are not enough to negate the enemies. But the load on Hopper and others has reduced by a lot and Sam who is now free can just go ahead and deal with the god.

 Chapter 1916: Artemis

    Sam took off on the hoverboard.

    Amid the explosions and flying wooden arrows that are asrge as spears, he flew to the God that was standing there.

    Sam stopped a few meters away from the humanoid figure.

    "So, let me guess. You are Artemis?"

    "Indeed I am. I am not very well-known around here. I am surprised you know of me."

    "Well, my knowledge is not from around here anyway."

    "So, you are the bastard that has been pestering the Olympus? I heard a lot of our followers have been attacked by your organization and you are even going against us in our quest to punish this."

    Sam looked at her silently for a moment.

    "Manner''s isn''t taught at Olympus, right? Maybe after I break open that realm and upy all of its territories, I will reform the poption with Sam''s school of thought. Its motto would be, ''Don''t run your mouth lest someone tears open your heart''."

    Artemis looked at Sam with a frown.

    Her hand extended and a tree nearby grew all of a sudden and tried to capture him.

    *SWOOSH*

    He made a hard spin in the air. The tailwind of the harbinger cut the branches off. Sam looked at Artemis and spoke.

    "I was still talking."

    The next second, he made his move. He zoomed off on Harbinger with wind element riling up around his body. The tailwind itself is sharp enough to leave a gash on Artemis'' body as he flew higher and higher.

    Artemis waved her hand and all of a sudden, the nearby trees that are shooting at the city changed their aim to him. Sam slipped through the gaps as the arrows came at him. He even used the wind force of the harbinger and redirected on of the arrows to hit Artemis''s body.

    Artemis was caught off guard by such a move. The fruit on the arrow exploded and a small patch on her wooden body was a bit corroded. But of course, neither the explosive damage, gash from tailwinds and the fruit corrosion was actually enough to cause a significant reduction in Artemis'' power.

    In fact, as Sam tried to get closer to her head, the wounds he left behind already healed. And from his energy vision he could see that there is literally no change in the overall energy level of her body.

    Sam knew that it is going to be a tough fight if he takes this approach. The whole forest is a very vitality filled area. This is actually the best ce to grow any and all kinds of herbs just from that vitality standpoint.

    And since Artemis'' form here is made of pure energy, there is no physical fatigue whatsoever. She can recover as many times as possible.

    But just for this, Sam already thought of an idea.

    A vine that grew from Artemis'' body was shot towards him and the Harbinger. He dodged to the side and cut the vine with a wind de.

    A few more vines were aimed at him. He stopped the wind energy and activated shadow energy from within his body. He let go of the harbinger and left its control to the spirit itself.

    Its job is very simple. Destroy the vines, arrows or whatever Artemis is going to throw at Sam.

    He just flew towards the Artemis'' head as he dodged all the vines and strikesing at him. He is a like a fly buzzing around artemis.

    Within just a few minutes, she got really annoyed. Meanwhile Sam on the other hand, didn''t try to deal a single giant blow that would take her down. After trying a few times and realizing that Artemis is very adamant about not letting go near her head, he decided to take a different route.

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam dodged a vine that came at him like a whip and closed his distance between him and Atremis''s body. He used void style and punched forward with the shadow energy.

    *CRACK*

    Along with the shadow energy, arge amount of death energy was injected into the wooden body.

    Artemis felt a slight sense of unease as she sensed the wound on the wooden body. Her whole form and strength is based on vitality and it definitely isn''t a pleasant feeling for her to feel the death energy in this body.

    She tried her best to expel all the death energy out and in process, she had to destroy a part of that wooden body. Albeit very small area. But what she didn''t notice is that a white sh that is very tiny to the point that it could fit in the grains of that giant wooden body disappeared into the body.

    Sam kicked on the wooden body and changed his trajectory a bit. He moved in the air like a water snake in shallow waters. He took a swing andnded a kick on the leg of the body.

    Once again, shadow energy, death energy and a white sh.

    Sam kept on kicking and punching the wooden body as he damaged it every chance he got. He didn''t even bother trying tond some massive blows.

    "You cannot defeat me with those puny attacks. I can draw vitality from this soil and if that is not enough, I can even draw vitality from the trees around me. These trees have been here for thousands of years, and some of them are here for even tens of thousands of years, they are batteries of vitality at this point.

    Do you want to see what I can do with it?"

    As Sam watched, Artemis extended her hand and aimed at one of the trees nearby. The vitality of the see was sucked out slowly. The leaves at the tip of the branches slowly withered out and they are followed by much thicker and bigger leaves, than the whole tree.

    All of this vitality is visibly gathered at the tip of Artemis'' hand.

    Sam frowned as he sensed the massive energy the vitality held. He immediately made his move. He gathered arge amount of energy in his own hands and smashed it behind the knee of the body.

    *BOOM* The explosive punch made the body buckle down a bit.

    At the same time.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive beam shot out of the hand of Artimes'' body. It created arge crater as it went towards the city. The beam just brushed past the formation around the city and destroyed a good section of forest around it.

    Sam was stunned by what he saw. He thought energy beams were his thing. In fact, the attack is very much simr to the vitality cannon that he equipped on a bunch of machines he made previously.

    The formation fluctuated wildly. Sam knew that it wouldn''t be a good thing to drag this out any longer. If Artemis does this a few more times, then the formation would definitely be destroyed.

    Sam didn''t hesitate any longer. He didn''t even give the body to recover. He used his maximum speed within the shadow fusion mode and went on rapid fire more. Artemis felt like she is being attacked by a dozen people at the same time.

    The time difference between two attacks is negligible.

    And as the cracks appeared, more white shes entered Artimes'' body.

    Aritmes looked at Sam hatefully.

    "You are a fucking bastard. I will kill you every one of the people here."

    As he said, she extended both of her hands and from there extended a few more vines and branches. All of them are aimed at different trees within the forest and the vitality is being sucked out of all of them.

    Sam didn''t look worried though.

    "I already told you. It is better if you mind your words properly. Manners will get you a long way."

    As he spoke all of a sudden the vitality that is gathered at the tips of the fingers, vines and branches of thatrge wooden body suddenly started reducing. In fact, even the vitality absorption ability of the body also reduced significantly.

    The vitality is actually moving inside the body, but Artimes didn''t feel energized. She felt like her life is being sucked out of her.

    "What the fuck did you do? What did you do to me?"

    She yelled hysterically.

    Sam just stood there as he watched all of it unfold. He is very calm.

    Within the next few minutes, Sam watched as the huge body slowly lose all the green within it, then the body slowly started losing all the moisture as the wooden structure withered away.

    Artemis looked at Sam with utter shock. She looked into her own body and understood what Sam had done to her.

    "How do even have such things with you? This is not possible. You are from lower realms."

    "Just how high have you been staying for such a long time that you are so ignorant of everything else?"

    Sam paused and looked at Artemis.

    "Learn some manners the next time we meet. I might handle you a little gently."

 Chapter 1917: Lost in thought

    The withered bodyy limp in the middle of the forest and from within a bunch of white creatures popped out.

    They are insects, termites to be precise. These are some of the long lost friends that were kept within the divine dimension. They didn''t have much to do for such a long time. One of the high-level creatures that Sam had with him for a long time. Zoi termites. Insects that feed on vitality.

    He even gave arge portion of them away to the Dusk organization during hisst visit. He was even nning to go and give away the rest during his next visit. But luckily, they are here with him and he found great use today.

    Since the whole body is dependent on vitality, this is the best way to just deal with Artemis.

    Now these Zoi termites even got a huge amount of pure vitality to aid their growth. He threw all the termites back into the Divine dimension and took off on harbinger. He went directly back to the city.

    Everyone was d that he is back. Sam didn''t bother greeting anyone, he just went to the beasts and took his leave back to the temple.

    Only after half an hourter did the rest of the peoplee here. By that time, Sam is already having a meal and this time alone as he got lost in some thoughts.

    Sandhya arrived and went to meet Sam.

    "Why didn''t you wait for us? What happened to you all of a sudden? Are you okay?"

    "I am thinking something. Anyway, my job there was done. Do you need anything?"

    "The n leader of the Forest City wanted to give you a present for your help. A plot ofnd directly under their territory. You can grow any of your herbs there. The n members will handle the herbs properly and with utmost care.

    It would be a constant source of some high-quality medicine to you."

    "I don''t need it. Just give it back."

    "Why? It is indeed a very valuable thing. Even if you are rich enough to splurge these kinds of resources and formations, it is good to have something here on this."

    Sam sighed and stayed silent for a moment before he spoke again.

    "Is there an orphanage on this? A proper and big one?"

    "Yes, there is an orphanage that is run by the Mountain temple. Why?"

    "Transfer that plot ofnd to that orphanage and let them have all the profits. Not just this, anything that these n leaders want to give me in exchange, you can directly give it to the orphanage. I have enough to sustain myself and I am not really into your and I have no ns of expanding my organization here.

    Even if I want to, I am sure I can earn my own bread. Don''t disturb me with these things anymore."

    Sam is really disturbed with a lot of thoughts at this moment. He really doesn''t want to deal with these nobles'' petty rewards and plots.

    Sandhya was confused. She left the room and decided to do as Sam told.

    She then went to the Priestess.

    That night Sam is a bit calm and disappointed.

    Priestess called him for a meeting and asked.

    "I heard the third one gave you some trouble."

    "It did, the terrain is a bit tricky. The forest is a great ce. I am surprised that other powers just left the area alone."

    "Oh, they didn''t. There are more invasions on the forest than any other area. It used to be double its current size. Due to a lot of battles, the area was destroyed."

    "I thought so. It''s a pity. That is indeed a great piece ofnd. I destroyed my fair share of forests, but even I have to hesitate such a lush region. Unless it is hiding and aiding my archenemy, I highly doubt I could convince myself to do it."

    "Anyway, are you feeling alright? Sandhya said your mood is down. She feels like you might be feeling too pressured because the third one was much more difficult than the previous two."

    "No, not really. I am not feeling down or anything. I was just thinking about something. I was actually working on a project and I thought I could get some inspiration after I witnessed the first disaster. Particrly when I saw the forest area.

    But it is bit disappointing."

    "Alright. If you are feeling pressured, please let me know."

    Sam nodded and then asked.

    "Why do you care so much?

    This is almost making me feel suspicious."

    Priestess just chuckled and left. Sam just shrugged it off and went to thinking again. He is indeed thinking about a project. There is a reason why he collected so many corpses in the previous mission.

    The Giants, the Lycans and the Demons. Even though they are threepletely different species, they have onemon thing. They are all shape-shifters to an extent. All three of them can change their original bodies into something else.

    The Lycans have their true form, the Giants have their gigantification and the demons can change and imitate their aura. That is the reason why he collected all of those corpses and then did a lot of studies while he was fighting in that.

    During his fight with Artemis in the forest, he felt like he came across something that would help with his research somehow.

    He noticed that when Artemis is interacting with the trees to grant them sentience, there are serious method involved. The whole process is surprisingly simple. The only change thing noticeable is the mist like energy that entered these trees.

    After the fight is over, he started thinking about the mist like energy.

    That is why he came back without bothering about the young masters so that he can have some time alone. In his mind, he is doing a lot of simtions and trying understand what could be the reason.

    But there is no solution.

    The main problem is that if he had understood the reason by the mist like state of the energy, he would have done some simtions in the divine dimension and then figured out something. But he couldn''t find a starting point.

    That is why everything is a bit disappointing.

    He is lost in his own thoughts.

    Meanwhile, someone else is also getting lost in their thoughts in a secret meeting far away from the Mountain City. A n leader has arranged a meeting a few of the important members from his n in a secret location.

    "What is it n leader? We need to prepare for the next meeting and possibly for the disaster. We might even be targeted next? Why did you call for a meeting now?"

    The elder almost sounded annoyed. The disasters are indeed making everyone feel a bit troubled. It is not easy to swallow the fact that such massive destruction could take ce within their home and they don''t know when or how it would happen and only person who can do it seems to be pretty pissed by their younger generation.

    "It is about the disasters only. I think we are getting lost in the preparations are missing a very important opportunity."

    "What do you mean?"

    "We have three active enemies that we are fight for territory with. And now these three enemies are going to face the same level of disasters. What if we manage to capitalize the situation? If we let the cities get effected by the disasters and propose to the one of our allies to swallow that territory, we would score a win big time.

    This is our chance to get an upper hand in power and resources. We might have a shot at being the second biggest power besides the mountain temple and even possibly the biggest power in the near future."

    "Do you really think it is a good idea to mess with them right now? Sam, the one in charge of saving our asses has repeatedly told us that he doesn''t want any interruptions during these times.

    What if that guy finds out? What if he just wants to take it out on us because of it? Do you think you can defend yourself against it?"

    "Come on, Elder. Just because he has some formations and special weapons, doesn''t mean he is invincible."

    "It seems like being the youngest n leader on the got into your head way too much. Its true, just because someone is good with defensive measures, doesn''t mean they are good at killing others too.

    But if someone is THAT good at defending, trust me even if he is half as good as that when trying to kill you, you will end up six feet under.

    So, don''t proceed with these stupid ns."

    The elder didn''t even bother to hold back.

    The n leader of course didn''t like it.

 Chapter 1918: Winged Mountains

    "Elder, you might have raised me and taught me, but that doesn''t excuse the fact that you are disrespecting me and my position as the n leader."

    "I would like to say the same to you.

    You might have be the n leader, but that doesn''t mean, you can forget where you came from and what the true extent of your capabilities are. If the n suffers because of you, I will break every bone in your body and make your crippled body take the throne of the n leader and lead the n until your son is ready to take your ce.

    And you know better than to think I am just bluffing."

    The elder left after that.

    Time passed slowly.

    Sam didn''t bother with meeting any n leaders or deal with any young masters. After a long time, he is lost in his thoughts. He is calcting every single thing in his mind. He even went back to doing calctions on the rocks and trees within the mountains.

    Doing small experiments and calctions.

    Only after two days passed like that and he got the vision for the next attack, did hee back to his senses.

    The next attack is actually a mountain city that is located a bit far away from the mountain temple.

    This Mountain City is called the Winged City. The whole area is surrounded by a mountain range that has a specific natural design that modifies the wind currents in various ways. It is a perfect ce for training in the wind element.

    It is also a house for a lot of wind elemental beasts and mostly bird type beasts. The number of bird species is very high. To the point Sam felt surprised with all the species he has seen and bred.

    "Is everyone ready? I am going to work on this a bit faster than usual and they might need to do a lot more work than the times before. Make sure that they are not goofing around. I am not going to take that lightly."

    Sam said to Sandhya before he took off.

    Sandhya immediately ryed Sam''s message to the rest of the young masters and their followers. It took some time before they reached this city.

    The Winged City didn''t get its name for nothing. It is located on the mountain which is in the centre of the range and there are two mountains adjacent to it, covering it on either side. These mountains are steep, wide and when looked from the front view, they appear like wings.

    These two wings are the natural protection for the city from the most dangerous wind currents that happen within this mountain range. So, the normal people are able to live there without much trouble.

    Apart from that, the positioning of the rest of the mountains made Sam feel a bit impressed as well as a bit inspired.

    Just from one look, he understood one thing.

    The whole mountain range is being subjected to wind currents from the sea shore that is not too far away from there. The geographical location created a natural pressure drop making the currents attack the range.

    And due the unique shape of the range and after some constant erosion over the years, the mountain range took a certain shape that a blind zone appeared in the middle of it all. That is the ce where the city was established.

    There are very few paths to the city and it also provides a lot of natural protection from the invaders. And the basic formation that wasid down around the city also takes advantage of the wind currents around to perform a defensive barrier.

    This is a well built city from both strategic and geographic point of view.

    When Sam visited the city, as usual he was given all the honors and respect from the n leader in charge. Sam also as usual ignored all of that stuff and already got into designing the formation properly.

    Luckily for him, he didn''t have to worry too much about the construction of the formation itself. Because the mountain range itself will act as nodes with a few inscribed modifications on their surfaces.

    The blueprint was created faster than before. He didn''t even take his time to investigate the surroundingspletely as he created the formation. And there is a reason for that.

    He just connected to the basic formation around the city that already existed and based on that, he has a clear cut idea on flow of the wind currents that could attack the city. That gave him a decent idea on how the wind flows and what he could do to make the best use of it.

    And this ce is kind of Sky''s backyard. He left Sky and Harbinger to go and explore all the wind currents. Meanwhile, the remaining beasts are assigned respective tasks. Hopper as usual for the spatial blockade. The previous spatial formation that tackled the wooden arrows, worked wonders.

    Raiju is in charge of tackling thend animals that are nearby along with Ape. They might not be of wind element, but one is faster than the wind and the other is tougher than a mountain. They could handle it.

    Forest Bear took control of the vegetation in and around the city. All the big trees. Sam used some special inscriptions to make the trees draw excess vitality from within the mountains.

    Dia is helping with modifying the mountains into formation nodes and she is in charge of creating some gravitational fields that are active temporarily within the mountains. He might find some use for them.

    The work was distributed and as everyone got involved in the construction, Sam went to the rear of the city and went past the Mountain Wings to test out what the most dangerous wind currents in the range can offer.

    He activated wind elemental fusion, got his wings out and flew against the current as he few.

    The wings are dividing and guiding the uing current into two and that is the only spot where the current is least dangerous. He started from that point and flew deeper into therge ravine in front of him.

    The wind currents are indeed sharp. Sam deactivated his fusion just for the sake of it and tried to take the winds head on by himself.

    The next second, he already saw a few cuts on his exposed skin and the wings are also facing tremendous pressure. He would have flown and hit the wings like a ragdoll if not for his strength.

    Sam was really shocked.

    He is pretty strong. Within his realm of cultivation he is the strongest and Divine ne cultivation is nothing to scoff at. He can destroy a easily.

    But to think that his pure physical form could be damaged by a mere wind current I something that he didn''t expect.

    He reactivated the fusion and went back to the wings.

    He is surprised that these wings not only managed to sustain and survive the onught of such currents, they are strong enough to break the currents apart and reduce the effect on the rest of the mountain range.

    Yet, from outside they just look like some normal everyday stone mountains.

    These wings are the only things that Sam didn''t let anyone investigate. He wanted to satiate his curiosity all on his own.

    He spread all of his energy and spiritual sense into the wings before activating Observation ability.

    Now, he could see every cell of the wings. Sam was surprised by what he saw. These wings are of a material that he has never seen before. He could sense some familiar properties, but it is definitely not a material that he saw and he definitely didn''t get this information in the library of the Divine dimension''s tower.

    He wanted to break a small piece and check it out, but for now he controlled the urge. He didn''t want to mess with these wings at a moment like this. Once the disaster is over, he can take a small piece.

    But now, he developed some ns in his head to make these wings much stronger and much more useful in the uing disaster.

    He took out amunication token and sent a message to Sandhya.

    "Tell everyone to finish their part of work and rx. I will be working on the wings for the time being. No one shall disturb me."

    Sam then extended his finger while a string of blood appeared from the storage device on his finger. The string of blood attached to the finger. Sam ced the finger on the stone and started engraving. The stone is very strong, but he still has earth elemental energy, so he basically modified thisplex stone a bit and made the engravings appear on it bit by bit while the blood ced itself on the engravings.

    Runic symbols one after another appeared as Sam swiftly drew an within no time an inscription ispleted. Of course, there is no significant change yet.

 Chapter 1919: Fast Paced Disaster

    Sam kept on drawing the inscriptions without any break.

    The natural state of this ce, gave him a lot of leeway. He doesn''t know exactly which god is going toe, but the attacks are definitely going to be rted to the winds. And the Winged city is built in a way to defend against the winds.

    So, he can just reinforce that more with his own unique tricks and then deal with the rest of the stuff spontaneously.

    While Sam is doing that, the rest of them team just finished the task he assigned them.

    When they heard Sam''s instructions from Sandhya, they all became curious about what Sam did. Even though they knew better, they couldn''t stop their curiosity and arrived at the wings.

    They didn''t disturb Sam, they just stood far away and tried to use the senses to see what Sam is actually doing on those wings.

    They were stunned by the scale of inscriptions that Sam is drawing on them. They never saw such arge inscription job before. The masters who came to take a look, immediately took a seat there and started taking some notes.

    This felt like a masterss for them.

    Sam didn''t care what anyone thought or if anyone saw. He just focused on finishing that marvelous task and he didn''t dare waste any time or energy.

    After he was done, there is only a couple of hours left for the disaster time.

    Sam hurriedly meditated and used the liquid energy capsules so that he could recover as fast as he can. By the time he reached the full energy level, it is only a couple of minutes for the disaster time.

    The young masters, soldiers and others are full of anticipation.

    Even though they are slightly nervous, they are definitely not as nervous as before. Sam managed to tackle three disasters and all these disasters were defeated without a single person dying.

    So, they are more excited than nervous this time.

    Of course, it couldn''t be said for the citizens of the Winged City.

    As the time passed, the wind currents that are brushing around the city''s formation started bing stronger. Due to the constant contact between the currents and the formations, the formation stayed continuously active as it glowed consistently.

    Sam stood in the middle of the city as he just took a look at the formation.

    Right now, there is nosting damage and everything looked perfectly fine.

    But to Sam''s surprise the speed of the wind increased at an incredible pace. Unlike the previous disaster where Artemis took her time and tried to drag it out, the current disaster moved faster.

    Sam watched as the glow of the formation increased at a certain areas. Those are the areas where the wind current and the formation are in a higher level of contact.

    He closed his eyes and connected to the formation to check the exact situation outside.

    The wind currents are moving at such a pace that the whole current like a massive wind de and it is brushing against not just the formation, but also at the mountain walls on the other side of the currents.

    The current is sharp enough to create the new marks on the smooth surface of the mountain walls.

    As if that is not enough, Sam saw something else. He could see that the concentration of the wind elemental energy is very high within the currents and it is the highest at the points of contact on both of the formations and the mountains.

    And from those points, the wind is manifesting physically created a humanoid figure. The figure is purely made of concentrated wind and it is visible to the naked eye because of the concentrated elemental energy within it.

    These humanoid figures grew wings and they flew out of the wind currents. They shed against the formation at different parts of the formation.

    *BOOM*

    Explosive sounds of the sh reverberated throughout the city and with every impact, there is a glowing patch on the formation at the point of contact.

    This formation is different from the rest.

    Everytime there is something trying to hurt this formation, it is showing a reaction unlike the ones from the previous disasters and there is a reason for that.

    The design of this formation is a bit more special than the rest of the disasters.

    Sam just watched as these winged humanoids hit the formation one after another. But after every attack, they were destroyed.

    There is a certain bacsh from the formation that sent them away and destroyed them.

    The onught continued and within the next five minutes, they saw much bigger winged humanoid forms attacking the formation and this time, they are using some ranged attacks instead of just colliding against the formations directly.

    The humanoid figures just attacked the formation with massive wind cannons, wind des and there are even a bunch of tornados that were redirected and controlled to attack at a single point.

    Sam frowned at the pace the whole thing is developing.

    The first disastersted for a couple of hours before Sam managed to destroy Poseidon''s form. The second disaster is more or less the same. The third disaster on the other hand almoststed for a whole day.

    But now this one is pacing very fast that he doubted it wouldst for an hour at this rate.

    And his doubts are not unfounded. Because just after a few more minutes of these humanoids attacking, even before Sam could deploy his own forces to eliminate them, he sensed a massive fluctuation of energy from far away.

    It ising from behind the wing mountains. Sam looked at that area and noticed that there is arger humanoid figure standing there with wings on his back.

    It is the god figure and he appeared quicker than Sam thought.

    The god had a staff in his hands and he waved it leisurely.

    The wind currents that are already dangerous beyond their belief amplified with just that single wave of the staff. This amplified current took the form of a bird and made its way to the winged mountains.

    The god is trying to destroy the winged mountains as long as they are destroyed, the Winged city is done for.

    The currents would be good enough to destroy the city, the god wouldn''t even have to do anything.

    Everyone in the city can understand this concept, but Sam just smiled without doing anything. Sandhya was worried. She knew that Sam had many tricks up his sleeves, but this is not something she could take lightly.

    She became anxious and almost wanted to go ahead and urge Sam to do something. Just when she managed to mentally convince herself to do it, the winged mountains started glowing. The crystalline glow came from the inscriptions that Sam made on the mountain surface.

    When the bird tackled the mountain, instead of a loud explosive sh, there is a much brighter glow that covered the whole city before a bird silhouette purely made out of the wind elemental energy popped out of the mountains.

    This bird figure is different from the one that shed against the mountains. This figure was shot towards the humanoid figures around the formation and it destroyed a few of these figures before disappearing with the wind currents.

    The god on the other side was stunned.

    He didn''t expect such a turn of events. He indeed thought of finishing this quickly as he is very busy himself. He also took the consideration of this uniqueyout around the city and wanted to take advantage of it.

    But to his dismay Sam''s presence made it much more troublesome than it has to be. And he knew that this might be the possibility and prepared ordingly. But from the way, things turned out, he is very sure that his preparations might not be sufficient.

    He waved his staff a few more times and a few more birds appeared within the wind currents.

    They all shed against the wings just like that and they disappeared along with that glow.

    Sam sat there crosslegged as he focused all of his attention on the inscriptions.

    This time, when the birds formed, two of them were redirected to dealing with humanoid figures on the formation while the third one was actually sent to attack the God himself.

    The bird flew against the current, but for some reason, its energy didn''t deplete in the slightest. And of course the main reason is, Sam is the one controlling the birds, that is why.

    The god waved his staff and struck the bird making it disappear.

    He gritted his teeth and looked at the Winged Mountains.

    "Let''s see how long you can hold up."

    He started walking forward while throwing more and more birds at the mountains.

    Wind energy circted around Sam who is in a meditative state while controlling the inscriptions on the mountain surface.

    "Come fast. I will kill from right here and leave this city soon."

 Chapter 1920: Hermes

    The sh between the wind currents and the birds that formed because of it raged wildly.

    The god came forward with every passing second as he attacked relentlessly, while Sam is much moreposed. No matter how many attacks came, he only focused on blocking them and he returned exactly the same number of attacks back to the god.

    He is testing the god out.

    Giving off a feeling that Sam is confident and stable enough to not even bother initiating an attack of his own. He is just sitting there in his position with a smile on his face.

    "Is this also your doing? A Bastard Named Sam that is challenging the authority of the Olympus?"

    Sam opened his eyes for the first time.

    By now the god is very close to the winged mountains and he just spewed these words out. Sam gritted his teeth in slight anger. He must say that he grew a lot of tolerance for this word, but that doesn''t mean he is not angry about it.

    And that also doesn''t mean that he is going to let anyone go if they speak that word in front of him

    He thought for a moment and decided to make a move.

    He sent mental messages to a few beasts. Dia started activating her gravitational fields she ced in various mountains, this creates a pressure gradient at various spots within the mountain region and next Sam instructed Yanwu to heat up the air.

    The wind currents that have been the same for many decades if not centuries are going to change for the first time.

    Usually, gravity creates a vertical pressure gradient on thes and because of this when air is heated up, it tends to move higher while the cold winds which are denser will move lower this is the main reason for vertical wind currents.

    But now Sam is creating individual gravitational fields that are higher than the gravitational field of the. These fields are also focused on very specific areas and their influence is very limited.

    Usually, to change the course of the wind currents in a valley like this, the wind currents that could injure a Divine ne cultivator, one needs a lot of energy and mental strength. It would be much more difficult since the wind currents are also natural.

    So, Sam is creating a natural phenomenon artificially and he is manipted the wind currents the way he wanted to. Of course, he is not going to change thendscape for that.

    He knew better than to destroy this area and make it inhabitable.

    In front of the surprised gazes of everyone, the wind currents that hadn''t changed many years finally changed, they took the same input paths, but they didn''t exit the same ways. The gravitational fields in the mountains redirected them.

    Almost of these paths had the same origin point when traced back and that is split at Winged Mountain, now after cycling all over the ce, all these currents are hitting the Winged Mountains once again from different angles.

    Unlike before when the Winged mountain only glowed whenever Sam made an attack or defended against it, this time the winged mountain stayed in a constant glowing state.

    And the wind that was being released by that mountain is taking a shape of arge humanoid figure bit by bit.

    The god was a bit flustered, but he didn''t make a move. He understood that this is going to be the showdown and he is all up for it.

    Within the next couple of seconds, Sam manifested into arge humanoid figure, and its resemnce with him in canny.

    It is basically him in a giant condensed wind form.

    Sam didn''t manifest any weapons though. He just looked tall and strong looking at the God in front of him.

    "Let me guess. Hermes?"

    "So, you know me. At least you have a decent knowledge about who you are messing with. But not enough to know not to mess with us."

    "Can we really stop this prideful speech about your Olympian ass? I am really sick of it. And you are nowhere near urate to the actual knowledge that I have about you. You are far more arrogant and far weaker than I thought."

    "Hmph, to challenge a god''s strength. How ignorant are you?"

    Sam didn''t even bother talking to him anymore. His figure lunged forward and threw a punch at Hermes. Hermes dodged the punch easily. He just floated backward, but from the tip of Sam''s fist, arge wind cannon that is condensed with wind des was shot.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosive noise, the condensed wind which formed Hermes''s body was disturbed. The arm of Hermes in particr which was targeted almost scattered because of that one attack.

    Hermes didn''t take it lightly though, he waved his staff and arge wind de came at him.

    Sam didn''t even bother dodging. He just let it enter his body. His body was indeed disturbed and fluctuated but it didn''t scatter. The fluctuation juststed for a fraction of a second and it stayed the same beyond that.

    It is because the winged mountains are constantly feeding the energy and the wind required for Sam to maintain his form. Unlike Hermes who has his powers restricted and only possesses a limited amount of energy, Sam has an almost infinite amount of energy.

    "Come on, don''t stop now. Let''s go. I want to see how long you canst with all of that big talk."

    Sam didn''t want to give Hermes any time to think this through. He just jumped at him and started beating the crap out of him. Hermes tried to dodge, but most of the time it is not working. His body is being scattered bit by bit and his recovery time is longerpared to Sam.

    Sam smirked at this and said.

    "Come on, with all that tongue yapping, I thought you would at least present some contest. This is way too easy. If you don''tnd a decisive hit in the next five seconds, I will fucking end this."

    As he spoke, Sam did a spinning back kick and threw Hermes far away into the ravine. He then followed up with a tackle and took the body to the ground.

    Hermes finally couldn''t take it and dispersed his body. After all, even if they are solidified they are made of wind, he just let go of Sam''s grip and manifested his body a bit away from him, but Sam didn''t give him too much time to recover. He once again lunged and threw a kick.

    For the next five seconds, Sam kicked at least three times and the fourth kicknded but it might have gone past the five-second mark.

    "Alright. I already gave you the chance. Don''t me me."

    Sam said as he snapped his fingers and his wind form disappeared into the winged mountains. Hermes was a bit confused. Before he knew it, the winged mountains are glowing like never before and instead of just taking in the wind, it is converting all of it into the purest form of wind elemental energy.

    And the energy was evenly distributed all over the surface that is covered with the inscriptions.

    Before Hermes could even react, the mountain surface shot arge energy beam attack of wind elemental energy and that energy beam is in the exact shape as the ravine the wind ising from.

    *BOOM*

    A massive continuous explosive sound came as the energy beam collided with theing current of the wind and created that continuous shing sound and it hit Hermes directly and went past him.

    Sam opened his eyes as the explosion continued for the next three minutes.

    "I should have done it the moment he appeared. Screw testing myself, I should just beat these guys up and send them backpacking. Arrogant assholes."

    He muttered to himself as he stood up.

    "I think the disaster is done. I will go back with the beasts. You guys can clean up the mess."

    Sam was about to take off immediately. By this point it is boring. The things he read about Hermes are not even half true, he is slowly losing interest in meeting these Olympian gods and he also has a research project that is eating his brain away.

    But at that moment, the n leader in charge of the Winged City came forward hurriedly.

    "Sir Sam, I would like to make a presumptuous request."

    Sam frowned and asked.

    "What is it?"

    "The way you used the Winged Mountains and the Wind currents, is it possible for you to impart your methods to us.

    I know that I am asking for a lot more after you took so much effort to save us. But with these winged mountain attacks, my city will be a lot safer.

    Because of this disaster, many of the other n members gained ess to the formations and other defensive measures of our city, it will not end well if any one of them decides to use this for their benefit."

 Chapter 1921: Tantrums

    Sandhya was dumbfounded when the n leader said this.

    The rest of the young masters didn''t have any less reaction. They were infuriated and felt insulted.

    "What do you mean by that n leader? Are you implying that all the powers are eyeing your city now? You shouldn''t forget that all the powers gathered to fight the disasters."

    Sandhya''s voice is filled with dissatisfaction.

    Sam chuckled at her righteous anger. He looked at the n leader and said.

    "Just close your eyes for a minute."

    The n leader ignored Sandhya''s words and closed his eyes. His posture is very subservient to the point that even though he is a couple of inches tall than Sam, his head is at Sam''s shoulder level.

    Sam tapped the n leader''s forehead and transferred the required information to activate the winged mountains'' defense. The n leader was surprised by all that information. He immediately bowed down in extreme gratitude and said.

    "Sir Sam, you will be our n''s benefactor for all the generations toe. If you, your descendants or any people rted to you ever visit this again, they will be treated as a guest of higher stature than the n leader forever."

    Sam was amused by such a deration.

    "Don''t you think you are making a promise beyond your means? How can you ensure that the generations thate after a few thousand years after you will honor this promise?"

    "Unlike many people we learned from our mistakes Sir Sam. After the incidents that triggered the wrath of the gods, our n leader at that time passed down a strict constitution so that our n and the citizens will not incur another loss like that.

    No matter what any of the members think, I wholeheartedly believe whatever is happening right now is something we have to pay for. And you are paying it instead of us.

    I can only imagine how much wrath you will incur from these gods. The least I can do is to ensure that you are honored when you are at my home no matter how many generations have passed."

    Sam nodded with that smile and said.

    "Sure, if you say so. Anyway, I highly doubt I wille back to this ce once again. But yeah, if someone rted to mees to this, they will have a token with this symbol on it. Or they would have a recorded message or a written message of mine with them.

    Don''t be deceived and serve someone based on mistaken identity."

    Sam said as he threw a metal piece to the n leader while walking away. The metal piece is precisely his symbol. The intertwined double ''S''.

    He jumped high into the sky andnded on harbinger. He was followed by his beasts can left to the mountain.

    Sandhya gritted her teeth at his nonchnce. She could see that the other young masters and other ns'' members are all looking at the n leader of Winged city with a cold look.

    They are all angry.

    Sam did give them the formations, but those formations didn''t really have much of the offensive abilities. For the first three disasters, Sam just dealt with the disasters by himself. He didn''t rely too much on formations.

    The formations only stayed as defensive methods as well and could be used to do some counters against the attacks. But apart from that, they don''t serve any other purpose. But the formation of Winged City is different. The Winged Mountain attack is way too lethal and powerful.

    They felt like this is unfair, particrly the people that belonged to the three ns Sam saved before.

    These young masters and elders all swarmed Sandhya with a bunch of questions and requests.

    They can''t do their dance around Sam, but they can smother this woman who is basically themunication bridge between Sam and then.

    Sandhya felt like she is being drowned in a sea of questions.

    She could only push through and break free of their bombardment before she escaped them and came back to the mountain.

    As soon as she arrived, she ran to her mother.

    "Where is that guy?"

    "Sam?" Priestess asked in puzzlement.

    "Yes, where is he? How can he be such a jerk. What kind of person leaves someone else behind to clean up after his miss."

    "What happened? Rx a little and talk to me."

    Sandhya sighed and exined everything to Priestess.

    She thought that her mother would understand where she ising from, but to her surprise all she got was augh. Priestess didn''t even bother to exin herself further and just continued on with her work.

    "Why are youughing? He just disturbed the whole bnce of the power structure. The only reason there are not as many wars in our between ns is that everyone has same level of attack and defense, except for our Mountain Temple."

    "There is nothing to disturb, you are overthinking things. I can understand why the n leader asked for it and I can see Sam giving it away because he was giving everything he made away. But I don''t see why you have to lose your mind over it."

    "The young masters of the other areas are on my tail. They are asking me to be the mediator so that they could be equally ''reimbursed'' just like Winged City. I need to talk to Sam about this."

    "He is in the back of the mountain area. But I suggest you don''t disturb him. He seemed to be in the middle of calcting something."

    "To hell with it. When my peace disturbed, I don''t care about the peace of the perpetrator."

    Sandhya ran away and soon found out Sam.

    "Why are you here?"

    Sam asked directly.

    "About the formation. The rest of the cities are dissatisfied."

    "And?"

    "You can either take back the winged formation from the Winged City or you might have to give more to the remaining cities.

    The bnce is off here."

    "You sound like I only have two options."

    Sandhya didn''t know what to say. Before she could reply, Sam continued.

    "I pick the third option. Tell them to fuck off. They take what I give and I give what I like. No questions asked, no answers given."

    Sandhya gritted her teeth in anger as she pointed at Sam before heaving a sigh. She really wanted to scold him but she felt like with her mother''s bias, she would get her ass kicked.

    She looked around and saw that there are a bunch of weird markings on all over the rocks.

    "What the hell are you doing? Why are you filling all of my mountains with these weird markings? You are destroying thendscape."

    Sam looked at her with a raised eyebrow.

    "Don''t worry, I will fix it before I leave. They are not markings, they are calctions."

    "What are you calcting? Why would you need these kinds of weird markings to calcte something?"

    "You wouldn''t understand even if I exin these markings to you. Just leave me alone for now."

    "Who are you to ask me to leave? This mountain is mine."

    Sandhya acted stubbornly. She just wanted to annoy Sam at this point.

    Sam looked at her for a couple of seconds without saying anything. The next second he took off on harbinger and disappeared. Hended at a much more solitary ce and started doing his calctions once again.

    Sandhya didn''t want to give up. She hurriedly ran to her mother and demanded.

    "I don''t know where he is, take me to him."

    "Why?"

    "I need to make him buckle at least one thing. Ever since he came, I am nothing more than a courier between him and the remaining people. I can''t even make him answer a few questions in my own home when he was the one who is a guest here.

    I want to make him answer and you are going to help me."

    Priestess chuckled over her daughter''s obsession. After some thought, she nodded and said.

    "Okay, let''s go. I will support you."

    "Really?" Sandhya was shocked. It is almost impossible to believe her mother''s words.

    "Of course, I can''t let my daughter be bullied like this."

    For some reason, Priestess who is usually rational, apanied Sandhya with her insanity.

    They arrived at the area where Sam is in a few minutes.

    Sam looked at Sandhya and Priestess and sighed.

    He stood there without speaking and waited for them to speak.

    "Hello Sam, I heard that you are researching something interesting. Care to share it with me and Sandhya."

    "It is a bit boring and it would be hard for me to exin these calctions. These symbols are not exactly the knowledge of your world. They are from my homnd."

    "Don''t need to go into detail. Just some basics would do.

    I am also intrigued by what stumped a guy that could build such monumental defenses in a matter of days.

 Chapter 1922: Reality Check

    Sam looked at both of them with an exhausted look.

    "Why are you supporting her? Are you going to keep her like this forever? Don''t you think it is about time she grows up?" Sam spoke to Priestess.

    "What do you mean by that?" Sandhya of course didn''t like that statement.

    Sam ignored her and looked at the Priestess.

    "I am doing that right now. All this while, I tried but didn''t get a suitableparison, now that you are here, things are a lot easier and will progress a lot faster."

    Sam sighed and took out a projector.

    There is a video of the mist like wood elemental energy falling on the trees directly.

    "This is the state of the energy that we couldn''t see with our naked eye during the Third disaster. The energy state is very unique and it managed to give sentience for the trees. I am trying to figure out how to achieve that state of energy."

    "Didn''t your bear do the same with the trees? Why do you need to calcte?"

    "It is not the same. My bear just shared its consciousness with the trees and used the excess vitality in those trees as leverage to make the attacks.

    But now this type of energy is different. I am sure that the consciousness of Artemis, the goddess who came to cause the disaster has very little to do with the change in those trees.

    Of course there is some connection, her consciousness is the anchor point for the existence of that change in those trees, but that is not the reason for the actual change.

    Now, I need to figure out what that change is"

    "Maybe a spirit was imprinted on to the trees. Isn''t it as simple as that. A strong spirit would definitely give the tree sentience and that spirit might havee to this world with Artemis as the anchor point."

    Sam looked at her and said.

    "It is not true. If there is a spirit I would have sensed it easily."

    "Really? You are not that strong. Even my mother wouldn''t dare im that she can sense every single spirit that easily. Why are you so confident?"

    "It has nothing to do with the strength. It ys little factor in identifying spirits. I y with spectres a lot. I am sensitive to the spirits and my spectres were in charge of the scout duty in every ce after the disaster arrives."

    "What?"

    "Do you really think I would trust you guys so much? In fact, the spectres monitor all the construction process as well. The spectres didn''t detect any other spirit form during the whole disaster. So, it is definitely not the spirits."

    Sandhya was stumped.

    She didn''t expect this to be happening behind her back.

    "Why do you need to monitor all of the construction process secretly? You could have done that openly if you are really concerned. What is the reason behind this?"

    "I thought you are concerned about the calctions I am making. Why do you need to know about my way to handling things? It has got nothing to do with you."

    "But¡­" Sandhya kept on going with her loud mouth.

    Sam ignored her wordspletely and looked at the Priestess as if he is asking her something. He knew that she understood his expression. And seeing that there is no answer from her, he decided to go with what he thought anyway.

    "Sandhya, did anyone tell you how annoying you are?"

    His words made Sandhya stop yapping. Her mouth was wide open.

    "I don''t know why you feel that I owe you an exnation for every doubt you get. I actually met a person like you not too long ago, but at least that guy respected my silence and reluctance when I expressed it.

    But here you are, constantly demanding answers as if I owe you a debt from my past life.

    Let me tell you how this whole thing works once again.

    I don''t exactly belong to your and I don''t really want to. I am here on a mission and I am only going to be responsible for that. Satiating your curiosity and taking care of yours'' so called bnce is not my concern.

    As for who I give my things to and who I don''t give them to, ispletely my business. I have neither borrowed resources from you nor did I gain knowledge from you.

    The only thing that I might owe you for is the amodation and the good food your mother is providing me. But I felt like it is more than a fair deal to take them since I am here on a mission to save the lives of your.

    So, please stop whining about the bnce that I ruined and about the exnations that I owe you.

    I am not a young master that wags his tail around you, hoping you would just give him a look. I am not a heir that is trying to climb his ranks by being yourp dog.

    I am Sam.

    And I would also appreciate if you can stop questioning my judgement.

    I personally know what the people of Winged City did as their contribution to this whole disaster mess. They have contributed in creating defenses for the other three cities that faced disasters prior to them and in all of these three cases, members from Winged City always stayed calm, finished their tasks without any hups and didn''t yap over on how to steal the formation blueprints, how to copy them without knowing and all that.

    They were straightforward and they did exactly what they promised they would do.

    Unlike the rest. If I go down now and interrogate every single member from the other cities, at least seventy percent of them will have at least one design of mine in their possession. They are greedy for these things.

    Even if I could care less about these mediocre designs, I still don''t like that behavior

    So, if you cannot give these young masters the answer that I previously gave you, then this is the most detailed answer you will ever get.

    In the future if I do something so ''nonsensical'' that you couldn''t stand it and want to question me in righteous anger, hold that thought and understand that I have my own reason and shut up.

    That is all I have to say to you. So, please don''t disturb me again."

    Sam gave this long winded speech and turned to Priestess.

    "I hope your desired effect has been achieved. Please don''t disturb me for a while. I need to finish these calctions as soon as possible. After this mission is over, I don''t where I would be, so I have to use every bit of time responsibly.

    I would appreciate it if you can convince your daughter to grant me that time."

    With that he turned around and went on to do his calctions.

    Sandhya on the other hand stood rooted on the spot. She didn''t even understand what Sam did to her with those words, but she felt an intense sense of shame and anger cloud her heart. But she could instinctually feel that if she burst out now, she would only lower herself even more.

    Sam essentially called her a spoiled brat that is demanding answers constantly.

    She looked at her mother, who just had that faint smile on her face.

    "I am going back. Are youing?"

    Priestess asked as she looked at her daughter.

    Sandhya only nodded slightly before moving along with her mother.

    She wanted to see if her mother would ask Sam for speaking like this or if she would at least console her, but she didn''t see any of it.

    Priestess just went to the meditating room, while Sandhya was left alone.

    She felt a bunch of different thoughts run through her mind. Sam''s words are constantly poking at her brain. And the more thought about, the more she felt that he is right. But that only made her angrier and sadder.

    Meanwhile, Sam didn''t care about any of this. He just focused on his tasks at hand and waited for the next disaster to strike.

    This time, he decided to finish the disaster as fast as he can and luckily for him he didn''t have to wait a lot before the vision came to him.

    This time, he is going to the city known as the Emerald City. It also happened to be the biggest territories that Sam has to defend on this.

    They have way too much ofnd that belongs directly to the city and the city is surrounded by all of thisnd.

    The best part is that all of thisnd has rich minerals and resources. They are also unofficially known as the strongest after the mountain temple.

    As soon as Sam got the information about this, he scoffed at the bnce that Sandhya spoke of.

    These guys are definitely richer and more powerful than the other cities. There are a bunch of cities that have this ce as their primary source of resources. There is no way these guys didn''t have an alliance or two, enjoying a good enough authority.

 Chapter 1923: Athena

    Sam arrived at the Emerald City and looked at the vastyout.

    The whole city is surrounded by the mines and there are way too many soldiers guarding this whole ce. All the important mines are connected to the city through Spatial gates. There is even a formation around every single mine within the area.

    Sam doesn''t know which Olympian god is going toe here this time, but he sure as hell knows that they are going to use all the minerals and mines to their advantage. He needs to find a way to neutralize that advantage somehow if he needs to have a chance.

    He already came across someone using energy attacks before, so if he is in the ce of that god, he would use arge energy cannon-style attack with one of the mines and almost ny nine percent of the formations he could make would be destroyed.

    Even if they are not disintegrated to nothing, there would at least be arge hole within the formation which would be enough for the god to take care of the rest.

    He would have to think outside the box for this a bit more.

    But of course, he couldn''t let the time go to waste. He simply gave instructions to everyone involved in the construction of the formation to build one for the base.

    This blueprint is mostly used for defending against the energy attacks only. It creates ayer around the city that would disintegrate the energy and disperse it into arge cluster of loose energy particiles.

    Of course, he added a fewyers of physical defense formation as well.

    While they are constructing that, Sam took the help of the shadow mice to investigate the whole area thoroughly. He needs to know exactly what kind of energy is abundant in what area and how to use these mines effectively.

    After some though, he decided to take out a few energy cannons this time. These energy cannons are part of the puppets that he used back in the previous mission when he was dealing with the giants.

    What he did is to remove the resonance and imitation part of the attacks and only kept the cannon part.

    The main job of this cannon is to condense energy from the elemental energy mines tounch energy beam attacks. These could be powerful if they are made in a gigantic scale, but Sam is now focusing more on the quantity and less on the quality and lethality of the attack.

    After all, he is going to fight the god''s form directly by himself and he still has his beasts.

    Also, if he wants to deal such arge attack, he would need a lot of time to construct this one thing.

    Sam ced these energy cannon puppets on many areas within the territory. Every ce that has a decent enough concentrated energy he ced them there.

    After that was done, he went back and focused on the formation. He spread out his beasts a bit and made them cover therge area. They are in charge of defending against any minions that mighte for the city and also interrupt anyrge scale attacks that might stem from these energy mines.

    Sam was pretty decisive about all the moves he made and this time he has no annoyance from Sandhya.

    She stayed silent for the whole time and just stood there. She received his orders and conveyed them to the young masters and their subordinates.

    She got their feedback and delivered it to Sam.

    Everything is so smooth. To the point, Sam felt a bit superstitious and assumed that the next one might be a tough challenge to crack.

    Time passed as the preparations went in full swing.

    On the middle of the second day, Sam decided to add an extrayer of defense just in case. Since the ground is full of mineral-rich soil, he and Dia worked together to create a few pirs around the city. They also raised a few pirs in the rest of the territory.

    Sam then drew a bunch of inscriptions on all of them. These pirs do have a formation, but their purpose is to supply energy to beasts and Sam and if it is not possible to create energy shields as well as energy attacks when an enemy poses a threat.

    He prepared everything until the time of disaster and waited along with the rest.

    All the miners are also currently staying within the city and they are all eagerly waiting for this disaster to pass.

    On the time of the disaster, everyone noticed a dazzling light appear all of their territories.

    Sam noticed that the energy is indeed being drawn from all the mines and this energy is taking two forms.

    One of them is the form of a humanoid. For some reason, this humanoid figure is actually a bit smaller than the ones Sam encountered before.

    The figure looked like it was carefully crafted out of metal. But Sam could sense that it is the manifestation of the essence from the many mineral mines. It is coupled with massive condensed energy.

    This time the figure didn''t manifest from a tangible substance like water, magma, or wood and it didn''t manifest from the condensation of air. Instead, it is the pure energy of various forms solidified.

    Sam looked at the humanoid figure. It is another goddess. He is surprised by that figure that appeared immediately just like how it happened with Hermes.

    But of course, that is not the only thing that appeared. The condensed energy took the shape of arge formation that covered the whole territory.

    Including the mines and the city, the formation fell on everything. Sam was surprised to see that even the nodes are being formed with the condensed energy only and the formation wasid down in seconds.

    He activated his energy vision and even came out of the city on the hoverboard as he looked at the condensed energy around the city. And he was surprised to see that the energy state is very simr to the mist-like state of wood elemental energy during Artemis'' attack.

    Apart from that the formation structure itself surprised him a lot.

    This is one of the most intricate formations that Sam has ever seen and he couldn''t even identify its purpose instantly.

    As he thought about this point, he noticed something else, the formation started extracting very fine metal and rock in the powdered form. These minerals joined together under the pressure of the condensed energy and in front of his naked eyes, they joined together to form a puppet. Meanwhile, the rest of the formation morphed into something like a maze.

    The puppet didn''t even take thirty seconds from starting as arge cluster of powder to being a full-fledged formation.

    This is the first time that Sam was so amazed by someone''s abilities. Even when Poseidon came down with those water dragons and Hermes threw those winged creatures, Sam was still unimpressed.

    But these puppets, he felt like he is looking at a brand-new toy.

    The puppet structure and design itself is not thatplicated. In fact it is a bit too simple, but to think that it could be made from the minerals in the ground just like that, he couldn''t help but feel a bit jealous.

    His mind was about to lose its way.

    But of course, he is in the middle of the battle, he has to bring himself back to focus on.

    While he was doing that, the puppets started running toward the city formation.

    The nearest beast is Yanwu and he just threw a tongue of golden mes onto the nearest puppet.

    The puppet on the other hand just jumped into the wall of the formation maze.

    Sam clearly saw that two limbs of the puppet were destroyed, but to his surprise, the wall shielded the remaining puppet, extracted the destroyed parts into powder, and released the puppet on the other side of the wall after it was repaired.

    This puppet once again made its move toward the city.

    Sam was amazed by this.

    This might not be something that he would do personally, but the technique is impable.

    Sam didn''t stop using his energy vision and just stared at them.

    As for worrying about these puppets reaching the city and destroying it? He didn''t bother too much, even if pushes to shove and the worst thing happens, Sam can handle it for now.

    As Sam is watching the whole thing in awe, the goddess called him out.

    "Are you Sam?"

    Sam turned to her and said.

    "Yes."

    "I am Athena. I heard that you are quite strong. I would like to see it for myself."

    Sam raised an eyebrow, for some reason this goddess is much better than the rest.

    Seeing that Sam didn''t answer, she continued.

    "I won''t beat around the bush, the puppets are after the city and I am after you. If you can win against me, you win against the disaster. It''s that simple.

 Chapter 1924: Duel

    "An Olympian god asking for a fair duel? That is new."

    Sam said as he took out his reaper sword. Athena didn''t mind his remark, in fact, she actually agreed with him.

    "If that is a provocation that won''t work. In fact, I believe no matter how bad you think the Olympian gods are, they would be worse in my opinion. Now, let''s just get this done with."

    As she spoke, her body condensed further and within a sh she became the size of a normal human. Shended on the ground gracefully and waved her hand. Energy condensed into a sword. She dashed towards Sam.

    Sam also got off of Harbinger and made his move toward Athena.

    The two swords shed. There is no use of elemental energy. It is all neutral spiritual energy and the sh between them is purely neutral as well.

    The two des shed and a keening sound came out of thin air.

    Athena looked at the sword in Sam''s hands and said.

    "It is a good sword. You crafted it?"

    "Yes."

    Sam said with a smile and slipped to the side, in process he attempted to slice Athena on her arm, but she already anticipated it and slipped along with Sam in the same direction. Both of their des separated and Sam initiated the attack this time.

    He aimed for her head directly with a stab, Athena parried the strike to the side and for a moment, it became a fencing match between the two. Sam just focused on her head and didn''t want back down. It is almost like he wouldn''t relent unless he hit her head at least once.

    Athena was in the defensive just for a bit, but soon she managed to follow those parries with her own counter attacks with ease and she aimed for Sam''s neck every single time.

    The shes looked fierce as with each of them the surroundings tremored. The spiritual energy turned sharper every second because of their auras.

    The sword fight continued for the next three minutes and finally Sam made a different move. As his stab went straight for her head, he kicked the ground and rose in the air.

    The angle of the stab changed and he aimed for the heart.

    Athena almost got caught off guard. Almost.

    She slipped to the side and blocked Sam''s attack, before sliding her sword against his and aiming for his arm.

    Sam stepped on the ground and kicked her before she couldnd a sh on his fingers.

    But of course, Athena didn''t take the kick full on.

    She tried to dodge and the kick brushed past her abdomen, but for that she had to divert the sword strike. Sam missed the sword strike, almost. But the sword suddenly morphed into a spear and the spear tip was charging at Sam.

    The spear tip left a very small scar on Sam''s face as he dodged.

    He looked at Athena with a smile as she spun her spear.

    Even though she is an energy being at the moment, Sam could clearly see all of her features. She is a tall woman with long hair. Sam doesn''t know her skinplexion, but her eyes are filled with the battle spirit and confidence that Sam rarely saw.

    There is certain pride in her eyes and it is unlike the ones he usually saw in the eyes of these young masters and even the gods he came across.

    It is refreshing to see such pride.

    Athena charged forward gracefully with repeated thrusts from the spear.

    Sam dodged them narrowly as he stepped back. He didn''t even use the sword in his hand. But Athena is not stupid enough to get used to his rhythm like before. She is veryposed. Even though Sam looked like he is dodging right now, he is not really on the backfoot. He is very calm and confident.

    After five of six thrusts, Sam caught the next one that came at him. He grabbed the spear and pulled Athena towards him. She was pulled forward and lost her Rhythm.

    Sam extended the sword in his hand to stab her.

    Athena controlled her body and made the spear extend even more creating a distance between her and Sam. The sword didn''t manage to reach her, but the next second, she saw the sword disappearing and a spear appear in Sam''s hand while his hand was still in that thrusting motion.

    She forcefully halted in her tracks and used the momentum to slide to the side. Sam swept the spear while Athena did the same with her.

    Both of them moved in a circle and switched their positions before breaking the contact.

    Sam also spun the spear in his hands. He had a smirk on his face.

    Athena threw her spear at Sam and ran after it with another spear.

    Sam threw a spinning kick to the spear on its shaft and made itnd behind him. He then charged forward and blocked the spear Athena is thrusting at him with his own.

    Now the fight turned into a ssic spear fight.

    Sam is trying to sweep her off with the swings, but she on the other hand is trying to just get a clean stab.

    While Sam and Athena are fighting to their heart''s content, the city''s formation and Sam''s beasts are under full stress.

    They are not exactly losing it, but the frequency of the puppets is so damn high.

    The puppets are using the formation maze to their advantage as they tried to escape smoothly before they reached the formation of the city.

    The beasts are assassinating them as much as possible, but still they managed to reach the formation and they are just exploding after they did that.

    When they exploded, the parts of the puppets are spreading far and wide as they stuck to the surface of the dome the formation created, before they are releasing another explosion.

    This explosion is different. It is more simr to an EMP from back on earth. The only difference is that this explosion is far less absolute and couldn''t prate the formation immediately.

    Of course, Sam also sensed this, but he has full faith that the beasts and the formations could handle it, so he left them as they were.

    But the people inside the city are not feeling the same.

    With every explosion that is happening on the formation, they are feeling a bit anxious. The formation is thinning a bit in the area where the explosion urred and it appeared like a vulnerable point until it recovered.

    It is understandable of course, but Sam couldn''t care less. As long as they didn''t do anything stupid like messing with the formation, then he is fine.

    "Your formation is quite good."

    Athena praised as she kicked Sam in the chest and tried to throw the spear.

    Sam slid on the ground before he stabilized himself. He dodged the spear that came and threw his own spear at Athena.

    Athena stepped back and tried to dodge, but Sam already appeared near the tail of his spear and kicked it.

    The spear shot forward. Athena missed the timing and a gash was left on her arm.

    "Your formation is also quite good."

    Athena looked at the gash on her body. It is not recovering directly. It seems like she really only kept limited energy within this body and she would disappear after taking a certain level of damage.

    Her body is also mimicking what a real body of hers would have reacted like when faced with such an attack.

    So, if Sam cuts off an arm, unless she has regenerative powers for her original body, then she wouldn''t be regenerating her arm here just because she is an energy being right now.

    Sam was impressed by such integrity which is very rare to seen in Olympian gods that he had encountered.

    Athena extended her hands and two daggers appeared. One of them is a normal dagger, but the other one is a throwing one. She threw that at Sam without hesitation.

    Sam dodged to the side, but the dagger just followed him around like a homing missile.

    Sam didn''t hesitate and just increased his speed, he sped towards Athena. He took out a dagger of his own and shed with her once again.

    He aimed to cut her neck off, but Athena blocked his approach with a kick and spun before trying to stab him on the side.

    Sam used his arm to block her by her elbow and tried to sh her arm off.

    Athena of course dodged once again, she used the contact Sam had with her as leverage and tried to twist him by his arm and stab him in the back.

    Instead of resisting the twist like she expected, Sam just rolled with it and made her roll over. He wanted to take the mount position and finish her off. But the sh he aimed at her throatnded on her cor bone, while a stab barely brushed past Sam''s abdomen as she slid from underneath him.

 Chapter 1925: Duel II

    Sam had a smirk on her face as he stood up.

    Athena also stood up and touched the sh on her corbone. She also had a faint smile.

    "You are enjoying this." She looked at Sam and said with an amused expression.

    "Of course, it has been a while since I had a technical fight like this. All this while, I couldn''t feel the pressure. This is refreshing."

    He said as spun his dagger and took a fighting stance.

    "Come on, we are talking."

    Sam shed to the side and metal nging sound appeared. The throwing dagger that Athena threw before, appeared out of thin air.

    In their brief exchange, the dagger disappeared and Athena seemed to have thought that Sam forgot about it. But of course, he didn''t.

    "That is sneaky."

    "What? You are going toin it is unfair?"

    "Why would I? I haven''t seen youin since the start of the fight." Sam smirked as he destroyed the throwing dagger that wanted toe back to life once again. Athena smirked.

    She understood his implication. He is telling her that this fight is unfair to her and she is notining about it.

    "You have way too much confidence. Let''s bring it down a little."

    As she spoke she did a continuous throwing movement. A bunch of throwing stars appeared out of thin air and all of them were thrown at different angles, but they all have the same destination. Sam.

    He held his dagger and danced around as he shed against one throwing star after another. Of course, meanwhile he kept a close eye on Athena.

    But she showed no signs of making any other attacks. She just kept on throwing the stars while Sam moved around trying to block them and dodge them.

    As Sam is dancing around, Athena manifested a bow in her hands.

    She aimed at Sam and shot an arrow.

    *ZOOM*

    Sam could hear the explosive sound from the arrow as it shot towards him. He was dumbfounded by the speed it came at. Of course, he is not dumb enough to staypletely still, he tried to dodge the attack, but a throwing star hit him in the same spot he had the dagger gash from before.

    He looked at the wound and clicked his tongue.

    He hid his dagger and took out his staff. He spun it a bit and all the throwing stars disappeared.

    Athena raised an eyebrow and threw them once again. Sam on the other hand didn''t just spin his staff this time, instead a metal card appeared in his hand. He spun it in the air and precisely hit its edge with the staff.

    The metal card shot forward in a curve and hit multiple shooting stars,pleted the curve and even came back to him.

    Sam just spun his staff again and hit it, making it go for another round.

    It is Athena''s time for being dumbfounded. Never had she expected such an attack. Not just from Sam, but anyone she ever encountered.

    Sam spun his staff once again and gestured Athena to continue.

    She thew another batch of the stars and started shooting a volley of arrows. Each arrow would have killed an average cultivator a dozen times over. They are that lethal, but Sam just danced around with his staff as he hit every arrow right on the mark.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The whole area turned into an explosive mess.

    Athena observed this and started moving closer to Sam. The distance is not much to begin with, but she is moving very slowly.

    Sam just stood there and attacked the shooting stars as well as the arrows. He appeared to be in the defensive, but the cheeky grin on his face as he yed around gave it away that he is very chill.

    Athena''s bow increased in size and the arrow also doubled in power.

    She shot them continuously and even abandoned the shooting stars.

    As she closed in the distance, Sam hit one arrow after another and his eyes never left her. She felt provoked. She wanted to defeat and destroy him as fast as she could, but she is unable to do so.

    As much satisfaction she might get from this fight, she still couldn''t bring herself to finish the fight. She had used many techniques that she hadn''t used in a very long while. Just like Sam, all her fights were over in an instant.

    As she thought to this point the arrow seemed to have increased in lethality with the energy condensed it multiplied by many times and it also happened so fast to the point that Sam was stunned for a fraction of a second.

    He spun a bit and energy gathered in the staff as she swung it at the arrow along with void style.

    *BOOM*

    Sam was blown away by the resulting explosion. He hadnded a few meters away from his initial position. He was really surprised by the intensity of the attacks. He is a master at condensed energy attacks by now, but he has never seen or even done an attack of this range before.

    And his surprise didn''t end there.

    Athena just jumped through the explosion and reached him with a halberd in her hands. She shed at Sam with all of her strength.

    Sam blocked the attack with his staff.

    He felt his feet go a couple inches into the ground. He felt like a nail being hammered.

    The next attack came at his legs as Athena shed with all of her might. Sam once again used his staff and blocked the attack. But he was blown away again.

    Hisbination of Physical strength and Spiritual energy is not working anymore.

    He was dumbfounded by how offensive Athena suddenly became.

    As the third attack came, Sam once again blocked with the staff and this time he managed to brace himself.

    Athena wanted to do another swift attack, but the next moment, Sam disappeared in a puff of ck smoke and the staff was left there.

    The force that was keeping the halberd in its ce disappeared in an instant.

    He reappeared behind her back and to her surprise hended a proper kick on her head.

    *BANG*

    Athena felt like she lost her hearing for a moment and crashed into the ground as she was sent flying. She was really caught off guard.

    Sam grabbed the staff once again and activated his lightning fusion. He charged at her like a silver sh and threw an attack.

    *BOOM*

    It was Athena''s turn to block. But even though she blocked it, she felt like the energy is rippling into her body.

    "Ripple Style"

    She muttered before she was blown away by the explosive force.

    Her whole body dimmed down. The condensed energy obviously lost its lustre.

    Sam didn''t stop though. He might have been enojoying the battle, but that doesn''t mean he couldn''t get serious. This moment where she waspletely off guard is very rare and there is no way he wouldn''t be taking advantage of that to the maximum extent.

    As he charged with another fierce attack Athena braced herself for that, but to her dismay, Sam changed from lightining fusion to water fusion. He freely and slickly went past her and threw the attack from behind.

    *BOOM*

    Athena was thrown into the air and felt like she is an arrow shot from a very powerful bow. She controlled herself and got ready to get back in the game. But at that moment, she felt a sudden spatial fluctuation.

    She turned around and swung her halberd, it went through a shadowy figure and destroyed it. Too bad it is not Sam and shadow undead instead.

    *BANG*

    Sam threw another kick to her head. She fell like a meteor towards the ground, but Sam didn''t give her a chance that easily. He charged forward even more and before she could hit the ground, hended a kick induced with earth element. The rtive gravity for her increased by a lot and she hit the ground being unable to get back on her feet.

    Samnded right next to her and pointed his staff at her throat.

    Athena''s lustre was gone. Her energy body is almost depleted. She looked at Sam with tired eyes and snapped her fingers. Sam could see a sense of unwillingness in her eyes.

    The formation and the puppets disappeared.

    Her energy body disappeared before a silhouette made of spiritual energy appeared in front of Sam. Sam could see her face more clearly now.

    "It was a great fight. I made a mistake by rushing there and you made no mistake by capturing that moment. Congrattions."

    Sam was surprised by such humility.

    "Thank you. It is indeed an interesting fight."

    "When you visit Olympus,e and meet me. I think we will get along fine."

    "Are you hitting on me? I thought you are an eternal virgin devout to your battles."

    "What can I do? No man worthy has born yet. Or maybe I just met him."

    With those words Athena disappeared with a smile.

    Sam shook his head with a smile and went back to the city. It was a good fight.

 Chapter 1926: Music

    Sam went back to the city in high spirits.

    A good battle is indeed refreshing. When he came back with that grin of his face, the people in the city didn''t understand his behavior. Many young masters would agree that this is the toughest disaster they faced until now.

    Even though Athena''s direct attacks were less, the puppets and the damage to the formation scared the crap out of everyone there is. They couldn''t even bring themselves to imagine what these puppets would have done if the formation has broken apart.

    Of course, Sam could give two shits to their thoughts and opinions.

    He just walked into the city with delight to go back.

    What he doesn''t know is, Sandhya who is following waspletely lost.

    She has been in contact with Sam the longest among all the people in this. She has seen first hand how he works and just based off of everything that is happening around him and the way he handled things, she thought she knew who he is.

    He is a cynical intellectual who is extremely capable of great threats, but not because of his individual strength, but because of his intellect and the way he applies it.

    Even though he fought with the gods'' figures before this disaster, most of the time he is using massive attacks, using the harbinger and taking the help of the beasts. It is easy for her attribute all of these results to Sam''s intellect.

    Because in her opinion he won because he is smart enough to know how to utilize the beasts and his tools to the fullest.

    And as many people thought, she also believed that to be Sam''s expertise. She didn''t think he is good at natural fighting as well.

    Not a fight filled with massive elemental energy attacks, rather proper skill based fight with swords, daggers and other weapons. She is even sure if he was caught off guard, he might even lose a battle of mages.

    But to her surprise, Sam subverted her expectations once again.

    This time she left along with Sam, leaving the young masters to clean up. Sam gave instructions to bring the cannons back. The cannons were barely used in this battle. They are not fast enough to keep up with the chaotic deception of these puppets purely made out of energy.

    The young masters carried out the instructions clearly.

    The spectres were in charge of supervising them and even they don''t know it.

    Sam and Sandhya went back first.

    Sam once again didn''t want to waste any time and delved deep into his research.

    Sandhya went to her mother.

    "Do you, he is good in battle also?"

    "You already told me. You said he fought against Poseidon, Artemis and Hephaestus. Why are you bringing it up now?"

    "No, not like that. He is really good at regr battle. Without any elements, only pure warrior style battle. He is good with sword, spear, staff and daggers too. I saw him fight with Athena. It is really good."

    Priestess looked at her daughter and had a faint smile on her face.

    "You have that expression again."

    Sandhya came back to her senses and asked.

    "What expression? What do you mean?"

    "You know, before you awakened, you wanted to be a warrior so bad. But you turned out to be a mage. You always said that you would bee a super warrior that can wield all the weapons in the world."

    Sandhya blushed as she heard her own words being repeated to her. She was indeed fascinated with warriors during her childhood. All the magical things the mages could do, she didn''t really feel them that much.

    But when she saw a warrior cleaving a mountain with their sabre, she felt like that is the true power. But too bad, she awakened as a mage and nothing could be done about that.

    "Don''t tell me, you like that guy now? Not too long ago you came to be and demanded that he give you exnation and all that. Now you are acting like a fangirl."

    "Who likes him?"

    Sandhya brushed thosements aside and left the room. She went to her own room and rxed a bit. She could still see the beautiful battle that happened not too long ago. She has seen many warriors fight, but she has never seen anyone like Athena and Sam.

    She hadn''t seen that level of battle.

    The most fascinating thing for her is that Sam and Athena both didn''t have any fancy moves. They didn''t have long cirction energy paths going through their bodies trying to emte a phenomenon while attacking.

    They are using very basic moves.

    Even that basic stab is very powerful against some thousand year old sword technique.

    And they didn''t have that rigidity in them. All of the attacks and defenses are very flexible. They transitioned from one attack to another very easily, one weapon to another smoothly. All of it appeared very organic and true to their nature.

    She felt really envious.

    Sam didn''t know that Sandhya not only already forgot about the scolding he gave her, she is evening thinking about something else rted to him. If he had known he would have considered her a fool.

    The next day, Sam is not doing massive calctions on the rocks anymore. Instead he took out his flute and started ying and it is not just casual ying, he let his energy flow freely with the music.

    Since he is stagnated in the calctions, he decided to free his mind as well as spiritual energy.

    Sam just closed his and his divine senses as well before he started ying his flute. He solely relied on his sense of smell, sense of taste and sense of touch to feel his surroundings.

    A cool breeze hit him and he transferred that feeling through his music. As he yed the flute, the neutral energy from within his body danced to that tune and it resonated with the breeze that he was surrounded by.

    Sam walked in the direction of the breeze. He still had his eyes and spiritual sense closed. As he walked on that rocky mountain, he soon arrived an area where the rocks are not as t. The area is very much ragged.

    But he didn''t stop.

    Sam stepped on a pointy rock, but he bnced on it. Neither was he injured nor was the rock destroyed. He just moved in a smooth motion, but his music changed a bit. It went sharper and smoother alternatively as he moved. Then he stepped in a very small stream. It is very shallow and it didn''t even reach his knees.

    Sam just walked through it and felt like his energy is also acting just like this water. It is resonating with the water and it seemed to be flowing out and into the body just like who this water is smoothly flowing in this stream.

    He walked out of the stream and then into a small patch of woods.

    He just yed his flute with the nature and only stopped after more than an hour.

    By the time he opened his eyes, he was surprised to see that some of the guards who roam around the mountain to patrol are looking at Sam.

    Looking might not be an urate word to describe it. They are staring at him.

    It seems like Sam has been on the flute for way too long time and they have been staring it for a while.

    He didn''t mind it though. He just went back to the ce he was doing his research and started writing some notes on the rock once again.

    After ying the music like that he did have some insights.

    He couldn''t understand how the energy is reaching a state where it merged into objects directly and made them do different things. The trees were in a sentient state, but they don''t really have a thinking will like spirits.

    They are more like coded robots but these trees changed naturally.

    All of this is a bit confusing to Sam.

    And to add to that confusion, he saw something else during his fight with Athena the day before. The energy changes that made these puppets happen. He felt like the state is extremely simr to the one with the trees and this time he got to observe it a lot longer than before.

    That is also the reason why he tried to y the flute today.

    Since he cannot understand or achieve the feat of giving these objects sentience, Sam decided to do at least make his energy resonate with these things. To make the adapt the nature and behavior of the nature, or at least his perception of the behavior of the nature.

    And this flute appeared to be the best way for him to do that.

    During this whole time, the flute made the energy flow exactly like the surroundings that Sam felt.

    So, his immediate goal is to make the energy adapt to the nature and surroundings and he would focus on this change only.

 Chapter 1927: Tale

    News about Sam''s musical concert was passed all over by the guards.

    They thought it was weird that Sam is ying such peaceful music. Not because of the music itself, but Sam himself is known as the guardian who came to save them from these disasters.

    When they encountered Sam doing all those weird calctions they just thought he is doing some serious stuff about the uing disasters and stuff. So, they were caught off guard when they noticed him ying his flute in the mountains.

    Sam of course heard this when he came for a meal at the temple.

    "Heard you were enjoying ying your flute?"

    Priestess asked with a smile.

    Sam just shrugged and said.

    "I was doing some research."

    "Even with music."

    "I do everything." Sam casually said and Sandhya snorted from the side. Sam of course tried to ignore it, but the priestess seemed to be having fun with this weird tension between Sam and Sandhya, so she fueled the mes.

    "Come on Sandhya, don''t be so rude."

    "I am not rude."

    "Then what is with the snort? If I don''t know any better, I would have assumed that you are showing your derision."

    "Of course, I was trying to express that."

    "Isn''t that rude?"

    "Should I care about the fragile ego of the guy who is boasting like that? Sorry."

    She obviously still held a grudge from the past experience. Sam gave her a side eyed nce. If not for the delicious food and the hospitality provided by Priestess, he would have left this mountain just from Sandhya''s annoyance.

    He didn''t even dislike her, but she is just a person Sam has no tolerance to. In front of those young masters she likes to act all high and mighty, but would you look at this behavior? She is just acting like some spoiled kid.

    In a way it makes sense. Only her mother who is the strongest of the is above her. No one else dares tomand her. Her own father doesn''t even dare to talk back to her.

    What could he expect from such person?

    At least she is not loose with her hands and legs like those young masters. They would have tried to attack Sam or even try to humiliate him directly, she is only throwing some tantrums. This is still bearable for him.

    He tried to ignore her and focused on the meal.

    "How do you know that he is boasting? Maybe he does do everything. At least I feel like he does.

    He is good with formations and inscriptions, he has multiple elemental control, he is good with artisanship is various fields, he is great in meleebat as you said and now he is doing music too. What else does he need to do?"

    "He might do a lot, but that is not everything. He is just little better than most. There is no need to brag about it."

    As the bickering between mother and daughter increased, Sam felt like he is out of ce. They are arguing about his abilities right in front of him.

    Sam looked at Priestess in askance.

    "I am really sorry Sam, my daughter really doesn''t know any manners."

    "Why are you apologizing to him? You don''t have to do it. Not on my behalf at least. If he really wants to get an apology then tell him to prove that he can do everything and I will do it."

    Sam sighed and stood up to leave.

    "See, he is just boasting."

    Sam almost turned around and pped her head off. He controlled his urge and left the ce. He went for some peace and quite while he awaited the next disaster. These Greek gods are so much better than this grown up brat.

    If he really reached his limit, he might as well leave.

    Time passed and the next disaster vision came.

    This time it is a rtively normal city with no special terrain around it. There are some forests, sea is a bit away from it, there is a river nearby. There is nothing special about this.

    As he travelled to the city, Sam started thinking about who the next god might be. Until now, he fought with Poseidon, Hephaestus, Artemis, Hermes and Athena. That is five disasters and he has five more to go.

    He doesn''t know which Olympian god will be next, but he really wished he could finish this as soon as possible.

    When he reached the city, he was dumbfounded.

    Because even though this ce looked like a normal city from vision and even from far away, as he got closer, he felt like he is walking through the streets of a war torn nation back on earth. There are a bunch of ruins on his way to the city. It is almost like there used to be a city there before.

    He looked at Sandhya in askance and she said.

    "There is indeed no significant natural ecosystem around, but this ce is a bit significant historically. The city used to be ten times bigger and it was destroyed. The leader of the city was once very powerful. Even without the same level of resources as the Emerald city, he managed to make his own city much more powerful and rich.

    Of course, along with his power, his vanity grew. No one knows how many concubines he had. And that resulted in many offspring.

    Among there, a young man was very talented. Thewful wife obviously wanted to kill him to make her son the sole heir. The n leader didn''t care.

    He just watched as his sons and daughters killed each other, while wives and concubines schemed behind each others backs. He was amused by it all.

    Even when it came to this talented son of his, he stayed indifferent in the name of neutrality. But that kid wanted to be an explorer. He just wanted to wander the whole by himself.

    When his mom found that his son was being schemed against, she immediately sent him away to be the wanderer he wanted to be. Until then she was very reluctant and didn''t let him go. So, he was very delighted when he got the chance.

    If only he wasn''t that na?ve. In the anger that the kid escaped, the wife killed the concubine in the cruelest way possible.

    The son came back after a short trip and found the empty house. His mother died and he couldn''t even find he ashes or the grave.

    When asked around, it was found out that her body was thrown as food for some hounds the n leader liked to groom.

    The son went to his father and asked him for some justice and an exnation. But all he got was the indifference. He got pissed and gave his father an ultimatum. Give him justice or face the consequences.

    The father broke his leg and threw him out of the city.

    That day everyone witnessed as the son limped away into the forest and everyone saw the wife openly sending people to kill him.

    But they never saw the assassins that went after him. Exactly after an year and a half, he came back.

    He killed his way through the whole city.

    All the guards, soldiers andckeys his father hand, all of his half siblings that tried to stop him, his father''s concubines, even the citizens who wanted to use the opportunity and him as a stepping stone. He killed everyone and destroyed the city the leader built with so much effort.

    He met the n leader in the battlefield and made him a cripple along with his wife. Then he tortured their first born son in the most horrific way humanely possible until the mother couldn''t bear to see. Her cultivation was sealed, so she had to bang her head against the road until she lost her life tomit suicide.

    The father on the other hand was left there in the city square with his cultivation destroyed, his body crippled for days toe.

    He had to witness hisrge city being destroyed by his own son and his son selling the city away to a n that was barely powerful enough and the new n upied city and built it anew.

    He even stayed at the n for years toe and nurtured some really powerful heirs within. After that n had enough power to be the major faction in the, he stayed and helped them. Only on the day he left did he let his fathere down from the pole he was tied to.

    Legend has it that he dragged his father away from there into the forest. His father is almost at the end of his lifespan as his divine cultivation was destroyed. Only his divine body could only sustain him for so many years.

    He should have died by now, but no one knows what happened to that son."

    Sam heard the history of the city and was surprised. Not by the story.

    He was surprised to see all the fucking ruins of the previous era still being there. The first he would have done is erase its traces when building a new city.

 Chapter 1928: Blood Lust

    Sam let the shadow mice out as he walked through the ruins before reaching the city.

    As usual, Sam was greeted by the n leader. After those pleasantries, Sam just directly went into work. He doesn''t know what disaster wille to this ce. He doesn''t have any idea on what kind of disaster will strike.

    Everything around the city is very neutral. The forests are not special, the soil doesn''t have any special qualities, there are no significant mineral ores and there is definitely no massive natural phenomenon.

    The only significant thing about this ce are those ruins.

    Sam thought for a while about what coulde here. Of course to not waste the time, he started building the formation already, but at the same time he sent the specters to take a look at the surroundings.

    Since the ruins are still here, he wanted to see if there are any stray souls left from the previous city. After all, the guy killed his way through the city with his own hands. There should be a lot of resentment going on around at that time.

    And from what the Shadow mice told him, there are a lot of skeletons that are still present.

    There is a great chance that some spirits might have formed out of the resentment.

    At least that is what Sam initially thought, but when the specters came back and gave him the report he was surprised by their findings.

    They didn''t find a single spirit. But they all felt that there is something present within the region they were searching.

    They all had this feeling that someone is trying to watch, trying to reach to them.

    "I could feel the gaze and the touch, but I couldn''t see or sense the presence properly." Those are the words of the specter that had the most experience and most strength among them all.

    This made Sam more confused.

    After all, how could one feel the gaze and touch without sensing their presence? In fact, the gaze and the touch themselves are ways to sense their presence. The sentence itself is a bit contradictory.

    But Sam knew that Specter is not being stupid. It must have been the feeling that it definitely had.

    Sam felt a bit confused with it.

    What is going to happen? What will cause the disaster this time? He doesn''t know. But if he couldn''t find that out the easy way before the disaster begins, he would have to find it the hard way.

    "Fuck it."

    Sam just went ahead and started making improvements. He didn''t want to hold back this time.

    This time he didn''t even want to waste a single minute.

    He started arranging the formation himself. Since he doesn''t exactly know what kind of threat mighte, he focused two things.

    One is souls and another one is space.

    Whether it is a life form or some non-living being that bes sentient, souls are the best way to restrain their operations.

    If the disasteres in the form of living beings, then he can use the souls directly. But if the situation simr to time he dealt with Artemises, like how the trees got sentient at that time, the souls wouldn''t have a direct impact.

    But he can still use these souls wrestle for the control over the sentience of the objects and things thate at them. If it is rted to soul necromancy, then of course Sam doesn''t even need to worry about it.

    Souls are the perfect counter for soul necromancy.

    Sam started weaving a formation that basically acted as the ying field for all of his specters. Along with them, he even started summoning a bunch of random spirits with the spirit enchantement techniques and attached them to the souls.

    Anyway, he already got a shit ton of souls from the previous mission. He didn''t let go of the souls of the thousands of Giants, Lycans and Demons. He collected every single collectible soul.

    He injected every single soul into the formation that he made around the city.

    The control of it is going to be a bit troublesome. In the middle of the battle, Sam might have to deal with the God by himself, so he might need someone else with good enough will power to control these souls.

    As for giving autonomy to the formation? He didn''t even think of that. With that many souls and spectres, there is a great chance that it might go berserk, particrly when it has power to restrain the sentience and souls of other people.

    So, he called for a meeting and gathered ten people from all the camps with various tests to check their will power.

    He assigned different positions to them around the city. Their job is to provide a counter bnce for the souls that are going to be doing the heavy lifting.

    After the formation set up was done, Sam still had around half a day left. He decided to do onest thing around the city.

    He connected himself with the formation at the centre and let the souls spread as vast as possible. They encroached throughout the city and also covered the ruins as a whole. The souls gathered energy around them and injected all of them into the ruins.

    Sam then took a deep breath and activated observation ability.

    He felt like a ton of bricks had fallen on his head. The headache and the pain in his nerves is way too severe.

    He wanted to scream his lungs out, but he suppressed it all and just focused on observing the area.

    He could see each spiritual energy particle in the whole area, but he could also see something else along with that. There is a faint read colored aura that is floating around along with those particles.

    It is seeping out of the ground and merging with the air.

    Sam felt weird.

    He couldn''t sense any energy fluctuations that could create this from the ground. But the aura is never ending and it is seeping out constantly.

    After examining it a bit more, he suddenly realized something. One of the weaker souls that is part of the formation is acting a bit weirdly. The change is very small and it is negligible. But he felt that the soul became a bit more aggressive.

    Not to the point the worry, in fact if not for his observation state, even Sam wouldn''t have noticed this.

    He wanted to test it more and instead of trying to understand what is it and what caused it, he tried to feel its presence. Just like how the spectres felt when they were searching here.

    Indeed, just like how the spectres felt, he could feel its ''gaze'' and he could feel its ''touch'' but he couldn''t exactly feel its ''presence''. But since Sam could use his observation ability he could ''see'' its presence.

    He let his soul get exposed to this red aura that ising out of it.

    He let himself be vulnerable just for a few moments and at that moment, he felt the presence of it clearly.

    The red aura is trying to seep into his soul like it wanted to be one with it and as soon as it did, his body started feeling a bit a agitated.

    He felt a bit angry. He doesn''t know what he is angry about and why that feeling ising out of him. He let more of the aura seep into him. The feeling amplified bit by bit.

    The anger surged and soon it turned into a temptation. An urge to cause some violence. Sam immediately understood this feeling.

    Its bloodlust.

    He is very familiar with it. His own bloodlust is actually very high. But the bloodlust thating from this is not as aggressive. It is very subtle. Like a slow drug. It is slowly urging him to cause violence and death.

    Sam immediately expelled all of this and closed his soul out. He retracted the souls and reset the formation back.

    He disconnected himself from the formation and looked into the horizon. He finally found out what is special around the city. But he doesn''t know exactly what this bloodlust is going to do. How the god is going to take advantage of this.

    He could think of a few ways to use it, but he cannot guarantee that the god will follow the same path as him.

    Sam just decided to continue with the current arrangements. He just wanted to make sure that all of his preparations are done without any hitch.

    At this moment, he suddenly felt something wrong with the formation around and went to a certain spot.

    He observed the cement of the nodes and frowned. He contacted Sandhya immediately.

    "I need you here ASAP. Bring the young masters here."

    He didn''t even wait for her reply. He just stood there and looked at the people working on the formation.

    "Stop your work as it is."

 Chapter 1929: Blood Lust Creatures

    Sam''s sudden decision made everyone surprised.

    No one understood why he is making everyone halt the work. He even made every one of the formation masters stand in line in front of him. His face is devoid of any emotion. It didn''t take long for the young masters and Sandhya toe.

    "What happened? Why are you stopping the work?"

    "I saw something happen. I knew this would happen sooner orter, so I just wanted to give you all the lesson the first time it happened so that I don''t have to repeat myself."

    "What is it?"

    Sandhya appeared to be a bit frustrated.

    Sam looked at the half a dozen formation masters that were working in the area he pointed out.

    "I will ask you guys, once and only once. One of you messed up with the formation in this area and you did it intentionally. You even tried to cover it up and thought that I wouldn''t find out.

    I want you toe forward and ept your mistake.

    Before you guys deny it, let me tell you something, I know who messed up. Don''t think I am bluffing. Sandhya knows that I already have surveince in ce."

    As Sam spoke, everyone of the formation masters were stunned. They are all of different elements. The formation doesn''t have any elemental effect. Except for the spatial elementyer that was being done by the others, the rest of it I neutral energy constantly reinforced bit by bit.

    So, it could be any one of them.

    All of them exchanged nces.

    Sam looked at them for a moment and sighed. No one ising forward.

    He took out his handgun and loaded it with a special bullet.

    He aimed at a person and shot.

    *BOOM*

    The bullet hit that guy''s leg. He copsed to the ground as he held the bleeding leg with both of his hands.

    The next moment though the pain on that guy''s face turned into horror. His leg started aging rapidly. He has been in this state for over hundreds of years, but at this moment, all the umted vitality is being sucked out of it.

    Sam looked at the guy and asked.

    "Who does this guy belong to? Which power?"

    None of the young masters answered. They all had weird looks on their faces. Sandhya looked at Sam and whispered.

    "He belongs to this city."

    Sam was indeed a bit surprised. He looked at the n leader who just arrived.

    "Seems like you need to clean your house a bit. Find out which power he really belongs to."

    He then looked at the rest of the formation masters and spoke.

    "Just finish the formation properly. I don''t want any upsets. Also take your positions as soon as the disaster starts. You don''t have to do anything. You are just reinforced power transmitters to it. All the energy will be drawn from the environment. You are just acting as a transmission medium for that energy.

    I don''t want any hups."

    He then turned to the n leader once again and said.

    "Send everyone into the estate. The formation around your estate building has some extra reinforcements."

    "Yes Sir."

    The n leader made all the necessary arrangements as Sam instructed.

    Everyone became extra vignt.

    When the masters checked, the formation is indeed tampered a bit. They became careful and suspicious of each other.

    Sam didn''t bother with inquiring further with the guy who messed up the formation. He became busy once again. After all, the time for the disaster is nearing.

    And it didn''t take long for that time to be over.

    Sam got ready and sent all the beasts out. He is a bit nervous. After all, fear is in the unknown. He still didn''t know what the disaster is going to be.

    But there is one thing he is right about. The bloodlust.

    That is the only thing special about this ce and it turned out it is the one that''s being used for the disaster.

    Sam couldn''t feel the bloodlust in the surroundings before, but now he could actually feel the bloodlust manifesting and the red colored aura became denser as it became denser and stronger. To the point that is visible to the naked eye.

    And this didn''t just happen outside the city. In fact, the situation inside the city is also the same. Sam watched as the bloodlust manifested and it is gathering at certain areas. It is gathering towards those areas and started taking different forms.

    The same scene could be seen out of the city.

    Sam watched as the red colored bloodlust manifesting into different figures. But his attention is grabbed by one particr spot. Most of the bloodlust aura is targeting at that one spot.

    It wouldn''t take a genius to figure out that the spot is where the god appears.

    Sam took out his sword and got ready. The beasts are also ready to get into action.

    "Yanwu, Raiju, Ape. You three are in charge inside the city. Rest focus on the outside. Hopper, restraints are your thing. Cooperate with the shadow mice and restrict the movements of whateveres out of those areas. Whatever this aura throws out, it should be destroyed before it could do anything.

    Be careful. Don''t let it effect your state of mind."

    Sam came out of the city and hovered in the air calmly.

    As he watched the ces where the aura gathered, started morphing into beasts. One of them is the closest to him and it turned into a giant wolf.

    A wolf purely created out of bloodlust that manifested into a physical entity.

    The Wolf looked like it wanted to destroy everything and anything thates in its way. It is manifestation of not just bloodlust but destruction.

    It lunged towards Sam who is hovering in the air. But before it could even reach him, Forest bear that was standing near him already mmed its w against the wolf''s head.

    The wolf crashed into the ground. Some red smoke came out of its body and disappeared into the air. The rest of the body decreased in size with the crash. Sam looked at the massive wolf almost losing two thirds of its body.

    He activated his energy vision to see if he could track the disappearance of the red aura. If it is just mixing with the environment around them of it is disappearing into void. But he couldn''t. He would have to spread his soul and find that out.

    For which this is not the time.

    He shifted his attention to the other figures that are created out of this Blood Lust. There are many wolves. Wolves of many sizes. Apart from that there are a bunch of Vultures.

    As he looked at them Sam felt like he knew who the god is.

    With his limited knowledge of Greek mythology from back on earth, there is only one that could be rted to bloodlust, wolves and vultures.

    It is none other than the God of War of Olympus. Ares.

    The humanoid figure is still manifesting and the more he looked at it, the more he felt that his guess is right.

    There I sword along with its sheath hanging on his waist, while a long spear in his hands. A helmet and a battle armor along with a shield. This is the most basic depiction of Ares as far as he could remember.

    And from his gaze, Sam felt even more sure. That craving for battle and destruction. It is not something just anyone could manifest.

    Athena is also very known for her battle, but she enjoys the battle. Enjoys the profound nature of that battle, but this guy craves destruction. He likes to tear apart his enemies and enjoy that victory.

    Sam wanted to make a move directly. But he decided to hold back a bit.

    He watched the behavior of the creatures made purely from that bloodlust. While the god is still manifesting, he watched his beasts battle these creatures to understand their behavior. He figured that since the god is being made out the same way as these creatures, he should be able to figure out the situation a bit.

    For the next two minutes, he indeed managed to figure out some clues. The wolves and vultures are being dominated by his beasts. Even though the creatures are not disappearing with a single hit, they are losing a lot of their strength with every hit.

    Their size is decreasing and they are bing easier targets.

    But there is also something weird happening. Sam noticed that as the fight progressed the beasts are bing more and more aggressive. It is very subtle and it would have gone unnoticed, but Sam is connected to them body and soul.

    It would be impossible for him to notice those feelings of aggression.

    He immediately connected to the Forest bear who is nearest to him.

    Forest bear just mmed a wolf to the ground and destroyed it. The bloodlust dissipiated into thin air. At least that is what he looked like. But the next moment, Sam could feel that the bear is a little bit excited.

    There is this increased urge to go and beat up another wolf that a few yards away.

 Chapter 1930: Fight With Ares

    "Get your act together."

    Sam spoke those words and they shook the bear a bit. The bear''s mind suddenly cleared out and the aggression went down. It looked at Sam before shaking its head and tearing the head off the wolf.

    Sam looked at the other beasts and noticed that their situation is the same.

    They are all gaining aggression bit by bit. He had to bring them all back to their senses. But at this moment, he noticed a sense of threat.

    The massive humanoid figure of the god has condensed enough. He is not as giant as the first few disasters, but he is not exactly the size of a human-like how Athena did. He picked a size that fits right in the middle.

    He threw a spear at Sam which alerted him a bit.

    Sam stopped what he was doing and swung his sword at the spear that came at him.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sh resulted in a miniature dirt storm. With just a wave of his hand, it cleared and the Sam felt his arm shaking a bit. This is the first time he felt like this. He felt the power and intent behind that throw.

    Ares looked at Sam with a taunting expression.

    "So, you are the brat that is toying around with my family members. Not too bad. You managed to block that throw."

    His voice was not loud, but Sam clearly heard it.

    He didn''t reply. His face is serious for the first time. For the first time he felt like on the same level he might not be able to match someone in pure strength. He felt like he was on backfoot. Last time he felt like this was when he was fighting against Karthikeya.

    At that time, he felt like Karthikeya beat him in terms of both strength and technique.

    Right now, he had a simr feeling.

    Ares zoomed towards Sam instantly.

    He looked like a sh of red smoke as he closed the distance. Another spear appeared as he stabbed forward.

    Sam dodged it instinctually. But the spear thrust created a force that hit the city''s formation that was behind him.

    *BOOM*

    The formation shook and trembled. The energy fluctuations were more than Sam imagined. Everyone felt a tremor in their hearts. Sam frowned as he looked at Ares who is still grinning like a mad man.

    On the other hand, the vultures and the wolves moved towards the spot Ares attacked. That spot on the formations has indeed recovering from the strike. But the spot is indeed weaker at the moment. The creatures crashed against it like their life depended on it.

    The blood colored vapor that came out of their bodies started seeping through those minute cracks. Luckily, no one was there within the city, otherwise things would have been very troublesome. The beasts and Sam are barely able to resist the bloodlust.

    These normal citizens wouldn''t be able to do the same.

    Ares looked at Sam as he spun his spear gracefully.

    "Athena spoke so highly about you. I don''t see it."

    Sam got ready with his sword. Ares lunged forward with his spear and started with the basic thrusts. Even though it is the most basic move, Sam felt like every thrust is aiming to kill him. If it hit, he would be critically injured.

    He is surprised by how strong Ares is. Because from what he knew Ares might be a god of war and violence, but he wasn''t the strongest of the bunch. In fact, many gods like Zeus, Poseidon, Athena, Apollo were known to be stronger than him.

    At least that is what Sam thought with his limited knowledge. But he never felt this threatened when he was facing the other gods.

    Sam blocked the spear strikes with his sword. His goal was to redirect and deflect them as much as possible.

    Even though he could feel the threat, he is not restless or clumsy. The only thing that changed is that he is extra vignt. He couldn''t focus on what is happening to the city and the formations.

    He had to leave thatpletely in the hands of the beasts and other formation masters.

    After exchanging over a few blows, Sam started attacking. His moves are fluid and precise.

    Ares used his shield very skillfully as he tried to block and counter with his spear, but Sam''s attacks were a bit weird.

    Whenever the sword hit the shield, he wasn''t able to hold that shield stably. The shield is being repelled by the force of the sword and Ares'' posture was changing. He couldn''t even properly aim the first few spear strikes.

    Sam took advantage of this and caught a hold of the spear with his free hand and shed his sword at Ares'' arm.

    Ares turned around to avoid the sh and used his shield to m against Sam''s face.

    Of course, Sam blocked it directly with his arm and he used the repel style once again. And this time since the area of contact isrger because of using his arm, Ares had to defend against more momentum than before.

    He felt like his arm attached to the shield was being pulled away by someone. Ares wasn''t able to use this momentum to his advantage because of the close distance between him and Sam. He dropped it and the spear disappeared in a red puff of smoke.

    Ares pulled the sword out of his hilt and shed at Sam.

    Sam blocked the sword with his own and in just a second it turned into a fencing battle.

    Ares'' moves couldn''t be more direct and basic. Sam deflected a sh with his sword. Ares'' sword moved to the side and that swing caused a huge crate on the ground.

    Sam took a deep breath as he looked at the sheer destruction each move is causing. As they exchanged blows, the surroundings are filled with tremors. Both of them are unable tond a clean attack, but each attack is leaving the ground destroyed and distorted.

    For every one that witnessed this, this felt like an even battle. But only the two people involved knew that one of them had a clear upper hand. It is Ares.

    For some reason, Sam is feeling slightly pressured. He realized that Ares had a slight edge over him since the start and for some reason as the battle progressed, it is increasing bit by bit.

    With every move Sam made, he felt like Ares is able to predict the next and as time passed, he is getting a hang of Sam''s style.

    Sam almost felt like he is fighting himself, but a version of himself that is more ruthless, more technical, more powerful and more precise.

    Ares is fighting Sam in his own style, which is usually what Sam did to his own opponents, it felt weird being at the receiving end of this.

    And his style is actually being perfected in a different way. Ares is using his shield in conjunction with the sword, making it hard for Sam to get a hit.

    After exchanging over a hundred swords, Sam suddenly felt his hair stand on its end. Ares mmed the shield at the stab Sam was about to make. Even the repel style and ripple style that Sam used didn''t work.

    They were countered and Sam even felt his arm go numb. He lost all the sensation in that arm. Ares then charged forward with the shield and hit Sam on the right side of the torso before stabbing him with the sword from the left.

    Sam had to take the hit on the torso just to block the attack and used the sword to block the stab.

    But Ares'' sword slid against Sam''s and the stab turned into a cut across his torso. It wasn''t deep, but it is clean and precise. It is almost like Ares was only aiming for a cut of that level.

    Sam kicked the ground and distance himself from Ares.

    "Come on. Don''t tell me, this is all you got."

    Ares taunted Sam.

    Sam sighed as he tried to calm down a bit. He lunged forward with a stab, but in the middle of his lunge, the sword disappeared and was reced with a spear.

    Ares who was prepared for the stab of the sword was stunned for a moment. He was indeed caught off guard. He dove right into the spear. In thest moment, he could barely slide to the side and the spear went through his shoulder.

    Sam wanted to pull the spear back, but surprisingly Ares let the spear stay in his shoulder, he even used then and turned forcefully. Sam who was holding the spear was dragged along with it.

    He was dumbfounded. Before he could make sense of it, the shield mmed into his back and made him crash to the ground. Followed by a stab of the sword.

    Sam didn''t hesitate and used his shadow element. All this while he was trying to fight with only his weapons, but Ares is too tough an opponent for him.

    Even though he used his shadow element, he wasn''t fast enough or it is better to say Ares is too fast.

    Sam got stabbed in the back right before he disappeared from there.

 Chapter 1931: Weird Fighting Method

    "I wonder how long you will take to use your elements. Yousted longer than I thought."

    Ares said as he waved his hand. His sword changed. It is also a short sword, but this one is much more flexible than the one before.

    Sam looked at him vigntly.

    He looked at Ares'' body. It is acting like a normal body instead of like an energy being. Even the sensation he felt when stabbing into that shoulder felt like a real body.

    And from that stab he could see the bloodlust that created this body slowly leaking out bit by bit, just like the blood. The only difference is that blood usually drips, but the blood lust is like a vapor going up in the air.

    Sam put his spear away and just stood there calmly. He is waiting for Ares to make a move.

    Until now, he couldn''t understand much about Ares'' own style. He sticks to basics, but even his basic moves are strong. Way too strong and lethal. And his technique is textbook perfection. Its like he created those moves.

    Apart from that, Sam didn''t understand anything much. Maybe the only other factor could be that this guy can adapt to the other''s style and that might be his style.

    Sam usually did that. But he adapted and created a counter style to the enemy''s style. But Ares on the other hand is imitating the enemy and perfecting the enemy''s style in his own way. Making it much harder for them to deal with.

    After all, a warrior knows about his own style than anyone else and when he saw it with his eyes, he would instinctually react and assume the next move. But Ares'' adaptation is changing greatly making it a huge drawback.

    Ares looked at Sam and they didn''t make a move for a few minutes.

    Meanwhile, the whole city is on its toes. The bloodlust creatures are attacking the formation like crazy. But the situation inside is rtively stable. The creatures didn''t have the same level of mobility and freedom like the creatures outside the formation.

    It is the effect of the soul and space formation Sam ced.

    They are not able to move freely and their sentience is being attacked by the souls. Sam''s beasts are having a much more easier time than their counterparts outside.

    But they had to stay vignt about the bloodlust effecting them and had to take it a bit slow.

    The only good thing is that there is no bloodlust within the estate. It seemed like the n leader at that time had taken measures to cleanse the whole area before building the estate.

    The citizens are all witnessing everything from within the estate. Even though they are safe inside, they couldn''t help but let their minds wander around about what would have happened if they stayed in the city without any formations to help them out.

    Sam and Ares stood in that distorted empty area without making a move.

    Ares had a smile on his face as he spoke.

    "Come on. Make your move. The longer your beasts are in contact with that bloodlust creatures, the harsher the side effects will be.

    They might be beasts of great bloodlines, but the mental strength is not proportional to the bloodlines most of the time. They might not be able to handle that much pressure."

    Sam didn''t say anything. He just stood there and waited for Ares to make a move.

    Another five minutester, Ares sighed and said.

    "It can''t be helped then. I mustmend your patience though."

    He lunged forward with his sword and shield in his hands. He stabbed straight at Sam while keeping an eye on his movements. This time no matter what Sam brings out, he would be able to defend against it.

    But to his surprise, Sam charged forward like a dumb brute. He aimed dodged to the side and mmed against Ares'' shield. He caught a hold of the edges of the shield and acted like he wanted to pull it off.

    Ares used his sword to stab at Sam while he was still hanging onto the shield. But at this moment, Sam made a move that Ares didn''t expect.

    He took advantage of the huge stature of Ares and hung himself from the shield, then he used that as a leverage to throw a kick on Ares'' arm from under his arm.

    The kick is imbued with void style and ripple style along with fire element.

    *BOOM*

    The explosive caught Ares off guard. Sam made that kick in a weird angle. It is not a decently strong kick for his strength. But the aim of the kick was not to cause maximum damage.

    The fire element spread through the body because of the ripple style and caused multiple miniature explosions with the void style. Since Ares'' body is acting just like a normal body, the fire element''s invasion and corrosion are going tost.

    Ares was stunned by the weird way Sam attacked him.

    He wanted to m Sam against the ground along with his shield, but Sam just let go of the shield and dropped to the ground. Before Ares could react, the earth opened up and swallowed Sam.

    Ares lost his smile for good. He is very serious now. He mmed the shield anyway. Energy transferred into the ground in an explosive way. The ground shook and tore open. It cracked andrge pieces of earth moved around.

    He is trying to force Sam out.

    And Sam indeed came out. He came out of a piece of earth that elevated behind Ares.

    Ares turned around and wanted to stab Sam, but to his surprise, Sam is not standing straight, instead he is upside down with his legs wide open. Ares'' stabpletely missed.

    Sam used his legs and locked on Ares'' leg, before Ares could react, he activated metal fusion and metal spikes spread out of his legs and entered into Ares'' body.

    Ares was dumbfounded once again. He hurriedly tried to pull his leg back. But when he sensed the depth of the spikes in his leg, he knew he couldn''t just pull it out harshly. His legs will tear open instantly.

    But of course, Sam is not going to just let him go.

    Ares changed the sword to spear and stabbed at Sam.

    Sam caught a hold of the spear by his arms tightly. The explosive force made him almost want to throw up blood.

    But he held the spear shaft in ce at the same time, his legs morphed a bit. The spikes on his legs that are dug into Ares'' leg started moving upwards.

    Ares groaned in pain. The leg was mangledpletely. He used the shield to m against Sam once again, but Sam was once again swallowed by the ground.

    Ares couldn''t stand anymore. His right leg is destroyed. He looked at Sam who appeared a few meters away. This is very weird. From the fight he had with Sam until now, he is very skilled person with a proper technique. But thest two attacks made by Sam made him feel very weird.

    Sam on the other hand, didn''t give enough time for Sam to think. He disappeared in a puff of ck smoke and closed the distance. They shed for a few times as Ares tried to turn the tables around.

    Even though he lost one leg and his left arm is already injured, he is still perfect in his technique and his defenses. Sam is even using the sneak attacks on Ares, but he was still unable to attack him properly.

    In a way, there are all proper techniques.

    After exchanging another dozen blows, Sam once again did something that doesn''t make sense.

    He first appeared as if he is trying to attack Ares'' legs, when Ares dodged and countered, Sam suddenly ducked and crouched so low that he almost looked like a frog. The earth distorted as it caught a hold of Ares'' leg.

    Sam mmed his palms on the ground, making a stone shoot out and hit Ares at the back of his head when he leaned backward.

    Then Sam jumped forward as he used his head to hit the crotch area of Ares shamelessly. When Ares tried to block the attack with his shield, the earth below Ares'' legs raised him up. His shield positioning moved along with that.

    Samnded straight at his legs. His head went right through those gaps. He caught a hold of Ares'' legs. Since one of them is already mangled beyond repair, he took advantage of that. He broke than bone further making it unable to stand.

    When the intact leg was about to buckle because of that, he didn''t let it. Instead, he forcefully made the leg bend the other way.

    Ares felt his leg break and fell on his back.

    Sam didn''t leave him at that. He crawled over to Ares and activated Fire elemental fusion along with metal fusion.

    As the golden mes raged, he started punching leaving a bunch of cuts and openings on Ares'' body while the mes acted like little snakes trying to invade the body throughout these wounds.

 Chapter 1932: Explosion

    Ares pushed Sam off of him and escaped.

    He didn''t expect such a crazy style of fighting from Sam. It is without finesse. The movements are weird and there is no connection between the first and the second move. It is a nonsensical way of fighting.

    Sam didn''t want to give Ares any more time to analyze his style.

    He is indeed using a nonsensical way of fighting, precisely because he knew how easy it is for Ares to figure out his patterened and regr fighting style.

    He disappeared with space element and reappeared behind Ares.

    Ares'' instincts screamed a punch wasing from the side, but a kick came from apletely different side. He barely tried to block it inst minute, which still made him take a huge brunt of the force from the kick.

    Then Sam disappeared once again.

    Ares jumped into the air as he felt a sweeping kick mighte at him. And it did, but to his surprise, the kick changed into a jump and Sam hugged Ares'' leg. He then tore the leg muscle or at least the part where the muscle should be in shreds with a w and disappeared before Ares could evennd.

    Ares was getting irritated with Sam''s disgusting and crude fighting method.

    The most frustrating part is, if anyone else fought with him like that, he could have easily killed him. An attack with no proper technique and crude is easy to deal with for an expert. But the problem is Sam is even executing these crude moves with perfection.

    It is a contradiction on its own.

    As he was gritting his teeth in anger. He sensed some spatial fluctuations and stabbed his sword there. But at that moment¡­

    *BOOM*

    An explosion happened. Instead of Sam, a liquid energy capsule that was destabilized arrived there. The explosion threw Ares away and Sam was there to receive him.

    He used a spear and lodged it directly into Ares'' back making him stop. Ares was about to react, but Sam disappeared and in process left a couple of more liquid energy capsules there.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Ares was thrown away from the spot by the explosion. He crashed into the ground. His strength has weakened a lot. If only his real body is here. That is what he thought as he looked at Sam.

    "You are a dirty fighter too. I like it."

    Ares said with a grin.

    Sam just shrugged. In a way, it is indeed dirty fighting. If Sam didn''t have anysting consequences that are rted to this fight, then he would have fought more. He would have taken his sweet time and thought of a way to properly counter Ares.

    But now, he doesn''t have that luxury.

    Ares closed his eyes as Sam came forward with his sword.

    He resigned to the defeat, but he is too proud to admit that and he is way too egoistic to not hold a grudge against Sam.

    But right now, he needs to satiate his ego and pride to a certain extent. He needs to fight some bright side to this shitty situation. And just from closing his eyes he saw something.

    He stood up weakly and looked at Sam.

    "You are one hell of a person. You are smart, can use battle prowess, great at reading your opponents and all the formation shit is an added bonus.

    You alone stopped so many gods from causing disasters. It is basically going against nature. But there is one thing that even a guy like wouldn''t be able to control and that would one day be the cause of your defeat."

    "What would that be?"

    "A shitty teammate."

    As soon as he spoke, Sam sensed something. He turned around to look at the formation.

    *BOOM*

    An explosion urred to the formations of the city. The one covering the city and the one covering the estate, both of them were damaged at one spot each.

    Sam widened his eyes disbelief.

    Ares disappeared into arge puff of red smoke that divided into very small equal parts and merged with all the bloodlust creatures that are targeting the city. All the creatures stopped whatever they are doing and started moving towards the hole in the formation.

    The same thing happened to the creatures inside the city. Due to the formation break, the spatial deterrence and the soul deterrence vanished. The creatures ran towards the hole in the formation of the estate.

    "All of you block the creatures. Kill them as fast as you can."

    Sam passed an order to the beasts as he used his spatial element to transfer himself into the city.

    His target was the hole in the estate formation.

    He activated space elemental fusion. He connected himself with the spiritual energy in the surroundings and the froze everything within a certain perimeter.

    A few bloodlust creatures that went past the hole before he appeared slowed down a bit, but the creatures that are in the immediate surroundings froze like statues.

    As more creatures poured towards the hole, the more frozen creatures were added to the mix and the more pressure Sam started feeling.

    He closed his eyes and focused.

    Void Hopper who was previously controlling the formation is already inside and he went after the bloodlust creatures that are not inpletely control of Sam.

    The citizens who were shocked by the sudden development of the events were panic stricken. Of course of those people got ready to engage with the bloodlust creatures to defend themselves, but before they could even make a move, Sam already managed to intervene.

    The Void hopper moved like a very tiny sh that could barely be seen. And with every sh that appeared in front of their eyes, they saw a spatial tear injuring the bloodlust creatures severely.

    Meanwhile, Yanwu, Raiju, Ape etc went all out as they fought every creature in the city. Since the creatures are not focusing on them, they are much easier targets than before. But the problem is the number is higher and they are crazily targeting Sam.

    Sam just took a few deep breaths as he felt the pressure increase on the formation. He knew this is as far as the beasts could help without using bloodline techniques and if his guess is right, they would have to use the bloodline techniques to end this as fast as possible.

    The only problem is, he has to hold up here. Since all of these creatures are gathering at this one particr point, they will all be in a cluster in a particr area. This way, the beasts would have less chance of missing the attack.

    He already sent the message and all the beasts are acting ording to the n.

    Meanwhile, Sam who is blocking the path also decided to reduce some numbers while he still can.

    The space around him started twisting upon hismands. Miniature explosions of spatial turbulence destroyed the bloodlust creatures on by one. The only problem is that all of that bloodlust that escaped this creature is being driven to Sam.

    Sam took a deep breath and let it enter his mind. Right now, he couldn''t use force to expel this. He could only count on his mental strength and be confident in himself to be able to resist thispletely.

    One creature after another was being twisted by space and was destroyed. The bloodlust started pouring into Sam bit by bit.

    This went on for five minutes as the beasts waited while doing small attacks.

    "Are all the creatures in the line?"

    Sam asked the beasts through his mental connection. Right now, all the creatures from outside the city are already inside the city and all of these creaturesbined are trying to squeeze through the hole in the formation of the estate.

    Sam took a deep breath and got ready tounch the final attacks.

    "Everyone, target the crowd of these creatures with your bloodline attacks. Every single one of them should be destroyed."

    Sam threw amand with a cold tone. But at this moment, he saw something happen.

    Some of the creatures that are in his captivity started exploding even without his prompting. He widened his eyes in disbelief and then he saw the bloodlust of all of these creatures that exploded by themselves is moving towards the citizens nearby.

    Within no time, Sam saw over half a dozen people getting infected and they turned to the people beside them to attack them.

    "HURRY UP. NOW."

    Sam said as he forcefully twisted the space. He didn''t give the time for the creatures to explode anymore. He destroyed them.

    As Sam destroyed the creatures at the front, the creatures at the back came forward to fill up the void and they are also victims of the turbulent twisted space. Meanwhile, the beasts outsideunched their bloodline attacks.

    Golden mes, Wind de hurricanes, thunder storms, maic turbulence, devouring forests, twisted space, venomous zone, all kinds of attacks targeted the bloodlust creatures and within no time all of them were destroyed.

    The citizens who saw the whole thing in awe, finally understood how powerful Sam is. Maybe he could have fought the disasters by himself without needing the formations. The only reason he is using the formations is to save the people.

    He wouldn''t have to go through so much trouble if he doesn''t have to save them.

 Chapter 1933: Fainted

    Five minutes of constant attacks.

    The dust settled and everyone witnessed nothing but rubble in the ce of their city. Not a single building survived. Except for the estate, everything else was destroyed.

    Sam stood there at the hole in the formation as he took deep breaths. Blood is seeping out of his nose and his veins are popping on his forehead. All the bloodlust that came out of the creatures entered him. The only target that was in front of them.

    Everyone looked at the change in the situation.

    Sam''s body gave out a killing intent that they have never felt before.

    The beasts connected to him could even feel it.

    The humans that are closest to him are a few meters away and they felt like they are standing on the edge of a razor sharp de and could be cut anytime soon.

    Sam on the other hand, lost the sense of his surroundings. Currently, he is inside his own head.

    He is hearing a lot of words.

    "KILL"

    "DESTROY"

    "KILL"

    "DESTROY"

    "SLAUGHTER"

    "MASSACRE."

    All of his beast bloodlines are running rampant, the surrounding spiritual energy is riled up and many elements are being cast.

    The beasts hurriedly came to him and surrounded him, trying to send signals to his mind to calm him down.

    But Sam''s aura is even effecting them at such a close distance. They stood a bit away as they all became worried about him. Sam held his head with both of his hands as he heard these voices constantly edging him towards this violence.

    He gritted his teeth and tried to control himself as much as he can.

    And the more he persisted, the more defined the voices have be. The voice became much clearer and it turned out of be Ares'' voice.

    Five more minutester Sam also saw a clear and defined picture of Ares in his mind. Standing there in all of his glory of being loser.

    "Come on Sam. Do you think beating me is that easy? I really wished I came down with my Divine body to fight you. I really do. This fight, I am not satisfied. And this is the consequence of that dissatisfaction. Try to win past that and you will be worthy of being my opponent.

    Then I can count on youing to the level I am at and have a proper fight with me."

    Sam bit his tongue as his breathing became ragged.

    For some reason, the more he controlled, the more his mind is feeling pressured and some memories that had been buried deep inside his mind are being awakened.

    All the bad memories that he desired to forget so many times, but didn''t dare to as he was afraid that he might not be what he is today without those memories.

    Ares who is inside Sam''s consciousness through those memories got the unwarranted and unhindered ess to these dark memories.

    Like the memories Sivan stole, these memories didn''t have any of his inventions, his theories and his techniques, instead every single one of them is an incident of pure sadness thatter turned into an incident of pure rage and anger.

    There are many things he had done. Many things that are inhumane and many that are immoral. Ares is tapping into all of them as he tried to make Sam''s anger re more and more.

    "You are one strong minded bastard. Any human with this much trauma would have died a hundred times over. The abuse, the pain, I am sure the underworld would like to devour your soul and absorb all the Karma you umted before sending you back into reincarnation.

    Hades might even incentivize mergely if I am the catcher of that soul and sent you there."

    Sam didn''t speak. His eyes locked on to Ares. He is full of anger and lust for violence. But right now, he wanted to control himself frommitting any of it and the best way to do it is for him to redirect it somewhere.

    To a ce where the area of effect is minimum, but the damage is maximum. And there is only one ce that came to his mind, which is his mind itself. He focused on Ares himself.

    The bloodlust was transferred into a soul attack.

    Ares was dumbfounded. For the first time, he felt fear like never before. All the bloodlust that Sam was emitting externally was all directed inside. The people who were afraid all around and felt the pressure finally felt relieved.

    They felt like a mountain was lifted off of their shoulders.

    Sam looked at Ares and didn''t even speak. His willpower and soul energy manifested into a storm within his sea of consciousness. Ares felt like he is being sucked into a ckhole.

    "You dare?"

    He yelled and started retaliating. But Sam didn''t let up. He pushed his consciousness to the maximum. He didn''t care if he would be exhausted or if he would even faint, but at this moment, he wanted to strain his soul as much as he can just to defeat Ares.

    As long as he didn''t cause any external damage to his body he is fine with it.

    After all, he already had a goal to finish the task of these disasters with minimum damage. And even in that situation, some assholes messed up with his formation. So, he might have to sacrifice the numbers a bit.

    In this situation, he doesn''t want to lose any more on the number of civilians and impact his score.

    The storm looked like a storm of blood and Ares''s image blurred gradually.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "I am pretty sure your wish will be satisfied. I would also like to see how you are going to deal with me in person.

    Toe to toe, hand to hand, I wille and test if your title as the god of war is worth your salt."

    By the end of that sentence, Ares disappeared from Sam''s sea of consciousness.

    On the outside, the beasts watched as Sam copsed to his knees and fainted on the ground.

    The surrounding people all looked vigntly, but the most vignt at the moment were the beasts themselves. They all surrounded him and growled at the people that were about toe forward.

    Sandhya wanted toe forward and check up on him, but Yanwu looked at her with killing intent. One more step and there is no doubt that he will destroy her right there and then.

    Sandhya frowned and said.

    "I am just checking up on him. We need to see if he gotsting damage."

    Yanwu shook his head. Even though she couldn''t understand what he is trying to say, she knew that she had no chance of checking up on Sam.

    Sky ced Sam on his back and took off into the sky. He traveled towards the Mountain temple. Yanwu also followed him, but the remaining beasts stayed there.

    Forest Bear injected his energy into the ground and built a forest around the estate. Hopper also went on and created a barrier. They are not exactly powerful enough to stop the people inside, but they were not meant to do that.

    They are meant to showcase their intent. No one is leaving the estate without their consent and their consent can only be obtained on Sam''s recovery and orders.

    Sandhya understood the intent and went to organize a meeting with the young masters.

    "One of your people messed up. You destroyed the formation that Sam created and from the looks of it, the beasts are not going to let you go unless this matter is cleared. I am asking you now. Who did this?"

    "The area where the damage urred belongs to the Emerald City. You might as well ask them. What is the point of organizing this whole meeting? It is a clear waste of time."

    "One of the young masters said dismissively."

    Sandhya sighed at this. She really didn''t want to deal with this and these young masters are clearly used to handling these kinds of tricks. No one is going to admit to these things.

    Sandhya thought for a moment and went back to the beasts.

    "Let me leave this ce."

    She told the beasts. But they didn''t respond.

    "I know you guys are angry, but these idiots are not going to admit to these things. And I am not knowledgeable about this formation to find out who did this. Sam would have toe to do that. So, if you want to find out who did this before that, I have to involve my mother.

    Let me go. You should know that I have no incentive in destroying this formation."

    After the beasts thought for a while, they decided to let her go.

    Sandhya hurriedly made her way to the mountain temple and by the time she reached there, Sam has already arrived. Priestess is already checking up on him.

    Her expression is very serious.

    She met with Sandhya and said.

    "I am going to talk to Kartikeya. I understood what happened there, but I don''t know what will happen after Sam wakes up. From his state, he will recover in a couple of hours."

 Chapter 1934: Unexpected Silence and Calm

    Priestess went to talk to Karthikeya.

    She called him hurriedly and exined the situation. Karthikeya felt a bit exhausted. Not physically but mentally. If only the gods that know Karthikeya saw this situation, they would have had a lot to say.

    "Are your people really that stupid? Do they really think that Sam is a soft persimmon just because he is restraining himself from killing every single person every ten minutes? If his task was to only save the infrastructure of the, he would have had a pic there by now."

    Karthikeya is really angry.

    After all, he took a lot of measures so that Sam would end up in that particr at that particr time.

    He had to owe a lot of favors for every one. But that is not even the most troubling thing there.

    Sam himself was aiming to get a perfect score in the mission. But Karthikeya already sensed the story going down by two points.

    Even though it is just a few points, he knew that whoever takes something away from Sam, would have to pay a price and it wouldn''t be a small one.

    "Just call for a meeting to the n leaders. Exin the situation to them. Tell them that the disaster would be the least of their concerns if Sam really retaliates. Tell them to surrender and resolve this peacefully."

    Priestess did as he was told.

    She called for the n leaders'' meeting and gave them a piece of her mind.

    "I don''t know exactly what happened there. But it hase to my attention that one of your genius sons might have pissed him off. I know that you all know what happened there. Someone thought that it would be a great idea to try and mess with that person who is trying to help you out.

    I suggest you guys juste out without interfering. Because once there is a detailed investigation and find out anything that is out of the norm, I will count your bones with mybear kids.

    Meanwhile, Sam didn''t take long to wake up.

    The meeting with the n leaders obviously didn''t lead to any conclusion. No one dared to take on the me for whatever happened.

    Sam''s return made everyone stand on their toes. They expected heavy retaliation. Among them, one young master in particr is so afraid that he even left the mountain before Sam even woke up.

    He is the same young master that previously talked about the n of sabotaging the defense of other ns. The first elder opposed the whole thing, but the problem is that this guy who recently adhered the throne happened to have some loyal followers and they all nned this together.

    "I will not hand over you there. But that doesn''t mean you are going to get the full protection of the n from now on. If Sam himself finds out what you did, you better believe, I am going to throw you away cutting all ties between you and the n.

    You can die for all I care."

    While the conversation is happening, they got a message from the mountains. Their spies reacted and sent the message as soon as Sam woke up.

    Like most people expected, Sam didn''t burn in rage. Instead, he was very calm.

    And this surprised the young master and the First Elder even more.

    They were expecting retaliation and that is one of the reasons the young master escaped to this ce.

    Very few people even in their own n know of this ce. He felt safe and sound here.

    But seeing that there is no reaction from Sam, gave him a short term sense of relief. But also at the same time, left him hanging. He is now growing anxious of how Sam would retaliate.

    The first elder is also feeling the same.

    Priestess who already prepared a big speech and an apology to appease Sam was surprised by his calm demeanor.

    "From the next disaster onwards, my preparation would be a little different. I am not going to work as hard as before. I will just design the formation and stay there, unless there is an absolute requirement for me to fight, I wouldn''t be fighting.

    But from the looks of it, my formation would be enough for most of the time. The remaining could really be handled by the city leaders and their subordinates.

    Sam''s decision of course rose more suspicions in the hearts of the young masters. One of them stood up and questioned him.

    "How can you do this to us Sir Sam? The remaining powers that were protected by you are now in possession of great formations that couldn''t even exist in our imaginations before. They have benefited greatly from your presence.

    Now before of the actions of the people who belong to the former category, we have to suffer. This is not fair.

    Sam looked at the young master who semed to have assumed a moral highground in demanding protection from Sam.

    Of course, Sam couldn''t be bothered by it. He looked at the elders, n leaders and the youngsters before smiling.

    "I want to know who destroyed my previous formation. Until then, I will not be participating directly in the confrontation. Unlike before when the formation is there for the sole purpose of defense against some stray attacks and acted a diversion.

    But now, it is the primary force for your defense. I would like to see who would want toe to my seat and do all the heavy lifting.

    Since some of you are confident enough to kill me, I am sure you are more than capable of handling these problems on your own. Meanwhile, I will wait for the disasters to be over and get out of this ce."

    The n leaders and young masters felt like Sam is very petty.

    Time passed and Sam spent most of it in istion while preparing for the next step.

    He just kept on drawing things and figuring out what kind of formation he would use based on the city they are going to target. After he managed to get that vision that alwayses with the disaster, he moved along with the team.

    Just like before, he behaved the exact same. He is chill and flexible. He just participated in action nothing else.

 Chapter 1935: Sit Back and Relax

    The day before the next disaster.

    Sam as he said took aplete backseat, he only worked on building the formation and that made the work move faster by a dozen times and this time, he is no worried about saving the whole city. He already gave instructions for all the people to be moved to the n''s estate.

    The formation around the estate is a dozen times stronger than the city''s formation.

    The n members were forced to be stationed in the city. If the outside formation is destroyed, they will be forced to deal with the god and the disasters by themselves.

    Sam''s beasts are also not getting involved.

    Because of this, he had a lot of free time involved. He even set up his barbeque had a good time with the beasts.

    At this moment, Sandhya and the n leader in charge of the city came to them. Both of them are nervous as they looked at how rxed and smiling Sam is right now.

    Before the attack happened in the previous disaster, Sam was very serious with everything. He was strict, cold and domineering. He made everyone feel ufortable, but he was constantly interacting with all the formation masters and young masters.

    He constantly improved the defense set up and constantly tried to upgrade the ns.

    But now, he is just there and did his own part. Even the examination for the other parts is not that strict.

    Sam looked at Sandhya and raised his eyebrow in askance.

    "You are acting weird."

    "How am I supposed to act?"

    "You are obviously angry. Why are you behaving like this? If you really want to take revenge on the situation before, find out the person and responsible and punish them as you see fit. Even if you kill him, no one will say a thing as long as you can prove it.

    But acting like this is not the right thing. Many people, including civillians are worried. They had their hopes on you to save this disaster. With your inactive involvement everyone is at risk."

    Sam looked at her calmly as he ced a steak on his te. He used knife and fork as he carefully and elegantly cut into it.

    "First of all, I am indeed angry. But you don''t get to decide or estimate my behavior. You are few lifetimes early to do that. Not to be a narcissist, but I am. I feel it as an insult to even think that you can assume how I would behave when I am angry.

    Second, I will find the person and punish them and for that. Not right now. I know when, where and how I should take my revenge. I have killed more people in a year than you have met in your lifetime.

    Third, I don''t need or want to show you or anyone else on this the proof for punishing that perpetrator. If anyone wants that, they can try and make me.

    Fourth, I am not responsible for the safety of any civilian, n member or a person that belongs to this ce. My work was purely voluntary and for me the receiving party of this voluntary is the poption of this.

    Poption of this as in the single entity that I made a deal with it. They will have collective consequences for whatever that wasmitted against me.

    And as I said, they are thinking that they are capable of killing me. So, this disaster should be a piece of cake."

    "When did anyone ever try to kill you?" Sandhya said through gritted teeth. Her fists are clenched and she is really ready to throw some hands.

    But she knew better than to do that.

    "Oh? You didn''t understand that? The very fact that these morons tried that stunt means, they should know that I aming from them. I wille for them. So, they should be confident in killing me if they want to mess with my ns.

    And when Ie, you will see that I am a hundred times scarier than any god that came to attack these people."

    Sandhya gritted her teeth and wanted to yell at him. Sam looked at her and smiled.

    "Don''t believe me? You will see it soon. Now please leave if that is all you want to talk about."

    The n leader wanted to say something about it, but he couldn''t. After all, whatever Sam said is right. This is voluntary and he doesn''t have anything on Sam to take something from him. He could only leave dejectedly.

    The next disaster came on time.

    It is a Goddess this time.

    Demeter. Goddess of Agriculture, fertility and harvest.

    Sam half guessed when the disaster struck. The city is known for its herb production and the whole area is surrounded by the fields special prepared for these herbs. The attacks of Demeter are very simr to Artemis.

    She gave sentience to some nt life form. But instead of to therge trees, Demeter managed to create some herb creatures that grew to the size of a giant tree. Every field has three to four of creatures and theyunched attacks that are very simple, but amplified and demonized versions of the effects of their herbs.

    Sam took a seat in the middle of the city as he watched different projectiles hit the city formation. One of them is a seed that got stuck on the formation and started growing into it. Some are corrosive things and some are pure physical damage.

    But all of them had this slight effect on the formation''s energy cirction. Medicine used for soothing is slowing down the energy flow. Medicine with burning energy, is making the energy re up.

    The problem is they are not strong enough and Sam really did stuck to his word of making the formation stronger than before. Since he didn''t have to focus on his fight strategy, he didn''t mind add a few extrayers.

    It is significantly stronger, but not to the point of seeing it as a cheat like advancementpared to the previous ones.

    At first, the n''s forces that are stationed in the city as the second line of defense after the formation are very nervous. But as the time passed, and they saw the formation taking care of these projectiles, they became more confident.

    But still, they got ready and intercepted these projectiles with their own projectile weapons.

    They didn''t take the things Sam gave for granted. They tried their absolute best as they fought against the projectiles.

    Sam chilled with a ss of wine as he watched the whole fiasco and soon the fiasco turned a bit dangerous.

    With the increase in defenders, the attacking projectiles also increased like crazy and no matter how much they tried, they are unable to keep up with the numbers.

    Then they had to move to the fields and attack the creatures by themselves. This turned into a closedbat. Many of them were reluctant to do that. Not because they didn''t want to fight, but because they had to fight in the fields.

    All the nts and herbs they have grown until now are being destroyed by them. They were really heartbroken. They might be mages and warriors here, but they are farmers through and through.

    This approach did make them a little bit upper handed, but that didn''tst long either.

    The creatures that were focusing on a single task before became multi-taskers. They threw projectiles like a crazy kid throwing stones into water. The formation rippled crazily with energy fluctuations.

    Sam watched the shy show of the formation slowly dimming and glowing while finally crack.

    He had a smile on his face.

    Once a crack appeared on the formation, Demeter didn''t want to leave that chance. She just kept directing the creatures to attack that one crack. In the next two minutes, those cracks expanded and¡­

    *BOOM*

    You guessed it, the formation broke downpletely.

    The energy disappeared in a shower of sparkles and that is it. The city isid bare in front of Demeter and the other creatures.

    The estate formation and some high level people from the city and the n are the onlyyers between the people and the disaster.

    But to Sam''s surprise and intrigue, the next wave of projectile weapons were not targeted at the estate area, instead they were focused on the spot that Sam was sitting at. All of them were aimed at him.

    Sam raised his eyebrow as he stood where he was. He didn''t even move. He just took another sip of his drink as he watched the projectiles closing in.

    It attracted the attention of everyone. Many young masters are praying that the attack willnd. Just so that Sam would be pissed and he would make a move. They are really desperate. But they were surprised by Sam''s reaction.

    The projectiles stopped exactly two feet away from Sam. They came from all directions and it is like there is a sphere of two feet radius around him. They just stopped there without moving as if they are floating there from the start.

 Chapter 1936: To the Last Disaster

    1936 To the Last Disaster

    All the projectiles that halted started disintegrating slowly.

    Sam looked at Demeter that is standing far away. She is unlike Ares and Athena. Just like the rest of the gods, she formed into arge being and looked down on Sam from there. He looked at her and spoke in a slow tone.

    "That attack right now is the stupidest thing anyone could have ever done. I am sitting here minding my own business. Unless you provoke me, I will not be meddling with your attacks on the city.

    So, use your might elsewhere."

    "Seems like you finally knew your ce. But it is toote. Everyone in Olympus has been ordered to deal with you. You are now our primary target. As long as there is a possibility anyone from Olympus can try and take you down.

    There is also a big reward on your head. There is no way I am missing out on that."

    As Demeter spoke, she waved her hand. Another volley of projectiles were targeted at Sam.

    Sam still didn''t move.

    He just took another sip of the wine and watched as the projectiles disintegrated before they could even reach him. The spatial energy is very handy.

    Demeter was obviously angry because of that. She looked at Sam while gritting her teeth andmanded the creatures. They suddenly sucked all the energy from the soil and vegetation around them to grow three times bigger.

    Now the projectiles also became three times bigger and three times stronger.

    This time when Sam stopped them from hitting him, he felt more pressure. He knew that his leisurely attitude might not be enough to defend against these attacks like it did before. Of course, right now not all the creatures are focused on Sam.

    The n leader, n members and other people fighting against the creatures were absolutely delighted by what they saw.

    They were happy that Sam was targeting. Which means, some of the fire power is being directed at him. They have some breathing space and there is a chance that Sam couldn''t just sit back and take those attacks.

    They really hoped that he would make a move.

    They took this chance andunched critical strikes on the creatures. And of course, they might not be that powerful, they are not powerless to the point they cannot kill stationary nts. They destroyed quite a few of those creatures in a short amount of time.

    Some of the youngsters even felt bloated to the point, they wanted to team up and go against Demeter herself. They felt like they could take her down if Sam still diverts her attention.

    Sam of course noticed and there is no way Demeter didn''t.

    She became pissed. She is already angry at Sam by the fact that he is not taking her seriously. Now these small fries are trying to challenge her. She went berserk and started attacking by herself.

    She is also focusing mostly on projectile attacks as he targeted the key members that are leading the attack against the creatures.

    The whole thing turned into a full on war.

    Demeter''s attacks are lethal and the n elder who got hit almost died from the very first attack.

    From within that explosion, the n leader flew into the air and Demeter who saw his body levitating, smirked and jumped forward to throw a p and kill him with it. But right before the hand could meet the target, two talons appeared out of nowhere and snatched the elder by his cloths.

    Sky caught the elder and disappeared like a sh.

    He flew to the estate and dropped the elder there before disappeared from that spot. Demeter looked at Sam with a frown.

    Not just her the remaining people involved also looked at Sam in surprise. But Sam didn''t bother answering. If it were up to him, he would have just left these people to die. After all, he already lost the perfect record as two people died in the explosion of the formation.

    Now, he doesn''t care about that perfect record anymore. All he needs is to win thispetition with a veryrge margin. It wouldn''t change even if a couple of people are dead during these disasters.

    But the beasts didn''t agree.

    They are way too invested in this round ofpetition and Sam couldn''t say not to them decisively.

    So, they reached an agreement.

    Sam and the beasts wouldn''t be involved in an activebat situation unless their lives were threatened. The members of the n and the city would be in charge of taking care of themselves.

    The only help they will have is the formation and then when people are about to die in the fights, the beasts will just save them in theirst breath. They would be out ofmission, sure. But they would be alive.

    That is their game now.

    Sam was really surprised by such a decision. He didn''t expect them to be this involved in a stupid game. But he was amused by how much they wanted it to be this way. Their indirect involvement is a significance of how much they are angry at these people and how much they still want Sam to win this game.

    Demeter stopped attacking the people and started focusing on her surroundings. She couldn''t find a single trace of Sky or any other beast. Sam is still seen sitting there rxed.

    She gritted her teeth and made her move. Her target is another elder.

    Once again, right before the elder died, Sky came and took his away. When Demeter had enough of it and tried to target two people at the same time, both Sky and Yanwu appeared.

    They took both of them away and disappeared like they were never there.

    Looking at this scenario, the fighters from the city finally found some courage. They are sure that Sam wouldn''t let them die, so they became much more daring and decided to y it rough.

    They became reckless and started attacking the creatures and some long range attackers targeted Demeter herself. For the first time ever the members are fighting for their in these disasters.

    The young masters of the other ns that are observing were really surprised and are in awe. Particrly the people that have yet to experience the disaster.

    They finally saw some hope and they are also relieved. Now even without Sam''splete involvement, they wouldn''t bepletely hopeless. Granted that Sam provided the formations of course.

    Some of these youngsters are of course very strong in their own minds. They are thinking what they could do and how they could impress with those moves.

    Demeter looked at Sam with an even colder look.

    Sam shook his head at that.

    All she can do is look, look and look even more. She hasn''t done shit since the whole thing started. She is not as smart as other gods and her attacks are not even that powerful.

    "I heard that you have quite high level beasts and it seems true. They also seem extremely loyal to you."

    Sam just shrugged at her.

    "Let''s see if they wille forward, if you are about to die."

    As she spoke, the surrounding spiritual energy surged into her body. The energy was so much to the point the formations fluctuated for a fraction of a second. The body of Demeter suddenly turned a few shades darker.

    Sam has seen this before.

    When Poseidon got too angry, he also overdrew the power from the nature. It seems like gods have limits set up on them when they visit theses, and once they overdraw past that limit, something like this is happening.

    Demeter raised her hand and aimed it at Sam.

    All the vegetation in the surroundings. And by surroundings it is not just from the fields around them, instead all the vegetation from even forests miles away suddenly gained sentience and all of them started gathering vitality and created projectile weapons.

    All of these weapons were aimed at Sam not even on the formation.

    Sam could feel the killing intent. He could feel the pressure that he had never felt before. This woman drew more power than Poseidon. Sam could see the nature trying to reject her. The space around her is crumbling.

    "You are a fucking idiot."

    Sam muttered as he took deep breath.

    The next second within the surroundings of Demeter, a bunch of spatial fluctuations urred and all of Sam''s beasts appeared from there. As the projectiles made their way to Sam, the beasts didn''t go to rescue him, instead they came to deal with Demeter.

    And in the next few minutes, the people of this have witnessed a beat down of the century. A beat down from beasts to a god. A beat down they never ever expected to see.

    Sam looked at this and sighed. His ns kind of failed. These gods are making it hard for him. And he had to witness this happening in the next few disasters as well. Until thest disaster was the only one left, Sam finished nine disasters in total in the next few days.

    In all of these days, the residents of theses didn''t die in the disasters. They followed the same n as they did with Demeter.

    And every time the gods focused more on Sam than the city.

    He just hoped at least in thest one Sam just

 Chapter 1937: Difficult Terrain

    Chapter 1937: Difficult Terrain

    The day before thest disaster.

    Sam is on the peak of a mountain. He has worked a lot in the past few days and thest few days have been interesting. Particrly the encounters with the gods. Since Sam already marked the whole Olympus as his enemy, this is actually a pretty good introduction to them.

    As he thought of thest two disasters in particr, he couldn\''t help but chuckle in amusement. Until now, in the ten disasters that he faced, Sam encountered only the major Olympian Gods.

    At least that is what they are known as back on earth. There used to be twelve people on the list and he met nine of them. He is going to meet the tenth one today, which means he wouldn\''t be meeting two of them.

    There are only three gods left. Zeus, Hera and Apollo.

    Sam doesn\''t exactly know on what basis these Olympian gods areing. If they areing in the order of their strength, from lowest to highest, then Poseidon shouldn\''t be the first one. Even the descending order doesn\''t match up.

    The difficulty was totally random.

    Thest two disasters are of Dionysus and Aphrodite. Aphrodite provided more difficulty than Dionysus and interactions with them are very much interesting and amusing to Sam. They are not the top dogs of the twelve major gods.

    But even they tried to deal with Sam as if this is the only chance to prove themselves. And it seems like the hierarchal structure and operations are lot more enticing than Sam initially thought. He managed to get a great deal of information from Dionysus in particr.

    Sam Sam\''s beasts had their way with him, he sang like a bird and gave all the information Sam might need. Only one piece of information wasn\''t avable.

    Thest and final god in this disaster, who would that be?

    If only he had gotten answer to that. If he would have had much more rxing time right now. Anyway, at this point there is no need to worry about this too much. All he has to do is wait and prepare.

    The one weird thing about this mountain range is that, it is cold. It is cold to the point there are some snow deposits on some peaks and they covered a lot of area. This reminded him of himalyan region. Only this area is almost a dozen times bigger.

    It is a pretty hard ce to defend as there are a lot of people staying within these mountain ranges. Due to the unique nature of the resources and the terrain that provided great difficulty to procure these resources, they created a lot of minor establishments.

    In thest few days, Sam and Void Hopper coborated in gathering all of these people in the city. They managed to create temporary space gates to transfer people.

    In process, they also explored a lot about this region.

    Sam really didn\''t like this ce. There are way too many methods to destroy it. If Sam was the native of this and he is in territory battle, then this ce would be the first target. He would destroy and upy with ease and use this ce as a rendezvous for his people in secret.

    The humans on this might be dumb, but the same couldn\''t be said about the gods that are attacking this ce.

    So, Sam is a bit worried.

    In thest few disasters, he didn\''t make a direct view.

    He didn\''t even so much as p someone or block an attack physically.

    He just stayed put and waited for the time toe. He might have to break that streak now.

    Sam climbed down the mountain and went back to the city. For its natural defensive purposes the city is built in a valley surrounded by mountains. There are some parts of the city that arepletely devoid of any sunlight throughout the day.

    ?¦Á?d¦Ás ¦Ç¦È¦Í¦Å|¡¤?¦Èm It would indeed be a ce with decent defense if they were fighting against other cultivators. The mountains, and the beasts that consider these mountains their home are a good line of defense.

    But right now, that might just be their biggest disadvantage.

    Sam arrived at the city and talked to the people in charge about the progress.

    "Just keep onyering it. The base of formation is strong, but it could be stacked with as manyyers of these repelling formations as you want.

    I suggest that you do it with every single resource you have at your hand."

    The n leader obediently followed the instructions. So did the other young masters. Recently these guys finally found the balls to talk to him again. They thought that Sam would have already showed some retailiation for the earlier mishap.

    But he didn\''t do that. Instead, he just held back a bit.

    This increased the contribution of the ns in defense against the disaster and this made them feel like they are worth something.

    They started talking to him more openly and daringly.

    They started asking him questions about this and that. Sam did answer some of them, but most of the time he ignored thempletely.

    Sam went to work too and at this moment, Sandhya came to meet him.

    "This is thest disaster ording to what you said."

    "Yes. This is thest one."

    "What are you going to do after this?"

    "Leave this ce. That is for sure. Apart from that, I don\''t really know. But if my guess is not wrong, I would be shipped some academy of sorts."

    "Academy? At your age?"

    Sam just shrugged at that. He is also a bit confused, but from what Karthikeya said, he would be enrolled into a Demigod academy of one of the gods and thepetition will start there. He doesn\''t exactly know what he has to do there, but he knew it would be very eventful.

    "Why don\''t you stay here? As you see this is a great ce to be at and there are a lot of things that you can develop. I heard from my mother that a lot ofs don\''t have the resources and natural diversity like this ce."

    "Yeah, indeed. Your does have a pretty diverse ecosystem. But I have seen better. You is way too small to hold me here."

    "You would be one of the strongest people here. Not a single person on the can touch you. I feel like you are missing an opportunity here. All the n leaders would kill to be in a position like yours."

    "Come on, you and I both know that these n leaders killed for a lot less. Killing is not a big deal.

    Anyway, this ce is too tiny. I constantly look for growth and this ce doesn\''t offer that. Why are you insistent on me staying here though? I thought you didn\''t like me."

    Sam said calmly while setting up a formation.

    Sandhya didn\''t know what to say, she just stayed put for a few minutes, just when she was about to say something, a smallmotion urred.

    Sam was surprised to see the Priestess arrive there.

    He walked up to her and asked with a smile.

    "Fancy seeing you here. Why did youe?"

    "Since this is thest disaster, I thought I would join in on the fun. I hope I am wee here."

    "Be my guest."

    Sam said and after some talk, he went on to do more of his work. Priestess left the ce to roam around the city and watch the preparations along with her daughter.

    "You seem down. What happened?" She asked her daughter.

    "Nothing. Its just¡­" Sandhya hesitated and stayed put.

    "Listen Sandhya, since the start, the only person you have in this world to call your own is me. If you cannot even be honest with me, just understand that you are doing something wrong or at least you think it is wrong.

    So, just be out with it and I will tell you if it is wrong or not."

    "It is just that thest few days have been way too exciting. I feel like I have missed a lot of the world outside of this and Sam kind of brought that to this ce.

    I know I cannot leave this as the heir. So, I asked him to stay back. I know it is selfish, but I tried. He just said that this ce is too tiny for him.

    Once he goes away, I might be stuck in those old ways again."

    Priestess smiled at this.

    "Why do you feel the need to hide this though? You are a youngster, it is normal for you to feel that way."

    "Thank you."

    "And, even if he doesn\''t bring the glimpse of that world to you, who says that you cannot go to that world and take a look yourself?"

    Priestess\'' words stunned her. It has always been a rule that the heir of this mountain temple will always stay in this. She always felt tied down to that rule.

    "Don\''t look at me like that. It Is not an impossible thing. I am not going to die any time soon. At least for the next couple of centuries, I can hold up the seat here. You can travel the world ande back. But you need to be careful though.

    The world might not be so forgiving to you. After all, your mother wouldn\''t be there to shield you every day."

 Chapter 1938: Bright Sun

    Chapter 1938: Bright Sun

    Sandhya kept thinking about what her mom said.

    She kept on imagining what the outside world would be like and how she might survive it. And in all of her possible experiences, she kept on thinking about Sam. After all, he is the only connection she has to the outside world and it is hard for her to not keep him away from those experiences.

    Of course, Sam didn\''t care for it that much.

    The next morning, they all gathered for the disaster to strike. Sam hadunched a myriad of flying puppets that locked on the whole mountain range. Keeping a constant watch to make sure no anomaly will pass by.

    After the sun rose, they all felt that it is a bit brighter than every other day. It is a bit warmer and the people of the city felt blessed because of that.

    The warmth of the sun and the brightness of the day, which they don\''t often see felt like a blessing.

    Of course, Sam was as usual and didn\''t think that naively. He knew better than that.

    As soon as he saw that the sun light is brighter than usual, he let his thoughts wander. After all, one of the three gods left is the god of Sun. Apollo.

    Sam let his puppets do more thorough search around.

    He must say the view and the environment is very beautiful. The dew on the leaves and the slight warmthbined with that morning fog is indeed a great feeling. He couldn\''t get enough of it. After doing a searching in the forests surrounding him, he focused on the peaks where the snow is dense and the sunlight is also highest.

    ?¦Á?d¦Ás ¦Ç¦È¦Í¦Å|¡¤?¦Èm Sam tried to connect himself with the puppets to feel the temperature in the surroundings. But he didn\''t feel much difference.

    It is within the eptable range based on the data he gathered.

    Sam didn\''t mind it though. The sun light literally be the disaster here and this might just be the starting point. If this one is also a slow disaster, Sam is ready to tackle it.

    "Keep minding the sunlight. I have seen that many people in the city are going to the sunlight rich area to enjoy it. Tell them to be careful and let me know if there are any anomalies."

    These are instructions he gave to Sandhya who was confused and when she ryed these orders to the young masters, they were also dumbfounded.

    They didn\''t really believe that some sunlight could be that much of a problem.

    "How can this sunlight be dangerous? Don\''t you think you might be a bit too paranoid?"

    Sandhya directly asked Sam.

    Sam stayed silent for a moment and thought of all the times he used the sunlight and light in general to deal with people. He couldn\''t help but let out a chuckle.

    "You have no idea how dangerous sunlight could be until you face."

    He just stopped there and waited to see more changes. Time passed slowly with every passing second, people are more and more assured that sunlight is just a regr weather change. Nothing more.

    Even Sam noticed a very minute difference, of course she still held the same belief, because he could see that the mountains indeed slightly warmed up and the fog is not as thick on them after a couple of hours.

    And he was more reassured that his belief is true when he saw a few drops drip down from mountains. His surveince to tight that he managed to identify a line of water forming as the time passed. He could see it clearly.

    And as soon as he saw it, he immediately became vignt.

    He started observing all the mountains. There are a bunch of small streams appearing on all of them. These streams are following the rocky paths and are joining the bigger streams that are naturally there.

    Basically, the water flow that wasing down the mountain has started increasing.

    Sam did take it up on himself to inform others about this change, but they are not really worried about it. This might not be amon thing, but that doesn\''t mean they haven\''t seen this before. The time went on.

    The sun brightened up and it is still in the realm of being warm. But this time the temperature difference became higher. The difference between the second and the first hour is a lot lesspared to the difference between the third and the second.

    When the fourth hour came he noticed that the difference almost doubledpared to the previous hour.

    This only made Sam much more sure that the next one is definitely apollo. He didn\''t waste any time. He left the city along with Dia.

    Both of them went to a mountain nearby and observed the increase in the flow of the stream. More water and more dangerous. Of course, it is not at the point of real danger, but there is no way he is taking that chance.

    He and Dia focused on changing the terrain of the mountain a bit. They decided to build a reservoir. Not a proper reservoir, more like arge container which is designed to reduce a lot of volume in the waterflow.

    He used the earth elemental energy to modify the terrain and built a bunch of pits and connected these pits to the stream.

    Sam knew that a flood wouldn\''t be much of a problem to the city. After all, at the rate of cultivation that the people have, they could swim through a tsunami, but Sam doesn\''t want to take any chances after all, a flood doesn\''t necessarily pose only one threat of drowning.

    And drowning is definitely a threat right now as the valley doesn\''t have enough space to hold all the water thates if the snowcaps on the mountains melt downpletely.

    They would have to fight in a space enclosed with water if that happens.

    As time passed, Sam created more and more of these sinks that reduced the water flow and they indeed proved useful. The flow of streams indeed increased at a visible rate.

    Sam went back to the city after working on these things for a few hours and he was met with a bunch of people that suddenly grew vignt.

    "This level of warmth is something we didn\''t experience before."

    The n leader said in a worried tone.

    It is indeed true that they craved for this level of warmth before, but when it finally came, they are scared shitless.

    "We can only take it as ites. There is not much to do anyway."

    Time passed. At ninth hour after the first change in the environment, the snowcaps showed somerge movement. The surface of the mountains heated up very much and all the smaller snow deposits already finished melting. They already entered the stream and there are a few floods on the mountain because of the movement ofrge volume of water.

    Some of the beasts had their habitat\''s disturbed and they ran down the mountain. Sam expected this too. The more time passes and the more ecosystem is disturbed, the more threats the city has to face. The beasts are just one part of the problem.

    As the beasts charged at the city, Sam took a backseat. It is city\''s turn to deal with them. Sam is not going to step in. At least not yet.

    The members of the city charged forward to defend the beasts. They didn\''t want to put the formations to use.

    The battle started. The tackle with the disaster officially began.

    Time passed.

    By thirteenth hour, the sun suddenly went down. Usually, the sunrise and sunset should be a one gradual process. It goes from low to high and high to low with a gradient. But the thirteen our day time here vanished abruptly and turned into night.

    It is almost like the sunlight was modified in such a way that the intensity of it increased ording to its position at the time of the day.

    Sam felt a bit weird. All the disasters he faced until now ended within six hours of time. He made sure of that as he tackled with all the troubles thrown at him by these stupid gods. This is the first time that he would have to fight against a disaster for more than a day.

    After sun down, Sam went out. The city is already disturbed, they finally understood that even sunlight could be an ominous thing. Sam decided to check the mountain terrain a bit and he was surprised to notice that the snow is still melting.

    The surface is not cooling down. Instead it retained the heat that it gained throughout the day. The beasts became much more rowdy as they charged blindly. The beasts that are closer to the peak are also moving now.

    Which is dangerous because the beasts in the mountains are one of the reasons other forces are not invading the city.

    They present a considerable threat and now the city in the valleys has to face that considerable threat themselves.

 Chapter 1939: On Fire

    That night no one in the city got any rest.

    Everyone became scared.

    The beasts that they only heard of in stories and lessons havee to attack them.

    Even Sam was surprised. His search was rtively thorough. But even he felt like his knowledge iscking when he saw the type of beasts that are attacking. They are powerful. And there are a lot of beasts that are in the middle stage of Divine ne Initiation.

    They are considered powerhouses in these areas.

    Of course, the formations are strong enough to defend their attacks. So, the city members had to take advantage of the formation''s defense and fight them in a battle of attrition. They wore each beast down and tried to win them over bit by bit.

    The only upside they saw is that they managed to hunt down these beasts and get their hands on the resources they provide. All the significant people in the city are now going to get some high quality weapons from the bones and even higher quality armor from the pelts.

    The blood of course goes to inscription masters.

    The flesh, its use is kind of obvious anyway.

    The night passed eventfully and they didn''t calm down by the day.

    The city watched as one beasts after another, one powerhouse after another got down the mountain and tried to break through the formation and reach the city. They also managed to see how the formation fares against a powerhouse that they can truly estimate the strength of.

    Let''s say it is a very deep impression.

    And the sunrise the next day is an interesting sight to behold. Because as soon as the sun came, the temperature was the same as the time the sun left them the day before. It started where it ended.

    Sam couldn''t help but chuckle at this.

    He doesn''t know how this is possible. It is scientifically stupid to even think of a phenomenon like this.

    But it is happening right here in front of him.

    With each passing minute, the temperature is raising. The snow on the mountains is of course notpletely ordinary snow. It holds a decent ice elemental energy within and it is many times colder than the regr ice.

    It also means, it needs more energy to melt. But the flow of the water is only increasing. The melting process hasn''t slowed down in the slightest.

    Even though Sam made a lot of sinks with the pits, he still didn''t manage to urately calcte the amount of water discharge thates from these mountains. This resulted in just one thing. Floods.

    The water flooded down the mountains and it brought a bunch of beasts along with it as it shed into the city.

    Now the city is surrounded by valley full of water. The dome of the formation is now clearly visible as the water separated from it.

    Since the overflow of the streams also joined these floods, the people in the city experience what it would be like to be in an aquarium for the first time.

    They could see all kinds of water type beasts swimming around the dome, trying to attack. And most of them are ice elemental beasts. The water with a lot of frost energy is around them and they used that very suitable environment to put intense pressure on the formation.

    The cultivators from the city were already having enough down time with the presence of normal beasts. But now the normal beasts are attacking from sky as they didn''t want to be in the water and the ice and water beasts are attacking from water.

    All of their attacks are concentrated on different points of the formation. Just the sheer number of the beasts is overwhelming them. They are not able to deal with them easily.

    Sam still didn''t make a move.

    He just stood there and waited for the situation to worsen. The only thing he did is to check the situation of the mountains through his puppets.

    The surfaces of mountains are awfully clean. A lot of vegetation has been destroyed and the floods are still continuing. Sam estimated that if all the snow melts down then the whole valley would be drowned.

    The city in the valley would be an underwater city and at the rate it is going, it is only going to take another two to two and a half hours to achieve that.

    And his guess was right.

    The mountains were stripped off all the water and it drowned the valley. Not just that valley of course, the water overflowed and entered other areas. But right now, the city ispletely submerged.

    By now the people who were pping about the blessing finally knew what fear meant. They didn''t dare to take the situation lightly and they are all feeling frightened.

    "What are we supposed to do? Should we call people from other cities for rescue? Maybe we should use space gates to migrate from here? If we start now, we might be able to finish it by tomorrow night."

    Sandhya said this to Sam in the afternoon of the second day.

    Sam didn''t reply to anything.

    "It is not the end yet. This is just the start. Thest disaster will be much longer than the other disasters and it won''t end just by moving away from here. From what I understood the homing point for the gods are the people, not just the city.

    If it was that easy to avoid, I could have done that since the start. Migrate people and move them back after the disaster passed. I wouldn''t need to put this much effort."

    Sandhya did ask about proper measures, but Sam didn''t care to exin much.

    He just focused on the mountain floors and watched any other changes. And he didn''t observe something. Afternoon, the mountain started evaporating water. The mountain floor got heated and the water deposits that were left on it started heating up.

    He noticed that the surface of the water even in the valley started heating up.

    When he noticed this change, he flew out of the city and came to the surface.

    He flew around and tried to get a gauge the stone surface temperature. At a visible rate it is increasing. Within an hour some small pools of water started boiling already. Sam kind of understood what is going to happen soon.

    He went back to the city and just waited.

    "Just deal with the beasts for now, you guys are going to be in for some long struggle with this one."

    As Sam said, the fight with the beasts increased.

    The city had to call in reinforcements from other cities. Most of them didn''t send much, but the mountain temple has sent enough.

    Priestess witness all of this with amusement and slight awe.

    "You are not worried."

    As Sam stood on top of the dome she came to him and said these words.

    "Why would I be?"

    "This disaster is taking too long. It will go to third day and even fourth. Why are you not worried?"

    "These Olympians do that. Just to preserve their egos, they will do anything. There is no point in being worried."

    As they spoke there and chatted for a while, Sam already sensed something from the puppets. The vegetation on the mountains is drying up. The pools are almost done and even the sinks that Sam built are boiling up even though they are full of water.

    But still he didn''t feel much. He knew what is about toe. He could guess it.

    The second day went with the wholend on steam.

    That night, everyone shivered in fright even though the surrounding water heated up and made the city heat up.

    The beasts became more and more unruly as they attacked the city.

    The overflowed water is destroying the habitats around the valley and it is attracting the attention of other beasts as well.

    The whole thing turned into a war of attrition. The cultivators fighting are exhausted. But the attacks are never ending.

    "Don''t rx. This is just the beginning."

    Those are the words he said on the night of the second day and on the third day morning, they realized what he meant. He is indeed right.

    It was just beginning.

    Apart from the beasts'' attacks, the next day, they saw something else. The temperature raised to the point, half of the water in the valley evaporated. Even Sam''s sinks were done for.

    Then they saw something else, but afternoon, the vegetation on the mountainspletely dried and up after an hour or so from the noon, the whole mountain was set on fire.

    Sam looked at all of this calmly. Imagine how much vegetation a mountain has and how long it would take all of this to burn.

    If the fire is of a very high quality like golden sun mes, it will take around a couple of days at least with the vitality the trees have.

    And Sam felt that the intensity of these mes is indeed on par with that.

    Only after the fire started did the real attacks from the disasters arrived. The floods and beasts are barely side effects when the god is setting the stage for this disaster.

 Chapter 1940: Mountains on Fire

    The fire burned everything and anything that''s on the mountain.

    The beasts that managed to hide away from the floods and survive the sudden heat rise were also engulfed in mes and the people in the valley could hear the screams of their agony. But that is just the start, they were more terrified by what happened next.

    The beasts that died off only left behind their skeletons that are engulfed with mes and once all of their flesh is gone, these skeletons started moving.

    These skeletons flew down to the formation and started attacking.

    Much less citizens, even Sam didn''t anticipate this change. These skeletons are very close to undead, in fact they should also be ssified as a type of undead. But they are exactly not. Just like how some gods gave sentience to the trees and rocks, this god gave sentience to the skeletons of the beasts that are still burning.

    These fiery undead skeletons of the beasts started attacking the formation crazily. They are a bit weaker than the beasts that came at them until then. But they are far greater in number.

    When these skeletons starteding down in bulk, it looked like a lot of torches are lit up in the sky above the valley.

    And these torches seemed never ending. Due to this, the cultivators of the city, finally started caving a bit. There was almost the first death of the city members. Almost.

    Sam''s beasts didn''t let them die though.

    Yanwu circled in between these ming dead beasts smoothly and threw the cultivator back into the city. Of course, these dead beasts didn''t take it lightly. They immediately change their attention to Yanwu from the formation.

    Yanwu caught a hold of the nearest dead beast with his talons.

    Golden mes burned from his body and engulfed the dead beasts. The golden mes consumed the original orange mes on its skeletons. Before the beast could even react, Yanwu devoured those mes and yanked the skeleton on to another skeleton like he is ying with a couple of ragdolls.

    Then without wasting any time, Yanwu went back.

    Sam looked at Yanwu questioningly. After all, it is very clear that Yanwu could have easily escaped if he wanted. The dead beasts might havee at him at once, but it is no challenge.

    That means, the attack on that one skeleton is deliberate.

    Even though Yanwu acted innocent in front of Sam, when he turned to his fellow beasts, his nose turned high. It seems like there is some internalpetition brewing between them. And the next scene confirmed it.

    When another cultivator was about to fall, Sky disappeared from the spot.

    He reappeared amidst the chaos and caught a hold of the cultivator with his beak. The cultivator was thrown into the formation and Sky charged straight ahead after him. On his way, his wings glowed with wind energy and he cut through to skeletons in mid-air before entering the formation.

    At least Yanwu was subtle, but Sky didn''t even bother trying to guise it.

    He just charged and destroyed two opponents before returning in the sh. Sam sighed at their antic. But didn''t bother trying to stop them. They seemed to be enjoying a bit.

    Seeing Yanwu and Sky already showing off in front of them, the remaining beasts of course didn''t want to hold back.

    They all keenly focused on what is happening outside. Luckily for them, more and more cultivators kept on falling. The beasts charged out to rescue them.

    The beasts had a very simple model

    For one cultivator only one beasts should go. Whoever moves first wins it. They shouldn''t push each other off.

    When the beast rescues the cultivator, they will throw the cultivator into the city.

    Then, on their way back, they will destroy as many skeletons as possible. They wouldn''t go out of their own way. They wouldn''t actively fight.

    Coming back should be the primary objective.

    And any skeletons that got destroyed in the middle should be the coteral damage. The game went on while the cultivators and citizens watched this with a pitiful expression. They are experiencing the biggest disasters of their life.

    Their saviors are just treating it like a game.

    They felt a bit vexed, frustrated and depressed. But none of them didn''t dare to go up to Sam or the beasts to talk to them about this. They didn''t have the balls.

    Sam observed the skeletal beasts carefully while his beasts are ying with them.

    They are never ending and they kept on descending from the mountains. It seems like there are way too many beasts on the mountains. After that, he sent the puppets to the surrounding mountains to check up on them.

    Then only he realized that the streak of these beasts would never end.

    The mes of the mountains surrounding the city have long spread to the mountains neighbouring them. The beasts in those mountains are also experiencing the same thing and are turning into skeletal creatures engulfed in mes.

    Sam presented this information to the young masters, Sandhya and the people in charge of the city.

    After listening to the news, they looked at the screen and all of them focused on only one thing. Instead of the mountains that are already on fire, they looked at the mountains that are yet to be on fire. There are way too many of them.

    All of them gulped nervously.

    Sam knew that the disaster would take a long time, but if by any chance the next phase of the disaster didn''te until all the mountains were not fire, then Sam wouldn''t be able to deal with this disaster without any damage.

    The battle of attrition might be his forte, but he would definitely have some damage.

    He finally had to take some initiative.

    "Ape, Raiju, Forest. All three of you are in charge of going to the neighboring mountains. Lead the beasts out of the mountains and move them farther.

    Yanwu and Sky. Both of you are in charge of setting fire to immediate neighbouring mountains as soon as the beasts were evacuated from there.

    Exin to the beasts about what is happening. How the god has forsaken thisnd and how they are going to burn to death if they don''t move away.

    Yanwu and Sky, your mes shouldn''t spread past the immediate neighboring mountains. We are setting them on fire so that these orange mes wouldn''t have any fuel to spread further. Don''t create a disaster of your own."

    Once Sam passed the orders, the beasts stopped ying around.

    They became serious and immediately made their move. Raiju, Ape and Forest bear jumped into action. Their working style is very simple.

    First they will meet the habitat where one or more beasts are living.

    They would show off their bloodline. Exin whatever it is happening on the mountains. If the beasts listened they helped them move their young cubs and apanied them to the neighboring mountains.

    But if the beasts didn''t listen, they got the shit kicked out of them.

    Raiju, Ape and forest. All three of them didn''t have any time of patience to deal with the antics of these beasts and they just went all violent on them. Their logic is that simple.

    A mini exodus began on those mountains.

    All three of them worked on a single mountain together to finish its evacuation and handed it over to Yanwu and Sky. The major benefit for them is that because of the floods a lot of beasts already left the mountains.

    Now the remaining ones also left.

    As soon as one mountain got empty, Yanwu set it on fire. Sky intensified the mes and made it burn faster. Both of them turned all the vegetation into ashes in a couple of hours. Of course, they didn''t just wait around until then.

    They got an idea after they burned the first mountain.

    Whenever the three beasts managed to convince some beasts on the mountain, Yanwu went there with sky to set that small area on fire. Looking at the intense golden mes burning on their mountain, the beasts also had an element of fear within them.

    Indirectly they are helping the three beasts to evacuate faster and the burning of the mountains also went on faster.

    On the fourth day of the disaster this is what Sam and his beasts did.

    While they are burning the mountains to stop the possible spread of the orange mes, Sam worked on observing the orange mes. The mes are very intense. They are consuming all the vitality of the trees and other vegetation within as they propagated further.

    These intense mes are then burning the mountain surface itself.

    At first Sam almost thought he saw wrongly, but then he realized he didn''t.

    The mountains that are mineral rich and extremely resistant to extreme conditions were also set on fire and he understood the significance of it on the night of the fourth day.

 Chapter 1941: Intervening

    The surface of the mountain at the peak started melting.

    It looked like a giant candle, except that there is no wick. It started melting and the molten rock and soil which is very dense started flowing down. But after it reached a few feet, it started morphing into something.

    The molten rock turned into a bird.

    It looked like a raven and after it morphed into the shape, it immediately took off. Sam was surprised by the size of it. It is just a little bigger than an actual raven. It is not gigantic.

    But it held so much energy.

    He activated his energy vision to check and Sam felt like he was woken up by a p in his face. The lump of molten rock held more vitality than a thousand year old tree and it is burning that vitality with that fire to transform it into energy.

    This small lump slipped past the skeletons that are fighting the cultivators and the formations to go straight for a cultivator who is almost exhausted.

    Sam made his move at the same time.

    As the bird came, the cultivator reacted in time and shed his saber at it. But he wasn''t able to defend against it. The bird shed against the saber head on and broke it. Apart from that, the impact spread to the arm of the cultivator along with the bright orange mes.

    The raven then broke the arm at the shoulder with a single hit.

    When the raven wanted to blow the head of the cultivator, Sam finally intervened. A kick filled with ice elemental energynded squared on the back of that bird.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosive sound the bird was kicked to the side of a mountain wall and crashed into it.

    A crater appeared and within that arge lump of ice surrounded the glowing and ming orange lump of rock. The ice started melting immediately. Sam noticed that there is a crack on the back of the bird, but his kick wasn''t enough to destroy itpletely.

    He was surprised again.

    It might not be a full powered blow, but the attack is not insignificant. To think that a lump of rock will survive this is surprising. Sam didn''t let it go. As soon as it broke through the ice within the crater, Sam appeared near it and threw a punch.

    This time the bird didn''t survive.

    The bird broke apart, but the fire didn''t stop burning. The rock held so much vitality for some reason and the fire burning that vitality is keeping that bird ''alive''. Sam used his ice to freeze the rock over and kill those mes.

    The bird finally ''died''.

    Sam looked at this and then he looked at therge mountains surrounding them. The fire on the mountains is burning brightly. Just from a look, he can see how the rock is melting bit by bit. He knew what is about toe.

    If by any chance these mes manage to melt down the mountainspletely, the number of birds thate out of them would be too many for him to count.

    No matter how strong the formation is, how powerful the defense is, if a bird is strong enough to take two blows from Sam, there is no way the formations could survive.

    The god this time didn''t hold back at all.

    "Fucking hell."

    Sam cursed under his breath as he looked at the new ravens being created out of the mountain tops.

    He flew out immediately on harbinger. His water elemental energy raged and soon it turned into ice elemental energy. But that is not all, he started pumping his ice elemental energy into harbinger through his feet.

    A frost cloud formed around him and created a trail as he moved around the mountains. Within those fiery mountains he stood out like sore thumb.

    As soon as the people saw Sam moving out, they wanted to scream and cheer on top of their lungs.

    Particrly the n leader of the city.

    He has been nervous since the start of the disaster and when Sam said this is going to be a long one, he felt like he swallowed a bug. He is already vexed that Sam said he would only passively contribute, now on top of that, a long disaster as they are the finale of this disaster series.

    He felt like he couldn''t just catch a break.

    And each stage of the disaster proved to be right. There are all kinds of twists and turns. First came the floods, then came the beasts and then the fiery mountains with ming skeletons. Now molten rock turned to ravens that are on fire.

    Sam flew over with his frost cloud and intercepted a flock of these ravens that came at the city.

    Since Sam came at them, they obviously took him as the target and charged at him. But if they want to get near him, they have to enter the frost cloud which reduced the mes by a significant margin. If the cloud is one thing then Sam''s hits are another.

    So, as soon as he made the move with the staff full of ice elemental energy, the birds were destroyed.

    Not just destroyed, Sam sent them along with a ton of frost energy into the fiery mountains near them. As soon as the birdnded on the mountain walls, it created a small area full of frost energy and put up the fire in that short area.

    Of course, the mes around raged more and devoured it in the end, but the intensity of the mes reduced in that small area.

    After sending over ten birds one by one, Sam understood that the rate at which these birds wille is only going to increase with time. He would need a proper set up to deal with them. He cannot fight all of them head on.

    He called for his beasts.

    "Stop them as much as you can. Don''t get injured."

    He gave those simple instructions and went back to the city. He met with Sandhya and said.

    "I want every single formation master in the city to be right here. Even if they are mediocre it doesn''t matter, bring them here right now."

    Then he proceeded to set up the formation needed. He is creating the resonance formation he used to deal with the giants in the previous mission.

    He took out the humanoid puppets as well as the cannon staves they used. He used the harbinger and puppets to scout the mountains once more to figure out the proper location to ce these puppets.

    The problem right now is the formation''s range is not that vast and he had only tried it on a t terrain.

    Now that he has to use it in such a tricky mountain terrain, it will be very troublesome. But Sam acted quickly. He created a virtual projection of the mountain area within the second floor of the tower. After giving the necessary tasks out, he disappeared into the divine dimension.

    "It has been a while."

    He muttered to himself as he started simtions immediately.

    It has indeed been a while since he took advantage of time difference in the second floor. Recently since he had to spend a lot of time on these stupid missions, he just used that time to do the research at a normal pace.

    But now he had to use it again.

    Luckily, he doesn''t need to figure out any basic concepts behind what he is doing. He just needs to simte and create a properyout and he would be good. Sam''s beasts had to get involved in the fight directly.

    Sam''s word of not getting involved in it has been broken too.

    Sam sighed as this thought popped up in his head every five minutes. But he knew better than just letting it get the best of him. He might value his word, but he also remembered the word he gave out. He said he would save them, then he would.

    On top of it all, he doesn''t want to give any Olympian god the satisfaction of defeating him.

    He can always take revenge for the stuff these people did anyway.

    The cultivators also finally got some breathing space to heal and recover.

    Yanwu, Sky, Forest, Raiju and Ape. The ones that went to set some mountains on fire came back soon and joined the rest of the beasts.

    Forest even went ahead and set up a recovery station. It is basically a wooden chamber that increases the wood elemental healing effect by arge margin.

    The battle became intense.

    The mountain started shortening like a real candle and the bird increased. The beasts fought them off and destroyed them at an incredible pace. But the speed of their destruction is a lot slowerpared to the speed of the spawn.

    Time passed like that and the fourth night went by.

    By fifth morning, Sam finally came out with the formation design.

    It took a lot longer than he expected. But the extra time was necessary. Because once he ced this formation, he believed when the finale within this disaster happens, he wouldn''t have to put in as much effort.

 Chapter 1942: ICE

    Sam distributed everything that is needed for the formation among the people.

    They didn''t have to do much. The major task is dodging the birds made out of that molten rock and their massive number. Once they dodge and reach the marked spot, all they have to do is ce the puppet set up that Sam has prepared.

    When the cultivators of the city got the instructions, they divided themselves into small teams and started moving out one by one.

    During his stay inside the tower, the number of birds increased by dozens of times. A lot of rocks on mountain have disappeared. On top of that when these birds are finally being destroyed, they are leaving a lot of residue on the ground.

    Basically, the fight is going to change the terrain of the whole thing.

    The main problem from this is, if the terrain changes too much, Sam''s formation will be effected, so he had to speed up the process.

    He even used Hopper''s ability to jump through space and transferred a bunch of teams out to increase the speed. While they were busy doing that, Sam made himself busy with setting up the formation. He made most of the coreponents within the tower, so he doesn''t have too much work to do.

    The only precaution is that the set up is a bit delicate and he has to be careful.

    As Samid down the formation, he couldn''t help but take a look at the sky once in a while. The fiery birds made of molten rock are moving around like missiles shot. This almost brought him some memories of suicidal attacks done by two armies in close range.

    After the advancement of weaponry on modern earth, the infantries and such had much more destructive power in their hands and Sam has seen this kind of scenario happen more than once when two opposing forces were in a deadlock.

    They would just go crazy and destroy the other party even at the cost of their own lives.

    This appeared to be like that. And he didn''t like it one bit. He hurried up with the formation. Within an hour or so, he was done with that and even went on to help the rest.

    After everything was set up, he called for everyone.

    "Just stay back and don''t do anything outside of the formation. Unless something or someone breaches the defensive formation, don''t interfere anything else. From now on, it is going to be me against the disaster once again."

    Sam took a deep breath and sat in the middle of the core.

    He is calm and collected as water elemental energy surged out of his body. Arge sphere of pure water elemental energy came out of his body and it condensed more and more until it turned into liquid form.

    The aqua blue color of the liquid made it looked like some gel. It is not pure liquid form that he gets from actually liquifying the energy. Like how he uses it in the capsules.

    This is a bit of a lesser form.

    But for now, it is going to work out pretty well.

    After the energy formed arge sphere big enough to envelop a house manifestedpletely, he started modifying the energy bit by bit. Theyer that was closest to him is the first one to change.

    The color slowly but steadily morphed into the one that of ice blue and that is slowly spreading more and more.

    Meanwhile, Sam''s beasts that are outside the formation, fighting against the molten rock birds started retreating. They weren''t injured, but even they are having a hard time with the numbers. Coupled with the intense durability, this massive number is way too high even for them.

    Once they retreated though, the power of these numbers showed to its fullest.

    The birds didn''t have any special attacks. Except for some explosiveness and the impact thates from its materials and elements. They can''t do some me throws or some earth maniption. They are basically missiles that can change their own direction without a homing device.

    And when they are attacking the formation, there are almost three dozen impacts happening at the same time. And every attack made the formation fluctuate at least three times. The formation vibrating to its core.

    Luckily, Sam did a very heavilyyered formation. So, the impact and vibrations were distributed among all of them. Which made the formation more durable. The city members who were already terrified just drowned in a new sense of horror.

    They really wished this was all a nightmare and it would be gone if they open their eyes.

    Of course, not all wishese true.

    As the formation is bombarded bit by bit, the aqua colored gel around Sam started turning into Iceblue. But now half of it turned into that color and threeyers of the formation were destroyed.

    Sam just continued converting that energy and three moreyers were destroyed before he was done.

    Once the whole sphere of energy was converted to ice elemental energy, it entered the new formation he set up.

    All of a sudden, it felt like a huge energy storm was urring. The massive influx of ice elemental energy into the formation made it contrast with the heat they are facing until then. At the same time, the citizens saw some icy blue glows appearing at various spots in the mountains and valleys.

    They are like beacons that are attracting their attention. Just like how arge sphere of ice elemental energy was around Sam, the energy around the beacons is also reacting and resonating to create a simr sphere.

    Of course, they cannot be of the same size as the one around Sam. It would literally take days to do that and the energy in the valley might not even be sufficient. There are that many beacons Sam left in the valley and the mountains.

    There spheres formed were one third of the original sphere around Sam.

    If one looked at the spot where these spheres appeared, they would notice that there is a humanoid puppet in the middle of each sphere., This puppet is very simr to the one he used back when he was fighting the giants, but this is slightly different.

    These puppets don''t have their individual energy source, but their mechanisms are a lot of more flexible.

    Sam took a deep breath and made his next move.

    The surrounding massive sphere of ice elemental energy once againpressed in an instant. Thepressed energy is concentrated near his heart and got connected to his circtory system. In the same way, the smaller spheres around the humanoid puppets were also condensed and contracted to a very small size, before they entered the area of the heart.

    The puppets started glowing. There is vein pattern on all of their body that originated from the spot of the heart and it looked like a genuine circtory pattern.

    This also made another change to the puppet, the puppets gained the mobility theycked because of the absence of the energy source.

    The puppets immediately jumped from their spots as they levitated in the air. But there is a vein of ice elemental energy that acted like a rope and connected it to the spot where it initially was. As soon as the puppets rose into the air, the nearest molten rock birds shifted their focus to them.

    The citizens who were closest to this debacle happening watched it intently.

    When three birds charged at one puppet, the puppet took a stance like a real cultivator and dodged them smoothly, whilending a few karate chops on their wings and the backs. The birds were frozen partially. The fire energy was exhausted in those ces.

    When Sam attacked previously with his own energy, it didn''t work well, because the fire eventually swallowed the ice, but now it didn''t happen, it is almost like the fire is repent to this eyes.

    The puppet turned around acted as if it is a real cultivator and caught a hold of the birds before they could escape. It really caught two of them with its hands like they are real birds.

    Ice energy seeped into them and the fire died before both the birds fell down gently on to the ground.

    He moved on to the third.

    Simr things happened in all the ces. Every single puppet is fighting like a real cultivator. Some of using staves made of ice, some are using ice sabers, some are using ice swords and some are using ice ws. But they are all fighting in a different style.

    The only thing that changed is their approach to the fight.

    They are not charging blindly, they are acting smart, they are matching the pace and the movements of the birds and then they are taking them down in the most efficient way.

    Even their attacks are not destructive. They are only being used to freeze the birds and stop them from moving.

 Chapter 1943: Apollo Descends

    The puppets went on a bird subduing rampage.

    The massive flock of birds reduced by half in nearly twenty minutes. The sudden surge of the ice attacks from the puppets is not only effective, but it was a visual spectacle to look at. They looked like some kind of fairies and the ice elemental energy that acted as a rope connecting the puppets to their control point appeared like star dust.

    The citizens watched as Sam finishing all the birds off with his puppets.

    His speed is way faster than the speed of the birds spawning from the mountains. This soon made the puppets number higher than the birds and then there are no extra birds. Only the onesing from the burning mountains.

    And of course, Sam is not going to wait and let them grow slowly once again.

    The puppets immediately went back to their control points, where Sam ced the nodes and where these puppets were initially ced. The ice energy riled up more and more as all the puppets stretched their arms out and aimed at the mountain they are standing at.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosive sound at that moment, arge beam of ice energy was shot out of the spot Sam was sitting at. It was aimed to the sky. There is obviously way too much water vapor in the atmosphere because of the sudden evaporation that has been happening for the past few days.

    The clouds are high in the sky and they are not too far away.

    Sam''s frost beam was shot at the biggest cloud of them all.

    At the same time, the puppets also shot out these explosive ice elemental energy beams on to the mountains they are standing at. These beamsnded on the nearest area and put out the fire in that small space.

    Then the ice started spreading as it slowly extinguished the fire around it. The air around the mountain started getting colder and the intensity of the heat in the whole valley cooled down by arge margin, in a very short frame of time.

    The citizens felt like they just had an ice cream in the middle of a hot desert. Of course, they wouldn''t understand that analogy, but the feeling is about the same. The valley started cooling down and some water drizzles are appearing out of thin air because of the overly humid air.

    The mountains that were on fire soon turned to the snowy mountains they were before and more.

    But in the sky, the sun is still getting hotter and hotter with every passing second, but this time, it didn''t have any effect on the mountains. After a certain amount, Sam finally stopped shooting theser beam as it started snowing from the clouds.

    There are a bunch of frozen water puddles outside the formation and the valley became arge ice skating rink.

    The whole valley turned more beautiful than ever before.

    The Ice elemental sphere around Sam didn''t change or falter. Except the beams from him and the puppets stoppedpletely.

    They all stayed still as if waiting for the sun god''s next move.

    But for the rest of the afternoon, they didn''t see anything at all.

    The sun just became brighter and the tried to raise the valley temperature more. For some reason, it didn''t work. No matter how hot the sun appeared, it didn''t manage to prate the premises of the valley and disturb the newly formed ice.

    The valley members finally heaved a sigh of relief after a long time.

    They could finally breath easy.

    And most of them wished that sun would never shed a warm light on them ever again. Who would have thought that some warm light could be so traumatizing.

    That night passed uneventfully.

    The citizens all looked outside of the valley and Sam. The brightly glowing lines and sphere are ice elemental energy are like twinkling lights in the dark. They contrasted well with the dark valley and theyplimented the cold atmosphere.

    Sam''s ice energy sphere gave off this cold and blue colored glow all over the city giving this calm and cool aura. They felt safe, relieved and rxed for the first time in the past few days.

    But as the time passed and they saw the night darken more and then lighten soon, they had this trepidation in their hearts. All of them tried their best to ignore that and count on Sam to save them.

    That still didn''t stop the increasing tensions as dawn broke open and soon the sun rose in the sky.

    The sun rise on that day, would be the brightest they had ever seen in their lives before and they truly believed that they would never see that even in their future. The sun came out zing. It almost looked like the has moved closer to the sun by many times.

    The ice that was frozen solid the whole night instantly showed a hit of precipitation.

    Sam who sat there in that meditative pose the whole exuded a st of ice energy and froze those small water drops that appeared at different corners of the valley and the mountains. A frost cloud was formed on top of the valley as it contended with the heat trying to prate into the valley.

    The sh of heat and cold might not be very apparent to the citizens'' senses, but they could visualize it and it made them shudder. The heat and cold are so intense that even at their cultivation, it seems like they wouldn''t be able to endure the sh.

    After an hour, they finally noticed one change in the way the attacks happened.

    The sun shot out a bright beam and it prated the cloud.

    The beam entered the valley andnded in a specific area.

    The ice turned into a pool of water and evaporated, but the moment it spread outside the range of the beam, it turned into water and then ice before it hit the floor.

    The light beam created a ming body and everyone saw it turning into arge humanoid figure. It seems like the finale for the disasters is here.

    Sam still had his eyes closed. But he could still ''see'' the humanoid figure of the majestic god appearing out of that light.

    Apollo stood there in his form with a bow in his hands. He had the regal aura of the sun god and the arrogance of an Olympian apparent in his eyes. He didn''t have a crown or something simr, but he had something that looked like a headband around his forehead.

    He didn''t speak like the other gods, instead he directly started acting. He took held out the bow and aimed at Sam who is in the middle of the city and the formations surrounding it. An appeared in his hands out of thin air as he held the string of the bow.

    The arrow is purely made of fire elemental energy and as he pulled the string which is also purely made of energy, the arrow started glowing intensely along with the bow.

    *BOOM*

    As soon as he released the arrow an explosive sound urred. The arrow shot through the air and created arge crater as it zoomed towards the formation.

    *BOOM*

    Another explosion urred as the arrownded squarely on the formation.

    But to the surprise of apollo, the arrow didn''t do much to the formation, at least that is what he thought initially. But only Sam and the formation masters responsible for the formations knew what exactly happened to those formations.

    A fewyers have been destroyed. It is just that there are still way too manyyers on it, that it is almost impossible to discern for the outsider like Apollo.

    It was only visible from inside.

    Apollo didn''t show any reaction though, he just took out another arrow and shot it with same intensity. And it was aimed at the same spot. Sam. And itnded on the same spot, the formation.

    *BOOM*

    Another explosion and a few moreyers of the formation destroyed easily.

    Apollo shot the third arrow. He is very rxed and didn''t mind the repetition, but this time, a frown appeared on his face, because the energy around Sam churned a bit.

    At the same time, the ming effect that was being left behind by the arrow suddenly reduced by a veryrge margin. The crater didn''t appear like before and the surrounding cold area reduced the intensity and explosiveness of the mes on the arrow.

    When it hit the formation finally, unlike before severalyers were not destroyed, instead only oneyer was destroyed and the rest were perfectly in shape.

    Apollo looked at Sam with that deep frown and he aimed his bow for the fourth shot.

    This time, the ice energy riled up even more and the arrow''s tip barely touched the formation. Apollo''s anger was triggered. He felt insulted and riled his fire elemental energy.

    At the same time, Sam also riled his energy up. This has been dragged long enough. He wants to end it in onest shot.

 Chapter 1944: One Shot

    The Ice elemental energy within the city riled up crazily.

    All the houses inside were covered in snow and all the liquids turned to ice. The cultivators barely managed to hang on, and some experts still felt the chill down their spines. Sam had his eyes closed, but he stood up for the first time after he started this formation.

    The ice elemental energy sphere that was at his heart, suddenly appeared to dissolved.

    It disappeared from the sit and it enveloped Sam''s body.

    He activated his fusion. It is very simr toplete fusion form, it is notplete. Because, Sam is using the Hydra''s bloodline energy as well. Hydra is inherently a water elemental beast, but Sam is using the ice energy to mimic its bloodline cirction.

    It is not asplete as water, but it is still good enough.

    The cirction led to the nine streaks of ice elemental energy circling throughout his body. His skin turnedplete ice blue and that energy is radiating of his body actively. His hair stood up on its end like he was some cartoon character.

    Sam whipped out a bow that he made for himself and the ice elemental energy covered it.

    The streaks of ice elemental energy circted throughout his body and entered the bow. Nine hydra different hydra symbols appeared on the surface of the bow and they were surrounded by many more streaks of inscriptions.

    All of those inscriptions looked like they were carved out ofyered frost.

    Sam raised his bow and pulled on the string. An ice arrow appeared on it. Apollo took this as a provocation as he also raised his bow. His energy reached the limits and he is even exceeding the limit of the energy that is allowed on this.

    There are slight spatial disturbances around him.

    As Sam pulled the arrow back with the string, all the ice elemental energy that was inside his body seemed to have charged into it. It is like he hadpressed the tundra thatsted a millenia into the tip of a single arrow.

    And even that raging tundra seemed to havepressed, condensed andpletely tamed into that arrow tip.

    Sam opened his eyes finally and they were overflowing with the icy blue light. The frost energy is leaking out of his orifices. He looked at Apollo who stood proudly and arrogantly.

    "As High as you may stay in the sky

    As proud as you may with the mes around you

    I shall make you weep and make you cry

    At the sign on my silhouette in front of you."

    Sam muttered gently as he let go of that arrow.

    The Ice arrow and fire arrow were both let go of at the same time.

    Apollo stood there as he waited for his ming arrow to charge, but what he or the other citizens didn''t expect is that the moment, Sam let the arrow go, the puppets that are at various spots within that valley and mountain, suddenly raised their arms.

    They manifested bows in their arms made of energy and shot much smaller frost arrows at Apollo who was standing there with most of his energy exhausted.

    He was stunned and then only he noticed something else.

    As his arrow made its way, the only area it caused enough destruction to create the crater, is the small area right in front of his foot.

    Apart from that, as soon as the arrow moved forward, the crater that was formed was instantly being covered with ice and even the arrow itself is being consumed by ice bit by bit.

    He widened his eyes in horror as he looked at Sam and the numerous arrows that were shot at him.

    "Do you really think I would fight fair? I had enough of your antics for the past few days. So, now pack your shit and fuck off."

    As Sam muttered these words, a the ice arrow shed with the fire arrow. It destroyed thetter and went ahead to Apollo who was already bombarded with a hundred other smaller ice arrows.

    Right there and then, all the arrowsnded on him at the same time and every arrow split into nine snake like streaks as they entered his bodypletely.

    His body froze instantly and within a moment, a life like gigantic ice statue of apollo appeared in the middle of the valley.

    In that statue he is holding a bow as he looked at the sky as if he is asking and pleading for someone to help.

    The ice energy ran rampant, but Sam who saw the appearance of statue out of Apollo''s energy body, extended his hand andmanded all the energy back.

    The frost energy storm calmed down and the rest of the citizens and cultivators also finally saw what was left behind of Sam''s antics.

    The ice statue signed brightly as the snow fell gently over it.

    Sam chuckled at this.

    This might be ack luster finale for the disasters, but he is very satisfied. He is honestly getting bored of what is happening here and it has been dragged way too long. He is just d that he ended this quickly.

    Sam looked at the crowd of cultivators all looking at this in awe.

    Sandhya, the young masters, all the formation masters that participated in this are all looking at Sam and the statue with great respect.

    Even the Priestess looked at Sam with much more admiration. She walked to her daughter and said.

    "See? He is that good. Who knows, he could have been able to stop the other disasters the same way. Just from the look of it, you can say that he hasn''t even used all of his tricks. And some like that will do great even in the outside world that you are so unfamiliar with.

    If you want to have a safe introduction with it, he would be the only way out for you."

    Sandhya didn''t even listen to her mother''s words, she just stared at Sam''s back.

    "What happened to you?"

    "Mother, I want to ask you. For the past few days, everything that happened to this area. Is that the true power of god?" She asked her mother with a shivering tone.

    "No, it is not even a fraction of the power of a god. It is just a very tiny part of his will. Why do you ask?" Priestess asked in a confused tone, after all she brought up apletely different topic.

    "Then, does Sam actually know what these gods are really capable of?"

    "He certainly knows it better than you and I."

    "Then, why did he provoke them like this? You said, these gods interact with the outside world very often and he interacts them with very often, why would he do something so foolish as challenge the gods?

    All these while, I didn''t really understand what these gods can do.

    I have seen the disasters, but in a way, I can stillprehend them. A giant tidal wave filled with water serpents, a beast tide and attacking trees, a volcanic eruption and golems, I can understand all of them, but I have never ever been terrified of sunlight and heat like this.

    I felt like I should have never stood against the god and I should never do that in the future. I felt helpless and useless. What made him fearless enough to do this?"

    Priestess didn''t know what to answer. Her daughter seemed to have been too shocked from the incidents. She has lost herself and is questioning everything way too much. Before the priestess could answer the question, Sandhya continued.

    "Do you know what he said when he shot that arrow? He said that he would make the god weep and cry in his presence? Is it something a mortal should say? Even if he is capable of contending against the god like this, how can he dare say that?

    We are of same age, his attainments are more than me, I can ept that, but are they enough to make him arrogant enough to do that? Is the difference so vast?"

    "Why are questioning this? Sandhya, what do you want to get out of this thought process?"

    "I was thinking of asking him to take me out of this. To stand behind for a while and find my own ce, in the outside world where I could grow independently. I wanted to learn the ropes from him and understand how to run things outside.

    But just from this difference, I suddenly feel a sense of inequality and subservience towards him. Something deep inside my heart is telling me to bow in front of him and submit my mind and soul to him if I have to associate with him anyway.

    If I cannot get answer to the question I have. About how much difference we have, I might not be able to get rid of that feeling inside."

    Priestess sighed when she looked at her daughter. She knew what her daughter is feeling. She has felt that before and her own mother felt that before as well. She just hoped that her daughter hasn''t fallen too deeply into that thought.

 Chapter 1945: Purple Flash

    "Sandhya, I won''t say whatever you are feeling right now is not real.

    But I will tell you, that it will notst. The basis of that whole feeling is the curiosity about the unknown and the attraction towards unfathomable things. Sam is a very attractive in many aspects and his prowess is way too much simtion for someone like you who didn''t see the world.

    I made the same mistake and had to be with your father.

    I was deceived and the whole reason for that is me being unable to differentiate this new infatuation with true love. So, be careful on what you pursue."

    "But, mother. You had unlimited power in the, the resources you have are way more and father had nothingpared to you. He had every reason and necessity to deceive you. So, he took advantage of that infactuation you had.

    What about Sam though? What does he need from us when he has everything he needs and wants. I don''t see anything wrong in acting up on it."

    "Still, your infatuation is not with the person. But the power of that person. I won''t stop you from making your decision, after all you are the one that is going to live with it. I will leave it in your own hands."

    With that Priestess left Sandhya.

    Meanwhile, Sam who was in the middle of the formation, suddenly felt a wave of exhaustion hit him. He has been working for way too long and this ice formation has taken a toll on his physical strength.

    He disconnected himself from the formation. The valley right now is freezing cold. It is colder than the time before the disaster. But the citizens and the cultivators of the city are extremely happy because of it.

    Sam didn''t get any alert from Karthikeya even though the ten disasters are officiallypleted. So, he made his way to the residence arranged for him and let all the beasts back into the Divine Dimension.

    His work in this ce is done.

    Now the only thing left is take revenge on that one n that wanted to screw him over and get on with his life of thispetition. From what he knew the next phase is going to be interesting. He would be closer to the gods and their subordinates more than ever and he could start exerting his revenge on those assholes for controlling his life for such a long time.

    He has been waiting for this.

    But before all of that could happen, he needs to get some rest.

    Samid down on the bed and closed his eyes.

    At that moment, the leader of that city took the stage at the center where Sam previously was and made a deration.

    "By Sam''s favor, we managed to avert the disaster sessfully.

    The debt our ancestors owed for the Olympian gods has been finally paid off and all our lives were saved. Tonight spend time with your families and enjoy the peace. Because I dere ten days of celebrations starting from dawn tomorrow.

    We will celebrate not only our lives that were saved but also our savior who will be leaving soon. On the day of his departure we will throw a grand farewell that he will never forget."

    His announcement made everyone go on an uproar. Everyone is happy.

    The leader then went ahead and met with the young masters of the other ns.

    "If it is not a problem, please contact your n leaders and let them know of my decision. Sam, indeed had to put a lot more effort in our disaster and it wouldn''t be an exaggeration to say that we suffered the most.

    I would like to host a celebration here. And from the looks of it, Sam is not looking to move around. If your ns also want to participate in this, tell them toe by tomorrow morning."

    The young masters agreed immediately.

    Priestess who is there didn''t want to be a part of this celebration. She turned to her daughter and said.

    "Whether you leave with him or not, please bring him to the mountain before the departure. In fact, he might have toe there. The way out of this for him is there after all."

    "Alright, I will let him know."

    After that, the priestess left.

    She went back to the mountain temple and immediately went into the prayer room to have a conversation with Karthikeya. She performed the usual ritual and waited for his arrival. But it has been few minutes, and still there is no sign.

    She frowned and got worried.

    Just when she was about to do a different ritual, a purple sh appeared within the room. A humanoid silhouette appeared out of nowhere and looked straight in Priestess'' eyes.

    "Hello, you must be the priestess that Karthikeya spends time with. You indeed have the looks for it."

    Priestess frowned at thatment.

    She gave him a good luck and then immediately understood who he was.

    "You must be Zeus."

    "You recognized me? That is a surprise."

    "Impolite intrusion, disrespectful words, twisted mind with lustful thoughts. All the boxes are checked. It wouldn''t take a genius to figure out who you are."

    As soon as her words left her mouth, Zeus froze in the spot. He looked at her angrily. But that anger was fleeting. He set himself straight and said.

    "Today, I am here to offer you something."

    "The people of this have learned a painful lesson. To not to ept anything from the Olympian gods easily. Much less directly from the King of Olympus himself. I am not a fool."

    "Who said anything about it being easy? It is just a fair trade. But you can also take it as an opportunity.

    I want you to kill Sam, right there on that."

    Priestess frowned as soon as she heard those words.

    "I want him dead. And if you do it yourself, I will give you anything you need. I will help you ascend to higher realms. I will give a bloodline to your family that will make you the predators among the humans.

    I don''t have much time. Just think about it. If you can do it, the reward is yours."

    By the end of his sentence, he was sucked by an invisible force and disappeared.

    The next moment, Karthikeya''s statue glowed and he appeared.

    "Are you okay?"

    Karthikeya asked in a worried tone.

    Priestess nodded and looked at him.

    "Are you okay? What happened? I did the ritual and waited. Instead of you, Zeus appeared."

    "I know. That bastard did something from here. He interfered my Divine connection sneakily. What did he say?"

    "He wanted me to kill Sam for some rewards."

    Karthikeya closed his eyes and sighed.

    "Why does this guy have toplicate everything?"

    "Can''t you just take Sam away? After all, he already finished the ten disasters. He should be free to go."

    "No, I can''t. I had to give others some leeway for me to include your and that leeway is that thepetitiors are going to stay back on the for a few days after the actual disaster times are over. And during that stay if anyone dies because of the residual effects of disasters, they will also be counted under the participant''s belt.

    At first I didn''t think much of it and agreed. But it seems like I underestimated the underhandedness of this person way too much."

    Karthikeya paused and his expression changed.

    "There is some more interference. Be care¡­"

    Before he could finish the sentence Karthikeya disappeared.

    Priestess went into a deep thought. Things are a little fishy.

    But what she doesn''t know is that the same purple shes have appeared all over the in different ces. That included the city inside the valley that Sam just rescued.

    Priestess thought for a moment and decided to go back to the valley city the same night.

    Sandhya was surprised by that arrival. But the Priestess didn''t reveal anything.

    Sam slept the whole night like a baby while the rest of the city was busy with preparations for celebrations. Throughout the night, people from different cities, including their n heads made their way to the city.

    The excitement for the celebrations is unreal. Everyone is looking forward to it.

    Sam slept through the night and woke up at the crack of the dawn.

    "You should be a lot more careful than this, you know. I could have killed you. You had your guardpletely down."

    Sandhya said as she looked at Sam who just woke up.

    Sam looked at Sandhya who is standing at the door. It seems like she has been there for a while.

    "You should have tried."

    Sam said casually as he stretched his bodyzily. He is shirtless at the moment and his muscled and scarred body is clearly visible to her. She is a bit shocked at the sheer number of scars.

    She wanted to ask, but didn''t dare to.

    Instead, she turned to a guard standing far away and gave him a message.

 Chapter 1946: Poison

    Sam got dressed and was about toe out, but he was greeted by a bunch of women standing at the door with trays in their hands.

    "What is this?"

    "Everyone knows that you like eating good food. So, all the ns sent over the best chefs. They made a very nutrient rich meal as soon as they found that you are sleeping in exhaustion. Please have it."

    Sandhya said with a smile.

    Sam thought for a moment and shrugged.

    He was indeed about to go out and find some food. It is a good thing that some was sent to him directly. He sat down at the table and waited for them to serve it. After thedies ced the dishes on the table, Sandhya gestured them to leave.

    Even though the women were reluctant, there is little they could do when Sandhya herself has ordered. She took over the serving duty from them. Sam was a bit surprised.

    "Seems like you are off your high horse today. What''s up with the sudden change?"

    Sam asked as he took a bite of the juicy meat.

    "Nothing much, there is something I would like to ask you."

    "What is it?"

    "Can I follow you from now on?" Sandhya asked directly.

    Sam stopped eating and looked at her with a frown.

    Sandhya pursed her lips and acted unlike her usual self. There is a tinge of embarassement and blush on her face.

    "I admire your prowess and I admire you as a person. I would like to follow you and if we like each other, I would like to be with you. This is just infatuation now, but who is to say that an infatuation cannot develop into something meaningful? Even if it doesn''t work out, we can still be friends¡­"

    "Wait a second. Don''t you think you are getting a head of yourself?"

    Sam stopped her immediately. He felt amused and exhausted at the same time. It is not like there are no women who admire him. Jyon who was Giyon''s sister admired him once, but she only knew him as the broken musical genius.

    He doesn''t like when someone just believes him to be a certain person and admired that certain person.

    They can keep that admiration to themselves.

    Now Sandhya is doing the same. And unlike Jyon, she is much bolder. She wants to follow him around.

    "Do you even know what I do outside of this? Do you have any idea of what my life is? Asking to follow me around? Do you even know what the consequences of that are? Of course, that is assuming that I allow you to follow me."

    "What consequences would there be? I am sure you have an organization of your own. There is no way, you developed all by yourself. And I am sure, there is a point where you had a team that follows your around.

    It would be the same. Its just instead of one team, you will have one person."

    "Do you really think it is that simple?"

    "Howplicated would it be?"

    Sam chuckled at how simple minded Sandhya really is. He shook his head and his eyesnded on a bowl of piping hot soup. He took a sniff of it and chuckled.

    He then took out a herb that has amazing vitality.

    "Do you know who made this soup?"

    Sandhya was caught off guard by the sudden change of topic, but she took a look at the soup and shook her head. Sam nodded and continued.

    "This soup is made with the blood of the most poisonous creature that your could possibly have and it is seasoned with the most poisonous flora your has to offer."

    Sandhya widened her eyes in shock as she almost yelled on top her lungs. But Sam gestured her to stop and calmed her down.

    "Don''t make a scene. Just take a look."

    He put his finger in the soup and let one drop drip on the herb.

    Right in front of Sandhya''s eyes, Sam''s finger turned purple and the herb lost all of its vitality in a second before dying in front of her eyes.

    His finger bulged a bit and it is apparent how effective the poison is.

    "We need to treat you immediately.."

    "No. I am not done yet."

    Sam stood up with the bowl of soup in his one hand and held Sandhya''s hand with another.

    "You want to follow me, right? Just don''t leave my hands for the next half an hour, no matter what happens."

    Sandhya is still puzzled over what is happening, but she looked at Sam''s finger that was dipped in poison. The purple color disappeared. She didn''t know if he was cured or not, but her heart told her to just follow along.

    She nodded and tightened her grip on his arm.

    Sam smiled and walked out with her. They are in the middle of the estate and all the other ns'' heads and other important members are located within the surrounding rooms.

    Sam sat in the middle of the estate and made Sandhya sit straight in front of him. He looked her in the eyes with that smile and spoke in a loud voice.

    "I don''t know who poisoned this soup, but I am pretty sure that you are part of the ten ns that I saved.

    So, you know what exactly is in my hands. Just to fill in the remaining people. This bowl in my hands has a soup made by the concentrated blood of Purple Blooded Frog as well as the most poisonous herbs avable in your.

    I am already exhausted from thest night''s fight and I haven''t even recovered half my strength. There is also another poison filled dish in my room, that I just finished eating.

    I don''t know who it is that wanted to kill me, and why you want to do it, but I want to test the loyalty of your''s members with this incident. I had risked my life and wealth to save you guys from the gods, I wonder if you would do the same for me."

    As he spoke, he started gulping down the soup.

    He took it all in just a couple of swigs and threw the bowl to the side. The residue of the soup fell on the grass and it killed a patch of it in an instant.

    Sam''s skin turned slightly purple as soon as he drank. He appeared weak and he looked like he lost all of his energy.

    Sandhya looked at him with her eyes wide open. In horror. She was about to stand up and take him away, but Sam didn''t budge.

    "Don''t move."

    Sandhya pursed her lips and sat down while still holding his hand.

    "Mother, please save him."

    She yelled on top of her lungs. Priestess who is not too far away, is standing on a balcony and saw the whole spectacle, but she didn''t make a move. She knew more about Sam than her daughter, so she is no worried.

    Sandhya yelled a couple more times, but there is no response. All she saw was Sam''s purple shade turning darker and darker.

    At this moment, she noticed that there are dozens of gazes locked on her and Sam. They are ominous and hostile. She had a very bad feeling and as if to prove, dozens of people jumped out of the rooms and charged at Sam with their weapons.

    They are all aiming for him at the same time and in process they even took each other down. But primary target remained Sam himself.

    When one of the young masters who was closest to them made his way first, he looked at Sam and Sandhya cruelly.

    "I am sorry, Sandhya and sorry to you too Sam. I am grateful for your help. So, I will live my life and let my family continue their legacy. Every generation will pay homage to you, but you should die for that to happen."

    He swung his de.

    Sandhya waved her hand and a water spear lodged into the abdomen of that young master, taking him away from there.

    But that was just one attacker gone, that was reced by two and then two became four, four became eight.

    Sandhya fought off people hurriedly and because of her presence and these attackers being youngsters mostly, they didn''t dare make very dangerous moves.

    But after five minutes, Sam coughed arge mouthful of blood. The blood has turned ck and he copsed with his face first, but he still didn''t let go of Sandhya''s hand. She wanted to pick him up and run away.

    Only she couldn''t move him no matter what.

    Watching this scene, the n leaders couldn''t hold back anymore and they jumped in with the elders. The youngsters left.

    "Lady Sandhya, this has nothing to do with the Mountain temple. You better leave now. If you don''t, the don''t me us for what is about to happen. Even your mother is not strong enough to kill all ten ns together.

    We already established that before."

    Sandhya looked at them and then at Sam.

 Chapter 1947: Talk with Karthikeya

    Sam sat up once again and wiped the blood off of his mouth.

    He sat there in meditation, but his body is still deteriorating. As Sandhya was thinking, one of the n leaders couldn''t hold it in and made a move.

    Sandhya felt the chill from the attack and immediately let Sam''s hand go and instinctually stepped away from there. She felt regretful the next moment.

    As soon as she let go of Sam''s hand, Sam''s body changed. The purple shade lost and he is back to his full health. He took out reaper sword and blocked the attack while still sitting there.

    Priestess who saw the whole scene, smiled wryly.

    She understood what Sam did from the start. She knew he is immune to almost all poisons in the world. This might be of a decently high level, but the poisons here could jack shit to him. The n leaders are in for something new altogether.

    Sam looked at Sandhya who stood there frozen as Sam stood up calmly.

    "See Sandhya, you asked me what would the consequences be. This just a glimpse into it. The way I act, I attract a lot of enemies who want to kill me and I have riches of all kinds. Land, spirit stones, blueprints, techniques. Anything you could think of, I have all kinds and these riches even turn allies into enemies most of the times.

    And many people are willing to offer anything to kill me and that ''anything'' can turn anyone into my enemy in an instant.

    For the past few days, I have worked my ass off, used all kinds of tricks and treasures to save the lives of these ten ns. Just yesterday, they were hailing me for getting past these disasters, but by the crack of dawn, there are already people trying to kill me.

    Right in front of you, there are seven n leaders holding their weapons at me.

    That is my situation almost every single day.

    As soon as I show weakness, there are countless people who are ready to backstab me, kill me and destroy me. I might be on verge of death on any second.

    And even those times, my people should never let go of my hand. Even when the de of the enemy broke the outermostyer of my skin and the blood already started dripping, my people should still believe in me or they should die fighting along with me.

    You have known these n leaders all your life.

    They are even afraid of you, but you are unable to deal with them, to save me. You have let go as soon as they made their move.

    It is easy to admire and follow me, when I am at my absolute best. It easy to say that you are loyal to someone, when both of you are sitting in a room, enjoying special food and luxury wine.

    I want someone who is loyal to me even when I in the maws of death. And that is the reason you cannot follow me. I don''t need admiration from a person like you. I won''t even have you as a foot soldier in my troops. Much less a prospective life partner.

    I hope you understand."

    Sam stood straight like a g pole and all the n leaders that came to attack him took a step back.

    He looked at them with a condenscending smirk and said.

    "I feel insulted more than threatened by your attack.

    How dare you even think that you can kill me with some mere poison. I challenge gods on a daily basis and you mere mortals thought you could kill me with some poison that you could find on your backwater?

    And you dare to pine for my head with such lousy judgement?

    If not for the task, I would have killed you just for thinking that.

    Underestimating is one thing, but this is way below the bar.

    As Sam spoke, he disappeared with spatial energy and left the estate.

    He took off on harbinger and moved towards the Mountain Temple.

    Priestess appeared beside her daughter and looked at the n leaders.

    "You guys should have just stuck with the ns for celebrations. In a way, you just tried to make your original fate into reality. After all, you are tempted by an Olympian god and tried to kill this guy. You failed and made your intentions known.

    If he retaliates, you will be faced with a disaster that might be more dangerous than the ones you faced until now. After all, this guy knows every nook and cranny of your cities. Imagine how much damage he can do?

    Just pray that he will hold back."

    She took off with her daughter.

    After two hours.

    Sam is sitting on a mountain rock as he enjoyed the sun rise. He is a bit tired of all this shit. He was not really interested in this game anymore, but he cannot let go of it now. He is very close to the end. He can already vaguely sense it.

    The time hees face to face with gods, is very very close. He cannot give up now.

    But in the past month, he has to do many things out of his character for this game.

    He had to suppress himself from taking revenge on someone who spoiled his ns. He had to break his own word and help these assholes after he said that he wouldn''t. This is not how he is used to doing things.

    But he had to do it.

    This is making him very frustrated to say the least.

    As he sat there calmly, Priestess appeared.

    "Your task runs for another ten days including today. Only after these ten days, would you be able toplete the task. If people die in this period of them, they will be counted in your death toll."

    "I guessed as much."

    Sam said as he sighed.

    "I am sorry about Sandhya."

    "Never mind. She is way too young to not experience these things and way too old for you toe and apologize in her stead. I already made myself clear. I am sure she wouldn''te and look for me."

    "I must say, you were too harsh on her though. You could have cushioned the blow a little bit."

    "Somethings are better done decisively."

    "Anyway, I would like to ask you a favor. Can you help my daughter get out of this? I don''t want her to be alone. I am not asking you to apany her, but I am sure you have ways."

    "I have an organization called Dusk. I can send her there if you want me to."

    "That would work. As long as she has some freedom to explore, but a branch to fall back on, it is fine."

    "Sure, I will tell the staff to employ her in some free position. She would have some responsibilities, but they would be mostly small and feeble. She could get used to the world and leave whenever she wants."

    "Thank you. I will let her know."

    "I will arrange the transport."

    "Thanks again.

    What are you going to do for the next ten days?"

    "Prepare for payback. Before that, I need to talk to Karthikeya, can you tell me if you can contact him?"

    "Right now, there is some interference. I will let you know as soon as it is cleared."

    After that, the priestess left on her own way, meanwhile Sam sat there for a while and then jumped off the mountain. He took off on harbinger and travelled a few miles. He is very close to one of the ns that attacked him a couple of hours ago.

    He didn''t go to the city to attack them, instead he waved his hand arge tower like structure appeared. It is one of the towers that is used for attacking. It was actually an equipment made by Sivan, but it was only half finished and Sam decided to modify it for Divine ne cultivators.

    He installed that tower there.

    The tower has red glow and patters and it looked like a giant pir rather than tower. There are no entry points, no openings nothing, it is indeed more of a pir than a tower.

    After that, he started checking the surroundings a bit and set up a formation. It took him an hour or so to finish it off.

    Then he moved to a different location within the vicinity, a mile away and ced another tower there along with the formation. Of course, some people noticed him, but they don''t know full story of what happened. So, they just felt like Sam is working on something again for the city.

    Still the news spread, albeit a bit slowly and it soon reached the n leaders who are still in the valley.

    They are already in a tense situation. When they heard that Sam is setting up something, their hearts slipped into their pants. They immediately made their way back to their own cities.

 Chapter 1948: Talk with Karthikeya II

    For the next few days, Sam just erected different pirs around different cities.

    On the fourth day, he finally got a message from Priestess. He went to the mountain temple to talk to Karthikeya.

    "How are you doing?"

    Karthikeya asked with a faint smile as he looked at Sam.

    "I am fine. How are you?"

    "Not as good as I want to be. I apologize for the sudden turn of events. Zeus got really pissed what you have done. The whole Olympus is shaking for the past month. You really brought the whole Olympus a peg down.

    A lot of gods are facing punishment because of Zeus'' wrath."

    "I can hardly care about that. How long do I have to stay here? And why did I not know about this extra day rule where the residual effects of the disasters will also be counted under my inaction?"

    "Well, it was a ploy from Zeus. I am sure you guessed that already. He made ast minute change and for some reason a lot of gods were strong armed into agreeing it. Anyway, a lot of gods are pissed at you for various reasons.

    So, they have many reasons to agree.

    But the most important reason could be that Gambler is stirring up the pot here. They might have actually agreed, just to get back at him."

    "Why am I not surprised?"

    "Even more surprising thing is that Hel remaining neutral in this and Gambler actually voted in favor of Zeus. The whole thing is a giant shitshow."

    "I can guess.

    But I have some questions. If I leave something back on this and it activates after the ten days are up, would it still be counted as my fault or whatever metric you are taking for this challenge?"

    Karthikeya was stumped by that question for a moment. He looked at Priestess who just shrugged.

    "What happened?" he asked in confusion.

    Sam looked at her and chuckled.

    "I thought she would have filled you in by now. I guess not. Here is what happened¡­"

    Sam went on the exin the whole thing.

    Karthikeya sighed heavily. He looked at Priestess and asked.

    "Are you okay what is about to happen? You do know that the only reason this made the cut is because of your presence here. Your opinion matters a lot in this."

    Sam also looked at Priestess.

    "You gave them a chance, Sam gave them a means to live and prosper. But they misused it and tried to bite the hand that fed them. I cannot be their safeguard for everything. Whatever decision that Sam makes, I am fine with it.

    He is the effected party and he should have all the right to retaliate the way he sees fit."

    Sam looked at her and thanked her.

    "Thank you for your understanding" Then he turned to Karthikeya and continued.

    "You know my opinion about this whole game. This round in particr made me break my word multiple times and I had to act out of my character. It is very unsettling. I don''t want to act like that anymore.

    I would be retaliating in kind of what they did.

    Just tell me if something happens after ten days because of the things I left behind, would I be effected?"

    Karthikeya sighed and said.

    "No."

    "Thank you. Now, just tell me when I could leave this ce and go to the next round. From what you said, it is going to be an academy for Demi Gods. I am looking forward to meeting all the forces that you guys are fostering for your future."

    Sam had a very weird smile on his face as he spoke to that point.

    He left the room and proceeded to erect the pirs once again. The n members wanted to get in touch with him and stop this. They are very scared of Sam, that is the reason one of them only tried to use some poison and they only made a move when they thought he already consumed the poison.

    Now that they knew the poison is ineffective, they don''t have any idea on how to tackle this situation.

    Sam on the other hand ran out of fucks to give. He didn''t care if they are sorry and he didn''t care if they were impulsive, they did the deed and they have to face the consequences. They can cry him a river for all he cares.

    Ten days passed pretty quickly.

    But the pirs didn''t show any reaction. Except for the glowing patterns and energy cycles within the pir, the ns didn''t understand anything about them.

    Within these ten days, the ns even approached Priestess to see if they could reach any consensus with Sam, but even she gave up on them. So, they just sent their formation masters, artisans and inscription masters to take a look at these pirs and tried to find what they are going to do.

    On the eleventh day, at sun rise.

    Sam went to meet the Priestess.

    "I am ready to go. Finally."

    Priestess smiled at him and said.

    "I know you don''t have anything good to remember about this. I wouldn''t have too if I faced the same situation as yours. But I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive this ce in the future and visit.

    Maybe when you are bored of conquering the world and got tired of constant war and need a break,e and visit the temple. I can promise you a freshly homemade meal and a room with a great view for you to rx."

    Sam smiled and asked.

    "Why are you so kind to me?"

    "Unlike what others see, I can''t help but look past the dangerous being that you are. And behind that, all I see is a young man who could use some kindness, love and care for a change.

    It is just my hunch. I could be wrong."

    Sam didn''t know what to say to that. He thought back to his previous life and this life. All he could do was let out a sigh.

    "I will surely visit this ce once again. My grudge was not with you. I will remember the care you gave me for as long as I live.

    And if you are ever in a need for anything, please use this at any branch of the Dusk organization. They will recognize this and they will help you no matter what it is."

    Sam then gave out the token that has his symbol.

    She held it chuckled.

    "That is a very big promise to hold up to. You know. I might juste and ask for a realm or two."

    "Oh, trust me. By the time youe to a stage where you need that, my organization would be big enough to do that on a whim."

    "That is some confidence right there."

    She said as she ced her hand gently on Sam''s head.

    "May everything you wish from this world be bestowed up on you. All the best child."

    Sam smiled at her blessing and stood in front of Karthikeya''s statue within the prayer room.

    "I am ready to go."

    As soon as he said those words, the statue glowed a bit and Sam disappeared from there.

    He reappeared in arge grey room with no walls. It is just a floor floating in void. There Kathikeya is sitting on a chair. In front of him there is an empty chair.

    He didn''t hesitate and went there and sat.

    "You are looking good. Do you know how ahead of the rest of the yers you are?" Karthikeya asked with a smile.

    "How far?"

    "From the speed the others are going at, at least three to four months on average? The closest is Noah followed by the rest. She might catchup in two months."

    "That''s smaller than I imagined. I thought the gap would berger. I might be slipping. I need to improve."

    "Can you stop that please? Do you know how many years ahead thepetition actually is that it was nned to be? You singlehandedly just pushed the whole thing forward. We thought this would go on for at least another two decades or so, but you shortened it by yourself.

    You basically speed ran through it all."

    "I will take it as apliment. So, what would be the next round in these war games. I have done intraary, interary and surprisingly against nature. Now, what is the fourth round?"

    "It would be abination of everything you have done until now. Because it is not a one off war and in this round you might stay for a decade or so if your performance is not good enough.

    Simply put all you have to do is be a part of the Demi God Academy and be a student there. Raise through ranks with your cultivation and reach the edge of god hood and be ready for the god hood.

    Throughout the process, you will be participating in many small wars, but the goal for you should be the domination of the schools under the remaining gods."

 Chapter 1949: To the Academic Realm

    Sam wasn''t really that surprised by what Karthikeya has said.

    It is not even thatplicated. Sam would be part of Gambler''s academy and the other gods who also have an academy in the same area would also have their own students and they will be joined by the other yers.

    These academies might bepeting for something and Sam would have to dominate the remaining academies.

    It is pretty simple.

    "I understand that you can find it all easy toprehend. So, I won''t bother you with the details about your exact tasks. You will figure them out as you go forward.

    Instead, let''s focus on the structure of that realm.

    This realm is specially created by a few dozen great gods bybining a bunch of different realms. And it is solely dedicated to raise the future celestials and the demi gods for the armies of the gods. I will tell youter on what these armies are for.

    The realm has two regions.

    One is the Astral Region and the other is the Divine Region.

    The Astral Region as you can assume, is full of smaller academies. They are run by affiliates and some independent Demi Gods. The academies are used to train and raise the Astral ne cultivators. When a lot of gods make promises to their follower organizations and grant them opportunities, this is where they bring their followers to.

    As long as they are mortals and Astral ne cultivators, they would be admitted into these academies under different affiliates of gods to be raised and made part of God''s armies.

    There are also some academies in this area that are run by some gods who are not too powerful and have less ranking among their peers.

    There is a whole hierarchy system which I am not going to bore you with. You will not be interacting too much with the Astral Region anyway.

    Thenes the Divine Region.

    As you can imagine, the Divine Region is for the Demi-god academies. And this one doesn''t have as many academies as the Astral Region.

    There are exactly a hundred academies within the Divine Region.

    This Academy realm as we call it is a rtively new ce. It has only been over there for a thousand years or so. And not all gods are part of it and not all gods can be a part of it.

    When we established this, we made a rule. Anyone who can pass a certain requirements can open an academy in the Astral Region and there is no limit for the number of academies there.

    But to open an academy in the Divine Region, the person has to be a god of certain standing.

    They need to have a certain level of faith energy and they would have to gain the approval of at least twelve gods and three of them should be in top ten.

    They also need to have opened and ran an academy within the Astral Region for over fifty years and finally, they would have to defeat one of the already existing demi god academies in a series ofpetitions that are previously agreed up on.

    The other Divine Regions'' Demi God academies would send representatives like their headmasters etc to bear witness for those tasks.

    If they win, they will be entering the ranks of Demi God academies."

    Karthikeya paused as he looked at Sam who had his eyes wide open.

    "Are you shocked?"

    "A little bit. Do you gods not have anything better to do? What is with this game? What the hell is wrong with you guys? What the hell is up with these academies and all thatplicated ranking system."

    "We have our reasons. You will no soon after you enter the academy. Anyway, let me continue. You need to know this information for your future to process smoothly."

    "Please go ahead."

    "There is another rule in Divine Region. At one time there are only going to be Hundred Demi God Academies. If a new academy joins the ranks one of the old ones are bound to be kicked out. So, it is a constantpetition between them."

    "What would happen to the academies that are kicked out?"

    "They would be demoted to the Astral Region. They would have a grace period to redeem themselves. If they cannot do that in that time, they would have to vacate the resources andnd they upied.

    One good thing is the buildings that actually constitute the academy are all movable in this realm. So, the realm will shift the academies."

    Sam was stunned by this.

    "You guys are moving the buildings?"

    "Of course, what do you think the significance of this realm is? It is created by some of the greatest of the artisans. Soul fragments of gods were used to create a Spectre that controls the whole realm and this Spectre attaches itself with the realm through a formation that was created using the space nodes as the formation nodes."

    Sam''s eyes lit up as soon as he heard this.

    "So, you are saying the whole realm is a giant formation?"

    "Yes, of course. This might be the single greatest creation in the past millenia and it is designed by one of the founding members of the Academy realm."

    "Can I get to meet them?"

    "It could be possible. It depends.

    After all, the gods don''t stay in these academies directly. Everyone has a bunch of their subordinates handling their tasks. And of course even the subordinates don''te in their original bodies. They send their divine bodies here. I am sure you already know of that concept."

    "A body created purely out of Divine energy and the will of someone very powerful."

    "That''s it. Gods who own the academies wille once in a while on special asions with their Divine Bodies. Of course, some gods never showed up at all. And some gods stay here all the time."

    Karthikeya went on exin all the details about the Divine region, Astral Region and the rtionship between the two etc etc.

    After a long winding dump of information, he finally told Sam what is going to happen next.

    "You are obviously Gambler''s yer. So, you have a special admission into Gambler''s academy. It is one of the mostpetitive academies and it is ranked in top 10.

    You can attend the courses you like, join some clubs there and be an active participant within the academy.

    I think Ling Tian is going to be there. He is one of the newly joined instructors. You will be fine.

    Apart from that, you also have honorary student status in the remaining eleven academies owned by the gods that participated in the game.

    As I said, the honorary student status can be achieved by clearing a certain set of exams and paying some fee to other academies. Many students try to get this with a lot of hard word. You are getting eleven of them from the get go, so use them wisely.

    There are no specific demands on which direction you are going to grow in. This round would end when you are ready to breakthrough to the god hood. Which means at the peak of your Divine ne cultivation and you formed your Divine Dimensionpletely.

    By the time you are done, the position of the academy you are in and your contribution in making that academy stand in that position will be calcted. Both positive and negative contributions and the more contributions you have, the higher your ranking will be.

    Based on who reaches the god hood first and who has more contributions the winner for this war games will be decided and after that, you will all bepeting for the championship of the whole game. Which of course is far off.

    Anyway, I have said too much.

    Just keep what I said in mind and enjoy your stay. This is also the time you are gonna get most freedom. You can interact with your organization members. Go and develop your organization a bit. Stay at home for now and then.

    It is going to be great.

    Do you have any more questions?"

    "You said this much. What questions could I possibly have?"

    Sam said as he sighed. It is indeed a massive load of information. But this is going to be a great thing indeed. He is going to interact with the gods'' armies directly and he could finally deal with them. All this while they yed around with him and now it is Sam''s time to do the same to them.

    "If you don''t have anything, you can leave right away. You will be in the city square near the Gambler''s academy. You can roam around for a while and enter the academy whenever you like. You just need to enter there and someone woulde and arrange things for you.

    You are a special admission after all."

    "Thanks. See you soon. Also, all the best for what you are about to see."

    "Looking forward to it. Go easy on my students."

    Karthikeya winked as he waved his hand.

    Sam disappeared from the spot.

    Karthikeya disappeared from there and he reappeared in the meeting spot. The same meeting where the gods usually meet for the discussion of the game.

    Gambler, Indra, Zeus and the rest are all in their seats. They were waiting for Karthikeya to arrive.

    "So, Sam was sent to the Academy realm?"

    Gambler asked with his usual cheeky smile.

    "Yeah, he was. Now, let''s talk about the interference in my round of the game."

    Karthikeya had a serious expression on his face as he looked at Zeus.

 Chapter 1950: Buying Soup

    Zeus looked at Karthikeya with equal seriousness.

    "What is there to talk about?"

    "Zeus, you interfered with this round way too much. Even that could be attributed to you being the obnoxious egotist that you are, but interfering mymunication with my followers is crossing the line. Even if we are not in thepetition, wars have started between gods just because of this.

    You don''t want to start a realm war with me do you?"

    "War happens between equals Karthikeya. To start a realm war with me, you need to take the permission of your father and the other two great gods of your legion. What reason are you going to give to those three great ones?

    That you are butthurt about not being able to talk to your human friend?"

    "Huh? Is that it? That is all you can do? Hide behind the rank of yours? Why don''t you draw your spear and see if I am your equal or not?"

    Both of their auras raged. Zeus'' aura is as usual full of his pride and tyranny, but Karthikeyas'' is different. He is very much refined and reserved most of the time. But at that moment, he looked like he is craving blood like a hound.

    He looked like he would devour Zeus any moment.

    Even Zeus was surprised by the sh. Karthikeya appeared a lot more powerful than normal and this made him think twice.

    "Come on. Draw that spear of yours. If I don''t nail you with that very spear to the peak of Mount Olympus, I will change my name."

    The room is heating up. They could break into fight at any given moment.

    *CLAP*

    At this moment, Gambler pped once and looked at both of them with a smile.

    "Come on gentlemen. Let''s handle this civilly. It is not like you are going to get anything out of this fight. After all, the fight itself is not going to get bloody. How long has it been since a god really died in a battle?

    I would rather watch those kids spar than you guys fighting."

    Karthikeya and Zeus backed down a bit. Their auras were back in check. But they are still staring daggers at each other.

    "Karthikeya, if you don''t want to backdown how are you going to settle this?"

    Indra asked trying to mediate the situation.

    Karthikeya threw a re at Indra and then he looked at Gambler and Zeus before saying.

    "Let the kids settle this.

    A fight between Kumar and Dayus. In the middle of the Academy Realm. With a realm''s rights as a wager. I am not going to ept anything less than this and I am not open for any negotiations."

    Gambler raised an eyebrow in amusement and turned to Zeus.

    "That is a decently fair deal. In fact that is much more entertaining for me too. Do you want to go ahead with that?"

    Zeus looked at both of them hatefully and nodded.

    "I am game. But that is the end of this issue. None of the issues of this Natural Disaster round would be brought up anymore again."

    "Deal."

    "Deal."

    Everyone agreed just like that.

    While the gods are negotiating to keep their egos and pride in check, Sam appeared in the Academic realm.

    He appeared randomly in the middle of a city square where people are bustling. It looked like the market of a very well developed trade city. He could see a bunch ofrge buildings in different directions far away from there and he understood what they are easily.

    They are the academy buildings and one of them stood out to him more than the rest.

    It is the Gambler''s Academy. A very werid name for a ce of study, but he could do little about it.

    He looked around to get a feel of the situation. The city looked like any normal city. The only major difference is that there are a shit ton of people who wore different types of uniform and among them one uniform stood out to him more than the rest.

    It is a purple uniform with the crest of lightning on the chest and the back.

    It is Zeus'' academy.

    Olympus has a bunch of academies in the Divine Region and they all created a consortium of sorts. They all interact and have exchange activities together. Except for the primary curriculum which is different for all those academies, they are basically a single educational institution.

    Among them Zeus'' academy is closest to the Gamblers'' academy.

    From what Karthikeya told, this area was dominated by the Olympian gods, but Gambler who has a knack for some entertainment opened his academy right here just to piss them off.

    Sam looked and asked around for a while to get an understanding of the surroundings. Of course, the best way is to hit all the restaurants and bars.

    He just roamed, ate and drank for the whole day. No one bothered him and he didn''t bother anyone. By night, he finally got an understanding on the dynamics around here. He had a very wide grin on his face.

    That night it is going to be a very eventful night.

    He ha to announce his arrival in a very grand way. So grand that Zeus far away in Olympus should hear about it and he has a n for it.

    It is very simple actually.

    Sam walked to a shop at the end of the main street. It is rtively emptypared to the rest of the shops. This shop is called the exchange center. It is the best ce for people who came to the Academic realm for the first time to get some money.

    Sam walked to the counter and took out a formation blueprint.

    "I would like to exchange the blueprint for some Academy Coins."

    The attendant at the counter is stronger than Sam in terms of cultivation. He is wearing a ck cloak and his face is covered in mask. If not for the obvious suppression that Sam is experiencing from the other party, he wouldn''t have even known their cultivation.

    The attendant silently took the blueprint and ced it inside a formation that was behind them. It is an appraisal formation. As soon as the blueprint was ced the formation whirred a bit and gave out a number.

    Sam looked at the number and smiled.

    The number is big and satisfying. He doesn''t know if the shopkeeper is surprised, but if did then he is great at hiding it.

    "3 Million Gold Academic Coins. What denomination do you want those in?"

    The shop keeper asked in a calm voice.

    "I am going to roam around the city for a while. I would be dining a lot and might buy some trinkets here and there. What do you suggest?"

    "I rmend, you take Two and a half million coins in tinum Coins. If you are making big purchases, they will be much more handy. One tinum Coin Equals Hundred Gold Coins, so that would be Twenty-five thousand tinum coins.

    For the remaining five hundred thousand, you can keep four hundred thousand in Gold Coins. They would be enough for you to experience any kind of luxury in the city. That would be way too much actually.

    For the remaining one hundred thousand, you can take them as silver coins. One gold coin equals Ten Silver Coins.

    There is no denomination lower than Silver Coins

    Sam was amused by this currency. The Academic Coins are basically the operating currency throughout the academic realm. All academies and stores should ept them. They are invented solely because of how cheap a spirit stone is for the people at their level.

    At Divine ne cultivation a million spirit stones wouldn''tst for a single breath of cultivation. It is just too feeble. Any transaction at their level starts at a dozen billion spirit stones and that would just be some having some meals.

    Throughout the day, Sam had trouble because of that.

    He knew about the currency exchange, but he just wanted to give an impression that he ispletely new to this realm. That would solidify the impact of the n he has been cooking in his mind.

    As for the Academic Coins, anyone can exchange them with anything in the exchange center. As long as it can be appraised by the appraisal formation there, students, shopkeepers, citizens, anyone can just go there and exchange it for the coins.

    Spirit stones are basically symbol of a newbie here.

    Sam finished the exchange and went out to execute the n.

    He walked into a restaurant in the same street.

    It is the most luxurious restaurant of the bunch. It upied almost same area as four shops. He has been waiting for it open and it just happened.

    Sam was the first customer to enter and many people followed him in soon after. He sat on the table leisurely. He looked at the waiter who came and asked.

    "I heard that you have a famous soup and you only give out ten servings a day. Is that true?"

    "Yes, Sir. It is the most expensive dish in the whole city. But it is also the best dish that you can eat in the entire city. Would you like to try? It costs ten thousand gold coins."

    "Of course, I would like to try. But I want all ten of them."

    "Okay, one souping rig¡­. WAIT. All ten?"

    The waiter''s voice quivered as he looked at Sam.

    Sam smiled and took out the tinum coins. A bag full of tinum coins. He threw them at the waiter and said.

    "All thirty of them. You can keep the change."

    The waiter opened the bag and his eyes sparkled along with the coins.

 Chapter 1951: Cliches

    The waiter counted the coins quickly.

    He is a Peak Stage Astral ne cultivator, so he is fast enough to count them up quickly. There are 1100 coins tinum coins inside. 1000 tinum coins for the soup and hundred tinum coins are a tip. His eyes widened in disbelief.

    With a 100 tinum coins, one can do almost anything within this city. If they lived a lowkey life, they can live for years without worrying about surviving. Or one can even attempt for auditing some courses within the academies of the Divine Region.

    He gulped nervously to see if Sam is joking.

    But Sam just smiled and said.

    "Bring them one by one as I signal you. Also a couple of side dishes will help."

    "Anything else sir?" The waiter quickly recovered and asked.

    "Nothing."

    The waiter nodded and went back to the kitchen. A bowl of soup came not long after. Sam took a whiff of the fragrant soup and smiled. The soup might cost a lot, but it is a damn good soup. Even though he had some great food until now, this is definitely a delicacy that ranks high in his books.

    He wondered how Makar would react if he tasted this food. He might just try topete to beat this taste. This might not be the best food that Sam has eaten, but this has a unique ce among them.

    He enjoyed the soup bit by bit and savored it thoroughly. He noticed the increase in energy. This is not just about taste. It has high quantities of cultivation aiding nutrients. Sam ate the soup and relished in it. He didn''t care who ising to the restaurant and who is going.

    He did get some nces when the waiter took away the first bowl and brough the second one, but he didn''t mind them.

    But his act of buying ten bowls at once brought up some awkward scenarios in the restaurant.

    "I want the special soup."

    "I am sorry. But all of them are sold out."

    "But he is the only one that ordered since the restaurant opened."

    "He ordered all of them."

    These kinds of conversations kept on happening.

    Some people even got curious on why Sam is eating so much and waited to see how much he would eat. After all, even if his stomach can take in that much energy, his body shouldn''t be able to take in all the energy thates from it.

    It would be way too much for a normal Initial stage cultivator of Divine ne initiation to bear with. But to their surprise, Sam just kept on eating bowl after bowl.

    After finishing seven bowls non-stop he took a break and just sipped his wine.

    The waiter who kept on bringing the bowls and side dishes, stole a whiff of the wine and felt his mouth salivating.

    "Sir, if you don''t mind me asking, where did you buy that wine?"

    Sam smiled and replied.

    "I didn''t buy it. It is my own brew."

    As soon as he heard those words, the young waiter''s eyes lit up. He went to the side and fell into a deep thought. After a long time of hesitation, he came back to Sam and asked.

    "Sir, if you don''t mind. Can you give me some of the wine in exchange for the tip that you gave me?"

    Sam was amused by it a bit.

    "Are you a student in Astral Region?" He asked casually.

    The waiter grinned and said.

    "Yes Sir. I am."

    "So, why are you working here?"

    "Well it is a long story sir. Simply put, I don''t have much capital. Spirit stones don''t amount to much and I was tight on resources when I came here. I need resources to breakthrough. Working in Divine Region is the best way to earn some money."

    "I don''t see a lot of students doing this though. I was roaming around since morning, but you are the only one."

    "Not everyone is willing to do menial jobs here. Everyone has way too much pride to their fault."

    Sam nodded and took out two jars of wine.

    "These are thetest brews in my collection. Go ahead and enjoy. You don''t need to sacrifice your tip for anything. Treat it as a gift."

    The waiter was dumbfounded. He looked the two exquisite jars of wines. The wines were brewed by Ape and they are indeed thetest part of the collection.

    He carefully held them and his eyes brightened up.

    "Be careful with the blue colored one. It is way too potent."

    Sam said with a smile. The young man didn''t understand, but he smiled and put it away.

    "Now, bring me another bowl."

    "Coming right up."

    The young skipped away and brought the next bowl. Finally, Sam started observing the customers keenly. It is the prime time for dinner. More and more people are swarming all the restaurants in the area.

    He looked at the people who are wearing their uniforms in particr. To see if anyone would fall into the trap that he prepared.

    As he sipped the eight bowl of soup slowly, he finally saw some prospects. A group of people who are wearing Zeus'' academy robes just arrived. There are five people in total. A guy in the lead and a woman standing beside him, while the remaining three guys are walking behind them.

    The girl had a refined temperament and she is trying her best act like she didn''t notice the hungry look of the guy beside her.

    It is very obvious and a very cliched sight.

    The guy in the lead is trying to court her and this girl knows it. She is either ignoring him naturally or she is just trying to make him shower her with more attention and kept him on the hook. Either way, she is the center of attention the group.

    The three guys behind them though are the most casualckeys one could find.

    Sam smiled as he looked at them. Just based on the way acted, this is the perfect group for his n.

    As long as they check a few more boxes of cliches, then Sam is sure that they are the perfect targets for this whole thing.

    "Junior Pearl. This is the ce I told you about. The chef here is a senior from the Olympian Association. He cooks to improve his fire control. The soup he makes is one of a kind. No one can make it like him and it is very beneficial for the Initial stage cultivators of Divine ne Initiation.

    I will treat you to that soup today."

    The young man bbered to the youngdy.

    The youngdy just gave him a polite smile as she took a seat.

    The youngsters also took their seats and called for the waiter.

    Sam who heard the conversation even from that far away, smiled contently. First check box is done. This guy is here to court her with the soup.

    Not a bad idea, but it is going to back fire big time.

    The waiter went to the table and coincidentally it is the same guy that attended to Sam.

    "Hello Gentlemen and the Lady. Wee to our restaurant. What would you like?"

    He politely addressed them as he poured theplimentary drink to them. The leader of the group, the young man spoke with a proud smile.

    "I want the special soup. Two bowls." As he said, he took out a spatial ring and ced it on the table. twenty thousand gold coins, is not a small heap. So, he is using the spatial ring.

    The young man awaiting a surprised response. Ten thousand gold coins is actually a very big amount. In fact, spending that much on a dish is extravagant beyond believe. The only reason there is not muchmotion even when there are only ten bowls of soup avable is because no many people can actually afford to eat it.

    They would have to save for months if not a couple of years to have one bowl. And since just one man ordered two bowls, the young man was expecting some kind of admiring gaze. But the waiter was very casual.

    He didn''t even bother to touch the ring and straight up said.

    "I am sorry sir. We ran out of soup for today. You have to visit tomorrow if you would like to have the soup."

    The young man was dumbfounded. He didn''t expect such a situation. Even though this is the rush hour, it is notmon for it to be out already. They arrived at the start of the rush hour.

    The young man''s face turned red as he saw the gaze of the youngdy named Pearl on his face. He wanted to show off, but it didn''t work. He is embarrassed.

    Sam smirked at this. The next check box is also done. This guy is overly embarrassed for no fucking reason.

    "I apologize. But I suggest that you take a look at our menu, there are an assortment of new dishes added to it. You will definitely feel satisfied with the taste and the quality."

    The waiter said as he passed the menus. The young man passed the menu to Pearl and took a look at one himself.

    "Senior Rain. I was really looking forward to tasting the soup since you were so confident about it. Too bad."

    The youngdy poked where it hurt. Another box checked.

    At this moment, exactly Sam suddenly yelled from his chair.

    "Waiter, my soup please."

    His voice reverberated all over. This made Rain and Pearl to take a look at it.

 Chapter 1952: Cliches II

    Rain and Pearl looked at Sam''s table that is full of empty tes and bowls.

    Even though the waiter removed the empty soup bowls, Sam was savoring all kinds of side dishes bit by bit, so there are several of them and it is pretty eyecatching. On top of that, the crystalline jars of wine are also way too shy.

    Amidst all those bowls, Rain and Pearl didn''t notice Sam''s already existing soup bowl. Instead they turned their attention to the waiter. Rain in particr looked at him in askance.

    But the waiter didn''t notice him. Instead he grinned at Sam and said.

    "Coming right up sir."

    As soon as those words fell out of his mouth Pearl frowned and voiced her confusion and frustration at the same time.

    "How is he going to give the soup if they already ran out?"

    Then her gaze was shifted Rain who felt his face burning. He felt embarrassed and stood up hurriedly as he mmed on the table. He pointed his finger at the waiter and yelled loudly.

    "HEY. DON''T YOU KNOW THE RESTAURANT RULES? HOW ARE YOU AN EMPLOYEE HERE? WE ARE THE FIRST ONES TO ASK THE SOUP. HOW DARE YOU LIE TO US THAT YOU RAN OUT AND YOU SAID YOU ARE GOING TO GIVE IT TO HIM?

    DID YOU ACCEPT BRIBES FROM HIM?"

    His voice reverberated throughout the restaurant. Everyone looked at the waiter, Rain and then at Sam. Some people who were there from earlier and understood the situation were stunned for a moment before they understood what happened.

    This guy thought that the waiter is favoring Sam over others and he felt insulted. Since that is not the case, things are going to take an entertaining turn.

    The waiter frowned and said.

    "I am sorry sir. But please refrain from using me of such crimes. I am very well aware of the rules of the restaurant as an employee here and I always act ordingly. I¡­"

    "If you always act ordingly, then what do you say about your preferential treatment?"

    "It is not preferential treatment, sir. That sir over there on that table has ordered the soup way before you did. He just wanted me to bring itter. He has already paid too."

    Rain was dumbfounded. If what the waiter said is true, then he would be a fool. He noticed that the frown on Pearl''s face has deepened. She definitely didn''t like the sudden outburst. And to make it worse, the waiter didn''t stop there. He kept on exining.

    "That sir over there has already paid for all the ten bowls for today. He was having his eight bowl and said he would ask for the remaining when he wanted. He just called me now to bring those two."

    The waiter left those words before going to serve Sam.

    He deliberately left those words there.

    He clearly felt pissed off by Rain''s performance and he just wanted to make him feel small. Rain just like the waiter expected felt dumbfounded. He had to work his ass off and sacrifice a lot to get twenty thousand gold coins for two bowls. But Sam just ordered ten of them and he is even enjoying a bunch of other dishes.

    "That guy ordered ten bowls alone?"

    Pearl said in surprise as she stared at Sam openly.

    Sam threw a smile at her as he received hisst two bowls of soup. But he didn''t even drink them. Instead he ced the piping hot soup on the side focused on what looked like a drum stick in front of him.

    The soup was just ced on the table. The waiter didn''t mind though. He doesn''t know why Sam bought all ten bowls of the soup, but he didn''t mind. He just went on with his work.

    Pearl looked at the soup bowls and Sam in confusion.

    "He is not gonna drink it? I heard it is most potent when it is piping hot. If he not going to make the most out of it, why did he buy such an expensive dish?"

    Rain heard it from the side and didn''t know what to say. But one of hisckeys just spoke up.

    "Junior Pearl, maybe he didn''t care about the potency anymore. The soup has way too much energy and one bowl would be enough for people of our level. Even with the innate difference, hardly anyone could take more than one bowl.

    He must be having them just for the taste. From what I heard, the soup gives off apletely different but equally great taste."

    Pearl widened her eyes in disbelief. She has seen her fair share of extravagant people.

    Still, if Sam really ordered the soup just for the taste of it, then it would be the most extravagant thing she has ever seen in her life. Her eyes sparkled a little bit.

    Rain who saw this, didn''t like it one bit. He immediately left his table and walked towards Sam.

    Sam acted like he didn''t even exist, even when Rain ced his hand on the table and leaned forward.

    "Hello brother. May I know your name? I am Rain a ss 1 Freshman at Zeus academy."

    His voice might be low, but he is pretty much arrogant and proud in the way he said his designation.

    "Sam."

    That is all he got in reply though. Rain''s smile stiffened a bit, but he continued.

    "I heard that you bought all the bowls of the soup for today. You already had eight of them. Can you please spare thest two for us? I brought a friend from afar to treat her. But the soup is all out because of you.

    If you could spare it, I will owe you a favor."

    "I don''t want to."

    Sam just answered straightforwardly.

    Rain gritted his teeth at the nonchnce Sam is disying.

    "Havent you heard of my name before?"

    "I have."

    "Then¡­" Rain was about to continue, but Sam cut him off.

    "I have heard of your name quite a few times, when it was Raining in my home town. They call Rain as Rain there as well."

    Rain didn''t even understand what Sam said. It took a minute for him to get what he said. He straightened and up and pointed his finger at Sam.

    Then only he noticed something different. A bunch of people are staring at him.

    Then only he understood. Even though he was whispering, Sam was not. He was actually speaking out loud, it was just that Rain didn''t think much of it and ignored it.

    Pearl almostughed out loud and stifled it to not embarrass rain any further.

    "Do you know who you are messing with?" Rain asked as he looked at Sam.

    "I do. You just said it yourself. You are Rain, ss 1 Freshman at Zeus Academy. Why would I forget it that fast?"

    Sam''s words are killing the conversation instantly.

    Rain is following the Cliched lines and in his head, he is screaming that Sam is not following the same. Where is the cliched, ''I don''t care'' or ''I don''t give a fuck''? Where is the utter disrespect that will give Rain a reason to attack?

    He really wanted to bash his head on the table just for this.

    "I am sorry, can you leave this table? You are disturbing my ambience. I am trying to enjoy soup here."

    Sam said as he looked blocked the table with his arms as if Rain is polluting it.

    Rain gritted his teeth and took deep breaths to calm down. Then only he got a good look at Sam''s clothes. He is not wearing any uniform. And he is not a familiar face. He is also here alone. He thought of something and asked.

    "You must be new here."

    "Yes, I am. I just arrived today and I heard that this ce is good at the exchange centre. So, I came here."

    Sam said casually as if he is not revealing anything secretive. But Rain felt like he is on to something.

    "So, are you a new admission here in the Divine Region? Which academy do you belong to?"

    "I don''t belong to any academy yet."

    "So, you are here for entrance exams?"

    "Kind of. Why are you asking me these questions? I am not obligated to answer am I?"

    When he heard this, Rain grinned widely and closed in on Sam. He whispered in an extremely low voice.

    "Listen to me asshole. I don''t know what you are trying to pull here. But if you know what is good for you, just hand over the soup and apologize to me before screwing off. Otherwise, I will make sure that you don''t get into any academy.

    Once I put in a bad word for you and ck list you from Zeus Academy, you wouldn''t be able to enter any other academy in your life.

    So, be a goodd and fuck off from here."

    He stood up again and then patted Sam on shoulder with a gentle smile.

    "So, do remember what I said my friend. It will be very helpful for you in the entrance Exam."

    Everyone is puzzled. After all, Rain was about to lose it just a moment ago. But right now, he acting all amicable and gentle. They wondered what he said under that whisper.

    But Sam just smiled and held the two soups of bowl in his two hands.

    He extended them toward Rain and asked with a smile.

    "You want the soup right?"

    "Of course, only if you don''t need it. I can''t pressure you now, can I?"

 Chapter 1953: Enforcement Team is Here

    "You want this soup right?" Sam asked with both of his arms extended.

    "Of course, only if you don''t need it. I can''t pressure you into handing it over right?" Rain acted as if the previous five minutes didn''t even happen between them.

    Sam on the other hand suddenly smiled and¡­

    *Spit* *Spit*

    Two shots of saliva one in each bowl entered the soup. The whole ce quitened down. It is a pin drop silence. Rain who was about to extend his hands looked at the soup, and then Sam. He couldn''tprehend what had happened for a moment.

    It almost took a minute for him toe back to his senses and his face turned red in anger.

    It is almost like all the blood in his body entered his face. His teeth are grinding so hard that a few mini chips flew away. His gums started bleeding and he looked like a bull that has gone mad with his deep exhales.

    "HOW DARE YOU?"

    *SLAP*

    He swung his hand and pped the two bowls out of Sam''s hand in one swift action.

    Sam who looked at his empty hands looked at Rain with a nk expression. He blinked once and then¡­

    *PAK*

    A pnded straight on Rain''s face.

    For Rain everything suddenly turned into slow motion. He felt the whole restaurant revolve slowly and something hard suddenly hit his back, then only he felt a stinging pain on his cheek.

    Then his eyes cked out. He didn''t see anything but a few glittering shes in darkness, before his vision returned to normal.

    Everyone stood up and watched the scene in horror.

    The status of a student in Divine Region is actually verymon but it is not small. Particrly for the people who are not the students of the academies, that status is akin to a behemoth. It is an iron rule that has never been broken that the students are always respected by the normal citizens and visitors.

    But today, Sam who is supposedly someone that came for entrance examinations, pped a student so hard that he made a round in the air before hitting the ground.

    Theckeys of Rain were the first toe out of the shock. They immediately ran over.

    "How dare you?" One of them yelled and charged at Sam.

    But Sam once again was very cool about this, he slipped andnded a perfectly square p on that guy''s face and this time the force is a bit more directive. Theckey flew over and crashed into the wall.

    This stopped the remaining two.

    Sam stopped and pulled his chair a bit outward and sat on it.

    "Whoever steps forward is going taste a p with my full strength next time. I won''t even care if you fucking die."

    By now Rain came back to his senses and stood up.

    "How dare you hit me? Me? A student of Zeus academy? Do you know how big of an offense is that? It is against the realmws for someone who is not a student to attack a student. You are going to die for it. Just you wait.

    You better fall on your knees and start begging now before the enforcement teames here."

    *PAK*

    As soon as he finished the sentence, another pnded on his face. Sam''s moves were so fast that he barely noticed him stand up and sit down.

    Rain copsed on to his knees instantly and his eyes started tearing up.

    "Stop threatening you dumb fuck.

    There are a few things you need to take note, before you start spouting some bullshit about thews of the realm.

    First, I was minding my own business with my food. You are the dumbass that approached me.

    Second, you are the one that constantly tried to use your status and talked about owing favors.

    Third, you are the one who talked all the shit about how you will mess up my admission if I don''tply to you.

    Fourth, I didn''t spit on your face you donkey''s bloody asshole. I spit in my own soup. The soup that I bought with my own fucking money. But you are the one that pped my soup.

    You know how much that soup costs right? It is twenty thousand gold coins you fucking retard. You are the one that destroyed my valuable property. Do you think I am a saint to not hit you after you did all that?

    Enforcement squad or whatever, let ite. I will not fucking leave this ce until I get my two bowls of soup back."

    Everyone looked at Sam and Rain and went into thought after they heard his words. The words made sense to them. Everything Sam said happened, even though they didn''t see the threatening part, they just went with the flow and just filled in the gaps.

    But Rain was horrified. He pointed his finger at Sam and yelled.

    "WHO THREATENED YOU? I GAVE YOU TIPS TO PASS THE EXAM AND I OFFERED MORE TIPS IF YOU LET ME BUY THE SOUP. HOW DARE YOU SLANDER ME LIKE THIS? ARE YOU LOOKING DOWN ON THE ZEUS ACADEMY?"

    *PAK*

    Sam pped him again and this time he touched the ground with his face. Sam literally looked down on him and said.

    "No, you dumbshit, I am just looking down on you."

    Sam said as he looked at Pearl and the remaining twockeys.

    "If you want to take this guy back, bring me the two bowls of that special soup. And they have to the exact same temperature as the time he ruined them. Otherwise, don''t even dream about taking him away from here.

    I heard that this restaurant runs through the night.

    Just so you know, I don''t have anywhere to be."

    Pearl didn''t even change her expression. She just ordered one of theckeys. Go and report the situation to the Enforcement squad and then immediately bring some seniors from our Academy. At least second years."

    The twockeys immediately ran away.

    Pearl walked forward and took a seat not too far away from Sam. She didn''t even nce at Rain and just focused on Sam.

    "May I know your name?" She asked Sam with a gentle smile.

    Sam nced at her from top to bottom. He didn''t act reserved. He just gave her a good look in front of everyone. Rain who saw this boiled with anger and was about to speak up.

    *PAK*

    But a pnded perfectly on his face. Pearl on the other hand, didn''t do anything. She just showed that gentle smile and pleasant expression. She is indeed beautiful even with that mundane and in uniform.

    "Sam. What about you?"

    "My name is Pearl. Nice to meet you."

    "I wish I could say the same. It would have been nice if I had my soup though."

    "I am wondering, why did you order ten bowls of soup? And how did you manage to hold all the energy in? You don''t seem like you are expelling it from your body."

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "The answer to both the questions is very simple and the same."

    "And that is?"

    "I simply can."

    Pearl''s smile widened and her pearl like teeth were visible.

    "You look good. Are you spoken for?" Sam asked with a smile that didn''t look like a smile. Pearl just chuckled.

    "I am not. Why? Do you want to court me?"

    "Nah, I am just curious. My friends mighte here in a few days. If any one of them is single, they can try their luck. But I am not interested."

    "Now, why did that hurt my pride? To think my beauty is not enough to move you."

    "Do you really think a person whose brain is working properly would be moved by just your beauty at this stage of cultivation?"

    Rain almost puked blood in anger. Sam is clearly refering to him as brainless.

    "True. But love makes people like that. They will turn brainless."

    "Lust does that too, in fact more than love. Anyway, are you trying to buy some time for them toe and stop me?"

    "Notpletely. I am really interested in speaking with you."

    "Why is that?"

    "If you are doing this right now, then you could only be two things. You are either too smart and know what you are doing or you are too crazy and don''t care what you are doing. In either cases, you are an interesting person to explore."

    As she spoke to this point, a few people came running. They are all in guard uniform.

    "You, stand up and get away from that person. Assaulting students is a crime punishable by explusion from academic realm."

    The enforcement team captain directly spoke as he pointed his spear at Sam.

    Sam looked at him with a smile.

    "I am sorry, I didn''t start the assault it is the student that caused me property damage." Sam said with a very rxed smile.

    "NO. HE IS LYING. ARREST HIM. SAVE ME."

    Rain yelled on top of his lungs as soon as Sam spoke.

    Pearl didn''t even nce at him. All the interest she had on him was gone the moment he fell into Sam''s trap.

    The enforcement team captain looked at Sam and then at Rain. He had a frown on his face. He looked at others to see if anyone woulde up and testify, the waiter was about to step forward, but Sam gestured him to back down.

    He snapped his fingers and a very small insect that is in the size of a eggnded on his finger.

    "I have evidence to support my im."

 Chapter 1954 Spilled Coins

    Chapter 1954 Spilled Coins

    As soon as Sam said those words, the insect dismantled itself and a recording crystal came out of it.

    Sam threw held it up and the screen projected the whole scenario along with the audio. And that audio included the whispers Rain made.

    Sam looked at him with a smirk. The Enforcement squad were a bit stumped. This is not exactly an ideal situation for them. Usually in these cases as long as there is no evidence, they would just side with the students of the academy.

    After all, these students have authority, power and connections, what would they gain from siding with a person who didn''t even get any admission. This would have been swept under the rug easily and everyone would have gone about their day.

    They didn''t expect such evidence and it would be aired directly out in the open.

    The one who was shocked about this is Rain himself. Because when he whispered those threats, he made sure of one thing. To mask it with his spiritual energy. It is a trick a lot of high level cultivators use.

    Since the cultivators will gain more and more acute hearing with time, catching whispers is very easy. So, he made sure to mask the threats. But still managed to catch that.

    "How did you¡­" Rain almost blurted the question out. He barely managed to hold himself from saying itpletely, but Sam understood the question.

    "You wouldn''t understand even if I exined." Sam just replied without much thought. These kinds of tricks are pretty easy for him to break. It is actually a waste of his time to think about these things, it is that easy.

    Pearl was also stunned, but that shock soon turned into an intrigue as she locked on to Sam''s eyes. Sam looked back at her, without breaking the eye contact. Both of them are trying to see if they can look into their thoughts, but neither of them are giving it away.

    The enforcement squad looked at the recording crystal and the captain of the squad sighed before saying.

    "Can you give that recording crystal? We would like to add it as evidence for this incident and we will investigate further. For now, you cannot cause any moremotion here. Both of you can go on your own ways and we will deal with this through the Enforcement Hall."

    Rain suddenly felt like he was given a way out.

    Once the case is taken up by the enforcement squad and the video is given as an evidence, then he can use his contacts to just push the case back to the extreme backend.

    All he needs to do is to get out this situation and it would never be talked again.

    Sam thought for a moment and smiled.

    "I am sorry, I can give you the video for your evidence, but I cannot leave this ce without having my two bowls of soup. They are part of my training and I am on a verge of breakthrough. I need my two bowls of soup at that exact temperature right now."

    Everyone looked at Sam with a weird expression.

    They looked at the empty bowl of the soup of the table and they already heard about how he ordered all the ten bowls for himself.

    They are already wondering how he managed to hold all the energy in without suffering anything at all. But now he is saying that those two bowls are part of his training? They felt like he is trying to make fools out of them.

    "But I heard that only one bowl of soup''s energy can be stored by a cultivator of our level. Why are eating ten bowls in the first ce?"

    Pearl asked the question that was in everyone''s mind.

    "Don''t judge me based on your and the general popce''s standards. The number of bowls I eat is my business, whether I am utilizing all the energy or not.

    And I can''t be conforming to the standards of the weak ass cultivators, who cannot handle more than one bowl of the soup.

    I am not fault for beingpetent and capable."

    Sam angered everyone with just a few sentences. Until now most of the customers were on Sam''s side. They wanted to support the underdog and watch a good show. But now, he just turned all of them against him.

    Everyone is staring daggers at him.

    "How about we make that person pay for your soup? We can talk rest of the caseter after we start our investigation?"

    The enforcement squad captain looked at Sam as he spoke.

    Rain looked at the captain and nodded reluctantly. Even thought twenty thousand coins is a very high amount, he can grit his teeth and ept it.

    But Sam was adamant.

    "Nope. I don''t need twenty thousand coins. I am not short on money now. I am short on soup. I need my soup now."

    By the end of this statement, a new group ran in. They all ran to Pearl as soon as they entered the restaurant.

    "Sister Pearl, are you hurt? You are okay right?"

    The leader of the group who is a woman asked. She had purple hair and her skin looked a bit tough for some reason. She might be a mixed race. As for what races, it is unknown for now.

    Pearl just nodded and pointed at Sam and Rain.

    "Junior Rain, I told you not to cause any trouble when you took Sister Pearl out, why did you create such a mess? You are going to be in charge of the cleaning duty within the school for a month for this."

    She then looked at Sam and after getting the information that he also had the evidence, she frowned and said.

    "Look Mister, our Junior did a bad thing. But he didn''t really mean any harm, he just wanted to show off in front of a beautiful girl. You are a man, you should understand how it is. Just take thepensation and let it go. I can guarantee if you do that, there would be no trouble for you in the entrance examinations.

    I can even help you out a little in Zeus'' academy if you get in."

    Sam looked at this woman with amusement. This is a much more veiled threat and it has a carrot and stick attached to it.

    there for him.

    Before Sam could speak, the woman continued.

    Basically, what he meant is that if he doesn''t do it trouble will be there for him.

    Before Sam could speak, the woman continued.

    "You can ask around. My name is Irel. I have a reputation to keep up, so you would know that I am not lying."

    "I am a forgiving person, but I am not going to let this go. This is my hard earned money. I had to work an hour to earn it and I had to wait for the restaurant to open ande in early to pay for the soup.

    But as I said, I am a forgiving person. Give me my two bowls of soup. I won''t pursue this offense and will let him go."

    Irel''s frown deepened. She looked at Sam and then at Pearl.

    Thetter is smiling as she watched the show, this makes Irel even more frustrated. It took a lot out of them to bring Pearl to their academy, so for her to witness such a sight of the first day is a huge setback.

    She cursed Rain under her breath.

    She looked at the Enforcement Squad and he took a step back. It is not obvious, but he is clearly taking a back seat on this thing, she then turned to Sam and said.

    "You better let this go. Since it is indeed the fault of my own person, I will give five thousand coins more. You can have this soupter on."

    Sam turned to the waiter and asked.

    "If I give you five thousand more coins, can you get me those two bowls of soup?"

    "No sir, restaurant rules are strict, even if you give a million gold coins, it is impossible to get anotherdle of soup, much less a bowl."

    "You hear that? Get me two more bowls and I will leave." Sam was pretty adamant about it.

    Irel gritted her teeth and looked at the Enforcement captain. He spoke up.

    "You are causing a disturbance to the restaurant here. Do you know that?"

    Sam smiled and took out a bigger coin bag than before. He threw it on the table. tinum coins spilled out of it onto the table. The waiter was on cue and ran forward.

    "What do you need sir?"

    "I am buying everything on the menu and in stock. Any customer thates to the restaurant can eat whatever they want and however much they want. I am going to pay it. Ask your owner if he is okay with this and let me know."

    Every spectator looked at this scene with their mouths wide open. They didn''t expect this situation at all. All this while they knew Sam is finding trouble, but they just assumed that he is an ignorant and arrogant guy.

    But watching the coins spill on the table, they are very clear on one thing, this guy is finding trouble on purpose and it is just getting started.

 Chapter 1955: Clash

    The waiter looked at the huge bag of coins and ran into the kitchen.

    Meanwhile, everyone looked at the bag and gulped nervously. That is a ten thousand tinum coinsying on the table. Everyone had at least one thought of just trying to pull some shit. It would change their lives.

    Not just for the normal citizens, even for the students. In fact, especially for the students that are starting out. Even the seniors like Irel are tempted.

    But of course, the seniors are much more vignt.

    They didn''t understand what a guy that can handle that much money is doing by picking trouble with them like this.

    Sam is also carefully looking everyone that focused on him. He even activated his energy vision and picked a few energy signatures that are raising. Some people are really thinking if they should make a move.

    They are not entirely stupid though.

    Even if they did, it wouldn''t be right now.

    Everyone is waiting for the waiter toe and he didn''t take long. The waiter picked up the coin bag excitedly and said.

    "Sir, the chef epted your order. Thank you for being such a valuable customer to us. He also offered a free meal n for you for the next six months, you can eat however much want here and you wouldn''t charged at all."

    The waiter didn''t even bother with the enforcement squad or the students from Zeus academy, instead he directly went back to the kitchen with his money.

    Sam chuckled and tapped on the table.

    "Now, I am sure the chef doesn''t mind. So, unless I am presented with my two bowls of soup, I will not be leaving."

    This put enforcement squad in an awkward spot. They believed that the restaurant is their best hope and since they are all from Olympian schools, they thought the owner would favor them. But Sam bought it with money.

    A much more tangible benefitpared to whatever these kids from Zeus school could provide.

    They didn''t know what to do.

    At this moment Irel took a deep breath and turned to enforcement squad.

    "We are ready for the investigation. The enforcement team can investigate the matter however they want and once the case goes through the trial, Rain will face whatever punishment he was given.

    But this case is of a small level. It is destruction of private property at most and since the person himself is admitting his guilt and is awaiting the punishment, this doesn''t warrant the victim to restrain the criminal.

    The victim would bemitting a bigger crime by doing that. That would be a separate case.

    That gives us a right to bring our fellow student back. You know the rules here. We are going to do whatever we can to bring our junior back. You can investigate that case also."

    Sam looked at Irel with a smile. She finally lost her patience and is making a decisive move. In fact, he wished she had done that sooner.

    The group of seniors are full of Middle Stage Divine ne Initiation Cultivators. It is perfect for Sam to test out how strong he is right now. But to his dismay, the one that made the move are not the seniors.

    Enforcement Squad captain, just stayed put as he tacitly agreed to Irel''s words. Meanwhile Irel took out hermunication device and called for some people.

    Within two minutes a new group of ten people arrived. They are also wearing the same Zeus'' academy clothes and their clothes are same as Pearl and Rain''s.

    This is the group of juniors.

    "Rain? I already knew that you are up to no good, when you tried to so hard to take junior Pearl out today. I shouldn''t have let you take her out. You just spoiled the name of our academy in her eyes."

    The young man said while watching Pearl from the side of his eyes to gauge her reaction. But she didn''t show any reaction. Her eyes are locked on Sam in amusement. She is looking forward to see what he is going to do.

    Irel looked at the new group of juniors and said.

    "Bring back Rain. We need to get back to the academy and report the whole incident to the student council. This is not going to end here."

    Thest sentence was said while she is looking at Sam.

    Even though she wanted to step forward and kill him herself, Zeus academy lost a lot of face today, she didn''t want to add on to that by being a senior and killing a junior. But if juniors fight among themselves that is a different thing.

    The group of students immediately made their move.

    The waiter who watched the whole scene suddenly turned nervous.

    He really liked Sam and he wanted to see if he is going to get out of this unscathed. Sam on the other hand is just as rxed. If it is people on the same level, then it isn''t even a fight. Even the standard here is not really that good.

    Rain finally saw some hope as soon as the first person among the group attacked, he also gathered energy and was about to throw a palm strike on Sam from behind, but before he could do that, Sam made his move.

    He pressed his hand on the chair and kicked up into the air. His foot went over his head and hit Rain on the face in an unnatural way.

    Rain felt like he is a nail being hit by a hammer. He couldn''t see anything for a second. While bringing his leg back, Sam mmed that heel into the head of the attacker that just lunged forward.

    *BAM* *CRASH*

    The kicknded right on the crown and mmed the guy''s forehead and face into the wooden floor.

    His head was almost invisible as it went beneath the floor. His body shivered slightly before he lost consciousness.

    Everyone turned silent.

    Rain who finally felt the stunning effect release his head, noticed that he is on his knees once again and one of his batchmates had his face nted into the wooden floor.

    The whole restaurant turned silent and all the attackers stopped in their tracks.

    "I won''t be leaving without the soup today. If you want to go for a fight, let''s go for it. But trust me, you should be willing to kill me to make me let go of your schoolmate today without having my two bowls of soup."

    Irel''s aura raged as she looked at how at ease Sam was. The juniors who were just mocking andughing at Rain are too afraid to make another move. They clearly understood that Sam is stronger than them and they didn''t want to risk getting injured too much at the start of the school year.

    But they didn''t want to get on Irel''s bad books either.

    To their luck, Irel told them to withdraw and sent a senior to deal with him.

    "Kill him if you have to. We can''t let this drag on. Crowd is getting bigger by second."

    She said as she looked at the group of people outside the restaurant. This is going to be a viral news now. Everyone within the academic realm will no of this and they should make a statement to save the face of Zeus academy.

    The senior stepped forward with a sword in his hands.

    The enforcement squad captain turned around as if he doesn''t know what is happening.

    As the sword shed towards Sam, he finally made a serious move. The reaper sword appeared in his hand and blocked the attack.

    The sword keen made everyone alert. The aura around them turned sharper. Sam felt the impact from the blow go through him to the chair and the floor.

    The senior didn''t mind that Sam blocked. Instead he smiled and quickly made another attack. The sword slipped against Sam''s sword and aimed at Sam''s leg.

    Sam jumped up on the chair and dodged the sword strike, before he threw the sh of his own.

    He had the higher ground because of the chair, so to deal with that, the opponent shed the chair off trying to make Sam lose bnce and attacked him at the same time.

    Sam indeed fell back, but it wasn''t an awkward situation for him. He skillfully manuevered in the air and blocked the sh before he went ahead and attacked the senior with a stab whilending on the ground.

    Everything happened in an instant.

    Sam and his opponent took a step back. The opponent is now way too vignt. He lunged forward as wind elemental energy condensed around him. He gathered all of it into his de and his moves changed.

    Even though he didn''t activate fusion, he looked like he is dissolving into the wind. His footwork was impable.

    Sam couldn''t catch him for a moment, and only managed to block the attack when it almostnded. But the wind energy shed at him on his chest where he blocked the attack.

    He had to slide back to reduce the impact and make sure he wasn''t cut deep.

 Chapter 1956 Trial

    1956 Trial

    Sam held the reaper sword tightly and lunged forward.

    The sword condensed with wind energy came at him. A huge sword storm seemed to have been following that de. Sam blocked that attack and his energy entered the sword with two stylesbined. Ripple and Repel Style.

    The wind energy that tried to go past Sam''s de and to his body dispersed into nothing within no time.

    The opponent was shocked.

    But Sam didn''t have any thoughts of giving him time to recover. Before he could even think a loud bang was heard by everyone.

    *BANG* *BOOM*

    The bang was followed by a concentrated explosion and it happened all on the shoulder of the opponent. The opponent was shocked. He couldn''t raise his arm anymore and he looked at Sam in confusion.

    He didn''t understand what is happening.

    That''s because before he could even blink, Sam brought out a hand gun shot him in a close range and hid it back in his storage. The opponent saw something sh, but he wasn''t able to catch what it is.

    Everyone was dumbfounded. They were impressed by how Sam is holding himself against a senior, but this situation is uncalled for. Something none of them predicted.

    "What the fuck did you do? It is cheating." Rain who was on his knees and had a unique view of this, had the simr vision as the opponent. He yelled immediately.

    Everyone looked at him like he was an idiot. Including the opponent.

    Sam didn''t care though. He jumped forward and shed his sword, when the opponent tried to block it, the wind energy dispersed once again and Sam slid the sword in an unnatural angle while bending his body in an awkward way.

    The sword slipped and cut the opponent under the left side of his abdomen and the sh went deep until it hit the stomach sac inside.

    Sam stood behind him and stabbed the sword on the other shoulder of the opponent, before kicking behind his knees to make him fall on the ground. Sam pulled the sword out and was about to sh his neck off.

    "STOP"

    Right before the swordnded, Irel yelled and Sam stopped.

    He held the opponent by his cor and threw him to the rest of the seniors before going back to his seat and sitting there leisurely with a disappointed expression.

    He overestimated the abilities of the seniors here in the academy.

    They are the same. They are also weak. The other yers on the same level gives more trouble than these seniors. Sam is frustrated because of this. A frown appeared on his face as he looked at Irel.

    "I don''t care if more people are gonnae here and fight. I am open for it. I don''t care if you want to blow this up as a case in Enforcement Hall. I am open for it too. But I am not leaving until I get my two bowls of soup from this restaurant.

    And without those, this guy is not going anywhere."

    As Sam said he pointed at Rain.

    "Do you even know what you are doin¡­" *PAK*

    Rain once again rambled after he came out of the shock of Sam defeating a senior. But a crisp pnded on his face and made him crash.

    "I am done with the chirps of sparrows."

    He paused and turned to the seniors and the enforcement squads.

    "If the Vultures want a piece of me, they cane and try."

    With that he stabbed the sword into the wooden floor.

    The whole thing turned awkward. Everyone paused and didn''t know what to do. Irel was tempted to make a move, but the Zeus academy lost way too much face. She didn''t know what would make the situation worse, whether caving to Sam''s demands or attacking directly.

    She very much wanted to kill Sam if not for this dilemma.

    So, she decided to solve it. She sent some of their team members to inform the seniors and the instructors of the academy. This thing got way out of hand.

    The Enforcement Squad on the other hand took a backseatpletely. They would wait until the situation is resolved and put all the cases that would happen in the Enforcement hall. These crazy people can beat the crap out of each other all they want.

    Time passed slowly.

    Fifteen minutes felt like a few hours before the people that went to the academy came back. Surprisingly they didn''te back with anyone. Just a letter.

    Irel looked at the contents of the letter and frowned. She was a bit reluctant by the way things are going, but she held it in and gave the letter to the waiter.

    "Give this to your owner."

    Waiter hesitated a bit, but still took the letter and went to his owner. After fifteen minutes, he came back and met with Irel.

    "Fifty thousand gold coins per bowl. That is the price."

    "That is fucking ridiculous. What do you mean by increasing the price that much?"

    "My owner said that you would have this reaction. But he said he is not going to reduce the price. ording to the letter, this is what you have to pay. Or you can leave the restaurant now. Since all the food is bought by that customer and you are clearly not wee to eat that food, you are not wee in the restaurant for now.

    You also need to pay for the damaged chair there. The one yourpanion just destroyed with the sword."

    "What about the floor he crashed?"

    "It is not up to you to worry about that. Please just do what you need to do and leave this ce as soon as possible."

    Irel gritted her teeth and fished out her spatial ring. She also took some from herpanions before giving it to the waiter. After looking through the contents and counting them all up, he nodded and said.

    "You need wait for another hour for the two bowls. Please take a seat and don''t crowd the entrance."

    He then turned to the Enforcement Squad and said.

    "You are not wee here anymore. Please leave."

    The enforcement squad didn''t mind this. They didn''t have any business in the restaurant anymore. They clearly showed their bias towards the Zeus academy students and they just need to register both the cases in the Enforcement hall and take these people there.

    That is all there is to it. Of course, to make sure that their reputation and the rtion with Zeus academy is not spoiled, they need to make some preparations.

    Do you want to exin yourself?"

    "It''s a waste of time to do exnation and stuff. I have a better solution."

    After the squad left, they waited outside the restaurant while one of them went back to make some preparations based on the captain''s instructions.

    Time passed and Sam soon was served with two bowls of his soup.

    "Now, let him go."

    "Nope, let the soup get to the temperature that I want it to be in."

    Sam said as he stopped Rain''s advance. He did that with his leg stretched out, with no regard to their status. Only after the soup cooled down a bit, did Sam smile and take his leg from obstructing him. Rain gritted his teeth in humiliation as he walked to the side of his seniors.

    He nced at Pearl who stayed silent for a long time. She is still ncing at Sam who is getting busy with the soup.

    All the Zeus students also left.

    Sam finished his soup and walked out. He had his hands in his pockets as he leisurely stepped down while being surrounded by the Enforcement Squad.

    "You need toe with us to the Enforcement Squad for both the cases. Your case against the Zeus academy student Rain and his case against you. A judge is ready to conduct trial on both the cases at the same time now."

    "Please lead me. I am happy toply."

    They were surprised by Sam''s cooperation.

    Soon, Sam is standing in the middle of the Enforcement hall. This is basically the court and a judge is presiding them.

    On the other side stood Rain who is the defendant of the first case and the ntiff of the second case.

    This proceeding is just like any other court trial a representative from the Zeus academy who is part of Irel''s group stepped up and exined both the cases.

    Sam heard it casually and the judge on the other hand seemed to be very serious as he even took some notes. After some time, the judge looked at Sam and asked.

    "The first case is resolved since they indeed gave you back the two bowls of the soup. But for the second case, to even injure the people after admitting to a crime, that is a punishable offense unless you have a proper reason.

    Do you want to exin yourself?"

    "It''s a waste of time to do exnation and stuff. I have a better solution."

    "I don''t think the ntiff is ready to ept mary payment for this." The judge said as he looked at Rain who nodded in agreement.

    "Who said anything about payment? I am thinking more of a trial bybat."

    Pin drop silence.

 Chapter 1957 Formation Battle

    1957 Formation Battle

    Sam looked at the shocked judge and smirked.

    "I know the rules. No matter what case it is. The culprit or suspect can always demand a trial bybat. Basically, as long as you are strong enough you can do whatever you want and get away with it. A trial method that hasn''t been used in a long time, doesn''t mean it couldn''t be used now.

    So, please I will be my own champion.

    The ntiff can choose any champion, I can give him leeway to choose someone who is of middle-stage Divine ne Initiation. I don''t mind.

    Duel time will be right here, right now.

    It can be a battle to death or a knock outpetition.

    I am fine for a team battle.

    Formation battle.

    Inscription battle.

    Whatever battle rules he wants to propose. I am open for it. Whoever wins the battle wins the case."

    Sam''s words reverberated throughout the court hall. No on expected him to be this brash. They already thought he was crazy when he picked a fight with the Zeus academy students, even that craziness is far behindpared to what he is doing now.

    The trial bybats are indeed very things in the Academy realm and it has been a long time since the previous one. There is a reason for that. No matter what kind of grudge a person had before the trial, it would be solidified and bes irreconcble after the trial is over.

    Particrly when big names like the academies are involved. It wouldn''t end well no matter who wins and they will hold the grudge against the other party for a long long time. More shes are guaranteed in the future.

    The judge took a deep breath and looked at Sam.

    "Do you really want to go down this way? The way you presented the challenge gives a lot of room for the Zeus academy to deal with you. And even if by chance youe out of this alive, you are going to have a hard time surviving in the Academic realm.

    Are you sure you want to do this?"

    "No problem. I considered everything here."

    The judge was a bit stumped. He didn''t expect such a confident approach from Sam. The whole vicinity here is full of Olympian academies. The only odd one out is the Gamblers academy. Even though Gambler Academy students are against the Olympians, even they avoid the trial bybat.

    He called his assistant and whispered something.

    The judge turned to Zeus academy students as well as Rain and said.

    "Trial bybat is a scenario that ignores every other rule apart from the rules of the duel. And the current case allows this. It has to be extreme circumstances to reject the duel.

    Since the other party gave you a lot of room, you would have toply with the time and ce. If you want to change the time and ce, that guy can change the remaining factors. Think and make a decision quickly.

    I don''t have much time on hands."

    Rain turned Irel nervously.

    They all saw what Sam did to that senior.

    No one is actually willing to fight with him right now. Even if they are confident that they are stronger, on the off chance if Sam pulls out some shit and make them lose, they will not only lose their own reputation, they will also have to bear the me of ruining the academy reputation.

    The seniors started discussing and suddenly Irel thought of something, she turned to one of the seniors and said.

    "Juwa, how confident are you to win a battle against him?"

    Juwa is a young man who looked weak and lean. He almost looked sickly for a Divine ne cultivator.

    "Irel, you are not kidding right? You know mybat strength. He would break me in half."

    "Of course, I know that. But you are well versed in formations. And a formation battle doesn''t necessarily have to be a battle of strength right? How about we propose a battle of pure skill¡­."

    She went on to exin her n.

    Juwa heard the exnation and nodded.

    "If that satisfies the definition of a formation battle, I am confident in my skills."

    Irel stood up and raised her hand.

    "We want a formation battle. But not a traditional battle. It would be a battle of skill. Our champion will create ayered formation in a certain amount of time and the other party can do the same. Then both of them will have to break the formation of their opponent. The fastest to crack the other''s formation will win.

    Does that satisfy the requirements of the battle?"

    Sam looked at Irel and chuckled.

    "Are you sure you want to go down this route? If we had a normalbat duel, you can at least me luck or some other shitter. If you lose in this, you won''t have anyone or anything else to me. You would have to suck it up."

    His words made Juwa feel offended, he almost wanted to yell out loud. But Irel stopped him and spoke up.

    "Don''t back out now. You said you are open for any form of duel. This is the duel between intellects. Are you afraid or are you just a dumb brute?"

    "Please, don''t try too hard. I said I will ept any duel. I just wanted to give you guys a friendly warning. Since you didn''t take it, don''t me me for what is about to happen. If you champion gets some trauma because of it, you have only yourself to me."

    "Stop bluffing and ept the challenge if you are that confident."

    "As you wish. I ept."

    Judge stood up at this point and said.

    "Okay, let''s move to the arena. I will preside the duel."

    After five minutes, all of them are standing at the arena. Sam and Juwa are standing inside the arena opposite to each other.

    The judge picked two cubes that are made of special crystal ss. He ced them in two spots on the stage.

    "These are just strong to enough to bear one strike from an Initial Stage Divine ne cultivator. They would break for the second one.

    Your job is to build a formation around them. You will have thirty minutes to do that. After those thirty minutes, you will try to crack or attack you opponent''s formation. As long as you either remove the cube from its ce and hold it, or break the cube while it is in the formation first, you will win.

    Do you understand the rules?"

    Both of them nodded.

    "Your time starts now."

    Juwa immediately made his move. He picked up a bunch of formation gs and hurriedly startedying down the required formations.

    Sam on the other hand, just stood there leisurely as he looked at the people below the stage. He started observing the faces of the people from Zeus academy.

    "Did you give up already?"

    One of them asked with a smirk. But Sam didn''t reply, he examined all of their faces carefully and started recalling if he had seen them before. From Karthikeya, he got some other information and it is regarding the Demi Gods he hase into contact with when he was going through hell training.

    The guys that threw two hundred titans at him and watched him as they enjoyed.

    It turned out they are also part of these academies. He just wanted to see if any of these seniors are part of that group of two hundred people. But they don''t seem like it.

    After making a mental note of all these people, Sam took out a scroll and started working on some calctions while he sat down. He seemed to have busied himself. Juwa on the other hand didn''t care about what is happening around him and worked on the formation diligently.

    He only looked at Sam when there were around ten minutes left and he was shocked to see that he hadn''t started on anything at all.

    Sam then looked at him and with a smirk mmed his foot on the stage. The stage morphed a bit and a few ''arms'' popped out of the stone surface. It is the earth elemental maniption.

    The arms held the formation gs and started establishing the formation at a rapid pace. And within ten minutes, Sam managed to finish his formation exactly at the same time as Juwa.

    Juwa''s formation looked well fortified, with lightning energy creating a cage around it. On the other hand, Sam''s formation is invisible. The cube appearedpletely open for their taking.

    "Now, you can go against each others formations."

    Sam walked towards Juwa''s formation and extended his hand a bit. The lighting crackled and a lightning snake jumped at him to attack him. He raised his eyebrows in amusement.

    Juwa smiled at this with confidence before moving to Sam''s formation. He tried to examine and see what kind of formation that Sam has used based on the energy flow.

    But now matter what he tried, he could only see that there is a lot of energy, but he couldn''t find anything rted to its nature.

 Chapter 1958: Go Back Home

    Juwa then tried to probe the formation with some minor attacks.

    But to his surprise, the attacks disappeared into thin air. He didn''t even notice a single fluctuation of energy. It is almost like there is an invisible portal swallowing everything he threw into. Sam on the other hand made a round around the formation and smiled amusedly.

    Looking at his leisurely expression, Irel felt a bit troubled. She walked closer to Juwa and asked in a whisper.

    "Are you confident in the formation? Why does that guy seem like he is not having any trouble?"

    "Its because he must have figured out the nature of the formation? It is obvious since I hadn''t tried to hide it. That formation is a type of defensive formation that focuses of hindering the advance of the people.

    It is the most basic defensive formation that uses lightning to defend against the attacks, but it allows people to pass through slowly. The only thing is that the lightning will attack them violently. By the time they reach the inner area of the formation, they would have already injected enough energy to paralyze ate stage Divine ne Initiation cultivator.

    Its defense is based on sheer amount of energy. It is direct and easy to understand, but hard to counter and extremely effective."

    Irel got some relief from that exnation. But she is not fully satisfied. She asked about Sam''s formation.

    "To bepletely honest, I don''t understand the formation at all. It has ayer that masks the energy cirction and behavior. And it seems to have some type of absorption mechanism which causes massive energy fluctuations that are hard to hide.

    So, not feeling a single energy fluctuation is really not normal and achieving that is extremely difficult.

    That guy is a real deal."

    "What do you n to do then?" Irel asked in a worried tone.

    "Of course, I have my tricks. The only way to enter my formation is through brute force which a person of that level cannot manage. Unless he has the formation key.

    I can use the time to inspect this formation and destroy it. I don''t even need to do much. I just need to destabilize it and the box inside will be destroyed. That is all we need to do¡­" *BOOM*

    Even before he could finish the sentence, a loud explosive sound was heard.

    Both Juwa and Irel turned to the explosion hurriedly and widened their eyes as they took in the sight in front of them. They were in awe and horror crept up their spines.

    Sam stood there calmly as he held the box in his hand while he examined it. The formation that wasid out by Juwa disappeared and the part of the stage that assisted in creating this formation was razed to the ground. Its like two lightning experts had a crazy fight over there.

    Just like Juwa said, Sam used his brute force to get to the centre of the formation and his brute is too high to the point that the formation broke apart and even within that explosion, he managed to secure the cube unscathed.

    "This is fucking disappointing. I thought the standards in the schools here are quite high. I am asking for too much I guess."

    Juwa and Irel copsed to the ground on the spot. Sam looked at the shocked judge and said.

    "I guess it is done. I am free to go now, right?"

    The judge nodded and the next thing they knew, everyone was gathered back in the court hall. The judge stamped on the case file in front of him and dered the case was closed and Sam doesn''t have to be ountable for anything that happened.

    The Zeus academy students were the first to leave based on Judge''s instructions and Sam is only allowed to go after ten minutes.

    "Why am I being held back?"

    "This is the rule of the Combat Trials. To avoid unnecessary aftermath." The judge answered calmly.

    "Sure."

    "I investigated you, you don''t have any background. You literally just appeared this morning and by midnight you are in the middle of abat trial with Zeus academy students.

    Its like you came just for this.

    Who are you exactly?"

    "I am Sam. That is all there is to it."

    "If you don''t want to tell me, it is fine. I am sure we will be meeting again in the future and we will have many more chances to go through this.

    But I am telling you, without a proper crew of your own and a proper power like an academy backing you up, it would be unwise to pick fights with the Olympian academies like this.

    You would be terribly sorry."

    Sam just smiled and didn''t answer him.

    "This is a genuine advice. I know a lot of people that acted just like you. But because they were alone, they were done in sooner orter. You might fall into the same category, if you act the same way.

    You are obviously skilled enough, so join an academy in the uing admission tests. It would be better if you are part of an Olympian academy, they will just brush this offpletely and even treat you better."

    "I don''t need their backing. We are not supposed to be on the same side.

    Thanks for your advice though. I will keep that in mind."

    Sam stood up and walked out of the enforcement hall. He attracted a lot of gazes as soon as he came out of the entrance. He made his way towards the nearest inn while he muttered to himself.

    "Crew huh? Let me show you what my crew looks like."

    As he muttered he took out a token and crushed it.

    "How many rooms do you have in this inn?" He asked the inn keeper.

    "Right now, half of the rooms are avable. Including the executive rooms."

    "Reserve all of them for me. If other rooms are emptied, reserve them for me too. If the current residents are willing, tell them I will pay for their room and to vacate it. I would like the whole inn for myself."

    "Are you sure sir?" The inn keeper asked nervously and Sam answered with a huge bag full of tinum coins.

    "Don''t worry, money is not an issue."

    Sam walked in after as if he owned the ce.

    He picked an empty room and crashed on the bed.

    "Fuck, I need to move around a bit now. I hope those guys gather soon enough."

    At this moment, far away from the Academic Realm.

    In a solely ruled by a faction that are devout followers of Apollo, the sun god of Olympus.

    The leader of the faction is standing in the middle of a volcanic region. His surroundings are full ofva streams and he himself is standing in the middle of a Lavake on a single rock.

    He had a panicked expression on his face as he looked at the person in front of him.

    This is the young man that came to their three days ago and before they knew it, this is the current state of their faction. The volcano that has been controlled for such a long time has ran out of their control and the once flourishing faction grounds appeared like a volcanic area that was devoid of any life.

    He has way too many questions to ask, but he didn''t even know where to begin. He is exhausted as he had to constantly fight for three days and he still hadn''t exactly figured out who his enemy is and why he came here.

    The young man slowly walked towards him.

    As the man was about to step back, a metal wall appeared behind him and stopped him there.

    "Don''t bother. It has been three days. You should have known by now. There is no point in resisting at all."

    "Who are you?"

    "I am Philip. I already told you my name three days ago. How can you forget that in such a short time?"

    "Wh¡­ Why¡­"

    "Why am I doing this? Your god must have told you right? Someone is knocking on the doors of all Olympus factions? I am the one that came to knock yours. You should have been prepared. I must say, I am very disappointed here."

    "L.. Let¡­" *BAM*

    Even before the old man could speak, Philip threw a fiery punch. The metal wall opened up and swallowed the old man, before a bunch of mes enveloped it and all of it turned into bunch of magma right in front of Philip.

    There is no trace of the old man.

    "This makes 122. I wonder how many others did." Philip muttered to himself, when he sensed something. He took out a token from his storage and it is vibrating vehemently.

    He had a smile on his face and muttered.

    "Guess, its time to go back home. It has been a while after all."

 Chapter 1959: Card Game

    While Philip was burning down a n that reigned for a few hundred years on a far away, Jack is currently hovering in the sky over another city in a different.

    He is currently sitting on his hoverboard high up in the clouds as he meditated calmly. The des of his hoverboard are rotating at a high speed and they are causing the surrounding wind to be chaotic.

    But at the eye of it all, he is very calm and collected. He looked rxed even.

    Meanwhile, from the city, a bunch of people are hurriedly leaving the city. The formation of the city has been wrecked down along with the city walls. The houses are down and so are the buildings of the main city.

    The people in charge of the city are currently kneeling down in front of the god they usually worship. They are feeling helpless right now. From the past few days, they have been hit by ''storms''.

    These storms are neither windstorms, rainstorms, nor the hailstorms. Rather, they are the sword storms.

    A few days ago, Jack came to their city and knocked on the gates of their estate. He looked like a young wandering swordsman who came to stop by and say hello. He was peaceful and polite throughout the whole interaction.

    He even showed respect to the watchmen who stopped him, the assistant who guided him and the elder who weed him.

    But that is the point where all went wrong.

    The elder respected Jack''s power and made sure that he showed enough kindness and goodwill.

    The only problem is that Jack requested just for one thing that made the elder and in turn the whole n furious.

    "I am requesting you to empty your city. Let your citizens scatter and migrate to other cities, from now on, you are not allowed to worship Hermes. At least not here and not as a n. If you refuse toply, I will have to destroy your n, your strength and your city."

    The elder of course thought that Jack was disrespecting them.

    But how would they know, he is the only guy among dusk organization who is still a bit kind to these enemies. He understood that the only fault of these people is that they are worshipping a wrong god. They didn''t have much choice in bing their enemies.

    So, he is giving a way out.

    No matter how many times he tried this though, things always went astray.

    These people are too stupid to understand what is happening to them.

    And he always had to take the drastic measures just like what he is doing right now.

    After the discussions failed, Jack just took hoverboard and went into the sky of the city. No matter how many people came to him to attack, he always cut them down. Every now and then, there would be a sword storming and hitting the city.

    The sword storms would be at an irregr interval, but they would have a regr progression. The intensity of each storm grew.

    At first, only the people who went after Jack were killed, so the city took a defensive stance and they tried to contact Hermes.

    The god initially responded and gave them some tricks, he even appeared as a projection and tried to scare off Jack, but too bad, there is nothing he could help these people with.

    No matter what formation he gave, it was destroyed by the sword storm.

    After the appearance of Hermes, Jack started the second step of this whole fiasco, he started giving the reasons for his attack. His enmity with the gods that these citizens believe in and why he is doing this.

    The citizens first believed in god, but slowly their trust in him died down. They lost all of it soon enough and the migrations started. Some of the n members cursed the gods and fled. Jack didn''t care. Their faith vaned and that is what he wanted.

    And these people will definitely make sure that the people under their control wouldn''t have any faint in this god, that is an even better result.

    Time passed in just three days, the city hase to this state. Except for the grand elders who had not much time left in their life spans and the n leader who didn''t have any other choice but to ept this responsibility of handling the whole n, all of them are basically fled or dead.

    Jack looked at the city and sighed.

    "I have tried my best to give you enough time. But this is war, you are now facing the consequences of your choice."

    He closed his eyes and took out his sword. While sitting down, he made a downward sh. At the same time a bunch of sword rays that were short of the des of the hover de started moving around chaotically.

    They took a revolving motion around the sword ray that came out of the sword and this created a turbulent sword storm that headed towards the city.

    Even before the rays touched the city, the buildings were swept away, people turned into bloody mist and the n leader who was still praying to the god had hisst breath.

    At this exact moment, Jack took out a token and the calm aura around him disappeared. It is reced with a very joyous look and he immediately made his move. It has indeed been a long time. He cannot wait to meet his friend again that too in their home.

    And of course, the meeting wouldn''t beplete if the remaining friend is not there.

    And that friend is currently in middle of a card game.

    In another far away.

    Watt sat in the middle of a n estate, the surroundings are covered with blood puddles and the earth soaked with that blood. Not a single de of grass in the fifty meter radius showed a green sheen.

    Across the table in front of Watt sat an old man who is currently shaking and shivering.

    They are all surrounded by a bunch of n members who held various positions of power and authority within the whole realm.

    *TRRRRRRIIIIIIIISSSSSH*

    Watt shuffled the cards rapidly. But these cards are all of blood red color. Of course it is obvious because they are made of blood iron.

    The game is actually very simple.

    On the back of every card, Watt has written something, and on the other side, there was a weird diagram inscribed. The text on the back are actually instructions and conditions of the duel.

    Both sides are protected with a formation and neither of them could see what was on the cards.

    After shuffling the cards, the n leader will pick a card they will read what is written on it. Based on those instructions, the n leader will assign his card to one of the n members.

    For example if the card says ''the opponent shouldn''t use their elemental energy for three minutes'' and the card is picked by the n leader, Watt shouldn''t use his elemental energy in the duel for three minutes.

    n leader will give this card to someone who can use this to their advantage and they will duel Watt.

    Each duel will go for ten minutes.

    If Watt lost the duel, they can kill him directly. But if he won, then he will activate the diagram on the card and that will cause something really really really bad.

    Right now, the n leader picked a card with shaking hands.

    The card read ''You cannot use your hands for the whole duel."

    Watt stood up and casually stretched. The n gulped down and looked at the crowd, but none of his n members are looking him in the eyes, he gritted his teeth and picked a person.

    That person reluctantly stepped forward and started fighting.

    Watt didn''t even give him chance. He had both of his hands in his pocket. He jumped high into the sky and threw an ax kick on the opponent. The kick went straight through the de and crushed the hands of the opponent.

    Watt had a clear upper hand, but he didn''t kill the opponent, instead he yed with him. He humiliated all the training the opponent had throughout his life and the rest of the n members felt like their whole lives are being trampled up on.

    After ten minutes, the opponent stood there with barely any breath left in his lungs. He is ready copse.

    "Too bad, it is my win again."

    Watt said as he picked the card.

    The n leader shivered and so did the rest of the n members. Watt looked at the diagram of the card and chuckled.

    "You know, this is one of the earliest cards in the collection. This blood is extracted from the leader of a n who were quite good at taming cranes. I hated them. So, after killing them, I took inspiration from the attacks of those cranes and made this card."

    As he spoke, he injected his energy into the card before throwing it. The card hovered near the opponent, the surrounding wind entered the card and exited in the form of cranes made of condensed wind.

    These cranes violently stabbed the opponent with their beaks. One hole after another appeared on the opponent''s body. Blood sttered everywhere. Even when the opponent copsed the cranes didn''t stop.

    Within two minutes, while everyone is watching the young man who was full of life a few minutes ago turned into mincemeat in a puddle of blood.

    Watt turned to the n leader, spread the cards and said.

    "Pick a card. Any card."

 Chapter 1960: Reunion

    Watt has done the same thing for hours.

    He would force the n leaders to pick a card, he will then force him to assign the card to someone and kill them the cruelest way possible.

    And that is not even all of it.

    After he sat down, Watt threw a small orb towards the blood puddle left behind by the previous opponent. The orb whirred and sucked in all the blood from the puddle. All that was left was the meat paste of a human being.

    He has been collecting the blood for their blood iron to make more cards for his collection.

    He was nning on going for more, but at this moment, the token started vibrating. The bloody aura he had until them disappeared for a moment and he appeared like a brand new person. He smiled excitedly as he looked at the token and without even looking at the n leader he said in a calm tone.

    "Let''s just end this. Pick ten cards and we will be done."

    The n leader was dumbfounded. He didn''t know what to do. But he knew that he couldn''t refuse Watt. At least with this game they have a very minute chance to make ae back, but if by any chance they refuse toply, he knew that they would be dead in an instant.

    Because unlike Philip and Jack, Watt came with a bunch of floating weapons of mass destruction. The devices that the dusk organization made when fighting with Sivan and his n are modified many times based on the base cultivation level of the organization and unlike the other two of his friends, he didn''t have any qualms or personal beliefs stopping him much.

    The only thing he checked when he visited a n or an organization is how they are treating the orphans and the kids of themoners. He didn''t even care much about the adults, their very and all that.

    He only focused on kids and if they are being treated in a way he didn''t like, he vacated the kids and sent them to Dusk to settle down, before raining hell on the whole organization. And if they treated them very badly, he set up a card game just like this.

    Usually card games go on for hours and some times more than a day. This is the first time Watt is trying to end it early.

    The n leader knew his time hase to end. Watt has shown then enough despair to make him beg the gods on his knees for days. But he hasn''t gotten any reply. He shed a tear as he picked the ten cards.

    Watt''s cultivation level was suppressed a bit, his wind element is gone. He can only use one leg and there are more of these handicaps.

    The fight started. The grand elders and the n leader himself jumped into the fight. Twenty minutes that is all it took. All ten of themid lifeless on the ground. Watt threw the orbs and contacted the team.

    "Finish it back and return to Deste. Stop the ongoing invasions for now. We are going home."

    "What happened Sir?" One of the subordinates asked. It is very unlike Watt to retreat back home.

    Even when the other two came back asionally, he didnt really bother showing up. It is almost like had a generational grudge against the Olympians.

    "Our boss ising?"

    Watt said with a smile and took off on silver wind.

    Two hourster.

    Watt wrapped up everything and arrived at the deste. He travelled full speed and the reached the main building''s top floor.

    Philip and Jack are sipping some wine as they waited for Sam and Watt.

    "You are finally here. It indeed took Sam himself to make youe back. How was the progress on your list?"

    Philip asked as he stretchedzily.

    "Three more to go. What about you guys?" Watt asked the two as he took out a ss of wine himself and sat down.

    "Same here."

    "Same."

    "You guys are way too slow. My process is slow but I only have three left. What happened to your supposed fast process? Fucking slowpokes."

    "Yeah yeah, whatever."

    As they are bickering with each other, suddenly the door opened once again.

    "What''s up guys? Seems like you are enjoying your time without me."

    Sam entered with a huge smile on his face. All three of them turned to him with the same type of grin on their faces. Sam walked to them and hugged them one by one.

    He sat down with them and had some wine. It is just like old times. It has been years since they saw each other, but none of them felt like it. They are happy, but nothing changed between them.

    They just had some small talk for a while before Philip asked.

    "So, are you going to stay home for a while or are you running around again?"

    "I am not gonna stay and you are not gonna stay either. Call for all the elite teams. Teams led by Night Ghost as well. We are leaving and going to a new realm with new rules. Its about time the gods really see what the Dusk is made of."

    "What''s the cultivation cut-off?"

    "Astral ne to Divine ne. Bring the cream of the crop of every realm. Cover all the fields. Formations, inscriptions, artisans, architects. I want everyone who is at the top of their fields following us."

    All three of them took out themunication tokens calmly and started giving out instructions.

    That day, the whole city went into an uproar, at least that is what''s visible to Sam.

    But he knew that right now the whole Dusk is on an uproar. Sam''s return is one thing, when the news spread that Sam is taking the elite teams somewhere else, they are even more pumped.

    Even though Sam had established Dusk and created a proper structure with all the squads and stuff, he never really led them to a proper battle. It was always either they were assigned to do a specific task or they were led by one of the trio.

    Now that Sam himself is leading the charge, everyone is willing and ready to get a chance to join the team.

    All of a sudden, the whole dusk entered apetitive mode. Everyone is trying to get a spot at the squad. Nobody knew when they will get another chance like this. But the notice Sam sent after that made everyone feel at ease.

    Sam decided to set a standard after taking the first batch of the squads away with him. And if the remaining people were to reach that desired standard, they will also be allowed toe to Academic Realm.

    Sam stayed there for the next two days. Dusk as usual operated with a very high efficiency. Everything was done within those two days.

    "So, we are going to go first. I will set up a formation there. Meanwhile, the squads here will create a formation on this side. We will be importing our squads in batches. It should be as subtle as possible."

    "Okay let''s go."

    "Before that, remember one thing. The next thing on your agenda is to break through to Divine ne. I need as many people as possible in the Divine ne for the ns to work. And I want my friends to be a part of it."

    "We are on the verge of breakthrough for a long time. We need that final push though."

    "Its fine. I have just the right thing for you guys. I am sure your faith is through the roof. You just need an energy push. You will break through in no time as long as yourprehension is up to mark."

    After that, Sam took out the dimensional drifter and four of them left the ce.

    Meanwhile back in the Academic Realm.

    Sam who disappeared for two days is the ongoing hot topic for everyone. Everyone heard about a guy who came and challenged the Zeus academy on the first day of his arrival in the Academic realm.

    Everyone knew how he dragged them down from their pedestals. Put them through thebat trial and made the Zeus Academy students stand there like clowns.

    He made the restaurant that never broke the rules to break the rules and he did all of this while being unscathed.

    Many academies were interested in the matter including the Zeus Academy. They wanted to know who he is and what he is trying to do. But he disappeared instantly. For the past two days, everyone is constantly searching for him, but to no avail. Everyone kept an eye on the inn he booked. By no one noticed anything wrong. Since Sam is lucky enough to convince the staff to keep the situation of booking the whole inn a secret, no one knew tat he did it.

    Now everyone is waiting for him to make an appearance in the academic realm.

 Chapter 1961: Deal with the Chef

    Sam and the trio appeared in the inn.

    With the added formations of his own, no one noticed his appearance in the room.

    "Just go ahead and stay in other rooms. Keep yourselves in perfect condition. Whoever reaches the optimum state first will get the first chance to breakthrough. I willy out the perfect formation with the perfect resources."

    The three of them nodded and went to three different rooms.

    Meanwhile, Sam went to the exchange centre once again. This time the receptionist who saw Sam stood up hurriedly with excitement.

    Sam looked at him and chuckled before giving three more formation blueprints.

    "Exchange everything to coins."

    The attendant nodded and threw them one by one in the formation. The appraisal of the items was done swiftly and with each blueprint, the receptionist felt a new level of excitement. Each blueprint is worth well over three million gold coins.

    It is not just the price that excited him. He has seen some miracles in his time here. It is Sam''s way of doing things. He is not immune from the rumors that are going around. So, He knew what Sam is doing.

    Just from the money he earned on the first day, Sam already stirred up so much shit, now with this amount of money, he can only imagine what is going to happen.

    Sam collected the money and went out.

    He walked openly on the streets and many people already recognized him.

    But Sam didn''t care.

    He walked into the restaurant calmly and took a seat. The waiter that previously served him came running with a wide grin on his face.

    "Hello Sir, how are you doing? Everyone thought you went into hiding after stirring up trouble."

    "Let them think what they want. I can''t be bothered with the opinions of the masses. Anyway, what''s special for today?"

    "It has been a while since there is a change in our menu sir. The specials are same as always."

    "Why is that? Your chef lost his touch with the creativity?"

    "I don''t know." The waiter just shrugged with a smile.

    Sam nodded and ordered for a bowl of soup along with some sides.

    "Any drinks sir?"

    "Come on, you know I have better drinks that this restaurant. I am sure you have tasted one of the bottles."

    "Of course." The young man scratched his head. He indeed tasted one of the bottles and he was absolutely lost in that heavenly taste of the liquor.

    "I will get your order right away. Please wait for a couple of minutes."

    "Wait." Sam stopped him and ced three scrolls on the table.

    He hovered his finger over all three and then thought for a moment before he picked one of them.

    "Give this to your chef."

    The waiter was confused and asked.

    "May I know what this is?"

    "Its something that your chef has been looking for."

    "My chef has been looking for?"

    "Yes, you can go to him and present this. He will understand what that is and I am sure he wille out and meet me."

    "My chef hasn''t met anyone for a long time. He has barely came out to for the public to see. Most of the people in the city don''t even know what he looks like. He is that level of a private person and you are telling me that he wille and meet you? I am sorry it is hard to believe."

    The waiter said those words, but still took the scroll and went to the kitchen.

    Inside the kitchen the waiter ran hurriedly to a man who is standing in front of arge stove.

    He wore a white robe and had a peaceful expression on his face. That peaceful expression is in aplete contrast with the huge size of his body that stood around six and a half feet tall. The muscles looked like they were carved out of mountain stones as he stirred arge pot with an equally hugedle.

    "Chef, Mr. Sam who caused a scene a couple of days ago came back and told me to give this to you."

    Chef frowned as he looked at the scroll. This is not the first time people offered him things. He is very popr and many of them wanted to be in their faction. He was offered treasures, women, riches and everything he could ever want.

    But he never really cared about those things.

    He thought Sam is also trying to bribe him, but when he recalled how Sam handled things, he felt that would be way too much of a simplification.

    He took the scroll doubtfully and opened it.

    There were a series of words written neatly. Line by line forming a full recipe and finally there is an image neatly painted at the bottom in a great detail.

    As soon as he skimmed through the contents, his eyes widened, the peace was gone and his aura raged for some reason. He calmed down the very next second and came back to his sense. There is visible excitement in his eyes and he had goosebumps all over.

    "Is he still in the restaurant?"

    "Yes, he is waiting for his order to be served."

    The chef immediately ran out to Sam who is leisurely sipping his wine. When he saw the chefing to him in such a hurry, he just smiled and before the other party could even speak, he gestured him to sit down.

    "I hope you liked what I sent you."

    "How.. How¡­" The chef wanted to ask some questions but he didn''t even know where to start. So, Sam took the cue to speak.

    "How do I know that your soup is an iplete recipe?"

    The chef nodded like a pecking hen.

    "Why do you think I had ten bowls of it? As much as it is beneficial for the cultivation, it is the not the greatest elixir I could afford for my growth. I can eat raw meat and still gain the same level of benefits if I want to.

    At first I was just curious about the taste and also wanted to mess with some people. That is why I ordered such arge amount of soup.

    But as I tasted all those bowls, I understood one thing. The energy is acting a certain way when you consume the soup. It is concentrated and refined. At the same time is acting like a conscious being. It is trying to notice the natural energy cirction route of the cultivation technique and move along with it.

    The soup itself is made to eliminate the energy wastage that happens with every single elixir intake. But that is not all, you wanted to infuse elemental energies into it, but that increased the wastage of energy, defeating the purpose of it.

    You have been trying this for a long time. So, I thought I would just give you a hand."

    The chef felt a mix ofplex emotions run through his mind. He had indeed been trying this for years. He has put in a great deal of effort and resources in research. And to think that Sam just ate the soup once and he came back with a solution after two days, he felt like he has been wasting his life all along.

    The excitement was reced with a glooming sadness.

    Sam noticed this and said.

    "Sometimes things are beyond our hands, just from the recipe you should have understood that the route I took would have been impossible for you to figure out since you couldn''t seen the energy the way I did.

    And in times like this, rather than being stuck on a problem you should take help from people like me and further your research.

    I am sure this is not the end of this soup. There is something more that you want to do with it. And that part is something that I didn''t understand or envision. That is yours to figure out."

    "Why are you giving this to me? This level of expertise in energy modification is very valuable. You could have gotten these techniques appraised and then publicized with an academy. You would get name, fame and all the recognition and riches that you could ever need."

    "I would rather have a friendly cooperation with you. Name, fame, riches and recognition, they are all very easy for me to acquire. Worthy coborations and friendships are hard toe by.

    I have worked on two more variants of this soup. One with a neutral element that works for swordsmen and another for a Dual elements of fire and metal. As long as you can sessfully finish making the soup based on the recipe I already gave you, I will give you the remaining two.

    You can take those as reference and work on other variants. Like a soup for spear users, a soup for archers and a soup for barbaric fighters, you can also work on soups for multiple elementalbinations.

    Not only that, I will also get a rival and a co-worker that you would love to work with."

 Chapter 1962: Bulk Amount

    Chapter 1962: Bulk AmountThe Chef looked at the recipe again and pursed his lips.

    The offer is tempting. So tempting that even the chef who rejected the advances of every academy in the vicinity wanted to ept it immediately. But his rational mind still won over.

    "What do you want in exchange? I don''t believe there is a free lunch in this world."

    "Of course, I never make a losing deal. I will assist you with your research by providing an equally talented chef and some of my own insights. I am also going to set up a club within this area that focuses of developing recipes of food type elixirs.

    You will have ess to that club and the research thates out of it for free.

    In exchange, you should also provide me with your cooking services. Every now and then I mighte up with a special recipe of a dish that I need you to make and I want you to make it. Also, there should be special treatment for some of my people in the restaurant.

    For that of course, I will improve the construction of your restaurant and build another floor on top of this one. The special floor for VIPs.

    Along with that, you will also have ess to some of the recipes my organization has developed over the years. Both food and liquor. You can add them to your menu¡­"

    Sam kept on listing out a few more conditions. They are not exactlyplicated and they are not even major in the chef''s opinion, but there are many of them. The chef agreed to them all.

    "What should I call you? I can''t keep going on with Chef, right?"

    Sam asked as he shook his hand.

    "Nn."

    "Sam."

    Sam and Nn discussed for a few more minutes. Then Nn left Sam alone and went back to the kitchen while Sam enjoyed his meal.

    But the next minute someone uninvited came and sat in front of him.

    "Just when I thought you couldn''t get more mysterious you pulled something off that threw me off. Talking to the chef of this restaurant? Shaking his hands and exchanging some scrolls? You are way more capable than I thought."

    Sam looked at the familiar face in amusement.

    It is none other than Pearl.

    "Yourckeys are really fast."

    Sam replied as he just ate freely. At that moment, the waiter came running with a special dish and ced it on the table.

    "Sir, chef said this is the new dish he has been experimenting on the side. It is not even on the menu yet. He wants you to try it."

    Sam looked at the dish and smiled before tasting it.

    "You must be really special to the chef. What kind of magic did you use?"

    "Can we just skip this talk and go to the point? Why are you here?"

    "Well, I am here on behalf of the Zeus academy. After you created thatmotion and disappeared, the Zeus academy seniors were searching for you along with the other academies as well. Even the gambler''s academy is looking for you."

    "For what? To see my face?"

    "No, to make you join their academies. You are good with formations and you are good atbat. Apparently, you also have a huge stash of blueprints that raking in millions of gold coins at the exchange center."

    "Your information is decent.

    But, did your senior brothers like the ones in Late stage and Peak stage know about me?"

    Pearl chuckled and said.

    "Come on Sam, don''t think you are that important. You might be good for a freshman, but the seniors in thetter stages are very busy. Only a select few rarelye back to the academy to stay for more than a month. They don''t have enough time on their hands to care for freshmen."

    "So, the seniors in charge right now are the people at Middle Stage?"

    "Yes."

    "Now that makes a lot of sense." Sam muttered as he smiled.

    "What makes sense?"

    "Nothing much. Anyway, if you guys want to take some revenge or something, go ahead and proceed with your ns. I can hardly care. If you are trying to poach me into your academy, then give up on your thoughts.

    I don''t really like these rmendations and stuff. I am going to attempt every single entrance examination of the academies within this region. I also have some other academies in mind that are a bit far away.

    So, if you want to try your luck, you can meet me after the entrance examinations are over."

    "Entrance exams start a monthter. So, will you be gone in that time?"

    "Why would I be gone? I will be roaming around doing my own thing? Why? Are you interested?"

    "A little bit."

    "Too bad, you are not really my type. I already told you about my friend though. If you want I can arrange a date for you guys."

    "Is your friend as manly as you?"

    Pearl asked as she leaned forward while cing her palms under her chin.

    "You can find out."

    Sam said as he savored the new dish in front of him.

    "You seem to be enjoying it a lot. Can I have a bite?"Sr

    Pearl said as she extended her hand to pick up a piece of meat.

    But it was blocked by a form in Sam''s hands.

    "Sorry, I only share food with three types of people and you don''t belong to any of the three."

    Sam said as he put thest piece of meat in his mouth.

    "Can I know what those three types are?"

    "Something you are not. Anyway, let your seniors know I am not enticed by your academy in the least and after thest encounter where I thrashed your guys, my impression has lessened by a dozen times. If you really want to entice me and make me join you guys, you need to work harder."

    Sam left afterwards and disappeared into shadows.

    As soon as he left, a bunch of other people in their student uniforms entered the restaurant and some people who were supposed to be the customers ran to them pointed the direction Sam has disappeared into.

    But to their dismay, they didn''t manage to get a glimpse of Sam.

    Meanwhile, Sam was busy with something else. He went to another shop that is very simr to the exchange center. The reason this is simr is because this is also run by the employees hired by themittee of gods that run the academic realm.

    And these people are in charge of the real estate within the academic realm.

    Sam entered and was greeted by a polite old man.

    "I would like to purchase some real estate in the outskirts of the city."

    "Most certainly, you can do it. How big of and do you need?"

    Sam went on exin his requirements. As he did the old man''s eyes widened more and more.

    "That will cost approximately eight million gold coins."

    "Oh? That is more expensive that I thought." Sam said in surprise.

    "We can work something out if you can lessen some of the requirements." The old man offered thinking that Sam might have some trouble with such amount of cash. But Sam shook his head.

    "No need. I will take it."

    "Yes sir. If you can pay the advance, we can proceed with the registration and other paperwork. If you are unable to pay the whole amount directly, we can also work on some mortgage n. For that you need to submit your student identity token and the academic credits you hold."

    Sam was surprised when he heard this.

    He was amused. He just shook his head and said.

    "No need. I will pay all the amount upfront."

    He just gave a spatial ring and dusted his hands off.

    The old man checked the contents and gulped in excitement. This is the biggest sale he has ever conducted. Even though there is nothing he would gain from making sales, he will still have bragging rights among other salesmen.

    Sam finished the procedures and went to the exchange center again.

    The attendant was surprised to see him. It has just been a few hours since Sam left.

    "I came back to collect some funds in bulk. I underestimated how expensive this realm actually is."

    He then started digging a bunch of blueprints. They included some of the ns he just drew and didn''t bother building them because they are not up to mark and there are some that are just pure concepts of spiritual energy with theoretical calctions with no practical applications as of yet.

    Looking at over twenty or so scrolls, the attendant gulped nervously.

    He took one scroll after another with shaking hands.

    Sam looked at the numbers that are increasing with a smile.

    The way he passed the scrolls on, is in an ascending order.

    The number of kept on increasing. When the total amount reached fifty million coins, Sam stopped.

    There are still five scrolls left and Sam didn''t appraise them.

    "I guess that would be enough for a long while. Thanks."

 Chapter 1963: Eccentric Architect

    After collecting the huge amount of money, Sam got started with something else.

    Construction.

    Now that he bought arge plot ofnd, it is time to change it into something that would suit his tastes and serves his purpose properly. But for the construction of it, he is not doing it himself and he is also not taking the help of other Dusk members.

    Instead, he is outsourcing it to someone else.

    Sam met with the trio who are still cultivating. He gave them a token each and said.

    "After you reach the peak condition, go to the restaurant. That guy is now our business partner and he is a great chef. He will make you guys a special soup that is suitable for your cultivations individually.

    That soup will help you with the breakthrough.

    There are some special areas within the city that can be rented out for the breakthrough purposes. This spatial ring contains the maps, the detailed procedure and finally the coins that are needed to ess those areas.

    Breakthrough as fast as you can.

    Because within the next week or so, more people from our organization would being and I need you guys to guide them through the same process."

    "Got it. No problem."

    The three of them answered and Sam distributed the tokens and rings. He met the chef and told him about the tokens before leaving the area.

    The current area that he is in is where most of the Olympian schools are and only the Gambler''s academy is the exception in the immediate vicinities.

    The realm does have a lot of open space for the students to explore and they mirror some unique wilderness and they are suitable for students to train. Of course, this distance also helps in reducing the conflicts between rival groups.

    Sam travelled for half a day and moved to a certain area. The area that has another group of academies. The academies established by Hindu gods. Indra, Karthikeya, Agni, there are many other gods who have their academies here.

    But Sam didn''te for any of them.

    Instead, he came to meet a contract architect within that region. He went to the office directly and met with the receptionist.

    "I would like to meet your boss."

    "I am sorry, you might have to wait. You can give me your details on a scroll and I will pass it on to him. He will decide if he wants to meet you or not."

    The receptionist took out a scroll, a brush and some ink. Sam chuckled and took the brush.

    He has heard of this man. On the first day, apart from inquiring about the surroundings, he also managed to sneak in some other information and when he came across some knowledge of this person, he modified some of his ns.

    He heard about this architect''s entric behavior.

    So, he is not exactly surprised.

    He dipped the brush in the ink and started writing down on the scroll.

    His aura changed and some earth elemental energy seeped into the brush as he wrote him name in the ink.

    He didn''t write anything else.

    All that scroll has is the clear and beautiful word written in ink and the spiritual energy signature along with his own aura clearly imprinted on it. The receptionist was surprised by this and gave Sam a look.

    He took the scroll and went inside.

    Inside the room a young man who looked to be in his early thirties is standing upside down as he looked at a weird shaped rock that was ced inside a weirdly shaped ss prism.

    His head is bent in a weird angle as he looked at the rock carefully from those distorted faces of the prism.

    The receptionist came in silently like a cat. He ced the scroll on the floor and spoke in a very silent tone.

    "Sir, someone hase to see you."

    "Did you collect their name and details?"

    "Yes, Sir. He is waiting outside for the response."

    "What did he write on the scroll, read it for me?"

    The young man asked as he changed his posture a bit.

    "SAM."

    The receptionist read and stopped.

    "Go on."

    "That''s it Sir. That is all he has written."

    The young man finally felt interested. This is the first time someone gave him such a short introduction of themselves. He stood up and took the scroll.

    His eyesnded on Sam''s writing and all of a sudden, he felt a weird sensation in his head. His eyes widened before he closed them shut. The one word stuck a cord in his heart and behind that one word, he started seeing many different things.

    Different qualities of earth came to his mind. Strong, solid and stubborn. Everything is so heavy and stable that it is impossible to move and within that immovability there is this sense of stubborn pride.

    He looked the name from different angles and a weird smile crept on his face. He picked a coat hanging on a stand nearby and walked out hurriedly.

    He arrived at the front desk, where Sam is leisurely standing while looking around. He is admiring the architecture of the building.

    "Who are you?"

    The architect asked directly.

    Sam smiled and replied.

    "I am Sam. That is only identity of mine that matters and I am here to give you a job."

    "I don''t just take any jobs, you know?"

    "Don''t worry, I can assure you, this job will be of great interest to you. You will absolutely love it."

    "Before that, let me ask you something. Did you genuinely write this?"

    He asked as he pointed at the scroll.

    Sam looked at it and said.

    "Of course. Not only did I write it, I drew this too."

    Sam then took out arger scroll and threw it to the architect.

    The architect, looked at therge scroll and crouched down before spreading it. His squat position looked weird, but he didn''t care.

    The scroll spread and he nced at the design that was unraveled.

    He carefully looked at the design and ced his hand on the floor beside the scroll. Earth energy seeped into it and the stone floor started morphing. A protrusion appeared which was automatically moulded into a specific shape.

    Sam looked at it and was surprised. It is one of theplex walls that are part of the blueprint.

    The wall is not exactly the mostplex thing in the design, but it is not easy enough for someone to build it in a single nce.

    But this only made Sam think that this guy is the right choice.

    "You designed this?"

    "Yes."

    "This is one of the greatestbinations of architectural design and machines that I have ever seen. Once it is done, it is going to be an absolute fort. Where are you nning to build it?"

    Sam gave another scroll with the map and the location of the area.

    "In the outskirts of the Olympian area? That is a tough ce to build this on. What are you nning to do with it?"

    "y a game."

    "What kind?"

    "The kind that shouldn''t be revealed to the rest of the world."

    "If that is what you think, then fine. But there is just one thing, I am not proficient enough in the inscription part of this blueprint and even the formation is not my strongest forte. I can only help with the machinery and architectural part."

    "Don''t worry. I will handle the remaining two."

    "So, what is this ce called again?"

    "It is called the Hub. I will be opening it real soon."

    "I am looking forward to finishing it. I will need one week at least though."

    "It is fine. After you are done with it, we can talk further. I have a feeling that we will be working for a really long while."

    "Let''s see. If you can acquire blueprints like this, I wouldn''t mind.

    Anyway, I am Harsh. Also known as the entric builder. Whatever you want to call me."

    He finally extended his hand.

    Sam shook his hand with this entric architect with a smile.

    "When it is the work gonna star?"

    "In one hour. Let me just finish with some packing."

 Chapter 1964: First Batch

    Time passed.

    Sam returned along with Harsh. But they weren''t seen together. Sam entered the city and went into the inn before everyone''s eyes. By now the news has already spread that Sam collected tens of millions of coins from the exchange center with just blueprints.

    The exact number was not revealed. But everyone knew that something big is about to happen.

    Many people visited the inn and tried to get in touch with him, but it seems like the weight of the inn''s owner is high enough to not buckle in for these requests.

    One of the major reasons is that the only students came until now. There are no big wigs.

    It is easier for the inn owner to resist if it is only students.

    The whole city is currently waiting for what is about to happen. They want to see what Sam is going to do next. When he took three million he pped the shit out of Zeus academy students. He took ten million and no one knows what he did and then he took even more money, everyone is curious on what is happening.

    But Sam has no ns of revealing himself voluntarily.

    He hid inside the inn without doing anything, at least that is what it looked like to the rest of the world. But he disguised himself and used the dimensional drifter to leave the inn and go to thend he purchased.

    Harsh already started work.

    He didn''t have a big team. Only three people and one of them is the receptionist Sam has seen back at Harsh''s office.

    But they are working fast. Really fast.

    The Divine ne cultivators using the earth element for construction. It couldn''t be anymore faster than it is right now. The stone and other material required was provided by Sam of course. He even brought some from the reserves of Dusk organizations new explorations.

    Harsh also brought some of his own rare materials and any other materials required were bought under Harsh''s name. But of course Sam paid for them.

    After the foundation was built, Sam also started working on the building actively.

    There are a lot of inscriptions and formations to be done in this. This ce is going to be one of the core locations that handles a lot of his future operations. Some of the inscriptions that Sam is adding were not even included in the blueprint given to Harsh.

    As the hub''s construction was going on in full swing, it was time for the first breakthrough in the trio. Sam thought Philip would be the one to reach the bottleneck first, but to his surprise it was Jack.

    Jack immediately did as Sam instructed. He took the token to the restaurant and consumed the special bowl of soup. This is one of the modified recipes Sam gave to Nn.

    Jack then rented the space for breakthrough and prepared for the breakthrough.

    As soon as he consumed the soup, the energy overflowed within his body. He is full of vigor and the energy easily took the form of his sword energy.

    While Jack went to breakthrough, Watt and Philip didn''t take long for their own. They both reached the bottleneck the very next day.

    When they went to consume the soup and breakthrough, Jack was already out. He already changed out of the coat and wore a much more lowkey attire and went to the hub.

    There Sam is already prepared with a formation and a task for Jack.

    "So, what should I do now?"

    "In three weeks or so, admissions will open up for the academies. You will be attending a specific academy. Of course, before that you have another task.

    This is the space gate connecting to deste. From now on, all the selected candidates will being to this realm in batches and you are in charge of this task along with the other two.

    Bring them out in small batches.

    There is another small space gate within the construction site. Use that to go to a forest nearby and then guide the out of the forest carefully into the city.

    Divine ne people are going to be here and the Astral ne people to a different region.

    By exam time I will be ready with the list of assignments for everyone. Be lowkey and make sure everyone gets to know the ways of these regions.

    No one should suspect that all these people are connected and are part of a single organization."

    "Don''t worry, that is what we have been doing for a long while now. We can manage that much."

    "Great. Now get on with it and exin the details with the other two as well."

    Sam then went back to work.

    The next day after the remaining two also finished their breakthrough, Jack went ahead and exined the task to the other two. Sam saw as Watt and Philip hand over a few spatial rings to Jack.

    Apparently they had a bet on who is going to breakthrough first.

    After those small exchanges, Sam waited for them to execute their first tasks.

    The first batch of people are of course Sam''s personal elite team. The ten people he had collected to finish the organizations task. It is still being led by Night Ghost who was the first person to breakthrough into the Divine ne within the Dusk organization.

    He was soon followed by Paras, Vidyuth and recently Saber Monarch also followed suit.

    The rest of the team including Sia, Gyan, Five elemental King, Tapas, Kiran are still in the Astral ne, but they are in the same situation as the trio. At the absolute peak.

    Sam actually thought that these people would breakthrough before the trio. After all, their cultivations were way ahead of the trio when he first met them. But it seems like the trio hunted down the opportunities to keep up with Sam.

    The rest of the organization also kind of supported their goal to the fullest and let them have the first pick over the resources. Sam is actually impressed.

    Sam went to meet with the first batch that came.

    After all, they all spent a lot of time together.

    As soon as he appeared in front of them, the first thing Sam experienced is not joy or a friendly hug, instead it is a close up of Saber Monarch''s face.

    Sam''s instincts almost red up to punch that face.

    "What the fuck are you doing? Are you into guys now?"

    Sam asked slowly.

    Saber Monarch poked Sam''s face a couple of times while blinking before saying.

    "Is it really you boss?"

    Sam swung his hand and pped on Saber Monarch''s head.

    "Haven''t you changed even a little bit? I heard that you have over a dozen kids, at least I thought you would have matured by now. Why are you still an idiot?"

    "Come on Boss, that is not what you used to say. I thought we became best of the friends when we worked together. Imagine how majestic we looked together when we are separating the heads of our enemies from their necks? People have written stories about us.

    How can you call me an idiot?"

    Sam rolled his eyes.

    "By the way, Boss. You have something else to do. I think you owe me over a dozens. Fourteen to be exact."

    s? How do I own you? When did I even incur that kind of debt?"

    "Well, you gave Watt a when he got married and had a kid. I had fourteen kids when you were away, so of course I need you to give me thoses."

    Sam and everyone else immediately ignored Saber Monarch and decided to catch up. Sam exined the n to them and left to do his own work.

    Now that the core members of the n are here, they are going to take care of the rest while Sam handles the development of the infrastructure.

    Time passed just like that.

    Every day a few people areing at odd timings from Deste and then they were sent to the forest before they individually arrived in the city.

    They acted like new people that wanted to get into academies. There are only few Divine ne cultivators, but there are many people who are on verge of breakthrough. Which is good enough for him.

    But still most of the people are in Astral ne and they are going to join the Astral ne academies. Before the admission, Sam arranged everything for them.

    Within the week, the whole building was constructed. It cost a lot, but Sam still had way too much money left.

    "This is an interesting project. I want to see how it will look once the formations and the inscriptions are done and it is on full use."

    Harsh asked as he looked at the building.

    "You can watch it. It won''t take too long. And you can ess this project and many more in the future too, if you get into a joint venture with me."

 Chapter 1965: Aron

    Time passed.

    It didn''t feel long and the month has gone by. Sam was constantly busy. Nobody knew what he was doing exactly. Even though there are a lot of people interested in him, the fact that he is not being seen made everyone be passive in pursuit of him.

    Also everyone is sure that he would be attempting the exams, so they didn''t really put in too much effort.

    And now it is already time for the first entrance examination.

    Since the academies wanted everyone to get a shot at their entrance examinations, there is a strict agreement on the ovep of the examinations. No two academies in a single region will conduct exams on the same day.

    Another condition to support this is that an entrance examination for an academy can only be held for a day. It shouldn''t extend more. Following all these conditions is a must.

    And the first day of the examinations is for the apollo''s academy.

    It is mostly suitable for fire users and archers. Thebination of both would benefit the most in this academy.

    Even the whole examination is beneficial to the archers and long ranged fire users. Everyone knows this, but no one really cares about this disparity and unfairness towards the other element users and other types of warriors.

    Sam finally made an appearance on this day and went to the examination site to register and participate.

    Along with him, Philip and Five elemental king is also taking the examination. Sam''s presence attracted a lot of attention. Not from his peers who are taking the exam, but from the seniors in the academy who are in charge of the admissions.

    After all the candidates gathered in the testing site, the seniors came on to the stage and started addressing them.

    "Wee to all the candidates. This year after reviewing all the applicants, only six hundred people were selected to take the test.

    The test is as direct as always. You will all be directed into the testing area. It is an artificial volcanic region that was created solely for testing and training of the people within the academy.

    The settings of this area were altered so that people of your level that too going in there for first time can endure it properly.

    The rules of the test are simple. Within this volcanic region, there will be some fire elemental creatures that will be travelling around. They are your enemies and their aim is to kill you guys. They will attack you with all their might.

    There are exactly one thousand eight hundred elemental creatures and as their time goes on their strength will increase little by little. And if they kill any of you, they will not only absorb your energy, they will even copy your skills.

    So, don''t just expect some kind of fire skills from them. If they kill a lightning user and consume them, they will start throwing lightning.

    Each elemental creature gives you a point and if a person who collected some points was killed or defeated by another person, they will lose all their points.

    If you don''t want to die in any scenario, use the escape token before yourst breath leaves your body. Then even if you lose your points, you will get to live.

    Thest hundred people will be selected into the academy.

    Thest thirty people will be assigned to the special ss.

    The top ten will get a chance to get lessons from the Elder Instructors.

    The top three get to meet Apollo''s projection and the first ce will get a custom made weapon from Apollo''s Army''s arsenal."

    Everyone is excited.

    At this moment, Philip raised his hand and asked.

    "By any chance if a person ranks high, but doesn''t want to join the academy, what would happen to the rewards?"

    The Senior looked at him with a frown. That is not a proper question. After all, it means that some high rankers are looking at the academy with a disdain.

    "That is unlikely to happen, but if they do, they will be awarded with a honorary student position along with the rewards they were promised."

    They were they redirected to the testing area.

    It is indeed an artificially created volcanic area. Sam could feel the massive formations functioning. Not a single ounce of it is pure spiritual energy. Instead everything is purely divine energy.

    Sam is pretty impressed by the sheer amount of energy that is being transferred and manipted every second.

    All the candidates appeared at different points within the testing area. Within the immediately visible range, Sam couldn''t see anyone. It seems like the area is quite vast.

    The whole terrain hasrge protrusions of magma rocks. Instead of vegetation, these protrusions made up for most of the cover. It is hard for anyone to get a clear straight line view with them.

    All the contestants did only one thing as soon as they arrived. They started moving. Not by flight, but by foot.

    Everyone of them could fly as a Divine ne cultivator, but none of them did.

    Instead, they all took advantage of the terrain and hid themselves while moving around.

    Sam on the other hand took apletely different approach. He floated in the air. He took flight and reached a certain altitude so that he can get a proper view on the whole terrain. He acted as if he owned the ce.

    After Sam took that altitude, he took out his bow and activated partial fire elemental fusion. He didn''t even any real arrows. He made energy arrows instead and aimed at one of the elemental creatures nearest to him.

    *SWOOSH* *BOOM*

    The arrow whistled through the air as it left a tail of mes and smoke that is clearly visible to everyone in the testing site before it reached the elemental creature and exploded.

    The creature was disintegrated in the explosion and disappeared as if it never existed before.The number ''1'' appeared on top of Sam''s head, confirming his first kill.

    And even before that number manifestedpletely, it flicked once again and changed into 2 because he shot another arrow at another elemental creature.

    As everyone witnessed a rain of arrows were shot in different directions. Sam didn''t sleep on his power. He just attacked ruthlessly. Only one attack was needed for every creature.

    Before the people could even realize, he had already killed fifty creatures. Fifty arrows shot in less than two minutes. Sam felt like he is still slow and increased his speed.

    The candidates are more or less elites in their own realms and territories, they easily saw the different in the speed and they made their move. In thest two minutes Sam already eliminated the hopes of a lot of contestants.

    And of course, there are other people who are also a cut above the rest and they immediately made their move at the elemental creatures.

    But there is another thing many people failed to notice since Sam just hogged a lot of attention.

    Philip and Five elemental king, even though not as shy as Sam, already started killing way before the rest started.

    In the first two minutes, Five Elemental king killed twelve while Philip is at eight. They are moving faster and faster with each passing second. The three of them were ughtered by the elementals. But among them, Sam did something else as well.

    He started destroying the advantage of the other ranged users. He is shooting their attacks down and stole their kills as he moved around.

    It is safe to say that the whole test is dominated by him.

    This attracted the attention of a lot of instructors, but of course, it didn''t really sit well with the rest of the contestants and some freshmen that joined through the special admissions.

    One of them looked at Sam and cursed under his breath, because his brother is currently in the middle of the test along with Sam and the rest.

    Of course, Sam could give a fuck.

    Meanwhile, somewhere within the testing field, four people gathered together. One of them had a bow strapped on his back as he stood and watched Sam''s fireworks ring in the sky.

    He had a smile on his face.

    The remaining three sat nearby as they rxed.

    "What do you think boss, shall we start?"

    "No, we are changing ns. Whoever this guy is, he is saving us a lot of trouble. Now because of him, everyone is gonna speed up and try to kill the elementals and it is going to stir up a lot of fights in between the contestants.

    Let''s fish in the muddy waters and also, since he is generous enough to not hold back his energy consumption and collect so many points, it would be disservice to not hunt him down and take those points.

    Let''s just make some preparations for it and reap the final rewards."

    "As you say, boss. That guy can only me his stupid luck for this then."

 Chapter 1966 Waste of time

    Chapter 1966 Waste of time

    One hour passed.

    Sam finally stopped attacking crazily. The number on top of his head stopped at 900. He singlehandedly took half of the targets for himself and now he is floating in the air with his arms crossed.

    His appearance felt like he is making a mockery of the rest of the contestants in the test.

    Philip and the Five elemental king also hold a huge number on their heads. Not as big as Sam''s but they are way past a hundred.

    Apart from them, none of the other contestants managed to make it to three digits. In fact very few people are in the high two digits.

    Philip and Five elemental king also stopped their hunting. They slowed down and waited for thepetition to end.

    They already attracted enough attention from the people that they need to attract and they are perfectly fine with their current position.

    At this moment, the guy with three of hispanions finally decided to make a move.

    "It seems like that guy already achieved what he wanted. He slowed down and from the looks of it, he might have be tired too. I guess it is time to make a move."

    The leader of the group said to his teammates.

    "I am actually surprised that no one else attacked him until now. It is not like he is hiding. Everyone in the contest is cocky enough to think they are not less than any other contestant. Why did no one go after him?"

    Hearing that question, the leader chuckled.

    "You didnt pay enough attention my friend. It is not that no one tried, but no one seeded in making a move at him."

    The teammates frowned in confusion and the leader exined.

    "Whenever someone wanted to make a move and tried to move forward, he attacked them. It doesnt matter whether they are dead or not, his attacks are powerful enough to make them unable to fight."

    "He did?"

    "Of course why do you think he shot so many arrows when he only killed half of the elementals? And at the speed he started the hunt do you think he would need an hour to kill nine hundred? He killed a hundred in two minutes. Do some math.

    Most of his fire power actually went for taking down the attacks of other contestants and taking out the contestants themselves.

    He is powerful alright. Very powerful.

    If he was born in a different generation or even a few yearster, he would have had all the glory, but too bad he is born with me in the same generation. This is my era. The era of Aron and no one can change it.

    Let''s go. We need to do something before we start hunting him."

    Aron went along with his team. They scouted the surroundings and spotted a guy fighting with an elemental. It is a very tough match between them. The main reason being the guy has wood elemental affinity and he is not versatile like Sam or Noah in using it.

    The elemental is a direct counter to him.

    And him being a mage is not exactly a great additional variable.

    To top it all off, he is not a properbat type. Like the guy Sam faced in the trial bybat he is focused on academics.

    At that moment, he is setting up a formation to take down the elemental. But before he could activate thest node, something happened.

    An arrow flew through the air and hit an active node within the formation.

    *BOOM*

    The contestant had to take the bacsh and flew in the air for a moment before crashing down.

    The elemental looked at Aron and growled. It didn''t even realize the remaining three members of Aron''s team already surrounding it from three sides¡­

    Time passed, more and more fights are breaking out among the contestants and soon all the elementals disappeared except one. At least that is what the formation stated.

    But no one bothered to actively search for it, instead they started hunting down the fellow contestants for the points.

    It is a much easier choice and a surefire option.

    The battles raged and soon Sam also started seeing more and more contestants in his immediate surroundings. They are all thinking of making a move on her. And a few of those people even had some simr thoughts.

    Those people with simr thoughts are right now gathered a bit far away from Sam.

    "So, the terms of alliance are like this. Our team of three and your team of three will participate.

    I will attack and drag the target''s attention. My agility and range are enough to keep him upied and all his focus would only be on me. My two teammates will add some extra weight for him.

    You three are responsible for the attack. We will help in keeping him upied. We will split the points evenly"

    "Deal"

    "Deal"

    The deal was made instantly and all six of them made their move. Sam aimed his arrow and shot at them. The team in charge of distracting Sam are indeed good with their agility. They managed to dodge Sam''s arrows pretty skillfully.

    But that is it. They are just skillful. The fifteenth-ranked soldier on twenty-sixth squad of Dusk organization is also skillful. That doesn''t mean, he is good enough to deal with Sam.

    The seniors and spectators wanted to watch a great show, but Sam just finished it off in two minutes. By the end of it he is holding one of the contestants by his throat and said.

    "You really thought this is a good idea? At least you should have made a detailed n. I almost feel insulted."

    The contestant who was trying to get out of Sam''s grip, suddenly stopped trying. A smile crept on his face fo Sam''s amusement.

    The contestant kicked up, but Sam blocked the kick with his other hand, but a token of sorts shot out from under his shoe andtched on Sam''s abdomen.

    A gush of ice elemental energy entered Sam''s meridianwork. It directly infiltrated his cells and organs along with his blood. It was meant to freeze him to death.

    Sam''s expression didnt even change as he looked at the token calmly. The energy is being injected rapidly and partial fusion form is weakening as he didnt try to fight back.

    At this moment, the guy in Sam''s grip admitted to his defeat and disappeared from the testing site.

    Sam stood in the air as he let the ice energy spread his entire body. He turned into a different direction and looked as a figure appeared. It is an elemental creature. Thest of the elemental creatures.

    He looked at it calmly to examine what kind of aura it is releasing.

    He is even more amused.

    At that moment, a bunch of vines shot out of the ground to capture Sam by his feet and dragged him. Next a bunch of lightning bolts appeared above his head along with some icicles that came from the front all the while the elemental creature ran towards him with mes spreading wildly.

    An energy sphere formed around Sam blocking all the attacks. The vines were not strong enough to pull him down as well. All attacks froze out of that energy sphere and they are not even disappearing.

    He then extended his hand and aimed it at the elemental creature. It stopped moving as if it was held by an invisible hand.

    "Whoever tried this, pleasee out. I dont want to waste my time dealing with you guys one by one. I already spent way more time than I wanted to on this stupid test."

    Sam

    Sam''s words reverberated throughout the testing site, but no one came out.

    He sighed and a few golden ming birds that are very small in size spread out of his body. They flew to four different directions and they hit different rocks.

    The rocks exploded, but the attacks aren''t powerful. But the next moment the team of four led by Aron came out of their hiding spots. Aron had a smile of his face as he looked at Sam who is holding down the elemental creature with his power while staring at them indifferently.

    Sam''s body is in its partial fusion form. The golden mes zing out of his body with the contrast of his ck shirt and the golden glowing out of his skin. All of this and then there are lines of ice elemental energy that invaded into his body and created a blue pattern on some parts.

    Surrounded by the energy sphere and the attacks of different elements, he looked like a visual out of a painting.

    "You are definitely a worthy candidate to consider as a stepping stone."

    Aron said as he flew into the air and shot an arrow at Sam.

    The ming arrow made its way and stopped in front of the sphere along with the other attacks.

    Sam looked disinterested. He watched as the remaining three got ready to attack him. He is ready to end this and he meant it when he mentioned he doesn''t want to waste his time here.

 Chapter 1967 Dropped

    Chapter 1967 Dropped

    Aron closed the distance between him and Sam while his teammates threw their attacks.

    But just like before those attacks stopped out of the sphere as well. Sam on the other hand, closed his eyes for a second before opening them again. Something seemed to have changed in his head.

    He looked at the elemental creature in front of him.

    The ice elemental energy lines within his body started glowing slowly and then they started moving towards his arm and then extended out. Under the surprised gazes of everyone a few lines of frost energy came out of his finger tips and shot towards the elemental creature.

    The frost lines entered the elementals body and spread rapidly.

    Aron had a bad feeling.

    He didn''t know what Sam is doing right now. He is not capable of understanding it. He didn''t even begin to think how Sam who appeared to be a fire type user since the start is controlling the ice energy.

    He just acted on his instinct and got ready to throw his biggest attack.

    A projection of bow enveloped his actual bow creating an image of him holding arger bow.

    An energy arrow was nocked on its thread and he pulled it.

    The energy from theva and the active volcanoes around him started gathering within the arrow rapidly.

    Sam sensed this change, but he hardly cared for it. The reaction remained the same when the threeckeys of Aron started preparing their ultimate attacks.

    But the next moment, they all stopped in their tracks. The spiritual energy cirction also halted by instinct. Because as they watched, the elemental that was struggling under Sam''s control squirmed before it lost its moment and turned into a fire elemental energy ball.

    And within no time, the blue lines spread even more rapidly. The fire elemental energy ball turned into the ice elemental energy ball. The next instant Sam sucked energy ball into his hands and the fire elemental partial fusion form turned into the ice elemental partial fusion form.

    Sam extended his other arm towards Aron and the other three before sneering.

    "Know your enemy before you prepare a trap. Fucking amateurs."

    *BOOM*

    A huge frost beam was shot and it spread wildly to all directions. It froze all the contestants within that direction including Aron and his team members were frozen.

    Fog cleared and Sam stood there with the bow still in his hands. He held it on his shoulders as he looked at the rest of the testing site.

    "Anyone who is still alive, you better quit right now. I lost my patience and in exactly fifteen minutes, I will start hunting you down one by one. If I give anyone of you a chance to even think of forfeiting when I find you, then I will change my name."

    Sam''s deration was heard loud and clear throughout the testing site.

    Everyone who is still hiding and trying to pine for some points gulped in nervousness.

    At this moment Philip and Five elemental king started their moves as well. They are eliminating the contestants rapidly.

    Sam just waited for their signal toe.

    And soon it came. In the form of the test ending.

    The rankings were decided.

    First is Sam with more than half of the points.

    Second is Five elemental King.

    Third is someone Sam didn''t care to know and Fourth is Philip.

    Philip''s fourth ce is a deliberate thing and a part of the n.

    As soon as they all appeared out of the testing site, the seniors in charge of the testing who are basically the student union of the Apollo''s academy immediately ran to the top ten contestants.

    And that includes Sam as well, but before they could even speak, Sam spoke.

    "I am leaving. I am not joining your academy."

    His words stunned everyone.

    They didn''t even know what to say before Sam took out a blueprint from his storage and threw it at them and spoke.

    "Build the bow ording to this. And you can exchange the blue print in the Exchange center. Maybe you will gain enough coins to raise these pathetic standards of your academy.

    Send the bow to the inn. I am sure you know where I stay."

    Sam didn''t even give them a chance to speak before he made his way to the entrance.

    The whole venue went into a pin drop silence.

    Some of the freshmen wanted to kill Sam right there and seniors wanted to torture him. They felt humiliated. But they couldn''t do anything.

    The formation of the whole realm will act if they really tried to vite the test rules set up by the academy and the gods. On top of it all, their reputation will only have more ck marks.

    Before they could even recover from this shock, they received another shock.

    Philip smiled with an embarrassed expression and said.

    "I am sorry, I also don''t want join your academy. My target is Hephaestus'' academy from the start. I wanted to take this test for experience, but I identally won without trying much. I don''t need your rewards as well. I apologize."

    His attitude is night and daypared to Sam''s attitude. He is polite and felt truly apologetic. But that made the whole situation worse somehow. Philip left right after Sam, but he moved in a different direction.

    Everyone looked at Five elemental king with doubt.

    "I am staying. I was truly aiming for this school."

    Only at that moment did the seniors heave a sigh of relief.

    Then they all looked in the direction Sam left in and clenched their fists.

    That day the whole city took note of this incident. All the academies were also notified of this. No one in the history of the academic realm ever dared to reject the admission much less a person who ranked top in the entrance examination.

    Also, the people who were already keeping an eye on Sam from before are surprised and got more curious about him. They didn''t know what exactly his elemental affinity or fighting style is. During the test, they thought that he is an archer with fire element. But by the end they had to rethink it again.

    While all these thoughts are fresh on their minds, the next day the exam of Hermes academy started.

    Sam arrived at that exam as well.

    This time the exam is mostly focused on speed. There are many beasts that are of Divine ne Initiation initial stage, a few in middle stage and very few in thete stage. This test is abination of point acquisition and survival.

    After all, thete stage is way too hard for any one in the contestants to defeat.

    Everyone was looking forward to what Sam is going to do.

    They were expecting him to take out his bow and arrow. But to their surprise, Sam jumped into the sky and whipped his wings out. He moved like the wind and started another ughter.

    "Whoever that bastard is, he is dangerous. We need to tail him and deal with him immediately before things get out of hand. Let''s Watt also joined the same examination and he was lowkeypared to Sam. But just when he was about to go on his own way, he noticed the movements of a group. Just like Aron''s group there is a guy who had someckeys in this exam as well.

    "Whoever that bastard is, he is dangerous. We need to tail him and deal with him immediately before things get out of hand. Let''s move."

    He led his team after Sam.

    Watt who is about to go in his own way stopped and almost followed him. His killing intent was apparent. But in thest moment, he gritted his teeth and went on his original way.

    Of course, it is not like Sam would need his help.

    Soon, the test was over.

    Sam once again stood at the top and Watt is in third ce.

    The second ce went to the guy who followed Sam. He had to sacrifice his teammates just to obtain the second ce. After sacrificing two lives all he could achieve was leave a small scratch on Sam''s left hand which healed before the blood could drip out of it.

    Sam once again dropped out of the selection. He didn''t want to go there.

    But Watt stayed in the academy without making any noise.

    He walked into the academy along with the remaining selected candidates and soon he arrived at the gathering point of the freshmen.

    The guy who ced second was received with arge entourage. It seems like he is really famous. This made that guy finally reveal a smile. But he still held the grudge against Sam.

    One of the seniors from student union patted his shoulder and said.

    "Don''t worry, we will deal with that bastard. Since he dared to look down on us, I will put a bounty on his head. Every single freshman from our school will be targeting him from now on."

    As soon as he finished the sentence he felt someone tapping on his back.

    He turned around to see Watt.

    The senior smiled and greeted Watt.

    Watt shook his head and asked.

    "Do you like ying cards? You look like man who likes to take risks and gamble."

 Chapter 1968 Before the final exam

    Chapter 1968 Before the final exam

    Days passed.

    Every day a new academy is conducting an examination and Sam is attending them all. Along with him at least one other member from Dusk who is in Divine ne is attending the examination. Sam is quitting but one member from Dusk is epting the test.

    While this process is going on many people started hating and resenting Sam.

    They tried to stop him from attending some exams, but they couldn''t get a hold of him. Even the people who sneaked into the inn disappeared without a trace. Some even spected that Sam already belonged to some other academy and he is just trying to piss off the rest to dishonor them.

    In a way their spection is right.

    But Sam has way more nned than just some dishonor.

    While Sam is doing all of this, something else is going on in his mind. He is sure that the Demi-gods he came across in the tasks belong to these Olympus academies. So, they should at least have a fleeting knowledge of who Sam was.

    But it seems like none of the juniors know who Sam is.

    They are just treating him like any other neer thates to this world.

    That could only mean one thing. These Demi gods and the gods didn''t inform these people about Sam. This is actually a great benefit for Sam as his ns would progress much more smoothly.

    He just decided to not think over it too much.

    A day before the entrance exam of Zeus academy, Sam arrived at the restaurant to talk with Nn about something. But of course, Nn insisted that Sam has a meal there.

    So, he took a table and waited as one dish after another was served there.

    The waiter is the same one as Sam''s first visit.

    "Hello Sir, the whole city is talking about your feats. I must say, you surprised me more and more."

    Sam smiled and looked at him up and down before asking.

    "How is the wine?"

    The young man''s eyes lit up and said.

    "The best I ever had. I actually wanted to talk to you about it."

    "What is it?"

    "I heard that you made a deal with our boss. Is that wine also part of that deal?"

    "Nope. The two wines that I gave you are not part of that deal. There are a bunch of other wines that I gave him though. Why do you ask?"

    Sam asked with a knowing smile.

    There is a reason why Sam gave this guy those wines and it is purely for his amusement. He liked this kid who is looking for opportunities in everything.

    When Sam first revealed the wine, the first thing he saw in this kid''s eyes is the excitement of finding something valuable. The major desire for him is not to taste it, but to see if he can acquire it and sell it.

    That is why Sam gave him those two wines to see if he would continue contact with Sam and try to gain that opportunity.

    "Why Sir? Are you not selling it?" The waiter asked in confusion.

    "Of course, I am going to, but those two wines are not of the best quality within their respective categories. They rank well in the middle and the deal with your boss is mostly about the items on the top of the list."

    "Then what about the items in the middle and the bottom?"

    "What about them?" Sam said with a smile as he twirled the ss on the table.

    The waiter clenched his fists and his heart is racing faster with every second. The words are on the tip of his tongue but he is hesitating to say them out.

    After three minutes of silence from both parties, he finally opened his mouth.

    "I want to sell your wine."

    "You want to make it and sell it or distribute it?"

    "I don''t have the means to make it right now. As you said, I can understand why the lesser quality ones within your list might not go well with the boss'' menu.

    But they are not exactly of bad quality, they are of better quality than ny percent of wines avable in thisnd. If you have stock, I can sell it for you.

    I will make deals with the restaurants and make you sure that you can get the maximum profit, and you can give me a cut from the profits."

    Sam smiled at him.

    He took out a spatial ring and said.

    "I have a lot of stock. You have the manufacturing costs of all the wine within that ring along with the wine.

    You will also find the unique properties of each wine. I just need ten percent on the manufacturing costs. If you can sell the wine to a higher rate, you can keep the extra."

    The waiter was shocked.

    "You mean, if I can sell the wine for twice the price of its making cost¡­"

    "Then you can keep all profits except for the making cost and an ten percent of the making costs."

    "But why? It would be a loss for you."

    "Because I can. Wealth is not my goal at this point. In fact, it has never been much of a goal. It was always a means to an end and whenever I try to meet that end, I involuntarily generate way too much wealth.

    Just think of it as me humoring myself by encouraging a kid like you. Go ahead and do whatever you want."

    Sam just waved his hand as if he didn''t just hand over a treasure trove.

    "I am Shun by the way. I am d to be working with you."

    "Sam."

    "Okay Sir, Boss said he created a new stew and wants your opinion on it. Please wait, I will just get it to you."

    "Thanks."

    As the kid left, Sam saw another familiar face.

    Pearl walked and didn''t even bother to ask before she took a seat in front of Sam. She looked at therge spread of dishes on the table and said.

    "You are indeed a VIP at this restaurant. Look at the spread. I am sure none of these are avable on the menu. Can I try some?"

    "No."

    Sam said decisively and picked a dish to start eating.

    Pearl pouted for a moment and sighed.

    "Anyway, I have been watching your performance in all the academies. I must say, you "That is very cold. Is that how you treat ady?"

    "Yes."

    He didn''t even hesitate to answer.

    Pearl pouted for a moment and sighed.

    "Anyway, I have been watching your performance in all the academies. I must say, you gave one surprise after another."

    "A kid already told me the same thing. I know what I did."

    "Of course. You must know what you did. Otherwise you would be the biggest idiot to ever exist in the universe."

    "I am not an idiot."

    "I know."

    "So only one entrance exam is left among the Olympus academies. The Zeus academy, are you interested in this academy that much? You even rejected offers from every elite academy. Including Hades and Poseidon''s academy."

    "You just have to wait and see."

    "I advise you, you better take the admission in the Zeus academy. Particlry after you rejected other Olympus academies. This is the only way out for you.

    If by any chance you don''t get into Zeus academy, the rest of the academies would have no qualms of hunting you down even if you go to an academy in a different region."

    "I am sure we are not close enough to show concern to each other and I am even more sure that I never asked for your advice. So, if you will excuse me I would like enjoy my lunch in peace."

    "Come on, every single man of your age would beg to treat me to lunch. And here you are telling me to get lost to have lunch. Do you even know what my true status is? Do you know what winning my favor might mean?"

    "I don''t know. Honestly, don''t care. In my opinion, the after taste of the marrow soup I am having right now is worth much more than any favor that you could give me."

    "You are way too arrogant for a guy who is backed into a corner. Maybe you are just stupid. You do know that other academies might not even take you in, even if you offer yourself to them, right?

    Even the gambler academy which is known to ept the most entric bunch wouldn''t take you in. Whichever academy that takes you in, will be the enemy of every Olympian academy. No one would risk it for just one genius.

    After all, this whole realm is full of geniuses and every single day, the number of those geniuses is increasing."

    She stood up and gave Sam a deep look before going out.

    Rain is waiting for her outside along with his group. Now he is her unofficialckey in the academy.

    "He¡­"

    "Every genius is a stubborn fool to a certain extent. He is no exception. Let''s go."

    "Where are we going?"

    "To greet another stubborn fool."

 Chapter 1969 Jade

    Chapter 1969 Jade

    Pearl left the restaurant along with the entourage.

    Soon she is in the Zeus academy. Deep inside the academy there is a small estate that is used as a residence for one of the elder instructors who also happened to be Pearl''s teacher. And inside that estate within arge stone hall, a beautiful woman is seen dancing.

    She is dancing gracefully like a peacock as a few more women yed various instruments.

    This woman had long ck hair. She is not as tall as pearl and could only be considered average and she is not exactly voluptuous either. But she has a different sense of beauty to her. ''Pure'' is the word thates to ones mind when they see her for the first time.

    Particrly when she is dancing.

    Pearl gestured for the musicians to stop and looked at the youngdy who also stopped dancing. Pearl''s expression is a mixture of anger, disappointment and exhaustion.

    The youngdy looked at Pearl and bowed slightly.

    "Hello Elder sister. Greetings to you."

    She is very polite and her actions couldn''t be more respectful, but her eyes said something else. She is showing respect to Pearl''s position as the Elder sister, not to pearl herself.

    Pearl also is discerning enough to notice this.

    "Why are you dancing aimlessly again? How many times do I have to tell you to get over this?"

    "I am sorry Elder Sister, but I have to decline this request of yours. You forcefully brought me here from the one I love, the dancing is the only way I could ease my longing a bit. Please do not take it away from me."

    "If you want to dance, you can dance, but you cannot dance for him anymore. You can not long for him. You can not dream of him and you can not think of him. You and him are over.

    Now you are at the most prestigious demi god academy and with your talent there would be many elders who would show interest in you. You are going to be a Demi god and will touch the boundaries of the god hood.

    Hell, you even have a chance to be a god. And all you are doing is whining about how you don''t want to be here and how you love that filthy animal of a person."

    "Please do not call him an animal."

    "What else should I call him? He is a filthy mine rat that carves the stone walls inside mining tunnels. He is a bloody ve. How can you even think of being with him? Don''t you have any sense? Even if we don''t consider status, we should consider potential.

    That bastard doesn''t even have any talent whatsoever.

    His body is devoid of any precious bloodline and in fact is a filth in more ways than on. And his brutish method of cultivation, no one knew how he even acquired that strength, but he is not suitable for any of the techniques that we have at our hand."

    Pearl said in exasperation.

    She is a person of high status and so is her sister.

    Her father is of course even more so. When he found out about her sister loving a ve, he became furious and almost wanted to kill her.

    Pearl had to intervene and save her.

    She had that ve more than anything in this world and wanted to kill her. She even sent some of herckeys to do the deed. But to her surprise that ve is not ordinary, he actually reached the peak of Astral ne cultivation all by himself.

    Without any cultivation, he forcefully expanded his spiritual and tried to change his body, muscle structure and bone structure to be a peak stage cultivator of Astral ne.

    He is very strong even though he didn''t have any proper technique. All he knows it how to use some tools that like stone chisels, pick axes and sledge hammers.

    At one point Pearl was heartbroken for her sister and tried to give him a miniscule chance. That guy who learned of her sister''s arrest at home sneaked in and got caught by Pearl when she examined him.

    Along with that, she found out some truths.

    Turned out, this ve is actually someone her sister came across when they were kids. He saved her from a small misfortune when they were kids and her sister being the pure one she is kept on visiting him.

    Their friendship grew and soon her sister started cultivating and the kid who was born to be a ve didn''t want to be left behind, but her family already tested him and deemed him talentless. To everyone''s surprise he forcefully cultivated without proper technique and worked like a thousand mules to get to where he is.

    He always kept up with Pearl''s cultivation.

    But once he hit the Astral ne peak, his brute force cultivation method didn''t work out anymore. Now he is full stuck in Astral ne. Once Pearl found out, she sent him to a faraway ce and brought her sister along with her to the Zeus academy.

    Pearl''s sister just stood there as Pearl scolded her.

    "Jade, I am not going to be tolerant of you anymore. The only reason I let your actions slide until now is because I love you. But my responsibility as the n''s heir is taking over that love. Now I am drawing a hard line.

    You and him are over.

    If youply, you can have a rtively independent life here. You are now a student of the academy, improve your cultivation. If you crave a rtionship so much, go ahead and find someone of your level. There are so many elites in all of those academies. Find someone and I will see to your wedding.

    If not, I will set up your engagement with a person of my and father''s choice and you will have to live your life like that. You decide."

    Pearl turned around without waiting for Jade''s reply.

    But when Jade spoke up, she had to stop.

    "Do as you may see fit sister. But I am sure he wille for me. He has pulled of many miracles with that ''filthy'' body with no talent that you spoke of. I am sure he and I will pull of another one. He will bring me away from this cage and we will fight for our love."

    Pearl took a deep breath and turned to look at Jade.

    "Get ready. After the test is over, you are to perform. Since you like dance so much, I am giving you a chance. You can dance in front of the elders and the new freshmen as the part of the ceremony. Maybe some properly suitable candidate will like you and approach you.

    From now on, it is my job to search a candidate for you and your duty to marry that man."

    She just left without saying anything.

    Time passed and the next day.

    Sam arrived at the testing site.

    By now, there is not a single person who didn''t know of him. Everyone knew who he is and they all knew what he is capable of. They are extremely vary of him. Of course, there are some arrogant guys who wanted to deal with him still.

    But Sam didn''t pay any heed.

    After the usual introduction, Sam went into the testing site. This time the test is a lot more interesting. Because it is a free for all fight.

    Of course there are some restrictions. Basically, anyone can move around and fight with anyone, but when two people confront each other, a formation will be created around them and they will be isted from any other interference.

    Only one of them would survive and the other one would either be defeated or killed.

 Chapter 1970 Net

    1970 Net

    Sam didn''t hurry in this test.

    He levitated in the air and moved in a particr direction at a leisurely pace. Whenever he spotted a candidate, he went down and initiated the fight. Even before the barrier could fully form, he finished the fight.

    It ended with at most three hits.

    The tests are easy.

    Sam guessed that even the remaining yers will have an easier time in this realm. None of the peers are theirpetitiors.

    Many candidates who already focused on Sam are now second guessing. If they had a choice of ganging up, then they would have a much better chance, individually at their current state they don''t see it happening.

    But one group among them, which is led by one of the seed candidates still decided to try their luck.

    After all, Sam is the public enemy number 1, so if they really take him down, it is going to bring them a great fortune. They will be heroes among their peers and of course the leader of the group obviously wants that glory.

    So, after Sam finished over a dozen fights, he decided to execute his n.

    He tracked the path Sam is taking along with his group and made some preparations with them. The group blocked Sam''s path after a while.

    Sam looked at them and said.

    "I would really like to take you all on, but thepetition doesn''t encourage group fights. It is really tempting though."

    The leader of the group didn''t mind Sam''s taunts instead, he just handed something over to hisckey before sending him forward.

    "Remember what I told you. Just stick with the n, don''t do anything unnecessary."

    With those instructions, the rest of the group backed down a bit.

    Sam is also a bit curious about what this n could be. He didn''t have to wait for a long time to find out though.

    The first guy who stood rtively far away from Sam, threw a bunch of tokens towards him. Even though they looked like tokens, they are actually very small formation discs. Theynded at various spots around Sam and created a formation.

    Lightning was shot out and created a web around him. This is considered an attack from the guy on Sam.

    Now, the area between Sam and the guy which is quite big is considered as a battlefield.

    The guy took out dozens of formation discs and started throwing them. While he is doing that, he is very vignt about what Sam might do. He didn''t want to end up getting his ass kicked by Sam while he did all of that.

    But Sam didn''t even bother to move.

    He watched as the new lightning strands appeared from the formation discs. They are attaching to the existing lightning and the is exceeding.

    Looking at Sam who didn''t make any move, the crowd outside the barrier are feeling a bit puzzled. They didn''t understand his choice of action. If they were in his shoes they would have immediately made a move on the opponent to stop the spreading.

    They are at least not dumb enough to think that Sam is stumped and shocked as he stood there.

    The opponent within the barrier on the other hand, gained a little bit of confidence. He increased the pace and stopped watching his back. His defense is extremelyx. He ced all the discs and the lightning was ready.

    Sam extended his hand and was surprised how the lightning invaded his body. It is almost like it has a consciousness of its own. It tried to attack his meridians and muscles to make paralyzed and the density of the lightning is very high.

    Looking at how even Sam backed down, the opponent felt more and confident. He attached a special token to his own body that let him move through the and not be effected by the lightning. He went on and started attacking Sam with medium ranged attacks.

    Sam didn''t have much room to move around. If he is going to be effected by the, then he would have to stand there almost stationary and block the attacks.

    So, he did exactly that, he used his hands to block the iing attacks. But the other party didn''t just want to restrict Sam there. He wanted to make use of the to reduce Sam''s endurance.

    He used the formation discs to throw projectile lightning attacks from different sides to force Sam from moving.

    But Sam didn''t do that. Surprisingly he even took some attacks directly rather than move. Showcasing how adamant he is.

    This made the opponent a bit angry and frustrated. He tried to throw a few more attacks at a faster pace, but Sam managed to still block all of them. The leader who is watching from outside is also a bit stumped.

    The n is that once Sam had no other chance than moving away forcefully going through the, then he would suffer from fatigue and muscle paralysis because of the lightning. But he is not doing that.

    Still he wanted hisckey to stick with the n. The problem is theckey had a whole different thought in his head.

    He wanted to try his luck and gamble at a chance to take Sam down.

    So, he made a move. He closed the distance between himself and Sam and wanted to take Sam into the. Since he wouldn''t be effected, he would be able to deal with him.

    But to his surprise as soon as he made his move the token on his chest deactivated. He was caught in the and his body stopped moving. He felt like his muscles were being torn fiber by fiber.

    Sam looked at this and sighed.

    He waved his hand and the kid reached the near death state. His defeat was confirmed and the barrier was gone before the formation kicked the kid out.

    The next was still there though.

    Sam looked at the leader of the group.

    "To keep a contingency like that. You are really something. You don''t even trust your own subordinates?"

    "When there are clear benefits the same subordinates don''t backdown to betray me. How can I trust them so easily?" He answered directly.

    Sam looked at the rest of the subordinates whose expressions changed a bit.

    He shook his head in disappointment.

    "Your name Alric right? A seeded candidate, who is on par with the rmended kids?"

    "So, you do know me? You must have did your research properly."

    "I wish I didn''t know you. My memory is being wasted just to remember the likes of you. You just sucked the joy out of the whole test for me. So, whatever happens next, ispletely on you."

    "What are you going to do? You are trapped in a lightning. That is a special designed by one of the greatest formation masters that this academy has ever produced. It might be a watered down version, but the likes of you cannot just defeat it with brute force.

    And as long as I have the controlling core of the formation, you are trapped there. I will exhaust you bit by bit and defeat you."

    "Great n. But I have been saying the same thing for everyone who made these kinds of ns to deal with me in all the entrance examinations until now. I am going to say it to you too."

    "What is it?"

    "Know your enemy, you fucking amateurs."

    As soon as he finished his words, his body turned silver. Partial lightning fusion was activated. Silver lightning snakes appeared out of his body and invaded the lightning. The blue lightning of the instantly turned silver. The whole became Sam''s.

    He looked at the shocked opponents and said.

    "As I said before, the current situation is purely because of you. I can''t believe I am wasting time ying house in an academy that considers people like you as seeded candidates."

    As soon as he finished that line, the responded weirdly. More and more strands and ropes of lightning started emerging, the area the covered increased rapidly.

    When one of theckeys within the group fell within the range of the new, the barrier activated immediately. Except for Sam and him the rest of the people were thrown back.

    Sam didn''t even need to make a move, the tangled the guy and defeated him, the barrier was gone and it caught another guy as it expanded more.

    The leader of the group, Alric immediately made his move, but his attacknded on the barrier. Sam finished the second opponent automatically with the before he moved further.

    Just like that, Sam''s spree of victories started. The only problem is the lightning is not designed to kill, but rather defeat the opponent with muscle destruction. For Sam achieveplete death with it, he would have topromise on the speed.

    But right now, he is in a hurry to make a mockery of this exam.

 Chapter 1971: Dean

    The lightning spread kept on spreading.

    Sam didn''t need any more formation discs like the opponents. He is condensing energy into a node and extended the rapidly. And every weakling that fell into the trap was defeated easily by the trap itself.

    Of course, there are people who are strong enough to defend against the trap.

    People like Alric for example.

    When Alric finally fell into the, a barrier formed around him and Sam containing both of them. The expansion of the was also stopped for the moment.

    Alric looked at Sam coldly and drew his sword.

    "Your tricks end here."

    "Tricks?"

    Sam chuckled and his body disappeared into a lightning, in the next second he travelled through the lightning and arrived right in front of Alric. Sam caught a hold of his throat and said.

    "Don''tment on mypetence. It almost feels like an insult."

    With just one proper hit, Alric was defeated. Before he could die, a token on his body triggered and saved his life, before the formation of the testing site took him away.

    Sam didn''t stop there.

    He just increased the more and more. The audience watched in awe as he finished the contestants at an incredibly rapid pace. Within twenty minutes the whole testing site is covered with the lightning and very few people remaining within the test.

    Then Sam activated full fusion as he used the to travel from one ce to another in an instant. He is now fishing out the remaining opponents that are hiding from the in some narrow ces.

    The elders of the Zeus academy watched this whole spectacle.

    They clenched their fists in anger and one of them even suggested killing Sam right there and then.

    But of course, the other elders didn''t consent to it. The one in charge of the test went to the Dean who is in charge of the whole academy and reported the situation to him.

    Dean who is already observing the situation is ready with the instructions.

    The elder went back and did something to the formation

    Sam who is ready to beat the crap out of the next target, suddenly felt some pulling him away. The lighting disappeared in an instant.

    Sam arrived outside the testing site in his fusion form and he got ready to attack.

    The elder contained him within a barrier and said.

    "You passed the test. You will be awarded the first position. But we cannot have the rest of the students all go away without having an opportunity to showcase their skills.

    We are going to restart the test without you.

    But as I said, you will be awarded the first position. You can take a seat and wait until this test is finished."

    Sam was then led to the spectators area where all the rmended students who just joined as freshmen were sitting.

    Pearl and Rain are also there, apart from them there are a bunch of unfamiliar faces.

    There were no empty seats, but one of the attendants brought one and ced it right beside Pearl up on her instructions.

    "So, what did you decide? Are you going to join the Zeus academy?"

    "Not really interested right now. This test is far more subpar than the other ones."

    "No, you made it subpar than the other ones and I feel like this is a deliberate measure. But you do know what the consequences of doing this right?"

    "Whatever they may be. I am sure it is not something I cannot handle."

    "Are you an adventure junkie or something? Why do you want to live on the edge so much?"

    "I don''t know any other way. Myfort lies on the edge. Anyway, why do you worry so much?"

    "I can''t watch a talented person ruin themselves like this. I have been witnessing one very close to me already. I can''t bear to watch more."

    Sam just shook his head and didn''t bother with the conversation.

    The time passed by quickly. With Pearl''s presence none of the other rmended candidates didn''t bother him.

    "You have quite the pull in this academy. Everyone is very scared of you."

    "Of course, why don''t you join the academy then, none of the seniors will also bother you."

    "They are not bothering me now and I highly doubt they would be able to. They are more of an annoyance."

    "I don''t know if you are being honest or boastful. Either way, you are going to be in way too much trouble."

    "That will just lead to more chaos within your academy."

    The second test was soon over and Sam got ready to leave. But Pearl stopped him.

    "They are not going to announce now. There is a small announcement before that and there is an event now."

    "What kind of event?"

    "A dance event."

    As soon as she spoke, Jade appeared in middle of the stage and started dancing while singing a song. Her dance is beautiful and graceful, she is an incredible dancer and the surrounding spiritual energy reacted to her dance.

    But her singing is not as good. It is considered decent and better than a lot of singers Sam came across, but it pales inparison to her dancing skills. But everyone is still drawn into her voice and the dance. Because she is expressing an emotion.

    A very strong emotion of sadness, loneliness, heartbreak and mncholy.

    "She is in love."

    Sam said in a very low tone.

    His eyes were locked on to her as she moved.

    Pearl clenched her fists and said almost in a whisper.

    "Unfortunately, yes."

    Sam looked around and observed all the special candidate students as well as the top rankers of the admission test. All of them are checking out Jade.

    Sam felt that this is weird and asked Pearl.

    "What is happening?"

    "We are looking for a groom for my sister Jade. And she is dancing as an introduction. Why? Are you interested?"

    "By the looks of it, your sister is not interested at all. Why bother forcing her like this?"

    "It is necessary. If not, she will run away with some mine rat that has no future or backing."

    "So, as long as she marries one of these highborn wannabe talents, it is fine?"

    "I don''t need them to be high born, they need to have potential, talent a future. But the guy she desired doesn''t have any. He cannot protect her."

    "She seemed strong enough herself though."

    "She is talented enough to be strong enough, but she is not willed enough."

    "Huh. I have crossed realms up on realms. From the lowly mortal words with absolutely cultivation to ces ruled over by Divine ne cultivators, but this shit hasn''t changed. If you are that powerful can''t you provide a life where your sister can just rx?

    Then what is the point of holding all of this power. This is in stupid. I don''t want to see this shit show anymore.

    Tell your academy people to send my reward to the inn. I am not joining this school anyway."

    Sam stood up and ced his hands in his pockets before walking away.

    Pearl''s face ckened a bit. She didn''t know what to say to Sam''s words. Her father did indeed have the power to let them lead whatever lives they wanted. But he is so greedy for more power that he wouldn''t stop at anything to gain it.

    And this led him to have a heart that doesn''t have enough sentiment to allow her daughters to have a life of leisure. Their actions are his signs of glory and their marriages are part of it."

    Sam walked to the gate of the academy while everyone''s attention was on Jade.

    As he walked to the entrance, an old man was standing with the hands behind his back. He looked down at the bottom of stairs where a bunch of guards holding another guy back.

    The old man watched Sam and spoke.

    "I thought you would leave early."

    "Well, I cannot take part in this farce anymore."

    "I guessed it. Based on the information about your character, you must think these political gimmicks are beneath you."

    Sam raised an eyebrow and looked at him.

    "You know me?"

    "Yes, I was warned by our Lord Zeus about you."

    "Then you are?"

    "The dean of the Zeus academy. Lord said that you woulde and pull some tricks."

    "Then you should have warned your students. They suffered way too much because of their under preparedness."

    "I had strict orders against it. You are here on the will of some gods and I have no right to defy their collective will."

    "Sure. Then you know that I will not join your academy, why wee such a tragedy up on yourself?"

    "It is your right as a student to take the entrance examination, I cannot stop because of the personal information that I obtained from the god."

    Sam looked at the bottom of the stairs and asked.

    "Then why is that guy being stopped? Is hete for the exams?"

    "No, he is not here for the exams. He is here for my niece."

    "Your niece?"

    "Jade. The one that was dancing just now."

    Realization dawned on Sam. Now he understood why Pearl has that much influence.

    "So, you are their father''s brother, I am assuming."

    "Yes."

    "No wonder, Pearl is so confident in making those promises. Do you hold the same beliefs as your brother?"

    "It doesn''t matter what beliefs I hold, but I cannot force mine on his daughters. It is not within my rights."

    "Just another way of saying you don''t want to bother yourself with your niece''s plight. What''s the point of all that experience you have gained over the years? The more I stay here, the more I am disgusted. Please send my reward to the inn. I am off.

    Also, make your elders and instructors know of my honorary student status. I am gonna use it very well."

    Sam slowly walked down the stairs.

 Chapter 1972 Desperate Calls

    1972 Desperate Calls

    Sam walked down the stairs slowly.

    He watched as the young man struggled forcefully. The guards are much stronger than him and they could have identally killed him if they are forceful enough, but it seems like they were told to control their strength.

    He turned to look at the dean for a moment before continuing down.

    The young man is in desperate state. He is shouting at the guards. Asking them to let him go.

    The guards looked at the dean in askance.

    The dean sighed and nodded his head. One of the guards clenched his teeth before he broke the legs of the young man. The young man didn''t even scream in pain. He just tried to use his arms to climb up.

    "Let me go. Let me go just once. Please let me go."

    His voice is full of anger and despair.

    Sam noticed his cultivation level. He is just in the Astral ne. Not even the peak of it. He is just in thete stage. He was surprised by this. Not many people of that level are in this part of this realm. Except for the people who act as attendants andckeys or someone that is working like the waiter Sam came across, there is practically no one this close to the academies.

    When Sam arrived and halted at the spot, the guards stopped for a second.

    Even the young man stopped screaming and looked at Sam who is looking at him dead in the eyes.

    Sam looked at the guards and said.

    "I will take it from here. He will not interrupt the tests. You can leave him alone."

    The guards exchanged a nce and then looked at the dean, who didn''t show any reaction. They backed down a bit.

    Sam looked at the young man who had his arms and legs broken. His face is bruised. His hair is messy. He had pale skin, but his body is a bit rugged. He is built way too big, particrly his upper body is bulging with muscles.

    "Please let me go. Please let me go upstairs once. I need to meet her. I need to meet jade. I need to tell her that I arrived in this realm just for her. I need to tell her that I am safe."

    Sam looked at him silently.

    The young man kept on pleading. But there is no change in expression on Sam''s face. After a few minutes, he crouched down and touched the young man''s head.

    His spiritual energy spread as he activated the observation ability.

    Sam examined every nook and cranny of the young man''s body and the young man could feel it. He could feel Sam''s energy and in turn the ''vision'' prating to every single cell of his body.

    A few thoughts shed across his mind.

    All his life there is one thing that always let him down. His talent. He has been chasing after Jade since he was a mere mortal and since then no matter what difficult situation he came across, his talent has be his obstacle.

    No matter who he asked for help, they rejected because of his talent and worst part is they tried their best to stop to curry favor to Jade''s father. When Sam examined his body, that is what he thought.

    Another person who is repelled by his talent.

    Tears streamed down his eyes and he looked at the sky.

    "Why couldn''t you have given me some talent. Some potential that I could use? Why?"

    He asked in anger and sadness.

    "Who are you talking to?"

    Sam asked as he looked at the young man with amusement.

    The young man had a puzzled expression on his face.

    "Who are you talking to?"

    Sam repeated the question.

    "To the gods."

    "So, have they talked to you back? At least once before?"

    "No."

    "Then why are you talking to them? Do you think the gods will just answer you if you cry like a baby?"

    "Wha..?"

    "I really don''t like you that much. I might people who go after what they desire with everything they have. But I also don''t like people who aim for more than what they deserve.

    That woman right there has a one in a million talent. She has infinite riches and she has status that will make every guy in this realm massacre a just to have a shot at having her hand in the marriage.

    She has every right to desire anyone in this world as her partner. But what right do you have to desire her the same way? Forget about love for a second, even if the odds have changed and you married her, do you even have means to defend your position as her husband?

    You will be her weakest link.

    All the guys who couldn''t do anything to her until now, will have you as a hostage to do anything they want with her. You might just be the biggest loss she has to suffer in her life."

    The young man gritted his teeth in unwillingness.

    Tears streamed more and more.

    "What do you want me to do? Kill my love for her? I prayed to every god that ever existed, but none of them showed me any pity. I tried to forget her, but these bloody gods didn''t even give me that choice. I cannot forget her.

    Every time she is out of my sight, I am feeling breathless. I want to cause destruction around me. I want to destroy the earth and air that is separating us. Tell me, how do I control this urge?

    I tried every god, but they didn''t respond and I even tried the devil but he didn''t respond either. I would sell my soul and more if I can be with her. But I cannot."

    "So, the gods and the devils didn''t respond to you. Then I will respond to you. What are you willing to pay? What do you want and what are you going to offer in exchange?"

    The streams of tears suddenly stopped. The young man was stunned. He didn''t even know what to say. To the point even his despairing heart paused for a moment.

    Sam looked at him with a smile and said.

    We might have to change the locations for the rest of this conversation.

    The next second, a glow of green light entered the young man''s body and healed his broken limbs.

    "Follow me, we have a lot to talk about."

 Chapter 1973 Offer

    1973 Offer

    A few minutester.

    Sam is inside the inn. By now it became his personal property. The inn owner is also rxed because there is not much he has to do but the money is streaming in.

    In the dining hall, Sam is sipping some wine as he looked at the young man in front of him.

    "Since you came here, you are extremely desperate and you really are ready to grab any straw that you can hold. So, tell me what exactly do you need?"

    "I need to be with her?" The young man answered instantly with almost no gap. And his voice is filled with conviction.

    Sam is aplete stranger to him and he was just insulted by Sam with all kinds of facts. But for some reason he felt that Sam is someone he can trust. At least, he is sure that Sam wouldn''t gain anything from betraying him. He gets nothing if this is deception and he would lose his time.

    That is why he decided to follow Sam and since he followed he figured that he might as well be honest and just gave the answer.

    Sam chuckled at his response.

    "So what do you expect from me?? Go barge into the Zeus academy and bring that girl to you?"

    Young man didn''t respond. The scenario Sam mentioned would indeed be convenient. But he knew it is impossible. No single man in this realm can ever do that. After a brief silence, Sam spoke again.

    "I can''t give you the end result that you want. But I can give you things that will help you get that result. So, I am asking you again, what do you need?"

    The young man went into deep thought. The first thing that came to his mind is strength. But he felt that Sam would reject it, saying it is not precise enough. Then the word talent came to his mind. He shook his head to shake that thought off. After all, how can someone change the talent of another person?

    Only gods can do it.

    But when he thought up to this point, Sam spoke again.

    "Don''t limit your thoughts based on your limited world view. Understand what stopped you from being with her and ask me exactly that. Think of me as the god that you were praying for an ask?"

    Sam said confidently. The young man was stunned for a moment The way Sam said those words was very casual. But that casual nature made him appear more arrogant.

    Sam just proimed himself as god''s equal for the people like him who believed their lives were god''s mercy, it is not an easy thing to digest.

    For a moment, he felt a sense of fear towards Sam. It came from being a ''smaller'' creature than him.

    He gulped and answered in a shivering voice.

    "Talent, Potential, Strength and status."

    Sam smiled as he swirled the ss and asked.

    "I will grant you all these, what are you willing to pay for that?"

    "I will pay anything as long as I can be with Jade."

    "Anything? Don''t make promises that you cannot keep."

    "No, I will really give anything for this. As long as you can give me what I need, you can take whatever you want."

    "Does that anything include your morality? Your free will? Your soul and your life?"

    The young man didn''t know what to say. For a moment he doubted his choice ofing here. Sam is asking what he wants and for every answer Sam is hitting him with another weird question.

    It is almost like Sam is deliberately trying to act mysterious and profound.

    But Sam is obviously stronger than him and he came out of Zeus academy, the guards had a weird attitude towards him and he even heard a few rumors and murmurs when he wasing to the inn.

    That slight doubt aside, a huge part of him is a bit hopeful. The aura and mannerism of Sam is different from other elite people he has met and because of his unique situation he has met a lot of them.

    Sam acts like he is a super being to him, but at the same time it feels like he is not looking down on him. This is very confusing and in that confusion, the young man kept on thinking about the questions Sam asked.

    Morality, free will, soul and life.

    He is tempted to say yes. At this moment, he doesn''t need anything other than Jade.

    But when he thought of the implications of selling his own morality, he grit his teeth and stayed silent.

    Sam got off his feet and walked to him with his hands in his pockets.

    He looked at the young man with a very faint smile.

    "I like it that you held in. If you had answered instantly, I would have thrown you out right away."

    The young man was surprised, but he didn''t get to speak as Sam continued.

    "I will give you what you need. A potential and talent so great that the young masters who were after you will feel jealous of you. The people that disdained you would wish to be you. Even if Jade''s fatheres face to face, he would never be able to say that youck talent and he can never use that talent as an excuse to reject you.

    But for that, I demand your undying loyalty.

    From the moment you ept this and the moment you ept your death, you will be my subordinate.

    You will act ording to my will and you will do my bidding. My enemy would be your enemy and my friend would be your friend.

    If a persones at me with a weapon, I expect you to stand in between even if you knew you were going to lose.

    And I must tell you, this loyalty to me should be absolute.

    If you agree to this, I will give you what the gods couldn''t and the devil wouldn''t. I will change you life with my very own hands to the point that you would have never even imagined it.

    So, are you willing? Are you daring enough to do this?"

    "Can you really give me talent? How? Isn''t it something decided at birth? Isn''t it naturally impossible to change it?"

    Sam looked at him without saying anything. He already told everything he wanted to tell. There is no need to answer any other questions. If the other party really wants to get what Sam has, then he would have to take a leap of faith.

    The young man gritted his teeth and said.

    "If you give me what I need, I will give you my undying loyalty. I will do as youmand for the rest of my life."

    "Good. From this moment on, exactly in ten days, you will go through a procedure that will be the first step in changing your destiny. Be mentally prepared.

    And until then, I need you to do a few things and you are not going to do anything that I didn''t say. Even your breathing should be in the way that I tell you."

    Sam said with a strict tone.

    "I willply."

    "Okay now. What is your name?"

    The young man pursed his lips and said.

    "Stone."

    "Stone?"

    "Yes, I was born in the mines, that is what I was named after."

    Sam nodded and sent him to one of the rooms within the inn to rest for little bit.

    Until now, every single thing in the realm has gone in the exact way he wanted it to happen.

    The hub is ready to open, and there is only one thing he need to do before that happens.

    And that will happen in the entrance examination of the gambler''s academy which is going to take ce a couple of dayter.

    Meanwhile, he decided to go ahead and do one of the greatest experiments that he had ever done. Aftering to this world he dabbled in every field. He has created machines, puppets based on robotics, hebined the cultivation techniques with the puppets, the formations, he even yed around with gics when he created the vines that could destroys if left alone.

    But there is one thing he didn''t deal with in too much. Gics of the cultivators. It would be wrong to say he didn''t touch it at all. He did it through beast cultivation and such, but he didn''t try to make any major changes.

    Now he wanted to try it too. Since he wants to challenge the gods of this world, he has to be a god himself. He needs to rival gods in everything.

    The one thing that the gods have over Sam is their control over the lives and destinies of so many people. The impact of gods on a person''s destiny is far more than what Sam could do.

    Sam could destroy a person''s life or improve, but the gods could change it to the point that it might look like its against naturalws and Sam is going to do the same now.

    He will bend the will of the nature and create something and show these gods what he has in store.

    And luckily, he is already dabbling in some research that will help him achieve this goal much faster.

 Chapter 1974 Soul Surgery

    1974 Soul Surgery

    Sam started taking out the research results he had on the lycans, giants and the shapeshifting demons.

    The three species that he had encountered in one of the war missions and the three species that he killed a lot of. All these three has one thing inmon, the transformation.

    The Lycans transform into the beast type humanoid form, the giants increase in size and the shapeshifting demons, well.. Shapeshift.

    And all of these are inherent and gic.

    When Sam first came across these creatures, he wanted to understand the gic concepts very clearly. He wanted to see if he could find any applications with this. His scientific curiosity made him do a lot of extensive research.

    He never really thought of using it on other living species though.

    But when he came across Stone, he changed his mind. Even though Sam never thought of bing a god and having that power over someone, right now he is in war with the gods and the one thing these gods are banking on is the faith the people hold over them.

    People like Stone and people like jade, irrespective of their social status believed in these gods as supreme entities. Even if their lives are screwed over, even if the gods they worshiped for so long didn''t even care for their existence, the people always held great belief against them.

    Now, when Sam saw Stone he saw an opportunity to shake that belief.

    Thispelled him to use his research on a living being.

    Sam took all the experimental records and started making some calctions while running simultaneous simtions.

    He examined every nook and cranny of Stone''s body.

    It is utter andplete trash.

    Just like how stone said before, he doesn''t have an ounce of talent. His bone structure, muscle structure, bloodline, organs, spiritual core, his soul quality, everything is less than mediocre.

    His meridians are overworked.

    The only good thing about Stone is that his will power. His love and desire for Jade turned him into an absolute lunatic and one great thing about lunatics is that their will is very strong towards what they believe in.

    Only with sheer will he managed to cross the boundaries of his mediocrity and reached his current cultivation level. It should have been impossible, but he still did it.

    Every cell of his body is overworked. The cells are storing and holding more energy than they should and by sheer luck he managed to not explode.

    If that is not enough, then there is the energy absorption.

    This guy''s body is so bad that the energy absorption is worse than when Sam was in his Mortal ne Pre-transcendent stage.

    A mortal ne transcendent stage Sam had a far more absorption capacity that this guy has now.

    Which means, the sheer number of resources that this guy is going to eat up and the time that he would need to progress further in cultivation is way too much.

    Even the best of the environments in this world wouldn''t be of much use to him. Many would even say, it is a waste of resource on him.

    Sam ran a few simtions of his body and how it would reach for various things he is going to put him through.

    He stayed in the second floor of the tower in the divine dimension for the whole day and conducted almost a thousand failed simtions. But there is one that seeded and Sam is going to attempt that.

    After that, he came out and called for Stone.

    "Your body doesn''t have any elemental affinity, which is a good thing for us. Your spiritual core is of a very bad quality, so your body cannot inherently store much energy. The energy you have right now is less than what an average initial stage Astral ne cultivator would have.

    And the quality of your spiritual core is also directly proportional to how much energy you can absorb since you don''t have any unique bloodline qualities.

    Now, let''s take it one step at a time.

    Let''s increase your energy storing capacity first.

    For that, you need two things. Strong body and a very strong soul. And since your body is worse than average, even the procedure that I have in mind to make it stronger needs you to have a very strong soul.

    So, we are conducting a procedure that I would like to call a soul surgery."

    "What do I need to do?"

    "You need to endure. That is it. I will be doing most of the work. We are going to turn your living soul into a specter."

    Stone was shocked. He almost felt like the earth is quaking.

    "You will turn my soul into a specter?"

    "Yes, you heard me right. We will turn your soul into a specter."

    "But specter is created with fusion of dead souls. How is it possible to make a living soul into a specter?"

    "You seem knowledgeable enough for a miner. Even if I exin, it will be very hard for you to understand. But it is not impossible for a living body to be partially undead.

    Take me for an example, I am partially a vampire."

    As Sam said, his skin turned paler and his eyes turned blood red. His canine teeth grew a little bit into fangs.

    Stone is dumbfounded once again. He learned about vampires from Jade. One of the undead creatures. To think a person can be both a living human and a vampire at the same time, it is something he never really thought of.

    Sam didn''t care for his shock and just exined the procedure.

    "My soul power is very high and I even have experience of splitting it before. So, what I am going to do is, split a part of my soul andbine it with a bunch of specters, I will dominate their wills and assimte thempletely.

    Then you will allow your sea of consciousness to bepletely open to mine. This split specter soul of mine will enter your soul and assimte there. When the time for my conscious to take your bodyes, it will kill itself and died down.

    You will have a brand you soul body that has energy of over a hundred specters, all of Astral ne."

    Stone didn''t even understand how Sam is going to do it. It all seemed impossible to him.

    "Is it a procedure that someone used before?"

    "Yes, a lot of specters use this procedure to take over people''s bodies."

    "Then is it going to seed?"

    "I already ran some simtions, as long as I surrender you will haveplete control over your own soul."

    "If this is such a direct procedure, why is no one else doing it? Shouldn''t the kids of those rich nobles use this method to grow their soul power easily?"

    "If you think this is a direct and easy procedure then you are mistaken. No necromancer with a right mind would voluntarily split their soul. And no rich kid ever will survive this pain. In fact, any normal sane person would die, after all during the assimtion the negative emotions of all the specters will be pouring into your soul. You will have to endure all of it."

    Sam went on to list out all the drawbacks of the procedure and possible ways to mess up.

    This kind thing has never been attempted, at least based on all the knowledge Sam has gained until now.

    Sam started making preparations, he needs to make new specters to make sure that stone won''t get swallowed by all the negative emotions.

    It will take two days and these two days, stone has only one job. Eat all kinds of foods that will increase his spiritual energy, nourish his body and rx his soul. He bought all kinds of stuff that are avable in the realm and consumed them while sitting in a formation that is meant to train his soul/

    These two days went in a sh. Sam hunted a few beasts within the wilderness and created the required specters.

    Then Sam proceeded to prepare the required formations that would assist him and Stone in handling the procedure smoothly.

    And soon it is time for the admission test of the Gambler''s academy.

    The whole city is waiting for this. This is thest test within the surrounding regions and all the students who failed in the Olympian academies until then are now trying out here.

    This is thest chance for many of them, or they would have to wait another year.

    Even though a year is not a big deal for many of them at their cultivation level, one year of training in an academy puts their peers way ahead of them. They cannot let this happen.

    Pearl is also interested in the test and came to witness it as a spectator.

    There are two reasons and one of them is to see if Sam is going to participate in this test. She wanted to see what kind of miracle he would pull off in this one.

 Chapter 1975 White

    1975 White

    The test of Gambler''s academy is uniquepared to the Olympian academies.

    One reason is that there is actually no upperlimit to the number of people epted into this ce. If all the candidates pass the test, then they can get into the academy as the freshmen. But the problem is even with that open ended entry, the number of students that get into gambler''s academy is actually less than most of the Olympian academies.

    That is because of the uniqueness of the testing procedure.

    And in this the seniors are more hands on because they are the conductors of the test.

    The rules are simple.

    The candidate for the exam has to pick of the senior students. Whoever it is, as long as they are part of the gambler''s academy and they are of at least middle stage Divine ne cultivators, then they can be chosen.

    The senior doesn''t have any other choice but to ept.

    Once they chose their senior, the candidate challenges them to a duel and they have tost for almost fifteen minutes in a fight. That would give them a pass.

    Just pure survival within therge battlefield that is up to their choice is enough to guarantee the admission.

    Of course, that is not all and there is more.

    If the candidates give the seniors a hard time,nding a couple of hits, dealing some blows, making them fall into traps and having the most easier time one could think of, then they will get more points and that will decide the ranking.

    If they beat the senior that willnd them probably in the top ten and based on how easily they did it, they would be ced higher.

    And of course there are some unique candidates who added some amazing uses to increase their own difficulty over the years and set some new records for the freshmen test.

    In such a unique setting, Pearl is really interested in seeing what Sam is about to do.

    But to her surprise, Sam is nowhere to be seen.

    Even when the candidates already started taking the challenges, Sam didn''t arrive and soon the time set for the reporting was over.

    Sam is officially out of the test.

    Pearl was disappointed and she wanted to leave.

    She turned to Rain and hisckeys and stated her opinion.

    "This is a waste of time. I want to leave."

    Rain had an awkward expression and said.

    Pearl was disappointed and she wanted to leave.

    And of course there are some unique candidates who added some amazing uses to increase their She turned to Rain and hisckeys and stated her opinion.

    own difficulty over the years and set some new records for the freshmen test.

    "This is a waste of time. I want to leave."

    In such a unique setting, Pearl is really interested in seeing what Sam is about to do.

    Rain had an awkward expression and said.

    "But Junior sister, we epted a responsibility under your name, you need to be the final decision maker in this, otherwise we will get in trouble with the elders."

    Pearl clenched her fists and sat down begrudgingly.

    The responsibility they are talking about is trying to scout any suitable candidates within the test.

    Yes, apart from the special admissions by rmendations like Pearl, and admission test, there is one final recruitment the Olympian academies do.

    And that is scouting from the Gambler''s academy.

    This is done in an underhanded way. They will spot some promising candidates who show greatbat ability and then shortlist a few.

    Later on, they will try to poach them with some benefits.

    This is to ensure two things.

    First one is that, they might have missed this promising candidates in their exams by ident. After all, not all the people who ranked in those tests are the best there is. People like Sam appear and eliminate a perfectly good candidate in early stages. They want to do some recovery based on that.

    The second reason is even simpler, they want to take away any good seedlings from the Gambler''s academy.

    This started a few years after the academy Gambler''s academy started. Since it is a new one, not many people joined. Only mediocre ones did. But those mediocre ones turned out to be pretty powerful. If not for the Gambler''s academy not doing well in growing them inrge quantity along with their very low entry, it wouldn''t have ranked lower than the Olympian academy in the ranks.

    And of course, they knew that if a really good seedling falls under the Gambler''s academy, they will definitely surpass the Olympian academies with no trouble whatsoever.

    So, when Pearl said she will poach Sam if he enters the Gambler''s academy, the elders who usually give this task to the seniors, gave it to pearl and her newckeys.

    After this is done, they are going to get a lot of credits for a freshmen which are basically converted to gold coins making them rich.

    For freshmen, this amount of credits isrger than they could afford.

    Except for Pearl of course. She didn''t care much about it and that is why she is disgruntled about staying here for longer time.

    As he tried to at least get entertained from the fights at least, she felt a bit disappointed. These candidates are good, but they are at most mediocre. Even with this academy''s amplification, there is not much they could do in the next few years.

    They cannotpete with the cream of the crop of the Olympian academies.

    She wanted to find an excuse to leave this ce, but then she saw someone very eyecatching walking up to the seniors. It is a young man, who woreplete white. But his attire is different. It is very close to what Sam was wearing, but instead this guy''s long coat is white. His inner shirt is white, his pants are white, he wore gloves that are white, his boots are white and he had a white mask.

    The mask has slit like eye openings and a smile moulded into it.

    On top of hisid a top hat that is also white.

    And he held a ck cane in his hands as he walked to the seniors.

    Not just pearl, everyone is kind of stuck by his weird outfit. It is not every day such an eyecatching guy walks around in the academic realm.

    The man didn''t speak anything and pointed his cane at the one sitting on the forefront of the seniors. The strongest of them all.

    The senior was dumbfounded. Every year, there is always one thing inmon. The top of the seniors was never challenged.

    "You must be very brave and confident in your strength or you must be very stupid to challenge me."

    The senior spoke calmly.

    "Or you might just be an easy target."

    The man in white retorted.

    The senior raised an eyebrow in amusement. He is not feeling insulted and he didn''t take this as a wrong thing.

    is way too hard for me to go easy on you with such a small space."

    10:59

    He spun the dagger a bit and looked at White with a smirk.

    He is very much amused and interested in thepetence of this guy who just came out of nowhere.

    "Fifteen minutes. Survive and you win. My name is crow by the way. What is your name?"

    "You can call me White."

    "Sure. Pick an arena. I suggest you pick arge one, we can wait if they are not avable at the moment."

    "No need. A simple stage will suffice."

    White pointed at the stage that no one has taken until now. It is clean and pristine.

    And obviously the reason is, the stage is too small for the candidates to dodge from their seniors'' attacks. It is not going to be easy for them to hold themselves in the best condition.

    White climbed on the stage and gracefully gestured for the senior toe too.

    Crow got on to the stage with a jump.

    "You know, you made a really big mistake."

    "Choosing you?"

    "No, that just shows your ambition it is fine. Your biggest mistake is choosing this stage."

    "And why would that be? Care to exin?"

    Crow stretched a bit and stepped forward.

    The next moment, he shed like a shadow and appeared right before White and mmed a dagger towards him.

    White reacted quickly and barely managed to dodge the tip of the dagger.

    "If we have a bigger space, when I go easy on you, you could have had a chance to pass it. But now, it is way too hard for me to go easy on you with such a small space."

    He spun the dagger a bit and looked at White with a smirk.

    White arranged his cuffs a bit and then adjusted a slight wrinkle on his coat.

    "You are so sure of yourself. You must be confident. I like it when opponents are confident."

    Crow didn''t reply and made another move. But this time, White followed his speed clearly. He is indeed very fast and there is a certain lethality to it, because even at that speed he didn''t have any kind of openings.

    And this time White didn''t dodge, instead he tapped his cane on the ground very lightly. A wave of energy swept through the stage and the origin of it is the point of contact of the cane.

    The wave swept over Crow and all of a sudden, he felt like the surroundings turned to some thick liquid. His speed lessened for a swift second without his will.

 Chapter 1976 Broken Kite

    1976 Broken Kite

    One second is all it took.

    Crow just watched as White poked his cane forward in the air. It was a very light poke. But he could feel dense spiritual energy at the end of it. Only if he could figure out what that energy is going to do before it happens.

    Crow tried to rebuild his speed and wanted to dodge.

    Energy shot out in invisible ripples. The ripple effect is eerily simr to the ripple style, but it is also different to its core. Crow felt the ripples of energy each one that felt like an ellipse, wash over his body.

    The energy he was about to build up was dispersed once again.

    Crow didn''t suffer any damage, but whatever he wanted to do became useless. He is surprised, but that didn''t stop him. He proceeded further with his attacks.

    But the same thing kept on happening. White is not doing anything except for disrupting his speed with one stomp on the floor and then one poke in the air. That is stopping Crow from advancing further and his attack is basically useless.

    After four of five times of repeating the same, Crow stopped.

    He is not insane. There is no point in repeating the same thing when it clearly doesn''t work. He took a step back and took a deep breath. He noticed that White''s attacks are very efficient. They didn''t take much of his energy.

    On the other hand, all the energy he ced in his attacks is waste. Even with the energy advantage he has, it is dangerous. Crow carefully analyzed every single variable that might y a role and for the two minutes, he didn''t do anything.

    White just stood there with a straight back and held his cane gracefully.

    "You are good. I am sorry for underestimating you."

    "No offense taken. It is amon misconception among the masses. I cannot expect your opinion to be different when clearly all the factors point out that I am the weaker one."

    "You know how long winding you are? The way you speak is irritating."

    "My apologies Mr. Crow, but this is the way I speak and it would be hard for me to adapt to a new version of speech. I hope you can understand that."

    Crow sighed and said.

    "Of course, I understand. In return, I hope you understood something too."

    "What might that be?"

    "Since I acknowledged my mistake of underestimating you, it is naturally implied that I will not be holding back anymore."

    The next moment, under the watchful eyes of everyone, without anyone noticing, Crow disappeared and reappeared behind White.

    Even White was surprised.

    Crow could sense the surprise, just based on the opponent''s reaction.

    The dagger shed White''s back, but due to isst moment reaction, he managed to barely dodge the attack, but the coat was still shed open. The white coat although looked like it was made of a quality leather is a very high level armor.

    But even that was cut in an instant.

    White became cautious.

    He was very vignt to begin with. But after this attack, there is a change in his aura. He is not a rxed anymore. He gave off a presence of being a hunter.

    Crow didn''t bother with it. His speed increased more. Within a fraction of a second, he is already at a ce where White stumbled up and a dagger ray was already shing his back.

    White''s coat was nicked again as he dodged it by a close shave.

    For the next few moves, White was the one on the backfoot.

    He couldn''t properly block the attacksing at him and he even has to use the cane in his hand to physically block the attacks. Even then, the force is too much for him as he had to move in the direction of the blow to negate the impact a little.

    He is not feeling well about the direction this fight is going.

    But the spectators thought otherwise. In their eyes White is doing absolutely great. Particrly the students of the Gambler''s academy. Crow is not famous outside of the school, so the outsiders have a mediocre expectation of him. But the students on the other hand know what he is truly capable of.

    Even though they still think that Crow is going easy on White, they still gave him his props.

    While everyone had their own thoughts, Crow wasn''t short of his own. He is good at judging the bodynguage and in turn the state of mind of his opponents. When he increased his speed, he did notice the surprise and caution of White.

    But as more moves were exchanged he noticed that White is stabilizing. And it is very very quick.

    He did manage to leave a few nicks here and there on White''s coat, but that is it. There is no proper damage done. As he was thinking this point, he noticed that White''s demeanour changedpletely.

    He frowned and shed down with increased force.

    *CLANG*

    The cane met the daggering at it. White slid the cane across the dagger''s edge and along with his motion, Crow felt an invisible wave of energy wasshed at him. It is like a whip that hit him squarely on his chest.

    He felt a burning pain on his flesh and was surprised to feel that level of pain. The armor he was wearing doesn''t seem to be of any use at the moment.

    The whipsh was a hundred percent sessful hit.

    As he thought about this, Crow suddenly realized one more thing. That he is in the middle of a fight and he is distracted.

    White ducked to the side at theing dagger pretty smoothly before poking Crow on the chest with the cane.

    It was not forceful and it was definitely not a stab. But as soon as the contact happened, an explosive sound was heard.

    The energy hit Crow like an air cannon. The energy became solid and it came at him as waves. And since it is concentrated on such a small point, he could feel his insides churning up around that area.

    He flew in the air like an arrow that left the string and had to forcefully take control of himself mid air.

    He had his mouth wide open as he looked at White in front of him.

    That is not the end of it.

    White spun his cane three times in the air. Crow can sense that there is a concentrated lump of energy at the end of the cane, and the energy is flowing into the surroundings with the movement.

    But he couldn''t sense what is happening to the energy itself. He managed to understand what the end result of that movement was.

    He sensed sudden danger from the side and he instinctually dodged. It felt like a de had flown past him. He could even feel that sharp wind near his cheek. But he couldnt sense the energy of the de his hand while he poked on the stage.

    10:59

    nor could he see it.

    This made him feel scared.

    It is not even vignce anymore. It is pure fear at this point.

    *SWOOSH*

    Another invisible de went past him from the back and his spine tingled. This is an even closer call this time.

    *SWOOSH*

    The third de came directly for this throat and he almost got nicked.

    Crow looked at White as he tried to regain his bnce and for some reason he felt like there is a faint smile behind the mask. White poked his cane straight into the air very slowly.

    Crow who didn''t recover his bnce yet felt a huge force blowing him away. Once again he felt like an arrow shot from the bow. But that feeling didn''tst long and it was overtaken by a worse feeling.

    Another explosive invisible energy wave shot him in the back while he was still flying around. He bounced to a different direction. Crow tried to circte his energy and stop in the air. He wanted to levitate and stabilize.

    But then only he realized that these invisible energy waves are not just bouncing him around, rather they are hindering his energy flow.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    More and more explosive sounds kept on happening. Crow felt humiliated. He felt like a broken kite stuck in a cyclone. Bouncing off of wind currents andpletely at their mercy.

    As if that is not enough, the next moment, he felt a sharp sensation on his skin. From within the waves, invisible energy des are being shot out.

    Several cuts appeared on his skin almost instantly and he bled out. Crow felt overwhelmed and when he looked at White, he felt even more scared as the other party is only standing there with the cane in his hand while he poked on the stage.

    It is like a person tapping their cane on the floor when they are bored.

    Crow didnt even know how long he has been like that broken kite and took the beating. Just when he thought he would be done for, he suddenly fell to the ground.

    It has been fifteen minutes already.

    The time for the challenge is over.

 Chapter 1977 Entrance

    1977 Entrance

    White stopped tapping his cane and adjusted his cuffs a bit. Then he seemed to have realized that his coat was cut at several ces and shook his head. Even though no one could see his expression, they all collectively thought that he is mncholic about the coat.

    White walked to Crow and asked.

    "I suppose I passed the exam."

    "Of ¡­. Of course you did."

    Crow stuttered a bit and said in a defeated tone.

    "Is it okay for me to assume that I have the highest score?"

    Crow looked at the remaining seniors and the candidates before saying.

    "You could say so. It wouldn''t be an exaggeration."

    "Thank you."

    "You can go back to your seat and wait. After all the tests are over, there would be a ceremony that is kind of like a pre-induction. You can even move into the dorm tonight if you would like.''

    "Thank you for the information. Then I will wait."

    White casually went to his seat and sat down. He watched the rest of the matches silently.

    But the rest of the spectators are restless. Everyone is talking about White. Particrly the poachers from other academies.

    Pearl who was almost bored to death once again, regained her excitement. She looked at the rain and said.

    "Poachers from the other academies might be sending out the information about him to their elders. Do as I say and stop that information from leaving this ce. This guy named White should be part of our academy or he should be stuck in the Gambler''s academy.

    Rain nodded and went to execute his orders.

    Pearl might not have been too interested in poaching when she arrived, but she absolutely hates losing in something that she is doing. So, she already made a fool-proof n to win in this poaching game.

    Now that she has seen a great seedling, she is d that she set the n up.

    White is a Dark horse,

    And right now, she doesnt know extent of his abilities. In fact, she doesnt even understand these abilities at all. One thing she understood is that White didn''t even show half of his strength. He is pretty rxed the whole time.

    Time passed and with the n she had in ce, Pearl closed off themunication between the poachers and their academies. Now she is perfectly in control of the situation. Gambler''s academy gives something like a pre-induction.

    They don''t force people to stay here. If the selected candidate likes the academy after the pre-induction, they can stay. Or they can leave.

    So, the poachers are going to stay until after the pre-induction is over and then they will make their move. Since they are notmunicating with their academies, these poachers cannot make any big promises.

    Pearl on the other hand can.

    As she was thinking, the tests were over and it is time for the Pre-induction.

    It is a very quick introduction of the academy and its activities. After the initial announcements, the students can explore the academy freely for a couple of hours, go back and think it over.

    Crow walked to White after the Pre-induction is over and asked.

    "I hope you choose to stay in the Gambler''s academy."

    White didn''t speak and just stayed silent. Crow continued.

    "The reason for the Gambler''s academy''s lesser prestige is because we don''t force kids to participate in the meaninglesspetitions. There are many geniuses who never even bothered to attend a duel with a rival academy before they graduated.

    And I am being honest when I say, right now, those graduates are in a stage where all the prestigious seeds of the other academies couldn''t even touch. Most of time this was ignored and it was drowned in the noise of academic glory.

    You are a unique man, I hope you can join this academy. This will be the best ce for you to actually grow.

    I hope you can consider it."

    "I have considered it. That is why I took the test."

    Crow smiled at this response. He is really d that someone as unique as White is joining the academy. That is something to look forward to.

    He wanted to talk more, but at this moment he noticed somemotion building up at the entrance of the academy.

    He looked with a frown on his face.

    Then the frown turned into surprise and excitement. There is a familiar figure standing at the entrance. It is none other than Sam. He is in his signature ck attire and had a smirk on his face.

    He slowly made his way into the academy and directly walked towards the elder in charge of the admissions that just finished the pre-induction.

    "Special admission. Sam."

    Everyone was shocked. Sam became famous in the past few days. Particrly, when he destroyed every single test of the other academies. He managed to stay on top for every admission test, but didn''t want to join any of those academies.

    Everyone thought that he would arrive at the Gambler''s academy as well. Half of the general crowd gathered for that very reason. But to their surprise, Sam didn''t show up. They were a bit disappointed, but still White''s arrival kind of satisfied their eager expectations.

    Now that they saw Sam here, they were expecting some kind of show. And what Sam said only riled them up even more.

    "Is this some kind of joke? You already made a mockery of the other academies by ying around with the rules. They might have let it slide in hopes to poach you, but don''t expect the same from us. The Gambler''s academy doesn''t need to go low just to recruit some talents."

    There is a sense of pride in that voice.

    But Sam didn''t care about the hostility of the old man and he just casually said.

    "You can go and confirm with the Dean of the academy. Also, here is the vial of blood. If you give him this, he will give you all the required information."

    Sam passed a vial of his own blood. This is what''s needed for a confirmation of the admission into the academy.

    The elder might be angry at Sam, but he is not an idiot or an arrogant fool. He took the vial and sent one of the instructors to meet the Dean. Ten minutes passed and every waited patiently. The poachers and Pearl in particr are waiting for the result.

    They are all gritting their teeth at the moment. After all, if Sam indeed belongs to a special admission "So, you must be Gambler''stest project. I should have known that you woulde here. My 11:00

    mistake."

    of the Gambler academy, then all the tests he took, all themotion he built up could only be on behalf of the gambler''s academy.

    And of course, it could have been a personal vendetta, but Gambler academy never really took the special admissions. This is actually the first, which made then question what Sam''s motives could have been from the start.

    Five minutester, the instructor came running along with a scroll.

    The Elder took the scroll and looked at the contents. He frowned and then his frown rxed turning into a sigh. He looked at Sam and extended his hand.

    "Wee to Gambler''s academy. Up on the special rmendation, you are now a student of the Gambler''s academy. Even though you are a freshman, due to your unique situation, you are awarded with all the rights and privileges of a Middle-Stage Divine ne cultivator of the academy.

    You can enjoy all the benefits including the resources, training areas, lectures and special perks including and not limited to eligibility for missions. "

    Sam shook the hand and nodded.

    Everyone who heard this announcement was dumbfounded. The Gambler''s academy that was known for its impartiality is actually showering a guy with so many privileges.

    Pearl''s face is twisted in a scowl. Sam looked at it and his smirk became sharper.

    She always acted calm. She was calctive and she always wanted to outwit others, but now she felt like a fool.

    But after a few seconds, her scowl was gone and she became calm.

    Sam was surprised, but he didn''t care much. She is all but passing entertainment.

    All the seniors of the gambler''s academy were also confused. At this moment, White who was standing beside Crow calmly walked to Sam.

    He didn''t speak and just sized Sam up. Sam did the same thing.

    "Judging by your appearance, I have a feeling that both of us are from the same ce."

    White said in a calm tone.

    Sam noticed the top hat, mask, and cane. Even he had the same thought.

    But he didn''t agree or deny it.

    "So, you must be Gambler''stest project. I should have known that you woulde here. My mistake."

    White said in a loud voice, everyone could hear it. There is no anger or any other emotion. It is still calm, but it is just loud.

    White turned around and looked at Crow.

    "Sorry to disappoint you, I cannot stay at the same ce as this person."

    He turned to the crowd and looked at the poachers.

    "I would like to seek admission to one of the other academies. All I ask is a little freedom from your regr rules. The more freedom you have, the more likely I will favor your academy over others."

    Just like that the seniors along with Crow who were very excited were once again shocked.

 Chapter 1978: Friction

    Sam''s arrival is one thing, but White''s announcement of departure as soon as he heard about Sam, made everyone curious.

    Particrly the seniors.

    Sam frowned at the sudden decision of this unknown figure.

    "Wait, do you know me?"

    "Yes of course, everything you have right now. Everything you were given by the one backing you, was mine. You are living in my stolen glory and I came here to im it back."

    Sam frowned at these words.

    His aura changed and he looked like he is ready to kill.

    Pearl who watched this widened her eyes in disbelief. She would have taken White''s words with a pinch of salt in a normal case. After all, she is not stupid enough to believe anyone''s words.

    But Sam''s reaction is making her doubtful.

    Sam spoke through his gritted teeth.

    "What the fuck did you say just now?"

    White turned around and looked at Sam before saying.

    "You are using the stolen glory that should have belonged to me. I came to this realm to im it back. You and your backer, you know who, stole this from me and it was given to you. All you achievements, wealth, strength and everything else that you have from the clothes to your internal energy, everything is mine and mine alone and I am going to take it back."

    Sam''s aura raged and he is ready to attack.

    Pearl who saw this immediately reacted. She came forward along with herckeys and stood in between Sam and White.

    Her back is facing Sam and she looked at White.

    "I am the representative of Zeus academy, I will give you the full freedom. Apart from satisfying the academic credit requirement for graduation and ess the special missions, you will have full freedom. You can ess all the training spaces and lectures as long as you meet the cultivation requirement.

    All the cultivation resources, weapons, medicinal resources, exploration rights, mission priorities everything that you need for your growth will be provided by the Zeus academy. If you pass a test, you can be under the personal tutge of the Dean too.

    I assure you, that you will not get an offer such as this from any of the other academies.

    I hope you can join the Zeus academy."

    Sam''s frown deepened and his hostile aura still didn''t subside.

    He looked at Pearl who turned to give him a smug look.

    White could sense the tension between the two and he clenched his fist before saying.

    "I agree."

    "Wait, White. What happened? I am sure we can resolve whatever issue you have with this guy. You said you would like to be here. Why would you change your mind just because some other guy. Your unique fighting style can only be perfected here."

    Crow ran to White and asked.

    For some reason, he is very adamant about having Crow with them.

    Sam frowned even more. He didn''t like what is happening. He came here with a n and everyone could see that, and from the expression they felt like it is already upset.

    White stopped moving and hesitated for a moment before saying.

    "I am sorry Mr. Crow, but I am unable to keep that promise. I will never be able to breathe the same air as that person. He belongs to the lowest of the lows and I am really sorry that he joined your academy.

    Even that special rmendation he got is part of my stolen glory. It is impossible for me to tolerate his existence. As for the details, I am afraid I can not give you any. This is all I can tell you right now. But one thing I can tell you, wherever he goes he will be a parasite that will destroy that ecosystem.

    I am sure, just by joining your academy, he might have already created some sort of trouble for you guys.

    Please take care."

    With that White turned around and walked. Pearl also left with him without giving him a chance to stop anymore.

    The rest of the poachers were dumbfounded.

    They immediately ran out to inform their respective academies.

    Meanwhile, Crow and the seniors all turned to look at Sam who is still standing on the stage.

    Sam looked at their eyes and took a deep breath before returning their cold gazes. He could sense the open hostility.

    Crow walked to Sam and asked.

    "What is the rtionship between you and him? What happened?"

    Sam disregarded him and looked at the Elder in charge of admission.

    "I would like a tour please. Preferrably from someone who is worth their salt. Not some random loser who got his ass handed by a freshman in an admission test."

    As soon as those words left his mouth, several gazes locked on him.

    "What the fuck did you just say?"

    One of the seniors who lost just spoke.

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "if you have a problem,e and make a move. Just take a swing and see what happens. Fucking amateurs. Not being able to knock out your opponent is one thing, losing in their hands? I didn''t even join and I am already sick of you guys.

    Don''t bother me."

    Sam''s words are very aggressive.

    Elder who saw this, pped his hands and an isting formation appeared on the stage. As if on cue, some instructors took the liberty to end the spectatorship. All audience were being escorted away.

    Crow''s frown deepened and he asked.

    "Just like he mentioned, you are being a carrier of trouble. You made enemies with every other academy and this is going to make our academy a target. They will all think that this was nned by the academy''s higherups.

    So, all the students will be subjected to the retribution of your actions."

    Sam looked at him with the disdain apparent in his eyes.

    "The very fact Gambler ced this academy in the middle of Olympian region is a provocation. He is meant to make every student in the academy, a target. But you guys are too wimpy to do anything of substance.

    And now you are saying that I am bringing trouble?

    Even if I am bringing it, so what? Who among you can fucking do anything about it?"

    Sam turned around and looked at the Elder once again in askance.

    The Elder sighed and ordered one of the dissatisfied students to take Sam to the dorm.

    When one of the seniors was about to stop Sam out of anger, Crow stopped him.

    "Brother, we cannot let him go like this. Look at this attitude? Does he really think he is all that just because he is best among his peers? How many geniuses have we seen until now? People more talented than him have more manners than him. We need to teach him a lesson."

    "I won''t deny it, but there is no need to dirty our hands by breaking the rules is there?"

    "What do you mean?"

    "The first session for every warrior and warrior-mage after they joined? Did you forget what it is?"

    As soon as Crow mentioned it everyone realized what is awaiting them. They had a smile on their face.

    The rest of the day went by without anything happening in the Gambler''s academy.

    But the Zeus academy is the opposite.

    In the evening, the Dean is meeting with Pearl and White in his office.

    "You promised him all those benefits without consulting me? They exceeded way past the agreed up on limits. I know I told you that you have some flexibility, but this is insanity."

    "But Sir, this person is the only one that could help us neutralize Sam. Judging from what I saw, the whole Sam''s situation is definitely a set up from the Gambler''s academy."

    The Dean sighed at this.

    He knew that this is indeed rted to the Gambler''s academy. But he knew that it is not in the way Pearl thought.

    It is mostly Sam''s personal vendetta. But he is in a tricky situation where he cannot reveal a single thing about this.

    He sighed and stayed silent. Then he looked at White with a frown. He knew what Sam is, but he didn''t understand who White and why he is iming that Sam stole everything from him.

    "How do you know Sam?"

    "I never met him personally. But themon link between Sam and I might be the same thing that you know about Sam and his background."

    Pearl was a bit confused at his words, she turned to her grandfather to see his response for this, but he made sure to not reveal anything."

    After a few seconds of silence, the old man finally spoke.

    "Alright, since you are open to enter the academy, I have no reason stop you and Pearl already promised, there is no point in taking those words back. Let it be. You shall have all that you were promised.

    Your sses will start from tomorrow."

    Pearl and White just thanked him and left.

 Chapter 1979 Surgery

    <h4>Chapter 1979 Surgery</h4>

    Just like that Sam settled in the Gambler''s academy while White settled in the Zeus academy.

    But Sam couldn''t stay there for long. He had to leave the academy after checking in his dorm and go back to the inn where Stone is staying.

    It is finally time to start the treatment and perform the soul surgery.

    Sam entered the inn where the room is already prepared.

    He made stone undress on arge surgical table specifically prepared for this. Sam then activated his vampire bloodline. His hair and eyes turned blood red with his fangs growing out. He bit his finger and started drawing some inscriptions with the blood on Stone''s body.

    After studying many necromancy techniques, he decided to merge a couple of them to properly perform this. These inscriptions are actually part of a soul binding technique. This will make sure that the soul is confined to the body.

    This is normally used to bind someone''s soul to an inanimate object and make them go into aatose state. Sam modified it and now it is almost a technique to temporarily strengthen the bond between the soul and the body.

    After the inscriptions were made, Stone closed his eyes andid down on the table.

    Sam ced his hands on the forehead and death energy riled up in his body. His whole body is full of energy and with the fusion activated, he is an embodiment of death itself. More than three dozen specters flew out of Sam''s soul in a second.

    Sam slowly guided these specters towards Stone''s body.

    Themands were very simple, ''Merge with the Soul''

    This is what every specter in existence craves for. So, they immediatelyunched themselves at Stone. Now Sam''s first task is to make sure these specters don''t start biting each other. Since these specters are essentially souls themselves, it is not abnormal for them to cannibalize each other.

    But since Sam is still attached to them, it is quite an easy task to control them.

    All the specters slowly started getting attached to Stone''s Soul. Now, Sam had to tighten the reigns over them, because if they start consuming the soul, then this whole surgery will be a bust. Stone would just die.

    Sam''s grip tightened and held the specters in seize.

    Apart from holding that seize, he also started attacking them. Not aggressive enough to destroy them, but it is strong enough to provoke them.

    The specters felt like their existence was being threatened and they all focused on attacking Sam''s attached soul to ensure their survival.

    Sam''s soul is stable.

    While fighting and holding these specters on his own, Sam is also dividing his own soul. The fragment that was attached to these specters is being slowly and gradually separated from hisplete soul.

    It is a hurtful process.

    But it is nothing Sam couldn''t bear.

    He didn''t even make a groan as he slowly tore his own soul away.

    Stone who is in connection with both Sam''s soul and the specters could feel that the turmoil happening. His nervousness went through the roof.

    Sam tore his soul away and his whole body went back to its normal state.

    He let go of the soul and the specters before sitting down and meditating. The specters are still fighting with the fragment of Sam''s soul and this gave them some leeway to focus on Stone''s soul as well.

    Stone became even more nervous. He sweated bullets and his hands started trembling.

    Sam''s soul fragment doesn''t have any memories of his. Only a couple. One of them is that the soul has to fight and absorb all the specters and the second is to merge with Stone''s soul and give up the surrender.

    So, the fragment worked on it. It became more aggressive and the battle started. The battlefield for this battle is Stone''s Sea of consciousness.

    Stone could ''see'' with his soul.

    In the vast void of his consciousness. He saw Sam''s soul and over three dozen very distorted figures.

    Sam and the Specters.

    Sam''s soul fragment is very smallpared to Stone''s soul and the specters, but it still has the most domineering presence. All the specters are on a backfoot because of this.

    But Sam''s fragment didn''t wait. He turned into a sh and zoomed towards the nearest specter. He just rammed into the specter and spread all the soul power in to it.

    He is forcefully trying to merge himself with it.

    Seeing this, a couple of other specters joined the fray and wanted to absorb Sam''s fragment.

    Only to their dismay, as soon as they touched Sam they were being devoured instantly.

    Within a couple of seconds, Sam managed to absorb one of the specters and the other two immediately escaped, with half of their power gone.

    When the other specters came across these half destroyed specters, they felt hungry and this time Sam is not connected to them to hold back. Just like that a riot has started.

    And Sam just jumped into fray.

    Stone watched as one soul after another tore each other apart while absorbing them again and throughout this process, Sam''s fragment is growing bit by bit and finally it is the only one remaining. Sam;s fragment looked like a savage at the moment.

    It grewrger and it looked more fierce. But at the same time a lot more stable. All thirty six specters are merged in that fragment and Stone could feel that fragment connecting with him.

    Stone felt a searing pain. He gritted his teeth and his fingers are clenched against the table.

    Sam''s fragment and his soul slowly started merging together. In process, Stone lost his consciousness even at the soul level. His soul temporarily became dormant. But since Sam''s fragment is still active, it didn''t let the soul be consumed.

    The procedure was finished.

    Time passed.

    After a few hours, it is almost dawn next day.

    Stone woke up on the table. The blood inscriptions on his body are gone.

    He looked at Sam who is still meditating then he tried to observe any changes in his own body. At first he didn''t feel that much different. But he felt very exhausted though.

    He tried to restore his spiritual energy and then he finally saw the difference.

    He widened his eyes in disbelief at the sheer amount of energy that he could sense in the surroundings. It is way too high and way too much.

    He has never sensed that much energy in his life before. He felt excited and wanted to absorb it, but to his dismay, even though with his newly obtained he could drag that energy towards him, he wasn''t able to absorb it.

    His body is not absorbing it.

    He felt depressed once again.

    "First step is sessfully done. The next steps would be very painful and this extra soul power would be very useful in enduring it. Meanwhile, I prepared a special training for you. I want you to go through it properly."

    He gave a spatial ring with a bunch of different things that Stone will need for his training.

    "I will not be here for the next few days. Just use themunication token I gave you, if somethinges up."

    "Thank you."

    Sam just brushed it off and walked away.

    He went to the academy again. Since this is going to be the first day, he doesn''t want to miss what is about to happen.

    But when he reached the academy and then the building where the first ss is being held, he was dumbfounded.

    Because he is standing in a Gym.

    A modern Gym with all the machines once could think of.

    Sam never ever thought that he would find himself in this ce again. He felt so shocked and dazed that he didn''t even notice all the hostile gazes that areing at him.

    He walked to the dumbbell rack and picked up one with a number five on it.

    Sam was shocked to see that he has to struggle a bit. After all, with his current strength, he could life a mountain. He wouldn''t start to think that he couldn''t lift a dumbbell.

    These are made with special materials and enchantments that would make it suitable for cultivators like him to train their body.

    Sam used observation ability to check the dumbbell, but at this moment, a dozen or so seniors entered the room and attracted everyone''s attention.

    Sam put the dumbbell back and looked at the seniors. The group is being led by Crow and when Sam noticed the hostile gaze from Crow, he knew things might get interesting.

    "Good day everyone, this is going to be your very first lesson in the Gambler''s academy and it will be taught by us, your seniors.

    Get ready for the most unique lesson in your life yet.

    The ce you are in is called a Gym and everything you see here is built to train your muscles, each machine and equipment is designed to train a specific muscle group in your body.

    We will teach you how to use this equipment today, but there is just one twist."

 Chapter 1980 Gym Fight

    <h4>Chapter 1980 Gym Fight</h4>

    Sam and the rest of the freshmen all focused on the seniors.

    Sam smirked at the introduction given by Crow. He probably knows more about the Gym and weight training than Crow. After all, it is notmon knowledge here. Of course, if the weight training is really a serious course in the academy, then things might be a bit different.

    Crow nced at Sam''s carefree attitude and the impression he had of him dropped even lower.

    "The gym has some set of rules and one of the unbreakable ones is that you cannot use your spiritual energy and elemental energies to train here."

    As soon as he spoke those words, a seal of some sorts seemed to have activated.

    Sam and the rest of the freshmen lost connection with their own spiritual energies. Sam felt just like a normal person. He tried to use his energy, but he couldn''t ess it. He felt like a regr human. But of course that doesn''t mean, he is weak now. His body is that of a divine ne cultivator.

    Even if he in an injured state right now, he would definitely be able to kill a Peak Stage Astral ne cultivator that has full power.

    Heck, he could even kill a few of his peers who are their full power. He didn''t feel weak at all.

    Crow looked at him, but he talked to all the juniors.

    "You can record your battle techniques in the special machine that was located in the corner. All you need to do is ce your hands on the machine and imagine using that technique.

    The machine will pick it up and it will give a detailed analysis on what muscle group you are using to perform it and what muscle group would perform it better and what muscle you need train and tone to increase your strength.

    This is a training structure specially designed by some of the first students of the Gambler''s academy.

    This is a gift left behind for the students and no other academy was able to replicate the benefits thate from this ce.

    As I said, there are some more rules in this room.

    If someone is using a machine and another person wants it, they can do one of two things.

    One, then can either wait until the other party is finished or they can fight it out with them.

    The fight itself has no rules. Whoever has the stronger fist wins and that is that.

    As long as you don''t kill someone, everything is fair game.

    You can also participate in duels if you wish to check your progress. You can also have group fights and team fights, no one would care."

    As Crow exined rules one by one, Sam understood one thing clearly. This guy is just encouraging them to fight.

    And he also noticed something else that most of the freshmen didn''t notice.

    The seniors are all spreading all over the ce. They are taking up one machine after another slyly.

    He understood what is going on and so did some observant freshmen.

    "¡­ One final rule.

    If someone is in Gym, either they should be doing some exercise or you should be resting from an exercise that too for a very short time. If you were observed to be idle for a longer time than permitted, then you would be kicked out of the Gym for the rest of the day."

    Crow ended all the rules and gestured all the students to go to the equipment of their choice.

    Since it is the first day, Crow advised them to first use all the machines and equipment to get familiar with them and then use the machine to revise the technique.

    All the freshmen were a bit excited and they wanted to check out the equipment by themselves. But to their surprise, none of them were empty.

    Even the dumbells and weights were upied.

    Sam smirked at this.

    Some freshmen were confused and even naively went to ask some seniors directly for the space.

    But they all got the same answer.

    "If you want it, you can just follow the rules. Wait or fight. But beware, group fights are allowed."

    Sam understood what is happening. They are being hazed. A verymon tactic used by seniors in any educational institution. It is particrly high in ces where a lot of talented people gather. This helps the seniors put the juniors in their ce, which they believe is beneath them.

    And Sam knew just from the hostile eyes, the seniors are clearly targeting him. Anyway, he also wanted something to make some perfect noise.

    He walked to the rowing machine which is the closest to him and asked.

    "I want this machine."

    The senior looked at him and said with a snort.

    "Get fucked. Can''t you see, I am using it?"

    Sam smiled and walked to the weight stack. That guy is using three tes and he seemed to have a decently leisure time with it.

    When weights moved downward, Sam mmed his foot on top of them. Pressing them down.

    When the senior tried to move it, he couldn''t. He looked at Sam angrily.

    "Take your leg off."

    "Get fucked. Can''t you see, I am trying to take the machine? If I can''t use it, you wouldn''t be able to use it too."

    The senior is obviously pissed. He tried to forcefully pull, but he couldn''t make the weights buzz. Sam using all his strength to press down on the weights and he is not going to let him have an easy time.

    The tension on the chord increased by a lot and by now everyone is already looked at Sam and the senior.

    The Senior noticed the gazes and felt a bit ashamed.

    "Take your leg off, or I will cut it."

    "With what? Your tongue? Get off the machine this second or¡­"

    At this moment, Sam stopped speaking and had to duck.

    *Bang*

    A fist flew past him and hit the column of the machine. Sam looked at the senior who made the move with a raised eyebrow. He was just doing some bicep curls on the other machine and it seems like just to mess with Sam he had given it up.

    "So, this is a group fight?"

    Sam asked with his leg still on the weights.

    "No, I want this machine as well, so before I go after the upant, I thought I would take care of the queue."

    Sam looked at the senior, who took a fighting stance.

    "Not a bad idea, but it seems like, you have no idea about one thing."

    Sam spoke and dodged theing attack, aimed at his throat. The senior missed again.

    "What would that be?"

    "Gym fights. It is a very dangerous game to y and almost always, the one with more brute strength will win."

    As he spoke, the senior came at him once again and Sam dodged it. The fist brushed past him, but Sam crouched down more than necessary and moved to the side.

    The senior got frustrated and this time, the senior who was on the rowing machine also stood up and got ready to attack Sam. As the fist drove towards him though, Sam picked up a barbell te that has a mark of number ten and held it against the fist.

    *BAM*

    The senior''s punch was blocked and the next second, Sam swung the te and mmed it against the senior''s shoulder.

    *BAM* *CRACK*

    Everyone heard the cracking sound and were stunned by how Sam wielded that weight mercilessly. The second senior managed tond a punch on Sam. But he didn''t think the price he paid next was worth it.

    Sam picked up the same weight and swung it sideways to the senior''s head.

    The edge of the te was mmed into his jaw and he could feel his teeth broken and the tongue crushed, along with a shattered jaw bone.

    Sam didn''t stop there, as the senior was falling down, he pulled the te back and hit the man on the face with its face.

    *BAM

    *

    The senior fell on the floor with barely any consciousness left.

    His facial bones were fractured and he is bleeding profusely. Sam''s attacks were ruthless. The hazing has been happening for a long time. Every year, every generation, the seniors always gave some juniors a hard time and there was always someone like Sam who was targeted in particr.

    But never in the history did someone do something like using Gym weights as tools and weapons. They never really saw them that way and they felt that it was beneath them to use these things to fight.

    After all, their aim was to give hard time, not to traumatize and harm them seriously. But Sam has apletely different point of you.

    You can''t pull the tail of the tiger and expect it to react in good fun. It is going to swing the ws and chomp on with its maw. And at full force. Once you pulled the tail, it is not your choice on how the fight goes anymore.

    Now these seniors pulled the tail.

 Chapter 1981 Ruthless

    <h4>Chapter 1981 Ruthless</h4>

    Sam didn''t even bother to take a look at the other seniors who are obviously very shocked.

    He just sat on the rowing machine and started exercising. As if he didn''t just beat two people close to death. One of the seniors immediately abandoned his machine and came to check up on his friends. This prompted the other seniors out of their daze and they made their way too.

    One of them directly went for Sam and grabbed him by his shoulder.

    Sam is not wearing his feather coat, he is wearing the uniform of the Gambler''s academy right now since it is a rule for all the students to wear it in the academy grounds.

    The senior grabbed him by the uniform and tore it.

    Sam found his bnce and stood up, looking at the senior coldly.

    "You tore my shirt."

    Sam asked in a very t tone.

    The senior became furious. He tightened his grip on the torn shirt and pointed at his friends with his other hand.

    "What the fuck is wrong with you? How dare you harm a senior like that in an exchange duel?"

    Sam looked at the senior''s hand that was holding his shirt and said.

    "Let go."

    The senior became even more furious and was about to say something.

    "YOU¡­ *ARGGH*"

    Sam headbutted the senior in the face. The forehead of his skull was mmed into the nose of the other party. A cracking sound was heard by the rest of the seniors and that is not the end of it. Following the first headbutt Samnded a second and a third all in matter of seconds.

    The senior fell off and tore Sam''s shirtpletely.

    Sam is now barechested. This scene felt like it belongs in a Telugu action movie. Usually, a goon or some goon''sckey will do what the senior did and the protagonist will now stand barechested flexing his abs and toned body.

    But in this world, abs and muscles are dime a dozen. The only thing Sam flexing right now is the scars that he proudly wore.

    As Sam believed that every scar is a mistake on his part, he always left it there without healing as a reminder to himself and right now it is giving these seniors a scare.

    It is like a warning to them stating that they are dealing with a person that is almost one of a kind and a kind that they have not met before.

    By now Sam is surrounded by a bunch of seniors who are closest to him. A few of them were taking care of the three Sam had knocked out.

    One of the seniors didn''t wait and hit Sam on the back. Sam didn''t bother to block. Instead he took the force of impact and leaped towards the senior in front of him.

    He mounted the guy who got caught by surprise and started punching him brutally in the face. He didn''t even bother aiming for uracy, he only rammed his fist as many times as possible with his maximum speed.

    When a few seniors wanted to beat him up from the top, Sam slipped to the side.

    "ARGH¡­"

    The seniors missed and they had to hit one of their own. The one that was already severely injured with Sam''s punches.

    In this chaos, Sam already slipped past them and arrived at the dumbbell rack.

    He picked two dumbbells of the smallest size there is and abruptly turned around to meet a kick to his chest.

    He slid backwards and knocked the dumbbell rack off. The kick was definitely no joke. The senior thatnded the kick wanted to continue the streak and threw a spinning back kick. But this time, Sam swung the dumbbell at the ball of the foot that came at him.

    "ARGHH.."

    He screamed in pain and hopped on his other leg. Sam closed in and used both the dumbbells to beat the crap out of him. One hit on the temple, another on the shoulder, one more on the chest and another on the abdomen.

    Finally, kicked the other guy off on his one stable leg, right on the knee.

    When the senior fell to the ground, Sam mmed his head with another dumbbell. Of course, taking his sweet time on just one senior is not a good thing. He left himself open for others to attack and he took two kicks to the side and fell towards the dumbbell rack once again.

    Sam sneered at the seniors that areing at him and to his mild surprise, some of the juniors joined the fray. They seemed to be trying to butter up to the seniors.

    Sam didn''t care. In fact, he is amused by how indecisive these people are. Sam clearly gave them a demonstration how lethal he can be with these gym equipment and it is also a demonstration on how lethal they could be if they wanted to.

    But they are too wimpy to take that chance. They don''t dare do that.

    Sam didn''t care though. He decided to go crazy.

    Immediately, he threw the two dumbbells in his hands straight at the heads of two seniors.

    One of them took a hit on their head and the other backed down, but still took a hit to his shoulder. Both of them stopped though.

    Sam took another pair and this one was bigger. He didn''t hesitate. He threw them on another couple of seniors, followed by the third and fourth.

    By now a few of them managed to clear the distance and came close to Sam.

    Sam is holding the fifth pair of dumbbells in his hands. These are the same ones he tested at the start.

    He swung one and hit one of the seniors in the face while he dropped the other one on the foot of a junior.

    When the junior lost his bnce because his foot was crushed, Sam hammered him on the forehead with the second dumbbell in his hand.

    *BAM* *BAM* *CRACK*

    The cracking of bones was loud and clear, the junior fell off and Sam redirected the hammering to the senior who is about to kick him.

    Sam caught the leg with his arm and rammed the dumbbells on the knee.

    *CRACK*

    The knee cappletely shattered and the senior fell. Sam didn''t let him go though, he raised his leg and mmed it on the senior''s chest and used the senior to create some distance between him and the other seniors.

    He then threw the dumbbell in his hand once again, but this time to the senior who is stillying down under Sam''s control.

    The heavy dumbbellnded on the chest breaking a few ribs, the senior vomited some blood and fell unconscious.

    Sam reached out to take another dumbbell, but another senior came and caught a hold of him from the back. He tried to restrain Sam and he seeded for a second,? taking this chance other seniors charged at him. Two of them held Sam in restraint while the third one finally started beating.

    Sam was caught and the seniors and juniors surrounded him.

    Crow and three more seniors are still attending the seniors who are severely injured.

    Crow looked at Sam in utter disbelief. He didn''t expect such a violent and ruthless reaction from Sam. He met a lot of arrogant and ruthless people in his life, but Sam certainly takes the top spot. He watched as over? dozen people swarmed on Sam.

    Some of them are just barely able to hold him down while the rest are trying to take their anger out on him. If Sam really took a beating, then he would definitely feel at ease, that is what their goal had been since the start. But there is a slight sense of dread, that is telling him to stop this madness.

    But hesitance made the decision toote.

    At this moment, Sam who is already swarmed, managed to free one of his legs. He didn''t dy like Crow did and aimed at the groin of one of the opponents.

    He didn''t hold back anything in that kick and with just one kick, he managed to make one opponent useless.

    Now, he had more space to move his leg around and aimed at another person to free his second leg.

    This time, he couldn''t catch the groin, so he could only kick them on the leg, that still got him a second of free space for both of his legs and that was all he needed.

    Sam kneed one of the opponents holding his hands and his hand was freed. He moved it around and managed to get a hold of a dumbbell.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    One dumbbell was aimed at the head of one of the opponents. Three hits and the blood sttered everywhere.

    Just like that, Sam is already free.

    Crow watched as Sam stood up. His whole body including his face is covered in bruises. His gums were bleeding from excessive hits to his face and he could clearly see the coldness in Sam''s eyes.

    Things just got worse.

 Chapter 1982 Light Work

    <h4>Chapter 1982 Light Work</h4>

    Sam didn''t even let the opponents any time to digest his sudden outburst of attacks.

    He leaped towards the nearest one with the dumbbell and mmed it on the side of his head. The young man fell to the ground and Sam mounted on him once again. He started swinging his dumbbell repeatedly.

    Six hits.

    Three teeth, fractured nose and then a crack on the side of his eye socket.

    A senior woke up from the daze and jumped at Sam to save hispanion. But Sam threw the dumbbell at him making him dodge it. Sam jumped over and tackled him. He then rolled over and before anyone knew it, he held the guy in a choke with one hand.

    He picked up a weight with another hand and started beating the senior on the head and the chest.

    Every hit broke a bone and the senior slowly lost himself in daze.

    Sam threw him to the side like a rag doll and took a kick to his face by a different opponent. But in process he caught the leg and pulled him over. He threw leg into the gap between machine columns.

    The senior was dumbfounded.

    He tried to get back up.

    But Sam picked up another weight and rammed it on the leg that was ced in between the columns. The leg broke like a tree branch. It snapped into two.

    Sam didn''t stop though, he mmed the weights into the face of the senior, urately into his mouth.

    The senior copsed groaning in pain, but the final blow is when Sam threw the weight directly on to his chest.

    One of the juniors caught a hold of Sam from the back, trying to restrain him again. After all, that is what worked before. But this time, Sam is a lot more.. let''s say uncaged than before. He grabbed a hold of the other party by his clothes and mmed him on the bench nearby.

    It happened to be the bench for the bench press and there are a bunch of weights hanging on the bar.

    He pulled one each from either side and pped them on the face of the guy.

    After three ps from both sides, he threw the weights at two more opponents who are far away.

    Sam then pulled another weight from the bar and turned around. A guy was running over to him with his mouth wide open. Yelling at Sam with a weight in his hands.

    For the first time, an opponent dared to pick a weight ande at Sam. He is actually impressed. But itsted only for a second.

    Sam mmed the weight horizontally into the guy''s mouth and jumped vertically before throwing a front kick to the weight.

    Crow winced as he watched the kid fly in the air andnd unconsious with the weight still in his mouth. And the weight in his hand fell off.

    Sam caught it before itnded and swung it at another opponent. This time hitting him on the knee with the edges for a few times.

    Making the other party halt, before he pped him with the weight on his face.

    Crow and his to other friends didn''t dare to move as Sam ran throw them one after another. But he didn''t give them a chance to stay back and watch the show.

    He picked up a barbell, with weights on onside removed. The weights are only on the other side. He held it over his shoulder as he walked to the three of them.

    Sam is drenched in blood by now and hardly any of it is his.

    The seniors and juniors are lying on the floor. Most of them unconscious and even the ones that are awake are brutally beaten down. They are groaning pain if not lost in daze.

    Crow took a step back as he looked at Sam. He wanted to desperately get out of the room right now. He is not confident in taking on Sam with the constraints on his spiritual energy.

    Sam swung the barbell bar and the weights struck one of the three seniors squarely on the jaw. The senior spun a little and fell on the floorpletely unconscious. Sam didn''t bother with him anymore and did the same with the second senior.

    Now Crow stood alone. Drenched in sweat. He very much wanted to deactivate the formation, but the override ess point is on the other side. He wanted to escape the room but even the exit is on the other side.

    Either to stop the formation or to get out, he has to go past Sam. Which by what he can see is impossible unless he is prepared to experience some real pain.

    "You don''t know what you are doing. You are making the whole school your enemy."

    "And?"

    Sam asked with no regard for the obvious threat.

    "You might be able to do whatever you want in this room, but once we are outside, your body wouldn''t be the only one fighting. We will have ess to all our means and what do you think everyone else is going to do?

    They are going to take their revenge.

    If you let this go now, I will try to help you out with the seniors. There are way too many of them and you are just one person. We can let this go as water under the bridge."

    "And?"

    Crow didn''t know what to say. He already ced all the reasons that Sam should probably consider to leave him alone, nut Sam is obviously not bothered with it, which means, he is about to get his ass whopped.

    At the thought of this Crow felt pretty frustrated.

    Sam has one cultivation level below them. He should technically have a weaker body than them, but Sam just ran through everyone as if he was fighting a bunch of toddlers.

    This made him not just feel lost, he also felt fear that he had never seen before.

    Sam suddenly moved and Cro understood that he has been lost in aplete daze and took too long to respond. Sam is tired of waiting and swung the barbel bar.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    A series of strong hitsnded. A few minutester, Sam stood there with his upper body bare, whole body soaked in red blood and at this moment, the door opened up. A bunch of women are standing outside and judging from their appearance, they just seemed to have worked out.

    The leader of the group is obviously a senior, she was in charge of handling the female students which are considerable lesspared to the male students.

    She turned and looked at Sam as the door opened.

    Sam is standing over Crow who is hupping because of the beating he took. Sam spat beside him and spoke in a condenscending and frustrated voice.

    "Light work."

    He walked to the door and didn''t even care for the women watching.

    "Get out of my way."

    The senior involuntarily stepped to the side.

    Sam wiped the blood off with a cloth as he walked out.

    He had a faint smile on his face. The first day in the academy is going to go really well. He caused enoughmotion to make sure that his brutal nature and scary way of handling things.

    Now he just had to wait for the rumors to do the work. His reputation will be standardized.

    Meanwhile, he needs to work on a brand new thing. Another part of his grand n.

 Chapter 1983: Glowing Hub

    Just like Sam predicted, the rumor of him beating the shit out of every senior during the first ss spread like wild fire.

    In fact, the speed of the news would put actual wild fires to shame. But the news mostly stayed within the gambler''s academy. Except for the select few like Pearl not a lot of people knew about this situation. The student albeit a bit gossipy didn''t want the prestige of their academy to be dragged down the drain.

    So, they kept it within the walls.

    That evening, all the seniors are gathered in the infirmary. Sam''s handiwork left every single one of them with extremelypound andplicated fractures. The healers had to set the bones and the fragments in order before they could heal them and the treatment is going on stages.

    One of the elders visited the infirmary and looked at the seniors coldly.

    His sweeping nce stopped at Crow who is blushing in shame. The shame and the guilt are obvious on his face.

    "Good, at least you know some shame."

    The elder sneered through gritted teeth.

    Crow didn''t say anything. He just watched in silence.

    "Hazing is one thing, but getting your asses handed to you by a junior, that too on a first day? What is wrong with all of you?"

    "We weren''t able to fight back properly because of the restrictions in the Gym."

    One of the seniors said in a light voice, almost like a whisper. But that didn''t escape the keen ears of the elder.

    "You should be ashamed to give that as an excuse, even to yourself. He is a junior with one cultivation level behind you. Most of you are pure warriors, while he is a warrior mage. Shouldn''t you guys have the obvious advantage in this? Shouldn''t your bodies be more trained than him?"

    Crow closed his eyes for a brief second and remembered the ghastly body of Sam. Riddled with scars everywhere. The scars of stabs, shes, cuts and blunt weapons, he could see traces of all of them. A thought popped into his mind.

    ''There is no way our bodies went through more training than his.''

    He is sure of it. But he didn''t dare to say that out loud in front of the elder.

    "Everyone of you suffered injuries that are very new to even the healers in the academy. They have an idea on how to treat you, but it will take some time.

    Reflect on what you have done while recuperating. As for your punishment, you all owe twenty thousand gold coins to the academy. You can either pay the money directly, aplish missions andpensate with academic credits."

    He left immediately and didn''t even bother to acknowledge the shock and the pain on the faces of the seniors. As for the juniors, who are also in the infirmary, he didn''t bother to visit them. He is afraid that he might not be able to control his anger when he confronts them and might even beat the crap out of them.

    What were they thinking getting involved in such a fight on their first day.

    Of course, there is one freshman that he still has to talk to.

    By the time he went to his office, Sam is already waiting there.

    "So, you are the new fire cracker that is causing too much noise in the recent days."

    Sam looked at him without answering.

    "You are the very first rmended candidate the academy has epted. That itself is a blemish on the academy''s reputation of its impartiality. On top of that, you have a quarrel with every other academy within the region.

    Now, the whole realm thinks that you causing all that trouble is orchestrated by the academy. Sooner orter the rest of the students are going to take the brunt of it.

    One would have thought that you would try to make friends with the students to resist that and whoever did that would have turned out foolish, because you just beat the crap out of your peers and seniors alike.

    What the hell is wrong with you?"

    Sam didn''t answer. He went into a deep thought as if he is really thinking what is wrong with himself.

    The elder looked at him with a nk expression. The question was rhetoric, but Sam''s expression stumped him.

    "Honestly, I just couldn''t help myself."

    "What?"

    "Now that I look back, I realize I could have handled it in a much simpler way. But I just couldn''t help myself. I just felt like doing it in such a high profile way. Even beating the seniors today, I never bothered to stop and think if I am going overboard."

    The elder didn''t know what to say for a second. He didn''t expect such a reply from Sam. It almost felt like Sam is really exining his problem to him and he felt lost for a second. He quickly regained hisposure and spoke.

    "Why is that?" He asked calmly.

    Sam hummed a bit and said.

    "Because I don''t give a flying fuck. That is why."

    Elder''s expression changed. He understood what happened and his face turned red in anger. He pointed his finger at Sam and was about to yell. But Sam interrupted.

    "I don''t know why I am being questioned here, the seniors are the ones who started it. I am sure you have some recording device installed in the gym. You can check. They made the first move and I properly followed the rules.

    They even ganged up on me, a freshman, what do you expect me to do? Take it lying down? Not gonna happen.

    If you have a problem with me, kick me out of the school. I don''t give a shit."

    With that Sam stood up and left.

    The sses for the rest of the day are cancelled because of what Sam did and this works well for him. Because his about execute his next big thing.

    That night, Sam and White are still the hot topic among the people of the region. Everyone in the city are talking about it. And while they are in the middle of that discussion, the subject of some of the old rumors attracted their attention.

    The hub building that was outside the city and at the edge of the forest. There are some light pirs around the hub and they all started glowing at the same time. There are some light instruments ced on the walls of the hub at various spots and all of them glowed at the same time.

    Hub looked like it is in the spot light all of a sudden and it indeed is.

    It is attractive and turned a lot of eyeballs towards that direction.

    But that is not all, the next thing that happened because of the hub called for more attention even from the people who didn''t bother with it in the first ce.

    A stream of lights shot out of therge castle like building and they flew in different directions. Dozens of lights, big and small are moving at a fast pace.

    But they are not exactly lights, instead they are metallic bird puppets that are in the size of ordinary birds. Some of them looked like pigeons, some looked like crows, some like parrots, there are many birds and each kind is of a different size.

    They all flew towards the city and the pigeons are the first tond.

    Every citizen who has a cultivation level of a Divine ne cultivator started getting a pigeon. The puppets hovered in front of them gently and in that night time, the puppets are glowing with a warm golden light and from close up they could see how this glow ising.

    The outlines of each and every part of the bird is highlighted, they could clearly see the feather patterns, the eyes, the gaps between the feathers, the wings, talons and the beaks, all of them being highlighted by the golden glow.

    They looked mesmerizingly beautiful.

    The cultivators extended their hands and the pigeonsnded on them gently and the next moment two things happened. A metallic band fell off of the neck of the bird and its beak opened up as a small glowing scroll slid out of it.

    The cultivators caught the band and the scroll.

    They were stunned to read the contents.

    "Hello, my fellow resident of the Academic realm,

    I am Joker. The owner of the hub; A brand-new establishment that is glowing right outside the city. Hub has been created to be an effective center of activity for this region.

    It is a ce where you can do business, train, hang out with your friends, make new friends, entertain yourself, eat new cuisines, exchange pointers, and much more.

    This is the ce that offers everything a cultivator might need. Tomorrow is its grand opening and I hope you can visit.

    Tomorrow is its grand opening and every service of ours will be on a massive discounted price.

    As a weing gift, I am offering the puppet that you have with you right now. I am sure you will like it.

    See you tomorrow.

    -Joker."

    The letter fascinated every one of their recipients, more than that the puppets fascinated them.

    As soon as they were done with the letter, the golden glow disappeared from both the scroll and the puppet and a piece of information popped into their minds.

    It is the connection the puppets established with them.

 Chapter 1984 Birds

    <h4>Chapter 1984 Birds</h4>

    While the normal citizens are fascinated by the message that came with pigeons, the small-time business owners and moderately reputed cultivators got bigger birds.

    Crows and ravens, the city guards got bigger birds, the guard captain got an owl.

    Not just them, the birds went to the students in every academy and to the instructors. The student got ravens and the teachers got small-sized eagles.

    The higher the position the bigger the bird.

    Pearl who is sitting in her courtyard is also examining the bird in her hand. Herckeys, including Rain all got one themselves.

    All herckeys got ravens, but hers is a sea hawk. More like a baby one that was still growing. Bigger than the ravens and crows, but smaller than the eagles that were sent to the instructors.

    After she read the scroll, she also got the information in her head, sent by the puppet''s spirit.

    ''Wear the band on your wrist.''

    Pearl was a bit confused by this, and of course, she didn''t do as she was told.

    She looked at Rain who understood what she wanted. He took the band that was given to him by the raven and wore it on his wrist. The golden glow of the birdpletely disappeared. The bird seemed to have lost all of its energy for a second.

    The next moment, his wristband started glowing with aqua-blue patterns. The bird that was about to hit the ground also glowed with the same aqua-blue patterns as it flew up andnded on his shoulder.

    A bunch of information started transmitting into his head.

    Rain was amazed with every single part of it. He exined all the details he learned to Pearl and she was also surprised.

    She wore the band on her wrist and her sea hawk also lost its golden glow before it regained a glow of a different color. It is a deeper blue than that of Rain''s and there is a hue of white to it.

    She extended her hand and the hawknded on it. Pearl closely examined the bird. It is clearly a puppet, but the detail on each and every part of it amazed her. It looked like a real bird if not for the obvious metallic body and the lifeless eyes.

    She took in all the information transmitted into her head.

    This puppet is basically a mechanical pet with a bunch of different features. The first one among them is the wrist band is the connection between the puppet and the owner. But a person cannot exchange the puppet and wristband with others. Once registered they are linked permanently.

    The second feature is that the owners can control the puppets with just their thoughts. They canmand the puppets to do whatever they want it to do and all the functions of the puppet can be essed the same way.

    As for the features of it, one of them is scouting. The puppet can be used as an airborne scout, it has an inherent disguise mechanism that will make it look invisible and resistant to spiritual senses that are not strong enough.

    It will provide live feed to the wrist bands and they can see it through holographic screens, they can even record it, but the recording crystal is within the bird''s body. They can change it.

    Another feature is about couriers, they can imprint a location to the puppet and no matter where they left it, as long as it is on the same, the bird will find its way there, so it can be a good messenger boy.

    Then there are attack features, the energy beams shot out of the beak are the most basic. All they had to do is charge the energy into the puppet. The puppets are programmed to be adapted to their elemental affinity.

    So, for pearl, it is water elemental energy.

    Apart from the energy beams, there are energy talon attacks. The talons will be supercharged with elemental energy and when theynd on the target, there is a high chance of energy corrosion to the target.

    Then there are wing shes, a physical beak attack and there is also self-destruction.

    The birds will gather energy from the atmosphere enough to perform regr scouting, but for the attacks, it is better for the owners to charge them by themselves, it would take way too long for the birds to gather enough to create attacks.

    And there is one final attack.

    They can record their own special attack into the bird''s body. The attack will be trapped in the inscription and the bird will be able to release that up onmand.

    Pearl was very impressed by the features of the bird.

    It opened her eyes to a brand new world that she never even imagined.

    Beside her, White is also checking his bird out. His bird is also a bigger one than raven. But instead of a Sea hawk, it looked like a falcon. The size is same as that of Pearl''s Seahawk.

    His is not glowing with any elemental color. It is neutral white signifying hisck of elemental affinity.

    "Do you like it?"

    Pearl asked the masked man.

    White examined the bird in his hands and nodded.

    "I do. But I wonder, who is extravagant enough to give these out as gifts with an invitation?"

    "I don''t know. But I know that anyone who received this invitation would definitely visit the ce tomorrow."

    "I am attending for sure. I don''t know about the rest." White said as he tested the flight ability of the bird.

    The students and the citizens are not the only ones who are wondering about this.

    At this moment, in every academy, all the instructors, elders and deans were meeting in their academies.

    In Gambler''s Academy.

    The dean who hasn''t made any appearance for a long time is currently sitting on his seat as the head of the meeting. He sat with his legs up on the chair like a kid. He had a thick white beard and his long white hair was tied up in a bun on the top of his head. His clothes are mostly messy.

    He controlled his puppet and made it fly across the room. There is genuine excitement in his eyes. Just like how a kid acts when they got their first remote control toy.

    "Dean, please stop it. It is distracting us from the discussion."

    Dean looked at the elder who spoke and shook his head in resignation. He made the birdnd in front of him on the table.

    His puppet ispletely different from the rest of the students, instructors and elders. Because it was modeled after the image of a genuine divine beast. To be precise, after a Golden Sun Crow.

    It is bigger than any of the birds in the room. The elders had the next big size. They all got birds that looked like Condor.

    The instructors got some big falcons and hawks.

    "So, what is it that you want to discuss?" Dean asked as he fiddled with the wings of the bird. He is just like a kid, trying to see how these joints are moving while they are in his hands.

    The elder sighed and said.

    "Originally our meeting was held to handle the issue with the new freshman Sam. The guy that was taken in as a rmended candidate.

    Dean, we never really epted anyone into the academy through rmendations. Why did we do now?"

    "Because the rmendation is from someone we cannot refuse. Did he cross any rules?"

    "Not exactly, but¡­"

    "Then what? Leave the kids be. That is how we handled the situation until now. There were unique geniuses and entric geniuses, they all behaved in their own ways and we let it slide. Just because this guy is acting in a way, you never imagined, do you think we should change our ways and pressure him?

    Yes, he might destroy a few of other prodigies in this generation, but that also means, we will wee the really resilient prodigies who use his pressure as whetstone. Don''t act like the stuck up guys in other academies.

    As long as he doesn''t break any rules, don''t bother with him. That is that."

    The elders didn''t know what to say. Dean kind of killed their argumentpletely.

    The Vice dean, who is also called the First elder spoke up finally.

    "Alright, disciplinary elder already gave him a warning. Lets keep on observing and as dean said, we will deal with him if he really goes against the rules.

    Now, let''s talk the other thing.

    The bird puppets and the ce called Hub."

    "I want to go there tomorrow. In fact, just cancel tomorrow''s sses, let the students visit that ce too."

    The Dean said as he raised his bird high up and observed it from the bottom.

    Another elder spoke up doubtfully.

    "Dean, don''t you think we should be a bit cautious about this? Who is mad enough to give away such valuable things? Do you really think they won''t have any idea or an angle of their own?"

    "Of course they would. But sometimes we have to let them y their cards before we find out what exactly they want. So, we are going tomorrow. That is that."

    And another discussion killed just like that.

 Chapter 1985 Grand Opening

    1985 Grand Opening

    Meetings simr to the one at Gambler''s academy were held at every other academy within the region.

    But most of these meetings went longer. They actually discussed what might be the reason for such extravagant gifts along with the invitations. They thought of more than dozen possibilities, both good and bad, but they couldn''t be sure of the Joker''s intentions.

    Finally, all of them only came to one conclusion, they will be visiting this ce.

    After all, no matter what angle the other party has, it would be rude to refuse a greeting after taking such an extravagant gift. Particrly the elders and the dean. Their puppets are tens of times better than the puppets of the kids.

    If the other party can just afford to give away things like these, they are wondering what he has in store for them to sell.

    The next day.

    The whole city seemed empty and deserted. Everyone including the citizens, shop owners, students and the instructors, city guards and even the staff of the Exchange center, all went to the hub for the grand opening.

    The whole city seemed to have been evacuated.

    Except for the people below Divine ne cultivation, everyone else managed to get an invitation and they all went.

    Of course, there are some thugs and people who deal things in the grey area that were not doing this, they instead sent someone from their team to check this out. There are also some skeptical people within the academy who didn''t attend.

    And of course, among the students there are barely any students of the third term or more easily understood, Late Stage cultivators and there are almost not peak stage cultivators who are known as the fourth term.

    The freshmen don''t know where they were sent to, but to their knowledge these people went to various missions and assignments.

    Anyway, for the hub''s opening their absence made little difference.

    More than ten thousand people are in front of the hub''s building within the grounds. The building indeed looked bit, it upied almost the same size as an academy grounds. But the academy grounds arerge estates, while the hub is one big building, a castle or a fort.

    The deans werest to arrive and as if they are on cue, they all arrived at the same time.

    The elders, instructors and students are already a bit disgruntled by that time.

    Of course, they didn''t have anywhere to project that.

    But the moment the deans arrived, the hub reacted and all these frustrations were gone.

    "Wee Everyone! Wee to the hub!"

    An excited voice was heard from all over the ce. Even the deans who are the strongest there didn''t manage to pick up where the voice ising from.

    At that moment, arge projection shot out of the building. It is of a man, who is wearing a formal and ceremonial attire, but half of his face is covered with the mask of a clown.

    The projection is huge, as big as a mountain and with a bright sh, itpressed itself and became the size of a regr human.

    The projection is very realistic, but that only applies to the features, the glow that it is emanating made it apparent that it is a projection indeed.

    The projection hovered towards the deans who are standing at the forefront of therge crowd.

    "Hello, honorable deans of the academies. I am Joker. It is very nice to meet you. Thank you for epting my invitation anding to my humble establishment."

    "This establishment is anything but humble, Mr. Joker. And also, this is not exactly a meeting is it?"

    One of the deans, the dean of the Apollo academy spoke calmly.

    Joker turned to him and smiled

    "I understand what you mean, Sir. But I must apologize and hope you can understand. Because of my past adventures, my body is no shape or form to physically present in front of you. What is left of me is what you are seeing right now.

    I hope you can ept this crude way I presented myself in front of you."

    The deans didn''t know what to say. They just stayed silent. Joker''s smile widened and his glow brightened a bit as he said.

    "I hope you all liked the present that I gave you yesterday. If you did, then you are going to like the hub even more. Wee to my Hub."

    As soon as he spoke, the massive stone doors of the hub opened up and a bright light shed. A few birds made of pure energy flew out and burst into a light that turned into one word.

    ''HUB''

    The opening is mboyant to say the least.

    The deans thought little of it, except for the Dean of the Gambler academy of course.

    The old guy was just short of pping and cheering out loud.

    They slowly stepped in and they gasped as they looked at all the things inside.

    Joker''s image hovered in front of them as he glided in air, just a few inches above the floor. He snapped his fingers and there are many glows on either side of the aisle.

    "The buzzing machines that you see on either side of the aisle are what I call Arcade Machines and this ce is called Arcade, the very first part of the Hub.

    Here people can y games that involve using their skills. The first game to your right example, is a shooting game. All a person needs to do is stand on that tform and wear the helmet and the body suit that was associated with the game.

    A holographic screen with the targets will appear and the person based on their attack style can simte their attacks through that suit¡­

    Well, the exnation is too long winding, we can call one of your students and they can demonstrate directly. Just wait a second."

    Joker disappeared and reappeared in the middle of the student crowd that is on the back and they didn''t even manage to take a glimpse of what is inside the doors.

    He looked around and asked.

    "Who among you deals with long range shooting attacks?"

    The students were surprised and didn''t react, but one of them was sharp enough to raise his hand in daze.

    "Perfect,e with me."

    Joker''s projection touched the guy''s hand and both of them disappeared. They reappeared back in front of the deans.

    "I found one."

    Joker quickly guided the kid who was frightened out of his wits to see all the deans at the same ce to wear the body suit and the helmet.

    "Now when you see the projectiles on the holographic screen, imagine yourself performing the attack, it doesn''t matter what kind of long range attack it is. If you are a mage, just extend your hand and perform the attack like you usually do, if you are an archer, just imagine you have a bow and arrow in your hand and channel your energy into the suit to do the attack.

    Don''t worry about destroying anything, just go ahead and do it."

    The kid didn''t understand what is happening, but he just nodded and got ready.

    A very lively holographic screen appeared. It is veryrge and almost looked realistic. It is a forest setting a bird flew by.

    The student aimed his arm and channeled fire elemental energy. He was about to throw a fire ball and when he discharged the attack, instead of a fireunching out of his hand, the energy was dispersed by the suit.

    The student was puzzled, and that confusion turned into shock and awe as a fire ball appeared on the virtual screen as it shot the bird down. Burned it to crisp.

    Not just the student, the shock of the deans is even bigger and it only grew as the kid performed a few more attacks and shot down a few more birds.

    "This is a game designed to practice the reaction speed and energy conservation of the long range attackers. I am sure, no matter what level of cultivation they are at, they can always use some improvement in those areas."

    Just like this shooting game, there are other games suitable for all kinds of fighters. Warriors specialized in hand to handbat, spear users, elemental users, formation experts, inscription masters, swordsmen, knife throwers, there are even games for people who just lift and throwrge rocks on other people."

    The deans are all looking at hundreds of machines are all lined up and arranged in the area, every machine is of different shape and when they are activated they are showing a different type of projection and interface.

    "How do they work? Did you create them yourself?"

    One of the deans asked.

    Joker smiled and said.

    "I cannot answer how they work. It is not that I am too secretive about the working, I can reveal most of it, but it takes too much time and it is way tooplicated. And yes, it is indeed created by me.

    These are actually byproducts of one of my research."

    All the deans'' ears perked as they heard his words, particrly when the word ''byproducts'' was used. Everyone went into a deep thought not revealing it out. Well, everyone except for one.

    "I want to try one. What do you rmend? I am a brawler by the way. A hot-blooded brawler

    through and through."

    The dean of the gambler''s academy raised his hand and jumped on his feet as if he is afraid he wouldn''t be able to attract Joker''s attention.

 Chapter 1986 Cubicles and Simulators

    1986 Cubicles and Simtors

    The dean acted like a kid.

    Joker just smiled and asked.

    "Well, would you prefer to y actual game sir? Rather than the demo version that the student just yed."

    "That is not the actual game?"

    "No Sir, I just yed a preprogrammed demo just to show you guys. If you y the actual game, you will be the first person to y this."

    The dean''s eyes brightened up and he jumped high pumping his fist.

    "Of course, I will y the real game. You can leave the demos for the other losers."

    Joker didn''t answer and guided the Dean to a different machine. This one has a tform in the middle and there are a bunch of pirs around it. Joker and the dean went to the tform, after the dean stood on the tform, Joker snapped his fingers.

    A gold coin appeared out of thin air. Unlike Joker himself, this is not a projection, it is a real coin and under his directions, it went into a small slot that''s on the side of the tform.

    As soon as the coin dropped, a ring of light shed and scanned the Dean''s body.

    A holographic screen appeared in front of him. The screen showed an image of the dean and there are a few empty slots to fill in the details.

    "Please speak up your name Sir."

    "Wharton."

    The name appeared in the slot, and then there are a few slots where the Dean had to choose his profession, he marked it as the dean of the college and then his fighting style, if he is going to use any elemental energy or not.

    After choosing everything, the pirs around the tform started projecting an image.

    A glowing text appeared right in front of his eyes along with that projection.

    ''Level 1'' it said.

    The projection changed to that of a forest. There are a bunch of trees and the Dean suddenly lost his spiritual sense, but instead of worrying about it, he became excited. This is going to force him to purely react on his instincts. This will hone the battle skill a lot.

    He could already see the benefits this will provide.

    From within the trees, something simr to rabbit type beasts started hopping. They are like white and grey shes as they targeted the Dean.

    He started punching them.

    Joker and the Deans along with some instructors who followed them watched as Dean quickly punched down the rabbits.

    "This machine is designed to improve quick reaction in fist fighters. They cannot get off the tform and their area of action is very limited. The condition for clearing the first level is to defeat at least eighty percent of the creatures.

    Based on how many creatures a contestant defeated, how many hits he took and how many creaturespletely left, a score will be allocated.

    The score they gain in this, can be converted into the Hub Points which the contestants canter redeem into gold coins or use it as a currency for hub transactions."

    "And how much do they need to pay to y these games?"

    "One gold coin for one try."

    "That is it?"

    The deans were shocked. Rightfully so. A training session that is focused to this level and also provides the necessary visual simtion and increased difficulty, it is very cheap.

    "Yeah, with one gold coin, everyone will be able to start from Level 1. They can y as long as they can survive, the current highest avable level is 120. If they are capable, they can even reach the Level 120 with just one coin."

    While he was speaking, the Dean cleared the Level 1.

    A sound along with some fire work disy and a word appeared in the projection.

    "PERFECT- LEVEL CLEARED"

    Joker turned to him and smiled.

    "As expected, this doesn''t pose any challenge to the Dean."

    Dean Wharton was about to go to the next level, but Joker stopped and spoke to him.

    "I know you are excited to try Dean Wharton, but I humbly request sir to hold back the excitement, you have a lot more exciting and a lot more interesting things to try and I need to show you.

    So, please. If you can leave it for now."

    Dean Wharton was clearly reluctant, but the Dean of the Zeus academy spoke.

    "Wharton, you shouldn''t throw a tantrum like a child here. There are thousands of people waiting behind us. I am sure you can find timeter."

    Wharton reluctantly nodded, just like a kid.

    Joker gave a brief about other categories of machines within the arcade and they finally moved to the next area.

    Now, this area is actually filled with cubicles.

    "This area is what I would like to call the Research area.

    During my time, I have travelled across hundreds of realms and I have met all kinds of people. And of course, I gathered knowledge in every possible. Some methods are the most obvious ones like buying their knowledge in the form of books and scrolls or some other recorded format, some not so pleasant.

    But all the knowledge is recorded in here.

    There are three main categories of this knowledge. One is flora. This contains knowledge of the vegetation of all these areas. If you want to research about some medical herbs with specific qualities, or wood some specific properties, or some poisonous nts and cures for those poisons, you can find it through this.

    Then the second category, fauna. This includes information about both beasts and cultivators of different races. Elves, Kinneras, Kimpurushas, demons, lycans, giants, titans, I have met many species and I can''t even begin listing the beasts that I have seen.

    You can get all the information of that here.

    The final category is of minerals. Stones, ores, metals, alloys. You can gain information about all of that.

    And the search format is actually based on conversations."

    As he spoke, he opened one of the cubicles.

    "Please, someone step in."

    One of the Deans took the chance and entered. The cubicle is not very big, but there is a veryfy chair and in front of them, there is arge and nt crystal table. It is like a digital touch screen.

    With a snap of Joker''s fingers, the demo started.

    Another projection of Joker appeared, but this one is smaller and he wore white robes in that.

    "What would you like to search for?"

    The smaller projection asked. Flora, fauna, minerals, the three options hovered and the dean selected the flora.

    The projection changed and the white robes changed into a dress that looked like it is made of woven holographic screen or if you want a bigger projection, you can use the bird''s eyes to do arger 11:31

    projection."

    leaves.

    "Give me some description please."

    "I need information of herbs that increase the natural body heat. Increase the virility and vitality of a person." He casually said and then the projection moved to the side.

    After a bunch of data scrolled past on the projected screen, a number appeared.

    "3278 results matching the search. Filter it with more details."

    Then the dean started giving more details.

    Cultivation level, the potency of the herb, possible undesirable side effects, possible size, possible rarity and the more he went, the lesser the number became. Even after more than a dozen filters, it still showed a three digit number. Finally, he filtered it with locations and asked for herbs that are avable in the neighboring three realms.

    But he felt that would be ridiculous filter. Only to his surprise, it actually reduced to a two digit number.

    "It can be this precise?"

    He asked Joker.

    "Of course, you can actually download all this data too and ess it at your time. The data will be of the herb description, an image, even the spatial coordinates of the realm, and a rough area within the based on its ecosystem and geographical factors.

    But of course, based on the level of information, the price will increase.

    Since you have information about 20 herbs or so, it would cost about 20 to 30 gold coins. The search function itself only costs 1 gold coin."

    The deans are once again impressed.

    "And by the way, there is a surprise in this. This data can be directly obtained in the form documents, or they can be sent to the wrist band you got for the puppet. You can watch them on the small holographic screen or if you want a bigger projection, you can use the bird''s eyes to do arger projection."

    As Joker exined more and more details, Deans just opened their mouths wide and this is just the second phase of the Hub. There are many more things inside the hub that will shock them more and more.

    And the shocked they were.

    The next phase is what Joker introduced as Experiment Simtor Areas.

    These are mostly for the professionals who are skilled in smithing, other artisan crafts, formations and inscriptions.

    Instead of performing the experiments outside with real materials, they can actually simte the environment they want along with all the ingredients and factors to run simtions. They even have time eleration function, that will allow them to waste unnecessary time in waiting and preparation.

    These cost a lot more than the first two phases, but they are still considered cheaper.

 Chapter 1987 Simulation Areas

    1987 Simtion Areas

    The simtion section was already shocking enough for the Deans and the instructors.

    Half of them are experts in side professions and they couldn''t stop themselves from checking it. Joker of course, didn''t bother to stop them. He just let them start ying around there. Only the Deans and some older Elders followed him.

    "Now, only two areas remain.

    One is another Simtion area, but it is not for artisans or other masters. This is pure battle simtion. You can connect yourself with the system here and you can simte any scenario as long as you can image it with clear constraints and metrics.

    You can rey the battle however many times you want. Theyout will physically change based on that. Of course, the area is a bit limited, so you can only imagine to a certain extent."

    When Joker exined, the deans were a bit confused.

    "You mean, it can simte anything? Including the beasts, natural factors, all kinds of variables?"

    "Yes, the simtion would be close to the real thing as possible. This is the result of a new research I managed to reach a breakthrough in.

    The architectural design of this space allows the stones in the floor, ceiling and pirs to morph and create a stone version of the terrain to a very precise detail.

    And a new technology of mine, allows me to recreate and simte by morphing the stone replica of whatever a person can imagine. You can do a demo for this too, if you want."

    The deans all gulped nervously. They looked at each other and they all recognized the dangerous amount of possibilities this can create if the technology is indeed a feasible one. They are even scared to try it out, because if it is indeed true, they don''t want to be the first ones to get hit by that reality in the face.

    But of course, not all of them are scared.

    Dean Wharton, dean of the Gambler''s academy, jumped so high that he almost hit the ceiling.

    "I, Wharton am the only worthy one to experience the demonstration of this ce. Allow me."

    He is so excited.

    His excitement is on par with a child that just got informed that he became the owner of the candy store for the rest of his life and can enjoy the free candy. Maybe even more.

    Joker weed Wharton with open hands and for the next thirty minutes, the things that appeared in front of the Deans and Joker are something that they wouldn''t be able to forget for the rest of their lives.

    Joker wouldn''t forget it because of how proud he is about his own creation and the Deans because they realized how terrifying this invention is. They believed that this would change thendscape of the whole Academic realm as this will open the doors for brand new ways of teaching.

    The Dean of Zeus academy turned to Joker and asked in a solemn but a bit shaky tone.

    "If you don''t mind me asking, are you nning on opening another hub in a different region?"

    "Not at the moment, no. I already have too much on my te just trying to maintain this one. And a lot of the things in this ce are new inventions, so I would be busy collecting data and improving it. So, there are not ns of opening another branch in the immediate future."

    The deans sighed in relief up on hearing this.

    And the next moment, a fire burned in all of their eyes. Except for Wharton who is purely excited because of what this toy can offer him, the rest of them all are burning up with ambition and things they could gain from using this machine.

    Many of them are tempted to ask Joker to sell this and it would be a lie to say that they didn''t have any wild thoughts to just obtain it in ¡­ let''s say more ''unfriendly'' ways.

    But to their dismay, they are in the Academic realm. As long as Joker is a registered and valid merchant selling these service, trying to take that off of him, will be a crime and the academic realm''s guardian formation will see to it that they are screwed.

    Theypressed their desires of course.

    They just waited for Joker to finish the tour.

    This simtion section is a veryrge one and it covered many acres, but all of that is covered and confiened within the building walls. Even though people realized that this is a big construction, this isrger than they imagined.

    After they crossed over this area, there is a final area that was left.

    "Well, this section is not the best of them all and in fact a little underwhelmingpared to the rest, but this is where people can give outmissions to the hub. Themissions could be about battle strategies, war strategies, ambush ns, weapon designs, medicine recipes, formation designs, whatever it is.

    They cane here, exin their requirements and they can gain a solution and direction from this ce."

    "How does that work? Do you have a team that takes up these jobs?"

    "No, the jobs are mostly done by the system based on my input."

    The deans didn''t get it. As much as they are shocked by everything have seen and as much as they could believe that this system or whatever Joker calls it can do it, they are still skeptical about the possibility of it.

    Joker just kept on exining.

    "The concept is pretty simple. Let''s say, you are looking for a new weapon that suits your needs. A saber for example.

    The first thing you need to do would be enter a virtual space and simte a saber with your mind. You need to perform the techniques that form the core of your battle prowess and based on that the system will simte, various scenarios.

    You will fight those battles as long as your will power can support it and after collecting enough data, the system will provide you with the designs of sabers. It willpute and analyze all the possible mistakes within your movements and will estimate the proper weight ratio, the shape, bnce, material and many more factors that I cannot list out now.

    It will create a bunch of designs based on this data and each design will be rated based on a grading system. You can buy the design and the forging method along with a simted video of forging with a set amount of coins.

    This way a contestant can hire a cksmith from outside and create their own ideal weapon."

    The deans were very impressed by this. This would indeed provide a great deal of improvement in custom weapons for the students and instructors too.

    "Don''t you forge them yourselves?"

    "Of course, we can. But the requirements for getting a weapon forged by the hub are very high."

    "Why? Is the forging quality that high?"

    "It is indeed very high, but I wouldn''t dare im that we are the best there is. The reason is to make sure the cksmiths and other masters within the region will not suffer losses because of the hub.

    The Hub is established in an attempt to develop a region as a whole. It should be an assisting factor.

    So, getting a cksmith from outside to forge a weapon will benefit the smith with the knowledge of the forging, materials and design.

    Of course, they might take some time to get to that level, but with all the educational material, they are bound to improve."

    The Deans understood, they are really impressed and mesmerized by all the things within the Hub.

    One of them, the dean of the Hephaestus academy asked.

    "What about the puppets? Are you going to sell them? Since you managed to make these bird puppets, I am sure you can do more than that."

    Joker stayed mum for a moment and spoke.

    "Well, there is one more section that I haven''t exined to you guys. I told you about getting score and points that the people can redeem right?

    There is a catalogue of items that they can redeem with those points and the puppets are also part of it. So, if they want to, they can get the puppets through that method.

    As for selling themmercially, I am not really interested in that."

    "But you will make a fortune if you put them up for sale."

    Joker chuckled and spread his arms while saying.

    "Looking at this establishment, do you really think that Ick any possible fortunes?"

    His words stumped the deans.

    "Please look around and do what you want. All the machines are operated with gold coins. So, you don''t need me to guide you. But if you do, you can just call for me in that wrist band of yours."

    With that Joker disappeared.

    Then the deans spread out and checked out the whole establishment. They noticed that thousands of people are already inside and are checking out.

    The arcade machines are full and there are many people waiting in line. The cubicles are same. Even the simtions areas are being upied one by one.

    The deans are had the same feeling. This Hub is going to change thendscape of the whole Academic Realm.

 Chapter 1988 Conversation

    1988 Conversation

    That day, every single person is within the hub.

    The city emptied out. Even the few people that were staying back came running after they heard of the news about how diverse and unique the Hub is. The students stayed mostly at arcade. Anyone who is interested in battle is there.

    They are trying to set highscores and beat each other''s records.

    Of course, right now not a lot of them are doing good since they are new to this. So, the scores and high scores are constantly fluctuating.

    The whole day went on just like that.

    Joker announced that the establishment will be closed everyday exactly an hour before midnight and then will be reopened after sunrise. It is to check the machine and equipment and make sure everything is in a perfect condition.

    Even though everyone left, they are all thinking about returning back.

    The Hub has everything and anything they could possibly need.

    Pearl and White are sitting in her courtyard after they returned to the academy grounds.

    "What do you think about the hub?"

    Pearl asked as she sipped some tea.

    White didn''t eat anything that was ced in front of him. He just looked at the bird that was on his hands. Today, he also spent a lot of time trying out everything in the Hub.

    "It is a great ce. I am actually surprised that someone is generous enough to open an establishment like this?"

    "Why is that? Isn''t it a good business?"

    "It is, but an establishment like this can only gain money in my opinion. It would just stay as an extremely good business. In fact, they would gain more moneypared to what they would get from selling it to someone or making it exclusive to someone.

    But they wouldn''t gain any power."

    "Wait a minute. How are they going to make more money this way, instead of selling it to some power? Do you know what these academies are willing to sacrifice just to make it exclusive to themselves? Even my uncle would go to lengths to make that happen.

    He might even summon Zeus''s projection to buy it at an insanely high cost."

    "Yeah, but the current method is still more profitable."

    "He is just opening each machine for one gold coin. How much can even gain much from this?"

    "That is where you are wrong. The arcade is not meant to rip off one person in a short term. If one training session costs too much, there wouldn''t be many people who would try it. But now, I am sure every single student in the academy would go there every day. Thousands of students and they would use up more than one coin.

    Just imagine, he has a guaranteed revenue of tens of thousands of coins every day. And the arcades are designed in a way that would encouragepetition and they also highlight the ws of the candidates.

    They are going to use them more and more.

    Then the research library. It is no exaggeration to say, these professional people are richer than average students, I am assuming Joker would make the initial investment with just one month of its opening¡­"

    White went on exining what he thought of the business model and Pearl was surprised. There are many things that she hasn''t seen and understood, but White''s exnation made everything clearer. She could see the financial scope of the Hub.

    "Thanks for exining. I am so used to the usual business models of this ce and I can only see this from the perspective of the academies, so I haven''t thought of it. But now, I understand what you mean by why Joker will lose out in the power he could have gained." Pearl said with a smile. It seems like she indeed learned something new from the conversation.

    "Really?"

    "Of course, with exclusivity Joker would have gained more in power topensate what he lost in money. He would have influence over the academy that he is affiliated with and they are going to give him more ess to resources, people and anything that he wants.

    He would be backed by the power of the academy and with the added factors like his future aplishments and what he could bring the academy, his importance would keep on raising."

    "That''s right. That is also the reason why I am surprised, why would a person leave a chance as obvious as it. If he could just meet one of the elders of any academy, his life would change.

    He would be a person with influence over realms and armies at his beck and call.

    Why do you think he didn''t do that?"

    White asked as he looked Pearl who went into a deep thought.

    "Unless, he doesn''t desire it? But what could make someone not desire that much power? Maybe he already has it?"

    Pearl muttered in that deep thought.

    She shook those thoughts off of her head. She knew what kind of influence an academy has. She couldn''t imagine an entity other than academies having that much influence. She changed the topic.

    "Anyway, whatever the long term impact this thing might have, I am more interested in what it would do the freshmen of this year."

    "Why?"

    "Since you just joined, you might not be as informed. Let me tell you, the whole point of academies is to createpetition and increase the output ofpetent individuals.

    And thatpetition begins since the first year.

    One month after the admissions, the academy towers will open for the freshmen. That would be the start of thepetition. People will enter the tower and try to climb it up, there will be an unofficial ranking among the freshmen, but everyone knows that even the elders and deans ept that ranking.

    After that was done, there would be the first tournament within a couple of weeks. This would be conducted by one of academies in the region. That would be start of a string of tournaments by all the academies.

    Every week, there will be on tournament. Even though they are announced as the internal tournaments of the academies, they are open tournaments. Anyone can participate. This would be until the inter-academic freshmenpetition which will happen among the freshmen of all regions. All the academies in the realmpete for it.

    The prizes for thepetition are extravagant, but more than that, it is a chance to make your mark within the academic realm. It will be start of the glory.

    I will be one of the candidates that would represent the Zeus academy in all of this, but I want you to be a part of that too."

    White looked at her without answering.

    "There is another candidate within the academy who is a great lightning mage. Apart from us three, I already made the list of all the seeded candidates from the other academies in the region.

    I drafted a n.

    Us three versus them is obviously going to be an unfair fight for us, but we are going to use the time before thepetition begins to deal with them. We will peg them down and defeat them in every way possible both inside and outside of the battlefields."

    "You seem to have a lot riding on this freshman tournament. For you to take this much effort just to n their sabotage."

    "Yes. We will use my n to estimate their prowess in every form. By the time the Inter-academic freshmen tournament begins, we should have a hold of all their strengths, weaknesses and make them dance in the palm of our hands.

    This generation is mine to conquer and I am willing to share the glory of this conquest with only a few people. You are one of them. Of course, I wouldn''t say I am impressed with you so much that I am giving this to you out of my generosity. Because that is a lie.

    I chose you because, you are the only one who seemed to know what Sam is.

    He is a man, that I cannot gauge from the time we met.

    I need someone to peg him down and you are the only usible option until now. So, please make your decision. If you do,e here again tomorrow morning. I will assign a team to you, that will help you in every you want."

    "A team?"

    "Yeah, Zeus academy is the nest of many great talents. Even if I only seeded us three, there are many talents who could be wild cards and dark horses. I am going to keep them close to us three and let us help us in this goal.

    They are going to be our cards in this game. Think about it."

    With that Pearl stood up and left.

    White didn''t speak anything. He just sat there for a while before he slowly walked out of the courtyard with cane in his hands.

    And the next morning, he walked just as slowly as he made his way to Pearl''s courtyard.

 Chapter 1989 Secret Room

    <h4>Chapter 1989 Secret Room</h4>

    White got into the deal Pearl proposed and as soon as it started, he was given a team and a bunch of tasks that he should focus on.

    On the same day, after White left with some brand-new information and his team some other guests arrived at Pearl''s courtyard around noon. Pearl is sitting outside under the shade of arge tree in her courtyard with a table full of dishes.

    And a man sat across her in a purple robe.

    If Sam or anyone from Dusk was here, they would have recognized this guy from a mile away.

    "Nice to finally meet you Vidyut. I have been dying to meet you for a long time."

    Pearl said with the same sweet smile she always had.

    Vidyut took a sip from the wine ss and spoke expressionlessly.

    "Nice to meet you too, Miss Pearl. I am sorry for not meeting you much earlier. I was still trying to get ustomed to this new ce and the new rules. I couldn''t fit in your appointment in that schedule."

    "No problem. No problem at all. In fact, I quite like it that you just didn''t move everything in your life to amodate my appointment. I have been quite sick of everyone doing it to suck up to me."

    "I could only imagine how that feels. Anyway, how may I help you?"

    "Well, I am forming a team. As you must have heard, this year the freshmen are indeed a bit morepetitive and of high quality than the previous few years. And you must know howpetitive our academies are¡­"

    Pearl went on to pitch the same idea to Vidyut and he didn''t even show as much resistance as White.

    "I agree. I like this idea."

    "That was easier than I thought. I didn''t even use my charm yet."

    "I prefer a well drafted n over charm any time of the day."

    "Oh, seems like you had bad experiences with Charm? A broken heart?" Pearl asked with the same faint smile.

    "Not really. I have seen lot less people die by a npared to charm. Anyway, if you don''t mind I would like to take my leave. I need to go and train. Send my team members to my courtyard along with the list of the tasks that I need to do."

    Vidyut left even before Pearl could answer him.

    Pearl didn''t mind, in fact she was intrigued. Sam was the first one who ispletely immune to her sweet nothings. Second is White. Even if she did manage to gain enough good will from White, she didn''t even begin to think that she had him in the bag.

    Now Vidyut, this guy couldn''t make it more obvious that he has zero interest in getting close to her.

    She is actually feeling refreshed.

    What she said to Vidyut hasn''t been a lie. She got pretty tired of every person that is trying to suck up to her. Now that there are three characters, she is feeling stoked.

    After Vidyut left, she walked back into her house alone and entered a room in the basement.

    The walls of the room are filled with pictures, information and even the table in the middle is the same. There are several brushes with ink all sprawled over different areas. This is the ce where she does her homework.

    Right now, she stopped infront of one corner of the wall where the first step of their n is going to start.

    With all this information and sketches, one might think that it is a veryplicated n. Even though it is in a way, it is also very straightforward.

    She has picked several candidates from all the academies and created a list. She considered this her hit list. They are not her killing targets of course, instead their growth is.

    Everyone who is on her list is going to be watched by her and her teams every single day. If possible, she is even trying to get a report on every second of their lives. She wouldn''t rest until she knows everything about them.

    Routines, their habits, tastes in food, people they like, ces they visit, their attack patterns, thought process, training duration, pleasures, desires.

    She is going to keep a watch on everything both inside and outside of the academies. And lucky for her the Hub opened up and most of these targets are also spending a lot of time there. It would be easier for her to gather this information.

    Once this information is in her hands, she will themmission the same teams to attack them mentally and emotionally.

    Before they knew it, they should be under herplete control.

    She opened up some reports that got thetest information. The people who held the current high scores in the arcade.

    She looked through the names and a smirk appeared. Her estimation is not even off in the slightest. It is very urate and all the people that she marked are on the list. She started sorting the names out and assigned a few in a different list along with a bunch of other tasks that needed to be done.

    She sent the scroll to Vidyut.

    Vidyut looked at the scroll. He felt surprised and amused at the same time. The list has a lot of familiar names. He took out amunication token and called someone.

    "What the fuck are you doing back in that academy?"

    On the other end Watt is standing in the middle of a training ground. He just came back an hour ago from the Arcade after a good session of training. He broke several high scores in different machines and came back to have somebat practice.

    And even before he went looking for trouble with someone, he was already greeted with a bunch of people who craved for a good beating.

    Right now, there are a bunch of people around him, lying on the floor as they slowly bled out. Their tendons were cut and they are unable to get up and there are a bunch of silver cards poking out of their tendons and a weird kind of inscription is glowing over that card.

    The inscriptions disrupt the natural healing of the cultivators and now they cannot get up.

    Watt casually wiped the blood off of his face and walked away leaving them like that.

    "What happened?" Watt asked in a very calm tone.

    "Well, someone from Zeus academy is keeping tabs on you.

    Since the start of the academy, you have fought with more than fifty people. And twelve of them are young masters of different areas. On top of that, you are on constant odds with the Student Union and the seniors.

    I thought you tried to assimte with the Student union of Hermes academy?"

    "I tried to assimte, but there is still some friction. Some assholes kept on yapping their mouths, so I had to teach them a lesson. I think they will kick me out of their inner circle in a couple of days.

    And the count is not exactly urate. Just now I dealt with ten more people, one of them is a young master. So, Sixty people and thirteen young masters.

    Anyway, how do you know these details. We didn''t have our first meeting yet."

    "Well, I have some interesting things to say to you in the first meeting. We will talk then. Anyway, just keep an eye open for some rats. They are sniffing around you and collecting information."

    "Got it. See you at the meeting."

    Watt cut the call off and looked around vigntly. He doesn''t know who is spying on him. In fact, only he knew that he beat fifty people, because a lot of these fights are picked secretly and the result of it was not leaked.

    In fact, he nned it that way.

    But it is not as leak proof as he thought. He needed to be careful.

    As he was thinking, Vidyut kept on making a few more calls just to warn some more people from Dusk. He didn''t call Sam though. That talk has to wait until their actual meeting.

    It will only be a few more days.

    Their first meeting is going to happen the night before the academy towers are going to open. They have a lot of discuss, meanwhile he just needs to grab this opportunity and gather as much information as possible.

    With the mboyant and massive opening of the Hub and the burningpetitive spirit of all the students, the time passed slowly and quickly at the same time. And before they knew it, it is already the night before the academy tower opening.

    And the first meeting of the important people within the Dusk is happening.

    The region itself is bustling with activity and the Hub is fuller than ever before. The instructors and Elders are also excited because this is the time the decisions about personal disciples would be made.

    Everyone is excited and as Pearl exined, for most people this would be the first de and starting point of their glory as a student in these Demi God academies.

    But what they don''t know is, the Dusk has arrived long ago and it is about to throw a veryrge shadow over their glory and all of it is going to be decided in this one meeting.

 Chapter 1990 Meeting and Towers Opened

    <h4>Chapter 1990 Meeting and Towers Opened</h4>

    Under the hub, there is a secret room built away from everyone''s eyes.

    Sam sat there at the head of a long table. Watt, Jack and Philip are currently sitting in the seats closest to him and they are waiting for the rest of show up. And within next fifteen minutes, the remaining people showed up.

    There is Vidyut, Paras, Five elemental king, Saber Monarch, and of course Night Ghost is also there.

    Sam smiled as he looked at all of them.

    "So, how is the experience in the academy. It must be refreshing to be the underdog as a freshman when you are used to being a top dog for so long." Sam asked in a jovial tone.

    The rest just chuckled and didn''t say anything.

    "Anyway, lets dive right into the meeting. I guess we don''t have too much time, before someone notices that all of us are not there. And based on what Vidyut has been saying recently, Pearl might just sniff the coincidence.

    What do you say Vidyut?"

    "There is actually a great chance of that happening Sam. She is way too meticulous and cunning. She has too many ns."

    "Care to exin?"

    "So, I was invited into an alliance with her. Pearl, White and I are going to the be the three seeded candidates of the Zeus academy and in her own words, she ''wants to share her glory with us''.

    But simply put she is following a technique very simr to the one we usually follow.

    She created a list of all the candidates that are doing great in the academies and all of you guys are on that list. At least that is what I assume, because in the list she gave me, which is notplete, I already saw three names.

    Watt is on top of that list.

    She gave me a team and a list of tasks that I need to perform.

    In thest few days, some people are following everything these people do in and out of the academy. I don''t know who is giving out the information from inside the different academies, but the external information is being collected by the teammates directly under me.

    One of them is shadowing Watt.

    He is recording everything he does in a video format. His constant runs in the arcade, his meals at Nn''s restaurant. People who he is meeting with and whenever Watt goes out into the forest, just to stay alone and calm.

    Right now, she has all that information.

    In fact, she even knows how many people hold a grudge against him and how many women are interested in him.

    She is being very detailed and she is doing this with every member she has on her list and I don''t even know the full extent of her list until now.

    "I am impressed. She is a lot smarter than I gave her credit for. But she is just a bit too green to try something like this. Anyway, let her think and do whatever she wants. The rest of the team will cooperate with you.

    Even if you guys have to do some mock fights, sell it properly. She shouldn''t doubt that we are working together."

    Sam spoke and then turned to Watt.

    "What''s up with you? I heard you are trying to get your schoolmates y card games with you. You turned into a gambler when I wasn''t there."

    Watt just shrugged.

    He knew Sam understood him and he doesn''t have to worry. With their rtionship, they can look past things like these.

    Sam got some more details from the rest of them. All of them are gathering just the right amount of attention from their academy''s people. Sam is actually a bit surprised that Pearl marked all of them as seeds.

    "So, what''s the deal with Hub? You said you will tell us what it can do in the meantime. The only thing I see as of now, is that it''s a damn good training ce. You really want to train these clowns from the academies?"

    Philip asked. He couldn''t hold back his curiosity anymore.

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "For now, that is going to be our cash cow. As for the other functions, I will show them to you when it is time to put them to action. Meanwhile, we need to keep all the freshmen academies on their toes. Our first major goal is messing up the inter-academic freshmenpetition.

    From this academic region, our team members should shine the best.

    For this, I don''t need you guys to hold back at all. From day one, I want you to shine the brightest. Right now, because of you holding back until now you are in a unique position.

    You are not allied with anyone on the outside and no elder has put theirplete focus on you. You also rejected the approaches of the regr instructors.

    Now is the time for you to shine.

    As soon as the towers open, go crazy with it. As long as you can, break as many records as possible. Just from the first day, I want you guys to be recognized and be famous all over the region. You will be like freshly litmps full of fuel.

    And as soon as that happens, I will cast a shadow over the academies and all the freshmen in the region and in that shade, you will look the brightest of the bunch.

    Of course, you are not the only ones that are gonna shine, there will be a bunch ofmps in the shade, but the moremps we have in our team, the better¡­"

    Sam went on to exin a few more things for the team to do and they dispersed.

    No one knew that the orders Sam gave started a burning desire in every member that just sat at the table. Not just them, there are many people from dusk including the rest of the team members like Sia, Gyan and Tamas who heard this and they are also getting excited.

    They are disappointed that they cannot participate in this n and now they are training intensely to break the barrier and enter the Divine ne.

    And these burning desires are going to set the whole region aze.

    In the dawn next morning, the hub finally felt a bit empty.? Not a single freshman was in sight. All of them are gathered around the towers of their respective academies.

    The towers are of the academies are very prestigious and they carry a lot of legacy.

    No one has every climbed the tower to the fullest and no one even knows how many floors it actually has. And the height of the tower has nothing to do with the actual number of floors.

    And the way to enter the tower and participate is actually pretty basic.

    The tower hasbat tests in each floor. Once someone clears the first floor, they will ascend to the second and then to third and so on.

    And thebat tests will be proportionate to the cultivation level of the person. Since there are students of four stages of cultivation within the academies, there are four ranking lists based on how far a person can climb.

    There are two factors to decide a person''s rank. The total score they gained and the number of floors they climbed.

    In each floor, a student gain around a thousand points, but they can pass the floor as long as they gain over five hundred points. The cut off might not seem much, but less than ten percent of people ever cross 550 points and less than five percent ever cross 600. As for more than 750, they are in the top one percent.

    When a person attempts to climb the tower, their points counting will start and by the end of their climb, when they are finally defeated or they forfeit, their highest floor and the total number of points that they gained from all the floorsbined will decide their rank.

    To climb higher on the tower by overtaking another student, a candidate must satisfy two conditions.

    One is they should clear more floors than the previous person and two, they should have more total points than the previous person.

    For example, if a person has climbed twenty floors in total with total points of ten thousand, to beat that person in rank, another person should climb twenty-one floors and get more than ten thousand points.

    If the second person only managed to ascend 20 floors and got beat in 21, he can still beat the first person if he has more than ten thousand points.

    But if the second person did manage to beat 21 floors, but he didn''t go past ten thousand points, his rank would still fall short.

    A lot of students over generations showed their dissatisfaction with this weird method, but they couldn''t change it. But still, everyone wants to beat the highest floor and everyone wants the highest score. With the added training and improvements from the hub, everyone is hopeful.

 Chapter 1991 To Zeus Academy

    1991 To Zeus Academy

    In the Gambler''s Academy, just like in the other academies, all the freshmen and most of the seniors along with the instructors and elders are gathered at the bottom of the tower.

    Today is an exciting day. It''s the beginning of the intensepetition that is going to burn for years toe and everyone is all up for it. The freshmen are all dying to enter the tower. But only twenty-five people can enter at the same time.

    Courtesy of the freshmen''s big day, the seniors held back.

    So, the freshmen have twenty-five slots all for themselves. They are still not enough. By the time everyone is done, it would be way past midnight and it might even go past tomorrow morning. The freshmen might not like that prospect, but the instructors would wee it.

    If it stayed that long, it only means the potential of the students is that great, and they would be more than happy to have that.

    The freshmen slowly started entering the tower.

    Everyone is curious about what their peers are going to get. Every instructor is looking forward to seeing a surprise. In all the excitement, Sam is nowhere to be seen though. Many people are wondering about his presence, but he didn''t make an appearance even after the opening and when the first batch of students were done with their attempts.

    Many wondered what was up with him.

    Some of the salty onesined that Sam''s tricks won''t work inside the tower so he is afraid to even attempt. Some stayed silent but were curious.

    Meanwhile, the other academies are also bustling with activity. Their towers are packed. In the Hermes Academy, Watt is waiting for his turn. The first batch of students failed miserably after climbing a few floors and the second batch already went.

    Now, if any of them is kicked out, Watt gets his turn and he is waiting for it.

    While waiting, Watt is looking at a small crystal tablet screen that is the same size as his card. Except for him, no one else would be able to see what''s on the screen. Sam gave him this in the meeting the day before to keep an eye out and find out who is giving out Watt''s information.

    Right now, small surveince bugs are roaming around trying to observe different people around him. Watt already narrowed down a few locations from which he would be a nice viewing target and he is focusing on them.

    As of now, there is no luck though.

    At that moment, he put the tablet back in his storage and walked out. Because a student was kicked out of the tower. He barely managed to climb the sixth floor. It is considered way below average on the first attempt.

    Looking at Watt who took a step forward, the remaining students who wanted to go stepped back.

    Everyone waited as they looked at him in anticipation.

    Pearl marked him for a reason. Watt entered the tower and the first floor was just a vast hall. It almost looked like abat training hall. He noticed that the energy he could absorb was not that much. It is not a ce suitable for cultivation.

    As he looked at the tiled walls and stone floor, something appeared out of thin air a few meters ahead of him. It is a glowing figure made purely out of wind elemental energy. It has a humanoid figure and it is around six and a half feet tall.

    It is lean and Watt could swear that he could almost see the definition of the muscles over its body.

    As he was sizing it up, the humanoid figure moved. It turned into a sh of wind elemental energy and in a fraction of a second a fist wasunched at Watt''s face.

    Watt dodged it easily. The humanoid is fast, but not fast enough. Watt slipped to the side and threw a kick to its head. The kicknded perfectly and the impact of the blow seemed to have sted the energy out of its body.

    Watt took a step back and took a defensive stance.

    The humanoid''s glow has reduced a lot. It is almost transparent and its movements suddenly be sluggish.

    Watt looked at it in confusion, before throwing a punch.

    The fist didn''t even connect. He just used wind energy to throw a small air cannon along with the punch and that smallpressed air hit the translucent humanoid figure and it disappeared.

    Watt was surprised. He didn''t think the test would be this easy. He knew that he could gain a thousand points from this floor and he knew a lot of people do, but this is still way too easy. If it is this easy, a lot more people should have had those thousand points.

    As he was wondering all of a sudden, he sensed some danger from behind. He dodged it barely, but then another punch almostnded on his face from the side.

    Watt made a backflip andnded on his feet to see two humanoid figures in front of him.

    He nodded in understanding.

    This feels more like a test.

    Watt jumped at them as wind elemental energy soared. The fight became intense, but it didn''tst long. Within the next five seconds, he was done with them. After that, three humanoids appeared, then four,ter five, and then six.

    The count kept on increasing as Watt fought with them.

    They are weak and he didn''t even have to use any of his elemental techniques. The fights were over quickly and finally, there were ten humanoids with which he dealt with the same ease.

    He scored full points and then opened up the stairs for the next floor.

    Watt went up and noticed no changes. Thebat hall is the same, maybe a bit wider, but it is almost the same ce.

    This time, the first wave consisted of three figures, and all three held weapons. One with a sword and the other two with staves.

    Just like that the difficulty kept on increasing as Watt advanced further.

    Meanwhile, outside the tower, everyone is looking at two boards on the walls of the tower.

    The first board is the ranking for current students. As long as a person is a student of the academy their rank will be there. Even if that freshman advances and bes a sophomore, they will still have their score and rank in the freshman bracket as long as it is not beaten.

    But once they graduate, their name will be removed from the current ranking board and if their score is high enough to stay in the top hundred rankers of all time, then it will enter the second board. The second board will only have one hundred members at a time and since it takes every single previous student of this academy into consideration, it is a very toughpetition.

    Right now, everyone is looking at the current ranking board to see how far Watt has gone.

    His clear speed for the first floor didn''te too much of a surprise. It is not that difficult and he scored full points which is also expected. But there were some raised eyebrows at the speed he cleared the second floor. He cleared that pretty fast and scored full points.

    Now the third floor was the same.

    Watt kept on clearing the tower floors at a record pace and decided to keep that thousand-point streak as much as possible.

    The same thing is happening in the other academies where Philip, Jack, and the rest of Sam''spanions are attempting the tower ascension.

    Once Sam confirmed all of them were inside the towers, he made his move.

    When the students saw that he came out of the dorm, they were expecting him to attempt the tower. But to their surprise, he walked out of the academy with a letter in his hands.

    A few minutester, he is at the gate of the Zeus Academy. He showed a token to the gatekeeper who begrudgingly guided him to the Dean''s room.

    The Dean looked at Sam and was a bit surprised.

    "Not expecting a visit from you."

    "Yeah, but as the special honorary student that is one of my privileges."

    "What made you use this privilege? My understanding of you is that you despise the Olympians and the academies affiliated with them."

    "You are only half right. I despise the Olympians and I pity the academies. In my war with them, you are going to be the coteral damage.

    Anyway, I used that privilege, to put another privilege of mine into action. I am here to request for the Olympian tower attempt pass."

    As soon as he said those words, the dean of the academy was dumbfounded. He had a serious expression on his face and asked.

    "How do you know about this?"

    "I do my homework. It seems like Zeus didn''t give you a full rundown about me. One of my greatest weapons is information. Since I am a student with the highest level of ess among my peers, I am sure I can get that pass.

    And I believe I satisfy the other requirements as well."

    "The requirements being thebat ability and high ranking ability in any professional skills. I am assuming you are going to submit formations as that skill?"

    The Dean asked in a calm tone.

 Chapter 1992 Enter the Tower

    1992 Enter the Tower

    "The requirements being thebat ability and high ranking ability in any professional skills. I am assuming you are going to submit formations as that skill?"

    The Dean asked in a calm tone.

    Sam nodded with a smile and ced the letter he brought on the table in front of the dean.

    "You came prepared.

    So, what academies do you want to attempt?" The Dean asked as he got ready to sign the document

    "All of the Olympian academies." Dean froze on spot and looked at Sam with utmost focus.

    "I want to ask, what you want to do. But I feel like I already know it and I feel it''s a bad idea."

    "I feel that you don''t need to worry about it. I am just going to be a good student that challenges himself using the amazing opportunity I have.

    I will make the most of the privileges that I have and challenge all the towers to increase my honor and glory."

    "Both of us know that''s a bunch of bullshit." Dean sighed and helplessly signed the document.

    Sam is a bit surprised with that calm reaction. He was expecting a bit more resistance from him. After all, not a single subordinate of Zeus he met until now was cooperative. They always made unnecessary troubles for Sam and giving him a hard time was their only approach.

    Seeing Dean being cooperative is almost unbelievable.

    Dean passed the letter back to Sam and took out a token from his storage. The token didn''t see the light of a day for a long time. He took out an inscription pen and tweaked it a little bit, before handing it over to Sam.

    "Whatever you are nning, my advice is to not do it. You might have hostility towards Olympus and Olympians, but openly disying it and that too with added disdain is not going to give you any relief.

    You will just make more enemies that way."

    "Thank you for your advice."

    Sam took the token and the letter before walking out of the office.

    At that moment, Pearl is standing outside waiting for him.

    He raised an eyebrow and spoke.

    "If I didn''t know any better, I would say you are head over heels in love with me."

    "Maybe, I am."

    "Oh, that''s a lot of heartbreak awaiting you in the future then. Too bad. Crying and swollen eyes don''t go well with your pretty face. It''s more suited for swollen lips and blushing cheeks."

    Pearl didn''t know what to say. This is the first time she felt utterly stumped.

    She shook her head of the wild thoughts in her head and asked.

    "What are you doing here Sam? Today is the first day of the tower opening. What are you doing here instead of attempting to ascend Gambler Academy''s tower? I hear that many people are waiting for you in anticipation."

    "It seems like you hear a lot of things from a lot of ces."

    "I do." She noticed the letter and token in Sam''s hands.

    "What is it?"

    "You will know soon enough. Come, let''s go to your tower. I want to see what''s going on there. I want to see the performance of the so-called Geniuses of the Zeus Academy."

    He didn''t wait for her reply and started walking in the direction. Pearl frowned in confusion. She is feeling a bit irritated not knowing what Sam''s angle is. She could only follow him trying to figure out his thoughts.

    Soon, they made their way to the tower and their arrival instantly attracted the attention of every single person there.

    Freshmen, sophomores, instructors, elders, everyone is looking at him with a wide spectrum of emotions directed at him.

    "Don''t look at me with those hostile eyes, I might be tempted to fucking gouge them out."

    Sam said out loud and at the same moment, more than a dozen freshmen instinctually turned their eyes away.

    He chuckled at the fear hemanded and Pearl frowned at the same.

    She really underestimated the impact of Sam''s performance on the entrance test. More than half of the freshmen are afraid to make eye contact with him and those who make it are too intimidated to keep it going.

    Sam looked at the current ranking board.

    Even though there are a bunch of names of seniors within the freshman bracket signifying their record as freshmen, everyone is focused on the portion where the names of the current freshmen appear.

    Sam noticed two familiar names, Vidyut and White.

    At the same time, he eavesdropped on the whispers talking about both of them.

    Vidyut and White are part of the second batch of people who went into the tower, but they haven''te out yet. The rest are already back and the third and fourth batches are also finished, right now it could be said the fifth batch is entering, but these two are not stopping yet.

    Sam looked at their scores.

    Both of them are at the twenty-third floor, they finished twenty-two floors with a score very close to Neen thousand points. That is approximately 87 percent.

    Pearl came and stood beside him.

    "Do you know, the record for a freshman''s first attempt at the tower is twenty-six floors? Right now these two have a very great chance of breaking it at the pace they are going.

    This year, the candidates are indeed better than the past few decades, it''s just they are outshined by a person like you. But I am sure it will change pretty soon."

    "You seem awfully confident."

    Sam said and at the same moment, both Vidyut and White ascended to the twenty-fourth floor.

    Their score barely crossed twenty thousand points. Sam had a smile on his face.

    "Yes, I am confident. You underestimate the influence of the academies on the students with potential. You are indeed strong, but that is because of your unique way of battling and your resourceful physique with all those elements.

    You won''t find anyone who could guide you to use them better while the rest of the realm is going to educate themselves to defeat you. You are going to end up as a giant whetstone.

    You should have taken up my offer when I was still being kind to you."

    Sam chuckled at that and didn''t answer, instead, he talked about something else.

    "Let the future you worry about the future me. I am very clear on what my future is like."

    "Oh, you nned it that well?"

    "No, I dered it as such."

    "Blind Arrogance."

    "Backed bypetence."

    "If you are so confident, prove it. Not with your words."

    "Oh, I will. I am here precisely because of that."

    Sam raised his token and the letter to show it to the elder in charge of the tower.

    "I would like to enter the tower and because of my special privilege, I believe I don''t have to wait too long."

    Pearl was shocked when she heard his and grabbed the letter and the token. Her shock only grew as she read the contents.

    The elder already noticed the Olympian tower attempt to pass.

    "You are an honorary student here?"

    He asked with a clear trace of anger and unwillingness.

    "Yeah, if you have any more questions, your dean will be happy to answer you."

    Sam took the letter and token back before turning to Pearl.

    "Let''s forget about the future. Right now, right here I am challenging you. Ascend the tower with me and beat me. Since you are the leader of this generation''s Zeus academy, I am giving you a chance to beat me fair and square in front of all these people in your tower.

    Stop me from stealing the glory that should belong to one of your academy members."

    Sam''s words made the students feel a sense of foreboding.

    The next moment two people were kicked out of the tower emptying two slots as if on cue.

    Sam turned to the entrance and started walking.

    "It doesn''t matter if you take up the challenge or not, because I am going to do what I want to no matter what."

    "Pearl, you better take this challenge, I have a really bad feeling and I have never been wrong with that."

    The Elder also nudged Pearl who gritted her teeth and ran to the entrance. She even overtook Sam and upied one of the two slots to enter the tower.

    Sam took his time. His pace is leisurely and he walks like a man admiring the scenery as if he is trying to savor the image in front of him.

    By the time Sam entered, Pearl was already halfway through clearing the first floor. She is very fast.

    Sam entered the first floor and he was greeted with a humanoid figure condensed from the pure purple lightning energy. The figure leaped at Sam and tried to attack him.

    Sam didn''t even move his feet, he just bent his upper body and caught a hold of the arm and the rest of the body of the humanoid figure and then suppressed it with his hold.

    He then used his observation ability to see what these things are actually made of.

 Chapter 1993 Tricks

    Chapter 1993 Tricks

    Sam held the lightning humanoid in that hold for about three minutes.

    He had his eyes closed and his face changed bit by bit with amusement, surprise and interest. He could see a lot of ingenious techniques used in making these creatures. They are just giant formations and the nodes are also condensed out of pure energy.

    The only problem is, it is very hard to deactivate these formations with formation techniques. To the point, it would be better to just damage it enough to destroy the nodes and let it disappear. Because the nodes are constantly moving within the body making it hard to mark them down and deal with them.

    But that doesn''t mean, Sam didn''t have any alternate ns other than fighting with brute force.

    He let his energy spread into the creature and it obviously resisted.

    At that moment, Sam''s observation ability is running with utmost focus. He wanted to understand the behavior of this creature and within no time, he got the basic idea.

    The nodes are indeed in constant motion, but when Sam injected his own lightning energy into it, the nodes came into a sudden halt, because instead of focusing on motion and stabilization, they need to redirect the energy to give more output and reject the foreign energy.

    And in that moment Sam could just do whatever he wants with it, as long as he can identify the location of the nodes, they are just sitting ducks.

    A few orbs of lightning energy hovered out of Sam''s body and surrounded the humanoid. The orbs started resonating with the nodes within the humanoid and this made the nodes a bit unstable.

    And that is all its needed.

    The humanoid started glowing and was ready to explode.

    Sam turned into a sh of silver lightning and disappeared from the spot.

    *BOOM*

    The humanoid exploded and no traces were left of its existence.

    "Easier than I thought."

    Sam muttered to himself as the next wave came. Two humanoids are aiming at him and this time they are a bit more fierce than the first one. He caught a hold of one of the humanoids and used the same trick as before while he dodged the attacks from the second one.

    When the first humanoid was ready to explode, Sam kicked it andunched it at the second one.

    *BOOM*

    With one explosion both of the disappeared.

    Even though the current process is taking more steps than Sam just beating them up, he still decided to stick with it. He wants to understand how they behave and how he can tackle them in theing levels.

    When Sam dealt with the third wave, Pearl is already on the ninth wave.

    By the time he hit the fifth, she cleared the first floor and moved to the second.

    Looking at this from outside the people cheered.

    They are so desperate to one up Sam that they are even feeling joy from little things like this. One could only imagine how much of a shadow Sam threw over them.

    Sam advanced to the second floor and he met with the three humanoids with weapons. He took the same approach, but this time the number of orbs used to destabilize the humanoids reduced. After he dealt with the first one, he reduced the orbs by two more.

    Pearl is finishing the waves faster than him, but Sam is closing in on the time while he also reduced the orbs he needed to finish the humanoids.

    On the third floor, Sam is facing the first wave.

    There are four humanoids standing in front of him, along with them there are two beasts. These beasts are also condensed from pure energy too and they don''t have any specific features. Except for the four limbs, invertebrate structure along with the tail and what looked like arge maw on its face, it didn''t even have eyes or other features that would define it as a beast.

    The humanoids also looked different.

    Their body structure changed a bit, if before they looked like a But it is still very manageable. He kicked at the face of the beast and threw a punch at the nearest humanoid while dodging the stab of model of human body, now they looked like a human body wearing an armor and holding weapons.

    Their speed increased and they have additional defense with an energy barrier that negated a few attacks before it reached a certain limit and copsed.

    A total of six targets and is feeling pumped.

    He must say that the increase in difficulty between each floor is higher than he expected.

    But it is still very manageable. He kicked at the face of the beast and threw a punch at the nearest humanoid while dodging the stab of the spear. The punchnded and the humanoid blocked it with the energy barrier.

    Sam took the recoil to his advantage andnded in front of another humanoid. He threw three kicks one after another breaking the barrier. The next moment, he extended his palm. Silver lightning energy condensed on his palm as he pped it on the face of the humanoid.

    The humanoid flew across the air andnded.

    There is a silver mark on its face and as soon as it stood up, a streak of silver energy flew out of that mark into rest of its body making it stop in its tracks. The energy destabilized the humanoid before making it explode.

    Just like that, one proper hit with a contact to its body and it exploded. This is what Sam wanted to achieve while he practiced in thest two floors.

    He smiled and turned around. An axe kick fell on the beast that was about to pounce on him. The axe kick of course has his silver energy at the end of it. When the beast halted and started battling with the silver energy, Sam kicked it to the nearest humanoid.

    *BOOM*

    An explosion destroyed the beast, destroyed the barrier of the other humanoid and destroyed too. All in the matter of seconds. Now, out of the six, three are gone. Only three more remained and it didn''t take long for Sam to finish them off.

    He is on the track to the next wave and this time the number increased by two more beasts, which didn''t make much difference.

    The battles went on and the Zeus academy students who were very ecstatic with how fast Pearl is clearing the floorspared to Sam saw as Pearl cleared the third floor too.

    This time also they are ecstatic as she finished it before Sam.

    But what they failed to notice is that the time difference between Pearl''s clear and Sam''s clear is not that much. It reduced by a lot when theypare it to the second floor clearance.

    They are just too drunk of the small victory to even care about that.

    Sam and Pearl went on to the fourth floor to continue their ascension.

    Meanwhile, the spectators noticed something else.

    Both White and Vidyut are neck to neck as they ascended further. They are on twenty-fifth floor and their score kept on increasing indicating their smooth battle in that floor.

    Time passed.

    The spirits are high as they awaited a glorious moment for the Zeus academy.

    But not everyone is stupid. When people noticed that Pearl and Sam both cleared the fourth floor, but the time difference is very small whenpared to the third floor, they understood that Sam is catching up.

    Of course, not all of them noticed this change. Only a few, and they are afraid to say it out loud for the rest.

    They just hoped that Pearl would increase the time difference in the next floor and they hoped that Sam would slow down.

    But the hope is all they had.

    The fifth floor was cleared at the same time and the cheers died down.

    They went on fast to the sixth floor.

    Sam kept on ascending without stop and the kill time for each humanoid that he is encountering remained the same. He just as fast as when he was on the third floor. It might not look like much.

    But the prowess of the humanoid on the sixth floor is the at least three times higher than the humanoid on the third floor. Still, Sam managed to keep the kill time the same.

    His tricks are and techniques to deal with these humanoids are getting refined.

    As he killed his way though the sixth floor and destroyed a whole new model of humanoids, the ranking on the board changed and he finished the sixth floor.

    Just a few minutes before Pearl did and the cheers died down. Still silence enveloped the whole area. The small sense of victory they felt was gone and they are at loss.

 Chapter 1994 Big Slap

    Chapter 1994 Big p

    Sam kept on ascending.

    He didn''t know what is happening outside of the tower. At least not at the moment. He just focused on enjoying himself as he made the whole fight kind of meaningless.

    With his energy tricks, it is bing a bit easy for him to deal with these humanoids and the beasts.

    The numbers are also not making much of a difference. The clearance for the next floor was much faster than whenpared to Pearl. His ascension speed just made the mood outside much more somber.

    The died down mood only cheered up when they noticed the ascension of Vidyut and White.

    Both of them finally broke the record. They broke past the twenty-sixth floor and from their speed, they are pretty fast even in the next floor. Most people in the crowd tried their best to ignore Sam and kept on cheering for Vidyut and White.

    There are even some betting pools, each betting to see who will reach a higher rank.

    A part of the lost zeal was recovered once again. But it would take a while for it to reach its former glory. Time passed and the points increase on Vidyut and White''s side finally slowed down a bit. But they still managed to ascend further at that slower pace.

    They crossed the twenty-seventh and twenty-eight floors at that same slower pace before theynded on twenty-ninth.

    Now the points rise slowed down by a lot. They are raising at a snail pace.

    As both of their scores approached closed to five hundred, the hopes of everyone increased. They wanted them to pass it and finish the thirtieth floor too. But to their disappointment, Vidyut was stopped around early four hundreds and he had to stop his ascension.

    Within no time, White also stopped. Their score difference is only five points, it is not that much. At most White must have justnded a couple of hits more on a target before he was kicked out.

    Even though the crowd is a bit disappointed, they are still in a good mood.

    Not only an age old record was broken, two people broke it on the same day and at the same time and they are going to stay here in their academy to break it even more.

    As mentioned before, the whole point of these towers is to start their journey to glory with a bang and these two people really did a great job.

    Many students ran to the entrance and they started cheering for both White and Vidyut who just came out of the tower. Both of them looked spent and haggard. Even though their energy recovered, they still had all the umted fatigue from the battles. Both physical and mental.

    Some students carried them to their dorms to let them rest.

    "Hey, which instructor do you think Vidyut and White are going to select? I am sure the instructors and elders would be fighting over them."

    One of the students asked his friend within the crowd.

    His one question thus triggered arge discussion among them. Until then the students were so drunk on that victory that they didn''t think much about the instructors and elders.

    But now that someone mentioned it, they fell deep into it.

    Only fact is that they didn''t notice that the instructors and elders are awfully silent with a very solemn expression.

    Even though they are d that the record is broken by two of their students, they are in no ce to celebrate it. They are focused on Sam and Pearl''s ascension.

    While White and Vidyut are in the spot light, Sam and Pearl already crossed the tenth floor.

    Pearl for some reason sped up a bit as if she got the news that Sam is leaving her in the dust. As for Sam, the raise in his points almost seemed like he is moving up at a leisurely pace. The instructors and elders all had that feeling.

    And they don''t want that feeling to be true.

    Because if it is, then the consequences of what is going to happen next will be a huge blow to their students and the academy reputation.

    As they awaited, Sam crossed the eleventh floor and went to twelfth, with a perfect score. Pearl followed suit and she also hit the perfect score of thousand points in the eleventh. Then when he cleared the twelfth the pace of his points increasing didn''t slow down and he still had the perfect score.

    Pearl also did the same. She crossed floor with a perfect score, but the she iste.

    By the time she finished the twelfth Sam is already two hundred points into the thirteenth. The instructors all gritted their teeth and one of the older elders who is at the back sighed and walked towards the Dean''s office.

    He is the first elder of the academy and he belongs to the same generation as the dean.

    "Why did you let that kid attempt the tower ascension? Do you know how good he is before you made the decision?"

    The Dean also sighed.

    He knew from whatever stories he heard from Zeus or at least theckeys of Zeus, Sam is a big trouble for their academy. But he still can''t do much. Sam never asked for anything other than the ones he was given by the gods themselves.

    And the Dean didn''t really want to mess with a child who is probably one tenth his own age.

    "I know what he is capable of. But I don''t know to what extent. I can''t do much. Let''s just hope that this generation can hold him and build a tolerance to his genius."

    "What do you mean tolerance?" The elder asked in confusion.

    "Because from what I heard, he might be the first one here that came to disrupt our bnce, but he is not going to be thest. This is just the beginning and the fate is going to head into a direction that we cannot predict because of these unknown variables of which Sam is a part of."

    As the Dean sighed and spoke those words, the students finally noticed what the instructors are seeing. The First elder meanwhile in the office copsed on the chair and said.

    "This might break the studentspletely but the ones that don''t will definitely be once in a generation level genius with excellence to back that talent up. Let''s hope more people will do so."

    As the two senior most peoplemented about something, the students are witnessing it.

    Sam cleared the thirteenth floor and the clear time is almost the same as twelfth and on top of that he has the perfect score once again.

    Meanwhile, Pearl who cleared the floor a littleter once again, didn''t even have the perfect score. She only scored around nine hundred. A total loss of a hundred points. That is just the start.

    Fourteenth floor. Sam finished first, Perfect score. Pearl finished seven minutester. Score 850

    Fifteenth floor. Sam finished first, Perfect score. Pearl finished eight and a half minutester. Score 830

    Sixteenth floor. Sam finished first, Perfect Score. Pearl finished nine minutester. Score 826

    Seventeenth floor. Sam finished first, Perfect Score. Pearl finished nine minutes and forty-five secondster. Score 828

    .

    .

    Twentieth floor. Sam finished first, Perfect Score. Pearl finished twelve minutester. Score 750.

    .

    .

    .

    Twenty-fifth floor. Sam finished first, Perfect Score. Pearl finished fourteen minutester. Score 700.

    Twenty-Sixth floor. Sam finished first, Perfect Score. Pearl finished fifteen minutester. Score 679.

    Another one of their students broke the record, but none of the students are happy at the time. Instead they are sweating and they all had somber expressions on their faces. Just like the instructors and elders who realized that this situation will happen since the start.

    Twenty-Seventh Floor. Sam finished first, Perfect Score. Pearl finished twenty minutester. Score 620.

    A massive drop in Pearl''s score.

    Twenty-Eight Floor. Sam finished first. Perfect score. Pearl finished half an hourter. Score 548.

    Another massive drop.

    Twenty-Ninth Floor. Sam finished first. Perfect Score. Pearl finished forty-five minutester. Score 500.

    Barely passed. Barely and before she could enter the thirtieth floor, Pearl was kicked out. Everyone looked at Sam who is already way ahead into the thirtieth floor. The pace with which his score is increasing didn''t change at all.

    His score is increasing slowly and steadily.

    Everyone watched as he closed into the perfect score once again. But right when his score hit 999, all of a sudden it stopped.

    The spectators felt like their breath is stopped in their lungs. They felt suffocated and some sort of craziness overwhelmed their minds. Some directly pulled their hair as they watched the tower door open and Sam walked out at a leisurely pace.

    The same pace he had when he walked into the tower. As if he is going on an evening walk. With the hands in his pockets and a faint smile on his face.

    And as he made his way out, every single student of the Zeus academy wanted to tear him apart. Kill him right there and then, but they knew they couldn''t.

    One of the instructors couldn''t hold back and raised his hand to attack Sam.

    Sam turned to him and smirked as if taunting him to do it. But there is no reaction from him. The instructor unwillingly put his hand down. He smashed the stone pir beside him in anger as Sam sneered at him before leaving the academy.

    Everyone watched as his shadow being cast into the academy because of the sunlight and they could only imagine it as the shadow cast by Sam on the Zeus academy with the biggest p they could possibly feel on their faces.

 Chapter 1995 Heated Students

    <h4>Chapter 1995 Heated Students</h4>

    Pearl who was tired as hell looked at the ranking bird and bit her lip.

    Her clenched fists started bleeding and her eyes are burning with fury. Sam''s actions might not seem like much, but they are an insult to the whole Zeus academy and its legacy. It is an insult to everyone who ever ranked on that board and the current generation of students who are trying to rank on that.

    Sam could have finished this floor and went to the next one. It is obvious judging by the way he scored.

    He is more than capable of that. Instead, he chose to stop right at thest point and came out at the exact moment.

    Right now, he is ranked first among the freshmen of the school. He is exactly one floor higher than them and his score is 29,999 points. He ascended until 30th floor. Second rank is held by Pearl who was kicked off in the twenty-ninth and they are followed by White and Vidyut.

    Everyone who enters the tower strives their hardest to reach the highest position they can.

    It is obvious based on how Pearl, White and Vidyut looked after they came out of the tower. But Sam who is clearly not done with his full strength and power walked out on his own volition and he stopped exactly just a bit ahead of Pearl.

    He showed that he is capable of going further, but he also showed that he is unwilling to go further.

    That could only mean one thing, he is here to defeat the current generation students of the academy and he used the tower as that means and his score as a provocation. Which in itself is an insult to everyone who is trying their best to make something out of themselves through this tower.

    They would have done anything to get that perfect score.

    But Sam doesn''t care about it. They would have given anything to rank first and advance further in the first attempt. But Sam doesn''t care about it. He is simply taunting them.

    ''I just beat you and I don''t even need to try my best to do it. Beat me back if you can, I am right in front of you.''

    That is what they are imagining Sam said with his score.

    And they are right to assume so. Sam did exactly that and he went out of the academy do the same with the rest of the academies. That very day, he visited every Olympian academy within the region. The Olympian tower attempt pass gave him ess to every single Olympian academy and their towers.

    In every ce, he just entered the tower ascended it and reached the exact floor above the highest scorer and every time he stopped at thatst point. Notpleting the floor.

    He derived the same reaction from all of his peers in his academy.

    Pearl who is resting right in front of the tower heard the news as soon as Sam entered the second academy. But she didn''t feel slightest bit happy knowing that there are people who share her misery.

    Her determination to beat the record burned even more.

    At that moment, she started swallowing different medicines like crazy and got ready to enter the tower and then only she noticed Vidyut and White are already inside the tower and started ascending again.

    The tower Elder stood beside Pearl and said.

    "One of you should absolutely break the record. It is an insult to the Zeus academy."

    It is clear that he is furious. Pearl nodded and walked into the tower.

    Simr scenarios happened all over the region in various academies. Watt, Night Ghost, Saber Monarch, Paras and Five elemental King did the same. They were all overshadowed by Sam and every single student in their academy got furious but most of them didn''t see themselves breaking Sam''s record.

    But everyone on Pearl''s list immediately used some speedy recovery and got back into attempt again and their attempts went on for the whole day.

    That day, Sam didn''t even return to the Gambler''s academy.

    After he is done with all Olympian academies, he flew off on Harbinger out of the region. People thought he was going to the Hub, but he was not. He flew into the wilderness and no one knows where he went.

    For the next few days the whole region kept on discussing how Sam dissed the whole Olympus.

    The fact that he didn''t even bother to attempt the Gambler''s academy''s tower stemmed some new discussions.

    Some said Sam doesn''t even care much about the tower rankings and only attempted Olympian towers to piss off the Olympian Students. Some said, this is a ploy from Gambler''s academy and Sam is their secret weapon created just to create this situation.

    And thetter rumor was easily bought by the Olympian students.

    For the next week, the students who had a considerable talent and could be considered a cut above the rest recovered and went to Hub every day trying to improve their skills and they went back to tower to challenge it again.

    The supply for pills and potions within the academies started running a bit low and the sales for these supplements went higher. This triggered some business opportunities for some Pill makers and Potion makers.

    They even went as far as to take some new recipes through the help of the hub and started sponsoring specific students to showcase their improvement and constant attempts at the tower as a result of the new medicine they developed.

    Within a week, Sam changed the wholendscape of the region and another major repercussion of this is the heat the students from the Gambler academy are facing.

    The journey from the academy to the hub became an extremely dangerous endeavor to the students of the Gambler academy. They are being constantly ambushed, attacked and being humiliated by the Olympian academy students.

    And at this moment Crow is standing in front of the dean with an indignant expression that highlighted his anger and the ck eye that he had.

    "Dean Wharton, you need to put a stop to what Sam is doing. This is very ridiculous. He created all this fuss and he disappeared. Everyone including the sophomores are facing the wrath of other academy students.

    If it is duels and fair fights, we could have endured, but we are being ambushed and being humiliated in front of the whole world. We cannot swallow this."

    Dean Wharton looked at the young man in front of him and asked.

    "What are you angry at exactly? Are you angry at Sam who made the other students angry or are you angry at the other students who couldn''t find Sam and started taking it out on you guys? Or are you angry at yourselves for not being able to do anything when you were being attacked."

    Crow''s frown deepened and he was about to say that it was the first scenario.

    But before he could say it out loud, Dean stopped him.

    "Think carefully before you answer. Because from what I see, you are just like the students from the Olympian academies at the moment.

    Sam never implied that this is a ploy from the Gambler''s academy. He never even behaved like a gambler''s academy student even inside the academy. He acts like he wants and he always stayed true to his character.

    He cannot control people''s assumptions about him and he doesn''t care much about their opinions. He stayed true to his character in that aspect as well. He never broke any rules and only made full of use of his rights and privileges.

    Right now the student of Olympian academies couldn''t find the strength to beat Sam''s record and they are taking it out on you guys. They couldn''t do anything to the source of their problem and they are finding an alternative.

    Now, you are ignoring the source of your problem that is Olympian students and you are taking it out on Sam, which is exactly the oue Olympians want.

    You, a proud student of Gambler''s academy that stood tall on its belief to foster people of unique talents and disdained the validation driven academic practices of other academies is trying to snub one of your own because you cannot resist the actions of the students of the academies that you hate.

    Get out of here, before I spank you silly."

    Dean Wharton turned around and looked out of the window while fiddling with the mechanical bird in his hands.

    Crow was dumbfounded. He didn''t even know what to say.

    The only thing he knew is that Dean confused the shit out of him with a twisted logic and Sam''s problem is not going away.

    Meanwhile, three more days went on like this before Sam was spotted.

    Nobody knows where he went away for the ten days, but many people awaited his arrival and a lot of people made preparations to deal with his problem.

 Chapter 1996 Noble League

    <h4>Chapter 1996 Noble League</h4>

    Sam appeared in the city and directly went to his academy.

    Within the academy nobody dared to provoke him. His peers don''t have the strength and his seniors don''t have the authority based on what the Dean told Crow. All they could do is re at him in hatred.

    Meanwhile, the news travelled fast to the other academies.

    Not just Pearl, every person that has some backing to their name targeted Sam.

    They put up a bounty to know of his arrival and their cost was worth it based on how fast they got the information. As soon as this happened, many meetings were held within several academies and they are headed by people of various statures.

    Some meetings are between instructors and elders, some are between the freshmen and sophomoresbined, some meetings are of student unions, some gangs and there are some solely run by sophomores and some solely by freshmen.

    All with different agendas.

    Everyone is thinking of what action should they take and how they should approach in taking the stain that Sam left on their academies. One meeting in particr is discussing some immediate measures.

    Within the private room of Nn''s restaurant.

    A group of sophomores and freshmen gathered. The unique thing about this meeting is that all of these students are from different Olympian academies and this group is formed based on the heritage and legacy of the families these students belonged to.

    This is a well-known group within this region and every kid belongs to a noble lineage that descends directly from Olympian gods and their ancestors and founders of the family are known to be demi-gods sired directly by the Olympian gods.

    Of course, those Olympian gods might be of higher tier or some low-tier, but still they can be part of this group.

    Every year when freshmen join the academies, new people will be added and the graduate students will leave this group. They execute missions together, help each other out and try to keep their legacy as noble families alive within this region.

    This also helps their families maintain good rtionships for their businesses and territories.

    Right now, these nobles all gathered together to find a way to deal with Sam''s position on the ranking within various Olympian academies. They felt that being the descendants of the Olympian gods, they have a responsibility to deal with Sam''s antics.

    The leader of the group who belonged to the Zeus academy sat at the head of the table and looked at the freshmen.

    "Are you sure you guys can''t beat that record? None of your peers can do that as well? We can send them support with resources and whatever they need to do that. Vidyut, White and Pearl are doing pretty well in my opinion."

    This man is Christos and his family is pretty high up on thedder even among the people in this group.

    The freshmen didn''t even know how to answer that question.

    Christos is one of the rare few who didn''t attend the tower ascension that day, so he didn''t get the full impact of the situation.

    After a long silence, Christos sighed and said.

    "We cannot let this stain stay on the Olympian academies like this. Since you are not sure, we can only explore different ways to approach this situation.

    First one, is to target all the seed candidates. Make contact with them and offer them sponsorships. We will use our families'' resources to help them breakthrough and in process, we will recruit them and for a separate unit that is directly under our Noble League.

    This group works for us, helps us in the missions and we will use their prowess to achieve our goals in the academy. Then when we go back, we can all try to recruit them into our own families based on what we can offer with some ground rules set between ourselves."

    He paused and looked at the rest of the agreement.

    Everyone nodded, they are really satisfied with the arrangement.

    Christos looked at the freshmen and said.

    "If we have the seed candidates within our group, then we wouldn''t have to resort to things like this. You be sure to improve. For that, our group will get in touch with Joker of the Hub. We will see if we can get some hidden techniques and training ns that will help you advance faster.

    That aside, another way for us to deal with Sam''s ranking is a much more direct and brute method and I believe that it is necessary to make sure this kind of situation wouldn''t repeat itself."

    "What would that be?" Another sophomore who is sitting on the left side of Christos asked. His smile implied that the question might even be rhetorical and he already knew what he was asking.

    "We will kill him."

    Most of the room were stunned when they heard it.

    Christos looked at them and sighed in disappointment.

    "Seniors told me that you lot are going to be like this and you are even a bit worse than him. How can you not see far enough?

    Even if the seed candidates manage to break Sam''s record now, he can juste back and push the bar higher. We have the problem of catching up with him, but he is nowhere near unleashing his full strength.

    So, to make sure that doesn''t happen, we need to kill him and I have a n for that¡­"

    Chirstos went to exin the n and all the details.

    Meanwhile, at this moment inside Sam''s residence he isying on his bed as he looked at the ceiling of the room.

    The room is dark and a metal puppet is ced beside him on the bed as it projected an image on the ceiling. It showed the image of the meeting happening in Nn''s restaurant.

    He also got a message from Nn about this, but Sam didn''t tell Nn, that he doesn''t need it.

    The metal puppets that he sent through the hub and the wrist bands they are wearing are the easiest way for him to listen in on to the conversations. This is one of the primary functions of the hub. It is a surveince system. The puppets are in a constant recording state.

    Whenever a conversation mentions Sam and other members of Dusk, an alert would be sent to the hub. There a central system will be alerted and the captured footage and audio will be transmitted there. The conversation will be analyzed and if there is any mention of threat or even suspicion, Sam would be given an alert.

    And then he would be able to see the footage like this from anywhere within the region.

    He doesn''t even have to worry about the signal nodes. Since almost everyone had a puppet in their possession, they did the node transmission job for him.

    Sam felt like he should have used this method long ago. This is a great way to infiltrate territories and make them fall into traps.

    Now that Sam knew all about their ns, it is about time he got ready.

    He stopped the projection after the meeting was over and got off his bed, he stretchedzily as he deactivated the formation to let the warm light in. With just a thought a pair of sses appeared in his hand.

    They are transparent sses and they looked just like any pair of spectacles a student, or a researchers or any guy with some style and a sight problem would use back on earth.

    This is one of the newest inventions Sam made along with the hub. It is also connected to the hub. But it is notpleted yet. At least not all of the functions Sam envisioned for it werepleted, still it would just fine for the current state of things.

    He checked the sses and made sure everything is working fine and put them back. At this moment, his wristband beeped. A small projection appeared and it showed Christos standing in the hub.

    "This guy is fast."

    Sam smirked and sat down in the courtyard with his eyes closed.

    At this moment, back in the hub.

    Christos is sitting inside the research section of the pod and he awaited Joker''s projection.

    Now Joker''s projection appeared in front of him.

    "Hello, Mr. Christos. It seems that you have search for a very extensive andplicated item. The main system got an alert. How can I help you? What do you need? I will be at your personal service."

    Christos smiled and said.

    "Sir Joker. I would like to have a private conversation with you. I want to make a deal and I believe you are the only person who can give me what I want and in exchange I believe I can give you a fair and satisfactory price."

    "Well, the conversation we are having right now is private in itself. But I must tell you, I have no thoughts of selling the Hub or any of its internal mechanisms if that is what you are after."

    "No, you absolutely misunderstood me. I want to see if you could provide me with a customized training n. I need you to improve some of mypanions who are freshmen in the academies now.

    You wouldn''t have been able to create a ce like hub without extensive and varied knowledge in cultivation and battle techniques. I need you to study the battle techniques and training procedure of these people and create an exhaustive n for them to improve in all aspects.

    The n could be about their meditation habits, training procedures, practices, geographical factors, herbs and medicines they need to use,patible food and nutrition. Everything. I will pay fairly if you are able to achieve the desired results and I can even give you more business after that."

 Chapter 1997 Attack

    <h4>Chapter 1997 Attack</h4>

    Joker or to be precise Sam, almostughed out loud when he heard Christos'' proposal.

    "Mr. Christos, you should know that if I want money, I could earn it very easily. If I want connections, I can gain them too. As far as I am concerned, I don''t see any plus side to me on this deal."

    Joker said in tone that''s cheerful as well as carefree.

    "I am sure we can work something out. You must need something, just tell me what would make you ept this offer, then I will try to find a way." Christos asked with a straight face. He didn''t care about the carefree nature and even the slight ridicule he felt from Joker''s words.

    He is here for a deal and he wants to make it.

    Joker went into a deep thought.

    "Well, I don''t have a couple of things that I want, but I don''t think it is a good idea for you guys to make this deal with me. For this to work out, you would need to reveal your cultivation technique and energy cirction methods to me.

    And as everyone knows, that is a taboo secret no one should ask another person.

    If I go forward with this deal, then you would have to give that information out."

    Christos finally smiled.

    "You don''t have to worry about it. The cultivation techniques of everyone in my group are special. They are in fact open and quite a few people know about them. But only people with our families'' bloodlines can use them. So, even if you know them, there is no fear that you would be able to use it.

    As for finding its weakness, there are not many except for the exclusivity. Even the weaknesses of our techniques are known by everyone and we always find ways to ovee those weaknesses.

    Please ept my request."

    "You are putting me in a tough spot.

    Usually, the only requests I get are people asking me share my tricks, techniques, blueprints and research.

    No one actually asked me help and guidance for their development which is what I actually like doing. It seems like you did you research and prepared quite well.

    The only problem is, it is my policy to not do anything for free."

    "No problem, please ask for whatever you want. I will try my best to fulfill it. I have my connections and ways to get things done."

    Joker thought for a moment in silence.

    "Anyway as I said, there are indeed two things that I am in constant need of. So, I would be shameless and ask you directly."

    "What are they?" Christos'' face started beaming.

    "Minerals and Herbs. You know the resources required for my different researches.

    As you can see the research required to make these things is a veryplex one and it needs a lot of high level resources. I must say, I always find myself in deficit of them no matter how many I have."

    "This is a very small issue. Please tell me what resources you need. I will arrange them to the best of my ability."

    Joker chuckled and replied.

    "No, I don''t mind no matter what resources you can give me. But the amount should be proportional to whatever work I put in. I suggest you provide me a list of all the resources that you can give me.

    After an advance amount, I will perform some tests on the students that you want me to work on. I will draft a n for that advance.

    If you want to take the n and train by yourselves after that, be my guests. If you want me to provide the training personally, then that is a different matter, you would need to pay me based on the sessions and the effort that would need from me to make that work.

    Also, please give me the geographical details of your home realms with the list, I will prepare a training n based on the terrains that you have so that you don''t need to look for ces somewhere else."

    "Okay, I will be on it. For starters, there are three kids that I want you to work with. We will do for three months, if the results are satisfactory, we can make a new deal."

    "No, three months is too long. We will check the results in the first Open tournament."

    Christos was dumbfounded when he heard this.

    "Are you sure, that is not really a long time?"

    "Of course it is not a long time, but that is all the time I need. After that we can see what we can explore our further cooperation with. But there is one big condition."

    "What would that be?"

    "Until now, the only custom orders that I got were weapons, pills, formations, blueprints and such. So, I implemented them in the hub''s reward system. This is the first time someone came to me and asked me to teach.

    I don''t have too much personal time on my hands and I can''t do personalized coaching for everyone. Since you are the first one I am agreeing. So, this must stay between us and no one else should know about it."

    "You have my word that this will stay between us."

    Christos left with a skip in his steps. He is ecstatic.

    Meanwhile.

    Back in the academy, Sam opened his eyes in his courtyard with a smile on his face. He was still thinking what group of people he should mess with next and these guys came to him. If a fishes out of water on its own andys down on the chopping block and even hands you a knife, it would be foolish to not chop it.

    As Sam was about to stand up, he suddenly noticed something. There is some weird energy movement around his courtyard. Then he noticed that a young man is running towards his courtyard with an inscription scroll in his hands.

    He threw it towards the courtyard.

    When the inscription is midair, it triggered a formation around the courtyard.

    A wave of death energy collided all over the courtyard. It is not strong enough to kill Sam, but it destroyed everything within the courtyard, the vegetation became dead in a second and the whole residence is corroded.

    Most of all, the energy gathering formation that increases the energy concentration in that courtyard was destroyed along with it.

    Sam already erected an energy barrier around him before the wave hit. He looked at the young man who already disappeared in a direction. He looked in that direction coldly. The death energy that is rampaging around him suddenly halted as it was all sucked into his palm.

    Sam jumped into the air and harbinger appeared under his feet.

    *SWOOSH*

    He whistled through the air and within a second he is in front of the young man who was still running directly towards the direction of the gate.

    "Where do you think you are going? Take what you left behind before you leave."

    Sam jumped off harbinger and pinned the guy to the ground.

    He startedpressing the death energy in his hand. The young man could feel that the energy is indeed beingpressed and concentrated, but there is something else he noticed.

    The energy became more chaotic and lethal.

    His face turned pale in fright.

    "Please. Please don''t do this to me. I had no choice. A guy forced me to do this. I knew that it wouldn''t do anything to you, that is why I agreed. If I didn''t, he would make my life a living hell. Please understand."

    The guy even started crying.

    Sam frowned and increased the pressure of his foot on the young man. The ground underneath him started cracking.

    He looked at the wrist band on the young man''s hand.

    Sam felt a bit confused. If someone is attacking him, then he should have some intel on it, the whole reason for the hub is exactly that.

    He took out his sses and took a look at the young man and the wrist band once before put them back inside.

    "I honestly don''t care what your circumstances are. You have to face the consequences for your actions and lucky for you, the academy restricts killing students.

    As Sam said, he threw the orb of death energy into the chest of the young man."

    The death energy spread all over his body and started restricting his energy cirction.

    "Remember, I am not the reason for what you are about to face, the people who put you up to this are."

    Sam turned around and left the academy.

    The young man coughed heavily and he could feel the excruciating pain as if each and every single cell in his body is trying to escape from the energy that is invading him.

    At that moment, some surrounding students who watched the whole scene ran to him and took him to the medicinal hall.

    Meanwhile, Sam who is already in the city smiled as he thought of the chain reaction that is going to trigger with this incident. But that smile went away soon and he became serious, because right now he is walking to another link that will help him test his new gadgets.

 Chapter 1998 Another Attack

    <h4>Chapter 1998 Another Attack</h4>

    Sam is almost at the outskirts of the city. An area which is free of people most of the time. At that time, it is emptier than usual.

    He arrived there and took out the sses that he used earlier and wore them.

    He looked around as he waited. He didn''t have to wait for long though, because someone made a move soon. A young man fully covered in cloak and mask jumped out of nowhere. He held his fingers like a w and the tips are growing with wind elemental energy.

    Sam dodged the w as he looked at the opponent with a smile.

    At first, he just used his regr means to see if he could figure out the identity of the person.

    But the cloak and the suit beneath it is specially designed to hide the body type of the person. Even though he looked like a young man, for all Sam knew, it is a petite goal underneath.

    As for the mask, it is even more reinforced. Even with his energy vision, all he could see is that there is energy gathered underneath the mask creating a blur for Sam''s senses.

    Then with a thought, a drop of energy went into the sses. The handles of the sses on either side started glowing with patterns. The glow is very slight and almost ignorable by the others.

    But if they knew what that glow signified, then they would have definitely changed their minds. They would have wished they recognized that glow.

    As soon as the sses glowed, Sam could see more than that meets the eyes, senses and even his energy vision.

    For others, he is just wearing some weird eye shield made of ss, but Sam could see everything with it. A holographic screen only Sam could see.

    And that screen has everything that he needs.

    Sam could see the enemy''s energy cirction within the meridianwork and in turn can see the body structure, he can also see the face. But that didn''t stop there, a string of text data appeared on the side.

    [Name: Nico

    Affiliation: Hermes Academy (Sophomore)

    Cultivation Level: Divine ne Initiation Middle Stage

    Cultivation technique: Heavenly Condor technique

    Identified 89 ws in battle techniques

    Identified 76 ws in Physical body

    Mentality: Below Average by Dusk Standard.

    Threat Level: Medium at Best¡­]

    The text went on to list all the ws in cultivation technique, cirction and every weakness and even some suggestions on the battle ns.

    Apart from that, as the opponent is moving towards Sam, red holographic spots are being highlighted in front of Sam''s eyes showcasing his energy nodes, some yellow spots showcasing his weak spots in the physiques and some lines showing the trajectory.

    Sam is really impressed by his own creation.

    This is the second advantage of the hub. If surveince is the first and most direct benefit with all the information he could gather, this is a step beyond surveince.

    When people enter the hub and use all of those arcade games and simtions, they are disying their energy cirction techniques, battle techniques and their physical body to a molecr level for the hub to observe.

    Now, hub as an impable database that has all the required datapiled at one single ce. This data is connected to these sses.

    So, when Sam sees someone who used hub, no matter how many disguising techniques they use, no matter how many deception techniques they can think of, theputation power of these sses will observe and match all the visual data points with the data in the hub.

    Then they will derive who the person is along with all the profile.

    They will alsopare the movements of the enemy in the battle to the movements in their practice in Arcade and simtions and offer all the openings before.

    As the opponent came, Sam just dodged the w once again and a wind bullet of a very small size wasunched out of his finger to target the elbow.

    That is one of the important energy nodes for the attack and it also happened to be a weak physical point because of the pressure it is enduring from that move.

    *CRACK*

    The crack was loud and clearly audible to all the people hidden.

    The wind energy rampaged at the node and the broken bone didn''t help. It just propelled the destruction and the opponent had to run back in desperation while he tried to control the energy there and stop the bleeding.

    At this moment the opponent''spanions came out.

    Sam gave them a sweeping nce and all the required data popped up on his screen.

    They might think that they cornered Sam, but they don''t know that all Sam could see are the red, yellow and green dots all over. They are full of weak points that he couldn''t wait to exploit.

    All of them might have superior cultivation to his, but Sam could see himself winning against them easily.

    A total of ten people including the one that ambushed him at the start. This is a cake walk.

    Sam dodged a fire attack thrown by someone from Apollo''s academy, he took out a small ice elemental liquid energy capsule. He dodged a few more attacks and closed the distance between him and that fire user.

    The opponent didn''t mind, in fact he weed Sam''s presence and when Sam threw the energy capsule, he didn''t even bother to dodge, because the capsule flew over his head and it didn''t look like much of a threat.

    *BOOM*

    When the capsule started falling after going over him, it exploded. Most of the explosion was targeted at the spine of the guy.

    A weak point both physically and an energy node that takes most brunt whenever he attacks, both are there.

    The ice elemental energy invaded that ce and the attack the opponent was about to throw destabilized before it exploded while still in energy cirction phase.

    *BOOM*

    With a loud and bright me, both of his arms exploded.

    Sam reached him at the exact moment, and threw a full brunt knee kick to the head filled with ice elemental energy andbined with ripple style.

    The opponent felt like his cells are being frozen before he fell off to the ground.

    One down, nine more to go.

    Everything happened in a sh. Not even a few seconds passed since the start of their attack and one of them is already down another one is injured severely with his arm bleeding out crazily.

    The team didn''t feel so confident anymore.

    "Come on, don''t stop now. I am just starting to enjoy this."

    Sam said as he jumped on to them. Harbinger appeared out of nowhere and hit an opponent from behind, Samnded a kick on that guy''s chest. A pressure point where a lot of energy is gathered. He was once again thrown against the board.

    Harbinger made a quick turn as it shed him in the back. Sam disappeared into the shadows the next moment and appeared somewhere else.

    Just when the opponents are distracted by Harbinger''s sudden appearance, it dropped a bunch of wind elemental liquid energy capsules before disappearing.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The capsules are not strong enough, they wouldn''t be able to do much damage to these people, and they are not even aimed at critical points, but the sudden change is enough for Sam to make use of it.

    He appeared out of the shadows along with a bunch of shadow mice.

    The shadow mice moved around based on Sam''s directions and marked the weak points of these guys. Now Sam activated shadow fusion as he moved in the shadows provided by the shadow mice and started attacking.

    He became the active attacker and the seniors who came to fight him became defensive.

    He is like a dancer on a stage performing to the fullest. His wide movements and shy kicks are full of openings but the seniors are unable to do anything with it. They could see the openings, but before they could reach it, Sam is not even there.

    He is busy crippling one of their team members.

    The only drawback towards Sam is that it is taking a lot more time this way.

    He targeted their weaknesses, but he didn''t take critical shots. He dragged the battle a bit and after around thirty minutester Sam finished it off. There is only one guy standing with injuries all over. His disguise was destroyed and he is on hisst legs.

    And at that moment, someone is watching this scene a couple of streets away from there. He is none other than Christos. The new business partner, Sam lined up as the Joker.

    He is looking at it through the wrist band, his bird puppet is right now hovering over the street where Sam is fighting. The bird is currently using a disguise technique that Christos imprinted on it.

    He looked at Sam who is walking slowly towards thest standing senior.

    Christos is a bit nervous, he though Sam would start asking some questions and he is afraid the senior would spill the beans, but to his delight, Sam didn''t ask any questions. He did a spinning kick to the chin of the opponent and a huge wave of visible shadow energy wave hit the senior.

    Sam''s whole body is covered in that shadow energy and when it was gone, Sam was gone as well.

    Christos frowned and the bird circled a bit checking the surroundings, but the next moment.

    "BOO"

    Sam''s face appeared in close up in front of the bird''s eyes and in turn on Christos'' screen.

 Chapter 1999 Preparations

    <h4>Chapter 1999 Preparations</h4>

    Christos jumped up in the air and almost punched the holographic screen.

    He was scared for a moment and it took him a few seconds to stabilize. He looked at the screen and watched Sam''s grin.

    "You are one clever little rat aren''t you? You think you can send some smaller rats and see if you can take a bite off my leg?"

    Christos had a somber expression as he looked at Sam. He is giving outmands in his head, urging the bird to escape from that ce, but of course the puppet is locked in ce.

    "I don''t know who you are now, but trust me. I am going to find you my dear rat. Good luck facing me."

    Sam let go of the bird and disappeared from that spot.

    Christos panted and let the birde back to him again. He watched the recording of what Sam did once again with a frown on his face. He wasn''t able to identify the deciding factor of the battle. Most of Sam''s moves were ridiculous.

    In some moves, he didn''t even target any vitals.

    But he still managed to win easily. His heart sank. The whole point of ambush is knowing what Sam would do when he is overpowered and outnumbered. In fact, he wanted to know Sam''s desperate defensive measures and the running tactics, but instead all ten of the ambushers got their asses handed to them.

    He needs to get some answers and he didn''t waste any time. He ran back to the Zeus academy to meet with his teacher, who is one of the elders of the academy and also an alumni of their Noble league.

    Meanwhile, back in the Gambler''s Academy.

    Within the medicine hall.

    The Elder in charge is looking at the young man whoid in the bed writhing in pain.

    This is the same young man who attacked Sam and became victim of Sam''s retaliation.

    The Elder in charge of the freshmen is standing on the other side of the bed.

    "How is he doing Elder Haron? Please tell me he will be okay?"

    The Elder in charge of the students asked the Elder in charge of the Medicine hall.

    Elder Haron''s face is full of sadness.

    "He will be okay, physically after a while, but I don''t know if he would be able to handle it mentally."

    "What do you mean?"

    "Sam used the death energy in a unique way. This is the first time I have seen this. The energy is not attacking the meridians on even the vitality of this student, but it is targeting a very limited number of cells in the body.

    And once the death energy kills enough cells that have the same level of energy as the death energy, he would recover. But the pain of it would be excruciating. I could put him on a sedative or a meditativea to offset the pain.

    The problem is if he is not awake, he wouldn''t be able to concentrate and resist the death energy, which will let it spread further. For it to not spread and leave his system on its own as it was meant to do, he should be awake.

    But after enduring all of that pain, if his will is not strong enough, he might be broken."

    "How long will it take for this process to happen? Can''t we remove the death energy directly?"

    "It will take one week, if we leave it as it is. We can absolutely try to remove the energy, but I am not confident that I can do it. The death energy almost acts like it has a conscious of its own. Once we try to deal with it, it is going to act up.

    And it is very close to the vital points as it is. It is almost like Sam knew every critical point rted to this guy''s cultivation and physique and death energy is targeting those areas. If it explodes, he will die. My suggestion is unless the dean or Vice Dean steps forward, we shouldn''t do anything and let it be.

    I can stay beside and help him ease some pain here and then, but we can''t do anything else."

    The Elder felt his heart sink.

    He just wanted to go and bash the shit out of Sam right now. But he already learned the context of the situation. The kid on the bed is the one that made the first move, Sam acted only in retaliation and worst part is, Sam only used the same death energy that was used to attack him.

    He just knew how to attack better.

    The Elder looked at the kid on the bed and wanted to say something, but he held back and walked out. He knew that the kid who suffered the consequences is not the perpetrator of this. He would very much like to know who is behind this, it is just not the right time.

    The Elder went to talk to Crow.

    Meanwhile, back in Zeus academy.

    Christos is sitting in front of an Elder in a luxurious office.

    The Elder had a clean face with no facial hair and his thick long hair is tied into a bun and a hair pin that is shaped like a sword held it together.

    He is looking at the video recording that Christos brought.

    "Teacher, no matter how many times I saw it, I wasn''t able to understand his fighting style. How did he manage to defeat them when he didn''t even aim for the vitals?"

    The Elder stayed silent for a moment and said.

    "It is a unique fighting method I must say. This guy has an impable fight IQ and it seems like he knows all of their weak points.

    At least that is the only thing that I could think of as I see it.

    As for how he managed to spot your bird, I cannot tell you. It must be his unique observation technique."

    "Weak points? But he didn''t aim for the vitals."

    "If you think Physical Vitals are the only weak points, then your education should be revamped. In fact, based on cultivation techniques, battle style, behavior, there are many kinds of weak points. This guy might be an expert in finding out."

    "But how?"

    "I don''t know that. The only thing that I see is that thing he wore on the face. It has been a long time since I saw someone fight like this."

    "Is his fighting ability that good?"

    "Yeah, he used a technique so good that you didn''t even see it and think of it even after all this talk."

    "What would that be?"

    "Information."

    Christos stayed silent. Its apparent that he didn''t understand it from his facial expressions.

    "Somehow he had information about the weaknesses of these people. And from the way he acted, he knew about your attack as well. He knew what he was doing throughout the whole fight. There is something off, a missing element.

    And even I can''t identify it.

    If you want to go after him, be more careful. I suggest you take your time and understand what he is and how he acts. Then, you will have a chance of handling him. Otherwise, you can forget it."

    "Alright Teacher, thank you for your guidance. I will wait until the first open tournament. From what I heard, Apollo wants to take the lead this time. I will see his performance in that and then I will act based on that."

    "Good. Now leave me alone."

    Christos walked out. He took out hismunication token and contacted a few people in his league. H needs to make some more preparations.

    Meanwhile, in the same Zeus academy.

    Pearl is looking at the video in front of her.

    It is the same video that Christos showed to his teacher. But this is from a different perspective.

    One of herckeys that is tailing Sam filmed this.

    "He is a lot moreplicated than I thought. Judging by how he managed to spot a camouged bird, it wouldn''t make sense that he doesn''t know a tail is after him and he is being watched by other birds.

    Then why did he let them be?"

    She had a tense expression on her face.

    She is a bit of a control freak. The situation should always be in her control and it was the case since she joined the academy, but it is in aplete imbnce ever since Sam showed up.

    She felt a bit threatened.

    She could only contact her team and make some extra preparations.

    While everyone is making preparations like this, Sam is also making his own preparations. He nted many seeds and now it is time to wait for the first open tournament and too see how far the seedlings havee.

    Of course, before that he needs to gather some information on who nned that death energy attack.

    It might not be lethal and from the looks of it, its designed to annoy him, but still there is a crack in the system since he didn''t find it. So, he needs to fix it.

 Chapter 2000 Discharge

    <h4>Chapter 2000 Discharge</h4>

    In the Medicine hall of the Gambler''s academy.

    The young man who was attacked by Sam is lying on the bed with his eyes closed. One could see how much pain he is going through just from his expressions. But what even the elder couldn''t know is what''s happening inside his head.

    The elder only managed find out about death energy and its workings.

    But because of its overwhelming domination in the situation, he ignored a small thing that is happening with the student. His nightmares. With the death energy and the wrist band, the student is being subjected a series of nightmares.

    And all of them have one thing inmon.

    The kids that gave him the task of pissing of Sam. The seniors who made use of him as a thorn to poke at Sam. And now he is broken because of that and they are nowhere to be seen.

    Even though he is suffering from nightmares, he is fully aware of his surroundings. He even knew that he is having nightmares and those images in his head are not real. But the more he is in that state, the angrier he felt.

    He felt angry for being used like this.

    And he felt angry for facing the consequences of the actions that he didn''t want tomit in the first ce. If he gets out of this without losing his mind, he will get his revenge.

    For the next seven days, he lived through these nightmares and luckily for him, he managed to keep his sanity intact. Albeit barely.

    When the death energy was finally expelled, he sat on the bed as the Elder examined.

    Even he is tired by now. The past seven days he stayed beside this student and saw what kind of agony he went through. He wouldn''t wish this situation on his worst enemy. And again, this Elder never really had that kind of enemies.

    "Please be careful, Riwan. Take it easy for a while. Don''t bother about training and academy duties. Try to rx and recover your spirit."

    Riwan, the young man looked dead.

    His body is brimming with vitality, but his face looked like death creeped all over it. His eyes in particr there is not an ounce of vitality within it.

    "Don''t worry elder. I know what to do to recover my lost spirit. Thanks for taking care of me."

    He walked out after the examination is done and he was cleared to leave.

    He didn''t even go to his dorm as he tried to leave, instead he looked towards the dorms of the sophomores and made his way there.

    Meanwhile, back in the sophomore dormitory.

    Crow is sitting on a chair with his legs crossed as he twiddles with the wristband.

    A group of five people are standing in front of him. They are soaked in sweat. It is apparent from the expression in their eyes.

    "I specifically informed everyone that you are not to mess with Sam in any way that is out of the rules. How dare you make a freshman do that death energy stunt? Because of you that kid is in the Medicine hall for the whole week.

    I went there and saw him.

    He is in such an excruciating pain that I wanted to kill all of your bastards."

    "Crow, we don''t know what you are talking about. We never bothered with Sam. After all, we are not really pestered by people that much because of our position right in the middle of the pecking order.

    Why would we go and mess with him? Did that kid tell you that we made him do it? He is lying. He must have done it himself and got scared of the consequences.

    Now he is pushing it on me."

    "Stop it. Don''t insult my intelligence.

    Do you think I would take a week to confront you without knowing the full story? Did you really think it took me a whole week just to track you down?

    I knew it was you guys on the day of the attack itself. I just wanted to know the full story. You must have been really into that freshman girl Pearl of Zeus Academy.

    You took money from herckeys and did this to Sam.

    And since you are afraid of Sam himself, you made a freshman do it and made him take the brunt of it."

    "No.."

    "I am not here to listen to your freaking exnations. You are going to face the consequences in the disciplinarymittee ording to the rules. Get ready for the trial. It will happen in two days and I will present all the evidence."

    Crow walked out and the people in the room finally managed to heave a sigh.

    But that didn''tst for long.

    They are clearly a bit nervous about the trial. Their prank in itself is not really that troublesome. In a normal case, they might get some tedious mission that wouldst for about a week. But right now things are different.

    They took money from Pearl''sckey to annoy Sam and just as Crow said, they were a bit scared of him.? So, they pushed one of the soft persimmons which happened to be Riwan.

    "Go and call some freshmen. I want to blow off some steam."

    One of them spoke and a guy walked out.

    After a few minutes he came back with a couple of freshmen and they began hazing.

    At that moment, Riwan who just got discharged came to the room.

    "Oh, look at that. Our very own bitch Riwan is here. See, I told you guys it''s a loyal bitch. He directly came to us after discharging."

    One of the seniors spoke in a cheerful tone. He walked to Riwan and ced his arm over his shoulder.

    "Loyal my ass. I am sure he is the one who spilled the beans to Crow."

    Another senior came and looked at Riwan, he felt a bit uneasy when he looked at those dead eyes."

    "What the fuck are you looking at asshole?" *PAK* A pnded on Riwan''s face.

    Riwan didn''t react and looked at them.

    "Why did you guys do this to me? If you are really such tough guys, why didn''t you do it yourself? Because of you, I had to endure seven days of hell that felt like seven years. Fucking cowards."

    The seniors all exchanged a nce and one of them started the beating.

    Riwan got angry and threw a punch at one of them, but he was simply subdued and after some beating, they threw him out.

    "If you go and cry at Crow or elders, we will fucking kill you."

    Riwan started shedding tears as he stood up and walked away. He didn''t know where he was walking, but before he knew it, he came to the entrance of the academy. He wiped his tears and walked out to drink his sorrows down.

    He didn''t know why he went to those seniors. He knew he had a grudge and he wanted revenge, but he also knew he wasn''t capable. That is why he went to them. To see if they will feel at least some remorse. But nope, there is none of it.

    He went to a bar and ordered a drink for himself. Only after he started drinking did he notice some familiar faces.

    A couple of freshmen who were being hazed by those seniors when Riwan went there just entered the bar and they are approaching Riwan.

    He was confused. If they are here, then that means these guys were left alone right after Riwan left and they came here following him and his guess was right.

    "Hey Riwan. You Bastard. Why the fuck would youe and enrage those seniors? Because of you, we have to face extra troubles. In the past week, because you were absent, they were taking it out on us.

    It is one thing that you are not grateful towards us for getting hazed instead of you for this week. You should have directly gone to your room if you are discharged. Why would you make our lives worse?"

    They yapped and yapped iprehensibly. Their words didn''t even have any logic and finally they got down to what they actually came for.

    To pick a fight.

    They grabbed Riwan by the cor and started fighting.

    Riwan who was already pissed at the seniors is full of wrath. It is one of things for the seniors to haze him because he is weak. But these guys are his peers and he is not that weak to the point even they can enrage him.

    He immediately made his move and started fighting with them.

    He managed to overpower the two pretty easily, but the bad part is there were a bunch of backup forces waiting outside and they stepped in.

    Riwan wanted to fight them, but all of a sudden he felt a sense of sharp pain all over and in his soul. Its the side effect of the recovery. He is still not up to par with his original condition.

    And this pain gave him enough gap for the new opponents to make a move. He saw a foot approaching his face, ready to kick the living daylights out of him.

    But at the same minute, he saw a silver card and a trace of wind going past him and cutting through the foot.

    [Important Notice ahead Read Author''s Thought]

 Chapter 2001 Card

    <h4>Chapter 2001 Card</h4>

    Fifteen minutester.

    Riwan is sitting at the table. His eyes are wide open and he is sweating bullets. His energy is a mess.

    Watt is sitting across him with a ss of wine in his hands.

    "What the fuck is deal dude? Are you going to speak any time soon?"

    Watt asked with slight annoyance in his voice. Riwan got out of his daze and gulped hard before looking at Watt.

    "Thank you so much. Thanks for saving me."

    "Whatever. I didn''t do it save you. I didn''t want to be disturbed while drinking. That is the only reason I beat? their ass. You are lucky that you are getting your ass whopped by them, if it was a fair fight, I would have beaten the crap out of you and thembined."

    Riwan chuckled at this. He sighed and leaned in to his chair a bit more.

    He felt exhausted.

    "Anyway, what''s the issue? Why are they so adamant about beating the crap out of you? Particrly when you already look like you are half dead with those eyes."

    Riwan didn''t know what to say. He didn''t feelfortable talking about it. He didn''t want to give out his story of being a wimp to a guy who just saved him. He didn''t want a pity party right now.

    "Come on man. I saved your ass. The least you can do is tell me why I had to do it."

    Riwan sighed and exined everything.

    "Damn, you take one hell of an ass whopping. Why didn''t you retaliate?"

    "I am not as strong as you my friend. If I was, I would definitely destroy those bastards. I would make them go through the suffering that I went through and more. But I have to wait for the time when I am stronger than them. If I could be stronger than them."

    Watt chuckled slightly at this.

    Riwan looked at him in confusion.

    "You are pretty stupid, you know that? That is why they are picking on you."

    "What do you mean?"

    "What do I mean? That is what I should be asking you. What do you mean, you need to wait until you get stronger than them? If you are not stronger, find someone stronger to help you with it. It is that simple.

    Unless you deal with them, your mind won''t be cleared and unless it is clear, you wouldn''t be able to breakthrough.

    Do you really think we are still in Astral ne or Mortal ne? We are in Divine ne, every breakthrough is a test to our will and with your wimpy ass? You would never advance."

    Riwan was dumbfounded and then some fear kept creeping in his heart. He remembered the nightmares he had. Whenever he closed his eyes, he could only see those nightmares and then he remembered how those seniors treated him.

    "Are you going to help me?" He asked in a low tone.

    Watt looked at him with a sigh.

    "If I really had the power, I would have. I kind of like you. But I can''t do that at the moment, because I have a few problems of my own.

    But I can give you this."

    He then ced a card on the table and slid it to Riwan.

    Riwan was confused as he examined the card carefully. There is just one engraving on it. Apart from that, there is nothing on either side. The engraving is also just a ming skull symbol.

    "What is this?"

    "You can insert your divine energy into it and it will show you some coordinates. Reach that location within the next hour and you will be able to meet someone that will help you with your troubles.

    They are very versatile with their services and they are kind of cheap as well. So, go ahead and use it."

    With that Watt got off and left.

    Riwan looked at the card. He didn''t know if he should trust this or not. But after some thought, he decided to just go for it.

    He injected his divine energy and some coordinates appeared on the card.

    He calcted the ce and it is not far from the city. He got out of the bar and started moving.

    After around twenty minutes, deep within the woods outside the city, Riwan arrived at a giant tree. There is no sign of any life other than the vegetation in the surroundings.

    The next moment, he saw a person appeared out of thin. He wore blood red outfit. It looked weird with a partial cloak. He had the skull mask on his face and the blood red eyes are clearly visible through the holes of the mask. He gave an eery feeling of blood and death.

    "I am the representative of ming skull, how can I be of your service?"

    "I am R¡­"

    "No, you don''t need to give your personal information, tell us who you want us to take care of, what they did to you and what way do you want us to deal with them. That is all I need.

    Of course, if you are unsure of thest question, we do give suggestions."

    Riwan was a bit confused, but he narrated the whole thing once again.

    The guy in the Skull mask thought for a moment and said.

    "With the level of pain and suffering you went through and you are going to go through in the future, my rmendation is either death or infliction of permanent disability. That disability could be mental or physical."

    Riwan became a bit nervous.

    This is clearly a shady organization, with thews in ce in the Academic realm, it would be hard handle if things got out of hand. But when he thought of what Watt said and what he has to go through from now on.

    He gritted his teeth and said.

    "Can they just go through, what I went through? Can you do that?"

    "Of course, thates under Metal Permanent Disability."

    Riwan was stunned for a moment and a small wry smile appeared on his face.

    "Alright, what is it gonna take?"

    "There is one more thing before we decide that. Do you want us to do it directly or do you want to do it? If you want to do it yourself, we will provide you with a fool-proof solution. There would be no evidence, nothing left.

    Even if youe out and say that you did it yourself, no one would believe you.

    If you want us to do it, it will be a bit expensive."

    "I can do it myself?"

    "Yes, of course. It is not applicable for all cases, but for this case, it is clearly possible."

    "How much do I have to pay for this?"

    The man in the skull mask gave the number. After discussing a few more details, Riwan was presented with exactly four different cubes in front of him.

    The four cubes are floating in front him as the man in the mask controlled them.

    A light appeared out his finger and engraved four different names.

    "As you can see, the names of the respective targets are engraved on these cubes, you can only use the cube on the selected target.

    The cube is small and perfect for you to hold with one hand throw it. All you have to do it use a drop of your blood and press on the name before throwing it.

    As long as the cube reaches the target person''s vicinities within twenty meters, the cube will do the rest."

    Riwan gulped as he heard the exnation. A part of him wanted to call this bullshit, but if it is true, it kind of terrified him. Because all he gave are the names of the seniors and their affiliations in the academy along with information on what they did to him.

    And this guy pulled these four cubes out of nowhere and said they would do exactly what he wanted them to do.

    This didn''t sound exactly believable, but if it happens, then it would be more terrifying than anything he ever faced.

    Lastly, the guy pulled out six cards out of thin air.

    Three of them have the same ming skull engraving, but instead of golden mes, they are ck. The remaining three didn''t have any engraving, they are just in metallic cards.

    "These cards are the only way to reach us if you have future assignments. But you wouldn''t be able to ess us that easily. The ones with the engravings are the distribution cards. You need to offer them to someone who is in need just like you.

    When those cards are distributed, the cards in your possession, the empty cards will be activated and you cane back to us for more."

    Riwan stood there confused and wanted to ask something, but the next second the guy disappeared and only a sound of his was left.

    "Thanks for using our service. Visit us again."

 Chapter 2002 Trial

    <h4>Chapter 2002 Trial</h4>

    Gambler''s academy

    Dormitory Area.

    Riwan is nervously walking as he held a cube while fidgeting with it. He has many doubts and one of them stemmed from the fact that these cubes didn''t even cost much. The dealer only asked for one month of his expenses.

    At that time, he didn''t think much.

    But now that he thought about it, he felt like this might have been a sham and if it is, then things wouldn''t be good after he closed in on the seniors and used the cubes.

    As he overthought until he decided on giving up the idea, he noticed that some of the kids that came to harass him at the bar just watched him and went running towards the senior''s dorm.

    Even before he could react, the seniors came out and spotted him.

    Before he knew the seniors are already in front of him.

    "I heard that you made some powerful friends in other academies. A guy actually beat some of your peers for you? What the fuck are you doing mingling with other academies and making the Gambler academy look bad?"

    One of the seniors closed in and started yelling.

    "Yeah, are you trying to tell them that the Gambler''s academy students bully each other? It was just a spat between friends, why are other involved?"

    *PAK*

    He pped him directly.

    Riwan was dumbfounded. Based on those far fetched words and their stupid logic along with their wicked smiles, it is apparent that they are just choosing this as a reason to pick on him.

    He felt exhausted once again and at the same time a surge of anger assaulted his mind.

    Riwan bit his finger and pressed it on the cube. The blood enter the engraving of the name before it glowed. The seniors were surprised for a second and the next moment, the shot out of his hand towards the person whose name was engraved on it.

    With a very bright sh, Riwan disappeared.

    The sh was so effective to the point it not only blocked the vision, it cked the spiritual senses and hearing as well. Riwan appeared a few streets away and stood there in apletely different ce.

    He checked his storage and found the remaining three cubes there.

    He doesn''t know what happened to the cube he held in the hand and what happened to the person who the cube targeted.

    He fidgeted his hands nervously before deciding to send the bird puppet to check up on them.

    When the bird puppet entered the air space and Riwan got a clear visual, he could see that the sh stayed for a couple of minutes before it disappeared.

    All the people who were enveloped by the light sh were standing still as if they are stunnedpletely out of their consciousness. After a couple of minutes, their minds cleared up and they shook their heads.

    The cube was nowhere to be seen and the senior who was targeted by the cube was also back to normal.

    "What the fuck did that bastard do? What happened to us?"

    He yelled since he also saw that the cube hit his body, he didn''t know where it disappeared to, but it certainly hit his chest pretty cleanly.

    And to think that he lost his consciousness for almost five minutes is pretty scary. They are at the stage where wars change tides in seconds. Five minutes is way too much.

    They looked around and after failing to find out where he is, they just walked back to the dorm.

    Riwan is a bit relieved and a bit disappointed as he saw the senior who was targeted didn''t show any signs of pain or attack apart from the sh light. He was relieved that there would be no one in the school who would me him for attacking a senior.

    After all, if the senior really suffered, he would be the one to get the me since there would be many eyes within the academy. He wouldn''t be able to handle the consequences that easily.

    And the reason for the disappointment is pretty obvious.

    He just followed the group with the bird and as time passed, his disappointment only increased.

    But right before he was about to give up watching that person, he saw something.

    The group of four are walking leisurely as they discussed what they would do to Riwan when they find him again.

    "That bastard did something with that cube. There is certainly something up with it. I am going to beat him until he spills where he got it."

    As the senior who got tagged with the cube spoke, he suddenly tripped.

    His leg stopped moving. Itid limp on the ground and no matter how much he tried he couldn''t move.

    "What the fuck? I can''t move my leg."

    Even before he could finish that scream, his second leg also fell limp.

    The next moment, he felt his arms go limp as well and finally his neck. Then came a searing pain in various points within his body.

    When he noticed where those points are, he felt absolute despair. Those are key acupoints for his energy cirction and from what he could feel right now, those acupoints are burning up. Flesh around that area is being seared by an energy that is very simr to the death energy.

    But instead of just death energy that would eat vitality away, this energy is more corrosive and focused on just deteriorating the flesh.

    "HELP. HELP. HELP ME"

    He started screaming on top of his lungs.

    His friends came to his aid and took him to the medicine hall.

    Riwan was stunned. He called the puppet back and watched the video again and again. He gulped in nervousness.

    He was scared that he would be caught.

    Meanwhile, in the medicine hall, the Elder looked at the patient and was stunned.

    "What happened to him before this? Who did this to him?"

    The friends looked at each other''s faces. They didn''t know what to say. After much hesitation, they exined what happened.

    The Elder frowned and immediately sent orders.

    Crow who was about to get ready for the trial of these four seniors was called again to investigate something before the trial and as part of it, he directly went to Riwan.

    Within half an hour after the incident, Crow is standing in front of Riwan.

    "So, those guys said that you threw some sort of cube at him and that is what caused him this plight. What do you say for that?"

    Riwan gulped in nervousness. He is sweating bullets and Crow sighed.

    He gently tapped Riwan''s shoulders and said.

    "I know those guys tortured you for no reason and I am sorry that you had to deal with it because of the school''sck of rules and turning a blind eye.

    But you shouldn''t be afraid of me like this. You can tell me what happened and if you really did this, even if you might get a scolding, you would still be able to get away scot-free without a punishment.

    The only problem is that he would also be going away since you already executed your own punishment. So, speak freely."

    Riwan pursed his lips and said.

    "I didn''t do anything. It is true I threw a cube, but it was just something that creates sh and distraction. I escaped using a space transference token when they surrounded me to beat me up."

    Crow frowned.

    "Okay, you need to be there in a hour for the trial. There is aint registered against four of them, Sam and you are the victim in the middle. Come there and testify and whatever you said right now better be the truth."

    Crow left and met with some of his friends.

    "So, what is the situation there?"

    "Whatever Riwan said checks out. It was indeed a distraction and he disappeared and there are indeed traces of spatial transference and spatial transference alone. Something else must have caused this."

    "There is someone who might have caused it and he would be in the trial. Let''s go." Crow said and walked towards the Disciplinary hall.

    Within the Disciplinary hall an hour after the incident.

    Riwan is standing on one side. The three friends out of four are standing on the other and Sam is standing in the middle. Crow stood in front of them and exined the whole thing to the elder.

    This process is very simr to the trial Sam went through when he was pissing off Zeus academy.

    Riwan and the Seniors said their piece, now all suspicions are on Sam.

    "Sam, why did you have to attack Riwan with such viciousness? The death energy trap he set up was indeed his own fault, but to use the death energy to put him in such aatose state. Don''t you think you went overboard?"

    "No, I don''t think so."

    "You don''t think you went overboard?"

    The Elder of the disciplinary hall is not happy with Sam''s answer.

 Chapter 2003 Revenge and Rumors

    <h4>Chapter 2003 Revenge and Rumors</h4>

    Sam didn''t give two shits about Elder''s anger. He just repeated the same answer.

    "I don''t think I was overboard."

    The Elder almost lost it, but he gritted his teeth and spoke.

    "You better give me a proper exnation."

    "It is very simple actually. He attacked me, not even from the front. But with a trap set up. I destroyed the trap, captured the energy released from the trap and used that exact amount of energy to attack him again.

    I even chased him openly and attacked with all the people present.

    You can ask anyone to testify."

    The elder looked at Crow, who nodded in response.

    "If you had hit him with the same amount of energy, why did he go intoatose state?"

    "Only the energy is the same, not the way we used it. I used the energy way better than he did and I was stronger. That is all there is to it."

    "If you knew you were stronger, why didn''t you hold back?"

    Elder continued with this stupid line of questioning. He is basically trying to push Sam and make him admit he did something wrong, but Sam is not going to have any of it.

    "I don''t know why you are pressing me with that. Why should I hold back? He started it. He might now say that it was done as a prank, but when I was attacked, I didn''t know it was a prank. I genuinely thought it was an attempt at my life.

    If you say the energy is not enough, then I can only say I thought the killer is too much of a weakling and an idiot.

    That is my answer and it wouldn''t change."

    "You¡­" The Elder was about tosh out. The elder is against Sam since the start because no one in Gambler academy has a good impression on him. But now Sam''s disregard to the court is making him go crazy and this only amplified when Sam interrupted him.

    "Elder, I don''t know why you are questioning me for a retaliation this much. Those seniors and this guy named Riwan are the ones who provoked me. You should be d that I didn''t go after their throats immediately.

    I was feeling generous letting these idiots live.

    And on top of that, I was the one who should be asking the Gambler''s academy for an exnation instead of you interrogating me like this."

    "What did you say to me?" The Elder stood up. His energyshed out. Even Crow turned around and got ready to fight Sam at any given moment.

    Riwan was shocked and the Seniors were thinking that they might just get away with the current shit if Sam provokes the elder a bit more.

    But Sam didn''t care.

    "The security of the Gambler''s academy is sox that a person set up a death energy formation of a fresher''s dorm.

    That too not for anyone. I am a student of special status, my dorm had extra privileges and supposedly have extra security. Right now, it is a small trashy formation, what if it was not? All someone had to do is design a proper formation disc and find a proper sell out in the academy and the whole fresherpound would be a graveyard.

    "You are spouting a bunch of bullshit over a small incident. It was merely a prank on their part and oversight on the Dorm Security part." The Eldershed back.

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "Really? Why don''t you tell the Dorm Security to be just asx when I take a stroll around the freshmanpound, if I cannot turn the whole thing into a fucking graveyard in less than half an hour, I will cut my own fucking head off.

    Make that bet if you want me to prove my point."

    Sam''s calm voice sent a chill down everyone''s spine. The elder gulped.

    "You¡­" Sam shunned him again.

    "If you want to force charges on me, then fine. I demand a trial bybat. I won''t ept any other punishment."

    Sam''s adamant attitude stunned everyone. He looked at Crow with Provocation. He doesn''t care if the other party is going to push it or not, but if he did it will only be detrimental to the disciplinary hall and the Elder.

    "What about the attack on the senior a couple of hours ago? Do you have any rtion to it?"

    Crow asked and Sam just looked at him in confusion.

    "What senior?"

    Crow shook his head and turned to elder. The trial went on and Sam was not involved anymore. It was indeed true that the elder was giving him a hard time, but Sam is indeed not in the wrong here.

    Riwan got the details of the senior''s condition as the trial went on and when he heard that the other party wouldn''t be getting up for the next seven days, he felt like he was hit by an earth quake.

    But soon, he was also sent away and the seniors had to face a punishment. They were given a very specific grunt work mission. To be precise it is a cluster of small missions or simply a mission package.

    They are the resource gatherers for the next six months. They have to go to different realms and capture different beasts alive and bring them back for the freshmen''s training activities.

    They need to escort the freshmen on their missions that are going tounched soon.

    They need to do herb and mineral collection and some small time mercenary jobs as well.

    The tasks themselves are not difficult they are just time consuming and these seniors would fall behind in their training.

    Riwan left the disciplinary hall and went to his dorm.

    He held the three remaining cubes in his hands as he looked at them with a nk expression. There is a weird feeling in his mind. The cube worked which means the rest will also work. He bought his revenge merely for his monthly expenses.

    This sent a shiver through his spine, but that shiver is apanied by a thrill. He wanted to test this more.

    He got up and ready to go out, but then he remembered how he was at the trial and the information of the cube was also investigated, if he went there and he was spotted with the cube, then things wouldn''t go well for him.

    He thought for a moment and decided on a different n of action. He bought a bunch of stealth scrolls that are used on hidden weapons.

    He applied his blood on the name of the cubes and wrapped them up with the stealth scrolls. Then he created a simple trap that can hold a cube. He gave the first cube to the bird puppet and started controlling its movements through the screen.

    One of the three remaining seniors was walking alone to receive his very first mission as part of his punishment. He has to find an Elder who makes medicine and take the mission. The Elder''s mansion is luckily a bit deste making it easy for Riwan.

    When the senior reached the vicinity, something fell randomly in his path around thirty meters away. He noticed that a bird puppet has dropped it and it didn''t stop to pick it back up.

    He frowned in confusion and curiosity before he went there and picked it up.

    As soon as he held it in his hands and injected some energy to check what it is, the trap triggered and it pressed on to the name on the cube.

    A bright white sh enveloped the senior and he stood there in stunned silence for a few minutes.

    During that stunned period, a millions thoughts ran through his mind. He is afraid. He is scared shitless to be precise. Because before his friend got that severe condition, he was also met with the sh.

    He wanted to yell and speak up when he regained his conscious state from that stunned condition, but to his surprise, he wasn''t able to speak. Unlike his friend, he didn''t manage to get any incubation time. His limbs went limp and he lost his voice. His acupoints started burning just like that.

    He stayed there for fifteen minutes before some passerby saw him and took him to the medicine hall.

    Riwan who saw this all the way from his room, felt a sense of gratification. A sense of victory and he looked at thest remaining two cubes.

    And he didn''t take long to use them.

    By the next morning, the remaining two seniors were also sent to the medicine hall and Riwanpleted his revenge.

    The news of the four seniors who just went through the trial spread like wildfire and as the more information was revealed, the more it got people curious.

    Just like how Riwan suffered seven days with searing pain because of the death energy, these seniors are also going to face the same. And when Riwan was interrogated again, it was revealed that he is innocent and his alibi is air tight.

    But of course, none of the students who heard the rumors believed that he had nothing to do with this.

 Chapter 2004 Before the Tournament

    <h4>Chapter 2004 Before the Tournament</h4>

    Days passed.

    Rumors about Riwan spread far and wide.

    Even to the other academies. Nobody knew how Riwan took revenge, but since just like him the seniors who bullied him also stayed in the medicine hall for seven days, they believed that he took the revenge.

    Some other seniors who also liked picking on juniors wanted to find out the information.

    But Riwan is still a hot topic and they couldn''t do much. As for the instructors, they couldn''t be heavy handed when dealing with this, after all Riwan was the victim of bullying for which they turn a blind eye to, so they couldn''t just force him to answer stuff.

    But there is one category of people that managed to find some courage to talk to Riwan in those seven days. They needed courage because they are also victims of bullying, just like Riwan. And just like that, the three cards that Riwan needed to give were given away.

    And in those seven days, even before the seniors recovered these three people contacted the agent of the ming skull organization and gave out their assignments.

    Out of those three, only one of them took the option of executing the revenge himself, the remaining two decided to leave it to the ming skull.

    The first person received cubes with names engraved on them. He didn''t use them immediately though, he decided to wait up for a while and in the meantime, the remaining two people watched as their revenges were executed.

    And even that happened through cubes only.

    No one knew how the ming skull made those cubes, but they are effective. Very effective.

    And these three people also got six cards. Three for distribution and three for their personal use.

    When Riwan was asked by other victims about how they can take revenge themselves, he couldn''t say anything anymore. He doesn''t have anymore cards, but he gave them the names of the three recipients of his own cards.

    And the new victims managed to get cards of their own.

    Every day, more and more seniors and in some case freshmen are being targeted in peculiar way. Some are being permanently crippled, some are being temporarily damaged, some small petty revenge and some massive blood debts.

    These were being settled.

    But even with all these incidents happening, it is still on the downlow.

    Because the reason these victims were victims of bullying is because they are ignorable by the top dogs, both students and the teachers. They don''t have any attention on them because of their limitedpetence and activity.

    So, when another mediocre but rtively stronger person spots them, they would take out their own anger over their own insecurities on this overlooked category of people.

    Even if some instructors smelled something fishy, they couldn''t focus on it too much. Because they had to focus on the training of their own students.

    Training for the first Open Tournament.

    This time the Apollo Academy took the lead and everyone is excited to see how it is going to be. After all, for the freshmen this is another thing that could mark their reputation within this region of the academy realm.

    Two days before the tournament.

    Pearl is in her secret room looking at the reports and started thinking out loud.

    "All the marked targets are disturbed just as I nned. Vidyut did a great job with his list. White did the same, the only problem is we couldn''t get to Sam.

    That guy didn''t evene out of the academy that often. Even when he came, no one knew when he came out and where he went. He would only show himself when he came back.

    As if he is taunting the watcher that he went out and came back without the watcher even noticing.

    This is irritating.

    White didn''t even get a chance to execute the ns on Sam.

    "There is not much we can do. The tournament is in two days. Let''s just hope our ns are working."

    After that, she came out of that secret room and met with White and Vidyut in the courtyard.

    "So, the open tournaments are a very important steps for us. This would be the best time for us to crush the spirits of the other academies during the inter academy tournament. We need to win the whole thing.

    In this tournament our academy should be the most dominant one. All our team members will participate and whenever they have to fight the other academies, they will always be at full force.

    Imissioned a few special medicines based on their affinities and body types. These are recovery medicines tailor made for all the members on our team. They can be on theirst legs, barely breathing, but they will still recover.

    I got the recipes from the Hub and made one of our genius medicine makers to make them. She is also part of our team by the way, but I will introduce her to you guyster.

    Our goal in this tournament is to get the top three spots between us three. It doesn''t matter in what order we hold those spots as long as us three are the ones holding them.

    I also marked? few members who have potential to be the seed candidates without our academy. Keep a track on their performance and if they qualify, then we would add them into our n and from the next tournament they would start upying from the fourth ce onwards."

    Pearl kept on discussing their ns that day.

    One day before the tournament, Sam who was inside the dorm meditating leisurely felt a jolt as he had some unexpected visitors back in the hub.

    He went into the deep meditative state and his consciousness opened eyes back in the hub as Joker''s projection.

    "I didn''t expect that the Dean Pyre and Elders would grace with their presence today. I thought all of you would be very busy with the tournament preparations."

    It is none other than the Dean of the Apollo academy and his elders who came to the hub.

    "We are here because of those preparations only. We need your help with something."

    "Oh, please tell."

    "Every year during open tournaments most of the participants would be the students of their own academy. And very few cream of the crop candidates from other academies would participate. This wouldn''t be a problem usually as we can host all of them and facilitate the tournament within the academy grounds.

    But this year, I am guessing because of Hub''s addition to the region, there are many people who are feeling confident with the immense growth they had.

    The number of applications for entry from other academies are way past any of our expectations and since we didn''t know of this in advance, we didn''t make adequate preparations.

    We can still do it, but one of our elders gave an idea."

    The dean turned to one of the elders who was standing beside the Dean."

    "We would like to use the simtion room for the initial testing. Since you said that we could simte our own battles, I am think if it is possible to simte the same battle for all the candidates in the tournament?

    If it does, they will all fight the same battle and after calcting their scores, we will pick the top 16 and proceed with a proper tournament as usual.

    Since there are hundreds of simtion rooms, I am sure we can walk through the candidates easily and the preliminary round would be over by afternoon if we start at the dawn."

    Sam who heard this was surprised and amused at the same time. He didn''t think that these people would adapt to the Hub''s existence so well and so fast.

    He actually expected some resistance. After all, Hub kind of makes these students teach themselves without the academy''s help. As long as they learn here, earn some money through hunting or other methods in the other realms and buy the necessary resources, they are set. They don''t need the academy at all.

    Maybe the academies wanted to see the coexistence of these two or they didn''t even realize this at all. To think they would already use hub in one of their tournaments is insane.

    But Sam didn''t see why he should not let them use the hub.

    "It would be a tough thing to do, since the hub is originally not made for that. But I guess it is fine. The problem is you shouldpensate me in some way. I don''t do anything for free."

    "Of course, what would you like?"

    "Resources. Resources are all I need."

    "We can discuss further then. Maybe, you can calcte the estimated revenue for that time period and we willpensate the same amount in resources, maybe a bit more as a token of appreciation for stopping your business because of us."

    "Sure, we can definitely discuss that. Now if you tell me what your requirements are, then I would be happy to set up the simtion."

    "We might need your help even that. We are looking for some special beasts that are not exactly native to this ce."

 Chapter 2005 Pearlâ€™s Plans

    <h4>Chapter 2005 Pearl''s ns</h4>

    The day of the tournament.

    Sam went to the Apollo Academy at the dawn. The main gate of the academy is flooded. Not with just participants, but with hundreds of participants who registered for the tournament.

    Even before they could enter the gate, one of the Elders came out and said.

    "This year, the number of participants has increased by many timespared to the previous years. So, we made special arrangements. The preliminaries are going to be held within the Hub''s simtion area.

    All the participants will be given the same simtion. In an environment where they need to fight beasts of a very special kind. The more beasts you kill, the higher your score is going to be and the top 16 participants will enter the final tournament.

    Now, all of you please collect your participation token in the academy and go to the Hub."

    The Elder announced and left.

    The participants swarmed the academy and started collecting the participation tokens from many special counters arranged for them. Everyone who took the token went to Hub.

    As theye, they are immediately allotted to a simtion room.

    There are around a hundred and fifty simtion rooms within the hub and all of them are filled instantly. Pearl who also came for the tournament didn''t go with the first batch of students, instead, she is busilymunicating with her team members.

    She is on the look out for all the marked targets and gauges their performance. She is fine with goingst as long as she establishes her goals. There is no point in trying to hurry since the ying field will be equal for everyone.

    To her surprise though some of the candidates on her list didn''t appear for the tournament.

    They registered for the tournament, but they just didn''t show up. This made her a bit stumped as she didn''t understand why they even registered if they weren''ting. The confusion ate her up a bit.

    For a control freak, unpredicted moves from the target is a nightmare.

    Sam who is keeping an eye on her himself, saw her confused and frustrated expression and smiled.

    After some time, the participants who entered the rooms in the first batch starteding out one by one. When the person came out, the spot was immediately taken away by someone else. The tests are going out pretty quickly.

    After around an hour, all the members in the first batch came out, except for one.

    Five elemental king. One of the marked candidates in Pearl''s list.

    He is thest member in the first batch and he stayed there even after some of the participants who went inter came out. When he came out, he looked pretty beat up. He looked like he was carrying the mental and physical fatigue of over a thousand battles.

    The only good thing about it is that he didn''t have any actual injuries on his body.

    So, the recovery would be good.

    Five Elemental King took the support of some of his ssmates and walked over slowly while taking some medicine. Pearl locked his eyes on him, trying to get any information from his bodynguage.

    But to her surprise, halfway through to the exit he changed his direction and walked towards her.

    He stopped right in front of her. Even when herckeys tried to stop him from approaching, Pearl herself let them be and looked at Five Elemental King curiously.

    "Do you really think you can have everything under your control? You can keep an eye on me and my peers in my own academy and you try to record every single detail of our lives and you even arrange things so that we would be disturbed mentally and we wouldn''t know a thing that it was you behind all of this?

    What do you think of yourself as?

    You might be smart, but not as much as you think you are.

    Make sure that yourckeys don''t cross the top sixteen and have topete with me in the tournament. If I meet one of yourckeys, I will snap them in half."

    He walked away, ignoring the shocked expression on Pearl''s face.

    Her body shuddered uncontrobly. Five elemental king just dictated her whole n, the whole secret n that she had been working on from her secret room for more than a month in just five seconds.

    When he thought of how she believed everything was in her control and the look of ridicule the five elemental king gave her, she felt like her whole world was crumbling.

    Thepetition went on with her still in shock and panic.

    Her mind worked at an insane speed as she thought of how Five Elemental King might have known about her n. He is looking for ws in her execution. And while she stayed in those thoughts, it is finally her turn to enter the simtion room.

    She is one of thest few that are left there.

    By the time she came out the preliminaries would be over and they would be ready to go to the next and final round.

    Pearl entered the simtion room in the same daze. She finally woke up when a gust of chilly wind hit her face.

    The area simted looked like a Tundra region, but the whole thing was dark. Even with her heightened senses as a divine ne cultivator, she could barely see far in that darkness and her spiritual senses were being hindered by some force.

    Then only she realize that that mysterious force is not just hindering the spiritual senses, but her mental will as well as her physical state.

    She could feel this weird force trying to enter her body and disrupt her cirction.

    The feeling is also very weird. It is like her energy''s purity is beingpromised. It is very simr to corrosive effect.

    And the cold, if not for her water elemental affinity she would have had a hard time from shivering. The atmosphere is surprising to think that Divine ne cultivators would feel this much cold. The simtion effect is indeed beyond her expectations.

    But that is just the start.

    Because the next moment she saw a pair of ice blue eyes appear in front of her.

    A cat-like figure appeared from the darkness. It was barely twenty meters before her and Pearl wasn''t even able to sense it until then.

    When that cat came closer, she got a better look. It looked like a leopard. It has white fur with ice blue colored hue and ck spots.

    The leopard looked menacing with its mouth wide open. And that mouth is glistening with blood-red color. Ice energy roared around the leopard as it jumped at Pearl.

    Pearl hurriedly created a water shield in front of her.

    The leopard''s strike crashed the barrier and pushed Pearl back. The attack is much more powerful than she initially thought and she noticed one more thing. When the w made contact with the water barrier, the water froze before it broke and turned into smithereens.

    The leopard didn''t stop.

    It leaped at Pearl and for the next few seconds all she could do was dodge, finally, she regained some of her sense and started fighting back.

    As the leopard leaped at her, she created the water barrier once again, just when the cat was about to hit the barrier, it turned into a water spear and drove straight into the belly of the cat.

    Since the barrier disappeared, the w almost hit Pearl on her face, if not for the spear driving the leopard away, she would have been hit.

    But the leopard didn''t die. The spear didn''t manage to prate its skin. It barely scraped past the upperyers.

    The leopard showed excellent agility as it used some weird movement techniques to attack Pearl. But after a few exchanges, Pearl managed to nail down the Leopard with water spears stabbing it in the eyes, mouth, and nose to the rear of its body.

    The leopardy down on the ground and blood spilled out while the water spears solidified and became ice.

    Pearl heaved a sigh as she looked around and the next moment, she felt a stabbing pain on her left heel.

    She looked down and saw a giant snake with ice-blue skin which acted as a perfect camouge in thatnd of ice biting into her heel.

    The bit is so strong that her boots which would put a high-grade armor to a shame were easily prated. Even the formations inscribed on it were of no use.

    She started losing the sense of feeling in her leg and felt an ice-cold sensation creep up her knee and thigh.

    He hurriedly jumped up.

    The snake still held on as it injected ice elemental poison into her body.

    Pearl shed it with a water de and killed it off, before taking a potion that was specially made for her.

    She once again regained the feel on her leg. But there is no relief because this is just the start.

 Chapter 2006 Panic

    <h4>Chapter 2006 Panic</h4>

    Pearl looked around nervously as she advanced in one direction. The terrain in that position is way too disadvantageous to her.

    She decided to move in the direction of the vegetation.

    Maybe she could find an environment with water nearby. As long as there is a water body, she would be much better off.

    When she first saw all the snow around her, she thought she could use it to her advantage, but when she tried to manipte the snow, this weird corrosion effect is increasing by many fold and it is much harder to resist in that state.

    So, she could only do that in emergencies.

    For the next two minutes, Pearl really thought she is having a better time, but all of a sudden, the ground under her feet gave away and she fell into a hole.

    As she descended vertically downwards many ice spikes shot out of from all sides. She tried her best to dodge and block as many of them, but whenever a spike touched the water barrier, the barrier froze and she is losing the control over it.

    When she tried to forcefully take back that control, she is once again being exposed to the excessive corrosive energy.

    *BAM*

    Pearl hit the hard surface with a loud noise. She looked at her own body and felt a sense of crisis. Her whole body is punctured with small holes done by the spikes and the holes themselves are not the problem.

    She will heal soon enough.

    The ice energy invading her body though, is going to be a problem. She is very tempted to down another vial of medicine, but she is afraid about what she will face in theing time.

    At that moment, the wall on he hear caved open and arge worm that looked eerily like an earthworm except for his snow white body came out. It tried to bit on Pearl''s back and swallow her whole.

    But Pearl reacted and created a crystallized water sphere around her, blocking it.

    The area of contact between the worm and the sphere started freezing. Pearl thought quickly and broke another opening in the spear before she came out and the next moment, sheunched all the water in the sphere into the mouth of that worm.

    A single st flooded through its mouth and in to its whole body, destroying everything that came in the way.

    Pearl took the chance and flew out of the hole.

    Now, she started levitating and didn''t dare walk directly. Once again, she realized that levitating is leaving her a bit vulnerable to the weird corrosive energy. But she didn''t care about it now. She couldn''t afford to.

    Since her senses are not working at a hundred percent, she had to do this.

    After stabilizing herself a bit, Pearl looked around nervously and finally she saw a bunch of silhouettes closing in on her. Until now the trial is just starting, now she is going to get a real taste.

    More than a dozen beasts of different kinds cornered her. Worms shot out of the ground and there are even some birds circling around.

    She charged her water energy to the extreme and battle began.

    She didn''t pull any punches and tried to kill a beast within three hits at most. And it worked, because the beasts might be strong and smart, but they are not to the point they can kill a decent ranked person within the academy.

    Pearl of course is more than just a decent ranker. She is one of the best.

    The battle became brutal and in the middle she had to take the second vial right when she was ready to give up. Her body was way too beat up with the ice energy and the atmosphere corrosion.

    And to her unpleasant surprise, even though the energy poisoning of the ice element was gone, the corrosion effect is notpletely taken away. She had to fight at her not so optimum state.

    The beasts swarmed her and soon Pearl couldn''t take it. Slowly she gave up and by the end of it, her whole body is covered with beasts as they tore her apart. She lost her senses in the middle as her whole body went numb with ice energy.

    Pearl was kicked out of the simtion room.

    She is exhausted, but she mustered enough strength to take a look at the board to check her results. She survived for a long time in there and she hoped she scored well.

    And when she saw the results, her jaw almost dropped to the floor.

    Her name is in sixth ce.

    It might have been a great honor for a lot of other people, but for her, it is a disgrace. She was born to rule this era. It is her era and the glory should be hers, but now, she is sixth ranked in the preliminaries.

    She looked at the remaining five people.

    The fifth ce actually belonged to a different academy student who is on her list.

    Fourth ce belonged to Five Elemental King.

    Third went for Vidyut, second went for White and first ce is obviously Sam''s.

    Vidyut and White hurriedly ran towards her.

    "Use three are in top sixteen as expected. Apart from us, there are three more people in the top sixteen that belongs to our academy.

    Two of them belong to the Noble League and another one is a marked candidate on our list. The rest of our academy students didn''t perform that well. But still the situation is a bit favorable to our academy since we have the highest number of people in the top sixteen."

    Pearl didn''t show any change in her expression.

    She just looked at Vidyut who is giving her the report and pursed her lips. Just a few days ago, she beat him in the tower ascension rankings. She was only second to Sam.

    But now both Vidyut and White beat her and thepetition is not close because there are two more people ranked between them. Separating them.

    She is afraid that things would go bad if they continued like this.

    After all, subordinates only listen to people who are stronger than them. Pearl has to solidify her position as the leader with significantbat ability and then her brains tomand them and strategize.

    Now herbat prowess is slowly being overshadowed.

    If this continues it is only a matter of time her suggestions onbat wouldn''t be taken seriously.

    Then she remembered what Five elemental king said.

    Her strong suit, which is the strategy also has huge gaping holes. One of the target not only found out he is being observed and analyzed, he knows what purpose he was being analyzed for, who is analyzing him and who is passing the orders.

    Pearl felt like breaking down.

    Her mind is a mess and she wanted to pull her hair and scream out.

    But she controlled herself and went into meditation on the spot.

    "The preliminaries are over. The top sixteen tournament will soon start. All the contestants are requested to recover as much as they can.

    If you are unable to participate to the full extent in the next round, it is not our academy''s responsibility."

    Everyone went to rest.

    The next part of the tournament is going to be in the Apollo academy grounds and this time the format is no secret. Because most of the time all the academies follow the same format for this round and it has been same for a while now.

    Late in the afternoon.

    Everyone gathered at the special arena prepared for this tournament.

    All the participating candidates, even the ones that were eliminated in the preliminary round are given spectator seats.

    Apart from that, there are a bunch of other spectators including the seniors in the Apollo academy, seniors from other academies, instructors from this and other academies etc.

    The arena is shaped in a different way.

    There is arge square in the middle which seemed like the main arena. It is big enough for fighting for anyone.

    And there are two paths to this arena. These paths are connected to two different squares individually.

    These squares a bit smaller, but they are good enough for a fight as well. These two squares have two more paths each and each of these paths are connected to their respective square and the same thing repeated again.

    This is what they call the fouryer arena.

    The fourth or the outermostyer has eight rings. Each ring will have two participants each, perfect for all sixteen candidates. Eight fights will simultaneously go on. The winners of these fights will move on to the thirdyer which has four rings.

    Four fights in thirdyer and winners will be four people. They will enter the secondyer where two fights will happen in two rings and finally the firstyer the single arena where thest two finalists will fight.

    Apart from this there are a couple of more twists within the rules of this tournament.

 Chapter 2007 First Fight

    <h4>Chapter 2007 First Fight</h4>

    First twist is that a person can move on to the nextyer''s ring as soon as he defeats his opponent.

    They can just wait their until their opponentes from their previous battles. This will let the first person rest after their fight and has more time to recover and since they defeated their opponent much faster, they might even be stronger.

    So, a stronger person who has more recovery time, is going to be a big problem for an opponent that camete.

    Another twist in the environmental set up.

    In every ring on the fourthyer, before the fight starts, the two contestants of the ring would participate in a coin toss.

    It is done by an elder and would be impossible for both contestants to interfere. The person who wins the toss would get to pick the environment of the ring from the avable options.

    So based on their choice, a formation will be activated that would create an energy environment.

    Most of the time the contestants who won the toss will pick a formation that would benefit their elemental affinity. An ice user picking a tundra formation that would freeze the whole ring or a fire user picking a formation that would make the whole ring turn into the stomach of a volcano.

    And the toss is only applicable for the fourthyer.

    From the thirdyer onwards, whoeveres to the ring first after finishing their previousbat will get to choose.

    So, the first person that gets into the ring will get more rest and a suitable environment.

    Not only this is a contest of strength, this is also a contest of speed.

    Whoever is stronger is going toe out on top and if they y their cards right, they can ride all the way to the championship.

    The top ten of these sixteen will be awarded and their rankings are decided with a few more battles in between themselves. The first and second are of course going to be the finalists on the firstyer of the arena.

    Sam looked at the whole process and couldn''t help but smile.

    This is indeed a lot more entertaining than just a casual tournament method.

    This will definitely add more fun to the game.

    He walked to one of the eight rings on the fourthyer, where the elder who is supposed to the referee is waiting. The other contestant also walked to that ring just in time.

    The elder was about to flip a coin, but Sam stopped him.

    "I forfeit the toss. You can give the chance to pick the environment to him."

    Elder wanted to say something, but he stoppedst minute and turned to the other contestant.

    "Choose wisely. It is a rare opportunity."

    He looked at Sam meaningfully as he said that. Then only Sam noticed that the opponent also belongs to the apollo academy.

    The Elder didn''t try to persuade Sam about the toss as he wanted to give the chance to their own student.

    Sam chuckled at this.

    The opponent picked the environment and Sam was surprised.

    "You really want to do that? I am pretty sure you have fire affinity, why would you do this to yourself? If the elder allows, I can let you choose another one."

    Sam said in a casual tone.

    As if he is indeed giving out a friendly advice t the opponent. His tone is very weird to the point it felt like the advice he is giving out is not that valuable to him, he couldn''t care less about that knowledge, rather he is giving it out just because he can and it might be valuable for the recipient.

    The opponent didn''t react.

    He just jumped on the ring and motioned Sam toe on as well.

    Sam climbed through the stairs, leisurely.

    The formation was activated.

    The opponent grinned wildly at Sam as death energy covered the whole ring. The dark energy came out of the ring like smoke and it went after both Sam and his opponent. Sam let the energy invade him and wanted to see what it would do.

    It is absorbing his vitality, just like regr death energy and it causing some corrosion to his healthy body tissue, just like normal death energy.

    The only noticeable thing is, it is not taking vitality from everywhere. It is focused on the blood and it is using the circtory system to the reach his heart.

    Sam let the energy spread and he noticed that there are a bunch of ck lines appearing on his body. Then he looked at his opponent. His body also has a bunch of ck lines, but the next second he took out a bracelet and wore it on his wrist.

    Sam could sense what it is from over there.

    It is light energy and it has some sort of holy aura to it.

    It is devouring the death energy within his body and in the immediate surroundings. Even the opponent looked like he is fresh off his sleep. Full of energy.

    Sam looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

    The opponent''s grin on the other hand kept on getting wider and wider as he channeled his divine energy. He is using all of his energy for this one Divine energy attack and even merge it with the rest of his spiritual energy.

    It seems like this guy just wants to do a single and simple attack and get it over with.

    "If you die in the tournament, there is nothing your academy can do about it. Do you know that?"

    The opponent asked as Sam just stood there letting the energy spread inside him.

    "All the ruckus you caused, I am going to kill you here inside this ring. It must be my lucky day since I got a chance to kill you.

    I am not going to lose this perfect opportunity even at the cost of losing the tournament."

    "Oh, the tournament is the least of your worries. You might want to focus on your attack right now at this moment after all, this might be yourst one."

    Sam replied in a calm tone.

    "Talk all you want."

    The opponent activated fire elemental fusion, but the fusion form is a bit different. It is very simr to Sam''s fusion when he is using the bloodline attacks.

    In that state, the energy will be focused on a few specific spots or rather organs giving it a special ability. This one looked the same.

    But this guy had a bunch of organs acting up. His lungs, arms, legs and heart connect all of them are burning up with this highly condensed and purified fire elemental Divine energy.

    Sam looked at him and felt a little impressed, this guy is not as weak.

    Maybe that is to be expected since hended in top ten. But that is about it. That''s the most reaction Sam is going to giving him.

    The other guy then charged his attack''s final form. All the Divine energy of fire element is being charged at his mouth and he roared.

    *ROAR*

    Fire shot out of his mouth like a gigantic me thrower. White hot mes spewed out and charged at Sam and as the opponent''s heart kept on beating, with every thump a wave of exploding mes areing along with this continuous me.

    But that is not all.

    From hands and legs of that guy a bunch of elemental creatures are being created. Birds from hands and wolves from legs.

    They are all charging at Sam from different directions and they exploded as soon as they reached him.

    Sam took the hit and skid backwards. Then he waspletely enveloped with the white mes.

    Everyone in the spectators looked at the scene baffled.

    They honestly didn''t expect such a turn of events.

    Sam has been the star way before the entrance exams began. He messed with the Zeus academy as he pleased. He won a trial over their students after pping the shit out of one of them. He messed up the entrance exams of every Olympian academy.

    He made the student seats look like sour candy that he could throw away any time he wants.

    Then the tower ascension, the worst of them all.

    He has been anything but respectful towards them and many people wanted to kill him, but a lot more people were excited to see what he would do next and they never expected this would be the oue.

    But only the Gambler academy''s students and Pearl''s group are looking at Sam''s opponent as if they are looking at an idiot.

    Only these people know what exactly Sam is capable of. Even if their estimation on limits of his capabilities is wrong, they know for sure, this is not it.

    After all, seeing how leisurely he is, they believed that he wouldn''t sumb to this.

    Three minutes passed and finally the mes died down.

    The opponent returned back to his original form, but he is still protected from the death energy because of his bracelet.

    He looked at Sam''s spot, hoping to find nothing. Even the bones should be gone.

    But all he saw is Sam just releasing a faint golden glow as he returned back to his original state with his hand extended forward.

    The death energy ck lines are gone and he stood there unfazed.

    Sam looked at the opponent and smiled.

    "Not too bad. But too bad its not enough."

    The next moment, all the death energy in the ring riled up. It started concentrating right in front of Sam as another small sphere of death energy gathered at the tip of his own hand.

    Resonance. It has been a while since Sam used it and this is the perfect time to put on a show with it.

    As the small sphere turned into a semi humanoid figure that looked like a ghost, therge sphere of death energy did the same and up on Sam''smand, therge ghost purely conjured of death energy leaped at the opponent and forcefully entered his body.

    At first a barrier appeared around him from the glowing bracelet. But the death energy kept on flowing as if it didn''t end at all.

    Soon the inscription on the bracelet brokepletely before the energy entered that guy''s mouth and then into his whole body.

    "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH...¡­.."

    A soul searing scream reverberated throughout the arena and the spectators as Sam stood there still with just hand extended and right in front of everyone''s eyes, his opponent''s body withered. From a youth to an old man and then into a rotten corpse with rotten bones and finally into bone dust that was swept up by the breeze.

    The whole ce turned still.

    Even people on other rings stopped fighting and looked at Sam.

    They were shocked, not just because of how powerful the attack is, but because Sam actually used the energy of the formation to do this attack. Not the energy of his own, but the energy provided by the formation.

    If one takes out the energy he used to defend the attack. Sam basically killed the prodigy of the Apollo academy in the open tournament of the apollo academy in the arena of the apollo academy with the energy directly from the formation of the apollo academy.

 Chapter 2008 Finals

    <h4>Chapter 2008 Finals</h4>

    Sam went to the next ring as if he just took a stroll in the park.

    As he walked, everyone could see the smirk on his face. At that moment, he could feel the eyes of the people from Apollo Academy on him. He feels their killing intent. If given a chance, hundreds of people would jump at a chance to kill him right there and then.

    But of course, nobody dared to make a move.

    Rules are there for a reason and in a ce like there where powerhouses sprout like grass on a meadow, rules are the only thing that are keeping the peace there.

    Sam waited as he looked at the ring that would produce his opponent.

    When the Elder asked if he would like to choose the environment meanwhile, Sam just rejected him.

    Once again, his opponent is going to choose the environment and he is going to destroy whoever it is. The two candidates in the connecting ring are pretty nervous. Their fight started with a lot of zeal and excitement.

    They looked forward to their performance. But too bad, Sam sucked the excitement out of them.

    They didn''t want to go to Sam''s ring to fight him.

    Their bodies are instinctively against it. But of course, they couldn''t back out now. They need to finish the fight at their hands. And they also knew if they hesitated and dragged this fight, Sam would have much more leisurely time to n ways to kill them.

    So, the battle sped uppared to the rest of the arenas and soon their fight was over. The victor is a student from Zeus academy.

    Sam did expect that he woulde across this guy.

    He is one of the two candidates who learned under the guidance of Joker in the hub. One of the prodigies that Sam himself is training to further develop his ns in the region.

    The opponent is a lightning-type user and he is also a warrior who uses throwing weapons and dual daggers. He is a good fighter who uses lightning speed to his advantage.

    He gulped down nervously and picked the environment for the ring. His choice surprised many people. They all thought that he would just choose an environment that would benefit him, which is lightning, or like the previous opponent he would choose one that would trouble Sam.

    But he did neither.

    Because he is one of the few people who remembered what Sam did in the Zeus Academy''s entrance test.

    He tore the test apart with his lightning expertise.

    He made the whole test null and void and the Academy had to conduct a new test.

    He knew better than giving Sam a lightning arena. So, he chose a neutral one with which he could use his newfound skills that he honed.

    The ring changed and very unique formation of metal and earth elements was created.

    The reason it is unique is because it doesn''t belong in battles in general. It is mostly a training formation and Sam was a bit surprised that it is even present in the list of choices.

    The gravity of the ring increased a bit and then four pirs appeared on the four corners of the ring. The four pir released a very concentrated metal elemental energy and conjured four metal shuriken.

    The metal shuriken were shot out and their aim is to destroy both the students. The shuriken''s attack is aimed to attack both the contestants. Sam chuckled at this.

    The attack of the shuriken is definitely good enough to cause some serious damage to them.

    Right now, both of them are in Initial stage of Divine ne Initiation and the shuriken can pack the power of a middle stage Divine ne initiation cultivator. Even not the strongest but it would still make them bleed.

    Sam didn''t want to get hit of course. He can block them easily and dodging is even easier. But his opponents havepletely different thought.

    The opponent activated lightning fusion from the get go, before he shot out. He jumped at Sam with his daggers and shed. With his high speed he managed to close the distance pretty easily. Sam blocked the attack and he had to dodge in a hurry because a shuriken almost caught him from the side.

    But the next moment, he was a bit stunned as a lightning flying dagger was shot at the shuriken. The dagger redirected mid air and came at Sam as it gathered extra momentum from the spinning shuriken.

    At the same time the lightning infused into the shuriken through the attack fastened the shuriken a bit as well as it disappeared into one of the pirs.

    When the pir shot out the shuriken again, Sam was surprised to see that the residual of the lightning attack is still in there and on top of that, the speed of the shuriken increased by a lot.

    "You seemed to have studied this formation a lot."

    Sam muttered as he blocked another attack from the opponent. The opponent of course didn''t reply, he continued on using the four flying shuriken and his own flying daggers along with lightning attacks.

    The battle looked extremely shy but equally decisive and on the edge. Sam didn''t use any of his elements, he purely used his body and his hand to handbat skills to dodge, block and evenunch a few counter attacks at the opponent.

    And once in a while he had to struggle a bit.

    At this moment, everyone in the audience started thinking.

    "Why is he not using his elements? He clearly has fire element and lightning element as well. He also clearly has better battle awareness, why is he not using them? I am sure if he uses lightning fusion with the level of his control he can easily overpower his opponent."

    This question has been asked in different ways by different people in the spectators.

    Then one of the keen eyed instructors seemed to have noticed something.

    "I think the pace of the battle is restricting him a bit.

    He is unable to unleash his lethal attacks and better forms because of the fast pace of the battle. For the freshmen, this battle is indeed incredible. And with the excess energy he used in the previous battle, it will be a bit difficult.

    I can see his lightning energy riling up bit by bit, but every time he was about to unleash it, he is being suppressed by the opponent''s use of lightning and shuriken."

    "Really?"

    Many people didn''t notice it at first, but as they paid a little more attention they noticed that there is indeed something up with Sam. They could see the faint annoyance in his eyes.

    But as the time passed they also noticed that even with that struggle Sam is not tired at all. His endurance is off the charts, but his opponent is unable to keep up the speed and attacks. He slowed down and when his speed dropped just a little bit, Sam grinned and he activated partial fusion to his arms.

    Silver light shed as he caught a hold of the two flying shuriken that are close to him and held them from flying away to the pirs. He then jumped high into the air before catching the other two discs.

    The opponent looked at Sam with gritted teeth, he wanted to fight again, but then he sighed and rxed.

    "I forfeit."

    Sam looked at him with a surprised expression. He let go of the shuriken and the formation disappeared.

    "Not a bad fight."

    Heplimented before he walked away to the next ring.

    This time the opponent is already there and this guy happened to be one of the top five. He is a marked candidate on Pearl''s list and he is the guy that made Pearl go down from the top five positions.

    The formation activated immediately and mes roared.

    Sam didn''t hesitate this time. His body turned golden and went all out from the start. In the next few minutes, the fight was over. It was intense and as onlookers watched, Sam downed a bunch of potions immediately before he walked to the final ring.

    At this moment, the second finalist is yet to be decided and everyone watched in anticipation because, the two Semi-Finalists are White and Pearl.

    Vidyut and Pearl met in the ring before and he gave up without putting up a fight. He decided to aim for the fourth ce since he knew Sam would take one of the top 2.

    Pearl appreciated this decision because she didn''t want to lose energy. But now that she met with White in this ring she is hesitating. She is sure that she can defeat Vidyut albeit in a close fight, but she is not confident with White.

    His fighting style is very unique.

    "What do you suggest?" White asked calmly.

    Pearl hesitated for a while and said.

    "Are you confident in winning against Sam?"

    "No, I want to defeat him though and I will go to any extent to do it. After all, he is the reason I am here in this region."

    After much hesitating she decided to give up as well.

    Sam and White ended up in the Finals as most people predicted.

 Chapter 2009 Anti Climatic

    <h4>Chapter 2009 Anti Climatic</h4>

    Sam and White stared each other down.

    "I waited for this opportunity for a while."

    White said as energy gathered at the palm of his hand as well as the tip of his foot.

    "I waited for this too. You really pissed me off and you are the only guy who got this much free time after pissing me off. My usual style is to take revenge immediately."

    "Your style won''t work on me. You must have already known that."

    White kicked on the ground. The shot out and gave him a boost as he aimed to punch at Sam''s face with the energy gathered in his fist.

    He is really fast, but he is not the fastest Sam has faced. Even the young man who became Joker''s student had a better speed with light lightning element.

    But White didn''t seem discouraged.

    He shot out another energy hit from his leg and used the recoil to jump at Sam from a weird angle as soon as Sam barely dodged him. White forcefully changed his direction with another energy hit to the empty space beside him and shed into Sam sideways.

    Sam expected this already.

    So, when White shed into him and was aboutunch an energy hit that would target Sam tly in the chest, Sam held White by his shirt and did a judo throw. While he did that, he channeled Void style energy so that when White hit the floor, there would be some serious recoil.

    But even before he couldnd the throw properly, White used an energy shot downwards making him move up.

    Sam had to take in the recoil and slow down. If that is not enough the Void style cirction was interrupted. Sam focused on stabilizing the energy so that it wouldn''t explode in his hand.

    He barely managed to do it and for that he had to put his utmost concentration.

    This gave White more time. He forcefully twisted body before throwing a kick at Sam''s head from that weird angle.

    *BOOM*

    His unique energy shot methodunched Sam to the other end of the arena with one Kick.

    Sam manuevered himself mid-air and had a smoothnding on his two feet, but the force is so huge that he slid on his feet for a couple of meters before he came to aplete halt.

    Sam stabilized himself and was about to make a move.

    When he just took one step, he felt an immense concentrated force hit him in the stomach. White already used an energy shot to boost his speed and appeared right before Sam could make a move.

    The hit was also a clean one.

    And this time, Sam wasn''t blown away, instead his body took the whole impact and it was distributed to a widen area within his body.

    He could feel his organs shaking.

    Sam stood there baffled.

    White took out his cane and spun it around.

    "I don''t usually go hands on with my opponents. I always prefer using the cane from far away. But I know it wouldn''t work on you. It would be a total waste of time. I am going to beat the crap out of you with my own hands."

    He tapped the cane on the ground and used the recoil to sh towards Sam.

    Sam blocked his approach. He could sense the path with the energy vibrations and he intercepted him in that path, not letting him gain enough momentum. He threw a punch with void style and brushed past White''s mask.

    White on the other hand, leaned backward to avoid that punch and used the cane to hit Sam on the chest.

    But to his surprise, Sam managed to use it to his own gain.

    The canended on the left side of Sam''s chest which is a bit backwards since Sam was punching with his right hand.

    When the hitnded, Sam let the energy throw his left side away, but he nted his right foot on the ground and used it as a pivot.

    He made a full turn at an incredible speed.

    He used void style on his left elbow that was aimed straight at White''s head once again. This time, the hitnded. When the Elbow made contact, Sam didn''t let him just fly away along with the blow, instead he redirected the elbow and made him go down.

    White hit the ground with his head and Sam''s elbow still stayed there. Some blood spewed out from gaps in the mask as Whiteid down on the ground.

    But to Sam''s surprise the mask itself didn''t break and it didn''t evene off.

    He was curious about the material it was made of. In that curiosity, Sam gave White enough chance to hit him with the cane.

    *BOOM*

    Sam was blown away once again, but this time he managed to control himself better andnded smoothly. But it still hurt like hell.

    White stood up and his energy riled up. All of a sudden, his whole body glowed as if every single cell of his is undergoing some change.

    Sam also gritted his teeth and activated partial fire fusion.

    Both of them lunged at each other and the fight ensued.

    White''s every single movement created that energy shot and even one step was taken with the help of the recoil only. He held his cane like a club and swung it at Sam.

    Sam''s spread the golden mes around and moved in fluid motion to surround White with his fire.

    The energy recoil hits are blowing fire away and creating temporary void in that space and White used those small gaps to move around and hit Sam.

    Sam replied in kind with the kits of his own.

    It looked like a slug fest as both of their hitsnded. But neither of them gained an upper hand.

    Sam got frustrated with the way the fight is going. His opponent is like a slippery loach. Even though the energy hits and recoil movements are looking a bit weird and very straight line oriented, all his transitions are very smooth.

    The opponent calcted every single movement perfectly and acted ordingly.

    Everyone could see Sam''s frustration.

    All his fights in the academy realm until now had been easy. There are only two fights in which he struggled.

    First fight is the one he had with his own pseudo student. The guy that used lightning and daggers. That fight is just irritating and annoying. He just couldn''t finish it quickly like he wanted.

    But this fight turned out to be a real challenge.

    Sam decided to go all out.

    He kicked in the air and activatedplete fusion. Then he closed his distance to catch a hold of White.

    When they are almost in the point nk range of each other, Sam''s lungs expanded to their limit and golden mes came out of his mouth.

    The Blood line art of Golden Sun Crow.

    White''s eyes widened and his body riled up. The white colored energy around him became so concentrated and visible to the naked eye that it almost looked like white colored mes areing out of him.

    All that energy was forcefully dragged into the tip of the cane as he poked it at the golden mesing at him.

    *BOOM*

    The energy rippled from that point and created a unique energy shield. Each ripple carried a bit of Sam''s mes away and spread it around the arena. White who took the recoil of such powerful strike flew off the arena and he couldn''t even control himself properly.

    He fell far away from the ring.

    Sam''s attack was disbursed, but he was thest one standing on the ring while White was not.

    So, Sam was dered the winner of the first open tournament.

    Sam was very frustrated. So was White.

    Neither of them believed that it was the actual end of the fight.

    Everyone could see as they red at each other. They knew that an intense rivalry just ignited and that is going to set the whole tournament aze.

    Sam took his award and walked towards Pearl''s group. He looked at White and said.

    "Don''t think that it is over. I will take your head off one day."

    "Likewise."

    White replied.

    Sam calmed down and looked at Pearl.

    "So, how are your little ns going on? A list of Marked Candidates? Sending people to disturb their training? Keeping an eye out on their habits?

    How was the meeting with Five elemental king?

    What do you think that angry muscle head Watt will do? After he knows about it too. Then again, what about that crazy soul necromancer Night Ghost? Then that rageful guy named Paras? Saber Monarch? Philip? Jack? What are you going to do about all these people?

    After all they are going toe after you.

    Pearl widened her eyes in absolute horror.

    "How did you¡­"

    "I am not gonna answer how I knew it, but I can tell you how they knew it. I told them. I leaked your whole project, including the fact about your little hidden room under your courtyard, they know about everything.

    So, get ready and I hope both of theseckeys of yours are enough to fight them all off."

    Sam walked away after saying all of this to her.

    He had a wide grin on his face as he left.

    Today''s n is ultimate sess and he needs to proceed with some other ns that were kept on hold because of this.

 Chapter 2010 Bone Transformation

    <h4>Chapter 2010 Bone Transformation</h4>

    Pearl almost copsed on the spot.

    Sam spilling out her ns right in front of her face when she was already drowning in doubts is thest thing she needed. She was so used to everything going in her way. Now she cannot digest this.

    White and Vidyut of course also heard all of this.

    Vidyut almost wanted tough out loud when he saw Pearl''s reaction. He wondered what she would do when she found out the depth of Sam''s ns. After all,pared to hisplex and borate schemes, Pearl appeared like a little kid ying adult in front of an old wise man.

    They are not even in the same league.

    She is impressive no doubt, but are her ns as borate as Sivan who managed to steal Sam''s body? Sam could his ass with a non-existent leg at that time. Pearl is child''s ypared to that.

    If only Pearl knew that one of the confidants she is trusting is one of Sam''s most trusted subordinates.

    Sam didn''t care about what happened in the tournament anymore.

    Even the unfinished fight with White was thrown to the back of his head.

    It is time to progress with some other n. The n to rebuild Stone.

    Sam''s work on Stone has been dyed, but it was not without any progress. For the past few weeks, Stone only focused on increasing his muscr strength. Sam''s customized training regimen, highly effective energy environment, and nutritional resources are specifically concocted to enhance his muscle fibers.

    Stone never felt this strong in his entire life.

    He felt so strong that he believed he could kill his past self in a fraction of a second. Previously, he thought he already hit the limit of what his body could achieve, but Sam showed him that there was still a new limit that he had yet to reach.

    Sam examined his body and nodded.

    "This is good. Your muscles are finally strong enough. I think we can proceed with the next surgery to enhance your body."

    "What kind of surgery would this be?"

    "This is a long one that takes ce in many stages. I am going to Transform your Bone and Marrow.

    Stone was stunned.

    "Did I hear you right?"

    "Why are you asking? Do you have a hearing problem?"

    "But Bone and Marrow Transformation? How is this possible?"

    "Stop asking stupid questions. Do you even know the concept of soul surgery before? You sessfully underwent one. So just nod, grit your teeth, endure your pain, and enjoy the change."

    Stone hesitated a bit before smiling widely and asked.

    "But still, can you just exin how it works? I am really curious."

    "In this, the bone transformation is very simple. I am going to use a very special alloy that I made bybining meteorite sand and other metals. This gives the metal strength and evolves with time and spiritual energy.

    I won''t go into too many details but just know that all your bones will change and turn into this metal. This is part of my new research.

    As for the marrow part, that is going to take some time. Simply put, I am going to use the genes of a strong bloodline that has great effects of physical strengthening. I will use the marrow sample from that bloodline and introduce it into your marrow along with a very special serum that I made.

    I need to do it in stages and let your marrow transform itself into that strong bloodline.

    It won''t be aplete transformation of course, you would only inherit parts of it, so your physical appearance wouldn''t change drastically.

    Once the marrow is transformed, we need to excite it and make it create a lot of new blood, you would need to bleed everyday and luckily, I prepared a fight training regiment for you. While you bleed, the new blood will take over the old and soon your whole body will mutate.

    Your organs will strength themselves because of this new blood as they adapt to the new strength of your body.

    But of course, all of this is still the ground work of the final stage of your transformation."

    "What would that be?"

    "Giving you a way to grow your strength over time. It is not enough to provide you with these enhancements, you should be able to improve your strength like a normal cultivator. Even if the method is not normal, the growth should be.

    It would be very hard to do that though. I do have some ideas and they are very promising. But if I proceed with that procedure directly, your body would explode in three seconds."

    Sam exined a few more things and started the procedure. Luckily, the other party didn''t ask the detailed exnation on the research and procedure itself.

    The bone transformation part is a feat of engineering. Sam got inspired by the Comic book character from back on earth. Of course, he put his own twist and he is using the research he has done on the Giants, Lycans and Shapeshifting demons.

    He had studied their genes very extensively and now he is starting to see some results.

    Luckily he had a test subject that is in desperate need of these things. Otherwise, Sam would have had to adjust with the simtions. He would never force anyone to be his subject.

    But as realistic as the simtion is, the real specimen is the real specimen.

    The Bone marrow transformation would be the most difficult thing Sam has ever created in this world. It is not that the result of it is most effective, his research in energy and engineering to use that energy is much more effective and had many applications, in fact that is going to be useful to him in the final stage transformation of Stone.

    But the gic research that involved kind of bends thews ofmon sense.

    With all the mutations, disgusting experiments and all kinds of things that the people of this world have done until now, they have never managed to transform a person like this. There are forceful mutations, even Five Elemental King is a part of that experimentation, but most of the time it is forceful and unnatural with a lot of side effects.

    But when Sam''s research bearsplete fruit, the possibilities are endless. He gets to rewrite the nature''s creation. Talent would just be a thing. But of course, the level of research that he had right now can only change someone like Stone.

    Who has willpower and endurance that don''t match his talent and physical abilities?

    To make it avable formon folk would take some time.

    Sam cleared his head of all these thoughts. He started the surgery. He held something that looked like a syringe, but it was very big and the needle appeared to be a bit too flexible.

    Sam made a very small cut on the back of Stone who slept on the table upside down. He is put into a deep sleep with an anesthetic synthesized by Hydra.

    From the hole that didn''t even look like a proper injury, Sam let the needle go in. After it reached a certain depth, the needle glowed a bit and it started crawling like a snake as it extended.

    It suddenly looked like a thread.

    Sam closed his eyes and controlled it before making it dig into the spine of Stone. The Syringe started glowing as the alloy serum that got mixed with the metal and a solution created with the base of the transformative gene being injected into the bone on a molecr level.

    Sam didn''t dare break his concentration.

    This is going to be the toughest surgery he has ever done yet.

    While transforming the bone, Sam also has to make sure that the other body parts are functioning normally. They shouldn''t be influenced by this and show any adverse reaction. He has to act as a human life support while performing the surgery.

    He wished that he had another him to help with this. But this challenge also excited Sam very much.

    He engrossed himself in this work.

    Meanwhile, back at Zeus Academy.

    Pearl is pacing around her house while biting her nails.

    While Sam is doing something that will leave a mark in the history of the world, Pearl is worrying that her world has been destroyed. She is imagining that Sam might be thinking of ways to destroy her.

    She believed that Sam must have invested his everything into dealing with her ns. She doesn''t even know how to react.

    And the worst part is, if Sam really gave information to the rest of these people, there is no reaction as of yet. She is nervous about what they are nning against her.

    Vidyut looked at the situation and went outside to contact Watt and others.

    "Did Sam n anything else? Or did he just intended to set her tail on fire and leave her alone?"

    "No, nothing changed, we just have to do what we have been doing until now. The n is the same. All you need to do is maintain your rank consistently in the rest of the open tournaments.

    And we will see to it that Pearl''s mind copses bit by bit.

    We will meet before the official inter-academy freshmen tournament."

 Chapter 2011 Celebration

    <h4>Chapter 2011 Celebration</h4>

    For the next week, Sam focused on the surgeries.

    He transformed one bone after another. But the one week is not enough. The body has over two hundred bones and each bone is of different size and shape. He has to be careful to not disrupt any of the bones'' functions.

    He also has to maintain the rtive strength and properties of each bone. Some needs to be more dense than the others, some need to be more flexible. Some haveplex structure.

    With all these factors, it will take a few weeks to fully transform the whole body.

    Sam came back after the first week to attend the next open tournament in the different academy. Before that he checked the updates of the whole week. Particrly the updates rted to Pearl.

    Her ns are exposed and no one reacted to it yet.

    So, she grew anxious day by day and tried to find out what others are thinking and what the next step should be. But she couldn''t do much because Sam already made sure none of his friends will show her any new information.

    She could only see them in the tournaments.

    On top of that, not all of them were at the same tournament. They are only going to participate in the open tournament rted to their academy. Just like how only Five Elemental King participated in the Apollo Academy, the rest would participate in their own academies.

    And all of them have the same goals, they are going to defeat Pearl in the prelims and if possible in the mains as well.

    They are going to disrupt her ns and make sure that she doesn''tnd in the top three or even the top five for that matter.

    Of course, in the first tournament, she managed tond within the top 5, but that is her n for Sam.

    He wanted to create a show of gradual decline.

    In every tournament, her performance will appear a bit worse than the previous one. In the first one, she managed to rank above the seeded candidates like Five Elemental King, but in the next one, she is not going to get that.

    She will rank in the same category of the seeded candidate.

    In theter one, she would go for an even lesser rank and she will continue to stay there.

    That is Sam''s n and it is going to be executed perfectly.

    The second tournament is in Hermes Academy.

    Watt is going to be there. Sam could rx even more. Just like the Apollo Academy, Hermes Academy also followed suit to conduct Prelims in the Hub. It is much easier, cheaper and faster. They didn''t feel shame in copying one of their peers for all these advantages.

    Sam of course didn''t mind.

    It is revenue and he would also make all these academies owe him a few favors.

    When all the ns reach the final stages, he is going to rip off these guys to his heart''s content. It would be a magnificent fleecing.

    The second tournament went as Sam nned it out to be.

    The final battle was once again between Sam and White and this time Sam lost the match. Not the fight, but he got kicked out of the Arena just like how he kicked White out of the arena in the previous fights.

    Pearl on the other hand was not in the top five this time. Watt took the spot. Vidyut also was in top five. The only problem is Pearl managed to take the top five once again. She managed to grit through the mental obstacles and fought with them cleanly.

    This made it hard for Sam.

    His n would not work out with proper impact if she stayed in the top five. So, he decided to change the ns for the next tournament.

    After the tournament, he went back to the surgery. Another week passed by and Sam finished another part of the surgery. It was a productive week. He went to the third tournament in Hephaestus Academy and this time to the tournament, even Five Elements King came.

    It is perfect for him.

    And Sam managed to clinch the top five spots just like he wanted. Pearl was thrown out of the pool. He also won first ce by the way. The problem is White didn''t lose the fight yet. For them to have a proper fight, they would need a lot of space and it might take hours.

    Another week of surgeryter in the next tournament which actually belonged to the Zeus academy, Sam let Watt, Five Elemental King, and even Philipe. Her spot dropped by one more rank. Pearl finally understood what was happening.

    The people that Sam revealed her ns to are trying to humiliate her. They are making her lose her ranks one by one and that is why all of them didn''t attend all the tournaments. This made her feel panicked.

    Her father is one of high expectations, if he knew this was the result of her failed ns, he would take it out on her.

    She became anxious, but she didn''t know what to do.

    Weeks passed.

    Every week, Sam performed Bone transformation surgery and went to kick some ass in the tournaments. Thest open tournament took ce in Gambler Academy and Sam won once again.

    By now, Pearl dropped out of top ten.

    At first she was still able to hold on mentally, but now she is way past her breaking point. She made mistakes in panic and every single prelim test happening in the simtor has a mental aspect to it. After all, the beasts are new, the environments are new and the damage they took is unfamiliar, she dropping out more and more.

    In a couple of tournaments, she barely made it into the top 16.

    In every tournament, after the fight was over, Sam gave her a look. A look of ridicule.

    Pearl went crazy.

    Vidyut was always the one trying to calm her down, but White on the other hand remained calm. He only had one question every week.

    ''What is the next n?''

    And every next n failed. She could see that his trust in her was reducing every day.

    In this panicked situation, Jade got a little freedom from her sister. She made some new friends in ss and enjoyed some peace. She really wished that Stone is nearby and a chance to visit him would have been great.

    She evenmissioned some people to search his and see if she could find him.

    If only she knew that Stone is in the same region going through hell to reach her level.

    On thest day of the Open tournaments, Sam finally finished all the bone transformation surgeries. Now he just has to wait until Stone gets used to his new skeleton and then do the marrow transformation surgery.

    Sam felt really satisfied with the current level of development.

    After all, he fancied himself as a creator. This is the greatest creation until now.

    He even wanted to celebrate a bit.

    While Sam is enjoying the sess streak his from all sides, there is a meeting happening between all the deans.

    "So, the format for the Inter academy tournament is decided. As usual, we are going to select ten people from the region for the Individual tournament and a group of ten from a single academy for the grouppetition.

    Usually, it would have already been decided who those ten individuals be. But this time thepetition is a bit tough.

    The ranks are a bit dynamic and many students from different academies are performing well. Zeus Academy has two students in the top five for every tournament. It is a good year, I must say.

    One of the deans said with a smile on his face.

    "Yeah, the top spots also have so muchpetition this time. Gambler''s Academy really gave us a great surprise this time. That candidate Sam is a force to be reckoned with. I heard that he was specifically brought here with a special rmendation and a bunch of privileges.

    Where did you get him, Dean Wharton? Did you bring him to save some dignity for your academy?"

    Dean of Hephaestus Academy asked sarcastically.

    Wharton who looked bored said with azy tone.

    "You should be asking how that guy managed to get so many privileges from the Zeus Academy. He even got the pass to enter all the towers in Olympian academies. It looks like your students are about to break the record.

    Sam might just visit your academies and increase the record again. Then I wonder where you hide your ugly ass face.

    Be prepared to console your students though, the next time it would be way too traumatic if my estimation of him is right."

    As they were speaking suddenly the assistant of one of the deans came running inside.

    The deans looked at him in askance.

    "Sir, that guy Sam. He just entered the Zeus tower once again. White was just about to break his record, but he just came and ascended faster than before."

    Whartonughed out loud.

    Sam is celebrating.

 Chapter 2012 Inter-academy freshmen Tournament

    <h4>Chapter 2012 Inter-academy freshmen Tournament</h4>

    Sam''s celebration reverberated throughout the whole region.

    He hopped from one academy to another as he destroyed his own records from previous visits. He is already being talked about by how he dominated thepetition, now this incident only increased the gossip.

    That night, the Deans announced the date for the Inter Academy Freshmen tournament and only an announcement of that level suppressed the gossip about Sam a bit.

    After the announcement was made, Sam called for a meeting with his friends.

    This time the rest of the team, who are yet to break through to Divine ne are also here. This meeting is also held in the same room under the hub.

    After they came, Sam took out several jars of wine and slid one each to the team.

    "Our ns until now are an ultimate sess. We dominated the freshmen top ranks and we are going to dominate the Inter academy freshmen tournament. I wish we could celebrate a bit grandly, but we still need to be a bit on stealth mode.

    So, let me go through what our next phase is going to be like.

    Soon the other yers are going toe here. Theary disaster task is not going to take long as it has a fixed time, so they might even be halfway there.

    And once the yers are here, the advantage we held over the region will be gone. The fact that we belong to the same group will be out and before that happens, we need to create enough groundwork.

    Once the news is out, we are all going to be targets.

    The academic authorities will target you, the students will be after you. But the worst part is that seniors will be after us as well. They are the ones we need to vary.

    Instructors of the Academy have many limitations because of rules. But seniors have no qualms about taking revenge. We need to prepare well for that.

    So, our next tasks are going to be focused on that."

    "What do we need to do?" Philip asked as he started enjoying the wine.

    "First you guys need to understand the student hierarchy properly.

    You must have already noticed something weird here. The cultivators of the Divine Initiation Initial Stage are freshmen. That is the criteria for entering the academy and they are considered Grade 1.

    But the Middle stage of Divine ne Initiation is already categorized as Grade 2.

    And you already know that there are only Four Grades in these academies. I have done my research and this is how they categorized it.

    The reason Grade 1 is small is to make the new students get used to thepetitive level of this ce. That is why they have a separate freshmen tournament as well.

    Once they enter the Middle Stage of Divine ne Initiation, they will be under Grade 2 and stay in Grade 2 until the Peak of Divine ne Initiation. Grade 3 will be Divine ne Pre-transcendence Initial stage to Peak Stage. Grade 4 is the Divine ne Transcendence Initial stage to the Peak stage.

    Once a student gets out of Grade 4, they will be Instructors. These instructors are Divine ne Consummation Stage cultivators and they start teaching different grades based on their understanding of concepts as they attempt to enter Godhood.

    This is the unofficial Grade 5 but no one calls it that as there are no teachings they receive as students, instead they be teachers as they try to unravel the principles of nature and be gods. This is also the true Demi God Stage where they can build a Divine Dimension of their own.

    The stronger the Divine Dimension they build in this stage, the stronger their starting point will be once they enter godhood."

    "Wait, but why did we only see Middle Stage Divine ne Initiation cultivators? They are practically the only ones in the academy apart from the freshmen."

    "That is because, at the start of every academic year, a special dimension will be opened for all the seniors. They need to be at least at the Late Stage of Divine ne Initiation to enter it. That is opened by the gods with a bunch of resources dumped over there.

    These students fight for them ande back.

    As for why the Middle Stage people were left alone, they are the ones closest to freshmen in strength, so they are perfect for amodating the new freshmen into the academy.

    The academies might have a solidpetitive spirit attached to them, but from what I can see, they do care about their students when they just entered."

    "So, that means these seniors are going to be our problem in the future? When are theying back then? How long do we have to prepare?"

    "They will be back any day now. The dimension closes right before the Inter Academy Freshmen tournament. It will be the perfect time for the juniors to be introduced to the hierarchy of the academy.

    Also, the seniors form opinions of the students as they get to see the performance first hand."

    "That''s great. So, we are acting immediately. What''s the n?"

    "I would be sending you guys a list of seniors through your wristband. The ones that are focused on their cultivation more than they care about the factions and politics, but they are the important influencing factors in the academies.

    We managed to get the freshmen attached to the hub. We need the rest of the seniors to do the same.

    The rmendation of the instructors and Deans would of course work in our favor, but we need an extra push.

    The people on the lists that I give are the ones with most rivals. Most people want to be them or beat them. All you need to do is meet them and act respectfully before challenging them to a battle.

    Of course, the battle would only be fair if both of your cultivations were on the same level. But in Divine ne even if they suppress the cultivation level, the natural state of bodies itself would be too far apart."

    "That''s where the hubes in. We will challenge them to a simted battle inside the hub and we let the recording out for the rest of the world to see.

    This will increase the intrigue of the other seniors."

    Philip finished Sam''s words.

    "That''s right. I am giving you all the information I have about these targets. You use that information to your benefit. You have been with me for so long, so you should know how to use information properly."

    "Got it." Everyone agreed.

    Then Sam turned to the team members who were at the peak of Astral ne. They are on the verge of a breakthrough, any day now they would enter the ranks.

    "I want to say that I don''t mean to pressure you, but that is exactly what I mean to do.

    I need you to break through to the Divine ne by the time I go to the Finals of the Inter-Academy tournament that happens between all the regions.

    I need you guys to execute some serious ns that influence our path forward in this realm.

    So, tell me. Can I count on you guys?"

    "Don''t worry Sam, that is what the target we set for ourselves and we are all on the verge of achieving it. Just give your orders and we will execute."

    "Thanks. Anyway, while you are at it, I need some push in the Astral Region¡­"

    Sam went on to exin the rest of his ns.

    At first, he thought the Academic Realm was the ce where he would struggle the most. He felt this would be the biggest challenge to his strength, intellect, and the organization as well, but it turns out it is not.

    The opponents are weak save for one. They are the same as everywhere else. Maybe a little tougher, but that is about it.

    This academic realm is not a challenge at this point. It is a stage to perform.

    Sam is using all the knowledge, inventions, and experience he gained from all of his previous exploits to put up a performance here. This is like a ce for him to y around after all the challenges he faced and experiences he umted.

    This is going to bring great joy for him.

    He would like to see the faces of those gods as he destroyed each one of their treasured academies.

    Sam ended the meeting soon and went to check on Stone.

    Stone has adapted to the new skeleton very soon. It didn''t even feel weird, particrly with the strong muscles as well.

    Now, he is back to physical training. His muscles are being enhanced once again and this helped him get used to the new skeleton much better.

    Stone started practicingbat techniques in simtions as well.

    Days passed like this and soon it was time for two things.

    Sam performed marrow transformation surgery on Stone and the seniors are back from the dimension.

    It is time for Inter Academy Freshmen Tournament.

 Chapter 2013 Dove

    <h4>Chapter 2013 Dove</h4>

    Sam is outside of his dorm sitting meditation at the dawn of the Tournament Day.

    It is going to start exactly at the noon and the first round of the tournament is the selection of the Academy candidates. Each academy should select ten candidates amongst themselves and send them out for thepetition between the academies.

    Sam of course is part of the examination.

    He stayed there in meditation as he waited for noon and soon it is noon.

    When he went to the testing site, the elder in charge started announcing the order of the duels. Sam''s name was also announced, but no one bothered to fight with him. Everyone he faced forfeited. It is to the point that he went to finals without even raising a finger.

    He didn''t seem surprised though, this is how it is in general. The Open tournaments are a clear indication of strength and no one would want to go against the guy who obviously ranked first in it. Of course, some times second.

    But there is one difference.

    Every year, the top ranker of open tournaments will have some fights. At least in the quarter finals and semi finals. But this time Sam was given a free pass. He expected someone to fight him in the finals at least.

    Only to his disappointment and amusement, even the final fight didn''t happen. He went through the whole thing and ranked first.

    It was so disappointing even to the elders that Sam given the first ce that easily. The freshmen clearly showed their obviousck of ambition to defeat Sam.

    Sam indeed destroyed this year''s freshmen students.

    Simr thing happened in Zeus academy. But that tournament went longer because every single member of that academy is full of some unbnced arrogance and pride. Just like the god they worship.

    And this led to them acting out and dragging their fights.

    Sam even had time to go there and watch the finals, while White kicked Vidyut''s ass.

    After the fight was over, White looked at Sam with a cold gaze. Everyone could feel the burning the rivalry between them, they all wanted to know what would happen if they really fought. Not with some tournament rules, but a real true fight.

    They wanted to see it.

    Everyone wants to see a genius'' conquest, but more than that, they would really enjoy if those geniuses tear each other apart. The mind of the weak.

    Sam''s visit to the Zeus academy has some other meaning though. He went there to provoke Pearl.

    And just like he expected, more than White, she is the one ring at him. When she saw Sam''s face, all she could think of was her failed ns and her glory that was stolen from her. She wanted to kill him and tear him apart.

    The way she acted at the beginning when she met Sam was nowhere to be seen.

    There is no bodynguage of a sophisticated person, there is no faint smile as if she knew everything. There is just frustration and anger. A sense of loss was also added to mix.

    Sam''s provocation worked.

    He didn''t expect any massive reactions. He just wanted to disturb her.

    That day went uneventfully.

    But there are some events that Sam is nning. After the Internal Academic tournaments are over, Sam went to the hub. It is time to release another batch of birds.

    Because the seniors are here.

    It is clearly apparent to everyone that the seniors are here. The poption increased by three times at least. But of course, the seniors acted as if the freshmen didn''t exist. At least that is what they behaved like.

    There is minimal audience from them and they didn''t even seem that interested.

    Sam focused on hub while a meeting was held in the Gambler''s academy.

    Crow sat on a seat at a round table, there are around twelve more people sitting at the table. The table there are a bunch of other people sitting at different spots in the room. The whole room is mostly dark and there is only one light source in the middle of that table.

    There is youngdy sitting opposite to Crow. She had long silver hair flowing down to her waist and has crystal blue eyes.

    "It has been a while Crow, how are you doing?"

    "I am fine Senior Dove, I hope your training went well. I can see all the seniors are definitely stronger than before."

    Dove smiled and said.

    Dove is the person is the leader of Grade 4 Students in the Gambler''s Academy. But she is not the strongest one among them. Crow held a great amount of respect for her just because of that aspect.

    Except for being the leader of the Grade 4 Students, she is not really famous for anything else in the region. She is not part of thebat rankings, she is not part of the tower rankings, she also didn''t do much in other professions.

    At least in a way people could see her.

    But all the Grade 4 students including the people who rank on top of the tower rankings listen to her and follow hermands. She is also a former Student Union President. Just like Crow.

    Ironically the student union is also run by the people who are least powerful among the Grade 2. The concept is that stronger people have much better things to do than handle the petty issues of the Academy.

    Crow took a deep breath and replied to Dove.

    "Senior, I really wished you were here.

    There is a wild horse that came to our Academy this year.

    He is even given a special admission in to our Academy."

    The moment he spoke those words, Crow fell silent, because he could feel the gazes of all the seniors locked on to him.

    Dove was also shocked.

    "A person was given a special admission into our academy? Howe?"

    "I don''t know the details. I tried asking the Dean. But you know how he is. He just brushed me off and told me to focus on my own things.

    But that is not all.

    Before he joined our academy, he went ahead and caused a huge ruckus in all Olympian academies. On his first day in the region, he beat the crap out of some special admission students in Zeus academy and even attended a judicial trial.

    He demanded a trial bybat and won.

    Then he attended all Olympian academy entrance exams¡­"

    Crow kept on reciting everything Sam said. If not for the tone of frustration and obvious hatred, it almost seemed like a praising session of Sam.

    Dove''s eyes widened with every sentence. She was even more surprised when she heard the details about White and his issue with Sam.

    After he recited the whole story, the whole room fell silent. Nobody spoke, it took a while to digest everything.

    "This guy is obviously a troublemaker. Dove, I think we need to tame him a bit. He definitely has some goals in acting like this. The Gambler''s academy shouldn''t be a coteral in this.

    I have seen the tournament just now.

    The freshmen were so down to the point they are not even fighting him."

    One of the seniors in the dark spoke.

    Crow didn''t mind his words, he just looked at Dove who is in a deep thought.

    "He definitely has some goals. But I still think we need to see what he is actually like as a person before we decide to take any action against him.

    I will try to meet him.

    Crow, you leave this matter to me. From now on, anything rted to Sam, you can leave it to me. Don''t let your training and growth be disturbed."

    "Thank you Senior Dove."

    "Now, let''s talk about all the metal birds that are roaming around in this city.

    I heard there is a new ce called Hub that came around here and it is the reason why there are so many people with these birds? What is this ce about?"

    Crow''s expression changed immediately when he thought of Hub.

    "Yes, this is another thing that has everyone''s attention and no one had any problems with.

    Hub is kind of like a training area and the owner of it has this weird ambition to spread his knowledge and his applications far and wide. At least that is what the talk is. As for the metal birds and the wrist bands, they are the gifts given to us along with the invitations.

    I think it is better for you to explode the hub yourself rather that me telling you about it."

    "Can I check you bird once?"

    Dove asked curiously.

    "Of course, Senior."

    As soon as he spoke, all of a sudden there is amotion from outside the door. One of Crow''s ssmates hurriedly opened the doors. A bunch of metal birds came flying inside the room and they all flew towards the seniors.

    Crow smiled and said.

    "I guess, you don''t have to check mine. You can check yours."

 Chapter 2014 Eventful Days

    <h4>Chapter 2014 Eventful Days</h4>

    The meeting was adjourned after the abrupt visit of the birds.

    Once again the evening sky of the city saw the beautiful lights of the metal birds moving to their new recipients.

    Dove caught the bird thatnded in front of her. She felt really impressed by the craftsmanship that went into it. She examined the bird a bit before she epted the wrist band and just like the recipients before, these people also went through the introduction on how to use these birds.

    "Someone is generous enough to give these out away? I wonder what his intentions are. Forget about Sam, whoever is the person behind this Hub, they pose a bigger trouble if they have any bad intentions.

    I think we need to keep an eye out."

    Another senior voiced out their opinion. Dove didn''t reply though. She was lost in admiring the structure of the bird and she even tried to examine the formations.

    "For how generous he is by offering the birds, he is way too protective of the mechanisms and research that went into this. I think the generosity is most likely backed by pride more than anything else."

    Dove said to her peers.

    Anotherdy who is standing at a corner is also examining her bird just like Dove, she understood Dove''s words more than anyone else in that room at that moment.

    Because just like Dove, she also managed to get a deeper understanding of what went into this bird.

    "I think so too. As generous as he is, giving away this bird also gives him a sense of validation.

    He is confident that no one would be able to go past his twisted security measures and copy this to make a knock off and the convenience it provides makes the people get attached to it easily. And he is the only one who can provide it.

    He gains a sense of satisfaction and pride from this."

    Thedy analyzed and Dove nodded in agreement.

    "Anyway, we indeed need to get in contact with this person and see what his true intentions are. But since even the deans of the academies are epting him, there is not much for us to worry about. We just need to observe what the effects on our students are and then we are fine."

    Dove then gave some more instructions.

    Meanwhile, Sam is preparing a bit more. That day, there is nothing else for him to do. He needs to wait for two days before the inter academy tournament is held. That tournament would decide ten people who are eligible for individualpetition from this region and there would be a group aspect.

    Each academy will send their top ten to fight in a group battle in a neutral ground. The academy that wins will send their group for the tournament at the finale of the Inter Academy Freshmen tournament.

    Usually, thebatants would either rest or make somest minute preparations before they enter the big stage. But Sam cannot do it.

    Because the next day, there is another part of the tournament that is overlooked by themon popce, but was always keenly observed by the instructors, students and even the seniors. It is the tournament for professionals.

    The Inter academy Freshmen tournament has both aspects. The first one being thebat and the second one being auxiliary profession aspects.

    So, the next day, there would be a bunch of tournaments simultaneously going on.

    Weapon forging, Puppet Making, Formations, Inscriptions, Medicine Making, Musicians, Painting etc.

    There are a bunch ofpetitions going on and since there are some people who are skilled in multiple upations, the tournament format is a bit different.

    From the dawn to midnight, anyone can go at anytime and participate in any upational test. For example, if someone wants to participate in Weapon Forging, they can just go to the examination hall directly.

    There the elder in charge would let them pick the challenge from a jar. The participant has to satisfy the requirements of the challenge in three hours, which is the average time limit. Once the task is done, they will submit it and leave.

    After thepetitions are done, the Elders will grade the scores. Of course, if they did it by themselves, there is a great chance of bias.

    A person like Sam would be screwed over a thousand times.

    The elders don''t like him, so there is a chance that they would screw him over. Since the challenge is different for everyone, it would be even more difficult to fairly grade. So, that task would be done in association with the Exchange Center.

    They would go there and use the appraising formation there.

    It would judge what the challenge is and what the result provided by the students is and it would grade the score appropriately.

    The one with the highest score wins. Each school will decide top ten in each profession and just like thebat part of the tournament, once again these people willpete. The only difference is that only a few professions have teampetitions and even for them there are only five participants for a team.

    The reason why themon popce won''t watch this is because of the format.

    Fights are exciting, one side wins, other side loses and they would have a clear winner over the rest.

    But thesepetitions go on for the whole day and there is no direct head to head sh happening.

    The students on the other hand are interested because they arepeting with each other and they need more talented people into their factions.

    Sam entered thepetitions the next day. Since the dawn to midnight, he kept himself busy.

    This came as an unexpected surprise to a lot of people. Sam never attended any sses rted to these professions and he never interacted with people in the field. He wasn''t seen at the simtion rooms of the hub. He just fought and made trouble.

    And Sam''s participation in every test is very quick. He went picked the challenge,pleted it in an hour or less and left.

    For the first time, even themon popce showed some interest in these upational tests. And to their amusement, Sam scored big in many tests.

    He is ranked first in formations and inscriptions, he is ranked second in Weapon forging and puppet making. Tied for second ce in medicine making. The results for the rest of the tests he participated were not released.

    Sam went to the Elders in charge and asked then they told him a rule that he never knew. A person can only be selected as participant in five upational test and they decided to give Sam priority in the five mostpetitive fields. Three of these five happened to have team events too.

    They didn''t announce the other results because they believed they are irrelevant.

    The whole day went eventfully.

    The seniors who were observing thepetitions were also met with huge surprise because of Sam''s participation.

    The next day is once again time formon popce to enjoy. They would watch as the geniuses beat each other up to get the top spot.

    But everyone knew that there are only two prospects for the top spot this year and they genuinely wished that the fight could go longer this time. They knew that as long as the arena isrge enough these two will fight.

    When they saw the arena, they were a bit disappointed. It is definitelyrge. Larger than the open tournament arenas, but it is notrge enough. They knew that one of them is going to slip out of the arena very soon after the fight starts.

    But they still hoped that one of the two made improvements and would dominate the other.

    The rest of the rounds went as expected. There is some excitement as many people tried their hardest and even overcame some serious obstacles, but the final results are mostly expected.

    The final battle was indeed between White and Sam.

    It also went just the same as the previous open tournament fights. The crowd was a bit disappointed, but they still enjoyed the treat of that fight a bit. Everyone is betting on who would win the tournament even if they didn''t win the fight.

    And the scale tipped towards White.

    Because Sam seems to have changed his fighting style a bit, he is not using elemental powers as much as before and he is trying to stay in close contact with White, which also happens to be White''s most advantageous zone.

    But right when they thought White would take the cake for this tournament, with a hit, Sam smirked.

    His palm is covered with dense spiritual energy. As White poked his cane at him, he met the tip with his palm.

    The rippling recoil that usually even dispersed the effect of Sam''s void style, ripple style, and repel style most of time, didn''t work as everyone expected.

    As soon as the tip and the palm met¡­

    *BOOM* A huge energy explosion urred. Neitherbatant moved, but the recoil energy that should have sted Sam away didn''t do that, instead, it seemed to have been dispersedpletely.

 Chapter 2015 Surprises

    <h4>Chapter 2015 Surprises</h4>

    White was stunned as he stood in ce.

    He looked at Sam in shock. Sam on the other hand looked at him with a smirk on his face. He threw a punch which White dodged, but a kick followed it and tripped White.

    It was a basic move.

    But White was still in shock from that unexpected nullification of his attack. That never happened before. Not in a long time.

    "You seem surprised."

    Sam said as he tried to take advantage of the small imbnce. White used his cane and another recoil shot to jump into the air and regain his bnce before creating some distance between him and Sam.

    Sam cracked his fingers and smiled.

    "Come on, enough with the daze. You would get seriously hurt if you don''t focus."

    The next moment he turned on partial light fusion and closed the distance at a speed that even White couldn''t catch. By instinct, White tracked the energy movements and poked his cane backwards. Another recoil shot.

    He slid on the stage and created some distance and Sam who appeared there in his partial fusion form took the recoil shot to his fist.

    *BOOM*

    Once again, Sam stood there unfazed. He nullified the attack and this time instead of pure energy explosion, there is a light explosion. The dispersed light energy spread crazily across the arena that it left some visible marks on the protective formation.

    The Elders were shocked by that reaction from the formation.

    This is also unprecedented. They have seen formations breaking before, but that is when the Grade 4 Students fought. Freshmen making marks on the formation with their energy is a new phenomenon even with their centuries of experience.

    And then the sh began.

    As everyone watched, Sam appeared and disappeared like a golden sh. Hitting White and leaving as if he wasn''t even there. White is trying to keep up with his speed.

    He couldn''t catch Sam directly.

    He had to track the energy movements and predict Sam''s moves. He is right most of the time and he became defensive. After some hits, he realized that he is taking some damage, even though he is blocking the attacks.

    He decided to change tactics.

    Instead of blocking he started making his own moves.

    The recoil hits collided with Sam''s attacks. Golden light energy dispersed with wild chaos and the golden shes lit up the whole arena.

    The formation started blinking now and then as the energy hit it.

    There are several golden spots on the formation in the next few minutes and they kept on increasing. The battle became intense. White became nervous. He knew that Sam is using a lot of energy to nullify his attacks.

    So, he wanted to see where Sam''s limit is at.

    If Sam bes exhausted soon and still tries to make the attack, it would be much slower and White would get a glimpse at how Sam is nullifying his moves. But minutes passed and Sam showed no signs of exhausting.

    In fact, his moves are bing trickier.

    A bunch of feints are being thrown in the middle. The whole arena erupted in cheers as they saw this fight. By now most of the onlookers don''t care who wins. They want to see someonee on top of this rivalry.

    White noticed that he is on the losing end and Sam is determined to nail him down there.

    The next moment, he didn''t bother to block Sam''s attack, instead he made an attack on his own. Sam smirked and let his fist hit White. As soon as the contact was made, his fist was supposed to make a hole through White''s shoulder.

    But to his surprise, White flew away.

    Only half of Sam''s punch worked. There is a deep burn on White''s shoulder and it went past his white coat. White used the recoil hit attack in a different direction to not be stuck in the same ce. Sam''s pattern is broken.

    He didn''t wait and used the recoil hit once again.

    Sam made his move.? Now the fight turned into a game of chase. Sam tried his best to catch White and he almost seeded. He left behind some small burns now and then, but wasn''t able tond a critical hit.

    The only silver lining is that White is not able to attack Sam either.

    To be precise, he is the one taking damage, albeit very small. After another ten minutes, Sam got a bit frustrated, he wanted to turn on full fusion and get this over with, but White did the unexpected.

    He took a direct hit from Sam in a rtively safer part of his body and used the recoil hit on Sam''s chest.

    Sam made a hasty nullification and he knew this wouldn''t be enough.

    So, he hurriedly kicked White in his abdomen.

    *BOOM*

    A huge chaotic explosion, blew both of them away.

    Sam gracefullynded on the arena with a bruise on his chest, while White fell off the stage. Match is over and once again fight is undetermined. Sam got off, frustration apparent in his eyes as he walked to the seats where Gambler''s academy students sat.

    Even though the crowd was a bit disappointed, they still cheered.

    The fight is a masterss for many of these non-students. White walked to Zeus academy seats. Pearl had a gloomy look on her face. She looked extremely angry and frustrated.

    "Why did you give up?" She asked through gritted teeth.

    "He is learning way too much, while I am not learning anything. If this fight continued any longer, my advantage would be taken awaypletely. I would have to use my trump cards if I had to fight him, which is not a good thing."

    "But we lost face. The Zeus academy lost face."

    "I am sorry, if one fight is all it takes for the academy to lose face, there is not much there to begin with. I already told you when I joined. I need some freedom and this time I cannot expose my trump cards just for a rank that is not going to be important in grand scheme of things."

    White calmly replied and leaned into his chair, trying to rest.

    She knew the reason for Pearl''s frustration. She has a fight up next and she is fighting for a top ten position. But to her disappointment, it is not for one of the high ranks.

    Instead it is for the tenth rank.

    She who ranked sixth at the start of the open tournaments is at the edge of being disqualified. And she had to use everything she got in this tournament just to keep this position. This is a humiliation.

    White''s actions only fueled that humiliation. She was supposed to be the leader of the group and White''s open words and disagreement, made her feel like she is not the leader anymore. She is not being respected anymore.

    She stepped on the stage and the opponent was someone Sam is extremely familiar with.

    It is one of his Joker Avatar''s students.

    The guy who Sam fought in the first open tournament. The guy who uses lightning and Daggers. He is also from Zeus Academy and his name if Sam remembers right is Bronte.

    In the first tournament, he was in the top sixteen, and by the end of the open tournaments, he was close to the top ten. Now in the Inter Academy regional tournament, he is already gunning for tenth ce. If this is not an improvement Sam wouldn''t know what is.

    When Bronte looked at Pearl, he took a deep breath.

    He felt great. It felt great to take in all the cheers and when he looked at Pearl, he felt even greater. He might be a part of the Noble League and he might be able tomunicate with Christos, but a person like Pearl is beyond even Christos'' influence.

    He might have more authority, riches, and connections than her outside the academic realm, but inside the realm, she is the peak of the nobility. Now, she is in front of him. As an equal in the arena, fighting him to be top ten in the freshmen tournament.

    He took out his daggers.

    The fight began.

    The fight was pretty intense. More intense than people expected and itsted for more than forty minutes. The longest solo fight that day. The fight ended and everyone cheered.

    Everyone except for the people on the Zeus Academy side, even though the person who won belonged to the Zeus Academy. Because the winner is Bronte. He stood on the stage bleeding, one of his arms broken to shards.

    There are a few wounds on his head, bleeding profusely.

    His legs have no strength left in them. But he smiled. Smiled bright as the first light at the dawn.

    He won. He got into the top ten.

    He wanted to scream at the top of his lungs, but his throat was injured.

    Pearly down on the ground as she looked at the sky. Tears streamed down her face. She has fallen and she is broken. She knew that she was better than this. And she also knew the reason why she broke down to this level.

    That reason is looking at her right now with a faint smile on his face.

    As if there is no surprise in this oue. As if this is what it''s destined to be since he willed it.

    The top ten were thus selected Sam''s friends, Philip, Watt, Jack, Vidyut, Paras, Saber Monarch, and Five Elemental Kings made it as well. The only person who didn''t make it is Night Ghost and that is because Sam gave him a different mission and he withdrew in the middle of thepetition.

    ''The only two people who entered the top ten besides Sam''s team are White and Bronte.

    Now it is time for the teampetition.

 Chapter 2016 Familiar Faces

    ?

    Sam prepared for the group test.

    The top ten rankers of the Gambler''s Academy all gathered. The same happened with the other academies. They needed to discuss the strategy for the group test.

    When Sam arrived at the already-gathered group, they did not seem very wee.

    They started discussing the strategy before he arrived and they didn''t feel the need to include him in the ns. They openly discussed the whole game n and Sam was nowhere involved. One of them looked at him and said.

    "Your role is to simply stay back and ride on the coattails."

    Sam is a bit surprised by that confidence.

    After all, not one of them dared to fight him until then. But now they are confident enough to tell him off. Then he recalled something about Gambler''s Academy.

    They never had good track record with the Inter Academy tournaments, freshmen or otherwise.

    That is mostly limited to the solobat tournament which is the hero event of the whole tournament. When ites to otherpetitions including the team tournament and auxiliary professions they didn''t do that bad.

    They didn''t win many championships but they gave great performances.

    It seems like nine of these people are confident in winning a decent rank even without Sam. Sam didn''t force himself up on them though. Instead he just stood back rxed while they discussed the ns.

    His eyes roamed around the spectators stand and locked on to a certain group of people.

    When he looked, he noticed that these people were also looking at him. Whispering among each other while asionally pointing at Sam. They even called a couple of juniors, particrly freshmen to inquire about him.

    Sam recognized them.

    A huge grin appeared on his face. He also knew they recognized him. Ever since Sam came to the Academy region he was waiting toe across these people. These are the Demi Gods of Olympus. The particr group that Sam noticed belonged to Zeus Academy.

    The same Demi Gods that sent two hundred Titans at Sam and tried to destroy him;

    The same Demi Gods attacked Sam even though it was against the rules. The same Demi Gods that wanted to turn Sam into a toy for their own amusement. At that time, Sam made a promise to them along with a giant middle finger statue made out of dead Titans.

    Those guys slowly forgot about Sam.

    But Sam didn''t. Now that he is here, he is itching to destroy these people.

    Meanwhile, the seniors that Sam is looking at are still discussing among themselves.

    One of them called Christos over, the guy who leads the Noble League of the Olympians.

    "Is that guy the Sam that people were talking about?"

    The Senior asked Christos.

    Christos nodded and exined the circumstances regarding Sam. How he destroyed the dignity of Olympus, how he constantly picks on Olympian geniuses, h, h, h¡­

    "Do you guys have any information on him? Where did hee from? Howe he got into Gambler''s School?"

    Christos shook his head.

    "We tried, but everything rted to him is obscure. From what little I could sniff around, I found out that our Dean might have some idea about it. I heard that Pearl demanded some information from him, but he refused to let out anything.

    Weirdly, he didn''t take any action and even stopped some students who wanted to take action when Sam made a mess."

    "How can you not find anything at all? Is this what became of Noble League in my short absence? You couldn''t even find a freshman''s origins much less deal with him?"

    The senior''s voice appeared cold.

    Christos pursed his lips and suddenly he got an idea.

    "There is one guy who might more about him, but he was off limits to us because he is under Pearl."

    "Who is it?"

    "White." Then Christos narrated the whole incident about how White left Gambler''s Academy to join Zeus'' Academy.

    "I want to meet him. This guy named Sam. He isn''t supposed to be here."

    Christos was sent away and the Senior is still not feeling at ease.

    "We need to hold a meeting with all the important people that came that day. Leaders from all main academies. This afternoon. See to it."

    He casually ordered and a Senior who was sitting behind him stood up and left in a hurry.

    Sam just smirked at this.

    He could get all of their conversations easily. After all, they took the wristbands and birds as well. He decided to let them do what they wanted to do. It would be a bit more entertaining.

    Soon it was time for the teampetitions to start. Since there are only a few academies in total, one match is being held each time.

    Sam entered the testing grounds with the rest of the Gambler''s Academy group. He rxed when he heard what thepetition was. It is a very simplepetition. Back on earth, people y this in high schools.

    Capture the g.

    The rules are also pretty straightforward.

    The gs of each team have fixed positions. A team should capture the opposing team''s g while defending theirs.

    If a team captures the opposing team''s g and brings it to their own gpole, then it is a win for them. They can distribute the team members however they want.

    They cannot use heavily enchanted or inscribed weapons, no formation discs or inscribed scrolls. They can however ce formations with thepetition-specific formation nodes around the g for defense.

    The usual strategy is that three to four people will stay back at the g with a proper formation set up while the remaining goes on offense.

    That is a decent strategy.

    As soon as thepetition started, Sam noticed the movements of the Gambler''s Academy students. He sat on a rock nearby while looking at their execution. Three people stayed behind while the remaining six moved in groups of two.

    The three of them worked together to ce a pretty goodplex formation.

    Sam is impressed.

    The formation has sixteenyers with four different elements and there are a bunch of illusion elements added to the mix. And the best part is the three people are also part of the formation. They became invisible.

    There are no signs of formation whatsoever. It looked like the three of them just ran along with the remaining nine.

    They did all of this in just fifteen minutes. Sam almost wanted to praise them. But after three minutes of examination, he could see a bunch of ws. Maybe it is because he saw them cing it.

    At that time, hismunication token buzzed.

    It is one of the Gambler Academy students who hid in the formation.

    "Get away from there. Your presence might not much difference, but it might raise unnecessary suspicions."

    Sam shrugged and he disappeared into shadows.

    But he was spectating.

    The people from the opponent''s side took their time. They made some formations and four people were left behind. The remaining six made a move. But unlike the Gambler''s Academy team, they got separated.

    And that was the mistake, before they knew it the groups of the Gambler''s Academy started sacking the offensive team of the opponent one yer at a time.

    They always had an ambush n. They scouted the forest very quickly set up some traps here and there and easily tricked the opponents. The whole round went on for over two hours, which is the only drawback.

    Gambler''s Academy team won.

    They were given five minutes and the next round began. This one was over quickly and they moved to the next round.

    The performance of Gambler''s Academy is better than thest year and to Sam''s surprise, the performance of Zeus Academy is still quite good. Pearl finally seemed to have regained some of her usefulness.

    Or maybe she devised the ns beforehand and the rest of the team is just executing it well. But in Sam''s opinion, they are doing better than Gambler''s Academy and if his guess is right, both will meet in the finals.

    Pearl became excited again and she gritted her teeth in anticipation.

    "We need to crush them." Pearl said to her team.

    It was already past midnight when the finals started.

    Sam was once again asked to stay back as the Gambler''s Academy team made preparations.

    Back at Zeus'' Academy team camp, they held a small meeting while the rest were working on their formations.

    "I am going to scout. From our information, the Gambler''s Academy is good with formations. My energy detection will be of great help." White suggested.

    "What if Sam tackles you?"

    "It''s fine. In an open field, I can easily shake him off if I don''t want to fight him. Just give me ten minutes and I will give you all the details needed. Just like Pearl wanted we will crush them."

    The rest of the team agreed.

    White hit the cane on the ground and flew into the sky before he did another recoil shot and flew across the field as he moved, with every foot he traveled a small recoil of energy spread in all directions.

    With the waves created by these recoil hits the energy in the atmosphere resonated.

    And just like that White had a cream of the crop energy detection method working on hyper-mode.

 Chapter 2017 Domination

    Chapter 2017 Domination

    White travelled at his top speed and his energy detection worked wonders.

    In the previous matches, his participation was minimal. He didn''t do much at all. But now he decided to go all out. Of course, not in the sense of using his trump cards. But he will think of all possible ways to defeat Gambler''s academy.

    Unlike solobat, teambat wouldn''t send multiple teams from the same region.

    Only one academy can go from this region and it should be Zeus academy.

    Otherwise, Pearl wouldn''t be able to attend the Inter Academy Freshmen tournament finals. There would be a huge wrench in their ns.

    With his recoil hits, he is making rounds over the testing area. He is covering all of it. He discovered a bunch of traps set up by the Gambler''s academy, he even reached the defensive area of the Gambler''s academy.

    Just like the previous contestants, he couldn''t see the three people who hid within the formation.

    At least until he used his energy detection technique on the formation. The energy waves that were caused by the recoil hits collided with the formation gently. They don''t have any attack power. But these waves reacted to the energy cirction of the formation.

    tried to get as much information as possible. The Gambler Academy students who are in the defensive seemed to have understood his It is simr to SONAR.

    Sam is nowhere to be seen at this point.

    White sent the waves to the formation from different sides as he tried to get as much information as possible. The Gambler Academy students who are in the defensive seemed to have understood his intent and decided to make a move.

    All of a sudden White sensed a threat. He hurriedly poked his cane in front of him tounch himself out of that ce.

    A me conjured in that spot that was dispersed instantly with the recoil hit.

    Before White could rx he sensed another threat. Another ming ball manifested out of thin air. He had to jump around and he didn''t have any time to check out the formation anymore.

    The spectators that are watching this from the arena were stunned and got riled up. They didn''t expect this type of performance from Gambler''s academy. White is being handled by the three students who are not even close to top ten in individual rankings.

    Three versus one might not seem like much, but those are the expectations thate with the top ten ranking.

    Among those spectators, Sam''s friends are also watching. Philip, Watt and Jack sat together. Nobody felt that it is weird. Since they are all part of top ten, people thought these three were getting to know each other.

    Jack looked at the way White danced in air trying to avoid being roasted by those mes and asked.

    "Don''t you think those recoil hits seem familiar?"

    Philip nodded.

    "Yeah, it seems like an upgraded version of ripple style."

    "The way White acted around Sam, maybe he did have a connection but we just don''t know this yet? Even though the fight style is different, I can imagine that if Sam has that recoil style or whatever it is, he would have fought simrly."

    Jack exined with a frown.

    The trio didn''t know what to think of it. Jack thought of something and he spoke.

    "I will be back in a couple of minutes. I think we need to confirm a few things. We might need the help our team members."

    "You need us toe?"

    Watt asked.

    "No, I can handle it. We need not involve ourselves in this. Until the finals are over, we would be under public eye. Let Night Ghost handle this, since he is going to stay here. And I don''t think he would need to put much effort. As long as I have answers to few questions, my suspicions can be confirmed."

    Jack left and went to talk to Night Ghost.

    "What do you need me to do Jack?" Night Ghost asked with a respectful tone. The rest of the team are fine with the trio, they got along as friends, but Night Ghost is a bit old school.

    If the trio are equal to Sam, then they are his superiors.

    "First, tell me where the rest of the team are ced one by one.

    Jw?"

    "She is focusing on her breakthrough she might be the first to reach it. She is also in charge of some Astral ne academies of lesser known fire gods."

    "Okay, Sia and Gyan?"

    "They¡­" Night Ghost answered.

    "Tamas?"

    "He is¡­"

    "Kiran?"

    "¡­"

    Jack came back with a smile after he got all the answers he needed. Looking at his relieved and cheerful face the other two asked.

    "So, I guess everything went well, based on your expressions."

    "Yeah, everything is perfectly alright. I am looking forward to the rest of our ns."

    The fight went on.

    After twenty minutes, White finally got some much needed information on the formation, before left.

    On his way back, he took out three people on the Gambler''s academy offensive team. He went to Pearl and rest of the camp to discuss their strategy. There isn''t much to talk about. White already took out three people.

    He already has information about the defensive formation. Only three people on offensive and his n is to take them out on their way.

    They decided to keep three people for defense and they have ced a formation they bought from Hub at a very high price. They are confident and marched forward.

    Their n had an amazing start.

    They managed to nail down two more opponents.

    The spectators all believed the Zeus academy is going to take the cake on this one. Zeus academy team thought so as well. They decided to go withplete domination. White even went to hunt down thest offensive member while the rest went forward.

    The Gambler''s academy defensive team found out the situation from theirst remaining offensive member and started getting anxious.

    "We are going to have a hard time if White really understood the workings of our formation. We might not be able to handle sixbat specialists if they are attacking our weak points in the formations. We need to think of something."

    As they were thinking, they lost contact with the offensive team. They also noticed the offensive team of Zeus academy is there. Pearl looked at the g viciously.

    "Attack the points White mentioned about. Don''t give them a chance to counter."

    White floated in the air as he showed the spots to attack. The formation is bombarded by the attacks. Soon a couple ofyers of the formation were destroyed.

    When the Gambler''s team was about to counter attack, White yelled.

    "Now."

    Immediately the whole offensive team shuffled from their positions. The attacks from the formation missed.

    White is handling the energy detection to figure the attack timing. The Gambler''s academy is done for. One after the otheryers copsed.

    When the Gambler''s team was on verge of despair, they heard a voice.

    "Hold on for three more minutes."

    They recognized this voice and they were surprised.

    Everyone''s focus was on the formation. They watched as the Zeus academy team tortured the Gambler''s academy team. Even though this Is not a fast match by any means, this is a dominating one for sure.

    But the next moment the spectators noticed something.

    Sam who is hiding in the shadows appeared all of a sudden and stood in front of White in the air.

    "You guys are having a party, I hope you don''t mind if I crash it."

    For a moment attacks stopped. Everyone including Pearl all focused on Sam.

    "Don''t stop. Finish it off. I will handle him. He cannot turn the tide now."

    White said confidently.

    Sam is calm. There is not a hint of anxiety on his face.

    "I like your confidence. I can''t wait to destroy it."

    "You wish."

    "I don''t wish for anything White. I just make it happen. All it needs is my desire. And unfortunately for you, I desire to win."

    White felt a huge energy movement. He took his cane and got ready to make a move, but he was toote.

    Shadow energy swarmed Sam. He looked like he was being swallowed by it.

    By the time White made his move, Sam is not there. He disappeared along with the darkness of shadow energy.

    The next moment, Sam arrived right in front of the Zeus academy''s defensive camp. Everyone is shocked.

    White noticed this and yelled at his team.

    "Increase your strength. Full power."

    He then shot towards his defensive camp.

    The defensive team of Zeus academy noticed this and one of them yelled. You cannot y any tricks. This formation will not be broken easily and White would be here before you make your first dent.

    Sam didn''t bother to listen. He pulled his fist back and lightning energy gathered. Silver lightning concentrated over his hand and as if to give a reaction to that, the formation around the g started cracking lightning.

    Sam punched the formation.

    *BOOM*

    A huge explosive noise and a wave of lightning energy hit the surroundings. His silver lightning injected into the formationwork. The purple formation lit up revealing its energywork as a whole and everyone could see the silver lightning cracking the whole thing up.

    In the next second, the formation copsed with arge quake of earth.

    Sam took the g and turned around. White right there.

    "As I said, all it takes is my desire and it will happen. No one can stop it."

    Sam once again disappeared into shadows along with the g.

    Pearl noticed this and screamed.

    "FULL POWER. YOU BASTARDS. DON''T YOU DARE HOLD ANYTHING BACK. I NEED THAT FLAG NOW."

    She yelled crazily.

    The team did as they were told. They didn''t want to deal with hysterical Pearl.

    *BOOM*

    The formation was destroyed and three Gambler academy members fell down exhausted. Pearl jumped up to capture the g.

    *PAK*

    Her hand was swatted away by Sam who just appeared with a puff of ck smoke.

    Pearl fell backward with despair apparent in her eyes. Sam gave her a look of disregard and merged the gs.

    Gambler''s academy won the teampetition.

 Chapter 2018 Break

    Chapter 2018 Break

    The victory of Gambler''s academy is loud.

    Cheers exploded all over the arena from the academy''s students. As much as they hated Sam, they still felt happy that he swooped in at thest moment and brought them victory. All the participants inside were brought out.

    Sam and the rest of the Gambler academy studentsnded near the instructors of the Gambler''s academy.

    The Elder looked at Sam and the rest and said without much emotion.

    "Congrattions. All the best for your future endeavours in the tournament."

    Sam looked at the team and nodded at them before he left. On his way back a third grade student from the Zeus academy blocked his path.

    "Our seniors want to have a chat with you. They are inviting you for a meal at Nn''s Restaurant."

    Sam raised an eyebrow and said.

    "I don''t feel like talking to them today. But tell them I am exactly who they think I am and I am here to make good on the promise I made them."

    The senior was about to block the path, but after taking a look at the surroundings he took a step back and let Sam leave. Everyone dispersed. After the next dawn, there would be auxiliary tournaments once again and since there are only a few people participating in each profession now, they wouldn''t take too long this time.

    Sam took some rest and went back there.

    He didn''t care to perform too well. As long as he stays in the top five and gets to go to the finals that is enough or him. And he did that as expected. After thepetitions are over, Sam went to his secret room to check on Stone.

    His body''s marrow is transforming as expected. The process is slow but very stable.

    "How are you feeling?"

    "I am getting mentally exhausted every day, just like you said. It is almost like my brain is asking for a reset every night and the next day, I feel like a new person.

    My blood is changing bit by bit along with the marrow and my organs have been impacted by this as well."

    "That is all expected. You are very stable. I thought this would be a faster, but its alright. The process is slow but more effective that I initially calcted. Maybe there is a hidden factor in your body that I didn''t take into ount.

    Over all, this is going to be a sessful operation.

    After Ie back from the tournament, I will finish the final surgery."

    "I already feel a lot better. My energy absorption level increased. Even if it is not up to the levels of genius talents, my senses are just as good. Even my control is good if not better."

    "Yeah, that''s because everything in your body and soul now has better affinity with the spiritual energy. Your spiritual core might also mutate a bit, but it wouldn''t be enough. You would be able to use up all the energy very easily. Thest surgery will fix it."

    "There is just another feeling I have¡­"

    Stone hesitated to speak.

    "What is it?"

    "I feel like that I shouldn''t exist like this somehow. I feel a bit unnatural. As if I am opposing nature."

    Sam chuckled.

    "Of course you are going to feel that way. You are not supposed to exist like this. I recreated you. But that is just a feeling as you said. You are so used to your existence like it was before, you are not able to digest your new life.

    Think of it as you being reborn.

    I heard that people in your realm believe in god''s blessings and whenever those blessings change your inherent nature slightly, you would be able to understand it and ept it.

    Think of it like that."

    Sam left after that.

    Stone looked at Sam with aplicated gaze. If he really considers this as a god''s blessing, who would that god be? Stone is certain it is An Elder in charge summoned him and other people who got selected to the finals.

    definitely not the actual gods that he prayed for.

    Sam went back to the academy to finish the procedures.

    An Elder in charge summoned him and other people who got selected to the finals.

    "My name is Chorus. And before anyone asks, yes Chorus as in Chorus of a Song. I don''t know why I was named like that.

    I will be the person in charge of escorting you to the Inter Academy tournament Finals. This time it is happening in the Norse Region. A couple of seniors will be apanying me. If you have any doubts ask them. Don''t disturb me unless it is a problem even they cannot solve.

    We are leaving in one week. Make all your preparations before them. If you are not here at the informed time you will be left behind.

    Also, I don''t give a shit about what sort of grudges you all hold between each other. Don''t let it get in between thepetition. I need a united front from all of you.

    And the MVP of Gambler''s academy this time is obviously Sam. He would be in charge of you all. If I and the seniors are not present, he should be one the rest of you should listen to."

    After giving this boring lecture for some time Chorus sent the rest of them away.

    Sam looked at the rest and said.

    "I don''t know why that Elder asked you guys to listen to me. I don''t have any interest in bossing you guys around. Since you are all holding up pretty well by yourselves in the teampetition, I am sure you can manage yourselves.

    We will just do as we did in the teampetition before. I will step in when you need me. Otherwise, you can do whatever the hell you want."

    Sam disappeared after leaving those words.

    The rest of them were a bit stumped. They actually wanted to cooperate with Sam after seeing his performance. They even came up with a few strategies that would involve Sam''s skills of Sam. Now they didn''t know what to do.

    Sam decided to rest in his dorm.

    Even though his ns this time are very long andplicated, he is very much enjoying the progress he made thus far.

    He couldn''t help but feel excited when all of this is over.

    As he was imagining what he should do next to create more chaos in the Academic Region, someone knocked on his door.

    He opened to see a youngdy with silver hair standing in front of him.

    "Hello, I am Dove. A Grade 4 Student. May Ie in?"

    Sam opened the door ajar and let her walk in.

    "I heard a lot about you Sam. I just wanted to introduce myself because we will be traveling to the Norse region together soon."

    "You are one of the seniors that wille with us?

    I didn''t expect the leader of Grade 4 Students would be so free to apany some Grade 1 students."

    "It is an important role after all. The Gambler''s Academy is going to be in the limelight because of you and I expect there would be a lot of evil eyes locked on us. So, we need someone who can handle it all so the rest of the freshmen won''t be affected by it."

    Sam just nodded and didn''t say anything.

    "Anyway, I heard some Grade 4 students of Zeus Academy wanted to meet you."

    "News travels fast here."

    "May I know what your rtionship with them is?"

    "Not a good one. That is all I can tell."

    "Anyway, if you do decide to meet them or if they force you to meet them, please do contact me. I will be there. I am sure they cannot go overboard with me present."

    Dove tossed a token over to Sam.

    It is a token that he just needs to crush and a message would be sent to Dove.

    Sam didn''t ask any questions. He is curious about why she cared so much, but he is sure that he can get the information in other ways. She has a wrist band after all.

    "I have another thing to inform you.

    The night before our travel, there would be a prayer ceremony. I am sure Chorus wouldn''t have informed you about it."

    "What''s this ceremony about?"

    "All the participants would be praying for the Gods that represent their schools. They would get a blessing from their gods that you could say will give them a minor boost in their mental strength and even provide help in their enlightenment to advance in their cultivation.

    It is a tradition. If you want to know more, you can check this out."

    She threw him a book.

    Sam caught it and decided to take a look. Dove left after that.

    Sam studied the contents of the book and raised an eyebrow. He

    kind of understood why Dove came to him now. It is not just for the reasons she mentioned. She wanted to understand Sam''s intentions through his actions.

 Chapter 2019 Claim

    Chapter 2019 im

    Days passed quietly.

    Sam spent most of the time resting and once in a while he visited the Hub in his original form and acted as a student training to gain experience.

    The rest of the candidates who got selected for the finals of Inter Academy Freshmen Competition spent most of their time in the Hub. Some went there when it opened and stayed there until it was closed down.

    Sam weed the business and the information that came along with it.

    Soon it is the day before the departure. It is the prayer ceremony time. Sam got all the information from the small book that Dove gave him. It has all the history, rules and significance of the prayer ceremony for the academies.

    As she said, it is for the students to get some enlightenment and blessing of the gods that represent their respective academies.

    The prayer ceremony is held in a special ce where the gods of all the academies in this particr region are ced.

    On that day, along with a bunch of Grade 4 Seniors, all the Deans apanied their respective candidates to that prayer zone.

    It is an isted area situation deep within a forest zone that is forbidden for students to enter normally. Sam watched as statues of different Olympian gods stood proudly. Each of them are carved out of various precious minerals.

    In between all of them stood Gambler''s statue.

    His face is just as obscure as it is in Sam''s memory. Unlike the remaining statues this is not made of any precious materials and it is not as huge as them. The only thing remarkable about is its craftsman ship. Other than that, it is just an ordinary statue.

    There is no grandeur and there is no overwhelming pride.

    Judging from Gambler''s personality, Sam knew this is deliberate. This might even be a taunt to the Olympian gods. ''My statue is lowly and shabby but it still stands in between all of your egoistic statues, what the fuck are you gonna do about it?'' Sam wouldn''t be surprised if he actually said those words out loud to their faces.

    Dove looked at Sam who was engrossed in the statues and said.

    "You can admire the statuester on. But ording to the rules the prayer ceremonies would be conducted in the order of the top ten rankings in Solo battles. So, the first one is the Gambler''s Academy.

    You should lead the team and go there."

    Sam nodded and stood forward. The rest of the students from Gambler''s academy followed him. Right now the whole scene is dominated by the students from Gambler''s academy.

    Sam might just be the only one in the top ten solo rankings. But they won the group contest.

    So, there are nine more members there.

    Apart from that, there is another person who ranked third in the inscription test solo contest, and the gambler''s academy also happened to rank first in the group inscription contest in which this guy is also a part of. So, that is another five.

    They didn''t manage to do much in the formation test and the Weapon Smithing test: both solo and group. But Sam ranked in both of them as well. First in one, second in the other. He also ranked first in the Inscription test and Second in Medicine Making.

    Apart from that, the Gambler''s Academy ranked positions in many other solo auxiliary positions. They had some painting, music, Embroidery, and Architecture.

    Sam is one, of nine more people for the group contest, five for inscription and four more for other auxiliary professions. That is a total of twenty-eight members. That is the highest that appeared today.

    Under Sam''s lead, all twenty-eight members appeared in front of Gambler''s statue and he performed the ceremony as he was previously instructed. Sam is very familiar with this. He performed simr ceremonies throughout his journey to this realm. He couldn''t help but remember all the Zeus and Hou Yi''s Statues that he destroyed on the way.

    Soon the sky is filled with clouds of spiritual energy.

    At least that is what it looked like. Gambler''s statue glowed and a bunch of light beams shouted out of these energy clouds. All twenty-eight people bathed in these light beams. Everyone had wide smiles on their faces.

    ''You are Doing Great.''

    Sam heard a voice in his head. He didn''t receive any other enlightenment. He knew who this voice belonged to.

    He stepped back after that and the next team was led by Zeus Academy.

    There are not many people from Zeus Academy. There are three people in the top ten, one person in the formation test and another person in the inscription test. Apart from that, there is not much progress there. They didn''t focus much on their auxiliary professions.

    At least the freshmen who were good at this were not up to par with the rest of the academies.

    The Zeus statue didn''t show a reaction for quite a while as they performed the ceremony. The Dean of Zeus Academy frowned at this. This is not a good sign. It means that Zeus is not satisfied with the student''s performance.

    person in the crowd.

    But soon the statue glowed with purple electric light and the dark clouds rumbled with lightning and thunder.

    The sky is currently upied with Zeus'' will and he is about to give blessing to the students.

    Everyone is watching to see what Zeus would give to his students since he paused for long. But the deans and Dove all looked at one person in the crowd.

    Sam.

    As soon as the clouds started conjuring, a spear appeared in Sam''s hand. Silver lightning Crackled from inside his body as he activated partial fusion. Raiju''s bloodline riled up. Arge amount of silver lightning energy coupled with his Divine Energy was injected into the spear forcefully.

    All this happened in a second and before the lightning beam was about to touch the students of Zeus Academy, Sam threw the spear at the beam.

    *BOOM*

    Both lightnings collided and the Purple lightning of the dark clouds is now corrupted by Sam''s silver lightning.

    "HOW DARE YOU???"

    Someone bellowed in rage and Sam felt a very dangerous auraing towards him to take his life. But he didn''t move, he had a smirk on his face and stood there motionless.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosive sound, a p was blocked by Dove who stood beside him. Her gaze is locked, Sam.

    Sam looked at the Grade 4 Student from Zeus Academy who came to kill him. He is one of the guys Sam recognized from his fight with the Titans.

    All the Olympian Deans looked at Sam with utmost hatred.

    "Dove, step back. He dared to disrespect Zeus, there is no saving him."

    The Grade 4 Zeus academy student calmed down and he addressed Dove to step back, but Dove didn''t do so.

    "Even your Dean is staying Silent. The rest of the Olympian Deans are staying silent. Even your God Zeus didn''t retaliate, why are you overreacting Perseus? Step back and let them talk first."

    As soon as Dove spoke another person spoke.

    "Perceus, step back."

    Dean of Zeus Academy.

    The old man stepped forward and looked at Sam.

    "Do you know what you did?"

    "Of course, I just followed a very old tradition. I am trying to im Zeus'' Blessing."

    All Deans'' faces turned stern when he mentioned this.

    "No one has done this in years. How do you even know about this?"

    Sam gave a faint nce at Dove and replied.

    "I came across it from an old book when I was researching Prayer Ceremony."

    Dean sighed and spoke out loud.

    "ording to one of the old rules, a student of a different academy can challenge to im the blessing of the god of any academy. But they have to win the challenge first and for Zeus, it is to take seven lightning strikes head on.

    Without a weapon, defensive artifacts or any other formations of inscriptions. All the candidate can use is their own body''s strength. If they withdraw from the test, they would be banished from the Academic realm for eternity with the cultivation they attained here taken away.

    So, only Zeus'' test can mark Sam as a criminal. None of us have any right to do so."

    Perseus looked at Sam hatefully with shock apparent in his eyes. White who is looking at the whole farce clenched his fists.

    Meanwhile, Sam floated into the air and stood under the clouds.

    He had a proud smirk on his face as he looked at Zeus'' statue.

    "I am right here in front of you. A perfect opportunity for you to retaliate from all my antics. Do your worst and let''s see who wins."

    As Sam spoke, he took off his feathered Coat and the vest underneath it. He is standing there with his chest bare. The chiseled body and the scars he wore proudly were clearly visible for everyone to see.

    Dean Wharton cheered and jumped as he encouraged Sam and Dove narrowed her eyes with curiosity apparent in hers.

    White and Vidyut took a deep breath as they looked at those scars and so did the other students. Those scars are Sam''s battle history and they couldn''t even imagine what kind of battles have given him that many.

    Raiju''s bloodline activated as Silver lightning crackled.

    Sam''s leg muscles bulged and his spine hunched very slightly. His upper body and chest muscles expanded a bit with his arms growing longer.

    His hair turned into a pristine silver color and the silver lightning covered every inch of his body like silver fur. Lightning condensed at his nails like ws.

    Sam looked like a werewolf and he taunted Zeus to strike him down.

 Chapter 2020 To the Norse Region

    Chapter 2020 To the Norse Region

    Everyone waited in anticipation.

    Some of the Deans remembered when thest blessing was forcefully imed like this.

    It was done out of rivalry between the Olympian academies. At that time, Gambler''s academy barely made the freshmen tournament contender list. And even then Zeus'' blessing was never imed. Zeus was too powerful and too spiteful for anyone to pull off such a stunt.

    In fact, Zeus academy students were the ones who used im other blessings as they inherited the arrogance of their god.

    But now Zeus'' blessing is being imed.

    *RUMBLE*

    Lightning rumbled indicated Zeus'' anger. The dark clouds condensed more and more. The lightning became denser as everyone anticipated, the first lightning bolt came.

    *BOOM* *RUMBLE*

    The whole area shed with purple lightning and the bolt is aimed at Sam.

    The usual thing to do is stay put and let the lightning wash over him while he defended, but Sam did the unexpected. He swung his silver lightning wolf w at the bolt that came at him.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sh of silver and purple filled the surroundings.

    absorbed into his body and turned to silver lightning.

    His energy increased.

    The students couldn''t even look and flinched. Only the seniors and the Deans were able to spectate. Sam was pushed back. There are small purple sparks in between his lightning body, but those were absorbed into his body and turned to silver lightning.

    His energy increased.

    Everyone could sense it. Sam not only fought off the lightning strike he absorbed part of it.

    The clouds roared more. It seems like Zeus is really pissed.

    *BOOM* *RUMBLE* Second strike.

    *BOOM* *RUMBLE* Third Strike.

    *BOOM* *RUMBLE* Fourth Strike.

    Sam just swung his ws at the lightning bolts and each of them cane with double the energy than the one before. He didn''t back down. He didn''t pray for the lightning to just wash over him. Instead he kept on challenging it.

    *BOOM* *RUMBLE* Fifth Strike.

    This time the lightning bolts are very dense and more the three bolts struck at once.

    *BOOM*

    "Sam''s w met with the bolts and he was stuck back. He crashed into the ground. But the grin on his face showed that he is not hurt. Almost all the silver lightning on his body turned into purple lightning at a moment.

    But he quickly conquered it and flew up.

    The clouds charged more and he could anticipate the energy of the next attack. He let the silver lightning energy gather at his w. Ripple Style and Repel Style were both activated and he is ready to strike the next one.

    *BOOM* *RUMBLE*

    Five Bolts stuck at the same time at the same spot.

    *BOOOOM* A loud explosion. Even the Grade 4 students had to flinch a bit. Sam''s w met with the bolts and it split thebined bolt into two.

    One of them flew into Sam and crashed into the ground leaving a huge crater. The surrounding earth quaked a bit. Another bolt went ahead and hit Zeus'' statue.

    The dean of Zeus academy and the students looked at this with their eyes wide open. The rest of the students, deans and seniors did the same. This is beyond disrespectful. And Zeus got angrier once again.

    Seven spots glowed in the sky and they all gathered to create one giant vortex.

    A face has formed with purple lightning and it is Zeus'' face. The Dean of the Zeus academy along with other Olympian Deans knelt down. The students followed suit.

    The only people standing are Sam, Dean Wharton and Dove.

    Zeus'' face looked like it gained wrinkles from anger. The face came out and soon Zeus'' whole upper body''s silhouette full conjured from purple lightning is there. He held a spear that looked like a condensed lightning rod.

    He gritted his teeth and threw it at Sam.

    Sam''s right leg condensed with all the lightning energy. His bloodline energy riled up to its limit and he didn''t hesitate to use all of his divine energy.

    He jumped into the air and kicked the lightning rod.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM* CRASH*

    Sam crashed into the ground and everyone saw as the lightning bolt was kicked back into the Sky, but when it left, the purple lightning turned into silver lightning. It sted through Zeus'' silhouettepletely destroying it and merged with the clouds high in the sky.

    The purple lightningpletely transformed into silver lightning.

    Raiju''s bloodline attack.

    The silver bolt merged with the clouds and conjured up with doubled silver lightning energy and it came crashing down into Zeus'' statue.

    *BOOM* *CRASH*

    Not a single student managed to see exactly what happened. But all the Deans had their hearts dropped to their pants. They looked at Zeus'' statue wide eyed and open mouthed and gulped in nervousness.

    When the lightning clear, Sam is deep inside arge crater. His fusion form is gone and he looked pretty weak. There is some blooding out of his mouth.

    But there is a huge grin overshadowing that weakness and the blood.

    He came out of the crater with a lot of excitement. But nobody is watching him. They are all focused one thing and one thing only. Destroyed Zeus statue.

    Except for the small portion of legs, there is only rubble left of that majestic statue.

    The Deans gulped down in fear. They didn''t know what would happen now. This is the first time someone sullied a god''s statue like this. Perceus'' aura raged and he wanted to kill Sam right there.

    But Dean of Zeus academy stopped him.

    "It is not a crime. It is considered an ident. Don''t go overboard."

    The Dean''s voice cracked a bit and it is barely audible.

    Dove looked at Dean Wharton who is also in a trance and said.

    "I will apany Sam to the academy. Please handle the situation here."

    Dean nodded without even looking.

    Dove went to Sam and grabbed his hands, before anyone could talk to him, both of them disappeared.

    Sam and Dove appeared inside the academy in an instant.

    Sam was stunned. It took exactly two seconds for them toe from that prayer area to the academy. It is not far and even Sam could do it if he is inpletely light element fusion withser mode. But Dove didn''t do that and it is not even space element.

    He frowned at this.

    He felt like he travelled through the whole distance, but he didn''t feel the speed or air resistance on his body when moving like that. And he could have sworn that he smelled something bestial.

    As he is pondering over what happened here, Dove asked.

    "You have really deep grudge against the Olympus, don''t you?"

    Sam looked at her in confusion.

    "Why do you want to know?"

    Dove didn''t answer and instead asked another question.

    "If my guess is right, your grudge is not even against the students or the Academy. It is against the Olympian gods or it could have been Zeus himself."

    Sam didn''t answer and just looked at her in silence. It is not exactly a secret that he wanted to keep. There is no loss in someone knowing this information. He just wanted to know what Dove actually wants from all of this.

    "I am just curious to know what is the cause of this grudge? Do you know how important the blessing is for these people?"

    Dove''s tone turned a bit preachy and Sam didn''t like it.

    "I am Sorry, I am not interested in a lecture. If you don''t mind, I will be leaving for now. Just contact me when we need to leave. If you have any other stupid ceremonies like this let me know. As for the advice, please keep it to yourselves."

    "Are you so arrogant that you don''t even want to learn from someone who is supposed to teach you?"

    Sam raised an eyebrow and said.

    "Just assume that I am that arrogant and leave me alone."

    Sam left without waiting for her again. He really didn''t want to learn about these Gods from someone else. He has been in contact with them for years. He knew where their intentions are.

    He rested for a while and the next day, it is time for them to go to Norse Region.

    Dove looked at Sam with aplicated gaze.

    The people from Zeus academy looked at him coldly. Particrly Perseus. He wanted to kill Sam so badly. They took a space gate formation specially reserved for the use of Academy executives.

    They arrived in the middle of the city. Sam looked at them and said.

    "I wille and join you guys in the afternoon as per the schedule."

    He was about to walk off when Dove stopped him and asked.

    "You know this region? Where are you going?"

    "There is an inn with great food two streets away. The best inn in the Norse Region. I already have my living arrangements made here."

    "Are you talking about the Paradise Inn?"

    Sam nodded.

    "We are going there only. The Norse region deans arranged our amodation there only. We are from Gambler''s academy and all of us will stay together. You cannot just run away as you wish."

 Chapter 2021 Encounter

    Chapter 2021 Encounter

    Ten minutester.

    Sam is standing in the Paradise Inn''s Lobby Area.

    It is a very luxurious and it is bustling with people. The rest of the Gambler academy students and even the students of the other academies are all waiting for their seniors to finish the procedures at the reception.

    This is awful lot like the procedure of a hotel on Modern Earth.

    Soon Dove came and said.

    "We need to share the rooms. One room for two people."

    The students were of course disappointed. Dove smiled and said.

    "You don''t need to worry, the rooms are pretty good at Paradise and even though they are called rooms they are houses by themselves. You will have plenty room inside, including a training area and a recovery area.

    You wouldn''t feel like you are sharing a cramped space. I even heard there are massive improvements over the room quality and the service they provide. Including new Menus, I am sure your experience here would be great." Dove went onto exin the inns features to the students as if she is a representative of the establishment.

    Sam shook his head and looked around.

    At this moment, one of the Inn Staff also spotted Sam and ran over hurriedly.

    "Wee Sir, Sam. How are you doing? How long have you been here? You should have asked for me as soon as you came. I even gave you my contact token details." He had a wide smile on his face and his tone is ttering.

    Sam just smiled and said.

    "I am good. Just get me my room key."

    "Of course, by any chance did youe here for the tournament?"

    "Yeah, I represent the Gambler''s academy."

    The waiter showed an expression as if a big mystery has been solved. Dove and the rest of the students were stumped. Even though a lot of them have great backgrounds and have a very deep understanding of the Academic Realm, their knowledge and influence is mostly limited to particr regions.

    Every noble kid in the Olympian region has a certain influence there, but they are unknown figures in many other regions.

    And Sam is supposed to be a person of unknown origin. To think that he influences Norse is surprising. They knew of Paradise and they knew it was not a ce where some small fry ran. The connections run deep into the Alumni of some top Norse Academies.

    Sam went to his room after he got the key.

    He rxed on the giant bed for a short while, before someone knocked on the door.

    He opened the door only to see Dove standing there. She didn''t even ask Sam''s permission before stepping in.

    "Wow, you have some serious preferential treatment here. And because of you, even the rest of us got an upgrade. Of course, it is not as good as yours."

    Sam looked at her without speaking.

    She looked at him in silence for a couple of minutes and said.

    "Come to the restaurant in five minutes, our team is gathering there. The teams from other regions will alsoe there. It is time for some socializing."

    "I don''t think it is a good idea for you guys to be with me. I prefer to be alone."

    "Not happening. As I said, we are part of one academy and you have to do some activities together. Luckily we are one of the first ones from the other regions, we get to see these people and gauge them a bit.

    They are the opponents that you are going to face after all."

    "It doesn''t matter. All the socializing and stuff wouldn''t make a difference.

    I am telling this for your own good and the good of the team that you seem to care about so much. It is not going to end well if you guys kept sticking with me. You need to leave me alone. Or those students are going to face some heat."

    Dove frowned and said.

    "If I didn''t know any better, I would say you are threatening to beat your peers up."

    Sam rolled his eyes in exasperation. That is clearly not what he meant.

    Dove finally left.

    Sam sighed and said.

    "Fine, whatever. Just Don''t regret itter on. Now get out of here, I will be there in the Restaurant."

    Dove finally left.

    Sam sighed and said.

    "Well, it was supposed to happen sooner orter and since you are wishing it, then so be it."

    He went downstairs after making sure everything in his room is how its supposed to be.

    In the restaurant, the Gambler''s Academy students took the most conspicuous table there it. Arge circr table at the absolute center of the restaurant. It is big, and grand, andpared to the rest, it looked like a King standing in the middle of peasants.

    The attendant who greeted Sam in the lobby hurriedly came over and greeted while guiding Sam to the seat that was right in front of him. It is way over the top.

    "Is this why you didn''t want us to go with you? Are you stingy to the point you don''t want to share your luxuries with us?"

    Dove joked.

    "Of course, I am unwilling to share my luxuries with you. They are reserved for the people who share my perils."

    Sam sat down at the table and even without ordering anything a line of dishes were being served one by one. But he didn''t care for them. Instead, he looked at the door.

    "What are you looking for?" Dove asked.

    Sam wondered why she was so nosy. The first impression she gave her based on the information he gathered on her is she is a smart, cold, and calcting person.

    But now all she felt like was a whiny parrot or rather a Dove.

    Whatever bird she might be, her crowing is making Sam irritated. He exhaled in resignation and said.

    "Just wait and watch. You will know."

    As soon as he spoke those words, the doors of the restaurant were burst open. Two different groups of people swarmed in. One group wore blue uniforms and the other wore ck uniforms. They all ran towards Sam''s table and surrounded it.

    The Gambler''s Academy team was dumbfounded.

    Dove looked at these people and even she was stunned. She recognized these uniforms. The ones who are wearing the blue uniform are freshmen of the Thor Academy and the ones who are wearing ck uniforms are students of Hel Academy.

    Those two are some top-notch academies in the Norse Region.

    A young man is leading the Thor Academy Team. He had glistening blond hair, muscled body, and golden eyes.

    He mmed his palm on the table and looked at Sam, killing intent apparent in his eyes.

    Sam picked up his fork and stabbed it into a piece of seared meat. He took a bite and spoke to Dove.

    "This is the reason why I didn''t want you guys with me. I told you, it is dangerous."

    When he was about to go for a second bite, all of a sudden the blonde young man held his hand. Sam raised an eyebrow.

    "You got a lot of galling back here. And you are even a student of Gambler''s Academy? I guess you and your time are going to pay for what you didst time."

    Sam didn''t respond. He just gazed at all the two groups and said.

    "All familiar faces. We have met before, under simr circumstances. So, can someone smarter than this golden boy here, remind me what happened when my meal was interrupted?"

    The blonde young man trembled a little bit and instinctively his grip loosened. Sam could have taken his arm back easily, but instead, he just locked his gaze on the blonde man. He is waiting for that guy to back down.

    The Blonde man pursed his lips and reluctantly let go of Sam''s hand.

    "You were named after the God your Worship, but you don''t have half the balls that he has. Fuck off and don''t show your face to me unless it is rted to thepetition."

    The young blonde''s name is Thor.

    He gritted his teeth and looked at the Gambler''s Academy students.

    "You better brace yourself and always watch your backs. Since you came with him, you might have to die with him. The whole of Norse Region holds a grudge against him after all."

    The students gulped in nervousness.

    The groups left and Sam said.

    "You guys better leave now. If you think this is bad, you need to rethink. Because this is just the start and you will see more like this."

    The students hesitated a bit, but one of them took the initiative to leave the table and soon everyone else followed.

    Except for Dove.

    "You are not leaving?"

    "I cannot leave a student alone. I need to be here with you. The other Senior is enough to guard those kids.

    Now, how about you answer some questions?"

    "I am not in the mood right now. If you really want to know, just wait for a while and ask around. I am pretty sure there would be plenty of people who are willing to give you answers."

 Chapter 2022 Hostility

    Chapter 2022 Hostility

    Dove didn''t stop asking questions.

    Sam got frustrated. He almost wanted to start a fight if not for the fact he knew he couldn''t do anything to her in the Norse region. He is just not strong enough and he didn''t have enough of his new toys in his hands.

    "Did you be the leader of the Grade 4 by annoying the fuck out of your peers? Did they just give up the leadership because they are unable to take any more of your questions?"

    Sam asked directly and Dove was stumped.

    Anger surged and she wanted to p the shit out of Sam. He could even sense her energy being riled up. He ignored her and gestured for the waiter.

    "Get me some grilled meat. Tell the chef it''s the fifteenth recipe. I want it fast."

    The waiter nodded and ran. Literally. He ran in the restaurant which is known for its elegance. Dove finally stopped speaking. Sam took out a chilled jar of wine. One of Ape''stest creations. Sam poured a ss for himself and started enjoying the cool and refreshing drink.

    As they sat there, the restaurant is slowly getting full.

    Dove was surprised. The restaurant is very big. Too big to the point one would wonder how someone is even maintaining the service here. It could house a few hundred customers at a time and one-third of the tables are already reserved for the students thate from other realms.

    The remaining tables are all full and soon Dove noticed that a lot of people are looking at their table.

    She wouldn''t have minded since it ismon for people to look at the most eye-catching table, but she knew this time it is different. They are looking at Sam and then her. Before she could process this, there is somemotion in the lobby.

    Many more people are trying to get into the restaurant, but the staff blocked them.

    "There are no more seats. The rest of the seats are reserved for the Freshmen Tournament Candidates. You cannot go in."

    The people didn''t resist. Most of them are citizens. They didn''t dare to lock horns with the people of the academy. But they all had one request, they wanted to see ''someone''.

    They wanted to see if that ''someone'' really came and how he looks.

    Dove is smart enough to put two and two together and of course, the actual mention of Sam''s name in the middle of themotion also helped. She wanted to ask Sam, but then she remembered his words and got angry again.

    At this moment, the crowd in the lobby made way. Several groups are walking in and they are all wearing different uniforms. They are the students from different regions.

    They were all wondering why there are so many people in the lobby.

    The Seniors in charge of the groups went to meet the manager and finish the checking in procedures. Meanwhile the rest of the teams were led to the restaurant. Their tables were already furnished with wine.

    As soon as they entered most of them stopped in their tracks.

    Dove once again noticed that their gazes are locked on their table. A few of them even took out their weapons and came at Sam. But right before they were about to attack, a voice reverberated throughout the entire restaurant.

    "Anyone who causes amotion in the restaurant will be banished from here and if they are a student that came for the tournament, their participation will be revoked."

    Sam smirked and looked at the people that surrounded him.

    "Go to your tables. I will see you guys in the tournament. Then you can try and fight me. Of course, it would turn into a premium grade ass whopping once again."

    His voice sounded so unbothered.

    "Who the fuck is talking? Come out if you dare?"

    One of the more impulsive ones yelled out loud.

    The same voice once again came.

    "I am the owner of this restaurant and also one of the alumni of the Thor Academy. I also happen to be one of the invigtors of this tournament. So, if you raise your voice one more time, you can forget about staying in Norse Region or ever stepping foot in here.

    If you don''t take my threat seriously, go and tell your seniors that Ivar gave you a warning and if they still tell you take it lightly, you can do whatever you want here."

    Dove was stunned when she heard the announcement. She is also a senior at Grade 4 and she knew very well who Ivar is and what that name represents.

    She shuddered at just the thought of him.

    "It is better for you guys to discuss with your Seniors before you make any decision. Go back to your seats."

    The crowd dispersed, but of course everyone gave a threat to Sam before they left.

    "What the hell did you do to attract this much heat? How do they all even know you? You are a Freshman and it hasn''t even been a couple of months since you came to this realm."

    "You will know soon."

    Soon, the whole room is full. All the students came and Sam earned more hostile looks. And Ivar''s voice came once again.

    "Well, everyone is here. So, this is your wee orientation.

    It is for you guys to settle in here a bit before the tournament starts. For the next few days, until all thepetitions are over, you are going to stay in Paradise Inn.

    Specific rooms are allocated to you and special menus are provided for you. Anything you want to eat from those menus are free¡­"

    Ivar went on to exin a bunch of stuff, about the tournament procedure. On the final note, he gave one sentence that made everyone curious.

    "Our most premium suite rooms are reserved for the Gambler''s academy and the whole floor is blocked along with the terrace for them. So, the rest of the candidates are not allowed to go there.

    And the central table of the restaurant is off-limits. It is permanently reserved for Sam, who most of you might know.

    Apart from that enjoy your stay."

    Sam chuckled at this.

    Dove is even more surprised. The reputation of Ivar is not a friendly one. To think that he showed such generosity to Sam is shocking to say the least.

    Everyone looked at Sam with extreme hostility. The hatred he is attracting is unreal.

    Meanwhile, Sam is looking at one particr table. His gaze is locked on a beautiful woman who wore a dark green robe with knee-length hairpletely let lose. She is extremely elegant and graceful. Nothing like what Sam remembered her to be.

    She looked at Sam and smiled before walking to the central table.

    Everyone was curious why she is going to Sam, particrly to one more guy who actually shared the table with her. He stood up and looked at her as she took a seat at Sam''s table. When the waiter was about to step forward, Sam gestured him that it is okay.

    "Long time no see."

    She said as she took Sam''s luxurious wine bottle and poured a ss for herself. She crossed her legs and elegantly took a sip.

    "Indeed, it has been long. How was your trip to this realm Noah?"

    He asked as he clinked his ss with his.

    "It was eventful, but I must say. My stay here is anything but boring. You have created quite a stir in a bunch of regions. You can never keep a low profile, can you?"

    Then Noah looked at Dove who seemed confused.

    "Hello, I am Noah. Freshman at Aranya''s Academy."

    "Dove, Grade 4, Gambler Academy."

    "Oh, I heard a lot about you."

    "I hope they are good things." Dove replied and paused before asking. "If I may, what do you mean when you said he stirred things in different regions? I feel like I am missing something with all the hostility directed to him. It is killing me."

    Noah chuckled and looked at Sam.

    "Can I tell her?"

    He just shrugged.

    "I think it is better if you know it by yourself. I am not going to ruin the experience for you. She stood up and then leaned forward towards Sam a bit."

    "We can talkter. But I need a favor from you. Since you are already attracting these flies, I hope it wouldn''t be a problem if one of it buzzes harder."

    Sam looked at the guy who is staring at them from their table. He is even about to walk up to them at the moment.

    "I am fine with it. But I don''t think Kumar would be happy if he knows that I acted as a shield."

    "Then that knuckle head should have been here by now. Thanks, anyway. I owe you one."

    "Its fine. Let''s have dinner tonight. We need to talk."

    Noah nodded and left. She didn''t even go back to the table and left the restaurant.

    The young man who was staring at them finally came to Sam''s table and mmed on it.

    "You. Stay away from her. Or I will kill you."

 Chapter 2023 Competition Begins

    Chapter 2023 Competition Begins

    Afternoon that day.

    There is another orientation program, but this time it is an official one and it is happening in the Thor Academy grounds. They took the role of the host and all students from different regions gathered over there.

    The Dean of the Thor Academy looked a lot youngerpared to the Deans of the Olympian region.

    However, Sam is sure that they are all of the same generation and simr age. At the cultivation level of the Deans, they can look however they want and this guy just decided to take the form of ate youth.

    He is also the father of a Student named Thor and his name is f.

    f looked at the freshmen with a cold gaze.

    "Wee to Norse Region my dear freshmen and congrattions on reaching this far in the Inter Academy Freshmen tournament.

    I hope all of you find the amodation to your satisfaction. If you have any problems contact Ivar from the Paradise Inn. He will sort it out.

    Now to the main point.

    Today will be the beginning of the Inter-Academy freshmen tournament. But we are not going to start thepetitions immediately. As per tradition, in this final phase of the tournament, we conduct the Auxiliary professionalpetitions first and then proceed with the team battle and finally with the solo battle tournament.

    Thepetitions will start from tomorrow at sunrise.

    I will be announcing the schedule now."

    He paused a bit and noticed the anticipating gaze of all the students.

    "Tomorrow we will start with the Team Formation Competition. The day after tomorrow will be the Solo formationpetition.

    On the third day, we will conduct the team inscriptionpetition. Fourth day Solo Inscription formation.

    The fifth day, Medicine making.

    Sixth day, Weapon making.

    Seventh day, Puppet Making.

    There are a bunch of other auxiliarypetitions. Some of them are going to happen on the same day. And finally, thest two days will be teambatpetitions and solopetitions.

    It is going to be very eventful for Sam. Luckily he is not participating in team auxiliarypetitions, or he wouldn''t have much break time in the middle.

    After the orientation is over, everyone was dispersed to do whatever they wanted.

    Sam didn''t want to waste any time here. He directly went to his room and Paradise and waited for the night.

    Once the night sky hit, he went to the empty terrace. A cool breeze hit his face as he took in the beautiful view of the city.

    At this moment, a waiter knocked on Noah''s door.

    "Miss Noah, Mr. Sam sent a dinner invite to you. He is currently on the terrace. Would you like me to lead you."

    She nodded and left the room. She gave a faint smirk to the roommate who is looking at her with wide eyes. That roommate is ced there by the annoying fly of a man that was following her that afternoon.

    Soon, Noah is on the terrace.

    A table was already arranged with some special wines Sam provided ced neatly on them.

    Sam smiled and greeted.

    "You changed a lot. What''s with the princess outfit? I thought I would be seeing you in the battle gear like usual."

    Noah smiled and took a seat opposite to him.

    "I wanted to keep a low profile here. I am trying to give off an aura of a rich youngdy from a noble family."

    "That is a good role to y."

    "Now, tell me what you are nning. With the war tasks that we had, I am almost bored to death."

    "That is what I wanted to talk to you about. Do you have any crew here? Did you bring any with you?"

    "Not at the moment, I am nning on bringing them once Kumar is here though."

    "Okay then, give me the energy signatures of your whole crew when theye. I don''t want you guys to get swept in the chaos I am going to cause."

    "Are you going to tell me or not?"

    Noah asked as she tore a huge piece of perfectly cooked meat with her teeth. Sam chuckled and said.

    "Right now, I don''t have many goals. I am mostly preparing for the rainy days. As of now, the only goal I have is to cause as much chaos as possible. Even for that my main focus is the Olympian region."

    "Yeah, rumors have been flying around. I heard you gave some serious trouble to the Olympians already. I can see it in their eyes, they are scared shitless of you, but given a chance they would love to tear your apart."

    "I mean, isn''t that amon category of people everywhere I go? I would be more surprised if someone isn''t hating my guts."

    They chatted for a while and just spent some time there. Of course, there is nothing romantic. Sam could have discussed this stuff in the restaurant as well. But he did tell her that he will act as her shield and this is him doing it.

    By now all these people pursuing her would have known that she is here with Sam.

    Meanwhile, Dove is sniffing around for some information, and what she learned kind of shocked her.

    Not just her, all the students that came from the Olympian region found some very interesting information. Right after the towers opened, Sam caused a mess in all Olympian academies, but that is not all.

    After setting the records and smashing the pride of all the geniuses there, he disappeared for about ten days from the Olympian region and in those ten days, he traveled around different regions and visited nine academies.

    He caused enoughmotion in all these realms, that he went through twelve trials under the Academy Realm''s Judicial System and he destroyed his opponents in trial bybat. He made fools out of them.

    Most of the people that had a conflict with him ended up losing all their respect there.

    But the worst of all is something he did in the towers.

    Dove is now standing in front of the Thor Academy Tower. She knew of this tower for a long time.

    Thest record was set by a man named Ivar. The alumni of Thor Academy. He climbed the Thor academy tower to the 85th floor.It was a record that was set over a decade ago and the previous record was 75 floors.

    In thest decade, every one of the students tried to break that record, but no one managed to do it.

    But right now, there is another name on the top of the freshmen list. It is not that hard to guess, it is Sam''s name. But what shocked her was the floor he went to.

    The new record is 99 floors and from what she learned he dropped out voluntarily after that. He cleared the 99th floor and went to the 100th but he didn''t bother to finish it. He couldn''t care less to finish it.

    One must know there has been a rumor since the establishment of the academy that there are only a hundred floors in the tower. But no one managed to ascend to that level and no one managed to figure out if the rumor was true.

    When Sam climbed then, everyone hoped that he cleared it, even if he wasn''t part of their academy, but Sam came out. When asked why he didn''t do it, he had only one answer.

    "I don''t feel like it."

    The freshmen and seniors alike almost jumped on Sam to kill him. But the Dean himself stepped in and stopped.

    And Sam did the exact same thing in eight more academies of all the important regions.

    The hatred he attracted almost sent a shiver through Dove''s spine. Because at this ce, Sam is themon enemy of every academy that has a shot to win this tournament. Sam gave them all these seeded academies a perfect reason to team up and go head-to-head with him.

    She couldn''t help but gulp in nervousness.

    When Sam made a mess at the Olympian region, she thought it was some personal hatred, but now it is much bigger than that.

    Time passed.

    The next morning Sam went to thepetition just to spectate the team Formationpetition.

    It isn''t much and it is not going to matter who is going to win it. But he just wanted to spot some talents that are participating here. And if they are from any of the yer academies, he would just destroy them. A genius with a destroyed psych will alwayse in handy.

    The day went eventfully, everyone enjoying thepetitions, and teams trying to one-up on each other. It was a great day.

    But the day after is time for Sam to participate.

    He went to the entrance of the test area. Which is actually a castle.

    The invigtor in charge of the exam stood in front of them to exin.

    Sam could feel the killing intent of all the students around him.

    "I am feeling slightly ufortable now. So, you better direct your gaze somewhere else, before I snap your fucking necks."

 Chapter 2024 Formation Tests

    Chapter 2024 Formation Tests

    There are around fifty odd candidates going for the solo formationpetition and the invigtor started exining the format.

    "All of you will enter the castle at the same time. A space gate will drop all of you at random. No two people wouldnd at the same ce.At the start of the game, you will be at the outermost region of the castle.

    There is a formation acting as boundary within which you need to stay in to be part of thepetition.

    Now, everyone of you will be given a set of obstacles that you need to ovee and reach the center. And at the centre of the castle, we have a trophy ced in the middle of one of the mostplex formations you have seen.

    Your goal is to get that trophy, whoever gets it, wins."

    Everyone is listening intently and the invigtor stopped to let them digest all that information. After two seconds he spoke.

    "There would be constant elimination in thispetition.

    All fifty of you will be given the same level of obstacles. The distance and difficulty will be same for everyone. So, the moment one of you clears their first obstacle, the boundary will start moving.

    As more obstacles clear up, the faster the boundary will close in.

    Once you touch the boundary, you are out.

    For example, even if one person among you clears ten obstacles before the rest of you could even clear one, the boundary would have already eliminated all of you, because it would be closing in on you by then.

    So, be fast.

    Finally, some restrictions.

    None of you can fight directly. No hand to hand, no weapons, no trinkets, no inscriptions, not even formations made from inscriptions, no beasts. Yound as much as a single punch you are out.

    If you really cross paths and want to kill each other, then use formations to fight. You can make some of your own and if you are capable enough use the formations ced in the castle. But all battles must happen with formations only.

    Thepetition ends when one of you holds the trophy.

    Any questions?"

    None of them spoke.

    After a couple of minutes, all of them were led into the castle gates. Sam felt a wave of spatial energy sweep over his body and in the next instant he is standing in a dark room. It is a very small room, as small as a broom closet and he felt restricted.

    He couldn''t move his arms or legs, he couldn''t even turn his eyes and his spiritual sense is restricted to the room. The only thing he could sense is the boundary which is around a hundred meters to his rear.

    Sam was impressed.

    He closed his eyes and spread his energy. It entered the walls of the room and with observation ability he could see the formation and its energy structure. It is indeed aplicated formation, but it is definitely not of a very high level. It is still within his means to easily destroy it.

    But Sam didn''t do that.

    He tried to find a node in the formation that connects to the parts outside of this room. It was hard as the structure of the formation is designed to iste whatever it is inside the room from the rest of the castle. Unless they break it, it is almost impossible to see what happens.

    Almost.

    Sam found the bridge point to the room and the area around the room. After all, since the room is not in a separated dimension there is bound to be some connection to the castle. So, it is only a matter of time, effort and skill to find it. Luckily, he didn''t require a lot of any of those.

    He tried to extend his energy as far as he could to see if he could spot any of the other candidates nearby.

    Even though he managed to get his energy out, he still felt some resistance. After two minutes of no results, he decided to just go on with it.

    "Fuck it."

    The next second, a few threads of energy escaped his body in a burst and targeted a few points in all corners of the room.

    The formation copsed instantly and the first obstacle is cleared. Sam came out of the room and arrived at therge corridor. It is a curved corridor and from what he could guess this might be a circr corridor.

    There are a bunch of rooms just like the one he came out of. He could also sense the boundary slowly moving forward. It seems like he is the first one to clear the first obstacle.

    He thought that the elimination would begin instantly, but luckily the formation is moving very slowly. It would take at least ten minutes for it to close in on the first obstacle range. Sam is actually relieved because of it. There are some ns he made, he didn''t want early eliminations to ur and mess those ns up.

    His energy finally spread again.

    Now with no restrictions, he started checking out the rooms while he walked in a certain direction. After five minutes, he managed to find a path that might lead him out of this corridor. Apart from the rooms that is the only way that he has seen until now.

    The room doors of course are in the direction of the boundary which is closing in.

    Sam didn''t enter the path immediately. Instead, he condensed some energy into his hand. It is space energy and it turned into a few small orbs that created a formation in the palm of his hands. The next moment, the surrounding energy resonated and the same formation, but of arge scale appeared at the mouth of this new entrance.

    With just a thought it assimted into the ground.

    The resonance trick is reallying into handy. Sam then looked around before he stepped into the entrance. The formation did nothing to him. Then for the next couple of minutes he walked at a moderate pace.

    Meanwhile, the other candidates are cursing as most of them are still stuck in the rooms.

    A young man from Thor''s Academy is a bit away from Sam''s room, but he is still the closet and at the moment, he is sweating bullets.

    "Who the fuck cleared the first one so fast?"

    He cursed under his breath and started channeling his energy into the formation. Blue lightning shed as he tried to gain some free motion. After that, he examined the formation with some technique, finally where there is just two minutes left before the boundary closed in on him, he escaped the room.

    "Fucking hell."

    He cursed and started running in the corridor aimlessly. He didn''t know where to go and he couldn''t spread his senses too far. He just picked the left side and ran at full speed and finally he found the entrance that he was looking for.

    But the moment, he set his foot at the mouth of the entrance.

    *ZAP*

    Spatial energy surrounding him and in a sh, he was transferred back into a different spot within the corridor. He is right in front of Sam''s room to be precise.

    He was stunned and since it is a circr corridor, he didn''t even know where to run, but he didn''t even have the time to do so. The boundary closed and he is transported out of the castle.

    He looked around in bewilderment and noticed that there are over three people. All three of them are eliminated because of Sam.

    Usually, the first obstacle is actually easy. But students would take some time to not expend all of their energy. It is first time the invigtor and the elders saw someone that didn''t care much about the expenditure and even set traps right after the first test.

    Instantly Sam who was already attracting a lot of attention became theplete focus.

    Everyone watched as Sam stood in the corridor.

    He reached the middle of it. Sam sensed that the boundary stopped inching forward and he could also sense that something is weird. He activated energy vision and looked around. There are no discernable fluctuations.

    He walked forward with that, he even ran at his full speed, but he couldn''t reach the end of it. It is like a never ending tunnel. Sam realized that he is in the second obstacle.

    Sam sat down and started thinking.

    After a couple of minutes, he sat ced a mark on the wall before he started walking backwards. At the same exact pace that he entered the tunnel with and in exactly two minutes he came to the entrance that he originally came through. His formation was still there and it was triggered three times.

    Right behind itid the boundary.

    He once again conjured a formation and this time utilized it on his own.

    He disappeared and reappeared in the dark tunnel. The mark on the wall is still there and he started walking forward. The mark moved along with him. That seems to be the beginning of that never ending tunnel.

 Chapter 2025 Different Route

    Chapter 2025 Different Route

    Back in the spectator area.

    There is a special room where the elders of various academies including f, the dean of Thor''s academy. They are all watching as the students got stuck in the never-ending tunnel.

    "This guy. He already figured out the problem in the second obstacle. He is pretty good."

    Dean spoke lightly as he watched Sam.

    His gaze is intense as if some anger is hidden deeply inside it. Everyone else agreed.

    "He is certainly fast, but that is still only half of the problem though. We still need to see how he can ovee it."

    "Still, he is way ahead of the rest of the students. They didn''t even find out. Maybe because they expended too much energy in the first obstacle."

    "I don''t know if that is intentional, but this guy really made everyone else take a step back. Three of them literally. That trap is pretty vicious. What the hell are you guys teaching their Chorus? You seemed to have created a dangerous fox." Ady from Hel Academy spoke with a smile.

    Chorus looked at herzily and yawned before saying.

    "We didn''t teach him anything. I am just as surprised as you guys are." His words and his expression didn''t even match. It almost seemed like he couldn''t even be bothered to be here and pay attention to thispetition.

    They obviously that he was bullshitting. But little did they know, the Gambler''s Academy really didn''t teach him anything at all.

    They just focused back on the screen where Sam sat down.

    They could see that he is densely spreading his energy around with his eyes closed. What they couldn''t sense is that Sam is using his observation ability. But to his surprise, even his observation is not piercing past the tunnel walls. The most he could see was the wall on four sides up to four feet thick. It is indeed a very well-reinforced tunnel.

    It would be very hard to dig out of it even if he tried.

    The worst part is, he couldn''t sense any formationid down on the walls. He could even nick the bricks a little, but it took a lot of strength to even do that.

    The material itself is a bit weird.

    As Sam examined it, his body slowly levitated and moved forward once again. After a few meters of walk, he once again reappeared at the same spot. His body slowly went down on to the floor once again.

    After a short while Sam finally opened his eyes, he had an interested expression on his face.

    "This is going to be interesting."

    One of the Elders spoke at the spectating area. It is an elder that belongs to the Thor Academy, the others looked at him in askance. He started exining.

    "The Never-ending tunnel is actually a very special trap. At the current level of the participating students, it is almost impossible for them to solve it alone."

    "Then why bother even using such a trap?"

    "Of course, we have to give them a way out. So, we put up a small loophole in the formation. Using that, they would be able to barely bypass the formation. But for that to happen, it is ideal if there are at least two to three people.

    A single person doing that will be a behemoth of a task.

    And it seems like this guy also noticed it."

    "So, essentially, the trap he set up to screw others, screwed him?"

    An elder grinned wildly as he looked at Chorus with a mocking gaze. But Chorus had the same expression as if this is aplete and utter waste of his time and he couldn''t be bothered to be here.

    At the same moment, in another tunnel, there are three students who also figured out that it is a never-ending tunnel trap and they are trying to figure out what is happening there.

    The elders immediately focused on them because they wanted to see how they would resolve the trap. They even believed they would be the first ones to do it before Sam. But what they don''t see is the smile that is widening on Sam''s face.

    Only Chorus, the one guy who seemed uninterested is focusing on it.

    At this moment, Sam is still sitting on the ground and he is looking at the walls through his observation ability. He opened his eyes and stood up. He got an idea of what this trap actually is and he also found out what could be beyond this.

    Usually, when someone is stuck in a neverending trap, it is most likely an illusion trap. People would be walking in circles, but they would feel like they are walking in a straight line.

    In fact, the trio in the different tunnels are examining for that only. They are trying to find a way to get out of the illusion at this point. But Sam is sure that this is not an illusion. This is a spatial and architectural trick.

    There is a small area here that marks the start of the never-ending tunnel which he also marked with a cross on the brick. Whenever he moves forward from that area, he walks into that same marked area after a few steps.

    And Sam figured out the reason why.

    Now imagine you are on a stationary train. It has exactly eleven carriages in total and you are in the sixth carriage. Exactly the center.

    He is moving forward to reach the seventh carriage and as he walks forward instead of going to the eighth carriage, he ends back in the sixth carriage. In a way, the seventh and fifth carriages are interchanging whenever he is inside.

    Of course, this is just an analogy, Sam doesn''t know how far the tunnel goes in the front, but he does know there is not much in the back. So, essentially, the center mark he is standing in right now is not exactly the center. The tunnel ahead is mostly much longer.

    Now Sam marked the area that he is in as the Origin and the area it upied as a block. He decided to divide the rest of the tunnel in the length of these blocks. He used spatial blink and moved one block forward.

    Hended in the tunnel and as he moved forward, he soon ended up in the same Origin Block.

    He used blink for two blocks,nded, and walked forward. He entered the same origin block once again and even this time, the walking distance needed to reach the origin block afternding is the same.

    Sam repeated the same thing again and again, each time increasing the distance by one block. He blinked three blocks, four blocks, five blocks, six blocks, seven blocks, and finally stopped at eight blocks. Anything past that is restricted.

    He figured the second test area is limited to the eight-block area forward. But no matter how many blocks he traveled ahead with a blink, he only needed to walk the same distance to reach the origin block.

    Apart from all of this, Sam noticed a few more things. The structure of stone bricks in the walls around and above him is veryplicated. It seems like each stone carries an individual formation within it, not on its surface, but inside the structure creating a specialposite.

    As for the spatial formation responsible for swapping of the blocks, it is not within the walls, at least not within the part of the walls that he could track with observation ability. The energy is not passing beneath it.

    The only thing he is sure of is that the wall thickness might be the same on all sides, and it is the same as the floor thickness beneath him and luckily he found something off with the floors. He is sure that it is not just luck, it was left there for him to find out.

    The formations in the internal structure of the stones on the floor have a few open nodes.

    Sam started conjuring another formation on it, but this time it is not a spatial formation, instead it is a formation suited for distortion and deconstruction.

    As soon as the formation wasid down¡­

    *CRACK*

    The floor cracked and then a bunch of stones turned into power.

    With a wave of his hand, the powder flew out an revealed anotheryer of stones beneath it.

    The elders who were watching this were a bit surprised. At the same time, in the tunnel, three people who figured out the never-ending tunnel trick also managed to break the floor."

    "This is impressive. This guy managed to crack it down alone." One of the elders spoke.

    The elder who said it would be hard for Sam frowned and focused. Then he revealed a smile.

    "Huh, I knew it. It can''t be that easy. See, that guy only cracked oneyer of the floor. There is anotheryer beneath it. He messed up because, unless he breaks both theyers at the same time, he wouldn''t be able to go past the route."

    Then only the elders noticed that the other tunnel with three participants created a hole.

    The three of them went down and that screen changed to a new location with a room that had three paths for them to take.

    Meanwhile, on Sam''s screen, he had a smirk on his face. His energy ran wild as it was directed to the secondyer of the floor. He used the observation ability and it is spread throughout the tunnel. Instead of the first surface, it is all enveloped to the second surface.

    Sam smirked the next moment.

    There are twoyers to this tunnel. The outeryer holds the space formations. Whichever block Samnds on after the origin block, the tunnel will interchange the whole block with the one before the origin block.

    It is a very straightforward one. The only reason it was undetectable is because of the intricate formations in the inneryer. Sam activated partial space fusion and injected his energy into the wall.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Small explosions happened throughout and the Elder who was just bragging about how Sam couldn''t solve the formation, stood up. Sam didn''t make a hole in the origin block like the others. Instead, he walked forward in the tunnel and this time, the blocks didn''t interchange. In the next minute, he is in apletely different room.

 Chapter 2026 Mishap

    Chapter 2026 Mishap

    The scene on the Sam''s screen and the scene on the rest of the people''s screens ispletely different.

    Luckily in this round, no one was eliminated. The Elder who talked about the Never Ending tunnel in a never ending humble brag now wants to pull his hair out.

    "This is interesting. He is in apletely different cepared to the rest. What will happen now, Elder?" The Elder from Hel Academy asked with a raised eyebrow. This is extremely amusing for her.

    But the Elder himself is gulping hard.

    "He is at a ce that he is not supposed to be in."

    He gritted his teeth and took out amunication token to contact someone.

    "A freshman contestant swarmed into the Grade 2 Zone in the Castle. We need to get him out of here. Try to remote operate a formation and see if you can get him out of there."

    "Yes, I will try." The other side replied, but the next moment Chorus spoke up.

    "What do you think you are doing?"

    "I am saving that guy''s life." Elder replied with a frown.

    "No, what you are doing is getting him out of thepetition unfairly. I won''t agree to that."

    The Elder stood up and spoke angrily.

    "That bastard walked into the Grade 2 test zone. It was the test zone prepared for the Inter-Academy Main tournament, for the Grade 2 students and only the equipment and traps required were set up there at the moment.

    We have yet to work on the restrictions that would save the candidates if they stumble up on some dangerous stuff there."

    The other elders widened their eyes in shock.

    The Elder of Hel academy in particr grinned wildly.

    "So, that means this guy is way out of his depth by being in a higher level test zone that he was supposed to be in and there are all kinds of traps set up to take him down without the contingencies that could save his life."

    "That is exactly it."

    f, the dean of the Thor''s academy is still sitting there without speaking. His gaze focused on Chorus who is just aszy as before. Except his eyes are a bit focused.

    "First of all, you are the reason that he is in that zone. You overestimated your abilities and let a freshman break the formation to enter this overkill zone.

    You are afraid now that if something happens to him, your ipetence would be remembered along with his death.

    But I am not going to let you pull my academy''s student off, just because you want to save your own ass.

    If you want to make any changes, shove them back into the Grade 1 test zone. If you cannot do that, just inform him of the situation and then let him make the decision. If you forcefully pull him out, I am not going to let you off."

    "Are you fucking threatening me right now?"

    The Elder stepped forward and screamed at Chorus.

    Chorus gave him a sweeping nce and said.

    "No, I am not threatening you. I am threatening him." He looked at f and continued.

    "You know me f, make a decision or pay the price."

    f didn''t even change his expression a bit, but ordered the elder.

    "Just do as he told you."

    The Elder contacted his team and gave them instructions to contact Sam, soon the room had a direct link with Sam who is standing in a dark room that only has one path ahead.

    "Hello Sam, this is f speaking."

    Sam replied casually.

    "Hello Dean, I am a bit confused. Is it okay for Deans to contact students in the middle of the contest?"

    "In special circumstances like these, it is eptable. Here''s the situation¡­" f went on to exin everything that happened.

    Sam nodded in realization. Even though he managed to get past the second trap the never ending tunnel rtively easily. He did feel like its way too big of a challenge. He did find the entrance that could lead him downward, but since he figured out the way to move forward, he didn''t bother.

    "So, I am in the Grade 2 Competition. Is it possible for me to go back to the Grade 1 Competition?" He asked.

    "No. It would be hard." The Elder replied.

    "How hard?"

    "If we really decide to do that, thepetition for the rest of the students will be interfered. The path you took to enter the current room is a one-way trap formation. The key to the trap can only be unlocked when all the trap paths are closed."

    "You could have ced a trigger to short the trap. Even a short energy overload trigger would be fine." Sam replied as if it is not much of a big deal.

    The Elder was stumped a bit and he got angry.

    "Then the rest of the circuit would be shut down as well. The whole point is for the remaining traps to be active as well. Stop preaching me if you don''t understand, kid."

    "I mean, you could have added an extrayer and some back up energy field to ensure parallel flow of energy. Anyway, whatever. I really don''t know the exact standards of your formation expertise, it is better for me to not say anything.

    Now, let''s talk about what I should do. I am not going to get out of thispetition that easily. I am sure I could win this whole thing. So, please don''t tell me that you are expecting me toe out of it just like that.

    I am not giving up my glory."

    "YOU¡­" The Elder almost lost it.

    "Shut it" f stopped him and spoke. "What do you suggest now Sam?"

    "I want to proceed with thepetition. Even if I have to go through the Grade 2. But of course it would be unfair, so give me a few things topensate for my extra difficulty."

    "What would that be?"

    "First of all, double the rewards. Whatever I win in this Grade 2 Competition, I need double that. Second, I need the formal announcement of this situation during the award ceremony. Third, give me theyout of the Grade 1 formation test."

    "Why do you need theyout?"

    "I am just curious. Also give me the starting points of the contestants as well."

    f frowned.

    "What are you nning Sam? Don''t you dare try to pull something distasteful. I might have been in the wrong here, but even your Dean wouldn''t want to do something too brazen."

    "Well, I am not my Dean now, am I?

    Anyway, I will take a step back. Give me theyout. No need for the contestant details. I am sure I deserve to know what the Grade 1 tests are."

    f thought for a moment and then agreed. The Elder immediately sent the details through a special method. He tapped a formation that projected a screen with theyout. Sam is a bit impressed. He memorized theyout and started walking forward.

    Luckily, the destination point for both Grade 1 and Grade 2 is the same. He is sure that he will meet the contestants there right before the final point. The only thing is he doesn''t want to meet them there.

    At least not all of them. He doesn''t abide by the saying, the more the merrier. He would prefer as less people as possible.

    Sam walked straight to the path that would lead to the next area. The area that would be the third obstacle for him. He walked and he ended up in an empty room. At least that is what it looked like at first nce.

    But the next second, apart from one tile that he was standing on that was right at the mouth of the entrance, the rest of the tiles of the room copsed. The bottom is endless and even his divine sense and energy vision are unable to give him an estimate. He looked at the ceiling and that is also the same.

    The next moment, Sam heard a faint noiseing from the bottom. After a short while, he could see a faint hint of glittery movement from that dark deep bottom.

    *SPLASH*

    It didn''t take his genius to figure out what it is. Water is surging upwards at a rapid pace. As Sam looked at it with focus, the tile under his foot disappeared as well. He instantly tried to stay afloat, but his levitation also didn''t work.

    *SPLASH*

    Samnded in the water. He steadied his breath and looked around. Underneath the water he could see a bunch of tiles on the wall glowing. These glowing tiles are at random and the glow is varying between bright and slightly dim.

    He tried to swim up, but to his surprise the water felt like sludge when he did so. He felt like he is dragging mountains when he tried to swim up. He was able to move sideways and he was able to swim deeper easily.

    But he couldn''t move up at the same pace.

    This is weird.

    Sam activated his water fusion to stay in the water more safely. Then he noticed another factor. His energy depletion increased by a lot. Now he understood why they didn''t want Sam to go through Grade 2 test. The energy consumption wouldn''t support a standard Grade 1.

    If that is not all, the cherry on top of the situation is what Sam saw next. All of a sudden the glowing tiles started vibrating in a certain pattern before the water conjured and created a shark underneath his feet.

    The shark licked its watery mouth with the watery tongue as it came to bit off Sam''s neck.

 Chapter 2027 Final Room

    Chapter 2027 Final Room

    Sam skillfully maneuvered around the shark and activated his energy vision.

    He knew that there is some rtion between the glowing tiles, their vibrating glows and the shark itself. And he is right, as always. The shark is being controlled by few of the glowing tiles. With the energy vision, he could also see that the energy concentration on tiles is different and right now, a set of tiles that have the same level of energy concentration are the ones creating this shark.

    Sam dodged the shark attack and swam towards one of the tiles that is acting as the node for the shark.

    He used the observation ability on the glowing tile and the tiles around it. The material is very much suitable to create formation nodes. He injected his own energy into the tiles around the glowing tile. Those tiles also started glowing, but it is different. They have a faint hue indicating Sam''s control over those tiles.

    *BOOM*

    After Sam activated six tiles around the glowing tile it exploded. The Shark that almost caught Sam disappeared and became one with the water. The remaining tiles are still glowing and are pretty much active. But exploding this one destroyed the formation.

    Sam kept his energy vision active and remained cautious. He tried to swim up, but the resistance is still there. Still he noticed some difference. It reduced a little bit. Even though he knew it might not work, he still tried to use space blink.

    As expected it didn''t work.

    The next moment, Sam noticed something, a different glowing tile which was initially not part of the formation that created suddenly gave out energy at a different frequency. It came into sync with the tiles of shark formation and all of a sudden the water started conjuring.

    It is another giant fish.

    Again a shark, but its body structure is a bit different. If the previous one looked close to Great White Shark, this one looked close to a Tiger Shark.

    It didn''t pose too much threat to Sam.

    He dodged, slipped and aimed his hand at a different glowing tile. The energy conjured and the resonance was achieved. The surrounding six tiles glowed at the same time and exploded the tile part of the formation. The shark disappeared.

    Sam kept a close eye on the rest of the glowing tiles and he noticed another surge.

    He also noticed that the resistance upward reduced a little bit more. He finally understood what the task it. These glowing tiles are rted to the resistance to move up. And they are responsible for creating obstacles that could kill Sam. He needs to destroy these tiles and he can only use the surrounding tiles to create formations to do so.

    Luckily, the resonance is working extremely well.

    Elemental energy conjured in Sam''s palm. The orbs turned and arranged themselves into a formation. The next movement, two more sets of orbs of muchrger scale appeared at the walls and they immersed themselves into the tiles.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The glowing tiles were destroyed. Once the trick is found out, it is easy. It wouldn''t be much of a challenge. Sam just went on to deal with the remaining tiles. Once the surrounding tiles were destroyed, Sam was free to swim up.

    But after he swam for a few meters, another set of tiles on the walls started glowing and this time, the number is twice as many. Two conjured beasts came at the same time. It seems like there are sublevels within the test.

    Still, once the trick is revealed it is much easier for Sam. He kept on moving up the levels and soon he came across a patch of the wall that is glowing as a whole. It is the exact fit for a person to enter.

    *BOOM*

    With one more formation, Sam destroyed the entrance and along with the water he was also dragged into that path. In the next room is once again a small room with a path ahead. The water that came along with him went through the path.

    Sam sat down and closed his eyes.

    "It seems like he is at least having a challenge. But that speed in which he came past that third obstacle, he almost made it look easy."

    Elder from Hel spoke and the Elder from Thor Academy cursed under his breath. Everyone almost abandoned the rest of the screens. They are all looking at Sam''s screen to witness how he is going to pass a higher grade test.

    They thought Sam was resting since he sat there.

    "He better not waste too much time. The third obstacle was cleared by the others long before and the boundary is moving. That room is not exactly the safe spot he thinks it is." The Elder said and it is apparent that he wanted to see Sam fail.

    But at this moment, Sam is actually sensing something.

    After twenty minutes or so, he conjured a lot of energy on his palm and a bunch of formations started appearing on various spots on the floor. After they touched the floor though, they disappeared. The elders were puzzled.

    "What formation is that? Why didy down so many?"

    One of them asked. Elder in charge of the exam contacted the team to get the answer, but they couldn''t find out. Sam walked forward and entered the path. His palm is still glowing as he conjured up various formations and they dissolved after they touched the stone.

    After some time, the team figured that the formation is just a dummy formation and Sam is using that as a make shift detection formation. The formation is indeed being absorbed into the stones of the walls and the floor, but it is going dormant with no effect whatsoever.

    They could scrub this off after the test.

    Sam moved to the next test area.

    He chuckled at what he saw. The whole room is filled with knee deep water. There are some tforms in the middle and they have a bunch of heavy puppetsying down dormant.

    He couldn''t see past the water, but he could guess the depth.

    He ced his hand in the water and the next moment, the puppets started moving. Most of them are puppets designed after the amphibious creatures. And they pumped the water out and started shooting water spears at Sam.

    He jumped into the air and dodged it with his wind element.

    The only problem is that he couldn''t levitate once again. Sam dove into the water and submerged underneath it. He activated water fusion once again and spread his body as much as possible before activating observation ability.

    He knew there should be some sort of indication here and he is right. Glowing tiles once again.

    Sam moved to that point and barely dodged a water spear aimed at him. A turtle came at Sam at unimaginable speed and tackled him. He crashed into the wall and barely dodged the next attack. He spread another formation underneath the turtle.

    *BOOM*

    The turtle wasunched into the air, crashed into the ceiling and fell back into the water again. Its power fluctuated a bit. Sam came to the glowing tile and started examining it.

    As soon as he injected his energy into it, a bunch of tiles glowed around it activated a formation. It is an attack formation. Sam instantly understood. He has to take control over the formation and attack, but to take control he needs to crack the formation that is acting as a lock.

    As everyone watched, Sam cracked it in five seconds before he upied the attack formation and just like that, the battle became easy. The puppets are destroyed one by one and he collected the cores that acted as nodes to create a formation in the middle of the room that opened the path for the next area.

    The fourth obstacle is cleared and this time he cleared it almost at the same time as the Grade 1 people.

    Sam walked forward and started releasing the formations once again.

    As the surprised elders watched, Sam passed through the second-grade test like the Freshmen passing through the first-grade test. He made it look easy and somewhere he overtook the first graders and started solving the obstacles faster than them.

    Soon, he is almost at the end of it.

    There is only one final obstacle in the final room. It is a giant room with a tform in the middle of it. The trophy is on that tform. The whole room is covered with red tiles, except for the tiles that created a path connecting the entrances into the room and the tform.

    There are fifteenrge tiles forming the path and each tile has a formation. He needs to crack them and the formation that is covering the tform to get the trophy.

    An energy thread extended from Sam and touched the formation on the first tile. The thread extended and started dissolving into the formation, after a couple of minutes the thread came from the other side of that formation and went past it to reach the second one.

    Sam repeated this and reached the fifteenth formation as he waited for rest of the geniuses toe.

 Chapter 2028 Plans and Plans

    Chapter 2028 ns and ns

    Sam waited there for a long while.

    Since he was already here, a bunch of students were already eliminated and only the cream of the crop was left. When they came out, they were exhausted. Not a single one of them looked energetic.

    Some of them had bruises all over, one even had a broken leg.

    He is practically dragging it over.

    They all looked at Sam who is ying with the formations in front. Upon closer look, they realized not just the formations in front, he is feeling out the formations on the other paths as well. Sam gave a sweeping nce and looked at the candidates who came from different regions.

    He looked at one particr candidate and smiled.

    "You are from Hou Yi''s academy, aren''t you?"

    The other party is wary. Of course, Hou Yi''s academy was not exempt from Sam''s tower-conquering quest. So, that guy knew about Sam plenty. But he still nodded.

    "I am impressed."

    He muttered and looked at the rest of the candidates.

    "So, guys. I nned something really big when I entered thispetition. But too bad due to a mishap I ended up taking a different route than the rest of you. So, my ns messed up a bit. Otherwise, I doubt any of your would have made it this far."

    His words earned a frown.

    Not just from the contestants, but also from the spectators as well.

    "Still, I cannot let those setbacks change my npletely. That is why I am nning a spectacr finale.

    I am giving you guys exactly three minutes to break all these formations and reach the trophy. In these three minutes, apart from conjuring energy, I wouldn''t be doing anything else. But the next second after these three minutes are over, I am going to im that trophy.

    I don''t care if you believe me or not.

    But if you don''t, it will be your loss. Your time starts now."

    Sam said energy started conjuring around him. Energy orbs are formed and they float to different parts of the room at random. They are like dandelions flying away from him. It looked beautiful.

    The rest of the candidates though didn''t have enough time to admire that beauty.

    Most of them believed Sam. They didn''t risk it and started cracking the formation. One of them even went ahead and took a risky way out.

    *BOOM*

    He started destabilizing the formation in the crudest way possible and he is taking in some damage. Of course, even that part is difficult. Because if they don''t use the proper formation to destabilize, there is a great chance they might create a tougher lock for themselves.

    *BOOM*

    It seems like with the added pressure everyone''s brains are working at overdrive. They managed to crack the first formation very quickly.

    They carried that quickness to the second one. But for the third one, things became trickier.

    *BOOM*

    Except for the crazy guy who is exploding the formation.

    Time passed and those three minutes felt like an eternity. The only problem is that in that eternity they felt, none of them were able to clear the formations.

    "FUCK FUCK FUCK"

    The guy who is exploding the formations started screaming as he tried to destabilize the next one. He is the farthest of the bunch standing on the eighth formation. Halfway there.

    "Sorry guys, time is up."

    Only at this moment did everyone notice that the orbs are all over the roomThey are densely packed and there is not even much space left for them to move around without touching one. For some reason, they felt that they shouldn''t be touching them.

    They had an ominous feeling.

    In a way, they were right.

    *SNAP*

    With a single snap of his fingers, the orbs started shooting out energy rays. They connected together and formations were created.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Explosions rained down and soon the contestants noticed that the formations that they were standing in at the moment were also being destroyed in those explosions. A few of them were bold enough to make a run towards the trophy.

    They wanted to try their luck and they even reached the tform.

    Only when the energy and dust cleared up, Sam is sitting on the tform as if he just sat there from the beginning.

    "I gave you guys a chance."

    He said and the next moment all the students copsed. Sam looked up and said in a low voice.

    "Oops, it seems like the energy explosions are too much for them to handle. Better send someone to save them right away. Or they might sustain some permanent injuries. You don''t want these prodigies to lose the ability to make formations, do you?"

    His tone is concerning and his words actually match the tone.

    But this didn''t make the elders feel the slightest bit of goodwill towards him. They even wanted to kill him directly. If only they are capable of it and if only they could get away with it.

    Choruszily stretched as the Elders ran over to take care of the kids. When the Dean was about to move, Chorus spoke.

    "Remember f, double the rewards."

    "I didn''t forget."

    "Last time we met, you had some serious memory problems. So, I just thought, I would just remind you. But it seems like the treatment from that time worked."

    Chorus spoke as he cracked his knuckleszily.

    f shot him a re before he left. Sam went back to his room in the Paradise. The prizes are not going to be distributed now. He had to wait to collect them all at the end of thepetition.

    Sam became the talk of the town. Which is normal by now. But his actions created some reactions in many ces.

    One of those ces hosted a rich crowd that night. The elite students, mostly leaders of different academies met there in secret.

    Thor, a student of the academy is hosting the meeting and only another twelve people are present there. All of them are the children or rtives of the current deans of different elite academies. They are all of the same generation and almost of the same age.

    Thor looked at the group and said.

    "As you must have witnessed, the firstpetitions are big upsets. The formation teampetition is fine, we still had an expected result, but the solopetition is dominated by Sam."

    The rest stayed silent and didn''t speak. Thor continued.

    "I did some digging.

    The reason Pearl is not here, which is also a huge wrench in our ns is also because of this guy. He is the one who made her unable toe. She executed our group''s n in her region, but it was cracked by Sam.

    It was leaked and theybined forces to break her down.

    It seems like she is almost not mentally sane anymore. I heard she took the blow too hard."

    This earned some reaction from the rest. A girl among them spoke up.

    "Pearl broke down mentally? Are you kidding Thor? Do you remember what she did thest time you challenged her intellect and fortitude?"

    Thor blushed a bit and cleared his throat.

    "I am not just spouting bullshit here.

    This is what I got from an agent ced in the Olympian region and it is authentic.

    It seems like even her subordinates are not briefed about our ns. We cannot use them."

    "This is going to be a problem. Pearl is one of the smartest among us. A lot of stuff is riding on her improvisations. And we already lost the Formation test. What are we going to do?"

    "What else can we do? We just need to proceed as nned. We just have to take extra measures for theck of Pearl''s presence.

    As for Sam, I think we can find a proper scapegoat to deal with him."

    "Who?"

    "The one from Aranya''s Academy. That girl named Noah seems to have hots for Sam and the second best of the Aranya''s Academy, Likhma has a crush on her."

    "But is he strong enough?"

    "He is not, but there is someone that wille out if Likhma is screwed. Let me y the cards right and we will deal with Sam without even getting involved."

    They discussed a few things and ended the meeting.

    They were sure that their ns for Sam and the rest of thepetition went smoothly, but they were disappointed. Sam never came out of his room, unless for thepetition. Even then, they didn''t even know when he came out and when he went back in.

    And whenever he participated in apetition, he just destroyed thepetition. Inscription test, Medicine making, and Puppet making. He surprisingly dominated thepetitions. The only thing he got in second is Weapon making and the guy who won is from Viswa Karma''s Academy.

    Even thatpetition is a close one. It is so close to the point that the winner was impressed with Sam and they even had a friendly chat over a drink in Paradise Inn.

    Before they knew it it was already time for thest twopetitions. Team Battle and Solo Battle.

    The twopetitions that always attract the most eyes.

 Chapter 2029 Teamed Up

    Chapter 2029 Teamed Up

    All the teams selected for the battle are gathered in front of the testing site.

    The spectator seats were arranged back at the Thor Academy grounds and they are witnessing the whole fiasco in a bunch of screens. It seems like no matter how far apart the realms are, most of them are using the same type of technology and methods forpetitions like these.

    Sam is standing along with the rest of the Gambler''s academy team. Dove, the other senior and Chorus are all standing along with the team as well.

    This time the whole fiasco is a bit more grandpared to the previouspetitions. Every team had a g in their hands. Turns out, this one is also a g capturepetition. But unlike before, all the teams will enter the testing area at the same time.

    They will all do a lottery and be assigned different spots within the testing field as their bases.

    They will establish their bases with the g as their center. They cannot use any external means toy down a formation. They cannot even use their own weapons to set up the formation, no formation nodes and no formation discs.

    They cannot even bring their own inscription tools.

    Of course, there is a way for them to gain all these things. As soon as they establish their bases thepetition will start and every five minutes, beasts will be sent into the testing field. Every beast would be at the Middle Stage of Divine ne Initiation.

    The teams can hunt the beasts and within their bodies, they will find some goodies that will help them establish their formations, inscriptions, etc. Of course, these Divine ne cultivators are elites and they have their own ways to create formation nodes, but they are way too traditional in terms of their approach to these things.

    They need to use these things to create the formations so the rest of the team can move freely.

    Of course, that is not all thepetition.

    Once thepetition starts, the students are wee to fight each other and capture their gs, and once a g is captured and brought back to the home base of the captors, the gs will merge. Once all the gs are captured and only one team remains, then win.

    The whole game is a tad bit moreplicated than regr capture of the g.

    Not tooplicated though, it is straightforward enough.

    The lottery is done by the elders and Chorus stepped forward to deal with it. At this time, Dove nudged at Sam and spoke.

    "I need to talk to you?"

    "Can it wait? I need to focus on thepetition."

    "Focus on it? The rest of the kids told me that they didn''t want to participate in thepetition until it is an emergency. What is that all about?"

    Sam looked at the rest of the team with a raised eyebrow. Tattletales.

    "So, what if I said so?"

    "That cannot happen. You need to y an active role in thepetition. This time the rest of the teams have a grudge against the Gambler''s Academy mostly because of you. So, you need to help out.

    Take themand and lead the team."

    She demanded.

    Sam looked at her and sighed. The first impression he had of her was very great. She is not the best in fighting, not the best in formations, and not even the best at strategy. But she is the leader of the Grade 4 in Gambler''s academy.

    He wondered what kind of person she is and even kept a close eye on the wristbands and the hub. She didn''t give away anything. She was always cold and calcting. Very reserved and calm. She was mostly handling the administrative duties and helped Crow manage the menial work.

    She handled the bullying cases and investigation for the enforcement hall in the Academy and the Judiciary proceedings inside the city.

    She was like a robot.

    But all of a sudden, she turned into an annoying and nosy neighborhood middle-ageddy.

    Sam also noticed that she was literally teaching the rest of the First Grade students like little kids. Even some of the Grade 2 students are no exception. This is really getting to him.

    "I don''t want to."

    "I am not asking. It is your responsibility as the strongest to do that. The rest of them don''t have the guts to order you around."

    Sam didn''t say anything and just stayed put. She kept on annoying him, but Sam ignored her and just asionally cursed under his breath. He looked at the rest of the Grade 1 students from his team. He really wanted to beat the crap out of them.

    Soon, it was time to get in.

    They got their base location and Sam is a bit surprised. They are ced in a central position. They don''t have any cover around. Their location is in a small ind in the middle of ake. Theke is very big and it covers arge area around that small ind.

    Sam wouldn''t have thought much.

    But the looks he got from the Thor Academy''s youngsters as well as the Hel Academy''s youngsters made him think otherwise. He knew something is odd about thatke.

    It didn''t take long for him to figure out the reason though.

    As soon as they went into the vicinity of theke, they understood immediately. First of all, theke is very deep. Sam could guess that it is at least a couple of hundred meters deep which is unusual for ake.

    And the supposed ind they were given is very small. Only a couple of square meters. If that is not all, there is another problem and that came from the water itself. With his observation ability, Sam noticed that the water is unbelievably potent with water elemental energy.

    It is very active.

    It almost felt like a very diluted form of liquid energy. If that is all, it wouldn''t be a problem. The water is polluted with another form of energy. Death energy. It is equally potent along with the water elemental energy.

    It is not noticeable at first nce, if not for Sam''s vampire part and the observation abilitybined, he wouldn''t have also noticed this. He could see the effect it would have on the rest. This ce is not suitable for most formations and thendmass of the ind is very small.

    The normal formations wouldn''t be able to hold much energy to stop the attacks of Divine ne cultivators.

    Sam hardly thought it would be possible to hold normal formations on theke even if they found the formation discs or nodes that could work on the water. This is going to be tricky. Of course, a bit fun too.

    Sam noticed that his teammates were already hard at work. They didn''t go too far away, but they started scouting the immediate area around them, where they could set up some traps. A couple of them were about to dive into theke. But Sam stopped them.

    "Check out the surroundings. Leave the water for now. It is not safe."

    The teammates frowned and wanted to ask some questions. But they decided against it and did as Sam told them. He tried to control the water. But it is not easy.

    The resistance is way too much.

    He started studying the water. He is not too worried about the g at the moment. The rest of the team as well, felt reassured about the presence of the g. In their opinion, the best strategy for every team is to secure the location around themselves first.

    It didn''t take long for the five minutes to be up.

    *ROAR*

    All the teams heard the roar of a beast that appeared in the middle of the testing area.

    In a way, it is not that far away from Sam''s position. He looked at the rest of the team and said.

    "I will go take a look. You guys stay here and take a defensive stance. As I said, don''t try to interact with the water much. Stay on the ind or on the bank of theke.

    Don''t get into the water. I will go to the beast and see what the stat¡­"

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam didn''t even get to finish what he was saying when he had to dodge an arrow shot right at his face. He frowned and looked around. His energy riled up. He could sense around twenty people around the area.

    All of them did not even bother to hide their aura.

    And leading them is a familiar face.

    Likhma.

    There are a few more familiar presences around.

    "Quite an entourage, I must say."

    *ROAR* *ROAR*

    Sam could hear the roars of the beast. It is clearly in a fight.

    It seems like the teams all came to an agreement and they attacking two things at the same time and that too together.

    One is Sam''s team and the other is the beast.

 Chapter 2030 Likhmas Formation

    Chapter 2030 Likhma''s Formation

    Sam looked at the rest of the Gambler Academy Team.

    They are a bit nervous. It is actually impressive that they are notpletely scared. Sam could see that they weremunicating within themselves to get out of this situation.

    "You are Likhma, I suppose. You are the one who warned me about Noah." Sam spoke as he stood on the water on theke.

    A man from the Hel academy who hid in the shadows snickered when he saw this. He assumed that Sam didn''t know about the state of thiske.

    "I am Likhma. You should have listened to me when I warned you. Now your team also has to suffer because of your arrogance."

    "Before we talk about suffering, I want to ask. Did you personally convince these select groups of people toe and fight against me or did your teams reach an alliance to kick the Gambler Academy out first?"

    "Why do you want to know? Are you curious about the reason for your demise?"

    "Think whatever you want. Just answer me."

    *SWOOSH*

    The answer came in the form of an arrow from far away.

    Sam stepped to the side and caught it before it could go past him.

    "It is rude to attack when we are still talking. I would appreciate some answers before this fight starts. After all, it wouldn''t be possible tomunicate after the fight is over." His voice is calm. Almost dejected.

    "I will fulfil your wish." Likhma seemed to have gained some confidence.

    "I wanted to kill you the moment we met, so this is obviously my gathered these forces.

    I had to offer some sweet deals out to these teams to get all of them onboard. But I am sure it is worth it. Making you bite the dust will be more than satisfactory.

    Now, enough talking. Let''s fight. I want to see you struggle."

    The next moment, vines shot out of the ground underneath his foot and turned into massive flowers that started shooting wooden pikes at Sam.

    Sam dodged them easily, but to his surprise, the pikes exploded when they went past him with poisonous smokeing out of them. Sam raised an eyebrow at this.

    *SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    The next moment, the arrows whistled towards him, which he had to block with a dagger. Fireballs, Icicles, long-range attacks rained down on Sam. The worst problem is not even the attacks, it is the gambler academy team.

    Sam created an energy barrier around one of the teammates and closed the distance between them.

    "You are the supposed leader for the rest of the team. So, just do exactly what I tell you from now on."

    Both of them moved together as they blocked the attacks. Luckily, no one was approaching to capture the g, so Sam managed to exin his n without any hups.

    The teammate was shocked.

    "Are you sure? Are you confident in doing this?"

    "Yeah. I wouldn''t have suggested to you otherwise."

    Sam looked at into the horizon, the roars of the beasts died down.

    "It seems like they all killed the beast. They might still not decide on the spoils distribution and in a minute the second beast would be released. Just do as I say.

    n. I also know that in my current state, it is not easy to kill you in a battle and you even have the quit option to use. That is why I I am sure, you can carry your own weight.

    I assure you that the g is secure right here."

    The next moment, the teammates all acted in sync. Sam caught a hold of a spear that was thrown at him. The energy in it was negated instantly before he filled the spear with his own golden mes.

    *BOOM*

    The spear flew with a trail of zing golden mes that destroyed everything in its path.

    The nine teammates followed the spear closely and took the path to get out of the encirclement. The surrounding people were stunned. The attack that Sam gave off is not beyond their imagination, but they didn''t expect him to use it at this early stage of the fight.

    It is a killer move and it would take a lot of energy.

    On top of it all, it wasn''t used in a proper way. The gambler''s team however thought differently, all nine of them left and are now out in the open field, they ran to the new beast that appeared in the area. The other teams sent a few of their people and they all ran to the beasts.

    But when they saw the Gambler Academy studentsing and they were nine of them, all of them had bells ringing in their heads. The news immediately traveled to the bases of the academies. Nine of these people are here means, the g only has Sam there.

    If they capture the g, they would set up a new record in the g capture.

    Every team started plotting. Including the teams of Thor and Hel Academy. Except for one. Noah looked at her teammates discussing and she only had one thing to say.

    "Don''t be stupid. I am not going to lead the attack team to Gambler Academy Base." That is what she said. Even though she kept a low profile, it doesn''t mean her abilities werepletely overlooked. She is still one of the primary candidates in the team.

    So when their acting leader asked her to make a move, that is the answer she gave.

    "But this is a great opportunity. If you and Likhma joined forces, the area control you have will easily get us the g. Even getting back to the base is an easy task."

    Noah looked at him like he was an idiot.

    "And what do you think Sam will be doing while we try to pull that off? I am telling you, the more people you send, the more likely we are facing trouble. I am already against Likhma going there. I am not about to make the same mistake."

    The leader grumbled. He thought Noah is letting her personal affection to Sam impact the decision, but he didn''t override her and kept the team to himself.

    Meanwhile, the other teams are still making ns, and back at the Lake, Sam stayed on the smallndmass as he blocked and deflected all the attacksing from different directions.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Explosive sounds overwhelmed the surroundings, thendmass is copsing bit by bit and he only had a small footing left there. Sam noticed something in the middle of all of this, the attacks are aiming at him, but the secondary goal seemed to have been drenching him in that water full of death energy.

    Too bad, they didn''t know much about Sam.

    After a few minutes, Likhma made a few hand signs which is weird for a Divine ne cultivator, but the next second, vines rapidly grew out of the banks of theke and flew towards Sam. They are spreading from all directions.

    They even created a boundary.

    Likhma held his position and channeled the surrounding forest''s energy into these vines and created a formation. An enclosed formation that surrounded the wholeke.

    The rest of the candidates jumped over and stood on top of the vines that created several bridges and tforms toward Sam. In that translucent green barrier, the vines, and the brightke, it looked like a scene out of a fantasy movie.

    Sam activated his energy vision to check out the situation.

    He understood the n. The vines created by Likhma are acting as nodes for the formation and he is acting as the energy transformer. He is gathering energy from the vegetation to create the formation. Apart from that, the vines extended into theke and the ind are serving another purpose.

    They act as filters. They are absorbing the death energy directed at the contestants and neutralized it so that the students wouldn''t be effected by it.

    Sam smiled as he looked at the twenty odd people that are staring at him with menace in their eyes.

    He cracked his knuckles and said.

    "Now, the fun begins."

    He took his staff and spun it for a moment. The water rippled and a slight breeze all the contestants. Sam''s body started changing a bit. His hair gained a blood red hue, his eyes turned blood red and his canines grew a bit like fangs.

    He breathed in the death energy and took in the death energy. The next moment from within his shadow grew out the shadow undead. Six humanoid figures. They all stood on top of the water. They also held metal staves in their hands and took a stance simr to that of Sam.

    The contestants already had a bad feeling. But they gritted their teeth and decided to hold on.

    "Since you are the elite among elite, I think its fair if I go a step further. Don''t call it unfair, you are the one with number advantage."

    The next moment, partial fusion activated. Water elemental fusion, the blue and blood red huebined and Sam looked like apletely different person, but that is not all. The blue turned into purple.

    Hydra''s poison shouldn''t be left out when there is such a grand audience waiting for him to perform.

    Sam kicked on the ground and flew high into the air. He didn''t aim at anyone and just swung the staff at theke.

    *BOOM*

    With a single hit, theke was cleaved into two and made a straight line creating two massive waves that hit either side. The shockwave went straight and hit Likhma who shook and the formation started shaking along with him.

 Chapter 2031 Play

    Chapter 2031 y

    The initial attack was just to cause a distraction.

    Sam kicked off and turned his attention to the closest opponent who had a sword in his hands. He is from the Thor Academy and he is also a lightning user. Looking at Sam who looked like a weird demonic creatures with his purple-red color and pale skin, he created a sphere of lightning around himself to defense.

    *BAM*

    Sam''s staffnded squarely on the sphere and shook it.

    *SWOOSH*

    An arrow came at Sam from a different direction. He took a turn and swung his staff at it. The arrow was deflected and went in the direction of another opponent. Meanwhile, the swordsman from Thor Academy braced himself and attacked Sam from behind.

    *CLANG*

    The sword shed with the staff because of Sam''s defense who already turned around to meet the opponent and the next moment a flurry of exchanges began in between.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    The staff and sword shed with explosive metallic sounds as the lightning destroyed the surroundings. By now the rest of the opponents managed to regain some senses from Sam''s initial attacks and started focusing on him.

    *BANG*

    Sam blocked the sword attack with his staff while holding it with one hand and caught a spearing at him.

    *SWOOSH*

    He threw the spear towards the g. A woman from a different academy was slowly reaching out to the g and the spear brushed past her cheek. A small cut appeared. She was a bit shocked and her heartbeat raised crazily.

    At first she thought it was just from the rush of being attacked.

    However she soon realized that something is wrong. Purple lines appeared on her body and they started from her cheek. Her body started paralyzing a bit. On top of that, the death energy started invading her body along with that poison.

    The heartbeat is because of that poison as well.

    The next second, Sam became more aggressive with the opponent. He used the staff like a cue stick and hit the swordsman squarely on the chest. The water energy with its purple and red hue sent the man flying while the recoil crashed Sam into the water.

    *SPLASH*

    He disappeared into the water.

    It is eerily simr to the recoil hit White uses.

    Everyone was stunned, but the next second the opponents rejoiced. Sam did exactly what they wanted. They wanted him to be effected by the water. What they failed to notice is that the next second, Sam appeared came out the water right behind the injured woman.

    *SPLASH*

    She was swallowing antidotes crazily, but without even her noticing, Sam swung the staff at the back of her head.

    *BANG*

    She was flung in the air with the hit and a Shadow undead appeared in her path. The undead swung its staff once again. The woman lost her consciousness by now and took the hit directly. She flew over once again and this time she intercepted three arrows that were actually aiming at Sam.

    She blocked those arrows like a meat shield and then fell into the water.

    The opponents were stunned by the sudden turn of events. Before that, they were already a bit surprised by how well Sam is holding up along with his shadow undead, but they still had the situation under control.

    Now, they don''t feel the same.

    "Quick, pull her out before she is effected by the water."

    One of the opponents screamed while he attacked Sam to make sure he didn''t interfere. He is a spearman and he is very quick on his feet. Two people over to rescue that woman.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    The staff and the spear shed. The spearman is a neutral warrior with no elemental affinity. During their sh, three arrows were shot at Sam from three different directions. He kicked the spearman back before swinging his staff at the arrows.

    The three arrows went in a different direction, precisely to the two people that were rescuing the woman.

    They had to take a step back as they looked at Sam in shock.

    Even when he was outnumbered, he is still controlling the battle, very well. They knew he is a troublesome opponent, but they still underestimated him.

    Sam looked at the spearman and said.

    "You are good. But I am still getting bored." He made his move. The hydra''s bloodline riled up a bit. With his vampire side also acting up, the wholeke started reacting to him. The opponents could feel that Sam is connected to the water somehow.

    He slid on the water like he was skating on ice as he attacked the spearman.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    After three blocks, Sam''s legs suddenly dipped into the water until his knees were covered, but he stepped forward. The spearman missed Sam. Sam on the other hand moved forward and closed the distance.

    He used his staff to tip the Spearman off bnce by hitting him on the legs, the next moment he caught off the guy and dragged him down into the water.

    The spearman struggled. Likhma also controlled his vine to catch hold of the spearman. The vine dove into the water trying to follow him. He even wanted to attack Sam and buy some time.

    Too bad, Sam disappeared inside theke and before the vine could catch a hold of the spearman, he was kicked to a different side and Sam kicked him out of the water high into the air. A shadow undead that was about to be hit by arrows was defended by the spearman even though he didn''t want to do it.

    One arrow injured him, while he fended off the other two. The undead took the chance and kicked the other opponent off, before hitting the spearman in the back of his head.

    Sam shot out of the water and hit the spearman under his chin with the staff. The hydra''s point infected him while he fell into the water. Sam came out and pressed the spearman under his feet, keeping his head under the water and forcefully making him drink theke water.

    When the spearman finally lost consciousness.

    Sam disappeared after destroying the spearman like that. He moved underwater while the shadow undead kept as many people active as possible. It seems like Sam figured out an optimum way to fight in theke now.

    A shadow undead that was surrounded by four people kicked one of them away, creating some distance, the next moment, Sam appeared from under the water there and hit that man on the spine, sending him in the path of an arrow.

    After taking that arrow the man flew towards a different undead which mmed him on the head with the staff.

    *SPLASH*

    The opponent fell into the water and Sam who disappeared from the previous position appeared there and held the man''s head underwater.

    A few people that are attacking the undead stopped doing that and ran over to rescue that man from Sam and this is another opportunity. The pressure of the undead reduced and Sam appeared near one of them.

    *BANG*

    The undead hit the woman and sent her flying and Sam appeared behind her before returning the hit. It is like the undead and Sam are ying a game and they are precise enough to let these opponents block the arrows and spears for them.

    The next five minutes, that is what the spectators saw.

    Sam disappeared into the water and held an opponent under it. The others do not have any other choice than rescuing them. But that is leaving an opening for the undead and they are targeting one particr person among them and then hit him like a tennis ball.

    Sam is appearing out of nowhere and is sending them back.

    Likhma who is already spending a lot of his focus on keeping the formation stable is unable to do anything to help the rest of hispanions. He is getting increasingly nervous and he can also see that everyone that got hit by Sam has purple lines all over their bodies.

    Their skin is turning purple and grey.

    And the longer they are staying in the water, the greyer they are bing.

    Soon, only six people left and the undead targeted each of them.

    Sam on the other hand looked at Likhma with a smirk on his face. Likhma modified the formation a little bit and wanted to shoot wooden pikes at Sam with all of his ability, but the next moment, Sam disappeared into the water and reappeared right in front of Likhma.

    He stood on the water while holding the staff with one hand as it rested on his shoulder. He looked Likhma dead in the eye and whispered.

    "Come on, with the level of confidence you have shown, you should be much more capable than this. Do you really think your pikes and their poison can affect me? At least maintain intellect equivalent to your arrogance."

    Likhma shivered and the formation shook.

    He wanted to take off the formation and run away, but for some reason, his body is not following what his brain thought.

    "And here is how you use the environment to create a proper attacking formation."

    As soon as Sam spoke, theke water riled up and several water pirs rose at the edge of theke and created a huge Hydra with the water, and the nine heads shot into nine different points of the formation.

    The water sucked the vitality out of all the vegetation and Likhma lost control instantly. He could feel his vitality being slipped away from his body and he fell onto his knees in the next three seconds.

    Sam held him up with the staff by his chin and asked.

    "Now, who the fuck made you do this?"

 Chapter 2032 To Offense

    Chapter 2032 To Offense

    Likhma didn''t stand a chance at handling Sam''s intimidation.

    He immediately confessed. Sam got all the information he needed and he threw Likhma into the Lake with the rest. Then he went back to the small ind and sat at the edge letting his legs rest in the water.

    His partial fusion is gone, but he still let his vampire form stay.

    After a few minutes, he noticed some extra presence in the surrounding woods. Sam knew more people hade and they might havee here to take his g away.

    "I am giving three minutes exactly. Come here and pick these guys up. They will die with death energy invasion if you leave them be and I have no qualms about letting them die. I will keep my hand for these three minutes. If you are here after those three minutes, you can also take a bath in theke."

    The students hesitated a bit, but they came and picked up theirpanions. People from almost every team came, except for the Aranya''s Academy.

    Sam chuckled at this and kicked his legs in the water a bit. The Aranya Academy students were kicked out of the water and fell onto the drynd. It had been a while since the fight started and Sam noticed that quite a few beasts hade over.

    He aimed to the sky and shot a golden fireball.

    At this moment, deep inside the forest, the Gambler Academy students are hiding in between the trees. There are a bunch of other students from different academies all searching for these nine people.

    "Those motherfuckers. Find them, they shouldn''t have escaped. With the beast still nearby, they are bound to be nearby."

    One of the contestants yelled. It is apparent that he is angry. While Sam made every opponent take a bath in ake, the remaining team brought the other teams to their knees. They barely let any of the beasts go.

    Their teamwork is impable and nine of them are actually enough to take down a beast on their own even if the beast is of a higher level. The rest of the teams couldn''t spare nine people to deal with the beasts.

    If they want topete with Gambler''s academy they need to team up and that is exactly what they did. But still, the Gambler''s Academy students were very elusive. They are not the best when ites to solobat, but these people are made for this.

    They just made fools out of other teams and acted like fish in the water while stealing all the spoils for themselves. They looked at the Golden mes that erupted in the sky. That was Sam''s signal. They immediately came out of their hiding and ran towards their base.

    The opponents followed, but after a short while, they didn''t dare to do so, because news came from their bases asking them to return. They were even ordered to leave the beasts alone for the time being. The Gambler Academy team gathered at theke. They could see the obvious signs of battle.

    Sam is sitting there as if he was not the reason for such a serious battle.

    They made their way towards him.

    "What did you guys get?"

    "Mostly, formation gs and a couple of formation discs. The discs are most suitable for traps based on their scale."

    Sam nodded and after counting the number of nodes, he decided to help them n the defense now. He dove into the water and swam a few meters deep before reaching towards theke walls. He used his earth elemental ability to extrude the earth into rods.

    Then he came out of the water and stood on top of it with his eyes closed. His body turned from Vampire form to the Purplish-red Partial Water Fusion and Vampire Formbined. The water underneath his feet started glowing a bit as a weird greyish energy started condensing from it.

    The greyish energy moved into the stone rod. He conjured so much that the water rippled for the next minutes and by the time he is done, the stone rod changed its color and the other teammates could feel that it turned into a storage vessel of energy.

    He threw it to the team and continued on to do the same for the next thirty minutes and this time, it didn''t take five minutes for each rod.

    His process is faster and more efficient. Soon, he had a bunch of rods in his hands.

    "Create a perimeter formation around theke bank. It doesn''t have to beplicated, it should just be enough for you to alert them. Of course, add a triggering mechanism to it as well."

    "Triggering mechanism? What should we connect it to though?"

    "I will handle that part."

    He took back all those highly active stone rods while some of the team members left to handle the formation on the bank. He levitated over the g and the rods were slowly carried by the water to certain positions.

    The water is not exactly a great ce to put formations. Particrly when the nodes they have are normal and not of high quality. So, Sam is using the tension between the energy to let the formation bnce itself.

    After setting up the formation he connected it to the formation other ced at the bank.

    It didn''t take long.

    "You guys cany down other formations as you like. Theke bed is not essible, so it will be hard toy down formations on the water surface. Just keep in mind. I am sure you guys can handle the rest."

    "What about you?"

    "I maintained the defense until now. It is time to go for the offense. I will go and collect the gs. If anyonees for those two, just hand them over without fighting. Also don''t initiate a close-range fight until they pass the perimeter formation.

    Long range can be tried as long as you have a perfectly clear shot that wouldnd a critical hit."

    Sam then disappeared from there and went into the formation. After knowing the details from Likhma, he is a bit pissed, so he is going to blow off some steam and deal with other teams. He already picked the first target for that too.

    The Hel Academy team.

    He didn''t have a good rtionship with Hel to begin with. She is right behind the Olympians on his hit list. So he might as well deal with that Academy first.

    First, he went to the two spots where the Beasts are being fought at the moment. With Gambler''s academy withdrawing all of a sudden, there is a deficit in attackers and beasts umted. Right now, there are three beasts, and one of them just died.

    Sam went to the spots of battle and checked out the candidates.

    He counted three Hel Academy students. With the two people who came to fight with Sam at his base, there are only five people back at the base. Sam marked the three of them and noticed that they are going back to the base.

    They sessfully got the lion''s share of one of the beasts and a minor share of the other. They got some resources that could strengthen their defense. They were not stupid enough to send a single person to send these supplies back, so they moved together.

    Sam disappeared into the forest with wood elemental fusion.

    When the trio from Hel Academy are running and are a certain distance away from the rest, they sense a threatening presence all around them. They stopped in their tracks and got ready for a fight. At that moment, a bunch of vines were shot from multiple directions.

    The trio dodged, and none of them were injured.

    Injuring them was not Sam''s goal though. Separating them is. He attacked them continuously until there was significant distance between all three before he suddenly appeared out of a thick tree nearby.

    Arge number of vines appeared from behind him. He caught a hold of one of the three and the vines enveloped both of them before they disappeared back into the forest as if they weren''t even there to begin with.

    The remaining two closed the distance and stood with their backs to each other.

    "Who the fuck are you? Come out if you dare."

    One of them yelled, trying to find some courage. They didn''t notice any reaction. After some thought they agreed to make a run for their base. They didn''t hesitate or turn back. They just ran straight. It would take less than two minutes for them.

    They almost reached their base too, but they halted in their path as the teammate that went missing appeared in front of them. Hanging from the trees by vines. He is unconscious and his whole skin is green in color.

    Both of them immediately ran to him to save him from the poison. They knew this could be a trap, but they could not let their friend die and that was a mistake.

    Sam appeared from underneath the ground and both of them disappeared. Sam stood there with the hanging opponent.

    By now the people from Hel Academy base noticed his presence and two of them came out of scout. Sam looked at their face straight before disappearing with the third opponent.

    Three down, five more to go and it would be checkmate for the Hel Academy.

 Chapter 2033 One Down

    Chapter 2033 One Down

    The Hel Academy base is covered with many formations.

    It looked well protected, to say the least. It seems like they had the upper hand in the teampetition. At the moment though, they didn''t know what to do. They definitely saw Sam capturing three of their team members.

    Those three were handling the offense for them and one of them is even considered a primary attacker.

    The captain of the team is conflicted. They didn''t know where Sam went, they only know the direction they spotted him. By now, he could have been anywhere. They also don''t know the exact status of the three.

    By now they knew that Sam managed to wipe out the people that attacked him at his base.

    They believed this is going to be a payback rather than just him trying to deal a blow or two. It is much more than him trying to win the game. They became nervous.

    The captain who had the responsibility of the team is even more.

    He lost five people. All of them to Sam.

    But too bad, Sam is not exactly nning on giving the time needed to gather his thoughts. The next second they saw arge wooden pike zooming towards their g.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosive sound as if lightning struck a tree, the wooden pike which is glowing with green energy hit the formation. The formation which was initially invisible started showing. It looked like a translucent screen and within that the wooden pike stayed as if it was a spear stuck in a body.

    The energy rippled out of the pike as it tried to disturb the energy flow.

    "How the fuck is it staying there in the formation without being expelled?" The captain asked his formation expert. The formation expert himself of course, didn''t have any idea. He was about to get to the formation and deal with it, but the next moment they saw more and more pikesing from within the forest.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The pikesnded on more than a dozen spots and the formation expert who saw this widened his eyes in disbelief.

    "Get away."

    He yelled at his teammates.

    *BOOM*

    Another pikended and then it is followed by a very shy scene.

    The energy nodes of the formation which are the formation gs started giving off very minute explosions. Like they are some electric fuses, they stopped working after giving some small electric discharge followed by a small wave of energy st.

    It didn''t cause a wide range damage.

    However the small discharge and the energy wave are enough to destroy the immediate surroundings of the node. That destruction was not loud rather it is concentrated and corrosive. This is the first time many of them watched as the vegetation around them turned into some kind of powder substance.

    As if it was just an illusion a couple of seconds ago.

    One of the formations is down.

    The attacks stopped and all five of them heaved a sigh of relief. Out of five, three are known for their defense and their expertise in formation. Only the captain is meant to be the primary attacker there. They doubted if they could even put up a fight against Sam.

    While they are nervously thinking about what is Sam is going to do next, Sam stepped out of the formation once again.

    They also saw the three captives Sam held.

    They are conscious now and their defensive gear was all taken away. Sam even took their spatial rings and shoes. He took everything valuable. Even the clothes they are wearing are the ones Sam gave them.

    At this moment, they wished they had any energy left in their bodies. They would have ran for their lives.

    They felt frustrated as they could see their base right ahead, but couldn''t do anything to reach it. They looked at Sam hatefully. Sam didn''t care though. He is the one who drained their energies. Their spiritual cores are emptied.

    The energy that was used to destroy the formations came from them. Now these people only have the enhanced physical strength, they couldn''t even use one spell or a skill that needs their spiritual and divine energy.

    Of course, Sam is not going to let their physical strength be intact.

    He left some wounds on their tendons with a special poison mixed with death energy. Now any energy that is being generated in their bodies needs to go to those wounds and their wounds wouldn''t go away as long as the poison is within their bodies.

    Sam nudged one of them forward and said.

    "Run."

    Sam conjured a wooden pike from the nearby tree. The contestant is afraid, but he gulped and started running forward, only to trip and fall hard.

    The tendons are hurting. He couldn''t muster any physical strength in his legs. But when he felt Sam''s killing intent from behind he started running forcefully. He is not as fast as someone of his cultivation level should be.

    "He is hurt. This is a bloody provocation. We need to save them. Or our academy would be theughing stock to the rest of the world."

    The captain cursed under his breath. Every one of them understood the spot they were in. Then after a minute, Sam sent the next one followed by thest one after another minute. Three targets walking at almost the same speed with a certain distance between three of them.

    All of them made their way toward their base, where they could have some rtive safety.

    However, they all felt the threat of death within the next minute.

    *SWOOSH*

    The wooden pike flew towards them as it tore through the air. The nearest target barely managed to dodge, but the pike still brushed past his arm tearing it. The only good news is the Pike deflected a bit and didn''t hit the other two.

    The three targets increased their speed.

    *SWOOSH*

    *SWOOSH*

    *SWOOSH*

    More and more pikes came at them. All brushing past them, but not one of themnded cleanly. Then only they understood that they are being toyed with. When they reached the halfway point, Sam changed the tactics a bit.

    It went in an arc andnded in front of the first target.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosion, the target was blown back a bit and crashed to the ground. From that crater some vines came crawling out creating a small barrier. The prickly thorns that came out of the vine gave a vicious gleam.

    They didn''t want any part of it.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Soon the three of them were blocked whenever they reached the halfway point, they had to take a different route. If they are staying at one ce, Sam is throwing pikes at them to injure them.

    They have to keep moving, but they cannot go. And they cannot stay. The three of them looked at their captains pleadingly. At the same time back in the spectator''s area the Elder of the Hel academy stood up from her chair.

    She looked at Chorus and said.

    "Is this what you taught your kids at your Academy? Does even know what the consequences of his actions are? He is making an enemy out of me and the Hel Academy."

    Chorus looked at her and spoke.

    "To me, it looks like your kids are the ones facing the consequences of their actions."

    The Elder looked to the main spectator area. The ce where f sat along with other deans, including the Dean of Hel Academy.

    The Dean looked at the elder and gestured for her to calm down. Both of them knew they couldn''t do shit. But they knew that Sam was now the thorn in their eyes and their students would be more than willing to deal with him.

    Back in the testing area, the captain of the Hel academy team couldn''t take it anymore and ordered.

    "All of you charge ahead. We need to save them."

    They came out of the formations by themselves and ran towards their teammates. Sam didn''t attack them instantly, but only when they reached the three targets did he start his attack.

    Dozens of pikes flew towards them, raining down and wherever they fell the craters formed from which vines came out. The whole scene looked beautiful with green explosions that gave out beautiful vines. But the Hel students didn''t think so.

    Before they could go back to their base, all of them were down in the dumps. The vines released some very distinguished poison that made them all faint. Sam walked through them and deactivated the formations without destroying them.

    He then collected the g as if it was left there for his taking.

    He broke the tokens of the candidates and sent them back, still unconscious. Then he made his way back to the Gambler Academy Base.

    He handed over the formation nodes and discs he collected from Hel base along with the g.

    One down.

 Chapter 2034 Last Three

    Chapter 2034 Last Three

    The news of Hel''s Team disqualification spread like wildfire.

    Sam didn''t make it subtle to begin with. So, some people from other teams witnessed how he toyed with them. He could have easily killed them, but he chose to humiliate them. He was provocative and disrespectful.

    They understood that this was Sam taking revenge and none of them were dumb enough to think that they were not going to be victims of it.

    So, apart from worrying about the beasts and the other teams, now they have to worry about Sam also.

    They initially called a truce until noon. They wanted to gather as many resources as possible until then and only attack each other after that. So, as of now, they are still working together. That might be the only reason that they shared the information about Sam''s deeds.

    However, everyone has an angle of their own regarding this.

    This might be a threat, but they also smelled some opportunity from this. All bases went into defense mode instantly. Sam who finished the Hel Academy and delivered the gains to the base came back to the central area.

    After thinking it over for a bit, he picked the next target and this time he didn''t go alone.

    On his way there, the next beast spawned and he decided to take it as hispanion for the next battle. He lured the beast to the base of his next target and unleashed it on their formation. This base also has eight people, so it is not easy for the beast to deal with all of them.

    The only problem is Sam is there to disrupt the flow.

    He created some chaos and let them sh with the beast. Just when they were about to gain the upper hand, they heard another roar. Sam lured another beast to their base and this time he didn''t go back again.

    He activated a partial fusion form with lightning elements and started bashing them with Javelins from afar. He is not doing much, he is not even attacking them directly. He just disrupts their ns to attack the beasts and letting the beasts overwhelm them.

    Once again, he is ying with them.

    Soon, everyone could see that this base was not going to make it. Particrly, when they saw Sam leave ande back with the third beast after a few minutes. Three beasts are too much for these eight elites.

    The formation copses and the Beasts destroy the team while Sam just stood there and watched. Some of them quit as they almost had their lives taken and some fell unconscious. Two of the three beasts are severely injured.

    Sam decided to deal with the three of them and started the battle. It wouldn''t take much effort from him. Right when he was about to kill the third one, he saw someone from the corner of his eye.

    That person blended with the shadows and stole the g away, before disappearing into the shadows within the forest.

    Sam chopped the head of the beast and collected the rewards from them. He looked in the direction the guy left as his energy vision activated.

    Meanwhile, inside the forest, the guy who stole the g ran in the shadows. He is currently in shadow fusion mode and is moving within the shadows to reach their base. He kept on looking behind to see if Sam would be there.

    Soon, he arrived at the foot of a mountain.

    The base is on top of it. He could levitate and reach the top of the mountain, but he knew better than to reveal his location out in the open. He started scaling the mountain through the shadows. On top of the mountain, the area is very small.

    It is half the size of a basketball court and right now the rest of the team members are standing there waiting for their teammates toe. Just when they noticed their teammate is just a few meters away from them, all of a sudden, a huge cloud of shadow energy appeared in the path.

    Sam came out of the shadow energy and kicked thepanion straight in the face.

    *BOOM*

    With a huge explosive sound, the candidate fell off the mountain and to his bad luck he was kicked to the steep side where he couldn''t even catch some footing. Even if he could, it is not going to be easy.

    Sam gave a look to the rest of the members and went after the candidate falling down.

    The team on top of the hill started hearing explosive sounds and their hearts trembled.

    "We need to save him."

    They came to a decision and jumped off the mountain to save theirpanion. Long story short, Sam flew to the top of the mountain after fifteen minutes and collected the formation nodes as well as the g.

    He went back to the Gambler Base and gave the nodes to the team and merged the g with the Gambler Academy''s.

    Time passed.

    Sam is like a menace. He just went on and on with his antics as he disrupted the operations of the rest of the teams. Of course, they couldn''t just stay put in their bases. Sam is destroying them and they need to score some points in front of the judges.

    If they really lost without doing anything, things wouldn''t look good to the rest of the world.

    And just like that, there is a massive war atmosphere between the teams. Sam finally sat back and enjoyed a bit as he watched them tear each other apart. The truce that was made initially to stop until noon, was up in smoke.

    Of course, he didn''t leave the opportunity to create more chaos in between. The only team that was exempt from this scenario is the Gambler Academy.

    They are the only ones with all ten members in their team.

    Nine of them are on the defense with formations that went way past theke where they are currently staying at. The surrounding forest area is also in theirplete control and this Gambler Academy team is best at working together.

    They even had a chance to prove that when a team came at them tounch a massive attack.

    The whole team moved and hung them like meat at a butcher shop. Sam caught the news and went to deal with the team''s base and catch the g.

    But when he went there, he saw a familiar face.

    Noah is standing there with the g in her hands.

    "I see that you are moving alone as well," Sam spoke with a smile.

    "Of course, with all the shit you stirred, I thought this would be a better thing to do."

    "Since you are not here, what about your team, what if someone attacks your base."

    "I am counting on it."

    "Okay then, I would like that g you are holding." He changed the topic with a smile.

    Noah tightened her grip on the g and smirked as well.

    "I don''t really want to."

    "Come on, you wanted to keep a low profile and I didn''te after your team because you are there. You also owe me a favor with that Likhma guy."

    Noah thought for a moment and broke out with a wide smile and said.

    "Nah, I still don''t want to give it you."

    "I thought you were keeping a low profile. If I need to take it away from you, you are going to reveal your power."

    "How about I cut you a deal?"

    "What is it?"

    "I will get rid of the rest of the teams and merge the gs. I will leave the Thor Academy team for you to deal with.

    I am sure I cannot win with you here, so leave me the second ce. We need a decent performance. You know, I have my own ns. I need to some influence within my academy to achieve that."

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "Alright, you better not try to pull anything over me."

    "I should be saying that you. I don''t know what you might be thinking with that oversmart brain of yours."

    Sam didn''t respond and left the ce.

    Noah went back to her base and their teammates were honestly a bit surprised. They didn''t expect her seed bringing the g when they knew Sam was going there.

    Noah then led the team to make an alliance with Thor from Thor''s Academy.

    They discussed in secret without the rest of the teammates present on either side. After listening to her n, Thor nodded and said.

    "There is only one thing. You and Sam seem to be very close. Howe you are not coborating with him?"

    "He doesn''t need a coboration. As for whether you can trust me or not. That is up to you to decide. You have to bear the consequences."

    Thor thought for a moment as he looked at Noah''s smile. He gritted his teeth and agreed.

    Within five minutes, Noah and Thor are leading their teams

    together to destroy the remaining bases.

    A little past noon and almost all the bases are cleared up. A couple of hourster only three bases remained. Gambler, Hel and Thor.

 Chapter 2035 Without a Blow

    Chapter 2035 Without a Blow

    Noah and Thor are currently facing each other.

    Now that only Sam is left as amon enemy, Thor is obviously vignt. He still doubted that Noah might side with Sam and betray him. Of course, he is partially true.

    "Let''s go and deal with Sam. We can figure out who is the winner among us after that."

    Thor proposed directly.

    Noah looked in a certain direction and said.

    "No need to go anywhere, I think Sam is going to your base as we speak."

    Thor was stunned and contacted his teammates and they indeed observed some movement within the surrounding forests around them because of some trap formations. Thor looked at Noah and asked.

    "As expected, you betrayed me?"

    "Not really. If you think about it, I only talked about the cooperation until the rest of the contestants are gone and I said we will think about Sam afterward.

    This is afterward and Sam seems to only hold a deep grudge against you.

    I am happy with the second ce to the Aranya Academy. After all, we rarely get this far inbatpetitions. The only saving grace you have is that I am not going to interfere in between your fight. You can try your luck with him yourself."

    Thor didn''t want to believe her.

    However, Noah just turned around and went back to her base. Thor suddenly got amunication token alert from his base.

    "Thor, Sam is here. He is standing in front of our base without doing anything. He told me to call you here ASAP."

    Thor gritted his teeth and ran to the base.

    Blue lightning crackled wildly as he activated fusion and moved at his top speed. Within no time he is in front of his base and he could see Sam just standing there as if he is just sightseeing.

    He held his hammer tightly and threw it toward Sam.

    It flew at an incredible speed destroying everything in the path, but Sam just side-stepped casually and extended his hand to catch the hammer by its handle.

    *BOOM*

    Blue lightning exploded everywhere and Sam just stood there with the hammer in his hand. The surrounding area is charred, the vegetation is destroyed and there is even a sizeable crater. Only the vegetation under Sam''s feet and half a foot radius around him was saved from that st.

    Sam was intrigued by the weapon.

    It was crafted with great precision and it was the exact replica of Thor''s hammer. At least in terms of looks.

    Sam started examining it before the hammer flew back to Thor.

    "How much of a copycat are you?

    Your name is the same, your hairstyle is the same, the armor style is the same and you even want to talk like him. Now even the weapon?

    At least if you want to imitate him learn about the weapon a bit more. What is that piece of crap in your hands?"

    Sam asked with a gloomy expression. He is disappointed and this makes Thor furious.

    "Shut the fuck up. What the fuck does an abomination who follows Gambler know?"

    "Abomination? That''s a bit too far buddy. Particrly, when the abomination is already pissed off."

    "Yeah? Then why don''t you take it out on the one who pissed you off? Likhma was the one who nned the attack and led people to you, but I don''t see you going after Aranya''s Academy. Guess Pillow talk is the way to negotiate with the high and mighty Sam who never listens to anyone."

    Sam didn''t respond, he just raised an eyebrow and looked at him.

    "What? Cat got your tongue?" Thor continued as he sent some signals to his teammates.

    Sam sighed and said.

    "You just made yourself a really great enemy, dude. For what you said, you are going to have a spear shoved in your ass by someone really nasty. And I am not the one who is going to do it.

    As far as Likhma is concerned, don''t try to insult my intelligence. I know who pulled the strings behind him. He revealed it himself, so before I strip you of your dignity, take this advice.

    Never use a weak pawn to do your dirty deeds when you are directly involved in orchestrating it. They will spill the beans if things don''t work out. Like Likhma did.

    I can give you some sses if you need them."

    Thor''s face is red with anger and he lunges at Sam.

    Sam activated partial lightning fusion and slipped as he dodged the heavy swings of the hammer. He didn''t even block or deflect. He didn''t counterattack either, he just slipped and dodged like a slippery loach.

    Thor got frustrated and gestured for his teammates. They activated every possible formation they could and joined in the battle. Sam still didn''t retaliate. He just danced around and among those many lightnings of these Thor Academy students, his silver lightning looked dazzling.

    It''s a sh that appeared and disappeared at its will.

    After ten minutes Sam is standing near the formation of the base. He is the closest one to the g.

    "Fight me, You coward."

    Thor yelled at Sam.

    Sam jumped into the air and threw a punch to the formation

    *BOOM*

    With just one punch, the formation started fluctuating and silver lightning energy invaded the whole thing. It almost appeared like silver cracks on the formation.

    Thor instantly attacked Sam from behind, but once again Sam slipped.

    *BOOM*

    He attacked the formation on the other side. The cracks intensified. He slipped once again and...

    *BOOM*

    The formation was destroyed. Oneyer of defense is gone.

    The Thor Academy students could only watch. They couldn''t do a single thing against Sam. No matter what they try, they are unable to corner Sam. They couldn''t use the terrain much as they were in an open field.

    Sam is just toying with them.

    And that realization couldn''t be truer. Sam just danced around and kept on attacking the formation.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The explosive sounds and the silver shes were extremely eye-catching.

    "IS RUNNING ALL YOU CAN DO? COME AND FIGHT ME LIKE A MAN."

    Thor kept on yelling to provoke Sam, but it didn''t work at all. Sam was stoic as he destroyed oneyer after another.

    The teams tried their best to defend the formations, which is ironic because the formations are supposed to be the ones defending them and the g.

    As time passed, Sam destroyed every formation theyid down. Only the team surrounded the g and looked at Sam coldly. Some of them are levitating and some of them are on the ground, Thor is hanging on top of the g.

    They didn''t want to let Sam take the g away that easily.

    By now, they kind of understood what Sam is trying to do and they didn''t want let him seed. It would make them look like utter fools if he did so. However, they didn''t know that their efforts were futile.

    Sam who was in partial fusion until now activatedplete fusion.

    He turned into a silver streak and went through a tiny gap before they could even react and left from the other side with the g.

    He gave a smirk to Thor and just turned into the silver streak as he traveled in a straight line toward the Gambler base.

    "AFTER HIM. CATCH THAT FUCKER. WE CANNOT LET HIM WIN. USE EVERYTHING YOU GOT. IF ANY OF YOU BASTARDS HOLD BACK ANYTHING, I WILL KILL YOU."

    Thor yelled and activatedplete fusion as well. His bloodline is also activated as he ran after Sam.

    The lightning streaks destroyed the whole area. Every tree in their bath is charred, they left craters everywhere they stepped. The destruction they caused, might not let a single de of grass sprout there for years.

    They ran through the whole test area and throughout the journey, the Thor team is right on Sam''s heels, but no matter how much they tried, they couldn''t catch Sam. He is just there but is unreachable at the same time.

    Before they knew it, they are Gambler''s Base and Sam jumped right into the formation. But the Thor team couldn''t. The water in theke shot up and created a transparent wall around theke area. Sam looked at them while he deactivated his fusion.

    "FUCK"

    Thor yelled and started bashing his hammer at the water barrier.

    The shock of the attack is being rippled throughout the barrier causing barely any damage. Even when the rest of the team tried to attack the formation, they could barely cause fluctuations. They broke it down after two minutes.

    Sam only took a step back and another barrier appeared blocking them.

    Sam waved his hand and slowly went to the center while Thor constantly bashed the formation while screaming.

    "STOP. YOU BLOODY FUCKER. COME AND FACE ME. BE A MAN."

    Sam merged the g with the Gambler Academy g and waved his hand. The water barrier disappeared and it turned into a giant middle finger.

    Thor Academy students despaired as they disappeared from the test area.

    Sam just defeated one of the seeded candidate teams withoutnding a single blow on them.

 Chapter 2036 Doves Arrival

    Chapter 2036 Dove''s Arrival

    The Thor Academy team is devastated.

    What Sam did is more than defeating them. He humiliated them in front of the whole world and they couldn''t stand for it. Even though they would be ranked third, it is worse thaningst ce.

    That is what they thought.

    If only they had seen what Sam did to the Hel Academy which was the first one to go. They might not feel the same. They didn''t have that much patience to think of that anyway. Meanwhile, everyone is expecting a massive fight between Sam and Noah.

    Both of them surprised the crowd way more than anyone expected.

    At least Sam''s actions are not too far-fetched, a lot of the Deans and Elders knew that he is a troublemaker, but the same couldn''t be said about Noah. She was low-key since the start. Except for the Dean of Aranya Academy nobody knew what she is actually capable of and what her background was.

    She kept a low profile and only gave enough effort to get into the team.

    The way she led the team and destroyed so many other teams attracted a lot of attention. Now they are anticipating her further actions.

    Sam went to Aranya''s base alone.

    Noah stood in front of the formation waiting for him.

    "You are quicker than I thought." She said with the faint smile.

    "They are weaker than I thought. I expected to be cornered at least once, but they are just way too pathetic."

    "Stop bragging. Would it hurt you if you be humble once in a while?"

    "Kind of. Every idiot would want to walk all over me, if I was humble. Can''t tolerate idiocy.

    Enough small talk. Give me the g and we will be on our way."

    Noah stayed silent for a moment and looked at her team.

    "Come on Noah, don''t y games. You know me better than most. And I know that you are above this bullshit. Just give me the g."

    Noah chuckled and gestured her teammates to bring the g out. In front of the deans, elders and countless students, Noah handed over the g to Sam. Admitting defeat without even putting up a fight.

    Sam nodded and the next moment disappeared.

    The final battle everyone wanted to witness, didn''t take ce.

    The Gambler Academy won.

    The Academy that never really managed to have many aplishments, particrly in the Freshmenpetitions won with extreme domination and it all happened because of one student. Sam and his team were sent out.

    Sam could feel the hostility towards him.

    Thor, his team, his seniors, the elders everyone is looking at him like they wanted a piece of him. Same reaction could be seen from Hel Academy as well.

    As for the rest of the academies, their deans and seniors were not here. They are few in number and their hostility could be considered negligible at this point. The Gambler Academy students who could be considered an extended coteral in this, couldn''t help but sigh.

    Sam really has a knack for pissing people off.

    Even Dove felt the same. She didn''t stay long to socialize. She brought the team back to Paradise inn so that they could avoid these res full of killing intent.

    Sam went to his suite and didn''t bother mingling with the rest. The rest of the team wanted to thank him and even treat him to a meal. They really do wished to bury the hatchet. As much as they held a grudge against Sam, it is not worth it to ostracize him for such a petty thing.

    However Sam didn''t care much.

    Fear of being ostracized might best thing on his list.

    He was fine when he waspletely alone, but now he has a bunch of his friends and teammates in the Academy realm, how could he even feel alone?"

    That evening Sam didn''te from his suite. He called for dinner to his room directly.

    When someone knocked on the door, he opened in anticipation to have a good feast. But to his surprise, the one in front of him is the annoying senior that he wanted to avoid badly.

    Its Dove.

    She didn''t even bother asking for permission and unceremoniously came into his room before taking a seat.

    "How are you feeling?"

    She asked in a calm tone. Sam frowned. There is some change. The annoying concern that is usually apparent in her tone disappeared. She seemed like the senior Dove that matched the rumors that he heard about her.

    "Why are you here? Can''t I have some lone time?"

    "I will leave you alone, but I need to give some news."

    "Sure, please go ahead."

    "Do you understand what you did today?" She asked in a solemn tone.

    "Do I look like an idiot to you?" Sam retorted. He then sighed and calmed himself down. "Please just get to the point."

    "Well the point is, you injured so many people severely. A lot of people that came to fight you at theke are part of the Solo Combat Competition. But everyone of them is currently in the care of Thor Academy''s Healing Centre.

    They had broken bones, their bodies are ingested with extreme poison that is even affecting muscle fibres and bones to their marrows, their internal organs are a mess and finally the death energy of thatke.

    They absorbed to much of that energy inside their bodies, it would take days if not weeks for them to recover. In fact, without cleansing that death energy, it is impossible to heal the rest of their wounds. You have upset the whole Solo battle stage."

    "And?" Sam asked nonchntly.

    "Since you are unfazed, I guess you do know what you were doing. But be careful. Likhma is a very well connected guy. His rtives are all in high positions within Aranya academy. Right now, his brother and his uncle are both here.

    They mighte after you."

    Sam seemed to have realized something and smile crept on his face.

    "So, that is why they picked him."

    Dove picked up on his words even though he just muttered under his breath.

    "What do you mean?"

    Sam looked at her an suddenly thought of something.

    "I don''t know what is the point of telling you this, but since you are the one in charge of our well being here, I might as well tell you this.

    The whole thing with Likhma is intentional."

    "Of course, Likhma intentionally came after you."

    "That is not what I meant. He was intentionally manipted toe after me. In fact, Thor is the one who talked to him about this whole thing. And from what I learned from him, he already knew that I was going to be ced in the Lake so he directly came there with the rest of the members.

    The only reason they took some time to attack is because they didn''t want to raise suspicions."

    Dove frowned and she spoke in a serious tone.

    "I hope you do know what you are implying by saying this."

    "Of course, I am implying someone messed with the draw of the bases for this teampetition. It was rigged against the Gambler Academy."

    "It is impossible unless someone on the level of an Elder interfered in this."

    Sam just shrugged and didn''t reply. He could sense that Dove''s aura changed a bit. Even her postured appeared a little bit domineering. She walked to the door and turned around to speak with Sam for onest time before she took the leave for the day.

    "If it was really someone of that level who manipted this draw, I will make sure that ites to light."

    "What if you couldn''t? Even if f did manages to find someone who did this, do you really think he would admit it out in the open? Admit it and ruin his reputation among the Divine Academies?"

    "Then I will subject them to a punishment on my own. Don''t worry, as long as I am here, not anyone could just conspire against Gambler Academy students and get away with it."

    Sam chuckled and replied.

    "I would prefer actions against words."

    As he spoke, the waiter brough the food Sam ordered. Sam looked at Dove and said.

    "Now, if you don''t mind, I would like to enjoy some food alone in my room."

    Dove nodded and left.

    "Well, that''s not so bad. I hope she will be like this. The annoying mother hen persona is hard tolerate."

    He muttered to himself as he grabbed therge tray of food from the waiter.

    "Congrattions, Sir. I saw your performance of the teampetition. You did great."

    Sam smiled and nodded.

    "You are wee. Tell the waiters to eat whatever they want today. Tell Ivar that I will cover the bill."

    The waiter was overjoyed. He immediately nodded and left. He knew better than refuse offer from this bigshot. Tonight he and his friends are going to have a party.

 Chapter 2037 Everyone with a Plan

    Chapter 2037 Everyone with a n

    The next day at dawn, Sam went back to the Thor Academy.

    It is thest and finalpetition in this year''s Freshmen tournament. The solobat. The one that is waiting for more than anything. Not just him, a lot of people are waiting for this. This is the most excitingpetition there.

    After all, as much as things like formations and inscriptions seem cool, nothing is better than watching two people try to destroy each other.

    Sam is the only one from Gambler Academy, so the rest of them went to the spectator area. Only Chorus was left standing beside Sam which he felt is a bit odd.

    This guy never really bothered to involve himself with these affairs, unless the Elders and Authorities were actually involved.

    "I need to tell you something." Chorus spoke and Sam paid attention to him.

    "Because of what you did in yesterday''s teambat, there has been a few changes in today''s Solobatpetition."

    "What are those changes?" Sam asked.

    "First of all, you wrecked a lot of the kids that are supposed to be part of the Solo Combat participants. If it was just one or two, they wouldn''t have bothered that much. However, you destroyed a lot of them.

    So, the Elders and Deans of different academies came to a consensus to allow substitutes. The academy can choose substitutes to the fighters that cannot join the fight now."

    Sam nodded a bit surprised and impressed as well.

    "What are the other changes?"

    "There is only one more. The usage of weapons. All of a sudden they lifted the ban on heavily inscribed weapons and Divine weapons that belong to a different level altogether."

    "There was a weapon ban before?" That is what surprised Sam the most.

    Chorus looked at him with a nk face.

    "Of course there is. What ce do you think it is? Once in a while those gods throw out some really great and perverted weapons like they are throwing bones to the dog. Any of these Divine weapons can alter the flow of the fight very easily.

    So, there was a strict ban on them during every tournament. The elders who are clearly pissed at you voted to make an exception.

    All these young masters are overflowing with these weapons and some academies even brought out and gave these weapons to the students just for the sake of thepetition.

    So, be careful.

    As you know the format is pretty simr to the open tournaments. In the qualifiers you will all be dumped together in a formation, until top 16 will be selected. Then the top 16 will fight in a regr tournament.

    It is a very cliched process.

    So, there is no need for me to exin it to you too much."

    Sam nodded and Chorus was about to leave, but suddenly he turned around and asked.

    "What did you and Dove talk aboutst night?"

    Sam didn''t know why he asked, but he didn''t hide anything and said it all. Chorus sighed.

    "You shouldn''t have said it. It is going to be annoying." Sam didn''t know what he meant by that, but he just shrugged it off and walked to the opening ceremony. Since this is thestpetition and the most important one, there are some extra formalities.

    After all that nonsense, they were all sent to the test area.

    Sam stood on top of a mountain. He is very visible to anyone with a decent vision. It is almost like he was sent there to be a target.

    Of course, even if he was visible no one was stupid or daring enough tounch an attack on him. Aside from the fact that they might or might notnd a good enough blow on Sam, they would most definitely reveal their positions to the otherpetitiors.

    It is not worth it.

    Of course, it is not worth it for them.

    Sam just stood there and looked around. He didn''t use any abilities and just looked around to see if he could spot anyone and within no time he did.

    He took out his bow and started circting his energy into the arrow. The energy glowed brightly as if he is trying to attract attention. As if that is not enough¡­

    *BOOM*

    A supersonic explosive sound came out went the arrow left the string and it reverberated throughout the test area. There are ripples of energy around Sam and they spread so far and wide that they made a small clearing in the clouds that are not far away from the position he was standing on.

    *SWOOSH*

    The arrow whistled through the air and it destroyed everything in its path.

    Arge line of vegetation fell down and the person who was being targeted by Sam reacted as soon as he heard the sound, but he is still a tad bit toote.

    He used all of his strength to dodge and by luck the arrow brushed past his shoulder. He thought that he managed to save himself, until he felt a ssh of red warm blood on his face. He turned to see that his left hand disappeared from his shoulder.

    The arrow cleanly took the arm away.

    *TSK*

    Sam clicked his tongue in disappointment.

    That was such a clean shot, he could have taken the head off if he used a bit more power.

    Sam got off the mountain and went after the guy he shot. That guy however hurriedly ran deep into the forest trying to minimize his presence as much as possible. Within no time, Sam went to the spot where hit the guy. The arm is still there and the blood was all over the ce.

    He took a sniff in the air and then turned to a specific direction. The bow disappeared from his hands and he took out a saber before he started moving in that direction. He didn''t hide his presence and he ran in a straight line. He shed down any tree or rock that came at him.

    Sam is creating a massivemotion as if he is trying to gain as much attention as possible. He looked like he let loose everything.

    Meanwhile, in another corner of the testing area.

    Thor is standing with a special token in his hands. It is blinking with a faint glow as he stood there waiting.

    It is a beacon of some sorts. The people who hold the tokens rted to this will know the direction he is at and they could reach him.

    Soon, one after the other people starteding towards him. They are not limited to one region. Except for the Olympian region, the students from rest of the regions all came.

    There is a woman who arrived first and she wore the uniform of the Hel Academy.

    Her name Zaara. The leader of the Hel Academy''s freshmen the person who holds the same level of authority as Thor.

    She looked at the attendance of people and spoke.

    "So, no luck regarding the people from Olympian Region? I mean, except for Sam the rest of them all belong to different academies.

    They should all be hating him for what he did to Olympians. Why are they are not working with us?"

    Thor just shrugged and shook his head.

    Soon, Thor''s token stopped blinking.

    "I guess these are all the people within the range. So, everyone of you know the n right? Before we start fighting each other, we are going to eliminate Sam. He needs to be one of the first few to be eliminated.

    As far as we are concerned, thepetition only begins after he is eliminated. No one engages with him alone.

    As soon as you spot him, use the beacon tokens, the surrounding people wille and aid you. If you want to move in teams, that is fine too. Once a group engages with him, don''t aim for any specifc goal. Eliminate him and if it doesn''t work, kill him.

    Don''t try to capture him with your own personal vendetta.

    He is amon enemy for everyone and he is hated equally by everyone of us."

    After some nonsensical instructions, everyone went to the spot where Sam shot the arrow. After all, they are not idiots, they noticed that Sam is at the mountain. He was sent there for a reason. The arrow he shot gave them an idea on what direction he might have went.

    They are just going to spread a little to cover more area.

    If only they knew.

    Once they are in the vicinity they will now that Sam didn''t even bother moving stealthily, instead he is leaving a big path for them to follow him.

    They might have made a n the day before to deal with Sam, what they didn''t know is that Sam made a n before the regionalpetitions even started and no matter what they do and how much they try, they cannot escape it.

 Chapter 2038 Preying

    Chapter 2038 Preying

    *CHOP*

    *CHOP*

    Sam moved around in the forest while chopping down the trees with his saber. He looked like a wild beast on a hunt and soon he managed to catch up with the guy who he hit with the arrow.

    The guy didn''t even bother running anymore and fell to the ground looking at Sam warily.

    "From the looks of it, you belong to the Thor Academy."

    Sam asked and the guy nodded nervously. He is badly hurt and even though he stopped the bleeding at his shoulder, he knows that its just a temporary measure as of now. He needs to get treated as soon as possible or he will lose his arm forever.

    He gritted his teeth and made a difficult decision.

    "Okay, you win. I will quit."

    He took out the token to escape the test, but the next moment.

    *SLASH*

    The saber shed and the second arm fell off. Sam''s face is covered with blood from the ssh. His sh was forceful and even a bit crude.

    The opponent was dumbfounded and he couldn''t even scream for a second.

    "AARRRRGHHHHHHHHH¡­."

    That pain and agony only kicked in after a second.

    "w¡­ what the fuck is wrong with you? I said, I quit." He spoke with a shivering tone as he looked at his severed and the token within it. He wanted to jump on it and bite the token if that is what it took, but Sam had other ns.

    "You are precious bait, how can I let you go away just like that."

    Sam picked up the token and threw it into his storage before picking up the spatial rings on the fingers of that severed arm.

    He went through it all and finally found what he was looking for. Communication device. After fiddling through it for a minute, he sent out a message to a bunch of people at the same time. The people from the Thor Academy.

    At this moment, Thor who is taking the lead in the search for Sam just appeared at the spot where Sam shot the guy with the arrow. He was about to follow the trail Sam left behind, but all of a sudden hismunication token rang.

    "Your Attention Please, a student named Egron who belongs to the Thor Academy is currently lying down in a pool of his own blood with both of his arms severed in the middle of the forest.

    I, the attacker who made him like that already stole the escape token to make sure that he doesn''t escape the test and in exactly twenty seconds, I am going to sh him on the chest and leave him here.

    If you want him alive. Pleasee and ensure his safety within the next three minutes. Or, you cer to collect his body.

    Yours truly, Sam."

    The message was sent to all Thor Academy students and they were stunned. A few of them were actually in search of Sam, so when they heard the message directly from Sam, they didn''t hesitate.

    They moved while bringing their allies from other academies along with them.

    At this moment, Sam looked at the young man in front of him with a cold gaze.

    "P..please let me go. I¡­ I already said I quit. You cannot do this to me.."

    "Apparently, moral and ethical rules like that don''t exist here. Only the rules by the books and you can bend it as long as you have strength and authority.

    Right now, in this test area, I have a strength that gives me authority.

    No hard feelings, though. It is not personal. It is just payback."

    *SLASH*

    The saber cut through him on the chest and Sam made sure that the bleeding wouldn''t stop. He damaged some meridians to make sure the candidate wouldn''t stop bleeding with his spiritual energy.

    Within the next two minutes, I cleared the surroundings and ced some things there before leaving the area. This time, he didn''t create amotion and moved stealthily.

    Thor was the closest one to the incident and he made his way first. But when he arrived, the student who is already on the verge of death sat up, looked at him, and said.

    "Don''t. Don''te forward."

    With those words, he couldn''t hold out any more and passed out. Thor wanted to go forward, but he felt a bit troubled. He started scanning the surroundings. Before he could do a deep search, someone from his team alreadye.

    "What are you doing Thor? Why did you just leave him like that?"

    Before Thor could answer, he went forward.

    *BOOM*

    An explosion urred. Divine energy converged into a concentrated sphere that enveloped the guy that just stepped forward.

    *BOOM*

    Thor could see the elemental energy invading his body. Created a bunch ofcerations and started corroding his flesh at a visible rate. His eyes widened at a visible rate. He took out his hammer and smashed it on the sphere.

    *BOOM*

    The sphere didn''t even fluctuate.

    At this moment, some people from other academies were already nearby, they saw this, but they didn''t move forward to help at all. They just stood there and watched the show.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    After two more shots, the sphere finally fluctuated. Only to his disappointment¡­

    *BOOM*

    With another explosive noise, the guy stuck in the sphere was shot out like a missile into the air. He traveled in a huge arc and fell somewhere else.

    At the same time, a few hundred meters away, Sam''s signature silver lightning roared. Both inpletely different directions.

    Thor appeared conflicted.

    "I will go after him. You guys go and treat our teammate."

    He ordered his teammates and went after Sam.

    Thor''s two teammates moved in the direction of their teammate who was sent like a bullet. They traveled at their top speed and it took some time to track the exact spot. When they finally reached, they saw that the guy is on hisst breath.

    They hurriedly tried to treat them, but at this moment, they suddenly felt a massive sense of threat.

    *SWOOSH*

    *SWOOSH*

    Two silver shes came at them out of nowhere, aimed at their necks. They stepped back and barely saved themselves.

    Watt stepped out of the forest and looked at them with a cold glint in his eyes.

    "Didn''t expect I will get to deal with two high-quality prey at the start of thepetition. You guys are really unlucky."

    "You are Watt? From Hermes Academy?"

    "And you are the dogs of the Thor Academy. The ones who sent a message to mest night."

    "We discussed a deal and you rejected it. What is this now?"

    "What the fuck are you on? Did you smoke something? This is apetition ofbat and we arepetitors. And I don''t remember being part of your little kids'' group. I am here to fight twopetitors.

    The only variable here is that I am fucking pissed about your Academy students and I am going to take it out on you."

    Watt zoomed and closed their distance before attacking them. The battle turned into a melee. The twopetitors happened to be of lightning element as they attacked with all their focus.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Every hit gave an explosive sound and the shockwaves destroyed the surroundings. Watt had an easy time handling their strength and technique. Soon, he caught hold of one of them and kicked the other in the gut.

    The kick was strong enough to send the other guy into the air. He twisted the hand of the remaining one and kicked him in the gut. The arm broke with multiple cracks and he also destroyed a bunch of ribs.

    By now he guy that was sent into the air was almost halfway back. Watt jumped into the air and smashed both of his hands into the chest of that guy.

    *BOOM*

    Both of them fell and created arge crater. Watt stood up first and didn''t let the opponent stand up. He gave a low kick and broke his leg. The opponent fell forward and with gritted teeth he pulled Watt into a tight hold.

    The second opponent came from behind and tried to attack Watt.

    Watt snapped his fingers and a card appeared between them, he swiped the card on the opponent that was holding him, leaving arge gash on his back. He then threw the same card at the second opponent''s fist.

    With two opponents on either side, Watt took out a bunch of silver cards and started throwing them.

    *SWOOSH*

    *SWOOSH*

    The cards whistled through the air and shed them at various parts. Within three minutes they already lost consciousness, but Watt didn''t even let them fall down. Whenever they were falling in a direction, a card with wind energy hit them and the blow sent them back in the opposite direction.

    Within this onught, they got their consciousness back, but they didn''t even have the strength to scream in pain. Watt kept on attacking. Soon, the flesh was being chipped off, bit by bit.

    Everyone who is watching this from the spectator stand felt their blood run cold.

 Chapter 2039 Confrontations

    Chapter 2039 Confrontations

    Watt took down two of the opponents from Thor Academy.

    Sam took down two. Now there are only two left from that Academy. Thor and another guy who is watching over the first opponent to save him. Sam is actually a bit surprised that out of ten people from Norse region there are six people from Thor Academy and three people from Hel Academy.

    Only person made it in from the other academies and ironically he is also working for Thor.

    Sam kind of guessed that Thor must have pulled same bullshit like Pearl did. However, Sam was there in Olympian region to destroy her ns, and here Thor seeded. And that sess is not going tost long because Sam is now going to take it out on them bit by bit.

    Watt left the three heavily injured Thor Academy students in that forest before making his move.

    His job is done there, now he can go and find new prey.

    At this moment, Thor is running after Sam''s trail to see if he could find him. Tough luck, he couldn''t. He could feel that Sam is very close, but he was unable to reach him and catch up to him.

    Soon, the rest of the allies he made also started searching the surroundings.

    What they all don''t know is that Sam is watching them from the top of thergest tree in the vicinity. He activated wood fusion and merged with tree and watched as they moved around searching for him. They upied the whole area.

    Even if Sam uses the space element now, they might be able to roughly estimate the direction he was moving in.

    He is a bit impressed by their efficiency, but he also pitied their stupidity.

    In the guise of searching in arger area, they spread themselves thing. Now only duos are moving and started keenly searching the surroundings and this is a great situation for Sam. It makes things easier for him.

    He took out his rifle and shot at a certain location. The bullet whistled through the air.

    At the same moment, a thousand meters or so away from Sam''s location, two people are looking around for Sam.

    One of them belongs to Hel Academy and the other one belongs to Hou Yi''s Academy. They looked pretty bored.

    "Fuck this. I don''t want to do this anymore. This guy is like a slippery eel. I am getting tired of this."

    The guy from Hou Yi Academy expressed his displeasure.

    The student from Hel Academy is setting up a trap formation for anyone that might cross this path. Sam or otherwise, this is apetition after all. Just as she was about to finish the formation, they sensed somethinging towards them.

    The bullet came toward them and both of them dodged to either side.

    *BOOM*

    They barely managed to escape from the bullet. Even the trap formation they set up was destroyed.

    "What the fuck is that?"

    Both of them looked in the direction the bullet came from. The explosion alerted a lot of people around. Sam had to change the locations. He immediately came out of the tree and flew away as he stepped on the wind with partial fusion and once again disappeared into the thick and lush forests.

    Everyone started moving that particr direction, even the two people who were attacked by Sam wanted to do the same.

    However when they just moved a few meters, a sword sh appeared out of nowhere.

    *THUD*

    A line of trees fell down with a single sh which was followed by the swordsman who made it. Jack came with the ck Meteorite Sword in his hands.

    Unlike Watt, Jack didn''t bother speaking any nonsense. He went into action immediately.

    Sam who was on the run, took a high position once again and aimed his rifle in a different direction. This time he shot down one of the opponents out of a three man group. The remaining two stopped in their tracks for a moment and were a bit nervous.

    At that moment¡­

    *BOOM*

    A massive explosion of mes happened.

    Five Elemental King gave a shy entrance and jumped in between the two of them.

    In a different spot. Another gun shot. Philip went after two candidates. Unlike Jack and the rest, he took up an annoying tactic. He didn''t even bother with showing face. Instead, the fiery metal projectiles started raining down on the opponents out of nowhere and suppressed thempletely.

    The spectators watched this from outside and felt that something is odd.

    If not for the fact that the timing is too perfect, they could have brushed this off as a series of coincidences. Sam is shooting someone from far away while luring the people to his direction. Wherever his shotnded someone is reaching there and are dealing with the people that are already there.

    The Elders started smelling some conspiracy, but of course, someone just took the most ordinary theory into consideration. They believed that since someone was attacking a spot, the nearest person decided to go there and reap the rewards.

    But some believed that Sam might have allied with the others from the Olympian region, since the people that were attacking were only from the Olympian Region and the rest of the people were being targeted.

    This caused a lot of discussion among the Elders.

    But there is nothing against making alliances. Thor Academy has led a bigger alliance with students from all the regions.

    The only ones they didn''t include is the Olympian Region. So, if Sam managed to buy the Olympian region, then they couldn''t do anything about it.

    Thor who is running at the forefront realizes that something is wrong. Whenever Sam is aiming at a point, he is only aiming once. He is not following up and he is not even going in that direction to take the prey.

    This made him feel nervous.

    After the fifth hit that Sam made, he finally decided to stand still for a second. He took out themunication tokens and contacted everyone he could toe and gather.

    They gathered within a few minutes and he made them contact all of their teammates. He could see the visible change in everyone''s expressions as they made one call after another.

    "I couldn''t contact the rest of my teammates."

    The Hel Academy representative, Zaara said in a worry.

    The others also had simr responses. Apart from the people that are there, the rest of them are not avable to contact.

    "We need to go back and take a look. Something is off."

    "Shall we split up?"

    One of them suggested.

    "No. No, we are not splitting up. We need to be together. Something is wrong. I can feel it. We will move¡­"

    Before he could finish, he felt somethinging from behind and dodged to the side.

    *BOOM*

    The bulletnded exactly where he stood and exploded. Sam clicked his tongue. He didn''t really like missing the shot like this. But he realized that the more powerful the cultivation level is raising to, the harder it is for the guns to keep working as efficiently as before.

    Unless he used arge amount of divine energy and used that explosion as the source of energy for the propulsion, it would be hard for him to deal with this. Anyway, he could think about itter.

    Now it is time to conclude this shit.

    He aimed the rifle and started shooting at the same spot multiple times.

    Around five to six shotster, Sam''s friends understood what he wanted. Except for Vidyut, who is tagging with White at the moment, the rest of the team made their way to this spot. Since Thor is so into making alliances and taking someone out of his way, Sam used the same.

    Within no time, Watt, Philip, Jack, and the rest of the team already arrived at the spot and they surrounded Thor and what was left of his team. Sam was about to go there and finish the fight, but the next moment, he had to turn around and throw a kick.

    *BOOM*

    His leg met with the kick of White and the recoil sent Sam flying. He put the rifle away and regained his bnce. His leg trembled a bit. That is a perfect kick. If he really took it to his head, he would have been in a state of confusion for a few seconds at least.

    Sam hovered in the air and looked at White Cautiously.

    "Come on, do you really want to do this now?"

    "I cannot let you be. Now there are no arena border restrictions, so this would be a proper fight."

    "Nah, I don''t think so."

    White frowned at Sam''sid-back attitude.

    "You know, since there are no boundaries, I just walk away."

    Wind elemental fusion activated and wings came on Sam''s back. He zoomed towards the spot where the groups were confronting, he cannot miss it now.

    As for dealing with White, once the top sixteen are set and they are in the actual tournament. He has all the time in the world.

    At this moment, Thor is leading the group as they try to attack Sam''s team, but to his shock these people who were supposed to not know each other that much, at least ording to his knowledge, are a perfect team.

    But still, Thor''s team has more numbers and he wanted to take advantage of it. He knew that he is fucked and he cannot afford to not get into the top 16.

    So, he has to find a way out of this.

 Chapter 2040 Dog Fight

    Chapter 2040 Dog Fight

    Thor felt like he was drowning in a thick swamp of mud.

    He couldn''t move, he couldn''t swim, he couldn''t scream, and he couldn''t even breathe.He ismanding his teammates, but almost every singlemand is useless. Because he couldn''t focus on the whole battle.

    Right now, he is being pressured down by Jack.

    *KEEN*

    Sword keened with every Jack''s every swing.

    *CLANG* *CLANG*

    The hammer and the sword are shing. Even with Thor''s brute force, he was unable to push Jack back. From the initial look, Jack''s sword style felt light, agile, and precise. None of them should be rted to Thor''s style, which is heavy, destructive, and brutish.

    Thor activated lightning fusion and jumped at Jack with a heavy swing of his hammer.

    Jack on the other hand looked nonchnt. Except for his eyes that are focused, his bodynguage looked loose and rxed.

    *RUMBLE*

    Lightning roared in the sky and a few thunderbolts attached themselves to Thor''s boosting the attack. As he neared Jack and was about to make contact, Jack gently kicked on the ground throwing his body into the air.

    His movements seemed light as a feather and slow as a snail, but he is quite the opposite. Jack made a turn in the air. As if he teleported, he appeared right behind Thor as he swung the sword.

    He is fast. Thor could barely follow his movements with his eyes. His worldview cracked a bit. He hasn''t seen such speed in a non-elemental fusion form. Jack swung his sword.

    Thor didn''t block it. He didn''t have enough time, instead, he leaned forward and hit the ground with his hammer. He used the maximum strength he could muster from that angle and timing.

    *BOOM*

    The shockwave disrupted the surrounding battle a bit and Jack also took the brunt of it.

    He had to cover his eyes because of the lightning sh that came from it.When the sh is gone, everyone was dumbfounded by what they saw.

    There was no crater. The expected sight of destruction is nowhere to be seen. Instead there is a long and straight skid mark as if a cannon ball is fired exactly on the surface of the earth. The line started right below Jack''s feet and on the other end stood Thor with his hammer.

    He redirected the force so that it could give him a boost and go past the current encirclement.

    In front of everyone''s shocked gazes, Thor turned his tail and ran.

    "I will definitely kill you." Of course, not before spewing out a threat that didn''t match his actions.

    He activated fusion to its limits and tried his best to run away. When he turned around to take a look, he saw Jack just standing there with the de of his sword resting on his shoulders.

    He is way tooidback and Thor didn''t understand why, but the next moment, he sensed a threat, he looked ahead and he saw a humanoid figure with wings on his backing at him like a hawking after a rabbit.

    Sam caught Thor by his throat and didn''t even give him time to react.

    He spun in the air and closed his wings off. With the momentum of that spin, hended in the middle of the battle¡­

    *BOOM*

    And mmed Thor into the ground.

    "Come on, I just came to join the party and you are leaving? No way."

    Thor swung his hammer to hit Sam, but he already moved. Not because of the hammer, but rather because White was about to crash into him with one of his signature recoil shots.

    *BOOM*

    He crashed into the ground. There was no crater though, instead, all the force that came from the crash is concentrated in the exact area where his foot touched the ground. It is a very small area and all that force is directed there.

    He used the recoil trick once again and kicked with all the force shooting himself like a missile at Sam.

    He was fast and Sam didn''t react to it immediately, he barely dodged but still White managed to hit him in the shoulder. Sam didn''t let it go. He caught a hold of White''s Coat twisted his body to the side and smashed him into the ground. Head first.

    Even with that hit, the mask didn''t loosen up.

    Sam took a step back and White stood up, looking at him coldly.

    By now, Thor also stood up. He looked at White and Sam coldly. His anger is surging to his head. If he gets any angrier, he might just pop a vessel. White lunged and shot at Sam with his recoil hit. He held cane that was pointed at Sam''s heart.

    Sam deflected the attack. He used the same trick that he used back in the Olympian region. But a bit improvised.

    The Deflected move was directed at Thor who didn''t expect it. He was about to turn around and run once again. Only this time, Jack kicked him back into the line of the attack.

    The cane''s pointed end hit Thor on the chest and he was shot out like a cannonball. He felt humiliated, but when he thought about how he could at least get out of this encirclement once again, reality hit him in the face in the form of Five Elemental King''s attack.

    Night Ghost appeared in front of him and pped him to the ground.

    At the exact moment, White was about tond a strike on Sam, who was grinning wildly while he used his wood element to grab Thor and another person from the opponent''s team to use as meatshields.

    White was so frustrated that he kicked both of them out with recoil kicks and this time, Thor knew someone would kick his ass in the air, so he controlled himself forcefully to not get out of the encirclement.

    Ironically, hended right in front of Jack, who had a faint smile on his face.

    The spectators are all screaming in excitement. This is a nasty dog fight and they are all here for it. Particrly themon citizens and the outsiders who just came here to watch the show. Thor Academy students and instructors of course had a sour face.

    But one student group of Thor Academy in particr had a really bad expression on their faces.

    While everyone is watching the exciting fight, they are not. Instead, they are sitting in a meeting room across from Dove who is leaning into her chair with a rxed posture.

    "Dove, you should better be kidding. Or your current attitude might be taken as a deration of war."

    Dove looked at the woman who spoke and the next moment the other party shut up. She redirected her gaze back to the leader who sat at the central seat on the other side of the table.

    "Flok.

    The fact that the student lottery was messed up for the teampetition is a big deal. Unless there is elder-level involvement, it wouldn''t happen. If you don''t reveal the details and make right of this situation with a proper exnation, you are going to suffer the consequences."

    Flok looked at Dove with a deep frown. That frown stayed there from the moment she came in.

    "What makes you think that Thor Academy did this?"

    Dove''s gaze is cold, but apart from that there is no expression. She yed with her nails and didn''t reply. Flok continued.

    "Just because some kids went after that guy named Sam in the teampetition, you think thepetition is rigged? Just how narcissistic are you guys to think that a mere Gambler academy will warrant us to use such measures?"

    Dove raised an eyebrow and said.

    "Flok, I am not here to argue with you. I am not here to discuss and reach amon ground. If the Thor Academy is not going to investigate, I am going to take this to the Academy Realm''s Judicial powers.

    I will blow the fuck out of this matter and make it go out of proportion.

    Even if that investigation fails to reveal any concrete evidence, as long as I smell so much as reasonable suspicion, I will lead my academy members toe after the Thor Academy.

    Then, you will answer your own question, whether Gambler Academy warrants you suck sneaky measures or not."

    Her voice was calm and collected, but they could smell the underlying venom. She meant what she said.

    She gave them a sweeping nce when Flok spoke up.

    "Even if you feel there is an issue, it is up to your Elder to talk to us. It is not your ce to do anything. Because of your wily bitchy attitude, we already informed our elders, they will meet your Elder Chorus and send an official notice to Gambler Academy about your undiplomatic attitude towards us.

    If you really think you can take this to Academy Realms'' Judicial Department, by all means, go ahead. But you don''t have authority. Only your Elder can and the whole realm knows what kind of person that Chorus is."

    Dove chuckled slightly and gave them a pitying look before leaving.

    "It seems like you want to do this the hard way. You better pray your Elders to give in. Or I will make you all cry like newborn babies."

 Chapter 2041 Thors Outburst

    Chapter 2041 Thor''s Outburst

    Dove came out of the room and sent a message to Chorus who is sitting in the spectator stand exclusive to the Elders.

    He looked at the fight on the screen for a second as he mulled over some thoughts. An Elder wearing the Thor Academy Uniform came over and spoke to him.

    "We need to talk."

    Chorus looked at him for a moment as if he is contemting something, before he sighed and got up. He followed the Elder out of the spectator area and into a building nearby within the Thor Academy. Chrous took a seat at the only table in the room, while the Elder still stood there.

    "You don''t seem surprised? You didn''t even ask any questions and just followed me?" The Elder asked.

    "I am expecting this."

    "You are?"

    "Yes, my just sent me a message about the little meeting she had with your students. So, I saw thising."

    "Since we are in the same page, I am sure you understand why I asked for this conversation. You student threatened us with pretty bold ims and very wild Bluffs."

    "Did she now?" Chrous asked as he yawnedzily. The Elder frowned. This is their home ground and the are in the middle of the one of the most prestigiouspetitions, Chrous should be a lot more nervous in his opinion.

    But instead all he got was a Lazy man who looked bored out of his mind.

    "It seems like your other student, the guy who attracted too much enmity from too many people is unable to swallow the bitter pill of consequences that came with it. Did hee and cry about how scared he was about being targeted by so many people?"

    Chrous chuckled lightly.

    They could see therge spectator screen from the window of the building. He could still gaze at Sam who is fighting wildly while using other academy students as meat shields.

    "Are you really talking about that guy? Can''t you look at his face? Look at him." Chorus gestured for the Elder to take a look and the Elder looked as well with a frown on his face.

    "Can you see it? Does that face look like it belongs to a person who is scared? That little weasel craves trouble. He cannot wait for all your Freshmen to gang up on him right this moment. He cannot wait to cause moremotion.

    You are saying he is scared?

    If the guy who single-handedly put a full-stop to the whole teampetition is scared, then what about the students that ganged up just to deal with him?"

    Chrous asked in the samezy tone.

    He stretched his body and moaned slightly in pleasure before standing up.

    "You know better than anyone whether something fishy happened. In fact, the moment you arrived and dragged me back here to discuss this, confirmed whatever suspicions those kids had.

    Otherwise, with the pride of one of the top Divine Academies, you guys would have used everything you have to pressure me and my Academy."

    "YOU¡­"

    The Elder was about to scream something, but Chrous'' gaze turned cold and the surrounding atmosphere thickened like mercury.

    Its as if the density of the spiritual energy itself increased by a thousand fold.

    "Stop it Elder. Don''t lose your dignity as a reputable Academy.

    I might not care much about it, but I don''t want to rip the desires of so many youngsters out in the open who still look up to the Thor Academy. They expect you to have some decorum and dignity, so show it to them that you have it.

    Or, whatever my students words that you may have considered threats, I will prove it to you that they are not.

    By the end of the preliminaries of this Solobat, if you don''t bring up a proper resolution, I will file an officialint. I am not going to let this matter rest."

    "How are you so sure that we did it? What proof do you have?" The Elder asked self-righteously through his gritted teeth.

    "I don''t know exactly what it is, but I do know where Sam might have gotten the confirmation from. The weakest link the little n that your beloved Thorid out.

    Likhma, the candidate from the Aranya Academy."

    The Elder frowned. He wanted to argue more, but he knew that the other party also knew about this matter.

    In fact, the moment Sam''s team was surrounded by Likhma and the rest, f, the dean of the academy and several Elders understood that something is very wrong with the situation. So, an internal investigation began.

    It didn''t take long for them to figure out what had happened.

    It was Thor''s n and it wasn''t executed perfectly. Thor, acted without thinking things through and left so many loose ends. They though they already caught a hold of the biggest at the same time Dove already made her move.

    But they didn''t expect that the thread the other party following is not the same one they had in control.

    At the same time, things heated up within the test area.

    More than three dozen Divine ne cultivators are shing at the same time, even though the terrain was picked based on their abilities, it is still being destroyed at a visible pace.

    Just the shockwaves are enough to drag everything out.

    By now, the Elders are all discussing the fight heatedly.

    "I didn''t know the Olympians have lucked out this much this year. Look at their candidates, all of them might just end up in top ten at this rate."

    "What of it? They are still from different academies."

    "They might be. But that doesn''t matter.

    Olympians may fight to death within themselves, but when ites to crushing the enemies outside of Olympian, they are as tight as they could get. They might as well be from the same academy.

    I wouldn''t even be surprised if the Olympians decide to host abined training program for all those kids"

    "I wonder how that Sam rallied so many people from Olympian side, look at them go."

    The discussions went on and on.

    At the battlefield, Thor is standing up after getting beaten a lot.

    His clothes are tattered, his fancy armor is nothing more than fragments on the ground. He looked at Sam and White who are still exchanging blows and in the middle Sam using the other students as meat shields.

    He then looked at the rest of the group. Watt, Jack, Philip, and the remaining are all toying with the other Academy students. If they wanted, they could have ended the fights a long time ago, instead, they are showing off by ying around with their opponents and in the middle of it, giving Sam a hand with a meat shield.

    He grew angry with every passing second and made a decision.

    "You fuckers forced me to do this." His charismatic persona has long been in tatters with his armor. Right now he looked like an angry homeless guy on the street. His hammer disappears and is reced by apletely different one.

    This is a bigger-sized battle hammer and it is made out of a dark electric blue metal. The handle seemed to be made out of a bone of simr color. There are runic inscriptions that give off an ancient aura. It seemed like it had an inherent energy of its own and that ancient aura surged into Thor''s body.

    His fusion formed activated once again, but unlike the regr lightning form which would look explosive and electric, now he looked at somerge glowing electric blue object with darker blue lines extending from the hammer''s handle into his body creating various runic inscriptions on him.

    He looked like an otherworldly being.

    Everyone in the battlefield turned to him. The first High-ss Divine Weapon came out. Sam smirked at this. He could sense Thor''s killing intent directed solely on him.

    He is the biggest pain in Thor''s ass. Noticing this, the rest of Sam''s team became serious.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    With explosive sounds, all of them activated their own fusion forms. Watt who is tangled with two opponents, took out his stack of Blood Iron cards. He threw two of them into the air, before he jumped out of their encirclement.

    The cards made a huge curve in the air creating a concentrated gale storm while shing the two opponents in the backs.

    The storms rampaged their bodies and the cardsnded in Watt''s hand as hended and looked at Thor coldly.

    Jack disappeared from his spot, at least that is what his opponents felt. With a single sh, both of them fell down unconscious, ironically there is not a single wound on their bodies.

    Philip was much more explosive. Two punches and he put holes through two more opponents. Five elemental King, Saber Monarch, Paras all put an end to the fights. Only Vidyut didn''t act out. He knew how important his hidden identity is.

    Sam''s energy surged and gave White a spinning backkick, sending him flying.

    He fell right into the middle of Sam''s team members.

    He was about to go back and fight Sam, but the next moment, Jack stood in front of him with a pointed sword while the remaining teammates surrounded him.

    "You know what to do." Jack said in a low tone.

    White looked at Sam. His gaze is cold and indignant, meanwhile, Sam levitated towards Thor. He had a very excited expression on his face. His aura surged and it felt beastly. He was about to make a move and that instant, he felt a spatial force pulling him into darkness.

 Chapter 2042 Ivar is Here

    Chapter 2042 Ivar is Here

    Sam looked around in surprise.

    The darkness is gone and he is standing in the middle of arge tform in the center of the spectator area. He could hear the ps and cheers of the people from all directions. The rest of the candidates also stood around him just as confused as him.

    Thor who activated his special weapon was the one who came out of the shock first.

    He deactivated the weapon and threw it back in the storage. He gave Sam a look that showed obvious hostility before leaving. Sam cursed under his breath. He missed out on a great chance. He finally took a look at the rest of the contestants around him.

    They are the top sixteen and unfortunately, it includes Thor which is against Sam''s n. He wanted to eliminate Thor in this preliminary round. He wanted to do the exact same thing he did to Pearl.

    The reason why he told his friends to just toy around with the other students is precisely to avoid this kind of scenario. Of course, toying around would highlight the abilities of his crew gathering a lot of attention towards them.

    There is still another benefit to it.

    The more people that are still in the field the less likely it is for Thor to identally make it into Top 16. He only wanted to eliminate the rest after dealing with Thor. Since his friends got a bit too cautious when Thor pulled off that special transformation, they dealt with the rest.

    Now, Thor is in the Top 16.

    Noah walked towards him and said.

    "It seems like your n failed. Your face says it all."

    "What can I do? Shit happens sometimes. I can only deal with it."

    "See you in the arena then."

    She said with a smile and left. Yes, she is also part of the top 16. As Chorus exined before, because of what Sam did to the other teams in the team match, a lot of backup students had to take up ces in the Solobat tournament.

    Noah who was only a team battle candidate reced Likhma who still hadn''t even open his eyes since the team battle.

    Sam left the tform and went to where his team sat down. Dove nodded at him in greeting. It is surprising to see her so silent. Sam could feel the change in her aura and demeanor. At least with him, she is no longer acting like an annoying guardian trying to teach the ways of the world.

    Now that the preliminaries are over, it is time for the final matches.

    A basic tournament structure with sixteen people.

    One contestant remains on top and takes the title of the Top Freshman of this year. Everyone is excited. Most people already believed that the title belonged to Sam. That is the consensus among themon audience.

    Among the instructors and seniors, however, there are more names being spoken. Some believed White had a good chance. Some believed Jack had a shot too.

    Sam was mesmerized by Saber Monarch''s fighting style. Even though they didn''t attribute the winner title to him, they believed he would have no trouble entering the top 5. Five elemental kings caught some attention.

    All in all, most of the attention and praise revolved around Sam''s teammates. Only White and sometimes Noah managed to sneak in a bit.

    As for Thor, there is a lot of ridicule directed at him. Since the start, the spectators hadplete ess to what went on in the testing area. They have seen Thor trying tomand an alliance of candidates to fight against Sam.

    The same thing happened in the Team battle.

    They did enjoy watching someone gang up on someone else. But they are more excited when the one who is being ganged up ones out on top. Sam defeated the Teams that were against him. He won the whole team battle by himself.

    Sam could be said about this solo battle.

    Now Sam one-upped Thor and came up with an alliance of his own. The best part is everyone in his alliance is badass in their eyes. Their fighting style, the way they toyed with their opponents, the way they forced a dogfight on their opponents and finally tore them apart.

    It is an incredible sight to see.

    Now, they want to see a very colorful ending.

    While the Thor Academy is bustling with these activities and the Arena for the final battle is being prepared, Sam takes some rest. Because of his n, he had to expend a lot of energy. He could use this rest, particrly since he nned to show off in the next few fights.

    While recovering he calcted his gains.

    The main reason to win this tournament is to create as much mess as possible. The conflict with Likhma helped a lot. Even Dove said there is some guy who is going toe after Sam because of Likhma''s status, which works in Sam''s favor in the long term.

    Even though he wasn''t able to destroy Thor in the preliminaries, that is still fine. He could fix him up in the next fights. It has little effect other than the psychological impact left on Thor''s mind.

    Since Thor himself tried to get on Sam''s nerves, he will get his due payback in time.

    His friends got the exposure Sam wanted. He needs them to build as much reputation as possible. The only problem is Noah is here.

    Since she is here, it wouldn''t take long for the rest of them toe back. It is fine even if others did. In fact, he weed Kumar and Arkiv. Akhil''s presence would be great too. But Dayus shouldn''te here that early.

    But there is one big gain that will benefit him more than anything else.

    Bronte is in the top 16.

    The kid who joined the Hub. Even if he doesn''t win a higher position now, Sam can use that guy''s current position to milk a lot.

    As his thoughts wandered around, Dove called Sam.

    Sam looked at her in askance.

    "Likhma''s backers are nowhere to be seen. They took Likhma back to the Aranya Region. You need to be careful. You have to assume that the whole Aranya academy is after you."

    "Sure."

    "Just a warning. Take it seriously. Ask if you need any help."

    "Alright."

    "Forget about the Thor Academy now. We got it covered."

    "Okay."

    That is all Sam could say. This is the information he didn''t ask for. So, that is all he said.

    Dove went back to keep a stoic face. Sam rolled his eyes. He couldn''t understand this girl. He just waited for the fights to begin. The Elders of Thor''s academy are discussing something vehemently. It seems like they are waiting for someone.

    Sam took a look and could guess who it was.

    Another ten minutester, that person came. At the entrance of the Academy, a young man wearing a sharp ck robe is walking in. He had bronze skin and his muscles are apparent even though he is fully covered with a robe.

    He is tall. Almost reaching seven feet. But he is clearly human. On his back hung a battle axe with its de covered with ck cloth. He had a cold expression and spectators could almost smell blood from far away because of his bloodthirsty aura.

    His sharp eyes, Long hair, and scruffy beard didn''t help the look. He looked handsome, but no one would even dare go close to him. It is almost like the air would have escaped from his presence if it had a choice.

    His presence is like the incarnate of destruction itself.

    It is Ivar.

    The owner of the Paradise Inn, Alumni of the Thor Academy, the previous record holder of the Thor''s Academy tower, and most of all, the invigtor or rather the referee of the current Solo Combat exam.

    Ivar walked in and looked around in the crowd.

    As his gaze swept around, everyone who remotely knew about him avoided the gaze. The seniors and students of the Thor Academy gulped in nervousness. Thor felt so ashamed that he hid behind the Elder who was checking up on him.

    The Elders of the Thor Academy gulped in nervousness when Ivar looked at them. He is intimidating even to the Elders here. His gaze finallynded on Sam and that cold face cracked with a smile.

    Sam waved his hand slightly.

    This scene shocked everyone. At least, everyone who knew about Ivar.

    Dove kind of expected this, but even she was a bit surprised. She still couldn''t understand how Sam managed to strike a friendship with the guy who managed to go through the whole academy period with no friends.

    Ivar took a breath and addressed the students.

    "Top Sixteen Candidates, on to the arena please."

    The top sixteen including Sam went on to the arena.

    "I am Ivar. I will be the Referee and the Judge for thest and final event of this Freshman tournament.

    First of all, congrattions on reaching the top 16."

 Chapter 2043 Beating

    Chapter 2043 Beating

    Ivar paused and looked at the group.

    "Still, I thought I could expect some quality in people this time. But too bad, almost half of you are utter disappointments."

    His words stunned not just the contestants, but the audience as well. The whole arena and spectators turned silent. One can hear a pin drop.

    "Anyway, the show must go on. The tournament rules are pretty simple. I am sure none of you are stupid enough for me to exin how a sixteen-person tournament works.

    The only thing I will mention is that there are few limits on you in this battle. Even the arena boundaries are just for show. As long as you don''t leave this area of the academy, you can fight to your heart''s content.

    If you were thrown off the stage, you can juste back on to it and fight.

    The fight stops only when one of you is crippled, in aatose state, surrenders, or dead. The surrender is only verbal. So, unless you voiced it out loud, you will still be part of the fight. There are no limits to your weapons as well.

    If you want to kill someone, go ahead. Kill them.

    If you have a Divine weapon that you begged from an Elder at your Academy that will help yourbat state, go ahead and use it. You might be considered a coward, but you wouldn''t be considered a loser ording to the tournament rules.

    The fight has no time limits.

    One fight will take ce at a time. There should be no external involvement. If any tries, they have me to deal with.

    I am the one and only judge and referee for the tournament. Even if involvement. If any tries, they have me to deal with.

    I am the one and only judge and referee for the tournament. Even if the Dean of the Thor Academyes down from hisfy throne, he still doesn''t have a say in this."

    Utter silence.

    Sam almost heard the Crickets.

    He couldn''t help but chuckle. The faces of everyone as they nervously nced at f are hrious, to say the least. Ivar gave no fucks.

    Ivar paused and looked at the audience. His gazended on a freshman who looked like a nerd and to be fair, he is. He is one of the high rankers in the Inscriptionpetition. The young man was stunned and gulped.

    He pointed his finger at himself and asked.

    "M¡­ Me..?"

    "Yeah,e on."

    The kid came onto the stage. Ivar waved his hand and sixteen metal tes flew out. Along with them, eight squares purely condensed of energy floated in front of him.

    "Pick two random cards in each square. You are deciding the first-round draws."

    The kid nodded and ced the cards at random. Right now, nothing is on the cards. They looked empty. Once they were all ced in the squares, the cards finally revealed themselves.

    Each card has the name of one contestant.

    Ivar got a good look at them and announced the first match.

    "Thor Versus Sam."

    There was a small silence in the surroundings. Even the kid who picked the cards seemed surprised. His expression said something was wrong. But no one voiced out anything. Because they could almost see blood condensing out of thin air purely from Ivar''s killing intent.

    Clearly, he is not going to hear anyone''s nonsense.

    Sam stretched his handszily as he walked onto the stage. It is great to warm up right up front and he is d that he managed to get Thor in the very first draw.

    Because most of the top sixteen contestants are rted to him.

    Watt, Jack, Philip, Vidyuth, Saber Monarch, Paras, Five Elemental King. Including him, that is eight of them. If that is not enough, now Noah is here. And Bronte managed to slip through the cracks andnd in this spot.

    That is ten people.

    Out of the remaining Six, White is a contender. He might even reach finals if he didn''t get hit by any hidden surprises. Thor managed to get in as well, based on pure luck. So, there are only four expendable candidates, who all looked nervous.

    Clearly, these four didn''t think they could get this far. They only managed to get in because Sam destroyed everyone worth their salt. He and his friend hunted them down. Gathered them together and then yed around him with their lives as they pleased.

    Sam bounced on his toes a couple of times as Thor came forward slowly.

    It is apparent that he is reluctant to face Sam this early in the game. He wanted to scream that Ivar is acting biased and the game is rigged. That would be pot calling the kettle ck and he is scared of Ivar.

    When he finally stepped on the stage, he managed to fish out a determined expression.

    "You can start the fight now."

    Ivar said as he got off the stage.

    Thor took out that Electric blue hammer from the start. His body returned to that weird fusion state. His aura is a weird fusion of chaos and stability. He wanted to see some nervous expression on Sam''s face.

    At least, some vignce would have helped.

    However, all he saw is a creepy grin. Almost like a wolf.

    Silver lightning shed and surrounded Sam. He is also using lightning element. Thor specialty. For three seconds, neither of them moved. The audience looked in anticipation. On the fourth second, Sam made his move.

    *BOOM*

    His leg muscles bulged and left a crack on the stage.

    He threw himself into the air. Thor did the same. Two huge balls of lightning one of Silver and the other of Blue shed. Both of them didn''t dodge and met each other''s blows head-on.

    As the hammer came swinging down like a meteor, Sam caught it with his palm.

    *BOOM*

    Silver and Blue lightning shed. Both of them were pushed back from the recoil. Since Sam was stopping the hammer that hit down, the recoil sent him down. Thor kicked his legs in the air.

    *BOOM*

    He stopped himself from losing bnce and came forward with another hammer strike. Sam once again blocked it with his palm and this time the recoil pushed him down straight. Samnded on his feet.

    *BOOM*

    The stage cracked. He jumped once again and threw a punch which was met with the hammer strike.

    Thor stumbled back because of the force, while Sam was thrown away a bit. But the one who was surprised is Thor and the Elders from his Academy. The specialty of the hammer is such.

    It belonged to one of the previous Deans who was known as the Warlord of the Thor Academy. He is so good in the battlefield that Thor felt it would be a loss if stayed a Dean. He was relieved and promoted to be a general in Thor''s Army.

    He got this hammer custom-made from the materials retrieved from a very special mutant beast that was known to be rare among the rarest creatures. The hammer head is made from a special alloy made of the blood iron of that beast and a rare metal that was given by Thor as a gift. The handle is made out of the bone of the beast.

    The spirit of the beast was sealed in the stone and it gives out this special power to the wielder. The patterns that are on Thor''s body is because of this. His physical strength in this form is something beyond anyone could muster in his peers.

    At least that is what they believed until now.

    Right now, Sam is trading blows with that hammer and they could feel that Sam''s physical strength is much more active than his lightning element at this moment.

    This put some huge cracks in Thor''s worldview. He wondered how those punches would feel if they hit him directly on his body.

    *BOOM*

    He couldn''t even finish his thought.

    Sam started raining punches. Once he got the upper hand, he decided to go ahead and deal with Thor.

    His fist and the hammer met. With an explosion, Thor was off bnce, he could feel the impact in his core. He made a 360-degree turn. It took a lot before he could regain his bnce.

    *SWISH*

    He barely managed to avoid a punch aimed at his head.

    However, it still didn''t negate Sam''s advantage. He noticed that the intensity of lightning around Sam increased and his muscles seemed to have bulged a bit more. They looked more concentrated. He gained a higher altitude and jumped over to throw a punch at Thor.

    *BOOM*

    He blocked the fist with the hammer.

    But he still went backward.

    *BOOM*

    Sam kept going forward. With every punch the lightning increased its intensity, and his muscles felt and looked stronger. With every punch, both of them moved down towards the stage inch by inch.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *CRASH*

    Soon, Thor crashed into the ground. He fell down and the runes on his started fluctuating. By now Sam had partial fusion activated. He is panting slightly. His eyes looked sharper and his canines were a bit grown out.

    It''s Raiju''s bloodline in action.

    Sam channeled a lot of energy in each of his punches and he didn''t want to stop.

    He locked in another punch as he spoke.

    "A Divine Weapon? Did I force you to do this? Yeah, I forced you. Forced you to be a bitch."

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Sam hammered punches one after another on the hammerhead. The lightning shes of both colors grew exponentially.

 Chapter 2044 Insult

    Chapter 2044 Insult

    Thor is lying on the stage.

    His special fusion state is still active. If it is gone, he knows he will not be able to endure Sam''s hits. Even though that hammer, he could still feel the impact. Not just him, the force is going through him and onto the stage.

    He can feel the cracks forming beneath him.

    In that state, all he can see is Sam mounted on top of him,nding one punch at a time in the most brutish way a person could imagine.

    And with every punch, his lightning is intensifying. His original state disappeared and Sam is now is a partial fusion state.

    However, Thor can feel a much more powerful aura inside Sam''s body being riled up with every hit. He almost wanted to resign to his fate. Only his ego didn''t want to give in. All of a sudden, Thor activated a secret art.

    His blood started burning.

    The original blue lightning now got a red-colored hue, creating a purplish lightning. But it is unlike the natural purple lightning. One could feel the bloody auraing from it. The spirit in the hammer is activated and it fed on Thor''s burning blood essence.

    *ROAR*

    A loud roar reverberated throughout the Academy.

    Everyone felt the primal force behind that roar. Even the Dean of the Thor Academy became vignt. Since everyone could feel it, Sam who is sitting on top of Thor, can also obviously feel it.He saw as this weird energy passed through the hammer and it surrounded Thor once again.

    It gave Thor a weird silhouette. His outline looked like he was a werewolf.

    *ROAR*

    He roared and pushed Sam up to stand. People could see the upper half of his body clearly. He indeed looked like a werewolf. The only difference is that it is obvious he actually didn''t turn into a werewolf. Instead, it is just the energy that took that form.

    Thor swung his hammer at Sam.

    The force was so strong, that the fabric of space reacted to it. However¡­

    *BANG*

    Sam caught a hold of the hammer. His energy also transformed and gave Sam a silhouette, he also ironically looked like a werewolf, but unlike Thor Sam''s bloodline made him much more beauty.

    He caught Thor by his throat and once again mmed him backward. The hype Thor''s new form created didn''tst even for a minute. He is back to a submissive position again and this time, he didn''t have the hammer to block the attacks.

    *BOOM*

    The explosive punchesnded, this time on the chest, torso, and face.

    *CRACK*

    *CRACK*

    The cracking sound reverberated throughout along with the explosions. Everyone could see the cracks appearing on the stage. The arena that was supposed to endure the whole tournament is being destroyed in the very first match.

    Thor slowly lost his senses.

    At first, he tried to struggle and fight back, but after a few minutes, he felt the life being slowly pounded out of his body. Once he started losing his will the hammer didn''t react to him as much.

    Slowly, the blood aura was gone, then the runic inscriptions on Thor''s body were gone, then the special fusion turned back to the normal fusion and Thorpletely lost the grip over the hammer.

    Sam stopped the attacks for amoment and picked up the hammer.

    It looked strong. He could feel the beast''s aura from inside. The craftsmanship is also great. He closed his eyes and let his consciousness slip in.

    "HOW DARE YOU?"

    "WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?"

    Two loud shouts came from two different ces. One from the Elders'' area and the other from the Seniors'' area in the spectator stands.

    Both of them belonged to the people of Thor Academy. They are outraged. They wanted to jump on stage and beat the crap out of Sam, but the next moment they stopped in their tracks.

    Ivar''s aura spread out wildly covering the surroundings of the stage. He nced at the two people who yelled, almost daring them to take a step.

    "DON''T YOU KNOW WHAT KIND OF OUTRAGEOUS THING HE IS DOING? AREN''T YOU ASHAMED SUPPORTING AN OUTSIDER, BEING AN ALUMNI?" The elder yelled with righteous anger.

    Ivar didn''t speak, instead, he unstrapped his ax and threw it into the ground. It lodged into the earth by its de. He looked at the Elder and said.

    "Come again."

    The Elder didn''t speak. He gulped in nervousness.

    f gestured for the Elder to stop. He turned to Ivar and asked.

    "Isn''t the match over?"

    Ivar looked at the stage and saw Thor trying to get up.

    "Looks like he still has some juice left in him."

    Ivar replied nonchntly. Everyone secretly sneered. They could see Ivar has a clear bias against Sam. One person among them is very sure of it. The kid that drew the first matches. He didn''t see all eight matches, but the first match was supposed to be Thor and some other student.

    But Ivar just announced this match.

    Of course, once he saw such a thing, he couldn''t stomach it alone, so he shared it. A few people already knew and they had the greatest response. But they swallowed it and kept it in.

    Sam closed his eyes and everyone could feel his aura all over the hammer. Right now a spirit battle is happening between him and the weapon.

    "Dean, we have to stop him." The Elder whispered.

    "And how do you n to do it? The spirit battle started, the moment we interrupt, he would be harmed. Then we need to answer Dean Wharton from the Gambler Academy. Not just him, but all the Alumni of the Gambler Academy will be here at our doorstep.

    Every single one of our rivals will support them.

    We already made a mess with Thor''s event rigging incident, are you nning to throw us out of the list of Divine academies?"

    f asked in a very calm and in tone. Almost as if he not talking about the future of the Academy.

    The elder didn''t answer. He stayed silent.

    "Let him be. It is not easy to tame that hammer. Even Thor had to run through the hoops and even take the help of the Former dean to make it ept him. Do you think an outsider will¡­"

    Even before he could finish his sentence.

    *ROAR*

    A loud roar came out of the Arena. The Hammer vibrated with that bestial aura. It looked powerful and a silver mark appeared on its electric blue surface. Sam smirked.

    He turned to Thor who crawled up and swung that hammer.

    *BANG*

    No lightning element, only pure brute hit on the side of Thor''s head.

    Thor flew off the stage andnded on the ground, almost near Ivar''s feet.

    Ivar leaned forward and poked Thor''s face with his axe.

    "Seems done.

    First fight, winner. Sam."

    There are no cheers, except for the Gambler Academy students no one even cheered or showed an expression. Sam swung the hammer a couple of times before he clicked his tongue.

    "Nah, I don''t like this."

    He then threw it off on the stage.

    f who didn''t show much reaction finally did. His aura raged. He controlled the urge though. He held the armrest so tight it was crushed under his grip. He gritted his teeth while looking at the hammer on the stage and then at Thor.

    His son, his pride is crushed. The hammer, the pride of the Academy was forsaken.

    This is the biggest insult someone has thrown at his face. He looked at Sam and he was met with Sam''s unwavering gaze. Almost provoking.

    It is the payback to the Thor Academy for messing with thepetition. Since the Academy set aside its prestige to suppress Sam, he suppressed the Academy''s prestige in return. If they want to y a game on their own terms, Sam will show why he is the best yer.

    He sat down in his chair while Ivar called for the next battle.

    It is between Bronte and one of the extras who managed tond a top 16 ce. As the contestants walked onto the stage, Sam took out some wine as well as some Divine energy capsules. He mixed liquid energy with wine and gulped it down.

    It might have looked like an easy fight, but that is because Sam didn''t follow his usual style. He always prioritized efficiency. Always made sure that he had energy left over after a fight is finished. For the first time in a while, he didn''t give a shit and just went with it.

    He exhausted himself a bit and as a result, made a moderately tough opponent look like an amateur.

    The next fight began.

    Bronte and the other candidate are pretty evenly matched. Both of them barely made it into the top ten within their respective regions and here. Here both of them made it into the top sixteen by a fluke. They are a perfect and an even match.

 Chapter 2045 Top 8

    Chapter 2045 Top 8

    Bronte and his opponent made their way on to the stage.

    The stage wasn''t repaired. After the damage Sam has done to it, it was left just like that. As Ivar said, it is mere there for the sake of it, it doesn''t dictate any boundaries. Bronte took out his daggers and he activated partial fusion.

    He made the first move.

    As Sam expected, Bronte and his opponent are evenly matched and this made the match more exciting for the spectators. However, everyone could see that the fight is slowly leaning towards Bronte. He is not faster than his opponent, he was not stronger than his opponent and his energy reserves are not higher than his opponent.

    He doesn''t have any special weapon like Thor, but they all noticed one specific thing he had.

    The fight IQ.

    He showed an exceptional fight IQ. When you are evenly matched with your opponent in all aspects, that is what makes a difference. How well you use all your weapons and Bronte did an excellent job.

    Sam is also impressed.

    Even though he was the one who trained Bronte, to improve this much in such a short time is still better that most.

    The crowd agreed with Sam''s assessment.

    Bronte won after half-an-hour fight. He managed to secure the victory. There were no shy moves and there were no overly powerful weapons, but still Bronte barely got injured. The only drawback might be his exhaustion.

    Still, his role here is over.

    He got into top ten, that is all he needs to do for Sam''s n to work.

    The matches went on, by sheer coincidence or from Ivar''s help the remaining two extras were next and they were against White and Noah. Needless to say, they won easily. Now, it is time for the matches between Sam''s friends.

    All his teammates are going to fight each other.

    First match is between Vidyuth and Saber Monarch. A tough fight by all standards. Before they got on the stage, they remembered Sam''s message.

    "Focus on showing your skills. It should be more like a disy or a show that you are putting on rather just a fight to see who wins. Of course, the intention must not be revealed. Make sure you highlight each other.

    Only after you are doing showing enough attract enough attention to yourselves, you can fight it out. I won''t agree to you guys injuring each other though.

    Three clean hits, whoevernds them first on the other will win and the other party has to ept the loss and surrender."

    Those are Sam''s instructions and both of them followed it precisely.

    The fight was amazing, the whole stage was destroyed by now, particrly the central part. Only the corners and edges remained and everyone could guess they wouldn''tst very long. Vidyuth and Saber Monarch''s fight was pretty neck and neck.

    Vidyuth showed off his lightning maniption. His elemental control is so precise that f shook in his seat with his eyes burning with anticipation and passion. He would have taken Vidyuth as his disciple if he was in Thor Academy.

    Saber Monarch on the other hand showed everyone why he got that name.

    Saber was a part of his body. It was never a weapon in his hands, it was just an extension of him and even with Vidyuth''s precise control, he could barelynd any hits.

    By the end though, Vidyuth won. Based on Sam''s rules, hended the three hits first while Saber Monarch onlynded two.

    The next fight was also simr in nature.

    This time it is between Five Elemental King and Paras.

    Once again an exciting fight. This time Paras took the win. Everyone is a bit disappointed at the end though. They are very powerful and if the fight went on until only one person stands, it would have been a much more exciting fight.

    But they cared about each other and didn''tst any critical injuries.

    The next fight is between Watt and the final extra.

    It is an easier fight. He didn''t even give the extra any chance. He threw sixteen cards that surrounded the other party. A wind sphere enveloped the opponent and took any control away him. The cards moved along with the sphere and rode on the currents to sh a pretty picture on the opponent.

    Within three minutes, the opponent is bleeding out of over a hundred small and thin cuts painting the floor beneath him.

    The fight was over and Watt got down all with a cold expression.

    Finally, the fight is between Philip and Jack.

    One must say in the first round, this is the most shy and satisfying fight. It is a master ss from both sides. Philip''s elemental control aside, his fight IQ is off the charts, where as Jack is a purebred swordsman.

    The spectators very close to the arena could feel their swords resonating with Jack''s every move. And the ck meteorite sword in his hands is an eye candy for every swordsman there.

    Philip gave up after some time. He didn''t even bother with the three-hit rule.

    Finally, the first rounds are over.

    The top eight have been decided.

    Sam

    Bronte

    Noah

    White

    Vidyuth

    Paras

    Watt

    Jack

    Sam''s recovery is almostplete. The next fight is his and Bronte''s. The Zeus Academy seniors advised him to just give up. They have already seen what Bronte is capable of. They have also seen Bronte Vs Sam back in the Academy.

    In their opinion, there is no need for him to participate in this. They are already satisfied that Bronte, who was actually an assuming candidate made it into top 8 and they still have White and Vidyuth.

    They have a chance to win the glory and they don''t want to dilute it with a humiliating loss of Bronte in Sam''s hands.

    However, Bronte had different ns.

    "I need to fight this. I need to measure my improvement."

    A good mindset. By now he felt like he wasn''t there for thepetition. He was there not to prove himself to others. Rather to improve, learn, and prove his growth to himself and fighting with Sam is beneficial to him.

    He didn''t hesitate and came forward to fight.

    "You improved a lot since ourst fight." Sam said with a smile.

    Bronte was taken aback, but he didn''t reply. Instead, he took out his knives and got ready for the fight. To his surprise, Sam also did the same. He took out the knives.

    Bronte then activated the partial fusion and so did Sam. Bronte took it as a challenge. After all, knives are his specialty and Sam is also using his knives. It couldn''t be more obvious. If only he knew, there is no such thing as specialty when ites to Sam.

    The fight began.

    Everyone expected that Bronte would be easily dominated, but they were surprised. The fight was surprisingly interesting. Sam held the upper hand and a clear advantage, but it was not as overwhelming as they thought.

    Bronte as able to avoid the critical attacks and tries to survive as long as he can. Even though he was still losing, it was not a humiliating victory that everyone anticipated.

    The seniors of the Zeus Academy were surprised and impressed. The evaluation of Bronte in their hearts increased by many folds.

    Still, the fight was over and Sam didn''t put much effort.

    "Great fight."

    Sam left apliment before he got off.

    Bronte nodded and left. He felt relieved and a bit satisfied with himself. Still, the desire to grow stronger burned within. And the next moment the picture of hub came to his mind. He knew where the improvement came from and he is very grateful.

    In fact, he felt that might be the best decision Christos made in a long time.

    The hub is indeed the game-changer, even better than the academies.

    As soon as that thought came into his mind, he shook it off. Hub is okay, but the heritage of the academies shouldn''t be frowned upon. He was surprised that thought even came into his mind.

    The next fight is between Noah and White.

    Another fight that raised the anticipation within.

    Noah stepped forward and looked at White.

    "Your attire is very simr to the one Sam usually wears. You guys know each other?" She asked casually as both of them were walking to the stage.

    White''s expression is not visible because of his mask.

    "I know him. But he doesn''t know me that well. I know you too. I know how you are rted. I know about the big game that you are ying."

    As soon as those words left his mouth, Noah froze. White already got on the stage. Her face became serious. This is notmon knowledge. Only the Deans and the other yers or the people involved with the yers should know about this.

    Several questions popped into her mind.

    At that moment, Sam walked to her and whispered something. The frown loosened up and she looked at him in surprise.

    "You are full of surprises, aren''t you?"

 Chapter 2046 Surrender

    Chapter 2046 Surrender

    Noah stepped onto the stage. She looked at White and spoke.

    "How about we keep it simple?"

    "What do you suggest?"

    "There is no point in both of us getting injured for no reason.

    So, let''s fight for five minutes. In exactly five minutes, we will use everything we have. The one who ends up having the upper hand by the end of it wins. No matter who wins among us, it is not going to be an easy fight moving forward. There is no point in needless injuries."

    "I am open to it. How can we judge who has the upper hand?"

    Noah turned to Ivar. Ivar nodded his head.

    "I can help you guys out with it. I can easily judge which one of you wimps has the upper hand."

    "I am fine with it," White replied.

    Noah also nodded.

    "You can start the fight now," Ivar dered.

    *BOOM*

    White hit the ground with the cane and closed the distance between him and Noah. Noah gently tapped the ground with her feet and jumped back very slowly.

    Just when White was about to reach her, he was trapped by the vines and dragged down to the ground. He was surprised.

    It was not easy to sneak up on him. Even Sam had a hard time.

    Noah smiled, and the next moment, her body started changing. She was using her blood art. She wasn''t ying around when he suggested they go all out in that short time frame. The next moment, the whole area was filled with trees.

    Noah merged within those trees and was nowhere to be seen. Even the Elders, seniors, and other spectators were impressed by the move.

    It''s not that they couldn''t find Noah''s presence. They could clearly feel it. The only problem was her presence was everywhere in every single tree that formed in this instant forest. The trees all had a blood-colored hue around them.

    White looked around in vignce. His instincts were screaming at him. He could sense the threating from every single direction. He could be attacked from anywhere, including from the ground and from the air. Right now, the spectators couldn''t even see him.

    His energy ramped up, and he tapped it on the ground.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosion, the patch of trees in his immediate vicinity disappeared. They turned into shreds and then evaporated as if they didn''t exist in the first ce. They disappeared just like that.

    Noah started her attack as well. Several wooden spears came from different directions, along with exploding fruits that carried different poisons, corrosive materials, and many more.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    White was in apletely defensive position. He was forced into it. He swung his cane everywhere, creating recoil shots that deflected the attacks that came at him. His defense was almost perfect, but not quite.

    White didn''t even realize when, but in between this constant onught of attacks, a green hue started forming on his skin.

    He gave his body a quick scan and noticed something weird. It was not a poison but very minute seeds that were the size of microorganisms, deposited in his skin. They were now growing by sucking the vitality from his body. As soon as he noticed that, Noah seemed to have realized his reaction.

    The seeds didn''t grow slowly anymore. White felt a huge amount of energy being sucked out of his hands. He stopped in his tracks. Nobody could see his facial expressions, but they knew he was having a tough time.

    At the same moment, the earth beneath his feet cracked, and several vines sprouted.

    They coiled around White''s body and soon formed arge cocoon. The crowd cheered in excitement. Noah and White didn''t actually do much in the fight, but both of their moves were still eye-catching and exciting. They could feel the power and strength behind them.

    Now Noah used one of her hidden cards tantly. The cocoon started absorbing the vitality from White''s body and started creating more vines out of that vitality, binding the cocoon tighter.

    Inside the cocoon, White felt helpless. He felt like he was stuck in a swamp that was trying to devour him. He felt suffocated. Now he finally understood the real purpose of these micro vegetations that grew all over his arms. They were connecting with the vines of the cocoon.

    Whenever he tried to utilize his spiritual energy, he felt it being drained through this vegetation.

    This was a dangerous technique. He knew that very instant he was backed into a corner. And it didn''t even take that long for it to happen. He felt a bit ashamed of himself. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes.

    The energy within his body slowly emitted out. It wasn''t circted or channeled; instead, it was emitted out.

    Even though his hands were covered with vegetation and absorbed the energy particles that came out of his hand, the same thing couldn''t be said about the energy particles that wereing out of the rest of his body.

    They spread out rapidly, and White finally felt a bit relieved. The upation of the whole cocoon with his own energy gave him slight sce and kept him a bit free.

    The next moment, the energy particles started vibrating. At the same time, the spectators noticed that the cocoon was not showing any strong fluctuations, which meant White gave up the attack.

    They were a bit disappointed. They wanted the fight to go longer. Luckily for them, White didn''t disappoint.

    *BUZZ*

    All of a sudden, the cocoon started glowing and gave out a buzzing sound.

    The experts there could see that the cocoon was vibrating a bit. Slowly, the vibration spread to the surrounding area. But the physical objects or the vines were not vibrating; rather, the energy in the surrounding environment was.

    The vibration was happening on a particle level. The spiritual energy particles and divine energy particles were vibrating with increasing frequency and at the same wavelength.

    Some seniors and even some Elders didn''t understand what exactly was happening.

    "Huh, he would have indeed been a great fit at Gambler''s Academy; too bad his head is stuck up in his ass," Chorus saidzily as he yawned.

    Sam frowned. He was one of the few who understood not just the visual appearance of this vibration. He had a million calctions going on in his head, trying to estimate the end result he could create if he was the one who created this scenario. None of these were, of course, good.

    He snapped his fingers.

    *SNAP*

    Noah, who was merged into one with those vines, heard the snap as well. She made her move. Her cocoon disappeared, and she retracted all the vines. She reinforced her bodypletely and had proper control over the energy particles in her immediate surroundings.

    *BOOM*

    With a loud explosion, a bright sh appeared, blinding everyone. White stood in the middle of it as a huge shockwave spread in all directions.

    It destroyed everything in its path: the rocks that came out of the craters, therge pieces of the stage, the leftover trees and vines left behind by Noah¡ªeverything disappeared and dispersed into energy particles.

    When the sh was gone, all they saw was White standing in the middle of a smooth t ground. It would have been impossible even if they tried to make the ground that t with their maniption. It was that smooth.

    The only thing that stuck out like a sore thumb was Noah stood in her spot. Her face

    was serious and flushed. She took the hit of the shockwave, but luckily, she was prepared.

    Sam''s cue helped as well, but she was confident that she could save herself even if he didn''t notify her. She still had fight left in her, but she raised her hand and surrendered.

    "What the heck is that? I have never seen an energy explosion like that. How did he do it?"

    "I don''t know. What element is it? How can energy explode like that?" Many discussions arose. Everyone was curious and excited. This is the ce where the cream of the crop gathers, after all; everyone is curious and eager to know what happened.

    Some higher-level people guessed it. Sam, on the other hand, saw it.

    With his enhanced energy vision, he saw every single particle''s reaction in that attack. It was not even considered a proper spell or a move; rather, it was just the utilization of high-level energy control.

    All the particles were vibrating at the same frequency, and that frequency was constantly increasing, achieving a certain momentum. Once it reached the desired momentum, all of those particles were dragged to one single point in an instant.

    That triggered the explosion with the sh. The rapid concentration of all those particles at the same point resulted in that sh, and the noise was from the collision of the particles. Once they collided, White just let go of the control and let the particles return to their original state. This was the result of the shockwave.

    This was not surprising to Sam, but the most surprising thing was how precise the calction had to be to make sure the force was right enough for just the collision.

    If he was off even by a bit, the particles would either not generate enough force or they would be fused forcefully. Neither of them was good for the person who was performing this.

 Chapter 2047 Nullify

    Chapter 2047 Nullify

    Amidst the cheers of the crowd, White walked back to his seat.

    He still wore his mask intact, surprising most people. Everyone briefly focused on White before their attention shifted to the next fight between Vidyut and Paras.

    This fight had to unfold differently from the previous ones among Sam''s friends. Sam had given special instructions to both of them.

    While they would test their skills with the three-hit strategy, it wouldn''t mark the end. They aimed to put on a show.

    Paras, disying overwhelming might since the beginning, is going to be defeated by Vidyut, advancing him dominantly to the next level. Sam and his friends knew the truth. But the rest of the world doesn''t.

    So, Vidyut is going to the semi-finals.

    The fight unfolded precisely as Sam had decided in the next twenty minutes. Vidyut progressed to the next round, setting the stage for the final match of this round between Jack and Watt. Sam hadn''t given any special instructions; it was up to them to im victory. Despite their friendship, theirpetitive spirits shone through in their skillful disy.

    Without the self-imposed three-hit rule they had established (which most spectators had caught onto by now), any impartial judge would have called it a tie.

    Jack emerged as the winner, leaving only four candidates: Sam, White, Vidyut, and Jack.

    In the order of their advancement, the time had finallye for White and Sam to sh. With no obstacles, interference, or limits, White had long awaited this moment.

    Sam wished it were the finals. It would have been a grand conclusion to the tournament. Still, he was prepared for this scenario. He ounted for all variables and devised a n to maximize the oue.

    Sam stretched, visibly excited. "Are you confident?" Dove asked.

    "Is that even a question?" Sam replied, making his way to the stage. Now the stage is merely a in plot in the midst of therge spectator stands.

    White, on the other hand, was even more thrilled about the fight than Sam. It wasn''t the same kind of excitement. White harbored a desire to end Sam for reasons unknown to anyone.

    "Let''s finish this," White said to Sam as he withdrew his cane. Sam stood calmly, offering no response.

    "Fight," announced Ivar.

    *BOOM*

    White made his move, executing his signature recoil shot that propelled him toward Sam like a cannon shell. In an instant, he stood in front of Sam, his cane aimed at Sam''s heart. Yet, Sam remained stoic, showing no reaction even as the cane made contact.

    The spectators were bewildered; they were familiar with White''s fighting prowess and knew that he could easily end a fight with a decisive blow if the opponent didn''t defend.

    In their minds, despite Sam''s strength, it seemed impossible for him to endure a clean, undefended hit. Yet, all they witnessed was a smile on Sam''s face as the cane made contact.

    Some of the more weak-minded onlookers closed their eyes.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sound reverberated, but contrary to expectations, there was no scream of pain, no one sent flying due to recoil, and no shyst-minute defensive maneuver. Sam stood there unfazed. This prompted a reaction from White, who staggered back.

    "H... How?" White stuttered, visibly shaken.

    Sam inspected his chest; aside from a small hole in his shirt, there was no damage, not even a mark on his skin.

    Then, he locked eyes with White, delighted by the horror he saw there.

    Whiteposed himself before making another attempt.

    *BOOM*

    With another recoil shot, he propelled himself toward Sam,nding another clean hit, this time aiming for Sam''s head.

    Normally, this kind of hit would take out Sam effortlessly if left undefended. White struggled toprehend that Sam remained unaffected by the powerful strike aimed at his head.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    White relentlessly attacked Sam, but no matter how hard he hit or how much energy he channeled into those hits, he couldn''t inflict any damage.

    Sam stood there, unmoved, leaving White panting not from exhaustion but from exasperation. He couldn''tprehend what was happening, and it frustrated him.

    Meanwhile, some perceptive individuals began to realize something, yet they couldn''t quite put their finger on it.

    "Fight back," White demanded, but Sam remained motionless.

    "I''d rather watch you exhaust yourself like this; it''s more enjoyable," Sam retorted, provoking White. However, White quickly regained hisposure, understanding his disadvantageous position.

    He tightly gripped his cane andunched another attack, this time neither as forceful nor as fast as before. He struck Sam, focusing solely on the hit without checking for a counterattack. Even if Sam had retaliated at this point, White couldn''t care less. He needs to understand how Sam nullified his style was more crucial.

    *BOOM*

    The attacknded, but Sam didn''t budge. Yet, White glimpsed the truth.

    Stepping back, he looked at Sam, horror on his face. He finallyprehended the method behind Sam''s nullification technique.

    The recoil style operated through a specific method: the energy at the point of contact served as the attack''s center. In a split second, this energy spread from the point of impact and returned, colliding to create the attack''s force. However, unlike his previousrge-scale attacks, White controlled the direction of the resulting collision''s power.

    He used this force to propel himself away from the point of contact, simultaneously directing the collision''s force back at the opponent. At the point of impact, the collision force not only caused damage but also provoked a recoil reaction within the opponent''s body, intensifying the harm.

    To counter this method, one had to create an exact opposite force to nullify the collision force. This required understanding the precise amount of energy in the attack, timing, attack point, and the atmospheric energy''s reaction¡ªa feat nearly impossible in a split second.

    White hadn''t considered this solution immediately because he couldn''t fathom anyone possessing such knowledge. The variables necessary to achieve this were tooplex to calcte instantaneously.

    Or so he had believed until now.

 Chapter 2048 Lesson

    Chapter 2048 Lesson

    White is in a stupor.

    He is lost in himself. At least that is what it looked like to the spectators. Sam just brushed on the point of attack with his palm and blew some air on it.

    "It is very itchy. Are you done?"

    "How did you do it?" White asked.

    "It seems like you understood what I was doing. I didn''t do much. You should have already guessed."

    "That should be impossible. Unless you are a good, there is no way you canmand energy around you to have enough understanding of it."

    "Why do I need tomand the energy? I can just see it and calcte it. What is the point of having a brain if you need cultivation level to achieve everything."

    Sam''s words stunned everyone into silence.

    Even though they knew that Sam didn''t mean to address them, it felt like he was calling out all of them. Including the Dean. After all, everyone there is obsessed with the cultivation levels which is often their whole identity.

    Because their strength determines their power and authority. And that power determines their position.

    If f''s cultivation is knocked down a couple of levels, the elders won''t think twice before skinning alive and eating his bones to take over his position.

    It is that simple. Of course, in this pursuit they often ignore a lot ofmon sense.

    Still, some of them wanted to yell at Sam to contradict his viewpoint. But unfortunately, this is not a debatepetition. It is thepetition to see who beats whom.

    White zoomed forward andnded a few more hits.

    He didn''t bother to wait anymore.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The attacks kept onnding and there is no effect.

    "Come on. Think differently. I don''t want to take out without younding a single hit. That will be way too ridiculous. After all, this is the semi-final fight."

    As soon as he spoke, White made another move.

    His cane is aimed at Sam''s head once again. Sam just stood there, bracing himself for the impact, but beyond all expectations, the hit didn''tnd on Sam''s head, instead at thest moment White drove the cane into the ground beneath Sam''s feet.

    *BOOM*

    With a loud explosion arge pit was created right underneath Sam. He was not prepared for it and he slipped. White spun around in the air and sent a kick.

    *BOOM*

    The kicknded on Sam''s back. For the first time since the start of the fight, a proper hitnded. Albeit it is not exactly a hundred percent shot, but Sam still ate in.

    In the middle of everyone''s shock, Sam flew to the other side of the arena with just one hit. He regained his bnce forcefully and looked at White. He had a wide smile on his face.

    "You finally figured out."

    White''s grip tightened on the cane. He indeed figured out how tond a hit on Sam. The task to calcte and negate White''s attacks is indeed insane. Sam''s mind might be able to control, calcte and manipte energy with that precision, but the drawback is, it wouldn''t be able to perform many other functions.

    One of that is maintaining bnce or moving around.

    So, once Sam lost his bnce, his body instinctively moved and the calction is halted. The attacknded.

    Sam is not ashamed that he got hit.

    Because this is literally the first time that he tried this method. So, he was unable to be as efficient as he wanted to be. Only when he saw White use such massive explosion did he manage to think of this technique.

    Since white discovered this technique, Sam didn''t bother to use it anymore. He decided to make his own move.

    His body started glowing with golden energy.

    White already closed the distance and threw an attack at Sam.

    *BOOM*

    Sam let the attack hit him and even moved in the direction the force is moving to make more distance. As he was travelling the air, everyone could see that the golden light is slowly changing color. They could also feel the energy concentration of Sam''s fusion form is very weirdpared to a normal light fusion.

    *BOOM*

    White used a highly concentrated recoil hit to close the distance.

    It almost looked like spatial blink as he made his way to Sam and threw another hit.

    The cane almost made contact. He could see the cane hitting the flesh, but he couldn''t feel it.

    The next instant, he felt a burning sensation on his back.

    "Peak a Boo"

    Sam whispered into White''s ears.

    White felt shivers run down his spine.

    *BOOM*

    He kicked backward and used the recoil to escape. However, Sam turned into a small light beam as he chased after White.

    White was stunned to say the least. Even though Sam''sser fusion gave him speed that surpassed all the times that they fought before, it is still not out of White''s limits. He could still sense the change in the energy of the surroundings and he can still feel Sam''s approach.

    So, he is able to react and defend himself.

    However, Sam''sser fusion is giving him one extra edge. It is enabling him to exploit a negligible loophole within the recoil style. When a recoil hit was made, right after the collision of energy particles, there will be a small gap in the center of the attack.

    That gap is essentially a void. It is simr to the void created by Sam when he uses void style.

    Sam used that small gap to make his move and close the distance between him and White.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Another onught of attacks from White. However, this time instead of just standing there nullifying the attacks, Sam moved around like a sh of light. He didn''t aim to attack White. He was just slick with his movements and he closed the distance.

    As if he is saying, that he can attack any time he wants, but he is choosing not to.

    It is kind of a greater insult to anyone.

    White appeared to have upper hand with only him being able to make a move. Still, he felt suffocated. Not being able tond a single hit is more than frustrating. No matter what he tried, Sam''sser form is a bit too fast for him.

    If he was able to block Sam with his recoil hits, then it would have been easier, but now it is almost impossible.

    "Fight me like a man. Stopping running around like a coward."

    White yelled through his gritted teeth. Sam halted and looked at White with a smile on his face. Now only a lot of spectators and even White managed to take a good look at Sam''s current form. He looked like he is molded out of some neon colored, glowing, slimy substance.

    "Really? Resorting to these childish insults? I am doing you a favor here and this is how you react? I thought you are better than that."

    Sam''s words stumped everyone. They didn''t understand how this is a favor. All he has been doing is running around and rubbing the loopholes in White''s face. He never even bothered to attack even when he had a chance.

    "You dare mock me?"

    *BOOM*

    White yelled andunched another attack at Sam. But to no avail.

    Sam once again slipped through that small hole and this time he came face to face with White. Laser beams shot out of his eyes and hit White squarely on his mask.

    White hurriedly blocked the attack with an energy barrier and moved back.

    "I am teaching you how many loopholes you have in your technique. I am not going to lie, this technique of yours is pretty unique and novel. Still, it is not efficient or effective enough.

    You have already seen me block it and deflect it back at Olympian region. Now you have seen how your technique ispletely useless if someone can calcte the energy and timing. I have also just shown you, how someone can easily stay unaffected as long as they have enough speed.

    You should be touching my feet and thanking me for being such a selfless teacher.

    But here you are throwing these insults at me.

    I feel kind of hurt."

    Sam''s expressions and acting, even his tone of voice made White''s blood boil. Indeed, Sam did everything he imed he did. He indeed exploited the loopholes and gave all the information to White, but now by saying it out loud, he is basically revealing the weakness to the rest of the world.

    "You Bastard."

    White yelled and made his move. Unlike the ones before this is a special attack. The body of the cane glowed brightly and the energy was shout out like an energy bullet aimed straight at Sam.

    The recoil from just thatunch sent White flying away and he felt the muscles in his arm put through immense torture for that one attack.

    It is a price to pay for the speed that shouldn''t be of his capability. The bullet shot out so fast even Sam in hisser fusion mode could barely react to it.

    For some reason, he didn''t even react to begin with. He just stood there and White could have sworn that Sam wasing out of his fusion form when the bullet hit him.

 Chapter 2049 Unexpected

    Chapter 2049 Unexpected

    The energy bullet hit Sam.

    Just as White thought, Sam indeed removed his fusion form and stood in front of the energy bullet with no visible defense whatsoever. The hitnded on his chest.

    *BOOM*

    The bullet hit him with a massive explosion. Surprisingly the force only stunned him. It spread across his body to halt his muscles as well as energy cirction. If someone who has a weak control over energy got hit by this, then they would have problem with recoils.

    However, with Sam''s current control, he was only forced to stop moving.

    To achieve that only a small portion of energy from that energy bullet as utilized. The rest of the energy moved in a spiral motion as it dissolved from that energy bullet form and spread around Sam, creating arge sphere with nodes at specific areas.

    Thest portion of the energy again hit Sam.

    It is just like a regr recoil hit.

    Sam wobbled and flew to one of the nodes of the sphere.

    *BOOM*

    The node shot out another recoil hit. Sam felt his insides vibrate. He was once again shot out to hit another node.

    *BOOM*

    Then another.

    *BOOM*

    He is like a ball being kicked around by a bunch of people. Throughout this, Sam had his eyes closed. He is pissed. Which should be obvious because of the usage of the word Bastard. The reason, he turned the fusion off is to finish the fight.

    He didn''t expect that his slow reaction made him get caught in this attack.

    He is unable to control his energy, the only he could do at that time was make sure the energy didn''t go on a rampage and destroy him from inside, which is the most damaging part of the Recoil technique. Luckily, there are only so many nodes in the sphere. Every hit took away that respective node. He started timing the hits inside his head and made his move. He couldn''t control his spiritual energy or Divine energy well at the moment, but that doesn''t mean, he doesn''t have other ways.

    A small metal piece fell out of his storage andnded on the node before he could hit it.

    *BOOM*

    The node was triggered and the metal piece was thrown off to the next node. Meanwhile, Sam slipped out of the sphere andnded on the ground. However, he couldn''t bring himself to rx at the moment.

    His energy might not have been stable, but he couldn''t afford to stay in the same spot.

    *BOOM*

    Sam jumped to the side as a recoil hitnded on the spot he stood before. White is already waiting for Sam''s release from the sphere. He is very disappointed and frustrated though. The attack with the sphere is on par with the attack he used on Noah. It might not look like much but any of his peers would have been dead by now. But all he could see on Sam right now were some flesh wounds. Mostly some muscr injuries beneath his skin. The actual effect, which should be the rampage of energy inside his body didn''t happen. Not just that, he cracked the sphere and came out of it. He even had enough energy to escape from the surprise attack that White had already prepared.

    Sam finally stopped and looked at White while panting. To no one''s surprise, White is also panting heavily. The sphere attack consumes a lot of energy and the excessive energy he used to make it fast enough to catch Sam damaged his hand a bit. He is definitely not in his best state.

    However, he knew better than to let Sam rest for so long.

    *BOOM*

    He charged at Sam with his cane and started shooting out recoil shots.

    Sam on the other hand finally found some stability with his energy. He ate the first hit from White. He didn''t defend or deflect it. He just blocked it like a brute while he tried to stabilize his energy.

    He watched as the next shot came and spat on the ground.

    "This has gone for long enough."

    Sam punched forward with energy gathered in his fist.

    *BOOM*

    His fist met with the recoil shot and White just from the energy reaction what will happen. The attack was nullified once again. Sam used the same technique that he used back when they were fighting in the Olympian region.

    However, this time his technique appeared more refined and much more precise.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    With every hit, Sam closed in the distance and soon both White and Sam are once again in close quarters.

    Sam took the lead and threw in a punch. The fist collided with the cane, and neither of them moved from the recoil. Sam pushed the cane to the side and went in for a left hook to the face.

    White used his other hand to block the punch before it could hit the face. Still, the fistnded on his hand.

    *BOOM*

    White widened his eyes in disbelief as he felt his body rocketing to the side like he had just fired from a slingshot.

    *CRASH*

    He crashed into the ground. Stood up in the same shock and surprise. He looked at his where the hitnded. He then turned to look at Sam, who is not standing in his original position. Instead, there is a skid mark from his previous position to his current position.

    He slid on the ground and stood there as he stretched his hand.

    His swollen skin is clearly visible and his shirt is ragged by now with all the explosions. He had a wide grin on his face. "Didn''t expect that. Did you?" Not just White, no one in the spectator stand ever expected it. Because the hit thatnded on White''s face is a recoil hit. At least for the spectators, it looked like a proper recoil hit. For the spectators, it looked like it.

    White on the other hand felt that the hit is a bit different, however, the effect or the result of the hit is exactly the same as the recoil hit.

    "H¡­ How?"

    Sam just stretched his hand one more time and asked.

    "How many times are you going to ask that question today?"

    He lunged forward and threw a spinning kick at White''s face. White reacted fast enough to deflect the kick with the cane. He used the recoil style once again, but when the leg came into contact with the cane, the hit was nullified with the blow method Sam used just before.

    Sam kicked on the ground with his other leg to spin and throw a head kick.

    This time itnded.

    *BOOM*

    White was sent flying with the recoil hit, while Sam was also sent back as he stabilized himself.

    He shot forward and that sparked a furious exchange between two of them. White tried his best to not think about how Sam did it. Rather he focused on making sure that he will not get hit by Sam. Unlike Sam who seemed to have perfected blocking the recoil hit, White is oblivious on how to do it.

    However, he does know how recoil works and he adapted quickly. Whenever Sam got ready tond a hit, White increased his speed and tried tond more hits than Sam. Based on his observation, Sam cannot use both of these tricks at the same time.

    This resulted in a long and consistent exchange of blows with neither of them backing down.

    "Fucking hell. That is what I am talking about." One of the spectators cheered

    "I bet Sam is going to win this one. Who wants some action?" Another spectator yelled

    "I bet White is going to win. What do you want to bet?" Apletely different spectator came in the middle.

    "That level of skill. I wonder if we can handle either of them if they are on the same level?" One of the Grade 2 students wondered out loud.

    "Forget on the same level. Do you think we can handle them now?" One of the Grade 2 students who is only at the Middle Stage of Divine ne Initiation spoke while gulping nervously.

    This year, the quality of juniors astonished them.

    There are so many talented people. A lot of them felt theirpetitive spirits burning. This is just the start of the year after all. There is no way all of them are disappointed that easily. They still have many days ahead in this year and many years ahead in the academy.

    They are looking forward to what kind of changes these new talents will bring to the Academy.

    "Both Zeus Academy and Gambler Academy lucked out with these talents. If only we knew about them beforehand."

    One of the Elders felt a sense of regret.

    f didn''t show any reaction to the Elder''s words. His mind ispletely focused on the battlefield. Many people are excited about who is going to win. But he and many of the perceptive people knew who would take the win in the end.

    At the moment, he is just feeling pity for the would-be loser.

 Chapter 2050 Erratic White

    Chapter 2050 Erratic White

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The whole arena is reverberated with the blows of Sam and White.

    The fight is neck and neck. The spectators savored the showcase of great skill in hand to handbat. White''s unique fighting technique often overshadowed his skill in hand to handbat. Now that he is fighting against his own technique, his skill is clearly showcased.

    Contrary to the feelings of the spectators, the twopetitors involved are facing each other at full pressure.

    Sam felt the full power of white. Every blow is aimed to kill him on the spot. White is not holding back. On the other hand, White is feeling frustrated. To the point he could feel the smokeing out of his ears.

    So far, fighting with Sam felt like hitting soft cotton.

    He couldn''tnd a proper hit no matter what he tried. By now, he understood that he is not skilled enough to break through Sam''s defenses in his current state. The only leaves him with one alternative.

    *BOOM*

    He diverted the kick he was about tond on Sam to the ground andunched himself away, when Sam was about to close the distance, he gathered another special energy bullet to aim at Sam. Looking at the glowing cane, Sam stepped back and dodged the bullet.

    He might not have escaped with little damage from the Sphere, but with his current level of energy expenditure, it would be stupid of him to get caught up in it once again. However, the moment he stepped back he realized that he has been tricked. White didn''tunch an actual attack like before. It is a decoy and just some lump of energy shot at Sam.

    White got the time he needed because of Sam''s back step. Energy gathered at the palm of his hands and it caused a few cuts on his palm. The cuts formed the shape of intricate runic inscriptions at a rapid pace. Sam looked at this with a frown. The blood is not dripping from his palm, instead it started burning. White is burning his vitality and lifeforce to attack Sam.

    The runic inscription is also an unfamiliar thing for most people who sat there. Sam could sense that there is some weird trick at y here. The blood burning is causing the atmospheric energy to react. The surrounding energy gathered toward White.

    The Divine energy is rising and it spread out the burning blood all over his body. While that happened, White''s body slowly started turning White like his name. The energy glow is very simr to the one Thor used, but only visually. Internally it is very different. Because Thor''s fusion is just basic elemental fusion.

    Rather White''s fusion is purely spiritual energy which is not something you see everyday.

    On top of that, the bloody runes of all of his body are condensing the spiritual energy and are conducting into Divine energy. This divine energy is not refined, not pure and not stable. It is a makeshift temporary strength.

    *BOOM*

    He kicked the air and came at Sam.

    His moves didn''t change. His technique didn''t change. But each hit is filled with Divine energy and not just a small amount that is used by most of their peers. It is a pure Divine energy attack.

    Sam spread his own divine energy around. His Divine energy reserves are hugepared to most of his peers. In the starting stages of Divine ne, it ismon practice to not use the Divine energy that much.

    They were almost always reserved for trump cards. Sam never had to use many trump cards. But since the other party is ying with divine energy it is only fair if he also uses it.

    *BOOM*

    Both of their hits are connected. Sam negated White''s recoil hit. The shockwaves sent shivers down the rest of the contestants'' spines. They didn''t believe they could take on that level of attack. At least not without paying a price. However, that is just an exchange between Sam and White.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Every exchange sent tremors through the earth. Slowly, everyone noticed that Sam is being pushed back.

    After a flurry of exchanges, a hitnded straight on his face.

    *BOOM*

    Sam was sent flying through the air and left arge crater on the ground. White made his way to Sam and was about to hit him. But the next moment¡­

    *CRACK*

    The earth cracked and arge stone wall blocked his approach. White was caught off guard, but he didn''t stop.

    *BOOM*

    With a single punch, he destroyed it to smithereens. Sam stood on the other side as he examined his face. His jaw bone cracked. It is almost on the verge of being broken. His teeth are loosened and some of his gums are crushed.

    He is bleeding.

    "Fucking hell."

    He muttered as he dodged the knee aimed at his face.

    "That would have hurt, you know."

    Whitended and he looked at Sam. His mask covered up his expression, but Sam thought there is a good chance there is a grin behind that mask.

    *SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    Sam dodged a few more blows. All of them aimed at his head. White is fast and the moves appeared crazier. His defense started showing many holes. Sam is tempted to make a move in between, but White is bing faster and faster. He is certainly not at his limit.

    Sam wanted to gauge the other party a bit and make a move.

    However, White decided to speed up the fight and he achieved this not by increasing his own speed, rather¡­.

    "Come and fight me your cowardly Bastard."

    Sam raised an eyebrow. The voice of White seemed a bit different. It is rasp and erratic. *SWOOSH*

    He stepped to the side and nullified another one of White''s attacks. It is filled with bloodlust.

    "Come on. Fight me, you bastard."

    Sam didn''t give in. He might have gone tolerant, but that doesn''t mean he became a saint. It is very hard to control himself when someone is trying to kill him while taunting him. It is almost an impossible task.

    White almostnded a punch on Sam''s face. He deflected it with his backhand. The hand slipped past Sam''s shoulder and White fell forward toward Sam.

    "Why are you not fighting back? Did your balls go bust?

    I heard you don''t like the word Bastard? Why are you not reacting then?"

    White whispered in Sam''s ear. Sam frowned.

    He never revealed this information to anyone.

    White wasn''t done though.

    "Are you going to fight back or should I start dictating some coordinates?"

    Sam looked at him with a confused gaze.

    "300. 4387.23.."

    *BOOM*

    Sam finally threw a punch. White deflected it once again with his own recoil hit.

    "You finally reacted."

    Sam''s face is cold. He is angry. "How do you know those coordinates?"

    Sam asked. Everyone else is also surprised. This is the first time they saw Sam loseposure. He was always calm and collected. He even beat the second-grade formationpetition like he was walking in a park.

    This is unlike him.

    "Why? You are scared that it will be revealed? If you really want information, why don''t youe forward and beat it out of me?"

    "You don''t have to ask.

    It''s my mistake giving you hope of beating me. I shouldn''t hold back anymore."

    "Come and try it out. You bastard."

    White lunged forward, and all of a sudden Sam''s body changed. He activated fire fusion. His fist met with White''s and the golden mes concentrated in the point of attack. White wasn''t worried, which happened to be a big mistake.

    Because at the same second, he felt fire elemental energy behind him. Before he could react, an explosive energy hit him. The attack is not exactly strong, but it is very simr to Sam''s hit which is used to nullify the recoil hits.

    White was pushed forward towards Sam because of the explosion.

    *BOOM*

    Sam gave a spinning kick to White''s Chest. Needless to say, it is a recoil hit coupled with his golden mes. For the first time ever, White felt the true horror of what his recoil style was capable of.

    At the point of attack, the divine energy Sam used dispersed and collided, but since it is fire elemental energy, the concentrated attack was much more explosive and corroded his body. It is unlike a regr explosion, the fire energy corrupted his energy cirction and invaded his channels.

    However, that horror doubled when he was flying from the impact of the attack only to be met with another attack on his back that came out of thin air.

    This shocked not just him, but also every other spectator that witnessed it.

    White flew forward and Sam met him with another hit.

    *BOOM*

    He flew like a broken kite and another attack manifested out of thin air as it hit him in the back.

    *BOOM*

    A few more volleys went just like that.

    Sam used resonance and yed tennis with White. At the same time, f sighed with his eyes closed. This is what he feared would happen. From the start, he realized that this fight was not as even as people thought.

 Chapter 2051 End of the Tournament

    Chapter 2051 End of the Tournament

    After taking around ten hits, White finallynded in a huge crater.

    He stood up every single bone of his body aching like never before. He looked at Sam, who was levitating in the air.

    "Come on. Fight back. Why are you just standing there?"

    Sam''s killing intent bubbled and golden mes spread out. They surrounded the whole arena. The mes are full of Divine energy and they are consuming the surrounding atmospheric energy.

    Influencing it to change into fire elemental energy.

    White could feel the effect the next instant. His fusion state which already became unstable because of Sam''s constant recoil attacks, is now showing cracks. He couldn''t use the surrounding energy to repair anymore.

    He felt like he was stuck inside a volcano.

    He kicked the ground and tried to get out of the encirclement. However, Sam had different ns.

    *SWOOSH*

    mes rippled as he shed towards White. He threw a perfect uppercut aimed at White''s Chin. White wasunched into the air like a rocket ship. The mes blocked his trajectory and hit him back toward Sam. Once again, it is Sam''s resonance usage, however this time he is not giving White any chance to recover at all.

    A lot of people couldn''t see what is happening in the middle of these mes. Only a select few senior cultivators are able to sense what is happening. As for the peers, they are trying their best to not get swept in the heat of the mes.

    The only thing that is giving them a sense that the fight is still going on, are the sounds of hits.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The explosive sound of the hits reverberated throughout and the mes danced to the rhythm of those explosions.

    Exactly after three minutes, the mes cleared. Sam is hovering the air in his partial fusion state and he holds White by his neck. White is almost unconscious. He presented a gruesome picture of himself.

    His clothes are nowhere to be seen. Most of his body, including his skin is burned. There are many spots with ruptured flesh and blood seeping out of it. His face mask is also partially destroyed. The right side half of it is gone. Still, it is almost impossible to make sense of his face.

    It is burned beyond recognition.

    Upon a keener look, they noticed that his energy was all over the ce. He is not in a stable condition. They also noticed that even though Sam is in a better state, he is not exactly in his best condition. White seemed to have put up a decent fight even in that state. However, they wondered if he could finish this off.

    At this moment, White came to himself a bit. Maybe the crisis of life and death made him muster a bit of strength

    White swung his legs and kicked Sam in the chest. In turn, Sam broke that leg. The only consequence is that he loses grip on White''s neck.

    Both of them crashed into the ground.

    "Even at the cost of my life, I will kill you today."

    White spoke through his broken teeth. His voice is weak and shivering.

    He dashed towards Sam. Sam stood there. He appeared weak and his broken leg is not letting him move as he pleased. This is the consequence of the fight that White put on beneath the mes. Sam could say that this was one of the toughest fights he had with any of his peers.

    Throughout his life, he had run through his peers like they were nothing.

    His fight was always with the seniors and even Elders that are far beyond his cultivation range. Maybe after Sanjay and then Sivan, this is the only time he had to fight like this with a peer of the same cultivation level to this extent.

    White''s life force is burning and he almost reached Sam. He believed that he couldnd this attack and finish this off.

    However at this moment, two ck shes popped out of Sam''s storage.

    Feather Coat wrapped itself around Sam and glowed with golden light. It took Sam into the air and levitated along with him, dodging the attack. At the same moment, harbinger smashed squarely into White''s chest throwing him away.

    The feather coat glowed with the bloodline energy of the golden crows and simted the blood energy in Sam''s body making him heal at a visible pace.

    This made everyone feel stumped a bit.

    This almost felt like cheating. White who flew like a broken kite because of the Harbinger looked as the hoverboard came back and ced itself under Sam''s feet.

    Sam didn''t even have to think.

    The board and the coat took care of him.

    "I didn''t expect you to put up such ast minute fight. I guess I underestimated you way too much."

    Sam muttered in a low tone as he slowly made his way toward White.

    The crowd understood what he was implying. From what he said, they believed White pulled some trump card beneath those mes and even though Sam had the ultimate upperhand, he looked like he struggled a bit.

    "It seems like I cannot kill you today, but this is not over yet."

    White said and raised his hand, he was about to surrender. He lost this fight, but he cannot die here if he cannot take Sam away with him.

    However, Sam had no thoughts of letting him leave this ce alive.

    *BOOM*

    A divine energy wind bullet was shot out of the Harbinger hitting White on his chest. Air left his lungs and he couldn''t speak. Sam sped up and took out Reaper to deal the final blow.

    Just when the sword was about to make contact¡­

    *BOOM*

    Sam felt a huge force pressing him down to the ground. Ivar who sat there watching the show made a move and lunged into the arena. He swung his ax upward and cut a lightning that was about to strike Sam.

    "Seems like you want to die."

    He turned to the spectator area where the Elders of the Zeus academy stood.

    An elder stepped forward and stood in front of White. He stopped Sam from dealing the final blow. White took this chance and yelled.

    "I SURRENDER"

    The Elder looked at Sam keenly. He is very tempted to finish him off, but looking at Ivar he knew it wouldn''t end well.

    "The match is over. Our candidate conceded."

    Ivar didn''t reply. His energy raged and his killing intent surged.

    "You interfered with the match."

    "Sorry, it was an impulse. My apologies. I will follow the rules of the tournament and withdraw our academy. They would be taking thest two spots in the top 16. We are fine with it."

    The Elder didn''t lose hisposure. He spoke calmly. "You attacked a candidate."

    Ivar spoke again. His aura didn''t recede, instead it became concentrated and its directed at the Elder. The Elder gulped down in nervousness. He knew about Ivar and he knew things wouldn''t go well if Ivar really decided to act.

    However, he cannot let a talent like White fall here.

    He turned to f and spoke.

    "Dean f, I will follow the rules and withdraw. Please exin it to the invigtor. I am sure you understand where I aming from. Please tell your invigtor to behave. He might break the rules on an impulse. It won''t be taken well by the Zeus academy.

    I don''t think it is a good thing to pressure a prestigious Academy over something minor like this."

    He then turned to the Elders of the other Olympian Academies and made a gesture.

    "We don''t have any problem with it if the Zeus Academy decides to Withdraw."

    "Us too."

    They started expressing their support. f didn''t speak. One of the Elders beside him decided to speak though.

    "Dean, I think it is better to let them be. We don''t know where this Sam guy came from, but White is the only one who put up a fight. We might need him alive in the future."

    Dean f closed his eyes and just nodded. The Elder stood up and announced their support.

    "Since the candidate is not heavily injured from the Elder''s attack, we will let it slide with a punishment. We will ept the withdrawal of the Zeus Academy and this Elder is banned froming as a representative for the future tournaments."

    The spectators all felt a bit disgusted. These academies moved too fast. Some of the clever ones understood what the meaning behind this is.

    However what these Academy elders didn''t take into ount is, the crazy invigtor the Thor Academy appointed for thepetition.

    The Elder turned to Ivar.

    "Ivar¡­"

    The Elder stopped his words in the middle as he felt the hair stand up

    *BAM*

    *CRACK*

    The ax head almost brushed past his nose andnded at his feet, breaking the floor.

    Ivar stood in front of him. It almost looked like he appeared out of thin air.

    "What the fuck did you just say, you bastard?"

    The Elder looked at Ivar. He could feel the hot breath of Ivar hitting his face. "I¡­ I¡­"

    "Who gave you the authority to make this decision?"

    "I¡­I¡­."

    "I will be the one to make the decision for this matter."

    He reappeared into the middle of the Arena once again. By now, Dove came and started checking up on Sam. She turned to Ivar and nodded her head. He turned to the Elder of the Zeus Academy and spoke.

    "I ept the surrender of the Student White, since he didn''t call for any interference and merely took advantage of the situation.

    He might be a bitch and a coward, but I will ept. However, you my dear Elder of the Zeus Academy have to pay for the transgression that youmitted by interfering thepetition I am invigting."

    As he spoke, he didn''t even hesitate and swung his ax at the Elder.

    The Elder blocked the ax with his sword and yelled on top of his lungs.

    "WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS? THE MATTER HAS ALREADY BEEN DECIDED. YOU ARE CROSSING A LINE, IVAR. IF YOU DON''T STOP NOW, THE THOR ACADEMY WILL BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS."

    "Like give a fuck." That is all Ivar said and he swung his ax again. The Olympian Academy Elders felt nervous, after some consideration they decided to jump in.

    Just like that a massive battle began.

    Ivar didn''t give a shit, no matter how many elders came at him. He dashed forward like he was a hot knife running through butter.

    He appeared in front of the Elder in no time. The Zeus Academy elder fell back, he couldn''t handle the pressure.

    "You¡­ you¡­"

    Ivar raised his ax and was about to swing it.

    "Enough¡­"

    f finally spoke up, but Ivar didn''t stop.

    *BAM*

    His axended and it shed through the shoulder of the Elder. He took his arm off.

    "Now, its settled."

    He muttered and walked back to his seat.

    "Since, the Zeus academy has withdrawn, the final match will be between Sam and Jack. Because of interference of the Zeus Academy Elder, Sam will be given fifteen minutes to recover."

    "No need. I withdraw."

    Jack replied ndly. This stunned his academy Elder and seniors.

    "Jack, what the fuck are you doing? This is the best chance we have. Sam is not in a good state. You can easily take the championship."

    "I don''t want to take it. I want to win it." Jack replied. Ivar looked at him and said.

    "At least, there are some people with balls in Olympian Academies."

    He cleared his throat and announced on top of his lungs.

    "I hereby announce the winner of the Solo Combat Tournament.

    Sam from the Gambler Academy."

    The crowd cheered.

    Just like that the long drawn out tournament is finally over.

    Sam is not even conscious when his victory was announced. However, when he finally woke up, he didn''t feel disappointed. The only bad thing that happened is that White stayed alive. Apart from that, everything went well ording to his ns.

 Chapter 2052 Meeting

    Chapter 2052 Meeting

    The Next day.

    The tournament gave too many people a shock. The finals didn''t happen, but the semifinals felt like finals themselves. Sam''s strength scared the crap out of many people, freshmen and Grade 2 seniors alike.

    Sam who took the brunt of an Elder''s attack woke up after a great night''s sleep. He woke up at sunrise and stretchedzily. He learned of the incidents from Dove who came to check up on him.

    "So, the Zeus Academy did make a move. I should have anticipated this, I was carried away in the moment."

    He muttered to himself and didn''t think much of it.

    "What are the numbers that White said out loud? He said they were coordinates. What are the coordinates for?"

    "Should I answer it?"

    "If you want to. I won''t force you. But you need to understand that many people are curious about it. Those coordinates provoked you too much and showed a massive reaction. You were a mystery since the start and finally there is a crack in that mist around you. I doubt the Zeus Academy was more interested in that information than White himself."

    "Its better if the Academy realm acts ignorant about it. It will not do anyone any good."

    Sam got off the bed and asked.

    "When is the award ceremony?"

    "Tomorrow. The Thor Academy needs some time to clean up the mess from thepetitions. Before that, I need to tell you something."

    "What is it?"

    "It''s the Thor Academy. The Dean of the Academy asked for a meeting with you. It is about the rigged lotteries and the interference of the elders and conspiracies against you. Elder Chorus agreed to put it in front of the Judiciary of the Academy realm. They are the only ones who have a right to judge something like this.

    However, Dean f asked for a meeting with you before we proceed with this.

    He is confident that he can convince you."

    "So, if I am convinced, we are not going to proceed forward?"

    "Yes. If the victim himself steps back, there is no point in the Academy officials poking around the case. We will do as you say.

    If you really want to not added the meeting, then it is fine too. We can cancel it. Since we decided to go all out against them, one less meeting wouldn''t make much of a difference."

    "No, I will take the meeting. I also need to discuss some terms for my extra rewards in the formationpetition. I won it with flying colors after all."

    "As you wish. Be ready in an hour."

    Dove left.

    After an hour, they met at the entrance of the Thor Academy. An Elder met them at the entrance and guided them to a conference room.

    Dean f and a bunch of Elders are there. Even the Chorus and Ivar are already there waiting or him. Sam greeted Ivar with a wave and took the seat that was offered to him.

    "So, here I am, Dean f. Why did you want to meet me?" Sam asked directly. "I am here to discuss a deal with you. From the information I knew, you are a man that loves cutting deals."

    "I am sure you have it on good authority, so I won''t bother denying it. So, what is the deal that you are talking about?"

    Sam asked while looking at the Elder standing beside f. He is the youngest Elder of the Thor Academy in the history and everyone knows he climbed there because of his retired father''s influence. He has potential to be an Elder, but not this fast.

    Since, everyone subjected him to criticism because of his situation, he was desperate to gain some approval and he figured helping Thor out with some scheme would gain him that. Too bad, Gambler Academy''s adamant attitude and investigation caught him off guard.

    He didn''t expect that Dean f will relent up on the threats given by the Gambler''s Academy.

    "As your Academy representatives have suspected, our contestant and the Elder both acted against the rules and ethics of thepetition to rig your lottery, in the hopes of defeating you. Your Elder said that they are willing to put this in front of the Judicial authorities of the Academy Realm.

    Even if you do it, there is no actual evidence that is connecting the Elder Bjor and Thor who are involved in this incident to the actual rigging.

    All you have is Likhma''s confession and it was obtained in questionable circumstances.

    It won''t be beneficial for either of us.

    So, I ask that you withdraw it and in return you will bepensated fairly."

    "What is your idea ofpensation?"

    "Resources? Territory? Opportunities? It can be discussed." A different Elder spoke.

    "Resources are the only things that interest me. Fine, we can discuss, but I have a few conditions."

    "What are they?" f asked.

    "Elder Bjorn, should be dismissed from the position. He should face whatever punishment that he would have gotten from a fair trial for this blunder.

    And, I want you guys to put all of this me on Likhma and someone mysterious that he coborated to rig the test.

    This is all on top of the resources that I am going to name. I want them all delivered to me in instalments overing months.

    And this is only for not making this matter public. I will deal with Thor and anyone else that got involved, including the Thor Academy with my own ways."

    "Don''t push it too far. You¡­" An Elder was about to speak up, but f stopped.

    "So, you will be retaliating against us without making this matter public?"

    "Yes, that will preserve whatever reputation you have, that is all you wanted anyway."

    "What would the retaliation be? Are you confident that you can go against the whole Academy by yourself?"

    f asked.

    "It seems like you don''t have enough information about me. It will do you good, if you do more research.

    If you are okay with these conditions, we have a deal. Or, we can go with the official procedures."

    "Deal."

    Sam gave out the list of resources that he wanted and left with Chorus and Dove.

    "Didn''t expect that you can easily bribed." Chorus remarked.

    "I would like to think of it as a payment. And the way I am going to deal with them¡­ It would be better if the news doesn''te out actually. It will have a better impact."

    "So, what are you nning? Should the Academy and the other students be aware?" Dove asked.

    "I don''t know how the Thor Academy is going to react. However it is better to be safe than sorry I guess. Just tell them to not piss off any Thor Academy people or pick fights with them.

    Same goes with the Hel Academy students."

    Dove just nodded and didn''t answer. They left the Academy grounds and went to the Paradise inn. That day went without a hitch. Sam met with Noah to discuss a few things. He couldn''t help but wait to go back.

    He felt the whole tournament was drawnout for way too long. It felt like he spent ages in here.

    The next day, the award ceremony was conducted. Sam was the MVP. He got awards in many categories. The Gambler Academy won the teampetition and finally Sam also got the Solo Combat. He didn''t care much about the rewards perse.

    The recognition and attraction was what he was after.

    However, most people, particrly the Elders and Seniors noticed something else that made them vignt.

    It is the Olympian Academies. The Solo Combat rankings are dominated by the Olympian Academy Rankings.

    Even though Vidyuth and White''s participation has been revoked because of what the Elder did, everyone tacitly agreed both of them are in top 8 and they believed White should be ranked second.

    This only made them more vignt. Not only did the Olympian academies dominated the ranks, three of the top ten are from Zeus Academy which is even more unusual. The Academy realm is not just about grooming individual talents, the quantity also ys a role and based on the results, Olympians seemed to be way ahead of the others.

    Sam is pleased by these results.

    This is exactly what he wanted.

    Now, the eyes of all the other Academies in the Academy realm are on the Olympian region. These students will be targeted, tailed and some times even be attacked, so the other academies won''t lose out an edge.

    The ceremony was over without too muchmotion. There was just another banquet at night to honor the winners.

    In the banquet, Sam had to meet a lot of people. Particrly seniors from other academies that specialized in auxiliary professions. They are the ones that didn''t think too bad of Sam, because they lost lesspared to the academies that tried to get high ranks inbatpetitions.

    After some tedious meetings, Noah finally came to his rescue and pretended like they need some privacy.

    He felt relieved.

 Chapter 2053 Return

    Chapter 2053 Return

    "How does it feel being so popr?"

    "I have always been popr, so you should have asked me this question years ago."

    "Have you always been a narcissist too?"

    "You didn''t know?"

    "So, are all of your ns executed perfectly? Did everything y out in this tournament to your benefit?"

    "Yeah, everything. My work here is almost done."

    "I am looking forward to seeing you deal with the Thor Academy though. I bet it will be fun to watch."

    "Do you want to take a glimpse?"

    Sam asked with a cheeky smile. Noah smiled and replied.

    "Of course. This banquet is so boring. It wouldn''t hurt to add some excitement."

    "Wait and watch."

    Sam walked out of the banquet hall without alerting anyone. At the same time, Dove who is socializing with her peers noticed the Grade 4 seniors of the Thor Academy walking to her.

    "Isn''t this the high and mighty Dove of the Gambler Academy."

    One of the women in the group spoke up attracting Dove''s attention. She looked at them all and frowned.

    "What do you want?"

    "You boasted about all that fairness, justice and judiciary procedures. However I heard that your boy keeled and licked our feet at the sight of some chump change? I was flustered unnecessarily. I shouldn''t have been worried when you came barking to me.

    I should have understood that you are begging for some money in exchange for silence. What a disgrace."

    The leader of the groupmented.

    Dove didn''t like this. It is apparent with her facial expressions.

    Looking at her frown, the crowd felt good. Dove cannot create amotion in such a formal asion, and since they were pressured by her and felt humiliated, they wanted to take some frustration out on her.

    Dove looked at them up and down. Sizing them up.

    "It was you Dean who came crawling and asking for a deal to save the ass of your youngest Elder in the history of the Academy realm. Get your fact straights before you try to rub it in someone''s face. Don''t show your ugly mugs one more trying to spew this shit in front me.

    If you do that¡­ Fuck this deal, I will blow the whole fucking matter up in front of your faces. Let''s see what will your Dean do at that time when he knows you are the ones that caused this shit."

    Her threat worked. The seniors immediately backed down. They seemed to be way too confident in these under the table agreements. Maybe they got too used to them and believed the non-existent sense of honor they have along with their fellow crooks.

    Dove, however couldn''t care less about it.

    Seeing their silence, Dove stepped forward and whispered so only they could hear it.

    "And don''t think that this is over. We might have skilled the judicial hearings, but that doesn''t mean, we are not going to retaliate. You will see what happens when you mess with the Gambler Academy."

    As soon as she spoke, everyone''s attention was gathered by a huge sh of bright blue light that came from somewhere in the campus. Everyone including the Dean f looked in that particr direction.

    Clouds glowing with that electric blue light are brewing in the sky.

    "Isn''t that from the Tower?"

    f asked an Elder. The Elder In charge of the tower immediately came running to him.

    "Dean, the tower. It is glowing. One of the students on the duty just reported. It seems ancient runes appeared on the tower and the patterns are glowing. The clouds are a reaction to it."

    "What happened? Did anyone enter the tower? Did someone mess with a core formation?" Dean asked as he made his way towards the tower.

    "No, sir. No one messed with any formations. The tower didn''t show the usual alerts. However, someone did enter the tower a few minutes ago."

    "Who is it?" Dean asked. He already in the air flying to the tower and the Elder tried his best to keep up with the Dean''s speed.

    "Its the Gambler Academy''s student. Sam."

    f stopped in his tracks.

    "What did you say?"

    "It is the Sam. He entered the tower a few minutes ago. He said, he will be finishing off what he started a long time ago, before he entered."

    f went to the entrance of the tower.

    *RUBMLE*

    The lightning roared in the sky and after a few minutes, Sam came out of the tower. The tower stopped glowing and it returned to its normal state.

    He stood in front of f.

    "You are waiting for me?"

    "What happened? What did you do?" f asked in anticipation. The Elder already went ahead to check the tower''s condition. However, it looked normal.

    "I didn''t do anything. I just finished the hundredth floor. By the way, that thest floor. The rumors are true."

    "What happened when you cleared it?"

    "Now, that''s where I stop answering the questions. If you want to know ask your students to clear and obtain that knowledge."

    Sam was about to leave. f extended his hand and stopped him.

    "Answer me while I am still asking you nicely. What happened after you cleared the tower? What is the cause of that phenomenon?"

    His voice is somber and he is serious. At this moment, the people that were originally in the banquet already made their way here. They heard Sam''s words and also f''s reply for those words.

    "What if I don''t want to answer you?"

    Sam asked cheekily.

    "You ARE going to answer me. You WILL answer me. This is the prestige of the Thor Academy. Don''t you dare y with me now and answer me obediently."

    "I am sorry, I cannot. All I can tell you is this. ''I have been blessed by the Mighty Thor''.

    "What the hell does that mean?"

    f came close to Sam and was about to ce his hand on him, but at this moment, Chrous appeared out of nowhere and blocked it.

    "Now, now, f. You are getting out of hand here."

    "Get lost, Chorus. This matter is way too serious for me to tolerate your disrespect to my position. I am not in the mood for this."

    "It seems like you are forgetting the rules here f. Any candidate who entered the tower has a right to refrain from saying anything rted to their experience in the tower, that includes clearing as well.

    I get it.

    You are embarrassed because the first tower that was cleared in the Academy Realm''s history is yours, it should have been a prideful moment, but instead of your own student, an external student that too the one who is kind on the opposite side of your Academy cleared it.

    That too on such a prestigious day.

    I understand your frustration. However, rules are rules. If you don''t back down now, I am going to call the enforcers."

    "Is that all you can do? Constantly begging for attention from the enforcers?"

    "Come on now, you know better than to provoke me with those remarks. The only reason I am calling the enforcers is because it''s the right thing to do.

    You of all people should know what will happen when I take things in to my own hands. It seems like a decade is too long and caused you some memory loss."

    f didn''t budge, he tried to move his hand forcefully forward. Chorus held it tightly in ce. Both the auras shed. After three minutes of that stalemate, an elder stepped forward and whispered something in f''s ear.

    f sighed and finally released his grip.

    "The banquet is over. Get out everyone."

    He went towards his office.

    Chorus looked at Sam and said.

    "You are making me work too hard. Can you stir up less trouble while we are here? I don''t want to deal with these assholes."

    "I am sorry. But I cannot promise you that, yet. There is still another stop and we can go back to Gambler Academy."

    "What are you trying to do?" Chorus asked with a frown.

    One hourter.

    The Sky above Hel Academy is rumbling with ck ming clouds. The tower is glowing with those ck mes that looked like they came out of straight from hell. The dean of Hel academy looked at Sam who came out of the tower.

    She just witnessed a simr scene in the Thor Academy. She couldn''t help but snicker in her mind when she saw how upset f was. However, now she had to experience the same feeling herself.

    Sam walked to Chorus and said.

    "Now, we are all done. We can leave."

    "We are not leaving now. The Thor Academy didn''t grant us the Space gate ess. We arest on the list."

    "Why, do they not want us to leave this ce?"

    "They just wanted to screw around with us." They went to the Paradise inn where Ivar was waiting for Sam.

    Both of them met in a meeting room.

    "So, everything went well?" Ivar asked Sam.

    "Not too bad. Results are all within my expectations. I am pretty sure you are satisfied as well. You got what you wanted out of this."

    "Yeah, chopping off that hand sure is exciting. I didn''t expect you actually trigger such response from the Zeus academy elder.

    How are you so precise with it though? What if the Elder didn''t step forward? What if that kid White is not actually that strong?"

    "No, my calctions regarding people are rarely wrong. They are way too predictable once you know them enough."

    "Its great that it worked out. However, are you sure that this is enough to cause the effect that you wanted?"

    "It is more than enough. You will see the result soon enough. With how prideful those Zeus academy people act, do you really think they will just sit back and let this go?"

    "I hope they don''t. So, what''s next?"

    "After I leave here, within a week the construction will start. Just assist the construction team to the best of your abilities. Also, inform your friends in other regions about the situation.

    Tell them to spread the information of the top ten candidates in their regions. I need as much attention as possible."

    "Sure, I will do as you say. Let''s hope everything goes well."

    "Of course, it will."

    The meeting ended. The next morning they went back to the Gambler Academy.

    Usually, there is a separate banquet and celebration back at the academy to wee the rankers from the tournament, but Sam skipped it this time. He went to meet Stone. The final stage of surgery needs to be finished. He heated up the metal long enough, it is time to beat it into the shape.

 Chapter 2054 Final Surgery

    Chapter 2054 Final Surgery

    Stone is in the middle of training by the time Sam arrived.

    He greeted Sam politely.

    "So, how are you feeling now?" Sam asked.

    "I am feeling great. I can wield a lot of Spiritual energypared to before. My cultivation level also raised rapidly. However, my body is not umting any Divine energy to breakthrough past that barrier."

    "Don''t worry, I am going to fix that. I have already prepared for it a long time ago. You will be the first Divine ne cultivator, who didn''t use the conventional measures to breakthrough. You will have your final surgery today.

    So, be prepared. Make sure your body is in its best condition. Not even a trace of muscle fatigue should be there. Go and Heal if you have any right now."

    "Yes, Sir."

    Stone left to do a full examination of his body.

    Sam then went to Hub without anyone watching. He appeared in the hidden room under the hub. The room doesn''t have any doors or paths leading to it. The only way to enter is through the spatial transfer. The room is currently empty and with a snap of his fingers, the tables and chairs disappeared, leaving the roompletely empty.

    He turned the wall that was on his left hand side.

    The wall is purely made of metal. Exactly in the center of the wall, there is a vertical line indicating that it was joined there by some means. Sam ced his hand on the wall and injected his Divine energy.

    *CREAK*

    The sound of metal griding filled the whole room, a pattern glowed on the wall and soon an opened appeared in the middle of it all. It is a path that only one person could walk through. There is even an energy shield present.

    Sam walked through the energy shield and marveled at the sight in front of him. Even though he was the one who created this, he still cannot help but feel delighted by what he saw.

    There are several pirs that are acting as foundational support for hub. No one knew that the ground underneath the hub is actually hollow.

    In fact, the foundation was dug way deeper into the ground and it is connected to the main building through a central pir which is built and reinforced with special alloys Sam created. They are also reinforced with countless formations and inscriptions. Even without them, the structural integrity of the alloys itself is good enough.

    In between the central pir lies the secret room where Sam and his team usually meet.

    This central pir and four special walls divide the ce into four pieces and Sam is currently in one of those areas.

    From the pathway that he just came in, there is a small path that is only suitable for one person to walk is leading towards the central part of this area. This central part holds one of the energy reservoirs of the hub.

    There are four in total.

    There are several pipes connecting the bottom of the hub and the central part. They are all glowing light pirs that came from the top and disappeared into the darkness. Sam went to the central part and tapped on a transparent tablet that was ced there for his use.

    He can control one fourth of energy operations of the hub from here. He can actually do it with his mind from anywhere in the Olympian region, but that takes too much of his mental power. However, here he can just do it with a touch of his finger.

    He started pressing some buttons on the tablet before the reservoir glowed. The spherical dome of the reservoir split open and from within came a few orbs that are glowing like light bulbs. They are as big as quail eggs and they are brimming with Divine energy.

    There are fifteen of them in total and among them, three of them appeared different. They are a big biggerpared to the remaining twelve.

    Sam made them float and probed one of the smaller ones. As soon as his energy made contract, the spherical shape it had was disturbed and it copsed like it was made of some gel like substance. With his energy control, he can manipte it like slime.

    However, the three big ones didn''t react the same way. When Sam''s energy made contact with them, they started sprouting some small tendrils out of their bodies.Sam stopped interacting with them and disconnected himself from the reservoir.

    He carefully ced the fifteen orbs in the Divine dimension as he made his way back to the central room. He locked the hub and left the ce. He reappeared in the surgery room that he prepared for Stone previously.

    Stone is already waiting for him there.

    Samid down a formation and let him stand in the middle.

    "Let yourself go. Don''t worry about anything that you might experience. I am telling you, there was nothing like this in this world before and there might not be another one.

    As much as this is a life changing moment for you, this will be a historical moment for me as well. You wouldn''t even be able toprehend the importance of it, even if I exined. So, no matter how much pain you are in once I start this, I will not be letting you go in the middle.

    That opportunity has long passed.

    So, you have to follow through this no matter what happens.

    You cannot faint, you have to stay awake and you have to suppress all of your energy back into your core while I perform this. The rest of your body should beplete devoid of any energy. Your spiritual sense should be at its highest focus and you need to control your energy to do whatever I tell you to do.

    Do you understand?"

    Stone nodded solemnly.

    He removed all of his clothes and stood in the middle of the formation naked.

    Sam activated the formation.

    Stone started levitating. Hepletely let himself be controlled by the formation and didn''t resist.

    "Suppress your Spiritual energy."

    Sam instructed. Stone closed his eyes and did as he was told. Within two minutes, his body is devoid of spiritual energy. Except for his core, he is just an abnormally strong but still a normal human. Sam waved his hand and the fifteen orbs started floating around him.

    The three big orbs are the first ones to move.

    Sam moved them slowly aiming them at three spots. One of them is his be, which is the pathway to his upper dantian.

    The second one is directed at his chest, the middle dantian, the final one is aimed at the lower abdomen, the lower dantian.

    Stone felt like he is looking at a superior existence as he saw the three orbs make their way towards his body. They are full ofpressed Divine energy, there is so much energy in them that if a normal Peak stage Astral ne cultivator consumed the orb without any hitch, they could easily breakthrough to the Divine ne Initiation and they will not have any energy deficiency to even gain some progress in that stage.

    It would take mines and mines of resources and loads and loads of herbs to umte that much energy in a person''s body. Even that cannot be consumed directly. It will take months for even a moderately talented person to digest all of this.

    And Sam managed to collect all of this energy thanks to the hub.

    When these people are using their attacks in the simtors and the arcade section, all of that energy is being redirected into several channels. One of those channels converts all the energy into neutral energy and then stores in the reservoirs of the four areas.

    Each reservoir has a specialty apart from themon functions and the reservoir Sam just essed is designed specifically to make these orbs.

    Sam decided to call them artificial cores and they have many forms and many times. However, this particr type is specially made for Stone and Stone alone.

    The three orbs touched Stone''s skin. He could feel the cells in his muscles dying. He could feel his vitality leaving his body. If not for Sam forcefully suppressing the energy within the orbs, Stone would have exploded into a bloody mist upon the first contact.

    The three orbs pierced through his flesh and slowly started dissolving into his body up on Sam''s guidance.

    The middle dantian, is the first one to react because of the spiritual core. The middle orb connected with the Dantian and it started devouring it greedily. The artificial core merged with the spiritual core and it wanted to take its ce.

    Spreading its energy, but since Sam ispressing it and Stone himself is alsopressing it, it couldn''t spread the energy wildly.

    Sam simted it to create the tendrils and these slowly expanded. Soon, the upper and lower artificial cores merged into their respective dantians. One simting the physical strength and the other simting the sea of consciousness.

    The energy tendrils spread out as they spread into different meridian channels connecting the whole body.

    Stone tried his best to suppress them.

    Sam made the twelve small artificial cores that are malleable and hovered them closer to Stone''s body.

    They all targeted the twelve primary meridians. As soon as they made contact with them, they wiggled like slimes and started dissolving into the meridianworks.

    "Slowly release your energy. Let the tendrils make contact with these new meridians."

    These malleable artificial cores are dissolving into meridianworks. Meridians are not usually energy stores, only cores can do that, however this malleable artificial core took the shape of the meridianwork and converted the wholework into an energy store and once the tendrils discovered this reaction, they immediately connected with the modifiedwork.

    Now the difficult part is over.

    It is time for both of them to stay patient as these cores do their jobs.

 Chapter 2055 Success

    Chapter 2055 Sess

    Sam and Stone stayed in that room for a whole day and night.

    Sam didn''t dare open his eyes. Since the start of the operation, he was in the control and now that he is in the final stage of finishing it, he couldn''t afford to lose control. Stone could feel the changes in his body.

    The meridians are merged with the malleable artificial cores and all his meridianwork are changing, the tendrils that emerged from the three major cores are forming a secondyeredwork over the first one.

    And these tendrils are connecting with the rest of the body merging with the original circtorywork.

    Now Stone understood why Sam spent so much time morphing his body bit by bit using so many different methods. With the connection he had with the cores he could observe every change of his body at a cellr level.

    Each cell in his body is now transforming. It is like a metamorphosis. It is almost like they are undergoing a mutation. His original body is designed or made to be only take in the energy that is given out by his own pathetic core.

    It was not made to endure higher levels of energy.

    If that body was directly introduced to these artificial cores, he would have died without even knowing what had happened to him. His new body can now endure this. However, his current cells are still used to drawing energy from that shitty core.

    Sam is now giving them a reboot through the cores so they could get used to this new energy. Both in terms of level, quantity and purity.

    After another three hours, Sam finally finished the surgery. There was no divine phenomenon and there was no shy finish. In fact, the start of the operation looked the shiest and by the end of it, Stone is actually devoid of any energy. All the energy in the cores is used up to bring the change in Stone''s body.

    Stone wasn''t even able to sense the results of the change when the operation was done.

    He fell on the floor as the formation was deactivated.

    "Close your eyes and try to cultivate. I think you can sense the proper cultivationwork now."

    Stone did as he was told. He closed his eyes and sat in meditation. As usual, he could sense the vast amount of energy in the surroundings because of his enhanced soul. However, his previous self wouldn''t have been able to absorb that energy inside.

    But now, as soon as he tried to absorb it, every ces inside his body became excited.

    The three big cores. In his head, heart and abdomen, all of them started devouring the energy greedily. Apart from that, he could see that all the pores of his body are also absorbing in the energy and they channeled that energy towards the cores.

    There are many pathways opened up in his body.

    Energy flowed so naturally. It didn''t feel like he just experienced this huge change. Instead it felt like he was born this way.

    He also noticed that as the cores started filling up, they distributed energy to different meridianworks and instead of just circting the energy, theworks are consolidating the energy storing it within themselves.

    Once that happened, they also started drawing the atmospheric energy.

    Sam sensed all of these changes and his face got stuck in a grin. He is sitting on the ground tired and soaked in sweat, but the excitement felt is out of this world.

    "FUCKING INCREDIBLE"

    He pped his thigh in this excited state. He wanted to look at the sky and scream at the gods.

    He sessfully overturned the verdict of the gods. He has rewritten the fate of a person who was born to be doomed. He made a ve into a genius. He has rewritten the history.

    Sam felt this sense of satisfaction and achievement creep up in his body. He forgot about all the fatigue and stood up. He focused his gaze on Stone, who opened his eyes after over an hour.

    His eyes are teared up. He is crying like a little baby. He fell on his knees his forehead touched the floor. He hugged Sam''s feet as tears streamed down his face.

    "Thank you, Sir. Thank you."

    His voice carried something that Sam had heard many times before. However it was never directed at him. It is pure devoting. In this moment, in Stone''s eyes, Sam is the god. Sam made him get up and said.

    "Be prepared. I will set the stage for you and you shall reim your love. Until then, just stay put and prepare yourselves.

    I need to go now."

    Sam rushed out after leaving those words.

    He was dashing towards Nn''s restaurant and he wanted to call his friends to share the news, however on his way, he was blocked by someone. In fact, he wasn''t even blocked, Sam halted his steps as soon as he saw that person.

    "Long time no see." He greeted the young man who was standing across him. Ling Tian grinned widely as he walked towards Sam.

    "It has indeed been a long time, Sam. I believe that you are doing well. I was anticipating this meeting for a long time."

    Sam smiled and Ling Tian and shook his hand.

    He shared a weird rtionship with Ling Tian, unlike other yers Sam didn''t get to interact with the god that was sponsoring him. So, he couldn''t be in touch with Gambler that much and Ling Tian came to him in his stead.

    Every time Sam met him, something major happened.

    It was very weird to meet him casually.

    "Even I was waiting to meet you. Karthikeya said that you joined here as an instructor. So, I thought you would be here along with the Senior students. However, you were nowhere to be seen."

    "I epted a special mission from the Lord. Even though I joined here as an instructor, my situation is very unique as you might have already guessed."

    "I do believe that you are way past just entering the Consummation of Divine ne. So, is this instructor post because of me?"

    "It is kind of true. Right now, you are way too close to the gods. With your behavior until now, they might just cross a line or two. So, Lord appointed me here just in case you face any anomalies."

    "Whatever the reason might be, it is good to finally see you in person."

    "Well¡­ that might have to wait for a while."

    Sam was confused.

    Ling Tian was about to exin, when hismunication token vibrated.

    "Anyway, it is not time to talk leisurely. Wharton is looking for you and he is in quite a pickle. So, it is better if we report to the Academy right away."

    "What for?"

    Sam asked, however, he already started following Ling Tian.

    "Well, you might have forgotten with your busy routine, however, whenever a candidate wins the Solo Combat of the Freshman tournament, that region will give out a special felicitation and reward for them.

    It was not exactly a rule created by the gods, it was created by the Deans of old times. The felicitation usually happens as soon as the candidatese back. With a huge parade and all the extravagance.

    This time though, the MVP has disappeared as soon as he entered the region."

    He looked at Sam meaningfully.

    Sam just shrugged. He was in a hurry to finish off Stone''s surgery, so he didn''t bother going back to the Academy, Chorus was toozy to stop him and Dove didn''t think that he would actually disappear like that.

    She thought he was just handling some minor matters as she assumed he understood the importance of the ceremony.

    Contrary to everyone''s expectations, Sam just disappeared for the whole day and right now is almost noon of the second day.

    When he finally arrived at the Academy, Wharton greeted him. He held Sam by his shoulders and shook him violently. Like a kid shaking a toy.

    He didn''t show a single sign of frustration from Sam''s sudden disappearance. He is just way too ecstatic as he praises Sam. The elders who were originally a bit hostile toward Sam are also a bit favorable toward him.

    "Go and Get ready. The ceremony will be this evening. The Deans of all the Academies in the region, and the deans of the affiliate Astral Region Academies will alle today. It will be very lively."

    Dove grabbed Sam out of all the congrattions and threw him into his dorm. Sam sighed in exasperation. He has way too many things to handle. The ns need to be executed as soon as possible.

    He is already feeling a bitte with the surgery going on for so long.

    He wanted to sneak out, but he knew this would be inevitable. So, he might as well get this over with. Since this is the ceremony for the winners, that means most of his teammates will be here anyway. As this thought came to his mind, a sudden idea popped into his head. He walked out to find where Ling Tian was. A ceremony like this will be handled on a grand scale. Not as grand as the award ceremony in the tournament venue, but this is a good enough stage.

    It would be a waste to not use it.

 Chapter 2056 Ceremony

    Chapter 2056 Ceremony

    Ling Tian looked at Sam with a weird expression.

    "What kind of trouble are trying to stir up?"

    Sam just looked at him calmly and replied.

    "All I asking for is some information. That is all."

    "Well, the nature of the information is what is surprising to me. Why are you asking about the entry qualifications for the event? Don''t think I don''t know about your friends in the region. They have been moving around quite a lot.

    I was keeping an eye on them just in case.

    So, you bettere clean right now, if you have any ns."

    "I won''t say I don''t have any ns, however it won''t have the same impact, if I give you all the details. Just tell me what the entry criteria for the event is."

    "Well, since you are the winner of the tournament and the felicitation ceremony is for your, you have right to invite a few people on your own. Some important people in the Academy will also have some passes to give to the other people.

    Apart from that, except for the important seniors with high level rankings acknowledged by the Academies together, the other academy seniors cannot even attend the event.

    Of course, some of our exceptional seniors like Dove will also have passes.

    Only these passes are the way for people to attend the event. So, if you use your own passes and let theme here, and they cause any trouble, it is very easy for everyone to trace it back to you.

    So, you better refrain from doing anything shady.

    Just enjoy the moment and behave like a normal student for a short while. Don''t you think your hyperfunctioning brain also deserves a short break once in a while."

    Sam just ignored Ling Tian''s advice and asked a few more questions about the event. After that, despite Ling Tian''s constant queries about what he was nning to do, Sam just left. He went back to his dorm and used the wrist band tomunicate with the teammates.

    "Hello guys, I wasn''t able to contact you immediately after I came. However, I am guessing that all of you met the target that I have set for you?"

    Sam asked. This question is directed at the team members that had yet to break through to Divine ne before he went off to the finals. As promised, all of the broke through.

    "Now that you guys are ready, how about I give you guys a chance to show off, against the best of the best the Olympian region has to offer. I will also let you guys see my brand new creation. Trust me, it will be magnificent."

    He started giving off more instructions. After he was done there, Sam contacted Nn.

    "I need a favor."

    "What do I need to do?" Nn agreed readily.

    "How many passes do you got and how many more can you obtain without raising any suspicions or questions from the Elders of the Academy?"

    "How many do you want?"

    "One each forJw, Tamas, Sia, Gyan, Kiran and Stone. Of course, one for Night Ghost too."

    "No problem, I can arrange something. Consider it done. Just tell them toe and stay in the restaurant for the next few hours. It will be easier for me."

    "Sure."

    Sam made the calls to the rest and told them to go to the Nn''s restaurant.

    Time passed and Sam soon got messages everyone in the team. They told him that they obtained their pass and Sam eagerly waited for the evening.

    Now the event wouldn''t be as boring as it was originally supposed to be.

    He called Stone.

    "Are you ready?" Stone is very nervous and didn''t even know how to answer it. He couldn''t let out a courtesy okay to Sam.

    "Don''t worry too much. Trust your new self. Just like you practiced. This is the first step for you to get back what you desired so far. Prove that you truly deserve it and I willy down a path for you to send a message to the Zeus Academy.A message so loud and clear that it will reverberate throughout the realms.

    Get ready."

    He cut the call off.

    Soon, it is past dusk.

    Sam walked out of his dorm, stretchingzily. However, his eyes are brimming with excitement.

    His friends who are ranked in top ten already arrived there and they are all gathered at the main table which was especiallyid out of them. The seat to the Sam''s right is empty. That is where White was supposed to sit.

    However, he is nowhere to be seen.

    Sam assumed that the other party must have not recovered until now.

    Watt, Jack, Philip are eagerly waiting for him.

    "What got you so excited? You have been on calls since afternoon."

    "You will see. There is a great news. I feel like getting drunk just imagining it." Sam said. This is not his usual self. No matter what kind of thing Sam has created until now, he was alwaysposed. In fact, once he created something he felt a sense of defeat.

    The excitement was only until he could finish building it.

    However, this is the first in a long long while he was this excited about a sessfully finished project.

    Not just the trio, the rest also noticed his weird enthusiasm. When Philip was about ask more questions, he noticed Bronte arriving and taking his seat.

    "Hello."

    He awkwardly greeted all of them.

    Sam nodded at him and so did the rest of the team.

    Soon the ceremony began. There are speeches starting from the Dean of the Zeus Academy and it ended with the Speech of Wharton. Sam was bored out of his mind and his gaze is mostly locked on to the spectators.

    He saw Pearl sitting at one of the tables.

    She is looking at him with all resentment a creature could muster. Sam smirked. He is provoking her. Pearl gritted her teeth and turned to Rain.

    "Contact Christos. Tell him, I am open for the discussion."

    Rain was stunned, but he nodded in the end. Pearl turned her attention back to Sam. In her opinion, her perfect n was ruined because of Sam. She could have suppressed everyone in the Olympian region and with the same level of dominance she would have dominated the tournament in the finals.

    She should have been the MVP of this year''s tournament. She has been preparing for this for months. However, Sam came in and dragged it away from her. At first, with her mind games, she thought Sam was just an amusing attention seeker.

    Now, she understood that this guy is the bane of her existence.

    She needs to have her revenge.

    As this thought came to her mind, she turned to Rain once again.

    "It will challenging round soon, contact the leader of the Grade 2 students, I need a favor."

    Rain did as he was told. Sam didn''t know or rather didn''t care for whatever Pearl was thinking. That provoking smirk is also for his own amusement and it was just a fleeting thought. In his opinion, Pearl is a dead snake. There is no point in beating her down anymore.

    Unless and of course, shees back baring her fangs.

    After the speeches are over, it is time for the announcement of the awards. Dean Wharton stood up once again and said.

    "This year, the Olympian region outdid itself. The freshmen were way too outstanding and they kicked some ass wildly. The Olympian academies in particr held so many positions in the top ten. Of course, they got their asses kicked by the Gambler''s academy in the end¡­"

    *COUGH* *COUGH*

    The Vice Dean coughed awkwardly and halted Wharton''s words.

    "Anyway, because of the outstanding achievements, the rewards are going to be increased this year.

    I have discussed with the Olympian academy and they have been generous enough to open the gates of the Pseudo Hell.

    Based on the rankings they obtained and the results they achieved, all the people that got good results in the Freshmen tournament will be able to spend some time in the Pseudo hell."

    Sam was surprised and impressed by the reward.

    Pseudo hell is actually a special dimension conquered by thebined efforts of the Olympian Academies.

    It simtes the environment very simr to the hell that Sam and the other yers experienced. They can refine their bodies with that corruption. Even though it is best used before they broke through the Divine ne, it is still beneficial.

    After all, the hell refinement is a forgotten technique and this Pseudo hell is barely a derivate of that.

    It will still be beneficial for his friends who hadn''t experienced this. He decided to make them some gadgets that will amplify the experience.

    That is not the only reward, there are some other rewards that are being given out by different Academies. Sam alone received a bunch of potions and pills, out of which one attracted a lot of attention.

    It is a potion that purifies the Divine energy. It is best used when breaking through.

    Sam held potion as he yed with the vial in front of others'' envious gaze as he waited for the next part of the event. The

    challenging round.

 Chapter 2057 Challenges

    Chapter 2057 Challenges

    The Challenging round as it name implies involves challenges between the students.

    There are two types of challenges in this. The first one is the freshmen or the equivalents, which means the people who are in the Initial Stage of Divine ne Initiation challenging the winners of the tournament.

    They cane forward and challenge any of the students that ranked in the Freshman tournament.

    However, it is clearly apparent that the winners are winners for a reason.

    So, once these challengers announce their challenge, three people of the same level cane out from the audience and challenge them. Once the challenger defeats these three people, they can recover and finally fight with the winner they decided on.

    The second type of challenge is simple.

    The Grade 2 Seniors, who are in the Middle-stage of Initiation can step forward and challenge the winners.

    The first type of challenge is for the students to test themselves against the winners and understand or learn their gaps.

    The second type of challenge is for the seniors to test their juniors. It is also not a fight for them to go all out. The referee can interfere any time stop the fight if the fights get serious.

    Simply put, this is just another phase of fighting within thispetitive space. This is to make the winners be in thatpetitive zone and not let this win get to their heads.

    Once the start of the challenging round was announced, a few people from different academies stood up. This Is not just a ce of testing, this is also a ce for them to get some prestige. Even if they cannot defeat the winners, they can put up some good fight and in turn earn some prestige for themselves.

    As soon as the challenges started, Sam saw the pattern that he expected to. Not just him everyone knows this pattern and no one could do anything about it.

    Whenever a winner is challenged, for example when Bronte was challenged, three people from Zeus academy stood up and fought with the Challenger. They acted as the gate keepers to reach Bronte.

    Only, when the challenger defeated all three of them, he got to challenge Bronte.

    The same applied to the other people as well.

    Even though these winners might not have a good friend circle within the academy, the students of the academy are still willing to step forward and act as gate keepers.

    They are desperate to make sure that their academy winner keeps all the prestige that he gained in the tournament and no challenges could take part of it away.

    The heat of the challenges soon grew and Sam noticed that some of the marked students in Pearl''s list are stepping up as well. He decided that this is the best time for his n to be executed.

    He gave a mental signal.

    From within the a man stood up.

    He wore dark cloak and hood covering his face up. The cloak is clearly enhanced with all sorts of inscriptions to hide his face away. He also had arge stick in his hand, which he is using like a walking staff. He slowly walked to the stage and looked at the group. His gazended on Vidyuth.

    This is the first challenge for Vidyuth.

    "I would like to take down the fake ranker." The challenger spoke in a low tone. However, everyone could hear it. The faces of the audience and the Deans changed.

    Dean Wharton had a grin on his face as soon as he heard these troublesome words. Vidyuth, Bronte and White are officially removed from the rankings of the tournament. They didn''t get the rewards from the Thor Academy too.

    However, the academy realm is a ce where strength is valued and they are in the Olympian realm. So, they just decided to honor them as rankers in this regional felicitation. None of the people in the audience objected, because¡­ who wants to be enemies with the Zeus Academy and the rest of the Olympian Academies?

    Of course, everyone can think of a name instantly, but an average sane person wouldn''t want that.

    However, here came a guy in a dark cloak covering his face up and throwing a challenge to the Zeus Academy''s face along with an insult.

    Pearl who saw this is furious once again. She might have lost the freshmen tournament, however, she still believed she could make aeback and she also believed that she is the future of the Zeus Academy.

    So, someone is challenging the Zeus Academy, and that makes her furious.

    She wanted to take this guy down a notch. She gestured for a couple of freshmen from the Zeus Academy to make a move. She also stood up.

    She will be the gatekeeper and she will take this guy down grandly. That will restore some of her lost prestige.

    The Challenger stood there and looked at the three challengers.

    "Let''s finish this quickly. Do you guys want toe together? It will make things easier."

    His voice is low, calm, but a bit raspy. As if he hadn''t spoken for a long time.

    Pearl frowned but didn''t show any response to such obvious provocation. One of the other two went on to the stage.

    "Fight."

    The referee announced.

    The Zeus Academy student, let''s just call him Vidyuth''s first gatekeeper. He took out a spear and lunged at the challenger. The Challenger didn''t show any reaction, while the first gatekeeper closed the distance in an instant.

    Just when the spear was a few inches away, the challenger switched the stick from his right hand to the left and tapped it on the ground.

    *TAP*

    The sound that came out is nothing special. It just sounded like a wooden stick hitting the ground, which is exactly what happened. However, the gatekeeper froze and fell down on the floor.

    Everything about his body just froze and that includes his energy as well. As soon as he hit the ground, the bacsh from the attack he was about to make hit the body.

    "ARGHH¡­"

    He groaned in pain and spat out blood crazily. He tried to stand up and looked around in a daze. He didn''t know what happened and he didn''t understand how he got injured.

    He never felt this level of confusion and he cannot remember thest two seconds. He can remember almost reaching his opponent and he can remember hitting the ground and suffering the bacsh. However, the reason why he stopped and what he felt when he stopped? That he cannot remember, no matter how hard he tries.

    He stood up and tried to channel his energy.

    "What did you do to me?" He asked through his gritted teeth and broken voice. He held the spear tightly and lunged forward once again. However this time, even before his foot could leave the ground, his body froze. He fell on the ground and the bacsh hit once again.

    He spat some more blood.

    The gatekeeper stood up once again, tried to move, froze, fell, and bled.

    Everyone watched this bizarre scene. Every time the gatekeeper fell, he felt more pain than before and he suffered more damage than before.

    However, he also felt more rage building up and he could feel somepelling thoughts making him rush forward again and again.

    "STOP."

    After the seventh time, the referee stopped.

    He looked at the gatekeeper and felt pity inside his heart. The gatekeeper appeared pale and he painted the stage with his blood.

    The attendants came and took him away.

    The hooded figure turned to the second keeper and said.

    "The offer still stands, you can still bring her and attack me together."

    The second gatekeeper looked nervously at Pearl, who is still focused on the challenger.

    Seeing that she had no intention of stepping forward along with him, he went by himself. He also didn''t hesitate like his predecessor and just attacked.

    However, the same phenomenon happened once again.

    Whenever he was about to make a move, he froze and got injured by his own bacsh. The next minute felt like Deja Vu to everyone. By now, everyone is wondering who this cloaked guy is. They would like nothing more than to learn his identity.

    The second gatekeeper was defeated soon enough.

    Everyone felt pity for him.

    To think that someone will be defeated by their own energy bacsh¡­ few things could be more embarrassing than that.

    Pearl stepped forward and spoke.

    "Who are you? Which Academy do you belong to?"

    "If you want the answer, defeat me."

    "Then let''s make it quick."

    She extended her hand and the water elemental energy surged. Some patterns appeared on her arms.

    *TAP*

    The familiar tapping sound. However, Pearl just stood there without even showing any change in her expression. However, at that moment, a surge of pure water elemental energy shot out of her back and exploded.

    *SCREECH*

    A loud screaming noise came as a very ugly ghost manifested out of thin air.

    *TAP*

    The challenger tapped again and the ghost disappeared along with that attack.

 Chapter 2058 Debut

    Chapter 2058 Debut

    A lot of freshmen were stunned.

    Because they weren''t able to discern that a ghost was even there. They didn''t sense any form of energy fluctuations. They couldn''t sense the energy of death and dark element from the challenger.

    Of course, the ck cloak could have been a giveaway. At least, it made sense to them now.

    They all felt chills run down their spine. The challenger is a necromancer. Most of the time, necromancers are easy to spot and it is easier to anticipate their attacks. Because more often than not, all of their attackse from their undead. They have to send amand to the undead which in turn will attack.

    That is also one of the major drawbacks of the necromancer and this prompts them to work from behind the scenes.

    However, out in the open, this necromancer defeated people and he used the same move again and again. Until someone destroyed the movepletely, they weren''t able to even find it.

    The cloaked guy, or Tamas looked at Pearl and felt impressed. This is one of the new tricks he learned while he was trying to break through. He wanted to take this chance and test the limits of it

    "Let''s see."

    He muttered and raised the stick he held. Dark energy circted through it and the whole stage glowed with a ck gloomy light.

    *BOOM*

    Pearl shot out her attack. The water morphed into a huge dragon that tried to devour Tamas.

    However, several ghosts appeared out of thin air and started hitting the dragon from all the sides. Whenever a ghost hit the dragon, it However, several ghosts appeared out of thin air and started hitting the dragon from all the sides. Whenever a ghost hit the dragon, it disappeared, but it took a part of the dragon''s energy with it as well.

    By the time the dragon reaches Tamas, it is nothing more than an empty shell.

    *SLAP*

    He pped the dragon to the side with his palm and it disappeared into a spray of water.

    The next second Pearl made her move once more, this time instead of onerge water dragon, several small dragons shot out as they tried to attack Tamas from all sides.

    Tamas swirled his staff and the number of ghosts increased. The dragons and the ghosts shed creating a majestic sight to the spectators. The contrasting glow of ck and blue made it much more eye-catching.

    They didn''t expect such a disy when the challenging matches are still between freshmen level people.

    After a couple of minutes, Pearl smirked and snapped her fingers.

    The dragons halted in their tracks and all of them glowed at the same time. Blue light shot out of them and the light connected these dragons, creating nodes.

    And in the center of these glowing nodes stood Tamas and he could feel the energy building up under his feet.

    He immediately mmed the tip of the staff into the ground sending in a huge amount of dark energy.

    *BOOM*

    A huge explosion of water elemental energy urred right beneath Tamas'' feet. When the water cleared up, Tamas was still there levitating. There is arge crater underneath his feet.

    Pearl frowned, however looking at Tamas'' ragged state, she still felt a bit confident.

    "You managed block it in thest second. Still, your luck ends now. You better forfeit if you don''t want to that humiliation."

    "Hehe."

    Tamas just chuckled.

    "What? Did your ghosts eat your brain away? They cannot block my attacks. Your ghosts are useless. Too arrogant of you to challenge me such a part trick, when that is all you got."

    "Don''t you think you are jumping into conclusions, way too early? No wonder you are sitting here as a spectator."

    Tamas spoke in the same low tone. His cloak started fluttering with the non-existent wind as he looked her dead in the eyes.

    At that moment, Pearl felt like she has seen his eyes. For a brief moment, she felt like her soul left her body.

    The next thing she knew, Dark energy overflowed out of Tamas as it physically manifested from out of his body.The dark streaks seemed like ravines in space as several undead starteding out. Ghosts, specters, physical undead. Pearl''s heart beat wildly as she threw her attacks in her all directions. Tamas disappeared from her vision along with the rest of the spectators, Deans, and everything else in the academy grounds.

    She was standing in arge wide word of darkness with only different kinds of undead swarming towards her, trying to eat her soul away.

    "GET AWAY"

    She screamed as she attacked in a frenzy.

    However, the spectators could clearly see what Pearl was doing. She is throwing her attacks in all directions, except for where the actual undead are. The undead are attacking her and she is not even defending herself, even a bit.

    They looked at Tamas who is controlling the undead.

    His body is glowing with death energy and they could see him panting. The move is definitely taking some toll on him. Pearl is currently in an illusion created by a couple of specters Tamas controlled. In that illusion, she felt like she was stuck in a closed space with this darkness and the undead that were way more than they actually were.

    So, she is attacking this non-existent undead and looks like an idiot with bad aim and fighting instincts to everyone who sees her.

    While the remaining undead started chipping her away, but by bit. They saw as the undead creatures came and hit her as they pleased and she couldn''t do jack shit about it.

    Five minutester, the referee decided to stop the fight. Before he could step forward, Tamas decided to finish it.

    Pearl suddenly saw the darkness disappearing from her vision, she also finally realized the damage she had taken until now. Before she coulde to her sensespletely, she saw an undeade face-to-face to her and p her.

    *PAK*

    Contrasting the silence, the p''s crisp and loud noise prated the air. Pearl fell on the ground as death energy entered her skin through the p. ck patterns appeared on her beautiful face. She fell to the ground, unable to move, her body paralyzed.

    The referee rushed to get her and injected his own energy.

    He is an instructor, which means is already in the Divine ne Consummate stage. He looked at Tamas angrily. The injection of death energy through that p has been very precise and potent. It is an easy shortcut to the brain and she could have died easily if hended a much more lethal hit.

    Tamas didn''t react to it.

    He just sat down and recovered. It is his right as a challenger to recover now that the gatekeepers are taken down. After a few minutes, Vidyuth stepped forward.

    They didn''t speak or interact. The fight began. The eerie undead attacks and the shy lighting presented a great battle as they collided. Unfortunately, it ended in a tie to many people''s disappointment.

    Tamas was about to get off the stage when one of the Deans asked.

    "Kid, what is your name? Which Academy do you belong to?"

    He asked in confusion. After all, if there is someone out there who can beat Pearl up like that and tie with Vidyuth, then it should have been impossible for them to not know. That kid would have entered the Freshmen tournament and he would have done very well.

    "Name is Tamas, as for the Academy¡­ I don''t belong to any Academy and I am not interested in joining one as well."

    Everyone was stumped. This is the most unexpected answer for them. No belonging to any Academy¡­ A person who entered the Academy realm doesn''t belong to any academy but still could kick the asses of people that are categorized as geniuses.

    They felt something was off about him.

    Tamas went back to his seat and closed his. Just when the Dean was about to ask more questions, a Lady wearingplete red stood up. She had very thick makeup to the point it looked like she was wearing a costume for some weird y.

    It is impossible to recognize her facial features unless they use their spiritual sense. However, when the Deans casually spread it, they realized they could not prate it, which meant they would have to force themselves into it and it wouldn''t look good.

    They are confused about how just makeup could obstruct spiritual senses.

    It is Jw, she took the stage and pointed at one of the rankers. Three gatekeepers from that Academy came and a simr situation ensued.

    The Deans and seniors sensed something off. They asked for her name and affiliation. She gave her name and told her she had no affiliation with any academy.

    They understood that their suspicions might be correct and theypletely believed in those suspicions when Kiran stood up and did the exact same thing. Sia and Gyan repeated the process after that.

    The Deans felt exhausted.

    They already had enough on their tes with the existingpetition between the freshmen. But the actions of these people who just came out of nowhere and imed to not belong to any Academy are giving them a new headache.

 Chapter 2059 Stone

    Chapter 2059 Stone

    Ling Tian looked at Sam with a defeated expression.

    He knew something like this would happen, when Sam asked him about the details. Because Sam never wasted any information that was eagerly gained. However, what he didn''t expect is that this is not the end.

    In fact, the main course is yet toe.

    By now, the Deans gestured for their elders who went ahead and gave some instructions to the seniors. They are all trying to get any information they can about this mysterious group of people. They are all following the same pattern.

    They did the same thing.

    The only difference is they have different powers. What they did is a shy and eye-catching thing. If only one or two did it, they would have brushed it off as some genius showing off their own strength against the freshmen geniuses of the Academies.

    Mostly for bragging rights.

    However, there are five people and there could be an organization at y here.

    They already have the ming skulls to deal with. Even though for the past couple of weeks the activities reduced a bit, they are still going on at a smaller scale. Now, if another groupes up¡­.

    They have to suspect that there is some much bigger y going on in the Academy realm and prepare for any possible bad situation.

    While the Deans and the rest are in their own thoughts, the finale came.

    Stone stood up from the group and appeared on the stage. He pointed at Bronte. The one who actually got challenged the most in this ceremony. Bronte wasn''t surprised. In fact, he is more surprised by the fact that he wasn''t challenged even more.

    Some people have the balls to challenge the higher rankers, even though they have a higher probability of losing.

    The Zeus Academy students in the spectators looked at each other. After some discussion among themselves, three people stood up. Bronte is surprised when he sees them. They are the people of the Noble League.

    It is unexpected to him.

    Christos looked at him and gestured to him. Bronte understood what he was trying to convey. Christos is telling him not to worry. This is also unexpected for him. In the Noble League, he was usually treated as ackey, a burden and he wasn''t valued or respected.

    The only reason he even got a chance to enter the special training program with Hub and Joker is because he was treated as an experiment. In Christos'' opinion, it doesn''t matter what happens to Bronte. If there is any improvement, then he could finally make use of Bronte. If there isn''t and even if there are any side effectspletely destroying the future prospects of Bronte, it is still the same.

    Christos will even feel that Bronte was finally useful. He would have been useful in finding out a real problem.

    That is Bronte''s significance in the noble league in a nutshell.

    However, with Bronte''s current achievements, his evaluation has significantly increased in Christos'' mind. Now, Bronte is someone deserving of the Noble League.

    The current freshmen are a pack of monsters. Any of the current rankers in the Olympian region that got a ce in the top ten of the freshman tournament would have been the rulers of an era in the Academic realm.

    However, now a bunch of theme together and they are aiming for each other''s throats.

    Even in that era, Bronte managed to lock in the tenth ce. He is now Christos'' focus. And he didn''t believe the whole creditpletely goes to Hub and Joker. After all, he sent two candidates, while the other one also got some significant improvement and didn''t fare that badly in the regional tournament, Bronte outdid himself by arge margin.

    That means Bronte had the talent all along, only Joker managed to bring it out. Now, Christos is going to improve the strength of the Olympian Noble League using him.

    This is what he thought and he wholeheartedly believed he could achieve it.

    So, he sent out three freshmen from the Noble league giving out his assurance to Bronte.

    Stone looked at the first gatekeeper before turning his gaze to the Dean of the Zeus Academy.

    At this moment, the Dean of Zeus Academy felt like his eyes were ying tricks on him. If not for the fact that he is sure of his cultivation level and mental state, he would have believed someone was ying an illusion on him.

    He even rubbed his eyes in disbelief as he started Stone.

    He remembered Stone like the back of his hand.

    The Miner-ve who came crawling to the Zeus Academy''s steps, the one who wept like a child to see his niece for one time. The one who was so insignificant in terms of talent of strength that it was even hard for him to bring out some empathy for him, that same person is standing in front of the rest.

    "Are you part of that group as well?"

    The first gatekeeper asked.

    Stone shook his head.

    "I don''t know them. However, I like what they are doing, so I decided to do the same."

    The Dean of Zeus Academy finally came to his senses and observed Stone. He was dazed because of the familiar face which shouldn''t have been in this ce. Now only he noticed the changes.

    Stone''s height increased a bit, and his body became leaner, but more muscr at the same time. His aura is refined unlike before and there is this otherworldly feeling from it. It almost felt like an aura that shouldn''t exist in this world. The feeling only increased when he noticed the energy emitted by Stone.

    It is the energy of a Divine ne Initiation cultivator. This created an explosion in his head.

    "H¡­ How?"

    He muttered. He is in confusion. In fact, confusion is an understatement. This is challenging his worldview.

    He knew more about Stone than most people think. His prideful brother handed over the case of dealing with Jade''s love to him. In fact, he fought for it. Because he knew his brother wouldn''t show any mercy to Stone.

    He guided Pearl and separated Jade and Stone.

    He knew about Stone''s constitution, cultivation level, the abnormalities he suffered from cultivating crudely. He is sure that even if the Zeus Academy utilized everything it had in him, he still wouldn''t have amounted to anything.

    That was his impression, he was sure that he wasn''t wrong.

    But the one in front of him is brimming with life and strength. There are no anomalies. At first sight, the body looked perfect. As if it was designed to fight.

    "What''s your name?"

    The first gatekeeper asked.

    "Stone."

    "What kind of fucking name is that? Did your parents hate you or something? Or are you a bastard child that was abandoned by everyone and put the first name that you can find."

    Stone didn''t react to the provocation. He just looked at the opponent weing him to start the fight.

    A pair of gauntlets appeared on the opponent''s hands and he lunged forward. Stone''s energy riled up, but it appeared veryposed to the people who are sensing it. It covered his body and they could see his muscles bing dense.

    The contraction in the muscle fibers is clearly shown by the movement of the muscles. Dean of the Zeus Academy just kept his focus on Stone, he didn''t even bother to check the opponent or the surroundings, his cultivation which is way too superior gave him a clear view of the energy around Stone''s body.

    He wanted to see how he was manipting that energy. He would very much like to check the insides, however even at his cultivation level, he can at most sense the elemental nature, which is pretty much doable by any skilled person. For the insides, he has to check it personally with a physical touch or needs to use a special ability to examine things.

    For now, he can only be satisfied with external examination and even that is shocking.

    He noticed that the energy umtion on the surface of Stone''s skin was rapid. Normally it is only a blink of an eye for any cultivator at that stage, but Stone''s appeared especially faster.

    *BOOM*

    The two fists collided.

    The opponent who thought that he could overpower the opponent suddenly felt shocked. In the instant the fist connected, he felt an unimaginable force pulling his energy away from the fist, as if that was not enough, Stone''s fist was like a cannonball hitting him at point-nk range.

    He could feel the muscles in his fist and the hand tearing apart and the bones going through a fracture. When he tried to gather his energy to cushion the blow, he figured out, that he wasn''t able to.

    The same force once again, dispersed his energy and pulled it away from the fist.

    Stone stood still as he looked at his own fist in a daze.

    He clearly felt the blow, he put a lot of energy into it, he didn''t feel as drained as he should feel, he experienced this before as well and he grinned in joy after confirming this in a real battle.

    *CLANG*

    Everyone heard the sound of a metal hitting the ground. Of course, little attention would have been attracted by it, if not for the fact the sound came from the table of Deans.

 Chapter 2060 Stones Prowess

    Chapter 2060 Stone''s Prowess

    Dean of the Zeus Academy looked at Stone in shock, while the rest of the spectators including the other Deans looked at him in shock.

    "Excuse me."

    Dean said aftering back to his senses as he sat back down. He didn''t offer any exnation and he didn''t want to. He looked at Sam who is also looking at him with a smile. He saw Stone leaving with Sam that day.

    He saw that they spoke something, however, he didn''t care. When Sam took Stone in, he thought he might have done that to spite the Zeus Academy, even though it didn''t make sense.

    In short, he didn''t care much for Stone and didn''t think much about what woulde out of the situation when Sam took him under his wing.

    However, now the same worthless and talentless guy is attacking one of the elites of his own academy and he showcased the abilities that he didn''t even think of.

    Right now, he saw that during the collision of fists, as soon as they made contact, the gatekeeper''s attack has dispersed mostly. He wasn''t able to hold the energy together to create the damage. However, the stone''s energy was not only concentrated and refined, it was also very precise.

    It created the perfect impact as if the bone and the muscles in his body were designed to throw a perfect punch and create perfect damage.

    He couldn''t put a finger on what made it the perfect punch. The motion of the fist? The movement of the muscles? The impact? The energy cirction? Or maybe everything isbined together. It is like the body morphed itself into delivering the perfect punch.

    As if that is not enough the final visual he had through his spiritual sense made him stand up in shock.

    The energy dispersed from the Gatekeeper''s fist was actually attracted into the pores of Stone, making him absorb part of it.

    So, Stone managed to recover almost half of the energy that he used to throw that punch. Basically, he is fighting and recovering at the same time. This is ridiculous.

    Sam chuckled at the Dean''s exaggerated reaction.

    He is enjoying it while his friends are watching this in awe. They knew Stone''s situation. They understood it clearly and they even saw it a few times. However, the Stone they saw right now, is not the stone they knew.

    While people in the know were lost in thoughts, the battle continued.

    Stone showed a remarkable improvement in skills. He didn''t use any weapon and only relied on his punches. His speed, agility, and strength, are in perfect sync and didn''t even seem like a skill, it is almost like his body cannot produce any bad moves.

    Sam looked at his own creation in absolute delight.

    He created weapons of mass destruction.

    He created machines that could basically give him unlimited wealth.

    He built things that could make the realms bow down.

    However, changing the fate of one cultivator who was doomed since birth, made him feel happy. The sense of pride he got was nothing like before.

    Exactly three minutester Stone made short work of his opponent. The second gatekeeper took the stage.

    Stone looked at Sam who tapped the table twice.

    Stone nodded and the energy circted rapidly within his body. Everyone could see that his body is changing a bit. His lean muscles seemed to have grown very slightly and he even looked a bit taller. He didn''t make a move forward and just waited for the other party toe forward.

    The second gatekeeper swung his spear at Stone.

    However, when the spear hit him, it didn''t pierce Stone. The gatekeeper felt as if he hit something made out of rubber. Stone''s body bent a little bit backward because of the force of the spear, but that is.

    Even the energy that burst out of the spear during the impact was channeled away from his body and even took that movement to his advantage and moved to the side.

    His movements are a bit slower than usual, but he is a lot more flexible and when the opponent is dancing with his spear, all Stone does is move around, making his body twist and turn in impossible angles. He just circled around the opponent in the range that was most beneficial to the opponent and as everyone watched he dropped to the floor and slid between the opponent''s legs with his face up.

    His legs moved from underneath. Soon, his whole body was up except for his shoulders, and his feet caught a hold of the opponent''s neck from behind in an impossible choke.

    *BAM*

    Stone pulled the opponent back by his neck and mmed the back of his head onto the stage. In that one single motion, he stood up and stomped on the head so hard it went through the stage and raised the legs of the opponent in an incline.

    Everyone could almost feel the pain of the guy.

    Bronte who got challenged is feeling a bit nervous now. He could see that Stone is¡­ Weird. The movements, the body''s sudden change, it almost seemed unnatural and weirdly and unbelievably natural at the same time.

    When the third gatekeeper stepped up, Sam tapped the table three times.

    The third one is a Fire user and a warrior-mage. This is one of the better opportunities to see what this third variation of Stone''s abilities could do.

    Stone closed his eyes for a couple of seconds and concentrated on his Divine energy.

    It circted rapidly within his highly enhanced circtorywork and the cores, his internal organs are also functioning at a higher pace. Then everyone noticed that the energy surrounding his body was glowing.

    Soon he looked like he was emitting lights out of his pore with that glowing energy. It is like the glowing needles havee out of his pores. His muscles became denser.

    His skin almost shrunk and everyone could almost see the outline of each fiber of his muscle.

    His skin reddened a bit.

    The opponent saw this transformation and gulped nervously. He didn''t even want to get close. mes roared and many ming spears were shot at Stone.

    Stone kicked the ground and lunged forward leaving a crater behind. He jumped and kicked a spear with the side of his foot and the spear exploded like a firecracker. It did nothing to him as he moved forward.

    Stone didn''t even bother dodging a single fire attack that came at him. He is fast enough to do it, but he didn''t. Instead, he chopped them with his palm or kicked them out of his path. They exploded like firecrackers while providing little resistance to him.

    The opponent was flustered and decided to shoot a continuous jet of mes.

    However, Stone opted for the same strategy. He swung his arm in a back-hand pping motion and the energy seemed to react to his wishes. A palm condensed out of the energy and it is ten times the size of an actual palm.

    It hit the jet which was diverted to the side.

    When another jet came, Stone jumped kicked through it, andnded his leg right on the opponent''s head.

    *CRACK*

    The audience could hear a crack. The skull split open and he started bleeding. The only saving grace is that he wasn''t killed instantly as the nearest healer jumped on the stage and saved his life. Stone flexed his muscles a bit and looked at Bronte.

    "I¡­" He was about to say something, however, he held it back and paused for a couple of minutes.

    "Not today, but we will meet each otherter."

    He stepped off the stage forfeiting the match. He was about to walk out of the ce before he turned to the Dean''s table.

    "Tell her, I came back reborn and I will being for her. And no one. Absolutely no one will be able to stop me."

    He walked out.

    The Dean of the Zeus Academy felt conflicted. He looked at the Elder and gestured for him to do some research on Stone as well.

    He needs some answers and a part of him told that Sam would have them all. However, he didn''t want to believe that Sam indeed does have those answers. After all, the change in Stone is something only gods can achieve.

    He doesn''t want to believe that Sam, a mortal that was being toyed around by the gods did something that aplished something that only a god can.

    While the dean was lost in his own thoughts, the rest of the ceremony went without any more hups. Sam''s goal of making his friends and Stone debut in this world has been achieved. Themotion is not too much and it wasn''t too small either.

    It is just enough for his ns to work smoothly.

    After the ceremony was concluded, Sam walked back to his dorm. He and his friends are going to meet upter. So, he needs to show everyone that he went back into his dorm and then sneak out.

 Chapter 2061 Warning

    Chapter 2061 Warning

    However, Ling Tian just decided to be a party pooper again. He stopped Sam in front of his dorm.

    "What have you done?" He asked in a distressed tone.

    "What do you mean? It is not that hard to understand is it?" Sam asked Ling Tian with a confused expression.

    "Not the ruckus in the ceremony. What did you do to Stone?"

    Sam nodded in realization.

    "Oh? That? It was just an experiment."

    "An experiment? You have rewritten the constitution of a person? And it was just an experiment?"

    "I never said it is a small experiment neither did I say it didn''t have marvelous implications. I just aid it was an experiment. A very great one and a very very sessful one."

    Sam said with a cheeky tone.

    "Come on, Sam. I never took you to be a person to enjoys talking in this childish way. You know I am here on serious business, so be serious."

    "Okay, alright. What do you want?"

    "How did you change the constitution of that man? How did you give him a new core? What is up with his soul size?"

    "So, I assume that you knew who Stone was and what his situation was?"

    "Of course, I knew it. Do you think you are the only one obsessed with information?"

    "That is good now. I cane to you when I need some more information."

    "How did you do it, Sam? Did you use any forbidden skill?"

    "I don''t know what you mean by forbidden and what ssifies a forbidden thing here, all I can say is I just did my research from scratch and tried to see if this would work and it did."

    Ling Tian sighed. He knew there was no point in arguing with Sam about this.

    "Sam, whatever you have done during this research, stop it right where it is. I don''t want you to progress any more than you already have."

    "Why is that?"

    "Because it is not natural to this world. You should not mess with the corews of the world. You are an anomaly in the world if you try to start changing the very nature of its things, you are going to piss off the world itself."

    "Are you talking in metaphor?" Sam asked in confusion. Even though he understood Ling Tian''s words, he could not visualize it. What does he mean by pissing off the world? What constitutes as changing the nature of things? Sam didn''t understand.

    It would be great if Ling Tian had a response that is not as vague.

    "Partially, you can think it is a metaphor, but the consequences would be immense. Stop that research."

    "Why? The very fact that I managed to create it means that it is possible in this nature. It was just not done before.

    If it is against thews of nature and its energy, then it shouldn''t have been possible."

    "Of course, what you said is true. However, there are somews that are not about the physical existence and running of this nature. I cannot exin it in a way that you can understand it.

    All I can say is, a person like you is not supposed to exist in this world. Your presence itself needs bending somews that I spoke about and whatever you do with this nature, is something that shouldn''t have been originally possible in this world. The only reason, you didn''t receive any bacsh because of this until now, is because whatever you made, whatever you have created until now, with or without you it would have been a feasible invention somewhere in the future.

    The nature epts it because a God is the one backing you.

    But once you create something that should never even exist in this world and you create it, then you are challenging it. I don''t know how nature will react, but I believe it wouldn''t be a great response."

    Sam went into a deep thought. What Ling Tian said made a bit of sense, however as Ling Tian himself mentioned, he is not exactly clear about this.

    It is a bit hard to understand.

    "Alright, I will keep that in mind. Since nothing happened until now, I guess it is not that serious yet and I am still in the safe zone.

    And don''t worry, I don''t have ns to research deep into the line at the moment. Because it is one of the things in my mind that''s better left unexplored."

    Sam walked past him to go back into his dorm.

    "But Sam, I must say. For just creating something like that¡­. You are the best there is."

    Ling Tian said with a smile.

    "Thanks. By the way, can you just cover for me? I would like to meet with my friends and celebrate."

    Sam went into his dorm and then snuck out. He went to his private room at Nn''s restaurant and all of his friends were already waiting for him over there.

    "So, how do you guys like him?"

    Sam asked as soon as he entered. He didn''t even wait to sit in his chair. "Did you really just change that guy''s talent?" Philip asked. He is still in a pretty shocked state. From what he remembered about Stone''s condition, that guy is the worst person to be nurtured. He doesn''t have an ounce of talent and he doesn''t know when to give up.

    Even if he was nurtured, a lot of resources would go to waste and a lot of time will be wasted as well. Time might not be that valuable in this cultivated world where people lived for centuries. However, for a person like Sam and many other talents in the Dusk organization, time is one of the most valuable resources.

    Even with a lifespan that almost seemed infinite, it would break his heart if he saw them waste their time, particrly when he knew clearly what they could have aplished in that time span.

    "Yeah, that is exactly what I did," Sam answered.

    "Then doesn''t that mean, everyone in the Deste and our other organizations start getting their bodies enhanced like this?" Watt asked.

    He is asking this because, better than anyone else, he knew how many people Dusk has been fostering. Everyone is contributing based on their capabilities after they took help from Dusk, however, sometimes he felt that his friend Sam who owns the Dusk is at the short end of the deal here.

    Sam provides world-ss facilities for them. Many Astral ne cultivators that have better talent wouldn''t even get to use those facilities in their lifetime. In fact, even Sam and the trio didn''t experience some of their facilities when they were in Mortal ne, however, the new orphans or students they are nurturing are getting these facilities.

    However, no matter how good they are, a lot of them are barely able to reach the Consummate realm because of their talent caps. Some of them are barely able to reach Astral ne Initiation, even with the current level enhancements.

    If they could really enhance their talents, then at least they could get more returns.

    However, Watt is bound to be disappointed.

    "Not really, the research right now is still at the stage of infancy. You can consider Stone as a Prototype. His conditions are unique, he is way too stubborn even for such a weak soul, his will and endurance to pain are very high.

    Without a person who has surgical capabilities like me, it will be impossible to recreate this result at the moment.

    However, if the research is taken further, then maybe, we could mass produce the results. Even if they didn''t match this standard, they would still be pretty good.

    Still, continuing this research might not be an ideal situation for us at this moment."

    Sam then exined the warning he got from Ling Tian.

    They discussed some more, they are disappointed by the fact that they could not produce the same results, however, they are very satisfied by what Sam had achieved until now. Even they felt that among all the things Sam made happen, this sits a cut above the rest.

    And in actuality, Sam really didn''t think about increasing the talent level of the Dusk. In a way, he too believed that creating talent with artificial cores and transforming genes is not ideal. It will make the current cultivation level obsolete. People will stopprehending what this nature has to offer and will fall into the research of these genes.

    He doesn''t want that. At least not now.

    Right now, he just wants to deal with gods and there is much more destructive and evil in his mind, which is trying to refrain himself from creating.

    He is wondering what would be the consequence of creating it? What could it bring to this world, how much would it anger the nature and the will of this world.

    Ever since Ling Tian mentioned it, he is a little tempted to find out. But when he imagined the destruction that could bring, he sighed.

    Maybe, it is better to not create it and he has to make sure his thoughts on this matter are protected at all costs.

    If someone like Sivan really tries to take over his mind¡­ There is a great possibility that the world as they knew it might cease to exist¡­.

 Chapter 2062 Expansion

    <h4>Chapter 2062 Expansion</h4>

    Sam shook these thoughts off his mind and just enjoyed the drink with his friends and teammates.

    After a couple of hours of relentless drinking, it was time to get serious again.

    "Now that the debut ispleted, we are going to move forward with our ns." Sam announced and everyone turned serious.

    "From now on, we are going to be two groups of people. The Academy student and the Intruders. The Academy students who are obviously the guys who are acting as the students of the Academy, you will be attracting the attention of the special squads formed for undertaking the missions.

    As you might have already seen there are two types of missions. One is the Academy missions, these are missions avable within the Academies, these are obviously the ones that are assigned by the academy professors, Deans, seniors and other students and they are limited to the people within the Academy.

    If you want to perform a mission, you cannot involve people outside the academy in it. Some squads will be formed within the Academy for some special missions with the special requirements. Let''s call them the Academy squads.

    In the same way, there are missions assigned for the whole of Academy realm, these are special missions open to everyone present in the Academy realm, both students, citizens and the visitors. In both cases the rewards forpleting the missions are the Academy realm''s Coins.

    The Realm level missions often have much tougher conditions and the squads usually consist of people from multiple academies.

    There are already many squads in ce.

    So, the Academy students will work extra hard inpleting the Academy specific missions within their Academies. As many as possible, as fast as possible. Finish them even if they have increased difficulty.

    Use the resources of the Dusk.

    Also, you guys are given special ess in the Hub, we are gathering information from many people every day and the database is fully open to you all. Use any information you want to finish the mission with flying colors.

    This will attract the top notch squads.

    And this will also be the way for your to make a name for yourself and get attracted by the top-notch squads that usuallyplete the Realm level missions.

    No two people should join the same squad. Spread out as much as you can and infiltrate the biggest squad you can actually find.

    Be as proactive as possible and earn as much as you can.

    Now, let''s go with the intruders.

    You will be handling three different tasks and all of them are longwinded and are useful for us in long term.

    First one ispeting for the Realm level missions. The specialty of these missions is multiple squads and multiple people can ept the same mission at the same time. Peoplepete for them all the time.

    You will bepeting for all the missions that can be cleared by Divine ne Initiation, Initial level cultivators.

    You are going to finish all of them, except for the missions that our Academy students group arepeting for. You are going topete with them, you will just create enough hindrance for them to highlight their skills.

    You are going to lose with just enough to not lose your reputation as troublemakers, but also help them elevate their reputation.

    That is your first task.

    The second one is that you will be handling the missions of the ming skull. From now on, the people who look for ming skull are going to increase and we will be dealing with more missions. Of course, this will be done in secret.

    The third and final task is creating trouble. Every once in a while you are going to challenge the students of the academies to duels and you will beat them to death.

    You will inflict enough trauma on them to the point that they will have a hard time recovering from it. They should in a state where they seem like they could get back on their feet, however they should never be able to.

    The Academies should hold the hope, but in actuality it shouldn''t even exist.

    You can use the information from the Hub to understand your opponents and handle it.

    Let''s start with the Olympian region first.

    For both the grounds, there is just one warning.

    I don''t care if the missions fail, I don''t care if your identities are revealed in some exceptional situations, I want all of you to stay alive. If you have to ask for my help to stay alive which will inevitably reveal our rtionship, do so.

    Do not hesitate.

    Even if I have prematurely reveal the fact that I created hub, I wouldn''t mind. I will do it in a heartbeat if it means, that you are all going to stay alive.

    And it is not a request. It is an order that you must obey.

    Do you understand?"

    Everyone stayed silent. Sam knew that they are way too loyal. It could because of Sam''s treatment or because they liked Sam and his ambitions too much, but a lot of them will die for his sake. Paras will do so in a blink because Sam helped him with revenge.

    Vidyuth will do so, because Sam granted him freedom.

    Night Ghost will do the same for obvious reasons.

    Five elemental king¡­ Saber Monarch¡­ By now they all value Sam way too much and they will do anything to help him.

    However, Sam felt that revealing their rtionship is insignificantpared to keep them alive. That is why he is so insistent about it.

    After exining a few more details, Sam turned to Night Ghost and asked.

    "I am guessing you finished the tasks that I assigned to you."

    Night Ghost nodded with a smile.

    When Sam and the rest went to the finals, he gave an important task for Night Ghost. As mentioned before, the Academy realm and the Academies havepetition as their foundations. Every aspect of it isced with creation ofpetition.

    There are many suchpetitions that are going to be held and the freshmenpetition is just the beginning of it.

    After the freshmenpetition is over, there will be new set ofpetitions in ce and one type of thosepetitions is the appearance of Pocket dimensions.

    The gods anonymously open some pocket dimensions throughout the year and each pocket dimension will have a set of tasks to be cleared or some conditions to be met and each of these pocket dimensions will have some rewards in ce.

    The reward could be a special item, technique, a blessing, a beast, it could be anything. Based on the conditions of the pocket dimensions, the Academies will select a few people and send them in.

    Once the pocket dimension is cleared usually one of three things will happen. First, it will close and will never appear again. Second, it will be open, however, it will be useless it would just be an empty ce with no particr benefits and it will still carry the conditions. For example, if the pocket dimension can only be entered by the Grade 1 students and it happened to be of the second type, even after it was cleared, only the Grade 1 students could enter it.

    Finally, the third type, it will be some sort of training ground. The Pseudo hell that the Olympian Realm people have in their control is one such Pocket dimensions.

    Once it is cleared, it will still remain open with some special environment within and the people can train within.

    But all three types of pocket dimensions have one thing inmon, once in a while a God can choose to renew this pocket dimension.

    Meaning, they can reopen the cleared and closed dimension, or they can revitalize and recreate the obsolete dimension that seemingly had no use until them, or they can upgrade the dimensions that are now being used as the training grounds.

    Pocket dimensions are one of the important aspects of the Academy realm, to the point that they will never be questioned, no matter what. No matter what kind of weird phenomenon happened inside, the Academy can only investigate it to a certain extent.

    They won''t go too far in fear that they will anger the gods that created these dimensions.

    Sam gave Night Ghost a list of tasks and a few things that involve these pocket dimensions. Since this Academy year has started, the Pocket dimensions are yet to open. Once they start opening, Sam will execute his ns.

    They are going to y an important role in dealing with the Olympian Academies.

    After discussing a few things with Night Ghost, their meeting was concluded. Everyone went on their own ways.

    The next morning, a few of Sam''s ns that don''t involve his friends were executed. First and foremost of them is the construction of Hub Branches in other realms.

    This news hit like lightning all of a sudden. The Olympian Academies didn''t like it. In a way, they are all a bit wary of the Hub since it has way too many things that the desire, however they are benefiting from it and didn''t do anything to it, while they still tried to gain information. If more people and regions are involved, things won''t go too well for their ns in the future.

 Chapter 2063 Christosâ€™ Request

    <h4>Chapter 2063 Christos'' Request</h4>

    The construction of the Hub might be bad news for the Olympian realm.

    However, the rest of the regions weed them with open arms. They offered upnds and even wanted to be part investors in it so that they could get a piece of this giant pie. Of course, Sam refused it.

    The Architects and artisans required for the basic construction of the structures arrived. Up on Sam''s request they all wore disguises. No one was able to contact with anyone from the Academies. This time the hubs were constructed a lot fasterpared to the first one.

    The simultaneous operations ran at a very high speed with improved efficiency.

    While that news was hot, of course there are people in other regions that are not really all that interested in hub. They are very doubtful about it since they didn''t actually see the effects of it.

    At that moment, a video leaked.

    The recording of Bronte''s training. The first part of the video showed the tests Bronte took before his special training had began, then it showed some of his training procedures. Finally, there is a sequence of clips that showed his progress on the tests at various stages of the training.

    Thest clip showed how much stronger and faster he had be by the end of the training.

    No one knows where it originated from, but it spread like wildfire.

    Christos almost lost it when the video finally came to him. He immediately ran to the hub and contacted Joker.

    "What the hell is happening? Why are the intricate details of Bronte''s training out in the open? I thought you didn''t want to poprize these special trainings." Christos asked as soon as he saw Joker''s projection.

    "Of course, I didn''t want to poprize it. In fact, I was about to ask you, why the news and the recordings are out. Except for me and the people from your group, nobody knows about this.

    And I am sure that I made it clear, that thest thing I wanted is the publicity. I am popr enough. I didn''t want these special sses in the first ce.

    So, the only possible leak is from your side.

    My best guess is that someone got jealous of Bronte and they leaked this. They wanted to undermine his efforts and his ranking. They just want to make him seem like a loser. That is all there is to it. However, I highly doubt that they will get the desired effect."

    Christos fell into silence for a few minutes.

    He knew that whatever Joker said right now made sense.

    There is indeed no reason or Joker to put out the news of this special training. After all, Christos had to take a lot out of his own pocket to convince Joker and even that was not because of the money, rather it was because of his insistence that Joker barely and reluctantly agreed to this arrangement.

    "What do you mean that this doesn''t have the desired effect? Bronte will be undermined wouldn''t he?"

    "Why would he be? If he disagreed that he didn''t take any special training and this is all false, then he would be undermined.

    The truth is in to see for everyone, so only if he resists there will be a problem. People will think that he was cheating and that was why he was hiding theplete truth.

    However, if he justes out and agrees and he even tells everyone how much harder it was to train, then he will even gain some poprity. Since this matter is also rted to the Noble league, you can piggy back on it and gain some prestige.

    You can tell everyone how difficult it was for you to convince me, but you did it anyway, because you cared enough for your juniors.

    Tell them how much it cost you for it and how much effort you guys have to put it in. Also emphasize on the difficulty of the training.

    The video just revealed some scraps, you can ask Bronte to share the whole video. Poprize it and blow out of proportions. I am sure that training is way brutal that people can actually imagine. So, they wille to respect you and the League.

    If you can find the support of some instructor, make theme out and vouch for it.

    Tell everyone that it was the instructor''s idea to make this special program. I am sure that will suffice and will not tarnish your reputation.

    And if I am lucky, I wouldn''t have to train anyone else."

    Christos became excited inside, but he didn''t show it on his face. Indeed, whatever Joker said will work like a charm. The only reason he was flustered in the first ce is because Joker was adamant about not revealing the details.

    He knew that this might bite him in the ass.

    He didn''t exactly know how, but he already saw people judging Bronte''s current ranking, he knew how tough Bronte''s training was, so he knew the ranking is well deserved. The only thing is the training is way too unique and it is way too good.

    The teachers and instructors wouldn''t be able to focus that much on that one student and create such a n.

    Now that Joker himself told him to reveal it, he will happily oblige.

    "Thank you sir. But what do you mean by not teaching anyone else? We already are partners in this. You need to teach the rest of the kids from Noble League.

    Including the Grade 2 people.

    Soon the Pocket dimensions will start opening, so we need your help all the more. For the nexting months, I need you to train every Grade 1 and Grade 2 student in the Noble League."

    Joker of course refused.

    He didn''t want to spend so much time on this. Christos on the other hand already expected this refusal, so he threw in a line that he was already prepared to throw.

    "You can even increase the price if you want. I understand that a lot of resources will cost you to maintain the Hub and since you are expanding, you will need even more resources. Everyone from the Noble league has vast influence.

    At least their families do.

    So, they would be able to pay a lot. You can name the price."

    Sam who is controlling the Joker''s projection from far away smiled at this. He was waiting for this.

    "Are you sure you can promise that? You wouldn''t be able to afford the price. Even those noble families will be in a punch once you actually calcte the price of this special training."

    Christos was a bit skeptical.

    Joker waved his hand and brought a screen forward. On the screen he started exining the training costs, one by one. Long story short, with increase in cultivation level the training resources wouldn''t just casually add up, instead they multiply andpound.

    Joker even went into a detailed exnation of each expense, just to showcase that he is not even going to make any profit off of it.

    "See, Christos. I don''t really care much for the expenses or these resources. I could use more resources and I am going to use them to help other kids learn, so even if I take it out of my pocket and teach these students, it wouldn''t be a problem.

    However, the problem is, as much as I like to teach people, it doesn''t mean I will do it for free. That is the bane of all learning.

    Once something can be learned for free, its value will be gone and soon the students will be in over their heads.

    They will not respect the time I am spending on them and I will be disappointed, I had to learn this the hard way."

    Christos listened to what Joker has to say.

    He is in deep thought. Whatever Joker said is once again the truth. If the expenses are really that high, then even the students of noble league are going to suffer.

    But when he heard what Joker said, he felt like he could draw something from it.

    He put up a conflicted expression and asked.

    "Sir, what you said is right. It does indeed cost a lot and even the students of Noble league might not be able to afford it moving forward. After all, it is not exactly a small amount and even the leaders of the family wouldn''t spend that much just on the prospects of their kids, hoping that they could gain the equivalent in return.

    However, I wholeheartedly believe that your training is worth it."

    Then he paused and suddenly bowed deeply.

    "Sir, I request you to find it in your heart to not just teach them, but teach them free of cost.

    I know that my request is shameless and I have no grounds for asking something like that from you, but I am going to ask it anyway.

    You might have been disappointed by this in the past, but I assure you that the kids from the Noble league will not do the same to you.

    You will see a set of diligent students trying their best to absorb what you are going to teach us. Please consider my request."

 Chapter 2064 Christosâ€™ Ambition

    <h4>Chapter 2064 Christos'' Ambition</h4>

    Joker''s projection had a serious expression, however Sam who was controlling the projection saw the scene through the eyes of the projection had an expression of amusement.

    He almost wanted tough out loud.

    Christos, the big and noble Christos that could care less about half of the instructors in the Zeus Academy, is bowing down. However, Sam is not stupid enough to believe that this guy really did this in good conscience.

    He is a selfish, arrogant, cunning and deceptive guy who will sell his own wife out if he could gain enough benefits, there is no way he will just bow down to Joker out of pure respect.

    In his words, he is just acting shameless. He just wanted to fleece Joker clean and gain as much as possible.

    The training ns joker showed him for the Grade 2 students in particr projected great results. Their cultivation speed and the speed of the breakthroughs will increase by at least ten folds. That means the breakthrough that should happen in ten years will happen within a year.

    That is also one of the reasons that it will cost so much.

    There is no way he can just let it go. He will fall on his knees and kiss joker''s toe if he can get that training for free. Once he gets all the noble league kids that training, he will be recognized for his contribution in making this happen.

    The achievements of the Noble league, the conquests, the rewards and the influence he can control once he graduates, he cannot help but feel thrilled just by the thoughts of it. He cannot let this opportnunity go.

    He raised his head and looked at Joker who still had that serious expression.

    Christos cursed inside his heart. How long does this old man need to make a decision.

    "Sir, I know it is hard to trust me just based on my words, however please name any condition you have and give us a chance to prove that we will take your lessons and teachings seriously."

    "Are you sure you can give thatmitment? I am sure it is not going to be an easy thing to do."

    "No problem, sir. Just name it."

    "Okay then, I need everyone who joins this program to sign a special soul contract. The contract terms will be like this¡­." He started exining the terms and Christos'' facial expressions changed with every passing word.

    Until now he acted like the great actor he is, but now he couldn''t keep his calm and once the conditions are all recited, Joker spoke thest condition.

    "The above conditions will all be null and void, if the students do two things. They need to pay a certain amount of Gold coins to me based on their level of cultivation and also they need to attend the lectures without missing a single one.

    At least, if they want to miss, they need to have proper reason, like the realmpetitions, or some expeditions, of course they will have some vacation days to take some rest now and then, but you get the point.

    They cannot miss out on many sessions and they need to bepliant to all the requirements if they fail to give me the coins that I want and the sessions that I conduct.

    If it is okay and they are ready to sign the contract, then we can proceed forward."

    Christos left the Hub in a daze.

    He didn''t even remember how he went back to his dorm. However, after a while he shook his head and called for a meeting with all the Noble league members. Including the Grade 3 and some of the Grade 4 members.

    He exined the situation with the Hub and what kind of terms Joker suggested.

    One of the grade 4 students asked.

    "Are you sure this guy is trustworthy? His conditions are not just offensive, they more brutal than the conditions offered to a surrendering countries in a war situation. This is crazy to say the least."

    "I am sure we can trust him senior. I do believe that he is only making such an outrageous demand because he wants to make sure that not a single student goes back on their word.

    He mentioned that he already experienced it first hand.

    And he did give me the basic intro into the training n, the equipment costs and material costs needed for it so that you could take a look and make a judgement after that."

    Christos showed some documents and videos to the rest of them.

    "Still, even if we can ignore the ridiculous conditions that he ced, since he we can guarantee that we will do everything in the list, the coins we need to pay him every week is still not small. We will have to be knee deep in the missions.

    Our squad should take the lion''s share in all the missions whether Academic missions or the Realm missions."

    Another Grade 4 senior spoke.

    Christos didn''t speak immediately, he stayed silent for a few seconds.

    "Secondary members, leave."

    He spoke, there was a silence in the room for a while before more than eighty percent of people in the room stood up and left. Only twenty percent are left and Christos took the central position as he addressed.

    "I think just from this gesture, you all understand that whatever I am going to say only considers the true elite of the Noble League. These minor families don''t need to know.

    As one of our seniors said, we will have to monopolize a huge portion of the missions in the Academy realm. It might have caused problem before, if we purely used our influence to do so.

    But now, I think we should go for it.

    We can all agree that we are the gods'' true favorites. We are the real descendants that came from the teachings of the gods. Many of our lineages are blessed with the grandchildren of the gods and the Academic realm is our learning ce.

    You all must have heard the stories, when the Olympian region was established, the first generation of students are purely from our families. The Academy Deans at the time who were born to Gods directly didn''t bother to take in the unworthy candidates even when they were facing a deficit in student numbers.

    However, theter deans became weak and epted the weak and unworthy just so that we canpete with the rest of the academies and attain some petty victories.

    See what happened now?

    The blood of peasants is reigning over us. They take our resources, our Academies and our gods'' blessings, all of which are ours by birthright and now they are towering over us. We need to reim it back and this is the time.

    We will use this training method to improve our strength. Not just ours but for the secondary league members as well.

    We will raise them to be our best knights and we will make use of them to take control of this ce back. We will not only monopolize the missions, we will do it openly and tantly, we will punish and suppress whoeverpetes with us.

    If they want to use the authorities of the Academy and realm, we will go to trial bybat. A specific set of people within our league that are extremely talented in that area will be trained to take these trials and we will destroy these trials.

    We will not try to hide this, we will publicize this. We will make this into a spectacr event and we will make it known that the Olympian realm is back in the control of its rightful heirs.

    I know it will take a lot out of us, but I also think this is our chance. We cannot let this go.

    I understand that at start, it will be hard to handle all the expenses by ourselves, however based on my calctions it is actually not impossible to earn the number of coins required for everyone in our league from the First grade students to the fourth grade students to join this program.

    I also have some special ns to earn coins from the other areas.

    I can also talk a deal with Joker so that we, the primary nobles from the league will have the ess to the data regarding the secondary nobles. We will gather, understand and discuss what route they should be developed into and how we can make most out of them.

    This is the best opportunity for us."

    His words moved a lot of seniors. The whole concept of Noble league, the core of it is based on the ego and elitism these kids were born into. They believe whatever Christos said wholeheartedly, the only problem is that they couldn''t voice it out like him.

    After some thoughts and back and forth, the majority of the group agreed and Christos'' idea passed.

    Sam looked at the whole fiasco from his room, lying on bed while munching on some snacks.

    This went on better than he thought.

 Chapter 2065 Stoneâ€™s Target

    <h4>Chapter 2065 Stone''s Target</h4>

    That day, the Noble league made an announcement and Christos as a representative of the Noble league was the one who made it.

    He gathered the first-grade students of the Zeus Academy and a few people from the other Olympian academies in the Zeus academy''s ground and made the announcement to get the maximum impact.

    He revealed the details of Bronte''s training and released the intricate training details. He also revealed that they signed an extremely expensive contract which he cannot reveal the details of, with the hub and Joker to even get a chance to train with this method.

    Just like Joker suggested, he used the influence of an instructor to add credibility.

    The instructor who is actually known for training some great fighters in the recent history came out and said that he did some research and even simted some of the training exercises and he said that it is the best training method that would suite Bronte.

    He openly admitted that even if he coborated with a bunch of professors within the Zeus Academy, it will be impossible to create the same effects.

    The credibility stuck. No one questioned about the training credibility after that and they became inclined to believe that whatever they said is true. Bronte''s reputation was cleared.

    However, the rumors about the training escted.

    They couldn''t even be called rumors anymore, because of they are talking openly about it. They were all wondering what kind of deal did Christos sign with Hub and Joker to get into this special training program.

    This also prompted many people in the Academies to want to be a part of this program.

    They wanted that special training and people started approaching Joker through hub asking about it. However, all they gained is a clean and cold rejection. Sam didn''t show any sign of offering them or opening up this training program.

    The students became a bit envious and anxious.

    They already experience some crushing defeat because of the current top ten holders. These people are dominant beyond belief and any one of them would have reigned over the realm at any point of time since the inception of the realm.

    However, they are all present in the realm at the same time.

    And these students are also part of this realm at the same goddamn time. They felt this suppression that stemmed from their inferiority.

    They couldn''t help but feel like they are being left behind and they will have to live in mediocrity, however hub brought up a solution for them.

    They saw a glimpse of it because of the overwhelming victory that Bronte obtained. He got a good ranking, his improvement is in as a day, so they have a chance.

    Only, if only they could get into the training program¡­.

    After the announcement was made, Christos and a lot of people from Noble league appeared at the Hub. They are here for signing of the contracts.

    Everyone of them signed a soul contract based on the conditions Sam or rather Joker put up and they are all now officially part of the Hub''s training program.

    The training will start from the very next day and this is thest free day they will have.

    After the contract signing is done, Sam moved the next n into action. He went to visit Stone who was cultivating diligently.

    "How are you feeling? Have you gotten used to your new body yet?"

    Sam asked.

    Stone fell on his knees with a smile and kowtowed.

    "Thank you for your generosity, now I am wielding a power that shouldn''t have been mine."

    "I told you, stop?this. I might be a narcissist, but not to this extent. You can keep the reverence within your mind and don''t need let it show.

    Anyway, I already set the stage for you. I want you to execute the n that I assigned to you. You are going to start it from today.

    Your first target is right now making their way to the hub. You must remember, make it grand, make it slow, make it ruthless. Take out your anger on them.

    By the time this is done, you should have no anger left against these people."

    "I don''t know if it is possible sir."

    "Trust me, it is more than possible. It is easier than you think."

    Stone didn''t answer and just bowed before he walked out. The band on his wrist projected a holographic screen out and it showed the details of the person that he is going to target today.

    These are the details of a first grade student of the Zeus Academy. The student is one of the lowest ranked in the academy. However, he has a nasty reputation from back home. A creepy guy whose sole purpose was growing his harem.

    Upon reading until this point, Stone didn''t bother to read any more personal information, he didn''t care about anything else and dove straight to the details about his strength, elemental control and other details regarding hisckeys, hidden weapons etc.

    One more thing he noticed is the details about his unruly behavior even in this Academic realm. And the reason behind that is he is the son of one of the ns that rules a realm. They believe in Olympian gods and they are just as unruly as their gods.

    On top of all that, he has an elder brother who is mid-ranked person in third grade students of the Zeus Academy.

    So, he has some backing.

    The details disappeared when he swiped the screen and now it showed a map with a pin of the target within the city.

    Stone ran at full speed and arrived at the location within no time. they are almost at the outskirts of the city, this guy was indeed moving to the Hub, two more minutes he could have gotten out of the city and went to the entrance of the Hub.

    There are many people at the entrance who were also about do the same.

    *BOOM*

    Stone jumped high into the air andnded right in front of the target.

    He left a crater beneath his feet.

    The target jumped back in a hurry and blocked the shockwave that came from Stone''snding. He looked at stone angrily.

    "Who the fuck are you? How dare you?"

    He yelled without holding back. There are two more people beside him. And they also showed their hostility openly, they got ready to fight.

    Even though Stone has been poprtely, a lot of people never actually saw him. The event that happened that night was a special event with limited entry. The target might have some status back home, but here is just a small fry and he couldn''t get in even if he wanted.

    Even his brother is utterly unqualified to get a pass.

    The target and hisckeys surrounded Stone. The target asked stone.

    "Who the fuck are you? Are you here to pick a fight with me? Speak up you bastard¡­"

    *PAK*

    The crisp pnded cleanly.

    As he yelled, Stone lunged forward and threw a p across his face.

    *BOOM*

    The target flew in the air and fell over like ragdoll on the street. His face skid on the gravel it painting a very gruesome picture. It was bad and humiliating. He sat up with difficulty. Not because he was injured, however, that p did make his head unstable.

    He felt a bit dizzy.

    His twockeys didn''t make a move. They stood rooted and stunned.

    Only when they saw Stone walk towards their target, did theye back to their senses and make their move.

    "You fucking bastard. Stop right there."

    One of them yelled, but both of them attacked. A sword and a punch flew towards Stone. However, Stone didn''t bother with them, with his perverted agility he dodged the attacks in unnatural angles as he made his way to the target.

    He moved slowly, he didn''t sprint or jump at the target. He isposed. He knew that it would take a few seconds for the target to get out of that daze.

    It doesn''t matter how strong someone''s cultivation level is and how strong their spiritual energy, once a strong and equally powerful pnds on the ears like that, it will shake their brain a bit and it will take some time to recover.

    He has been on receiving end of it, for quite a long time.

    Only when he was two feet away did the other party, the targete back to his senses and looked at Stone in horror.

    "W¡­ Who are y¡­?"

    *PAK*

    Stone pped the target once again, this time since the other party was already sitting on the ground, his head hit the ground faster and he skid much further away. Since he was in the middle of saying something, he tongue came out of his mouth and was dragged against the rough street.

    *ARGH*

    He tried to scream, but he couldn''t properly do it. his tongue was bleeding.

 Chapter 2066 Boiling Rumors

    Chapter 2066 Boiling Rumors

    Stone walked to the target.

    He has not intention of letting his target escape and he also has not intention of dealing with theckeys directly. At this moment, his goal is to inflict damage on the target and the target only.

    *PAK*

    He threw another p on his face.

    The target fell back on the floor as he looked at Stone in horror.

    "Who are you? Do you know who my brother is? Do you know who my father is?" He finally managed to speak up a bit and hurriedly threatened.

    However, Stone couldn''t give two fucks.

    "Why are you asking me who your brother and father are? Didn''t your mother tell you? Or even she doesn''t know who your father is?"

    Stone didn''t speak out an swear words, however the venomous intent in his words couldn''t be more apparent. The target became furious.

    "YOU¡­" *PAK*

    His words were cut short by a crisp p. However this time theckeys saw a very small and thin red colored object fly off of the spot Stone pped on.

    It is ayer of skin and with a p it flew off of the target''s face. It went and hit theckey who was standing not too far away.

    The cut was smooth and even the outline of that rectangryer was very precise and urate to the point it looked like it was cut by a machine.

    The target felt so shocked that he even forgot to scream. Air got trapped in his lungs and didn''t even let him cry out loud. He watched as Stone''s body morphed a bit. His muscles changed, they became denser and leaner and even his bones seemed to have changed their length.

    Particrly the bones in his palms. When he opened his palm, from the sideways it looked like a real de with the spiritual energying out of it.

    "Save me, you bastards. What are you looking at?"

    The target screamed at hisckeys who were too stunned to make a move. When they heard these words, they came back to their senses and started attacking.

    The next few seconds felt like a dream to everyone that was watching the whole scene.

    Stone looked like he was made of rubber, no matter where the attack came from, he dodged it easily and the worst part is he didn''t even move more than a couple of free from where he originally stood and he didn''t even stop attacking the target.

    *PAK*

    *PAK*

    *PAK*

    Each attack made by him took ayer of skin from the spot where the pnded. "ARGHH,,,"

    The target kept on screaming his lungs out. He couldn''t bear the pain. This is the worst type of torture he could imagine. He wanted to go down on his knees, beg and plead his torturer to leave him alone.

    Only problem is that Stone has not intention of even letting him raise his head up.

    He kept on pping and soon the cuts were deep enough for the blood to seep out a rapid rate. Everyone watched as the target crawled forward while leaving a thick trial of blood. His expensive clothes are ragged and torn apart.

    He is bloody with dozens of injuries. Some are so deep they could see the bone. The target barely held to his life.

    By now theckeys actually lost all the energy and fell to their knees exhausted. They didn''t understand how Stone managed to dodge all the attacks. He bent his spin in unnatural angles. One second his back was there and the next second it disappeared with a ridiculous twist.

    When they tried to attack his arms or legs while he was throwing the attacks, he is bending his whole body in a weird angle to let the attack through. He is like a weirdly made gooey puppet that couldnd a hit no matter what.

    For theseckeys, it felt like they were training their precision and failing excellently.

    However, when they saw the state of the target, they didn''t hesitate and ran. Both of them ran in different directions. One of them went and found the nearest city guards and the other went to find the brother of theckey.

    Stone saw them go and Sam even told him that something like will happen if he seeded in his attack. He wasn''t panicked in the least, in fact he waited for them to bring someone to stop this.

    In fact he thought they would have gone sooner.

    Theckey who went after the city guards seeded in bringing the guards the first. They surrounded Stone and yelled.

    "Stop. You are under arrest."

    Stone didn''t resist. He let himself be arrested and cooperated. By the time the City guards took Stone away for the juidicial proceedings, the brother of the target finally made an appearance. He couldn''t find his brother there though.

    The City guards took him away to give some treatment.

    The target''s brother went to check on his brother. Time passed and in a few hours, Stone is standing in for the trial. He only had one thing to say as Sam instructed.

    "I demand a trial bybat."

    That is all he has to say and the enforcer who was sitting to judge the trial and pass on the punishment didn''t even bother with the case anymore. The only they asked is if the target will be ready to actually fight against Stone.

    They had to wait for him to wake up before that could happen and Stone has stay in the prison cell until then. Apart from the restriction of the prison cell, he doesn''t even have restrains on his body.

    Sam who was observing the whole process from the dark smiled in satisfaction.

    "I better get going too."

    Sam knew things wouldn''t go bad for now, so he decided to proceed with the ns from his side as well.As of now, his team is already on the move, they are taking the missions already.

    Even the Noble League didn''t start hoarding the missions yet, but Sam''s team is already on the move. Sam entered the Gambler Academy mission hall. Unlike a lot of his friends, he has much more freedom in choosing these missions.

    Because he can finish the missions in other categories as well.

    His first focus is on the gathering missions. There are several resource gathering missions ced by seniors in auxiliary professional departments. They will give him few coins. They might not give out a lot, however, they are high in number.

    So, he can umte quite arge number of coins from them without much effort. Since he actually has enough man power to finish this off easily.

    The problem is, he cannot sign up for such arge number of missions at the same time and has to finish them one by one. When Sam looked at the list though, he couldn''t help but smirk a little.

    His luck is really good.

    There are a bunch of missions that he could sign up and finish that very instant, because he has the goods stored with him.

    So, the very first time Sam stepped in the mission hall, he finished ten resource gathering missions. Even the receptionist felt speechless.

    Sam memorized all the items that he needs to gather and got out. He knew where he could get most of these things. A lot of things could even be bought with money without much effort. So, he started hoarding and finishing.

    The very first day, he had an incredible recordpletely twenty-five missions.

    After the resource gathering missions are done, Sam got an idea, so he contacted Nn to execute it immediately. Meanwhile, he focused on other types of missions. Some are hunting missions, some missions are for assistance in auxiliary professions.

    Some missions are about escort services, some are messenger missions.

    Sam didn''t discriminate. As long as he could finish it fast, he was interested in and started doing missions. Even though the umtion of coins didn''t impact his financial situation, a lot of missions were taken away by him from the others.

    The moves are set in motion and the whole realm will shake within the next two weeks. If only the hubs in other areas are finished construction a bit faster, the impact would be double.

    While Sam and his friends are dealing with the missions, Stone''s trial was finished. He beat the crap out of the brother who took up the mantle as the champion for the target. Even though it was a close fight to a certain extent, he still won and with his enhanced healing, he was already looking normal by the time he came out of the arena.

    By that night the whole Olympian region is boiling with a few rumors.

    The hottest one is still about the special training program of the Hub. For some reason, the news has spread that the Hub has agreed to sign a special contract with the Noble League.

    So, everyone is mad at the Hub for showing such discrimination.

 Chapter 2067 Fifteen Targets

    Chapter 2067 Fifteen Targets

    The rumor was obviously not received well by the Noble League members, but they stayed silent for now.

    The remaining rumors were not as hot as the first one, but they still made some waves. The second one is about Stone and his brutal attack on one of the students of Zeus Academy. He attacked that person deliberately and didn''t even defend himself during the trial.

    The reason why this rumor is so famous is that a few videos of Stone fighting during the ceremony and the fight he had with the first target were leaked.

    It clearly showed that he is a capable guy and he has a serious grudge against the Zeus Academy. The rumor about him choosing the trial bybat is also very popr.

    The third rumor is actually pretty mindpared to this and it is purely a spark that ignited some curiosity in the people of the City.

    It is the rumor about the speedy increase in the missionpletion. Not just the missions of individual academies, but even the Realm missions are beingpleted at an incredible rate.

    This is also one of the rumors that bothered the Noble League.

    However, they didn''t take any immediate action.

    Things went on like this for the next two weeks. The missionpletion rate was at an all-time high. Of course, this only applied to the missions exclusive to the Grade 1 students. Sam and his team are capable, but to take the Grade 2 exclusive missions they need to be at Grade 2 as well.

    That is the only reason the higher-grade missions werepletely left alone.

    After these two weeks, the Noble League held another meeting.

    "The situation doesn''t look well. Why are the rankers trying so hard to deal with these missions? They are finishing at least one mission with a high difficulty every day and in the passing they are finishing other missions.

    The gathering of resources is beingpleted at a never-before-seen pace. The auxiliary professionals are having the time of their lives. We actually started a bitte. These rankers and the few people who admire these rankers are now hoarding all the missions. Thepetition is stronger than ever before."

    One of the Grade 4 seniors immediately spoke up.

    "Luckily, it is currently limited only to the first grade and as you mentioned, it was the rankers that are going crazy. That guy named White who was the unofficial second among the freshmen didn''t even take a look at the mission board for a long time.

    After all, many geniuses won''t bother with missions unless, and of course they are trying to advance to the next grade.

    But he jumped in when he noticed every one of his peers was doing them.

    Our first graders already had to dig into their savings to pay the weekly fee in the Hub. This is going to be a tough situation."

    Another senior spoke.

    "The question is, why did they start doing this in the first ce? That too, how are they finishing the missions so quickly? Even though a lot of first-grade missions happen in low-grade Divine realms where Astral ne cultivators are the majority, they still need to travel, investigate, and n to perform all these missions.

    How are they doing it so fast?"

    They are all throwing in questions, but barely anyone has any answers.

    After some unproductive questioning, Christos finally spoke up.

    "All these questions are irrelevant to us. The only doubt we need to be aware of is this. Our league members are striving for missions because we need to make weekly payments to the Hub.

    These people are doing the same and from the timeline even though they are the ones that started it first, they started it only after our deals with Hub have been signed.

    It is almost on the same day.

    This is way too much of a coincidence.

    So, we need to find out if the Hub has the same kind of deal with these people."

    Hearing Christos'' doubt, everyone''s expressions changed.

    "How can Joker do that? he already had a deal with us."

    One of the first graders spoke up. Christos red at him and continued.

    "He might have signed the deal with us, but that deal doesn''t stop him or restrict him from teaching to others. He might not have publicized this whole thing, but the rumors spread like wildfire. These exceptional kids might have convinced the Joker in the same way as us. We still don''t know if it happened, but it is better for us to get that information.

    However, I think it shouldn''t matter to us what their goals are. As long as we deal with them, things will be fine."

    "What do you suggest?"

    "I have been having some meetings with Pearl about dealing with Sam, since we have amon goal against him.

    I have been trying to convince her to deal with everyone in the top ranks. Except for Bronte, none of them have anything to do with the Noble league. If we want to rece them with our own freshmen, it is better if they disappear entirely.

    However, Pearl has her own ambitions. Particrly, after that bitter defeat in Sam''s hands, she wants to get back some glory. She could have just joined the Noble League and have been a good member, but as you all know, her ambitions are way too high, maybe because of her father.

    I will try to give her a bit more push."

    As they are discussing, someone''smunication token gave out an alert. It is a third-grader and he picked up the call with a frown. It was from his brother.

    "ARGHH¡­. Brot¡­. Sav¡­."

    A painful scream followed my two incoherent noises that sounded like they were words, that was all they could hear before the call was cut off.

    The senior stood up from his chair in a hurry and yelled.

    "I need to go."

    He activated some sort of tracking system that showed him his brother''s position. He ran at full speed and reached that spot within a couple of minutes.

    The sight stunned him.

    In the middle of the street, a young man is standing with his clothes tattered and his whole body covered in cuts. Blood dripped out from all the cuts and the surrounding area was stained with blood.

    His face is also covered with blood and dirt. He is sweating bullets. Tears and snot ran down his face, while he panted heavily. He held a staff in his hands as he moved around in that small patch.

    However, every step of his is wobbly and unstable.

    He let out a muffled groan now and then as another young man moved like a sh and hit him from different directions. The hits are small, and precise and were only aimed to create very little damage.

    It is none other than Stone.

    He looked like a grasshopper with his slightly green attire and his constant jumping around. Hended three hits every second. If not for the fact that he is showing himself in between each hit, nobody would have even seen him with their naked eyes.

    They would have to use their spiritual senses.

    Stone is doing a number on this Zeus Academy guy. This has been happening for the past couple of weeks. Every day, he picked a target and destroyed them. Then he got caught, asked for a trial bybat beat the crap out of a different person, and bounced.

    He has been a headache for the Zeus academy for the past few days and they cannot do much about it. No matter who they sent after him, he always knew they wereing and he always escaped.

    Even today, as soon as the Senior came, Stone stopped attacking. He stood beside the target while holding the other party by the hair. He had a grin on his face as he looked at the senior with a taunting expression.

    "You must be that fucking stone. The one who is making a fuss for no goddamn reason."

    The senior asked as he stepped forward. He wanted to attack, but he could sense the city guards are already there. He cannot do much even if he tries to.

    "You are awfully sure. Do you really think I don''t have any reason?"

    "You haven''t told one. So, I guess mine is a reasonable assumption."

    "Your assumption is wrong. If you want to ask a reason, go and ask your academy''s pearl or better, go ask your Dean. They will tell you."

    Stone smirked as he let the city guards arrest him.

    "I will be seeing you soon." The senior replied.

    "I hope, you are going toe to the trial. I would like to fight you."

    "No, there isn''t going to be a trial. I will deal with you myself. All the charges against you will be dropped soon. A bitter, you will die a horrible death. I will make sure of it."

    He took his brother and left.

    With this, it is fifteen targets. Fifteen people from the Zeus Academy freshmen were hit, however, there is no proper reaction or retaliation from the Academy, and everyone is waiting for one.

 Chapter 2068 Pearls Plan

    Chapter 2068 Pearl''s n

    The senior went back to the meeting. He looked at Christos and said.

    "Make Pearl agree to this. As soon as we are done with this, we need to deal with these new worms that came out of nowhere. The ones that caused disruption in the ceremony. They are dealing with a bunch of students from the Olympian Academies.

    The Zeus academy in particr lost fifteen students. All freshmen. They might be of filthy blood, however, they are our gods'' believers and our future servants. We cannot let someone else destroy them. It is the same as eating from our te.

    Also, Stone said something about a reason that''s only known by Dean and Pearl. Find out what it is."

    It is apparent that this senior is way too influential within the group.

    Christos who always led the group didn''t refute and concluded the meeting after some more details.

    He directly went to a different meeting. A meeting with Pearl.

    Pearl is sitting alone in her yard. There are nockeys, no servants, no one. She was alone when Christos arrived.

    She was watching a video on her wristband. The video is aption of fights Stone had against the students of the Zeus Academy. Every day, a new fight is being added to thisption and she was watching them without missing a single one.

    Her eyes showed, shock, confusion, anxiety, all at the same time.

    "I guess, it is true that you must know the reason for this sudden attack on the Zeus Academy. Care to exin?"

    She looked at Christos and gestured him to take a seat before cutting the video off.

    "I don''t want to exin myself if it is not about the deal."

    "Well, it is better to give some info. After all, whoever this persistent insect is, he attacked the Noble League member. He is also rtive of a Primary member.

    We need more details and from what we learned, his arrival has something to do with you and the Dean. It is better to tell us the story so that we could be well prepared. After all, if it is a conflict between you two, then you should keep it between yourselves.

    The rest of the Academy shouldn''t be affected. Not Noble League at least."

    "I don''t have anything to say about it.

    If you want to talk about the issue at hand, then we can talk. Or you can take your leave."

    Christos sighed. The senior asked to get the information from Pearl. Of course, even if Pearl doesn''t reveal anything, he could find other methods. He didn''t want to wait on the current important topic.

    "About dealing with Sam and the rest of the rankers. You are still reluctant about dealing with them. I don''t understand why.

    Even if you want someckeys, you can pick from a very wide range of people. I can even give you a very heavily vetted list myself. There is no point in trying to get these guys on board with you.

    Not when they already knew that you nned such an borate scheme to screw with them.

    Do you think they will forgive you for it?"

    "The n I have in my mind might need your help Christos, but that doesn''t mean, I canpromise on such a big thing.

    I have my own ns regarding the rest of the rankers. I need them for a specific purpose and I cannot tell you what it is. However, it is true that they need to be alive."

    "Okay, don''t tell me about what this purpose is, but I am sure you can tell me what kind of people you want for that. I will arrange what you want. I will pick them up directly from the Noble league. In fact, you can even call in a coboration."

    "Why? So that you can just swallow everything after I carefully set everything up for you?"

    "If you are that doubtful, then we can operate with Soul Contracts.

    I don''t know what you are thinking of or why you need those people Pearl, but we have not interest in it. Our ambitions lie elsewhere."

    "Even if you can guarantee that, your people won''t be able to handle my requirements. They should be far stronger than your noble league people. These geniuses¡­ I don''t know where they came from, but they came at the right time.

    I need them for my own vision."

    Christos sighed.

    "Well, Bronte, one of the rankers is a member of Noble League. He is within top ten. So, I don''t think your standards are that hard to meet, are they?"

    Pearl suddenly thought of something and asked.

    "Speaking of Bronte, I wanted to ask. What is it with this special program? Is your Noble League really in a deal with Joker and the Hub?"

    Christos looked at her expression and started calcting in his mind, then he had a sudden thought.

    "Yes, we do have a deal and we are indeed training with the Joker at the Hub. It is an exclusive deal between the Noble league and the Hub."

    "Exclusive deal?"

    "Yes of course, you have seen many people try it, why do you think that they were unable to reach a deal with Hub? Why? Are you interested?

    You have a rightful ce at Noble League, if you want I can help you join the training program."

    "So, all of your freshmen are in this?" She asked again.

    Christos nodded and Pearl went into a deep thought. After some time, she sighed and spoke in a solemn tone.

    "If you really want, we can find a way for both of us to get what we want. However, I will not be joining the Noble league and I need some extra training slots within Hub."

    "That is a starting point, we can negotiate a bit¡­"

    Christos and Pearl discussed the terms of the deal and finally they found amon ground.

    "So, now will you tell me the n on how to deal with them?"

    Christos asked.

    "I am not going to tell you now. Not just you, I am not going to reveal it to anyone. In fact, I will be away for the next fifteen days. Tell your father to receive me, I will only talk to him about the n and you will only learn of it in thest minute.

    At that time, just prepare as many people as you can. I want everyone you can gather who are at the Grade one cultivation level¡­"

    She continued on to give more details.

    However, none of them are critical details that gave out the framework for the n. Sam who was listening in on the conversation from far way felt a bit odd. The way Pearl was acting so conscious made him curious.

    Why would she be so cautious all of a sudden?

    He didn''t know.

    However, he still decided to keep an eye on her and Christos. He needs to be careful and he will be.

    As he was about to leave the conversation was over, he noticed that Pearl was going to meet Jade. He became curious and stayed on listening.

    He saw the whole thing from the bird puppet''s eyes. Jade was dancing when Pearl arrived there.

    However, her dancing wasn''t sad like before. Instead, it is happy, brimming with joy and there are tears of joy streaming down her face. She presented an elegant picture with her graceful moves. He could feel that gently, warm and positive aura from just that video.

    "Stop."

    Pearl spat coldly. Jade looked at Pearl and her smiled widened.

    "Good to see you too, Sister. What made you find time for me in your busy schedule?"

    Her words had a hint of sarcasm in them.

    "I am guessing you already heard the news. From the past two weeks, that guy named Stone is wreaking havoc."

    "Yeah, I heard."

    "How did he get those powers? He was a pathetic ve a few days ago, how can he be so powerful all of a sudden? Where did he get the strength like that?"

    Pearl shot those questions one by one. In the past two weeks, she wanted to ask Jade these things, however, her uncle, the dean wanted to investigate the issue by himself.

    However, they couldn''t find any details. Stone had spatial transference scrolls that led him out of the city into the forest, whenever he finished a target and dealt with the trial, he went back and escaped.

    Nobody knows how he came back without knowing anything. Now, she lost patience after discussing with Christos. At first she thought Stone was throwing a temper tantrum, however by the way things are going it is a lot more than that.

    If the factions like Noble league gets involved, it will be a mess that they cannot control.

    "I don''t know."

    "You don''t know? He didn''t tell you anything about it before?"

    "No." Jade''s tone is making it apparent that she couldn''t care less about this.

 Chapter 2069 Info

    Chapter 2069 Info

    "Are you not curious how he got those powers? What if he had done something forbidden? Do you want to be implicated by it?" Pearl asked. Her tone is slowly bing angrier.

    It is apparent how frustrated she has be because of Jade''s behavior.

    "I don''t mind. If you and father mind that it might effect the family, you can just disown me."

    Jade spoke nonchntly.

    Pearl became angry and grabbed her sister by her arm.

    "Listen Jade, just because that guy became a bit stronger, that doesn''t mean things will change. Everything is the same as before. He is not worthy of you. I will not let you taunt father by trying to be with him.

    I will not let you bring father''s wrath up on you.

    I cannot let that happen." Her tone is angry for sure, but the anger is mostly out of concern. She knew what her father is capable of. Her uncle the Dean of the Zeus Academy is known as a fair but ruthless man when he was young, her father however is equally ruthless if not more and he was never fair.

    He always got what he wanted by hook or crook.

    Nothing in the world could stop him. His goal is to be the greatest warrior and ascend to be a god and he will do anything to make that happen.

    She was d that her father wasn''t interested in any forbidden techniques that involve eating out the hearts of ones children, because she believed that her father is capable of that.

    "You know what kind of person father is. He only has two goals, one is to be a god and not just a puny god at the bottom of the celestialdder. Since he was a kid he wanted nothing more than gaining respect from the gods he worshipped so much.

    The second thing is to create a family that is worthy of his reputation and pride. You are obviously talented, but you are wasting that talent away. You should be on the same level as me.

    I can seem myself breaking through to the Middle stage of Divine ne initiation in a few months, but you are nowhere near that. Since we came to this academy I have barely seen any progress in you.

    Just because our father is busy with some of his pursuits, that doesn''t mean we can just let loose. He wille back and concentrate on us once and if our progress is not up to par, you should know what happens.

    Our mother tried her best to give us the status of his offspring, you should know how many bastard children he had and how they are eyeing our family and father''s things. We need to be careful or anything that is valuable to us will be taken away from us."

    Pearl said without even taking a breath. Her voice is full of frustration and exhaustion. She wanted none of this, but she cannot afford to ignore the obvious responsibilities ced on her.

    Jade brushed her sister''s hand off and said.

    "Are you done? Why are you so annoying all of a sudden?

    Do you think I don''t know what you guys did to Stone? You tortured him, plotted against him and sabotaged his every attempt to rid himself of that ve status. You never let him seed. But he came looking for me.

    The father who only sees me as a tool and a sister who treats me like I am less than her, the rtives who eye me like vultures and the noble young masters who know little more than the arts of bed chambers, I don''t want any of it.

    The biggest mistake I had done is confiding in you about my love for that man.

    You used to that get praise from father. My rtionship with you and father has been destroyed from that very moment. So, I am sorry if I cant give a flying fuck about father and his goals."

    "YOU¡­"

    Pearl wanted tosh out at her, but she held herself back.

    "From your rtionship, I can only guess that he must have told you what he had done. If you have a way to contact him or send a message to him, tell him that he needs to make this stop. He finally became somewhat decent, he can go live his life with rtive ease, or trust me I will send him back to being a fucking ve."

    Jade didn''t reply and waited for her sister to leave.

    Sam watched this scene too. It is interesting to know how rough the rtionship between these two sisters is, but he currently doesn''t have a way to use it.

    He wrapped the surveince up to check on how the ns are going. He is actually a bit surprised because the Pocket dimensions should be open by now. However, for some reason there is a massive dy.

    He tried to get some info, but it was kept under the wraps. So, he decided to pester the insider he has.

    Sam arrived in front of Ling Tian''s ssroom.

    He was in a lecture exclusive to the third grade students and it is rted to battle strategy. Sam''s arrival has been abrupt, he looked on the projection shown in front. It was a projection of massive map with various spots showing the troops, their level of power and some more details.

    Sam nced at it in interest.

    Ling Tian looked at him with a frown.

    "Why are you here?"

    "I need to talk to you."

    "I am in the middle of the ss, we can talk in fifteen minutes, please wait."

    He then turned to the ss and said.

    "This is the critical juncture within the war as shown in the projection. Assume you are themander of this war and you are going to charge forward to the enemy lines, you are giving the finalmand to your troops.

    How are you going to do it so that you can assure a win even if its by a narrow margin."

    The students started discussing among themselves, Sam looked at them and sighed.

    "Send a squad fire mages to the eastern camp, tell them to destabilize the White Volcano and that will cause a beast tide, the Eastern camp will be swamped by the beasts and at this time, send a Beast tamer legion that is specialized in aerialbat to stomp the Eastern camp and lure the central camp to the east¡­"

    He went on to dictate the strategy.

    "Attack the central camp from the rear and the spot between the central and Eastern camps will be the final battle."

    Sam yelled out loud.

    Ling Tian looked at him angrily.

    "Come on, let''s go. Why are you wasting time on such a simple problem?"

    He gave the seniors a side-eyed nce. Their faces are burning in shame. Ling Tian sighed once again and said.

    "What Sam said is a valid strategy. Think for more."

    "If you don''te out now, I can just say them out loud."

    "Stop."

    Ling Tian stopped Sam and walked out.

    "What do you think you are doing?"

    "I am just trying to be you."

    "What?"

    "I am trying to see how it feels to disrupt other people''s lives without any warning and always forcing them to do things that way I wanted. Isn''t that how you and Gambler disrupted my life until now?"

    Ling Tian was deted. He felt a bad taste in his mouth and even his posture slouched a bit.

    "I thought we were going to get along well, when I came here. Now you are making me regret my decision."

    Ling Tian said with a sigh.

    "Of course, we are going to get along. All I did was y a small prank, is it really necessary to sulk this much?"

    "Anyway, what do you need me for?"

    "I need some information. From what I research the Pocket dimensions should be open by now. Why didn''t they open yet."

    Ling Tian sighed once again.

    "There are two reasons."

    "And they are?"

    "One of them is someone under the Olympian control are pressuring to stop the opening of Pocket Dimensions.

    It seems to be rted to you. Once the pocket dimensions open they have to give ess to that pseudo hell simtion pocket dimension to you and your friends. The academies are acting like they areplying to that pressure."

    "Acting? They didn''t open the dimensions though."

    "That brings to the second reason. This is rted to the gods. Since the rest of the yers are taking a longer time to arrive here, the pocket dimensions have been dyed a bit. The Deans got orders from them and the dimensions are not opened because of it.

    The Deans are acting like they areplying with the demands of these ns and organizations under the Olympian control.

    They can use this easy chance to pocket a few favors."

    "Why would the pocket dimensions be dyed just because the yers haven''te? We were told that thepetition is already free flowing."

    "It kind of is, but you broke the expecttaions once again. Do you know the reason for special admission to you yers in the first ce?" Ling Tian asked.

    "It is because the gods are sure you wouldn''t finis the tasks before the admission tests. That was why you were given the special admission. However, you brought thepetition forward, as usual."

 Chapter 2070 Request

    Chapter 2070 Request

    "So, what does that have to do with me?" Sam asked.

    It is not his fault that the gods are too dumb to estimate his progress. He has been breaking their expectations since the start. They should have expected it by now.

    "Well, if everything went well ording to the original ns, then the yers, including you will have rtively even ground. You wouldn''t have ess to the privileges given to the freshmen of the Academy realm.

    That was the n all along. Having the yers with not privileges of the Academy realmpete with the freshmen who gained the privileges of the Academy realm.

    But as usual, you screwed up everything.

    Not just you, Noah as well. Even she came a bit earlier that they thought. Now, the other gods areining that you get to enjoy the privileges and the other''s don''t."

    "What privileges are you talking about? I know my research is not wrong. The pocket dimensions as a whole are not really that great. Not to the point going this far.

    Also, the yers are bound toe and the pocket dimensions are going to be open for the rest of the year until a couple of months before the start of the next academic year.

    So, we are going to benefit either way."

    "Both of your points are valid. But there is one twist. The pocket dimensions prepared for this year are a bit special.

    As you might have already witnessed the difference between the students of the Academy and the yers is very different. It is the difference between night and day.

    You might want to say, your friends are not yers, but you must understand except for the trio that tagged along with you, who practically grew like the yers would, the rest of them are talents that are exceptional in their own right.

    They are actually good enough to be yer candidates.

    Most gods are shocked that you managed to go this far and find these people on your own to form a team with them.

    Indra even said that they should be excluded from your forces."

    Sam just shrugged. He indeed wanted to say that his friends are really whopping the asses of these greenhouse academy students. Except for being talented, they don''t have much going on for them.

    They are not as experienced in battles. Sam''s troops, even the lowest ranked ones have more experience that these people. If they are not the same cultivation level in an all our war, Sam''s people will burn the Academy realm to ground albeit suffering some casualties.

    Ling Tian continued¡­

    "Anyway, I digress. To even out the ying field a bit, the pocket dimensions are loaded with some exceptional rewards for the students here.

    ording to the estimated timeline, you and the rest of the yers are supposed toe when these people are still in the middle of clearing these pocket dimensions.

    Then you will startpeting with them.

    Your official yer missions are also going to start from there onwards. However, now Noah and you are already here and you will have way too much advantage over others.

    Of course, there are some gods, who say that youpletely earned this because you made your way yourselves without any help, but the majority won and they decided to keep the pocket dimensions closed until then."

    Sam thought for a moment and asked.

    "So, thepetition will start when exactly? When all the yers are in the Academic realm or when all the yers joined their respective academies?"

    "When they step foot in the Academy realm of course. Joining and not joining the academy is up to their strategic decision, the admission is provided as a gift and some of sort of personal special treatment to the yers."

    "That''s good to know.

    By the way, you are giving me all this info, are you allowed to do that?"

    Ling Tian stayed silent for a moment and said.

    "I don''t know. I didn''t have any explicit instructions about giving information like this. Of course, there are some parts of info that do have restrictions, I am not giving that away."

    "I don''t understand the limits of it, so whatever. See youter."

    Sam started walking away.

    "Oh, next time don''t interrupt my ss, particrly don''t interrupt by solving problems. I know you got a big head, but that is no reason to let some lesser minds to learn a bit."

    Sam just showed a thumb''s up symbol showing that he understood and walked away.

    He got enough information. He really could get used to having Ling Tian around. The information is free with little to no effort. Now, he just has to wait for things to roll forward a bit. But before that, he needs to takone precaution.

    He went to the hub to give out certain instructions to the main system. After that was done, he went back to clear more missions. The hub''s system is spreading rumors more and more, particrly about the deal between Joker and the Noble league. Once it reaches a certain boiling point, Sam can proceed forward with another big step. He only wished that the ming Skulls are operating a bit more. Theints from the students have been saturated for quite some time. The Deans took some really strict measures. One lucky thing is that his friends who are not part of the academy but cleared the realm level missions attracted more heat than he anticipated and it kind ofpensated for theck of assignments for the ming Skull organization.

    Anyway, he already has ns set up for this scenario, that will fuel the chaos enough to satiate his desires.

    Time passed as everyone became busy with their own ns. Noble League is busy with the training. Joker trained them every single day and they could see their improvement with every passing day as well.

    Sam''s mission monopoly is working well. Since Noble league is alsopeting for the missions, the situation became a bit harsh for the rest of the first year students.

    Missions are the primary source of ie for many students, since most of the academy students are monopolized by Sam''s teammates they wanted to opt to Realm level missions. Then Sam''s teammates and Noble leaguebined upied all of the Realm level missions. The rest of the students started feeling a bit troubled with the situation and it is showing a strain on the economic situation of the city.

    A lot of students opened a bunch of businesses to gain some extra coins, now even they are straining. While things are going like this, exactly one week after this, when Sam was about to leave the Academy and go out to do some hunting, he saw a familiar face that brightened his day abit more.

    "Its about time you guys are here."

    Arkiv and Kumar are standing at the entrance of the Academy waiting for Sam toe out. They could have sent message through themunication tokens, but they didn''t. Noah is also waiting along with them, Sam almost didn''t notice her for a moment.

    Arkiv and Sam hugged each other and then Kumar and Sam.

    "So, what took you guys so long?"

    Sam asked.

    "Can we sit somewhere and talk? I could use some of your good booze. Noah said that you have an excellent new booze added to your collection."

    "Of course. Let''s go. I know a good restaurant here. The food is amazing."

    "Did Makare with you?"

    Arkiv asked hopefully. He is one of the few people who frequented Sam''s city and ate a lot of Markan''s food. It is indeed very hard to beat.

    "Don''t worry. This food will meet your standards."

    Sam said as he looked them up and down. They looked pretty ragged.

    "You guys didn''t have a good time did you?"

    "Of course not."

    They just joked around and went to Nn''s restaurant. Nn always had new recipes ready for Sam to taste and since he came with friends, he was more than willing to put his skills to test.

    "So, did you guys join your Academies?"

    Sam asked both Arkiv and Kumar.

    Arkiv nodded and replied.

    "I did, but my situation is not exactly good there, as you know Hou Yi and I don''t get along, despite him being my sponsor. He must have given explicit instructions to make my life a bit harder. The Grade 2 students are already looking to get a piece of me."

    "Notpletely out of my expectations."

    "I haven''t joined the Academy yet. I actually came to directly meet you. Even meeting Arkiv was a coincidence." Kumar said and his voice was a bit solemn.

    "What happened? You need something from me?"

    Sam noticed that Kumar is a bit serious and it must have been an important thing. At least that is what he thought.

    "I came here to make a request on behalf of Karthikeya. He is too embarrassed to ask this of you. So, I am asking this as a personal favor."

    "What is it?"

    "He wants you to undo whatever you did to the that you were in for your final test."

    As soon as he said that, Sam''s expression changed. The Smile was no longer there.

    Noah is a bit surprised. Even she doesn''t know what Kumar was talking about, Arkiv was also same. However Sam clearly knew what he meant.

    It was the where he went to finish his final test.

    The war against the nature.

    Sam almost forgot about it. At least, he didn''t keep actively thinking about it.

 Chapter 2071 Kumars Request

    Chapter 2071 Kumar''s Request

    The atmosphere turned solemn with Sam''s serious expression.

    "What exactly did he do there?"

    Noah asked Kumar. She is the only one not too worried about speaking out of line. In a way she is closer to Sam than Kumar, because she understood Sam more than Kumar. They have the mutual respect that created that bond.

    With Kumar and Sam, it is typical guy friendship, that developed because they were in the same situation since the start. They do respect each other, but it is a bit differentpared to Noah and Sam.

    That is also the reason why, Noah acted much bolder with Sam even when the rest of the yers were walking on egg shells around him.

    Kumar sighed and took out a recording crystal.

    Noah yed the video of the. What she saw made even her, who saw destruction of all proportions to gasp in shock. The whole is barren. There is not a sign of vegetation. The video showed different locations on the.

    The snow fields are not like normal snowfields they are in a state of storm but not with just normal snow, but with the ice elemental energy, wrecking havoc and in the centre of that storm lied the tower that Sam ced.

    Then there is the desert. The storm of wind and earth elemental energy destroyed everything, she could see the corpse of a person that got stuck in the storm, he was recently dead and she could see both the energies running rampant over that body.

    The forest area is not a forest area anymore. The vegetation is dead despite the wood elemental energy ran rampant.

    Volcanoes, seas, everything is just like that. Except for the few cities that housed the whole poption the rest of the is suffering from constant elemental storms.

    Kumar started exined as Noah and Arkiv watched the video.

    "The elemental storms became a constant phenomenon. Except for two small time gaps where the storms will calm down, the rest of the time the storms just run rampant. Very few people could barely endure the storm and even they cannot survive it for a long time.

    The only ce that doesn''t have storms is the mountain area."

    The video changed and they could see the Mountain where the Priestess and her daughter lived along with the rest of the temple''s forces.

    "The mountain is the only ce with vegetation and forests. That is the only source for any form of nutrition avable for the rest of the cities and now this nutrition became valuable because the cultivators are unable to absorb the atmospheric energy because of the storms.

    Even in that gap when the storms stopped, they are unable to do much.

    The energy takes a long time to stabilize, the cultivation level of a whole has stagnated beyond repair. As if that is not enough, a new disease became active in the. It looked like a form of Energy Poisoning, but it showed symptoms are different to a normal poisoning or corrosion situation/

    They are trying their best to survive.

    The worst part is this doesn''t have any connections to the other worlds. There is only one path and that is currently experiencing a spatial storm that started ages ago.

    They have nowhere to go and there is no way to solve this problem. They have to go out and try to destroy the towers, but they were unable to do that too."

    Noah just kept staring at the video even after Kumar was done exining the situation.

    "What exactly did they do to deserve this?"

    Arkiv asked. He is not asking in a self-righteous tone, as if to question Sam''s moral integrity, he knew better than that. And he has done a lot of bad things himself. None of the yers are exactly saints.

    Sam didn''t even get to answer his question before Kumar did.

    "They betrayed him.

    That was Sam''s war with nature. The people of this got a curse from Olympian gods, the gods used nature as a medium and descended up on this to deal with them. Sam stood there and fought back.

    There are almost no casualties in that war.

    As usual, he passed the test with flying colors."

    Kumar passed as he looked at Sam with a smile before continuing. "However, these people wanted to take away Sam''s technology and tried to poison him. So, he went ahead and nted these towers before he left.

    At least, that is what Karthikeya and Priestess told me."

    "Who is the Priestess that you are going on about?"

    Noah asked all of a sudden making Kumar smile wryly.

    "She is a friend of Karthikeya and she was the strongest person on that. She is also only person that didn''t have a conflict with Sam because of Karthikeya''s information. Sam stayed with her in that temple when he was there."

    Noah nodded, but still gave Kumar a warning nce.

    Sam who stayed silent for a while looked at Kumar and asked.

    "So, what is the personal favor that you want? Is it to deactivate the towers?"

    Kumar pursed his lips and nodded.

    "Why are you asking this from me? Did Karthikeya put you up to this?"

    "No, not really. We did discuss it because I asked him about your progress. He was a bit distressed by what happened. As I said, Priestess is his friend and it is her home, so it is all a bitplicated. He did say that it would be great if you could forgive them, but he also said that he cannot ask that of you."

    "Well, I did warn them about cross me like that and I did tell them there would be consequences."

    Sam muttered as he sighed.

    "Couldn''t you have talked about this after we celebrated? You sucked the joy out of this reunion."

    Samined and then said.

    "If I do this, you owe me big time and I need a massive repayment from that. You will be responsible for handling that payment for me."

    Kumar looked at him in surprise.

    "You agreed that easily?"

    "What can I do? I can''t have you bitch and whine for the rest of your stay in the Academic realm, can I? From what I can see, we might even stay here for a few decades."

    "Thank you." Kumar replied with a smile.

    "Yeah, yeah. I am sure it will helpful for you to kiss Karthikeya''s ass."

    Sam said as he gave a wrist band to Kumar and sent a document. A screen popped in Kumar''s wrist band as he looked at the contents.

    Those are all the conditions that Sam had.

    "What the fuck?" He couldn''t help but curse out loud as he looked at the conditions.

    "You are prepared for this?"

    "Of course, I have long prepared the conditions for their release. After betraying me, that has only two options, one is to be useful to be while being alive or be useful to me while being dead.

    The poisoning that you saw is one such phenomenon. I won''t reveal all the details to you, all I can tell you is that the current situation is basically me grooming them into the final products that I can reap after some time.

    Right now, all I did was give them the conditions that should have endured after the disaster stuck. If they want release from it, they better agree to these terms and you will be responsible for making sure all these conditions are met and if they didn''t meet any, you should be the enforcer that metes the punishment for them andpensation to me."

    "But¡­" Kumar wanted to say something, but Sam interrupted.

    "Kumar, I consider you my friend, but you are the one who brought up the topic of me forgiving someone who screwed me over, so you should be taking responsibility.

    Do you think I would have just agreed to leave them alone even with these harsh conditions if anyone else asked me?

    I prepared this list only for Karthikeya because he was the only one I would have considered, but our friendship is equivalent to Karthikeya''s god status.

    You know me. You have seen me grow and you know what I would have originally done. This is the best I can do."

    Sam didn''t talk anymore and just stood up to leave.

    "You can have lunch. It is on me."

    He walked out of the room. Arkiv looked at both of them before patting Kumar''s shoulder.

    "Think before you make a decision, buddy."

    He followed Sam out.

    Noah and Kumar were left alone there. "You think I messed up my friendship with him?"

    Kumar asked.

    Noah stayed silent for a moment and asked.

    "What would you have done if you were betrayed by someone and Sam came to ask you to forgive them? Not just normal betrayal, what if they tried to kill you, would you easily be able to forgive them? What will you think of Sam then? The one who considered your friend is asking you to forgive someone who tried to kill you.

    On top of that, Sam actually saved their from disaster. You remember the war with nature situation. You know how difficult it is. And Sam has to fight against the gods in that. Be it for the game, but the direct beneficiaries are that''s people.

    They are saved because of him. They almost lost no lives because of him. How do you expect him to react after such betrayal?

    In my opinion, Sam has mellowed down a lot.

    Do you remember what he did to that n back in Deste? The one that kidnapped one of his teammates? He ughtered all of them with his own hands.

    The ck Water Organization? He uprooted it on his own when even an empire had a hard time dealing with it, that is just for the grudge a friend of his held on that organization.

    Usain sect, he burned it to the ground because another one of his friends had a problem with it.

    He basically changed thendscape of the Deste, because of his friends, and now some people whom he saved while incurring the wrath of gods on himself tried to kill him in cold blood.

    What do you think he would have done if he was just like before?

    In my opinion, he mellowed a lot.

    He just gave them the disasters that he had taken away from them."

    "So, I did indeedmit a mistake."

    "I wouldn''t say that. What I would say is that I wouldn''t have asked him for such a thing if I were you."

    Noah sighed as she said it. Arkiv is a friend to them all, but he values Sam more because of how Sam saved his life back in the Pce of Inheritance.

    They shared a deeper bond.

    So, he decided to leave Kumar and go to Sam in this situation. Noah cannot do that.

    She loved Kumar and just one mistake against a friend wouldn''t make her leave him. She held him tightly as they sat there for a while before both of them left.

    Sam felt a bit disappointed when Kumar ced such a proposal in front of his face. He was in a unique situation. With all the things they have been through, it felt inappropriate to let Kumar go and he even felt maybe Karthikeya prompted him to do that.

    However, Kumar should have it in him to not ask Sam about this. But he did anyway. So, he could only do this. He will give him what he wants. And for now, he should have some space between both of them.

    Arkiv caught up with Sam and asked.

    "So, how are things? That thing called hub, is it your doing?"

    He asked with a smile. Sam also smiled and nodded.

    "Who else could make it?"

 Chapter 2072 Two fronts

    <h4>Chapter 2072 Two fronts</h4>

    "Your narcissism didn''t go anywhere, I see." Arkiv retorted.

    "Of course, what can I do. It is an inherent trait." Sam replied with a smile.

    "Anyway, how are things? Anything important that I should know?"

    Sam just passed him a wrist band and said.

    "Soon, in your region the hub will bepleted. A metallic bird wille and meet you at that time. If you any crew members, leave me their names, I don''t want you guys to get swept in my ns."

    "I only have a very small group of people with me."

    "Finally, you learned. It is important to have a team of your own."

    "Yeah, I learned. Anyway, what else is here? What are the standards of these people? Are they any good? I noticed the top ten ispletely upied by your crew."

    "They are not bad. Just above average. Except for select few, the rest are not exactly notable. However, I heard that it will change soon."

    Sam proceeded to give some information. Including what Ling Tian told him.

    "I guess, I better be prepared."

    Sam nodded at Arkiv''s reply. They just chatted for a while.

    Of course, the arrival of his friends didn''t hinder Sam''s ns. They kept on going forward. Particrly, in two fronts.

    And at the moment when Sam was speaking to Arkiv, some meetings are taking in Zeus Academy which are going to catalyze Sam''s ns and help him move forward better.

    One of the meetings in between the Student Council. Pearl is there along with the rest of their student council including Christos and some Grade 4 students as well.

    "The agenda of this meeting to end the nuisance named Stone. That guy has been targeting our students every day. And he always has a smooth escape n.

    We were unable to catch him.

    One of the reason was because we underestimated him at the start and didn''t bother to put any focus on him. We brushed him off as someone trying to seek attention after the stunt he pulled off at the felicitation ceremony.

    However, his actions are getting bolder."

    Pearl scoffed at this. Quite openly too.

    The senior looked at her and frowned. He is very displeased, but he cannot lose his cool on her.

    "You have something to say Pearl?"

    A different senior, also a woman asked.

    "I better stay quiet, the student council wouldn''t be able to handle my loose tongue. It is better this way."

    "Don''t worry about it. Just say it out loud." The same woman spoke, interjecting the speaker who was about to continue forward.

    Pearl shrugged and spoke.

    "It is just so weird listening to such?bullshiting out senior''s mouth. And that straight face, you could have sold that crap to me, no problem, if I wasn''t aware of it beforehand."

    "What do you mean?"

    "Don''t act like all of us here don''t know about it.

    I already told you that Stone is a problem. But no one bothered to listen to me. Particlry when he only targeted some small fries at the bottom of the list. It was neither underestimation, nor was it a miscalction.

    You were biased and didn''t want to do anything because there are no benefits in there for you.

    Now that Stone''s ws are even bared against the Noble League and their rtives, everyone became anxious about dealing with him.

    Just say it as it is and don''t cover it up like some whiny bitches. At least, being greedy and selfish aligns with the values of Zeus Academy. Acting like you have some special moral high ground is disgusting to be honest."

    Pearl''s outburst silenced everyone in the room. Except for thedy senior who is smiling with a big grin on her face.

    She knew this would happen, that was the reason why she egged Pearl on. Pearl had repeatedly asked for assistance from the Student Council. She wanted to handle it with rules. She could have moved her own forces, but there is a lot of attention on her because of the felicitation spectacle as well as the ranking.

    Many people are already gossiping that Pearl already became a ''has been''. She is not in top ten and she didn''t even do that well in the felicitation ceremony. Stone who happened to be the person that got some really great attention in the ceremony could be seen as target of Pearl''s jealousy.

    Of course, most of it was her own spection.

    In short, she had a long winding excuse for the student council to take action instead of her. But they rejected her proposal. They told her that they couldn''t just target an up anding person by ganging up on him, just because some of their students lost.

    As for the personal grudge Pearl had with him, they have nothing to do with it.

    But now that the Noble league is the one that got their asses handed to them, they wanted to deal with him instantly.

    If not for her own vested interest in destruction of Stone, she would have gotten up and left.

    The meeting continued after her small disturbance.

    The conclusion is simple. They decided to predict who the next targets are going to be and they are going to give out some specialmunication tokens along with some hidden guards.

    These guards wille and try to subdue Stone as soon as he initiated the attack. At the same time themunication token will inform some of their other team members and they wille and capture Stone.

    As long as they captured Stone before the City guards, they can deal with him in the confines of their Academy.

    They will have more influence there and they can put a stop to this.

    While this meeting was happening, another meeting took ce, however this is not a meeting between students, instead it is between the Instructors. None of them are considered Elders, they are just a bit more experienced Instructors of the Academy.

    "The Dean officially gave us full power to deal with Ivar and his disrespect towards our Zeus Academy.

    Our Elder interrupted thepetition in the freshman tournament in order to save one of our precious candidates. Ivar who was the invigtor of the examination, didn''t give our Zeus Academy any face even when we withdrew from thepetiton.

    We lost a lot of our reputation because of this.

    From the talks we have with the Thor Academy, they imed no responsibility and dered that it solely rests on Ivar''s shoulders.

    Even Ivar imed that he will take the sole responsibility and anyone from the Zeus Academy can go and knock on his doors. He eve dared us to test our guts by knocking on his doors and make him admit his mistake.

    It is a test to our dignity and self-respect.

    We are convening this meeting solely to deal with this issue.

    Now, everyone, please provide a suitable approach to handle this issue."

    This instruction opened the topic. One of the other instructors immediately raised his hand and asked.

    "Isn''t Ivar the monstrous student that appeared a few years ago? The one that beat an instructor when he was still in fourth grade?"

    Everyone just nodded. The question was mostly rhetorical. However, that one question stumped everyone from speaking up. The instructor that Ivar beat at that time was precisely their equivalent at that time.

    Even though the fight wasn''t exactly easy for Ivar and damaged him a lot, the Instructor had it worse. Because Instructormented something about Ivar''s mother, Ivar chased the instructor down throughout the Academy.

    With his arm broken, ribs cracked and even one of his leg''s crush and a bunch of burn injuries all over his body, he used his left hand and half broken axe to cut off that instructor''s head while he was still in front of the Dean''s office.

    There Ivar lost his consciousness, but he didn''t fall. Instead he stood straight like a stone pir even in thatatose state.

    Not a single healer dared to touch him until f came out andpelled a healer to heal Ivar. He became a nightmare to the instructors at that time. More often than not, people don''t do certain things because they believe they are impossible.

    Once they deemed possible more and more people will attempt to do it. Since Ivar''s sess at cutting an Instructor''s head off, there are many genius students who tried topete with the instructors, but they utterly lost.

    Many came close that almost jeopardized the Academy''s hierarchal structure.

    It almost led to instating a Grade 5.

    All these instructors felt a shiver go down their spine. Now, they have to deal with that guy? On their own? They almost felt that it was impossible.

    However, they had to make some ns and once they had the ball rolling, they managed to manifest some sort of feasibility within their minds. They slowly believed that they might have a chance. The meeting was soon concluded after they agreed on one particr n.

 Chapter 2073 Surrender

    <h4>Chapter 2073 Surrender</h4>

    Sam and Arkiv are touring around the Olympian region. They are having a pleasant time when they arrive at a street.

    "What are we doing here?" Arkiv asked.

    "Watching mytest creation." Sam smiled as he pointed toward Stone.

    Arkiv was a bit surprised. After all, who would ever imagine creation being a fellow person? But he knew how entric Sam''s creations could be. He just stayed put and waited to see a show. Stone walked in the street as if it is just another afternoon.

    At the corner of the street all of a sudden, he sprung into action and dashed forward. A young man who wore Zeus Academy''s uniform wasing.

    He was caught off guard by Stone''s sudden approach.

    *BOOM*

    Stone tackled him to the ground and both of them slid on the ground for a few feet before they came to halt. Stone held that mount position and started pounding the target like crazy. The Zeus Academy student felt like his life felt his body for a moment and came back again.

    He couldn''t breathe, couldn''t see properly and couldn''t even feel his own body.

    He tried his best to calm himself down, but he couldn''t even muster his spiritual energy to defend against Stone''s attacks. However, he managed to take out token from his storage and crushed it.

    Stone felt some energy fluctuations from behind.

    *SWOOSH*

    A wheel kick just went past the spot where his head was. He barely dodged it and looked at the neers with vignce. There are three people who surrounded Stone from all directions. They are all Freshmen and just from a nce he recognized them.

    Whenever he wasn''t training or fighting the targets, he tried his best to gain knowledge about the Zeus Academy.

    He recognized these three immediately. They rank within top 25 within the Zeus Academy or even all of the Olympian Academies, they are really good.

    Of course, anyone who saw Stone''s performance at the ceremony should have sent more than three above-average fighters and people from Zeus Academy are not stupid enough to not realize it.

    Stone was ready to fight when he sensed a threatening presence from behind. An arrow whistled through the air almost hit him. It was very stealthy to the point he barely managed to pick up the energy fluctuations from it.

    In thest second, he pped the arrow to the side while lunging towards the target. He didn''t want to change his tactics. He dodged the arrows and the attacks from the three around him and reached the target.

    Instead of attacking the target on the same spot, he kicked him and that kickunched that guy to the far end of the street. Stone''s energy riled up as he kicked the ground andunched himself horizontally.

    He was like a bullet slicing through the air and reached the other end with no time.

    He wanted to control the fight with his speed. Since the other party wanted to subdue him with numbers and long-range attacks, he will simply be out of reach and out of range for both of them.

    The next thing they knew the city saw a performance of Stone dribbling a cultivator through the streets. He treated the target like a ball and every kick sent the other party through the air, or passing through the buildings and sometimes leaving craters on the street.

    Not a single arrow managed tond anywhere close to him after the first arrow was deflected. As for the three people that wanted to surround him, they were unable to catch up with him.

    However, they didn''t panic, because this is not exactly the full extent of their n and merely the beginning. Exactly five minutes after their intervention in the fight, Stone felt a far more threatening presence aimed at his back. He hurriedly picked up the target and turned around using him as a meat shield and the attack aimed at him stopped.

    A Grade 2 student is levitating with his leg aimed at the throat of the target. His eyes met Stone''s.

    "You are dead meat today. No city guards are going to save you."

    As he spoke, he bypassed the target and threw a Kick at Stone''s shoulder from the side.

    Stone blocked the attack, but was still swept away from the force as hended on the street.

    He stood up with a smile.

    "We will see about that."

    "You are way too confident for a guy who''s about to die."

    "You would like to think so, wouldn''t you? Too bad. I came prepared." Stone replied with utmost confidence. Sam said everything would be fine and hepletely trusted Sam. The next moment, the senior felt three people closing in on them.

    Sia, Gyan, and Jw.

    All three of them appeared, however, they were in their disguises. They are in dark robes covering their facespletely with skull masks and they are glowing as if they are on fire. On the left side of the chest and on the back of the robes, ming skulls are engraved.

    It wouldn''t take a genius to figure out what organization they belong to and why they are here.

    "ming Skulls?" The senior asked in sudden surprise.

    He instantly took out hismunication to ry the news, however, the three new arrivals didn''t have any intention of letting him do that.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosion a phoenix conjured of pure mes appeared behind the senior and attacked him. When he dodged, Sia was waiting for him to appear in that location. She threw an attack aimed right at his throat.

    The senior dodged it with utmost difficulty and that made him vulnerable to Gyan''s sneak attack from the back.

    Jw controlled the battlefield. She has to use everything she has with each attack. She is fighting with a Middle stage Divine ne Initiation cultivator, she can''t really afford to hold back. If her attacks have to pose any threat, she has to go all out.

    That made the senior vignt and even though he is throwing long-range energy attacks to disrupt Jw, Sia and Gyan are making it hard for him to maintain any sort of precision.

    The three of them are perfectly suited to deal with him. The worst part for him is, it is almost like they knew all of his weaknesses. They are always in his blind spots and weak spots aiming for the most dangerous areas on his body.

    He always had to be on guard.

    He couldn''t care less about Stone. He has to be careful so that he doesn''t lose his own life. Meanwhile, Stone made himself busy, he picked up the target and threw him into the sky. He kicked the ground and shot himself like a bullet.

    He kicked the target to the side and before he could crash, Stone increased his speed and intercepted the target''s trajectory kicking him once again.

    He started ying tennis by himself. Instead of a racket, he used his leg and instead of a ball, he used the target. The punishment was vicious. Soon with every kick, blood started spraying out of the target''s body and small pieces of flesh were shaved off of the target''s body.

    When the city guards finally came there, Stonended one final attack smashing into the ground, before he came down and surrendered.

    Too bad, the city guards cannot do shit if the person is not resisting. They would have loved to kill Stone then and there and they knew they would get a handsome reward from the Zeus Academy.

    At the same time, the trio wearing the ming skull outfits also stopped whatever they were doing. The senior is lying down in a crater as he looks wearily at the city guards. If only they hade sooner.

    But he could only me himself for that. he was the one who instructed the city guards to not show up immediately.

    While he was thinking, Sia took out a small cube and threw it at him after activating it.

    The next second with a silent explosion a few streaks of energy crept into the senior''s body.

    "What the fuck are you doing?"

    The city guards were about to attack, but the three of them raised their hands and showed that they surrendered.

    One of the guards contacted someone from the Zeus Academy before he ran and checked up on the senior.

    The senior''s body is paralyzed. He didn''t lose consciousness, but he was definitely not in his right mind. He has the semnce of his surroundings and looks like he is about to go crazy.

    His energy is rapidly circting, but the cirction path is not exactly ideal. It is very chaotic and unstable.

    He is on the verge of death, but for some reason, oddly he doesn''t look like he will die.

    The city guards arrested the four of them.

    At this moment, Christos came along with a bunch of Second-grade students.

    "Leave them. Forget this happened. We will take care of them."

    One of Christos''ckeys yelled.

 Chapter 2074 Arrogant Stone

    Chapter 2074 Arrogant Stone

    Stone stopped in his tracks and looked at the new arrivals.

    "What? You want to take care of this yourselves? You would like that, wouldn''t you?

    Typical of Olympians. Thinking that you can do whatever you want and get away with it. Newssh assholes, it doesn''t work that way every time. Sometimes, paybackes and bites you in your velvet asses.

    This time I am that payback and you can''t do jack shit about it."

    Christos gritted his teeth as he came close to Stone.

    He looked him in the eyes and spoke.

    "I dug up some information about you. You are a nobody. You shouldn''t be making such ims. You were a fucking ve. You are only suitable for wearing a cor and carrying stone around in the dark tunnels of the mines.

    Eat when you were given something, shit when you were told you can do it. That is the only suitable life.

    You can hide behind the rules of the Academy realm. But the moment, you are out of this realm, what do you think you can do? I will get my hands on you. Even in this Academy realm there are few things that I couldn''t do, if I manage to get my hands on you.

    What do you think I am capable of outside of this realm?

    I will make your wish that your torturous ve life of the past is a heavenly blessing."

    Stone smiled at the threat. He didn''t speak for a moment and let Christos take in that smile.

    "Is that all you can think of? Poke me with my past life? Very original Christos. Do you know how many times I was insulted? Do you know how many ways I was insulted? I was stomped on by the guards of your Academy right outside of your gates.

    I managed to bounce back from that. Do you think you can peg me down with just words?

    Think again.

    Not everyone has a massive stick up their ass when ites to their pride and ego like your Olympians."

    The City guards dragged Stone and the ming skulls away. They didn''t want the argument to escte anymore.

    However, whatever Sam wanted already happened. The whole exchange was recorded by several bird puppets and it spread faster than a wildfire.

    Not just how Stone tortured the target, but also how the ming skulls were involved, how they destroyed a Grade 2 senior and the exchange between Christos and Stone.

    Everyone wondered if all four of them will opt for the Trial by Combat.

    The Academy realm has never seen the usage of Trial by Combat so much. This is the first time in a long while. Usually, people wouldn''t opt for this, because there is always a chance of losing. Particrly when they can choose the champions.

    The opposition could always bring someone big and strong. They could always throw in a once in a life time genius and make them eat dirt.

    But Stone didn''t give a hoot about this.

    He always chose the Trial bybat. Some times, it is apparent that he didn''t have muchbat experience, but his body ispensating for theck of it. He performed like he was built tobat and since most of the time the champions on the opposition are just as low level as the targets, no one managed to score a win on him.

    The most they did wasnd some hits. But nothing more than that.

    However, now that the news about ming Skulls spread to the Zeus Academy, the student council took some measures. Pearl wanted to make a move on her own, but Christos who had his ego bruised, wanted to take over.

    "Don''t worry, Pearl. I have one of the best on the job."

    He said as he pointed at Bronte.

    She cursed under her breath. As soon as Christos and Bronte left along with his crew to the court to confront Stone and the other three.

    Apart from Bronte, he had three other first graders who were training in hub under the special training program for the past few days.

    "We all demand a trial bybat."

    That is the first and only thing Stone said as soon as he was presented in front of a judge.

    The Judge sighed. He kind of expected this and it felt a bit exhausted to be right this time.

    "Mr. Stone, I have seen that you are a frequent visitor for this enforcement trial and I already know that the trial bybat is your favorite method

    But did you, by any chance think of opting for another method?

    A settlement perhaps? Or confessing for the crime and just taking the punishment of the realm which would most likely be lot less that what you would suffer from if you actually lost the trial bybat?"

    "Not really, I haven''t thought about it."

    "Then, you should. I am telling you, you are going suffer greatly if you keep this up. I have an even better suggestion for you. Focus on what you came to the Academy realm instead of getting it on with the Zeus Academy.

    You seem like a talentedd, I hate to see you fall."

    "I am sorry, your honor. But I am focusing on the reason that I came to the Academy realm for. That Academy is currently imprisoning someone that belong to me. They are barring me from seeing that person and before they hand over that person to me, before they release that person, I will not be stopping.

    I will destroy the Zeus Academy student by student, brick by brick, even if I have to spend the rest of my life here.

    Until then, I will keep on attacking their student and I will keep on choosing the trial bybat."

    His words stunned the rest of the room. Including the Judge. He looked at Christos in askance.

    It is apparent that his original words were not merely a suggestion and advice for Stone. He was trying to fish for information. If Stone had been a hardass and didn''t give out this information, he would have continued down this line of question, until he got an answer.

    After all, even if a person chose trial bybat, the judge has to be the one to approve it. Of course, the Judge cannot put wrong in the right even if he wanted to. But bending the rules this much is still fine and within his limits.

    Christos went into a deep thought.

    His brain ran at its fastest speed to understand the implications of Stone''s statement.

    He then remembered what Pearl has said¡­ a few spections are formed. He nodded at the judge gesturing him to continue. Stone noticed this and smirked at the Judge. His eyes held a disdain that was very apparent to see by anyone.

    The Judge cleared his throat. He got a bit angry. That disdain irked him, but he cannot do anything, instead he continued with the line of questioning.

    "Did you collude with the ming skull organization? The organization that was deemed as a terrorist organization by many Academies in the Academy realm?"

    Stone didn''t speak immediately, he looked at Christos who is also waiting in anticipation and asked.

    "Why drag this? Let''s get the trial over with. You will know the answers to everything eventually. To go so far as topel a judge? Can you show some respect to the rules of the Academy realm?"

    Christos raised an eyebrow and said.

    "I don''t know what you are talking about. From what I see, you are the only one showing disrespect to the rules of the realm, by ignoring the Judge."

    "Yes, Mr. Stone. Please answer my question."

    The Judge asked once again. However, Stone showed no regard andpletely turned his body to face Christos.

    "Grow a fucking pair. Didn''t they teach what guts are in Zeus Academy? Admit it if you have the gall to do something. Fucking idiot."

    "MR. STONE."

    Judge yelled finally attracting Stone''s attention.

    "What is it?"

    "Do you know what is the punishment for disrespecting the judge and the court?"

    "I don''t give a fuck. Even for that, you need to run a trial and I am going to choose a trial bybat."

    His words stumped everyone. Stone then took a deep breath and continued.

    "To answer your question, I don''t give a shit if ming Skulls are terrorist organization or not. They are mercenaries for hire and I hired them for protection.

    When a Grade 2 student of Zeus academy attacked me from behind, they came and beat him half to death."

    "So, are they going to stand for trial or are they going to choose the same option as you?"

    "Of course, they are going to choose trial bybat."

    Christos looked at Stone and the trio from ming skulls. If given a choice, he would just jump in and kill them all himself.

    However, he doesn''t have that privilege.

 Chapter 2075 Threats and Threats

    Chapter 2075 Threats and Threats

    Christos is just d that he is prepared.

    He brought Bronte along with him and the remaining three are also promising. So, he believed they still have a chance. The fight was set up instantly and the Olympians chose a teambat. They can all fight together and whichever team has thest one standing wins.

    When all the candidates stepped on the stage, the referee signaled for the start of the fight.

    Christos and the rest were looking to enjoy the fight. However¡­

    "Start."

    As soon as the announcement was made.

    *SWOOSH* *BOOM* *CRASH*

    The next moment, the trio made their move. Except for Bronte and Stone the rest of the people on the stage moved and their caused a massive sh. When the scene is finally visible, the three of them are standing with their feet on the three candidates from the Olympian side.

    Bronte was stunned.

    He didn''t expect such a massive domination from the other side.

    Stone slowly stepped toward Bronte and said in a very slow voice.

    "Do you still want to go on Bronte? You think you can win?"

    Bronte is a bit nervous. The four of them surrounded him. All four of them are strong. His instincts are telling him to fuck off that stage, but there is also a sense of anxiety and excitement deep inside his heart. A curiosity, asking him to find out if he can walk out of this.

    However, the person who is handling him, or managing him, is not a person with same curiosity. Christos immediately called for a withdrawl.

    "This is fucking ridiculous."

    He muttered to himself as he turned around and walked away.

    Stone and the other three were clearly disappointed. They didn''t expect such an easier time. They actually wanted to destroy Bronte that day, even Sam gave a green light. It would have set the whole Noble league on fire.

    Christos is too much of a wuss for that though.

    They had to go back and report to Sam.

    Sam didn''t mind too much.

    "We need to push them a bit harder. Let''s hope things are looking well on Ivar''s side."

    A couple of days passed. Stone continued with his quest, but the reaction from the Olympian side has slowed down again.

    On that day, the Zeus Academy finally sent a delegation of sorts to meet with Ivar from the Thor Academy. They wanted to demand an exnation from him for his horrendous disrespect towards the Zeus Academy.

    When the delegation reached the destination of the meeting, they felt like they ate a bug.

    "This is really where we are meeting? For a meeting regarding an almost diplomatic issue between two regions? Is he even serious?"

    One of the Instructors that was part of the delegation asked. The rest of them just shrugged and sighed as they walked in to one of the cheapest and the dirtiest bars they have ever seen. When they walked in, not a single person that fell into their eyes belonged to an Academy.

    They are all old, weak and washed up. They are the ones that came to the Academy realm with aspirations but couldn''t handle the pressure and thepetition and finally gave up. They must have worked as mercenaries or assistants for the other people in the Academies their whole lives.

    Doing odd jobs and missions and soon they are not suitable for those jobs anymore.

    At least that was the first impression they gave off to this high and might instructors. In the middle of this filthy bar which is filled to the brim there is one big table where only one person sat while taking a swig after swig of a cheap and hard liquor

    None other than Ivar.

    Ivar waved the at the newly arrived group.

    The group slowly made their way to him, trying to avoid touching anything or anyone in the ce.

    "You don''t have to act all disgusted. This ce is not filthier than a beast''s gusts. Shouldn''t the war torn instructors of the Zeus academy be a bit more tolerant for ces like these? In a way, you are the reason that ces like these are created."

    The instructors looked at Ivar with a frown.

    They obviously didn''t like what he said, but they didn''t retort. They believed Ivar was just trying to rile them up and make this into a fight. At least that was what their opinion is of him.

    "Mr. Ivar. You are an esteemed alumni of one of the greatest academies in the Academy realm, but your behavior during the freshmen tournament didn''t reflect that. You acted on your whims and wishes and tarnished the reputation of Zeus Academy in front of the whole world.

    For that we would like to demand a reasonable exnation."

    "What kind of exnation would you like?"

    Ivar asked with a smile. Not denying any of these usations.

    "First of all, we would like a public apology. You should admit to what you have done to the instructor and you should admit to your ill behavior. On top of that, the attack you made to sever the arm of the instructor was very special.

    We needed a special treatment method the required us to use some of the most precious herbs within our inventory.

    We would like you topensate that."

    "What would you do if I don''t do it?" Ivar once again asked with the same calm smile on his face.

    "We will take official action. Even if the Elder did make a mistake by interfering with thepetition, your punishment to that was way too excessive. We are sure that we can get you expelled from the Academy realm with a proper hearing."

    "Oh, that is it? That is all you can do?"

    Ivar asked nonchntly. The instructors didn''t know what to say.

    Ivar chuckled at this and spoke.

    "Alright, I will y along with you guys. I will do all you want me to do, but I have a few conditions."

    "Please do tell." The instructors felt a surge of hope. They are afraid to deal with Ivar with the usual methods. In a normal situation when someone disrespects the academy like this, the instructors will go and challenge them to a duel.

    It will be in an extravagant venue with a bunch of people spectating it. However, now they didn''t want to do it.

    It would just serve as a great stage for Ivar to embarrass them further.

    So, they decided to take what they usually call as a coward''s approach. Hide behind the rules of the Academy realm and try to make the other party keel in annoyance.

    Now that Ivar is stating some conditions, that means he is ready to let go of this.

    "Before I tell you those conditions, I am gonna ask a few questions.

    Instructor Beli, can you turn around and tell me who is sitting at the right corner of the restaurant?"

    He asked one of the instructors of the Zeus Academy. All the instructors turned to take a look at the corner table in confusion. Even when they saw the people sitting there, they didn''t feel much. However, Instructor Beli had a change of expression, because the person at the center of the table is someone he recognized very well.

    It is almost someone he didn''t want to see in this lifetime. It is a man with only one arm and one eye.

    He looked at Ivar with fear apparent in his eyes.

    "That is Monor. I am sure you are very familiar with him, so don''t bother denying it. He was one of the people that you recruited as your subordinate when you were a student at Zeus Academy.

    He used to help you with the missions, particrly those rted to exploration and resource gathering.

    Do you remember what happened to him? Please share it with your colleagues."

    Ivar continued with that smile. Beli didn''t speak. He was flustered and the rest of his colleagues are confused.

    When Beli didn''t speak up, Ivar continued.

    "He is the one you framed for the murder of your fellow ssmate and in process, he lost his arm and the eye. He was processed through the Academy realm''s judiciary proceedings and since he doesn''t have backing or resources, he was subjected to the rules of the Academy realm.

    He was trapped in the Prison of Remorse for more than two decades and came out with his soul injured. He has yet to recoverpletely.

    All because of your crimes.

    Now, you just need to do what I asked you to do. Confess, Apologize, and Compensate."

    Just judging from Instructor Beli''s face, they understood that he had actually done it. The rest of the instructors are weighing their options. They don''t care what Ivar wants to achieve from this. They just want to finish their task and if the price of it is just one instructor, maybe¡­

    Even before their thoughts ended, Ivar continued.

    "Don''t be in a hurry to push it down, Instructors. I am not done yet"

    Listening to Ivar''s words, all of a sudden, they felt a slight chill down their spine.

    "You might want to take a close look around all the tables in the bar. You might find someone familiar."

 Chapter 2076 Conditions

    Chapter 2076 Conditions

    For the next ten minutes, Ivar kept pointing to different tables and he asked different instructors to do the same thing as Beli

    Confess, Apologize, and Compensate.

    The instructors started sweating bullets.

    "Mr. Ivar. This is too much. You are bringing unrted matters into this situation. We will proceed with the judiciary procedures if you act like this.

    Whatever happened between us and these people has nothing to do with the freshmenpetition. In fact, this will just show that you acted with a bias against the Zeus Academy.

    Think before you demand such atrocious conditions."

    One of them gained enough confidence to retort.

    However, Ivar just smirked.

    "Go ahead. If you refuse, then I will also follow up with the judicial procedure. I will file cases on behalf of all these people and more.

    Be aware that I have much more information than just these people. Instructors and Senior students of your Academy are using these people for your own benefit for a long time. You lure them with the rewards saying that you will nurture then even give exclusive benefits on behalf of the Zeus Academy.

    But you use them all up and throw them away like this.

    Then they are unfit do anything else. They cannot go back to their homes in this state and they cannot improve. To save your asses you used them and stole their lives.

    I have already collected all the evidence required regarding this. If you don''t agree to my conditions and file a judiciary trial. I will also file for one. You don''t really have much on me, because I was upfront about my position as an invigtor from the start.

    But you? You don''t have any justification to do these things to these people, do you?"

    The instructors fell silent.

    They didn''t expect such a move from Ivar. For most people Ivar is nothing but a blood thirsty brute who kills his way through his problems. They are in a unique position where Ivar couldn''t casually kill them even if they push some of his buttons.

    They wanted to score a win against him with their brains.

    Only now did they understand how stupid they were.

    "We need time to think this through. We also need to report this to the Academy. We will meet again."

    The instructors stood up, when they were about to leave, Ivar spoke.

    "Elders Minsk, Bronx, Drake and Kraken."

    The instructors stopped and looked at Ivar. Those four are the elders of the Zeus Academy and quite senior ones at that.

    "I have dirt on them too. Try saying this to them and they might help you get to a conclusion regarding this."

    The Instructors'' faces paled. This is worst than they thought. It is one thing for Ivar to threaten them with this kind of thing, but for the Elders? If the Elders knew, they will force the instructors toply with Ivar''s conditions to keep their dirt out of people''s eyes.

    Ivar is known for his ruthless nature.

    So, when they heard that he didn''t kill the Elder at the tournament and only took an arm, they thought he just mellowed a bit in the face of Zeus Academy.

    Now they understood what he was trying to do.

    If he took the Elder''s life, Zeus Academy would have directly gone to war. They would be no discussion, there would only be confrontation, even if Ivar released this dirt at that time, it wouldn''t have the same effect of Zeus Academy instructors directly admitting to these mistakes.

    This way is more humiliating.

    They gritted their teeth and left to the Zeus Academy. That same day, they held a meeting once again and this time along with them the four Elders Ivar mentioned and the Dean of the Academy are there.

    Dean sighed as he looked at the instructors and the Elders.

    "You did all of this and covered it up using the Academy''s name. You should know exactly what I will do if the Academy''s name has been tarnished because of you guys.

    For me the Academy is important, even if I have to carve out the rotten part with my own two hands.

    I am not going to give out any suggestions to you, nor am I going to get involved in this. You should solve this mess yourselves, but once again no underhanded means. Keep it straight ad solve it.

    If you get caught once again, I am not dragging the Academy down with you guys.

    I am already having enough headache with other issues."

    Dean left with a sigh. The Stone''s issue is getting out of hand with Noble league''s involvement. The Pocket dimensions are not open yet and the date for the Inter Academy Tournament is nearing. Everything is a bit of a mess right now.

    On top of all that, the missions.

    Many people might not have noticed this, but he noticed one thing. The currency within the market started to dip. The ce where most of the coins are going is the Hub. That ce because the primary source expenditure for almost everyone in the Olympian realm.

    And he noticed that once the coins went into the hub, they are noting out. He never saw Jokering out to buy anything. It is safe to say that the coins once gone into the hub, will nevere back out again.

    He noticed that the Noble league hoarding coins because of the deal they had with the Hub, but the top ten rankers are doing the same and they are doing at a faster rate.

    Many students are using their savings since the Hub became almost a daily necessity from them. The only reason they didn''t notice their inevitable deficit of coins is because they don''t have to spend arge sum of money in the Hub in just one day.

    He knew things will be tough if the missions be scarce, people will try everything in their power to gain more coins and once they be desperate, only god knows what level they will stoop to.

    If that was not enough someone was waiting for him at the office with some news and it is a bad one.

    White and Vidyut are waiting for him.

    "What do you guys want?"

    "We need you help with something, Sir. It is regarding the Hub."

    Vidyuth asked first.

    "Hub?" The dean had a bad feeling.

    "Yes Sir. We would like your rmendation to join the Special training program."

    "Special training program?" The dean frowned.

    "Yes, sir."

    "Why do you need that program? Do you think the Zeus Academy''s teachings are inadequate for you?" He is genuinely hurt. Even though the Hub is a great ce to train, he still believed that the Academies are still the ces where the true learning is.

    He is already a bit pissed with the Noble league''s actions on creating this special training program. Now, even the best students are asking for this."

    "No, sir. We don''t believe that the Academy''s teachings are inadequate, however, the academy''s teachings are more focused on the theoretical aspects and increment in cultivation level and battle strength.

    Hub''s teachings on the other hand focuses on honing thebat IQ and awareness as well as energy conservation.

    We believe most of our losses in the Freshmen tournament are because of that. Even I believe my defeat against Sam is rted to that.

    I am attending the Hub everyday and I can see myself improving in this area, but it is not enough."

    It is White who answered it this time.

    The Dean sighed, it is indeed true.

    "But what can I do to get you in? I don''t have any authority over the Hub. You can only ask him."

    Vidyuth frowned at this.

    "Sir, how can Noble league get the authorization from an Instructor in the Academy and enter the special training program, but we cannot?

    ording to the announcement made, the instructor is the one who made them enroll, but when we asked the instructor, we were told that we cannot enter and he doesn''t want to rmend us.

    Is Academy acting biased against us?"

    Vidyuth''s question threw him offand the Dean stared nkly. Vidyuth''s expression stated that he would kick up a fuss if he doesn''t get a proper answer.

    "Vidyuth, the instructor might have used his personal favor to make them be epted into the training program. Noble league does have intimate connections with some people in the Academy realm to make them use their personal favor."

    Vidyuth sighed and stood up.

    "Dean, please tell us directly if you don''t want to help us. An organization like hub? A person like Joker? He is moved by the personal favor of an instructor? It is already far fetched that he gave face to an instructor here. He is not even the best one among you.

    But this biased position is really hard to swallow."

    Dean''s face turned purple. He didn''t know how to react to this sudden tantrum. If it was from the instructors, he would have made them cry in agony just for talking back to him like this.

    But for Students¡­.

    Whatever others might think he really cared about the students and seeing the best students are about to throw a hissy fit, he didn''t know how to respond.

    "Vidyuth, I am being truthful. I never interacted with Hub''s owner regarding this matter. I was never involved in the whole process."

    "Sir, many people are trying to enter the hub for this special program. Both students and citizens. However, only people associated with Noble League are able to ess it and they endorsed directly that they only got in because of a rmendation from the instructor.

    There should be something you can do."

    White answered and the Dean sighed.

    "I will look into it."

 Chapter 2077 Capture

    Chapter 2077 Capture

    After the two students left, Dean copsed back into his chair in exhaustion.

    He thought for a moment, before contacting someone through themunication token. An old man who had a schrly aura walked into theDean''s office after a few minutes.

    "Greetings, Dean."

    "Greetings. How is the research going? Is there any progress?" The Dean asked.

    The old man sighed and shook his head.

    "I am really sorry, Sir. We have already used up every metal puppet we have ess to including the wristbands. But we are unable to crack it."

    "Are the inscriptions and formations built into them really that difficult to crack?"

    Dean asked.

    "To be honest, the formations and inscriptions used are not exactly of the extremely high level. But they are arranged and implemented in such aplicated manner that even Peak Stage Divine ne Cultivators will have a hard time dealing with them."

    Dean was dumbfounded. He cannot think of a formation that could stump such a cultivator.

    "One of the reasons they are so difficult to crack is that they are designed to be annoying and exhausting. There are almost two thousandyers of formations inscribed and each of these formations is further enhanced with a dozen different kinds of illusory and concealment formations.

    Technically, the Divine senses of a person at our cultivation should directly ess the core of it and not be affected by the formations of this level, but thisplex array of formations and the sheer number of them obscures our senses as it has to pass through so manyyers.

    The worst part is whoever made this set up almost half a dozen triggers to each of theseyers. These act as restrictive conditions. We need to figure out these conditions to break theyer. If we don''t and just try to use normal methods, theyer will explode and it will create a chain reaction, destroying the whole device.

    The only reason they took such a roundabout way is because they might be throwing out a challenge to us and everyone who wants to open them and crack it."

    "So, in short, there is no progress as of now."

    "No, Sir and I doubt we will have it any time soon. Because all the restrictions I mentioned just now are just to cover the outer surface. Who knows what''s inside the device? Whoever it is that made these things, they have my respect just for the patience to make this."

    "Is there any way that I can help you with this? Any resources?"

    The old man thought for a moment before replying.

    "Not resources actually, rather we need more information. It would be great if we could get more information on how the Hub works. Even the person''s information on how Joker operates, the way he uses energy could be helpful.

    If he really is the creator, it will help us get to know his mindset better and understand his creation."

    Dean thought for a moment and nodded.

    "Okay, you can go now. Just let me know if you have any progress.

    But try to think outside the box. Sometimes you might want to empty everything in your mind before tackling situations like this."

    "Thank you, sir."

    The old man left and the Dean once again sighed in exhaustion.

    This is the old man who was put in charge of dismantling the wrist bands and the metal puppets. On the surface the Academies might just be epting and weing of this new entity called Hub.

    But the Deans are not idiots, they have enough awareness to understand the possible implications of the introduction of such a new entity to their environment.

    The only thing is they are actually smart enough to not voice their resistance out loud. Particrly when they saw the great inventions involved. Looking at such great things they all wanted a piece of it, but Joker is smart enough to not pledge any allegiance. Now they are trying to dig some information on Hub meanwhile trying to reverse engineer the devices to see what they can gain.

    But there is no progress.

    Suddenly, he thought of what the old man wanted. Information.

    Then he though of the special training program, Vidyuth, White. He got an idea.

    He immediately contacted the instructor who was used by the Noble league to do the announcement.

    "Instructor, I hope I didn''t disturb you in your busy schedule."

    "No, no. Dean. What are you saying? How can your calls be considered disturbing. Please tell me what you need me for?"

    "I want to talk to you about joker and the Hub. It seems like you have a great rtionship with them, since your rmendation even let the Noble league enter the special training program."

    The Dean and the instructor are in for a long discussion.

    Meanwhile, at the same time, Pearl made all the preparations to leave the Academy realm. She assigned all the tasks to herckeys. Right when she was about to leave, Vidyuth and White appeared in front of her.

    "Are you leaving?" White asked.

    "Yes. I will be back in a few days. It won''t be longer than a week. In this week, the Noble league will ask for your cooperation. Both of you, try your best to drain as many benefits as you can if you decide to help.

    Even if you don''t it is fine."

    Vidyuth and White nodded.

    "So, how did the meeting with Dean go?"

    Vidyuth told the small discussion they had.

    "He might try to think this through. You wouldn''t be able to contact me during this trip. So, you can just update me about the progress when Ie back."

    "Be careful."

    After that, Pearl left the Academy realm. Of course the news came to Sam.

    "Did she give any news about where she is going?" Sam asked Vidyuth.

    "No, she didn''t."

    "For some reason, I cannot sense the link to her wrist band. It seems like she might have removed it. Anyway, let her be."

    "Okay Sam."

    Sam hung up the call and thought about how his ns are progressing so far. Ivar''s side is doing very well even though Stone''s side is still a bit subpar. The Zeus Academy is not retaliating as fiercely as he wanted.

    The introduction of ming skulls into the mix made the academy and noble league go silent for a moment for some weird reason.

    He really wished they acted more impulsively. He still continued with the preparations though. He needs to increase the pressure of the Zeus Academy and other Olympian Academies after that. When all hell broke loose, he should be tear the forces of Zeus Academy as much as possible.

    They should have many fronts to fight against.

    As he was speaking Sam suddenly got a notification on his wrist band. It is glowing with red light and his eyes lit up.

    Not just his, even the wrist bands of all of his friends lit up and a holographic map was disyed to all of them.

    It is the map of the whole city and there is a red dot glowing in the middle of it showing the location of their target. There are also several green dots along with the names of the people that these dots are representing.

    These green dots are Sam and his team.

    The remaining yellow dots are the people that are just around that area.

    Sam immediately made his move. He disappeared into the shadows and used his full speed to reach the location of the red dot.

    The rest of his team also mobilized. They tried to be as sneaky as possible and they all took different routes to make sure that their intentions of going to the same spot wouldn''t be noticed by anyone who could possibly be keeping an eye on them.

    Sam is the first one to reach the target location. He ran through a dark alleyway and was heading towards the main street. From the map, he could see that the target is about toe to the intersection. *SWOOSH*

    With a swift movement, he crashed into the target and took him away into the alleyway on the other side of the road. The people in the street didn''t even notice that a person has disappeared.

    He pinned the target to the ground and closed his mouth forcefully.

    "Long Time, no see. Dayus."

    Sam whispered into Dayus'' ears making him tense up. He looked at Sam''s eyes and tried to use his lightning to get out, but the next moment a group of people surrounded him directing their auras at him.

    "You know my friends, right? You have met them before. You might want to rethink using your abilities. You will regret it greatly."

    Dayus hesitated a bit, and that was all Sam needed, he knocked him out and took him away.

    Soon, within the depth of the hub, Sam tied Dayus up to a special chair designed solely for this purpose and the chair is attached to a special set of tools that Sam hasn''t used in a long while.

    The chains that are used to tie up Mia''s mother. The Variant Hydra.

    Now, Dayus is safely captured and restrained.

 Chapter 2078 Pearls Father

    Chapter 2078 Pearl''s Father

    Five minutes after tying up, Dayus finally woke up and he felt as powerless as an infant.

    He looked at Sam in shock.

    "What the fuck did you do to me?"

    He tried to move, but he cannot. He is restrainedpletely. Even an immortal beast was restrained without a way to move from these chains. Dayus is far from that strength.

    "Nothing. Just wanted to greet you before you start your journey in the Academy realm."

    "Greetings? Fuck off."

    Dayus cursed as he looked at Sam hatefully. Nobody hates Sam more than him, at least that is what Dayus thinks for himself.

    "Let me go. Or you will face the consequences."

    "Consequences? Come on Dayus, you should know better than to threaten me by this point. I have beaten your ass so many times, that I don''t even remember how many techniques I have to defeat you."

    "What do you want from me? Why are you restraining me?"

    "Nothing, it is just that your presence in the Academy realm is going to be a bit troublesome for now.. I have some ns in ce and if you are out, you are going to spoil them."

    Dayus suddenly smirked.

    "So, you got scared shitless and wanted to use these underhanded tricks to get ahead of me? Fucking Corward."

    Sam raised an eyebrow.

    "You are the one to talk." Watt scoffed from the side. Among the yers Dayus has been the one since the start who time and again involved outsiders and broke promises. No one likes him and almost every yer wanted to kill him at least once.

    So, preaching about underhanded techniques is very riching from him.

    Dayus looked at Watt coldly.

    "Don''t stare at him. He might gouge your eyes out. You know how violet Watt can be when he is pissed." Sam grabbed Dayus'' attention once again and continued.

    "I want you to stay put for a while. Think of it as a rxation period. Once my ns are in ce, you will be out of here."

    Sam then stood up and started attaching a few formation discs on the wall of the room.

    A holographic screen appeared showing a scene from the Gambler Academy.

    "I know it will be very boring to stay here. So, this is here to entertain you. Have a good time."

    With that, Sam and the team retreated.

    This went smoother than Sam thought. He kind of expected more resistance from Dayus and that is why the rest of his team has been prepared. However, this guy is beat up pretty badly. It seems like he directly came after the war with nature was over without even recovering.

    He must have been desperate for some reason.

    Sam didn''t want Dayus at this moment because he will definitely reveal Sam''s ownership of Hub as well as Sam''s rtionship with the new geniuses of the Academies, aka his friends.

    Once the cat is out of the bag, all hell will break loose. Sam needs to do a few things before that.

    Since Dayus is already here, Sam believed that the other yers will also be in the Academy realm soon and the pocket dimensions will open. He is waiting excitedly for that.

    However, at that moment, he got an alert from the Hub. It is an alert set up to notify him when some interesting conversation happening regarding his ns is happening. It is unlike the one rted to the threats and plots against him.

    He opened the screen and he is delighted once again. It is two of the four elders of the Zeus Academy that Ivar threatened and they are currently talking about Ivar.

    "What evidence do you think he has on us?"

    "I don''t know. But if he really has information on that incident, what do you think will happen? Even if even slightest evidence rted to that incidentes up, we are both dead meat. It might not have happened in the Academy realm, however, we will lose all of our reputation.

    Heck, Dean will directly kill us.

    And the retaliation from the people involved. You can only imagine the consequences."

    "Maybe we are overthinking this. How can he even know? We took every possible contingency we can think of. We had to bury half the for this. I am sure this might be rted to some small time thing.

    Like the ones those instructorsmitted."

    "You think so?"

    Sam felt intrigued when he listened to this discussion. He knew what they were talking about and Ivar told him that they would react like this. It is that big of a deal. Even when Ivar mentioned all kinds of crimes the instructorsmitted out in the open, they felt more embarrassed than guilty.

    Because it is almost amon consensus that the instructors of the big academies can do somethings like this behind the scenes. Of course, they felt slightly afraid that they will judged harshly by the judiciary system of the academy realm.

    But that is it. They still felt that they have a way out if they tried hard enough.

    However, these Elders are different. The crimes of the instructors are iparable to theirs. If the teachers had grabbed a lollipop from little kids, they raped a whole vige and then ughtered them, including the kids.

    That is the extent they went and when Ivar mentioned this to Sam, he devised this n.

    He knew that once a string like this is pulled, even the mountains have to shiver a bit. And a truly guilty party will shiver more since they knew exactly what they did. The threat triggered the exact conversation they expected and it is going in the direction the expected.

    "What do you think could have possibly given away? I thought the secret was fool proof. What method do you think he might have to know about this?"

    "I don''t know, but the only possibility I see is if either that person involved should have revealed it or maybe the refugees that managed to escape that time have to know more than we think they know."

    "Do you know where they escaped to?"

    "I believe they went to one of those has beens. That is a secondary under the control of a n that worships apollo. I have some people there who asionally keep tabs on those people. From my investigation, they don''t know anything about the incident.

    As far as they are concerned it is aary disaster that forced them to escape."

    "We cannot be a hundred percent sure. We need to eliminate any possibility. Tell your people to keep an eye on them. They could have some uses in the future, but if pushes to shove we might have to eliminate them. Send Ivar''s image and other details to your people and tell them to inform us if he is spotted there.

    Based on Ivar''s personality stealth is not really his thing.

    Also, tell we might have to go and deal with Ivar ourselves and make sure that our secrets are in the dark if he really did find any inkling of information about this." Elder Minsk said.

    "Do you believe there is no other way?" Elder Kraken asked.

    Even though he asked that, judging from his expression, it is apparent that he also believed the same and thus, they started discussing the ns.

    Sam listened in on it and smirked.

    It is almost too easy. Day by day his respect to this realm is going down bit by bit. Surely, this ce is just as he thought.

    A ce for him to perform.

    He closed the screen and got off his bed. He took off on hoverboard and went to the Norse region. He needs to ry this information to Ivar and he has to do it in person.

    While Sam is traveling, in a different corner of the world.

    Pearl arrived at her father''s training grounds.

    It is a vast mountain range. She has been travelling for a while and even with the protective charm her father gave her, she had a hard time find the location where his father was cultivating.

    By the time she found her, he is sitting under a waterfall. There is a weird formation ced under him and also at the mouth of the waterfall. A few cuts are appearing on his body before they healed and got cut again. He had dark ck hair, with slight blue hue. His body is covered with scars. Not of the cuts that he is experiencing now. But from previous battles. He had a tall and muscr build. The calluses and his palms and legs showed just how much he trains.

    There is an aura of menace around him. As if he is the manifestation of destruction himself. Pearl felt shivers down her spine as she felt that aura. She felt like she would die if she took two more steps.

    Not from an attack but just from that suffocating and menacing aura

 Chapter 2079 Asking Help

    Chapter 2079 Asking Help

    "Greetings Lord Theron."

    Pearl greeted in a low tone. That is how she talked to her father. She couldn''t even begin to remember when she actually addressed him as father and she is definitely sure that she never called him with terms of endearment like Dad or daddy.

    "Why are you here?"

    Theron spoke without opening his eyes.

    "I am here to seek your help, my lord."

    "Last time I checked, you are still an academy student. Do you need my help even for the puny missions of the Academy?"

    "No My lord, it is not about the academy missions. It is about a person in the Academy. The ns that I told you before are seeing obstacles one after another with no sess in sight.

    Unless this person is eliminated, it is impossible to proceed forward with my ns."

    "Which family does he belong to? Is he from the Noble league? Do you need my rmendation?"

    His tone is filled with displeasure. And there is a hint of mocking as well.

    "No, My lord. He doesn''t belong to the Noble league and he is not part of any Olympian academy. He is from the Gambler Academy."

    As soon as she finished speaking, the waterfall stopped flowing as if the time has stopped.

    He opened his eyes and looked at her. His eyes are a bit abnormal. He has red eyes, but unlike the eyes of the vampire, the tone of the color is a mixture of ck and red. It is a color more menacing than red color.

    It is almost like blood of a person tried to paint the darkness in red, but was being devoured. That is the only possible description that even Pearl coulde up with.

    She couldn''t maintain eye contact for even a couple of seconds.

    "You are telling me that you, the daughter of Theron is stumped by a single student in the Gambler Academy and came begging for my help? Are you even my daughter?"

    His aura fell on her and Pearl immediately crashed into the ground. She could even raise her head from the ground. The pressure made her spit up some blood and only they did it lessen a bit.

    "My Lord, that person is out of ordinary. He is unlike any other student that ever stepped foot in the Academy realm.

    He managed to make the Gambler Academy give out a special admission, he conquered two Academy towers of the Thor Academy and Hel academy.

    Not just high score, he reached and cleared the hundred floors, the first in the history. He has been on logger heads with the Olympian Academies since the start and his strength is beyond any Grade one student.

    Even some of the early stage Grade 2 students feel helpless in front of him.

    He won the freshmen tournament. Not just the solobat, he even singlehandedly won the teambat for his team and destroyed twenty freshmen that targeted him. All of them are elites among elites.

    Nobody knows where he came from and nobody knows what his n is, even uncle didn''t want to divulge any information regarding him."

    She spoke as fast as she can without even stopping for one second. Unlike most people Theron didn''t have much of an opinion on the Academy realm. It indeed produces results, but most of the people there end up being theckeys of gods.

    For a person like him, who wanted to be a god, that ce didn''t seem fit. He quit the school in the middle and went to find his own path and most of his peers are nowhere near his match in any metric they want to measure.

    But still, the results of the Academy realm give out a pretty good estimation on a person''s strength and potential.

    So, if what his daughter said is true, then that person is a really special person among his peers.

    Just like Theron is.

    His interest is finally piqued.

    "So, this person is targeting you since the start?"

    "Yes, Lord. He has been after me from his first day in the Academy. He provoked my people, taunted me in every step and even spoiled every one of my ns deliberately. It almost feels like someone has put him up for this."

    "If someone is really that strong and that capable. Why would they want to target you? You haven''t show anything remotely remarkable in Academy realm and except for being my daughter and Dean''s niece, you barely have any achievements of yourself. It doesn''t make any sense."

    Pearl froze for a moment and spoke in a low tone.

    "Maybe, it is because of that My Lord. Maybe they are trying to target you and Uncle through me."

    "That indeed could be the reason. I don''t see any other usible cause there. That or, you should be special enough to be acknowledged by such an entity, which rarely happens from my experience."

    Pearl didn''t dare speak up, but inside she is burned in up in anger and pain. Her own father''s condescension towards her is making her experience an agony that she could never get from anyone else.

    However, the fear induced by her father is far too great for her to respond.

    "So, what do you need my help for?"

    Pearl continued to exin her situation and why she actually came here. After around fifteen minutes, he nodded.

    "It is indeed a great n. But to think that you are using such a n to deal with a freshman. Do you really believe he is worth it?"

    "I believe so, My lord."

    "It better be, because for this n to be implemented, I need to speak to people myself and if you fail, you will face consequences that you cannot bear. Do you still want to go with it?"

    "Yes, my lord."

    "At least, you have guts." He paused before continuing.

    "How is your sister doing?" Pearl felt like her heart was caught in a cold grip.

    "S¡­ She¡­"

    "Don''t bother trying to cover up. I know she is still acting up. Tell her that I will soon lose my patience. The deadline I gave for her will be over, then if she still doesn''t change, she will have to marry whoever I say she has to marry."

    "U..understood my lord."

    "Get lost."

    Theronmanded and a huge gale hit her, carrying her through the mountains and throwing her down out of that mountain range.

    She heaved a sigh of relief and she also felt a bit less cautious. Only now did she realize how much her energy was restricted in that mountain range. She heaved a sigh and contacted someone. A servant from her father''s estate.

    "Contact these following people. Arrange meetings with their family heads as soon as possible. Tell them, I am meeting them with the blessing of my father."

    "Understood, young miss."

    The servant went ahead with the instructions.

    Meanwhile, back in the Academy realm.

    Sam is oblivious to the conversation between this weird father and daughter pair. He is busy with something else.

    He reached the Norse region and went to meet Ivar.

    He gave the recording of the two elders'' discussion.

    "So, they are sending someone to a particr ce. It is better if you follow that person."

    "I understand. I know what to do. I didn''t expect this n to actually work. Even though I know of the incident, I don''t really have much evidence against it."

    "Of course, the best kind of lie is something that is mixed with truth. Same goes with bluffing."

    Sam then took out a crystal table and gave it to him.

    "The person will be wearing a wrist band of the hub, so he will be easier to track. Once I confirm who is being sent, I will automatically update the tablet with their signature. As long as you are within a certain radius, you can easily track them.

    Follow them and get the rest of the evidence and also make sure that they know you got the evidence. That will provoke a proper move."

    "Alright. This is fine, but what about the remaining regions? The rest of them are getting a bit impatient."

    "Don''t worry about it. The hub''s construction is going well in every region. They might be finished in just a week or so. If the pocket dimensions open, I need to redeem my reward with the Pseudo hell dimension. Once that is done, we can proceed with the next n.

    The presence of hub is vital for collecting the information needed for this n."

    "Alright, I will inform them. Maybe one of these days, we can hold a meeting. That way, they can be more assured."

    "Not a problem. We can arrange that. By the way, there will be a guy named Donnering here soon. He will be admitted into the Thor academy.

    Keep an eye on him for me."

    "Alright. So, he is also like you?"

    "Kind of. What about the information that I asked you of?"

    "The one rted to the followers of Hel? You will get it in a couple of days."

 Chapter 2080 Asked Nicely

    Chapter 2080 Asked Nicely

    After discussing the details with Ivar, Sam went back to the Olympian region. The Elders acted faster than he thought. They decided on the person to send to check up on this source of information. That guy would be leaving that night and luckily, Ivar will be arriving by afternoon and Sam could program the signature of the guy that Ivar needs to chase.

    As he was waiting for it, he is surprised by a new development. He got a notification from the Hub. The Dean of the Zeus Academy requested a meeting with Joker. Along with that came another notification from Christos.

    Sam let his Joker projection meet Christos who is waiting there in the hub.

    "What is it, Christos?"

    "Sir, I got information that the Dean of our Academy is going to try and contact you. He might ask you for a meeting."

    "Oh? He already contacted me and asked for a meeting. I already agreed to meet him this evening. Why do you care about this?"

    "You already agreed?" There is a hint of distress in Christos'' tone.

    "Yeah, why?"

    "Sir, the Dean might ask you regarding the special training program. I think he will ask you about admitting more people into the special training program."

    "Really? Why would he do that and how do you know?"

    "Some students went to the Dean and asked him for a rmendation to join in the program. They bought the announcement we made with that instructor and they believed the dean''s rmendation would definitely get them a spot.

    So, now Dean ising to ask you about the admissions."

    "Okay, that is fine and all. But I still didn''t get an answer from you. Why does this concern you?"

    Christos was tongue-tied for a second.

    "I¡­ I just wanted to know if you are going to take in more people and wanted to give you some suggestions regarding the admission process if you are nning on it."

    Christos tried to search for the words in his mind quickly, to make sure that he didn''t sound like he wanted Joker to not take any admissions at all.

    Even though that is what he wanted to say.

    The whole point of the Noble League''s ridiculous contract with the Hub is for them to gain an upper hand amongst their peers. They want to stand ahead above the rest of the realm. But if Joker takes in more students, then there is no point to this.

    "Christos, remember this. The admission, special training program or any other matter regarding Hub or me, is of no concern to you. You have no right to even discuss these things much less offer suggestions.

    So, never try this.

    And it would do you good to remember that you do not try to use me for some faction crap that you are running in the realm. Hub and I will stay away from this now and always. So, don''t bring this topic again, or I might have to terminate the contract entirely."

    With that Joker''s projection disappeared entirely.

    Sam is satisfied with this response from Christos. The level of panic showed by Christos reflects how high the stakes he ced on the hub.

    That afternoon Ivar came as nned. Sam programmed the target. Ivar waited in the region for their departure.

    In the evening, within the Hub Dean of the Zeus Academy arrived. Joker''s projection is sitting in the chair waiting for him.

    "Good to see you, Dean. I didn''t expect a sudden meeting with you. What can I do for you?"

    "Well, it is kind of an urgent matter."

    "Please, do tell me. I will help you to the best of my ability."

    The Dean chuckled and replied.

    "Please don''t make such promises with me. This old man might hold you to that."

    "Please, Dean. Ask."

    The Dean stopped beating around the bush and spoke.

    "I want to talk to you about the Special training program that you are running. What are the criteria for a student to be admitted to it?"

    "Not much actually. Why do you ask?"

    "Some of the students of our academy are very willing to enter this special program. So, I want to request you to open up a few more admissions."

    "May I ask, why you are making such a request?"

    "There are a few reasons. The most important one is, that I see the benefits of the training and right now it is being hoarded by a specific group of people. I know that I don''t have any right to tell you who to take into your program.

    But right now, knowingly or unknowingly you are tipping the power bnce of the whole region and even the whole realm.

    Some students aregging behind, while some are taking advantage of this to the fullest."

    Joker paused and spoke.

    "I can understand what you mean. Even if I want to take in more students, the price for it is not something that people can bear easily. Even Christos and his friends are paying a lot and I am sure you know what the price is."

    "I understand. But don''t you think the biased situation right now might result in a wide difference between the students? I don''t know to what extent the rivalry will go.

    If you can open up the admission, you can set criteria for the students. If they pass it, you can let them take it at the same price Christos and the rest are paying.

    If they don''t pass the criteria that you gave, then they can only me themselves. At least, this way they have a chance to try."

    Joker thought for a few moments and a sigh escaped his mouth.

    "The only reason I took in Christos and his friends or what people called them the Noble League is because they are the only ones who asked.

    My only goal is to help people here, I didn''t have any other reason. And since I already stepped on this path of special training, I don''t see why I have to restrict more students from taking it. There is not really a need for criteria here. They just need to sign the contract just like the kids from Noble League did. If they can do that, they can be a part of this program."

    The Dean is delighted by the response. He thought he would need a lot of persuasion to make Joker agree to this. He didn''t expect that the task would be so simple.

    He smiled and asked.

    "Can I get a copy of that contract? I will put it up in the Academy and let the students make their own decision."

    "No problem."

    With a thought, a scroll flew over and hovered in front of the Dean. He put in his storage, thanked Joker once again, and left.

    The next day, an announcement was made in the Zeus Academy.

    For the students of the Zeus Academy, the special training program has been opened up and all they need to do is sign a contract provided by the Hub. It is open for students of all grades. From grade 1 to Grade 4.

    The students went and saw the terms of the contract on the scroll that was hung at the notice board of the Zeus Academy.

    Dumbfounded is an understatement to describe the reaction of the students. The payment of coins is one thing, the other conditions that will be triggered if they cannot pay the coins made them question the choice.

    However, there are always those impulsive people who act up on things without thinking. Within an hour after the announcement, a bunch of people came running to the Hub to sign the contract. Once these people came, most of the people followed like sheep. Sam gained the attendance of almost every freshman from the Zeus Academy by afternoon. A lot of Grade 2 students also did the same.

    Grade 3 has a decent attendance, but the Grade 4 are few and far in between. Apart from the Noble league people the rest are still contemting. One of the reasons is the coins they need to pay is pretty high.

    However, this is not what delighted Sam the most.

    The reaction of the other academy students to this sudden opening is what delighted him.

    The students of the other academies, including the Gambler Academy are trying to get into the program. But they didn''t seed because they didn''t know full details and Sam deliberately made it hard for them to inquire about it in the Hub.

    So, now that they saw the Zeus Academy students managed to find a way to get in, they ran to their respective Deans.

    Of course, these swarms of people were led by Sam''s friends themselves. Just like how Vidyuth asked the Dean of Zeus Academy, the rest of his friends asked the Deans of their respective Academies.

    That night, they went to meet the Dean of Zeus Academy and demanded him to let them know the secret to reach a deal with the Hub.

    Dean of course had an answer prepared.

    "Ask him nicely."

 Chapter 2081 Admissions Open

    Chapter 2081 Admissions Open

    Things moved pretty fast.

    The next morning, Joker had the attendance of every single deal in the Olympian Realm.

    To his slight surprise, Dean Wharton also made his way there. Sam expected him to take a different approach, after all the personality is different from the rest.

    "Oyy, why did you only give a scroll to that guy. Give me one too."

    Dean Wharton stepped forward from the crowd. Came as close to Joker''s projection as possible and demanded.

    Just like that, Sam''s doubts disappeared.

    Joker chuckled and waved his hand. A bunch of scrolls appeared out of nowhere andnded in the hands of the Deans. Dean Wharton looked at his and nodded with satisfaction.

    "Thanks. I need something else from you too."

    "Please mention it, Dean."

    Wharton was about to speak, but then he noticed the rest of the Deans looking at him. He narrowed his eyes at them and turned towards Joker without whispering.

    "These bastards will eavesdrop if we speak now. I will message youter. You better keep some of your time free for me."

    "Of course, Sir. Whenever you want."

    The rest of the Deans looked at Wharton weirdly. Because even though he whispered, he didn''t actually say it in a low voice. It is loud and clear to everyone there.

    Dean Wharton made a face at them and left the group. Joker turned to the rest of the group and addressed them. After some discussion, things went well, everyone just stayed silent for most of the time except for a few questions and went back.

    To avoid the rush of the students, Sam assigned separate days for the admissions of students from different academies.

    The next ten days or so, things will be extremely busy. The next day, Joker gave out another announcement.

    "Since all the students from different academies are eligible for the admission, I don''t see why the regr people on the Academy realm be excluded from this. Please join. As long as you can satisfy the conditions of the contract, then you are in."

    Everyone is cheering for this.

    Of course, there is one group of people among them, that felt like they swallowed a bunch of burning coals. The Noble league.

    They could almost feel the burn inside their guts. They couldn''t believe that the stage they set so meticulously is now benefitting everyone else. The advantage they thought they had on the rest of the students is now gone.

    Christos in particr is fuming mad.

    When he sessfully convinced Joker to let the Noble league be in this special training, he felt so smug about himself. He believed that he is great because he managed to fool a powerful guy like Joker.

    Thinking back to that, he wanted to p himself. And when he remembered the passionate speech he gave to the Noble league to make them agree to these ridiculous conditions, he felt even more embarrassed.

    A Noble league meeting was called immediately to discuss the contingencies.

    "So, you better have some solutions for our current predicament. With the current conditions, we are going to face some severe constraints on earning the coins.

    The missions will not be enough. People are going to tear each other apart.

    Our ie for businesses has also reduced a lot because of Hub''s presence."

    One of the seniors asked Christos. Even though they are technically the seniors here, the rules of their league is that the Grade 2 students too the ones who are in the Middle Stage of Divine ne Initiation are the ones responsible for leading the Noble league within the Academy region.

    The Grade 3 and Grade 4 students have better things to do.

    Christos also happened to have a better lineagepared to a lot of his peers and seniors, so he was selected as incharge. At that time, he felt very proud of himself. Now, he is seeing the downside of it all.

    It is not easy being in charge. Particrly not when handling a crisis.

    He sighed and spoke.

    "I actually thought of this scenario before. I already prepared the strategy for this. But I didn''t think this situation will arrive at all, much less this soon. So, we need to iron out a few details."

    As he spoke, he pushed out a few documents forward to the members. They started skimming through them and felt a bit relieved and hopeful at the same time.

    The n is to increase the ie of their coins. However, the coins are going to be scarce within the Academy realm. So, they need to find an alternative way to do this. However, there is one thing they have in abundance even though they don''t have any coins.

    That is money.

    Not just money, they have a lot of resources and territory under their control which will give me more money. Usually, they couldn''t find a proper use for this. After a certain point money bes moot. It doesn''t matter how much the number increases, it is all the same.

    But now, they can put it to proper use.

    Of course, they cannot convert this unlimited money source into coins directly, but they can make sure of the exchange center to do it.

    All the families of the people in the league will now start hiring people of different professions. There are many people who are conducting very high-level research outside of the Academy realm. Their families will sponsor the research and in exchange, they will give the end product blueprints to the families.

    These families in turn send these blueprints to the students in the Academy realm. These people will use the blueprints to exchange for coins in the exchange center.

    The missions might be scarce, but the exchange center can give out unlimited coins. As long as the blueprint is worth it, then the coins will keep oning.

    Not just the blueprints of formations and inscriptions, they can also dump arge amount of cultivation techniques, battle techniques, healing techniques, and anything they can get their hands on, that requires a good amount of research. They have conquered many areas and they are nning on doing more and in these conquests they have acquired many of these things.

    They are not just going to focus on the quality of it, instead, their main goal is quantity. It is easy to find a low-quality cultivation technique. All they need to do is pick a prosperous city within a and pick a couple of thousand people at random.

    And to acquire a much higher quality cultivation is actually harder. They can just tackle the coin target with sheer numbers.

    Anyway, there are many ces that are waiting to be conquered in the lists of all these families, they can use this opportunity to hit them a bit harder and do it.

    There is also another strategy and that is solely dependent on the high-level professionals of the Noble league. They are to go and utilize the resources avable in the hub to create these new things. Any form of research results can be used to exchange for coins.

    Once again, they just need to focus on getting as many research results as possible. It doesn''t matter what kind, as long as there are enough, they can get enough coins.

    Another n he noted down is to use the virtual simtion space within the Hub to make money. A lot of seniors have experiences in many pocket dimensions and they participated in a lot of battles and trials there.

    Now, they are going to rey that and recreate that within the virtual space and they will try to clear it with new methods. Then they are going to create a research document based on it.

    Same with the battles regarding the beasts.

    The list went on and on.

    "You are very thorough."

    The senior praised. Even though just like Christos said, there are multiple details that need to be ironed out, the n is very solid with clear-cut instructions. They can implement it very soon.

    "But we need to be careful with this. All of this needs to happen very subtly. Not a single soul other than our league should know about this.

    Particrly the methods of farming the coins using a hub. The more people know about this, the morepetition we will have."

    "Why do you sound so distressed?"

    One of them asked.

    Christos sighed again. He is worried and he can''t hide it.

    "It is just the implications of these actions. I am sure the Deans already understood these implications. But they still opened up the training program to all the students. The strain on the economy will be immense.

    I am just wondering what will this strain drive the people to do and how we should be prepared for this."

    Only after he mentioned did some people understand his worries. Of course, some people simply couldn''tprehend this. But Christos'' worries arepletely valid and Sam is kind of counting on those adverse effects.

 Chapter 2082 Deal with Dayus

    Chapter 2082 Deal with Dayus

    Sam did listen in on the conversation of the Noble league.

    However, it didn''t worry because of it. Even if everything goes ording to Christos'' ns, it will only be for a short while. In fact, Sam is counting on the Noble league doing exactly as they nned and gain a decent stream of coins.

    It will just create more variables that he can tweak around with.

    One week passed and the admissions are still going on. Sam is surprised that Ivar hasn''t returned yet. So, he checked on the Elders and they seemed more nervous with every passing day. This means Ivar is fine for now.

    At least, he can assume so.

    The afternoon, Sam got another notification from the hub. Dayus who is captured by Sam has been yelling and screaming since the day of his capture. He has been demanding Sam consistently to leave him.

    Of course, Sam didn''t n to leave him yet.

    However that day, Dayus took a different approach. He didn''t demand a release, rather he asked for a meeting. Sam is intrigued by this and went to talk to him.

    "So, what do you want to talk about? Don''t tell me that you got lonely and wanted somepany." Sam joked as soon as he entered the room and took a seat opposite to Dayus.

    "Of course not, I called you here to make a deal with you."

    "Deal? Is it about your release?"

    "Yes. I don''t know for what reason you captured me, but I am sure whatever I can tell you is well worth my release."

    "There is not much reason actually. You know that I find you annoying. I believe that is good enough reason."

    "Don''t try to kid yourself out of this. I know why you captured me. Even before I came into the realm, I already got some information about you. The geniuses and the Olympian realm that dominated the top ten rankings of the Freshman tournament are talk of every town that is 08:53

    under Olympian control and knows about the existence of Academy realm.

    As soon as I heard the news and your name along with your friends'' names, I knew that you are up to something here.

    But once I open my mouth, your secrets will be revealed and your ns will be crushed. Am I right?"

    Dayus spoke with a smile. There is a hint of arrogance and smugness in that expression. Sam had a faint smile on his face as he replied.

    "I am not going to say you are wrong, but you are not particrly right either."

    "Of course, it is you. The trickster. How could it be that in and simple? However, you must know that I don''t really care. You must have already noticed, I didn''t even bother to recover as soon as my war with nature was over.

    I hurriedly arrived.

    Don''t you want to know why?"

    "I would be lying if I said I am not curious. But does that information really warrant me to release you out? I don''t think so."

    "Come on, I know how much you value your information. There is no way, you are not curious. And trust me, the information is well worth it. I can even sign a soul contract to maintain silence on certain things that you want me to stay silent about.

    But let me out. A week has already been wasted."

    "Okay I will bite. Tell me what this is about?"

    "I wont give out full details without the contract. It is about Pocket dimensions."

    "What about it?I already know about pocket dimensions."

    "Obviously not enough. I can tell you this confidently because I got the information from the source that even you know and you will definitely believe that I got it from him."

    "Zeus?" Sam asked and Dayus just nodded. Sam chuckled and contined.

    "So, you are admitting to me that Zeus once again yed dirty and gave you some extra information regarding the pocket dimensions?"

    "Yes." Dayus agreed immediately. He didn''t even care to feel shame for this. In his opinion, it is only natural that he got that information. After all, he is favored by the king of the gods. The rule of Olympus.

    It would be weird if he isn''t treated specialpared to the rest of the yers.

    "But why should I bother knowing this information? Zeus has already done this a multiple times. He has given you all kinds of special privileges before, but not one time did you manage to beat me. How is this time going to be any different?"

    Dayus choked on the words he already prepared in his head. He didn''t expect Sam to be so blunt and on the second thought, he realized he is being na?ve expecting Sam to hold back against him.

    "Of course, I can understand why you are saying it, but this time it is different. Previously, even if you didn''t get the information before hand, when thepetition started, everyone knew what will happen.

    You can spontaneously adapt and fight.

    However, this time things are different. Because the information I can give you doesn''t ovep with the regr flow of thepetition. It is more like a side quest and fiddling with it or not will not have any impact on the regrpetition that we are having.

    But if we finish that, the rewards will be doubled or even tripled.

    Zeus arranged this specifically for me.

    No matter how much you search on your own, you wont be able to find it, because you don''t know what it is exactly. Only if I give you the information of what it is, will you have any chance of finding it."

    "If it is nned like that, Zeus must have taken extra care to make sure that it doesn''t end up in my hands. Are you sure, you can just give it up like that? You might make him angry."

    "Do you think I want to give this up? This is a desperate situation. If the pocket dimensions open while I am still here, it will all be a waste.

    And even if I give you this information, there is no way to tell if you will win one over me this time. It is still highly likely for me toe out on top. So, I figured it is better to trade like this."

    Sam looked at Dayus intently and spoke.

    "There is just one thing, why are you acting so calm?"

    "What do you mean?"

    "If not for the fact, I can even smell your blood and flesh properly, I would have thought that you are a doppelganger. The Dayus I know wouldn''t be giving out such a sweet deal willingly. He will try everything in his power to get out and even after that, act like a whiny bitch demanding the release.

    You are not like the usual Dayus at all.

    Calmly discussing deals and all."

    Dayus gritted his teeth and looked at Sam hatefully. He felt embarrassed by what Sam said just now. One reason is because, he knew that it is true. If not for the fact that he is truly desperate, he will not try to act this coy with Sam.

    After some silence, Sam finally spoke up.

    "Alright, I can agree to the deal, but there are going to be some conditions, so once you agree to them, we can fix a date of release for you. Don''t worry, I will allow you to enter the pocket dimensions."

    "Write up a soul contract first. Then we will discuss it."

    "I am going to write up a soul contract without you revealing some information."

    "No, I want a soul contract that states that you will write up a soul contract after listening to the information that I give you. I don''t want you to go back on your words."

    "Has there ever been an incident, where I did?"

    Sam said, but he still drew up the soul contract. After fixing that deal, finally Dayus spoke up. The discussion went on for an hour. Sam was surprised, amused and intrigued all at the same time in that one hour.

    "Zeus has be so generous. Just how many arrangements has he made just so that you would stop sucking so much. And to help you get a crew of your own."

    Dayus didn''t respond to that and instead just looked at Sam straight.

    "Alright, don''t re at me. I will write up the soul contract. Now, it is time to start the discussion. Before you say anything, there are some non-negotiable conditions in there that you must know. No matter what you do, they are not applicable.

    I would rather kill you and be done with it."

    Then the negotiation started. This one is much longer than the actual discussion about the information. Neither Sam nor Dayus backed down easily and of course, Sam just aimed to make Dayus'' condition worse and worse with every condition he listed out.

    Finally, they came to amon ground, which still favored Sam and signed the contract.

 Chapter 2083 Interesting

    Chapter 2083 Interesting

    Sam went back to the academy after the meeting with Dayus.

    He is in a deep thought the whole time. He is sure that Dayus hasn''t revealed the whole information, but the first soul contract they signed ensured that whatever information he got is truth. This information made him rethink his ns a bit.

    So, in the second soul contract that Sam has written, he actually didn''t mention much about Hub. Even though Dayus not talking about hub will definitely give him a lot of peace, Sam doesn''t want peace in long term.

    And Dayus'' impulsive stupidity will help him a lot in the future.

    Sam just wants to let the things flow on their own when ites to Dayus and the hub. The major condition that he ced is that Dayus has to shut up about Sam and his friends as well as Dusk. He cannot talk about it, until the truth of the matter reveals itself naturally within the realm.

    He also cannot help anyone or guide anyone to this matter using his bag of tricks.

    This is what Dayus originally expected, so he didn''t think too much when he signed the contract.

    Of course, there is something else Sam wanted to do after the information and he wants the presence of Ivar for that.

    As if the universe is listening to him, that evening Sam got a notification from Hub. He saw the video of the Elder Minsk trying to destroy everything in his office as he screamed his head off. A subordinate of his stood in front of him with one of his arms missing and bleeding from several cuts all over his body.

    He looked like he is about to die.

    "How the fuck can you fail this? I told you, you can kill the guy if pushes to shove? And you are supposed to be a master of assassination? You cannot kill someone sneakily? What the hell did I pay you for?"

    Sam chuckled at this. He knew for sure that Ivar seeded.

    And the next morning, his knowledge is further validated when he got the message from Ivar. He arrived at the Olympian realm and met at the private room inside Nn''s restaurant.

    "So, I assume that the operation went sessfully?" Sam spoke with a smile.

    Ivar grinned widely and nodded.

    "Yes. We finally got evidence against those Elders. But the incident is indeed out of the jurisdiction of the Academy realm. We cannot go through the normal procedures."

    "We will figure it out. But will you give me more details about the incident?"

    Sam has been curious about this for a long time. All Ivar said that these two Elders did some unthinkable massacre at a certain. However, he never bothered to reveal much details. One of the reasons is that Ivar doesn''t know the intricate details behind this.

    In fact, he never saw or even associated with this incident in any way.

    But one of his friends, who was a student at Zeus Academy during the time of Ivar seemed to have found something about this incident and these Elders forced him out of the Academy using various means.

    This friend of his didn''t have a background and was easily subdued because of his weak family members. In the end, not only did he lose his position as the student, he even lost his family. That was the only information Sam had until now.

    Ivar sighed.

    "My friend has given up hope because of this incident and entered seclusion. Last time I checked, the elders still kept some surveince on him and even that is not enough for them to feel assured.

    That is why, I dug up into this trying to know the truth.

    Now that, I knew of this, I wish that I didn''t. Because I cannot take revenge against immediately and had to endure. I am feeling ashamed of the fact that I am breathing the same air as those monsters.

    So, brace yourself before I say this¡­."

    Ivar went on to exin the whole scenario and Sam felt like he listened to a story out of a movie. He is a lot moreposed than what Ivar thought, but even Sam whomitted more massacres and took more lives than anyone else in the entire Academy realm or even some gods, felt that the things these peoplemitted are atrocities.

    He doesn''t even want to imagine these things, but now that he knew the information he has to.

    Sam closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths and spoke.

    "I understand your anger. However, as you said, we cannot take any action instantly. The problem is, we still have to defend against them. Now that they are sure that you have the evidence against them, they are going to take action. I want you to be prepared for that. I can give you some tips, but unfortunately there is no efficient way ofmunication between here and Norse region without me having to travel half way through the realm.

    Just be prepared for everything.

    "I understand."

    "And there has been a slight change of ns. I would like to meet your team in two days."

    "Really?" Ivar beamed with a smile. He has been trying to get Sam to meet his team for a while. A lot of their ns are hinged on these team members and the ns are made by Sam. So, of course thisck ofmunication is bugging a lot of his team members.

    However, because of Sam''s busy schedule it has been impossible to meet.

    "Yeah, but you can assure me that they are as good as you say they are? Right?"

    "Of course, I can vouch for you. They are alumni of the academy, but from different years. However, everyone dominated in one way or the other."

    "Alright, and I want you to get that student who got kicked out of Zeus Academy because of the incident that we just discussed."

    Ivar frowned.

    "Him? That might be a bit difficult."

    "Try to convince him. I don''t believe someone can give up on revenge that easily. Particrly if he is really as capable as you make him out to be. Tell him what I can do and what I can offer. Tell him, that I can get him a chance to obtaining revenge."

    "I will try. But why do you need them?"

    "To gather some spot light. Not just him, but the rest of your friends as well. Soon the eyes of everyone in the Academy realm will be on them. There are some new variables that came into y and I believe this new change will better suit that."

    "Alright. We will see you in two days. Where do you think the meeting should take ce?"

    "Here would be good."

    "Alright. See you then. Keep an eye on those elders. And by the way, I brought the witness from that realm. Right now, he and a bunch of his family members are in Paradise."

    "So, you want a residence for them?"

    "Yes, I don''t want them to stay with me. Who knows what kind of this these Elders will pull."

    "No problem. Just give me a couple of minutes."

    Sam took out some transference tokens and started making some changes to it.

    "Bring them to the vicinities of this city and make them use these tokens. They will be directly in a secure residence. They wouldn''t have to worry about anything for some time."

    "Thanks."

    Ivar left. Sam had an eventful day. However, the universe dictated that is not enough. Because he saw another video and this time it is another meeting between the Noble league. But only the grade 2 and grade 1 students.

    When Sam went through their whole meeting, he couldn''t help butugh out loud. At first, he thought that the Noble league might have gone soft or they were too distracted with the changes happening in Hub.

    After all, with all their bravado and challenges, they didn''t take care of Stone. But it seems like they didn''t let it go. It''s just that Christos wanted to meet someone and the other party didn''t ept the meeting until now.

    So, now he finished the ns and they are going to attack the next day.

    Sam contacted Stone.

    "So, are you prepared for the next target?"

    "Yes, Sir."

    "At what time are you hitting?"

    "Around noon, sir."

    "Good. I will be there as well."

    "You, sir? Why? This is just a small matter and I am getting used to my body. You don''t need to trouble yourselves with such trivial tasks."

    "Don''t worry too much. I know you are getting better. I am the one releasing your fight videos to taunt the Zeus Academy. It is just, something interesting will happen tomorrow and I don''t want to miss it.

    It will be fun.

    And I am not goinge as I am. You will see tomorrow

    anyway. I will give you more details then."

 Chapter 2084 Vs White Again

    Chapter 2084 Vs White Again

    The next morning, when Stone is moving around the streets following the target, Sam arrived in front of him. However, Stone wasn''t able to identify Sam at all. Because Sam is wearing a disguise. He held the staff, he used when was forced to stay in Sivan''s body, he is also wearing the same clothes as Sivan and of course, even his face is covered with mask and cloak.

    His elemental energies were also hidden.

    Stone almost attacked him when Sam arrived sneakily.

    "Why are you disguised, boss?"

    "Didn''t I tell you that things are going to be interesting today? Today, I am the ming skull representative that is going to guard you. You proceed with the rest of the n as usual."

    "Alright, boss."

    Stone didn''t question Sam. He immediately agreed and went after the target. At noon, he finally executed the attack. As usual, it is extremely eye-catching. However, this time no one from Noble league came to guard this target.

    Stone had full ess to break as many bones as he wanted before the city guards arrived. Sam in his disguised form, made his association known and apanied them for the proceeding.

    When the judge saw it is Stone, he sighed. He is getting exhausted. Stone has beening and going every single day and he has covered almost every single judge that works in this region.

    "Let me guess, trial bybat again?" The judge asked and then he turned to the representative of the target.

    "I heard the victim is beaten to the pulp. Who is going to be the victim''s champion and take the role as he opponent in the trial."

    Sam recognized the person who is acting as the representative. He is a small time guy in the noble league and he is purely here based on the instructions.

    "The champion will arrive in a few seconds, your honor."

    Right when he finished the sentence, the door opened a dozen people or so arrived. In the lead is Christos and along with him is the champion of the victim and a very familiar face¡­ or rather a mask.

    It is White.

    That''s right. Christos tried to convince White and that took him three days to even get a meeting. Surprisingly, White was convinced pretty quickly and he agreed to be the champion for the next target.

    By now people stopped counting how many people Stone has mangled up, all they want is for this to stop now.

    If even White can''t do anything, then the Noble league and Zeus Academy will have to take some extremely drastic measures even at the expense of being ridiculed.

    Stone looked at White and his expression changed. Now he understood why Sam wanted to tag along. This is indeed going to be interesting. However, what he couldn''tprehend is why Sam wanted to disguise himself.

    Even his walking style and aura has changed.

    "Our champion has arrived. White will be fighting instead of the victim."

    Stone looked at Sam who nodded.

    Stone turned to the judge and said.

    "I am also choosing a champion." His announcement stumped the opponents. Including White. The main reason he agreed to this is because he will get to fight Stone. From what he heard about the fight Stone had at the ceremony, his abilities are unique.

    And the videos heter saw, it only increased his curiosity. He noticed that Stone''s abilities rely a lot on the surrounding spiritual energy. White''s abilities are also very much dependent on the surrounding energy.

    So, he is curious and wanted to test himself against Stone.

    He is also very confident about winning. After all, from what he saw through those videos, Stone might be good with his unique abilities, but his battle prowess and IQ are ringlycking. It is apparent to a truly experienced eye.

    He is sure that he can defeat Stone.

    But both of these ns are subverted with this new presence.

    Sam stepped up and raised his staff. He didn''t speak, but his intention is pretty clear for everyone to see.

    "Alright. This is new. For good or worse, I could use this kind of change. I was starting to think my life has be mundane." The judge muttered out as he processed the trial.

    Soon, they are in the arena with the referees and a bunch of audience from the Noble league as well as some of Sam''s friends that are acting as the ming skulls organization.

    Sam stepped on the stage and White slowly walked up.

    "Who are you? What is your name?"

    White asked. Sam didn''t speak. He just looked at White, waiting for the referee to signal the start of the fight. White didn''t show any emotion, or he did, but it is not visible on his face. The referee soon came on to the stage and signaled the start of the match.

    *BOOM*

    White''s signature start. He kicked the ground with a recoil hit and propelled himself towards the opponent. Sam''s staff lit up and an energy bullet shot out. White blocked the bullet, not wanting to changing his trajectory.

    *BOOM*

    However, it is not exactly a good idea. The explosion made his energy cirction unstable and he had to stop in his tracks. He reacted quick enough and changed his posture tond firmly on his two legs. Just to make sure that this energy cirction disturbance wouldn''t throw him to the ground and serve him up to the opponent.

    That would be a tragic sight to see otherwise. After all, a freshman tournament runner up getting his ass handed to him in the first second of the fight with an unknown person? Imagine that.

    He immediately regained his footing and once again charged forward. This time, he is a lot more vignt and willing to dodge.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The three energy bullets were dodged nicely and he came close to Sam. However, the next second he felt an energy impact hit him in the chest. An energy wave with Sam''s staff as the center hit him in the chest and slowed him down.

    From the aura the attack showed, he thought it would be dangerous, but to his surprise, nothing happened, except for his slight distraction.

    *BOOM*

    An energy beam shot out of the staff toward White.

    *BOOM*

    With a recoil hit, White dodged, but weirdly enough the beam took a turn and followed him. He frowned under his mask.

    He stabbed the air with his cane and the energy recoiled. He was shot backward while the resulting energy wave deflected the energy that came at him. He watched the opponent with surprise.

    Sam who noticed this, smiled. Once a puzzle is solved, it is much easier to find alternate ways to y with it again and the one he thought of is using his energy bullets. White noticed Sam''sid back attitude. If he knew the other party is Sam, he would have turned the whole ce upside down. It is one thing to lose to Sam when Sam went all out, but if he really gets overwhelmed by this extent, it will be a much bitter pill to swallow.

    Sam took a deep breath and started conjuring an energy bullet. But this time it is not a spiritual energy bullet, instead it is of Divine energy and he conjured it slowly as if he wanted to make sure that every step of the process and every grain of energy is gathered with utmost focus. Of course, when White noticed the Divine energy, he knew he has to move.

    *BOOM*

    Recoil hit and charge forward, this time his posture is different. His legs are far apart and he slid on the air, but very close to the ground. His body leaned down. He is currently half his original height. S

    *BOOM*

    An energy beam shot out of the staff''s midsection. White tapped his cane on the ground¡­

    *BOOM*

    The explosion of the recoil hit spun white as he moved forward like a spinning bullet. He closed the distance at an unexpected rate and he missed the beam at hair''s breadth. Sam couldn''t dodge it. He had to block it. *BOOm*

    An energy wave and White is ready with a counter. A recoil hit changed his trajectory as he came on top of the energy wave. Sam managed to find the time to dodge. All this while. The divine energy orb is being slowly conjured.

    White didn''t understand why Sam is conjuring the orb at such a slow pace, but he knew better than let himself lose in that thought. His best solution at the moment is to make sure that Sam cannot conjure it fully.

    What happened next looked more like a chess match rather than a fight. White tried to catch Sam, while Sam dodged and countered while focusing on the orb.

    The audience on the other hand are in a shocked state. Except for Stone. Stone already knew that Sam is the best there is, but the rest didn''t.

 Chapter 2085 Victory (Merry Christmas From Author)

    Chapter 2085 Victory (Merry Christmas From Author)

    The rest of the audience doesn''t know that Sam is the one under that cloak and mask fighting against White. For them, he is aplete stranger who just happened to be a pain in the ass. A pain in the ass that messed up their n to destroy Stone. But now that they saw how good he is against White, they became nervous.

    Most of the audience are from the Noble League and they are already having a hard time with existing talented people. Sam''s presence itself caused them a bunch of headaches.

    At least, White is somewhat in control. But they are nning to kill off Sam with an borate scheme for a while now. But now, there is another guy who popped out of nowhere.

    This is bad news for the first graders.

    Stone just looked at the match with excitement and once in a while he savored the ugly looks of the Noble league people.

    On the stage, the fighting is going on, but it is not going anywhere. White noticed that Sam is almost done with orb. It finally reached the size of the energy bullets he previously shot out.

    *BOOM*

    Sam suddenly took the hit from White, but White wasn''t least bit happy. Just from the way the recoil felt, he knew Sam did it to create some distance between themselves and the Divine energy orb¡­

    Sam swung it towards White who hurriedly channeled his own Divine energy and got ready to block theing bullet.

    *SWOOHS*

    The orb made a whistling sound as it came at White. Aiming straight at his heart.

    White stabbed the cane into the air. The divine energy filled recoil hit¡­ everyone is expected an explosive sound, however to their surprise, the energy seemed to have frozen on the state. The recoil hit which usually starts at an extremely narrow pointnded squarely on the surface of the spherical orb.

    But instead of exploding, it actually created a hole on the orb and entered the middle of it. Or it would be more urate to say the orb seemed to have opened up itself and let the recoil hit enter its center.

    As if it had a mind of its own the orb stopped mid-air and the hole closed up.

    All of this happened within the fraction of second, so for people that are not involved and are not able to sense it, it seemed like the recoil hitnded and disappeared while the orb became stagnant for half a second.

    And before they could make sense of it, it started expanding it.

    Sam closed his eyes with his staff extended. He kept a steady breath and controlled the orb. What no one, including White and the audience didn''t notice is the intricate structure within the orb. For them, it just looked like an extremely concentrated mass of Divine energy.

    But inside, Sam created a nodal structure that would put the world-ss formation masters, including the ones in the god''s army to shame.

    When the recoil hit went inside, it actually exploded like its meant to be, but the smaller nodes within it absorbed the hit and spread it out. With resonance, the nodes around these first set of nodes are doing the same.

    And this chain reaction continued making all the nodes resonate at the same time and the constant collision of energy is making the orb expand. All of this is happening within a second and Sam is keeping the orb stable so that it can keep expanding without the explosion. Therger it is, the better the explosion is and he doesn''t want to waste it out in the open.

    White noticed that something is wrong. He slid to the side and used a recoil hit to close the distance between him and Sam.

    He aimed at cane at Sam''s head. But Sam kicked the ground to the side and skated in the air. With his eyes still closed. He dodged the attack narrowly while still focusing on the orb. He started sweating with the stress his mind is taking.

    But he didn''t dare let it go. The orb kept on expanding.

    White noticed this and gritted his teeth. He aimed his hand at Sam while aiming the cane at the Orb. Two recoil hits at the same time while he stood rooted to the ground. To his surprise, not only did Sam appear flustered in his actions, instead he gracefully moved. He jumped into the air and spun around dodging the attack while the orb followed the direction of the staff and let the recoil hit go past it.

    White started sensing the threat brewing inside the orb. The energy around his body started vibrating. His speed increased and he became on with the surrounding energy. Sam smiled at this. The orb stopped expanding. But he still didn''t open the eyes nor did he throw the attack.

    *SWOOSH*

    White whistled through the air as he came close to Sam. Sam dodged the swing of the cane and slid to the side. All the while spinning the staff. Now the orb followed it and finally hovered behind Sam.

    Sam levitated in the air and extended his fingers to taunt White to make a move.

    What everyone saw next is White moving like a fish in the water. He showed the movement technique that they have never seen. His dexterity and agility are off the charts. But what they saw Sam do, is even more iprehensible.

    For everyone to see, Sam just yed with the energy orb and the staff, tossing it and spinning it along with the staff, but all the while dodging all of White''s attacks and moves. They are in close range. Both the fighters and the orb, but not a single one of them made contact with each other. It didn''t look like a fight anymore.

    It is more like a game of tag.

    After around three minutes, White finally managed tond a hit.

    *BOOM*

    Sam was thrown to the edge of the stage and White also was sent back with the recoil. However, it was Sam who had a smile on his face behind the mask, while White had an expression of horror.

    As soon as there was enough distance, Sam threw the orb at White.

    *SWOOSH*

    The orb disappeared like it was doing a spatial blink, even before White could stop from the recoil, the orb is already about to make contact with him.

    "FUCK"

    He cursed and used his cane like a club. Channeling all the Divine energy he could muster with a recoil hit. Trying to hit the orb like a baseball.

    *BOOM*

    However, it already exploded.

    With the explosion, everyone saw an amazing scene. The nodes of the orb separated and they spread all over the store with the point of explosion as the center. The energy wave that was caused by the explosion, shook White''s innards. But he wasn''t thrown away. He is practically stuck at the center of all these nodes.

    *ZAP*

    With a zapping noise all these spread out nodes connected with each other with energy lines and at the next moment. They moved to the center or in other words the ce where White is standing.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosion, all the nodes are extremely charged with vibrating divine energy collided together. They all went through an individual explosion all at the same time and these explosions also collided with each other.

    White''s body took in almost eight volleys of explosions. He could feel his white coat exploding along with the energy barrier he created around himself. Then the explosions started spreading to his flesh. At first it was very painful, but soon he felt so numb, that he couldn''t feel anything.

    The blood loss made him feel dizzy.

    At this moment, Sam stood there and watched this. He is panting. He exhausted a lot of energy this time around. The only reason this looked easy is because of how much he expended throughout the whole time.

    He felt a bit gratified with how well the whole n worked though.

    Christos frowned as he looked at this.

    He immediately raised his hand and admitted defeat. The referee jumped onto the stage and brought White back before Sam had a chance to finish him off.

    "One more time. This guy is a bit too lucky for his own good."

    He muttered to himself and got off the stage. "Who are you?" Christos made his way to Sam and asked.

    "Someone you have no business knowing."

    He turned to Stone and said.

    "I will see you soon. Continue with your task and call me again when you are suspicious about such an attack. I will jump in and might even give you some discount."

    Stone didn''t understand why Sam spoke such words. It is essentially, him giving away the fact Stone is getting information about Noble league''s attacks beforehand.

    Christos of course is not dumb enough to not pick it up. He looked at Stone and then at his own crew.

 Chapter 2086 Talk with Dean and Dove

    Chapter 2086 Talk with Dean and Dove

    Sam knew this will rattle Christos.

    With how chaotic the whole Olympian region has be, this is thest thing that Christos wishes right now. This is also what will make him the most paranoid. Now he couldn''t help but suspect that something is wrong with his crew.

    Looking at Christos'' expression and how Sam spoke, Stone caught on to what he was implying.

    When Sam was leaving, he looked at Christos and asked.

    "Do you really think, I will be so oblivious to everything you cook up? I have managed to deal with tens of students in the Zeus Academy and always caught at the time where they can be easily dealt with. What do you think made it possible?"

    With that Stone also walked out after Sam.

    The news of this new battle spread out like a wild fire. The most effected one is White and his reputation took a big hit.

    Thest attack Sam dealt him was way too much. He was only expecting a normal energy explosion, he didn''t expect such a clever trick being yed right on his face.

    He had never seen anything like that.

    He is infuriated and by the time rumors were spread to him, he was in the healing hall of the Zeus Academy and destroyed everything within his room. Vidyuth is only visitor and he had to witness his outburst.

    "I wanted to ask how you are feeling, but I guess that is pretty apparent with the state of your room."

    Vidyuth said as he picked up a chair and sat in it. White sat at the edge of his bed. He still had his mask. Even the healers weren''t able to take it off his face for some reason and they noticed that is the only part that wasn''t effected by the explosions.

    So, they left it on his face.

    "That is some durable mask"

    Vidyuth muttered.

    White red at him. He is currently panting heavily. Out of exasperation towards his current state.

    "Who is that guy? Is there any information about him?" White asked.

    "No. None whatsoever. I heard Noble league was trying hard to find out about him and when the news spread to the seniors who are in charge of investigating the ming skulls, they got on it too. Everyone is searching for the mysterious man, who beat your ass."

    White didn''t respond to the taunt. Instead he closed his eyes and thought back to the fight.

    "He felt¡­ weird."

    "What do you mean, weird?"

    "Its like he knew the way I fight beforehand. And it is not like he learned about it in the fight. It is like he has studied it well enough. He cannot just predict where my hitsnd, it is almost like he can predict the way I think.

    It is like he is the key and I am the lock."

    "Not a great metaphor. But maybe he has studied your fighting style very well. Ever since Hub became popr our fights have not been that secretive. Anyone can get ess to the old fight recordings if they try hard enough.

    The virtual reality simtions actually work great.

    Maybe, he examined you there."

    White looked at Vidyuth and asked.

    "Why are you here?"

    "What do you mean? I came to check in on you after you got your ass kicked."

    "We are not that close for you to show any concern. We work together at best and the only time we actually have amon perspective is when we asked dean about the special program.

    What are you doing here and why do you have answer to every one of my questions?"

    Vidyuth stood up and raised his hands.

    "Here I was, expecting some gratitude. Sorry for caring enough toe and check on you. And I am just saying how I would have done it. Anyway, I am leaving. Don''t take too long to recover, or you willg behind in the special program."

    After leaving Vidyuth sent a message to Sam stating that everything went perfectly.

    White recovered by the evening and as he walked out of that healing hall, he subconsciously started walking towards the city gate.

    The next thing he knew, he is standing inside the virtual reality room of the hub simting his battle with this new mysterious enemy.

    Sam had another great day and what made that day even better is when an announcement was made by the Deans of various academy. All the students from all the grades were asked to gather on the Academy grounds.

    Sam went there and Dean Wharton took the stage.

    "I am here to announce that the Pocket dimension which are put on hold are finally ready to open. This will start with the opening of the Pseudo Hell Pocket dimension that is under the joint control of the Olympian academies and some of the external territories.

    The pseudo hell realm will open exactly in one week and once the winners of the freshmen tournament who are qualified to enter that dimension finish their training, the rest of the pocket dimensions will start opening.

    As usual, there will be an announcement for any pocket dimension''s opening and if there are any changes in the way these dimensions operate.

    Now go back and enjoy. Sam, pleasee to my office."

    Just from the way Wharton spoke, it is apparent that he couldn''t be less interested in this whole farce.

    Sam went to the Dean''s office where along with Wharton Dove is also there.

    "Hi, it has been a long time." Dove greeted him with a smile.

    "Yeah, it has been a long time. Heard you were busy." Sam returned the greeting.

    "So, Sam as you know the Pseudo hell is opening up we just wanted to give you a headsup before you go in there."

    Dean Wharton cut in the middle. Dove who was about to say something was stumped.

    "Yeah, but as you might have known, I don''t really need much caution in the pseudo hell." Sam replied with a knowing smile

    Wharton nodded.

    "Of course, this headsup is not about what you need to do inside, rather what you might encounter while going inside or getting out. The actions of the Olympian families and organizations that control part of this pocket dimension are kind of weird.

    We also got some information that Noble league and Pearl are coborating to deal with you and it has something to do with the Pseudo hell.

    So, its better be careful."

    "Alright."

    "You can go."

    The conversation between Sam and Wharton was straight forward and it was done. Sam was about to leave when Dove spoke up in an exasperated tone.

    "Dean, is that all you want to say? That he has a threat and someone is thinking about harming him? Can''t you really think of anything else? Like what measures he needs to take? What kind of enemies he might encounter."

    Wharton put up a pouty face and said.

    "Why are you nagging me again? Don''t you think Sam is smart enough to ask about those things, if he wants to know? People say, I am old. But trust me, youg like my grandma. I can''t really tell the difference."

    Wharton grumbled,pletely unsuited for his age and the position.

    Dove sighed and looked at Sam.

    "We need to talk."

    Both of them walked out.

    "So, what do you want to talk about?"

    Sam asked Dove as they took a walk the campus.

    "Dean might have said the warning lightly, but you need to make sure that you are safe. You cannot trust the Noble league. I don''t know what prompted to target you, but they can stoop to any level.

    I wouldn''t be surprised if they even messed with the Pocket dimension inside.

    The pocket dimension is a restrictive space with only the Grade 1 student entry ess. It will be difficult for you to get any help from the Academy, but the Olympian academies have all the remaining ranks under their control."

    "Its fine. I am always ready for these things. And I don''t even have to be, when I am dealing with the fellow first graders." Sam replied.

    "Of course, I know that you are leagues above. But the insides of the pseudo hell are different. It is a different experience. Its job is to simte the hell refinement some cultivators used to go through before breaking through to the Divine ne.

    I have been to the pseudo hell and I assure you the experience is unpleasant.

    I don''t know why the Dean just brushed off about this."

    "Well, he is sure that I can handle it."

    "Come on, no one can be sure about it. It is such a unique experience that it cannot bepared to anything else."

    "Really? What about the real hell refinement?"

    Sam asked and Dove froze in the spot.

    Sam continued.

    "There is a reason why dean didn''t bother me with pseudo hell thing. When you have seen the real thing, a simtion won''t scare you that much."

 Chapter 2087 Meeting

    Chapter 2087 Meeting

    Dove looked at Sam intently and asked.

    "You know about the real one? How can you possibly know that? It is a practice that has been stopped centuries ago. Are you joking with me?"

    "Nope. I have been through the real thing. Not just me, there are a few more people within the Academy realm who have done so. So, don''t sweat it. I am sure I can handle whatever a simtion can offer.

    In fact, I am looking forward to it."

    Dove wanted to say Sam is lying, but his tone and expressions suggested otherwise.

    "How is it possible?" Dove asked.

    Sam smiled once again and asked.

    "Even if I tell you, it would be very hard to believe and I am not in a mood to go through the quest of convincing you. Let''s just say it is a well-preserved secret.

    Anyway, I want to ask you something."

    "What is it?"

    "Is there any time in the history of the Academy realm where the academies waged wars against each other?"

    Dove frowned and asked.

    "Why do you ask?"

    "No, just wondering. With how chaotic the things are, I wouldn''t be surprised if the academies take action against each other. What if one academy tries to break the rules and do something to the students of other academies? What would happen?"

    Dove thought for a moment and said.

    "There are actually incidents like that before. However, they wouldn''t be registered as the wars between academies, instead all the events that are part of the war are recorded individually.

    For example, you must have read about the battle of Draconic dimension."

    "Yeah, I read about it."

    "It was two academiespeting to conquer a pocket dimension. It is between the Apollo Academy and Agni Academy. The conflict started way before that and rightfully the dimension should have belonged to Agni Academy.

    However, the Apollo academy students fought with them to conquer that dimension as part of the ongoing war.

    Not only did they lose, Agni academy even retaliated by conquering one of the external territories under the Apollo Academy. They suffered some serious loss of resources."

    "So, wars happen in the guise of rivalries andpetitions. Good to know. Has the Gambler academy has been in any wars before?"

    "I believe there is one after a decade or so of Gambler Academy''s establishment, but after that nobody wants a war like that with the Gambler''s Academy."

    "Really? With all the heat they give Gambler''s Academy, they didn''t challenge it to that extent?"

    "No. It is said that after the first war, the Gambler Academy left a deep impression on the other Academies. They didn''t want a war after that."

    "That''s impressive. I wonder if I can get an urate record of that."

    "Sam, if you are thinking of doing something stupid, it is better for you to let me know now."

    "Not really."

    "Then, why are you asking these questions?"

    "As you can see I am great at pissing people off and I have no intention of stopping it. However, I am good at ying within the rules, but I doubt the same can be applicable to the Zeus Academy. I wanted to know if the Gambler Academy will have my back if pushes to shove.

    But now that I think about it, I highly doubt it. All I had was increasing hostility from the other members since the day I joined. I doubt you guys will be involved."

    "That''s not true." Dove stopped walking and spoke.

    Sam turned back and looked at her, waiting for her to speak.

    "No matter, what kind of differences we have between each other, that is all the business of Gambler Academy. When ites to the outsiders, we are always one.

    There is a reason why the Gambler''s Academy doesn''t participate in the externalpetitions that much. It is because thepetition within the Academy is way too high. You might have received the most hostility this year, but every year there is one or the other who attracted attention just like you.

    Of course, you were a bit over the toppared to them.

    In short, all I want to say is, if the Zeus Academy or any other academy thinks they can get away with harming our students, you are wrong.

    All that will happen is the world will be reminded once again, why they never wanted a war with Gambler''s Academy in the first ce."

    She walked off.

    Sam just shrugged and muttered.

    "Good to know and you guys better get ready."

    Sam left and the next day was pretty uneventful. Everything was normal and the next day after that is the meeting between Sam and Ivar''s friends.

    They all came on time and Sam was already waiting for them. It is a group of eight people. There are five men, including Ivar and three women. All of them had an aura just as dangerous as Ivar. Different but equally dangerous.

    "Wee everyone, please take a seat."

    Ivar smiled and shook Sam''s hand before speaking.

    "Everyone, this is the young man I told you about. Sam. The creator of the hub, current grade 1 student of the Gambler Academy and the most dominant student that every existed in the history of Academy realm.

    If you think that we pissed off instructors, you haven''t see what this guy has done until now.

    Just for his sake, let''s introduce ourselves one by one. Even though he knows me, I will start.

    "I am Ivar. Former Student of Thor Academy. Divine ne Consummate Stage cultivation, Initial Stage."

    Sam nodded at him. That is Ivar''s strength. When he left the Thor Academy, he was at the peak of Divine ne Transcendent stage and at that very stage he killed at instructor who was at Divine ne Consummate stage.

    It was his most famous feat.

    No one in the current Academy realm knows his exact cultivation level. Even the Elder that he chopped the hand of is a person Middle stage consummate stage cultivation.

    The person next to Ivar raised his cup and greeted Sam before introducing himself.

    "I am Icarus. Former Student of Zeus Academy. Current Cultivation Divine ne Consummation, Initial stage. Nice to meet you."

    Sam nodded at him. He is the one that was suppressed by Elders of the Zeus Academy. The one who first found out about the incident the Elders caused.

    "You can call me Lan, Former Student of Hou Yi''s Academy. Divine ne Consummation Initial stage."

    The woman that sat next to Icarus spoke.

    They went to introduce themselves the rest are all at Divine ne Peak stage Transcendence.

    Daksh a man formerly from Indra''s Academy in Santan Region. The same region as Karthikeya Academy, Aranya Academy, etc.

    Michael from the Archangel academy. Khufu a man formerly from Set''s Academy

    Miko a woman formerly from Susano''s Academy

    Ayita from Coyote Academy.

    In the Academy realm, there are four major regions which are upied by four big groups of gods. The biggest them is the Olympian region. Followed by Xia, Norse and then Sanatan.

    The remaining area is divided into four more regions apart from the major four and the Archangel Academy, Susano''s Academy, Coyote Academy are some of the best Academies that don''t fall under the four major regions.

    After introducing themselves to Sam, Sam also reciprocated their greeting.

    "I am sure, you all have your doubts. After all, why should you be following orders or taking instructions from a Grade 1 student, meanwhile you guys were legends in the Academy realm. Your stories are still popr among the students.

    However, all I can say is that I am your only shot at achieving what you want to achieve."

    Icarus cleared his throat and looked at Sam.

    He has dirty blonde hair and he looked way too handsome. If not for the bloodthirsty aura around him, people would mistake him for a pretty boy.

    "I wouldn''t ask too many questions. Ivar told me what you are trying to do and it is undeniable that your goals along with everyone''s goal at this table.

    But as you said, your cultivation level is way too low. It is hard for us to imagine how you can assist us. And all of us here might work with each other asionally, we exchange information ande to each other''s aid when necessary.

    Still, we are used to work alone. Much less working together, you are asking us to work together under your instructions.

    Asking for a little convincing is not too much, I believe."

    "Of course, I can understand that.

    The first thing I can offer you is information."

    "Information?"

    Lan asked a bit doubtfully. She is someone who is skilled in scouting and gathering information. Even the small force she manages is specialized in it and there isn''t muchpetition for her.

    Sam smiled and waved his hand a few formation discs flew over andnded on the table, projecting virtual screens.

    A video is ying. It is Elder Minsk talking to his subordinates.

 Chapter 2088 Assurance

    Chapter 2088 Assurance

    "How can you lose sight of Icarus? Is he a little kid in a market fair? You only had one fucking task and you lost him?" Elder Minsk is yelling at his subordinate. His breathing is erratic and his beard is shaking along with him in anger.

    Icarus realized who they are. The subordinate was supposed to be the one that kept an eye on Icarus while he stayed in seclusion. Icarus knew about his presence from day one, but he ignored him. And the moment Ivar called and asked him toe, he slipped past that subordinate.

    Of course, he is even more sure of Elder Minsk and the incident they are talking about.

    So, he is surprised that Sam had such a clear video about this.

    "You managed to record this?" Icarus asked.

    "No, this is live. This is happening right now in Elder Minsk''s office within Zeus Academy."

    Everyone froze for a second. They couldn''t believe what he said.

    "You are kidding, aren''t you?" Michael asked as he focused his gaze on Sam. He could feel some kind of weird sense enveloping his body. "Of course, not. This is a meeting to discuss out potential partnership. Why would I joke around in such an important situation. This is what''s happening within the Elder''s office as we speak.

    Not just that¡­"

    Sam snapped his fingers and the image changed. A dozen screens appeared out of nowhere and it showed different incidents happening at the same time all over the city.

    And one of the screens showed the room they are in. They can see themselves in that video.

    "I am using my own technology to make this happen. Before I proceed forward to exin, I am hoping that you can maintain utmost secrecy regarding this. Right now, I cannot afford having this information leaked to the outside world."

    "I can vouch for them." Ivar replied to Sam''s concern.

    "Very well then, let me exin how my informationwork works.

    You must have heard about the hub already. And as Ivar mentioned, I am the creator behind this. For people, the hub is a ce to train and improve and even for the most cynical, Hub is just a ce to rip people off.

    But the primary purpose of the hub has always been information gathering.

    The day of the opening, the metal puppets have been sent to every person in the region. In fact, they are even sent to the criminals that are in the hiding within the Academy realm.

    They are sent along with the wrist bands that connect with these puppets.

    Now almost everyone owns a metal puppet that is connected to the hub.

    Most people ignore these puppets because of its usefulness and for some people it is even a novelty. However, what they don''t know is the puppet acts as my eyes.

    Right now, the puppet that belongs to Elder Minsk is broadcasting what is happening to the Hub and in turn me.

    Of course, that is not the only information we could gain."

    Sam snapped his finger once again and an image of a person is shown.

    "I am sure, you know who this is Icarus." Sam said and Icarus nodded.

    "A current grade 3 member of Noble league. He is the heir of one of the ns that is directly under the Zeus Realm. They contribute a lot of money to the Academy in the form of donations and they help organize a bunch of Olympian tournaments within their territory.

    They also have a lot of graduates over Olympian academies.

    His name is Winx, I think."

    "Yes, you are absolutely right."

    The next moment, a bunch of information appeared beside the image of Winx. The information is detailed. His battle techniques, cultivation techniques, energy flow, ws in the energy flow. Openings, his stamina, energy usage for each and every one of his moves.

    "Everyone who uses the machines in the hub are allowing me free ess to their moves and the more time they spend the more knowledge I have about them. The arcade machines, the virtual reality simtions, everything is designed to collect as much information from them as possible.

    You can also find out exactly how they react to different situations.:

    Sam changed the screen once again and it showed the recording of Winx training in the virtual simtion.

    "There are several simtion packs that these people to use to train themselves. But honestly these are just different scenarios that I created to understand how they will react.

    As you are all experienced fighters, you should know what you can do with all this information."

    The room is silent. No one is answering his question. They are all staring at the screen. Only Ivar is looking at them contently.

    Even he had a simr expression when Sam first demonstrated this to him. However, these people are more surprised than him. He is d that he was much moreposed than they are now.

    Sam snapped his finger to make the screen disappear and only then did they finallye back to his senses.

    "How are you able to do this? How did the elders and Deans didn''t find out about this?"

    "Its all smoke and mirrors. People want to see what they want to see and I show it to them. My persona, the Joker gives high and mighty speeches about teaching and learning.

    There are people with suspicions, including the Deans and Elders, but they are unable to open my technology, because of the traps I set. If they try to force it, it will be destroyed.

    And my methods totallyply with the Academy realm''s rules. I am a legitimate business, I am not a shady dealer operating it from under wraps. In fact, a lot of people know that I am collecting information, including the deans and the Elders through the hub.

    But they don''t know that I am focusing on their weaknesses and they believe that information is being collected by the formation of the simtion rooms and it will stay there.

    In short, it is just a big borate scam designed to turn them into fools.

    I am sure you can use this information to achieve your goal of crippling the Academy realm. The whole point of the academies in this realm is to be teaching grounds for the soldiers created by the gods. To cripple this academy all you have to do is make that purpose meaningless.

    I am already on that path.

    The only reason I am trying to cooperate with you is because your current strength and ambitions will lessen my work load by a lot.

    You all have personal agendas against one academy or the other. Use my resources and go ahead with your personal revenge. I don''t mind. Just help me out in the way by following a few of my instructions. What do you think?"

    They stayed silent for a moment and finally, Icarus was the one who spoke.

    "Sam, what you did is amazing, to say the least. It is something none of us would have been able to aplish. However, it is still not enough assurance. Many people hereid down a great amount of groundwork to achieve their goals.

    For them to abandon them and work with you¡­ even with all that you have to offer, they might want some assurance."

    "Of course¡­"

    Sam went on to discuss the cooperation and they all signed soul contracts after some time. Once a bunch of contracts are signed, they are now in a proper partnership.

    "As the first step of our partnership, let''s drag those elders out into the open. Ivar is already working on it, so the rest of you can get in on it. Since Icarus knows about the Olympian realm and will also take charge of this area in the future, it is better if you take over the lead position on this from Ivar. I already prepared a couple of ns regarding this.

    The Elders already noticed Icarus'' disappearance and if you are not spotted by them, they will proceed with the drastic measures. I already thought they would have made a move on Ivar by now, but they didn''t.

    I think we need to give an additional push. I rmend, letting them know that Ivar was the reason for Icarus'' disappearance."

    After discussing a few details, Sam left the room. The rest of them all disguised themselves and left one after the other.

    While they were leaving, Sam asked Ivar and Lan for a personal favor.

    "In the Norse realm and Xia realm, you will find two people. Donner in Thor Academy and Akhil in Sun Wukong''s Academy. If you don''t mind, can you guys give them a message for me?"

    The both of them agreed naturally and Sam sent the message that he wanted to send.

    Since the announcement for the Pseudo hell and pocket dimensions was made, he is sure these two are already here.

    So, he has to give them the warnings regarding the Hub.

 Chapter 2089 To the Pseudo Hell

    <h4>Chapter 2089 To the Pseudo Hell</h4>

    In the next few days, Akhil and Donner visited Sam.

    Akhil and Sam are okay, they don''t have exactly great friendship, but they did spend some time together and he was also the person Sam was wary of besides Noah. Akhil has always been on his own. He never teamed up with anyone.

    And he is also proficient in beast taming. Most important of all, he is taken care of by Sun Wukong. Sam would be an idiot to think that any guy that God-sponsored is not a tough nut to crack.

    However, their rtionship is still amiable and Sam hoped it would stay well.

    On the other hand, Donner''s situation is still as awkward as ever. The attempt he made on Sam all those years ago, is still haunting him like crazy. The rest of the yers are not as friendly to him and he didn''t want to be associated with Dayus who always had handouts.

    So, this put him in a weird situation.

    And even weirder is that Sam was the only one who stayed a bit nice to him. So, he was d that Sam gave him a warning about the Hub. Even without Sam asking, he directly promised that he will never anything rted to hub to anyone.

    After that was done, it was soon time to go to the Pseudo hell.

    Sam was looking forward to it for a long time.

    It has been dyed because the yers hadn''te to the Academy realm, which is kind of a bitch move, but he had to wait because he couldn''t get even with the gods. Not yet.

    All the candidates eligible for it were gathered. It was mostly Sam and his friends except for White and Bronte. In the tournament just one of his friends had to step back and let Philip win. It was Saber Monarch.

    With Noah''s involvement, they had to give away one of the top ten spots. At that time, it didn''t matter much. If he had known that something like Pseudo hell existed and top ten is the way, he would have definitely wrestled to get Saber Monarch a spot on that roster.

    Still, Saber Monarch was fine.

    "I had seen my hell in that maze for a long time. I don''t think I need another one." Was what he said. Sam did promise him that he willpensate with an equally good training.

    He of course agreed with glee.

    Once everyone gathered, the Dean of the Zeus Academy finally came.

    "Hello, nice to meet you all. Let''s not waste any time. I am sure all of you are way too excited to try this. So, I will get straight to the point and give you the notes that you need to take."

    He didn''t expect the students to greet him back, so he didn''t even give them a chance and just continued on with the rules.

    "As many of you might have learned from your Academies, the pseudo hell is based on the concept of Hell''s purification or Hell''s refinement.

    It was an age-old practice that was followed by cultivators thousands of years ago¡­."

    He went on to exin the Hell''s refinement a bit and continued.

    "Pseudo hell was designed to simte a simr experience.

    When you are inside, you will find a foreign energy trying to corrupt your body. At least, you will feel that way. However, it was actually the energy extracted from the blood of Divine Beasts that specialize in having strong bodies.

    That aura is good for your nourishment of physical body.

    The more you umte it, the stronger your body will feel after the refinement isplete. Of course, as that energy umtes, you will have a hard time using his divine energy and spiritual energy.

    And when you umte enough, you wouldn''t be able to use your energies and will have to rely purely on your physical strength.

    After more umtion, even that will not be enough.

    Apart from this energy, there is also a hint of hell''s actual corruption mixed in. Along with the nourishing energy this will also umte, but a miniscule amount with no side effects.

    This will help you refine both your body and soul.

    The moment, you are unable to fight inside and lose consciousness, you will be transported outside."

    He paused a bit and let the students digest the information.

    "Now, I will tell you what you have to fight."

    Everyone paused and waited in anticipation.

    "You are going to fight your past. Every single sin you havemitted, taking lives, destroying people, causing harm, to animals, to people, whatever living creature that you have hurt either physically or emotionally, you will have to face it again.

    In actual hell''s refinement, these will be formed by the hell''s corrupt energy, however here, they are mostly virtual projections conjured up of the nourishment aura.

    You need to fight as much as you and umte as much aura as you can.

    And don''t worry aboutsting longer than your peers. The amount of time you spend there and the amount of energy you umte are not necessarily proportional. There were times when someone spent an hour but umted more than someone who spent a day.

    It all depends on how epting you are of that sin and how decisive you are of erasing it and how much your sin you have destroyed in there.

    I hope everyone understood. If you have any questions, this is the time to ask."

    Sam didn''t raise his hand. Neither his friends nor White. But Bronte had a bunch of questions. He even felt a bit embarrassed for asking so much, when the rest of his peers arepletely oblivious to this.

    "One more thing before you go.." Dean continued his tirade.

    "This pocket dimension doesn''t just belong to our Academy realm. It is one of the vaster realms that we needed numbers to conquer and for that reason, we had to share it with some of the Olympian powers.

    God Hades who made the dimension was generous enough and gave two entrances. One to us in the realm and the other that allows people from the Olympian powers to enter.

    Since the pocket dimension is opening, the other side will send some of their people as well. Their quota is less so there would only be a few people, some even powerful than you.

    They will not cause you any trouble, I hope you can extend the same courtesy to them as well."

    Thest sentence was clearly directed at Sam. Dean looked dead in his eyes when saying it. Sam rolled his eyes.

    Even though he would like to kill everyst Olympian follower, he knew when to pick his fights. This is for his friends. Not time for him to take care of his personal grudges. Of course, if the others really do try to make a move, he couldn''t be med for just ying along, right?

    After the long speech that almost made everyone feel sleepy, the dean finally led them to the pocket dimension. It was out of the city and they had to fly deep into the forest before they arrived at a valley that didn''t look like it belonged in that lush forest that surrounded it.

    The valley looked like the manifestation of death. It exuded the death energy like it was hell itself. The stenching from it was unbearable for the students.

    Except Sam. His vampire bloodline riled up inside his body as if it found its long-lost sweetheart.

    Sam calmed himself down and followed the Dean who led the way. There is not a single living thing in that vast valley.

    Not a single de of grass. Everyone is vignt about the death energy corrosion. Even at their cultivation levels, it was that bad.

    Soon, they arrived at the deepest part of the valley and there a young man sat on a chair with a book in his hands. He is still a Grade 2 student by his cultivation level. It is a bit surprising seeing that they let someone as weak as him be a guard.

    The young man looked at the group and smiled. As he already expected the question to pop in their minds, he said.

    "The pocket dimension wouldn''t allow anyone above Grade 1 to enter. Even if the higher grades came and get me, they couldn''t do much about entering the dimension. As for the lower ones, I can stop them."

    "What if a higher grade person apanies the lower grade person?" Philip is the one who asked.

    The young man didn''t take offense and just smiled.

    "Even then, all I have to do is kill the lower-grade students. All it takes is one hit and I don''t even have to be the one tond it."

    The rest of the students felt a bit puzzled. Sam said.

    "Traps."

    They came to the realization.

    "You are one of the select few who realized it. You must be Sam."

 Chapter 2090 Interruption (Happy New Year)(Mass Release)

    <h4>Chapter 2090 Interruption (Happy New Year)(Mass Release)</h4>

    Sam smiled and spoke.

    "I indeed am. What gave it away?"

    "That cocky expression of yours."

    The atmosphere instantly turned awkward.

    "Enough, Bhim." Dean cleared his throat and stopped the conversation. Bhim, the senior looked at Sam and licked his lips. The initial mellow and schrly aura he had was gone.

    Dean stood to the side and gestured to Sam to enter the Portal that leads to the pseudo-hell. Sam walked in slowly. As soon as he entered, he found himself standing in the vast expanse of cknd. It felt extremely familiar.

    Just like how it was back in the real hell.

    He took a deep breath and let his defenses go down a bit. An unfamiliar aura invaded his body and then it became familiar. It indeed felt like the hell''s corruption. However, it is fundamentally different. Hell''s aura felt more sinister, however this one felt a bit weird.

    It felt more engaging and friendly. That is all he could describe it as. One thing he noticed is that his beast bloodlines are engaging with this aura well. It seems like a lot of that blood must have been from the preys of his beasts.

    The rest of the students walked in. All nine of them stood in the middle of nowhere and at that moment, the portal closed behind them.

    At that moment, red screens appeared in front of all of them. They only had two options. Get out, Go forward.

    That is all they had, not even a sentence exining where they are getting out to and where they are going forward to. However, it was already in the briefing given by Dean of the Zeus Academy and they all pressed Go forward.

    At this moment, a huge figure appeared in front of them. It is purely conjured up of dark aura that surrounded them. It is a humanoid figure sitting on a throne made of Dark ebony. They could actually understand what the throne was supposed to be made of, even though it was conjured up of smoke.

    It was that clear, except for the face of the person sitting on it.

    Bronte immediately fell on his knees.

    "Greetings to the King of Underworld and ruler of the dead. Lord Hades."

    His voice quivered as he greeted the illusory figure. The rest of them however, didn''t have a reaction.

    "Wee all of you to pseudo hell."

    Hadespletely ignored Bronte''s devoted greeting as well as the rest of the students''ck of respect. He just continued with what he wanted to say.

    "Since you chose to go forward, in five minutes, pick a spot and mediate. Your body will be in an ethereal state for a while as your soul connects with this world. When the connection is made, all of you will be able to summon your sins and fight them here.

    It is advised to sit a few miles apart.

    Everyone will have their own hell to go through and their own fights to battle. Everyone, except you."

    His eyesnded on Sam and everyone turned to look at him. Sam smiled and Hades continued.

    "I am sure, I don''t have to exin why."

    "Of course."

    "Good, stay if you want to. But you wouldn''t be able to connect with the pseudo hell¡­" Hades stopped himself from speaking and disappeared. Sam knew the rest of his sentence.

    He can only connect with the real hell.

    Since he already made a connection before, Pseudo hell wouldn''t have any effect of him. The refinement it provides falls way too short. And Sam doesn''t really want to do it anyway. He is here to just help his friends out.

    Soon everyone picked a spot far away from each other. Sam hovered in the sky so that he could get as much view as he could as he observed his friends. He wanted to help their friends umte as much nourishment energy as possible so that their bodies would transform.

    The Dean warned that if they take in more by force, it will be hard for their bodies to digest it. It would dissipate and during the dissipation process, they will still be unable to do anything else with their spiritual and Divine energies.

    So, to avoid that Sam created a n back in the hub.

    As he waited soon the students felt a connection with the dimension. Sam also closed his eyes and focused his senses on his friends.

    He could feel the nourishing aura moving towards all of the students except for him. However, at this moment something made Sam extremely vignt.

    There was a turbulent energy movement high in the sky and it is followed by spatial fluctuations. rm bells rang in his head and he turned to look at his friends, they all suspended in the air, their bodiespletely left there for hanging.

    This wasn''t supposed to happen.

    Once they made connection and gathered enough nourishment energy the sins should be conjured around them. However, now they are in this suspended state.

    He could feel that their souls have lost control over their bodies. He zoomed to the nearest person, Watt and was about to touch him to check on his condition.

    *ZAP*

    A weird force repelled him away and Sam fell on the ground a few meters away. He looked at his friends in worry. Whatever is happening, it isn''t a good thing. He flew forward once again and ced his hand on the invisible barrier surrounding Watt.

    He activated energy vision trying to understand it.

    But he stopped his actions in the middle. His eyes widened in horror as he felt a chill run down his spine. He looked into the sky and a spatial crack appeared. However, like the regr spatial cracks he has seen before, it wasn''t turbulent and it also didn''t have chaotic spatial energy.

    Instead, the energy he felt from it was extremely familiar to him.

    "Hell''s Corruption. How?"

    He is very familiar with this. He doesn''t even know how long he spent in that hell all by himself. But he cannot forget it even if he wanted to. His body instinctually reacted to it and tried to absorb it. He is that familiar with that energy.

    He saw as the hell''s corruption materialized and spreading to different students. His mind is running at full speed and at this moment another fluctuation urred. This time, it is not in the sky, rather it is right in front of Sam. In the middle of the empty space.

    The spatial fluctuation turned into a massive portal and he saw a familiar figure walking out of it.

    "Pearl."

    He muttered with a frown as he looked at her. She looked at Sam in disbelief.

    "No, it shouldn''t be possible. How are you still normal?" She asked out loud as several more portals opened up around Sam andrge groups of people came out of them.

    Sam looked at Pearl and then his friends.

    "What the fuck did you? This is not nourishment aura. This is real Hell''s corruption."

    He asked her directly. Pearl still looked at him shock and gritted her teeth in anger and frustration. The people are stilling out of the portals.

    "First you speak. How did you escape this suspended state?"

    She asked in return.

    Sam didn''t answer her. He just looked at his friends in worry. Right now, as far as he could see nothing is happening to them. Their bodies also seemed normal even though the hells corruption is creeping up to them.

    They are at least physically okay, but the souls¡­ that is the question that kept on bugging him. He needs answers.

    As he was thinking, a cloud appeared high above in the sky right beneath the spatial crack that emitted this hell''s corruption.

    And within that cloud eight humanoid figures formed. They are the students that got stuck in that suspended state. Right now, all of them could see their own bodies floating in the air. They were all worried and almost panicked.

    Sam''s friends saw him standing on the ground looking at them. They could see the worry in his eyes from up there. They could also see therge group of people that surrounded them.

    At this moment, another humanoid figure conjured in the middle of the cloud.

    The humanoid figure looked tall and muscr. Standing at almost eight feet. But the body is lean and he held a sword in one hand and a shield in another. He had long hair and a beard. He looked like a person who was born to fight.

    "Greetings my dear contestants. Under the special requests of some devotees, lord of underworld Hades, has interrupted your pseudo-hell refinement and now you are to undergo a special trial if you want to continue with your body refinement process.

    I am your examiner.

    In this trial, you will be going against me. I will transform in to your worst fear and you should win against me, which means you should win against your worst fear to pass the trial."

 Chapter 2091 Arrival

    <h4>Chapter 2091 Arrival</h4>

    Sam stared in silence as that new humanoid figure spoke to his friends.

    His expression was nk as he waited for that man to continue speaking.

    "Of course, there is a twist in here. While you wait here, your sin will already start manifesting out and it will not just use that shitty nourishment aura. It will also use the proper hell''s corruption. And the longer you wait to finish your trial, the stronger the conjured-up sins will be at the same time your bodies will slowly umte hell''s corruption.

    After you are finished with the trial here, you will have to go back into your body that is already full of corruption and fight the sin.

    Until you fight the sinpletely you will not be able to leave this ce. And if you cannot fight it all off, you will be dead."

    The exnation has ended and the cloud expanded covering the whole sky. Sam and the rest couldn''t even see the spatial crack in the sky anymore. Sam couldn''t also see his friends. He kicked the ground and flew into the air.

    As soon as he touched the cloud, he was once again repelled, just like what happened when he touched Watt''s body. Hended on the ground and he still had an expression of worry. But at least, now he has some information.

    Even though the soul trial and the conditions are worrisome, he trusted in his friends toe out of it. As long as they are not bound by that mental trial, then all is well.

    They coulde back to their bodies.

    As for the sin in the physical world, it doesn''t matter. Sam can help them out. Whether he could touch the sin or not is secondary, he is sure that he can help them out. One way or the other. However, it is inevitable that his mind is now clouded with anger and rage.

    His body emitted killing intent with no restraint.

    He looked at Pearl and therge group of people spread across the vast area.

    "You¡­. This is your doing, isn''t it? Why?" He asked Pearl. His voice is ice cold and even with all the people that gathered around her, she felt targeted, she felt like a prey.

    He walked into the close the distance and looked her in the eyes in the whole time. They are now just a few feet away.

    The feeling of fear that put Pearl in daze for a moment. She shook herself awake and gritted her teeth in anger. She felt ashamed by how cowardly she acted.

    "You¡­ This was supposed to be the perfect n. How the fuck did you escape the suspended state? Right now, your body should be hanging in the air like theirs and your soul should be in that grey cloud fighting the worst fear of your life.

    How can you walk around in the Pseudo hell?"

    She almost yelled at the end ofst sentence. Sam didn''t answer her, instead he just repeated the question.

    "Why?"

    Pearl finally lost it. She kicked the ground in frustration, clenched her fists and gritted her teeth so hard, her gums bled.

    "Why??YOU DARE ASK ME WHY? SINCE THE DAY YOU ARRIVED AT THE ACADEMY. YOU HAVE BEEN ON MY TAIL.

    YOU ARE CONSTANTLY GOING TO AGAINST ME. YOU ARE SPOLING EVERY PLAN I MAKE. YOU CAME HERE DELIBERATELY TO MESS WITH MY PLANS.

    I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE RISING STAR OF THIS GENERATION. THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE MY ERA. I WAS SUPPOSED TO LEAD THE OLYMPIANS INTO A GLORIOUS FUTURE.

    BUT LOOK AT ME NOW.

    IT IS ALL BECAUSE OF YOU.

    IT IS YOU WHO DID THIS.

    YOU DELIBERATELY CAME HERE TO SABOTAGE MY PLANS. YOU CAME HERE TO DESTROY MY FUTURE. YOU CAME HERE TO BE MY ENEMY.

    AND YOU PUSHED ME TO SUCH A DESPERATE STATE THAT I HAVE TO SACRIFICE SO MANY PAWNS THAT WANTED TO ACQUIRE. BECAUSE OF YOU I HAVE TO KILL ALL THESE TOP TEN STUDENTS ALONG WITH YOU.

    IT IS ALL BECAUSE OF YOU.."

    Pearl really lost it.

    Sam sighed and looked into the sky. He took a deep breath and asked while still looking at the grey cloud.

    "What about White, Vidyuth? Are they not part of your team? Didn''t they support you in your stupid n since the start?" Sam''s voice is calm and heavy.

    "DO YOU THINK I WANT TO KILL THEM? IT WAS YOU. TO BE ABLE TO KILL YOU, I NEEDED TO SACRIFICE THEIR LIVES. TO GAIN THE POWER TO KILL YOU. IT IS ALL ON YOU."

    "And this huge group of people? What are they here for?"

    Pearl finally calmed down a bit and spoke with a?smirk.

    "They are here to ensure that every one of you are killed. Do you know what happens if sins of two people ovep? They will be tangible. Usually a person''s sin can only be attacked by the person, and the sin can only attack the person that conjured it.

    But once the ovep urs, they can attack anyone in the realm and they will be stronger as well. Their powers multiply."

    "So, you brought how many¡­.?" Sam paused and gave a nce before saying.

    "Around five hundred people here just to ovep the sins and attack these people? Didn''t you hear the announcement? Once a sin is conjured, the person cannot exit the dimension unless it was culled."

    "That is for you, bloody idiot. Only for the people that are in the suspended state. All these people have to do is say that they quit and use a token, so that they could escape. Of course, they have to wait until the cloud is cleared¡­"

    Sam shook his head a bit and said.

    "You know, Pearl. Your n really does seem perfect. You almost covered all the bases."

    "Of course, I did. But once again, it is you. You fucking bastard that came and destroyed everything. You still didn''t answer how you weren''t suspended. But it is just as well. I will beat the crap out of you and make you spill the beans."

    "Of course, that being a great w, there are some more things that you didn''t consider. As a person more experienced than you, let me tell you a few things."

    "What?"

    "First, when you execute a trap like this, you shouldn''t waste your time talking. I might be a variable here, but that shouldn''t faze you this much to the point you are just reciting your whole n to me."

    "What does it matter? Do you think you can kill past the five hundred people? These are the best of the best soldiers groomed by the best Olympian families. Even for you, it is impossible to escape from here. You can no longer hinder my growth." Pearl replied.

    Sam smirked at this and spoke

    "On that note, let me just say the second point. Do you really think, I was doing everything that I did, just to deter you? You of all people? Do you really have such a high opinion of yourselves pearl? Let me give you a reality check¡­"

    Sam paused and walked close to her. Just a few steps and they could grab each other throats.

    "Destroying you, is this easy for me."

    *BANG* *BOOM*

    Sam whipped out a handgun and shot. Not pearl though, but the person behind her. The bullet pierced the head and exploded. The cultivator fell on the ground lifeless and headless.

    The bullet went past Pearl''s cheek and she could almost feel the tail wind leaving a slight cut.

    Sam already put the hand gun back in his storage. She couldn''t even see what happened. She was horrified and her whole body is instantly covered in sweat.

    "K¡­KILL HIM."

    She yelled inmand. But before they could make a move, Sam yelled back.

    "STOP. I AM NOT DONE SPEAKING YET."

    His voice is louder and lot more intimidating than Pearl''s and they even stopped in their tracks.

    "It is not good to interrupt when people are talking Pearl. Let me tell you thest thing I wanted to say. In fact, it is a question."

    "¡­"

    Pearl just stood there speechless.

    "Do you think you can stop a grim reaper that came directly from hell to reap the life of a target with these five hundred people?"

    Pearl frowned. Confusion and doubt were apparent in her eyes. The answer is obviously no. But she didn''t understand why Sam asked such a question.

    "If you don''t think so, what made you think you can stop me with these five hundred people?"

    *BOOM*

    An explosive shockwave spread from his body throwing the people in his immediate surroundings back by a few feet. A big enough empty circle formed around him. His energy surged and a few weapons appeared in his hands.

    The shadow sword in his right and the reaper resting on his left shoulder with its hilt on his left. A spear lodged itself in front of him in the ground and a whip coiled around his waist and neck like a snake.

    Sam''s killing intent spread around and the opponents could almost see it visibly surrounding him.

    Even though they surrounded Sam from all directions, including the air, they felt like they were the ones stuck inside this ce with him.

 Chapter 2092 One Vs Five Hundred

    <h4>Chapter 2092 One Vs Five Hundred</h4>

    Sam''s killing intent made the five hundred odd group of people feel a bit suffocated.

    They even found a problem with breathing properly. Its like a beast that is infinitely stronger than them is looking at them. Locking them down like they are it''s prey. What will happen if the beast finally shows its maw?

    They are about to find out.

    *BOOM*

    Sam kicked the ground andunched himself into the air. The weapons on him flew into the different directions. All of them are spirit weapons and with their currently level, they are very much able to levitate and travel a bit.

    He only held Shadow sword in his hands. In the air, he came face to face with one of the opponents. That person gave out the dark energy and Sam''s body changed a bit. Dark elemental energy surged inside and the shadow sword is also riled up.

    It could sense Sam''s raging bloodthirst and is resonating to it.

    *SWISH*

    Sam swung the sword at the opponent.

    "QUICK. ALL OF YOU. COME BACK TO YOUR SENSES. ATTACK HIM. KILL HIM."

    Pearl yelled on top of her lungs freeing the group from the stupor. The opponent in front of Sam, blocked Sam''s sword with his own. But he was pushed back by the force. He didn''t wait and he didn''t let the surprise stop him.

    He dashed forward and swung his sword again. Sam didn''t even look fazed.

    He blocked and deflected the attack, at the same time¡­.

    *BOOM*

    Arge ming dragon conjured purely of fire came at him from a side.

    *CLANG*

    He deflected the sword of the opponent and the resulting sword ray cut the ming dragon in half and then it disappeared. Dissipated into the atmosphere and at the moment, a man followed behind that dragon. mes glowing in his hands.

    Sam gave him a side-eyed nce and focused on the current opponent once again.

    *CLANK* *CLANK* *CLANK*

    Three deflections, three dark elemental energy infused sword rays, moved in three directions, stopping the advance of opponents from three fronts and the next thing they knew, Sam stood in front of his opponent with his sword.

    *SWISH*

    A single swing and the dark sword ray severed his head off the body and in that same motion, he let the sword go.

    *SWOOSH*

    The sword cut through the air and went to the fire element user who sent that ming dragon just quarter of the second ago.

    The opponent dodged the sword, but the next moment.

    *BOOM*

    The head of the dead opponent was set on golden mes and flew towards him.?The ming skull hit the opponent in head and¡­

    *BOOM*

    It exploded again. Void-style explosion infused with the golden mes. The first explosion was followed by the second energy explosion of the golden mes which burst the head like a watermelon.

    All of this happened within half a second.

    This stopped the people at the forefront of the advance stop in their tracks.

    Sam is expressionless and looks at them. Pearl is still on the ground looking at him. Eyes wide in shock. She has seen Sam in action, but this time it''s different. Previously, Sam tried to show off, he was amused while fighting his opponents, but right now he is just aiming to kill.

    Now she understood, he never really put much effort into any of his fights. Except for fighting with White, he never really cared about any other fight. She saw in just half a second, Sam killed two of the elite fighters in the same cultivation level.

    These two fighters were groomed to be killers since they were toddlers by the ns and they died as if they were pure mortals that don''t have an ounce of power to fight back.

    In that daze, what she didn''t notice was that Sam was already tackling three more opponents.

    The sword is not in his hands. Sam''s dark energy also dissipated. The three people around him are all hand-to-hand fighters. Their only weapons were the gauntlets they were wearing. From the looks of it, they belong to the same ce as well.

    Sam stood there in the air¡­

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    With every hit explosive sounds and shockwaves are created. Not a single long-range attack aimed at him connected.

    *CRACK*

    Sam cracked the fist of the opponent and shattered it, then with his palm, he tore the flesh off the hand, with a knee strike, the arm broke. He picked the sharp bone and stabbed it downward through the mouth of another opponent.

    The bone went through the throat and with an axe kick the bone went through the throat, stomach, and intestines and finally came out of his anal region from below.

    The opponent had just lost his arm and looked at how his bone had been used. He looked at Sam with a horrified expression.

    That expressionless face of Sam, made him shiver in fright. He even forgot to feel the pain that he was in. The third opponent also stood there in a daze,

    Sam changed his altitude and two long-range attacks came at these opponents.

    They weren''t killed, but the next moment, they felt a huge pressure mounting on them. They crashed into the ground. Sam controlled the gravity and kicked down in the air. The force crushed both of them into meat paste.

    The next moment a man came from the back a saber and another opponent used lightning to crash into him.

    Sam blocked both of their attacks and looked at Pearl.

    "Do you know what is the problem with ganging up on me like this?

    At any given moment, only four to five people can actually attack me. And at that moment, I can kill them as easily as breathing. The next moment, a new four will join in and the same thing will happen.

    The only thing you could ever do is pray that I run out of energy, which will not happen until I kill you."

    *SWISH*

    The next moment the lighting saber appeared in Sam''s hands and he shed the necks of the two immediate opponents, dropping them down. He threw the saber at a different opponent while dodging a series of long-range attacks.

    Maybe after listening to what Sam had said about their strategy, they seemed to have grown some brains. Sam noticed that the opponents started spreading out a bit and instead of justing at him in random, they started grouping together with their own factions and teammates.

    He didn''t show any expression.

    *BAM*

    At this moment, a shockwave came and hit him. It is not directed at his body, but his mind. He could feel a few ripples in all of his senses.

    *BAM*

    The ripples intensified, albeit not enough to deal him any significant damage. He looked at a specific group of people that formed a circle.

    They are around him, but they spread out a bit in the form of a circle. So, on the first nce, they just looked like soldiers randomly standing among thatrge group.

    Of course, Sam also thought so, the only point that gave them away was their uniform and the thing they carried in their hands.

    A shield.

    Arge round shield and they are banging the shield with their des. The inscriptions on the shield lit up and they are sending these mental shockwaves to Sam. They are aimed at his senses, to make him lose his bnce, focus, and control over his energy.

    He didn''t expect these kinds of tactics here.

    Finally, these people are thinking.

    At this moment, he also noticed a few long-range attackers. Particrly, mages and archers take their positions far away from his location.

    They are charging their attacks.

    The warriors also banded together with the people they were familiar with. Some on the ground and some levitating in the air.

    They are moving into a formation and in an extremely fast pace.

    Pearl finally heaved a sigh. She had lost her senses since Sam made the first move. Apart from giving the kill order, she couldn''t bring herself to give another order to them. She just stared like a dumb statue.

    Now she came back to her senses and she also joined the formation.

    But in this tion, what she didn''t notice or didn''t bother to take notice of is how Sam is not making any move.

    He just watched them as they arranged themselves into a formation as if they were not doing it to kill him. As if they are putting on a performance for him.

    However, some of the observant people noticed his stillness, but their foolishness associated it with the drumming of those soldiers standing in the formation. They believed their mental attacks worked and theymanded their respective long-range attackers to make a move.

    Sam could feel the energies being charged. More than a hundred attacks are being directed at him.

    *BOOM* *ZAP* *SWISH*

    They were all released at the same time with a loud noise.

    Sam simply raised his hand and a weapon that he hadn''t used in a very long time appeared.

 Chapter 2093 Lightning and Shadows

    <h4>Chapter 2093 Lightning and Shadows</h4>

    Silver color lightning sprung out of his palm and shot into the Sky.

    Followed by that came out a small metal bird cage andnded on his palm. The metal base of the cage transformed into a glove that fit right on to his palm before it spread with lightning crackling all over.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The opponents saw the lightning glow and something metallic appearing on Sam''s hand, but they didn''t see what exactly that is. By then, their attacks have connected.

    "Don''t wait. Attack with one more round."

    Pearlmanded. The opponents felt it was unnecessary. It was more than a hundred attacks, even if it is a Middle stage Divine ne Initiation cultivator and even ate stage one, they wouldn''t be able to take it.

    However, they just wanted to be sure.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The attacksnded with no resistance whatsoever. Pearl still wasn''t sure and told them to continue.

    "Warriors, move forward. Drummers, don''t stop what you are doing. Increase the intensity." Pearl is paranoid. She didn''t want to take any chances.

    The drummers obeyed hermands and did as they were told. The warriors approached slowly and Pearl also joined along with them.

    Around two dozen people are advancing towards Sam''s location as the attacks kept onnding.

    "Stop. Warriors attack."

    The long range attackers stopped, while the warriors made their move. Sword rays and energy condensed javelins. Conjured fists and palm strikes, allnded. Even though Sam is in the air, the shockwaves caused a huge dust cloud and the smoke from the previous attacks made it impossible for them to see it with naked eye.

    They let their senses spread. However, the next second, they didn''t need to spread their senses.

    *SWOOSH*

    Metal keening could be heard and from within the cloud eight metallic tentacles shout out as they areced silver lightning. They caught a hold of eight different opponents making the remaining sixteen of them move away.

    The dust cleared.

    Sam is standing in the middle of what looked like a metallic cage. His hand is raised up with it connected to the dome of the metallic cage and from the bottom eight tentacles shot out. The whole cage and every single inch of it is full of condensed silver lightning.

    A wave of energy shot out of Sam''s body and entered the cage, the next moment¡­.

    "ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHH¡­"

    "NO...¡­"

    They saw as the eight people that got caught let out soul searing screams. They saw as their special armors and the luxurious robes, melting and turning into ashes and then their hair and finally their bodies and bones.

    Within a second, nothing was left of them.

    The tentacles retracted back to Sam and the rest of the thunder prison disappeared. It went back to being a glove on his palm. Everyone stopped in their tracks. Sam could almost smell the sweat of utter fearing from them.

    The smell of prey.

    "A¡­.ATTACK HIM."

    Pearl yelled with her voice quivering in fright. The warriors were about to move, but Harbinger appeared beneath Sam and propelled him into the sky. He activated his fire elemental fusion.

    *SWISH*

    His bow whistled through the air andnded in his hands. ming arrows conjured.

    "Mental Attacks. Increase the mental attacks."

    *BUM**DUM* *DUM *BUM*

    The drumming intensified and Sam could practically see his vision turning distorted. Ripples invaded his sight and he could feel a weird heaviness attack his mind. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The next moment, his vision cleared.

    *SWOOSH*

    A ming arrow, burning with golden mes left his bow.

    *BOOM*

    With a loud and violent explosion, itnded on one of the drummers standing in the formation. However, it didn''t kill him instantly.

    "ARGGGGGHH¡­.. AGHHH¡­."

    Everyone could see him burning in those golden mes his body burning upyer byyer. The molten armors, burned clothes, burned hair and finally burned flesh and bones. They could almost see his blood vaporizing in front of their eyes.

    The process was fast enough to consider it an instant death. However, they could see every step of that burning process and they don''t know if they should really consider it as such.

    *SWISH*

    Sam dodged the attack of a warrior nearby as he aimed his arrow at a different person within the drummers formation. The warriors are hot on his tail. However, Sam''s harbinger and its agile manuevers in the sky made it impossible for them to catch on.

    At this moment, Pearlmanded the rest of them tounch the attacks.

    Sam is surrounded from all directions once again and they are swarming at him.

    Still, they managed to have a semnce of coordination as they gave enough gaps to let their long-range attackers attack him.

    *SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    Two more ming arrows shot out.

    One attacks two iing attacks, while the second one went for another drummer within the formation.

    "Drummers. Don''t stop."

    Pearlmanded.

    *SWOOSH*

    When the third arrow came, she threw an attack of her own to destroy it.

    Sam looked at Pearl who stood afar from him and frowned. Taking this chance one of the warriors closed the distance and came at Sam with a Spear.

    The next moment, a spear flew through the air and stabbed the warrior from his back and passed through him. The blood-coated spearnded in Sam''s hand as he stabbed another person around him and used his body as leverage to make a hard turn with the harbinger.

    *SWISH*

    A wind de shot out cutting the approach of a few warriors.

    Sam kicked the guy that got stuck on the spear and threw it at an iing long-range dark energy attack.

    The next moment, his fire fusion is gone and is reced with shadow fusion.

    He made another quick turn and kicked a warrior that came at him. The leg pierced through the man''s stomach like a spear and held him there. This stopped the remaining two warriors that were closest to him.

    Sam stood like that and aimed his bow.

    *SWOOSH*

    An arrow conjured purely of the dark and shadow energy was shot through the mouth of the soldier got stabbed with Sam''s leg and hit the mage who threw the dark elemental attack.

    Sam then used the body hanging on his leg like a sandbag and threw it at the nearest warrior.

    *SWOOSH*

    Another arrow, went through the dead body and exploded on the opponent behind him.

    *BOOM*

    At this moment, an explosion hit Sam beneath the harbinger and threw him off bnce. A warrior took the chance and swung his sword at Sam''s neck who was falling upside down.

    Sam used his bow to block the attack.

    *SWOOSH*

    Reaper appeared from god knows where andnded in his other hand. With a single swing, the man''s head was cut off.

    *BOOM*

    He kicked the falling head with shadow energy and dark energy hitting a different mage.

    *BOOM* Void style as usual worked wonders and exploded the main into several pieces.

    Sam tangled with the warriors in the close range and the mages in the long range. Even if more people wanted to attack him, they couldn''t do so.

    Every single one of Sam''s arrowsnded precisely where it needs to destroy the formation and the long-range attackers are losing freedom since a lot of warriors attacked Sam from close range.

    If they gave him more space, Sam became faster and in turn much more lethal. This left them in a dilemma. Pearl kept on screaming orders, but nothing managed to stop Sam.

    She started crying, weeping and almost sobbing in fright and horror. However, she still had to shout out the orders to make sure they could kill Sam.

    But a nagging feeling deep inside her heart told her, that everything she is trying is going to be futile, and as if to prove her point, she heard a scream from a woman who is attacking Sam from mid¡ªrange.

    She saw as the dead body of the drummer who was shot by Sam''s elemental energy arrow twitched and from within it rose the shadow undead of that person.

    That shadow undead held the sword and the shield and drummed heavily.

    The woman felt her senses being attacked and the next moment the shadow jumped on her and stabbed her through her neck.

    Pearl''s eyes widened in horror.

    She hurriedly looked in different directions, trying to point out the locations where the shadow arrows were shot by Sam.

    But it was toote.

    "ARGHH¡­.."

    "EVERYONE CAREFUL. UNDEAD¡­"

    She could see several undead sprouting up from the deadbodies and attacking her soldiers through the rear.

    Her heart dropped. This is the worst that could happen. At least she couldn''t think of anything worse than this happening.

    "WE GOT HIM. PUSH FORWARD."

    She suddenly heard the yelling of the warriors and looked at Sam.

    She recognized the people who shouted. They are a team of four elites who are trained in taking down high-value targets.

    She looked at them hopefully. Two kicksnded on Sam''s abdomen simultaneously and he was thrown into the air.

    This is the best chance.

    "ATTACK."

    She didn''t know what to say, so she just yelled.

 Chapter 2094 Manifestation

    <h4>Chapter 2094 Manifestation</h4>

    Sam was caught off guard by the kicks.

    These people''s stealth was off the charts and if not for his nose powered by the Raiju''s bloodline, he wouldn''t have even spotted them upclose.

    They behind the attacks of their peers to close in andunched these attacks and these attacks. Sam could feel the poison coursing through his body. These four people have some unique poison constitutions. Their attacks, pure physical contact made him experience poison ingestion.

    Of course, Poison is one thing Sam stopped worrying about a long time ago. He could make the worse of the worse poisons into a cocktail and drink it as if it was a real cocktail and nothing will happen to him.

    Taking this opportunity, the enemies surrounded Sam andunched him to the ground where he fell. His fusion form was gone and heid on his back on the earth. He could see dozens of warriors zooming towards him, trying to finish him off.

    The next second, Sam activated wood fusion and¡­

    *SWOOSH* *SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    A few vines popped out of the ground around him, the coiled together and formed into a single giant stalk above it. Sam is secured in between their routes as the stalk grew bigger and bigger. Almost like it is part of the fairly tail and tore through the clouds.

    But the clouds are the not the only ones it tore through.

    *SWOOSH*

    Several vines whipped out from the stalk and hit the warriors that wereing at Sam. They were caught by surprise as all of this happened in a me. They barely managed to dodge the stalk plowing through them, but these vines didn''t miss.

    At least some of them were caught.

    And their peers saw the people that got caught screaming as life was sucked out of them. A strange poison invaded their bodies and made their live bodies go rotten at a visible pace as they fell to the ground, right beside Sam.

    The warriors understood the danger of the stalk and asked the mages to kill it while they also attacked. But that is enough for Sam.

    Golden mes covered his body and he took a deep breath.

    Bloodline art.

    *BOOM*

    The mes took the giant stalk as guidelines and the whipping vines as their extensions as they fried every single warrior that was descending towards Sam.

    He watched as their bodies burned in a instant, their burning flesh falling off of their skeletons as they lost their lives.

    The giant stalk turned to ashes and dispersed into the air, creating a cloud of ash and smoke. Sam kicked himself and tore through the cloud reacting the highest point that he could possibly reach.

    Golden mes turned into Silver Lightning. The lightning took the form of the wolf and his leg muscles started bulging as the lightning and his muscles acted in tandem.

    One axe kick in the air.

    *BADAM* *BADAM* *BANG*

    The streak of lightning hit the ground and moved forward, destroying everything in its path. It took at least ten lives on its way before it dissipated. Pearl who was also in the line of the lightning barely escaped.

    Not because she managed to dodge.

    Rather the lightning dissipated before it could hit her. She looked ahead in horror. Sam who performed such a massive attack, didn''t stop.

    *SWOOSH*

    She felt somethinging from her rear and dodged hurriedly. A whip travelled through the air like a snake through grass andnded in Sam''s hands.

    *SWOOSH* *SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    Sam swung it in the air a bit as he hit theing attacks. He didn''t use any elemental energy. The attacks werebined with the repel style as he threw the iing attacks to different directions. By chance or by design, they hit his opponents and destroyed them.

    When a warrior managed to move past the attacks ande at Sam, he got caught by the whip that coiled around his leg.

    Sam threw him along with the whip as if he got bored of a toy. The whip and the man flew and crashed into the ground. The man felt like the whole world turned nk, only to realize that his vision is covered by a shadow undead that mounted him.

    The undead stabbed him in the eyes with a spear and nailed him.

    *BANG*

    An attack came and destroyed the undead, but it was too little toote. The man had already died. Sam''s onught continued. If previous fights of Sam back in the realm were a showcase of his skills, battle prowess and IQ, this time it is a showcase of pure might.

    Pure unadulterated and arroganceced might.

    He is just showing how unsignificant his opponents all are. He is showing what he can do them if he willed so. All he needed was some anger and he is taking their lives as easy as reaping wheat. Pearl didn''t know what to do. Her knees are on verge of buckling as she saw so many people just running at Sam waiting for their death.

    Soon, she also noticed that Sam has already done with more than half of her forces within an hour and the only reason it took an hour is because Sam took his time dealing with each individual in different ways.

    One person was stabbed to death, another was exploded, one turned to undead and another became subject to burial in between poisonous wooden vines. Some were frozen to death.

    Sam countered every single opponent that came at him and most of the time, he used the same method of attack they are using. If they are a swordsman he used his sword. If they are a fire element user, he used fire.

    If they are ice users, he used ice, if they are a poison user, he used poison. Only when he felt a little pressured, heunched a massive attack like bloodline art and made them disperse in a second, giving him upperhand once again.

    Not that he lost it to begin with. He acted as the overlord of that battlefield.

    Pearl could see that the warriors that are trained to either kill or die are finally showing fear. She had seen most of these soldiers in action before. They overturned cities in hours, they destroyed civilizations in days and theymitted genocides in weeks.

    Now, they are afraid.

    They are shivering fright and she finally saw them take a few steps back in fear with a mere nce from Sam.

    Her world view has been shattered way too many times. Then she thought of the discussion she had with her father. These forces were brought here with a promise made by his father and here she is sending all of them to their death.

    This made her feel afraid.

    She panicked and started pulling her hair. Then she spotted something. Its from the students that are in the suspended state. The sin is being manifested around them. She hurriedlymanded.

    "MOVE. EVERYONE DEFEND AND MOVE. SPREAD OUT AS MUCH AS YOU CAN AND CONNECT WITH THE REALM. MANIFEST YOUR SIN AND OVERLAP IT WITH THE SINS OF THE STUDENTS. HURRY."

    The soldiers didn''t know why pearl wanted them to do this, now of all times. However, they didn''t question hermands, they were trained that way. They turned tail and ran. They spread out as far as possible. They used all kinds of escaping tactics including the spatial transference tokens and scrolls.

    Sam of course, has not thoughts of leaving them alone. He didn''t even call harbinger. Instead his wings popped up and then along with the wings, he activated the light elemental fusion. The wings acts like gliders as he moved at an extreme speed that he rarely moved at.

    Pearl watched as Sam just passed through a soldier and took the upper body away. The lower body fell to the ground while the upper body in Sam''s hands disintegrated into nothing within just seconds. Of course, even that speed is not enough for Sam to get everyone.

    A lot of people managed to escape and he couldn''t urately spot the exact directions of each of them. However, everyone he could spot fell dead within a couple of minutes.

    Just a few minutes ago, it look more than an hour for Sam to kill half the forces, but now in two minutes, he took fifty of them.

    Pearl watched this.

    Even though shemanded everyone to leave, she was frozen in shock by Sam''s sudden killing efficiency and stayed rooted to the ground.

    Sam looked at her. His killing intent apparent in his eyes. He turned to look at the grey cloud and noticed that there are still no changes. He controlled his urge to kill her and went in search of these people.

    He killed ten more before the soldiers started ovepping their sin with the sins of the students. These sins became tangible and within no time, thousands of beasts and people manifested out of that nourshing aura surrounded the whole area.

    And since they are ovepped sins, Sam is also a target.

 Chapter 2095 Nerfed

    <h4>Chapter 2095 Nerfed</h4>

    Pearl immediately ran behind the lines of these sins.

    *CRACKLE*

    At this moment, the grey clouds started roaring with ck-colored lightning. Sam could see his friends'' faces showing some expression. It seems like they are struggling in the sky. The sins kept on being manifested and for some reason, Pearl''s forces weren''t being attacked by them.

    They all turned to Sam and they all moved forward slowly as if they were trying to understand what Sam was.

    The sin usually is naturally programmed to attack the person who manifested it. However, these sins are set free because of the ovepping domains. They still have that urge to attack, but they lost their target.

    That is why they are trying to process the limited mental power they were granted by this ce.

    Sam looked at the vast expanse of sin manifestations. He used his energy vision to check. The energy radiated by them is vast, bloodthirsty, and chaotic. However, he didn''t show the slightest expression and if there was any, it would have been disappointment.

    The sin manifestation in hell was thousands of times better than this one.

    There the sin actually strengthened itself, however here Sam could sense that the sin has weakened. Just in case, he looked at some of the sins he was familiar with. He has seen his friends kill many people and he could recognize their victims easily.

    They don''t have the abilities they should have.

    Instead of being strengthened by the nourishing aura that was acting as the recement for hell''s corruption, these creatures were nerfed. What hell experience the students thate here are going to gain?

    Sam''s disappointing silence seemed to have given the opponents some hope. One of them who is closer to Pearl moved closer to her and spoke.

    "Youngdy, I think he will not be able to escape this. Even if he is formidable enough, there is no way he can sustain his energy enough to kill all these creatures by himself.

    Even if his strength and prowess allows, his energy and endurance, wouldn''t.

    And the nourishing energy that is absorbed into his body will constantly increase energy restrictions on his body. This is the end."

    Pearl listened to him, but she is still nervous. Her legs are still shivering in fear. The soldier noticed this and said.

    "Youngdy. Please calm down. You don''t have to worry. The sins will definitely take care of him. There is no way out of this, no matter who the opponent is. Unless he clones himself a few dozen times, he wouldn''t be able to pass through it.

    Even with that, he will still lose, because by the time he reaches us even those dozen of him would be exhausted and dead tired.

    He will turn into a fish on the chopping block.

    So, breath and rx a bit. Instead, we must think on how to deal with the suspended students. Sir Theron already said that even if they are suspended, they could witness the whole thing. The sins should have been enough to take care of them.

    But instead of just leaving it to the sins, we might have to stay behind and check up on the situation."

    Pearl calmed down after the soldier''s exnation and heaved a sigh. She nodded for his suggestion and said.

    "We will do as you say. Get in contact with everyone that is alive. Try to recover any bodies you can. We will at least take them back to their respective homes."

    "Yes, Youngdy."

    Pearl who calmed down after so much effort, looked at Sam. She could feel that the sins are getting more and more unrest, but for some reason they didn''t attack immediately. They are still in that conflicted state.

    She wasn''t worried though, because from what her father said, when this ovep happens, they will be in that dazed state and wouldn''t be able to identify the opponents.

    So, if a person shows and hostility towards them, he will immediately be the target and even if it was not direct hostility, even a hint of battle will or killing intent will provoke them. Even a touch might just trigger them.

    She knew that if Sam wanted toe at them, he will have to cross them and all, the moment he makes a move, the sins will concentrate on him and if he touches them, he will be done for. She is more than willing to wait for him to make the move.

    As if her thoughts were heard loud and clear by Sam, the weapons that were flying all over the ce just a few moments ago, came to a halt. Reaper and Shadow swordnded in both of Sam''s hands and he pointed his sword towards Pearl with a?cold look.

    Pearl had a sinking feeling in her heart. Even though she is sure that Sam couldn''t do anything, even though told herself that it will be her victory, that cold arrogance on Sam''s unflinching face made her feel fear.

    She had yed everyst card she had, but her enemy is standing there unfazed. She didn''t know what to think of it.

    Luckily, for pearl she didn''t have to think of them anymore, because the next thing that happened made destroyed any thoughts she could possibly muster.

    With a bright glow that almost blinded her, a few silhouettes appeared around Sam. The silhouettes are all of different sizes, some are big, some are small.?When that bright light went away, she saw the real form of the silhouettes.

    Her mind went nk. Her body shivered, even the soldier that gave assurance to Pearl to stay strong started shaking in fear. Some weakminded people lost their footing and fell to the ground as they watched Sam and what surrounded him.

    "T¡­The..They¡­" Pearl pointed her finger at the beasts, but couldn''t open her mouth. That is the effect of Sam''s beasts. Golden Sun Crown, Sky Sovereign Roc, Raiju, Shadow mice, Forest Bear, Hydra¡­.

    It is not the first time she has seen these beasts. Crediting to her father''s influence, she managed to witness some of these beasts, but that too from far away, not even being able to touch them. That is because the standing of these beast tribes in the Divine realms is way higherpared to a lot of other powers.

    Even the Noble league that toots its own horn with all of its members iming to be the descendants of gods, had to bow down to these beasts, because these beasts are true descendants of the Mythical beasts that are equivalent to the gods.

    In front of these beasts, even Christos who has an impable lineage had to take two steps back.

    But Sam had all kinds of these beasts surrounding him. They all levitated around him locking their eyes not on the sin manifestations, rather on the soldiers that are hiding behind the sin.

    They are connected to Sam. His anger is their anger, his enemy is their enemy and his hunger is their hunger.

    If he deemed someone worthy to be killed, they will tear them apart and now all they can see are the opponents that are hiding behind these insignificant creatures, ready to be torn apart.

    *ROAR*

    All the beasts gave out a unifying roar with a killing intent that transversed miles of distance. The whole dimension quaked under their might and they focused that killing intent directly on the sins that surrounded them.

    Sam and the beasts jumped into the sins. Golden mes raged, Silver lightning destroyed, Earth shattered and the vines rampaged. The spatial rends, shadow attacks, the whole field as far as they could is being effected by the beasts that came.

    The most fearsome thing though, is the Golden Ape. Not because it caused the most destruction. Yanwu''s one me attack burned dozens of sins at the same time. However, the ape is expressing more anger than the rest.

    At least, it appeared that way as its attacks are more handson as it jumped high into the sky and violently crushed whatever it could find around it. It didn''t care about any attacks the sins are making on it, it just grabbed a sin, tore it apart, smashed the body into another until nothing of it is left, before it moved forward to the rest.

    For the first time or maybest time, Pearl and her forces saw a scene they could never forget. The sins of the pseudo hell. The ones that were known to have forgotten any fear or other emotions that were only known to the living, stepped back.

    Maybe the little bit of sanity they gained by that ovepping must have been upied by the fear Sam and his beasts'' destruction. They stepped back and soon Pearl saw as the sins started running away.

    However, it was tough luck for them and their forces.

    Because at that moment, the grey cloud rumbled. It hasn''t shown any reaction in a while and finally, it showed something¡­.

    A thunder struck Watt''s body and the next moment, his suspended state waspleted.

    Hended and the Silver wind appeared beneath his feet instantly. He zoomed towards the battlefield, not even wasting a single second and a pack of metal cards appeared in his hands. His eyes were cold as a cier and killing intent thick as mercury.

 Chapter 2096 Projection

    <h4>Chapter 2096 Projection</h4>

    Pearl and her forces also saw Watt who was initially far away closing in on the distance.

    They were shocked by his actions of moving immediately to the battlefield to the point they didn''t notice the simrity between the silver wind and harbinger.

    Watt''s board glowed as the wind elemental energy charged with his approach, and when he finally entered the battlefield, he made a quick and hard turn.

    *SWOOSH*

    Arge wind de cut through the sins like they are vegetables. Then only they noticed Pearl and her group noticed the board. Watt''s cards started flying as he jumped into the battlefield and started his killing spree.

    Sam and his beasts are already doing a light work out of the sins, now Watt also joined.

    Of course that is not thest of their surprises.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Another explosive noise, Jack and Philip both of them dropped at the same time and made their way to the battlefield simrly on their boards. They are not holding back anything.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Rest of Sam''s friends and even White starteding down after another with very little time gap. White was still focused. He didn''t know what to make of the situation. He looked at Pearl and then his gaze hardened he held his cane and started attacking the sins.

    The forces realized that they made the wrong bet here.

    Because of the special means they employed, the sins will not attack them, but the same will not apply to the yers of those sins. Once the whole group of elite ughters finish it off with the sins, it will be their time.

    "Madam Pearl, we need to get out of here immediately. We might not survive."

    The same guy who reassured Pearl a few minutes ago,pletely changed his tune. Pearl wanted to p the shit out of him. It was almost like he jinxed the whole thing. The moment he said, that their victory is imminent, the tables turned.

    Of course, she couldn''t care about that pettiness now. She has to find a way out of this situation and fast or else¡­.

    Only god knows. Or even the god might not know.

    However, there is no way out for her. due to the modifications they themselves made, the exits will not open, even if they surrender at this moment. Since their very own sins merged with the rest of the sins out there, they need to finish off all the sins before they could leave.

    From the looks of it, these people might just finish it off. After racking her brains for a moment, she finally came to a conclusion.

    "We need to attack them." She told the man beside him.

    The man understood without any boration. Their opponents are currently swarmed by the sins. Even if they have extreme upperhand, they still had their hands full. They cannot afford to be distracted with sheer number.

    And Pearl and her forces don''t know if they can survive if their opponents deal with the sins by themselves, they only found one way out.

    They need to kill their opponents right now and they clear the remaining sins and then finally they will be able to escape.

    Thus, they made their move instantly. This attacks are led by the long range attackers as they are the ones that have high probability of dealing high damage without losing their lives.

    They believed so because now they have utmost freedom. With none of their allies around their opponents, they have free reign over the attacks. Even if they missed, it would be the sins.

    However, as soon as they started attacking, Sam turned his focus on to them.

    "Hopper, One."

    He called out. Two of the beasts that he contracted with. Void hopper and the shadow mouse.

    "Tear them apart."

    Just like Pearl''s men, Sam didn''t need to give them detailed orders. Void Hopper tore open the space and hopped into it, while Shadow mouse ordered hundreds of shadow mouse he had under hismand to make a move and disappeared into the shadows.

    Pearl who was at the forefront since the start, finally decided it was time for her to be at the rear. She didn''t feel safe and this stance gave her rtivefort.

    She looked at a mage throwing zing fire attacks that are solely focused on Sam and his surroundings. She could see Sam having a bit of hard time focusing, but all of a sudden, the mage stopped the attacks and fell to the ground while clutching her stomach.

    Pearl immediately ran to her and check what happened and then she saw arge tear on the mage''s stomach.

    The tear isced with active spatial energy and right in front of Pearl''s eyes, the energy rampaged through the flesh of the mage.

    She tried to lift the mage, but she realized that the mage is locked down. Even when Pearl got up and her support being absent to hold the mage in that weird position, the mage didn''t move.

    She didn''t fall back on the ground and instead just stayed there half floating and half leaning on the ground.

    The spatial energy in the tear started increased and soon everyone witnessed as the flesh of the mage being torn apart and being sucked into the tear. Within no time, all that was left is a lump of torn flesh and blood sprayed all over.

    That is just the beginning. An archer not too far away was swarmed by ck shadows that slowly cut him apart bit by bit and soon he was torn into a million pieces in front of their eyes, finally turning into minced meat, along with his bones and innards.

    The whole endeavor is gruesome and retching.

    Pearl almost vomited right there on the spot, but she could only gasp as one long ranger attacker after another was torn apart one by one. These beasts took Sam''s orders in a literal senses and they killed these people in the most painful manner.

    Watching this, Pearl knew that there is no chance of winning and her knees finally buckledpletely. She fell down in despair.

    She doesn''t know how the next few hours have passed. Its like the whole battle shforwarded and the next thing she knew, Sam is standing in front of her.

    Tall and mighty, with his whole body soaked in blood most of which belonged to his enemies. The nourishing energy did nothing to him. He didn''t even absorb a hit of it. She saw his friends, including White all standing nearby.

    Everyone''s eyes focused on her.

    In the whole force that she brought, only a few people remained and when she saw them, she noticed that all of them had different uniforms. Only one person each group has remained and they are all Sam''s captives for now.

    Of course, not for long.

    Sam raised the reaper and ced it on her neck.

    Pearl looked at him with teary eyes and bated breath.

    "Who are you?"

    She asked.

    Sam frowned at the question.

    "Just why did youe into my life. Do you know what I have to endure to until I climbed this far? Do you know what it feels like having a father like mine? Do you know what it feels to constantly live up to harsh expectations of someone who would see you in a heart beat if they were promised enough power?

    I waited to be the official part of the academy my whole life.

    This is supposed to be my era. This is supposed to be my road to freedom and salvation.

    But YOU. You came and destroyed everything. You stole my thunder. You stole my glory. I deserved this, you bastard. I deserved the glory that you are currently enjoying. The reverence you have, the fear you enjoy, it is all supposed to be mine.

    You stole it from me.

    Who are you to deserve this? Who are you to steal this from me?"

    Sam stood there in silence before saying.

    "You deserve all this? I stole this?

    Fuck off. The strong win. Always. That is all there is to it. Go cry a river in hell."

    *SWOOSH*

    The reaper was pulled back and he swung it at her neck. He needs to get more information about this whole incident, but for that she doesn''t need to be alive. Sam can just use soul search and he will have all the information he needs.

    The sword almostnded on her neck, but¡­.

    *BANG*

    An invisible barrier appeared out of nowhere, stopping Sam''s sword. He frowned and noticed that in the middle of Pearl''s chest, something is glowing and the next moment, a projection came out of it.

    A human silhouette appeared. Theron. Pearl''s father appeared.

    The projection looked around ignoring Sam.

    "So, the n failed."

    He muttered and turned to look at Sam.

    "You must be Sam that Pearl talked about."

    Sam didn''t answer and just pulled his sword back. His injected more energy into the attack and swung it again.

    *BANG*

    The barrier stopped the attack, but this time the force made the projection ripple.

 Chapter 2097 Going to Zeus Academy

    <h4>Chapter 2097 Going to Zeus Academy</h4>

    "Boy, I am talking to you." Theron spoke with anger apparent in his tone.

    *BANG*

    Sam couldn''t care less about it. He just swung the sword again and this time the barrier was strengthened a bit and the projection caught a hold of the de.

    "You are not going to kill her. Not today."

    Sam looked at Theron and finally spoke.

    "I heard about you."

    "Everyone in the Academy realm has."

    "Are you the one behind this attack?"

    "Partially, yes. She came to me for help and from the looks of it, it was wasted."

    "So, you do know of her actions. Then you should also the actions have consequences."

    "Of course, that is why I am making sure that she is not dead. She has to pay me back for the losses she caused me. So, I cannot let you kill her."

    "She has to pay me back for plotting against me"

    "My debt is bigger and I am stronger. As you said, stronger one wins."

    "Right now, in this moment, in this location, there is no one stronger than me. So, I win."

    "You are one tough nut to crack. You amuse med." Theron smiled, it seems like he was indeed really amused by Sam. He paused and spoke after a short break.

    "I will let you live for a short while. But today, you are not killing her."

    *BOOM*

    With that a light explosion covered them whole and Pearl disappeared along with it. Sam gritted his teeth in frustration. He should have killed her without that nonsense conversation. He is angry. His friends and him were endangered in this ce.

    He gritted his teeth and turned to the few captives that are left. He decided to direct his anger to on to them.

    "You guys leave. You need to focus on digesting that nourishing energy. If you leave it like that, your bodies won''t function for quite some time."

    Sam spoke and his friends left. White watched as all of the elites of this region obey Sam''s words and those elites included Vidyuth too. He started having some doubts. Vidyuth came to White and said.

    "Thank him. He saved your life."

    White didn''t respond. He just stared at Sam for a while before exiting the realm. When his friends were about to leave, Sam stopped them for a moment and spoke.

    "Go to the Hub andpile all of your memories to create a video of the whole incident. Omit the beasts of course. The spirit of the hub can manage to do it. Collect thepiled video and give to your Deans.

    File apliant and make the whole incident public. Tell them that if they do not give a proper exnation, you will quit the academy."

    They nodded and didn''t ask Sam any questions.

    After they left, Sam focused on the remaining group of people. He didn''t ask them any questions, he just put them through immense pain and killed them one by one performing the soul searches.

    He extracted every piece of information he could, but there is not much about Theron in there. The only information he found was regarding the ns and families that these soldiers belonged to and what their actual orders were.

    At least this is enough for Sam. For now.

    Since he faced such provocation, it would be out of character for him to not retaliate in kind. And the first step in that retaliation could start from here. A dozen ns popped up in his mind even without putting much thought.

    He exited the realm.

    His friends are still with the guard who stayed there. He walked to them and Watt informed.

    "The guard didn''t let us leave immediately when he saw our states. He believed the situation has to be reported to the Dean of Zeus Academy first."

    Sam just nodded and soon the Dean of Zeus Academy is there. He heard the whole ount and felt his heart skip a bit. Sam didn''t speak a single word. His anger and the slight killing intent constantly seeping out of his body, is very clear that he is pissed beyond all boundaries.

    "Did Pearl really do this?" The Dean asked in disbelief. Almost as if he didn''t want to believe it.

    "If you are done with this, I would like to fucking leave. I have a war to prepare for."

    Sam spat through his teeth and the guard frowned.

    "Hey¡­" He was about to rebuke Sam, but the Dean stopped him. He knew more about Sam than the rest and because of Zeus'' bias against Sam, he gave extra information and hammered it into Dean''s head.

    He knew things are not going to end well.

    He has half a mind to stop Sam and talk to him right now to see if he can resolve anything, but Sam is not even making any eye contact and he constantly tried to leave from the side. It is apparent that he is in no talking mood.

    Dean pursed his lips and let Sam go. The rest are all from the Zeus Academy and they can wait.

    At this moment, dean suddenly realized.

    "Where is Bronte?"

    The rest of them were stunned. Theypletely forgot about this guy. As if on cue Bronte exited the portal. He looked at the group awkwardly. He felt ashamed.

    "What happened to you?"

    Dean asked.

    "I was stuck in the mental test for longer than I thought. And the barrier protected my body during that huge battle. I only finished now, but the sin was already cleared up."

    He was dejected as he said this. Sam''s friends all wanted to congratte him for his lucky stars. This guy lucked out real big.

    Everyone left and went back to the respective academies, not before stopping in the hub and making the videos out of the memories. Sam on the other hand, just went to the Gambler''s Academy and knocked on the door of the Student Council.

    When they saw Sam''s appearance, they were stunned. Crow who is the current person in charge of the student president shuddered as he felt Sam''s immense killing intent. His is still drenched in blood, with his eyes sharp.

    "What happened?"

    "Call Dove. This is above pay grade."

    Sam took a seat without even asking and closed his eyes, with his legs stretched out a bit. He acted like he owned the ce. Within five minutes Dove is there. She looked at Sam with her wide in disbelief.

    "What happened?"

    She asked. She knew about Pseudo hell well enough to know that the sin won''t bleed.

    "Did you kill other students in there?" She couldn''t help but ask. Sam frowned and shook his head.

    He waved his hand and a bunch of heads fell on the floor.

    "We were attacked. Pearl of Zeus Academy colluded with a few ns and organizations that are part of the Olympian rule and came with a n to kill us. They tweaked the pseudo-hell''s formation, I don''t know how, but there was an interference that endangered our lives."

    Sam''s bird then yed a video. It is the video that his friends created at the Hub. It was sent directly to Sam from there.

    Everyone watched this and Dove''s facial expression became more and more ferocious with every passing second.

    *CRACK* *CRASH*

    The arm-rest of her chair was crushed and she stood up abruptly, breaking the whole chair.

    She looked at Sam and spoke.

    "Get ready. We need to go somewhere."

    "Where?"

    "To the Zeus Academy."

    "Then I don''t need to get ready."

    Sam just stood up and walked out of the room. Dove didn''t know why he wanted toe out in such a dirty state, but on the second though, he looked way too intimidating this way.

    Both of them walked to the Zeus Academy and everyone on the street noticed how gruesome Sam looked. It is almost unavoidable.

    At the gates of the Academy, when the guards saw them, they stopped. Their Dean already said something about possible visitors from the Gambler''s Academy.

    "Please wait here."

    One of the guards spoke while the other took themunication token. He directly contacted the Dean''s attendant. Dove on the hand couldn''t muster up the patience for it.

    *PAK*

    One hit, a p no less. Sam watched as the guard stood there stunned for a second, before his knees buckled and fell on the ground face first. His body started jerking. His body seemed to have lost all the function.

    The other guard saw this and was about to speak.

    *PAK*

    Another hit and this guy also fell on the ground. A lot of students of the Dean academy that saw this were shocked and some of the immediately ran into contact their guys.

    "Let''s go in."

    Sam followed her. They walked slowly, but full of confidence.

    "Dove, what the hell are you doing?"

    Ady running yelled at Dove. Sam recognized with her just a nce. She was part of the Fourth Grade students and he saw her back during that little event in the Arena.

    She was one of the faces that he clearly remembered.

 Chapter 2098 Declaration

    <h4>Chapter 2098 Deration</h4>

    Dove didn''t answer. She just looked at the woman with that cold gaze.

    "Answer me, you Bitch. Do you think this is Gambler''s Academy that you can just walk in? You even dared to assault the guards? Do you have a death wish?"

    The woman kept moving closer and closer to Dove and kept on yapping away.

    *BAM* *CRASH*

    Dove threw a kick and pinned the girl''s face to the ground and kept her leg pressing on the head.

    "I told you before N. I don''t like your face and not bring it close to me. I also told you before that all the chances I gave you are over. From now on, whenever I see you, I will hit you. If I hear you in my proximity, I will burst to open your ear drums, if I know that you are breathing the same air as me, I will break your nose.

    And if you act like this one more time, I will kill you. Next time, I will break your skull open and let all your greenhouse juniors see your pretty brains.

    You understand?"

    One would have thought that his question was rhetorical. However, Dove happened to be serious.

    "I asked you a question, N. I haven''t heard your answer yet."

    "I¡­. I understand."

    "DOVE. WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?"

    How, the fourth-grade students of the Zeus Academy over.

    "Hello, Baron. It has been a while. We haven''t really talked to each other since thest time I kicked your ass."

    Dove spoke up, but she didn''t even look at the man who spoke up. She is still watching N while still rubbing her face with her foot.

    "N, I didn''t hear you because of your leader''s yelling. So, answer me again."

    "You¡­"

    "Dove, are you feeling great while beating someone weaker than you?"

    Baron spoke and Dove couldn''t help but smirk.

    "I at least I didn''t dig a ditch behind her and try to set up a trap. I am stomping on her face head on. I even announced my arrival directly, didn''t I?"

    "What the hell do you want?" Baron yelled. Then only he noticed Sam''s presence beside Dove and he had a bad feeling. He is part of noble league as well and he is privy to some details.

    Pearl did say that the n will be rted to the Pseudo Hell pocket dimension. And he knew they went there that day. Looking at Sam''s get up, she could connect some dots.

    Dove finally removed her leg off N''s face and looked at Baron.

    "I am here to dere a war on the Zeus Academy. Your academy members tried to use the Pseudo hell pocket dimension as a ruse to kill one of our academy''s students.

    I have a reason to suspect that the fourth graders, Instructors and even the Dean might yed a role in this."

    Baron widened his eyes and his aura raged.

    "What the fuck did you just say? Those are some pretty big usations Dove. If you are unable to back it up, you might have to die defending them."

    Dove didn''t reply and sent the video clip that she got from Sam. The wrist bands are really handy when ites to things like these. Baron looked at the video. It consisted of even Pearl''s long and pathetic speech, before they started fighting.

    His expression darkened.

    "Until Pearl was handed over to us, I will be holding every single one of the Zeus Academy members as guilty of this crime.

    Your students, territories, pocket dimensions, treasures, none of them are safe."

    At this moment, an attendant came running to the scene and addressed Dove and Sam.

    "Our Dean wants to see you."

    Both of them followed without making any fuss. Sam in fact wanted to meet the Dean, he didn''t even care for meeting the students.

    Dove and Sam are soon sitting in the Dean''s office. It has already been five minutes and they have yet to speak with each other.

    "Why did you call us here?"

    Sam asked directly.

    "Why did youe here?" The Dean asked in return without answering the question.

    "Are you asking this because you are really ignorant or are you just acting dumb?" Even Dove is dumbfounded with the way Sam asked that question. She is also furious but she knew to respect the Dean who could kill her with a flick.

    "The incident in the Pseudo hell, the rest of the ¡­." Dean was about to say something, but Sam cut him off.

    "I don''t give a fuck if your Academy has nothing to do with it. It was your responsibility to make sure that something like that doesn''t happen in the Pocket dimension.

    Yours and the rest of the Olympian academies.

    So, I am going to take it out on all of you. That is the reason I came here. If you want to keep this damage only to the properties and territories, then handover Pearl to me right now.

    Otherwise, the war will spread to people. I will ughter every single first grade student and the second grade student and as I climb up, I will kill every grade student that is my peer and that is from the Zeus Academy.

    I will find each and every one of their ns, organizations, territories, I will annex every single one of them. I will kill everyone that so much as irks my sight. Theirs will be inhabitable after I am done with them.

    And by the end of it, you will see that anyone will be scared to be associated with the name Zeus Academy.

    The only reason I am here is because I wanted to give you this information up front. I want to prove it you that even after knowing what is about toe, even after knowing what will hit you, neither your students nor the organizations that are involved in this, will be able to do anything."

    Sam stood up, ready to leave.

    Dove looked at Dean and spoke.

    "We are filing an officialint with the judiciary system of the realm as well."

    Dove then left along with Sam. Sam went to his room and freshened up while Dove went to hold a special meeting among the union members to discuss the situation.

    Sam then went to hub and contacted the architect and his team.

    "I want you to finish the construction of all the hubs immediately. I am opening them in exactly three days. I don''t care how you do it, but you have to do it."

    After that, he went to Nn''s restaurant to see if there is any news from Ivar and his team members and to his surprise, Ivar and Icarus were waiting for him there and he even held a couple of people hostage.

    Two people that have the strength of an Elder. Neither of them belong to the Academy realm. They are outsiders.

    After extending some greetings, Ivar spoke.

    "Your spection is right, they did make a move. However they didn''te personally and sent these two people. These are part of the small group behind the Elders and the incident theymitted that time.

    We got a lot of information and it is enough for them to not just get expelled, but be executed by the Dean himself."

    "What is the information exactly?"

    Sam asked. He never gotplete information about this case from the start, he only know half of it at most.

    However, it was Icarus who answered Sam now.

    "Do you know the war Titanomachy?"

    "Of course, I heard of it a bit. The war between the current Olympians and the Titans. Not the Titans that are currently epted in this world, the real titans."

    "Yes, you got it right. The Olympians actually wanted to suppress the Titans so much to the point that they created this Titan race from the descendants of the original Titans.

    They tried to erase the history of Titanomachypletely.

    Not a lot of people even know the actual names of the titans who participated in it."

    He paused a bit and continued.

    "I don''t want to give the full recount, the thing is some of the Titans left out their Divine Incarnations before they were imprisoned in Tartarus.

    You must know what the Divine Incarnations are, right?"

    "Clones of gods. They are at the Peak of Divine ne."

    "Yes. Some of the titans managed to keep these Divine Incarnations out. Of course, with their original forms not actively sending in the power required, these incarnations are going to weaken over time.

    These clones were left out to find a chance to get the Original bodies out. Hyperion is one such Titan that had a clone outside. The faith of Hyperion has long been exhausted, that was actually one of the methods Zeus and other gods used to suppress the strength of titans and imprison them.

    So, for Hyperion to get out, he needs faith or strength equivalent to faith to get out."

    "So, the clone is spreading Hyperion''s faith?"

    "I wish that was it. Instead, he was going for the equivalent. Fear, pain and agony."

    A/N: Please read the Author''s Note below

 Chapter 2099 Announcement

    Chapter 2099 Announcement

    Once again Icarus paused. He took a deep breath.

    "If Hyperion''s clone spreads the faith, the gods will know and they will hunt the clone down. So, they took the alternative of an equivalent energy and that is the power through sacrifice.

    The sacrificial souls of the people who were offered as a sacrifice will reach the gods and they merge within the gods to add to their strength. Hyperion''s clone gathered a small group of people in Divine ne Consummation stage.

    Then they found a race of people that are best suited for sacrifice."

    "So, I am guessing the two elders are part of that group and they conducted the sacrifice of that race."

    "That is not all. They entrapped this race and made them procreate with some special species. Beasts that grew strong enough to assume their human forms. They forced them to procreate and used some special method to make the fetus grow faster and give birth.

    The nine month period has been reduced to one month with this device. The babies were delivered and those babies were sacrificed.

    The process was repeated again and again, with the women of that race in particr constantly healed, conceived and then the process was repeated. This put an immense toll on those women and their vitality is sucked dry.

    Once they be infertile, then they were killed. Offered up as the sacrifice once again. The men in that race were put through a special treatment. The bloodline that they need was purified and refined to be active and they were forced to procreate with other women.

    When they conceived more babies, the boys were sacrificed immediately while the girls were grown until they could menstruate. Once again, the whole process repeated. This has been happening for almost a hundred years and it was all under the radar.

    The only reason it was brought up was because Hyperion''s clone was in a desperate state. His strength apparently was reduced to Divine ne Transcendent cultivator. So, they conducted a massive massacre to give the original a bit of power boost that increased his strength enough to strengthen his clone directly from tartarus."

    Icarus just went on with the whole story.

    Sam sat there in a frozen state.

    Sam is by no means a saint. He has done terrible things. He killed people, families, ns, races, but this is a new low even for a morallypromised person like him. This is way too much even for him to visualize.

    "What happened now?"

    "That massive incident attracted way too many eyes. In fact even the Academy started investigating it because there are traces of Titan. However, their mistake was to put Elder Minsk in charge of it."

    "Fucking Idiots."

    "Now we have all the details. I captured these two people so that it would be easier to convince the Dean. Only he can take action against this whole thing." Icarus spoke.

    Sam nodded and said.

    "You can actually use the Hub. The simtion room can make a video out of the whole thing. Of course, I am strong enough to make them rey the whole thing in their head, but you guys are.

    You can go there and then publish the whole thing through thework of the hub.

    In three days, the hubs on the other ce will open and on the fifth day you can let the whole Academy realm know of this.

    That way, the Zeus Academy cannot just bury this incident."

    Both Ivar and Icarus exchanged a nce before nodding.

    "That works perfect."

    "I am going to war with the Zeus Academy and a bunch of ns under the Olympian rule."

    Sam just worked it into the conversation. Both Icarus and Ivar froze.

    "WHAT?"

    Both of them asked in unison and Sam exined the situation.

    "This came at such a time."

    Ivar muttered.

    "Anyway, contact your friends ande to a decision, in exactly three days, I want your answer. Since the first case can be considered solved, you should be able to make the decision. I have a lot of things to handle."

    Sam left.

    Ivar and Icarus contacted their friends again and they were in deep discussion about the next course of actions. Meanwhile, Sam started contacting his subordinates in the Astral Region of the Academy realm.

    A lot of his forces, more than one third of it are currently in the Astral Realm studying in various academies.

    It could be said that Sam has one of the biggest Astral ne forces under him. When he contacted them, he only gave one order.

    "I want one thousand Divine ne cultivators in the Dusk organization within a year."

    That is all he said. The Dusk organization doesn''tck resources and facilities and many of them are at the Peak for a while, if they push it hard enough, they are for sure capable of achieving this goal.

    Many of them immediately went into seclusion. The most promising are the couple of hundred cultivators from the Dragon Hawk tribe. They don''t need much enlightenment. They can just cultivate further like Beasts.

    They have a great chance at achieving this goal.

    Three days passed in the blink of an eye and on the third day, Sam had to travel between the realms on harbinger. He had to be there to activate the hub. The metal puppets and the wrist bands flew all over the regions and the whole Academy realm, is now full of Sam''s customers.

    Once that is done, Sam went back to the Olympian realm by night. The return however, didn''t happen through harbinger. Instead, he used the space gate formation. The space gate formation connected between hubs alone.

    He already knew that themunication between these regions will be a problem, so he madeast minute arrangement. Usually, the academies have a very strict rule against the private space gates. However, the hub uses a lot of spatial energy for its regr activities, so the activation of space gate will just be mixed in those energy residues.

    They will not find it suspicious.

    When he returned, Ivar''s group is waiting for him.

    "We agree to your proposition."

    "Alright, as we previously agreed, you guys need to move to your respective locations right now. From now on, you will be living in the Hub. The spirit there will give you the information you need and how to use various functions of the Hub. And I want you guys to not do anything stupid like trying to pry in Hub''s secrets. The bacsh will be something unbearable."

    Sam crafted the soul contracts and now officially they are all on the same boat. Sam took them to Hub and sent them all to different Hub locations through the Space gate. Only Icarus was left and he is holding the two witnesses that are required to deal with the two Elders.

    "Tomorrow, I will make the announcement and you can also go and talk with Dean of Zeus Academy after that."

    "Will he grant me the audience?" Icarus asked. When he left the school, he didn''t exactly leave it on good terms."

    "I am sure he will. The announcement will make it so."

    The next morning, all the Wrist bands across the Academy realm started glowing with a holographic screen that carried a written announcement.

    In the Olympian realm, the notification is like this.

    "As of today. Icarus, the former student of Zeus Academy will be the person in charge of managing the Hub of Olympian region. He will act as my representative and all the official meetings and discussions will be done by him. The instructions for the special training program will be still given by me, however, Icarus will be there as the supervisor. He will be responsible for collecting your doubts and passing on to me. Same goes with other operations of the Hub.

    With the increase in my work due to the special ss, I decided to take this step and hired apetent young man to help me with this.

    Please treat him with the respect he deserves as my representative and ept him as the point of contact."

    The moment the announcement was made, the whole Olympian region shook. Icarus was very famous in the region before.

    The biggest shock was from the two Elders who were frantically searching for Icarus over the past few days. When they heard the announcement, their heart turned cold.

    They are also panicking because of the disappearance of the two people that were sent to deal with Ivar. There are too many bad signs and they almost went all superstitious on it.

    They immediately ran to the Hub to talk with Joker. They wanted to see if Icarus could be bought. They also wanted to know if joker knew about the incident and did this deliberately. They need to investigate a lot of things.

    Dean of the Zeus Academy was also stunned by this announcement. But those are not the biggest shocks they are going to experience that day. At around noon, Icarus walked into the Zeus Academy campus, wearing a uniform that was newly created for the hub''s staff.

    "I need a meeting with your Dean."

 Chapter 2100 Release

    Chapter 2100 Release

    Just like Sam said, Icarus was immediately granted an audience.

    Icarus was sitting in the Dean''s office within five minutes of his arrival.

    "Hello, Icarus."

    Icarus looked at the Dean who looked a haggard and seemed to have aged a century. "Hello Dean, I would prefer if you could address me as Manager Icarus." Icarus greeted with a smile and Dean''s smile froze. He shook his head and sighed.

    "Hello Manager Icarus. Why are you here? What is the reason for this meeting?"

    "I have some interesting news about two of the Elders that work under the Zeus Academy. When my Employer, found out about this, he felt vexed and disgusted to the point that he doesn''t want to associate himself with anyone from Zeus Academy until the matter is cleared.

    So, I am here to confirm the matter on his behalf. Please check all the contents of this spatial ring."

    Dean looked through them. One of them contained the testimony of the people that they caught and held. Another recording crystal had the videos created from the memories of those people. Then there is the testimony and the videos from the survivor who is also in their protection.

    When the whole thing was presented in front of Dean, his face paled and hands started shaking.

    He looked at Icarus and spoke.

    "What the hell is this?"

    "The truth. Same truth that got me expelled from this cursed institution. You as the Dean of this academy, put someone who caused this incident as in charge of the case to investigate. If that doesn''t tell you the standard of this ce, I don''t know what will.

    In a way, despite all the suffering and pressure I had to endure, I am d that I was expelled from this institution.

    And my employer, Mr. Joker told me that he will not be interacting with you any longer. Since he agreed with the students, he will be conducting the sses. However, your Elders and anyone else associated with the incident, even in a small and roundabout way are not allowed in the Hub and that includes you.

    Because of your ipetence you are an aplice to this incident and you are banned from using any services of the Hub."

    With that Icarus stood up and walked out, Dean wanted to call out to him to ask a few questions, but at this moment, his wrist band glowed and the videos that he just saw in the recording crystal popped up in the wrist band.

    "Fuck." He cursed and ran out.

    "Icarus, wait. What is the meaning of this? Why is the information made public?"

    Icarus turned around with a frown. "Since when do we have an obligation to keep this information private? We are going to announce your ban out loud and people will ask questions. We need to have a proper reason. It is not like we are the shady party in this situation. Why would we have any qualms to not release the information out?"

    Icarus didn''t wait and left.

    Dean held his head and was about to scream.

    But what he doesn''t know is, the information didn''t just spread throughout the Olympian realm. In fact, it is spread far and wide in all the other regions as well. Right now, while he was pulling his hair, the dirtyundry of his academy has been exposed to everyone.

    "Dean, what should we do now? What about the two Elders?"

    Dean suddenly came back to his senses and asked.

    "Where the hell are they?" His eyes are red and it is clear to anyone that he is pissed. His aura raged and the attendant shivered in fright.

    "I¡­ I don''t know, Dean. I will send someone to check up on them."

    "No need."

    Dean immediatelyunched himself into the air and made his way out of the Academy.

    Meanwhile, at the entrance of the Hub, the two elders are watching the video evidence that was broadcasted all over the realm. They shivered in fright at this and at the same time, they got angry. Their secret has been revealed.

    They wanted to barge into the Hub and made a fuss, when they were unable to enter through the barrier. They wanted to destroy it, but they knew it would immediately give their ce away.

    At this moment, Icarus arrived.

    "You two fools must have lost your brains. You should be running for your lives right now. Not kicking up a fuss."

    As soon as he said those words¡­

    *BOOM*

    Deannded on the ground and looked at both of the Elders angrily.

    "Toote, I guess." Icarus muttered and turned to Dean.

    "Please don''t make a fuss on the grounds of our establishment, please take your fight outside."

    "Don''t worry, there wouldn''t be any fight."

    Dean extended his hand and made a grabbing motion. The Divine energy transformed into two hands that grabbed both of the Elders. Dean then flew away with both of them towards the Zeus Academy.

    Sam watched the whole scene from a bunch of screens.

    He then contacted Icarus.

    "Strike while the Iron is hot. Contact Ivar and tell him to release all the stuff on the Instructors."

    "Are you sure? Didn''t they say, they wille back to negotiate?"

    "No, that''s not gonna happen. They might have let it go because the Elders have much more shit to deal with than them and they believed that the Elders would take care of it. It is way past the deadline anyway.

    Just release one after another and make sure it spreads in different regions. I want to strip the Zeus Academy bare. Since more than half of the instructors have so many crimes under the belt, I want to see how much trouble the Academy is going to face.

    I am sure, you know what to do with the evidence after publishing it."

    "Of course."

    Icarus went inside the Hub and used the space gate to go to the Norse Region''s Hub. "Sam asked to release the rest of the evidence of the instructors."

    "Got it. It will be done."

    Theymunicated a bit more and Icarus collected all the information to organize a bit more. That evening he went to the Academy realm''s enforcement office and filed shit load of cases against the Zeus Academy and an announcement was made to make the information public.

    "Some one filed 120 Cases against the instructors of the Zeus Academy withplete evidence." "Yeah, I heard too. Do you know what the best part is? The person who filedints was actually an old student of the Academy. It was said that he was forcefully expelled to cover up for someone else''s sins."

    "Really? I mean, I knew that none of the Olympian powers are clean, but I expected a bit more from the Academies at least. Zeus Academy, acts all high and mighty, but just look at it now. More than half of their instructors areplete criminals. I doubt the other half are clean."

    Discussions like these were happening all over the region.

    Deep within the Zeus Academy, Dean has a secret room where he tied up the two Elders.

    "You conspired with a Titan''s Incarnation and performed a ritual of sacrifice? Who else is involved in this?"

    Dean who was rtively softspoken most of the time had a cold tone. Cold as Ice.

    The two elders froze and shivered, but they are a bit reluctant about speaking.

    At this moment, Dean''s wrist band glowed and the two messages came. One of them is the release of evidence by the courtesy of Hub and the announcement of the Criminal cases registered against the Hub. He didn''t understand why everything is going wrong all of a sudden. Since the start of the Academic year, everything has been troublesome.

    Sam constantly picked fights with them and he even pissed off every student with the Academy Tower situation.

    Then he attracted even more hatred by messing with the God''s blessing. Pearl''s ns were exposed and other geniuses ganged up against Pearl and suppressed her, which should have been out of the question in a general circumstance.

    At the freshmen tournament, Ivar picked a fight with them and that one was also deliberate.

    Then the Pseudo hell situation.

    If that is not all, Icarus, one of their former star students who was dragged in the mud before came back with vengeance.

    In between the situation with the ming Skulls, then Stone who is breaking the freshmen one after another.

    Even the good thing like Hub is creating a lot of side effects, the economic strain which he is worried about.

    He felt a headache just thinking about it.

    However, what he doesn''t know is that the headache is far from over. Sam is just getting started.

    That night he went to the room where Dayus was imprisoned.

    "There is two days for the Pocket dimensions to start. I am going to release you today."

    Dayus finally heaved a sigh. He knew he is way toote to the game. But as people say, betterte than never.

 Chapter 2101 Payback

    Chapter 2101 Payback

    Dayusnded in the street out of thin air.

    He finally heaved a sigh and started walking to the Zeus Academy. At the same time, Sam contacted all of his friends.

    "Everyone, wear the ming skulls uniform and disguise yourself. We are going to do a crackdown and make sure leave the special token I gave you behind after you are done with them."

    That was the message. Sam''s friends moved. Including Night Ghost who has always beenying low. They arrived at their special room in the Hub, disguised themselves and used a special attachment Sam gave them.

    This attachment is an extra essory that works in tandem with the wrist band they have. They can use this to reach their targets with spatial transference.

    At this moment, each one of them have around ten targets each.

    Sam is also participating in this. He used the spatial transferences and appeared in the restaurant.

    "WHAT THE FUCK?"

    Samnded on the table and got a huge reaction from his target. It is a first year student of the Zeus Academy. He is neither a special target like on the list of Stone''s target, nor does he have huge prospects.

    He is just another negligible first grader who will sooner orter dropout because he hit his peak.

    Sam extended his hand and an energy bullet was formed.

    *BOOM*

    He sted the energy bullet on the chest and sent the target through a wall and finally outside. A huge hole appeared on the target''s chest and he is barely breathing.

    Sam took out a small cube and threw it in the middle of that hole before dropping another token to the ground and leaving the ce.

    "What the fuck happened? Who is that person?" One of the customers asked in shock.

    One of them walked to the student who was inst breath and noticed the cube.

    "This guy is from the Zeus Academy and the attacker is definitely from ming skulls. That robe, mask and the cube, I have heard about them before.

    He is definitely from the ming Skulls, he must be here on a contract."

    "Quick, we need to inform the City guard."

    The owner of the restaurant prompted the waiter to run and inform the city guard. Sam who disappeared from the restaurant reappeared inside a brother. A young man is lost in pleasure as he was engaging in intercourse with a woman who from the expression was definitely pretending.

    He aimed his hand and sted his chest open, just like how he did with the previous target and once again, he dropped the cube.

    When he dropped the cube here, the cube in the chest of the first target was activated.

    A huge me popped up from it and engulfed the guy. The me looked chaotic, but up on observation one can see that it is targeting the meridians.

    At this moment, the city guard finally came and hurriedly tried to put the me out while carrying the guy for emergency treatment.

    Even before they reached the treatment ce, Sam already moved to the third target. Once again, chest open and a cube dropped.

    The second target started burning. The brothel room which was filled with the other prostitutes and customers was caught on fire. The city guard hurried up and tried to help the target.

    They could see that he is on thest breath even while burning, they could see the target writhe in pain like a rodent set on fire.

    Within next fifteen minutes simr incidents kept on happening and they are not just caused by Sam. Simultaneously more than ten people are doing and within a couple of hours over a hundred students of Zeus Academy were attacked, set on fire and even left a message.

    There were tokens left behind every attack and they read one thing.

    "Payback for the Pseudo-hell ¨C Sam."

    The city guard was furious. They knew Sam, he was the one that started the chaos in the region which used to be fairly peaceful. Of course, Sam himself was not directly involved in many incidents, however, they attributed Stone''s obsessive challenges of Trial by Combat were inspired by Sam and gave him the credit of their hatred.

    Of course, if only they knew how on point they are.

    In fact, they might even be crediting him with less than what he actually deserves.

    They cursed under their breaths and collected all the targets. Even though they managed to save some of them, they were unable to keep their cultivations intact. Because the mes burned down their meridianworks and made it impossible for them to cultivate anymore.

    Their muscle fibers were also subjected to this intense burning. They wouldn''t recover.

    The whole Olympian region is shook. It is normal for fights to break out in the city. Even though Stone''s activities made the fights more frequent, it was still not far off from the norm.

    However, more than fifty people were attacked within a couple of hours and nobody even knows who the actual perpetrator is. Of course, many believed it was Sam because of the note left behind and this prompted a meeting in the headquarters of the City guard.

    "What do we need to do, Sir? This situation has went way too out of hand. If Sam was really behind these attacks and we let him get away with it, the whole city will be in a state of panic. The most number of citizens in the city belong to the Grade 1 level, that is the demographic with the highest number.

    And they are our current victims.

    If they all leave, the whole city will beid bare and our rating for this year will hit rock bottom. The revenue of the city will also take a huge hit."

    One of the subordinates in charge of City administration exined. Even though the Academy realm is created to groom the soldiers for Gods'' armies, the presence of the citizens that don''t actually belong to the Academies also y a significant role in running the city.

    They are entities that circte the currency within. Just like how poption is a resource in any other territory, the city in the Academy realm is the same.

    And these administrators and guards who are actually theckeys of the gods are also in apetition behind the scenes. There are some serious consequences if a city didn''t generate enough revenue and meet certain conditions.

    The captain of the city guard sighed.

    "We need to take action regarding this. We will go to the Gambler''s Academy and talk to the Student Union. We need to at least take him to trial."

    "But don''t you think he will just escape with the same trial ofbat situation? As far as I know, there is no person in the Grade 1 that could fight with Sam. Even white, the top student of Zeus Academy was defeated by him in the tournament.

    Unless that mysterious guy from the ming skulls steps forward, there is not chance of defeating him."

    This caused everyone else to pause once again. The captain thought for a few moments and gritted his teeth.

    "I have a way, even if it is despicable, I will do it. We cannot let this matter go. Sam definitely has to pay the price."

    "Captain, there is also the possibility that Sam has nothing to do with this, right? Just that tablet is not enough of an evidence. In fact, it falls short by way too much.

    He will just ask us the proof that the tablets belong to him and that''s it, we cannot refute it."

    "Even if he doesn''t have anything to do with it, we still need to make him bear the brunt. We willunch an investigation to see if we can find the people behind the attacks.

    If we cannot find them, then Sam has to sacrifice himself for our sakes."

    The captain then continued to exin his n. Half of the team was led by the Vice captain of the force and they went to the Zeus Academy, while the other half of the team led by the Captain of the force went to the Gambler''s Academy.

    At the same time, on both ends the meeting between the City guard and the Student Unions have been conducted.

    While things were like this, Dean who was still interrogating the two Elders and was on verge of losing his patience, got the news.

    When he heard the details that the tablet with Sam''s signature was found there, his heart turned cold. He gritted his teeth in anger and destroyed themunication token.

    He looked at the two Elders with boundless killing intent.

    He stopped himself from killing them and walked out of the secret room, before heading to his office.

    And outside his office, Dayus who has been waiting impatiently for the past few hours stood.

    However, Dean couldn''t give a shit about a youth in front of his office at this moment and ignored him.

    "Dean, do you know how long I have been waiting for you? How can you ignore me like this?"

    Dayus called out to the Dean and the whole atmosphere froze for a second. "A student is this arrogant? Can''t you see the Dean is busy right now?"

    One of the instructors yelled and pped Dayus across the face.

    "Kneel down and reflect on yourself. The first graders are getting more and more unbridled every single day."

    Dayus who got pped on the face and was forced to kneel, frowned and gritted his teeth. Rage surged out of his heart and he looked at the instructor with a cold gaze.

 Chapter 2102 One Slap fixed it

    Chapter 2102 One p fixed it

    Dayus'' anger red.

    He was very frustrated to begin with. He has been cooped up inside a closed room, tied to a chair unable to do anything but think.

    And all he could think about was, how humiliating it was of him to get caught by his peer as soon as he set foot in the Olympian region.

    This was supposed to be his territory.

    Him being the representative of Zeus in this game, whenever he stepped in an Olympian territory, he was given the best treatment possible.

    He could lord around people stronger than him, he could enjoy the women that are otherworldly, he could fill his coffers to the brim and they would thank him for emptying theirs.

    He was expecting a simr treatment here, in fact, he was kind of promised that treatment by Zeus.

    When he was stuck in that room, a thought did cross his mind.

    The dean should know that unless he arrived the Pocket dimensions wouldnt open. Since they opened, that means Dayus was here, however, he wasn''t in the Academy.

    This should have prompted Dean to search for him.

    Dayus knew that it would be hard to find him since Sam was the one that hid him, still the Dean is a Divine ne Consummate Cultivator, maybe, just maybe there was a chance.

    He hoped they at least made the effort.

    But only after he came out did he understand, there was no such thing. The Dean didn''t even inform the guards about Dayus'' possible arrival, much less searching for him.

    So, he had to wait outside the dean''s office like a peasant and when the Dean finally came, he was pped by an instructor and was forced to kneel down.

    All these bottled up frustrations finally exploded.

    "How dare you? How dare you hit me? How dare you attack me? Do you know who I am?"

    Dayus roared. His face turned red and his veins are bulging.

    The dean who initially ignored the student turned around and looked at the fuming Dayus.

    Dayus looked at the Dean and spat on the ground.

    "I am Dayus. RING ANY BELL?"

    Dean jerked on the spot. He held his forehead in frustration.

    "Please stand up."

    He walked forward and helped Dayus stand up before leading him inside.

    Dayus looked at the instructor who hit him coldly. The instructor at the moment is infinitely stronger than Dayus. However, he is not afraid. He is that arrogant because of the backing he has.

    One must say, Dayus perfectly fits with the profile of an Olympian.

    Undeserving pride and arrogance.

    Unyielding ego that stems from nothing but backing.

    Unstoppable mouth that gets them killed.

    Every olympian Sam killed until now more or less fit the criteria.

    Dayus sat inside the office and looked at the Dean with righteous anger. Even without asking the Dean knew what Dayus wanted to know.

    ''Why has the dean not found him?''

    And the dean only has one answer which he is a bit ashamed to say out loud.

    He forgot.

    in and simple. The whole Academy realm this year has been way too eventful and he couldn''t stop to think of Dayus. He was thest thing on his mind. The worst part is when the gods sent a message saying that the pocket dimensions are good to go, the first thing that should havee to mind his Dayus.

    However, he didn''t.

    He just forgot.

    "I was kidnapped as soon as I entered this realm. Just four streets away from here, I was captured out in the open. I thought the Zeus Academy would bepetent enough to notice my disappearance.

    However, I was only disappointed."

    "You were abducted? Who did it?"

    Dean asked with a frown. However Dayus didn''t want to answer it. It was a matter of disgrace.

    "Forget it. Can you just process my admission? I also need your help with recruiting a few people under my wing. They need to bepetent individuals. I need them for the further explorations of the pocket dimensions."

    "You want to make a crew of your own?"

    "Yes, it is absolutely necessary."

    "There is only two days left for the first pocket dimension to appear. It will be hard for us to put a crew together. After all, you are a new face and no one really knows you. How can they trust and follow you in these two days?"

    Dayus also understood this point and this only made him more frustrated. All of this is because he was trapped like an idiot.

    He thought for a moment and spoke.

    "Then can I bring a few of my people the other realms? Can you just admit them?"

    "That is not possible as well. The admissions are closed. The only reason you are able to enter the Academy now is because of your special status.

    However, even that special status doesn''t warrant you to get more admissions."

    *BAM*

    Dayus mmed his palm on the desk and yelled.

    "THEN WHAT THE FUCK SHOULD I DO? IF YOU HAD COME FOR ME BEFORE, I WOULDN''T HAVE BEEN IN THIS PICKLE.

    I FOUGHT WITH A WHOLE PLANET AND HURRIED HERE IN HOPES OF CREATING MY CREW. BUT BECAUSE OF YOUR ACADEMY''S INCOMPETENCE, I¡­"

    *PAK*

    He was in the middle of his ranting, when a pnded across his face and mmed him to the ground. Dean looked at Dayus coldly.

    His aura raged and suppressed Dayus in his position. Dayus who was stuck fell in a daze for a second. He couldn''t evenprehend this situation. Until now, whenever he reached a ce that belonged to Olympians, his treatment was extraordinary to say the least.

    He was treated like he was their ancestor."

    He kind of felt the Zeus Academy will be like that. Zeus explicitly told him about the ''special treatment'' he will get here.

    He looked at the Dean and wanted to scream, but just that gaze made him stop.

    "Mr. Dayus. I don''t know what gave you the confidence to rant in my office straight to my face.

    The first time I let it go because, Lord Zeus indeed told me to take care of you and your disappearance waspletely out of my hands and reach. I should have indeed kept a better eye out for you.

    But that is it.

    You have no right to treat me with disrespect. You might be something worth in other areas, here I am the Dean and you are a student. If you need help, I will try my best to amodate you. However, if you act like a raging bitch, I will treat you like one.

    Now get back on your seat and exin what you need and why you need it so that we can solve this problem."

    Dayus obediently sat down and looked at Dean who is looking at another document as if he wasn''t even interested in the conversation.

    "Speak."

    Deanmanded.

    "Zeus has promised special rewards for the pocket dimensions of the Olympian realm this time. Almost every one of them will have a hidden objective.

    It could be a separate space with trials or it could be an added difficulty, or an extra hidden threat, it depends on the dimension and even I don''t know exactly what it would be.

    The presence of these wouldn''t impact the regr operation of the pocket dimensions.

    However, if these hidden things were tackled and solved, the rewards would be great. And the rewards are huge."

    "You are saying rewards this and that. What are those rewards exactly? Do you have any information?"

    "I don''t know to a full extent. All I can tell you is they are rted to legacy inheritances."

    "Legacy inhereitance?"

    Dean frowned. iT wasn''t an unfamiliar thing for him. In fact, he is only way too familiar with it. Legacy inheritance is not just some inheritance of techniques and treasures, it is an inheritance of cultivation, strength, insights and bloodlines¡­

    When people ascend to godhood they leave behind Divine incarnations to do their bidding in the Divine realms where the Gods don''t have ess.

    Apart from that, there are some special Divine incarnations that were created solely for the purpose of passing on the inheritance.

    Divine Incarnation is a replica of the god and that includes their bloodline, constitution, insights and many more. The only thing they don''t have is ability to cultivate and grow.

    So, for that reason, when these incarnations are at the end of their lifespan, they enter a special state. They leave behind the physical body and extremely small fragment of their soul before dissipating their consciousness.

    The person who is able to inherit this, will gain changes in constitution, the insights and even the bloodlines that were left behind in this Incarnation.

    In fact, in a twisted way it is very simr to how Sam managed to change Stone''s state from a useless bum to a machine ofbat.

    The only problem is, the Legacy inheritances are so rare and so sought after that when one appearedst time, the Academy realm was thrown into a state of war.

 Chapter 2103 Legacy Inheritances

    Chapter 2103 Legacy Inheritances

    The Academy realm has been in war many times.

    The Academies fought with each other on virtual any metric one could imagine and that included conquest and ughter. However, even in those myriad of wars, some wars were meant to be special.

    And the war caused for iming the legacy inheritance was one such war.

    Within the Pocket dimensions that appeared that year, one of them had the legacy inheritance as the prize. Everyone wanted to im it and one of the Norse Academy students managed to win it after clearing the quests of the pocket dimensions.

    However, no Academy was willing to back down.

    They openly challenged each other. Ambushes, assassinations, trickery. Everyone stooped so low in front of one inheritance that the prestige of all the Academies was drawn down the drain. In fact, that might be the only time when one of the Academies actually physically got destroyed.

    Even the Elders were on each others'' throats and the Deans had to step in and almost got into conflict.

    All of this happened in the short span it took for the student to assimte the inheritance and truly im it as his. Finally, the Academies lost the actual reason to battle. Even if they kill that guy, they wouldn''t get im the inheritances.

    But the war still went on for a while.

    By then a lot of resentment brewed within themselves and they couldn''t just let it go.

    Finally, when the war spread way too far and wide into the realms outside the Academy realm and some really powerful figures intervened, they finally had the mind to sit and talk.

    That was a nightmarish period and he for one would rather forget it ever happened.

    "Legacy Inheritances?"

    Dean repeated and Dayus nodded.

    He finally pushed the document away and looked at Dayus intently.

    "Zeus has prepared ten legacy inheritances of various elements. They are extremely strong. I don''t know exactly what elements they are and if there are any variants, so I need to prepare a big crew to cover as many bases as possible.

    For now, only I know exactly what the prize is and to look for it. The rest of the students don''t. But I know for sure that they will attack me if they find out. That is why, I need the crew even more.

    I need them to save me and help me out in the pocket dimensions and of course they will get to inherit these amazing rewards after that."

    "You do know how much of a fuss these inheritances cause right?"

    Dean asked and looking at Dayus'' nk expression, it is apparent that he actually doesn''t know the impact of it.

    So, he told me briefly about the war.

    "These are gifts from Zeus. Are you sure you just want to let it go with that as excuse?"

    Dayus replied. Even though it did feel a bit ominous to think about what sort of war these legacy inheritances will bring, he knew he needs a crew. He cannot just give up on it.

    Dean sighed. He then recalled what Pearl spoke to him before once.

    "There is a vision to one of the oracles that the gods are going to create something special this time around. They will bless our region with rewards and I want to make sure that I get to control the people who can obtain them.

    I want to be the leader of this new era."

    He now understood why she was gathering a crew and was so desperate about it.

    He also realized that Dayus is the one to trigger such a fortune in the Olympian region. He put a brake to those thoughts and said.

    "I did want to give you a crew, however, you must understand why it is hard for me to support you openly in this.

    It is one thing for me to exin your sudden admission out of nowhere, if I really force some first graders to follow you, then things will blow up in our face.

    You need to organically recruit them.

    However, for that, you don''t have enough prestige. No one knows you and therefore no one trusts you.

    Even if you reveal your special status no one will follow you willingly. Do you really want let those kind of people to inherit these rewards?"

    Dayus nodded. What Dean said is absolutely right and it is one of his worries as well.

    So, if this needs to work, he needs to increase his prestige instantly and he needs to attract people while doing it.

    "What do you suggest I do?"

    Dayus asked. He mellowed down. The beating must have really helped.

    Dean went into a deep thought andnded on the documents on his table. He suddenly had an Idea. Dayus is one of the yers after all and he believed he could use him a bit.

    "I don''t know if you have heard, but Sam and Zeus Academy are on logger heads. One of the students made a huge mistake and broke a lot of rules to entrap Sam. Right now, Zeus Academy is going to face the legal trials based on the realms Judiciary proceedings.

    This put us in a lot of trouble. On top of that, there are problems from several fronts. As if that is not enough, Sam employed a group called ming Skulls to deal with the students of the Academy.

    Until now, a few seniors were put on the task to weed out the ming skulls, but they were unable to do anything.

    Right now, ming skulls are attracting a lot of attention and they are causing a lot of first grade students to suffer, if you can investigate this, find them and deal with them, then you will get the poprity you need, while attracting a lot of people''s loyality since you will be the person that saved their lives, how about it?"

    Dayus'' eyes lit up. This is indeed a great chance. It is almost like the stage was set for him just to perform and capture the audience. "I will do it." He immediately agreed.

    "Before I announce your admission, I want you to attempt the Academy tower, in fact go ahead and attempt all the Olympian Academy towers.

    After that was done, go to the Hub, register yourself. The procedure for getting a new wrist band and puppet is simple. Enter the Hub and attempt the Arcade tests. Get as high score as you can¡­."

    "Wait a minute."

    Dayus stopped and asked.

    "What is this Hub?"

    Dean sighed and exined and Dayus kept on frowning.

    Because the exnation of Hub sounded a lot like something he has seen before back in Deste. Before Sam built a Park, more like an amusement park in thend he obtained for some of his exploits in military.

    It was very famous. In fact, its impact was much higher than when Sam built his City and the Academy. After all, it was the first time in the world that something like Sam''s park was seen. A lot of working models in the Hub are simr to Sam''s park.

    Of course the scale is obviously very different.

    But Dayus had a bad feeling.

    Then he thought about the reason for Sam kidnapping him¡­

    He felt like he is connecting some dots.

    "Who created this Hub?"

    "Someone named Joker. He wears a mask and he only appears as a projection. No one has met him in person. Maybe the current managers did, but that''s about it."

    "Joker?"

    "What does he look like?"

    Dayus asked.

    "You will find out when you go to Hub and register. Hub is the most happening thing in the Realm, so the arcade scores hold a lot of prestige.

    Since you are a yer, then I am sure you will do great. The only problem is, we have way too less time and way too much to do. You need to work on all these immediately. You have until tomorrow afternoon to finish these tasks. After that, the case of ming skulls will be yours."

    "Alright."

    Dayus and Dean discussed a few more details.

    At the same time, in the Gambler Academy''s Student union room.

    Crow is looking at the vice captain of the city guard.

    "Crow, this is not a small matter. The whole city is in chaos. People are dying left and right, some of them are in an even worse state, they are being crippled and a lot of them are from big families.

    Sam must take responsibility for what he has done."

    "What has he done, exactly? Do you have any proof?"

    Crow asked in a calm tone.

    "You know better than I, what kind of person he is. Just for a couple of bowls of soup, he caused a lot ofmotion. There is no way, after doing something as bad as using a pocket dimension to trap him, he will stay put.

    And only he is the one arrogant enough to leave his name behind on the crime scene."

    "That is what you believe. Belief only helps when you are praying to god, not investigating the cases like this."

    "Crow, you better make him surrender, or else the consequences would be severe. The city guard might usually turn a blind eye to things like fighting between academies, but that doesn''t mean, we are ipetent.

    Don''t take our leeway for granted."

    Crow just stood and spoke.

    "The meeting is over. Get out."

 Chapter 2104 Meetings

    Chapter 2104 Meetings

    Crow left even without letting the city guard speak.

    He arrived in a different room, where Dove was waiting along with some other people. "So, what did he tell you?"

    Dove asked.

    "Just as you predicted, he asked us to hand over Sam. He told me to make Sam surrender and appear in the trial."

    "I knew the guard captain will pull some shit like this. If I am not wrong, then there should be a meeting happening in the Zeus Academy as well."

    One of the seniors beside Dove spoke and they exchanged a nce with a smile.

    That guy is not wrong.

    At the same time, there was indeed a meeting happening in the Zeus Academy. However, it wasn''t just the student union that was there. The student union requested help from the Noble league. At least on the paper to deal with this matter.

    The captain looked at Christos and spoke.

    "The situation is a bitplicated at the moment. From my estimation, the Gambler''s academy is not going to let Sam surrender. So, we need to draw him in somehow and make him suffer."

    "What do you suggest?"

    Christos asked.

    "I need the information on all the victims of Sam. I want the information of their closest rtives."

    "What do you want them to do?"

    "There is a specialw in the Academy realm that applies only to the outsiders. The academy is not supposed to be a ce where everyone could do whatever they want. One of the main reasons, the city guard and judiciary services are present is for the sake of these outsiders.

    When they suffer any grievances, no matter what kind, they can appeal to the Judiciary system and the suspect will undergo a stringent investigation."

    "But the outsiders are not the ones that suffered." Christos spoke.

    "Well, the word suffering is a bit subjective. So, we are going to use that. Let the Zeus Academy fileint against Sam. But it should be a jointint for all the victims.

    It should be like the Zeus Academy filingint on Sam for attacking the students of the Academy. No single student should get a special treatment.

    Thatint is strong, but Sam can still use trial bybat to escape.

    But at the same time, I want the families of all the victims to file individualints against him. From the count, he has more than fifty victims and from the looks of it, he might go again. We are going to file theints at the same time after it reached a bit higher number.

    Once it reaches a certain number, Sam will be devoid of using regr Trial bybat. Particrly, the matter involves the outsiders."

    "So, you are saying that you will make the ''suffering'' a subjective thing. Since the victims are killed, their families could indeed be considered ''suffered''. Still, how is this going to help us.

    From what I know, when an outsider who is powerless wants to deal with a situation like trial bybat, the best they can do is choose a champion from the students or even teachers of the Academy."

    "Yeah, true.

    But when the number ofints hits a certain threshold, a few things will be triggered¡­"

    The captain went on to exin his detailed n and Christos'' eyes widened in disbelief. Not just him, everyone within the room were shocked and that included some of the city guards as well.

    "Howe no one knows that such aw even exists?" Christos asked. If he had known something like this exists, then he would have used thisw to deal with Sam, instead of using other means.

    Even now, he still doesn''t know exactly what Pearl did in the Pseduo hill. The only thing he knows is that she collected a lot of death soldiers from a bunch of the families that are part of Noble league.

    He also knew that she used the entrance of the Pocket dimension.

    But that is it, the exact details of what transpired in the Pocket dimension are unknown to everyone. All he knew is that Sam and the other rankers came back and none of them were dead. Pearl disappeared and Dove came with Sam and dered a war as well asunched a judicial process against the Academy.

    He wanted to deal with that, but then a lot of other things happened in the realm. One that gave him a headache is the case against the instructors and elders.

    The crimes of them came to light.

    There are a bunch of charges being filed against them. Obiviously the Noble league has a vested interest in the instructors, so strict orders came from their families to handle this along with the instructors.

    He never felt such a huge headache in his life. He couldn''tprehend why the stable Olympian region is going through so much chaos at the same time.

    He was already thinking of how to handle Sam. Because once he knows about their involvement, there is bound to be some heat and he wanted to be prepared. Now, the city guard captain came with the perfect solution that will handle a lot of his troubles.

    They discussed a few more details and left.

    While everyone has their own ns.

    In the secret room of hub, Sam and his friends are watching these different meetings happening. They were all smiling at the deliberate schemes that everyone is hatching against Sam.

    "Since we already know what ising, then it is easy to handle them all. Let''s just focus on our tasks at hand."

    Sam spoke and swiped his hand on the table, the holographic screen changed and a few images appeared on it.

    There are images of vast buildings and estates.

    "Our first target. Thssa.

    A vast with almost eighty percent of it full of sea. It is full of archipgoes. It is upied by one of the families that is under the Olympian rule.

    Obviously they worship Poseidon.

    This acts as their ancestralnd. They have several realms ands under their control and they are very rich as well. Thssa has been a great blessing to them since ancient times and it still does.

    Their whole family has water elemental affinities and constitutions. It is almost like a default setting to them. And they also have very high affinity with the sea beasts and they have legions of them. And maybe because of Poseidon''s blessing, who is known as the creator of horses, they have affinity with a special breed of Pegasi.

    It is not exactly rare and it is definitely not of the mythical bloodlines, but from what I can see they are great beasts. They have affinity to manipte water and wind both. They are like Dia in the sense that their size not enormous. They are actually like normal horses in terms of size.

    Their existence made me withdraw the n of destroying the whole as it is."

    Sam paused and continued.

    "Now to the actual family. The Thssa n. The''s namesake.

    The head of the family is a Divine ne consummation Cultivator. At the Initial Stage. Luckily for us and he is the only ording to the info, in that cultivation range. But still, he can kill all of us a hundred times with his strength."

    Everyone took a deep breath.

    They have guts to pick a fight with anyone they want, but the problem is the guts are not enough to win the battles."

    Sam noticed their solemn expressions and smirked.

    "That is why, we are not going headon with them, my friends.

    We are going to destroy them, but in an indirect way.

    That brings us to their enemies."

    Sam waved his hand and images of another family came.

    "Sjor family. The n that is absolutely against the Thssa family. Their rivalry started several thousand centuries ago and Thssa family managed to win, which actually made them obtain the Thssa.

    From then on, both of them are at odds with each other.

    Their territories ovep and they fight constantly over anything and everything. They are going to be our borrowed hand."

    Sam exined more intricate details of the n as he disyed several images of the Sjor family''s territory along with Thssa family territory. There is some info about the key figures that will be involved in their n and how they are going to be useful.

    After all of that was done, Philip asked.

    "So, we have the n, we know who to use and who to discard, the only problem is making contact.

    Sjor family has some significant presence in the Norse region ording to our information. So, they must know all of us. We might even be under their list.

    So, how are we going to make contact without revealing our intentions?

    After all, there is a chance that they might just sell us out to the Thssa family. As much as they hate each other, we are nothing insignificant in front of their powers, they can use us as bargaining chip."

 Chapter 2105 Meetings Meetings More Meetings

    Chapter 2105 Meetings Meetings More Meetings

    Philip''s reasoning might appear a bit farfetched, but it is notpletely out of possibility.

    There is a good chance that they will sell the whole team out to their enemies, to use as a bargaining chip when they sense the opportunity.

    Worse, they can use the whole team for a while to create chaos in Thssa before selling them out. Double the impact. "That is why, we are not going to interact with the Sjor family directly. We know a guy, who knows a guy."

    Sam paused and Night Ghost spoke.

    "Ivar?"

    "Yes. Ivar still has a lot of influence in the Norse region and he happens to know a Fourth Grade student in Thor''s Academy who is part of Sjor family''s branch lineage. He is currentlypeting with the offspring of the main branch and other side branches for the position of the sessor.

    And with them approaching the Peak of Divine ne Transcendence, they are all neck to neck with thepetition. We will use him as the entry point and make contact with the family. We can make a deal after understanding the circumstancespletely.

    However, the rest of the n is going to be like this¡­"

    Sam proceeded to exin the whole n and the topic was concluded after they discussed their goal and approach to destroy the Thssa first. "So, how are the squad selections going?"

    Sam changed the topic after that. Even though he could get all the information he needs from the Hub''s surveince, he just let his team handle some of the things. For those things he doesn''t need to waste his time checking and observing each and every move.

    "We got invitations. All of us except, Night Ghost."

    "That''s good. I won''t go into details, just pick the missions that get most amount of coins as prize. We need to remove as much coin from the market as possible."

    They nodded.

    Vidyuth thought of something and asked.

    "It seems like the pressure was alleviated on the Zeus Academy because of Christos'' n. Even though he tried to keep it tightly under the wraps, the observant students still figured what was happening and tried to use the same methods.

    The exchange center is buzzing everyday with their presence.

    Is it something of concern?"

    "Not really, I let them do it. I want them to pin as much hope on it as possible and I want them to mobilize more resources from their ns as well.

    I already started seeing some distress among low level students. They are barely able to make their ends meet while fulfilling the weekly quota of payment.

    I think within one week or so, I will strike. It will throw a huge wrench in their ns and let''s see how they will handle it."

    That topic was concluded and Sam brought up a different one.

    "Night Ghost, the Pocket dimensions are opening. I hope the preparations areplete. I know it is a huge task, but I am looking forward to the results."

    "Of course, everything is pristine and even I am looking forward to the results." Even Night Ghost grinned at the thought of their n.

    "So, care to let us in on the topic?"

    "Yeah, tell us."

    Philip and Saber Monarch asked.

    "I don''t want to spoil the surprise. Just make sure that when you are attending the Pocket dimensions, always bring your wrist band with you.

    Apart from that, there is something else that I hope everyone is prepared for.

    The Hidden rewards of the Pocket dimensions. I got some more information because of Dayus and Dean''s meeting. The rewards are something called Legacy Inheritances¡­."

    Sam exined what they are and then continued.

    "If any of you are interested in one, we can arrange you to merge with it. If you are not, we can either store them for future use or gift them to some of our Students in Dusk. I am sure they will serve as sweet rewards for some hugepetition."

    No one spoke.

    "So, students it is. Just make sure that you obtain all of them. Not a single one should fall into Dayus'' hands."

    They kept on discussing one n after another for a few hours. After some time, they left and went back to their respective academies. However, on their way, they stopped at the Enforcement hall of the Academy realm and filedints.

    Comints against the Zeus Academy and the Dean for trying to use the Pseudo-hell as a trap and trying to kill them.

    Since they have the evidence as well, the person in charge cannot reject theints. They didn''t file amonint though, they filed separateints one by one.

    When the Dean got the notices for theseints, he almost lost it. He contacted Christos and the Student Union leader.

    "I don''t know what you are going to do. Go and convince all of them to take theirints back. I already held their Deans from filingints against our Academy, I can''t be bothered with handling the students too."

    Christos sighed.

    "Sir, we already have our hands full. We are trying to handle Sam''s case. The attacks haven''t stopped. The frequency might have reduced but the ming skull is still attacking us. The n we have needs all our hands on the deck."

    *SLAM*

    The Dean mmed the desk to the ground.

    "I don''t give a crap." He cursed in a low tone. He finally lost his bearing. Christos gulped in nervousness.

    "Don''t think that I don''t know that you were behind this shit as well. From the video evidence I knew that a bunch of your forces and the rest of the noble league''s forces were involved in this whole shit.

    Since you started it, end it yourselves. I am already knee deep in this mess with the Instructors and Elders doing all kinds of shitty things. You might not know this, the Academy is about to fall apart. Soprehend this with your numb skulls and do what I told you to.

    If the other Academies also take action against us¡­"

    He fell back into his chair and sighed.

    It has been way too frustrating for a while.

    "Forget about the ming Skulls for now. Someone else is going to handle it. Just provide him man power and some resources if he needs."

    Christos was surprised.

    "Who?"

    "His name is Dayus. Special Admission. He started just today. He should be at the Academy tower. If you want to know more, just follow him around for today."

    They left and the Dean was alone in his office.

    He locked the doors and opened up a gourd of wine before leaning in on his chair once again. He felt exhausted.

    No one knows how many meetings have taken ce that day. However, that was not the end of the meetings. Because as soon as Sam''s friends went to their academies, they were all called by their respective Deans.

    Everyone had one thing inmon.

    They all had a notice in their hands. And no, it is not the notice about the cases they filed against the Dean of Zeus Academy.

    *BAM*

    Dean of Hermes Academy mmed the notice on the table and looked at Watt.

    "What the fuck do you think you are doing? Filing aint against me? Your own Academy''s Dean? How dare you?"

    He spoke through gritted teeth. Watt looked at him with his signature nk expression.

    "Answer me, you little shit. I gave you some special treatment and you are getting way over in your head. Do you think I won''t expel you just because you got some rank in the freshman tournament?"

    "Do it."

    Watt replied. Clear and concise. The Dean''s face froze.

    "What did you say?"

    "Do it, expel me. And tell the whole world why you expelled me too, while you are at it."

    There was a pause.

    "What do you think you are going to gain from this?"

    Dean asked.

    "I am just exercising my right. The position in pseudo hell is something that I won fair and square. The Zeus Academy''s student, that too a student who wasn''t qualified to be in the Pseudo hell, came and tried to kill us.

    They even modified the formation of the pseudo hell and got a person from Hades directly involved in the test.

    I almost died there without even a chance to fight back.

    When I came back and told you about the situation, what the hell did you do? You didn''t even press the matter. You had one meeting with the Dean of Zeus Academy. All he did was promise you, one unconditional favor and you buckled.

    Its obvious that your personal benefits outweigh your responsibilities as the Dean, so I took matters into my own hands.

    I filed aint against Zeus Academy and I filed aint against you. Just get ready to go for the trial. If you want to expel me, do it. I will just file aint against you once again.

    And unlike some of the old students that you suppressed with the threat of family, friends and some other thing, you can''t do shit to me. I would die trying to get the justice that I deserve."

 Chapter 2106 Dayus Plan

    Chapter 2106 Dayus'' n

    Simr scenes were urring in the other Academies as well. The Olympian Deans suddenly felt like they were hit by lightning. Sam who was behind all thisughed his heart out when he saw the plight of these Deans.

    Lawsuits were not a thing in this world. After all, everything is based on a person''s strength and the stronger one always wins. Whatever that winner says is the truth, it is the justice and it is thew.

    However, back on earth, Sam had his fair share of games withwsuits, a person can be dragged through the mud and more with that power. A saint can be reduced to a devil and a rich man can be reduced to a beggar.

    It is a great and convenient weapon and those who knew how to wield it, used it to a great extent.

    Now, Sam is using the same weapon against these people. The city guard captain was stupid enough to reveal what a person can do with the judicial proceedings in this realm. As Christos said, no one really knew what it was.

    Now that Sam knew, he has more than ten ways to make the lives of all these people miserable.

    But they have to wait until the first pocket dimension was opened and done. Until then, he just needs to let the situation ferment. Kill some more Zeus Academy members and fan the mes by spreading the news more and piss off any many people as he can.

    While doing that, he was observing Dayus'' actions.

    Dayus followed the Dean''s n perfectly. First he went to the Academy tower and went up to forty-five floors on the first try. It might not seem like much, but even Vidyuth who is a talented guy only went up to almost thirty floors.

    Forty-five is a big number. He didn''t stop there. After that was done, he heard about Sam''s exploits and instead of going to the Hub like the Dean said, he went to get an Olympian pass. This made the Dean also a bit happy. This improvisation can only help him out.

    The impact will be better. And if Dayus creates enoughmotion, then a bit of attention will be diverted to that side.

    He attempted the other towers one by one at the maximum speed. Up on his request, Christos even sent some very high quality recovery medicines that helped with energy consumption. Particrly the mental energy.

    He fought through the night and went to the Hub.

    He attempted one arcade game after another and set some very high scores. In a couple of machines he even beat the highest scores and made look at him in awe.

    He was only done with all of this by the next day afternoon. After he was done, Dean announced handing over the ming Skulls case to Dayus. After the announcement was made, Sam had a very intriguing thought.

    And it only strengthened when he saw what Dayus did next. He arrived at the city square and made an announcement.

    "Recently, there were a lot of attacks on the Zeus Academy and its reputation. Many people who were jealous of our legacy and envious of our strength are trying to smear our reputation and harm our Olympian honor.

    This caused a lot of our seniors and instructors to be busy with a handful of things and taking this as advantage, the ming skulls and some vicious ba¡­ fiends behind it are attacking the first grade students of the Zeus Academy.

    To put an end to this, I was asked to catch the ming skulls.

    For that, I need a team. At first I wanted to recruit only from the Zeus Academy, but I believe this is not just the problem of Zeus Academy, rather the Olympian Academy. So, I would like to recruit from all the Olympian Academies in this temporary team.

    Our team''s one and only goal will be to catch the ming skulls and that is what we will do.

    Everyone who participates will bepensated. However, time of essence, so I want everyone wants to be a part of this toe and register in the Zeus Academy''s dorm area.

    The test will be concise and fast so that we can get on duty immediately."

    The announcement of Dayus shook them. Even more when they found out what the test was. It was just basic one on onebat. They had to fight with Dayus.

    Sam kept an eye on the whole recruitment process and the only surprise was when White showed up. He actually applied for the recruitment which only delighted the Dean a bit more. Twopetent individuals is obviously much better then one.

    However, Dayus had his reservations.

    He doesn''t trust White as much as he did with others. Because he couldn''t find much information on White''s background like he could with the other candidates. The test process appeared to be transparent to the people''s eyes. But what they do not know is that Dayus has rigged it a little bit. There was a hidden criteria which will decide whether they could pass the test or not.

    A transparent background.

    Courtesy to Christos, Dayus managed to ess the detailed background information of the candidates. Dayus is going to allow these candidates to get some really high level rewards, so he wants someone that he could easily control as well as someone who is blindly loyal to Zeus and the Olympian Gods, preferably Zeus of course.

    If they satisfy this criteria, it will be easier for Dayus to control them. However, White doesn''t fit any of those criteria.

    He is not a devout believer of Olympus, much less Zeus. He first came with the intention to join the Gambler academy. He had made it known that he and Sam had a connection, which also made Dayus extra vignt.

    Whenever it concerns Sam, his brain is on overdrive and he cannot overthink enough. Sam is a person who thinks all kinds of possibilities. After facing several defeats, he tried to start thinking like Sam and those thoughts led him to several spections regarding White.

    Majority of them made him suspicious. After all, for all Dayus knew, White could be a decoy set up by Sam to raise chaos in the realm.

    He wanted to reject White, the only problem is that he cannot. Unlike the rest of the candidates, Dayus didn''t have the prowess to defeat White bad enough to not meet the announced criteria. Tost a certain time with Dayus in the ring. White proved more than worthy, almost defeating Dayus to a tie. Even though Dayus didn''t reveal all his trump cards, judging from the discussion of the audience, the case could be same with White.

    So, just like that, White and Dayus became reluctant teammates. White seemed to have sensed the reluctance, so he spoke.

    "I am only here because I want to fight the ace of the ming skulls again. I won''t interfere with your matters and I will not be part of any other situation other than the ming skulls investigation. You can rest assured."

    Dayus was a bit stumped. His intentions were exposed way too easily.

    After the recruitment was over, the whole team went for a meeting. Dayus selected eleven people including White, making the team twelve.

    The meeting was simple. Dayus wants to set up a n and it is not even a unique n of some sorts. It is the oldest trick you could find in the oldest book. To create a fake assignment for the ming Skulls.

    They will use some decoy and ask for ming skulls to deal with a certain target who would also be part of the set up.

    "You really think that no one thought of this before? I am pretty sure the student unions of every single academy within the region must have tried this. But it didn''t work. Its almost like the other party knows exactly what the fake assignment is and what a real assignment is."

    "I know. That is why we are not going to set up a single assignment. We are going to set up multiple random assignments all with different set of parameters. One would be revenge against a second grade student, another is stealing something from a peer, etc, etc. And we are also going to set up the whole thing in a much more secretive manner. I want each of you to randomly pick two people from the people in the academy. They shouldn''t be your friends or people you are acquainted with.

    You should barely know them.

    Just give me the names thate to your mind. Of course, don''t say them out loud. Write them don secretly in slips of paper. Don''t copy each other."

    The whole team was a bit confused, but they did as they were told. After that, Dayus collected all the slips without letting anyone take a peek. "I will be back."

    He went to a different room to make sure what he is about to do remains a secret. If only, he had the sense to not take the new puppet that he just gained from the Hub.

 Chapter 2107 Pocket Dimension Opens

    Chapter 2107 Pocket Dimension Opens

    Dayus stayed in the room for quite a while and after that, he came back with a few slips of paper each.

    He distributed one for each of them.

    "The slip given to you has the name of your target."

    He then took out some envelops and passed it over to them.

    "Your task is to distribute the envelops to your targets. Don''t talk anything else with them. Just tell them that it is a favor for the Dean, Noble League and the Student Union. Don''t open the envelop and don''t try to see its contents by any other means.

    For now, those are your only instructions and I hope you can follow them to the tee."

    The whole team was confused, but they nodded. This new leader of theirs was pretty entric and some of them even started having some doubts. But the promised rewards were pretty high and all of them happened to be in big deficit of coins.

    They need to pay for their special sses in the hub.

    "Don''t wait. Do it now."

    They left the room and went to their respective targets. These people are someone they don''t know, but they just believed that their target might have been someone chosen by another teammate.

    They went and delivered the envelopes.

    The targets were of course curious. They opened the envelopes and found four things inside. A spatial ring, a ming skulls card, a smaller envelope, and a letter. The spatial ring contained a shit load of coins and the letter contained a few instructions. They are to go and ce an assignment with the ming skulls using the card.

    As for who they should ce the hit on, the details were given in the smaller envelope. And they have to do it right away. With no dy. They were given the methods to contact the ming skulls. However, Dayus really didn''t have to do all that.

    Because almost everyone knew how to do it. In fact some of them even ced a hit before.

    Everything is fine until then.

    The only weird part is that they shouldn''t open the smaller envelopes themselves, they are to deliver it directly to the ming skulls representative.

    The targets moved and went to ce the hits.

    Sam watched this all unfold with amusement. He understood what Dayus is trying to do. He is trying to prevent any form of information leak. The targets that were chosen actually were not in the names given by his teammates. These eleven candidates arepletely different from the people chosen by his team. But because he interchanged it, they just assumed they got the name of the target chosen by a different teammate.

    Based on which assignment was messed up, Dayus could identify the information leak. Its not that he is just suspecting them directly. There are many ways for an information leak to happen.

    And he is going to check all the boxes to make sure how it was happening.

    For that, he employed the Noble league. They provided him with additional man power to monitor all of his teammates.

    As for the little envelopes, there are obviously the names of the targets in there and they are also not part of the names given by the team. They are apletely different set of random people that Dayus picked.

    With the support of Dean, he is going to send some instructors to warn them of the possible assassination attempt of them.

    The whole n was set up based on few assumptions.

    One if that there is a definite information leak and Dayus wanted to identify that leak first and the second one is based on the first one. Unless the ming skulls have a deep enough towork to identify the whole thing was a hoax, they are not going to suspect that all of them are fake and they are going to act on some of them.

    That means, the ones they don''t act on have the information leaks.

    He is going to use the people given to him by the Noble league to identify the possible cracks and start investigating from there.

    And if the informationwork was indeed that deep, then it would be much easier. Because there are only a few ways that could infiltrate that deep into the Academy region and it wouldn''t take long to find that out with simple trial and error.

    Sam didn''t even have to put much effort to figure this whole thing out. It is pretty straight forward and the moment Dayus started preparing the envelopes and stuff, he understood what he was trying to do. Confirmed it when he saw the actions of the targets.

    This method would have worked well, if not for the Sam''s way of collecting information. In a way even if Dayus assumed that the ming skulls knew everything that happened in the realm, he still underestimated how well they knew and how deep their actualwork is.

    Now that Sam, knew Dayus'' n, he can actually break it very easily.

    And the first step in doing that is sending a message.

    "You are all going to get some ming skull assignments. ept them, they are safe and no one is waiting in ambush.

    But tell them only one thing.

    ''Our services are suspended because of the Pocket dimension that''s about to open day after tomorrow.'' We will resume the operations after that first pocket dimension is over.''"

    Sam got the affimitive answers from everyone.

    Time passed and in a couple of hours, the message Sam left behind, reached Dayus'' ears.

    "FUCK"

    He cursed out loud.

    "For a fucking sell swords, these guys have way too many fucking rules." He spat through his teeth and looked at his teammates who were confused.

    "We cannot do much. Let''s just finish the first pocket dimension and then we can continue with the n. I will talk to the Dean, so don''t worry about it and just focus on the pocket dimension for now."

    The next day, things were pretty uneventful. Everyone just pushed everything to the back of their minds and just prepared for the pocket dimension.

    The first pocket dimension belongs to the god Apollo.

    It is a fire domain and it takes ce for exactly three days. The whole thing is simple. Everyone will be given a star fragment up on entering the pocket dimension. Within the pocket dimension, the fire domain will create several elemental creatures, each will have a star fragment as their core.

    When they defeat the elemental creature, the fragment will join the ones they already have. After collecting a certain number of fragments, a ''star'' will be created. As the days pass, the creatures will be more difficult to deal with and the fragments will be rarer as some creatures will not be able to gather the fragments together.

    That is not all.

    There are some creatures that will carry some memories in their fragments. It could be a cultivation technique, battle technique, a crafting technique, formation blueprint, it could be anything. Only the person who defeats the creature can gain those memories.

    Of course, it wouldn''t be a properpetition without thebat between the students.

    On the third day, they can fight among themselves. The loser will lose all the stars to the winner and by the end of the third day whoever, has the most stars will win.

    In a way, it is just an borate scoring game.

    Sam felt like he could have a field day along with his friends, particrly when he found out that this pocket dimension allows people to enter as long as they pay a certain fees and their cultivation level is within the limits, in this case the First grade level.

    So, all of his friends, including Stone can enter the game.

    "Let''s have some fun."

    That''s what Sam said to the rest of his teammates.

    The day the pocket dimension opened, hundreds of people left the city and entered the forest where the entrance was located. Many elders moved to protect their talented students from the shadows. With the crowd and the whole ruckus, it is very easy to assassinate someone. As soon as the portal opened though, everyone became excited. This year, the whole batch of first graders is highly talented. Everyone improved greatly and they are looking forward to see how they are going to score.

    Even though the first ce candidate is going to be the ultimate winner, there are some exciting prizes for everyone that ranked within top twenty four.

    Granted by the yours truly Apollo.

    Sam entered the portal and he felt a spatial pull. Hended in a pretty empty barren ce. Except for theva river flowing beside him, there is nothing but rocks and asionalva puddle for as far as he could see.

    At that moment, a small stone like thing appeared out of thin air and floated beside him with a faint red glow. It connected with Sam''s spiritual sense. Its his star fragment

 Chapter 2108 Observation

    Chapter 2108 Observation

    Sam examined the star fragment.

    It looked just like a glowing piece of stone. He tried to hold it by his hands, but it went right through it. When he used the energy vision, it appeared like a singr mass of burning energy¡­ like a nano-sized sun.

    Keeping the energy vision as it was, he looked around trying to examine the surroundings. At that moment, he sensed an energy fluctuation behind him.

    A small orb of burning energy formed out of nowhere. In a fraction of a second, the energy turned into an elemental creature. A Wolf to be precise.

    *SWOOSH*

    The wolf zoomed towards Sam.

    Sam dodged it easily and watched as the burning glow has cooled down in his energy vision. He could now see it as a normal elemental, except for the small spot in its head.

    It still emitted a slight burning glow.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosion, the wolfunched itself on to Sam. mes circled around him as he dodged the wolf trying to observe its nature.

    After three minutes, when the wolf lunged at him, Sam decided to make the move.

    His palm is covered with golden mes as he pped it on the head.

    *BOOM*

    The collision caused an explosion. Half of its head was blown into nothing much spiritual energy particles. The wolf crashed into the ground violently. Sam is a bit surprised. He was aiming to prate the skull directly and catch a hold of that fragment.

    Just from the glow it was apparent that it was the skull, but instead of prating the energy body of the wolf, it felt like he hit a regr beast.

    Even the texture up on contact felt like that.

    Sam was curious how the mechanics behind it work. But of course, before that, he needs to finish this off.

    As the wolf came at him, he slipped to the side and held its neck in a choke hold before mming it into the ground.

    *THUD*

    *BAM*

    *BAM*

    As the blowsnded, he felt like he was hitting the beast on its skull. After a couple of hits, the wolf ''died'' and the body disappeared into a puff of spiritual energy particles. The star fragment floated from within and flew towards the floating star fragment he already had in his possession.

    He tried to catch a hold of it, but he couldnt.

    The fragment just passed through his palm and merged with the floating fragment.

    From the energy vision, he could see that the glow became brighter and orb became slightly bigger. It is still very small, not a single thing about it says it belongs to the star, except for the glow. But up on closer inspection, it is clearly bigger than before.

    As he observed it, the orb circled around him and changed its position and for some reason, it felt like it was telling him to move in that direction.

    He did exactly that.

    After a couple of tests, he even confirmed it. No matter his position, the orb is still floating in that particr direction.

    So, he moved in that direction

    In just two minutes, a wolf jumped at him from ava stream.

    *SWOOSH*

    A ignored the burning mesing at him and grabbed a hold of its throat. He choke mmed it on a pointed rock nearby. The rock pierced through its body while his grip broke its neck.

    The body disappeared and a fragment appeared, joining the orb. The orb moved in a different direction.

    It is like apass, directing him to the nearest elemental creature.

    Not just Sam, many people were testing out the creatures as well as the environment of the surroundings. They are even running tests on the Star fragments just like Sam.

    They got some information from various sources, but for a lot of them it is the first time inside the pocket dimension and they were curious about how things work there.

    Of course, contrary to them there are people who were going all out since the start. Before Sam could even deal with four creatures,some one already killed their tenth, twelfth and even fifteenth creatures.

    These are the people that either participated in the pocket dimension the previous year. Which means they are either repeating students who got stuck in that low level, or they are citizens that have not many prospects for growth.

    They onlye here to get as high rank as possible and gain some reward. They could either sell it or use it for themselves. Some people even came here just to gather as many stars as possible.

    On thest day as soon as thebat is allowed between participants, they will intentionally lose to the person who hired them and give away all those stars.

    Of course, there are also students of academies. They are just going at it straight without many thoughts. Either they don''t care for minor details, or they were given enough information by their instructor.

    However, Sam is not doing this out of his usual preparedness. Instead, it was for the legacy inheritance. The legacy inheritance was hidden and its discovery will not hinder the pocket dimension in any way.

    It is definitely not part of the final rewards.

    He has to find out any possible anomaly in this dimension to make sure that he can find out. After all, the information the instructors gave to their students is not exactly a secret for him.

    With all the informationbined, he might even have the most information about this dimension than all of them.

    He wants to make sure that he can find out that legacy inheritance and was looking for signs.

    Meanwhile at the same time Dayus already sprung into action.

    As soon as he entered he took out a special spear. He bit his finger and started painting some inscriptions on the tip of it. He injected his spiritual energy and the spear tip started glowing. He ran around while holding that spear.

    Whenever he came across an elemental creature, he didnt hold back and killed it in one blow. Even though he collected a lot of fragments, if he could just run past these creatures, he did. He didn''t care for the prize thates from this dimension.

    On top of that, he still believed he had a shot at the final prize anyway. On the third day, he could walk through these candidates. He already heard all the exploits of Sam and as usual, if Sam could do it, he believed he could do it too.

    After ten minutes, the glow on the spear changed. From white it turned to bright red color. Dayus finally stopped and looked at the elemental creature in front of him.

    It is not a wolf. Instead, it is a swan and it is floating around in argevake.

    Dayus stored the spear away and took out another spear. The first one was the tracker and the second one is his real weapon.

    *SWOOSH*

    He lunged forward and dashed on top of theva. It was boiling and with all his cultivation strength, he still felt the heat.

    The swan looked at him indifferently and open its mouth when he was just few feet away.

    *SPLASH*

    Arge ball of magma was shot at him.

    Dayus swung his spear and hit the magma aside.

    But he still frowned in pain. Just the stters made him feel a slight burn. The swan disappeared from Dayus'' sight.

    He lost it and he couldn''t even sense it with his spiritual sense. He looked around and then focused on the surface of the pool.

    *SPLASH*

    He stabbed the spear into theva, but the next moment, he felt a stinging burn on his back.

    *HISS*

    He hissed in pain. It was more annoying than harming.

    The swan came out of theva and spit another magma ball at Dayus.

    *SWISH*

    The spear swing took the ball away. He slid back and activated his lightning elemental fusion.

    "You are a fucking swan. Where did your fucking dignity go?"

    Dayus swung the spear and a huge wave of lightning hit the Swan on its head.

    It was paralyzed for a moment and that was all he needed.

    With a single stab, he killed the swan. Its body disappeared and dissolved into theva. But at that same time, a fragment came flying towards him and marged with his star fragment.

    This fragment didnt feel any different from a regr fragment. But Dayus is sure that the swan was definitely stronger than the other creatures he faced.

    In fact, the very next moment another swan appeared. But it was neither as strong nor as big.

    It was just like any normal swan.

    The star fragment that came from this also merged with the other star fragments. The spear returned to its white glow and he started moving towards a different direction.

    As Dayus ran many people witnessed his mad dash. They were curious about why he ignored so many beasts on his way, but they were too busy fighting the beasts to think and satiate their curiosity.

 Chapter 2109 Speed Run

    Chapter 2109 Speed Run

    Dayus kept on search for the rest of the day and found a few more beasts with his spear. Both in terms of the sheer number and in terms of his own personal goal, he is at a satisfactory level.

    Sam on the other hand, just focused on examining this ce and he even gained a lot of insights on the possible conjuring spots of the elemental creatures.

    He even gained inspiration for some training areas that he could use in Dusk.

    By the end of the day, he still hadn''t noticed any anomaly regarding the legacy inheritance though. If only he could meet Dayus once, but he knew that it will be very hard to meet him until the third day and there is a chance that it could be toote before that. The whole day passed with him mulling over those thoughts.

    There was no day or night in the pocket dimension, but everyone was clearly aware of how much time they spent here. Even if they didn''t the dimension had a special way to remind them.

    At the end of the first day, the time that marked the midnight of the first day¡­

    *DING*

    *DING*

    *DING*

    A huge bell sound could be heard all over the pocket dimension.

    Everyone looked at the huge glowing sun that was over up in the sky. That''s where the sound came.

    After the sound, the sun showed a few names in the sky.

    White- 485 kills - 4 stars

    Dayus- 470 kills - 4 stars

    Night Ghost- 468 Kills - 4 stars

    Five elemental king - 460 - 4 stars

    ¡­

    ¡­

    ¡­

    The leaderboard was announced. Everyone with a mediocre intelligence can understand how the starts being measured. Every hundred kills conjured a star. Only the top ten were announced though and Sam''s name was nowhere to be seen. Apart from White and Dayus, the rest of them were all his friends.

    Sam looked at the three orbs that are floating around.

    Two of them were bigger than the third one. He only had two hundred and sixty kills. But Sam wasn''t dejected. In fact, he would have been surprised if he ranked in the top ten at his pace. He was also surprised to see that the different between his score and the top scores was only two hundred kills.

    He even felt a bit disappointed with the performance of his friends. The creatures were nothing difficult. In fact, they were pretty easy to deal with. So, they could have sped up a bit more. He even had half a mind to lecture them about it.

    Sam thought up to the point and decided to take a break.

    He sat down on a rock and just looked into the horizon with energy vision. However, this time he modified the technique a bit. Instead of using regr energy vision, he modified it with purely fire elemental energy.

    He even activated his roc bloodline to increase the effectiveness of the eyes.

    If only he could use his observation on the whole dimension at the same time. He isn''t that powerful yet.

    He controlled a few small pebbles as he focused his gaze, he decided to increase his height, so he conjured earth elemental energy to increase the altitude of the rock. A lot of people could see Sam and the growing stone pir beneath him. With his current cultivation level, his energy vision could cover a decent distance.

    He looked at the horizon and noticed that a participant was running in certain direction. He threw one of the pebbles in that direction.

    *SWOOSH*

    The pebble whistled through the air andnded a few meters away from the participant and from that exact same spot, a wolf elemental creature rose. It looked around like a rabid animal and noticed the pebble infused with Sam''s spiritual energy.

    The participant was stunned.

    One of the reasons, this ce is dangerous is that the creatures always ambush them. They won''t appear unless the participant is in a certain range and before appearance they cannot be detected.

    That is one of the patterns Sam observed and of course, if there is a pattern, there should be some indicators along with it. That is what he research for a long time.

    *SWISH*

    Another pebble flew andnded at the bank of a stream.

    An alligator came out of the water and the participant who was just going there to take some rest, jumped up in fright. If he did as he nned to do, then his leg would have been alligator food.

    Sam repeated the process a couple of times more and he urately predicted where the creature was about to manifest. The next moment, his body changed. He activated light elemental fusion. Not a partial fusion, ratherplete fusion and shot himself into the air.

    *SWOOSH*

    The whistling sound of his movement resounded throughout his surroundings. The stars and the fragment that he had with him, moved at the same speed.Twoser beams were shot from his eyes and theynded at a certain spot a few hundred meters away from him.

    *ROAR*

    A big wild cat appeared out of the spot, while roaring in anger and rage. The moment it manifested.

    *HISS*

    A hole appeared in its head. Sam didn''t even shoot a beam at its head, instead he just ran through it. The star fragment manifested and at an incredible speed it shot towards Sam and merged with the iplete star.

    By the time it could even merge, he already destroyed a second creature, not too far away from that ce.

    In two seconds, he destroyed two creatures and he didn''t intend to reduce his speed anytime soon. For the next thirty minutes, many people witnessed as Sam just shot through the realm collecting the fragments.

    Its like he was a kid on a sea shore. Picking up the sea shells after a very generous high tide.

    They felt even the pocket dimension is favoring him.

    Sam continued for a while and after the first thirty minutes, he finally found an anomaly that he was looking for.

    One thing he noticed about the manifestation of the creatures was that the energy concentration as the ces they manifested has always been constant. The energy was same for the wolf, alligator, the wild cat.

    And when the day changed, the energy and in turn the strength of all these creatures increased a bit. But even then, there is one thing inmon. All of them possessed same level of energy and strength. However, at one particr spot, he noticed that the energy concentration has be higher.

    And he deactivated the fusion for a moment to take activate his energy vision once again. He threw a small attack at the spot making the creature awaken. It was a wolf, it looked just like the ones he killed before.

    Even the strength felt the same.

    At least for the most part. His observant nature and his sensitivity to the energy made him thing otherwise though. The energy concentration of this creature is definitely higher than the rest. On top of that, there is one more difference.

    The spot where the star fragment was located, it is glowing with a bright red color instead of the usual glow he saw since the start of the dimension.

    This creature is definitely different.

    *SWISH*

    Sam cut its head off and the fragment merged with his iplete star fragment. He focused his energy vision on it. To his surprise the white colored regr glow didn''t increase, instead within the orb a smaller orb was created with bright red color.

    Sam couldn''t help but smirk. He is sure that he came up on with something.

    *CRACK*

    His joints popped as he stretched as a bit and activated the fusion again.

    Now, the true hunt began.

    The participants saw a golden sh moving past them. That is all, and the surrounding area experienced a sudden decrease in the appearance of the creatures. At the same time, within that hour, a change happened in the leaderboard.

    Sam''s score kept on increasing bit by bit and he arrived at the top ten. At the same time, he already gathered ten creatures with these red colored star fragments. The small orb within the star is increasing in its size and it is bing more full.

    Even though everyone was trying their best to kill their way into increasing their ranking, Sam''s speed was too much for anyone to catch up and even for the top rankers to keep their ce in check.

    Dayus who saw the leaderboard change, frowned.

    "It seems like he is solely focusing on the game. I was a bit anxious, when I didn''t see his name there."

    That''s right, Dayus was anxious instead of happy when he saw his own name on the leaderboard without Sam''s name. He is not an idiot to believe that Sam is not strong enough or doesn''t have enough skills and means to increase his ranking.

    He was afraid that Sam might have been in search of the legacy inheritance.

 Chapter 2110 Chase

    Chapter 2110 Chase

    Time passed.

    Just a few hours after the second day started, Sam already climbed to the top of the leaderboard, and by afternoon, he left the rest of the group in dust. His light element and overwhelming strengthpared to his peers left the beasts pretty much helpless in the face of his attacks.

    Dayus on the other hand, didn''t mind the leaderboard that much. He just focused on finding the special beasts and he did have a decent yield. ording to his estimation and the guidance given to him by Zeus, as long as he was close to catching around seventy-five of these special beasts by the end of the second day, then he should be fine.

    He needs a hundred of them to be able to locate the Legacy inheritance.

    Just an hour before the end of the second day, Dayus killed his eightieth special. However, almost exactly at the same time, Sam killed his eighty-fifth.

    Since he could see the shape of the orb that is forming within the star, he guessed that he needed around fifteen more to get to the required target and locate the Legacy inheritance.

    If Dayus knew about this¡­ who knows what his reaction would be. But it didn''t take long for Sam to find out.

    As Dayus searched for his eighty first beast, his spear tip finally glowed and he ran in a specific direction. After two minutes, he identified the location and dashed towards it. But before he could reach the spot, all of a sudden he saw a light beam hit it.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosive sound, a huge worm like creature crawled out of the ground and looked around trying to identify its enemy. Dayus frowned as he looked in the direction from which the attack hade from.

    *SWOOSH*

    A light beam appeared and from within Sam revealed himself levitating in the air, with a big grin. His energy vision was running full as he looked at the numerous stars around Dayus. His grin widened as he looked at the bright red orb within a star.

    He then looked at the brightly glowing spear in his hands.

    "Seems like you came prepared. What number are you at? Eighty? Eighty One? I can''t say it from this far away."

    As soon as he spoke those words, Dayus'' vignce turned into absolute horror.

    "You¡­"

    "Don''t make that face. Knowing me for all these years, you are still surprised that I managed to catch on to this? Come on, Dayus. Improve a little bit. Upgrade yourself. Its getting uninteresting."

    As he spoke, heunhed himself into the mouth of the huge worm.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosive sound, he destroyed the worm in that single jump.

    *CRASH*

    The worm died and Sam managed to gather another fragment. Finally, Dayus got out of his shock.

    Sam increased his altitude once again and said.

    "I don''t know what your spear tracker''s range is. Since its not glowing anymore, I am guessing its not that big. I am gonna do you a favor and tell you this. The closest fragment is in that direction."

    Sam said and pointed in a specific direction before moving into that same direction.

    "FUCK YOU."

    Dayus yelled and activated full lightning elemental fusion before he too charged in the same direction. "Oh, you are following me? It''s a good thing that you are not idiotic enough to not trust me."

    Sam taunted as he moved forward. Dayus had to use all his strength to keep up. He left a crater behind with his every step. When he saw Sam shot a light beam at a certain spot from far away, he saw that a creature has emerged from that spot.

    Dayus took out a spear and threw it.

    *ZOOM*

    As soon as the creature appeared, even before Sam couldunch andattack to im it, Dayus'' spear took it out. The star fragment flew towards him. Sam halted in his tracks and looked at Dayus with a smile.

    "Are you sure, you want to do this?" He asked.

    Dayus didn''t reply. He just recalled the spear he just threw and swung it at the ground. As if trying to show off.

    "Alright, let''s go."

    *ZAP*

    Sam turned into a sh of light as he disappeared. Dayus felt his heart shake for a moment. That speed wasn''t something he was expecting. But he didn''t let it stop him.

    *ZAP*

    He used all of his strength to keep up with Sam. But no matter how much he tried, there was always a certain distance between him and Sam. It wasn''t reducing and neither was it increasing. It didn''t take long for him to understand that Sam was maintaining the pace.

    This only made him angrier.

    *BOOM*

    When Sam made another creature appeared, he threw his spear once again, but this time however, Sam didn''t let it hit the creature. With a beam of light, the spear was torn into two from tip to tail. The two pieces flew to either side of the creature and Sam destroyed the creature in that time gap.

    He didn''t even wait for a moment, before he moved to a different direction.

    "FUCK"

    Dayus cursed and followed. For the rest of the day, that is all the participants saw. Sam and Dayus. A golden light followed by purple lightning. They rampaged through the whole pocket dimension as they pursued the special star fragments.

    Some times, Sam managed to take down the creature, but some times Dayus managed to snatch it. After some time, Dayus didn''t even bother using his spear tracker. He just followed Sam crazily.

    A few minutes before the end of the second day, Sam and Dayus finally came to halt. Both of them are panting heavily. The whole pursuit was relentless and both of them had to exert a significant amount of their energies.

    However, their harvest wasn''t exactly satisfactory for either of them.

    Sam reached ny eight fragments and Dayus reached Ny five.

    If either of them had pursued these creatures by themselves, they would have definitely reached the limit. In fact, Sam had a higher chance of finishing it, since he can find them by himself much more efficiently.

    But now, because he wanted to show off a bit, he didn''t hit the target. However, he wasn''t that disappointed. At least not as much as Dayus.

    Dayus wanted to curse at Sam''s face.

    "How did you know?"

    Dayus asked.

    "Know what? The special star fragments? Or the legacy inheritance?"

    Dayus widened his eyes. It felt like a huge cannon hit him in the gut. "Y¡­ You¡­"

    "Come on Dayus, you know me better than that. Do you really think you can outy me by hiding some information? Do you really think that little of me?"

    "Now, in a few minutes the third day will start. We have less than ten more fragments to collect. The number of beasts has lessened which means we will have to get those fragments from the other candidates.

    So, it alles to who gets it first. Or do you want to take a chance and swing at me?"

    "Or I can just follow you around, Sam. I am sure you have a better detection methodpared to mine. I will just do what we have been doing until now. I wonder if you are willing to risk being chased by me.

    Who knows we might just catch the fragments at the same time, or I might even steal it from under your nose before you do."

    "Novel Idea, Dayus. However, are you sure that you are going gain by following me around? After all, the legacy inheritance is more important to you than me.

    All I need to do is to make sure that you didn''t get your hands on it, as for me acquiring it? Do you think I am dependant on it like you?

    I already have a crew that will kill and die for me. I have friends that you couldn''t buy with all the wealth in the world. At most this could be a boost to their strength, but I don''t need to rely on these things to do that.

    However, for you.."

    Sam just chuckled after stopping there.

    Dayus gritted his teeth and tightened his hold around the spear, he got angry. Because whatever Sam said was right.

    Its true that legacy inheritance is of utmost importance to him, and it was also true that Sam is not as desperate as him. This knowledge made him angry and frustrated.

    After some thought, he decided that he should explore on his own and he didn''t waste any more time. He moved with his top speed and disappeared from there.

    Sam chuckled and took a different route. He doesn''t know exactly how Dayus'' tracking works, however, his own tracking method was impable and he already has a few targets in his mind. So, he turned around and moved to find his first victim in this pocket dimension.

 Chapter 2111 Third Day

    Chapter 2111 Third Day

    While Sam was still travelling towards his first target, the second day was over.

    The restrictions on the battles between the participants was gone and now everyone can attack everyone. In an instant, everything turned into nasty dog fight. Alliances crumbled instantly. Back stabbings, betrayals, group fights, assassinations.

    Sam watched as he moved at an incredible speed, soon he arrived at the location he wanted.

    Two people were attacking a person.

    These two belonged to the Hermes Academy while the other one belonged to Zeus Academy.

    "Your Zeus Academy targeted Watt in the Pseudo hell. So, if you want to me anyone, me your management and authorities for being bitches enough to make such a move."

    Sam was a bit surprised. He didn''t expect that Watt''s situation would effect the academy students like this. By default he always assumed that all Olympian followers including students as his enemies.

    He never held much expectations for their characters either.

    He didn''t expect the pseudo hell''s situation to have an impact on any of the students. The only reason he publicized the information so much is to use it against the academies and authorities in the judicial trials.

    "You¡­ You fucking traitors. We were fighting for the past two days. How can you stab me in the back like this?"

    The Zeus Academy student spoke.

    *BOOM*

    At this moment, an energy explosion urred at the feet of the two students from Hermes academy. They looked around to find Sam standing there.

    "You better leave now."

    Sam said with a cold smile. The two of them froze.

    "You¡­"

    They were about to speak, but Sam just shot twoser beams. They were shot through their chests and they lost consciousness. They were barely alive and their Stars and fragments now merged with Sam.

    He looked at the student from Zeus Academy.

    "Thank¡­"

    Student was about to speak, but Sam didn''t let him.

    *BOOM*

    He made the Zeus Academy student''s body explode with a single attack. The star fragments and stars merged once again. And Sam obtained one Special star fragment.

    He couldn''t help but curse the guy for thinking that Sam actually wanted to help him. How stupid one should be to assume that, after knowing everything Sam did to the Zeus Academy?

    He didn''t waste any time and moved to a different target. It is a bit troublesome to find them, because there were not many special fragments in the dimension to begin with. They were very rare. On top of that, Sam and Dayus hunted most of them, not leaving much for the rest.

    So, anyone who possessed a special fragment only managed to hold one or in a rare case, two fragments.

    However, whenever Sam came across someone who hunted it, he remembered their scent. That''s right, Sam was using his the raiju bloodline''s amplified olfactory skills to remember their scents and then started searching for them. So, it was rtively easy tracking them, except for the distance travelled.

    On the other hand, Dayus didn''t even have that advantage.

    His spear is indeed a wonderful tracking device, however it worked only in a certain distance range. So, every time he found a creature withs special fragment, he had to run around blindly before he managed to find another hit on his tracker.

    If not for the fact, he was on the search since day 1, there is no way, he could have managed to reach the target like Sam did.

    However, he was still decently fast.

    Soon, Sam collected all the fragments, like he wanted to. It didn''t even take a couple of hours for him to do that.

    He watched as aplete and spherical orb form in the middle of one of the stars. The star that was previously visibly glowing white, now started glowing slightly orange. While the rest of the stars tried to move in a different direction, indicating the presence of a target with stars, this star floated in different direction.

    It is guiding him to a different location instead of the next target.

    Sam didn''t hesitate and followed it.

    Within thirty minutes, he travelled in a certain direction, until he reached a mountain. He climbed the peak and stood there as the star started revolving around him.

    At the same time, something tugged inside Sam''s mind. At the peak of the mountain, there is a pattern mark which was reacting to the star.

    The feeling inside his mind, tugged him to move towards that spot, however, Sam held himself back. Instead, he activated his eye technique to check the surroundings of the mountain. There was no sign of Dayus or anyone else.

    Sam went into a deep thought. Ever since he heard about the legacy inheritance and the war that was caused by its mere presence, Sam couldn''t help but concoct a few more ns revolving around that aspect.

    After all, the main goal of his in the Academy realm is to reap as many benefits as possible while creating just as much chaos.

    A thing that could cause such chaos has appeared, so it would be a shame to not utilize it.

    He jumped off the mountain and moved in a certain direction. Soon, he saw two groups fighting in his path.

    *BAM*

    Hended in the middle and beat the shit out of two of them, who looked like leaders. They are both Olympian teams and they recognized Sam instantly. At the same time, they saw the weird orange star that was indicating a different direction as well.

    "What do you want?"

    One of them asked as he saw Sam stopped his attack. He just stood there, ncing at both the teams.

    "I was looking to beat the crap out of some people. Who better than the Olympian trash?" Sam muttered and he turned before leaving in a sh.

    The two groups didn''t understand anything that happened.

    Why did Same? Why did he attack? What did he mean by those words? Is he crazy?

    All of them kind of hand a consensus on thest question, butut the remaining three were a bit debatable and iprehensible for them.

    "Have you noticed that orange star?"

    One of them asked the leader who was still sprawling on the ground in pain. The leader nodded.

    "It is a bit weird. It is not moving along with the other stars."

    "Yes. What do you think it is? We have never seen something like this."

    "That''s true too. Sam is not even focusing on extracting more stars from others. Even though he is on the top of the list, everyone knows that the more stars they have the better the final rewards.

    Why is he not doing that, he could have taken down all of us and walked away."

    The other team''s leader spoke.

    They definitely believed that in a normal scenario Sam would have imed all their stars, they knew they would if they were as strong as Sam.

    However, he didn''t finish them off. Instead, he just attacked them and acted like he was looking for something, they could have sworn that they saw some disappointment across his face before he left.

    "Maybe we should follow him?"

    One of them mentioned. It seemed like they have forgotten the rivalry just now and acted like teammates all of a sudden.

    "Follow him? Can you even see that guy when he was moving? We would die of exhaustion and physical failure before we could catch up to him."

    They did have the mind to follow him, but they knew they were incapable of it.

    Simr scenarios took ce, but most of them happened within the close vicinity of the mountain. Sam just ran in circles a couple of times and made sure the presence of him and the orange star was known to everyone.

    After around an hour, Sam who was focused on the mountain, finally saw that Dayus was closing in. He smiled and made his next move.

    Near one of the groups that he encountered.

    *BAM*

    Sam came flying down as he crashed into the ground. He left behind a deep crater. His glow is flickering slightly and he had blood dripping down the corner of his mouth. There was an expression of distress and frustration on his face.

    He didn''t even acknowledge their presence and just moved in a different direction.

    However¡­

    *BOOM*

    A massive burning meteorite came out of nowhere and struck the ce Sam was just standing.

    "FUCK YOU BITCHES. YOU ARE NOT GONNA GET THE ORANGE STAR. THAT TREASURE IS MINE."

    Sam yelled out loud.

    *SWOSH*

    "Argh.."

    At that moment, a spearnded near Sam. It missed him, but the hit created massive recoil that made everyone have a familiar feeling.

    Along with that, they watched as a shadow manifested beside Sam trying to block his movement. Sam however, dodged it and left.

    The group were confused beyond words. All the attacks that Sam just took, were very familiar to them. The meteor strike was used by Philip before, the recoil hit by White and the shadow attacks were from some of the ming skull members.

    Sam''s injuries, his words, orange star¡­ treasure.

 Chapter 2112 Timer

    Chapter 2112 Timer

    They didn''t see the people chasing behind Sam.

    All they saw is few humanoid figures shing through the air, emanating different elemental energies. They couldn''t even see their faces clearly because of their speed.

    "Did we hear him right? His orange star¡­ something about treasure. What do you guys think?"

    "Those attacks are certainly familiar. They definitely feel like the attacks are from the top ten rankers in the realm. And except for them, no one is strong enough to attack Sam to that extent. There might indeed be treasure."

    "But¡­"

    The discussion continued in the next couple of minutes. They do have some suspicions, but that doesn''t mean the curiosity will go away just like that.

    They are way too curious and¡­ greedy.

    There is no way a bunch of Olympian followers are not greedy about something that could potentially make the top ten rankers to fight among themselves like this. Even though they do know that they couldn''t do shit about it in the fight between the rankers, they do something called ''hope''.

    It''s a bitch that makes you feel delusional in situations like these. These people are weak enough to die of aftershock from battle between Sam and White, but they are now thinking of doing something along the lines of tailing Sam.

    "Let''s go and take a look. With the way their battle is going, they are bound to leave a bunch of traces. Let''s just follow them and take a look. We need to see what got the rankers all riled up."

    And just how Sam appeared and attracted their attention before, right now, he also garnered the attention of a lot of people with this ploy.

    In fact, he was lucky enough to encounter, Watt and Philip as they roamed around and made them directly be a part of his n. He just made them rece the humanoid illusions he created with the base of his shadow undead.

    The whole mountain area was a mess within a few minutes. By the time, Dayus who was climbing the mountain eagerly, reached the peak, Sam was already there with his two friends.

    Dayus frowned at this and took out his spear.

    "Get out, I reached first, this is mine."

    Dayus spoke with utmost vignce. He couldn''t even handle Sam alone, on top of that he had two of his friends with me.

    "That''s not going to happen. Do you really think you are the first one here? I came here way before you."

    "Then since you left, you can just keep off the mountain. Now this is mine."

    He gritted his teeth and willed the special orange star to move closed to the special inscription circleid down on the peak.

    The star moved swiftly, but before it could touch the circle, Sam star moved as well. At the same time, Dayus felt a massive spatial fluctuation behind him.

    He instinctually dodged, the ce he was about tond, a spatial tear appeared making him move farther away. The star that was close to the inscription circle followed behind Dayus. Meanwhile Sam''s star became closer, however he didn''t let the star touch the circle. He instinctually knew that once the star touches the circle and merges with it, there is only onest step before the legacy inheritance could be his.

    He doesn''t even have to absorb the inheritance, he can just acquire like it is any other object.

    Dayus noticed Sam''s weird behavior and yelled.

    "What the fuck do you want? You are not doing it and you are not letting me do it. Do you have a fucking screw loose?"

    "Kind of."

    Sam smiled and replied as he looked at the horizon.

    A bunch of groups areing from different directions and Dayus who was levitating because of Sam''s antics became their visual target.

    "Wee the guests."

    As soon as Sam said that, Watt and Philip started putting on a perfect show. They threw a bunch of attacks aimed at Sam, but missing them of course. Dayus was also targeted, but they didn''t have to miss him.

    The fight continued for the next five minutes before the fastest of the chasing groups already climbed the mountain.

    Sam finally started the merging process of the star and the circle.

    It actually didn''t take a long time to do it. It was quite fast in fact.

    However, once the circle started giving out that orange glow of the star, a timer appeared on top of it.

    Amand appeared in Sam''s mind.

    "Defend the circle until the timer runs out and the legacy inheritance is yours."

    Once the timer started, Sam''s grin widened.

    Dayus became furious. Because his orange star disappeared. All the effort he put in collecting that star, even sacrificing his position in the rankings¡­ it disappeared.

    Now, Samid his im on the legacy inheritance and he has to defend it for the next few minutes to acquire it.

    Of course, once Sam acquires it, anyone can kill him and take it for themselves before he merges it with himself or someone else.

    However, Dayus was not stupid enough to believe that someone could that easily take away the legacy inheritance from Sam.

    At least definitely not within this pocket dimension.

    By now, Sam''s attention was diverted to the rest of the crowd. With a wave of his hand, all the blood and bruises he had on his body disappeared. He looked as good as new.

    "This treasure is mine. If anyone is confident that you can defeat me in this short amount of time, they cane and fight me. Otherwise, turn around and leave. Focus on the pocket dimension test and at least, you will have some benefits left for you.

    Or, I might just plunder every single star that you painstakingly collected in the past two days."

    Sam''s warning brought semnce of rity to these people.

    The presence of a treasure was something they didnt expect and from the orange stars they witnessed, they are sure that it is only triggered by special conditions. They are very tempted to see what it actually is.

    But fighting with Sam¡­ no one is looking forward to that.

    Dayus gritted his teeth and he was also very tempted to make a move. But he looked at Philip and Watt.

    He knew how loyal these guys are to Sam. Even the temptation of legacy inheritance is not enough to make them fight against Sam. They might even chuckle and scoff at it.

    He cannot trust the others on top of that. He is also tempted to reveal that Sam is in possession of legacy inheritance. That will surely rile up and increase other''s motivation. The only problem is that, out of spite Sam might reveal the information of other legacy inheritances.

    He doesn''t know how much information Sam knows, but he doesn''t want to find out in a hard way. That will make Dayus lose the rest of the inheritances.

    "FUCK"

    He cursed out loud, not knowing what to do and his frustration only grew as more and more people started gathering at the mountain.

    Some familiar faces like Bronte and other members of Noble league appeared and they were soon followed by White, Philip and the rest.

    "Seems like we have quite the party here." Sam muttered as he smirked at White.

    White frowned and looked at Dayus whose frustration was apparent. Hended beside him and asked in a whisper.

    "Is this treasure rted to the benefits your promised?"

    Dayus pursed his lips and nodded.

    "What are the conditions for him to lose the treasure?" white asked again.

    "We need to attack the inscription circle with enough strength. Once the damage reaches a certain extent, his star will be unmerged and the other orange stars will be activated again."

    Dayus exined, but White didnt understand.

    "Orange Stars?"

    Dayus sighed and said.

    "Let''s just say, if we damage the circle enough, I can try to im the treasure and then we will have to defend it."

    "Okay, let''s do it then." Dayus was a bit stumped.

    White looked at him and said.

    "Our special team members are here as well. I am sure, both of us can handle Sam, they will attack the inscription. After that, you can im the circle while I will keep Sam at bay. Later, we can fight with him again. Sam doesn''t have any allies here."

    Dayus pursed his lips.

    That is actually a feasible n. In fact, he also noticed his teammates, the only problem is that Sam''s friends are here. He is not sure that they will stay put.

    Once they make the move, he highly doubted his teams capability to endure their onught.

    "I heard his bond improved with other freshman rankers. Are you sure, they won''t side with him?"

    Dayus asked and this time White also thought that it was a great possibility. He looked at them and went into a deep thought. At that moment, Dayus suddenly had an idea.

    He whispered in White''s ears.

    White looked at Dayus in surprise.

    "Are you sure about that?"

 Chapter 2113 Chaos

    Chapter 2113 Chaos

    "Yes, I am." Dayus nodded with conviction and turned to Sam with a smile.

    Sam raised an eyebrow at this. Dayus and White backed down. White went to his teammates and they left the mountain. Dayus looked at the rest of the people and said.

    "If any one wants, they can try and take the treasure." He also dove off the mountain.

    Sam kind of expected this reaction and his smile widened.

    "Well yed, Dayus."

    He muttered and¡­

    *SNAP*

    He snapped his fingers. Dayus didnt even leave the vicinity and he cleared heard the sound of the finger snap. Even before he turned to take a look, he sensed massive energy fluctuations. A battle has began and everyone was attacking everyone.

    All hell broke loose. They didnt understand why Sam''s friends made a move all of a sudden. And its not just his friends, Sam also made his move against them. Of course, they didn''t take it lying down, they fought back.

    Dayus hurriedly turned around to take a look.

    To his shock, Philip flew in the air with severe injuries. He flew past Dayus while bleeding through his mouth.

    After some other people followed, he saw Watt being dropped down the mountain, while two other Sam''s friends ran to save him.

    "Fuck, its ming skulls."

    Paras who was running after Watt yelled out loud.

    Dayus widened his eyes. Now he hesitated with going along with his n. ming skulls are definitely strong people in his opinion and since they were attacking Sam, this could be an opportunity. He stayed back just in case.

    Even though Sam''s friends disappeared from the mountain, Sam was still there, he knocked the hell out of a lot of people, even though he was injured a bit because of the suddent attack.

    However, in the middle of it all, a young man kept on attacking Sam. He is strong. In fact, way too strong to be hidden so long under the wraps within the Academy realm.

    He knocked the most people from the mountain and it looked like Philip and Sam''s other friends were also knocked out by him.

    This surprised Dayus.

    "Who the fuck is he?"

    He muttered.

    And he also noticed that he is not going all out against Sam. He is attacking him, but its like he was just keeping him busy.

    Dayus looked at the timer and frowned.

    There isn''t much time left for the inheritance toe and it would be sam''s to im.

    As soon as his thoughtsnded here, realization dawned on his mind.

    "Fuck"

    He cursed and dashed forward.

    *BOOM*

    The young man threw a palm strike. The energy conjured into a huge palm shape and pped Dayus in the face.

    He blocked the strike with his spear and dashed forward.

    Sam was about to make a move, but at this moment¡­

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Massive explosions hit the mountain from all sides stopping Dayus'' advance. He turned around to see a few people wearing ming Skulls'' uniforms.

    *DING*

    A bell sound rang and the inscription circle shout out brightly. An orange colored beam of light converged at its center and covered Sampletely. Sam felt the sudden influx of energy that simted his vitality. It was trying to heal all of his injuries.

    At the same time, he felt a sphere, conjure in his hands.

    [From this moment on, the legacy inheritance belongs to you. It is up to you to do whatever you want. I hope my divinity will be passed along for the next generations and help raise a worthy person to the glory.]

    Those words rung inside Sam''s mind.

    The light beam disappeared and Sam stood there in the middle with the legacy inheritance in his hands.

    *BAM*

    Dayus didnt wait anymore. He kicked the ground and shot out. Lightning fusion activated and he tried to deal with Sam in a single decisive strike. Sam was prepared though. Silver lightning covered his body as he raised his leg and kicked forward in the air.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosive sound, a recoil hitced with the Lightning energy was shot out. Dayus felt the horse hitting him and heunched his spear in thest moment.

    Sam who used the recoil force to move away, suddenly got hit by the spear in his chest.

    Dayus fell far away from the mountain and so did Sam.

    However, the three people in ming skulls uniform along with the unknown young man who made short work of everyoneunched themselves towards Sam.

    *CRASH* *BOOM*

    Dayusnded in the ground, creating a huge crater. He hurriedly stood up and zoomed to the top of the mountain once again.

    There is nothing there, nothing left. He ran to the other side trying to find where Sam could have fallen.

    After five minutes, he saw the unknown young man stand along with other ming skulls people. The orb is no longer in Sam''s hands. It is in the young man''s hands instead. He couldntprehend how it could be possible.

    As far as he could remember, Sam was always the strongest among the bunch. He didn''t bow out to anything and anyone. He waspletely in control of the situation and he can escape the worst of the situations. Four people at the same realm? That wouldnt even scratch the top twenty five of the list of things that could make Sam yield.

    However, he saw something that could definitely reach top five in the list.

    The three men were holding unconscious Philip in his hands.

    "What the fuck." He cursed under his breath.

    Sam gave the orb and they threw Philip at Sam.

    Dayus thought, Sam would be pursuing them, now that his friend is already in his hands. But instead, Samid Philip down on the ground and started treating.

    "Fucking hell."

    Dayus cursed out and pursued the four.

    However, the four of them seemed to have anticipated this.

    "Think twice before you do it."

    For some reason, Dayus sensed enormous threat from the four and he hesitated for one moment. That was all it took for them to leave. After some thought, dayus ran back to White''s position. It was a bit far away.

    He met with him and the teammates and said.

    "Change of the ns. Sam didn''t have the treasure. The ming skulls has it. Their group is within the pocket dimension. We need to capture them."

    Dayus was in a hurry and the team started their search.

    At the same time, the leaderboards started changing. All of a sudden, most of Sam''s friends started quitting, freezing their star count.

    Dayus only nced at it, but didn''t care that much.

    Legacy inheritance is way too important.

    When he thought of how he hesitated not making a move against the four, he wanted to bash his head to a rock and kill himself.

    Why would he do that?

    He doesn''t know. Even if some spections are forming inside his head, he doesn''t want to encourage them, because, just the thought of them beng true made his crazy with anger.

    "What the fuck happened to me?"

    He mumbled to himself as they searched.

    After some time, white stopped and said.

    "There is no point. They must have left the pocket dimension. Judging by your reaction, the value of that treasure must be pretty high. So, there is no way, they will stay back after getting it."

    Dayus knew there is some truth to that spection. He just didnt want to admit it being true.

    At that time, they saw another change in the leaderboard.

    Sam''s name.

    It was on the top for a while, but the number is increasing at a rapid rate.

    Each change showed a difference of around a few dozen stars.

    "This bastard must have gone on a rampage. Berserk bastard."

    Dayus mumbled to himself.

    Even he wanted to go on a rampage for a moment. He lost way too much in this pocket dimension. But the most terrifying of all is that not just Sam, but someone other entity, an entity that he swore to capture has known about the most secretive information he had in his possession.

    Except for the dean, nobody should have known about it. Dayus didn''t discuss it with anyone else. But Sam knew and so did the ming skulls, at least that is what it looked like.

    "Fourteen days."

    Dayus said out loud.

    White looked at him in askance.

    "We have that much time to destroy ming skulls and retrieve our treasure. Even one minute after fourteen days and we will lose it permanently."

    White had some questions, but he held it back.

    The third day went on after that major event.

    The news of some secret treasure and its usage spread to all the participants. When the third day waspleted, the rankings froze and everyone was transported to an empty grey space.

    All the previously eliminated candidates, their deadbodies and people who quite were all there.

    That''s right.

    Until all three days are over, they cannot just leave and go out.

    That means, the previous candidates that were eliminated and quit had some time to talk among themselves.

 Chapter 2114 Information Spread

    Chapter 2114 Information Spread

    As soon as Dayus entered that waiting room, he froze on the spot.

    "ming skulls, got a hold of a Legacy inheritance. A fucking LEGACY INHERITANCE. Can you believe it?"

    "What the hell? A legacy inheritance? How is it possible? How did they even know about it?"

    "Apparently, Sam, Dayus and the ming skulls all were fighting for it. It turned out Dayus had a special tip about it and went to find out, but Sam tailed him and almost got an upperhand, finally the ming skulls swooped in and took it away.

    I heard there waas a young man who even managed to beat Sam. I dont know if thatst part is true though."

    They were loud whispers as if they were really discussing some secret and Dayus really wished it was just that.

    However, to his dismay, everyone else was also discussing this secret. He looked around to find Sam, who was sitting in the middle in a meditative state. Dayus rushed to him, but before he could reach ten minutes of him, he froze once again.

    Sam''s killing intent was radiating, like he was ready to kill anyone whoes near him. And this made him hesitate a bit. But Sam already sensed his presence and opened his eyes.

    "Did you leak the information?" Dayus asked with some newfound determination.

    "Trust me, the news leaked out from your end, not mine." Sam spoke and stood up.

    Dayus thought for a moment and asked.

    "Do you have any leads on the ming Skulls?"

    "It is not my job to catch them, why are you asking me?"

    "You are here in this realm way before me. With all your obsession, do you really want me to believe that you don''t have any information on them?"

    "I don''t care if you believe me or not. Even if I have the information, there is no way i am giving to you. Fourteen Days. It will take fourteen days for the inheritance to be fully processed and the merging to begin. That means, I have fourteen days to get that back.

    Why would I give you the headstart with all that information? Grow a brain Dayus."

    Dayus gritted his teeth and wanted to yell something, but Sam''s aura scared the shit out of him. He could imagine what kind of rampage Sam went in thest few hours of the third day. He was clearly pissed off, there is no use in pouring oil over the fire.

    "How about we team up? I don''t believe they didn''t piss you off with all of their activities."

    "No, they haven''t done a thing to me until now. I was even happy with their activities. The damage they dealt to Olympus might not be on the same level as the damage I caused, but it was still good."

    "Really? Some assholes stole the legacy inheritance that was almost in your hands. And you are praising them?"

    "Of course, what do you think I am? A person like you? Unlike you, I am a person capable of respecting even my arch-nemeses. That wouldn''t stop me from killing them though. Good luck with your search."

    Dayus went back to stand with his team.

    He looked around, he is sure that the ming skulls are definitely there, however they are definitely not in their irregr uniforms and they are not wearing their disguises. If only he could beat the crap out of all of them and make them confess. But he cannot do that.

    Many thoughts went through his head as the rewards are being processed and distributed for each of them.

    His brain was on overdrive, when he finally couldnt get any more ideas, he looked at Sam. He noticed that Sam''s eyes were glowing. That reminded him of the energy vision that sam usually uses.

    He finally got an idea. The next moment, he rummaged through his storage and took out something. He turned to his team and asked.

    "I have got a n. The ming skulls are definitely here, we might not be able to catch them now, but we can still try."

    He whispered his n thoroughly. White and the others felt a skeptical for a little while, but they finallyplied.

    They all took out some tools and started roaming around the room.

    Sam looked at their actions and chuckled.

    "You know, it would be easier if you just beat the crap out of all of them and make them reveal their storages right here and now. That n actually might have some sess."

    Sam said before the dimension opened and everyone left.

    Dayus didnt have anyeback, because Sam''s suggestion was his original n. To rile up the crowd and make them all prove that they are not the ming skulls. But he has to avoid that n. He doesnt exactly know how much the ming skulls know about the legacy inheritances. He doesn''t want them to reveal anymore information than they already have.

    He is also sure that the moment he makes these people reveal their storages, he will have a huge target on his back. They will resist, he will insist, they will resist more, he will use his status and noble league to make them bend.

    No matter the result, they will bite his head off when they get a chance.

    Who wants that risk?

    By the time he reached the Academy grounds, the news has blown up. Every participant contacted the organizations they are associated with. Their academy, n, sect, faction or even their gang.

    The news reached spread through the Olympian region and reached every other region before the outside realms all came to know about it.

    That night, Dayus and Dean of Zeus Academy sat in the Dean''s office.

    The Dean held his head tightly as he looked at Dayus with exhaustion and exasperation.

    "What the fuck did you do? Do you know what is going to happen now?"

    "Dean, I already told you, the information didn''t leak from my side. I don''t know how the ming skulls got a hold of this."

    "Forget ming skulls, how did Sam know about about it?"

    "I dont know that either. Now, how about we try to figure out how to get out of this situation, instead of trying to figure out how this happened. We have to do the damage control."

    "What Damage Control? Tonight, Deans from all over the region will send their representatives here or they might evene here themselves. We already screwed up. Just hope that if Sam and the ming skulls know more information about the remaining legacy inheritances, they are going to keep their mouths shut.

    Or we would be fucked."

    Dean cursed.

    He has been having bad days one after another. The cases are piled up against the academy and the pseudo hell issue, ming skulls killing his freshmen. If that is not enough the other Olympian deans are now going back on their agreements.

    Regarding the pseudo hell issue, he offered them some favors as thepensation so they wont make it the issue between their academies, but he heard the rankers filed cases against their own deans because of this.

    So, now they are denying the favors and just want ''justice'' for their students.

    Dean did have a n of course. To bring his niece, pearl into the realm, put her through some bogus air tight judicial process and make herpensate the students as well as use the chance to expel her.

    And the expulsion should directlye from the enforcers.

    That way, it won''t look like he was openly protecting her. Even if it was implied, nobody can prove shit and they can bite his ass for all he cares.

    The only problem there was that his brother. Lord Theron, hid Pearl away and he himself was very hard to contact.

    He even prepared some special package topensate in exchange for him to put on this show and save Pearl. But he couldn''t get in touch with his brother. He must have gone back into that mountain and only physical contact is possible.

    Dean wanted to eventually make a trip after the first pocket dimension is over and Dayus is back with the legacy inheritance.

    However, shit hit the fan once again.

    As they were discussing, the attendant knocked on the door.

    "Sir, other Deans are here."

    "Olympian Deans? Not just them, sir. Norse, Sanatan, Xia, they all already sent representatives. They said, that their Deans will be on their way based on the situation."

    "Fuck."

    Dean cursed once again and walked out to meet them.

    Dayus sighed in exhaustion. He doesn''t know why things are progressing this way. This was supposed to be his time to shine. The stage was set for him. He was supposed to take care of ming skulls and increase his prestige. He was supposed to recruit the most loyal soldiers with the legacy inheritances.

    Now his stepping stones, stepped on him and took away the inheritances.

    Sam and his friends were watching this whole fiasco as theyughed their asses of.

 Chapter 2115 Deans Visit

    2115 Dean''s Visit

    Sam and his team watched as the Dean went to talk with other Deans and the representatives from other regional academies.

    "Why are you here?"

    He asked them directly.

    "You know, why we are here Dean, you owe us an exnation? How does Dayus know about the information regarding the legacy inheritances? And howe you didn''t share it with us? I thought we were all friends here."

    "The information was acquired by the student himself and he said that he acquired it within the Dimension. He tried to find it, and as you might know, the ming skulls obtained it."

    "Are you sure, there is nothing more to the story?"

    "Yes, there is nothing more."

    "Then howe, we came across this?"

    They spoke as they yed out an audio clip. It was actually a video recording, but the image has been reced with a ck screen.

    The Dean was stunned when he heard the clip. Because it was the conversation between him and Dayus. It was their discussion of ns regarding the legacy inheritance and stuff.

    "How did you get this?" The Dean''s face darkened. After all, the conversation took ce in the privacy of his own room. There is no way, he could feel secure anymore."

    "You don''t expect me to reveal that, do you? We all have our own means. Anyway, since the cat is out of the bag, we are requesting you to bring out that kid named Dayus. We would like it if he can answer all of our questions honestly."

    Dean gritted his teeth and stayed in silence.

    "Come on, you don''t want to repeat whatever happened in ourst Academy war, do you? I am sure this time it will be worse, particrly to the Zeus Academy. With all the heat you are attracting, it wouldn''t be a wise decision to resist all of us."

    ¡­

    The meeting went on with all of them spewing some veiled and some even open threats to Dean''s face. They gave Dean some time and told him to think over.

    The Dean walked back to his office where Dayus was waiting.

    He slumped into the chair and said.

    "This cannot go on. I need to fix this, immediately. I am going to leave the Academy realm now. I think it is better if youe with me. Without my presence here, I cannot guarantee your safety."

    Dayus was surprised.

    "But don''t we have the trials tomorrow?"

    "Let them be. The first trials are against Sam anyway. For some reason, I have a feeling he wille out on top once again. So, there is no point for us being here."

    Dayus didn''t resist anymore. He is also sure that his situation is in a bit of jeopardy, so he decided to follow.

    Sam and his friends are a bit surprised by this decision. Even Sam didn''t expect this. After all, he has been the biggest pain in the ass for every dean, particrly the Dean of Zeus Academy.

    So, he expected that theye full force against him for the trials, but it seems the legacy inheritance issue is much more dangerous to the dean that he thought.

    He didn''t worry too much though. He had hundreds of cases on his head, but he is sure he can move past them. Sam turned to his team and spoke.

    "We broke the news to the world and attracted them all. As expected the possibility of gaining more inheritances definitely restrained them from extreme measures. But that won''t stop them from seriously pursuing the ming skulls.

    Not just the Academies, every greedy student from freshman to the grade 4 will be after the ming skulls.

    And I believe this is the right time for us to exhaust this chess piece called the ming skulls.

    We are not going to take anymore assignments, except for the ones Dayus nted, that too if he wants to pursue that idea more.

    As for the rest of the students, when someone ces as assignments, we will just ignore them and if any of them takes some drastic measures like stalking our possible locations, wreaking havoc in hopes of finding us out, we will just divert their attention to something else.

    I am sure, all of you knows what that means."

    They all nodded.

    "That''s great. Now, go back to your academies. Once again, put pressure on the Deans, if they don''t take a rigid stance against the Zeus Academy, tell them that you are quitting immediately.

    That is something they cannot afford right now.

    They already have information regarding the legacy inheritances, so, they know that these are only avable in pocket dimensions suitable for freshmen. And you happened to be their star freshmen. If you are not there and work independently to get those inheritances, your chances will go way too high.

    They will not let you go. So, let''s y around with that."

    After discussing a few things, everyone went their own ways.

    At the same time, the Dean exited the realm secretely with Dayus. They went to the same mountain region that Pearl went to meet Theron.

    After travelling for a while, they reached the ce the next day. They were at least faster than Pearl.

    Theron was sitting under the same waterfall as he did when Pearl visited.

    "What are you doing here, brother? Did you miss your little brother after such a long time?"

    Theron asked the Dean.

    Dean looked at him coldly.

    "You know why I am here, Theron. Please don''t y these word games with me."

    "If you are here for Pearl, then please don''t bother. That girl used up all of my favor and squandered it. She has to repay me."

    "I need to end the issue with her and the pseudo-hell back at the Academy realm. This will also help her stay safe. You know what will happen if the Judiciary proceedings against her take a turn for the worse.

    If she is punished by the Academy realm seriously, even if you try to save her, the pursuit of the Enforcers will be endless. You will not have any peace. I am also sure that you do not want to sabotage your rtionship with the gods at the moment."

    "There is a IF before your theory, brother. IF the trial goes for the worse and even if those kids out there manage to get her maximum punishment, it is still up for debate, whether the enforcers can keep up the pursuit."

    "Don''t do this Theron. She will be in constant danger. The more she resists, the severe the punishment gets. And I don''t trust you to be her protector for the rest of her life. Once she is out of your sight, she will be dead."

    "Are you really so concerned for her? A part of me is telling me that this is all bogus and you just want to cover your ass.

    You of all people should know where my reluctance stems from."

    "Two Elders from the Academy were caught. They were helping out a Titan''s Divine Incarnation and conducted a massive ritual. They are currently in my custody. I will handover them to you. They are key yers within the organization supporting that divine incarnation.

    15:25

    "You are afraid that the Academy elders will user her as scapegoat and let her die to appease the other academies."

    "You are right. She can die for all I care. But she cannot die before she repays me. I will send her to you after the debt has been paid. You can just go ahead and use her as a scapegoat after that.

    I don''t have that much time.

    That is why, I am here to repay the debt in her stead."

    Theron finally opened his eyes as he looked at his brother. He was curious as how his brother was nning to do that.

    "Two Elders from the Academy were caught. They were helping out a Titan''s Divine Incarnation and conducted a massive ritual. They are currently in my custody. I will handover them to you. They are key yers within the organization supporting that divine incarnation.

    I am sure, you can make use of it."

    Theron was amazed.

    "ording to the rules, do they not have to attend the trial?"

    "I can handle that. A few judges owe me a favor. Iwill cash all of them in. I will y out a fake execution in front of the Academy realm. I will hand them over to you. Neither me nor the Zeus Academy will interfere in this matter.

    Whatever you find from them, is exclusively yours to take.

    I am sure you can strike some deal with the Olympians regarding this."

    Theron went into a deep thought.

    "Alright, that is fine by me. You can take her on your way back. Is there anything else?"

    "I heard you interfered in the Pseudo-hell and I came to know that Sam¡­."

    "Oh, that arrogant bastard? Don''t worry, I am not going to pursue it for now. At least not immediately. You can rx for now."

    "Thank you."

    "Anyway, who is this creature that you brought along?"

    Theron asked as he looked at Dayus. Dean thought for a moment and said.

    "He is a new special student of the academy. Rmended by Zeus. He is attracting a lot of attentiontely, so I kept him by my side to save him."

 Chapter 2116 Trial

    2116 Trial N?v(el)B\\jnn

    While the meeting between the Dean and Theron was going on, back in the Academy realm.

    The Olympian region was in chaos. Many new faces and powerful forces were spotted and every academy member is on high alert. Hundreds of cases for ming skulls are being sent, but none of them are getting any response.

    After all, a child could guess that they are just plotting.

    Sam does have a n to reduce that, but for now, he has to go for a trial. He has hundreds of cases filed against him, courtesy to most of the Zeus Academy students, the students'' family members and many other academy students.

    All of hisints were going to be on abined trial today.

    And the opposition¡­ it is the one and only the City guard captain. Even in that fervent atmosphere with everyone focusing so hard on the legacy inheritance, people still had time to pay attention on Sam''s trial.

    This is the biggest trial in a few centuries.

    To have more than a dozen cases filed on a single person is already a record in itself. Sam has multiple dozens. When Sam entered the courtroom, he walked with a calm and bored face. He had his hands in his pockets, while he chewed on something. He didn''t even look interested and to everyone''s surprise, he walked in alone.

    Usually, whenever a big case like this was filed, their academy or their forces would be backing him and will send a couple of representatives to help him argue his case, but he came alone.

    Dove and others actually wanted toe as well. In fact, Dean Wharton was more than willing to send some elders. Even Ling Tian wanted to give out a helping hand, however, he rejected all of them. He already knows what the enemy is nning, it would be stupid of him if he couldn''t take advantage of that.

    This whole thing should be his victory by default.

    When he stood in the stand, the guard captain didn''t waste a second of time. He immediately stood up and made his case.

    "Sir, this man named Sam, who is also student of the Gambler''s Academy has been causing a lot ofmotion in the Academy realm.

    Apart from repeatedly offending many people and antagonizing other academy''s students, recently he started exacting revenge on the Zeus Academy.

    He employed ming Skulls, a known terrorist organization within the Academy realm to kill dozens of students from the Zeus Academy. Apart from the deaths there are dozens more that were injured severely and with a possibility of being crippled.

    His activities exceeded any moral tolerance and the constant attacks are threatening the operations of the city.

    I hope that I can prove it to you and you can grant him the highest form of punishment possible."

    The judge looked at the captain and asked.

    "The ming skulls is a terrorist organization? Captain, you know there are certain requirements an organization should meet before you can say that, right?"

    "And the ming skulls meet all of them, sir. Yesterday, the city guardmand has officially dered the ming skulls as a terrorist organization.

    We are coborating with the Zeus Academy to catch them."

    A document was passed over. The judge nodded. He turned to Sam and spoke.

    "The ming skulls is indeed a terrorist organization, employing them could be considered a crime against the Academy realm. What do you have to say for yourself?"

    "They are not dered as the terrorist organization when I hired them. So, I believe I am not obligated to exin myself for that. In a way, it is the city guard''s fault. How can they not let the city and the students know about the ming skulls?

    Were they trying to entrap me?"

    "Don''t tter yourself, student. You are not worthy of us to entrap you with dirty schemes." The guard captain spoke.

    Judge just gave him a nce and continued.

    "You are indeed right, part of what you said at least. You cannot be considered to coborate with a terrorist organization, if the organization hasn''t been dered as such when you were coborating.

    But the case still lies if you knew that they are a terrorist organization, but still coborated anyway, without reporting to the City guard.

    After all, it is every student''s responsibility to find any possible threats and bring it forward to the city guard.

    So, unless the city guard can provide proper evidence that you know they are a terrorist organization before the deration, then you cannot be charged for that."

    "Thank you."

    "Don''t thank me yet. By defending against this im, you actually admitted to hiring them. Does that mean, you are agreeing to whatever the city guard used you of?"

    The judge asked.

    Everyone looked at Sam weirdly. Even the people that hated his guts looked at him with the same weird expression. They all knew that Sam is no way an idiot. There is no way, he could fall into such an amateurish trap.

    Even the city guard didn''t expect that.

    Sam just smiled and said.

    "There is nothing to deny. I am responsible for the deaths of every single person he presented in front of you."

    "So, you are pleading guilty?"

    The city guard captain asked even before the judge could. He is way too anxious. Things weren''t going as he wanted. But they are not going in a negative direction either, instead they are going way too good for him.

    He nned several things to make Sam look guilty. After all, he doesn''t have any hard evidence against Sam.

    Seeing that Sam is agreeing, he felt some warning bells ring.

    "Of course, not. ording to the rules of the Academy realm, only the weak are guilty. Everyone here in this room, knows that and agrees with it. So, as usual, I demand a trial bybat.

    I will not be taking your punishment, however I will let thebat ability decide if I am worthy of that punishment or not."

    The judge frowned, while the captain grinned. This is what he was looking for. In fact, he couldn''t care less about any punishment the judge could give out.

    "A trial bybat? Student Sam, it seems like the education of Gambler''s Academy is not progressing well. Before cultivation they might need to teach simple math.

    Do you know how manyints you have against you? One hundreds and seventy three. You cannot escape it will onebat because they are not formed as a single bundle.

    They are individual cases. If you want trial bybat, you need to fight them one by one."

    The judge said.

    Sam almostughed out loud. This guy could have said anything, but he said that Sam''s math is not good. Only Sam could understand the ridiculousness of that statement. Of course, it was sarcastic, but still¡­

    "I am okay fighting, all of them at the same time. If they dare to do so that is."

    Sam smiled and looked at the people who filed theints. They all froze for a second. Most of them belong to academy realm and they know Sam''spetence all too well.

    And many people know about the Pseudo hell''s situation by now.

    The things Sam did there¡­

    No one wants to take such a risk. Even if there are one hundred and seventy members, they are still not confident about this.

    But the captain with his very punch able face spoke with a wide grin.

    "Sir, even if he is ready to take the trial bybat, he is not eligible for it. ording to the specialw of the Olympian region, a person who is determined as a threat to the stability of the Olympian region should be given punishment based on the severity of the disturbance.

    They cannot opt for the trial bybat directly.

    And Sam with his cases, is a great threat to the stability. Since he arrived in this realm, he repeatedly admitted that he wanted to cause trouble to the Olympian Academies. The first day he was here, he attacked the Zeus Academy students, he constantly targeted them.

    There are many testimonies from the students and seniors that he was vocal about his intentions.

    There was an incident, when he killed almost twenty students of various academies directly and vanished their bodies.

    Only after we started investigating deeply, did we find that out.

    Now he couldn''t care less about the judiciary procedure about the case of Pseudo realm, he started taking revenge, that too on the students that never really got involved in the pseudo hell.

    The Zeus Academy''s student union has given testimony about how student Sam and his senior went directly, injured a student and spewed all kinds of threats. We need to consider him a serious threat and punish him ording to the Olympianws."

    Dove stood up from her seat, her aura raging. She narrowed her eyes and looked at the city guard captain, who was a bit startled.

 Chapter 2117 Verdict

    2117 Verdict

    Everyone was shocked, not only because of the punishment demanded by the captain, but also by the sudden outburst.

    Dove stood there in silence for a moment until Sam spoke to her.

    "Are you okay?" Everyone was dumbfounded. Isn''t she the one that''s supposed to ask him? Why would the guy undergoing the trial ask someone else if they were okay.

    Looking at hisposed face, Dove also tried to calm down.

    "Are you going to be okay? Are you confident?" She asked him. At that moment, both of them ignored the trial and the judge. They just talked normally.

    "Don''t worry, it is within the expectations."

    "Okay then, I will trust you." With those words, she left. Sam looked at her with a confused expression. He can understand her outburst. By now, he had a grasp at her personality. She is way too protective of the Gambler''s academy and its students.

    She takes her responsibility way too seriously and it is not necessarily a bad thing. He watched as she disappeared through the entrance and turned back.

    The judge cleared his throat to attract the attention of the courtroom, before speaking.

    "Sam, do you have anything to say about captain''s usations?"

    "No, sir. Most of it is true. As for the rest, I honestly don''t care. If you think what he said makes sense, if you and him really believe that a grade 1 student can be such a threat to the safety of the academy realm, by all means, please judge me ording to the Olympianw."

    The judge stayed silent for a while and gave out the verdict.

    "The Olympianw is one of the special regionalws that is only applicable to the Olympian region. And ording to it, a threatthat could topple the stability of the Olympian region should be subjected imprisonment in the Tartarus Pocket dimension.

    However, that is only the punishment for the highest of the threats and the ones that cannot be neutralized. Even if the city guard captain deems Sam as such, I fail to see how a grade 1 student could be considered as such.

    So, I am going to consider Sam as a person with Anti-Olympian beliefs and a minor threat to the peace and quite of the Olympian region.

    Under that condition, Sam shall go through the Twelvebors.

    The deans serving the twelve major Olympian gods shall design thebors and send it to me for the approval within the day. If Sam finishes thebors, he shall be deemed innocent and will also gain immunity within the Olympian region.

    If he fails to do so and forfeits, he shall be imprisoned in the tartarus pocket dimension for a decade. If he dies while finishing thebors, it shall be considered the divine punishment. Any foul y detected from any external parties will be seen as the failure of the academy that gave out thebor and they shall be held ountable.

    The verdict has been passed and the court is now adjourned."

    And just like that, Sam''s fate has fallen into the hands of the Deans of the twelve academies.

    Sam looked at the Captain, who smiled at him.

    "No hard feelings kid, but there is a lesson in there for you. If you stand outtoo much, you will be hammered down."

    "Some nails can be too strong, captain and that might break the hammer in half."

    "Speak all you want. But your fate is now sealed."

    "Can you do me a favor captain?"

    "What is it?"

    "Can you remember the line you just said and repeat it to me every time we meet in the future? I really liked it when you said it just now."

    "Why?"

    "No reason, really."

    "I won''t do things without reason."

    "Then how about we make a bet? As long as you can keep on saying that line, I will give you a million gold coins every time we meet. But if you cannot, you have to quit the job as the captain. Are you interested?"

    "A million gold coins?"

    "Of course, a million. Not one coin less."

    "Why are you making this bet?"

    "I don''t keep anything that was given to. I always pay back my debts and let''s say this wager makes that debt repayment more interesting."

    The captain looked at Sam suspiciously. "Alright, Deal."

    They shook hands and left.

    As soon as Sam stepped out of the courtroom, his wrist band got a hit. It''s a video recording sent by Vidyut. In the video, Crow, the current person in charge of the Gambler Academy''s student union is standing in the middle of the Zeus Academy''s grounds.

    He held a scroll in his hands, standing upright as he read out loud.

    "From this moment onwards, the Gambler Academy isying im on the Thunder Star that was under the control of the Zeus Academy until now. We are giving the Zeus Academy administration five hours to evacuate and hand over the Thunder Star to the student union of the Gambler''s Academy.

    Or else, severe action will be taken and the Gambler Academy or its students will not be held responsible for the consequences." N?v(el)B\\jnn

    No one made a move on him. I understood why, because this is a true deration of war and Crow is just a messenger from the Gambler''s Academy. As mentioned before, so many times,petition is highly encouraged throughout the Academy realm and there are constant shes between the academies.

    Just like how they organized so many tournaments for the students topete with some semnce of civility, there are also certain measures in ce to fight inrger scale.

    And one of them is the direct deration of war byying ims on the property of the other party. It is a bit old as a custom. This is not usually used in the Academy realm. When wars happen, they usually keep it hidden under the wraps so that they could ignore certain rules.

    Also, who would give up their advantage ofnding a surprise attack?

    Dove would.

    She first wanted to deal with the Zeus Academy in a different way, but the trial pissed her off way too much, so he wanted to subject the academy to utmost humiliation possible. Now, this is the method she chose.

    The thunder star is a purely mining. Except for the Zeus Academy mining the minerals there is no civilization there. Only the beasts and other creatures.

    Sam smiled at this.

    He has two days before his twelvebors start and before that he has quite a good show to enjoy.

    He went back to the academy.

    Thegambler''s academy as a whole is shaken. Everyone is running around hurriedly as if they are preparing for something. Sam went to the student union and asked.

    "What is happening? I just heard about the deration. Are you guys really making a move right away?" He asked Crow.

    Crow nodded and said.

    "Dove''s order. She is directing the war herself. Things are going to get really chaotic. I told her that you might have some trouble because of this. After all, if the Zeus Academy is pissed and they want to take it out on you in theirbor, there is no way for us to stop."

    "It is fine. Can I participate in the Thunder Star''s raid? I am sure theZeus Academy is not just giving it up."

    "ording to the rules, it is a Grade 2. That means only Grade 2 students are allowed. It is also a that is devoid of any contact with outside world, so the academy realm judiciaries are the ones who keep tabs on it. It will be hard to convince them to let you in."

    "Alright. Go ahead. Just let me know how it turns out."

    Crow nodded and left. Things are getting more and more exciting and Sam couldn''t wait anymore to muddy the waters more.

 Chapter 2118 Ransom Meetings

    2118 Ransom Meetings

    Sam went to meet with Dove, who became busy with the meeting.

    They were nning the strategy to take down the Thunder Star by the time Sam stepped into the room. She gestured him toe forward as soon as he arrived. A rectangr table as big as a snooker table, on which a projected map of the Thunder Star.

    There are several smaller projections indicating different teams of Grade 2.

    These projections are used to show their positions, their attack strategies etc. Sam stood in silence as the team talked about different scenarios and their counter measures. The n was well made and there were no ring holes in the strategy.

    And on top of that, Sam came across many people that he hasn''t even seen in the Academy.

    There are many Second grade students that rarely appear in the academy and let their presence known, but a lot of people like that are being used for this attack.

    After the strategy meeting was over, only Sam and Dove remained in the room.

    "I must say, I am a bit impressed and touched at the same time." Sam said as he nced at the map.

    "That was the goal." Dove replied with a smile, clearly not meaning what she said.

    "So, why the sudden action? I thought you had a n that has been forming for quite a while."

    "Well, there was, but I didn''t know that the assholes of the Zeus academy teamed up with the city guards. That crosses a line."

    "Really? How is that any different from plotting without involving the city guards?"

    "City guards are not here out of their sense of duty, they are also selfish beings that have their own goal and for that, they often toy around with the students and academies when things go sideways. So, there is a hidden consensus among the academies that they wouldn''t give the city guards any leverage to use it against the Academies.

    Zeus Academy broke that.

    I am sure even the other academies, including the Olympian academies are not happy about it. It is just that you are the one that''s getting destroyed, that is why they didn''t react. They are way too happy about your imminent disaster."

    "Then I must savor their disappointmentter."

    "Don''t be so sure of yourself. It has been centuries since the 12bors were used as punishment. You know how that punishment came to, right?"

    "Yes, Heracles and his 12bors. 12 Impossible tasks. Don''t tell me, they are going to be as hard as that."

    "No, not really. Heracles'' 12bors were done when he was on verge of bing a god. These 12bors will not be the same or of same difficulty. But they can still be considered as impossible task for you and your peers.

    And most of the time, you might have to sh against some second graders in process."

    "Don''t worry about it. As long as there is a way to do it, then I can do it."

    It is good that you are confident, but keep in mind about the difficulty."

    "Alright, can you give the information regarding the battle for Thunder Star? Since I was the one who started the whole issue, I would like to know the updates."

    "No Problem."

    After discussing some more details, Sam left and went to his own dorm.

    He sent a message to Icarus.

    "You must have already heard the news, I was subjected to the Olympianw and got punished with the 12bors. You can start the n from tomorrow."

    Icarus sent a simple message back.

    ''Affirmative.''

    Sam just smiled at this. Once the city guard captain locked on to Sam and discussed the ns with the student union of the Zeus Academy, Sam already formed his own n. There is a reason why he surrendered without any resistance.

    To establish a precedence.

    That night, Sam got a detailed report on how the Gambler Academy students took down and upied the Thunder Star. They even held the Zeus Academy students hostage and demanded a ransom. Another unspoken rule to avoid too much unnecessary bloodshed. Also a great way to sow discord in between the students and their own academies. Even that tactic was included. Basically, the Gambler academy is demanding a very high ransom that is beyond unreasonable. But the proud sons of the Zeus Academy, do not believe that it is that unreasonable whenpared to their own lives.

    So, they are angry at the student union of the Zeus Academy or even the administration. Of course, it is not really that effective. It does little damage, but little damage is better than no damage at all.

    Dove asked Sam if he is interested in participating in the ransom negotiations and he readily agreed.

    The next day, the ransom meeting would be second best thing that''s going to happen in the Olympian realm. The meetings were held at early in the morning. Gambler Academy''s team only has three people. Crow, Dove and Sam.

    The Zeus Academy has over ten. Five from the noble league, five from the Student union, all from various grades. Sam even saw a couple of familiar faces. The demi gods that he swore to torture during his trials of hell.

    As they sat at the table, Christos spoke.

    "So, we all know that whatever you asked is beyond uneptable. Now you can bring your real offers and we can talk."

    "We don''t believe that its too unreasonable. We have ten hostages. One of them is the young master of a notable family within the Noble league. He stands to inherit at least a dozen realms from his father. I am sure, he can let go of one realm from it." Crow replied while still looking at some documents.

    As if he wasn''t even interested in the ransom meeting.

    Christos looked at him and spoke.

    "That has nothing to do with his current situation. You are speaking as if his inheritance is guaranteed. We can only give you the ransom based on the current worth of the students. We cannot just pay based on their future potential.

    Who knows, he might be aplete idiot and might just get devoured in the family politics."

    "That is not what he said though. He personally said, that is worth far too much for the Zeus Academy and that our demand was even a bit petty for his current status.

    He said that he is within the top ten of your grade 2 students. I am sure that''s status alone warrants the rights over a fews." Crow replied once again.

    Christos gritted his teeth.

    "Still, do you really believe what you say? This is not going to be ourst negotiation meeting, so you might want to tone it down a bit.

    The best we can do for him is the rights over the metal resources in fours. Thes are in the same realm as the Thunder Star and you are only entitled to the mining resources.

    Do remember that you only won a against us. You cannot demand outrageously to give out a realm or two just because you caught some weaklings."

    "Mining rights of the whole realm. For a decade."

    Crow replied ignoring thements.

    "No, fours, for a decade. I am not moving an inch."

    "Then sure, we will keep the captive with us. Let''s move on to the next one."

    Crow replied and gestured to Sam to proceed. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "No, no, no, wait." One of the seniors broke and looked at Crow.

    "We need that man back. We are not moving forward with the negotiations without getting him back."

    "Then that means, we are not having a negotiation today." Once again, crow replied. Sam and Dove just followed his lead and stood up along with him.

    "Stop." Another senior spoke and turned to the first one.

    "If you cannot give them what they want, then they have the right to move on. Just because you cannot get your young master out, do you think the rest should also stay a prisoner? If you are not going to let him out, let us have a shot at getting our people out."

    The trio from Gambler''s academy watched as the hell was about to break loose. The reason for such arge entourage was because these people were rted to the captives and they wanted to take this into their own hands to make sure that Christos doesn''t short change them.

    They are not here as a single unit and that only makes it easier for the Gambler Academy.

    The first senior who spoke noticed the displeasure of his peers. So, he gritted his teeth and spoke.

    "I am only allowed this much. Sevens. Two of themplete authority, including the taxes. The remaining five, mining resources. That is the best we can do."

    He directly offered his bottom line.

    Crow looked at Sam and thetter nodded.

 Chapter 2119 Spread the Info

    Chapter 2119 Spread the Info

    Simrly, Crow and Dove started negotiating the terms to release the remaining captives. As for why Sam was there in the first ce, it was for thest two captives. The two who has the highest value among all the captives. They are not just the members of the Noble league, but they are also directly rted to the Elders of the Zeus Academy.

    They are also the strongest, on the verge of breaking through to the Pre-transcendence of Divine ne.

    They are way too expensive for the Zeus Academy to lose. The loss of students aside, the political ramifications are too hard even for them to face. However, Christos was a bit rxed. Because even though the negotiations were a bit hard and they paid a lot, it was still within his expectations.

    The payment for any ransom didn''t exceed the limits he had set before.

    With this precedence he was sure that he will be able to release the remaining two people as well.

    And that is where Sam came in.

    Too bad for Christos Sam already knew his limits and he knew what he was about to offer, so, when Dove asked him if he wanted to join in the negotiations, these two were his first pick and he has only one demand.

    "I want the ransom for these two to be paid in Coins."

    And that''s it. The whole room was filled with pin drop silence. Christos froze in shock.

    "What did you say?" He asked, hoping that he heard it wrong. Hoping that he lost his bloody mind and imagined Sam''s previous words.

    "I want the ransom to be paid in coins. We will only ept coins. No mines, nos, no realms, no dimensions. Coins and coins alone. If you are not up for this, then the negotiations are over."

    "Wait, how many coins are you expecting?" One of the seniors on the side asked.

    "These two are the most valuable among the bunch, they should each worth at least thrice as the current highest paid ransom. So, I think thatnds you somewhere near the worth of three realms with resources filled to the brim.

    I am sure the people in the Exchange center will definitely help you evaluate that. You can talk to them, give us a certificate indicating that the evaluation is correct and approved by the exchange along with the coins."

    The trio stood up.

    "Wait."

    "There is no negotiation regarding this. We will only ept coins. And we are not even giving you an enormous number. It is purely based on the evaluation of the Academy realm''s administration. I don''t believe it was a big ask.

    So, please prepare the coins and exchange for the students."

    With that they left.

    Crow and Dove exchanged a nce. They were swamped with many questions haunting their minds.

    "What is it?"

    Sam asked.

    "Why would you waste such an opportunity just to get some coins from Zeus Academy? Don''t you think the realms and resource would have been a better choice?"

    "Nah, you guys are underestimating the impact of coins in the current scenario. But I guess I cannot me you for it. The Gambler Academy hasn''te to the point yet."

    That''s right, the Gambler''s Academy was the only one that wasn''t impacted too much by the sudden increase in demand for the coins. Because of their unique nurturing techniques and the number of people with their own unique talents being so high, the coin exchange has been pretty easy for them.

    They always managed to secure enough coins to pay the Hub without going through too much trouble.

    "Right now, the coins are the most important and scarce resource among all the Academies, particrly in the Olympian region. If they don''t cough up the coins, then they will lose the trust of their own students, if they did¡­ well, you will see."

    Sam just smiled without saying much.

    He went back to the secret room in hub, where his team was working on some ns.

    "So, how did the ransom meetings go?" N?v(el)B\\jnn

    "A bit amusing. But I must say, I now understand how these Academy wars work. It was never about the territory that they were attacking directly. The Zeus Academy lost over hundred times the value of Thunder Star.

    I think the strategy is focused more on capturing the high value targets. The actual territory matters less."

    "No wonder¡­ even I thought the Thunder Star was not worth that much hype. The ns the Gambler Academy made were scary." Philip agreed from the side.

    "Anyway, let''s leave that aside for now. How are our ns going? The announcement in other regions¡­ is it ready?"

    "Yeah, one word and we can spread the news. The other yers are given the priority."

    "That''s great. What about the things Icarus needs to handle?"

    "He is already on the way. He will message us once he is done and we can spread the news."

    They are all on sync and they just waited for Icarus to message them. It didn''t take long for that to happen. Within a few minutes, the message came. Sam ordered for the news to spread and it did.

    It was big enough to shake the whole Olympian region.

    Icarus who filed cases against the Zeus Academy a while ago and was awaiting the trial date for it, has filed even more cases. Including the Dean, Elders, Instructors and students, he filed cases against almost a thousand people that belonged to the Zeus Academy.\

    And for most students and Instructors that cases numbered in dozens to hundreds.

    As for the Elders, the case almost neared five hundred each. From the unfair treatment they gave to students, trading sexual favors from female students, bribes, biased treatments, forbidden practices, abuse to even the slightest embezzlement from the academy funds, the cases were numerous.\

    It was one thing for Icarus to file cases regarding the two elders that practiced forbidden rituals to help the Titans, but this came as an unexpected shock.

    However, many people who were privy to some more details noticed something else in these cases. That is the nature of cases. Sometimes, same issue was filed in different cases with different point of view as the only variation.

    For example, a case was filed by the teammate of a person who died because of the instructor. At the same time, the same issue was raised in a case filed by the family member of the person who died.

    When looking at it, the personnel of the Zeus Academy realized one thing. They have seen and used this pattern before and it happened just the day before. The timing cannot be a coincidence and this sent chills down their spine.

    For one hundred and seventy or so cases, Sam was subjected to 12bors.

    And those cases were not actually that vicious as most of them were straight up murder and revenge killings. But the things these instructors did¡­. They vited their duties as the instructor, the academy realm''s moral guidelines and to top it all.

    The case number is also quite high.

    And the worst part is, they themselves colluded with the city guard to set a really nice precedence. Now they are going to die by the axe they grinded themselves.

    This is the worst possible oue they could imagine.

    While this news was like a bomb, what they didn''t expect was that the news regarding the legacy inheritances has been spreading like wildfire in other regions. Particrly to the yers, Sam revealed most of the information he got from Dayus.

    So, that very evening, dozens of people from the other regions have moved to the Olympian region as they awaited the opening of the next pocket dimension that they could challenge and try their hand at capturing a legacy inheritance for themselves.

    The Elders that are currently put in charge of the academy because of the Dean''s absence in the Zeus Academy, were way too swamped in dealing with their own cases to notice this.

    As for the other academies, they did and they sent some rats out to get some information.

    Sam decided to be generous and gave them some crumbs so that they can fill in the gaps. Just like that, most of the people in the Academy realm now no of the possible presence of legacy inheritances in the pocket dimensions of the Olympian region.

    Dayus almost destroyed the whole dorm area when the news came to him.

    He knew Sam did it, but he couldn''t do shit about it.

    As for why Sam did¡­

    Just be a bit more cautious. He had a hunch that the Zeus Academy might use the 12bors to prevent him from entering the pocket dimensions. That n has been in their discussions for a while now.

    So, he wanted to make sure that Dayus won''t have a smooth time in gaining these inheritances if he was absent because of this.

 Chapter 2120 First Labor

    Chapter 2120 First Labor

    Dayus and the Dean returned to the Academy realm when the hysteria caused by the leak of the information was at the peak.

    And as mentioned, Dayus nearly destroyed his dorm room up on learning the information about the legacy inheritances has been leaked.

    The Dean however had more pressing concerns, the cases. He had to meet each and every member of his academy to prepare them for the cases. And that day went away just like that.

    Soon, it was time for Sam''s firstbor.

    The first academy to give out thebor is the Dionysus Academy. The Dionysus Academy is actually one of the diverse academies in the Olympian region. Unlike Zeus academy that specializes in Lightning and Spear and Hephaestus Academy that specializes in cksmithing and formations, the Dionysus Academy is a bit diverse in its specializations.

    And each specialization doesn''t really corrte with each other.

    First one is the weapon, staff. Another one is brewing and concoctions, finally illusions and illusion formations.

    Of course, there was asionally some cross between the concoctions and illusions, but that was it.

    However, even with that Diverse specialization in different fields, the Dionysus academy is still one of the best. Even though based on Sam''s estimation, Dionysus must not be the strongest of the bunch among the Olympians, his academy ranking didn''t reflect his strength.

    His Academy is ranked in top 5 among the Olympian academies.

    Sam walked into the Dionysus academy grounds to receive hisbor. Thebors have actually been reviewed by the court and even the authorities of the Gambler Academy. It was just that its tradition for the person subjected to thebors to get it directly from the academy grounds.

    He met with the Dean in the middle of the academy grounds. Many students, instructions and elders were assembled, watching the whole fiasco.

    "Student Sam, here is your first of the twelvebors.

    As the Dean of the Dionysus Academy, I herebymand you to bring me the blood of a Sea beast named Illuthralith.

    Your quest doesn''t not have any time limit and shall only be consideredplete after you submit the blood of that beast and the blood is verified to be that beast''s. The verification process will be conducted in the grounds of Gambler Academy and in the presence of the city guard and judiciary official to avoid any foul y.

    Do you ept the quest?"

    The Dean spoke with a wide toothed grin.

    Sam took a deep breath and extended his hand. The dean folded the scroll that he just read out of and ced it in his hands.

    "I wish you the best of luck."

    Sam nodded and walked out.

    His expression solemn until he exited the academy grounds and walked back to his dorm in the Gambler Academy.

    As soon as he did, Sam broke out in to a wide grin. Thebors were not actually discussed in extensive meetings before, for that reason Sam was unable to gain much information from it. The Deans only discussed how they wanted to use thebors to deal with Sam.

    That is all.

    Even the proposal was given to the court through documents. Even though Sam can use the birds to get info on the documents, focusing too much on them from various angles might raise unnecessary suspicion. After all, to do that kind of spying, the birds have to move and position themselves in certain angles.

    That could only mean a disaster if the usually ignorant deans find it odd.

    Anyway, he already knew what thisbor is awaiting him in terms of danger, but he didn''t know what the actualbor was. Now he knew.

    Illuthralith is a squid type beast that is specialized in illusions. In the ocean, it upies its own territory and creates an illusion that leads the other creatures directly into its mouth for easier consumption.

    The creatures won''t know that they were being devoured until they were being digested inside its body.

    The beast is very hard to spot and the sea needs to be of a certain kind to allow an Illuthralith to survive within it.

    Right now, it is only avable in two ces, one of them is a pocket dimension of the Norse realm. The pocket dimension known as the Turbulent Seas. It is open for the First graders and second graders as well. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    And it is open on the same day as the next pocket dimension will open in the Olympian region.

    That was where the Dean of Dionysus academy and the people behind himid down a sketch for Sam. Right now, so many people wants to kill Sam, he stopped keeping track, but he knew the Noble league would be most active during the twelvebors and his assumption didn''t turn out to be wrong.

    They are behaving exactly as he expected them to behave.

    They are confident that Sam wouldn''t know or able to ess the second ce where he could find an Illuthralith. Because the second ce was in the territory of the Sjor family and Sam had some ns already in line with them.

    He took out themunication token and contacted Icarus.

    "Can you inform Ivar that the ns with Thssa and Sjor are moved up. We need to finish negotiating the deal in the next two days."

    "Alright."

    That was all he got from the other side. After around fifteen minutes, Icarus called.

    "Fifteen minutes. Meet him at the Norse branch."

    Icarus only gave that message and cut the call. He is way too busy to make any small talk.

    Sam didn''t mind and just took out his dimensional drifter. It has been a while since he used this. Whenever he went out in the Academy realm, for example to the other regions, he always went on harbinger, to check out the realm itself.

    Now, there is nothing much left for him to see.

    He used the dimensional drifter to appear in the Norse branch. He went straight to the hidden office to wait for Ivar.

    Some timeter, Ivar arrived.

    "We are pushing the negotiations forward? Why?"

    "I need Illuthralith''s blood? How valuable is it for the Sjor family?"

    "Not much. From what I gathered on them, those assholes basically farm that beast. It is not exactly known to the outside world, but the person I marked in that family leaked this information without even knowing."

    "How?"

    "I stole his recording crystals."

    "Is he the same person we are going to meet? Your ''friend''?"

    "Yeah."

    "Some friend you are. Stealing directly from him." Sam smirked at this. Ivar just shrugged. Sjor family has way too much influence in norse region and that made them prime suspects for some of the crimes Ivar was investigating.

    Even though nothing substantial hase up and there were not many shady things these people have done corresponding the academy realm, he did find some bad apples. The friend he made was the only way for Ivar to get in touch with these bad apples. Because this friend is one of the few who has high talents that his family wants to make use of. But he was also suppressed slightly because of the family politics and his background.

    So, he is a bit easy to approach and take advantage of.

    "When do you want to meet him?" Ivar asked.

    "Right away."

    "We can go now then."

    Sam disguised himself and followed Ivar. At first he didn''t want to meet the other party directly, but now that he has a coincidental task and the time that came along with it, he might as well.

    They left the Academy realm through a wormhole leading to the outside world and from there it didn''t even take a couple of hours to leave. Soon, they arrived at a bustling ind city within Sjor territory.

    They walked through the streets and arrived at a high end bar.

    "Really? Don''t tell he is a drunkard." Sam asked. "Fine, I won''t tell you." Ivar chuckled and led him in. Sam sighed. Whenever he plotted against a family or used a family to his advantage, he always tried to find a guy that he can use to his advantage and more often than not, that guy always ended up being a drunkard.

    This time as well.

    "Even though he drinks like a skunk, he is a very productive guy. He actually works out of here."

    "Good to know."

    They enteredprivate room soon. A young man is sitting on the other side of the table with a document in his hands. There was a half empty ss of wine on the table.

    He looked at Ivar with a smile.

    "Nice to see you my friend. After such a long time. I was hoping you would stop by."

    "Really? Why?"

    Ivar asked in surprise.

    "My team is working on a new alloy metal for making weapons of high impact. I wanted you to test it. I was about to contact you in a couple of days. And you contacted me yourself. And this must be the friend you mentioned."

 Chapter 2121 Business Deal

    Chapter 2121 Business Deal

    "Hello nice to meet you. I am Sandy." Sam introduced himself with his alias. He extended his hand which the other party too graciously.

    "Nice to meet you too, I am Joran." The young man greeted and gestured them to take a seat. Sam looked around at the private room which Joran and Ivar exchanged some more pleasantries. The room is a bit on the dark side, like the modern day pubs. Even the lightning has a purple glow giving out real night club look.

    On the other side of the table, there were sofas fastened to the wall, on which Joran actually sat.

    On this side, where Sam and Ivar sat they were chairs, that were heavily padded with high quality leather and cushions. Sam felt quitefortable there. It was a ce truly designed to rx.

    "So, Ivar said that you have an excellent business opportunity for me. What would that be?"

    Joran asked as he poured a ss of wine for Sam.

    Sam looked at the young man in the eyes. Joran looked like a typical young master at first nce, his luxurious cloths, the way he wore his hair, the scent emitting from his body and the ornaments. He looked like a young master through and through.

    But just from his callused palms and his sharp eyes, Sam could guess that there is someone else hidden beneath that young master fa?ade. A true warrior and maybe even a business man, or both. For a moment, Sam felt that Ivar didn''t gauge this guy properly.

    Sam tookthe wine offered to him and said.

    "I do. Not just one, multiple actually."

    "No problem, let''s go through them one by one."

    Joran smiled as he leaned back against his sofa. He made himselffortable, ready to hear Sam''s long offer.

    Sam smiled and took a sip of the wine.

    "First and foremost. Let''s start with something simple. I heard from Ivar that you are quite a fan when ites to alchohol."

    "Drunkard must be the word that he used." Joran replied with a grin.

    "I am not wrong." Ivar said from the side as he took a swig of his own wine.

    "Then, I can use your expert opinion of some of my own creations." Sam waved his hand and six different wine gourds appeared on the table. They are all shaped differently and each and everyone of them had different patterns on it.

    Onlymon things about those wine gourds is that they exuded water elemental energy quite a bit and also they were all decorated with aqua-blue colored patterns. *SNAP* *POP*

    With a snap of Sam''s fingers, the cork of the first gourd popped open. The whole room was covered in a thick and fragrant alcoholic scent. It was a bit sweet and also a bit hot at the same time. Joran closed his eyes and took the scent in.

    "First and foremost, the Crystal fin."

    Sam exined as he controlled the gourd to make it levitate and pour some wine in a ss crystal ss.

    The wine appeared a light aqua blue colored with a slight tinge of red hue that gave it a slight purplish tint when ced against the light.

    Joran took the ss and savored it thoroughly with a very small sip. An explosion of vors hit his tongue. His water elemental energy within his body riled up a bit, but the next second it calmed down."

    "Made from the heart of the Demonic Shark and several exotic fruits that can only be found in the habitat of that shark. It is mild in vor and great for some long-winded nightly asions or long sessions of drinking."

    "Great wine." Joran nodded as he looked at the ss only to realize that he had already emptied it. It just felt like a small sip.

    He licked his lips and wanted to ask for seconds, however at that moment.

    *POP*

    The next gourd opened automatically. Sam took away the first ss and poured the new one into a fresh ss.

    Sam went on to exin the wines.

    Siren''s Serenade.

    Kelp Whisper.

    Mermaids Luby

    Deep Leviathan Elixir

    Coral Cascade

    Abyssal Embrace

    Sea Nymphs Nectar

    Mystic Manta Essence

    Triton''s Tranquility

    The ten bottles were tasted by Joran. By the end of it, hepletely forgot that this was supposed to be a business deal. He was just looking forward to taste more and more of the amazing wine.

    Sam was satisfied with that reaction. He was not the one to care much when making business deals like this. Since he was just a novice he has been making deals after deals. Most of them for sake of gaining a foothold or taking down someone.

    The deal with Sjor family is the same.

    However, he knew just how important this deal is, that is why he prepared meticulously. He collected materials from all the ces the dusk had influence in and carefully crafted these wines with the help of the ape, Sia and Gyan.

    And the effect is just what he desired.

    After the ten bottles of wine were emptied, Joran felt a little tipsy in his heart. He wanted to drink more, but he appeared a bit ''full''. Not of the wine itself, but rather the energy within the wine. The pure water elemental energy had a unique effect on his body.

    He could feel that the energy he was circting was being filtered and his body is ready to excrete these impurities.

    "I am sure, you want to take a bath. I can wait." Sam said as he took the empty bottles away. Joran immediately disappeared from the room and came back after ten minutes. He looked like a brand-new person.

    There was a slight healthy pink glow on his face and it was amplified by the satisfied smile he had.

    "The unique effect of the ten winesbined is amazing. Is that a wine set?"

    "Yes, it is. Carefully brewed by my own two hands. This will be our first deal. I will give you an exclusive dealership of this wine in the following territories. But I need something in exchange for that." N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Sam passed a slip of paper with the list of all the territories Sam wanted to hand over to Joran. Joran took a look and raised an eyebrow.

    "Half of these territories are territories of conflict. Themon point being Thssa." He muttered without hiding his thoughts.

    Sam also nodded without hiding his own.

    "I will be honest with you. I have a personal conflict with Thssa and I need your help in dealing with it."

    His direct statement made Ivar frown. That was not how they decided to approach this. At first they nned to be a bit more vague about their situation and use some indirect means. However, Sam changed his mind.

    His instinct told him that dealing with Joran in a more honest way will yield better results.

    "Dealing with Thssa? You picked quite a bit target. And me entering their markets with this product will most definitely create some conflict. And the value of this wine did seem like it''s worth it, after all my conflict with the Thssa is always going to be there."

    "I guess you are in then."

    "That depends, what do I gain apart from this? Let''s discuss the profit share and the remaining businesses that you want to do."''

    "No problem then. Sam took out a few metallic objects. Neither Ivar nor Joran recognized them. But people from back earth would be ever so familiar with them. They are handguns. Ever since Sam stepped into this world, he has one strict condition set to himself.

    That he wouldn''t sell this world''s version of handguns. Guns were heartless in his opinion and simply put, he never really liked the addictive nature induced by these tools. But since the Olympians yed dirty first, he decided to treat them to a little something.

    "These are my inventions. Handguns. If it is okay with you, I would like to demonstrate a bit."

    Sam said and five minutester, they were in an arena within the restaurant.

    There were some battle puppets in the arena likely for sparring. "Can you call a waiter? Preferably a mortal ne cultivator."

    Sam asked ad Joran nodded. Soon the waiter was there.

    "Wear this."

    Sam gave a glove and a token that could be stuck to the guy''s chest. Then he made the waiter aim the gun at the puppet. "Pull the trigger when you want."

    Sam said and stepped back.

    The waiter was confused. He couldn''t feel any energy fluctuations from the gun or the token on his chest. But he did as he was told.

    *BANG*

    The gun worked just like a modern-day hand gun. The muzzle gave out a couple of sparks as the metallic bullet escaped. A shell came out of the back and fell to the ground. However, there were a few extra things.

    The glove took the brunt of the recoil and most of it wasn''t even absorbed by it, instead, the token on the chest of the young man cracked slightly.

    As for the bullet itself.

    *SWOOSH*

    It shot through the wind and hit the training dummy.

    *BOOM*

    An explosion of red mes burned the dummy to a crisp.

    And finally, there was one change that no one really noticed. Below the butt of the gun, there was a number. Previously it was twelve and after the shot was fired, it became eleven.

    The dust settled and both Joran and Ivar had their mouths wide open. If not for the burned wooden taste in their mouths, they wouldn''t havee to their senses.

 Chapter 2122 His City

    Chapter 2122 His City

    Sam looked at the two spectators. Even the young man who actually shot the bullet was stunned.

    He had his mouth wide open and his whole body trembled. He couldn''t believe that he was the cause of that destruction just now. Of course, there is good reason for that. The young man is a mortal ne cultivator, but the attack could kill a person at theter stages of the Astral ne.

    There are very few minutes that could aplish that feat.

    Like some special formations, high level inscription scrolls or some artifacts with special enchantments.

    But that is about it. Even to ess them, people need certain level of strength. Even Sam had to pay heavy price whenever he had to deal with people higher than his own strength. Only he always knew how to obtain the cost required for it.

    The handguns however, are much cheaper. A man in mortal ne can buy this and shoot someone from Astral ne, if they could close the distance enough.

    One bullet is all it needs if the other person is just an average level person. The best part, they don''t even need to use their own spiritual energy. The trigger will spark an energy reaction within the gun''s body which will ignite the bullet''s motion. The bullet hits the target and that''s it.

    Sam walked up to the still shocked waiter and took the handgun back.

    He removed the magazine and ced a different one inside. The first magazine is a fire elemental magazine. It had twelve bullets and now eleven. Each bullet had a special attack engraved on it. The second magazine however has ice elemental bullets.

    "Shoot once again."

    Sam said and stepped back.

    The waiter gulped and tried to wipe his sweat over his sleeve before he aimed his trembling hand again.

    *BOOM*

    Another explosive sound. Another crack on the metal ne on his chest and another destroyed wooden dummy. Only this time, icy des started sprouting out of the dummy and it soon crumbled into pieces.

    Sam turned to the two spectators and waved his hand. A bunch of magazines all ofdifferent color floated in front of him.

    "You can pick anything you want. We have elements, curses, we even have ones that could heal you. You want to try more?"

    Joran almost nodded his head vigorously and Ivar actually did.

    "I want to shoot one." He said and stepped forward. The waiter carefully handed the gun to therge man. He was also about to take off his metal te and glove, but Sam stopped him.

    "He doesn''t need it. These are astral ne attacks. He won''t get any bacsh."

    Ivar nodded and just shot the gun. Ice attacksnded on the dummies destroying them. Each attack was different and he doesn''t have to use any energy at all.

    Ivar only had one thought in his mind.

    It''s fun.

    He emptied the whole magazine. Sam stopped him and pulled out the magazine. He refilled it with new bullets and set it back. He then passed it to Joran who eagerly took it and started shooting.

    "So, these are handguns. I want you to sell it. I don''t care where you want to sell it, but I want you to open a special kind of business in the Thssa territory. If you are open, we can discuss further."

    Sam exined when Joran was done shooting.

    He nodded and all three of them went back to that private room. The discussions were long and exhausting. For the rest of the day and even through the night Sam, Ivar and Joran were in heated negotiations and various business ventures. Sam took out many of his ventures to make a deal with Joran.

    In fact, the business exceeded what Ivar was initially told.

    As they discussed, Joran also got a clear idea on what Sam was expecting out of this deal. Apart from massive ie, there are many other things and most of them were rted to the Thssa family.

    "It seems like Thssa family hurt you greatly. To think that you would spend so many valuable things just to get back at them." Joran said with a knowing smile. He felt like he figured out Sam a bit.

    Sam didn''t reply. Neither confirming nor denying it. In fact, there is no point in denying it. It was very apparent based on his actions that the Thssa family has been his target from the start.

    They exchanged a few more pleasantries and Joran finally asked.

    "Are these all the businesses or is there something else that you can offer?"

    "What do you want?" n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "If all these are indeed your creations as you imed, I need you to help me out with something. If you are up for it, we can meet a weekter at the same ce."

    "Alright. We can talk in a week then."

    "Thanks. Please to meet you and your friends."

    Joran said with a smile. Sam shook his hand and just smiled in return. Ivar frowned at what Joran said, but he didn''t speak.

    "Oh, don''t forget this." Joran took out a crystal jar and passed it to Sam.

    "I almost did. Thanks." That is the blood of the illuthralith. With all the deals they made, he didn''t even have to pay for it. His new business partner gave it to him as a gift.

    Sam and Ivar left the restaurant and walked through the streets.

    "What did he mean by friends? Did he misspeak?"

    He wondered out loud, but Sam shook his head.

    The next moment, small shadows shot out of various corners of the city and merged with his own shadow before the shadow mice disappeared into his divine dimension.

    "He meant these."

    Ivar looked at them with a frown.

    "He spotted shadow mice?" Even Ivar with his vastly higher level of strengthpared to Sam will have a hard time if all Shadow mice did was hide in shadows. So, how can Joran spot them. Particrly from what he could see the shadow mice were sent to different corners of the city.

    Not a single one of them were inside the restaurant. And Joran hadn''t left the restaurant.

    Sam chuckled at Ivar''s confusion and exined.

    "Whatever estimation you had of that guy, rewrite it. He is far more intelligent and resourceful than you think."

    "Why so?" Ivar didn''t even appear offended. Usually people in Norse region feared what would his reaction would be if they misspoke. He was that fearful. Here Sam is directly lecturing him.

    "You said, this is kind of an ovepping zone right? Even though it is officially under Sjor family control, there are too many influences that are wresting in power here."

    "That''s right. That is why Joran was sent here by some family politics."

    "No, he wasn''t sent here. He came here willingly. The city that you see, it is not a hotspot for multiple powers as you imagined. In fact, the whole city is Joran''s."

    Sam said as he looked at the beautiful city and its structures. A faint smile on his face.

    Ivar was stumped.

    "What?"

    "Everything you see in this city. From these cobble stones, to that fancy cobbler shop in the former and the guy that is acting like a cobbler, everything belongs to that guy.

    This city is hisir.

    The restaurant is the core of this city and that private room is the core of that core. Every single person in this city is working for him. The person that came in as a wanderer, the city guard, the city lord, the artisan, the thief hiding in the corner, the beggar on the streets and the peasant donating to that beggar.

    All of them are acting."

    Ivar stopped and looked around him, with his eyes and mouth wide open. For a man as dangerous as him, he gets shocked so easily.

    "How is that possible?"

    "With enough nning anything is possible.

    If I am not wrong, he should even know that you stole those recording crystals. In fact, he is even listening to our conversation right now."

    Sam smirked as he looked at the restaurant.

    At this moment, within the private room Joran sat leisurely in hisfy seat as he looked at the projection on the wall.

    He could see Sam watching at the restaurant. It almost looked like Sam is looking directly at him.

    And Sam is right, he is indeed listening to what Sam is saying.

    Ivar suddenly felt a bit naked.

    "Why? Why would he do this?"

    "To create a cover. A perfect cover. He is nning something big. That''s why I went above and beyond with the business deals. I want to see what kind of waves he will create."

    With that Sam and Ivar left the city.

    Joranughed out loud in his private room.

    Sam is indeed right. This is his city.

    And he is indeed nning something big. Something that will overturn his status in his family and even his family''s status as a whole.

 Chapter 2123 Second Pocket Dimension

    Chapter 2123 Second Pocket Dimension

    The next day.

    Sam is back in the Olympian region. He came back the night before, but he stayed in the room alone ruminating over the business deals he made with Joran. Ivar has underestimated Joran too much. That man might be a good judge of battle prowess, but he is definitely not good at spotting these kinds of mind games and tricks.

    Sam felt that the deals with Joran might speed up his n.

    As for why? He doesn''t know it himself. It was just pure instinct after noticing the city.

    With those thoughts he rested the night and now in the morning, he walked to the Dionysus academy with a faint smile and a rxed posture. With his hands in his pockets, one might mistake him for a person going on a walk into the park.

    Sam reached the Dean''s office and informed his reason of arrival to the assistant.

    "You finished the quest?" "You finished the qust?" That''s all the assistant said. That was all he was able to say. He had his mouth wide open as he walked into the office and informed the dean about it.

    Fifteen minutester.

    "What the hell? You finished the quest."

    The Dean looked at the crystal bottle full of Illuthralith''s blood. It was much purer, stronger and potent than the blood of Illutrhralith the pocket dimension hosted.

    "Where did you get it?" The Dean asked.

    "How is that relevant?" Sam asked.

    Dean was caught off guard and then only he realized that he wasn''tsupposed to ask that question. IT doesn''t matter where Sam got it from. Since he got it, the quest should be over. But he cannot just stare at Sam like a dumb idiot and say that he asked just for he sake of it.

    As for admitting that he forgot, there is no way, he is doing that.

    So, he found something and clutched on to it.

    "What if you just stole it from someone? What if you just bought it?"

    "What if I did exactly as you said? What is the point of it. You and I both know that it doesn''t matter where I got it from.

    Please start the procedures and finish this whole fiasco. I have a pocket dimension to attend."

    Sam left after that.

    That was all he wanted to do. Submit the blood. The next day, the trials of the Zeus Academy started. Initially, the cases were not that many, but after the recent filings, they numbered in hundreds for every single one of them and the first ones to have their trials are the freshmen.

    Not any freshmen, but the freshmen that belonged to the noble league.

    Sam attended the trials as the spectator. But no one paid much attention to him during the trial proceedings. Most of the stands were upied by the Zeus Academy members and they were all panicking.

    They wanted to see what fate awaited them. And they saw it.

    Icarus argued the trial himself. His argument was eerily simr to what the Captain of the city guard made against Sam. And finally he forced the judge to ept the situation and a verdict has been given.

    The student of the Zeus Academy has been subjected to the punishment of 12bors and on top of that, since he belongs to one of the Academies that was supposed to give out the trial, which is the Zeus Academy, that twelfthbor will be given by the Gambler Academy instead, to avoid any bias.

    The verdict has been passed and most spectators froze in their seats.

    They knew that they just saw their own future. The twelvebors.

    They knew that these are not the actual twelvebors the Heracles faced, but that doesn''t mean, these are easy for them. All they could do is pray. And these prayers turned into curses when they saw one scene.

    After the trial is finished, Sam walked to Icarus and in front of all their shocked gazes, he fist bumped with Icarus as both of them walked away. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Many of them already had suspicions regarding the connection between them. When Icarus used the same pattern while filing cases, there were many people who made this connection, but now they were confirmed.

    But what is this connection exactly?

    Is that connection between Sam and the hub? Or Sam and Icarus only?

    Once again, no answers though. Only questions.

    For the next few days, the Zeus Academy has been sending their students for the trials in the court. Meanwhile, the Olympian region has be more and more chaotic. The search for ming skulls has reached its zenith.

    At first, Sam wanted to y around with Dayus a bit more. After all, dayus made such an borate sketch. But he gave up the idea, when he saw the result of his own actions.

    The legacy inheritance has much more appeal than he initially estimated. Particrly, after he spread the information in other regions, all academies went crazy. There is a massive influx of people into the city and they are all creating one problem after another for the city guards.

    There is at least one murder for every couple of hours.

    Constant fights, stealing, destruction of bars and restaurants in the name of their search for ming skulls, even Dayus'' own investigation became stagnant like a pool of mud because of this. And he only grew more and more anxious with every passing day. After all, fourteen days and there is no more legacy inheritance.

    But what he doesn''t know is even though Sam and his team has it in their possession, they weren''t trying to assimte the inheritance. The legacy inheritance is of fire element. Five Elemental King and Philip, both have affinity with it. But neither of them showed any interest in absorbing the inheritance. Both of them pushed the other to take it.

    So, right now it is just lying in the Divine dimension without anyone to im.

    Sam is actually surprised by how interested his friends are regarding this. He expected at least some enthusiasm, but they werepletely averse to this. If only the rest of the academy realm knew what they were doing.

    He wondered if they would gain more ire from stealing the inheritance or for refusing to absorb it.

    The excess activity of the other regions of course bothered the academies more than Sam and his friends.

    While things were like this, leading up to the second pocket dimension, Dayus and White were on an exhaustive search for the ming skulls. And they were using a very unique method. The energy signatures.

    That was what they did before everyone could leave the grey area while the rewards are being distributed for thest pocket dimension.

    Dayus and White registered the energy signatures of all the people that were in that pocket dimension and they started tracking all those people. There was a continuous twenty four hour tail on them to observe all of their actions.

    Whenever there is a suspicion on someone, particrly if they are just amon citizen without any backing, they were tracked, nailed and beaten down until everyst thing about them was brought out.

    Most were directly killed and their souls were absorbed to search through their memories. Unfortunately for them, they were the wrong targets. Dayus and White don''t have any other way to know that information other than attacking them.

    And as expected, the more failed searches happened, the more frustrated they have be. Soon, their moods became unbearable and even the slightest disturbance provoked them to the extreme. At least it was the case for Dayus.

    Soon it is time for the second pocket dimension.

    Unlike the first one, this one is limited to the Academy students, which caused a lot of discontent among the citizens, but they could little about it. The pocket dimension rules were set by the god who created it.

    The academies don''t have any control even if they desire it.

    This pocket dimension was created by Hermes.

    This pocket dimension was very simr to the first one, except in this one people don''t have to fight against elemental creatures as such.

    Instead, they need to clear zones.

    Each zone will have a differentyout and different problem, but most of them if not all are rted to the wind and wind element.

    When a person clears a zone, they would have a mark on their hand. There are hundreds of such zones in the pocket dimension, big and small. Each zone has a different score based on the timing and the method ofpletion.

    The mark given for a zone will depend of these aspects and based on that mark the final score will be calcted.

    As usual, the highest score will be given the reward.

    Sam doesn''t know which special zones are going to give him those special rewards. He once again will have to do the research. Of course, this time he has a bunch of other yers to trouble Dayus, so even if he doesn''t get anything out of it, things will work out in his favor.

    But what is fun in not winning?

 Chapter 2124 Moving Plans

    Chapter 2124 Moving ns

    Sam entered the pocket dimension along with his friends.

    As the previous one, he was thrown into a random spot. The expanse looked like the ins of savanna. All he could see were the grassy ins in his sight. There were some mountains far far away. "Its like I am back in Africa again."

    He muttered to himself and spread out his senses.

    In just two seconds he got a hit. The wind elemental energy concentration was high in that direction. He walked there while observing in surroundings. Just like in the previous pocket dimension, he needs to find out what the pattern is here.

    Once he finds out the pattern, he can find a way to break it, find the loopholes and finally figure out how he cane across the Legacy inheritance.

    His initial spection is to just find the zones with higher energy concentration. Since that was the case in the previous pocket dimension.

    When he reached the zone, he was impressed by what he saw.

    It was a small patch in the middle of the grasnd. In that small area, there was no tall grass and it looked like it was artificially created.

    It is almost as big as a basketball court. Not much bigger than that. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    There was arge inscribed formation that covered the whole patch. The runes were veryplex and the inscriptions wereyered creating multiple formation that were woven into formation arrays. In this formation there are five circles at random spots.

    These circles were upied some totem poles.

    The totem poles of course were also covered with some more inscriptions and formations.

    On the other end of the patch, there was a g. With the symbol of wings embroidered with golden threads on the white cloth.

    Wind elemental energy oozed out of the whole patch. This is the first zone Sam encountered. And there is a number hovering on top and it sowed a big round zero. Indicating that no one has cleared this zone at the moment.

    Sam stepped forward. With just one foot into the zone, a bunch of information was imprinted in his mind.

    This zone is actually quite simple. He has to break theyered formation while defending against the attacks thrown by the totem poles.

    He cannot attack the totem poles and he cannot change the formation itself. Instead, he needs to create a barrier around himself by circting his energy. The barrier however is not enough if it just blocks whatever the formations throw at it.

    Instead, it should circte with a certain energy flow.

    Only when the energy flow of the shield matches with the energy flow of the inscription at that step, can he move forward.

    So, the energy flow of the attacking pattern of the inscription will keep on changing with every step and with every step he needs to change the cirction of his own energy barrier. So, its basically a game of understanding the energy pattern of the formation and circting it.

    The twist is that the elements y a factor in this whole thing. If the elemental energy of the candidate doesn''t match with the wind element properly, they will have a hard time. Like the fire element is usually vtile in the presence of the wind elemental energy. So, when they use the fire elemental energy, they need to use a lot more control and they need to focus a lot more.

    This is basically an energy sensing, reading and controlling exercise. As long as one is good at that, he would be able to pass this test. The sensing is easy. Anyone that reached the status of the Academy realm''s student and of course worth their salt, they should be able to do it.

    The problem arises from reading the energy pattern after sensing it.

    How fast was the energy moving, which direction, etc.

    Then they need to estimate what kind of impact the energy has when moving in that identified pattern and they the candidate needs to create the barrier that satisfies the exact condition.

    As Sam looked at the zone, he activated energy vision and looked at the inscriptions.

    With only one of his feet on the zone, he got the information but the inscriptions were not activated. He stepped forward and stood at the edge. The inscriptions started glowing in his energy vision and the next moment¡­.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive sound came out of nowhere. A ring of condensed wind conjured in front of him. Just one foot away and hit him in the chest. At the same time, the totem pole closest to him was activated and started shooting wind bullets at him.

    Sam hurriedly blocked the attacks with an energy barrier, but for some reason the barrier copsed the moment it was made. He took the attack squarely to his chest.

    "FUCK"

    Sam groaned slightly. He almost fell out of the zone. His insane physique came in handy.

    He frowned and looked at the inscriptions once again with the energy vision, however this time he activated wind elemental fusion.

    *BOOM*

    The wind bullets and that ring of wind which was surprisingly difficult to handle hit him in the chest again.

    He gritted his teeth and made his body absorb it. The attack transferred through his body and left from his back.

    *BOOM*

    The attacks continued as he studied the formation. He let the body absorb the blows.

    After two minutes, a smile appeared on his face. Then only he realized, maybe this pocket dimension might be a bit too unfair for his counterparts.

    ¡­

    Three minutester, Sam was standing on the other side of the patch. He was holding the g of that zone. The number that was floating on top of that zone changed to 1 and a golden colored symbol that looked like a totem pole appeared on his right forearm.

    His first zone clear time, a little more than five minutes.

    And he also got some understanding of how a zone works. He activated his energy vision once again, injected a lot of wind elemental energy into his eyes to modify it just like how he did with the fire energy in the previous dimension.

    He activated wind fusion once again and let his wings out. He shot into the air like a streak of light.

    He first increased the altitude to the maximum range the dimension allowed and projected his vision all over the ce.

    He managed to find a few hotspots of energy which are more than likely the zones. He zoomed towards the nearest one.

    Sam didn''t wait as long as he did in the first one. With the previous experience he moved a lot faster.

    And he also noticed another thing. This pocket dimension can be considered much smaller whenpared to the previous pocket dimension.

    While things on Sam''s side are moving very fast, the things on other yer''s side is not going slow either. Everyone has their own methods to handle these zones and they have their own ns in finding the legacy inheritance clues.

    Meanwhile.

    Outside of the pocket dimension, the cases were still going on full swing. By then Ivar has sent over a dozen people to take on the 12bors and for a few people they already started. Of course, to ensure the fairness the court made sure that the tasks given to them were hard enough.

    And there were other continigencies to make sure that they won''t try anything funny to help themselves.

    For the first few people that did try, Ivar brought out some audio recordings to the court revealing their ns.

    This made the court angry and they increased the punishment. Often times by many fold.

    While these are happening. Night Ghost who was asked by Sam to stay back once again entered one of the dead pocket dimensions.

    This dimension has been part of their ns for a while and Sam figured that this would be a great time to use it.

    This dimension has the threshold for entry. Only Freshman can enter. But the trials are not refreshing inside and it is pretty much an emptynd. However, while Sam was dealing with the freshman tournament, Night Ghost used some of the things Sam left behind and nted them inside this dimension ording to Sam''s ns.

    Since only a few people who wants to train or spar in piecee here, he didn''t attract too much attention at that time and neither did he attract any attention now.

    So, when Sam was acting in the second pocket dimension, he acted ording to Sam''s instructions and went to activate their n.

    Night Ghost looked at the vast expanse ofnd around him.

    It just looked like arge patch of woods. The trees were sparse and rocks were many. To top it all off, there was just one big mountain in the middle.

    Night Ghost sat on top of one of the rocks a bit away from the mountain before he started meditating.

 Chapter 2125 Revival

    Chapter 2125 Revival

    A soul flew out of Night Ghost''s shadow.

    It is one of the souls that Night Ghost collected and programmed to establish a specific task. It flew through the woods and reached the mountain. It just dissolved into the mountain surface.

    Within the mountain, there was a closed space created and moulded by Night Ghost with the help of Sam''s tools.

    It is a rectangr space created by removed a perfectly box shaped rock out of the mountain. It is 100 square feet at best. It is the middle of that space, there is a sphere floating in mid-air. The floor and the walls of that room were covered with various inscriptions as well as various formation discs that were engraved into the walls and merged to be one with those walls. The soul that Night ghost let out, reappeared in this room.

    It flew in the room ones before it merged with the sphere in the middle of the mountain.

    The next moment¡­

    The sphere that previously had a slight grey glow turned into a bright blue colored object. It was like fluorescentmp hovering in the dark night.

    The light crept on to the inscriptions from the sphere. The inscriptions started glowing slowly. The glow gradually crept to the edges of the room and then to the walls. Finally, the formation discs also started glowing. The formations were activated.

    The light crept on to the inscriptions from the sphere. The inscriptions started glowing slowly. The glow gradually crept to the edges of the room and then to the walls. Finally, the formation discs also started glowing. The formations were activated.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosion the room exploded, along with the mountain. The few people in the dimension were shocked. The dimension has been inactive for such a long time, except for the few fights and spars between the students, nothing of consequence usually happens.

    And even then, they thought it is something rted to one of those fights.

    Only when they looked at the mountain, did they realize that the peak of the mountain that proudly stood has disappeared. In that ce, there was arge glowing dome with golden light and in between that golden light was the flourscent blue light.

    The blue light which is obviously the sphere that was activated just now.

    Everyone was shocked.

    Except for Night Ghost, everyone started running towards the mountain, by the time they reached the foot of the mountain, they noticed something.

    There are several cracks on the mountain surface and from within it there is a golden flight glowing. It is very faint. So faint that even with their heightened senses they didn''t immediately sense it. Even up close what they didn''t see is that these glowing cracks were growing and spreading underneath the ground.

    As they spread to all the directions in the dimension, they are triggering the previously hidden formation discs and other objects that were engraved and inscribed with various formations.

    These inscriptions and formations activated at a rapid pace creating several small domes, pirs of light barriers, and some times they shot out stone pirs that were equipped with various mechanisms. The students that were watching these changes and were running towards the mountain were shocked once gain. Before they could make sense of it, they felt a strong force pulling them away and the next ting they knew, they are at the entrance of the pocket dimension.

    When they appeared there and looked back into the dimension, all they could see is therge expanse of the pocket dimensionpletely glowing with earth and wood elemental energy. This energy emanated from various formations and devices that appeared out of nowhere.

    Night Ghost opened his eyes and looked around him.

    After confirming that all the previously set traps are activated, he used a token to reappear at the entrance along with the rest of the students.

    Just like them, he also acted shocked and surprised.

    "What the fuck just happened? Hey, Dude you came outst. Did you see anything?" Someone asked Night Ghost.

    "No, I resisted a bit by using a technique. But I wasn''t able to. I was still pushed out." Night Ghost just shrugged and replied off handedly.

    Then before they could ask more questions, he started running.

    "I need to inform my academy."

    Then the lights went off in the minds of rest of the students and they started running as well. Within the next fifteen minutes, the information spread like wildfire.

    Not just to the academies, even to the forces that were hidden in the Olympian region. They were all here for the Legacy inheritances. Everyone has already be very suspicious of the Olympian region.

    After all, the whole region as has been on fire for quite a while. The arrival of the hub. The top ten rankings in the freshman tournament. The scandals and finally the legacy inheritances. There are just way too many events happening.

    As if that is not enough, there is this new situation.

    Everyone knew about that Pocket dimension. It was an earth elemental and wood elemental pocket dimension and it was a one time dimension.N?v(el)B\\jnn

    The rewards were some special blueprints that use the growth of trees and maniption of terrain to create a defensive area. Many students from different regions actually fought for it. It wasn''t given one god too, it was given by multiple gods.

    Everyone thought it was a done deal after the pocket dimension has been cleared.

    After so many years, it has shown an anomaly. In the Zeus Academy.

    Dean is inside his office gulping downrge bottles of wine one after another. His whole academy has be a mess and he wasn''t able to do shit in the past few days. He has been trying to clear Pearl''s name for a while.

    His n was to pull some strings and directly subject to some punishment that includes her being expelled.

    But because of all the new cases filed against his students, instructors and even elders, the judges are not ready to ept his favors and they are certainly not ready to do him any favors. Troubling times.

    He is very worried about how the other students are going to take out their anger on his niece. He knew that he wouldn''t be able to live with himself.

    As he was mulling over his situation, his attendant barged into the room. This has be a norm by now.

    "What the fuck happened now?" He asked after taking another swig.

    The attendant exined the situation about the revival of the pocket dimension.The Dean sat up straight.

    "You are not kidding me, are you?"

    "No, I am not, sir."

    "A fucking dead pocket dimension, revived again? There was no prior announcement from gods regarding this and everyone already knows that it revived?"

    "Yes, Sir. Many students are already swarming in, but right now no one is getting any instructions regarding what they need to do inside.

    Also they are not appearing in the random spots inside, rather, there seems to be a barrier stopping them from entering in."

    "Why the fuck are so many things happening in this region?"

    The Dean muttered and got out. Meanwhile, Night Ghost came back to the entrance of the pocket dimension and just watched as more and more people swarmed in.

    The crowd is very high. Since the citizens were not allowed to the second pocket dimension that belonged to Hermes a lot of grade one level people are there in the city.

    Now that they heard such an opportunity came by, they hurriedly came to check.

    Night Ghost felt really impressed by Sam''s foresight. Sam''s n is to attract as many people to the Olympian region as possible and create as much chaos as he could. In those muddy waters, he can easily do what he wanted and shake the foundation of the zeus Academy.

    Once that is done, the rest of the academies will slowly follow.

    And as part of that n, these pocket dimensions are being used. He had this set in stone for a long time and finally they are being used.

    Night Ghost was a bit skeptical as he didn''t know if this would work well.

    But Sam yed to his strengths. In terms of pure and utter strength, he is way too behindpared to his opponents. But when ites to the formations and inscriptions, his knowledge and innovation are way ahead of the rest.

    Even the Deans and Elders of this region cannotpete with him when ites to these things.

    After all, they have yet to crack any products of hub. So, it wouldn''t be a problem for him to cheat some students with the pocket dimension. The can only sumb to his n.

    When the Deans and Elders gathered at the entrance of the pocket dimension, Night Ghost activated something with his token. To the students who entered inside a timer was disyed and an announcement was made within the dimension.

    ''The pocket dimension will be activated and open for the students by the time the timer ends.''

    The deans were a bit surprised by the duration of the timer, but it also made sense.

    Because this pocket dimension opens exactly when the second pocket dimension which was currently running closes.

 Chapter 2126 Serious Measures

    Chapter 2126 Serious Measures

    Time passed.

    It is just an hour away from the closing of the second pocket dimension. Sam is standing in an empty patch of thend along with the rest of the yers.

    However, they were not staring at each other, instead all of their focus was locked on one person who stood at the other end of the patch.

    It is the same young man who stole the first legacy inheritance. At least that is what he is known as for Dayus, who recognized him instantly.

    "Hand over the legacy inheritance and surrender. Or I will fucking kill you." Dayus screamed on top of his lungs as he looked the young man. The young man didn''t reply, he just looked at the yers with a smirk.

    At that moment¡­

    *SWOOSH*

    White came running to the patch and stood beside Dayus.

    "He is the one?" He asked, but no one felt the need to answer. White looked around to spot Sam who stood there with a straight face. He had his hands crossed across his chest. It almost looked like he isn''t worried about this scenario.

    If only White knew how true it is.

    The other party that stood there is none other than Kiran. He just employed his disguise technique, that is all. He is acting as the representative of the ming skulls to attract as much focus as possible. "Do you think you can escape with the legacy inheritance that easily? The seniors of Zeus Academy are waiting outside and we already have your energy signature. Even if you escape us in the grey area, you will be easily spotted by the elders and instructors of our academy.

    You can fool us with your energy signature because we are of same level, but do you think those with such higher level strength will also be fooled?"

    White spoke as he locked his eyes with Kiran.

    Kiran didn''t answer for a moment. He stayed silent with that smirk. Dayus and White''s Duo kept on threatening him.

    "Shut the fuck up."

    All of a sudden Sam spoke up. He looked at the two of them and continued.

    "Can you guys stop and think for a moment? Do you know how pathetic you look with all those threats? If that guy can steal the information from the heart of Zeus Academy, do you really think he cannot estimate what you can fucking do?

    Just stop insulting his intelligence.

    If you want to attack, do it. If you don''t want to and just want to sit back and wait. Then Wait. If I hear one more peep of threat out of your mouths, I will fucking kill you guys myself."N?v(el)B\\jnn

    His voice was cold and harsh. He acted like he was fed up with all the empty threat bullshit.

    "YOU¡­."

    White''s aura raged and he looked at Sam. He wanted to jump at Sam immediately.

    Even before Sam could reply. Dayus pulled White back.

    "He is thest person to piss off in this type of situation. Reign in your temper. Let''s focus on him."

    He turned to Kiran and immediately lunged forward. He swung his spear at Kiran hoping to catch him by surprise. White also hit the ground with the recoil shot and dashed forward.

    Kiran started running. As he moved forward, he took out a few small spheres and dropped them in the path of Dayus and White.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Explosions hindered the two and then only they realized that the other yers are following them and in that small gap, they already overtook them. Sam was in the lead. Whenever Kiran dropped a sphere, Sam would skillfully hit it with his spear.

    The sphere would fly over and ''coincidentally''nd in the path of the yers. Mostly in the path of Dayus and White.

    Of course, the yers are not stupid enough to assume that it was purely a coincidence. They understood that Sam is hindering them and they couldn''t do much about it. It is apetition after all.

    The chase intensified with every passing second.

    But there was no progress. One hourter.

    Sam almost closed the distance between him and Kiran. He almost caught the guy and the other yers also believed that it is a done deal. However, at that exact moment¡­

    They all felt a force pull them away and theynded in the grey space awaiting the evaluation with the rest of the students.

    "FUCK.. FUCK FUCK."

    Dayus screamed at the top of his lungs swinging his spear wildly. White rushed towards Sam and held him by his cor. Immerse Yourself in the Storyverse: N?v¦ÅlB?n.

    "Its all because of you. You sick bastard. If you weren''t so focused on hindering our advance, we could have caught up with him. I have enough reason to suspect that you might even coborating with the ming skulls."

    Sam took a deep breath and looked at him with a death gaze.

    "Let him go." Dayus came and forced White''s hand off of Sam.

    "I already told you not make an enemy out of him now. Do you have no better thing to do? If you are so excited to pick a fight, go and find the ming skulls."

    Dayus yelled at White.

    He looked at Sam''s cold gaze and had a bad feeling. If Sam just screamed and yelled, then it would be much easier for him. Things wouldn''t be tooplicated. But Sam stayed calm. It is enough to raise rm bells in his head.

    He just hoped that nothing serious happens.

    The evaluation was done. Dayus and White waited patiently. They are sure that their instructors will catch whoever that person is based on the energy signatures they collected. However, when they came out, they were stunned by what they saw.

    Or rather, they were stunned by what they couldn''t see. They were expecting the presence of a bunch of their elders and instructors, but most of them were not even there.

    Only some low level instructors were left behind.

    The approached the students of Zeus Academy and said.

    "Hurry up. Let''s go. Another pocket dimension opened. You need to be there."

    They didn''t even exin the situation clearly before they dragged the group away.

    Soon, everyone is gathered around the revived pocket dimension. The timer is showing just five more minutes for the opening of the dimension.

    The yers and other students who just came out of the second pocket dimension learned the news of this from the other students. Five minutes passed quickly and everyone swarmed into this. Only after that did the instructors and elders outside began to talk about the legacy inheritance.

    When they heard that the ming skulls snatched the second one too, everyone became angry. But all of theirbined cannot be on par with Dean of Zeus Academy''s anger. He gritted his teeth and clenched his fists.

    His body trembled in range.

    Not a single thing has been going well for him until now. Not a single thing went ording to his n and he finally lost his cool.

    He wanted to bash the shit out of everyone that so much as looked wrong in his eyes. He immediately called for his elders.

    "Create a blockade out of this pocket dimension. Tell every instructor, elder and student to move. Call back everyone that went out on a mission. Share the energy signature of the kids to every one of them. I want to see how the ming skulls will escape this time."

    He didn''t hide or whisper his orders. In fact he was very loud and he let everyone at the location hear him.

    However, the rest of the stayed unnaturally silent. Not letting their thoughts known. They didn''t even resist one bit.

    In fact, most of them weed such an action from the Dean. Since the legacy inheritances were in the hands of some unknown entity, they were unable to take any serious actions. Even if they wanted to direct their strength, they didn''t know where they should target it.

    However, if Dean seeds in capturing and acquiring these inheritances, then they can finally pressure him. Since they already know the strength of the Zeus Academy, they also know which buttons to press and which levers to push.

    That day, the Zeus Academy''s force was moved. The energy signatures were shared and they started searching every single First grade level cultivator within the city.

    The city gates were blocked and no one was allowed to leave the city without the permission of the Zeus academy.

    While the city came to a standstill because of Zeus Academy''s sudden actions, something else is happening inside the revived pocket dimension.

    When the timer came to zero and everyone entered, a spatial formation was triggered sending them to different spots within the Pocket dimension. When they arrived, they were all trapped inside a formation.

    The formation is also created with using the trees and rocks as nodes. They were using purely wood and earth elemental energies.

    They also got a set of instructions from the mechanical voice. They all need to travel towards the peak of the mountain where the blue sphere under the golden dome was ced. That is their final reward.

    They need to crack the formations, fight the obstacles, fight each other and finally reach the peak.

    That is their task.

    At least, that is what they were told. What they don''t know is Sam who is also in the pocket dimension is the one deciding who encounters what obstacles and who has to fight which opponent.

    In the end, he is the one going to decide who wins the biggest prizes in this pocket dimension.

 Chapter 2127 Directing the Game

    Chapter 2127 Directing the Game

    Sam is sitting in arge translucent glowing golden sphere. It was precisely the peak of the mountain in the revived pocket dimension.

    In front of him, a bunch of screens hovered to give him a detailed view of all the students'' activities. Right now, there are thousands of students trying to break the formations that surrounded them.

    He is waiting to see who will do it first.

    He does have some specific targets in mind. All of them belong to the Olympian academies and specifically the noble league. Their screens are glowing with a slight red border among the cluster of screens.

    His eyes drifted to one of the marked targets.

    He is Raios. One of the freshman directly under the noble league. He is also part of the first batch of admissions in the Hub. He belongs to a medium level family within the league. His background is nothing to scoff at, but it is not mind-blowingly powerful either.

    Which makes him a great fit for what Sam wants to make him do.

    Raios looked at the formation intently. He was never really skilled at the art of formations. He does have some basic knowledge to understand how they work, but that is about it. The formation that he is currently in is way tooplicated for his pea sized brain.

    However, as he tried to grasp his energy flow, for some reason, he felt like he could understand the pattern.

    He felt like he could break if he could grasp what that pattern is and he is slowly getting it.

    After some trials, he injected his energy into the formation and finally he saw something. Something that Sam named as the dead spot.

    Dead spots are something he implemented in each of the formations so that the people he deemed useful will have a way to break the formation.

    The dead spot will guide these students and shows them where to attack.

    And that''s right, attacking is the way to go for them. Because they are way too stupid to break the formation even with Sam''s expert guidance.

    Even then, Raios didn''t know what to do with the dead spot that was right in front of his eyes. He first injected his energy, then he started using spiritual senses, then he tried to manipte the energy. After some trials, he finally decided that attacking my work.

    After all, the task was to break the formation, not to understand and decode it.

    He raised his sword and stabbed at that dead spot with lightning energy condensed at the sword''s tip.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosion, a crack appeared on the formation starting from the deadspot he stuck. It extended upward to the top of the dome where the second dead spot is located.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Seven or eight hitster, the formation finally broke open. Raios stood in the middle of a patch that wasn''t bigger than the formation he broke previously. He is surrounded by the glowing golden walls and only one path is avable for him to take.

    He walked through the path to take a look.

    For a moment, he felt a force pull at him. But itsted only for a second that he chose to ignore it. Particrly, because he entered the next formation and he gotpany.

    There is a person who he is very familiar with standing on the opposite side of the formation.

    The formation is shaped like a dome and the paths they came from disappeared altogether. In the middle of the formation, there is a pir standing straight, connecting from the center of the peak of the dome.

    The pir is also purely condensed of energy. Raios ignored the pir and looked at the person opposite to him. That person is Auria. He belongs to the Apollo academy. But he is neither him nor his family are of noble league. But they are trying to be and in attempting to do that, they are shing with Raios family consistently for a while

    Its fair to say that they have rivalry worth killing for.

    "You¡­"

    Before either of them could speak, the pir in the middle glowed even before and with that pir as the center, a wall emerged on either side of it. Separating the whole dome into two and each half housing a student.

    A piece of information was heard loud and clear to both of them.

    "Two men entered. One man leaves. The wall will start expanding and the moment it touches a participant they will die. To stop it from expanding the participant must consistently attack the pir. If their attack strength exceeds the opponent, the wall will expand to the other side. The game continues until only one of you survive."

    That was it.

    *SWOOSH* *BOOM*

    Raios reacted quickly and attacked the pir. The wall started expanding to the other side. Its width increased by a foot and it is now closer Auria.

    Auria was shook for a moment and hurriedly cast a spell.

    *BOOM*

    A serpent conjured purely out of mes wasunched at the pir. The Serpent coiled around it and produced a constant burning effect.

    Raios noticed that the mes of the serpent are being exhausted slowly as it constantly burned the pir. However, Auria had other ns.

    *BOOM*

    A jet of mes wereunched out of Auria''s palms. Aimed at the serpent. The energy exhausted from the serpent were restored immediately.

    The serpent not only attacked the pir, but it also defended the pir from Raios attacks. The wall returned to its normal width before it started expanding towards Raios'' side.

    "Fuck."

    He cursed under his breath and started using fusion.

    *SWOOSH* *BOOM*

    The sword shed with the serpent and the expansion of the wall stopped there.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    The attacksnded on the pir consistently, the wall didn''t expand. However, it didn''t reduce in size either and it wasn''t expanding to the opposite side.

    His attacks are barely enough to keep the wall stagnant. Sam watched the whole thing with a smile.

    Raios was in back foot. And his attacks couldn''t be as consistent as a constant jet of mes feeding the serpent. The serpent''s attack is not only consistent, it is also uniform. It is hard to beat.

    At that moment, Sam tweaked with the formation just a little bit.

    *BANG*

    Raios'' attacknded on the pir, but it slipped off its surface, not impacting the pir as it should. But that wasn''t the problem. The swing of the attack was so powerful, that he tripped. He had to bnce himself whichnded him closer to the wall than he should be.

    Since there was also a dy in his attacks because of the slip, the wall increased its width, much faster and wider than he imagined or desired.

    *BOOM*

    He hurriedly swung his sword at the wall as he moved backward.

    It was purely out of instinct as he swung the sword that gave out lightning infused sword ways. Most of them aimed at the wall and very few at the pir.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Explosive sounds upied the two domes. Raios stood up and swung the sword at the pir again stopping the expansion. But his mind ispletely upied by the previous incident.

    Not because of how close he came to death, but because how the attacks acted.

    The sword rays prated through the wall. They didn''t stop. The impact didn''tnd on the walls at all. Because it was at edge of the wall connected to the ground, it was a bit hard to notice.

    But he knew that his attacks went past the wall and the ground the explosion came from the sh between the sword ray and the ground on the other side.

    He looked Auria. Auria gritted his teeth and solely focused on increased his energy output. That slip was a perfect opportunity and he had no intention of wasting it. So, he only focused on increasing the attack on the Pir. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    But that is not the reason for him to not notice the wall''s nature. It is because Sam only enabled Raios'' attack to pass through.

    Now that Raios noticed this, Sam only needed to push the situation a bit more.

    And he adjusted the settings of the wall. All of a sudden, the expansion towards Raios'' side increased by arge margin.

    In that hurry, Raios diverted his sword towards Auria. He ignored the wall in the middle. The sword ray passed through the wall and cut Auria''s hands off.

    Raios took the chance to reduce the wall''s width, when he noticed that Auria is getting back up, he gritted his teeth and attacked him once again.

    *SWOOSH*

    And Auria is dead.

    The pir and wall disappeared. Raios felt his energy restoring back.

    A path opened. However, what he doesn''t know is that Sam he captured thest part in a video. He has some use for it.

    Raios walked into the path and appeared in the new formation with increased vigor. He finished the first two stages rtively fast. Even if he doesn''t get the first ce, he still has a great chance at a decent prize.

 Chapter 2128 Deans Meet

    Chapter 2128 Deans Meet

    Raios''s whole journey to the mountain was not exactly smooth, but he always found a way to defeat the opponents and step further. And every time the opponent always ended up dead.

    Not just him, a lot of people were dying in other paths as well. Except for the people who quit as soon as they sensed danger, everyone else died a tragic death and Sam recorded all these deaths. He has a very specific use for these videos and he is sure that it wille in handy.

    Soon it is the end of the day. It has be a norm that the pocket dimensions usually take three days to finish except for some special ones.

    Sam decided to keep this as a three day challenge as well. Except the format changed a little bit. Other dimensions were mostly continuous challenges, but this one however has rest times.

    And at the end of the day, the first break was given. An announcement has been made.

    ''Only top hundred people who were ahead in the path to reach the peak are left. The remaining candidates are eliminated and are waiting in the grey space for thepetition to be over.''

    That was the announcement.

    Even though it is a bit odd for such arge number of people to be eliminated at the same time, it is not unheard of. Every pocket dimension has its unique traits and they just attributed this elimination as the unique trait of this pocket dimension.

    Even though it is a bit odd for such arge number of people to be eliminated at the same time, it is not unheard of. Every pocket dimension has its unique traits and they just attributed this elimination as the unique trait of this pocket dimension.

    The candidates were given a chance to not just rest but also check up on the formation they were currently in.

    Meanwhile, the city of the Olympian region is in chaos. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Dean of the Zeus Academy made such a big decision to lockdown the whole city. Even when the city guards tried to persuade him otherwise, he didn''t budge. He acted with blunt decisiveness and his words hit like ps to their faces.

    The personnel of the Zeus Academy searched every single person in the whole city with the energy signatures.

    There weren''t many people there. Most of them are inside the new pocket dimension. However, the people they caught were captured and forcefully dragged back to the Zeus Academy. The Dean decided to make them cough up if they do belong to the ming skulls.

    They even took out a special formation that could identify the truth from the lies.

    It is not perfect and it is not as efficient as the one in the judicial court, but they work fine. Anyway, the Dean didn''t need a full confirmation as long as they are suspicious enough, he is ready to do whatever is needed.

    As things are like this, what the Dean didn''t know is that everything is being recorded. Either from his own bird puppet or the bird puppets of other people, everything is being recorded and sent back to hub.

    Icarus is collecting all of it intently.

    Their primary goal in the Olympian region is to tear down the Zeus Academy and for that, this is the best opportunity.

    He has dirt on everyone else in the Academy, even the Grand elders that are on the same level as the Dean.

    But the same couldn''t be said about the Dean.

    He had a pretty clean te. Until now. Even now, it wasn''t because he was corrupt or anything. Its just that became exhausted and his frustration took over. Until now, the ming skulls only ever sent first grade members.

    It could be said it isprised of mostly first graders. And to think that he was being toyed and yed around by these first graders¡­ it just hurt his ego after taking so many blows from so many sides. The cases, the financial situation of the Olympian region, the issue with the other academies, all of these are big problems.

    He cannot possibly take his anger out on these troubles.

    The only one that''s left is this ''small'' issue. He wanted to see how these first graders will escape from his grasp when he bes serious.

    In that thought process, without even knowing he is giving Icarus what he needed for such a long time.

    That night not a single person in the Olympian region rested. Everyone was focused on the Zeus Academy''s activities.

    That night they interrogated all the suspicious individuals that are not the students of the Academies in the city and concluded that none of them have any links to the ming skulls.

    No matter how harsh he wanted to be, he hesitated a bit with the academy students. He arranged a meeting with the Deans.

    The Deans who saw the situation of the Olympian region can guess what he wanted from them. But they all feigned ignorance and went to meet him in the meeting room.

    It is a basicrge conference room with a long table. Everyone sat leisurely as they pleased. Someone stood at the window, someone sat leaning against the side table and someone had their elbows on the table with the palms mounting their face.

    Dean of the Zeus Academy didn''t mind.

    He is way too frustrated and worked up to care about such small things.

    "I want to interrogate your students as well. I need your permission."

    "Interrogation? What interrogation?"

    One of the Deans asked.

    "Bitch, Please. I know that you all know what I was doing the whole day. I want to find those ming skulls bastards no matter what. And I need to interrogate the students from you academy as well. I already interrogated every other citizen candidate that is currently avable. There are only a few students left behind in the city, the rest are all in the Pocket dimension, so I want to finish interrogating these people before the pocket dimension closes."

    "There is no way I am letting you anywhere near my students. I have seen your craziness, don''t let it spread to my kids."

    One of the Deans rejected immediately.

    Dean of Zeus Academy sighed and said.

    "Don''t be like that. Everyone of us here wants to get those legacy inheritances. Since the news is already out, there is no point in hiding. There are other pocket dimensions with the legacy inheritances as well.

    There is a good chance the ming skulls know about it and we need to find them soon. We have only four days before they finish assimting the first legacy inheritance.

    You must have all seen the situation in the city right now. The external powers are all over the ce. The yers are increasing in this game. Tensions are high, if we don''te to a consensus now, everything will blow up in all of your pretty faces."

    "Still, I heard what you were doing to them while interrogating. You are making them reveal their secrets. You cannot do that. Their secrets exposed, they will be way too vulnerable. I can''t weaken my first graders. They are the foundations for the next."

    Another Dean said.

    "What would I gain by revealing their secrets. It is all to find out the legacy inheritance. The ming skulls has been running rampant for a while. What do you think will happen if they get their hands on other legacy inheritances as well?

    Do you think other forces will believe that we weren''t able to catch them?

    They will use it as an excuse and wage another war. Do you want another Academy war? I am sure you didn''t forget thest war. It wasn''t very kind to you."

    The dean shut it down.

    He didn''t really want to remember that academy war days.

    After some discussion, they finally agreed on one thing.

    The Academy deans themselves decided to interrogate the marked the students. However, the other deans will also be present, but only the respective deans will be responsible to ask questions from their respective students.

    The rest of them will just witness the process.

    After everyone came to consensus, one of the asked.

    "So, its all well and good with us. What about the Gambler Academy?"

    Everyone turned to look at Dean of the Zeus Academy. They all noticed that Dean Wharton was not in the discussion. Its not because of theck of invitation. He was invited, its just that he decided to ignore it.

    He knew what this meeting is for and he doesn''t want to allow his students to be interrogated, so he didn''t bother feigning ignorance like the other deans. He was direct with his approach and just didn''t bother attending the meeting.

    "I will talk to him. No matter what the ming skulls should be purged. I am sick and tired of it."

    Dean of Zeus Academy said and opened the door.

    "I wonder, if there is a hidden meaning behind Wharton''s absence. After all, with all the tricks the ming skulls perform, isn''t it more likely that they could be Gambler Academy students?

    What if it is true and he already know? What if he is just trying to hide it and that''s why he didn''t attend the meeting?"

 Chapter 2129 Meeting with Dean Wharton

    Chapter 2129 Meeting with Dean Wharton

    Dean of Zeus Academy walked out of the room and walked directly towards the Gambler Academy.

    Dean Wharton is in his office. He is ying around with an arcade machine that he got from Sam. This is one of the requests that he made to Sam and he got a customized Arcade machine.

    He is just like any other child that had their favorite arcade game in their home.

    "Wharton."

    Dean of Zeus Academy spoke, loud and clear. Wharton removed his headgear and looked at him with a frown.

    "Fuck you. I was about to beat the high score."

    "Why didn''t you attend the meeting?"

    "I had to y the game. I heard the kids are getting better. Their score is reaching close to mine. I need to beat my score again and keep my record intact." Wharton just brushed off, removed his gear and came back to sit in his seat again.

    Dean of Zeus Academy sighed deeply.

    ''Every fucking time¡­'' he cursed in his head, kept his thoughts in order and addressed Dean Wharton.

    "I don''t have time to deal with your craziness right now. Answer me directly. Why didn''t you attend the meeting?"

    *BANG*

    Dean Wharton mmed is hands on his table, stood up abruptly, brought his face to face with the Dean of Zeus Academy and said.

    "I already told you. I had to y the game."

    "The meeting of utmost importance." n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "So, is my high score record."

    Dean of Zeus Academy massaged his be and said.

    "I need to talk to you about the investigation of the ming skulls."

    "Didn''t you already appoint that jerk Dayus to do that? Why are you trying to get involved in this now? ming skulls aren''t that big of a threat to the point that you need to step in."

    "That is what I thought initially. But they are overstepping the boundaries. I need to take these things into my own hands."

    "Good, your hands, your wish. Go and take it."

    "I need to interrogate some of your students. The other deans agreed as well. We all came to consensus."

    "I am not letting you do it."

    "You have to. ming skulls are disrupting the order of this region."

    "When was this city ever in order? It looked like it was in the order because no one had balls to fight in the open. Now someone just blew that fucking cover.

    In my opinion this ce is better than ever."

    "Wharton¡­"

    "Come on, even you know what I meant. And do you think I am stupid. You are just frustrated because those pipsqueaks are stealing the legacy inheritances. You are pouring all of your irritations to get some release.

    I didn''t expect that I would see you in this state, to be honest."

    "You¡­"

    "See, I am not letting my students be part of this interrogation. I can tell you this, as far as I know there are no operations of ming skulls within my school. Even if there are some of the ming skulls are really in my school as students¡­ I honestly can''t find a reason to give a shit."

    "If you are this okay with it, it is hard to assume they are not part of your academy."

    "I am already out of fucks to give. Assume what you want to assume. But if you forcefully try to interrogate my students, then you have to deal with me.

    Fuck having an Academy war for legacy inheritances, we will have an academy war for that interrogation."

    "Do you really want to put all of your students in risk by making such deration?"

    "Risk their lives? Me? You are too busy handling too many things and might have stopped putting your energy in your spying and information gathering.

    More than seventy percent of my academy students are itching to go to war against the Zeus Academy. As we speak, one of the teams is scouting one of your academy''s resource points.

    They are itching to tear your students apart. Go and start ahead if you don''t believe. Within twenty four hours, you will see your first grade students trying having their heads pushed to coconut shell.

    NOW, If that is all there is to it, then please get the fuck out of here. I have a high score to beat."

    With that, the meet concluded. The dean of Zeus Acaedemy didn''t have anyeback for Dean Wharton''s words. When he carried the news back to the other deans, they all felt like they got a new lease of life.

    They started pumping up all kinds of doubts they had against the Gambler academy. Dean of Zeus Academy of course became angry because of this. Not because the other deans are acting like bitches.

    Rather it is because he cannot take any action against the Gambler Academy.

    Even if he thought of making a move, when he remembered of how adamant Dean Wharton looked, he started having a bad feeling.

    While the outside was almost set on fire with the tensions, inside the pocket dimension, lives are being taken left and right the moment the second day started.

    After four to five hours of rest, Sam started the trials for the second day. This time, instead of one person facing another, they are being grouped into three at every obstacle.

    At the same time they started experiencing something that they rarely experienced in a very long time.

    Gravity.

    Every trial that is past the foot of the mountain, started influencing the gravity. Some formations have a high gravity, some have very low and some were so high that the moment the students carelessly stepped in, they felt like a mountain has stepped on their shoulders.

    The first day, the formations were pure and directly. With little elemental interference. Even if the formations themselves were formed with earth elemental energy and wood elemental energy, it was strictly the source of the energy.

    The formations themselves were just barriers and variations of barriers.

 Chapter 2130 Third Day

    Chapter 2130 Third Day

    The second day.

    Raios is facing his third formation. He is feeling the pressure of a thousand mountains on his shoulders. His veins bulged as if the blood in his body was trying to find and outlet.

    He has been undergoing physical training since he was a toddler. He was put in many life threatening situations throughout his life. And most of them tested his physical limits, but he was never tested like this.

    Every step felt heavy.

    Even keeping his eyes open felt like a herculean task. Every movement of his threatened to copse his flesh and bone. He felt frustrated. Because it has been almost half a day and he barely finished two formations.

    Now the third one is tougher than thest. He is barely halfway through reaching the mountain. He doesn''t know how well the remaining people are doing. But only hundred people are eligible to stay in the game by that night and he is not willing to let that chance go by. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    After all, all he knew is that this is a revived pocket dimension and the difficulty of this is much higher than the other two.

    He needs to get a higher position to get a greater reward.

    As his thoughts reached this point, he gritted his teeth and looked at his two opponents. One of them is a mage which put him in much worse state the Raios. However, the third one is a pure warrior. His physique is much better that Raios'' physique.

    He had much easier timepared to him.

    Raios channeled his energy to the limit. Lightning concentrated all over his body as he activated fusion. Complete fusion. Even in that fusion state the gravity is effecting him. This only resulted him in consuming more and more every with every passing second.

    *BOOM*

    The battle began.

    The three of them fought tooth and nail. The mage was the first one to be targeted by the other two. But Raios and the other guy are not actually giving it their all. Whenever the mage is cornered those two start attacking each other.

    This gave the mage a chance and these two retreated.

    The fight went on and on.

    When Raios almost lost hope, he managed to notice some energy fluctuation in the formation.

    He brandished his sword and shed at the formation when the attacks from the other two were aimed at him. The lightning-induced swordnded on the formation spot. The blow deflected him and sent him away to another corner of the formation.

    At the same time, the bacsh of the blow created a massive explosion that targeted the other two.

    He didn''t know how that target worked.

    He didn''t know why there was such a fluctuation in the formation all of a sudden. But it helped him out of that situation.

    He hurriedly killed the other two.

    Even when the other two desperately tried to surrender directly, Raios didn''t give them a chance. He killed them and the formation rxed its pressure on him. He felt relieved and his recovery began. Time passed.

    Raios went on to clear three more formations before the second day came to an end. He thought he didn''t do well. However to his surprise, he managed to not just reach the top hundred, rather he went past that.

    He reached the top ten.

    And these results were disyed on a leaderboard on top of the golden dome. He was shocked to say the least. He didn''t focus much on all of those hundred names. Only the top ten. Because his name is floating among those ten.

    Albeit the tenth ce, he is still there.

    And to his surprise, most of the top ten rankers and other possible big shots of the grade 1 are not there. In fact, some of them are not even on the list of the hundred ranks.

    He was shocked, to say the least.

    At the same time, a message hase.

    "The top hundred people are announced and these hundred people shallpete for the top ten ces. The top ten ces will reach the peak and fight under the golden dome. One person will be decided as the winner and they will fight the final obstacle to obtain the ultimate prize."

    That was the announcement.

    The participants inside the pocket dimension were all delighted. However, most of them had simr expressions to Raios. The people that were supposed to be on the list are not there. Except for Sam and White, most of the other people including the yers are not on the list.

    Sam, of course, ced his own name in the list. As for his friends, he eliminated most of them in the earlier rounds. All of this is of course part of his n.

    The second night all the participants were charged with all kinds of medicines they had that could enhance their strength. They are up to gills with those potions and pills.

    Raios followed the same strategy. He rested well, recovered to his peak position, and got ready to fight. As soon as he stepped into the next formation, there are ten other people along with him.

    However, this time he almost fell off the mountain as soon as he appeared. Because he was not standing on the t ground, instead he appeared on the steep slope of the side of the mountain. Not just him, the others did too and the gravity is way too high.

    He had to start his flight to stay afloat.

    But the gravity was still charging him downward and at this moment, an announcement came to their heads.

    "In the next one hour. Only one person should remain in this formation. If by any chance more than one person stays in this formation, all of you will be eliminated.

    You will be given plenty of time to recover after the one hour is over. Please do not hold back."

    *BANG*

    The announcement wasn''t even over when Raios was attacked. He barely managed to dodge it. The gravity fluctuated and his flight was unstable. He hurriedlyunched himself to the slope and dug his palm and leg into it to hang from the side.

    He held the sword with his second hand and looked at his opponents.

    He frowned as he noticed something. All the other nine people in this formation along with him are from Zeus Academy just like him. On top of that, there are three people who are from the noble league just like him.

    "Fucking hell."

    He cursed under his breath. Until now, he killed many people in his ascent in the past two days. But because of his luck, he didn''t have to kill many people from his academy. But now, all of them appeared here at the same time.

    That too in such a cutthroat round.

    No one will be willing to surrender just because they were defeated. This pocket dimension is way too weird and everyone wants to reach the end.

    As he was thinking, as if to prove his thoughts and spections, someone took out a special spear. It is full of inscriptions and it even had a spirit.

    "Fucking hell. You Moron."

    Raios cursed as the spear was brandished towards him.

    *BOOM* CRASH*

    The spearnded on the surface of the mountain, creating a massive crater. The debris and destroyed rocks flew all over the ce. However to their surprise, it didn''tnd on the ground, instead it floated in the air.

    The gravity that focused on pulling them down at all costs is making the rocks float.

    But they didn''t have time to wonder.

    "You are taking out your family''s hidden treasures? Are you out of your fucking mind?"

    Raios screamed at the spearman who almost killed him.

    "Of course, you are the one who is out of their damn mind though. It is time to go all out or all the stress I have gone through in the past few days is a fucking waste of time. I shall be in the top ten no matter what. So, DIE!!!"

    He threw his spear once again.

    Raios kicked the mountain surface andunched himself out of the spear''s way. He crashed into one of the other candidates who was floated. This caught that guy off guard and the gravity showed its might.

    Raios kicked that guy on the back and used that recoil to reach another point of the mountain.

    Meanwhile, the spear went past his original spot and shed with another candidate''s attack.

    Just like that a mighty chaotic battle started. All of them are from the same academy and most of them have a good enough rtionship to be considered friendly acquaintances. But now they are trying to kill each other like there is no tomorrow.

    Of course, even for Raios, this is not surprising. In fact, he would have been more suspicious if someone told him they wanted to cooperate with him.

    The current behavior is more up the league of freaking Olympians.

 Chapter 2131 Popups

    Chapter 2131 Popups

    One hourter.

    Raios is hanging from the steep slope with a surprised expression.

    One of his arms was cut off and his second arm is the only anchor holding him to the mountain without letting him fall. He looked around. A lot of the mountain surface has been destroyed. Except for the spot he held on to, the rest of it looked fragile, brittle and loose.

    He is still surprised by how the battle went. The other nine opponents he had, were by no means any weaker than him. He didn''t believe that he could juste out on top. He hoped for it of course, but he didn''t believe he could achieve as easily as he thought. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    From the flying rocks to the gravity within the battle zone, everything worked in his favor.

    Whenever he was in a critical situation something or the other happened. A flying rock came to his rescue or the battle between other opponents interrupted his attack or his attacker became a victim to that gravity.

    There were some instances when all these factors werebined.

    By the end of the fight, he waspletely banged up, but he was the only one remained. As for the rest¡­ they were all dead. No one got a chance to escape for some reason. Whenever someone tried to surrender in a desperate situation, a rock or an attacknded exactly on their mouth.

    By now, he is not exactly delighted by this oue.

    Since the start, he realized that he had some luck with all the formations.

    For some reason, he managed to cross every single one by what looked like sheer luck. However, he always managed to get out of the situation.

    At first, he believed that it was just his time to shine and he just managed to get by with coincidences, then he believed that it was his sheer dumb luck. But now, he felt suspicious. No matter what, no one would get this lucky.

    No one can have such a lucky streak.

    The universe is not that kind. And these suspicions grew higher and higher with the battle.

    As he was thinking, a bright light enveloped him and threw him into a white space. He started healing and his body is recovering a rapid rate.

    His arm grew back, but he still didn''t feel at ease. It was all way too spooky for him. What he doesn''t know is that he is not the only one feeling like that. The rest of the top ten rankers of this pocket dimension, except were feeling the same thing as they healed.

    Because some of them beat even better fighters than his opponents.

    For example, White. He is the most suspicious of all, because he didn''t end up in top ten. When his nine opponents came at him, his formation favored them way too much.

    Whenever he used recoil hit, the formation nullified a big portion of its energy at random.

    By the end of it, he lost the fight and ended up being eliminated. And to his disgrace he was the first one to be out of his group. He is now mulling over this misfortune in the grey space. At least, what he doesn''t know is that he is one of the select few who managed to get out alive.

    That too because Sam wanted him to stay alive.

    After the recovery is over, thest ten people left in the pocket dimension were sent over to the golden dome.

    The rest of the set up Sam had before disappeared. All that was left is a small pedestal on which the glowing blue colored orb is hovering. For some reason, the moment theyid their eyes on it, they felt attracted to it.

    To the point that all these candidates forgot that they were just feeling suspicious a few minutes ago.

    Soon, they broke out of the trances and noticed each other. Even when they knew that they were the ones in the top ten list, they still couldn''t believe it. The freshman ranking kind of became a joke because except for Sam, no one else from that ranking was there.

    "Now, it is time to decide the top ten rankings and also the winner. For your information, when you are die or stay alive by the end of this battle, you will stay in the top ten rankings. Your prize will go to your closest blood rtive or any other nominee that you desire if you are dead.

    Go to the orb on the pedestal and imprint that nominee name on that."

    That was the first announcement given by whatever entity that was giving the announcement since the start.

    After they did what they were told, the blue orb and the pedestal disappeared. All that was left it is an empty space covered by the golden dome above and ten participants.

    Out of those ten participants, nine of them are shit scared of the tenth one. The tenth one being one and only Sam.

    Sam knew that the n will go smoothly from now on. He knew they will gang up on him. Otherwise, they would have no choice. They know that Sam will be the sole decider of the rankings if they left him alone and they were not ready to do it.

    That would be stupid.

    But solidify that resolve, Sam had another n.

    "In this battle, if it was just some royal rumble, things will not look so good. So, to make it interesting, random powerups and handicaps will popup in the battlefield as you fight. When a participant captures that powerup or handicap, they will be affected by it for a set period of time.

    Be careful with that.

    Only person will be left standing by the end of it, and they shall face the final challenge alone.

    Let the battle begin."

    As soon as the announcement ended, a green colored orb popped up in the middle. Right next to Raios and as he drew his sword, he involuntarily touched it.

    He felt a wave of vitality spread all over his body. A green colored energy enveloped him. Sam made a move and threw a wind de at him.

    The de left a cut on Raios'' face as he tried to avoid it. But even before he could observe the wound, the green colored energy healed it.

    "That''s a fucking powerup."

    One of the candidates yelled.

    "Raios, you lead the attack. We will take him down first."

    Another candidate spoke and Raios didn''t waste any time. He lunged at Sam with his lightning fusion. The green energy still lingered around him.

    Sam took a step back, pulled his arm andunched a palm strike. Itnded squarely on Raios'' chest. His energy became unstable which fluctuated his fusion form, but to his surprise, the green energy even fixed that.

    His fusion form stabilized. His energy control was stabilized. He felt shocked, but he didn''t let it affect him. He knew dealing with Sam is troublesome and he focused solely on that.

    Samunched himself at the nearest opponent. The attacks were precise and powerful, not leaving any room for the others to doubt him.

    Just when he was about to kill the first guy, Raios felt two things. One is that the green energy is leaving and another one is an energy fluctuation that gave him an ominous tingling feeling. He focused on the location where the feeling ising from and the next moment, a red colored pop-up appeared there.

    One of the candidates believed it was a powerup and caught it.

    The next moment¡­

    *BAM*

    He copsed to the ground. He is subjected to hundred times gravitypared to the rest, which made him copse.

    Sam was distracted by the sudden copse which happened very close to him. This gave the chance to his victim who pushed Sam away and surrendered. One down, eight more to go. Sam thought popped up, not just in Sam''s mind, but in everyone else''s as well. They might be teaming up now, but they never forgot that they were each other''s opponents as well. The fight continued. Sam focused on the guy who was being effected by the handicap of excess gravity. Raios soon lost his healing factor. The seven of them tried to keep Sam in check, not letting him deal with the handicap.

    At that moment, Raios felt another fluctuation very close. But this time, it gave an auspicious sense. However, a sense of threat from Sam made him jump sideways making him push another candidate.

    The candidatended on a green popup that appeared out of nowhere and by coincidence that was from the same spot Raios caught that auspicious feeling.

    The man who caught that green pop-up suddenly felt the green energy around him, but it wasn''t a healing factor, instead his speed increased. The gravity lightened up and the energy increased his performance. The energy levels in his body raised to a threatening level and he had to expel it.

    Who better than Sam to receive it?

 Chapter 2132 Puppet

    Chapter 2132 Puppet

    *BOOM*

    Sam felt the punch on his spine. He was sent flying like an arrow from a bow. Hended a few meters way and then rolled on the ground for a couple of meters. By the time he came to stop, he was already surrounded by a bunch of people all brandishing their weapons.

    The guy with the buff made his way forward.

    He lead the attack while Sam tried his best to defend himself.

    A few minutester, Raios once again felt it. Another ominous feeling. He could also see where the possible spawning spot is, so he kicked on Sam''s chest, sending him flying in that particr direction.

    Just like that he caught another handicap.

    "FUCK YEAH!"

    Raios punched the air in excitement like a little kid and attacked Sam with new found vigour. At that moment, Sam is suffering from an energy handicap. He is unable to circte energy as freely as he wanted and the sudden change left him a bit defenseless.

    "This is great." He muttered to himself, but the others heard it as well. They believed Sam is in trouble and the onught continued.

    As they lost themselves in the high of beating the shit out of the top ranker, the debuff disappeared. Sam who was lying on the floor suddenly punched the ground and threw himself into the air. He caught a hold of one of the opponents and attacked.

    His arm directly went through that guy''s shoulder.

    He used that shoulder as pivot and broke the neck of him. At the same time, Raios jumped to a different location and caught a hold of the popup that came there.

    The moment he did, a specter manifested near him.

    He could feel its connection with him. At that time, it became a part of him and he knew how to use it like its his own arm.

    The battle continued just like that.

    Raios predicting the appearance of the pop-ups. When it is perk, he would either take it or ''identally'' make his teammates take it. He was smart enough to understand that showing off by taking more would make him the next target after Sam.

    So, he yed it safe.

    And long story short, as time passed the participants managed to do something that they didn''t think was possible.

    That was corner Sam into a miserable state. He stood at the corner of the formation with his arm broken, a couple of ribs fractured, clothes ragged and the flesh covered in bruises from top to bottom.

    "I am going to pay you back for this."

    With those words, he surrendered and disappeared.

    An ominous silence resonated in the dome after his disappearance. The silence that felt so threatening and violent at the same time, but there was no visible change in the dome''s atmosphere.

    "We did it."

    Raios muttered almost like a whisper as if he couldn''t believe it himself. As if he is afraid that if he spoke out loud the surroundings will disappear in a whisper and he will wake up from a dream.

    Even if Sam was repeatedly stuck with handicaps, even though he was outnumbered by one to many, even though he felt like it was very unreal, they still managed to deal with him. They might not be able to kill him, but they really did defeat him.

    He surrendered.

    Voluntarily with some help.

    *BOOM*

    Once the shock settled inn, all hell broke loose.

    They started attacking.

    By now it is obvious who is going to win and the story didn''t change one bit. Raios used the massive advantage he held to defeat the others one by one. He killed some, defeated some. Once they were all gone, he sat down in the middle of the dome while panting heavily like his life depended on it. Even with all the advantages he held, he felt a bit troubled dealing with all of them.

    He couldn''t even understand how Sam held out for so long on his own.

    It felt like an impossible task.

    But now that''s done, there is something else waiting for me.

    "Congrattions, Mr. Raios. You are the top candidate of this test. Now you have the final test. If you clear it, your current reward will be multiplied by ten, or the reward will stay the same. However, you do not have the option to not take the test.

    You have to and you shall go through it."

    That was announcement and the next moment, the blue orb started glowing. Raios felt his whole body enveloped with that blue light. He started healing, but his sense became dull. He could see, hear, smell or use his spiritual sense.

    By the time the light cleared out, something stood in the ce of that blue orb. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    A humanoid metallic puppet.

    It is glowing with silvery grey energy as well as some purple runic patterns are being engraved on it in real time. The puppet is at least ten feet high. It looked lean, small waist with its torso forming a giant V taper. The legs long, bulky, but long. Same goes for the arms. The head looked in, except for the sharp de like structure extending from its eyes brows to the back.

    It is abination of silver and purple.

    "Your final test. Fight with the puppet."

    And that next moment, the runes on the puppet werepletely engraved and the silver ones glowed. The gravity in the surroundings increased by a thousand times. At least that was what it felt like to Raios. He couldn''t even feel his own face as he hit the ground with his face first.

    The puppet is now controlling the gravity.

    Sam watched with some snacks as two of his puppets are about to fight. The metallic puppet he created and the human puppet, namely Raios who he was ying with for a while.

    The puppet started glowing with lightning energy.

    It the purple lightning crawled up to the de of the sword as it swung at the young man.

    The des shed.

    *BOOM*

    The explosions raged the golden dome that was intact even when ten candidates were fighting started cracking up, bit by bit.

    Raios felt what hell would feel like, what real terror is. The puppet was overwhelmingly powerful. The power that could crush him at any moment. However it is not doing that. As if that power is trying to¡­ teach him?

    The way the puppet moved that sword, the way its body moved. It is like a dance, powerful but graceful dance. A grace that shouldn''t possibly match with that gigantic figure, the metallic body and that menacing might.

    However, it is doing it.

    It is like a giant metallic butterfly, only the wings are not visible.

    The puppet is trying to teach Raios. Teach that sword art, trying to make him explore it.

    And when the sword art was executed¡­

    *BOOM*

    The explosive swordnded on Raios'' chest making him fly and crash into the golden dome, breaking it.

    "You have failed."

    That was the announcement and Raios came out of his trance.

    After healing him, his reward is announced.

    "Congrattions, you won that puppet. Not only can you autonomously operate it, you can also mount it."

    The announcement paused and the puppet''s body opened up. Raios was stunned, a force pulled him and then threw into that puppet''s body. The puppet closed up.

    Raios felt like he was hovering in a dark space. However, he also knew that he is inside the pocket dimension.

    He just felt bigger, stronger and powerful. Along with the control over the runic patterns and attacks programmed into the puppet.

    The announcement continued.

    "The puppet also has the sword technique you have seen recorded into it. It was just the first step of it, that you have seen. It consists of five more and all of them are recorded. With a guided learning feature, you can learn it.

    That is also your reward.

    Now, get out of here."

    He was thrown into the grey space. The puppet around him disappeared and it directly entered his storage, even without his permission or prompting.

 Chapter 2133 Calling for Backup

    Chapter 2133 Calling for Backup

    The rewards were distributed.

    Most of the rewards were just formation designs, inscription arrays, blueprints, formation discs, and even. There was not a single cultivation technique in there. There are some battle techniques, but those are for the top twenty-five ranks only.

    Apart from that, the results were announced for everyone to hear in that grey space.

    After the rewards were distributed, everyone was sent out of the pocket dimension gate.

    Sam appeared along with the rest.

    "FUCK"

    He cursed out loud as his aura raged. But the next moment, he calmed himself down. His eyes swept through the participants and momentarily met the gazes of the nine other people who ''kicked'' him out.

    He wanted to get out of that ce, but for some reason, several gazes are locked on him.Some powerful students of Zeus Academy are managing the crowd. This prompted Sam to find a few people from the Gambler Academy.

    While trying tomunicate with the Hub to get some information on this situation.

    Raios gulped hard. The excitement of getting the awesome puppet disappeared for a short span. It came back when the Deputy Dean of the Zeus Academy came and grabbed him away.

    Within a short moment, he is inside the Deputy Dean''s office. Looking at the old man as well as a few other elders who were far too eager to know the details of the pocket dimension. Of course, Raios wasn''t the only from the Zeus Academy who entered the pocket dimension.

    But Raios won the pocket dimension.

    If it was just another top kid, they wouldn''t have cared much. But Raios, a mediocre student managed to snatch the first ce. They are beyond curious. They need to know exactly what''s so different about this pocket dimension.

    By what metrics did they exactly gauge the performance that made this mediocrity to gain the first ce.

    And the also noticed the uniqueness of the rewards of the other students. They are desperate to know what the first ce got.

    This made them feral.

    "What did you get?"

    Deputy Dean asked.

    "I¡­."

    "What is the final test?" Even before Raios could answer, the first question another elder asked.

    "How did you get a first ce? You are not even that good atbat." A different elder straight up insulted him.

    Raios was dumbfounded. He knew he wasn''t good abatpared to the cream of the crop, but he believed he is decent and that insult was uncalled for.

    However, the elders and the Deputy Dean are in no mood to care about his fragile heart. The only problem being that the Dean barged into the room even before Raios could mentally die of the exhaustion and annoyance.

    "What the fuck are you doing here?"

    The Dean asked and everyone froze in their ce. Except for Raios who heavedsigh of relief. He jumped out of the chair and ran towards the Dean. As if he was hiding behind his mother to escape from the angry father.''

    "Sir, Please save me."

    Dean didn''t answer him, instead he looked at the rest of the elders in the room.

    "I asked you, what the fuck you are doing. Why is there no answer yet?"

    "Dean, the pocket dimension is unique. We don''t want any other academy to get the details. Particulrly with how unique the rewards are. Our student got the first ce. We need to monopolize the information."

    "And why did that warrant you to breaking my rules? I was conducting a crackdown there. I was trying to find those bastards from the ming skulls. You just brought back this student without asking me?" n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "Sir, this is our student? And one that brought us glory in the pocket dimension?"

    "And your point being?" Dean is stubborn, he is not ready to listen to anyone''s opinion. He turned to look at Raios.

    "You need to get back to the pocket dimension right now. Leave."

    Raios was confused. He walked out of the office though. He knew what kind of person Dean is. Since even he is that serious, he didn''t want to face the consequences of challenging that.

    He walked out of the academy. Albeit slowly as he mulled over the sword art and what this victory of the pocket dimension meant.

    Meanwhile, Sam who connected with the Hub and got all the information he needed, took a deep and tense breath.

    He knew things are going to be a bit troublesome now.

    First of all, the Dean of the Zeus Academy finally lost it. Sam''s antics got to him and made him go crazy. He is using the truth verification formations and several stupid soul arts to analyze the emotions of the students as they are being interrogated.

    He became too hard-headed about this, that he started interrogating his students first.

    Even now, that is where the interrogation started and Sam is still waiting there.

    Sam might be good at a lot of things. However, he is sure that even with his overly amplified soul strength that could put the Grade 2 students to a ring shame.

    But he is sure that he cannot resist against an Elder''s soul art. He wouldn''t be able to do shit to resist it and this thing is muchrger than just leaking the information about the ming skulls and the hub.

    His friends and the rest of the dusk organization. He could only imagine the destruction he will bring on to himself with this information leak.

    He had to stop this by hook or crook and he also had some ns on how and what information the Dean should get. He just started the n and the first step just finished with him giving Raios that puppet.

    He cannot let it all go down the drain.

    And luckily he got contacts.

    He called Dove.

    "I am out of the pocket dimension and the Zeus Academy has restrained me and the rest of the students. They re trying to use a forceful soul search to look through my memories."

    That is all he said.

    *BAM* CRASH*

    He could hear some crashing sound from the other side.

    Dove ran to talk to the Dean while yelling at Sam through the call.

    "We already sent some seniors to escort you all to the academy without this trouble. It seems like that was ineffective. I will rip their assess apartter. Be careful."

    The call is cut off.

    Sam contacted Icarus through the Hub.

    "Cause a scene. I am blocked here. I think I have something that could help you do this.

    Raios, the man who is supposed to be here too, the first ce candidate of this pocket dimension is taken away by the Deputy dean of the zeus Academy.

    They are showing some sort of discrimination.

    While they are subjecting the rest of the students of other Academies and the general citizens are being subjected to soul damaging arts of the elders of the Zeus Academy. The nefarious nature of their actions¡­"

    He cut the call off at that exact moment.

    He started thinking¡­

    What else can he do?

    What else can he do?

    What else can he do?

    He asked himself again and again. But there is not much that he could think of. At this exact moment.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Explosive sounds, zing mes, chaotic lightning. All hit the area at the same time. Even the Elders and students of the Zeus Academy that are preparing the crowd are shook by it.

    "You fucking imbeciles. How many times do you need to taste bitter defeat before you stop pissing us of."

    There she is.

    Dove is here. Not alone if one might add. There are more than a dozen seniors along with exactly one elder of the Gambler Academy. And that too a familiar face.

    Chorus.

    The one and the only elder who doesn''t give two shits about the students and always ims to be toozy to do anything.

    Dove directly ran into the crowd and held one of the seniors by his cor as she made her way towards Sam. "What do you think you are doing?"

    One of the Elders frowned and growled at Dove. She ignored him directly and looked at Sam.

    "Are you alright?"

    "Yes, you came before they could do anything else. I am alright for now."

    "Good to know."

    Dove turned to the Elder and spoke.

    "Thest time I checked the Dean of the Gambler Academy, Dean Wharton has told the Dean of the Zeus Academy to fuck off when he asked to interrogate our students. Does he not know what Fuck off meant or did he have trouble teaching his underlings what those words mean?"

    The Elder started shaking in anger. His huge body is trembling and it is apparent on his long beard. "YOU¡­"

    He screamed and aimed an energy induced palm at Dove trying to kill him with a single blow.

    "Fucking hell."

    Two words reverberated throughout the air and destroyed the energy injected into his hand.

 Chapter 2134 Contingency

    Chapter 2134 Contingency

    The elder felt a searing pain his chest.

    He never knew the bacsh from his attack could be so severe. He gritted his teeth and tried to fight the urge to puke his blood out.

    "Come on, an elder is trying to attack a student? Is Zeus Academy in such a bad state? To hire some second rate idiots who cant control their temper as elders?"

    Chorus spoke in azy tone. It isn''t much different from the tone of a person who just woke up from a sleep.

    "Chorus?" The Elder asked in a confused tone. He is genuinely puzzled. Rarely anyone ever sees Chorus outside of the academy. Even in the Academy he is only visible in his sses. It was already a big deal when he went to the freshmen tournament.

    Now, that he is seen here, there is a good reason for being surprised.

    And along with that surprise they also felt fear. There is a reason why even the Dean of the Thor Academy felt threatened and stayed on his toes with Chorus around. They don''t want that smoke.

    Sam knew that the situation finally turned for better.

    He blinked from the spot and reappeared beside Dove. "YOU¡­."

    An elder once again extended his hand to catch a hold of him, but Dove shielded Sam as she shielded him. She got ready to attack him upfront. Which stunned the Elder. And that stunned expression turned into an ugly scowl.

    "How dare you? A mere student dares to attack an Elder?"

    *CLAP* *BOOM*

    Chorus pped his hand at the moment and an energy wave hit the Elder in the face, throwing him off.

    "Don''t make me work like this. Stay put." Choruszily spoke and turned towards the rest of the students from the Gambler Academy.

    "Let''s go. Do you want to get interrogated by them?"

    They shook their heads and ran towards Dove''s side. They started moving back. However, even before they could leave the premises¡­

    "Stop. No one is leaving this ce."

    Dean of the Zeus Academy made his way and spoke in a resounding voice. Sam sighed and almost cursed out loud.

    Just when he thought they escaped.

    The Dean is fucking persistent.

    Chorus finally had a serious expression on his face.

    "Dean, you shouldn''t be doing things like these. You know what Dean Wharton is like. You don''t want to see him angry."

    Dean of the Zeus Academy looked at Chorus and said.

    "Its true Chorus. Dean Wharton being angry is really not a good thing. However, I am already angry. No matter what happens today, I need to interrogate these kids today and find out who among them belong to the ming skulls."

    "If you really want to do this, then please get permission from our Dean. Unless you have this consent, I will not allow you to do this."

    "You think you can stop me, Chorus?"

    "I don''t know. There is only one way to find out and I am not really in the mood to find out. Not just now, I would like to keep it in that state for as long as this academy realm exists."

    "Then leave the kids here and go back to your Academy."

    "I cannot do that."

    "Then let''s see how long you can hold me down."

    "I don''t want to."

    "Then leave."

    "I cannot."

    The argument grew. Sam looked at the current situation and knew things will not move forward in this case. He has to find a way to get out of this before it blows up in his face. Now that the Dean is here, even if the Icaruses, there is little benefit.

    Sam thought for a moment and decided to use one of the contingencies. He sat down on the ground and closed his eyes. Connecting with the hub. Soon, he tried to locate where Raios currently is through the wrist band. After narrowing his location down, he once again focused on the hub.

    Inside the secret room of the hub, three metallic spheres started glowing. With spatial energy that concentrated around them, the three metallic spheres disappeared from there and reappeared high in the sky of the city.

    They shot towards Raios who was still slowly walking towards the pocket dimension. His speed is so slow that a normal mortal man who doesn''t have any cultivation could have overtaken him.

    Raios felt the danger and his hair stood on its ends. He immediately jumped high into the sky before activating his lightning fusion and moving forward like a streak of light.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Three loud explosive sounds fell on the ground like three meteors leaving behind huge craters. Raios barely dodged them. Even with that speed, he was barely able to escape. He came to a halt and looked at the three metallic spheres.

    They were all glowing with elemental energy.

    Right in front of Raios'' eyes, the three spheres spread out. The glow became brighter and slowly they started transforming. Soon, in front of his eyes stood three handsome humanoid puppets. All three of them had ming patterns. They are very simr to the puppet that was given to Raios. However, they are the next versions of that puppet. These puppets have sma des that can be extended from the forearms. Apart from that, there are several energy sters inserted in its fingers, palms, chest and the eyes.

    Apart from that, there are several hidden features. There are several energy sters, missiles, other projectile attacks, much more.

    As Raios is looking at them with a shocked expression, the three puppets glowed once again. The fiery red patterns were activated. Both arms ejected sma des as they lunged at Raios from all three sides.

    *SWOOOSH*

    Raios who was in too much of a shock to contemte what is happening, barely dodged the attacks. Even then, one of the des brushed past his hair and cut off some strands.

    The air is filled with burned hair. The cut of strands didn''t even hit the ground, they just burned in a second and disappeared altogether.

    Raios gulped hard.

    In that small instant, he felt the heat from that sma de. Even the small scruff of facial hair he barely grew was burned off from that distance.

    He gulped hard and he didn''t even want to fight. He activated lightning fusion, turned into a streak. He started moving towards the pocket dimension. The three puppet''sunched themselves into the air. There are several jet mechanisms installed in the back and the legs of the puppets. sma wings opened up on its back as they helped them glide through the air.

    The sters are simr to the design Sam implemented in his hoverboard. The three puppets flew towards Raios and blocked his path.

    He swung his sword to block the sma de while dodging the other two puppets. Once again, he only escaped through hair''s breadth.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Explosions rang loud and clear, creating shockwaves all over the ce, destroying the surroundings. Soon, Raios is crashed into the ground as the three puppets surrounded him. From one of the puppets'' eyes a light beam shot out to scan Raios'' body.

    [Verification Done. The candidate has obtained the Puppet Created by the Southern Faction. Proceeding to Eliminate the target.]

    Raios'' blood turned cold. He immediately took out the puppet he just obtained and merged with it.

    *SWOOSH*

    As the sma de of the puppet came towards him, his own puppet wielded a sma de of its own and swung it back. He started performing the same sword art that the puppet tried to teach him. As he blocked the attacks one by one, he got more used to it.

    He could feel the new information being injected into his mind. With every passing second the sword art became easier. Heprehended more and more of it. Along with that, the three puppets were also pushed back.

    After three minutes¡­

    Raios suddenly felt something click in his mind. The surrounding energy condensed into his energy de and he shed vertically downwards. The inscriptions of the puppet''s arms glowed. The gravity around them is manipted.

    It is focused on the opponent puppet.

    The vertical cleavended straight on the chest of the puppet opening it up.

    The second puppet in the distance stopped moving.

    [Target already connected with the puppet. One of the puppets is down. Initiating retreat.]

    The two other puppets came and caught the third puppet before all three of them flew away.

    Raios finally rested. The puppet dismantled. He ran out of it.

    However, the next moment, a searing pain invaded his mind and he passed out. At the same time the puppet the puppet shrunk in size and disappeared. In ce of it, a ring appeared. The ring flew over and inserted itself over Raios'' finger.

    Raios had a pained expression on his face as several memories and information were forcefully injected into his mind, imprinting themselves into deepest subconscious."n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

 Chapter 2135 Escape

    Chapter 2135 Escape

    Sam opened his eyes again.

    Chorus and the Dean of Zeus Academy are still in a stalemate. Even with all the talk the Dean is very hesitant about to fighting againstChorus. Sam couldn''t help but wonder just how strong Chorus really is.

    Back in the Norse region and now, the Deans are practically showing their fear in front of him.

    Then his thoughts went to Dean Wharton. If Chorus is this strong, then what about Dean Wharton?

    As he was wondering, one of the instructors got a call from someone from the city. Sam knew his n finally worked when he noticed the panicked expression on the Instructor''s face. And as he guessed, the call was about Raios.

    "Sir, one of the city guards spotted a battle not too far away from the city. When they went to check, it is Raios. Right now, he is there unconscious. The perpetrators have already fled."

    Dean frowned.

    "He didn''te here yet? I sent him a long time ago."

    Dean asked and then shook his head before giving the instructions.

    "Send someone. Tell them to bring him back to the academy if his condition is serious."

    "Wait!"

    Chorus yelled grabbing the attention of the Dean and the Instructor.

    "Isn''t Raios the one that got first ce in the pocket dimension? Why is he allowed to leave? Why did he even leave in the first ce? And now you are taking him away because of the injury? Please. You are just keeping your good eggs safe while trying to spoil ours."

    "Well, that is actually their n." At this moment the voice Sam has been anticipating for a while has appeared. The voice of the one and only Icarus.

    He very much liked to go and bash Icarus about beingte, but judging from his expression, it seems likethe problem could be solved.

    "What the fuck are you doing here? This is the matter of Zeus Academy and doesn''t have anything to do withmon public. You better back off or you will pay." One of the instructors yelled. He is very pissed right now.

    Because he is one of the few who is being subjected to the twelvebors.

    In fact, the difficulty of the twelvebors is much higherpared to some of his peers. He had that big oflist of crimes.

    Icarus just smiled and said.

    "Indeed, you would like to think so. But the people you are obstructing right now are not exactly part of the Zeus Academy. Most of them are normal citizens and by virtue of the contract with Hub, they are affiliated with us.

    The same goes for the other academies.

    You have no right to detain them here because of some crazy theories that you cooked up. For all we know, this is just your desperate attempt at revenge for being constant losers in everything that you came across in recent times."

    "Icarus, I know you have your grievances with the Academy, that is why I am letting you run wild. But don''t you dare run your mouth? You will have to face some serious consequences."

    The Dean spoke and all he got in return was a snort from Icarus.

    Icarus'' gaze swept through the instructors and the seniors in the spot. He activated his wrist band and soon a notification popped up in the wristbands of these instructors and seniors. They all had a bad feeling.

    They all got a written message and it read the same.

    "From this moment onwards, the student/instructor <name> is banned from the Hub for participating in immoral activities.

    This decision has been made because your behavior has breached the seventh use in the special training contract you have signed with the Hub. The use clearly states that you shall not perform any activities that go beneath the basic moral code.

    You have used your superior strength against the grade 1 students outside the pocket dimension, forcing them to undergo soul-damaging interrogation.

    For that reason, your ban will be applied indefinitely until the management of the hub investigates further and confirms your actual involvement in the matter. If the involvement is confirmed, you shall be revoked from the hub permanently."

    And that was it.

    "FUCK"

    "OH MY GOD"

    "What the fuck is happening?"

    "No, you can''t do this to us."

    People started yelling. Particrly the seniors. Soon there is going to be the interacademy tournament for the seniors, they were all training like crazy in the hub. If they are kicked out now, they will be left behind by a huge margin.

    They know for sure that their rivals in the other regions will not let this chance go.

    Dean frowned deeply as he looked at Icarus.

    Since the start, only he knew how much of an influence the hub wielded. At least, he is the only one that too precautions after being aware of it, but he didn''t expect this kind of attack.

    "You cannot do this. Joker will not allow this." Dean said to Icarus.

    "I am the acting manager and if Joker indeed decides that it is indeed my fault, then he will be the one to punish me. It is between us, the employee and employer, and not for the general public to interfere."

    Icarus looked at the instructor who said simr words to him.

    The next few seconds the ce held aplete silence.The elders and the instructors were not ready for a situation like this.

    They were prepared for instructors intervening, they were prepared for Elders defending, they even prepared for these kids weeping like babies. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    But threats were not something they prepared for. Particrly, a threat that could impact the future of their students and in turn their academy.

    The Elders started whispering with the Dean.

    At first Dean''s expression was stubborn. It was clear that he didn''t want to give a shit. He looked like he wanted to press forward. However, after some time, the elders finally managed to persuade him. He didn''t speak a word.

    He just turned around and left.

    The encirclement ended.

    Sam heaved a sigh of relief and so did the rest of the students. All of them felt lucky. They believed that their luck was the reason they escaped. After all, before there were many students who got subjected to the interrogation and Icarus wasn''t there to save them.

    However, before their turn came, he came and saved them from this precarious situation.

    If only they knew that the difference is not luck, but Sam''s presence, well, in a way, that could be considered as luck as well. They are lucky to be in the same ce and time as Sam.

    Sam messaged Icarus that he will meet himter and went to the Gambler Academy along with the rest of the members. He knew there would be some discussions and since he is the one that summoned Dove, he is needed there.

    And just like he expected, there were some meetings. Mostly it is some constion from the Elders and apologies from the instructors for failing to stop the Zeus Academy.

    After that, Sam was invited to a special meeting of the student council.

    It was like an auditorium this time and there are a lot more people than before.

    Dove stood at the front and wrote something on the board.

    ''War on Zeus Academy''

    That was what she wrote.

    "From this moment onwards this is our only goal. Technically we already started the war and won the first exchange. The only we stopped it is because we wanted to respect the timings of the pocket dimension.

    However, they obviously don''t respect that time. So, let''s not either. For every pocket dimension, most of the students from the other academies leave and since the attacks from other academies are also less, they can only maintain minimum security at some points.

    Our first goal is to capture as many first-grade resource points of the Zeus Academy as possible.

    Of course, there are many limitations in capturing first-grade resource points. But Gambler Academy does have something unique and we are going to use it to the utmost advantage¡­."

    Dove went on to narrate the n while drawing it on the board. She was serious and her demeanor is that of the military strategist.

    Sam was impressed beyond words. After the meeting was over, he went to meet Icarus and his friends.

    "The Dean of the Zeus Academy is one piece of work. He forced my freaking hand."

    Sam said with a sigh. Even though he got out of the situation easily, he had to push the ns forward a bit. Particrly, using the threat of banning students from the Hub.

    There is a reason why the conditions were both strict and vague. Sam left it open to have control over the students in cases like these. But now that this is revealed, the retaliation from the Deans should be expected soon.

 Chapter 2136 Second Labor

    Chapter 2136 Second Labor

    The whole point of establishing the hub is to disrupt the academy realm.

    The best way for doing that is to undermine the authority of the Academies. That day, with Icarus'' threat, Sam showed exactly that. The Dean of the Zeus Academy, one of the most powerful people in the Academy realm had to back down.

    Sam is sure that most people would notice this and the Hub is bound to face some friction. However, it is too early for the hub to receive that much heat. He needs to create some sort of distraction. Even if the upper echelons want to focus on Hub, they should have their handful with other things.

    They shouldn''t have any time to deal with the Hub.

    Luckily, he already started the n. The puppet that he gave away to Raios and the three puppets that attacked him are part of that n. He is sure that someone must have noticed that battle. Even if they didn''t, he is nning on giving out the recorded video of the battle and spread the information.

    Also, the words left behind by the three puppets. Like the gravity faction and other stuff. It is all clearly made up by Sam, but the other parties don''t know this.

    In their eyes, this is an unknown variable and Sam has to find a way to amplify it even more. Add in some chaos and instability among the students, things should be safe for some time. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "Philip, how is Joran''s shipmenting along?"

    "We are ready to send the first batch."

    "Including the weapons?"

    "Yes."

    "Tell him to peddle them all in the Thssa region. I want to see the results in the next week."

    Sam discussed a few more details and went out. He has a meeting scheduled with the Dean of a different Academy. It is going to be his second quest. The secondbor in the twelve.

    He went to the Artemis Academy to receive the quest.

    By the time he arrived there, the Dean was busy in a meeting. Sam kind of expected this. There are some people in the Artemis academy that got a bunch of good rewards in the pocket dimension. He was the one that gave them deliberately.

    The Dean sent thebor in a scroll through an Elder.

    Sam read it and nodded.

    "Much easier."

    He muttered and walked out of the Academy, he contacted Icarus.

    "I need your help with something for my nextbor. I don''t have much information about the region that I have to go to. Can you help me out?"

    That is all he asked.

    "Of course, tell me what you need."

    "Meet me in the secret room."

    Just like that, Sam had to go back to the secret room once again.

    He handed the scroll over to Icarus who read it and appeared surprised.

    "Really? This is the task given to you? How did they even think of such an absurd task?"

    "I don''t know."

    The surprise is not because of the task is difficult with traps, rather it ispletely opposite. The task didn''t have any holes. Sam even skimmed through Hub''s records to see if he could find any anamoly. But there is none.

    Before he went into the pocket dimensions, there was no discussion of any trap regarding Sam''s secondbor.

    And during the pocket dimensions, if they discussed, Sam should have gotten a recording of it from Hub. There is nothing of that sorts. That means, this is definitely a properbor.

    The task is for Sam to eliminate some beasts that are targeting the Golden Hinds.

    The Golden Hinds are the sacred beasts beloved by Artemis and even though they are rare in a general sense, in thends and territories blessed by her, they are still findable in some specific territories.

    And of course, these are the descendants of the Original Golden Hind and much less powerful.

    However, they do hold a lot of powers and characteristics simr to the original one and that makes them a good target for other beasts on the same level. They provide a good nourishment.

    And right now, in one of the territories that are ruled by Artemis''s followers, the golden hinds are being hunted by a beast called the Blood Yena.

    They are hyena like creatures that feast on flesh and blood of the creatures. Of course, one might say,a all the carnivorous beasts do it, however these things consume the prey while keeping it alive. They can only enjoy the flesh while the prey has its peak vitality.

    And that makes the death a torturous endeavor for these creatures.

    Sam''s job is to protect these golden hinds from the pack of Blood Yena.

    And the area assigned to him doesn''t have any beasts that are too strong. That is why he is a bit confused.

    Icarus looked through the tasks and then at some of his own documents.

    He finally found what is there.

    "It is that time of the year. Now it makes sense."

    Icarus muttered and looked at Sam. "You are right, the Dean of Artemis academy really didn''t have any thoughts of killing you.

    They are only trying to make you miss the next Pocket dimension.

    This is the special time of the year and this time Blood Yena from various regions of the will migrate inrge droves to that ce. It is because of the special call of the Yena Alpha that rules over all the Yena of that."

    "Why does it call the packs?"

    "It''s the mating season. That is why. The Yena albeit beasts are very intelligent and they have a strong cunning sense for conquest. Basically after the pack reaches a certain strength, the alpha sends its generals to different areas where they mate with simr beasts and produce offspring.

    Every year they bring back a part of their pack along with suitable mates. They crossbreed and create variant beasts that go around destroying the ecosystems.

    And it just so happens in this the Golden Hinds are also very high in number and they are way too good of a nourishment for these Yena.

    So, you will have to kill hundreds and hundreds of beasts and they will being in waves. You will miss the next pocket dimension for sure."

    "Is there a way to deal with this instantly?"

    Sam asked.

    Icarus nodded with a smile.

    "Killing the Alpha. The call stops, the migration stops and the Generals will try to take over and establish their own packs. There would be some infighting.

    However, there is just one problem."

    "Its strength." Sam said as Icarus paused.

    Icarus nodded and said.

    "You are right. Its strength. You are not too strong and you wouldn''t be able to deal with the Alpha.It is at least Divine ne Transcendent creature. Middle stage or higher. There is no way you can tackle it.

    But as it happens, you have many partners who can easily take care of it."

    Sam smiled at this. It is indeed true. A beast of that level is easy for Icarus or Ivar to handle and he is sure that they would be more than willing to do it for him.

    However, Sam had a different Idea.

    "I don''t need you to take care of it like that. I have a different n. I also want to opt out of the next pocket dimension."

    "What''s the n?"

    "I will go to that ce and observe the Yena. I will protect the Golden Hinds as much as possible and when I need your help, you will get my message. Then I will tell you the rest of my n."

    "Alright. I am here to help you whenever."

    Sam talked with his friends again and left the Academy realm. He used to the dimensional drifter and reached his destination.

    The he entered is full of forests and ins. And it is mostly dominated by the beasts. The territories are divided up by them and there are few settlements of cultivators. Even the few settlements were established by some external forces who are interested in the produce of this.

    "This is going to be fun."

    Sam muttered as he noticed a golden hind nearby.

    While Sam is busy here, meanwhile back in the Academy. In the Santan Region. In the vast mountain range that contained hundreds of peaks of various heights. Within a dark and deep valley, there is a small hut overseeing a beautiful waterfall.

    There is barely any light and there are few chirpings of little birds.

    Outside of the hut, there is a young man sitting on the rock with a metallic bird in his hands. It is the bird puppet given to the students by the Hub.

    He had a small instrument in his hands, that resembled a screwdriver. However, it had many functions than just being a screw driver and with one of those functions, he is currently navigating through theplex web of the inscription arrays.

 Chapter 2137 Moving Plans

    Chapter 2137 Moving ns

    The young man hand long dark hair tied up into arge bun on his head. He had a full beard. If not for the smooth skin without any sight of ageing or wrinkles, no one would believe that he is a young man. The took in his hand is just a metallic stick with a handle and a sharp tip.

    He navigated that sharp tip through the inscription arrays as it glowed.

    At the same time his eyes are glowing as he focused on it.

    The only thing that wasn''t glowing is the puppet. However in his vision, the puppet had the brightest glow. The intricate web of inscribed formations made by Sam are all visible to him. However he couldn''t identify their nodes directly and he certainly cannot see what is beyond those inscriptions.

    The young man is not disappointed though. After trying to bypass one of the junctions Samid down, he deactivated his eye technique and stored the puppet away.

    Heid down on the rock and looked at the clear blue sky.

    *SIGH*

    He sighed heavily and closed his eyes.

    Another failure. However, he is still not dejected. He still believed that he can bypass it.

    "Until tomorrow."

    He muttered and started taking a nap.

    Back in the Olympian region.

    The intervention of Icarus did trigger the reaction Sam expected. The deans, particrly the Dean of the Zeus Academy is ready to take some serious measures to prevent something like this from happening.

    One of the actions was pushing his research teams to speed up the cracking of the puppets. He needs to find out the secrets behind the hub, before he decides to take any actions.

    At the same time, many people were dispatched from the Zeus Academy to start an investigation to find out who is behind the hub. The real identity of joker and how they came cross Icarus.

    Of course, simr things happened in other academies.

    While things are like this, Icarus took the opportunity to create more drama for the Zeus Academy. One of the measures was to spread the news of the puppets that fought Raios. The news spread like wildfire with the hub''s amplification.

    At the same time, there are several witnesses who imed that they saw the red spheres appearing in thin air, in the sky above the city before the fight happened.

    So, the Dean has to send someone else to investigate it.

    However, no matter how much they tried they don''t have any results. After all, for all they knew the spheres appeared out of nowhere, fight happened and the puppets disappeared.

    They don''t have a clue.

    For that reason, the focus was ced on Raios once again.

    Dean called him to the office.

    "So, what was the pocket dimension like?"

    Dean asked.

    Raios gulped nervously and answered.

    "It was like any other pocket dimension. The only difference was thepetition format and the prize distribution. The difficulty is quite high."

    "Is that so? Then howe you won?"

    The Dean didn''t have any filter. Raios was dumbfounded. Frozen on the spot. The Dean''s gaze urged him to respond. Raios calmed himself down with deep breaths and spoke.

    "I don''t know, Sir. But I want to attribute most of my victory to my luck. I managed to take advantage of the several loopholes within the formations. If one looked deeply enough, they don''t even have to brute force through those formations.

    I just lucked out in finding those holes and escaping the formations one by one."

    "Do you really want me to believe that? Or do you really believe that you are so lucky to the point the heaven''s chosen that are all over the ce in this city and the realm are not as lucky as you."

    If Sam saw this, he would for sure be surprised a bit. Dean of Zeus Academy is actually a bit odd for an Olympian follower in a general sense. He always took the welfare of his students into his own hands. Once in a while he obviously sumbs to the pressure of themunity.

    However, he was always responsible and he never with his own words put down a student.

    But this day, he did exactly that.

    Since the start, he repeatedly dismissed any of Raios'' ability and constantly humiliated him with his words. Even when Raios swallowed his pride and agreed that this might have been a luck factor, the Dean didn''t leave him be.

    He even found a way to take the dignity away from that.

    It is fucked up.

    "I don''t know, sir. From what I heard, all the heaven''s chosen you spoke of walked in the same path together and they encountered each other in the early rounds. They were focused on their own dick measuring contests instead of victory in the pocket dimension.

    That is why, they damaged each other and dragged each other down.

    My victory might seem like a small thing to you and the Zeus Academy, however only I knew that I almost died in everyone round except for the first. I always had to push myself harder to get past it and reach the next round.

    I still believe that luck yed a huge factor. And I also believe, I wasn''t the only lucky one. The rest, including the heaven''s chosen might have being blessed the same opportunities. However, I might be the only one that managed to use that luck for my own development."

    Dean stayed silent for a moment and took a huge gulp of the wine.

    After that, he looked the crystal ss that showed a faint reflection of his own.

    "So, what about the puppet? Can I see it?"

    Raios nodded and waved his hand. The puppet appeared from the ring that was bound to him.

    Dean stood up and examined the puppet. He ced his arm and injected his energy to examine it. However¡­

    "ARGH.."

    Raios felt a sharp pain in his head, disturbing the Dean''s vision.

    Dean frowned. He knew what the sign for that is. When someone had a soul bound artefact of a weapon that has a spirit of its own, the owner must give the permission if someone wants to check it out.

    Owner should allow the consciousness of the puppet spirit to stop resisting. Or the soul of the person will also face pain due to resistance.

    That was what Raios felt at that moment.

    The Dean needs Raios'' permission to take a look at the puppet. Of course, he has another way. But that would destroy Raios'' soul and might even trap that soul deep into the spirit of the puppet. His soul would just merge with the spirit and his body would soon die, without proper treatment.

    Dean sked Raios'' permission and examined the puppet. Through his vision all he could see was the intricate mechanisms that made up the whole puppet. He hasn''t seen such novel usage of metal before.

    The intricate and delicate mechanisms made him feel like a child witnessing something new for the first time. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    But of course, he understood little of it.

    Only with his high level senses, he understood a bit about the location of the power source and also the output of that power source.

    But that is all.

    The rest, he could sense but couldn''t understand.

    But he did notice one mechanism and upon some further prodding, he managed to understand what it is.

    It is the fusion between the puppet and the cultivator.

    "What exactly did the three puppets say to you after you were attacked?"

    "They talked something about finding me, the person who bound to the puppet, they also talked about how they need to eliminate me and bring the puppet back somewhere.

    However, I managed to win.

    I wouldn''t even call it a win. I basically triggered their code for retreat. That is all."

    "When you fused with the puppet, did you get anything out of it? Anything at all, that we could use to track down the people behind it?"

    At that moment, Raios started scratching his head.

    For one moment he felt like he knew the answer to the question, but it isn''ting to his tongue. He just couldn''t figure out how to say it loud.

    Seeing his struggle, the Dean decided to let him go.

    "Alright. Go back for now. But coborate with the puppet branch. I need to understand how these things work."

    "Okay Sir."

    "Right now, there is only four days for the next pocket dimension. Make sure that you can prove that your first victory is not aplete fluke."

    Raios left after that.

    Dean turned around to slump in his chair. But at this moment,as assistant barged in and said.

    "S¡­Sir."

    "What happened?"

    "Your hearing has been moved up. We need to get there this afternoon."

    "Moved up? Why?"

    "I don''t know, Sir. All I can telling you is that you need to be there and it could have been a consequence of yourtest reactions."

 Chapter 2138 Suspension

    Chapter 2138 Suspension

    Dean held his forehead in distress.

    His head is hurting and his veins are threatening to burst open. For a moment, he just wanted to go ahead and kill Icarus directly. However, he knew he couldn''t do that. Once he crosses that line, he wouldn''t be fit to be an educator.

    At least, he held some personal standards and ethics that he wanted to adhere to.

    He sighed and got up to know more case details.

    When he reached the courtroom he felt a bit stumped. As expected, Icarus was the one that filed the case and he is the one who brough the date forward.

    But what surprised him is the reason Icarus used to bring him to the court.

    The Judge looked at him and said.

    "Dean, Icarus has filed aint against you. There wasn''t much to begin with when he did. After all, everyone knows what your character is, but Icarus submitted new evidences that says otherwise.

    The case with Pearl has be a key point here. She used the external forces to invade a pocket dimension and almost killed the most promising students of this era. And he has evidence to suspect that you coerced some judges to make her get a p on a wrist instead of a proper punishment.

    So, the Judiciary system of this region is taking the case forward and going to investigate the involvement of the judges.

    Apart from that, cases have been filed against the two Elders of your academy. The elders that were proven to be involved in the acts of ughter of innocent in the name of sacrifices. Icarus became a representative of all the people that filed cases on those two.

    In total there are three hundred and fifty eight cases against them.

    The judiciary system has sent notices to the Zeus Academy for a long time to send them to the court for further proceedings.

    Do you know about that?"

    "Yes, however, I already reported why they weren''t able to attend the court. They are missing and are absent from the academy realm. I already dispatched a search party and we have documents to support that."

    "Indeed, you have the documents to support that. That is why instead of just a case of being an aplice in crime theymitted, you are being charged with a fraud.

    From what Icarus submitted, you are the one who captured those two elders from the city when their news was leaked."

    "Yes, I am the one who did it. But they are some of the most experienced elders in our academy and they have heretic powers from the bloody sacrifices. They escaped."

    "It would have been believable, if we didn''t have the evidence showing that you handed over them to your brother Theron."

    Dean frowned.

    He couldn''t help but look at Icarus, who is looking straight ahead.

    Icarus didn''t even acknowledge his presence since the start. Most people might think that as some arrogant behavior. But only people who can see the hands in his pockets would know that he is just scared shitless.

    He is nervous because Dean''s case shouldn''t have been this early. But because of the circumstances, he has to rattle the dean a bit and this is the only way they could do it effectively.

    "That is not all. Comints against you rose more than that. Your recent actions of disturbing the students and forcefully using soul arts on them, trying to interrogate and torture them without consent from the academies or suspicions against the students¡­ the list goes on.

    You just destroyed your wless record in just two days.

    And your position as the Dean of a prestigious academy only amplifies the crime that you havemitted and increases your punishment.

    However, you now have a chance to defend yourself. Keep in mind, most of the usations against were attached with substantial evidence. So, if you want to provide any defense, it is better to have solid evidence that could refute this evidencepletely."

    The judge finished his long-winded address.

    And thus the argument began. The Dean was not the one arguing though. Instead, he just gave up. He knew that his punishment wouldn''t be too severe. It wouldn''t be too lenient, but it wouldn''t be too unbearable either. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    All he needs to do is to make sure that he controls himself during these punishment days. Which would more likely be twelve weeks with all the twelvebors. One per each week.

    Of course, that wasconservative estimate. If he finishes the tasks early, he can just ask for the next one immediately and there are no rules against finishing the twelvebors early anyway.

    After the argument was over, just like the Dean expected, he was punished with the twelvebors. The most popr punishment in the recent days. He epted it silently, but what came next surprised him.

    "As I said before. Your position as an educator only amplifies your punishment. So, you are also tasked with brining the two missing elders. The Special enforcement team of the Academy region will also be deployed to catch them.

    Only after they were caught would your position as the Dean be reinstated. Until then, you shall be suspended from your duties as the Dean of the Academy."

    Everyone''s breath turned cold.

    This is not an expected result. Twelvebors for a Dean was already degrading and insulting enough. That too for the Dean of the Zeus Academy.

    But to think that the Dean of the academy will be suspended¡­ something like this never happened ever since the Academy region was created.

    This is an unparalleled insult.

    Dean clenched his fists as he looked at Icarus. He felt angry. Not just at Icarus but himself as well.

    Icarus looked at him in the eye for the first time. The Dean walked close to him and asked.

    "Is this the n of the hub? To weaken the Academies?"

    "No sir, in fact Hub has little to do with this. It is my goal to weaken the academies, particrly the Zeus Academy. I used the authority of the Hub to do my bidding that is all."

    "Then, do you think Joker will let you do this? Bing openly hostile to this ce? What will happen if the other Deans react to this? What if they started plotting against the Hub because of your actions."

    "I am expecting them to do so. But don''t worry. Before they could do anything, they will soon follow you. Until then, they won''t have enough time on their hands to deal with the Hub."

    Icarus walked out.

    Dean had a deep frown on his face. He didn''t understand what Icarus actually meant, but he felt like the meaning behind those words is bound to be a bad news for him and the Olympian region.

    And he doesn''t know how right he is yet.

    After leaving the court, Icarus immediately went back to the Hub and holed himself up in the secret room. He started looking through the details of all the people that used the hub''s services, the special training program members, and the total poption of the hub.

    Judging from the numbers, the hub is not far from the ideal state it needs to reach. Only a couple of more days and he can implement the next n that Sam had in his mind.

    Maybe after everything is said and done, Hub might not even exist.

    Of course, to survive until that point, he needs to create some more diversions. He looked through the candidates and picked a few. Most of them are the members close to the Noble league. They are famous, but not as famous as the noble league members.

    So, when they do something, there wouldn''t be too muchmotion, but everyone will know. However, when something happens to them, themotion would be just right.

    At the same time, he started checking various screens from the secret room. They are the live surveince provided by the puppets of the Deans and the Elders of the Academies.

    He already saw that they are discussing the counter measures against the Hub. The Hub needs to be ready for any kind of defense. Of course, and the best preparation is to make sure that they can''tunch any attacks at all.

    He used a special method to send the signal to the rest of the hub managers.

    He then went into the secret meeting room with a round table.

    This is a secondary meeting room within the Hub. Most of the time it is used by smaller teams to discuss specific ns when Sam is not here. Unless Sam or his friends are not there, they wouldn''t go to the main meeting room.

    Soon rest of the managers are here.

    Icarus took a deep breath and said.

    "The Hub is about to reach its ideal stage. We need to start the n. It is time to tighten the leash."

    All of them had solemn expressions immediately. Suspending the Dean of an academy might feel like a big deal. However, what they are about to do next will make that look like a paper cutpared to a stab with a Divine sword.

 Chapter 2139 Contribution

    Chapter 2139 Contribution

    The meeting went on for a few hours.

    The whole team looked through the profiles and started picking some people that would y a decent role in their n.

    After the meeting was over, they all collected some Divine Dimension Fragments left behind by Sam for this n. Icarus looked at the fragment is holding. Just one peek inside, and he couldn''t help takedeep breath.

    No matter how many times he saw it inside, he couldn''t help but feel amazed every single time.

    The space inside which could be considered as big as a city is filled with blueprints and recording crystals¡­ to the brim.

    Not a single square inch is left. If a person enters it, they will suffocate to death. It is that full.

    And they are all blue prints left behind by Sam. The best part is that he created one for each Hub branch and each Fragment haspletely different blueprints. There is no repeated document. Maybe there are some variants of same product in there, but they are all different.

    Icarus is almost reluctant to do this.

    He wore a disguise and went to the exchange center. He is about to do something that was never done before. He is trying to empty the exchange center.

    He ced the Divine dimension fragment on the desk, along with a bunch of tokens. "I am here to submit contributions of these people''s behalf. The ck tokens altogether get ny percent of the whole contribution while the remaining tokens get the remaining share. We would like it in separate spirit stones."

    The receptionist looked at Icarus in confusion.

    "You want to submit all the things in the divine dimension fragment?"

    "Not submit. Contribute."

    "What does that mean?" The receptionist asked. Icarus cleared his throat and brought out a book that''s as thick as a loaf of bread and openedspecific page.

    Deep inside that book, thereid a very oldw, that almost got lost in fine print.

    "Rule 1234 of the Exchange center. Any residence of the academy realm can offer up their findings as contributions instead of just submission. Not only would the contributor gain the price determined by the appraisal formation, the exchange center will set up a price for the information, theory or a blue print.

    When any student of the academy wants to buy this, they have to pay the price and that price will be given to the contributor."

    Icarus had to read the rule out loud.

    The receptionist looked at him in surprise. "There is such a rule? Howe I don''t know about it?"

    The receptionist asked and checked the book. It is indeed the rule book of the Academy realm.

    It is understandable though. This rule hasn''t been used in centuries. When trying to use thewsuits to deal with the Academies, Sam looked through the rules of the Academy realm more than a dozen times.

    And in that process, he came across this.

    At first, he also ignored that rule. It is a bit stupid. After all, the research of every person is valuable and they don''t want to give it to others, even with the price. And the whole point of exchange center is for them to get something for their research without actually selling it.

    The contribution rule is just a bunch of bullshit for them.

    Sam understood why the rule became so obsolete that no one really cared about it anymore, including the receptionists.

    However, after he decided to damage the economy of this realm, there is no way, he will not use such a great rule.

    The receptionist looked at Icarus and said.

    "Honestly, I cannot make a decision on this. If this is indeed the rule, I have never used it before. I would like to send a message to the headquarters and get their approval."

    Icarus nodded and he walked in to meet his manager. Even his manager was a shocked and called the headquarters.

    At this moment, in an isted pocket dimension.

    This is a world of clouds. That''s all one would say if they took a look at it. There is not a singlendmass visible to the naked eye and all anyone could ever see is a sea of clouds covering the blue sky.

    In the middle of it all, there is arge floating mountain on top of whichid a busy mansion. Several people are looking at hundreds of screens looking at the lives of various people.

    All of these are the members that handle the administrative tasks of the Academy realm. All of them have different duties.

    Finding new students across various realms, handling the coins of the realm, monitoring the appraisal formations, training the new members for the administrative tasks, etc.

    And at this moment, in one of the cabins of the mansion, a middle aged man was looking at over a dozen screens. Those are the screens monitoring the exchange centers as well as some other ces in the Academy realm.

    At that moment, his gaze is locked on one particr screen. The screen that showed Icarus in his disguise as he waited in the exchange center for the receptionist toe back. The middle-aged man sported a crew cut hair and wore the purple uniform the rest of the staff are wearing. He stood in the middle of the room with an air of curiosity rather than the authority. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    He had pale skin, blonde hair and blue eyes. Tall figure with broad chest and slim waist. That gruff beard made him way too handsome for a guy who works like a shut in.

    At that moment, a formation on the wall lit up and started blinking.

    *SNAP*

    With the snap of his finger, the light stopped blinking and turned into a constant glow.

    "Hello."

    "Sir, this is the manager of the exchange center in the Olympian region."

    "Speak."

    "There is a situation in our branch. A person came here and showed some old rule about contributing. We checked our logs, thest time the rule was used in the realm was more than a hundred and twenty years ago.

    It seems like he has a lot of stuff that he wants to add as a contribution. He even brought a Divine Dimension fragment to carry those things.

    "I am yet to hear your problem." The man interrupted. The manager was stumped and spoke.

    "Sir, we are not sure if we should take the contribution."

    "Is it in the rule book?"

    "Yes, Sir."

    "Is the rule book legitimate?"

    "Yes, Sir."

    "Then why the hell are you asking me if you want to do something that is already clearly stated in the rules?"

    "I¡­I¡­"

    "Don''t keep the resident waiting. Go there and finish your job. If you call for something like this once again, you are fired."

    He cut the call.

    He looked at Icarus with keen interest. Because unlike most people in the Academy realm, there is no way, Sam, his friends, the hub and any other things that he did can hide from these people.

    He tapped on a different formation and made a call.

    "Give me the Identity of the resident that is currently making the contribution in the Olympian realm''s exchange center. Get me his spiritual signature as well as the spiritual signatures that he submitted. Send me the constant surveince on him and his friends."

    He cut the call even before he could hear the response from the other side.

    Meanwhile, back in the Olympian realm exchange center.

    The manager came back and took over the process. He took a peek inside the Divine Dimension fragment and he was stunned.

    "All of them?"

    He asked.

    Icarus just nodded.

    "This will take days."

    "Then do it."

    He then took out amunication token and gave it to the manager. "Contact me, after you are done. However, I hope you will follow the firste first serve policy that you advocate.

    That means, unless my transaction isplete, you shall not perform any other transaction."

    Icarus turned around and left.

    The manager gulped. He knew something big is about to happen. He made the receptionist close the exchange center. He then took out a recording crystal. He ced it in the appraisal array.

    A video yed out very quickly, there is not much he could make out of it, however he got the title of it.

    ''Concept of Decoding Sword techniques using Vectors. Lesson 1: Stab'' (A/N: It is theoretically possible guys, but it is not useful in real life that much because, an average human cannot do such calctions on the go while fighting.)

    And it showed a video of how the vectors work and how they can be rted to a swordsman''s movement, when he performs a stab. Vector principles in the video are modified to be suitable for the spiritual energy and its behavior.

    Once the video is appraised, the manager looked at the number intently, waiting for it to change and give him a surprise and surprise it did.

 Chapter 2140 Behind the Scenes Deal

    Chapter 2140 Behind the Scenes Deal

    The big round zero started changing rapidly, it turned into one, two, four, five, six digit number and finally it reached seven digits before it slowed down. Even then, the number moved up.

    The manager''s gaze is locked on the first digit. His heart tightened as it grew slowly.

    1¡­

    2¡­

    4¡­

    6¡­

    And that is when the first digit stopped moving, soon the second digit, the third, fourth, finally when the number appeared.

    6561234

    He gulped hard. That is gold coins. It is not like the exchange center doesn''t have the reserves for it, instead, he is worried that if a single theory can draw so much, what would happen when he appraised all of them?

    He also noticed the time taken for the appraisal, it is much longer whenpared to appraising a theory on paper. This video is taking longer. Maybe the format is one of the reasons for it and theplexity could be another.

    No matter, he knew that he is going to spend a long long time in front of the appraisal formation.

    And that is just the start.

    The videos kept oning. The manager of the exchange centers watched this from there with interest. But at that moment, he spotted something that piqued his interest. Because at that moment, Ivar has dressed in the exact same way as Icarus.

    The disguise so simr that no one would believe that they are two different people unless they saw them together.

    He did the same thing as Icarus. He dropped the divine dimension fragment and then the tokens along with it. A call came to the manager and he responded exactly the same.

    "What the hell are these guys nning?"

    He muttered to himself and made a few more calls to pull up the logs and all the administration details. Soon, he found out one thing. Thend deed of all the hub areas are protected from the academy members to see.

    This made him curious and he checked who bought it all.

    Lo and behold it is under Sam''s name. He started connecting the dots and his anticipation only grew.

    "For so many fucking years, this Academy realm has been way too boring. Now, finally someone with some balls and abilities came. I want to see how this turns out."

    Just like he anticipated, these actions already started making waves. That very day, the students that went to keep to the exchange center were sent back. None of them were allowed to make any contributions.

    When they asked about when they cane back, the receptionist only gave one answer.

    "If only we can find that out."

    He went back. Many students, hundreds of them were rebuffed and they all panicked. They directly ran to their instructors and elders, the news was quickly spread to Deans.

    Even the Gambler Academy was not devoid of suffering from this.

    Dove held her forehead, she was just getting ready to make a big move on the Zeus Academy and at this moment, this news came to her. She sent one of the grade 4 seniors to go there and check the situation. Since it was a Grade 4 student, the receptionist patiently exined the situation. After that, he took arge parchment and wrote it down there.

    He sealed the door and pasted it there along with the signature of his own and the signature of the branch manager.

    The senior went and reported this to Dove.

    "Why the fuck would someone give that many contributions at the same time? It almost seems intentional."

    She muttered in her heart. At that moment¡­

    *TING*

    Her wrist band lit up. It was a message and it came from someone she didn''t expect to evermunicate with.

    None other than Icarus.

    She was surprised, because Icarus asked for a meeting. She hesitated before agreeing to it and went out to the Hub to meet him.

    As soon as she entered the hub, she felt a force pulling her away to the cabin in which Icarus was sitting in.

    She was stunned to find herself sitting in a wooden chair. Across the table in front of her, Icarus sat waiting for her arrival.

    "That''s quite a wee, you have here."

    She muttered and looked around. Only then did she notice that the whole room is a closed box. There is no entrance or exit to it. There is no venttion.

    "Is this a secret office?"

    "Yes."

    "So, why did you call me here?" She asked. She is still calm, despite being trapped with someone stronger than her.

    "I contacted you because a friend asked me to do you a favor on behalf of the hub. So, I called you to give you a headsup as well as an olive branch."

    "Heads up? For what?"

    "You must have already gotten the news that the exchange center has been closed down. It won''t be opening for days. It might even take a couple of months before it opened."

    "Couple of months? Why would you know about it? Even the staff are not sure how long it will take."

    "Let''s just say, my friend has his means. I won''t go into details. All I can tell you is, the coin influx from the exchange center is going to be blocked for a while."

    "So? The students will struggle in the next few days a bit. It is not like there was never a coin shortage in the realm. It happens quite often."

    Icarus smiled at that reply.

    "Of course, even I faced the coin shortage you mentioned myself. But if you think about it, you will understand that the coin shortage this time, is quite different from the coin shortage in the previous years.

    This time, the students don''t have the reserves like they usually do. The missions are not sufficient as well, because the students all have new expenses."

    At this moment, realization dawned on Dove. Shepletely forgot about the special training program and its use.

    "The students have to pay for the special training program." She muttered out loud.

    "Exactly. The students have to pay a weekly fee and I am sure a lot of your academy''s students are already panicking about it. I called you here to help you out of this situation."

    Dove heaved a sigh.

    "Icarus, if I remember correctly, the Gambler Academy didn''t really have that much friendship with the hub. Why would you contact me directly to offer help? After all, I heard many cases in which the hub was stubborn like a bull.

    Why would you bend the rules now?" n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "As I said, because of a friend."

    "Who would that friend be?"

    "I am not in a ce to reveal the details. Of course, Dove, if you are that suspicious and do not want my help, you are wee to reject it.

    It is no problem for me."

    "Never mind, whoever it may be, since it is for my academy''s benefit, I cannot reject it."

    "All right, I heard that the Gambler Academy is about to wage arge scale attack against the Zeus Academy."

    "It is no secret. I already announced it."

    "So, whatever you gain from the Zeus Academy, in terms of the resource points, you need give five percent to the hub.

    Of course, you don''t have to pay the share from the ransom. That ispletely yours. Only the resource points and the resources thate from it. That too, five percent in the existing reserves. It is not even a continuous deal.

    If you do that, your students do not have to pay the fee for the next few months. Even after that, I will modify the contract so that they can use other things, even the spirit stones to pay instead of the coins."

    "Why does that deal sound too good to be true? Everyone knows that the true profits from the Academy war onlye from the ransoms. You are leaving such a big pie alone? Based on how much desperation this situation is going to cause, you could have gotten quite a big piece of that pie."

    "Once again, this is a favor, not a pure profitable deal and it is for a friend."

    "That''s one generous friend. I wonder what Joker will think about it."

    "Don''t worry, Joker never rejects that man''s words. Even if that man says to give away the whole Hub, Joker would do that."

    Dove was stumped.

    "Who the hell is that man?"

    "You know him. Its just that you don''t know that is him that''s doing this. Anyway, you can go and tell your students this. However, there is one thing, you need to issue a massive gag order.

    You need to inform each and every student separately and make sure that you make a soul contract with them. They also need to act like they are in distress. The hub is not ready to face the pressure from other academies because of this."

    "Alright, this deal seems like it is too good to be true though. I hope you are not pulling my leg here."

    "Of course not. That friend might get me fired if I did so."

 Chapter 2141 Dean and Christos

    2141 Dean and Christos

    Just like that, a deal was made behind the scenes. The gambler academy students who were the most rowdy because of the closure of exchange centers suddenly calmed down. They all got a message from the academy to go back.

    Dove divided all of them into small batches and spread them across multiple rooms. The student union members from the freshmen to grade 4 seniors were the first batch that she met.

    "I just made a deal with Icarus, the manager of the hub regarding the exchange center situation¡­"

    She exined the whole deal. They were all surprised that they managed to solve this impeding disaster just like that.

    She made them sign the soul contracts right there and assigned them to one room each so that they will exin the situation to the rest of the students. Then she went to the Dean and asked him to do something.

    "Why do I need to be the one to sign all these soul contracts?" Dean Wharton is pissed. Because Dove wanted the students to sign the contract with the Dean. Which means, Dean has to sign thousands of contracts at the same time."

    "Because you are the Dean, and you should have been the one to solve this problem to begin with."

    "Then what is the point of the rest of the staff in this Academy and your stupid student council?"

    He grumbled, but he did as he was told.

    The contracts were sent to different rooms and were signed.

    Everyone in the city knew that something big is happening in the Gambler Academy, however no one other than the Gambler Academy students know what actually happened.

    After that, Dove and the student union started going on with their business of messing up the Zeus Academy properties. By now, there are a lot of grade 1 resource points that are already under their control.

    Their should have been doing the ransom exchanges if everything went normally. However, right now the Gambler academy didn''t open the ransom talks. Instead, they just locked up the prisoners and didn''t even offer a chance to have a conversation.

    Many students, seniors, instructors and elders came to Gambler Academy to ask for the ransom exchange, however, the student council was adamant with their decision. Their next instinct was of course to go to their Dean, the only problem is that their Dean is suspended at the moment and is not allowed in the academy premises. So, they went to find him in the inn within the city, where he is currently residing.

    Christos took the lead on this one again.

    *KNOCK* *KNOCK*

    Christos knocked on the door.

    "Come in."

    He opened the door and went in. The Dean is sitting on the floor. The room is empty, nothing is in there. Not even a bed or a chair. The dean is in the lotus position in a meditative state. He opened his eyes and looked at Christos.

    "Sit down. We need to talk a lot."

    Christos did as he was told. Both of them stayed in silence for a couple of seconds, before the Dean spoke.

    "There is a lot to go through. But let''s start with why you are here."

    "It''s the ransom exchange. The Gambler Academy upied several resource points and their activities are already our Grade 2 resource points. But they are not epting any sort of ransom to release our students.

    They are being held as prisoners for a while now and there is no response."

    "So?"

    "We need your advice. How can we get them out?"

    "To be honest, I don''t know how to handle that situation either. The most I would have done would be going to the Gambler Academy and mediate with my words. And those words would have carried some weight, when I had the position of the Dean.

    Now, I am not the Dean."

    "Sir, Please. How do we handle this?"

    "Christos, that is the only way I knew. I always follow the rules and y by the rules. Only in thest few days, I gave into the circumstances and here I am. I lost the reputation I have umted, I lost the job I put my life into."

    "It is just a temporary thing. Why are you acting so depressed? You are the Dean of the Zeus Academy for gods sake."

    Christos lost it. He was not a patient person to begin with.

    "Yeah, that is all you know. Do you know where these two elders actually are? With Theron. Do you want to go there and bring them back? Do you want to go and mediate that situation? Then I will fix your mess.

    How about that? Do you want trade?"

    "Theron has them?" Christos asked with his mouth so wide that his jaw could hit the floor and he wanted to do that, because even that would have been an understatement to express his surprise.

    "Yes, how do you think I brought back Pearl to make a deal with the Judge? Do you think that he will handover that girl after the giant screw up caused by your stupid n? I had to trade them."

    Christos took deep breaths.

    "Wha¡­what is he going to do with them? What is he nning?"

    "I don''t know. He is nning to ascend to the celestial realm and be a god, he saw little sess until now. He doesn''t know what the problem is and he needs the help of a god to identify the problem so that he can solve the issue.

    For that, he needs to give out a certain level of sacrifice. The two elders are the sinners of the Olympus, they would fetch a pretty price."

    "So, you are not going to get your job back?"

    "Not until the case stands."

    "So, either the case has to be solved or the intiff has to disappear?"

    Dean looked at Christos and said.

    "You might have enough background Christos, but don''t poke something that you shouldn''t have. A few years ago, Icarus pissed off one elder, because of this case and had to quit school, he was tortured andpletely got stuck in that house arrest.

    However, never ever take that a sign of his weakness. He is neither weak nor ipetent. I don''t know how he managed to get in touch with the Hub, but the moment he did, he disappeared and came here.

    He can at least go against a person that is one stage higher in cultivation than him. Whatever pride you have for your background, he should have double for his aplishments, but he didn''t have that."

    "What are you trying to say? Can you get to the point?"

    The Dean chuckled.

    "See, you couldn''t be patient to let me finish my point, he has been patient for years."

    "What does that prove?" n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "It proves that he is someone that shouldn''t be provoked. A person who has patience like that, who can tolerate all that¡­ they react extremely wildly when they are pushed into corner and those corners include threats to their life, threats to the people they love and the actions of the people who take their patience for granted.

    And you are nning to do exactly that."

    Christos gritted his teeth.

    "You focus on getting your job back. Since you are not the Dean, the situation is getting out of hand. No one is respecting the academy any more. If you are the Dean, I am sure the gambler academy wouldn''t have acted this way."

    Christos was about to get up, but at this moment, Dean gestured him to sit back down.

    "I have something more to talk to you.

    First of all, right now there is a problem going in the region. The exchange center."

    "Yeah, there is just some trouble with the exchange center. It will be fine."

    "No, it won''t be. In the next few days, it will be the end of a week. You need to pay coins to the Hub."

    "So?"

    "You stupid Idiot." Dean chuckled at Christos'' stupidity.

    Christos didn''t know why the Dean is chuckling, but he just stayed put and waited.

    "You are going to see one of the greatest disasters that ever hit the Academy region. It would be worse than an Academy war. Because just to get over this disaster, people will start fighting against each other, there will be assassinations nned, close friends will turn on each other.

    The families of the people that are involved will be effected in a way that you do not know.

    And all of this is happening right under your knows, under the smokescreen created by the ming skulls, the court cases, the new pocket dimensions that should have never existed.

    I kind of think everything is connected. If they are not connected, someone is taking advantage of it with all the knowledge.

    You need to act carefully.

    Right now, it is already toote for me. I cannot get out of the current situation that easily."

 Chapter 2142 Situation in the Bar

    2142 Situation in the Bar

    Christos looked at the Dean for a moment in silence.

    After some time, he stood up and said.

    "You are overthinking this. The ming skulls are nothing but a gang of rats that hide after making a small hole in a mountain. They are not the concern now, the Gambler''s academy is. It seems like you became too obsessed with them."

    He turned around and walked out.

    Dean chuckled once again and looked at the sky through the open window.

    "I never knew that all the respect I garnered was only because of my position. It wasn''t because of virtue and it wasn''t because of strength, purely because of my position.

    And now that the position is gone, even a grade 2 student is lecturing me, saying that my spections are wrong.

    Whoever you are, my friend. The one operating behind the scenes, in a way, I am grateful to you. You just showed me how pitiful my ambitions are to change the way the entities of Olympus operate. You showed my how weak my position as a Dean of the Zeus academy is.

    You are, in a way, my teacher that taught me a great life lesson."

    He closed his eyes and went into a meditative state again.

    Christos went back to the academy and assembled a meeting to talk with the senior students.

    "We need to get rid of Icarus." That''s what he started the meeting with and it went on for hours and even to the next day as they discussed all sorts of ns.

    Meanwhile, time passed and it is time for the third pocket dimension.

    In general, in such a hugepetition, Sam''s presence would have given immense relief to everyone in the scene, however the ming skulls are still at loose. Dayus who nned to build his reputation on the heads of the ming skulls is now aughing stock among the students of the region.

    However, he at least hoped that he would gain this legacy inheritance.

    Otherwise, he wouldn''t be able to hold the crew that he so desperately wanted. And by the end of the third pocket dimension, his wishes came true. He did manage to score the legacy inheritance and to his pleasant surprise it is the inheritance of a swordsman.

    His team also happened to have a swordsman and the legacy inheritance was given to him.

    He did that so openly and brazenly that he didn''t think about the consequences. And for that, Christos called him for a meeting on thest day.

    "Are you an idiot? Why would you announce that you are giving the legacy inheritance to him? Now, for the next fourteen days, we will have to guard him like mad dogs."

    21:06

    "Alright, I will send him to my family without anyone knowing. He will finish the assimtion process there, but you owe me a favor and I need that in writing."

    So, even though Dayus didn''t really ask for it, he had to sign a soul contract, agreeing to do a favor to Christos.

    In the middle of it all, the day of the payment to the Hub has gone and went. Icarus expected a lot of people to be unable to pay, however to his surprise, everyone paid their dues. With that surprise, he checked the footage after the payments are done and understood the situation.

    Everyone went above and beyond to gather the coins required to pay the dues. After this payment, most of them are really out of all the coins and the exchange center is still not opening. They are in a much more desperate situation because, for this payment they had to go out and sweep other realms to gather coins from their own families, ns, sects and other entities that gathered coins for theirtter usage in the academy realm.

    Now apart from paying the Hub, they need to pay to those people as well.

    While things are like that, anothertent pocket dimension that has been dormant for so long suddenly lit up. Courtesy to Night Ghost''s activation. Another pocket dimension that came out of nowhere. And it opened up exactly after the third pocket dimension was closed.

    So, most of the people directly went in there. Sam is not present in the academy realm to direct this pocket dimension, but of course, he did give the instructions to his friends. This led to another unassuming mid-tier talented young man getting the prize.

    Another puppet that was out of this world. And once again, an attack happened out of nowhere and this time, it garnered much more attention than ever before. As if that is not enough, that very night something unexpected happened.

    In the dark night, within the end streets of the city, in a bar where the citizens that lost all their potential drink their sorrows away.

    The bar is filled with the chaos and destruction. People are drinking with huge hugs as they screamed at each other. At that moment, a young man entered the bar in disguise. His face scrunched up because of the disgusting stenching out of that ce.

    *CRASH*

    A chair crashed at his feet. A drunk bald man with a huge stomach is tripping and walking towards him.

    "Hello, dear friend. Ihave never seen you here before. Wee to our bar of losers. What kid of loss did you take today? What sorrows are you trying to drown here?"

    He asked with a crooked smile.

    The young man closed his eyes and gritted his teeth.

    "What kind of bloody situation did I get myself into? To think I had to stoop this low."

    A dagger appeared in his hands and shed across the throat of the bald man. The man copsed on the spot and the chaotic bar is silenced the next moment.

    He looked at them and kicked the door close. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    That night, screams of pain and death resounded through the streets of The Olympian region and all of that for some coins.

 Chapter 2143 Boiling Olympian Region

    2143 Boiling Olympian Region

    The news of the bar room massacre spread throughout the region.

    However, no one knows who did it, no one knows what was the reason behind it. The only thing they knew is that all the bodies lost the spatial rings on them. If not for the gruesome massacre, they would have mistaken it for a robbery.

    But who would tell them, that it is actually a robbery.

    Simr incidents happened that night at various spots, but the scale is much smaller. And it wasn''t limited to just the Olympian region. Starting from Icarus and Ivar, the rest of the exchange centers are soon closed.

    They are all busy trying to appraise all the things Sam dumped on them.

    So, the crisis is approaching in all the cities and finally Christos who initially thought nothing of the issue, took note of it.

    He immediately contacted the head of the city guard.

    "What do you want? Last time I checked, your academy members are pretty furious with me for dealing with Sam, the way I did. You wanted nothing to do with me ever again." The captain said with a smirk.

    The Zeus Academy people are indeed furious as the captain said. At first, they coborated with the captain to bring Sam to the trial. Then they wanted to use the twelvebors as an excuse to make him suffer.

    But it backfired big time.

    With Sam''s case as precedence, Icarus is making them taste their own bitter medicine. Of course, as usual, they became allergic to ountability and pushed it all on to the captain who actually did his freaking job for once.

    "I wanted to talk to you about the bar room massacre. Do you have any clues about the culprit?" Christos asked.

    "I don''t. I just took over the case. Why, what do you need?"

    "The Dean warned me about something and I believe this has something to do with that. Can you keep me in the loop about this case? Also, can you make the exchange center open? The situation might get out of hand because of this." n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "About the case, yeah, maybe I can. But the exchange center. You might not know this, but the Academy realm hierarchy clearly shows that even the receptionist of the exchange center has a higher rank than me.

    Just because they are not getting involved in the every day shit, doesn''t mean they don''t have the means to.

    If the exchange center says that they are closed, then they are closed."

    Christos sighed. Things are not really looking good for him. He should have acted immediately after the Dean''s warning. But still, he mobilized his troops right after.

    He spread them all over the city and kept an eye on every ce where a crime can be done easily. He doesn''t know what he wants to achieve with this. Maybe the safety and security of the Academy students and their properties. That is the most he could hope for.

    But too bad, what he doesn''t know is that many people under him are having some really dark thoughts.

    He then went to talk with several elders of the Academy. He needs someone to make the Gambler academy start the ransom talks. The academy war is still going on and every day at least one territory of theirs is being subjugated.

    The captives are increasing.

    He needs a solution for this, because the families that are part of the noble league are putting pressure on him.

    After some time, he came to a conclusion. He needs someone in the position of the Dean urgently. Only they can get these students out. And there are only two ways a Dean could appear.

    One is Icarus'' disappearance and another one is appearance of apletely new Dean.

    He decided to move in two fronts.

    He ordered the Seniors to make a move on Icarus that very night. To their delight, they also got some intel from god knows where that Icarus is about to dine in Nn''s restaurant that night.

    After issuing the order, he went to meet some of the representatives from the Noble league families.

    "I want to propose to the admission of a New Dean for the Zeus Academy. Even if it is a temporary admission, unless there is a Dean, the Gambler academy will not budge."

    There are a bunch of middle-age looking people sitting in the room along with him. They all stayed silent and looked at him. Waiting for him to continue.

    "Right now, there are three candidates that we can make use of.

    One is the Deputy Dean Karnik. He is the graduate from the same batch as the current Dean. He has great enough reputation and when the current Dean was being appointed, hepeted with him. In process, he joined hands with several Noble league families.

    Even though he didn''t win, he still maintained the alliance. I am sure, many of you people here have an impression of him.

    The second candidate is the Grand Elder Narc. He is an expert inbat, and medicine making. He is also a poison expert. He is the strongest of the three candidates that I am proposing. He is the junior of the current Dean and is also very loyal. Whenever Dean wants someone to do some behind the scenes work, he is the go to.

    In a way, Narc knows more about the operations of the academy than Karnik.

    The third one, an Elder named Miva. The Female elder that is known to be the most dangerous in the Zeus Academy because of her underhanded means. No one knows where her force is located, but whenever she wants something, her force gets it."

    He finished exining their profiles and waited for them to speak.

    "Why are there only three candidates? Why are some candidates isted from this list?"

    One of the Elders spoke and christos immediately understood why he spoke those words.

    Noble league has one goal and that is to make the Zeus Academy truly theirs and the most important thing in that endeavor is to make one of their own into the most authoritative figure. For that reason, the noble league grooms candidates that are suitable to take over the Dean''s position.

    These three are also part of those candidates. However, even in the Noble league, there is some power struggle and for that reason, every candidate obviously leans towards one family or a faction or the other.

    And this elder pointed this out because the candidate selected by his family is not there.

    "These three elders are the only ones that have the least chance to being prosecuted by the judicial proceedings.

    The n hatched by the Icarus has not effected these three and that is why they are the only three viable candidates."

    "So, the Dean Steel te is finally bing just Mad man Steel te. Just like old times."

    For this, Christos didn''t have any response. Steel te is a nick name given to the Dean. Because before he was in power, everyone did whatever they wanted. The corruption in the Zeus Academy and even other academies is way too high.

    But once he came, all the corrupt people finally kicked a thick steel te. Of course, his steel te like mentality was there before that as well and at that time,he used to be called Mad Man steel te and after the Dean''s position was taken over by him, he became Dean Steel te."

    They discussed a few more details and adjourned the decision for now.

    Christos knew that there is no use in making them decide right there. Now they will approach the three candidates in secret and then make a decision.

    He just decided to move on to a more pressing topic.

    "We are in a dire need of coins right now. The exchange center is closed for some reason and the contract with the Hub is going to be a big trouble to a lot of people. At first, I thought it is not much of a big deal.

    Because most students from the noble league have an abundance of the coins. The strategy of the Noble league that I implemented to farm coins worked well and we can go by for a couple of months.

    But the problem is the rest of the region will be in a chaotic state because of them. A massacre has taken ce recently just for this reason¡­

    They went on discuss the issues. There are many arguments. Some said, they should take action against the Hub because of the suspicious nature of the request, some said they should make a deal¡­ h..h¡­h.

    While the Olympian region is boiling in the mes he created, Sam is currently in the middle of executing another beautiful n that will move things faster on the Thssa''s front. After all, those families conspired against him and he has yet to payback in a significant scale. His hands are itching and he just found a perfect way to make some damage.

 Chapter 2144 Virus

    Chapter 2144 Virus

    Sam is currently inside a cave deep inside the forest.

    The cave is full of medical equipment that he created. It looked a lot like the modern equipment, but after years of research in the Dusk, these devices are all made to suit the needs of the cultivators.

    In the middle of the cave, on the table in front of himid a Blood Yena,pletely unconscious. Sam is currently monitoring its bodily functions with the observation ability.

    Blood Yena are kind of unique creatures. They live inrge packs. Packsrger than wolves and they have a strict hierarchy. At the same time, they are much more cunning and intelligent that hyenas.

    However, there is one thing that makes these creatures more unique than the rest of the canines. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    They are outcasts. Not just canines, the rest of the beasts all despise these creatures because of their uncontrobly gluttonous nature. They cannot be satiated no matter what.

    Whenever they are full, they consume that energy by copting and increase their tribe. The female yena consume a lot of food during the pregnancy period, which helps them go crazy for the food. And Male Yena constantly looks for mates to satiate their food.

    One could only imagine, how much they consume just for procreation.

    Of course, a single pack can only have so many mates for these creatures. In a general case, it is more likely that the males start fighting each other. But in case of these things, they don''t. Instead, they look for mates in other canines.

    Wolves, foxes and hyenas mostly.

    That is also the reason for the existence of such a variety of Yena Species.

    In the information Sam has, the reason for such sessful spread of Yena species is the highly reactive and cohesive gene they hold. When Sam came here and witnessed just how many species the Yena have and how much they assimted the gic strength of the other creatures, he couldn''t help but feel a bit creative.

    That is the cause of some experiments.

    He made some quick arrangements for the Golden Hinds. There are not many strong beasts within those Golden Hind tribes. And the actually strong ones can protect themselves.

    So, Sam''s main task is to deal with the weak ones.

    Sam did two things. He let out of his beasts to act as the body guards. He even let out his specters, shadow mice and shadow undead. Then he arranged a bunch of formations that could help with dealing with the slightly stronger foes.

    The rest of the golden hinds will be taken care of by themselves.

    While things are like that, he delved into the experiments.

    He did some gic research and came across some really interesting qualities of the genes. To put it simply, he realized that the Blood Yena, the original species have a gene structure that appeared to be ''iplete''.

    Whenever this gic structure is merging with the genes of the other species, they are gaining a sense of pletion''.

    And that is the reason, the variant Yena have much better control over their gluttony unlike the Blood Yena.

    This gave Sam a great idea and he got tempted into making a living biological weapon. He created a gic serum that will react with the DNA of the Yena. And this gic serum is created with the genes of microorganism.

    This provides a slightpletion to the gic structure, but at the same time the Yena will be carriers of an extremely powerful virus.

    This virus has symptoms very simr to rabies and they are amplified by a million times to react against the spiritual energy possessed by the other creatures.

    So, now Sam is testing the first ever live subject of the gic serum.

    From the looks of it, everything is perfectly normal. There are no adverse affects to the creatures. The only effect the virus will have on them is that it consumes all the excessive energy from the consumption ofrge amounts of food.

    That means, the Blood Yena, will not immediately look for a mate and it will take much longer time to be full.

    At the same time, once the virus within the body reaches a certain level, it will be excreted and will be reced by its own offspring. This allows the Blood Yena to stay at proper health. In long term, the packs of Blood Yena will not be as big.

    In a way, Sam is indeed finishing his mission. And his method will make sure that the Golden Hinds might not even face this problem ever again in the future.

    Now that the experiment is sess, there is one problem.

    "How do I make them ingest this?"

    That is the problem. These Yena are exactly friendly creatures and if they are just a couple of realms stronger, then he might have tried tomunicate or even other methods. But now, things are a bitplicated. Of course, he did have some ideas. Just he doesn''t know how well they work.

    While Sam is studying this problem, his new business partner Joran is currently in his room looking at several reports that came to him.

    "Are you sure these are real? They are demanding this much stock? They are not hoarding the goods are they?"

    He asked with a surprised tone. He is looking at the Stock requests from various businesses he had in the Thssa territory. These businesses are all selling Sam''s products there and those included the disposable guns.

    He already estimated that the demand will raise in just a couple of days. But he didn''t expect that he will see the highest demand for the weapons.

    "Did you get the report on the consumers for these weapons? Why are so many people buying?"

    He couldn''t help but ask. Of course, the ease and the power are the main reasons. The sales are numbering in tens of thousands from the day one. The only problem is that he thought some big family might be trying to snatch the load of these weapons. He cannot have Thssa itself hoard these weapons.

    The assistant nodded and passed another report.

    It is analysis on their customer base and from the looks of it, they don''t actually belong to Thssa.

    "I knew that these would be in demand, but this much?There are so many repeat customers. What they fuck are they doing with them?"

    He couldn''t help but mutter out loud.

    The assistant then spoke.

    "Sir, we have our scouts following some of the buyers with highest number of purchases. To our surprise, not only did their background not link to Thssa, it is quite opposite. The biggest buyers are actually people with no background.

    They don''t even have money to actually buy this many.

    Once they heard of it, they came to the store, used all of their life savings to buy one. In a few hours, they came back with their guns exhausted as well as a bunch of goods and money to buy more guns. That is how they became the biggest buyers.

    And the scouts said that these people are going on a rampage in the Thssa territory. One of them was a former genius who got his family killed because a branch family member of Thssa couldn''t control his temper and suffer humiliation.

    Now this young man took those guns and killed more than half of the people involved in the incident of his family''s massacre. He doesn''t seem to want to stop any time soon. Usually, he shouldn''t have been able to do that, but with guns he was able."

    Joran took a deep breath.

    "I wonder how the Thssa will react to this."

    He paused and went into a deep thought.

    "Send the stock they demanded. Let these things sell as fast as they could. Just keep an eye on the Thssa family and their movements. If there is any major retaliation from them, let me know immediately.

    Now, what about the wine? What are the sales like?"

    The entire room''s atmosphere retuned to normal.

    "Sir, the demand for the wine is creating quite a ruckus. The influential people are all acting forrge batches to be sold. They are even winning to let us auction the wie¡­"

    The meeting went on.

    Back in the Academy realm. The chaos that started with Olympian region as its origin is spreading like a wild fire to other regions. None of the regions were spared. The coin deficiency started showing. All the coin that has been collected by these academies over the years is being spent very fast.

    And to add fuel to the mes, Ivarnded another blow to the Thor Academy.

    He went to the Judiciary court and started filingints against the Thor Academy. Just like how theints were filed against the Zeus Academy. The news was announced.

    Almost every one from the Thor Academy. From the freshmen to the Grand Elders received the notices from Ivar.

    And the people that are in the know about the current situation of the Zeus Academy are shivering in fright.

 Chapter 2145 Preparations

    Chapter 2145 Preparations

    Ivar''s actions raised a lot of questions. At first, when Sam appointed this new team as Managers of the hub, they already felt a bit confused. The sudden disappearance of Joker also left them puzzled, but since the Hub was performing as it should, they didn''t look too deep into it.

    They even drew rationalizations like .. ''they are talented and not bound by any organization, they have strength and skills. Great pick to run organizations.''

    Simr spections were made and without any exnation from Joker, they just epted it.

    That is the nature of the people. They just try to rationalize everything when they stand to benefit from it. They could even rationalize things like cold blooded murder to mass genocide if they want to. The only factor is how big the benefit they gain from it.

    If the benefit is big enough, they can rationalize everything. Even after Icarus made his move and brought the Zeus Academy to its knees, they just thought it was a personal vendetta and Icarus was using the hub as his borrowed knife.

    Once again, rationalization.

    In that rationalization they chose to ignore the fact that the rest of the managers also have grudges. The very reason they are not affiliated with any of the academies is the grudge they held for the academies. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    However, they can ignore it once and of it as coincidence, but now that Ivar also did it, they didn''t want to act that stupid anymore and decided to take it seriously. Once again, meetings were held. They dug deeper into the situations that turned these talented students into former students.

    Of course, they also started looking deeper into hub, but there wasn''t much they could find. All of a sudden, they are wary of the bird puppets too. They performed all kinds of test and their methods became a bit drastic. These kinds of things happened all over the realm.

    And as this reaction kicked in, the other branch mangers also followed suit in filing the cases. They all picked the most troublesome academy they personally had the grudge with and filed cases against them.

    Of course, this action once again made the rest of the academies specte and they are on the verge of rationalizing once again.

    But still, right now, every academy and the administration of these academies are all wary of Hub and its things.

    Some seniors and student councils also noticed these, but majority of the people are still oblivious to this. They are all only thinking about their benefits, material or otherwise. Hub and its inventions are benefiting them, so they shall continue using them.

    And to do that, they are all in a desperate struggle to find the coins and this increased the crime rate everywhere. Even though there are attacks between students, the primary target right now are the citizens that are not part of any academy.

    Particrly, the businessmen.

    The people that operate various businesses became the prime targets and one way or the other, there was death in the cities with all the spatial storage rings missing from the dead bodies.

    Everyone is dreading the day for the next payment of the Hub and to their dismay the Pocket dimensions are right around the corner. On top of all these, the most nervous of them all are the Seniors from Grade 2 to Grade 4.

    Because soon it is going to be the Inter Academy Tournament. They are going topete once again and this decides the ranking of the Academies until next year. The ess for their resources, the favor with the gods they follow¡­ all of these things depend on this ranking.

    Of course, there is the point of personal glory too and they cannot miss that part. They need to be in favor with the gods to get better status after leaving this academy life.

    With all this chaos, there is some extra unprecedented pressure over their heads.

    Meanwhile, the one who caused this, who initiated this never seen before mayhem is ploughing a field like a farmer within his divine dimension.

    After a lot of thought on how to make these Yena ingest the newly created serum, he went back to his rooms. nts and vines has been the greatest way for him to spread terror or anything else for that matter.

    However, these Yena wouldn''t even eat a divine fruit much less ordinary nts. They only crave and eat meat. Their bodies cannot digest any sort of nt material.

    And that made him go on another gic experiment. He holed himself up in the divine dimension''s second floor and ran thousands of simtions simultaneously.

    Finally, with the transformation gene and some old experiments, he managed to find a way to make this work.

    For that, though the nt has to evolve and he needs to feed it with a lot of vitality. For that, he has to take the help of the Forest Bear.

    He ploughed the field and dropped the seeds that he created.

    He rearranged the earth back in its ce and made the bear work.

    "Redirect the vitality of the whole forest in this area. Let it grow until it drops all of its fruit."

    He ordered the bear.

    Bear looked in the surroundings. It is the wood elemental area within the Divine Dimension''s field. In the area, the forest is full of high vitality trees.

    There is only small patch ofnd with the seeds.

    The Bear sat on the ground and started diverting the vitality of the trees. It all flowed through the ground and entered the seeds. The sprouts came from multiple spots and soon they grew into the trees. The flowers appeared and then the fruits, after the fruits grew big enough, the tree disintegrated. Bear stopped spreading the vitality. Sam picked a fruit up. It is a red colored fruit. It looked like condensed blood and even the fragrance emitted by it is of blood. As he took a sniff, he could feel his Raiju blood line reacting to it.

    *SWOOSH*

    At this moment, Raiju who was in a different area of the divine dimension came running there with his tongue out.

    "Alright, you can''t eat it. It won''t be good for you."

    Sam said with a smile and buried the fruits as they were. The fruits are a sess, but he cannot stop the process here. It needs to go through the process a few more times and he needs to make the gene of the fruit evolve a bit more with the properties of the soil and the surrounding trees.

    Only that way, the mutated gene he injected in it will survive and propogate properly. It also increases its strength and resistance from the immunity of the Yena body.

    The process went on for a while, he made the trees grow ten times and only took the fruits of the eleventh batch. The blood smell is very thick and the flesh of the fruit resembled actual red meat while the liquid of the fruit resembled actual blood.

    He stored the fruits away and went outside.

    He already scouted for the perfect ces to spread the trees as fast as possible.

    He already ced several formations in ce that would attract the vitality of the trees a bit faster. Of course, he could have used the same method in the divine dimension as well. But the energy drawn by the bear is purer and it will have positive effects on the fruits themselves reinforcing the cell structure a bit.

    As soon as he buried the fruits, the sprouts came and they started growing out. The surrounding flora started losing their vitality to it and within minutes they turned saplings and within hours the tree is full shape and soon there are fruits.

    Sam picked the fruits from them and nted them on the side, he was constantly moving for a couple of days and finally he had tens of thousands of fruits in his storage. Meanwhile, all the trees are still intact and they are still growing fruits albeit a bit slowly.

    After he collected enough, he travelled to different areas through which the Yena will pass from different regions. All he had to do was drop those fruits there and the Yena will take care of the rest.

    Nothing changes in their original nature. They would still be greedy and they would be still be gluttonous. But the aftereffects will only be more suitable for them tomit to their nature.

    Which only makes them more dangerous.

    By the time Sam is done with all these, the fourth pocket dimension day hase along with the payment day. He is still not nning to go back. The pocket dimensions are not exactly attractive to him.

    They are only for him to disrupt the chaos and his absence there might just benefit him a bit more.

    He just needs to finish this.

    Of course, the academies are not just boiling by now, they are just short of being drowned in Lava. For the first time in the history of the region, the pocket dimension day was overshadowed by one thing and it was as trivial as the coin.

 Chapter 2146 Pressure

    Chapter 2146 Pressure

    The payment day, the same day as the pocket dimension day.

    Icarus is waiting outside the Hub as he sent constant messages through the wrist band to many students. The message was basically to notify them of one thing.

    "If by midnight, you do not pay up this week''s coins, the soul contract shall take effect and you shall pay the price ording to that."

    That was gist of the message. This made everyone go back and take a look at the copies of the soul contracts they signed. The most notable and eyecatching condition was that they are going to hand at least half of their personal property that belongs to them if their payment is dyed by one week and this will only be considered interest.

    So, after one week they need pay up the two weeks'' payment and they also have to pay up half of all their personal properties.

    Half of personal properties might not seem like much. For many of the students and citizens that don''t have big backgrounds, it is indeed so. Their personal property isn''t something they could''t afford to lose. They might face some serios financial trouble for a while, but they can recover.

    But people from big families.

    Particlry, people like Christos and other members of the Noble league¡­ Their personal properties go as far ass, realms and all the resources thoses and realms provide. Apart from that, they have personal businesses and business partnerships that they have established with so many other merchants.

    They own ves as form of their dark forces that were hidden from their families and organizations. All of this, had to be handed over for ust missing one week''s payment.

    And that wasn''t even the worst part of the contract. It was just the most notable thing because, it was the first rule in the penalties and they all kind ofughed at it when they had to sign the contract.

    Because, the coin amount they had to pay was not exactly big. They could pay it off easily at that time. They all thought¡­ ''why the fuck would I need to dy my payment for a week?''

    That was their mindset.

    And now they felt a prick in their hearts when they looked at the same statement. Then they looked at the remaining conditions. What happens when their payment is dyed by two weeks?

    They would be barred from the Hub and they still have to pay for that week. What happens after three weeks? They will be giving up all of their inheritance rights that they had until that payment day to the Hub. So, if they had the inheritance rights for the twenty percent of the family property, that right then belongs to the Hub.

    And the fourth week is thest one. They lose everything. Their personal property, inheritances, knowledge, their soul, body and of course their coins. They all bes the ve of the Hub, or to be precise the ves of the owner of the Hub. Who they believed is the Joker.

    But in reality, it is none other than Sam.

    So, this triggered a reaction that set the upper echelons off. Apart from all the wary behavior that they are establishing against the Hub, they now have to answer another question to quell the raging situation.

    ''Where the fuck is Joker?''

    At this moment, in a room within the Zeus Academy where Christos usually held some important meetings, a man sat across him on the table. The man is middle aged looking and he had some silk robes that do not go with his burly and ragged face. He had thick beard and a natural frown on his forehead.

    Just looking at his face, one would either feel scared or feel angry. But the silk robes almost looked like they belonged on a schr with their white color and the exquisite embroidery.

    "Where the fuck is Joker?" n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    That is what he asked.

    Christos sighed as he looked at the man in front of him. This guy is the leader of one of the families in the Noble league. He is neither at the top of the league, nor is he at the bottom. They just go by in terms of strength. But in terms of background¡­

    One of the major families of the Noble league, a family that could rival Christos'' own family, is backing this guy up.

    "Sir Whilt, I don''t really have any knowledge about the Joker. Ever since he appointed Icarus as the manager, he disappeared. Even when consulted, he is talking only through virtual projection, that too only when he wished.

    For some reason, even before we visited him, he knows our purpose ofing there and he is not talking to us anymore."

    "I don''t give a shit. You are the one that encouraged the whole league to be in bed with this Hub or whatever that hell hole is. Now, my family is out of the coins. My son who followed your orders is in debt and he needs to pay it today or he will lose half of his properties."

    "Sir, we can manage the payment for your son. We will have a week to figure out this situation."

    "And then what? Even the reserves of the noble league are not enough. You might not know this, more than half of the upper echelons of the Noble league sent their secret forces they are nurturing to the Academy realm.

    They are all part of the special training program. They got in after this Joker opened it up to the rest of the citizens as well.

    Do you think they will bleed out of their coin reserves to make the smaller families like ours get out of this situation?"

    Christos was stunned. This is brand new information. He didn''t know that the other families did this. If he did, he would have stopped them at any cost. After all, he is one of the few that foresaw the probable economic crisis. Its just that he trusted the exchange center too much and didn''t expect it to be closed.

    Most of his ns actually depended on the exchange center being open.

    Now that it is closed, he is also at a loss.

    Even when it was closed, he took it way too easy. He believed it is just a matter of couple of days or a week at most. Never did he realize something like this would happen.

    But even with the assurance of the exchange center, he wouldn''t have let the secret forces be included in the special program. Secret forces are individual forces, they are hidden in the dark and cannot be used by the league or him personally.

    They belong to the families that are grooming them and he cannot benefit from them. So, how could he let them benefit in his territory.

    But there is no use in crying right now.

    "Sir Whilt. I understand the situation right now. More than anyone else. Maybe there is indeed someck of thinking on my part when I pushed the hub that hard. But no one can deny the obvious benefits that came from them."

    "Still, you should have been more prudent when he gave such unfair contract conditions. This all started with you and you better handle it."

    Whilt stood up and left.

    On his way out of the academy, Whilt''s assistant who was in a deep thought said.

    "Sir, why don''t we do something like¡­"

    He exined his n, but Whilt shook his head.

    "No, there is a contingent to that as well. The contract is absolutely fool proof. I cannot believe how someone so obviously stated so many rough conditions, but we managed to look past t.

    Whatever the others say about us Olympians, is true. We are a greedy bunch and we might have to pay dearly for it."

    Whilt spoke with a frown. Even though there is a sense of trepidation in his heart, he also had half a mind that the noble league would solve this issue. Because he could predict how much of a fall the noble league takes if these contracts be effective.

    He believed they will try their best to stop it from happening and if they only cared about their children and offered up the smaller family children as sacrifice until they figure out the situation¡­. Whilt also knew what kind of adverse reaction they would have to face.

    "Let them do what they can. We will try our best as well."

    While things are like this, there is another pressing concern for Christos. The hostage situation.

    The gambler''s academy is still not letting them go. Pressure from Whilt and this allbined¡­ he is ready to lose it.

    He looked at his assistant and said.

    "Tell the seniors that they need to kill Icarus today. Steal as much coin from him as possible. I am sure he has a lot in reserve because of how much the Hub gains. I want the result by tonight."

 Chapter 2147 Icarus and Christos

    Chapter 2147 Icarus and Christos

    For Christos'' words, the assistant stood there like he swallowed a bug.

    "Sir, the seniors¡­ I don''t know if they would be willing to do this."

    Christos looked at him and said.

    "One failure and they all turned into cowards? What the fuck are they useful for? The reason a Second grade student like me took over the duties of the league was because they could shut the fuck up and focus on increasing their strength and skills.

    Icarus was a guy who got kicked out of this school, because he didn''t have anything these guys have. Neither the background, nor the resources.

    And now they are shaking in their boots to fight him?"

    "Sir, you also know what happened that night in Nn''s restaurant."

    Christos gritted his teeth and sighed. He slumped into the chair and held his be trying to get rid of this headache.

    A few days, he passed down a simr order.

    To deal with Icarus that very night. And the seniors all expressed their delight up on getting the chance to crush this once powerful figure and gain some glory in process.

    They even felt lucky when they found out that Icarus was going to the Nn''s restaurant to eat that night. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    To deal with Icarus that very night. And the seniors all expressed their delight up on getting the chance to crush this once powerful figure and gain some glory in process.

    They even felt lucky when they found out that Icarus was going to the Nn''s restaurant to eat that night.

    So, they all donned their most regal battle attires and went to find him that night.

    Many people saw them on the streets as over a dozen fourth graders of the Zeus Academy brandished their weapons and went to a restaurant of all ces.

    They were curious and followed them, but they went to the exclusive top floor, from which everyone else was barred.

    They were expecting some kind of noise, at least. But they couldn''t hear a thing the whole night. They thought these people were going out to fight someone, but there was no sign of it.

    After waiting for hours, people didn''t find a thing and had to go back. Rumors spread for the next couple of days, however no one really cared much. So many other important things were happening and this passed away.

    Only the seniors that went in, Christos who gave the order, the assistant who saw the report, Nn who arranged the encounter and finally, Icarus the man whomitted the deed. Only they knew. Only they knew the nightmarish hell Icarus put them all through.

    In fact, even Christos and the assistant only knew bits and pieces.

    What they knew for sure was that the next morning, Nn sent a message.

    ''Come and collect your people.''

    Christos who was eagerly waiting for the news of Icarus'' death, had to be greeted with that message. For some reason, he felt like he wanted to go there alone. When he went in there, he saw all the dozen seniors that were known across the realms as heroes.

    They were huddled together, in a corner. With their clothes tattered. With their bones broken. With their skin yed and many more burn wounds all of their bodies.

    They were shivering in fright as they wept like the infants crying for their mother''s milk. There were dried streaks of tears left behind on their faces. Their tears dried up, they couldn''t even bring out one more. When they spotted Christos, all of them crawled towards him,

    "Christos, save us. Please Save us."

    "Home¡­ I want to go Home. I cannot stay here."

    "Water, give me some water."

    They all cried. Cried like children and an inexplicable disgust rose from within Christos'' heart. He instinctively kicked the hand of the senior away. And the next moment he realized what he did. After all, the senior is hundreds of times stronger than him. This senior could kill him in a second.

    But to his shock, the senior didn''t attack him in spite. The anticipated attack didn''te. He looked at the senior.

    "S¡­S¡­Sorry.."

    He was whimpering and apologizing. A peak stage Transcendent stage cultivator of the Divine ne. He is whimpering like a puppy lost in a winter night. A puppy that was afraid of incurring the ire of any stray pedestrian.

    He looked at the rest of them and felt his heart go heavy.

    He contacted his assistant to bring these people away. He then went to meet Nn.

    "What happened to them?" He asked.

    Nn looked at Christos.

    "What do you think happened? They came, they fought and they lost. That is all there is to it. If you want more details, go and ask Icarus."

    "You¡­"

    "Christos, you don''t want to add another enemy to your list. It is already long enough. I might not mean much in the grand list of your enemies, but right now, I just could be thest straw that breaks your back.

    So, pay for the tables they broke yesterday and get the fuck out of my restaurant."

    That was all he got.

    The news needn''t be suppressed more, because it didn''te out to begin with. However, he still felt that something is wrong. It almost felt like the other party knew they wereing. And that feeling was a bit too familiar.

    Still, he couldn''t do much as many more problems were there on his head.

    Now, this day.

    He sighed once again as he remembered that day. "What should we do? The seniors became too cowardly, the juniors couldn''t do shit. The academy is filled with people who are about to go perform their twelvebors. We are neck deep in debt and if we don''t solve that, the league that was present for thousands of years will be destroyed.

    The academy itself might copse.

    What do we need to do?"

    He spoke out loud, as if he was asking the assistant. But he was just speaking to himself. The pressure was too high.

    After some time, he stood up and said.

    "Tell the people that are about to leave for the Pocket dimension that their debt will be settled. But they will have to pay up with some equivalent to that.

    I will try to find a way out of this."

    The announcement was made and he went out. He directly went to the Hub and asked for Icarus. He thought he wouldn''t be able to meet him. However, Icarus invited him in to the office and said.

    "What brings you here?" Icarus asked.

    "Why are you doing this?" Christos asked in return instead of answering the question.

    "What do you mean?"

    "You know what I mean. Why are you pushing the Zeus Academy into the corner? I investigated your case, your fight was with those two stupid elders who went after the n and conducted a genocide.

    I don''t know why you are so pressed on that case, but you did, you got involved. You didn''t gave power, they strong armed you. Now, you got power and you screwed them over. The matter should have been over.

    Why are you targeting the Dean and the rest of the Zeus Academy."

    Icarus chuckled and said.

    "It seems like you are still far away from bing a true leader of the league. They might have put you up for the task too soon."

    Christos frowned and said.

    "I would appreciate an answer instead of you trying to insult me and mypetence."

    "Alright. Here is your answer.

    My problem was not just the Elders. They never were, they were just the most rotten part of it. My problem was and has always been with the ways of the Zeus Academy.

    And hearing the way you speak. Talking so lightly of a genocide, I am only more sure that this fight is necessary."

    Christos gritted his teeth and said.

    "Every damn day, a genocide happens at some corner of the world. Why don''t I see you fighting everywhere? It is just personal vengeance. Don''t glorify yourself."

    Icarus chuckled again.

    "I never denied that it wasn''t personal. And my personal grudge with the ways of the Zeus Academy. Sheltering the Elders like that and even after they were found out, they were used as a bargaining chip in some backhanded deal with Theron.

    They should have been punished ording to thews of this ce, because theymitted the crime in the name of this ce.

    And why were they let off scot-free? Because the Dean wanted his niece safe, the elders wanted the benefits given by the Dean and the judges want the favor given by the dean.

    The students many of whom are part of ns like the one that got destroyed. But they don''t have a care for it. Because of your conditioning in this academy.

    And you are right, genocides happen all the time. But more often than not, they happen for personal grudges, wars, revenge, punishment or a show of strength. But your Elders did it to gain the favor of an entity that was despised by gods they preach so much about.

    And they dared to shun me to silence and damn me to suffering because they are too scared to reveal their own rottenselves and this academy aided them in.

    I will keep on pressuring the academy. Let it crack and let it break. I want to see it rebuilt and teach the things that its actually meant to teach."

 Chapter 2148 Sour Meeting

    2148 Sour Meeting

    Christos didn''t understand why Icarus is doing all these.

    All he felt was that Icarus is acting with a Holier than thou attitude. That is all. He didn''t understand the morality behind that decision. In his opinion, it was just pure hypocrisy on Icarus'' part. He believed that with enough benefits anyone can do anything, no matter how immoral it is for the others.

    "Sure, you can do what you want. But leave the Dean alone. Withdraw the case." Finally Christos spoke why he actually came here for.

    "And why would I do that?"

    "The Zeus Academy is already on the verge of copse. Since you said you are doing this for the good of the academy, you cannot just allow the academy to be trampled on. The Gambler Academy is expanding its reach way too much.

    Zeus Academy is facing severe pressure from the families and forces behind the students that are kidnapped.

    Absence of Dean is making them act way too overboard."

    Icarus looked at him with a puzzled expression and asked.

    "And what does this have anything to do with me?"

    Christos gritted his teeth and said.

    "I am asking for a truce. I am in a desperate situation and that is what prompted me to send the seniors to you. If you push me anymore, I would have to take even worse measures.

    Take a backstep for a while. Once the issue with the ming skulls and the Gambler academy are settled, then we can lock horns as much as you want."

    "No thanks. I like the current state a lot better. I believe pressuring Zeus Academy in this time is the perfect way to teach them a proper lesson. Otherwise, there is no point to my convictions."

    Christos felt like he is trying to push a mountain. It is not budging.

    "Please, I will pay you appropriately for it."

    Icarus raised an eyebrow and asked.

    "Really? How?"

    "Whatever you want. Resources, Resource points, territory, ves, power, authority. I can even get you instated as an instructor in the Zeus Academy if you want. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    After all, since you are sincere about the change in the Zeus Academy, you can do much more from inside. I will even help you deal with whomever you want."

    Icarus didn''t show any change of expression.

    Christos was losing it. He had an urge to scream out loud and tell him to spit out what he wanted. But he controlled the urge and said.

    "Just tell me what you want."

    "You will not be able to give me what I want, Christos. Not in this lifetime and the next. You cannot afford to buy mypliance."

    "Just tell me. As long as I can do it, I will do it. Please."

    "Alright." Icarus took out a paper and passed it to Christos. Christos looked at it. The more he read, the paler his face got.

    "Are you fucking kidding me?" He screamed hysterically.

    Icarus still had a faint smile on his face as he said.

    "I already told you. You cannot afford me."

    "I thought, I could find a middle ground with you Icarus. But I understood, you have no intention of it. You want to be destroyed. You are craving for destruction and the way you are acting, it is only a matter of time.

    I feel like that time is not even that far away."

    Christos turned around and walked towards the door. "Let''s see Christos. Maybe my time might end. But before it does, I am going to see the reformation of this Academy."

    Christos paused, but he walked out. He went into one of the simtion rooms and activated a consultation with Joker''s virtual projection. He took a deep breath and spoke.

    "I don''t know why you appointed that idiot Icarus here. But he is going to bring a great cmity to you.

    I want him to back off from the Dean''s case and if he doesn''t do it. I am going to take action. That is my personal grudge with Icarus. I also believe he might be the reason we are unable to get in touch with you.

    We need to discuss the contract once again.

    So, I hope you can send me an invite soon. Otherwise, Hub might suffer as coteral damage in my fight with Icarus."

    Christos walked out after giving out this half-assed threat. The Joker''s projection had a puzzled and confused expression on its face.

    It wasn''t Sam that came as the projection. It was the spirit of the formation. And in its thuoghts, Sam or the Joker is an almighty being. So, for someone to threaten him¡­ it appeared childish, immature and iprehensible to it.

    Christos walked out of the Hub and started moving towards the Zeus Academy. He didn''t fly away and he didn''t use a beast to go. Instead, he walked slowly through the streets. He wanted to cool his mind off.

    After some time, he hesitated a bit before taking out a specialmunication token.

    "This is Christos, I am activating the Shadow Cavalry in my name. Reach the Academy realm''s Olympian region by this evening. Wait for me in the woods behind the city. I will give you your target."

    10:01

    At the same time, in a realm farther away from the Academy realm, Christos''s family the chous family''s main estate.

    Within the family, inside the darkroom where no light reaches, A pair of eyes appeared out of thin air. Only if someone clearly observes with all their senses would they know that those eyes were always there. They just were always there. They were just closed.

    Not just that pair of eyes. Several pairs of eyes opened up following the first one.

    At this moment, an old man with a hunched back opened a door leading to that room. Instead of the light entering the room, the darkness inside crept out casting a huge shadow on the old man.

    "Shadow cavalry. Young master Christos used his credits to summon you for a task. You shall go to the Olympian region of the Academy realm by evening and aplish the task. If you cannot, your existence shall be erased. With no ce in this world or living or in the underworld controlled by Hades."

    He left those words and turned around.

    *GRUNT*

    A grunting noise came from within the room, acknowledging his words.

    After the old man left. Several ck shadows flew out one after another. Their aura reeked of death and as they passed through the corridor, the surrounding light was being devoured. They left the building and entered the outside world.

    The grass and nts died as they passed by. The trees decayed, the small life forms exhausted their lifespan. The people within the estate felt a chill run down their spine and several discussions were happening in various corners of that estate.

    The shadows appeared near a space gate and jumped into it disappearing from there.

    Christos knew it will take some time for the forces he called for. He just arranged the remaining things. He is not short of any tasks.

    First one is collecting the coins. Even though he said that their backup n is dead because of the locked exchange center. Christos kept a backup n for this backup n and that is hoarding some more coins.

    Along with the contribution from the league families, it is enough to pay off the payment for the week for everyone. There will be some left, but it would only suffice for a couple of people the next week.

    But he is not worried. Because, with the arrival of the Shadow Cavalry, he believed that this will be able to buy some time for himself. And if worsees to worse, the Hub''s problems will disappear along with the Hub itself.

    Meanwhile, Sam doesn''t know that a pawn in the chess board heid out is thinking of burning the whole board.

    Even if he knew, he would only chuckle. Because, no one managed to provoke the Hub. He is very tempted to edge someone to do it, because he wanted to see the results of all the effort he put into it.

    If someone wants to do it by themselves. Then he would only wee with open arms.

    And at the moment, he is doing something else with open arms.

    In the vast grassy ns, several Yena are running with mindless rage and Sam is in front of them, running backwards while facing them with a huge grin on his face. He looked like a crazy psycho, because his body is currently bathed in blood.

    And it is not ordinary, it is his own blood with all the goodness of the Mythical beastsbined together. These Yena are getting crazy over it. The whole pack is running towards him.

    The vast difference between their cultivation level of course, gave them the confidence that they could catch up to Sam.

    But just when the leader of the pack was in a pouncing distance¡­

    Sam who was within a few feet disappeared and appeared a few hundreds of meters away. It could still smell him. The most frustrating thing for the beast was this happened a bunch of times, but the temptation of the blood and its mutated hunger is not letting it move on from Sam.

 Chapter 2149 Transfer

    2149 Transfer

    Sam didn''t even wait to nce at the Pack leader of the Yena. He just continued running.

    The strength difference between both of them is way too high. Maybe if he used light fusion, he could keep up their distance a bit, but then the blood smell on him will be gone and the Yena might not even be attracted to him.

    So, he had to take this risk.

    Of course, he is not stupid enough to take this risk without making any preparations.

    He prepared a destination where he needs to lead these Yena. He wanted to build that ce in the path of the Yena itself, but the conditions are not suitable, so he had to take such a risk. After building the destination, he decided on a point of interception.

    The ce where he is going to interrupt the path of the Yena.

    And from that point of interception, he drew up a path to the destination. In this path of destination, he set up his life saving measures and now he is using them to the best of his ability.

    ¡­

    Two minutester, the Yena are already near Sam. One jump and he would be caught. However, the Yena didn''t jump this time, instead it waved its ws.

    *SWOOSH*

    Rays of ws charged at Sam. He could feel the tingling sensation on his back. His senses are telling him that he is at the end of the rope, the moment that attack meets his body. His hair stood on its ends and the ws almost touched them.

    At that moment, Sam''s foot stepped on a small circle engraved on the earth. The moment his foot touched the circle, he disappeared and reappeared at a different spot far ahead.

    *BAM* The attacknded on the ground. The pack leader felt frustrated. In fact, just frustration would be considered an understatement to describe its feelings.

    It growled and ran faster. Meanwhile, Sam was sighing in relief. It is way too dangerous for him to deal with these Divine ne Transcedence creatures at his current level. But the situation called for it.

    After considering all the factors, throughout this path, he created dozens of small formations that helped him blink from one spot to another without using his own energy. He knew that the moment, his body showed any form of spatial fluctuations, the Yena would take a different approach.

    So, he engraved these spatial blink formation to help himself in this chase.

    He has been using all these means properly.

    He maintained a speed that he estimated after observing the Yena and fixed these spatial blink device exactly where he calcted he would be at and he seeded in doing that.

    Whenever a w almost reached him or he got close towards the maw, he managed to reach the next nned spot and escaped from there.

    The chase continued for a few minutes, before Sam halted in his tracks. *SWOOSH*

    He took deep breaths trying to catch his breth.

    The yena pack leader looked at Sam and a wild grin appeared on its face. It halted along with the rest of the pack and slowly made its way to him. When it is only a couple of feet away.

    *SWOOSH*

    It kicked the ground with its hind legs and jumped at him.

    Sam didn''t move, he just looked at Yena and stood there while panting.

    *RIPPLE*

    At this moment, unbeknownst to Yena, Sam is watching as rippled form in front of his eyes while the Yena jumped towards him.

    He could see the close up of the sharp ws and the stinky mouth.

    From his position, that hit should take his head of, but the moment the w touched that rippling surface, the Yena felt a slight negligeable spatial pull all over its body. *BAM*

    Itnded on the ground and looked at the surroundings. It all looked very familiar. It is still in the grassnds and it thought it is still at home. Particrly, when it smelled the bottle of the bloodid down there not too far away.

    The Yena hurriedly ran towards it. As if it on cue, the bottle opened up by itself and the blood flew out, dissolving into the Beast''s mouth.

    Yena looked in the surroundings and soon noticed that her whole pack is behind him. It turned around and finally noticed just how different is this cepared of its home. The grass and trees do look familiar, but the breeze and the atmosphere, it ispletely different.

    It ran back hoping to go back, but it couldn''t. The invisible ripple that brought here, disappeared.

    Meanwhile back at Yena''s home, Sam stood there as hundreds of Yena disappeared from his vision. They all lunged at him mindlessly and they disappeared into the invisible space gate that he created.

    This is the destination he set up for them or to be precise the destination is the other side of this space gate.

    Sam dropped to the ground and took heavy breaths. He has to get ready for the next one.

    While Sam is resting, the Yena and the pack that just got tricked are raging.

    *HOWL* *HOWL* *HOWL*

    They all looked at the sky and howled.

    The grasnds shook and those vibrations bouncing off the des of grass and the leaves of trees before it reached every nook and cranny of that area.

    Yena shook its head wildly and walked deeper into the forest. Since its home has been taken away, it is going to make this its home and it will eat the guy who made it face this situation sooner orter.

    At the same time, the howls that reverberated throughout the forest, didn''t just stop there, they reached the city closes to them and many people were alerted.

    Within the city walls, inside a luxurious whore house, a young man is floating in the pleasures of the body. He looked tall and lean. Not an ounce of muscle could be seen on his body. He had dark circles under his eyes and his hair is unkempt.

    His haggard appearance didn''t suit the luxurious silks that he wore.

    *KNOCK* *KNOCK*

    A woman walked inside after knocking the door without even waiting for reply. She is tall, wearing red colored loose attire. Her hips swayed as she walked to the young man and whispered.

    "City Lord Thssa. The guards reported a situation. You might want to take a break from him and handle it. It is urgent."

    Her voice sounded ethereal, she made sure it did. That is the only way to make this debauch young man do any work.

    The young man threw the girl in his hands away and just donned on some loose robe before turning towards her.

    "What happened?"

    Thedy spoke in the same voice.

    "The guards reported that they heard hundreds of howls from the forest. Some hunters reported that they saw arge pack of beasts walking into the forests.

    No one knows where they came from. No one has seen such a creature before."

    The young man frowned and said.

    "How can there be any new creature? And how can hundreds appear out of thin air?" He asked in a frustrated tone.

    The very reason, he got himself the post of the city lord is because he didn''t want to do any work. He just wanted to revel in pleasures while the city ran by itself. Everything from work to women should be served in silver tter to him.

    So, the woman''s vague details were getting on his nerves.

    Seeing that she didn''t have an answer, he said.

    "What is the fucking point of all these people if I have to do everything by myself? Send the Deputy City guard along with a squad. Tell them to investigate what they see in that forest and control the situation."

    "Yes, Sir."

    She bowed after that and left immediately. Once again, she swayed her hips deliberately, she could feel the ogling of the young man from behind. She got out of the room and turned the corner. Finally, her walking became normal and her expression turned dark.

    "Fucking bastard. I need to get out of here soon. Young master better pay me double for this."

    She mumbled as she walked to the Deputy''s office. She put on a fake smile and gave the mission details, before going back to her own quarters. She used a special formation to activate amunication link.

    A man''s silhouette appeared in front of her as projection.

    And it is a face that Sam is very familiar with.

    It is none other than Javin.

    "Young master, didn''t you ask me to report if something odd happens in this city and surroundings? I spotted something."

    She went on exin the whole situation and Javin just listened to the whole thing without so much as a change in expression.

    The woman even revealed more details to Javin that she did to the City lord.

    Only after she exined everything did Javin speak.

    "Alright, good job. I think it is time that youe back. You can take a vacation for a while and I will assign you a new task."

    The woman is delighted and nodded like a pecking chicken. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

 Chapter 2150 Tension and Shock

    2150 Tension and Shock

    Back in the Olympian region, Academy realm.

    Christos is waiting patiently in his office. He is looking at the ceiling counting seconds. Even though he looked dazed and lost, all of his attention is actually focused on the wrist band. He was hoping for Joker to contact him.

    He was hoping that he wouldn''t have to wield that sword he brandished. That sword being the ShadowCavalry.

    The chous family''s secret weapon. One of many, but also one of a kind in its own right. Their speciality? With every battle they go stronger both in quantity and quality. All the while drowning their targets in shadows making their existence all but a glimpse of the past.

    Whenever they were deployed, it always ended in irredeemable destruction. Even though he understood that he was scammed by the Hub and his own greed, he still wished to make use of that wonderful venue. And in his opinion that might not be possible if the shadow cavalry had their way with it.

    Soon, it is the time he set for Joker. And there is no response.

    He sighed and walked to the woods in resignation. If he could have his own way, he wouldn''t do it. He would go back on the threat. But there is too much at stake here. He needs to make sure that the Zeus Academy and the rest of the Olympian region is stable.

    If they are not, then the noble league would be in danger.

    He can afford to let go of the benefits of the Hub for that. With those heavy thoughts, he reached the woods all alone. It was already a bit dark, but there is a particr part of the woods that is extremely dark.

    Christos went there and spoke.

    "I am your actingmander for now. Tonight, I want you tounch an attack at the person named Icarus."

    He paused and projected a picture of Icarus.

    "He will be at these coordinates."

    He then showed the coordinates of the Hub. *GRUNT*

    All he got was a grunt of acknowledgment from the other side and in fact, that is all he needed.

    "If by midnight, I didn''t give any orders. You can proceed with the attack. Your goal is to kill him and retreat. Kill him at any cost."

    That is all he said and then he left. He sighed. He wanted to make themunch an attack immediately. But in thest moment, he changed his mind. It just slipped and he went along with it.

    He really wished he didn''t have this exhaustive responsibility. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    It is draining him.

    While Christos made his way back to the office with a heavy heart, Icarus who saw the whole thing is also nervous.

    As soon as Christos sent a message through the virtual projection, he received. He made the surveince focus more on Christos. He heard the words ''Shadow Cavarly'' and his heart turned cold.

    He knew more about the Olympian families than anyone else. He knew things about the families that even some of the family members didn''t know. So, he obviously heard about the shadow cavalry and this made him nervous.

    No one knows exactly what its strength is, but from what he heard every time theye out, they kill, they destroy and they disappear.

    They are used to assassinate targets of Divine ne Pre-transcendence to Initial and middle stages of the Divine ne Consummate stage. Icarus happens to be in that category.

    Even more than that, he is afraid of them more because of the mystery surrounding them. Nobody has ever seen the shadow cavalry. Maybe except for the family head of the chous family might have seen them before. Apart from him, nobody did. In fact, there are some family heads within the history of the chous family that didn''t get a single glimpse.

    Even now, when Christos went and talked to them, all he saw was the ck patch.

    They didn''t even bother to speak to him. However, he didn''t show any displeasure and left. The same Christos who trolled the crap out of his senior. The same arrogant Christos who is in charge of the decisions that decide the position of Noble league, just let it slide when faced with such a situation.

    With every passing minute Icarus'' tension grew.

    However, Sam did say a few words before he left.

    "When you believe you are facing an opponent that you might not win against, even if that opponent is an Elder of the Academy, just stay inside the Hub and tell the hub to take over.

    If the opponent is on par with the Strongest elders and even the Deans, then just use the emergency space gate to leave the ce. It will inform the rest of the managers and they will escape as well."

    He repeated those words in his head.

    Sam was very casual when he said it. And he was also confident. This gave a slight boost to Icarus, but he still wished that Sames back. He would be more at ease, if Sam is here to take care of this uing threat.

    Of course, just because he wished, doesn''t mean it would happen.

    He just went to the special room created for a situation like this. It is a small room with a bunch of screens that gave aplete view of all the corners of the Hub and the city surrounding it.

    If the overall city surveince is focused on the Olympian city as a whole, then this is ultra focused on this small region. Even if an insect farts, they would know.

    He waited there, observing every single spot. Not wanting to miss anything. But he also got ready. Even though he is afraid, apart of him is urging to find out if he can get away from the shadow cavalry unscathed.

    While things are like this¡­

    Somewhere else, in one of the corners of the Thssa territory.

    The debauch young master that Sam targeted is packing around in his room while biting his nails.

    *KNOCK* *KNOCK*

    Someone knocked on the door and came inside. It was a woman, another one who dressed raunchily. However, her aura didn''t match with her dress at all. And why would it? She wasn''t a sexy vixen, even if she looked like one. She is captain on the city''s scouting team.

    As for why she had to dress like this¡­ they are the rules. The rules enforced by the young master in front of her. In fact, not just her, every single person who works in the administrative tasks of the city with a considerable position is a woman and they all dress like this.

    It is one of the twisted fetishes of this young master.

    "Where is that bitch? Where did she go?"

    He yelled as he looked the scout captain.

    The scouting squad usually doesn''t actively contribute to the city. Instead, they are a passive force only to be used for emergencies.

    And it is easy to guess what this emergency is. The deputy who went out to deal with the foreign creatures that appeared, didn''te back.

    He called for that teasing assistant to get the news regarding. After all, the whole point of her existence is for him to not do any work.

    When the news reached it, he became furious. Not because of the deputy''s disappearance, rather because the news reached him. In his opinion, it absolutely shouldn''te to him.

    He told them to find that woman.

    But she is nowhere to be seen and finally he came to his senses. He searched the whole city and after not finding a trace of her, he called for the scout captain.

    Now the scout captain came to him with the results.

    At least, he hoped she did.

    "She left the city. She escaped. We believe she could be a spy and she might have known something about the pack of beasts that appeared.

    We sent someone to check up on the pack. There is a good reason why the Deputy leader disappeared. The beast pack is huge and their strength is high. Right now, the pack is battling with the rest of the beasts in the forest. They are trying to upy the forest. Some of the beasts even ran towards the city after suffering terrible defeat.

    They were weakened by arge margin and that became a great day for the hunters.

    They captured the beasts, alive and tried to heal them. Even though they managed to heal the physical injuries, there is something internally wrong with those beasts.

    The reserve research squad is currently taking a look at them. They noticed that the hunters that captured these beasts are also showing simr symptoms to the beast.

    All of this happened in the short time span. Between the report made by the assistant and now.

    Young master. Your territory is in trouble. Give me your orders."

 Chapter 2151 Shadows Attacked

    2151 Shadows Attacked

    The young master of the Thssa family. He is neither from the main family line, nor was he the heir for his branch family line.

    He is just one of the many offspring and he happened to be born to a rtively powerful man. He knew that he couldn''t do shit in his family''s fight for power, so he decided to take the easy way out. He picked a remote city, at the very edge of his family''s influence and became its city lord.

    This city doesn''t have much significance for the Thssa family.

    They upied it just because they could. The tax thates from them, the resources they could gain from it, none of these factors are specialpared to other cities. It is manifestation of mediocrity.

    He picked that ce and used his father''s authority to make some sick changes.

    The old staff was fired or transferred. New staff was assigned and all of them were women. He just enjoyed his life in debauchery and wanted to do that until the end of his life.

    And for the first time, he started running around. The scout captain took him to the research center where the beasts are being analyzed.

    An ape like creature is currently in a transparent energy cage, whimpering and groaning in pain and agony.

    There are several rashes on its skin. Most of its fur was gone and several spots around those rashes were shrivelled. It is bleeding from its orifices.

    "How long is the incubation period?"

    The scout captain asked with a frown. Because she has see the ape when it was captured. It was definitely weak and odd, but it was nowhere near the current state. The difference is like night and day.

    "Not very long. We used all kinds of medicines, but we only managed to slow it down a little bit. The rest of the beasts that were caught along with it are on the verge of death. Their organs are failing as we speak and it wouldn''t take long before their brain or heart stops."

    The captain''s expression grew serious.

    She looked at her deputy who stood far away.

    The deputy ran forward and bowed. "Yes, Captain." She greed the captain.

    "How is the activity in the woods? What is the status there? Is the pack still on the move?"

    "Yes, Captain. At first, they were moving in a linear direction. They weren''t turning or anything. They walked as if they didn''t have a destination in mind. But the beasts in the forest along with the city guard squad that went in¡­ they provoked them and now they are all over the ce.

    They are trying to consume everything and if by any chance some creature escaped, they all turned out like this.

    We found several corpses, all of them are in the simr state. But from the traces, we realized that they killed a lot more beasts than the corpses we saw."

    "Then what happened to the rest?"

    "They were eaten. These beasts are showing an unnatural level of hunger. They are eating and eating constantly. And when they are about to be full, some weird glow is appearing on their bodies, their physical bodies are getting stronger even though their cultivation level is not increasing.

    It is almost like their muscles are being reborn.

    At the same time, the stronger they got, the worse it became to the remaining beasts.

    I always thought that this forest housed way too many beasts numbering in thousands and I believed it would be a huge threat to us, but this one pack¡­

    I think they will be done with the beasts by tomorrow. But I don''t know if their hunger will be satiated by then."

    The scout captain''s eyes narrowed.

    Now that is a real thing to worry. The young master didn''t even understand the heads and tails of the situation. But he knew that this I something that he should be terrified about.

    He looked at the scout captain and viceversa.

    His eyes are wide open, as if the eyelids are refusing to shut down. His clothes are disheveled like usual, however this time there is no sign of carnal pleasures engraved on them. Instead it was from the hysteria and anxiety.

    He is gulping down nervously and his whole body is soaked in sweat. He is dripping from head to toe.

    And there is even a went spot at his privates, which is also not that unusual, however the captain felt that she would rather not know what caused it today.

    "Y¡­y..you handle this. Im..immedia¡­"

    "Immediately. Don''t stress yourself from speaking too much."

    She turned around and ignored the young master. She knew the situation of the city will change to worse if the beast pack turns to the city. She needs to find a way out of this.

    "What is the strongest creature in the pack?" She asked the deputy.

    "We don''t know. The strongest we have spotted was a Divine ne Transcendent creature at Middle stage by our estimates."

    The captain took a deep breath. Because that is just one stage below her cultivation level and she is one of the strongest in this ce.

    "So, what do you think the probability of that being the strongest creature of the whole pack?" She asked. Just hoping that it is the highly probable. But one could hope. That doesn''t mean it wille true.

    "Very low. Tiny in my opinion. The density of the beasts in the pack is way too much. There are hundreds and they divided themselves into smaller portions. They didn''t spread out far. But they are hunting in squads of sorts.

    And if my guess is right, the creature we spotted might be the leader of one of those squads." n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "The beasts that organized?"

    "Not just organized ma''am. They are the most elite hunters that I have seen. And I am including the cultivators as well. All the beasts they targeted are mostly stronger than themselves. Their team work is off the charts and I have seen them take down bigger targets without so much as getting a scratch.

    That was one of the reasons, the other beasts are bing desperate. Even before this pack could be a direct threat to the city, it has already be an indirect threat. This might cause a beast tide."

    "Alright, then let''s move. Set up a defense against the city. Call for a meeting with all the forces in the city. From street gangs to that underworld guy that''s running the ck market. I want everyone there."

    She then turned to the young master and said.

    "Use the family distress call. We need the nearest family affiliated mercenary group to report immediately and they still need to send more reinforcements.

    Be quick please."

    With that, she left.

    The young master came out of his daze and clumsily ran out. The city is thrown into Chaos as the sunset and the night arrived.

    Back in the Olympian region.

    Icarus is still looking at the screens trying to figure out from where would the attacke from. Meanwhile, he already informed Sam''s friends and other managers about the possible threat.

    The managers wanted toe and help, but Icarus refused. Even if the Hub is destroyed, Sam told him not to move the people from the other hubs here. Because, once the battle starts and they are noticed, the chain reaction will start. Other hubs will be targeted.

    And he once again assured that there would be no need as long as the threats exceed the threshold he mentioned.

    Sam''s friends came to the Hub and stayed in. To Icarus'' surprise, the trio even brought Snacks as they sat along with him.

    "You are not nervous?" Icarus asked.

    "You already said that their strength threshold should be less than what mentioned, then why should we be nervous?"

    Philip replied.

    And soon Icarus understood why they were so carefree, in fact they are even excited. Which is initially weird on so many levels.

    At midnight.

    Christos sighed in his office.

    As if that sigh was the cue, at the same moment, a flock of shadows rose from that ck patch in the woods. *THUD THUD* *THUD THUD*

    The rhythmic sounds of the horses enveloped the woods and it is reverberating to the city. Many people who were doing various activities across the city were all surprised. It is not odd to listen to the sounds of the beasts.

    But these hooves, they were different.

    The rhythm to it was loud. Louder than any horse they have ever seen.

    And there is a tone of death assigned to that rhythm.

    Soon, someone spotted the ck shadows that are moving towards the city. In fact, it is not hidden at all.

    The signal was given by the vast vegetation that was dying as these shadows passed. No one could figure out the exact shape of the creatures that areing.

    But they could all sense the trepidation. Trepidation of death knocking on the doors of the Olympian city.

 Chapter 2152 Turrets and Regenerating Walls

    Chapter 2152 Turrets and Regenerating Walls

    The city guards were alerted. Everyone made their way to the gate and the walls.

    Not just them, many curious people made their way too. Some thought more and sent their bird puppets and that triggered a chain reaction. Everyone sent their bird puppets to get a clear view of what is happening.

    But all of them could only see the dying forest and vegetation. They could hear the hooves of the horses, but they couldn''t see anything other than the moving masses of ck.

    The city guard captain was alerted, but by the time he came to the door, the shadows already reached their destination. Everyone including the captain heaved a sigh, but also felt nervous at the same time.

    Because the destination of the shadow is obviously the Hub. And right now, they are at the closed gate of the Hub and they also converged back together into a single mass.

    It moved towards the door at an incredible speed trying to crash it down.

    But the moment, it touched therge stone door¡­

    *HMM*

    With a slight humming sound, the stone door rippled a bit, activating a space gate. Same principal as the one Sam used to take the Yena away. But obviously these shadows are better than that. They recognized the fluctuations and stopped.

    And the moment they did.

    *SWOOSH*

    Severalser turrets appeared on the walls of the Hub. All of them are aimed at the spot the shadows are.

    At first they shot out a neutral beam and the beam actually didn''t have any threatening energy behind it. It was as harmless as a torchlight.

    And it passed right through the ck mass. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    *GRUNT*

    With a grunt, the ck mass leapt at the door. Trying to cross the wall with that single leap.

    *HMMMM¡­.*

    And the next moment, the turrets all changed their colors. Instead of the neutral white, they turned much brighter. Except for the metallic body, the rest of it glowed with intensity akin to the starlight¡­

    Anyone can guess it.

    *HMMM*

    With a humming sound, hundreds ofsers were shot out from the turrets all aimed at the ck mass and they were fast. Almost as fast as light.

    *PSSSSSSSHHHHHHHH*

    A sound akin to the waterdroplets falling on a hot pan came from the ck mass as thesers made full contact.

    *SCREEEECH*

    A scream of rage was heard throughout the Olympian region.

    Christos'' heart shook.

    He knew that voice. However, he never heard it in that exact tone. He had heard the cavalry grunt and only heard that. No one he knows and the people they know actually heard anything more than a grunt.

    He never thought he would hear it here.

    He looked through his window. He could see the bright shesing from the Hub, he couldn''t see the shadows though. But he had a nagging feeling in his heart, that told him to go and take a look.

    And he did exactly that.

    By the time he was there. He saw as the shadow cavalry split up into several smaller ck masses as they all tried to destroy the turrets.

    However, the movement of these shadows, which even the City guard captain could barely follow are being followed by these turrets. The movement is precise to the point that if the shadows moved a fraction of a millimeter, the turret did as well.

    The damage is not actually that much. It barely scratched them. But the energy that wasing out of thoseser beams is what irritated the cavalry.

    That energy is made of pure light. The one thing these shadows are averse to and didn''t like interacting with. It is fine if it is just normal sun light, their cultivation strength is way too high to even bother with it.

    But thesesers¡­

    They are irritating and they didn''t want to force through thesers. This made Christos think. What if¡­

    What if there is a turret, there is an energy beam that could be shot with much more intensity, much more attack level, much more threat. What would happen?

    He couldn''t waste too much time on those thoughts, because at the moment, one of the shadows finally had enough.

    *KEEN*

    A de keening was heard. The sound of the de cutting through the air. It was clear, crisp and terrifying.

    *CRACK*

    With a small cracking noise, the turret was cut into two.

    The turret''s body copsed. However. The stand of the turret which is the only one intact is still glowing brightly.

    Several shadows managed to shoot down dozens of turrets and they all found the openings. But as they passed over the turret stands¡­

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Explosion of light elemental energy happened right underneath these shadows. They took the full brunt of the attack.

    *SCREEEEEECH*

    And this time, they were not just screams of rage. There was definitely some agony trapped in there.

    The shadows that were nothing but ck masses now wore a patch of white merged into their bodies. Even now, no one could see what their actual form is, but that white patch is painfully visible.

    At the same time, the ce where the explosions happened¡­ the portions of the walls where turret stands were present, the wall has opened up. It seemed like the explosion has cleared up the outermostyer of the wall, revealing the internal structure and they saw metallic grid like structure made with several metal bars. It was like a big frame made with metallic trusses.

    But instead of the hollowness beneath that metal frame, it is filled with several crystalline blocks that looked like they were made of crystalized ss and were filled with some sort of vapor.

    It was like a party trick with ss bricks, neon lights and smoke.

    Even before they could make sense of what they were looking at, the metal trust started morphing. The wall was being covered again with the same material as before. The turret stand grew and finally the turret is back in ce.

    It looked like the wall built itself. It happened in a blink of an eye. By now, some of the shadows made their way beyond those walls, of course with the gift of white patches of light elemental energy.

    As for the rest, they are hesitating.

    Christos looked at the most fearless force of his family hesitating over something so simple.

    *HMMM*

    The shadows might hesitate, but the turrets won''t.

    The attacks continued.

    The shadows on the otherside were not being targeted for some reason. Instead, they got the breathing time. Their bodies expanded a bit and glowing ck energy is focused on the spot where they got hit.

    The area with the patch bulged out and they severed it by hand.

    The patch is gone, they suffered a small annoyance and the shadows looked at their peers before running inside. At least the viewers felt that they ''looked''. All they did was pause and run inside. They directly took the central path.

    The path that leads from the gate to the front door of the hub building.

    Meanwhile, the rest of the shadows noticed that they are having much more troublepared to before. Previously, the turrets were focused on all of the shadowbined. Now that there is a reduction in the number of shadows, thesers increased.

    They seemed to have realized this problem and made their move. They became angry and attacked. ck colored attacks, who knows what it was actually, attacked the walls.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The explosions rang, turrets stopped. Everyone watching felt pained. Hub is way too valuable for them and they felt it was a loss to have it destroyed. Even Christos felt pained. He knew that these creatures could destroy the wall from the start.

    The only reason they didn''t is because he told them to hold back. But they got pissed off by thesers and made their move.

    However, as the explosion cleared, they were surprised by what they saw. Only the surface of the walls was gone. The internal structure with the trusses and the crystalline blocks of energy are still there.

    The wall is repairing at a visible pace. There are some parts in which the crystal blocks and the truss were damaged, but even they are regenerated back, but at a slower pace. Everyone was confused.

    What kind of technique was used in constructing those walls? No one knows, but the shadow smoothly crossed over.

    They also took the path and with their speed, they are not far behind their peers.

    Half way through their path, however they noticed something. On the either side of the path, it was just some normal garden with grass. Most of the time students just stay there, talking or waiting for module to open up during the working hours.

    No one is there now. But several spots in that garden started glowing and pirs shout out of the ground.

    In an instant, ayered formation with more than a thousandyers was activated. Light beams shot of the walls as well and joined the formation adding an extrayer.

    It almost looked like the formation is trying to not save the building in the middle rather it was trying to trap the intruders and it is doing exactly that.

 Chapter 2153 Reveal

    Chapter 2153 Reveal

    The formation''s first visible part is therge translucent dome. Even the Divine ne Consummate cultivators who are watching this, could only see that blurry image of what is happening inside.

    Their divine sense are not prating it. To be more precise, it is prating but even those sense are only detected some blurry image.

    The second visible part is the connection between the dome and the wall.

    Theser turrets shot the beams into the formation and the beams spread over the dome like an intricate spider web. At the junctions of the spider web, there is a concentration of light mass. They didn''t understand the purpose or the function of the light mass, but they had a very ominous feeling.

    As for the shadows, they could see a lot more.

    The pirs that grew out of the ground are glowing with runes soplex and intricate that they would make a grown man''s brain short circuit. Light beams shot out from the top of those pirs and joined the formation dome.

    The next moment, the shadows couldn''t see anything but bright white light.

    Even the people that could see the blurry outline from the outside, now lost that.

    Icarus who was looking at the screen with Sam''s friends lost it as well. "What is happening? Did the screen go nk?"

    That is what it looked like. All he could see nk white. "Nope. It is a defense technique created by Sam. I didn''t expect him to install this in the Hub."

    Philip said as he walked to the screen and adjusted some settings. The bright light cleared up in the screen. As if the whole white light was being filtered from only their vision.

    They could see the Shadow cavalry once again. And at this moment, the ck masses are squirming on the spot.

    Muffled screams and screeches are being heard. But there is no attack happening. At least not something Icarus could see.

    "What is happening exactly?"

    He asked with puzzled gaze. He squinted his eyes as he watched at the screen as if that would help find any missing details.

    The rest of the people in the room chuckled.

    "Don''t bother. You cannot see the attack. The bright light you have seen before is the actual attack." Philip exined. In the people present only he could understand some of the technical details of Sam''s mechanisms.

    Sirona might be better at exining it, but she is not here right now.

    "The light is the attack?"

    "Yeah, this is a defensive formation created by Sam a long time ago. And for the longest time, it was mostly just a theoretical blueprint fermenting in our base back home.

    He didn''t want to use it.

    It is created by merging the soul necromancy and the light element together. The bright light you have seen is not exactly light itself, rather souls merged with light element. They became one with light and they spread out upying the physical space there.

    The shadow cavalry or whatever they are called are feeling the burn of pure light elemental energy enveloping them from all around.

    If just the small patch created by the turret explosion hurt them, what do you think is happening withthis?"

    Icarus opened his mouth wide and looked at the screen. His mind has nked when Philip exined the merging of light and soul necromancy.

    Those are literally two opposite forms of usage of spiritual energy. They thrive on consuming and destroying each other.

    But Sambined them both?

    "I can understand your surprise. But do you know what the best part is? The first victim of the formation is Sam himself. And he had to work a lot to get out of this. I am wondering what kind of changes he has made to ovee the weaknesses he found."

    Philip said and at that moment, the light masses on the outer dome of the formation started morphing. Only the people inside the hub could see what was happening there.

    The light mass took the shape of a small cannon. Light means were shot out of those spots all aimed at the shadow cavalry.

    *SCREEEECH* *SCREECH* *SCREECH*

    The screams of agony.

    The ck masses are squirming like they are subjected utmost torture.

    Icarus who is connected to Hub could feel the energy in each and every one of thesers that are being shot. Their energy level is ten times stronger than the ones shot by theser turrets.

    He could sense that even he would have to take a step back from those attacks if he got shot by one. Defense would be hard. However, if it is continuous attack¡­ he doesn''t know what to do against it unless he goes all out without holding back.

    With a single attack, he should just try to destroy the whole formation and from the looks of it, he could definitely do it. The formation is definitely of highest quality in terms of technique and the technology, but the energy level of is achieved by just stacking the lower level formation.

    Sam with his current strength cannot weave formations that could cross so many levels.

    Of course, just because Icarus could do it doesn''t mean the shadow cavalry could do the same as well.

    The light energy is extremely potent against them. So, they have to take even stricter measures. After around fifteen minutes, they did exactly that.

    The squirming of ck masses has been reduced. All of a sudden, ck mist started expanding from those masses and their unrecognizable figures started showing some tangible shapes.

    As the ck mist expanded, it started devouring the light around it. *HISS*

    The sound simr to the water hitting a hot surface once again was heard all over.

    The ck mist devoured the light and started converting the surrounding space into a space of darkness.

    In that white space the ck spots are way too contrasting and eyecatching. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Philip changed the set up back to the original to get a better idea of what is happening.

    "Those guys are devouring the light elemental energy of the formation. They are devouring that along with the source, but it doesn''t seem like they are consuming it."

    They started analyzing it.

    Night Ghost looked at it more keenly. Among them, he and Tamas have a better idea of necromancy, souls, shadows. They even light elemental energy because they are always trying to counter the light element which is potent against their own attacks.

    "The ck mist¡­ that is what''s giving them that intangible shape and form. It seems like an inherent energy or a technique. Like the bloodline technique or an organ of a beast through which they can attack.

    The ck mist is not devouring rather, it is freezing and enveloping it in reverse. That means, once their hold is weakened, they would be open targets for the light energy and thesers once again." Night Ghost exined.

    Tamas also nodded and agreed with it.

    The rest of the room showed an expression of understanding.

    Icarus is dumbfounded.

    Who woulde up with such weird ideas? It almost sounds dumb (A/N: I know that readers are thinking the same)

    Their attention was soon grabbed by the shadow cavalry. The ck space is spreading and their forms are more and more tangible and recognizable.

    Thesers are still being shot, but the cavalry is fighting back. The sword rays are flying up and thesers are being intercepted.

    In about fifteen minutes, they finally saw something that not a lot of people in that world witnessed by that time.

    The true form of the shadow cavalry and they understood why they are called the Cavalry.

    But they also felt that if the word cavalry urately describes this troop. Because behind that darkness, what they saw were centaurs. A group of dozens of centaurs. They are unlike the centaurs that Sam interacted with previously in that elf word.

    These centaurs had ck skin. Not even proper ck, it is the ckness of hell, simr to the one Sam and the yers witnessed back in the hell.

    They oozed ck vapors that emitted ominous aura. It is the aura of death and torturebined. Their eyes are of extreme red. The one that is eerily close to the red of the blood.

    Their canines are a lot longer than they are supposed to be and they all carried great swords in their hands. While Icarus is stuck in awe at the sight, the rest of the team are in a heated debate. Whether a troop of centaurs could be called a cavalry or not.

    After all, a cavalry is a troop of warriors mounted on horses and in that world, maybe a troop of warriors mounted on beasts.

    But the centaurs are not exactly mounted on anything. It is their natural form to be born with four legs and the upper body of a human.

    So, can they be considered a cavalry?

 Chapter 2154 Bombardment

    Chapter 2154 Bombardment

    Whether they are the cavalry or not, the few dozen centaurs are all emitting an aura of destruction and death.

    They are looking at the door of the building hatefully.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Explosions rang as the beams were still being shot from the dome.

    *SWOOSH*

    They wielded their swords blocking every single attack that ising their way. As the ck mistpletely disappeared, it is apparent that their speed has been reduced by arge margin. However, their attack was still as sharp and precise.

    Icarus looked at them and frowned.

    From all the way there, with the help of the Hub, he could sense the cultivation level of these centaurs. It should be considered a weird state to say the least. They are clearly emitting an aura that is of Peak of Divine ne Transcendence.

    But their strength and even the quality of that ck-colored spiritual energy they are emitting is of Divine ne Consummate stage initiation.

    Icarus can understand why their strength is much higher. Many people can attain strength beyond their cultivation.

    But the quality of energy shouldn''t and be different no matter what as long as the person is alive.

    He paused and looked at the centaurs once again closely.

    "Are they undead?"

    He muttered out loud, the question wasn''t meant for anyone else. It was just for himself, however he heard a voice that he is kind of familiar with at that moment.

    [The centaurs in the yard of the Hub are not the undead creatures. They are very much living.]

    Along with the voice a small screen appeared in front of them. It showed the image of the centaur along with a bunch of text that urately described what these centaurs are.

    All the information it gave came from the database Sam collected.

    He did prepare well when he left this ce. Even including these kinds of features, but he forgot to inform Icarus of all these details. It could have made him feel at ease.

    As he wondered, the screen revealed more and ore information.

    [The Centaurs in the yard are gically modified. Their cultivation is the same, but their strength is indeed different. It is gically enhanced. Their cultivation was forced to enter that level. The shadow affinity was also forcefully enhanced and amplified.

    From the initial analysis, we can find multiple DNA strands merged with the existing DNA.]

    The voice paused, the screen expanded and soon there are a bunch of images of various beasts.

    "These are the possible beasts'' DNA that could have been used to merge."

    That is the state of their strength.

    At the same time, Tamas examined them a bit more and said.

    "The ck mass of energy¡­ It doesn''t belong to them originally. It was attached to them through those gic modifications. And they might be the biggest reason for their higher strength. They are just lumps of gic experimentation."

    He had an expression of intrigue and amusement.

    He has been doing his fair share of experiments regarding the bodies and genes of the creatures. But his experiments are focused on dead bodies. Still it is an interesting field.

    On top of that, everyone else is also intrigued by this. Some of the most dreadful creatures assassins of this world turned out to be nothing more than gically modified creatures.

    "Can you tell us more about these creatures? What is their potential? How can we deal with it?"

    Icarus asked.

    The screen changed and it started showing a bunch of information.

    [The centaurs have already stagnated in their growth. No matter how many years they cultivate, they wouldn''t be able to get past their current stage of cultivation. There are twenty-seven approaches with the current stage of Hub''s configuration to deal with these creatures.

    All methods have varying possibilities.]

    With that the screen shifted to show a set of tabr data.

    There are different methods all named and the columns showed the steps followed in each method. The final column showed the probability ofpletely annihting the crisis of the Shadow Cavalry.

    The team looked at these things. Icarus was shocked, but the rest were more or less able to ept it. Sam did really invest a lot in this.

    When he was still in Mortal ne, as a Grand realm cultivator he was already fighting with Transcendent cultivators using the formations of a city.

    With all the research progress he made and the new methods he discovered, it should be a given that he managed to create so many methods.

    Icarus looked through the table and his eyesnded on one that looked most unbelievable.

    The method was called ''Infinite Bombardment''

    The probability of destroying the cavalry before it could even reach the doors of the Hub is 99%.

    The only drawback for that is some property damage which would be automatically recovered in a few days.

    He wanted to call bullshit on it as soon as he read it. However, he really wanted to see how it will work. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "I want to try this."

    He asked the rest for their opinion. They just shrugged. He pursed his lips and clicking on it.

    [Activating Infinite Bombardment.]

    The feminine mechanical voice gave out the announcement. The dome that was shooting out theser beams suddenly stopped. The next moment, the pirs that shot out to create the Light soul formation were also retracted.

    The vision is back for the outsiders, albeit still blurry. The cavalry is confused by the sudden change.

    But they didn''t have a long time to revel in that confusion, because they were greeted by the shock next.

    *CLUTCH* *KEEN* *HMM* *BANG*

    Various metallic sounds spread from all over thepound. Multiple turrets of various sizes, sters, guns all of different sizes, lengths, and lethality.

    They all grew out of the ground, the wall of the gate of the hub and even the walls of the building itself. There are hundreds of them if not a thousand or more.

    And that is not all. From the roof of the hub several spheres shot out and hovered all over thepound in the sky. They were all glowing with different elemental energies.

    The cavalry felt a bad feeling creeping up their hearts. They immediately took control over their ck mist once again and tried to turn ethereal. But at that moment.

    *BOOM*

    A gun that was on the wall of the hub''s building shot out. It''s bullet was around five inches long. There are over a thousand runes engraved on its surface as it glowed brighter with every passing centimeter.

    As it reached close to the centaur nearest to it, the bullet transformed. It exploded and turned into a fire ball and it is not just an ordinary fire ball. Everyone inside the hub and also the centaurs could feel that the fire ball is of at least Divine ne Transcendent level. At leastte stage.

    rm bells rang in the centaur''s head. He hurriedly blocked the attack with his sword.

    *BOOM*

    The explosion was defended, but notpletely. He was blown back because of the shock. *BANG*

    Another bullet from a different gun. It was aimed at another centaur. When the attack was near the centaur, it exploded into an ice spear of simr level as the fire ball.

    *RATATATATATATATATATA¡­.*

    Then began the rapid fire. Bullet after bullet. They rained over the centaurs that are spread out.

    *SWOOSH* *BOOM* *BANG*

    The bullets turned to various attack spells as they neared the targets. Some are basic spells like fire ball and ice spear. The only trouble with them is the sheer energy injected into that attack.

    But there areplex spells as well. Like the phoenix charge. A fire elemental spell that shoots a consecutive stream of six attacks. All six attacks are conjured phoenixes. They are conjured purely out of fire.

    They can be controlled by the wielder for a few minutes before they explode with utmost damage.

    Right now, a turret that has six barrels is firing Phoenix charges at a regted pace.

    The cavalry soon noticed that they were being overwhelmed by just the sheer number. There is no technique, there is no restraining formation, nothing. They are just facing a lot of the attacks all of the different kinds.

    And since the start of the attacks, they are unable to bring their mist back and merge with it. Their physical body is being attacked in this small gap.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The attacks continued. The surroundings of the Hub are vibrating from the attacks and the force behind them. These tremors went as far as the city and the city center. They are that strong.

    One of the centaurs dodged a few attacks and then ate the next few, all of it just to reduce a few guns into dust.

    But as soon it broke a few weapons, the sphere in the air, floating over them, started vibrating. It opened up and a bunch of puppets flew out of it. They are all small bird puppets and they had inbuilt storage features as well as all the knowledge embedded in them

 Chapter 2155 Capture

    Chapter 2155 Capture

    These bird puppets are simr to the ones distributed to the rest of the people.

    However, these are of higher hardware, quality and configurations. They are made to build and repair other things. The moment the turret was destroyed, the birds flew there and started repair it at a visible pace.

    Within three seconds the turret was reinstalled.

    As for the self-regeneration of the equipment? It still works, but it is way too slow to use in such a heated moment.

    The attacks resumed and the cavalry was bombarded. When one of the centaurs hit the bird puppets out of frustration, the puppets'' bodies copsed and a small rock wasunched out of those copsed bodies.

    It had a homing function and it was locked on the attacker who did it.

    At that moment, it destroyed itself with an explosion simr to the destabilization of a Divine ne cultivator''s whole Divine ne energy.

    *BOOM* n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Of course, the target of those small rockets is obvious for anyone. The centaurs.

    The outer dome of the formation started fluctuating soon. Theser beams are not stopping. All aimed at the centaurs, the intruders that dared to take the live of the Hub''s employee.

    The people outside who had their eyes fixed on the blurry dome started having a faint inkling of what is happening inside. They could feel the explosion from every direction.

    Fifteen minutes passed.

    Several turrets were destroyed. Several guns were broken. Even a couple of spheres hovering the sky were also taken down. But right now Centaurs became frail.

    The attacks was almost over. Icarus finally stepped out of his room. All the centaurs are sprawled on the ground. He walked to the nearest one and checked their breath. They are about to die. He wanted to end their agony witha single move and they will be severed from any rtionship they had with the hub.

    "No, don''t kill them. Why do you think the hub stopped attacking?"

    All of a sudden, Philip''s words were heard through the wrist band.

    Icarus was surprised, but he nodded. "Can you sedate them?"

    He asked the Hub. He was unsure if it would work, but the Hub replied through a text in his wrist band.

    Soon, the sedation was done. Dozens of Centaurs were confined in Divine Dimension fragments without their will and were brought into the Hub.

    The dome formation was disabled. The bird puppets moved around and started repairing the path, garden and the walls.

    Soon, the hub looked like it was never even attacked.

    Christos who was watching this was stunned.

    He gulped nervously as he tried to use his mental link to contact the Cavalry, but he wasn''t able to. The connection disappeared.

    Icarus started receiving many messages from different academies. Students, instructors, elders and even the Deans messaged him. All of them were asking what happened to the Hub. They are asking why there was a sudden attack and they even offered to help.

    Offer to help after the deed was done.

    Icarus knew what they were doing. They were doing damage control. If they want to keep the connection with the Hub with genuine intentions, they should havee to their rescue.

    But they didn''t.

    They were sitting on fence and wanted to see how the hub will fend for itself. If the Hub goes down to serious peril, then they will weigh the pros and cons before making the decision to help or not. Everything is calctive.

    Icarus didn''t respond to any of them.

    He just observed the restoration of the hub. After the repair was done, the only notable change in the hub is the energy level. Even that is not exactly a considerable loss. From the calctions, it could be recovered within the next few days easily.

    The puppets and weapons, of course were destroyed, but they weren''t really that significant in value.

    Everyone went back to their own ce and they all are waiting for the reaction of Hub. They are also waiting for it to open to see how Icarus will act.

    But even before it opened they got the response they were expecting.

    "The attackers were captured and they are going to be interrogated by the Hub. The whole interrogation process will be recorded and if proven futile their memories will be extracted and made into a video through the simtor.

    All the evidence will be shared to everyone and appropriate measures will be taken ording to that."

    That was the response.

    Christos'' heart felt cold. A lot of people knew about the Cavalry and just from a nce almost any notable figure within the Olympian region, can easily understand who was behind the attack.

    So, Christos is not exactly afraid of his nameing out.

    In fact, he even threatened Joker ''directly'' in the simtion room. Warning him about it. So, he was expecting his name to be out. Of course, he also felt that the Hub would sustain some serious damage and Icarus would die.

    Then Joker wille out and ask Christos about this. At least in that way he can have contact with Joker.

    That is what he thought.

    But to his surprise, not only did Hub appear unscathed. The cavalry was done in before it could step foot inside the building and Icarus didn''t reveal his name.

    This angle scared him. Since the other party decided to hide it, that could only mean that something worse than what he expected is going to hit him.

    He could only wait for it.

    Meanwhile, back in the corner of the Thssa territory. The Debauch young master of Thssa is watching the city from his balcony. His legs are shaking and his silk robe is drenched in sweat.

    The city that looked vibrant and lively is now looking a lot like an abandoned ruin.

    The streets were deserted and the city is surrounded by beasts from all sides. Just like the scout captain predicted, the pack of Yena made the whole forest move. The beasts couldn''t take it anymore and ran for their lives.

    And to their dismay many of those beasts are infected. Only then did people realize that the disease that was given by these Yena can be transmitted through physical contact. This made the whole situation worse.

    The soldiers that went to fight these beasts all got infected and brought the disease back into the city. And then another realization dawned on them. The cultivators and mostly humans are extremely weak and strong against this disease at the same time.

    It is indeed a weird concept.

    But here is how it worked.

    The cultivators are weak in a sense that the symptoms are working way harsher on them than on the beasts.

    The loss of hair, loss of strength in bone and muscle, etc.

    But they are not dying like the beasts did. For some reason, their immunity system albeit unable to deal with the symptoms worked great in keeping them alive.

    However, that wasn''t a good news for a lot of them. Because they were left vulnerable. Many people that ran like tyrants in this city are now bedridden. Since the young master who ruled the city the city is such an ipetent man, it wouldn''t be an exaggeration to say, it is one of the most corrupt ces there is.

    And that corruption of course led to a lot of oppression towards the weak in the society.

    So, now that the strong are vulnerable, the weak bared their fangs.

    Assassinations, robberies, raping, looting. The crimes increased overnight. And among all of these activities, there is onemon point in most.

    A disposable weapon.

    A handgun.

    Even Sam didn''t think such a coincidence would ur. Just like many other Thssa territories, handguns are being sold in this city as well.

    However, the business wasn''t that good because the ss difference between the oppressors and oppressed is way too high. The only business that happened here is from the outsiders.

    But this sudden change brought a shift to that. The only the people who sold realized the reason behind the previousck of sales.

    The power difference between the strong and weak, made the weak so afraid to even fight back. They just couldn''t even bring themselves to fight as they became way too worried about possible retaliation with increased force.

    But now that the other parties weakened, the weaker ones bought guns like crazy. Ny percent of the new found crimes in the city involved guns.

    The young master and the scout captain couldn''t care less about this. They don''t care about the lives in a general sense, but right now they could have used those forces.

    In fact, they did have the mind to convince these sick and vulnerable tounch suicide attacks on the beast tide.

    That was their main concern and now they are dying like flies. They went on to search for the person who was selling the guns after learning about their usage.

 Chapter 2156 Going Back

    Chapter 2156 Going Back

    They wanted to use that power to fight against the beast tide.

    But they couldn''t. The merchant had only one clear instruction from his boss. ''Even if you take away the guns for yourself, I might let you go. But if a single gun falls in the hands of Thssa¡­ you will see what true torture is.''

    That was his warning.

    So, the merchants made sure they only sold to the people that wouldn''t want to get caught by Thssa and the people that have no rtions with Thssa.

    The scout captain came to see the young master who is ready to copse on his knees and cry to the skies.

    "Young master. I think it is better if you retreat. We cannot hold on to the city. We already spotted the leader of the Pack and it is not looking good for us. The squad sent by the family forces is also trapped inside the forest.

    The pack identified them and those beasts are toying with them.

    You should leave this ce before you be a victim to this."

    He turned to look at her. She is in her battle gear. No more raunchy dress and she looked a lot more natural andfortable with herself.

    She had a couple of open wounds, which seemed to have been cauterized. She looked a bit exhausted with droopy eyes and dishevelled hair. She just came from the battle.

    His eyesnded on the wounds and he became a bit cautious.

    "Don''t worry, the wounds were cauterized the moment I got attacked. Until now, that was the only thing that worked against this disease.

    When the infection was fresh, it should be bathed with extremely high level mes. Only then would the infection die."

    That is all they coulde up with. So, as soon as they found a dead body in the city they are burning it right there and then.

    "Are you sure?"

    The young master asked.

    "Yes, I am sure."

    This made him feel a bit uneasy, however, since she prompted the idea of him leaving, he decided to do just that.

    "I will leave. I will try to let me father send some reinforcements. Until then hold the city."

    He said and left. The scout captain heaved a sigh as soon as he went to use the space gate. She looked at the city and gritted her teeth. She took wanted to leave, but she cannot. If she does so, then she would have to deal with the Thssa family.

    However, she and her team cannot just die in vain. And if they continued in the same pace, their deaths are only a matter of time.

    So, she decided to hatch a n in which the young master wouldn''t be here and no one from Thssa wouldn''t be a witness to what she is about to do.

    Her n is simple. They already sent a reinforcement request for the main family, they didn''t send it yet. So, as long as the city is destroyed before theye, she has a valid reason to leave the city and go back.

    For that happen, all she has to do is tweak a few things here and there.

    Soon, all the mercenaries and the soldiers of the city were given different orders. They were told to focus on various areas around the city walls. She gave them an excuse that the city walls are weak there.

    The groups did as such.

    She and her team on the other hand took a backseat.

    All of a sudden the wall copsed. Particrly at the spots where she said were ''weak''.

    The beasts breached and the people started running in chaos. The soldiers still tried to hold back and managed to push back a bit.

    However, in this time period, the crime rate sky rocketed.

    ''Criminals'' who were only targeting some elite few before are now on the streets. They are killing and looting everyone and by evening the whole city is destroyed, with almost no one alive. The mercenaries hired were killed in the ''beast tide'' along with the soldiers.

    The captain and her team ''barely'' escaped with some injuries.

    And before their escape, they also had to burn down the whole city to make sure that the infection doesn''t spread.

    She wove the story and escaped.

    Her story was sold and the family didn''t press too much on her. In that excitement though, she forgot to notice one little detail. The two cauterized wounds that she had on her arms, were itching a bit.

    That was just the first city among a long list of Sam''s targets.

    He used a simr trick as he did with the first Yena pack and sent them all to various corners of the Thssa territory. In fact, that is the reason they couldn''t send the reinforcements to all the ces.

    Sam''s first target happened to be considered negligiblepared to some more important ces he targeted and that made the Debauch young master''s ce be the first one to fall so quickly.

    Thssa territory felt like they set on a hot stove and the center of the fireid the water. Thssa.

    Time passed.

    The fourth pocket dimension is over. Sam came back on that day and he reported to the Demeter Academy. They didn''t care much about his report. However, they did express a certain kind of glee.

    Because in their view, their n worked wonders. Instead of trying to kill Sam or defeat Sam, the just put Sam away for a few days and he wasn''t able to attend both pocket dimensions and the extra revived pocket dimension as well.

    That is already a big win in their opinion.

    Maybe that win soothed their heart a bit since their actual students didn''t win anything in the pocket dimension those few days.

    The news of Sam''s return alerted everyone. All the first graders wished that he wouldn''t join the fourth revived pocket dimension. And to their delight Sam didn''t have any wish to do that.

    Instead, he directly went to meet Dove.

    "You are back."

    She greeted him with a slight smile. He returned the courtesy and took a seat.

    "What is the current status of the war we waged? How is the Zeus Academy doing?" n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "Not just Zeus Academy, every academy is in a perilous state. Right now, only our academy is floating by.

    The closure of the exchange centre is happening all over the academy realm and people are striving hard to get more coins.

    For some reason, they managed to get by until now without any pressure from the Hub. But I don''t believe all of them can be safe from Hub this week. At least ten to twenty percent people will be gone and they would have to pay a lot ofpensation ording to their contract with the Hub."

    "I kind of know all that. What about the war situation?"

    "Well right now, the Dean is not there. So, there is a slight behind the scenes internal strife going on in the Zeus Academy. We won a lot of resource points across all levels. We are holding the cream of the crop as our hostage.

    Since the Inter academy tournament is nearing, the Zeus Academy is extremely frustrated. Without the Dean, the other academies are not offering their support. Some elders tried, but no one openly supported them.

    We did get some under the table deals which we rejected.

    From what we know, there are three prime candidates to be the next Dean and people are pushing for them. But it seems like it won''t go down without a fight."

    "That is good.

    But I am sure, we cannot hold them hostage forever."

    Dove pursed her lips and nodded. That is indeed true.

    "Yeah, I just wanted to keep them until you are here. I want you to be involved in the nning. So, what do you want to do with the hostages?"

    "Well, I suggest that you seniors exchange for whatever that is you need to get a higher score at the inter academy tournament.

    I am sure, you are all desperate for it."

    "You don''t want anything?" She is surprised. After all, Sam yed a key role in this whole war thing. In her opinion, he suffered because of her ipetence and it is her duty topensate him for that.

    Since the academy itself doesn''t have any involvement in the ransom they get, she hoped Sam would take a piece of that pie.

    "No. But I do have suggestion." Sam said.

    "What would that be?"

    "Tell him a sky highpensation."

    "I am sure they would just agree at this point. We pressured them way too much. We are already seeing the activity of external forces trying to attack our academy students to get them back. If they can find a way out with money and without offending an academy, I am sure they would do it."

    "Well, that is where the twistes."

 Chapter 2157 Auction

    Chapter 2157 Auction

    The disappearance of the Shadow Cavalry made Christos feel headless. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    He didn''t understand what to do. The family will ask him and hold him ountable. Particrly, the rival factions will definitely not let this go.

    He is just short of banging his head against the wall, when he received two pieces of news.

    One is that Sam has returned to the Olympian region and went to meet Dove. And another news is that Dove has agreed to start talking about Ransom exchange.

    The first news made him wary and the second news made him delighted. He believed that both of them maybe rted and even thanked Sam for his sudden arrival. He immediately agreed for the meeting.

    And the time would be whenever Dove and her team wants the meeting to be held and the ce would be wherever they wants the meeting to be held.

    He just gave them free reign. As long as he could get back these people, he will feel less pressure from the league. And he can use them to get more coins so that the league students can get past the Hub for a couple of weeks at least.

    This is the only chance he got to buy some breathing space.

    To his further delight, Dove agreed for an immediate meeting in the Gambler Academy campus. The meeting was held in the student council office of the Gambler Academy.

    It is a board room basically. With arge oval table.

    Neither parties stood at the head and tail of the table. But only stood on the either side.

    On the Gambler Academy''s side, Dove, Sam and another senior named Hurin, the guy that usually tailed Dove. One of the grade 4 students. That was all their team had.

    On the other hand, the Zeus Academy sent a bunch of people. Christos, and a bunch of other people from the League. Surprisingly, Sam recognized that a lot of them are the Demi-gods from way back when he was doing the hell trials.

    They are part of the group that pit him against the Titans and in return got a giant pulsating middle finger created by the deadbodies of the Titans all neatly ced together.

    And one of them is even more highlighted in his eyes. Because of thest name of that person.

    Privi Thssa.

    The young master and the next in line to the throne of the patriarch of the Thssa family. He could even summon the wind andmand the rain back home. But here, he is not much. For context he is not even sitting at the table.

    There is a line of people standing behind the Zeus Academy members and he is part of that line.

    Sam looked at the list of people in his hands. There is no one named Thssa in there. None of the captives belong to the Thssa family, at least directly. So, his presence is a bit surprising.

    Sam didn''t have the time to check out the footage from the previous few days of surveince, so he didn''t know the reason which could have been possibly discussed in the meetings.

    "Alright, let''s get this thing started. What are your demands? As long as you can be a bit reasonable, we are happy to be generous with the ransom payments."

    Christos opened the discussion.

    "Of course, it is not like you have much choice here."

    Sam muttered out loud. He is still looking at the list of people as if he couldn''t care less about the big wigs sitting in front of him. And in reality he really couldn''t care less.

    Christos nced at Sam, but didn''t retort. He just looked at Dove.

    "What do you say, Dove? I am sure you already thought of what you want from this ransom exchange. You had so much time to think after all."

    "Well, we did. This ransom exchange is going to be a bit different than the ones we had before. Since, this war is very important to the Gambler Academy and it kind of influences the belief the students have in our school. That is why, we before we go further and discuss the exact value of the students that we captured, these are the list of the resources that we are going to ept the payment in. We can talkter about the quantity and if you want add or remove any items from the list, then that is fine as well. In that list, we also mentioned the maximum quantity of the particr item that we will ept. Even if you are willing to pay in that resource, we will not ept the resource once it surpasses a certain quantity.

    You have to ept the situation and pay us in a different material.

    This is the first thing that you need to go through and ept. Once the quantity limits and the materials themselves are fixed, we will proceed to next step."

    Dove passed a bunch of booklets to these people. The booklets contained arge list of materials along with the maximum quantity limit of the items that can be used for the exchange. Christos looked through the list and felt his throat go dry.

    It is not that the resources are extremely valuable, in fact not a single item in there can exactly considered be an unexchangeable material.

    The materials are traded all the time and they are mostly liberal. He is shocked by the level of uracy of the information mentioned in that booklet.

    All of these resources are under the control of the families to which the captured students belonged to.

    But the information that some of these resuorces are under these certain families is a secret. No one knew about the existence of those.

    Even Christos doesn''t know some of those details. And he turned to various family representatives that came along with him to see their reactions.

    And just by judging their expressions, he could understand that these things did exist in their hands.

    He didn''t like the aftertaste of that thought. He just turned to Sam and the rest and said.

    "We agree to use this as the currency. So, how are we evaluating the ransom for each person?" Dove smiled and said.

    "That is what I am about to talk to you next. This will also be pretty straightforward."

    She passed over another booklet. It has the list of all the captives in their hands. Christos looked through them and frowned.

    "What is the meaning of this? Why are they evaluated in terms of coins?"

    He had a bad feeling ins his heart. His heart is literally pounding in his chest.

    "That is the decided ransom value of these students. There will be no negotiation in that." Dove replied, without exining further.

    "I can understand that part. But what I asked you is, why is their evaluation in coins? You just said that you want the resources as currency."

    "Oh, that is true. However, the coins will be the unit they are evaluated by. For example, there are some captives that are worth around one hundred thousand coins.

    So, for a captive like that, you need to pay one hundred thousand coins worth of resources." Dove said.

    And this made the people behind Christos heave a little sigh. It is not of despair or frustration, but rather a slight sigh of relief. The reason for that relief? They believed that with this kind of pricing situation they can at least negotiate. After all, they are essentially giving a selling price for the resources.

    However, if that is all there is, there would be no reason for Sam''s intervention in this. Because this is the twist that Sam gave.

    At that moment¡­..

    *DING*

    Everyone''s wrist bands gave out alerts. They all got a message.

    And everyone was lost in daze for a second when they saw the contents of it and it is from Joker.

    "Hello my dear patrons.

    This is Joker. Over the days I have realized that everyone is going through a troublesome phase.

    The coin supply of the Academy realm has been stopped and you are all experiencing trouble finding a way to pay the weekly installments.

    Many people have sent requests and certain someone even went as far as giving me threats and even sent assassins to the Hub.

    So, I understand the seriousness of the situation. However, a contract is a contract. You should have been prepared by the rainydays.

    Still, when I mentioned this problem to one of my friends, they became generous enough to give you guys a way out.

    My friend will be holding a virtual auction in the Hub. You can join in from any Hub''s branch.

    In the auction, batches of coins will be auctioned and you can buy them with resources. And resources will be evaluated based on the current market rate in the Hub. There are going to be limited passes to even participate in the auction.

    You need to buy it. In a few minutes, you will see an entry field in your wrist band''s projection screen. You can enter what you can offer for the bid. Each branch has a hundred seats and the top hundred people can get ess to the ticket.

    To ensure fairness, the hundred are going to be divided among the four grade levels based on the academy grades.

    And just to give you guys some leeway, the Academy can send elders, instructors or Deans themselves to the auction. Each academy has two seats for themselves and they are not rted to the hundred seats that I mentioned.

    The managers will help you gain ess to the auction. I wish you the best."

 Chapter 2158 Bidding

    Chapter 2158 Bidding

    The message shook everyone.

    Christos stood up, almost got ready to leave and only then did he remember what his purpose was and what he came to do.

    He sat back down and looked at the Gambler academy members in askance. His expression, his shaking legs, and his fiddling fingers, all showed that he is anxious to leave.

    This is an opportunity, he cannot let it go.

    "How do we evaluate the value of the coin?" He asked.

    Sam smiled and said.

    "Tomorrow in the auction, the coins value will be decided. You need to pay the ransom based on that value."

    Everyone froze. All the Zeus Academy members froze like they were thrown into the middle of a cier. They couldn''t even move his fingers and they even forgot to breath for a second.

    "What did you say?" Christos asked to rity. He was hoping that he heard Sam wrong.

    "You heard me right. Tomorrow, we will know the true value of the coins. Based on that you can pay the ransom."

    "That is unfair. Do you even know how much the coins value could go to?"

    Christos yelled as he pointed his finger at Sam''s face. His finger his shivering.

    "How would I? We will only know it tomorrow." n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "This¡­ you are taking advantage of the situation. The coin price could reach sky high. You cannot do this."

    "I thought you guys are going to be generous." Sam said with a smirk.

    "That doesn''t mean, we are ready to get fleeced. You better think of better conditions, because that is not going to happen."

    "Of course, it will happen. But since you guys are acting constipated, I will ease it for you.

    The lowest price that goes in the auction. He did say they are auctioning in packs. The value of the cheapest pack will be the value we will go by. Otherwise, you can forget about the exchange. I am sure the will enjoy their time in the Gambler Academy prison.

    And if you don''t agree to the conditions now, we are not going to hold another meeting until after the Inter Academy tournament.

    After all, we need to prepare for the tournament as well and we cannot keep on having these stupid time wasting meetings."

    Sam said and stood up. The remaining two also followed.

    They got ready to leave and it didn''t look like they were bluffing. Christos gritted his teeth and decided to take the call.

    "I agree."

    The deal was closed and the Zeus Academy students came back with a million questions haunting their minds. How did Sam know that something like this is happening? Did he just take advantage of the sudden message by thinking on his feet or did he really know that something like this is going to happen?

    If he did, how did he know? What is his connection with Joker? What is his background?

    These kinds of questions burned in their minds. And they shared this fire with their peers back in the Academy.

    Everyone started specting and of course, the initial questions broadly expanded and people started thinking.

    Maybe a first grader like Sam didn''t really have any connection? Maybe it was the Gambler Academy that forged the connection? Maybe it was even the Dean?

    And that was the reason Sam was bold enough to execute the n like that. Sometimes, he doesn''t even have to give out excuses himself. People will do it by themselves and they will rationalize things.

    That night the silent bids were ced. Of course, the silent bids were just a ploy by Sam. It was so that he could control the intake of the people. He will know all the bids and he will know all their goals. All he needs to do is send passes to the people that has goals that will align with his.

    He did as he wanted.

    The Noble league only got three passes out of the twenty five in the first grade. Two for the second grade, four for the third and only one in the fourth grade.

    Christos was dumbfounded. He almost ran to the Hub and took it up with Icarus. He wanted to call that it was cheating. But he knew that it would be just asking for more trouble he was already in.

    He cannot just blindly throw usations.

    The next day he went to the auction to see who exactly got the other tickets and when he went there, he is dumbfounded once again. Most of the people that got the passes were not exactly powerful people, but they had one thing inmon.

    They were all a bit against the Noble league.

    Some that were humiliated by the Noble league, some that were surprised and some that were even tortured by the noble league.

    This made him frown. But then he shook his head.

    He cannot look too deep into things.

    That is what he thought. Once again with the rationalization.

    Everyone was directed to different virtual rooms and once they were there, they felt like they were being suspended in void. After some time, they realized that their consciousness or the virtual body they are projecting is in a virtual auction hall.

    In the middle of it stood Joker with his own projection.

    "Hello everyone, I don''t want to waste a lot of time.

    I will get straight to the point. My friend is giving out ten million coins to you guys in this auction. We are going to sell those coins in packs. A hundred thousand coins in each one. A hundred packs in total.

    A person can but two packs maximum. If they did two, they are out of the auction.

    And each grade has twenty packs reserved for themselves. The remaining twenty packs are open. That is where the instructors and elders can big along with the students.

    We will start with the first grade.

    How about we start the auction right away?"

    Joker pped his hands and a pack of coins floated in the air. One hundred thousand coins.

    "A Nether-Copper Mine that spans for eighteen miles."

    That was the first bid. It was done by a first grade student that came from Noble league. So, essentially it is a bid from the first grader. Everyone took a breath of cold air. He had an ugly expression on his face. Because Nether -Copper is a very special metal and it is no way inexpensive.

    However, it is also not the most valuable metal there is.

    But no one expected a first grader to go that strong with the first bid. It is an unspoken rule in auctions that they start small and slowly increase their bids with time.

    That will allow them all to test each other''s limits.

    But this openly big offer can only mean one thing. He is throwing the gauntlet. He is telling that he is not ready for games and he wanted them toe on strong or back the fuck off.

    However, what they don''t know is that although Christos had those thoughts, there were bigger reasons for him.

    The ransom payment.

    After going back the day before, he sat down and started calcting their maximum limits. Then he came to a realization. There is a great chance that some families will go bankrupt if the bidding price is way too high.

    He cannot afford that.

    Even if the moneyes from the treasuries of the families themselves and not the league. The moment these families are out of resources, they be targets and there would be imbnce in the league.

    So, he fixed a limit. Based on those calctions, he could at least pay two such mines for a hundred thousand coins to get the captives back.

    He needs to at least keep the lowest price close to that so that he could finish the exchange freely.

    And he used a different tactic that most would.

    He is bluffing.

    He is showing them a side that will appear like he is willing go too far for the coins. That is why he gave such a high price. But what he believed is that the same people who thought that the price is high, will definitely pay a lot more than they originally thought and it would be a lot more than just two mines of rare metal.

    "An Inferno Iron Mine, twenty-three miles." A different candidate from Apollo Academy said. He is not part of the Noble league. He is from an upstart family that rose to the power recently.

    Inferno Iron Mine is also a higher grade metal and its value is more or less simr to Nether Copper. So, therger mine obviously takes the bid.

    Christos looked at that man and told the junior to increase the bid.

    "Nether-Copper Mine, 25 miles long."

    He increased the bid. His limit is 36. He needs to make sure that the lowest price stays within the limit.

    "Inferno Iron, 28 Miles."

    Another bid to counter it.

    Christos gritted his teeth and he was about to tell the first grader raise the bid again, but hispanion pulled his arm back.

    "Why are going higher? I am sure that we can get it for lower in the other batches."

    "Are you an idiot? There are twenty-five people in each grade and only twenty packs for a grade. And one person can bid two batches. They will go fucking crazy over it. The only chance we have is the first bid.

    This usually is used to test the waters, but I don''t want them to do that. We need to go strong and keep within our eptable limits."

    "Nether Copper, 31 Miles."

    The bid was ced.

 Chapter 2159 Target

    Chapter 2159 Target

    "Inferno Iron, 35 Miles."

    The other party didn''t back down.

    Christos gritted his teeth and made the junior raise the bid once again.

    "Nether Copper, 36 Miles. The maximum has reached."

    "Inferno Iron, 35 Miles and a Blue Moon Pearlke farm of 5 square miles."

    Christos mmed his fist on the armrest. But there is no sound. It is the virtual space after all. The junior turned to take a look at him.

    His expression is obvious. He is asking him what to do. Christos''panions are gesturing him to stop it there. The price has increased way too much and they still didn''t buy into the theory that Christos exined.

    However, after gritting his teeth for a few seconds and noticing that Joker might just hand over the pack.

    He decisively made the decision.

    "Nether Copper 36 Miles, Star Sand Mine, 12 Miles."

    The bid was made. Star Sand is an equally valuable resource. It is mostly used as a catalyzing agent during alloy making process. It is harder to obtain. Even in the mine, it doesn''t have arge output. But still, a twelve miles mine made everyone gasp.

    Sam raised his eyebrow.

    This is indeed a bit unexpected. However, he could only smile. This is a great deal. Usually, a hundred thousand coins couldn''t possibly buy that big of a mine. Maybe, one tenth of the price offered by christos.

    But the scarcity created by Sam himself made him earn quite a big amount.

    "Sold." n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    The other party didn''t raise the bid and Christos heaved a sigh. He went over the budget. He might have to convince the league to make the big families bear some cost to get those students out. They are important factors in the Inter Academy tournament.

    He cannot let them deal stay rotting in some Gambler Academy prison.

    As he was thinking, one hundred thousand coins reached his physical body outside.

    The auction continued and just like Christos predicted, the price kept on getting higher and higher. People are throwing mines, blueprints, valuable herbs and elixirs like they are nothing. Of course, they would. Because the coins are not just coins anymore. Those coins are the only key to save their lives. To save their properties. With every dyed payment, they will lose a bit of themselves. So, they are pouring shit tone of resources into them.

    Sam felt pretty good about himself. However, judging by the expressions, he knew he aplished more than he wanted.

    By the end of the auction, he made several interesting observations.

    First one is, most if not all of them are now a bit more hostile towards Hub. In their opinion, not only did hub put them in such a weird situation of almost losing themselves, now it is taking advantage of them by not being flexible when it should be.

    These arrogant snobby brats, who got whatever they wanted by fair or unfair means are now facing a steel te that they cannot rust away with their money, strength and background. So, now in their opinion hub is acting unfair to them.

    The second observation is an interesting and useful one.

    The hostility is brewing among themselves. The groups that came in rtively friendly terms are now openly hostile against each other. After all, everyone wanted coins, but there are only so many of them.

    And added to that fact, a lot of them asked Sam or Joker about the next auction and Sam immediately rejected any chance an auction happening immediately. Even though he did have some thoughts of auctioninig further, provided how profitable the whole gig is, now that he can make them hate each other, it would be stupid of him to not make use of it.

    The auction was over.

    Everyone collected their coins and left the Hub. The same thing happened in all the other branches. Everyone who gained the coins are very very cautious of what might happen.

    They are afraid that someone might just rob the coins. For that reason, several instructors and elders were dispatched from the academies to make sure that their students wouldn''t be hurt.

    As for the independent cultivators¡­ they are too poor to even get a decent chance at bidding. If Sam''s guess right, they will be the first ones to go in the next week''s payment. He would have to take some measures to collect and operate a whole lot of property and resources.

    The Academy realm turned to extreme silence that night. Tensions are sky high.

    And that night, Christos had to hold a meeting with the league members. Many of them are angry at the decision he made to get the kids out at that sky high price. It is not that they didn''t believe their kids are valued that high.

    Its just that they didn''t believe the kids of other people should be valued enough to dig out their own pockets.

    The meeting was just basically, all the old men bitching about how they cannot afford this and that. But they all knew that they don''tpensate for theck of resources on the smaller families side, the bnce will break.

    Nobody wants that now, do they?

    Sam listened in on this call in amusement. He enjoyed it very much. The next meeting between Gambler Academy and Christos was set to the next day. Sam wanted to finish this as soon as possible and fleece as much as possible from Christos.

    Of course, that is not all that was nned by him that night.

    He has some travelling to do.

    He wore his disguise and covered his face to the extreme before he left the Olympian region. There are two ces he is targeting at the moment. Norse and the Xia.

    He used the space gate within the hub and went there. He met with Ivar.

    "How are things here?" Sam asked, out of courtesy.

    "Stop it with those questions. It is not like you don''t know what is happening here."

    "Well, it is just out of courtesy. Anyway, just make sure that you have my back. If something really bad happens, I want you to interfere in the way that I asked you to."

    "Why do you even want me to interfere? If my spections are true, you could escape easily as long as the Deans and Elders are not there."

    "That might be true, but we need to create an image here. Whether I win or get my ass kicked, the image should be present. I am hoping that you checked the footage properly and learned to imitate it?"

    "That I did. You can rest assured. If pushes to shove, I will fight exactly like that Idiot. Even though it would be an insult for myself. I will bear with it."

    Sam just smiled and disappeared from the spot. Right now his target is a first grader from the Thor Academy.

    He is neither the top most, nor is he the most influential by any means. However, he managed to get the ticket for the auction by virtue of Sam''s rigging. But this guy is bold enough to buy a pack of coins by himself.

    And he also realized that the Thor Academy is not exactly secure for him at the moment. He even thought of that before the auction and made preparations for it. He used a transference token as soon as he stepped foot outside the hub building. He disappeared into the forest where he already arranged a location for himself.

    Even that preparation is wild. In one day, he hired a higher grademoner from the city to clear a dangerous ce within the forest. A ce that rarely anyone ever goes to. As soon as that person finished the job, he then hired a different high grader and killed the first one.

    To make sure that his hiding ce is not revealed. He went to that hiding ce right now.

    And just like he imagined, some people were searching for him. The moment he won the bid, people targeted him. They went all out in their efforts to search him, but he was nowhere to be seen within the city premises.

    Him on the other hand, just went ahead and chilled in that hiding ce.

    As for why he wasn''t in the pocket dimension like most first graders¡­ he already realized the threat provided by the dyed payments and stayed back to earn some coins. He was already well near that target. But when the auction presented itself, he stopped proceeding further.

    Sam was really impressed by this guy''s nning and the way he operated.

    However, he happened to be one of the few that belonged to the hit list prepared by Ivar. His family dabbled in many unscurplous things and Ivar had no hesitation when he was asked to help Sam screw him over.

    Sam reconfirmed this man''s location with the wrist band and took off on harbinger.

    It was a valley that no one ever visits because of itsck of spiritual energy and nock of disgusting creatures.

 Chapter 2160 Spread the News

    Chapter 2160 Spread the News

    The young man is not even in the valley. Instead, hidden beneath a very foggy area within the valley, there is a small opening, as if it was just some crack in the mountain. There is a very small stream flowing down from the rock and that small crack is sucking in a teeny tiny bit of that stream.

    Sam turned his body into water using water elemental fusion and merged himself with the stream.

    His body slowly went through the crack at the same pace as the water. Hended in a small water body that is bigger than a puddle and smaller than a pond. He didn''te out and make his presence known immediately.

    Instead, he spread his observation ability.

    He is inside a small hollow room. There is no entrance or exit apart from the small crack from which he poured himself in. The room is rather small.

    It is not even fit for a real proper fight.

    It is lucky that there won''t be one. On the other side of the room sat his target. A young man sat in a lotus position as he meditated with utmost focus. Just the peace on his face made Sam think of all the other people back in various cities.

    Every one of them was feeling troubled and they all struggled with the impeding crisis.

    But this guy is calm and collected. He would have been a great subordinate that could handle some trivial tasks in the Dusk if not for the path he chose. Anyway, Sam is not short of people like that.

    Sam looked around for a moment to see if there are any traps. Once he realized that there are not any, he prepared himself for a moment, before he canceled his fusion.

    "FUCK"

    The other party screamed like hell as he opened his eyes and mouth wide.

    He realized Sam''s presence as soon as he changed from the fusion form.

    "Who are you?"

    He almost yelled out loud. But even as he did, Sam understood that he was trying to stifle his panic. However, Sam looked at him with a smile. His face is covered up, so the other party wouldn''t actually know that this intruder is smiling.

    "I am here for something that you have. I have an urgent need for it and I realized that I cannot afford to hold back.

    So, hand it over and I will let you go. Or, I will have to take it the hard way." Sam said.

    "You are here for the coins." The other party replied.

    Sam smiled and lunged forward. His body moved like a water serpent swimming in the shallow waters. He slid on the floor as if he was ice skating and made his way towards the opponent.

    It didn''t even take a few steps though. The room is that small.

    *SWOOSH*

    The other party shed with his sword. Sam''s brushed past that sword. The sword thatnded on him just flew to the side as if he was just a giant blob of gel like substance. The sword slid down and Sam moved around like a snake and threw a punch at the young man''s face.

    *BAM*

    The punchnded squarely on the jaw. It made the young man crash into the wall. But he stabilized himself. He realized that he might not be able to win and instantly made a decisive move. *BOOM*

    He threw an inscription at Sam and turned around to flee. On a corner within the room, some runes started glowing. A space gate was inscribed over it.

    *SWOOSH*

    A spear conjured out of water slid past the young man and hit the wall with runes.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosion the space gate exploded.

    "FUCK"

    The young man turned around in resignation.

    "Who the fuck are you? Why are you after me?"

    Sam held a spear with a frown on his face. His eyes are the only things that were out in the open and even they were disguised to look different. Looking at those eyes and the spear, the way Sam moved, something sparked in the young man''s head.

    "You¡­ You are from the Zeus Academy, aren''t you?" He asked hesitant. But there was a sense of surety in his eyes. As if he knew for sure that the other party is definitely the person he is thinking.

    Sam''s leg stretched out as he shot his spear forward attacking the young man with vicious threats. The spear shed with the sword. Sam appeared like the manifestation of water itself.

    "Why are you attacking me?

    I don''t have anything to do with the Zeus Academy. Why are you after me and my coins?"

    He screamed at the top of his lungs.

    He is still misunderstanding that Sam is from the Zeus Academy. He has no ns of clearing it though. The whole point of wearing that disguise is to create this misunderstanding.

    Right now, Sam is copying the fighting style of a water elemental warrior mage of the Zeus Academy. He is part of the Noble league and in first grade. As for how Sam''s target knew of this guy¡­ it is from the activities in the Pocket dimensions.

    The one that Sam copied from, the man named Arkwa, is actually one of the few that Sam highlighted in one of the modified pocket dimensions. He got some decently high level rewards, even though he didn''t get the top reward.

    So, he got some eyes on him.

    Sam''s target who is actually a person with keen eyesight for people also got his eyes on this guy. And luckily for Sam, Arkwa also didn''t enter the pocket dimension when he is executing this n. He is now taking advantage of this whole thing.

    *SWOOSH* *SWOOSH* *BAM*

    After two swings and one clean hit, the spear pierced through the target''s chest and left him there to bleed and die. Sam took off the spatial ring of the target.

    He walked to the small opening and swung his spear.

    *BOOM*

    The rocky wall copsed opening a way out of him.

    As the target died, the bird puppet that he owned flew towards him as if it was looking at him calmly. In reality, Sam is just checking if that guy is going to die or not.

    To keep up the appearance ofing there for a robbery, he has to leave as soon as he got what he wanted. That detail would be ignored by most, but knew for sure it subconsciously makes them believe that he only came for the coins.

    The bird waited until the man died slowly. All that while, it kept on pecking him as if it is trying to keep him awake.

    Up on the death of that guy, it flew through the hole Sam created and flew towards the Norse City.

    It flew straight to the Thor Academy and went to the dorm room of the target that just died. The next moment¡­

    *BOOM*

    It sent an energy beam and destroyed the whole dorm room from inside. Because that is the only way to do it. If attacked from outside, more than enough defensive formations will trigger. From inside, it gives out a big enough effect.

    People started gathering around.

    People came running and that included the student union. When they came, all they saw was the metal puppet.

    The puppet came in front of them and the next moment, the wrist bands of the student union people started glowing. Virtual screens popped up showcasing the video of the battle.

    It recorded all the conversation too. As the student council students looked around, a bit panicking, the bird puppet transmitted the video to the rest of the students that gathered as well. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    One of the student council members just caught a hold of the puppet and ran away to the council room.

    "For fuck''s sake. It is going to be a diplomatic nightmare."

    He muttered to himself as he went to the council office.

    And what they didn''t know is that it was just the tip of the iceberg that night.

    After leaving that valley, Sam went to a different ce and targeted another person from the Hel Academy. He didn''t use water element this time. Instead, he was wielding a saber with metal element.

    He danced around like a brute and killed the second target in a much more brutal manner. The puppet also went to the Hel Academy and blew up a dorm there.

    Then another thor academy candidate, a candidate from the Loki academy were also killed.

    After wreaking havoc, Sam felt relieved to see that Ivar didn''t need to be used. Sam is worried that the instructors would have some brains to guard the people who bought coins in the auction. That is why he prepared Ivar.

    As a contingency and he even felt a bit disappointed that there is no intervention. It would have created a bit more impact if they did.

 Chapter 2161 Meeting

    Chapter 2161 Meeting

    Sam went back to the Olympian region.

    Waiting for the night to pass and the morning to arrive along with the aftermath of what he did that night.

    The next morning, it is also the day when the pocket dimension will be over. The fourth pocket dimension and of course, Sam''s extra pocket dimension will also open that day. Sam knew that things will get really intense once theye out.

    Not many people will go to the extra pocket dimension Sam created.

    They would all be anxious about the coins and once the news of the auctiones out, there will be added disruption. He can just sit back and enjoy for now.

    The sun soon rose and when everyone was anticipating for the pocket dimension to open to see if there is another legacy inheritance, three groups of people from the Norse region entered the Olympian region.

    The moment they stepped in, the city guard moved. The captain of this city already got the news about the yesterday''s incident from the city guard of the Norse region.

    He frowned when he saw the person who led the group of the Thor Academy. It seems like because of the two fallen candidates, the Thor Academy took the lead in this whole fiasco.

    The Elder is known as Gungnir. Yes, the same name as Odin''s spear. And it wasn''t his real name. He is a spear user and people believe that he got blessings from Odin himself. The only problem is that they don''t have an academy for Odin in the Academy realm.

    And there are few families who actually follow Odin. Sam was also surprised and did some research on it. It turned out that the publicity of Odin is very less. The other gods try to market themselves like crazy. They give gifts to their followers and make them conquer morend to increase their faith.

    However, Odin is one of the gods that couldn''t care less about the faith. The only few organizations, families and tribes that follow him are very rare toe across. As for how this guy named Gungnir got in.. nobody knows.

    Everyone knows that his spear art is impable and he is the only one below the Dean and the Grand elders, who might possess the same strength as them.

    The city guard knew that this wouldn''t be easy to handle since this guy was sent.

    If things go sideways, he will just attack even if the whole academy and even the city is against him. He cares little for the consequences which is the worst possible thing that could happen to him. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "The city guard of your city informed me about the situation. I am very sorry for whatever happened to you and I understand why you are here today.

    However, if you can allow it, I will be more than happy to arrange a meeting between you and the officials of the academy that you want to visit. We can arrange it in a neutral ce like my headquarters for example and we can solve this issue with a proper civil discourse."

    Silence followed his plea.

    After three minutes of silence, Gungnir finally opened his mouth.

    "This is yournd. It is your duty to keep it safe. I respect that. I shall give you a chance."

    His words were mechanical and a bit robotic even. As if he is not used to having a proper conversation at all.

    The city guard captain heaved a sigh and directed them to the office.

    "Can you please tell me exactly what the problem is? I know a little, but I don''t have all the details. It will help if you can tell me all you can."

    Gungnir looked at an instructor who followed them there. The instructor nodded and started exining.

    "Yesterday, four people from the Norse region have been attacked. All four of them died and all of them were first graders.

    They were stolen for their coins. The bird puppets that were apanying them recorded the scenario and brought the news back to the academies. We reviewed the footage and understood the conversation.

    These conversations indicate that the attacks all belong to the Zeus Academy.

    We tried to investigate a bit and from the sources we had, it is apparent that the suspects indeed belong to the Zeus Academy. They are all first graders. We analyzed a bit more to understand the fighting styles. They match precisely.

    So, we are here to capture those kids and get an exnation from the Zeus Academy."

    "All four of them are from the Zeus Academy?" The guard captain asked. The other party nodded.

    He knew things are not going to end well. The other guard captain from the Norse region didn''t give this detail.

    Maybe he doesn''t know himself.

    However, he also felt a bit relieved. Now, the heat is focused only on one academy. Granted that it is a big academy and kind of the leader of the Olympian region, it is still one academy.

    And that too, an academy that doesn''t have any Dean at the moment. Which means, he can try to pressure them into agreeing for a very generouspromise that appeals these academies.

    After all, killing first graders is like plucking a de of grass in this Academy realm. How many first graders haven''t died in his own watch?

    He thought and spoke to them a bit more, asking some questions and went to the Zeus Academy. He first thought of meeting Christos, however because of the previous incidents, they are not really on the same page for most of the things.

    As for meeting an Elder or the Deputy Dean of Academy, he realized that there is no such person right now in the academy. All of them are gone. Even out of four grand elders only one of them is left. After asking around a bit, he came to understand where they went.

    They are all off to meet with the families that support the Zeus Academy from behind. They are all aiming for the next Dean position.

    So, the captain can only meet thest elder. But even that wasn''t easy.

    After a couple of hours of Jumping the hoops, he managed to meet him. Then only he realized just how much of a shitty position the Zeus Academy is in and how much trouble they are facing. The administration is a mess.

    No one is willing to work properly. Everyone is trying to interfere with someone else''s work. And the rest of them becamezy since no one is there to maintain that hold of iron w and judge their work.

    They are all busy sucking up to the three Dean candidates.

    Anyway, after meeting the grand elder, he bowed and greeted him.

    "Greetings, Sir Bloody Chariot."

    That is the nickname of the Grand Elder. It can also be considered a hero title. Because it was gifted by the god Zeus himself.

    The old man didn''t reply. He sat there in meditation.

    If not for the slight wrinkles and the huge mound of grey hair tied in a bun, no one would believe that he is an old man. His body has that bronze skin tone, taut with muscles. He sat in a meditative state and his expression is one of peace. Not normal peace. It is the peace thates with the feeling of having everything under control.

    After three minutes, he opened his eyes.

    "Greetings, Captain. To what do I owe this pleasure?" His voice was soft, pleasant and soothing even. As if a dew drop is sliding down a leaf. "Sir, there are some allegations on the four students from our academy¡­." He listed the names and exined the whole scenario. The old man closed his eyes for a second and said.

    "Gungnir is handling this? Why?"

    "I don''t know, sir. But it seems like the other party is very serious about this. They even brought big enough entourages to start a decent fight here. I don''t want to escte this. I just hope that you cane to my office and we can reach apromise there."

    The old man sighed.

    "What state did my academy has stooped to?" He muttered to himself and got up. He wore a long sleeved robe and walked out slowly. The captain followed him hurriedly. He didn''t fly and he didn''t even run with his power. He didn''t even use his spiritual energy.

    He just walked like a normal human being. He walked through the streets like he was amoner. His aura was not present and his expression was calm. He arrived at the office building before entering the meeting room.

    As soon as he stepped in, the presence in the meeting room changed. First it was filled with aura of anger and frustration. Now, it turned into pure caution.

    "Greetings, guests from afar."

    He even bowed down a little as he greeted the people from three academies.

    Gungnir''s body is soaked in sweat. He gulped as he tried to the trembling of his hand. Is it nervousness or excitement?

 Chapter 2162 Investigation

    Chapter 2162 Investigation

    Nervousness and Excitement. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Gungnir is infected with both at the moment. The Bloody Chariot. The man who earned a title way before Gungnir even amounted to something significant in the cultivation world.

    If Gungnir''s reputation is mystery, the Bloody Chariot has a history that everyone wanted to be a mystery. A lot of them wished they didn''t know anything about it. Particrly, the people who held grudges against him.

    They wished that they never knew what wrongs Bloody Chariot did to them, their friends and their families. Because they were pushed to the spotlight. They were in the spotlight because of Bloody Chariot''s deeds.

    The world forced them into a spot, making them look like wimps if they don''t try to take revenge, at the same time they will turn into meat pulp or worse cripple if they did make a move against him.

    Bloody Chariot was that menacing when he was on the field. After earning the title and destroying everything that came in his way. Gaining the favor of the god Zeus, he was given a chance to retire. He came back to the academy that he graduated from and took up the position of the Grand Elder directly.

    There was no resistance and no one wanted to contest him. In fact many people were d. Because they knew that the Dean''s position could change hands at any time, just like the remaining grand elder positions.

    Now with this immovable rock in ce, the people at the bottom rungs of the hierarchy are a bit relieved. They have an anchor to rely on when things go sideways. Like right now.

    Unless such a situation arises, he will not make a move. Now that he made a move, the other academies realized that things are not as easy for them as they want to be.

    "Sir, Blood Chariot. It is an honor to meet you."

    Gungnir bowed down as he came back to his senses.

    "Nice to meet you too, Sir Gungnir. The spear of Odin. I have heard a lot about you. And from what I see, you don''t fall short to your title."

    He spoke and gestured them to sit.

    The captain looked at the situation as he sat down as well.

    He is expressionless. But inside his head, he is screaming in joy.

    Things have gone exactly what he wanted them to. The other party from the Norse has backed down a bit.

    "So, Sir Gungnir. From what I heard, you believe that some of our students have caused some trouble in your region. May I know what this is about?"

    "Yes, Sir¡­" Once again, the same story.

    Bloody Chariot sat peacefully.

    As if he is listening to some story about apletely third party.

    "Sir, I understand what your concern is. After all, all of you lost promising candidates from your academy. They don''t deserve to die just for possessing some coins. However, don''t you think you are being a bit excessive just to investigate the matter of four people?

    That too four first graders."

    Silence.

    Absolute Silence.

    What are they going to say? That they are here to strong arm the Zeus Academy that has no leader, into giving them great benefits? That they are nning to even get their hands on the Legacy Inheritance that Dayus currently has in his hands?

    They don''t dare say it. In fact, they don''t even dare think those things in his presence and are trying to suppress the goddamn thoughts.

    "Sir Blood Chariot. You know how things work. We are just here to ask for justice. We don''t have any other intentions. We would just like perpetrators to be handed over after the investigation is conclusive. As for why we had toe¡­ as you know with the appearance of legacy inheritances and the new great rewards from the revived pocket dimensions, things are getting a bit messy.

    I didn''t want to risk sending some subpar and selfish individual toe here and make a mess of things after getting too greedy.

    That is the only reason we came.

    Of course, with how the situation of the current Zeus Academy has turned to, we didn''t want you to take extreme measures and put pressure on us. I understand that you guys are going through multiple crises, we were just worried that you might take that frustration on our representatives."

    Bloody Chariot cleared his throat a bit and said.

    "I am sad, that you think that lowly of us. However, it is an understandable concern, given how vtile our elders have been acting. And with their profiles, and all the cases that are piled on them¡­. I must say I am a bit ashamed to see that this prompted such a reaction for the other esteemed academies.

    However, you can rest assured. With me here, there will no form of oppression, no form of greed taking over, and certainly no form of impulsive attacks.

    I will handle this fair and square, through the academy realmws.

    So, first let''s go and talk to the suspects."

    Bloody Chariot stood up and smiled at them. The rest of the room is filled with forced smiles, except for the captain. He is delighted inside and out.

    This is the best decision he has made. Even though he went to the Bloody Chariot because he couldn''t find any other person in the academy, that happened to be a great decision for him.

    Ten minutester, all of them are inside the Zeus Academy in another meeting room.

    There are four students standing while the rest sat at a long boardroom table. The kids are looking at Bloody Chariot with confused gaze. Because, they have never seen him or heard about him. That''s right, they have never heard about the Grand Elder of the Academy. Bloody Chariot is that secluded and kept to himself.

    Looking at their confused expressions, Bloody Chariot smiled and said.

    "I guess, you don''t know me. I am the grand elder. The least important one in the Academy. Since, the other grand elders who were supposed to be here are not here, I am going to take up some of the academy''s administration duties.

    First of all, our friends from the Norse region are here with someint that I want to take up with you people.

    Before we proceed, I want you to demonstrate your fighting ability."

    *SNAP*

    He snapped his fingers. Four people wearing second grade uniforms entered the room.

    "You are going to fight them here. Since you are in first grade, you don''t need to hold back. Go all out. The second graders, make sure you push them to their maximum limit.

    Don''t worry about any serious injuries or possible killings. Since, I am here, I will make sure that no one dies."

 Chapter 2163 Deduction

    Chapter 2163 Deduction

    The table was moved a bit.

    The guests that came arranged the seats to the side to sit and watch. They suggested that they could do this outside, even though most of them didn''t know why they are doing this. Bloody Chariot however, didn''t even move an inch.

    He just sat there calmly, waiting for the match.

    The first suspect, let''s just call him Suspect-1 stepped up and his opponent is a senior who wields a sword. *SWOOSH*

    The battle began with the swing of a sword.

    *BANG* *CLANG*

    The shing of metal. The collision between the spear and the de rung like a bell in that closed room. Everyone is watching the match intently. At this moment, one of the Elders who arrived from the Norse region asked another elder in a whisper.

    "What is he doing? What is he trying to do with these battles?"

    The second elder who obviously had more experience exined.

    "He is analyzing the battle. Particrly, the moves of the suspect. The only evidence we have is those videos and all those videos are indicating is their battle skills as well as the victims identifying the suspects.

    I think he is trying to see how these suspects are going to fight and match their skills with what is shown in the video"

    "Isn''t that a bit too long winding? We could just interrogate them and we would get results." The moment elder spoke those words, his body froze. He felt like a predator is staring at him, like he is some kind of tasty treat.

    His eyesnded on Bloody Chariot who is still looking at the fight.

    However, the elder definitely felt like he is being watched by Bloody Chariot. The conversation between the two elders has been done in whispers. They even used the spiritual energy to make sure that even the people next to them could hear it.

    But it is hard to escape from the ears of Bloody Chariot.

    Both the elders were soaked in sweat. They forgot about their doubts and conversation. Only when they focused back on the fights did they felt a bit relieved.

    The other people also noticed this change in these two elders. Even though their conversation was not heard, they did notice that they were conversing. They understood who could make them sweat like that.

    The first battle is soon over.

    Everyone looked at the suspect-1 with serious expressions. Because, even though the start of the fight wasn''t anywhere close to what was shown in the video, soon the moves matched with the moves in the video.

    There is no difference.

    That is what most believed. Bloody Chariot had a frown on his face though. A small frown for a small moment. It appeared and disappeared before anyone else could even notice.

    The second battle started. It went on and the result was simr. Within the next few minutes, the remaining two battles also finished.

    Everyone looked at Bloody Chariot with an expression of askance. Now what?

    They are all waiting for him to pass the judgment. Bloody Chariot held his chin within his fingers. His expression indicating that he was thinking something deeply.

    Seeing his seriousness they wondered if he was really thinking about the case or if he isprehending the mysteries of the universe. After three minutes, Gungnir got a bit frustrated and cleared his throat.

    *COUGH*

    Bloody Chariot has came back to his senses. He looked at the rest and said.

    "Oh, I am sorry. I was lost in thought. These kids didn''t do it. Whoever attacked you was just imitating these kids."

    *CRICKET* *CRICKET* n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Stunned silence. Gungnir frowned and asked.

    "Sir, we have seen the videos dozens of times. We also saw some old footage of these kids fighting before. On top of that, because of you, we have seen their fight live. There is no denying that the fighting styles matched to perfection. There is no way that these suspects are clear.

    They definitely did it."

    Gungnir''s aura emanated stubbornness. He looked like he wouldn''t back down even if the opposite side is Bloody Chariot.

    Bloody Chariot asked calmly.

    "Are you sure that you want to question my judgement? I agree that they are simr in moves. Even I would have had a hard time if I wasn''t focusing so intently.

    Whoever did that is a genius. A genius that doesn''te often. A genius that you should either hold the thigh of or break the neck of.

    Because when he tries to conquer this era, you don''t want to be in his way or his opposition."

    Gungnir looked indignant. How is Bloody Chariot''s exnation any different from giving no exnation.

    "Sir, how is this possible? How can someone just imitate someone else''s fighting style just like that? They are not some novice mortal ne cultivators who use some pathetic arts.

    These kids are considered geniuses across realms and they are Divine ne cultivators. Even if the best of the best of this generation in the first grade happens to have the same element as the suspects, there is no way, the can imitate it to that level.

    Even if we assume that you are right, I am not saying you are. Let''s just make such massive assumption and think.

    How can you find four different people with that level of skill.

    There are four different suspects. Four different elements. Four different fighting styles. Four different approaches. Do you think it is possible to have four such geniuses in this era? At the same time?"

    Bloody Chariot looked at Gungnir calmly.

    It seems like he is unfazed with Gungnir''s (almost) outburst.

    "No, you misunderstood. That is not what I meant. How could there be four geniuses like that at the same era? It is impossible."

    "Thank you." Gungnir said with an exasperated sigh, only to be stunned by his next words.

    "It is the same person."

    Everyone looked at Bloody chariot with his mouth wide open.

    "What the fuck did you say?" Gungnir slipped his tongue. He lost himself for a moment and the next moment he realized what he said and said.

    "I am sorry, but I meant what I said, what do you mean? A single person? Who can use four elements? Four elements with that level of affinity and expertise to the point that he can imitate someone else''s style to the tee?"

    Bloody Chariot looked at Gungnir who is basically ranting at this point.

    "That is exactly what I am saying."

    At this moment, back in the hub, Sam is looking at a screen with his mouth wide open.

    He is shocked. Genuinely shocked. He has yed a million tricks since he came to the Academy realm. Bringing his friends, establishing the hub, the ming skulls, the renewed pocket dimensions¡­ even though many people doubted that someone is behind some of these events, Sam was never suspected.

    In fact, not a single person thought Sam along with these things. They couldn''t associate it. Maybe there are two people who did.

    One of them is Dayus. However, he is a yer so he doesn''t count.

    Then there is the Dean of the Zeus Academy.

    When the cases against the Zeus academy followed Sam''s case and trial, he believed that there is some connection with Sam, Icarus and the Hub. However, he didn''t suspect that Sam is the one behind it. Just like that, many of his deeds were gone undiscovered.

    No one came close to finding him.

    However, right now, Bloody Chariot came closest that anyone ever did.

    Back in the room, oblivious Sam''s surprise, Gungnir is exasperated. He gritted his teeth and pulled his hair a bit.

    "Sir Bloody Chariot, I respect you a lot. But you are talking absolute bullshit.

    How can there be someone who can use so many elements with that level of affinity? Even if someone has multiple affinities, they obviously have a dominant one. How would someone be able to develop all these elements at the same time?

    Do you know what kind of person that would be? He would y the whole generation on his hands. He will make every other first grader his bitch. He will be considered as the undisputed and undefeated champion of this¡­."

    He paused. His mouth wide open, as he remembered an image. Someone with multiple elements. Someone withbat skills that could make the rest of the first graders look like children. Someone that already suppressed the whole era of the first graders. Someone that was targeted by an academy, but still walked away scot-free. Someone that is the undisputed and undefeated champion of the current freshmen.

    Bloody Chariot looked at Gungnir in confusion and said.

    "Guessing from his frozen shock, I am assuming there is someone in the freshmen this year, who might fit this criteria."

    He looked at the rest in askance. By now the remaining also realized who could that someone be.

    Everyone saw the video of that someone killing hundreds of people in the Pseudo hell. Multiple elements, multiple elements and absolute domination.

 Chapter 2164 Meeting with Bloody Chariot

    Chapter 2164 Meeting with Bloody Chariot

    Gungnir hesitated to say anything.

    But after some time he made up his mind and spoke.

    "There is indeed someone who might be able to pull it off. But I don''t know if he is involved in all of this."

    "Who would that be?" Bloody Chariot asked with an intrigued expression.

    "His name is Sam. The champion of the freshmen tournament. In fact, he could be considered be the trigger of half the problems your academy is facing."

    Bloody Chariot became even more interested.

    "Please, do tell."

    "I don''t know how much you know about it, but I will just start from the top.

    That guy named Sam, based on what we know came to the Academy realm right before the entrance examinations. The very first day he came, he had a sh with your academy students. In fact, your academy students are the ones who started that.

    That day, he beat the shit out of your first grade students and the issue was only resolved after the seniors and the city guard were involved.

    After that, he went on to participate in all the Olympian academy entrance examinations, he beat everyone else and got first ce and he rejected all of those admissions.

    He even did so with the Zeus Academy. In fact, your Zeus Academy''s admissions had to be cancelled the first time around. He just destroyed the wholepetition with someplex lightning formation.

    After that was done, he was given the first ce. The test was conducted once again.

    Then he joined Gambler Academy with a special admission. He didn''t even attend their admission test."

    Gungnir spoke up to this when Bloody Chariot interrupted him.

    "Wait, Gambler academy took a special admission?"

    "Yes, they did.

    The special admission was also done in a high profile manner. At that time, the topper of the Gambler academy''s admission test, White seemed to have some previous unknown grudge with Sam. He rejected the Gambler Academy''s admission and was scouted by your academy''s Pearl. Theron''s daughter.

    Later the freshman tournament was dominated by him. However, because of Pearl''s underhanded schemes to take control over the freshmen, Sam managed to reach an agreement with the geniuses of other Olympian academies and pushed the Zeus Academy out ofpetition. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Except for White and Vidyut, no one capable was left in your academy.

    The grudge intensified after the freshmen tournament and Pearl did something stupid along with the Noble league.

    They tried toy down a n to kill him and other geniuses in Pseudo hell pocket dimension. Sam ughtered all of the enemies along with the sin manifestations by joining forces. However, he did most of the work.

    In that video, it was clearly revealed howplex and efficient his affinity and mastery over various elements is.

    Later, he mmedw suits on the Zeus Academy. However, the past grudges were used against him. A bunch of studentsid down severalw suits on him and subjected him to the twelvebors. Out of which I think he did two, as of now.

    However, the Hub which you might have heard of had a manager named Icarus who was done wrong by your academy''s elders. He used Sam''s case as precedence and filed hundreds of cases against your academy members.

    Students, instructors, elders, everyone is targeted. All of them were given 12bors which they are currently undergoing.

    On that momentum, even your Dean has been kicked out of the academy. He tried to protect his niece Pearl and they used that case to kick him out. He cannote back until Pearl is brought back here to go through the trial.

    However, Pearl is with Theron right now.

    Also, the Gambler Academy is pissed and their students started an Academy war. A bunch of your territories both in first grade and second grade are upied. Some third grade ones too. The only ones that are notpletely involved are the fourth grade.

    The Gambler Academy won with andslide, in every single battle. They have a bunch of people from you academy as hostage and I heard they recently agreed on a deal.

    That is the gist of it."

    "Interesting. I would have been more active if I had known something this interesting was happening in my academy."

    Bloody Chariot spoke and called for an attendant.

    "Contact the Dean of the Gambler Academy. Tell him that I want to meet this Sam as soon as possible."

    "Yes, sir."

    Bloody Chariot turned to his guests and smiled.

    "Let''s start our investigation from him. Of course, you might believe that there is a slight chance that these four students are still guilty and you cannot easily take my word for it.

    So, let''s focus on that angle too. Until they are cleared of everything, they are still suspects."

    Everyone heaved a sigh of relief. In their opinions, there is very little possibility that Sam is the one who did it. After all, they don''t really remember having any grudge with him. Even with all the affinities and mastery, they still have a hard time wrapping their heads around the fact that someone can imitate other styles that easily.

    In a way, they believed that Bloody Chariot is just diverting the case away from them. And what could they do if he did? Fight him? The Deans and Grand Elders have to make a move and no one even knows if they can even beat him.

    They are just d that this guy is still keeping the four suspects in the loop. As long as they have a strong enough evidence, they can just make him hand over those four.

    Soon, within a few minutes, the attendant went to see Wharton.

    "Sir, Sir Bloody Chariot hase out of the seclusion. He has asked if you could arrange a meeting with Sam as soon as possible. They has been a case filed by some academies of the Norse region and Grand Elder Bloody Chariot believes there could be a possible lead connected to Sam."

    Wharton looked at the attendant with a frown on his face. He is rubbing his beard and nodded absentmindedly.

    "You can meet him. I will call Sam. Once hees, I will let someone from your academy know."

    The attendant left after thanking him.

    Wharton called his own attendant.

    "Contact Dove. Tell her toe here immediately. Also contact Sam."

    Within a few minutes, both the students are in the Dean''s office.

    "What is it, Sir? It is very weird of you to call us to your office."

    Dove said with a semi-sarcastic tone.

    "Bloody Chariot came out of his seclusion. It seems like the Zeus Academy was pushed too far and he has toe and take charge."

    Wharton said with a serious tone. Neither Sam nor Dove has seen the Dean with such a serious face. He was always goofy and child-like with his antics. To think that there is something in the world that could make him be serious like this.

    "I want you guys to be careful with that guy. He is not a good man."

    Dove nodded and said.

    "I have read stories about him. He is considered a nightmare in the battlefield." She paused and turned to Sam and said.

    "I think he handled more people than you in a single battle. I wonder what he wants with you."

    "I don''t know."

    Sam just said casually. He turned to the Dean and asked.

    "What is it Dean Wharton, you are thinking about something?"

    "Its about that Bloody Chariot. It has been a while since we met and we have somethings to settle. Whatever you knew about him, he is much much worse than that. His character has no standing, even if youpare it to the worst of the human beings.

    Just be a bit careful.

    Don''t act too rash with him.

    You know what, I will be with you. I do not want leave your safety to a chance."

    "If you say so."

    Sam just shrugged. However, inside he was really surprised and became a bit more vignt. In all his calctions, this entity named Bloody Chariot never came to y.

    Sam doesn''t even know about this guy''s existence to include him in the ns. Even the Hub''s system that sent birds to everyone wasn''t able to find him inside the Zeus Academy''s territory.

    So, he is also one of the few who never came into contact with the Hub''s influence. He also happened toe close to specting Sam''s involvement.

    This could indeed go wrong.

    Dean Wharton sent a message to the Zeus Academy and within ten minutes, Bloody Chariot came along with some elders of the three Norse Academies.

    The meeting was held in a big meeting room.

    Dean Wharton looked at the guests.

    Bloody Chariot smiled and said.

    "Long time no see, Wharton. It has been a while."

    He extended his hand.

    *PAK*

    Wharton pped his hand away. He looked down at Bloody Chariot from his nose and said.

    "I won''t shake hands with the likes of you." Way to not act rash.

 Chapter 2165 Demonstration

    Chapter 2165 Demonstration

    Sam and Dove were surprised.

    The Dean just warned them not to act rash inn front of this guy. However, the Dean himself acted like that. And those words¡­

    Bloody Chariot however didn''t blow his top off. He just smiled and said.

    "It seems like you are still holding the grudge from that night. Good to know that your life is smooth enough to do that."

    Wharton didn''t reply and just turned his head to the side while cross his arms. He is acting like a child throwing a tantrum.

    By now even the Elders from the Norse, including Gungnir were a bit stupefied by the way Wharton acted. They knew about Wharton''s reputation. That old man is ky as hell. However, even from him, they expected a reserved behavior when it concerns a person like Bloody Chariot.

    And from the words of Bloody Chariot, it seems like they share some history.

    Bloody Chariot ignored him for the moment and turned to Sam.

    "You must be the freshmen champion, Sam. Nice to meet you."

    Bloody Chariot extended his hand. His voice was formal and polite with no hint of superiority or arrogance.

    "Nice to meet you too."

    Sam shook his hand and both of them took a seat followed by the rest.

    "I heard that you have something to talk to me about some case investigation. May I know how can I help you?"

    Sam asked directly.

    Bloody Chariot took out a video recording. It is the video of the four battles of the students in the Zeus Academy that took ce a few minutes ago.

    Sam looked at the videos and asked.

    "Why am I looking at these?"

    "Sam, I heard that you are proficient in multiple elements. I need you to do something for me."

    Bloody Chariot gestured the Elders and they called someone. A Second grade student who is at the Peak of the Divine ne Initiation came inside. He is also part of the Zeus Academy.

    "With your master, can you try and imitate these battle techniques in a fight against him."

    "May I ask, why I should do that?" Sam asked.

    "It will help us with the investigation of four murders that took cest night in the Norse Academy."

    "So? Why should I help with that investigation? It is not like I am a student of the Norse Academy. I don''t have any responsibility on my part to help with such an investigation."

    "Of course, that is true. You don''t have. But please consider this as a request from the Zeus Academy to the Gambler Academy. If you want, we can even discuss a price for it."

    Bloody Chariot replied. All this while, the smile on his face was consistent without even a single flinch.

    "I am not really keen on doing more business with the Zeus Academy. You guys still owe us a lot for the ransom exchange. Until now only half the payments are done and we are still waiting on the remaining half.

    We are contemting if we should start charging interest.

    So, right now the credibility of the Zeus Academy and its people is not very high. Particrly with the Gambler Academy."

    Bloody Chariot just chuckled at this while the rest of the people in the room took deep breaths. That was such a sharp statement.

    "I did hear about it. We are currently going through an Academy war. I understand that. However, for this, I will pay from my own pocket. You can be assured of that."

    "Like hell, you will pay. You lying bastard. Sam, don''t trust this guy at all."

    All of a sudden Wharton who was in the middle of his haughty tantrum turned around to scream."

    Sam raised an eyebrow and looked at the old man.

    Bloody Chariot looked at Wharton and said with a smile.

    "Come on, Wharton. You can''t bad mouth me in front of juniors. You are giving me a bad reputation."

    "Bad reputation, my ass. You don''t have enough bad reputation."

    "What is all this about, Wharton? It can''t be about that day."

    "You bet your ass, it is about that day."

    Wharton screamed as he ced his face close to Bloody Chariot''s.

    Dove and Sam are looking at both of them and exchanged a nce. For some reason, they have a bad feeling about this whole. A bad feeling that this might just end up¡­ a bit silly?

    Wharton looked at the two of them while still pointing at Bloody Chariot.

    "Can you believe this guy? After all that he did, he has the gall to say that it doesn''t have anything to do with that day." n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    As the two students looked at him in askance, Wharton continued.

    "He owes me money."

    Sam almost wanted to palm his own face and Dove actually did it.

    "How much?" She asked.

    Wharton suddenly became less talkative. He paused for a moment and said.

    "Does it matter how much?"

    "Yes, it does." Dove spoke through gritted teeth and looked at Bloody Chariot.

    "Ten spirit Stones."

    *BAM* *CRASH*

    One of the elder was so shocked that his energy riled up and broke the damn chair he was sitting in.

    Sam and Dove covered their faces with their palms. The second hand embarrassment is unreal.

    "You see, it is silly." Bloody Chariot said from the side.

    "Of course it is not. As I said, it is not about the matter of how much, it is a matter of principal. You lost a bet and you need to pay up."

    "IT is just ten spirit stones. And it was a silly bet."

    "There is no such thing as a Silly bet."

    Dove looked at Sam who sighed.

    "I guess, I could trust the words of a grand elder, even though the Zeus Academy is not that trustworthy at the moment. Let''s get this over with."

    The opponent was called and Sam started the fight right there and then.

    The opponent is of higher strength and Sam couldn''t really defeat him if he didn''t use all of the tricks. But this is just a demonstration and Sam started imitating the tricks of the four suspects.

    In the process, one would imagine that Sam wouldn''t imitate it properly. After all, it could just implicate him directly. Even if he could, he shouldn''t imitate those skills. However, to everyone''s surprise, Sam just went ahead and imitated the tricks to tee.

    In fact, his movements were so efficient that they felt like they belonged to him to begin with. It felt like these four suspects were imitating Sam instead of the other way around.

    As they watched him, the elders from the Norse Academies, started believing Bloody Chariot''s words more and more.

    Sam finished the battle and took his seat. He barely warmed up and sweat started trickling down his forehead, however he still looked pretty energetic.

    "You did a great job." Bloody Chariot opened up with apliment. Sam just nodded and asked.

    "So, if this is over, I would like you to give me my payment and we can all go on our own ways."

    "No, you can''t do that. You are now suspected of murdering four youths of the Norse region."

    Gungnir immediately interrupted. However, Sam didn''t even acknowledge his words. He just looked at Bloody Chariot and said.

    "I would take a hundred thousand gold coins. Right now, there is a huge scarcity for them. I could use more in my reserves."

    "You¡­"

    Gungnir was about to mouth off once again and Sam said.

    "What is your problem, sir? I thought this was a deal between me and Grand Elder Bloody chariot. Why are you interfering in the business when you should not?"

    "You¡­"

    "Enough, Sir Gungnir. Sam is right. Please do not interrupt."

    Bloody Chariot spoke and took out the coins. He passed them to Sam before saying.

    "You do understand why we are suspecting you, right?"

    "No, I don''t. Just because I have the ability to imitate these measly skills, doesn''t mean, I will automatically be the suspect."

    "Then¡­." Gungnir was about to speak, when Bloody chariot looked at him coldly.

    "Elder Gungnir, just because someone has ability to do something, doesn''t mean that they had done it. And I don''t believe I have to prove myself just because some old men decided that I am a suspect.

    I am neither under your people''s authority, nor am I obligated to do your bidding.

    If ites to this, then I will file aint against all of you saying that I suspect you for the deaths of every single student in the past ten years. After all, you have the ability to kill all of those students.

    So, you can lead me by the example, by proving yourself that you didn''t do all those murders."

    His words stumped everyone. That was such an unreasonable thing to say, at least in their opinion.

    When Gungnir was about to say something, the city guard captain got a call from his subordinate.

    The news he delivered made everyone stumped once again.

 Chapter 2166 Another Incident

    Chapter 2166 Another Incident

    The city guard captain looked at the rest of the room and said.

    "A few more students are attacked in the Norse region. From various academies. However, once again there are two people from Thor Academy.

    The attack pattern is extremely simr to the one before."

    This cause everyone to frown. They looked at Sam who is right in front of them. And one call clearly made them be sure of the other four suspects. Then how could an attack of the same pattern happen?

    "We need more details."

    Bloody Chariot stood up and spoke. He gave a courtesy goodbye before leaving the room. He went straight to the City guard office and for the first time, he flew. The city guard captain and the Elders from the Norse also followed. They arrived at the city guard. The deputy of the city guard is still in a call with the City guard branch of the Norse. They are gathering more details.

    "What is the status?"

    "Four murders and four different people. All of them wore masks just like the case before. Apparently, the metal puppets came back and destroyed the dorm area once again."

    After getting that answer, the group started feeling a bit troubled. They could sense that something big is happening and they are unclear of things.

    Bloody Chariot looked at Gungnir. "Use the space gate and get your people to bring those videos over. These bird puppets¡­ I wonder why they are pulling such an act after their hosts are dead¡­"

    He then turned to the Elder from his own academy and said.

    "I want the status on all the Grade 1 students. I am pretty sure, you have a record of people who went into the pocket dimensions. I want you to locate every student that didn''t go to the pocket dimension.

    I want the report this instant."

    He walked out.

    For the first time, he had a truly serious expression on his face.

    After around half an hourter, a few people from the Norse Academies came with the video copies. They were presented in front of Bloody Chariot.

    He started examining the videos and his gaze became a bit peculiar. Just like the first batch of crimes, these second batch of crimes also happened to showcase the same simrities. The four suspects of this second batch, also have different elements, different fighting styles and different levels of strength.

    However, he could sense that simrity. It is almost like the same person did all four murders once again.

    The only point is that he felt like the person that did the first four murders is not the same as the person who did the second four.

    This made it much moreplicated.

    By the time he ended the examination of the videos, someone came with the details regarding the location of the students.

    There are a lot of people in the pocket dimensions, however there is no short of people who stayed back. However, most of their locations are unknown. They don''t know exactly where these people went.

    This is actually a pretty normal practice.

    Bloody Chariot sorted the list of the students that are in unknown locations. He called for the instructors in the Academy and arranged a meeting.

    "I want you to find out when was thest time these people are spotted and where is their possible destination after they left the Zeus academy. I want these answers as soon as possible."

    The instructors didn''t even reply anything and left to do the task in hurry.

    Bloody chariot''s attention once again went back to Sam. But he didn''t go back there to question him. He knew that he cannot push on Sam''s side too much without proper evidence. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    And anyway, the second incident happen right when Sam is in front of them. There is no proper reason to even suspect him.

    Bloody Chariot felt a bit exasperated.

    He then asked a few more questions and finally found where the suspended Dean is currently staying at.

    The Dean is still in the Olympian region. In the same inn. He is just staying there. The reason for it¡­ it is to act as a deterrence for the other academies. He knew that he is the only thing that is keeping other academies to target Dayus and snatching the legacy inheritance that they acquired.

    That is why he stayed behind.

    He also believed that the coin shortage would have shown a much more adverse effect on the Zeus Academy if not for his presence. They will just be an open target.

    Even now the students of Zeus Academy are open targets to other academies, however the moves made on them are being done with trickery and treachery. However, if there is no deterrence, others will open devour the students and their resources.

    The Dean of Zeus Academy knew that he couldn''t openly interfere, he will be subjected to the Academy realm''sws. The stronger you are, the stricter thews are and he is already under the scrutiny of the Judicial system.

    That is why, he is staying put waiting for his 12bors to end.

    He already did one of them and now he is waiting for the second.

    When Bloody Chariot arrived at his room, the Dean weed him inside with a warm smile.

    "Long time no see, Senior." He bowed deeply while greeting Bloody Chariot.

    "Stop it kiddo. You are the Dean of the Zeus Academy. You shouldn''t bow just like that. I am just a Grand elder." Bloody Chariot smiled and hugged the Dean.

    They sat down and Bloody Chariot asked.

    "So, what brought you out, Senior? It must have been a big trouble since you came out."

    "It is indeed a big trouble, kiddo. The academy is being targeted."

    "I know that, it is just that I am not clear of the details. Do you think all these things are rted to each other?" Bloody Chariot asked.

    "I don''t know, if they are rted. However, I have a hard time believing that they are not connected. The Hub, the ming skulls and the youngster named Sam¡­ particrly that Youngster, ever since he came the whole Academy realm is in a mess.

    He stirred up trouble in every academy possible. You could say, he is the starting point of the troubles. And he is linked to the guy named Ivar in the Norse region. And Ivar and Icarus are friends. Also, there is my case¡­

    If the ming skulls, the hub and the managers of the hub, and all the other troubles are not rted together, then that guy named Sam might just be the converging point.

    He might just be the factor that is making all these move together. Otherwise, there is no way, we are pushed to this extent."

    "So, this guy named Sam¡­ does he have a grudge against the Zeus Academy?"

    Dean hesitated. Because, he doesn''t have the permission to share the information regarding the game of gods. Only the deans have the authority to know. He pursed his lips and said.

    "There is a probable reason for him to hate not just the Zeus Academy, but all of the Olympian academies. I can only reveal you that much."

    "Seems like Zeus has interfered. What is it this time? Did he lose control and have another child? Did this kid happen to be Zeus'' kid that started hating his father?" Bloody Chariot asked with a serious expression. It seems like he is indeed serious about the question.

    "No, certainly not. I am sure of it. He should be a human by birth. However, he does seem to have some special blessing from Gambler. That is all I can say." Dean spoke carefully. Making sure that he doesn''t reveal anything that he shouldn''t.

    "Alright, just tell me what happened, ever since he came. Also, what is up with the hub? I heard there is a coin shortage because of it. This is the second time I have seen the exchange center being closed.

    The first time it was during the Academy war and the second time is now.

    What is the deal?"

    "Well¡­" Dean started narrating the whole tale. Bloody Chariot sighed in exhaustion just for listening to this.

    "There is no doubt, there is certainly a hand behind all these elements. Someone with a deep grudge against the Zeus Academy is running the show and guiding it behind. We need to be careful. I will try to settle it down.

    As for the situation with Theron¡­ how do you want to handle it? Even I can''t do much when ites to him. It will most definitely end in battle and it won''t be good for anyone."

    "I don''t know. I do have a way to make the case a bit diverted. After all, Theron doesn''t have any rtions with the Academy realm now, so, I can just pin the me a bit on him and finish the twelvebors.

    I just need to make sure that it doesn''t piss him off."

 Chapter 2167 Further Investigation

    Chapter 2167 Further Investigation

    "Yeah, sure. That is an easy thing to do." Bloody Chariot rolled his eyes and sneered.

    It is apparent that Bloody Chariot and Theron had some history. The Dean just chuckled a bit. He is the first hand witness of the events that transpired between his senior and his own brother. Theron is technically a junior to the Dean, since he is older.

    And to Bloody Chariot, Theron is junior by a few generations.

    This only made these two seniors witness Theron grow from a level below them to their own level. And by now, no one knows what is the true strength of Theron. All anyone knows is that it is better tomit suicide than piss off Theron.

    The problem is that Theron has a fuse shorter than a bald man''s hair. Even the veteran like Bloody Chariot is not exactly willing lock horns with that savage.

    And that''s why the sarcasm.

    "I will try to leave a message. There should be an emergency channel he left behind." Dean said with a wry smile.

    "An emergency channel? Theron left for you?"

    "Yes, Jade is still in the Academy and she is technically the student here. Also, he gave his word to Jade that he will let her be for some time."

    "Let her be for some time? What does that mean? Did that cold hearted bastard started caring for his daughters?"

    "I wouldn''t say that. It is just that Jade has fallen in love with a ve who worked in some mine. He of course didn''t like it. So, he gave the two girls an ultimatum. Either live up to the standards of being his offspring, or he would marry them off to the sons-inw worthy of his stature."

    "So, basically they should either be strong enough to benefit his goal or he would use them as bait to attract a strong enough entity to help him do that. Is that it?"

    "Yes, I think it is mostly rted to his faith gathering. You know, he took the quality route there¡­"

    They discussed Theron a bit more. But finally, there is only one conclusion, Dean will finish his twelvebors and meanwhile try to leave a message to Theron. He will then make aeback as the Dean. Until then, Bloody Chariot is in charge of the Academy.

    After the discussion, Bloody Chariot went back to the academy. He immediately sent message to all the instructors and elders to be there. Even the ones that left the academy to go off and suck up to the patron families of the Zeus Academy.

    He announced that there will be a meeting that evening.

    Meanwhile, the report that he asked for was prepared.

    The whereabouts of the students. By then, almost all of the students were ounted for, except for ten people. And in those ten people, the new set of suspects that were used by the new set of victims happened to be there.

    This made him frown.

    He called for the elders and asked them to see if there are any internalpetition footages that he could review to understand how these kids fight.

    Even though it is hard to gather, after striving hard, they managed to get ess to some footage. He looked through the footage and cross-checked it with the footage obtained from the Norse region. The moves matched. These four kids are nowhere to be seen and no one knows where exactly they went.

    "Find them. Whatever the cost, just find them as fast as you can. I need them here."

    Bloody Chariot just became more and more sure that this whole thing is being orchestrated. However, there is nothing concrete that he could gain from this. The only other observation is that all of them belonged to the Noble league.

    This made his thoughts divert to a different directionpletely.

    If not for the fact he genuinely believed that the attackers are not the suspects, he would have definitely believed that the Noble league pulled off something like this. In his opinion, the league is nothing but a nest of leeches that tries to such on the power of Zeus and other Olympian gods.

    And the worst part is these leeches act territorial as if they are the lions that fought for the power bestowed by the gods, when in reality most of their achievements are because they managed to please these self-centered gods very well.

    They could stoop to any low to get what they want. And with the scarcity of the coins, he is actually surprised that they didn''t do something like this yet.

    But with all the things happening, it is too fishy.

    So, the noble league members are still not on top of his list of suspects. However, he still called for Christos for a meeting. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    When Christos arrived, he stopped at the door and took a few deep breaths to calm himself a bit. He is a bit nervous considering that he is meeting a legend.

    He opened the door and walked in.

    His eyes were solely focused on the old man Bloody chariot, to the point the keen observations he used to make were gone out of the window.

    He didn''t even notice the minimalistic state of the office.

    Inside there are only three things.

    A table. One chair on the other side, clearly belonging to the host and two more chairs on this side.

    Christos stiffly walked towards the old man who sat in his chair waiting for him.

    "Greetings, Sir Bloody Chariot. I am honored to meet your esteemed self."

    He gave aplete ny degree bow. Even though he is nervous, he is brimming with respect.

    He actually meant his words.

    "Christos, nice to meet you. Please take a seat."

    He gestured and Christos sat down.

    "I called you here because eight noble league members are being suspected of murder and robbery. I am sure, with yourwork you might have already gotten the news, at least a few details about it.

    Four of those suspects are here, however the remaining four are not. We are still investigating the first four and the second set of incidents happened.

    And unfortunately, the second set of suspects are nowhere to be found in the Olympian region and their whereabouts are unknowns. It seems like they were deliberately masking their trial and made sure no one knew where they are going to.

    So, this makes them a highly likely suspect."

    Christos frowned as he saw the list of the names. He indeed got some news about this and he also came to know who the first four suspects are, the second set is a surprise for him.

    "What do you want me to do, sir? Even though, I am familiar with them, I am nowhere near rted to this case."

    "Of course, you are rted. The onlymon point among these eight students is that they are members of the noble league. Their families are part of the noble league. So, I need some information regarding their families in the noble league."

    Christos gulped and nodded.

    Bloody Chariot smiled and asked.

    "I want to know what happened in the recent meetings of the noble league. I guess that a lot of noble league families are fleeced because of the academy war. I am sure, there are a bunch of meetings happening in the recent days.

    And also, how is the noble league being affected by the coin scarcity? Particrly, these eight families."

    Christos'' eyes suddenly widened and his mouth opened involuntarily, but he couldn''t make out a single word.

    Up on looking at the list and thinking of their families, Christos really didn''t think much. He did believe that there is a chance these people have made this mess.

    After all, the whole of the Olympian city is almost in a dystopian state. A bunch of crimes are beingmitted every single day and he had it on a good authority that even there the majority is the Zeus Academy.

    So, if a few students from the league, went ahead and robbed someone from another region? There is nothing for him to be surprised about.

    And all these people are mediocre and their families hold mediocre positions in the league.

    However, now that Bloody Chariot mentioned it, something clicked. Out of eight suspects, three of them are having family trouble because of the ransom incident. So, they couldn''t afford any coins in the auction.

    The other five, already exhausted their reserves of the coins up on pressure by the high level families, now they are almost on the breaking point. In fact, even Christos was thinking how to appease the higher level members to agree to pay for the students of these families.

    It is just that there are too many families and members like these, that he couldn''t connect the dots immediately.

    Christos didn''t hide anything and just exined all the details to Bloody Chariot. The old man nodded and went into a deep thought.

    Just from this, it is apparent that all the families have the motive to do these crimes. If the norse members investigate in this route, they will definitely be able to find this. They will just pin the crimes if there is one more link attached to this. They wouldn''t even care about the investigation process anymore.

 Chapter 2168 Taking Charge

    Chapter 2168 Taking Charge

    That evening.

    The meeting with the Elders and Instructors wasmenced. Bloody Chariot, stood at the head of the table, where the seat for the Dean was ced. This is arge meeting hall. With the long table in the center, and more tables on either side. It is meant for the meetings with the whole staff. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Everyone has their own assigned seat, except for Bloody Chariot.

    In fact, half of the people in the staff doesn''t even know he is the Grand Elder of the Academy. They only know that there is a Grand Elder hidden and he is very powerful. Even in the remaining bunch, most of them haven''t seen him once. They only know of his existence and his legends.

    As for the remaining who managed to see him, only a select few ever got a chance to interact with him.

    To be fair, Bloody Chariot might be the only Staff member, who is getting paid by the Academy without doing anything at all.

    His eyes swept the room. Around one tenth of seats are empty.

    It has already been five minutes since the starting time of this meeting.

    He stood there in silence and then saw an instructor hurriedly running and was about to enter the room.

    "Stop there, please."

    Bloody Chariot slowly said and the instructor halted his tracks. The foot hovered in the air and he didn''t dare put it down. He didn''t even dare retract. Because at that moment, he felt like his neck is being gripped by an invisible python, ready to bite down and swallow him whole.

    "Please step back and stand at the doorway. Tell the people that wille after this moment to stop there as well and make them wait there."

    The instructor nodded and retracted his foot. He stood at the side of the door, like the gatekeeper.

    After that, Bloody Chariot finally addressed the room.

    "First and foremost, let me introduce myself.

    I am Bloody Chariot. Some of you might know me, some of you might not. I am a Grand Elder of this Academy. I usually take a passive stance in the Academy and won''t involve myself with the regr operations.

    As you know the situation is not ideal for our academy and it seemed like with the absence of the Dean came somecency among our staff.

    This even led to a drastic raise in ipetence.

    To put it short, I was forced to step up. Now getting to the point¡­

    I am going to be the Acting Dean of the Academy, in everything but the name.

    I will take every single responsibility of the Dean''s role, I will be handling all the Academy''s affairs and I will bemanding you for the time being.

    However, I am not going to take that seat or the title.

    This situation will persist until I solve all the problems of the academy and our current Dean who was suspended, returns back to the Duties."

    He paused and he looked at two people in particr before saying.

    "Or, if someone proves themselves that they are apetent enough candidate to be the Dean. And the proofes from purely yourpetence to keep the academy''s interest as first priority at all times.

    Not by appeasing the families that donate some money, not by trying to make underhanded deals with other academies, not by dividing the academy team and the students into different actions, making the whole academy vulnerable."

    He paused once again and looked at the door. By now, all the people that were supposed toe are here.

    "And the first important decision that I am making, all the instructors and the elders standing out of this room, right now, are all fired.

    You are relieved of your duties. The Zeus Academy no longer needs your services.

    The current Dean, Dean Heron, has informed me about the retirement n that he introduced to the Academy, you will be going through that process."

    (A/N: To be honest, I kind of lost track and don''t remember if I have given a name to the current Dean of the Zeus Academy, from now on, the Dean will be Dean Heron. Sorry for the trouble)

    The instructors and elders were shocked. Particrly, when they noticed that one of the Elders standing outside is actually a Grand Elder. The same one that was contending for the Dean''s position.

    So, even he is going to be terminated from his post¡­

    Everyone gulped. They looked at the dismissed grand elder and expected him to act out. After all, this is his life''s work. All the struggle that he went through in his academy days, getting to the God''s battlefield, participating in the God''s army, fighting for his life, getting back here topete with everyone to join as an instructor.

    Enduring the politics to be an Elder, and finally Grand Elder.

    All the effort that he has put in is going down the drain. The remaining two candidates for the Dean position, the other Grand Elder and the Deputy Dean, are actually hoping that he wouldsh out.

    However, this Grand Elder happened to be one of the senior ones and he knew who Bloody Chariot actually is. He just fell to his knees in helplessness.

    He mmed his head to the floor as he wept like a helpless woman that just lost her husband.

    With a wave of Bloody Chariot''s hand, the door of the room was closed and the weeping was not heard anymore.

    He turned to looked at the two other candidates.

    "You guys are juniors, so you don''t know me. But there is a good reason for that guy to just kneel and weep instead of going against my words.

    You better hope that you won''t have to find out what that reason is."

    He straight up threatened them.

    "So, on to our agenda.

    We need to talk with the Gambler Academy to stop the Academy War. Right now, the whole realm is going through a severe crisis of coin scarcity and the reason is clearly hub. Someone deliberately pulled off that contribution stunt.

    It is so vicious and on point. Nobody even dared to go there and check what was actually contributed, because no one has any spare coins left.

    It was that bad.

    So, we need to focus on finding out who did it. My initial suspicion is that it''s hub''s doing. They might just be trying to use this long winded approach to upy a vast territory and heaps of riches and resources from all the Academy realm''s students.

    We need into investigate in that angle also.

    And for that, we shouldn''t be locking horns with another academy which could potentially drain us of our power.

    Second thing, we need to get all of the students out of the Gambler Academy''s imprisonment. From what I heard, only the Noble league''s students were left out and that is because the Noble league families spent the money to bring them out.

    Which means, our academy not only owes the Gambler Academy money to release the students that are still trapped there, we also owe money to the noble league families.

    After all, the students were captured in the academy war and they should be relieved with the academy resources. The noble league also knows this. But why do you think these greedy bastards so eager to spend their own money?

    Why do you think they haven''t demanded any of it back yet?

    Out of the goodness of their heart? No, to breed their influence the academy more and more. And we need to wash that away.

    So, we are going to repay them whatever they have given us until now."

    Everyone got shocked. They looked at Bloody Chariot in unison with their eyes and mouths wide open. They knew of the exorbitant prices demanded by the Gambler Academy. It is going to cost a fortune, if they really have to pay.

    Of course, they also knew of the problem Bloody Chariot mentioned, however they just believed they wouldn''t fall into the trap of those families.

    They believed themselves to be smarter than that. But only Bloody Chariot understood why they shouldn''t be involved. As powerful as these elders and instructors, when ites to the legacies of the deception those families inherited with their messy internal politics and the deity boot licking, these elders are mere children.

    These people could never stoop as low as a family or a n.

    However, he is not going to exin himself. After passing a few more ultimatums, Bloody Chariot went to have the final meeting of that night.

    It is with a former student of the Academy.

    The one that is in the middle of this whole storm. Icarus.

    Even though Icarus is reluctant to meet with anyone, up on Sam''s instructions he decided to meet with Bloody Chariot and they agreed to meet promptly within the Hub.

    Bloody Chariot figured he would take a look at the Hub while he was at it.

 Chapter 2169 Key Detail

    Chapter 2169 Key Detail

    Amazing.

    Wonderful.

    Excellent.

    Bloody Chariot couldn''t think of too many adjectives to describe what he felt when he looked at the Hub. All the trinkets, machines, the virtual reality system, everything felt so novel and new. He could feel a few doors opening for him.

    "I can see why so many people are obsessed with this. This ce is a really great for training and tapping into one''s own potential through self-learning."

    He spoke out loud with a smile, not feeling reserved in giving out praise.

    Icarus just nodded as a thank you. He didn''t even utter a word for that statement. Because he couldn''t bring himself to. He is confident in dealing with Noble league members, Elders and even the Dean, however this Grand Elder is a whole different being altogether.

    This is a league above and he has to be careful. So, unless he deemed it necessary, he doesn''t want to utter a single word.

    If not for the fact that Sam kind of forced him to take this meeting, Icarus wouldn''t have. He doesn''t want to meet a figure like Bloody Chariot on such a short notice. He would have preferred some ample preparation time.

    But Sampelled and Icarus couldn''t refuse.

    "I knew modest people, but not people who are modest to the point they don''t even acknowledge a praise. If I could brag a bit, I am sure that Can think of at least a hundred people who would have killed to get such an assessment from me."

    He called out Icarus on his tense behavior.

    Icarus smiled and decided to speak. His smile is stiff and a bit forced.

    "Well, I don''t deserve the praise, since I only run this ce. The one who created is someone else and I highly doubt he would care much about praise from anyone. So, the nodding is all I could do."

    "Really? Is there someone really so detached to the fickle pleasures of heart? I thought praise is everyone''s favorite poison."

    "Maybe his too. But I believe it could be the one he uses to feed others. Not feeding himself."

    "Interesting."

    Bloody Chariot stayed silent for a few minutes as he fiddled with different machines. All the while observing Icarus and his actions. He could see that Icarus is feeling a bit tense, which is not all that surprising to him.

    Anyone would feel tense, including the Deans of the Academies and the family heads of the noble league. And in his eyes, Icarus is a little childpared to those figures.

    However, the way he answered is still a bit amusing.

    "I really wish I can the creator once."

    ''You already met him.'' Of course, Icarus didn''t say those words out loud. He is very much tempted to do so, just to see what this old man''s reaction would be. Icarus is willing to bet anything on the fact that this guy who has seen hundreds of years of life and millions of people has never met anyone like Sam.

    "We can go to my office and discuss." Icarus offered.

    "No need, we can just talk here. It won''t take long anyway."

    "Then, how can I help you?"

    "I would like to inquire the payment status of the Zeus Academy students. See I came out of seclusion recently and I am still not up to date with all the changes that happened in my absence. So, I would like to catch up."

    "That will be a bit troublesome. It is after all, private information of the students and it is mentioned in the contract that any personal information rted to the students cannot be divulged out to anyone without their permission." Icarus replied in a nd tone.

    "Really? That''s bad. I should have read a soul contract you guys drafted beforeing here. Is there really no way to get that information?"

    "Well, if you have the consent of the students, then it is possible."

    "Oh, getting the consent of everyone right now is impossible¡­" Bloody Chariot muttered out loud and thought for a moment.

    He sighed and said.

    "Give me a second. Does themunication token work here?" He asked as he took out hismunication token.

    *SNAP*

    Icarus snapped his fingers and said.

    "It does, now."

    "Thank you."

    Bloody Chariot walked to the side and contacted someone. After two minutes, he came back.

    "Can you give me ten more minutes? Someone ising. I would like to try out your Virtual reality machine meanwhile."

    Icarus just shrugged and guided him to the nearest machine. While Bloody Chariot indulged himself in the novel technology, four students from Zeus Academy came. All four of them are the first set of suspects. They came running because of Bloody Chariot''s call and they all held a letter.

    In it was a signed deration, expressing their consent in Bloody Chariot getting ess to their private matters of the Hub."

    Icarus checked the drafts and nodded. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "If they are fine with it, then I am fine with it."

    He spoke and snapped his fingers again. A translucent screen appeared in front of him. With a swipe of his fingers a bunch of text flew over the screen and he paused after a minute.

    "All four of their payments for the next three weeks is done. A little more than hundred thousand gold coins are deposited in each of their names. All deposits are done this morning."

    The moment he said those words, the air seemed to have frozen in that room. The four students stared at the screen and Icarus with dumbfounded expressions. Their mouths wide open and their legs are shivering as if they are standing in bitter cold with their pants down.

    "H¡­ how is that possible?" One of the students spoke out loud. It is clear that he is way too shook.

    "Shut up."

    Bloody Chariot scolded him without holding back. His aura slipped and enveloped the four students making them calm down in an instant. He then looked at Icarus with a frown.

    "Is something that matters? Why are they all so shocked?" Icarus asked in the same nd tone.

    "You don''t know? These four idiots are the suspects in killing four students from Norse region. They are being investigated. And the motive seemed to be coins."

    "Oh? No wonder¡­"

    Icarus muttered almost like a whisper, but Bloody Chariot noticed. His frown deepened and asked.

    "Is something wrong?"

    "Nothing, it is just these four students were in a very tight situation, not too long ago. Christos made their payment for the past two weeks. I am a bit surprised seeing that their three weeks'' debts are cleared while the rest of the noble league''s payments are yet toe."

    "You see, Icarus. Here is the problem. I am absolutely sure that they didn''t have the gold coins, because they didn''t steal it from them. So, how do you think the payment was processed?"

    "I don''t know. Honestly, payments is a weekly thing, and of course you can imagine, we are not really keen on collecting them from thousands of students manually.

    So, Joker has installed a really great machine that takes in the payments.

    And anyone can deposit anyone''s payment. So, whether they did it or not¡­ I cannot confirm. However, just think of the logic, who in the right mind would deposit the fee for a different student? Particrly, in such an unfortunate time."

    "Funny you say that, when you are partially the reason behind that unfortunate time. I didn''t expect you to be an empathetic type." Bloody Chariot mumbled. Icarus frowned and said.

    "I am sorry Sir, but I don''t believe we warrant such kind of judgement. Our Hub has been reluctant about this whole training program since the start. It was your academy''s Christos that came after us, constantly pestering Joker who was already neck-deep in his own ventures.

    The payment was solely made with the intention that after Joker spending is overly valuable time on your idiotic students, they should be responsible enough to digest and apply those teachings.

    With all the arrogance and elitism your academy breeds in your students, it is a necessary step to make take this education serious.

    Don''t me us, me your students if you want to."

    Icarus'' tone was harsh. Which was unexpected to Bloody Chariot and the students. While the students were dumbfounded by this sudden outburst.

    Looking at their expression, Icarus felt relieved inside. That means his acting worked. He knew better than anyone that this is all a trap. A trap so deep andplicated that even he doesn''t know where it is going to end.

    Bloody Chariot asked a few more questions before left along with the students. He didn''t further aggravate the situation anymore.

    On his way, he let the four students go. This is thest link he is worried about. Now, there is motive for these kids and there is also proof that stolen money is used for a purchase that benefited them. It will be hard to counter.

    As he thought up to this point, he stopped and remembered that he forgot to mention to those kids not to reveal the situation to anyone.

    However, he believed that no one would be stupid enough to reveal such damaging information, right?

 Chapter 2170 Expulsion

    Chapter 2170 Expulsion

    The next morning.

    Bloody Chariot is sitting in his new office. He is leaning in the chair while holding his be. He never felt a headache like this. It was like a thousand crazy monkeys are ganging up and beating his brain with hammers.

    He looked at the four kids in front of him. The first four suspects. They are all standing there in front of him with hands cross, legs shaking and heads bowed down. They didn''t dare look at him straight.

    "Just what is wrong with your heads? How did you even get into this school with brains like that?"

    He asked with genuine puzzlement.

    He is not even sarcastic. He is genuinely curious about their level of intelligence.

    As for the reason? It is easy to guess. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Last night after he went back to the academy from meeting, leaving the students alone, he thought they would have sense to not reveal the critical information like their payment status to anyone else.

    However, by sunrise, when he was talking a walk in the campus, he noticed that half the people he encountered were talking about this situation. The news spread like a wildfire. And as soon as he reached the office, the first message he received is from the Norse Elders, stating that they have something to talk and on the sidenote, they also informed him that there is might be no more need for further investigation.

    Of course, Bloody Chariot is not as stupid as these kids to not understand the implication behind it. They are clearly stating that they knew the information and now they are going to hammer don hard to get the heads of these four kids.

    As if that is not enough, these idiots did something else.

    In that panicked state, they actually called their homes and exined the whole thing. Now, four fucking Noble league families are involved. Their representatives are already here and even some of the forces are being deployed.

    The worst part of it all?

    The news of the families getting involved also spread to the Norse academies for some reason. As for who did this part, no one knew. He immediately called for these idiots and that created the current situation.

    The four students just stayed put without doing anything. They are extremely stressed and panicked.

    "What do you guys want to do, now?

    The news of your payment status is enough to paint you guilty. Nobody would give a shit if you actually did it or not.

    I for one, won''t believe that you are capable of pulling this off. You are cowards, big ones too. And your greed is not enough to overpower the cowardice."

    They all nodded. Completely agreeing with the statement. They are cowards. If they can get out of this situation, they will admit that they are not even adults and no even men. Bloody chariot continued after short pause.

    "However, the Norse Academies have way too much to gain and way too much evidence supporting their ims. They wouldn''t back down.

    And logically speaking, the current state of the Academy cannot afford another opponent. Half of the people are out to do the 12bors and the other half is waiting for their ownbors and trials.

    I should just hand over you idiots and be done with it. If I did that, with some strings pulled, I am sure you would have gone through the formal trial and be let off with some punishment and some huge drain in your pocket.

    However, you needed to prove your freaking stupidity and had to go and babble to your families. Making everythingplicated.

    So, right now elders from different Norse Academies are waiting outside and they are almost ready to knock the doors down to take you away. What should I do?"

    The four of them were silent. They couldn''t bring themselves to say anything. In their minds, they would very much prefer to say that he needs to protect them.

    Not ''he can kindly'' protect them or ''if he can protect them''. He needs to.

    Fuckers are entitled.

    However, they also have a feeling that they would be beaten until they reach the underworld if they spoke like that. So, they held back.

    *KNOCK* *KNOCK*

    An attendant entered.

    "Sir, the Elders from the Norse region are here. They are demanding to see you right now."

    Bloody Chariot raised an eyebrow and asked.

    "Demanding?"

    "Yes, Sir. They are very demanding. Their choice of words indicated that."

    Bloody Chariot sighed and looked at the kids.

    "Things I have to bear for the likes of you. The Gungnir is a kid in front of me. And I respect him a lot. Now because of you, fools I couldn''t even stand worthy of getting the respect reciprocated. Idiots."

    He looked at the attendant and told him to allow the elders in.

    Soon, the room is packed. This time all the Elders that were deployed on the mission are here.

    Gungnir was once again in the lead and he looked at Bloody Chariot with a menacing aura.

    Bloody Chariot looked at him with a smile and spoke.

    "Before you speak anything, I must say my piece.

    I understand that all of you are pretty angry, even so far as to demanding to see me. I can understand it very well. And based on the evidence it indeed seems like that these kids did the deed. For that reason, as a punishment, we are expelling these four students. And we will be looking into the second set of suspects.

    If they also deemed to be the same, they will be expelled also.

    With this, I would like to make sure that you understand something. The actions of these kids are not rted to the Zeus Academy in any way, shape or form."

    Pin drop silence. No one expected that turn of events. Not even close to what they imagined how this scenario will turn out to be.

    "You¡­. Expelled them?"

    Gungnir asked with almost a stutter.

    "I did." Bloody Chariot just smiled and looked at the kids.

    "Since, they are so eager to contact their families about this, they must be very secure with their family backing.

    If you have a bone to pick with them, you can do so, but not in my academy though.

    They are given exactly half a day to evacuate the Academy premises. Once they are out of that gate, you can do whatever you want with them. They are not our business anymore."

    Gungnir was stumped. But he gathered his thoughts and immediately responded.

    "Why don''t you just handover them to us?"

    "Is it my business to handover them to you? If there was indeed concrete proof, I would have done exactly that.

    But Gungnir, you and I both know that there really is no concrete proof for this.

    Still, because of their mistake, I expelled them. If you want to take them away, do as you please when they are out of this ce. That is it."

    Gungnir left without saying anything. He wanted to push it a bit, but looking at Bloody Chariot''s face, he felt a bit threatened.

    He silently walked out along with the other elders.

    One of the younger elders couldn''t hold back and asked.

    "Sir, Bloody chariot definitely backed down. Why don''t we just pressure him now? It is not like we came here to resolve this issue. We came here to increase the pressure and take that legacy inheritance."

    Gungnir looked at the man and scoffed.

    "Demand? Bloody Chariot? I should have punched you in the face when you used that word before. I am d that there is some mistake on the other side, otherwise, we wouldn''t have your body remained to take back to your family."

    His voice was calm and cold, stunning everyone else.

    Gungnir however didn''t even look at them. He just looked straight as they walked and continued speaking.

    "Have you heard of the Branxin Family?"

    The rest exchanged a nce and one of them spoke.

    "Yes, isn''t it one of the Noble league families that declined after their head died twenty five years ago? They used to be one of the great patrons of the Zeus Academy." "Twenty-five years ago, that was the first time Bloody Chariot came out of the Academy, just for two days. That was the first time he showed his face after he joined as the Grand Elder.

    He went out to meet someone, there he was having a drink, while sitting in a seat. And a guy demanded that he give up the seat.

    Bloody Chariot didn''t even look to the side, he just pped the guy''s head off. It turned into bloody mist and the body fell right there."

    "Why are you telling me this?"

    "The ce he visited in the Branxin family''s main hall, the chair he seat and drink he had belonged to the head of that family and the dead man was the head of the Branxin family."

 Chapter 2171 Idiotic Move

    The prefix ''Bloody'' Chariot wasn''t there for nothing.

    The norse elders stayed in the inn, while keeping an eye on the entrance. Waiting for the kids toe out. The kids however were kneeling in front of Bloody Chariot.

    "Sir, Please. We cannot be expelled. My future is dependent on this Academy. You know that I didn''t do anything."

    That is the gist of theirints. All of theirs.

    Of course, Bloody Chariot, didn''t care for thoseints though. He is just thinking about what to do next.

    But after some time, theints were getting annoying.

    "If you hadn''t involved your families, I would have at least tried to resolve this situation even though you let the cat out of the bag. But now, I don''t care. You will have better luck begging those Norse guys out there."

    He said and made the attendant carry all these guys out.

    Meanwhile, back in the inn in which the Norse elders are staying. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "Sir Gungnir, if you think that he is surely going to expel them, then why are we staying here? Once they are not part of the Academy, there is no point in doing anything to them. They are useless to us."

    Gungnir stayed silent for a moment and said.

    "That is indeed true. However, they are all idiots and I have a feeling that they might do something idiotic once again. If they do¡­ then maybe we can try and use that to our advantage."

    And he is not wrong.

    The four idiots who just got out of the office, immediately went to different corners of the Academy. They already knew the norse elders are staying in an inn nearby and they believed they will be waiting for them to take them away.

    So, now they are calling for protection. Since they are from decently powerful families, there is of course, some influence. They also have a lot of their subordinate members and subordinate families ced in the Academy. Both in the form of students and even some elders.

    They contacted them immediately. They also contacted the representatives sent by their families here. All in the hopes that they could leave this ce safely.

    They never wished that there is a space gate installed within the Academy grounds more. Time passed. These kids tried their best to get as many people involved. They cashed in every single favor they could and finally they had to step out of the academy.

    As soon as they did, everyone was shocked. All four students stuck together and they are surrounded by arge entourage of third graders, fourth graders, some instructors, and even a few elders.

    Granted that the elders and the instructors are of low level, they at least have the status of the instructors and elders.

    They all surrounded the four kids and looked around vigntly.

    And to no one''s surprise, the Norse elders came to meet them.

    "The four suspects are under arrest formitting murders in the Norse region. We are taking them back with us and investigate. They will go through the academy realm''s procedures and undergo the punishment necessary."

    Gungnir spoke in a in tone, while he was still walking. The students in particr didn''t even know where and when he came from. Before they knew it, he is already past them and is moving towards the four kids.

    The Instructors and the Elders tightened the circle.

    One of the Elders spoke.

    "Sir Gungnir, please refrain from taking any action¡­"

    Even before he could continue speaking, Gungnir raised his hands and asked.

    "In what capacity are you telling me to stop? As the Elder of the Zeus Academy or as an acquaintance of these kids?"

    His words stumped the Elder.

    The only thing that could save his ass him from being handed to him by Gungnir is his identity as the Elder of this academy. And even that is very unlikely.

    However, if he really acted with that identity, then this would be an escted diplomatic issue. Bloody Chariot will have the elder on the chopping block.

    "I¡­" He was about to say something, however he was cut off once again.

    "First dere your identity and capacity before you speak any further. As far as I know, the Bloody Chariot himself expelled them from you academy and their current status should be just that, expelled students."

    He didn''t even wait for them to finish as he extended his hand and caught a hold of one of the students His followers soon followed and did the same.

    At this moment, everyone has something on their minds.

    The supporters of the four students are worried. The only reason they agreed for this is to try and use their identities as a deterrent and buy some time before the people from the four families arrive.

    None of them want any beef with the four kids.

    At the same time, the kids are thinking or to be precise, praying for every god that they believed and didn''t believe to send their parents faster.

    While Gungnir is thinking¡­ that these supporters will act more firm.

    Yes, he wanted more resistance and the fact that this is going on smoothly is a bit disappointing to me. The whole reason that he came here is to increase the conflict and fish for a legacy inheritance after all. Once one of them made a mistake, things would be in favor.

    Just one move.

    One idiotic move and he could turn things around.

    Meanwhile, someone watching this from afar, someone who orchestrated the whole thing is thinking something simr on the lines of Gungnir.

    However, he has much more power than just wishing that they make the idiotic move. They themselves can orchestrate that as well.

    With just a thought from Sam, a bird puppet that hovering beside one of the elders made a move.

    *SWOOSH*

    *BOOM*

    With an explosion it shot out lightning that stuck Gungnir squarely on his back. The hit was clean and precise, aimed perfectly at the shoulder join, making his arm go numb and he had to let go to the student.

    The student who saw the hint of freedom immediately started running.

    The Elder whose puppet shot the lightning was stunned for a second, however at the same time.

    "Zeus Academy broke the rules and is resisting us. Attack."

    One of the elders on the Norse side made a move. Even before the elder could exin his surprise and understand what is happening, he is already attacked.

    Within a couple of seconds, Gungnir is back in full swing. It is like he was never even injured to begin with. And the reason for that was that he was neve really injured to begin with.

    He clearly sensed the attack and took the hit intentionally. So, that they will have proper reason to attack.

    As soon as the attacks started, they were escted.

    Gugnir stabbed the spear into the Elder that ''attacked'' him and threw him face first towards the entrance of the Academy.

    Some of the student who were watching the whole scene stood there and waited ¡­

    Fifteen minutester.

    Bloody Chariot is standing at the entrance and looked at the scene in front of him.

    Gungnir is standing in the middle of some unconscious people. All the supporters, except for the students are knocked down.

    Both of their eyes met and one could sense the visible tension in between. It is like a fight would break out at any given moment. However,Bloody Chariot is in no mood to start a fight.

    Gungnir cleared his throat and said.

    "What a great Zeus Academy, you said you expelled them and the next thing we knew, the elder attacked us. We will be reporting this to the Dean. Please await us with an exnation.

    He then captured the four people and immediately left with the students. He was afraid that Bloody Chariot will speak something. He didn''t want a discussion that could damage the high stance they currently held at the moment.

    Bloody Chariot just watched them.

    The city guard captain stood there at the road with a heavy heart. The way things are, it is definitely not the worst case scenario, but it is closer to that.

    And no where near the best case scenario.

    Bloody Chariot looked at the guard nearby and asked.

    "I hope you witnessed the whole thing."

    The guard nodded nervously.

    "The first attack. How was it made?"

    ¡­

    Meanwhile, after Sam felt satisfied with the oue, he went back to do something else.

    During his absence in the academy realm, the defensive mechanism captured a bunch of presents for him.

    The cavalry.

    The shadow cavalry of cyclops.

    Right now, half of the energy captured by the Hub is being used to hold them back. And Sam is working along with Icarus to perform some surgeries on them.

    Since he got his hands on this valuable resource, he needs to use them properly.

    After all, he has around ten families to ruin and only one of them is on its way to its ruination.

 Chapter 2172 Thalassa Status

    Inside a room, the powerful shadow cavalry that left millions of dead bodies in their wake are struggling to escape the binds that are forcing them to stay in a suspended state.

    The binds are invisible, they couldn''t even sense them, they couldn''t see. Their spiritual senses are not working. They couldn''t smell anything, in fact, even their breathing is not under their control. They couldn''t sense the breath circting into their noses.

    They couldn''t feel their weight and finally except for the heart beats, they couldn''t hear anything else.

    This is a special room created by Sam and he used the chains that he obtained from the Immortal Hydra back in Deste to achieve this.

    The same chains that managed to bind a celestial creature, they finally came in handy after a long time. It has been way too long since he used them. Of course, those chains would usually make a person lose all of their energy slowly, while they keep on recovering. It is a never ending cycle of abuse which will eventually copse a person''s will and strength.

    That is why he used a lot of tricks to make sure that the people inside are locked up, but still keep their energy. Only they wouldn''t be able to use it.

    That is the reason why so much energy is being consumed from the Hub.

    However, it is something that he could still afford.

    Sam is performing the final surgical procedures on all these cyclops and once they are recovered, they would be let go to help him in the n to destroying the ten families.

    Right now, the first step in that, the Thssa family''s destruction is going on very smoothly.

    Sam is getting regr updates through Jamin and Ivar. The process was a bit slow, however things couldn''t be any better.

    At the moment, while Sam is doing this surgery¡­

    In the Thssa.

    The small ind that hosts the core of the Thssa family. The whole is covered in water, with littlend mass and in that smallnd mass the Thssa family upied the most strategically and resourcefully sound spot.

    That is the perfect spot to gather all the resources the is giving and they also kept the one and only worm hole connecting this to the outside world. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Usually, this ind would be prosperous with a bunch of people mining for different resources and people constantly in training.

    The Thssa family, albeit an Olympian family is actually very strict with themselves when ites to training. All their descendants can train there, all the facilities are arranged there for them.

    However, right now, the whole ind is empty.

    Almost deserted.

    Except, one could see the activity in the core estate area.

    Of course, even there, they were not exactly active in the streets or gardens, everyone is locked up in their own rooms.

    And all those rooms are filled with weak and painful coughs.

    The rabies that Sam created has sessfully spread throughout the Thssa family and while Sam is causing havoc in the Academy realm, the Thssa family as a whole is now on sick bed.

    After the young master he targeted caught the disease, he came back to the main estate directly. So, the very first high profile target for the city actually brought the disease to the core area which Sam was targeting.

    This made things easy.

    Particrly, when the guy went and hugged his mother and even made her wipe his tears and snot while acting all whiny and coquettish like a little child. Even Sam couldn''t have guessed that the virus he created is that potent.

    The virus spread to the woman. She is a concubine of one of the Elders within the family. To reduce her son''s punishment she went to her husband and pleased him in the bed for hours. Almost fainting in the process.

    The man who was tricked into taking aphrodisiac by this woman to get him to bed, had to find the rest of the women in his harem to satisfy his desires.

    And then came the twist. One of his women was cheating on him with his brother. She got that guy infected which spread to his own harem, in just one and a half day there are more than twelve people with the disease.

    If only Sam knew that he would be credited for creating an STD.

    Even before this spread has happened, the other targets from different ces already reached their respective destinations. All the territories of the Thssa family were infected in the next few days.

    By now, everyone from the family, including the head of the family is infected. The head of the family already sensed that his body is infected. However, his strength is so much higher than the strongest Yena Sam infected.

    Even though the virus has strengthened through the whole transmission process, it is still too much of a gap for it to strengthen itself to kill a man like that easily.

    Not just him, some high powered elders and grand elders are also staying strong. They can also sense the virus trying to wreak havoc in their bodies. The only problem¡­ they don''t know how to get rid of it.

    Their power is draining, very slowly and at the start it is negligible. But they are all sure that it is leaving their bodies.

    So, they called for the best doctors, they could find. Best herbalists, potion makers, pill makers, they even found people who are experts in curses.

    But no matter what they did, they didn''t manage to find a solution.

    In fact, some of the attempts backfired big time.

    One of the curse experts, collected a sample of blood and tried to identify the virus. After identifying it, he used a curse to get rid of the virus. After all, it is a living being and he believed he could kill the being with the curse.

    An Elder was used as the test subject. The rest wanted to see what the result is going to be, to decide if they can go with the process.

    The elder felt great for a bit. He felt the symptoms go away and thought that he won over. So, he went back to his wife who was still uninfected and had a great time. But by the end of the session, he was vomiting blood.

    A test was conducted and they realized something very very eerie.

    The virus didn''t die. Instead it mutated. It absorbed the curse and increased its strength. So, now they have a mutated strain that could increase the effect and reduce the incubation time on the high powered individuals.

    The quarantine is strengthened further. The family head refused to have contact with anyone, including his own children. He is only staying put inside his room and only allowed for the doctors and healers to take a look at him.

    Meanwhile, he constantly performed different rituals to Poseidon, hoping that he woulde and help.

    However, Poseidon didn''t respond. Who knows what reason the reason is?

    The news of this spread to other families, even to Jamin''s family as well.

    Thus the sales of the fire arms increased. Attacks are being made, the Thssa family is being attacked from everyone who ever suffered in their hands.

    Jamin who has the edge over this, made a killing. Overnight, he upied over ten different cities and even a whole under Thssa territory.

    Even in some ces, he killed the Thssa family''s influence and expanded his business. Of course, he didn''t stop. He just went on expanding.

    So, right now the Thssa family is on itsst legs. Sam decided to lend a hand and throw them off.

    While he is working on it, somewhere high up in the celestial realm. In the Mount Olympus.

    Inside the Zeus'' Pce.

    He is sitting on his throne as he looked at the screen hovering in front of him. He is looking at the things happening within the Academy realm.

    Ever since Sam stepped inside the realm, he has seen what Sam has been doing. He tracked every single action. He didn''t even care what Dayus did. He only focused on Sam.

    He watched as Sam established the hub, he watched as he pulled the bricks of the Zeus Academy, he watched as this brat destroyed the prodigies from his academy. The students are being hunted down even now by Stone. Even with all the shit, Stone never even bothered to attend the pocket dimensions and all the nonsense. He tortured each and every first grader. Albeit a bit slowly now, but he is taking his sweet time.

    The ming skulls is there as well. Zeus never felt this angry. It has been days since he moved from his throne. And his anger caused arge cloud to generate on top of the mountain. The lightning is rumbling ready to strike and destroy the worlds. But he cannot do anything. He has to stay put.

 Chapter 2173 Release

    Chapter 2173 Release

    As Zeus looked at the screen, someone barged into the room.

    It is a man withplete blue skin. He is almost seven feet tall and he looked like he is made of nothing but muscles. Chest as big as cobble stones and abs so detailed, it looked like the most a person could have. He had long flowing blue colored hair. His lower body is covered with blue colored pant like garments. They looked like they were made of the scales of the finest sea creature to ever exist.

    His eyes looked like they could hold down the culmination of all the oceans in existence.

    It is none other than Poseidon.

    Zeus looked at Poseidon with a cold gaze. The screen was still there and he was still in that pose, but his gaze just told a lot. Zeus was not pleased by his brother''s actions.

    Poseidon was not intimidated by that gaze. The difference in their strength is not as exaggerated as the myths make it out to be. If anyone can fight with Zeus on equal footing with Zeus, then it would be Poseidon, excluding Hades and some extinct titans, of course.

    "What are you doing here?" Zeus asked in a leisurely tone. Poseidon grunted and asked.

    "Why was a decree passed in your name saying that I cannot interact with my followers?"

    "Because I passed the decree. That''s why it was passed. What kind of stupid question is this?"

    "Zeus, what right do you have to stop me from involving myself in saving my followers?"

    "Because it involves my game, you idiot. I know that you were going to help the Thssa family. I cannot let you do it. Once you get involved the other gods will zero in on the Olympus. It would be another celestial realm war."

    "You and your stupid game. I am not a participant of it. Why should by abide by your rules?"

    "Because, the whole of the Olympus was involved in the game because of the previousary defense task.

    Just like how you all went and wreaked havoc in that where Sam defended your attacks, the gods from other realms went to differents that provided simr tasks to other candidates.

    There was a pact made by the gods in the game that we would all gather together and stop if any of the gods got angry and took it out on the students.

    I was locked in that pack without knowing. Karthikeya and gambler pulled one over me for this. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    So, all you can do is just stay put for now."

    "Fuck¡­"

    The argument went on for a while and Poseidon who was defeated, could only leave in a huff.

    Zeus went back to watching Sam.

    Back in the Academy realm.

    Sam finished the surgery and they all recovered.

    There is not much change in them. At least based on the looks.

    The centaurs are still in the suspended state as they slowly drifted into a sleepy daze. They didn''t know how long they stayed in that state. But by the time they opened their eyes, there was a path opened in front of them.

    A path of bright light in that endless darkness.

    They also could feel their own bodies. They could feel the slight breeze brushing past their skin, they could feel that prickly sensation under their noses.

    They could feel their mane, they could feel their legs and hands.

    They could feel their own breath.

    They felt delighted, if they could even feel that emotion, that is what they are feeling at the moment.

    They immediately ran towards that exit.

    They ran until they bathed in that white light. They didn''t even care about turning into a ck mass like they usually do. They didn''t even use their strength, not even their spiritual energy, they just ran out like normal centaurs.

    They were so delighted to the point that they didn''t even feel slightest bit suspicious when the bright light pathsted for more than three minutes.

    And then they saw the clear blue sky.

    Only¡­

    *SWOOSH*

    The moment they saw it, they were attacked.

    Of course, this sense of danger made theme back to their senses and they dodged it. Their fearsome auras returned. They went back to being the killing machines and finally got a sense of where they were.

    They were inside a city. That is all they could see.

    *SWOOSH*

    Another attack came. They dodged and turned to look in that direction. An Elder from the Thssa family who looked pale and sickly is aiming his arm at them.

    His cultivation is on the same level as the leader of the cavalry.

    The centaurs, immediately a move. Their killing intent soared to skies as their shadows extended.

    They soon merged together into one big ck mass and they shot themselves towards the elder.

    ¡­

    One hourter

    Thssa city.

    A city full of subordinates and descendants of the Thssa family is brought to its ruin. From the borders of the ind where some training camps were arranged to the core center of the city, every single structure was destroyed.

    Not even a single tree was spared. Everything was brought to ground. And the whole area was strewn with dead bodies.

    The centaurs all stood at the center of the destroyed main building and in the middle of them stood the Head of the Thssa family.

    "Y¡­Yo¡­ You are Shadow Cavalry. Why are you attacking us? Why did you kill us?"

    He asked as he tried to hold his breath in desperate struggle. Not to stay alive or fight back. Just to keep himself stay awake until he gets an answer at least. He didn''t understand the reason for his death.

    The sudden disease that started at the far ends of the Thssa influence and crept up to the family head and ancestors.

    The unresponsive god to whom they sacrificed so many things for. The sudden surge of riots and rebellions from themoners and enemies they trampled on before. The new age weapons that even let a mortal n person kill an Astral ne person. The weapons that let an Astral ne person kill a divine ne person.

    All of these dawned on the Thssa family at the same time.

    And just like that, when he was trying to figure out a way to deal with these problems, the shadow cavalry arrived.

    He knew of them of course.

    chous family is a Zeus Follower family, while Thssa is a Poseidon follower family. However, both of them are part of the Noble league. In fact, Christos yed a role in making Thssa family participate in the quest to kill Sam.

    It failed miserably.

    But he didn''t think much.

    Now, all of a sudden the secret weapon of the chous family is here and killed them. Worst of all, the whole family is sick and their strength reduced a lot.

    Even though the Head of the family is several levels higher in strength, he was worn down by the shadows.

    Now he is dying an unwilling death.

    A centaur came forward and stabbed him in the heart finishing his plight.

    Finally the centaurs looked at the surroundings and observed their own situation. They are now in an ind with a full of water. They need to find a way out to get out of here. They found the wormhole soon enough and without hesitation used it.

    They arrived in another Thssa territory.

    It is one of thes upied by Thssa and the whole ce is chaotic to the extreme.

    "Who the fuck are you?"

    One of the low-level elders who was there asked them immediately.

    He is an elder from Thssa family and he was stationed there to escort the healers or other experts that came to help the Thssa family.

    He is also sick.

    Now as soon as he asked that question, he is dead.

    The cavalry scouted the whole estate and found someone who has decent authority.

    When that person was surrounded by the cavalry, he immediately knelt down and surrendered. Only then did the Centaurs stop their killing spree.

    Even they were surprised by their level of aggression and the way they killed people.

    From the moment they were attacked, they were filled with rage that they couldn''tprehend and they also noticed that their attacks are much more powerful than before. A tad bit stronger and the victims once got attacked by them exhibited a certain kind of behavior.

    They don''t know what caused these effects, but they do know that something weird is happening.

    Only when they saw someone not put up any resistance, not so much as a question did they feel their urge to kill has cooled down.

    Finally, they couldmunicate with someone and find their way out of here.

    They inquired the man they captured. They need to go back to the chous Family. And in their minds a seed is nted. A seed of vengeance.

 Chapter 2174 Another Deal

    Chapter 2174 Another Deal

    Sam is actually keeping track of the Shadow Cavalry.

    There is no direct space gate from the Thssa family to the chou family.

    They might have had some dealings because of their league situation, but they definitely are not close enough to have direct travelling means like that.

    The problem now is that the Shadow Cavalry is not exactly adept at navigating between thes and realms like this. They are a kill-action squad. They would be directed by someone to their destination and they would be given a target.

    They will just kill them and be done with it.

    They were brought to be that way since they were infants.

    So, they are having a bit of a hard time.

    And whenever they used a space gate, they are arriving at an unfamiliar territory. And Sam wanted to take advantage of that.

    He apanied Ivar to go and meet with young master Jamin once again.

    "It has been some time. How are you doing?" Jamin is still in his own city, in the middle of the restaurant. In the same private room.

    Sam smiled and asked.

    "I am doing great. I am d to know that the business is booming."

    "Of course, mostly because of the chaos created in the Thssa family. I heard that some weird creatures appeared out of nowhere and are wrecking havoc in all of Thssa territory. The suppressedmoners and smaller families are taking advantage.

    They all want the weapons that could grant them an extrayer of protection.

    I even wanted to ask you to increase the supply."

    "Sure, why not. The weird creatures that you are talking about¡­" Even before Sam could continue, Jamin smirked and stopped him.

    "Please, don''t act like you don''t know about them. The whole plight of the Thssa family started when you met me the first time. I am still not sure of your identity andI am unsure of your involvement in the whole fiasco. But I am sure of one thing, you are definitely aware of all the chaos that happened.

    Including the weird creatures. The centaurs or to be more urate the Shadow Cavalry."

    Sam didn''t reply and just stayed put.

    He wanted to see how far Jamin actually spected.

    "If my guess is right, you are definitely a person that is currently involved in the Academy realm.Maybe Hub, ming skulls, or a student, maybe even that guy named Sam, or the person that is helping that guy named Stone.

    You could be anyone."

    Sam just smiled.

    "Is it necessary for you to learn about my identity right now?"

    "Not really. Just admit that you are involved and speak straightforwardly. I will appreciate it a lot more. By now, you should have understood my character.

    As long as you are upright with me and give me the benefits that I deserve, I am happy to cooperate."

    "Okay, then.

    You can keep on guessing my identity. I am sure you will. Right now, I came here to offer you a deal."

    "What would that be?"

    "I will destroy the core ind of the Thssa family. The Thssa will be cleared. Do you want a share?"

    Jamin widened his eyes and his jaw dropped to the point that an egg could fit in his mouth.

    "Don''t tell me you are kidding." For the first time, Jamin leaned forward with interest.

    "Of course not. Even if I can clear that, I cannot spare resources to develop it. In fact, I have little interest in making it my base. All I need are the resources that are native to that.

    So, if you help me, you can take over that and give me resources in return."

    "What help would that be?"

    "I am sure you know that most of the Thssa territories are weak and the shadow cavalry is using theirwork to travel.

    I want you to make sure that the Shadow Cavalry travels in circles with the Thssa territory until all of their bases are cleared and only after they are done, you can let them go back to chous territory."

    Jamin is once again dumbfounded.

    Ivar looked at them both with a straight face.

    However, in his heart he has been screaming on top of his lungs. He is already shocked when he found out that the shadow cavalry is captured by the Hub.

    He is even more surprised to learn that Sam restrained and even performed surgeries on those fearsome centaurs.

    He was shocked when he was told that the centaurs were sent away. He didn''t know where they went.

    Only now did he hear about their presence.

    And when Sam said something like clearing out the Thssa family he wanted to bash his head to the wine bottle andmit suicide right there.

    After all, how old was he? He is several generation senior to Sam. How many years had he been trying to put up a fight againstthe Academy realm? But Sam came and it hasn''t even been a year. But he is already making big moves.

    He caused the academy realm to fall into crisis after crisis. Right now the whole academy realm owes the hub and a bunch of them surrendered their assets. The big families are all in trouble. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Zeus Academy is brought to its knees to the point that some old man lying deep in seclusion has toe out.

    Now, he is talking about clearing out a family from Noble.

    Ivar can only imagine the joy on Icarus'' face.

    While Ivar is lost in his own imagination, Sam and Jamin agreed on the deal. Sam shook his hand and said.

    "I will await the first batch to be delivered in a week."

    "For that, I have to upy that ce in two days."

    "Why wait? You can go ahead now. The Thssa family is already destroyed. Not a single member is left in the Thssa. Not even the spies of the other families were spared. That is why, the news didn''t spread.

    You can just go right now and upy it properly."

    Sam just smiled and left along with Ivar.

    Jamin stood up abruptly and was in a daze as he watched at the receding backs of those two people.

    Only after a few minutes did hee out of that daze and he immediately contacted his men. Soon, he received the news and confirmed what Sam said.

    This made him gulp down in nervousness.

    This is too big of a move from Sam. This almost made him rethink if the decision to look into Sam''s identity.

    He then pushed the thought to the back of his mind and went to handle the things. Even though he has enough influence, Jamin didn''t have enough strength. So, inevitably, he would have to rely on his family.

    At least, he can find a reliable elder that is neutral in the family to im this newfound opportunity.

    But before that, he needs to execute Sam''s n.

    ¡­

    Meanwhile.

    By the time Sam went back to the Academy realm, the fourth revived pocket dimension is over. Another overpowered puppet and some battle techniques along with a bunch of blueprints were delivered.

    Bloody Chariot who is also curious about these things pushed everything aside and went to talk to the students who came out of these pocket dimensions.

    Dayus who came out of the Pocket dimension, realized that the dynamic of the whole city changed.

    He also came to know the Norse Academy''s ploy to snatch the legacy inheritance. He wanted to storm the Dean and ask him to help him.

    But he also realized who this Bloody Chariot is and how he is now in charge. This made him feel even more wary.

    While things are like this, by that night, the news of Thssa family''s destruction made its way to the Zeus City.

    Not just that, there is also another news that apanied it.

    That is the presence of the Shadow Cavalry in the Thssa territory along with the massacres they are conducting.

    Sam didn''t know what method Jamin used, but he managed to make the Shadow Cavalry go circles within the Thssa territory along with other subordinate territories of Thssa.

    Within a day, they already covered half of the area and wherever they went, someone created a conflict with them.

    They left trials of blood in their wake and madly searched for a way to go back to the chous family.

    Christos felt like he was hit by a hammer.

    How did the shadow cavalry that was originally captured by the Hub appear in Thssa family.

    And when he thought of Thssa family, a different thought appeared in his mind.

    The Pseudo-hell incident.

    As if the existing twists and turns are not enough, a brand newyer is added to the confusion.

    This is the worst thing that could happen.

    Now it is hard to not suspect that the Hub and Sam are not rted.

 Chapter 2175 New Faith

    Chapter 2175 New Faith

    After the deal with Jamin is facilitated, Sam went to another academy to collect a different quest. As part of his twelvebors and this time also the academy followed the previous trick

    They decided to just give him some longsting quest instead of trying to kill him.

    Of course, Sam found a way to do it faster and easier, with all the man power and resources he had.

    While Sam went away, the payment day for the Hub hase.

    Many people did their best to make the payment and most of them did. But there is a significant number that couldn''t.

    After midnight which directly indicated the end of that deadline.

    In a far away from the Academy realm. Within an isted city that is full of light energy that gave off holy vibes.

    There is a city that is fully made of gold and white colored materials. Ordinary gold and even some high level gold is nothing more than decoration to most of the cultivators and these people did exactly that.

    The whole city is decorated with gold. The pirs, gates, walls, doors, all of them are decorated with gold. Some are even made of these golden metals. The city is small, but grand and exquisite.

    Even though it is midnight there, the golden lighting off of those golden ornamnents lit up the whole city. In the middle of the cityid a massive building. It looked like a castle that only the greatest of the kings could live.

    However, right now even people with mortal ne cultivation and looked like beggars are walking in and out of those gates.

    The gates are wide open, for anyone to enter as they wish.

    And there are two gatekeepers. It would be more urate to say that they are the people who were ced there to wee everyone.

    They are wearing long robes embroidered with various forms of golden patterns. They are greeting everyone with their smile. And if not for that sense of peace oozing out of their pale faces, they looked rather creepy.

    A young man walked in through the gate. Unlike most people who are walking through that gate, this guy looked rather strong. He wore a battle armor and walked in nervously.

    After talking to the gatekeeper a bit, he was guided to a special ce within the pce.

    Soon, an old man wearing a robe that is much more luxurious than before hase and sat in front of him,

    "I heard that you came here to change your faith. Are you sure you want to do this?"

    The old man asked. His smile is also peaceful and made the young man feel a lot less nervous

    "Yes, Sir." The young nodded like a pecking hen.

    "You do know that once you transfer your faith to the almighty god, you cannot go back to your faith.

    You need to surrender your soul and mind. And from now on, you need to act solely ording to our beliefs and practices."

    "Yes, Sir. I understand."

    "So, before we proceed, I need you to exin what prompted you to change your faith."

    "A soul Contract. I.. *ARGH*"

    The young man suddenly stopped speaking. He held his head with piercing pain coursing through his nerves. He copsed from the chair and started rolling around.

    The old man frowned and snapped his fingers.

    Someone came running. It was a woman with golden blonde hair and pure white robe.

    "What happened, Sir?"

    "I think it is a soul contract reaction. And it seems like a very powerful contract. Restrain the contract a bit, by isting his soul."

    Thedy nodded and ran to the young man. Several runic patterns appeared on her palm. The runes are archaic and gave off very weird aura. It is different from the regr spiritual energy, very simr but there is definitely some variation.

    The runic mark is locked on the forehead of the young man.

    That instant, he finally stopped squirming in pain. He opened his eyes and looked around in confusion for a moment, before he came back to his senses.

    "S¡­Sir?"

    He looked at the old man in askance.

    The old man sized him up. He even stepped close to him and examined the golden rune that was engraved on the young man''s head.

    Up on closer inspection, one could see that the rune''s glow is fluctuating. After some time, it stopped. It is glowing with only ten percent of the original goal.

    The expression on the old man grew extremely serious.

    "Who wrote this contract?" he asked the young man.

    The young man sighed and exined.

    "Sir, I am a Student from the Zeus Academy in the Academy realm. I joined some ce called hub and they have a weird contract. If I don''t pay a certain amount of coins, we have to pay a lot of our assets. The more the dy, the more trouble we will have.

    Right now, I am unable to pay and the soul contract is acting up.

    That is why I came here.

    I realized that there is no way for me to go through this deal."

    "A soul contract of that level? Is it exclusive to you? How many people signed that contract? How many conditions are there in it?"

    "Thousands of students signed it. As for the conditions, there are hundreds. I can''t even remember them at this point."

    "So, you came here after learning about us? To iste the soul and rid yourself of the soul contract?"

    "Yes." The young man just agreed.

    "You can have it, but for that, I have a condition as well."

    The old man said and the young man frowned. He is pretty scared about conditions by now.

    "You still need to continue as a student in the Zeus Academy. The baptism that you are about to go through will not stand as a hindrance to it."

    The young man was confused.

    After all, how could a condition be so beneficial to him? He came here believing that he will lose his status as a student of Zeus Academy. After all, he did gain some information about this specific faith that he came for help.

    It is a rtively new faith and has only been around for a few decades.

    The influence it has is very concentrated and it didn''t spread very far.

    In fact, apart from the he is currently on, there is only around four mores where this faith is prevalent.

    However, everyone in that space is a devout believer.

    Every follower of the faith is rid of all kinds of injuries and sicknesses.

    Their souls were freed and their cultivation improved by a lot.

    This is the specialty of this faith. Improvement and united front. It is not very popr and even this young man found out by chance because of a mission he took to investigate this. After some investigation he realized that this faith is not exactly obsessed with power and spreading their influence.

    He reported it back to the academy and everyone forgot about it, except for the young man of course.

    He has been a follower of Zeus for as long as he could remember, but whenever a problem came to him or other followers, Zeus rarely responded. In fact, most of the faith towards the Olympian gods is due fear instead of devotion.

    So, a faith that is so generous made his curious, which made him dig deeper.

    That is why he believed that he could rid of the soul contract if he came here.

    He was expecting to pay a high price and if he was asked such a price, he wouldn''t have doubted the other party.

    But now¡­

    Sensing the hesitation in the young man''s face, the old man understood. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "Don''t worry. We are actually nning to enter the Academy realm and establish our academy. From the looks of it, you are just a freshman there. In the next few years, stay there and help us understand how an academy and its system of operations work.

    I am sure it is not exactly a difficult or a confidential thing. We would like to take inspiriations from other academies and build a system of our own."

    Then only the young man sighed a bit. This is indeed not a particrly outrageous request, but it is not easy either.

    He has to be constantly vignt to make sure that his change of faith is not revealed if he went back. And if that was revealed and he is also going to be scouting their practices¡­ it is indeed a bit risky. Ironically, that brough relief to him.

    He immediately agreed.

    Both of them shook hands.

    "Wee to the Faith of Agmon.

    May I know your name?"

    The old man asked.

    "I am Alton." The young man replied. He paused for a moment and asked.

    "May I know, how I should address you?"

    "You can called Broman."

 Chapter 2176 Mess

    Chapter 2176 Mess

    Alton came back to the Zeus Academy and by that time, the fifth pocket dimension has started.

    Sam is once again nowhere to be seen. For him, these pocket dimensions are not interesting anymore. The ming skulls are operating and they can snatch those legacy inheritances while leaving some to Dayus.

    In short, only those two will get to hog these inheritances.

    Since the ming skulls are not being tracked, the focus will be on Zeus Academy.

    However, at least on the surface, the focus on it has reduced a bit, except for the Norse region''s trials.

    As soon as Alton came, he started working on the mission given by this new faith.

    In process he realized one thing. More than a dozen people have died the day before. They are dead because they reached the end of the soul contract. The worst part is, they paid so much to dy their deaths, but finally they ended up dead anyway.

    This made him gulp down hard and realize that his decision is indeed right.

    Even he would have died the same way.

    These deaths enveloped the whole region with gloomy expressions. Everyone is now scared and they are now plotting against the Hub.

    Most of them wanted to just attack the hub and be done with it, however the news of what happened to the Shadow cavalry is still fresh in their minds. Of course, it is not deterrent for everyone.

    As Alton roamed around in the city, he saw a group of Grade 4 students run towards the Hub. He followed them with a frown.

    A young man who appeared to be in his thirties is leading the charge and from the second nce, it is obvious that the rest of the group are not actually following him to charge up. They are there to stop him, but failing.

    "JOKER! JOKER!!! COME OUT YOU MOTHERFUCKER. COME OUT RIGHT NOW. HOW DARE YOU KILL MY BROTHER?"

    The young man yelled on top of his lungs. He took out a trident and threw it at the entrance.

    *SWOOSH*

    The trident is infused with wind energy and it moved as if a million storms were condensed into that one blow.

    It flew through the air and hit the wall, but there is not even a scratch.

    "Bro, let''s get out of here. There is no use. It is not like Joker hase and killed your brother with his own hands. It is the effect of soul contract. We should have checked well before we got deceived."

    "SO? DO YOU WANT ME TO LEAVE HIM BE? HE KILLED MY BROTHER."

    The young man rushed forward.

    At the moment, the whole hub is empty. No one has visited with the sudden deaths over a dozen people in just Olympian region. They are yet to know the situation in other regions. But they are sure it is not much different.

    As the young man walked in, Icarus walked out of the doorway. He looked at the young man who took out his trident. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "Long time no see. I didn''t realize that you are still in grade 4. I thought you would have graduated by now."

    Icarus said nonchntly.

    If Sam is here, he would have recognized this person as well. He is one of the Demi gods, Sam wanted to kill for a long time.

    His face is one of the few that were imprinted in Sam''s mind, because he spoke the most at that time.

    "You fucking Bastard. Bring that dog Joker around, right now. Or I will fucking kill you."

    He yelled at Icarus as well, but these are low shouts, he didn''t dare shout as loudly as before. Even though it ismon consensus in the whole city that Joker is some hidden expert, some people just don''t believe it until they see it.

    On the other hand, he has seen what Icarus can do. Not first hand, but he saw it. That is why, his volume reduced quite a bit.

    "If you havee here to use the facilities, thene in. Or, you can fuck right off. No one can make a fuss in the hub."

    As soon as he spoke, the young man is enraged. He infused his energy into the trident and got ready to attack, however, he suddenly saw a sh in front of his face and before he knew it, his body felt light.

    And the next moment, pressure increased on his neck bones.

    Finally, he saw it.

    Icarus is standing in front of him, or rather Icarus came to his front, caught a hold of his neck and both of them are flying into the sky.

    This action obviously caught the eyes of everyone that witnessed the whole fiasco with anticipation.

    Icarus is covered with spiritual energy that wrapped around him like some divine and holy smoky light.

    After reaching a certain height, he looked at the young man dead in the eyes and pulled him by the neck.

    The next moment, the energy condensed in his arm. An arm conjured up from pure spiritual energy as it grew bigger and bigger.

    And in that giant arm was the young man, getting crushed under its weight and pressure. Several of his bones broke and he turned into a giant ball. He felt like dying would be better than that. However, that was just the beginning, because Icarus threw him like a baseball.

    *SWOOSH8

    The giant human sized ball was thrown directly at the Zeus Academy. Icarus used so much spiritual energy that the young man left a trial of white smoke behind while most of the energy was enveloped around it.

    It almost looked like Icarus was not hitting the young man himself. Instead it felt like he is using the young man as the weapon to hit the city.

    Not just the people who are witnessing, the formation that was protecting the Zeus academy also felt the same.

    As soon as the body reached the vicinity of the academy, the formation was suddenly activated.

    The young man, who was spinning his ball form, vaguely caught the sight of the formation activating. His face paled.

    *BOOM*

    Under everyone''s gazes, his body hit the formation dome.

    His ball form opened up after the impact as he bounced up. He levitated in the air a bit before he came crashing down. The formation seemed to have detected his presence and it opened up.

    He crashed into the academy grounds.

    He fell in the open ground without doing any actual damage to the academy. Since most of the attack was actually absorbed by the barrier, there is not much force left behind his fall.

    The young man lost his consciousness as people took him away.

    The whole academy is in a mess. People who didn''t see the situation were scared witless.

    That applied to the elders as well. After all, the formation of the academy was triggered and it was a big deal.

    Meanwhile, the one who should have been alerted first didn''t even get to know that something like this has happened.

    Because at the moment, he trying to investigate something in the City guard''s office.

    It is Bloody Chariot, he is in the city guard office, asking for details regarding a particr person.

    He is talking to the guards that were ced near the exchange center.

    "So, you are sure that you saw a person wearing hooded clothes and a mask?"

    Bloody Chariot confirmed again as he looked at the city guard in front of him. The city guard gulped in nervousness.

    It always has been them that interrogated others. Since when was it that the city guards could be interrogated as well?

    It is clearly the privilege of the city guards and their status. However at the moment, Bloody Chariot is using his status of being ''strong as fuck'' to interrogate the city guard and his target is the one person who blocked the exchange center.

    As soon as he realized just how deep the debts of the academy students with the hub are, he got on track with this.

    Within a day, he found out about the mysterious hooded figure that went to the exchange center, which also happened to be thest one that ever went to the exchange center in a long while.

    After confirming it again and again, he stood up and went to The exchange center.

    The attendant that was standing outside, immediately stood straight and said.

    "Sir, the exchange center is not conducting an appraisal for a long while, pleasee back after the announcement for the reopening is made."

    "I am not here to exchange, I am here to take a look at the contrributions."

    As soon as he spoke, the attendant froze.

    He paused for a moment and nodded before leading Bloody Chariot to the wall of the exchange center. The attendant took out a token and ced it on the wall.

    "I am sorry sir, it will take a couple of minutes, since the contribution board hasn''t been used for a long time, we shut it down."

    Bloody Chariot just nodded and waited.

    The wall soon glowed brightly before showcasing arge screen. Bloody Chariot smiled.

 Chapter 2177 Theories

    Chapter 2177 Theories

    Bloody Chariot looked at the Contribution board with narrowed eyes.

    There are a bunch of things listed on there and he couldn''t even understand ny percent of them.

    One of them is, ''Usage of Ultra-violet rays in Dialysis of blood to rid of a Parasitic Micro-organism targeted at Red Blood Cells''

    This is a theory and a practical application submitted by Sam. Bloody Chariot felt that this sentence is wrong on so many levels.

    What the fuck is Ultra-violet ray? Is it a truly dark violet colored ray?

    What the heck is dialysis?

    He knew what a parasite is and what an organism is, but is a parasitic microorganism? How does it look like?

    The only thing he properly understood was the Blood cells.

    He scratched his head in the confusion. The joy and the smile that came with it foring to this contribution board haspletely vanished at the moment. He felt like an idiot looking at the theories. And the first one is the leastplicated one, he has seen so far.

    When he looked at the price of that contribution, he wanted to smash the wall right then and there.

    Bloody Chariot has been patient and cool-headed in dealing with everything since the time he stepped foot into this scenario. But now, he has an urge to smash his fist into this contribution board. Just how could some theory cost that much?

    He couldn''t wrap his head around it.

    He took out a spatial ring and gave it to the attendant standing nearby.

    "For the coins in there, buy me different things from this wall. I can see that there are theories, blueprints and even some techniques. Buy me a good mixture of all three. Just keep the techniques quantity a tad bit higher."

    Bloody Chariot didn''t even want to bother taking a deeper look at the titles. He is unable to understand them. But looking at therge number of coins disyed right beside the title, he knew that it is definitely not some trashy thing.

    Even if he couldn''t believe the iprehensible titles, he could believe the appraisal of the Academy realm. It is controlled by thews of the universe after all.

    He collected as many as he could and went back to the Zeus Academy.

    Only then did he see themotion in the Academy.

    He soon realized what happened.

    He sighed and looked at the seniors.

    "That kid is stronger than all of yourbined. Don''t go around making fools of yourself. Even the Shadow cavalry couldn''t do shit to those walls. What are you even trying to achieve by doing that?

    You should have used thosest few brain cells to look at the contract properly before signing it."

    He just said those words and went back to his office. He decided to iste himself and study these things. Even if he is beaten to death, he wouldn''t believe that the incident of the exchange center closure and the Hub are not rted.

    So, he decided find more about the culprit behind by studying whatever that is in those theories and techniques.

    *KNOCK* *KNOCK* n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Bloody Chariot looked at the door with a sigh. Christos stood there with pursed lips and a nervous posture. He almost didn''t dare to even stand straight there in front of Bloody Chariot.

    "What is it now?" Bloody Chariot asked impatiently. He clearly wanted to see what is in these theories that he bought with so many coins.

    "There is something that I would like to discuss with you. I think this could be used to establish a link between Sam and the Hub."

    Bloody Chariot''s interest is finally picked.

    He gestured for Christos toe in and take a seat.

    After Christos did that, he spoke.

    "When Pearlid down the n to take down Sam, she asked me for people from the Noble league families.

    I contacted ten families and established contact between them and her. These ten families have one thing inmon, they are decently ranked in the Noble league, in terms of strength and influence. However, that influence didn''t have enough actual authority at the right ces.

    They don''t have much influence on the Battlefronts of Gods and in the Academy realm. I baited them with those two.

    Of course, Pearl also used her father''s help to make them agree."

    He paused and looked at Bloody Chariot. After confirming that he is listening intently he spoke further.

    "Thssa family is one of them. The followers of the Poseidon.

    Sam ended the whole thing in a massacre and the rest of the shit started from that moment.

    And recently I received news that the Thssa family has been destroyed overnight."

    Bloody Chariot frowned. This made things much more serious and interesting at the same time.

    "What happened to them?" He asked.

    "From the information, the Shadow Cavalry has been spotted in the Thssa territory and they are going around destroying every singleir big and small. All of the main members died. In fact, not just main members, anyone with significant influence in the family has died.

    And the way the cavalry is going they might just stop only after killing every single member with Thssa bloody."

    Bloody Chariot leaned back into the chair and looked at Christos with a raised eyebrow.

    Christos felt a bit embarrassed and said.

    "I know what you are thinking. I was the one who mobilized the shadow cavalry. So, the cavalry should only take my orders from now until they reach back to the family and Ipletely relinquish my control over them.

    So, this is definitely not done by any of my family members. And I can assure that you that I haven''t done this.

    I mobilized the shadow cavalry to only to deal with the Hub and Icarus, but that didn''t work.

    The Hub captured allof them. You can ask anyone in the city. Almost all of them were at the entrance looking at the hub.

    So, I am sure that Hub is the one who did it."

    "So, you are suspecting that Sam is actually connected to the Hub because of this? Because he has a grudge against the Thssa family. I cannot think of any other connection other than that for the Cavalry to be present in that territory."

    Bloody chariot stayed silent for a couple of seconds and said.

    "I have two theories. If you can prove them wrong, I willpletely believe what you said and will take immediate measures."

    "What are they?"

    "First, there is a good chance that this is a ploy from the Hub. They might have captured and let them go in Thssa territory. They might just be trying to mislead the whole thing and this could all be just a coincidence."

    "The second one."

    "This could be your ploy. You might be trying to direct my attention towards hub, because obviously you have a grudge against them. You might be using my hands to deal with them.

    Of course, both of them are pretty far-fetched. However, whatever that I saw until now, I would like to look at the more far-fetched theories than the obvious ones.

    There is also a third theory and that is yours. Maybe Sam is indeed rted to all of this and it is not like there is no merit to it. However, it is just as far-fetched as the first two. So, I will look into all three.

    You can go now."

    He sent Christos away.

    Christos is a bit disappointed though. There is indeed some truth to what Bloody Chariot said about him. Christos did want to increase some pressure on Sam and the hub so that he could get some investigation done.

    But things are not looking good.

    The city is still in chaos. People are scared about the next payment day. Crimes increased and people are killing each other.

    Time passed and soon Sam finished the quest and came back. He came and checked the surveince as well as other things.

    One thing that surprised him is the notification he got to his contribution token. It is the notification from the exchange center. It indicated that someone bought some of his contributions.

    He did some digging and found out, who did it.

    The one and the only Bloody Chariot.

    Sam raised an eyebrow. To his dismay Bloody Chariot didn''t have the puppet and whenever he is meeting someone, he would ask them to ce the puppet aside. The surveince on him is the least informative right now.

    At this moment, Sam is ready to add a few more elements into the whole mess. For that, he needs to understand just how far Bloody Chariot hase.

    Anyway, this whole situation has dragged out for too long. It is about time he sped this whole thing up and ended it.

    By the end of these twelvebors this shoulde to a conclusion and he is nning to finish those twelvebors in the blink of an eye.

 Chapter 2178 Ling Tian and White

    Chapter 2178 Ling Tian and White

    Just like Sam wanted, he started finishing thebors quickly. Within that week, before the fifth revived pocket dimension was finished, he is already at the eighthbor.

    This news surprised everyone as it spread. However, it wasn''t much of a concern for most people. Except for the select few.

    Dayus was among them.

    Luckily, in the fifth pocket dimension, he managed to obtain the legacy inheritance and rewarded it to one of the team members.

    And another one of his team members managed to snatch the highest prize in the revived pocket dimension.

    Dayus believed in his heart that his luck was because Sam is not present in the pocket dimensions. In fact, even in the first couple of pocket dimension, he believed that the only reason the ming skulls managed to trick Sam away into taking the rewards is because Sam is not prepared for them.

    No one knew that the ming skulls possessed information regarding the legacy inheritances and expected them to appear in such a high profile manner in thest second.

    So, he was d that Sam didn''te from the third one. After all, he didn''t see Sam losing all that many times in this whole journey. But now that he saw Sam is speed running thebors, he had a bad feeling.

    However, there is another person who had an even worse feeling. White.

    When White arrived at the Academy realm, he made a name for himself on the first day. Everyone was curious and everyone thought he became the next best thing. However, Sam happened.

    Granted that he is the one who picked the fight, it is still a huge dent on his reputation and confidence. Then came another person from ming skulls.

    Wearing that stupid mask, he came over and destroyed White. The whole fight is controlled by that person. White waspletely on the passive side.

    As if that is not enough, ever since the pocket dimensions there is another guy from the ming skills. He is the only one that walked around with his face wide open to the rest of the world. His face is the only known face among the ming skulls.

    He came for the first two and didn''te forward after that.

    The word is that he even managed to catch Sam off guard. From what White knew, Sam is not someone who you can just catch off guard. Even if you can manage that, that means you have at least strength equivalent strength.

    This made White even more resentful.

    With all the nonsense of hub and its payments, he couldn''t even focus too much on his training and with these revived pocket dimensions, thepetition red even more. The team established with Dayus failed in a blockbuster way.

    mings skulls remained untouchable.

    With the disappearance of the Dean, no one was able to create as muchmotion as before to catch the ming skulls.

    Now, White is a bit aimless.

    Sam is not appearing in pocket dimensions. He just went on to deal with thebors.

    Meanwhile he couldn''t help but think about the rest of the situation.

    The whole city is in chaos. The city guards are unable to control anything. More and more murders are happening. In other regions, academies are already at war. The three Norse academies also made big moves on Zeus Academy.

    The Gambler Academy is still not backing down.

    Bloody Chariot did say that he wanted to stabilize the situation with the Gambler academy, but he didn''t make any moves regarding that.

    Zeus Academy is in constant peril.

    With all this mess happening, there is just one thing that scared most of the upper echelons in the Olympian region and some other regions.

    There are two regions that didn''t have this much turmoil. The sanatan and the xia regions.

    Both of them are the ones with the least amount of turmoil. It turned out that they have enough reserves of coins to make their people survive. They also formed tighter alliances with the other academies within their region. They became wary of the new entries and ensured strict measures to counter any ns to create conflict.

    Since the other regions are in constant state of turmoil, these two regions are now stronger rtively. So, once the conflict reaches its peak, the academies there can just gain biggest advantage possible.

    White sighed at this situation.

    He has known about the Academy realm a long time ago. Some of the finest powerhouses graduated from here, but now it seems like all the future powerhouses will definitely fall down here.

    He needs to find his focus once again.

    He gritted his teeth and made a decision. He took out amunication token and infused his energy in there.

    "Can we meet?"

    There is no response for a moment. Before a perfunctory"okay" came.

    White took off from the academy and walked deep into the forest outside of the city. In the forest, there was someone already waiting for him.

    A young man standing tall under a tree as he looked at a small bird that stood on the branch.

    The man''s face is something many people in Gambler''s academy including Sam has repeatedly seen. Particrly Sam. With the long robes and a peaceful expression, the man that stood there is none other than Ling Tian.

    The assistant who dealt with the issues for the God Gambler. One of the senior most instructors and elders in the Gambler Academy.

    "You said you didn''t want to talk to me again when you ran away."

    Ling Tian spoke while still looking at the bird.

    "I didn''t want to speak either. But the situation is not ideal for me." White said in a low voice.

    "Situation is never ideal for anyone White. You either need to change yourself to fit in better or you change the situation to make it fit you better. I thought I taught you that since you were a kid.

    Seems like I am just a failed teacher at this point."

    White didn''t say anything and just stayed silent.

    "Anyway, why did you contact me?" Ling Tian asked me with a sigh.

    White looked at him and spoke.

    "I need coins. I don''t want to worry about this Hub''s payment hanging on my neck. I need to get back on track to focus on myself. I need to train and improve myself. Otherwise, I will never be able to defeat him."

    Ling Tian chuckled and asked.

    "Is that Hub''s payment the only thing that made you stop from seeking the sess you deserve? As long as I clear this obstacle, are you sure you can achieve what you want?"

    White once again maintained silence.

    Ling Tian continued.

    "Its fine if you don''t want to answer me. But you need to answer to your own conscience before you can ept this help from me.

    Before you set out, I asked you not to. I told you that you cannot do this. But you did it anyway. You were adamant and you used me, your teacher, as being a biased individual.

    You said that I am biased towards someone that I never taught, that I never loved and I never even helped grow properly.

    All because I told you the truth. But you didn''t listen to me.

    You wanted to prove me wrong. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    But this is the first real problem that you encountered after youe here. The first real problem that you couldn''t solve with your recoil style and you are asking me for help.

    So, are you really trying to prove me wrong? Is this really the right way for you to gain victory?"

    White just stayed silent for a long time. No answer.

    Ling Tian sighed and said.

    "You can leave. I will handle your coin problem. But remember White, it is notte to backdown now, but at one point, it will be toote and you wouldn''t be able to get out of the situation, even if you want to.

    Maybe, even I won''t be able to stop you from suffering. Remember that."

    White didn''t say anything once again. He just turned around and left.

    Ling Tian pursed his lips and took out anothermunication token.

    "I need to meet you¡­"

    After twenty minutes.

    Sam came to the same spot on Harbinger.

    *SWOOSH*

    Hended on the ground while the Harbinger disappeared.

    "So, why the sudden invite? Did Gambler want more entertainment or something? I understand that the current plot is boring, but it is necessary in my grand scheme."

    "No, it is not. I need to ask you for a personal favor."

    "A personal favor? To the one and the only Ling Tian?"

    "Yes, I know that the Hub is yours. So, I want you to release White of that contract."

    Sam raised an eyebrow. This is indeed something that he didn''t expect.

    "So, you are where he knows me from. That guy is a piece of work, I must say."

 Chapter 2179 Favor

    Chapter 2179 Favor

    "So, you are where he knows me from. That guy is a piece of work, I must say."

    Sam muttered and with a wave of his hand, the earth around was manipted. A table and two chairs were conjured out of the solid stone. He sat on one chair while gesturing Ling Tian to take a seat on the other.

    Ling Tian raised an eyebrow, but still sat down.

    Sam then took out some wine and poured a ss for Ling Tian.

    "This is the new brew. I made it myself along with Ape. Tell me how it is."

    Ling Tian held the wine ss and looked at Sam in confusion. After some silence, he took a sip and asked.

    "So, is that a yes, or no?" n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "It''s a maybe." Sam replied.

    "How can I turn it into yes?" Ling Tian asked.

    "How about you spill me some stories about what that guy''s deal is? Why is he aiming at my ass, even though, we never even met in our lives? He even acted as if I killed his father and son at the same time, when we met for the first time in Gambler''s academy."

    Ling Tian sighed. He kind of expected this, but it is not his ce to give these answers.

    "I cannot tell you this. I have no authority." He admitted.

    Sam nodded and asked.

    "So, you know of it, but cannot speak?"

    Ling Tian nodded.

    "Alright, at least you can rify some doubts about him?"

    "Depends. For example?"

    "Have we really met before?" Sam asked.

    "No, you haven''t met him. That is for sure."

    "Then, how much of my journey does he know? He talked about the Game a bit. Does he know from the beginning of it all?"

    "Kind of. Depends on where the beginning is?"

    "Beginning as in you screwing over my soul by brining me here?" Sam said with the same smile.

    Ling Tian almost spat the wine out of his mouth. But he controlled himself and said.

    "Harsh Toke, but no, he doesn''t know that part. He knows from the time you started scaling the volcano in the Lava Rock vige. He has been observing you since then. In fact, your cultivation was almost parallel to each other. Except, he reached the next levels faster than you by a bit."

    "Wow, he reached faster than me? That''s very cute." Sam said in an almost effeminate tone.

    Ling Tian looked at him with a nk face and asked.

    "What is wrong with you? Why are you talking like that?"

    "Just for fun. It is not every day that I get to have Ling Tian owe me a favor or two. Since the start of our journey, I have always been on receiving end."

    "Not entirely, we have been on the receiving end of your endless verbal abuse." Ling Tian replied.

    Sam just smirked and said.

    "d that my words are reaching your god.

    Back to White?

    Let me guess how he is rted to you.

    Is he your fellow disciple kind of thing? Or a fellow servant of Gambler?"

    Ling Tian shook his head.

    "Is he your son out of wedlock?"

    Once again, Ling Tian was stuck. The wine got stuck in his throat as well.

    "Can you stop this nonsense?" Ling Tian asked with a sigh.

    "Chill out. I am just having some fun. Anyway, it could be done if you want." Sam said.

    "What is the catch?" Ling Tian asked.

    "Nothing, I will just think of it as a favor to a friendly acquaintance. But I am telling you this right away. I am only removing from the trouble of coins. He doesn''t have to pay anymore, but the rest of the problems are not my responsibility.

    He has to take care of themselves."

    Ling Tian nodded. Even though he is not clear on what the rest of the problems are, he knew for sure that there are going to be some.

    "But I am a bit worried since you are not taking any payment. I don''t trust you to be a saint."

    "I am better than you gods, who toy with others lives. So, you can be rest assured."

    Ling Tian looked at Sam with an odd expression. Sam looked at him with a frown and asked.

    "What?"

    "Toying with people''s lives? Really? You are talking about that? Have you been walking with your eyes closed in the Olympian city?"

    Ling Tian asked with a righteous expression and it was time for Sam to cough.

    After some idle chit chat, Sam went back. Hemanded the hub system to remove White''s name out of the ledger and made the contract void.

    White who was cultivating within the dorm, felt the contract being severed.

    At this moment, Sam was checking the hub system to make sure that everything is alright. At that moment, he noticed an anomaly. The count of the contracts seemed to be unevenpared to the number of connections that the hub has with the puppets.

    It is not exactly abnormal, after all some people who had contracts with the hub already lost their puppets one way or the other. However, this is weird.

    Instead of decreased number of puppet connections, one connection is morepared to the contracts. This is definitely abnormal.

    He looked through the logs and tried to find where this anomaly is. After some search, a profile appeared on the virtual screen in front of him. A young man, the same young man that went to look for the new faith of Agmon.

    It is none other than Alton.

    Sam raised his eyebrow.

    This is weird. He checked Alton''s payment records. The previous payment was not made and by default he should have died.

    If he is dead, the puppet should have automatically made its way to the hub or it would have went into the sleep mode if it cannot be reached. However, right now, the man is alive and kicking. The puppet is still with him.

    Payment wasn''t made. No tampering was done from the side of the Hub. So, there is no way he should have been alive. Who severed the contract?

    The contingency of the soul art is that unless someone is so strong and have expertise of a god in soul arts, it couldn''t be just removed like that. Even if they want to remove it, it is not going to be an easy task to do that.

    That is the reason the soul contracts are not made lightly and they are almost fool proof.

    And apparently Sam didn''t stress enough on the almost part.

    Otherwise, how could someone so easily escape this? And he even came back to roam around in the Hub. Sam immediately sat down. He focused on the surveince information of Alton in the past few days.

    And the data is amusing to say the least. He travelled around the most absurd ces and stayed there absurd levels of time. And among them, there is one ce that Alton spent a lot of time at. The Hub.

    If it was before the whole fiasco, Sam wouldn''t have minded. After all,it was normal for the students to spend the whole day in hub, but now people areing there scarcely. Everyone is scared shitless.

    Then why is he roaming there so much. That too without doing anything?

 Chapter 2180 Bloody Chariots Request

    Sam increased the surveince on Alton.

    He didn''t act up immediately and just wanted to learn more information. After that, Sam focused back on Bloody Chariot.

    For the whole week, the man didn''te out of his room. He kept on studying the theories. He lost himself in it and only the payment day did hee out. Sam borrowed the surveince from the other people as he observed Bloody Chariot intently.

    Bloody Chariot, aftering out of this seclusion talked to his assistant for a while. For some reason, the whole discussion was about the Gambler Academy and their state.

    He realized that not a single person from the Gambler Academy has actually died from the contract. They are all alive and well. Except for the Sanatan region and Xia region, only the Gambler academy was the one and only ce where this phenomenon has happened.

    After that, he inquired about how many losses they have taken in the past week by the Gambler academy. The academy war barely showed any hope for the Zeus Academy and the tensions are only increasing.

    The Zeus Academy is cornered into defending. The Gambler academy didn''t exactly win with overwhelming strength.

    It is not like they are swarming with powerful cultivators and destroyed them, but rather the approach was so smooth and quick at the same time. They are intellectually taking down the Zeus Academy one resource point at a time.

    In a way, one could even say that their tactics are very simr to the tactics Sam employes when he deals with his own enemies.

    They are dealing with each resource point as a project and are deteriorating the defenses before just straight up abducting them. In fact, the lives are very lesspared to any other academy war.

    This only made them feel more scared.

    If the Gambler academy can deal with them without even killing, what if they stopped giving a damn and straight up went on a kill mode.

    They didn''t want to imagine that situation.

    After learning more details, Bloody Chariot went to meet with some of the Elders.

    The meeting room was small and the elders are all swamped with documents.

    Sam looked at them and said.

    "How far did youe with your task? Did you calcte all the assets well?" Bloody Chariot asked without even stepping in. The room seemed to have been locked up for a while now. It is even irritating his nose a bit.

    "Yes, Sir. All the assets of the academy and our affiliate businesses are calcted. However, there are some more assets acquired by the Gambler Academy at this moment and we need to remove them from the list." n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    An Elder passed a document to bloody chariot.

    He took a look at them and nodded. That list indicated the total worth of the Zeus Academy at the moment. Bloody chariot gave this task when he went on to the seclusion and the elders didn''t disappoint him.

    He looked at them and asked.

    "What about the assets of the elders that were dismissed? Did you evaluate them? Is the investigation underway?"

    One of the Elders pursed her lips and spoke.

    "Sir, we did gather all the details required. The investigation is not concluded yet, but the way it is right now, it is as good as done. The Elders indeed umted a lot of assets in the name of academy by abusing their position.

    However, are you sure you want to take such drastic measures?

    Even though they are dismissed, they have umted quite some reputation in their time here. They are also connected to a lot of families who happened to be our patrons. So, it will be troublesome if we get into conflict with them.

    We are not peaceful after all."

    Bloody Chariot looked at the woman who spoke. He nodded and replied.

    "You have a point, but don''t worry. I am not Heron. Heron is good at preventing conflicts, but since we are neck deep in the conflicts anyway, that means, it is about time for us to take a new approach.

    So, there is no need to worry about the conflicts now. We will go in a hard way."

    After that, he took another list from the elders before leaving.

    He walked out of the academy and towards the Gambler Academy.

    He walked to Wharton''s office and knocked on the door. The attendant just looked at him nervously. He knows that Wharton is not petty enough take his anger out on an attendant, but he doesn''t want to face that childish retaliation.

    He would whine like a kid,

    Just imagine a man who looks like he is in his sixties whining to you like a child?

    *KNOCK* *KNOCK*

    Bloody Chariot knocked again and again until the doors opened.

    Inside, Wharton is standing beside his own arcade machine with the simtion gear on his body.

    He looked at Bloody Chariot and frowned.

    "Are you here to return my hundred spirit stones?" He asked.

    Bloody Chariot gave out a wry smile and took a seat unceremoniously.

    "I am here to talk about something serious. Can you let that silly wager go?"

    "How can any wager be silly? Every wager is supposed to be taken seriously."

    "Alright, I don''t have any time to endure your whining. I came here to ask you something."

    "What is it?"

    "I want you guys to end the Academy war. At least put a hold to it until I restore the Zeus Academy a bit. Right now, the three Norse academies are targeting the Zeus Academy. They are making moves behind the scenes and I heard there is some diplomatic pressure in thest week.

    They are asking me an exnation for the attack that happened at the entrance.

    And the parents whose kids were killed at that day are being impatient. They are asking me to seek justice.

    I think they can make some grave mistake if they don''t take proper measures.

    So, until I deal with this, I want you guys to take a break on attacking the Zeus academy.

    After I step down, everyone can knock themselves out."

    "Its not in my hands. I cannot do it." Wharton directly rejected him.

    "What do you mean? You are the Dean here, I am sure you have the authority to stop the academy war."

    "No, I can''t do it. Dove is in charge of those boring things. So, she makes the final decisions."

    "Dove is in charge of what ''boring things'' exactly?"

    Wharton thought for a moment and started counting on his fingers.

    "She is in charge of external rtions, business affiliations, patron management, wars and battles¡­"

    "Stop" Even before Wharton could finish speaking, Bloody Chariot stopped him.

    "You left all these important jobs to a student?"

    Wharton frowned and said.

    "They are boring and she is good at that boring stuff."

    "Are you insane?"

    "No, I think I am just slightly twisted." Wharton answered with a straight face. Bloody Chariot held his forehead in defeat.

    "Alright, I can''t deal with you. Let me just talk to Dove then."

    "Then go to her office. What the hell are you doing here?"

    Bloody chariot can only hold his forehead tighter.

    After some time, he sat in her office. He told her about his situation.

    Dove looked at him with an amusing smile.

    "I don''t know if I should feel happy or sad."

    Bloody chariot remained silent for this. Dove sighed and spoke.

    "I don''t know if I should be happy that a man like THE Bloody Chariot came to me for a favor. Or if I should feel sad for you. For being such a situation because of the stupid mistakes made by your arrogant juniors."

    "Even I can''t answer that question. But what about my request. Can you do that?"

    "Well¡­."

    Dove was about to speak, when her wrist band got a ping. It was a message from Sam. She looked at the message in surprise, but she didn''t show it on her face and said.

    "It is not like we can''t do it. But there should definitely be a price and a few conditions attached to it."

    "Expected. What would that be?"

    "The exchange rate for the hostages will increase by ten percent, effective immediately. And after this truce, in the next phase of the war if your academy doesn''t take away the hostages within the first three days, that means, you are consenting us to increase the ransom by ten percent every passing day.

    And if you don''t do it by a week, that means you are allowing us to kill them.

    Also, in this time of truce, you need to give ess to the Olympian exclusive pocket dimensions to the students of the Gambler Academy.

    Of course, not to be unreasonable, that ess can just be first and second grade.

    That is all. If you are fine with these conditions, then we are fine with the truce."

    Bloody Chariot took a really deep breath. A very very deep one, to the point, Dove could have sworn that the air density in the room has lessened.

 Chapter 2181 Meeting Gorn

    Chapter 2181 Meeting Gorn

    Bloody Chariot stayed like that for two minutes.

    He didn''t speak anything and he had his eyes closed. Dove felt a bad premonition, however nothing of that sort happened. He just opened his eyes and said.

    "I really wish I could demand this and not request you like this. If not for Wharton''s presence, I might have done that.

    Anyway, I agree to your conditions. Anything else?"

    "Yes, there is actually one more thing. What if? I mean what if the Zeus academy is dragged into this state again after our truce ends? What if when the academy war between us resumes, the Zeus Academy is back in these dire states because of us?

    Will you juste back again and make the same demand?"

    Bloody Chariot smiled.

    "No, you don''t have to worry about that. Right now, I believe there is an external influence that doesn''t belong to the Academy realm is manipting the things behind the scenes. As long as I confirm their existence and rid of them they are truly there, my duties with the academy will be over.

    If the Zeus academy is dying down just because they couldn''tpete with other academies, then there is nothing I can do. I would rather watch it crumble than save it with begging and requesting."

    "Good to know."

    Dove nodded and they signed the contract.

    There is one more condition added at the end.

    And that is the Zeus academy cannot under any circumstance plot against the Gambler academy. This involves not just the academy authorities or the staff, even the students are not allowed to plot against the students of the Gambler academy.

    If proof of any such action exists, the Zeus academy will be forfeiting their end of the contract and the gambler academy can do whatever they want to the Zeus academy.

    That includes resuming the war and dealing with the hostages as they see fit.

    After the contract was signed, Bloody Chariot left. In his opinion, the major threat to the direct stability of Zeus academy has been put on a temporary cool down.

    But the price he paid is far too high. He needs to recover it somehow so that the Zeus Academy itself wouldn''t strain itself too much on the resource front.

    After all, those resources are not just for students, but also for the core strength of their academy, the instructors, elders and some of them even go to the Battlefield of Gods. There are also many hidden expenses that he has to manage.

    And for that, he took out the second list that he had.

    The list of assets of the former employees of the Zeus Academy, since he needs to find a ce to regain the losses, he might as well start from there. The best part is, that with them, he doesn''t go on about requesting them.

    He can just ''demand'' them and they can justply.

    It is the perfect way to gain something.

    He already made some preparations and he needs to just execute the ns. However, even before he could go about executing the ns, Sam who already got the gist of what Bloody Chariot wanted to do, made a move.

    A message went to all the Hub Managers.

    All eight of them donned the same disguises they wore, when they went to make the contributions in the exchange center.

    "I have forwarded names to all of you. Each of you should go to your respective targets and put your persuasion skills to test. You need to convince them about Bloody Chariot''s n and make them do exactly what we want them to do.

    I am sure, you are all strong enough to protect yourself.

    And be sure to use the names of the Noble league and the Zeus academy strongly. Don''t forget about the awesome backstory that I created. All the best."

    That is what his message said.

    Icarus looked at the string of texts and felt a little nervous. Even when he was at the exchange center in that disguise, he couldn''t really feel confident. He would rather fight people or endure humiliations than doing something like this.

    But he had to do this.

    He disguised himself and moved. He used the space gates and wormholes to reach his destination within no time.

    His first stop is a city on a that is not too far from the Academy realm. The city is kind of a merchant city. The itself didn''t have any valuable resources for them to create a merchant hub like that.

    However, that ce acts as one of the contact points between the Academy realm and the outside world.

    People of lower levels, with their strongest individuals barely reaching the initial stage of the Divine ne initiation,e here to buy things thate from the resource points of the academy realms.

    These things are basically crumbs left behind in the treasuries of the academies and the businesses affiliated with the academies, after they are done trading the actual resources.

    Even the products are considered low level from the academy realm standards, they are still great for the low levels and realms.

    And in that city, there is a newly bought estate by one of the Elders that was dismissed by Bloody Chariot.

    Not many people in the city knew of this, but the Sam managed to lock down his location through the wrist band and the bird puppet.

    Even though with their current location, he cannot receive the live surveince and stuff, he can still get ess to their location coordinates. Matching them with Dimensional drifter is all he needs to do.

    Icarus went there and knocked on the door of that estate.

    *KNOCK* *KNOCK*

    After knocking on it for over five minutes, the elder finally came.

    "Who is this?"

    The man peeked from the side of the door, only revealing his head. His hair is unkempt and his face looked droopy. He was clearly drunk out of his mind.

    Icarus sighed spoke.

    "Elder Gorn, I need to speak to you about something important. It is rted to your position in the Zeus Academy. Can I have five minutes of your time?"

    Gorn immediately became wary. He even sobered up a bit and looked at Icarus. The mask, the hood, he looked shady as hell.

    Icarus sighed once again and said.

    "I know I don''t look trustworthy, but I must wear this to protect you. If you give me five minutes, I can exin myself. If you don''t trust me, you can take a look at these."

    As Gorn said, he gave a recording crystal to Gorn. Gorn took a look at the contents and hepletely sobered up.

    "YOU¡­ WHERE DID YOU GET THIS?"

    He yelled out loud and came out from his hiding behind the door. He was in his underwear. Icarus felt his eyes burn from that image.

    "I already told you, please give me five minutes. I will exin the matter to you."

    Two minutester.

    Icarus and Gorn are sitting in a room.

    Gorn appeared impatient and wanted to ask more, but he couldn''t bring himself show his desperation and tried his best go hide it. Tried, but failed.

    "First off, I am here to tell you about the threat that you are facing right now.

    Bloody Chariot didn''t dismiss you just because of the dy in attending the meeting. He dismissed you with a bigger n in mind."

    "How do you know I was dismissed like that?" Gorn asked.

    "You are focusing on the wrong thing, Elder Gorn. It is not important how I know. It is important what I know. You know more than anyone about the mishap that happened with Sam from Gambler Academy. Many noble league families sent forces to deal with him and failed.

    It is one of the trigger points for the current dire situation of the Zeus academy as it started a war. I don''t know the full story on that front, but with that move, the Zeus academy stepped on toes of some big wigs that are out of their control.

    So, to appease them, Bloody Chariot came out of perform a clean out process. That is the reason that he dismissed a bunch of elders and instructors."

    Gorn widened his eyes like saucers. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "That¡­ that is impossible. Nobody could have predicted that only that bunch of people will bete that day. Even with that, how can dismissing me, be useful in that situation? It doesn''t make sense."

    "I don''t know how he did it, but I am sure you can understand what I am saying, up on seeing this list."

    With that, Icarus gave him a list. It is the list of the people that were dismissed that day. Besides their names, some families and organizations names were written.

    Beside Gorn''s name, there is the name of a family written. Diplodes.

    Another n that is on a simr footingpared to the Thssa family.

    Now, Gorn managed to connect the dots and understood what this meeting implied.

 Chapter 2182 Blowing Smoke

    Chapter 2182 Blowing Smoke

    "I don''t know if you are caught up with the news. But the Thssa family is no more.

    Recently,strange disease caught the Thssa n and their affiliates. Their strength as severely weakened and all of a sudden an unknown force has invaded their territory, killing every single one of them.

    Only a few remnants of the Thssa family were left behind in this world right now.

    And the elder that was rted to Thssa family is being dealt with as we speak."

    "Dealt with? Who is doing that?" Gorn asked.

    "Who else? Bloody Chariot. From what we heard, this is all the n of chous'' family and Bloody Chariot. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Since Christos chous'' was the one that gathered the forces from these families, he and Bloody Chariot are working together to appease the big wigs. They dismissed you first and then, they gathered the list of all of your assets."

    Icarus paused and yed another recording.

    This one has the conversation between the elders who werepiling the elders'' assets.

    "Theption was ordered by Bloody Chariot himself. Their n is to kill you, the elders and take over the assets and then attack the families that you are affiliated with. In that way, they can regain the losses the academy has suffered because of the war, while appeasing that hidden power."

    Gorn went into a deep thought before asking.

    "How are you so sure about this?"

    "Well, there are two reasons. One of them is that the secret force that destroyed the Thssa family, is none other than the Shadow Cavalry of the chous family."

    Gorn is stunned again. How many times has it been since the start of this conversation? Icarus didn''t keep track, but he sure as hell is getting bored of it.

    "Then the other reason?"

    Icarus sighed at this question. Here is the biggest lie.

    "I am one of thest remnants of Thssa family. The one who is barely enduring the life threatening disease that is about to kill me soon enough. That is why I am wearing this attire, to make sure that you will not be infected by this."

    "WHAT?"

    Gorn jumped up from his seat and the hid behind that chair like a kid.

    Icarus almost wanted to p him. That expression of disgust really irked him.

    "Please don''t worry. With this attire, the disease is sealed. It might be killing my insides as we speak, but it won''t spread out as long as I am alive.

    That is why I am in a hurry to say my piece and leave.

    I would like to spend myst few days in peace."

    Gorn looked at Icarus warily. There are a million questions running through his mind at that moment, but he doesn''t know how to ask them. But the most important one is the trust. As much as he felt that whatever Icarus said is the truth, he still held some suspicion.

    However, he couldn''t possibly have a reason to doubt the other party either. After all, what would his aim be in deceiving him like that?

    "Why are you giving me this information? What are you expecting to gain from this?"

    Icarus got a bit tense, this is going to be a bit troublesome.

    "I have limited time. If my guess is right, I will die by tonight. And I don''t believe I can reach the upper echelons of the diplodes family in the given time. You were much easier to find. You can also say that I am doing this out of spite against the Zeus Academy.

    I cannot do anything against them right now. I can only find some satisfaction in making their ns go to hell. At least, trying to do that.

    In fact, not just me. There are a few more people who managed to escape the death temporarily and they are actually meeting other people who are about to be the victims of the Zeus academy and Bloody Chariot''s plot."

    Gorn still didn''t know what to do.

    If he can have his way, he wanted to ask him to prove that he is really dying. But the only way to do that is for the other person to sit beside him and die.

    Even for that, Gorn is notpletely willing. He just learned the disease is contagious. Why would he be stupid enough to risk getting infected.

    Icarus sat there in silence for two minutes, before he stood up while holding his chest.

    His eyes appeared blood shot.

    "I told you all I wanted to say. From now on, whether you believe me or not ispletely up to you. So, please make the right decision."

    Icarus was about to turn around and leave, however at this moment Gorn asked.

    "What do you want me to do?"

    Icarus paused and said without turning back.

    "The best course of action for you is to first confirm whether my words are true. I am sure, once you are sure that this is true, they you can think with conviction.

    If I were you, I would invite someone high up in the Diplodes toe and visit you. Let them stay in hiding and wait for Bloody Chariot to show his hand.

    Once you do that, you can take further action.

    If you choose to believe me at that time, the best course of action is to go to the Diplodes and make the first move before the Academy does."

    The meeting concluded and Icarus left.

    He went to a different target. Its not like Diplodes have only connections with one Elder.

    Simr meetings took ce across various ces.

    As soon as Icarus left, Gorn immediately acted.

    He contacted someone from the Diplodes and within a couple of hours, that person came.

    It is a middle-aged woman that wore blue and brown colored robe. She is tall, almost reaching six feet and she had a serene expression on her face. She looked at Gorn with a faint smile.

    "To think that you would use the emergency call note. I thought you would be dead by the time I am here."

    She spoke without any change in her expression. Gorn felt like he followed a fly.

    "But to me, it looks like you were hoping that I would die before youe here. Two hours after using the emergency call note? If I was really in danger, the enemy could smoothly kill me, clean up, have a nice meal at the restaurant around the corner and leave leisurely.

    Why are you sote, Elder Niman?"

    His tone is filled with righteous indignation, but he didn''t dare turn it into anger.

    "I amte, because I know that you are not in a state of emergency." She spoke casually, but at this moment, both of them sensed a presence from the entrance of the estate.

    Someone opened the door and is fearlessly walking towards the entrance. Since the other party is not hiding their haughty attitude, Niman and Gorn didn''t back down either. They immediately spread their divine senses to identify the person.

    Gorn closed his eyes as he tried to get a better look of the face and it made his body be paralyzed for a moment. That is a familiar face. Way too familiar in fact.

    "Elder Niman, pleasee inside and wait for me in the hall. I would like to receive the guest. You don''t have to worry about anything, it is someone that I know and I am sure you will enjoy the conversation that we are about to have."

    Niman is a bit surprised, but didn''t refuse. She walked in and took a seat. She was focused on Gorn who stood at the door.

    Soon, that uninvited guest arrived at the front door.

    "Greetings, Former Elder Gorn. How are you doing? Is retirement treating you well? Or is it better to call it unemployment?"

    The visitorughed out loud as he greeted.

    "Elder Krinin. Why are you here?" Gorn kept a straight face as he looked at his former colleague.

    This guy is an elder in the Zeus academy and he also happened to be rival of Gorn. They both joined in as instructors around the same time and their growth path was basically the same.

    Now, Gorn is kicked out why Krinin is still in. That''s why the gloating and sarcasticmentary as soon as he arrived.

    "Oh, I am here to reim all the property and assets that you have umted illegally and immorally by abusing the power of being an instructor and elder of the Zeus Academy.

    The acting-dean demanded that you hand over all the assets directly to avoid any confrontation. If by any chance you do not hand over and it is proven that you have hidden some for yourself by superficially handing over something, Bloody Chariot will be here himself and deal with you."

    "Why should Iply to this? I am no longer an elder of the Zeus academy. If you have any remations, you should have done it at that time. All my assets are in my personal name. You don''t have authority to do this?"

 Chapter 2183 Plot thickens

    Chapter 2183 Plot thickens

    "Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahh"

    Kriminughed like he heard the biggest joke of his life. He looked at Gorn like he is looking at a silly little kid.

    "It seems like you don''t really understand your position, Gorn. No matter what organization or affiliation you are part of, there is one absolute rule that applies to all. It is one absolute authority that anyone should obey.

    I am here on behalf of that authority."

    "What authority would that be?" Gorn asked. Just from the frown and the scowl on his face, it is apparent that he is very annoyed.

    "It is the authority of the strong. Whoever has the bigger fist has the higher authority and the people with lower fist has toply.

    So, you, the former elder of the Zeus academy has toply no matter what you think. Your thoughts are the most irrelevant thing in this whole transaction.

    Hahahahahahah¡­"

    If Sam was here and heard the whole conversation, he would have definitely thanked Kririn with all his heart. Not just thank him, Sam would even give him a big present.

    Because since the Start, Sam didn''t really have too many high hopes in this n being hundred percent sessful. In fact, he only aimed to create some doubt and friction between the patron ns and the academy or to be more precise bloody chariot.

    After all, how could someone just believe in the words of some stranger who came in masks? No matter how Sam used the information he has in hand to weave the lies, there is bound to be some doubt. This second hand information he is handing over is definitely not enough to be blindly trustworthy.

    Most of it depends on what the actions of the academy and bloody chariot are.

    And Sam''s assumptions are right.

    Due to Icarus'' wless acting and Gorn''s inherent cautious and cunning personality made him be inclined towards the Zeus academy being the robber here.

    However, he is still a bit suspicious and that is why he called Niman over. But some of the elders in other ces are way too suspicious of this. They are still making inquiries about the possible truth behind it.

    Sam is actually counting on Bloody Chariot sending someone to take cover the assets. Once that robbery part is confirmed as truth, then the rest will be naturally trustworthy.

    And even if one of the targets believes it wholeheartedly, then the rest will soon follow.

    This guy named Kririn is making this whole thing much more easier. Maybe Sam should thank Bloody chariot for sending such a fool.

    When you are acquiring something forcefully, the only thing one should show off is just strength. Nothing else matters in that. And if they show it, they would just be asking for more trouble than necessary.

    Because when the other party is humiliated beyond limits, they might just set the whole thing on fire and burn along with it, rather thanply.

    And at this moment, Gorn''s face is very close to bing the face of an arsonist.

    "You have twenty-four hours." Kririn gloated a bit more and left the estate to stay at an inn.

    Gorn walked back into the house. There Niman was waiting for him in her seat.

    "So, this is what you wanted me to witness? And why didn''t I know about your dismissal earlier?"

    She frowned while asking. Her displeasure is almost dripping down her face.

    "Because, no one from the academy knows about my rtionship with Diplodes. That is why, no one bothered to inform you of this development. And most of the news about dismissal has been suppressed quite heavily.

    So, it is not a surprise that you don''t know."

    "So, why am I here? Are you asking me to back you up in keeping your assets?" Niman asked. Except for displeasure, there is nothing else being shown on her face. Making it hard to discern what she is thinking.

    "Nope, that is not why I call you. I called you because Diplodes is also a target¡­"

    With that, he exined the whole story that Icarus told him and he also presented the documents, and videos that Icarus gave.

    Along with that story and what Kririn did, Niman felt a huge weight burden her heart. She could feel that something might really happen.

    Particrly with the disappearance of Thssa family, she is even more cautious. Because Diplodes is not as strong as Thssa in terms of overall strength, even though they are pretty close when ites to status.

    So, whatever force that destroyed Thssa¡­ Diplodes could only be a much easier target to them. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    "We need to go to Diplodes main family. Bring all the evidence you have. Also, give me the details about the guy that gave you the news. I need to verify a few things."

    Gorn did as he was told. Both of them decided to sneak out, but before that Niman, went into the city with the details given by Gorn to do something. After around twenty minutes, she came back with a face full of tension and worry.

    "What happened?" Gorn asked.

    "A man in grey hoodie and mask was found dead in the grassy ins outside the city a short while ago. His body is rotten and it looked like it was like that for quite some time before he died.

    The hood and the mask are high level disguise devices."

    As soon as she said those words, their belief in the stories became stronger.

    With every passing second, it seems like they are buying into this story more and more. This is a good news for Sam, but it is yet to be seen who this will be the bad news.

    Gorn and Niman immediately left the city sneakily. At that time, Kririn who was so ecstatic that he was going to take everything away from his rival was in the middle of an early celebration by sharing the bed with the most expensive prostitute he could afford.

    Before he was even finished with his celebration, Gorn and Niman are back at the Diplodes territory. Gorn already started contacting the peers that were dismissed along with him. Even though it was a bit hard to contact them, it wasn''t too troublesome and the belief is strengthened among them.

    A couple of hours after they left, Icarus came out of a bar that he was sitting in. He casually walked to the space gate that connects this city to the academy realm. The moment Gorn left, he knew that he is no longer in the city.

    Gorn might have been in trouble with the Zeus academy, but he is not in direct trouble with Hub and he still carried the bird puppet even after he quit.

    Even though it wasn''t being used that much, as soon as it left the city, Icarus managed to get an alert in the tablet that he held.

    He didn''t know how it worked, but Sam said it works and it worked perfectly.

    His mission here is over.

    After he returned to academy realm, he contacted Sam to exin the status of the mission. Sam got the confirmation he needed. Now, he needs to spread the news in a way that will irritate bloody chariot. And in a way, it is not exactly difficult.

    After all, Bloody Chariot was not asking for the assets. He is demanding it. And the way Sam spread the news, Gorn couldn''t give two shits about Bloody Chariot and asked Diplodes for assistance. And Diplodes acted as if they can save Gorn and his assets from Bloody Chariot.

    This is an open defiance in his eyes.

    Of course, even though those are his initial thoughts, he is not a kid who acts on impulse. So, his suppressed his initial ire and waited.

    Because the second thing he got angry on is Kririn who went to fetch the assets from Gorn. However, Bloody chariot who is in academy realm got the news of Gorn''s escape even before kririn.

    This is more than enough to piss him off perfectly.

    From here on, there are few steps that Bloody chariot could possibly take and Sam decided on a few ns each conform to each possibility.

    This is perfect for him.

    At the same time.

    Alton is back at the territory of Agmon also called the city of Agmon. The ce where the faith of Agmon established their headquarters.

    He went directly into the building he was previously in. As he walked deeper and deeper, an expression of delight and peace surrounded him. He felt like he was floating in the clouds of bliss and peace instead of walking.

    After a while, he appeared in the hall. He looked at the old man who helped him with the process of eliminating the contract.

    Alton knelt on the ground and looked at the old man.

    "Greetings Sir. I am here to give my first report on the mission that you assigned to me."

 Chapter 2184 Archigos

    Chapter 2184 Archigos

    The old man looked at Alton.

    "Speak."

    "Sir, the Sanatan and Xia realm are the only ones without much conflict. Apart from those two, every other realm is in chaos. The most effected is the Zeus realm. The death rates have increased. Only a couple of hundredmoners are left and they might just die by the next payment date.

    The number is also increased in the students. They are all fighting just to get enough for the next payment date.

    Even more than the payment date kills for not following the contract, the murders for robbing the coins have increased. In fact, from what we noticed, the auctions that sold the coins only increased these murders.

    The city guard is in trouble as well. They are unable to maintain the security of the ce.

    I think this is the ideal time for us to make our move. For many people there, right now the faith of Agmon is the only way out.

    They cannot find any other way to live¡­"

    Alton went on with a few more statements before he stopped.

    The old man looked at the Alton with a satisfied expression.

    "Alright, you can go back and keep an eye there. As long as there are new developments, keep me in the loop."

    The old man looked at the Alton with a satisfied expression.

    "Alright, you can go back and keep an eye there. As long as there are new developments, keep me in the loop."

    "Yes, Sir. I will take my leave."

    Alton went back to the Academy realm after that.

    Back in the Academy realm. Sam is having a meeting with Stone.

    Stone has been pretty busy training himself. The challenges were still going on, but he has reduced the frequency. One of them is because it has been hard to find the students roaming in the streets of the academy realm.

    The second one is that right now, only the elite few are left. Stone is good right now, but based on Sam''s evaluation, to get the overwhelming victory like he always did, he needs to train more and hone his technique.

    "So, how is the training going? From what I can see, you are meeting the training targets, consistently."

    Sam said with a smile.

    Stone smiled and replied.

    "With your grace, it is going well sir. I can feel my strength improving day by day."

    "That''s good. I think you might want to speed up a bit. Soon, you have to challenge two people. White and Dayus. I don''t want to be pessimistic but, I doubt that victory will be easy against them with your skillset.

    It is possible if you have more time though, but we don''t have too much time.

    So, your next target should be, fighting to draw with any of them. You can use my friends as sparring partners. That will increase your chances by arge margin. After you are done with that, it will be your time to fulfill your wish."

    Stone widened his eyes and started tearing up. He bowed deeply before leaving to train.

    Sam smiled at his receding back. Soon, a screen appeared in front of him.

    It is a corner in the Sanatan region. Within the Viswakarma academy.

    A young man with long hair tied into a bun on the top with a lot of hair let loose. He is holding a pen like tool as he tried to bypass the hundreds ofyers of formations inscribed on the bird puppet.

    Sam looked at him with a smile.

    "You are already half way there my friend. Go faster. I really want you to do this by yourself without my help. And the faster you finish it, the faster the dynamic of the academy realm changes."

    Sam is really looking forward to the day this genius unlocks the bird puppet.

    While things are like that, Christos had to go back to the chous family estate.

    He was called in by head of the family. And it is due to the mishap of the Shadow Cavalry.

    After a couple of hours of waiting in the empty hall of the family court, Christos knew that he is in deep trouble. Making them wait is one of the most obvious, and petty tactic of showing their displeasure. chous family has been doing this kind of petty practice for quite a long time.

    Christos just stood there in the middle, standing straight as he looked at the empty seat of the family head. He didn''t even look at the other empty seats on the either side of the room. He was like a statue.

    Only when finally the door of the room was opened and he heard some footsteps did he rx a bit.

    Still, there is a lot more tension to go away from his body and at the moment it is impossible to do so.

    The family head walked past Christos and took his seat. All the while, not even taking a single nce at Christos. It is a man with tinum blonde hair. The current head of the chous family making him one of the strongest creatures in the Peak of Divine ne.

    The man known as Archigos chous.

    After five minutes, Archigos finally acknowledged Christos'' presence.

    "How are you, my dear Chrsitos? Is academy life treating you well? I heard that you are being talked about a lot as the current leader of the student''s noble league."

    The statement sounded like one of concern andpliment. But it is far from that. The only reason christos is being talked about so much is because the suggestion he made to the league, which is to join the Hub has backfired in a bombastic way.

    Everyone is cursing him and his ancestors whenever they are paying the coins.

    "I am doing alright, sir."

    "Good to know. So, how did the task that you assigned to the Shadow Cavalry go?"

    Christos gulped, but he didn''t dare stay mute.

    "It¡­ It.. didn''t go well, sir. They failed."

    "Really? Are you sure? They exterminated the Thssa family. Not a single descendant could be found. Even their main has been taken over by a norse family. Considering this, I would say it is a great sess."

    "I¡­ I¡­"

    "Speak properly, my child" Archigos'' voice turned a tad bit colder.

    "I didn''t order the extermination of the Thssa family, sir."

    Archigos still had that smile on his face.

    "Then howe they are exterminated by the Shadow cavalry?"

    This time Christos didn''t have any answer. He wanted to say that he didn''t know, but he had a feeling that it would be worse than not saying anything at all.

    "Answer me." Archigos said with the same smile.

    "I¡­." n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    *BOOM*

    An invisible pressure pressed Christos to the floor.

    "Answer me, you pathetic bastard." Archigos said with the exact same smile.

    Christos couldn''t even speak now, even if he wanted.

    "You had the chous family''s influence. You are the head of the league. You had over fifteen elders from Zeus academy at your beck and call. Forty more in the other academies. Hundreds of subordinates.

    You used the influence of the family to move ten families from the noble league to kill one student. You even used the secret force of the family, the shadow cavalry, but you lost the control over the cavalry and then one of the families is dead.

    Why are you not investigating this matter at all?

    Why is there no immediate news from you?

    Shouldn''t you have contacted us the moment something like this happened?

    You wasted so much of the influence and resources. And all that yielded is the reputation of the whole family in tatters.

    I am this far away from the Academy realm, and even I seem to have more to say rted to this matter, than you. What are you doing, Christos?"

    The pressure lessened and then Christos finally came to his senses.

    "Sir, I don''t know what happened. We do know that Hub has some connection to the disappearance of Thssa family. And before the Thssa family disappeared there is the appearance of some Yena in their territory.

    Sam, the one who we targeted with the Thssa family was the one who had connection with those Yena, but that is all.

    I tried to get Bloody Chariot to take action, he said he will investigate, but that is it. I wasn''t able to do anything apart from that.

    I ept my ipetence. Please guide me further."

    Christos said everything in a single breath.

    "No wonder, you are smarter than your peers in the family. You at least know how to ept what youck.

    But guidance is impossible. You should have asked that before you messed up.

    I need you to find out what happened. Investigate and find out how the shadow cavalry that was supposedly captured by the hub or whatever it is called, ended up in the Thssa territory. Whoever did it, I need the details.

    Use whatever means you can. You can only use the emergency forces of the family that are under your direct order.

    And once you use them up. Your contributions will be nullified. Unless you find the culprit yourself, of course."

 Chapter 2185 Efforts of Christos

    Chapter 2185 Efforts of Christos

    Christos came back to the academy realm with a gloomy expression.

    After the lecture and the threat from the family head, he went to meet some elders in the family to collect some resources. He knew that he could only move the emergency resources that he was given. But he had to go and check what actually his emergency resources consists of.

    Because he has been facing setback after setback, failure after failure, his rank obviously decreased among his peers. Many of his privileges would have been cut. And he even used some of his contributions to get some coins from the reserves of his family.

    However, when he saw what he was actually assigned, he felt like puking blood.

    Right now, his status is same as an Astral ne level cultivator within the family. He might have the strength, but the privileges and even the resources assigned by the family indicated that his status is that lowly.

    Obviously, the other factions within the family took the chance and struck while the iron is still hot.

    He just realized that not only were the league is in peril, even his individual status within the family is in peril.

    He needs to find his footing back and for that to happen, he needs to find a way out of this.

    He has to find a way to make Bloody Chariot believe that Sam and the Hub are rted. He had to make sure that Bloody Chariot breaks Sam and in turn the hub so that these contracts could be nullified.

    Once they are done, everything will be fine. The contracts and money are the things that held the whole academy realm hostage. Once they are cleared, everything will be back to normal after some time.

    However, thinking is one thing, executing is another.

    If he had this decisive nature towards this thing two days ago, things would have gone smoothly. However, now that he lost a lot of power, he cannot do things as freely as before. But he has to do them. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    He tried to gain his spirit back and went to meet with some of his close aides.

    "I want you guys to use all your channels to get the information regarding Sam''sbors until now. I want all of you to do this individually, which means, I need a separate report from each one of you.

    The report should be as detailed as possible.

    Even if Sam stopped to take a leak somewhere on the cliff of a forest, that needs to be added there. Don''t ever consider any information as irrelevant."

    He sent those aides out and went to meet with noble league members from different academies, and these were individual meetings. To all of them he had just one request.

    "Can you find out why thebor was given and what thebor is exactly? Also, can you give me the information on the clear status of thebor?"

    These were the only questions he asked.

    Since he believed that Sam is rted to the Hub somehow, he wanted to cover all the bases. He will focus solely on Sam and will try to find that hidden link.

    He then went to meet one of the subordinates of Dayus. This guy is one of the members that has yet to gain any real benefit from Dayus. He is at the moment on the fence.

    So, Christos used him to get some more information.

    This time, the information is regarding the ming skulls. However it is not that deep, he just wanted the investigation results of the incidents that involved ming skulls and Sam.

    By that evening, Christos got all the information that he wanted.

    Even though he lost the power that involved his family, the connections that he built by himself are working properly.

    He looked through the information and realized some anomalies. Even though he felt that there are some far-fetched spections, he still managed to rte the twists and turns that happened in the Academy realm to Sam''s activity in thebors.

    For example, the speed at which Sam finished thebor involving the Yena is very slow. He took his time for days and didn''te back.

    However, thest fewbors were done in an instant.

    Both of them are inconsistent.

    However, the Yena incident is rted to the start of the destruction of the Thssa family. The disease that triggered the chaos in the Thssa territory started approximately at that time.

    And at the same time, the things went on rather smoothly back here in the academy realm. Of course, smooth is not an appropriate word, but the pressure and tension indeed lessened a bit.

    Then there is the incident with coin auction.

    The gambler academy invited them for the ransom exchange negotiation after Sam came and the next moment the announcement for the coin auction was made by the Hub.

    Like that he drew some more spections, but apart from these few, the rest are just bullshit. It was just his wild imagination filling in the gaps.

    Throughout that night, Christos was either gathering information or analyzing the existing information. He didn''t even think of taking a break.

    The more he researched though, the more he became curious about Sam''s past. No matter how hard he tried, he was unable to get any information about Sam before he entered the Academy realm.

    The ce he came from, the organization he was affiliated to, everything is just unclear.

    While he is researching along those lines, there are two pieces of information that pricked his interest. One of them is Sam''s encounter with White and another one is Sam''s grudge with the Olympians.

    From the very first day Sam was openly hostile towards the Olympian academies. He was so actively showing it off as if he is afraid that someone might not know that he is hostile towards them.

    So, he needs to investigate from that front.

    He contacted White immediately. However, White is in a pocket dimension and if he is not in there, he is inside the Hub training like crazy.

    That is one thing about Hub that no one can deny. No matter how ckhearted the Hub''s owner is, it definitely worked wonders on people and their skill.

    Anyway, Christos put someone on the task of arranging a meeting with White.

    Meanwhile, he started meeting all the instructors in the academy to ask some questions. This time the question is about their hometowns.

    Since he already knew which of the instructors are groomed by the families and which of them are not, he easily got a hold of the news.

    He tried to ask about all the Olympian territories that are near their native ces.

    Then he also tried to find the students who came from lower realms that are far away from the influence of the Noble league. The list went on and on as hundreds of territories were named by these people.

    Christos really wanted to have that influence right now. It would have been a great help to mobilize hundreds of people to check the ces in this list.

    However, he couldn''t move that many people in the league or family. So, he had to take another approach.

    For the first time in ages, he went to a ce that he didn''t want to go. The Astral Region of the academy realm.

    The ce where the academies for astral ne are established.

    There are a bunch of smaller gods under the Olympus and there were quite a few news ones out there.

    So, there are a lot of Astral ne level academies there. Even if Christos is not a chous member, just his status as a member of The student noble league will be enough to make them mountains in that area.

    He did just that. He picked up a bunch of students from there and gave them missions. Overnight hundreds of students went to different realms ands to establish contact as the envoys of the Academy realm.

    All of that, just to gain some information from Sam.

    The cast was so wide, yet it was also very coarse, Christos is sure that a lot of benefit might note from this, but he is desperate, he need to make sure that he can find that link that he is looking for and preserve his own position.

    For the first time, Christospletely ignored all of his league duties and every other responsibility of the Zeus academy. He is focused solely on Sam and he hoped he could make some process.

    Meanwhile, there are two more young men who were busy handling things rted to Sam.

    One of them is Stone, who is training like his life depended on it. Every day, he is on the verge of death and he is being brought back to life.

    The other is the young man from Sanatan. He has acquired dozens of metal puppets to the point that Sam''s surveince in Viswa Karma''s academy is being affected.

 Chapter 2186 Failure to Obtain Information

    Chapter 2186 Failure to Obtain Information

    Time passed with everyone being busy with their own ns.

    Sam''s n of instigating the dismissed elders to join hands with the families and ns was sessful. Bloody Chariot, whose n was to acquire the assets of these elders has slowed down and now is in snail''s pace.

    He absolutely cannot backdown from it now.

    He already spent a lot of money on the peace with Gambler Academy and there is no way he could just backdown right now.

    If the academy was in a normal state, he would have barged into those family grounds and brought those elders out.

    However, right now those families and ns are patrons of various Olympian academies. Once he made a move on them, the other academies will show their fangs at Zeus Academy. He just prevented the war with the Gambler academy.

    If the other academies now start a war with because of this, it would be like jumping from the pan into the stove.

    So, he had to slow down a bit. But still, he is adamant about getting those assets and resources.

    Meanwhile, he started investigating Sam.

    Over the days, he spent a lot of time investigating Sam and Icarus along with other members. He realized that Sam did have connection with them through Ivar.

    After further digging, he came to a conclusion that Sam and Ivar became close when Sam went on to set the records in the academy towers of the Norse academy. However, then also he didn''t gain much information on why they got acquainted.

    However, questions did raise about why Sam targeted every academy in the Olympus, but only a few academies in other regions?

    Some in Sanatan, some in Xia, a couple in Norse and a lot in Olympian region. Why?

    This is something that stumped Christos as well, however he didn''t find too much merit in this line of investigation. After all, in his opinion, Sam was just acting up to gain some fame. He did it to spread his name far and wide.

    Christos wholeheartedly believed that reason because that is what he would do if he had the same ability as Sam.

    People really do judge others by their own standards.

    However, when Bloody Chariot came across this, he took it seriously. He immediately went to meet Heron, however, Heron was nowhere to be seen in his room at the inn.

    There was only a message left.

    It stated that he went to look for Theron as he got some lead.

    Bloody Chariot couldn''t ce much hope on this suspended dean for information, but that doesn''t mean he doesn''t have a way. There are other academies and other deans.

    Of course, he would still miss the most important piece of that puzzle. How did Sam convince Heron to give him the Olympus token that let him ess all the academy towers?

    Whatever purpose Sam has, with his hostile behavior towards the Zeus academy before, the Dean shouldn''t have even considered giving him that token. Particrly, when Sam is part of a different academy.

    It seems like most people just ignored this link.

    Heron can give that answer, however he could still talk to other Deans.

    He first went to the Norse region and met with f.

    "Why are you here, Bloody Chariot?" f asked with a frown as soon as Bloody Chariot appeared at the gates of the Thor Academy.

    Because of the conflict currently the Thor academy is constantly demanding the Zeus academy for ''exnation''. They are threatening the Zeus academy with war. f also allowed this as this is the proper excuse to obtain the legacy inheritances.

    However, he also knew about Bloody Chariot and his crazy history. So, he informed everyone that the moment Bloody Chariot appears in the Norse region, the news should reach f.

    Even before f could react, Bloody Chariot already appeared at his door step.

    "Don''t worry, I am not here about the silly struggle you are putting up to get benefits from the Zeus academy.

    I am here to investigate something."

    "Investigation? What would make even the one and only Bloody Chariot to investigate personally?"

    "Apparently, a mysterious and well-known first grade student from Gambler Academy would do." Bloody Chariot replied with a slight smile.

    The sarcastic expression on f''s face disappeared and was reced with a deep frown.

    "Sam?"

    "Yes, I need to know something about him."

    "What is it?"

    "Why on earth did you let Sam challenge your academy tower?"

    f was stunned and that expression was followed by an expression of fear caution.

    "Why do you care? It is not like your Zeus academy didn''t allow him to enter your tower."

    Bloody Chariot smiled and said.

    "That is what I don''t understand as well. Heron, you and thatdy that likes corpses¡­ the rest as well. What is wrong with your brains to allow someone from another academy to just barge in and defeat your towers?

    Why did you even allow him to do that?"

    "Again, you can ask your own Dean about that."

    Bloody Chariot sighed and said.

    "f, for the past few days, no matter what I did, it ended up in failure. The suspended elders were not listening to me, those bloody noble league families are not bending backwards for me, it is very frustrating.

    And I am not really willing to take a no for an answer."

    f was incensed when he saw that expression on Bloody Chariot''s face. It was humiliating to be recipient of that expression of disdain and disregard.

    "What will you do? If you want information only the Dean of your academy can tell you that. It is not anyone else''s business to meddle in that regard.

    You won''t get anything from me anyway."

    f turned around and was about to walk away, but Bloody Chariot held him by his cor and pulled him back forcefully.

    Bloody Chariot was indeed not feeling amicable at this moment. Right now, he just wants everything to go his way.

    In his mind, it is clearly not much to ask. So, he just held f by his neck and said.

    "Come on, f. I don''t want to make a fuss. If I really hit you right now, the Thor academy will use that as an excuse to start a war. Then I will really lose all the patience and I will escte the war to the instructor and elder level.

    You know what happens then.

    So, let''s not just step on each other''s toes and keep it civil. Just give me the information that I want."

    f gritted his teeth and forcefully got out of that hold. He looked at the surroundings and saw that some of his students saw him. He got very angry. His aura raged along with his Divine energy. He is ready to thrash this guy ck and blue.

    But when he looked at Bloody Chariot''s face, he gritted his teeth and held back.

    "Do you think I talked nonsense all this while? Only a Dean of the academy can know this information. If you are desperate for it, go and beat the crap out of Heron and see if he will reveal it. Or you can go fuck right off and ask Zeus directly.

    Why are you pestering me here? I don''t have anything to tell you."

    f almost yelled out loud in frustrating. This is what''s wrong with strong people. You can''t do shit to them when things be difficult. f felt like he lost his face right there.

    Bloody Chariot watched as f walked away after saying his piece. He felt like there seemed to be some truth to what f said.

    He went to Hel academy.

    And then to the academies in other realms. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    All of them gave simr answers. So, he can only go back to Zeus academy without any information, except for learning that there is definitely some information to be learned from here.

    So, he could only go back with this failure and look for Heron himself.

    Meanwhile, Christos is overwhelmed by the information that he got from the wide he cast.

    The information is abundant, but there is a lot of useless information mixed with it. However, one thing he learned made him feel a chill run down his spine.

    That is the disappearance of some of the Olympian forces. He couldn''t help but feel surprised because of this. The reports that came back clearly stated that a lot of forces that followed Olympian gods were destroyedpletely.

    They were uprooted, with no bloodline left. Even if someone people were left behind, they are useless and they don''t even any sense of their own identities.

    And their territories werepletely deprived of any faith towards the Olympian gods because they were all suffering from various diseases, famines and floods. It was like the nature has cursed them to damnation.

    Only after theypletely renounced their belief in Olympus were they able to regain peace and growth in their lives.

 Chapter 2187 Academy Wager

    Chapter 2187 Academy Wager

    Christos could only sit back and calcte the faith that was lost in the Olympian gods.

    He couldn''t help but feel a sense of dread because of this. It is not like this didn''t happen before. When the gods are fighting in the celestial realms, it is verymon to send their followers on the far to erase their faith.

    However, whenever something like this happens, the faith of the other party will rece the faith of the eliminated.

    And when something happens on this scale, there would be a mission to the academy realm to reim and reignite the faith.

    Christos has read about these kinds of incidents and some seniors in the family participated in those missions. Some of them worked for Zeus to reim the lost territory and reestablish the faith.

    Right now, the cleansing is happening in such arge scale, but there is no information. There is one more thing that he noticed from there. The organization that is responsible for most of the cleansing, the traces that weremon in every area that the Olympians lost.

    The Dusk.

    Went looking for Sam, now he came across Dusk. In his opinion, both are not rted, so now he is in a tight spot whether to get involved in this, or to keep his focus on Sam.

    At the end of the day, his own motives won over. Usually, it is an unspoken rule that the people of higher realms like them are not to involve themselves in the lower realms. So, unless Zeus publishes a mission himself, there is no point in thinking about this.

    If only he has be a bit nosier and went there to search a bit deeper, things would have turned out much better to him. He would have really found a good clue or two about Sam.

    Christos kept on looking.

    While Christos'' search yielded nothing, Bloody Chariot''s search yielded him frustration and endless blockers.

    No matter how much he tried, he couldn''t find Heron.

    The guy that justzed around in the inn for so long just had to disapper when Bloody Chariot actually needed him.

    So, he took a drastic step and decided to go to the big man to answer these questions. After so many years, Bloody Chariot did something that he didn''t even do when he was on verge of death.

    Prayer.

    He went to the temple of Zeus and performed the ritual to summon the projection of the god.

    Within a few seconds, the statue started glowing.

    [Why have you summoned me?]

    Zeus'' voice could be heard from the statue.

    "Hello, Lord Zeus. It has been a while. When was thest time that we talked?"

    [In the Battlefield of Gods. In yourst war. When I was pleased by your service and gave you a boon. You wished for the position in the Zeus academy to live the life of a recluse."

    "I am really honored. To think even the great Zeus will remember the meeting with a lowly human. I must be very special."

    [Special Indeed. Why did you call me?]

    "I am at a roadblock and I need your help. I hope you can point me in the right direction here."

    [What would that problem be?]

    "A young man named Sam. Even though the Dean has authority to issue the Academy tower tokens, essentially the academy belongs to the god, which means you. So, I am sure you are informed of the reasons why he was given a token.

    Can you tell me why?"

    [Only the Dean has the right to know.] Zeus answered nonchntly.

    "You are saying the same thing? You don''t have to tell me anything. Just give me a direction and I will take care of the rest."

    [No, I can''t do that. Only the Dean has the right to know. That is all I can tell you.]

    With that Zeus went back.

    Bloody Chariot slumped in his chair and sighed. The same answer as f. A bit different when put to words. But still¡­

    ''Only the Dean has the right to know.''

    At that moment to hinder his already suffering thought process his attendant came with the news.

    "Sir, Gungnir hase again and this time he came with a bunch of students from all grades. He is here for an Academy Wager."

    "Wager?" Bloody Chariot was dumbfounded.

    An academy wager. It has been ages since hest heard of it. That is because he lived as a fucking recluse for so many years.

    The academy wager is actually pretty standard thing. Whenever there are some conflicts between the academies, or if one academy desires the property of another academy, instead of going to the war, they can go to the wager.

    It is very simr to the trial bybat conducted in the court of the academy realm.

    Both partiese together and select a method ofpetition. Both sides stake something and their representatives duke it out.

    This minimizes the casualties between both sides and they don''t have to be wary that some other third party wille in fish in the muddied waters.

    So, it is a much more preferrable option.

    Bloody Chariot didn''t hear about it because he is not participating in the academy activities. He went to meet Gungnir.

    "What is this Gungnir?" He asked directly. Gungnir noticed that the smile on Bloody Chariot''s face is not as calm as before. It looked a lot forced at the moment.

    "You came to our academy and tried to mess with our Dean when you already owe us an exnation andpensation for letting your academy members attack us for conducting our duties.

    We preferred an academy war, but our Dean advised us to take care of this in a much more tame way.

    So, we are going to go through this academy war.

    Students from all four grades. There will be five teambats.

    The first graders will participate in two, while the remaining three grades will participate in one each. The first side to win threebats will win."

    "Oh? Then what do you want to stake for this? What do you want from the Zeus academy?"

    "Legacy inheritances. Two of them."

    Bloody Chariot narrowed his eyes. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "I am sorry. The legacy inheritances are the private property of the students. They will not give up."

    "I don''t care. It doesn''t stipte in the rules that we cannot demand a student''s property. Anyway, it is not like youe to the rescue if we attack the student and forcefully take away the inheritance from him.

    And that student is a special hire from your academy and the team was formed with the backing of your academy. The inheritance was obtained through the hardwork of that team. I am sure, you can take the authority to approve this."

    Bloody Chariot looked at him and asked.

    "Do you want me to do such a shameless thing?"

    Gungnir didn''t reply. Just silently showed his agreement.

    "What if I don''t agree?"

    "We can go to the academy war. Even if you threaten by saying that you want to escte it to instructor and elder level, are you sure you can back those words? More than eighty percent of your elders are in the middle of the twelvebors.

    The other Olympian academies are deliberately making things difficult for them by giving them difficult tasks almost making them risk their lives.

    Your first grade is almost destroyed and is on a steady path of destruction.

    Your students are also knee deep in debt. Of course, our situation is also perilous, howeverpared to yours, we are in a much better shape. Also, we are not surrounded by the snakes ready to destroy us.

    You also know that we are not the only academy willing to go to war with you. There are two more. If you really want to go, then let''s go."

    Gungnir said calmly. Right now, he is determined. He will not bow down to Bloody Chariot in front of such a wonderful opportunity.

    Bloody Chariot sighed.

    Indeed, whatever Gungnir said is true and he didn''t really have much of a choice.

    "Alright, alright. Let''s do this. Just talk to the student council. But don''t forget that you have to put an equivalent coteral for this."

    "We came prepared."

    That went like that.

    After some vicious negotiation, they agreed on the terms. Dayus of course was infuriated when he heard that the hard-earned legacy inheritances are at the risk of going away.

    So, he stepped forward to fight in the Team fight himself. However to his surprise, Donner hase forward from the Thor academy to fight from their side.

    When Sam got the news he became so excited that he went to be a spectator.

    He also told Stone to observe the fights because White is also participating in the second team battle of the first grade.

    Since, the time for Stone to challenge them ising soon, they figured this would be the perfect time for Stone to understand them a bit more.

 Chapter 2188 Donner Vs Dayus

    Chapter 2188 Donner Vs Dayus

    The stage that usually used for the academy tournaments was set up for the academy wager.

    Even though they are team battles, both sides decided to just hold them on the stage directly. Since the stage is big enough, even if they fought there as a group, it won''t end up like some brawl. The first match was about to begin.

    Sam and Stone sat in the spectator stands at various spots.

    The seats around both of them were empty. None of the people wanted to associate with either of them. On the stage, two groups of people stood on the either side. Each group consisted of five people. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    One side is of the home team, the Zeus academy.

    Dayus who couldn''t control his fury was the first step up leading a team. The other four members are from his very team.

    On the other side, Donner stood with four members from the Thor Academy. Sam recognized all of them. They are the participants in the Freshmen tournament.

    The battle is pretty evenly matched in Sam''s opinion. Even though he just fought Donner a couple of times and kicked his ass, he does have a couple of tricks up his sleeve and could put up a decent fight against Dayus.

    Soon the referee signaled the start of the fight.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive start.

    All ten people moved immediately. Even though it was said to be a team battle, it immediately turned into five individual duels.

    Donner lunged forward with the lightning covered war hammer in his hands.

    *BANG*

    A straight swing. There seemed to be no technique or some fancy trick involved. It is abination of pure raw physical power and the destructive nature of lightning.

    At least, that is what it looked like at the first nce.

    *BANG*

    Dayus blocked the hammer strike with his spear shaft. Holding it up horizontally against the hammer.

    *BOOM* The blue lightning and purple lighting shed. Both of their strengths were evenly matched.

    Dayus gritted his teeth and kicked the ground underneath him. The stage cracked as he pushed Donner off and swung his spear.

    *SWOOSH*

    Ripping thorugh the air, the spear strike was aimed Donner''s throat, but it was cleanly blocked by his hammer.

    *BANG*

    The hammer hit the spear making it lodge into the stage. Donner lunged forward and stepped on the spear to jump high beforeing down with the hammer strike.

    Dayus didn''t even have a change in his expression as he swung his spear upwards trying to hit Donner on his legs. His aim was to change the trajectory of the attack and it worked. The hit gave Donner too much boost and he flew higher than he wanted.

    As he tried to control himself, Dayus appeared behind him and tried to stab the spear in his back.

    Donner turned around in the air and swung his hammer sideways.

    The spear brushed past Donner''s arm, while the hammer¡­.

    *BANG*

    It hit squarely on Dayus'' arm from the side.

    The impact was clean and everyone thought that dayus might fly in the air like a broken kite. Even he felt that and regretted charging to take the opportunity of stabbing someone in the back. It was such a wide and clean back, he couldn''t control himself and tried to nt his spear there.

    However, Donner anticipated it, in fact he set it up for that exact scenario. Only when Dayus felt the hit on his shoulder did he realize that.

    But he was even more surprised by theck of force pushing him away. The hit was clean, but he didn''t feel any pain in that instant.

    Hended on the ground and took a step back.

    He frowned as he looked at Donner who is already charging at him.

    That hit¡­ even though it didn''t hurt, it made him feel a bit suspicious. However, he couldn''t just stand there and examine it. He can only charge forward.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    The sound of metal hitting metal apanied the sound of thunder and lightning. The blue lightning an purple lightning and increasing in their intensity. Donner was on a total kamikaze mode as he almost gave his body up for getting clean hits on Dayus.

    At first, Dayus was a bit worried, however whenever Donner hit him, he is not feeling any pain. All he felt was some kind of numb sensation in his body for a moment and it is back to normal again. He knew that something is wrong with this and he felt like Donner was plotting something.

    The fact that he wasn''t able to find what is happening to him made him enraged.

    As Donner watched his face slowly turn into a scowl, he couldn''t help but let out a smirk. Dayus is just too easy to read and understand. This guy¡­ the day that he can control his own character, is the day he will have a chance of some sess.

    Donner thought to himself as he suddenly took a step back.

    His body suddenly changed. Partial fusion was activated as he lunged forward once again. His hammer strikeing down as if it was there to subject Dayus to divine judgment of lightning.

    He gritted his teeth and activated partial fusion as well.

    *BOOM*

    At that moment as the purple lightning manifested on his body, he felt a weird numbing sensation at several spots on his body. The same numbing feeling that he felt whenever Donner hit him. But much more intense and powerful than before.

    He frowned as he felt his fusion process slow down a bit. However, he couldn''t take his time to think.

    *BANG * *BOOM*

    An explosive hit from the above. He barely blocked it with the spear, however he still felt the stage underneath his feet sink a bit. The stage cracked again.

    Before Dayus could recover, Donner kept on hitting.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    He was acting like a boorish man trying to breakdown a rock on a mountain. The hammer strikes allnded at a single point. When Dayus had enough and prepared to just move even at the risk of slight injury.

    *BANG*

    The hammer strikended and¡­

    *URGH*

    He felt his arm hurt terribly. It was the exact same spot where Donnernded his first hit.

    Dayus immediately closed his eyes and concentrated his focus on that one spot.

    He could sense a condensed ball of of blue lighting spreading wildly in that area.

    Before he could eliminate it.

    *BANG*

    Another hit and this time a different area in his body lit up with that blue colored lightning, the first spot was cleared of it all.

    Dayus was stunned.

    *BANG*

    And this time physically as well. Because the lightning this time appeared in his head targeting his brain.

    His thought process halted for a bit. He couldn''t think of anything and he lost control of his body for a moment.

    Donner noticed this and didn''t let this chance go.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    The hammer swung like crazy as the hitsnded on the head and the two shoudlers.

    Dayus didn''t even feel his hands go down. His head is also wide open now for another hit.

    Donner gritted his teeth as he swung his hammer to hit him in the face.

    "FUCKING BASTARD"

    Dayus screamed. Purple lightning came out of his body like a million lightning snakes as he activatedplete fusion. The surrounding tiles on the stage were obliterated.

    On his body several lumps of blue lightning energy appeared. The energy that was left behind by Donner in a sneaky way with his barrage of attacks that didn''t have any force.

    The energy was passivelypressed in the body and it even allowed for a smooth cirction without disturbing the regr flow of Dayus'' body. However, they reacted when Donner willed them to. The hammer strikes are the trigger.

    That is also the reason why Donner didn''t bother executing someplicated fighting techniques. He fought like a brute most of the time, since he had to focus on keeping that blue lightning in check.

    It is not exactly a high level tactic. Donner is sure that it wouldn''t work on other yers at all. It only worked because it was Dayus.

    Dayus is also of lighting element and it is extremely simr to Donner''s. It is easy to mask on his body when he is focused on the fight.

    And it won''t work again. It is a one time trick. Donner is not worried though. He just needed it to work once.

    His body surged with lightning as he activated his own fusion as well.

    All his energy moved into his hammer as he struck at Dayus.

    *BANG*

    As Dayus blocked, all the residual blue lightning in his body reacted at the same time.

    "FUCK"

    He yelled in pain.

    "NOW"

    Donner yelled at his teammates to make a move.

    All of a sudden, people who were tackling the Zeus academy members in the Duel stepped back. All of them had their fusions activated.

 Chapter 2189 Overnight

    Chapter 2189 Overnight

    Only after Donner''s shout did Dayus realize that there is something odd about the positions of the other four duels.

    Two of them are happening ahead of him, while the other two behind him. All four duelsbined are forming a square. In each duel, both them opponents were in a locked state within each other''s close proximity.

    However, within that state the Thor academy members created themselves an advantageous situation.

    In the first corner of the square, the thor academy student''s back is towards the second duo where the second duel is happening, which is also the second corner of that square. In the second corner, the Thor academy student''s back is facing the third corner.

    The same with the third corner in which the back of the thor academy student is facing the fourth corner and in the fourth corner where the thor academy student''s back is facing the first corner.

    As soon as Donner shouted, they all kicked the ground and lunged backwards.

    In the middle of that leap, they all turned around as they moved towards the Zeus academy students of the different corners from the ones they were previously fighting.

    The Zeus academy students were caught off guard by such a sudden situation and before he could rx, the attacks came at them

    *BOOM*

    *BANG*

    The explosions and the impact caused by those attacks is huge enough to destroy the whole stage on the four corners. The only part left is the center where Donner and Dayus were still standing. Of course, even there the stage is cracked and banged up.

    Dayus was caught off guard, before he could make sense of what is happening, he felt five attacksing at him. Four from four diagonal directions with him as the center while the one major one from Donner which ising straight ahead.

    ¡­

    Five minutester.

    Dayus woke up in daze as he looked around. He didn''t know where he is for a moment.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The loud explosions came from the stage. They forced him back to the present situation. His eyes widened in disbelief as he thought of thest thing he remembered before he cked out. He was¡­ defeated.

    He lost.

    Not against Sam, not against Kumar, rather against Donner.

    Even though there were no deliberate rankings created among the yers, it is already a given among the existing seven that Donner is the least strongest. Or in other words, the weakest among them. At least that is what he wholeheartedly believed.

    But to think that he is defeated from the supposed weakest, this made Dayus furious. He wanted to destroy something to vent out. Killing intent surged from him as he looked for Donner among the crowd.

    However, he was nowhere to be seen.

    "Stop looking around and stay put. Don''t make a scene."

    He heard a voice and noticed that it was a Senior speaking to him.

    Dayus frowned. When he was about to retort, the senior simply replied.

    "This is an order from Elder Bloody Chariot. He said that you will act up after you wake up. So, he gave me these instructions especially to keep you in control. So, don''t make me use force."

    Dayus gritted his teeth and had to watch the next match of Thor academy and the Zeus academy.

    After some time, the match between the second first grade match waspleted. White led his team to a victory by himself. Thepetition for him is not as strong. Because of Ivar''s activity, there are many cases filed against the Thor academy as well.

    Even though their situation is not as bad as the Zeus academy, they still had a lot of their people gone for the punishment.

    A lot of people of Thor academy of all grades are affected.

    However, the Thor academy managed to snag a win in the second-grade fight. It was not overwhelming but it was good enough. Except it was drawn out for so long. By the time third grade fight which was won by the Zeus academy, it was way past midnight. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Both academies decided to postpone the fourth grade match to the next day.

    And this happened to be a great opportunity for whatever that Sam wanted to do.

    That night, the Zeus academy was still bustling. Everyone is either nervous or excited. The Thor academy''s amodations were arranged in an inn. The Zeus academy did offer them to stay in the campus.

    However, Gungnir insisted that they will stay outside.

    They stayed in an inn. All the fourth grade students were meditation. Even though the fourth grade consists of all Divine ne Transcendence stage cultivators, right now only the Peak stage cultivators are there in thispetition.

    The same goes for the Zeus academy.

    However, on the Zeus academy''s side. Three of their top five students in Grade 4 are not actually there. They are in the middle of their twelvebors. Because their crime list is just one step below the teachers and instructors.

    So, the Zeus academy happened to be on a weaker side in this game.

    The Thor academy students are feeling pretty confident at the moment. In that confidence they are meditating in their own individual rooms.

    A couple of hours before sunrise, Sam made his move.

    Four metal bird puppets that had perfect stealth moved through the sky. They are perfectly merged with the night and they flew at high enough altitude to not be under anyone''s detection.

    When they were still at an undetectable distance away from the inn, the Thor academy students all had their bird puppets reacting to something.

    The reaction for the first graders, second graders, third graders and the elders was negligible. They saw that it is weird the puppet''s eyes are glowing, however the fourth graders had their birds knocking on the windows as if they are trying to get out.

    The students felt something is really wrong. However, they didn''t know what is truly wrong yet.

 Chapter 2190 Eerie Silence

    Chapter 2190 Eerie Silence

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Four explosive sounds one after another. All targeted in a broad scalended on one particr side of inn. The side where the people of the Thor academy resided. The fourth grades did manage to sense the attacks that were aimed at them and so did the elders.

    They even reacted and prepared to block them.

    Gungnir managed to block two attacks, while another elder that apanied them managed to block the other two.

    They looked in the direction from which the attacks came, however there is no sign of anything there. All the puppets that were there a second ago, were gone, as if they disappeared into thin air.

    However, at this moment.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    A simr sequence of four attacks appeared on a different side, but all aimed at the same block of the inn. The seniors reacted by now and came out of their rooms. They levitated in the air closer to the building.

    When the sensed the second wave of the attacks, their first instinct was to dodge. Because their senses screamed that the attacks areing from something of their level.

    So, they didn''t make an attempt to block it, however the elders did. And they blocked it pretty easily. And this time, they managed to spot a person a few blocks away. Someone disguised very heavily. That someone was obviously suspected as the attacker.

    Gungnir frowned as the attacker moved and tried to escape.

    He turned to his elder and said.

    "You go after him. I will stay here." Gungnir spread his divine sense without holding back. The attacker fell under his senses and from the initial sense, he is much weaker than him and the elder the apanying him.

    That was such an obvious bait. However, he doesn''t want to let him go. So, he sent the assisting elder away with them, while he awaited here.

    And it was a good choice.

    More attacks came from different sides and he did manage to find some entities that are blurry and almost non-existent. That''s because he was only able to sense them when they are attacking and the moment the attack wasunched they are disappearing.

    Gungnir swung his spear and destroyed every attack that was thrown at the inn. He had a frown on his face. He doesn''t understand the why these attacks areing like this. He focused more on his senses and tried to observe these attacks that areing at him.

    He also kept an eye on the Zeus academy entrance. He could see that people areing out of the academy. The people around the area, already surrounded the inn as they witnessed this fiasco.

    "You go back inside and do note out. Take care of your juniors."

    The fourth graders are already shaken. They could feel the attacksing from all sides and each attack is very consistent with their level. They could be seriously injured and if they are not careful, they might even die right then and there.

    So, this made them feel a bit flustered and tense.

    They went back inside the inn and met with their juniors, they all gathered inside.

    At this moment, Gungnir saw a sh from the Zeus academy. Within a second, Bloody Chariot appeared beside Gungnir as he looked into the horizon.

    *SWOOSH*

    He waved his hand and an attack was blocked halfway. It was no where nearnding near the inn and it was already destroyed.

    "What''s happening?" He asked with a frown.

    "You tell me, Bloody Chariot. I am under the impression that the kids from your academy might know something about this."

    "Come on now, even you should underestimate the stupidity of these guys. Do you really think they would juste and do something like this out of the blue, right before thepetition, when they are the obvious suspects?

    Maybe if things are normal, then it could have been at least understandable with minute possibility. However, now? They are screwed out of their own asses, they are getting close to their death with every single passing second of their lives.

    Why would you think, they would do something like this?"

    "Then why the fuck are they not here?" Gungnir asked with a dark expression.

    "Because, I told those idiots to stay in my office, when I wasing out of the academy. Because I knew that this going tobe coiled around their necks no matter what happens."

    "I will believe it when I see it. Thank you. But I do hope that you are right.Otherwise, I will fucking kill them."

    "Yeah, right. First take care of those metal creatures."

    As he said, he waved his hand. An invisible wave hit all the puppets that were attacking them. More than three dozen puppets exploded at the same time. Gungnir looked at Bloody Chariot with pursed lips.

    He was able to sense them, but not clearly. He did consider them attacking them with all his might and destroy them. Even though he couldn''t sense them clearly, they were close enough for him to attack them.

    He was just a bit cautious about it being a trap.

    After a few waves, Bloody Chariot''s frown deepened and suddenly threw an attack to the ground. *SWOOSH* n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    A metal puppet that looked like arge earthworm sprung out of the ground and almost jumped towards the entrance of the inn. Only it was destroyed by Bloody Chariot''s attack.

    Before it was destroyed, it alreadyunched a cannon beam made of earth elemental energy, which was chaotic andpact at the same time.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosive sound, the energy beam hit a pir of that luxurious inn. The pir was pulverized to dust.

    The explosion caused by the destruction of the puppet, caused a huge pit that waspletely full of newly made granr sand of that very floor.

    *SWOOSH*

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    A wave of gungnir''s spear and a streak went through the street in front of the inn. A bunch of giant mechanical earthworms appeared out of there and exploded. The whole street was destroyed. Bunch of buildings copsed and pretty sure, someone might have been injured or dead.

    The students inside started feeling scared. Even the seniors are not exactly brave right now. Their hearts are ready to get out of their chests. All of them are in a single room sensing all the conflict happening outside.

    "So, any idea who could send dozens of high level puppets that could throw energy beams of various elements?" Bloody Chariot asked in a sarcastic tone.

    Both of them looked towards the hub that was outside of the city.

    "Do you think it is really the hub?"

    "I don''t know. We have to find out."

    As soon as that doubt came, something else happened. Eight humanoid metal puppets, all that looked like mechas that were gifted to the students in the revived pocket dimensions. Bloody Chariot frowned, but before he could think of what these tin cans are, they all blinked and appeared within the innpound.

    The spatial blink was so precise as if there is a node marked in the innpound.

    Bloody Chariot zoomed towards them and started destroyed them. Four of them were destroyed in a blink.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Four explosions and that was followed by another one.

    *BOOM*

    But the fifth one was from the puppet and it destroyed the wall of the room the kids were staying in.

    The wall was not just blown, it evaporated or to be precise sublimated along with that energy beam. The hole in the wall was clean as if it was cut by a piece of high precision machining equipment.

    The explosion''s shockwave made everyone in the room crash. The juniors felt the brunt of it, while the seniors managed to hold it in, albeit a bit more tense.

    Bloody Chariot gave a gentle punch at the back of the puppet and made it fall to the ground.

    At that moment¡­

    In the corner of the room, one of the first grade student''s puppet that was initially resting on the side, suddenly glowed.

    Energy gathered at its beak and at that moment¡­

    One of the fourth grade students, one that was supposed to lead the team the next day in thepetition, has sensed the energy gathering. Extended his hand towards without knowing as his nerves made him go crazy.

    Orange mes gathered at his palm. Even before Bloody Chariot or Gungnir could react, those orange mes were shot out towards the metal puppet. However, two first graders, a bunch of second graders, some third grades are also there.

    *BOOM*

    On explosion of fiery orange and Gungnir who was standing in the air almost copsed to the ground. The next moment, all the puppets disappeared as if they are not there. The only remnant is the big humanoid puppet that Bloody Chariot captured. An eerie silence followed as the dust and smoke settled.

 Chapter 2191 Dismantling

    Chapter 2191 Dismantling

    Gungnir dashed back to the room and looked the scene left behind.

    All the juniors that were in the path of the attack were killed. When he registered who actually got killed, his heart felt cold by several degrees. This is a worst case scenario that they never even thought off.

    Except for Donner and a couple of others, the rest of the first graders are all from notable backgrounds. One of them is called the Odinson family. Just from that one could guess that they are indeed very special.

    Their degree of influence and strength was not less than that of the chous family.

    That kid died today right under his watch and in the hands of a Grade 4 student. The thing that made this even more worse is that the guy thatunched the attack is from a different family that directly rivaled the Odinson family.

    They were never on good terms even though both are Thor Devouts.

    They always had rising tensions and only sustained with barely delicate bnce. Now with just this one thing, Gungnir is sure that the bnce is broken and all the pent up tension will explode.

    He looked at Bloody Chariot and said.

    "Take care of them right now. Make sure that everyone else is alright."

    He said those words and flew away in the direction of the hub.

    A minuteter, Gungnirnded in front of the hub. His eyes cold as ice. One could almost sense the drop in the temperature of the surroundings.

    "Come out Joker."

    His voice was calm, yet also loud. His aura raged. Showing off his Peak Stage Divine ne Consummate cultivation. There is no response from inside the hub.

    Gungnir didn''t ask again and instead charged his divine energy into the spear. The energy was a bit foggy, white like snow and glowing with that ethereal nature. As if it was gathered from the stars themselves.

    *BAM*

    He put his foot forward and got into a stance. The ground cracked underneath and he threw the spear at the Hub.

    The sound of the spear travelling through the air while leaving the ground beneath it in a trail of destruction made everyone within the city to be on the edge. They could feel that energy all the way from there.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosive sound it shed into the wall around the Hub, but the wall was destroyed immediately. However, as soon as the wall was gone, it started regenerating slowly. The spear then flew towards the door of the hub which was closed.

    But before it could reach.

    *BOOM*

    An explosive shockwave, came from the door and the spear with all its momentum came to an immediate halt. It dropped on the ground like a twig.

    Gungnir frowned and reached out with his hand, the spear raised from the ground and was about to go back to him, but a condensed wind streak captured the spear and made it stay in the air. The force Gungnir pulling the spear waspletely negated by the force of the wind.

    Gungnir was surprised.

    That wind attack was gave off a familiar vibe. But he is more surprised by the fact that Joker is making a move on him without even appearing in front of his eyes. At least that is what he believed.

    As he was about to make a move, two objects flew out of the hub and levitated in front of Gungnir. They are metal puppets. Both birds.

    One of them is a model that Gungnir is very familiar with it. The other one looked very simr and familiar to the first one, but there is some obvious difference in its style of making.

    From the familiar puppet, a voice was heard.

    "You are barking at the wrong tree, my friend. If you want to find out who attacked, you might want to check out the extra puppet that I sent.

    After investigating yourself, you cane back here."

    Gungnir frowned, but he still took both the puppets. Only then did the spear came flying towards him.

    He went back into the city.

    Meanwhile, inside the Hub, Sam is sitting in a chair. He is sweating bullets as he stayed limp on the chair. He was panting heavily and the veins on his head are clearly visible. They were ready to explode.

    He hurriedly took out a potion and gulped it down to stabilize his racing heart.

    Right now, the two attacks were controlled by him.

    Of course they were not really his own attacks, but the attacks stolen from the Elders that came to hub before and practiced.

    Sam used his resonance technology and the energy absorption gear that everyone is using to store the attacks of the elders and he canter control it. However, to use them better, he still has to control the attacks himself.

    If it was just some attacks of the Divine ne Pre-transcendence and Divine ne transcendence, or even the initial stage of Divine ne Consummation, the mental energy of all the specters and souls that arebined in the spirit of the hub, will be enough.

    With his own brain into the addition, he should be able to control them very well.

    However, the attacks that came now are of Late stage and Peak stage of Divine ne consummation.

    Even with all the tech in the world that Sam could create, it will be very difficult to fight against them.

    Not just physically or mentally, even the hub might not be able to withstand it too much. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    After all, the materials that are being used to hold those massive attacks are not exactly the best in existence.

    Even though Sam managed to rip of several families and managed to gain a lot of resources from them through which he strengthened the hub, it is still impossible for him to create something of perfection, without actually using his own hands.

    It look a lot of out of him to defend against those.

    Sam stabilized himself before he went out of that room and travelled down to the core of the hub.

    It is one of the energy containers of the hub. Right now, it was glowing like bright moon, however there is a small crack on it. A very small one that is almost as thin as a hairline.

    He connected himself to the energy core with his palm and started channeling that energy. After around a half an hour, the crack started recovering. The core is back to normal.

    Sam however is exhausted again.

    Meanwhile, inside the Zeus academy.

    In a special room.

    Bloody Chariot and Gungnir are standing there. The puppet that was simr to the ones distributed by the hub is floating in the air as it gave out a projection of a video.

    Another puppet is on the table, being dismantled by one of the artisans based on the instructions in the video. The artisan is well versed in both formations and puppet making and his eyes are getting brighter and brighter with every single second. After some time, he finished the dismantling process to find a small rectangr crystal.

    There are some characters engraved on it. Characters that they are not familiar with. They have never see something like that before.

    Along with the crystal, there is a strip of metal inside. Even that metal ispletely unfamiliar. The artisan dismantling that puppet could considered one of the best in the world. He is the person in charge of the artisan department of the Zeus academy and has seen a lot of stuff across the realms, but even he hasn''t seen it. Theposition of that metal or alloy is totally new to him.

    "You are saying, you haven''t even seen any records in all your experience that talked about some metal like this?" Bloody Chariot asked with an incredulous face. He couldn''t even believe what the artisan said.

    "I am exactly saying that. And from what I can observe, the metal piece is not just some random thing in this puppet. There are some intricate engravings on granr level. I don''t know what medium was used to engrave those things, but it is something that I have never seen before and it should contain important clues.

    As for the characters on that crystal. I don''t know what they are as well.

    But this level of creation is certainly very high. I am not even sure, if I could make a design like that from the scratch. Even though it falls short to the puppet given by the hub, it is still right up there.

    If this blue print gets out, there is a huge chance of a war happening."

    "Then what can we gain from this if you can''t say anything." Bloody Chariot asked.

    "Oh, there is definitely some information. The big humanoid puppet you got? That and this bird puppet are of simr construction. Also, there is something else."

    "What?"

    "Do you remember the puppets that are being awarded in the revived pocket dimensions? They are of the same build as well. There is a great chance that are all of them are made at the same ce and even by the same person."

 Chapter 2192 Clues

    Chapter 2192 Clues

    Bloody Chariot and Gungnir exchanged a nce.

    "There are incidents like this before. However, not at this level. Two people won those puppets in the Olympian region and one of them had an attack.

    Simr humanoid puppets came here and they attacked him.

    However, that humanoid puppet that he won immediately activated itself before destroying the puppets that came out of nowhere. Nobody knows who exactly sent those puppets even now.

    There are indeed some spections, some that even rted to the hub. However, even at that time, the artisans identified that there is a significance difference in the craftsmanship of Hub''s puppets and those humanoid puppets."

    Bloody Chariot openly revealed the information.

    Gungnir frowned and said.

    "Then it couldn''t be a coincidence. One of the kids from the Thor academy also won a puppet like that in one of the pocket dimensions."

    "And who is that kid?"

    "He is one of the few that came here and he is among the ones who died." Gungnir replied in a heavy tone.

    There is a few seconds of silence in the room. Because everyone could guess each other''s minds. The only reason the puppets previously was because they were destroyed. But now, they left after the person who acquired this puppet from the pocket dimension, died.

    Gungnir thought for a moment and then remembered something.

    "Make sure that no one touches that things there. We need to check it out ourselves. We cannot let anyone tamper with anything, even as an ident."

    Bloody Chariot agreed.

    After ten minutes, both if them are back at the inn. They focuses on the ashes of the kids that died and fished out a few things that weren''tpletely destroyed from the explosion. And among them, there is one thing that wasn''t effected by the attack at all.

    The ring.

    The Gungnir took that ring, it started glowing a bit, before it became dim again.

    Gungnir felt a prick in his mind right before it went dim. He didn''t understand what happened, but it felt like the ring tried to make a connection with him, however it didn''t. It almost seemed like it¡­. rejected him.

    It rejected the one and the only man who has ever received the approval of Odin. It rejected him.

    This made him confused and at the same time curious.

    What is the actual requirement to acquire this ring?

    How can one get his acknowledgement? Nobody knows as of now. However, they do know and have ess to the people who have acquired these puppets in these revived pocket dimensions.

    After they went back to the Zeus academy, Gungnir proposed his idea.

    "We don''t exactly know the information regarding these weird puppets. They are powerful and they don''t have anyone controlling them from within the vicinity, except for the man who acted as a bait¡­"

    Gungnir paused here and then thought of the elder that went after that person in the grey robes hasn''te back yet. But it was only a fleeting thought and he continued.

    "We have a few avenues to investigate this incident. First one is the Hub. However, the tensions between the academies and the hubs are at an all time high. The students are dying day by day and the crime rate of student-on-student has increased quite a bit as well.

    So, it would be nigh impossible to do this.

    Maybe, if we try this from the Sanatan realm or the Xia realm, then we might have some breakthrough.

    The second avenue is researching the puppets themselves. We need to understand thatnguage that was engraved on these puppets and also study the style of their making.

    The alloy metals, the inscription styles, the formation concepts, all of this can help us get to them."

    He paused and Bloody Chariot continued.

    "The third avenue is obviously the one and the only grey hooded guy. Isn''t he? If your elder manages to catch him, we might really have a quick breakthrough.

    All three avenues are troublesome.

    The first one is the moderate and most sure approach, because we can be sure that the Hub does know about them.

    Then the second is the most unsure method. We don''t know how many years it will take for us to actually understand these things.

    The third one is something I don''t know what to think of. If it works, then it works. As long as we capture him, we can directly perform soul search.

    But the fact that he wasn''t captured yet and came back along with your Elder is something that is concerning me."

    While they are discussing this, somewhere deep inside the forest outside the Olympian city.

    Four people that wore grey robes surrounded one person. That one in the middle is the elder that came along with Gungnir. Also the same one that followed the man in the grey robe.

    The four people are obviously the managers of the hub''s various branches.

    Icarus, Ivar, Daksh and Lan.

    All four of them gathered here for Sam''s well executed n.

    The Elder is panting heavily in the middle of all four. The surroundings were destroyed and the elder didn''t even have a single spot on his body that wasn''t bruised.

    He felt like he was dying and in fact, he was doing exactly that.

    Even though is high up in the energy levelspared to the four, when four of thembined their powers, they managed to subdue him. Of course, there is one more thing that actually yed a key role.

    Ivar''s arm glowed and the glove that he wore started showing archaic runic marks all over it.

    He threw a perfect jab at the face of the elder. The energy condensed in that glove prated through the elder''s head. The runes disappeared at the same time as the life left the body of the elder.

    The fight waspleted and the elder is dead.

    The four them ran in four different directions leaving the crime scene.

    At the same time, Sam who finished repairing the core and recovering himself, went to check something in the hub''s data.

    The information regarding the inactive links of the hub but the active links of the puppets. In other words, the people that now joined the faith of Agmon.

    He is actually surprised by the amount of people who did so. Alton really went above and beyond to poach a load of members to convert them to this new faith. He is preying on the fact that many of these people are abandoned by the academies, student unions and even some of their friends and peers.

    Because these people are weak as of now and they were plundered so that their coins can be used by the strong.

    This sudden discrimination that they were subjected to, all because they were in the middle of a crisis that none of them are really responsible for¡­ this made them feel helpless and all the gods that they worshipped until them with their utmost heart are not there to save them.

    And Alton took this chance to spread the faith of agmon.

    A god that not only removes all their problems just for epting their faith and going through a brainwashing process of believing and even denouncing the other gods.

    Sam had a sense of dejavu.

    This is how the cults operated back on earth.

    However, he still didn''t expose their existence. In fact, he even helped them out by suppressing the spread of information.

    This extrayer, might just add to the chaos and Sam would wee it. After all, Sam''s goal was neither to conquer the academy realm nor to rival it. His goal is to destabilize and destroy it, in turn hurting the gods that are supporting this ce.

    As long as he does that, it doesn''t matter if he is using a borrowed knife.

    Of course, the stab wouldn''t feel as satisfying, but it is a stab nheless. A stab that could make even the gods bleed. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    As Sam was smiling to himself, he got an alert from hub''s system.

    Someone is requesting Joker''s audience.

    He was surprised to see the people that came there.

    Gungnir and Bloody Chariot. The two legendary elders are at his doorstep. It seems like they took the first approach.

    Sam controlled Joker''s projection and appeared in front of them both.

    "Hello, I would like to say it is nice to meet you. But it is really not. So, why are you here?"

    "We need some information on those puppet strikers. Why are their tricks very simr to yours?"

    Gungnir asked directly.

    "May I know, why do I need to give you that information?"

    "Our students were attacked¡­"

    "No, no, what you are saying is, why you need this information. I am asking why do I need to give that information.

    There is a vast difference between those two cases. So, please answer my question. But before that, think of your behavior and treatment towards hub in the past few days.

    Think carefully and answer me."

 Chapter 2193 Striking a Deal

    Chapter 2193 Striking a Deal

    Joker''s words made the two old men feel a bit tongue tied.

    They don''t how to answer that question. Why does Joker need to answer the questions? In their heads there is one answer.

    ''Because they are asking him.'' n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    However, Gungnir is sure that they cannot give that answer. Joker is the most mysterious being that he has evere across. He has even seen the projection of gods and bathed in their celestial radiance. But this joker appeared even more elusive.

    No one physically saw him. No one knows his true face. No one knows his abilities. No one knows what he can actually do.

    Everything about him is a mystery.

    Everything rted to him is unknown.

    Where did hee from?

    Why did he put such a vast thing like hub in open?

    Why did he hire the people who were hostile to the academies as the managers of the hub?

    No one knows.

    Even though all the academies are hostile with hub as of now, they still don''t know anything about hub or the hub''s intentions. And they are nowhere near finding any information in that regard.

    Everyone''s investigation has stagnated for such a long time that they want to bash their heads to a piece of cotton and die right there.

    If they at least knew him, they could try to force him to give that information. However, what could they do now?

    Except for properly offer something? But even that is difficult. Because no one knows what this guy needs.

    Can they give him rewards like money and resources? Can they give him influence and power? Can they give him blueprints or recipes? These things would have made everyone else agree, but both old men looked at the Hub and then exchanged a nce.

    Right now, Hub is the undisputed richest entity in the whole of the academy realm. Hub basically is the reservoir of every single coin that originally belonged to the academy realm. The designs and blueprints of the hub are way ahead of theirs.

    The resources¡­. They don''t have to talk about it.

    They stood there in awkward silence. So awkward that even the crickets didn''t make a sound.

    "It seems like you are unable to answer that question. Why don''t you go back and think it through?"

    Bloody Chariot sighed.

    "Enough games. We need information. What''s the deal?"

    "Deal? I don''t want to deal with you guys. In fact, I won''t be dealing with anyone from the academy realm anymore. I will leave this ce after my contract ends. And you won''t even be able to find my traces even if all of your godsbinede to find me."

    "It seems like you don''t know me all too well. I am called a bloody chariot for a reason. I can chase you to the ends of not just this world, any world if I want to.

    And, I saw your contract. Every student''s contract will end once they graduate from the academy. That means, you need to stay until the current first year students graduate.

    Do you know how many years it will take?

    They need to go from the Divine ne Initiation to Divine ne transcendence. Do you think I won''t be able to do anything to you in that long while?

    Who knows, by then I might have even uprooted the whole hub.

    But I am not here for that. So, just tell us what you want in exchange for the information."

    "You cannot afford to make deals with me. And I don''t make losing deals."

    "Don''t beat around the bush and tell us what you need."

    "Oh? You sure sound confident. Then fine. Go ahead and pay me fifty million gold coins each."

    Both Gungnir and Bloody Chariot stiffened. They had the urge to beat him to death. Looking at their expressions Joker smiled and said.

    "Alright, I will make a deal with you guys. But in exchange I need something that only you can do."

    "What would it be?"

    "Sign a contract of security. You two are to provide me with the protection. Or to be precise you have to guard the Hub branches of both the Olympian city and the Norse City.

    I don''t want some random idiot just going against the hub building just because they were effected by some other idiot''s deliberate n."

    He said as his gaze lingered over Gungnir. He sized him up and down in disdain.

    "That is impossible. Even you should know by now that the people of the academy realm long stopped being the fools you thought they were.

    There is no denying that your involvement is there in the current state of the academy realm."

    "Of course, I won''t deny that my involvement is there. But I don''t think it is voluntary. You are acting as if I deliberately established this hub, createdplex contracts by myself and then made you all forcefully sign it.

    Then I contributed some of the most valuable research data to ever exist in the exchange center, all to just mess with you.

    Do you really that a person that can do all this, will have to hesitate and y in this roundabout manner just to get back at you?

    I can rage the academy realm upside down with my abilities and none of you would be able to do jack shit about it.

    Even if I want to do it in a roundabout way, you won''t even be able get a whiff of what is happening, until you are burying your own body in your own grave.

    So, please mind the usations.

    It is already great that I didn''t take the anger out on the whole academy realm for the stupid things your students are doing.

    And now even the elders are joining."

    Joker lied through his teeth and his voice grew more and more intense as he spoke. He appeared exasperated.

    "You dared toe here and flex your spear throws in front of me. If only I hadn''t given that word¡­."

    Joker''s expression shifted as if he said that something he shouldn''t have. He immediately turned around and said.

    "If you agree to this, then we can proceed forward. If not, then please don''t bother me.

    But I have to tell you one thing. Right now, only the puppets came and you already know that the strength of those puppets is not exactly high. There is a reason for that. And sooner orter, there will be more than puppets here.

    Even if you think that you can stop them, I am afraid you will face nothing but bitter disappointment. You will lose so much that you would feel despair even after winning in the end."

    Joker''s projection disappeared.

    Both Gungnir and Bloody Chariot felt conflicted. They didn''t know what to say, but they went back. They didn''t understand the exact motives of Joker and the Hub.

    They indeed suspected that the hub is involved and there is also that connection that Bloody Chariot explored between Sam and the Hub. He is sure that something is fishy. But the way Joker talked¡­ it almost seemed like the world is subjecting him to some unfair treatment.

    He is conflicted.

    Gungnir is the same.

    Meanwhile. Back in the hub. Sam heaved a sigh of relief as both of them left. His aim was only one thing and one thing alone. Bluff the shit out of those two and make sure that they believe all the bullshit that he says.

    He was hoping that they wouldn''t lose their shit and directly attack the Hub. It would have been very hard for him to defend against them. Not like he couldn''t. He definitely could, but the price would have been atrocious.

    Also, he had other ns.

    That is why he added that new type of puppets and the new story that apanied them.

    The night passed and it is soon dawn.

    Finally, Bloody Chariot came back alone, while Gungnir took his students and went back to the Thor academy. The final round of battle between both academies has been put on halt.

    "Why are you here alone? Is your friend noting?"

    Joker asked Bloody Chariot.

    "He is not my friend and he went back."

    "Okay, are you sure you want to make this exchange. I will still be okay with revealing the information to you, for the protection. But I don''t know if you will believe that this is worth it."

    "I am willing to consider, but we might need to negotiate some conditions."

    "Sure, I am open for business in that regard. But I doubt there is much we can change. My conditions are simple and straightforward. Like always."

    Bloody Chariot coughed at the word ''always''

    Hub''s contract is anything but simple. There are few things asplicated as that.

    Both of them started the discussion and soon found amon ground.

    "So, now. Are you ready to reveal the information?"

    "Alright. First, answer me this question. How many realms do you think are there in this existence?"

 Chapter 2194 A Story

    Chapter 2194 A Story

    The three of them are inside a room within the Hub.

    The very first question that Joker asked. ''How many realms do you think there are in existence?''

    This question caught both of them off guard. They really don''t know what to say for this. After all, just the realms they knew number in hundreds. So, how could they give out a number.

    That made them stay silent.

    After that silence, Joker led them inside.

    He then continued the conversation.

    "It was wise of you to not answer. Because, there are way too many realms. I have travelled to many of them and learned loads of things. The formation techniques, inscription patterns, new runes, etc, etc.

    However there is just one realm that is very unique. Unique to the point that I have never seen anything like that before and I doubt that I ever will."

    As he said he waved his hand and a sr system appeared on a projection in front of them.

    The sr system has fives, however instead of sharing different orbits, they share the same orbit. All thes are at the same distance away from the sun. But the orbit isrge enough that thes are not effecting each other with their gravity.

    All fives looked simr as well.

    "This realm doesn''t have any name. The people in there didn''t really ced a name on it, because in their opinion they didn''t have to have a unique identity.

    The reason behind is that they never ever leave their own realm. All the transactions happen within the fives as each of them have their own expertise.

    Of course, some external peoplee in and pay a shit ton to buy whatever that is made in those five realms. That is their only external trade route. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    They don''t really wee settlers or immigrants. They are very closed off and unified.

    Of course, the outsiders did name them and they are called the Outcasts."

    Joker paused and looked at the two audience that he has in front of him. They are intently waiting for him to continue.

    "The reason why I am bringing this up is the solution to your answers wille from here.

    This realm and the people in there, all have different expertise, but themon expertise they share is in the arts and crafts of formations, smithy, pill making, puppetry, etc.

    They are very good. Too good to the point that the outside inventions and novelties look like toys in front of their own expertise. They have their own runic system, their own form of puppetry, their own alloy making methods.

    Apart from very few core principles everything else is different."

    "I am guessing, the puppets we sawe from there?" Gungnir asked impatiently.

    Joker nodded and continued with his story.

    "To maintain the bnce between themselves and have a unified front against the external forces, the fives and their administrators always shared the critical things with each other. There are trade routes between them for the new research information and such.

    Any time, any one of them came up with a revolutionary invention, most of the research except for the actual core and critical part will be shared with the remaining four. The remaining four research the data and create their own versions and interpretations of it.

    For example, one of thes created a unique puppet core that is very suitable for controlling the battle puppets for close range. They are designed for high endurance and defense.

    But when the data ended up in the other''s hands. One of them managed to create a puppet core suitable for exploration of precarious natural spots, which also happens to have the requirement of high endurance and defense.

    It was pretty harmonious.

    Until something happened."

    Joker waved his hand and the screen zoomed into one of thes. It went deeper and deeper until it showed a special valley that was glistening with white colored rocks.

    They almost looked like diamonds, but not quite at the same time.

    "One of thes discovered a new type of alloy making method. The valley I am showing you is actually a mineral vein with a specific type of metal. The experts of that, managed to fuse it with some other mineral vein they extracted somewhere else using some unique method and converted the whole mineral vein into a new one."

    Both Bloody Chariot and Gungnir were dumbfounded. It was like a thunderp in their heads.

    They do have some knowledge about the alloy making. It is not as much as the actual artisans involved in the field, but they do have a decent understanding. Even that made them feel like the alloy making process is way tooplex.

    But to think that someone fused to mineral veins to create a new metal. They didn''t even know how to express their shock in their own words.

    Joker didn''t mind their shock and just continued with their story.

    "This is not the first time, such a revolutionary discover came up in that realm. In fact, it happens every couple of centuries. But the previous discoveries were all shared and the power bnce always remained as it was.

    But for some reason, the n that discovered this which is also the n in charge of that''s administration, didn''t share this info. They wanted to effect the power bnce and take over the whole realm.

    And for that they decided to even take the help of some external forces.

    The conflict intensified and that was destroyed. All of its forces were killed. Except for the few people who managed to stay alive and ran away with most of its core legacies. Of course, the war took away a lot from the other fours as well.

    But they wanted to erase the fifth one by all costs. Their family is being hunted down even now.

    In fact, I think only a couple of people are left in that lineage. From what I heard though, they decided to spread their legacy not by lineage anymore, but by letting different people inherit it.

    And those are the legacies that you are getting in those revived pocket dimensions."

    There it is. The Bombshell that both Gungnir and Bloody Chariot are waiting for. They didn''t expect such a turn in the story.

    Joker continued.

    "I am sure, I don''t have to spell out who actually attacked you and why.

    From what I know, even though each puppet that they are gaining carries a legacy, none of the puppets have theplete and the core legacy of that n. Nobody knows how to inherit it. Only the people from that realm would know how to uncover it.

    And the remaining four lineages are trying to destroy the fifth one. The attack on your students is a part of that."

    There is a heavy silence in the room. A million thoughts are churning in their heads. And one of them is that they regretted bring the other party with them.

    Bloody Chariot in particr felt the regret the most. After all, the legacies were found in Olympian city, which means the Olympian kids were supposed to be the ones to inherit those legacies.

    But with all the drama that ensued here due to the legacy inheritances given by the gods, this new story is unraveled. This made the whole thing severelyplicated.

    He wanted to p himself silly to make sure that he doesn''t repeat that mistake.

    Of course, he can p himself all he wantster on. Right now, he needs to focus on something else.

    "Then why are your own designs so simr to the ones they used? Why do you even know so much about them? Are you part of the four lineages?"

    Joker smiled.

    The meaning behind the question is quite clear. Even though the other party wanted to know more and curious, but a part of them might have wished that Joker answers positively for this. Because just now like Joker mentioned, only the people in the four lineages can know how to uncover the legacy.

    If Joker really is one of them¡­

    "I was one of the external forces that used to trade with that area. I was an explorer as I said and I stumbled up on that realm with great difficulty. In fact, entering it is highly difficult. I don''t even know the spatial coordinates of that ce. It is that secretive.

    As part of my travels, I stayed there and observed the research directions the took. I wanted to understand the reasons behind their growth and I did find some answers.

    Of course, you cannot say that our designs arepletely simr. I just took some inspiration and did the rest on my own.

    In the Hub, you can see a lot of stuff, that their realm only wishes to make. And I even exchanged some of my techniques with them before. That is why I know all of this."

 Chapter 2195 Race to Dismantle

    Chapter 2195 Race to Dismantle

    Bloody Chariot and Gungnir were in a deep thought.

    They don''t want to take whatever Joker said at the face value. After all, there is no guarantee that Joker is saying the truth. However, they also don''t want topletely eliminate the possibility as well. At that time, Jokernded the final blow.

    "You must have gotten ess to the crystal chip from that puppet that you dismantled. If you decode it, you would be able to find a ce called the Nest.

    The nest is where the puppets stay and repair themselves after their missions are done. The four ns of the other fours must have left their nests various locations. So, whenever the traces of the fifth n are spotted, they will look for them and deal with them.

    Once you find that nest, you might be able to find more details.

    Of course, if you manage to dismantle the humanoid puppets as well, you will get simr information. There would always be a nest registered with a puppet. Even if you can''t find its original nest, it is equipped with mechanisms to find the nearest nest.

    You can find more details once you arrive at a nest.

    From what I see, the strength of the puppets is not that high, which means the nest wouldn''t be that strongly equipped with the defensive measures.

    From what I see, the strength of the puppets is not that high, which means the nest wouldn''t be that strongly equipped with the defensive measures.

    If I were you, I will start the decoding process and go back to search for the nest."

    Joker''s words gave some hope of both the elders.

    This is not only a way to verify the authenticity of Joker''s words, but also a great opportunity to improve the strength of their respective academies.

    Both Gungnir and Bloody Chariot left after that discussion.

    Both of them were silent and didn''t exchange any information. Gungnir didn''t even bother asking anything from Zeus academy. Nopensation, no exnation, nothing. He picked up all the juniors and made his way to the Norse region.

    Bloody Chariot also silently cleaned up the whole mess and went back to holing up. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    The tensions between the Zeus academy and the Olympian families is increasing every day. He was still thinking of handling it a bit delicately. After all, he still needs the patronage of those families. But now, he decided that its time to be decisive.

    He pushed forward his decision to the rest of the elders.

    It is time to bring the resources back to the academy and stabilize it. Since the suspended elders holed up inside those families, he might as well shatter that defense and bring them back forcefully. Now, he has much better things to focus his time on, rather than these suspended idiots.

    Just like that, conflicts triggered between the academy and the families.

    For the first family, Bloody Chariot himself went, knocked down their gates and captured the elder. He killed a few of the elders of the family. Forcefully took over the assets from the suspended elder, even demanded thepensation from the other elders.

    The heat intensified.

    With Bloody Chariot''s encouragement, the other elders also didn''t hold back anymore. The conflicts also triggered in noble league, because some of them are being explicitly targeted. Christos who was busy with investigating Sam is already frustrated with the roadblocks that he hit, now he is having even more trouble because of them.

    Meanwhile, back at Norse realm, Gungnir immediately got into the work.

    His focus was on the Humanoid puppet that was won by one of their students. That student might have died, but he managed to get the ring back.

    After some trials, he failed to open that ring and in turn see that puppet. So, after some consideration he once again went back to the Hub. But this time, the Norse Branch.

    "What brings you back to me, so soon? It has barely been six hours."

    Joker asked with a smile.

    Gungnir didn''t say anything and just extended his hand.

    "How do we open this?"

    "That information is way too valuable. Way more valuable than the story that I told you before. Are you sure, you have something that you can exchange for?"

    Gungnir pursed his lips, but Joker knew he would buckle.

    ¡­

    An hourter. Gungnir went back to the Thor academy. Within a secret room, he picked up one of the students who was not exactly the best at thebat, but had great skill in using his weapons as well as skill in formations and inscriptions.

    It is a first grade student.

    He made the student drop a little of his blood on the ring and at the same time, Gungnir used the help of a soul necromancer to cut of a piece of the young man''s soul to attach it with the ring.

    As soon as he did that, the ring started glowing brightly.

    A bunch of runic patterns appeared on it.

    "ce your hand on it and think of all your basic knowledge. Combat, formations and inscriptions. Just think of them and let it enter your mind freely."

    Gungnir said and the student obliged.

    After some time, there is a projection that came out of the glowing ring. The projection showcased a test. The young man who was merged his blood with it, was able to modify the projection.

    And the tests began¡­

    Two hourster.

    "FUCK"

    The young man screamed while holding his head. It is hurting as if a thousand hammers are being rammed against his head. He didn''t want to deal with this. He wanted to give up desperately.

    Gungnir sent the kid away, but he didn''t let him interact with others. The kid was ced in solitude, while another kid with simr talents was called.

    But this one failed within thirty minutes. One in ten minutes, the next one in twenty minutes.

    As he watched these kids fail, one after the other, he couldn''t help but feel a bit frustrated. Particrly, when hepared his own situation with the Bloody Chariot. The other party''s luck is way too good. After all, Bloody Chariot has his own humanoid puppet and the bird puppet.

    One of them was even dismantled smoothly.

    He believed that Bloody Chariot is using the experience of dismantling the bird puppet to dismantle this humanoid puppet now.

    And his guess is not right, while he is trying to struggle with this, Bloody Chariot is going well with the dismantling process. And luckily he has multiple puppets. One that he captured during the fight, which is dead.

    The others that were won by the students. He is first trying to dismantle the one he acquired. Because based on Joker''s story, the one that he captured belongs to one of the four ns that is still there. He would like to know more about them, since they are the direct threat.

    The other thing can still wait a little bit.

    As long as he is faster than Gungnir, then the whole thing is fine.

    While things are like this, Christos who usually had knowledge of every piece of important information, doesn''t even know what is happening. He is still busy investigating Sam and after some time, he stumbled up on some interesting information which he previously ignored.

    The special admission of Sam.

    Of course, that was actually well known and no one can actually ignore it.

    Rather, he realized that there could be a connection between Sam and some other people who also came to Academy realm through special admissions as well. This made him think about the incident between Sam and Noah in the Norse region.

    He connected the dots there when he was investigating Sam''s rtionship with Ivar.

    Once he came across that, he started focusing more on the connection with Noah and Sam, then in turn Noah''s rtionship with Kumar which is very apparent for everyone to see.

    And then he noticed some coborations between this couple and three other students from the different academies.

    All of them had only one thing inmon.

    They are all special admission students, which he didn''t believe is a sheer coincidence. Then he also recalled Dayus who also came in as a special admission.

    Now that he got this lead, he immediately acted up on it. The first target is obviously Dayus, who is right under his nose.

    "What do you mean, you can''t say anything?" Christos asked as he looked at Dayus with a frown. He is very pissed off up on hearing that answer.

    What does he mean by being unable to share the information? That is an answer he is not willing to take.

    "It means exactly as I said. I cannot give out any info. I am not at a liberty to. If you want any details, you can try it with the other candidates that you mentioned. They can give you the detailed info. Or, you can go ahead and talk to the Dean.

    You won''t get anything from me."

    That is the answer he received.

    Christos was dejected, but he didn''t waste his time and went to Norse region.

 Chapter 2196 No Answers

    Chapter 2196 No Answers

    Donner is surprised.

    He looked at Christos who looked haggard. He literally looked like a Shut-in. His hair is disheveled, his eyes are read and he clearly didn''t look put together. His clothes are crumpled up and ragged.

    The only thing missing is the body odor and he would be a perfect Shut-in.

    "Why do you want to talk to me?"

    Donner asked in confusion.

    "I need to ask you about your special admission. I talked to Dayus and I am sure that he knew something. He basically confirmed that there is a connection between, him, you, Sam and other people who got in through this special admission.

    I need to know those details."

    Christos didn''t beat around the bush.

    He didn''t showcase his usual attitude to using trickery and polished words.

    He was straightforward and asked what he wanted. He is just mentally exhausted to think about using all kinds of trickery like this.

    He just babbled his query and awaited the answer.

    "I am Sorry, I don''t know what you are talking about." Donner answered tly. Christos frowned and asked.

    "Donner, don''t y these games with me. I know for sure that there is a connection. I am sure of it. I will find it sooner orter.

    If not for the fact that I am in a hurry, I wouldn''t have bothered toe to you like this.

    You better tell me what you know. It is beneficial for all of us. Or, you might regret it in the future."

    Christos'' tone was icy and sharp. He looked at Donner dead in the eyes waiting for him to speak. Donner chuckled slightly. He adjusted the hair falling over his forehead and matched Christos'' gaze.

    "Alright, there is a connection. But I am not going to tell. Do whatever you want."

    He just spoke and stood up to leave.

    Christos'' aura raged. He has been so busy in administration since he got into second grade, it seems like everyone started ignoring him. Even a first grader is wagging his tail at him. First Sam, then White, Dayus and now this.

    "Donner, you better behave. Just because I am being nice, do you really think you can show this kind of attitude to me?"

    Donner looked at Christos.

    Disdain apparent in his eyes, he looked at him from head to toe.

    "The arrogance of you to say those words¡­

    Christos. I have seen way too many people like you in my journey. And that connection that you are looking for¡­ you won''t be able to get the answer from any of the people involved, because they have seen people like you more than me.

    In a way, the challenges that we took up to reach the academy realm are by far much harsher and tougherpared to whatever that is happening in the academy realm.

    So, none of us are thinking about our survival here. Which means, we have a lot of other stuff to think about. Don''t act up and make us put that extra time on you.

    You wouldn''t even know what hit you."

    Donner turned around and was about to leave.

    He halted suddenly as he sensed the energy from Christos.

    "Don''t wait. If you want to make a move, they do it. But you must already know that the situation between Thor Academy and the Zeus Academy is bad. If my calctions are right, at the moment, less than one-third of your first graders are still active.

    The moment, you make a move, you will trigger a war and the next thing you knew the heads of these remaining first graders will explode in a million pieces.

    Try it if you dare.

    I don''t care how far the war will go on, but I am sure, before a truce has been implemented, I will be done with them."

    Donner threatened directly.

    His aura raged as well. Christos'' aura is definitely more powerful. But Donner''s aura is much more fierce and ruthless.

    Donner might have been overshadowed by the rest of the yers. But he is one of the few that survived. He has done a lot of things to reach this ce and there is no denying that he ispetent. Just like for other yers, even to Donner this ce is child''s y until now.

    They are still waiting for the actual tasks the gods imed they would give. That is why, the yers are still trying to keep a low profile. Of course, Sam is an exception.

    If the rest of the yers also actedout, there is no way, Christos would havee here and talked to him like that.

    Beyond no one''s expectations, Christos didn''t make a move. He could only swallow his pride and leave the ce. He didn''t lose hope though. He went to other realms and asked everyone. The answer however is one and the same.

    No one spoke about this. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    This frustrated him a lot. If not for the fact that the Zeus Academy is in a precarious situation, he would have taken much more forceful measures.

    While he swallowed failure after failure, Bloody Chariot finally seeded after a long time.

    "Sess¡­ Sesss."

    The voice of an old man reverberated through the secret room. He looked around in joy only to notice two other people who are in the simr mood to his. Apart from that, there is no one there.

    "We did it." Another one muttered in a low voice.

    In front of them there are a bunch of mechanical parts that they dismantled with great efforts. They didn''t even feel relieved when they actually made something. But now, they are more relieved because they managed to dismantle just one puppet.

    Among those parts, they found the rectangr crystal chip, which is the most importantponent.

    Bloody Chariot soon came and took that chip.

    Right now he has two. One of them is the chip that came from the bird puppet, Sam or rather Joker gave them to prove his ''innocence'' the second is the chip that they obtained now.

    Now, he needs to decode them.

 Chapter 2197 Decoding

    Chapter 2197 Decoding

    "You can''t do it?"

    Bloody Chariot looked at the people standing in front of him with a raised eyebrow. The two rectangr chips that are obviously of different styles but with numerous simrities are resting on his table.

    "Two days, two dozen experts and you consumed a shit load of resources. But, you can not do it? Is that what you are telling me?"

    The group nodded without saying anything. They looked dejected and depressed. After dismantling, Bloody Chariot isted the three experts that were involved in the process. They were kept in the secret room.

    He came out with the two rectangr crystal chips and made all the formation experts and inscription experts left behind in the academy. For the past two days they were intrigued, interested, amused and almost lost their goddamn minds as they tried to decode those chips.

    They almost brought themselves to their own despair.

    It is not easy after all.

    But the problem is no matter what they tried, they couldn''t understand or decode these chips. All they understood is that the formations are inscribed on a granr level in that chip. And one chip as hundreds ofyers, eachyer with its own formations inscribed. All of theseyers are connected.

    They could identify that much.

    But they couldn''t identify what kind of formations they are except for the few surfaceyers. Then, the rest of it is nk.

    The only way they could think of understand what is beneath it is by removing ityer byyer, which also means destroying it.

    However, Bloody Chariot has just one statement for their thoughts.

    "Unless, you can reconstruct the whole thing without a single w and make sure it works the, don''t even think about leaving a scratch. Otherwise, be prepared to have your bloodline exterminated. It has been a while since I went on myst genocide.

    I am honestly itching a bit. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    So, be my guest and try it."

    A very light threat, one could say. So, they are unable to do anything.

    "All the talk and all those honors behind your name. What they are good for? You can even retrieve some coordinates from these things. Waste of resources."

    Bloody Chariot muttered and took the chips away. He walked towards the hub.

    Fifteen minutester..

    "So, you want my help again. But are you sure, you can pay the price for it?"

    "Trust me, I don''t want. But I need this. So, as long as it is reasonable."

    Another streak of painstaking negotiationster¡­

    "Alright, for this¡­ I will just think of it as teaching another thing to the Zeus academy."

    Joker said and took a hold of one of the chips.

    "I understand that thispact chip is veryplex for you guys to decipher without destroying it. But sometimes, you don''t really have to deconstruct everything to understand it.

    You can take a different approach.

    First of all, you know what purpose this chip serves. This is the one that enables these puppets to find the location of the nest. So, there should be coordinates somewhere within it.

    And for it work properly, the puppets need to have those coordinates imprinted in their pseudo-minds.

    That means, when this chip is activated, the puppets are directed to those coordinates."

    He paused and ced the chip in the middle of table. There is a small formation inscribed on the table and it created a scaled projection of the chip in the air.

    "Now, the second thing you need to do, to understand how this chip can be activated. For that, you need to have some visual understanding and a few trial and error attempts to understand from where the energy goes in and from where the energyes out of this chip.

    That way, you will know that the chip is being activated.

    Of course, it would help if you actually have the parts that are connected to this chip, so that you can understand it even better."

    As he said, he started injecting the energy from a few directions, one after the other. All the energy input process and rejection process can be seen in that scaled projection.

    After a few attempts, the energy finally went through. The chip started glowing properly. Like how it glowed when it was still working in the puppet.

    "Now, you know that the chip is working.

    So, think about how this gives the information to the puppet. All you need to do is find, how this chip is connected to the core of puppet and analyze the part of the core that ''thinks and understands''. If you can''t even do that¡­ all you need to do is understand how this is transmitting the information to the core of the puppet.

    Then, use that understanding to transmit the information to a puppet core that you are familiar with. So, when the information was registered in the puppet core that you are familiar with, you can get that data out of that puppet spirit.

    It is that easy."

    Joker stopped the projection and gave the chip back to Bloody Chariot.

    "I will stop here. I can decode it, but I am sure, you would be more secure with me not actually knowing those coordinates.

    With the current hostile state between Zeus academy and Hub, I would rather not add another reason to sh.

    You can go back and follow the process that I mentioned to decode it yourself."

    Joker''s projection disappeared.

    Bloody Chariot held the chip and looked at the room. He keenly observed the walls for two minutes before he left.

    He gave the chips to the experts and told them exactly what Joker said. Then he called one of them who is known for the formations that are meant for energy control.

    "I need you to test something else for me."

    "What would that be, sir?"

    "I need you to create a formation. There should be a ce within it for energy storage. I should be able to manipte that energy to do anything in that formation. I should be outside the formationpletely and operate it remotely through the spirit."

    "It is not really thatplicated. Almost all kinds of formations can be made to be operated remotely."

    "Yes, but the issue lies in how delicately can you manipte that energy.

    The energy storage shouldn''t highlight itself. It should appear like the natural part of the environment. Also, the energy control should also be delicate. It should almost be like¡­ the energy should act like my arms and legs.

    I should be able to control it to do even the delicate of things. Like holding something gently, or moving it around, tossing a coin, threading a needle. Something like that. Can you do it?"

    The elder frowned.

    "Doesn''t that mean, you want me to create a zone in which you will have absolute control of everything?

    To make it happen, we should either condense the energy to act as a tangible and controble entity. Or you should be able to control thews within."

    "I don''t care what approach you take, try to make it happen as soon as possible. I want to see how this works."

    The elder went away.

    Everyone is busy with the new developments. Except for Christos.

    After repeated failures, he came back to the Olympian region. And a message from his family awaited him. Which frustrated him a lot. When he looked at the message, he was actually more anxious than frustrated.

    From the message, he learned that various forces hidden deep in the shadows are attacking chous family at the moment. The family is still unable to track down who these forces are and what their goal is.

    But the attacks are happening in various methods. Financial, physical, methodical. They are targeting in every way possible.

    chous family lost a bunch of their businesses, resource points and lost a few loyal people who hold a lot of information regarding their family.

    Christos was told to be careful, because the academy realm is the only ce where the chous family were not attacked.

    This new development is actually beneficial to Christos because, they are not going to pressure him for the time being. But that didn''t stop him from feeling a bit lost and anxious for the chous family situation.

    If attacks came from a source that even the chous family couldn''t track down¡­ this actually narrows down the forces by a lot and there are only a few that could actually do it.

    And if the forces are really part of that select few¡­ then things are actually a lot more troublesome.

    Everyone has something they need to worry about. Even Sam is worried as he looked at the young man from Viswakarma academy grappling with the bird puppet.

    "Do it fast."

    He muttered to himself and looked at holographic screen beside him. It contained the pictures and names of the people who were formerly just the students of the academy realm, but now the followers of the Faith of Agmon.

 Chapter 2198 Plans and Results

    Chapter 2198 ns and Results

    The propagation of the Agmon faith in the Olympian city has been going on for some time.

    Alton was very sneaky with the way he chose his targets. His primary focus was on the people that are not affiliated with any academy. They are the most desperate ones right now. Even if they managed to snag a mission or two and earned the weekly payment for the hub, they are being targeted by the academy forces.

    Since they don''t have any backing, they don''t have any protection from the city guards as well.

    Even the people that they were previously serving had turned their backs on them and left these people to survive on their own. This made them vulnerable and open to this new path. They were easily persuaded and no one actually missed them in the academy realm, when they went to the Church of Agmon.

    Alton even went as far as showcasing his payment status in the Hub''s interface.

    It clearly showed that his payment hasn''t been made for a couple of weeks already, but he was still alive and well. This made them have more faith in him and in turn they became followers of the faith of Agmon.

    Sam still doesn''t know what their ns are at the moment. But he is looking forward to see their actions.

    For now, they only seemed to want to recruit more people and there is certainly some brainwashing going on during the onboarding process.

    While Sam was observing the situation, he got messages from other yers one by one. There is a message from the couple, Noah and Kumar as well.

    Even though Sam didn''t keep in contact with them and kept a distance, he wasn''t openly hostile to them either. Their messages came one after another with not much time gap between them. All the messages talked about the same thing.

    Christos'' enquiry.

    They must have gathered to discuss this before deciding to send a message to Sam. The message contents were simr, but there is also different behind each.

    Donner was just warning him out of goodwill, saying that Christos seemed to be quite intent on digging the information out.

    Arkiv asked if Sam needed any help. Surprisingly, even Akhil offered help saying that he would be open if things really got serious. Noah and Kumar... well he could sense that they wanted to offer his help, but they are also aware of their awkward status.

    Before, Kumar asked Sam of something that he shouldn''t and Noah being his partner, stuck with him to the end.

    Sam is not particrly angry with either of them, but he did feel a bit of detachment with Kumar after this.

    After all, Sam has repeatedly helped them and even held back whenever ites to the yers. The least he expected from them is that they wouldn''t want him to forsake his personal grudge.

    Anyway, he is d that messages came. Even though he knew what happened because of his surveince.

    He also knew that he doesn''t have to do much when ites to Christos. He himself has a lot to deal with and he would just fall into a trap of his own set up.

    And just like Sam imagined, Christos is actively making moves towards that goal.

    The next day, he went to meet with a few elders of the Zeus Academy for a meeting.

    "I want you guys to do me a favor. I am asking this as not just the leader of the Students'' Noble league, but also as the young master of the chous family. I would exchange fairly for this favor."

    "What would that be, Young master chous?"

    One of the Elders addressed him as such. Since Christos is using that title, they might as well use it. They also don''t have to be reserved when ripping him off as part of that ''exchange''.

    "ording to the rules, in twelvebors, the Zeus academy will be thest one to give out the trial to Sam. I want you people to use your influence to move the trial forward and give our spot to the Poseidon academy"

    The Elders were surprised.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    Since Christos used his identity as the young master, they actually thought he might be asking for some huge favor. But to think that he will ask for something this simple.

    There is no need for him to make such arge statement of exchange like that.

    But they still agreed. They are only a bit disappointed by the fact that they couldn''t fleece him a bit. The request is just too small to get anything substantial. After ironing out a few details, Christos walked out.

    He is sure that the changes in the order of the Twelvebors would be done smoothly, without letting his name out. Luckily, the elders didn''t ask any questions. So, it is much more convenient this way.

    Later, Christos went to meet some elders from Poseidon academy in secret. No one, except for the elders involved and Christos knew about the meeting.

    "I need you guys to do me a favor. I am willing to exchange..."

    Christos did the exact same thing once again. Basically, the Zeus academy will take the Poseidon''s spot which is the eleventh trial. While the Poseidon Academy will take the twelfth trial. All this effort, so that Christos can execute a n he had in mind.

    A n that would allow him to capture Sam and then fish out all of his secrets.

    As for why, the Poseidon academy has to be the one that should help him... well, the Zeus academy is in control of Bloody Chariot and he doesn''t want Bloody Chariot to know about this situation. He cannot let him get involved in this.

    After he made the deal with the Poseidon academy, he went out of the Academy realm.

    He went to a certain realm out of Sam''s reach and surveince to discuss the next part of these ns. Christos didn''te back for two days.

    In these two days, Bloody Chariot closely monitored the work of the elders. Right now, there are three active tasks for them. One is to decode the crystal chip of the bird puppet, second one is to decode the chip of the humanoid puppet and the finally the third one is to create the formation he asked.

    By the end of the second day, only the third task waspleted, while the first two did have some significant progress.

    Bloody Chariot went to meet the Elder who in charge of the formation making. He made three formations.

    "Sir, these are the three variations that I could think of. One of them is a formation that is made to perform certain functions that are rted to energy control. Like charging, discharging, arming, etc."

    As he said, he guided Bloody Chariot to the first formation. It wasn''t exactly big, it was only as big as a basketball court.

    It is a small formation.

    The reservoir of the energy is quite visible as a smalleryered formation wasid down in the middle of it. The massive energy reservoir was not visible to the naked eye, but Bloody Chariot could easily sense it.

    He connected himself with the formation and tried to control it.

    He could feel all kinds of elements within the formation. There are some energy channels built into it to do certain tasks.

    For example, there are some phantom crossbows mounted at the edge of the formation. They could be armed by controlling the formation directly.

    There are also uses, there is an invisible system built to create an energy explosion of some sorts. All of this can be done remotely with a range of few hundred meters.

    "We can use this method to set up many more actions, sir. However, based on theplexity of the actions and the number, we might need to alter the energy storage capacity and the formation structure itself."

    Bloody Chariot checked the reservoir and frowned.

    "The energy consumption is way too high. It would take a mine or two to control it every day. The atmospheric energy is not enough to run this, is it?"

    "You are right, sir. This is not a viable option for long term. In my opinion, it could used as an emergency defense system or even a trap mechanism. It could only be used once and it has to be reset properly. It cannot be used as a continuous mechanism."

    "Okay. What is next?"

    They moved on the second formation.

    "This formation has much more freedom in your movement. Please try it."

    The formation indeed has much freedom. The elder even arranged the same case that Bloody Chariot mentioned as a test.

    A coin toss.

    However, Bloody Chariot is not really that impressed by this.

    The formation operated based on the spirit. Based on Bloody Chariot''smand, the spirit will manifest the energy from the reservoir to have physical presence. It tossed the coin like an actual human would.

 Chapter 2199 Developments

    Chapter 2199 Developments

    Once again, Bloody Chariot wasn''t impressed at all.

    This is the most direct method, but the energy consumption is a lot more than the first. The only saving grace is that the spirit allows a better recovery from the atmosphere. Bloody Chariot moved on to the final formation.

    This one is very simr to the first one. However, instead of prefixed actions, the controlled can make the energy do the actions in real time.

    He can think and the energy will act like a conscious entity and will make it happen.

    When Bloody Chariot tried to toss a coin. The energy inside condensed together to toss the coin into the air and the same energy dispersed a bit, slowed down the descent of the coin and finally made it levitate.

    The action is very simr to what Bloody Chariot has asked for.

    But¡­

    "Why the hell is the energy consumption so high? All I did was toss a coin. The energy wasn''t even used much to throw it in the air."

    "True sir. But we are still using the spirit as a medium for the formation to understand themands. And the spirit needs to consume a lot of mental energy to derive a solution that is suitable based on yourmands.

    Right now, you sent amand to toss a coin.

    The formation spirit processed the thoughts and tried to think of a solution on its own. It went ahead and used the small energy explosion to toss the coin and another one to make it stop and levitate.

    Even the energy consumed for the action itself is not that high, the problem lies in the mental energy of the spirit. Once it is dissipated, the spirit might extinguish itself, so the immense spiritual energy and Divine energy acts as a supplement to replenish it."

    Bloody Chariot nodded in understanding.

    Just when the elder felt relieved a bit, Bloody Chariot asked more questions.

    "So, if the spirit is taking this much energy to conjure the thoughts, can it at least consume less when it is doing the same action second time? After all, the difficult part of thinking up the solution is over.

    The execution shouldn''t be much of a problem right?" n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    The elder was stumped.

    "Well¡­"

    After twenty minutes, Bloody Chariot went back to the research area to see the results of the chip decoding. The deep frown indicated his dissatisfaction and even a slight anger towards the answers given by the elder.

    Simply put, the Elder wasn''t able to replicate the effect that Bloody Chariot wanted. The spirit cannot store too much information. It can only store the information when the formation is programmed to do something already, which is the first mode of formation the elder showed.

    Of course, they could improve this with the quality of spirits,yered formations to increase energy absorption and improvement on energy conservation, but Bloody Chariot is not exactly satisfied.

    Because what he saw in the hub¡­

    The whole time while Joker was demonstrating the decoding process of the chip, the projection of the scaled image, the movement of the chip¡­

    It is not that they are difficult to do.

    Bloody Chariot could do them as easily as he breathes. Anyone in Divine ne can do it, but the thing is Bloody Chariot didn''t sense any movement of energy, or to be precise, the energy movement is very subtle.

    And the worst part is, he couldn''t sense from where the energy is being controlled from.

    He is sure that Joker is not in the hub building. He is sure that the projection of Joker is being controlled far away from the hub. If that is true, then how is that person doing what they are doing in the hub?

    He has seen a dozen times at least and he got all kinds of descriptions from other students. Joker can actually control every single aspect of the formation remotely, without his physical presence directly there.

    And the remote control range is so high to the point that he can control them even when they are all ced in various cities of the academy realm.

    As for why he is suddenly obsessed with this situation?

    It is because, he suddenly had a thought. Even if he managed to find the link between Sam and the hub and then investigated deeper into it. What if¡­ what if Joker is not even in this realm. What if Joker doesn''t even exist.

    After all, they knew was a name a projection. There is a huge possibility that Joker doesn''t even exist at all.

    What if this whole manhunt will just be a waste of their time resources?

    This also opened a new branch of questions. What if that person who masked himself as a joker,es back in a different way? Since they don''t even know his real identity can they defend against his tricks?

    If the Joker is that powerful, what is his true goal?

    Can they even fight with him?

    These are all the questions that haunted his mind, as he looked more and more into Hub, Sam and the overall situation of the Olympian realm.

    However, these are the questions that he cannot answer now. Until then, all he could do is try to understand the Hub better and prepare.

    Two more days passed with the things almost in the same situation.

    However, only after Bloody Chariot received various messages from other academies and some outside forces did he understand that the outside world is actually burning.

    The chous family''s situation which was abrupt to begin with had some developments. At the risk of losing some important resource points of their family, the n went ahead andid down a trap to catch a few of the perpetrators.

    After expending tedious effort, they did manage to capture someone and interrogate them.

    However, the results only made them be more wary of their situation.

    The people turned out to be part of another Noble league family and that too a family of equal stature as the chous.

    The chous family members grew so angry by this sudden and abrupt assault that they killed the two captives in a fit of anger.At first, they wanted to use these people as some bargaining chips. That is also the reason, they didn''t just use some soul search or other disruptive method to interrogate them.

    But after hearing part of the story from them, they couldn''t control themselves.

    They realized, they are not just being targeted by one family from the Noble league, but from around nine families. Out of which three of them can directly contend with chous, while the remaining six are slightly inferior.

    That is not even the worst part of the story.

    They only managed to identify one family.The two captives don''t know who the remaining eight families are.

    They are cooperating, but only people who are handling the talks and deals between the families know who they are cooperating with.

    In fact, even the family heads who are directly involved in this coboration, don''t know all the nine families that are involved. Each party only knew three to four of the nine.

    So, it is no wonder that these small fries that got caught would not know any answers. However, the chous didn''t expect that there would be such a tight knit being cast at them.

    To think that they would even keep each other in the dark just to deal with them. They knew that they couldn''t handle them that easily.

    This news obviously reached all the important people of the chous family, which included Christos. Despite his current demoted state, he is one of the promising members of the chous that contributed a lot.

    People might try to take him down for political reasons, but they wouldn''t object to using his brain in times of crisis.

    When Christos received the news, he felt his heart beat rapidly in anxiety. Because, the family that they found out was one of the families that was involved in Sam''s trap. Just like Thssa family, this one also sent a bunch of people to kill Sam in Pseudo-hell realm.

    Christos didn''t know if he was just seeing things because of how deep he was in with investigating Sam. But his gut feeling told him that all of this is rted.

    While he is brewing that anxiety, Bloody Chariot also received the news and this made him feel another wave of headache. He heard more bad news in the past few weeks that he had in decades that he spent on battlefield.

    However, there is just one silver lining to all of this.

    That is, the elders managed to decode one of the chips. The bird puppet chip was obviously lessplex was broken and they managed to find the coordinates of the nest location.

    Bloody Chariot decided that he would go to this expedition alone. Only after witnessing what is happening there, would be return and gather what is needed to perform a proper exploration there.

 Chapter 2200 Interesting Approach

    Chapter 2200 Interesting Approach

    Bloody Chariot tried to narrow down and find out where this nest location is.

    However, none of the known locations that are connected to the Academy realm are near this ce. So, he could only take a different approach. A costly one at that.

    "I need you guys to build a space gate. An interdimensional transference token connected to that ce. I will go to that ce ande back here. After getting an initial idea, I will take a team of you people to build another space gate there."

    That was what he said in a meeting with the elders of the formation department.

    The elders all looked at the coordinates of the ce and then at some of the instructions written below. It was just a single piece of document. But they felt like they are carrying a million ton weight in their hands.

    "Sir, the situation is not really good at the moment. Just from basic calctions, we can see that the location of these coordinates is way too far away from here.

    Even if we are optimistic about our travel means, it will take almost twenty days to go there through wormholes. That too assuming that there are connection realms ands with wormholes leading up to there.

    To create a space gate of such arge distance¡­

    If we knew a few details about that ce like the atmospheric conditions and the presence of spiritual energy in that environment, we might be able to reduce the energy consumption and resources needed. But right now, we will have to put a strain on our academy funds.

    Please rethink this decision.

    After all, our Academy tournament is about to start in a couple of weeks. We need to make sure that the needs of the kids are met."

    Bloody Chariot was stumped and indeed fell into a deep contemtion.

    He is in a hurry to explore that ce. But it was purely because he wanted to find a way to secure some benefits to cover up the losses of the Zeus academy.

    After all, it wouldn''t be toote before other academies get a hold of this information and they would startpeting.

    Right now, Zeus academy is in a vulnerable state. If the other academies find a way to trigger some conflict with Zeus academy, it will spell the end to them. So, Bloody Chariot is not interested in that conflict infested expedition.

    He would rather take advantage of the information that he got before the other academies even became aware of this.

    But the expenditure.

    He decided to think it over a couple of days. After all, the threat from these unknown lineages is not exactly urgent at this point. He easily fended off the previous wave and the only ident happened because of an idiotic senior from the Thor academy.

    Just when he was trying topromise, a piece of news entered his ears. The Thor Academy is nning an expedition to their Third Grade Students ahead of the Inter Academy tournament. This expedition is also ast sprint before thepetition begins.

    This news was like a thunderp to him.

    A part of him told him that Gungnir definitely cracked this. But he also didn''t want to ept that he lost the race. So, he wanted to confirm.

    The only way to confirm that¡­. is of course going back to Hub.

    "When did Gungnir ask you about decoding this?"

    He asked Joker immediately.

    "Why are you asking? By any chance did he crack the code before you did?"

    Bloody Chariot''s expression changed a bit. He didn''t answer, but that face said all he needed to say.

    "He asked before you. In fact, he even asked my help for dismantling the puppet."

    "What did you do then?"

    "What else? I cut a deal with him and helped him out."

    "So, is it entirely possible for him to crack the chip before us?"

    "Possible? I believe that he will do it. Otherwise, it would be a waste of the deal he made with me. He didn''t pay a small price."

    "Fuck" n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    The man who was so calm and cold as an ice ran back after cursing in front of Joker''s projection. Sam almostughed out loud as he watched Bloody Chariot run out of the Hub.

    "We are making that space gate formation. Don''t say anything to me. If you want resources, then I will go get you some. Just tell me, what you need. You have three hours, before you can give me that list."

    He demanded the elders once again.

    The Elders were dumbfounded. They didn''t expect that Bloody Chariot wille back with such a decisive order. After all, from the previous meeting, they believed that Bloody Chariot would think this through andpromise.

    But now, he came back yelling and even imed that he would bring the materials they wanted.

    They wondered why. But they could only swallow their questions and move on. They got ready to prepare the list to build that space. Within two and a half hours the list is ready and was presented in front of Bloody Chariot.

    "You guys get started with whatever that we can spare from the academy''s resources. I will be dropping off these things soon."

    He immediately made a move and his first destination was Arita Family. One of the ten families that sent people to attack Sam. One of the families that sheltered one of the Dismissed elders. One of the families that is in conflict with the chous family right now.

    Sam is already delighted when he learned that the n he made worked and the chous family started facing heat from the nine families. He was still wondering if he should already take the big guns out since he doesn''t have any means to increase the conflict bit by bit.

    But Bloody Chariot with one impulsive decision made it very easy for Sam.

    He directly barged into the Arita Family and demanded that they hand over the elder that they are sheltering. When they refused and tried to y word games with him, he beat the shit out of a couple of elders.

    This caused a fight between the head of the family and Bloody Chariot.

    Bloody Chariot won a victory so overwhelming that everyone felt like they were conned by the Arita family before. They could swallow the fact that the Arita family is one of the powerhouses that serve directly under the Zeus.

    When the Zeus academy representative itself came and attacked them, even kidnapped someone that was in their custody and protection all the while even looting them of a bunch of stuff, they were pissed.

    They immediately recalled their kin from the Zeus Academy. The other academy students were left there and only the Zeus academy students were brought back. Even though Bloody Chariot felt pained for the loss of the students, he couldn''t give two shits about it.

    The reason he went and picked that elder is because, that elder is one of the few people in charge of high level space gates of the academy. He used to maintain and repair the space gates and the main crime hemitted frequently in the Zeus Academy is embezzling the resources needed to build the space gates.

    He didn''t even sell them or something, he just wanted those resources for his experiments and did as he wanted.

    Now, Bloody Chariot beat that elder into a bloody pulp and got a hold of the whole stash that belonged to the elder. That was actually more than thirty percent of the resources required for the space gate.

    The academy can spare another thirty. So, only forty more and he could get the resources he needed for the formation. Lucky for him, there are more families that he could piss off.

    Sam was delighted when he saw this and even wanted to tear up the contract he made with Gungnir. After all, even with that leverage, just making Bloody Chariot do something like this is awesome.

    And to Sam''s further delight, Bloody Chariot used this opportunity and started collecting the debts that they owed him¡­ i.e the Zeus academy and started recovering their treasury. Even though, the actual people who should be filling that treasury were very confused by Bloody Chariot''s methods, they still let me be.

    All of this is only adding fuel of the fire.

    Sam didn''t even have to lift a finger and everything went smoothly.

    Bloody Chariot soon came back after offending everyone. That very night, the formation has already been moved up to the next phase.

    Bloody Chariot couldn''t wait to use it and go to that ce. Maybe that was the most anticipating anyone has ever been about some Space gate formation.

    He just hoped that it would be open and up to use as soon as possible.

    And his hopes came true, the next day around noon, the formation was sessfullypleted and it is time to go for him and get what he desired the most at the moment.

 Chapter 2201 Solo Expedition

    Chapter 2201 Solo Expedition

    Bloody Chariot used the formation.

    The transfer was smooth. The Zeus academy elders didn''t skimp on anything. Particrly, when Bloody Chariot himself brought the resources.

    The transfer didn''t even take much time.

    It was just a few minutes. But to Bloody Chariot, it felt like an hour. He was excited.

    After all, he has been through a lot.

    He lived for a couple of centuries. Fought in many wars. Faced many people. Encountered many civilizations and even ended a few by himself. This is the first time in a long time that he hase across a new civilization.

    One that is way too advanced than his own in many fields.

    When he finally saw the light and the suction force disappeared around him, what greeted Bloody Chariot was infinite brightness at the first nce. He couldn''t see anything. He felt like he was standing the light of a million stars all focused on him.

    After a fleeting second, the brightness cleared out a bit and he saw what was in front of him.

    That sight made his jaw drop.

    Even with all the experience he never saw something like this. As for what is it... its crystals. In front of him, as far as he could see white ss like crystals could be seen. He couldn''t see anything else. Not a single rock, a nt or anything else for that matter, could be seen.

    The air was flowing. It was stagnant.

    If not for his breathing, he wouldn''t have noticed the air as well. The crystals are all sharp edged all of them justy there. Their appearance reminded him of some nts that grow mostly in deserts. Multiple long crystals are originating from a single point, giving them a bush like appearance.

    However, these crystal bushes are at least three feet tall. That is the smallest one he has seen as he walked around in awe.

    The biggest he has seen is over ten feet tall.

    The white crystals looked ethereal. He couldn''t even describe thatbination of crystalline sheen and the white color. It was just weird and beautiful. But that was not the thing that made him curious and intrigued.

    Rather, it was the energy that was being emanated by these crystals.

    It is indeed spiritual energy, but it is weird.

    He believed the presence of the energy might elemental in nature. He could even sense faint traces of metal and earth, but there is some weird sense that he couldn''t put his finger on.

    But it attracted him a bit.

    He wanted to see what it is and touched one of the crystal bushes nearby. He tried to apply some force and break it a bit. At first, he was surprised. Even though he didn''t even use one percent of his strength, it should have been enough to destroy most metals at their natural state.

    Unless they are reinforced by Divine energy, it would be hard defend against his base strength. He is just way too strong. But he felt like that one percent strength was not enough to break it. The crystal didn''t budge.

    He gradually increased his strength and finally some cracks showed up. It is strong. Stronger than he imagined.

    Then another surprise awaited him as he broke the crystal apart. A metallic glistening liquid bled out of the stump where the crystal was broken. The liquid was thick, metallic and once again white. This time, Bloody Chariot managed to sense the earth and metal elements very clearly.

    He touched the liquid curious and he felt a slight burning sensation on his finger.

    It wasn''t exactly a burning sensation caused by the fire or heat. Or it is because of the reaction between his own spiritual energy and the weird energy emanated by that liquid.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    That foreign energy is trying to seep into his body while his own energy is trying to fight it out. And the result... the burning sensation he was feeling. Out of his curiosity, he decided to control and suppress his own spiritual energy to see what is going to happen.

    The next moment, he felt like his blood was being burned by some ethereal me. That pain is bearable for him, but Bloody Chariot is sure that the people with weaker strength wouldn''t be able to bear this. Particrly, first graders and some early second graders.

    As for Astral ne cultivators, he believed their arms will die out immediately.

    Because, the liquid is prating into his skin and is directly making contact with his blood. As if a chemical react his happening, his blood started boiling immediately and that boiling sensation is spread wider.

    He injected his spiritual energy, made a small hole and bled out a bit. The blood along with the foreign liquid came out of it.

    He took a look at the crystal piece in his hands, it is still dripping with that liquid.

    He ced the piece in his storage, before he moved forward with his task. He explored the area by walking slowly. But no matter how far he walked, he couldn''t see anything else other than the crystals.

    After around half an hour, he finally saw something that made him feel delighted. In front of him is arge bunch of crystal bushes. These bushes are each fifteen to twenty feet long. Each bush opened up like a crown and in the middle of each bush, was an egg shaped energy container.

    He could sense that the container was purely made of the energy.

    There are dozens of bushes like this. The container on each bush is translucent and inside, he could see something. The image was not clear, but he could have sworn that it is a type of bird puppet.

    Bloody Chariot excitedly moved forward, however the next moment he sensed some resistance and instinctually stepped backward.

    A translucent screen greeted his eyes. A dome that looked like an onionyer, is in front of him. It covered the whole bunch of crystal bushes and the energy eggs that are locked in. Bloody Chariot walked closer to the barrier and it started vibrating. He frowned at this behavior of the formation.

    The closer he got, the more it is vibrating.

    The moment he is about to touch the barrier, it gave out a loud vibrating noise. A few images shed past his eyes. The image of him touching the formation, the image of it vibrating like no other object in existence. The image of the vibrating energy particles slowly turning the translucent barrier turning into a bright curtain of light.

    And finally, everything inside the formation and the formation itself destroying and turning into nothing.

    Bloody Chariot felt his head go numb as he stepped back. The vibration lessened.

    "Why would some set such a weird trap?"

    He muttered to himself. He is not ann expert in the formatioins or inscriptions. Better leave it to the pros.

    He turned around the formation and continued the exploration. He came across a few more domes like the first one. But every formation gave off the same vibe and same vision. Bloody Chariot is excited but also a bit anxious.

    After all, he cannot test anything before his teames here.

    The ones that he could at least check, something in environment, etc.

    But the whole environment is nothing but crystals.

    After some relentless just before when he decided to go back, but at that moment, he came across something that piqued his interest once again. However this time, the dome is not translucent. It ispletely bright and opaque.

    He couldn''t see what is inside and he is sure that the moment he tried anything, the formation might copse. So, he decided to back off a bit and decisively took the token to crush it and go back.

    The moment he returned back, the elders that participated in decoding the crystal chip are all awaiting his return. Even though most of them initially worked without even knowing what they are working for.

    He immediately called for a meeting.

    After all the elders that he called gathered in the room, the meeting started.

    "As most of you are aware, we managed to decode one of the crystal chips in these puppets. I believed it would just be a waste of time. But on the hindsight it is a great decision for me."

    He then paused and showed the images of the crystals.

 Chapter 2202 Bringing the Team

    Chapter 2202 Bringing the Team

    The images were recorded by him before he came back.

    Bloody Chariot didn''t take out the piece of the crystal and the liquid he collected immediately. He just wanted to see if any of the elders here have any knowledge about this. He just wanted to test them a bit.

    However, apart from surprise and curiosity, nothing could be seen in their faces.

    "It seems like you cannot rte this to anything that you already know of."

    "No sir, even though we havee across several crystalline minerals before, this one appears different. Just from a nce through the screen, I feel like this is different from the rest."

    "How so? They look exactly like the regr crystals. Why do you think so?" Bloody Chariot asked as he looked at the elder that spoke. It is one of the youngest elders that was involved in the project. He is an expert artisan and he is now part of the team that dismantled the humanoid puppet.

    Even though the senior elders didn''t let him handle it directly because of their credit hogging Olympian mindset, his ideas were still applied.

    "Can you zoom it a bit?" The young man asked.

    He stepped forward from his seat and looked at the screen intently.

    "Just as I thought." He muttered and looked at Bloody Chariot.

    "The crystal''s structure is most likely different from regr crystalline structures. If you observe it closely, you can see that the grain structure is different. Just from the granr pattern on its surface, I can say that the internal of this crystal might not bepletely solid.

    Maybe it is semi-solid?

    Or it might even be apound material. The white structure could be the outer part and there might be a different internal part?

    These are just my guesses, but I feel like there is a huge possibility of it being true."

    The young man spoke and his frown deepened.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "You can assume all of that just from the surface? I don''t see anything wrong with its patterns though. I don''t even see any patterns at all. It is smooth like any other crystal structure."

    One of the older elders said it directly.

    The young man looked at him and said.

    "True, we cannot observe it directly on the surface of the crystal. But if you take a closer look at the image, you can see a small spot on the ground where the crystal is projecting some bright light.

    That patch of the surface is also very smooth. The light patch is showing off the crystalline structure a bit. Even if the patterns are minute for us to see from here or even based on touch, if it is really insignificant, it wouldn''t be visible to us."

    Bloody Chariot closed his eyes and let his conscious go into the Storage he had. He is observing the surface of the crystal.

    The exnation of the young man almost sounded like nonsense, without any logic.

    Bloody Chariot just believed one thing. In their world, it makes sense. That must be it.

    The discussion began and the elders participated one by one. After some time, Bloody Chariot suddenly stopped the discussion.

    "Elder Yavin, Elder Grajo and Elder Mavi.

    You three stay here. The rest of you can leave."

    Elder Yavin is the younger elder who spoke first. Elder Grajo is one of the senior elders who is the deputy in-charge of the artisan department. Elder Mavi is an energy and formation expert, the onlydy that stayed behind.

    After discussion, Bloody Chariotpared their thoughts with the material he had in the storage and believed these three are the best candidates to analyze this ce further. Then he took out the crystal and the liquid that was collected out.

    Even though the crystal was in the spatial storage where this material should have been in a suspended state, it still dripped.

    Bloody Chariot has to condense his energy around the liquid like a bubble made out of energy to bring it out. The crystal piecended on the table and he told the three.

    "This is the piece of the crystal that I brought from there. When I broke a crystal, that crystal bush started bleeding this liquid. It is alsoing from the broken piece.

    In terms of luster and appearance, the crystal didn''t actually change. But it dripped out this liquid for hours now.

    Analyze both of these things.

    You have three hours. If you provide me with results, I will consider bringing you guys there along with me, when we go with the formation team that will build the spatial formation.

    However, I need some deeper analysis on the nature of that energy. We need to make sure that the spatial formation created there will stably stay there."

    With that, Bloody Chariot left the room.

    The three elders were excited beyond belief. They couldn''t hold themselves back and started studying the materials.

    In that excitement the three hours went past like three minutes.

    They didn''t have enough. Their research brains were tickled to the extreme and they are now very much troubled to even let this go.

    They did get some answers and some basic understanding.

    "Sir, this crystal. It is hard to believe that it is natural. But the way it was shown in that image, it could only be natural to grow like that.

    The granr patterns on it surface did indicate that it is their natural growth. It propagated like how a metallic ore. I have seen this behavior in some ores that have very high metal elemental energy. They just protrude out of earth like this.

    But the crystalline appearance and the structure on the other hand... it doesn''t appear normal either.

    The molecr structure is not the same as regr crystals. It is notpact enough. It rather feels like some crude, hard rock type structure.

    Crystal structures tend of be symmetrical and uniform. But the molecules of this crystal is anything but uniform. There is not a single sign of symmetry. This is weird."

    Yavin spoke until he is almost out of breath.

    Bloody Chariot can feel his enthusiasm.

    The older man Grajo also shared the same views as Yavin. Meanwhile Mavi''s major focus was on the liquid that dripped from the crystal.

    "This liquid is highly reactive and the energy is definitely elemental. However, I couldn''t identify which element it is. That is very very weird.

    I have studied various variant energies. Like the death and shadow energy of the element, the sand energy and even the crystal energy of the earth element, etc.

    However, I have nevere across this. This energy is far from the crystal energy that I understood. But this is very reactive. Its nature is aggressive like that of fire or lightning, but at the same time,

    that aggression has some weird stability, like that of earth element or more precisely the stone element which is a variant of earth element.

    However, it is very reactive and counter regr elements. Particrly, water element. It has high resistance against it. Also, regr spiritual energy shows instant results as it doesn''t have that extra elemental benefit to resist the attack of this.

    The best part is, the liquid doesn''t seem to be pure energy substance. It is actually a physical substance, which we can use for making something. Maybe not directly, but it can be used for alloys and such.

    The sample size is very small for me to examine it further." Bloody Chariot nodded and smiled.

    The three people reached his expectations and he decided to take them. He called the team in charge of the space gates so that they will prepare the experts to go to that again. Since they don''t exactly know the name of that ce, they decided to called it as Crystal nest for now.

    After some preparations, Bloody Chariot moved with thirteen people in tow.

    The three elders and the rest are the team responsible for building the space gate.

    When they arrived at the ce, the whole team was stunned by the sight. Even the three elders were no exception. Even though they saw the crystal and the liquid along with various images of this area, they are still shocked when they saw it in person.

    "You guys examine, while the formation team finds a proper spot to begin setting up the formation. Meanwhile, I will look around on my own."

    Bloody Chariot watched as everyone dispersed. Then he thought of something and looked at the team leader of the formation team. That man is another deputy of the formation department. A space element user and aplete expert in formations.

    Bloody Chariot went to him and said.

    "I need you to give your opinion on something. Come with me.

    The Elder was surprised, but he went along anyway.

    Soon, both of them are in front of one of the domes.

    They are a safe distance away. Bloody Chariot prompted the elder to test the weird behavior of the formation.

 Chapter 2203 Another break

    Chapter 2203 Another break

    Twenty minutester.

    The deputy of the formation department and Bloody Chariot stood at a spot as they observed the formation. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Because of their current position, the formation is barely reacting. It is neither vibrating heavily, nor is it stable and stagnant. It is right in the middle. The formation master has checked the formation several times, but he wasn''t able to touch it until now.

    He was sure that if he really tried it, the formation will copse and explode along with everything that is inside.

    So, he stayed at this position which he would like to call as the Reaction Threshold Point and studied the formation. Even though he couldn''t get too much information from that point, he understood the formations purpose and its basic working.

    "Sir, this is actually a security measure."

    "Exploding a formation is a security measure?"

    "Yes, sir. Whoeverid down this formation, they were pretty adamant about the details of this formation not leaking out, at least the people of certain cultivation level cannot ess it.

    Only people of certain cultivation level and below can enter this formation. If anyone else does try to break it, or even decode it, the formation will trigger the self-destruction. In fact, they put in so many conditions to trigger its self-destruction that it is almost impossible to break past it.

    Only people of certain cultivation level and below can enter this formation. If anyone else does try to break it, or even decode it, the formation will trigger the self-destruction. In fact, they put in so many conditions to trigger its self-destruction that it is almost impossible to break past it.

    Like, if you attack it, it will explode. If you try to touch it, it will explode. If there are too many people of higher cultivation level around it, it will explode. If some body tries to tinker with it from afar, it will explode.

    If the energy supply is messed with, it will explode.

    If it cannot determine the cultivation level of the person, it will explode. In my opinion, it is not even worth it to try and breach this formation. We might as well y by the rules if you really want to check out what is actually inside."

    "Are you sure, there is no other way?"

    "I am sure, sir. Any attempts might just lead for sudden explosion. It is better to just to y along the rules of the game they set."

    "So, what is the cultivation threshold?"

    "From my tests, I can assume that people in Grade 1 and Grade 2 can enter this ce. My personal opinion is to let the Grade 2 students take a shot at it. Grade 3 might be too much, but we can bring one and test it out."

    Bloody Chariot nodded and sent him to do his work.

    He went into a deep thought and started thinking about the announcement made by Gungnir and the Thor academy.

    The special expedition was for the students of third grade. But this elder said that this is only for the second grade. He wondered if they made the mistake or if the Thor academy made the mistake.

    Still, he decided that it is better to just test the theory and see what happens.

    He waited until the formation team set up the space gate. Once it was done, he went back, while leaving the researchers behind. He brought the formation team away along with him.

    The researchers were given clear instructions that they shouldn''t go near the domes no matter how tempting they might look. They are only in charge of studying the crystals and the liquid thates out of it.

    Bloody Chariot went back to the academy and he started looking through the profiles of everyone. When he asked the elders topile the list of the best students, he was surprised to see that the list is filled with people from Noble league.

    And most of them are actually undergoing the twelvebors, courtesy of the cases filed by Icarus.

    At first, he thought that the elders were still trying to curry favor the Noble league members, but after some time and his own research on all kinds of results from previouspetitions, he learned that the noble league students of the second grade are indeed the best among their peers.

    When they were in the first grade, Christos took the lead of the batch and led them upwards. Even though he is barely at the middle stage of the Divine ne initiation, making his strength to be at the bottom of the barrel, he managed to influence thete and peak stage students as well.

    Under his leadership they did improve leaps and bounds.

    Particrly, when he saw their results after their training through the Hub, he felt even more impressed.

    One thing is sure, whatever were the reasons behind establishing the hub, it never really skimped on actually training these people. It did help them improve and results were in to see.

    Even though he was reluctant, he couldn''t do much. It is only right and fair to bring the people that are actuallypetent.

    However, he didn''t want to take them immediately. He wanted to get some more information on those crystals. They are weird and he needs to see if the energy on that and those crystals will have any adverse effects on the students.

    Even if it is a treasure trove, if it is harmful, he has to take measures.

    He believed that Gungnir also took the decision to stay behind because of this only.

    While he was waiting for the results, the team that was left behind to decode the remaining chip, gave him the good news.

    Since the first one is a sess, the second one didn''t take too long, even though they are different, the principle behind the making was simr. So, they managed to crack it sooner than they initially believed.

    Bloody Chariot immediately called for the space gate formation team to construct another formation for this ce.

    Based on the coordinates, this ce is also far away from their ce and also quite some distance away from the first nest they found.

    Within a few hours, the space gate was constructed.

    He travelled without hesitation. He was actually expecting a simr scene as he did in the first one. A massive crystal, but to his surprise, when he arrived, he saw apletely different scene.

    It ispletely¡­ normal?

    It appeared extremely normal to a regr. He appeared in the middle of a forest and he couldn''t see anything else other than the trees. The only weird thing about the ce is that the energy of the is very less.

    With that level of spiritual energy, he believed it could only product people of Astral ne level. It would be near impossible to grow past that level in that.

    He believed that if he forcefully cultivated there for a couple of years, the will be deprived of a lot of its vitality and spiritual energy to the point the ecosystem would be inplete shambles.

    This intrigued him.

    Why would there be such a stark difference between the first and this one?

    He started exploring the surroundings with those thoughts and soon enough, he saw a simr scene as in the first one.

    In front of him, was a formation dome with a translucent barrier. Inside the dome were a bunch of egg shaped energy containers that housed puppets of various kinds.

    The most in number are the bird puppets, followed by the humanoid puppets that he has seen in Olympian realm. They are the same model as the one that was sent to deal with the Thor Academy kids.

    He had sudden revtion.

    The bird puppet that was given to him by Joker must have belonged to the fifth lineage that discovered the new method to fuse minerals and mines together. That exins the weird crystal in that.

    After all, he hasn''t see any humanoid puppets there. At least not for now, with his partial exploration of the ce.

    As for this, this could be the nest for one of the remaining four lineages. This nest''s goal is to find the remnants of the fifth civilization and finding it, while the nest of the fifth lineage''s goal is to spread their legacy.

    He still didn''t know how they are nning to do that, but it must have something to do with the threshold of cultivation.

    When Bloody Chariot moved closer to the formation dome here, it started vibrating as well. He got the same image in his head.

    This one will also explode if touched up on. The self-destruct mechanism is very simr.

    He has to bring the formation master to examine this. Until now, apart from these domes, he didn''t find anything weird about this ce. Maybe theck of any beasts could be a weird sign, but in his opinion, it is pretty normal for a set up like that to have no beasts. He just credited it to the lineage to clear the ce up.

    He went back using the token and brought the space gate team along with him to build the space gate on this as well.

    There is nothing much to examine here, except for the formation dome''s threshold.

    After examination, it was determined that the threshold of this formation is indeed different from the first they visited. ording to the formation master, the people with cultivation level of the third grade are much more suitable for this ce.

 Chapter 2204 Plans and Plots

    Chapter 2204 ns and Plots

    Bloody Chariot concluded and he is sure that he is right about it.

    Gungnir had a humanoid puppet at his hands and he announced an expedition for the Third grade students. Now the that he discovered from the humanoid puppet also had simr threshold. The bird puppet however only has the threshold suitable for the second grade.

    However there is one thing that made him a bit more curious.

    The existence of the crystals...

    Based on the information provided by Joker.

    The fifth lineage, which he decided to name as the Outcasts managed to invent a method to two fuse different minerals. The white crystals and their weird properties could be attributed to that. And the humanoid puppet used by Gungnir also belonged to the Outcasts.

    Joker said that the Outcasts are mostly eliminated and are trying to spread their legacy which is the reason or the appearance of humanoid puppets in the revitalized pocket dimensions.

    That means, the nest that was discovered by Gungnir from one of those puppets should belong to the Outcasts. He wondered what kind of minerals are there on that. What if those minerals are more valuable than he imagined?

    Can he let the Thor Academy take advantage of it?

    After all, the puppets were supposed to belong to the Olympian region. The revitalized pocket dimensions appeared in his region for a reason. If not for the chaos and attraction, the other academies wouldn''t have even discovered these puppets'' existence.

    As he thought up to this point, he couldn''t help but feel a bit anxious.

    He cannot let the Thor academy have all the benefits of that.

    While Bloody Chariot was thinking like this...

    Gungnir who is in the Thor academy preparing for the expedition looked at a letter that he just received from one of the members of the Zeus academy.

    Bloody Chariot is obviously more secretive than Gungnir about this. However, that doesn''t mean no information would leak out. Even though Bloody Chariot made sure that no one knows where he built the space gates for, and acted all normal about building them... he didn''t take care of one thing.

    He didn''t make the space gates themselves secretive enough.

    Or maybe, he believed that he could hide them in in sight and constructed those space gates within the area where Zeus academy built all of their space gates. In fact, he actually masked the whole construction process by iming that the space gate team is performing a maintenance.

    But Gungnir managed to bribe some low level watchman in that space gate region.

    All he wanted to do know was the number of space gates that were present there, every single day.

    Right now, two new space gates emerged and the news reached Gungnir. It doesn''t need a genius to figure out what these two new space gates signified. Just like Bloody Chariot, Gungnir is also significantly curious.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    He knew for a fact that Bloody Chariot has ess to two different nests. He wanted to know what is on the nest discovered through the Bird puppet.

    He wants to know what''s up there.

    He doesn''t want to let the Zeus academy have all the benefits. Particrly, when the Zeus academy is getting twice or even thrice the opportunitypared to the Thor academy.

    Even though Both Gungnir and Bloody Chariot are not in contact with each other, their thought process ended up in simr direction because of their own selfish motives.

    And this made them contact each other.

    So, within two hours.

    Gungnir and Bloody Chariot are meeting in the Zeus Academy.

    Both of them are silent. Because both of them initiated this meeting almost at the same time, so they can guess what the other party is thinking. They believed that once they spoke, they would lose the upper hand in this negotiation.

    The silence persisted for a long time until Gungnir finally gave in.

    After all, Zeus academy does have the upperhand here. They have two nests, while he only has one.

    "I am sure, you know why I am here, so let''s cut to the chase.

    I would allow three of your Third grade students into my nest while you allow three of my students into the nest that you discovered through the bird puppet."

    "It seems like you are well informed."

    Bloody Chariot spoke instead of answering.

    "Don''t be like that. You and I both know that it is impossible topletely hide things. It is only matter of time if we look in the right ces.

    So, let''s just talk about the deal. What do you think?"

    After some discussions, they finally agreed on it.

    The discussions are about what their students might obtain in the others''s. After finding a middle-ground in that, they epted.

    The expedition will happen at the same time, to ensure that there is no foul y. However, Bloody Chariot refused to publicize the matter like Gungnir did. He is adamant about keeping it under the wraps to the best of his ability so that no one cany im on these benefits.

    While things are like this in the academy realm. The chous family is having a hard time. The hidden attacks are getting fiercer and fiercer. Particrly, with Bloody Chariot''s recent attacks, the families are not showing any decorum anymore.

    At least previous, they still hesitated against using fatal attacks on the resource points of the chous family, because they didn''t want to waste those precious resources.

    However, it changed. Now, they just want to destroy the chous family... root and stem.

    They are not going to let them off. But they are still doing it at a moderate pace. That is the only saving grace to the chous as they tried to fight back a bit as well as n some backup.

    They need to find information to see what the grudge actually is, so that they can make adequate preparations.

    As for why the families are going at it in a moderate pace... they are trying to lure Bloody Chariot and other Zeus academy forces to intervene.

    They areying down traps to attract these people out.

    After all, in their minds the attacks are a coborative efforts of the chous and Bloody Chariot. So, they believed that the chous family will definitely demand help from Bloody Chariot.

    Meanwhile, the situation is not that good for the students who were affiliated with chous family before.

    And right now, just as the two elders Gungnir and Bloody Chariot fixed a deal of cooperation, there is a meeting happening in between the Noble league students as they decided on something.

    The key part is that the supposed leader of the Noble league students, Christos is not there.

    At the moment, there is a vote happening in the meeting with all the noble league students gathered there.

    Even the ones who were deemed as the ''not-son-important'' members and were usually excluded from most meetings are also there. They are all voting on something. A woman is standing at the front as she addressed the room.

    "The voting is concluded. It is one-sided as there were no votes against the motion and only five votes that are neutral.

    The rest are all agreeing with the motion.

    So, by the will of the noble league members. Christos is officially no longer the leader of the Student Noble league.

    He is deprived of all his leadership privileges as well as his privilege of being the core member. He will remain an ordinary member, however. And to ensure that he wouldn''t take this as a personal thing and foster a grudge against the league, we are going to keep him under observation for the next few days.

    If he acts up, he will charged ording to the league rules and will even be expelled based on the severity of his actions."

    Christos didn''t even know that something like this is happening. Because, he is holed up in his room as he drew out a n to deal with Sam.

    No matter how much he tried, he couldn''t get the information that he wanted. So, all he could do was make the biggest move possible.

    He already dealt with the Poseidon academy. They will hold thest trial for Sam. Now, he is preparing for the suitable location that would help him deal with Sam properly with all the resources at hand.

    After some more nning, he went out of the academy realm, without actually knowing that his noble league leadership has gone away.

    He arrived at his destination in no time.

    One of the subordinate families of the Poseidon and a family that is not an active part of the noble league, but more than qualified to be part of it. The Telchines.

    They are named after some of the water deities that are loyal subordinates of Poseidon. It is believed that the Telchines n which has several branch families originated from the Telchine deities when they consummated with the human worshippers of Poseidon.

    Christos doesn''t really want them to do anything, he just needs to use a ce in their territory to set up his trap.

 Chapter 2205 The Day before

    Chapter 2205 The Day before

    The day before the expedition.

    By now Christos is back from the Telchine territory. He made all the preparations that he could. He staked everything on the point that Sam might be rted to the Hub. He is now praying to Zeus hoping that he can prove his spections with this.

    In fact, he would have liked to stay back at the Telchine territory waiting for Sam''s twelfthbor, so that he could deal with him by himself.

    However, he was informed by Bloody Chariot about the expedition, which made him unable to refuse.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    And Sam is not showing any signs of going on his twelfthbor any time soon. Since he is way ahead of the schedule inpleting the first eleven, the Poseidon academy didn''t really have any grounds to pressure him.

    Even if they do, they are not really bothered to it.

    In their minds, Sam''s matter is now not the top priority. Even if the suspected his involvement with the Hub and in turn the cases filed against their academies, they are more inclined to believe that Sam is but a pawn in the grand schemesid out by Icarus or any other backer that he might have.

    So, focusing on Sam so much is counter productive in their opinion. But they are getting their benefits from young master chous, that''s why they cooperated well.

    Christos thought it would take more time for Sam to make a move and agreed to go on the expedition. But to his dismay, Sam immediately went to meet the people at Poseidon academy. Christos had half a mind to cancel the expedition, but he knew that Bloody Chariot wouldn''t have easily kept his differences with the Noble league aside to call him on to this.

    He was curious to know what is happening.

    Particrly, when he came to know that the expedition is going in conjunction with the Thor academy.

    He knew something big is happening and he wanted to be a part of it. Particrly, after he learned that his post as the leader of the student noble league has been ousted.

    He doesn''t know what is happening behind the scenes, but he does know that the influence of the nine families that are attacking the chous family is behind this. He wondered how things would end up at this rate.

    The day before expedition, he is feeling down on the dumps, worrying about what might happen the next day. Meanwhile.

    There is a meeting happening inside the Hub branch of the Olympian city.

    Sam and all the Hub managers, the eight members that he recruited are all there along with his friends.

    "I have some important instructions for all of you today.

    We are about to make one of the most critical moves we have until now. Tomorrow, all the key Third grade students from the Zeus academy will leave for the expedition and the same goes for their second grade students.

    The first grade students were already dwindling, so they are not much of a threat. On top of that, there is a pocket dimension opening tomorrow. So, most of them will be gone there.

    I will be going on my twelfthbor. I already collected the information today and I will be leaving at the dawn

    tomorrow.

    Dean Heron is not here, Bloody Chariot will be busy with the expedition preparations. Most of the elders are still performing their twelvebors. The numbers are at all time high. Coincidentally, the progress that we are hoping to get from the kid in the Sanatan realm is already reaching our current goal.

    By the time he reaches the goal and cracks open the puppet, we need to make sure that all of us are safe.

    The first graders, my friends, will all be in the pocket dimensions tomorrow. Philip, you take the lead on that. Make sure that all of you are noticed by someone prominent who doesn''t keep their mouth shut. Make sure that you do something significant enough for them to spread the news, but not significant enough to be remembered for a long time.

    I am sure, you understand what I mean."

    Philip nodded his head.

    "Also, we don''t exactly know when the exact moment that kid will crack the puppet. So, we need to make sure that our actions are aligning with it. Luckily, it would be while the pocket dimension is still going on.

    So, the managers need to be prepared.

    You are going activate all of the hubs mechanisms tonight and gathered in this branch. You will receive a message when the kid cracks the puppet. At that moment, you need to move immediately.

    Your wrist bands, will give you the exact locations of all our targets that we are going after tomorrow. All of them are the fourth graders. The moment, the kid cracks the puppet, you go after them. Cause as much chaos as possible.

    I am sure, you are not exactly going to feel guilty about targeting them. You already saw all the criminal activities they have conducted."

    Sam paused and waved his hand. An injection gun and a bunch of vials appeared in front of everyone in the meeting.

    "The vials that are in front of you, are the key to your escape. After the puppet is cracked, there is no way the academies will stay still, you will have a target on your backs. The vials and the injection will be of great help to you.

    All you need to do is inject yourself with that vial.

    I would have liked to give you more, but it was onlypleted a few days ago and I couldn''t find time to make it.

    Anyway, it would be enough to escape safely.

    Not even the Deans, Grand elders and even Bloody Chariot himself can pin you down with those. As long as you escape after executing the ns here, everything will be fine..."

    Sam exined a few more details to the managers, before he turned to speak to Stone.

    "Your time has finallye.

    You have executed everything that I told you perfectly. You made the perfect use of the gift that I gave you. Tomorrow, you can have what you want"

    He paused and waved his hand again.

    A spatial storage ring appeared in front of Stone.

    "You can use the contents of the ring and you will be able to leave this ce. I don''t want to impose a live of very on you by taking advantage of your gratitude. After all, I believe that we have a fair exchange.

    You became my test subject and let me experiment on you while you gained the results of that experiment. And you worked perfectly based on my words in the past few days. We are even.

    After you achieve your goal, you have two ways and you will find both of them in that ring. You can choose either. If you choose the second one, I hope that you do it as soon as possible. I would also be d knowing that you are safe!" Stone hesitantly picked up the ring and looked at Sam.

    "Sir, I am honored to be a ve to you. I have been a ve my entire life. However, it was against my will. My life might have been sold away to the owners of those mines at my birth, however, every time I failed to fight back that fate, I sold my self-respect in parts.

    For the first time, I ever did fight back, those owners made sure that I lost everything that I had.

    You...

    You bestowed up on me the blessing that all the gods in this world failed to do.

    So, for the first time, I am willing to be your ve. Not just out of an obligation, but with my whole heart and soul."

    Sam didn''t speak and just stayed silent.

    After that, he turned to the rest of his team.

    "I am sure you are all a bit nervous. I know that I am. However, this is the key n in achieving ourmon goal of destabilizing the academy realm.

    With our tomorrow''s move, the gods will see what it means when the mortals truly fight back with all their heart.

    I won''t say that I am doing all this out of pure intentions. In fact, I would like to believe that I am very candid about my selfish motives. It just so happens that our motives aligned.

    I hope, we will be sessful with the execution of our n and live to tell the tale of how as mortals, we shook up the foundations of the gods."

    Sam finished his speech and raised his wine in toast.

    The others raised as well.

    However, they were not as openly excited as Sam. Even though they are happy that they havee this far and confident that they can execute the next n perfectly, there is just one thing that they all hand in their minds.

    All of their backs are covered with the ns Sam just exined. But there was no mention on how Sam''s back is covered.

    Because, until now, only one person is the key suspect to have direct connection with Hub, apart from the managers. And that is Sam.

    If they really executed the ns as Sam mentioned, then he will be the first suspect to not just Zeus academy, but every person that is any way rted or associated with the academy realm.

 Chapter 2206 On the Day

    Chapter 2206 On the Day

    The day of the expedition.

    The streets are bustling with first graders as they hurried towards the pocket dimension. The hub is devoid of activity except for the few people here and there. Icarus checked the surveince of the whole city from the hub.

    The city is operating as usual.

    As smoothly as it can be run in such a chaotic time.

    He couldn''t help but chuckle as bit as he saw everyone being too involved in their own activities. They don''t know that this is one of the biggest days for the Academy realm. One that would surely be remembered in the history.

    Only it would still be a question if the people will actually know that a first grader is behind this whole change.

    Icarus asked Sam why he is doing all this. He wanted to know the proper reason and all he got was.

    ''I hate Olympian gods. They are a bunch of assholes.

    That is all he said. Even though that could be considered the gist and Icarus there is a bigger exnation behind it. But to imagine that a kid did all of this just because the Olympian gods were assholes? One can onlyugh out loud.

    Icarus made sure that all of Sam''s friends safely entered the pocket dimension.

    This is the task Sam assigned to Icarus in secret. Sam is not confident that his friends, particrly the trio. Sam is not dumb enough to assume that his friends haven''t seen the huge loophole in his own n.

    Everyone has an alibi, everyone has a purpose. Once the hub executes this operation, there is no way for the people who are already suspecting Sam to sit back and just pick their own nails. They are going to want to know some answers and for them Sam was the only link they could think of.

    They will be after Sam.

    They wille after him with full force. However, Sam hasn''t exined the n of his own escape or any shield that he might have prepared.

    Sam is worried that they might just want to stay back to back him up. And based on Icarus'' investigation, there were indeed signs of it, he had to forcefully make them abandon all of their ns, before seeing them enter the portals leading to the pocket dimensions.

    After they were sent, he tried to contact Sam, however he disappeared at dawn. He didn''t leave behind any contact means nor any other extra instructions.

    Icarus and the rest of the managers decided to perform the first step of their n. The step that will create very minor level chaos in all of the regions of the academy realm.

    He just pressed a button on the screen and just like that it began.

    At the same time, Dove is sitting in the student council room of the Gambler academy. She is currently in the middle of a meeting. A meeting held because of the message that she received on the night before.

    The sender is someone unexpected. It is none other than Icarus. This is also done based on Sam''s instructions. The message was not sent as a personal message from Icarus, rather it was sent on behalf of the ''friend'' that previously encouraged Icarus to make a deal with the Gambler academy students.

    "Last night, I received a message from a certain someone. This person is the one that solved our crisis of coin payment with the Hub. Because of this friend, we are able to avoid the same crisis that the other academies are undergoing.

    This is the message."

    With that she projected the message she got on her wrist band through the bird puppet.

    Everyone started reading the long text message.

    ''Hello Dove,

    This is the friend of the Gambler academy. The same one that helped you guys out before.

    I am reaching out to you through Icarus, because I wanted to give you a heads up about some pretty big things that are going to happen in the Olympian city and the academy realm tomorrow.

    First and foremost, a message will be spread around the academy realm. A message regarding the discovery of some new realms that was meant to be for everyone of the Olympian academies and how the Zeus academy has monopolized it under the lead of Bloody Chariot and another family that he has vested interests with.

    The message will be apanied with several details of the expedition on which the key members of the current second grade and third grade students of the Zeus academy will be going on tomorrow.

    Bloody Chariot will apany them at the first light and will not be back in the meantime.

    This will incite the rage of the other Olympian academies and the greed of other academies, so there will be some chaos.

    The final statement of that message would indicate that some of the Zeus academy students might have the ticket to get to that ce.

    I understand that the expedition and its details will be pretty enticing to your students as well. But I strongly advice that the Gambler academy students take a backseat and not get involved in that. I can only say one thing.

    The greedier someone is in obtaining the ticket to the expedition, the harder their fall would be.

    That is the first thing.

    The second thing is that irrespective of the actions taken by the academies based on the first message, the Olympian city will be in a state of chaos. Please tell your students, particrly the fourth graders to stay out of this.

    Finally, there will be a huge change with the Hub today. Please make your students stay back and not attend the hub today.

    That is all I can say.

    But I will tell you, that you will thank meter for this."

    That was the whole message. Sam is clearly showing favor to the Gambler academy. Icarus didn''t understand why he did that.

    He just assumed that since Sam is the Gambler academy student, he is a bit biased towards it. And this didn''t really affect Icarus in anyway. In fact, he is even a bit jealous. Time and again he had thought how good it would if the Olympian academies are also more like the Gambler academy.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    However, Sam is just doing this is a favor to the Gambler and Ling Tian. More for Ling Tian actually and he does have every thought to use this favor to gain something back. This is just some investment.

    "How sure are we that this is a legitimate message?" One of the council members asked Dove.

    "As sure as it can be. There is no reason for us to actually doubt the message. Previously this person indeed help us a lot. The only suspicious thing about it is that we don''t know who that person and what their motives are." Instead of dove, someone beside her answered.

    "I think we will pass on the orders to the students to be on standby in the academy. Even though I trust the person, I need to make a rational decision here.

    Once the students are on standby, we will pay attention to the events that he mentioned. If any of the events turns out to be true, then we have a good enough reason to assume the rest are true as well. Then we will proceed based on that." Dove said passing on her suggestion.

    Since the suggestion appeared reasonable, it is approved by everyone.

    *DING*

    At that moment, a unified tone came from all the wrist bands in the meeting room. All at the same time that it appeared like one huge beep sound.

    Everyone looked at the wrist band and it showed something that shocked them.

    It is a message. A message that showcased the details regarding the white crystal and the puppetir that was discovered by them. The discovery of this ce through the puppets was conveniently omitted.

    "What the hell? This is an enhancement alloy? This can be used in weapons for additional effects? Look at that, high durability, bleed effect... what the fuck is this."

    One of them eximed as he absorbed the benefits of the white crystal. That made him extremely tempted, but then he remembered what Dove said just now. He involuntarily looked up at Dove''s face.

    She had a grim expression on her face.

    Everyone is looking at her while she looked at the message on the projection.

    Now, she is sure that the messages were indeed sent in good-faith.

    "Order all the students toe back and report in the academy. Pass the orders to the instructors and elders as well and tell them to gather in their offices. We need to ount for every single gambler academy student immediately."

    Everyone followed her orders and left the room. The whole Olympian city is driven into chaos. Almost everyone there received the message. However, this message not only left the others in confusion, it even left the Zeus academy members in the same confusion.

    After all, not a single person that is present in the academy at the moment, knows about the expedition.

 Chapter 2207 Chaos

    Chapter 2207 Chaos

    In a restaurant out side of the Zeus academy.

    A youngster is trying to focus on the food in front of him. But right now, he is a bundle of nerves. He looked around anxiously hoping that no one would recognize him.

    At that moment.

    "Nice to meet you Mr. Koman."

    Three people came at sat at his table. Two people on either side of him and one on the opposite side. Koman gulped nervously. He recognized the uniforms they were wearing. Even if he didn''t notice the uniforms, he sure as hell recognized the face of the man sitting in the front.

    That is the top ranked third grade student of the Poseidon academy.

    Among the Olympian academies, Poseidon and Zeus academies were always trying to one up each other. However, in the current third grade, it was not even apetition when ites to one on onebat.

    Because the one in front of Koman, who goes by the name Trenk beats everyone else by arge margin. He is hailed a genius and no one actually knows his background. He mysteriously appeared, but even the Noble league members don''t show attitude to him.

    It was a surprise at first. Many people then came to specte andter believe that he belongs to one of the recluse families. In this case, they strongly believe he is part of the Telchine n.

    Koman nervously looked at the man in front of him. Hair white as the foam of the tides and the eyes that carried the blue of the sea.

    "I heard that you are currently holding a ticket that should have rightfully belonged to me. So, why don''t you hand it over so that no one will get hurt."

    "I... I..." Koman was about to speak.

    But the next moment, Trenk showed a smile and ced his finger on the lips of Koman.

    "Shhh... it seems like you are having trouble registering what I am saying. I didn''t say that you have to take the burden of using your words. All you need to do is give me the ticket. Only the actions required to do that, like moving your hand, activating your spiritual energy to ess the spatial storage are allowed.

    I am already being gracious enough to let you breath after all."

    Koman pursed his lips and gulped nervously. He is sweating bullets and was soaked in no time.

    "See, you are sweating. And that... is your bodily actions."

    A blue colored glow appeared on Trenk''s fingertips. At that moment...

    *BAM*

    The door of the restaurant was mmed open as five people with the Zeus academy uniforms came barging in. They looked around and nced at Koman.

    The man in the lead with long silvery grey hair held a sword tightly as he gazed at Koman and then Trenk.

    "You are a bitte to the party, Kwik." Trenk remarked casually. His gaze reverted back to Koman with an expression of askance.

    As if he is asking, why Koman didn''t hand over the ticket yet.

    "Trenk, do you really think just because you are supposed rank 1 of third grade students, you can do whatever the fuck you want?

    You are threatening the student of the Zeus academy right in my face, do you really think the Poseidon academy will back you up all the way to the end?"

    "Poseidon academy? Fuck off, do you really think I have to throw away the weight of the academy to something as snatching a ticket?

    As for threatening him in your face, what the fuck are you going to do about it. Just try and stop it if my actions are bothering you so much.

    And for the first question. Yes, I truly believe I can do whatever the fuck that I want."

    "Take him down." Kwik didn''t bother responding to Trenk''s arrogant but slightlyckluster reply. He just made his move.

    Koman watched as all hell break loose and he didn''t know what happened next. One moment he is blinking and the next moment...

    He saw the five people that came from the Zeus academy were sprawling on the floor like they were on their beds in their own rooms. They were out cold. And their faces looked so peaceful, that one might really mistake it for their bedroom.

    Only the blood made it a little apparent that it is actually not.

    Koman looked at the terrifying man that is Trenk standing still. He hasn''t moved yet, it was actually the twockeys that came with him, that did this.

    "Your dogs are quite ferocious, I wonder why they didn''t participate in the rankingpetitions."

    At this moment a different man walked into the restaurant.

    He is also wearing the robes of the Zeus academy. However, there is one stark difference and everyone including Trenk felt quite some pressure up on noticing it. That difference is the robe belonged to a fourth grader.

    Granted that it was just the Divine ne Initial stage of Transcendence, it is still higher than Trenk''s current cultivation.

    "Leave right now. I don''t want to intensify the conflict between the Poseidon and the Zeus academy. You are not match for me. You might be the best of the best in your own level, but the cultivation difference is undeniable.

    I am sure you don''t want to identally die in a fight."

    Trenk looked at the young man with an intense gaze. After three minutes of silence, he spoke.

    "Too bad, that is the way that I want to die." The next moment...

    *BAM* *BOOM* *BOOM*N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Surprisingly Trenk started fighting the senior and he wasn''t even being pushed back with overwhelming power difference. If it was done out in the open on an official event, it would have been quite the sight to see.

    The victor of the match would have quite some reputation, granted the reputation would differ based on the victor.

    But right now, in this fight, the victor is irrelevant. Because the actual winner is someone ho is not even at the ce. Simr, conflicts started raising in the Olympian region just like that. Koman who was lucky enough to have the seniors and his peerse on time, escaped as the fight broke out. And his way to the academy, he saw the chaotic mess that is the Olympian city.

    Every street is suddenly in the state of a riot. People are fighting, third graders, attacking each other, second graders trying to kill each other, could be see almost at any ce that usually gathered some reasonable number of people.

    The Zeus academy students are being targeted left and right.

    The Zeus academy students are being targeted left and right.

    Dove who has been observing the status outside was surprised. Because there are less than ten people who possessed the ticket as per what''s listed in the message.

    However, what she doesn''t know is that the ten names that are listed are not same in the message sent to every person. It is one of the oldest tricks in the book. After some calctions, Sam created different sets of people and sent messages to different sets making sure that majority of the third graders and second graders are busy.

    Just like the case with Koman and Trenk, the fourth graders had to get involved. After all, not everyone is crazy enough to fight a senior like Trenk did.

    Just like that the whole city is in chaos.

    At that moment, Icarus and the managers were all watching the whole chaos ensue until the afternoon, when all of a sudden a red colored light orb appeared in the middle of them. It exploded into a bunch of sparks before it disappearedpletely.

    Icarus and the rest of the team looked at each other in surprise. Nervousness and excitement burned in their eyes.

    All of them stood in attention. That is the signal that they have been waiting for. They all wore the gear Sam gave them. The gear that they wore to hunt down the instructor of the Thor academy before. They then stood at their respective previously assigned spots.

    They looked at the screen projecting from their respective wrist bands.

    The screen showed the map of the Olympian city along with several red dots. Each dot representing their target. All of them are fourth graders.

    The managers took a deep breath before locking in on their respective first targets before they disappeared.

    *SWOOSH*

    With a sh, the spatial blink of arge scale urred.

    Icarus who was initially standing in the hub, now appeared in the restaurant. He looked around and his gazended on the two people standing while facing each other.

    Trenk had his hand severely injured. His body is full of broken bones and his expression is grim. There is a weird blue glow surrounding his body, which is flickering like a candle in the wind.

    Opposite him stood the fourth grade student. He is panting as he looked at Trenk. His body his haggard had several injuries. Nothing grievous but they are not shabby either. Despite the cultivation difference, Trenk gave him some serious fight.

    However, Icarus'' arrival spelled an end to that amazing fight. After all, that fourth grader is his first target.

 Chapter 2208 Virat

    Chapter 2208 Virat

    "So, you guys are finally making a move?" Trenk asked as he looked at Icarus.

    Icarus gave him a side-eyed nce and didn''t even bother with him. He is impressed with Trenk and his fighting ability, but that surprise and shock were gone in an instant. After meeting Sam, it takes a lot more to astound him than some fighting prowess.

    He looked at the fourth grader from the Zeus academy.

    Icarus closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath before opening again. A cold glint shed past his eyes.

    "You are here to help me? I thought you left the academy for some ideal bullshit. You are just as opportunistic as the Olympians." Trenk said with a scorn. However, Icarus didn''t reply and made his move.

    Three secondster.

    He stood there with bloodied hands while holding the head of the fourth grader in them. He walked out into the street and threw the head a bit into the air. Once it got sufficient altitude¡­

    *BOOM*

    He kicked it like a ball andunched it to the Zeus academy.

    After that, with a wave of his hand, he disappeared from the spot and reappeared at a different area. Trenk frowned at this behavior. He suddenly felt like he was used. After a few minutes, he walked out of that messy restaurant and was about to leave.

    But at that moment, people from the Zeus academy came. They are the members of the student council and they are all fourth graders.

    When they sensed Trenk''s cultivation level, they were puzzled and felt their rage dampen a bit. It was clouded with confusion.

    "I guess you guys came looking for the killer. It''s Icarus."

    He didn''t bother waiting for them to ask anymore questions, he just used the wrist band to transfer the video recorded by the bird puppet to them and left.

    The seniors saw the video and were stunned.

    It was indeed Icarus. He just killed someone out in the open and he didn''t even bother to hide his identity. It is apparent that he is provoking them directly. They immediately made a move.

    One of them went to inform the members of the academy, while the other went to meet the city guards to track Icarus down. When the first one went back to the academy, he saw a few more people already back at the academy meeting with an elder.

    All of them had the sameint.

    Members of their fourth grade have been killed at various spots in the city. All at a swift pace like they were weeds being pulled out of the field.

    None of the perpetrators bothered to hide their identity though. They came using spatial blink, killed and left using spatial blink that is all. As for the identities of the killers, as mentioned before, they didn''t hide themselves.

    Everyone looked at them and realized that they are the managers of the Hub and also the former students that were mistreated greatly in the top academies of the academy realm.

    They had caused quite some chaos in different regions after they became the managers of the hub, but for the first time, they acted this violently.

    Before the city guard or the elders in the academy could react, the killings already went past twenty. The fourth graders are like little kidspared to what the managers could do. There is no resistance. Particrly, since their initial targets are mostly within the Initial stage of Divine ne Transcendence.

    The chaos that initially started in a small scale, suddenly escted toplete mayhem.

    Meanwhile in Sanatan Realm¡­

    Virat is sitting in the same forest that he always stayed in. He is holding a few metal pieces while a bunch more were neatly arranged on the table.

    His upper body is bear and his locked hair was left loose. He wore some loose saffron robes that covered his lower body. He had slight scruff growing out of his chin.

    This is the same kid that has been trying to unlock the bird puppet for the longest time and a few minutes ago he seeded. Not only did he manage to bypass all the inscribed formations, he also found the way to dismantle the puppet.

    Even though there were a lot of intricate and delicate mechanism, they are fundamentally just iterations of some basic mechanisms. His mind was sharp enough to understand them and dismantle them quickly.

    For some it almost felt like, he already knew how to do it inherently.

    However, in that excitement, hepletely ignored that weird feeling.

    Right now, he is trying to understand the purpose of each of the parts of the bird puppet. There are two parts that he is highly curious about.

    One of them is a crystal chip and the other is the puppet core. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    The puppet core is also a culmination of various mechanisms, but they are bonded together with the energy source in the middle. This made it hard to remove as even a slightest mistake could make the core explode making him lose everything.

    The crystal chip is simr to the chips the Thor academy and Zeus academy found. Virat doesn''t know its purpose yet. However, the puppet core on the other hand had some very obvious functions.

    Energy reservoir, energy gatherer and energy distributor are the three primary roles that it ys. Apart from that, he cannot understand what it does and he is not exactly an expert in dealing with the energy bonded objects like this.

    For that he has to share the secret of dismantling to the rest.

    So, for now he ced the core away and focused on the rest of the objects.

    For the next couple of hours he was on it. Most of the metallic objects that are part of the mechanism are very easy for him to understand. They were levers, gears, springs, and many more. There are also recording mechanisms, the navigating system, attack storage system, the defensive measures¡­ it is indeed a marvel created by intricatelybining the results of various fields.

    The more he studied it, the more impressed he became.

    After some time, his gaze finallynded on the chip. This chip was attached to the memory device of the puppet. The memory device stored all the recorded videos and images of the puppet. Even though Virat managed to understand the purpose of all the other mechanisms, he still cannot understand what the purpose of this chip is.

    Then he could only understand it in one way.

    Testing.

    He started testing the chip in multiple ways using various mechanisms of his own. Another hour or so passed by when the curiosity and excitement on his face started changing to a face of worry and distress.

    After some trials, he understood that something is wrong with the chip. Or to be precise, the chip is functioning perfectly, but the function itself is something that shouldn''t happen in the first ce.

    And if it is happening that means¡­ he couldn''t imagine the implications.

    However, no matter how much he tested it, the results are always ending up with the same conclusion. That this is indeed as bad as he initially thought¡­

    After some time, he almost pulled his hair out. He took some of the parts of the puppet thatid there and started assembling them. It was mostly the head and some lower mechanisms that are used for recording and projecting.

    After mechanism was installed along with the chip then he saw some changes.

    Now what happened was that within the memory space of the puppet a bunch of new files

 Chapter 2209 Elope

    Chapter 2209 Elope

    A bunch of new files or new pieces of content appeared in the memory space of the puppet when the chip was connected.

    The bigger shock is that the content is of muchrger quantitypared to the original content. He made that makeshift projector with the head work and started looking through the contents. If anyone from modern earth saw the interface at that time, they would clearly think of aputer folder.

    The files were neatly arranged one after another.

    Each file is named with the date and the time duration in which it was recorded. When Virat saw this, he had a gripping fear in his heart. Because he couldn''t remember actually recording stuff on those days.

    In fact, he never really recorded much using the puppet. He only experimented with it and stayed in the valley. But there are so many recordings. He opened one of them with his shaky finger and saw himself in the video.

    The video showed his face along with his curious and somewhat frustrated gaze. It was the time when he was fiddling with the formations near the neck joints of the bird puppet. At that time, its eyes were directly facing him as he held it to his face.

    It was recorded at that time.

    He moved to a different file.

    It was the time, when got a bit tired and dropped one of the puppets that he obtained from one of his peers. Heid down on a stone and looked at the sky muttering some incoherent bullshit. All of it was recorded.

    There was also time when he justzed around and cursed the creator of the puppet.

    All of these things, all these incidents that he never even told another soul were all recorded. When he thought of what the actual function of the chip is¡­

    He felt a shiver run down his spine.

    He hurriedly took out a few more puppets that he has bought from some of the members of the Viswa Karma Academy, the academy which he was part of.

    He dismantled them one by one hurriedly until he found the chip. He attached the chip to the new mechanism that he made with the first puppet and looked through the files. He could see the video records of the time he fiddled with those puppets. He found the record of the time he bought the puppet and there is also the record of the first time the puppet reached the hands of its first ever owner.

    Or, with his newfound understanding, it would be better to call it as it''s first ever target.

    Just like that, he understood the key purpose of the puppet sent by the hub. It was continuous surveince. Every moment that it was outside, it recorded the videos and it started transmitting the recorded videos to the hub.

    That means, the process of him dismantling was also recorded and in an way, the process of him understanding the reason behind it is also recorded.

    He felt a bit nervous now.

    He doesn''t know the exact power of the person behind the hub and now he became the direct enemy that needs to be eliminated.

    When his thoughts came to this point, Virat shook his head and muttered out loud.

    "What the fuck is wrong with me. This is not the main point. People didn''t suspect the puppets much since the start.

    All the secrets, meetings, discussions, ns and plots, everything is exposed to the Hub. I need to inform them immediately."

    He hurriedly ran out of the valley and entered the administrative area of the academy. At that moment, the Dean of the academy was in a meeting with a few elders. He obtained the news about the chaotic mess in the Olympian academy along with the possible ticket to a special expedition.

    At that moment, Virat barged into the room

    *BAM*

    The Dean also have locked hair and he was not sitting in a chair. Instead, he was seated on a floor with a small sitting table in front of him.

    The elders were all sitting in the same way. When they saw a student barging in, they didn''t express their dissatisfaction immediately. The most they showed is some slight frown on their foreheads. The dean looked at Virat and asked.

    10:10

    "What happened, Child? You seem to be in a hurry."

    "Dean, you need to see this."

    He started exining the situation¡­.

    Meanwhile, back in the Olympian region.

    Thest few hours became bloody and vicious. Particrly to the students of the Zeus academy. Fourth grade students were dying left and right. Dozensid headless on the ground. The elders already reacted, but they were unable to catch up to the managers as they used the spatial blink with the equipment given by Sam.

    The third graders of Zeus academy were already being targeted by the other academies, so did the second graders.

    The first graders, were mostly in the pocket dimension.

    It is time.

    Stone appeared at the entrance of the Zeus academy. He didn''t wear his usual clothes, instead he wore the Zeus academy''s uniformed robes as he ran into the academy through the main entrance.

    Nobody noticed him or bothered with him as many people ran in and out of the academy at that time. For while, Stone also has been in the back of their minds as the recent crises went beyond the troubles caused by the fights of the first graders.

    No one noticed him. After running deeper into the academy and entering a ce with rtive calm, he opened his wrist band to check a location. A red dot is blinking in there. Luckily, he is not too far away and reached the ce in five minutes as he snuck his way through.

    He is standing in front of a courtyard. A quiet and a peaceful courtyard, full of greenery and aesthetically pleasing. No one was there outside. Not even a single living soul.

    Stone felt his heart beating like crazy. Almost as if it wanted to leap out of his chest.

    He entered the courtyard and stood in front of the main door of the house.

    He stayed there for a couple of minutes, ready to knock on the door. A million things went through his mind. His childhood to the young age in the mine, the moment he met Jade, the hope she gave him, his despair.

    He remembered everything as if it were yesterday. Most of them were bad days. But now, he saw real hope. He gained power that he couldn''t even imagine, just because of Sam''s grace and he now made him stand in a ce that is beyond his dreams.

    *KNOCK* *KNOCK*

    He knocked on the door twice.

    He could hear the slight ring of the anklets along with the footsteps from beyond that door.

    *CLICK*

    The knob of the door was undone before it was opened. And¡­ there is nothing but silence. A young woman that looked as pure as snow stood there as she looked at Stone. Her eyes widened and tearing up.

    She just started at him while still holding the door with her hand.

    She has seen so many times before, but every time same feeling welled up her heart. Like she was looking at him for the first time. The imagine of him ving away at the mines to the image of him standing there like a dashing hero of the Zeus academy.

    Both of them ovepped in her mind. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "What? Do you like my new look so much that forgot how to speak?" Stone spoke in a quivering tone. His eyes were also watery.

    *BAM*

    The next moment, she leaped into him and hugged him tightly as both of them fell. Stone''s back hit the floor loudly, but he didn''t show any change of expression. He held her warmly as she snuggled deeper and deeper in to his embrace.

    As if she is afraid that Stone will disappear.

    "What new look? You look the same to me." She spoke through her muffled voice still tightening her hug.

    They stayed like that for around twenty minutes. Inplete silence without speaking anything. But Stone had to break the silence.

    "Jade, we don''t have time. We need to leave."

    As soon as he spoke, she flinched.

    "How are we going to leave? My father¡­. The academy wouldn''t let me go because of my father. Even if the Dean is not here and my sister is gone, they are too afraid of my father to let me go just like that."

    She sat up and looked at him with a worried gaze. He smiled and said.

    "Don''t worry about it. None of the people at the academy have the luxury to care about you. Just trust me ande with me. I need you to meet somebody."

    She held his hand tightly and stood up along with him.

    Twenty minutester. Both of them are in the hub. It is another special area with the space gate that was drawn exclusively for Stone to use.

 Chapter 2210 Fight with Instructor

    Chapter 2210 Fight with Instructor

    The Zeus academy is in so much chaos that they didn''t notice Jade was missing.

    That was not their first priority anyway. The elders and instructors were deployed to catch the managers. At this moment¡­.

    Within a secret room created under a bar in the outskirts of the city.

    Icarus and Ivar are sitting together. Their bodies are drenched in blood, even though it is not theirs. They had slights smiles on their faces as they looked at each other while looking through the contents of the spatial rings of the people they just killed.

    "Can you imagine doing this a couple of months ago?"

    Ivar asked and took out a wine bottle from one of the rings. He took a huge swig and passed it to Icarus.

    "I certainly wouldn''t have. After all, my goal was to demolish the Olympian academies, not to mindlessly kill a bunch of fourth graders. If that was all what I wanted to do, I would have done it by myself a long time ago."

    "True that.

    I am actually surprised that you even agreed to this.

    Needless violence is so unlike you."

    "How is this needless? If killing these disgusting creatures could destroy the academies, I would have done that a long time ago too. Since this is a part of a bigger n, I don''t have any qualms about it.

    Anyway, my headcount clearly shows mymitment to the cause.

    You, on the other hand."

    "I am only a four behind. Not forty. No need to make suchme usations. Don''t forget that I was the one who got you onboard with Sam in the first ce."

    "Whatever. Competence is what matters. Not the seniority in whose participating started first."

    Icarus paused and stood up from his spot. He looked into the screen of his wristband. Ivar did the same before picking up his axe.

    "They are here. This is going to be a tough one."

    Ivar muttered and both of them jumped up high from their original spots.

    *CRASH*

    They broke through the ceiling of the room and entered the bar. A bunch of people were shocked at the sudden arrival in such a shy way. More than ten fourth graders mostly of Zeus academy and a couple of them from other Olympian academies are standing there.

    They just entered the room and were about to take their seats in the empty bar.

    "What took you guys so long? We have been waiting for a while, you know."

    Ivar said as his energy surged into his axe.

    "What¡­"

    One of them was about to speak, when Icarus made his move, followed by Ivar.

    *CRASH*

    Two minutester.

    Ivar and Icarus stood among the rubble of the now copsed bar as they looked at the dead bodies of the ten fourth graders lying headless around them. They swiftly collected all the spatial rings and Ivarzily stretched as he looked at Icarus.

    "What do you want to do? Leave or confront?"

    "Of course, we need to confront. How could I let one of my former instructors not have a great wee when he came all the way here in search of me? Right Instructor Gawk?"

    Icarus spoke out loud. A shadow man came out from behind a nearby building. As it moved forward, the shadow slowly transformed into a human form. It is a middle-aged man with a clean shaven face and short hair.

    His attire is nowhere shy. It is just amon shade of grey. He held a dagger in his hands as he walked forward.

    He is one of the instructors at the Zeus Academy. He is not really popr. But he is known for his stealth movement techniques, agility based trainings, dagger usage and one hit kill methods.

    He is really good at that to the point, some people just take his course so that they could understand how the assassins operate so that they could avoid them.

    Icarus was also part of his ss.

    "It seems like you haven''t cked off Icarus. You did have the talent anyway. Now it looks like it came to fruition.

    To think that you can spot me."

    Icarus and Ivar chuckled at the same time. Only both of them knew, how they managed to find him hiding nearby. It is the easiest and most direct way to find someone in the Olympian region. That is tracking them with their own bird puppets.

    Icarus and Ivar noticed that man while they were in the middle of fighting, they didn''t react, but they were very vignt of him. After all, his cultivation is higher than both of them. They need to be careful. With his experience of being an instructor, they need to be much more careful.

    Icarus and Ivar didn''t reply after that chuckle, they just willed for something to appear in their hands. Their spatial storages granted the wish.

    A metallic glowing glove appeared on their right hands. Both of them felt a surge of energy. The surrounding divine energy is entering their bodies at an increased rate.

    The glove itself of course, gave them a huge boost.

    It also gave off some sort of sinister aura though.

    "You really think that you can fight me with your Divine ne Initial stage Consummation cultivation? I am at the middle stage. You might be geniuses, but this is a stretch for you. You could do that when you are still in Mortal ne.

    Even in the early stages of Divine ne, it is fine.

    You are in the final stages. You are all so close to the god hood. Don''t be so delusional."

    "We can try."

    Icarus muttered and he made a move. He punched out towards Gawk.

    Gawk didn''t bother to dodge the attack, he was about to block it. But right before that fist could touch his own hand, he felt a trepidation like no other.

    The glove started glowing with a unique pattern. The energy induced in the glove, the energy condensed in a certain way to execute Icarus'' own punching technique¡­

    It started resonating with the surrounding energy.

    Energy overly emitting by the glove itself is condensed in the surroundings. Three more swirling fists condensed of pure Divine energy appeared on either side of Gawk while Icarus came at him from the front.

    Gawk widened his eyes and¡­

    *SWOOSH*

    His body hurriedly turned into the shadow and disappeared into his own shadow. He slipped past the three fists.

    *BAM*

    The three fists collided at the spot creating an explosion.

    Gawk who was just inside the shadow, felt the tremendous shockwaves from that explosion. He hurriedly moved past and just when he was about toe out¡­

    *SWOOSH*

    Therge axe condensed purely out of energy was being swung at him at an incredible pace.

    The axe head brushed past his head cutting off a few strands of his hair.

    *BAM* *CRASH*

    The axended on the road, destroying everything within a few hundred meters radius, copsing every single structure that there is and sessfully built up a gripping fear in the heart of Gawk.

    Right now Gawk was stunned beyond belief. He couldn''tprehened, why there was such an artifact that could amplify one''s power so much was not snatched by anyone yet.

    That''s right, he doesn''t even care about the mission that he had. To capture these two.

    His focus was shifted to the gloves that they had on.

    Icarus felt his glove''s glow is reducing a bit by bit.

    That is to be expected. After all, it is not a long term use tool. It is an expendable thing. No matter how advanced that person in terms of cultivation or how advanced the technology behind that glove was¡­ it was made to be an expendable for the fights like this.

    Sam used the resonance tech he hasn''t used in a while to create these gloves for the managers. They are now part of a new series of weapons and equipment that he is researching.

    These gloves carry a lot of energy in the form of the special energy cells that Sam created using the mechanisms of the hub. It is very simr to the artificial spiritual energy core that he created to rebuild Stone''s body.

    The energy stored in each cell was obtained from the elders and instructors of the academies. The energy is now being used as not just the power resource, it also provides the mechanism to achieve the resonance as well.

    Since the resonance attacks need the surrounding atmosphere, Sam decided to make some tweaks.

    The energy cell will provide that energy and also increases the speed of the resonance process.. When an attack is made, the mechanism inside will be triggered. It will discharge the energy and make it condense together.

    The discharged energy will be subjected to resonance. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    The attack they made will be replicated because of the resonance affect and vo, multiple attacks at the same time. The only drawback is that they are not strong enough and they cannot mask the bacsh for using high level items.

 Chapter 2211 Escape

    Chapter 2211 Escape

    The bacsh from using this particr high level item is that it has to absorb all the impact thates from the multiple attacks. Much like a gun''s recoil.

    So, it will break down after taking enough hits like that. But that is enough.

    *BOOM*

    Ivar swung his axe again as he lunged at Gawk. While Icarus moved like a sh of light as he tailed Gawk who already shifted into his shadow form. Gawk is light on his feet and he floated in the air like a feather.

    Ivar did have some trouble catching up to him, particrly when their cultivation levels are this far apart.

    However, Icarus didn''t have that type of struggle. After all, he did learn from Gawk and knew many things about how he fights. So, he managed to keep himself at the tail of Gawk and he helped Ivar get enough chances to deal the damage.

    The fight went on and on for a few minutes until¡­

    Ivar gritted his teeth and focused on the glove. The initial pale white glow suddenly turned red. The energy started channeling into the axe and formed various runic patterns. Ivar felt his arm go numb. His veins are bulging out as if they are ready to pop up out of his arm.

    The muscle fibers were put under so much stress and they are ready to be torn into shreds at any moment.

    He started sweating profusely.

    *HISS* *HISS*

    Ivar''s breathing was like the hissing of a snake. Icarus and Gawk obviously noticed this change. The former became decisive while thetter became vignt. Before Gawk could react however, Icarus also focused on his glove.

    However, his glove''s color didn''t change into red. Rather green.

    His arm also experienced extreme stress, but not as much as Ivar''s. The next moment, he extended his hand. From the center of the glove, an energy wave shot out, followed by what looked like a tiny bullet condensed out of pure energy.

    Gawk who was ready to escape, felt the shockwave disturb his energy cirction, very slightly.

    It was just a minute vibration, nothing much. But it dyed him for a split second which allowed Icarus'' ''energy bullet'' to catch up.

    Even before it could touch Gawk, the energy bullet exploded, not with too much noise or destruction, instead it broke down into several small orbs that arranged themselves in a certain pattern creating a formation.

    Gawk felt energy surging in the middle of the formation and finally the attack came.

    Heat surged as mes roared from within the formation.

    *BOOM*

    Gawk was caught off guard. Fire element was not Icarus'' forte, he didn''t have the affinity, so that was thest thing he expected. When it exploded in his face, he hurriedly blocked it and was blown away.

    *SWOOSH*

    The next second, he felt something cold move behind his neck. He tried to turn around, but he couldn''t. All he could see was what''s in front of him.

    A sharp created from the cleaving of an axe was moving in front of him. Surprisingly, not towards him, but away from him. Almost as if it has¡­ originated from him.

    He tried to look down and the next thing he knew, he was seeing his own body with Ivar standing behind him. Before he couldprehend what was happening, his head and body which were separated were crashing down.

    The ice ray came out from Ivar''s axe. Just like how fire was not Icarus'' affinity, Ivar also doesn''t have an ice affinity. Both of the ming explosion and the cleaver of Ice were not their attacks, instead they were the attacks of various elders from different regions.

    They were the special attacks programmed into the gloves. When the glove is pale white, they are basically using the resonance and the energy reservoir. When using the green, they are using a mid-ranged attack, which is a bit powerful than their own power.

    When using the red mode, the attack is way beyond their means and they shouldn''t wield it.

    Icarusnded on the ground along with Ivar.

    Both of them removed the gloves.

    Icarus'' glove is damaged badly. But if one took a closer look, they could see that the cracks are trying to heal themselves. He took out a different energy cell and ced it in the slot where the existing energy cell was as already empty.

    Meanwhile, Ivar''s glove copsed and turned into dust the moment, he took it off.

    There is one thing inmon though.

    The state of their arms.

    Icarus'' arm looked damaged. The arms are broken and from the fingers to the shoulder, it is effected with extreme fire element corrosion. It is almost like fire has taken room into his cells to consume his fresh slowly.

    The pain is apparent in Icarus'' eyes, but he endured it. He gritted his teeth as he pulled out an injector. It is different from the ones given by Sam for their escape. This injector has a bunch of medical vials that are created specially for recovering from the bacsh.

    The injection started expelling the fire elemental corrosion.

    Meanwhile, Ivar''s situation is even more dire.

    His hand was frozen. The flesh was torn apart. They could see his bone and it looked like it is ready to fall off any given moment. He is even afraid to move and the pain is already enough to kill him a few times.

    He took out a different vial and injected it into his shoulder where the flesh was still intact.

    "We don''t have much time. We need to move." N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Icarus said as he sensed multiple people, making their way there. Even before he could finish the sentence, both of them could see few people just a couple of hundred meters away.

    The elders are here.

    Both of them knew that this fight will attract the attention of the elders. They are not strong enough to fight them at this moment. They need a few years for that to happen.

    And they achieved what they wanted to a great extent. The exchanged a smile before they crushed tokens.

    *SWOOSH*

    With a sh they disappeared and appeared at a different spot of the city, to another hide out where they are getting ready to recover from the bacsh.

    The healing is already happening at a visible pace, so they only need a few minutes.

    Meanwhile, back at the spot where Gawk is lying headless¡­

    One of the Elders angrily took out hismunication token and started contacting everyone of the Zeus academy elders that are on the search.

    "Scan everything. Screw holding back. Those bastards just killed one of the Elders. They have means to fight back. We need to fight back and ensure that they didn''t not leave. Half of you, search every single building and use all of the city guard.

    The remaining, gather at the Hub. We are going to break it down today."

    The elders are angry.

    Back at the hiding spot which is another ready-to-copse bar, Icarus and Ivar are healing.

    Icarus contacted the other managers through the wrist band.

    "We have sessfully killed an Elder from the Zeus academy. The elders must have made the move. You can see them on your trackers. We need to leave the city as soon as possible. We cannot get caught.

    Be careful and not get caught. Abandon all of your fights right now."

    He didn''t bother to listening to the other''s replies.

    Somewhere in the city. A beautiful woman holding twin daggers is sitting on top of a house as she looked at the bunch of fourth graders lying helplessly on the ground as they bled out.

    "Damn, it. I wanted to y around with you guys for some more time. But I guess, the ns take precedence."

    As she spoke, she disappeared like a sh and the next moment, all the heads of the people lying there were cut off.

    In a different corner, a young man is in the middle of two instructors. They were not elders, but recently joined instructors and they already informed the elders that he is there.

    He was actually waiting for the Elder''s arrival, but when he heard Icarus'' announcement, he knew that he couldn''t wait. He swung both of his hands as he made a grabbing motion.

    Both of his arms were covered with the gloves and both of them are still in white mode. The palms condensed giant ws that ripped into the throats of the instructors before he disappeared from there.

    Simr scenes urred in other ces. Soon, all eight of the managers are at the same hiding spot with Icarus and Ivar.

    By then their hands are almost healed. They are in the final stage.

    "You guys did take quite some beating. Still, an elder kill is an elder kill. Who did you guys kill?" The twin daggered woman, Lan asked them.

    "Gawk." Icarus replied half-heartedly as he checked his arm movement.

    Lan was stunned.

    "Gawk? That guys is pretty high in the list, isn''t he? I thought you found some wuss. You took down a decent target."

    "Enough Chitchat, we need to leave. Prepare your injections."

    Ivar cut her off and took out the special injection given by Sam.

 Chapter 2212 Disguise

    Chapter 2212 Disguise

    The managers all took a deep breath before they injected themselves with the special vial.

    They all had simr expressions immediately. Even though this is the first time they are trying this in real life, they actually tried it before in the simtions. They knew full well, what the effects of this medicine are going to be.

    And just like what they expected, they all hand this weird tingly feeling all over their body.

    They couldn''t understand where it ising from, it is all over the ce and nowhere at all. The next moment, on each of their bodies, there were some lumps forming. Their flesh is bubbling like some liquid on a stove.

    Apanying those bubbles is the severely itchy feeling. They could barely stop their urge to scratch their body all over some rough surface. Even a bed made of nails and spikes would look like a soft silk mattress to them.

    They could only try and endure it.

    Because they know the consequences of subjecting their bodies to any kind of external pressure at the moment. The bubbling increased as they gritted their teeth and waited for the process to be over.

    After around three minutes that felt like three hours, they finally felt a sense of relief.

    The bubbling died down slowly and their skin returned to normal. They sweated buckets by then and felt the effects of it. They hurriedly took out some drinks from their storage and rehydrated themselves.

    This could be considered the first time their bodies actually underwent dehydration after they started cultivation seriously. Most of the time, spiritual energy will make sure that the body gets all the things it needs from the atmosphere.

    But this is a special case.

    Even though they could substitute the usage of water and other drinks with the spiritual energy, it is highly rmended to absorb as much liquid as possible.

    After the process was finished, they came out of the dark room with no hesitation. They put away all of their weapons and changed into different set of clothes casually. There is no hurry or rush in their eyes.

    It is almost like they are not the same people who were just now running away from the elders and instructors.

    They acted like they have nowhere else to be.

    After changing their attire, they walked out of the bar and started walking in different directions. By then, a few instructors were looking around hurriedly, their gazes swept past these eight people. However, none of them stopped them.

    Icarus and Ivar were walking together for a few minutes, as they went past the Elder, that is extremely familiar with them. But he didn''t stop them once again. They just walked away.

    There is a lockdown in the city to ensure that no one would escape, but of course with so many killings happening everyone wanted to leave. There are people from other regions and justmoners in general.

    All of them are swarming the city gates, demanding that they were let go.

    But the elderspletely took over the city.

    Even the city guards'' authority becamepletely secondary. They couldn''t even wrestle the control back, even if they desired it. It is impossible to do so.

    Of course, even if themoners cannot do anything about the situation, the other academies and the other regions can. The people that are stuck here, immediately contacted their academies using their emergency means.

    They people already moved.

    The managers took different routes and all of them gathered at the exit waiting for the gates to open so that they could leave.

    They didn''t try to break through, nor did they use the transference tokens to escape back to the Hub. Right now, the Hub ispromised. At least the branch of the Olympian region. The Zeus academy''s strongest elders are stationed there, trying to break it down.

    They already barged into the Hub building after breaking through the walls. Even in such a state, they didn''t just destroy everything. Instead, they tried to find people in there. That maze like structure and so many formations addingyers up onyers of concealment did pose a challenge.

    However, they soon realized that the whole Hub is but an empty shell at this point. Of course, they didn''t just break everything down. Even in such a state, they cannot stop their greedy hearts. They did find some rationalization though.

    At least for this equipment someone muste back. Even if they don''t they need this ce to find clues that might lead to Joker and the managers.

    The managers settled down in the crowd.

    They all keenly observed each other. More precisely their new faces.

    "I always thought that there is no such thing as perfect disguise, but this is the closest to the perfect one." Icarus said in a low voice. He activated a sound proof formation around them. Not just him most other groups did it. So, it didn''t seem that suspicious.

    "True. This just didn''t change our face, it changed our whole body structure. I wonder how he even made this. Even though the duration is long, the disguise is perfect for however long it stays on us."

    Another one of the managers replied.

    "I asked him and he said something about taking the transformative genes from different creatures and using it in that serum.

    I don''t even understand itpletely, but in short he used some kind of genes from different creatures and the final image that he had in mind to transform our original look to this." Ivar replied as he looked at his own hands and legs.

    He is a few inches shorter and his hands are a bit chubbyand longer.

    He ispletely different from the person he initially was. He is a lot of bulkier, chubbier, shorter and even a bit balder, with different hair color.

    And that is not even the best part.

    "The best part is that he even disguised the nature of our energy. Unless we use it excessively we won''t break it. The other''s wouldn''t be able to sense our energy unless we let them. It is impable. If only he could perfect it so that we can keep it as long as we can.

    It will be gone after a few hours and we need to top ourselves up with another vial before that if we want to keep up the disguise. There are only ten of those vials too. I wonder why he became so stingy."

    Lanined as she grumbled.

    "Stopining. We already have enough. Anyway, if everything goes well, we don''t even need to use the second vial. If my guess is right, the Sanatan region should be burning up right now." Daksh who rarely spoke said.

    And just like he assumed, at the moment the Sanatan region is in intense ze. Not the actual mes, but the current state¡­ it might as well be burning right now.

    There is a massive meeting happening at one of themon buildings of the region. Yes, they did have a fewmon areas. Unlike the other regions that are constantly in a state of conflict and with little to no cooperation at all¡­ Sanatan region is a bit more harmonious.

    At least on the surface level, they have much deeper cooperationpared to even the likes of Olympian region and Norse region.

    Themon buildings like the one they are in right now is a result of such cooperation. Thismon is hosting one of the biggest meetings in the history of the academy realm. The meeting has all the Deans, Grand elders, Senior elders and some core instructors along with the student council heads of each grade.

    On top of all of them, there is one person who does not fall into any of the above mentioned categories.

    However, he is the main attraction of the meeting. It is none other than Virat.

    He just finished demonstrating what he discovered and said.

    "This chip¡­ I don''t know how they created it. I doubt that I will even be able to break it down its structure and understand how its made any time soon. It is too intricate.

    But I do understand that they are sending all the information they are collecting to somewhere else and my best guess is Hub. The surveince exceeded the stealth of any of our existing methods. We never even suspected it one bit.

    This is one of the greatest failures of the academy realm.

    We need to quickly understand why they are doing this and where they came from. The information they have collected¡­ the secret meetings, plots, spies¡­ everything is within their grasp. With this much information and if the man behind this knows how to use¡­

    Tsk, I believe that he knows how to use it more than anyone else. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    The academy realm will face the biggest crisis that it has ever faced. It could even be destroyed root and stem.

 Chapter 2213 White Crystal Planet

    Chapter 2213 White Crystal

    The room is dead silent before the Dean of the Indra Academy spoke up.

    "I already sent people to the Hub, but there is no one there. None of its usual activities are happening. I also got the news that Daksh and the managers of the Hubs in other areas are all going berserk over the fourth graders of the Zeus academy and some from other Olympian academies.

    The death toll is rmingly high. Each of them took out more than dozen.

    They also didn''t hold back at dealing with the instructors that faced them. One of my men is stuck there and the news is that Ivar and Icarus, two of the managers had killed Elder Gawk. The assassin maker of the Zeus academy."

    This only increased the tension in the room.

    By now everyone came to one conclusion, their initial suspicions when the Hub employed these managers were actually true. They were all hired not because they were allpetent and were also kicked out of their respective academies¡­ instead it was their hatred towards the system that made them the perfect hires.

    "To think all of this was because of the mistreatment of a few students¡­. This is indeed a tragic thing. It seems like the dark side of the academy realm that we don''t show outside has finally caught up with us."

    One of the elders spoke.

    "What mistreated students? These managers are all mere pawns. I am sure that the real culprit is whoever that created the hub.

    There is no way these managers can create something as sophisticated, innovative and intricate as the Hub. I already made my enquiries. These guys might be skilled and powerful, but apart from Daksh no one among them had anything remotely rted to auxiliary professions like artisanry and formations."

    A different elder rebuked.

    The first elder who is clearly lot more aged, sighed and spoke.

    "Still, it is the academy realm that mistreated these talented students and nted the seeds of vengeance. The creator of the Hub might really be the real culprit, however those seeds of vengeance are the reason that he got such a great chance."

    "Enough out of you two. We have bigger things to consider." The Dean of the Viswakarma academy spoke. Actually neither his academy nor him are actually highly powerful, when ites to purebat prowess.

    Even in numbers, the people in Viswakarma academy are quite pitifulpared of the rest.

    But they are highly respected because of their focus on the auxiliary professions. In that regard, they are neck on neck with Gambler''s academy. The major difference being Viswakarma academy only focuses on creating these masters of smithy, formations, inscriptions, etc.

    They don''t focus on any form ofbat strength that much apart from the basic lessons.

    If the students of their academy are interested, they are allowed audit those sses from the other academies.

    Anyway, the Dean of the academy has quite some sway because of all the connections. He turned to Virat and asked.

    "Are you sure that the chip is that difficult to decode? You managed to do the bird when we all thought it was not even worth it to try. You might have a chance."

    "No. I don''t think I can do it. At least not any time soon. It might take months or even years. Because these chips are engraved with so many self-destructive mechanisms. It is almost like the other party is daring us to try to decode them.

    In fact, if anyone with the cultivation level of over second grade even injects their energy forcefully, it will be destroyed.

    This intricacy¡­ I almost feel like whoever made this, actually made these puppets actually wanted us to find out what is inside the bird.

    It is almost like they deliberately left a chance open for someone like me to decode it."

    "Enough Virat, don''t overthink too much. What could anyone gain from leaving a loophole that even a first grader could crack? It is definitely some form of ipetence on their side. I am sure with enough time and thoughts, you can break the chip too. Stay on it."

    The dean of Indra academy spoke as he stood up. He didn''t give Virat or anyone else any chance to interject as he continued.

    "I don''t believe there is any point in this meeting. First of all, I think we need to inform the other academy regions. Otherwise, they will still be victims of further surveince.

    Since we are the first ones that actually found out about this, we can stay united and gain as many benefits as possible.

    Second point, we need to make sure that the Hub is left intact. That is the only way for us to find the people behind it. There is no other possibility for us.

    Finally, we need to find a way to convince the Zeus academy to let our people go. There are a lot of spies from all our academies in that city, it would be trouble if Zeus academy vented their anger on them. We will lose our credibility with our people."

    The rest of them all nodded at the three suggestions, however thest one¡­ they knew the difficulty of it.

    How do they convince the Zeus academy about this, when they already had the momentum because of the already caused destruction.

    "I think we have a method for it." Virat who has the lowest authority there, spoke up. He then projected a different video.

    Inside the video, they all saw three people. Joker, Gungnir and Bloody Chariot. It was the video of them discussing their agreement, when the terms were heard, the room was stunned silence once again as everyone exchanged a nce.

    Things are looking great for them. The Zeus academy people has to let their grip loosen up now.

    Meanwhile¡­.

    In the White crystal nest discovered by the one and only Bloody Chariot, the atmosphere is also very tense.

    It has been a long time since they entered the and since it was a second grade expedition, the second graders split into teams as they explored different ces.

    Every group focused on one Dome each, while Bloody Chariot and the formation team oversaw both the expedition and their escape route.

    Even though Bloody Chariot was a bit skeptical about how the students of the Zeus academy will do after the fight, he still gave them the benefit of the doubt. He hoped that they could do something about the domes.

    After the first couple of hours, the initial skepticism was gone.

    The students actually showed remarkable progress as they interacted with the formations. There are several tests included in there which couldn''t even be triggered because of the overwhelming power of the elders who tried to get close to it. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    After three hours, the first dome opened up. The dome that was handled by the team under the leadership of Christos.

    Bloody Chariot is d that he brought that guy here despite the differences. That team broke down the first dome and then opened up the egg shaped containers around the puppets. They didn''t dare to randomly im ownership to those puppets, in fact even though one of them tried, they couldn''t.

    With bloody chariot on their backs, they left them alone and moved to a different dome. After the first one broke down, the other teams are managed to break it down a bit.

    But after some time, they were unable to do anything to the remaining domes. Up on closer inspections, the students noticed that the domes that they managed to break all had the same number of puppets inside.

    However, the domes that they are trying to break down now, are much bigger and have more puppets as well. They even noticed that there is slight difference in the egg shaped pods inside.

    It seemed like there are levels of these domes.

    Bloody Chariot implored that they identify how they can crack the other domes. Meanwhile, he focused his efforts mostly in assisting the research teams.

    The white crystal is indeed a fascinating item, as they slowly harvested it bit by bit, they started discovering more and more about it. One of them is that the crystal part that is closer to the root of the crystal bush, is of much higher quality.

    The liquiding out of there is of much better quality as well.

    And they also noticed that the more they are moving towards the poles, the denser the crystals be. Another thing is that the as a whole rarely has any spots without the white crystals. Everyone was doing their tasks, and it all seemed to go well¡­

    Until¡­

    In one of the corners of the, a student team that was stuck at this second level of the formation domes along with the rest of the teams, the tensions were really high.

    One of the students who was supposed to be a prodigy in formationsis expressing his dissatisfaction as he led his team with an iron fist.

 Chapter 2214 Development

    Chapter 2214 Development

    "Howe we are unable to break this stupid formation?

    We are already behind that idiot Christos. Why is this happened? Answer me." He yelled at his team like they are his servants.

    "Krimin, this is not a problem exclusive to us. All the formations stopped working. The other teams alreadypared the sizes and the qualities of the formations. They are specting that there are levels in these formations. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    We might have finished the level 1 formations without any hitch.

    For level 2 formations to be solved, we might need to trigger certain conditions. I suggest that you calm down and think straight."

    "Think straight? Think straight? Is that what you said to me or did I mishear you?" Krimin closed in on the young man who spoke and held him by his cor. The young man and the rest of the teammates all looked at Krimin with a weird expression.

    For some reason Krimin has been acting weirdly ever since the first formation has been broken by Christos'' team.

    He became extremely irritable and it seems like some hidden rivalry is there behind them.

    "Krimin there is no point in making a scene. Even Christos is not able to do anything with his team at this moment."

    Another teammate spoke. Krimin didn''t respond and walked close to the formation. The others don''t know, but he knew what things are at stake right now. He is part of the noble league and was supposed to be the part of a different team.

    To be precise, he should have originally being teamed up with Christos.

    But now that Christos has already fallen from grace in the noble league, there is a huge void in the upper part of the hierarchy. Along with Christos, several of his originalckeys were also dragged down, so that power void is up for grabbings.

    Of course, the higher positions particrly in the second grade are not easily obtained.

    Christos was the leader, because he proved himself. So, the seniors and even the elders back at the ns all agreed on one thing. Whoever can prove their superiority against Christos will get the seat.

    Even though most of the noble league members in second grade are on that, not a lot of them are as good as Krimin when ites to the formations. So, this is a great chance and possibly even thest chance for him to prove himself against Christos.

    But after he came here, Christos who was not given a single member from Noble league actually managed to make a team withmoners. He also won most merits as his team was the one to crack the formation for the first time.

    Krimin felt like he is losing his chances every moment Christos and his team beat a formation.

    That is why he is so frustrated. To gain most credit, Krimin even separated himself from the rest of the noble league members and made a team with the high level students in the formation department.

    However, they still fell short.

    Krimin looked at the formation intently and started injecting his energy into it. The others didn''t speak or stop him from doing that. They have already done it and there was no effect. So, as long as Krimin doesn''t go on another rant and abuse the people that are working for him, they are fine with whatever he does.

    However, with every passing second, the energy he is injected is increasing bit by bit along with a fierce facial expression growing grim.

    After a few minutes, Krimin''s eyes widened. A small tremor escaped the formation. Not just from his own, but from the rest of the formations in other areas as well.

    As if on cue, the elders who were focusing on observing the white crystals felt a weird every brushing past them.

    All the formations started vibrating and so did the white crystals. The crystal bushes started giving out a faint white glow that matched with the frequence of their vibrations.

    Bloody Chariot and the elders had an ominous feeling about it. Because for some reason they could feel that they are the target of the vibrations. It was only confirmed after a few minutes, when they noticed that the glow is actually exclusive to the crystals that are surrounding these elders.

    If an elder moved from one spot to the other, the glow is actually transferring as if it had a mind of his own. The glow grew brighter, albeit very slowly and along with it the vibrations also increased.

    The formations all locked up even more and they gave out a weird energy emission that made every student almost shit their pants. That energy is definitely spiritual energy and it is definitely elemental, but it had that eerie feeling to it. Like it shouldn''t have existed in the first ce.

    The elders that came to research, immediately dove into action and came to a conclusion. The formations are getting ready to explode.

    The energy crystals that were glowing near the elders¡­ they are also doing the same. They are getting charged around them to prepare for an explosion. When the elders are moving the energy is being transferred to the crystals nearby them.

    "Sir, there is no other way. For some reason, it seems like the second level formations triggered a destruction mechanism. We still don''t understand the extent of damage these crystals can cause. I think we might have to leave this ce.

    I already tested it out. One of the research crew members left the and the crystals around him lost the glue. At the same time, the energy levels in the nearby crystals around his original location increased by a lot.

    We can let the students take care of it for now."

    The elder exined to Bloody Chariot.

    Bloody Chariot begrudgingly had to agree to it. He left Christos in charge and went back. Christos was to use the formation and get back to him.

    While things developed like that on that, somewhere far away, in the that is controlled by Telchines, things are going in an equally extreme and unexpected way.

 Chapter 2215 Krejin

    Chapter 2215 Krejin

    The telchine territory is isted from the other Olympian regions.

    The only connection they share is actually with the Noble league, even though they are not part of it. All the resources that are harvested in the Telchine territory are traded through the Noble league. And their revenue is equivalent to one third of the revenue of the Noble leaguebined.

    For some reason, Telchine n is one of the few ces the Noble league or any other high level powers want to spread their fangs in.

    The Telchines are secretive, powerful and the word on the streets is that they have such a big influence because Poseidon favors them a lot and they are the actual descendants of the Telchine creatures that are part of Poseidon''s Underlings.

    Sam doesn''t know how much of it is true, except for them being the powerful part.

    However, the moment he stepped into their territory, he got a glimpse of their influence. His task was for him to go into the Undersea forest on a in the Telchine territory and obtain some kind sea shell that is only avable there.

    It is one of the rare resources of the Telchine territory.

    In fact, people are constantly looking for this as the shell has some qualities to improve one''s mental cultivation or something. But there is one problem, the production is so low that they always go in an auction piece by piece.

    Luckily for Sam, the auction is going to be held in two days. Of course, he already knew this is all pre-nned.

    In fact, he was even informed about thisbor. They even mentioned about the auction being held. Of course, all of it is for him to get caught in the n theyid out for him. As soon as he stepped in their territory and entered a city, Sam started feeling some eyes on him.

    They started watching him almost immediately.

    And the person watching is more powerful than him. Even though Sam knew that Christos nned something here, he is not sure of the details. What did he n, what kind of deal he made¡­ he is not aware of this.

    Sam did send his shadow mice out and tried to get more information to understand what he might be facing.

    However, to his surprise he didn''t have to wait too much. Someone approached him within a couple of hours when he sat alone in the bar.

    "Come with me."

    It was a youngdy with long braided silver hair. He is tall, taller than Sam by a couple of heads and she had a menacing aura around her. Everyone in the bar acted as if they haven''t seen her. When she entered the bar, nobody even gave so much a nce.

    But when she talked to Sam, they did look at him with gazes of pity. Even then, they didn''t look at her directly.

    "Do you know me?"

    Sam asked as he took a sip of his alcohol. It wasn''t really as good as the brews made in Dusk, but it is decent.

    He is not worried. Even with all her menacing aura and mysteriousness, she is barely on the same level as him in terms of cultivation. He wouldn''t even be worried, even if she was stronger, much less now.

    "I do know you.

    You are the student of the Gambler academy, here on yourst quest of the twelvebors. You came here for the Ethereal Sea Shell.

    Now,e with me. Our young master wants to talk to you."

    "Who would that young master be? Isn''t it basic courtesy for him toe to me, if he was the one that wants to talk to me?"

    *SILENCE*

    Sam''s voice was not loud, but it wasn''t low either, everyone in the bar heard it and immediately fell silent. Thedy''s aura raged. Killing intent manifested around him, but Sam is unfazed. He took another sip of the alcohol and he also acted like she didn''t exist.

    She ced her hand on his shoulder and said.

    "You bettere if you want to leave this ce alive.

    Just because you are a valued student of some academy, doesn''t mean your arrogance works in Telchine territory. We don''t give a fuck about you, the top students of the academy. You are barely second rate to us.

    So, shut your attitude ande with me."

    By the time she finished her sentence, Sam sensed a different aura focused on him. It is the person that was tailing him ever since he stepped foot here. He is far stronger than Sam, so this aura lock could just be him warning Sam toply.

    "Fuck it. Let''s go.

    I just hope that your young master has better wine that whatever this is."

    He said as he got up.

    Thedy frowned, but didn''t say anything. She didn''t like Sam''s attitude. Even now he ising as if he was being invited as a guest. However, it doesn''t matter what he thinks, as long as hees, that is all she needs.

    As they walked through the streets, everyone was looking at Sam. But just like before, none of them are even ncing at the woman. They are acting as if she didn''t exist. Maybe the power of local influence.

    After walking slowly for over ten minutes, Sam and the woman arrived at a building outside of the city. It is in the middle of the forest and there is not a single structure nearby.

    As soon as they entered the building, they were greeted by arge wide empty hall. It ispletely devoid of people save for one person.

    A young man wearing white robes, sat at the center of the hall of a chair. There is not even a table in front of him. He sat with his one leg over the other leaning back into the chair, leisurely as he looked at Sam.

    He also had silver hair. But his is more vibrant and a bit more sparkly for theck of a better word.

    His eyes are of deep sea blue.

    "You are the Sam that caused the stir in the academy realm. Good to finally see your face. All the talk I heard about you, it was hard to just picture you in my imagination."

    "May I know who you are?"

    Sam asked casually as he looked around. Its as if he is expecting something to happen.

    "Don''t worry. Nothing is going to happen to you here."

    "No, I am not worrying about that. I am just wondering about the hospitality of the Telchine n. With all the reputation that guys carry, I was expecting a little more manners and courtesy. But I guess, all the Olympian ns are the same.

    You guys are just too full of yourself."

    "YOU¡­"

    The reaction came from the woman instead of the young man in front. Energy riled and she was ready to attack, but the young man stopped her.

    He stood up from his seat and the chair disappeared.

    "I am the eighth young master of the Telchine n. My name Krejin. Nice to meet you."

    He extended his hand and Sam shook it.

    "Sam."

    "That is all? No n identity, nothing?"

    "I am sure, you already know about it. And I don''t really need one. My name is more than enough."

    "You got quite some tongue. But I hope yourpetence can back your confidence."

    Sam didn''t answer and just looked at him.

    "Anyway, I wille straight to the point. Someone from the academy realm came to the Telchine territory a few days ago. His name is Christos and I am sure that you know of him.

    He said that you two have some old grudges and he came here seeking our help. At first I didn''t understand why, because Christos has enough influence among the Noble league and other Olympian families, that he doesn''t need a n like us to intervene.

    But recently I came to know that chous are not in the best state and he believes that you are the key elements that might save them from the deteriorating situation.

    He asked our help, to let him use our territory to capture you." Krejin paused.

    "And?"Sam asked. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "Well, I wanted to know what kind of person made the head of the student noble leaguee here begging.

    And I wanted to test you before you go fall into Christos'' trap.

    So, I have a proposal for you."

    "A proposal?"

    "Yes."

    "Can I refuse it?"

    "Unfortunately for you, you cannot. This is non-negotiable."

    "Then don''t call it a proposal."

    "I can''t find a better word. Anyway, enough nonsense.

    Whether you like it or not, you will have go through whatever trap Christos set up for you. However, for that to work, you will have to run in circles for a few days. So, I will the cut the chase and make this more interesting.

    For the next few days, you will be tested my people. If you can do it, I will give a couple of tips to you about Christos trap and also ensure that you will have an Ethereal Sea Shell with you once youe out of Christos trap safely.

    If not, you will be defeated in those tests and you will be captured by us, without the need to use the trap at all."

    Sam felt like something is weird. After all, there is no point to this test. Why would krejin evenplicatethis when there is already a trap set up for Sam? He could just test him based on that trap.

 Chapter 2216 Game

    Chapter 2216 Game

    "Why are you doing this?"

    Sam didn''t bother wasting his brain cells. He directly asked Krejin.

    "Well, Christos came with a bunch of requests. I did promise him that they could done. However, they would only be done on my terms. And I want to see what this generation of the academy realm has to offer.

    My cousin joined a couple of years ago and he dered that its nothing much. However, Christos'' ount differs a lot from what he said.

    I want to see if that is true."

    "So, you are just being willful? I get it. What would that test be? If possible I would like to finish it as early as possible, I got thinks to do and I am on a very tight schedule."

    "Simple, for the next twenty-four hours, you will have people that have the same cultivation level as you, Divine ne Initiation, Initial stage,e and attack you.

    They can attack you from anywhere, they will ambush you, they might even try to assassinate you from afar. Their goal is to kill you and you have to survive. Based on the way Christos hyped you up, I am hoping that you wouldn''t disappoint me.

    So, survive and the reward is yours."

    "That doesn''t sound tooplicated.

    I do have a couple of questions though."

    "Go ahead."

    "You are also of same level as me. Does that mean, you are also going to participate?"

    "I might. It depends on my mood."

    "Second question, is she going to participate?" Sam asked as he pointed at the tall woman that escorted him here. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Krejin was surprised.

    "She does. Why do you ask?"

    "Nothing, just making sure." Sam said as he sized her up.

    "You will be escorted back to the same bar that you were sitting in. Once you reach there, you will have thirty minutes to prepare yourself. Don''t bother trying to escape. Even though only the Initiation level cultivators are going to attack you, Pre-transcendence and transcendence cultivators are in charge of keeping an eye on you.

    The exits from this and the realm are blocked.

    If you use some bullshit like transference token and such, I will use all the means of the Telchine family toe after you and your loved ones.

    I am sure, you don''t want that, no matter how audacious you might be.

    Also¡­"

    Krejin paused and the next moment, a red colored inscription circle appeared underneath Sam''s foot. He immediately tried to jump away, but an invisible force pushed him down. Just enough to make sure that his feet touched the ground and he was able to stand straight.

    It was not there to attack him.

    Its there just to keep him still. The inscription circle is red in color, but except for the color there is nothing threatening about it. Sam immediately activated his energy vision as well as the observation ability.

    He immediately scanned the energy patterns.

    The next moment, his brain is running at the highest speed possible. He is only short of smoke emitting out of his ears and the top of his head. He is trying to decode the formation pattern inscribed in those circles.

    "HMPH"

    Before he could do that, however¡­. A snort of derision or displeasure or both was heard throughout the whole hall.

    "Oh? That old man reacted?" Krejin was amused as he looked at Sam. Sam on the other hand ignored everything, he injected his energy through leg into the inscription circle.

    He is trying to elerate the observation process.

    "Kid, know your ce." An old archaic voice was heard from deep within the building and Sam''s concentration was finally broken. At that exact moment, the inscription circle also disappeared, and a mark appeared on the back of Sam''s hand.

    He frowned as he looked at the runic patterns on it.

    The runes were a bit different from what he is used to, but based on his analysis earlier, he understood a bit.

    "Tracking Spell?" Sam spoke out loud. Almost like it is a question as if he is also unsure of his hypothesis.

    "Not bad. You actually understood it a bit." The same age-old voice spoke, but it didn''t exin what the actual use of the pattern is.

    That doubt was rified by Krejin.

    "This is indeed a tracker spell, however it is a bit different from the regr tracking techniques. The tracking wil begin only if there are certain conditions are triggered.

    In this case, the tracking spell will be activated if you stay at a single ce for a long time, at least thirty minutes or so. After all, I can''t have you use some weird treasure to disguise or hide yourself in my own territory.

    If I could just go berserk then I would have allowed you to, but unfortunately this is my ce and I can''t just thrash it, just because I felt like it. So, to make it easier for me to find you, this tracking spell would be used."

    "What are other trigger points? What is the range?"

    "When you try to leave this city, leave the or the realm. The range¡­ I don''t know."

    Sam just looked at the inscription without saying anything. He is curious. The runes were familiar in many ways, but there is definitely a stark difference. He managed to analyze arge portion of the inscription, but not enough.

    After some time, he looked at Krejin and said.

    "Anything else?"

    "You don''t seem to be worried."

    "Anything else?"

    Sam didn''t answer, he instead he repeated the same question.

    "Young master is asking you a question." The tall woman spoke with dissatisfaction.

    Sam frowned and this made Krejin even more amused.

    "Nothing, you can leave. Escort him properly."

    He directed thetter sentence to that woman. Sam followed her to the bar and sat down at the same table. He closed his eyes and focused on the pattern trying to understand it.

    "You will be dead today. Do you have any will prepared? Or do you want to leave a message to any of your loved ones? We will ensure it will reach them."

    Sam paused and looked at her in askance.

    "Young master is a generous person. He often gives his enemies to have their way with thest wish. As long as it doesn''t exceed certain limits, he is a generous man with a heart of gold."

    "You can keep that gold for yourself. You can screw off now and not disturb me. I have things to do."

    Sam then focused on the inscription again.

    The tall woman felt frustrated. She couldn''t really put a finger on it, but the moment she looked at Sam''s face, attitude, she wanted to beat him to death. There is something that she saw in him, that felt so distant and irritating to her, that made her want to beat him to death.

    She left Sam in the bar and went back to the mansion to meet with her young master.

    "You keep a close eye on him. I just want to see how much he can endure."

    "Yes, young master." She received Krejin''s orders and dered herpliance with the face full of joy and reverence.

    Krejin just shook his head after he watched that expression before walking away.

    The tall woman contacted someone using hermunication token.

    "The target is the one in ck colored attire. He is seated at one of most attention grabbing chairs.

    Mobilize all the forces that you can muster, but all of them should just Divine ne Initiation that too in the Initial stage. Not weaker, not stronger.

    Use any tactics and kill him.

    You can start the attacks in fifteen minutes.

    Once again, don''t you dare lose."

    With that she cut off themunication not even bothering to answer. She went into a different room to sit in meditation while awaiting the uing announcement of her subordinate regarding Sam''s death.

    Sam on the other hand sat in the restaurant as if he was oblivious to the impeding danger, Sam is focused on the pattern inscribed on his hand.

    And in that lost self, the time passed quicker than usual. By then a couple of people entered the bar. Both of them are in neat uniforms. When they arrived and showed a token, the bar tender and the manager cooperated fully.

    The customers were removed.

    Even when the time is up, Sam is not really out of his dazed state. Instead, he actually started projecting some small simtions in the virtual screens.

    *SWOOSH*

    The sword keened through the air and is ready to cut off the head of Sam. But¡­

    *KEEN*

    Right before it could make contact, the sword stopped at the exact moment before it touched Sam. He is still calcting stuff, when all of a sudden¡­

    "Ah¡­ AHH AAAAAAAAAAA¡­"

    The swordsman that was about to take Sam''s life, suddenly fell to his knees before he rolled on the ground.

 Chapter 2217 Working

    Chapter 2217 Working

    The attacker rolled on the floor. His mouth wide open as he tried to gasp for air. However, he couldn''t. No matter how much he tried, he couldn''t do it.

    His body slowly started turning a shade of ck before heid there dead.

    A bunch of small ck shadows left the body as they spread in different directions. Everything happened in just a minute. In that time, Sam just focused on the inscription marking. The second attacker stopped in his tracks as he looked at his dead colleague.

    He wanted to take a step back, but the next moment he remembered where the order came from.

    He gulped hard and lunged forward, hoping to catch Sam with all his power. But the next moment, he stopped in mid-air. His body froze and floated in the air. The next moment¡­

    *SLASH*

    A deep gash appeared on his shoulders spraying blood.

    *SLASH*

    Followed by another on his abdomen.

    *SLASH*

    Followed by one more on his face. One after another more and more gashes appeared on his body.

    "Hopper."

    Sam didn''t even raise his head and said in a dismissive tone. Only then did the continuous and torturous shes stop before the body fell to the ground. After a moment of struggle, he died as well.

    The Bartender cum owner of the restaurant looked at the whole scene in fear.

    His legs started shaking as he imagined the consequences of this. He knew for sure up on whose orders these two people came here. That is why, he staked his business for that hour so that they could finish the job and leave.

    That would be the easier option usually.

    But right now, not only did the target retaliate, he retaliated in such a decisive and straightforward way.

    He saw how Sam didn''t even move from his seat but he did all the damage he has to do. If that is not a clear indication of power and strength, the bartender couldn''tprehend what actually is. He felt a bad feeling welling up in his heart.

    Now, that woman will retaliate and this guy will fight back. In process he will lose his restaurant.

    As soon as his thoughts stopped at that point, he saw a few more people walking inside the restaurant. The pace of their steps is a lot faster than their predecessors. They also wore the same uniforms, all of them carrying swords.

    They immediately ran over and surrounded Sam''s table. Their armors and swords started glowing creating an energy pattern around Sam.

    The sword formation¡­

    One second it is ready to tear Sam apart, but the next second¡­

    Tiny ck shadows started swarming them from all the sides. Their bodies became infected from the shadow energy of the shadow mice. They felt like their veins are being slowly picked up on.

    The next moment, the sword formation is disrupted, apart from the bacsh, they felt cold weapons on their necks. The weapons held by the shadow undead of Sam.

    The necks were split open and their bodies were left there. The shadow undead and the shadow mice disappeared as if they were not there.

    Hopper on the other handnded on Sam''s shoulder and looked at the virtual screens.

    It looked like it is enjoying the glittery screens.

    At the same time, someone else is looking at a projection formation, looking at the scene in the restaurant.

    It is a middle-aged man, the subordinate ofKrijen, but a few levels. He is the one who received the order from the talldy. At first he thought it would be a simple thing and sent a couple of knights. But while they were on their way, he wanted to be sure and sent the rest of the squad.

    Before the squad reached, the first two died, and before he could stop the squad, the squad died.

    "Call the Dark Dagger Squad. Deploy their first level warriors. We need to kill him asap and clean up that ce.

    I want you to recruit new fine members and rece that knight squad. We cannot let this matter reach young master Krejin."

    The man tried to cover his behind as he babbled the orders.

    His orders were moved forward and within a few minutes, a bunch of shadowy figures moved towards the restaurant. The shadow mice and the undead moved. However, the sheer number of the people that came at him, even the numerous mice and the immortal undead might not suffice.

    While Sam is busy, the sh happened. Shadow mice and undead are shing with the enemies who are skilled in using shadows as well.

    It seemed like every prominent family held an assassination squad skilled in using shadow skills.

    As the shadow mice and the undead fought, some skilled assassins started getting past them and entered the restaurant. Sam didn''t move and just spoke.

    "Are you moving or not?" He addressed the Hopper on his shoulder. But instead of answering him, it just stared at the characters on the glittery screen.

    "When will you ever reach maturity?" Sam muttered as he got the message. The little guy just wants to be a brat now of all times.

    He focused back on the screen while the ring with his divine dimension stone glowed.

    Just when a shadow was about to pierce the dagger in Sam''s throat¡­

    *SWOOSH*

    A giant arm caught a hold of the shadow and dragged it away.

    "Keep quite."

    Sam said to the ape as he started drawing something on the wooden table. The golden ape nodded and slowly walked away with the shadow while it also captured another shadow with his other arm.

    The next thing they knew, both dark squad members were minced into pulp without making any sound at all.

    The ape then proceeded to kill other members as quietly as possible.

    The battle only gave out the sound of the wind whistles except for that, nothing else came. The middle-aged man saw this and his heart turned cold.

    "No¡­ this cannot be. That is a Golden Ape. How is it even here? And to have it as a pet, we can''t deal with him with just Initial stage Divine ne Initiation cultivators, we need people of higher level." He muttered to himself.

    He is sure that unless the true geniuses were brought forward, he wouldn''t be able to deal with the Golden Ape.

    And since Sam managed tomand the ape, the assumed that his background is either too powerful on par with their own young master, or he is too powerful. Either way, the difficulty just increased by a dozen fold.

    "We cannot sir. We cannot use the next level cultivators. Madam gave strict orders that we need to use the cultivators of the same levels. It is the requirement set by young master Krejin himself."

    The middle-aged man fell silent for a moment and spoke.

    "Deploy all the auxiliary forces of that level. Spare no expense and use everyone in our control. I will go and apply for usage of special squads and deployment from our Foster Wing."

    Just like that he went.

    Soon, the whole street was evacuated and it was all taken over by the forces. People who wore different uniforms and had different affiliations were all pulled together.

    As long as they are connected to the Telchines, they were asked toe and they all rushed at the restaurant at the same time.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The explosive sound were the first to reach Sam.

    He waved his hand again. Sky and Yanwu came out in their smaller forms.

    "Keep it quiet."

    That is all Sam said.

    Both the birds flew out of the windows and into the sky.

    *BOOM*

    With a loud explosion, wind and golden mesbined created a tornado.

    Sam''s hand flinched a bit and he muttered.

    "I told you to keep it quiet, you idiots."

    He went back to his work.

    After noticing that Sam is not reacting that much to all the noise the birds are creating, the ape became sneaky and with a grin started a rampage.

    The people started falling like flies. The whole street is drenched in blood as the battle intensified. Hundreds of dead bodies.

    As the bodies increased, so did the people that came. Sam had to release a few more beasts. Raiju and Forrest Bear were also out. Only Dia and Mia remained inside. Sam didn''t want to let them out too.

    Since he is in Olympian territory, those two beasts¡­ they are a big deal here.

    Particrly the Hydra. Even though Poseidon and Hydra never really had too much interaction, the talk in the streets is that the descendants of Poseidon have been trying to tame the Hydras for centuries.

    Sam only heard it fleetingly, so he didn''t know the truth of the matter. Anyway, their help is not needed and he doesn''t need to let them out. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    Hours passed and Sam still kept on working with the runic patterns. He made significant patterns.

    Meanwhile, the tall woman who gave the order to kill Sam came out of the meditation and when she got the report¡­ let''s just say that it is nowhere near what she expected.

 Chapter 2218 Progress

    Chapter 2218 Progress

    The tall woman, Krejin''s number oneckey.

    The woman that literally grew up with her and was decided as his assistant since the moment she was born. Her name is Si.

    Si has seen many things in her life. She has seen her young master pick fights with people older than him. She has seen him crush thepetitors in the family. She has seen him single handedly subdue the businesses of theirpetitors.

    While seeing all of that, she met many people.

    By virtue of thework and the circle the Telchians operate in, the people she met are all of distinguished nature. She saw warriors that could man handle the elders in the academy realm like fathers beating the shit out of their sons.

    She has seen mages that could destroy a on a whim.

    She has seen genocides and participated in a few. With all the life experience she umted, she believed that she is assisting her young master to stand at the pinnacle of the world and nothing else can surprise her.

    Now¡­ she has seen it.

    The one thing that surprised her more than anything. The first thing she noticed as soon as she came out of the meditation is not the report prepared by her subordinate, rather it is the location of Sam.

    She believed that there wouldn''t be a location indicating his existence, because in her mind he is already dead.

    But, not only was he alive and well, but he is in the exact same ce. The same ce that she left him. Not even an inch away.

    That made her jump to her feet and check the report. Even while taking the report she hoped in the corner of her heart that Sam might have surrendered and was being held captive by her subordinates after he put up some fight.

    But the contents of it made her shiver in fright.

    "We used up so many of the Telchine forces, but he still didn''t even move?

    And what about these legendary beasts? Where the fuck did theye from?" Si yelled at her subordinate as she ran out. She moved towards the restaurant while she also spoke through hermunication token.

    "Push the approval for the usage of the special squads. Whatever squads that have the Initial Stage of Divine ne initiation cultivators shall move right away. As long as they are avable they need to move."

    Unlike the middle-aged man, Si does have some special authority, being the right hand of Krejin and all.

    As soon as she spoke, the middle-aged man''s request was approved. He knew that Si is out of the meditation. Even though he felt relieved that the special squads areing, he is worried about what Krejin will do it.

    After all, hundreds of people died under his watch.

    Someone should be held answerable to it.

    He mentally prepared himself as he contacted the special squads to guide them to the restaurant. Most of the special squads are actually on differents and messages were sent. But two squads were already on this only. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    So, he immediately went to them and gathered their eligible candidates.

    Eight from the Fire fist Squad and Seven from the Ice spear squad. As their names imply, both squads are filled with Warrior Mages. Fire fist squad is full of cultivators who are mostly skillful at fist technique, but also have high affinity with fire element.

    They are good to create destruction onrger scales.

    The Ice spear squad on the other hand is full of spear users that have ice elemental affinity. The thirteen people gathered and arrived at the restaurant in no time. By the time they arrived, Si was already there.

    She watched as the beasts leisurely rested.

    Raiju is crouching down at one of the corners of a broken building, Sky and Yanwu upied the roofs of different buildings. Ape is digging through the spatial rings along with the shadow mice and Forrest Bear.

    They are the most mischievous of the bunch and they having the time of their lives as they distributed the loot.

    Sam is still at the table. There are a bunch of engravings on the table in front of him.

    *BOOM*

    The inscription failed and the next moment the table exploded.

    Ape who was busy arguing with the other beasts about the loot, looked and hurriedly came forward. He took the broken table away and reced it with another table. Sam just kept on working as if he didn''t even notice it.

    The special squad members also saw this scene and felt a sense of unease.

    "Who the hell is this guy? We are supposed to take him down?" One of the fire fist members said and looked around. The whole area is covered in dead bodies. There is almost no ce left in the vicinities of the restaurant without a dead body and blood that came along with it.

    It looked like a ughter house. The only difference is here the butchers and beasts and the meat is reced by cultivators. The special squad couldn''t help but feel a bit troubled.

    "We can only attack all at once. The beasts are very powerful. We don''t know much about them apart from the knowledge we gained from the books. But from the looks of it, their strength is way too high, on part with the geniuses of Foster Unit.

    We need to overpower them.

    My suggestion would be to focus on one, while blocking the rest¡­"

    One of the fire fist members exined the ne. Soon, the ice spear members surrounded the whole area, standing far apart as they started a formation. Sam who was writing with ink, suddenly felt a chill. The ink froze in his hands.

    He frowned and his fingers started glowing, warming the ink back up. He then looked at the ice spear members who activated the formation.

    The beasts are all ready and they seemed to be in discussion.

    "There are thirteen people here. It is impossible for you guys to divide evenly. Just deal with it, this is irritating."

    Sam''s voice stopped them all and the beasts looked at their enemies. Fire fist members and Ice spear members suddenly felt a bit wronged. The beasts are looking at them as if they are ming them. ming them for not being an even number that they could divide.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The battle continued. Si watched the whole battle from start to finish. Itsted exactly ten minutes. Three minutes breaking the formation, three minutes capturing the weak link and the remaining four minutes is torturous.

    The beasts made these people feel sick in the stomach about their own physical conditions before they died.

    Si at that moment, understood one thing. Sending any more special squads blindly wouldn''t result in anything, instead it could dwindle their own forces. So, she decided to sit back and draft a n. Soon, the remaining special squads starteding one after the other.

    Three hours of nning and careful execution, all aimed at the beasts and then Sam. All of it¡­

    The execution began after the three hours, Si doesn''t remember what happened after that. She knew that the whole ce is covered with formations as they surrounded Sam and his beasts.

    They were about to move and deal with the birds first.

    Sky and Yanwu started circling the sky together, creating a golden me tornado. That is all she remembered.

    She doesn''t know what happened.

    At that moment, Si felt an itchy feeling on her forearm and tried move it. Only then did she realize that she is unable to move as if something heavy resting on her body.

    She opened her eyes wide and looked around. With great difficulty she managed to sit up. All she saw is the deadbodies of various uniforms. All of them dead with various weapons poking out of their bodies, some even had their own bones showing out of their bodies.

    It was as if they all died with the sole intention of disying the cruelty of their internal violent personalities.

    She looked around and her eyes finallynded on Sam, who is still at the table. His eyes areser focused. He is still busy.

    He is now surrounded by all of his beasts.

    They are also looking at him intently.

    Because at the moment Sam''s eyes might be focused, but his body is trembling a bit. There is a weird brightness to his eyes as even his hand trembled slightly.

    Weird runic patterns that didn''t look like runic patterns appeared on the table in front of him as he carefully drew one after the other.

    He finally understood it. He understood the significance behind the runic patterns that were used in creating that tracking spell.

    "Si calling. Requesting emergency backup. Break the protocol. Breach it."

    Si suddenly yelled on top of her lungs. Sam who is about to write the final set of engravings, suddenly stopped.

 Chapter 2219 Disturbance

    Chapter 2219 Disturbance

    For the past few hours, Sam''s brain is on overload.

    He is working with the utmost focus that he could manifest. The weird runes¡­ the reason they were familiar yet unfamiliar¡­that sensation was like an itch to him. The only thing that he understood about is how the energy is transferring through that inscription, which made it into a tracking spell.

    He didn''t get a good idea of each rune worked while he was being inscribed by this spell.

    So, he came back to the restaurant and started studying right then and there. As for why he did that immediately, to put it simply he didn''t feel threatened by the challenge. He has his beasts and he is confident in their abilities.

    There is no need for him to even make a move.

    He is confident that even without him moving, the beasts could cleanly handle any first grade level cultivator. He took the chance to study those runes. Of course, apart from scratching that itch in his mind, he does have another purpose.

    To leave a message.

    An arrogant and haughty message that is backed with his ownpetence. A message that will be deeply engraved in the minds of the people. A message that will be remembered

    He was thinking of how to do it and he did have some ns in his head, but this tracker spell gave him the perfect opportunity.

    So, he left the heavy lifting for the beasts while he worked on the runes. After spending a few hours on it, he saw just how difficult it is to draw them. Even though he managed to draw them with energy, the runes didn''t work.

    They copsed as soon as he tried to make them transmit energy.

    He even went as far as replicating the exact pattern of the runic circle that appeared when the spell was being cast on him.

    But it is still fall apart, which should have been impossible. Then he started dividing each of the runes within the inscription and ran hundreds of small energy simtions to understand how they work. He was multitasking all over the ce.

    After repeated failures, he finally found where the key was.

    The familiarity of the runes. He started looking at the familiarity and matched it with what he already knew, which are the regr runes and their patterns. Sam is extremely confident in his ability use the general runes.

    After another round of repeated tries, he managed to find what the trick and he was absolutely gob smacked.

    Then he started trying his inscriptions based on what he understood. Repeatedly failures once again. Knowing the principle and applying it are different things. The repeated explosion of tables was for that exact reason.

    Of course, he did see some sess and he was about to engrave a bigger inscription that he had high expectations about.

    For that, he even made the beasts sit down on the side without making any noise. He did every rune slowly, at a snail''s pace. He was at the final set of runes that needs to be engraved. At that exact moment¡­

    "Si calling. Requesting emergency backup. Break the protocol. Breach it."

    He heard the loud yelling of Si, his hand trembled and the energy that he was about inject went off bnce just a bit.

    *CRACK*

    The table cracked. The crack started from the inscription pattern and it slowly spread all over the table''s surface like a spider web. Sam''s face that was originally focused suddenly turned into a sea of calm. He looked at the woman who screamed.

    His aura changed a bit.

    He stood up and started walking towards her.

    "What part of ''Keep it quiet'' did you have trouble understanding?"

    Sam''s words were low and menacing.

    Si felt his killing intent as he walked towards here. He walked through the corpses as if they were not even there and stopped right in front of her. She was still sitting on the ground and looked up to meet his gaze.

    That gaze that is filled with anger.

    It wasn''t unrestricted rage, rather it felt like he gathered the rush of a crashing river and confined it in a small marbled sized container with sheer brute force. It is dangerous, yet looked calm on the surface.

    Ever since Sam stepped his foot in this ce, ever since she saw him, Si only had one expression on her face.

    Contempt.

    She talked down to him, acted haughty, particrly when saw Sam go to the restaurant directly to drinkvishly as soon as he stepped in the Telchine territory.

    He didn''t act vignt, he didn''t act careful, he didn''t even attempt to cover his tracks. He was carefree as if he wasing here on a trip. This pissed her off. Particrly, when Krejin showed such interest in him.

    In her opinion, since her young master ced high expectations on someone, it should practically be their life''s purpose to live up to those expectations, it is totally on them.

    And Sam is just goofing off. That pissed her off alright.

    She talked to him with derision and contempt. But now¡­ she is unable to utter a single word. She wanted to scream and hurl curses at him. She wanted to yell and talk down to him. She wanted to remind him of the lowly life he was.

    But her words didn''t daree out.

    Even if her mind was thinking of them, her body is refusing to obey. Her vocal chords are refusing to activate. They are all saying same thing to her.

    That she shouldn''t.

    Sam raised his hand, extending it towards her face, like a stealthy snake, slow and steady. Si didn''t move, or her body refused to budge. Its as if it is saying to her.

    ''Just surrender'' n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    At that moment¡­

    *BOOM*

    An explosion out of nowhere, aimed at Sam''s hand.

    *SWOOSH*

    He took two steps back. The attacknded in the middle. Right in between in him and Si.

    She was blown away by that attack, creating more distance between him and her. A young man came in between both of them and stood there. Shielding her from Sam.

    "Step back. Now." The young man spoke through gritted teeth.

    Sam looked to the side. The beasts were ready to move and only stopped after this gesture.

    At the same time, he also noticed someone else. A few more people that were standing a bit away from his current position. Their gazes felt familiar, maybe because they are the group that were in charge of monitoring Sam.

    Sam looked at the group while addressing the young man.

    "Krejin made it clear that only people of my cultivation level will attack me. What is this?"

    The young man''s face turned a tad bit red. Maybe from embarrassment.

    "We are not attacking you. We are here to stop you from continuing this sick ughter."

    *CHUCKLE*

    Samughed slightly. The young man was pissed. He knew that he himself talked absolute nonsense. He just couldn''t just say that he wanted to save this woman so that he and his team wouldn''t be implicated for her possible death.

    After all, they are all subordinates and they don''t know what runs in the heads of their entric masters.

    They just took a bet, assuming that Krejin would want this woman alive and they might be punished if she isn''t.

    As for those big words, he just didn''t want to admit it. He felt shameful for doing something likes, particrly when he saw the dozens of corpses all over the street.

    He only stood firmly without giving Sam any response.

    "Do whatever you want, she will die today. One way or the other."

    Sam spoke and activated fusion. It is dual elemental fusion that he developed. Space and Shadow.

    *SWOOSH*

    He disappeared into his own shadow and appeared behind Si. Shadow sword appeared in his hand as he swung it towards her neck.

    *BAM*

    Just before it could touch her neck, he felt a strong force blocking his sword, not letting it move.

    *SWOOSH*

    He didn''t waste his time, he disappeared and arrived at a different spot. Aiming to kill her in the same way, but the result was the same.

    The opponent, the young man, is atte stage of Divine ne Initiation. He is just two levels higher than Sam. He is also the weakest among the group of guards that interfered. The others didn''t dare to go in recklessly.

    *BAM*

    *BAM*

    *BAM*

    "Stop it kid. Don''t push it too far."

    The young man spoke through his gritted teeth.

    Sam just smirked and continued to attack.

    *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

    The attacks became faster and more precise. The young man had a hard time resisting Sam without attacking back. His body is urging him to do so. His instinct is tempted to do so, but he cannot.

    After five minutes, just when he was about reconsider that thought¡­

    "What the fuck is happening here?"

    A voice familiar to all of them was heard.

 Chapter 2220 Message

    Chapter 2220 Message

    Krejin looked at the situation with a frown.

    The dead bodies around the area shocked him. After handing over the task to Si, he didn''t bother checking it again. But now that he saw its results, he gave Sam a once over and then to the beasts.

    A glint of greed shed past those eyes before it disappeared.

    He then looked at the young man who was blocking Sam''s sword. He wanted to say something, but at this moment, Sam smiled.

    "Let''s get serious since we have the appropriate audience." His arm that was holding the shadow sword glowed a bit. A glove covered his palm magically even without the sword moving in the slightest.

    The glove started glowing.

    Shadow energy ran rampant from within his body and the glove, all of thembined charging in to the shadow sword.

    Sam could sense the feelings of the shadow sword''s spirit through the connection he shared. At that moment, the spirit acted like an athlete on drugs. As if it was filled with roid rage. A crassparison but very apt.

    Sam didn''t do any fancy move, he just directly shed the sword from his position.

    Everything happened in the fraction of a breath. Before the young could react, the sword went through him, cleaving him into two. The young man''s body fell down. Now no one stood between him and Si.

    The glove copsed and turned into dust.

    Sam held the sword calmly while using his left hand to catch Si by her throat as she sat there in shock. Only after she felt her body light and breath go low did she realize that she was held up in the air by her neck.

    Sam looked at Krejin and smiled.

    "You bragged so much about, Telchines, their pride and all the shit.

    But it seems like your subordinates don''t carry any of that. Just the prospect of a possible punishment is enough for them to break the protocolpletely. Truly a pity, for some of your position, all you have is some ipetent and barely loyal subordinates."

    Sam''s words had an immediate effect on Krejin.

    His face turned red, and his fists clenched. He wanted to kill someone so badly at that moment.

    He looked at the squad member that interfered.

    "Since your team is what changed the game, then let me crank it up a bit. I will y your game now, I will run and survive, but the twist is, your dear subordinate, this woman whose eyes that I very much want to gouge out, will be with me.

    Before the time limit is up, if you do not catch me, with just the specified rules that you set.

    I will do an autopsy on her while he is alive. I will hide each of her parts in the Telchine territory for you guys to find like the treasure hunt the children y.

    I do believe that she deserves a proper burial since she worked for you so loyally. I wonder if you would be able to find her body though."

    Sam snapped his fingers. A grenade flew out of nowhere and exploded mid-air. The explosion created a massive sh thatst for three seconds.

    When the sh is gone, Sam is floating mid-air. His beasts disappeared and he held Si by her hair carrying her like some luggage in his hands.

    Krejin gritted his teeth.

    The calmness that he wore on his face since the start is gone. He is really pissed. It did seem like the squad take a right decision. Krejin does care about this woman.

    Sam snapped his fingers once again.

    Another grenade ofpletely different nature appeared in front of him.

    "See you soon."

    He smirked before he disappeared from there.

    *BOOM*

    The explosion filled with death energy spread like a wildfire in a dead forest.

    Itsted a few minutes. Krejin didn''t even flinch, he just looked into the darkness that enveloped him. His senses are still intact and his body is fool proof. The death energy with its meager amount is no threat to him.

    He just stood there until the energy clearedpletely. His gaze locked into the squad that interfered. While the squad looked at something else. They are looking at the dead bodies on the street. Those dozens of bodies, are all glowing slightly. Right in front of their eyes, one by one started standing up.

    They became undead creatures.

    This time, the squad didn''t hold back, they directly made a move. Some of them closed in on Krejin to protect him while the rest of them attacked the undead.

    They made the right move, but their estimations were wrong. Unlike what they thought, the undead didn''t attack them directly. They also didn''t try to swarm them. Instead, their bodies started absorbing the surrounding energy crazily.

    For a moment, the spiritual energy in the surroundingspletely lost the bnce.

    Krejin''s frown tightened. He hurriedly activated his defense artefact.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    A series of explosions, caused by the undead being overloaded with the surrounding spiritual energy. Meat and bones were sshed all over the streets. The whole squad was caught in the explosion. The high level members were not effected.

    The low level members were.

    Krejin would have also been in caught in it, if not for the defense artefact.

    However, that is not the main issue. Themission created there is the bigger problem. Because of the magnitude of the explosion, the surrounding area quaked like a coward''s legs. The whole city is in aplete disarray.

    It is one thing for the forces to die, but even themon popce under the Telchine territory is being affected. And Krejin is the one answerable for it.

    "Track him down. The tracker spell is still on him. Be on his tail and move the Foster Unit and the Branch Elites.

    I want him captured alive, immediately.

    And don''t you dare kill any of his beasts. Not just killing them, they shouldn''t even suffer a scratch. You have the leeway on how much you can attack him, but the beasts are out of the question. And this time only Initial Stage of Divine ne Initiation.

    Even if the world turns upside down, no rule breaking. I will not tolerate it."

    Krejin left the orders to his subordinates and left.

    He didn''t disappear like before, but instead went to the same hall in which the spell was ced on Sam.

    "Old man, you there?"

    He greeted the empty hall space. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "What do you want, kid?"

    "I need to know the live location of that guy, Sam. I know that you can do it. So, help me out here."

    "Why are you asking me that? I am sure, the trinkets I gave your team are already enough to track his location properly. Why do you want know his live location at all times?"

    The old man''s voice asked.

    Krejin didn''t really have an answer to that. Technically, he would get a lock on Sam''s location sooner orter. As for why he needs an immediate solution.. Its just that he is in a bit of hurry. He just doesn''t want to wait and deal with Sam as soon as possible.

 Chapter 2221 Back in Academy Realm

    Chapter 2221 Back in Academy Realm

    "Krejin, you made a deal with that man.

    You admitted that only if he stays in one location for more than an half an hour would your people be notified. I set the tracker to act that way. You knowing his live location is not the part of thatmitment.

    By doing this, you will be going back on your word.

    That is something you can nevere back from. Are you sure you want to do this?"

    "Old man, are you giving me moral education right now?"

    "No, I am telling you are worth just as much as your word. With this action, your worth is going to decrease by a lot."

    "But that guy has Si. I need to find him or she will die." Krejin said with his fists clenched.

    "And?" His words stumped Krejin.

    "What do you mean ''And''?"

    "Krejin, it seems like you are so absorbed in your identity as the young master of Telchine n. Everything went your way for too long and too many times. It seems like you don''t understand the way of the world anymore.

    You made a deal with Christos to screw over some guy.

    That''s your business, but you would have to be ready to deal with the consequences it. No man would take it lying down when ites to their lives. They have the right to fight back and that is what he is doing.

    On top of the deal, you even made a game out of his situation.

    He is ying it now and he got the upper hand. You have to deal with it. You used to ask me why I have such an obsession withmitments.

    This is the exact reason.

    Once youmit to something, you have to face the heat it brings, no matter what."

    Krejin gritted his teeth even hard to the point, the old man could practically hear that noise.

    "I want to know his live location. I can''t afford to lose Si now."

    "Really? But do remember, even if you managed to win this after using this location, in reality do remember that you lost. Also remember that a young man came here alone with his meager strength and yed the game that you set.

    But the first one to cave was you in the end."

    With that a small token flew through darkness of that hall before itnded in front of Krejin.

    Krejin hesitated a bit before he took the token. He wanted to say something to that old that hasn''t even shown his face until now. But after some thought, he realized he is out of words.

    He cannot say anything to justify his actions.

    He already said everything he wanted to say. ''Wanted to say'' is the keyword.

    He activated the token. A screen was projected before him. The map of the city was shown and Sam''s spot is highlighted with a red dot.

    He contacted his subordinates and said.

    "He is at the west corner of the city. Go ahead and deal with him immediately."

    Sam was resting there and he restarted engraving the inscription with these new runes. Even though the previous flow was disturbed, it did work as practice for him. This time it was a bit easier. Si who was already weak with all of her energy exhausted, looked at him with hateful gauge."

    "The words that I told your young master are not false. With every passing second that you are looking at me with those eyes, my temptation to gouge them is increased.

    If you want to live longer, you better shut those eyes down and mind your own business. Pray to Poseidon that your young master and all hisckeys are capable enough to catch me and get you back. Or¡­ you can think of the ces that your parts have to be buried.

    Even torn apart, being buried in nice ces is not a bad thing."

    "Do you really think you can live after doing this? Even if young master Krejin binds by his word and not attack you with higher level cultivators, you are going to die in that trap set up by Christos.

    Even if you use up all your luck and survive that, young master Krejin wille and kill you no matter where you hide.

    Even if you hide in the deepest parts of hell, he wille and avenge me." n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "And? Any more hopes that you have?" Sam said casually.

    Si looked at him in askance.

    "You can list out all the hopes, or derations about your young master as you want. I would like to see how much trust you have on him and how much he can actually live up to.

    I am feeling a bit amused."

    "Amused? You are either feigning confidence or your brain is dead. Talk all you want. Soon, you will die."

    "You had your chance."

    Sam went back to doing the inscription. After around ten minutes, Sam spoke once again.

    "We have somepany. Seems like the first batch of suicide victims are here."

    Sam stood up and walked towards the entrance of the building he is in. Three peoplended on the road along with three hawk type beasts. They all carried sabers and wore green. Looked like they are a unit.

    "You¡­"

    One of them started speaking, but as soon as the first word was out, Sam stopped it.

    *BOOM* *SLASH* *HOWL*

    Before long the three of them are dead along with two birds while the third bird flew away with injuries. Sam came back in and met the shocked gaze of Si with his own.

    "You seem shocked. Did you really expect those small fries to do something?"

    Sam started doing the inscription once again. But as soon as he did, Si sensed that the next group is already there.

    But to her surprise, they didn''te in and soon battle sounds were heard.

    "Don''t think too much, they are fighting with the undead creatures created from the corpses of the first batch."

    Si is a bit lost. She almost forgot about the undead wave that Sam created in the previous battlefield.

    She knew that it is going to be a long day.

    Meanwhile, back in the Academy realm.

    Bloody Chariot who came back from that expedition was met with the chaos the Zeus academy and the rest of the Olympian region is in.

    He immediately went to the academy grounds to see if he can find anyone. Luckily for him, every significant elder is in a meeting. They are trying to decide on a situation because they are met with a tough situation.

    "What is happening here?"

    Bloody Chariot asked. Killing intent is running rampant from him.

    The elders froze in their spots. Their discussions came to a halt. They all exchanged a ncemunicating to decide who is going to speak with Bloody Chariot.

    "Speak"

    He pointed at one of them and asked.

    That elder stood up and started exining the situation.

    "It all started after the pocket dimension opened and the first graders left. The hub managers of all branches started killing everyone like crazy. Their primary target are our fourth graders, the other academy fourth graders were also attacked, but not many.

    Our people died the most.

    Not just students, around half a dozen instructors died. Elder Gawk also died. Icarus and Ivar joined forces to kill him. Our fourth grade copsedpletely. We already locked down the whole city, but the news already reached the other regions.

    They are all pressuring us to release their people that are stuck in the city.

    We are also tried to capture Joker and the managers in the hub, but none of them is there. All the hub activities are closed down. We were nning to destroy it, but¡­"

    The elder paused and looked at Bloody Chariot nervously.

    "What happened? Continue."

    "The people from Sanatan realm came here and demanded that we release their members. They gave us a video showing something. They are threatening to release it if we do notply. They also have some other conditions."

    As she said, she showed him a video.

    It is the video of Joker discussing the deal with Bloody Chariot and Gungnir. Bloody Chariot''s heart turned cold. The Video is indeed not something that should be leaked at the moment.

    He didn''t even have a proper justification to say why he did that.

    That will make him reveal the details of the expedition. Then he thought of how the expedition was all directed by Joker himself. Doubts started to raise, but before that he needs to handle the problem at hand.

    "Did you perform a search? Did you find any traces of those managers?"

    "Yes, sir. We did, but they are nowhere to be seen. It seemed like they disappearedpletely."

    "How can they disappear like that? How did they even escape from all of you present here?"

    All of them stayed silent.

    "Let''s go meet that representative from the Sanatan realm."

 Chapter 2222 Next Step

    Chapter 2222 Next Step

    Bloody Chariot met with the representative from the Sanatan Region.

    The man who was waiting for him belongs to Yaksha Race. The same ones that Sam encountered in his journey, but this man has a very high-grade bloodline among Yakshas. They are basically considered the assistants of Gods.

    "A Yaksha. Haven''t seen you guys in a while. So, what are those conditions that you want to talk about? And what is your name?"

    "You can call me the Messenger."

    "Oh, you are part of that unit. This makes it easier. Out with it, let''s just get this over with."

    "Sir, the moves of the managers of the hub, as you might know are very sketchy. The Hub of our region has beenpletely taken over by our alliance of academies."

    "Alright, I know that would happen. Get to the point."

    "I am about to. Thepromising video of you and Gungnir discussing a deal with Joker is out now. So, we don''t really have too much trust in you. In fact, there are other rumors about you, your organization and the noble league.

    So, I hope you can release our people in your region first. That is our main condition. Apart from that, we needplete details on the expedition that you nned under the guidance of that Joker¡­."

    Messenger went on to exin the conditions.

    Bloody Chariot listened in on with his fists clenched and jaws tightened. He wanted nothing more than to rip that throat off the Messenger.

    But he held back.

    He got his balls locked in a vice at the moment and thest thing he can do right now is act up. The Zeus academy is locked in such a critical phase right now¡­

    He agreed to several of the conditions and with great effort managed to push some of them back with some negotiations. Only after that did he heave a sigh of exhaustion.

    He went back to meet with the elders.

    "Start releasing those outsiders and call in for a lockdown after that. Only allow one exit and check every single one of them. If you find them remotely suspicious hold them down. Contact all the academies.

    Make sure you get a message across.

    Tell them that the zeus academy is on the edge and their spies won''te out if they don''t admit to their identities. We will not shake them down, we will not ask them to reveal any information they might have collected until now.

    They just need to admit their identity.

    Anyone that cannot prove their own identity will be held here and they will be locked downpletely.

    They will not be allowed to leave."

    The instructions were sent immediately.

    The eight managers started moving along with the crowd. They walked through the exit, they even managed to answer all the questions that were asked. They were prepared enough. So, smoothly they escaped the lockdown without arising any suspicions.

    Once they left and entered deep into the forest without anyone noticing their presence, they had a meeting. Their disguises disappeared and they are back to their normal forms.

    "So, the next step of the n. We need to get back in there."

    "How many do you think we could do like this?" One of them asked the other.

    "I don''t know, until they actually realize the pattern in the killings that we are making. I am sure they will know, after we are done with the second academy. With bloody chariot there¡­ that guy is very smart if not anything else."

    "Let''s get on with it. We already got the goods, didn''t we?"

    They all took out the special injections once again and injected themselves. This time however, their bodies changed into a different set of people. And all of them took out the costumes they prepared beforehand.

    The costumes re just uniforms of different academies.

    "You all know the n right. Go to marked spots, activate the special devices which we don''t know how they work and then get back into the Olympian city.

    And be sure that when you activate the device, you take care of your safety. Don''t go within a few hundred feet of the device. If you do, you will take the heat that the Olympian city has to take."

    Icarus announced and all of them moved.

    They used their full speeds to reach their respective locations. There, in the middle of nowhere, each of them found arge metallic pir. They didn''t dare to step anywhere near a hundred feet of that pir.

    They looked at them from far away and took out their crystal tablets. At the same time, they also sent a bunch of metal puppet birds. The bird puppets circled around the metal pir. Then the crystal tablet was activated.

    They pressed a fewbinations as per Sam''s instructions. The birds activated and so did the pir. It started glowing brightly. At least that is what the managers could see.

    But what they couldn''t see, hear or even feel is emitting from that pir. It''s a frequency of the sound that cultivators of most races would not even be able to listen. It is programmed and created to only alert the beasts.

    Something simr to a modern day dog whistle.

    A very highly upgraded dog whistle that will make every beast go crazy with rage. The n is created with the information Sam gained from his travelling around the realm. He used all his knowledge to find what kinds beasts are situated in what locations. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    As he already learned before, there are a bunch of beasts transported to the academy realm by the gods, to not only test the students, but also the instructors and the Elders of the academies. He used the knowledge he gained and the locations of the beasts, before setting up these pirs carefully.

    The managers looked at the pir and the beasts in the surroundings that are gathering towards the pir.

    Ivar looked at the pir he was watching and the beast that came in at thest. The earth quaked a bit as the beast stepped forward.

    "Oh boy. Bloody Chariot is going to have hell of a time with this."

    The beasts gathered at the pir. The small fries didn''t dare to touch the pir for some reason and the big one immediately mmed the pir with its paws.

    The next moment however.

    The beasts immediately became silent. There is no sound whatsoever. It seemed like the peace that came with the absence of the pir made them savor without any roars. The silence onlysted for a couple of moments though.

    Because a few hundred feet away from the original location of the pir, the earth started shaking a bit and opened to up to push another pir out.

    The frequency a bit higher and making the beasts crazier. All the beasts immediately ran towards that location and destroyed that pir, only to activate the next one a few more hundred feet away, in the direction of the academy.

    "This will do. The beasts will be there to give us good enough distraction. Gotta go meet up with the team."

    Ivar muttered and left.

    The situation is pretty simr in all the other locations as well. Everyone did the exact same thing as him and started going to back to their meeting point before heading to the academy realm. But they are not doing a normal entry, they are doing a special entry with the transference tokens.

    Straight into the belly of the beast instead of doing it in a more roundabout way.

    They met up onest time before executing the next step.

    ''Here goes nothing''

    That''s the thought they all hand in their minds as they used the transference tokens at the same time. All of them disappeared and each of them reappeared in the space gates of the respective academies.

    Not just them, while they are there they saw dozens of people of different grades appear at the space gates.

    Sam''s guess about the academies'' behavior was right. He said that once the disaster strikes, the academies will call up their students toe back just in case.

    Since the tensions are high, they need to keep an eye on all their loose ends. So, a lot of students either came back to the academies or they moved to their secure bases and resource points. None of them are at the individual missions at least.

    The managers are now inside the Academies. They made their way to the dormitories person, whose identity they are assuming at the moment. They didn''t face any resistance as they went there. Now, all eight of them, who are stronger than any of the fourth grade students in the academies are mixed in the midst of them.

    Ready to break the hell loose.

    The best part about this n? Not a single one of them entered the Zeus academy. They all targeted other Olympian academies only.

    While this is happening, the elders of all the academies, including the Zeus academy are gathered at a single ce. Meeting to make a critical decision.

 Chapter 2223 Meetings About Losses

    Chapter 2223 Meetings About Losses

    "What do you guys want?"

    Bloody Chariot asked the elders and the Deans of the other academies.

    "We just want to understand the situation. What happened? Why did the managers suddenly attack the students of your academy?"

    "I don''t know." Bloody Chariot tly answered.

    "How many students died?"

    "I don''t know."

    "What is your n now? Where did those managers go? How are you nning to deal with me."

    "I don''t know." Bloody Chariot''s face is as t as a piece of paper as he answered. He didn''t even show a hint of emotion on his face. That actually made these people a bit nervous rather than give them courage though.

    "Do you need any help?"

    "Yes, stay out of my academy''s business.

    I know what is going on in your heads. This is not of the first time one of the Olympian academies has to go through this kind of situation, and all the times previously the remaining academies, focused only on one thing and one thing alone.

    To take advantage of the situation.

    This time however, I am on the edge. So, please do not provoke me. Not until I am here. Once I leave, you can do whatever the hell you want, I will not object at that time.

    So for now, maintain this false fa?ade of care that you are portraying. It would provide me some peace of mind. If you don''t do that¡­ It has been a while since I truly flexed my muscles.

    I might do something about it and see if I still got it."

    He left the meeting as soon as he said those words.

    The rest of the elders and Deans stayed behind. After making sure that Bloody Chariot left, one of the Deans initiated the conversation.

    "What do we need to do about the Hub? That is what we wanted to ask him about. But it seems like he is really pissed off. I don''t want to get on his bad side in this situation."

    "Nobody wants to be on his bad side. That is bloody Chariot for god''s sake. But do you really want to give up the benefits of the hub, just because of that? That is a treasure trove, I tell you. That is a freaking treasure trove."

    That was followed by a silence. Everyone had the same thing in their minds, when they came here. They knew the Hub is shut down and currently the Zeus academy is upying it. They want to make sure that they wont hog all the benefits.

    But now, the discussions halted.

    As everyone was lost in their own thoughts, suddenly they all received the messages through themunication tokens.

    Even before they could digest the message, the whole Olympian city started quaking. The vibrations could be felt under their feet.

    They all spread their divine senses without reservation to the outside of the city, to the different directions.

    And they all saw what wasing to their city.

    *RUMBLE* *RUMBLE*

    The rumbling sound of the charging beasts along with the clouds of dust that followed them behind. Multiple stampedes are alling to the city from different directions. Beasts of are different characteristics.

    From north, the beasts are mostly serpentine and venomous. Snakes, big and small and they are all led by a low-level Sesh Snake. Its bloodline is watered down with various other low level gics. But the Sesh bloodline was obvious to see.

    As it crawled towards the city, everything in its path was trampled if it was lifeless, corroded and degraded if it had life.

    In the same way, on the west, the horde is being led by a type of Ape. It is a variant creature with multiple strong ape bloodlines, including the Golden Ape bloodline.

    Unlike Sesh, this one had all bloodlines that are surprisinglypatible with each other.

    Another direction, the beasts are being led by wolf, a tiger in a different direction and so on.

    All the beasts are of Divine ne Consummate State.

    One of the Deans looked at them and frowned.

    "Those beasts¡­ they were supposed to be tests and missions for the fourth grade students. They shouldn''te out of their zones unless they are provoked. Why are they charging at the city? That too all of them together at the same time."

    Everyone had that question in their minds and they all wanted answers.

    "We need to restrain them and send them back to their zones. But something is clearly off."

    "That is obvious. We need to investigate it thoroughly. But before that, we need to restrain them. We cannot let them run loose like this."

    Another Dean said and turned to his staff. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "Restrain as many beasts as possible. Don''t kill them. Most of these are needed as the prey for the big ones. Send them back to their zones carefully.

    Grand Elders, you bypass the beasts and check what the situation is."

    All the academies followed the same process.

    Meanwhile, the managers that entered the hub, didn''t even know that they stuck the lottery. They actually only expected the beasts to create a minor distraction. Nothing major. As long as there is no immediate intervention, they are fine with it.

    But they got lucky.

    The same thing doesn''t go for the students though. When all these managers became the predators, the fourth graders are nothing more than the prey.

    When the Deans and the elders wrapped things up with the beasts quickly and were about toe back, news already came.

    All of their messages came from the different people, but the contents of the message and the urgency along with the terror within it, were all the same.

    Every elder and dean exchanged a nce. They all knew what is happening. They just left without saying anything else among themselves. The words would purely be a waste at that time anyway.

    When they reached the academies, what greeted their eyes, made them feel like killing someone.

    The dorms of the fourth grade students of eight different academies were turned into ughter houses The corridors were drenched in blood. Dorms were destroyed and dead bodies were everywhere. The scene was gory.

    The elders immediately followed the trials that led towards the space gates.Dean is in the lead ready to attack without any reservations about the power gap whatsoever. But by then, the managers are already standing in the space gates fully charged and loaded.

    All the managers showed middle-fingers to the deans and left.

    *BOOM*

    The Deans of course attacked, but they couldn''t do much. The space gates were destroyed incurring several losses.

    "This is going to be a nightmare. What the fuck is wrong with those psychos?"

    One of the elders cursed.

    "Recover the coordinates of their escape. We need to capture them. Someone had to answer to the loss of lives."

    Simr orders were heard.

    All the academies started taking attendance to list down who were killed and who were spared. The damage to the other academies is definitely not as high as the Zeus academy. But it is not small either.

    A simr meeting was held after the kill count and the dead people were analyzed. This time, the deans were the only ones there and they all had adamant expressions on their face.

    "We need to search for them. Even at the cost of tearing that Hub down. We need to find a clue. My people are already after the coordinates recovered from the space gate.

    But there is no concrete lead.

    We discovered some residual space elemental energy fluctuations at the coordinates. They might have used a transference scroll of some sorts there."

    "Simr results from my side."

    "Same here."

    The Dean of the Poseidon academy was the most silent among them all as they all exchanged their thoughts and started brain storming what to do.

    "Have you guys noticed anything peculiar with the choice of their killings?" He asked out of the blue.

    Everyone looked at him in askance.

    "I took a look at the list of people that were killed in my academy. I also talked to the students who tried to fight back. For some students, even when those bastards could kill them easily, they didn''t. But for some students, who were about to escape, those bastards ran behind them and killed them as quickly as possible.

    The hurry I can understand, but the pickiness I don''t.

    Previously, I believed that the attack on the Zeus academy was just as part of the revenge. Since the start we all assumed that those managers wanted to take revenge on the academies that did them dirty.

    But that motive doesn''t exin their attack on the rest of the academies.

    There is clearly something bigger than just personal revenge. It seems like their goal is not the academy that kicked them out, rather the system that caused them to be kicked out.

    This could very well be an organized revolutionary tactic.

    And the list of students they killed kind of solidifies it."

    As he said he ced two lists on the table. One of them is the list of students of Zeus academy that got killed, while the other is the list of students of Poseidon academy.

 Chapter 2224 Confirmation

    Chapter 2224 Confirmation

    There are a few notes written beside each of the names listed on both the lists.

    The notes indicated, what affiliation they belonged to, and the allegations these students had on them along with some other information. Then the Deans finally felt a sense of realization dawn on them. The students that were killed all had only one majormon point.

    They all belong to the Noble league.

    Most of them, if not all of them are part of the Noble league families and even among them thergest percentage covered the low ranking families of the noble league. The core members of the noble league only included a certain ten families.

    Based on the information the Deans secretly gathered, some of these ten families are the ones currently destroying the chous bit by bit.

    They even have an inkling of what the reason behind that destruction might be. So, they couldn''t help but connect the dots. All the Deans fell silent. None of them voiced their thoughts, but all of them knew that their process right now is not much difference.

    All of them more or less reached a simr conclusion.

    After a few minutes of silence, one of them spoke.

    "What should we do?"

    "We cannot move rashly, we first need to confirm this. Bloody Chariot''s moves are indeed a bit odd recently.

    However, we cannot jump to a conclusion based on that and antagonize him. Whoever is behind the managers and the hub, they are certainly a powerful enemy. If Bloody Chariot is not rted to them and we pushed him, then we will definitely make him and the Zeus academy another enemy that we shouldn''t have."

    "But we can''t deny that he is not rted to them though. The attacks on the Elders that were kicked out on the academy. Direct attacks on the families that sheltered those elders. His repeated visits to the Hub in the recent years.

    I also heard that he was building some space gates to god knows where.

    Also, if you haven''t noticed, the second grade and third grade students of the Zeus academy are nowhere to be seen.

    Most of them are not here."

    "I also got information that some people from the Thor academy have visited the Zeus academy." Another Dean chimed in.

    "What you guys are saying does make sense. However, you are overlooking one major factor. The Managers.

    If it was any other group of people, I would have agreed with you. But the managers were all greatly wronged by the academies. The Zeus academy and Icarus¡­ they imprisoned that guy for years fearing that he might make most of his potential.

    They deliberately hindered his cultivation progress.

    His anger is clearly shown on the people of the Zeus academy. Did you forget how many people they put through the trials and how many people have got stuck doing the trials. I have never seen so many people 12bors before.

    Why would he coborate with Bloody Chariot and Zeus academy all of a sudden?"

    This question silenced everyone. It is indeed true, there is no motive and without that motive they are unable to identify a proper logic that would connect Bloody Chariot and the managers. The suspicious actions like attending the hub and the space gates, could most likely be ignored.

    There is no concrete connection between that and the current scenario.

    However, that thought just shows their ignorance about this whole matter. There is in fact a proper connection between everything. Done by someone behind the scenes that they are not even suspecting. At least not yet. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    "So, how do we proceed with this?" One of the deans asked.

    Dean of the Poseidon academy thought for a moment and said.

    "First of all, we need to be united in this. We need to confirm and act together. If anyone has any intention of jumping ship, you better do it right now and don''t give the rest a hard time in the middle of all this.

    Only then would I express my thoughts any further."

    The room stayed silent for a moment after voiced his thoughts.

    No one moved.

    "Please understand that if you make a decision against thister, you will have the rest of the academies to deal with."

    With those words he continued his n¡­

    After everyone listened in on this, they felt a bit reassured. If they go by this, not only will they be able to confirm Bloody Chariot''s position in all of this, they will also not lose out too much even if he is not involved in this.

    It is actually a very simple n. But they didn''t think of it as they looked at this as aplicated situation.

    Also, they are scared of Bloody Chariot, which could be the primary reason.

    "I guess we are all agreeing on this, right?" Dean of Poseidon academy asked.

    Everyone nodded in agreement. Then he took out themunication token, took a deep breath and called an Elder from the Zeus academy.

    "I need a meeting with Bloody Chariot immediately. The rest of the Deans are also waiting. Please tell him toe to our academy."

    They waited for ten minutes, before Bloody Chariot made his way here.

    At first, he didnt want toe at all, but he knew that these academies also experienced severe losses and he knew that their thoughts will be moving in a direction that he doesnt want them to move.

    When he arrived at the meeting, his thoughts were only validated even more.

    "Bloody chariot, we are thinking of dismantling the hub right now."

    Dean of the poseidon academy started the conversation with those words. Bloody Chariot froze for a moment and looked at the dean with aplicated gaze. But he maintained his silence, gesturing the other party to continue speaking.

    "We all suffered severe losses and we also identified a pattern. Most of the kids that died belong to the Noble league. The families of the deceased are yet to receive the message, but once they do, they are going to swarm the academies.

    We need to keep in mind that these families fund most of the resources all our academies need, including the Zeus academy.

    We need to show them something, otherwise, we will be enemies with no chance of settling this issue."

    Bloody Chariot still stayed silent and looked at the rest.

    Dean of the Hephaestus academy spoke.

    "We sent people to track these miscreants, but there is no solid lead. We need to dismantle the hub and find out any clue. If not anything, we would at least know what are the possible realms these people are in based on the materials and the techniques used in building that ce."

    *sigh*

    Bloody Chariot finally opened his mouth. He knew that he couldnt keep silent any longer.

    "First of all, I clearly understand the validity in your points. It is indeed difficult find a valid lead with things as they are.

    And you are indeed answerable to the funders.

    For that, I would like to help you.

    We managed to attain some knowledge about the puppets simr to the ones the hub has distributed.

    The puppets that we researched on are a bit different, but there are a lot of simrities with the hub''s puppets. So, the knowledge can still be used."

    The deans were stunned by this. They didnt expect Bloody Chariot to be so cooperative.

    However, they just let their thoughts run wild before listening to what he had topletely say.

    "But I don''t agree to dismantling the Hub. Not just dismantling, you shouldnt even think of removing a brick from it.

    The hub stays."

    His voice turned cold and calm by the end of that statement and so did the atmosphere. They all exchanged a nce, not understanding what Bloody Chariot is getting at.

    "Dont look confused. What you heard is right. As long as I am here, you will not touch the Hub, or I will fight you myself. It wouldnt be a war, and it wouldnt have too many rules. I will attack, you and every other person involved regardless of the cultivation level and consequences.

    You will face my wrath in full.

    If you need any other help in apprehending the criminals, you will have my full support."

    With that he stood up from his seat and stormed off.

    His face turned uglier and uglier with every step he took as he slowly walked to his academy.

    He remembered the day when he signed the contract with Joker in the hub on that day along with Gungnir.

    The condition that Joker mentioned.

    It didn''t seem like much to him at all.

    ''One year, protection of Hub. Not me, not the managers, nothing. Just the hub, physically. No reservations''

    Bloody Chariot was too involved in decoding those puppets, he didnt think too much. Limited period, no involvement of personnel. No promises to the protection of Joker¡­ ording to that promise, he could kill Joker himself, if he wanted to, but he cannot destroy the hub as a whole.

    It didnt seem like a big deal.

    But now, he knew how much of a pickle he is in. Particrly, when he thought about a use that he himself included in the contract.

    ''Absolute secrecy about the deal they made and the expedition.''

 Chapter 2225 Space Gate trouble

    Chapter 2225 Space Gate trouble

    Bloody Chariot is in a tricky situation and even he knows it.

    He knew that he is extremely suspicious from the perspective of other deans. He also needs to deal with it as soon as possible before it bites the whole Zeus academy. But before that, he has something else to deal with.

    The students in the expedition.

    Joker is a bullshitter. He understood that much. Even if he is beaten to death, Bloody Chariot wouldn''t believe that Joker is not involved in the attack against the academies. He also believed now that he fell into Joker''s trap.

    So, he started feeling a sense of unease about the expeditions as well.

    First he went to the elders who examined the white crystal and the.

    "Are the white crystals really as magical as you say? Are they really useful? Are you sure they are not some dud decoy materials used to fool us?"

    He shot the questions one by one.

    The elders exchanged a nce not knowing what to say. If it was before when Bloody Chariot''s mood was actually good, they would have nodded their heads like some chickens. But they could clearly feel his gloomy mood.

    They didn''t dare to promise that it is valuable as they felt like they had their lives at stake.

    "Sir, from whatever tests we did, we couldn''t find a single abnormality apart from its uniqueness. From our limited knowledge, it just feels like a rare and unique mineral. Nothing else."

    "How sure are you that your conjecture is right?"

    "Sir, the mineral itself couldn''t be a problem. It is legitimate. But the¡­ I cannot guarantee that. If there is any problem then it could be from the the mineral is located it and how it is used."

    The elder mustered some courage and defended his position.

    Bloody Chariot on the other hand, stayed silent. He started sweating a bit. His heart rate increased and his breathing is a bit rugged.

    ''I am feeling nervous. How long has it been?''

    He looked at his slightly trembling palm and gritted his teeth. He immediately zoomed towards the space gate. He is there within seconds. Just when he was about to use the space gate to go back to the expedition¡­

    *SWOOSH* n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    The space gate activated and someone came from the other side.

    *PANT* *PANT* *THUD*

    A young man barely stumbled out of the space gate formation and fell on the ground while panting heavily.

    Bloody Chariot was surprised and ran towards him. It is a very familiar face. None other than Christos. He has injuries of several kinds. He is battered, clearly from a tough battle. Bloody Chariot took out a pill and fed it to him.

    Christos'' injuries started disappearing quickly and some life returned to his face.

    *COUGH* *COUGH*

    He coughed twice and woke up.

    "What happened?" Bloody Chariot asked with a frown. He does have some spections, but if they are right, it is not necessarily a good news for him.

    "I was ambushed. Noble league students. They attacked me together¡­"

    Christos began recounting the whole thing. A few hours ago.

    After the elders left the white crystal, the crystals didn''t show any signs of calming down. However, their energy level was distributed evenly around the crystals of all the students present on the.

    They understood that something went wrong. At that time, Christos'' team focused on the formation dome in front of them instead of worrying about the possible disaster. He felt that clearing the dome will be the only way to avoid this.

    So, their team started brain storming.

    "Tell me whatever you think. Say it out loud. Don''t contemte if that idea is idiotic or feasible. Just say it out loud." Christos instructed his team.

    The rest of them exchanged a nce. Seeing their hesitance, Christos started.

    "I feel like there are certain conditions to go after these domes. We already know that the energy level and even the rewards inside are different.

    Maybe, we left a few level 1 domes without clearing them. Could they be hidden in some unseen ces?"

    One of teammates finally mustered some courage and replied.

    "But the elders already scoured the whole to its deepest parts. Even the hidden ces are past our abilities to detect, the elders and Bloody Chariot¡­ I believe they have the skills."

    "What if there is a hidden condition within the state of the formation itself? From what I observed, this formation was dense and packed up previously, but after this reaction urred, it became a lot more active and the energy is much more essible."

    Christos frowned at this and asked.

    "So, we need to understand what triggered this phenomenon¡­ contact the other teams and try to get an update from them. Ask them if they did anything notable."

    All of them took themunication tokens and contacted others. Coincidentally, Christos contacted the formation genius who hit the formation dome in frustration.

    "Did something happen with your team before this weird phenomenon? Did you guys do anything?"

    "Why the fuck would I tell you that information?"

    That is the answer Christos received.

    "You might be a genius at formations, but I am better than you at reading the situations. You really think you can have a better chance at figuring this out than me? The crystals around us are warming up. The speed of charge might have decreased, but they are going to explode sooner orter.

    So, tell me know."

    "This guy hit the formation dome and then we felt a bit of quake. The energy of the formation became a bit more active and unstable."

    A different voice answered from other side. Christos felt like he stumbled on something.

    He thought for a moment and threw a punch on the formation dome.

    *BOOM*

    Nothing happened to the dome, but the crystals around him increased their speed of charge.

    "Check the formation now."

    He instructed his teammate who did exactly that. They soon figured out what the situation is. The formation domes of second level are activated only after getting hit. Once a formation is hit, the crystals act up and they charge to explode. The more number of formations that are activated, the faster they will charge.

    And also the more number of formations that are hit, the easier it is to decode them. They need to strategize and attack only a select number of formations so that they can decode them while still having enough time.

    With Christos'' lead and direction, the rest of the teams worked together and they all managed to start decoding the formation domes.

    Unsurprisingly Christos'' team came first¡­ again.

    The second level of domes were cleared soon with the same lead.

    This time, the genius got pissed off and he contacted the rest of the noble league members.

    "Guys, this is the perfect chance. We already nned to dispose off Christos. We are far away from the Academy realm and any other Olympian realm. He also doesn''t have any helpers. And once he is gone, his team''s lead will also reduce.

    I already tested the third level formation domes and they also act the exact same way as the second.

    We cannot lose this chance."

    He proposed the idea out of spite and the rest of the noble league agreed readily. They already nned this a long time ago. They came here with the decision that they would attack Christos if a situation presented itself.

    And right now, the situation did present itself.

    Christos didn''t know this is happening and by the time he realized, he was already surrounded by the noble league members that are present on the. They even prepared the contingencies against his abilities.

    Christos realized that he couldn''t beat them and started running. On his way, he started attacking the formation domes crazily. He even attacked the central formation dome, which is the biggest of all. Afternding that attack, he used the transference token to leave.

    Bloody Chariot understood the situation and he felt a bit conflicted. It is one thing if the other side is a trap, but it is a few levels worse if the students are killing each other. He gritted his teeth and wanted to activate the space gate to go there.

    But he stopped.

    The eleration theory of Christos¡­ if he goes there the speed will increase drastically and the explosion might just happen in seconds before he could react.

    He won''t have enough time to contact those students and set this straight.

    He could only do one thing.

    He contacted another promising second grade student and gave him clear instructions before sending him into the space gate. He activated it¡­ but nothing.

    The space gate didn''t activate.

    He had a bad feeling in his heart. He hurriedly went to the third grade expedition space gate and tried to activate it. Same situation. It didn''t activate.

    The bad premonition got intense. At that time, an attendant came running over.

    "Sir, there is an urgentmunication request from Thor academy."

 Chapter 2226 Examining

    Chapter 2226 Examining

    Bloody Chariot went to themunication formation.

    On the other side, Thor''s image is visual. A tragic one actually. His clothes and armor are tattered. He has several injuries which shouldn''t matter much for the man of his strength. So, the gloomy and sad expression on his face can only be a result of something else.

    "They died."

    That is his opening statement.

    "Who died?"

    "The kids, everyone that went to the expedition. Everyone that was on the. Except for the elders that went to apany them. They all died."

    Bloody Chariot''s spine shivered. He felt the chills run all over it.

    "What happened?" He asked inquivering tone.

    "The formations became odd as we kept on solving them. After that, the domes for some reason started acting weird. They got charged with unstable energy which threatened to explode. We tried to stabilize it, but it was toote.

    The whole imploded on its own. From what we saw the formations that exploded caused a disturbance in the numerous energy veins and spirit mines that are present on the. With their destruction, the instability extended to the core.

    Once its energy became unstable, everything imploded. We were thrown into the vacuum. The kids are unable to withstand the implosion and died before they could activate the transference token.

    Even if they did, I doubt they could have withstood the turbulence in the spatial pathways that are opened in that area.

    Bloody Chariot, we have been set up.

    The Hub is behind this. I just came to know what happened in your city. I am sure the rest of the academies are trying hard to go at the Hub. If the news of these expeditionse out, the families of the students are that are involved¡­.

    The shit is way out of our hand. We can''t handle this without suffering some losses. We need to find out the culprit as soon as possible to withstand the heat."

    "Do you have any leads, then?" Blood Chariot asked. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "No, our team already started dismantling the bird puppets at hand. We are not having much luck. These are much more difficult than the ones used for luring us to the expeditions. But there is some progress.

    Anyway, you didn''t mention anything about how your expedition went. But from your expression¡­"

    "When we encountered something from that grade 2, the elders suggested that we evacuate it. We did exactly that. After some time, when I tried to go back¡­"

    "It didn''t work" Gungnir finished the sentence. There is a pause.

    "Bloody Chariot. I don''t have any leads. But right now, I am grabbing any straw that I could find, and I found out something. A grade 1 student from Gambler academy. The only academy that wasn''t affected by the managers. The only academy that wasn''t involved in this whole scheme.

    Sam.

    His connection with Ivar. It is a small lead. I guess every academy investigated, but they couldn''t find anything regarding his background.

    However, this is the only lead avable for us and I need to make sure that we hold on to it. So, I want to know, where is this Sam right now?"

    "I know that he is the only lead. Even I didn''t have much on his background. But one of the students was investigating his background. He might have found something on him."

    "So, where is that student?"

    "In the academy. He was one of the students sent on the grade 2 expedition and he was lucky enough toe back from it."

    "I aming to Zeus academy."

    The call was cut off. Within a few minutes Gungnir came from the Thor academy using the space gate.

    Bloody Chariot and Gungnir went to meet Christos who was in the healer''s room.

    "I need all the information you gathered on Sam. I knew that you manipted his twelfthbor. I need to know what is happening."

    Christos became silent for a moment and said.

    "I indeed manipted the twelfthbor of his. But I don''t haveplete control over it. Because I made a deal with the Telchines. The oung master of the Telchines, Krejin is in charge of his twelfthbor and I gave him authority over the Shadow Cavalry.

    The goal is to have Sam captured at all costs."

    Bloody Chariot held his forehead in distress.

    "You made a deal with the Telchines? That mad fucking race? Those prideful punks?" His voice sounded distressed.

    "Why? What happened? I know the Telchines are bad, but you are Bloody fucking Chariot." Gungnir spoke.

    "I have history with Telchines. The head of the Telchine n¡­ the moment I step in their territory, he will be alerted and he will be after my life. Trust me, the moment I am involved with Telchines, it will rain literal hell fire in the academy realm."

    That conversation ended there. Gungnir didn''t really want to expand any more on that. However they had to wait until something of consequence came from Sam''sbor.

    But they don''t have to just wait and be sitting ducks here.

    Because the deans of the other academies are already plotting something. And Bloody Chariot is preparing for it.

    Meanwhile, in the Sanatan Realm.

    In the hub branch, which waspletely empty, in active and almost¡­ dead. Virat, a first grade student is leading the massive team filled with elders, seniors and experts in all kinds of artisan arts, formations.

    "Virat, what do you think? Where do we start from?

    We have been at this for hours now and we still haven''t started."

    One of the instructors asked in a cold tone. He is very dissatisfied since he has to follow the instructions of a first grade student of all people.

    "I get it that you want to deal with this situation as fast as you can. This must feel like you are in a heaven of your dreams, Instructor. But what I understood, at least from the manufacturing and style of design this bird has, the equipment here will all be connected to one core.

    We need to find the core first. I need to understand how thework between all these things were established. If we don''t find that and mess with an equipment, the wholework might just crash."

    "No Virat, as you said, you believe that this is the way this hub has been wired. We don''t know if it was actually wired that way. So, stop being an amateur and make a decision. We can''t just look at these things on a surface level."

    The instructor yelled out loud. Virat felt a bit nervous. He clearly felt more at ease when he actually spent his time with the machines instead of these whiny people. The egos are raising high. However, he is very sure that there is a way to approach the Hub.

    His original n is to activate it first and examine the core of the Hub, which should be the carrier of intelligence that actually handles the operations of the Hub. He is sure that the mental energy and capacity should be at least on the level of a Divine ne Consummate state, that too at the peak.

    He is also sure that there is no such cultivator operating the hub. To have so many branches running, just to use that level of cultivators be the passive brains of these hubs? That will be a waste of an incredible resource and to have such a wastage, the organization has to be brimming with people like that.

    And there is no way the academy realm is not aware of such an organization.

    At least be believed that the academy realm and the gods behind them are that omnipotent. So, he needs to understand this and operate it with a greater caution. To damage any of this set up would be a sin greater thatmitting a genocide in his opinion.

    Of course, not everything goes ording to a n.

 Chapter 2227 Communication with Machines

    Chapter 2227 Communication with Machines

    Virat was very particr about the whole thing.

    He didn''t give any autonomy to the team at the moment. The elders and instructors whose egos were so beat up because of this protested harshly to the Deans. But the Deans didn''t give a hoot.

    They only had one answer for them.

    ''That same kid beat you all to actually dismantling the bird puppet of the hub. So, technically he had the lead on all of you. We always have been seekers of knowledge and believed that whoever holds more knowledge is fit to be the leader and teacher of that subject.

    Howe it is changing when the said person with more knowledge is just a bit weaker in cultivation?"

    This answer kept them all dumb.

    They didn''t know what to say. It is not that none of them never followed that rule. It has always been the rule of Sanatan realm and they actually followed it in many cases. They were even taught by students in some cases.

    But most of the time, they are only fourth grade students who held lectures or gave them guidance. That was the only age gap and power gap they were willing to swallow. Anything more than that is too bitter.

    On top of that, Virat''s indecisive nature is not helping the situation at all.

    After some time, feeling the impatience of all these people, he finally made a decision.

    "All of you re dismissed for now. I suggest that you guys go back and work on the bird puppets first. Since the puppets are connected to the hub and even tallies your score from various machines in the hub you might have good luck finding that connection.

    Meanwhile, I will search for the core, or activating mechanism or anything that helps us achieve this using my method.

    Within one day, if I can''t do it, we will do it the most agreed up on way among your suggestion."

    Only that calmed the crowd and everyone was dismissed. Some of them, mostly students stayed behind as they tried to examine Virat''s methods.

    Virat used the same pen that he used to dismantle the bird puppets as he examined various parts of the hub.

    The problem at the moment is, that the machines and the rest of the hub are not active. However, the thousands ofyered foramtions inscribed on the equipment to conceal and even destroy it if there is any forceful prying, are active.

    For him to tap into the circuits of the machinery he needs to break past these. However, there is another thing he is afraid of because of the methods the creator of Hub used before. He is worried, that there might be a pre-set contingency that might activate. This contingency could make the machinepletely dud if all the formations were cracked open.

    After all, there is a good justification for a man to put up such kind of defense when he put so many self-destruction triggers. If he is so aversive to people opening it, he could very well made it air-tight with no holes.

    He didn''t care what others thought of him and with Dean''s support to his decision, he managed to get the peace and quiet to examine these machines by himself.

    After thinking for a while, he picked up one of the arcade machines that is used to test the reaction time of the punching techniques. It is the simplest device he could find. At least, he assumed it it.

    The device is inactive, but the concealment formations are not. And he could see that there is a connection with this device with the concealment formations of the rest of the hub. The only thing that he couldn''t find is the source of energy that are keeping this formations active.

    He identified a simr pattern with the bird puppets as well.

    The energy is stored inside the core, and the core is recharged with the surrounding energy that is being absorbed by the bird. However, the energy core couldn''t be identified no matter what. The very concealment formations that the core is powering are covering it up.

    So, he started using his pen to once again navigate through the concealment formations. However, this time he is extra safe and he didn''t just try to experiment too much. Instead, he spent time on each and everyyer.

    Since he already got a hang of the style of the inscriptions by dismantling the bird puppets, he had an easy time in the first fewyers.

    And the moreyers he uncovered, the more new details he gained about the style and the more insight he got into the nextyers that are about toe.

    Many people watched as Virat worked without taking any real break. Every time he got a bit exhausted or his energy ran out, he actually just sat on the side and sipped on some potions while still examining the physical structure of the machine.

    Sam used many modern fastening methods, like the rivets, screws, nuts and bolts, Even though these are not foreign to these people as there are several fastening methods developed in the same way, the problem lies with Sam''s entric methods to improve them.

    For example, a screw that held the rear outer cover of the machine actually had a very tricky formation inscribed on it. So, when Virat slowly loosened the screw, the formation got triggered and an energy bond has formed, holding the joint together, making it impossible to remove.

    He figured out the formation and cracked it, the next moment, another inscription that he didn''t even notice before, got triggered, this is an energy maniption formation.

    When he tried to inject the energy into the machine to figure out a different formation, this energy maniption formation intervened out of nowhere and diverted that energy flow almost triggering a self-destruct trap set up.

    And these don''t even scratch the surface of the various other traps he set up. These are still in the realms of the child''s y. Inside the machine, there are many more mechanisms and circuits that are enveloped with many more traps.

    Virat just felt more and more impressed and intrigued with the way it was arranged. After all, inscribed formations are tricky by themselves. So many intricateponents having their own inscriptions and then they got fastened togetheryers with more inscriptions.

    It is very easy for the energy flow to go wrong. On top of that, all theseponents are then assembled together involved more inscriptions.

    Virat suddenly felt like he saw a million new doors open up for him.

    And this is just from separating theponents that are not even at the core of the machine yet. He has yet to dismantle theseponents a bit more and understand the mechanisms within. He has yet to go deep into the core of the machine and find the connection that leads to the core of hub.

    He has yet to understand how all of those work.

    He felt like he has his tasks lined up for the next decade or so at least.

    As Virat seeded in dismantling theseyers and machines without triggering any nasty reaction, more and more people saw hope.

    Even though there are a lot more skilled people with bigger brains in the team, including the elders, they all felt like they hit a steel te when they tried to dismantle the machine.

    Only after the way Virat worked did they understand, where they arecking.

    It is the thought process.

    In their eyes what Virat is doing now didn''t just look like some dismantling, it felt like he wasmunicating with that machine. Even if they felt that and wanted to try it by themselves, they weren''t able to do it as well as him.

    Following that thought process and the ideas left behind by Virat, they managed to dismantle the bird puppets and started experimenting on the transmitting mechanism it used to share the info with the hub.

    But that is the extent they can go right now. They are not confident enough to go and crack open one of the machines in the hub without disturbing thempletely.

    Of course, not all of them shared the same sentiment. One of the elders, who was dissatisfied with Virat''s method thinking, decided to take a more radical yet well engineering approach.

    "I am going to build a Negation device." n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    He told his team who looked at him like they just heard some foreignnguage they don''t understand.

    "The problemes with the concealment formations working like this in this interwovenwork. The mechanism of the machine itself might be intricate and beyond ourpleteprehension. But it is not like we can''t even see it with our spiritual senses and observation skills, when the concealment formations are not there.

    Once the structure is apparent to our vision, then we can do the dismantling much faster after we experiment with it a few times with a simted projection."

    Still, his team didn''t understand.

    The elder facepalmed and decided to exin while getting started on the work.

 Chapter 2228 Device

    Chapter 2228 Device

    The Elder''s name is Gaja.

    He has been working on this negation device for quite some time. He is also an artisan that is focused on creating puppets, while being an expert on inscriptions. He has quite few great creations under his name.

    One of his specialties is modernizing the ancient puppet building techniques.

    He has explored numerous ancient and extinct civilizations that had various technological paths of their own. Understood those methods and integrated them with the methods of the Sanatan region and academy realm.

    He is also one of the reputed professors of the Viswa Karma academy.

    Ever since he got his own bird puppet from Hub, he has been trying to understand it. And his research started. Luckily, he had his own method of investigating it. Since he has the habit of exploring and reverse engineering the ancient tech, he created a device of his own.

    It was called the observation device.

    Once any puppet, machine, a formation disc, or even a pure mechanism without any spiritual energy reinforcements was ced in there, the device will give aplete scan. It is just the spiritual energy apanied by a spirit that scans the object, by creating a energy mesh of some sorts.

    The mesh has a great quality that is to trace out the patterns of formations and inscriptions inscribed on the object along with a three dimensional structure of the machine or object itself.

    He actually tried his device immediately after he got the bird puppet.

    But as if it to mock him, the mesh that came out was not only too dense, but the traces that were there were fully energized. The final projected mesh came out like a glowing lump of substance that he couldn''t make any sense out of.

    Then he realized that he needs to cut off the energy in the inscriptions, which would trigger the core to activate the self-destruction mechanism.

    He has to deactivate the energy in the inscriptions for a moment when the scan in his observation device happens. In that time, the device will trace everything, including the ink or whatever it was that was used in creating the inscriptions and through the inscription patterns, he can recreate them in simtions to understand the whole structure at the same time.

    This also gives him a ready made simted blue print that could help him rebuild it.

    But for all of this to happen, he needs to scan it without destroying it.

    Then he realized something.

    He needs to deactivate everything in that bird puppet without destroying it, before scanning it.

    For that, he needs to create this negation device. That willpletely shut off all the spiritual energy, including the core of the puppet. He has been working on it for a long time and it is at the ending phase right now.

    All this while, he was working on it in secret.

    But now that the situation has turned out of like this, he believed he would get more support if he is straight forward with it and might even get special ess just like Virat did.

    Instead just being a whiny, jealous old bastard, he started working with his disciples on fast tracking the machine.

    He also wanted to make it so that he could beat Virat by the time whole dismantling process of the hub is taken care of.

    Hours passed like that. Gaja constantly got some updates and about Virat''s progress. Not because he wanted to beat him in getting information from an arcade machine, rather he weed Virat to dismantle it faster.

    Once he does that, Gaja can understand the level of intricate detail these things possessed and tune up his own observation device to meet those requirements.

    But what he failed to notice is that just like how he has been keeping tabs on Virat, someone else has been keeping tabs on him. And not for the same type of idealistic reasons that he had.

    These reasons are a tad bit selfish and filled with ulterior motives of another elder. The same elder who constantlyined about Virat and his methods.

    His name Vajan.

    And right now, he has bought up one of the students under Gaja to act as his spy and kept tabs on it. He couldn''t copy what Virat was doing. It was a great method and the gods he pray know that he wants that ability.

    But it can only be earned and learned through experience. It cannot be copied or stolen.

    So, he went for the next best thing. The one that he could steal.

    That night, Gaja managed to make the first properly working prototype with the help of his students. He then connected it with the observation device.

    He picked one of the bird puppets and ced it in the center. The device is not really thatplicated.

    It has four weird shaped pirs that are on four sides creating a square. At the center of the square was the puppet that needs to be scanned.

    *SWOOSH*

    A sh appeared from the four pirs when the device was activated. The bird puppet which was active just a few moments go suddenly fell as if all of its energy has been died down. At that moment another sh came from the design.

    The sh stayed a bit longer. When it disappeared, a virtual holographic projection was floating on top of the bird puppet that was on the ground. Excitedly, Gaja deactivated the device and walked to the middle of it.

    He wore a special bulky metallic glove and managed to manipte the projection. The projection is nowhere near as clear as what Sam can create with his tech. Not even one twentieth, but for a wireframe it has enough quality.

    Gaja muttered something inaudible to himself and snapped his fingers, the projection disappeared into one of the pirs.

    Then he picked up the bird and started examining it on the side.

    "Deactivate the device. We might need to spend some time on it."

    He didn''t even turn back and just left. And thus came the opportunity for the mole among his students who was bought over by Vajan.

    The student didn''t even hesitate and spoke to his fellow students.

    "Did you guys have an insights after seeing this?" He asked with such a genuine smile that the other students almost thought he gave a shit about their thoughts. So, they all nodded and said briefly about what they thought.

    "I guess I am the unlucky one. I don''t have much thoughts, apart for the quality of projection, so I am going to work on the projector, which as you all know might not work for a long time.

    How about you go and work on the thoughts you have. I will dismantle the device by myself."

    The students being the nerds they are didn''t really think much and left. Anyway, that guy was used to doing a lot of grunt work, so they couldn''t care less.

    They just left. This kid, directly contacted Vajan.

    "I have seen it. The projection came, the old man tweaked it and it worked."

    And that''s when all thing went south. Not for that greedy elder, not for the sold out student, not for Gaja or Virat.

    But for the whole of hub and the Sanatan region.

    If that student hadn''t given into the filthy bribe given to him and sold out his soul, things would have gone extremely different for these people who were working on the hub.

    One must understand how meticulous and enduring they were. They learned that the bird puppet was spying on them, they learned that the hub is gathering info on them and all the other academies. And they knew their deepest darkest secrets were seen by someone.

    Instead of trying their best to destroy the one ce that holds their secrets, they instead just started working together to decode it slowly. They even used the talents of the first grade without just dismissing him because of his cultivation level.

    They have done everything right.

    Except for reigning in the idiots that they had within them. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    So, a skit was performed. The student was supposedly moving the machine and at that time, all of a sudden, an explosion happened.

    His body was mangled and he was covered with fragments of the said machine.

    The worst part is, since they are in an isted room, no one responded instantly

    When Gaja came and took a look after noticing themotion within one minute, he just looked at the student and scolded him.

    "Now I need to build another one. What the fuck happened here?"

    He asked, the student brushed the answer saying that he fucked it up by clicking on something that he shouldn''t. Gaja dismissed him in anger and rage and left.

    Meanwhile, the geniuses who stole the machine were not smart enough to ask the student if Gaja cleared the machine for direct use and they are not skilled enough to understand that there is a reason why Gaja mentioned something about working on it more.

 Chapter 2229 Mishap

    Chapter 2229 Mishap

    Vajan didn''t even bother waiting for long.

    He took his team and snuck along with them into the Hub. It didn''t take much effort as a lot of people are walking in and out. But it did take some time for him to find a secluded spot that wasn''t being monitored properly.

    After he caught a hold of that, he proceeded with the obvious n.

    He set up the pirs of the device on four sides of a machine and then wore the metallic glove. He activated the device without further ado, while his team members surrounded him creating a concealment barrier around, so the shes won''t attract any attention.

    Soon enough, he realized that the shes are something he doesn''t need to be concerned at all.

    Because there are bigger problems rted to that machine.

    The wireframe did get created and he was indeed able to manipte it, however he couldn''t get any clear picture of the internal structure of the machine. Because most of the inscriptions are ingrained into the metal while they were forged and machined.

    That is also one of the reasons, Gaja said that there is some work that needs to be done.

    And the machine was not just made to handle a scan of that''s scale. So, while Vajan who doesn''t know the heads and tails of the design is still marveling if he really got what he thought he was getting, the device used for scanning, started heating up.

    Not just normal temperature heating up.

    Instead it is overloading. Its circuits were fired.

    *BOOM*

    Then it exploded.

    Not the scanner. The machine that was scanned. So, what happened is that the negation part of the process happened without any hitch and then the scanning process also happened. But the scanning process involves enveloping every miniscule surface area of the machine with energy.

    And it leaves a trace of it behind.

    Which is a foreign energy. This foreign energy still stays there when the negation was cancelled and the core of the machine is back to work. The moment that happened, the foreign energy triggers the traps set behind.

    That''s the reason for explosion of the machine.

    In fact, the reason why Gaja just muttered to himself in disappointment is because most of the circuits, including the core werepletely fired in the bird puppet he scanned.

    The scan was only partially sessful and the object was destroyed.

    Of course, it would have been a lot better if hemunicated that properly with his students. But who would know that a mole that was sold out needed that information to stop this massive blunder.

    The moment the explosion happened in the hub, the whole of the hub started shaking.

    Virat, who was in the middle of dismantling the machine at hand, suddenly felt a shock on his hands. This small shock was simr to an electric shock, instead of electric currents, it was the currents of spiritual energy that were used.

    The shock set him away from the machine.

    Before he could make sense of what is happening, the whole of the hub started glowing. All the machines powered up. But instead of the regr vibrant lights, they showed something else.

    ring and Ominous blood red lights.

    A mechanical voice followed those red lights.

    "Breach of machinery detected. A machine in the simtion section has triggered its self-destruction mechanism.

    Scanning the hub for any other anomalies."

    The voice paused for a bit and the next moment, a sh of red light went past everyone scanning everything in the room.

    "Anomalies detected. An arcade machine being dismantled by a person named Virat from Viswa Karma Academy.

    The self-destruction of another machine, triggered by Vajan from Viswa Karma Academy. Thirty five more people, roaming in the hub without any authorization.

    Determined that their presence is hostile.

    Initiating lockdown.

    Initiating safety measures.

    Absolute defense activated.

    People inside the hub, it is better for you to identify yourself and leave the hub within the next fifteen seconds, before the absolute defense ispletely implemented."

    The mechanical voice sounded awfully alive at that moment.

    Virat couldn''t even touch a single part of the machine that he dismantled about half. That is not even the worst part of the situation.

    He felt an extreme pressure dawn on him. It forced him to stick to the ground, like a pancake on a hot pan.

    He coudlnt even move himself.

    Not just him for some reason, even the elders and instructors in the hub felt the pressure. Based on the cultivation, the higher ones level is the lesser pressure they felt, but they definitely felt it nheless.

    They felt like they were being locked down by someone as if they were targetted as a recipient for a lethal attack.

    This made them cautious and created a urge to leave this ce.

    "I would like to leave this ce." One of the students couldn''t hold it anymore and said it out loud.

    Spatial energy enveloped him and sent him out of the hub building. Following that example, more and more kids started doing the same. Some instructors and elders followed suit. Virat who was the most reluctant of all was unable to take it anymore and also gave up.

    The hub transported all of them away. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Vajan and his team also appeared at the gate and they sensed dozens of hostile gazes focused on them. Gaja also came running. He was holding a student byhis hair as he ran. The same student that betrayed him and sold the machine to Vajan.

    "You sick bastard. Do you even know what you have done? That device was iplete. It required a lot of modifications and tune up. Why the fuck would you use it in the hub directly?

    It is one thing that you stole the machine, but to think you don''t even have themon sense to actually test it before using it, just how the fuck did you be an elder."

    He screamed on top of his lungs and didn''t hold back.

    He didnt care to save the face for this thief. For him more than the theft, the stupidity of the whole thing was much more annoying. To think that his own creation was used to cause this situation..

    He wanted to kill Vajan right there and then.

    *DING* *DING* *DING*

    His rant was then interrupted by the chiming of the wrist bands of everyone in that area. Ever since they learned of purpose of the bird puppets and the wrist bands, they are way too wary of it. They stopped using these bands tomunicate.

    But they are also a bit reluctant to take it off

    Its functions are immacte and they still don''t know where they stand with the Hub at the moment. What if they take down the hub? What if they can make it their own? They can still use these bird puppets then.

    To be short, they just are too greedy topletely let those go.

    And right now, they are seeing an automatically popped up screen with a list on it. The screen was translucent green in color and the contents of the list are a bit darker shade of green. However, in the list, there are a few rows that are red colored and they are all on the top of it.

    And on top of the list, above the contents, there was a message

    "Since the people of this region has tried to breach the hub without following the rules dictated by the hub, ten percent of the total information gathered by the hub has been shared to everyone in this region.

    Each entity in the list indicates a video file. All these video files constitute the ten percent knowledge we gained in the past few months.

    The red entities are also part of that knowledge, however they indicate the information regarding the conspiracies targeted at you.

    If you behave in the same way once again and attack the hub, much more harsher measures will be taken.

    Thank you."

    It is a threat. A direct and straightforward threat.

    But more than the threat, what made them feel cold are the contents. They all clicked on the red colored entities. The videos opened and they saw people discussing various plots. Everyone became silent.

    Someone saw his own best friend having sex with his wife as they both plotted to kill him.

    Someone else saw a teacher being greedy over the achievements of his own student and plotting to steal them.

    Someone else saw their own brother plotting to backstab him just to get a bigger share of inheritance.

    All the plots that were exposed, made everyone''s hearts turn cold. Their most trusted people have been trying to destroy them and they didnt even know that.

    Now everyone became distrustful in everyone else''s eyes.

    Virat looked at the videos that are targeting him. He has quite a sizeable red list. However, that didnt bother him as much, instead he got scared of what the hub could do.

    Information is one of the most expensive things in his opinion, because Virat knew how it can be used.

    But now only he realized that he doesn''t know jackshit about making the most out of it.x

 Chapter 2230 Spread

    Chapter 2230 Spread

    The Sanatan region was thrown into chaos.

    The messages were sent to everyone. Everyone had their worst enemies exposed in front of their eyes. As they digested all the news they got, they couldn''t help but mull over Hub''s threat. If with a single message, it could do this much damage, what exactly is it hiding?

    What can it do with all hundred percent of its knowledge?

    What is it hiding? And to what extent the damage will be if this is just a warning shot? What would the extreme measures mean?

    Millions of questions ran through everyone''s mind. Even though they learned that the hub has recorded all of their events, secrets and such, they didn''t feel the same level of urgency as they did now.

    Because they didn''t know where the transferred information went.

    They didn''t know what is happening with that information. But now that they saw the sample, they wanted to know just to what extent the hub has scanned them. The fear is such a funny thing.

    It makes people act on impulse.

    The first impulsive decision is that many people destroyed the bird puppets and the wrist bands they are wearing. As if the recordings in it will just be disappeared along with it. Bloody idiots.

    Some people, immediately went to the Viswa Karma academy to dismantle their bird puppets and attain the memory storage device inside it. In the hopes that they could ''delete'' that information.

    Some people, which are the mostmon kind immediately went after the people that are now proven to be targeting them. Fights broke out everywhere. Fights to death mostly. Nobody interfered immediately. Not even the Deans.

    Because, even they don''t know what kind of secret about them was revealed to their enemies.

    Everyone became paranoid.

    But these are not the only consequence. The biggest one caused the most chaos in the Sanatan region. That is the public knowledge. Even when Virat figured out what Bird puppets are capable of doing and even though the information was shared among the higher ups of all the academies in Sanatan region, the information was still air-tight.

    Much less themon popce, even not all of the students in the Sanatan region learned about this.

    Only the people involved and then the people that were added as the research team to dismantle the hub were aware of this. Because of it, the news didn''t leak to the other regions. Now¡­ the news is out to the rest of the popce.

    And they started attacking each other.

    At the same time, the spies of other regions that are residing here also got the news and it immediately spread to the higher ups in the other regions. That was the immediate spread. But there is a slower one.

    Some people started escaping the Sanatan city and they escaped to various other cities. These aremoner citizens and of course, they are going to meet othermoners in the other cities. If anyone asks ''what''s up?'' they could more or less share the story of how hub steals their secrets.

    Of course, even before the public chaos could see a raise, the private chaos already sparked.

    The Deans of all the Olympian academies got the news and the next moment their anger almost destroyed everything in their way as they arrived in front of the hub.

    "We need to destroy it. Immediately."

    They all had the same thoughts in their minds. After all, Sanatan region is considered a rtively united and peaceful regionpared to all the other region. Olympian region among them is the worse. They don''t have any unity unless they all have amon enemy.

    Even in that situation, they more or less have to stay vignt about stabbing each other in the back.

    They are just full of venomous people.

    There is no doubt that they all are involved in all kinds of schemes against each other. If Hub really revealed all of those secrets¡­ things would be much worse than the previous academy war. None of them would be able to walk away without suffering losses.

    Whole of the academy realm will be swept in it causing massive losses to everyone.

    They didn''t evenmunicate, but everyone is of the same mind. They wanted to destroy the hub to the veryst brick. They all extended their hands, energy gathered around it as they charged their attacks. They didn''t want to hold back.

    No matter what happens, even if that mysteriously powerful Jokeres, they are ready to face him. They just couldn''t give it a chance to recover. All of a sudden, Divine energy and spiritual energy in the surroundings all swept towards that one area.

    A cold breeze brought a strange stillness to the Olympian region.

    Everyone with sane senses felt like something ominous is happening. The elders felt the extent to which the attacks are being charged.

    *BOOM*

    As if they were all on cue, they release their attacks at the exact same moment and it sounded like a unified explosion. The sound didn''te from the collision, rather just from the release of the attacks.

    The surrounding space cracked a bit as if the fabric of reality is threatened by these attacks.

    Even before the attacks reached the hub, the surroundings walls copsed into dust. However, before the attacks could connect and obliterate the hub¡­

    *SWOOSH* n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    A sh negated all the attacks.

    The deans all exchanged a nce. There are only two deans that are not there at the moment. One is Wharton and the other is the Dean of Zeus academy. Of course, Heron is not in a situation toe and Bloody Chariot didn''te.

    The Deans already guessed that only Bloody Chariot or Wharton could negate these attacks.

    And they didn''t even have to keep guessing for long as the bright light cleared in a moment. Bloody Chariot hovered in front of the Hub looking at the Deans with cold expression.

    "I remember, clearly stating word by word, that the Hub cannot be touched. Have you lost your minds?"

    His voice was menacing.

    "Bloody Chariot, we are already full of suspicions towards you. You are jet to clear your name, now your actions are implying that you have no intention of doing this either. Are you aligned with the Hub?"

    Bloody Chariot sighed. He knew situation like this would ur sooner orter. He just didn''t expect it to develop so fast.

    "Think whatever you want. But the Hub is not to be touched. You better go back to your academies."

    As he spoke, all of a sudden¡­.

    *DING* *DING* *DING*

    Their wrist bands started chiming.

    It is a sound they have gotten ustomed to. But now¡­ it sounded so ominous.

    They hurriedly opened the messages. The screen that appeared felt familiar to them. Because they just heard it in the descriptions of the messages they received from their spies. The green screen, with a list of videos. Some marked with green while the top ten marked with red.

    But the contents in the list are a lot more than the ones in the lists of Sanatan region people.

    "Because of the radical actions of several Deans, a warning measure has been taken in retaliation. Twenty-five percent of the gathered information has been released. If any other action is taken, the hub will make the hundred percent information avable to the public along with the measures of mutual destruction."

    This threat is a lot more direct and fearsome.

    Even when the Deans are digesting the information, they also sensed various incidents happening in the Olympian city.

    There are not many people left. Because of the ughter carried out by the managers, most of themoners left the city. Only a select few people, who had deeper roots in the city stayed back.

    The students are all gathered in the city though. With such high tensions they impulsively acted. Fights broke out.

    "You better go back and handle your academies. Let''s restrain our own people. There is no need to have fights in such situation.

    When the timees I will exin myself to you."

    That is all Bloody Chariot said.

    The Deans gritted their teeth and they are reluctant to leave the hub alone.

    But they didn''t want to risk the leakage of the hundred percent of the info. They still don''t know how they could tackle the hub without triggering something like that. Also, they are sure some impulsive elders might just cause destruction of academy if the Deans are not there.

    Everyone reluctantly left.

    Bloody Chariot heaved a sigh and looked at the Hub. The outer walls are gone. They are not regenerating like how they usually do.

    He sighed once again and left.

    A simr scene has been taking ce in the Norse region. However, Bloody Chariot''s role is taken by Gungnir, while the opposition is not just Deans, but also the Elders as well. In the same way, around twenty percent information has been leaked and the region was thrown into utter chaos.

    While things are like this, Sam is also on thest leg of the twelfth trail.

 Chapter 2231 Proposal

    Chapter 2231 Proposal

    In the Telchine territory.

    Sam still held Si hostage. Krejin was constantly tracking his live location and kept on sending people to deal with him, but he was unfazed. No matter how many people went as long as they are within the levels of first grade, Sam folded all of them.

    Sometimes he didn''t even have to fight by himself.

    Void hopper and shadow mice took care of things most of the times. If not, he used some of his tricks that he picked in thest few months within the academy realm and some other times the beasts did most of the work.

    All in all, Sam had plenty of time on his handsto experiment more and more with these new runes.

    Si on the other hand, didn''t have any choice. She had to following him along as he dragged all over the city. At first, she had utmost hope in the young master. Even with all the restrictions ced, she still believed that he would deal with Sam and save her.

    But as time passed and she recalled Sam''s words of how he would tear her up and bury her parts at various corners of this¡­ she understandably lost her hope bit by bit.

    After all, seeing her young master fail so many times¡­ it is hard to keep her hopes high.

    Meanwhile, Sam managed to gain some sess in the runes and he even managed to mimic the inscription that the old man used on him.

    With things like this, soon time passed and the one day deadline Sam gave was over. It was actually around the time when Vajan lit up the whole hub with his stupidity, Sam also managed to pass the trial of Krejin.

    All of sudden, Sam didn''t sense anymore enemies around.

    He turned to Si and said.

    "Your young master lost. So, now I just need to tear you apart and we can move past this."

    "Y¡­You¡­" Si wanted to threaten him, but she didn''t know what to say to him. Sam saw first hand what Krejin is capable of. Even all academies in the Olympian regionbined couldn''t sacrifice so many of the first grade cultivators.

    But Krejin not only managed to mobilize so many of elite cultivators, but they were even sacrificed.

    The cultivators kept oning consistently without any stoppage until the end of the time period. Sam smirked at her and took out the reaper. He was just about to swing, when¡­

    *SWOOSH*

    A familiar face appeared before him. It is one of the guard teams that previously interfered with Si''s killing.

    "Not this again. What the fuck do you guys think you are doing? Is Telchine n so spineless that their descendants can''t even stand on their own words? So much for separating themselves from the rest of the Olympian scum.

    None of you Olympians are different."

    "Please, Sir Sam. I am not interfering just to forcefully save her from this. Young master Krejin has a proposal for you. In exchange for her life."

    "A proposal?" Sam was intrigued.

    "Yes, I assure that you wouldn''t lose out on this."

    "Alright, let''s hear this."

    "Then, please follow me."

    "Nope, that is not going to happen. Either tell him toe here alone or we can usemunication channels tomunicate. I am not following you anywhere. I don''t trust you guys."

    With that Sam took a seat, but his sword is still pointed at Si''s neck.

    "You have ten minutes. Or, I will make good on my promise. I hate going back on my word, anyway."

    In ten minutes, the Telchine young master is standing in front of Sam.

    "So, what is the deal that you speak of?"

    "Nothing much. Let''s have a duel. No external interference, no use of formations of inscriptions, no usage of external help. We will fight, man to man. If I win, Si will live. Since you already passed the test and I am kind of bending my words, I will give you the item you wanted and I will also help you go back immediately.

    The trap set by Christos wouldn''t bother you anymore.

    I believe that it is a fair exchange. If you win, you can kill her and still leave this ce without triggering Christos'' trap. I will just give the item to you as well."

    Sam frowned and looked at Krejin with wary eyes.

    "When an offer is too good to be true, it often is indeed not true. Right now, your offer sounds too good to be true."

    "You can think whatever you want. But you have to trust me on this."

    "Can we make a soul contract, then?"

    "No, we cannot."

    "Then why should I trust you?"

    "You have to, because you don''t have any other choice." Krejin acted adamant as the whole team surrounded him.

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam used spatial blink and appeared beside Si. He held her by her neck.

    "Argh¡­"

    She felt like a huge needle has been struck in her spine as she stiffened. Sam held the sword on her throat and said.

    "Come on, Krejin. You have to show me something more trustworthy than a threat to ept your offer."

    "Sam, you must understand how important she is to me since I even went as far as changing the initial agreement we had. You need to understand that I will not break my word this time. Not if it effects her negatively.

    You have to trust me on this and take my word for it."

    Sam raised an eyebrow and asked.

    "So, what if you lost? What guarantee do I have that I can leave this ce unscathed?"

    "My word is a guarantee for that as well."

    A cold glint shed past Sam''s eyes. He jerked Si by her arm and she turned around. With a snap of his fingers, something fell in her mouth and she was forced to swallow it.

    "YOU¡­."

    Krejin became anxious and yelled. The gang was about to make a move.

    Sam took a step back and raised both of his hands. Si staggered back and fell to the ground. Krejin ran to her and checked up on her. In front of his eyes, her wounds started healing. Even the wounds like her broken bones are healing at a visible pace. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "I just fed her something to heal her. Nothing more."

    Krejin narrowed his eyes and asked.

    "How do I trust you on that?" Even as he asked, he realized what answer he is gonna get.

    "You have to take my word for it."

    Krejin was about to lose it, when Sam continued.

    "At least, I have some proof. Her wounds are healing. And you can confirm with her that I only made her swallow one pill. You can check inside her body if you have any doubts. Unlike your words that appear truly empty, I at least have some truth backing me up."

    Krejin calmed down and did some checks. Except for the lump of pill that was in her stomach which is slowly dissolving, there is indeed nothing wrong with her.

    "Do you agree to the duel?"

    "That is why I gave her back to you. Of course, if you lose, I will take her back. The only reason I gave her the pill is for the past few hours, she sumbed to despair and I wanted to kill her in that state. But with this interference, she garnered faint hope.

    I need to increase it and put her hope in a higher level so the fall would hurt even more. I am psychotic like that."

    Krejin frowned. He wanted to call bullshit. But he doesn''t have any other evidence other than the pill and it didn''t show any signs.

    "Alright, let''s get started with the duel. Where do you want to do it? Here? An arena?"

    "Here is fine."

    Krejin looked at Sam coldly and took out his spear. Even as he spun it a bit, it felt like a current of water is following the spear.

    "A spear user. Nice."

    Sam waved his hand and the reaper is reced by a spear. He swung his spear and water elemental energy surged.

    "You can make the first move."

    Krejin immediately lunged forward and swung his spear. Sam blocked it with his own, but he was sent like a broken kite in the middle of the storm and fell a couple of hundred meters away. The attack didn''t look forceful, but up on impact, it really packed a punch.

    Krejin didn''t let Sam be and followed after him.

    "Is this going to be okay, sir?"

    One of the guardians asked the captain of the team.

    "Don''t worry. When have you ever seen a Telchine lose to the people of same level. Young master Krejin could take on people in Late stage of Divine ne Initiation if he wants and can easily win.

    I understand your concern, this guy really did cause some chaos, but those tricks won''t be useful here in a direct one on onebat."

 Chapter 2232 Decision

    Chapter 2232 Decision

    Krejin zoomed towards Sam''s crash site.

    Sam is in the middle of the crater, along with the pile of rubble. He didn''t move for a moment and Krejin didn''t want to give him the chance to recover. He aimed his spear. Energy channeled through it a serpentpletely condensed out of water formed behind his spear.

    *SWOOSH*

    *BOOM*

    The spear lodged into Sam. Krejin could see it standing still. The water serpent crashed into Sam as it drilled through the ground. As if trying to force Sam into the ground. When the water cleared, Krejin went to take the spear from Sam''s body.

    But only then did he realize he has been wrong about this.

    The spear is not lodged into Sam''s body. It was merely standing there. The tip of the spear was caught in between Sam''s fingers. And Sam himself is just lying there as if he is contemting something.

    Krejin hurriedly stepped back and extended his hand.

    The spear glowed and tried to go back to him. However, Sam''s grip was too tight. When Krejin tried too hard, Sam leveraged that pull to stand up, while still holding the spear tip.

    He looked at Krejin with a smile.

    "Great technique. Water element. Spear moving like a serpent. All that power behind it and judging from the energy waves around you, you are still in a great shape.

    However, all that power and to think you can''t even deal an inch of damage.

    The quality of energy too¡­ you are the son of the sea, aren''t you? Water element loves you. That spear usage as well¡­ it''s great. But it seems like you have shit for basics."

    Krejin lunged forward and held the spear shaft.

    He channeled his energy into it and tried to push towards Sam.

    "Come on, man. I am talking to you. I have been heapingpliments all over, I don''t expect a thank you. But at least, don''t disturb while I am speaking.

    And as I was about to tell you, your basics in the spear are not good. You know, it might be a long weapon that could help yound some heavy blows, but all that energy that you can channel through it, all the force that you could bring with every sing, you need to keep it all locked at a single point.

    It should all be focused on the tip of the spear."

    Sam let go of the tip of the spear and let him fall behind.

    Krejin staggered back. Sam then swung his own spear. He even materialized the energy motion as if he wanted Krejin to take a look.

    Water energy, the spear moved like a serpent and it just manifested into that. As he swung it and stabbed at Krejin, The serpent disappeared. All of that energy went into the spear and then it went to that spear tip.

    Krejin hurriedly blocked the attack with the spear of his own.

    *BOOM*

    There was indeed an explosive sound, but the impact didn''t send Krejin flying, instead he fell the force of the impact go through the spear''s body and the arms and then with the rest of his body. His internal organs rattled up.

    Krejin spat blood that instant.

    "Come on, man. I thought only your attacks suck, but even the defense? You shouldn''t resist it like that. Like an immovable rock trying to block the stream.

    Do you know what happens to an object like that? They break when a proper force meets with it. Like what happened just now. You need to move along with the force of impact. Then only you would be able to minimize the damage.

    Seriously, who taught you to fight?

    A tree?"

    *BANG* *BANG* *BOOM*

    Sam kept on making moves one after another. And he kept on talking. Giving lectures to Krejin as if he is teaching a student. Their battlefield moved from Sam''s crater to where it actually began.

    The guardians and Si watched as the undefeatable and unhindered young master they witnessed until now was being schooled like he was a little kid. That too in his own specialization.

    Fifteen minutester¡­

    *CRACK*

    Krejin hit the ground with his knees. He is bleeding from several wounds. The destruction his body went through¡­ He looked at Sam in surprise. Because even with all the attacks that hended on Sam. There is not a scratch.

    Sam just had a smirk on his face, but in his head he was thinking something else.

    ''I need to breakthrough.''

    He has been in the Initial stage of Divine ne Initiation for son long it felt like an eternity. His energy level also reached its limit and he needs to breakthrough. That''s one of the reasons he destroyed Krejin so easily.

    Krejin is strong, but he is a little worse than yers and Sam didn''t really have that much hard time even when fighting yers. These ns are only so-so.

    Krejin felt his world copse.

    "I lost¡­ I lost¡­ I lost¡­"

    He is screaming in his mind.

    "Young master. Young master." Si ran to him and started shaking him. He felt lost in his own thoughts and didn''t even respond to her. His own thoughts are gnawing at him.

    "It can''t be. I shouldn''t have lost. How can I lose?"

    He muttered under his breath with lost look in his eyes.

    "Oh, was I too harsh?"

    Sam rubbed his chin as he asked. The guardians looked at their young master and gulped down.

    "We need to do something." Their captain whispered as he looked at Krejin.

    "Young master has never lost and never faced any defeat. This is not just some casual defeat. He was overwhelmed and was treated like a fool. Even receiving lectures in between. This might be a mental blocker to him."

    The guard captain continued and narrowed his gaze as he looked at Sam. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Sam looked at them and said.

    "You are not nning on going back on your words, are you?"

    "It is our young master''s promise. We follow his orders. However, you need to wait here until we can get the item. We don''t have it in our hands."

    "No problem. I will wait right here. Along with my prize."

    Sam said as he pointed his spear at Si while sitting on the ground. The guards looked at Si and then brought the dazed Krejin away.

    Krejin was brought back to the empty hall and the guardians backed away.

    "Sigh¡­. It seems like that kid is indeed ruthless. To give you such a defeat. Not of physical nature, but mentally too. You are way too unfortunate."

    As soon as he spoke those words, Krejin felt like a p of thunder has rung in his ears. He got out of daze. Its almost as if those words magically healed him.

    "Old man, what is this? What is happening to me?" He asked in distress.

    "That is what you call a defeat. A true defeat. Not just losing in some duel. But a defeat that your body and mind epted deep in your conscious. With all the pride you bottled up¡­ you are yet to realize it, but your instincts did and surrendered to your superior."

    "No.. It can''t be. I am a true Telchine. How can I be defeated by a nobody from the academy realm?"

    "That''s what I wanted you to let go of. He is not a nobody just because he is from the academy realm. He is someone who can defeat you, and he just happened to be from academy realm. You cannotbel someone with an identity you despise just so that you can make their worth lower than yourself.

    It is not a good habit to have."

    "No, I can''t lose. You know me. I am the future of the Telchines. I am Krejin. I am supposed to be undefeated. If the news of my loss spreads¡­ what will happen to me. My power. My authority¡­"

    The old man stayed silent for a moment and his voice reverberated again.

    "You aremitting another grave mistake Krejin. You are thinking in the route that you really shouldn''t. It wouldn''t end well for you.

    That state of mind¡­ it is not suitable for growth."

    "No, if my loss is publicized, that is not suitable for my growth. My future¡­. And Si¡­ that''s right. I can''t let him kill Si. She is someone that should stay by my side."

    "Krejin. This is the second time you are going in the path I told not to. I hope you remember our deal."

    With that, the voice didn''te back again. Krejin just knelt down and started weeping.

    "Why can''t you understand me? You know I cannot let this go. Why are you pushing me like this?"

    The character shift from being arrogant to so scared and insecure. One must wonder what his real side is.

    And as one would expect, he made a really really cliched decision.

    Half an hourter. Sam who is sitting along with Si looked at the Guardiansing his way.

 Chapter 2233 Mistake

    Chapter 2233 Mistake

    Krejin came back along with the guardians.

    He walked toward Sam and gave him a spatial storage ring. Sam checked the contents and nodded. It is what he was promised. Sam looked at Si. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    "I am gonna kill her right now. Anyst words that you want to speak to her?"

    "I do have something to say to her and I would like to do that with some privacy."

    "I will close my ears and you can whisper it to her. I promise that I won''t eavesdrop. But letting her go¡­? That''s not happening."

    "Do you really think you can do whatever you want, just because I am asking nicely? I said I wanted to talk to her alone." Krejin said in a cold tone.

    "I would turn down that re a bit if I were in your position. The position of the loser. What the hell are you going to do besides order yourckeys around? Beat me with your own hands?"

    Krejin''s whole body twitched.

    He then leaned in towards Si and whispered. "you are not going to die." In a very low tone. Sam as he promised didn''t eavesdrop. He just read the lips and a smirk appeared on his face.

    *SWOOSH*

    The next moment, a giant wave of darkness enveloped the surroundings. Sam is cornered by a few familiar faces from all sides.

    "Seems like, young master Krejin has invited a few more friends."

    Sam said as he focused on the shadows. He has sensed them ever since the guardians and Krejin came. A familiar group, all are hiding in the shadows of the guardians. The shadow cavalry.

    "I don''t know what you are talking about. It seems like they followed me here, when I went to tell them that the trap has to be withdrawn. It is a honest mistake. And technically I didn''t break the promise."

    "Do you know when people actually use technicalities? When they are trying weasel out of something they shouldn''t. Anyway, it is not like I am not prepared for this bullshit."

    Sam snapped his fingers.

    *SWOOSH*

    With the massive sh, both Sam and Si disappeared.

    The shadow cavalry is the only one that had a slight negative impact because of the sh. But even they recovered within seconds.

    Krejin hurriedly took out the tracking map to locate Sam''s position. He wanted to see if he escaped from the and to his surprise, he is not even that far. He is within the same city and is not even moving.

    "Hurry, this way."

    Krejin led the shadow cavalry himself, followed by his guardians.

    The situation is not really that unique. Krejin wanted to kill Sam, save Si along with his reputation. So, he thought he was being smart with the shadow cavalry technicality. But as soon as Sam sensed the shadow cavalry, he didn''t really care.

    He knew things became a whole lot easier. After all, he kept the cavalry in the captivity for so long, so there is obviously a contingency against them. One of them is the sh of light.

    After that, he used the previously prepared scrolls to transfer him and Si from there. As for tracking device¡­

    Krejin didn''t even take long to reach the location. He spotted Sam immediately and as if they are bulls that saw red, the shadow cavalryunched themselves at Sam.

    Sam who was in the middle of nowhere, and no one, not even Si beside him was cornered. He panicked and looked like he was about to say something. But Krejin became anxious that he might escape again and said.

    "Prepare the soul capture. We are going to capture his soul after death and absorb his memories."

    Following Krejin''s orders, the guardians prepared the.

    It is a device created using some necromancy. Even though for soul absorption, necromancer is mandatory, with some tweaks and tricks they managed to create the device that will help in direct capture of the soul without the involvement of the necromancers.

    Everyone within the area of the that died, will have their soul captured in that.

    Sam was about to say something, but no voice came out and before he could even react, the shadow cavalry stabbed a sword straight through his back.

    "Contact Si, she must be around here, trying to escape. Tell her that everything is fine."

    Krejin leisurely ordered as he watched the Shadow Cavalry butcher Sam into minced meat right in front of his eyes.

    Now, the secret is safe, Si is safe and his reputation is safe. Sam''s soul is also captured in the Soul. Krejin for some reason had a bad feeling at that moment. His gut told him something severely went wrong.

    The shadow cavalry didn''t stop even after destroying Sam''s body. There is not a single sign to show that the bloody stter was once a cultivator, a living breathing creature.

    However, they are not stopping at all.

    Krejin felt like he missed something.

    "Where is Si? Why wasn''t she found yet? From our speed and reaction time, she shouldn''t have been lost. She couldn''t possibly move that far away. Not with all the injuries she is still carrying along with her energy depletion.

    Go and find her now.

    Also, put an emergency request. I need a necromancer in front of me in the next five minutes."

    The guardians sensed their young master''s anxiety and obeyed. In the five minutes, the necromancer paid the visit. Krejin immediately absorbed the memories of the soul and the next moment, he lost his mind.

    "FUCK. SIOLAAAAAA!!!!"

    He screamed at the top of his lungs turned around and lunged at the shadow cavalry.

    "STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT YOUR BASTARDS"

    The guardians reacted quickly and tried to stop their master, but they were a tad bit toote. Krejin fell to his knees in the middle of the shadow cavalry and looked at the bloody mess in front of him. The memories he absorbed from the soul, clearly showed what he missed and what actually went wrong.

    And how he lost his Si to his own orders.

 Chapter 2234 Return

    Chapter 2234 Return

    Krejin felt like his whole world is copsing.

    He should have understood that something is wrong when he saw Sam alone in the middle of nowhere. How could someone who created so much destruction and showcases so much of his abilities, even managed to escape from the shadow cavalry with just a sh of light be so easy to find? Why didn''t Krejin even stop to question himself about this?

    He just lost himself in hiscency.

    Andcency lead to the death of Si. That''s right, the bloody mess on the ground right now is Si and the soul that he just absorbed also belonged to her.

    As for how it happened... it is very simple. The pill that Sam drove into Si''s mouth yed a key part. It is the disguise serum that he created. This one is not really a perfect serum like the ones he has given to the managers. Instead, it is a prototype. The purpose of it is actually very simple. The outeryer of the pill contains regr healing pill or any other pill for that matter. The core of the pill, will have a small casing made an animal''s internal organ, like an intestine. It is marked with a special inscription.

    Up on Sam''s will, the inscription will activate and dissolve thecasing, release the serum into the body of the consumer. And just for the sake of it, Sam used the modified serum that will turn people into him. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    When Sam took Si and ran away from the shadow cavalry, he just activated the pill, injured her throat and escaped while leaving her there.

    As for the tracker spell...

    That was result of the time he spent on researching the runes. Not only did he break himself of the spell, he even transferred it sessfully to Si while they were waiting for the guardians and the young master toe back. He predicted that Krejin might break his word and Sam prepared for it. Now, he is out of this and he also let a little something for Krejin as a parting gift apart from Si. And right now, the parting gift was brewing in the blood of the shadow cavalry.

    After stopping the rampage they are going on, the shadow cavalry started seeing red all over the ce. Their eyes are also giving out a red hue and their killing intent just increased. However, they are trying to maintain their sanity, because thest time they experienced this, they were rampaging all over the Thssa territory.

    At that moment, the idiotic young master who should have never even involved himself with Sam looked at the cavalry hatefully.

    "YOU BASTARDS. YOU... YOU ALL KILLED HER. YOU KILLED MY SIOLA. I WILL KILL YOU ALL."

    Maybe its because he is so used to having his way in his own territory, his killing intent and bloodlust rose to the peak even in front of the cavalry which is several times stronger than him.

    And that is a mistake.

    The cavalry that was trying to gain a control of their own emotions, couldnt help but be attracted by this sudden killing intent directed at him. The guardians understood that things might go out of hand and immediately intervened.

    The strongest guardian of Krejin is only in the early stages of Divine ne Consummation. Krejin might be a young master of the Telchines, but even they cannot produce the high level cultivators just for guarding some arrogant brats, that too when he was still in their own territory. Who would have known such a situation would emerge? All the guardians knew of the deeds Shadow cavalrymitted. Even though these people looked down on the Noble league, it is just their own swollen pride, making them do that. they still knew what kind of force wields what kind of power and Shadow cavalry is no less powerful than any of the elite forces. They are not confident in defending their young master against them.

    But the captain''s reaction has been a tad bitte.

    *BOOM*

    The cavalry attacked. Krejin was in the direct line of the attack. He was dazed, but was brought back to his senses because of the yells and shouts of the Guardians. He hurriedly crushed a token.

    *BOOM*

    The attack met a barrier. However, Krejin still felt a bit of the impact. It hit him squarely in the chest and he was sent flying like a broken kite.

    "Young master, use the transference token. Escape immediately."

    The guard captain spoke as he lunged at the shadow cavalry that came at them. Even though his words addressed the young master, they were also a hint to the other guards. One of the guards sprang into action and made their young master act immediately. He helped him crush the token and sent him away.

    However, that was the extent of things they could do.

    Shadow cavalry lost it and the massacre of the guards began.

    Sam on the other hand used his transference scroll to return to the academy realm. He ced an anchor at a distant ce from the Olympian region. From there, he took on harbinger to go back to the Olympian city. To submit hisst and final trial.

    He didnt travel at full speed. Because at the moment, Sam is a tad bit cautious, a bit nervous and also a bit excited.

    Because if everything went as nned on all sides, a surprise would await him as soon as he arrived at the Olympian city. And that surprise would be of multipleyers.

    He would find arge scale curfew all over the city, he would see the elders, instructors and students all tip-toeing around each other. He would also see a lot of chaos brewing beneath the shadows.

    Most of all, he would see a giant problem awaiting for himself as soon as his arrival was announced. And that will lead him to see exactly what the Gambler academy truly capable of.

    First thing Sam did as he neared the city was to use the remote link he had with the hub to see how many people are still using the wristbands and the bird puppets. To his surprise, there are still a significant number of them left.

    He thought they would all be destroyed.

    He even believed that the deans and elders might force everyone to destroy their devices after the info leak. But they are still many intact.

    Maybe, after learning about the enemies that they dont even have any idea about, they have developed a love-hate rtionship with the Hub.

    Sam was blocked at the city gate. There are representatives of all the academies standing guard there. "I am a student of Gambler academy returning from abor quest. May I know why I am being barred from entrance?"

    He asked if he really didnt know why.

    "Wait here, until your academy members verify your identity. It is the new crisis protocol."

    One of the guards exined. Sam looked at the two students in Gambler academy uniforms. Both of them are fourth graders. He is not extremely familiar with them, but he knew a lot of significant details about them.

    They are above mediocrity falling a bit short of remarkability.

    They took a drop of blood from Sam and matched it with some device. After it glowed green only was he allowed entry.

    Even that has a catch.

    "Follow this team, that will escort you to the academy. Once you reach the academy, please report to student union or an Elder in charge. You are also advised to stay in the dorms. The remaining details will be given to you in the academy."

    Sam wasn''t really surprised by so many security measures. But it is surprising to see how meticulously they are doing this.

    "I am sorry, but I must report my sess in the quest to the Poseidon academy and submit the item they requested."

    His eyesnded on the representative of the Poseidon academy that was there.

    That guy immediately contacted the academy.

    "Elder, a student came with a quest item and said he needs to submit it to our academy. How should I handle this?"

    "It is not that important right now. Tell that guy to go back to his own academy. We will send a representativeter on to collect it."

    That was the answer he got.

    "Due to the security measures, you are told to return to Gambler academy, we wille and collect the item."

    Sam was a bit amused. Because he is sure that if the student mentioned his name instead of just ''a student'' the answer would have been a lot different. Sam just nodded and left.

    As he slowly walked through the streets along with the escort provided to him, he noticed several gazes from many hidden locations. Several messages were sent to all the academies and their student unions. Several messages about just one first grader. However, a first grader they have been looking for quite a while.

 Chapter 2235 Meeting

    Chapter 2235 Meeting

    Sam reached the Gambler Academy entrance and the moment he did, he noticed some people hurriedly flying towards him.

    Sam smirked at this and blinked from there into the entrance. He took out hismunication device to contact Dove.

    "Hello, I am sure you are in the academy. I just arrived and am at the entrance right now. I can see some people with different academy uniforms are flying towards the entrance as well.

    You might want to be here, right now."

    There is already an elder guarding at the entrance and he also heard Sam''s words. Of course, he also noticed the elders from the other academies, he just assumed that they areing here for something.

    However, after hearing what Sam said, he connected some dots and realized what the problem could be.

    *BOOM*

    The elders from different academies made quite an entrance.

    They allnded in front of the entrance just a few feet away with utmost pride and ferocity. And all of their gazes are locked on Sam.

    The elder frowned and stood in between them.

    "Why are you all here?" The elder of the Gambler academy is very youngpared to the people who came. He is also a lot less experienced. He is one of the youngest elders of the academy realm.

    Usually, he would have talked to them quite politely, but based on their behavior, he realized that politeness and respect could be thrown out of the window for now.

    "We are here to apprehend a suspect who is known to have connections and dealings with the managers of the hub, who are now criminals that carried out massacres in all of the Olympian academies.

    So, handover Sam right now."

    The Gambler academy elder, frowned at the moment. He was about to respond, when someone beat him to it.

    "Those are some pretty big usations elder, all the academies ganging up and even sending elders to target a first grader? That too not ask us the academy who has authority and affiliation with the student, but to directly apprehend him?

    Everyone of you must be pretty proud."

    It was not Sam who spoke those words, rather it was from Dove.

    She arrived on time.

    Sam looked at her and smiled. He did expect her toe and defend him, but he didnt expect her toe on so strong. Things will surely get heated like this. And he wanted it.

    "Couldn''t expect anything more from the Gambler academy. Even students who are still green behind their ears are talking back to the Elders.

    Go and tell you Dean toe and greet me if you are so stuck up about consent. Today, i am going to take this guy away with me, no matter what."

    The oldest of those uninvited guests, who happened to be wearing the Zeus academy uniform spoke with a cold tone and he made a grabbing motion.

    Sam felt the spiritual energy in his surroundings gain some sentience as it condensed and pulled him away towards the old elders.

    The Elder who was watching the scene made his move. A halberd appeared in his hands and swung it in the air. There was no sh, no destruction, all they saw was a gust of wind which is the aftereffect of the swing flow in between Sam and the elder. Just like that, Sam felt the force vanish and he stood his ground.

    He raised an eyebrow as he looked at the elder.

    "Thank you Elder Nian." he expressed his gratitude and stepped back.

    Elder Nian ignored his words of thanks and looked at the Elders.

    "I understand that the tensions are quite high at the moment, but that doesn''t warrant such unruly behavior from the elders who are in such esteemed positions.

    If you want to apprehend or even use one of the students of the gambler academy, do your due diligence and approach the proper channels.

    You can contact our Dean Wharton, or you can approach the city guard and make them mediate the situation.

    Any other approach will be seens as provocation from your academies.

    Andst time I checked, the Zeus academy had signed a contract with the Gambler academy that they will not make the first move. Or, you have a price to pay. So, please proceed with caution."

    Nian''s words were calm, andposed and he didn''t seem afraid even though there are so many elders in front of him.

    Sam is actually surprised, because in all the surveince footage that he had of Nian, he had barely seen him fight. He never even trained in hub for fighting and instead he was solely focused on developing his knowledge of inscriptions.

    Weapon enchantments are in particr his specialty.

    He is already a bit surprised that such a guy was ced at the gate as a guard, now Sam is interested in seeing what he is capable of.

    "You are speaking to the Grand elder of the Zeus academy. So, mind your tongue boy. You are acting like a young chick that''s not afraid of a tiger."

    Nian didn''t say anything and stomped the tail of the halberd into the ground, the next moment, several inscriptions spread from that spot and then all of them gathered back on to the halberd.

    He then spun it a bit before looking at the grand elder nkly. He is ready to fight. There is no need for words.

    The grand elder of the Zeus academy was about to make a move when all of a sudden Sam saw someone elseing. It was the face that he was most interested in seeing right now.

    The man himself¡­ Bloody Chariot.

    He hovered in the air as his gaze got locked on Sam.

    "Let''s go."

    Even though he was looking at Sam, the words were meant to someone else. The grand elder of the Zeus academy. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    The grand elder didnt respond and red at Sam.

    "Elder two. Let''s go." Bloody Chariot''s tone got colder. The elder froze in the spot for a second and gave Sam a final dirty look before he left. Bloody Chariot looked at Nian and said.

    "My apologies for his behavior."

    With that he left as well.

    The rest of the elders contemted for a moment before they left as well.

    Dove frowned at this and then looked at Sam with a sigh.

    "Why are you always in trouble?"

    Sam just shrugged and was about to walk away.

    "Where do you think you are going? You are needed in a meeting. A lot of people are waiting for you."

    "Waiting for me? Such an honor. But I am tired after the trial. You know I had to go and mess around with Telchines. Their young master put me through so much stress, I think I need to¡­"

    "Come to the meeting."

    She spoke coldly and walked away, she was clearly not expecting any resistance to those words.

    Sam followed her with a smile.

    In a meeting room, there are a lot of people. Dean Wharton is there, and all the elders of the gambler academy, who are usually holed up in their rooms doing research or busy doing expeditions are all there.

    The instructors are all standing, and most of the important fourth graders and some third graders are also there.

    There are no second graders and Sam is the only first grader there. The room felt a bit cramped, with all the tension in the air.

    "You are finally here."

    Ling Tian spoke with a sigh.

    Sam smiled at him and took a seat arranged for him.

    Dean Wharton asked.

    "Oy Kid. Are you involved with the hub and those fools who did all those killings? You are not are you?" His question was straightforward. Sam almost chuckled.

    Before he could answer, Ling Tian cut in.

    "It doesn''t matter whether he is involved or not. We need to ensure his safety. In fact, if he has any connection with them, rted to this massacre or otherwise, we need to guarantee his safety even more.

    If he falls in the hands of other academies, who knows what they will do to him."

    He seemed really concerned.

    "Still, Ling Tian, dont you think it would be better to actually know the details before we make the decision? After all, antagonizing all the Olympic academies should be worth it.

    It would be if he is really innocent, but if he is really nted here by the Hub''s people with some agenda, I don''t believe it is worth it.

    We need to interrogate him."

    "He is not nted by the managers or the Joker. I am sure of it."

    Ling Tian said decisively.

    "How do you know?" the elder asked.

    ''Because he is the Joker dammit.'' Ling Tian really wanted to scream those words out loud. But he knew better than doing that.

    "I can''t tell you. But you can confirm it with Dean Wharton."

    Dean Wharton nodded solemnly. When the elders were about to follow up, another elder''smunication token suddenly rang.

    "Someone from the Poseidon academy is here to collect the quest items from Sam."

 Chapter 2236 Weird Move

    Chapter 2236 Weird Move

    Sam is surprised.

    He originally thought that since the whole region is in chaos, the Poseidon academy willpletely ignore the quest situation. After all, that is a trivial thing. And he is also sure that the news from the Telchine territory shouldnt reach the Poseidon academy at the moment.

    After all, for that Krejin has to pull himself together, inform their family, subdue the shadow cavalry that is rampaging in their territory and then finally, they would contact Christos.

    Then only the Poseidon academy will know the details of the incident. Right now, the academy is too closed to care much about this. However, Sam immediately connected this with a different issue. Right now, every academy wants ess to him which is being denied by the Gambler academy. In Nian''s words, they need to find a legitimate way.

    Now, Poseidon academy has one.

    Sam stood up and walked out of the room. The elders didnt stop him. It is not like the people in the room are stupid, they know exactly what is happening.

    "They are at the entrance. Nian is holding them back."

    The elder said as if it inform Sam.

    "I think it is better to keep an eye on Sam. who knows what the Poseidon academy many pull." One of the elders spoke.

    Ling Tian was about to say something, but immediately stopped after Dove stood up and volunteered. She followed Sam all the way to the gate.

    Sam stood behind Elder Nian and took out the spatial ring.

    "The quest item multiplied by a hundred. All of them are there. You can check it out."

    He just casually threw the ring. The Elder frowned and didnt even bother catching the ring. It just hit him on the shoulder and fell down.

    Sam was about to turn around and leave. But the elder called.

    "Is this the respect the gambler academy students show to the elders thate on official business?

    It is one thing for you to not invite me in by yourself, but you even block the entrance and throw the items to my face? Seems like all the talent made your head swell big."

    The elder''s aura raged.

    Nian gritted his teeth and swung the halberd in the air. Another showboating action. Nothing more.

    But his stance is clear. Since the elder from Poseidon academy decided on some show of power, he did the same. The elder red at Elder Nian.

    "Elder, you can state what you want with your words. If you use strength, then I will have to as well. Today I am the guard here and I will do everything in my power to do it.

    So, please stay your hand when you speak."

    Sam and Dove looked at Nian a bit weirdly. It is one thing that a nerd of inscriptions was ced as a guard at the gate, but to think this guy even went as far as issuing threats to elders.

    Sam had a weird thought, but he shook it off his head, because he had to deal with the Poseidon academy''s elder.

    The elder calmed his aura down and looked at Sam. "You need to hand over the time to my hands and sign the contract indicating that the quest ispleted. You will also have a copy. Only then would the quest be consideredpleted.

    So, either youe outside or Ie inside."

    "Why do I not remember such a tiresome procedure when I submitted eleven other quests? You are the only one asking me for that. And with the situation as it is now, I don''t really trust you guys.

    What if you do something?"

    "Hmph, do you really think a man of my stature has to stoop so low as to use tricks on you?" The old man replied haughtily.

    Dove looked at him weirdly. The cracks left behind by the elders of the Olympian academy in front of the academy gate are still there, fresh for all of them to see.

    Now he is saying something like this?

    Sam looked at her and asked. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    "Can we let him in?"

    "I guess it wouldn''t be a problem."

    Dove replied and even Elder Nian nodded. Sam looked at Elder Nian''s expression for a moment. It is very weird. There is something up with him. The elder of the poseidon academy came forward and spread the scroll.

    "You need to sign it with your blood and spiritual signature."

    Sam nodded and gave him the item before signing it with his blood. As soon as his bleeding finger touched the scrolls, a glint shed past his eyes. He looked at the elder with a smile that didn''t look like a smile.

    He then ced his spiritual signature without bothering much.

    "I guess it is done."

    Sam said and he gave the old man a once over. His gaze particrlynded on his wrist and he was a bit disappointed when he didnt see the wrist band. If it was there, things would have been a lot easier and a lot less severe as well.

    But now, he has to do something big.

    The old man looked at Sam with a puzzled gaze. He is expecting some reaction from Sam, which he is not getting.

    However, he didn''t have any reason to stay there anymore and left without making a sound.

    Elder Nian had a frustrated look as he saw the receding back of the old elder. But after half a minute, he calmed himself down and went back to his guarding position. He stood there and kept on tapping the tail end of the halberd on the ground, the blows so focused and concentrated that only the area that was touched by the tail end directly was impacted.

    The surrounding area, even the immediate surroundings werepletely unaffected, not even a single crack.

    Sam gave him a sweeping nce before he walked back along with Dove. On his way, he asked her.

    "Is it really necessary for me to be in this meeting? There are not really many answers that you can get. All I can say is that I need had a close dealing with Ivar. But that was just business.

    He had something that I wanted and I bought it from him.

    Apart from that, there is not much. I don''t really like being grilled that much, you know.

    After all, don''t tell me that with all the power behind the academies, you cannot really catch the trace of rtionship that I had with the managers, if I really had one."

    "Well, it is not just that.

    There are a few coincidences. First of all, the Yena pack. During your trials, you were ordered to clear Yena packs. Coincidentally, at the same time Yena packs were found in Thssa territory spreading a deadly disease.

    At the same time, Thssa territory is involved with your Pseudo-hell incident. Finally, the shadow cavalry appeared right inside the Thssa territory when they are already depleted because of the disease and killed them all. That too, right after they were captured by the Hub.

    Don''t you think these coincidences are too much for anyone to ignore?"

    As they spoke up to this point, they are already at the meeting room.

    They walked in and everyone bombed him with more questions. The same ones that were asked by Dove before were being asked by them.

    Sam stayed silent for a moment and asked a question of his in return.

    "So, may I ask one thing?"

    Ling Tian gestured him to do so.

    "When I went to the Telchine territory to my final trial, the young master of the Telchine n, Krejin said that they had a deal with christos and Shadow cavalry was there to trap me.

    And when I was about to escape from the trap they set me I saw the shadow cavalry turn around and attack Krejin. His guards barely saved him and in process they were all killed.

    Last thing I saw was the shadow cavalry going on a rampage in their city.

    So, are you guys going to pin this on me too? To make me the scapegoat for all of this? I won''t deny that I have personal vendetta against the Olympian academies.

    In fact, the dean and Ling Tian can confirm it. They knew most of it and the reasons behind it.

    But you all saw the way that I fought against them. I humiliated them, yed the rules and made them feel insignificant. For all I know, there is a plot brewing in the Olympian circle and because of the way that I acted up, they just wanted to use me as the scape goat.

    If I didn''t know any better, I even believe that the Olympians are involved with the Hub directly. It is just as usible as me being a first grader, getting involved in some grand scheme that could copse the academy realm as we know it."

    His words all of a sudden made a lot of sense.

    Particrly, the incident about Shadow cavalry acting up in the Telchine territory.

    The elders lifted their focus off of Sam for a while as they made calls to investigate this.

    Meanwhile, the Elder from Poseidon academy that got a scroll signed by Sam, was walking back to the academy slowly as he examined the scroll and signature with a deep frown.

 Chapter 2237 Payback

    Chapter 2237 Payback

    The Elder from Poseidon academy did go with a certain agenda in his mind.

    But when the scroll was signed by Sam, it didn''t take any effect. Sam was standing there like a straight g pole without so much as a change in his expression as he signed the scroll.

    However, the Elder didn''t have the privilege to check why in that setting and had to leave.

    Now on his way back he is trying to see if the trick they left in the scroll is actually working of if it got faulty. However as he injected his energy into it¡­

    *SPARK*

    It started burning. The scroll caught mes starting exactly from the blood drop and spiritual signature Sam left on it before the whole thing burned. The Elder didn''t even have time to react as it happened.

    He had a bad feeling and ran to the academy.

    Meanwhile, as soon as Sam the scroll burned, Sam got the message in his head. It was linked to his spiritual signature and in turn his soul after all. As soon as he got the message, he got into work. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    In the meeting while everyone else is discussing the possibilities andpletely ignored him, he closed his while sitting in his chair.

    Only Ling Tian and Dove noticed this. While thetter just believed he was resting, the former had a bad feeling.

    At that moment, some of the systems of the hub were activated without making much noise. Since no one is here in the building and the rest of the building being shut down, there is no disturbance.

    Sam first tapped into the surveince data.

    He looked for the Elder of the Poseidon academy that came with the scroll. After locking in on him, he went through all the information to pinpoint all of the people that are close with that elder.

    His favorite students, direct disciples, confidants, servants, friends, partners both sexual and business, descendants, both of legitimate and private. Most of them are unsurprisingly part of the Poseidon academy in one way are the other.

    After identifying all of these people, of which the total number added up to a little more than sixty, Sam went through their histories to identify their dark acts. To see if any of them have any saintly qualities that could mark them as innocent.

    Unfortunately for them, none of them do.

    His descendants in particr¡­. Sam would have killed them to just avoid breathing the same air as them. They are that rotten.

    Then he started checking for their bird puppets and their wrist bands. Unfortunately for him, not all them had these. Only around half of them maintained and luckily for him, all the descendants of the elder maintained their wrist bands.

    Sam took a deep breath at this point.

    Because he is using one of the functions of the hub that he hasn''t use at all. It is also part of histest technology. Maybe not tootest, but something he discovered before he got into the academy realm.

    Something that helped him kill people that are a lot stronger than him.

    The Energy Resonance.

    And he is nowbining them with what he learned from the special book tha Gambler got him from Hel.

    Dark elemental energy that was stored in one of the cores of the hub was utilized as it gathered on a special tform that he created. It couldn''t exactly be considered a tform, more like a secret chamber.

    In that secret chamber, based on Sam''s will, the gathered ark elemental energy is mixed with fire elemental energy and Sam manufactured a curse.

    A curse that is powerful, dangerous, painful, but not lethal or life threatening. However, he is sure as hell that they would wish that they could die. The moment the curse was manufactured, wrist bands of thirty five people all of them at various corners of the Poseidon academy started glowing.

    Sam''s vein on his forehead started bulging a bit. He is sweating. This is a big operation, even bigger thanunching Divine ne Consummate level defenses and attacks using the hub.

    The problem is not with the level of the energy or the attack, instead because of the distance and most importantly the resonance.

    He had to use the surrounding energy of the wrist band, which is mostly in the control of the people who are wearing it.

    However, there is indeed some aide for him. The bird puppets. They have energy cores. So, the people among the thirty-five, that still had the bird puppets were the first to get affected. The birds flew close to the wrist bands and supplied the energy.

    Even though it took a lot of effort, the upside is everything happened fast enough to make sure that they couldn''t resist even if they did notice it before the curse manifested.

    The curse immediatelytched on to them.

    It is a very powerful curse and since there is bodily contact with the users, it didn''t really discriminate based on the cultivation levels. Of course, for the truly powerful, it didn''t really hurt that much.

    Like for the people in theter stages of the Divine ne transcendence.

    However, there are only four people like that and even they felt a bit drained as they fought against it.

    The rest of them however¡­. Particrly the weakest of them all. The offspring of the elder. They took the brunt of it, the true effects of the curse are disyed on them.

    First, following the veins, the curse spread all over their bodies creating a burning sensation prompted by the fire elemental energy injected into the curse. The energy was imprinted all over the veins and the pain intensifies with time as blood circtes within the body.

    The only way to stop the pain is to either diffuse the curse or stop the blood from flowing.

    The first one is veryplicated. Sam believed that unless people from Hel academy visits here, not many people would be able to diffuse it without harming the people.

    The second method is to stop the blood from circting altogether. Of course, that has a small side effect called death.

    But those are the only ways. Of course, they could also strongly resist it with their own spiritual energy and negate it, but not a lot of them are that skilled.

    By the time the elder reached the academy, these people that were cursed are already noticed.

    They also identified the pattern. The elder went to the dean and reported that the scroll didn''t work. Then he also received the news that more than half of the people that are important to the elder are cursed.

    A curse that is so potent that even the Dean at the first nce was not able to identify theplexity of.

    As for why Sam did this?

    It is simple.

    The scroll that the elder brought to Sam was a trap. A curse was associated with the contract in that scroll, but it was hidden by some special means as it was ingrained in the scroll material itself.

    Once Sam imprints his blood and spiritual signature, the curse will be activated. And by the nature of the curse, it had only two effects. One of them is that it will cause a lot of physical pain, gradually increasing with time.

    The second one is that the pain multiplies every time he lies.

    Sam didn''t know exactly what the Poseidon academy wanted to gain from this. Either that they trusted Sam to identify the curse ande crawling to them, or they believed in gambler academy to get the truth out of Sam in that condition, along with the secrets.

    The first case is farfetched, because there is no way in hell the gambler academy would let him out of their sight.

    Then, the second case, is likely, but with the condition that the Poseidon academy has means to know the information learned by the Gambler academy after interrogating Sam.

    Which means, there could be a spy in the gambler academy.

    Of course, the best way to counter a curse is always diffuse it the moment it applied on someone.

    Sam, as soon as the curse was activated, managed to break it down. It is of high level in terms of energy, but not in terms of quality. Compared to the curses in the book from Hel, these are mediocre at best.

    The moment he broke the curse, the scroll started burning. And Sam sent a return gift to the elder.

    "It seems our n backfired. But we can be sure about one thing. Sam is definitely rted to Hub somehow.

    The wrist bands are the origin of the curse and the curse effect is simr, only they used fire elemental energy to cause the burning sensation."

    Dean exined o the elder.

    "Then, we must apprehend him. This is enough evidence." The Elder said with grief and sorrow overwhelming him.

    "We could. But we need to prove that we used a curse against him and this is a consequence of that. However, as you just said, the scroll is burned. And even if we can prove that, then we would have to give an exnation why we encroached on the rights of Gambler academy now.

    We can''t use direct methods regarding this incident.

    However, I think we can find another way."

 Chapter 2238 Conference

    Chapter 2238 Conference

    Sam opened his eyes after doing everything he wanted to do.

    As soon as he opened his eyes, he met the gaze of Ling Tian who is staring at him with a deep frown. Sam suddenly felt a bit exposed and adjusted his position in his seat.

    "Everyone, I need a minute alone with Sam."

    He announced and without waiting for anyone''s reply he pulled Sam away. Dove looked at this with a bit of confusion. Even a few minutes ago, Sam said that Ling Tian could vouch for Sam''s purpose or something.

    She was already a bit curious, but because of all the chaos, she couldn''t really ask him. Now, the curiosity burned even more.

    Ling Tian pulled Sam a bit far away from the meeting room and even activated a concealment formation. He looked at Sam straight for a couple of minutes before asking.

    "What did you do?"

    Sam scratched his head and asked.

    "What do you mean?"

    "What exactly did you do? Don''t fool around now. Just answer me."

    "I really don''t understand what you mean. I did a lot of things. What are you asking about?"

    Ling Tian is a bit stumped. He is almost exasperated. He took a couple of deep breaths and said.

    "I don''t want to dig into everything you have done at the moment. I know there is a lot of shit that you stirred and you are directly connected to the current state of the academy realm.

    I want to know what you did while closing your eyes in the meeting room."

    "Oh, that? I just paid something back. You can even consider it a return gift for what Poseidon academy tried to give me earlier."

    "Tried? Fucking hell. The Olympians are truly idiots. What did they try to do? What did you do to them?"

    "Well¡­"

    Sam is contemting whether he should exin or not. But Ling Tian saw Dove walking towards them. Even though he is sure that she couldn''t really hear what they were talking, he could see that she is there to talk to them.

    So, he removed the formation and looked at her.

    "What happened Dove? You need anything?"

    "Just some information from the Poseidon academy. Something else happened there. A few people in their academy fell victim to a very potent curse."

    "A curse?" Ling Tian asked and the cogs in his brain moved non-stop. It didn''t even take a second for him to figure out who is the creator of those curses. He knew first hand what Sam is capable of particrly when ites to curses.

    "Yes, a very peculiar curse. Very advanced as well. It isbined with the fire elemental energy, but that elemental energy is so constricted that apart from burning sensation and increase in temperature of the blood, it didn''t do anything.

    It is bing painful with the time.

    The Poseidon academy, is asking us for aid. They are requesting for Elder Acruse."

    "I am sure Dean Wharton could figure something out. In times like these¡­ I think even that favor could actually help ease tensions.

    I am sure I am not needed to make that decision."

    Ling Tian tried to conclude the conversation. Almost as if asking Dove ''I can''t do shit about it, so you don''t have to inform me about it.''

    Dove also noticed it, but she didn''t give in. She looked at both him and Sam before asking.

    "You guys know each other from before the academy?"

    Even though it was phrased like a sentence, it was more of a confirmed spection in her head.

    "Yeah, Kinda. We had a few interactions before."

    Sam readily replied. Dove looked at him askance as if she wanted him to continue. But Sam smiled and said.

    "I am not in a position to exin the details. Only Ling Tian has the authority to reveal that info. You can ask him."

    With that, Sam slipped past her and went back into the meeting room. Ling Tian sighed and said. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    "In fact, even I can''t tell a lot. But I do know him before."

    "Is his rmendation to the academy because of that."

    "Sort of." Ling Tian replied.

    "So, you knew that he has so much beef with the Olympians?"

    "Yeah."

    "You still let him stir so much conflict with them in their own home territory?"

    "Well, that part is honestly not in my hands. I even gave him a few warnings. But he doesn''t heed anyone''s advice that easily."

    Ling Tian felt a bit aggrieved as if he was being subjected to unfair treatment. Dove shook her head and left.

    Ling Tian followed them.

    The meeting room''s topic of discussion has changed from Sam to the curses of the Poseidon academy. While they are doing that, excluding the gambler academy and Zeus academy, a secret meeting was held.

    And this is not even a proper meeting, it was a conference call only between the deans of the Olympian academy.

    The Dean of the Poseidon academy led the conversation.

    "I am going toe clean here. We all want a piece of Sam at the moment and just like everyone else in this conversation, our academy also thought a dirty trick and tried to catch him.

    However, it backfired¡­"

    Then he proceeded to exin the whole process of how they wanted to ce a curse on Sam and how it backfired big time. They also generously told the part where they identified themon point between all the cursed people.

    "This strongly proves that Sam is indeed connected to the hub. In fact, this attack could have been an open taunt." The dean of the poseidon academy concluded.

    "Still, how can you be so conclusive? These are just spections. From the info that I got from the Gambler academy, Sam has a very strong excuse to make them all believe that the hub could be using Sam as a decoy here.

    They are deliberately trying to increase vignce against him and made him more and more suspicious." Dean of the Apollo academy said.

    "Now, who is proposing weird spections? Dean-Poseidon said sarcastically.

    He paused a bit and continued.

    "Alright, I didn''t mean to be salty, its a force of habit. Anyway, I do understand how all of this could be struck off as spective and the point the gambler academy is going with also has some merit.

    Even if we assume that both of those true, with this we at least understood the hidden dangers of the wrist bands and hubs a bit more.

    So, I believe that we can use this to leverage some more resistance against the Hub.

    For that, I need your help."

    "What do you need?" One of the other Deans asked.

    "First and foremost, the main advantage the Hub has over us is the information. The hub not only has all the deepest darkest secrets of everyone that ever stepped in this region, they also got the live updates.

    At least from the wristbands and the bird puppets of the people who are still stupidly using them.

    We need to eliminate that.

    The elder I sent didnt have either, and the n of nting a curse on Sam was executed by everyone that didn''t have their wrist bands of bird puppets. In fact, they were all strip searched with all kinds of means that I could think of.

    There is no way the information leaked from the inside, at least not through the regr means of hub. After the n was executed, and the scroll was sent to him, there was no conversation about the curse at any possible moment.

    So, the only way for this to happen was that themunication happened from Sam''s side. He didn''t even spend much time with the scroll. He just signed after reading it a bunch of times.

    How did that happen then? Sam didn''t even get affected by the said curse to even specte further. Either, Sam is someone who is so proficient in curses that our experts are closer to foolspared to him.

    Or, the Hub has already taken measures before, for such situations.

    If they can do all this with such partial surveince now, imagine what kind of control they had when everyone was actively using their things?

    What would happen, when the first graders that went to the pocket dimensiones back?

    So, we need to control the situation and destroy this means ofmunication by any means necessary. Even if we have to bend the rules a bit."

    There is an eerie silence in the call and this made Poseidon happy. Because for the first time in a while the deans that were used to crushing everything with absolute force, started thinking of plots.

    After some time they agreed.

    At the same time, Bloody Chariot who was not part this little rule bending stint, is actually following thew. And he went through proper channels to arrange a proper meet with Sam.

 Chapter 2239 Interrogation

    Chapter 2239 Interrogation

    Bloody Chariot jumped through some hoops and finally stood face to face with Dean Wharton.

    He passed over a document and exined his reason for him being there.

    "I have all the detailed information regarding Sam''s possible links to the managers and the Hub.

    All the information was submitted to the city guard and the judicial system. I requested their permission to interrogate him. Since this is s perilous time, they agreed with certain conditions.

    And of course, the prerequsite is that you also agree as the person in charge of the Gambler academy.

    So, I am here to discuss the conditions with you."

    Dean Wharton looked at the document and then passed it over to Ling Tian.

    Bloody Chariot looked at him with a nk expression.

    "I will be taking over this." Ling Tian said to Bloody Chariot who looked at Dean Wharton.

    "You heard him. I don''t want to deal with you or other elders. I handed everything rted to Sam to this guy. You can take it up with him. I will just be present that''s all."

    "If you say so." Bloody Chariot replied and turned to Ling Tian.

    Ling Tian didnt beat around the bush and just started stating his conditions.

    "Alright, he is not going to stand trial. Not without his right for the trial bybat. Unless it is present, I am not going to allow him to sit for a trial."

    "Alright, kind of expected." Bloody Chariot replied.

    Sam has a sure-fire way to deal with the trials. That is bybat. He is stronger than all the first graders and it guarantees a hundred percent sess rate of escaped any form of conviction.

    It would be stupid if he didn''t take it.

    Ling Tian didnt reply and just went through the document.

    "The truth identifying formation that you mentioned¡­. What kind are we talking about¡­"

    Just like that, the discussion went on and on for a while. Until that night.

    That is stil just the second day ever since Sam''s final n got executed.

    The next day, will be the third day. The day the first graderse back to the region with the wrist bands and bird puppets still with them. Bloody Chariot doesn''t know what exactly the hub is going to do if such ess is provided, but he needs to make sure that he handles at least a part of this, before that.

    At the moment, the hub is at the lowest point in terms of surveince. Of course, even that is better than anywork that was established by the academies, he just wants to get as much work done as posible, while also testing the limits of hub at this point.

    After negotiating all the terms and conditions, a little past midnight, Bloody Chariot wanted to hold the interrogation immediately.

    "I am sure, Sam won''t mind. But as per our conditions, you need to bring some of the other academy officials. Preferrably deans. Four of them in particr."

    "Alright, I will bring them. I am sure they will not reject my request. You can go to the Court room with Sam and wait for us there.

    I am sure, you want to give him some pep talk before we actually keep him in the hot seat."

    Bloody Chariot left.

    Ling Tian brought Sam and both of them walked to the courtroom. There was no judge and no officials, except for the captain of the city guard, who is pretty much useless for some time.

    He is only there to be a direct witness of the uing interrogation and of course to make preparations for it.

    He arranged one seat for Sam as the person who is going to be interrogated. The chair is in the middle of a special formation. The ce where the judge usually sat is now filled with six chairs.

    A total of six people have authority to question Sam. One of them is Dean Wharton, the other is Bloody Chariot, the people who are actually involved in the deal. Of course, Dean Wharton used Ling Tian as proxy.

    Then the remaining are the Deans of the other academies. Poseidon, Apollo, HeHephaestus, Ares

    These Deans came forward, or maybe those deans were the ones approved by Bloody Chariot.

    Wharton is nning on staying quite the whole time, so the other five will have a go at Sam.

    They can only ask questions. They cannot attack him, force him to answer questions and they cannot make him admit to something forcefully.

    Apart from answering questions and hoping Sam would answer truthfully, they only have one more ally in this whole scenario.

    And that is the special chair Sam is sitting on.

    The chair is surrounded by a formation. A truth detection formation.

    Sam wondered how it actually works as this is different from the ones he came across before. He tried to probe the formation a bit to understand it, but Ling Tian interruped him.

    "I know I should have asked you if you wanted to do this. But I figured, you wouldn''t want to back out of this at the moment. Also, I don''t want the situation to escte too much. This can be used to reduce the impact."

    "I ampletely fine with this. In fact, thank you. After all, I believe you thought this could be the only way for me to project some innocence on my part."

    "Of course. But I doubt you will y along. Anyway, just don''t go overboard.

    The chair has a special formation. It actually connects with the soul world. Some souls or spirits whatever you want to call them, they are formed of pure energy and they can see the vibrations of a person''s soul.

    They are now going to act as the detectors. Whenever you lie, the soul can detect it. As long as youpletely believe it is a whole-hearted truth, they won''t find anything wrong with it. Of course, that is not the only function of the formation and the detectors.

    Once they find out that you lied, then the formation will activate the pubishment. Your soul will hurt. And the hurt can only be relieved by either exitng the formation or by telling more and more truths.

    The hurt of one lie needs at least ten truths that you say afterward to return to normal."

    Sam was intrigued.

    "What if I don''t tell the truth or lie. What if I just said some neutral answer like I don''t want to say it. Then what will happen?"

    "I was about to exin that as well. From what I understand and from the emperical data collected from all the experiments conducted from this formation, if you say such bullshit answers to appear neutral, you will be still be effected if you are feeling guilty for it.

    For example, if I asked you about your native ce, which could be considered as Deste, but you didn''t want to say it and expressed it as such, the spirits will check the vibrations of your soul.

    If you are feeling guilty for being from the Deste, then you will face some punishment.

    The same soul pain. The only difference is the level of hurt depends on the level of guilt."

    "So, I am guessing the goal of this formation is to bring out the truth of the matter eventually instead of with just a couple of straight forward questions?"

    "It is. So, be careful.

    Bloody Chariot in particr. He is not stranger to this game. He must have had a couple of tricks up his sleeves."

    "Okay,I will try and be careful."

    The pep talk was over. The deans arrived and they took their seats.

    "I hope the rules have been exined to you." N?v(el)B\\jnn

    "Yes, you can just start with the questioning."

    "Alright, I will start with a simple one.

    Where are you from? I mean, where are you born?" Bloody Chariot asked.

    "I would rather not say." Sam replied with a smile. The formation gave a very faint and minute glint. Sam did feel some probing to his soul. It is hard to describe, but he did feel like someone is examining him.

    Bloody Chariot also looked at him keenly while the Dean-Poseidon asked.

    "What is your purpose of visiting the Academy region?"

    "I came here ording to the instructions of a certain person."

    As soon as he said those words, everyone froze and looked at him. Ling Tian face-palmed. He should have guessed something like this would happen.

    Bloody Chariot frowned and said.

    "Who is that certain person?"

    "I am sorry, I am not in a position to say. You can ask Dean Wharton, he can answer your question. He might be the person of highest authority in the academy realm regarding that information."

    Dean Wharton opened his mouth wide and looked at Sam.

    He couldnt understand why he was dragged into this.

    He noticed the other Deans looking at him, scrutinizing him as if they are asking him to spill the beans.

 Chapter 2240 Questions

    Chapter 2240 Questions

    *BAM*

    "What the fuck are you looking at, you bastards.

    I can''t tell you that. If you want to know, go and ask Dean Heron, yourself. He knows what''s going on. But that reason has nothing to do with the Hub or the killings.

    I can vouch for that."

    Dean Wharton mmed the table and lost his cool.

    Bloody Chariot frowned and asked.

    "Why can''t you tell me?"

    "Only the Deans can know of it."

    *SNAP*

    Bloody Chariot snapped the armrest off the chair with a single twist. That is one sentence, he got sick of hearing.

    That almost gave him a short fuse. If he hears that shit enough times, he is sure that he will lose it one of these days."

    The other Deans wanted to press on further, but Bloody Chariot knew it will be futile. So, he just turned to Sam and continued the questioning.

    "Do you have a grudge against the Olympians and Olympian Academies?"

    "Yes, I do."

    "Is that grudge the reason for you attacking the admission tests of all the Olympian academies?"

    "Yes, it is."

    "What were you expecting from it?"

    "Nothing much. Just to send a message to the academies that I am hostile to them. I just wanted to piss them off at that time."

    "What did you gain from it?"

    "Material gain? Not from that specific incident, but it would be fair to say that itid arge enough foundation for me to make some really good money from that."

    The formation is not reacting. Sam is still sitting there unfazed.

    The basic questions continued for a few minutes. The Deans are not really asking anyplicated questions. Sam guessed they are trying to understand his way of answering questions.

    The questions are very broad

    "What elements do you use?"

    "Why are you so good withbat?"

    "What is your most powerful skill?"

    Sam answered most of them and the ones he rejected, he didn''t feel guilty one bit.

    He is clean and didn''t face any hits from the formation. However, Sam felt that these questions are a bit odd.

    Maybe they are looking for logical habits in his word formation or something like that. "All right, how are you rted to the Hub?"

    Bloody Chariot dropped the question once again. Sam smiled at this. The question is very broad and vague.

    "Depends on what you define the rtion as? What are you expecting from this?"

    Sam asked in return and all of a sudden, he felt a bit of jolt in his soul. It is like a very light electric shock. The formation also gave off a different kind of sh. The Deans'' eyes almost sparkled with enthusiasm.

    They couldn''t even hide it properly.

    Sam understood immediately. Whatever the question is, the only thing he could speak out are the answers. And his return question is a bit dodgy, which came from the guilt in his heart. After all, he did wanted to be a bit more careful as to not reveal too much about hub.

    Those thoughts were indeed sensed by the spirits of the formation.

    "You can just answer based on your interpretation. What we think of is not that relevant." N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Sam sighed and said.

    "I am rted to the hub as a student of the Olympian realm who participated in the training exercises, simtions, etc and utilsed other features of the hub."

    "Have you benefited from the hub in anyway?"

    "Yes."

    "Can you please borate on it?"

    "I have gained a lot of benefits from Hub. I have done a lot of experiments. Learned a lot of new things through the hub''s simtions and data base. Created a lot of new technology, developed a lot of my ideas to execute a lot of my ns that would benefit my future."

    "Did you have any direct connection with the managers of the Hub?"

    "I do, I am friends with Ivar and through him I talked to the other managers once in a while. I had a few business rtionships with them."

    The whole court went silent once again.

    They noticed the formation, there is no jolt like before and there is no reaction from Sam as well.

    He just answered directly.

    "What kind of business rtionship do you have with them?"

    "A decently fair exchange. I give them some technology that they need to achieve their goals and they do me some favors in exchange."

    *BAM*

    "What the fuck did you just say?"

    One of the spectators, an elder mmed the table in front of him and pointed at Sam while yelling.

    Sam looked at him with raised eyebrow and turned to Bloody Chariot.

    "Is this also part of the interrogation?"

    Bloody Chariot gave a side-eyed nce and the elder fell back into his seat while sweating like a pig.

    "Sam, you do understand the implications of what you said right?"

    "I do understand that there would be a lot of implications and conclusions you could jump from what I just said. So, please ask me more questions if you want a much more clear answer."

    "Alright, you asked for it. Do you know that the goal of the managers is to collude with Hub and destroy the lives of the students in the Olympian academies?"

    There is an eerie silence in the room. It seems like with a few more questions, that silence could be a permanent state in this interrogation session.

    "I do."

    Sam answered directly.

    Ling Tian widened his eyes in disbelief. He gulped down hard and looked around. Many people''s gazes and their killing intent has been locked on to Sam.

    Even the Deans conducting the interrogation are looking at him like they want to eat him alive.

    He became vignt.

    But Sam didn''t care. At least that is what he looked like. He just leisurely sat in his own chair and looked at them, waiting for his next question.

    "How privy are you to the information regarding this massive n executed by the managers?"

    "Well, I kind of now who are about to die in their hands."

    *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

    Many more people rose from thieir seats.

    "Poor craftsmen. Whoever made those tables will feel said. Show some respect to the artisans."

    Sam muttered under his breath. This careless nature only triggered more anger from them.

    "If you have prior knowledge of these incidents why did you not inform us?"

    "Because I am not obligated to. By whatw and the rule of the academy realm, do I need to inform you when I got wind of the news of people dying? Don''t you think you are being unreasonable?"

    One of the Deans at the main seats stood up and yelled.

    "UNREASONABLE? YOU BASTARD. DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY PEOPLE DIED? YOU COULD HAVE SAVED ALL THOSE PEOPLE. YOU COULD HAVE HELPED US AVERT THIS DISASTER. AND YOU ARE SAYING THIS IS UNREASONABLE?"

    Sam locked his eyes on the Dean who screamed. That is the dean of the Ares academy.

    His gaze narrowed for a moment and said.

    "Yes, I am indeed saying this is unreasonable. It is not my job to deal with the problems of yours.

    My affiliation is with just the gambler academy, not the whole of the academy realm and particrly not with the Olympian academies.

    Anyway, if it makes you feel any better,I don''t know the exact time of the execution of the n. I only knew it will happen, I have no idea of the exact time. Also, I didn''t get the information on who will die from the managers. I kind of deduced it by myself.

    And I couldn''t be bothered to think much about it because, I had to fucking do the unreasonable 12bors.

    Which by the way, is being taken too lightly by all the members of your academies who are also subjected to the same punishment."

    "This is a trial about you and you alone. Nothing else matters."

    "So, this is a trial now?" Sam replied with a smile.

    "Sam, Do you know where the managers are right now? Do you know their escape n?"

    Bloody Chariot directly interrupted the argument and asked in the same calm tone.

    "I do know a bit about escape n. They decided to disguise themselves and leave the city. I don''t know where they went to though."

    No jolt. Not reaction.

    Sam just looked at the calmly.

    "Do you know Joker?"

    "Yes, I do. Like everyone else."

    "Do you have a personal rtionship with him?"

    Sam paused for a moment and said.

    "In my opinion. I believe Joker doesn''t exist." His words stumped everyone. They observed the formation and they noticed there is no reaction.

    "What do you mean?"

    "I meant what I said. Joker doesn''t really exist. I wholeheartedly believe it."

    No reaction from the formation again.

    "Only one more question."

    Ling Tian said from the side. By now he is sweating and he didn''t really want to stay here any longer.

    He alsomended the stupidity of Bloody Chariot and Dean for not asking the questions that truly mattered.

    In his opinions, the questions about the hub and managers are much less important than the questions about Sam''s past and the game.

    Luckily, they didn''t think to ask that and now with one question this will be over.

 Chapter 2241 High Tensions

    Chapter 2241 High Tensions

    Thest question is here and Sam is sure, that this would be a direct one.

    From the previous questions, he understood a lot of things about this interrogation. This is definitely not the first time something like this is used. And every time it is used, it is always the same strategy.

    They bombard the suspect with a bunch of question which would be ufortable to answer.

    Like Sam was asked how many elements can he use.

    Most people wouldn''t answer it. But Sam without a change of expression replied. ''More than Most''. It is deflecting, but it is true. Because of that, the other party has to ask the question again. ''Be specific?''

    Then Sam replied with the number directly, because he has no qualms about actually revealing his power.

    Whenever questions about his backer and affiliation was asked, he deflected them to Wharton, who wanted nothing more than to smack on the back of Sam''s head.

    With all this, he managed to sessfully waste their time.

    Even though everyone''s suspicions are raised to the peak and they believed that Sam is definitely rted to this. They all decided to make a move on him one way or the other.

    Bloody Chariot of course, wanted more confirmation. So, he looked at the paper in front of him. It was used to construct questions and he did it even knowing that the other deans might ridicule him. But he didn''t care.

    He just looked at the sheet. After numerous iterations and so many questions struck off, he finallynded on the one question that he believed he should ask. At least to get some closure and prepare for what''s toe.

    Even though this question appeared simple and couldn''t be more straightforward, and almost made him feel like all that thinking has been wasted, he wanted to go with it.

    In fact, for this very reason, he even made a pact with other Deans that he will get thest question.

    But of course, unbeknownst to him, the other Deans are all in Cahoots. Before Bloody Chariot could open his mouth, Dean-Poseidon already asked the question.

    "The curse that attacked the Poseidon academy students just now, were you the reason behind it attacking the students?"

    *BAM*

    Bloody Chariot didn''t even wait and swung his fist across the dean''s face.

    The fist made contact, the flesh on the cheek was brushed off just like that revealed the cheek bone bare for everyone to see, and before anyone could see it, the bone cracked, shattered and it spread to more of his skull.

    All of it happened in less than half a second.

    Dean-Poseidon flew off his seat like a broken kite in a storm and literally went ''through'' the stone table in front of him, then through the railings that separated them and Sam.

    The Dean created a crater right in front of Sam''s feet with his head half buried inside the ground.

    "Argh¡­"

    He weakly groaned with barely any breath left inside him.

    Sam chuckled and said.

    "Yes."

    Immediately he stood up and looked at Bloody Chariot.

    "Seems like you wanted to ask that one question that badly. You shouldn''t have wasted so many questions and so much time just to pry me open. Now, you will never know the answer.

    Unless and of course, I feel generous, which I rarely am to my enemies."

    The Elders of the Poseidon academy jumped forward and fed some pills to their Dean. The potency is not enough to grant an immediate recovery, but it worked. His breathing stabilized, even if it is just a little bit.

    Bloody Chariot looked at Sam, who was immediately guarded by Ling Tian and Wharton as he was guided back to the Gambler academy.

    Then he left in a huff.

    They got a lot of answers.

    And suspicions on Sam were not clear, instead they were at an all time high.

    Bloody Chariot, got most of the questions he wanted except for thest one.

    Thest question that was far-fetched, but extremely straightforward at the same time.

    "Are you involved in establishment of Hub?"

    That is the question he wanted to ask. Even though everyone grilled Sam for an hour, everyone just asked him, how he is rted to the people behind the hub, how he is rted to ming skulls, if he had conspired with the ming skulls or if he had killed any of the students by using the ming skulls, his involvement in the defeat of Thssa family, etc.

    But they never directly asked this.

    Because even to ask a probing question, they didn''t believe a frist grader could do it. On the other hand, Bloody Chariot, felt different.

    The initial warnings given by Heron, then all the signs and suspicions, along with the answers Sam gave. He just felt like this question would have worked.

    Initially, he wanted to ask about the people who are now missing in the expeditions. The elite second graders and third graders of the Zeus academy, but he felt like changing the question was the right thing to do.

    Until that bastard intervened of course.

    He felt helpless as he walked back to the Zeus academy.

    His posture is nowhere near the man of his stature should have. There is no confidence. He quietly walked and after some time, he couldn''t bring himself to hold down his frustration and called someone.

    "Why are you calling me now? I am telling you, there will be not more interrogations like this. That pipsqueak put me in spot so many times."

    Dean Wharton spoke without any barrier to his tongue as usual.

    "Can you really not tell me whatever it is that you are hiding regarding Sam?"

    "I cannot."

    "Why? Can you at least tell me the reaosn why? And don''t tell me something like, only a Dean could know it."

    "*Sigh* Alright, it is because of a rule imposed by Gambler. And it is not just imposed on me. If my guess is right, Zeus imposed it on Heron as well. That is all I can tell you."

    Bloody Chariot cut the call and closed his eyes. It is already close to dawn. In a few hours the other students will being and in a few days, the Academypetition will be held. The internalpetitions should soon start.

    There will be a lot of external traffic including the family of the second and third graders that he lost. Before all that, he needs to understand what is happening and for that, he only has one way right now.

    He went to the Zeus academy immediately and entered the Prayer room.

    The most magnificent Zeus status was there, along with a ritual altar in front.

    He then summoned Zeus.

    "Bloody Chariot. Trust general in the Battle field of Divinity. I thought you would never ever contact me again." Zeus said with a tone that hid a hint of smile beneath it.

    At the same time, while Bloody Chariot is holding a meeting with the God, the deans of other academies are also holding a meeting.

    "How do we go about this? I am thinking we need to dere a war on the gambler academy. That bastard surely knows a lot. We need to kill him and extract his soul."

    That well-thought suggestion came from Ares Academy''s Dean.

    The same guy who was so smart that he used the B-Word on Sam in the interrogation, without knowing what kind of price he had to pay.

    "And who is going to make the first move against the Gambler academy? You?" n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Dean-Poseidon asked in a weak tone which made everyone stay silent as if the words were not referring to them at all.

    In fact, many people were enraged in the interrogation and wanted to deal with Gambler academy.

    But no one wanted to make the first move.

    Before the interrogation they might have went there and showed some bravado, but that is only because they knew the nature of the Gambler academy. They won''t get into war until they know why they are fighting. They would mostly be in defensive.

    But now, the war is definite. Sam''s involvement is bing more and more apparent. Of course, there is no conclusive evidence, and even if there is, there is no way the Gambler academy is going to abandon Sam. This means, they are prepared for war.

    Nobody wants an academy war with gambler academy.

    They might not have best solobat oriented cultivators, they might not have some powerful fighting teams.

    But when ites to end results created with pure destruction, there are hardly any academies that could beat the Gambler academy.

    Nobody wants the first person to be the recipient of that wrath.

    Of course, Dean-Poseidon made preparations for that. He called for his disciple, one of the fourth grade students that hadn''t died in the massacre.

    "Execute the n I mentioned. Tell them, they need to be here in a couple of hours. No moreter than that."

 Chapter 2242 Attacks

    Chapter 2242 Attacks

    It was not just Bloody Chariot and the Deans that are in their respective meetings.

    A meeting was held in the Gambler academy as well. This time, Sam was not the center of it.

    "We will deal with youter."

    That was all what he was told and he was left to Dove to take care of, while the Elders and the Dean had a meeting.

    "So, are you guys going to abandon me now?"

    "Why would we do that? Even with the interrogation, all that was clear is that you had deeper connections with the managers of the hub. It is not proven that you are involved in the actual plot of the murders.

    Even the rtionship between the ming skulls and other stuff¡­ technically the city guard is the only one that has the right to hold you ountable for these things.

    And you actually paid the price for it after all.

    You went through the twelvebors for you involvement with all these anti-academy region elements only.

    So, since you already went through punishment, no one has the right to punish you again.

    Now you are but a student of Gambler academy and if theye here knocking on the doors, they have to receive the answer from the whole academy."

    "Then, what''s the warning about? How are they going to deal with me?"

    "Well, we might defend you, but that doesn''t mean we will let you off easy for dragging all of us in to it. You might have topensate one way or the other."

    "Alright."

    After some time, Wharton and Ling Tian came to Sam.

    "You need to be in protection for the time being. Ling Tian will see to that. Even if a proper academy war was waged and the first graders are also involved, you will not be involved in this mess.

    Your job is to just stay safe in the core region of the Gambler academy."

    Dean Wharton who was usually goofing around, appeared pretty serious at the moment. He didn''t even wait for Sam''s retort or response, before leaving.

    "Dove, you organize the fourth graders, they need to be involved in this as well. We will try to finish this off with negotiations if possible, but if that doesn''t work, I want you guys to organize the defensive formations."

    Dean paused and delivered this order before he left.

    Ling Tian and Sam are the only ones left.

    "I am actually surprised, that a war is happening for a first grader." Sam said while scratching his head. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    "Why? You would rather they not fight for you?"

    "Well, I actually believed that would happen and made some preparations. I believed that the Gambler academy would just surrender me to the Olympian academies to deal with to escape from the perilous situation."

    "Then, I guess you are mistaken. There is no way Wharton will do something like that.

    In fact, even if they knew that you are the one who established the hub and made up this borate n to attack the other academies, they would have defended you."

    "Really? Why?"

    "You are part of the Gambler academy, Sam. That is how it works.

    It is one thing if your enemies caught you while you are out in the world. But when you are in the academy premises, you will be defended at all costs. No matter what."

    "I am very tempted to test that hypothesis."

    Sam muttered and Ling Tian red at him before walking towards the designated area for Sam''s stay.

    "Why go through all this Sam? With your progress, it would only be a matter of time before you could uproot the whole academy realm with sheer strength. I honestly believe that if anyone could do it, it would be you.

    Why put yourself through much and risk yourself like this?"

    "There is no big reason for this. I just dont want to y the game based on the rules of the gods."

    "But you have no strength to resist them. At least not right now."

    "You are right and that''s why I am doing this. This is my version of defiance. If they are going to lock me in a maze like a rat and force me to find a way, even if it takes a lot more effort and even if it breaks all of my teeth and ws, I would rather dig through the maze walls and bore a hole through it rather than running in the predetermined path."

    Ling Tian stayed silent for a moment.

    "Maybe, that''s why Gambler insisted on you being his representative. I still can''t understand your way of thinking. After all, I have seen millions of people who would kill a million people to get an opportunity to be in your position. In fact,..." Ling Tian didn''t continue and stopped speaking.

    "In fact?" Sam asked.

    "Nothing. Why are you so aversive to this? You were about to die a premature death back on earth. Here, you aplished hundred or even thousand times what you did on earth.

    Why didn''t you think of it as an opportunity? Why aren''t you grateful to Gambler? I can even understand the reasoning behind the other yers'' attitude towards their respective gods.

    They were often treated like pawns. But Gambler gave you a starting line, just like how you like it. He arranged for resources, knowledge and paths instead of just giving you some bonus arts and techniques.

    You of all people should know the benefit of it.

    I thought you would change your mind, but over the years your hostility only grew. To the point, the whole thing blew up.

    You are just in the first grade and you already caused the whole academy realm to be in such a big mess."

    Sam stayed silent for a couple of minutes.

    "I guess we are just different people Ling Tian. I would have preferred that premature death on that seemingly insignificant than pursue this path of gods. As you said, I might aplish enough to shake the gods here, but that''s not something that I chose. It wasn''t my desire.

    In my past life, everything since my birth to the better half of my life, it was decided by someone else. Even the way I breath and the way I eat was controlled by someone. I don''t know if you will understand how that feels.

    Just when I got my life under my control. Just when I finally started living for others without anyone forcing me to do so, something tragic happened and I dealt with it in my own way. Even that reaction was under my control and so was my final death.

    You don''t believe those soldiers had what it takes to kill me, do you?

    It was my will to die like that and the gods here took that away from me. No matter who it is, if they take something of mine, they have to price. And that something includes my will to live and die.

    And all of this¡­. This is just to make them pay the part of that price and I will not stop until the debts are all settled."

    That conversation was followed by some long and still silence. Hours passed.

    *BOOM*

    A loud explosive noise was heard. It was from the direction of the main entrance.

    Ling Tian closed his eyes and scanned the area.

    Sam on the other hand, opted for a much easier option.

    He let one of the bird puppets fly over there and got the live transmission. He even projected it out so that Ling Tian could see it without any effort.

    "Your trinkets are really way too handy."

    Ling Tian said as he opened his eyes and looked at the projection. And the next moment he was surprised.

    Because the attackers on who he imagined them to be. They are not members of the other academies. Instead, they are all outsiders. They wore robes with various crests on it and he recognized most of them.

    They are people that belong to the prominent Olympian families.

    They are attacking the Gambler academy gates like crazy. Nian who is still solely guarding the entrance is warning them while still poking the ground with the harlberd''s tail end.

    "Why are they here?"

    Ling Tian looked at Sam and asked him. usation was apparent in his tone. Sam shrugged and said.

    "Trust me, I did have a n for them to be involved. I thought Gambler academy wouldn''t involve themselves with my issue, so put us in the same boat, I did a favor in the past.

    I don''t if you noticed, but the Gambler academy students are not making payments to the Hub. I nned to reveal that information to the academies and the families. So, they won''t believe that the academy and I are not in cahoots.

    The academy wouldn''t have another choice. They would have to fight with me.

    Ling Tian gritted his teeth.

    "You¡­. you have no stops do you? Just how big of a mess have you nned?"

    At that moment, Sam suddenly froze for a moment and projected another screen. It is from the perspective of the hub and another interesting scene is happening there.

 Chapter 2243 Prowess of Gambler Academy

    Chapter 2243 Prowess of Gambler Academy

    Sam and Ling Tian watched what''s happening in front of the Hub.

    A group of people got ready to attack that building as well. They are nowhere near as strong as the Deans that went to destroy that ce, in fact, these people are not even on part with the elders of the academies.

    They are the Elders of the families that came to attack the Gambler academy.

    They are here to attack the Hub on the orders of their family heads. Of course, the family heads got these suggestions by the Deans of Various Olympian academies, just like how they were encouraged to attack the Gambler academy.

    So, after Dean-Poseidon almost kissed death on the lips and came back just by taking a single clean punch from Bloody Chariot, he cooked up this n.

    He contacted all the family members that lost their children who were in fourth grade. He also made the other academies to do the same. Now all these angry families were told a single store.

    A student from Gambler academy conspired with an entity called hub and the people that worked in Hub to kill their children in cold blood. And while doing so, they uprooted the foundations of their future generations.

    With this little direction, everyone got angry and came here.

    They manipted these angry people a little bit to divide their forces like they did now. While these people are mindlessly attacking the Gambler academy and the Hub, the Deans are watching this whole thing from the shadows.

    That is not the most interesting part though.

    The interested part is the one defending the Hub. It was neither a manager nor a member of Gambler academy. Instead, it was Bloody Chariot.

    A soon as he sensed some disturbance in the region, he immediately went to the Hub and stood guard. His contract is still not over. He needs to do it until and unless he finds the guy who he signed the contract with and kills him.

    For that he needs to leave the academy realm, but the moment he leaves, the others will destroy the hub, hence he cannot leave. So, he is stuck in such an ufortable position

    The number of people surrounding Bloody Chariot is veryrge. But neither Sam nor Ling Tian were worried. At least for the Hub.

    Ling Tian isbit worried about what this one-sided beating would do the Olympian region though.

    Sam was amused by the situation as well. But he shifted his focus back to the main gate and smiled.

    Because he saw Elder Nian doing exactly what Sam expected him to do.

    Which is to beat the shit out of the people that areing at the academy, with a wide and borderline creepy grin on his face.

    "I knew it. This guy was itching for a fight."

    Sam muttered to himself. And this time Ling Tian didn''t appear surprised.

    Both of them just focused on the battle.

    Nian jumped out of the formation''s protection and swung his halberd. The energy condensed into runes at a speed that appeared impossible to the naked eye. And these runes follow the swing of the halberd''s de.

    When the de stuck one of the opponents, the condensed runes gathered at the point of contact and formed an inscription in that fraction of a second.

    *BOOM*

    It is an inscription for energy discharge, or in other words a mild explosion. Which is mostly used for small scale traps while hunting beasts. It was usuallybined with concealment formations and ced in the forest paths.

    When someone chases a beast and it steps on it, it could most possible lose its bnce and trigger the next and much bigger trap.

    So, in a way, this is not even the actual trap. One could guess just how unimportant or insiginificant people believed it to be.

    But when the full power of such an inscription was concentrated to the narrow area like the tip of the de and it was concentrated into an even smaller region, right in the middle of the wound created by this de¡­

    It had the perfect efficiency for that explosion.

    *BOOM*

    The flesh exploded along with that inscription and the whole arm was mangled. The impact also threw the opponentpletely off bnce and Nian used this chance to spin andnd another attack on the opponent''s leg.

    *BOOM*

    The same attack, exploded limb and the guy crashed at this point and just fainted.

    Nian''s grin widened as he blocked another attack with the halberd. And this time the inscription conjured into a shield as soon as the contact was made with the weapons.

    The weapon was just deflected.

    When a huge ball of mes made its way to him, he swung at it again. Like a bat hitting a ball, the attack flew away and hit another opponent. Elder Nian, didn''t look out of ce at all.

    Usually, with his schrly look and the level of research time he put into inscriptions, one would assume that he is a good inscription master. And judging by the way he conjured inscriptions just based on spiritual energy condensation, he definitely is the master.

    He understands the runes better than even Sam.

    Maybe, he might not beat Sam in the creativity levels of using the inscriptions. But he definitely beat him in terms of knowledge, working principals and even the basics of it.

    On the other hand, his halberd skills.

    Sam really couldn''t find any holes in that as well. It was perfect, almost too perfect. Maybe because he was only using basics and there are no fancy tricks involved that it was smooth and efficient. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    "I thought he was a pure schr. Even the hub didn''t manage to collect any info on his battle records."

    Sam eximed.

    Ling Tian smiled and said.

    "I bet you will find the same with all the instructors and the elders of the Gambler academy. Elder Nian¡­

    That guy was quite a piece of work when he was a student here.

    His reign was not as dominant as yours, but his opponents often ended by being traumatized so bad. So, did the healers of the opponent. He could make them feel hell.

    But he had a drawback, whenever he battles, he bes way too excited and gets lost in it.

    That''s why he focused mostly on inscriptions."

    "I can see that. This guy is good. I am going to record his battle and use it for my research. The usage of inscriptions in a battle at that level¡­ I hope I could create a squad like that in dusk.

    There are a lot of kids who are losing out on thebat side because of their over research in the inscription side.

    This could be a good inspiration for them."

    Ling Tian stayed silent as he looked at Sam and sighed. He knew more than anyone else how many hidden figures are there in the Gambler academy.

    So, he is preparing himself mentally to hear more of these ridiculous statements from Sam.

    It is one thing for Sam to be not worried about this, but it is a whole lot of messed up for him to be looking for more research material.

    He shifted his attention back to the fight.

    Elder Nian was slick and smooth with his halberd. The attacks were precise and he focused more on dodging and blocking than attacking. However, he still maintained the upper hand.

    But of course, he soon found himself in trouble as the number of opponents increased. People from more and more families areing forward to join the fight and a lot more are still standing there watching the show.

    "He won''t be able to hold out for too long. And from the looks of it, the outer barrier formation won''t as well."

    Sam said as he gauged the battlefield.

    And just like that, in two minutes, Nian finally got a clean hit on his back while the outer barrier cracked.

    Some more elders joined in to finish the formation, while Nian retreated a bit.

    He stepped back and whistled loudly.

    Then only Sam noticed several fourth graders standing at various spots near the entrance of the academy. They are within the academy grounds, but they are distributed along the gate and the wall of the academy.

    They reacted to the whistle and activated what seemed like formation nodes.

    At that moment, an announcement was heard all over the academy.

    "First Level External Guardians have been activated.

    Second Level External Guardian Controllers take positions and await orders. Initializing the Second level barriers."

    After the announcement was made, a ring of light appeared from the ground right outside of the academy walls.

    The ring of light perfectly enveloped the whole academy and rose up like a curtain.

    *RUMBLE*

    At the same time, the ground quaked and the area that emitted that ring of light copsed into the ground. However, the copsed earth was not ordinary like what it looked on the first sight.

    Even through the projection Sam could see that it is abination of rare soil and stone. And while everyone is witnessing, the copsed earth rose up in the form of humanoid golems.

    And in ce of the copsed earth was a huge pit which emitted a dark ck smoke and up on inspecting one would find ava light substance inside. Except it is ck in color.

 Chapter 2244 Prowess of Gambler Academy II

    Chapter 2244 Prowess of Gambler Academy II

    The fourth graders that are involved in the activation all closed their eyes.

    Sam is surprised that the students are actually in the frontline while defending against the Elder level opponents. But to think they are actually the firstyer of defense is beyond his imagination. The students controlled the golems that came out of the pit.

    The golems are mostly humanoid in fact most of them are based off of many races Sam has encountered until now. They are even exact life-size models of those races.

    Judging by the way they are positioned, it seems like even those golems are divided into various squads as they moved.

    There is a small group of three golems. They are based off of humans and they are wielding spears. All three of them are focused on only one opponent. As they lunged forward and attacked the opponent from three sides, Sam thought they would be done for.

    Only at that moment, from underneath the ground, some kind of ck sludge appeared. Exactly from under the foot of the opponent andtched on to it.

    His attack missed and the three golems have a free hit. Theynded it without a miss and the opponent was taken down. The next thing Sam saw made him feel excited and wary at the same time. The sludge that came out of the groundpletely enveloped the elder.

    He was still alive, only injured, but he was overpowered.

    The golems kept him from using his strength while the sludgepletely surrounded him. Before anyone could even help him, the ground opened up and swallowed him along with that ck sludge and the opening was closedpletely.

    Just like that, the elder was disappeared and the golems went after another person.

    Of course, not all encounters are a sess like that. Some golems were instantly taken down by the opponents. However, as soon as they were broken, the ck sludge swallowed up the golem instead of the opponent and disappeared into the ground.

    Sam frowned.

    This is the first time he came across the sludge like that. The golems did seem a little familiar, but at the same time vastly different. Most familiar is the strategy that they are fighting with. The defense is something Sam would have set up.

    If Sam was defending the academy, he would have definitely put up an external barrier first and as soon as it fails, the first line of defense would definitely be something misceneous. Some ideas off the top of his head would be some puppets, or some undead.

    If he goes with undead, he would put all kinds of the undead and also an undead ring, that will turn the dead enemies into undead as well.

    The physical undead will be the eye-catchers, the shadow undead will be elusive attackers and the soul undead will be the hidden weapons.

    The golems are there, and the ck sludge that was in the pit is travelling from underground and is helping out the golems.

    Apart from the Elder Nian being the guard, he would have done something simr to this, if he has arge amount of material that is suitable to make golems.

    Of course, there is one more addition that he would have done¡­

    His thoughts came to a sudden halt and then he noticed something. From the pit that was around the academy walls, a golem climbed up once again. Upon observing it, he realized that it is the same golem that was destroyed by the opponents just a couple of minutes ago.

    The broken parts were all joined together with the ck sludge and the golem is healing at a visible rate, all the while it went to attack the opponents again.

    And that is not all.

    Sam noticed that at one particr spot, where the golems are having a hard time, which is also where one of the strongest opponents is present, the ground opened up. Instead of just the ck sludge. A sludge covered humanoid created crawled up out of the hole.

    Sam instantly recognized what it is.

    It is one of the opponents that was dragged down by the sludge and it seemed like it was converted into some kind of creature.

    "What is that ck sludge?"

    Sam couldn''t contain his curiosity and turned to Ling Tian.

    Who only had a smirk on his face. This is the first time he had seen this much surprise on Sam''s face. Even when dealing with gods, the pce of inheritances, even hell, didn''t shock Sam too much. He almost went past the phase of shock pretty quickly and acted nonchnt after that.

    The only time he was properly surprised to the point curiosity burned him is when he discovered the liquified energy and the energy cells created by that one group of people. Once again, Ling Tian noticed this.

    "I can''t go into too much detail, because even I don''t know much about it. But it is created by one of your seniors that graduated from the Gambler academy. Previously, it used to be an undead ring. But after the golems were added to the defensive line, that senior felt like an upgrade was in order.

    So, he used his research to create this.

    Now, that sludge covered body is actually an undead, but a very evolved form of it."

    "Evolved in what way?"

    Even as Sam asked this question, he got the answer in the video.

    The undead creature, attacked the opponent, but not just with physical strength, rather it held the sword and performed a proper sword art, just like how the cultivator would have done.

    "So, it retains the memories and the skills, along with the meridianwork?"

    Sam asked in surprise.

    "Yes, most of it. But it is only temporary. We can''t let itpletely lose control and deal with others after all.

    The sludge basically absorbs the soul of the victim and upies the body. It uses the same techniques as the victim and with improved efficiency. It won''t have any qualms about performing kamikaze tactics, taking injuries, etc.

    It will fight until the body ispletely destroyed.

    Of course, that is not all that it could do."

    "Then what else?"

    "Just keep on observing."

    Sam looked at the fight.

    Soon, after a few more rounds, he understood what Ling Tian was saying.

    When the undead creature''s dead body was almost done for, the ck sludge escaped. But this time, the escaped sludge didn''t go back to the pit, instead ittched on to the nearest golem. In an instant, the sludge started spreading over the golem''s surface.

    And all of a sudden, the golem started attacking with the same techniques as the cultivator before. Now, the golems became stronger like this.

    Basically, the golems are collecting the corpses of the weaker targets first, the sludge turned them into undead and attacked the stronger opponents supporting the golems and when the bodies are done for, they absorbed all the memories and techniques before going back to the golems with all of those things increasing the attack power.

    This is all the firstyer of defense.

    Of course, it is not all smooth sailing. The other side just has way too many enemies. Hundreds of them that are fighting and hundreds that are yet to move.

    It is not like they didn''t want to, but the leaders of the groups are making them stay back to conserve their strength.

    It seems like they are extremely wary of the Gambler academy.

    Time passed slowly for them, even though the battles are going at full swing.

    Even though the Golems initially had an advantage because of their continuous attacks and revival, more and more people joined the battle from the other side and soon the advantage reduced a great deal.

    Particrly the revival time yed a key role. Also, no substance no matter how much it was charged with energy and how good its recharging capacity is, will not be able to go on forever.

    The ck sludge started to slow down.

    The attackers finally managed to bypass them and started crossing over the pit.

    Nian retreated by now to take rest.

    "Second level Guardians activated. First level guardians retreating. Healing and Recovery Team required to go forward. Secure the guardians."

    The fourth graders that were controlling the golems and the sludge all came back along with Nian, while the second level guardians stepped forward.

    To Sam''s surprise, there are fourth graders even in this group. Albeit very few of them, including Dove. They are all the cream of the crop.

    At the same time, most of the guardians are the academy instructors. Only one elder who held a saber is standing in the middle. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    He took over the position of Elder Nian and they even high-fived as Nian retreated as if they are passing the baton.

    "Third Level Guardians please be on standby"

    Now, the low-level elders stepped forward and took their stand by position.

    "Who devised this strategy?"

    Sam asked Ling Tian.

    "The actual defensive measures were created by the people of the academy across various generations. But the actual strategy was given to them by Gambler. In a way, you couldn''t even say that it was given actually. It was a result of his teachings and numerous simted iterations."

 Chapter 2245 Plot

    Chapter 2245 Plot

    The battles went on at the gate.

    Sam watched as some puppets came out of the academy grounds. They are farrger and they are much more vague in terms of appearance. They are clearly inspired by the humanoid structure, but they don''t have a particr species one could attach to them.

    They just looked like the puppets.

    As soon as they appeared with their long staves in their hands, they stuck those spears into the ground. The ck sludge started decreasing in pit. It is travelling through the ground and entered these puppets through these staves.

    It seems like the usage of the sludge has not ended yet.

    There is more in store for them. Then the puppets stopped moving for a second. From what Sam could see, they are made of more stone than metal. As for why they are considered puppets, they are not made of a single unified piece of stone. Instead he could distinguish theponents separately.

    The sludge started creeping all over theirrge stone bodies and it glowed as it did so.

    Slowly, but steadily the puppets started absorbing the sludge, creating a pattern. There are manyponents that now changed color at least on their surfaces because of the sludge. The more these colors increased, the quantity of the sludge decreased on its surface.

    Soon, itpletely merged with the puppets.

    At that moment, the long staves started changing shape. One of them changed into a sword, another into a spear, one into an axe. Thest actually disappearedpletely. Sam immediately noticed. Those three weapons are the mostmon weapons among the opponents.

    These four puppets, the second level of guardians are being controlled by more than sixteen people. All of them are the fourth graders. The instructors are not even controlling the puppet. Instead, they are controlling something altogether.

    And they are all doing it together.

    In the energy barrier that is clearly visible to everyone there, arge eye conjured up. Just one single eye without any other visible enhancements. However, as soon as it locked down on the opponents they felt an extreme sense of unease.

    The eye looked like it could see through everything about them.

    But that is not its actual purpose. The puppets were the first to move. They are at least three times the size of a normal human and they appeared very domineering. It is already a big deal to create puppets that couldbat with the elder level opponents.

    With Sam''s current abilities, he wouldn''t even be able to process that level of metals. That is also the reason the hub was more focused on regeneration type walls and also energy barrier defense instead of pure material defense.

    But these things¡­ he couldn''t even identify the material they are made of. He couldn''t understand how they are absorbing that sludge and how the memory transfer is happening.

    He is very intrigued.

    The battle continued.

    Sam just stayed there and watched. He even prepared snacks for himself as if he is watching movie.

    Almost as if he forgot that this whole thing started because of him.

    Meanwhile, back at the Hub, the situation is a lot lessplicated. Those young elders are not match for the time tested Bloody Chariot. He basically made them eat the dirt in seconds.

    He didn''t kill a lot of them. Just enough to make the rest of the bunch run away like a rag tag bunch. He didn''t want to do the dirty work for the Hub. But he was stuck in that stupid contract and he has to do it.

    So, he is trying to minimize it.

    "If anyone attacks the hub again. I will not stop just at teaching you a lesson. I will visit your fucking estate and we will see how many lives I can take in ten minutes."

    With that warning, he left.

    Sam is positive that there will be no more attacks on the hub. At least from those families.

    "Tell me, why is Bloody Chariot so passionately defending Hub?"

    Ling Tian asked Sam.

    "He madebad deal."

    That is all Sam said. He didn''t go into details and Ling Tian didn''t ask for more.

    He put his focus back on the academy. The attacks are increasing, but the second level guardians are working perfectly fine.

    "I don''t understand, why is the Gambler academy ying in such a conservative method? I am sure, you guys can just overwhelm the enemy in a single wave of attacks.

    Why are you not opting for that?"

    Sam asked Ling Tian.

    "We actually can. But Gambler academy is focused more on efficiency than anything else. So, we try our best to deal with the problems with as little resources as possible.

    Also, this acts as a great way to test the defensive measures and the researchers that put so much effort in designing and creating these defensive mechanisms get a lot of data."

    "I don''t know about efficient. I mean, most of them are consumable resources. You got make the golems again, puppets again and I am guessing even that ck sludge takes some effort to create.

    However, an attack from a powerful elder? That is easier to recover. All you need some energy boost which they can get from a round of meditation. That is more efficient in my book.

    The research data on the other hand.

    I can only say that I need to admire the Gambler academy to even utilize the crisis situations like this to gather data and improve the standards of education here."

    "For a guy who only relies on measures like these to defend himself. You are pretty judgemental about this." Ling Tian retorted.

    "Come on, I am not being judgemental here. It was just honest feedback.

    And, I am a pipsqueak in terms of cultivation strength. This is the only way I could defend myself. If I am fighting first graders, trust me, I would kick their asses at the first second."

    "Yeah, yeah. Just watch.

    I just don''t understand why these guyse here knocking on our doors. What are they trying to achieve here? Do they really think they are going to make it in here and apprehend you? They should be shit scared about Wharton sneezing on them and they would be dead."

    "Well, I could take a guess." N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Sam said as he stuffed himself with food.

    "What would that be?"

    "If I am not wrong, there should be a bunch of people from the other academies, watching this whole fight. Most probably the upper management, even deans."

    "And what are they looking for?"

    "Defensive patterns. Right now, they are getting the full show of how the Gambler academy defensive measures work.

    Just what level of defense reacts to what level of damage. How you deal with the attacks thate from different methods.

    You can see, the opponents are using different tactics. First, there are a bunch of people attacking randomly like a mob.

    Now the attacks are organized.

    If my guess is right, they wille with some beasts, puppets or something simr next. Something like assisted attack methods.

    Then, they will try to check with heavy hitting. A single powerful person making attacks.

    They are going to test your security system. I am not saying they will do it exactly like I said they would, but they will test all of these.

    By the end of the day, the attacks will stop and they will escape the academy realm. ''Coincidentally'', even the city guard wouldn''t be able to stop them.

    They will leave. And you won''t face any more attacks today or even for the next few days."

    "Really? I think you are being a bit far-fetched here."

    "Not really. I don''t know how well you know the Deans and elders of the other academies, but I do. I have been studied these assholes for weeks. My guess is that you will be attacked seriously in a few more days, by the academies.

    And I even know who cooked up this n."

 Chapter 2246 Info

    Chapter 2246 Info

    Ling Tian looked at Sam as if he is talking out of his ass.

    "You are kidding me, right? There is no way, that these families are sacrificing so many of their resources just to give the other academies some kind of simtion of Gambler academy defenses.

    They should be idiots to do something like this."

    "Well, they kind of are. But you are missing a point here.

    These families don''t necessarily know that is what they are doing. My guess is that the Deans are manipting them. They must have said to these families, that the other academies cannot act without proof and instigated them.

    Then, they would have helped the families by drafting the n. Telling them, how they could deal with the defensive measures.

    However, all those ns are just indirect way of make these families do their bidding.

    It is pretty simple. I am surprised that you didn''t see past this."

    Ling Tian smiled for a moment, but it was gone by the time Sam looked at him.

    "Even if what you said is true. And I mean a bit IF, what is the endgame of the academies? What will they gain from this? They will suffer unbearable losses in process and they will get their hands on what? A first grader?"

    "No, in their perspective, they will get ess to Joker and hiswork and in turn the knowledge and resources behind the Hub.

    That is also the reason why the hub was attacked. I locked Bloody Chariot in a deal and now he is defending the hub. The Deans probably wanted to estimate just how far he will go with that defense. They got their answer.

    They understood that they wouldn''t get much progress on that end, unless they dealt with Bloody Chariot.

    They put a hold on that side and now they are working on me.

    To be honest, I don''t really understand what is stopping them from directly attacking. No matter how strong the Gambler academy is, dealing with ten academies? That is not easy. Anyone with rational mind will give me up and save the rest of the academy.

    I don''t what is the key deterrent here.

    They have been acting on their own suspicions and assumptions, whenever they did anything in the academy realm. The academies really don''t have any overseeing authority that could punish them, unless someone consciously goes and files a case in the court.

    The city guard is more of a symbolic representation to keep themon citizens in line.

    I have been wondering what is stopping them for some time. Do you have any idea?"

    Ling Tian stayed silent for a moment and said.

    "First, they are afraid of what this will escte into.

    There have been some serious wars between academies before. They always ended up bloody and left the whole academy realm like some half eaten carcass.

    Because of the wars and the losses, the academies wanted to minimize it and some unspoken rules like capturing the resource points, ransom exchanges and all came into picture.

    Its just that these academies are inplete tension, trying to one up each other and when two of those fight, the other academies couldn''t let that opportunity go.

    It always spirals down. So, everyone is afraid of starting it. Even if they did, it is always in the controlled proportions. This is the first time in a long while, something like this is going down."

    "Is there a second reason?"

    "Yes, there is indeed a overseeing authority.

    An authority that lords over the Academy realm. Specifically selected to monitor and even maintain this academy realm. You could consider it a special task force, consisting of the members that follow different gods.

    But there is a core team that handles the most of the decisions. It is called the Messenger Council.

    They look at all the activities in the Academy realm and let them y out. When everything goes to shit, they interfere and act as mediators. They actually put a stop to the previous academy war."

    "But I didn''t see any records or information regarding them."

    "Of course, you didn''t. Because there were none. They are a taboo to talk about and except for the upper echelons of the academies, that too highly senior members, no one else knows about them."

    "What''s so special about them?"

    "I already told you. They monitor everything. The Deans and the Grand elders of the academy realm might have missed this great joke that you pulled on them, but the Messenger Council knows about it. And the fact that you managed to go on this long without any interruptions means, they are allowing you to do this."

    "Why? I am damaging the academy realm to a great extent. The reputation of the realm will be in tatters soon enough and it wouldn''t even be fit for people toe here and study by the time I am done with it."

    "They don''t really care much about that. They only interfere when the academy realm is on the verge of actual destruction, like the kind where recovery is almost impossible, or when the fight of the academy realm spreads too far and effects the high profile ns and organizations that are devout believers of the gods."

    "Like Telchines?"

    "Well, Kind of. Telchines are a decent example, but there are some more close to gods than that."

    "That''s interesting. But why though?

    I thought these academies are created to create the armies for gods. Some Battlefield of gods, Battlefield of Divinity or whatever screwed up names you guys have around here."

    "True, but do you really think, the almighty gods who have power to even dictate the fate and nature will just put their focus on one realm like this?

    If you think that, then you might want to reevaluate your opinion on them. Even though the Gods are involved with this realm, by giving rewards and such for their academies, the true controllers are the Messenger Council.

    They act as the actual messengers between the academy realm and the gods. Hence the name."

    "What makes them so special?"

    "The key members of the Messenger council are mostly half-bloods."

    Sam was stunned.

    "By half-bloods you mean?"

    "Yes, they are descendants of the some of the high level gods of various factions. They carry the god''s blood. The higher cultivation level they have, the more effective this strain of blood is. I cannot reveal you any more than that."

    Sam fell silent for a while and watched the battle at the entrance.

    The defensiveyers of the academy are crumbling, but the opponents are falling much faster. Just like how Sam predicted, the family heads are acting like idiots and are sending the attacks in patterns.

    Even without knowing they are testing the defensive measures for the other academies.

    However, as the time passed, they saw that their people are going down and they are losing too much in the battle.

    One family after another withdrawals started and after a few hours, the opponents copsed as they took different directions.

    The whole thing was a bit anti-climatic as there was no massive showdown at the end. By the time they left, the defensiveyers were down to eight. Sam wondered how many they actually had, but they are still pretty distance away from the core area of the academy.

    Sam rxed and went into a deep thought.

    "So, why did you reveal all this information to me? About the messengers and stuff. You said it is taboo topic."

    "I just wanted to make you more cautious. You progressed way too far in raising chaos in the academy realm.

    I expected this type of disruption, but I didn''t expect it would happen while you are still in first grade.

    It is an eye-opener for me.

    I just wanted to be aware that there is a hidden element at y here. You need to take measures by taking that variable into ount. I know that is your style, so I am giving you a headsup."

    "Then, the taboo part of it? Won''t you have any bacsh?"

    Ling Tian just smiled and replied.

    "I am sure the Messenger Council would want to do something about it. I just don''t know if they actually can."

    "You sound arrogant." Sam replied.

    "Backed by Competence."

    Sam just shrugged and paused. He is used to those replies because he used to give those to others.

    By evening, everything in the academy realm cooled down. There is a strict curfew outside. The city is empty and no one is making a peep.

    "So, what''s next? Can you give us a headsup so that we can be better prepared?"

    "In a couple of hours, the pocket dimension will open. The first graders will be out and they will receive loads and loads of information about various people. Of course, just pumping information is no fun, but there is going to be something special in that. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    So, you might want to be prepared.

    Go with full force and keep your students safe.

    Meanwhile, I need to meditate a bit."

 Chapter 2247 Mules

    Chapter 2247 Mules

    Ling Tian immediately moved after getting that tip from Sam.

    He ordered for the elders to move directly and secure the surroundings of the gate that leads to the pocket dimension. As hours passed, he got more and more nervous as he knew how ruthless Sam could be just to send a message.

    Ever since the whole thing blew up with the managers attacking the hub, he has been in a deep thought.

    While he was in those thoughts, the time passed very quickly. Faster than ever and soon the pocket dimension showed the reaction that he was anticipating so much for.

    All the first graders came out.

    As soon as they did, their wrist bands all received a silent alert.

    First one''s went for Sam''s friends. It was a headsup so that they would take the necessary measures to be safe from what is about toe.

    Ling Tian''s eyes locked on to Sam''s friends as soon as they came out. He didn''t even look for the students of Gambler academy. He just observed them. Of course, the other academy elders and instructors that came rushed the whole crowd.

    They are trying to find every possible student from their academy and they are here to make the students remove their wrist bands and destroy the bird puppets. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    However, even before they could approach, the silent alert hase.

    Sam''s friends made a move. They all took a step back and went to the extreme back of the crew.

    At that moment, all of a sudden the second alert came to the wrist bands. Not just to the wrist bands of these people, but all the active wrist bands of the whole region. When Sam did this before, the information was filtered and it was categorized.

    Every person got whatever information that is rted to them. It is all tailor made.

    However, this time, the information was not like that. If the previous attempt was like a straight shooting, but this¡­ this is something different.

    The second alert can be divided into two parts.

    First one is the information that was sent to the wrist bands and the information is mostly focused on a single faction, a person or a group of people that are working together momentarily because of theirmon aligned goals.

    Second part is an activation mechanism for the wrist bands.

    The mechanism injected the information into the souls of the recipients. Even if they didn''t want that information, it is now imprinted into their brains.

    After that was done, all the recipients regardless of their cultivation level experienced a headache. The first graders in particr almost copsed. Sam''s friends and a few more students from various academies were exception of this.

    Sam left them just to avoid some doubts.

    However, there are some people he didn''t excuse. Even White and Dayus got affected by this.

    After the second alert was sessfullypleted, a third alert was sent to everyone. And this information is a little bit more unique than the previous one.

    But the gist of themon message is this:

    ''Dear Recipient,

    All the things that you havemitted and you wanted to hide, all the information about your illicit affairs, your less than appropriate measures, your more than criminal actions have been sent to a specific person. That person will now act as what I like to call the Information Mule.

    And a message was also sent to the worst enemy that would like to kill you more than anyone else.

    So, please be informed that they can do whatever they want with this information. As long as your worst enemy catches the Information mule, they will have ess to all the things that you have ever done.

    Trust that the revtion of this information, even partially, will either get you killed by your peers or you would face some serious punishment in the court of academy realm.

    While I don''t want to say the name of your worst enemy out loud, since you would know it better than I will ever do, I would like to share the name of the Information mule along with their affiliation details with you.

    All I need to do is for you to pay the price. So, go to the Hub and check in with the machine which is used for the weekly payments after midnight. Because after midnight if you do not respond, the information will automatically reach the person that it was meant to reach.

    Thank you.''

    While the message and the exact words might have differed from person to person, the gist and intent was this.

    Of course, Sam cannot just have the people who don''t have the wrist bands off just like that. So, he did something else. A bunch of bird puppets flew out of the Hub and reached all the people that didn''t have the wrist bands with them.

    The birds flew in front of them and then projected the message.

    Just to make sure that they all got the intended message. When Ling Tian understood the situation, he had cold sweats. He gave out an order.

    "Send all the students back to the academy. Core area. Take them to the location where Sam is. Tell the Dean and Dove that I sent them."

    He raised his aura to make sure his presence is known to the surrounding elders and instructors. He separated the gambler academy students and made them move. The elders of the gambler academy formed a protective formation around them and escorted them all safely back to the Gambler academy.

    However, right before Ling Tian was about to leave, he looked back into the ground and his gazended on White.

    White was still in aftershock of the sudden headache. For some reason he felt that the impact that he had was stronger than the rest.

    He looked around as the elder of Zeus academy examined him. Then he looked in Ling Tian''s direction.

    He could see the worry in thetter''s eyes and felt a bit wary.

    In whatever the past that both of them shared, he has never see Ling Tian this worried. He had a bad feeling about this. But because of the elder''s hurry, he was moved to the academy.

    Soon, Ling Tian is back in the academy grounds and he immediately went to Sam.

    All the first graders are already moved there. Whatever fight that is about toe, Ling Tian is sure that the first graders cannot handle this. They will die before they realize what hit them.

    He looked at their concerned faces and felt irritated.

    The Gambler academy students are usually the toughest of the bunch, because most of the other academy studentse from ces of privilege, they could more ruthless or evenpetent, but their wills are weakerpared to Gambler academy students.

    But even they are in full on panic mode.

    Ling Tian went into the room Sam is staying in activated a concealment formation. Sam didn''t react. He was meditating and stayed that way.

    "Sam, I need to talk to you."

    "About?" Sam just asked calmly without even opening his eyes.

    "About the shit you pulled just now. Do you have any idea what this could to the academy realm? The Olympian region is going to implode because of this. They are going to tear each other apart the moment the information about these Info mules leaks out."

    "Come on Ling Tian. You sound surprised."

    Sam asked with genuine confusion as he opened his eyes.

    Ling Tian was stumped.

    Sam chuckled and continued.

    "Even before, just a few hours, you had that longwinded conversation that would put anyone to boredom.

    Did you have that without knowing my goal?

    In fact, you should be the first one to know this. You have been following me since day 1. You cannot act like this is the first time you are seeing me.

    As I told you before, I am going to tear apart the whole academy realm. The ce that is supplying the soldiers to the gods that I have a conflict with, it shall be destroyed."

    "I understand, but this¡­ this is worse that giving information about to enemies to one and the other. This, you are involving the first graders in such a dangerous plot.

    I know that you wanted to force everyone into war, but this spreads way too much. The first graders¡­ they all have connections outside, the moment the attacks begin, all the external families will be involved, they will start killing each other and the conflict spreads out of the academy realm.

    The messenger council will be involved.

    The whole point of that bored conversation is to remind you that, so that you will stay your hand a bit. So, that you will consider the repercussions before doing something like this. However, you did it anyway.

    Sam, I think you are locking horns with something bigger than you.

    You and your friends¡­ the way you are going at this, you are going to be in big trouble.

    The Dusk, and all the things that you worked to get¡­ they might be big, but not big enough to y like this."

 Chapter 2248 More Chaos

    Chapter 2248 More Chaos

    Sam sighed.

    He kind of understood what Ling Tian is getting at. Sam is indeed too small. Just based on the legends and lores back on earth, all these gods¡­ they are way too powerful and invincible. The only times mortals won against a god is when a bigger and more powerful god had their back.

    Or, if that mortal was born to give that god some lesson or a revtion.

    Of course, this world is different. Sam already read a lot of information of people trying to beat the gods and how tragically they died. However, he did believe that there are some sess stories, its just that he didn''t hear of them yet.

    Even if there are none, he is going to create one so theing generations will remember it.

    "Ling Tian, your concern is a bit out of hand here.

    I don''t know if you are concerned about me or if you are concerned for the gods. But either way, if you are that concerned, you should have never ever brought me to this ce to mess with me and my death.

    So, even if it triggers not just the Messenger council, but also the gods behind them, I would like to wee the challenge with open arms. I know the bed I am making and I will sleep on it."

    Ling Tian''s frown deepened and he said.

    "Sam, this is not like your past life. I know you, I have went through your past life a million times before I actually decided to bring you back here. In your past life, you had minimal attachments, barely any human connection with others, even as you were destroying that world, you didn''t have to worry about any retaliation to any people that are affiliated with you at any capacity.

    But this time¡­. this is different.

    You are not dealing with people who just wear some expensive clothes, dine some fancy food and try to y the lesser born like puppets.

    You are not dealing with some weasel politicians and the people that are controlling that said politician from behind.

    You are not dealing with rich asshole who got wealth from so many generations prior to his birth and grew up to believe that even his shit is more elite than the rest.

    And you are definitely not dealing with some rich people who had godplex.

    You are dealing with actual gods. Their invincibility and egos fostered and fermented their egos for millions of years. With the rules of the game as the shield, you have been poking that ego in the spots that you should actually not even touch.

    Even that is manageable.

    Right now, you are treading a path which might just make that ego explode.

    I want you to be here and be careful."

    Sam stayed silent for a moment and said.

    "If I were you, I would worry less about me and more about the people who destroyed their wrist bands and the bird puppets in the academy realm."

    His sudden shift in the topic made Ling Tian extremely wary.

    "What do you mean?"

    "It seems like everyone got so scared about the possible leakage of the info and forgot something basic. Their contracts with the hub.

    They need to pay the weekly payments and today is the payment day. To make the payment they need to scan a wrist band in the machine and deposit the coins.

    Of course, they can also let someone else pay with their own wrist band, however, nobody knows how long the hub stays and how long it will take to resolve the contract issue with Joker, which is me.

    Now the coins are very scarce. The exchange centers haven''t opened in weeks and they showed no sign of opening. Everyone needs coins now, more than ever. So, will anyone trust someone else to pay the coins to continue living normally?

    Think about it.

    Of course, the Hub does have a deal with the Gambler academy and they don''t need to pay with the machine. However, the other academies, don''t have that chance. So, how will they react?"

    Ling Tian immediately left.

    As Sam said, the Gambler academy really doesn''t have much negative impact because of this issue, but the issue is not just paying back the money.

    It is about the consequences of all these people struggling to pay the money back before the deadline is over. In this tension, they will not be able to focus too much on the information mules. Of course, that is if all these people actually remembered the payment day.

    And if they didn''t, and instead focused on the information mules, they will definitely lose a lot. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Tensions will raise, another attack on the hub or activities to destroy it in secret will increase.

    Some desperate people might just go after Sam once again. Of course, the academy defense is very tough. Individuals will not be able to put a dent on it.

    But no matter what happens at this moment, it will be a trigger point.

    The fuse will be lit and everything will blow.

    He has to manage it somehow.

    Five hourster.

    Sam opened his eyes from the meditation and connected with Hub.

    Around three hours before, he started getting the notifications of the payment being received and to his surprise, even the people who didn''t have their wrist bands are getting their payments done through the people he had.

    This is surprising as much as intriguing.

    He wondered what Ling Tian has done to manage this.

    And just as he was wondering, Ling Tian arrived.

    He was panting and sweating. Not of physical exhaustion, mostly mental. He sat down on the ground in front of Sam and asked.

    "You got any good wine?"

    "I am sure, yours is better."

    "In quality, sure. But in taste, yours is."

    Sam shrugged and threw him a wine bottle.

    "Do you know how many morons I had to deal with in thest few hours?"

    "I don''t know what you did, but to think you made all these academies coordinate and make the payments smoothly? Great job."

    "Stop this Sam."

    "What?"

    "In a few hours, everyone will go to the payments machine to get the info about their info mule. This will blow up. I want you to stop this."

 Chapter 2249 Story Time

    Chapter 2249 Story Time

    Sam is a bit pissed.

    He looked at Ling Tian and almost wanted to beat the crap out of the guy. But Sam knew he would get his own ass whooped in a spectacr fashion if he tried it.

    "Ling Tian, I am getting tired of your constant pestering. I understand that you are concerned that the yer handpicked by your beloved Gambler, is in harms way and you don''t want to go through the trouble of finding a new toy for him.

    But you made your bed when you brought me here, so you have to face it.

    You are not me. You are not in my shoes and you will not understand my anger. So, you cannot just constantly push your concerns on to me and force me to obey them.

    If the messenger council really intervenes, so be it. If their duty is really what you say their duty is, they would have stopped me by now. But they didn''t. If they had seen my whole n since the start, they knew what the consequences of it are going to be, but they didn''t.

    If really pushes to shove, I do have some contingency for myself. As long as the gods themselves don''t break the rules ande here swinging, I would be able to stay safe.

    So, enough with your advice.

    Whether you like it or not, the fuse will blow and the realm will be in chaos. In fact, it is necessary for that to happen for me to n my next steps."

    Ling Tian stayed silent for a moment and suddenly something hit him. Something about how Sam talked about the strategy that the academies used to deal with Gambler academy. To understand the defensive measures.

    "This is your fucking trial run?" He asked with a gasp.

    Sam didn''t say anything and just looked at him.

    "You want to see what exactly happens when a situation like this takes ce. You want to see how the gods will react to deal with this.

    Don''t you?"

    "Finally, you understood something.

    I do want to make this realm copse this very second, but I also know the consequences of preparing shabbily. Otherwise, I would have applied the same information mule strategy to the rest of the regions as well and see how far I could go.

    But I need to minimize the damage. So, that the gods will intervene, but not too much. Their intervention will be minimal and bearable.

    Once that is done, ¡­"

    He paused and looked at Ling Tian and then had a puzzled gaze.

    "Why the fuck am I exining my whole n to you? You would just ship it back to Gambler and I don''t want to give that guy an opportunity to do something to screw this over."

    *SCOFF*

    "Do you think Gambler doesn''t have anything better to do?"

    "Apparently not. He is ying this game now, isn''t he?"

    "Why are you so stubborn? Why can''t you just take this as an opportunity?

    I know many people, even the close and dear ones that tried to get this chance, but it ended up in yourp. It just hurts me to see you treat it as a burden, while I remember how much they struggled and failed to get this."

    Sam sighed once again.

    "Alright, it seems like you didn''t do you homework fully when you brought me here.

    Let me tell you what kind of person I am once and for all and you stop with this convincing attempts."

    "Okay, go ahead." Ling Tian said as he leaned against a wall and took a swig of his wine.

    "It was back when I was just starting out as an independent entity. At the age of around seventeen, I killed my handler and his immediate supervisor along with the rest of the administrative staff of the branch of the assassin organization.

    The same branch that I was working with at that time.

    I upied their base, subdued a few more assassins under me and decided to start growing. I tried to suppress the news and started preparing for the war. But obviously, I was not smart enough and let one of the new crew members slip.

    The information reached the main branch and they immediately moved.

    A team of elites that I trained with, that I learned from and along with some hired guns that were as strong as me at that time. All of them came to take my head.

    My defensive measures are not exactly perfect by that time, but they were suppressed and they retreated.

    Then I started pushing back and soon took over the organization. But the guy, the person who led the team that day to take my head off, he was alive.

    Not only was he alive, I realized his true identity. He was part of a Mercenary killer tribe. They were a very nomadic and secret tribe of warriors. It basically formed by the mercenaries that stayed together and created a family and grew as mercenaries together finally ending up like a tribe.

    Almost like how rich families are made. Instead they made killers instead of entitled rich brats.

    Their toddler could kill a teenager with their bare hands with their trickery and cunning.

    The only reason he was working for that organization is because he was temporarily exiled from the tribe. He joined in after that somehow and his whole tribe was trying to get back at me. After a few hours, when I started branching out, like when I was twenty something, they attacked one of my branches.

    They locked whole building and burned every single one of them alive through the windows using methrowers and then set everything on fire.

    Along with that, they sent a message.

    ''Soon, it will rain hellfire on you.''

    I lost only five people in that ce and they were all actually on probation. Their task was to open that branch there and take on a few assignments and prove that they were useful to me.

    And I put them on probation because, they were spies sent by some other organization. But they were dead by the hands of ten nut jobs.

    The tribe did my job and technically reduced my troubles.

    How do you think I reacted?" n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    Sam paused for a second, letting Ling Tian answer.

    "Regr answer would be that you just let them be and directed them to some of your other enemies. But since you were young, maybe chalk it up to some impulse of yours. You might have been pissed.

    "I did neither.

    I stayed silent. Complete radio silence. By then I am almost printing money in a few of mypanies. One of them is a chemicalpany.

    I shut it down and upied theb. I removed every staff member. Then I started collecting books from all over the world. Trust me, I assigned a squad of twenty-four world ss assassins to travel the world and collect me books and stories from various regions.

    I stayed in thatb for months. I operated the organization from there.

    And after those few months. One day, a flock of unique birds the area of that tribe. The next thing they knew, the very next night, the sky was full off dark clouds and it started raining. The rain was unusual which caught the attention of these people immediately.

    But it appeared way too usual and casual for them to think too deeply. Until one of them dared to go out and touch the rain water.

    It started burning.

    That night, in that remote forest, the animals and trees witnessed, something that they never seen in the nature.

    A greenish ck me nketed the whole tribe which as big as the city. Nothing in that city was safe from it. Even the bricks and stones started burning. It was as if the devil has visited the ce. And in that silent night, screams of horror that came out of that tribe, the screams that were begging for help, which then turned to screams of agony and finally, into the begging for death and release thates along with it.

    Every single living and non-living object in that city alike, was burned to ashes. Literal White ashes.

    Nobody ever knew what exactly happened there. But the running theory was that I burned everyone to death.

    I never bothered to rify what I did. Today, I will tell you the truth.

    In thatb, for months that I stayed there, I studied two things. First one is the lore of the world. I studied every mythology, superstition, epic, lore, etc, etc that the world had to offer about hell fire.

    I studied how the pain was described in these epics and understood what would real hell fire will make a living person feel.

    The second thing I studied is a chemical substance that is reactive and mmable.

    A special reactive chemical, that only catches sh as soon as it reaches a certain temperature. In this case, approximately the temperature of the human body or more¡­

    I created this special chemical, loaded it up in my special bird drones, that are created for cloud seeding and let the chemical rain on the whole city.

    And I made the whole tribe feel the closest thing to hellfire and the only ones on the earth that ever experienced while living.

    And I looked at the city as it caught the first tongue of me until everything that belonged in burned to white ash, while hearing the screams of my foes. I remember it clearly because that day a few of the world records were broken.

    My favorite one was the loudest voice ever achieved by a human.

    So, now if I reacted like that to someone who was stronger than me, killed the spies in my organization that I was supposed to kill. What do you think I would do, when someone butt in and destroyed my n to grieve in death to find some peace after the only person that I ever came to love was killed?

    Do you still want to convince me?"

    By the time the story is over, the fuse has been lit outside in the Olympian region.

 Chapter 2250 Macht the Match

    Chapter 2250 Macht the Match

    After the story time is over, Ling Tian stayed with Sam there.

    They drank in silence as the time passed and soon it was past midnight.

    Due to the extreme efforts of Ling Tian, all the academies worked together to make the payment for all the students so that no additional chaos would be added to this mix. They stably worked together using their fourth graders and elders to make the payments for everyone properly.

    Of course, they also agreed on one thing. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    No one would ever touch the payments machine after the payments are all settled. They do not want to risk anyone eve identally knowing who their information mule is and they didn''t want to trigger chaos along with that.

    For that reason, the people who were selected to manage the payment process were all the people who destroyed their bird puppets and wrist bands.

    The academies believed that they sessfully severed the connection between the academy and themselves.

    At least, they believed that they don''t have a way to ess the payments machines after that. As for the hub using the bird puppets to send the messages again like they did before¡­ they didn''t bother with it.

    They came to a consensus that they would destroy every single bird puppet thates out of the hub. They already tested it with the previously sent bird puppets and they are mostly sure that nothing will happen.

    So, as long as they controlled any more information from reaching the people, then they would be fine.

    However, if it was that simple, then what is the point of Samying such an borate plot?

    When one of the Ares academy''s fourth grade student walked near the payments machine, making sure no one left anything behind to y tricks, he suddenly felt a faint glow from the payments machine. He turned around and saw its screen.

    It disyed his image along with a bunch of information that made his mouth go wide. He hurriedly looked around noticing that no one was observing, he moved forward and covered the screen with his body.

    He is so close to the machine.

    At that time, in the controls, a new slot appeared. A slot that is in perfect shape and size to put a finger in. It was glowing and with every passing second the intensity of the glow is increasing. He hurriedly put his finger in that slot.

    *ZAP*

    A slight shock a flood of information to his brain. The machine stopped glowing, everything went back to normal.

    "What are you doing? Is everything okay?"

    Someone passed by and asked with a frown. The young man nodded and didn''t respond. The machine is back to normal and he walked past it like nothing happened. But deep inside, he is nervous. Anxiety is eating him away.

    He wanted nothing more than to run away from there at the moment and his patrolling shift is also luckily over.

    He went back to his academy and waited in his dorm room. He is one of the few that managed to survive without dying in the hands of managers. In fact, he felt so damn lucky, because his secrets and activities he conducted are nothing scoff at.

    To be where he was, he crossed a lot of lines and did things that he shouldn''t have.

    The things that initially haunted him day and night, then gradually he came to the point where he felt okay as long as he not caught.

    It got so bad that he acted like he is the not the same person who did those terrible things all for the sake of improving his cultivation level a bit. All because no one else but him knew about them. When the people that died in the hands of managers and their crimes were revealed, he felt his throat go dry.

    Because he thought he should have been on the list and he felt lucky that he wasn''t.

    Now, he figured that he has jumped to the conclusion way too quickly. His secrets have been exposed and they are right now in the head of a kid in a different academy. A first grader.

    Based on the initial agreement, the academies will iste the information mules for now until they work on a memory sealing technique, that would iste this information. Everything should be fine for him.

    However, the problem is that the information is currently in the head of a student that it shouldn''t be in.

    It is in the head of a student of the Hephaestus academy. His name is Hammer and he didn''t have much of a background. He is one of the rare seedlings that came to the academy realm without any actual organizational backing.

    Big or small.

    However, aftering to the Hephaestus academy, the word of his crafting talents spread. One of the noble league members of the Hephaestus academy, who belonged to a decently prestigious family approached him and scouted him.

    That family has four generations of people studying in the academy.

    Each of them belonging to four different grades.

    Hammer, became friends with his fellow first grader and both became training partners. While he was also appointed as a subordinate of the fourth grader who was supposed to lead the family in the future.

    The brothers were cooperative and take care of Hammer extremely well. And the issue is that the Fourth grader from the Ares academy, whose name is Macht also the one that just knew about his information mule, has conducted some deadly and forbidden practices and used the blood of children.

    Mostly people of fire attribute and the ce he chose happened to be the territory of the four brothers'' family. One time, he went as far as to use the children of the branch families of that family.

    Everything is recorded and all that info is now in the head of Hammer.

    Right now, Hammer is sitting along with the rest of the first graders, including his noble league friend in the core region of the Hephaestus academy.

    He feared that his information will be divulged right now and once it does, his life would be over. After all, sooner orter, themunication will be open once again. The news will reach that family and they wille for his head.

    Before all of that happens, he needs to get rid of Hammer.

    He fell into a deep thought, but he couldn''t really find a proper method to get to that kid. He would have to use desperate measures. So, he is ready to call in a favor. From a person that he never really wanted to interact.

    A person who is the only one that actually shared the knowledge of his acts, because they carried a simr secret and both of their secrets originated from the same source. They knew what the other needs to do, but the kept the secret because both of them didn''t want to be exposed.

    Macht''s advantage is that the other party is an elder.

    So, he came out with the patrol as an excuse and awaited to see that Elder join the patrol as well, so that he canmunicate with him and get his help. Luckily, he managed to meet the elder and to his surprise, he was met with a set of words that he didn''t expect.

    "My information mule is in your academy. I need you to kill him for me."

    Those are the opening statements of the elder. Only then did Macht understand that he is not the only one who got the information about their information mule.

    Macht felt like he found a new lifeline.

    "I will, but it won''te without a cost."

    "What would it take?"

    "Hammer from Hephaestus academy. He is my mule. Kill him." The Elder widened his eyes and then shook his head. I belong to Poseidon academy, how can I target a student in Hephaestus academy now?"

    "I know that you are working a family in Noble league that is trying to spread its influence in other territories. You definitely have someone inside the Hephaestus academy that you can move. You have good enough influence there.

    Kill Hammer and confirm it with me, then I will kill this kid."

    "What if you go back on your words after I am did what you asked of me?"

    "I will not."

    "Just your word is not enough."

    "Then let''s sign it. The soul contract."

    Just like that the contract was signed and the Macht became the Match that lit the fuse.

    That night, Hephaestus academy was thrown into an uproar when Hammer was killed. His neck was broken with a single twist, while he was meditating and his friend, one of the four brothers has witnessed it first hand.

    At the same time, he also noticed a ck colored spell trying to extract the soul of his friend. He hurriedly used an artefact to prevent that and contacted the elders in charge.

    At the same time, Macht received the news of Hammer''s death and he took the duty of protecting the first graders. Killing the second first grader that very night.

 Chapter 2251 Plan

    Chapter 2251 n

    Hammer''s death caused quite some stir in the Hephaestus academy.

    Because the death was so sudden and there was no sign of the attacker. It was quick and easy. If not for the Hammer''s friend using that artefact, his soul would have beenpletely erased and no one would have managed to find a connection to the death.

    But now that the soul was stopped and the elders heard about the incident, they immediately reached the obvious conclusion.

    "Hammer is someone''s information mule and they are responsible for his death."

    That was agreed up on by everyone and immediately, Hammer''s soul was absorbed to see the memories. Meanwhile, Hammer''s friend obtained the wrist band from the dead body. Since the importance of the wrist band decreased and is even considered a dangerous thing by everyone, he managed to get it without any resistance.

    And to his surprise, he managed to ess the contents.

    The hub''s restraints are no longer there.

    He went through all the information and immediately became furious. Macht is the person who benefits from killing Hammer. And in this kid''s mind, Hammer belongs to their family and in a way, their family''s future head, he immediately gave the news to his eldest brother.

    The eldest brother suppressed his rage and didn''t disy it openly.

    Instead, he took the chance to go on the patrol duty. He waited for an hour or so and encountered Macht.

    They battled. Macht couldn''t keep up and was soon overpowered. So, he used some tricks to escape back to his academy. However, before he could get in there, he was killed.

    Meanwhile, in the Ares academy, the death of the first grader also triggered an investigation. While the Hephaestus academy already sent an elder to talk to Ares academy since they knew Macht was the only one who might want to kill Hammer.

    Meanwhile, in the Ares academy, the death of the first grader also triggered an investigation. While the Hephaestus academy already sent an elder to talk to Ares academy since they knew Macht was the only one who might want to kill Hammer.

    But by then, Macht was killed right in front of the Ares academy.

    Now, both academies are furious.

    Hephaestus academy because Macht''s death will not settle the chaos anymore and Ares academy, because they wanted to use Macht to deal with the Elder from Poseidon academy, who is responsible for the death of their student.

    Conflict raised. Not just there, in other academies as well.

    As for why, Macht''s information mule was conveniently ced within the influence of the Poseidon elder, and how that elder''s information mule was ced in Macht''s academy¡­ it is Sam clearly trying to make sure that the fuse will be lit.

    He created several instances like this to ensure that the conflict will rise.

    And it raised just like that.

    The stability that Ling Tian brought with great effort has evaporated into nothing in just a few hours.

    The night passed, with the academies getting into conflict and people killing each other. The Deans themselves had to step in to ensure the safety of the first graders. However, the pettiness of the people effected didn''t stop there.

    Whenever an info mule is dead, the information collected from their wrist bands was submitted to the court and a case was filed. Because of Sam''s antics, the courts became really popr nowadays.

    But they are not hoping for some fair verdict. Rather they are looking for a chance at trial bybat.

    By Dawn, many more people did, but the situation stabilized a bit since the Deans themselves stood at the front and forcefully stopped their people to not attack others.

    After that, they all held a meeting once again, excluding Wharton and Bloody Chariot.

    "Fucking hell. We can''t let this go on. We need to squeeze Sam out of the Gambler academy''s control and get the news on the managers and Joker.

    We are getting screwed over with every passing second. It is one thing for the information to move within our region. Once it leaks to other regions, a massive war will go on. We will not be able to stop the destruction that will fall on us.

    Before that we need to destroy the hubs no matter what."

    The Dean of the Ares academy mmed his table and yelled at everyone. It is not that he is angry at them, but that is the only he found to vent his anger.

    The rest of the deans are irritated by the noise he is making, but they didn''t disagree with what he said. They need to find a clue regarding the hub and stop it. Even though they wanted to somehow find a way to destroy the hub directly, they still don''t know the consequences of it.

    And Bloody Chariot¡­

    They need to now choose if they should fight with Gambler academy or Bloody Chariot. The problem is that most of the Deans grew up in their teens while listening to the stories of Bloody Chariot. He is too much of a legend and this is making them lean towards dealing with the Gambler academy instead of fighting him.

    Also, the Gambler academy has a lot more to lose inparison.

    After all, most people in the Gambler academy, including the students and elders are of little to no background. Even if they are killed, the only retaliation they need to face is from the Gambler academy and the few connections they had.

    If the situation in the academy realm is normal, they would have definitely feared that.

    But right now, when the families that are affiliated with the academies are on the verge of knocking the doors of each academy, they felt Gambler academy is a safer bet.

    They also believed that the Gambler academy wouldn''t be taking too many losses and they will handover Sam once the situation is out of hand.

    The academy has too much to lose if they go too far to protect a single student.

    They could do the same with Bloody Chariot. He also has the duty to protect the Zeus academy. But right now, they are taking too much heat from the families already. If something happened to people in the Zeus academy, their families will react.

    Overall, Gambler academy is a better target.

    As they were discussing on how to deal with the Gambler academy, all of a sudden, someone forcefully entered this secret meeting room.

    "What are you doing here?"

    Dean of the Poseidon academy asked the person that came.

    It is none other than Bloody Chariot.

    "I thought this is a meeting between the Deans of the Olympian academies. I just took charge as the Dean of the Zeus Academy. So, I figured, I would just attend here."

    "You took charge?"

    "Yes, its only temporary. But recently I realized that there are things that I could only do with the official title of Dean, so I took it. I will leave it after Herones back. So, don''t worry about it.

    Anyway, I am sure that you are interested in what I am about to say now."

    "Please continue."

    One of the Deans gestured.

    "All of you want to deal with the Gambler academy. Because you don''t want a conflict with me and you don''t want to trigger Olympian families than they already are. So, your best bet is Sam.

    But it won''t be easy. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    The trick that you yed with the families of the people that were killed. It was okay, but it wasn''t enough. I am sure, you are nning on using them again, but they won''t enough this time as well. And judging from Wharton''s personality, this time he will definitely lose his cool and then those measly number of people will die a dog''s death in his hands."

    "Then what do you suggest?"

    "We will mobilize all the families that are rted to the dead fourth graders once again, but I also know of some even more powerful families that would like to be involved in this. I will make contact with them and we can mobilize them.

    On top of that, all of you need to use the forces of your academies. The elders and instructors all should be mobilized."

    "The Zeus academy won''t?"

    "We have a deal with the Gambler academy. I can''t mobilize the Zeus academy forces. I can''t fight them either. If I do that, the Gambler academy doesn''t have to follow the ransom rules anymore. They can do whatever the want with the people of Zeus academy."

    "If we are all attacking the Gambler academy, what is the point of holding to those stubborn rules?"

    "Because we are not trying to kill of all the members of the Gambler academy. You guys don''t know what kind of person Wharton and his close students are. Most of his students have long since left this ce, that is why you don''t know.

    But they will do anything for him and their strength¡­ let''s just say its unique.

    If we kill the students and elders of the Gambler academy, the alumni will enter and they will take definite revenge. It would irreconcble.

    However, if we capture most of them, then exchanging for Sam would be a much more easier and realistic task.

    So, mobilize everyone in a few hours. We will deal with the Gambler academy and use the captives to exchange for Sam as ransom."

 Chapter 2252 Sphere

    2252 Sphere

    Two hourster.

    The Gambler Academy is once again surrounded by people. People from different families and other academies are all swarming around it.

    Wharton hovered in front of the academy and looked at them.

    He addressed the Dean of the Poseidon academy who stood there in the front of the group.

    "Are you sure you want to do this? Because by now, I am fucking tired from holding back. I will not be responsible for anymore deaths from this point on. They are all on you." Wharton directly issued a threat of death.

    "You can avoid this Wharton.

    All you need to do is handover Sam and we will turn back around without causing a fuss."

    "Are you fucking listening to yourself speak? You brought all these people just to take care of one first grader? Do you have any pride left as a Dean?"

    "That first grader is rted to the biggest terrorists that the academy realm has ever faced."

    "You already interrogated him. That guy just made deals with the said terrorists. Just like you and I did. What is the point of harping on one first grader when you failed miserably at dealing with them by yourself?

    It is one thing that the Olympian academies are not feeling ashamed of not being able to catch the managers and joker, but to try and shift the responsibility on to a first grader? Can you stoop any lower?" Wharton fired back.

    "Can you stop this nonsense? We are here to take Sam by hook or crook. Are you handing him over or not?"

    ¡­

    The argument went on. The tensions are high, but nobody is making the first move.

    Ling Tian is still talking to Sam.

    "The deaths of information mules have been reduced."

    "They are halted temporarily. But they will not stop for long." Sam said.

    "No, right now everyone is surrounding the academy. They are after you. I guess, you are enticing enough to keep everything on a tight leash for now. They have gathered the families of everyone that was killed in the mess caused by hub."

    "True, indeed. However, do you really think that I didn''t calcte for this? In fact, I hoped all of these external forces will be here.

    After all, the information is tightly locked in the Academy realm because of the mess I caused. These families only know the partial truths about the deaths of their children. However, now that they are here, things will be a lot more interesting.

    You don''t have to worry, that not even half of these people will be focusing on the Gambler academy in the next five minutes.

    All you need to do is activate this device and it will done."

    Sam took out a spherical device and handed it over to Ling Tian.

    "Really, you are using me to make your n work? Do you really need to do this?"

    "Of course, its your wish if you want to use it or not. However, I do believe that just because the Gambler academy is strong, doesn''t mean it can endure two back to back attacks in just the span of twenty-four hours.

    You can use it to make them back out."

    "What is this exactly?"

    "It is what I would like to call a Memory Injector. It injects a lot of video information into a person''s brain in a sh of a second. Use this, almost no one from thatrge group will attack you. Except for the people directly from the other academies.

    The other families will all scatter."

    Ling Tian hesitated for a moment before he gritted his teeth and walked out with that Memory Injector.

    Sam smiled at this and let him walk out.

    This is actually one of the many possible developments that Sam has foreseen. When he executed the memory mule strategy, he knew the first triggers would be some desperate people killing their mules. From there, heid down few possible paths.

    One of them is the desperation of the academies that gather together to deal with Sam and they will obviously use some borrowed knives.

    And the best way to do that is that they will not reveal the whole information regarding the deaths of the students and use the Hub as the target while convincing the families. He hoped they did that and if that is true, he had the perfect way to trigger these borrowed knives and turn them away.

    Ling Tian reached the entrance.

    There Wharton''s aura is raging as he was surrounded by a bunch of elders from different families.

    Unlike before, instead of using theyered defenses, Wharton directly stepped into the field.

    *BAM*

    With a single punch, he tore the face of one of the elders and made him crash into the ground like a ragdoll.

    "You fucking bastards. I am done reasoning with you all. Come at me all of you. I will kill everyone of your bastards today."

    Wharton started screaming. At this moment, Ling Tian pressed a button on the sphere and threw it into the air.

    *BANG*

    With a loud noise, it exploded with a series of shes. Several images, hundreds of them were all shed in front of them. Along with several voices.

    They could feel the information getting injected into their heads. They are unable to stop it. It would be more urate to say that they don''t know how to stop it. Their minds are out of their control for a moment and are frantically absorbing the knowledge disyed in front of them.

    Sam created this sphere as an experiment.

    Back on Earth there was a TV show named Chuck. The main character has a special brain that could store a superputer''s worth data in his head, through a very special device called the Intersect. While working on the information projects of the Hub, he tried this.

    The cultivators'' minds are upgraded along with their cultivation level. Their memory capacities and the ability to absorb a lot of information is way too high.

    So, Sam thought he would try this and it worked perfectly.

    Ling Tian was also subjected to the sh and even he was surprised by how fast his mind absorbed the information.

    He hurriedly came back to his senses and said.

    "As much as you would like to take that first grader with you and get information on the hub, understand that the hub alone is not the reason for the deaths of your kids. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    The major reason is actually the academies that you entrusted your kids to and their greed to get more and more from the hub.

    The actual culprits the ones who actually took the life or your kids and the way they died.. I am sure the new information shows all of it."

    Ling Tian''s words triggered the whole crowd.

    One of the family leaders looked through the info and screamed.

    "Bastards from the Brign family. Your son killed my daughter. I will not let him live. He shall pay the price with his life."

    He screamed and immediately led his family members towards the Athena Academy.

    "You¡­ how dare an instructor from the ares academy collude with an outsider to kill my son. And the academy dared to cover it up. I will kill you all."

    Another person turned towards the Ares academy instructor who thought he was the only one lucky enough to cover up his tracks in killing one of the mules.

    Those are not the only triggers though.

    Another major trigger is actually directed towards the Dean.

    "Why did you deny us attacking the Hub? If the person behind this used the hub to y with all of you and got our kids killed, why didn''t attack that ce instead?

    Some of the other families also mentioned that Bloody Chariot of the Zeus academy was defending the hub. Why is this happening?

    Instead, you brought us to fight with Gambler academy and even im that a first grader has answers for all of this?

    To think we are almost fooled by you.

    It seems like you guys are only using and our grief to deal with yourpetition."

    That was the conclusion one of the family heads came to.

    And that ignited some really hot rage.

    Just like what Sam said, except for the Deans who are ring at Ling Tian and Wharton, the rest of them are upied. More than half the forces left to deal with the Hub, some went to the Zeus academy and the rest of the spread among fighting with other academies or the elders and deans that were in the spot.

    Ling Tian has followed Sam''s journey until now, he has seen him pull off many miraculous things.

    Every time Sam always focused on getting as much information as possible and dealt with his opponents. He used weak links, the arrogant youngsters, the stuck up elders, the people with dirty secrets. He exploited them until he destroyed them.

    But this is the first time, Sam put so much information to use.

    Academy realm was always known as the ce with all the elites gathered and these elites all had one major thing inmon. Everyone had too many secrets and with such a wide range of people and ambitions, there has always been hidden conflicts.

    All Sam did it, increase the conflicts and bring them out to the open.

    Without actually showing his direct involvement, he is making the academy realm copse, bit by bit.

 Chapter 2253 Arrival

    2253 Arrival

    Ling Tian watched as the whole of the Olympian region plunged into chaos.

    He saw battles moving all over the ce. It was a good that there was curfew and a lot of people were not allowed to move around. Of course, some hiddenmoners here and there are not exactly safe now.

    But with such arge city as a battlefield and so many buildings, they could always find a ce to hide and maybe get out of this with some luck.

    The problem however is that something Ling Tian has yet to observe. Taking the chaos as an advantage, some people with ulterior motives are moving around. The mostmon goal¡­ killing their info mule.

    They are barging into academies and started killing their targets. In the hopes that the whole thing will be swept under the rug as the coteral damage of the chaos. The first graders who were usually considered as the backbone of the academies, since they are the ones who will evolve into the second, third and fourth graders are being ughtered left and right.

    All the damage Sam has done until now.

    With the ming skulls, the weekly payment, the trial bybat and even using Stone¡­ he killed so many first graders over the past few weeks.

    Even with all the destruction he created, before the fourth graders were targeted and killed by the managers, the biggest damage he has actually done is to the first graders. Particrly to the Zeus academy.

    Now, even more damage is happening.

    Ling Tian looked at Wharton who is still surrounded by the Deans. They are the only ones left there apart from some stray elders.

    Nian who already recovered, jumped into the fray with his halberd and some other elders.

    Ling Tian noticed that he is not needed and turned around. Once again sitting with Sam in that room.

    "You might not want to rx that much. A lot of people are killing their info mules at the moment."

    Sam said all of a sudden. Ling Tian frowned and asked.

    "Why are you saying this to me? Do you really want to use me for another step of your grand n? Give me a break."

    "Not really. This has nothing to do with the n. I just want to know something and in return I might tell you something that you might want to know."

    "What would that be?"

    "White. The young man that has been on my back ever since I came to the academy realm."

    Ling Tian''s body stiffened.He forgot about White. With all the chaos that is happening, he forgot about that guy. He also forgot that he revealed his rtionship with White to Sam. There is no way Sam who is an information addict to not want to use this.

    He was in fact a bit surprised that Sam didn''t press further to know more about it.

    Now that Sam asked, he had a bad feeling that this will not be something that he will like.

    "I would like to know who White is and how is he rted to you. Why is he targeting me?"

    Sam asked calmly.

    Ling Tian pursed his lips and asked.

    "What were you nning on exchanging with me for that?"

    "You know, White is also a first grader and even though he didn''t get the wrist band and the puppet at the start, he owns one set now. And he was also among the people who got injected with the memories.

    He is an info mule."

    Ling Tian clenched his fists.

    "Did you reveal his information?" His face is glowing with anxiety. It couldn''t be more clear that he scared of what might happen for White.

    "No. Not yet at least. It depends on the information that you give me."

    "Sam, are you really threatening me? I thought our rtionship was better than this."

    "It is, that is why I am not exactly threatening you here. I am telling you that I spared him by not giving his info to the person whose information he is carrying right now. I am doing you a favor by not killing that guy who is so dear to you.

    But Ling Tian, you should know that you are the one who owes me already.

    You already asked me for a favor regarding that guy. And I did it, regardless of his constant pestering. You know better than anyone how irritating I get with pests and how I usually deal with them.

    I left him alone because I had bigger fish to fry.

    But sooner orter he was going to die.

    However, you interfered in the middle and you asked me for a favor to relieve him of the coins. Either he knows that I own the hub and my rtionship with you, or he just asked you for the coins without knowing that I own the hub.

    He is close to you.

    I would have treated him like any other first grader and made him an info mule. Even to a dangerous person. Like the info of a Dean or a grand elder. To make sure he definitely dies.

    But I refrained from doing so, because he is rted to you."

    Ling Tian stayed silent and waited for Sam to continue. Although, he knew what Sam is going to ask next.

    "You of all people know that I am not that generous. So, if you want me to spare him, tell me who he is, or I will treat him like any other guy."

    Ling Tian slumped into himself. He is like azy and exhausted old man who doesn''t want to deal with the world anymore.

    "In the past few hours, you have made me feel more and more helpless and exhausted.

    Only Gambler made me feel that way. You are the second one. Not even other gods did this to me."

    "I will take that as apliment."

    "To be honest, I would like to reveal it to you. But I need to confirm it with Gambler first.

    You might have some guesses and I have a feeling that some of them are very close to the truth. However,the truth about him is not mine to reveal. As for my rtionship with him, you can consider me as his teacher.

    At least in part.

    I taught him closebat since he was a kid. That is all I can say."

    "Well¡­

    *RUMBLE* A loud rumbling was heard

    Sam was about to say something. But at the moment, his senses screamed. Not just his, even Ling Tian''s senses screamed just the same. He hurriedly stood up and waved his hand.

    *BOOM*

    The wall copsed just at that moment. Ling Tian''s hand wave created a shockwave that collided with some energy that came at them.

    The first grader were all blown away, but they were safe, nothing life threatening. Ling Tian kicked the ground andunched himself into the sky.

    *BOOM*

    With another explosion, he knocked down another iing attack. The attack was powerful and strong enough to kill a dozen elders at the same time. Even Sam who is now far away andpletely protected from the attack was shaking in his boots.

    It was primal fear, or rather his body''s instinct warning him that it could kill him at any moment.

    He hurriedly steered some of the bird puppets that are still out to take a look at who the attacker is.

    14:49

    He hurriedly steered some of the bird puppets that are still out to take a look at who the attacker is.

    But the moment they were steered in the direction of the attacker, the puppet was destroyed, however, he managed to grasp a slight glimpse at the person or rather the people at that short moment.

    ¡­

    Around half an hour ago.

    When the chaos outside was at its highest, the whole region was in the mes of murder and ughter. One of the space gates of the Zeus academy was activated.

    From within two people came. One of them is way too familiar a face for the people of the Zeus academy and the people who were trying to run for their lives immediately knelt in front of him.

    "Dean Heron, please save us. Please."

    "Save us. They are trying to kill us."

    "It''s the elder from the other academy. I know his secrets. He is trying to kill me."

    Heron looked at the blood soaked academy in horror. There are dead bodies everywhere. Most of the space gates are locked and only the special ones were unlocked, but they can only be used toe in the academy, not out. That was what Heron andpanion used. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    The rest of the students up on facing the wrath of the other elders immediately ran to the space gates, but they are unable to use them.

    A lot of first graders and the seniors that tried to save them are dead.

    And the culprits stood in front of him.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Lightning roared in the skies of the Zeus academy as every intruder was ughtered in the matter of seconds.

 Chapter 2254 Theron Vs Ling Tian

    2254 Theron Vs Ling Tian

    As Heron went on cleaning up the vermin that entered his academy grounds, hispanion walked towards a certain direction.

    All the bloodshed and the terror stricken people are of no consequence to him. His nk expression told a million words about how he couldn''t give two shits about the whole thing. He walked slowly and steadily as if he was taking a walk in a park on a warm summer evening.

    After some twists and turns he finally arrived at his destination.

    But the moment he stopped there, the nk expression disappeared. His jaws clenched, teeth grinding, forehead wrinkled and fist clenched. He looked at the house with increasing anger every passing second.

    He broke through the main gate and looked inside.

    The house is empty. Not even a single living being was there. He turned around and walked back to Heron with the same pace. Heron was just breaking the legs of the one of the Poseidon academy elders who almost killed a first grader.

    He was nning on holding him ountable and make the Poseidon academy pay for his discretion.

    At that moment, his heart froze for a moment as he heard faint footsteps approaching him.

    "What happened, Theron?"

    He asked in almost shivering tone.

    Theron looked at Heron with the same cold gaze one would look at an annoying fly.

    "Where is Jade? Why is she not in her quarters?"

    "What?" Heron widened his eyes in disbelief. Even he didn''t expect this.

    "Sh.. She is not there?" Heron asked. With all the bloodshed going on, he expected the worst. Fear and rage gripped his heart tight.

    "Th..Ther.." The Dean was about to speak, but Theron gestured him to stop and looked at the academy. This is the first time he is observing all the chaos around.

    Finally his gazended at the Poseidon academy''s elder. He stepped forward and held the Elder''s throat by his hand and raised him up.

    "You have three seconds. Tell me what is happening."

    His eyes were cold, sharp and the Elder would have sworn that there is some indescribable energy hidden beneath all that coldness. An energy and power that made him spill the beans immediately.

    He told Theron everything. From how the suspicions developed around Sam, how the interrogation went, how Bloody Chariot got involved and how they tried to attack the Gambler academy to force them to give up Sam.

    How the information was revealed all of a sudden and how the family forces attacked the academy forces. And how everyone went to kill off their information mules.

    "Coul¡­ some elder¡­" Heron stuttered trying to make a coherent sentence. But Theron stopped his once again and said.

    "There are no signs of attacks, nothing happened in that house. If an person of that level attacked her or even tried to forcefully bring her away in any method, the talisman I gave her would have been triggered.

    My soul fragment would have being notified. And there is not just one talisman. There is no way for her to be taken away forcefully by someone."

    "Then¡­"

    "She left willingly." Theron spoke, his voice sounding eerily calm. But that calmness didn''t fool anyone. Even the Elder that was on the verge of death a second ago, could feel that some hidden storm is brewing beneath that fa?ade.

    Theron dropped that elder and walked back to Jade''s residence once again. He closed his eyes for a moment and took out a special formation disc. He walked to the center of the house and ced the disc there.

    Heron calmed the chaos in the academy and called for the elders of the Zeus academy. He tried to contact Bloody Chariot, but got no response. The elders replied and he informed them of his arrival and at the same time asked them toe and take over, before he ran towards Jade''s residence as well.

    There he saw Theron setting up the formation disc in the middle of the house.

    Then he started drawing some inscriptions connecting it to the formations around the house.

    Soon, he was done and tapped the top of the formation disc.

    *SWOOSH*

    The whole ce turned into blue colored projection. Within that projection, they saw two people. One of them is standing at the door while the other is standing on the other side.

    This side, it was Stone and the other side it was Jade.

    Jade opened the door, she hugged Stone and both of them walked out of the residence area.

    The projection ended.

    "Is that Stone?"Theron asked Heron. The same calmness still full of his tone.

    "Yes."

    "I thought he was a prospectless cripple." Theron muttered almost as if he was saying that to himself. Not to Heron.

    Heron gulped as a million thoughts ran through his mind. He remembered a time in the Olympian region when Stone was the biggest problem they had. But soon it was gone and reced by so many bigger problems that he practically forgot about him.

    Of course, he should have expected that something like this would have happened. After all, Stone is not here is protest and scream. He is here for the love of his life.

    "Last time I checked, that cripple left his with nothing more than an Astral ne cultivation, messed up meridians and overly swollen muscles of his upper body.

    How did all of those ws get corrected and he came to his realm?

    Did he obtain a Divine Inheritance?"

    This time Theron''s questions were directed at Heron. Thetter came out of hi daze and answered.

    "He didn''t take and inheritances from the Pocket dimensions, that much I am sure, he actually changed before the pocket dimensions opened. When he first arrived at the academy, he was still like his original self.

    Between then and the fresh tournament, this big change happened.

    Until then¡­"

    Heron paused and bit his tongue. He didn''t want to reveal too much. He can spout all the spections that he wanted in front of someone like Christos, but he cannot do the same with his brother. He is far too powerful and the consequences would be far too dreadful for him to do that.

    Theron looked at the ring he was wearing and started ying with it.

    "You better continue Heron. You were about to say something. I am sure you know better than hiding things from me."

    Heron gulped down and said.

    "When Stone came to the academy, I made the guards throw him out and keep him in the streets not letting him enter. At that time, the person named Sam who was mentioned before by that elder also came to our academy for some reason and was returning.

    On his way back, he saw Stone at the entrance and took him along with him."

    "So, that kid is the only connection with Stone and this miraculous change? So, in a way the hub could be the reason for the sudden change? Are you telling me that now?"

    *GULP*

    Heron gulped and nodded.

    "Alright."

    *SWOOSH*

    Theron disappeared from there.

    When he arrived at the Gambler academy, he saw that Wharton is fighting with all the other elders and Deans. He directly ignored that fight and tried to barge in. Of course, the defensive formation blocked him.

    He appeared surprised.

    "Gambler academy. Full of surprises as always."

    He mumbled and raised his hand tond a p on the formation.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosion, the formation copsed and the remnant energy of that p went through it straight towards the next fewyers of the formation. The energy only dissipated after copsing a couple of other buildings.

    He finally captured everyone''s attention.

    Wharton looked at him and eximed.

    "THERON??!!"

    Theron looked at Wharton and smirked. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    "Its just as I have heard. You are wasting your life away in this ce Wharton."

    Theron said and he zoomed in towards the core area where Sam is held.

    Wharton wanted to turn around and deal with him, but the Deans and all their tricks are handful. But after a second, he thought of something and just rxed.

    Theron sensed expanded his divine sense without any worries and that is when Sam and Ling Tian felt the sense of crisis and reacted.

    Theron waved his hand, pping the air. The shockwave was so strong that it copsed everything in between and destroyed the building Sam and Theron was in.

    And that brought us to our present situation.

    Ling Tian and Theron are hovering in the air looking at each other.

    "You are Ling Tian, aren''t you?" Theron asked in amusement.

    Ling Tian didn''t answer and looked at him with a frown.

    "What business does an outsider like you have in the Academy realm? Attacking the Gambler academy out of blue."

    "Out of blue? It is totally called for. Bring that kid named Sam out. I need to ask him some questions."

    "What for?"

    "To decide if I should leave him alive or dead."

 Chapter 2255 THE Battle

    2255 THE Battle

    Ling Tian didn''t answer and just stood there in the air looking at Theron with a cold gaze.

    His expression is mostly nk apart from that coldness in his eyes. No one could guess what he is actually thinking.

    *SWOOSH*

    Theron suddenly moved. But so did Ling Tian.

    *BANG*

    Both of them shed as Ling Tian blocked Theron''s path directly with his body. Both of them recoiled from the impact and the staring continued.

    "You know, I heard a lot about you. You were a few years junior to me in the academy realm. Of course, that''s based on the admission time, since I didn''t technically graduate from here.

    However, I always heard news about you.

    Ling Tian did this, Ling Tian did that. You were quite famous."

    "I disagree. I was never popr in the academy realm. Apart from my ssmates in Gambler academy, no one knows about me much."

    "That is notpletely true. You are not famous in this realm which can only be considered as a glorified echo chamber. But you are famous where it mattered."

    "And where would that be?"

    "In the battlefield. In the Battlefield of Gods¡­ your feats are praiseworthy. I always wanted to meet you there when I heard the rumors. I wanted to see if you were worth the salt. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    However, soon I forgot since we never really crossed paths. Now, I am actually d that I met you here."

    Ling Tian stayed silent. His frown deepened. His time in Gambler academy was very tricky. He always kept a low profile and barely any people knew of him outside the academy or his grade. But on the battlefield¡­ even though he kept a rtively low profile to make sure that his peers and juniors won''t know too much about him¡­ things are different when it came to enemies.

    There was need for them to know his abilities, so that they won''t end up underestimating him.

    And he could only think of one reason why a person like Theron came across his name. Someone tried to hire Theron to kill him at that time.

    "I don''t believe you will hold that thought for long. I suggest that you leave this ce and never return. You are not going to talk to Sam."

    *SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    *BAM*

    *SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    *BAM*

    *SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    *BAM*

    Three tries and three blocks all perfectly done. Only problem is¡­ the shockwaves.

    The surroundings buildings started breaking down bit by bit. Even the ground beneath is ravaged.

    Ling Tian gritted his teeth and looked at Theron once again, dead in the eyes.

    "This is thest warning, Theron. Leave. NOW."

    *SWOOSH* Theron smirked and moved. Trying to move past Ling Tian once again. His speed is top-notch. Probably the fastest thing Sam ever witnessed. In fact, just to get a sense of those moves, he activated energy vision to its limit, with all his divine energy.

    *SWOOSH*

    Ling Tian moved and he blocked Theron''s way, however, this time, instead of just blocking him he caught a hold of Theron''s cor and used all that force to make a spin in the air, before throwing Theron out.

    *SWOOSH*

    Theron flew in the air like a broken kite and flew out of the school grounds.

    *BAM* *CRASH*

    He flew out of the Gambler academy grounds and out into the empty streets. He crashed into the shops and buildings crashing them to rubble.

    Theron stood up from the rubble and looked at Ling Tian who is floating over him with the same cold gaze.

    "Leave Theron. You don''t want to do this."

    Theron raised his hand and energy gathered at his palm.

    *BOOM*

    Divine energy turned into a beam as it barely went past Ling Tian and stuck something behind him. It was an Elder that belonged to Zeus academy who was sneaking up on Ling Tian. His head exploded with the energy beam and he copsed to the ground.

    "An insect trying to get into my business." Theron mumbled as he flew in the air and hovered in front of Ling Tian, just a few meters in between each other.

    "It seems like you are not going to back down."

    "No, I am not."

    "Then, let''s do this."

    *SWOOSH*

    *SWOOSH*

    *BANG* *BAM* WHAM* *BOOM*

    The sounds literally felt like they wereing out of a movie. Sam felt exactly that. He tried to keep up with the fight, but even all his might behind the energy vision is not working. It is not good enough to observe the fight at level.

    All he could see is the impact of the shockwaves on the surroundings and the faint after images of their sh in the air.

    One moment, a shop copsed, the next moment a crater appeared in the road, another moment, the broken rubble of a building flew around like a tornado was carrying it and another moment, some random elder who was hidden was dead just from the shockwave.

    The battle was all over the ce. It wasn''t just at one spot or even one area. One moment they are in front of the Gambler academy and the next moment, they are in front of the Ares academy. They are travelling at unimaginable speeds.

    Sam believed even his blink wouldn''t be enough to match that speed. If he was really targeted by someone of that level, he would definitely be dead before he knew what hit him. Or even feel that thing that hit him.

    He would be in a worse position than a fish on the chopping block.

    His body shivered a bit, out of both fear and excitement in a weird but thrilling way.

    While the most of the academy realm was unable to see what is going between the two, the two parties involved are in a tense battle. In everyone''s mind, particrly in the minds of the Elders of the Olympian academy, Ling Tian is doomed.

    The stories they heard about Theron, the legends that he created, they are still fresh in their minds. Most of them grew up listening to them and some are lucky enough to witness them. But there is a specific circle of people that were looking nervous.

    The internal circle, the few that actually knows Ling Tian. Like Heron and Wharton who is the only one that had a smirk on his face.

    *SWOOSH* *BOOM*

    All of a sudden, one of the two figures fell straight into the ground.

    Ling Tian stood in the air, while Theron created arge crater in the middle of the road. Thetter gritted his teeth and stood up. There is blooding out of his mouth. His calm expression was nowhere to be seen.

    Judging by the bruise and the blood, it was a punch straight to the jaw. Itnded cleanly and Ling Tian punched in a way that nailed him into the ground.

    Theron''s energy charged at his palms as he got ready to throw energy beams like he did before. Energy gathered in Ling Tian''s palm as well. It condensed into a long beam, almost like a rod made of energy and then its end turned into a spear tip.

    Then there is a faint metallic sheen. Almost making it look like a real spear. In fact, it would impossible to differentiate if one didn''t see it being created.

    Ling Tian threw the spear straight at Theron, who shot the energy beam.

    *BOOM*

    Both of them met, creating a shockwave that sent dust flying all over the city.

    In the middle of that dust cloud, the spear pierced through the beam of energy and split it into two. The spear went straight at Theron who dodged it in thest moment.

    *BOOM*

    The split parts of the beam of energy didn''t even graze Ling Tian and went away.

    Theron gritted his teeth harder and kicked the ground to fly into the sky.

    *ZOOM* *ZOOM* *ZOOM*

    The energy beams making the same sounds as aser gun in the sci-fi movies as Theron closed in the distance, Ling Tian conjured up a staff and started defending himself.

    The staff spun with such resplendent golden light as it hit the oing energy projectiles. Ling Tian is not even moving from his position as if he anything that Theron could thrown at him wouldn''t faze him at all.

    Theron closed the distance soon enough andunched himself at Theron trying tond a punch aimed at his left jaw.

    Right before the fist couldnd.

    *BOOM*

    The staff spun from the side and almost hit Theron on the same spot once again. But he diverted his fist to block the attack, holding the staff, while other hand was like a w trying to take Ling Tian''s life, aiming at his heart.

    The staff that was in Theron''s hand, suddenly split into two. Exactly at the point where his hand gripped. The bottom part slipped past. It turned into a dagger and Ling Tian tried to stab Theron.

    Theron didn''t have a choice and diverted his second hand to block the attack.

    And then¡­

 Chapter 2256 Escalation

    2256 Esction

    *PAK*

    A p so crisp and clear that made Theron freeze on the spot.

    One p that resounded all over the half destroyed city. It brought all the chaos to a standstill.

    Theron''s face contorted after a moment of daze. He locked eyes with Ling Tian. His energy raged. He crushed the piece of staff in his hand and also tried to crush Ling Tian''s hand that he was holding. He used all the force that he could muster and kicked Ling Tian on the knee.

    Ling Tian tried to pull his arm back, but Theron wasn''t nning on leaving it. So, he took the kick while he threw a punch of the face.

    *BOOM*

    Both of them connected at the same time. Ling Tian was kicked higher into the sky while Theron was smashed into the ground. But they didn''t stay there for long. Not even for a tenth of a second.

    *SWOOSH*

    They went after each other once again.

    This time, its Theron''s turn to use Ling Tian''s force against him as he captured the guy''s cor and threw him over the shoulder into the ground. But while Ling Tian was falling, his finger nails gathered energy and turn into conjured up ws.

    The ws dug straight through Theron''s flesh making him bleed.

    As Ling Tian fell to the ground, Theron followed up with an energy beam attack, which brushed past Ling Tian''s stomach, creating a small gash.

    He gained control over his body and shot himself up into the sky. Theron did the same and started punching down. The blows connected, dodged and blocked. It didn''t matter what the oue of each exchange was, what followed every exchange was destruction to the surroundings. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    The city is being brought to the ruins like no other.

    The battle also seemed restless and unending as they exchanged blows like they hated each other for ages.

    It was also hard to understand who is gaining the upperhand. However, after some keen observation, people could see that Ling Tian isnding more clean hits. Sam tried to take in as much as he can, but he is unable to catch a proper glimpse at the exchange because of their speed.

    Except for when one of them was throw into the ground or shot into the sky by the other, it was hard to get a grasp of what the situation of either of them is.

    Theron seemed angrier and angrier as the fight went on, while Ling Tian appeared calmer and calmer.

    As even more time passed, he managed to observe some other thing, Theron is being thrown away or knocked down a lot morepared to Ling Tian. Both of their energies are still at peak, and they didn''t seem nowhere near the end of their stamina.

    However, it does seem like things are going out of the hand.

    Even if they can battle to the end of eternity, the city wouldn''t be able to endure it. As Theron felt more and more cornered, he was being pushed back towards the Zeus academy. Ling Tian deliberately threw him in the direction.

    All in the hopes of damaging the academy.

    Even though he appeared calmer, he is furious with all the damage that Theron did to the Gambler academy.

    That ce is very dear to him and to see it in that state, made his blood boil.

    He gritted his teeth and caught a hold of Theron''s arm that came at him. He then threw him over once again, but this time, he didn''t just drop him. Ling Tian fell along with him, punching him in the face as they fell to the ground.

    This is the only time, people actually saw them at regr speed.

    They are free falling without any additional force and they held each other as they brawled mid-air while reaching the ground.

    *BAM* *CRASH*

    The crash sent shockwaves to all the surroundings, the walls of the Zeus academy copsed. When the dust settled, Ling Tian was sitting on the top as he threw punch after punch at Theron.

    As Theron struggled and grappled, he managed to roll to the side, but he also tried to hold Ling Tian in a lock. The grappling continued and to Theron''s ultimate surprise, he didn''t even realize, when he ended up in it, but he was in a guillotine.

    Ling Tian held his neck by one arm and started mming his elbow into the back. As if he wanted to tear through the body forcefully.

    Theron gritted his teeth and forced his way out of the lock. He held Ling Tian by the cor and the two of them once again exchanged blow after blow.

    But Theron felt like he was losing.

    He took more blows, he looked more damaged and it seemed like a lot more than his body was hurt in this fight.

    He might havee across Ling Tian''s name, but it was just fleeting to him. Ling Tian was good, but the rumors are not good enough to make him be remembered in some unfathomable light.

    His reputation was on par with any decent cultivator that performed well in the battlefield. But Theron''s reputation¡­

    It is stuff of legends, the people he killed, the armies he destroyed, the massacres. People dream about watching him battle. He maintained that reputation for a reason and made sure that his image remaind wless.

    However, now, when facing Ling Tian, he stooped to be a brawler. Whenever he used an energy beam, Ling Tian conjured up some random weapon that destroyed everything. Whenever they are locked, Ling Tian managed to react a tad bit quicker and gained upper hand.

    And as the time passed, he started taking more and more blows. His techniques are being countered and for the first time, he felt like he has met his match in hand to handbat.

    If anyone who knew of him and his reputation, saw him for the first time in this battle, they wouldn''t believe a word of what that reputation stated of him. They wouldugh and mock him.

    His reputation and image that was built over thousands of dead bodies all drained just like that.

    When he thought up to the point, he is stifling with rage. He couldn''t control himself anymore.

    "ARGHHHHH¡­."

    He screamed, almost like a roar of an injured beast and the next moment a weird glow appeared from his body. It is different from the spiritual energy and Divine energy. Imagine white colored flouroscent particles dressed up with golden hue so faint that you could barely recognize it being there.

    It is an energy that was so familiar yet distance for most of the people there.

    Everyone, particrly, the elders grand elders and seniors had an expression of longing and astonishment at the same time.

    While of course, the surroundings reacted a bit differently.

    Theron was levitating just a couple of inches above the ground. It didn''t seem deliberate. It didn''t seem like he was consciously levitating. It is almost as if the earth is repelling him. The ground seemed like it was scared of epting him in that state.

    At the same time, a faint vacuum was created around Theron. Almost like ayer forming around his body. The air is refusing to touch him.

    Theron''s eyes glowed and he moved forward, the fabric of space is cracking. It is visual to the naked eye. The spatial rends are urring around him and they spread bit by bit. Every living being that could even faintly sense it, felt a primal fear.

    As if they are being suppressed as a species. As if it is their inherent nature to be afraid of Theron at the moment.

    Except for Wharton and two other Deans, even the rest of the Deans didn''t dare look straight at Theron for a moment and even to take a peek, they struggled. Some of the elders who are closer to him fainted on the spot with blood seeping out of their nostrils, ears, eyes and mouth.

    Of course, not much to be said about the kids. It was a great thing that the Deans took the decision of guarding their first graders deep inside the core areas, or they would have died in vain.

    But there is one man, who looked unfazed and unimpressed by this disy. Ling Tian. He looked dead in the eyes of Theron. As if he is afraid that Theron would miss that unimpressed look and fearless gaze.

    As if Theron would miss that condescension disyed in those eyes.

    *SWOOSH*

    He raised his hand and threw a jab. It appeared slow, but at the same time iprehensibly fast. It tore the space in its path, creating small spatial turbulence which was immediately mended by the nature, but the force of the punch cannot be mistaken.

    Ling Tian stood there and raised both of his hands to catch the fist using both his palms.

    *BOOM*

    The explosive sound this time, is different from anything anyone has ever heard before.

 Chapter 2257 Brontios

    2257 Brontios

    *BOOM*

    The fistnded straight into the palms.

    Ling Tian gritted his teeth and took the hit. The force ravaged all over his body and he slid on the ground, leaving marks on the ground. The dust settled and everyone saw Ling Tian standing there with the cold face.

    He is panting heavily and a fresh strain of blood started dripping down his lips. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    He looked at Theron who ising for a second blow. This time, Ling Tian blocked the attack with a shield he conjured and once again slid on the ground. He went on the defensive for the next ten moves or so.

    Everyone looked at the scene in awe. Ling Tian is getting exhausted. That weird energy that most people there are unfamiliar with is strong. Stronger than what they expected as they saw Ling Tian being dominated.

    At least he appeared so.

    After the ten odd moves, he started puking blood. His body is shaking.

    Sam frowned at this. The fight has finally slowed down enough for him to observe it from afar and he could see Ling Tian''s expressions faintly. There is no sign of defeat or resignation there. Even though his actions seemed to indicate otherwise¡­

    But Sam could swear that he saw Ling Tian''s grin widening with every move and he is also sure that he is not the only one that has noticed this.

    Theron got angrier with every blow.

    The city is being ravaged with every one of his moves. Even the academies are being affected with many of the buildings already copsed. But his anger is not subsiding because Ling Tian''s figure is still standing strong.

    *BAM*

    Theron kicked the air and shed towards Ling Tian. He crashed him into the ground and took a mounted position, raining blows left and right.

    *BOOM*

    "DIE"

    *BOOM*

    "DIE"

    His screams and blows echoes throughout the city. Ling Tian is conjuring up energy shields on his arms as he blocked the blowsing at his face. Each blow destroyed a shield and it was only reced by the next shield.

    The strength of the blows couldn''t be underestimated, its just that Ling Tian''s defense is so stronger even in that state.

    Theron kept on punching, until all ofsudden, his hand froze for a split second, before it could connect with Ling Tian.

    As if on cue, Ling Tian''s energy raised to the skies and the next moment, something else did.

    *BOOM*

    Theron''s body was like a projectile shot straight into the sky. With that resplendent golden glow following him. He looked like an ethereal shooting star, only it was flying high instead of dropping down.

    Then everyone saw something amazing.

    Ling Tian is standing there with his whole body covered with a simr ethereal energy. White color particles covered with golden hue.

    And his energy is much more resplendent than that of Theron''s. And the reaction of the surroundings is a lot stronger than that of Theron''s.

    *SWOOSH*

    He disappeared from the spot and reappeared above Theron who was still unable to regain control of himself.

    *BOOM*

    He threw a punch and sent Theron flying in a different direction. Once again Ling Tian disappeared. And at the spot where hended the punch, a huge spatial tear appeared sucking everything in as if its trying to swallow the surroundings and make the world copse into itself.

    Only it is not strong enough, but it is gradually increasing trying to fight the recovery of the surroundings that are mending the spatial tear naturally.

    Ling Tian reappeared in the path of Theron''s flying and¡­

    *BOOM*

    Landed another proper punch, sending him flying again. This time apart from the spatial tear, a small cloud of mist formed from the sprayed blood from Theron''s body also appeared.

    Theron gritted his teeth and screamed inaudibly as he regained his bnce by force. Ling Tian appeared on the other side and almost managed tond another clean hit. Theron dodged and the fist brushed past him.

    Theron halted and looked at Ling Tian with shock and surprise apparent in his eyes.

    He is breathing heavily and his skin cracked at several ces. It is almost like his body is breaking down by itself. Meanwhile, Ling Tian appearedpletely fine. Even the injuries that he took before are healing rapidly and it is almost like he recovered all the stamina back.

    "You¡­" Theron wanted to say something, but he couldn''t finish.

    Ling Tian said hurriedly and conjured up a sword. He swung it at Theron, who dodged it and just like that the exchange began, however this time each blow is much more destructive and each exchange is much more dominating.

    This time Ling Tian''s upper hand is apparent.

    It felt like he was not even trying properly. At least, his moves looked that much at ease.

    The same couldn''t be said about Theron.

    His body is shivering and it looked like he is ready to give in at any moment. At one point¡­

    Ling Tian''s weapon changed into a staff and a clean hitnded on theron.

    *BOOM*

    While he was still flying, Ling Tian caught up andnded a few more hits.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    When Theron hit the ground andid there motionless, Ling Tian got ready tond another hit.

    "NOOOOOOOO¡­."

    Heron screamed at the top of his lungs as he looked at the scene. The final blow looked like it was aimed to kill.

    At that moment, A bright light was projected on both of them.

    "Fuck. I amte." Ling Tian cursed as he looked at Theron with regret. And the next second, the light disappeared along with the two of them.

    Everyone was stunned, except for the Deans. They sighed and appeared a bit nervous. They immediately turned back as if they had a tacit understanding and left. At least, there are not more fights between the academies as they called their elders and instructors back.

    The outsiders lost the battle, even though they are higher in number. Some of them just died from the aftershocks of the Ling Tian and Theron''s fight. They also left the academy realm without much noise.

    But the tensions are still brewing behind the scenes.

    Sam had a billion thoughts running in his head. What he saw was too much for him at the moment and this made him excited. He had an inkling of what that ethereal energy is. He has felt it before, but now he has seen it directly.

    It is just way too stimting.

    Meanwhile, somewhere that Sam doesn''t know about yet.

    The castle that floated in the sky, the ce where numerous people were constantly working to monitor and manage the academy realm to function as it usually does.

    A man wearing purple battle gear, with short blonde hair with all his muscr and masculine features disyed in all their glory is looking at Ling Tian and Theron as all three of them stood in the middle of an empty white space.

    He smiled and looked at both of them.

    "Ling Tian and Theron. Nice to meet you both. I am sure both of you know who I am."

    Ling Tian sighed in resignation.

    "Nice to meet you too Brontios. It has been a while."

    Brontios smiled as he looked at Ling Tian, then redirected his gaze to Theron, who opened his mouth wide in shock.

    "Wh¡­ What are you doing here?" He asked. Clearly he also knew about Brontios.

    "Of course, this is my work ce. I work for the messenger council. Have been ever since I passed my trial. At first, I wasn''t doing anything big, but I am now one of the Mangers of the academy realm."

    Brontios answered casually.

    Theron looked stunned. Because he and Brontios are peers. Not in the academy realm. No Brontios doesn''t have to do something like studying in an academy. They met of the battlefield. After Theron quit the academy and entered the battlefield, he met Brontios there.

    Brontios was trying toplete his trial there at that time. He was part of many armies as he was transferred between them and both of them worked together as Theron acted more like a frencer for the Olympian side.

    They knew each other very well.

    Its just that Brontios passed his trial and then disappeared. Both of them had some sort of rivalry, and Theron always kept an eye on him. But to disappear all of a sudden, he was a bit disappointed.

    "You dragged us here?" Theron got his bearings back and said.

    "You became a lot more expressive Theron. You can even be shocked. I didn''t even it was a possibility. And the shit you pulled down there with your rage¡­ Its like you are ten years old all over again."

    Brontios smiled as he said that.

    Theron gritted his teeth and looked around.

    "Why am I here?"

    "Of course, you are here because you broke the rules of the Academy realm and as per those rules, you are brought here to be given a warning.

    Wee to the Messenger Council."

 Chapter 2258 Punishment

    Chapter 2258 Punishment

    Brontios looked at both of them once again and snapped his fingers.

    Three chairs appeared out of thin air. All three of them sat down without much reservation and Brontios started speaking.

    "I am sure, both of you know why you are here.

    Theron, you are an outsider and have no connections to the academy realm. Even though we don''t restrict people froming there and even battling, we don''t allow them to create irreparable damage to the realm either.

    And you were almost trying to do that with the use of Celestial Energy.

    As a man to the path of god hood, you should know better than to step on the toes of already established gods like this. You are running rampant in their territory with the intent of destruction.

    As if you are trying to show off.

    That is not something you should be doing. And I am saying with all the goodwill that I could possibly muster for you."

    He paused and turned to Ling Tian.

    "Actually, I don''t have authority or status to talk down to you or even summon you here. But I know you are not a man who sweats the small stuff like this. So, Ling Tian please take this as my request and refrain from causing the damage that you have done today.

    Please don''t repeat this in the future."

    The difference in the tone between the first and second lecture is way too apparent.

    When addressing Theron, he was showing determination and a bit of anger. His tone was firm and dignified.

    But when addressing Ling Tian, it took more of a pleading tone.

    This change in tone irritated Theron, but he didn''t show it on his face or in his words.

    "I understand what you are saying, but you should know that I have waited for long enough time hoping that the messenger council would interfere. I took so many blows from a guy using celestial energy.

    I waited for you do your due diligence, but I realized, I would have lost this body if I hadn''t use my own celestial energy as well.

    As you might have seen, even then I held back a lot." Ling Tian said with a sigh.

    Brontios nodded and said.

    "I understand sir that you have ensured there is proper justification. For that I thank you as you made our work easier. We will ensure that there is prompt action if any of such instances arise.

    But I hope you understand that due to the overwhelming chaos that''s happening all over the academy realm, the messenger council members were consulting with the gods and all of this mess happened while we were still awaiting orders.

    So, we were a bit dyed in our reaction.

    However, it is still a mistake on our part, which we are going to rectify in the future."

    The words that came out of Brontios'' mouth¡­

    He was clearly exining himself and the messenger council. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Theron frowned and looked at Ling Tian.

    "You may leave now, sir."

    Brontios said to Ling Tian and even slightly bowed. Meanwhile, Theron also stood up assuming that he could also leave.

    But Brontios just snapped his fingers and an invisible force pushed Theron back into his seat.

    "I didn''t say you could." Ling Tian smiled and disappeared from the spot, while Brontios focused all of his attention on Theron.

    "You know, with a man of your ster reputation, people will assume that you are a lot more stoic. But just how fragile is your ego? Its almost like there is no change in your attitude at all."

    "Why am I still here?"

    "Because, you punishment hasn''t been decided yet. Not only did you use cause so much havoc in the academy realm, you even used celestial energy.

    Do you really think you would just leave without any consequences?"

    "He left." Theron said inly. Clearly implying Ling Tian''s situation.

    "Hahahaha¡­"

    Brontiosughed out loud. As if he is looking at an idiot.

    "What?" Theron asked in a cold tone.

    "I thought you knew, but you are really out of touch. I mean, I knew that you were off the grid, trying to bridge the gap between you and your godhood, but you should at least keep up with the times man.

    The man that you just saw, or just fought, he is not just some random professor at the Gambler academy.

    He is a god.

    A newly ascended god and what you fought is just his Divine Incarnation. He is the mosttest ascended, but not only did he already manifest his Divine Incarnation, he already brought it to the Peak of Divine ne.

    I mean, even you should be impressed by that.

    But to think, you would be suppressed even with the Divine Incarnation, maybe you should stop holing up ande out more.

    You might be getting rusty."

    Theron froze in the spot and looked nkly. He is not even registering what he is seeing in front of his eyes. He was just in so much daze.

    Brontious amusingly observed him for a moment and said.

    "Anyway, I don''t care what you actually think. For the punishment, you are banned from the academy realm. You cannot enter until you get further notification from the messenger council.

    The people who brought you into the realm, Heron, will have to face punishment as well. Since he is not in his position as the Dean and was temporarily suspended, the Zeus academy will be dodging the punishment at the moment.

    Apart from that, you are banned from any realm that was branded as the Battle field of Gods and this ban stands for the next century unless at least ten of the gods affiliated with the top hundred academies will vouch for you.

    That is your punishment.

    Now, you may leave as well."

    With that, Theron was sent away as well.

    Brontios sighed and muttered to himself.

    "Was I too harsh?"

    His expressionpletely contradicted his words. He clearly enjoyed whatever he did.

 Chapter 2259 New Rules

    2259 New Rules

    After Theron left, a message was sent to all the Deans of the academy realm.

    It was sent using the formation of the realm as a whole and was directly injected in the heads of the Deans.

    It was not limited to the Deans of the Olympian realm and was sent to every Dean irrespective of their region. While the message was still being processed, Ling Tian already came back to the Gambler academy.

    He appeared in such a calm manner as if he is afraid that he will attract some unnecessary attention.

    "A littlete to be low profile, don''t you think?"

    Sam asked with a smile as he looked at Ling Tian who is currently hiding in Sam''s dorm.

    "I have to. Wharton will eat my head if I go out right now."

    "Why? What happened?"

    "Wharton wants to quit as a Dean and wants to take the position as the normal elder. I was asked to take over in his stead and I told him that no one would be convinced since they don''t know my strength and merits.

    Of course, I used that as an excuse.

    But now, I don''t have it. Because of a certain someone I had to fight with a monster level cultivator and my abilities are exposed."

    Sam just shrugged not feeling tiniest bit guilty.

    "Anyway, this should be set to rest for a while. I hope you don''t n to stir this on even more."

    Ling Tian sighed.Because for some reason, the message that has to go to only the Deans was also sent to him.

    As they kept on drinking quietly, a loud announcement was heard throughout the Gambler academy.

    "A new rule has been passed throughout all of the Academy realm. Due to the increasing chaos in the recent days, all the Deans havee to a consensus, that there shall not be any more killings and fighting in the academy realm until further notice.

    The only time a fight is allowed is either in the tournaments or if it is a supervised duel approved by someone who is at an elder rank and both parties involved in the fight should consent without any form of coercion.

    The pocket dimension and external missions are all being closed. The students of the academies are all going to be recalled and the training would bepletely internal to the academies until the inter academy tournament.

    Due to the unique circumstances, there will be no regional tournament this time. Based on the categories, each academy should send their respective representatives with an internalpetition of their choice.

    The tournament will still be held in the Norse region with the Thor academy as the hosts.

    There is a high chance that the rules of the tournament might change. However, you can assume that they are the same until a proper notice is given.

    Anyone who breaks any of the rules, including instigating or participating in a fight or any other conflict without proper supervision or consent will be permanently banned from the academy after suffering a stringent punishment.

    Also, until further notice, no external members are allowed to the academy realm. Themoners who do not belong to any academy also cannot stay in the academy realm unless they are vouched by a person of at least an elder level.

    The rules also apply to them.

    So, in case they break the rules, the elder that vouched for them will be dealt with the exact same punishment as the victim.

    In this time period, there should not be any intentional harm to personal property of any person. Strict punishments will be implemented upon doing so.

    I hope everyone recovers from the set backs we faced and get ready to participate in the Inter-academy tournament two monthster.

    Thank you for your understanding in this matter."

    The announcement was big and very borate. Sam smiled and shrugged at this.

    "I guess, I don''t have to worry about plotting for some time. Its good to know." n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    "Like hell, you would. I am sure a wicked plot is brewing in that twisted brain of yours as you speak those lies." Ling Tian directly said it to Sam''s face.

    "No, I am actually done with it for now. I will await for some time before I get involved in this.

    Anyway, I want to know something."

    "What is it?"

    "We were told that there would be some missions from the gods after we enter the academy realm, but there is no contact until now. What''s happening?"

    "I guess there is no problem in telling you, but you need to promise that you will share it with rest of the yers."

    "Sure."

    "You guys need to trigger some hidden conditions to activate the missions. In fact, every mission has its own set of hidden conditions and only then will you be informed specifically by the academy realm''s formation.

    The first mission has a bit more hidden requirements than the rest. Or it would be better to say, the threshold is a bit higher."

    "What kind of hidden requirements?"

    "That part, I cannot reveal."

    "Okay then. Thanks.

    How long are you going to stay in my dorm?"

    "Just until Wharton gets busier."

    ¡­

    Sam left Ling Tian to rest and he focused on sending the message to the rest of the yers. Even though he would prefer not to, he revealed it to Dayus as well. After that, he decided to just cultivate.

    Right now, he kind of got a feel of how the academies will react. A lot of blood has been shed because of him and he managed to utilize the protection of the academy to the full extent.

    The first graders of the Olympian region in particr are crushed. Their numbers dwindled, spirits destroyed.

    Sam ensured that the next generation of the frontrunners of the Olympian academies could only serve as cannon fodder for the rest of the regions that are less effected.

    Now, he just needs to focus on destroying the existing generation''s front runners. For that he just needs to sit back and cultivate as he has an opportunity in two months.

 Chapter 2260 Aftermath

    2260 Aftermath

    Days passed.

    The aftermath of all the chaos Sam created took so much time for people to recover from.

    People no longer trusted each other and the first graders are all walking on eggshells. They are carrying the darkest secrets of so many instructors and elders. It is also safe to assume that everyone knows who their info mule is.

    Even though a rule has been passed saying that no one can kill the other in the academy realm, these first graders are still on the edge.

    They all know from the experience, that the death is not the worst thing that could happen to a person.

    And they all believed that the things in their head could make the others resort to subjecting these info mules to those things than death. They couldn''t rx for a second. When in fact, this should be the most rxing time of their academy lives.

    That''s right.

    By now, the pocket dimensions would have been over and the final sprint for the inter academy tournament would be going on.

    Since the freshman tournament is already over, things would be much more free for them. They just have to be witnesses as their seniors duke it out. But now, they are the most affected. None of them are willing to leave the academy and they thanked the gods for turning the missions off.

    Of course, even though Sam stopped making waves out in the open, there are still a lot of things happening behind the scenes.

    First one is that after the incidental day, the next payment day came without much trouble.

    Ling Tian once again graced Sam with his presence.

    "What can I do to convince you to not make a fuss about thising week? This is unfair since all the missions have been temporarily stopped. None of these people have any money and the academies are already running out of reserves.

    Just tell me what you need and I will make it happen. It would be better if you could tell me how to stop the whole thing."

    "Come on, Ling Tian.

    Not even the messenger council hasn''t intervened regarding the coin situation. Why do you want to stop all of my fun? You are not being supportive at all." That was Sam''s response.

    "After all the shit you pulled, can''t you make a concession? These poor kids can''t take your constant battering."

    "Do you really think these guys are that poor souls? You should go through my hub data once and see all the things these guys have done. I reckon you will bash in a couple of heads in to mush and that would be assuming that you have no moralpass to speak of.

    If you are anyone with a ounce ofpassion, you will run through these academies and leave a bunch of bodies in your trial.

    Me ripping them off is letting them off easy.

    Anyway, it is not like I didn''t tell them to go and practice in the hub. You can say many things, but my hub''s training n is definitely beneficial to them."

    Ling Tian wanted to argue, but he also knew what Sam said is the truth. All the people here¡­ none of their backgrounds are clean. Of course, Sam is no saint and he is no ce to judge, but if the gods don''t do it, then Ling Tian can''t me the ones who are doing that at least.

    Anyway, because of this problem and because the students cannot loot anyone, a lot of them are losing their assets to the Joker, or to be precise, to Sam. This applied not just to the first graders, but also to the seniors.

    Instead of preparing peacefully for the uing tournament, they started losing their shit over getting money for the payment. Everyone got busy. Everyone is trying to make some sweet promises to others.

    Some people who hoarded some coins started coercing people into signing unfair contracts.

    They would have done it before as well, but they were scared for their lives. Now that they don''t have to worry about it. They have gotten bold.

    There is another extreme group.

    Even though the messenger council has intervened and banned the students from going out, themunication between the students and the outside world is not cut off. The students contacted their families.

    These families went ahead and held some of the smaller families hostage.

    Here, the student who belonged to that smaller family handed over that money to the student of the bigger family.

    Things became easy for them. Maybe this is the only time having arge background hase in handy and they could use that influence with maximum efficiency. Because of this the conflicts on the outside became extreme.

    However, the messenger council didn''t intervene this time.

    Because essentially, the students themselves are prompting their families outside to increase these conflicts, so there is really no reason for the messenger council to intervene.

    But of course, these are not the only conflicts outside that are influenced by the academy realm. The problems Sam has ignited when they all visited the academy realm are still burning brightly. Some elders and fourth graders, because they are so scared of their info mules, they started targeting their families outside.

    Some of them even managed to drive their info mules to suicide. Of course, it was only a couple of people, so it is no big deal.

    Apart from that, there are still so many families that have grudges that are looking for an opportunity to take revenge.

    Even with all that, the biggest conflict going on outside is between Telchines and chous.

    This is actually surprising even to Sam.

    Because he expected Telchines toe after him to the academy realm and create chaos here. In fact, he banked on that happening and hoped they would create much more damage. But for some reason, the Telchines didn''te to him.

    Instead, all of their anger is directed towards the chous family.

    Even though, the chous imed that they don''t have anything to do with the plot and it was done solely by Christos, they didn''t manage to convince the Telchines.

    The most surprising part is that for some reason, Sam''s name didn''te out anywhere. There is no news of the Telchines trying to gain ess to the academy realm and there is no news of them investigating about Sam.

    He even confirmed it with Ling Tian and he is sure about it.

    He doesn''t know what happened to Telchines, but they are definitely doing a lot of work that is only beneficial to Sam in long run. After all, chous is one of the families he wanted to take down.

    But the problem is that the nine families that were going after chous kind of took a backseat. They also participated a bit in the mob fight that happened in the academy realm, but they are not the key members, so they didn''t suffer much damage.

    Weirdly, they still took a step back.

    They are looking for Telchines and chous to tear apart each other. They even went as far as stopping their hidden damaging activities they usually do to deal with the chous family.

    After around one month, these things became new norm and were thrown to the back of the people''s minds. Because, this is the time for thepetition to start. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    Even though there is a month for the start of the tournament, the internal tournaments have to be held in all the academies. For the benefit of the students, the academies finally decided to pick up the tab of their weekly payments until the tournaments are over.

    This gave the students a slight relief.

    The Olympian academies in particr decided to be particrly generous with their students. After all, they lost a shit ton of their candidates and they wanted to have every opportunity they could, to get a better ranking in the uing tournament.

    22:40

    If they get a bad rank, they would be at a risk of dropping from being the divine academy and might have to be moved to the Astral Region within the academy realm.

    With all the losses, they are already very close to that.

    For that reason, the Olympian academies are all talking behind the scenes hoping that they could reach some agreement to have each other''s backs in the tournament. After all, the first grader tournament was full of safetys, in this one there is a great chance that a lot of people will die.

    In fact, some tests are focused solely on that.

    So, there is a need for them to be careful about it and conserve whatever pitiful number of students they have left.

    Gambler academy as usual is doing it on its own, but the internalpetition was conducted on the same day as the Olympian academies.

    First are thepetitions for the auxiliary professions and it was for the second grade students.

 Chapter 2261 Start the Competition

    2261 Start the Competition

    The second graders are all excited.

    They are all geared up and ready to tackle this new challenge. The atmosphere is tense, but also festive at the same time. At least, until the tournament is over, the Deans, Elders and the people behind them will go to any extent to protect this status quo.

    Of course, there could be many tragedies in the tournament, but no one goes into this tournament thinking that they would die.

    They all go into it hoping that they would win and shower in glory and praise.

    Thepetitions are all going to happen one by one. There is no parallelpetitions going on like it happened with the freshmen. And the firstpetition is of weapon making. Thispetition is a lot moreplicatedpared to the freshmen tournament.

    In the biggest forge avable in the Gambler academy, all the weaponsmiths gathered. They all have their own individual furnace and standard equipment. Thepetition is being conducted almost with the same standards as the final tournament.

    So, the rules and privileges are simr.

    The elder in charge of the Department of Weaponry came on to the stage and looked at them. He is an old man with bulky figure. His hands are calloused from all the hammering he has done over his life. He had that robust aura around him.

    The stage is at the far end of the room.

    On either side of the room, there are seats for cultivators. They are like gallery seats of a stadium. The closest to the floor sat the first graders, followed by the second graders who are not participating in the weapon making contest, followed by the third graders and finally by the fourth graders.

    Behind the galleries, the instructors and elders stood calmly.

    Up on the elder''s arrival, the crowd calmed down.

    "As usual, we will not know exactly what the level of difficulty of the finals will be, but like we did every year, we are going to use the previous year''s contest as a temte. Since this time, there is no regional tournament, we can only send three weaponsmiths over for each grade.

    That is for the individualpetition of course. And there is a teampetition. We are also sending a three-man team.

    Both thepetitions will proceed today only.

    You can use the special formations for any time taking process and elerate the processes. Even if you want to anneal something or temper something, you can use the formations rted to that. An instructor will help you with operating the formation.

    22:40

    The same will be provided at the final tournament, so don''t skimp on them.

    Now, let''s go through the rules. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    You need to make five standard weapons in the given time, only with the materials provided to you. You can use some basic materials that are in the forge''s inventory. A list of those materials is provided to you and they will only be provided to you up on your request.

    In the next, few minutes there will be a demonstration of five battle moves performed by five people. Each of them will use a different type of weapon. After watching their performance, you need to make the five weapons that best suit the battle move they are performing.

    After you are done, they will once again, use the weapons you made to perform the exact same move. Based on the experience of the wielder, damage dealt, efficiency of the spiritual energy conduction, the durability of the weapon, material usage, time taken, technique and finally aesthetics, the evaluation of the weapon would be made.

    Even though the second graders constitute of cultivators from Middle stage of Divine ne Initiation to Peak Stage of Divine ne Initiation, they wouldn''t have a separatepetition.

    You all know what you signed up for when you joined the academy. You are going to follow those rules andpete with people stronger than you.

    Thepetition will end at noon and you can make as many iterations of weapons as possible until then, but only one weapon of each kind, which means a total of five weapons will be tested from you and they are final.

    Does anybody have any questions?"

    The elder paused and waited for any questions from the students. And he did get a question alright, only not from one of the students. Instead from an unlikely person in the audience whose face is blushing red from the shame of asking this question.

    "Ling Tian?" The elder looked at him with a puzzled expression. It is entirely abnormal for a person like him to ask a question, that too by raising the hand like he is a student.

    "How many more minutes can you wait before starting thepetition? Someone is yet to arrive."

    Ling Tian said and only then did the elder notice one of the empty spots. A student of Ling Tian''s is standing beside holding it off for someone.

    The Elder frowned. There is indeed a few minutes for thepetition to start, but he couldn''tprehend who would be sote, toe to apetition like this. And why of all people, Ling Tian will endorse such behavior.

    That is also the reason why Ling Tian''s face is blushing red.

    "Who is sote to apetition?" The Elder asked directly. Many students are murmuring the same thing. However, some fourth graders and student council members in the crowd had some guesses.

    "He might bete, but in some ways, he is definitely early to thispetition. Too early in fact."

    Ling Tian said in a low tone.

    At that moment¡­

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam arrived on Harbinger.

    "Sorry, I amte. The administration department is very busy because of thepetition and they are unable to process my token immediately."

    Sam said as he shed his Grade 2 Token.

    The crowd became dead silent.

    Sam went to the position that was held for him and ced his token in the slot of the table. That is why he got herete. He recently broke through to the Middle stage of Divine ne Initiation, which makes him a Grade 2 student.

    He is technically eligible forpetitions. But for most of the auxiliary professionpetitions, he needs to submit his token, which supposedly records whatever that is happening at his workstation and assigns it his name for further reference.

    So, the admin staff took their sweet time.

    Sam ignored the elder and Ling Tian. He ignored all the shocked stares and looked at the student that was holding the ce for him.

    "What did I miss?"

    The student who was one of the few who knew about Sam''s breakthrough exined the rules.

    Sam looked at the Elder on the stage and said with a smile.

    "Thanks for holding on for me Elder. Please proceed."

    The Elder came out of his daze and pped his hands a couple of times to attract the attention.

    "The Demonstration will begin now."

    With that, five students got onto the stage. All of them are at the peak of second grade. They each held a different weapon.

    A sword, A spear, a battle axe, a hammer, and a dagger.

    All standard weapons. Not tooplex. Simple and direct.

    All five of them stood in front of their respective test dummies. All five dummies are the same. One by one they started attacking.

    *SLASH*

    The swordsman started first and a number hovered over the test dummy.

    "967"

    That number indicates the damage absorbed by the test dummy. That number is actually of little consequence. The participant used his own sword and it is made of all the fancy materials and most of all, it is tailored for him.

    The goal of the demo is to watch the move as it was disyed.

    Only one move. One proper vertical sh. Nothingplicated. It couldn''t get any simpler than that. Of course, the simpler it is, the easier it is to find mistakes and also the more ring even the slightest mistakes will be.

    The rest of the participants also demonstrated.

    A thrust from the spear.

    A hack from the axe.

    A direct smash from the hammer.

    And two moves from the dagger. One a forehanded sh and the other a backhanded stab. It was all done in one fluid motion, so maybe it could be considered as one move.

    "You can now begin."

    With that thepetition began. Everyone essed the spatial ring that was ced at their workstation to ess the materials. They also started examining the list of the auxiliary materials.

    One of the students beside Sam looked at him and spoke.

    "I know that you are arrogant, but I didn''t know you are this arrogant. You barely entered the school and already broke through. It is one thing that you didn''t wait to solidify your foundation and breakthrough next year, but to think that you would participate in thepetition.

    You are way in over your head."

 Chapter 2262 Finish Early

    2262 Finish Early

    The young man went right into work after saying those words to Sam.

    It seemed like he didn''t expect any reply and just wanted to express himself. Sam took a look at him for a couple of minutes as he started drawing the designs for his weapons.

    Sam looked at him for a moment and then at his designs. For some reasons, he didn''t say anything to him. Just observed him for a short while and got back into his work. He took out one of the scrolls and started designing the weapons.

    He needs to submit these designs along with the final pieces as well.

    It is to ensure that whatever that the winnerse up with is not just some random ident. Thepetition that already garnered a lot of excitement has attracted even interest. Only this time, Sam is the prime focus of it all.

    As the student beside Sam said, it is not unheard of that some first graders breakthrough into the Grade 2 in the same year of their joining. But they are mostly special cases, like a guy who was already on the Peak of Grade 1 joining the academy after repeated failed attempts, or an unavoidable breakthrough that couldn''t be ignored due to some special circumstances, etc.

    Most people just tend to solidify their culitivation level and try to utilize the benefits of being a first grader as much as possible before breaking through. Because of that, it is not unusual to not have a single incident in a year.

    But Sam just pushed it.

    Not only did he do it, but he also started participating in the academy tournament. Technically, as a second grade student he can, but as the student said before, it is way too arrogant from the point of view of an average academy student.

    Sam had his own reasons to breakthrough and enter thepetition.

    After so much effort, he managed to ignite the conflicts that are still burning passively behind the scenes. He cannot let all of that go to waste just because of some stupid rule passed on by the entity that is supervising the academy realm.

    He needs to pour fuel on the fire and for that he needs to take more lives, crush more dreams and destroy more students.

    He joined thepetition solely for that reason.

    But he realized that even without that, breaking through is a better move for him. Because as soon as he broke through, his wrist screen which didn''t react for such a long time glowed again.

    It showed the following message.

    ''yer Sam has met all the requirements to be eligible for the missions of the Academy realm.

    Mission Name: Path to Glory 1

    Description: Forge your own path to glory and increase your reputation across the academy realm and beyond.

    List of Conditions for Mission Completion:

    Participate in the Inter-Academy Tournament or Equivalent Get recognition as one of the best in the academy realm in at least two auxiliary professions. Be the Best in the Grade in your Internal Academy Tournament in Solo Combat. Reach Top 5 in the Grade in the Inter-academy tournament in Solo Combat. Win at least one first ce in any of the Inter-academypetitions or equivalent. Be part of a Group that ranks at least fifth among all the academies in the Team Combat. Kill at least three people in the Inter-academy tournament. Challenge a person of higher grade and achieveplete victory. Contribute with increase in the ranking of your academy in the Inter-academy tournament or equivalent. Be a part of your academy''s student council and win endorsement and clearance of at three elders to participate in any department of your academy''s gods'' army in the Battlefield of Gods.

    (Note: You can clear this conditions over the years. However, keep in mind that you cannot activate Path of Glory 2 mission without clearing this and any contributions you may have made as the first grader to this will not be counter.

    You canplete the conditions in multiple attempts over time.)

    These are the ten conditions listed down.

    There is no strict duration for the mission and it can be done on his leisure. However, he understood that the earlier he got into this, the more time he will have. After all, the Path of Glory is not the only mission.

    It has a sequel and only the gods with the twisted minds who created this stupid game will know how many more are there. So, this decision of joining the game early is a great one for him.

    As these thoughts ran through his mind, Sam finished his designs. He was almostpletely in daze when he did that and when he raised his head to take a look, he could see many students have a bunch of torn up scrollsying all over the floor around them.

    He was not the first one to create a draft, many did and they even rejected their initial drafts and worked on thetter ones.

    Even Sam''s neighbor whomented on his participation earlier did the same.

    Sam on the other hand didn''t have any reason to do so. He ispletely satisfied with the designs and started the forging process. The furnace is already heated up and ready for him. Of course, most people only use those things as a support to their own fire element.

    Usually, smiths will use their own fire elemental energy to heat up the metal. They would have to do that, throughout the process, which consumes their physical, mental and spiritual energies. So, the furnace, will serve as the external source of fire and they can just use their mental energy to connect their spiritual energy with the fire and manipte it to operate the heat.

    The fire will have the same effect as their own element and they don''t have exhaust themselves prematurely.

    Sam liked the furnace mechanism. He dropped his metals in. He used his golden mes and the mes in the furnacepletely changed color ordingly.

    The metals heated up with the eleration and he started hammering.

    He didn''t use any gimmicks, he didn''t use any fancy techniques or tricks, he was just doing in forging, however every move of his was precise, refined and calcted. Every strike was not wasted and was doing whatever he intended it to do.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    The hammering finally drew attention of the other participants who looked at him with utter shock. They thought his participation and breakthrough were fast, now his forging is faster.

    The audience are murmuring. At least most of the students are. But some keen eyed elders observed what Sam was doing.

    Time passed, Sam heated the metal, beat it, made turned its shape into exactly what he wanted. He didn''t even have to use his metal element to do that. Then he quenched his first weapon. A sword. He made a hilt while he ced the second metal in the furnace.

    This time, he didn''t hold back. He used a special wood and his wood control to make a proper hilt quickly and attached the de. He just needs to sharpen it.

    After that, he didn''t even test the weapon and ced it on the side.

    Then proceeded on to make the second weapon, the spear.

    By then, most of the other participants were only in the middle of their first weapon. By the time they finished it and were in the final stage of finishes, Sam was also finishing the spear.

    For this, he didn''t make a separate shaft and such. He made the spear with a singlerge piece of metal. Beat it into shape, turned the body into shaft and created a proper spear tip, nothing fancy.

    Then he moved to the axe and then the hammer and finally the daggers.

    He followed the exact order the weapons were disyed in. He is at least a whole weapon a headpared to the rest of the contestants.

    "What the hell? I thought he would show me something interesting, turns out he is not taking thispetition seriously at all."

    One of the elders standing beside Ling Tian murmured.

    Ling Tian sighed and muttered.

    "Not these cliched lines. Even I am getting bored of it. Anyone with half a brain can predict what will happen next."

    He said as he nced at Sam''s weapons.

    The weapons are well-made, but that is all one could say up on the first nce without any closer inspection. They are fine weapons, they fulfill all the requirements of being a standard weapon of their respective kind.

    But that is all, even aesthetically, they are just in boring, just like the methods Sam used to make them. They are just Basic.

    Sam raised his hand indicating his submission.

    The Elder in charge nodded and sent a student to collect his weapons.

    N?v(el)B\\jnn

 Chapter 2263 Bet

    2263 Bet

    Slowly, one by one started submitting their weapons.

    Sam stood at his spot while observing everyone else. There are many kinds of people there. The most eyecatching are the people at the peak of the second grade. The people that are ready to breakthrough to the Divine ne Pre-transcendence.

    And these people have participated in previouspetitions as well.

    These kinds of people are present in every single year. The people at the peak of the grade that are ready to move forward and give their all in thest stint to be the best of their grade. More often than not, they end up being the main characters of the tournament in all the aspects.

    So, everyone expected them to be the same in this one as well.

    The Elder and some fourth graders who are the elders'' assistants started sorting out the weapons and performed other tests like the aesthetic level and the durability. Meanwhile, the students just hung there at their stations.

    The guy next to Sam looked at him and said.

    "Did you really juste for the sake ofing here? I thought a guy like you wouldn''t do things like that."

    "Your name is Manson, right?"

    "Do you know me?"

    "You are one of the students that hang out with Crow. Of course, I know you. Particrly, since you are the odd ball of the group. Your cultivation level is at Late stage of Divine ne Initiation, while Crow is at Middle Stage. So, it is pretty hard to not notice you."

    Manson just shrugged.

    "Anyway, you didn''t answer my question."

    "I am actually as serious as I can be for thispetition. I don''t know what gave you that idea."

    "First of, your participation in thispetition. If you are serious about this, like everyone else, you would have waited out your breakthrough, watched this year''spetition like a spectator."

    "And?"

    "Even you have joined this, you should give it your all. The weapons you made, no offense, they are good, but the are definitely not up topetition standards. They are made with basic techniques, you didn''t make a single alloy and you didn''t even ask for any materials from thepetition inventory.

    They are the basic among the basic weapons.

    You are a genius, but you should take these things seriously and not tarnish your reputation by just brushing it off."

    Sam just chuckled and looked at the elders and the students processing the weapons. The other tests are done and only onest test is left. The damage test.

    The five students responsible for demonstrating the attacks lined up in front of their training dummies with the weapons of the first contestant.

    *BANG*

    They all attacked at the same time.

    ''782''

    ''792''

    ''783''

    ''800''

    ''765''

    The five scores popped up. There was a stream of apuse that followed those scores. The scores are nowhere near the scores the students got from the original demo. But as mentioned before, they are the custom weapons the students use on a regr basis.

    These weapons are made on the spot after watching the move one time. They are pretty good, all things considered.

    The second contestant''s weapons were tested.

    '' 723, 721, 700, 698, 674''

    The five scores appeared again.

    The third contestant.

    ''515, 512, 567, 627, 537''

    "That kid is gone." Mansonmented as he saw the scores. Even though these scores could be considered okay, they are indeed not cut out to be in the top rankings.

    Sam looked at Manson at this moment and wanted to test something out.

    "You want to make a bet."

    Manson frowned and asked.

    "A bet? On what? Is this about how your scores are going to be? Is that the way you want to choose to make me believe that you are serious?"

    "Not really. I don''t need to bet on my scores. I just want to have some fun until we wait our turn. After all, both of us are thest two entries of thepetition. We need to kill the time anyway. And I am sure, what I am about to suggest is a lot more entertaining than just witnessing the scoring part of it."

    "Okay, what is it?"

    "After the tenth evaluation, I will start guessing the scores of every contestant. It would be approximate of course. If the actual scores are closer to my estimation, than I win. If it is off by ten points or more, then you win."

    "You are going to guess the scores for all the contestants? There are dozens."

    "I will. You know, let''s make it more interesting. As long as I get it wrong for three contestants, then you win. How about that?"

    Manson thought for a moment and said.

    "Okay, alright. I can do that. But what would the winner get?"

    "A favor? I don''t really have anything that I want to ask you right now. Let''s just go with a favor."

    "Okay, but nothing outrageous, alright. Make it a small favor, like information, knowledge sharing or going on a mission together, that is all."

    "Alright, Manson. You don''t have to worry about that. I won''t ask too much of you. It would be a small favor. After all, this is just a friendly bet."

    "Alright. You are on."

    They shook hands and Sam activated his energy vision. The seventh set of weapons were being evaluated and it would be soon the time for the tenth set.

    He just observed the energy cirction of the students who are doing the demonstration. Of course, he cannot observe what is happening deep inside their bodies from here, but he can observe what is happening in the weapons.

    The energy cirction through the weapon cannot be hidden.

    And he did observe it when they demonstrated before the forging process began.

    As the evaluations went on, he examined the energy cirction in the weapons andpared that information within the first original demonstration.

    Now, in his head, he has some data topare with. After the ten are done, Sam spoke.

    "All weapons approximately 530."

    Manson nodded and looked at the scores.

    ''530, 538, 528, 539, 537''

    "Not bad, were you always this good at guessing."

    "Yes. The next one, All weapons less than 300."

    ''290, 291, 290, 261,293''

    "That is pretty cool. You got it right again. But are you sure, you want to continue this. You won''t be able to guess everything."

    "We already made a deal, let''s see through it. The next one, The first three weapons around 730, the fourth one around 500, the fifth one around 300. That guy didn''t have enough time." n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    ''728, 734, 725, 493, 295''

    Now Manson felt a bit stumped. He looked at Sam and then at the stage. The first one could be brushed off as a guess, second one as luck, but third one? He didn''t know what to consider that as. It would be stupid of him to just attribute everything to luck and guesses.

    This made him feel a bit nervous and excited at the same time.

    Nervous because he will lose the bet, and excited because¡­ it is fun.

    "Next one¡­"

    Sam went on to guess the scores and the more he got correct, the more urate he became. He even started estimating urate scores for some and he only missed the mark by two or three points. The uracy definitely improved.

    In that process, he even noted who could be the top scorers of thepetition.

    Out of all the people, only five people managed to go past the middle of eight hundreds for their scores and out of them, two of them have some nine hundred scores as well.

    After looking at the scores, Sam also felt kind of confident about his weapons. Even though he is confident that he can get into the tournament from multiple events, if he learned anything after observing Gambler academy for so long, that is to not underestimate the people in here.

    In his mind, this academy is the only one that is actually focused on improving the student skills without much ulterior intent. For the rest of the academies, the improvement of students is just a means to gain glory.

    But here the goal itself is the improvement.

    And the whole academ is focused on identifying and developing the individual talents and needless to say there are some really tough, smiths in the academy that use their unique techniques. They might not beat the profession focused academies like the Hephaestus, at least at the moment, but in the long run, these students will carve their own unique signature in the outside world.

    So, Sam is actually considering one thing in thispetition.

    That there is a possibility that he might just get a run for his money. He never had to worry about it in the first grade because, those guys can''t beat him on a fair ground without an advantage in cultivation level.

    Now hispetitors got it.

    "Well, its my turn soon. You want to guess that?"

    Sam nodded and looked at the stage.

    "You are really good. The first three at nine hundred and thest two at 890."

 Chapter 2264 Scores

    2264 Scores

    Sam said in genuine surprise and awe. He is really impressed with Manson''s skill. The most impressive of all is that how he managed to keep the quality consistent throughout all the weapons. Every cksmith has a specialization irrespective of their skill level.

    Even if they are the greatest masters of their craft, they will always have an expertise in making a specific item better than the rest.

    He has clearly seen it all over the previous evaluations. If someone tried to keep the quality consistent over all the items, they are not actually that great. They only managed get approximately 700 to 800 points.

    Very few people managed to bring it up tote eight hundreds, except for the few top scorers.

    "You are getting more precise. I guess, I lost the bet."

    Manson admitted. He didn''t appear bitter or lost.He is very much okay with it. Almost convinced Sam that he really was giving Sam genuine feedback about his participation.

    "Do you want to guess your scores?" Manson asked.

    Sam didn''t bother and just shrugged.

    "What does it matter? You can see them directly in a couple of seconds, can''t you?"

    "I want to see if you can guess your own. Why? Your calctions don''t work on your weapons?"

    "They do. But the scores are already here. You can take a look."

    '' 920, 920, 920, 920, 920''

    All the scores are same and all of them are 920.

    "Fucking hell, you are good." Manson cursed and looked at Sam in utter shock.

    "I never imed that I was bad. By now, I assumed everyone would understand to get used to shocks caused by me."

    "Dude, you are the top scorer in terms of damage. It would take a lot more than the chaos you caused to make them get used to this. This is not some stupid freshman tournament, you are in the big leagues."

    "Really? Second grade is big leagues, then what about the third and fourth grade?"

    Manson was stumped and looked at Sam with his mouth wide open. Sam is focusing onpletely wrong things.

    "Let''s call them bigger and biggest leagues. I hope you are satisfied with those names.

    Anyway, you are going to get a huge target on your back with this. You better be careful. The second graders that are on verge of breaking through have been trying so hard to suppress their cultivation just for this.

    They will not let you go for this."

    "Don''t worry about it.When am I ever not a target to begin with."

    "Still, the grudge from being stolen of their first ce is not going to be easy to ovee."

    "Don''t worry about it either. I am not going to get the first ce."

    "But¡­"

    "The damage is only one of the parameters. I am going to lose in some ces like the technique, aesthetics, and a bit less on the durability. So, if my guess is right, you will still hold the second ce, I will hold third, and the first will go that woman named Marina."

    "Marina? She is not going to be the first ce, there is another guy with higher score than her. His aesthetics are also better."

    "Of course, they are. But the problem is, after the attack, the weapons have to stay intact, if the durability ispletely zero, I doubt they will recognize the entry at all."

    "His weapons are destroyed?"

    "Just wait and see."

    Time passed, the elder and the rest of the judgespleted their final scoring and announced the winners.

    "First ce: Marina

    Second ce: Manson

    Third ce: Sam

    The evaluations for the second grade weapon making contest has ended. Please prepare for thepetition seriously. As I said before, thepetition will be in one month. Some of our alumni who are specialized in weapon making will being to the academy by evening to organize a special retreat.

    You can ess their expertise to improve your skills in this time. They will be essible to you twenty four hours a day. The rewards for you will also be given by those alumni. Because of the special circumstances and the recent attacks that we faced, the academy is a bit strained on resources.

    But still, as you all know, once you are a Gambler academy student, you are always one. The alumni generously contributed to take the burden of the training resources and the rewards for the preparation of thepetition.

    Thank you for your time."

    Everyone erupted into chaos. They have been trying to suppress the urge to scream ever since Sam''s scores have been released. Particrly the guy that just lost the first ce because his weapon''s durability has hit zero.

    Sam of course didn''t care much about them. He was just about to turn around and leave the ce, when all of a sudden Manson stopped him.

    "Wait, are you participating in the team event?"

    "Nope, I don''t have a team."

    "If you are interested, we can be on a team together. Marina is also open, we wanted to make a team, but we didn''t have a third person."

    "Why would I join you?" N?v(el)B\\jnn

    "You said, you didn''t have a team. That''s why?"

    "Why would I need a team, I am not participating in thepetition."

    "Did your brain go nuts from all the guessing?"

    "I am just messing with you. I am not interested. You don''t want to be on my team. You will have a giant target on your back if you join up with me. All the other academies will have it against me. You don''t need me to drag it out."

    "Still, you are good. We can crush thepetition. That''s all we need to win."

    "True, but I don''t want to be responsible for you guys as well. I will just stick with the solo contests for now, if you are interested in teaming up forbat, then I am open."

    "Combat? Don''t tell me you are trying for that as well."

    "Of course I am. See you."

    Sam left and on his way, he looked at his wrist screen to see if he managed to scratch off any requirements to finish the mission.

    Even though his participation is finalized, it is notpleted yet. That condition could only be satisfied after he participated in the final.

    But that is not what he was interested in, the condition about ''Challenge a higher grader cultivator and win''

    In a way, the bet would be considered a challenge. That is why he made that bet. Not to show off his analytical abilities. But it is still unsatisfied, so the testing had been a waste of time.

    Anyway, he went back to his room for some peace. He came out to witness the weapon smithpetition for the teams that was conducted in the afternoon.

    This one has simr rules, except the time is less since three people are going work on five weapons. Manson and Marina didn''t participate in this. It seems like that they are picky with their teammate.

    Manson came to Sam and asked.

    "So, what otherpetitions are going to participate in?"

    "The formation and inscription contests tomorrow?"

    "And?"

    "The solobat and if I find someone, the teambat. I believe those are enough for now. I don''t really want to participate in other contests. The don''t interest me as much."

    "Alright."

    "Why do you ask?"

    "Just like that. I am interested in seeing how you will do in this tournament."

    Sam just shrugged and waited. He saw thepetition. The guy who fumbled the durability of his weapons but with high damage managed to get the highest in thispetition along with his twockeys.

    He left after that and awaited for the next day.

    On the first half, there is a formation tournament and in the afternoon, they have inscription tournament. He is participating in both.

    Meanwhile, the news of Sam''s participation and evennding in third ce has spread throughout the academy and then to the other academies in the region and finally it wentthroughout the academy realm.

    Everyone wanted to see what he is going to stir up next.

    And they didn''t have to wait for long. The next day, Sam participated in the two contests and managed to score in the top 3. The formation contest ended with him in third ce, while inscriptions he managed to gain second ce.

    Perfectly cementing his position in the respectivepetitions.

    After that, it is time for him to rx. Thebatpetitions are going to be thest ones and until then, he doesn''t have anything to do with thesepetitions.

    With all the excitement that is going on, it didn''t take long for that time toe.

 Chapter 2265 Combat Tournament

    Chapter 2265 Combat Tournament

    Combat tournament.

    Sam walked to the contests area of the arena and looked at the audience. Unlike the other tournaments, thebat tournaments are all going to be held on the same day, one after the other. It is possible only in the Gambler academy though.

    Because the number of people who participate in thebat tournament is the lowest in all of the academy realm. Even though Gambler academy has one of the highest number ofstudents if not the highest.

    Sam looked around at the contestants.

    There are only thirty people in the second grade along with him. Five people will be selected out of it as candidates. Most of them would be at peak stage and rarely somete stage ones. In the Gambler academy, with so few candidates, it is more likely for thete stage ones to slip up if there are no strong peak stage candidates.

    That, and the fact that people who do specialize inbat in the academy are way too good.

    Take Ling Tian for example, he was former student who was specialized inbat and he smashed Theron left and right. Sam observed the candidates as he awaited the start of the tournament.

    "How are you doing?" Crow came and asked Sam.

    "I am good. How are you feeling? You and I are the only ones in the Middle stage of the Divine ne Initiation. Are you nervous?"

    "No, not really. This is one of the times when I don''t have to hold back. I am confident in getting third ce at least."

    "Really? I counted fifteen peak stage guys. I thought they would take us down. After all, we are in the middle-stage only."

    "Well, that is the best part of the inter academy tournament. Only in the freshman tournament there are significant restrictions. Here, you can use all kinds of tricks. As long as you don''t y extremely dirty, like using some high level artefacts, or some kind of cheap tricks like the cubes the ming skulls used before, you can do pretty much whatever you want.

    You can use your inscriptions, formations, pre-made inscription scrolls, some special enhanced weaponry, even some artefacts of low level."

    "I heard that too, so are you confident in your cards that much?"

    "You will see."

    Crow walked away.

    No one else talked or greeted Sam. Even though the Gambler academy has epted him even with all the troubles that he brought, the students are still a bit resistant of him. After all, he did make their lives a bit miserable.

    And if the part of Sam''s alleged coboration with the hub is true, which most of them believe, then the current resistance or even more opposition ispletely understandable and in fact could be considered expected.

    Soon, it is time for the tournament tomence and it starts with the usual courtesy announcement of rules.

    Surprisingly, Ling Tian stepped into the arena. He scratched his head awkwardly and started speaking.

    "Alright everyone, calm down and take your seats.

    I am Ling Tian, an elder in the academy. I am in charge of thebat tournaments this time. We are starting with the Solo Combat tournament. There are only thirty candidates this time and five of them will be selected to be sent to the finals tournament.

    They represent our academy, so we need to sort out the best of the best.

    We are starting with the second grade first.

    The rules of the second grade are simple.

    We are going ahead with a basic tournament style. Two students will enter the arena and battle. One wins and moves to the next round. Since, there are only thirty people, the second round will have an extra person.

    For that reason, one of you will have move past that round and go to the third round directly.

    That person will be decided based on the votes of the audience. They will vote the winners of the first round, based on their performance and whoever gets the most votes will move to the third round.

    The tournament will be fast paced and we expect you to move fast. Don''t waste too much time, because I have two other grades to evaluate today.

    Thank you for cooperation in advance.

    So, for the first fight will be between Rashma and Drake." n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    The announcement sound like it was read from a script. He didn''t sound the least bit enthusiastic

    Drake who is actually the only at the middle stagejumped into the arena and surprisingly his opponent is actually a peak stage candidate. And ording to Sam''s information from the hub, she is not really well known in the academy. She had an average first grade experience, without any involvement in the tournaments orpetitions.

    Ever since the second grade started, she spent most of the time out doing missions and she kept her missionpletion rate private. Apparently, they could do that.

    He didn''t really have much information on her, except that she is interested in art and took a lot of auxiliary art sses in the academy.

    She painted, sculpted and did music and overall, she tried any artistic thing there is. And the most notable thing is that¡­ she sucks.

    She cannot hold a brush, she cannot carve a rock and she cannot y a string instrument without breaking it.

    Sam is really curious about how she will do.

    Ling Tian walked to the area where the participants are standing and stood there. Sam walked to him and asked.

    "Why did you pair peak stage kids with the middle stage one?"

    "I already said it. This is a fast paced tournament and I don''t want to drag it out by making it easy for the kids. Now, there are only three middle stage kids in the second grade. You, Drake and Crow. You are my primary targets followed by thete-stage ones.

    Three of the fifteen will face against you and the other two. While the remaining twelve will face against thete stage kids.

    All the people that should eliminated sooner orter in the tournament will be eliminated in the first round. Things will be easier for me and the spectators."

    Sam nodded in understanding.

    "You don''t think this is unfair do you?"

    "Not really. I actually appreciate the efficiency."

    Both of them stopped talking and looked in the arena. Drake took out his spear and mes started spreading out of his body. A spear user with fire element. Not a badbination, but depends on how he uses it. Meanwhile, Rashma stood there nonchntly with her hands in the pockets of her pants.

    She had long curly hair that had too much volume and her eyes had that sharp glint.

    Ling Tian examined them from there and nodded.

    "Fight."

    The fight began.

    *BOOM*

    Drake lunged with a trial of mes as he appeared right in front of Rashma. His body levitating in the air as he thrust his spear downwards towards her head.

    Rashma had a faint smile as she reacted. She jumped up, took her hands from the pocket. She had some gloves that threw out a reflective glint from the mes. They were shiny. She held the spear shaft with one hand and mmed her other palm straight into his face.

    Then she locked both of her legs around Drake''s waist before abruptly falling down in that weird position.

    *BAM*

    Drake fell on the ground with both of his legs forward. Maybe he instinctively moved them to make them sure they don''t break in a weird angle.

    But still, he took some real damage.

    Rashma sat close to him, still on those legs. If not for the agonized expression of Drake and the legs that are pressing on him from the back, one could even assume that it''s a bit intimate.

    She twisted the spear, making Drake''s grip loosen a bit, before she used her other that was originally on his face to deliver a chop on his shoulder.

    The spear came off his hands and she threw it away.

    Before, she slid back on his legs a bit to create enough room between them. Then her gloves shined a bit more before a few knuckle spikes came out of it. Then she started pounding on his face.

    "ARGHHH¡­*BAM*"

    Not even a scream ising out of his mouthpletely. Just hit after hit,nded on him and whenever he tried to use his hands, she threw a chop at the shoulder, pushing back down. He couldn''t even get the words of forfeit out of his mouth.

    "I think, that''s enough. Why don''t you stop it?" Sam said to Ling Tian.

    "Nah, rules are rules. Either he is knocked out or surrendered I wouldn''t interfere. Of course, unless he is on verge of death."

    At that moment

    *PACK*

    She threw an uppercut and his neck whipped.

    "That neck definitely sounds broken. You better stop it or his death is on you." Sam warned Ling Tian

    "What do you care?" Ling Tian grumbled and stopped the fight.

 Chapter 2266 Crow Vs Samil

    Chapter 2266 Crow Vs Samil

    Needless to say Rashma won.

    She stood there as Ling Tian examined the injuries on Drake''s face and shoulders. Apart from that, there are some very distinct injuries on his back. Exactly above his tail bone. Two injuries. They were clearly there because Rashma locked her legs by digging her heels into there.

    It is just that there is more to those hells. It is not very clear what it is, but it definitely dug deep into his flesh and even left some miniature fractures on his bones.

    Drake never even had a chance.

    Rashma just stared at the scene until Ling Tian let her go. The crowd cheered with ps and whistles, but of course the participants grew a bit more nervous. At least, thete stage cultivators did. Crow is calm for some reason and Sam didn''t feel the pressure that much.

    It is not that he ispletely confident in winning and it is definitely not that he became arrogant enough to believe that he will definitely not lose. He just felt like he has lesser stakespared to the rest. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    If he took a step back from his obsessivepulsion to grow, his actualpetitors are yers.

    He has it on good authority that they didn''t breakthrough yet. It will take a couple of months ording to Sam''s calctions unless they have fortuitous encounter that goes beyond his estimations. Even then, he is far ahead.

    The only reason he is even participating is to create more chaos.

    He can do it whether he is part of the solobat or not. So, for the first time in a while, he didn''t have too many self-induced pressures and can operate freely with little to no stakes.

    "Next.

    Crow Vs Samil"

    Ling Tian announced the next fight.

    Crow nodded at Sam before jumping into the arena. A young man wearing a clean white robe slowly levitated out of his seat and appeared in the arena.

    Samil. This one is an interesting individual. He is one of the pure mages of the academy and he is of wind element at that. He is really good with his ability control and is very big onbat. Only, his movements are a bit unconventional.

    Samil appeared at his position in the arena.

    He is still levitating though. He is in a lotus position and looked like he is sitting in the air.He had his eyes closed. His long hair fluttered gently as if they are responding to his slow and rhythmic breathing. He just had that gentle aura around him.

    He is still levitating though. He is in a lotus position and looked like he is sitting in the air.He had his eyes closed. His long hair fluttered gently as if they are responding to his slow and rhythmic breathing. He just had that gentle aura around him.

    Where as Crow¡­ he held his daggers and stood there with his usual dark and menacing aura.

    Crow is considered the best among the Middle stage students among the second graders. He is also the leader representing the student council from the second grade. It is safe to say that he didn''t get that position because of his pretty face, because he didn''t have one.

    He is good atbat.

    The only mistake he had done was boldly fight White in the arena during the freshman admission test and lose.

    Granted that there are many restrictions ced on him, it is safe to say that his reputation took a slight hit. Now, he has a perfect chance to cleanse it.

    He held two of the daggers and waited for the fight to start. Ling Tian looked at them for a couple of seconds before he nodded and announced.

    "FIGHT"

    *SWOOSH*

    Crow disappeared. He was like a dark that could be seen. He reappeared behind Samil''s back within a second and was ready to attack.

    *BOOM*

    Samil didn''t open his eyes, instead a burst ofpressed hair emerged from his back and hit Crow, sending him back.

    Crow spun himself to the right as he took himself out of thatpressed air''s path and charged forward again.

    Samil once again used the same tactic. However this time, thepressed air is followed by a wind des that are conjured behind Crow and came at him.

    If he moves back because of that air cannon, he will fall right into the path of those wind des, even if he didn''t and stops in his tracks, the des will get him. He has to dodge by going down or block the wind cannonpletely and move forward.

    That''s what everyone thought. That appeared like an obvious approach. But to everyone''s surprise, Crow made a weird move. He leaned backwards by charging at the wind cannon with his legs. When they made contact.

    *PHEW*

    A sharp explosive sound, almost like a muffled bullet sound came before he shot himself towards the wind des. Even Samil is taken aback. Before he could react, Crow kicked a wind de in the air.

    *PHEW*

    The wind de disappeared and he used that recoil to moved towards the Samil again. He was shooting like a bullet. At a speed that is normally not seen at the middle stage of Divine ne Initiation. Even Sam felt like had to use his shadow fusion or partial light fusion to get that speed.

    But Crow is just using that in his normal form.

    *PHEW* *PHEW* PHEW*

    Wind des emerged out of nowhere as they swarmed Crow trying to hinder his advance. They covered Samilpletely not even leaving a small gap for Crow to exploit. Meanwhile, Crow is deflecting the wind des by kicking them and using them as stepping stones.

    His speed aside, if not for the contact between him and the attacks, and its subsequent energy release, it would have been hard to trace him. Sam had to activate his energy vision and use it at full strength to even see the energy tracks left behind by crow.

    Its like he perfectly blended into the area.

    He couldn''t be sensed normally. He couldn''t be seen at the speed he was going. He is barely making any sound.

    Even though he is right there in the front, it also felt like he is not there. Sam doubted, his spiritual sense would pick him.

    This is not even the first time Sam has seen Crow use this technique, he has seen this hundreds of times from the Hub''s simtions. Crow has been perfecting this technique, ever since his defeat against White.

    His style is very simr to Recoil style, but it is very different as well. Even though it looked like he is using the recoil of attacks, to be precise, he is just jumping off of the attacks as if they are solids, while deflecting them. The diffusion of the attacks was purposefully done.

    Repel style is also very close to this, but the repel style doesn''t diffuse the attacks, it just makes them slip to the side.

    This could be considered apletely new style, its just Sam has no word to name it.

    Samil still hasn''t opened his eyes. A condensed wind sphere faintly visible to the naked eye is revolving around him. Wind des and wind cannons are being shot from it in addition to the ones that are being conjured all over the arena.

    Since the start he didn''t open the eyes and only increased his control over the wind in the arena.

    Crow on the other hand didn''t even step on the ground one time. It is not like he is levitating, he is just moving around the wind des like a pinball.

    "Seems like Samil is going for a longsting battle. He will win in that case without revealing any of his attacks."

    Sam heard one of the other participants muttering.

    "Well, you know how Samil handles things. I don''t even remember seeing with his eyes open or even standing up in any battle in the past few months. He would just let the opponents breeze out if he could help it."

    "Yeah, sometimes I don''t understand if he just cocky or straight upzy."

    Sam couldn''t help but smile at this. Because he knew these guys are on point with their spections. Samil iszy and just to keep him image, he guises hiszy sitting in the air as meditation. In fact, if one observes clearly, they could see the air propping his back and the bottom, to give him good lumbar support.

    But most of the time it is ignored by his peers as he is constantly controlling the wind and the people who could notice don''t bother with it.

    There are many good reasons for him to bezy. However, the main point is that when he does get serious, and Sam has seen how serious he can get, he has tendency to wipe everything out. He is actually intrigued by how it will y with Crow.

    From the looks of it, Samil is moving dangerously close to being serious since no matter how many attacks heunched, he is unable to catch Crow, while Crow is doing justice to him name as he flew in between those attacks.

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 Chapter 2267 Crow Vs Samil II

    Chapter 2267 Crow Vs Samil II

    Crow might not havended an attack and always fell short whenever he tried to.

    But every try made Samil reveal more and more of his strength. Crow also didn''t try the same angle again. Every attack had a different pattern and a different approach, making Samil guard himself from more angles.

    However, if someone has to focus on so many things, it is only natural for them to lose their focus and leave at least one opening. More often than not, that one single opening ends being a clean and direct.

    *PHEW* *PHEW* *PHEW*

    Crow hit three wind des that were flying from three different directions and appeared to be falling down freely. At that moment, another wind de came at himterally.

    *PHEW*

    At thest minute, Crow hit the de and he wasunched like an arrow through a very narrow gap. Making him appear at the wind sphere covering Samil.

    *BAM*

    He lodged his dagger and it created an explosion, disrupting the flow of wind sphere. The gap is created and Crow''s second dagger glowed with blood colored runes.

    *BOOM*

    Samil opened his eyes and mouth at the same time.

    *WHOOSH*

    He blew a jet of air, that was condensed,pressed and rotated into bing a lethal wind missile.

    It was aimed at Crow''s chest, it was almost point nk range, making it nigh impossible to miss. Crow''s dagger brushed past the surface of that wind missile before it made its way through a narrow gap and reached Samil''s shoulder.

    At the same time, Crow''s body took the brunt of the wind missile as he was blown away. The myriad of wind des and cannons disappeared. The contact created a shy explosion as both participants moved away from their original spots.

    Crownded on the ground and dug his feet in to stop his movement.

    Samil didn''t move as far, but he definitely stepped back. When the dust settled, Crow looked at his opponent hopefully. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    His dagger is indeed lodged in, but it didn''t show any bleeding. Samil''s shirt which was torn revealed a special leather armor underneath. The dagger is lodged into that armor and didn''t even hit the skin.

    The dagger is glowing with blood colored runes which seemed to be countered by the blue colored runic inscriptions of the armor. Samil frowned and looked at Crow.

    Crow also had his shirtpletely torn and his glowing vest inside took quite some damage. He was also using a special defense item. It seemed like both of them are prepared.

    Samil''s frown deepened, even though Crow''s armor is damaged, it is not enough. The attack should have prated through him. A person two levels lower than him shouldn''t be standing there with just some partial damage to the armor.

    Samil''s expression became a bit twisted. He was no longer assuming that lotus position and instead stood there on the ground.

    His robes and hair fluttered in the wind. The surrounding sand and dirt started moving. The sphere that Crow just broke came back and it is revolving with a speed multiple times faster than before.

    Crow grinned wildly and took out another dagger. Now, both of his daggers are glowing with those blood colored runes. His whole body is boiling with his Divine energy as he made his move. In an instant, Samil created arge tornado. The surrounding earth was all deformed and huge chucks of soil and rock was reduced to mere dust in that high speed tornado.

    From within the tornado, a huge wind missile came out as a tangent aimed at Crow.

    *SWOOSH*

    Crow slid over the surface of that missile and deflected it, moving towards the tornado. Everyone was amazed at how Crow is even resisting the wind currents. In all fairness, he should feel like a broken kite by now.

    His body shouldn''t be able to move in that wind. He should have lost all control. But as he moved, his body ignored all the wind resistance. Only when he used the direction of wind currents to his advantage to dodge or deflect the attacks, he did let them hit him.

    Otherwise, everything went smoothly.

    *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

    Samil multiplied his attacks, but they were met with direct blocks from his daggers. Whenever a dagger touched the attack, Crow took a lot of force which made him falter and absorb some damage, but the missiles were easily diffused and deflected, making the attacks mostly useless.

    Until now, there was only one proper exchange between the two. The rest of them are just blocking, parrying and dodging. And Sam anticipated a second exchange soon.

    He is not the only one and he is not wrong. The second exchange did happen.

    The blood colored hue spread from the daggers to Crow''s whole body and all of a sudden, it didn''t even look like he is moving. He was there in the air one moment and the next one, he is just a couple of feet away from the sphere.

    *SWOOSH*

    He threw a dagger at the iing wind missile. The dagger hit the missile, diverted its direction and spun in the air and moved like a parab, before it started dropping from the top.

    Another dagger appeared in Crow''s hand as he lunged forward. He passed through the wind missiles, des and air cannons. He pierced through the tornado and could see the sphere. With his two daggers, he stabbed the spear vertically downwards.

    *BOOM*

    The red colored aura along with inscriptions started spreading throughout the spear and exploded. Samil who is a pure mage was unable to take the force to his body. His shirtpletely disappeared as the dagger rays ravaged all over him.

    The armor on which he counted on suddenly exhibited a weird behavior. The runes stopped working as the blood colored energy lines appeared on it.

    *SWOOSH*

    *SWOOSH*

    Crow threw both of his daggers at him, hitting him on his chest and abdomen, then he caught the dagger that was still spinning in the air before he lodged into Samil''s chest squarely.

    *BOOM*

    The hitnded with explosive energy, but the energy that required to pierce Samil, was enough to make the muscles on his arms to tear. Crow is bleeding from his arms just by the attack he delivered and Samil puked blood in response.

    The winds died and both of them fell to the ground.

    Crow stood up while panting heavily. Even though it didn''t show in the earlier stages, he put too much effort into the dodging and all the fatigue did build up. It is only that he needed the first dagger to do its job by disabling the armor.

    Then he used most of his energy to break the defense, the two daggers tond some soft attacks, enough to distract and finally thest attack tond decisive blow.

    From breaking the sphere tond the final blow, it took less than a second.

    It took some time for most of the audience to even register what has actually happened. But whatever the price, he managed to win the round.

    Ling Tian stepped in and announced the win. Crow hurriedly came back to the stands and took a special elixir.

    He didn''t even have time to enjoy his win as he tried to recover his energy.

    Sam was kind of impressed. He has seen Crow practice in the hub before, seeing it in real life is much better. Samil on the other hand. It could only be said that he has limited himself way too much with his abilities.

    His attacks are very one dimensional with wind des, cannons and missiles. He uses the condensed wind for defense. His control is impable, but since his constitution is only of a pure mage, he didn''t focus on movement too much and developed in a much more defensive way.

    His strategy has always been keep a robust defense and taking people down after wearing them down.

    Even though Sam still is notpletely sure of the unique nature of Crow''s attacks, they did work well beyond his expectations. Maybe he needs to study the information from the hub a bit deeply and understand this style.

    As he was thinking, the arena was rearranged properly. An elder with earth element recreated the whole arena and it was a good as new.

    Ling Tian gave Sam a look as he walked in. It is time for Sam''s fight.

    The only remaining middle stage cultivator to fight a peak stage cultivator. Sam took a deep breath and got ready.

    If he has any chance of winning, he has to fight a bit dirty. He is confident on taking on Late stage cultivators easily. But peak stage¡­ he has to be a lot more careful than usual and might have to remove some of his cards.

    "Next Fight.

    Sam Versus Marron."

    Sam looked at the woman who wore aplete maroon dress. She walked into the arena and Sam heaved a sigh before following suit.

 Chapter 2268 Sam Vs Marron

    Chapter 2268 Sam Vs Marron

    Sam looked at Marron and a million thoughts ran through his head.

    Just like how he collected a lot of information about most students, he had her information too. That''s what went through his head when he looked at her. She is a staff user and she has a unique ability. Blood maniption.

    It is a unique cultivation technique that she uses thatplements her bloodline.

    Her body generates unnatural amount of blood. Something that she can control as naturally as her limbs. It is a very unique constitution. Her fighting style is such that the more she bleeds the more she has control over the surroundings.

    Unless she runs out of her spiritual energy and Divine energy, her blood continues to generate. But the problem is that her absorption rate is abnormally high topensate for her usage of blood physically.

    It is all a weird loop and the bottom line is that she is hard to fight and she is versatile with high stamina.

    Sam ran a dozen scenarios through his head to see if he could have a fighting chance if he hadn''t broken through and he could only seerare few scenarios in which he had to use the cubes that previously prepared to deal with these guys.

    Without those cubes¡­ he could escape and defend for a while, but that is all.

    But now, with the breakthrough and everything that came along with it, he definitely has a fighting chance. Its only based on the simtion data that he gained on her from the Hub. So, if her actions don''t exceed those limits by too much, he would be perfect.

    "FIGHT"

    The fight is announced, Sam instantly activated partial shadow fusion and held his daggers. He shot towards her with the highest speed he could muster in that form.

    *BANG*

    Marron''s staff hit his dagger dodging that attack at a point nk range. She didn''t even have a change in her expression. She is not even flustered a little bit. There is not even a single hit of wariness.

    *SWOOSH*

    She swung her staff throwing him along with his dagger. Sam came back at the same speed, attacking her from all directions possible.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    The sound of the metal hitting metal rung throughout the arena. It is almost simr to the previous fight, only that Crow didn''t have a chance to closing the distance between him and Samil, but here Sam managed to close the distance, but he is unable to attack.

    Of course, Marron is also not exactly defensive type like Samil.

    After a few blocks, she finally made her move. Her speed is just as much as Sam''s if not higher. It now became Sam''s turn to defend himself.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    Sam blocked three hits and he already felt a bit cornered. Her speed impressive and timing impable. Her staff spun and came down to her head with a vertical swing.

    *BANG* N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Sam blocked it both his daggers. At that moment, she started pushing the staff down, then she mmed the middle of the staff with her palm pushing him further down. Sam felt the force prate his body. The staff slipped past the daggers.

    Even with his shadow partial fusion, he managed to just avoid his head, and he hitnded on is shoulder.

    He shed back and immediately and activated full shadow fusion.

    But as if to give Sam a reality check, she lunged forward and stabbed with the end of her shaft hitting him squarely on his chest and then followed with a swing to his head.

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam dodged the staffing at his head, but it still brushed past him. Then another swing that came from the sudden change of the staff''s direction that was aimed at his head once again.

    Sam ducked down and rolled to the side before trying to attack her from the side. She blocked the dagger, but this time, Sam used the repel style. The contact helped him slide down the staff. He spun around and tried to stab her with the second dagger.

    *BANG*

    She blocked it with the staff again. At this moment however, at the tip of the dagger, the gathered energy suddenly turned into a sphere and was shot at her face. Like an energy bullet just with shadow energy.

    *SWOOSH*

    The bullet grazed past her cheek and made her step back.

    The small bullet left a small cut, that is all. But the cut is still reinforced with that shadow energy might add up to something. Still, it is just a drop in the bucket at this point.

    Marron looked at Sam with a smirk and made her nove.

    Her speed increased and Sam looked like slippery loach in shallow waters. His movements arepletely unorthodox and he is trying to be at his top speed.

    Each swing of the staff made his heart shudder and Sam could feel himself sweat even in that fusion form. At least he felt like he was sweating.

    *SWOOSH* *BANG* *CRASH*

    And that wasn''t enough, he was hit squarely once again and crashed into the ground.

    Sam stood up hurriedly. The staff is already in front of his eyesing at him with full speed, and at the exact moment.

    *BOOM*

    An energy explosion. A small energy bullet exploded. The staff''s direction changed and with Sam''s shy dodge, he managed get away without putting as much effort as before. He is already feeling a slight dent on the energy reserves.

    Marron for the first time stopped moving and looked at Sam with slight surprise. Sam didn''t even care about the stopping, instead he is d that her facial expression cracked a bit. She is way too calm and Sam doesn''t really like it in his opponents when they are that calm.

    They are fun to y with when the are a bit lost and paranoid.

    That will be easier to handle. Of course, her current situation is nowhere near that. But it is a start.

 Chapter 2269 Surprise

    Chapter 2269 Surprise

    Twelve energy orbs are revolving around Sam.

    All of them made of shadow energy ready to do his bidding. Marron raised her eyebrow and stepped forward.

    Her staff came at him at an incredible speed. Needless to say she is faster than before and Sam even his shadow form found it hard to dodge it cleanly. One of the orbs moved parallel to the staff and exploded.

    *BOOM*

    The staff''s direction changed and it almost threw her off bnce. Sam took this chance and slid underneath the staff before closing in the distance. As she was about to pull herself together, the remaining orbs started circling her from different sides.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The explosions rocked herpletely and she left herself wide open. Sam''s dagger started glowing with some runes as well. These are dark ck runes with faint red and purple hue.

    *SLASH*

    *SLASH*

    He got a clean sh on her torso and a stabnded at her shoulder. It was aimed at her neck, but she managed to move and avoid it a bit. The hit on her torso was blocked by the armor. It didn''t prate deep enough, though the armor was decently damaged messing up the inscribed defenses.

    The hit on the shoulder on the other hand was clean.

    Sam didn''t want to let this chance go. As Marron stepped back hurriedly like a red colored blur, he suddenly disappeared from her front in a puff of ck smoke. She dashed a hundred odd yards backward and came to a halt.

    *PUFF*

    Only for Sam to emerge from behind her and stab another dagger into her back.

    She sensed his move and tried to dodge. The attack stillnded on her back, right beside her shoulder de. This one is also not deep and didn''t manage to prate all the way through her armor.

    *SWOOSH*

    Marron spun around with her staff. The staff brushed past his shoulder and even hurt him a bit. Sam disappeared once again and reappeared from her rear.

    This time Marron anticipated it and managed tond a thrust with the rear of her staff, but at the same time¡­

    *BOOM*

    An explosion of shadow energy emerged from the spot where the dagger was lodged in the rear. Then only Marron consciously realized that the dagger was still stuck in her armor. Not noticing that cost her, her armor''s inscriptionwork, at least the ones on the rear.

    Along with a good and solid damage to the flesh making her bleed.

    The second spot from where she is bleeding after the face. The explosion threw her forward towards Sam who took the thrust squarely and felt like his lungs are burning.

    As she came towards him, he aimed his hand at her and shot another energy beam with shadow energy.

    She couldn''t find her bnce and hurriedly swung her staff to block the attack, but took the residual force that came from the explosion upon contact.

    *BAM*

    She kicked the ground and leapt into the sky, levitating and keeping as much distance from Sam as possible.

    She realized that she needs to reassess her situation at the moment.

    For the next couple of seconds, neither Marron nor Sam moved. Both of them stood still one in the air and one on the ground. Sam took deep breaths to calm himself down and two dozen shadow energy orbs started circling him while he did that.

    He also tried to recover from the blunt hits he took.

    They are hurting even in this fusion form. Marron on the other hand just looked at him once and then closed her eyes. She was in a deep thought for about ten seconds before she opened them again.

    Sam shot himself into the air like an arrow moving towards Marron. He left behind tailwinds of shadow energy as he moved. Marron zeroed in on him with her attack.

    *BOOM**BANG*

    The noise of explosion and the noise of sh. Except for the two, nothing else was heard for the next few minutes. Marron became extremely irond with her defense and attacks. She kept her movement to minimal.

    Sam didn''t have the advantage of utilizing her shadow anymore. So, he has to manage with the energy orbs. They are exploding continuously, but their job was not to deal damage, but help him dodge, escape and create openings. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    Sam didn''t use any other tricks and kept with the shadow fusion.

    He knew for sure that the current attacks of Marron, would send him to high heavens with one clean, undefended, undeflected hit. One and only one will be needed if he is not defending himself.

    To make sure that doesn''t happen, Shadow fusion is the only one that is malleable, agile and spontaneous enough.

    The tango continued in the air and Sam appeared to hold himself. However, the control of the flow was still in Marron''s hands.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosion Sam managed to find another opening, but as he approached tond a hit, Marron made an unexpected move. Her staff went between both of Sam''s hands. With a twist and a turn, Sam''s ands were stick in a very weird lock, within a sh.

    Before he could make sense of it, he is already face to face close with Marron.

    Sam gritted his teeth and dozens of energy orbs appeared around them. Marron tried to break Sam''s arms, but the shadow fusion is helping him a bit, however, her energy that is trying to invade his body, is hurting him.

    "Go on, explode them."

    "Exploding is not all that they do."

    The next moment, orbs arranged themselves in a formation, creating an energy concentration point behind her back. She sensed the thread and aimed to escape, however, Sam used the same lock and leveraged his strength against her, keeping her in ce.

    As if that is not enough, several vines purely condensed on shadow energy emerged from within the orbs and tangled around her, locking her in ce.

    *SWOOSH*

    The energy beam of shadow energy was shot at her, at that time, she gritted her teeth and looked at Sam. Her eyes glowed with that blood red color, the small blood drop that has been dripping down the cut from her face turned into a sharp needle shooting towards Sam''s eye.

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam had to let go, but the vines tangling her didn''t just disappear, instead they exploded. Marron moved out of the energy beam''s path and braced herself for the explosion of the vines. But to her surprise, there is no massive explosive force destroying her. She stumbled down as the vines disappeared into the puff of dark ck smoke.

    Her heart raced and she breathed heavily. Sam kept as much distance from her as possible. That was a close call.

    The needle made of blood almost prated his eye. If not for his immediate reaction¡­ an eye is way too much of a sacrifice just tond a hit.

    Marron looked at Sam with her heaving breath. She is furious. It is apparent in her eyes. Two dozen more orbs appeared around Sam as he looked at her with a smile. As if to respond to Sam, blood came out of the wound on her back. Several des conjured out of blood hovered around her.

    "You are done."

    She muttered and dashed towards Sam.

    The staff came at Sam, when the orbs moved as usual to deflect, the des reacted and attacked the orbs. Deflecting them, making them explode prematurely. Sam activated ripple style and repel style, meeting the staff with his daggers.

    The resulting explosion up on contact sent him down, creating a gap.

    *SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    Two daggers were thrown at her from the bottom. She easily deflected them, but he was not done.

    *SWOOSH* *SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    Projectile weapons were thrown into the air all aimed at her, the blood des were enough to deflect them as they moved towards him followed by her with her bloody staff.

    However, the deflected projectiles that she went past by reacted with the shadow energy, emitting it in their full glory as humanoid figures appeared out of them. Shadow undead emerged from the projectiles and are now hovering behind.

    Marron widened her eyes in disbelief as the undead appeared behind her.

    Sam took out his staff as shadow energy raged from him. He kicked the ground and shot towards her

    *SWOOSH*

    The blood des were all shot towards him as Marron turned around and blocked the attacks from the shadow undead. Just when she was about to blow the head of one of the undead, she realized that the des missed the target.

    Sam disappeared in a puff of smoke and he reappeared behind one of his undead. That undead happened to be the one that she was targeting.

    Her staff connected with the undead, while Sam''s staff banged her on the head.

    A clean directly hit.

    Marron spun like a top while in mid-air, with blood sttering out of her mouth.

 Chapter 2270 Clash

    Chapter 2270 sh

    Sam didn''t waste the chance.

    He disappeared once again and reappeared beside another shadow undead that was closest to Marron.

    *BANG*

    Marron braced herself for the impact and blocked his move.

    *BANG*

    She was able to block him easily, but not the undead that came from behind her. The undead hacked on her back, expanding the previous injury that was already bleeding.

    Marron winced at the sudden pain and kicked backwards, the undead was destroyed in a puff of smoke. Sam also did the same and disappeared from there, reappearing near an undead that is far away.

    By now, Marron dealt with two of Sam''s undead, but the problem is they are just shadow undead, they could be respawned as long as Sam had enough spiritual energy and a decent control over it. Sam did have both of them. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    Sam threw two more projectiles at her. She pursed her lips and realized that blocking them or deflecting them, might not be ideal. So, she decided to make the most proper decision at the time. She dodged.

    She ran away from them and the projectiles missed her by arge margin. However, Sam didn''t use them to spawn the undead. He just kept on throwing projectiles at her as she dodged them, trying to keep as much distance as possible.

    Marron spun her staff and more blood gushed out of her wounds on the back. The bleeding appeared unnatural and certainly dangerous, but even herplexion didn''t change. The blood morphed into projectiles as well and she started throwing them at Sam.

    The way of her control is also unique as she used her staff tounch the energy required to throw the projectiles.

    Another unique point is that when Sam dodged them, he realized that they are homing towards him. She is controlling the blood projectiles while creating more from her own blood. Sam also started increasing the rate of his attacks, but most of his energy went into dodging.

    Her bleeding increased at an rming rate, but she is not showing any signs of stopping. She is not getting slow, not losing control and didn''t even show a sign of weakness or dizziness.

    Sam is sure any other cultivator would have been dead by now if they bled that much.

    As the time passed, Sam''s movements are getting restricted. Its just that there is way too much blood surrounding him and it is all trying to kill him.

    As the exchange continued, everyone else is engrossed in the fight.

    They are very impressed with both sides, but Sam''s fighting style is raising a shit ton of questions.

    "Why is he not using any other abilities of his? He uses almost ten elements, why is he sticking so hard with that shadow element?"

    "I think that it is a better decision to do something like that. That could be his main choice of the element that he is confident with.

    And the speed of the shadow element might be the only reason he survived this long. He cannot do that even with the wind element."

    "You maybe right, but he should have used other elements at least for his own support. Even though Marron''s blood maniption is dangerous and versatile, I believe he could benefit from mixing up his earth element a bit here and there."

    "Like hell it would be helpful. And what do you know, have you used a ten elements before?"

    The discussions like that are sprouting everywhere in the gallery and people are getting more and more opinionated with the fight. But they are all enjoying it and craved for more.

    Even though Sam''s element of choice puzzled many people, some also understood it. Marron is not exactly known for her overwhelming strength against her enemies. She always won with overwhelming control of the battlefield.

    The versatility of both the staff and her blood maniption made her try to control the battlefield as much as possible to gain victory.

    Everyone that is knowledgeable about her skills expected a simr strategy from her and that is how it went. She tried to gauge Sam''s strength with her staff and most likely wanted to progress with the usage of her abilities.

    It would have worked.

    But only this time, she met her match. Sam is even more of a control freak than her and he knew that he should never give it up. He chose the shadow element precisely because of that. When facing with a stronger opponent, speed is the way to go. The versatility of the shadow element made it easy for him to keep the bnce in the battlefield.

    From all the simtions he watched of Marron, he noticed that by now, she would haveplete control of her opponents'' moves, but Sam is still like a slippery loach.

    She didn''t have the control of the battlefield yet and she was the only one with higher number of injuries.

    Now, she is trying desperately to take the control back and win over Sam.

    At least she saw some improvement in the situation. Sam on the other hand is feeling the pressure. He could feel his energy exhausting bit by bit.

    However, that became the least of his worries the very next second, because he foresaw something that''sing.

    As he was hurriedly dodging the bloody projectiles while throwing some of his own, he noticed that some of the blood projectiles are hovering without doing anything, even when he walked past it. That made him observe the rest of the projectiles and realized something.

    A memory shed in his head.

    ''I can''t believe I realized it thiste. Good thing I already have a counter in mind.''

    He thought to himself, but even before he could finish that thought, all of a sudden Morron started glowing, along with all the blood projectiles that are hovering around in the air. Energy strands shot out of them connecting each other, finally creating a formation.

    Sam who was on the move, was suddenly caught by the web cast by that formation and was dragged into the middle of it.

    Marron''s staff is glowing brighter than anything as more and more blood seeped out of her body. Not just from the injuries, but from her pores as well. All that blood circled around the arena as it concentrated around Sam.

    It created a sphere circting around with an extreme speed.

    Sam felt his fusion form waver. He is locked out of the surrounding spiritual energy. The blood''s speed increased as it tried to seep into his skin. Sam didn''t panic. He has seen this move, way too many times.

    He cancelled the shadow fusion and his vampire bloodline is activated. No one could see him by now and his aura is alsopletely suppressed by Marron''s blood. He let her blood hit him as sharply as it could.

    It seeped into his body, but instead of hurting him as it should, it just stayed there. Sam could have absorbed it and converted into his own energy if he wanted, but he stayed his hand for that part. Otherwise, it would be too noticeable.

    At the same time, he slowly activated partial water fusion. As a vampire he has certain control over blood. It is certainly not enough to create projectiles with it, but it is enough tobine with his water element.

    Blood in usual cases has around fifty five percent of sma out of which ny percent is water. So, typical blood is made of fifty percent of water. The rest of it is allbined with this water, so when he moves the water within the blood, the rest moves as well.

    With the partial fusion, he is also fusing himself with the blood that is now trying to prate his vampire body.

    Marron got ready to crush Sam, but the next moment, she felt the connection between her and the blood loosen up. She realized that she didn''t haveplete control over it.

    Before she knew it, she felt huge pressure pressing on the blood sphere from inside.

    *BOOM*

    Blood colored water gushed out of the sphere mixed up with the blood. In the middle of it all stood Sam in his weird form that is a fusion of the water elemental fusion and vampire form. His hydra bloodline riled up and the mixture of water and blood around him took the form of nine giant hydra heads.

    Sam jumped and the nine heads followed up shooting towards Marron along with his staff.

    Marron gritted her teeth ad swung her staff.

    Blood rushed out of her body. Her body started turning into blood color. It is very simr to a fusion form. The blood rushed out and turned into several swirling missiles and moved forward to sh with Sam''s attack.

    *BOOM*

    Blood and water mixed together showered the whole arena. In the middle of that chaos, Sam and Marron shed with their staves. At that moment, Marron who should have had upper hand all along, suddenly felt something tugging from her back, followed by that¡­.

    "ARGHHHHHHH...¡­." She screamed at the top of her lungs.

 Chapter 2271 To the Third

    Chapter 2271 To the Third

    Marron''s scream reverberated throughout the arena.

    Agony and pain apparent in her tone. It was filled with so much emotion that even Sam''s cold heart felt a quiver upon hearing it. But he is very aware of the fact that he is the one who caused it, so he brushed it off.

    Marron copsed to the ground.

    *BAM*

    Sam''s staffnded on her head and sent her flying. By now the arena is flooded with reddish water and it stunk of blood. She fell in the middle of that stinky and bloody water.

    Marron shivered and quivered with pain and tried to get up.

    Sam stood at his spot for a moment. He is panting heavily, its as if an obese old age man ran a marathon. His gasping and heaving could be heard in that loud silence.

    The fusion form was cancelled and so did the vampire form. She stood there barely managing to hold himself from falling off of the dizziness.

    The energy he had to expend for that attack is way too much. On top of his energy consumption until this moment, just to stay alive¡­ it is safe to say that he spent too much of his energy in this. After the current situation is resolved.

    Marron''s veins are bulging as she stood up with the support of her staff.

    She tried to say something, but the pain is way too much and she could feel that her body is not responding well to her thoughts. Even just standing up took a lot of her energy and had to endure so much pain.

    As for the reason¡­

    It is curse and poison. As soon as Marron was decided as his opponent, Sam already knew what to do. He knew Shadow element is the only thing apart from the light and space that could keep up with her. Thetter two demand too much energy and he knew that it will be a longer battle with her, so he made a decision.

    He used the daggers that are infused with the curses before.

    These curses arebined with the hydra poison and some other pain inducing poisons that Sam concocted. The curse is a bit of ate bloomer. Sam didn''t want Marron to immediately feel the effects. With the difference in power, Sam didn''t want to take any chances.

    He guessed that most of the students here are prepared with antidotes and anti-curse devices that might help them at least alleviate whatever that he can concoct.

    So, he made it a bit slow acting and it acted when the opponent is at their weakest and distracted.

    Marron put a lot of energy into thatst attack, her concentration waspletely on controlling thatrge amount of blood. The perfect time for the curses to activate. By then, the curse and poison circted all throughout her body and they affected her spine more than anything.

    She copsed and is now struggling.

    But Sam could already see that the curse and poison are being suppressed slowly.

    Sam had to hold back a little when he decided on the curse that he infused into the daggers. He cannot have them made too powerful. They might be rejected ording to the rules and disqualify him. So, it was a bit held back and closer to mediocre than he wanted.

    That is the only reason why she managed to resist so much. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    Sam walked towards her slowly.

    When Marron finally had enough control and was about to conjure up some energy to wield her staff¡­

    *BAM*

    He raised his hand, his hand gun appeared and he shot her in the chest.

    *SPLASH*

    He fell in to the pool of bloody water once again.

    "Sam won."

    Ling Tian finally announced his victory.

    *SWOOSH*

    Harbinger appeared and carried Sam away. As he sat down, he threw a potion to Ling Tian.

    "The antidote for the poison and the curse."

    Ling Tian caught it and nodded. The water was removed from the arena and Ling Tian administered the first aid. He made her drink the antidote and removed the bullet. He let the healers do the rest.

    He still has the tournament to run after all.

    The crowd stayed still. They are still amazed at how Sam managed to acquire victory. The battle was long, strategic and most of all, the underdog who no one thought would win, had won. Even aesthetically, the battle was a pleasure to look at, with all the shy projectiles flying all over the ce.

    Cheers erupted the arena as they pped for Sam.

    Meanwhile, the arena came back to normal and Ling Tian announced the next fight.

    The peak stage second graders are a bit nervous. It is one thing that Crow managed to snatch a victory from a peak stage second grader. He is considered a wild card himself. But Sam appeared to be a wilder card.

    His victory might not be as overwhelming, his struggle is higherpared to Crow, but he still managed tond a wless victory. In their minds, they were thinking when Marron might have slipped up and made a mistake that gave Sam a victory.

    But they couldn''t think of any. In their minds, based on their knowledge of her skills, she did everything she could, but Sam still won. Which means it is a much cleaner and more powerful victorypared to Crow.

    This put a pressure on them. If the middle stage kids managed to do this much damage, what about the Late stage ones? Won''t they have much more chance to beat them? This pressure mounted on them very much.

    Maybe because of that, in the next fight, the peak stage second grader didn''t even think of going easy. Since the start he unsheathed his sword and used his ultimate move. It is instant and decisive.

    The opponent didn''t even have a chance to think of what is happening. He was crushed immediately and the watch was over within seconds.

    Looking at this, the rest of the peak stage second graders also decided that this is the way to go.

    Because of Crow and Sam, thete cultivators are suffering without even having a fight chance. The next four matches went like that. That concluded seven fights that had five peak stage wins and two first grader wins.

    The eighth match though, turned the tide.

    Even when the peak stage second grader used his ultimate move, the other party managed to defend himself. And once he managed to survive in a state just enough to wield his weapon, the peak stage cultivator appeared beat and exhausted.

    It was actually a rtively easy victory, except for the damage which can be recovered soon with some high level medicine.

    The next two once again were taken by the peak stage second graders.

    The next one was a victory for thete stage and the remaining all were for the peak stage second graders.

    Now, that means, there were eleven victors from the peak stage, two fromte stage and two from middle stage.

    Fifteen people that moved to the next round. A voting was conducted by using the arena formation. The audience voted. Breaking the records of all the years, two fights that were won by the two middle stage cultivators were considered as the best ones so far.

    Sam barely won with around ten votes. Crow was the close second. Sam heaved a sigh. Even though he recovered quickly, he really did appreciate this break. It helps him understand his next opponents better.

    Sam moved to the third round, but the remaining matches should happen.

    First match in the second round is between Rashma and another peak stage cultivator. The victory is once again wless for Rashma. There is actually no different in terms of effort in her first round fight and second round fight.

    This peak stage opponent stood just as much chance as that middle stage opponent.

    It is almost ridiculous.

    The second fight is between Crow and ate stage cultivator. In a usual case, it could be considered lucky, but thiste stage guy is just as strong as an average peak stage guy, if not above average.

    Crow fought tooth and nail and won.

    Sam is mighty impressed. He must say that he really underestimated his true strength because of the fight with White, which is something Sam usually doesn''t do.

    This is a decent wakeup call to make sure that he doesn''t repeat this again.

    The rest of the fights went on. They are all, peak stage cultivators. No,te stage cultivator managed to win anymore.

    With that Sam''s break is over. Only eight members remained. One more win and he would be in top four. He can guarantee his position as a representative of Gambler academy in the solobat. That is all he needs from this tournament.

    For the third round, Rashma is the first one to fight again.

    Once again, without much effort, she destroyed the next opponent.

 Chapter 2272 Solo Combat is over

    Chapter 2272 Solo Combat is over

    In the third round, Rashma won her fight without much effort and destroyed the opponent again.

    Crow went after that and he fought once again tooth and nail to win his third round fight. But as soon as the fight ended, he couldn''t even stand up. He just managed to stand up for three more seconds than his opponent.

    Then he copsed.

    Ling Tian had to carry him to the participant area.

    Sam volunteered to administer the first aid and brought him back pretty quickly. He couldn''t stay still and wait too long though. Because the next fight was his.

    Sam looked at his opponent. Another peak stage cultivator. However, this one didn''t have unique abilities like Marron and his strength is kind of straight forward. He is a swordsman. A pure swordsmanthat wields a rapier.

    He has a small figure and lean body type.

    On one nce, no one would ever think that he is strong, if not for the aura. He is also one of the frequent visitors of the hub. He had one of the highest visits in the hub among the second graders. He is also one of the few people that improved a shit ton from the hub.

    Based on the usual rankings of the academy, this guys is not exactly apetition or tournament material. He ranked well into the middle and had decent prowess. But after hub, he managed to maximize on his skills and climbed through the rankings pretty quickly.

    Now, he is here in the tournament and he won he first two rounds. He is basically put in the top ten of all the second graders in the gambler academy, when ites tobat. He wouldn''t be too far off in the list even if he is ced in other academies.

    Sam almost felt proud of him.

    After all, his abilities are indirectly Sam''s product. Sam slowly walked into the arena and looked at the young man in front of him. The young man let out of a breath and took out his rapier. He appeared tense and calm.

    He didn''t mouth off some unnecessary warnings, he didn''t try to trash talk Sam and he certainly didn''t try to put down Sam with some cliched lines about Sam''s cultivation level.

    He tried to stay calm and kept his mouth shut. This only made him more impressive.

    After all, yapping is easy. Silence is difficult and of course more rewarding.

    Sam took a deep breath and took out his two hand guns. He definitely believed that he used the full power of his guns and all the special bullets that he has at hand, they would be rejected by the formation of the arena as they would be ssified as special artefacts.

    Sam took a deep breath and took out his two hand guns. He definitely believed that he used the full power of his guns and all the special bullets that he has at hand, they would be rejected by the formation of the arena as they would be ssified as special artefacts.

    At least, that is what he believed. So, the bullet are not the most powerful, but they pack quite a punch.

    *SWOOSH*

    The opponent made a move. He came straight at Sam. Not levitating, not jumping. He was dashing towards Sam.

    *BOOM*

    Sam shot a bullet in the ground. In the straight path that the opponent was taking.

    *BOOM*

    A slightly muffled explosion was heard and arge pit appeared at the ce it was shot. Along with that, a ripple of earth elemental energy spread from that point as the origin, towards the opponent.

    Sam then tapped one of his guns a few times and a rune glowed on it.

    At the same time, the opponent sensed the ripples on the ground and jumped up, trying to leap towards Sam and finish him off.

    All of a sudden, he sensed something else. Two small projectiles, very small to even consider weapons, Sam''s bullets came towards him. He was about to swing his sword and abruptly stopped in the middle. Because the bullets were shot in the path in which his arm was about to move along with his sword.

    *BOOM*

    Both of them exploded with golden mes at the same time.

    The opponent absorbed the impact and moved to the side.

    *BOOM*

    Another explosion from the ground, but this time, the gravity reacted weirdly. He couldn''t feel himself falling and was pushed up instead. He felt way too light for a moment.

    16:00

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Two more bullets that exploded in his path, even before he fully entered it. On the first nce, Sam''s aim seemed to be off, because he never actually fired a single shot at his opponent directly. However, every bullet he shot, sessfully restricted his opponent from making any move.

    It looked like he knew what the opponent is going to do in advance.

    In a way, itis right. He does know what his opponent will do in advance. The opponent''s style has been studied way too much by the hub and he already identified everything that he needs to know to defeat the opponent.

    He knew where the sword will be, no matter what position the opponent is swinging it from.

    He knew where the opponent''s foot is going to be no matter what kind of move he is making. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    He knew what the opponent''s path is even before he fully realizes it.

    Sam''s regr attacks might slip up in term of speed if he tried to deal with the opponent, there is a slight chance of that happening. But with bullets, he saves a lot of time taken to charge the energy, conjuring up the attack, the thinking process, etc.

    It might look like a small time frame, but itpounds and umtes over the fight time.

    Now, all he needs to think about it is where to fire, when to fire and what to fire and then pull the trigger. The bullets take care of the rest.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG* *BOOM*

    People are looking at Sam with their mouths wide open. Sam''s first fight went above and beyond. He was constantly on his toes, moving around trying to dodge and block the attacks that could have sent him packing at any given moment.

    Compared to that, in this fight he is basically chilling.

    The fight went on, it was dragged to be longer than the first one.

    But Sam didn''t even sweat that much. He was tense, continuously calcting, his eyes are burning a bit because of the energy vision, but he didn''t suffer any damage at all. Even when sword rays flew towards him, he managed to dodge, deflect and block easily.

    The opponent on the other hand¡­ as the time went on felt more and more nervous, insecure and afraid. The others might not know, the spectators might not have noticed. But he did.

    He knew that Sam knew everything about his fighting style.

    This made him feel like he was being stripped naked in front of the whole world. All of his ws are out there in the light for everyone to see. His mental strength eroded with every passing second and he couldn''t muster any of it back.

    After aroundforty-five minutes, Sam started panting lightly, but the opponent is heavily breathing. He gritted his teeth and lost his cool.

    All his energy entered his sword as he prepared his ultimate move. He noticed that even though Sam saw through everything he did and maintained perfect defense, Sam didn''t attack. Maybe his body and mind got used to that pattern and didn''t think much about leaving an opening.

    Sam tapped the gun and the bullet changed. A special bullet entered the gun and he shot it. Not at the opponent, but at the sword. In fact, it didn''t even precisely hit the sword, it hit it just a few inches away from it.

    *BOOM*

    The explosion was of pure divine energy. No elemental influence could be seen in it. It also exploded with void style and ripple stylebined.

    The explosion resulted in the energy spreading in ripples, creating more explosions and then alling back to the origin point of the explosion creating a bigger one.

    The energy that was being charged into the sword was suddenly sucked into that void, creating a slight imbnce. That was all he needed.

    *BOOM*

    The energy bacsh hit the opponent. His arms took the burst of the explosion and then his chest and head.

    He dropped the weapon and fell down unconscious.

    "Sam Won."

    Ling Tian announced with his ''devil may care'' tone. He checked the opponent took him away and administered first aid.

    The rest of the fights went on and Sam stayed a spectator.

    "Semi-finals will begin now. Sam versus Rashma" Ling Tian announced.

    Sam raised his hand and said.

    "I forfeit."

    Ling Tian shrugged and Rashma looked at him with a curious gaze. The next fight is between Crow and another man named Chetan. That guy is a pure martial artist. He doesn''t even use weapons and a pure warrior, at the peak stage cultivation.

    Crow didn''t back down and went to fight.

    He managed to hold himself for ten minutes before he was beaten down.

    The final match is between Rasha and Chetan. But before that Ling Tian decided to conduct a few matches, the match between the losers in semi finals, which would be between Sam and Crow, to decide on the third and fourth ces, along with a few matches between losers of the quarter finals to decide on the fifth ce.

    First it was to decide the fifth ce. Ate stage cultivator named Mathir made it. Another woman that is proficient in multiple weapons. Sam simply forfeited the next match as well, settling down at fourth ce.

    The finals however happened, but the oue was decided way faster than what Sam anticipated.

    Rashma won in exactly three minutes.

 Chapter 2273 To the Norse Region

    Chapter 2273 To the Norse Region

    The solobat is over just like that.

    Sam settled for fourth ce, while Crow is in the third ce. The first two ces belonged to the peak stage cultivators, while the fifth ce belonged to thete stage cultivator. The line up is weird. It is not unusual for one or twote stage cultivators to take ces in top 5.

    Middle stage is out of chance though. But this time, there are two of them. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Everyone could already imagine the jeers and sneers they will get from the people of other academies in the finals. They would be a butt of all jokes, but also they will give the most surprising punch ever given in the tournament.

    A lot of people are actually looking forward to it.

    Next is the teambat.

    Sam is not exactly popr in the academy. It is true that they have all defended him against the external enemies, but there are too many questions surrounding Sam and he has been distance since the start.

    So, he didn''t have a team ready to go ahead and take on the teambatpetition. Unlike the freshman tournament, the team tournament of the regr tournament is a bit different. First one is that there are only three man teams and only one team from an academy can join in.

    It will always be battle royale of one form of the other.

    All the teams will be chucked into the same space at random locations and the would be it. Whichever team stands until the end wins. There are some other auxiliary rewards as well. The rules are also a lot more lenientpared to solobat.

    Ambush, formations, traps, poisons, teaming up, betrayals. It will be aplete package.

    Sam is really intrigued by this. But he doesn''t have a team and he has no intention of going around and asking people to get them to ept him as a team member.

    He was fine just being a spectator.

    When thepetitions began Sam was really surprised. The number of teams is a lot higherpared to the number of participants in the Solobat.

    Solobat only had thirty candidates. But there are eighty four teams altogether in just the second grade. All of them are three-man teams. Even more intriguing thing is that the first three ces of the solobat.

    Rashma, Chetan and Crow formed a team together and participated.

    Thepetition went on for the old day. Multiple screens were projected so that people could see all the corners of the area and observe the contestants they desire.

    Sam''s eyes were locked on two teams throughout thepetition. The one with the first three winners of the solobat, another team created by three people who were actually the middle of the list of second grade rankings.

    These three people don''t have anything special when ites to their individual prowess.

    They would have lost in first round in the solobat. But when all three of them came together, they had such unique strength. Their movements, thoughts and ideas all matched each other. They are really good.

    Sam thought they had a great chance at winning, but in the end Rashma just overwhelmed them. She beat the crap out of the three while walking right through their traps. It appeared like whatever traps and preparations they had, they are worthless in front of her absolute strength.

    She won with such a straight face that even Sam felt a bit sorry for her opponents.

    That is thestpetition that Sam has spectated and he didn''t care much about the remainingpetition. He just let things be and prepared himself for the finals. Time passed like that.

    Meanwhile, because of the travel andmunication restrictions the information spread between the academies and regions has slowed down. But still, the Olympian region at least knew that Sam not only broke through but is entering the tournament in multiple auxiliarypetitions and solobat.

    This made many people feel lost.

    This only happened a few days before the finals are about begin, so most academies couldn''t spare time to dig for more information, but most of the Olympian region had a bad feeling about this.

    After all, all the major conflicts that happened in the Olympian region somehow had Sam''s name appear in the investigations. He appeared connected and there are some connections they could even establish.

    They even tried to capture and kill him, but he remained safe.

    Now that he is entering the tournament that too solobat, many people, particrly Deans had different thoughts pop-up in their heads. This smelled like a great opportunity to them. An opportunity to deal with Sam without any interference and no direct consequences.

    When the news spread to Zeus academy, Heron and Bloody Chariot were already finalizing the list of students that would go to the finals.

    "This kid, Sam. What is he nning now?" Heron muttered.

    Bloody Chariot looked at him and asked.

    "Christos told me that you are the one that told him to investigate Sam. At first, I didn''t think much, but after taking up the position as the Dean and the information that I got¡­ I understand it now.

    That guy really might be the mastermind behind all this."

    "He could be."

    "So, what do you think he is nning now?"

    "I don''t know. But t wouldn''t be good. He knew that he has a giant target on his back. Not just from the Olympian academies, but other academies as well. In fact, they might desire him more than us.

    Right now, the Olympian academies lost too much. Man power, resources, students, reputation. The only way we can recover is by gaining something huge and hub the biggest thing right now.

    Sam is the only possible link that we can use to get to the hub.

    Even if it is just to reduce the Olympian academies'' chances they would go after him. They would either try to control him orpletely destroy him."

    "And that will only cause more chaos. So, you think he is doing this just cause that chaos."

    "It is more than likely."

    As they are discussing, someone came without even a knock on the door.

    It is a familiar face, or rather a familiar mask.

    "It seems like I am slipping way too much. Just a first grade brat is not even respecting the Dean''s office and just barged in like its his home."

    Bloody Chariot said the words very calmly, but White who just entered stiffened in the ce. He started sweating that instant. Bloody Chariot''s aura pressed on White making him want toy t on the floor without any resistance.

    He came with so much emotion that he forgot basic manners. It didn''t even take much time to get that lesson though.

    "I¡­ am¡­"

    "I don''t want your apology. But you better have a damn good reason to barge in like this. Otherwise, expect some punishment befitting of your arrogance."

    Bloody Chariot spoke. Heron stayed silent as if he is not even there.

    Because right now, he is still not the active Dean. After Theron left, Dean Heron understood that there is no way to absolve himself. He just has to wait it out. So, Boody Chariot kept the Dean''s position, but made Heron do most of the work.

    But in front of the students, Heron refused to speak or act in the authority of the Dean.

    "Sir, I am going to attempt my breakthrough to second grade. I aim to do it before our academy members deploy to the finals. So, I want to be allowed as a participant of the Solobat."

    Bloody Chariot dropped the document in his hand and looked at White with a smirk.

    He gave him a once over and said.

    "You are indeed on the verge of breakthrough, but I don''t believe you are at a point to breakthrough in just a couple of days. At least not without external assistance.

    And if you are going to use external assistance, I can only say that it is not advisable. As one of the promising students of the academy, your safety and growth are also my concerns.

    So, I would try to even slightly force you to not make that decision.

    And even setting aside all of that, there is no way I can just let you enter the tournament in Solo Combat."

    "I understand why it would be difficult sir. So, I will prove myself. I will earn my right to participate. All I ask is an opportunity to prove myself."

    "Prove yourself? What do you think you prove yourself with? All the participants from our academy are peak stage students, except for one. That guy is inte stage and is on the verge of breakthrough. Unlike you, he has an actual chance of breaking through before the finals.

    And, you said just a chance? Seems like you are handed everything way too easily, since you can''t even understand the significance of a chance.

    I would like you to get lost now. Don''t evere in front of me unless I demand to see you."

    Bloody Chariot didn''t even raise his voice and sent White out.

    Days passed. White was unable to breakthrough, but the world still moved on and it is time to go to the Norse region.

 Chapter 2274 Straight to the Point

    Chapter 2274 Straight to the Point

    Norse region.

    The city that usually is full of hustle and bustle is silent. Even if there are nomoners and there are only students, the number is in tens of thousands in one region. It should have been thriving. That was how it was when they camest time.

    And now, instead of just freshmen tournament, it is a full tournament of the academies.

    This is the biggest test the academies take and this basically decides their ranking among the hundred Divine Academies. So many people, the students from other regions, elders,moners, outsiders, everyone should have visited this ce.

    But right now, there are barely any people in the city, except for the elders and the participants that came to represent their academies.

    "Why do I have to do this again?" Choruszily muttered his frustrations as they walked to their destination.

    Paradise Inn.

    The building that they stayed at when they came for the Freshman tournament. It has obviously changed owners. After learning of Ivar''s actions and his departure, the Thor academy quickly upied this ce.

    So, it neither had the previous level of service nor it had the same majesty.

    It looked pretty dull. There is definitely some seriouspses in maintenance. The building is still solid and the rooms are free and wide. Usually, with the increased number of contestants for this tournament, inns wouldn''t be sufficient.

    After all, this time in particr, there are hundred academies participating.

    There is no way all of those people will fin in the inns, with each academy having more than a hundred people for all thepetitions in all the gradersbined. However, since most of the Norse region has been emptied out, there are a lot of buildings.

    So, there is no trouble for upancy. Everyone got their own room. Sam managed to get his old room at the paradise inn back. The room service is certainlycking though. The opening ceremony is that evening and as usual, the auxiliarypetitions will begin first.

    The Dean did say that there will be some changes in the format, they will also be announced that evening.

    Sam almost got bored waiting for the ceremony to begin.

    Usually, this time gap is created so that people can socialize a bit. The different regions might havepetitive agendas, but benefits can be increased by rtionships like this. Students also take the opportunity to do so.

    However, this time no one is in the mood for that.

    Every region suffered a bit and the tensions are really high. Particrly the Olympian academies and some Sanatan academies. They faced the most losses, so both of them are especially vignt.

    At the evening, Sam followed the group of Gambler academy members to reach the Thor academy.

    In therge open ground of the academy, all the participants from various regions were seated along with the representative elders that came with them.

    It was like arge open-air auditorium. Everyone got their own seat. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    f stood at the one and only stage, all alone as he addressed the people.

    "Wee everyone to the Annual Inter-academy tournament.

    I believe that with everything that is going on, there is a lot of tension. But this tournament is our tradition and it represents the long standing survival and prosperity of the academy realm. So, I hope that all of you can find the lost vigor and excitement for this.

    I am sure, a lot of young heroes are waiting to show off their skills.

    So, I will keep the small talk to minimal and get straight to the point. As you might have been informed, a decision has been made to keep the format of the tournament a bit a different from the previous years. All hundred academies sent their representatives.

    That is of course the biggest and the most notable change.

    For that reason, the scale of thepetition will be a lot bigger than usual. Most of thepetitions will remain same as well.

    We are going to host the auxiliarypetitions first before we go for thebatpetitions.

    Because of the high number of participants most of thepetitions might take longer than usual and there will be moreyers to each of thepetition. They will be exined more when thepetitions begin.

    As you all know, these results will hold a significant weightage in your academy rankings, so I hope everyone can perform their best¡­"

    Even though f said that he will keep it short, his tirade went on for a while before he actually came to the point that Sam was most intrigued by.

    "With the all the changes that I mentioned, there is one big change in thepetition. That is the Solo Combat.

    Usually, there would have been a tournament style preliminarypetition until the 32 top participants were selected before another tournament stylepetition to decide the top 5 winners.

    However, this time there are way too many participants. So, we made a decision to make the preliminaries more interesting."

    f paused for a moment and continued.

    "From the moment that you step out of the Thor academy gates after this opening ceremony, the preliminaries for the Solo Combat begins."

    He paused once again as people became and started murmuring.

    "What you heard is right, from the moment you step out of this ce, the solobat prelims will begin.

    The whole city is your arena and the cultivators can fight their respective grade students in the city. Of course, there are a set of rules here.

    Anypetitor can track, ambush, challenge or even try to assassinate their fellowpetitors of the same grade. However, you cannot team up, take the help of your seniors or elders and no external interference would be tolerated.

    If you are helped by someone, your fellow peer or otherwise, you will be eliminated.

    The fights can be done anywhere and anytime, except for when one of the participants is also participating in anotherpetition. Only in that time that participant cannot be challenged or attacked.

    Apart from that, the students can use any means.

    You can attack your opponent when they are sleeping, or eating or just finished fighting another opponent.

    Of course, there is also the problem with people trying to bend the rules and attacking an opponent together. But there is a rule to ensure that won''t happen. If two candidates are engaged, then those two candidates are not be engaged or attacked by anyone else.

    The engagement could be a direct attack, a sneak attack, a verbal challenge from face to face, or even a sneaky poisonous attempt.

    All the solobat participants will be given a special token that they have to attack to their clothes all the time.

    By default it will show an yellow color, which indicates that you are neither engaged, nor eliminated. If the token turns green, that means you are engaged with another candidate and you are off limits for the rest.

    The engagement no matter how small will always be detected. Even if you involuntarily taste the poison left behind by one of the other candidates, you will know. But you will not the name of your opponent.

    Only that you have an opponent.

    Of course, you might be thinking how can I ensure that you won''t be able to attack or get attacked when you are not supposed to.

    Preparations have been made. The whole city, including the academy grounds have all been surrounded with a special formation. In this time, if you are attacked by someone or something while you are already engaging with some other participant, you will be protected by this formation.

    The formation will also not allow you to attack anyone else if you are already engaging with someone else.

    The attacks could even be from a person at the level of the Dean or Grand elder, they will be defendedpletely.

    Now,ing to the elimination criteria. It is very simple actually.

    Death, and direct surrender. Those are the only two criteria. Even if you are unconscious, it wouldn''t matter. Your opponent cane and kill you. The only way to avoid death is to beat your opponent, surrender yourself, or in the nick of time, your elder has to notify the surrender in your behalf.

    The formation will listen to you and protect you up on your surrender.

    Also, the formation will strictly prohibit the usage of Divine artefacts that exceed thepetition limit. The participants can use formations, inscriptions, etc. But they should also not exceed a certain range. The judgement will be left for the formation only.

    As I said before.

    Only sixteen people will remain at the end.

    The remaining will be a normal tournament. I wish everyone all the luck in the world. Hope the best student wins."

    With that Sam lost the interest again. There are some rules that were exined once again. However, no one is in a mood to listen.

 Chapter 2275 Attack

    Chapter 2275 Attack

    Ceremony ended.

    Everyone is a bit nervous and vignt. Not a single one of them stepped forward or moved. Everyone is hesitant to be the first group to move and they also don''t want to be thest group either. The moment one of them stepped outside, the Solobat for all the grades will begin.

    And they are nervous because this is the home ground of Norse academies.

    They also discovered something else. Not a lot of Norse academy students are there in the ceremony. There are some who took the front rows in that open air auditorium. But their number is not as high as the students from the other academies.

    At first, people didn''t care much.

    They just assumed only some select few students came and sat here to make sure there is enough room for guests.

    But now, they have a different understanding.

    All thanks to their elders. After the rules were announced, first thing the elders did was to take note of the participants from the Norse academies. Even Chorus did that and a message was passed to the students in secret.

    "There is a chance that the Norse students are waiting in ambush outside."

    After all, it is home ground and even if the Dean f abided by the rules and didn''t give the full info to the Norse students, he could have still implied it. Since thepetition is going to start right away, what is the point of not taking advantage of it despite being the home teams?

    For Honor? Pfft

    Anyway, now they are all in a pickle, the first team to go out might face the ambush. But being ater team to cross the door is not exactly a good thing either. Theter they go, the more variables that they have to deal with.

    Chorus looked at the Gambler academy students and said.

    "f said that the participants of otherpetitions will be protected by the formation as well. So, if the solobat teams are not such wimps, we can get out. All these rows of people, I am feeling suffocated here.

    I want to go back to my room andy down for a while."

    His voice is loud, he didn''t hold back at all and just said it out loud.

    Sam looked at Dove. The person who is part of the fourth grade solobat and also part of the teambat.

    Dove also looked at him and shrugged. She actually couldn''t care less about this. She then looked at the rest of fourth gradebat participants. They also hesitated for a moment before all of them came to consensus.

    Just like that, the Gambler academy is the first one to move.

    The participants of the otherpetitions walked leisurely. They were indeed nervous at first, after all who could entrust their whole lives to just to the operational efficiency of a formation? What is it suddenly shut off?

    However, up on repeated assurance from Chrous, they believed it and walked leisurely. When the Gambler academy group moved, the rest of the academies became a bit relieved and also prepared. After the Gambler academy leaves, they would surely know if there is an ambush or not.

    From then on, they can boldly move knowing what might or might not hit them.

    See, it is the fear of unknown that terrified them more than the actual danger.

    The Gambler academy group stepped out and walked a few meters into the street leading to the Paradise inn. As they slowly walked and vigntly looked around, Dove made a move.

    *SWOOSH*

    She jumped to the air and caught something with her hand beforending again.

    It is an arrow. Except for the other fourth graders and Chrous, no one in the group, including Sam has seen it. It is so fast and too powerful for their level of people to even witness it.

    Dove looked at the arrow, then at the ce it was about tond. It is one of the solobat members and also an archer. This made her raise an eyebrow.

    *SWOOSH*

    Another arrow flew by and this was aimed at the archer only. The original target.

    *BANG*

    An energy barrier appeared around the target blocking the arrow.

    At that moment, Dove''s token turned green. She couldn''t help but smile at this.

    She basically stopped the arrow from hitting one of their academy students, but in process made herself locked in an engagement with an opponent she has yet to see. The only thing she knew is that the other party is an archer.

    Anyway, she is not too worried about this and as an added bonus they also managed to test the protection of the barrier.

    *SWOOSH*

    Another arrow came but this time it was more powerful and it was aimed at Dove directly.

    Dove casually threw the arrow in her hand. It collided with theing arrow nullifying it.

    "Let''s move."

    She suggested and all of them followed her.

    *SWOOSH* *BOOM*

    On their way, there were several attacks, but they are all for fourth graders. It seems like the fourth graders are the only ones who got targeted. The third graders and second graders didn''t have any obstruction at all.

    They soon reached Paradise inn.

    "Tomorrow it is the formationpetition for the second graders. Sam, you are part of thepetition and are also participating in the solobat. So, make sure that you are not injured and lose your shot in thepetition tomorrow.

    It shouldn''t be too hard to do so.

    The rest of you, just make sure you don''t get killed. I will go and take rest."

    Chorus left while yawning.

    "Why did this guy bezierpared to thest time?"

    Sam muttered and walked to his room.

    His door opened¡­ at that moment

    *CLICK* *SWISH* *BOOM*

    The click of the door being closed, something flyingthrough the room which suddenly appeared unusually dark and an explosion.

    All of them happened at the same time.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM* n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    It did just stop there though. Multiple attacks followed through and finally it stopped. The ck formation tes attached to the windows to create this artificial darkness are removed. It is a weird type of darkness.

    It not only obscured the vision, it even obscured the spiritual sense.

    A young man is standing inside the room as he looked at the copsed humanoid figure at the door.

    His smile froze instantly.

    The young man is tall, almost seven feet. Had a body that looked like it was chiseled out of marble stone. And the blonde hair thatplemented him very well. The perplexed and lost expression contradicted that handsome face very well.

    It is a peak stage cultivator from Thor academy.

    And as he watched with his mouth wide open, the shadow undead that copsed at the door stood up.

    At the same time.

    *CLICK*

    Sam opened the door and looked at him with a smile.

    "Nice set up."

    "How¡­"

    The man was about to speak, but Sam made his move.

    *SWOOSH*

    A knife was thrown at him. The opponent dodged it very easily and it went past him. Then he took out his hammer and was ready to pounce on Sam.

    The undead in front of Sam, lunged at him to block the attack. At the same time¡­

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam disappeared from his spot and reappeared at the knife that he just threw. (A/N: Inspired by flying raijin)

    *BANG*

    The opponent tried to turn around after sensing Sam''s movement, but Sam already fired his gun.

    *BOOM*

    An energy bullet. It is a bullet that haspressed fire elemental energy liquid. It was actually a rtively crude thing Sam has created. He created a small metallic cylinder with the materials that are usually used to make the spatial storage rings.

    He created a small spatial storage and filled it with the energy liquid to the brim. Then, this cylinder was used as the skeletal structure for the hollow bullet which was filled with energy liquid once again.

    As soon as Sam channeled his energy into the gun, the bullet destabilized, while the spatial container cylinder cracked, spewing the liquid out.

    It was fired and the liquid burst out as it moved towards the target and finally¡­

    It exploded at the target.

    The shockwave hit Sam even though he was already prepared with defenses. He was blown through the window and flew out of the building. He controlled himself as he looked at the burning room from there.

    The opponent stood there with his arm blown off. The bulletnded on his huge tricep, exploding it. Fire energy is spreading through body, raving it. it created lines like veins all over him.

    "That was quite a hit. You should have worn some defense artifacts."

    Sam muttered and aimed his gun once again.

    The opponent looked terrified. He hurriedly tried to suppress the fire energy and retreated. Leaping off through the open door. Sam of course, didn''t want to let him go.

    *SWOOSH*

    He went back into the burning room.

 Chapter 2276 Old Strategist

    Chapter 2276 Old Strategist

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam dashed through the burning room and appeared in the hallway.

    The opponent took some real damage. He was stumbling as he tried to run, but tried to keep up his pace. As he did that, he started dropping formation discs that created barriers to keep Sam at Bay.

    Sam just aimed his hand gun and started shooting as he moved forward.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    One formation after another was knocked down easily. The distance between him and the opponent closed down. At that moment, the opponent already reached the other end of the hallway. Sam is just a couple of feet away.

    Now, he could either turn to the side and roll down the stairs or¡­ well he chose the second option. He gritted his teeth and jumped out of the window.

    Sam lunged forward and stood at the window before shooting down.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    By now, there are dozens of people inside and outside Paradise inn all looking at the spectacle. They saw as Sam shot down his opponent who was free falling.

    *BAM*

    The opponent crashed into the ground, leaving a crater. His body is burning with mes and the surroundings are melting down. It was eerily simr to a meteor strike. Sam jumped down the window andnded beside the opponent.

    The opponent lost consciousness and is barely breathing.

    He couldn''t possibly dere his surrender. Sam shrugged and aimed the gun at his head.

    *BAM*

    When he shot, a barrier appeared around the opponent and the bullet''s force was negated. The energy dispersed and the metal shell just bounced back. The token on Sam''s body which was green a moment ago, turned back to Yellow.

    Meanwhile, the token on the opponent''s body turned to red and a crack appeared on it.

    Sam raised an eyebrow as he observed the surroundings. The opponent surely couldn''t have surrendered. So, the only possible exnation is that the elder in charge has dered the surrender, saving this guy''s life. That mean''s the elder is definitely around.

    Of course, if the other party deliberately tried to hide, there is no way Sam could find his presence.

    He shrugged and went back to the inn. Luckily, there are no many people on his floor and not all of them came back there after ceremony. Maybe they were discussing strategy among themselves. Or they were hunting down others. Or, they are not participating the Solo Combat and are minding their own business.

    Sam just picked one of the empty rooms and decided to stay there.

    This time, there is no one waiting in ambush for him. Heid down on his bed and looked at the gun and the special bullet that he used. He is actually surprised that this bullet was not stopped by the formation.

    After all, the damage created by this bullet is extremely unnatural. It is not like there are a bunch of people running around with the capabilities to liquify energy and then making it explode.

    It is a very rare skill to begin with.

    The explosion that stems from that kind of energy is not small. Sam reckoned that even the Divine ne Pre-transcendence cultivators will feel the punch from it. So, he half guessed that the formation would have blocked the attack.

    His whole intention was to test that impact.

    He was already ready with another bullet in case it failed. But luckily for him, the attack passed the threshold and he dealt with opponent easily. Without breaking a sweat.

    Of course, his tests didn''t stop there. He sat up and started inscribing some more bullets and took out some formation discs. He wanted to see exactly what the limit is.

    He attached the formation discs to the windows of the room, to the doors and even ced one at the window of the hallway.

    He then sat down in meditation.

    Meanwhile, back in one of the other buildings near the Paradise inn.

    "Elder, that brute head is almost dead. I told you that even if he used so many tricks, he won''te back with a victory against Sam. From all the information we gathered, that guy named Sam is cunning like a damned fox.

    How could he have not prepared against such an obvious trap.

    Now we lost someone unnecessarily. The Healers are telling me that the damage is way too high and they don''t know if he will recover by teambat. How am I supposed topete in teambat if he is like this?"

    A young man with long ck hair and two knives hanging down his waist spoke to the Eklder in an aggrieved tone.

    The Elder with white hair isying down on the bed as he looked at the ceiling, lost in his own thoughts.

    He is an Elder from the Thor academy and he is helping the kids with the strategy to take out the opponents.

    He has picked a few opponents and marked them as immediate targets. The five people from the Second grade of Thor academy went to eliminate these five targets. Only problem is that the four of them seeded while the fifth one was the guy Sam folded just now.''

    "He should have easily killed that kid. What is the point of being at the Peak stage and still losing to a middle stage child. I wonder how he even came this far."

    The elder muttered and sat up.

    He is the one that dered surrender for that kid and saved him from dying.

    The young man didn''t like the way the elder dismissed his friend who got his ass kicked by Sam.

    "I don''t think it is right to underestimate the threat of Sam. I even told you that I would go, but instead you sent him, who is known for his brute strength with such a simple strategy.

    In a way this is more your fault that his."

    The Elder looked at him with a sneer and said.

    "If you are done with your whining, then I have some new advice for you, Harron."

    "Please tell us."

    "Simple, just from the way that kid Sam battled, I feel like he has more tricks up his sleeve. So, he would be a hard opponent to take down.

    So, my suggestion is that we leave that guy alone, while at the same time use him for our benefit."

    "What do you mean?"

    "The reason why I picked the five guys that you went after is that they are the variables that differed my original calction. Even with all the things I understood about this guy named Sam, I never ever expected that he would be participating in this year''s Inter academy tournament.

    The other four are also the same, they are the variables that I didn''t ount for. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    It was all because of theck of urate information of these people. So, I wanted you guys to eliminate them first. You seeded in dealing with the first four as they were indeed as I expected, made it into the final five by some fluke.

    I thought Sam is also same, but he managed to turn the tables around on us.

    We cannot estimate what kind of measures he used to deal with him. So, we go with the next best option, we will use others to deal with him. I am sure, you guys will be targeted from now. So, your job is to make sure that you are not attacked.

    You need to instead guide them and deliver them to this guy named Sam and make sure that both of them engage. That way, you will definitely have much less trouble in this whole game."

    "It is easier said that done." Harron snickered, obviously not trusting the idea too much.

    "Harron, this is our home ground. This is the ce, you have been staying for years now. Can''t you use theyout of the city to your benefit? The city has also been modified a lot to improve our defenses, don''t tell me, you don''t know them and know how to use them?

    Use the escape paths, diversion mechanisms, and the secret pathways that will provide us ess to all the areas in the city.

    You can easily do it if you put your mind to it."

    "But what if that guy, just holes up in his room?"

    "He is a candidate for other auxiliarypetitions. Do you think he has a luxury to just stay in there?

    There are three hundred participants for the formationpetition tomorrow, do you think they can just chuck them all into the castle and then conduct thepetition on such arge scale? The formation castle is not designed to hold that many people.

    Not at that level.

    There are prelims that will go for the whole day tomorrow and then there are finals the day after.

    See, he is going toe out two days in a row, right after today? There are otherpetitions too.

    This is all basic information that you can gain just from asking the service staff stationed in Paradise inn.

    You need to learn to gather this info, if you want to attain a significant position in the realm or even in the battlefield."

 Chapter 2277 Formation Prelims

    Chapter 2277 Formation Prelims

    Sam stayed in his room the whole night.

    But there are no more attacks. However, Dove did pay him a visit.

    "You almost destroyed a whole floor."

    That''s her opening line for the conversation.

    "Can''t help it. The opponent is a bit too powerful and I cannot let him drag the fight out. Or I would have been dead."

    "I am d you are safe. You might be the biggest variable that ever stirred up an Inter academy tournament. Even with my limited experience, I participated in these for over twelve times, I have never seen anyone that is as eventful as this one with all the hundred academies participating.

    As if that is not enough, you are here and created such argemotion on the first day itself.

    I hope that you will be careful."

    "Don''t worry. I will. My actions mighte off as reckless and might make me look like I am looking for death, but I do like living. I still have a lot of things to do before I die."

    "That''s good to know. And I hope that you can reach out to us when you need help. That is what I wanted to tell you. It is true that there is some tension between you and other students. The Gambler academy did suffer a bit and a lot of them me you for it.

    They do know, the academy would have done the same thing for them as well. Still, they are only people. They wille around in time. So, please don''t hold it against them and don''t stay isted."

    "Don''t worry. I am fine and I am not really the shy type. I will keep your words in mind and reach out to you when needed."

    "Good. Now rest well. I am hoping you would show us some great things in the formation prelims tomorrow."

    "I will try my best."

    That night the city was full of encounters and battles. However, Sam was left undisturbed. He managed to get some good rest while he worked on some designs and calctions for fun.

    The next morning, he followed the gambler academy team to go to the formation event. On his way, Sam kept an eye on surroundings to see if anyone would attack. But he didn''t see anything unusual. Most of the Gambler academy people are targeted across different grades.

    But to his surprise, he wasn''t targeted at all.

    At least he could think so, until he reached the entrance of the academy.

    As soon as he started climbing the stairs to enter the academy.

    *SWOOSH*

    A spear came streaking towards him. Sam turned to the side and it went past him. A few feet away, there stood Rashma, who caught the spear that came at her.

    Sam look at his token and then at hers. Rashma''s turned green while his stayed yellow.

    It was clearly aimed at Sam and it was done at thest moment, maybe they thought Sam would be too lost in the nervousness of attending the formation contest. But he was attentive enough.

    All in all, he could only say that whoever that made this move is an idiot. They should have at least tried more stealth, better strategy and better technique.

    Rashma looked in the direction from which the attack came from.

    The attacker didn''t even hide properly. She leaped and disappeared into the buildings going after the attacker.

    Sam felt a bit sad for whoever threw that spear. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    "That guy is dead meat."

    Crow said it out loud as they walked into the academy. Sam and the other formationpetition participants moved to the testing area.

    This is actually the same open air auditorium that they were at yesterday. They were all assigned a position and in front of each of them was arge stone table with multiple inscriptions. Sam ced his hand and used his observation ability.

    What he got from the analysis made him a bit intrigued. The inscription has a pretty simple purpose. That is to erase the elemental nature of the stone. Basically, the earth element that is inherent to the stone table is now nullified. So, whatever formation that is created on that stone table will not be effected by that earth element.

    Apart from that, there is also arge red circle on the table.

    This is not connected to the inscription and it was just there.

    Soon, three elders appeared on the stage on which f stood the day before. Each of them wore different robes.

    One is the standard Thor academy''s ceremonial robes, the elders wear on special asions, the other two belonged to Hel academy and Heimdall''s academy.

    The Thor academy''s elder cleared his throat and exined.

    "Hello my dear students.

    Good morning to you all. Today the officialpetition for the best formation master of the second grade among all the academies will begin.

    For thispetition, we have a lot more people that previously anticipated because of the sudden change of rules. So, we are going to change thepetition model a bit.

    You have two preliminaries before we pick the top ten people who will reach the finals. The finals will be conducted in the Formation castle. The same castle in which the freshman formationpetition was conducted.

    Of course, the necessary requirements for the second grade have been made.

    Anyway, the first preliminary is based on elemental harmony. Each one of you is assigned to a table. On that table, you need to create a formation. The scale of the formation has to be limited to that table.

    The goal of the formation is pretty simple. The area of the stone table within the red circle has to be protected by the formation. The elders here will use the same attack on all your formations multiple times.

    They will keep on attacking until the table breaks. The longer your table endures, the higher your score will be.

    I hope everyone understood until now. After all, it is pretty straightforward."

    The students nodded.

    "Now, herees the twist. The formation you have to make should project the concept of elemental harmony.

    You should create the formation with at least three elements which coexist without any conflict between them. If your formation has less than three elements involved, you are automatically disqualified.

    The more elements you use and moreyers you use, the more points you will get. It is your choice what elements that you want to use and how you want to use them. But all the elements should have equal importance and equal role in the formation.

    You are also disqualified if the formation copses before you finish construction.

    You only have once chance.

    You can also use any materials that you can handle.

    You can even request the materials and our academy will provide it to you. You have two hours to finish the formation.

    And the time starts now."

    As soon as the elder announced the start of the time, everyone hurriedly started taking out their simtion devices. These devices are very umon in the lower levels. Like thes that only has Astral ne cultivation as limit.

    However, in these high level realms, there are some formation tes that could be used to simte the formations using the spirit stones.

    Sam looked at them with intriguing gazes.

    They are all nervous, excited and anxious about the results. It seems like not a lot of them are confident about this.

    However, all Sam had to do was close his eyes and think a bit. That too not to design something right now, rather to decide on what design he has to pick.

    All the requirements that the elder has spoke, he has done these a million times before and the ''million'' part is not even an overstatement. Every time he tries to create a new thing, invent some new formation, a device or anything new, he always experiments a lot.

    These formations are also parts of those experiments.

    Literally, any part within the machinery of the hub is a dozen timesplicated than what the current task is.

    The formations used in the bird puppets are behemoths whenpared to this task and these things can only be considered as measly ants. He wondered what all these people are even doing without practicing such things when they are hoping to be experts in the art of formations.

    Sam took out a liquid energy capsule and ced it at the center of the table. It has enough energy to sustain Sam''s recovery needs by half.

    After cing it in the middle, he closed his eyes and ced both of his hands on the stone table. Both of them are outside the circle.

    The next moment, orbs of different elemental energies flew out of his hands and started circting around the red circle with the energy capsule as the center. Every element that he could control is revolving there.

    After that, the orbs started spilling up into smaller orbs as they all connected together with energy lines, creating a formation.

    The orbs acted as energy nodes.

    Finally, the nodes are then connected with the energy capsule which acted as both energy source and as the core of the formation.

    That is all, the formation is done.

    It has only been five minutes since thepetition started and for two minutes, Sam was just looking at others.

    Now, he didn''t know what else to do.

 Chapter 2278 Result

    Chapter 2278 Result

    Sam looked at the rest of the participants, not knowing what to do. After a minute, he raised his hand, hoping to gain the attention of the elders. When the three elders saw him, they frowned.

    One of the attendants in charge of overseeing the needs of thepetitiors ran towards him.

    "Student, what do you need?" The attendant asked Sam, while looking at the peculiar looking formation on the table.

    The formation looked like a cylinder that was formed by stacking the circles on each other with the help of orbs. On top of the cylinder was a slightly conical shape that covered up the stop.

    Each of these circles contained a bunch of elements all of them creating a formation.

    The attendant was lost in daze as he looked at it.

    "I am done." Sam said calmly.

    ''"What?" The attendant came out of the daze and asked. He thought he heard wrong.

    "I am done with my formation."

    "Student. I hope that you are not making a mistake here. It is good to be confident, but if your formation doesn''t meet the standards you will be eliminated. You should continue to work on it."

    The attendant hurriedly said as he looked around.

    He was genuinely hoping that no one was there to here Sam''s words. Because once a person dered that they are done with the formation, they are done. They cannot tweak with it.

    The attendant who is more aged and experienced, didnt want a kid to lose his position in thepetition because of a momentary impulse.

    At least, that is what he believed.

    In his eyes, Sam just made a formation that barely meets the requirements and decided that it would be enough to pass.

    Sam looked at the old man and sighed. Ever since he came to the academy realm, it has been a while since he saw eyes like that. Everyone who was in a position of a teacher or in a position of authority within this realm are all drunk with arrogance and obsessed with their pride and superiority.

    This guy being an attendant showcased the concern to a student who is not even from his academy. And this is the first time he has seen it.

    However, his concerns are wasted on a wrong person.

    Sam was about gently insist that he is done, when one of the Elders who wore the Hel academy robes came to them.

    "You are done student?"

    "Sir¡­" The attendant was about to say something when the elder gestured him to stop.

    Sam just shrugged and said.

    "Yes, I am."

    "You are Sam, aren''t you? The winner of the freshman tournament."

    "I am."

    "Seems like the arrogance of the freshman tournament has gone to your head. Not only did you¡­"

    "Can you please spare me the lecture and just tell me what do I need to do now."

    Everyone was expecting a lecture as soon as the elder started speaking. However, Sam is a bit done with these words. It is one thing for Manson who was a senior to him in the academy to speak to Sam like that.

    But this elder, particrly of the Hel academy has no business butting his nose into his business.

    "You little¡­"

    "Elder, I don''t take swearing well. Particrly, when ites from the people who have no actual authority or seniority over me."

    ".."

    "And I am also known to be petty. I might just take it out on someone of my size from your academy if I get pissed off by whatever you are going to say. So, please be careful with the words you omit out of your mouth."

    "YOU¡­."

    The Elder lost his cool and his energy raged. The surrounding students all flinched at the sudden hit of energy. Their formations copsed and all the preparation they have done was gone

    "ELDER MANGUS."

    A sudden yell came from the Thor academy''s elder.

    Elder Mangus turned around to look at his peer.

    "Is this the etiquette an elder in charge of thepetition should show?" His voice is stern.

    After Mangus stayed put, he turned to the students and said.

    "Those who have experienced the disturbance from Elder, you can now restart your test." He then turned to the old attendant and said.

    "Please mark their names separately so that they could be given the appropriate time."

    The attendant bowed and went to do his job.

    The Thor academy''s elder then turned to Sam and looked at the formation on the table.

    "I heard that you are done."

    "Yes, sir."

    "If you want, you can stay here and wait until the whole test is concluded. Or, you can sit and rest along with the audience. However, you need to be in the premises until thepetition is over."

    "Alright. However, can I ask you something?"

    "Please."

    "Can I expect a fair test from the Elders?"

    His words stunned everyone. The students, the Elders and most importantly Mangus.

    The elder of Thor academy gave a disgusting look to Mangus and said.

    "I understand why you would think that. But the Thor academy is in charge of thispetition and we won''t stake our honor just to satiate one Elder''s pettiness."

    Sam chuckled at this. Almost as if he was being tickled. In reality, he felt like he was being tickled by those words.

    After all, just in the freshman tournament a couple of months ago, he faced rigging. Not just by anyone, but by the one and only son of the Thor academy''s Dean.

    So, these words obviously sounded funny. Sam was almost tempted to poke at it a bit, but he refrained from doing so. He didn''t want the Thor academy''s dirty secret to be out. Not from his own words at least.

    He went to the gallery and sat there looking at the others perform.

    The time passed by rtively quickly. While he was in the middle of it, he saw Rashmae back with some blood on her hands. She must have destroyed that poor guy who threw a spear at her.

    (A/N: Apologies. In the prev Chapter, I mentioned Marron instead of Rashma. It is corrected now)

    While the time went a boring pace for Sam, it is not the same for the other students, spectators and even the elders.

    There are many exciting designs among the participants. After everyone is done, the evaluation started.

    All three elders raised their hands and conjured energy attacks aiming at all the tables at the same time. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    *BOOM*

    A resonating and explosive sound clouded everyone''s ears as all the attacksnded at the same time.

    *CRASH* *BOOM* *CRACK*

    Sounds of varying level appeared from various tables. There are many tables that were destroyed with just the first round of attacks.

    Most of the formations copsed because the bnce between the elements has been ruined. Most of them overreached and tried to go with more elements or moreyers. This made the formationplex and the bnce was barely reached.

    So, the first significant disturbance caused them to be destroyed.

    The second round of attacks conjured. This time they are a lot less in number and a bit more lethal.

    *BOOM*

    Second attack.

    Third attack.

    Fourth

    Fifth

    The attacks came one after another.

    By fifth attack, less than a quarter of the formations left.

    "All the people that endured until now, will be eligible for the next round of preliminaries."

    One of the elders announced. However, they didn''t stop for the students to be excited and the attacks went on.

    There is no reason for them to attack. The ranking in the prelims will have no impact in theter rounds. But the scores will be given and the rankings will announced.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Ten more formations copsed.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The attacks went on. Sam looked bored. Unbeknownst to him, he is actually the center of the attention, at least his formation is. Sam finished first. No one ever is close enough to beat his record. Five minutes¡­

    Even the elders are not confident toy down a formation like that. That too with elemental harmony.

    *BOOM*

    It was twenty fifth attack before only three formations were left. Sam''s still standing proud. Only two more people were left along with him and both of them are from Viswakarma''s academy.

    Sam didn''t find this surprising. Those guys are obsessed with these professions.

    *BOOM*

    Thirty fourth attack.

    The remaining two copsed and Sam''s alone stood. The two elders from the Thor academy and the Heimdall academy stopped their attacks.

    This is enough. The winner has been dered and that winner made the wholepetition look like a joke.

    What two hours? What preparation? What harmony and bnce?

    Sam''s formation only conveyed one statement.

    "This is child''s y."

    The elders wanted to go and rip that formation apart. However, the elder from Hel academy who is more pissed off than anyone else kept on attacking.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    Fiftieth attacknded.

    *CRASH*

    Dust rose and a massive energy fluctuation could be felt from the ce of the formation. Mangus grinned like a mad man.

    Sam smiled at this and stood up as he walked away from there.

    The dust settled and everyone was ready to be dispersed. The Elders left and the gallery was emptied. If the formation test took two hours, the evaluation took more than that. The next round is tomorrow, while some otherpetition will be done in the afternoon.

    For that, the students of the Thor academy under the guidance of the Elder in charge started cleaning up the area.

    As he passed by, the elder saw something in Sam''s rubble.

    He frowned and waved his hand, the rubble cleared up and in the middle was something that shook him. A stone b in the shape of a perfect circle. The circle exactly outlined by the red circle they drew.

    He just understood something. Sam''s formation copsed at fiftieth attack. But it didn''t lose directly to the attack, instead it was destroyed, because the rest of the stone table copsed from the attack and couldn''t withstand the formation.

    All of a sudden, the elder had a bad feeling about this.

 Chapter 2279 Relentless

    Chapter 2279 Relentless

    Whatever happened at the formation prelims, has spread like wildfire. Sam''s performance has gone above and beyond whatever expectations the elders held for the participants. Not only did he create it fast, he also made the formationst so well, that even when the table broke, the part of the b within the circle didnt even have a single scratch on it.

    That is the gist of the report that was sent to all the academy teams by the spies who are disguised as spectators in the arena.

    And the report went even before Sam left the grounds of Thor academy group.

    After the prelims are over, Sam met with the Gambler academy group. A lot of people are still participating in variouspetitions. So, after informing Chorus and Dove, Sam decided to go back to the Inn.

    There is nothing interesting going on at the moment.

    As soon as he stepped out of the Thor academy gate though, he sensed something. *SWOOSH*

    An attacker came out of nowhere. That person wore a ck robe and cloak covering himself. A bunch of inscriptions are glowing on his body and mask, giving him an obscure look.

    They are doing their job very well, which is to conceal his shape and form.

    Sam''s eyes glowed with energy vision and at the same time, he channeled his Raiju bloodline as he dodged the attack.

    He stepped back on to the steps of the academy and looked at the attacker with a frown.

    The other party is a peak stage second grader.

    That is all Sam knew at first nce.

    He immediately activated lightning fusion. He also took out both of his hand guns.

    *SWOOSH*

    The dagger came at him at an incredible speed. Sam kicked the ground and used the utmost speed he could muster in his fusion form to dodge it.

    *BANG* *BANG*

    He shot twice, the attacker dodged both of those bullets and looked at Sam, who is hovering in the air.

    Sam''s mind is running at a speed of million miles per second. Even with energy vision, it is hard to figure who this guy is.

    The mask and the cloak are actually distorting the figure of the person. At this moment, Sam couldnt estimate, how tall he is, if he is lean or bulky, or even his skin tone and race.

    The only thing he is sure of is that he is a participant in the solobat and he is sure of it because of the token that glowed green on his chest.

    *SWISH* *SWOOSH*

    *BANG* Two more swings and Sam took a hit. For some reason he didnt use his guns to make the other party dodge nor did he dodge it himself. He just blocked it with both of his arms.

    After he took the hit though, Sam had an expression of revtion. He became confident immediately and started shooting.

    *BANG* *BANG* BANG*

    One bullet after another were shot at the guy. A scene very familiar to the gambler academy students yed at the school gate. The scene in which Sam yed around with a peak stage cultivator with just his guns.

    For the next few moments, the attacker was unable to even close the gap between himself and Sam.

    "FUCK" N?v(el)B\\jnn

    He cursed and left.

    Sam didn''t chase after him. Instead, he deactivated his fusion form and looked around. By now, there are many spectators watching him. After the first attack, he attracted a lot of attention.

    He looked around for a moment using his energy vision. After ensuring that no one is nearby, he deactivated the fusion form. He took off on harbinger to reach the Paradise inn.

    As soon as he entered his floor and walk to his room through the corridor.

    *SNIFF* *SNIFF*

    Sam sniffed lightly and a smile appeared. He walked to the door and noticed that the defensive formation he left was tripped, but it didn''t work for some reason.

    He took out his handgun and¡­

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    sted it through the door.

    *BOOM*

    The whole room started burning and the mes aren''t even red, orange or gold. Rather they are all of some dark purple color.

    *COUGH* *COUGH*

    *BANG* *BANG*

    He could hear the loud coughs and the banging sound from inside.

    *COUGH*

    Then the coughing sound closed in. The windows are tightly shut with the formations. They are set there to ensure the windows won''t break or open. The formation at the door on the other hand¡­ it was set as a trap to capture the person that enters.

    Even though the formation at the door seemed to have failed, but the formation at the windows stayed intact.

    A young man stumbled through the door as he tried to take deep breaths. He felt suffocated. The poisonous mes are burning all over his body and there was not an ounce of clean air inside. With the windows intact, the only way out for both the smoke and this guyis the main door, that Sam just sted open.

    *GASP*

    As the young man took a deep breath, Sam aimed the gun at his forehead, in the point nk range.

    *BOOM*

    Before he could speak, the bullet exploded his brain. The whole head didn''t explode, instead only the front part of the skull and the brain exploded. The bullet wasn''t strong enough to explode the whole thing. However, it did the deep.

    The young man died and the next moment, the obscurity created by the ck clothes disappeared. It was an artefact. It masked the young man''s body size, face and height. But it didn''t mask his skill set which Sam identified with his hub knowledge and it also didn''t mask his scent, which Sam caught with his Raiju Bloodline.

    Sam crouched down to take the artefact¡­

    *BOOM*

    A loud explosion came from the other side of the room. Someone attacked the window, but the formation discs blocked the attacks.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    The explosive sounds didn''t stop. They are attacking the other side relentlessly. But that is not the only thing.

    Sam looked at the other end of the corridor.

    *BANG* *CRASH*

    The sound of wall breaking and ss crashing following by door breaking. He saw a woman run out of a room and abruptly halt her momentum on the other side. She held a sword. A rapier to be precise and started running at Sam while swinging it wildly.

    *SWOOSH* *KEEN*

    The sword keen and the sword rays both reached Sam within no time. Even before she managed to reach him.

    Sam kicked the ground and jumped into the burning room. He hoped the attacks missed him, but they brushed past him. Barely. His token which didn''t even turn yellow for just a few moments, turned back to green.

    Sam''s face turned cold. Even if he is beaten to death, he wouldn''t believe that this was not deliberate. He is being targeted. But by whom? And for why?

    Sam did expect some heat from the other participants. After all, many people still believed that he is rted to hub and a lot of academies and their elders, particrly the corrupt ones have a bone to pick with him.

    However, he did believe that thepetition takes precendence over their grudges and they wouldn''t worry about dealing with him directly like this. After all, they need his memories. Simply killing him won''t bring them anything.

    For that, thepetition, at least this preliminary one is not an ideal ce. So, he assumed that there would be some safety at least.

    But it seems like someone is a bit desperate.

    *SWOOSH*

    The woman with the rapier arrived at the room. However, she noticed the poisonous gases and cut open the wall directly, letting out as she held her breath. The wall in the corridor was also cut to let the poison sweep quickly.

    The banging on the walls stopped. But Sam could sense that they are still there. The moment he finished her, they will attack once again and even if the windows hold up, the walls wouldn''t.

    Sam thought for a moment, made a decision.

    He put away one of the handguns and took out a hammer.

    *DING* *CRASH*

    A single direct hit on the floor. The whole floor cracked in a fraction of a second, before it crumbled down.

    Sam let himself fall along with it. The woman was caught off guard and fell along with it. By the time she retook control of her body, Sam already made his move.

    Earth element surged through his body. The rubble of the floor which was still falling suddenly stopped before it all gathered at one point. With that woman as the center.

    *CRASH*

    Sam could feel her energy still surging through her de as she tried to break through. He gritted his teeth and increased the pressure. Her superior cultivation is making it hard to keep her like that.

    Sam threw his hand gun into the air and took out a pack of cards from his storage.

    "I haven''t had a chance to test these things yet. Hope they would work."

    He muttered to himself and threw the whole pact at the same them. All the cardsbined moved like a giant snake as it moved around the huge ball of earth and stone locking the opponent.

    The gunnded back in Sam''s hand.

    He aimed at one of the cards, changed the bullet. It is now an attack bullet. An attack that he captured from a Peak stage Second grader in the hub. An attack called Inferno Snake.

    A twisting inferno that takes the form of the snake and burned the opponent from skin to bone.

    *BOOM*

    The bullet turned into inferno snake as it shed with one of the cards.

    The next moment, all the cards glowed and all the Spiritual energy in the surroundings disappeared. It almost created a spiritual energy void in the one kilometer radius.

    All the cards glowed red with mes as they burned and from those mes, inferno snakes came out.

    It all happened within two seconds. Sam immediately took out Harbinger andnded on it.

    His head is aching with the stress on his mental energy.A massive dent in his spiritual energy reserves. However, the attack is worth it.

    *BOOM*

    All the snakes crashed into the ball of stones within which the woman just struggled and managed toe out of.

    An explosion of mes that enveloped everything within the radius of few hundred meters.

    Sam bled from his nose, but harbinger took that as a cue and¡­

    *SWOOSH*

    He disappeared from that point like a sh.

 Chapter 2280 Stress

    Chapter 2280 Stress

    *BOOM*

    mes raged in the skies of the Norse city.

    The st that upied at least a five hundred meter radius, burned everything in its path. Since its in the sky there is not much to begin with. Most of the brunt was also taken by the Paradise Inn.

    Of course, it is still not as much as the woman that came after Sam.

    Sam on the other hand was nowhere to be seen. He disappeared from the people''s eye on his harbinger. Almost like a sh of lightning. The elders of the Norse academies that are in charge of the security came running after they saw the explosion.

    They knew that the people that are not involved in the solobat will bepletely protected by the people that are involved in the solobat. However, every year it is a norm for the elders to monitor the security.

    They arrived at the scene of the explosion and saw the corpse of the woman was burned to the crisp. Except for the token and the spatial ring that she wore, everything else was burned. Even the sword was broken under the impact.

    The eldersnded there and checked her credentials. They found her disciple token that represented her academy.

    Among the two elders, one of them frowned. It was a student from his academy, the Hel academy and he knew the student.

    "She is our Solo and teambat candidate." He muttered only loud enough for the other elder to hear.

    "I am sorry for your loss."

    The other elder spoke casually and walked into the Paradise inn to check the situation.

    Luckily Sam was in the top floor. Previously, he was in the floor below that and it was destroyed because of the previous day''s fight, now that floor and the floor above it which he stayed in now, was also destroyed.

    At least, the floors below it are still okay, except for some slight rubble and the disturbance.

    None of the people that are inside are injured. They are protected from the attacks by the formation.

    The elder sighed at the destruction and noticed that several second grade students are hurriedly moving around as if searching for someone. After asking some questions and exploring some spections he realized that they were after Sam.

    "Oh, boy"

    He muttered and immediately ran back to the Thor academy. He met with f and reported.

    "Sir, it seems like the info about Sam''s performance in formation prelims has reached all the academies. They are faster than we estimated, he is being targeted by the other solobat participants.

    He killed two people. One of them is from Hel academy and the other is from Loki Academy (The guy who died of poison and gun shots. The one who attacked Sam at the academy entrance)"

    f sighed and said.

    "I thought this year''s security will be easier since most of thebat participants are being restrained by the formation from hurting other people.

    But now, even using the solobatants they are using extreme methods."

    "How do you want me to proceed with this, sir?" The elder asked.

    f shook his head and said.

    "What is there to proceed? At least in the previous time, we could have given them warnings for the assassination attempts, but now they are ying within the rules. Even if all the other candidates target him, we cannot do anything.

    Just leave him be and do not interfere. The formation wouldn''t take it lightly. It is programmed that way."

    "Alright, sir."

    After the elder left, f took a swig of some hard liquor.

    "Why the fuck is that guy here this time as well? I thought I wouldn''t get involved with him for another year. He made a mess in just the freshman tournament, what the hell is he going to do this time?"

    He spoke out loud as he looked at the sky out of his window.

    f is not just worried about the chaos, but also about his students and candidates. Apart from the Olympian regions, Thor academy has been the biggest victim of Sam.

    In the freshman tournament, there was that rigging issue and there was issue with Ivar. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Apart from Icarus, Ivar was the most active with the cases in the court and put Thor academy through hell.

    If that is not enough, there is that expedition. They lost a lot of potential candidates that could have been the future of Thor academy''s formation expertise.

    He lost a lot of precious candidates in bothbat and auxiliary departments. The good thing is that he didn''t face the same level of pressure as the Zeus academy. He managed to cate a lot of ns and families that lost their descendants in the expedition.

    He also pushed the next prospects higher in hoping to cover the losses created. Just so that new prospect''s families will fill in the gaps in the support created by the old families. He also needs to ensure that Messenger council is satisfied with thepetition this time or the worth of the city will be decreased.

    With all this stress mounting on him, he was relieved when he heard thepetition rules.

    No killings until further notice from Messenger council.

    As for why he was relieved? Not just because of the grudges and other stuff. Rather, thepetition itself is a harbinger of chaos along with the celebration.

    Thepetition is not just a ce for students to gain glory and rewards. It is also the biggest factor in deciding the rankings of the academies. In fact, it could be the biggest factor. If performed badly, the support from messenger council will be reduced, their location will be changed and the density of energy within the area will also change.

    They will also lose their pocket dimensions.

    The worst of all, they will be prone to attacks from other Astral Region academies.

    So, every year one thing happens to almost all the prospective champions. That is at least one assassination attempt. The academies wille with a clear n on how to gain enough wins to keep their ranking in ce or to grow higher.

    And in every field that they want to win, they would try to pick the brightest candidates and take them out.

    Even if they cannot gain the first ce, they will take out the candidates just to increase their rankings. The attacks always happens. For that reason, the security of thepetition is usually very strict.

    And it will be increased as soon as the firstpetition starts. The real deal candidates will be identified in the prelims and they will be targeted.

    Sam''s formation created more waves than he could possibly imagine. In fact, a video of thatpetition is currently ying in the Thor academy''s formation department as their elders are trying to figure out its construction principles.

    If possible, they would figure out a form and feed it to their candidates to increase their chances in the next round.

    It seems like Hel and Loki academies took a different approach. They sent theirbat participants to take Sam out and in turn lost two candidates and from the looks of it, they are not going to stop any time soon.

    f just hoped that he could feel a bit of relief before thispetition ends and that will onlye if there are no major mishaps that could throw Thor academy off its current position.

    While f is current stressing out, there is someone that is feeling even more stressed. It is the old strategies of the Thor academy students.

    Right now, there are only three candidates standing in front of him.

    "I told you to lead people to him. Why on earth would you tell your team member to attack him directly? Are you out of your mind?"

    The old man asked through his gritted teeth.

    The youngsters stayed silent.

    "And you didn''t even engage with him. Instead you attacked their top candidate. Rashma¡­ from the information I gathered, there is only one term that could be used to describe her. She is a fucking animal.

    Even if all of you gang up, you might not win. Why would he attack her instead of Sam?"

    He almost wanted to scream out loud and it took everything in his power to stop himself from doing so.

    "Sir, we did try to do so. But he was quick on his feet and it connected Rashma. He even used a transference scroll, but she still managed toe all the way to his hiding location and destroyed him.

    However, we did manage to find a way to lure people towards Sam.

    I took the video of the formation he created in the prelims and showed it to my grand uncle. He evaluated the formation highly and I took a video of that formation and sent it to various academy teams that are interested in gaining higher ranks in formations.

    Now, he is being targeted like crazy.

    He will definitely be down on his luck soon."

    "But I heard, he killed two people that came after him and disappeared."

    "I believe that is even better. This way, he is umting grudges. So, while cleaning up all these people, he will also be primary target in the tournament.

    I am also gaining the evidence for his previous achievements in inscriptions and his weapon making skills. I am going to make him gain as many enemies as possible. Even if he repel them he will be making enough enemies to be targeted by most of the alliances in the tournament."

    The old man scratched his chin and said.

    "Not a bad idea, I guess. Not bad kid. You are finally learning."

 Chapter 2281: To the second round

    Chapter 2281: To the second round

    ?

    After reaching far enough and ensuring that there is no one nearby, Sam stopped.

    He sat on the harbinger while hovering the air as he went into a deep though. He knew that he is going to be a target because of the grudges, but he didn''t expect that level of focus on him. After all, shouldn''t the academies focus on getting better results in thepetition?

    Thinking from that perspective, Sam kind of understood some possible reasons which aligned with the actual reasons for the attack on him.

    However, no matter the reason, at this moment he cannot focus too much on dealing with the targets. The formationpetition will go for another two days and on the fourth day, the inscriptionpetition will start.

    The format for that was yet to be announced, they only knew that the prelims are going to be on the fourth day.

    Sam hoped that he could just finish the auxiliarypetitions first before he moves to focus on the solobat.

    That is also the reason that he didn''t voluntarily go after these people. But their pestering is a bit annoying. Anyway, as tempted as he is, he still wants to focus on the auxiliary contests first. He needs to see if he can finish the conditions for the mission.

    Luckily for him, because of these iing idiots, two thirds of one of his conditions is satisfied. The condition number seven, ''Kill at least three people in the Inter-academy tournament''. He already killed two people.

    Anyway, the first condition is also met.

    ''Participate in the Inter-Academy Tournament or Equivalent''

    His participating became official as soon as he was marked and attacked the day before.

    He wanted to clear as many conditions as possible. At least the ones that are rted to the academy tournament and the ones that he has scope toplete.

    Sam stayed silent for a moment and thought for a while. After some time, he decided on the current path. He will not deal with these people at the moment. He would y defense and try to kill anyone thates at him in the process.

    Meanwhile, his focus would be on the auxiliary professions.

    After making the decision, he immediately executed the n. Ivar had a couple of secret hideouts in the city and Sam knew of their locations. So, he stored the harbinger away, and merged into the shadows.

    Using the shadows of the people and his space element as well to carefully sneak away into a hide out.

    Luckily, the Norse academies were not thorough enough to discover a couple of these hide outs and now they came in handy.

    Sam rested for the whole night there without caring for much.

    Of course that doesn''t mean, he is going to leave this alone. Only he shouldn''t be out to not attract too much heat on to himself. But he is not alone.

    ''Let''s see who ys this game better.''

    Sam said and waved his hand. A dozen shadow mice appeared and they all dispersed into the city.

    It has been too long since the beasts came out. They only fought along with him in the Pseudo hell and they participated in his breakthrough.

    Apart from that, they didn''t have a chance toe out. However, as luck would have it, the rules of the Inter academy tournament state that people who make contracts with beasts are eligible to use their beasts as well.

    That rule is basically made for Sam.

    ording to that rule, beasts are Sam''s extensions. They are his tools and weapons. So, any beast that is contracted with Sam, cannot be dealt with by seniors, elders or even stray attacks. They are safe from most attacks.

    And Sam decided to make it safer.

    He closed his eyes while lying on the bed. He startedmanding the shadow mice and could see what they are seeing by their shared vision.

    Sam located more than twenty people and eavesdropped on their conversation. They are within the vicinity and they are all searching for him. And it turns out more than half of them are not even involved in the solobat.

    They are just students helping their members out.

    The rules stated that they cannot attack Sam. However, it seems like finding Sam''s location with these people doesn''t vite the rule regarding the external assistance.

    Anyway, what surprised Sam even more is that there are some solobat participants who are looking for Sam, but they are not exactly looking to engage with him.

    Instead, they are also doing this as a favor for some other academy students.

    Based on their conversations Sam got an idea about which academies are targeting him.

    One of them is Hel academy and another Loki Academy. This much is obvious because those students attacked Sam.

    And obviously there are the Olympian academies in the fray.

    Sam kind of assumed that it''s a default setting at this point. Olympians mess with him, he messes with them. They get killed or brutally forced to suffer a humiliating loss, Sam takes counter measures and makes them into sitting ducks once again.

    The usual stuff.

    After getting some information, Sam at least had an idea on who he should avoid. At least some of them.

    He now needs to find another countermeasure, just in case.

    A smile appeared on his face as one of the shadow mice he controlled disappeared into the shadows. It reappeared in the shadow of one of the solobat participants. This guy

    belongs to an academy from the Xia region.

    He apparently made a deal with Hel academy.

    Anyway, this guy would suffice.

    The shadow mouse bit him lightly from over his shoes.

    "Ptch...."

    The young man frowned and looked at his feet. But by then the mouse disappeared.

    "Yong..." Hispanion wore a shocked expression and called out to him.

    Yong looked at hispanion and noticed that his gaze is locked on Yong''s token.

    Yong looked down at his own token and noticed that it has turned green.

    "What the hell?"

    He cursed and looked around in horror. No one is there, no one attacked, he didn''t feel

    anythin...

    He then looked at his foot. The leather of his shoe was barely damaged and only a small needle like prick was made on his foot. It was barely considered as a wound, even among

    toddlers.

    But that is now considered an attack and he is engaged?

    He wanted to weep on the spot.

    Sam smirked and made the shadow mice disappear from there. From this moment on, Sam is also engaged, but no one knows who he is engaged with. This is just an extra measure to make sure that the mice are safe and he is also protected from sudden attacks.

    Still, it is better to ensure that no one is aware of his location.

    That night passed.

    The next morning...

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam came on his harbinger like a sh and appeared at the front gate of the Thor academy. He didn''t even stall for a second. He got off the harbinger and entered the academy. He went to

    the open-air auditorium.

    The same elders that came yesterday arrived. But this time, an additional elder with dark green robes also came with him and he took the lead as he addressed around the hundred odd

    candidates that are left in thepetition.

    "Congrattions on passing the first stage of the formationpetition.

    Now, we are moving on to the second stage. And this one will eliminate more than ny percent of the existing candidates and only ten people will remain in thepetition to participate in the finals which will take ce in the formation castle. Without further ado, I will introduce the next stage ofpetition to you.

    The first stage is focused on elemental harmony which is influenced by your control over

    energy. But this one, focuses on your control, deduction, spontaneity, perception and many other skills required by a good formation master.

    To make sure all of these qualities are tested, your second round will be conducted in an

    illusionbyrinth."

    The elder snapped his fingers.

    *SNAP*

    The next moment, Sam felt a huge force envelop him. He disappeared along with the other

    students.

    When the vision came back to him, Sam felt bit a chilly. He is inside what looked like a neatly

    constructed tunnel.

    "Illusion Labyrinth"

    He muttered to himself when the elder''s voice came back again.

    "Thepetition has now began. You are now in illusionbyrinth. Your goal is to make it

    out of thebyrinth alive. You can use any attack skills, you cannot use inscriptions. You can only use formations and rted skills.

    There is more than one way to get out of it. But there are more ways to lose your mind in

    there. So, be careful and make it out alive.

    That is all you need to do.

    The first ten toe out will be eligible to participate in the finals."

 Chapter 2282: Tunnels

    Chapter 2282: Tunnels

    ?

    Abyrinth of illusion.

    First thing Sam did was of course, activating his energy vision. If the words illusions and formations are put together, the sure fire way to counter it is to understand how the energy is flowing around. The illusions are designed to trick all the senses including the spiritual sense. However, if he goes beyond those senses and focuses on energy, it is hard to do so.

    Because, no matter how well the illusion is designed to create fake senses, the flow of energy couldn''t be faked. At least not with subpar or even good methods. If someone wants to do it, they have to go beyond, ordinary, good, better and even the best.

    They need to go beyond that and aim for the ideal and the perfect.

    Of course, there are tricks to create additionalyers that couldpensate for thisck of this perfection. And Sam realized that the people who created this decided to go that extra step. The moment he activated energy vision, what he saw is something simr to a TV''s static.

    The energy in this area is very dense, potent to the point that it is masking his vision to identify he energywork corresponding to this formation.

    So, the next thing he did is to spread his energy and to activate observation.

    It has been a while since he properly used it.

    However, as soon as his energy extended past a three feet radius, it stopped spreading and the energy is only on the surface level. As soon as it went deeper into the stoneyer that he could touch, it is disappearing.

    Almost like a big wormhole is sucking the energy.

    Sam opened his eyes and sighed.

    It seemed like his shortcut abilities has been limited to a great extent. He needs to do it a bit more traditionally than he wanted to.

    So, he took the first step... and the second and the third.

    He started walking straight into the tunnel. He couldn''t see that far ahead. Only three feet. He even made an energy orb float into that distance. He thought it would stop moving as well, but it didn''t. He just couldn''t see it.

    He could sense a faint connection, but he just couldn''t move it.

    He made the energy orb crackle, by making the energy go a bit chaotic. But he couldn''t heart it. There is nothing to be said about the spiritual sense. He couldn''t sense it either.

    All senses are being blocked off.

    Sam walked for a few minutes, before he saw a left turn. He took it. A few more minutes, this time a right. He took that one too. A few more minutes and another left, this time there also an immediate right turn a few feet away.

    Sam walked like that for some time before he turned around to take the route back. However, when he took a few steps, he was dumbfounded to find a wall in front of him.

    There is no path. No turn. Nothing.

    He had to turn around and take the path going forward. The next turn came. He stopped there for a moment before taking it. He kept his eyes on the turn while walking. Three feet...

    Three feetter, the turn disappeared. He hurriedly came back to find the wall.

    *KNOCK*

    *KNOCK*

    Sam knocked on the wall to check if it is an illusion. But the sound was genuine. The observation ability also didn''t reveal any signs of it being fake.

    He was very tempted to punch it through. But the stupid rule of not using attacks, tied him down a bit.

    Sam turned around and walked forward. Next time he saw a turn, he created several orbs. All of them are small and they are all connected to him. He let them float stationarily. Since the energy orbs can exist after three feet as long as they are not touching the floor, Sam made the orbs upy the turn as he walked forward.

    After three steps, the turn disappeared. When he walked, only half of the energy orbs are there for him to see. The other half disappeared.

    Sam tried to sense them, but with every passing second the connection became weaker and finally the connection disappearedpletely.

    Sam absorbed the energy orbs back in.

    Just from this time, he already guessed what is happening. The tunnel path that he is taking is not stationary. They are all shifting.

    Sam took the next turn and jumped the three feet instead of walking. Even before a second, he reached the three feet mark and came back.

    The turn disappeared and there is wall.

    The shift also seemed extremely fast. Almost like a sh.

    Sam felt a bit stifled.

    He could guess what kind of approach the others will take.

    The most sought out approach will be to ce a tracking formation before the turn and see where it goes. If repeated a few times, they can find a pattern. They also identify if any given moment, which tunnel is actually moving.

    The one the candidate is at or the empty tunnels.

    Even if people have different ideas about solving this, most would take this as first approach. Even Sam couldn''t think something better than this. However, it would be two slow. He cannot just try to find answers to one question after another. It is boring.

    He needs to find them all at once.

    Sam walked to the next turn. It is a square corner. He thought for a moment and took out some metal pins.

    He is using them as formation nodes. He could go with an energy orb formation, but this is better. He doesn''t want to waste too much energy. The pins would suffice for now.

    He also didn''t use any energy source. They created such a dense energy environment to mask any form of energy sensing, so he might as well use it to his benefit.

    And he is doing that in such arge scale.

    He started energizing the pins and ced them as formation nodes creating small formations. They are basic trap formations that create energy explosions. When the rules

    were told, the clear mention of attacks piqued him.

    They cannot attack using their regr moves, but there is no mention of attack formations. Anyway, a trap formation is not exactly considered and attack formation.

    Afterying down every trap formation, heyered another formation on top of it.

    An energy gathering and condensing formation. It is pretty self-exnatory. The trap formation usually explodes with whatever surrounding energy was gathered in it to explode when some sort of energy fluctuation, whether it is big or small, whether it is natural, or artificial, it would explode.

    The energy gathering formation, gathers and condenses the energy. Nowbining those

    two...

    The energy will keep on piling up to the limit. At least until the formation cracks or until formation nodes are destroyed. It basically depends on the quality. Sam is not putting much effort in that department.

    Heid down a formation within the tunnel he is in. Heid down one for every foot until he reached the wall. After that, he took a few more pins and startedying down on big

    formation that upies the whole tunnel.

    This formation only has one duty, that is to connect all the trap formations that heid before. Which means, if one of them goes boom, everything else goes boom.

    After that, he didn''t wait there anymore and took the turn. He didn''t even turn back or test the wall''s appearance. He just made startedying the formations down one by one in the simr fashion until he encountered the next turn.

    While doing so, he was also observing something else.

    The connection with the formations. He obviously connected himself with the formations

    that heid in the previous tunnel. Even though he couldn''t sense the exact distance, he did sense that they are still in tact.

    He took the next turn and did the same once again,ying down formations.

    And the next turn after that.

    But when it came to fifth turn, Sam smiled. He didn''t have toy down the formations

    anymore, because they are already there in this one.

    And they are the first set of formations heid down.

    He crossed the formations without triggering the traps and took the turn.

    Another tunnel appeared.

    He saw the formations again, however they are not the second set, but the third.

    The next one was the second set and theter one was the first set again. Sam walked until he encountered all four and didn''t encounter any empty tunnel.

    There are only four tunnels and they are all moving. Of course, one might wonder that it

    would be easier to just draw a line or something. Sam could have saved a lot of time making the formations. Of course, as mentioned before, he didn''t want to take too much time.

    When the next turn came, Sam stood at the square corner andid down another formation. This time, he connected this formation to both the sets that are already there.

    He then took a deep breath and kicked the wall slightly to move to the other end of the tunnel

    in a sh.

    *CRACK*

    He could hear a faint cracking sound as he did so.

 Chapter 2283: Broke it

    Chapter 2283: Broke it

    ?

    *CRACK*

    The sound of the crack was very crisp and it felt very natural. As if something fragile has broken.

    But that crack is a trigger.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The series of explosions. One after the other, the trap formations exploded. All the trap formations in the set were gone. By the time the third one exploded, Sam is already at the other end of the tunnel and he looked at the explosionsing towards him.

    He looked at the turn ahead and ran into it.

    After taking a couple of steps...

    The turn disappeared and at the same time, Sam couldn''t hear anything. However, he could sense what happened with his connection with the trap formations. Two sets are gone. Now, he is standing amidst the third set.

    He walked to the other end. The square corner is there. Heid down another formation and joined the two sets of the formations. Then he confidently took the turn and shed to the other side.

    The third tunnel was obviously blocked with the sudden appearance of the wall. The fourth tunnel...

    *CRACK**BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    It is filled with the familiar explosive sounds. Sam came to the opposite square corner and he took the turn. What appeared in front of him put a smile on his face. It is the first tunnel again, however now...

    Except for being enveloped from all four sides, it didn''t look like the previous tunnel at all. The outeryer of stone brinks that covered all four sides are now destroyed by the explosions of the trap formations.

    Revealing theyer beneath it.

    And one thing the intrigued Sam is that he can see it. The other end of the tunnel. He can clearly see it with his own eyes. Previously, his vision was restricted to three feet. But now it is not. Not just that.

    Sam picked up a piece of stone from the debris caused by the explosion.

    He took it and threw it to the other side.

    He could see it move. He could hear it cutting through the air. He could spread his spiritual sense. Everything worked perfectly.

    "Now, I can work easily."

    Sam stepped forward and moved the dirt and broken stone away. He directly put it in his storage to avoid any unnecessary disturbance because of it. Now the whole tunnel is clean. What greeted him is a smooth stone surface.

    Previously the outeryer of this tunnel is also made of tone, but it wasden with stone bricks. But this one looked like it is a single stone b.

    He ced his hand on it and use his observation ability. Now it is time to understand what''s the deal with these tunnels actually is.

    ...

    Meanwhile, the four elders that are watching the situation of all the candidates all had their jaws wide open.

    "Th.. That crazy bastard. He destroyed the tunnels...." The elder from the Hel academy muttered. His tone dripping with venom.

    Sensing no response from his peers, he looked at them and said.

    "Disqualify that bastard. How can he do this? That is illusionbyrinth. He can''t do whatever

    he pleases there. That utter disregard to that sacred relic of the Loki academy..."

    Still there is no reaction.

    The elder of Hel academy, Mangus appeared flustered and frustrated even more.

    "Why are you guys staying put? He broke the rules? Is that how the tunnels are supposed to be solved? It is an illusion test. He should have seen through the illusion of the moving tunnels, examined the patterns, understood the logic behind the pattern and figured out the way out of those tunnels.

    The outeryers are there to protect the formation controlling the tunnels.

    Now he destroyed the outeryers despite our warning of not using any attacks.

    He disregarded the whole concept of the test.

    We should disqualify him."

    Finally, the elders reacted. The elder from the Loki academy looked at Mangus with a weird expression.

    "Elder Mangus, your bias is bing more and more apparent. Why are you acting so childish? Do you have to be this petty just because he talked back to you in the previous test?"

    Mangus'' face turned blue in anger and a bit of shame.

    Then the elder of Loki academy sighed and said.

    "As for disqualification... you are right, the test is supposed to be about how they can find the pattern of the tunnels, understand the logic and break it before revealing the door.

    However, where did it stipte in the rules that they should only follow that logic?"

    Mangus was dumbfounded.

    In the rules? Its not there. But... this is how its supposed to be done...

    That''s what he thought. The Loki''s elder continued.

    "Just because you have done it and our predecessors have done it in such a way, do you expect everyone else to do the same?

    Surely, based on clear logical thinking, most people if not all of them end up at the path that you just mentioned.

    However, that doesn''t mean, that is the only path to solve the tunnels.

    Anyway, the illusionbyrinth belongs to Loki academy. Even I am staying silent. Why are you acting all riled up with such righteous anger?"

    That shut him up.

    Back in the tunnels, Sam opened his eyes.

    He got a good grasp of the tunnels with the observation.

    At first, he thought the tunnels could have been a maze. After all, illusions and mazes go really well together. However, after repeatedly encountering only one turn, he realized that it

    is not a maze.

    It couldn''t be.

    If it is a maze, there should always be more than one path in most of the turns. That is the only way they can truly confuse someone.

    However, there is only path every time. He realized that the tunnels could be moving. To make them run in circles and he is right.

    The tunnels make the people move in circles or to be more precise, in squares. From there they could identify some patterns for the tunnels. After some keen observation and performing indepth analysis of each tunnel, they would be able to identify several formation puzzles in each tunnel.

    Once they solve these puzzles, they would be able to unlock the passageway out of this ce.

    That is the structure of the tunnels. The puzzles themselves couldn''t be considered difficult. The difficult part is to identify the pattern as they need to do a lot of rounds to create a

    sequence.

    For example, one of the participants encountered the tunnels in this particr order 1-3-2-4 in the first round, then in the second round 2-3-1-4, and the third could be apletely different set. In this way, there are 24binations.

    The sequence or the order in which these 24binations appear, give out the location of

    some nodes in the first tunnel. Using those nodes, they can unlock the first lock to the passage way. After that, the sequence of the 24binations would change, which will give the clue for the second lock in the second tunnel.

    This goes on until they could unlock the four tunnels, which will then reveal the location of

    the passageway out.

    It is a very intricate andplex puzzle. And the thing that makes this difficult is the time taken to move in these tunnels. They need to go around at least 96 times, that too assuming that they entered the tunnels knowing what to do.

    Of course, since Sam just decided to flip the table and broke the usual rules, he managed to uncover all of this easily. The outeryer''s destruction exposed the energyworks of the tunnels, in which the nodes for the locks are present.

    Just studying thework gave him the clues that he needed.

    The puzzles themselves are of course not that difficult. He unlocked the first tunnel and

    walked into the next one.

    It was the third tunnel this time. But Sam didn''t unlock it. He needs to unlock the second one next. But next came the fourth and finally came the second, which he unlocked.

    Then lucky for him the third came and the fourth.

    As all of them are unlocked, Sam sensed a movement behind him.

    The stone wall which appeared as usual when he took three steps away from the corner

    opened up. He could see the square corner.

    But he didn''t need to go there, because apart from that, another passageway appeared in the

    middle of the tunnel.

    Sam just walked through it and soon he reached a cross-road. There are three more passage ways. There are no restrictions so he could see where they led to. To the other three tunnels.

    So, there are only two ways out. Top or the bottom.

    Sam ced his hand on the ground and used his observation ability once again. There it is the

    final lock.

    Just for the sake of it, he did the same with the ceiling by levitating. And unsurprisingly he

    found another lock there as well.

    It seems like there are two ways out of here.

 Chapter 2284: Jontar

    Chapter 2284: Jontar

    ?

    Sam thought for a moment and he didn''t take long to decide.

    He just tapped his foot on the bottom a few times before it opened and he fell straight down. He didn''t have to think much. He doesn''t know what is the on either side of this ce. Si, he might as well just go ahead with anything.

    Since he discovered the bottom one first he disappeared.

    "It has only been an hour and forty five minutes. He cleared the first round."

    The Loki Academy elder spoke with a tone that clearly suggested that he is impressed.

    "What is so great about it? Brute forcing through it like some kind of barbaric brute." Mangus is still going on with it. The other elders just shrugged at this point.

    Sam''s approach is indeed a bit brutish, but it is also the most direct and least troublesome approach. However, there is one thing that needs to be considered. Sam didn''t know what it was going to be after destroying the outeryer.

    In fact, he shouldn''t even know that only the outeryer would be destroyed.

    There is a good chance that the whole tunnel could have copsed. It is not such a far-fetched oue. But he still went ahead and sted it. They don''t know if they should call it bravery or stupidity.

    Did he believe that nothing will happen to him? Or did he think that he could have faced whatever that came out of it?

    ...

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam felt the wind st his face as he fell down freely. Only after three minutes did his speed slow down without him doing anything. As soon as his feet touched the ground, he felt a faint chill on his face.

    Cold wind sted all around him.

    Hended on a rock in the middle of a vast expanse of snonds. Sam shook his head at the sudden change. When he fell down, he didn''t see a single glimpse or a sign of these snownd. He thought he was just entering another room.

    Only after he touched the floor did the scenery change like this.

    Sam looked around as he resisted the cold wind. It is not cold enough to make him shiver or anything, but the wind is way too chaotic. It as almost like a storm and the snow is flying along with the wind, ramming his face with an asional pellet of snow.

    It was annoying more than anything.

    Sam checked his senses, but there is nothing wrong with them. He could use all of his abilities like usual. No restrictions, nothing.

    As Sam looked around, all of a sudden, he felt something. His intuition got on high alert, making him feel threatened by something. He turn around.

    *SWOOSH*

    A huge club that seemed to have been made of hard stone came straight to his face.

    Sam hurriedly extended his hand to block the club, while trying to moving back. However, he realized his feet are stuck for some reason.

    The hand which was extended met the club. But...

    *SWOOSH*

    The hand passed through the club as if it is not real. As if it is a mere mirage. Sam felt relieved for a fraction of a second, but...

    *BAM*

    When the club appeared in front of his face and made contact, it became realm. It felt exactly like how an actual stone club feels when it hits the face. There is no doubt about it.

    Sam flew in the air like an arrow. He whistled through those white winds andnded in a pile of snow far away from that spot. He slowly sat up in a daze.

    ''What the fuck?''

    That was his thought. The stone club... he clearly felt it on his face. But when he tried to block it, he clearly felt it at that time too. He couldn''t touch it. There was no sensation.

    The worst part it, why didn''t he sense whatever that came to hit him?

    Sam stood up and saw in the direction that he just came from. Arge humanoid figure that seemed to have been carved out of ice stood there. Just because it looked like ice doesn''t mean it was transparent. It was like an opaque icy blue colored ice sculpture.

    That is the apt description for that creature.

    The only odd thing that made it look less like the sculpture is the white beard and the hair. Along with that heaving muscled chest of course.

    The creature is at least eight feet tall and it held the stone club that just gave Sam the cleanest hit he had taken in days.

    "Frost Giant?"

    Sam muttered in surprise. He knew of these creatures. He has interacted with Giants before. By interacting he meant killing them left and right, and he has interacted with Frost Giants before, however the one in front of him is of a different species.

    This frost giant is one of the descendants of the Divine beings of Norse. These are also called frost giants, because they have inherent ice elemental energy and they are... well giant.

    They don''t have shape shifting or some other abilities.

    Their actual name is of course Jotnar. Which is also the name they usually go by. These Jotnar are very resilient species, particrly when they are in their own element.

    Sam shook off the unease he is feeling and lunged forward.

    The Jotnar might be fearsome, but it is on the same level as Sam. And on the same level Sam is not afraid of anything.

    *SWOOSH*

    He whistled through the air and got ready tond a punch of the giant.

    However...

    He passed through. The giant as if it is not real, he just passed through it. When his bodypletely crossed through the giant, the creature turned around and quickly caught Sam by

    his leg.

    It held Sam upside down like he is some kind of game it caught in the wilderness.

    *BOOM*

    Sam threw fire balls at him from that upside down position. The mes flew threw the giant.

    No effect whatsoever.

    At that moment, Sam could have sworn that he saw a smirk on the Giant''s face.

    *BAM*

    It threw Sam into the air and mmed the club at him. As if it was ying baseball with him. Sam flew in the same direction as is mes with a dazed expression. He almostnded at the

    same spot as his mes.

    He sat up in the snow and looked at the scene in front.

    He looked on the ground. On the snow he was sitting on. The exact spot where the golden

    mes fell and frowned.

    "It didn''t melt."

    Even if he was stuck in the coldest of the ces that the nature could offer, even if was frozen

    with the oldest of the frost essence, there is one thing Sam is certain of. The Golden mes

    leave a mark.

    Even if it is the densest of the ice, there would at least be a momentary change in the

    temperature of the ice.

    However, this measly snow didn''t even melt. It was just there. He could feel it, its cold. But when it tried to touch it, he felt like he was touching nothing. He hand didn''t pass through, but it felt like it was hovering the void.

    But as he sat on it, he could feel the coldness of snow on his behind. This is weird.

    As the Jotnar made him way to him, Sam sighed. He understood the situation right away.

    All of this is an illusion and it is one of the best kind. Because, he knew he is stuck in an illusion, but he doesn''t know the way to go out. And even the illusory things like the snow, the rocks and that giant over there... all of them can affect him, but Sam cannot do anything to

    them.

    The only way to deal with it is, understand the illusion formation and break it.

    However, the present of the invincible Jotnar, that can neither be attacked, nor be blocked is

    going to be a big big trouble for him.

    Sam stood up and he suddenly heard a click.

    He frowned and looked around, then he realized that the big big trouble he thought of has just

    doubled in quantity.

    *SWOOSH* *BAM*

    Another Jotnar holding another stone club appeared behind him and delivered that blow

    straight to his face.

    Sam looked a the sky which looked like the actual sky in daze.

    Which insane guy came up with such a test? Whoever he is, he had Sam''s respect.

    Sam controlled himself mid-air andnded smoothly. He stretched his body a bit and healed

    his injuries. He then looked around. Gave the ce one clean and keen once over.

    Then he started using his skills.

    First energy vision.

    He could use it. He could see things. However, for some reason, he could only see the illusion

    as reality even though the energy vision. All around is the frost energy. He could see ice

    elemental energy emanating from the giant as it charged at him.

    However, he knew that is not exactly real, so this is troubling. Energy vision, might not be as

    useful as he initially thought.

 Chapter 2285: Basics

    Chapter 2285: Basics

    ?

    Sam ced his hands on the snow.

    He used the observation ability and once again, he was greeted with failure. With the

    observation ability he couldn''t see anything. It just felt like he was waving his hand in theplete void.

    Sam with the rock nearby.

    Sam sighed. Until now, these two abilities haven''t let him down even once. They always came through. They always worked, even when they didn''t unravel the things as they were, they at least gave him a clue.

    For the first time he had back to back failures with these abilities. The tunnel was one thing, at least, he could see the rationale of why his abilities didn''t work. But now... it is just frustrating. A million things went through Sam''s mind as he looked around.

    *SWOOSH*

    As the club came at him, he just jumped up without even looking at the Jotnars. They tried to beat him up, but he all he cared was to dodge and to take a good look at the surroundings. He is trying to see if there is any clue.

    Just like the sequence of the tunnels and their appearance in the previous challenge, there should be something here.

    Right now he is trying to identify all the moving elements.

    First one that is constantly moving are those white winds. They are carrying snow as they moved in huge currents. They are not stopping just like a snow storm. Then there are these Jotnars which areing at him relentlessly.

    Apart from that, there are not really any moving elements in this space.

    Sam then started moving around. He just dashed through the snownds as if it is his own backyard.

    *CLICK*

    Around ten minutester, he suddenly sensed something and dodged to the side.

    From a snow mound, another Jotnar arrived with a huge club in its hands. He looked behind to see the first two still running towards him. Now a new one is here.

    He is at least d that they are slow. And judging from the timing it seems like the next one mighte another ten minutester.

    As stepped aside and ran forward, he noticed that no matter how much he ran, nothing is changing. There is only that vast expanse of snow and asional rock in between. He decisively turned around and dashed in the opposite direction.

    He went past the Jotnars that tried to hit him once again and ran forward. At least, he didn''t have to walk against the white winds at the moment. His running became a bit easier. Soon, he is at the point where hended.

    The origin point of the challenge.

    Sam frowned a bit as soon as he reached here. There is something off about this ce. At least that is what he felt after he went out and came back. He waited for a moment, but was unable to put a finger on it.

    He activated energy vision.

    He saw the overwhelming amount of frost energy which is effecting him, but he couldn''t do anything to it.

    He tried to use the observation ability in the surroundings and once again, he felt like he was standing in the void.

    Nothing conclusive.

    Only now did Sam realize how much he is relying on these two abilities. Even though he kind of understood they wouldn''t work, he still went for them. Hoping something might appear. He shook his head and dashed forward.

    One thing he could appreciate in this whole test is that for him even if he couldn''t attack, the current number of Jotnars are not a threat.

    They are slower than him by a lot and the expanse is huge enough for him to dodge easily. He ran straight, without thinking much, keenly observing everything. After some time, he turned around and came back to the origin point. He then took the right and did the same, after which he did the same with the left side.

    After some time, he came back to the origin point and sat down in the middle.

    *THUD**THUD*

    He could hear the foot prints of the Jontaring from all directions. There are now six of them. Which means, it has almost been fifty minutes since Sam came here. And all he did was look at the vast snownd and dodge these dumb brutes'' attacks.

    *SWOOSH*

    He jumped straight into the air as he dodged theing clubs and levitated there.

    The Jotrans also leaped into the air and started attacking him. Their levitation is clumsy at bestpared to Sam. It seems like whoever designed this test had some conscience. These Jotrans are clearly nerfed.

    If not, then Sam would have some really hard time.

    As Sam flew in the air, ying the game of tag, he noticed something else.

    "The wind speed. It changed."

    He could feel it. He didn''t notice it because the speed at the start of the challenge and now didn''t really bother him that much. Apart from the slight annoyance from this wind speed because of the snowy lumps it is carrying, he didn''t have much trouble with the weather.

    However, after noticing this much, he decided he might as well look deeper into it.

    *SWOOSH*

    Wings appeared on Sam''s back and he dodged another attack from the Jotnar.

    He kept on dodging as he manuevered around. His focus was mostly above the origin point only. The more he observed the more he felt like he is missing something obvious. However, there are not many elements that are in this ce to begin with.

    The wind, the snow, the rocks, the giants....

    What could he be missing? Sam started going through the memories of the past one hour in

    his mind. Again and again and again.

    He felt images go one by one. The arrival, the hits of the stone club, the cold wind on his face.. Hm? The cold wind on his face.

    *CLICK*

    Sam realized something and he opened his eyes.

    *SWOOSH*

    The club hit him in the face. However this time, he controlled himself easily. A new Jotnar appeared. A total of seven. Indicating thepletion of one hour in this wretched ce.

    Sam started channeling water elemental energy and then tried topress it making it into ice element. Not all over his body, only to his eyes. Even though it is not the perfect and the most natural ice element, it never bothered him inbat, so it didn''t bother him in

    detection either.

    He activated energy vision from that altitude. Still he couldn''t get the picture that he wanted, so he flew higher and higher until he got the picture he desired.

    He could see it now.

    The flow of the wind... it was such a basic thing that he missed. When he ran in the first direction, straight ahead, the wind hit him in the face. When he came back, it was behind him.

    It was only natural.

    However, when he ran in the opposite direction, once again the wind hit his face, he didn''t

    feel odd at that moment.

    Sam thing happened when he travelled right and left.

    Sam wanted to verify something. He let the Jotnar''s tail him as he flew diagonally. Once again,

    the wind is hitting him. With the help of wings, he could feel the subtle fluctuations of the wind. He changed directions multiple times. But as long as it can be considered away from the central area, the point of origin, the wind is hitting his face.

    It is definitely by design.

    And with the windspeed increasing every now and then, it is clearly giving resistance to Sam

    as if to make his stay in the central area.

    It could either be a good thing or a bad thing. It could be a clue, like it is saying that Sam

    should stay in the center to get out.

    Or it could be trying to make it hard for Sam like opposing to move away.

    However, if it is the second case, everywhere other than the central area will be an exit... which

    is idiotic if you wanted to test someone on formations.

    So, it is probably more suitable to think of it as former.

    Which means, the answer should like in the central area.

    Sam activated energy vision once again. He observed the movement of the ice elemental

    energy. He could see it. The movement of the wind very clearly.

    Sam is focusing on it to look beyond the energy carried by that wind. After all, it is not natural

    for the wind to flow from all the directions.

    It has to be artificially created and there is only one way to do that. A formation that is located

    at the center. In the central area.

    ''I can''t believe I wasted one hour for such a basic analysis.''

    Sam thought to himself and went down. He cannot use energy vision or observation to get a

    clear glimpse at the actual formation nodes that are creating this situation. He has to go find

    them himself.

 Chapter 2286: Break through

    Chapter 2286: Break through

    ?

    Sam increased the intensity of the energy vision.

    He is not just focusing on the energy of the whole area, instead his focus is mostly on the white wind itself. Whatever formation that is dragging this white wind from all sides, must gather the ice elemental energy within the wind.

    And all of that energy should pool up at the core from where it dissipates to the nodes. So, he is trying to get to the core. However, no matter how much he tried, he couldn''t see it through the energy vision. It is being masked my the ice elemental energy of the surroundings.

    A simr tactic to the one used in the tunnel challenge.

    Sam deactivated the energy vision and started thinking.

    Meanwhile...

    "One hour... not too bad." Elder of the Loki academy clicked his tongue and praised Sam. "What''s so great about it? Its just the first of many." Mangus of course tried to undermine it. But that statement itself is not enough, so he went on with more words.

    "There will be other kids who could understand the wind pattern in less than an hour. There could be some who could do it in thirty minutes.

    This just shows that the first prelim is just a fluke for him. He was coincidentally in possession of a blueprint that fits the challenge."

    The other elders looked at him.

    His bias against Sam is almost non-sensical to them. Of course, they knew all about the controversy and stuff. In fact, in the Norse region, Thor academy was the biggest victim. But f made sure that none of them will go after Sam for their personal grudges.

    And also made sure inform that the academy grudges will be dealt with in time and they are his to take care of.

    It is just a subtle way of saying everyone to stay out of hisne.

    So, the elder put everything aside and kept a neutral stand. He is not going stoop his own level and dignity just to make things difficult to one of the participants.

    However Mangus is crazy about this. He is the first one to go and pick a fight with Sam. Even his words were out of the line the moment he opened his mouth. Knowing Sam''s temper, which most people do, there is no way he could take it lying down.

    He did exactly as it was expected of him.

    He shut Mangus up with the most arrogant response they could image and now this madman is trying to screw Sam over. It is great that he is way ahead of others. Otherwise, the elders thought about what Mangus could have done with his dirty tricks.

    The other elderspletely ignored hisments and discussed.

    "It is indeed a bit weird that it took so long for him to notice the oddities of the wind patterns. Judging by how quick he was for the first one, I kinda assumed he would be done in an instant here too."

    One of themmented.

    The others nodded as well.

    "And I don''t know why he is observing so much. All he need to do is stick with the wind patterns and await for the winds to grow in intensity. Both of thembined will solve the puzzle.

    Until then, he just needs to use formations to either trap the Jotnars or block their attacks." "I mean, that is the obvious choice, but once again, the standard procedure takes too long. I wonder how he can speed up the process to find the nodes. The answer to the first round was pretty unique."

    "He is moving."

    Only then did they move back to look at the screen. Sam indeed made a move, however this is different from what they initially expected.

    Sam dashed down and started cing formations. These are simr ones to the energy gathering formations that he has created in the first round. However, there is some small tweak which is he added with space elemental energy.

    Sam focused at the central point and ced his formations only there. He felt some space for him to stand in and ce four formations around him.

    Front, back, left and right.

    He stood in the middle and connected himself with all the four formations before activating them.

    *GRRRRMMM*

    The formations gave a coarse humming sound as they activated and started glowing. At that moment, the wind in the surroundings of Sam started increasing in intensity. The formations also started concentrating the wind, creating four tornadoes around Sam.

    At first, they are small and feint. If not for the snow trapped in the wind currently, it would have been hard to identify the presence of the wind there.

    However, with every passing minute, the intensity grew more and more. They thickened in diameter until they were close enough to almost touch Sam before they stopped growing. From then on, the wind became denser andpressed.

    The surrounding snow finally reacted, it was also being sucked into the tornado and Sam opened his eyes to activate the energy vision.

    Now there are ten Jotnars at the moment and they are all trying to hit Sam. But they are unable toe past the tornados that are acting as a wall. Finally, Sam also discovered something. These creatures can be attacked.

    He cannot just attack them on his own, rather the formations can be used to engage against them.

    He is d that the ''no attacks policy of thepetition had some leeway. He might have had to pay some price for trying to attack the giants at the start.

    *BAM*

    As one of the giants attacked the tornado with its club in full force, it was repelled and sent flying away. It crashed into arge rock and looked around in daze.

    Sam now kept his full focus on the four formations. He could sense it, the formations are forcefully sucking the wind from all the directions. The wind flow that was originally controlled solely by whatever mechanism inbuilt into the challenge is now being forcefully controlled by his formations.

    Which means, the mechanism is not working properly anymore.

    And when the wind suction by the formations reached a certain point, Sam finally felt it.

    Some invisible force, an energy that he couldn''t sense, see or even detect with his energy vision is trying to suck the wind out of his formations.

    It is trying to wrestle the control away from Sam.

    Sam smiled at this and restricted the wind even more. There is no way, he would just give it up that easily. As minutes passed another Jotnar appeared right behind Sam and as soon as it did, it was thrown away by the tornado.

    At the same time, the force of that energy increased. It was trying harder and harder to take the wind currents away. It is happening to all four tornadoes and even the directions in which the force is dragging became more apparent.

    Sam now closed his eyes and he carefully observed, the ice elemental energy that is circting in the tornadoes. Previously, the challenge area formation has the whole control over it and it used to surrounding ice elemental energy to mask it.

    Now, Sam has control over the energy circting in the formations, and he can easily observe

    in which direction it is going.

    ''1, 5, 16, 24.."

    Sam counted how many directions the force is pulling from and slowly gave in a little bit. Just

    a small amount of control was reliquised.

    The energy from the formations started moving in multiple directions. Sam divided his consciousness and followed the trials of energy.

    Soon each trial stopped at different points. All of them just merged into the environment.

    When all the trails disappeared, the wind currents now established new paths following those trails and all of them moved in those directions.

    Sam mentally marked the directions and located the points where the trials disappeared.

    They are the nodes.

    Even though he doesn''t know how these nodes are connected and what type of energy

    network they established to create a formation that gathers the wind currents from all

    directions, Sam knew how to deal with it.

    Sam flew out from the tornadoes and went to the first node, he ced a trap formation simr

    to the one he ced in the first round.

    *SWOOSH*

    A club was swung at him. He dodged and itnded on the trap.

    *BOOM*

    It was destroyed.

    *RUMBLE*

    The ground trembled from the explosion. The Jotnar was blown away like a broken kite. Sam

    knew he seeded. He destroyed a node. Only a few more to go.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    One after another the nodes fell within a couple of minutes. Sam is fast and precise. After five

    more nodes, the broken formation revealed the energywork that was already broken and

    fluctuating wildly.

    Sam then saw the glitches in the illusion.

    The Jotnar that was swung at Sam flickered and copsed into itself. Sam with the rocks and

    snow and a few patches of just cold grey floor were revealed.

    *BOOM*

    One more node and that is it.

    *SWOOSH* *ZOOM*

    Weird sounds followed before Sam found himself in arge grey room with nothing but a

    stairway in it.

    He stepped on in confidently and reached the next floor and he don''t know why and when, as if

    it his mind glitched, he found himself in a wastnd It looked like a desert, but from the fairly solid ground instead of just in sand, along with some signs of some life that existed in distant past, he believed the wastend could be more suitable term. The bright sun that

    almost looked like it is right next to him, made him feel parched in an instant.

    *GRRR*

    A growl could be heard from behind.

    *KAT*

    Sam leaped forward and missed it. Something was ready to take a clean and swift bite out of

    him and he barely escaped. He turned around to look at arge creature that looked like wyvern except it didn''t have wings.

 Chapter 2287: Beating Time

    Chapter 2287: Beating Time

    ?

    *SWOOSH*

    *SWOOSH*

    *SWOOSH*

    *SWOOSH*

    That all Sam could hear as he dodged the iing attacks from the creatures around them. The creatures that looked exactly like wyverns, except for the wings are fast. Their speed almost matched a Roc''s, which is no small matter.

    Sam had to be in a constant fusion state just to dodge them as he figured out the puzzle for this wastnd. The current test is simr to the previous snonds that he experienced. Except for the environment, the moving elements and the creatures, the core subject of the test remained same. Sam cannot attack these creatures, he cannot tinker with the environment directly without a formation.

    All he can do is engage with it through formations.

    The major difference right now is not even the moving element. Because, Sam realized that it is the intensity of the sun in this area that hid the pattern. It is not that much difficult than identifying the wind patterns.

    The difficult part is the spawn time of these creatures that he couldn''t clearly identity. These creatures are spawning for every seven minutes and Sam has already spent thirty-five minutes in this ce. There are a total of six creatures attacking him.

    Once again, Sam just focused on dodging. However, since he identified the moving element quickly, it didn''t take long to identify the patterns.

    He used partial light fusion, out-manuevered the creatures and ced the nodes.

    By the thirty-five minute mark, he is almost done with one-third of the nodes. By the time it was forty minutes...

    *CRACK* *BOOM*

    Thest node has exploded before the seventh creature coulde. The environment dissolved revealing the familiar empty grey room.

    He looked at the stairs and walked up.

    Sam felt a bit good about himself. The first one took more than one and a half hours, now he has halved the time. He needs to continue this improvement so that he can finish this round quickly. While Sam approached the next round, which happened to be in the middle of vast ocean with no sight ofnd or other creatures, the elders are checking if the tests are working properly.

    "It is one thing for this guy to finish the first round quickly, what is happening with the second one. How can he be so fast? That one is also multyerd formation. The nodes are even located in mid-air. How did he even identify them and destroy them like that."

    Mangus questioned the elder from Loki academy.

    His eyes are clearly showing some doubts, but he didn''t dare use the man directly. He knew the consequences if he is wrong, which he believed he probably is. The rest of them stayed silent.

    However, simr thoughts are pricking their minds as well.

    They did believe that around one hour Sam took in the first round is indeed a decent time, it is neither too fast nor is it too slow. That time fell within their expectations which made it easy for them to digest it.

    However, the way he cracked the formation... that is troublesome.

    All these years, the formation contest was conducted with only one objective. That is to make the best of the best formation masters among the students to stand out among thepetition.

    To reward them for their expertise.

    So, every test is designed to test the skills required to be a formation master. The kids usually take simr approach to all the problems. They always try to identify the formation, locate the nodes, understand its energywork and diffuse it.

    No matter how difficult it might be, they never attempt to destroy the formationpletely.

    It is not even within the list of the possibilities they usually consider. Because that measure is so drastic and it is very risky.

    Because everyone knows that messing with the nodes with half-ass knowledge is akin to courting death. There is a great chance of destroying themselves along with the formation. Particrly, when ites to the formation of that level.

    However, Sam is confident about this.

    It is almost like he knew the formations inside out, the moment he detected it.

    In a way, they are right. It might be first time for Sam to see this, but he is notpletely unfamiliar to them. In fact, they are very close to the simtion formations in principle. And Sam could bet that no one uses as many formations as he did in the whole of the academy realm.

    Once he understood the energy node location, a bit of their energywork, he managed to fill in the nks easily.

    As the elders are keenly observing Sam''s performance in the third floor, Sam himself is literally acting like a slippery loach in the water.

    The spawn time of the creatures has changed to five minutes. There are five shark-type beasts trying to rip him apart. Sam once again relied only on his agility. He figured out the energywork and started setting up his own formation.

    This time, he didn''t go for trap formation on each node. Because, the formation nodes and the energywork of the puzzle, gave it a unique spherical structure instead of the usual dome

    structure.

    This adds an additionalplexity that wasn''t there before. So, Sam decided to destroy it all at once and this became easier.

    He stood at the center and first created a barrier formation, with him as the center. He was the power source and the energy orbs were the nodes. The sharks are biting and crashing on to the barrier trying to destroy him.

    Then more energy orbs started emerging from him.

    They went in different directions, all toward the nodes. When they reached the node

    locations, the formation was connected.

    Meanwhile, Sam''s barrier formation is increasing in brightness. It is glowing more and more

    as if it is charging...

    *BOOM*

    With an explosion that was strong enough to create a momentary vacuum around Sam, the barrier formation exploded. Then the explosive wave hit all the nodes at the same, making the

    whole formation copse in a single hit.

    Sam closed his eyes and reopened them to find himself in the grey room.

    Around forty minutes. Not much improvement between the second and the third. But it

    doesn''t matter.

    He stepped into the fourth one.

    A word of magma and volcanoes with some flying beasts attacking him from all sides.

    ...

    Thirty minutester.

    *CRACK* *CRACK* *CRASH*

    Several volcanoes in the area copsed and the illusion was cleared. Now ten minutes can be considered a decent improvement.

    He entered the fifth one and this time he is hovering in the sky.

    -

    "Why is his speed increasing with every single floor he is taking? What the hell is wrong with

    him?"

    Mangus is gnashing his teeth as he witnesses Sam passing through the whole thing. By now, only a handful of other students managed to bypass the tunnels and only a couple of them are

    on their way to pass through the snond.

    "FUCK"

    Mangus cursed as he looked at Sam. The other elders were even more surprised by his

    outburst.

    Ignoring their gazes, Mangus left the evaluation room.

    The other elders started conversing.

    "How long do you think it will take for him to break this?"

    "I don''t know. But I don''t think it will be easy this time. It should definitely take a couple of

    hours at least."

    "Only a couple of hours?"

    ...

    While they discussed how long Sam will take to break the formation, Sam is experiencing the

    formation illusion.

    When he appeared in the sky, he thought that he would be facing some sort of aviation creature this time. However, there is none whatsoever.

    Sam didn''t know what was happening there, there are no sudden attacks, no intangible beasts, no moving elements that he could see. The wind is stagnant, the sun is invisible, and

    the cloud are just there.

    He couldn''tprehend what is happening.

    As he looked around all of a sudden, he felt a shock in his head. A sharp headache urred and right in front of his eyes, the clouds and the blue sky distorted. The surroundings changed and

    he is in the room.

    He looked at himself.

    His is not wearing his usual attire, in fact, he is not wearing any top. The chest is bare and he

    could see the scars on himself. But they are lot less familiar and feel so distant to him at the moment. However, there is an indescribable familiarity to them.

    And most of all, he is not as tall, not as strong, and he definitely not the same Sam that entered the tower of illusions.

    He felt his heartbeat. He could hear it like a drum.

    *CREAK*

    At that time, a door cracked open just a bit. A faint light appeared and Sam could finally see,

    albeit barely.

    In that blurry state, he managed to catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror.

    He saw a very familiar face. It was him. Not him of the present. Him of the past, the past life.

    It was him from when he was just eight years old.

    And he knew instantly, what was awaiting behind that door.

 Chapter 2288: Reflection

    Chapter 2288: Reflection

    ?

    Sam felt his body shiver.

    He could feel it, the fear that was ingrained into his soul. The fear that yed a part in turning him into the monster he is. The fear onlysted for a moment though.

    The shiver turned to a tremble.

    A tremble not of fear, but of anger and rage. In his past life, one of the things he regretted is not being able to take revenge for this. The people who subjected him to this died in his own hands. He poisoned them.

    However, he didn''t kill them with that intent.

    He didn''t get to channel this rage. That anger is now ring up. However, that is not the only thing that is angering him. Instead, there is something else, someone else that is the target of his anger.

    The bloody test.

    There is only one thought that is running through his mind.

    How dare they do this? How dare they peer into his deepest darkest memory and make it re up now?

    Sam''s trembling anger made his mind clearer and clearer. Hepletely isted himself from this thought. The momentary fear and anxiety that came with that memory disappeared and along with it, the illusion around him also copsed.

    Sam found himself in the same sky.

    There is still nothing around him, however he could guess what happened here. It could be a spirit attack. The other party could have been a specter, or a corrupted soul. Something like that has attacked him.

    His mind.

    The fact that he couldn''t perceive it, sense it or engage with it, made it easy for it to deal with this situation.

    However, it is not like he didn''t have any measures against it. Sam''s body surged with death energy. The partial fusion state made him look like he came straight out of hell. He fortified his mental statepletely.

    *BUZZ*

    There it came, another attack aimed at his mind. But this time, the specter, spirit or whatever it is, didn''t have enough strength to prate it.

    The specters that came out of his body all spread around. Hundreds of them. They are enough to upy a significant radius around him.

    From all the previous rounds, he noticed one thing, the formation nodes are within a specific radius from the area he spawned. Whether the structure was of a dome, sphere or something else, they were always within a certain radius.

    Sam made the specters spread around and upy that exact radius.

    They all started gathering energy. Their death energy riled up as well and soon, energy lines spread from their bodies.

    They are acting as nodes and awork is being formed at great speeds.

    Sam acted as the center of it. He didn''t care to find the moving elements, he didn''t care to find the core of the formation puzzle, he just stood there and made his own formation. Soon, a faint grey hue emitted from all the specters

    The formation waspletely filled with it and within that grey hue, Sam managed to spot two figures, that were previous invisible.

    Their audacity... they are even right next to him.

    *SCREECH* *SCREECH*

    The formation acted up.

    All the specters used the formation and started sucking the energy out of these specters.

    Specters are such peculiar creatures, they don''t have any cognitive skills except for the instinctual thinking. But they can project all the other emotions like happiness when attacking others, anger when their prey resists, pain and fear when they finally be the prey.

    Right now Sam saw them screaming. He didn''t bother with the puzzle, he didn''t bother with thepetition.

    He just wanted an outlet for a moment and the specters are perfect for it.

    *SCREECH*

    Within next three minutes, another specter spawned out of thin air. However, it fell within the formation radius and it started screeching as it came.

    It didn''t even have any time to attack or even project an intent to attack Sam.

    Sam let the specters scream in pain.

    The elders watching this were stupefied.

    "He broke his illusion that fast? Is it really working properly? How can someone escape from their darkest memory that fast?" One of the elders spoke with a shivering tone. The other one is too stunned to even speak.

    The elder from Loki academy looked at the situation and gulped.

    "I don''t know what memory he saw, but it definitely triggered him too much. he is not even trying to finish the test, he is just trying to vent his anger."

    "But... the specters are the key to move out."

    "I know. The whole point of this round is to make them endure. They need to endure the specters long enough time to let enough specters spawn.

    Once they are enough, they will reveal themselves as nodes. If they could gather enough of their mental energy and endure enough to not copse under the onught of these dark memories, they would be able to construct the formation to break this puzzle and move to the final stage of the illusion tower.

    But this guy...

    I don''t even understand the point of thispetition.

    Did he really juste to the second grade? What are the second graders even trying for?" The elder of Loki academy borated the absurdity of it.

    "The kids from the Viswakarma academy and that kid from Hel academy are doing really well. Their timings are better than all the second graders that attempted the illusion tower before.

    If this monster is not here, they would have shined brightly.

    He just stole the spotlight."

    "The attempts on his life are for no reason. I heard he was attacked repeatedly yesterday. It seems like the results of the first prelims already made him a target."

    "Of course, his identity itself doesn''t help much."

    As they are discussing, another three minutester the fourth specter appeared, three more minutes, the fifth one came.

    At that moment, the specters all started glowing. Sam immediately sensed it. Just like how the elder exined to his fellow elder, the specters are the nodes of the formation that Sam needs to use to get out.

    These are not just typical nodes, they themselves are iplete formations with their own intricate structures.

    Bybining all the specters and finishing thework, they will create the formation to get

    out of here.

    Sam scanned their structure, he did want to make them suffer a bit more. However, he knew better than taking his anger out on juts mere tools. What would happen to the people who

    used these tools if they don''t give them a message?

    They need to take the brunt of it. Until then, he has to suppress it just a little.

    After looking at the structure, four of Sam''s specters moved. They broke out of the formation

    and came near him.

    Sam started modifying their bodies. He injected the energy forcefully and morphed their structurespletely. The next moment, using the force of the formation, he started moving the specters of this illusion to their specific locations.

    The elders abruptly stood up.

    "What the fuck..."

    One of them screamed out.

    Sam forcefully ced these specters in their locations and used the specters of his own to

    finish the formation to exit this space.

    As for the energy source? He used his own energy. He didn''t care for the energy of the puzzle''s

    core, he just used his own and burst out of this ce.

    "This guy is fucking crazy. That formation... it consumes even the energy of a peak stage

    second grade studentpletely dry."

    Sam just set a new record for escaping that phase of the illusion tower. That phase basically had a minimum time because at least nine specters are needed to get out of there. But Sam

    didn''t wait until nine are there.

    Five spawned and he used his own specters to fill out the rest.

    Sam exited that zone quickly and found himself in another grey hall. However this time, it is

    not just some empty hall with nothing in it. There are mirrors, dozens of them, all ced at various spots in different angles.

    As soon as Sam appeared there, his reflection from various angles is visible on those mirrors. Sam looked at them with a frown. He didn''t know what to do here.

    At least in the tunnel puzzle, he knew he had to walk, in the next subsequent levels, he knew he had to deal with the creatures and climb the floors, but now... he doesn''t know what to do. The only thing odd is that even though there are so many mirrors, none of them is clearly and directly facing him. So, there is no straight reflection of his on any of the mirrors.

    He walked to the closest mirror and stood in front of it.

    He could see his image, clear as a day. He then turned around and took a few steps, but before

    he knew it...

    *SWOOSH*

    A fire ball flew towards him.

    The reflection that he saw in the mirror before, is stepping out of it with both hands carrying

    golden fire balls.

 Chapter 2289: Marking

    Chapter 2289: Marking

    ?

    *THUD* *THUD* *THUD*

    Sam''s footprints echoes through the hall. The mirrors are shining brightly and the golden mes areing at him from behind.

    The reflection that came out of the mirror is chasing after him.

    Sam cannot attack, ording to the rules. Even though he did attack by instinct in the snond, he didn''t want to push his luck again and get disqualified right now. The reflection that looked exactly like himself is taking full advantage of that.

    As Sam ran around, he observed the surroundings.

    Just like in the other rounds, there are various restrictions against his observation ability and his energy vision. He is unable to use them freely. So, he had to collect information while on the run.

    *POOF*

    After running for a couple of minutes, Sam disappeared into a puff of ck smoke with his shadow ability.

    The reflection stopped for a moment, the next second, it turned around and threw the fire ball in a certain direction.

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam who was hiding in the shadow of a mirror dodged the attack, the fire ball went and crashed into the mirror.

    *CRASH* The mirror broke down instantly and the next second...

    Sam felt a sh envelop him whole. When he regained his vision, he stood there at the spot where he appeared the first time.

    He is sweating profusely.

    He looked around to make sure that the reflection is not there again and then looked at the mirror that exploded because of the fire ball.

    The mirror is there. There are no signs of attack, not even a scratch on it.

    He carefully moved, making sure that his reflection is not fully and directly appearing in a mirror. He didn''t even make eye contact with any of his partial reflections just to make sure. He slowly made his way to the first mirror that projected the reflection out.

    The one from which that ming maniac version of him came out.

    He crouched down just to be more safe and ced his hand on it. His energy channeled into it and there it is, he could feel it. The mirror is not exactly a mirror. It is a formation. It is a formation that was created on the frame of the mirror. It manifests and captures an aspect of Sam.

    At least that is what he understood by analysing it in the brief moment.

    However, as for how the reflection managed to came out of the mirror itself? Sam doesn''t know. That could be the part yed by the muchrger, greater and moreplicated formation that wasid around the hall.

    Sam tried to break a couple of nodes to deactivate a formation.

    *CRACK*

    The first one went well.

    *CRACK* The second one didn''t. As soon as he did, a crack appeared on the mirror itself and the next moment, Sam felt the sh again.

    He reappeared at the center once again and this time he noticed something. Approximately five percent of his overall spiritual energy has disappeared.

    He could feel it. When he tried to absorb the surrounding energy... he couldn''t. He took out an energy capsule to absorb the energy, but he couldn''t. A recovery potion also didn''t work. Some uncontroble force, just suppressed all the energy that came out of the potion and store it inside his stomach.

    It felt a bit heavy and odd, making him feel ufortable.

    Sam refrained himself from just swallowing one of the liquid energy capsules. That would be tantamount to a self-sabotage at this point.

    At least, with this he understood two things. If he tries to the break the formation of a mirror, or if he breaks the mirror, he will return to the origin, everything resets and he will lose a portion of his energy.

    And if he messes up enough times, he will run out of energy and fails the testpletely.

    If he sees himself in the reflection, the reflection will step out of the mirror ande at him with his own attacks.

    Once again, following the previous patterns, Sam believed that the answer lies with the moving elements and the only moving elements are the reflections. After some contemtion, he just decided to take a risk with it.

    He walked to the same mirror again and looked at the reflection.

    After the eyes met, he didn''t step back or look to the side, instead energy orbs left his body as they got embedded into the ground, creating a formation. The formation ispleted in an instant. He took a few steps back, while still looking at the reflection.

    He noticed that there is no change in the reflection. It should have be smaller, taking two steps back as well, but it didn''t.

    After a couple of seconds, it came out of the mirror. Golden mes emerged in its hands as it stepped forward.

    *CLUTCH*

    The formation is triggered and the reflection is captured. Ropes made out of energy appeared from within the formation and enveloped the reflection. Sam shed like a shadow, avoiding the reflection and came in front of the mirror again.

    Now, he can''t even see his own reflection in it. He ced his hand on the frame once again to check its condition.

    A smile appeared on his face.

    There is a change in the formation of the mirror frame. The previouslyplete formation now appeared iplete, revealing a ring gap in thework. Even though it is

    iplete it still functions as a gateway.

    A gateway to let the reflectione out.

    However, just by judging the pattern and a couple of calction in his mind, Sam could guess what theplete version will do.

    It acts as a two-way gateway. Previously only the reflection coulde out, but after the correction, he could go in as well.

    *CLICK* *CLICK*

    He filled in the nodes and a ripple appeared in the mirror.

    Sam walked into the mirror without hesitation.

    *SWOOSH*

    He felt a whistling sound. He was falling in the void, but it is full of enigmatic patterns. He couldn''t identify them, he couldn''t register them to his memory. A dizziness invaded his

    mind.

    After a couple of seconds which felt like an eternity, he felt himself walking through a path involuntarily and the next second, he found himself in the same hall full of mirrors. However, he is far away from the central area that he was originally at. Right now, he is deep in the hall and didn''t even know the direction of the central area.

    He closed his eyes and felt the connection he had with the formation.

    He couldn''t sense its location. He can sense its strength, he can sense its existence, but not its location. Sam then turned around to look at the mirror he came from. He ced his hand on the surface. He could see his reflection in it. As soon as his palm touched the mirror, the reflection grabbed his palm and locked the fingers.

    Sam dragged his palm back hurriedly.

    *BAM*

    A punchnded straight on his face as the reflection came out of it. At least, the hand wasn''t locked anymore. Sam activated his shadow fusion and disappeared from there. The reflection

    looked around and threw a punch in the air.

    The force itself broke a mirror and...

    *FLASH*

    Sam disappeared from the spot and reappeared at the central area.

    "Fuck."

    He cursed in exasperation. He lost energy once again. Not just the one he used to ce the trap formation, but also the energy he used to create the nodes and then some more energy on

    top of that. That final part might be the penalty for breaking the mirror.

    He sighed and looked around.

    He kinda got the mechanism of it. The room is too big, there are too many mirrors. A reflection wille after him and if a mirror breaks, he will have to start again.

    He spected that the exit is through a mirror in the room. However, which one? He cannot

    go by trial and error. He will eventually run out of energy. Even with his extended reserves,

    this is not possible.

    Sam looked around and an idea came to his mind.

    He took out some color from his storage and threw a drop at the mirror near him. Nothing happened. There is no energy in the color. It is just some paint.

    He took a few steps around and came back to the central area. The paint is still there. He

    smiled

    He closed his eyes and activated wind fusion, wings appeared on his back and he flew into the

    air.

    Just after a few feet, he couldn''t go higher anymore. But that is enough. He started moving rapidly. And as he moved he marked every single mirror with the color. First he went in a straight line from the central area.

    A straight line forward, all the mirrors are marked red, creating a divide line, then backward extending the line to the rear. The whole hall is divided into two halves.

    He changed the pain and picked blue. He then moved to the right side as he marked every

    mirror.

 Chapter 2290: Exit

    Chapter 2290: Exit

    ?

    Sam marked all the mirrors with colors. After drawing the red line, he went left and then he changed the color before going right.

    Only three colors of course. The middle red line, the blue on one side and green on the other.

    It took him more than twenty minutes. Even though he could go faster, he believed that he might destroy a couple of mirrors in the process and end up at the starting point once again. After he marked the mirrors, Sam hovered in the air and looked at the mirrors with a sweeping nce.

    He had a confused expression on his face.

    Because from his observation, even though he figured that the mirrors are the way out, from what he saw the mirrors cannot be a way out.

    It should be impossible.

    Because based on the count, there are a total of 2480 mirrors in this room. An even number. Judging from how he entered one mirror and appeared from another, there is a good chance that all the mirrors are connected together...

    Then that means, all the mirrors will still end up making him roam around in this mirrond with no way out.

    This spection made him a bit frustrated and immediately wanted to test it out.

    He targeted a different mirror. Laid down a trap formation, engaged with the reflection, captured the reflection and finally entered the mirror.

    He entered a mirror on the blue side and came out of another mirror on the green side.

    He is prepared this time and once again trapped the reflection that came out of that mirror before stepping back into it. He is back at the mirror on the blue side. He could see his reflection struggling hard to break out of the formation.

    He ignored it and flew into the air again and tried the same with three different mirrors. All of them led to a different mirror and when he entered those mirrors, he came back. By now, he ispletely sure that all of them are connected.

    Which also made him sure that he cannot get out of these mirrors from this ce

    There are around eight to ten reflections of his struggling in different formations as he moved around thinking of a way to get out. After some thought, he got a different idea.

    He started examining the formations with reflections already out. The mirror frames that are activated as gates.

    Now, there are around ten mirrors activated and he drew up those formationworks all in his mind. cing them all side by side trying topare them.

    Time passed.

    More than an hour and a twenty minutester, Sam is still looking for the clues to get out of here.

    Meanwhile the elders are finally relieved.

    "I thought he woulde out of this with the same insanely impractical record time. I am d he stumbled on this one at least."

    "True that. I am d as well.

    At least for his own sake. He might not know this because of the inexperience and the entricity of the Gambler academy. He already has a target on his back and now he just amplified it a dozen more times.

    I hope that this dy at least reduces the negative impact of the first few rounds." This came from the Loki academy elder.

    The Thor academy elder was a bit surprised.

    "You are concerned for him?"

    "Are you not?"

    "Honestly, I am more concerned about the face of Thor academy and other Norse academies. Even though the illusion tower and its stages are kept a secret from the students this time, the Norse academies have trained their students for simr things before.

    Our formation departments basically focus more on the illusions.

    So, to see that no one showed great promise is a bit envious. So, I hoped that this guy is not so excellent with this so that the gap is not so wide."

    "Hmm... Didn''t expect you to be so much on the selfish side."

    "I didn''t expect you to be so much on the generous side. To think you are showing concern to him? He is the biggest suspect of the hub incident. Most still believe that he is closely connected to the mastermind and might even be that mastermind''s prot¨¦g¨¦.

    In fact, I cannot think of a better exnation than that for his prowess in the formations." "Well, I don''t know if you can call me generous. I just hope that such a good sapling is not destroyed in his initial stages. He has a clear unique perspective to the formations and his basics are rock solid. His focus on the basics itself deserves some appreciation.

    I want to see what he can create when he is maturedpletely.

    Who knows, he might even create a masterpiece like the hub."

    "You hold him in a high regard."

    "Anyone who doesn''t is an idiot."

    As they chatted, all of a sudden, they watched something change on the screen.

    Sam finished analyzing the formations in his head and walked to one of the mirrors that was already activated as a gate. He then used one of his hands to ce on the frame while the other was ced inside the gate.

    His hand passed through the mirror surface, while his other hand felt the slight buzz. He closed his eyes and started understanding the energy cirction of the formation the frame. Right now, it ispletely active.

    It is in the middle of transferring his hand to the other side. This is the time the mirror is most

    active.

    He focused mostly on the elemental energies as well as energy conversions that are happening in the frame.

    After some time, he opened his eyes and there is a sparkle in his eyes.

    He came to a conclusion.

    There are no clear signs of what exactly is the exit condition of this room. There are specific conditions to actually clearing this room, so he believed that he can clear it on his own terms. He also believed that clearing means getting out of here, just like how it was in the previous

    rounds.

    So, he decided to leave the room on his own terms.

    If he won, it is fine. If he didn''t, then so be it. He didn''t have many stakes ced on his

    victory.

    He roamed around a bit and found an empty space big enough to do what he wanted to do. He then took out some metal rods and used his metal element to transform it into a metal mirror

    frame.

    There are several grooves on the frame, where he embedded the energy capsules. Even though he couldn''t absorb it, doesn''t mean he couldn''t use it for the formation. It is working

    perfectly.

    He started adding more grooves and created formations. First, it simted the mirror surface. Showing Sam''s reflection perfectly.

    Then he started adding other energy capsules. Space energy in particr. He is transforming the mirror into a space gate and he is not even using his own energy to create it directly. After some time, the formation is ready.

    He took a deep breath and walked through the mirror directly.

    *SWOOSH*

    With a sh, Sam felt the suction force. He could feel it, he definitely left the hall and before

    he knew it, he stood in the open air auditorium. At the exact spot that he initially stood before

    thepetition began.

    He looked around.

    Several audience members are gawking at him. Several screens are hovering showing the live proceedings of thepetition. The elder from the Loki academy hurriedly made his way to

    Sam.

    He wanted to say something, but he couldn''t find any words.

    After some hesitation and contemtion, he let out of a sigh of resignation and said.

    "You are the first. You can go now."

    "Thanks."

    Sam walked out of the academy with a smile. It is good to know that he is the first. He doesn''t care what the actual procedure is. He didn''t care about themotion that he left behind. All he wanted to do is leave and rx a bit. Those formations are a headache. However, what Sam didn''t know is that the news of his progress in the test has been sent to different ces in real time. In fact, the news that Sam is out of the test has already reached and the action has already been taken.

 Chapter 2291: Trap

    Chapter 2291: Trap

    ?

    *SWISH* *CLUTCH* BOOM* *BAM* (A/N: And a bunch of otheric book noises)

    Explosions, wind attacks, sword rays, thrown spears, fire balls, projectile weapons, traps from under the ground, lightning from the clouds.

    Everything was targeted at Sam as soon as he stepped off thest stair of the Thor academy. The moment both his feet hit the street, the attacks came flooding in. Sam did sense them as they came, but he made no effort to defend himself.

    He let the attacks swarm him from all sides. When the dust settled and Sam came into view, he stood there like nothing happened. There is not a single scratch on his body.

    It seems like all the spies that shared news about Sam''s formation expertise, didn''t seem to be aware of Sam''s current status in terms of the solobat. He is already engaged with someone else. Even the other party doesn''t know about it.

    So any attacks on him arepletely futile.

    But still, the attackers don''t know it. They didn''t see the token beforeunching the attacks. It wasn''t clearly visible for some reason. Now that they could see it, they saw it green. They just assumed that one of them engaged with Sam just now.

    Whichever attack hit Sam first, is the one responsible for engaging with him.

    So, they all started looking around, among themselves, trying to identify who managed tond the attack. However, all their tokens are yellow. Sam smiled at their confusion.

    He didn''t even bother addressing them. He just walked like nothing happened and went past them.

    "He is engaged prior to this?" One of theme eximed. It didn''t take a genius to figure this out. Then why did they not make this clear before they attacked?

    One is that Sam has hidden his token a bit. It was not done on purpose, he just wore it on his hip and it was covered by his coat a bit.

    That is not even the primary reason though. All these youngsters trusted their informants too much. They believed their informants won''t make a mistake as silly as not identifying if the target is even... kible at this moment.

    "If he is engaged... then who is it? Who is he engaged with?"

    Discussions emerged among the crowd.

    Sam leisurely walked through the crowd and arrived at Paradise inn. He went to his newly assigned room and stretched his bodyzily beforeying on the bed. He had a smile on his face as he took a nap.

    Meanwhile, the outside is on fire.

    Many academies'' elders are holding a meeting along with their students. Previously, the attacks on Sam were purely based on the fact that he might be rted to the hub. Everyone wants information about the Hub so that they could retrieve their shameful information that is stored in the hub.

    The messenger council put a check to their movements, so this is kind of a perfect opportunity. They can kill within the rules and extract the memories.

    However, after looking at Sam''s performance in the formation tests, people knew that their carefully done calctions, spections and estimations are going to be disturbed. Their intensity increased after the first prelims.

    But now... Sam is way too good with it.

    He came out in just a few hours, when most people estimated that the whole second round might go on for more than half a day at least. And that is an estimate for the top seeded candidates from various academies.

    But Sam overturned that and came out.

    The rest of the students, including the seeds are still way too far back.

    So, he became a bigger target. Now he is being targeted by so many people. They need to find

    a way to disrupt his participation in the final round of the formationpetition.

    And as they thought through this, they dide up with some ideas on why they are unable to attack Sam at the moment

    "He must have attacked someone lightly and sneakily. Just to protect himself."

    This thought hase to many elders from many academies. However, there are a few elders and students of one region that immediately found more answers as soon as they thought this.

    From the Xia region.

    The day before, one of the students came to their seniors and the elder in charge with a trouble. That he is attacked by someone sneakily and he is now marked as engaged. But he does not know who the other party is and he is also unsure what to do now to protect himself.

    After all, the other party did leave a small nick on his foot without even letting him know. So, he is not confident in defending himself.

    They didn''t really care much the day before.

    He is not exactly the prime candidate for winning and he was already assigned a task to be the supporter of the actual seeded candidate. So, they didn''t care much and just kept an eye on him.

    But now, as soon as Sam''s situation was told, they realized that this guy might be the one Sam is engaged with at the moment.

    So, they decided to test it instantly.

    That kid was sent to Paradise inn and he was told to attack Sam. Of course, he was sent along with some support.

    Because of that, Sam who waszily napping on his bed was woken up by the noise of his traps tripping all over the ce. When he opened his eyes, he saw a bunch of Xia region members all being covered with translucent barriers as they tripped over his traps.

    At the same time, he saw the guy who he was engaged with.

    " *TSK* *TSK*. You guys are way too smart for your own good"

    Sam clicked his tongue loudly and prepared hurriedly.

    He took out his hand gun and aimed it at that guy. Since the others already suspected that they are linked, there is no point in that guy still being in the contest.

    Sam just needs to finish him off just to reduce the variables.

    However the other party already came prepared. Sam''s reaction gave them what they came for and that guy immediately activated a transference scroll that took him out of Sam''s shooting

    range.

    Sam looked at the rest of the people who are eyeing him like he is some kind of juicy prey.

    He knew things are not going to go well for him.

    He got on the harbinger and tried to barge through the wall.

    *BAM*

    The wall broke, but a barrier came up on the other side. It was not a barrier made from formation or something. If it is, ording to the rules, others cannot entrap Sam at the moment and he would have slipped right through.

    It was a person who was hovering right outside of that wall.

    And that person seemed to have no idea about why he was hovering there. That means, Sam is

    the one that attacked the person without knowing and triggered a barrier, sending Sam back.

    Sam took a deep breath and looked around in his room.

    This is the third time...

    This is the third time the paradise inn is about to be destroyed.

    Sam already destroyed two floors. Only two more floors are left with habitable conditions and

    he is sure, this one will also be gone at this rate.

    Sam used his blink to appear out of the room, far away from the building. However, he is already toote. He underestimated the decisiveness and preparedness of these people. They already covered the bases properly.

    Because as soon as Sam appeared out of the paradise inn, he noticed that the token he wore

    turned yellow once again.

    His opponent, he must have quit. Or even the supervising elder in charge of that academy

    might have announced the withdrawal from thepetition.

    Sam was left out in the open with no protection that he had before.

    *BAM*

    The next moment, a flying spear came at him, which he blocked with the help of harbinger.

    His token turned green again as the opponent came at him. Up in the air, the opponent leaped at Sam and tried to move down with increased speed.

    Sam tried to get out of that grip, but be he couldn''t. The other party is adamant on getting him down. Then only Sam noticed that he was being dragged into a building in the area.

    *BAM* *CRASH*

    The other party is ate stage second grader and seemed to be purely physical type. The surprise element made it a great sess, whatever he is nning anyway.

    Next moment, the opponent pped a small metallic token on Sam''s chest. It is covered in

    runes and Sam felt like a dense force prate every fiber of his being. At the same time, the opponent activated another formation that seemed to have been pre-arranged.

    The gravity of the surroundings increased by ten times at least.

    Sam felt like he was being crushed by a mountain of lead.

 Chapter 2292: Reverse Trap

    Chapter 2292: Reverse Trap

    ?

    Sam could feel it.

    His own body became heavier. Heavier than he had ever felt. The inscription on his chest is the reason for it. It is of a special inscription that increases the weight of the object it is attached to. It is usually used in training purposes.

    It is used a lot in dusk as well.

    As if that is not enough, the gravity of the room is also being manipted. It was a clear trap. However, Sam kind of felt that the formation trap that is causing the gravity is definitely not set for him. It was too well ced and was created with too much finesse to be a trap set for him.

    The next instant, he realized what it was.

    It was the trap of the Norse region. The whole city is full of traps set by the Norse academies. Sam knew of it, he just didn''t think of it. They activated this when they came to know how the hub shared the private info of so many people.

    The Deans got together to refurbish and reactivate these age old traps that weren''t used for decades.

    Now, one of the students of these Norse academies clearly got the info from their elder and used this to deal with Sam.

    *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

    The other party started raining punches over Sam.

    Sam took the three punches to his face. They were clearly done out of anger and frustration, not to take him out. Otherwise, he would have been done for. Of course, otherwise they wouldn''t havended as well.

    Sam pursed his lips and gritted his teeth.

    Spiritual energy surged through his body and spread to the ground.

    He used the modification ability to break down the ground beneath him into small grains of Sand. The expensive stone floor under him and the solid foundation built underneath it, and even the soil beneath that foundation, all of it was turned into loose grains of Sam in an instant. At the same instant the punch connected with his face.

    *BAM*

    The force pushed Sam into that loose ground and the increased weight only elerated his descent even more.

    The opponent also felt his legs go knee deep into that loose ground and was caught off guard. He tried to dive out of there, but at that moment...

    His feet were stuck. He looked at the ground with eyes wide as saucers, the ground solidified. Not all of it, only the part where he stood. He couldn''t even feel the legs beneath his knees. It is almost like that part of his body is non-existent.

    *BAM* *CRASH*

    A few more people came running into the house, hoping to see Sam''s dead body. However, they saw this guy standing there trying to pull his legs out.

    The trapped guy looked at the sneers and snickers of the others and got agitated.

    *BAM*

    He punched on the ground, making the solidified part crack.

    *HISS*

    Red hotva spewed out of the crack and soon it turned into a giant jet.

    "FUCK"

    He cursed and shielded his face with his hand. It is hot and it burned, but it is not lethal. As he took a step back, all of a sudden...

    *CRASH*

    The whole earth gave it away and a force that he has never felt before assaulted him, dragging him into the ground.

    Everyone took a step back and the people who didn''t were protected by the barrier. While Sam''s opponent fell into a giant pool ofva.

    Within that Lava Sam is swimming around him, manipting the molten rock around him as he tried to suffocate his opponent.

    Of course, the rest of the people who are watching didn''t want to let that happen. But when they attacked, the barrier stopped them and didn''t let a single attack, or even a stray drop of water to reach that pool ofva.

    Because at the moment that is Sam''s domain and it is attacking his opponent.

    Everyone examining whatever that is happening below noticed that there is no sign of Sam or the opponent below. At least, they couldn''t see or hear anything. They could barely sense the two living beings with their spiritual senses.

    Only then did they realize that there is a formation at y here and they are right.

    Sam indeed activated a formation below and it distorts the senses a bit. The others cannot confirm anything withouting into physical contact with theva and they wouldn''t be able to do that because of the barrier.

    However what they didn''t know is that beneath pool ofva a small barrier is making sure that theva doesn''t enter a hole. That hole in which Sam is currently standing in as he modified the surrounding earth and escaped.

    At the same time, the body of Sam''s opponent floated on theva pool.

    "Look, Look"

    "Fuck, Is he dead? All his skin has molten off of his body. I can see his muscle tissue. It is charred. That gotta hurt."

    *SPLASH*

    One of them used an ice attack, but it hit the barrier again.

    "He is still alive. Quick. Someone help him."

    "Are you an idiot? How can we help him? The pool is technically Sam''s attack and he is still alive which means we cannot interfere with him."

    "But..."

    "Don''t worry, he is going to die soon. He cannot stay like that forever." Thest part was a whisper and it is clear that it came from someone who is not from the same academy as the

    victim.

    "Hey, can you see it? Something is glowing with a faint golden light on his chest."

    Suddenly, one of them pointed out. They looked at the chest of the victim and they indeed saw something faint. They focused their spiritual senses on that part and instantly felt their blood

    turn cold.

    "Di... Did he really do that?"

    "If it is really what I think it is... that bastard... is he even a human?"

    Everyone gulped in nervousness. Because what they sensed from the small golden glow is actually the healing energy. It contained immense vitality and it is actively healing the victims body at a rapid pace, while theva is burning him up from the other.

    "That guy... he just locked him up there."

    The victim is constantly burning, but the healing is keeping him alive, barely. So, as long as that guy didn''t die, Sam cannot be attacked.

    Of course, there is another way to attack him again, but for that the supervising elder of that guy''s academy should forfeit on his behalf. It will take some time for the news to reach him.

    At this moment, Sam came out of the ground, far away from there and once again went into hiding. He bought himself a few minutes to escape, in fact he could have just escaped without locking that guy up like that.

    But it is just an insurance. He doesn''t want to be spotted and if he did because of his bad luck, he would at least not be attacked immediately. Of course, mostly it is a distraction. Until they discovered that healing device left behind, they would assume that he was still hiding there. Once they did find out, he knew that the supervisor would be informed.

    After a few minutes, Sam could sense his token has turned back to yellow. He also noticed that the connection with the other party has been removed. The barrier seemed to have protected

    him from the pool.

    However, the next moment, Sam''s token turned green again.

    Because as soon as that man was rescued, the formation disc which left behind activated its

    final phase. An explosion.

    *BOOM*

    The explosion is not extreme. But theva sprayed on someone at the edge of the pool and

    Sam is engaged with him.

    *BAM* BAM* *BAM*

    The person who was attacked also happened to be the ice element user who was trying to save

    the previous opponent. He immediately attacked into the pool. Only to discover the hole Sam

    left behind.

    He hurriedly looked around. Not only did he not notice any signs of Sam, but he also noticed the cold and indifferent gazes on him. He immediately realized what is going to happen. Now, he has to be forefront in finding and capturing Sam.

    If he couldn''t find him before someone else does, he would be forced to forfeit, because for more than twenty or so academies, the current priority is taking Sam down. Sacrificing a guy that is sure to be eliminated before reaching top sixteen of the solobat, is not that big of price to pay for that. He hurriedly looked at his friends and said.

    "We need to find him. Now."

    He hurriedly took off and so did the rest. One hourter, Sam appeared in front of his pursuers.

    The moment he did, the first they did is surround him and send a message. So, without even engaging, the other guy who didn''t even get a chance to properly confront Sam has been

    eliminated.

 Chapter 2293: Formation Finals

    Chapter 2293: Formation Finals

    ?

    Sam immediately escaped as soon as his token turn yellow again.

    It didn''t take long before it turned green though. One of the shadow mice attacked another opponent far away from his current location while Sam is escaping. As he hid himself, the people who are trying to hunt him down regrouped to figure out who among them is Sam''s current opponent.

    It took an hour to figure out and confirm that they got the right one.

    Once again, they embarked on a search. Of course, Sam appeared again that too in front of apletely different member far away from his opponent. A message immediately spread among the rest of the group while they started chasing him.

    "We have eyes on Sam. We are chasing him now. Where is Sam''s opponent? Is he on the west side?"

    "No. He is on the east side, Sam might just flee and hide in a different location before he can make it to the west side."

    "We can''t wait and let go of this opportunity. Eliminate him. Inform the elders."

    That is the small discussion among themselves and soon the message did reach the elders. The rest of the elders targeted this one elder.

    "What are you guys looking at? I already lost two candidates. This would be the third one. He is also a decent prospect. I cannot just let him go. And this is his final year in second grade. He should have broken through long ago, but only stayed because of this contest.

    I cannot do that to him."

    "Then what about your academy''s ranking?

    You yourself said that he is only a decent prospect. You are obviously not counting on him. He is also only participating in Solobat, in which he is definitely not going to win. I doubt he will even reach top 16.

    But that Sam will push all the top ten rankings in the formation contest to the down. Not just that, the team from the gamble academy is also performing beyond anyone''s expectations.

    If we don''t knock him down a beg right now, your academy''s n will definitely go down the drain. I don''t think one candidate is that big of a sacrifice for capturing this guy." "Still..."

    "We already agreed to do this. You cannot backdown now."

    "But my damage is obviously higher."

    "It is not that big of a deal. The two remaining candidates are the prospects to reach top 16, you can keep them. This is thest time, we are going to eliminate your candidate."

    After some more discussion, the elder finally buckled.

    However, it is already toote by then. In fact, even if they reacted immediately in the very next second, they would have still been toote. Because Sam had already nned this out. The moment his opponent was eliminated, the shadow mice alreadynded an attack.

    The elder who grudgingly let go of his third candidate immediately got the news that his fourth candidate was attacked.

    "FUCKING HELL!!!"

    He screamed on top of his lungs. His academy is not really that high up in the rankings to begin with. They are a rtively smaller academy that is not even part of the major regions. They are nning to increase their rank a bit high up and already partnered up with various norse academies.

    Now, he is regretting it.

    He was ecstatic as he managed to bring two candidates that could do well in solobat, but they are the only ones left now and one of them is already engaged with Sam.

    As much as he wanted to act confident because of the cultivation level superiority his student has over Sam, he couldn''t bring himself to.

    His student is not the first candidate that targeted Sam with cultivation superiority on their side, but they are all dead.

    Now he is not confident that his candidate will stay alive.

    He immediately took out hismunication token and said.

    "Rinky, do not fight with Sam. Stop the pursuit immediately and go to hiding. Stay hidden as long as possible, until you get into top 16. Use the turtleshell strategy that we discussed." While the other elders gave him frowning looks, he brushed it off without even a courtesy nod as he walked away.

    The first crack in the alliance is there. In fact, that might just be all Sam needs at the moment. If the other party is going to hide, then he can walk in the open and just finish hispetitions in peace.

    The next day.

    Sam walked to the entrance of the academy.

    The shadow mouse is keeping tabs on his target and he ispletely out of everyone''s sight. So, he leisurely went to thepetition.

    There are only ten people left and the finalpetition is going to happen in the formation castle.

    The same formation castle that was used in the freshmanpetition. Of course, the formations would be changed and the whole thing will be updated to meet the requirements.

    Sam is looking forward to this.

    Soon, everyone including the elders all gathered in the open-air auditorium.

    "Congrattions on reaching the top ten. You have already proven that you are the best of the best among your peers and contributed greatly to your academies as well.

    Now, let''s talk about the final round of the formationpetition.

    The winner''s academy will get one thousand academy points. They are of no use to the students, but are there to assign a numerical value to the position of the academy.

    These points significantly impact the ranking of the academy. Anyway, that''s besides the point. All ten of you will gain rewards directly from the academy realm based on your rankings.

    You can decide these rankings easily in thispetition though. Now, all of you will be sent into the formation castle, at different corners. The castle is full of formation traps. There would be illusions, obstacles and some other hindrances that are not even rted to the formations. You could even lose your life if you are a bit too negligent.

    Your task is to navigate through this castle and try to find each other. You will be fighting against each other. You can use traps that you set up yourself, or you can manipte the

    threats inside to attack others.

    Whoever stays there the longest wins.

    The only condition is that you cannot use yourbat skills to attack others. You can only use formations and formations alone. Not even inscriptions or any object that has pre-made inscriptions can be used for this challenge.

    Apart from that, there are several other rewards hidden in various spots of the castle. Finders

    keepers.

    There is no time limit for this round ofpetition.

    Stay as long as you want. However, do realize that with passing time the challenges in the formation castle will be harder and harder. If you stay long enough you might even encounter third grade level traps or even fourth grade level illusions.

    So, stay at your own risk.

    And unless you are thest member there in the castle, you will not be brought out without

    you forfeiting or dying.

    Keep that in mind.

    Also, no foul y. Dean f and all the elders from the other academies are all watching thepetition. They are monitoring it. The formation of the castle itself might kick you out if you do something that you shouldn''t be doing.

    Finally, all the best."

    The elder stopped yapping and without even seeing if the students understood all the information, he just waved his hand and sent them all into the formation castle.

    Sam arrived in the castle and found himself in a dimly lit room.

    There is no door or venttion. He activated his energy vision. Luckily it is not obstructed like

    when he was in the illusion tower.

    He could see a thin energy barrier covering the walls. The energywork of the barrier is a bit odd. He couldn''t identify the energy source or the formation nodes that are keeping this

    barrier intact.

    After some examination he concluded that the nodes are outside.

    That means, he cannot interact with the nodes from here directly, but has to find a way to get

    out of here.

    That too with formations.

    Sam went into a deep thought, not because he doesn''t have a way to figure this out, rather he has too many ways and he doesn''t know how to deal with this at the moment.

    He came to a conclusion pretty quickly. He ced a formation with normal nodes on one side, but he didn''tplete the formation, only one gap is there. A gap for just one node. On the

    other side of the room, he started cing another formation.

    Once again with just one node nk.

    Both of these formations arebined with space element and another one is gravity formation. Both of them have one node each missing. And the position of those two nodes is

    actually the same.

    Sam took out a formation node in that ce.

    Both formations glowed and the whole room started vibrating.

 Chapter 2294: Trapped in Tunnel

    Chapter 2294: Trapped in Tunnel

    ?

    Both the formations are ovepping with each other.

    This sh of energies created a vibration throughout the room. And that vibration is not just limited to the physically tangible objects like the walls, even the energy barrier over the wall is also vibrating.

    The spiritual energy moved chaotically as both formations worked together to create a field of gravity in the middle. The gravity part of the formation created a core area where all the energy gathered. It created a gravitational pull and tried to pull the walls of the room.

    In addition to that, the spatial formation started messing with the fabric of space in the surroundings. The excessive force of attraction and the excessive disruption of spatial fabric soon created enough chaos to tear the whole room apart.

    Sam stood in thebined core of this formation unaffected by all of this.

    The first thing that went away is the energy barrier. Then the wall started copsing bit by bit.

    The walls on all four sides along with the ceiling. The only thing that is not disturbed is the floor because of the arrangement of the formation.

    Sam controlled the formation now and started redirecting the force of attraction. He focused mostly on the central parts of the four walls and the ceilings. This change made the wall lose it parts faster in the central area.

    As it copsed, soon five pathways opened around Sam.

    He activated his energy vision and looked through all five paths. All five are open pathways. He could just walk out. He thought for a moment and decided on the ceiling path.

    *SWOOSH*

    He disappeared from the core of the formation before he reappeared in the ceiling''s hole. He went through the hole and stood in the dark path. He could barely see anything even with his enhanced vision.

    Sam slowly started walking forward.

    Meanwhile, the formation made of gravity and space is still chaotically growing slowly. Bit by bit. Without Sam controlling the formation, it is attacking the walls uniformly. Increasing the holes in their central paths while sucking the surrounding spiritual energy to its core.

    All the debris joined together at the center and deformed more and more with the acting gravitational force. The debris almost turned into a ball and it is increasing in its size. At the same time, the spatial tears, albeit minute are appearing with the room.

    The only good thing about it is that the force of attraction or spatial disturbance is not going past the boundaries of that room. Even though the wall is disappearing, the force is only acting up to the point where the wall has been.

    The only thing from beyond the boundaries that is gathering is the spiritual energy. Nothing

    more.

    Sam left it there and didn''t bother with it.

    He is in a long corridor that he is kinda familiar with. It is simr to the corridor that he encountered in the freshman tournament. As he walked, he soon figured that it is the same corridor, but a different part of it.

    Because he saw a familiar pathway leading him into a dark tunnel of sorts.

    The tunnel that gave almost all the participants a lot of trouble. The same tunnel that Sam broke openst time and identally slipped into the second grade level formation challenge. He thought for a moment and ced a formation at the edge of the tunnel.

    The formation has ayer of concealment that hid it well with the surroundings. He didn''t take the tunnel and went straight in the corridor. Since thepetition is to take each other down, he might as well ce as many traps in the possible locations as possible.

    Sam increased his speed and moved like a sh. Within two minutes he saw the next corridor. He ced a formation there and walked further in the corridor. This time, it took a bit longer to find the tunnel. However, as soon as he arrived there, he saw it with his energy vision.

    The energy is moving weirdly there.

    Simply put, he could see the spiritual energy at the border of the entrance all pouring downwards, creating a circle on the floor, before it disappeared into the ground. It doesn''t take a genius to figure out there is a formation there.

    The concealment is good, but it is no thorough.

    He enveloped the formation with his own spiritual energy and used the observation ability. He scanned its energyworkpletely and started simting its structure in his head. It is a veryplicated formation.

    It is a trap to capture the opponent, however, he could see that there is a signal mechanism embedded into it.

    As soon as someone enters this, they will be stuck but the owner of the formation will also get a signal immediately.

    He doesn''t know what the opponent is nning, but Sam thought over and didn''t bother triggering it.

    Instead, heid down a formation of his own around it.

    Then he started moving around in the corridor. For some reason, there are no traps in thisrge circr corridor. There are only tunnels that could lead them inside. Maybe the traps of the castle will only be triggered once they entered the central area through the tunnel. He also remembered that they used a simr pattern in the freshmanpetition. Sampleted a full circle in the next twenty minutes and made a few traps here and there. He entered the next tunnel he came across without much thought. He ispletely enveloped with darkness and his other senses are blurry. It is state ofplete unawareness.

    The only thing he is aware of is that there is an energy barrier that appeared behind him. As he stepped back, he felt that invisible wallpletely trapping him here.

    He tried to get a feel of it, but he is unable to deduce its structure. It all looked like aplete mass of energy. He kind of figured that that is not there for him to break through. He took a couple of steps forward and the lights appeared in the tunnel.

    He could see the other end even. It is a closed wall, but it has a groove of some sorts, which he believed helps him ess the exit.

    The problem is Sam couldn''t just dash to it and be done with it. Because the whole tunnel is filled with energy beams. All of them looked extremely simr to securitysers that are used in security systems from back on earth.

    The simrity brought him so many memories.

    However, unlike most securitysers, which are usually used as sensors of an alert system, these energy beams are lethal. He could feel their lethality around him.

    Sam stood there, straight like a g pole, without moving even an inch. He is surrounded by energy beams. From the ceiling, the two walls on the side and even from the ground, the energy beams are shot creating a cage around him.

    He only has space a bitrger than a square foot. That is all. He cannot even move his arms around freely and had to stand there.

    He instantly spread his spiritual energy into the surroundings.

    *CRACKLE* *CRACKLE*

    Even the spiritual energy which usually blends in as the part of surrounding atmosphere was attacked by the energy beams. When the energy touched the beams, it is crackled as if a

    mosquito passed through an electrified mesh.

    As usual, Sam moved to his familiar technique. The all-purpose energy vision.

    He could see it. The energy beams are not just simr tosers in terms of looks, but even their function is very simr to lethalser beams.

    It is just that they are so potent that they are even cutting through the spiritual energy that touched them.

    Judging from the intensity of it, Sam might be able to endure a couple of those beams if he decided to run past it. But, neither his strong body nor his defensive capabilities would be enough when pure energy like this cuts through him.

    Just to test it out, Sam conjured an energy barrier in the path of the beam.

    *SWOOSH*

    It didn''t even take the time of conjuring the barrier, it is gone instantly. Gone might even be

    an unsuitable word here. A hole directly appeared in the barrier as if it was conjured that way.

    The barrier dispersed and Sam sighed.

    This is some sick trap. Sam hasid down some pretty sick traps himself, but this is a revtion even to the likes of him. However, he is sure that there must be a way out.

    He tried a few things first.

    Shadow element, didn''t allow him to pass through. The moment he turned into the shadow, the energy beams suddenly turned into energy curtains,pletely blocking him in there, forcing him toe out of his form.

    He tried using wind fusion, light fusion as well. The moment he turned, once again the energy beams became curtains.

    When he used space fusion, some barrier function of the tunnel as activated that negated him

    from leaving the spot.

    After trying a few methods, he realized only formations can get him out of here. Should have realized that before, after all, that is the point of the whole test.

    A few metal pins flew out of his storage. He controlled them with his metal element.

 Chapter 2295: Empty Room

    ?

    Sam might not have enough space to move around, but the energy beam mesh as dense as it is in the tunnel, still left a few gaps on the floor, the walls and even in the air.

    These gaps are enough for his pins to move around. If he is moving them solely with the help of his spiritual energy or even wind energy, then it would be a bit troublesome. However, his metal element has maic ability.

    He can control these metal pins as easily as using his fingers.

    First he focused the metal pins at only one area. They created a small formation in a gap where the energy beam density is rtively less.

    In that spot, only one beam is close to the formation while the rest are a bit far away. To test something out, he created a very small, but extremely refined energy gathering formation.

    The energy gathering formation is one of the most basic and simplest formations that ever existed. Their purpose is extremely straightforward. They just need to gather energy in the surrounding atmosphere.

    Unless the energy is way over the limit, they just absorb to the full extent and stay like a full charged battery. At the moment, from what Sam could see and observe, the energy beams are just condensed energy.

    They are very simr to the beams that Sam can create for attacking others.

    However, these are condensed with the help of a bunch of formationsbined together. So, in a way they are just a dense flow of energy.

    So, Sam is hoping that he could disturb that dense flow through the formation.

    And it turned out his hunch is right. As soon as the formation was activated, the energy beam closest to the formation started gathering fluctuation. The width of the beam which was as thick as a thumb has reduced slightly. The reduction is not exactly significant, but it is something.

    Sam waited as the formation charged up at a great speed. He realized that it might really overload because of the excess energy and might just explode, and who knows what kind of disaster it will trigger in this tunnel?

    So, Sam hurriedly made the adjustments.

    Metal pins flew from the storage and they started falling around the existing formation. Sam is adding an extrayer of energy gathering there, increasing its capacity. This addedyer increased the energy absorption.

    Now, Sam could see a significant reduction in the width of the energy beam.

    Not just that, there is something else that was really interesting for Sam to see. The energy beam basically originated at the wall. And the formation he arranged is just a few inches away from him. So, when he initially ced the formation, the energy directly came from the base.

    It just reduced the beam diameter a little bit.

    But with the extrayer, he saw it. The beam at the base is actually of the same diameter, but a few inches away from the base, within the area of the influence of the gathering formation, the energy beam is being effected.

    As the suction power increased, the energy beam almost split into two.

    So, from the base, it came as a single energy beam, after a few inches, in split into two. One went in the original path and the other went towards the formation.

    Sam immediately got another idea.

    He added the third and fourthyers for the formation. Once he did that, the energy beampletely turned towards the energy gathering formation.

    Sam figured out what is happening.

    Basically the formations of the tunnel are condensing the energy and are also providing a guidance to the condensed energy forcefully. However, once the suction force of the formation increased to be more than the guiding force, the energy beam has turned to the formation.

    As soon as it did, a lot more space has opened up in the tunnel.

    Of course, it is still far away from Sam and the mesh that is covering him up, however, this approach is a sure shot way to get out of this.

    Sam closed his eyes and the production unit inside the divine dimension is working at top speed, producing the metal pins. The metal pins came out of the divine dimension and flew to the now much more empty spot.

    Energy gathering formation with fiveyers was immediately set up. One more beam of energy was diverted there. A new spot opened up.

    For the next thirty minutes, Sam just stood there as he diverted more and more beams one by one. And he slowly created an empty space in front of him.

    The space is big enough to draw enough formations and the mesh was finally broken. All the beams that are blocking his path of the front opened up and he can now walk forward.

    He didn''t waste time and walked forward.

    There are only a couple of beams adjacent to the front wall. With free motion range that he has now, he was much faster with them and managed to have a clear path.

    He ced his palm in the groove of the wall and felt it. Even without a prompt, energy was sucked out of his body through his palm into the groove and in turn into the door.

    *ZAP*

    An image popped up in his mind. He is now connected to what felt like a lock formation, within that wall or the door. All the nodes of that formation are justrge umted masses of energy. Now he is connected to them.

    He understood what he needs to do.

    He just needs to move the nodes without destabilizing the formation or destroying it. He just needs to disturb the energy pattern stably so that the door will open up and the door will open

    up.

    Sam felt like the puzzle is a bit too easy. It didn''t take long for him to figure out the nodes. However, as soon as he moved the first node, he felt it.

    *HMMM*

    The humming noise, that he just made himself familiar with in the past few minutes. He turned around with his eyes wide open like saucers.

    The energy beams... they started reacting again. Their width increased all of a sudden as if they are trying to be the energy curtains. And he could sense it. The guiding force is changing their direction towards the door, in turn towards Sam.

    The energy gather formations are still holding them for now, however with every passing second the energy output in the beams is increasing along with the guiding force.

    "I don''t know which sick guy designed this, but I will definitely have my share of fun with

    him. Just what the hell was he thinking."

    He muttered out loud and closed his eyes.

    *RATATATATA*

    The energy gathering formations are vibrating, their energy gathering capacity is reaching its

    limit and they might just explode at any moment.

    Sam tried to ignore the noise as well as the increasing spiritual energy levels in his

    surroundings.

    *BUZZZ*

    Then he heard the buzzing sound reach its highest. He could sense the formationyers

    cracking a bit.

    *CLICK*

    And then the puzzle was unlocked.

    *SWOOSH*

    As soon as the small crack opened in the door... he turned into a shadow to cross it. But he was blocked by the invisible force.

    He braced for the explosion, however, it wasn''t there. The door opened wide and he could see it. The energy output is decreasing at a rapid pace and it went back to the original level. Sam smiled at this and left the formations as they are. In fact, he even left another formation at the ce he was initially standing before he walked past it.

    The door locked behind him and he found himself in arge empty room. It is asrge as a dozen basketball courts. There is nothing he could see there.

    The walls are in and clean. There are no doors, no grooves that he could see. No cracks, no patterns. The only thing that is eyecatching about the room are therge tiles of the floor. Each tile is a square with area of around a square meter. It is not exactly big, but it is not that small either. For some reason, Sam had a bad feeling to step on any other square other than the one he is standing in.

    He wanted to explore the room while levitating. And he believed that with all the shit that he has seen in the previous rounds, it would be pure idiocy to not think that there might be something dangerous hidden underneath this.

    He levitated in the air and moved a few feet forward.

    *BAM*

    An invisible force mmed into the ground. He fell t face first. Sam didn''t even have a chance to try and gain control before he fell face first into that cold stone floor. And to his bad luck, as he fell his hand fell a bit out of the square tile he was standing in.

 Chapter 2296: Gold Pillars and Red Pillars

    Chapter 2296: Gold Pirs and Red Pirs

    ?

    *GRRRR*

    The title on which Sam''s hand fell moved. It slid out and then only he realized that it is not

    exactly a tile. It is arge stone pir and it is sliding out. Sam removed his hand and stepped back as he looked around.

    Several other pirs also rose at the same time.

    And all of them are glowing.

    "Formation?"

    Sam muttered as he noticed that the glow of the pirs is exactly the same. They are raising very slowly and they are not yet connected to finish the energy structure. However, he strongly believed that they are all the nodes of the formation.

    He doesn''t exactly know what kind of formation it is going to be. Based on the node location there are dozens of possibilities.

    So, he just focused on the pir in front of him.

    He noticed that the surface of the pir is not like a usual pir. Instead, there are several slidable pieces almost resembling a sliding puzzle. However, the puzzle area is not just limited to a square. The objects themselves are also not just tiles that are usually showing in the sliding puzzle.

    The whole surface is covered by various grooves among with there are some stone pins, some grooves with square stone tiles, some holes in which the stone pins are ced and some other empty holes. There is no fixed pattern to these grooves and the stone pins.

    They are all randomly ced all over the surface. It is almost like some hyperactive kid got a hold of some machine tools and took it out on the stone.

    There are four faces since it came out of a square time and the surface of the four faces is just as random. There are randomly created holes, grooves and pins. The only redeeming quality is that on all four surfaces, at the center of each face, there is a small fixed formation that held a lot of energy.

    Even though it is a formation, Sam understood its purpose immediately.

    It is the energy core. The energy source for that particr face of the pir. And that energy source has only one purpose. To facilitate the needs of whatever formation he makes on that surface.

    While he is examining that, around twenty eight pirs erected from the floor and they all glowed with the golden glow.

    Then the top of the pir opened up. An intricate flower, consisting of several sophisticated mechanical elements came out of it. It is like a big lotus, big enough to cover the entire top surface of the pir.

    In that flower, there is a core at the center, an energy core. The petals however spread out like the lotus is on full bloom. Each petal is a node. However, the flower itself is not a formation made of those nodes.

    Instead, it is just a mechanical ce holder.

    At least that is what it looked like. As for what these nodes are there for, Sam didn''t know. At least until the next moment.

    One of the petals started glowing. It is the outermost petal that was pointing straight ahead. It glowed and two energy threads spread out from it likesers in two different directions.

    Sam followed the threads and noticed that they are connected to the lotus petals of two other pirs. Even on those pirs only, each one only had one petal activated with that excessive golden luster.

    Threads came out of those flowers as well as they connected to the petals of the other flowers. Sam soon realized what is happening.

    A formation is being made. But not with the pirs, not with the cores of the lotuses and not even the lotuses themselves are the formations.

    The petals which are nodes are interacting with their counterparts on the other lotuses and created a formation.

    Just at a nce, Sam guessed how this might work. The lotus has thirty six petals. So, if they are going with a simplistic single purpose node approach, they can create thirty six formations at least. And if they can multipurpose each node for multiple formations and even use abination of multiple already used nodes as a singleplex node... even for Sam it will take some time to do the math to figure out how many formations that will be.

    Then, each formation has at least twenty eight nodes. Twenty eight nodes is not exactly a very high number.

    In fact, Samid formations in the bird puppets with hundreds of nodes.

    However, twenty eight is not exactly a small number either, when ites to formation structures. There are infinite number of formations they could do with those nodes and all of them could be lethal.

    His brain is overheating trying to figure out what might it be.

    As the energy threads connected, he even though of trying to break the pattern by interrupting the process, but the moment he gathered energy and tried to move it in the path of the threads, it evaporated.

    It is almost like a ball of camphor sublimated into thin air.

    As for moving around in the room? He didn''t want to do that. Who knows what each tile will trigger. He has to at least wait and see what this first pir will do and what it can trigger before trying to make a move.

    Soon the much awaited revtion happened. The formation isplete. He could see the energy threads, they didn''t get concealed like with most formations. However, he realized what kind of formation it is immediately.

    Because a beam of light came out of it and hit a spot on the wall. After a hit, a huge square pattern glowed there.

    The pattern is just a in square. However, it revealed something about the wall.

    It is not as in as it was initially seen. Instead, it is arge grid and at the moment one of the squares in the grid is being highlighted.

    *SWOOSH*

    The square extended forward and split into two. It slid to the either side and opened up. From within, a humanoid metallic object jumped out.

    It looked like a mecha robot. Whether the mechanicalponents or the design they are highly advancedpared of the usual puppets that are seen in the academy realm or even any other cultivation realm.

    This is the most advanced puppet Sam has encountered apart from the ones he created.

    *BAM*

    The puppet is glowing with golden light as itnded on the ground. It turned towards Sam

    and its eyes glowed red.

    Sam immediately knew what is going to happen.

    *SWOOSH*

    The puppet aimed its hand at him and shot a lightning bolt.

    Sam dodged the bolt andnded on the tile next to him.

    *GRRR*

    With a rumbling sound, the tile started moving. A pir started emerging from it while Sam

    still stood on it.

    On top of that, this pir didn''t glow gold, instead it is red. Sam looked around to see if there are other pirs going red. However, there are none.

    Only this pir came out of the tile he stood on, while the rest of the tiles remained unmoved.

    *BOOM*

    While he is thinking, the puppet shot another bolt. Sam slid down the pir and stood behind it. The bolt hit the pir, but nothing happened. Not even a scratch. It is a perfect shield.

    *BAM**BAM*

    The puppet started running towards him, while Sam thought hurriedly. Right now, he is hanging on to the surface of this red pir. Unlike the golden ones, the surface of this pir is

    completely clean and neat.

    *BAM* *BAM*

    The puppet is already close to him. Just a couple of feet and it will be beside him.

    Sam grit his teeth and jumped from that pir by kicking it.

    He was shot out like a cannon ball andnded on a tile far away.

    *GRRR*

    Another rumbling noise and another pir erected from under his feet. This one is also

    smooth and this one is red.

    *BOOM*

    The puppet shot a lightning bolt, which once again was easily dodged.

    Sam then noticed it, an energy beam shot out from the top of the first red pir and connected

    with the second red pir.

    A light bulb lit up in his head.

    He has a really good hunch on how to use these pirs. The red pirs or the tiles are for him

    to use as nodes to create a formation.

    However, as soon as that realization stuck, he saw something that made him feel a bit tense.

    On the first golden pir the second petal it up. He could also see that on two other pirs, the second petal is slightly glowing. As if its radiance has increased a bit.

    He doesn''t know exactly what would happen with that, but he has a pretty good hunch about

    that too.

    *BOOM*

    Sam came back to reality as the puppet made its way to him and shot him at the close range.

 Chapter 2297: Golden Pillar Mechanism

    Chapter 2297: Golden Pir Mechanism

    ?

    *SWOOSH**SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    Sam moved at a rapid pace. Hended on one tile after another. Each tile erected a pir and the space between each tile is very long. The pattern also appeared a bit random. However, all of them are on the left side of the room.

    While doing that, Sam also kept his eyes on the petals of the lotuses. By now, he activated around a dozen red pirs in the past three to four minutes.

    In that time, nine lotuses had their second petal lit up and the next three are well on their way. He could see their radiance increase with every passing second.

    He increased his speed andnded on two more pirs one after the other.

    The puppet is still moving around trying to kill him and Sam managed to keep it hooked to him while still dodging all the attacks. Now there is only one pir left to achieve his desired result. But before he that, he has to lure the puppet in.

    So, he stood there on the pir and waited.

    *BAM* *BAM* BAM*

    As the lightning bolt were shot at him, he clung to the pir and moved around it avoiding the attacks. Soon, the puppet is very close to him. It is standing right next to the pir and extended its hand to hit Sam.

    Sam kicked the pir and jumped away from there.

    Hended on a different red pir on the side. The puppet turned around and ran towards him.

    At thest moment, before it could make contact, Sam jumped on to thest red tile.

    *GRRRR*

    With a loud rumbling sound, the pir came out of the tile. And the red energy thread was connected to that pir from thest pir that Sam activated.

    *BUZZ* With a moderately loud buzzing sound, the red pirs all glowed much brighter. The energy dome is created from the pirs within which the puppet has been trapped.

    *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

    The puppet hurriedly attacked the barrier with lightning bolts. But there is nothing. Except for the slight ripples on the barrier, it held on really strong. Sam sighed in relief. What he created here is not exactly a very powerful formation.

    However, he is confident that it can handle a cultivator who is just a couple of levels higher than him, which means a Peak stage cultivator wouldn''t be able to easily escape it. After all, even if it is a basic formation the power of it is almost always proportional to the person who created it.

    Unless they are deliberately trying to create something that is lower than their original strength. Of course, here Sam couldn''t inject any of his own energy into the pirs.

    He has tried it.

    However, the energy reserves contained within the pirs are extremely high and he figured it would definitely be enough to block the puppets even if it is a basic formation and it worked.

    Just like he wanted it to.

    With a sigh of relief, Sam looked at the golden pirs. Now, there are twenty-two lotuses glowing their second petals.

    He didn''t have much time before the twenty-eight will have their second petals glowing and he figured there would be another puppeting at him. With the huge number of tiles in the floor and the vast floor space, Sam believed he can handle quite a few of them, for hours or even days.

    But, eventually, he wouldn''t be able to do it anymore.

    First of all, he cannot recover from the atmospheric energy. And he doesn''t know if he can recover with his own resources. Judging from the trend in thepetition, it wouldn''t be wise to think it is possible.

    Even if he is able to ovee that possible problem, what he is more scared about are thepound andplex formations that mighte after all the thirty six simplebinations that could be possible with the lotus petals are over.

    With all the set up, the intricacy, he would be an idiot to believe if they didn''t set up that part as well. So, he knew he had to speed up and figure a way out. The only way to do that is to check the golden pirs.

    They are the core to bringing these puppets out and they should be the key to getting out of here.

    Sam went to the closest pir, clinging on to it and then started fiddling with the pins and the grooves. The first thing he did was analyze the inner mechanism of the pir. Just make sure that it is not the mechanical lock.

    It didn''t take long to confirm that.

    After checking from the four sides, he concluded that there are a few possibilities.

    One is that the internal mechanism could be essed by the external formations that could be created with the pins and grooves. The second possibility is that it is locking formation that will allow him to ess the internal formation.

    The third one is that he can directly control the lotus on the top.

    The problem is he could sense the presence of energy inside the pir and he could sense that the energy is flowing in certain way. But he couldn''t sense the patterns or the functions, even with the observation ability.

    The only saving grace is that he knew that the energy sources on the surfaces are connected to the energy inside.

    Sam started up with a casual formation on one of the surfaces. This formation doesn''t have any purpose except that is it is used for learning the art of formations. Beginners practice this before they could go for the real formations.

    The goal of this formation is to create a closedwork that stays stable while the energy is circted within it. It doesn''t have any function other than staying stable while making the

    energy move.

    Samid down that formation and there it is... he sensed the change inside. Just like what he guessed, the energy inside started changing. A stream of it is diverted to the surface that he just interacted with and that made the existing energy circuits a lot more discernable. Sam used his observation ability to the fullest, while increasing the energy consumption of the formation on the surface.

    The more he did, the clearer the circuit has be.

    It seemed like the core on the surface is programmed to always have the same amount of energy. So, the more energy the surface formation consumed, the more the core has been dragging from the pir''s inner mechanism.

    Because of the increased energy density from this excess cirction, Sam is able to clear that blur he got from when he examined the pir before.

    After around ten minutes, he finally got it.

    *BOOM*

    In the excitement, he didn''t realize that the second puppet has alreadynded and it is already

    close to him.

    A fire ball came at him, which he dodged at thest moment. He got a slightly charred smell from the tip of his hair. It was close.

    Sam turned around to look at the puppet and was stunned. He realized why he wasn''t able to

    sense its approach.

    What he saw was a puppet modeled after a serpent. It looked like a real giant serpent except for the metallic structure and the obvious intention to make it known that it is made of metal. If not for that excessive sheen, the intricate detail could easily fool a lot of people. Sam thought what these academies are doing by hiding this level of technique in these hidden traps. He knew what the puppet making and weapon making programs of the Thor academy are like and they are absolute shitpared to the level of finesse he is seeing on these

    puppets.

    Not just that, this snake puppet despite having such a huge body has been intricately designed to be a stealth weapon. Even though it is directly in front of him, he couldn''t sense its presence. He couldn''t feel the energy emanating from it. He could smell that giant metal

    hunk.

    He could hear even the slightest creak as those joints moved.

    If it didn''t attack with the fire ball and instead chose to slowly bite Sam, it would have had a

    better chance to dealing with him.

    Sam dodged the snake hurriedly as it came at him.

    He didn''t hesitate and jumped to an empty tile.

    The red pir came out and a new formation has started. This time, Sam had a much easier

    time and his actions are much more decisive. He also used a lot less nodes and made the snake

    coil inside a barrier formation.

    However, even the golden lotuses also increased their speed. The third petal has been active

    for fourteen lotuses already.

    It is way too fast and he could guess that it will only be faster.

    Sam came back to the golden pir and started moving pins along the groups.

    *CLICK*

    A formation was ced and a click was heard.

    One of the corners of that surface gave a hissing sound. That is just the first lock. There are

    eight more before he could unlock the whole surface. And judging by thework inside, he believed he has to unlock all four before he could stop the lotuses.

 Chapter 2298: New Entry

    Chapter 2298: New Entry

    ?

    To unlock all four corners of the surface, there are eight locks he needs to undo.

    At least, the puzzles are not that difficult to his standard and he can do it quickly.

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    He finished the next two. But he is definitely not fast enough to stop more puppets froming out.

    Because as evidence, the third puppet fell down from the walls..

    And this time, he didn''t even have some grace period that he usually has before itnds an attack on him. This one is faster than the previous twobined.

    It is also a puppet that is in the shape of a beast. A wolf to be precise.

    The metal wolf seemed to harness the wind element. It didnt even look like it was running. Its almost like it was gliding as it made its way to Sam.

    Sam barely managed to dodge by clinging on to the pir. But the wolf is too agile. He turned around and tried to bite him down.

    Sam climbed upwards on the pir making the wolf bit on to the edge of the pir.

    *CLANG*

    The sound... the pir is too hard and durable. Sam could see that the wolf''s teeth deformed a bit.

    The wolf looked at Sam and jumped up. An air cannon appeared undeanth its feet as it shot upward, almost reaching Sam.

    Sam twisted to the side and moved to the other surface.

    *BOOM*

    The wolf didnt fall down, itunched another air cannon to divert its direction and came at Sam and this time, some wind des followed along with the wolf.

    *BAM*

    Sam kicked the pir andunched himself like an arrow, towards the closest red pir that was already there.

    That pir was already part of a formation that was restraining the snake.

    The wolf didntg behind and came after him.

    *BOOM*

    A condensed wind bulletnded on the pir first as Sam jumped to a tile when the wolf followed.

    A new pir was erected. Sam looked at the previous pir a bit hopefully and his eyes lit up when an energy thread came from it to the new pir.

    He also looked at the formation warily, hoping that it was not deactivated and he is d it didnt.

    Sam doesn''tpletely understand the workings of the red pirs. Can a single pir be used for multiple formations? And if he tried to do that, will first formation be affected? He wanted to find out the answer and this is the attempt.

    It is not like he hasn''t stepped on a pir that was already in the formation before. When the snake came that is first thing he did. And he jumped from that already active pir to new tile, making a new pire out. However at that time, there was no link between the old and new pirs.

    At the time, Sam also didn''t have the intent to connect them both. Now, he wanted to connect them both and jumped with that intent. So, they were connected. It seems like the formation of the room is too advanced.

    Advanced to the point that it can even detect intent.

    Sam is a bit wary of the setting. It is never a good thing one something is peering into one''s head. He could never befortable about that. He pushed that thought to the back of his mind and dealt with the problem at hand.

    He connected the formation with a few of the old pirs that are already binding the snake. Soon, a new barrier appeared and it merged with the barrier around the snake, creating a slightly bigger barrier.

    Sam just used six more pirs and connected them with the snake barrier to make it bigger, trapping both the wolf and the snake.

    Of course, the barrier type changed a bit, however it is defensive nheless and it worked perfectly.

    Since he acted a lot quicker this time, he has a bit more time before the fourth puppetes falling down. He hurried to the first golden pir.

    He even activated partial light fusion to his hands as he started working on the formations. He only focused on speed and precision nothing else. Not even the energy expense mattered. It is not like those small movements will consume a lot of begin with.

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    Five clicks, consecutively rang through the room as Sam opened the first surface. The pins came off the surface and the rest of it fell down to the ground. He could see the huge sphere of energy at the center of the pir''s hollow.

    Apart from that, the rest is all blurry, even to his energy vision.

    It seems like some excessive measures have been taken to keep it all concealed.

    He just moved to the second surface.

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    He unlocked six locks before, he heard it.

    *THUD*

    The fourth puppet came out.

    Sam didn''t even bother examining this one. All he checked was if it was humanoid, what its speed like, what element attacks it is using. He got that information in the first three seconds and the he lured it to the pre-determined trap spot. He used six more pirs and expanded the first formation and blocked this together with the first humanoid puppet.

    Sam went and opened the second surface.

    The internal mechanism is visible much more clearly now. But still not clear enough. He even tried to poke his hands inside to see if he can ess it in its state. Then he felt it. The aversive reaction of the energy over his skin.

    It felt like he ced his hand in the boiling hot oil.

    However, instead of his flesh and bone, his spiritual energy cirction is being effected. He hurriedly grabbed his hand back and used observation on himself. It could have be

    lethal.

    Luckily, he didn''t put his hand all the way through and only a few fingers were affected. It didn''t take long to recover before he dove into solving the next surface.

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    He is faster this time. The third surface is done and he noticed the mechanism much more clearly. Now the fourth surface. He knew he could crack it before the next puppetes and

    he did.

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    *CLICK*

    The surface fell down and he saw the energy core inside. There are no extra circuits surrounding the core. It is connected to the bottom through a specially inscribed metallic rod from which it is drawing the energy from and it is channelling that energy to the lotus on top.

    It is very simple. In fact, the energy core''s presence wouldn''t have impacted the function of the lotus. He could see it easily working with a straight inscribed rod. So, the only reason the core is hear to make the other puzzles intact.

    If he wants to stop this lotus, all he has to do is dissipate the energy of the core and keep in a constant state of energy deficit. However, he didn''t rush to do it.

    Before that he needs to understand what type of node the petals of these lotus are in the

    golden formations that were created until now.

    Each petal is acting as a node for different formation and there are four until now. Even though all formations triggered a square to open up, Sam noticed that all four of them are not the same formations. The sequence of the nodes is different, which means apart from triggering the walls to open up, they have some other purpose.

    Sam needs to identify it became he cannot ess the formationwork openly. However, now that he has ess to one of the energy sources of the formation, he can.

    He thought for a moment and closed his eyes. He activated a different type of partial fusion this time. A fusion of neutral spiritual energy. No element, nothing. This is a bit harder than the elements oddly and it is not exactly energy efficient to sustain.

    But right now, he believed this is the best way to go.

    He extended his hand to the energy core. He didn''t feel the resistance or the previous burning feeling. He took a deep breath before using the observation ability.

    A string of energy was drawn from the core as it connected with Sam''s own energywork.

    He connected himself to the formation as a passive object and is reading how it works.

    Now, he could see it. The energywork that he failed to see with his previous observation ability and energy vision is now clearly visible.

    He started looking at the four formations that are already ced and the fifth formation that

    is being constructed in real time.

    His focus is at all time high.

    And at that moment...

    *GRRR*

    He heard the familiar rumbling sound. A frown appeared on his face. The fifth formation is

    clearly not done.

    He opened his eyes and looked straight ahead.

    A wall opened a small entrance. And a person is standing there.

 Chapter 2299: More New entries

    Chapter 2299: More New entries

    ?

    Sam looked at the young man who came from the other side of the hall.

    He didn''t look good. His armor is broken, and there are several wounds of various kinds all over his body.

    He is panting heavily, with blood seeping out his mouth with every breath.

    It is safe to say that he has a really rough time.

    He stood on the neutral tile, simr to the one Sam stood when he just entered the room, as he checked the room out.

    The first thing that caught his attention was of course the therge formation of barriers that are blocking the huge puppets. The puppets are banging and attacking the formations continuously creating a lot of noise.

    So, they are hard to miss.

    The next thing he saw were the golden pirs and the eye-catching lotuses.

    He only noticed Sam after that. His eyes lit up for a moment, but it was immediately gone and was reced with a frown.

    Sam took his hand off the energy core and stood up.

    "What is this ce? What is the problem here?" The young man asked Sam.

    Sam didn''t answer immediately and looked at him up and down. Because he is one of the few people who was after Sam in the Norse city, he is from the Hel academy and to maintain this guy''s ranking the people outside have been trying to kill Sam for the past few days.

    Sam didn''t answer his question and replied with something else instead.

    "If you want to leave this ce alive. Don''t move from that spot. That is all you need to do.

    If you interfere in my work, you will be dead. That''s all I am going to say."

    Sam didn''t bother anymore and turned to examine the core once again.

    "You fucking little..."

    "I would hold that tongue if I were you. With all the annoyance you guys created in the past few days, I am not in a good mood. I might just do something to relieve that annoyance a bit. So, shut the fuck up and stand there."

    He then closed his eyes, trying to get a more urate picture of the energywork. It took an awful lot of time for him to understand it.

    This is very troublesome.

    Just like he expected, the formations created by the lotus petals are not just there to unlock the puppets. In fact, that is just the tip of the iceberg. An auxiliary task at best.

    The real deal is the formations themselves. Individually, they are not such a big deal, they are just channeling the energy in a certain way. However, judging from the pattern each formation is creating and extrapting from there, there are a bunch of possibilities that he could imagine and specte and all of them are dangerous to him.

    All these formations will beyered together and then create a killing formation.

    Sam thought for a moment and turned to the other guy.

    "How many stages did you go through while you came here?"

    "Huh?" The young man looked at Sam in surprise, then he looked angry.

    "You dare ask me something like that after all the nonsense you spewed?"

    "Just answer the damn question. Do you want to get out of here or not? I am the only one who understands what is happening in this room and I don''t believe a guy like you who wants to use the academy''s power to secure a rank in the top ten is capable of understanding this in a short time.

    And I dare say that even if you understand it, I can sabotage it before you can form a thought. So, answer the damn question quickly."

    The young man gritted his teeth and said.

    "Ipleted four stages. After I found a door through the initial room, I went through two more mazes before I entered the circr corridor. I took an entrance and got trapped in the energy beam tunnel.

    From there, I came here."

    "Which side did you find the door open in the starting room?"

    "On the right side?"

    "Did you encounter anyone else in the middle?"

    "Two people. One of them was trapped in the energy beam tunnel along with me. He quit after he got his arm cut off.

    Another one, I met in the maze, I don''t know where he went."

    Sam nodded in understanding.

    It seems like he has skipped past a few stages. Maybe because he sted open the ceiling in the first challenge and just entered the corridor directly.

    Then, more people might have encountered each other and some more might have been eliminated.

    Sam without even knowing hase to the core area, which is also the final stage of thepetition.

    As he thought up to this point...

    *GRRR*

    The rumbling sound came again. He turned to the right and saw another door open. Another came out of there. He is a candidate from Viswa Karma Academy. One of the seeds and the person who stayed as second ce right after Sam.

    However, he is not the only one that came. There is another man who came from the same side.

    He is someone Sam is a bit more familiar with. A person from the Hephaestus Academy.

    He is one of the few who is suffering from paying the weekly payments in the hub. "Sam?" The Hephaestus-student looked at Sam in surprise which didn''t take long to turn into

    anger.

    After all, every single of the Olympian students hold a grudge against Sam at some level. Even the ones that are not out to get him, hold that grudge against him to some extent.

    He was about to step forward when Viswa-Student stopped him.

    "Don''t step forward. The tiles are odd. We need to understand the situation first." With that, he turned to Sam and observed the golden pir.

    Only the golden pir next to Sam has its surfaces open. So, he guessed Sam is the first one here and the one with the most knowledge.

    "What is the situation here?"

    Sam thought for a moment before exining briefly.

    "My first step triggered the twenty-eight golden pirs and the lotuses. The formations created by lotus petals are bringing those puppets out. Just like that..."

    Sam said as he pointed at the tile on a wall.

    *SWOOSH*

    It slid open because the fifth formation had beenpleted and the puppet came out.

    *THUD*

    It is another beast-type puppet, but this time it is modeled after a vulture.

    He must say that it looked quite vicious.

    Sam observed the puppet from afar. The puppet didn''t attack him directly like its

    predecessors. Instead, it looked around. After some observation, it went straight towards the

    Hel-Student.

    "Fuck"

    The student cursed and immediately decided to run. His direction was straight ahead,

    towards Sam.

    However, as soon as he took a step forward.

    *GRRR*

    A pir came out of that tile and it pushed him up.

    "WOAH..."

    He eximed, with just one foot on the pir as it rose up while he tried to bnce himself.

    Sam''s face turned cold as he looked at the pir that came out. It is golden in color and there are grooves, pins, and an energy core on the surfaces that he could see from there.

    "Fuck. DON''T RUN BLINDLY YOU IDIOT"

    Sam screamed at the Hel-Student who was about to get off the golden pir and run on the floor. At the moment another twenty-eight golden pirs in different locations areing out along with the golden lotuses on top.

    Sam knew the puppet count is going to increase because of this. If the red pirs are blindly activated they will have fewer chances to trap the puppets and defend themselves.

    The Hel-student couldn''t care less and just jumped off the golden pir.

    He activated the immediate adjacent tile which turned into a red pir. Sam wanted to kill that guy immediately, because the red pir almost blocked the othe

    surface. There is only a gap as big as a couple of fingers in between.

    Sam couldn''t hold back anymore and activated light fusion.

    *SWOOSH*

    He jumped off from the golden pir andnded in the middle, activating a red pir. From there, he jumped again to reach the red pir on which the Hel-student is standing.

    *CAW*

    As the vulture closed in on them, he caught a hold of him and jumped back to the middle pir along with him. While holding that guy like a sack on his shoulders, Sam started jumping around luring the vulture and trapping it in the middle with a formation.

    He took a lot more pirs than he wanted.

    ''What a waste''

    He thought to himself and ran back to the golden pir. On his way back, he left the hel-

    student on the nearest red pir.

    That guy is still in shock about what is happening.

    After clinging to the golden pir, Sam looked at the new set of golden pirs. He addressed

    the Viswa-Student.

    "I think you are the only other guy that has some brain cells left. You want to cooperate?"

 Chapter 2300: Flip the Table

    Chapter 2300: Flip the Table

    ?

    The Viswa-student did hesitate a bit for a moment, however he nodded and asked.

    "How do you want to do that?"

    "As I said, the golden pir sets trigger the walls and throw the puppets at us. Since ourbat abilities can''t be used we cannot handle them for too long.

    We need to use the red pirs to lock them.

    As of now, only that Hel-Student and I can use the red pirs. So, that guy will be solely focused on controlling the puppets, while I guide him and assist him.

    As for both of you, if you step in, I am sure new golden pir sets will be triggered and the obstacles will increase.

    Apart from that, the formations created by the lotuses will increase as well. We would need to decode more golden pirs before we could do anything more. From what I can see, the more formations a golden pir setpletes, the more trouble we have as it would be harder to decode.

    So, I want you guys to be solely focused on the Golden pirs. Since you cannot directly walk through the tiles, i will provide you with the assistance to move around. I will also exin how to identify the locks of the golden pirs.

    The locks shouldn''t be difficult since you guys came this far."

    "I thought only both of us are cooperating. You just said both of them don''t have any brain cells." The Viswa-student said while giving a side-eyed nce to the Hephaestus-student beside him.

    Judging by his expression, this guy shared the same opinion as Sam, at least partially.

    "Of course, that is why we are the primary on this one. They can only assist us through this while we solve it.

    And if you believe they don''t amount even do that much, we can get rid of them first and finish the rest.

    Its your call.

    Think it over and tell me if you agree. But no matter your decision, none of you shall move from your spots. If the puppetse, just await my move and don''t do anything stupid." Sam jumped towards the next golden pir and started unlocking it as well.

    With the light element partial fusion on his hands increasing his speed, he managed to quickly finish off the first surface in the next couple of minutes. By the time he finished the second surface, he got an answer from the Viswa-student.

    "I talked with this guy. He is fine with the condition. I don''t know about that guy though."

    All three of them looked at the Hel-Student.

    "I am okay as well."

    "Good. Now, first I will exin the pirs to the both of you. You start working on the second set, that idiot triggered, while I finish the first."

    Sam went to them by triggering a few red pirs in the middle and brought them to the golden pirs triggered by the Hel-Student.

    After exining how to identify the locks, he didn''t immediately move back, instead stood on the pir''s edge and waited for the puppets toe.

    The new set just finished its first formation and the old set did its next. Two new puppets

    came out.

    Both of them are luckily bulky humanoids.

    They are slow. Sam and Hel-student lured them to the right side and trapped them before focusing on the golden pirs again.

    Even though he is already fast, with every lock, his speed is increasing. Even with all the intricacy disyed in these formations, the patterns are same. Sam principles were used in the locks, so it became easier for Sam to unlock them.

    Time passed.

    No new golden pirs are triggered. Even though Sam is working alone on the first set, he is the first to unlock his setpletely.

    Now, he needs to identify which lotus he needs to deactivate first based on its importance in the formation. The goal is to deactivate the formation without making it unstable or explode.

    After some more investigation, Sam did figure it out.

    Then he used the stone pins that are left over to create a small formation around the energy core inside the golden pir.

    He used the same principle he used in the energy beam tunnel.

    The core is sucking the energy from the bottom, so he is creating another sink that will divert the energy there, deactivating the lotus cleanly.

    Sam went on to deactivate the lotuses, after the first one got deactivated, the formation pattern of the lotus petals seemed to be shifting, but at least they didnt trigger anymore puppet entries.

    Sam worked quick for the next forty-five minutes. He didn''t spare any energy sessfully deactivated the first set of the golden pirs.

    All of them disappeared into the tiles and started glowing with golden light.

    Sam stood on the title to check it.

    They became neutral tiles, which honestly gave Sam more space to move around.

    By then, the Viswa-student and hephaestus-student are working together on the fourteenth pir of the second set.

    It is not that fast, but still decent enough.

    Hel-Student is close to them standing on a red pir, awaiting the arrival of the first puppet.

    Sam jumped to the nearest golden pir and started decoding them, increasing the speed. Another thirty minutester, they are done with unlocking the pirs.

    Sam is about to check the deactivation pattern for the lotuses, when Viswa-student stopped him.

    "I have a doubt though. Do you think we can leave as soon as we finish the golden pirs?"

    "I would assume so, apart from that there is no other problem identified. If you have seen any, you can tell me now."

    "You have examined the whole room?"

    "Not all of it, because there is nothing much. There are no clues in the walls, they are just there to throw the puppets. We can not fly, and the ceiling is too far high for there to be any other problems hidden if we can''t even fly.

    There is no other type of problem produced by the tiles, other than the ones that we are

    solving.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    So, my belief that we should be able to get out once we suppress the golden pirs.

    The answer may lie in those glowing golden tiles."

    Viswa-student nodded and said.

    "Thanks, I guess you have done a lot."

    Sam frowned and had a bad feeling. Unfortunately, he is right to have those bad feelings.

    *BAM*

    Viswa-student and the hephastus-student jumped from the pir andnded on two tiles a

    bit far away.

    *GRRR*

    They triggered the golden pirs. Two new sets of golden pirs starteding out. Even before they full came out, they moved to activate the red pirs.

    Hel-student also joined.

    They connected these to the existing red pirs creating a small barrier formation, trapping Sam. however, the golden pir that Sam was just about to examine is also trapped along with

    him.

    He looked at the three who are standing outside the barrier on the red pirs. This is notpletely out of his expectations. With the target on his back, it would be stupid of him to not think that something like this would happen.

    Now that it happened, it didn''t surprise him.

    "You look unfazed." Viswa-studentmented as he looked at Sam''s uninterested

    expression.

    Seeing that there is no response, he continued.

    "Anyway, I meant when I said I am thankful. You indeed did a lot. Now, that I understand the principle of beating this round, then I will do so after eliminating you."

    "All the best."

    The three opponents started activating more pirs. It is a basic attacking formation. It is

    used to kill the people that are already trapped. Usually, applied on targets that are way too powerful or unpredictable. It is amon-knowledge formation at that.

    Sam turned to the golden pir and poked his hand into the energy core. However, he didn''t connect with to figure out the pattern, instead he channeled his own energy and used his

    energy maniption ability, destabilizing the core.

    *RUMBLE*

    The room started trembling a bit. While facing the stunned gazes of the three opponents, Sam

    made the whole lotus destabilize.

    *BOOM*

    The golden lotus exploded on the spot and the shockwave threw Sam against the barrier.

    He coughed up some blood, but wiped it off and stood up without even a change in

    expression.

    *RUMBLE*

    The rumbling increased, the second set of the golden pirs suddenly became unstable.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    *BOOM**BOOM*

    One after the other, the lotuses started exploding. Only the second set though, the third and

    fourth remained intact.

    The three opponent''s faces paled as they watched what happened next.

    *SWISH**SWISH* *SWISH*

    Several walls opened up and puppets started pouring in.

    In the second set, five puppets were already activated, by their initial estimation, thirty-one

    puppets should be remaining, but Sam''s spection turned out to be right. There are not just thirty-six variations with the petals. There are somepound and

    complex variations in the formations and they seemed to open bigger doors in the walls, sending puppets of higher might.

    All of them came from all four sides, targeting the students.

    And the barrier they created around Sam, became a blessing to him, and a curse to them,

    because while the puppets jumped over the barrier and reached them, their path in that direction is blocked because of that barrier. Sam just crossed his arms and watched the scene.

 Chapter 2301: Struggle

    Chapter 2301: Struggle

    ?

    *BOOM**BAM*

    "ARGH.. FUCK"

    *THUD* *THUD*

    The explosions from the attacks of the puppets, the screams and curses from the opponents as well as the heavy thuds from the movement of the puppets. The enormous room echoes with those noises as Sam looked at the whole scene unfolding with little interest.

    Sam actually didn''t have any idea what would happen if he destroyed the core of the golden pir or the lotuses.

    He knew that things wouldn''t be smooth-sailing and something would definitely be triggered, but he didn''t know to what extent.

    Still, this is a lot better than the worst-case scenario he had in his mind.

    Sam looked at the tiles within the barrier.

    The space is not too big. There are not too many tiles inside the barrier for him to create the formation that he needs to defend against all the puppets outside. The most he can do is use the pirs to mess with the barrier itself and get out of it.

    So, first he decided to do that.

    He activated the pirs and joined them together before hended on the only one pir of the barrier that he has ess to from the side.

    The barrier trembled and opened up, making the formation moot.

    *BOOM**THUD*

    The moment he did, several puppets that were actively trying to get in, fell around him. Sam turned his shadow fusion on and disappeared from there. Hended on the red pir nearest to him and started moving to the right side of the room.

    That is where most of the puppets that he trapped are present.

    At the moment, the three opponents are randomly moving about activating the red pirs. They are trying to create the defensive formations, but because of the sheer number, they are failing miserably.

    So, before they mess up everything, Sam needs to do some damage control.

    First, he started creating small barriers by utilizing the random pirs are erected in the middle of the room. Nothing more than the five pirs. If he is lucky enough, he managed to trap a puppet or two in the middle of it.

    If he couldn''t, he just created the barrier, leaving it empty. He didn''t mind even if the golden pirs are stuck in the middle.

    He noticed that even if the golden pirs are stuck inside the barrier, the lotus formations are not stopping. The barriers did work well. Even though the puppets are fast, only the avian model puppets like the ones that looked like birds are able to fly.

    The remaining puppets, albeit powerful, most of them are not strong enough to jump past the barriers and of course, almost all of them are unable to climb past the barrier directly.

    So, their movements are a bit restricted.

    However, the things Sam did, not only hindered the puppets but the other three opponents also fell victim for it.

    The Hel-Student who was also on the right side of the room was stuck between a few small barriers that Sam created. To his rear is one of the big formations which Sam created at the start.

    At that moment, Sam swung past him and jumped over a few red pirs.

    All of a sudden, therger formation behind him opened up and itbined with a few smaller formations to envelop the whole area around him.

    He also noticed that the height of the formation has been reduced.

    Before he knew it, he is stuck inside a barrier formation along with around ten puppets. The puppets stuck inside didn''t try to break out of the formation. Instead, they are focused on the target they have among their midst.

    The Hel-Student thought of his options and realized, escaping is the only way left for him.

    But he is a tad bit toote.

    *BOOM*

    He is hit by the attack from a puppet. He crashed face first into another puppet that crushed him. A guy who is supposed to third or fourth ce at least in thispetition, had his head crushed and dead.

    Too bad for the other opponents, they are not even in a position to take a look at this situation.

    They are not even in a position to save themselves, how can they care about someone else? Sam didn''t stop there, he started joining more smaller barriers creating a chain. The barriers are all, almost empty. But within the chair, the Hephaestus-Academy student was stuck with a bunch of other puppets.

    However, he is much more quick-witted than first guy. He immediately charged an attack andunched it at a puppet nearby.

    The next moment, an invisible force enveloped him taking him away from there. He chose exit by disqualification without a second thought.

    Now, only the Viswa-Student was left. He stook on a red pir, while panting heavily. Sam on the other hand had a much more rxed expression. He already figured out what the exit could be, so he doesn''t have to worry too much about energy conservation.

    So, he just went all out.

    However, that is in no way beneficial to this guy.

    When he noticed that Sam ising towards him after dealing with the two other guys, he became decisive.

    But he has much more thought than the two before. He made a different and unexpected move. He reached one of the golden pirs nearby. This belongs to the third set.

    He danced around while clinging to the pir dodging the attacks. He managed to open one side pretty quickly. This even surprised Sam who was watching him quietly.

    He clearly held back when dealing with the second set.

    Once the surface opened, he took out a formation disc and just activated a couple nodes it

    before shoving into that gap.

    *BOOM*

    The energy core and the lotus exploded.

    By that time, he already disappeared from there and appeared at a different golden pir. This

    one belonged to the fourth set.

    Sam hurried towards him with his shadow element, but before he could reach him.

    *THUD* *THUD*

    The new set of puppets fell down from the top and to his bad luck theynded right before

    him, blocking his way.

    *BAM*

    Sam took the hit head on and was sent flying.

    *BAM*

    That didn''t end there of course, while he was in the middle of the air, he was beaten by another puppet andnded on the floor. When another puppet was just about to crush him, the red pir erected from that tile.

    Sam took that chance and jumped away from there. He stepped on two more red pirs while dodging the attacks, before he arrived at the golden pir where the opponent is working. Sam didn''t do much and just a grabbed a hold of him before throwing him into the air.

    *BAM*

    An attacknded on that guy.

    Sam checked the surface of the pir, it is almost unlocked. There is only one lock left. He did

    it quickly and a surface is done.

    However, he couldn''t focus on these surfaces for long at the moment. He needs to finish the

    puppets, one way or the other. He reached the nearest barrier and stood on the red pir that

    is part of that barrier.

    He closed his eyes and jumped to another red pir within was standing alone. After a couple of other jumps, hended on another red pir that belonged to the same formation.

    *BOOM*

    The formation barrier became unstable and exploded.

    The puppets inside the formation were destroyed along with that, while a lot of puppets around the formation also took a lot of damage.

    On top of it all, the red pirs arepletely unscathed. Sam jumped on to the nearest one and started creating a new formation with them. This time, an attacking formation, something simr to a trap formation.

    He stood in the middle and controlled the formation from within. As a few puppets stepped

    in, he manipted the energy of the formation. A huge force crushed the puppets to the ground and mmed them.

    This is simr to a gravity formation, instead of increasing the gravity, it is just a pushing

    force done by the sheer energy.

    The puppets became immobile, however, Sam knew he cannot do it for long.

    When a few puppets entered in, he just destabilized the formation once and left it.

    *BOOM* Another explosion destroyed everything in the formation.

    As Sam was about to do some more clean up, the Viswa-student appeared in front of him. He

    attached a few pirs to the formation Sam was working on.

    *BOOM*

    The formation exploded in the middle making Sam fly like a broken kite. He managed to stop himself andnded on the red pir barely dodging a puppet''s battering fist.

    He looked at Viswa-student who once again went after a golden pir, trying to destabilize it.

    "Fuck it."

    Sam cursed and took out a formation disc.

    *SWOOSH*

    Within a moment he reached Viswa-student who was about to dodge his approach, but Sam

    didn''t give him the chance. He attached the disc to Viswa-student''s body and activated theN?v(el)B\\jnn

    formation.

    The opponent disappeared from the spot, while Sam clung to the golden pir. Viswa-student was taken aback as he felt the suction force take him away from this room.

    Before he knew it, he appeared in a familiar tunnel. However, this is a tad bit different.

    It is the same energy beam tunnel that Sam came through.

    "What the fuck"

    He cursed and stepped to the side, identally destroying one of Sam''s energy gathering

    formations.

    *SWOOSH*

    The energy beam cut through his leg and made him fall down.

    "ARGHHH...."

    More and more energy gathering formations are destroyed and the energy beams were not

    longer being restricted.

    Viswa-student didn''t even get a chance to express his agony, before he was destroyed by the

    beams

 Chapter 2302: Winner

    Chapter 2302: Winner

    ?

    Sam looked at the myriad of puppets. All trying to surround him and kill him right then and there.

    The thought of admitting defeat and leaving this ce didn''t even cross his mind. He just kept on thinking for a way out of from this, while jumping around on the red pirs. The fourth set of the golden pirs which are still active are releasing more puppets as the time passed and he knew he wouldn''t be able to hold on for long.

    After running a bunch of scenarios in his head, he decided to go with one of the most feasible

    ones.

    He started creating arge formation surrounding all the puppets in the room. This formation didn''t have much purpose. It is neither a barrier, nor is it an attacking formation. It doesn''t have anyplex functions.

    However, it effects arge area and connects with everything within that area. And the wielder of the formation can create the effect of connecting with all of them properly, if their mental strength and energy control are strong enough.

    In process, Sam was dodging the thunder bolts, fire balls, wind des, punches, kicks, battering metal hunksing at him from all the directions. If even for a second, he bes a little bit distracted, his body would be destroyed.

    The great thing about these puppets are that with all the sophistry they are still not too focused on the efficiency of movement. They are bulky for the sake of powerful attacks they are capable of throwing.

    But they are not created in a way to ensure those powerful attacks alwaysnd on the target. That is the only saving grace for Sam to be able to dodge these many attacks.

    As he got busier with building the formation, the audience who are watching the wholepetition are gulping down hard.

    Since the start of the formation finalepetition, most of their focus was solely on the screen that was disying Sam''s feats inside the castle.

    And they never spoke. They never discussed, they didn''t throw any snide remarks. Nothing. From the elders of various academies that are watching it along with f to the students of various academies who are witnessing it from the open air auditorium, everyone was silent as they looked at the performance of all the students.

    The more time passed, the more stunned everyone became.

    Not just from Sam''s performance even though it yed the bigger part, even from the rest of the students.

    Without argument, thepetition this year was tough, they expected some losses, but more people have died in this top tenpetition that they expected and those academy representatives in particr are much more silent than the rest.

    All of them just watched as Sam disyed the impable agility that they have rarely seen in the second graders. And he is showing it off in the formation test.

    Everyone who marked Sam as their target are feeling the pressure. Even the kid who is currently marked as engaged with Sam.

    This way, many people are feeling myriad of emotions while most of them prayed that Sam just fails and dies inside.

    Meanwhile, Sam finished his preparations at a speed that surprised even himself. The formation is created and within that formation, at the absolute center of it, was a single red pir.

    On that, he ced another formation te.

    He stood on that formation te and used himself as the medium to connect it to the formation he ced to cover the whole room.

    All the puppets areing at him with all kinds of attacks.

    He activated a barrier around himself, which is also part of the formation. It is strong enough to defend a few attacks, while he aplishes the goal of this formation.

    Soon, he connected the formation te to the rest of the formation and closed his eyes. When the maximum number of puppets entered the formation range, with only a couple of them left outside, he made his move.

    *SWOOSH*

    Like a sh, several energy tendrils emerged from the formation and coiled around the puppets. They didn''t stop them, block them or even trap them. They just coiled around them, without even hindering their actual movements.

    Once that is done, Sam injected his own energy into the formation te to activate it.

    Spatial energy reverberated throughout the room and it enveloped every single puppet within the formation.

    Sam''s veins on his forehead are bulging with pressure, his mind and soul are working on overload. Blood started seeping out of his nose and ears. But he just gritted his teeth and endured that soul searing pain.

    *SWOOSH*

    All of a sudden, like a sh, the whole room went silent. All the noise disappeared along with the puppets. As for their destination...

    In the far end of this formation castle, in the first room that Sam entered. The gravity and space formation that Sam created is bubbling with overflowing energy. The spatial turbulence and the gravity that is manipting it are creating a chaotic mess.

    The whole room has long since copsed and it is tearing apart the surroundings.

    At that moment, the spatial turbulence has calmed down for a moment, before a huge sh

    urred.

    *SWOOSH*

    Puppets, all of them that Sam targeted started pouring from that sh and they were immediately being sucked into that massive globe created with the spatial turbulence and gravitational force.

    The energy piled up and the massive spatial disturbance created by this sudden space gate added to it. The chaos that was still being bnced a second before, couldn''t be bncedn/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    anymore and that is it.

    *BOOM*

    The explosion urred. All the puppets that came were destroyed. A huge spatial tear urred and the gravitational force created by that spatial tear has been increased to an astonishing level.

    All the spectators stood up as tremors disturbed even them, because at that moment, that corner of the formation castle exploded along with that spatial disturbance, creating a huge tear in the walls of it. The formation protecting the defenses of the formation castle was also destroyed along with it.

    Of course, whatever were the tremors outside the castle, inside Sam experienced it even more. There are only a couple of puppets around and even they stopped for a moment after the

    explosion.

    The whole room is shing, even the golden lotuses slowed down as if something is interfering with its energy source.

    Sam hurriedly unlocked one pir after another. He ignored the bright shes of energy fluctuation and finished the second set of pirs as well.

    Once they are all done, they also disappeared back into the tiles, leaving the golden tiles

    behind.

    Once these two sets of golden tiles appeared, the whole room shuffled. The tiles started shifting locations and soon they arranged themselves in a pattern around Sam.

    Just one look and he saw what it is.

    The added arrival of the spatial energy is another give away.

    Sam felt a fluctuation around him and he disappeared from there. He reappeared in the open-

    air auditorium. Concluding the end of thepetition and silently dering himself the

    winner of it.

 Chapter 2303: Inscription Test

    Chapter 2303: Inscription Test

    ?

    The formationpetition is over.

    Sam took the championship for it and his presence disrupted the ns and preparations of many academies. While he left the academy without any care for it, the said academies'' representatives that came to the tournament are sending news back to their respective academies.

    The most shaken are the Viswa Karma academy, Hel Academy and Hephaestus academy.

    In the Hephaestus academy camp.

    All the students from various grades are gathered. The Elder looked at the representative leader of the fourth grade students, who is kind of the highest authority among the students.

    "I want you to help me n the rest of thepetitions so that our scores will sustain. Initially we at least expected a third ce from the formationpetition in the second grade.

    However, we are dropped to fourth because of Sam.

    If I had known, I wouldn''t have made Deals with the Viswa Karma academy and the Hel academy. Sam just pushed all the ranks down. That will create a deficit of points in overall ranking strategy.

    Which are thepetitions that we can strive for some improvement?"

    The Elder asked calmly. Even though he is shook by the unexpected loss they suffered, he is stillposed.

    He knew that this is not the time for losing his shit. That is the reason that he is even here, instead of some rtively younger elder. With his seniority, this job is a bit too below his paygrade.

    "Elder, our initial requirement from the second grades are rtively lowpared to the other two grades. We know that many of our second grade students have suffered losses due to the ming skull situation.

    So, we didn''t put too much pressure on them. However, whatever small requirements they have... they are essential in the end.

    Now with this deficit, it will be hard to expect recovery from thepetitions of other grades."

    "Then, what do you suggest? You are not suggesting that we just let the situation be, right?"

    "Of course not. I just think we need to recover this in the second gradepetitions only. Since the initial expectations itself are low, any rtive improvement will have significant impact on the overall grade.

    If we can improve slightly in every otherpetition, I believe we will be able to recover this deficit."

    The Elder looked at the scroll spread on the table while thinking over the student''s words.

    There are several numbers and details written on the scroll. It is basically, a report of sorts on how many points eachpetition can bring them based on the position attained. This is not actually an official criteria.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    This is what the academies spected after years and years of the experience in these tournaments.

    You can consider the first ce in each auxiliarypetition counts as ten points, while thebatpetitions have twenty.

    Each position in thepetition of course holds some points and in this second grade formationpetition, the Hephaestus academy wanted to have eight points at least. Now, with Sam''s intervention they dropped to fourth ce, which is only seven points.

    Even though these are not the official points and they cannot be sure about it, they really did expect that they needed that extra one point to at least stay in the same rank as they did now. The worst part for them is that the Hephaestus academy is not known for thebat prowess.

    Formations, inscriptions, puppet making and weapon making are their forte. For the second grade students they reduced their requirements in otherpetitions to very low and hoped that they would score decently in these three.

    Now, they have to recover it.

    But in whatpetition could they do it?

    Inbat, half of the Olympian academies already dominate it. Zeus, Poseidon, Ares, Athena all of these academies are already having high hopes for this.

    Then, there are skills like painting, music, medicine making, healing, etc.

    They can''t do shit in these. However, they are still hoping to get a quarter of a point which is what they get for crossing the first round of prelims and entering the second round.

    Now, to cover this one point loss, either they have to quadruple the second round entries or enter the finals.

    And this problem is not just the situation in the Hephaestus academy camp.

    The Hel academy, Viswa Karma academy are all dealing with simr situation. Of course, this is also not new this year. Every year something like this always happens and they always have to improvise their n.

    But this year is extremely bitter because the person who caused this upset is Sam.

    Meanwhile, the Gamble academy side situation is much more lively.

    Chorus understood the advantage their academy is in. Even though the Gambler academy is not exactly known to focus too much on the rankings, they do have condition that everyone at that academy abide by.

    That their academy should always stay in top 100 and should not leave the rankings of the Divine Academies.

    However, even with that condition, they don''t go around making alliances and ns. Every department just focuses and performs well to get as many points as they can and win. Their performance wouldn''t be too great, but it would be decently remarkable nheless.

    Every year, in the second gradepetitions, they only get around third to sixth ces in almost everypetition.

    So, Chorus who is in charge of handling everything rted to thepetition is surprised by the sudden victory of Sam. He didn''t expect it. On top of that, there is also another person from Gambler academy in the formation rankings.

    He ranked eighth. Not too high. But it is still three points. So, just this contest got them

    thirteen points.

    The students of course, are delighted. After all, they cannot be as detached as their elders, can they? They behaved like there was never any bad blood between them and Sam and cheered happily. The seniors got some added motivation. After all, they cannot do worse than their

    own juniors.

    Just like that the formationpetition for second graders closed the door and led to thepetition of inscriptions, the very next day.

    While everyone is still trying to get over how messed up their ns became, Sam came back to thispetition with a wide toothy grin.

    Because he justpleted another mission condition in the list. He won the first ce in formationpetition. Apart from that, there is another condition that he believed that he surely fulfilled. Contributing in increasing the academy ranking.

    Even without Sam''s involvement, the Gambler academy has always been capable of sustaining its ranking. And with his sudden contribution of points, which are extra, it couldn''t get any better. Once the final calctions are done, this would be finished as well. Since he didn''t have too many expectations on thepetition itself, he got a great haul.

    The original goal was to increase the conflicts and from the looks of it, performing well is enough to do that. So, Sam just decided to stick with the flow and achieve what he wanted. With those thoughts he is cheerfully in the inscriptionpetition.

    The first round of preliminaries once again took ce in the same open-air auditorium. Simr tables are ced in front of them. Thepetition is also very simr. "You have one hour to inscribe the whole table. The stone p part of the table will be attacked by the elders with each attack increasing in its power. The longer the stone stays

    intact the better.

    The inscription could be of any kind. You can even inscribe the formations if you are capable of it. But you only have one hour. The longer to your formation stays the higher your rank will

    be in prelims.

    Your time starts now."

    Sam felt like he had a dejavu.

    He took out his inscription pen. It is not the one he got from inheritance of Murali back in Deste, neither is it some kind of divine weapon. It is one of the tools invented in the Dusk organization. Students of the academy did it.

    And it is a coboration between the formation department, inscription department and the artisan department, which is more into the way of engineering than the traditional methods

    of this world.

    This inscription pen is eerily simr to a normal pen in the modern world. Except, it has multiple cartridges inside, which allow the wielder to host as many inscription inks prefilled

    as possible.

    With just intent, they can decide which inkes out of the nib and they can also decide the side of the nib, just with the intent. It also has a small energy reservoir within that helps the wielder not stress about running out of energy.

    The highlight of it is that it records the pattern in which the inscription is done, which couldter be shown in a projection.

    It is a hotmodity in the markets Dusk is active in and way too convenient. Sam started drawing the inscription with the pen. Looking at him, not preparing any material or instruments, not even nning or marking anything beforehand, everyone is surprised. Sam just acted like he is doodling on a desk like a bored student and within ten minutes, he is done.

 Chapter 2304: Coercion

    Chapter 2304: Coercion

    ?

    Sam''s move appeared badass to the Gambler academy.

    Even though he did take a few minutes longer than he did in the formation test, it is still way too fastpared to the rest of thepetitors. Of course, there are many other people who found this chilling and concerning.

    Generally, if an academy is an expert in the formations, their expertise in the inscriptions wouldn''t be too far off. In fact, it is more than likely that they are of simr levels. So, when the ns in the formationpetition have been destroyed, people tried to make some amends in this inscription contest.

    But the sense of dejavu, Sam gave made their hearts sink to their stomachs.

    They couldn''t bring themselves to imagine what would happen and how much would their ns be disturbed if he repeated the same thing he did in the formation contest.

    So, many meetings were convened even while the first round of prelims is going on.

    And they all have only one goal at the moment, that is to make sure that Sam wouldn''t advance past this first round of prelims.

    There were many suggestions pouring in.

    "I think we can buy off the elders and rig thepetition. That is the only sure-fire way to get him out of this. I am sure, the Hel academy can cut some deal with the Thor academy."

    One of the elders said to the elders of the other academies.

    "And, why would they do that? I don''t know if you heard about it. But in the freshman tournament, the same guy faced rigging and f himself has toe down and apologize. He suffered severe losses.

    Now, you know things have be much more troublesome. There are way too many rules. The judiciary system of the academy also be quite strict with everything. The Thor academy won''t risk it.

    Particrly, when they don''t have any vested interests in thispetition."

    "Then, we have two more choices.

    One is to convince the Gambler academy to withdraw him from thepetition and the second one is to kill him or making him unable topete any further."

    Another elder said it out loud. Those two ideas are ringing in everyone''s mind. There are around eight academies gathered here. Hel academy and Hephaestus academy are leading the alliance. The rest of them are from rtively lower level academies from various regions.

    And one of the academies had great prospects in the solobat this year, however, because of this alliance, they lost three candidates, only two more are left.

    One of them happened to be engaged with Sam.

    Everyone is staring at that elder, their expression is obvious. They are trying to coerce him give his student up so that they can go after Sam again.

    "No way. It is not going to happen.

    Those two students are the pride of my academy. How can I let their dreams go bust andmit of the dishonor of not even giving them a chance to participate.

    This is theirst year in second grade, it will take a long time for them to climb high enough to this position in the third grade.

    There is no way, I am letting you guys force me to do this.

    Over my dead body."

    He stormed off without even letting them speak.

    The Hel academy elder looked at the departing figure and turned to the Hephaestus academy elder.

    "I have a few ideas..."

    He exined a couple of ns to them. Their faces showed a myriad of expressions before turning determined. Even if it is just another half a point, they need to secure it and they can do anything for that.

    After all, it is not like they hadn''t done much worse things before for far less.

    They all dispersed after agreeing with the tasks.

    The Hel academy Elder walked straight to the Paradise inn. Even with the repeated attacks, the Thor academy didn''t change the residence of the Gambler academy student, so they are still staying there in the remaining two floors.

    At the moment, Chorus is taking a nap in his room.

    *KNOCK* *KNOCK*

    The knock on the door disturbed his peace. Hezily got up and waved his hand, the door opened.

    "Come in."

    The Hel academy elder walked in without any reservations as he looked around.

    "Paradise inn. Although, the management changed, the rooms are still as luxurious as ever. I though the Thor academy would botch this up."

    He muttered out loud. Chrous looked at the face of the elder and said.

    "What is a small fry like you doing here, disturbing my nap?"

    The elder didn''t feel offended, instead he just smiled and said.

    "Well, I am indeed a small fry. However, I am here on behalf of a much bigger person than I am. I am sure, as a representative of that person, I am worthy of you holding a conversation with."

    "Oh? Who would that bigger person be?"

    "Elder Mangus. The Head of the formation department of the Hel academy."

    "The formation department head? Indeed, a very big seat. What does that old man want?"

    "I am here with a proposal to the Gambler academy.

    I know the Gambler academy holds little significance when ites to the academy tournament. You care more about the material benefits.

    So, I would like to know if you can consider withdrawing Sam from the inscription contest. Your ranking will not be effected even if he doesn''t participate. In exchange, you can gain a lot of material benefits. For you personally, if you prefer or even for your academy.

    We can also discuss an alliance in this tournament. We can all help each other in other rounds

    andpetitions.

    We just need you to withdraw him from the inscriptionpetition."

    *YAWN*

    Chorus yawnedzily and said.

    "See, I am not really interested in handling things like this, you must know that. The whole

    realm knows me as that onezy elder of Gambler academy.

    So, can you just handle this discussion with the guy in the floor above this? He is in the room that''s right above this one.

    He will give you the answer you need. No matter what decision he makes, I don''t care."

    With that he fell on to the bed immediately. The elder frowned in confusion, before going up. Only to see Sam standing at his door, leaning against the frame while looking at him with a

    cocky smile.

    The elder froze for a moment, he hesitated a bit. Just when he decided to step forward, Sam

    said.

    "Not a chance. Get lost."

    The Elder''s face turned red. He walked away immediately. This is humiliating. On his way back, he took out hismunication token and contacted the Hephaestus elder.

    "I failed on this side, you need to convince that person. There is no other way. Meanwhile, I will organize the other smaller academies to send their students."

    At the same time, on the other side.

    The Hephaestus academy elder is walking through the broken down slums of the city. He walked into an abandoned, half-copsed house and knocked on the floor.

    "Come out kid. I know you are here."

    After some hesitating silence, a young man came out of the ground.

    It is the same kid that is engaged with Sam.

    "I just talked to your elder. I wanted him to withdraw you from thepetition. However, he

    is not to be coerced so easily. He left even before we could say anything. I guess the academy

    must have really invested a lot in you.

    They care so much about you getting higher rank in thispetition."

    The young man didn''t speak.

    "I guess, you also worked quite hard. I have seen your fights, in your internal academy

    tournament. You did great.

    Particrly, the usage of your earth element is great. However, I feel like there are several

    factors limiting your growth.

    Your strength is not reaching its full potential. That is the only reason, why you were unable

    to beat the other guy.

    I heard he is the son of the Grand elder. He must have gotten quite a few resources. Should have been frustrating, losing to someone just because of the resources you have are limited. Particrly, when you might be more talented than him. Now imagine, what you could have aplished, if you are at an academy like ours..."

    Fifteen minutester, the elder walked out and contacted someone.

    "It is done. These kids are way too easy to deal with."

    As soon as he hung up, Sam who is inside the paradise inn trying to cook up his next ns in

    this tournament, felt the green light go off on his token.

    He became vignt immediately and tapped the formation disc.

    *SWOOSH*n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Three attacksnded from outside of his room. They attacked at the same time. Not one of

    themnded on him, but definitely made contact with his formation, which means he is

    engaged, once again.

    He looked to the broken wall of the building and sighed.

    Once again, the chase started.

 Chapter 2305: Second Round

    Chapter 2305: Second Round

    ?

    *BOOM* *CRASH*

    Sam broke through the only intact wall of the room into the corridor. He didn''t crash into the wall head first, rather he used the guy who boldly attacked him as the tool to create this path.

    Once the opponent is stuck to the wall in the corridor and is stunned for a second, earth element is conjured on Sam''s leg.

    *BAM*

    He stomped on the ground, breaking it open.

    He let himself fall freely onto the floor below. Only after he fell did he realize that he truly underestimated these fellows.

    Few people were standing there oblivious to what was happening. The corridor of that floor is filled with people. They panicked when the ceiling above came crashing down and attacked instinctually.

    The rocks and debris from the feeling didn''t hit him. The barrier appeared and blocked them. In the same way, the barrier blocked Sam from the attacks and at the same time from falling downpletely.

    This made him levitate in the air as the continuous attacks poured in from below.

    He couldn''t move for a moment and just like that the opponent came from the hole above.

    *BAM*

    A punch came at Sam, which he blocked with an energy barrier. However, he still felt the shockwave and a slight numbing pain.

    The other party''s cultivation superiority is clearly showing its edge.

    Sam activated his spatial element and used blink. In a sh, he disappeared from there and reappeared at the entrance of the building.

    This time, things were not out of his expectations. He guessed that someone would be there and they were there, standing and doing nothing.

    Judging from their expressions, they don''t exactly know why they are standing there.

    He didn''t wait for even a second before he blinked again.

    *SWOOSH*

    His opponent came down and looked around. He rapidly spread his spiritual sense with no reservations trying to find Sam''s location. But there is nothing. The rest of the opponents spread out to examine the surroundings.

    They knew Sam was using spatial elements, so they were looking for spatial fluctuations.

    However, there are none they could find nearby.

    The possibility that Sam might have used a node far away from this ce did cross through their minds.

    Still, even their contacts at various locations of the city didn''t find anything.

    For some reason, one of them wanted to look underground and he managed to discover a faint trace of spatial energy.

    The marked candidate, the one who is currently engaged with Sam, gritted his teeth and threw a punch to the ground.

    *BOOM* *CRACK*

    Apanied by an explosive noise, the ground split open, creating a crevice until it reached the spot where the spatial fluctuations were created.

    However, that is another dead end.

    They didnt find any other traces nearby.

    There are not signs of digging, or even a sign of any human presence that might hav existed there.

    They could only guess that Sam managed to leave this ce with another blink and they went back to finding where he could have possibly blinked to.

    Sam disappeared from everyone''s trace and reappeared in the hideout again.

    He sighed and muttered to himself.

    "These guys are pretty persistent."

    Sam just sat there as he started thinking about his ns once again. By now, he got a lot more than what he initially expected in this tournament.

    He won the formation contest and is pretty confident about the inscription contest as well.

    It would be great if he could win more, but it is not the main goal anymore.

    The main goal is to create more chaos in the academy realm.

    Just his ranking alone already caused so much tension, so he can continue doing that and try to increase his rankings in otherpetitions.

    At the same time, there is another way that he could use.

    The motivation of all these academies is to rank higher in thesepetitions. He realized that it could be exploited easily.

    He just needs to find a way to disturb the rankings. That is his current small goal.

    While he brewed in his own thoughts, time passed and it is tomorrow.

    Sam made an entrance on Harbinger to the second round of the Inscriptionpetition.

    He didn''t check the results of the previouspetition. He didn''t also worry about his ranking. He is confident that he will win and he did.

    The Elder came onto the stage and exined the second round.

    "Thirty-two people have managed to pass the first round of prelims and advanced to the second round.

    Now, we decided to take a much more direct approach to select the finalists.

    There would be sixteen finalists. So, right now all of you will be paired against each other andpete head on.

    The format is pretty simple to understand.

    Both contestants will be given a room. An empty one devoid of any protection except for what

    little the stone could provide.

    Your job is to turn the room into a cage of inscriptions.

    You can use any kind of inscription, elemental type, fusion with attacks, added scrolls,

    inscription formations, everything is on the table.

    Once you and your opponent have finished with your respective rooms, both of you will be ced in the rooms of the others.

    You need to break the inscriptions ande out of it.

    The one whoes out faster with as limited damage as possible, will be dered as a

    winner.

    As you might have guessed, you cannot use attacks, you cannot use direct formations or formation discs. You cannot use any external help.

    If you are going to use your own specialized tools, you need to get them examined and

    approved.

    First follow the process of approval for the tools and then we can start thepetition."

    All thirty-two contestants went for the approval process. It is not really that difficult. It is just

    to ensure that someone doesn''t use an overpowered tool that could make others take advantage of the whole thing.

    Sam doubtfully ced his inscription pen in the formation for examination. The pen could be considered simple andplicated at the same time. It doesn''t have many features that could actually help with drawing an inscription or amplifying it.

    At least, not in the version he is using. But it does have a lot of other features that could help him in the drawing process. Like the multiplepartments for various inks, the ease in shifting the cartridges fluids and the nib is also flexible.

    But his worries are for nothing. He managed to pass easily. Contrarily, the other candidates

    faced a few difficulties with their own tools.

    After everything was sorted, lots were drawn to determine the opponents.

    Sam couldn''t even stop himself from grinning as soon as he saw the opponent he was

    assigned to.

    It is a candidate from the Zeus academy. This guy tried his hand in the formationpetition as well, but didn''t do well in the illusion tower.

    His forte is inscriptions and he couldn''t handle the pure formation-basedpetition.

    But he believed this is his yground and in fact came in third in the first round prelims.

    However, when he saw Sam''s grin, he felt a bit odd. A bad feeling gnawed at him.

    When he sat and waited for his turn, he even got a message from the academy members.

    "Destroy him"n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    That is the gist of it.

    He mulled over those words until it is their turn.

    Sam went into his empty room and took out his pen. A wicked grin appeared on his face as he

    drew in the inscriptions at an incredible pace.

    The elders watching whatever that is happening the room were dumbfounded at the runic

    marks Sam is making on the walls.

    "What are those runes? They look.."

    "I have never seen those kinds of runes. Is that guy ying a joke here? Or is it some kind of a

    disguise technique that covers the real runes? I have heard of those kinds of tricks before." "It is a possibility, but the disguise techniques are usually ced on top of the already created runes. And the way they are glowing, I don''t they are just some random symbols." Many spectators had simr thoughts. Whatever Sam is doing, it is quite a mystery to them. The most mysterious thing of all is that his runes are not dissolving into the wall.

    It is quitemon for people to hide the inscriptions by adding a few runes in the form so that the others cannot perceive it easily.

    It is even moremon, almost a norm inpetitions like these.

    But his runes are visible to the naked eye as if he is confident that they wouldn''t do shit even if

    they saw it.

    At least, Sam took some time in this round and didn''t finish it with a massive gappared to

    his opponent.

    They finished approximately at the same time.

    With a sh, both of them exchanged their ces andnded in each other''s rooms.

    *BAM*

    Sam felt a huge thrust of gravity and almost hit the ground with his face first. He mmed his

    foot against the ground to regain bnce.

 Chapter 2306: Torture

    Chapter 2306: Torture

    ?

    Sam stood his ground after the initial jerk of the excessive gravity.

    It is not something he cannot handle, he was caught off guard because of the way he fell into the room. Once he got his bnce back, he looked around. The whole room looked squeaky clean.

    Cleaner than its original state.

    All the inscriptions are dissolved into the walls.

    Sam activated his energy vision and looked around. The walls still looked clean, but when he looked at the ground and ceiling, he saw small portions of both glowing. The pattern of the glow is same shape as the runes inscribed.

    It seemed like the other party didn''t think too much and just believed that the inscriptions are hidden properly.

    Sam took out his inscription pen again and first levitated to reach the ceiling.

    As he ced the nib on the glowing inscription pattern, a few sparks rose.

    *CRACKLE*

    The sparks are close to brown in color, indicating the earth element. Sam''s hand glowed with earth element as he forcefully drew on the wall.

    *JOLT*

    He took a small jerk of energy that came out as recoil since he pushed through the already active inscription. But he didn''t care. He anticipated it and was ready for it. So, he didn''t take any damage. As soon as he made the changes he wanted, he hurriedly came down.

    *BOOM*

    A small explosion urred. It is not impactful enough. It just barely broke the surface of the ceiling. It didn''t break it downpletely.

    But it did its job, the inscription is no longer working. However, Sam felt the effects of other inscriptions.

    He could feel those effects. The air inside is heating up. The energy around his has thinned, and he could feel some invisible force attacking his mind.

    But Sam ignored them and worked on the second gravity inscription which is still active on the floor.

    *BOOM*

    Another explosion resulted in a few more inscriptions getting active. Sam took a step forward to examine one of them.

    *BOOM*

    A fire ball came out from a corner. He dodged it and expected it to hit the other ide of the room, but it didn''t. Instead, it went past him, took a turn and came back.

    Sam dodged to the side and stepped on something else.

    *BOOM*

    Another fire ball out of a different corner. Sam dodged them and looked at the corners with his energy vision. There is a small array of inscriptions active, controlling the fire balls. *SWOOSH*

    He dashed to the corner and used fire element on his pen.

    *BUZZ*

    He ced the pen at a certain point stopping the inscription''s functions. The fire ball that was about to hit him, stopped a couple of inches away from him.

    Sam slipped down to avoid the second fire ball that is already there. He jumped to the other corner and paused this fire ball as well.

    He then examined the ground once again. He believed his position on the ground is what triggered these corner inscriptions. So, he is searching for a pattern.

    It didn''t take long to find one. Judging from the two spots that he stepped on to trigger the traps in the corners, he kind of guessed where the other triggers might be.

    He activated the observation skill to confirm his spections. Sam crouched down and started inscribing his own inscriptions.

    It seemed like there was a trigger set for this action as well, the four corners of the ceiling acted up and started throwing lightning bolts at him.

    Sam hurriedly wrote something down and a barrier appeared on top of him, covering the trajectory of the lightning bolts.

    In the next two minutes, he finished an inscription array on the ground and activated it. At that exact moment, he jumped away from that spot.

    *BAM*

    The four lightning boltsnded on that spot he was crouching at.

    The inscription heid down started glowing wildly before it exploded. Along with the explosion, it threw out of the four lightning bolts to different sides, destroying and triggering various inscriptions. However, at the same time, the area in which heid down the inscription has exploded destroying all the inscriptions and triggers ced there.

    Sam created another barrier to defend against theing attacks andid down another inscription simr to this.

    The surroundings are changing. Ice spikes areing from the walls, lightning bolts are charging at him, fire balls areing, the floor is burning up, the energy is thinning. The mental attacks are of course there since the start.

    It''s just that they are too weak to effect him.

    All Sam needs to do is break this whole thing down and he is nning on doing it by using the inscriptions on the walls themselves.

    He didn''t know if it would take longer time and make him lose his first position, but he didn''t care. Its just fun this way and would be more helpful to his goals.

    Looking at his yful bodynguage and the ease at handling, people wondered if the Zeus academy candidate had actually been an idiot that gave an easy problem to the opponent. When they focused their gaze to look at that guy''s performance, these thoughts only reinforced themselves.

    Because the situation of Sam''s opponent ispletely opposite.

    As soon as hended, he was expecting some kind of initial jerky trap, much like the gravity one he has ced, but it wasn''t there.

    Instead, there is a circr spot in which there is no sign of inscriptions and that is where he fell. The rest of the room is filled with inscriptions visible to the naked eye.

    At first nce, they looked like normal inscriptions and arrays, however with a little observation he noticed that something is seriously wrong with what''s on the walls.

    The runes appeared familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

    Much like how Sam felt when he saw the for the first time in the Telchine territory.

    However, unlike Sam who burned with curiosity to figure out how to crack them, this guy just felt like he lost his mind. He didn''t know what is happening.

    He touched the inscription closest to his feet gently to see if there is any trap or trigger, but nothing of that sort happened.

    Only after thirty-seconds, as we watched nkly, something happened. A circle of runes around him glowed. It is a ring enveloping the circle that he is standing in. It also glowed with

    such an ominous dark light, he became anxious for a moment.

    He scratched his neck as he started observing the ring that is glowing. The only thing he understood is that the ring is a single inscription.

    He started scratching his arm as irritation crept in. The fact that he couldn''t even figure out what is happening and what kind of inscription this is made him feel like an idiot.

    At least, in a couple of seconds, he figured one of those questions. He realized that he is scratching all over his body, without even knowing.

    There is one part of his hand, where he almost scratched the skin off.

    He tried to stop, but he couldn''t. If he left a spot on his skin without scratching, he felt like he would lose his mind, he dropped his inscription pen down and scratched vigorously. In just thirty seconds, there are several wounds on his body.

    At that time, the second circle glowed. It is equally ominous if not more.

    He felt a burning feeling all over his body and it is more intense in the wounds that he inflicted on himself. But the itchy feeling didn''t stop. In fact, it increased. He kept on scratching creating more wounds and feeling that intense burning pain. Another thirty-secondster, the third circle lit up. Now, he felt a different sensation. Previously, his enhanced healing and regeneration that came with his cultivation were trying

    to reduce his wounds.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Now with the third circle it is gone.

    Only then did he understand how much relief his natural regeneration has been providing

    him. Once it is gone, the pain almost made him pass out. But he couldn''t. He felt like some

    force is making his mind stay active.

    Then he felt another effect of the third circle.

    ck vapor started seeping out of his wounds. They are bing corroded with some

    invisible energy.

    Thirty secondster.

    His blood became thinner and his heart race increased pumping it more and more.

    He screamed and rolled on the ground.

    By now, the spectators who initially thought this guy is just an idiot because of his nk

    expression are showing expressions of pity and the more experienced ones understood

    something more.

    "Sam... the ease he is handling the room, he can break out of it any time he wants. He is just

    passing time." One of them muttered in a low voice.

    The others also understood. There is only one reason they could think for Sam to just pass

    some time.

    To torture his opponent more until he dies.

 Chapter 2307: Inscription Finals

    Chapter 2307: Inscription Finals

    ?

    After half an hour, Sam finally broke through the room and came out without so much as a scratch.

    On the other side, his opponent is still struggling. The spectators are unable to even look at his state. His body bleeding all over, the blood corroding at a rapid rate, his hair fell off and whatever that''s left of his skin seemed to have been charred.

    Now, he even lost his ability to move.

    All they could see is that he is screaming at the top of his lungs. What they didn''t know is that, he also lost his vision and the only thing he could see is an illusion that is torturing him just as much as the physical torture of other inscriptions.

    He didn''t look like the prospective candidate of the Zeus academy.

    The arrogance and superiority that is usually associated with that identity has long since disappeared.

    He looked nothing short of a corpse. Except he is still faintly breathing which is burning his lungs up. As soon as Sam arrived outside, the elders in charge of the test broke the room downpletely and brought him out.

    But all of them knew that there is no point in that, except that guy might have a couple of peaceful moments before he dies.

    One of the elders is even kind enough to give him some pain numbing medicine which made him stop feeling that pain for a moment.

    They all turned to Sam who just casually walked away from there. As usual, the news spread like crazy. The Elder of the Zeus academy who is supposed to be at the examination is not there and he got the news only after the kid was retrieved.

    He came to check on him.

    He was so confident that he wouldn''t be needed in an inscriptionpetition and stayed back, focusing on the solobat situation.

    He should have at least sent someone there to inform him. But most of the Zeus academy members are not there among the spectators. The ones that are in were unable to contact the elder. The people from other academies? They couldn''t care less.

    They did feel some pity for the man since he endured so much pain, but that is all. It stops at pity.

    Everyone in the Zeus academy, irrespective of their rank or status, hates Sam. Now, their hatred burned so much that they wanted to just to run after him and kill him.

    They knew they couldn''t do that though.

    They had to bury that anger.

    After walking through a couple of blocks, Sam took off with spatial blink before he could be attacked again.

    He disappeared from everyone''s eyes.

    Meanwhile, the Zeus academy students without even the prompting or permission of the elder in charge took a major decision.

    "We are going to destroy Gambler academy. All the Solobat people will focus on their respective counterparts from the gambler academy.

    There is no other goal until this is finished."

    Even though it is proposed by one of the fourth graders, the rest of them agreed unanimously.

    The Gambler academy people didn''t know they are in peril because of Sam''s actions. Even if they did, they wouldn''t likely care. Gambler academy did defend Sam in a much more serious situation after all.

    That day passed with the whole realm learning how Sam tortured and killed a Zeus academy student in an inscriptionpetition.

    The next day.

    Sam arrived at the Open-air auditorium, for the third and final round of the inscriptionpetition.

    Everyone is looking at him weirdly. Every gaze is mixed with some level of anxiety, some level of fear and a little bit ofpetitive spirit.

    Sam looked ahead, waiting for the elders to exin what kind of twistedpetition this would be.

    He ended up being surprised after listening to the details though. It is not as twisted as he expected it to. It is pretty straight forward.

    "All sixteen of you will be sent into the exam tower specially modified for thispetition. Including the ground floor which is marked as the first, there are sixteen floors in total.

    Each floor contains a challenge for each of you. A challenge that should be ovee by anypetent inscription master.

    Once your challenge is done, you will be eligible to move upstairs. However, you wouldn''t be able to leave immediately. Because thispetition has elimination on all sixteen floors.

    In every floor, one person will be up for elimination. If a person is unable to even ovee the task, even if it is just ast ce, then they are directly eliminated.

    However, if they managed to finish the task even at thest ce, they get to challenge the secondst candidate for an inscription contest. The person being challenged can dictate the type of the challenge.

    Unless they want to give that opportunity up to the challenger.

    The challenger can request for a few revisions, but it is ultimately up to the person being challenged.

    Whoever wins the challenge will be moved to the next round, while the remaining person will be eliminated.

    The same happens in the next floor, and the next one, until only one person reaches the sixteenth floor. That person is already a winner if they are in that position.

    However, they still have one final challenge which allows them to multiply their rewards. Whether they finish it or not, will not impact their ranking and the rewards are purely for the

    winner and not the academy.

    It will also not effect the ranking of the academy.

    There is one final condition, that I forgot to mention.

    When you are trying to solve the problems in a floor, there are no rules barring other candidates to interrupt you. The only restriction is the same as before. They cannot use, physical, ranged or any other direct attacks and can only use inscriptions.

    As long as that rule is satisfied, even killing is allowed.

    With that in my, always keep an eye on everyone around you. Because just the speed at which you solve the problem will not be enough to seed. No matter how fast you can do it, if you are unable to even attempt the solution, then you will inevitably fail.

    Keep that in mind."

    The elder exined all the rules in one breath while the candidates listened intently.

    Sam really did feel a bit surprised, because there are way too many known variables in thispetition. In the formationpetition at least, they were put separately in different ces and there is a variable chance for them to encounter each other.

    However, this time, save for the actual problems that they need to solve inside, the rest is clear. Everyone is already strategizing what they need to get the most benefit in their minds.

    Still, along with the surprise, Sam is feeling a bit excited.

    This is just another method for him to stir up more trouble. If things go south, he can always quit. For some reason Sam felt relieved with this kind of feeling. Not a lot of obligations, no need for the grit to always win. No need for constant stress because there are limited

    consequences.

    ''This must be how mediocrity feels.''

    Sam muttered to himself as he walked into the tower with the rest.

    They were greeted by sixteen swordsman, all wearing a set uniform. All of them looked so identical, in their body type, height and weight, even in the aura, that if Sam hadn''t seen their face, he would have believed they are clones of the same person.

    One of the sixteen stepped forward and spoke.

    "We are the people speciallymissioned by the Thor academy to assist in thispetition.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    The first round ofpetition is to test the effectiveness of your inscriptions on weapons. We will all be used swords and we are going to the same technique. A single thrust. This will be done on an academy standard training dummy. We will calcte the damage done before and after the inscription. Whoever creates more damage with their inscription

    wins.

    It is a simple contest, I am sure for esteemed masters like yourselves, wouldn''t be fazed by

    this.

    First, lets start with the demonstration."

    He didn''t even wait for any reply from the candidates and just proceeded with the demo.

    All sixteen of them took out swords, they stepped forward and a few training dummies came out of the floor. They all in one unified motion, thrust their swords forward on the training

    dummies.

    *DING*

    Even the sound that came up on the contact is unified.

    "900"

    That is the only number that hovered over all the statues. Their strength is also the same. The impossibility of just made all the participants feel a bit odd.

    Of course, that onlysted for a moment as they immediately picked up the swords that were

    ced neatly on the tables.

    All sixteen tables are ced side by side in a single line for them. Awfully convenient if someone wants to mess with others.

 Chapter 2308: Elimination Match

    Chapter 2308: Elimination Match

    ?

    As soon as Sam ced his inscription pen on the sword, he sensed something sliding towards him.

    A piece of leather which is usually used for creating inscription scrolls slid on the floor

    towards him. It stopped right behind him.

    *BOOM*

    It exploded and luckily, Sam already moved to dodge it. He appeared on the other side of the table while still inscribing on the sword. As he guessed, that is not the end of it. Everyone took out inscribed scrolls and tokens as they threw at each other.

    However, at least half of them were focusing on Sam.

    Even if there are no grudges, they would have targeted him anyway. After all, a guy who just broke through to second grade is making them eat dirt. So, it didn''t sit well with them. With all the bad rep and grudges against him, all the more reason for them to deal with him.

    Sam only managed to dodge a few.

    The sword cannot leave the table at all.

    If it could, he would have carried it and roamed around the room. With how big it is, he would have lot more room to dodge the attacks.

    So, after a few attacks, he wasn''t able to dodge all of them and even took a few hits. He sighed and decided to make a move as well.

    A ss vial dropped from his storage to the ground. It created arge ssh of dark red liquid. Water elemental energy surged from his feet and the liquid started morphing itself into runes.

    Everyone looked at it with their eyes wide open.

    In front of those widened eyes, Sam created a runic shield, made solely out of runic inscriptions around him.

    *BAM* *BOOM* *BAM*

    The attacks kept oning and the runic shield got damaged. Some of the runes even deactivated and copsed, but that didn''t have much impact on Sam''s defense, because a new vial dropped and it is used to repair the broken runes.

    This feat made them even more surprised and frustrated.

    It is not like they are unable to do something like this. There are indeed some water element users in there that could manipte the inscriptions since most of inscription inks are made of liquids that are taken from ns and blood of the beasts.

    They all have water contents and several have shown feats like these before. In fact, even without the ink, they could mould their energy to manifest into runes and create it.

    But neither of these methods are efficient and neither of them can be done in the same leisurely way as Sam is doing.

    Even if they are able to do it, they wouldn''t. Not when they are focusing on the sword inscription right now. They wouldn''t risk it.

    But not only is Sam leisurely doing it, he is splitting the focus between this and the sword, since they would see him repair the runic barrier real time.

    However, they soon understood how he managed to achieve. At least partly.

    They realized that he is not using any of his energy even for activation of the inscription.

    Unlike formation, in which most of the time they only need to energize the nodes before it could use the atmospheric energy, the inscriptions are a bit different. Creating it and activating it require a lot of energy.

    They need to infuse their own energy into the inscription runes, if they want it to work without any external aid.

    However, the runes Sam is creating are activating themselves. That means, the ink itself is high in energy content.

    The candidates shook these thoughts off their head, when they reached here. They knew this will be a bottomless pit of thoughts if they go down that path. They focused on the sword and soon.

    "DONE"

    One of them submitted the sword inscription. He is the person from Hel academy. Even though he is d that he is first, he also became a bit nervous seeing that others are still working on theirs.

    One of the swordsmen stepped forward and picked up the sword.

    He went to the training dummy and performed the same exact movement with the same exact posture and energy level. There is not even a minute deviation.

    *THRUST*

    The sword was thrust forward and the wooden dummy gave out the number.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    "1230"

    The candidate felt pleased. That is indeed a great number. An increase of over three hundred points, which is more than thirty percent of the original strength is considered a good deal for the amount of time and resources he invested.

    Once someone submitted the rest hurried as well.

    "1120"

    "1190"

    "1059"

    One after another they submitted, even though the scores varied, Sam believed the score wouldn''t have much impact. Because the rules did not stipte the exact amount by which the attack has to be improved.

    So, the real test is something else altogether. Sam decided to test his hypothesis.

    One by one they submitted their weapons and the highest record has been beaten by the person in the fourteenth ce.

    A candidate from the Viswa Karma academy.

    "1290"

    That is way more than the decent score.

    Only Sam and another person remained. The person is from Xia region. He kept on eyeing Sam who is still working leisurely with the runic barrier still active around him.

    He even stopped attacking Sam and only focused on inscription. After a few minutes, he is

    done.

    Sam is the sixteenth person.

    *DING*

    "1120"

    The fifteenth guy didn''t have a bad score. It is not some record-breaking score, but it kept him in the middle.

    After his evaluation is done, Sam also finished his inscription. He handed the sword over to

    the swordsman.

    *DING*

    "909"

    Everyone was dumbfounded. The time Sam took and the number of runic inscriptions he ingrained on it... it did not match with the actual score. Some even thought he might have given up. After all, that small amount will not be enough to make him qualified for the next

    floor.

    "All sixteen havepleted the test. Now, sixteenth person shall challenge the fifteen." The

    lead swordsman took a step forward and exined.

    The fifteenth ranked student hurriedly objected.

    "Wait, wait. That guy did not even increase the score by that much. He only increased the

    strength by one percent.

    Shouldn''t he be automatically eliminated?"

    "The rules do not stipte any of such condition. You willpete. As the holder of fifteenth position, you can select the challenge."

    "I... I.."

    "If you do not select the challenge, that chance will also be given to the challenger. So, please

    select it now."

    He twiddled with his fingers and didn''t know what to do. Then his eyesnded on the wooden

    dummy. The number 909 is still floating on it.

    He gritted his teeth and decided on a challenge.

    "We will do the same thing we did now. A weapon enhancement challenge. Whoever makes

    the bigger enhancement wins."

    The lead swordsman looked at Sam who nodded and replied.

    "Time limit. 15 minutes"

    The lead swordsman then looked at the opponent, who hesitated for a moment and agreed.

    He nced at the 909 once again and believed that he mighte out on top.

    The Lead swordsman took out two more swords that didn''t have any signs of inscriptions.

    Both of them worked on it for fifteen minutes.

    First the fifteenth ranked guy''s sword was tested.

    DING

    "1120"

    The same score as before. Basically, he did the same inscription as before, which might be the

    only reason that he managed to finish it in fifteen minutes.

    Sam also submitted his sword.

    *DING*

    "1121"

    The number stunned everyone. Even the swordsmen that had a cold and indifferent look

    almost like puppets showed an expression of shock and awe at the moment.

    Then suddenly, they remembered his first score.

    Exactly one percent increase to the existing power.

    Now 1121, exactly one point higher than what his opponent scored.

    "I guess, I won. Good bye."

    Sam walked past the fifteenth ranked candidate with a smug smile on his face. While his

    opponent copsed in despair, he strutted to the next floor along with the rest of the

    candidates.

    As soon as they stepped inside, all of them felt a light sh by. Before they realize what happened, they found themselves standing inside a runic barrier. It is a barrier made of inscriptions, simr to the one Sam made in previous round.

    But a lot bigger, a lot moreplicated and a lot more powerful.

    Even if they try to break it with all their brute strength, it might survive. The only way out is

    breaking it through the inscriptions.

    Everyone hurriedly started. They knew whoever wins first has an edge over in thispetition. They can sabotage others easily in this one if they manage to get out first.

    The inscription pens danced on the barrier, clearing it oneyer at a time.

    The first one toe out is the guy from Viswa Karma academy. He held is pen and nced at

    his opponents before deciding not to intervene.

    Of course, not everyone is like that.

    The second guy, from the Hel academy came out and immediately went after Sam.

 Chapter 2309: Fourteenth floor

    Chapter 2309: Fourteenth floor

    ?

    Sam''s hand is in a partial fusion mode with wind element as he moved his pen.

    His opponent, actually the second fastest finisher who wanted to be Sam''s opponent is trying to his best to add more runes to the runic barrier, but just looking at the speed, Sam is going, he is cutting it really close.

    At that moment, a third person came out of his own runic barrier and joined in with the second to make it difficult for Sam.

    They thought both of them working together will give them an edge. However, they realized the situation... remained exactly the same. They are cutting it really close. Sam is clearing the runes just as fast as they are making them.

    Their lead is just a few runes.

    When the fourth opponent came in and joined, they finally saw a change in expression in Sam''s face. Until now, he has been doing it with one hand, but with this new added opponent, he had to work with both of his hands.

    Once again... they are cutting it really close.

    The spectating elders outside and even the Viswa karma student who finished it first, looked at Sam and his three opponents with a weird expression.

    Even though it is these three people that are messing with Sam, for some reason, weirdly they felt that Sam might be the one ying around with them.

    When the fifth person came out of the runic barrier, he is unable to join in these people.

    The saying too many cooks spoil the broth seemed to be apt for this situation. Even that guy knew that if he intervened, he might just make this unnecessarilyplicated with no positive results.

    So, instead he looked at the rest of the opponents and focused on one particr woman. She is from Sanatan region. Not from Viswa Karma''s academy, instead she is from Vinayaka''s academy. A god known for his wisdom, intelligence and knowledge along with a level of battle expertise.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    He has other names which is not relevant at the moment.

    She is one of the tough opponents in the top sixteen, so this fifth guy went after her. When she saw this guying at her, she immediately increased her speed of solving the runes.

    Just one look and anyone can see that she was obviously faking before. She deliberately underperformed a bit. To ensure that she doesn''t be a target. But she became one anyway. Either that guy has a keen perception or he did his homework before the test.

    When she noticed that sixth person is also out, she gritted her teeth and took out another pen, working with both of them at the same time.

    *BOOM*

    As her inscriptions merged with the barrier, it exploded. Particrly at the spot where these guys were trying to interfere.

    That threw the sixth guy away and made him fall on the runic barrier of a different opponent. The fifth guy gulped nervously and stepped back.

    *BUZZ* *BUZZ* *BUZZ*

    Within the next minute, she broke through her barrier and looked at these two hatefully.

    But she also didn''t go after anyone else. These two still didn''t learn their lesson and went after someone else.

    Like this, only two people were left. One is Sam and the other is some random guy who wouldn''t matter anymore.

    Only then did the sabotage stop.

    Sam finished at fourteenth ce, while the fifteenth finished right after. Now, Sam has the right to issue the challenge.

    "The same thing that we did now. A runic barrier. You create one in fifteen minutes, I will do the same. Then we will break through, whoeveres first wins."

    As one might expect, the challenge didn''t take much time and it was very predictable. With the expertise Sam showed many people with some reasonable perception guessed what will happen and it did.

    He won.

    The fourteen people moved to the next round.

    The time, the challenge is different. There are fourteen rings set up in the area. All fourteen of them have a puppet inside. They need to get on a ring and fight with the puppet. They can once again sabotage each other.

    If someone leaves the ring before the puppet is defeated, they will be disqualified automatically, without even the right to challenge the secondst ce.

    In this round, it seemed like people finally got some sense into their numb skulls. When someone finished their challenge first, they didn''t go after Sam. They noticed in the first two rounds, that he is capable of finishing this much faster.

    But he is deliberately staying in thest positions.

    They also wanted to test this theory and left him alone. Their thoughts turned out to be true. Sam came in secondst ce once again and he can issue another challenge. He chose a

    challenge simr to the test.

    They will step in the ring.

    Whoever pushes the other out of the ring wins. Time limit is fifteen minutes. If both are inside the ring after fifteen minutes, then they will extend the time by another fifteen. If both of them are inside after that too, thest ce guy, the challenger will take the victory.

    The challenger felt a bit of hope when he heard thest line.

    He doesn''t have to beat Sam.

    He just needs to stay for thirty minutes and he will win.

    With those thoughts he stepped into the ring and...

    *BOOM*

    Three minutester, he was sent flying out of the ring, with a huge hole in his chest.

    They moved to the fourth floor.

    One more test focused on their skills, but not something that couldn''t be done by any of them. Sam came in thirteenth and challenged thest guy once again. He destroyed him and moved

    forward.

    By now, even the moron amongst the morons could understand what this whole thing is actually about. Each round was never about the skill. It is just to decide who among them will

    be set up to duel.

    And whoever wins moved forward.

    So, this is basically fifteen rounds of inscription duels between these candidates. The extra tests are just to give everyone a strategic edge against their opponents. Same goes for the sabotage and other perks.

    If one shines too much, they will be targeted and sabotaged making them face the risk of

    elimination.

    If one doesn''t shine at all... well they will be in duels anyway.

    So, they need to use all these variables and ensure they can move to the next round. The more rounds arepleted and the more they are eliminated, it would be less of a strategic contest and bes a contest of skill.

    Of course, knowing all this, Sam can only disrupt it and make it boring. None of the skills of others can shine while he is here.

    He is determined to use the format to his own advantage and crush every single one of them one by one and his n worked sessfully.

    On the thirteenth floor, when Sam eliminated the thirteenth candidate, only three of them

    left.

    Sam, the candidate from the Viswa Karma academy and the candidate from the Vinayaka

    academy.

    Those two exchanged a look as they walked to the next floor.

    Sam knew, they are going to n something now. Otherwise, they will be next. Even if they

    trust their own ability to deal with Sam individually in the fifteenth floor, they cannot take the

    chance.

    What if... what if Sam pulls off another card?

    What if they failed?

    So, they tacitly agreed to team up.

    In this round, as soon as they arrived in the fourteenth floor, they were transported into the middle of three different formations. These are pure formations made of nodes and they have severalplexyers and structures built into it.

    Their goal is to break out of that formation. Whoeveres first, wins.

    Sam felt that this could be the first actual difficult test in this tower. The rest of the tests are

    just some added variables, while this one... whoeveres first actually might have a better chance to win the whole finale.

    The formation is indeed a work of art and it seemed like it is made with at least a beginner third grade student in mind. Which means, it is a lot more powerful than them. They cannot

    just brute force it.

    They have to understand the nodes, destroy them one by one and then destroy the formation

    after that.

    However, Sam is not concerned. Because in the formation test he had most of his senses blocked, including his observation ability and energy vision.

    But now, he doesn''t have any restrictions and especially not on his resources.

    He can use whatever he wants as long as it is not some cheat like ability or tool.

    As soon as the test began, he activated his observation ability through one of the identifiable

    nodes. Then several ink vials fell out of his storage and it obeyed hismands.

    Runes, thousands of them are formed with just a mere thought and they arrayed together with

    perfect sync.

    And Sam was stuck in that state for the next fifteen minutes.

    Meanwhile, the other two candidates ignored him and were hard at work.

    *CRACK* *CRACK* *CRACK*

    As they destroyed one node after another in matter of minutes, they progressed fast and

    smooth, leaving Sam behind.

    Until the fifteen minute mark.

    *BUZZ*

    Sam''s formation vibrated along with the runes which suddenly became stagnant and just like

    that...

    His formation copsed.

    Surprising the other two, he broke through first and those two are bound to fight it out among

    themselves whether they want it or not.

 Chapter 2310: Final Round

    Chapter 2310: Final Round

    ?

    The two opponents are very familiar with each other.

    Their expertise is in inscriptions and both of them are from Sam region, so Sam guessed the duel will be fearsome. He hoped that it would be. Until now, he has spent a lot of energy in defeating his opponents.

    That is one of the reasons the rest of them left him be.

    They hoped he would lose energy in the higher levels and they could deal with him there. Now, that the tables are turned, he expected nothing less.

    However, to his surprise, the remaining two decided to still work together to some extent.

    The woman from the Vinayaka academy spoke.

    "I don''t know who wins between us. However, I believe whoever wins they should be in shape to deal with that guy. So, I propose that we choose an easier challenge that allows us to

    conserve as much energy as possible."

    The Viswa-student agreed readily.

    So, after they are done with their formations, they agreed on a simple test. It should be less energy dependant, but still highlight their skill. After some discussion, they agreed on something.

    "We will do a simple attack storing inscription. I have existing inscription tokens, they will throw out a fire ball up on using them. We will create inscriptions to capture those fire balls. Whoever captures and stores the fire ball with the lowest amount of energy loss, wins."

    It is a weirdpetition. Because the attack capturing runes are basically a form of fusion inscriptions. Basically, the inscription is created to store an attack. Sam has done this many times, in fact that is one of his most frequently used skills after the hub is created.

    That is how he stored most of the attacks created by the hub members.

    But to use that as a test of skill that too for a fireball? If they are decent inscription masters, they should be able to clear it easily.

    Both of them were done within fifteen minutes and just like Sam expected, they managed to get almost same output.

    "Your is 0.1% better than mine."

    The Viswa-student said and bowed down.

    "I lost."

    Sam is really surprised by the sight. This is kind of anti-climatic. He expected some sort of high level inscription duel. Both of them trying so hard to get to the top that they would risk everything they had.

    But thepetition itself isme and the way the victor is decided is evenmer.

    She walked past both him and Sam before walking upstairs.

    Sam sighed and followed her, disappointment apparent on his face.

    When they reached the fifteenth floor, the rules of the test are given. They are very straightforward.

    "A battle between inscription masters. You can use and create any type of inscription that you can and attack your opponent. As long as you defeat them, then you are the victor."

    That is it, very simple.

    The opponent kicked the ground and moved farther away from Sam, maintaining a decent distance between them.

    "You are way too cautious. Do you really think I will attack you by surprise?"

    Sam muttered out loud as he walked to the side. Arriving at a middle part of the room. "Your reputation precedes you. Cannot me from taking care of myself, when you are known to be devious. The disy you put on in the previous rounds, doesn''t help either?" "Really? Well, if it makes you feel safer. It wouldn''t make much difference to me anyways." Sam spoke and ink starteding out of his storage. It spread all over the floor from where he stood.

    Surprisingly, the opponent also took a simr approach. She took out several vials and threw them at different spots of the room.

    "I hope you are not arrogant enough to believe that only you are capable of this."

    As she spoke, she made the first move.

    A patch of ink that is closest to Sam, turned into an inscription. The inscription gathered the surrounding air and conjured a wind bullet shooting at Sam.

    An inscription shield appeared in the trajectory of the bullet, blocking it from reaching Sam.

    Neither the inscription created by the opponent nor the shield disappear after the contact. Both of them stayed intact.

    *SWOOOSH**SWOOSH*

    More attacks wereunched at Sam. But the shield moved to block any wind bullet from reaching there.

    *BOOM*

    A fire ball came from the rear, which once again was blocked by a different shield. From all the patches of the ink, various arrays were created, aiming the attacks at Sam. The attacks are of various elements and intensities, but all Sam did is create and move his shields

    in response.

    He didn''t even get on offensive and only yed defense.

    Meanwhile, the opponent who also started leisurely, now showed the signs of anxiety and frustration. Even though she can also control the ink like Sam did, there is a clear distinction in the ease with which each of them controlled their respective inks.

    And she believed she exposed her inferiority in this aspect to Sam already.

    That''s what she took from the way he acted at the moment. She knew that if this bes a battle of endurance, then she will lose. Even though her higher cultivation should have given her the edge, Sam''s energy reserves seemed to be same as hers if not higher.

    So, she can only take him down with brute force.

    *SWOOSH* The inscription ink moved all over the floor they all appeared in a pattern around Sam while she maintained the attacks.

    "I will take you down. I will take you down in three moves." She yelled out loud. All the inscriptions gathered together, creating a muchrger array. Most of them are fire and wind element inscriptions, they merged andplimented each other.

    The wind and mes created a huge spinning bullet of raging fire.

    Like a missile it was shot at Sam.

    *SWOOSH*

    His shield inscriptions flew from around him and created arger shield in front of him.

    *BOOM*

    Even with the contact, that huge raging fire bullet didn''t disappear. With the opponent''s insistent control it tried to press down on the shield. Sam could see the translucent energy barriers stressing under that mountainous pressure.

    The ink that is still unused on the floor started moving. It joined with the existing shield and increased its durability.

    When he noticed that it is still not enough, he slightly bent to the side while inclining the

    shield as well.

    *SWOOSH**BOOM*

    The raging fire crashed into the ground as it glided on the inclined shield. Sam was sent back with the shockwave, but he regained his bnce pretty quickly.

    Only, he realized that he is not quick enough.

    While his feet justnded on the ground, he noticed something at him.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    What seemed like a thousand wind des appeared out of nowhere while they carried frost energy in their tail winds. Sam felt chills as these wind des surrounded him. Sam guided his shields to fly towards him, trying to block these frost wind des, but even when they exploded up on contact, they dissipated so much frost energy that seemed to try to seep into

    his body.

    The temperature of the whole dropped.

    Sam felt like even his sweat wanted to freeze.

    He raised his hands and drew them back down. All the inscription shields flew back to him, creating a vertical and cylindrical barrier around him.

    *SWOOSH**SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    As the frost wind des hit the barrier, the cold energy still seeped through.

    At that moment, with a mere though, the inscription runes started moving around. Even though it created a small gap in the defense, it quickly recovered.

    The previously neutral white colored runes, now turned golden. The transclucent barrier burned with golden mes as theing frost energy was consumed by it.

    *SWOOSH**SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    *SWOOSH**SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    *SWOOSH**SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    All the frost wind des attacked Sam, but they were all negated with the raging ming

    shield around him.

    After they are all gone, the barrier dismantled itself, creating a bunch of smaller burning

    golden me shields.

    Sam panted slightly as he looked at the opponent.

    She gritted her teeth and made her next move.

    Wind ranged in the room. If not for the fact that he can see the energy is being channeled through th inscriptions, he would have thought she is attacking directly.

    The attacks are noting from a single direction like the first move, nor are theying

    from all sides circrly, this time, the range is spherical.

    Some of her inscriptions stabilized at various spots creating a formation that channeled the attack of the rest of the inscriptions. The wind became so chaotic, Sam is floating in the

    middle along with his shields.

    He tried to control himself, but the wind currents became sharp. Before he could change his inscriptions to hit back, he is covered in a sphere of condensed wind.

 Chapter 2311: Tensions

    Chapter 2311: Tensions

    ?

    The sharp currents attacked him.

    The increase in pressure made his muscles contract and joints ache. The opponent gritted her teeth, increasing the pressure. The ming inscriptions of Sam are being effected. The richness of wind element energy is trying to suppress those mes.

    The irony of the wind.

    When the me is small, wind kills it. When the me is raging, it just rages it more.

    Sam tried to control his inscriptions, but whenever he tried to focus, the pressure increased. He didn''t know if he should be pissed or impressed. After all, the wind element''s usage he has seen until now has always been very uncreative and monotone.

    She is using the wind in a new way.

    After a couple of minutes, Sam made a move. Ink swirled out of his storage and it was dragged away by the wind currents. With the level of attack she used, his current inscriptions and space are not enough.

    He needs to either use his strength directly or create a new method for himself.

    He did thetter, of course. The inscription ink turned the condensed wind from white to ck. It is aplete ck color that glowed with faint red hue.

    The opponent''s eyes widened. She knew something bad is about to happen.

    As the wind spun, the ink followed its pattern, however with every passing second the ink seeped outwards. Atst, it went out of the spherepletely.

    The floating ink turned into inscriptions. The inscriptions are of two elements. Wind and fire. Both of those elements raged together. Rotating in the opposite direction of the wind sphere. The wind sphere, slowed down.

    She couldn''t control it anymore. She couldn''t speed it up anymore. She is losing control.

    Finally...

    *BOOM*

    The inscriptions controlling the wind sphere exploded.

    Samnded along with the golden mes surrounding him. His opponent copsed to her knees. They are just a couple of feet away. Sam even felt surprised that they are that close at the moment.

    "Three moves are over."

    "I know...."

    She muttered slowly and looked at Sam. She slowly stood up and looked like she is about to give up.

    At that moment.

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam''s inscriptions are all activated, creating arge dome around himself, protecting him. *BOOM*

    Several spears conjured of mes, ice and wind are all blocked by that one barrier. Within the barrier, both Sam and his opponent are standing.

    "A student from Vinayaka academy? Dealing such a low blow? Who would have expected?" Sam said with a sarcastic smile.

    "You did." She muttered and this time, copsed once again, this time for real. The whole point of dering that she will deal with him in three moves was just a ruse. She knew Sam would be able to block all three of those attacks.

    She staked it all on the fourth one. Assuming that Sam would have consumed most of his energy defending the first three, by believing that she only has three moves. Sam just stayed on guard.

    "I give up."

    She dered her loss directly. Both of them were transferred out of the tower and appeared in the open-air auditorium.

    "Winner, Sam."

    The deration was made by the elders.

    Sam looked at the audience and then at the rest of the contestants awaiting then/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    announcement of their rankings.

    He didn''t wait for them and walked away. Now, he is dered as best in two different auxiliary professions in the academy realm''s second grade. More targets, more opponents, more peopleing after him.

    Sam took off on harbinger at the gate.

    After a few minutes, he disappeared with spatial element. Completely out of the view of anyone who might want to target him. He just hid from anyone else and plotted silently.

    Meanwhile, the search for him raged even more. It didn''t matter if the person engaged with Sam is going to agree to lose. The academies decided to take strict measure. At the same time, the Gambler academy became a target for them.

    Rashma, Chetan, Crow were all getting targeted left and right. And they targeted them just like how they targeted Sam. They swarmed them from all sides, arranged unrted people to stay in their way to make them unable to move around freely.

    All in the hopes of killing them.

    They believed that they could overpower gambler academy like this, since the academy is not even known for itsbat ability. They just felt that Sam is likely a ck sheep.

    But they soon realized how wrong they are. Thebat ability of these people... this time the Gambler academy came with some serious wild cards.

    The situation is not just for the second graders. Even the third graders and fourth graders are being targeted.

    The fights between the fourth graders are most brutal. Almost as brutal as the second-grade fights. Because Dove being the senior has created her fair share of chaos and fair share of enemies. And the team that came along with her are all her close aides in the student council

    at that time.

    The other academies really wanted to target them since the start, but they didn''t want to be the first offerings to the gambler academy.

    With the new alliance, they grew a pair each and came after them.

    With almost half of the academies targeting them, the Gambler academy basically dominated

    the solobatpetition.

    The Norse city has seen more fights in those few days than in the past decade.

    While days passed like this, Sam just hid himself and didn''te back. There are only two morepetitions that he needs to participate in. One is the weapon making and the other is

    the solobat.

    There is a lot of time before the weapon makingpetition starts. It is the one right before

    the solobat.

    So, he decided to stay put until then.

    He ignored the chaos and ignored all the people that are trying to find him. Many spected that Sam became overwhelmed by the chaos and hid. Some said, he learned his ce and decided to step back from the solobatpetition.

    However, no one can deny that the more time he was left unfound, the more the chaos

    brewed. Because as the days passed, the alliances started copsing. After all, until now some of the academies lost too much in pursuit of Sam, while some academies were left unscathed.

    Same with the ones attacking other gambler academy students. By nning or not, some academies indeed took most losses.

    Now that Sam couldn''t be found, they are also thinking about their own interests. There are only a limited spots to be in the finals of the solobatpetition. But the alliance they

    made has more than hundred people.

    They eventually had to fight.

    As days passed and the finals neared, tensions rose among them, threatening to explode at

    any given moment.

    And at that moment, Sam came out of hiding. He appeared at the entrance of the Thor academy on the day of the weapon makingpetition.

 Chapter 2312: Restoration

    Chapter 2312: Restoration

    ?

    This time thepetition didn''t take ce at the open air auditorium.

    Instead, they went to the forges of the Thor academy. The audience has lessened a lot. Only the elders and enthusiasts of the weapon making trade came to see. Still, it is arge audience and is only rtively smallerpared to the otherpetitions.

    Whether they witnessed this or not, almost everyone is feeling excited for this.

    Because after this is over, the solobat will start. Usually, groupbat is done first and then the solobat. But now it changed for some reason.

    Sam arrived at the forge assigned to him.

    In previous years, there is only one test for the weapon makingpetition. Like the one Sam participated in the inter academy tournament.

    Five or six weapons, a time limit and some score requirement. But now they divided even this into three rounds.

    In the first round of preliminaries, the test is also a bit uniquepared to the previous ones. In the worktable assigned to Sam, there is a worn out rusted weapon. It is something he is very familiar with, as it was part of his collection in hisst life. A katar.

    Back on earth, it was an old Indian weapon. A thrusting dagger from India with a distinctive horizontal grip, allowing the wielder to punch and stab with great force. Once stabbed, you can trigger the de to open up. That means, within the hollow de, there is a straight de. Once inside the body, it will open up like scissors, tearing that person apart.

    It is a closebat weapon and it is very hard to master and even harder to forge one properly.

    It might not too versatile, but the range of the weapon is pretty controble, since it will be attached to the fist. A great weapon for ughter.

    Sam looked at the rusty katar and then to the table next to his. There is also a simr worn out katar there. He could guess what thepetition is.

    As if to validate his guesses, the elders came and took their ce on the stage.

    "Wee everyone.

    Let me start with congrattion everyone for making it here. I hope the best smith wins thepetition.

    Now, let''s not waste any time and get to the point. The first round of the weapon makingpetition is actually, a weapon restoration test. On your tables, you can find a worn and torn weapon. Many might not be familiar with it, but this is Katar.

    It was primarily used in realms dominated by the Sanatan beliefs.

    The weapon itself is a great representation of a smith''s abilities. And it is a great weapon of ughter. Even for the people who have seen the weapon all their lives... forging it is a difficult task. To the point that a well made katar is a rare sight in this day and time.

    So, for our test, you need to restore the katar.

    The elders will suppress their cultivation level and wield the katars on the training dummies. After that, they will be ced in the analysis formation, that will determine how durable it is, basically we are going to evaluate the damage to the target and the damage to the weapon.

    Adding up both of those scores will give your score for this round.

    The thirty-two people with the highest score will move to the next round.

    You can only use the materials ced on the table. They are enough to restore the katar to the perfection. The time limit is three hours. You can use the specially modified furnace as well as the quenching formation.

    But you cannot use any inscriptions or formations, even if they are ingrained into the surface while being forged, they are a vition.

    We are focusing solely on your abilities as a smith. Any other expertise you have should not be involved in here.

    Now, you may begin."

    Everyone immediately jumped at the katars and started analyzing them. Some even went ahead and started dismantling them. Sam also worked a bit quickly. For some reason, this excited him more than the formations and inscriptions.

    Ever since he came to the academy realm, he has barely seen anyone excel greatly in those trades. The only thing he is satisfied about the people here is that the level of forging, puppet making and other artisan traders are really developed,pared to thebat, inscription and formations.

    Even the test this time is unique.

    Most of the smiths don''t like to restore the weapons made by someone else. Some really prideful ones even find it insulting to be told to do work like this. But right now, none of them had those thoughts.

    The Katar is such a weapon.

    Even Sam felt impressed by the weapon of choice. He worked fast, but also gentle as well. After everything was dismantled, he started examining the damage of all the parts. The metal used to make this weapon seemed like an alloy. Except for the inner de, the hollow de, the handle seemed to be made of the same metal.

    If he has to restore it, he has to use the same alloy and he guessed the materials on the table are enough to do it.

    Anyway, first things first, he needs to remove the rust.

    He injected his spiritual energy into the parts one by one and used his maniption ability to remove the rust at a granr level. Once that is gone, even though the weapon is not shiny, it looked pretty new.

    Now, with observation, he understood the alloyposition and then he used his fire and metal element to melt these different metals to test the ratios. After around twenty minutes, he managed to get the alloy the way he wanted.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    However, he paused before using it to restore the weapon.

    After all, the alloy might bring the weapon to its original state. But that doesn''t mean, it

    would be the best state.

    So, he took his sweet time to make the necessary improvements only in terms of alloy and the reforging method.

    Unlike the previouspetitions, Sam worked slowly with a faint smile on his face. He was sweating, hammering it down properly, taking care of every detail gently.

    He neither shocked anyone with some instant trick, nor did he try to show off. He just

    carefully crafted the weapon.

    He remade it, sharpened it and until thest moment, kept on polishing it. He submitted the weapon with the same smile on his face.

    "Now, for the evaluation... we are going to use the original version of that katar."

    The elder took out a shiny katar and stabbed it into the training dummy.

    "1000"

    The score was shown. A clean perfect one thousand. Then, he triggered the des.

    "1520"

    The score changed. One for the stab and another for the des opening. It is a lethal weapon

    alright.

    The evaluation began.

    "890" "1300"

    "921" "1341"

    "1023" "1290"

    The scores kept pouring in. Sam is actually impressed by them. They are decent scores that too considering that most of them don''t really have much experience with a weapon like Katar.

    Amidst all of it, Sam came across a familiar face.

    "1390" "1789"

    Those are the scores of Manson''s Katar. He knocked it out of the park. That immediately made

    him the highest scorer yet.

    After a few more tests, Sam''s turn came

    Manson turned to look at Sam and he had a smirk on his face.

    "1440" "2340"

    Even the elder stopped for a moment and took a look at Sam.

    When he was about to ce the katar away, Sam raised his hand and asked.

    "Can I have it? I can pay if needed"

    "You can have it after the durability test."

    Sam nodded and stepped back.

    After the evaluations for the damage are done, the durability tests started, in the same order.

    "35%" That is the first score. Kind of bad. For just one attack it lost 65% of its durability.

    "42%"

    "24%"

    "01%"

    Manson''s turn came.

    "85%"

    Once again, the highest yet.

    "94%" And that''s Sam''s score. He beat everyone else. Once again. The elder looked at the

    Katar and felt it with his fingers.

    "This is a really good weapon. With your expertise in the other professions, I didn''t really think much of your forging skill.

    But you are as good at this as you are with them."

    Sam is surprised by the generous praise, particrly when he realized that guy is from Hel

    academy. He just caressed the Katar and walked out of the venue. The thirty-two are decided and this time not just one gambler academy candidate, but two of them took the cake.

    Sam and Manson are in the first two ces.

    Sam appeared at the entrance and he didn''t leave immediately. Instead, he walked down the

    steps and walked slowly in the streets.

    He still had the Katar in his hands. After walking for a few minutes, he arrived at a spot. Spiritual energy raged in his body and spread to the Katar in his hands.

 Chapter 2313: Fighting

    Chapter 2313: Fighting

    ?

    *SWOOSH**CRACK*

    Sam stabbed the katar into the ground, earth elemental energy surged through that strike. A crack akin to a spider web, spread from there. Then he pulled the trigger to open the outer de.

    *CHING* *RUMBLE*

    The cracked ground, broke down into further pieces with a tremble. Then, keeping the de like that, he pulled the katar out forcefully.

    *RUMBLE*

    The cracked pieces of earth and stone flew into the air, revealing a giant pit inside. Inside the pit, there is a formation dome, within which a young man is holed up, looking at Sam in horror. Inscription ink came out of Sam''s storage as he slid down into the pit.

    Inscriptions were conjured with the ink around him. They moved to cover the entire dome as they were activated.

    Sam closed the Katar''s outer de and aimed it at the formation. His eyes glowing with energy vision as he found its weak spot.

    *SWOOSH* *BANG*

    With a single hit, the katar went through the dome as if it was not even there in the first ce. He then opened the de and pulled it in that form forcefully. Just like how he did it with the ground a couple of seconds ago.

    *CRACKLE*

    The formation dome broke and at the same time, the inscriptions did their job. The opponent who is already shocked and stunned, felt the invisible restrictions around. It seemed like the inscriptions together created a formation around him.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    One of the spatial elements, making it impossible for him to move. Sam kicked the ground and lunged at him, stabbing the katar straight into his heart.

    "ARRGGH...."

    The opponent tried to move. He tried with all his strength that he could muster, but he wasn''t able to. It was toote. If he had moved while he was still in the formation. Or if he had moved before Sam even came and escaped instead of holing up, he would have had a chance.

    Sam ced the inscriptions around the formation and from that moment onwards, it is game over for him.

    There is not much he could do. He also wasted too much time being shocked. That wasted a lot of time.

    *CHING*

    The des opened and that guy was cut in two. The next moment...

    *SWOOSH**SWOOSH* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Several attacksnded on him from all sides. The inscriptions that were already in ce, just changed the nature of their energy a bit and a formation appeared around Sam, blocking him from the attacks. His token that barely turned yellow has turned back to green again.

    He looked at the candidate whonded the first attack on the formation and locked him down. Sam used spatial blink and appeared right next to him. His inscriptions also moved along with him.

    *BAM*

    The opponent swung his spear, but it was blocked and deflected by one of the inscription shields, while Sam punched with his Katar. With its horizontal handle, the de is basically in front of his first. So, all he had to do is throw a normal punch to deliver the perfect stab of the Katar.

    The opponent dodged barely.

    Still, the Katar left a small scratch on his face. He stepped to the side and swung his spear sideways. Aiming to hit Sam with the shaft of the spear. Sam kicked the ground and jumped on the spot. The spear left from under him.

    Before Sam evennded, he changed the direction of the spear and tried to stab him.

    Two of the Sam''s inscriptions acted. One of them blocked the spear''s advance, while went behind the opponent and...

    *BOOM*

    ...Exploded with a wind cannon.

    At the same time, Sam pulled the spear towards him, while his Katar is extended forward.

    The opponent barely managed to stop himself. The katar still poked him slightly, making him shed a teeny tiny drop of the blood. Until...

    *BOOM*

    Another explosion from the inscription made him lodged himself into the Katar.

    *CHING*

    Sam triggered the outer de without hesitation.

    *SLASH* The des cut the opponent in the torso, creating arge gash from which the blood spurted out.

    The opponent punched Sam in the face at the same time.

    Sam felt the impact. The opponent is ate stage Divine ne Initiation cultivator. A stage higher than Sam. The punch clearly showed the difference in there.

    The physical strength of a pure warrior is also in to see, but it isn''t enough to take Sam down.

    As he fell backwards, he slid his foot to the back to stop himself from moving, while he pulled the spear towards him. The opponent albeit injured tried to take advantage of this and maneuvered the spear.

    But Sam already made the move.

    He pushed the spear down, trying to deflect the direction, making it lodge itself into the ground, and at the same time, four of his inscriptions attacked the limbs of the opponent.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    When an explosion urred at the back of his leg, the opponent became alert and jumped up with the other. Sam who already stepped forward, swung the closed Katar once again.

    *SLASH*

    He managed to take that injured leg, with that hit.

    *BOOM*

    An explosion urred on top of the opponent, who was jumping and made him crash into the ground. Sam turned around and stabbed him through the back, before opening the Katar

    again.

    His token turned yellow and...

    *BOOM*

    Another attack came, which was blocked by the inscription shield.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The fire balls maneuvered around the shield and tried to hit from the both sides. Sam sensed

    the attacks. They are powerful. The other party is a peak stage cultivator and also someone

    Sam wanted to fight.

    He is from the Zeus academy.

    Sam used spatial blink and disappeared along with his shield.

    *SWOOSH*

    The opponent turned around andunched a dozen attacks in an instant.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    All of them hit the inscription shield, but Sam is nowehere be seen there.

    *SLASH*

    Then he felt it. The deep and perfect stab in the back. *CHING*

    Sam opened the de, but before it could do the full extent of the damage, the opponent''s body transformed into mes. He activated fire fusion and slipped off the de. At the same

    time...

    *RUMBLE*

    The mes turned into a giant infernal dragon that came down at Sam from all sides. It was instantaneous. And even with Blink, Sam barely managed to escape with a burn on his hands. He came out of the inferno''s range and extended his hand, manipting his floating

    inscriptions that are being devoured by the mes.

    *BOOM*

    He exploded them all at once.

    With their presence right behind the opponent, they created a huge explosion of spiritual

    energy, creating a vacuum in the ming inferno. In that space, he saw the opponent''s body

    that was shaken off the fusion form.

    *SWOOSH* Sam appeared right next to him and stabbed him through side into his ribs, straight through his lungs, aiming to reach his heart from that angle.

    *CHING*

    The opponent tried to move to the side and attack, but at the same time, Sam also moved in

    the opposite direction while opening the Katar. The heart might have missed, but the rest of

    the body parts are done for.

    When he was almost cut in half, barely breathing about to die, Sam stabbed the Katar into his

    chest, and activated his own fire element.

    *SWOOSH*

    The golden mes covered the dying body, devouring his life slowly. He then picked the body

    and looked in the surroundings. Within those few seconds, heunched the ming body at

    the nearest candidate from the Zeus academy.

    *SNAP*

    With a snap of his fingers, three inscriptions arrived right next to the new Zeus academy

    student who was caught off guard by the sudden burning almost dead bodying to him.

    *THUD*

    He ignored the inscriptions and barely captured the dead body. The moment he did.

    *SNAP*

    Sam snapped once more.

    *SWOOSH* The golden mes raged around the body, killing him in an instant, but at the

    same time, the three inscriptions were activated with ominous energy, creating a triangle

    around the Zeus student.

    The dead body that was burning reacted to the death energy and moved.

    *SCREEECH*

    With a scream that didn''t sound like a scream, the burning body bit into the student.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* Meanwhile, Sam is already attacked by the remaining people around him.

    However, before even the first attacknded, his token turned green. It happened the moment the burning body really died.

    That body turned to undead and bit the other Zeus student making it Sam''s attack. So, he is

    already engaged.

    Now, his new opponent is a peak stage second grader, which is a bit tough. So, he had to resort

    to all sort of tricks, one of which is the ming undead.

    "FUCK"

    The opponent felt the heat of the golden mes as well as the strong bit. He hurriedly summoned a lightning, destroying the undead in one hit. But that still took out a piece of flesh from his neck, making him bleed.

 Chapter 2314: More fighting

    Chapter 2314: More fighting

    ?

    n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    He tried to stop the bleeding, but he couldn''t.

    Even the usage of his spiritual energy to stop the bleeding turned futile. Also, Sam didn''t intend to give him a lot of time figure out the situation. The undead is just the start.

    He activated blink and appeared behind the opponent. His body glowed with golden light as golden mes surged around him. He activated the partial fire fusion, charging the katar with that fire elemental energy.

    *BANG*

    He tried to stab that katar into the back of the opponent, but he is better prepared than to take it.

    He blocked the Katar with his sword and looked at Sam hatefully. That coldness in his eyes, even the surrounding golden mes couldn''t mask it. He pushed the Katar away and tried to stab Sam. But...

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam used blink again and disappeared from there. He reappeared behind the opponent once again. Thus, started the exchange. Sam used his me partial fusion, the Katar for attacking, while the spatial blink acted as his hit and run tactic.

    The opponent is unable to determine Sam''s location at any given moment. When would he appear? Where would he appear?

    Is he behind his back? Under his feet? Right in front of him, or a hundred meters away?"

    The blood is still seeping out his neck and it is slightly burning at this point. The bleeding showed no stops of slowing down. The blood streak just went dripped down into his armor, giving him a slight feeling of irritation.

    After exchanging a few moves, he took out a metal shield from his storage, waiting for Sam to appear.

    *BANG*

    When Sam did appear, he used the shield to block the Katar. The Katar went through the shield and was stuck.

    The opponent looked at Sam and was about to swing that sword at him.

    Golden mes ranged from the Katar, therge streak of golden mes surged through that hole made by the Katar and hit the opponent''s hand. He still endured it and tried to sh Sam, but the pain from the mes made him step back a bit.

    This is enough for Sam.

    *CHING*

    The Katar opened up. The ming streak also parted into two hitting the opponent along with the swing of that de. The shield parted into, while the opponent took a step back to avoid the burns.

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam used blink and moved forward, stabbing at the opponent once again.

    *CLANG* The opponent blocked the Katar and kicked Sam.

    He flew in the air like an arrow. The attacknded cleanly and he took the brunt of it. The difference in cultivation... the damn difference in cultivation.

    *SWOOSH*

    The opponent didn''t want to give Sam any time to recover, he dashed forward and swung his sword, but Sam didn''t even care for the bnce at that moment and just disappeared from there. However, in that ce he left a gift for the opponent.

    *BOOM*

    An inscription exploded with golden mes. However, there is something ominous hidden behind those golden mes, which the opponent didn''t identify at the moment. He only felt his neck bleeding a bit more intensely and the flesh around it burning a bit more.

    He just chalked it up to be a side effect of the explosion.

    He turned around, but Sam is nowhere to be seen, yet he knew that he would appear. He intently observed his surroundings. Trying to identify any spatial fluctuations. He could hear his own heart beat like a rattle drum.

    His muscles are throbbing, reacting to the pain all over his body and most importantly neck. The salty burning sensation on top of that, because of the dripping sweat is unbearable.

    He felt that burn smell that enveloped him because of those mes.

    He felt pathetic. A guy who is not even the same level as him, is putting him in such a state. He gritted his teeth harder the more he thought about it.

    He wanted to kill him, destroy him to smithereens.

    He felt that is the only way to calm himself down.

    "COME OUT. YOU COWARDLY BASTARD"

    He screamed out loud. His sword is glowing with the spiritual energy, his attack is locked and loaded, ready tond on Sam at any given moment.

    *SWOOSH*

    And Sam appeared. Not behind, below or beside. He appeared in front of him, at an arm''s length. The opponent swung his sword in a hurry.

    In that hurry, he forgot to take a look at Sam''s face clearly. If he did, he would have seen the sses Sam wore.

    The same sses Sam used to deal with ten of seniors in the Olympian region long ago. The sses used to identify the weaknesses of the opponents. Now, with that swing, Sam could see three ring red dots.

    Tempting him to strike.

    *SWOOSH*

    He stabbed the Katar to one of the points, ignoring even theing sword strike. Right before the sword could strike, Sam''s Katar reached him. The spot was not even a vital spot. It was just the inner side of the elbow.

    However, the moment the Katar pierced him, the opponent froze.

    His energy cirction went bust. Without even knowing, an explosion urred within his

    chest.

    *SPURT*

    Blood sprayed out of his chest, covering Sampletely, but he didn''t care. Golden mes surged through the Katar and into the elbow, next the des opened up, tearing through the hand and then into the body.

    The opponent was enveloped with mes and dropped to the ground, unable to move.

    He is dying, but slowly. Sam panted slightly. He binged the blink way too much. The energy consumption is high. But he is still very close to his perfect condition. He eyed the crowd to

    pick his next target.

    However, to his dismay, no other member of Zeus academy is there. He clicked his tongue and

    decided to go for the next best target.

    He disappeared from the spot and reappeared behind someone. Before that person could

    react, three things happened.

    *SNAP* Sam snapped his finger.

    *BOOM* The burning body of the previous opponent exploded.

    *STAB* Sam stabbed him in the back.

    The explosion killed the man right before Sam''s Katar made contact. Making it okay for Sam

    to kill this guy.

    The Katar went into the back, right beneath the shoulder de, but before it could pierce to the other side, the opponent turned around. Because of that, the Katar de tore the body apart. He is looking at the opponent face to face, but the Katar is still in the opponent''s body. Sam didn''t even know how to react to this. The opponent himself made the injury worse.

    *SWOOSH*

    Golden mes erupted making the opponent fall.

    Thete stage targets are much easier to deal with. This guy is from Hel Academy. These people tried so hard to deal with Sam, he believed it is only right for him to deal with them. He blinked once again, reaching the next target. But he was interrupted.

    *BOOM*

    An attacknded on him before that. He hurriedly blocked it. A guy from Thor academy is

    coming at him. Sam clicked his tongue and used blink once again. He reappeared behind that

    guy, however the pattern is already observed.

    The opponent turned back waiting with his lightning imbued axe.

    *CLANG*

    Sam blocked the lightning axe with his Katar. Silver lightning crackled around him, fighting

    fiercely with the lightning of the opponent.

    The other party is little surprised, but that didn''t stop his advance.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    As they exchanged moves, Sam''s sses are already pointing out several weaknesses in the

    opponent.

    Sam just smiled, he blinked once again. The opponent turned back precisely to the location where Sam arrived and the next moment, the opponent felt something on his back.

    *STAB*

    With a few spatial fluctuations, a shadow appeared, stabbing him on his shoulder. He hurriedly moved to the side, shaking off the shadow. It is one of Sam''s shadow undead. But in that direction, another shadow undead came and stabbed him in the arm.

    *SWOOSH*

    He swung his axe and chopped the shadow off. But it is alreadyte. Both of the stab wounds

    are at the spots where his weaknesses lie.

    And the stabs were made with the knives containing cursed corrosive poison. The opponent felt the curse effects immediately. His cultivation superiority gave him a small chance to defend against it. But Sam is not exactly there to just stand and watch.

    Neither are his shadows.

    While he struggled to suppress the curse, a shadow appeared underneath him, stabbing him

    at his foot.

    He hurriedly descended hoping that would never happen again. But Sam already made his

    move,ing down on him with the Katar. When he focused on blocking it.

    *STAB*

    Another tab. This time, it is from a shadow mouse, on the foot.

    The curse and poison kept on spreading bit by bit.

    Finally, he stopped moving with paralysis. Sam stabbed him and opened the Katar, mangling

    him to death.

    After that, for the first time, Sam didn''t see any initiative to attack him. When he turned around giving them all a sweeping nce. Everyone took a step back.

 Chapter 2315: Zeus academy students

    Chapter 2315: Zeus academy students

    ?

    The silence is so loud.

    The silence that is backed by the fear, it is so loud and apparent on everyone''s face. More than ny percent of the people there have higher level cultivation than Sam. Among them there are barely any inte stage.

    Sam has already plucked the lives of most of them. Only mostly peak stage members are there.

    If it is a group fight, maybe they might have attacked him. But the moment one of them attacks, they would be locked with Sam and he is dealing with them relentlessly. The means he used didn''t look like much to them.

    He spammed the spatial blink, he overly used that Katar, maybe to use that de opening or something else, but he is reliant on Katar.

    Then he used some weird inscriptions that they have never seen and they could sense that he has been applying curses as well. If Sam didn''t have that speed and space element, then they wouldn''t have been worried much.

    Even if he wanted to use the curse, they could ovee with their speed, since his cultivation is low.

    But he has that speed. Even in that situation, if he didn''t have that curse power, then they would have risked taking a couple of blows to capture him. But, he is locking them down with those curses and who knows the severity of those curses?

    They could attack their wounds, flesh and even the mind, they didn''t understand them enough to risk it.

    As if all of that is not enough, he is good atbining that''s spatial element with the inscriptions making them immobile. The shadow undead added to that... he is just not ideal person tobat like this in such a space.

    They need time to n out and figure it out.

    However, what they don''t know is that Sam has given all the time they needed before that day. After all, he never took initiative in the previous days and just focused on the contests.

    Now, things are different. He is going after them and there is nothing in this world they could do stop him.

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam activated the blink and everyone immediately made their move. Some of them activated transference tokens. The ones that didn''t have them, ran in different directions. But Sam appeared near someone.

    *BANG*

    When he was about tond the attack, the opponent channeled his metal element into the armor he was wearing. The attack was blocked and instead the opponent was pushed forward by the unexpected force.

    However, when he charged forward, he felt like something blinked past him. Before he knew it, there is a deep gash in his torso.

    Sam looked at the void hopper that came to him and smirked. Before the opponent could realize, he is swarmed with the shadow mice and the shadow undead, Sam justnded the final blow and went after another target.

    And thus the hunt began.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    As the solobat contestants screamed and ran through the streets of the Norse city, Sam used various elements to take them down.

    Of course, he didn''t go after anyone. Because he knew they will soon be desperate enough to reduce the numbers on their own.

    So, he just picked a destination and hunted down the candidates on his face.

    Hours passed as Sam ughtered the targets in his way. By now, the news has spread to various elders and they are all frantically searching for their own candidates. The Zeus academy candidates, at least what is left of them are gathered in the quarters arranged for them.

    There are three people left.

    The three strongest that they could offer in their current situation. They also have a very high kill count behind them.

    "Why have you asked us toe now? We just managed to nab one of the Gambler academy guys. He is almost done for. We could have killed him."

    One of the candidates said out loud in frustration.

    The elder gritted his teeth in frustration and said.

    "While you are off to target the Gambler academy students, one of them is ughtering everyone else. Sam killed the remaining two candidates. He is nowing here. I want you guys to be together and think of a n to deal with him."

    *BAM*

    As they are talking, they heard some noise outside. They ran out to check what is happening. Sam is on his harbinger as he chased after his opponent. He threw a green wooden spear that seemed to have been made from a freshly harvested bamboo.

    *SWOOSH*

    The opponent barely dodged it and the spear went past him. Before he could heave a sigh, the spear stopped moving and vines grew out of it while still in mid-air.

    The vines coiled around him, blocking his path.

    *BOOM*

    He exploded with mes, to burn them down. However, the vines are generating faster than he was burning them. Before he could do anything more, Sam already reached him.

    *STAB*

    He stabbed the Katar into his back and twisted it before opening the des. The man is once again cut in half like most of Sam''s opponents. The spear fell along with the vines and the coiled parts of the body.

    Sam''s breathing is rhythmic, with slight panting. With every second he is recovering his breath bit by bit. The harbinger brought him down slowly

    He looked at the remaining three targets.

    Even with all the damage Sam has done, these three strongest second graders of the Zeus academy still managed to survive till today.

    He did feel like he should have killed them a long time ago. Things would have be easier for him at the moment. But them being alive now did have its own benefits. He couldnd a blow to Zeus academy so big that they will either try to kill him with all the pretenses torn down or they would be beaten like dogs by the other academies.

    He needs to see what oue it would be.

    His sses are activated, his Katar is raging with the sharp spiritual energy. Several metal objects flew out of his harbinger andnded at different spots around them, while a lot of

    them floated around him as well.

    He is ready to deal with these pests.

 Chapter 2316: Two Down

    Chapter 2316: Two Down

    ?

    The three members of Zeus academy looked at Sam.

    Their fists are clenched, teeth gritted, eyes sharp. Everyone of them is itching to fight and put an end to Sam. But they also knew that it would be difficult to achieve that. They need someone to warm him up first.

    They need someone to exhaust Sam andy down all the ground work to increase their own odds.

    They exchanged nces as if signaling others to go first. After observing their actions Sam smiled and said,

    "I guess, you guys are struggling with who goes first. Let me make it easier for you.

    I will call you the Target 1, Target 2, Target 3. Easier for me to remember. I won''t have to remember your names."

    He named the opponents from left to right.

    "Now follow the sequence, ande at me. If you don''t, I will follow the sequence ande at you."

    Sam''s aura raged once again. Target 1 knew he would be attacked whether he would make a move or not, so he decided to take the initiative.

    He took out his sword and went after Sam.

    *SWOOSH* The sword ray went past Sam. He just stood there on Harbinger, waiting for the opponent toe. And when he did, Sam snapped his fingers.

    The metal objects that flew out of harbinger started glowing. A formation was created, trapping both of them inside. The dome is white in color and mostly translucent. The outsiders could barely see what is happening inside.

    It is blurry.

    *BAM* *BOOM* *SWOOSH*

    They heard all kinds of noises. The explosive sounds, the raging attacks. They could feel that an intense battle is going on. As it went on, they noticed something odd with the formation. The translucent dome is soon covered with various inscription symbols.

    That felt weird and unconventional.

    Creating a formation with inscriptions is one thing, but to think that there is a formation that holds inscriptions like this... they don''t even understand how that even works. However, they knew that something might be really wrong inside that.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    But the constant noise that came from the sword swings made them feel a bit of hope, whichsted until the formation dome disappeared.

    Sam stood inside, on the harbinger still. There are a few cuts and bruises here and there. He is panting heavily with blood covered face. But Target one who attacked him is on the ground, his body is burned to crisp.

    There is no sign indicating that he is alive. The token on Sam''s body also turned green attesting to that fact.

    Sam shook the blood dripping off the Katar and looked at the Target number 2.

    "You might want to make the first move. You could use any advantage that you could possibly grasp."

    The opponent gritted his teeth and made his move. He didn''t attack Sam. Instead, he went after the metal objects nearby. He wielded a staff. With a single swing, a huge current of wind ravaged everything in the direction of his swing.

    He took off a good chunk of the metal objects.

    He then lunged at Sam with the staff.

    *BANG*

    Sam blocked the staff with his Katar. The force pushed him back. He didn''t resist it. Instead, he let the force take him and the harbinger backwards, negating most of the damage.

    The opponent came at him with all his strength. Spiritual energy is running rampant along with whatever amount of Divine energy that he could conjure.

    *BANG* *BANG*

    The Katar and the staff met. Sam used his motion to negate most of the attacks, whileunching the metal objects once again. The opponent tried to stop him, but he couldn''t. He couldn''t focus on them. Sam himself is keeping his hands full.

    Once Sam is prepared, heunched another formation. Once again isting the opponent and himself from the outside world.

    ...

    Fifteen minutester. The formation copsed.

    Sam stood there on the ground, the harbinger is hovering next to him. He had a couple of his bones broken, he bled from a few injuries on his arm. The opponent''s strength is indeed not to be taken lightly.

    Without his formation and inscriptions, it would take a lot to defeat the other person.

    Even with them, he did face a few setbacks. Taking injuries that could have been easily fatal if The made even a slight error.

    Sam looked at the third and final target that he has at hand. Once he is done with that guy, the Zeus academy will be out of the solobatpetition. And he also remembered that four of these guys are part of the teampetition as well.

    So, he essentially cut off both of theirbat teams.

    Which means, they would lose a lot of points. As much as the auxiliary professions contribute to the academy rankings, thebatpetitions contribute a huge chunk. They are the deciding factors for most of the academies.

    No academy would like to lose in those twopetitions.

    Now, Zeus academy is done for. The elder is also in a tricky situation. He can neither give it up now, nor can he let this continue.

    He couldn''t do anything and just stayed silent. If things were normal, he would have yed some dirty tricks. Now, there is no scope of it. He couldn''t even threaten Sam, because he is afraid what the realm formation might consider that threat as.

    If it is considered an interference, than their academy will be more screwed than it already is.

    He looked at the student who is now facing Sam. At that moment, the student turned around and rted running withou

    ion.

    *SWOOSH*

    He took out a dagger that is infused with lightning and threw it at Sam.

    Sam dodged it by moving aside. The dagger went past him and destroyed a building in process. The opponent didn''t even turn back to see if the attack has connected. Instead, he activated lightning fusion and just moved at a rapid pace.

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam zoomed towards him on harbinger at full speed. He is barely able to keep up with the opponent even at that speed.

    He couldn''t help but smile at his opponent''s approach. The first two were really idiots. Those two guys didn''t even think much and just jumped at Sam. Even after seeing Sam arrange the metal objects. If it was before thepetition, then it is mildly eptable.

    But Sam proved to be a master in formations and inscriptions, who in the fight mind would walk into the trap like that?

    The Target 3 had enough presence of mind to run away while still attacking Sam.

    *SWOOSH**SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    The daggers kept oning. The lightning elementbined with projectile weapons, it has such destructive lethality and the way he used it, Sam is very impressed.

    *BANG*

    He shed with one of the daggers, deflecting it with his Katar, to ensure that he is engaged with the target. The way the target ran, he king of felt that the other party might be looking to

    find another person, to avoid fighting Sam.

    Luckily, no one is there.

    When Sam is finally engaged with the target, the target clicked his tongue and increased his speed. He had full fusion, with electric blue lightning. He looked like the blue lightning itself. He is also not flying, instead he is bouncing off of the buildings at low altitude.

    Just his after images are creating a simple visual illusion which could have fooled a lesser

    being easily.

    He is destroying the whole city in process, but neither him nor Sam cared enough about it. Soon, Sam also started attacking back.

    He extended his hand with the Katar. Energy gathered at the tip of the Katar and very sharp energy bullets were created there before he shot them.

    *BOOM*

    The bullet and the dagger met. The opponent stopped for a moment and turned back to stare

    at the explosion in surprise.

    His dagger is destroyed and he could faintly feel the shockwave from the explosion. It is not

    strong enough to lethal to him, but he cannot guarantee that he would be able to endure it, if

    it really hit him.

    He became much more vignt and moved faster. Sam had a hard time catching up to him even on Harbinger. He had to resort to using lightning element coupled with the Harbinger.

    Only then did he manage to keep a closer distance between him and the opponent.

    *BOOM* *BOOM**BOOM*

    The bullets and the daggers collided creating explosions. Since their distance has lessened, they are being thrown off bnce with the shockwaves. The opponent was effected more and he started focusing more on maneuvering more than just moving along.

    As the intense running fight took ce, more and more people started following them as audience while keeping a decent distance. Just to see who will win.

    Sam soon realized what the opponent''s strategy is. A battle of endurance. Since Sam has fought for a couple of hours straight until now, he wanted to exhaust Sam. However, once he realized this, Sam made the next move, that changed the trajectory of the fight.

 Chapter 2317: Third Target

    Chapter 2317: Third Target

    ?

    The opponent realized something is wrong when Sam pointed the Katar at him. The same energy bullet that he has been facing since earlier is being conjured.

    It is shot.

    He threw the dagger to block it.

    *BOOM* The explosion happened, however, he felt a sense of dread that he didn''t expect.

    *BOOM BOOM*

    Two explosions, happened on either side. The left one is near him arm, while the right one is near his leg. He lost his bnce and crashed to the ground. He didn''t know where the attacks came from.

    He didn''t sense them.

    He didn''t see theming.

    He didn''t even see Sam conjuring the energy tounch those attacks.

    At the same time, Sam is currently holding his throbbing forehead with gritted teeth. That move is not exactly lethal and it is definitely not overly poweful.

    But it took a lot out of him. Mostly mentally.

    It is something he improvised on his resonance technique. When the explosion happened from the collision of the dagger and the bullet, he used resonance to replicate the explosion at the two spots. Usually, the resonance is created when he is the source of the attack.

    He can replicate it, enhance it and amplify it.

    But this time in the explosion, his contribution is only half. The dagger yed a role in there as well, which makes it hard for him to replicate. This has been in progress for some time. This is the first time he used it in the field.

    He felt the pressure in his head. The sharp ache is tad regretful.

    The opponent tried to get up after crashing down. But as he tried to circte his spiritual energy to support his broken limbs, sharp pain hit him.

    He couldn''t move.

    He couldn''t even feel the presence of his limbs. His energy circtionwork seemed to have been busted by that explosion. And his guess is right. Sam used the weakness disyed in the sses and destroyed them with the explosions.

    That is the only thing that made the head ache worth the price.

    Sam went down and stood in front of the target. At the same time, he looked around searching for someone. His gaze is locked on top of the one of the closest buildings. A familiar face in a familiar uniform.

    Christos is looking at Sam with a cold gaze.

    Anger has never been more apparent in his eyes. Sam clicked his tongue and said to the target who is sprawled on the ground.

    "You know, you are not supposed to die here. Because you were supposed to be only in the Teambat, but you are moved to the solobat and you are dying. I wonder if Christos anticipated it when he changed the position with you."

    The opponent didn''t say anything.

    His face is not showing any signs of anger or frustration. It went way past despair. He lost the will to fight.

    Even though he had doubts about a clean victory, he did believe that he would give a hell of a fight in this solobatpetition. When Christos withdrew from the Solobat exactly the day before thepetition started and offering him that position, he took it happily.

    He believed this is his opportunity to shine.

    But to think that he will meet his end like this. Even when fighting Sam, he thought he could make him run around the city and have some epic showdown. But a few minutes and Sam made the whole fight anti-climatic.

    There is no excitement or struggle in it.

    His chance to finally shine and the opponent that is ending him didn''t even bother knowing his name. He was assigned an identity called Target 3. That is all he is worth in the opponent''s eyes and the history might even remember him as such.

    When this thought hit his mind, he wanted to put on one final struggle.

    "I... I am..."

    He was about to say his name to Sam. But...

    *STAB*

    Sam stabbed the Katar and opened the des. Tearing him apart. Once he is dead, Sam walked back to the Paradise inn.

    He didn''t care if anyone will attack him. He weed it with open arms. All this while, he didn''t take initiative because he wanted to create this impact. When thepetition is announced that there are no restrictions on using formations and inscriptions, he knew would win.

    Heck, the Hub is a clear representation of what he can do with ample preparation and

    resources.

    To deal with a bunch of Peak stage second graders? That is childsypared to it.

    He knew that he will also attract a lot of trouble and even more trouble if he kept his cards hidden. So, he just repelled back the enemies that came after him, showing a glimpse of the threat that he could be.

    Creating an opposition of thebined forces who had aligned interest of dealing with Sam. With each passing contest, this happened and they just put everything aside and focused on

    Sam.

    Now, that it is thest couple of days of thepetition, they don''t have a choice. Originally, they still had Sam as an excuse to stop and push back the fighting. Now, they don''t. Anybody who wants to fight him cane and get some.

    The tensions that are growing through the days are now about to erupt.

    On top of it all, they are all scared of Sam at the moment. No one from the second grade would want to fight him. They are also scared how Sam would take revenge on them. So, before that happens, they need to ensure that they be finalists.

    So, even as Sam walked back to the Paradise inn, people already started fighting with their

    allies.

    Meanwhile, Christos and the Elder in charge of Zeus academy are in a meeting with the other gradebat participants.

    There are only two participants left in the Third grade. Three in the fourth grade. But the three people from the fourth grade are in a very bad shape. Two of them are exhausted with the constant running, as they were trying to escape any possible attacks from Gambler academy

    students.

    The third one is already in an engaged state.

    It is the war they started, but they got their asses handed to them.

    The fourth graders of Gambler academy led by Dove, made their lives living hell. If not for the alliances they forged and the timely intervention of others, all five of them would have died. The elder is pulling his hair in frustration as they looked at the pitiful state in which the Zeus academy''s team is at the moment.

    "Is this why you escaped, Christos? When you gave up being a contestant in the solobat, I knew there is some hidden intentions. Did you know this would happen? Were you aware how troublesome that guy is?"

    Christos pursed his lips and didn''t say anything for a moment. After some time he sighed and

    said.

    "I was not sure, but I was aware of somethings."

    As soon as he said that, the elder abruptly looked at him. In fact, he wasn''t really expecting an answer from Christos. He was merely ranting.

    Christos didn''t exin and just walked out. He went to his room and justid down on then/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    bed. Christos was indeed supposed to be part of the team. But like the elder mentioned, he backed out. There are two reasons for that.

    One of them is that through his informationwork, he managed to find out what exactly the

    solobatpetition is.

    It is a free for all hunting season.

    That is not even the deciding point though. He got some information about Sam. Ever since he took up the task of dealing with Sam, he has been facing severe set backs.

    Soon after he got his ass handed to him with the Telchine incident, he got some information

    from the lower realms.

    The information rted to Dusk organization. For some reason, the Dusk that he ignored before made him think and he noticed how they are going after the Olympian organizations in

    the lower realms.

    And the methods they used... he managed to rte them to the way Sam and the Hub handled things. Even the ming Skulls had a simr approach.

    Then he kept on digging and digging. Soon, he understood that Sam is definitely rted to Dusk. He doesn''t know to what extent, but if it is true, then the feats created by the Dusk members... he knew no one else had a chance in the open season when Sam is here.

    With the old and new grudges, he is sure that he will die.

    That is why he backed out. As for why, he didn''t inform anyone else in the Zeus academy... no

    one would be willing to listen to him now.

    He is out of student council and he is out of the Noble league. He lost his family support as

    well. Except for thework he built in a isted way from his family is left and that just might have saved his life.

 Chapter 2318: Second round of forging

    Chapter 2318: Second round of forging

    ?

    That day Sam is probably the only second grade solobat participant that was able to rx.

    Rest of the city burned with their fights. The Norse academiesmented at their beautiful city being destroyed because of thepetition. The process also revealed a lot of their design ws to the rest of the academy realm.

    They need to redesign it and rebuild the whole thing.

    When their coin reserves are almost drained, credit to Sam and the Hub, this is another unexpected and unwanted expense. Anyway, that''s besides the point.

    The next morning, Sam went to the Thor academy once again. To the forge just like they day before. The elders are already waiting for them to reveal the secondpetition.

    After the thirty-two people that passed the exam all gathered here. Apart from the Gambler academy with two candidates, there are only a few academies that had two candidates or

    more.

    The Viswa Karma academy and Hephaestus academy had three each. They are the most dominantpared to the other academies. There are a couple of academies that had two candidates each.

    There is one from Zeus academy and Sam hoped that he could eliminate him in this round.

    Sensing Sam''s gaze that guy shivered visibly. He just wanted to hide away somewhere. But he knew better than hoping that his wish woulde true. As everyone observed theirpetition, the Elder exined the rules for the second round.

    "With thirty-two people here, as many people would have guessed, we are going with a duel route. All participants will be paired. You need topete with whoever you are paired with. From each pair, only person will be moved to the next round.

    As for how that person will be chosen...

    He waved his hand a blueprint design appeared on the work tables of the participants.

    "Within that scroll, you will find a design of a weapon. The person you are paired with will also get the same weapon design. There won''t be a minor change.

    Your task is to follow the design to every minute detail and create that weapon. You are not to make any changes to the design. The material weight shouldn''t change, the alloy percentages shouldn''t change, even the micro details on the handles shouldn''t change.

    The only freedom you have is with your forging method.

    You can use whatever method you arefortable with. But the end result should look, weight and measure exactly the same as the one shown in the blueprint.

    After you are done, your weapon will bepared to the weapon made by your paired opponent. The weapons will be tested in the same circumstances, there will be no difference or bias in the way of testing.

    Once both of the weapons are tested, whichever weapon has the better make, durability, lethality will win.

    The duration is four hours.

    Does everyone understand the point of thepetition? Do you have any questions?"

    There is only resounding silence from the participants.

    "I am d you don''t have any. You can start forging now."

    Sam opened the scroll and he is a bit surprised what he saw. The design kind of brought back some memories.

    A memory of a really great opponent that he faced when he was still in Mortal ne back in deste. He could even be considered as one of the biggest opponents he faced at that time. Not in terms of the cultivation level, rather in terms of meticulous nning, intellect and backing.

    Sanjay... Sam doesn''t know how he is doing. If he recovered from the inflected trauma or not. Sam is pretty sure he broke him...

    But when he was still in mint condition, that guy is a menace when ites to wielding his chain sickle.

    Now that is the exact weapon in the blueprint. A chain sickle.

    It has fourponents.

    The de, handle, chain and the counter weight at the tail end of the chain. That is used for the bnce of the weapon when throwing.

    It could be a veryplex or a easy weapon to forge depending on the method he chooses. The chain might also take a long time for him to forgepared to rest of theponents.

    Based on the duration of the forging, the counter weight will take the shortest time, followed by the handle, the de and the chain. That is if he sticks to forging everything instead of using some shortcuts.

    For example, he could create the chain rings in a much faster way by pouring them in moulds. But an object that is made from casting and forging will havepletely different properties. For starters Cast objects don''t typically have a uniform grain structure as you mentioned. In casting, metal cools and solidifies at different rates, especially in thicker or irregr shapes, which can create non-uniform grain structures. Cast metal is generally weaker than forged metal because casting can result in voids or inclusions, and the grain structure tends to be random.N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Forged chain links are generally stronger than cast ones because the forging process aligns the grain structure to the shape of the link, particrly improving strength in areas of high stress, such as bends. This makes the chain less probable to damage in those areas.

    *BANG* *BANG*

    Sam came out of his daze as he heard the hammering of other opponents, they already started their own.

    He decided to get started as well. First, he took the counter weight. The alloying is the easiest part for him. So, he first figured out the alloys and then created the counter weight, with purely heat and metal maniption.

    He didn''t even hammer it and made it in the perfect counter weight shape as shown in the

    design,

    It took less than five minutes to do it.

    Next, the handle.

    The handle of the chain sickle is unlike other weapons. Other weapons like swords, sabers, etc has their handles safely secured in the hands of the user. They do take a lot of force from the impact, but the chain sickle is on a whole different level.

    When it is thrown, the handle will take the impact directly, it won''t even have any other object for example a hand holding it to distribute the impact a bit.

    So, he decided to forge it carefully, along with the de.

    Both of them took a considerable time, and only around a hour and a half was left for the

    chain.

    He scanned the surroundings and finally focused on his opponent. He grinned so wide that his lips almost left his face. Because the opponent is the Zeus candidate that he wanted to deal with. His wish dide true.

    And he looked at the opponent''s progress. He is spending his time on the handle and the

    de. It seems like he is done with the chain and the weight. From the mess he left behind, he definitely used some moulds to do it this fast.

    Sam is a bit surprised.

    Why would someone with this much experience in forging make such amateur mistake?

    It seems like he is making a weapon only for the test not for it tost longer for regr use. Sam just shrugged and focused on forging the chain links one after the other. A repetitive action, until he had all the chain links.

    Once it is done, he linked the chain together, then linked the counter weight and the de along with its handle.

    Now that the assembly is done, his weapon is ready.

    "Time is up." And then came the announcement. Everyone was working until thest minute.

    Sam didn''t care much for the other people''s pass or fail. He only got curious when Manson''s turn came. He had to forge a meteor hammer. Two weights on either side with a chain connecting them. Hard to master, but very flexible and hard to forge as well.

    He observed the tests carefully. First test is against a training dummy, the second test is against super strong pir. They need to beat it down continuously until it breaks. Finally, a test shing both the weapons together, if both weapons survive that sh, then a durability with the formation like they did in Katar restoration test.

    Manson''s meteor hammer went through all three. In the final test, his meteor hammer shed head on with the meteor hammer of the opponent.

    When both the weights hit each other, a few cracks appeared on Manson''s weight, but the

    opponent''s is destroyed.

    He won.

    Finally, it is Sam''s turn. He looked forward to the test, because just from observing the forging method, he knew what will happen to his opponent''s weapon.

    The first training dummy test has begun.

    *BANG* *BANG

    "1234" "1345" Both of their scores came out, and surprising everyone, Sam''s chain sickle had less score. Even

    the judges are shocked, much less the opponent.

    Then they moved to the pir.

    "10 Hits"

    "10 Hits"

    Both weapons performed equally. Now a sh against the weapons.

    *CLANG*

    Both the sickles were thrown at the same time. The de of each sickle went into the chains of

    the opposite sickle. Both sides pulled at the same time.

    *SNAP*

    Just like that, the opponent''s chain is snapped. Not at one point. The link at the center where

    the sickle is locked, and the joint where the handle of the sickle is attached to the chain.

    The opponent who just had some hope fell in despair. So, close. But he lost.

 Chapter 2319: Request

    Chapter 2319: Request

    ?

    Sam walked out of the Thor academy.

    Nobody is waiting for him. Nobody attacked him. He just walked to the paradise inn. On his way, he spotted dozens of battles of all kinds of grades.

    When he reached the paradise inn, he was dumbfounded by the sight. The building is copsed to the ground. Nothing''s there except for the huge pile of rubble.

    *BAM*

    At that moment, someonended beside him.

    Dove looked at Sam and said.

    "I was wondering when you will be here. Our team shifted ces."

    "What happened?"

    "Really? You can''t take a guess?" She rolled her eyes at him. Sam nodded in understanding and walked with her. It seems like they were ambushed, an attack simr to the oneunched on Sam, might have taken ce.

    "Seems like we are very popr this time around." Sam asked on their way.

    "Thanks to a certain someone."

    Sam just shrugged. He has no guilt whatsoever about whatever he caused in this realm. If they want to me someone, they can take it up with Gambler and the other gods for dragging him here.

    "Anyway, what''s the status of the third and fourth grade students? I haven''t bothered with you guys until now, because I was busy hiding myself.

    I would like to know how you guys are doing."

    "We got some wins here and there. Second ce in third grade formations, third ce in third grade inscriptions, first ce in third grade war strategy, the weapon making is still in progress. They are doing well in solobat as well.

    One of them is eliminated just today. He was swarmed like you were swarmed. They targeted the Paradise inn like their lives depended on it.

    But they soon regretted their actions and turned their tails.

    The third graders are hunting them down as we speak."

    "I never knew the gambler academy students are into hunting down and tearing down the enemies. That''s new."

    "That''s new to us as well.

    Our academy never put any pressure on us to get the scores or do well in thesepetitions. We participate purely out of our own will and perform as we wished. Most of the time a lot of us don''t like to show off our capabilities because they are unconventional.

    We prefer mastering them more than disying them.

    However, there are times even that kind of patient and low-key people feel provoked."

    "And I happened to bring that out. Why do I feel a bit proud of myself?"

    "I don''t know if the rest of the students do so as well."

    "Tell it to someone who cares. Anyway, why did you want to meet me here?"

    "Nothing, I just wanted to show you the new ce of residence. You are not attending to yourmunication token."

    Sam had an expression of realiziation.

    "I am sorry, I turned off the academy issuedmunication token. Too many people were trying to track me, I cannot have such an easy lead get stuck to me."

    "How can someone track you with themunication token? Are you sure you are not bullshitting?"

    Sam just shrugged and didn''t bother borating.

    "Anyway, the fourth graders also entered top five in most of the auxiliarypetitions and we are doing well in the solobat as well. We almost lost one, but he survived.

    That''s good to know. If all five of you can move to the top sixteen and participate in the next round, I wonder what the faces of the Olympian academy deans would look like. I am sure those old men will throw tantrums."

    Dove rolled her eyes once again.

    "Your sadistic fantasies aside, I have something to ask of you."

    "What is it?"

    "The second graders almost lost one of the candidates in Solobat to the Zeus academy members. Maybe because of themotion you caused, the Zeus academy member appeared distracted and didn''t focus.

    Our member used all his strength to escape and gave up.N?v(el)B\\jnn

    You killed those guys after that. Of course, you know that part."

    "Okay, what do you want me to do? Don''t expect me to apologize to him. I didn''t even really provoke any academies this time around. They started everything."

    Dove facepalmed and said.

    "Why are you in such a hurry to speak? I don''t want you to apologize. That guy happened to be in the teampetition as well. I want you to join that test."

    "The teampetition?"

    "Yes."

    "Why?"

    "I do admit that you didn''t start this stint for thispetition. Only for thispetition, but you did escte the crap out of it. Those kids will be targeted inside like Crazy. They won''t

    even get a rest."

    Sam thought for a moment and suddenly he realized something.

    "Wait a minute, this time around, there are only three man teams for the teampetition. So, did Crow lose?"

    "No actually..." Dove paused a bit and Sam guessed who it is.

    There is no way Rashma could lose. He doubted anyone in the second grade could go toe to

    toe with her.

    "Then, Chetan? That is unexpected. He is a strong opponent. While the guy who defeated him... he is weak as fuck. How could he even lose? Even I managed to take him down with just one proper clean attack."

    Sam is kind of downying his attack here. Target 3 that he killed from Zeus clearly showed exceptional speed and projectile attack methods with his daggers. He is very powerful. The only reason he fell down is because of the two explosions that happened without any sign and they happened at the two weak points that even the Target didn''t know existed.

    So, saying its just one clean attack.... Albeit being right technically is a huge understatement. "It was an ambush. Arge formation trap wasid down there. He was bombarded by many people. He killed four before hended in that spot where the trap was ready.

    Once he killed his fourth target, the trap triggered and caught him off guard.

    He didn''t have a way to escape. The poison that was used also had a severe weakening effect

    on him. It seemed to effect him on a gic level. He is an extremely perilous situation even

    now."

    "A trap? That guy really didn''t look like he couldy down such a thing, though."

    Sam is indeed very surprised. The Target 3 he killed didn''t really seem like much. To think a tough opponent like Chetan would fall in his hands....

    "Still, I think you are worrying too much. Rashma is still in there. Do you really think anyone could eveny scratch on her?"

    "There are a couple of contestants who might put up some fight. Still, I am sure she can handle everyone there is. The problem lies with Crow. If things are as they are now, he will definitely die. The fights for the solobat already increased.

    A lot of academies became desperate.

    To keep it short, I would be more assured if you are inside. That is all I can say. If that is not enough to convince you, there is no need for me to say more.

    Just think it over."

    They halted at the new building assigned to them. He went to his newly assigned room and

    took out the chain sickle and some daggers. He thought over what Dove asked of him while

    making some inscriptions on all the weapons.

    He spent more than two hours on that.

    After he was done, he even felt a bit exhausted. Then he packed all of them in his storage

    before he disappeared with spatial blink.

    Meanwhile, in the far away corner of the city.

    The remnant members of the Hel academy students are gathered there. To be fair, it would be

    a stretch to call it a gathering because only two people are left here. The remaining three are done. One of them had their token marked green.

    He is engaged with a candidate of a different academy.

    "Did your n work?" The first guy asked the second guy. The second guy is the one who is

    engaged by the way.

    "It did. I beat him up, locked him and ced him in a hidden location within our academy grounds. Even if someone goes there searching for us, they will not find him no matter what." "That is good. Now, your position is secured. We need to try and reduce the participants with borrowed knives. There are still almost hundred candidates left. We only have until tomorrow

    night...

    As they are discussing all of a sudden, both of them sensed somethinging at them.

    *SWOOSH*

    A barrier automatically appeared around the second guy, while the first guy looked at the

    coming de ray. It is sharp, so sharp and flexible that it came at him with the weirdest angle

    he has ever witnessed.

    He jumped to the side hoping to dodge the attack. But at this moment, a shadow undead

    appeared a few meters away in the direction he was moving in.

    *SWOOSH* It threw a dagger aimed at his eyes.

 Chapter 2320: Final Round of Weapon Making

    Chapter 2320: Final Round of Weapon Making

    ?

    Everything is happening so fast.

    The opponent is moving at a speed that he could possibly muster. He has never been faster

    that he is at the moment. And for some reason, even though he knew everything is fast, he felt like all of it is happening very slowly.

    He could see every minute change in his surroundings.

    Maybe it is the shiver in his spine or the racing beat of his heart that are happening for reasons unknown.

    He could see everything clearly.

    However, even if he could see, he could feel it and sense it, he was unable to gain any confidence.

    He stopped his advance to the side as soon as the shadow appeared, the dagger moved towards his eyes.

    He changed his movement and tried to lean back.

    *SWOOSH*

    Another shadow appeared diagonally throwing another dagger, this time aiming at his hip.

    Even those two daggers are appearing slowly.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    He kicked the ground and rose up.

    *SWOOSH*

    Another shadow with another dagger, from a different direction.

    He tried to fly higher and move to the side.

    He managed to increase the altitude, but he wasn''t able to move. He had to resist the urge to do it.

    All of this happened in less than half a second. When he was a few feet high above the ground, he noticed all the six daggers are forming a circr spiral around him. They are stilling at him, just a couple of feet away from him.

    At that moment, the Chain sickle that initiated the attack, came back again.

    And judging from its trajectory, it didnte for him.

    Instead, it went after one of the daggers.

    The curved de ray hit the dagger cleanly.

    *SWISH*

    The dagger spun in the spot and its inscription glowed. Not just for that dagger, the inscriptions on the other daggers started glowing as well.

    *KEEN*

    The keen of the des resounded from the daggers. Large curved de rays akin to boomerangs were shot at him from various sides and at various heights.

    He didn''t even have time to react as all of them went through him.

    The opponent''s friend who stood on the side watched the gruesome scene. The opponent turned into a dozen pieces. Its like he was a turned into pieces by a drunken butcher with a crazy fetish.

    All of this happened so fast that not more than one and a half second has passed. Maybe the opponent''s sense of danger made him react that fast, and gave him some reaction speed. But the now staring friend only saw a sh of de ray followed by daggersing out of shadows and his friend turning into chunks of flesh.

    That is all his brain registered and he copsed to the ground.

    Sam finally came out to check the scene. He went down and checked the pieces of flesh to see how it worked.

    The chain sickle is such a thrilling weapon to use. At first, he just wanted to go on another rampage with it like he did with Katar. However, he wanted to try something new and came up with this idea.

    With his enhanced tricks, he could easily hide himself from the opponents as long as he is not extremely close.

    With the versatility of the chain sickle, he can even ensure that the de rayes from a different direction than the one he is standing in. He wanted to see how he can kill his opponents with this weapon without them being unable to acknowledge that he did it. The first variation worked well.

    The surprise dagger attacks and a single attack from the sickle. The rest is handled by the store energy in the daggers and the resonance inscriptions.

    The death is so gruesome. The only thing he noticed is that the cut is not as clean as he wanted. The resonance works really well with energy attacks and explosions. Even material manifestations work to an extent.

    But it seems like the bigger problem is in the manifestation of sh rays. He needs to research this more.

    After getting the information he needed and collecting the spoils, he turned to looked at the other candidate. His token clearly denoted his engaged status. Sam clicked his tongue in disappointment before leaving.

    As soon as Sam left, the candidate stood up and heaved a sigh of relief. His friend died so cruelly, but he couldn''t care much about that matter now. He is just d that he is engaged.

    The moment that thought hit him, his token turned yellow.

    He felt like a he is greeted by a spring breeze. He never knew his luck is this great. His opponent seemed to have withdrawn, but he did after Sam left. Which means, his life could have been lost. He was saved by hair''s breath.

    *KEEN*

    His thoughts didn''t evenplete when he felt a slight chill in the spring breeze he was feeling.

    The next thing he knew, he saw the world turning upside down, including his own body and the chain sickle''s de was in the spot where his head was supposed to be.

    *THUD*

    His headnded on the ground. Sam took the chain sickle back and took the spatial ring of the opponent as well, before he left. He is d that he left a shadow mouse behind.

    That day was another nightmare for the second graders. At least, previously Sam came at them directly. They knew that he wasing.

    Now, he came out of nowhere, came without giving any signs. He imed whoever''s life he wanted and he took them away like it was his in the first ce. Of course, even with all the grief he caused the news that he made Hel academy go out of business in the second grade hasn''t gone unnoticed.

    At this moment, the Dean of the Hel academy is furious as one could ever be. She looked at the Elder In charge and asked.

    "What kind of stupid strategy did you implement? All of our candidates are dead and most of them died in the hands of Sam. It is one thing to be defeated and lose the points, we even lost those genius kids as well.

    Who is going to be answerable to their parents? Three of them are our biggest supporters. If our score and ranking dips, we need their backing. Are you going to fill in the gaps they will

    leave?"

    The elder didn''t speak. He knew better than to be a smart ass and suggest solutions now.

    "I need to know how this escted to this point. From what I knew, we didn''t really have too much enmity with Sam.

    Even if we consider him to be the linked to the master mind behind the Hub, our academy didn''t suffer too muchpared to the Olympian academies and even the Sanatan academies. Even in the Norse regions, the other academies took most of the heat.

    Why did we go so far?

    And don''t bother pushing the me on to Sam. I know for a fact that this issue has started from our side. We are the first ones to draw a de at his room''s doorstep on the first day."

    The Elder pursed his lips and said.

    "Its... Elder Mangus warned us that Sam is a tough opponent even before thepetition

    started.

    His pressure increased after Sam embarrassed him in the formation contest. However,ter on we also understood that he is indeed a threat to our rankings in the auxiliary professions.

    We tried to take him down because of it. We formed alliances as you know, but it ended up like

    this."

    She held her forehead in exasperation. She believed that Sam targeted their academy definitely because of the fuss caused by Mangus. She wondered why that old bat of a man did

    this.

    That day passed like that. Sam didn''t go and eliminateplete academies for the rest of the

    day and just took down a few lives.

    The next day.

    The finals of the weapon makingpetition.

    Sam went to the forge.

    With only sixteen people, it looked way better and a lot less congested.

    Sam is excited to see what he will get to make today.

    The Elder soon gave the information he needed.

    "The finals of the Competition. Even though there are sixteen people here, we are not going

    with the tournament mode. Rather, all sixteen of you willpete to get the top sixteen

    ces. The top ten of course has better rewards.

    The remaining six will only get a constion prize from the Thor academy.

    As for what you are going to make... in the first challenge, your ability to adapt to someone

    else''s product has been tested.

    The second challenge is to test your basics and forging technique.

    Now, the final challenge will test everything rted to your weapon making. Design, forging

    skills, adaptability.

    All you will have is a bunch of requirements which you need to fulfil with your own skills.

    For that, we are making weapon sets."

 Chapter 2321: Umbryxium

    Chapter 2321: Umbryxium

    ?

    "There are different types of weapon sets prevalent in various ages of our history.

    And they changedrgely based on the region and culture as well. When the wars were much moremon and times were much more barbaric, the armor of any kind had much more significancepared to now.

    I must say, with the increase in politics and modern warfare, the armors also went to be developed to carry an element of stealth, by making they way too flexible and way too thin, almost like they are your everyday clothes.

    As much as the technique needed to make them is refined, the rustic look and the majesty of the old armors are almost lost in today''s time.

    So, I am going to use thispetition to my benefit and would like relive the days of the glory. A time when warriors were much more rounded and not one dimensional.

    That is why you are going to make sets.

    Like I mentioned before, you will be assigned a set that you need to make. You will have the list of all the weapons that needs to be in that set. That is it.

    Unless you have all those weapons, your set would be considered iplete and you are out of the race.N?v(el)B\\jnn

    If you would like, you can add additional features to the sets. But it shouldn''t hinder the original function of the set. Of course, no inscriptions or formations as well.

    The rest is your choice.

    As for the test, it will be a tournament between your weapon sets. We created some special wooden puppets for this asion.

    There are sixteen wooden puppets of the same length, same durability and same dimensions. You have to make the armor to suit that wooden puppet as well.

    An absolutely same set of attacks are configured in the puppets. Then two puppets will be set against each other. Whichever puppet wins, will be moved to the next round in the exact same state. Until the finals where thest two remaining puppets will fight.

    Finally, after the battle is over, the weapon set worn by the winning puppet will be the winner.

    To keep it very fair, we went ahead and chose the same type of weapon set for everyone to forge. A set that is very well known for its looks. A full te armor set for a knight."

    He then waved his hand, sending small scrolls to everyone of thepetitors. Sam caught his. There is a very in drawing of a full te armor. It is very simr... almost identical to the full te armor of the Europe in 1400s.

    There is the standard long sword, the full te armor, a shield, a short dagger and a cross bow with a bunch of bolts and not to leave out a polearm weapon. For some reason, the examiners gave them the choice.

    They can determine which polearm weapon would better suit the Armor and can create it.

    Sam looked at one of the sixteen candidates who is in the mix. He had blonde hair and blue eyes. A ssing knight description from western fairy tales back on earth. He is from an academy region called Eden.

    Lucifer also belonged to that region, so it shouldn''t be hard to guess what kind of gods will be there.

    Sam guessed that guy would have better knowledge of these armors and weapons than the rest. As for why he believed the judgement... almost every god he saw here and every consortium of gods that he has seen, they reflected the mythology and folklore back on earth.

    He guessed that guy who is from that Eden region might have some cultural experiences simr to that of Europe.

    Judging by the excitement in that guy''s eyes, Sam believed his guess is quite close.

    The Elder continued after giving them a few minutes to take a good look at the scroll.

    "You can use any metals that you have in our inventory. You will be assigned some personal assistants who knows every single metal and the quantity that we have in our inventory. They will fetch you whatever you want.

    You can just focus on your design and forging process.

    Of course, you can still not use your own modified and inscribed tools. You can only use the academy provided ones. I am stressing again, no inscriptions or formations.

    I want to see a master piece in metal work today.

    As for the time limit, you have until midnight. You can submit it before that, or you can make it untilst minute. However, if you don''t have all the elements of the set by midnight, then you will be disqualified directly.

    Keep that in mind.

    Now, you can begin."

    As soon as he made the announcement, everyone hurriedly started sketching. First they need to decide on a design that is both functional and visually appealing. Then only they can start with it.

    Sam thought for a moment and called for the attendant.

    "I want a in and smooth wooden table. Same dimensions as the work bench that you gave me."

    The attendant nodded and waved his hand, the table appeared. Sam is impressed with the preparedness. Next with a wave of his hand, the upperyer of the table was sanded off, revealing a much smoother surface.

    That surface is as clean as a paper if not better.

    He then focused his light element in his finger, creating aser. He started drawing on the surface by burning the lines in it. His mind worked at an impable speed as theser acted like aser should and finished the sketch in just a minute.

    He is doing a gothic style full te armor. It has the best bnce between the mobility and defense. It is lighter than a mail armor or amer. But it still had good defense overall. Obstruction to movement is less.

    As for why he is using such a broad table. He intends to building the armor in parts and then assemble themter on. If he forged the terger isrger chunks it might be easier, however the material quality will bepromised.

    He didn''t want to do it. Also, he has some other use for this. He wanted to try a new metal treatment method and see how well it works. All the finishedponents can go on to that table and get treated, his work bench would be free.

    Of course, he also used that table to draw the designs of eachponent in the real life size, instead of scale.

    While he did so, instead of just oneser from one finger, he projected fivesers, bending them unnaturally and making five drawings at the same time.

    It didn''t take more than ten minutes for him to draw all theponents. The parts of the

    te armor and helmet, the de of the long sword, theponents of the cross bow bolt,

    the shield and the de and staff of the halberd separately.

    After the design is done, he didn''t hesitate for even a second, there is no thought of

    rechecking or verifying.

    While the rest are still drawing and determining the dimensions, Sam is already heating up the metal inrge quantities.

    As soon as the knowledgeable spectators saw his choice of metals, it stirred a huge discussion.

    "Is that guy nuts? What is he doing with so much Umbryxium? To make armor? Why would he

    need that?"

    "Maybe he figured out something new regarding this? He has been pulling all kinds of tricks since the beginning. Maybe this time is no different?"

    "What kind of trick can be pulled with that metal? Despite its high quality and malleability, you do know why it can''t be used right?"

    The Umbryxium. A dark matte ck substance that is usually added to steel type metals to create a much more malleable alloy.

    Umbryxium increase the malleability of the hard metals that usually have high durability but

    no formability of their own.

    When you use an unusually hard metal and umbryxium together to create an alloy, during the stage of its creation when it is still in extreme temperatures, it as such flexibility that it could

    made into anything.

    However, once the alloy hardens in that state, it will be hard to change it once again. This also increases the resistance to kic shocks and sh attacks as well.

    The only drawback is, if the amount of umbryxium is not ideal. If it increases or decreases even a slightest bit from the ideal ratio, it is prone to failure. Either it makes the alloy way too flexible which will make it bend and deform too much in battle, or it will make it prone to fracture under high impact attacks.

    And there are only a very few known metals even in the academy realm that are good for using in tandem with Umbryxium. They figured out ideal ratios only for these few metals. However, none of those metals are known to be suitable to create an armor of a shield.

    They are mostly used to create flexible weapons, some intricate puppetponents etc. That is why its demand is still high despite having limited usecases in weapon making space. Now, they are way too curious to see what Sam is going to do with this metal, since he took it to make not just one metal, but rather a metal set.

 Chapter 2322: Forging

    Chapter 2322: Forging

    ?

    As everyone watched curiously, Sam carefully forged the Umbryxium.

    After heating the pieces sufficiently, he started hammering them out in the shape of theponents that he has designed. The shape and basic measures like length and width are all the same. However, the thickness of theseponents that he beat out of the Umbryxium didn''t match the design he drew.

    Which made everyone even more curious.

    Another peculiar thing they observed is that, after aponent is shaped out and had just enough heat that its malleability is very close to its cold usual state, Sam ced his hand over it and used his metal element along with his maniption ability.

    Nobody knew what exactly he was doing like that.

    Since the metal itself is very malleable and easy to beat into shape, he managed to finish theponents very quickly. Heid all of them on the table in their positions. Now, he needs to work on each weapon separately.

    The first thing he went after is the long sword.

    That could probably be the easiest and fastest thing that he could do at the moment.

    He already ced a metal in the furnace. It is also a rare metal. As for why no one had any reaction like they did when he used the Umbryxium? Because this metal with all its rarity looks like amon iron ore.

    The color, texture and even some of the reactions it has toe of themon tests are all the same as regr iron ore. However, this metal is called Soul Steel.

    Forming this ore is extremely difficult and it is mostly avable in the areas where death energy is rampant and a lot of specters reside. The formation of the soul steel as an ore is the same as an iron ore.

    However, during the early stages if the surroundings of that area are filled with specters, and if those specters failed to get away from there and their soul energy dissipates in to the surroundings, then the ore in its infancy will absorb this energy.

    So, most of the time this appears in the battlefields from long long ago. That is the only clear sign to find out the location of the metal. There are no other clues or tricks.

    This is also one of the findings of the Dusk. Not just one or two, they found dozens of mines over the realms. It seems spreading far and wide had its own advantages.

    He started forging the soul steel. He made two think des out of it. The des are of course of same length and width as his original design. Just like how he made a thin de out of Umbryxium, he made it with this as well.

    After those des are ready, he ced them in a furnace of much lower temperature, meanwhile he heated the Umbryxium de to a certain extent. After the soul steel des and Umbryxium des reached the desired temperature, he took them.

    He sandwiched the Umbryxium with the Soul steel and beat them together. After they became one de, he heated it once again before cing his hand on it and using his metal element in that heated state.

    After the de including its tang are done, he made it levitate to cool down. Just to make sure it doesn''te into contact with anything else until it is ready for its final treatment.

    With the remaining soul steel, made a fewponents of the crossbow and a bunch of bolts. Next for the main body of the crossbow, he took out some rhino gold. He made it into powdered state, created some moulds in which he ced the thin Umbryxium body and then filled the rest with the rhino gold powder.

    The Rhino gold is known for its heat resistance, cold resistance, deformation, etc.

    And the crossbow he designed is one the knight could wear on his arm. With the way he designed it he can attach it smoothly on the arm guard.

    Once he put the mould in the furnace and made it solifiy together, the main part is ready. He also made these levitate around him.

    Now, the shield, he took some more rhino gold and made twoyers with it. He sandwiched the Umbryxium in between these twoyers, simr to how he did with the sword. Once again, he did his metal element thing.

    Even though Sam appeared like he is moving fast, it has been three hours by the time he is done with it. He is sweating all over, and panting slightly. His arm muscles are aching a bit as well. However, rtively, he is way ahead of the rest of thepetitors.

    Even though all of them started forging, some of them are still correcting their own design ws which they didn''t think of earlier as they forged.

    Meanwhile, Sam took another rare metal.

    This one is rarer than the above two. The void stone metal. This metal... Sam didn''t obtain from the Dusk rather, this is what he exploited from the Academy realm''s students as part of the ransom. The specialty of this metal is that it can only be obtained in two ces.

    One is from the special meteorites thatnded on some and the other is the core of a dying.

    Sam has yet toe across either of them.

    This one has very unique properties. The shock absorption in particr is off the chartspared to any other metal he ever came across. If not for the fact Sam held the heir of one of thergest ns in the Noble league as his hostage, he wouldn''t have been able to use it. Looking at the void stone metal in Sam''s hands, a huge fervor went through the crowd.

    Sam even took off the outer robe and stood there bare chested as he started banging the metal. The Void stone metal is also hard to forge and the more it is closer to the stic state (A state from which the metal doesn''t undergo any deformation without breaking), it is the hardest it could ever be.

    To reach that stic state, he needs to ce this at the utmost stress.

    He cannot just use other tricks like he did with the Rhino gold and Soul Steel.

    Once again, he made two thinyers of eachponent of the armor. This one is also ck color, so the threeyers of the ckponents are forged together.

    He once again did his metal element thing with theseponents as well.

    If the first fewponents took three hours, this armor alone took almost four. Luckily, he didn''t add many minorponents or someplicated designs, otherwise who knows how

    long it will

    take.

    There is still around seven hours before midnight.

    Sam hovered them around in the air as he waited them all to cool down. Once they he is done, he ced them all on the wooden table in their positions. Now, is the final step.

    Even though Sam''s forging process is refined and did really good, theponents are not looking that great at the moment.

    The sandwiched metals are looking a bit odd with varying textures.

    And, even though theyers he made were very thing,bined together they didn''t look

    that refined and even had an appearance of being a bit bulky.

    With a wave of his hand, Sam removed all four legs of the table and made itnd on then/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    ground gently.

    He then sat on the ground facing theponents. With a wave of his hand, several space jades appeared in front of him.

    He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. His body started glowing with a golden re while the metalponents started levitating just a couple of inches above the table.

    They still had a decent distance between each of them and wouldn''t interfere with each

    other''s process.

    The golden light around Sam intensified as he condensed it. It is the light element and with extreme concentration it can generate enough heat to rival any me that they could obtain

    here.

    At the same time, a streak of blood flew out of each space jade he ced. The blood is unusually thicker and denser than the normal blood of any kind. Each streak also had different

    tone and texture.

    Soon, the metalponents heated up to the level Sam required it to.

    He then started moving the streaks to them. Each streak split into multiple smaller streaks

    and the blood soon wrapped around each metal.

    The armorponents were all wrapped with one type of metal, the sword has one type, the bolts of a different type and the crossbow body and the shield are of different type.

    Each blood has its own characteristics.

    With the intense heat the blood started evaporating, but there is a continuous supply of iting from the space jades and wrapping around theponents.

    That is at least what everyone else could see from his actions. However, behind the scenes there is something else happening. Something no one could see or guess. Along with the light element, Sam is using his metal element as well and it is on the blood. While the blood is heated, he is concentrating to separate the blood iron from. That heated blood iron is being forcefully speed through theseponents. They are

    merging and bonding with theyers. With the added heat and Sam''s maniption, all of it is

    turning into one alloy.

    Each blood is extracted from different species, giving the resultant blood iron unique

    characteristics.

    Even until the hour before midnight, Sam just sat there and kept on doing what he was doing. Meanwhile, the rest forged their sets, and are doing the finishing touches.

 Chapter 2323: Puppet Fighting

    Chapter 2323: Puppet Fighting

    ?

    Sam finally opened his eyes after another twenty minutes.

    He ignored everyone''s attention on him. The blood is still enveloping the weapons and the armor. He Just reduced the heat. He moved his hands assembling the armor pieces. The halberd''s head is being attached to the shaft, the de is being installed into the handle of the long sword. The cross bow is being assembled, then the armor.

    While these things are assembled individually, the attendants brough the wooden puppets to the contestants.

    The participants can adorn the armor on the puppets themselves. Just to make sure that there is no human error involved in this process.

    Of course, they also have another privilege. Thepetitors can program a few moves into the puppet. However, they cannot be some borate moves, and they also cannot program adjustments to the existing moves.

    They can only program something that is rted to the usage of their weapons.

    For example, they cannot show how to improve the uracy of its shooting or improve the energy cirction to increase the damage done by a crossbow.

    They can only show the mechanism of their crossbow.

    If their long sword is different than a normal long sword, they can show it how to hold the sword. If their polearm weapon is special and not of a standard model and they made some modification to it, they can show how to use it.

    Sam took his time assembling the weapons. After he is done, he threw them on to the wooden puppet, while still covered in that blood.

    So, even as the armor is being worn, no one could make out what its actual appearance is like. When it waspletely worn, Sam took a deep breath and dropped the blood.

    As if a red muslin has been removed over it, the blood dropped down fluidly, revealing the armor for everyone to see.

    Instant awe is the only term that could be used to describe the expressions of the people. What they witnessed is the wooden puppet wearing a thin Gothic style armor. The armor is of ck color, but with red blood hue. The blood hue is very clear and not vague at all.

    That bloody glow that ising out it, gave the armor and the weapons a menacing yet majestic look. The helmet covered the head of the puppetpletely, only leaving the gap for its eyes and the nose.

    The armor didn''t have any specific patterns, however they noticed that there are no gaps in the joints. Instead, it had a blood colored metallic lining beneath it. It is as flexible as a fabric, however it is as durable as chain mail could be.

    The chest te, shoulder guards, arm guards, are done very simply. There is no pattern, no intricate design. Even on the part covering the abdomen.

    The only thing notable is that Sam marked his double S symbol on the left side of the chest te.

    In its right hand, the Puppet has the sword, the Halberd is hung on its back. Sam made an attachment for that.

    Now, the shield and the crossbow.

    The crossbow is mounted on arm guard of the left hand. And that crossbow also acted as the attachment for the shield. This helped conceal the crossbow. When the wielder desires, they can just extend the arm straight and shoot it.

    The shield is design in such a way that the bolt wouldn''t be obstructed by its body.

    Everything is glowing with that blood red hue over the ck color.

    It is great to look at and looked functional as well. However, thetter has to be tested.

    One thing they are sure of is that, if they had just seen the armor and the weapons like this they would have never guessed that Sam used differentyers and then bonded them together. It is very clean and felt like it was created that way.

    There are no signs of any form of work done on it.

    Sam heaved a sigh and sat on the ground. He spent too much effort on it. He is soaked in sweat and a lot of his reserves are depleted. He is only at twenty percent or so. If someone attacks

    him now, he would have some trouble killing them if they a bit stronger than him.

    He didn''t feel secure and took out some wine.

    The time is soon up.

    All sixteen of them finished it and the test began.

    They didn''t wait at all and just drew the lots. Sam''s is in at the eight duel, thest one. Manson''s is in first.

    Manson''s armor is shining brightly as it went on the stage. It is made of silver and gold coloredponents looking grand and luxurious. He made some modifications to the shield, while the crossbow is hung on the back through an attachment. The long sword is hanging by the waist and the puppet carried the spear as the primary weapon.

    As for the shield modifications, there are some spikes on its surface and the edge of the shield are unusually sharp.

    His opponent also had a handsome armor. An armor made of many rare metals. Sam could identify them just by looking. Their usage was made so obvious.

    The battle began.

    The puppets executed standard fight moves.

    Manson''s puppet thrust the spear forward, while the opponent one blocked it with the shield. It didn''t try to dodge, just like how the examiner has mentioned before. Then that puppet drew its sword and attacked.

    Manson''s puppet blocked it with the shield and attacks.

    The exchange continued until the opponent''s shield couldn''t handle it anymore. The puppet''s moves were too urate and both of them moved with the same monotonous technique.

    This made the spearnd on the same spot of the shield again and again. As the luck would have it, the spot happened to the thinner part of the shield, closer to the edge.

    *BANG*

    The spear went right through it and it went straight toward the arm. The Arm guard covering the arm barely managed to deflect it.

    But the deflection had been a bigger mistake. The puppet pulled the spear back, since it is deflected it moved diagonally making it stuck within the hole it made in the shield.

    When the puppet forcefully pulled it, it brough the shield back along with the spear.

    Since the puppet didn''t know let go of the shield consciously, its fingers and the forearm were broken in process. The arm guard covering that are is also deformed.

    The puppet based on its programming went for the secondary weapons. The spear on its back and the crossbow. But that broken arm is of no use. When it picked the spear, the forearm

    cavedpletely under the load of it.

    Manson''s puppet of course didn''t stop.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    The attacksnded on the armor. Once again at the same point. With minimal defense, the

    armor was pierced open and the spear lodged itself deeply into the puppet.

    Just like how a cultivator would have died, the puppet also copsed.

    Manson won.

    Sam looked at the stage with a weird expression. He didn''t know whether he should be

    impressed or disappointed.

    This is the finals of the weapon making tournament, so in all fairness he expected a strong exchange between those puppets.

    However, they are done after executing a few basic moves. The weapons failed immediately after taking a few attacks. Its just too damn nd.

    Thepetitions continued.

    The only interesting exchange was between the Hephaestus student and the Viswa Karma Student. Both of their sets were really strong and functional. Their defense is great. The

    shields were unform and worked perfectly.

    Their crossbows are also working properly.

    However, the Hephaestus student''s armorcked some flexibility in motion. The joints could

    have been a bit too rigid.

    When a sword strikended there, the join broke, exposing the hand. That one loss spiraled down. It was a rtively close match, but it is a clear victory with no doubt. The Viswa Karma

    student won.

    The second student from the Viswa Karma academy, went next and destroyed the opponent

    easily.

    The rest of the matches were unremarkable. Including Sam''s own match as well. His puppet went on to the stage.

    The examiners sensed a blood thirsty aura from it. Which shouldn''t be present in any non- spirit weapons and certainly not in the puppets they created themselves. They attributed it to the blood iron and treatment Sam gave it.

    The opponent''s armor looked much shier, but it did pale inparison up on closer look.

    *BANG*

    When the attack happened, Sam''s puppet blocked the attack strongly and thrust the long

    sword.

    The opponent''s puppet blocked the attack.

    However, when the next exchange happened, a frown appeared on the faces of the examiners.

    For some reason, the opponent''s puppet appeared a beat slower to them. Not to a great

    extent, very minute one.

    They thought its them being paranoid.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    However, as the time went on, they noticed that they are not wrong.

    After ten moves, there is not a nick on either Sam''s armor or the opponent''s armor. However,

    the opposite puppet suddenly copsed to the ground.

 Chapter 2324: Victory

    Chapter 2324: Victory

    ?

    Everyone looked at the scene in stunned silence.

    The puppet just copsed out of nowhere. The Elder stepped forward and examined it. The armor is still fine, the wooden puppet didn''t have any damage. So, it is not physical. He gave Sam a sharp nce, before he checked the puppet''s core.

    There it is.

    He saw it. The puppet core is devoid of the spirit that was enchanted to it. The spirit disappearedpletely. As if it was not there.

    The Elder stood up and walked towards Sam''s puppet.

    "I would like to examine your weapons."

    "Please do." Sam obliged. The Elder ced his hands on the armor. Spiritual energy spread out and turned into a runic inscription, covering all theponents. His eyes glowed brightly. It must have been his own version on observation ability

    He stayed in that state for three minutes and then sighed.

    He felt the armor surface and clicked his tongue.

    "Winner, Sam."

    He announced while still standing there.

    "HOW? He must have cheated. There is no damage to the puppet at all."

    "Damage is not just physical. There is something beyond that. And judging by your words and tone, would I be wrong to assume, you are questioning the credibility of a judge in the Inter academy tournament?"

    The Elder rebuked sharply.

    The opponent didn''t know what to say and took a step back.

    ''What the fuck is happening?'' He cursed inside his head and turned to look towards the elder of his academy who is among the spectators.

    The elder hesitated a bit and asked the judge.

    "Can we know the reason?"

    The elder looked at Sam and said.

    "I am not in a position to reveal that. However, I can stake my reputation on my judgement. Sam''s weapon set won fair and square, without any form of underhanded y."

    The Elder nodded and just took his student away.

    Sam smiled and let his armor back down.

    Thepetition went on.

    Manson won the second round as well. Even the Viswa-Karma academy students did. Sam also won the second round in the same way. This fight is also anti-climactic. They didn''t understand how Sam is winning.

    With all the majestic weapon kit, they couldn''t even see how well it works. Even his opponents are indignant about this.

    The next round is between Manson and the first Viswa-Karma student, then Sam and the second Viswa-Karma Student. This realization made most people get diverted from Sam''s issue. Gambler academy versus the Viswa Karma academy.

    That too in the finals of the inter-academy tournaments.

    These things did happen before, in some regional tournaments or some low level tournaments, but this is the first time that this happened in such a huge official tournament. No matter what the results are, the first four ces are upied by these two academies. And they have a feeling that Gambler academy wouldn''t lose out in this. Sam''s set... it has yet to undergo any amount of stress. Much less a dent or a breakage. It didn''t even a slight scratch. It is as pristine as it was, when it was assembled.

    Even the sheen hasn''t faded one bit.

    Manson went first.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    The attacks were relentless and the exchange was really well bnced one. However, soon Manson''s armor gave in. The spear lodged into the gap and pierced the puppet.

    Manson lost, but he wasn''t too disappointed. He still has one more fight. After Sam''s fight with the second Viswa Karma student, whoever wins goes to finals, while the person who lost will fight with Manson, for the third ce.

    So, it is not really a bad thing for him. He has a chance to reach the third ce and he is still only in thete-stage. He has some time in the second grade and he can improve.

    The next match soon began.

    Sam''s puppet went on to the stage first.

    Viswa Karma student hoped that he would be able to win. He bit his nails in nervousness.

    *BANG*

    Sam''s puppet blocked the first attack from the enemy''s sword.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    As the sword constantly came, it kept onnded on the edge of the shield.

    *CRACK*

    With enough attacks, a crack appeared on the sword, while a dent appeared at the edge of the shield. The puppet swung the sword again, in a different direction and Sam''s puppet used a different part of the shield to block the attack.

    *BANG*

    The sword broke. It took too much damage from the previous fights, it is already good enough that Sam''s shield has dented, that is the first ever sign of damage.

    The enemy puppet dropped the sword and raised its hand to hold the spear on its back, however, the moment it did, it appeared like it slowed down all of a sudden. Its movements became sluggish, leaving a huge opening.

    *BANG*

    Sam''s puppet shed the long sword from the side.

    *SLASH*

    Itnded on one of the dented and deformed parts of the armor. The sword went through it

    directly.

    With just a single sh, the armor was cut open along with a huge chunk of the wooden puppet. As soon as thatnded, the puppet also copsed to the ground.

    That is it for the semi-finals.

    Sam looked at the opponent. He is not disappointed at all. The opponent is just observing his fallen puppet and then at Sam''s puppet. He had his fingers rubbing against his chin as he climbed the stage and observed Sam''s weapons closely.

    "May I?"

    He asked Sam. Sam just shrugged. The other party looked at the armor and the sword carefully and it seemed like a revtion dawned on him.

    "Is it Soul Steel?" He asked Sam.

    Sam nodded and the other party clicked the tongue. He understood what is happening. The soul steel''s preciousness doesn''t juste from its rarity, but by its ability. Soul Steel has one

    of the most dangerous abilities in its natural state.

    When someone touches the ore without necessary preparations, they will lose their soul

    power. It will consume their soul power bit by bit.

    Even if the contact is indirect like with a sword or stick for example.

    However, once the ore is refined, more often than not, it loses its ability. That is why only very high level masters work on the soul steel.

    Right now, Sam''s sword and shield which are made of soul steel are contacting the spirit hidden inside the puppet. Even with that indirect connection, that spirit is being depleted and

    the puppet is eventually copsing.

    The opponent sighed in admiration.

    When everyone was thinking of creating a great alloy to defend against physical attacks, Sam just went beyond everyone''s thinking and used soul steel to target the mental world.

    And no one can even say anything about it.

    One can only say that he ispetent enough and covered all the bases. And they cannot find

    fault saying that the puppet''s soul is weak. Even if it is a cultivator, their soul strength wouldn''t be able to escape.

    It might take longer to deal with the cultivators, but they will also fall eventually.

    The opponent turned to his friend from the same academy and said.

    "You cannot win this. Give up. We can at least leave early."

    The judge was a bit stumped by the suggestion. It could be considered extremely

    disrespectful. However, his friend shrugged and replied.

    "Sure. If you say so."

    He immediately withdrew from thepetition. Then the opponent still on stage extended

    his hand to Sam.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "Great work. I really you joined our academy. I am sure a lot of our instructors would have

    appreciated your skill in the craft."

    Sam shook his hand and thanked him. The opponent then looked at Manson.

    "Would you like topete for the third ce? I hope we can dere it a draw. But if you

    insist, I am fine withpeting."

    Manson frowned and asked.

    "Why?" He looked at his own set and then at that guy''s. Manson is not really confident, except

    for the one spot, where attacked, the rest of the armor is still effective.

    The shield is barely damaged and the spear wasn''t even used. However, his own set is

    damaged much more.

    There is a high chance that he will lose.

    "I just had some inspiration and would like to go back earlier. So, a draw is not big of a deal."

    Manson was stunned. Someone would let go of a rank like this just because of some

    inspiration.

    He just nodded and agreed. Just like that, the wholepetition came to another anti-

    climactic end. The elders were a bit dissatisfied, so were the audience, but they can''t do much.

    Sam walked up to the stage and started removing the set off the puppet.

    The judge walked to him and said.

    "Your skills are really good. Too bad, the set didn''t have a worthy adversary to shine. I really

    wish I could see it in its full glory."

    Sam didn''t mind thepliment that much and smiled.

    "Don''t worry about it. Juste into the city in a short while. I assure you, the set will be put

    to a good use."

 Chapter 2325: Knight on a Horse

    Chapter 2325: Knight on a Horse

    ?

    Sam left the academy, along with the armor.

    He didn''t put it in the storage. Instead, he made the pieces hover around him as he walked. And while walking, he started wearing one piece after another on the way. Everyone knew what was happening since thest two days.

    Ever since the weapon makingpetition has started, Sam has been on the path of ughter.

    In the day, he made a weapon based on thepetition requirements and after thepetition, he went on a rampage in the city. He killed so many people that even the rest of thepetitors constantly fighting in the past few days seemed a lot mellower.

    Now, when they heard about what he said to the elder and the way he walked while wearing the armor, they could guess what is going to happen.

    Some people looked forward to it with anticipation and followed him.

    Some people hurriedly contacted the people of their academy and some people sighed in despair. By the time Sam reached the entrance of the academy, he was done with it. He wore theplete set. The crossbow is loaded with the bolts, the halberd is hanging on his back, while the long sword on his waist.

    He held the shield with one hand and the helmet with the other.

    Sam stood there for a moment to think before he made a decision. With a thought, a sh covered himpletely, from within that sh...

    *NEIGH*

    The neighing of the horse filled the surroundings. The ck mare, the finest one anyone had ever seen stood in front of Sam. Dia is here.

    She rubbed her head against Sam.

    It has been way too long since she came out. At least she is lucky, Sam has kept all the other beasts cooped up inside the Divine Dimension. Anyway, he didn''t n to keep them hidden any longer and that is one of the reason he left the shadow mice out.

    Now Dia is out as well.

    "Let''s go. I am sure you want to run wild for a while."

    Dia has already been saddled up. Since Sam made it, she refused to remove it. Sam sat on her with one fluid motion and wore his helmet.

    *SWOOSH*

    He took the halberd off his back and spun it a bit.

    *NEIGH*

    Dia lunged forward after raising her forelegs into the sky, dering its descent on this filthy city and her prey. The city reverberated with the footsteps of the horse. Dia didn''t hold back her strength at all.

    With every step, her gravitational force riled destroying the surroundings. The shockwaves are turning the buildings into rubble.

    Soon, they took a right turn and Dia went straight towards a house.

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam swung the halberd. With the single swing, the house copsed and then Dia stomped on a particr spot.

    *CRASH*

    "ARGGHH..."

    The ground caved in and a scream came out. A young man is holed up inside and he had his eyes wide open in disbelief.

    He looked at Sam in his ck armor and the ck mare he sat on.

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam lodged its halberd at him. The opponent blocked the attack and jumped out of the pit. He flew into the air and started fleeing.

    *NEIGHING*

    Dia jumped into the air and started following him. With her every snort, a gravitational shockwave attacked that fleeing guy. And just like that, Sam and him are engaged.

    When his token changed, he knew that there is no point in fleeing. He turned around while contemting whether he should give up or fight. He is really unwilling to give it up. He hase too far and survived for too long.

    He is very close to being in the top 32 candidates. He knew there are only a handful of them left. He just had to wait until then. But here he is. Being targeted by Sam.

    The worst part is that he didn''t really have any enmity against Sam at all.

    Of course, how could he know? The very fact that he is part of Hou Yi''s academy is enough for Sam to target him. He should be d that Sam didn''te after him on the first day.

    The opponent gritted his teeth and conjured lightning in both of his hands. He looked at Sam with a hateful gaze and ran towards him.

    "SWOOSH"

    Sam didn''t attack him. He hovered in the air along with Dia. When the opponent came close enough, Dia neighed once again with her forelegs raised.

    The opponent suddenly felt as if his body be lighter. A force that he couldn''t even make sense of suddenly came from underneath him, pushing him into higher into the sky.

    He was caught off guard and didn''t even have a chance to stabilize himself.

    Sam threw his halberd at him.

    *SWOOSH*

    The halberd cut his shoulder and went past him. He stabilized himself, but still felt a bit dizzy

    all of a sudden. He gritted his teeth andunched himself at Sam.

    His palm shaped like a de conjured with lightning. As if resonating with him, the surrounding sky also conjured up clouds.

    *SWOOSH*

    Dia turned to the side forcefully, dodging the attack without even Sam''s instructions.

    *BAM*

    The lightning de he conjurednded on Sam''s shield and with the movement deflected his

    attack.

    *KEEN*

    A metallic keening sound was heard as she moved. The opponent suddenly felt something is

    wrong...

    *SWOOSH*

    The halberd that was thrown away came at double the speed. Dia''s maic abilities are too good. Sam caught the halberd and stabbed at the opponent who closed the distance by too much. When he tried to move, the gravity already affected him and stopped him for a

    movement.

    *SLASH*

    Another halberd sh, on the same shoulder, he felt even more dizzy, but when he was about to jump and leave, Dia bit his foot and dragged his down.

    "FUCKING BITCH"

    He screamed and conjured lightning in his legs. Dia didn''t give in and covered himpletely with her gravitational force. Dragging him down along with Sam.

    Meanwhile, Sam mmed the edge of the shield into the opponent''s knee and stabbed him in

    the chest with the Halberd.

    "FUCK"

    He caught the de of the halberd and tried to stop it, but he couldn''t. It just went through

    and cut him deeply into the chest.

    As they descended the speed increased.

    Dianded gently on the ground, while Sam stood on her and used that extra momentum to crush the opponent into the ground with his halberd. The halberd thirstily absorbed the soul energy of the opponent and with it directly in his body, the effect is much better.

    He copsed right there.

    Sam didn''t even hesitate and was about to take life away. But all of a sudden, the opponent''s token turned yellow. He gave up, or more precisely, the elder of the Hou Yi academy gave up on this guy''s behalf to save him.

    This kid is just in thete stage, he cannot give up on him. He still has chances in the future. Sam didn''t care much and ran in a different direction.

    As he did, dark elemental energy fused into the halberd and he threw it, aiming at a house far

    away.

    *SWOOSH*

    The dark energy appeared weird with a menacing aura. The halberdnded in the middle of

    the house.

    *BOOM*

    With a huge explosion, the house turned into rubble.

    *COUGH**COUGH*

    From among that rubble a woman rose out while coughing heavily. Her body is covered with

    dark lines as the cursed energy spread through her.

    *NEIGH*

    Before she could even try to expel the energy, she felt the excessive gravitational force almost

    m her back into the ground.

    Sam and Dia appeared once again.

    *SWOOSH* She threw a dagger, which Sam blocked, but the force made a small dent on it.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    *BANG**BANG* *BANG*

    As Sam and Dianded nearby, she tried her best to stand up and threw the daggers. Sam blocked them with his shield and moved forward.

    The opponent stabilized herself a bit and started running. Sam charged forward and picked

    the halberd on the way, before throwing it again.

    *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

    She threw the daggers on the Halberd, sensing that she couldn''t dodge with her movement.

    The dagger deflected the pole weapon a bit, however, all of a sudden she felt an invisible

    shockwave hit her.

    Dia''s snort made her crash into the ground.

    The Halberd brushed past her. She is still safe. However, before she could even heave a sigh of

    relief.

    *SWOOSH*

    She felt it. A bolt to her thigh. Sam''s crossbow bolt hit her cleanly. Only now did he she notice

    the effects of the curse. Sam''s curse, even though he nted it in a rush, worked well. It

    caused two things, one is some irritation and slowing the motion with temporary paralysis, and another is dulling the senses.

    Even though the bolt wasing at her, she couldn''t sense it.

    Sam came at her with the halberd to finish her. But she recovered enough to make a move. She

    lunged at him, held the Halberd''s shaft under her arm and tried to pull Sam down.

    However, in that rush, she kept her neck way too close to Dia''s mouth.

    *CRUNCH*

    Dia bit her in one smooth motion. It didn''t tear it off... but it wasn''t exactly a good thing in

    this case.

 Chapter 2326: Solo Combat

    Chapter 2326: Solo Combat

    ?

    *BOOM*

    The gravity around them increased, it has increased by at least a dozen fold.

    Dia''s teeth bit deeply into the flesh of the opponent and as the gravity increased, naturally the opponent''s body is sagging down. Due to the weight of the body, the flesh was ripped apart.

    Dia chewed the flesh with relish as Sam stabbed the halberd into the head of the opponent. Another one, taken down.

    And that day, it was just the beginning.

    For the next few hours, the Norse city is filled with the steps of horse hooves, screams of the second graders and the intense battles so that they can meet the 32 member limit and ensure they are safe from Sam.

    At least, at the start Sam just used the weapons and the beast he was riding on. But as he encountered the stronger opponents, he started using his tricks. Inscription traps, curses, formations, ambushes, invisible attacks.

    He fought so fiercely, but he didn''t even get off his horse. Not even once.

    Three hourster.

    In the main street of the Norse city. The street right in front of the Thor academy.

    *THUD* *THUD*

    The heavy footsteps of Dia could be heard. The whole street is a mess. It is almost like a scene out of an apocalyptic novel.

    Sam is chasing after his opponent.

    By now, his shield is way too dented and it is resiting on his back. Even his armor is also dented a lot. He held the long sword with his right hand, and the halberd in the left.

    *SWOOSH*

    The halberd flew threw the air and lodged itself into the leg of the opponent. It pinned him into the ground.

    Sam halted near him, but by that time, the halberd sucked the soul power out and that guy died.

    There are already several injuries from both the long sword and the halberd on the opponent''s body. His soul power was already on the verge of exhaustion.

    *SWISH*

    At that moment, suddenly someone came at him out of nowhere.

    Sam raised his left hand and a crossbow bolt was shot at theing opponent.

    *THUD*

    That guy fell down without even having a chance to attack. Sam turned and shed his head off with his long sword.

    At that moment all of a sudden, his token turned from green to yellow before it turned to white in color.

    ''Only thirty two candidates still left in thepetition. You are officially one of the finalists of the Solobatpetition of the second grade interacademy tournament. Sam smirked as he looked behind.

    There are at least a dozen corpses in the path, all left behind by him. He felt very satisifed with what he aplished.

    He killed so many people in thest three days, that he himself brought the number to 32. And on his way to do that, he aplished many things that he wanted to. At the moment, people who are effected by his aplishments are gritting their teeth and grinding their palms in anger. Anger that came from their inability to retaliate in kind.

    Because Sam took down the teams of various academies. After dealing with the Zeus and Hel Academy, Sam went after the Hou Yi''s academy. Aftering to the academy realm, he hadn''t created much trouble for that guy.

    So, Sam took this chance to remind Hou Yi that he hasn''t forgotten the grudges.

    He also dealt with the Indra academy.

    He didn''t care about the rest of the academies in the game, but he did deal a lot of losses to other Olympian academies. The Hephaestus academy was eliminated, the Poseidon academy lost four. There are also a few other Olympian academies that go eliminated or had barely one. The damage he did this time, is off the charts. They have to recover the score they lose here in other aspects, otherwise they wouldn''t be able to keep their rankings stable. They wouldn''t have been this worried if this is a good oldpetition.

    Every year, there would have been a regionalpetition and only ten people from each region wille, which means, a lot of academies couldn''t send any people at all.

    However, they would get some rewards for ranking in the top 16 in the regionalpetition, so high ranked students would gain some score to their academies, and the prelims would

    have been a tournament style, which would bring more points.

    But this free for all reduced all of it. They don''t know how the score will be calcted.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    This is making them anxious.

    All because of Sam. They couldn''t even understand how Sam managed to have so many tricks up his sleeve. They understood that unless they dealt with Sam with overwhelming strength that couldn''t be ovee with any kind of trick, they wouldn''t even have a chance.

    Sam got off Dia and golden mes raged from him. The armor heated up and while everyone is watching, it turned back into its original shape. No dents, nothing, it is as good as new.

    They were dumbfounded, news quickly spread around.

    Sam went back to his room and rested while many people talked about his feats throughout

    the night.

    While everyone waited in anticipation, that night passed.

    It is time for the Solopetition.

    All thirty-two contestants are now lime light of everyone. The biggest arena of the Norse region has been arranged to be the venue of thispetition.

    A straight up tournament on arge open stage. No, special rules, no tricky loopholes to exploit. They can just go there, use all the means they can gather and just try to defeat their

    opponent.

    Of course, there are special restrictions on the level of artefacts that they can use. Sam is sure that the Thunder prison wouldn''t be qualified to use in this tournament. Only artefacts of that

    overpowered nature are restricted.

    They can use the moderate ones.

    Sam observed his fellowpetitors.

    There are three people from Gambler academy. Rashma, Sam and surprisingly Crow. Of course, it is not as surprising as Sam being here. Ares academy has two, Karthikeya academy has three, Thor academy has two, the Eden realm''s Michael Archangel academy has two candidates, Sun Wukong''s academy has two.

    These are the only ones that had at least two students. Except for Gambler academy, there is only academy that has three students that is Set''s academy from Duat Region.

    The remaining are all alone from their academies.

    The line up itself made everyone feel like they are dreaming. Gambler academy never had this level overwhelming results in previouspetitions, not in solobat. Maybe Dove''s batch can produce these kinds of results, but they mostly restrain themselves.

    Set''s academy is also a surprise. They are also mostly known for Team battles and then their performance in divine battlefields, they don''t do that well in solopetitions. The nature of the free for all is the primary reason for this change.

    After exining of the rules, they started drawing lots to match the opponents.

    Sam looked at his opponent and smiled. It is someone from Ares academy. He can do whatever

    he wanted, however his match is thest one.

    First one is Rashma''s match. Sam went to his seat and eagerly watched.

    Rashma is matched against a Thor academy student.

    "FIGHT"

    The referee announced.

    One minute passed.

    "Rashma Wins"

    The referee announced again. Everyone looked at the arena with dumbfounded expression.

    Rashma just took her foot off the chest of her opponent. She just caved him in directly. Single hit. He couldn''t even react before she started beating him up and made him crash into the

    ground like this.

    Nobody knows if he is even breathing anymore.

    She just scratched her head in boredom and left.

    The second match is between a member of Karthikeya academy and a member of Ares

    academy. Both of them happened to be spear users.

    The fight was intense and it went for more than fifteen minutes. The kathikeya student won at

    the end. He hurriedly drank some potions before going to rest.

    Then the second Ares academy student fought a student from Set academy.

    As both of them entered the arena, the Set academy appeared extremely rxed as if he is not

    there to fight, while his opponent is nervous.

    Sam knew some information about both of these people. He knew that Set guy is very powerful, but to think that he made the other party this nervous. He wondered what happened

    during the free for all.

    After a couple of minutes, he understood.

    No matter how much the Ares student tried to attack, the opponent, he couldn''t.

    The Set student is a master of illusions. In fact, even the people sitting the stands couldn''t differentiate what is illusion and what is not.

    Whenever the Ares student managed to stab his opponent, the illusory body disappeared and

    reappeared near him.

    That illusory body threw the attack, he felt the pain and took the damage, but when he counter attacked, the illusion copsed again.

 Chapter 2327 First Match

    2327 First Match

    Everyone is impressed.

    It doesn''t matter the cultivationlevel, or the academy they belongs to, everyone is impressed by the uniqueness of the technique.

    This is very simr to one of the illusory creatures in the illusion tower. The opponent can''t attack, but he can receive the attacks from the illusion. Sam activated the energy vision to understand what is happening.

    But the illusion is so perfect and refined that he couldn''t see any traces.

    There are no holes and no signs for him to identify. Of course, he couldn''t examine the energywork of the person. Anyway, the illusory technique worked perfectly.

    The other party didn''t stand a chance and just took one hit after another, before he gave up. Next is Crow''s fight with some other academy''s student. Finally, Crow had some trouble. He is almost beaten to death, before he barely managed to defeat his opponent.

    He lost two teeth and broke his arm. Several ribs cracked and his stomach was torn open.

    Soon it is time for Sam''s match.

    The opponent from the Ares academy climbed up nervously. If anyone asked, any person involved in the second gradepetition would say that the most terrifying opponent is Sam.

    When fighting one on one, their higher cultivation by small levels is not worth much. His inscriptions and formations, the way he used them¡­ they more than made up for theck of cultivation strength.

    Even now, on this stage, he is a bit nervous.

    After a couple of minutes, he gritted his teeth and resolved himself to see it to the end. He made it this far. He might as well see this to the end. He channeled his energy, the muscles became denser and explosive strength sent shockwaves to the surroundings.

    Sam smiled and waved his hand.

    Golden Ape came out of the Divine Dimension and stood in front of him. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    *ROAR* *DUM* *DUM* *DUM*

    The ape came out roaring. Thumping its chest. Its maw so wide as if it wanted to devour the world. The aura of the ape is fierce to begin with.

    The thumping made its whole fur tremble and the sound reverberated in everyone''s hearts. It looked like an invincible existence that is dering itsmanding presence to the world, demanding that its opponent bow down to it.

    That raging explosive strength of the opponent was intimidating, there is no denying that.

    However, it paled inparison with the brutish disy of the Ape.

    With a snap of his fingers, a hand gun appeared in his hands. At the same time, some grey colored energy is circting in his left hand. But everyone ignored this. Because their eyes are glued to the Golden Ape.

    There is obviously some rumor outside circting regarding Sam''s possession of some legendary beasts. However, they have never seen it and nobody who has seen it has lived to tell the tale outside.

    Only in thispetition Sam showed his cards. He is sure that some people already came to know about the existence of shadow mice. They just stayed silent to ensure that they didn''t vite any rules in process to alerting their students.

    The opponent looked at the ape and then at Sam. Both of their auras are equally menacing. He looked at the referee, hoping that there is some loophole to rule out the ape. But the referee just stood their like a pole.

    He cursed inside his head and decided to make the first move.

    *BOOM*

    He kicked the ground and jumped into the air, throwing an ax kick towards Sam and the ape. He is nowhere close to them and the kick was done mid-air, at a rtively high altitude.

    It is a long range physical attack. The spiritual energy riled up and condensed densely before it mmed into the stage towards Sam and the ape.

    Along with that, the opponent is alsoing down.

    *ROAR*

    The ape roared and punched out at theing kick.

    *BOOM*

    The collision of the attacks, sent a shockwave the shook the surroundings, the opponent stabilized himself and closed the distance between them. Sam and the ape moved to the either side, making the opponentnd in between.

    *SWOOSH*

    He kicked towards Sam, but Sam just dodged and barely missed the kick. But the Ape punched the opponent from behind.

    *BAM*

    He blocked the attack and was about to throw a kick.

    *BOOM*

    Sam shot a bullet near the feet of the opponent. It wasn''t aimed at him and it wasn''t lethal. Its goal is to create a big enough shockwave to deal with the opponent''s bnce and it did. The opponent slipped slightly and his kick missed.

    Ape caught a hold of his leg and dragged him.

    The opponent mmed his other leg into the ground to stabilize himself. He then kicked up with that leg, aiming at the ape''s huge chest, but the ape didn''t give him the chance and pulled him to the side mming him down.

    *BAM*

    The kick brushed past the ape, throwing to the side. The opponent let his body roll a bit, the ape regained its bnce before he did and mmed its fists into the ground.

    *BOOM*

    The shockwave broke the stage as it moved to hit him. The opponent pushed the ground and stood up hurriedly.

    But all of a sudden, he sensed a crisis. He kicked to the side, creating a shockwave to throw himself away, at that moment..

    *BOOM*

    A bullet was shot behind him. He just missed it, if he raised like he originally thought, he would have taken the bullet directly to his head. But still, the shockwave hit him, as he was falling down while facing the sky, he saw the giant figure of the golden ape falling towards him.

    *ROAR* *BAM*

    It mmed its fists into his head. The dust rose covering thempletely. Ape instantly jumped back afternding the attack creating a distance. When the dust settled, the opponent is revealed. His hands are crossed against his face, blocking the attack.

    They are trembling wildly, but he did manage to save his head from it. The intensity of the attack, can be felt by the massive crater underneath him. The shock went through his body and destroyed the stage.

    A stage set for the academy tournament¡­ it is meant to endure attacks like these. But the ape''s strength¡­ it is a bit too wild because of its superior bloodline.

    The opponent stood up and looked around.

    Sam and Ape, standing in opposite directions of him. With an equal distance.

    *SWOOSH*

    His energy raged, the spiritual energy around him smelled like blood and looked like red vapor. His speed increased to the point, Sam almost couldn''t track him. Almost¡­

    His energy vision worked on hyperdrive and he could see the energy moving even before the opponent did.

    Sam aimed near his feet and shot the bullet.

    *BOOM*

    The moment the bullet left the chamber, the recoil hit and he flew back, the bullet hit the ground right when the opponent came to that spot.

    *BOOM*

    Cursed energy flew out of the explosion and the opponent felt a stinging sensation all over his body.

    *BAM*

    The ape didn''t give him a chance and mmed him on the head. He reacted in time to block it, but his knees caved and he was out of breath for a moment. He fell to his knees.

    *BOOM*

    Another bullet came at him. Not at him perse, it was aimed at the ground near his knees. The ground caved in and his knees went inside. He didn''t even know what is happening. The ape already went back, even though it had the chance to make a move.

    The opponent felt frustrated, as he broke through the stage and came up. His skin and face turned red. Not like it angered him, rather it is true red.

    His aura changed and he didn''t look like a normal person anymore. His veins throbbed and his eyes turnedpletely white, his armor and the robe were torn apart.

    The bloodthirst and killing intent, even the referee looked astonished. However, Sam and the ape, both smiled.

 Chapter 2328 Second Match

    2328 Second Match

    The opponent''s behavior has turned instinctual.

    His thinking has been turned off for a great extent. It is a special bloodline of his. And with his thoughts as a price, he now gained great strength.

    The Ape with its grin lunged at him.

    A head on charge with no tricks. It threw a punch.

    *BAM*

    The opponent took the punch to his head, but he wasn''t sent flying. He dug his legs into the stage and threw a punch at the ape.

    At that moment¡­

    *BOOM*

    A bullet hit him in the path of his arm. It is not the same kind of bullet that Sam used until now. Inparison, the energy explosion is very small and it is almost harmless. The only thing it did was divert his punch.

    Combined with Ape''s movement to the side, it didn''t even brush past it.

    The punch is a miss.

    *BAM*

    Ape punched him from the side and this time, he crashed into the ground. The opponent turned to look at Sam and ran towards him. Its not that he is thinking here. He knew Sam attacked him from the side, disturbing his attack on his supposed prey, so he is going after him.

    But even before he could take a few steps, the Ape already interrupted his path and punched him into the ground. When he was about to get up and attack, bullet made its way to him and deflected his attack.

    The audience were dumbfounded.

    They expected some spectacr match, but all they got is some treacherous trick yed by Sam.

    It seemed like Sam knew everything there is to know about his opponent.

    He knew how to provoke that guy, he then knew how to make him lose his mind, he also knew how to make sure that his attacks won''t hit.

    The exchange between the ape and the opponent, turned into a brawl. Whenever Sam disrupted the attack, the opponent ran towards him. At that time, Ape grabbed him and mmed him into the ground.

    As if its ying with a ragdoll, it smashed him left and right.

    His beastly instincts could only think of attacking both the parties and since they are not at the same spot, he couldn''t do it at the same time. When he tried to attack the ape, Sam is bothering him, when he switched them, the ape came and crushed him to bits.

    The people looking at the brutality to which the opponent is being subjected to¡­ they felt pity.

    They didn''t expect that the whole thing will be this easy for Sam.

    Of course, they don''t know how much research Sam has done to make it this easy. He indeed knew what the other party will react like and he also knew the weak points of his attack methods. That is the reason, he attacked with his bullets only at certain points.

    The points where theck of bnce is apparent and the concentration of energy is critical.

    Of course, even though he escaped itpletely, the Ape still had to bear the brunt of the opponent''s attacks now and then. But he took it with a smile.

    He is only d to fight to his heart''s content. He has stayed in the divine dimension for far too long. So, now he got a chance to let it all out. A few injuries are a small price to pay.

    The drawback of the other party''s unique bloodline technique is that his stamina will run out. So, soon he couldn''t even defend against the attacks like he did before. Ape''s attacks became lethal. It started boxing him down.

    That guy became desperate and he cried out. His skin cracked, blood started seeping out. His aura raged and for a moment, it is reaching the limits of what a Divine ne Initiation cultivator should hold.

    At that exact moment, the spatial energy Sam held until now in his hands disappeared from there.

    At that exact moment¡­

    *PSST*

    A tear appeared in the chest of the opponent. And the spatial energy returned back to Sam''s palm before it disappeared.

    *BOOM*

    A shockwave originated from the opponent''s body.The bacsh¡­

    His energy flow has been disturbed and he had to face the bacsh. Ape didn''t wait anymore and just took the opportunity. It beat him down until he was nailed into the stage floor.

    Sam won the match.

    He smiled and let the ape go back into the divine dimension to recuperate.

    He went back to the seat. His fellow participants looked at him.

    That guy is as fresh as he was before the match began. He didn''t even break a sweat. They really wanted to bash his head in. At least, they got to see the ape beforehand in the first match. The next candidate who is the second guy from the Set''s academy is already drawing up strategies to deal with him.

    The second round soon began.

    Rashma as expected won without much effort. People started wondering where this woman came from. Because from what Sam heard, this is her first time in the Academy tournament. She was not part of it even during the freshman tournament in the previous years.

    Even Sam didn''t know much about that situation.

    After Rashma''s victory, that Set academy''s student who used the illusions so well, managed to secure another easy victory. Not as easy as the one Rashma did, but easy enough.

    Few matches are done.

    Crow met the second Set academy student. This guy used necromancy. The sheer amount of the corpses he took out stunned everyone a little bit. And there are all kinds of corpses. They are also not some random rotting corpse, instead they were modified a lot.

    It would be more urate to call them puppets. The corpse¡­ it is just a medium to create that entity to be like that.

    Crow was simply overwhelmed in the battle of attrition and decided to quit. He is already satisfied with the current ranking. He is in top 16 and he is kind of satisfied. He still has a couple of years to try his hand at the second grade.

    And he is sure he can win next year.

    The Set academy student came up to the stage unhurriedly. He is pretty rxed. Sam smiled as he looked at him.

    This guy¡­ his skill set isparatively unique. Even with the academy realm being so vast and being a gathering of so many talented individuals, most of the talents aremon ones. Its just that their affinities are higher.

    The bloodlines, unique constitutions are rare here also. Compared to a regr run off a mill realm, this ce does have higher density, but it is not like you can swing a cat and it will hit one.

    And among those rare ones, this guy is one of the holders of such a constitution. However, Sam knew this information because of the hub, this guy rarely ever revealed his constitution and the innate abilities thate with it to the outside world.

    Even in the previous fight, he didn''t use his full powers. He just used his elemental energy to increase his speed and used the daggers to swiftly deal with his opponent.

    As Sam watched his opponent, the other party slowly activated partial shadow fusion.

    "You better summon that monkey. Or you will not be able to hold on for long."

    "I am sure I can make do. You continue."

    With the shadow partial fusion, the opponent appeared in front of Sam in just an instant. The dagger came down at him. Sam also activated his partial shadow fusion and dodged to the side. The opponent is a bit stunned, but not for long.

    There is indeed some information about Sam using many elements. He didn''t lose himself in daze and continued his attack. Sam also took out a dagger and made a move.

    *BANG*

    *BANG*

    The daggers met creating shockwaves. Sam is obviously on the receiving end of the brunt. The other guy is a peak stage cultivator. So, he relied heavily on the repel style and ripple style.

    He tried to dissipate the energy imbued into the opponent''s dagger to reduce the impact he felt. He also used that force to make himself move away from the opponent. Combined with the shadow element, the trick did a great job.

    The sh continued. Sam''s dagger y, movement technique and instinct everything worked on hyperdrive. He cannot even for one moment rx in the exchange.

    The other party is clearly faster, stronger and might even be better than him in the dagger art. So, one mishap, he will be dead.

    Maybe the other party realized that he might not gain much from this, when they were just about to engage once again, he suddenly activated theplete fusion. He brushed past Sam''s dagger and tried to stab his into Sam''s chest.

    n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

 Chapter 2329: Unique Power

    Chapter 2329: Unique Power

    ?

    Sam disappeared in a puff of smoke as the dagger came at him. He reappeared behind the opponent.

    In between he already activated hisplete fusion. The opponent also used the same view. Now, they kept on disappearing and reappearing, aiming daggers at each other''s throats. Trying to kill and maim each other.

    However, they were able tond a clean hit on their counterpart.

    The battle became intense with every passing second. The anticipation is brewing in the audience as they watched. Every dagger attack was a close save. Every dodge was a close save. There is the mastery of shadow element at disy and they were all for it.

    The stage is once again damaged. The person in charge of rebuilding the stage for every match felt exhausted. These guys had no regard for the surroundings. He couldn''t understand why the second grade fights became so brutal and destructive all of a sudden.

    It wasn''t like this in the previous years.

    Of course, he forgot to ount for the festered resentment they had this year. After all, in the previous years, the selection rounds were held regionally and any resentment they had stopped there on the fair ground on a stage.

    Now... many people have fallen for the tricks and treachery.

    Ambushes, chases... the resentment just grew consistently and this is the result of it. Everyone is angry at everyone else.

    The battle on the stage is a direct representation of it.

    Sam didn''t target Set academy, and the Set academy didn''t target Sam. However, because of Sam''s actions, some academies, ganged up and fought each other. Set academy in particr was betrayed by their allies and they lost two people.

    So, even though this guy didn''t have much grudge against Sam, he still felt like venting his anger at Sam.

    After a few shes, when he tried another stabbing attack, Sam dodged once again.

    *SWOOSH*

    He pulled out another dagger out of nowhere and threw it at an empty position. Sam appeared in that exact spot. He caught the dagger with his hands.

    But the impact sent him back a few feet.

    Sam used that impact force to turn around and threw it back at the opponent. The opponent disappeared from his spot and appeared underneath Sam. He tried to catch Sam''s foot, but Sam slipped down the opponent''s arm as if he is sliding down a steep rock and tried to stab him.

    The opponent gritted his teeth and took the stab to his shoulder. He took out a push knife, with three spikes and punched Sam in his ribs.

    When the knives were about to prate into his skin, Sam dropped his elbow on the other party''s arm, so they barely brushed past his skin. One knife edge did leave a bitter mark though.

    Usually fusion forms are semi-tangible.

    Regr physical injuries wouldn''t have much impact.

    But this time, both of them are experts in using the fusion form and knew how bypass that. The stab wounds are healed, but they did lose some spiritual energy because of them.

    And they are still tangled up close.

    They are disappearing, reappearing, climbing on each other. Stabbing each other. But they are not backing down. Sam in particr is facing the highest amount of pressure. He is on thin ice. The moment he let himself get hit with a clean shot, he would be done for.

    Luckily, the single shot kills are not the expertise of the other party.

    Otherwise, he wouldn''t have dared toe this close. Of course, the understanding of his battle style also helped him.

    As for why he is risking so much instead of just countering the other party with some petty tricks... Sam wanted to test himself and bring out the real strength of the opponent. He wants to reveal it to the rest of the world.

    While Sam is on the edge trying to save himself from the constant onught and fighting back at the same time, the opponent is getting restless.

    ''What is this?

    What is happening to me?

    I am clearly moving fast. At my full speed, but why do I feel like I am not moving at all? The atmosphere around me, it feels so dense. So, suffocating.''

    Those are his thoughts.

    He is sure that the surroundings are not really effected by anything, he is also sure he is not invaded by any curse or poison.

    But it felt so suffocating still.

    He also has a vague idea about the reason though. It is because of theck of progress. He is fighting, just like how he fought in thest few days, just like how he fought ever since he entered the academy realm.

    However, unlike now, he always had progress.

    He always managed to at least tire out the opponent, but now no matter what he did, Sam is not budging. The small attacks are not having any effect. He even doubted if Sam''s cultivation level is really lesser.

    It is not a small matter to cross the cultivation levels in the Divine ne even if its initiation.

    His frustration grew.

    "FUCK IT"

    He cursed out loud and took Sam''s dagger straight to his chest. In the fusion state, his organs won''t be injured. He would loserge amounts of his spiritual energy though.

    He constricted the dagger in his chest and held Sam in ce. Then he took out a simr push dagger and punched Sam on the chest several times. Sam barely dodged a few attacks, but three attacksnded cleanly.

    For the first two, even using the repel style didn''t have much effect.

    He was still stuck in the ce. For the third one, he used the recoil style. The one he stole from

    White.

    This worked, the recoil style made him move far away, while sending the opponent

    backwards.

    *COUGH* *COUGH*

    Sam went back to partial fusion while coughing and the opponent did the same.

    The opponent''s expression is ice cold. He looked at Sam with some inexplicable resentment. A faint hint of dilemma shed across his eyes before it quickly disappeared. He activated the

    complete fusion once again.

    But this time, it is different.

    The aura is more menacing, it appeared a bit primordial and ancient. His fusion form emitted ck vapors that seemed to want to corrupt everything around it. Even the stage is turning ck at the spot he stood and it is spreading with every passing second.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    Sam smiled and he knew that the other party is revealing his core strength. He was waiting for

    this show.

    Sam also activated hisplete fusion.

    The opponent''s shadow spread around and a few humanoid figures appeared from the shadows. They are shadow undead. There are three undead.

    Sam''s shadow also spread, but humanoid figures didn''te from it. Instead some shadow

    energy orbs that are in the size of a basketball came from it and hovered around him.

    However, their energy seemed a little weird.

    The opponent closed his eyes for a moment, ignoring whatever Sam has brought out.

    In his opinion, it wouldn''t matter what the other party did. With this move, the other party will die no matter what.

    No one of the same level has ever lived after witnessing this and if not for the fact he needs to win against Sam, he wouldn''t have brought this out in front of so many people.

    When he closed his eyes, his consciousness moved to apletely different realm. A realm that always runs parallelly to the realm they are in. The Shadow realm.

    In the shadow realm, he is in front of a scene that is same as the one he is facing in the

    academy realm.

    A scene where Sam and him are fighting on the stage. Even the shadows of the hundreds of spectators on the stands are reflected.

    He scanned through the crowd quickly and his gazended on a few second grade students.

    One of them is Rashma''s shadow, the second one is the shadow of Sam and the third one is the

    shadow of himself.

    He opened his eyes back in the academy realm. All of this happened in an instant and at this moment, the eyes of the shadow undead changed. Their energies also changed. All of a sudden, the surrounding spiritual energy has all been sucked by these shadows. The one of the left changed its posture and it looked awfully simr to the posture Rashma takes, the second one stood with the same posture as Sam. Loose and rxed.

    The third one stood with a dagger conjured up of dagger energy in its hands.

    Sam''s smile widened even more.

    This is what he wanted to see.

    His energy riled up and he leapt towards his now four opponents.

    The opponent himself took a step back and focused only on controlling the shadow undead.

    He is mostly supplying the energy to them.

    Meanwhile, Sam collided with the three shadow undead along with the orbs.

 Chapter 2330: Understanding

    Chapter 2330: Understanding

    ?

    Sam attacked the undead with all his strength, he didn''t hold back.

    Instantly, the expressions of the people changed. The moves of the shadow undead, they are very familiar. They have seen those moves clearly and have been seeing even a couple of

    minutes ago.

    Rashma''s shadow fought just like her, Sam''s shadow fought just like him, and of course the opponent''s shadow fought just like him.

    This is a special constitutional ability of the opponent.

    Sam knew of it. He has seen the other party practice this many times in the hub. The moment he saw it, he knew he had to study this technique. As for what exact this is...

    The opponent''s constitution allows him to be one with his shadow and ess the shadow realm.

    When he is inplete fusion with no restrictions, he will be an anchor point connecting the shadow realm and the realm of the living. The energy of the shadow realm leaks out, which is why the stage is changing in color.

    It is the corrosion of the shadow realm.

    And of course, the ability doesn''t stop at just essing the shadow realm. That is just the start.

    He can use his will power to connect with the shadows on the other side. The shadows in the shadow realm retain the memories of the counterpart in thend of living. Depending on the will power he has and the strength of the shadow, he can make the shadow do his bidding. For example, if his will power is high enough, he can summon Sam''s shadow to this side and make it perform all the battle techniques Sam ever used. Of course, the elemental attacks will not be replicated in the same way, but the physical attacks will be.

    However, the difference in the strength of wills should be very vast. So, a person in the Divine ne can only summon a shadow of Mortal ne.

    That is why, this guy found a way to supplement it.

    He used the shadow undead and partially summoned the wills of those shadows into the undead. He cannot also tap into all the abilities of the shadows, he can only do so partially.

    That is also the reason Sam is able to tackle three of them. Otherwise, with Rashma''s abilities alone, he is not confident with the cultivation level difference.

    Sam''s sh was intense and he didn''t hesitate to take a few more attacks than usual. As he attacked them, his orbs attached themselves to the shadows. They almost blended themselves together with the shadows with every passing minute.

    When all the orbs are finally attached to the shadows, Sam finally made his next move. *SWOOSH*

    The space element activated.

    He blinked and reappeared behind the opponent.

    Rashma''s shadow tried to attack him and so did the corruption of the shadow element, but he is fast enough.

    The shadow fusion has changed to the space fusion and he had ced his hand on the opponent''s back

    *BOOM*

    With a shockwave, the surrounding space trembled a bit. Sam''s space fusion once again changed. It turned into a dual fusion. Both Space and shadow.

    At this moment, the opponent froze.

    He felt an enormous pressure on his will power and on his body.

    Sam''s orbs are finally revealed to him. They are not just any orbs, they are the shadow mice. They just disguised themselves with the fusion and they are now attached to the shadows. They are now simting their bloodline to mimic the starting stage of the shadow transference.

    The shadow mice also have the ability to connect to the shadow realm. However, it cannot be used recklessly and it is mostly used for moving from one ce to another.

    It could be used as attack technique as well, but it definitely didn''t provide too much ess to the shadow realm.

    Not enough to toy around with the shadows there like the opponent in front of Sam.

    Sam tried to study this technique with whatever data he gathered from the Hub. However, he was missing a key point. He was able to identify the connection with the shadow world, but he wasn''t able to understand the nature of the connection.

    So, he had it in his ns to find out more. Luckily he is facing this guy in the tournament this time. He decided to take the initiative to do this.

    He activated his observation ability. His soul power invaded the other party. His body is also simting the spatial energy along with the shadow energy as he exploded the connection between the opponent and the shadow realm.

    The shadow mice are also simting the state in which they usually connect with the shadow realm to resonate with the connection of the shadow undead with the shadow realm.

    They are frozen in the state on the stage.

    They are not moving even one bit. The audience were all dumbfounded. They didn''t understand what is happening. However, the Set academy elder and the other Set academy students had a frown. Some of them knew about the ability.

    The Elder in particr definitely knew.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    He is anxious.

    He didn''t understand what Sam is doing, but he knew that something is wrong.

    He hesitated a bit and stood up.

    "What is happening, referee? Why is there no change in their movements?"

    The referee didn''t reply. He didn''t understand either. He wanted to use his divine sense to scan them and get a reading on the situation, however, he knew that it wouldn''t be perceived as an appropriate action.

    But looking at the situation, he felt like there is a need for his intervention.

    At that moment...

    "ARGGHH...."

    The opponent of Sam suddenly screamed. The shadow energy fluctuated and the surrounding spatial fabric rippled with turbulence. The elder immediately made a decision.

    "We withdraw."

    The moment he said that, the elder made a move, when he was about to separate them, Sam let go of his hand and just took a step back. The opponent fell forward unconscious.

    Sam raised both of his hands, his fusion disappeared, his orbs disappeared, the shadow mice

    along with them.

    "He is fine."

    Sam said just to make sure that the other party didn''t attack him.

    The referee checked the student and nodded to the elder of the Set academy. He was taken away and Sam attained the victory.

    However, he is a bit too exhausted. Thest move... it didn''t look like much, but it took a lot of his mental power as well as a lot of his own energy. First to try and peer into the secrets of the shadow realm and the second to ensure that the shadow realm''s energy didn''t just corrupt his

    soul to the core.

    He sat in his chair and started taking the wine and some potions to recover his energy.

    The Set''s academy members looked at him with resentment. Sam didn''t care. Even if they didn''t have this resentment now, they are going to cross paths sooner orter. After all, one of the Hub managers in from Set academy, which means, there are a lot of skeletons of the Set academy that he is going to dig sooner orter and they would be brought to their knees when

    he did so.

    Compared to what he is going to do to them, these angry res... they are less than nothing.

    The matches continued.

    Now there are only eight people left.

    Two from the Gambler academy, two from Set''s academy. The remaining four are from four

    different academies.

    Maybe to make thepetition more interesting or by sheer coincidence, the Set academy students and Gambler academy students are not assigned to each other. They are all matched

    up with the individuals from other academies.

    So, if all four of them win, then the top four out of five ces will be taken by them.

    This will be a lot more exciting.

    The individualpetitors also understood this and they lost their morale. They lost in the

    next round.

    The set academy students in particr, bodied their opponents. All the while looking at Sam.

    It seemed like they really want to deal with him. They are pretty loyal if not anything else.

    The next round is expected.

    The top four are going to fight among themselves and it was arranged as Gambler vs Set

    beyond no one''s expectations.

    First fight is between Rashma and the Illusions guy.

    The second one is between Sam and the necromancer.

    Rashma got on the state with her bored expression. Her nk and innocent expression did

    nothing to the terror she created in the hearts of the other students.

    She is the second most viciouspetitor apart from Sam. Even that illusion guy who have a pretty easy time in the first two fights is a bit cautious when he got on the stage.

    "FIGHT"

    *BAM*

    The announcement was made and Rashma made a move. She is already in front of her

    opponent and threw a kick.

    Itnded on his chest, clean and this might just be the first time he actually took a hit.

 Chapter 2331: Semi Finals

    Chapter 2331: Semi Finals

    ?

    Shock

    Surprise

    Bewilderment

    Imagine all the words that can used synonymously for surprise and you will see the expression of all the second graders. Only a few people are not really surprised. Because ever since this Set academy guy started fighting, people are wondering how they can counter that.

    Not just the second grade people, even some third grade and some rare fourth grades are also wondering how to counter him. Because a lot of them didn''t even understand the ability. Some did understand it, but couldn''t figure out a counter.

    Rashma who usually acts like a barbaric brute has figured it out a lot faster than most people.

    That confident kick is the direct representation of her understanding.

    As for what the ability is...

    The other guy also has a rare constitution. His body can turned into a specter at his will. In a way it is kind of a fusion form with soul energy.

    That is the most apt analogous description anyone could give. He has inherently shit tons of soul energy and he can use it in a much more versatile way. The added benefit is that he has a higher stealth than a regr specter.

    He can be undetected for a lot longer and he wouldn''t be emitting death energy like a specter does.

    So, it is a great stealth and of course, he can also create illusions using that soul energy. Sam knew it because of the Hub. There is no credit to his own intellect or anything else. And it is debatable now if he can really detect him easily in the span of a few minutes.

    That aside, Rashma detected his trick almost immediately.

    There are a few ways one could deal with specter.

    Battle of soul power. A mental battle essentially.

    Using light energy.

    Using vtile spiritual energy, simr to the void style or even energy bullets. After all, they are just manifested energy forms.

    So, they will work. Sam noticed that Rashma is cleverly using abination of first and third options.

    She is physically manifesting her soul power into her body and then making it much more vtile when attacking. That is what he saw in her kick. And he barely managed to catch him. The moment that kicknded, the opponent felt like his soul has been really kicked out of his body.

    He could feel it.

    The burning sensation deep in his soul.

    He looked at Rashma who just stood there calmly. His face is full of doubt and a million questions ran through his head.

    His body was about to turn transclucent, when Rashma made her move once again.

    *BAM*

    She stomped on his chest.

    *CRACK*

    The stage cracked and his body slipped into the cracks. He used that chance to turn his body into the spectral form before seeping into the stage. But...

    *BOOM*

    She threw another kick, this time towards the stage.

    *CRACK*

    The stage cracked openpletely and the force of the kick attacked the opponent who was in that ethereal form. He came out coughing blood like a lunatic. Even his eyes are bleeding. His soul has been attacked and his brain is effected.

    He is only all fours, coughing and trying to breathe.

    *SWOOSH*

    Rashma appeared beside him and kicked on the ribs.

    His body flew like a ball. He went past the stage andnded far away, almost hitting the stands.

    *PANT**PANT*

    He panted heavily before he lost consciousness.

    "WE GIVE UP"

    Rashma was about to make a move, after all, there are no boundary conditions for this match. She could just beat him up there. But the elder of the Set academy acted to give up the match. He hurriedly went to treat that guy.

    Rashma with that Sam bored expression went down the stage.

    Everyone watched with nk faces. This is semi finals. Usually battles at this stage would have been intense, neck and neck, burning everyone with anticipation. This match is over in thirty seconds. That included the time they took to go on to the stage.

    This is beyond ridiculous at this point.

    Now, Sam went on to the stage. His opponent, the final candidate that remained from the Set academy came up.

    "You Gambler academy students are really audacious."

    Finally, someone spoke in the matches. This time the Solo Combat has gone way out of hand and too many people died. Almost all the people who were not part of the top 32 have died. Only a small percentage of them managed to give up and remain safe without critical damage. So, there is too much animosity and everyone tried to kill everyone even on the stage. And people should actually be scared at that moment, because there is no goal to showcase their pride, no desire for prestige, but only to kill.

    But for the first time a candidate talked.

    This one out of burning vengeance.

    "FIGHT"

    Maybe he expected Sam to move out immediately or he was just vignt, the first thing he did was to bring out four corpses. The corpses of the Giants. They stood around him on all four sides. They are earth giants and they have solidified rock chest thighs and arms.

    It seemed to be a mutated corpse puppet. They didn''t look even a bit agile.

    Sam guessed their job is to defend the man that summoned them.

    Then the opponent waved his hand. A few beast undead came out of nowhere. All four of them are insect type beasts. They are Golden Mantises. They are predators of the predators. They are a bit taller than Sam and their bodies are full of inscriptions.

    They are not high level inscriptions in terms of their energy storage. They are definitely made by a second grader. They are high level in terms of quality though.

    And their major job is to increase the defense of the mantis'' exoskeleton and also increase the sharpness of its des.

    Sam was impressed. He took out both of his hand guns and got ready.

    *SWOOSH*

    The mantises moved, all four of them at the same time. They are nothing but golden shes

    as they came at Sam from four sides.

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam was faster though. He activated the light element. Partial fusion was enough to match at

    the speed and he moved vertically up. Several meters into the air.

    *BAM* *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

    He just shot the bullets downwards at the spot where he stood.

    The bullets didn''t explode normally like his usual bullets, instead they whistled through the

    air. At a very high velocity the first two bullets went directly into the stage, drilling through it into the ground, but the remaining six...

    They attacked the skulls and des of the mantises and they went through them. Not only did they go through them, they also messed up the inscriptions.

    *BOOM*

    *BOOM*

    One mantis exploded, its exoskeleton is destroyed by the inscription''s energy. The other

    mantis lost a couple of joints losing its des.

    Third and one fourth had rtively less damage.

    But the cracks could be seen.

    *SWOOSH*

    A bird is already in front of Sam. He didn''t even see when the opponent has summoned it. But

    Sam manuevered around it and shot it on the head point nk.

    *BOOM*

    Its head exploded and fell down towards the mantises.

    The two mantises cut through the birds and jumped at him.

    *BOOM*

    Sam shot the first one, its head exploded and its de went through the second one, killing it.

    Then he aimed his gun towards his back over his shoulder and shot.

    *BOOM*

    *SCREEECH*N?v(el)B\\jnn

    A specter appeared and it was burned by the vitality of the light energy.

    Sam didn''t wait and aimed at the ground to shoot.

    *BOOM*

    ming explosions came out of the ground along with the corpses of the burning Mud worm

    type beasts. Sam blew the non-existent smoke off the barrel of his guns as he looked at the

    opponent, taunting him.

    These undead are indeed powerful.

    For the people who don''t know how to handle them. One of the greatest things about these

    undead creature is that they are enhanced, way too much in fact. Most of them are covered with inscriptions. For run of a millbatant, understand the inscriptions, analyzing them and finally using them against the undead will take a long time.

    For Sam...

    It is easy. Not just because he is good at inscriptions, but rather most of the inscriptions on

    these undead creatures are designed in the hub.

    That''s right. This guy is also a frequent user of the hub and he enhanced most of the undead

    he carries using the hub''s resources.

    So, all Sam had to do is jog down his memory a bit and *BOOM*

    He can remember the weak spot of the undead like his own signature.

    *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

    Three more shots and three specters that came it burned in the vitality. Sam''s smiled widened. He hovered in the hair, looking at the opponent. He definitely didn''t

    want to finish it fast. He is taking his sweet time.

 Chapter 2332: Versus the Undead

    Chapter 2332: Versus the Undead

    ?

    *BOOM* *BAM* *BOOM*

    The sounds of explosions and gun shots rang throughout the arena.

    No matter what kind of undead they are, and no matter how fast they came, Sam just shot them down. He did expend some of his own energy in doing so. But it is negligible. In fact, his general recovery speed is enough to fill in the gap in just a few minutes.

    The opponent slowly started feeling the pressure.

    Until now, his go to strategy has always been overwhelming the opponents with the undead creatures. He whole heartedly believed in his art of necromancy and making the enemy surrender in front of his undead might.

    For that reason, ever since he was a kid, he spent most of his time in battlefields and remote areas, where dangers lurk.

    He killed, collected the dead, studied them, understood them, moulded them. He worked so hard and they are all falling down as Sam used what looked like a toy more than a weapon to destroy them. He felt his world view shatter.

    Sam didn''t show one bit of mercy.

    He attacked and attacked, relentlessly the moment an undead appeared, he just destroyed them.

    After some time, the opponent realized that his inscribed undead are of no use, so he changed his strategy. A bunch of non-inscribed, in undead came out. They are minimally modified.

    *BAM**BAM*

    Sam shot his two bullets on them. They pierced through the undead, but it still came at him. Watching this scene, the opponent seemed to have gained some confidence, he increased the number. In an instant, more than two dozen undead surrounded Sam. Charging at him.

    *SWOOSH*

    He dodged one and shot.

    *BOOM*

    He just switched to the explosive bullets.

    Even if they can''t destroy the undeadpletely, it is enough to make them immobile. For example, a flying wyvern type undead came at him, of course, flying. He shot one of its wings and it fell off bnce.

    It crashed towards another undead that was just about toe up.

    Sam them aimed another bullet on its back. To be precise, on its nape, exactly where the body is connected with its head.

    One bullet, one explosion and it is done. The head was separated.

    Even if that head is still a sentient undead creature, without the body, what is going to do? Chomp on the air and climb up to Sam?

    Just the method changed slightly, not Sam''s domination.

    The audience are looking at the whole scene in awe.

    The sheer number of undead creatures are already surprising. They are not a small amount by any means.

    They are dozens that already came and got destroyed. There is no sign of stopping them. Even more surprising is the way Sam dealt with it. In his first fight in the tournament he did use the bullets a fair amount, but at that time mostly his precision and uracy were highlighted.

    However, now they saw his speed along with the other qualities. And they also understood that he is nowhere near consuming his energy, contrary to his opponent who is already sweating and stressing out.

    No matter how big his reserves are and how many modifications he might have done to the undead creatures, there is no way his consumption of energy is small. He must be feeling the pinch.

    And their thoughts were right.

    The opponent is indeed feeling the pinch at the moment and it is not a slight one. He is already one-third done. Never has ever felt that he would becking in energy when he dealt with an opponent of the same level.

    Much less someone like Sam who is a couple of levels behind.

    He gritted his teeth and decided to change the tactics. He thought that he would be able to finish this with numbers alone, but it doesn''t seem possible. He took a different approach.

    He took out a few space jades and threw them on to the ground off the stage. They fell around the stagepletely circling it.

    *RUMBLE*

    Huge amounts of death energy speed out of them as the undead creatures swarmed out. All of them are giants of different kinds. Sam could feel the residual elemental energy on them and of course he can distinguish them based on their features.

    These giants surrounded the stage forming rows on all sides.

    Sam stayed silent and stood there.

    The opponent aimed his hand to the sky and summoned more creatures.

    Flying type undead. Birds, Wyverns, Bats, etc.

    They are all of different elements and different sizes. Their strengths are alsopletely different.

    All of these charged at Sam as if they are flying to their death. At least previously, the undead were moved with a bit of tact. Now, they are not. They are just bombarding him.

    Sam kept on shooting them down.

    The Giants around the stage didn''t move and Sam didn''t focus on them. In fact, he would have to increase his speed, if he really wants to focus on them. The flying beasts are just rushing at

    him.

    Meanwhile.

    A tree came out of the middle of the stage. It is ck all over. The roots, trunk, the branches and the leaves. All of them are ck and it oozed death energy. The undead bodies that are on the ones that Sam destroyed, all of them started seeping into the

    the stage and the

    ground.

    The tree grew taller, wider and dozens of vines came out of its branches.

    *ZOOM*

    A formation has been formed. With the giants as the ground nodes, the tree as the core node

    and the flying puppets as the moving nodes.

    The huge dome covered them, including Sam.

    This is an entrapment formation. This was created for ambush purposes. To catch enemies by

    surprise.N?v(el)B\\jnn

    He had figured out various sets for different purposes. This shouldn''t have been used like he is using it now. It is just that he couldn''t find a better alternative in all of his strategies.

    Only now did he see a ring hole in his usual tactics. If someone can destroy his undead in one shot each, then they he cannot win, no matter how many undead he can throw at them. Because in the fight he has already seen so many methods Sam could have used to take him down. But Sam did not. He just wanted to show off and he is doing that. If he wanted to kill... he doesn''t have the confidence that he would have survived.

    So, he went with the best method he could think of at the moment.

    Once the formation is created, he made a move.

    The inscriptions on all the undead started glowing. The flying undead got into a battle formation of their own, while still connected to the formation. They surrounded Sam with

    him in the center and they are circling him.

    *SWOOSH*

    One of the undeads came at him.

    *BAM*

    Sam shot it down and before it could even fall, two more undead came, one from the front and

    the other from the rear.

    *BAM* *BAM*

    He managed to shoot them down too, but now there are four of them.

    When he was about to shoot them down, he sensed the threat of the giants below. They took

    out some spears out of thin air. The spears inscribed with what he guessed is a curse. The

    spears were all thrown at the same time.

    *SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    Dozens of spears thrown at Sam, he shot down some of them and dodged a few more, even

    used the undead as meat shields. But the undead were not effected by the spears, as they

    attacked them.

    Meanwhile, the corpses that fell on the stage are disappearing into the ground and the tree

    vines seemed to have grown longer.

    Sam dodged and shot one of the undead.

    However, this time a barrier appeared in front of it.

    *BAM*

    As the undead charged at him, the barrier also moved along with it crashing into Sam.

    He didn''t expect that.

    *SWOOSH*

    When he fell down from the air, the flying beasts swarmed him.

    Sam''s fusion activated mid-air, just with the swing of his arms, he cut through the undead

    that came at him, before he stabilized himself.

    *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

    He shot at a rapid pace. As fast as he could shoot and cleared himself some space before he

    stood in the air.

    He noticed that the space might have been cleared, but the undead are not destroyed. The barriers around them activated instantly.

    Sam didn''t even have a change of expression. With a thought he made a change to the guns.

    Some mechanisms have been changed inside and then he jot again.

    *ZOOM*

    Instead of bullets, energy beams came out. Beams purely made out of the condensed energy. It is also light elemental energy, so they are basically high poweredsers.

    The barriers are activated. But when the continuous beam channeled on it for more than one

    and a half second, it cracked open, revealing a small hole, which was enough to destroy the undead hiding beneath that shield.

 Chapter 2333: Black Smoke

    Chapter 2333: ck Smoke

    ?

    The energy beams are much more destructive than the bullets.

    They disintegrated the barriers around the undead and destroyed the undeadter on. For some reason, Sam mostly focused on the flying undead. He didn''t attack the Giants that much except for when he blocked and fought against the spears that are constantlying at him.

    The stage is filled with corpses. Wyverns, Hawks, Eagles, Vultures... All kinds of vicious flying beasts are there.

    The corpses that fell on the stage and ground are being rapidly absorbed by the tree. The absorption speed only increased with every passing second. Sam didn''t attack the tree though.

    He let it be.

    In fact, he made sure that he didn''t identally attack the tree. He made sure that it is left undisturbed. Of course, the opponent didn''t know that Sam even had such a thought in his head.

    He just focused all his mental power on strategizing the next step.

    Necromancy, the game of numbers that always made him win is turning out to be useless. All the things that he thought are his advantages didn''t seem to mean shit in front of Sam. He couldn''t focus on anything else other than trying to make sure that his world view wouldn''t copse.

    And he is only a bit too delighted when he saw how tall the tree is growing.

    The tree is the most important part of it even though it is not actively attacking at the moment.

    The vines grew longer and soon the tree reached the maximum height it could. At that moment, while Sam incessantly destroyed the undead, the opponent showed a smirk. A runic circle appeared on his palm as he mmed it into the ground.

    A wave of death elemental energy hit the tree.

    The next moment, the tree seemed to have gained sentience. It shook slightly on its own, all the leaves that overgrew on it suddenly slipped off the branches. The tree emitted a ck smoky energy that filled the dome.

    As the smoke came out, the tree started withering.

    In an instant, all the massive structure has turned pitifully small. Soon, it just burned into ashes. But that is not visible for Sam at all.

    Not just for his eyes, but none of his other senses including the energy vision managed to pick up the disappearance of the tree. It didn''t matter anyway. Sam suddenly felt his levitation being affected.

    It is neither that the gravity has increased, nor was it a restriction on his cultivation level. It wasn''t even his inability. It is just that there is this hidden pressure on his soul that is telling him to go down.

    He shook his head and put that thought to the back of his mind.

    As he levitated in the air looked at the ck smoke thatpletely blinded him in all his

    senses...

    *BAM*

    He felt a punch on his back. He flew like a broken kite as he tried to bnce himself. Stone like arms held him by his throat from behind while pir like legs stomped on his chest from the top.

    *BAM*

    He felt his back crashing against the stage.

    *SCRAP*

    Something tore through the stage and wrapped around him. Trying to tie him down. Of course, the physical assault didn''t stop. A punch to the face, a kick to the leg, constant beating on his back.

    The attacks came. And all Sam could see was nothingness. The only feeling he had was the sudden pain that came from each of the attacks.

    *CRASH*

    Finally he crashed on the ground and slid down. Almost to the edge. He felt up the edge and stood up there. Turning towards the stage.

    He activated earth elemental fusion and stomped his legs created two barriers on either side. All of it happening in an instant.

    *BAM**BAM*

    He heard the noise of something crashing against the rock barriers that he created. At the same time, he felt it.

    *BAM*

    A hit on his back, he didn''t resist and he didn''t try to stand against the force. He just took it to his body in the full. However, the moment the contact was made, an earthen spike has grown from that point of contact.

    Precisely in the direction in which the attack came. The spike was shot in that direction.

    He didn''t know if he hit it. There is certainly noise restrictions that limited him from seeking the sounds past a certain radius.

    As he was shot forward, Sam crossed his arms and several earth spikes shot out of it.

    *BAM*

    He crashed into arge structure. The earthen giant that was charging at him crashed into him. With the spikes stabbed into it. Sam opened his arms and the giant was torn into two. It still hung to his spikes.

    He caught a hold of one of them and started swinging around.

    Void style and rippled style acted together as he swung it around with the earth elemental

    energy.

    *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

    Each move more explosive than thest and each hit more destructive than thest. The giants copsed one after another. As he ran around the stage swinging that piece of giant like some stuff doll being swung by a child, the whole stage and the surrounding area

    reverberated.

    The pieces of giants flew past the stage and hit the dome, making the barrier ripple slightly. the ones who are obviously way too

    No one knows what is happening ide. Except

    powerful than thepetitors, no one else can even take a peek inside.

    While Sam is blindly raging inside, the opponent is shivering in his spot. He held his palm tightly to the floor. Inside that dome, within that ck smoke, only he can see what is

    happening and whatever that he is seeing is making him shiver.

    The guns and shooting was one thing, he felt aggrieved and frustrated at that time. He had doubts about his path, doubts about his pursuit.

    But now, he has doubts about his sanity.

    Until now, all the might Sam disyed is mostly linked to his intelligence. The battle prowess was also assigned to that. Sam picked the targets one by one, he didn''t blindly go. He used a million means to deal with them.

    But inside, he saw Sam dancing around the space. He is swinging that rocky limb of the earth giant as he beat the crap out of the puppets. And the only way for him gain the location of the puppets is for him to get in physical contact with them, which is possible only to get beaten

    by them.

    He took the hits, and used himself as a probing stick to find the location of the giants and destroyed them limb to limb. Apart from the earth element and his pure physical strength, he

    didn''t use anything else.

    At this moment, he wanted to end this battle more than anything.

    So, Sam''s opponent made his move.

    The runic circle he inscribed on the ground changed. The ck smoke became much more

    sinister and it became denser.

    The earth giants are melting down from the pure corrosion created by that smoke.

    Even Sam felt a slight tingling sensation on his body, but he didn''t even flinch. He just looked

    at the direction of the opponent with a smirk. The opponent quaked in the spot.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    That look... it ising at him. It is tearing through that ck smoke and is looking at him. In

    his own eyes.

    Sam can see through it.

    He could stand Sam destroying his undead, he could stand Sam dancing around in this cursed

    fog beating the crap out of his undead, he can stand Sam still standing right in front of him. But in this situation.... He cannot understand how Sam can even see him. That shouldn''t be

    possible.

    Because only he knew where this fog came from and what it is supposed to do to the people who are not his wielders. Only he knew the secret behind it and for Sam to see through it.

    *SCREEECCH*

    Screams of gore and agony mixed together, they resounded through the arena. Within the dome, the ck smoke started changing. Faces of creatures that shouldn''t exist in the world

    of living are appearing.

    They charged at Sam, trying to invade his soul. Sam just stood there and let them enter his soul. The opponent is sweating, shaking and shivering. He is unable toprehend this. In his opinion, no living being that is at the same level as him, shouldn''t be able to endure this.

    Sam looked him in the eye, letting these creatures enter his soul. After a couple of minutes he stepped forward. Slowly, steadily, he stood in front of the opponent. The young man lost his

    will to fight.

    "H... How? How can..?"

    Sam looked at him and said.

    "You believed that no one can tackle the infinite number of undead, I proved that they are

    finite. You believed that you can take me down if you can break me down, I ended up breaking down your toys. You believed that the smoke that you relied on, the tool that brought you victories and the aid that was given to you from the person behind you, the one that shouldn''t have even existed in this world, now it is gone. I have taken it."

    As Sam spoke, his vampire part acted up. The ck smoke started entering his body, the dome

    is broken and the scene inside is revealed to the audience.

    Sam extended his hand and the gun that fell on the stage a while ago flew into it.

    *BAM*

 Chapter 2334: Vs Rashma

    Chapter 2334: Vs Rashma

    ?

    "NOOOOOO..."

    A scream that shook the clouds high up in the sky originated from the audience. The elder of the Set academy made a move as soon as he saw their student kneeling on the stage and Sam standing in front of him with the gun.

    He is a tad toote. Sam already took the shot.

    "YOU....."

    The elder screamed as he appeared at the stage. His killing intent raged. He was about to make a move, when he sensed a movement.

    He noticed that Sam''s opponent is still breathing. He is not dead...

    The bullet Sam shot didn''t pierce his head, instead it just slightly pierced through the skin and stuck there on his forehead. He is alive. Sam just walked off the stage while stowing his hand guns away. His vampire form slowly turned back to normal and the ck smokepletely entered his body.

    Inside his stomach, that ck smoke is condensed into a very small orb.

    The elder wanted to say something, but he decided against it and walked away with the young man. Sam took his seat and started recovering. He didn''t take the wine this time, instead he started downing the vials of liquid energy. Mostly wood element.

    It is essentially liquid vitality.

    He recovered at a crazy pace. His cracked bones healed, and the cuts and bruises of the skin disappeared. The repair of his body was done faster than the repair of the stage and he back to normal. Of course, he had to drink a bunch of vials to recover his energypletely.

    There is some time for him to prepare for the finals.

    Rashma and him are going to fight in the finals. He meditated for the short time and when the stage was set and ready for the final round of the solobat...

    *SWOOSH* *THUD*

    Rashma flew out of her seat andnded on the stage. A few cracks appeared on the freshly made stage and she looked at Sam gesturing him toe up. A grin on her face and a spark in her eyes. A spring in her step and itchy feeling in her fingers.

    She is excited.

    For the first time in this tournament, she felt extremely excited.

    Until now, every single candidate she fought against was boring for her.

    They didn''t offer a challenge and everyone was done for in a couple of hits. Only the previous opponent managed to endure a couple more, but even he fell soon.

    She felt frustrated and believed that this trip has been in vain. She hoped that she could find some people that could offer resistance. And finally, after the series of disappointments, she is excited facing Sam.

    Even though he is a couple of levels behind, he made her excited.

    Sam took a deep breath and got on the stage. In this whole tournament, there were only two people that he is actually concerned with. His previous opponent and Rashma.

    The previous opponent, because of the ck smoke. It could be considered one of the dirtiest secrets of the Set academy. Rashma because... even if he knew more about her, even if he gathered a lot more information on her, it will be hard for him to defeat her without sufficient prep time.

    She is that overpowered.

    She just overwhelms her opponents with sheer strength and there are not many things that could ovee that and one must pay sufficient price to reduce that gap. Even if Sam can afford it, he has to spend a lot of time to do so.

    Of course, that is assuming that he didn''t want to reveal everything he has on the spot.

    He walked slowly to the stage with a million thoughts in his head.

    He stood there and tried to loosen his body a bit. He skipped on the spot while moving his hands. As if he is warming up.

    "FIGHT"

    The referee announced.

    The next moment, in a sh...

    *BAM*

    Rashma''s foot crashed in the spot where Sam was and Sam is standing on the spot where Rashma previously stood. Spatial energy rippled around him and Rashma''s current location. She arrived at a speed that didn''t match her cultivation level.

    She could easily catch a Divine ne Pretranscendent initial stage cultivator with that speed.

    *BAM*

    She appeared back at the original location trying tond a kick, Sam once again disappeared from there and reappeared in his original location.

    Sam knew that he wouldn''t be able to match her in reaction speed, so he used a trick. He activated energy vision and observed the energy around her. He used the vision at the maximum level, trying to catch even the slightest disturbance in the surrounding spiritual

    energy.

    When she was about to move, right when he made it, the energy in the surroundings showed a slight movement as well and Sam used the space element to disappear.

    Even before her muscles reacted ording to her thoughts, Sam already reacted. That is the only way, he knew that he can dodge her with.

    *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

    Sam kept on dodging with the space element, he didn''t attempt any other form of defence as he moved around like that and Rashma kept on beating the stage, she even tried to trick Sam,

    but he was always spot on with his movement.

    He didn''t leave anything to chance or assumption.

    Just when he noticed that she is about to get frustrated, he changed the strategy a bit. A pack of metal cards appeared in his hands. He threw them in an arc. They made a circle around the stage, which made Rashma paused her assault a bit.

    Maybe she remembered what happened thest time when Sam threw a different pack of

    cards.

    *BAM*

    She mmed her foot on the stage, the shockwave induced was enough to make the cards go bust. They fell on the spot. However, she noticed something that surprised her a bit. Around nine cards didn''t fall down, instead they froze in particr spots around the stage. They are levitating there with a slight glow. Upon observation she noticed that all those spotsn/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

    are the exact spots where the stage cracked.

    Those are the spots where she tried to kick Sam.

    Which means, those are the spots he was in before. The spatial energy residue made the cards hover just for a moment in that position and the basic formation has kicked in. The cards are linked and they are holding each other in position.

    Rashma frowned and paused her attacking spree. She looked at the cards and thought for a moment before going after one of them. She couldn''t sense any threat from them at the moment. However, she knew better than letting Sam proceed forward with that n.

    She also kept an eye on Sam to ensure that no threat cane from that side.

    Sam took out his hand gun and aimed it at one of the spots on the stage. She noticed it, felt a bit strange and cautious. Because it wasn''t at her, but at apletely different and random

    direction.

    Before she could make a decision, he attacked.

    *BAM*

    The bullet went and hit a card on the stage.

    It didn''t show any reaction at all. The card broke, that is all. But after a fraction of second''s

    dy,

    *BOOM*

    A fiery explosion of golden mes engulfed Rashmapletely. She was blown to the other side of the stage. Sam blinked away from there and shot a different card.

    *BOOM*

    Another fiery explosion hit her from behind at an angle, throwing her in a different direction.

    As for how it happened. It is his resonance trick. All the cards in the pack except for the nine floating cards are pairs.

    If he shoots one of the pair, the other one resonates with the attack of the bullet. So, he aimed the cards in such a way that the night will definitelynd in those floating positions. The rest...

    it doesn''t matter.

    He is sure that one card or the other will be near her and he just needs to shoot its pair.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Sam kept on shooting down and Rashma was caught in the explosions for the next three

    times. On the fourth one though... she gritted her teeth and conjured an energy barrier around

    her. The explosion was strong enough to destroy it.

    But that gave her enough time to stabilize herself. She took the explosion, moved in the direction, but before she could reach the destined location, her punch reached it. With a shockwave, that part of the stage exploded throwing all cards away.

    Shended in that crater and took a deep breath.

    She looked at Sam warily.

    There was not much damage for her, except for some light bruises due to the shockwave. The

    mes didn''t do anything to her. The only change is that there is a drop of sweat tricking

    down her face.

    This is the first time she sweat in the tournament.

 Chapter 2335: Vs Rashma II

    Chapter 2335: Vs Rashma II

    ?

    Instead of getting angry or showing her frustration on her face, Rashma wore a smile.

    A pleasant smile as if he was surprised by a gift. Even though she just took a beating. Sam grew extra cautious. He believed that when dealing with people like Rashma who is obviously stronger than him, he has to make sure that their mind is not stable.

    Only in a moment of insanity can he trump over them.

    In fact, that is what those fiery explosions are for and it didn''t seem like they served their purpose fully.

    His energy vision is on high alert. When he noticed the slight twitch in the energy around her, he made a move.

    *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

    He even took out the second hand gun and he shot a bunch of cards.

    *BOOM*

    The cards around the crater created by Rashma exploded, but this time they were neither the fiery explosions, nor were they energy explosions Sam is usually very handy this. This time, they are explosions created by excessive gravitational force.

    With explosion of every card, there is a gravitational field.

    Rashma felt the pulling force from all these different directions. She couldn''t move and was stuck in the ce. No matter which direction she wanted to move. Left, right, up and down, she felt a very strong force resisting her movement.

    It hurt really bad.

    Of course, she didn''t want to surrender to such a trick. She started charging up her spiritual energy. Sam also knew he wouldn''t be able to stop her with such an attack. So, he made a

    move.

    He charged a special bullet in the gun and aimed at the spot a few inches above her head.

    *BAM*

    The bullet exploded on top of her head and a cloud of ck smoke erupted. It is not the same cloud as the one he absorbed before. This one is his own creation. It is but a curse that he prepared beforehand.

    The smoke permeated through her skin, at the same time when she exploded with her spiritual energy.

    *BAM*

    She stomped her leg on the ground, at the same spot. The shockwave of spiritual energy disrupted the gravitational forces.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    A series of explosions rang out, destroying the whole stage. The cards that Sam left behind in those nine floating areas are also blown away. Sam blocked the shockwave with a barrier and clicked his tongue.

    The cards did serve their purpose, which is to be good distractions. However, he did want to use them once again.

    Rashma walked out of the cloud of dust she created. The rubble is spread everywhere and there is barely any stage that they could see. The only intact part without any cracks is one where Sam stood and it is very small.

    Rashma slowly walked towards him. Her skin has various ck patches courtesy to the curse imbued by the ck smoke.

    However, under the surprised gazes of everyone, the ck patches started moving. Even to Sam''s surprise, they moved from their original spots on her body towards her arm. The movement started slow and it gained momentum soon enough.

    All that curse has been condensed into her palm, which then turned into a fist.

    *SWOOSH*

    She disappeared and reappeared in front of Sam and punched on his barrier.

    *CRASH*

    The barrier broke, and from those cracks, the curse flew at Sam in its ck smokey form, enveloping him, before he disappeared using his spatial blink.

    *BAM*

    Her punch didn''t even make contact with the ground, but just the force is enough to shave off thatst bit of the stage.

    It wasn''t even five minutes since their fight started and they have already destroyed the stage.

    Rashma looked around to find Sam''s location. However, he is nowhere to be seen. She frowned and observed the surroundings more keenly.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    *BAM*

    She jumped and dropped a heel kick on the rubble of a particr spot. The rubble cleared and her leg went through something solid. However, to her surprise it is a shadow. One of Sam''s shadow undead creatures.

    The shadow exploded into ck smoke and disappeared from existence.

    However, at the same time, Sam appeared right behind her. Levitating in their air with the gun in his hands, aimed at her back in point nk range.

    *CLICK*

    He pulled the trigger, but when the bullet is still travelling through the barrel, she turned around swiftly almost hitting him. Sam condensed a barrier to his side, all ready to defend the attack. He was sent flying like a broken kite even though most of it is absorbed by the barrier.

    *BOOM*

    The bullet didn''t hit her clean, instead it brushed against her shoulder and exploded there.

    She was also sent flying.

    Both of them stood up from the rubble.

    Sam is bleeding from his mouth, his arm bone is broken and he is sure that several of his ribs had cracks. There might even be some perforation in his lung.

    Rashma''s injuries are much less serious. But her arm had a deep dash which is also burned. The bleeding still didn''t stop though. The pain is searing.

    She looked at Sam and a smile bloomed on her face despite all the pain in the wound. Sam

    didn''t wait or hesitate, he made a move.

    A pack of cards was thrown into the air.

    When they were about to fall all around her, she punched into the air and blew those cards away. But Sam didn''t mind the position of the cards. He took out a special bullet and shot the

    card closest to him.

    *BOOM*

    With an explosion, the card disintegrated into ashes. The remaining cards started glowing with ck and red light. Giants snakes conjured out of those cards and all of them shot

    towards her.

    The energy of curse and the firebined together attacked her from all the directions. Meanwhile, Sam took a potion to heal a bit, as he got ready with his next attack. He decided to

    take another pack of cards, but...

    *BOOM*

    All those cursed fiery snakes exploded into nothing and he was blown away just from the residual shockwave. He went past the stage area and hit the wall separating the arena from

    the stands.

    He broke the wall almost to smithereens.

    His back didn''t even touch the ground before Rashma appeared in front of him and mmed her foot into his chest.

    Sam groaned in pain and coughed up blood. He gritted his teeth and used the earth fusion. He instantly dissolved himself into the ground, disappearing from her sight and senses.

    She hurriedly levitated in the air, hoping to not get caught in his hands. Sam is thinking, how to proceed. He could bring out beasts, he could use some of his puppets, undead creatures, spatial attacks. However, judging by the performance he has seen, he didn''t think anything would be effective.

    Bringing out beasts will only increase the damage she will cause.

    They are fast, but apart from Hopper, Raiju and Shadow mice, the others might not be a match for her in speed. Right now, her damage is limited because he is the only target.

    To increase his chances, he needs to slow her down. With his current strength, only the resonance attacks and poison are his strengths. The cursed poison he used before was repelled

    back though.

    As his thoughts are running wild, Sam suddenly felt a huge tremor.

    *BAM*

    The ground split open revealing Sam''s location. He activated the blink and disappeared from there. He appeared behind her back, dropped a bullet and disappeared from there again.

    She is faster than before. She was fast enough to try to p the bullet away, but when it made

    contact, it exploded.

    She was blown back once again. Hitting the ground. She stabilized herself and kicked the ground,unching herself into the air. From that position she threw a punch towards Sam.

    The shockwave made him stick to the ground.

    He could feel small fractures appearing on his bone. He once again disappeared into the ground and reappeared far away to shoot another cursed bullet at her.

    He disappeared as soon as he pulled the trigger, he didn''t even wait for the bullet to reach her.

    *BOOM*

    When it did reach, it gave out a shy, eye-blinding explosion that put her in a daze just for a moment, then Sam made a different move. His body with full shadow fusion appeared behind

    her.

    He grabbed her by her clothes and activated the bloodline attack. Both of them disappeared into the shadow world.

    The blinding lights cleared and the destroyed stage came into everyone''s sight. But there is

    no sign of the twopetitors. They were dumbfounded. Every expert there did notice the huge residue of the shadow energy and spatial energy.

    But they just assumed it is Sam''s attack, but didn''t expect both of them would be gone.

    One minuteter.

    *SWOOSH*

    A spatial tear opened up with a huge wave of shadow energying out of it. Two figures dropped from there, entangled against each other.

 Chapter 2336: Solo Combat Over

    Chapter 2336: Solo Combat Over

    ?

    Sam and Rashma are holding each other by their cors as they rained punches.

    Sam''s every punch is charged with shadow energy, which broke through her defenses and infected her on a cellr level. At the same time, Rashma despite being affected by the shadow element, didn''t back down.

    The only problem is that a bunch of shadow undead enveloped themselves around Sam and blocked her punches with all their might.

    She wasn''t even able to destroy them with the single punch like before, because of the excessive shadow energying out of the spatial tear. They are just recovering even before they could fully disperse from the attack.

    *CRASH*

    Both of them fell in the middle of the stage. By then, Rashma gained the upper hand and pressed him into the ground. The spatial tear was closed. She pressed him down, making sure that he couldn''t move. The shadow energy that is trying to corrupt her body started moving, towards her palm.

    Sam''s fusion form changed.

    The shadow fusion disappeared. The body is now covered in golden mes. Before Rashma could punch, the golden crow bloodline activated.

    The bloodline attack. Sam took a deep breath and blew the mes on her face.

    *BOOM*

    Rashma hurriedly jumped off him, but was still caught in the mes. The burn of the

    bloodline attack is muchrger and intense than the regr me attacks. She tried to resist it as much as possible, but still she felt the pain.

    That was a clean hit.

    When the mes cleared, Rasha is levitating in the air, panting. Her arms are burned, so did a part of her face and chest. She looked at Sam who just stood up.

    Her energy riled up, her breathe stabilized. She threw a punch at him from distance. Sam''s fusion form changed, fire to light. He shifted toser form and dodged the attack. By now, he has depleted a lot of his energy. He is more than half empty. Space element will deplete him faster. Of course, the light element is not exactly energy efficient, at least he will have much more movement control.

    *BAM*

    *BAM*

    *BAM*

    The continuous explosive punches came at him from different directions. She didn''t even bother stopping her bleeding and focused on attacking Sam. Even with her speed being a bit inferior, she managed to catch up with Sam every time.

    The fight dragged on.

    Sam''s energy is being exhausted, bit by bit.

    At that moment...

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam activated another bloodline attack of the golden sun crow. Light rays flew out of his body and covered her whole. Her mind and body are both effected at the same time.

    She gritted her teeth and covered the distance her and Sam, trying to kick him down, however to her surprise, instead of Sam, she found a few shadow orbs.

    The orbs turned into shadow mice and attached themselves to her. Once again performing the bloodline attack. She was dragged into the shadow realm again.

    With her injuries exposed the corrosion of the shadow energy has a greater effect. Once inside, she couldn''t do much as the shadow mice made her run circles inside. She couldn''t even conjure spiritual energy.

    The only way out is for her to take the damage of the shadow realm and stick with the mice.N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Of course, shadow mice also cannot just stay inside the shadow realm for long. After two minutes, they brought her back.

    As they are free falling, Sam is awaiting them. Rashma saw as he activated the lightning fusion. The silver lightning around him too the form of a wolf. He looked like a werewolf for a moment. Lightning conjured in his leg and at the same time, the sky is covered with dark clouds.

    Rashma spun in the air dropping down with an axe kick.

    Sam jumped up with a lightning kick of his own. The Raiju''s bloodline attack.

    *BOOM*

    The legs met, the residual lightning hit the dark clouds up in the sky.

    *BAM*

    The clouds conjured up an even more powerful lightning and struck Rashma from behind.

    She fell on the ground, with her back charred.

    Sam alsonded weakly. His energy consumption is way too high. However, his energy vision told him that the other party is not done yet. Even with all the attacks, injuries, burns and shocks, Rashma''s energy fluctuations didn''t change much.

    He stood there panting heavily, thinking of his next move. Rashma got up and looked at him with a smile. The next moment, her energy raged.

    The burns that were so ring started healing at a rapid pace. The wounds, bruises, bleeding, everything disappeared. She is back to her regr shape.

    And that''s not all.

    Her skin tone turned tad bit red. Her veins throbbed and her eyes turned red as well. Sam felt an eerie sense of threat. His spine chilled and sweat turned cold.

    His instincts are telling him only one thing. Run.

    He couldn''t even begin to resist the urge. He activated his space fusion without hesitation. He disappeared from the spot.

    *BAM*

    *BAM*

    He didn''t even know what happened. All he realized is that his face has met Rashma''s fist and he was sent flying away.

    He tried to use blink once again, but Rashma is already there. Not at his original position, but his destined position after the blink. She already appeared there and kicked him.

    In the next few seconds, Sam became a ball that she could kick around like she pleased. After taking around ten kicks, Sam disappeared in the middle. Rashma tried to move, but halted noticing that there are no fluctuations nearby.

    Sam disappeared with the space element, but he didn''t reappear.

    After a few seconds, she suddenly dashed to a certain direction. She felt some spatial fluctuations there. A humanoid figure appeared there and she punched it.

    The shadow disappeared in a puff of smoke. At the same time, in the arena, Sam appeared.

    *SWOOSH*

    "I GIVE UP"

    Right when the fist was about to meet his chin, he yelled out loud. Rashma stopped closely. Sam let himself fall into the rubble andid down, panting heavily.

    Rashma alsonded on the ground and sat there. Her aura cooled down a bit, she is also sweating and panting. There is a wide smile that is inplete contrast to the destruction two of them created. Soon, the silent arena is filled with cheers and apuse.

    The fight was surely great.

    They really underestimated Sam. Rashma finished even her semi-finals fight in a matter of seconds, only Sam dragged the fight long enough. He used so many elements with so much proficiency that he managed to hold his own against such an overwhelmingly strong

    opponent.

    Soon, both of them were sent to the stands and the stage was recreated again. Initially they wanted to hold a match between the two set academy students to determine the third ce, but one of them is not in a position to even stand up.

    So, the third ce was determined and the stage was only used to announce the final results and to inform about the teampetition.

    "From day after tomorrow, we will be starting the teampetition. I am sure, that a lot of academies have lost their team members, so we are allowing you to use substitutes in their ce if you wish to proceed with the participation.

    If not, you can also withdraw in advance or just not attend thepetition.

    You should bring your full team on the day of thepetition no matter what.

    If you don''t have the three members, then you are disqualified from thepetition. Please

    don''t cause any fuss if that really happens."

    With that, everyone left. For one day, the second graders can rx from this excess excitement.

    Sam went back to his assigned residence and focused on his recovery. Soon, there was a knock

    on the door.

    He saw an expected face outside.

    "Come in."

    Dove walked in. Sam is sitting on the floor with a wine gourd and some delicious dishes in

    front of him.

    "Are you celebrating for getting the second ce?"

    "Nope, I am recovering."

    She looked at him and then at the snacks in front of him. Obviously, suspicious. She just sat in

    front of him and unceremoniously took the wine gourd to have a sip.

    She was surprised by the taste and said.

    "Do you know, that in some realms it is extremely rude to not offer such a delicious wine your

    seniors?"

    "In my world, it is even more rude to drink someone else''s wine without asking and thenining about it."

    He took out a different gourd and started drinking.

    "So, what are you here for?" He asked.

    "About the teampetition. Crow is still excited to join. He is recoveredpletely. Rashma is obviously in. If you are not going, then we have to withdraw."

    "I am sure, there are other candidates who would love to have this opportunity." "True, but the teammates wouldn''t love having them. Those two are asking for you. Particrly, Rashma. She is very adamant about you being the teammate."

 Chapter 2337: Team Combat

    Chapter 2337: Team Combat

    ?

    Sam paused and just looked at her for a moment before asking.

    "Why are you so adamant about making me participate? I am sure I never gave any mixed signals about it. I was pretty clear that I didn''t want to participate."

    Dove also paused and spoke after a sigh.

    "You... you are the spark that the Gambler academy needed and I want you to burn as brightly as possible at the moment."

    "What?" Sam is surprised.

    "You heard me right. I am sure you have observed the Gambler academy and understand it very well. It has everything that one could ask for the growth of a cultivator. Its reluctant attitude to be a part of the prestige fights of the academy realm, their freedom for the students, theirck of desire for power over other academies.

    It just lessened the pressure and made the gambler academy students prosper for generations. However, on the way, the gambler academy students kind of grew a bit toocent andx. There are of course some students who followed the footsteps of the old generations and strived to improve. But the majority of them are just taking this academy as the safety.

    They are looking at the other academies, where the students have to strive to prove that their existences are worth it, the students trying to ensure that they can spend another month in the academy, but here they have all the freedom they can think of to research whatever.

    They are using this as an excuse to stay mediocre.

    The strive for excellence has vaned. And then came you...

    Gambler academy has long since been thrown to the back of the mind for most of the other academies. But you brought the spotlight back and made everyone conscious.

    You might have put a lot of pressure on your peers, however this spot light made them strive for more as they didn''t want to be the one who brings shame to the academy. I like the current direction the students are going in.

    And I need you to make sure that they stay in that path without straying."

    "So, you are using me."

    "You got a problem with that?"

    "No, not really. But still, if they really resonate with my actions, they are going get in more trouble. I doubt you would like that."

    "Its fine. As long as there are results, Gambler academy is not afraid of attracting more trouble. I just want them to strive for a bit more excellence.

    This time, you shook the rankings of the academy. The Gambler academy which usually stayed in top twenties or thirties, will now climb higher. I need you to make it rank higher. And attract as much attention as possible.N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Once gambler academy and you are in spot light, you will be targeted of course, however the Gambler academy will abide by its policy and defend you.

    At least this time they will not just think that they are forced to do it. They will just be defending the contributor for their rankings and the issue would just be the other academies targeting their contributor.

    I need that kind of unity in the academy at the moment."

    "Why?" Sam asked.

    She frowned in confusion.

    "What do you mean, Why? Isn''t that the necessary atmosphere for an academy that''s looking for growth?"

    "I am not asking about that. Why now? You have been in academy for a while. Don''t tell me that you are not capable of attracting attention like I did. I have seen the performance of the fourth graders. You guys are more than capable.

    You could have done this as soon as you joined the academy.

    Why me? Why now?"

    "I don''t know. Even though were quite a hateful bunch ourselves, we never managed to ignite the conflict like you did.

    So, I am just going to use you now. Anyway, I am sure this is a small repayment for defending you against the whole academy realm."

    "The whole academy realm has yet to attack."

    "From the way you are going, it won''t be long."

    Sam thought for a moment and said.

    "Sure, but I will only stick with Crow. I am sure Rashma can handle herself quite well."

    "She sure can. I will let them know."

    Sam looked at her for a couple of minutes.

    "Why are you not leaving?"

    "I am eating." She kept on munching on his food.

    Sam ignored her and focused on his recovery. The details of the team battle are not out yet. Sam decided to just wait in his room.

    That night and the next day passed quietly. Maybe because of Sam''s absence in the city streets, it felt very peaceful.

    The day of thepetition, Sam walked through the destroyed streets. In these streets, second graders, third graders and fourth graders, all of them fought to take each other''s lives. However, more than half of the destruction is actually caused by him as he hunted down the second graders.

    He felt a little proud of himself.

    He arrived at the Thor academy and went to the Open-air auditorium. f stood on the stage as he looked down at thepetitors standing in the teams of three.

    "The finalpetition of this year''s second grade Academy tournament. The team battle.

    Just like every other year, this one will also be a royal rumble. A free for all contest of might and wit.

    You will be sent to a special space in a while. A pocket dimension that has been recently acquired by the Hel academy. And this time there are some special rules.

    Because this could be the year in which the teampetition might not have a definite winner. For a team to even qualify being a winner, at least one member of your team should spend in that space for twenty-four hours.

    If all of you are eliminated before twenty-four hours, or decide to quit unable to endure the atmosphere inside, then you are out. This year will go with no one getting a win in this

    competition.

    Thepetition still goes on even after the twenty four hours, if more than one team is present in the space.

    There are no rules, except for obviously special and overpowered artefacts. You can use the formations, inscriptions, puppets, curses, poisons, traps, ambushes, beasts. It doesn''t matter what means you use. You can kill your opponents or cripple them. You will not be held liable. Unless the members of only one team remains in that space, thepetition will go on forever.

    I am sure, I am direct enough with this, so I am hoping no one has any questions. But if you do, this is the time to ask them."

    There is just a ring silence.

    He then snapped his fingers. The whole open-air auditorium lit up with its formation. A bunch of tokens flew out of nowhere and attached themselves to the candidates. One for each. And each team has an identical token.

    A spatial force surrounded them and pulled them away from that ce.

    Sam let himself go.

    Soon, he felt gravity again. Then, came a huff of death energy. More intense than any death energy he ever felt. His vision cleared and he found himself in the middle of nowhere. His vampire part became extremely rampant. He is surrounded by a bunch of rocks, and dead trees. Thend is a patch of grey and ck. Even the winds appeared darker than usual, if they had any color. The sky seemed to represent the darkest night he has ever witnessed and in

    that''s sky, there are no stars.

    Only asional grey cloud and the bright red moon that is glowing in the middle.

    The whole area is faintly lit by that glowing red moon, adding a bloody share to everything.

    The death energy is pure, but also different. Forgetting about his vampire part, even the beast bloodlines inside him are a bit too active. Maybe because of the bloodlust induced by the energy. Anyone who spends enough time here, they will definitely go crazy and start a killing

    spree.

    He knows that he would like to.

    He couldn''t see anything but that wastnd in the horizon.

    He let his vampire side take in the death aura. It makes a great cultivation ground for the

    undead type creatures and he decided to take advantage of it. He took out Harbinger and

    started moving. Just when he moved around three feet...

    Something suddenly came out of the ground from behind and caught the back of the harbinger. Sam halted and looked back with a frown.

    He saw a massive skeletal hand protruding out of the ground. The fingers holding the back of

    the harbinger.

    He activated energy vision to check what it is. He followed the energy surrounding the bones

    of the arm. It went into the ground and took shape of a gigantic humanoid form. A skeleton that is struggling to get of the soil as it held Sam in his ce.

 Chapter 2338: Weird Energy

    Chapter 2338: Weird Energy

    ?

    The soil is unusually dense and there seemed to be some force holding the skeleton down. Sam kicked on the fingers of the skeleton.

    *BAM*

    He was stunned. The skeleton fingers took the full impact of his blow, but they weren''t even effected. Not even a little bit. He frowned and tried to stow the harbinger away. However, the spatial pull of the divine dimension is countered by the skeleton''s force.

    It just held the harbinger in ce.

    Sam could see the skeleton''s head, its neck and cor bone are also almost out of the ground.

    He checked the energy fluctuations of the skeleton. The more its body is out of the ground, the more forceful it has be. As it kept on pulling on the harbinger, Sam had to increase the thrust of the harbinger to ensure it is not pulled away.

    Sam became decisive.

    From the rear outlet of the harbinger, instead of the high pressured wind, a condensed beam of energy was shot out.

    *BOOM*

    It hit the skeleton''s wrist and exploded.

    A hole was borne through and the joints were broken. The fingers fell off, letting the harbinger go. However, Sam didn''t immediately leave. He halted and looked at the skeleton with his energy vision. The weird energy emitted by the skeleton, clearly indicated its strength.

    It is almost on par with the strength of a peak stage second grader. It is clearly more than when only the hand was visible.

    Now with every passing second, he could see it. The energy which under his energy vision looked like a me enveloping the skeleton, is gradually increasing in size and density. Along with that he also saw something else.

    The broken and fragmented pieces of bone are slowly gathering back together as they went towards the broken arm bone of the skeleton.

    It is healing back to its original shape. Whenever a piece is joined back to the skeleton, its energy seemed to have reduced a bit. However, within just a few seconds it is being recovered and kept on growing further.

    At this moment...

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    Two red mes were shot into the sky and exploded. They came from the same spot. He guessed it could be some signal of a different team. Sam got his focus back to the skeleton. Its upper body ispletely out of the soil, and its struggling with the lower body.

    Sam took out two cards and threw them one by one.

    The first card, travelled over the Skeleton head while the second one was thrown towards the skeleton''s face.

    Sam conjured a spear purely made of lightning and threw it towards the second card. *BAM*

    With an explosion, not only did the lightning pierce the card, it went throughpletely and hit the skeleton in its face. At the same time, the card behind the skeleton also conjured a simr spear and hit the skeleton head from the back.

    The head of the skeleton exploded.

    Sam caught a small fragment from it.

    As soon as he held in it in his hand, it tried to corrode his flesh with the death energy. It didnt feel like ordinary corrosion, more like a curse instead.

    He negated the curse quickly and tried to store the fragment in his storage, but he wasn''t able to. There is a restriction.

    He saw as the fragments of the skeleton slowly gather again. He thought for a moment and threw the skeleton fragment with all his might in a particr direction.

    Then he turned around and went towards the signal that came up.

    He agreed to be with Crow and work together with him. So, he alreadymunicated with Crow and they agreed on arriving at the closest ce with trouble.

    Sam travelled at his full speed.

    Within seconds, he came across a forest of dead trees. This scene is very simr to the one he saw in the undead realm way back.

    The trees are dense, but there is no leaf, so even without his enhanced senses, he could see what is happening to a certain extent.

    He could see a few trees burning from there and there are noises of some people fighting.

    Sam stored his harbinger away and decided to sneak up to the fighters.

    He took a few steps into the forest and his instinct screamed.

    *CLICK**BOOM*

    There was a slight click followed by an explosion. A trap formation has been activated.

    Sam reappeared outside the forest. He used his spatial blink to avoid getting trapped in that st. He felt so stupid for a moment. Such an obvious trick, to use traps before sending a signal and he didnt bother to check for them.

    He sighed and activated the space element again.

    With partial fusion, he calcted the approximate coordinates at where the fight is going and blinked once again.

    Meanwhile, in the forest.

    Two people from two different academies are in a fight. Both are fire element users. One is using blood red mes, simr to the ones Sam saw exploding in the sky a moment ago. Another one has bright blue mes, maybe a result of special bloodline.

    Both of them easily noticed that the dead trees here are very resilient and are burning for a long time. They are also sturdy and are not getting destroyed with every attack they are

    throwing.

    They are using the trees to hide themselves and are throwing ranged attacks at each other,

    turning that small patch into their little arena.

    While they are intensely in the middle of a fight...

    *BOOM*

    The trap one of them set has been triggered. They immediately stopped attacking each other. As if they already had a consensus and awaited silently, even using concealment techniques.

    Of course, the trees that they already set on fire are still burning and are like a beacon torches.

    As they are focusing in the direction where the trap has been triggered.

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam appeared in the middle of their little battlefield without any sound.

    *BOOM* *BOOM*

    The moment he arrived, he was attacked by a fiery red snake and an inferno of blue mes.

    Both mes shed in an explosion. The attacks are powerful and intense creating a massive crater in the middle. Except for a residual tree burning nothing has been left there.

    Both of them slowly came out of hiding.

    Their senses are on high alert. They looked around carefully. They knew their attacks are powerful, but they doubted they are enough to kill a person. Theck of dead body or any other remains is another clue. The other party surely escaped.

    Both of them wanted to deal with this third-party before they have at it.

    The man with the red mes walked cautiously in one direction, while his opponent walked

    the opposite direction.

    When there was a significant distance between the two, the shadows of the red mes guy

    moved.

    *STAB*

    The arm of a shadow undead came out and stabbed him in the thigh.

    *BOOM*

    He instantlyunched a giant fire ball at his feet, trying to escape. But the shadow clung on ton/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    him, taking the attack fully. Not only that, a shadow climbed out of the first shadow and stabbed the opponent in the abdomen from the side.

    Only when the two shadows are locked inpletely, Sam appeared out of thin air. With a hand gun in his hands. He pressed it in the opponent''s mouth before he could react.

    *BAM*

    It was actually a normal metallic bullet. However, he charged his own spiritual energy inside

    and used void style.

    *BOOM*

    The head exploded.

    Sam and the shadows disappeared from there.

    The blue me guy who was on the opposite side of the forest instantly arrived. As he came

    close, he activated his fusion and created arge inferno around him. That inferno moved along with him, creating a huge of patch of blue mes around him.

    It is his precaution. His way to controlling as much space around him as possible. He looked at

    the corpse of his former opponent and gritted his teeth.

    "Come out, you coward."

    He screamed.

    When he saw no response, he aimed his hand into the sky and shot out of fire ball into the air.

    It reached a high altitude and split into several miniature fire balls before exploding. Sam who is hiding far away, looking at this new opponent had a deep frown on his face.

    Because while dealing with the first opponent, he noticed an anomaly in the forest. As he looked with his energy vision, at the moment, he could see the energy simr to the one he saw around the skeleton.

    That energy is enveloping a dead tree, not too far away from the opponent.

    It is much brighter than the one around the skeleton and far too ominous. The part that made

    fall into this deep thought its, just a few seconds ago, he saw that energy on a tree at least fifty

    meters away.

    Now, it is just a couple of trees away from the opponent.

    He thought for a moment and activated his light fusion.

    *SWOOSH*

    He zoomed towards the opponent, out in the open.

    *BOOM*

    The ming explosions came at him. Sam dodged them all with his superior speed. When he entered the inferno zone created by the opponent, he suddenly changed the light fusion to the

    fire fusion and then into partial fusion as he reached the opponent.

    He punched out with the recoil style.

    *BAM*

    He hit the opponent and the recoil sent him out of the inferno zone. The opponent was shot towards the tree that is still glowing brightly with that weird energy.

    The moment the opponent touched the tree, the branches bent in an unnatural way and

    caught a hold of him.

 Chapter 2339: Multiply

    Chapter 2339: Multiply

    ?

    The opponent didnt even have a chance to resist.

    The tree branches prated into his body and soon he stopped moving. Sam still hovered in the air and looked at the tree. The branches for some reason didn''t stop moving even after killing the opponent.

    The branches kept on growing and soon enveloped the body of that man. He looked like a cocoon. Then, the roots of the tree came out of the soil. With a glow, the cocoon started absorbing the rest of the tree''s body.

    Finally, within a minute, a cocoon transformed into a humanoid creature.

    It is exactly as tall as the cultivator that the tree just consumed. His skin turned into tree bark. There are several small protrusions here and there on his body that looked like branches and twigs.

    Sam noticed that glowing weird energy is now surrounding that creature and it eyed him. Sam felt like he was locked under a scope. His instincts are screaming him that a predator has locked its eyes on him and ising at him to kill.

    The creature stepped forward and leaped.

    Literally, in the blink of an eye, it appeared before Sam.

    Its arm grew in size with wooden protrusionsced with corrosive death energy as it punched at him.

    Sam spun in the air and met the punch with a kick.

    *BOOM*

    Recoil style sent that overgrown wooden fist away, along with that fist, of course, rest of the body was also sent flying.

    Sam was also blown away. He turned around mid-air and escaped. The tree-man stood halted, and awaited for the broken parts to mend back together with its body while still looking at Sam.

    He couldn''t sense any other presence in the nearby area.

    There are no signs of attacks or fights. He just took off on the harbinger to cover as much area as possible.

    After he travelled a few hundred meters, he suddenly sensed a threating from behind. *SWOOSH*

    A skeletal dog came out of ground and tried to bite him down. Sam manoeuvred the harbinger and escaped barely. The dog is also emitting the same energy as the giant human skeleton and the tree-man.

    Sam didn''t bother engaging with it. Its energy level is even higher than the tree-man and the giant skeleton. He travelled in the same direction, in a straight line and soon he saw the traces of fighting.

    It seemed like a fight between a spearman and a swordsman. Both of them seemed to be pure warriors and they are quite strong. That is all the information he bothered to focus on, because something else caught his eye there.

    A giant crater that seemed to have disrupted this fight. Then he found a trial of the attacks and craters leading in a different direction than he was in.

    *BOOM*

    Just when he was hesitating, he heard a loud explosive noise from that direction. He couldn''t see anything but a cliff in that direction. It could be from below the cliff.

    As halted for a moment and kept on thinking. Ever since he appeared in this pocket dimension, things appeared weird.

    The weird energy, the odd creatures. The distance betweenpetitors is also a bit too high. He also hasn''t seen many signals in the surrounding areas.

    Those two g signals sent by the two fire users also didn''t attract many people.

    As he was thinking...

    *SWOOSH*

    All of a sudden, the Skeletal dog that he just ignored a few minutes ago, suddenly emerged out of the ground. Its maw wide open and aimed straight at Sam''s throat.

    Sam dodged the attack with a hard turn. The harbinger created a sharp wind de. The wind de hit the dog, but it didn''t cut throw.

    The bones are too strong and it barely left a crack in the skull and the dog was thrown a couple of feet away.

    Sam stowed the harbinger away and got onto the ground.

    The dog dashed at him. He jumped towards it, aiming to meet it with an axe kick on top of its head.

    Just before the kicknded,

    *SWOOSH*

    The dog dug through the earth and disappeared. Digging might even be a wrong word to use.

    It just bore through the ground, making Sam almost fall into thatrge hole it left behind.

    He was d that he controlled himself.

    Because right when he stopped the hole closed up with a sharp bang.

    Hended on the ground, when the ground opened up behind him, with the doging at his

    head.

    Sam activated metal fusion, his head turned into solid metal. He kicked the ground and charged into the oing head.

    *BANG*

    The teeth of the dog broke first, before the fracture spread to the rest of its head.

    The dog stopped its advance.

    The broken teeth floated towards the dog as they slowly merged back to the body.During that process, the Dog is stationary.

    Sam waited there, to test something. The dog''s teeth merged back and the fracture

    disappeared.

    It shook its head and was about toe at Sam. But Sam beat him to it.

    He activated metal fusion and started beating the crap out of it. The cracks appeared, simrly just like before. The broken teeth however, this time merged a lot faster and the dog

    is not as stationary as before. He also saw through his energy vision that the energy around

    the dog has increased.

    It is a lot higher and denser than before.

    On top of that, it is about to change color.

    That white color now had a tinge of red and it kept on turning darker every second.

    He also noticed that the death energy in the surroundings is increasing.

    By the time the skeletal dog becameplete, he felt a second presence in the surroundings.

    *RUMBLE*

    The ground underneath him trembled a bit. He jumped away from there. A second skeletal dog appeared from within and it tried to bit him like the first one. This one has aplete

    white glow, while the first one has aplete red glow.

    When both dogs attacked, he could clearly see the difference in their strengths.

    The first one is a lot faster, stronger and lot more lethal.

    *BOOM**BAM*

    When he attacked, the second one was a lot easier to breakpared to the first one.

    Sam had a bad premonition.

    "FUCKING HELL. GET LOST ALREADY."

    All of a sudden, he heard a scream from the direction of the cliff. Two people, a human man

    and an elf woman just flew up and are moving towards him. Behind them Two minotaur

    undead skeletons just climbed up the cliff.

    Both of them held weapons.

    *BAM* *BAM*

    They climbed up really fast and swung their weapons at the two people. The man used a sword while the woman used a spear. The impact of the weapons... that left behind craters.

    This exined the whole scenario that has seen.

    Through his energy vision, he could see the energy of those two skeletons.

    One minotaur has red colored energy while the other one had light red.

    The twopetitors were surprised when they saw Sam who is dancing around with the two

    skeletal dogs.

    "Shit."

    The woman cursed.

    Their eyes locked and both of them exhibited the same feeling. Feeling of wariness.

    Sam doesn''t want the two minotaurs toe at him. Neither does she want to deal with these

    additional dogs.

    Sam turned andunched two attacks.

    One of them broke the spine of the first dog and the second broke the head.

    Both of the dogs slowed down and he immediately ran in the original direction he was

    travelling. The elf woman also made a decisive move and broke one of the minotaurs that was

    after her.

    He went straight ahead. The swordsman gritted his teeth and broke the minotaur before he

    went in the direction from which Sam came.

    The skeletons are regenerating at a rapid pace.

    After travelling a certain distance, Sam increased his altitude to the maximum and kept a clear

    view in all directions, before halting to think.

    From what he understood, these creatures are strong and truly undead. No matter how many times they are broken, they will regenerate without fail.

    Every iteration increases their regeneration speed and energy. When the energy is dense enough it changed color, when color changed a new creature has been added.

    Judging from what he observed, fighting them would only increase the number of enemies.

    However, not fighting them is not exactly ideal either. Even without attacks, the skeletons are

    still increasing in their energy capacity.

    They will still multiply.

    The only thing he didn''t understand was the possible location of these skeletons or other

    creatures.

    There is no pattern. The onlymon element is that, the giant skeleton appeared near Sam. The tree-man appeared in the forest where the red me guy was originally present. The dog.., that could be from the blue me guy''s location.

    Then, the cliff and the minotaur? That could be one of the two. Then, that leaves the second

    one.

    As he was thinking, he suddenly felt a suffocating feeling around him.

    *SWOOSH*

    He dodged it by a hair''s breath as a skeletal bird came at him.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    "I guess, you are that one."

 Chapter 2340: Planning

    Chapter 2340: nning

    ?

    The skeletal bird in front of Sam has red energy around it.

    It seemed like the other party might have fought with this creature and then escaped after realizing its regeneration. Then he or she might have encountered the minotaur and the person fighting the minotaur, which finally resulted in the current situation.

    Sam dodged theing bird for a couple of minutes as he organized his thoughts.

    After that, he made a decisive move. He used the spatial blink to disappear from there. The Skeletal bird that wanted to tear him apart halted in mid-air and looked around in confusion. It started moving around in that area, but was unable to sense Sam.

    After a couple of minutes, it halted once again and looked in one particr direction, before taking that route.

    At the same time, in that same direction. Sam appeared hundreds of meters away. He checked the surroundings for a moment, dropped a small metal node, let out two specters from his body and used the blink again.

    The two specters moved in two different directions left and right. The undead environment is also very suitable for them and they are a great way for him to cover a lot of area.

    He travelled like that far fifteen minutes, dropping those small metal nodes and spreading those specters on his way.

    He moved in a straight line and assigned a specific area for each of the specters.

    In this path, he has encountered severalpetitors fighting with these weird undead creatures, he has seen some undead creatures kill thesepetitors and he was also attacked by a lot of them. But he only went with one goal.

    To find crow and meet him.

    From all the information he gathered until now, the biggest threat is not the students in thispetition. Rather, the undead creatures that areing from all the different directions.

    The undead creatures attacked them students and the students are not actually ipetent to defend against them right now.

    But the more they fight, the more troublesome it will get. The creatures grow stronger and they multiply in number. The twenty-four hour time limit... it has been a little more than half an hour since he came and he already saw several creatures that multiplied.

    And he is not sure if that is all there is to this ce.

    He tried to move in the straight line once again, but he wasn''t able to. He hit a barrier. Which means he is at the edge of the pocket dimension.

    Some of his specters also moved to edges in either side. He believed he is covering more than half of the dimension at the moment with these specters and the nodes.

    After making sure that there is no other presence beside him, he closed his eyes and started sensing the locations of the nodes and the specters.

    The nodes are ced in a straight line, until the original location of the skeletal bird. Beyond that Sam already marked the path until the giant skeleton''s location. The nodes are going to act as stationary markers.

    While the specters act as mobile markers.

    They are moving in different directions and they are marking the locations where these undead creatures are. With these specters, they can easily leave a small part of themselves behind as markers.

    Even though primary purpose is to search for Crow, the helped him map out most of the pocket dimension. Once he has the markers in ce, it is easy for him to travel in between and navigate the threats.

    It might seem a bit excessive now, but he believed that soon this pocket dimension will turn into a hell hole with something or the other threatening the students every passing moment.

    After getting a sense of location for all the nodes and specters he left behind, he started the journey once again.

    This time, with a single blink he reappeared at the first node, a few hundred meters away from the original location of the skeletal bird.

    At this moment, far away from Sam, a skeletal bird which is moving in a particr direction, halted in its tracks and turned around, before moving back in the same straight line.

    Sam started using blink again. He dropped the nodes and let the specters out. On his way, he saw an intense battle. The swordsman is entangled with two tree-men in the dead forest and at the same time, a minotaur is after him.

    Sam sneakily left the ce. Even though his presence was felt, they weren''t able to pinpoint his location and they didn''t have a chance to bother him.

    He made a straight line until he reached the other end of the barrier.

    By now, it is approximately an hour since thepetition started. He split the pocket dimension into two main parts with this straight line connected by these small marker nodes.

    The specters are using his marker node as reference as each of them searched a pre-defined area on either side. Unless Crow is eliminated, he shouldn''t have a problem finding him.

    He also noticed that the edges are the safest at the moment. There are no signs of undead and also no signs of candidates. The same goes for the edges on the remaining two sides.

    It seemed like the candidates were all sent into the middle part.

    Sam kept on creating a map in his mind as he waited. About ten minutester, he finally found Crow''s location.

    He seemed to have just fought with apetitor and is running in a specific direction. Sam calcted his distance from the marker and then made the specter follow Crow. He disappeared from there and reappeared at the marker.

    The specter already closed in on to Crow''s location. Sam used the specter as a reference and did a long distance spatial blink.

    Crow who was being chased by an undead creature.

    He has fought with while dealing with apetitor who ambushed him. He killed thepetitor by using the undead creature, but now it ising after him.

    At that moment, all of a sudden he sensed a spatial fluctuation beside him. Just when he thought he was being ambushed again, Sam appeared out of thin air.

    *SWOOSH*

    A spear flew out of his hand and struck the oing skeletal creature that looked like an elephant. The spear went straight into its head, cracking its skull open. Sam''s arm tore off a bit and it bled.

    He took a deep breath and healed himself, looking at crow.

    "Let''s go."

    Sam took out a transference token and started modifying it a bit. Both of them disappeared from there and arrived at the edge where Sam was just a few moments ago.

    Sam then gave a potion to Crow.

    "I have my own stock." Crow replied and was about to pass it back to Sam.

    "Mine are better."N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Sam said as hended on the ground and sat there. He rejoined the torn muscle fibers in his

    arm and started drinking the wine to heal himself.

    Crow alsonded beside him and sat down. Catching some breathe.

    "No threats around?"

    "No. The edge of the pocket dimension."

    Sam said as he pointed at the invisible barrier. It just looked like a vast expanse of greynd is

    behind it. He coined it up to being an illusion. A well made one.

    "So, what''s the n?" Crow asked Sam.

    "You tell me. How do you want to proceed forward? If you want to go and roam the area trying

    to fight them one by one, I advise against it. This ce might appear safe for now, but I can''t

    even guarantee that.

    And soon the whole pocket dimension will be a chaotic mess.

    At least now, the others are still getting used to the situation. So, I managed to get by without

    much trouble. But soon, they will get used to it and they will being after me.

    I might be able to escape somehow, can''t guarantee your safety in that scenario."

    Crow nodded and went into a deep thought.

    "What is the alternative for that though? I don''t really have too many tricks up my sleeve that could help in this scenario. You might be well equipped with this."

    Sam nodded and said.

    "Right now, we have several advantages.

    First one is that we have a temporary secure spot. We can use this as our rendezvous for now. I

    will give you a couple of transference tokens that you can.

    Second, I kind of got a glimpse of how this pocket dimension works.

    Third, I have some markers spread out and have a faint idea on where the undead creatures

    and other participants are.

    Fourth, we don''t really have any scoring criteria. So, we don''t have to be the ones to kill these

    people. If I could help it, I would just try to limit the killings by my own hand and let the dimension take them out.

    This way, we can focus more on the survival and less on the others."

 Chapter 2341: Trapping the Snake

    Chapter 2341: Trapping the Snake

    ?

    Crow nodded and said.

    "I see your rationale, but I did want to see some action. I don''t know if we would be able to get that high if we just focused on tricks.

    And there is a chance that someone might just get a hint at your n and counter it. You might want to think about that, if we go ahead with it."

    "Don''t worry about the action. I am sure you will get enough of it. If all you want to do is show off to the world, then I can create more than enough opportunities. I am the spectators outside will definitely enjoy it.

    As for the counter...

    I do believe some people in thepetition have simr ns. As we are speaking, there are some people who are trying to map the pocket dimension just like I did. Some are gathering with their teammates.

    Some are forming temporary alliances.

    Based on my spections, they are going with simr ns. They will examine the environment, try to use it to their advantage and then deal with the rest.

    Their approaches will be different of course.

    Anyway, if we are going to stick together, then we have some priorities in the targets we choose."

    "Let me guess, Zeus academy."

    Sam smiled and replied.

    "You are absolutely right. First let''s knock those fuckers out. Their team is not exactly at its strongest state. The three candidates are just a bit above mediocrity, not far from it though. Dealing with them is a piece of cake.

    I already have the locations and the first one is way too easy to deal with at the moment.

    You want to go?"

    "Your wish."

    Sam ced his hand on Crow''s back, enveloping both of them with the spatial energy.

    Meanwhile, far away in the pocket dimension, there isrgeke within which there is a small ind.

    On that ind, a young man wearing the uniform of the Zeus academy is panting heavily.

    He kicked the ground and tried to leap off the ind ande out of theke, however, as soon as the left the surface of thend, the surface of theke split open. A skeletal snake came out of it and tried to bite him down.

    He tried to change the direction mid-air, but then the water in theke which was in an unusually ck colored rose up, blocking his path.

    Just like the tree-man, this snake is also one of the unusual creatures in this ce. Unlike the other skeletal creatures which are mostly using only brute force and regeneration, this is manipting the water.

    That guy appeared on the ind from the start and he has been trying to get out of theke. He even used transference tokens. However, as soon as he did...

    Theke water as a whole rose up and froze the space. He couldn''t even fathom the logic behind such a weird reaction, but it is a fact that he is stuck here even after exhausting a bunch of transference tokens, which could have be life savers for him.

    Hended back on the ground and looked at theke.N?v(el)B\\jnn

    The snake is not acting up. It just moved beneath the surface and only when he showed signs of movements would it react. It has been toying with him for a while. He has tried everything in the past hour or so.

    He even tried to fight it out with it. But theke water, the ck water is way too impable with the defense. His attacks are barely moving past the surface.

    He tried to shoot signals into the air and he did attract a couple of people as well. However, they are not his or Zeus academy''s allies. No one is at this point. They just witnessed his predicament and guessed he would die right there and left.

    Now, he is finally losing hope. At that moment, he sensed a spatial fluctuation nearby.

    Sam and Crow appeared out of thin air and hovered in the air looking at him.

    When he saw them, the Zeus academy student wanted to scream for help, but when he noticed who they actually are, he directly gave up. No student from gambler academy will help him. Much less Sam.

    He just copsed on to the ground and started attacking the water while he was still on his knees.

    The snake is riled up and attacked him with the water pinning him to the ground, before disappearing back.

    "Why are we here? From what I can see, he will definitely die sooner orter. It would definitely take him down. We don''t need to do anything."

    "I know that. I am just trying to speed up the process. Once this guy is done, I have ns for theke. For that, I need him to die a bit early and in a certain way.

    For this, I don''t really need your help, but it wouldn''t hurt to have you nearby. Look out in that particr direction, there is a great chance a threat might appear from there."

    Sam put him on look out and went to deal with the target.

    He took out formation nodes. Not some makeshift nodes, proper formation nodes. Metal pirs with hundreds of inscriptions on them.

    They are also not some general nodes that he could use to make different formations. They are a set. They are used to make a specific formation or to be precise a set of formations. Even if a person doesn''t have any knowledge of the formations, they can use the manual given with it to create this formation.

    These types of sets are verymon in the Dusk organization.

    Even though Sam rarely used them, now it would save a lot of time and they are kind of perfect for the current scenario.

    He was leisurely, as he dug the earth on the bank of theke and ced the nodes of the

    formations.

    The target was just staring at him like a dumb little doll. After Sam ced thest node, the formation was activated automatically.

    On each node, there are a string of inscriptions drawn from top to bottom.

    At the moment, the bottom most inscription of each node is lit up. They are determining the current properties of the formation and that is a simple barrier formation. Theposition of it is very simple, but the barrier is strong as well.

    Maybe because the creature sensed the energy fluctuations, its head raise above the surface. Its head first moved to face the target and then to the dome. It didn''t care much and just went

    back into theke.

    At that moment, Sam activated the next phase of the formation.

    The next three inscriptions on each node were lit up. The dome which was translucent white changed to semi-translucent red. The target who is sitting on the ind, not knowing what to do, suddenly a slight change in the temperature around him.

    He looked at the dome curiously.

    Within no time, he started sweating, it then became irritating as the temperature increased. He removed his shirt and tried to endure. The ck water started boiling up. The target also felt parched. He didn''t know what to do.

    At this moment, the creature inside theke came out all of a sudden and hit the dome.

    *BAM*

    There is not even a tremor. The dome ispletely intact. The water became steam and it umted at the top of the dome.

    *BAM*

    The creature kept on hitting the barrier and soon its'' skull cracked. It halted a bit and started healing. The opponent wanted to take advantage of this and tried to make a move. However, at the moment, the fourth inscription one each node lit up with a faint purple light.

    The opponent suddenly felt his energy being sucked dry.

    The area within the dome turned toxic with highly dense death energy. The surrounding death energy is being sucked and is being injected forcefully into the formation.

    The target couldn''t even breath and the absurdity of the surrounding death energy finally

    showed its dark side. The blood thirsty aura Sam felt ever since he arrived here, finally showed its ugly end. The target''s eyes became red like burning coals as he started rampaging inside.

    He jumped into the boilingke fighting with the skeletal snake.

    The snake also started fighting back, while also smashing its head against the dome and cracking itself more and more.

    Soon, the opponent''s dead body floated over theke, but by that time, theke has already became two-thirds of its original size. The skeletal snake could barely hide itself. Sam used his energy vision to take a look. The weird energy around the snake has turned red

    and while he was watching, from under the bed of theke, a second skeletal snake hase. Now, as theke evaporated rapidly and formed a massive cloud inside the dome, the snakes kept on smashing dome. The second snake''s energy is also changing along with the first one''s. Just for some safety, Sam activated the next phase of the formation, strengthening the dome

    even more.

 Chapter 2342: Snakes and a Worm

    Chapter 2342: Snakes and a Worm

    ?

    *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

    The snakes kept on trying to break the dome, but they are not strong enough. They are breaking their own skulls instead and had to regenerate back to their original states before trying again.N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Sam activated the final phase of the formation.

    By now, theke is devoid of any of that ck water. The clouds created by steaming it were condensed and the formation used them as a carrier for the lightning. The lightning struck down on the snakes, breaking their skeletons continuously.

    The snakes are breaking and getting back together repeatedly.

    Right in front of Sam''s eyes, the first snake which already had red colored energy, went through another transformation. The energy around it became orange, its skeleton also seemed to have under went a transformation.

    Now, even when its body is broken, it was able to move and attack while regenerating.

    That restriction is gone. The second snake''s energy has turned to red and now a third snake appeared.

    The third snake is too weak in front of the lightning onught and their gigantic statures already filled the wholeke. They are now crashing against each other with the slightest movement, except for when they were standing up on their tails and hitting vertically upwards.

    Sam also noticed that the third snake is way more durablepared to the second and the secondpared to the first.

    However, the third snake is changing its color faster, as if to keep up the pace with the second and the first.

    Simply put, the first creature and the second one has to be broken and regenerated for them to gain a certain speed in changing color, but the third one doesn''t. Even if it is not broken, as long as the hit is significant, its speed is increasing.

    Crow came to stand beside Sam watching the creatures inside.

    "Are you speeding up the process of making this ce much more dangerous?"

    "Yes, what did you think when I said I wanted to use the surroundings? I am not just going to lure some creatures to the enemy''s ce and make them fight each other. That is fucking boring.

    This one the other hand, makes things a lot more interesting."

    Sam said with a faint smile.

    His ears perked up and he said.

    "I told you to keep a watch on that side."

    Crow frowned and turned around. Far away in that direction, he could see someone. A person

    is running towards them, with injuries all over his body. Behind him two creatures are following.

    Behind them, there are two more creatures which are slower than the first two. Thepetitor is from Hel academy and the creatures behind him are two types. The Goris and Rhinos. The first two are in red stage and the second two are still in the white stage.

    Thepetitor is very exhausted, he is burning every bit of his strength to escape and then he sensed Sam and Crow who are looking at him. His first instinct is fear. He knew what Sam did to his academy'' solo team.

    At first he felt a bit happy because, since most of the solo team is dead, he managed to get in to the teambat. Otherwise, he wouldn''t be worthy of getting in at all. But now, he is regretting it.

    As soon as he came here, he was faced with that Rhino skeleton that charged at him. He barely dodged and fought back.

    However, while he was still dealing with that Rhino, he saw another candidate who is running from the Gori skeleton.

    Even though it looked like running, he is actually luring the gori skeleton to find a different candidate. However, both these candidates crossed paths and they entered a deadlock.

    Neither of them let the others escape and while dealing with the skeletal creatures they fought with each other.

    Once the Hel candidate won, he realized that these creatures multiplied. This made his throat go dry.

    He realized his mistake and ran towards a random direction, in which Sam and Crow are staying. Sam guessed most of what happened here and turned to crow.

    "It seems like we don''t get much action here. If you want, you can deal with that guy ande back. You can use the transference token to get back to the rendezvous."

    Sam disappeared after saying that.

    Crow smiled and became excited. He took both of his daggers out and turned into a sh. He dashed towards the opponent at the front who got ready to meet him. He conjured a n in his head. Just make sure to hit crow with one big move and make him fall down.

    The creatures will focus on him, while he will escape.

    A bit farfetching even in his head, but he is happy with at the moment.

    He held his sword and lightning energy conjured over it. He jumped over and tried to meet Crow''s move. However, at thest moment, Crow slid down on the ground, his speed increased and his daggers swung at the ankles of the opponent.

    *SLASH*

    With a unified sh, both of his ankles were cut down, making the opponent fall down. Then Crow kicked the ground, rose into the air and kicked the Gori that wasing at him. He cracked its skull and reached a decent altitude, before he whipped out the transference token. Before the second gori could attack him, he disappeared from there.

    The opponent fell down and crashed into the ground. Not able to get up. The Rhino reached him first and it started its onught.

    Soon, the candidate is done for. The creatures halted and they roamed around in that area. They didn''t go back to their point of origin. They didn''t attack each other. The four creatures just roamed around like normal.

    Sam and Crow are back at the rendezvous.

    Sam closed his eyes to do a quick review of everything. Apart from the two people they helped kill, there are four more deaths in this short while. And from the way things are there are at least two more on the way.

    Sam narrowed down on the current location of another Zeus academy student.

    He opened his eyes and said.

    "Let''s go. I am sure, you will get to see some action this time..." Sam exined the n.

    Both of them disappeared from there and reappeared at a marker. From there, they got separated and moved in different directions. Within two minutes, Crow saw his new

    opponent.

    A Zeus academy student is fighting with what looked like a skeleton of a snake. However, it didn''t have a snake head. Instead, both ends are circr and it looked more like arge

    skeletal tube.

    It is digging through the ground and attacking the opponent with sudden movements. It couldn''t control the soil to attack him, but it did manage to cover up its traces as soon as it went into the ground.

    The candidate is not having a bad time. He is still in a decent shape and since he is levitating, he is able to dodge the worm attacks efficiently. However, he was unable to escape the worm. The current location is actually a long way from the original spot he appeared in. This worm is a lot faster as it moved through the soil. He even used a transference token to cover arge distance. However, after around fifteen minutes, he was still caught by the worm.

    He couldn''t understand how to get away from this.

    So, right now he is fighting with it.

    The only good news is that he can defend it from the air and doesn''t have to worry too much.

    At that moment, he sensed the spatial fluctuation nearby and saw Crow appear.

    Crow took out his daggers with a grin and immediately jumped into action.

    *BANG* *BANG*

    The daggers met with the opponent''s sword as they tangled in the air. The sh was intense from the start. Crow was obviously at a very slight disadvantage because of the cultivation level difference. However, his mobility is superior.

    He managed use the worm''s movements to his advantage and kept the opponent engaged. Soon the opponent realized something. The other party which is Crow is not decisive. He is not making any risky moves and only kept him tangled. He is exhausting him. This made him feel extremely cautious.

    At that moment, a few hundred meters away from them, Sam is standing on arge rock. He is looking down at the ground, particrly at a specific patch.

    This patch of soil at the moment is burning and on the verge of boiling. With that patch of

    soil, a young woman is running around trying to get out. However, she was unable to do so, because the patch moved along with her.

    Whenever she tried to fly away, she was mmed down by an invisible force that forced her

    stay down.

    Her bones are broken, no matter the medicine and potions, she is unable to heal and her

    whole body is corrupted with fire elemental energy.

    It is only a matter of minutes before she died.

    And Sam is waiting for that moment.

 Chapter 2343 Ambush

    2343 Ambush

    *BANG* *BANG*

    Crow is feeling the pressure a bit. It has been more than fifteen minutes since he started the fight. The opponent is not exactly the strongest one he faced. The people he defeated in the solobat are definitely stronger than this guy.

    However, Crow couldn''t use his trump cards at the moment.

    Sam repeatedly warned him against it. Without his trump cards, he cannot possibly ovee the difference in cultivation level. The slight advantage of speed and mobility can only get him so far. And the worm skeleton below is also getting faster.

    While these two are fighting, the skeleton indeed had more targets to focus on. However, instead of gaining advantage, it only got more damaged.

    However, Crow already knew that damaging the worm more is not exactly a good thing.

    So, he is hoping for Sam''s arrival.

    All of a sudden, it seemed like the opponent lost his patience and made a move. The sword he conjured created several images and Crow felt like he was surrounded by an infinite number of swords. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    No matter where he wanted to move, he felt like he would be stabbed by a sword. Even his instincts are confused a bit and are telling him to stay in ce At the same time, something deep in his mind warned him against it.

    He gritted his teeth and braced himself to block the impact.

    The swords came in from all the directions. At that moment, the worm skeleton charged at the opponent and got in the way of the attack.

    *CRASH*

    The sword crashed against the edge of the skeleton and broken it in half, the other half of the sword ray went ahead and brushed past Crow''s arm.

    Crow was about to fall off, when he managed to get his bnce back in mid-air. Meanwhile, the skeletal worm fell back into the ground. The opponent didn''t want to let this chance go and went after Crow, who is already at his top speed ready to dodge.

    His arm is bleeding and his energy cirction is in disarray.

    The opponent quickly gained a hold on him and was about to stab the sword. Crow suddenly stopped running and stood there with a grin. Opponent suddenly realized something, he turned around and saw that the worm is still there, just barely regenerated.

    And then looked down below him.

    The earth opened up and a second worm came out of it. Hitting him from below, holding him in its mouth and then dragging him back into the ground.

    Crow stabilized himself and got ready to throw an attack. Just when the opponent was about to break away from the worm ande out of the ground. He got angry and wanted to attack the worm further. He raised his sword, but before he couldnd it¡­

    *BOOM*

    A highly intense me came out from the ground underneath.

    The young man copsed to his knees. The worms both couldn''t move anymore and started burning vigorously.

    "Come on, we are done here, let''s get out."

    Sam appeared and called Crow who is directly above the fire.

    "d you could make it. But you arete."

    "That woman is a lot stronger than I thought and it took a bit longer than I thought to move the creature along with the soil to this exact location. I had to exhaust a lot of my energy to do it. Now, let''s just go back, we need to get out of here, I feel some¡­"

    *RUMBLE*

    Sam didn''t even get a chance, when all of a sudden, the sky above them tore apart.

    *SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    Several metal rods fell out of the spatial tear in an instant. They created a perfect circle, covering the fire pit, the worms, Sam and Crow.

    The formation was created, sealing the space, and also increased the gravity several times. The soil became looser. As if it came back to life, it started moving around loosening with every passing second, drowning the young man who was yet to die with the fire pit.

    His body was ground to nothing in that loose gravel that was once soil. Not even his bones were left. The only trace was the slight blood marks here and there that are slowly disappearing with every passing second.

    Sam and Crow tried their best to resist the gravitational force. However, it felt like more than the gravitational force was at y.

    Sam activated his energy vision to take a look below. Beneath the moving soil, apart from the earth element, there is also an element of space. It is actively effecting the gravity like an amplifier. However, he believed there is something else at y and he isn''t wrong.

    *BOOM*

    All of a sudden, a tear appeared in the ground and pushed out a skeletal dog.

    Sam recognized it. It is one of the creatures he encountered before. This made him frown. He thought he had a pretty good hold of the situation with the specters spread around and marking all the opponents.

    Some one meticulously nned ahead and made such a move.

    The dog like creature which is simr to the worm from before, used the moving soil to its advantage to attack the two of them.

    Whenever they moved, their movements are effected by the fluctuating gravity, trying to pull them down.

    Sam thought of his options as he observed the surroundings. The fire pit is still burning. The undead creature causing that fire pit doesn''t move much and with the spatial restriction, it is also locked here.

    The worms are increasing their energy. The skeletal dog is much more agile and mobile with its smaller stature and it ising at them.

    The spatial formation itself is not exactly powerful. However, his slight exhaustion from before is ying a key role in making him to think before he made a move.

    Crow is also injured and he doesn''t have the same level of immunity as Sam does, to the spatial force and gravity.

    He could break the formation, and try to run away, but the spatial tear in the sky is still open and Sam believed he will be trapped again the moment the formation is broken.

    The other party must expending a shit ton of energy to operate this and they are definitely not doing this alone.

    Millions of thoughts ran through his head. He dashed to Crow''s side and started using his own earth element, creating an opposite gravitational field towards the sky. Both of them moved together, trying to immobilize skeletal dog.

    Meanwhile, Sam''s undead energy riled up. His soul power is at an all time high as his specters moved.

    He knew he missed something at the moment. Someone managed to keep an eye on Sam, while he didn''t even know where this attack came from. And right now, that person is operating the spatial tear on the top while charging the formation at the same time.

    The specters moved at their fastest speed, trying to sense any anomaly in his surroundings. And all of them moved to one particr area. The area that is at the exact center of Sam''s current location, the location of the skeletal dogs.

    He tried to sense a huge umtion of the spatial energy.

    However, he wasn''t able to find that out.

    This made him frown even more. Sam gritted his teeth and suddenlyunched himself at the iing skeletal dog. He caught it in a choke hold, breaking its neck and keep the head and the body separate.

    He then used that skull to bash the worm that came at him with full power, leaving argeteral crack on its surface.

    Crow dealt with the other worm and Sam got a breathing space.

    He activated his observation ability. He let his energy spread to the formation and also sensed the energy emitting from the spatial tear. He is running the calctions in his mind. For every passing second, how much energy is needed to operate this?

    Meanwhile, at the same time, somewhere in the pocket dimension, in a dark space, three young men are sitting cross legged with several formation nodes around them.

    There is a huge amount of death energy circting towards them and it was all transferred to a special formation te ced in the middle of them.

    All three of them had deep frowns on their faces, sweat tricked down and their bodies are running out of energy with every breath they are taking in and they are filled to the brim with every exhale.

    The surrounding death energy is using them as mediums before it transferred into the formation te.

    "How long is he going to endure this? He is not only neutralizing the gravitational force, he is also helping his friend stay afloat while fighting them. We need to take him down." One of them said out loud.

    "But how? If we make another transference, we will risk getting our locations found out. I don''t want to make the mistake of underestimating him."

    "Are you sure, he can find out? The method our energy extraction and transfer makes us the most unique set of existences that he evere across. I say that we send another creature through the tear and send another set of the formation nodes to deal with him.

    It would another case if he is doing the search by himself, but he is using the specters. Their biggest disadvantage is that they cannot detect us who blended with the environment."

    As the third one suggested, all of a sudden the three of them opened their eyes. A voice prated their ears.

    "Are you sure?"

 Chapter 2344 Counter

    2344 Counter

    The three participants opened their eyes in absolute horror.

    A foreign voice in this ce is something they never even dreamt of. It is at the absolute bottom of the list of things they could expect. They would expect to die of idental meteor strike before they could expect this position being leaked.

    In that daze and shock, they finally realized that a foreign energy that they have nevere across has invaded this space.

    *SWOOSH*

    A keen of a de resonated inside. The small space is invaded with shadows and the three of them lost their lives.

    After two minutes.

    At the edge of the pocket dimension that is at an equal distance from the fire pit Sam created and the location of the skeletal dog. There are no signs of people or undead creatures in sight. In that in sight¡­

    *RUMBLE*

    *BOOM*

    An explosion urred throwing tons of soil into the air, revealing a huge crater within which Sam and Crow are sitting.

    Crow''s body has several ck patches all over. He is weak and powerless. If Sam wanted to kill him, he wouldn''t even be able to resist. Not even for a second.

    "What is happening to me?"

    Crow asked weakly.

    Sam who is also panting heavily, took a shot of liquid energy and ced his hands on Crow.

    "Its shadow energy." He started absorbing the shadow energy that is trying to corrode Crow''s body.

    Crow felt a bit of relief. Sam made him drink a shot of liquid energy and started guiding it gently to help him digest it. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    Crow who gained some energy, spoke.

    "What the hell happened? One second I was tangled with that bony worm and the next we were in that dark space, before I knew it, we are here in this crater, what the heck happened?"

    "Three candidates from Iktomi academy. Their team¡­ let''s just say they have a distinct set of abilities that would work well with moves like this.

    One of them can create a sub-space, isting an area from the existing spatial fabric. That sub-space cannot be detected with regr methods, unless it is impacting our current space. The second one has a constitution that helps him control gravity.

    An earth elemental constitution, very rare.

    The third one is an expert in formations and inscriptions. He has an affinity to interact with multiple elements.

    They created a subspace underground here. My markers couldn''t find them. The third one created a massive energy siphon, he drew huge amounts of death energy into that space and converted it into spatial energy and earth elemental energy.

    He also created a special spatial gate that allowed the third one to interact with the formation nodes to create the gravitational and earth elemental attacks that we experienced.

    They used the same method to send skeletal rat to us."

    "Then how did you kill them? How did you even detect them?"

    He asked, but Sam didn''t answer. He just healed Crow and both of them went back to their rendezvous.

    "I need to rest for a bit, if you want to fight, you can travel ahead for twenty miles. A participant from Hel academy is there entangled with an undead creature. He has an upper hand, and already created a second creature.

    He will be a good match up for you."

    Crow nodded, but didn''t move. He just sat down and meditated.

    Sam closed his eyes and went into deep thoughts.

    What he did just now¡­ it created a bunch of ideas in his head and he needs to organize them. The subspace¡­

    The other party did everything right. The isted space, locating themselves at the farther end of their range of operations, waiting until Sam is in the middle of a fight. But they did one thing wrong.

    The siphoning of the death energy.

    They converted the death energy of the surroundings inrge amounts. With so many battles happening and the undead creatures moving around, it is indeed hard to notice that energy being moved.

    However, Sam has way too much information to be stumped.

    He calcted the approximate amount of energy needed for this, he then used the specters to get the location of the spot where this much energy is moving. He narrowed it down to few spots, when he noticed that there is nothing in that space, he rummaged through his head to look at the list of all the candidates participating and he managed to narrow down these three.

    Once he knew who is doing, he easily picked the spot they are at.

    Their cautious nature and the proximity to the skeletal rat''s location¡­

    Then he used the ultimate move he could think up at that moment. No matter what kind of spatial technique he used to get out, it would be a sh of energies and he would be directly facing the bacsh.

    So, he figured the best way to be the shadow transference. The shadow transference has limited effect on the space around them and they cannot interfere with that spatial transference, so he dragged Crow throw it and appeared within the subspace killing them.

    For all the tricks and specialities this trio has, they are not exactly strong.

    Their big mistake is to mess with Sam, if they had tried this on other candidates, they would have racked up more kills and survived the twenty four hours.

    ''Sub Space''

    Sam thought in his head and rxed himself.

    It has barely been two plus hours. They did way too much in this small time period.

    He managed to create two traps in this time, the snakeke, the snakes would be multiplying there, and then the worm in the fire pit will also multiply.

    These people made that skeletal rat go there, so it will also be multiplying now, and the creature that is creating the fire pit itself¡­ that will also multiply if it is damaged by the worm, however that is not a guarantee.

    He decided to mark these as hot zones.

    Sam is sure that there are some people who have seen the hot zones and might try to imitate it. There are some people who will opt for a simr method. They will try to trap the creatures instead of fighting them.

    Of course, they will not multiply them. But it doesn''t mean Sam can''t do it.

    That is his next target.

    After recovering his energypletely, Sam stood up.

    "Two out of three Zeus academy students are done. We can push thest forter. Right now, let''s change the targets."

    "Whatever you say."

    Crow stood up and stretched his body.

    Both of them disappeared from the spot.

    Far from there, a Hel academy student is currently levitating in air while looking at a spot from various angles. After a few more nces he is satisfied and muttered to himself.

    "Now, I just need to attract a few idiots to fall into the trap."

    He flew in a certain direction and noticed someone who is charging in his direction. His eyes lit up and got his spell ready. Lightning conjured in his arms and in the sky at the same time.

    A lightning bolt was thrown at the other party.

    Crow looked at the lightninging at him and grinned. He swung his daggers and stuck the bolt down, while still moving towards his new opponent. The lightning mage is more than happy to oblige this opponent.

    He moved farther, happy that the opponent is so easy to trick and be lured towards the trap.

    The whole are is surrounded with lightning bolts. Crow is at his fastest as he blocked and dodged the attacks while shing at his opponent. He cut through several lightning bolts directly and kept the opponent on his toes.

    Even though they are fighting under the lightning clouds, the opponent didn''t have any advantage that he should have as a mage. He had to be on a constant run. Lightning known for its quick attacks wasn''t able to catch Crow even one time.

    There is not a single clean hit.

    "FUCK IT."

    The lightning mage screamed and his eyes transformed. They glowed with an eerie silver light. The moment he locked those eyes with Crow''s, thetter has stopped in his tracks for just a moment. It wasn''t even a fraction of a second, but that was enough for him to get caught.

    *BAM*

    The lightning stuck cleanly, Crow felt all his muscles go rigid. He lost his control over his flight, as he started falling down.

    The opponent waved his hand and an attack blew Crow in a certain direction. After crossing a few meters, he disappeared mid-air.

    The opponent looked at the spot where Crow disappeared with a sense of glee, his eyes glowed with that silver light as he looked in that direction.

    However, he didn''t see what he wanted to see. Because the scenery did not change in front of it. It is same before and after. He hurriedly flew in that direction and extended his hand.

    He felt something solid. He was relieved about it, because that should be the formation that he just ced, an illusion formation that he wanted to use as a trap. He tried to see the inside of the formation, but he failed.

    He became cautious. Instincts screamed that something is wrong. But he was unwilling.

    It is his formation, his trap, he doesn''t believe that he is being outyed. He conjured lightning and was about to break through, at that moment¡­

    *SWOOSH*

    Crow appeared from the side and shed on his back from shoulder to hip before stabbing a dagger into his side.

    He then kicked the opponent.

    The solid wall that he felt until now.. couldn''t be felt anymore. The opponent went through the barrier and fell into what looked like a fighting pit. Two Boar skeletons are shing against each other. One of them ran through the other and kept on dashing towards the lighting mage.

    He stepped back, but the barrier blocked him.

    Before he knew it, the boar impaled its tusks into his chest and dragged him around. It even crashed against the regenerated boar skeleton, which impaled its own tusks into the mage''s body. Which resulted in a tug of war that tore him apart.

 Chapter 2345: Trap Zones and Manipulating Conflicts

    Chapter 2345: Trap Zones and Manipting Conflicts

    ?

    Crow watched from outside the formation as Sam stepped out of it.

    While the opponent is tangled with Crow, Sam just switched the formation up a little bit and now the opponent is dead.

    Sam looked at the surroundings for a moment and said.

    "You leave to the next location first, I want to do something here."

    Crow didn''t ask him any details and left. Meanwhile, Sam started cing a few more formation discs in the area. He knew that the lightning would attract a few people here, the specters already informed him of the movements.

    The sudden disappearance of lightning might have slowed down the approach a bit, but they will surelye.

    It would be a waste if he let theme here and leave without experience anything, so heid down those formations and disappeared from there.

    A few minutes after he left...

    A participant came and looked around. He frowned at the sight in front of him. It is way too clean. There are no signs of battle, in fact there not even a trace indicating a person was here. No residual energy, no distortion in the terrain, nothing.

    This rang several rm bells, but he still couldn''t help butnd and look around carefully.

    This made him think that maybe someone is here and is hiding. If someone is hiding after such a huge scene of lightning, then they are most likely injured and that is an easy prey. The participant rationalized the situation and tried to check the surroundings.

    After five minutes, he suddenly felt a bit odd.

    *SWOOSH*

    Before he could think, a Boar rammed into him. He didn''t even have time to react and only after that impact did he manage to see what truly is in front of him. There are two boards constantly running around and one of them is currently holding him by his tusk.

    He also felt a weird energy invade his body.

    He is cursed.

    Just like that another candidate fell.

    Meanwhile, Sam went to the next location in which Crow is already fighting with a different guy. This participant also made a different trap to deal with otherpetitors, using the terrain and the undead creature.

    Sam used a simr tactic to use the trap and defeated him, before covering up the tracks. This process repeated for five more times, before they finally stopped.

    Sam and Crow and went back to their rendezvous.

    "So, what''s next? Care to exin the n?" Crow asked.

    "We have been here for more than six hours. One fourth of the minimum time required to qualify as winners.

    From what I checked, by now, almost every participant gathered with their team. At least the ones that actually wanted to participate as a team.

    At this point, from my estimation, there are only a couple of dozen people who are working solo, either by a pre-arrangement with their team or just because they wanted to work alone. Rashma is also part of these two dozen people.

    And one thing that ismon for all of them is that they are actually strong. Really strong to the point they would have done well even in the solobat. They will be the variables that will increase the intensity of the battle as they fight for individual glory.

    We will help them reach that glory state.

    Meanwhile, we will let the arrangements we made until now ferment and fester. The zones that we created, they are going to increase the number of undead creatures by arge amount in a short time, they also act as asional sink that will devour the people thate across, identally or otherwise.

    Still their primary goal is to increase the number of undead creatures and they will do so. Once they reach a certain level, which will take some time... we will put them to work.

    Until then... we can take on a much more passive role and ensure that everything goes the way we want it to be."

    "Still, I am a bit confused about your approach though.

    At first I thought you just wanted to use the traps to deal with them one by one, but you created those traps and are letting the creatures grow. You even kept them inside the traps making sure that they won''te out.

    So, unless someone is idiotic enough to interfere with them, they won''t be of much use. I thought you would be a lot more aggressive and deal with them, when I saw the way you hunted down people in solobat prelims.

    But you are acting so mellow right now."

    Crow sighed and said it with a tinge of disappointment. Maybe he really wanted to see Sam in action.

    However, Sam just smiled and said.

    "If it was normal pocket dimension, I would have done the same. You might have even seen me use a bunch of my other tricks.

    However, I was given such a great yground with so many features of its own. How can I not use them to the fullest?

    Just wait and see, I will make you witness one of the most astonishing disys of victory that you have ever seen and you won''t even need to lift a finger after a while to achieve it.

    So, until then just follow me around.

    We can entertain ourselves with the uing fights. But before you can do any of that, I need you to be at your best shape. So, recover."

    Both of them focused on recovering for the next hour. The constant fights did drain Crow and the constant formations made Sam exhausted as well.

    After an hour, they finally made a move.

    This time however, they didn''t directly attack someone, nor did they try to lure someone into a trap zone they set up, instead they tailed a candidate from Indra academy who is acting solo. From what Sam knew, it was a team decision.

    The remaining two will fight together, while this guy will act solo. However, they will be within a certain distance from each other and will have each other''s backs when needed.

    So, right now, as they tailed this guy, the remaining two people are also within a certain range and they might just attack them as soon as Sam and Crow revealed themselves. After tailing him and observing his behavior first hand, and also confirming the location of a few more people, Sam decided on a n and exined it to Crow.

    Both of them got separated and went into different routes.

    In a spot, a man and a woman are currently keeping an eye on a different participant. These two are the Indra academy students.

    "Is the leader safe?" The woman asked while she held her bow tightly and estimating the distance of the candidate in the front.

    "Of course, he is. How many times are you going to ask this? I will let you know myself if he is

    really not safe.

    Anyway, it is not really our turn to worry about him. He can handle himself really well.

    If you really want to help him, just go on dealing with the targets without needing his help."

    The man obviously sounded frustrated. Judging from the woman''s expression indicating she wanted to continue the conversation, it is kind of understandable.

    However, at that moment their target moved, which made them stop the conversation and

    move. But as soon as they made their move while still hiding their presence, they felt energyn/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    enveloping them.

    At the same time, an arrow flew over their heads and headed towards the target who is

    moving.

    *BOOM*

    The arrow was not exactly powerful, but it did create a lot ofmotion as it moved. The two candidates from Indra academy are stunned. They tried to move, but they realized that the energy surrounding them is a formation that is restricting their movement.

    Their target turned in their direction and their positions wereid bare for everyone to see.

    "Fucking hell."

    The woman couldn''t hold on any longer and pulled the bow string. An arrow purely made out

    of energy conjured and on that arrow, the energy even turned into some runic forms.

    "No, wait. This is an enclosed space, the recoil...."

    The man wanted to stop her, but she just fired the arrow to the ground.

    *BOOM*

    The formation did break, but both of them were blown away from the resultant explosion.

    At least, they thought they increased the distance between themselves and their target. However, as the man tried to regain his bnce, he suddenly felt cold metallic sensation on his neck. The next thing he knew, three sharp objects prated into his neck. Before they could tear his neck away, he elbowed the opponent behind him and escaped from the grip. But the stabs despite being light made him bleed. The woman regained her bnce and attacked the target, before joining her friend. Both of them stood against their target

    vigntly.

    There is a reason, why they were tailing in secret without actively hunting him down. Because

    that guy is one of the strongest contenders in the second grade and also one of the secret

    weapons of the Sanatan region.

    A student from the Karthikeya academy, and also the rival of their leader.

    Their n is to take him down when he was busy fighting with some local threat to clear the

    way for their leader, but now... their locations are found out.

    Sam looked at the targets that are locked in with each other. He just hoped Crow did his

    bidding on the other side.

 Chapter 2346: More Conflicts

    Chapter 2346: More Conflicts

    ?

    At this moment, the leader of the Indra team got an alert in his mind.

    This is a special spell created by a Soul Mage. If the team is attacked, he will be informed, and if he is attacked the team will be informed. He turned around and was about to make a move, but the moment he did...

    *SWOOSH**CRASH*

    He saw somethinging at him out of nowhere. It literally dropped from the sky above.

    A person jumped through the portal and brushed past the target, behind him came down arge Rhino skeleton that fell on the Indra team leader''s head.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Just like that, he didn''t even have a chance to find his team and had to be entangled with the skeletal creature.

    He stood up and looked at the person and the Rhino.

    He recognized them both.

    One of them is an elite from second grade of the Agni academy. The other is the creature that The saw the traces of in the surroundings not too long ago.

    "What are you doing here, Margo?" The Indra academy leader asked the sudden visitor.

    "Hell if I know. One moment I was about to dance with that Rhino and the next moment, I am here. If anything, I should ask you. Why am I here, Rajan?"

    Both of them red at each other. The Rhino seemed to be in a dilemma and stood there, indecisive about who it should attack.

    Rajan''s hands crackled with lightning sparks. The rm system in his head is ringing wildly with every passing second.

    The dead lock of the three entities is getting tense.

    He pursed his lips before saying.

    "Why don''t we go our own ways? No need for conflict at the moment."

    Margo frowned and thought about the suggestion, he also didnt want to fight with Rajan at the moment.

    Just when he was about to agree, a runic pattern on his arm started glowing.

    His eyes widened his horror as he looked in a specific direction.

    *KEEN*

    In that direction, an arrow could be seen whistling as it shot into the sky, as if its cutting through the atmosphere.

    It reached the sky and created a dark cloud. In front of their eyes, the lightning formed from the cloud manifested into the form of a human. That human form held a bow conjured purely of lightning. It pulled the bowstrong and aimed at a specific direction.

    "FUCKING HELL. Rajan, you and your bastard friends are dead meat."

    Margo immediately tried to run towards that lightning figure, but Rajan gritted his teeth and intercepted him.

    Margo took a step back and looked at Rajan coldly.

    "So, this is your n all along. You distracted me with that Rhino and the portal to kill my teammates? That bitch is using the Lightning God Astra. Get out of my way now."

    Rajan looked at the lightning arrow, still charging and pursed his lips.

    Lightning God Astra is the special attack of the Indra academy. One of the strongest attacks that was ever created for a lightning archer.

    It also happened to be the strongest attack of his teammate.

    And right now, in the direction of the attack is where his teammate is and judging by Margo''s reaction, his teammates are also in that direction.

    This exins the rm in Rajan''s head. That means, he cannot let Margo go there, no matter what.

    As he was thinking, the Rhino which was unusually quite and calm until now raged. It rushed at the two of them. They dodged it easily and brandished their attacks.

    An intense battle of fire and lightning started.

    The lightning God astra waspleted. Itnded on the desired location, but contrary to the expectations of those people, itnded not on the teammates of Margo, but on a bunch of skeletal creatures.

    One who performed it is not the student of Indra academy, but rather Sam who is currently hovering in the air looking down on the destroyed skeletal creatures. He also got a pretty good look at the raging fire and lightning not far away.

    He disappeared from there and reappeared near Crow who is already there, waiting for him.

    At the same time, Rajan who is already having a handful with Margo and the Rhino, suddenly felt a sense of threat from behind. Two more students who are wearing Margo academy''s clothes appeared running, attacking him from behind.

    Just like that, the start student of Indra academy is surrounded by the Agni academy students.

    "How long do you think he willst?" Crow asked Sam.

    "You should be asking the opposite question. How long do I think they willst. The answer is that if he doesn''t hold back, he can deal with them in twenty minutes at most."

    "He will win?"

    "Yes, he will. If he didn''t want to hide and hold back, he could have been the top contender for the Indra''s solobat."

    "He is that good? Then why does he even hide it?" Crow asked in surprise.

    "Not everyone is like you, Crow. Eager to show off, eager to prove themselves. In fact most people like Rajan.

    They try to hide when they arepetent enough to shine brightly but also aware enough that the moment they shine they will be suppressed, because as bright as they are, they are just better than mediocre and not the best there is.

    Usually, people who do that are not really worth much. Its just once in a while therees a Rajan, who is actually worth all his paranoia.

    He got the talent, skills and enemies worthy enough for him to hide it. I kind of like him a bit. Too bad, he is in the middle of it all."

    Crow nodded and suddenly realized what Sam said.

    "You said he is not like me? What about you? You are the biggest showoff that I have ever met. You should look at yourself before you criticize me like that."

    "Not really. I don''t show off because I have a need to prove myself. I show off because I don''t have any reason to hide myself. Or to be precise, I don''t have a worthy enough enemy for me

    to be a coward."

    "All these academies, families and Divine ne Consummate cultivators are not enough?"

    Sam just smirked and disappeared from there.

    Crow activated the transference token and disappeared as well.

    They reached their next target. Another solo target, another round of deception and another round of forced conflict.

    While they are doing that, Rajan destroyed the Rhino, killed one of the three opponents, broke the leg of the second one and escaped from there. In the supposed direction of his

    teammates.

    He ran there and all he saw was that both of them are injured beyond any scope of recovery in

    the short time.

    His brain worked in overdrive as he thought of the situation. His teammates were threatened, he felt the signal, he was suddenly met with Margo and the Rhino, then he saw his teammates'' attack, the special move only used when dealing with people that are above their league, however from the looks of it, they didn''t get a chance to put up a fight.

    They are done in by a much more overwhelming opponent, someone who is a bit too out of their league. To the point the other party made them like this, with almost no sign of damage,

    except for the explosion sign he saw.

    Then Margo''s teammates came without so much as a scratch.

    This whole thing stunk.

    He sensed a conspiracy. Someone isted him from his teammates and dealt with them. He is

    trembling in rage. He is furious more so than he ever was. Spiritual energy gathered in his

    palms as he pped his hands.

    The spiritual energy particles moved like a wave and the surroundings started glowing. They

    are highlighting patterns and shapes that are not visible to the naked eye.

    He saw footsteps in those highlights and ran in that direction. With every few steps, he

    pped once to reveal more footprints.

    Soon, he saw someone fighting with a skeletal creature.

    The person that fought with or rather destroyed his teammates. The star student of the

    Karthikeya academy.

    Just like that the two start students are once again, in a fight.

    Simr scenes are happening all over the pocket dimension. Since thepetition has more

    than twenty hour time limit, people initially had a tacit agreement to tone down a bit. However, with Sam fanning the mes people are trying to kill each other a lot faster. It became so bad to the point that they are not even going after Sam, which was the initial n

    since the start.

    Now, they are too busy guarding their own backs that they don''t have any time to look for this

    prime target.

    Just like that another eight hours passed.

    More than fourteen hours have passed since the start of thepetition.

 Chapter 2347: Violet Creatures

    Chapter 2347: Violet Creatures

    ?

    Fourteen Hours.

    More than half of the people are either dead or eliminated. Sam contributed to a good chunk of those eliminations, both directly and indirectly.

    But after the fourteenth hour, Sam finally attracted some heat.

    Despite all the conflicts that he stirred, he was soon targeted by people. After all, even though Sam had special tricks to cover theyout of the Pocket dimension, it is not like no one else had simr measures.

    Its just that their tricks are not as easy to implement as his. But they did implement them.

    However, in times like these the first to have the control over thend and information gains a severe advantage. Crow got to witness it first hand.

    People started hunting Sam and attacked him. However, not a single plot was sessful. In fact, the one that came closest to sess is the sub-space trick used on Sam at the start, which also ended as a terrible failure.

    But the rest sucked even more.

    One academy team, that happened to stay intact with all three people, tried to lure undead creatures from three directions to deal with Sam.

    They didn''t even have the brains to lock the space to ensure that he stays put.

    Another group tried to poison and curse him while using a simr tactic as before. They used undead creatures as a distraction. This also ended in failure and Sam even turned the tides.

    He trapped them inside a formation along with the undead creatures they lured by themselves.

    There is one guy who tried to ambush Sam, but with how clumsy he is, he might as well have tried to attack him head on.

    He is powerful, but doesn''t have any concept of efficiency.

    Sam used the undead creatures and a different team to deal with him. Poor guy got his limbs broken before he barely managed to quit thepetition. As time passed, the attempts became numerous, while they became less and less threatening.

    In fact, based on what Crow noticed, Sam could just ignore them and dodge them as he pleased. But he deliberately fell in their eyes, he made his presence known and made them attempt these fruitless attacks.

    While ying around with them, Sam still kept an eye on the undead creatures that he is breeding.

    The energy around them is still transforming.

    It started with white, when they became two, the first became red, the second became white.

    When the third one came, the first one became orange and the second became red, while the third became white.

    Soon, he noticed a pattern.

    Every new creature ising with White energy and it has the same stats as the first creature when it was in the white phase.

    A white energy skeleton, will not be able to move when it is injured. All the pieces must gather together and join back with the white skeleton. The recovery is slow.

    The red energy skeleton is simr, however, the recovery speed is a bit higher. Same with the orange energy skeleton, this time the recovery speed is at least three times as fast as the red- energy skeleton.

    However, it changed after the orange energy skeleton, took its next form.

    It became yellow energy. This one can move and attack even when it is injured. As long as the parts of the creature that are responsible for its movement are not injured, it moved like normal. It became much more durable.

    Its regeneration speed for cracks is negligible, and if a piece is broken and it didn''te back to it immediately, it is regaining new material in that ce, which happened to be more powerful. And when the broken piece dide back, it joined with the body and increased the density of the skeletal creature.

    After yellow, then came the Green.

    This one''s regeneration is off the charts. It barely got a scratch and it healed. Its functions otherwise are very simr to the yellow one.

    The next is blue. From Sam''s observations, the density of these creatures increased with every passing second, even if they are not injured or attacked, they kept on getting stronger.

    The Indigo one, which is the next version has a much bigger change. When a piece of it got separated, that piece is noting back, instead it just nted itself into the ground and its energy density increased.

    The creature regenerated at a rapid pace that wanted its opponents to puke a hundred liters of blood.

    As most might have guessed, the next one is violet. They just followed the pattern of rainbow. The violet creatures had a much bigger qualitative change. Their bodies finally transformed. With the increased bone density, the creatures transformed a bit.

    For example, the skeletal snake, Sam trapped in theke, now grew spikes all over its body, starting from the head, going all the way through its spine and even to its tail.

    These spikes are not just there for the show, instead the snake was able tounch those bone spikes. Even though they looked like some spikes on the giant body of the snake, when they wereunched, in front of a human, they are big as the biggest spear a human can wield.

    Only after the creatures reached the violet color did their energy slowed down its change. It didn''t show any immediate signs of transformation, but Sam is sure that it is still getting dense, albeit at a much slower pace.

    As of now, Sam only observed violet level creature and hasn''t seen anything beyond that. But those are enough to cause chaos.

    Not long after Sam spotted a violet creature in his trap zones, he noticed that some other creatures in the open field also turned violet. And they became extremely difficult opponents, more difficult than any other yer.

    Far away from Sam''s location.

    Rajan could be seen running through a rocky cavern. He is injured from head to toe. His face was crushed at several ces, a couple of his teeth are missing, there are several burn marks

    all over his body.

    His shoulder is disced and several of his toes are broken.

    He could also feel the pain in his ribs, most probably because of the broken ribs.

    There is no one is sight, but he didn''t dare to rx. After fighting with the star students of the other academies, he escaped when they tried to gang up on him. He tried to run around in random paths just to avoid leaving any pattern so that the others won''t hunt him down.

    However, in that process, he managed to attract a much bigger trouble.

    As Rajan ran, he felt a slight tremble underneath the ground. He immediately leaped into the air without hesitation, but he was extremely vignt with this sudden flight.

    *RUMBLE**

    The earth split open and a massive Dog like skeleton came out of it. Its size is just a tad bigger than him. Comparatively it is a lot smaller than most of the creatures here.

    However, it is different. There is a violet aura around in and there are several bone spikes protruding out of its body. The dog''s fangs grew a couple of inches stronger and on top of it all, it has one more terrifying ability.

    The dog kicked the ground and leaped at Rajan who is still levitating.

    As it leaped through, the surrounding earth and rocks modified. They deformed and turned into dust before they gathered towards the dog''s skeleton. The dirt, earth and rocks conjured together to create a body for the dog on top of its skeleton.

    The now, earthen dog, almost bit into Rajan who barely dodged it. However, as it went past, the skeleton of the dog slipped through its earthen flesh. However, the earthen part didn''t

    disappear.

    It still stayed in dog''s shape.

    Now there are two dogs. One skeletal and the other earthen. Both of them attacked Rajan at

    the same time. The skeletal dogunched bone spikes while the earthen dogunched earthen

    spikes.

    Rajan halted in his tracks to avoid being hit by the projectiles and gritted his teeth.N?v(el)B\\jnn

    He has been running away from this creature. In his battle with the star kids of other academies, he escaped and ended up in this special zone of the skeletal dog creature. This is unlike the regr skeletal creature and has the ability to manipte the earth at a higher

    level.

    And there were a lot of them in the zone for some reason.

    He was stupid enough to not be vignt enough and got caught by this creature which

    happened to have that violet aura. And then started his battle. All the skeletal dogs attacked him, he broke through the encirclement and tried to get out of the territory of those creatures.

    Which mostly worked in his previous encounters with them. However, this time, he was given a surprise and this creature has stuck with him ever since.

 Chapter 2348 Plot

    2348 Plot

    As Rajan maneuvered around the attacks of the skeletal dog and the earthen dog, the first skeletal dog is gathering soil once again.

    It created another earthen dog, making it three opponents.

    As if that is not enough, another skeletal dog came out of the ground attacking him and he even observed a slight and faint violet aura around its bones. Within no time, he is once again upied.

    Simrly, Margo who escaped from Rajan before, also encountered a special creature.

    This one is something Sam is way too familiar with. It''s the Tree-man that he encountered before. As if he has no other way, Margo came running towards this patch of trees after escaping from Rajan. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    By then, this tree also entered the violet level and once it did, its effect is much higher than the other creatures in the zone. At least Rajan managed to find some openings and make a run for it. But Margo didn''t even have that chance.

    From the moment, he entered the patch of woods, he was lost. No matter in which direction he went, he was surrounded by trees. If he tried to fly away, the tree branches are blocking his way and pulling him down.

    The trees are turning into tree men of various strengths in random.

    And these tree men all have different unique perks. One of them can manipte its size,pletely or partially and generate great force when inflicting physical attacks.

    Another one is shooting spikes and thornsced with poison.

    A different tree is shedding its bark which is turning into several small pieces that are flying around and hitting him like daggers.

    One of the tree men even spit fire.

    After a while, he forgot where exactly he was and where exactly he is going. But no matter what he did, he was unable to get out of there. All the things he burned down in his life¡­. To think that he will be taken down by a dead forest¡­

    Simr scenes could be seen all over the area.

    By now, the edges are also infested with too many skeletal creatures for Sam to just stay there. However, he also had other ns. He targeted the violet creatures and lured them to specific spots where they are most likely going to get hooked with one of the start students.

    As he did this continuously, soon almost all the solo yers are upied.

    Even if Sam appeared in front of them, they wouldn''t be able to do anything. They are way too pre-upied. The creatures are strong, strong enough to even kill an average team participating in thepetition.

    The star students proved why they are the star students just by surviving against them.

    Sam also understood why these people were in the Teampetition. Even though they are strong, their cultivation is not at the absolute peak of the second grade. They still have a year left in the second grade. At least one more year.

    Which means, they still have another chance to gain glory in the solobat.

    So, they were used in the teambat as contingency.

    If by any chance, their other teams didn''t do well in the otherpetitions, they canpensate that loss with the teampetition. Of course, even if the others did well, no one canin about having too many points now, can they?

    Even then, they are not the primary target for Sam.

    Instead, he focused more on the teammates of these star students. More often than not, the students apanying the start student usually, end up being much less powerfulpared to him. Particrly, when the said star student is working alone instead of apanying them.

    So, now with their guardian star kids gone, these people are targets in a open hunting season. Even then, Sam didn''t just kill them directly.

    He only attacked them enough to damage them severely.

    Once they are exhausted enough and they were almost at the twenty-hour mark, Sam moved to the final steps of the n.

    Just as he was about to implement it, he just had one thing to do. To go to Rashma.

    Ever since thepetition started, Sam didn''t worry about Rashma for one bit. She is way too strong, way too powerful and way too resourceful for herpetition. He is sure that even if there are a bunch of skeletal creatures surrounded or when even a violet creature targeted her and chased her around, Sam knew she would be safe.

    But the thing he is going to do next, will put even her in a tight situation.

    Coincidentally, when he was about to go meet her, he sensed a plot.

    "You go to the ce that I mentioned and stay there. Don''t even dare think about moving around. You can move around as much as you live, once we unleashed the chaos. Just stick to the n."

    After that, Sam used spatial blink to quickly travel to a certain location.

    Meanwhile, Rashma is fighting with a violet creature with a wide grin on her face. It is a violet bird. A Hawk''s skeleton to be exact and it developed a weird ability of conjuring bony feathers. With every passing second it generated more and more feathers. These feathers were thrown out and were controlled by the bird, trying to hit Rashma.

    At the moment, she is hovering in the sky as the Hawk skeleton came at her, with hundreds of feathers attacking her from all sides.

    Rashma purely used her brute force to crush the skull of the bird. Of course, in the violet stage, it barely slowed the creature down. However, its constant resistance against the attacks only made Rashma more and more excited.

    She kept on breaking the bird down, waited for it to gain its strength back and even let it be more powerful before she attacked it again.

    But in all that excitement, she forgot to notice one thing. On all four directions of her, there are four teams and all of them are busy doing one thing. They are conjuring a trap zone of their own.

    At first, Sam didn''t think much of it, because the four teams didn''tmunicate at all, but just created trap zones of their own. Then, they lured some people and defeated them. The only reason, he didn''t go after those trap zones, is because they are not as good or efficient as the rest.

    However, after some time, he noticed the weird change in Rashma''s movement, almost as if she is being deliberately moved.

    She was lured to this ce, even then didn''t think much. But soon, the formationsid down by the four teams¡­ they made him think twice about this. The main reason, he ignored them until then was that they are all small teams. They are negligible in terms of rankings are and are barely hanging in the nies.

    They are not evenpetition.

    However, now he realized that something is off. And like he guessed, the formationsid down by the four teams are very identical. One can call it as guiding formations. They are basically formations made in the form of a path.

    Afterying down these formations, they broke the trap zones they created. Several creatures, including a few violet ones immediately ran out and rampaged.

    However, to their dismay, they were unable to move anywhere. Maybe the constant suppression triggered their rage, they tried to break through and run away. But the guiding formation they created restricted the movements of these creatures.

    They blocked the path of the creatures in all three directions and left only one direction for them to move in.

    The same direction in which Rashma is currently ying with the Hawk skeleton.

    Just like Sam guessed, it is a plot. These four academies, had a tacit understanding without any openmunication. His specters weren''t able to see them meeting, and he didn''t even observe their usage ofmunication tokens.

    They stayed low, set up the trap zones, bred the creatures and now they left these creatures to deal with Rashma.

    The more he thought about it, the more questions arose. However, before he could think about them, he had to help Rashma deal with them.

    Soon, Sam arrived at one of the guiding formations. A tunnel like path made of energy barriers is guiding the creatures towards Rashma.

    At the end of tunnel, a barrier started raising covering arge circle. Sam tried to throw some energy capsules, but to his surprise, even that unstable energy explosion is not attacking the formation. There is barely any fluctuation.

    He activated energy vision and observed the barrier. He realized that the energy from the barrier is not exactly regr spiritual energy or divine energy.

    He took out themunication token to try and contact Rashma, but he couldn''t connect with her. After thinking for a while, he couldn''t do much and jumped into the barrier.

 Chapter 2349 Multiply again

    2349 Multiply again

    The barrier closed as soon as Sam jumped.

    By now, Rashma also saw the creaturesing at her from all sides.

    "Why are you here?" She asked with a grin.

    Sam sighed and said.

    "I just noticed this, so I came to get you out of here. Iid down some borate plot to mess up the whole teampetition. I didn''t want you in the middle of it all."

    "Nice. What is the n?" She broke the hawk once again and asked.

    "For now, getting out of here."

    Sam tried to use the transference token and spatial blink, but as expected they didn''t work. Whoever,id this trap is not an idiot, but they are not overly smart either. Sam closed his eyes to try and sense something.

    Then he opened his eyes once again and smiled.

    "I need you to do me a favor." He asked Rashma.

    "What is it?"

    "In around twenty seconds, all those creatures, around four dozen of them will be here, among those over a dozen are violet aura creatures. I want you to break them down to the smallest pieces possible.

    Judging from the recovery speed, crushing a skull like you did will take around three minutes for them to recover fully.

    I want you to make the recovery time at least ten minutes. Leave the small fries alone. They won''t pose much threat to me or what I am about to do."

    "That''s all?" Rashma asked her grin even bigger now.

    "That''s all."

    "Consider it done."

    Rashma gave a sweeping nce to all four tunnels. The creatures are out. She disappeared like a sh as she picked her first target.

    A violet creature that looked like a giant humanoid. Its simr to the first skeleton Sam encountered. Rashma punched on its giant head. The punch connected, with one hit it broke then skull and the impact travelled through the neck and to its spin until the pelvic bones.

    Except for limbs, the rest of the bones are all destroyed.

    They started recovering immediately, however, Sam is sure that it will take more than ten minutes.

    He closed his eyes and sensed the connection with his specters to keep an eye on the four groups. He wanted to see if they are making contact with some other groups. But no, they are not.

    For the first time, Sam felt like closing down the hub has be a problem. He is sure that whatever plot these four academies conjured up, it was done after the whole hub''s issue and when the academies isted themselves from the hub.

    Otherwise, he would have had the first hand information on this plot as well and things would have been simpler.

    He clicked his tongue in disappointment as he went past some small fry creatures. While he fought them, within his mind, he is controlling the production unit inside the divine dimension.

    The production unit is designing and manufacturing a formation disc. A special formation disc with an extra special purpose that he just thought of.

    While he did that, he also had his energy vision active. Because he is touching the barrier and checking the structure with the observation skill and energy vision. The formation is good, durable and space restrictive, checking all the essential boxes.

    But it is no where near invincible.

    Sam is sure that there would be a lot of loopholes. As for why, he believed that. A formation of that scale cannot be created with some pre-made nodes and cements. The real-time changes of the terrain and energy flow in the physical space y a key role in keeping it stable.

    So, a person has toy down the formation by cing the nodes.

    However, the four teams¡­ none of them have a person who is skilled at that level. There are a couple with some decent potential, but their level is just that decent, which is also another word for mediocre.

    So, to achieve this, someone must have given them an borate n and guided them to ce this formation. Even if it is not a real-time guidance, maybe some practical training beforehand.

    If that is case, then the original creator is one and the current creator is a much less-skilled one. That can only mean one thing, this formation is full of loopholes and hidden disadvantages. And Sam is skilled at utilizing both and turning them to his advantages.

    The fight continued.

    Rashma finished her job in ten minutes. All the violet creatures are shattered and are recovering rtively slowly. The first one she broke came back to a bit of its original shape, but it is far from being able to move. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    Maybe she got bored, but she turned around and started taking her anger on the small fries reducing the work load on Sam even more.

    This made Sam''s task easier and much much faster.

    The first formation disc is soon ready. After the first one, the second one is even faster since he only has to manufacture now.

    The formation disc is not like a regr formation disc.

    It has a unique shape, it is small andpact, while also it is essorized to hold onto solid and uneven objects. Almost like a flexible w below it.

    Sam stopped fighting and went to check on one of the creatures that is healing. He ced his hand on it and used observation skill.

    He got a pretty good and detailed vision of how the energy is operating to heal these creatures.

    The creatures are using the surrounding death energy for regeneration. He also understood what the uniqueness of it is and what kind of role it is ying in the healing process.

    Once he got a hang of it, he started collecting the surrounding death energy and imbued it into the formation disc.

    He tweaked it just a little bit and went to the nearest skeleton that is still intact.

    As soon as he ced the formation on it, the ws locked into the spine of the skeleton. It gathered the surrounding death energy inrge amounts. The formation disc kept on glowing brightly with every passing second.

    When it reached a full glow¡­

    *BOOM*

    It sent a shockwave throughout the skeleton. A shockwave made withbining the ripple style and void style. A very toned down void style just to be precise.

    As the energy shockwave went into it, the bones broke. Split into several pieces like a rotten tree bark. But that''s not the end of it. The piece of spine to which the formation disc was attached, remained intact.

    After theplete copse of the skeleton, when the skeleton started rejoining and getting back into shape, the glow of the formation disc dissipated rapidly. It injected arge amount of energy into the skeleton.

    The regeneration process instantly sped up.

    It is almost ten times faster. The skeleton joined within no time. Its energy became denser and it is also a step closer to the next color grade upgrade.

    The moment the skeleton is intact and its energy is stable. The formation disc once again gathered more energy and created a shockwave.

    Sam smiled as his little trinket worked its magic.

    He already picked a second target and ced the trinket on it. His first targets were obviously the white color grade skeletal creatures. He then moved up. By the time he was done, there are already new skeletal creatures that spawned because of the color grade changes.

    This made him think again.

    It would be a shame to not use this chance to multiply them after all. It is already a shame for him to not think about this beforehand. But it is not toote.

    The production units in the divine dimension stopped everything else and started working on these trinkets on hyperdrive.

    Soon, Rashma just stood there and looked at the skeletal creatures in daze.

    The skeletal creatures doubled in the matter of forty-five minutes and they are still not showing any signs of stopping. As soon as a new creature spawned, Sam just strapped them with another disc.

    While doing that, he worked on something else. He observed the formation structure and started tweaking with it to take control over. Once he gained the control, the first thing he did is to cut of the view of the others from it.

    Now, even if the four teams tried to break in, they wouldn''t be able to do so easily.

    After everything is done, Sam clicked his tongue and said.

    "I think we can leave now."

    "Where are we going? Are we not going to fight? I want to beat up the guys who nted this trap."

    "Not right now. As I said, my plot is way too borate and boring to be just messed up like this. Now this barrier and those overly increasing skeletal creatures are a perfect addition for this.

    Let it blow over and after that, until the end, you can just fight to your heart''s content. You will have more than enough enemies to do that."

 Chapter 2350: Burst Open

    Chapter 2350: Burst Open

    ?

    Sam activated shadow fusion and extended his hand to Rashma.

    "We are going through that path?"

    "That is the only spatial gateway that wouldn''t alert the four teams. The only other way is to break the barrier and I don''t want to do it."

    Rashma pursed her lips and held his hand.

    Sam activated Shadow transference and took her away from there. Far away, in a special spot Sam picked, Crow is waiting for them while fidgeting around. The spatial tear opened up revealing Sam and Rashma along with a ton of shadow energy that invaded the surroundings.

    Sam hurriedly treated Rashma, while the spatial tear closed. Once he removed all the shadow energy from her body, he left that spot once again. He arrived at a spot that is exactly the center between the first two trap zones.

    He took out a giant pir from his storage and nted it there.

    After that, he went to the center of the second and third trap zones. He once again nted another pir there.

    For the next few minutes, he kept on nting pirs. In the process, he did attract some enemies that tried to attack him. Some creatures that wanted a piece of him, however he never bothered to stop. He didn''t even retaliate. He just dodged, blocked and escaped as he nted pirs.

    Once he is done with nting at least one pir between two consecutive trap zones, he came back to the spot where the other two are waiting.

    "What''s next?"

    "We just wait. And then we will use the new trinket that I just made. It is working really good. I want to see to what extent that it will escte this situation."

    As Sam said, they just waited there.

    Meanwhile, the pirs that he ced at different spots started glowing. The glow also extended to the trap zones that he set up. The formations blocking the creatures from getting out of the trap zones are vibrating. The energy wavesing out of it spread far and wide, alerting all the candidates throughout the pocket dimension.

    Everyone whether they were fighting or escaping, stopped for a minute.

    Because along with the energy vibrations of the formations, they also felt something else. The collective aura of all the creatures trapped in those formations leaked out. Not even all of it, just a little bit.

    A small teeny tiny bit of it and that sent shivers down their spines.

    The violet creatures, just a couple of them are already a handful to them, but any one of the trap zones created by Sam has dozens of those creatures and they are multiplying with every passing second.

    Some of the people closest to the trap zones felt the effect the most and they immediately ran towards the formations. They wanted to check out what is happening and then they saw it.

    The trap zones are getting unstable.

    The creatures that are banging against the formation barriers, finally saw some results.

    It is not like these candidates haven''t seen the creatures and the trap zones before. They just ignored it and even thanked the person who trapped them in their hearts. The pocket dimension is fraught with danger and one less creature is one less trouble for them.

    They also just attributed the increase in the creatures inside the trap zones as a side effect of trapping them.

    After all, the creatures obviously will try to get out and in process get hurt which increases their number. But as long as they are not out of the barrier, who cares. At least, they didn''t.

    However, they didn''t expect they will being out now.

    Judging by the way, the energy is leaking out from all directions, they knew all those zones are going to burst out. Everyone tried to run to the spot where they could sense the least amount of energy. That made them all gather towards the center. However, the center is awfully close to the tunnel trap that was set up for Rashma.

    They weren''t able to enter the formation from outside. And they are unable to sense what is inside. Their vision was blocked and so were his senses. Before they could think of what is going to happen... it happened.

    The formations broke open.

    The creatures for some reason, all ran in the same direction. Towards the center. They didn''t go the other direction, towards the edge of the pocket dimension. Of course, it is not because of theck of trying.

    Some creatures, just wanted to run that direction to avoid the traffic of the other creatures, however the moment they did, an invisible barrier appeared and blocked their movements. They couldn''t move no matter how much they tried.

    Sam thing happened to the other participants. They were unable to go past that barrier as well. They tried to break it, but they couldn''t, not fast enough to escape from the swarm of the violet level creatures that are trying to get a piece of them.

    They also felt like the creatures are a bit... angry? If that is even possible?

    Hundreds of creatures flooded the pocket dimension. Sam, Crow and Rashma looked at the scene. They could feel the energy fluctuations, the creatures are rampaging over the area. They are not just attacking the candidates, they just destroyed everything. The ground, trees, rocks, and the participants.

    The only thing that they didn''t attack was the other creatures.

    The participants couldn''t even hold back anymore. They pulled out all of their tricks. Rashma''s grin went crazy. Her aura is raging, as if she finally got a new lease on life.

    "All these things. I can fight them. All of them..."

    Just when she was about to run off, Sam stopped her and tossed a spatial ring to her.

    "Do me a favor and strap those creatures with this, when you are done, send me a signal. An explosion of a creature up in the air over a fifty meters in the sky should do.

    Rashma nodded and disappeared from there."

    "What do you want to do?" Sam asked Crow.

    Crow gulped in nervousness.

    "This is way too much."

    "Of course it is. I just multiplied the danger of this ce by twelve, or fifteen, I don''t know exactly. But you ought to handle this carefully. Have more spatial transference tokens with you. Don''t get entangled in special spots that I have marked.

    My rmendation is that you don''t go out on your own."

    "You wille with me?"

    "Sure, why not? Just pick a target. You can fight with that target, I will keep the creatures from that ce away. I need to make those creatures more powerful. It will work both ways." "Why are you doing this? Why are you making this whole ce a mess? You have higher mobility than most, your escaping tricks... I have never seen someone using spatial blink like you do. You have the best control of all that I know of.

    You could have still performed and achieved what you wanted by dealing with these guys with

    your bag of tricks.

    Why are raging all this havoc?"

    "Crow, you have asked way too many questions and we have had way too many conversations until now. I think it is better if we move past this.

    Just assume that I am a fucking lunatic that likes to create trouble and all your questions are

    answered with just that one assumption.

    Now, pick a target and we will move on."

    Crow shrugged and indeed picked a target from the list Sam provided. Both of them used the spatial blink to reach there.

    It is a candidate from Poseidon academy. One of the guys Crow is acquainted with and kind of a rival. By the time Sam and Crow arrived there, he is had his blue hair covered in blood of his own. Two violet creatures and a bunch of other lower level creatures surrounded him.

    He is using all his strength to deal with him.

    He emptied half his energy reserves and is panting heavily. He has several tears and bruises all

    over his body.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    When he sensed the spatial fluctuations and saw the two people that arrived, he cursed under

    his breath.

    Crow didn''t miss the chance, he maneuvered through the gaps between the creatures and

    arrived at the candidate.

    Meanwhile, Sam let his shadow undead out and tangled around with the creatures. The undead carried his new trinkets and attached them on the creatures.

    Along with the shadows, he also let the shadow mice out. Making them hold the creatures

    down, while Crow and the opponent hand their little contest.

    "You... fighting me while we are in this shit? Gambler academy does create the twisted and

    self-centered idiots.

    Why don''t you meet me on the fair ground, Crow?"

    "Because I wouldn''t be able to do this."

    Crow slipped past an attack from the opponent and tried to stab him, when the opponent

    blocked, the stab became a blow that sent the opponent flying. Sam at the moment released one of the creatures, which happened to be in the way of the opponent''s flying trajectory, catching him with its good white teeth.

 Chapter 2351: Sleeping Prince

    Chapter 2351: Sleeping Prince

    ?

    Sam and Crow moved to their next target.

    They went after another Poseidon academy student. For whatever reason Crow decided to focus on one academy after another in taking down the opponents and Sam is all up for it. He has a beef with Olympian academies anyway.

    So, screwing them over while helping Crow wouldn''t even feel like he is putting in much effort.

    Of course, while he did so, he also made sure that he strapped the creatures with the trinkets.

    He noticed that effect of the trinket is higher on a higher level creature. So, it is best disyed on the violet level creature.

    Because for the violet level creatures, even though initially the skeleton is brokenpletely, as time passed and it recovered back from multiple breaks, the effect of the breaks is not as intense.

    It only left cracks over the body at one point and the skeleton healed quickly because of the trinket itself.

    This made the skeletons move even though they are getting injured and recovering. This also increased their energy density at an unprecedented level. Sam also noticed that the skeleton seemed to be reaching a certain limit as it went through the breaks and repairs again and again.

    He wondered what it holds after it reaches the peak of the violet level.

    After the second candidate is done, the third one also belonged to the Poseidon academy. Once they are done, they moved to the Ares academy students.

    One of them is already dead and the remaining two are at the same spot, critically injured. Crow who is still close to his hundred percent is more than enough to deal with them. After finishing them, their question continued for another thirty minutes, before they took a break.

    These people did put up a desperate struggle.

    And the creatures... there are just way too many.

    Sam and Crow went to one of the safe points they marked. It is a small crevice in the rocky terrain. He fixed up a formation that concealed them. They recovered. From that high altitude, they did get a decent view of the surroundings.

    The skeletal creatures are swarming the dimension. The candidates one after another, are either quitting or they are putting up a desperate fight, escaping from the creatures. None of them had any mind to go after other candidates.

    At this moment, only Sam and Crow are going after the other candidates. Even if they are not recognized as public enemies in this pocket dimension, Sam knew what will happen once they leave this ce.

    They might have already been marked by various academies.

    Since there is still a restriction on fights in the academy realm, they would be safe for now, however there would certainly be measures taken. The war between the academies has long spread outside of the realm and the attacks on the Gambler academy that toned down for now, will increase again.

    He also knows who will lead the charge this time.

    Surprisingly, it wouldn''t be the Olympian academies, or some other yer academies.

    As if it to prove his theory, outside the pocket dimension, in the camp of the Set''s academy, the elders are all gathered around the bed of one person.

    The young man who Sam bodied a few minutes ago. The guy who used that weird ck smoke that Sam inhaled to make it his.

    The young man is sleeping on the bed with a peaceful expression, that is asionally disturbed by a frown or teeth clench.

    The elder stood beside him as he controlled a formation attached to the bed, trying to heal the young man.

    The young man really didn''t suffer much damage from Sam''s attacks. It was mostly physical injuries and they are not something uncurable. They are in fact very curable. However, even after all the injuries are gone, that guy is not waking up.

    Another elder just entered the room with a solemn look and asked.

    "Has the Prince shown any sign of improvement?"n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "No, the separation from the fog is showing its ugly face. His constitution is going rampant, his soul and body are not strong enough to sustain that spiritual core without the assistance

    of the fog. We need to get it as fast as possible.

    What is the status on that?" The first elder asked.

    "He is still in the pocket dimension and he is stirring it up. He has been on an edge ever since The entered that dimension."

    "When do you think we can expect him out?"

    "Judging by the way it is going, he will either turn out to be a winner or he will die soon."

    "Then let''s hope for the former. He must not die in there. If he dies while being in possession of the fog... I can''t even imagine the consequences if the fog disappears."

    "If he really dies with that fog in his possession, the fog disappearing is least of our worries. The very fact that he managed to suppress it without decaying into a pile of dead tissue is already something beyond our understanding, so he might just trigger something involving the passage.

    So, we need to get our hands on the fog as soon as hees out."

    "But, are you sure we can do that?"

    The conversation came to an abrupt halt at that question. They might not have been directly involved with Sam, however they are sure that he is not an easy guy to deal with. He captured that fog intentionally, so they have to assume that it will not be an easy task retrieving it from

    him.

    And both of the elders know about it.

    After some pause, one of them spoke.

    "Just keep an eye on him and tried to talk with f about getting a direct meeting with the candidates. If something looks like its really going wrong, you talk to Chorus and make him

    give up on Sam''s behalf so that he can get out.

    Until then, I will keep prince in his sleep so that he stays stable."

 Chapter 2352: Black Skeleton

    Chapter 2352: ck Skeleton

    ?

    The Set academy''s elders'' tension was not the only thing happening outside.

    There is another group of people that are currently sitting in a dark room. There is arge table in the middle of those ten people projecting a three dimensional holographic image of the pocket dimension.

    These are the elders from various academies sent to represent their respective academies in handling the pocket dimension.

    The undead creatures, constant spawning and upgrading of their threat levels has made this one of the most unique pocket dimensions that ever opened up in the Academy realm. So, the academies were extra cautious in handling it and installed a unique surveince method that cost them a dozen fortunes.

    In the projection, they can see the markers of various colors identifying the locations of the skeletal creatures as well as other special creatures like the tree-man.

    Surprisingly, they are also marked with the same colors that used to categorize them. From white to violet. And each type of marker is also of different size, indicating their energy levels.

    There are also markers indicating the positions of the candidates inside.

    At the moment, all their eyes are focused on only three particr spots. All three are of the violet creature markers and they are the biggest in the size among all the markers on the table.

    "These creatures... they went past the previous testing limits. Their energy density is higher than all the creatures. The energy density and level of all three put together is higher than the enegry level of all the other creatures in therebined. It is almost a boon that these creatures don''t actually have living bodies with muscles and flesh. The skeleton body actually made them a bit more fragile. If they could have energyworks and a way to handle that energy... these kids will have the run for their money."

    One of the elders said, with a faint hint of excitement in his tone.

    "Why do you sound so happy about this?" Another elder said.

    "If anything we have to be worried about this. We tested the pocket dimension a dozen times, we barely managed to push around a dozen creatures to violet level at the same time. But now we have dozens, even more than a hundred now. These three... their energy density, I have a bad feeling about this." A different elder said.

    "Based on my calctions, they are soon going to reach the estimated limit of violet level creatures. We don''tknow what will happen after it reaches the limit. The growth patterns are also not exactly clear for us to guess what will happen."

    "I guess we will find out."

    One of the elders created a separate projection beside the original one and that gave the actual image of what is happening in the pocket dimension. A skeletal creature, to be precise the Giant humanoid skeleton. simr to the one Sam encountered as soon as he entered the pocket dimension is standing there in the middle of rampaging creatures.

    It didn''t even move. It came to aplete standstill as the trinket Sam attached to it glowed. It constantly kept on gathering enegry, while the skeleton absorbed it in real time. There are no signs of broken spots, or cracks, but the creature is absorbing energy non-stop. Sam who was taking a break along with Crow also sensed the weird behavior of the skeleton. He took off with Crow and reappeared, keeping a decent distance between this Giant skeleton and themselves.

    He activated energy vision to absorb what kind of change is happening.

    Then he noticed that the raging violet enegry around the creature has be lot more refined. It is not as raging as before and in fact is pretty tame. Of course, tame doesn''t mean it is less dangerous.

    Sam felt the most threat from that one skeleton among all the threats he faced ever since he entered the pocket dimensions and his gut instinct is screaming to him with every passing second, indicating that the skeleton is bing more and more dangerous.

    Sam also noticed a ting of ck to the violet energy through the energy vision.

    After a couple of minutes, he did not even need the energy vision, because the bones of the skeleton started changing color.

    Started with a faint grey hue, then a slight grey shade, then the shade became darker and finally it ended up bing ck.

    It didnt even take long. The whole process onlysted five minutes.

    However, that is not the end of it, as Sam expected. Once the whole skeleton reached the ck color, the remaining enegry that was gathering into its bony body until now, started gathering at the central point of the skeleton.

    It basically turned into an orb, that hovered in the rib cage of the skeleton. While the orb became bigger, the energy enveloping the skeleton also started bing visible to the naked eye.

    The energy is like a me, but a ck me. Sam who is the cause of all this, had a bad feeling about this. Along with that bad feeling there is also an unknown excitement that he couldn''t really express.

    His only goal ining to this academy tournament is to wreak havoc as much as he could and turn the enemies more hostile. He didn''t even have the intention to join the teambat.

    And even before he entered he gained way too much from this tournament and he was pretty satisfied.

    However, at this moment, he felt like joining the teambat might just be the best decision he made after entering the tournament.

    The Giant skeleton, whatever it is... It is a threat that few people could handle. And just from the energy spike, Sam knew that it is long past the peak stage of second grade.

    It is very close to the third grade level than the second grade and these candidates, even with all the tricks... Sam doesn''t know if they will be able to handle it.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    He excited to what the consequences of this would be.

    Of course, not everyone shared Sam''s excitement. A different candidate nearby observed the energy fluctuations and came here, of course he is entangled with a bunch of other creatures as he observed the ck skeleton transformation.

    But when he sensed the energying out of the ck skeleton, he immediately pulled out his trump card.

    A spear with an energy that could drown a continent into the sea is thrown at the skeleton.

    The spear destroyed a few skeletons on the way, without even touching them. The residual energy that it left behind on its trail was enough to do that.

    However, when it hit the ck skeleton.

    *BANG*

    The spear was stopped at the moment of contact and the recoil force was so strong that the shaft buckled into itself. But there was not even a scratch on the skeleton. Because for there to be a scratch there has to be some form of impact. But the force didn''t even reach the skeleton''s surface.

    It was stopped by the ck energy that covered its body. The sound of the spear hitting something solid didn''te from its impact on the skeleton, rather from its impact on the

    energy.

    The candidate is ck jawed, and his knees buckled just from that sight. He cannot believe that the attack he put everything in, was just negated like that.

    But he didn''t have enough time to stay there and process it. He is not exactly in a safe situation. The skeletons pounced on him, while the ck skeleton didn''t seem to want to bother with him for attacking.

    It looked around for a moment and its eyes finallynded on Crow. Sam frowned and looked at Crow and then at the skeleton.

    Before he could understand what is happening, the skeleton disappeared into a ck sh.

    *SWOOSH*

    It ran through the sky and threw a punch at Crow.

    As the ck bony fist of the skeleton came at him, Crow froze on the spot. His body didn''t

    heed hismands or thoughts. A feeling... as if he is being devoured by something superior, something extraordinarily evil invaded his mind.

    He knew he should try and dodge, but he also knew for some reason, he should just surrender

    and die.

    Just when he was about to be embraced by that feeling.

    *BOOM*

    The fist was intercepted. Sam kicked it from the side before it could make contact with Crow.

    He used the recoil style, while he held the Crow''s cor. The skeleton''s fist was deflected, but

    it didn''t break and neither did the skeleton fly away.

    However, Sam and Crow did fly away without much trouble.

    They crashed into a group of other skeletons that tried to pounce on them.

    With a few energy bullets flying around, the path cleared up. However, before they could slip

    out, the ck skeleton came at them. It went after Crow once again. Sam''s earlier interception, did nothing to attract its hostility towards him.

    This time, Sam didn''t even have time to intercept the attack. He could only kick Crow out of

    the way and then followed after him.

    While they are still in mid-air, he used spatial blink.

    The ck skeleton halted its charge and looked around.

 Chapter 2353: Change

    Chapter 2353: Change

    ?

    The killing intent emitted by that ck skeleton went away immediately.

    The difference is night and day. Now, it just looked like a dumb undead creature created by the most useless necromancer to ever exist. As it walked, it even bumped into the other undead creatures as if it didn''t know how to dodge. It appeared a bit clumsy. However, it is still fast.

    After looking around for a couple of minutes, the light in its eyes returned and it suddenly charged straight ahead. It didn''t even bother with the presence of other skeletons. As it charged, those skeletons were destroyed.

    At the same time, in the direction the skeleton was charging in, a young man just stood on a giant rock while panting.

    He just destroyed a couple of skeletons and is resting as those skeletons tried to recover.

    He held a bone in his hand. He tried to push it in his storage and even divine dimension fragment, but he couldn''t.

    "It figures."

    He muttered to himself as he watched the bone in his hand tremble as it tried to go back to the skeleton it came from.

    He gritted his teeth, turned around and threw it with all his strength.

    While he is throwing that, he felt a sense of threat.

    He looked down to see his own shadow moving. A hand came out of the shadow, holding a de aimed at him.

    He froze on the spot, unable to move. Just when he thought he was done for.

    *BOOM*

    A ck sh came out of nowhere and hit the rock he was standing on. He was blown away by the impact and crashed into the ground. On his way down, he saw the ck sh transforming into a ck skeleton.

    That ck skeleton''s arm caught a hold of the ck shadow arm that was aimed at him. The skeleton pulled the shadow which extended out like an stic band out of which a human being came out of.

    The skeleton used its other arm and stabbed into the human''s chest. More than stabbing, it should be called severing the body in half. The moment, the fingers made contact, the body split into two parts.

    He is one of the candidates.

    After that guy is done, the skeleton turned towards the young man that was still on the floor.

    He immediately turned around and started running at the top speed. The skeleton followed him.

    It didn''t even take a minute for the skeleton to catch up to him. Just when he thought his head was about to get blown off, the skeleton halted. It turned around and looked in a different direction, where a woman was standing looking at the scene.

    She shivered in fright upon feeling the skeleton''s gaze. Before she could react, the skeleton came and ripped her head off.

    The first target was stunned.

    He took the chance to turn around and run in a different direction.

    He was not only one who was shocked by this abnormal behavior though. The elders watching this through the projection are equally surprised.

    In the projection, they can see arge orb of ck light shing through, indicating the position and the movement of the ck skeleton.

    In the side projection, they can also see the exploits of the ck skeleton.

    "Why is it behaving so weirdly?"

    One of the elders asked in confusion.

    Meanwhile, another one of the elders has already arrived at a solution.

    He projected a few lists that showed the kill count of the students inside the pocket dimension.

    "The ck skeleton is picking up the strongest living prey around it. Among the two candidates, Sam and Crow, thetter has more kills in the pocket dimension. So, even though Sam directly interrupted its advance, it went after Crow, adamantly.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Once they disappeared, since there are no living prey in the immediate surroundings, it started searching around.

    Once a living prey appeared in its radar it went in that direction.

    In between that two kids, the shadow kid had more kills, so it went after him, even though the other kid was an easier target.

    When the other kid was running away and the skeleton was about to bust his head open, that woman appeared in the radar, who had more kills, so it changed targets."

    The elders quickly connected the dots. They were intrigued and wanted to study more.

    One of them also raised another observation.

    "The energy density of the ck skeleton. It is not changing when it is idle. It only changed when it killed a living creature.

    And there seemed to be a qualitative change too. Our surveince doesn''t pick the energy signatures clearly. We could have had a much better analysis in that case."

    All the elders seemed to be in a research mode instead of just surveince mode. They are just focused on observing the changes of the pocket dimension as well as the skeletons.

    They don''t seen interested in the lives of the participants.

    And to reinforce their intriguing minds, another ck dot appeared in the map.

    At a different corner of the pocket dimension. A gori skeleton has transformed into a ck skeleton. This one is much faster and much more agile than the giant skeleton and its killing methods are also a lot more ruthless.

    It exuded the same behavior as the Giant skeleton. It also went after the target that has the higher kill count.

    Within a few minutes of the first two ck skeletons, the third one appeared in a different corner of the pocket dimension.

    Judging by their pattern, soon they will kill everyone in the pocket dimension until no living creature is left.

    While these ck skeletons are running rampant over the pocket dimension, Sam brought crow to a secure location. Thetter is still in a shock. His body is shivering while he soaked in

    his own sweat.

    Sam closed his eyes and used his soul energy to interfere with his state of fear.

    "You are alright. Snap out of it."

    Crow took deep breaths and came back to himself.

    "That thing... what the fuck is it?"

    "I don''t know. But my guess is that is thetest stage of evolution in the skeletal creatures of

    this ce.

    And it is damn powerful. You are lucky that I was there besides you. You would have had your head knocked off your neck if I wasn''t there."

    "I know. Thank you.

    That creature... it had such weird energy. It felt so evil. I don''t even know why it felt like that."

    "My guess is that it is the result of all the blood thirst in the surroundings gathered into the creature along with the umted energy.

    I was wondering what happened to that. It didn''t invade the bodies of the students as much as

    I expected.

    I guess it is going to the skeletons."

    "What should we do now? That thing... you created that thing."

    "No, I merely elerated its creation process. I don''t want credit for something I didn''t do.

    As for what we should do? We just need to continue what we were doing before. That too if

    you can be sure that you won''t piss your pants."

    "That''s reaaal funny."

    "I know it is not. My concern was serious."

    "Alright, if you think its fine, let''s go ahead and continue the hunt."

    "Okay, just be careful. We will be close to the giant skeleton more and more. To observe how it works. I might just pull you out of a fight at any given moment."

    "No problem."

    Sam then took Crow to their next target. A target close to the ck skeleton. And Sam started

    making observations. Just like Sam guessed, he had to pull Crow out of the fight several times.

    And through that, he managed to observe everything the elders did through the projector screen and then some.

    As time passed and the energy density and nature of the ck skeleton changed. And that change incited a specific behavior.

    At first it is very minute. However, he recognized the pattern soon enough. Along with that,

    the change in the energy nature itself is a big indicator of something else, which made him estimate what will be the final picture of this pocket dimension by the end of the twenty-four hour time limit.

 Chapter 2354: Failed Contingencies

    Chapter 2354: Failed Contingencies

    ?

    As Sam studied the ck skeletons, the outside world is very much in silent chaos.

    The elders who understood theplexity and the possible threat of the ck skeletons, immediately pushed the news to the Deans of the respective academies. Of course, even if they didn''t, since everyone worth their salt is already watching the live broadcast of thepetition also understood what is happening in there.

    They might not have the same insight as these elders. They don''t know the energy density, transformation parameters and such.

    But their experienced eye did catch the fact that these ck skeletons are way too strongpared to the other skeletons. They also identified the killing pattern of these ck skeletons. They didn''t have the urate stats, but they did keep track of the kills of the students and they understood what is happening.

    They are also not stupid enough to not known what will be the end result.

    So, everyone is panicking and are sending secret messages to f, asking him to see if the pocket dimension is still safe.

    f is also feeling a bit of pressure.

    He called one of the elders in charge of monitoring and asked.

    "What are energy levels of the pocket dimension like? Are they suitable for forceful transference?"

    The elder pursed his lips. That reaction was enough to make f understand the answer even without any words.

    "I was given a guarantee that it wouldn''t be a problem to pull out the second grade students, no matter what happens inside the pocket dimension if an emergency situation arises.

    From the looks of it, those ck skeletons are clearly capable of creating such an emergency. Now, you are saying.... No, you are not even saying anything. You better have a good exnation for this."

    "Sir, we... when we tested the pocket dimension, we used the death row candidates and beasts to push the pocket dimension to its limits.

    No matter what kind of scenario we created, the creatures only reached violet level. However, what we never anticipated is the creatures no matter humans or beasts, always tried to resist the creatures. However, this time... the guy named Sam, he created conditions to increase the number as well as the level of the creatures.

    The environment is already veryplimentary for their growth. But this guy optimized it. We never even dreamed of such a scenario happening. So, we are not prepared for this."

    "Are you not ashamed to say this? You already experienced difficulties in emergency transference before. Even with your shoddy testing. Shouldn''t you have prepared for more? Why am I giving you guys so many resources for your research if you brains are so muddled with cob webs?

    You are no good for battles, you don''t operate in front lines, when academies are attacked, you will even escape in the name of preserving legacy and now, the one thing that you should be doing, you are failing.

    Inside that pocket dimension, we trapped the star kids of all the academies in the academy realm.

    More than half of them already ended up dead, and the half of the remaining are seriously injured before they quit.

    Whoever is left is inside is the cream of the crop. They are talents being groomed for the next year''s tournament. With all the loss suffered by these academies in the solobat, do you think they will be willing to let go of these as well?"

    "I am sorry, sir. We will think of a way."

    The elder turned around before f could speak and left.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    He is way too nervous. The pocket dimension is so new that they didn''t even put a name for it. f and the other deans, took the coincidence of this dimension appearing right before the tournament, way too seriously.

    They decided to make it as the teampetition grounds.

    After testing it repeatedly, they knew that the threat level varies depending on the people that went in.

    With a lot of research and resources, they managed to figure out a way. They tapped into the pocket dimensions, core and constructed a formation that allowed them to do a live surveince of it. They spent way too much, particrly when they are in a crisis created by Hub and Sam.

    Since they don''t know what the threat level could be and what kind of crisis this could lead to, they even decided to add a contingency n. A spatial transference feature that could be used in emergencies.

    Apart from the escape through the token and giving up, they added a backdoor space gate.

    It helps them pull out a candidate forcefully. However, they also noticed some resistance to that process.

    Depending on the threat level, this resistance increases. At violet level, they already faced a lot of resistance. They almost failed to bring back the people from inside. However, now... the ck levelpletely blocked them out.

    When ck skeleton appeared, everyone of the elders from every academy went into slight panic state. They didn''t want to lose their candidates and kept on sending the messages.

    With the way things are going, it would only be a matter of few minutes before they start withdrawing their candidates. However, without the backdoor mechanism, they wouldn''t be able to bring them outside.

    He just prayed to Thor that no one would submit their withdrawal.

    However, maybe to throw cold water at his prayers, at that exact moment, something else happened inside.

    A Snake skeleton stopped rampaging and the color of its energy started changing. The fourth ck creature. By now, most of the people witnessed the ck skeletons and understood the

    threat.

    There are only a couple of hours left for the twenty-four hour time limit. So, they solidified their hearts and tried to stay inside the pocket dimension, while they avoided the ck

    skeletons.

    But the fourth creature, indicated that there could be a fifth, a sixth and seventh one.

    Of course, not all of them have the means to bepletely away from these creatures.

    One of the Hephaestus academy students was not fast enough and was stuck between a swarm of skeletons covering three sides, and a ck skeleton on one side.

    The skeleton hit him too badly that he couldn''t even take the token out and escape. He is semi-conscious, because of the killing intent of the ck skeleton ravaging his head.

    The elder of the Hephaestus academy immediately ran out of the booth he was sitting in and yelled out loud.

    "We give up. That is thest student from our academy. We are not willing to lose him."

    f who was already feeling like he sat on a seat of nails, clenched his palms against the armrest. He crushed them in an instant as he got up. He walked towards the dark room held by the elders in charge of observation.

    "The Hephaestus academy has appealed for a withdrawal. Their candidate is in the hands of that giant ck skeleton. For some reason it is toying with him, instead of killing him. He

    won''tst more than a minute.

    And that is what I am giving you.

    In a minute, he should be out of there. If not, then I will make you all dearly pay thepensation for costing the Hephaestus academy, their prodigy."

    He left without waiting for their reply.

    f went back to his seat. Sat there with his back straight and addressed the elders.

    "We have a problem with the emergency backdoor we prepared. We do not know if we can retrieve your participants, even if you withdraw from thepetition. We also do not know what will happen in the pocket dimension in the next few days.

    I am going to face whatever consequences you impose up on me in case we are unable to bring

    your students back.

    So, I implore you that you do not act recklessly."

    That is it. That is all he said.

    f gave a sweeping nce to the people around him and they all just stood or sat there in

    silence. They didn''t raise any objections, they didn''t throw any tantrums. They just looked at him calmly. However, a million thoughts ran through their heads as they watched the live footage of what is happening inside the pocket dimension.

    As the time passed, more and more creatures went to be the ck skeletons. When the number reached ten, the Elders suddenly realized something else. One of them ran

    out and flew towards f in panic.

    "Sir...som..something happened."

    f looked at him with the same cold gaze. He didn''t even show a tinge of emotion or

    concern on his face.

    The Elder is soaked in sweat. He couldn''t bring himself to speak. The fear is consuming him. However, he knew that he has to speak up now.

    "The withdrawal mechanism has failedpletely. Now, even the candidates cannot withdraw even using their tokens. They are stuck there. Unless the conditions of the pocket

    dimension are met, they will not be able toe out."

    Dead silence.

 Chapter 2355: First ever destruction

    Chapter 2355: First ever destruction

    ?

    Inside the pocket dimension.

    Sam and other participants are not aware of the silentmotion outside. However, they are aware of the apparent threat inside. While the elder is breaking the bad news, Sam is currently hovering over one of the formation pirs he had nted.

    Crow is currently resting while sitting on the pir. A concealment formation of the highest level that Sam could create is separating them from the rest of the pocket dimension.

    Their location is not too far away from the scene that is currently the focus of the elders and the other audience. The Giant ck skeleton, which usually killed opponent with a single strike, is currently toying around with one of the participants in a yful manner.

    Even though its bony skull face is devoid of any form of expression, the bodynguage indicated that it is definitely toying around. Sam could see it, the student that was being toyed around could see it.

    Other people that are in the vicinity could see it and eve the audience outside the pocket dimension could see it.

    That is a very huge behavioral changepared to how the ck skeletons acted before.

    They didn''t think. They just targeted the living creature that had the most kills. Now, they are ying around. The only reason Sam observed is the change in energy density and energy quality. With all his enhanced senses that is all he could deduce.

    The blood lust in the skeletons became more refined and more malleable.

    Which means, the skeletons are controlling it by will. Which is always a bad thingpared to unfettered and unbridled blood lust.

    He also noticed something else. The failure of the escape tokens.

    The candidate that is currently under the abuse of the ck giant skeleton, already used his escape token to withdraw from thepetition. However, he wasn''t able to leave. He didn''t feel that suction force that could send him out.

    Despair enveloped him like a nket of darkness. Maybe his heart and mind gave in realizing that he is at the death''s door, they stopped working. His chest tightened and his brain went numb. He couldn''t think of anything else other than dying.

    He wanted to die.

    At least that is what his mind told him. It is informing him on his desire for death. However, no matter how much he waited, the death is noting. The giant skeleton kept on toying with him. It hit him with controlled power and caught him even before he couldnd.

    It them stabbed him slightly in the stomach, making his insides churn.

    It tore his ligaments with a swipe of its bony fingers on him. He felt pain like never before as the foreign energy ravaged his body.

    Every cell of his being hurt like hell and he died slowly absorbing all that pain. Sam hovered down and spoke to Crow.

    "Situation is getting a bit out of hand. I want you to be extra careful now."

    "Why? What is happening?"

    "The withdrawal mechanism of the tokens is bust. You cannot leave the pocket dimension by breaking it. There is a good chance that the forceful contingency mechanism of the academies also stopped working.

    If it worked, they would have pulled that guy out of here.

    That means, we need to find the natural way out of this pocket dimension."

    Crow became a bit nervous. He has seen the wrath of those ck skeletons. He knew that the threat is real.

    "This whole thing became a whole lot interesting."

    Sam muttered to himself as he watched the ck skeleton once again start roaming to find its next target.

    "You made it a whole lot interesting."

    Crow corrected Sam and thetter only shrugged in response.

    "I am sure the others also noticed this. What do you think they are going to do?" Crow asked.

    "Why think? I am already observing their movements. Some people are gathering together. There are two groups formed at the moment and there is a great chance that they will be

    one soon.

    The ck skeleton count is increasing. We already have six. With the aid of my trinkets and the atmosphere in general, they will keep on increasing. There is no way, anyone could deal with them individually.

    Someone will try to unite all the remaining candidates to put up a fight against these -creatures."

    "Then, are we joining them?"

    "We will see." Sam paused for a moment, he is looking at something through his specter and a smile appeared on his face.

    "Let''s go."

    "Where to?"

    "One of the ck skeletons found Rashma''s location. You might want to see this."

    Both of them moved. Soon, they appeared at Rashma''s location. By the time they arrived, the ck skeleton and Rashma are already engaging. The sight in front of them made sam smile and Crow''s mouth wide open.

    "What the fuck is this?" Crow yelled out loud in shock.

    At the moment, Rashma is mmed exchanging blows directly with a ck skeleton. The skeleton is the Gori skeleton that transformed second. It is also most tricky of all the ck

    skeletons ording to Sam.

    However, Rashma is matching its speed and having a straight up slug fest with it. Both of them hit each other without holding back. Rashma ate those punches up without even a change of expression. Except for that wild grin, there is not even a wince of pain on her face.

    So, while the ck skeleton even failed at prating that smile, Rashma on the other hand prated that thick and dense energy around the skeleton and made contact with the bones. With every punch a crack appeared on the ck skeleton and its stable energy fluctuated to heal that crack.

    Its healing really fast and getting back to its original state, pretty quick. But it is clearly being slowed down. Rashma''s fast and precise attacks are widening the crack before they could feel. She just targeted the right shoulder of the creature and kept on battering on the same spot. Not a single person has shown such fierce exchange with a ck skeleton until now. Even when Sam kicked it with the recoil style, the most he managed to do was push it to the side and deflect its direction. He didn''t manage to crack it. And that is when the Giant ck skeleton was just formed. In this short time it has grown a lot.

    *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

    The exchange continued.

    Rashma''s grin stayed like that as she reveled in the feeling of an equal fight.

    In that state of ecstasy, she pushed the skeleton''s shoulder, but the other party seemed to have anticipated it and caught a hold of her arm before it couldnd. Rashma used that grip as leverage and jumped up to throw a two legged kick aimed at the shoulder.

    *CRACK*

    The legs went through the skeleton pulverizing that targeted joint. The skeleton''s arm fell off, with its cor bone and shoulder de shattered into fragments.

    The ck skeleton slowed down for the first time. As the hand went back, Sam observed that

    its energy absorption has slowed down by arge margin.

    Usually, when a skeleton breaks, its energy absorption and capacity increases. Here, the

    capacity didn''t increase. It is almost like it is saturating.

    Rashma stood at the side, breaking a couple of other skeletons while it waited for the ck skeleton to assemble again.

    When the ck skeleton finally came to its original shape, Sam saw something different in the

    energy vision.

    The energy that started with raging intensity around the skeleton has finally died down in its

    intensity.

    It is calm and circting in the skeleton just like how the spiritual energy of a cultivator would. It is only changed in its speed or intensity when the skeleton moved which is also the

    same as a cultivator.N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Sam also saw something else. Within the core of the skeleton, a red saturated mass of energy

    appeared.

    It was only visible through the energy vision and he is sure that it wasn''t there before.

    "Rashma, break it again."

    Sam said out loud.

    Rashma didn''t even turn to look at him. But nodded her head. Her aura raged, much fierce

    than before. After a fierce exchange of blows, the cracks started appearing on the ck

    skeleton again.

    She went on full brawling mode. As he rampaged, soon the arm broke off again. She was about

    to step back and wait for it to recover. But Sam spoke.

    "Don''t. Finish it off. I want you to break its rib cage and the spine as well."

    Rashma didn''t respond. Instead she pounced on the skeleton and started tearing it apart. Her punches soon destroyed the targets that Sam wanted her to destroy.

    The Skeleton is on the ground. In pieces. The ck skeletonid down on the ground in pieces.

    There are no signs of regeneration. No signs of it getting back into shape. For the first time since they arrived in the pocket dimension a skeleton was actually destroyed.

 Chapter 2356: Negotiations

    Chapter 2356: Negotiations

    ?

    As soon as the skeleton is destroyed, Sam made a move.

    *SWOOSH* *SWOOSH*

    *BOOM*

    Rashma who just finished off such a critical opponent also made a move. He punched straight ahead in the empty air. To her surprise, Sam actually blocked her move. He was almost sent flying, if not for her timely stop, maybe he would have.

    As for why he blocked his attack? In the original trajectory of her punch stood a stunned and stupefied young woman who is from Apollo''s academy. She is soaked in sweat, shivering as if she was thrown into the harshest and whitest of the winters.

    Sam looked at her and said.

    "You should really think twice before you make a move. Just because the other two members of your team are dead because of idiocy, doesn''t mean you should walk the same path as them."

    The woman came out of her stupor and gritted her teeth.

    Her aura raged as if she wanted to attack Sam, but thetter just clicked his tongue and said. "Don''t bother. You know it will not end well. For you tond an attack on me, you will have to use all the things up your sleeve, for me to kill you, all I have to do is step aside."

    The woman, who is named Grethen, controlled her anger as her gaze met with Rashma''s. Judging by thetter''s expression, it is obvious that she will kill her if Sam asks her to.

    "Now that you calmed down, do you mind exining your sudden move? I thought you were just spying for your new boss, that is why I didn''t say anything. But making a move on her? Particrly, after seeing what she did to that skeleton a couple of minutes ago? That is in idiotic."

    Grethen ignored Sam and looked at Rashma.

    "I need to talk to you.

    I don''t know if you understand the situation of the pocket dimension at the moment. But if you want to get out of here safely, we need to work together."

    Rashma looked at her without answering.

    Sam shrugged and waved his hand. The bones of the skeleton started flying towards him and into his storage.

    Grethen extended her hand and caught one of them. However, she wasn''t able to store it away. Sam''s force is still pulling it.

    "You better let that go." Sam spoke calmly.

    The woman ignored him once again and said.

    "It is you who destroyed this skeleton and look at this parasite already iming the spoils. You know what kind of person he is. He is nothing but an opportunist who colluded with the Hub to work against the academy realm as a whole.

    In a situation like this... you have to keep your back safe from him.

    So, please let''s talk privately."

    Sam sighed and turned to Rashma.

    "You want to talk to her? Or work with them? She is currently working with a bunch of other students from Olympian region, Norse region and some other smaller academies. You want to go there?"

    Sam''s question was direct and now, Rashma gave an answer.

    "What do you want to do?"

    Sam smiled and turned to Grethen.

    "You heard her. She is part of the Gambler academy team and I will be talking on behalf of the Gambler academy students. There is no need for our star fighter to take the burden of talking with external people like you.

    And before we talk, you better let that bone go. Or, I will take more than a bone."

    Grethen was unwilling to let go and looked at Sam a tad bit stubbornly.

    The next moment, she suddenly felt a hit of pain on the shoulder. She noticed that a very thin tear has appeared there with a faint streak of blood dripping out. She gulped nervously and let go of the bone.

    But by then, the small tear turned into a huge tear, revealing her bone inside.

    "Fuck."

    She cursed out loud and started treating her arm. She didn''t speak while she did that and fell into a deep thought. After some hesitation she finally spoke.

    "I am sure, you understood the situation. The ck skeletons are way too powerful. Including Rashma, only three people managed to leave a nick on those skeletons. However, the count of the ck skeletons is increasing.

    And the idiotic thing you did to help them grow even more... the situation is out of hand. We cannot use the escape tokens.

    We need to work together.

    Currently, Drik from Loki academy is leading the team. He is the strongest among us. There is also another team being led by Hari from the Karthikeya academy. Our team members also sent an envoy to them and we are sure that we will be working together as well.

    The team also spread out to find people that strayed. The only one left is Rashma and I am here to bring her with me."

    "Only Rashma?"n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Sam asked with a smirk and a raised eyebrow.

    Grethen pursed her lips without saying anything. She knew Sam is smart enough to know the hidden meaning behind what she said. She need not exin herself more.

    Sam turned to Crow and Rashma and said, "I am guessing, you have no qualms about me making decisions?"

    Both of them shook their heads. Sam nodded and said to Grethen.

    "Alright, we wille along with you."

    "Let me guide you. I have created spots with concealment formations. I also put up some surveince formations around. We need to avoid the skeletons and move while halting in these concealment formations."

    Sam rolled his eyes and said.

    "No need. Just take these."

    Sam gave a few space tokens for all three of them and told them to break in a certain order.

    After three tokens, all three of them appeared near a structure that looked like a huge tent. The only difference is its conjured by the ck mud.

    Someone used their earth element to construct it.

    Inside, there are around thirty plus people from different academies. They are not the whole team though. Some people are out there scouting and fetching other people. ording to Sam''s calctions, there are a little more than a hundred people left. Two hundred people are out of thepetition, but most of them are dead. From what the specters checked, the team led by Hari only has around twenty five to thirty people. The team

    lead by Drik has fifty people. The remaining are strays.

    They are being recruited by both the teams at the moment.

    When the trio from Gambler academy walked in, they could feel the gazes of surprise. No one expected all three of them to be here.

    And one of the Olympian academy candidates spoke their thoughts out loud.

    "Grethen, why did you bring all three? You mission is to only bring on person, Rashma. Why

    did you bring that extra baggage here?"

    Grethen gritted her teeth, but didn''t answer. She couldn''t care less about what these thought

    and turned to Sam.

    "You three wait here. I will bring Drik here. This is the outer area. You are only allowed until

    this point until you join the team."

    She didn''t wait for an answer.

    Crow sneered and said.

    "These guys seemed to have nned to stay here for a long time. They even established hierarchy. Do you really think that we should work together with them?"

    He didn''t hide his tone and spoke out loud. This of course attracted a few sharp and scornful

    gazes.

    Sam just chuckled and said.

    "We will see." Soon, Drik came out of the room with a deep frown. He looked at Sam and said.

    "We are not interested to work with you. We are only interested in talking to Rashma." He

    came straight to the point.

    "You can try. I don''t really have any objections." Sam said directly even stepped to the side

    and gesturing him to talk to Rashma.

    But Rashma frowned and said.

    "Talk to him, or we leave."

    That is all she said. She didn''t even look at Drik.

    "Now, do you want to talk to me?"

    Drik hesitated and said. "How can we even trust you? Would you trust yourself if you are in my ce?"

    "First of all, that ''what if'' scenario you just mentioned... cross it off your mind and never think

    of it again. I will not be in your position. Never.

    Second of all, what choice do you have?

    I will be honest. At the moment, I came here with these two, just because I am curious. I didn''te here out of necessity. Right now, I have the most information, I have the most things set up in the pocket dimension, I have most number of bag of tricks and finally, I have the strongest fighter in the pocket dimension with me.

    The only fighter who has yet to actually defeat a skeleton and no less a ck skeleton. If anything, I should be asking you questions about why we should even join you."

 Chapter 2357: Trap

    Chapter 2357: Trap

    ?

    The whole room is in absolute silence.

    No one spoke.

    "Seems like none of you have an answer. I hope the neers do."

    As he spoke, few people just walked in. Hari, the leader of the second group came along with two other members of Drik''s team. Hari had a smile on his face as he stomped in like he owned his ce.

    "We got quite a party here." He walked to Sam and extended his hand.

    "Hari. Nice to meet you, Sam."

    Sam shook his hand and replied.

    "Nice to meet you too. I heard from a grapevine that your team ising along quite nice."

    "Yeah, it is. Until Drik''sckeys came along. I heard they wanted to discuss something with me. But I didn''t hear anything about you. Are you here for the same thing?"

    "Nope, not really. I came here uninvited. To negotiate on behalf of my friend. I hope they gave you more details."

    Hari looked at Drik who gritted his teeth and cursed under his breath. This is thest thing he wanted. He didn''t want Sam here in the first ce and he definitely didn''t want Sam and Hari to fraternize like this.

    From the looks of it, it is highly likely that Sam and Hari could team up before they discuss any deal with Drik.

    This made it easier for him toe to a conclusion.

    "Come with me, both of you. Rashma, you too. Follow us."

    Sam, Rashma, Hari and Drik all went into a room.

    It is a standard meeting room, with arge round table and chairs. Sam looked at his and chuckled.

    "You guys are nning to stay here for a long time. What the hell is wrong with you?"

    He is genuinely confused. It seems like these people epted their fate way too readily. Why would they create a building with meeting rooms and stuff if they are nning to go away?n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "We had a meeting out in the open a few hours ago.

    Our experts in necromancy and formations imed that taking down the ck skeletons is next to impossible. We need to spend our time here, nning on isting one of them and studying it to find out a way.

    Until then we need to stay here and also ensure that we have an enclosed space incase they start trying to fight us. This acts as a defensive fortress as well."

    Sam just shrugged while Drik continued.

    "However, from what Grethen tells me, Rashma managed to figure out a way to defeat one of the ck skeletons. I also heard that there is not much help from you, there."

    This is directed at Sam, who just smiled in response.

    "I don''t mind that you think that. I can''t expect more from you anyway.

    But as she said, if you want her, you will have to deal with me. But at the moment, I am not sure about dealing with you guys."

    Drik ignored Sam for a moment and talked to Rashma.

    "Do you really need this guy? He talks a lot of fluff. But he is not worth the salt. Please just cooperate with us. Tell us what you know about the ck skeletons. How you dealt with them, and you can have something out of the deal.

    I can even negotiate on your behalf."

    Rashma didn''t even bother looking at them and asked Sam.

    "Do we need this?"

    Sam didn''t answer her and instead told Drik.

    "This is getting old Drik. It is almost pathetic. I don''t know how much you know about me. But you should know that I am as petty as one can get. You guys are constantly insulting me. I am still enduring it. One more word about bypassing me and dealing with her, I won''t anymore. And trust me, in an environment as vtile as this, you don''t want me as an enemy."

    Hari suddenly intervened.

    "I agree with Sam. I don''t want him to be my enemy. So, Drik. If you are going against him, I don''t want to team up with you guys either."

    Drik mmed the table and spoke.

    "Alright, here is the n.

    First, we will alert and direct everyone in the pocket dimension to one ce, which is here. Once we are done with that, we will start tracking the ck skeletons. We will lure one of them into a trap that we will set.

    The formation experts will create the trap to ensure that not only will it bepletely immobile, it will also be isted from the rest of the pocket dimension''s weird energy.

    It would almost be an energy vacuum. Then, our undead experts will start examining the creature there.

    I heard that Rashma ''killed'' one of the ck skeletons. I would also its skeletal pieces for further study.

    Once we get enough data on it, we will try and deal with the creatures one by one."

    Drik paused and looked at the rest, expecting some questions. Hair took the lead.

    "So, what are you going to n after that? With what goal in mind are you going to test the skeleton?"

    "The goal to leave this ce?"

    "That''s not what I meant smartass. What is it that you are aiming to do to that skeleton to ''kill'' it? I am sure, you have thought of a couple of approaches and one of them would be in

    the lead."

    Drik pursed his lips and said.

    "Our goal is to destroy the skeleton in at granr level. We willpletely distort every cell of the skeleton including various methods."

    "So, you are trying to tackle its regeneration mechanism. Your thought is that the basis of regeneration is the presence of a piece of skeletonpletely intact and you want to make sure that no piece of skeleton will be in its original state, thus invalidating its regeneration

    process.

    Not a bad thought." Sam said casually.

    Drik nodded and said.

    "However, we might change some ns. Rashma has destroyed one of them. If webine the information, maybe we will have a better idea moving forward.

    And if we are going to work together, Sam will be part of the formation team in charge of blocking the retreat of the skeleton while we enforce the trap.

    Hari, you will be working along with Rashma and I to be the frontal attackers. We will suppress the ck skeleton while the formation trap is set.

    Once the first one is captured, we will be moving on to the second and third and so on, at

    regr intervals.

    From what one of my team member said, there is a pattern for the upgrade of the skeletons. I am sure you have seen some skeletons having violet hues around them before they upgraded

    to be ck skeletons.

    The working theory is that the presence of the skeletons at a certain level simtes the

    energy of the pocket dimension. Once the energy reaches a certain limit the ck skeleton appears. The second threshold hits, the second ck skeleton appears, so on and so forth.

    If we manage to iste the ck skeletons from the energy of the pocket dimension, we think

    we can..."

    "stop spawning more ck skeleton?" Sam interrupted him.

    "Yes, that is what we think."

    Sam wanted to call all of them idiots. Because the most obvious thing in this pocket dimension is that the skeletons be stronger with destruction and regeneration until they reach the ck state. Once they reach a certain limit as ck skeletons, they can be destroyed.

    But he didn''t.

    He neither called them idiots. Nor did he exin the obvious to them.

    "We are in." That is all he said.

    The n was set in motion immediately. Hari didn''t have any objections and moved his team.

    With Sam''s tips on locations, they collected everyone in the pocket dimension. They also narrowed down one of the ck skeletons that was farthest and more isted than the rest.

    Then the luring began.

    Drik took the lead on that and lured it to the pre-determined location where most of the formation was set up. This one is a humanoid skeleton. Not as big as the giant one, not as

    small as a regr human.

    It is like arger scale human being''s skeleton.

    Once it was lured, Rashma took over the lead position. She could destroyed the skeleton to

    bits, however she has to hold back. They don''t want the skeleton to be damaged. They want in

    intact and be captured in their trap.

    Drik, Rashma and Hari restrained the skeleton. They carefully deflected its attacks and

    suppressed its movements. Of course, Rashma did most of the heavy lifting. The remaining two basically yed support.

    It became easier for other two because Rashma is the only one the skeleton focused on. The

    one with the highest kills.

    The skeleton did try to escape. Its instinctual thinking evolved into actual thoughts. It knew

    that its in trouble.

 Chapter 2358: Benched

    Chapter 2358: Benched

    ?

    Sam joined up with three others and blocked its escape route.

    He nned a formation and made them execute it along with them. He operated the core of course, while the rest of them are operating the nodes to strengthen the formation.

    The skeleton looked around lost, not knowing which way to go. The formation blocked all kinds of senses. Just when Rashma was about to pin it down from behind...

    "To the left. Hold on to it properly. Your node is fluctuating. The illusion will copse. If it even gets a semnce of sense, it will break out. You won''t be able to stop it."

    Sam''s words resonated throughout. As if on cue, to the left of him, the guy holding the node seemed to have tripped.

    The energy fluctuation was huge enough to trigger a gap in the defense.

    *BAM*

    The skeleton rammed through that gap and escaped. While its body is passing through, the formation barrier closed in on hurriedly. Sam filled that gap. However, the sudden influx of energy seemed to triggered something in the trinket on the skeleton''s back.

    At the same time, Rashma''s attack coincidentally hit the skeleton at the exact same spot as the trinket.

    It loosened and fell, right next to the guy who tripped the formation.

    *BOOM*

    The trinket exploded with all the excess energy stored up inside of it.

    The explosion blew him away with that weird death energypletely corroding his body. The formation brokepletely, but that also crashed the skeleton to the ground.

    The skeleton was captured, but one of them is down. He was immediately taken back to the hide out where he was being treated by the healers.

    The necromancers were sent to examine the skeleton.

    Meanwhile, in the meeting room.

    Drik charged at Sam who stood there calmly.

    Just when he was about to punch, Rashma made a move and stopped his charge with just two fingers.

    "You did that on purpose. That formation fluctuation story is bullshit. That trinket you ced on the skeleton exploded because you wanted it to explode."

    Sam just smiled and said.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "I can understand why you think I did it on purpose. And I am not going to convince you otherwise. However, just know that if I really want to create a hole for one of your guys, I don''t have to go through so much trouble.

    I could do it a lot more easily and efficiently. You wouldn''t even know what is happening before I am done with it."

    Drik didn''t know what to say to that.

    "How do you exin the trinket?"

    Sam threw one and said.

    "Examine it yourself. Believe it or not, it was just an ident"

    "I don''t believe you. You are sitting the next one out." Sam just shrugged and sat on a chair. Rashma looked at him in askance and he just gestured for her to go and continue the task.

    Drik went to the formation team and gave them the trinket to check it out. He then asked them.

    "Is it really not possible to use a stationary formation for this? Why can''t we just use a defensive formation to lock the skeleton down? Why do we even need a formation that needs our actual physical presence there to control it?"

    "The ck skeletons are way too powerful. Their energy levels are way past second grade. To set up such a formation we need equipment like the metal pirs Sam used to create thatrge formation around.

    However, those pirs are not good for locking down a smaller area.

    On top of that, we don''t know how the skeletons will move. We need to adapt and improvise. Of course, it is not impossible to create a formation that meets the criteria, however we need

    someone who is an actual expert on the formations."

    "And you guys are not?" Drik asked in frustration.

    "Drik, we are good with formations. Great in fact. But what you need is not good and great. You need perfect. In fact, you need to go beyond perfection and absolute masters who can deliver it a hundred times out of hundred attempts.

    This is a teambatpetition, not the formationpetition. In here, only Sam is capable of achieving what you want."

    Drik pursed his lips and asked again.

    "What happened before, do you think it is an ident? Or did he do it?"

    "It could be either to be honest. He is capable of doing both. In fact, he is capable of doing it without getting caught as well."

    "You have way too much praise for him."

    "It is still not enough. I understand since you are not an expert in other auxiliary professions,

    so you wouldn''t be able to grasp the depth of it.

    To reach my current expertise, you need to be damn good at everything rted to that profession. Talent, energy control, imagination, calctions, everything. But to be as good as Sam... you have to be built different.

    Just from what I saw in the formationpetition.... That guy''s brain works hundred times faster than mine and I still believe it is an understatement.

    If I were you, I would be wondering why he let such a blunder happen instead of being pissed

    about it.

    And decide if you are either going to throw him out or get his full cooperation. Having him on the same team and being an enemy at the same time, with this many formations working around, he can chew you up and spit out your damn skeleton out and you wouldn''t be able to detect shit."

    Drik didn''t know what to say or even think at the moment.

    Someone else came to him to execute the next trap. Meanwhile, back in the hide out. Sam and Crow are sitting in the room.

    Thetter had so many questions but he knew better than ask all of them. Of course, his curiosity still got the better of him and he yapped a bit.

    "Why did you do that?"

    "Because they are idiots. I ran the oldest trick in the book and they still fell for it. He should

    have kicked me out immediately along with Rashma and you.

    But he didn''t. I guess, he deserves whatever that is about toe to him just because of that."

    "What are you nning?"

    "Something that is not your concern. The transference token I gave you at the start. The one

    that will lead you to our first rendezvous, you still have it."

    "Of course, I didn''t use it."

    "Keep it. You might want to use it soon."

    "When."

    "You will know when the timees. Don''t worry.

    For now, guard for me. Make sure no one disturbs me."

    Sam said and sat on the floor. He closed his eyes and went into a meditative state. He activated earth elemental fusion and he looked in the same color as the soil in the ground

    around them.

    Some people dide to check on him. However, they never got past Crow. They did take a glimpse at him. However, they just assumed he is cultivating. They cannot really say anything against it when they are all cultivators.

    Time passed.

    It is way past the twenty four hours limit.

    Drik, Hari and Rashma and coordinating the people well and captured the ck skeletons. However, to their dismay, the ck skeletons are increasing in number. And even the number of skeletons are also increasing much much faster than their speed of capturing them. The situation became extremelyplicated. Drik didn''t know what to do. He took the lead

    proactively and now even though they are making progress, the size of the job kept on

    increasing with every passing second.

    Finally, after hours he came back to the hide out and knocked on the door where Sam stayed.

    "I need to talk to him." He asked Crow.

    "He is cultivating. You have to wait."

    "There is no fucking time to wait. Situation is getting out of control."

    "Let him in."

    Sam opened his eyes and called out.

    Crow let him in. Drik looked at Sam who is still on the floor. He didn''t raise up and he didn''t

    stop his cultivation. He just opened his eyes. That is all. Of course, he also deactivated his

    fusion mode.

    "What do you want?"

    "I need your help."

    "For what?"

    "To figure out a solution. The number of ck skeleton..."

    "Increased? By my calctions, it should be thrice the amount that you already captured and

    it would soon be four times. You are actually a lot more efficient than I thought."

    "How do you know that?"

    "I am not going to answer that. What do you want from me and what price do you want to pay

    for it? Just discuss that and that alone."

    "Price?"

    Drik along with the rest of the members are all confused.

    "You are seriously negotiating now?" Drik asked with gritted teeth.

    "In your own words, I am an opportunist. I have a reputation to live up to."

 Chapter 2359: Divide

    Chapter 2359: Divide

    ?

    Within no time, Sam is in the room with the rest of the participants in the pocket dimension. Every candidate that is alive is there. He is standing on one side with his hands in his pocket along with Rashma and Crow on either side. While the remaining candidates are standing opposite to him, with Drik and Hari as their leaders.

    This is the start of their negotiations.

    "You know something like this would happen from the start, didn''t you?" Drik asked, his tone dripping with venom. He wanted nothing more than to jab a dagger in Sam''s eye. Particrly, that confident glint made him feel like a thousand leeches are sucking his blood at the same time.

    "No point in discussing how we reached here. It is better to focus on how we move forward." "Alright, what is your price?" Hari asked, a tad bit impatient.

    "You guys tell me. What is the price of your lives? I can assure you that there is no way out. The withdrawal mechanism of the pocket dimension is a bust. Now, you need toplete the task of pocket dimension before you can get out.

    If you don''t get out from here, I am also sure that you will die a very tragic death in here as the ck skeletons hunt you down. One at a time.

    So, you decide on a price of your own life and we can move forward with the arrangement."

    "No, no, no. This is not happening. We are not getting dragged into this. You are going to name the price and we will negotiate from there. We will agree on a fair price that will be beneficial to both of us." Drik is adamant about not letting Sam have his own way.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    He knew that if negotiation starts as Sam just mentioned now, the price will be through the roof. It would most likely be something that they cannot afford.

    "Alright. Then I want to talk to you guys individually." Sam suggested.

    And that is rejected.

    "Not a chance. Everything has to happen right here, right now. Utmost transparency." "Okay then. I want to offer each of you a different deal, considering different circumstances. But I think I can manage it even from here, out in the open.

    What I want is that for my hard work in attempting to let you get out of this pocket

    dimension, I need to bepensated with one-third of the private assets that you hold. They could be mines, territories, resources, even if you have a b of meat in your storage, I need to bepensated with that.

    And I need you to sign a soul contract saying that you will do so.

    The n I am going to propose is going to be risky, so some of you might die in process. But my effort will still be expended, so I need a contingency.

    So, we are going to include a use. In case of your untimely death, I shall be the inheritor of one-third of your assets, as well as the assets that your family is supposed to give you. Which means, apart from the right into inherit the position in your family, any other material asset will be mine.

    In a way, this will be your will.

    And all the elders and the deans that are watching this as it ys out will be the witnesses. So, in case I don''t get what I deserve after you guys die, then I have the right to seek the Deans to serve me justice.

    That is my offer. Take it or leave it."

    "YOU FUCKING..."

    Drik finally lost it and he lunged at Sam. He was instantly followed by a bunch of hisckeys. Rashma made a move and sent a kick to Dirk.

    He flew like a arrow and hit the people that are behind him. She then proceeded to break some bones of other aggressors.

    Immediately, the situation calmed down. As if she was doing some magic.

    Sam looked at them and said.

    "See, this impulse just cost you a great deal. Everyone, I am increasing the price. Apart from the current conditions I mentioned, I want each one of you to owe me a very personal favor. Equivalent to risking your life to save mine.

    As for the ones who actually made the attempt, they are going to owe three such favors." "You want us to be on your fucking goons? Do you think we will take it? Do you think we will take it lying down, no matter what you say?"

    "You have no other choice.

    I am confident because, none of you idiots understand how these skeletons work and even if you did, you won''t be able to do shit with your current strategies. So, I have an absolute upper hand. And I am not an idiot like you, to not take advantage of the upper hand that I have.

    So, once again. Take it or leave it."

    The negotiations went for an hour. And one might think that they actually made some progress in that time. But no, Sam didn''t budge. He neither gave them more favorable terms, not even a guarantee that they will live.

    He also didn''t give them a discount on the price.

    They had to either sign it or just stay back.

    Drik along with hisckeys broke the negotiations after that one hour.

    Hari and his team are very cooperative. Drik even told Sam and Hari to fuck off along with their people.

    However, there was slight mishap even in that. Hari''s team didn''tepletely. It broken down and only around ten people came along with Hari.

    They all agreed to pay Sam what he wanted.

    "Pleasure doing business with you."

    Sam said as they signed contracts in one of the zones that he created to conceal themselves.

    "So, how are we going to do this Sam. For the steep price, you better have a proper n to move forward."

    "Of course, I do have something like that.

    Sam then wrote down a list. It is the list of creatures that are present in the pocket dimension. One of each kind is mentioned in the list.

    "These are all types of undead creatures that are in the pocket dimension. Each type has dozens of creatures roaming around. And at least one creature in each type has my trinket

    attached.

    So, this allows us to track them all easily.

    With this, we will track down the skeletal creatures that just turned into their ck skeletal form. We will then iste them and go with full force to attack them and destroy them."

    "But it is of no use. With every attempt, it just bes stronger. It will just be a waste of time

    and energy."

    "No, the only way it bes a waste of time is if we don''t spend enough of them on a skeleton. I am sure, I can prove my theory with my first attempt."

    "Alright. Do we need to prepare much?"

    "Not really. This pocket dimension, with all the problems that it threw at us, is more suitable to test the strength, endurance and will power more than the preparation.

    Just so you know, don''t try to conserve your strength at all. I am not saying you should use your trump cards, but don''t hold back too much. You must have felt a lot of frustration because of these skeletons, just take it out on them one by one.

    But following my instructions takes utmost priority."

    Sam said that and marked their first target.

    It is the giant skeleton. The one that just turned into a ck skeleton. Sam didn''t use spatial transference to move all of them. Instead, he took them through the safest path he could find. The moment they are within a certain range of the ck skeleton, it spotted Rashma and

    charged towards her.

    She is the one with highest number of kills.

    Rashma didn''t mind the charge. She weed it with open hands and mmed the skeleton

    to the ground in one punch.

    Sam conjured a spear of lightning along with a bit of void style before he threw it into the skeleton. His shadow undead appeared in the surroundings and held the other skeletons

    down. Half of Hari''s team was also on that job.

    Since Sam told them to break the skeletons down without holding back, they just let themselves go and beat the crap out of them.

    Meanwhile, the rest of them broke the skeleton down to pieces in an instant.

    They stepped back and let it recover as per Sam''s instructions. Once it came back to its original

    shape, Rashma once again led the attack. The ck skeleton is strong and if it was fighting

    any of them, they wouldn''t have been able to hold it back.

    But its unwavering focus on Rashma made it an open target that allowed them a lot of

    breathing space.

    So, the battering of the ck skeleton continued on.

 Chapter 2360: Streamline

    Chapter 2360: Streamline

    ?

    Sam kept his eye on the ck skeleton throughout the fight.

    He examined it through the energy vision. The fight went on for hours before he noticed that orb of red in the middle of the skeleton''s core. Once that came, he gave instructions.

    "All your patience is about to pay up guys. Follow my lead and keep it busy."

    Sam activated his light fusion. While the guys fought the skeleton and kept it busy, he transformed himself into a beam of light and zapped towards the core.

    He bore a hole through the skeleton at exactly the spot where the red orb is. The skeleton froze on the spot. The rest of the team immediately doubled down with the attacks, destroying itpletely. The skeleton crumbled into pieces.

    The participants still didn''t rx. They are vignt and didn''t want to let their guards down. They guessed that the skeleton will reassemble again. But to their surprise, it didn''t. The skeleton is now nothing more than a bundle of ck bones.

    Everyone is stumped.

    "How did this happen?"

    Hari wondered out loud. Crow and Rashma just shrugged at that question.

    Sam meanwhile, collected the bones and addressed the group.

    "Alright, I got all the information we need. From now on, we are going to follow a much more systematic and efficient n. First, I am going to set up a special formation. A stationary one. One that doesn''t need multiple people to operate.

    In other words, a real formation.

    I will be in charge of supervising its operations. The formation will be our battle zone. Rashma will be our bait and Hari will be her support if it is needed. From now on, none of you will speak with Drik and his followers we are in this together and I will try my best to get you all out, provided that you follow all of my instructions.

    Including the one about not speaking to those idiots."

    Sam paused and gave out formation discs to these people. One each.

    "Use that. It is a concealment formation. It has faint healing effects as well. Activate it and sit down in this exact area to recover.

    I want all of you to be in the best condition possible. You have three hours. I need to move out and make some preparations. If you need anything or have any questions, ask crow while I am away. He can contact me.

    As long as it is not too troublesome and increases your attack power, I will try to amodate you.

    Last but not least. Do not, under any circumstances leave this ce. Stay within the boundaries I set and you will not have any life threatening problems. Of course, don''t

    deactivate the formations until Ie back."

    With a load of instructions, Sam went out.

    At the same time, not too far from here, someone is under a different concealment formation observing. They are unable to hear what Sam and the other students discussed, but they did manage to witness the entire battle.

    He even saw thest move when the team took down the ck skeleton.

    When he saw Sam disappearing, he also left the ce and went back to their original hide out. Ten minutester.

    "So, they just beat the crap out of the skeleton and it eventually broke down? And they took this long to take down one skeleton? Are you serious?" Drik asked hisckey with an expression of disbelief. That is one of the most ridiculous things he ever heard.

    In his opinion, there is no good reason to spend four hours to take down one skeleton. Particrly, when their count is increasing by dozens every hour.

    With all the criticism of Sam about how inefficient Drik''s ns were, this appeared pretty stupid and contradictory.

    "What else did they do? Did they use any special method to kill? A special trick? A formation? Special energy?"

    "Nothing. Just constant attacks."

    "This is ridiculous. Have you seen where Sam went?"

    "No Idea. He disappeared like a ghost."n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    Drik thought for a long while and said.

    "Alright, the next captured skeleton, we can just focus on destroying it like they did. Tell the formation team to make arrangements necessary."

    "Okay."

    They started their preparations.

    Three hours passed. No one knew where Sam was and what he was doing in those three hours. He came back to their original location.

    "Rashma, Hari. Go in that particr direction. You wille across a vulture skeleton that is just transforming into the ck skeleton. Lure it here. Maintain a decent altitude. Don''te too low and don''t go too high.

    There is a rocky path and a cliff. That makes it easier for you to reduce its range of motion. Use it. I don''t mind if you damage it, but it is better if it enters the formation while its

    independently mobile."

    Both of them left, nodding their heads. They didn''t ask any questions and followed his instructions.

    Sam thenid down the formation. He once again used a set of pre-made pirs. Once the formation is set, the pirs disappeared. Not even the people inside could see it.

    It didn''t take long for him to set up and it also didn''t take long for Hari and Rashma to do their tasks. Rashma was in charge of being the bait while Hari made sure to restrict the movements of the skeleton. It flew at an incredible pace following Rashma. Sam stood at the entrance of the formation and gestured for them toe.

    He then fell back into the formation, reappearing at its core, controlling it. Rashma and Hari entered the formation along with the Vulture skeleton.

    The moment it entered, the Vulture crashed into the ground.

    The force of gravity selectively applied on the vulture stuck it to the ground. When the vulture tried to p its wings and fly, the gravity increased, even creating very minute fractures on its

    wings.

    It could still take some steps and moveterally, but its movements are very restricted and slow. It is as if its moving inside a thick, viscous gel like substance hindering its motion. The team started pouring the attacks down.

    At the same time, they sensed a great influx of death energy from the surroundings that was injected into the ck skeleton. This essentially increased the recovery rate of the skeleton by a hundred times over. It is a lot faster than the trinket Sam attached. The students weirdly didn''t object and let Sam continue. The recover process is fast, the destruction is also fast. So, the skeleton reached its peak state a lot faster. When it reached that state, Samnded the final blow destroying the core.

    The vulture skeleton this time, was considerably intact. Only the core which is invisible to everyone else was destroyed. The bones lost their glow. With a wave of his hand, Sam stored

    the skeleton away.

    The students are surprised by how fast they have finished this skeleton.

    It is a lot fasterpared to the previous one. They barely spent more than forty minutes inside the formation, attacking it.

    They didn''t even have to expend much of their energy. They also realized that the formation supplied them with a lot of energy aiding their recovery.

    They sat down immediately in meditation to recover. Rashma and Hari did the same, while Sam decided on the next target.

    They thought Sam would go after the nearest one. However, he just picked another one from the list. Right now, the destroyed three skeletons. Including the first one Rashma destroyed on her own. All three of them are different types. Sam went for a fourth type of skeleton, even though it was rtively farther away.

    They lured another skeleton and trapped it in the same formation. Sam changed the focus of the formation a bit. He still focused on hindering the movement, but also reduced the lightning attacks, instead used the earth element to draw up the spikes that hindered its

    movements in a different way.

    Because it was a boar skeleton. It moved mostly on the ground with ground rted attacks. Sam disrupted its movements repeatedly making it a target suitable for rigorous beating.

    While Sam''s side is progressing very well, Drik is lost in his approach. He doesn''t know what to do. He captured two more ck skeletons after the first one. For some reason, the skeletons were easier to lure and they managed to make some modifications to formation to break the skeleton a bit, restrain it and then make it recover before isting it. However, his team was beaten up pretty badly and most of the man power is in recover.

    At the same time, he also noticed that more and more skeletons are appearing in the vicinity of his hide out. For a moment he doubted the concealment formation. But when checked, they didn''t notice any anomalies.

    This made him even more scared. All his approaches are dangerously close to leading him to

    deadend.

 Chapter 2361: Driks Frustration

    Chapter 2361: Drik''s Frustration

    ?

    Drik still kept on eye on Sam''s side.

    All he learned was that Rashma and Hari are leading the skeletal creatures. However, the concealment formation made by Sam made them invisible. The Drik team members always lost the track and they didn''t dare to be aggressive in their pursuits.

    They knew better than to out themselves directly. However, Drik kept on pushing them to get more details. But even when his team tried to be a bit more aggressive, they are unable to locate Sam and his team.

    The only information that he managed to get was the creatures that Sam and his team lured out. He noticed that every turn, they lured a different creature. Even if a skeletal creature is close, they didn''t lure it out if they had already done it before.

    He also noticed that they are luring the creatures out at approximately forty minute intervals. That came as a surprise.

    He called his formation team and asked them to see if they can investigate any of Sam''s concealment formations and locate them. He also wanted to know or at least guess what Sam and his team are doing.

    After all, there are only more than ten members on Sam''s team, but they are doing a lot more from the looks of it,pared to his muchrger team.

    Of course, that was also fruitless.

    As if that is not enough, Drik faced the next challenge which made his situation a hundred times worse.

    "Drik, the scouting team hase back. You need to take a look."

    Drik who was busy suppressing one of the newly captured skeletons was called by one of his team members.

    He went to meet the scout team. Since he saw Sam''s team lure out certain creatures, he wanted to take a look at them. So, he told them the scout team to locate them. He wanted to understand them.

    However, from the state of the current scout team, he knew he made a bad judgement call here.

    The scout team has ten people who are all skilled in shadow element or wind element. They are fast and has excellent stealth skills. However, right now, most of them lost their limbs, badly battered, faces and chests caved in with dozens of bones broken.

    Only the leader of the scout team had fewer injuries, maybe because of his added prowesspared to the rest.

    "What the hell happened to you guys?" He asked

    "We are about to get surrounded. All types of skeletal creatures areing towards our hide out from all the different directions. I don''t know why, or how they are doing it. But slowly and steadily they are moving in this direction.

    We tried to see if there is any anomaly, but we cannot identify anything.

    In the process, we got mauled by more than a dozen ck skeletons. We need to figure out a way out or change our location. Or we should make sure that our formation ispletely air tight without any breaks in between.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    If there is even a small gap and they are attracted by even one of us, we won''t have a chance to break out. All the routes will be sealed and we will be facing certain death."

    Drik started dripping with sweat. He shivered in the spot and asked in a shaky voice.

    "How long do you reckon it will take for then to surround uspletely?"

    "A few hours."

    Drik heaved a sigh.

    "That means we still have some time. The analysis is showing some promise, if we try to move the skeletons now, we will lose all the progress." Drik thought out loud.

    "Still, don''t you think staying alive takes precedence?" The scout team leader disagreed directly.

    The discussion went on and on.

    "Maybe we can create another hideout outside of the range. We can maybe use a space gate to that location and escape if the emergency arises?"

    That was the final idea the scout team leader could think of.

    "But we need to delegate some of our formation team to that. However, they are needed in capture of ck skeletons."

    "Drik, you need to understand. If we don''t have a way out and we don''t have results by the time we are surrounded, then we are fucking done for. We will be buried in this wastnd. Do you understand?"

    Drik pursed his lips and nodded his head.

    "I will do as you said. Just scout for a location then. Of course, focus on your recovery first."

    The scout team leader did as he was told. The healers assisted them to elerate the recovery speed. After an hour or so, a much smaller scouting party was assembled with the task of finding a new hide out spot.

    The only obstacle for this task was the stream of skeletons approaching in their direction. That also made the task a tad bit easier in a different aspect.

    When spent an hour sneaking past these skeletons, they were greeted by a rtively free space ofnd that they could use for a hide out. It didn''t take long to find a spot that has some natural advantage within a valley surrounded by cliffs on either side.

    They left behind a marker just like the formation team has told and activated it.

    The formation master back at the hideout was alerted by the activation of the marker and used it to transfer himself out of the hide out and to the new spot.

    He then scouted the ce for the formation positioning. After making sure that it is fine, he created a smaller space gate to bring out some of the formation team members. The formation team members together, worked on two things. A bigger space gate that could transfer all of their team members and a new hide out.

    Both will take a rtively longer time.

    Drik kept an eye on the skeleton''s activities while he tried to elerate their research results.

    He wanted to find why Sam is trying to lure different kinds of skeletons and also what he wanted to do with them.

    Even when his own team tried to destroy one of the skeletons, he didn''t manage to gain any insight. Because no matter how much he tried, the skeleton kept on regenerating again. It did stop bing stronger at one point, but it be more intelligent with every break.

    It stopped going after the person with most kills and focused on whoever is nearest, that only made it a much worse opponent.

    After repeated failures over three to four hours, he sighed and just captured that skeleton.

    He became frustration beyond his imagination and didn''t even know what to do going

    further.

    He then thought of how confident Sam has been and how stealthy he has been all this while. This made him have second thoughts. But the price Sam asked for... it is indeed way too high.

    "That greedy bastard."

    He muttered under his breath.

    ...

    More time has passed and Sam is almost done with the checklist. Once he is done, he can move

    to the next phase of the n. The next step is not rted to getting out of this ce. It

    deviates from that a little bit.

    Before that he has to be done with the checklist though.

    He only has the tree-man left.

    He kept it for thest because of the unique nature and also the restrictive and calcted

    movements of the creature.

    The rest of creatures are also mostly dedicated to certain areas, maintaining invisible territories. But if they are forcefully transported and lured out, they did move aroud. However, the tree-men are different. With the growth of the tree-men, the dead forest expanded bit by bit and no matter what tactics they used, they didn''t manage to lure a tree- man out of it. If they go ahead and take a risk with it in the dead forest, then they would have to face the wrath of all the creatures.

    So, they need toy down a trap within the region and that needs them to take their sweet

    time to achieve.

    He had to shift the team there.

    In this process, the scouts of Drik''s team saw them move and set up near the dead forest. At

    the same time, someone from Drik''s team used more than two brain cells to figure out

    something.

    "Drik, I think Sam might have identified the crux of the whole pocket dimension. After collecting all the information from our scouts, I managed to list out every possible creature that existed in the pocket dimension and matched them with the creatures that Sam''s team

    lured out.

    They managed to lure out everything. The only thing left is the tree-man and from what I heard, they moved to the dead forest now. This pattern might not seem like much, but I am sure there is something here.

    Do you think, capturing all these creatures is the key to moving out of here?"

 Chapter 2362: Tailing

    Chapter 2362: Tailing

    ?

    Drik had a Eureka moment in his head.

    "That''s it. Even if they managed to destroy one of the skeletons at the start, that is all because of Rashma and I am sure it is a coincidence.

    It is almost impossible to figure out the reason behind its destruction in such a short time. And they are only taking around forty minutes to one hour to capture a creature before moving on to another. There is no way, they could destroy it that easily.

    Maybe they are indeed capturing them all.

    That could be the key." Drik said out loud and immediately started listing out the creatures they captured until now.

    The fact that he tried to imitate Sam''s team and ended up capturing some of the same creatures, didn''t seem so bad now.

    They are almost at half-way through the list and they can just focus their efforts on the remaining of that list now.

    He believed that there might be some way out here.

    Of course, he also understood something else.

    "Make our scout team stick with Sam''s team. Since they were spotted setting up shop at the edge of the dead forest, they will still be there. Use all kinds of trinkets that you have ess to. Focus on energy vibrations and fluctuations.

    Also the spatial fluctuations.

    Sam''s concealment might beat ours, however when someonees out of the concealment formation, they will definitely reveal some fluctuations. That is our key to identifying them.

    Tell them to keep an eye out and spot them for now.

    I will talk to the necromancers to figure out a tracking method that will give us their location at all times."

    Drik passed these orders and left to meet the necromancers. One of the necromancers who specializes in soul necromancy and also some expertise in curses did have a method to achieve this.

    "But it will be risky. With Sam''s perception he would be able to find it. There is no way we can tag Hari or Rashma. Those guys are too strong."

    That is what the necromancer said. Drik thought for a moment and decided to go with the next possible option.

    "Just give me the method. I will make it so that we can track Sam''s team."

    He gave those instructions and went running towards the scout team before they could depart.

    "Mark Hari''s sidekicks and Crow. They are our targets. Keep an eye on them instead. Use a space node marker and keep it on yourselves. I will send the trinket to attach a tracking scent on the target."

    The scout team took their instructions and left.

    Meanwhile, Sam and his team set up the formation at the edge of the dead forest. Rashma managed to lure the tree man to the edge of the forest. However, the said creature didn''te out of the forest area and enter the formation.

    So, Sam had to improvise a bit.

    When Rashma is beating the deadly hell out of that undead creature, Sam came out of the concealment formation and reappeared at a higher altitude. He started throwing formation pirs into various spots at the edge of the forest.

    Simply put, he just carved out a piece of that forest and merged it with the formation. *BAM*

    Rashma punched the day lights out of that tree man who was about to crash into the ground. However, its trajectory was interrupted by the barrier of the formation and it stuck to the edge.

    There are several dead trees stuck in along with it and they seemed to have sensed that their connection to the remaining forest is being severed. They also transformed into tree-men and started attacking left and right.

    This is truly a much bigger challenge to the team members. After all, all these creatures are at least at the violet level with at least three of them being at ck level. The tree men are much more versatile and they have way more tricks up their sleevepared to other undead creatures.

    They only managed to hold them back for a few minutes before they felt the pressure. Lucky for them, Sam activated the formation''s attack mode.

    Basically, it sucked the death energy from the surroundings and used Sam as the central core, a nexus of sorts and converted that into fire elemental energy. Not any fire. The golden sun fire of the Golden sun crow bloodline. The golden mes raged.

    These golden mes with their overwhelming vitality are way too effective on the undead trees. They burned and squealed like goats that are being ughtered. Of course, Sam had to focus extra to ensure none of the teammates are attacked by these mes.

    And of course the teammates are attacking the tree-men with all their strength.

    This took a much longer time than the other creatures. But after a couple of hours, Sam and

    his team did manage to deal with these creatures and destroy them. By the time they are done, all they had was a huge of pile of ash.

    Sam is finally done with all the creatures on the list. Of course, it is still a fact that there are hundreds of those creatures still out there. A lot of ck level creatures at that.

    Hari came to Sam and asked.

    "So, what are we going to do?"

    "For now? You guys can rest and recover for a short while. I need to do something out there. But I can leave the formation here. You can lure the skeletons in here and destroy them bit by bit."

    "I still want to ask. Why did you destroy one creature of each kind? Are you analyzing something?"

    "No, it is actually key to getting out of here. I will exin it a bitter after all my preparations are done."

    With that Sam left concealment formation along with Crow.

    They started travelling in a random direction.

    "So, why am I following you?"

    "I want you to be the bait."

    "To the skeletons?"

    "Nope, I want you to be the bait for the idiots that are trying to spy on us. I don''t know what they are nning, but they will definitely try to find a way to mark you and track you."

    "Okay, what should I do?"

    "You remember the safe zones I marked for you?"

    "Of course."

    "Stay in them and move around randomly. They won''t attack you. Just make a few rounds here

    and there and go back to the concealment formation near dead forest while holding

    something in your hands.

    They might try to mark you with something. A trinket, or some spell sort of thing. Just let

    them do it and lure them to the concealment formation location."

    "What will you do, while I do that?"

    "I need to do my fair share of luring. I will be back exactly after two hours. Just keep the others

    in the loop. If Hari''s team gets impatient, tell them to find a low level skeleton nearby and

    make them attack it.

    Tell them to increase its level until ck level as fast as they can.

    That has to be done anyway. It won''t matter if they do it a bit earlier than I anticipated."

    "Alright. I will be on it."

    Crow and Sam split up. Drik''s scouts marked Crow and started following him. Just like how Sam anticipated, he was marked with one of the spells created by the necromancers. Crow did managet o sense their approach. But he let it be and lure them just like Sam told.

    He is back at the concealment formation within half an hour. He lured the scout team back to

    that spot.

    The scout team sent the news back to their hide out.

    One of the formation team members was sent to their spot. That guy tried to study the surroundings to see if he can find a way to break open Sam''s concealment formation. If he cannot break it, he tried to at least find a way to peer into it to observe what is happening

    inside.

    Of course, there is no tangible result even after they tried.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    Meanwhile, Sam was on his task on doing what he aimed to do.

    Two hours passed and he came back to the formation. The team is beating the daylights out of

    one of the skeletons. He let them finish it and stopped them from going after the next.

    "Come on Sam. Be fast. We are looking forward to this. This is greatbat practice."

    One of the team members said.

    Sam chuckled and replied.

    "Okay, I understand it is exciting, but I want you to know the full n from here on out. I

    understand how this pocket dimension works and I am sure I have a way to get out. And the first step in that we have finished a couple of hours ago.

    So, before we go to the next step, I want to exin everything to you guys."

 Chapter 2363: Explanation

    Chapter 2363: Exnation

    ?

    Every team member is eager for what is Sam about to say.

    This pocket dimension is full of mysteries. The presence of skeleton, the multiplication, the increase in their power level. Everything is happening right in front of their eyes, but they don''t how it is happening.

    They also don''t have a clue about what the is key to getting out of here.

    So, they are more than willing to spare some time and learn it.

    "First and foremost, the whole pocket dimension is divided in several parts. You can consider them as zones and each zone is guarded by an undead creature. When people are sent in here, they will be spawned at random locations.

    Irrespective of their arrival, the zones will create these undead creatures and send them out. They absorb the death energy of the surroundings and increase their strength.

    With special means, you can distinguish how much energy a creature has gathered and how dense its energy is.

    Based on those two metrics, you can divide the levels of these creatures. The ck is thest and the highest level on this scale. Whenever a creature reaches the next level on this scale, a new creature will be created in its original zone.

    At the start of the pocket dimension, if you encounter these creatures, you can fight them in their zone or you can escape them. Even if theye after you, you might have noticed that they halted their pursuit after you travelled far enough.

    That is because, when their numbers are low, these creatures tend to not leave their zones. Unless and of course you forced the creatures to go out using spatial means.

    There is another method too. When the creature''s number has reached a certain limit, then they will start spreading out of their zones.

    They will increase their strength until they reach the ck level and they will keep on increasing in number if you don''t trigger the conditions to stop that multiplication.

    And that condition ispletely destroying, at least one ck level creature of its kind. Once a ck level creature of a kind is destroyed, it will stop the multiplication.

    Herees the most difficult part. Actually destroying one of the ck creatures. As you might have noticed, no matter how many times you beat the skeletons, you won''t be able to destroy them. They will alwayse back, regenerated and in a stronger form.

    However, there is one and just one point within the skeleton''s body, that will be its core or the weak point, after certain number of regenerations and certain level of energy threshold.

    Once it reaches that level, when we attack the skeleton at that point and do enough damage, it will finally be destroyed.

    After that one ck skeleton of a kind is destroyed, it will stop the multiplication, then you will be left with all the other skeletons that are already spawned. All you can do is target them one by one, let them increase their strength to the maximum ck level, let it reach that threshold level and break it down through the core.

    You have to do this repetitively with every skeleton until we destroy every other skeleton in this ce.

    That should allow us to leave this ce."

    Sam looked at them after dumping that load of info on them.

    "Are you for real?" Hari asked with his mouth wide open. The test of this pocket dimension, if what Sam spected is actually true is the toughest and most time-consuming of all the pocket dimensions they have participated in over the years.

    The time taken, the effort they have to put in and the threat level of each skeleton on top of that... this is almost an impossible challenge.

    The regenerating skeletons are tailor made to exhaust them of all their energy. Every regeneration increases the difficulty. No matter how one looks at this, this is more like a torture chamber than a training center.

    The team fell into discussion and after digesting it all, Hari asked Sam.

    "So, the first step of our n was to destroy one ck level creature of each kind. We finished that with the tree-man. That means the creatures will not be multiplied anymore." There is almost a faint hint of relief in his tone.

    Sam nodded in return.

    He then noticed a slightly bitter expression in the faces of some people. He understood what they are thinking. They are feeling bitter because Drik''s team will also be able to get out once they destroyed these skeletons.

    In a way, they will be putting all the hardwork, while Drik''s team despite being the idiots, won''t have to pay a dime, will get to escape this ce The aftertaste is even more disgusting when they thought of the price they paid.

    It is beyond exorbitant.

    "Then what is the second step? You went out to execute it." Hari asked.

    "Well that is to ensure that the customers that haven''t paid the fare can''t get on the ride." Everyone looked at him in askance and then realization dawned on.

    "What did you do?" Hari asked.

    But Sam didn''t answer.

    "We can start with our grind. It will take a long time to destroy these skeletons. Even with the amplified formations and inscriptions, it is going to be a long task. If the conditions align we can destroy a skeleton in thirty minutes, but we are not going over for more than forty for one ck skeleton.

    The problem is that we need to increase the strength of a lot of these skeletons, which will take a lot of time

    With all that, it will take days. So, I hope you guys are prepared for this."

    After saying that, Sam jumped into his concealment formation and started operating it. While doing that, he also crushed a token that he made while he was out roaming and making preparations.

    The people who are observing the concealment formation''s location noticed the change in fluctuations. Crow is also inside. Hari and Rashma went to lure out of their next skeleton,

    their process didn''t change.

    It remained absolutely same.

    Maybe they wanted to throw Drik''s team off, Hari and Rashma agreed on luring the skeletons in the same order as before.

    So, all the tracking and preparation of Drik''s scout team amounted to nothing. Meanwhile, what the scout doesn''t know is, the moment Sam broken a token, the situation of their hide out has turned upside down.

    Drik who was busy trying to put all the pieces of the puzzle in the right order, suddenly felt something was off in the energy distribution around him. He checked the concealment formation of the hide out and also other defensive formations.

    No matter how many times he checked, with his limited expertise, he couldn''t find anything. However, he can sense that there is something really off about the energy flow.

    He contacted the formation team. One of the members came to him angrily and yelled at him.

    "We are in a pinch here, Drik. The formation team members are stretched thin. We are in a constant state of either recovery or energy overdrive. Our minds are on verge of copse with the stress. Can you stop calling us and assigning us random tasks based on whims and

    hunches?"

    Drik pursed his lips and said.

    "The hideout formation. I think there is something wrong with it."

    The formation team member paused and immediately connected with the formation. He

    frowned and said.

    "All the nodes are operating and the concealment should be working properly. There is indeed

    a slight disturbance in the flow, but it doesn''t seem like much. It could just be a glitch because of the shift in environmental energy.

    The pocket dimension''s energy level is increasing, so it might have caused..."

    *BOOM*

    He didn''t even get to finish his spection, when something hit the formation. The explosive sound rattled everyone out of their rtive safety. The formation broke down and

    disappeared at the same time.

    *BOOM* *BOOM* *RUMBLE*

    They could hear the explosive noises and the rocks flying around. The impact from each hit reverberated in their heads. Soon, they saw it.

    The concealment formation is gone. All the defensive measures are kicked it. The ck skeletons surrounded them and they even saw more of them charging towards them.

    The reverberations are so strong, that even though the formation is not destroyed, the aftershock is enough to rattle the walls of the hide out. Drik came out and looked at the scene

    in shock.

    Everyone gathered without anyone alerting them.

    Dozens of ck skeletons. All of them with the sole aim of destroying the hide out.

    "We need to escape. We cannot stay here."

    One of them yelled out loud.

    Drik tried to calm them down, but even before he could raise his voice...N?v(el)B\\jnn

    *BAM*

    The first barrier was broken down and the skeletons charged forward.

    He knew that they wouldn''t hold up. Luckily, the space gate is ready. "Go to the space gate. Everyone, hurry."

 Chapter 2364: New Deal

    Chapter 2364: New Deal

    ?

    Even before Drik could finish his words, the team has already started running towards the space gate.

    The ones that are close to the space gate, who are supposed to monitor it, were the first one to use it and leave. Everyone rushed as if the space will be closed at any given moment. Drik who was stunned by the scene was actually one of thest few to get into it.

    By the time he entered the space gate, the barriers broke down and the ck skeletons started running rampant. Some of the team members fell prey to them and were killed instantly.

    In that panicked state, they weren''t even able to put up much of a fight.

    In the valley where the other end of the space gate was located, Drik''s team members all appeared one by one. They are all contemting if they should leave the ce or stay there. Some even contemted destroying the space gate to ensure the ck skeletons wouldn''te from it.

    Of course, they cannot do it openly.

    Even in that panicked state, they didn''t forget that they are being watched by the elders and deans outside.

    They cannot sacrifice their futures for the sake of this momentary impulse. One must appreciate their optimism though. They are still so firm on their belief that they have a future past this pocket dimension.

    When Drik finally arrived, everyone looked at him in askance.

    They are expecting him to have an exnation as well as a n on what to do next. Drik felt frustrated. However, he knew his priorities. He immediately closed the space gate after five minutes buffer period.

    "No, some people are still there. The team in charge of monitoring the second captured skeleton didn''t make it."

    One of the students said out loud. But their voice was meek and unsure. As if he is reluctant to point it out. Drik pursed lips and just showed his decision through his actions. He decisively shut the space gate down.

    Everyone stayed silent without saying anything.

    With a quick count they knew that they are ten people down. Their hide out is gone, their captured skeletons are gone, the formation team is not confident about their research results. They are technically back to square one.

    As if that is not enough, even before they could voice out their concerns and opinions, shit stirred up once again.

    They all turned to a particr direction. One of the cliffs started trembling a bit. All of a sudden, a hole appeared through which a ton of rubble showered into the valley followed by a snake skeleton that rushed out.

    A ck snake skeleton to be precise.

    It rushed towards the team, with particr focus on Drik. As the snake rushed towards them, the team didn''t have an intentions of looking at Drik for instructions. Instead, they all dispersed to different directions.

    None of them wanted to be anywhere near Drik.

    They didn''t want to die as coteral damage in the battle between Drik and the skeleton. As for fighting together... its merely a joke at this point.

    They spread away. Some people moved in small groups based on their prior affiliations, some people tried to escape alone.

    No matter where they went, most of them only had a single destination in mind. It is apletely different question whether they will be able to make it to that said destination.

    Drik who was being chased by the skeleton, exited the valley and used all his strength to escape. He didn''t want to fight with a ck skeleton head-on. He knew it is a losing battle. After some great struggle, he managed to get out of its grasp. He found a spot with no skeletons in sight and copsed on the ground, gasping for air.

    He couldn''t believe how things have changed in the past few moments. Less than half an hour ago, he was still a little optimistic despite repeated dead ends he encountered, but all of a sudden, he is on his knees.

    He thought of his odds to escape this ce and felt despair creeping up his heart. He couldn''t even imagine how he can survive here for a few more hours, much less find a way out.

    Then a thought popped in his head. More like a name.

    Sam.

    No matter how he looked at it, Sam is the only way out for him. With the earlier fall out, he did hesitate a bit. However, he knew there is no other way. He gritted his teeth and swallowed his pride. He found the tracking device he had on him.

    The tracking device that lets him know the location of the scout team in charge of monitoring Sam''s team.

    He started travelling in that direction.

    It took him about an hour to reach the destination as he had to avoid the numerous skeletons he encountered. He almost had to go head to head with some of those skeletons and barely managed to escape without injuring himself.

    When he reached, the scene in front of him, shocked him to the core.

    At the edge of the dead forest, around thirty people gathered. All of them former members of Drik''s team, including the scouting team. They are all looking at Sam''s team who stood in front of them with their hands crossed.

    Sam''s team had a wide range of expressions.

    Crow is excited, Rashma is bored, Hari amused, while Hari''s party is mostly satisfied. Sam on the other hand, had no expression on his face.

    His gaze turned to Drik as soon as he arrived there. Drik''s former team looked at him as well. He expected them to avoid his gaze in shame, but to his surprise, some of them immediately

    ran to him.

    "Come fast. You need to talk to him. That guy is out of his mind." That''s the gist of the gibberish they spouted.

    Drik who just felt abandoned by his team a short while ago suddenly felt stumped and confused. He didn''t expect them to be so thick-skinned. But when he heard Sam''s demands, The understood why.

    "You need them to sign a soul contract stating that they have to pay one-third of everything they earn, gain or inherit in the next five decades. That is on top of the one-third of their current assets? Am I hearing you right?" Drik asked Sam.

    "Yes."

    "Are you sure? You didn''t mean to say five years?"

    "I am sure. Five decades. That is as low as I can go."

    "Low? Where did you start?"

    "Five centuries."

    Drik became speechless for a second.

    "What is this use then? In case you are not avable, the holders of your tokens with your special spiritual signature are eligible to be beneficiaries of these contracts?"

    "Yes."

    "Who are these people?"

    "I am not telling. The tokens are the only identifiers."

    "Can''t you..."

    "No."

    "Listen to..." "No."

    "Just hear me out dammit.."

    "No can do. I am not budging. Take it or leave it."

    Drik mmed the contract on the ground and said.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "Do you even understand how ridiculous you sound? You are just taking advantage of

    everyone''s dire needs."

    "I know."

    "You will make everyone an archenemy after this."

    Sam pointed him to the contract where Drik saw another use.

    "Any attempts at retaliation against Sam and any of his associates and token holders or even Sam''s friends, friendly acquaintances is banned for eternity. Not only one has to abide by this, they also have to inform Sam or his associates if they possess or gain any knowledge of any possible malice directed at Sam and his associates for the rest of their lives."

    Drik didn''t even know what to say for that.

    "You are serious." He muttered.

    "This is thest and final offer that you get. If you don''t take it, I will ensure that you will not

    come out of this pocket dimension by riding my coattails.

    We are now luring a ck skeleton. By the time we are done with it and move on to the next

    one, you have the time to decide on this contract.

    Once the window passes, you are on your own."

    Sam walked back into the formation, while the rest of the team did what they are supposed to. Of course, not before leaving a sneer behind for the neers.

    For some reason, they are not longer so dissatisfied with the price they had to pay. They lost a lot, but it is a lot lesspared to what the rest of them are going to lose. Five decades... within that time frame a lot of them will graduate and leave the academy realm. They will be out there in battlefield of gods where they will gain their actual riches and glory. Sam is basicallyying im on all their future achievements with this.

    It is too cruel, but soon of the candidates couldn''t take the pressure anymore and signed the contract. If there is a first, then there is a second and a third.

 Chapter 2365: Hunting

    Chapter 2365: Hunting

    ?

    Drik watched as one member after another of his team signed the contract.

    Of course, there are still some people who are reluctant to do it. Sam didn''t ask them again either. Drik struggled a bit to choose if should sign it or not. But after some thought and getting enough of Sam''s cold gaze, he made a decision.

    He signed the contract.

    "I hope you know what you are doing with these contracts. You are just making your situation worse with every action of yours."

    "It was never good to begin with. So, you can save the advice."

    "I hope you can swallow all that you just bit."

    "Don''t worry, my appetite is the best there is."

    After the signing is over, Sam looked at seven people who didn''t sign and have stubborn expressions on their faces. Four of them belong to different Olympian academies and the remaining three are from Norse.

    "You can leave this ce. I advise you to not try and imitate what I am going to do here. But be rest assured, no matter what happens, you will not be getting out of here with my help. I will stop you, even if it means killing you.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    If youe across other people that strayed and couldn''t find their way here, tell them that the same thing I told you.

    They had their chance and they blew it. Now, they have to live with the consequences."

    One of the seven people is a woman who looked at Sam hatefully and spat through gritted teeth.

    "You think you can do whatever you want? Try and kill me if you dare. Do you know who I am?"

    "Yes, I do. The daughter of the Heimdall academy''s dean and the grand elder. Also the heir to two of the most prominent families under the Norse region. I know you better than you think madam Yagrit."

    Yagrit was stunned and then quickly came back to her senses and sneered.

    "You just admitted under the surveince of all the Deans including my parents that you will kill me if I tried to get out of this pocket dimension. You think, you can get away from this?"

    Sam chuckled and stared at her. He didn''t have to exin in detail about his position. He knew and even she knew whatever he said here wouldn''t hold much weight, and it will depend solely on his actions.

    In fact, that is what she was aiming to do.

    Her position is way too sensitive for her to sign such an absurd contract. It might not seem like much, but it will shake up the power bnce of the entire Norse affiliated families and organizations if some outsider gets a hold of her position and power.

    Even though Sam mentioned that he will not be inheriting the position and privileges, properties and businesses are what provide weight for her position, so he will still get some authority which could be critical.

    That is the reason, he was tried to see if he will be threatened.

    However, Sam didn''t care. It is just more enemies, he already has enough of them and it won''t matter if he adds some more.

    In fact, he was hoping that he could make more enemies. That is the whole reason why he came here in the first ce. He looked at the people who signed the contracts. There are a lot more than he thought.

    He quickly assigned them to different tasks.

    He set up a second formation nearby and told them to lure the low-level skeletal creatures in there. The formation will help elerate the regeneration process of these skeletal creatures. Their task is to increase the strength of the skeletons until they reach the ck level.

    Once they do, it will be transferred to the main formation, where Sam and his original team will beat them until they are destroyed.

    It elerated the process by a lot. The people who didn''t sign the contract with them, didn''t stay there. They knew that it would be dangerous if Sam willed to kill them. He can just lure one of the ck skeletons to their way and they would be done for.

    So, they kept a safe distance, an eye on Sam and his operation, all the while trying their best to survive without getting injured.

    Sam and his now muchrger team are working with regr intervals in between. They knew it will take days before they finished it, so they didn''t rush forward. They took their time and put their safety first.

    And in every break, Sam left the formation and went out into the pocket dimension.

    He didn''t take anyone else with him, he didn''t say anything about what he is going to do. He just went and came back after some time.

    They were curious but they didn''t ask.

    However, every break Sam took made hearts of the elders and Deans outside race like a river.

    And it started right from the first break he took after he came out of the formation from dealing with half a dozen skeletal creatures.

    He silently left flying in a certain direction. While the team members didn''t care, the spectators did. They observed him as he reached a certain location. They wanted to know what is up with it and noticed that someone is there in the vicinity.

    It is not too far away from the ce where he set up his formation.

    One of the people that didn''t sign contract with Sam has set up a concealment formation there and is spying on them. Sam appeared not too far away from him and concealed himself.

    From that concealment, he took some formation nodes out and ced a formation in the area. He moved stealthily and took his sweet time setting up. Soon, he made a circle around the guy in hiding. The nodes created a formation.

    There is no glowing barrier and there is no restriction imposed. That guy didn''t even notice the presence of formation and he still has an eye on Sam''s activities.

    Sam went back and continued his operations.

    The spectators are puzzled. However, after some time they realized what he had done.

    A ck skeleton rushed to the position of that man. However, no matter how close the skeleton got, the man didn''t react. It is almost like his senses are not working.

    *BAM*

    The skeleton mmed its fist into his back and only then did he react. He tried to dodge, but the hit still went through. He was injured and became immobile. The skeleton proceeded further with its attacks.

    While everyone is watching, the skeleton killed the guy in the most gruesome way possible.

    In the same way, Sam kept on taking breaks and every time he took a break, a life was lost. Even when everyone came to know that the pocket dimension is blocked, the elders didn''tin much. If the things are really out of their hands, they cannot do much and can only think of how to benefit after the fact.

    But from what they saw, they knew there is a way out.

    They knew that Sam can really bring them out if he wished. That made this current situation

    very rage inducing.

    However, they knew they couldn''t do shit. All they could do is re at Chorus and the rest of

    the group.

    Time passed.

    Sam kept on taking breaks and people kept on dying. Of course, not all the people inside the pocket dimension are unaware of it. Particr, Yagrit who kept a close eye on Sam''s activities noticed this. For some reason, Sam didn''t really cover his tracks that well.

    Yagrit went after him one time and saw how he lured a ck skeleton to deal with another participant. This made her heart turn cold.

    She knew that sooner orter, Sam is going to make his way towards her. So, she set herself up with a sturdy concealment formation and readied all kinds of trinkets that her parents gave

    her.

 Chapter 2366: Plotting

    Chapter 2366: Plotting

    ?

    In one of the breaks, while Sam is off to pick on his next prey, one of the team members who joined along with Drik, left the formation.

    After travelling for a certain distance and confirming that there is no one else following him, he took out a token to find Yagrit''s position.

    Yagrit who was vignt to every movement around her, noticed his approach but only felt relieved when she actually saw him.

    "What is the status there? What the heck is he doing?" she asked him eagerly. She has been waiting for him for a long time. He is one of the reasons that she was able to gather enough to courage to reject Sam''s proposal.

    Because she knew he will enter his team and get the required valuable information.

    "Sam is iming that he figured out the exit strategy for this pocket dimension. He knows how to destroy the ck skeletons and he has seeded in destroying a lot. Once all the skeletons are destroyed, he believes that a gateway will open up to leave this ce."

    "Are you sure it is trustworthy? How can he be sure?" She asked.

    The young man shrugged and said.

    "Young mistress, even I believe that his theory holds some salt. Its just basic pocket dimensionmon sense. For most of the pocket dimensions, the default condition is to clear the obstacles or enemies inside.

    If you think back, that is the mostmon type of pocket dimension across all the regions of the academy realm.

    You go in, kill everything and you are out. This makes sense. We just didn''t consider this from the start because we were unable to kill these things."

    "So, I will be out of here after he kills all these creatures?"

    "Technically, you should be."

    "So, that is why that bastard is hunting down all the people that didn''t sign the contract with him. He has killed more than twenty people already."

    The young man frowned and said.

    "Then it would only be a matter of time before hees at you."

    "I know. That is why I need your help. We need to stop Sam before hees after my throat." "It is easier said than done."

    "Why? I read the contract. It clearly stated that you guys cannot kill him or harm him after you leave this pocket dimension. Nothing has been mentioned about killing him within.

    All we need to do is convince some other people in the team and attack Sam at the right time. He will be done for.

    I am sure, everyone else will agree. After all, the contract is way too much of a price weighing on them. If not for the fact their lives are on the line, no one would be willing to pay such price."

    "Once again, it is easier said than done.

    Until now, except for Sam, no one knows how to destroy a ck skeleton. Even though we destroyed more than couple of dozen of them, none of us managed to figure out what the trick

    is.

    He alwaysnded the final blow or directed Rashma tond it.

    Every time, it was random and he always focused on a particr location with a concentrated attack. He even specifically said that we should not attack a ck skeleton in its final stages as soon as he alerts us.

    I am sure everyone in that formation is trying to figure out why Sam''s method is working and how to replicate it. But I am also sure no one managed to figure it out."

    Yagrit pursed her lips.

    She is unable to swallow this exasperation. At first, she never really cared for Sam or all the hatred that he attracted to himself. She just ounted it all for somerger political y. But now she understood why he is so hateful.

    Usually, if someone is in Sam''s position, they would know when to step back.

    They would never dare to ask such a price like Sam did. Because they cannot be sure if they would ever be in a position to take instead of the position to give in the future. They will also use this chance to make other owe favor instead of material gains.

    But he isplete opposite.

    He even dared to leave out any use that offers him protection inside the pocket dimension. It is as if he is sure that no one would dare to attack him here. He is only unting his situational invincibility.

    That is the most hateful person if she ever met one.

    "Then how do you propose, we move forward from here?"

    "I have some suggestions. One is that we figure out how the ck skeletons can be destroyed. We will let Sam deal with as many as possible all the while looking for his weak moment.

    Once we figure it out, we can kill him and proceed with the rest of the n like this.

    The second option is that I will broker a deal with him. I know that you cannot afford to give out your share and resources. But I don''t have any qualms like that. I don''t own any property. If I ept the pledge of servitude, then everything that should have belonged to me will be belong to my master. So, technically he won''t get anything.

    I can just talk to him about the deal now. I will say I will offer the remaining two-thirds to him in exchange for your life.

    Once we are out of this ce, I will immediately take the pledge.

    He will definitely be fooled."

    Yagrit looked at the young man in disbelief. The pledge of servitude is not a small thing. It is a practice among the households that are believed to be the direct descendants of gods. Households like the Telchines.

    It is also a different type of soul contract. Once taken, they will not be able to do anything against their master''s wishes. Even when they are cultivating, a part of the results will be transferred to their master.

    If the master is not near, the energy will umte within the body waiting to be transferred. If the umted energy increases to a certain threshold, then the servant will die of energy explosion.

    They cannot ess that energy to expel it. At least, not most of them. Only a select few ever managed to achieve that feat.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    This guy just decided to sign off his life for her sake. For a moment, all the tension was gone and a faint blush appeared on her face.

    Of course, she brushed it off and soon the cold thinking her father instilled in her has made its

    way out.

 Chapter 2367: Clash in audience

    Chapter 2367: sh in audience

    ?

    Yagrit looked at the young man and said.

    "Let''s try to go with the first option.

    The second option... it could only be ast resort. Anyway, the chances of the first option being a sess are way too high.

    Now, you go back and don''t give him any reason to suspect you. I will try my best to hide from it. But I not confident that I can hide from him forever. He is way too resourceful. But I can assure that I will be thest to be found."

    The young man nodded and left, while Yagrit went on her own way. Before she disappeared, he looked at her back, longingly. Soon, he shook his head and went back. He was a bit cautious, thinking that maybe, Sam might have a clue about his plotting.

    But after some time, noticing that there is no sign of any vignce or suspicion from Sam, he rxed a bit.

    This time, whenever Sam went on a break, he started conversing with other members of the team. Mostly the people who came here following Drik. Every time he finished a conversation with a member, he left them perplexed and in a state of indecision.

    However, that only made him smile, instead of feeling unsure.

    For some reason he believed the people that are indecisive are the best choice for this. Once they are persuaded, then he can use them to persuade the others. And he won''t have to think too much about the reasons.

    These indecisive people who convinced themselves will provide enough reasons just get some assurance that they haven''t made a mistake.

    Also, if they are readily agreeing, then he would have a hard time believing them. After all, no matter how much price Sam has charged, he is still saving them. If someone really betrays someone who saved them so easily, then they are not a worthy teammate.

    Particrly, when they are going to hunt someone much more dangerous like Sam and in turn Rashma and Crow.

    Soon, he saw some results as some of the indecisive people were convinced and like he anticipated, they helped him lure some other people.

    Minutes, hours and days. Time passed, pretty fast.

    Everyone is getting more and more restless as they waited for their exit in anticipation. Not just them, even the people spectating are also eagerly waiting.

    After a few days, Sam is almost done with the hunt. Only one person remained. Yagrit.

    Even Yagrit''s admirer also understood this point more or less. He knew that there are not many people other than Yagrit out there and judging from the secret messages he got from her, it seemed like even she was unable to find any other survivors.

    There are still some skeletons left though.

    Around ten of them. Before they started dealing with them, Sam called everyone for a meeting.

    "There are only ten creatures left. They are all also of same kind. We have dealt with a lot of them in the past few days.

    So, it won''t take much effort for us to deal with them as well.

    That means, today we can finally get out of this. However, I regret to say that I won''t be able to help you deal with all ten of those creatures today. As I promised you guys, I cannot let someone else who didn''t buy the ticket have the same ride as you do.

    So, I am going out to make sure they step out of the ride before we leave this ce.

    For that, I need to spend a bit more time out in the field than usual. This rat has found itself in a very cozy hole, hiding from me. I now need to go and dig the whole mountain to bring it out. Anyway, no matter what, I will be here in a few hours, before deal with the first six creatures. Rashma will help you deal the decisive blows, so you don''t have to worry.

    Crow will also lead in the formation operations. Not like it needs much attention."

    Hari looked at Sam and wanted to say something, but he didn''t.

    Sam gave a sweeping nce at everyone there. Maybe Yagrit''s admired is a bit too paranoid, however, he felt like Sam''s gaze has stayed on him for a tad bit longer.

    He brushed it off as him being overly vignt. He made sure that he kept all the conversations under the wrap, he also left some bait in his words to ensure that if someone were to betray the plot, they would have outed themselves by now.

    He calmed himself down and started working with the rest.

    They started luring the skeletons. All ten skeletons they have right now are at the violet level. So, they have to bring them to ck level and then the peak level and finally destroy them. It will take some time.

    While the team is hard on work with a lot of them having the thoughts to betray Sam...

    Sam is standing on arge rock as he looked into the horizon, while he stretched his body with a wicked grin.

    "This hunt should be interesting. I want you see what you can do to resist me."

    He said it out loud. He knew the spectators will listen and he wanted to ensure they heard his thoughts. The Dean of the Heimdall academy gripped the armrest of the chair he was sitting on. From that point, the whole stone chair cracked into bits and pieces.

    He stood up and looked at Chorus, who is still as nonchnt as ever.

    "You have such a bold student."

    "He is not my student. But you are right, he is way too bold."

    "Maybe you should have taught him that, this much boldness is not a healthy thing."

    "Nah, it is a bit refreshing."

    "You do know that if he even hurts so much as a hair of my daughter, it would mean irreconcble war with Heimdall academy."

    "Oh, we crossed that bridge a long time ago.

    The day you sent your forces to bring him out of the gambler academy, you already pissed

    that guy off.

    I heard that he embarrassed the Zeus academy, just because one of their students spit in his

    soup. Do you really think, he would let that shit go?

    In a way, you are the reason that your daughter is going to get hurt."

    Chorus said while yawning. The Dean almost lost it. Dove who was standing on the side, nudged Chorus with her elbow.

    "What? I am just kidding. Everyone knows that her daughter did it to herself."

    The Dean couldn''t take it anymore and made a move. However, before his move could even register in the minds of people, he felt a warm breath on the back of his head.

    "You should learn to control yourself. Losing temper just because of this? There is still a restriction on killings, you know."

    Chorus''s voice, reverberated in the ears of everyone there as if it is a whisper. The Dean''s attack disappeared into thin air. Chrous could still be seen in the same spot he was in before.

    The Dean turned around to look, no one is there, but still there is that warm sensation on his neck along with a slight prick. A slight prick that made a drop of blood appear on his skin.

    His body trembled and fear gripped his heart.

    Chorus looked at him and said.

    "You don''t want to miss what is about to happen next, don''t waste your time on me."

    The Dean looked into the screen. Chrous then looked at a certain direction into the crowd. Dove was surprised.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    "What happened to you? You never make a move. You haven''t even made a move when the academy was attacked."

    "When academy was attacked, fight has already broken out. Now, a disy of power is needed to ensure a fight won''t break out."

    Dove didn''t understand. She looked in the same direction as he did, but found nothing but the

    idle crowd.

    Then something on the screen caught her eye.

    Sam is hovering over a certain area. His body slowly transformed. He turned silver with partial lightning fusion. A spear conjured up in his hands, with condensed lightning.

    He threw that bolt, aiming it at a certain spot.

    *BOOM*

    The lightningnded. With an explosion, the concealment formation was broken, from within

    revealed, Yagrit who looked at Sam in horror.

    Sam grinned and threw another lightning at her.

    Yagrit dodged the attack and gritted her teeth. She took out a doubled straight sword and

    jumped into the sky.

    *SWOOSH*

    Sam threw another lightning at her. This time, she shed the lightning and closed the

    distance at the same time.

    Sam distanced himself from her and threw another attack.

    She cut that one down too and came at him. When Sam was about to meet the attack, she

    disappeared from the spot.

    Sam clicked his tongue and chuckled.

 Chapter 2368: Hunting

    Chapter 2368: Hunting

    ?

    That was a good move.

    Yagrit reappeared far away from Sam. She dropped the remnants of the crushed transference token in her hand and was about to run in a certain direction. However, all of a sudden,

    *SWOOSH*

    A spear of lightning zapped her.

    It brushed past her face. The electric current, made her muscles stiff. Her facial muscles in particr. She had a momentarypse in her movements. That is all Sam needed.

    *SWOOSH*

    Another spear rushed through the wind. Itnded on her palm. Precisely on her fingers. Her pinky finger of the left hand exploded. Not only was her finger lost, but the lightning burned the stump and charred it.

    Yagrit felt like her life was taken away from her, for a moment.

    She immediately activated another transference token. The lightning bolt just missed her by hair''s breadth. When she reappeared at the new location, she didn''t even turn around to take a look. She took out another transference token and used it to travel in a random direction.

    Then another token and finally at the third stop, she hurriedly used a defensive barrier token that surrounded her with a translucent barrier.

    *BOOM*

    The moment it did, a lightning bolt came and hit it. The spherical barrier, held her inside, it is pretty good.

    It blocked the full extent of the attack from reaching her. However, it wasn''t really as solid and stationary as she would have wanted. The sphere flew like a bouncy ball with the impact. She crashed into a couple of rocks and debris, before she halted.

    Yagrit felt shaken. Her mind was abuzz and she couldn''t even make sense of her location.

    But she did manage to make sense of something else. A sense of danger.

    *SWOOSH* *BOOM*

    The lightning hit the sphere from the stop and this time, it didn''t bounce off and it also didn''t make the ball fly away. Instead, the bolt is pressing down into the barrier, making it dig deeper into the ground. Yagrit never felt this helpless.

    As she noticed the soil''s elevation increase around the barrier, her first instinct is to just disable the barrier and slip away. However, she noticed that the moment she disables the barrier, the bolt wille at her.

    The direction of its movement...

    It is aimed at her. She checked the reserves of the transference tokens. There are a few. But not as many as she wanted.

    She gulped anxiously and took out a token. She crushed it.

    The barrier disappeared into a mass of sparkles as she disappeared.

    Sam also made his move, following her to the next location.

    The chase continued.

    Meanwhile, outside the pocket dimension, back in the Thor academy, the spectators became more tense than ever. Chorus who is usuallyid back is also looking at the scene intently, while Dove is having second thoughts about her approach to Sam.

    She put him in this teambatpetition, it has long since stopped being that.

    She knew he will attract a lot of heat to the Gambler academy. Her intention to use that heat as a whetstone to sharpen the gambler academy... She felt like maybe she bit off more than she can chew.

    She turned to look at the fourth graders of the Heimdall academy. They are eyeing her like they are looking at a prey that just fattened to its peak. She knew they would chew her head off the moment they get a chance.

    With the way he is handling Yagrit, she doubted if the Heimdall academy will be able to hold it in for long and not break the no-killing rule.

    She also noticed how tense Chorus has be.

    "What is happening? You are acting weird. The team is getting restless because of you."

    Chorus'' frown deepened, but he didn''t speak.

    He just looked at the screen and then he turned to look at the same spot in the crowd. Meanwhile, back inside Yagrit felt like she is living through her worse nightmare. Wherever she went, Sam is there behind her.

    He moved like he was living in her shadow. Every turn she took, every trick she had, no matter what she used, he managed to find a way around it and destroyed them. But that is not even the scariest part of it.

    She has given clean openings to him many times in this chase.

    However, Sam didn''t take it.

    Instead, every attack he made, it always hit her where it wouldn''t be lethal. He took out her fingers, her toes. He even waited until she managed to recover herself enough to run again. He went after her. Hit her with lightning bolts that barely created some cuts on her body and zapped her all over.

    She crashed into the ground, broke a few teeth, bruises all over her body. Her heart... she didn''t even know how many times she felt like it is going to stop and how many times it came back to beating.

    Whenever she lost her strength, Sam once again left her alone.

    He even stayed within her line of sight and made sure that he knew that he gave her that breathing space.

    Whenever she tried to make a conversation in that time. Maybe trying to find a way out of this torture, he made a move. He made her run for her life once again. Just a couple of hours in that situation, she felt like she has been running for twenty days or so.N?v(el)B\\jnn

    When she was on sixth break, Sam finally let her speak.

    "Why the fuck are you doing this? What are you getting out of this? Are you some kind of fucking psycho?"

    Sam just shrugged as he stood in the air.

    "Well, you better love being hunted down just like how you like hunting. My mother and father... they will kill you. They will kill you and everything that you ever appreciated." "Someone will. But I doubt it would be your mother and father."

    "A vermin like you. You dare make a judgement about my mother and father? You are not

    even..."

    *SWOOSH*

    The lightning bolt brushed past her cheek andnded behind her.

    "Seems like you are getting over your head, just because I let you speak for a while. I thought,

    I should be merciful and let you speak with your parents for a while. I am sure, they are

    listening from out there.

    I am sure, the father and mother who gave birth to you, will appreciate you sending them your

    love for onest time."

    Yagrit froze.

    She went into a deep thought before she seemed to havee to a decision. She crushed a token and disappeared from there. Her secondst transference token.

    Sam didn''t hurry after her. Instead he paused and said out loud.

    "I don''t know what to say man. I did try to get her to speak with you. I believe you deserve to hear from your daughter, at least one time. At least one time before she dies here."

    The dean of Heimdall academy felt a bit tense as he looked at Sam. For a moment, Sam''s eyes felt like they are peering through the screen and are piercing his heart.

    His heart beat wildly and he looked at his wife. His wife avoided his gaze. Tears dripped down

    her eyes. Her fists clenched.

    She had a really really bad premonition.

    After five minutes, Sam finally made his move. He disappeared and reappeared at the spot

    where Yagrit appeared after using her token.

    She is not there.

    He could sense the spatial energy fluctuations though. He also has a couple of specters that

    saw in which director she ran in.

    He couldn''t help but smile.

    She also took off in that same direction. Chasing her at a moderate speed.

    While the chase is still going on, back at the edge of the now burned down dead forest...

    The two teams are working like a clock.

    Hari is leading his team of ten along with Rashma and Crow. Drik is handling the remaining.

    These two teams worked alternatively. One of them worked in increasing the skeletons'' level, while the other worked on destroying the ck skeleton. Then they exchanged the

    formations.

    When Hari''s team changed from the ck skeleton formation to the growth formation, Drik''s went to the ck skeleton formation.

    Of course, a ck skeleton has been lured into the formation for the Drik''s team to destroy. Rashma and Hari are done with the luring and went back to the formation. Fighting against

    one of the low level skeletons, bringing it up to the speed.

    Drik looked at the soon-to-be servant who pursed his lips and nodded his head.

    Drik addressed the rest of the team.

    "Get into positions. It is go time."

    They shifted from their original positions and conjured their attacks. They looked at the ck

    skeleton, joining together back to its original shape."

    Back in the open field, Yagrit is panting heavily, looking into the horizon at Sam who is

    approaching her.

 Chapter 2369: Exit

    Chapter 2369: Exit

    ?

    Sam halted a few feet away from Yagrit.

    Yagrit who is panting heavily and even felt a bit dizzy with blood loss, tried her best to be sane and sharp. She brandished her sword, held it with both her hands, barely managed to have a firm hold on it with her fingers gone.

    She gritted her teeth and charged towards Sam.

    Sam didn''t dodge. He stood in the air, waiting for her toe to him. Yagrit aimed at his chest, trying to stab him.

    Sam extended his hand, intending to catch the sword. At that moment, Yagrit suddenly let go of that sword. It was stilling at him, but she wasn''t just holding it anymore. Instead she ducked past his hand and pped it on his stomach.

    Sam didn''t even feel any pain.

    However, he had a familiar force surrounding him. A force that he is very familiar with, that he often used. The spatial energy of a transference token.

    Yagrit had a wide smile on her face. The time seemed to have slowed down. She could see everything in such a slow motion.

    She could see the space energy manifesting around Sam. The energy spreading all over his body trying to envelop him and take him away from here. She could see it, she reveled in it. As she observed every hint of Sam, her eyes finallynded on his face. A grin, much more bright that her own, has spread on his face. This made her own smile froze and she felt that something is wrong.

    The spatial energy that was just raging, suddenly seemed to havee to a halt. It still surrounded Sam, but it is not doing what it is supposed to do. Sam extended his hand slowly. Yagrit wanted to run, but her surrounding space froze her on the spot.

    He held her by her throat and said.

    "Just how stupid do you guys think I am? I am able to understand and know what''s happening all over the pocket dimension, but you think I won''t know what is happening in my own two formations? I won''t know what the idiots that I saved have been doing?

    Do you really think, I am stupid enough to leave such an open hole in the contract, and wouldn''t consider that you vermin won''t do anything with it?

    And to think you would assume that you can make me move into a trap with a transference token of such inferior quality."

    Yagrit had her eyes wide open. She was not even bothered that much by his clenching palm on her throat. Her shock was that big.

    Because of all the things that she has seen in her life, the most impossible things, things that even the greatest of the men couldn''t even fathom, she has never ever seen someone go on their merry way after using a transference token, without sumbing to the force.

    Unless the energy level of the token is so small and minutepared to the strength and energy of the person who it was applied on, it can never be opposed.

    Now, Sam not only not moved, but just stood there and grabbed her throat while making his grandstanding arrogant speech.

    "So, how do you think it would have gone?

    You lure me into the formation that I built, with those shabby modifications if I might add. You will encircle me along with a ck skeleton and let the skeleton do the dirty job.

    Lock the spatial nodes, you guys will make sure that I don''t break out. While using the second formation to lock down, Hari and Rashma, who actually pose a threat to you.

    Am I right?"

    Yagrit didn''t speak. It is not that the grip on her throat was too tight. She understood just from his grip, what he was aiming to do.

    It is not that he cannot crush her throat. He just wanted to show that he can and chose not to. It is a disy of his authority over her in a situation like this.

    "Not a bad n, but it is just too simple, too in, too useless and dumb in its execution."

    Yagrit''s heart shook with every word of Sam''s. Not just hers. The spectators also felt tense with every second. They have seen how Sam used specters and spatial markers to move around. They have seen how much control over the environment he exhibited, since the start. So, it is not like it never urred to them that Sam might have caught on to their n. But most of them, just hoped that he didn''t since they haven''t seen it.

    But now...n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    They lost that hope and they are filled with trepidation.

    Sam''s eyes turned colder as he looked at Yagrit. The next moment, the spatial energy surrounding him, spread towards her and enveloped her as well. To her horror, she was also pulled into the spatial transference.

    The next second, both of them disappeared there and reappeared in the middle of the ck skeleton formation.

    Drik, Yagrit''s soon to be servant and the rest of them team are waiting intently for the arrival. When the sense the budding spatial fluctuations and saw two peopleing out, instead of one, their eyes widened in horror.

    Even before they could react, Sam tightened his grip on Yagrit''s throat, and threw her over his shoulder into the ck skeleton that just finished healing up.

    "YAGRIT"

    Her soon to be servant yelled and charged towards her.

    "Stop it. You cannot leave your position." Drik tried to yell out loud as well. But for some reason, his voice didn''te up. It was low, almost like a whisper. All because the formation has changed a bit.

    The killing intent that came along with the surrounding death energy, started getting sucked in atrge amounts. It is so dense and powerful that it started manifesting in the air for them to see it with their naked eyes.

    His voice and even breath was suppressed. His body felt so powerless. The ck skeleton and Sam are the only ones who didn''t feel any pressure from this. Instead they felt like they are at

    home.

    The ck skeleton raged.

    It stuck its hand through the heart of Yagrit, killing her in one shot. The second hand went into the servant''s heart the very next moment. Two down.

    Drik''s team wanted to fight against the skeleton. They managed to do it until now, but they weren''t able to.

    They found out that the formation that has helped them and enabled them to fight against these skeletal creatures is now hindering them and is making it easier for the skeleton to kill

    them.

    When they tried to break through the formation and escape, they realized what they had nned has bitten them in their own ass. That too not a small bite.

    Sam has tinkered with the formation without them knowing. It basically enabled the feature of restricting any people from leaving the formation. However, it didn''t stop Sam.

    Instead it focused on the team members.

    Sam hovered in the air with the lightning fusion still active. He started throwing lightning bolts like a god throwing judgement on the mortals.

    "SAM, LET US GO. LET ME GO. FORGIVE ME. I WAS COERCED."

    Screams of begging starteding out. However, those who screamed were the first one to

    be hit. Soon, the screams died down. Then the sound itself is down. All that was left inside was

    Sam and the skeleton.

    Sam snapped his fingers and the formation changed once again. The skeleton that raged until now started going down. It couldn''t move. It froze on the spot as Sam rained it down with

    silver lightning. He didn''t hold back.

    His body is in full fusion and the bloodline of the Raiju has been activated.

    He didn''t use the bloodline attacks, but they are imbued with more force than any other normal attack that he has conjured.

    As he did that, several metal cards flew over from his storage. They flew around and created a formation around him. When he conjured a silver lightning bolt, the surrounding death energy was injected into those cards and they converted it into the silver lightning bolts.

    Now every lightning he conjured created six more. Seven lightnings at a time breaking down

    the ck skeleton.

    The formation elerated the healing process of the skeleton, before Sam broke it down. While everyone is watching, Sam crushed the skeleton to bits after it reached the final form.

    The next moment, he snapped his fingers again. The skeleton that was being dealt with Hari''s team and the Hari''s team itself were brought into this formation.

    Hari''s team didn''t have any knowledge of what happened.

    But when they came, they saw all the corpses and the debris of the destroyed ck skeleton.

    Sam just kept on destroying the skeleton. Once it is done, another skeleton came out of

    nowhere.

    This continued until thest skeleton was dealt with.

    As everyone that was left alive in the pocket dimension anticipated with a racing heart, a white light enveloped them, taking them away.

 Chapter 2370: Parting Gift

    Chapter 2370: Parting Gift

    ?

    N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Sam along with the rest of the participants reappeared in the middle of the open-air auditorium. They are surrounded by hundreds of students from various academies. All of them are spectators for the match and they didn''t think the participants would be appearing here. Sam and Rashma are the only ones who had good enoughnding. The rest of them just crashed into the ground. They are mostly bruised and exhausted from all the fighting.However, their senses are sharp enough to pick the changes in the surrounding energy.Several energies that are way too powerful for them to even fathom raged at different spots. But mostly from the box where all the key spectators including the Deans of the Norse academies are currently at. The deans, elders and the grand elders all were about to make a move. Their energies zeroed in on to Sam and other participants. Sam who was standing crashed into the ground, the pressure broke his bones and damaged at least half a dozen of his organs. He spat out blood. The same scenario repeated with the rest of the candidates. All of them felt like their lives already left their bodies. With a lot of effort, Sam barely managed to raise his head and look in the direction of the box. It seems like the Deans didn''t make a move physically. They areing at him with just the pressure of their energy.Which is actually enough to kill him. However, there is not a hint of fear in his eyes.Sure, his body is trembling, his instincts are screaming, cautioning about his death, but his eyes are not. He forced a grin, that pissed these bigshots off. When they are about to finish the job."Enough, hot heads."A voice almost akin to the whisper of the wind reverberated all over the academy. The deans and grand elders who were just showing off their powers, trying to crush Sam and other participants like ants, trembled in thier spots. their concentration broke down, making the pressure disappear.Chorus stood up from his seat and said. "None of you have a right to make a move. Thepetition guidelines strictly state that taking revenge for what happened in thepetition is a vition of our academy realm''s rules. So, don''t push your luck and stay put.""*SNEER*"Chorus heard the sneer from within the crowd and he made his move. The grand elder of the Heimdall academy, the mother of Yagrit made her move. Chorus interrupted her dagger with his palm as both his and her figured appeared in front of Sam.Just the aftershock of the crash sent him flying. He crashed into the ground, barely able to raise his head. Heimdall academy''s Dean took the chance to attack him.*BANG*The sword aimed at Sam''s throat, everyone thought he was done for. But at thest moment, *BAM*With a blinding sh of lightning the sword was stopped in its path. By a hammer covered with blue lightning."Get out of my way f. I need to kill this guy.""And what? Bring the wrath of gods on to the Norse academies? That kid leaves this realm, safe and sound. That is my responsibility as the organizer of thispetition. No one is going to die tonight, except for the ones that are actually trying to kill.So, you, your wife and everyone else affiliated with your academy, get out of here before I make you."Dean of Heimdall academy looked past f and his gazended at Sam. That crooked grin on his face made the Dean''s killing intent rage. However, he knew better than to fight it out with f at the moment. So, hesitation creeped in. "You fucking coward. That''s my son. How do you even think..." His wife''s screams came from the back and this made his heart tighten a bit. But those screams halted in the middle.*PAK*Chorus'' p made her faint on the spot. "You are quite a handful. I wonder how his husband is enduring you. "Everyone looked like dumb idiots at his leisurely pace of handling the situation. He not only halted her surprise attack, he made her faint with a p. While Chorus is an elder, that woman is a Grand elder. Apart from the decades or even centuries of difference in their experience, she is also perceived as the stronger part among the two. But the way he dealt with her...It reminded them of the reality check the Gambler academy gave them a few days ago. When Ling Tian gave a piece of his mind to Theron and their defenses collectively sent all the other academies from two regions packing. Now, their elder casually shut down a grand elder of Heimdall academy.He turned to f and said. "Thanks for doing your job. Now, if you can also tell those students to stop eyeballing the Gambler academy students, it would be great. That girl named Dove, contrary to her name, she is no creature of peace. I saw her banging the head of an instructor into a ck stone b, just because he looked at her in the wrong way.I can''t promise that she won''t eye gouge them if they keep this up."f turned around and looked at the students. His cold nce made them unable to meet his gaze.Chorus turned to Sam and asked. "You can take care of yourself?" Sam barely raised his hand and gave him a thumbs up. With the energy he had barely had, the wine gourd flew out of his storage and poured down into his mouth. At the same time, an injection came out of the storage with a special healing energy liquid capsule in it. He injected it into himself. The recovery sped up rapidly as huge amounts of energy waves came out of him.Just when he was about to stand up, Chorus who stood far away from appeared right next to him. His palm is covered with dense energy as he mmed it down. Everyone was shocked. They thought Chorus has gone crazy in just seconds and is now attacking Sam. It is almost like he stopped others to take him out himself. However, the palm went past him and is mmed against the ground. Cracking it open. His hand went through and he pulled out a human out of it. He swung that man over his shoulder and mmed him into the ground as if he is swinging a ragdoll. Sam didn''t even flinch, he just had a smile on his face as he looked at the man and then at the grand elder of the Heimdall academy. The man that came out of the ground is a lot youngerpared Dean or the grand elder. At least by a few decades. But he is just as strong. He is wearing the elder uniform of the Hel''s academy. And he has reputation. As being a handsome genius. So handsome that the moment he was mmed on the ground, a bunch of women in the crowd felt a prick in their hearts.Chorus pressed him down and said with a smile. "I have been eyeing your movements since the start. How stupid of you to make a move now? Considering your situation too...."Chorus shook his head like he is disappointed of this guy''s move.f sighed and said. "Everything is over here. We are going to finish the ceremony of the inter academy tournament. And before that, I dere the gambler academy as the winner of the teambat."Before the crowd could explode in uproar, he shut them off. The ceremony went pretty normally, except for the savage looks Sam and the rest of the gambler team has been getting. Sam in particr, apart from being the guy who killed so many people in the teambat, he has been the star of the show as well. He nailed the weapon making, formation and inscriptionpetitions. His high ranking in the solobat and teambat are not small either. He is the biggest winner of the tournament. And because of him Gambler academy turned into the biggest winner in the second grade level. The others didn''t do so bad either. So, their ranking will definitely raise.When Sam was on the stage to take the prize for the teambatpetition, he smiled and said. "I have a gift for everyone here."f tensed up and said. "You have done enough Sam. Please don''t increase the tensions than you already have.""Well, I am here not on my volition. So, the ones that caused my presence here must be held responsible for it.""I realize that the Gods are not as perceptive and omniscient as I believed them to be. Otherwise, you would not have been cast up on us like this.""You got that part right."As Sam said that, he took out a cube and threw it into the air. *FLASH*Several images shed, imprinting various pieces of information into the eyes of everyone present

 Chapter 2371: Conversation

    Chapter 2371: Conversation

    ?

    The shes disappeared.

    Sam stood on the stage with a smile. He turned to f who is trembling in horror and spoke.

    "I hope you like that gift. It took quite a lot of time to gather all of it andpile. I almost thought I would never get to use it. But I am d I got the chance."

    He turned around and walked off. f took out amunication token and said.

    "Lock it. Use the defensive formation and make all the elders active or otherwise make a move. Subdue everyone in the audience. Not a single elder should break into a fight here." The Thor academy elders immediately jumped into action.

    f and his grand elders did the same. They jumped into the audience.

    The Dean of the Heimdall academy was the first to make the move just like how f anticipated. He went straight to the Handsome elder from the Hel academy.

    "YOU FUCKING SNOT-NOSED BASTARD. I WILL KILL YOU. I WILL KILL YOU AND YOUR WHOLE LINEAGE."

    He screamed at the top of his lungs. He forgot all the hostility he held for Sam. He also understood why this Hel academy elder has made a move against Sam even after f issued an ultimatum. Because Yagrit, the daughter he thought was his, is not actually his.

    Yagrit is born out of the affair his wife had with this handsome man. Among all the shes that Sam showed, the recordings regarding this matter upied arge part.

    And those series of shes include the images of the Dean''s wife meeting that elder for nights of passion, their pillow talk and also a very important conversation. The Handsome basically got all territorial over her and ensured that she would never procreate with her husband.

    He made her promise that she would only have Yagrit as her child and wouldn''t have any child with her husband.

    Just to ensure that it wouldn''t happen, she lied to the husband time and time again. She even used some special medicine to fake physicalplications. Basically, it is worthy of a soap opera back on earth.

    Its just that the cuck here was supposed to be one of the strongest men in the academy realm and he wore a green hat without knowing for decades.

    That is just one of the images that Sam projected into their heads. He has several like that, implicating a lot of elders from various academies, mostly Norse academies. He aired a lot of dirtyundry and that turned a lot of people against each other.

    Except for the gambler academy members, none of the other academies are in a peaceful state. Because this little stunt took off a lot of heat from their backs.

    f''s quick measures, ensured that a brawl wouldn''t break out. He used his elders and some elders of other Norse academies to round up everyone, before escorting them to their assigned residences within the city.

    He wants nothing more than just sending everyone on their merry way.

    However, he knew hurriedly sending them might create gaps and opportunities for the brawls. So, he quickly drafted up a schedule so that one academy after another can use the space gates at regr intervals, underplete supervision of the Thor academy and its elders.

    As the Gambler academy team went back to their residence, everyone from Chorus to the auxiliary members of the team are eyeballing him.

    Everyone is curious about a lot of things. The pocket dimension and his role in cracking it is one thing, but having this much information? They are wondering if he has any more of it and to what extent.

    Now it became even more impossible for them to believe that he is not deeply affiliated with the Hub.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    They stayed in the residence and Sam stayed in his individual room while healing himself. He was battered up to say the least and despite how well he looked, he is far cry from his peak condition.

    While he was meditating in the room, all of a sudden he opened his eyes with energy vision. In the middle of the room, there is ck foggy humanoid figure hovering in front of him. "Please Sam. Do not panic. I mean you no harm."

    The figure spoke in a cold tone. Sam didn''t respond and just looked at in silence.

    "I believe that with your level of intelligence, you can figure out why I am here and who I am affiliated with."

    "Seth academy?" Sam made a guess and the other party let out a chuckle.

    "Indeed, I am not wrong about you.

    So, I am assuming you know my purpose as well and I hope that you can help me fulfil it." "The ck fog?"

    "Correct."

    "You and I both know, that it is in a ce that it shouldn''t be and it was used on someone that it shouldn''t have been used."

    There is no response from that figure.

    "I will also go out on a limb and assume this. You cannot openly try and get this from me and you certainly cannot kill me for this. Because you will lose it the moment I die."

    Still no reply.

    "So, help me understand this. Why would I ever think of giving this fog up? With this in my possession, the Seth academy will have to provide me with protection. They have to ensure that would neither die of the external factors nor of the faults of my own.

    So, the academy will ensure my safety as long as I hold on to it.

    Why would I give that advantage up?"

    And finally the reply came.

    "Trust me on this Sam.

    You might just be overestimating your intelligence here. Do you really think that you can hold the biggest secret of the Set academy as your hostage and get benefits out of us?

    Have you ever heard of cing a foot on a tiger''s neck?

    Just because a tiger is sleeping and tired, you cannot ce your foot on its neck, because once you remove and the pressure it off, it will swallow you down in one bit."

    "I am not sure, you exined the metaphor correctly."

    "I am not sure either. But I am sure, that you got the message. Don''t y with us Sam. Just handover the fog and we will be generous with ourpensation with you. Otherwise, you will just be adding the Set academy and all of its affiliations in your already long list of enemies.

    And we might even cut the line, to take what is ours.

    After all, we are known for our wicked methods and we managed to umte through our experience that there are a lot ways to break down a man other than the threat of death. And some of them are a lot more scarier than death."

    "At least we agree on that part. And one of the things that is scarier than death is reputation and honor. Both of which can easily be destroyed and manipted with information."

    There is a pause. Neither one spoke.

    Finally Sam said.

    "Anyway, let me think about it. I am sure even if I agree now, there is no way for you guys to

    take it from me at the moment. It will attract too much attention.

    So, we will meet against after I settle the aftermath back at the Gambler academy."

    "Alright, your words. See youter Sam."

    "You too, Elder Trike."

    The ck figure trembled a bit before it disappeared.

    At the moment, on the other side of the city. In the Seth academy''s base.

    One of the elders opened his eyes. His face is like a painting of surprise, shock and

    amusement."

    His held his forehead while brushing his silver hair aside as he said.

    "This kid is a lot more interesting than I thought."

    Soon, it was Sam''s and the Gambler academy''s turn to leave the Norse region. This time, f

    himself came to escort them.

    They walked in the street slowly under f''s lead who insisted that Sam walked along with

    him.

    "An escort from the Dean himself. To what do we owe this honor?"

    "I just wanted to talk."

    "Could have fooled me. I didn''t know your silence spoke this much."

    "Why do you do this Sam?"

    "Urgh... another questioning elder. Just how many people will bury me with these questions.

    First, Ling Tian and now you."

    "Just answer me. Why do you have to choose this way?

    I have been following the activity of the others that came along with you. None of them, not even one of them have the same approach as you.

    They attract attention, they gain resources, they take downpetition, they also run scams and pull wool over the others. But no where near the extent you are going.

    When the gods asked for this, I was surprised. But I was also a bit delighted, a bit curious. I thought, finally the gods are paying enough attention to their followers, even though they are

    just ying a game.

    But now...

    They cast you up on us and tied our hands, not letting us do anything. If not for that, you

    should have been dead the moment you pulled the first stunt."

    "Are you sure, you can talk about all of this openly like this? The gambler academy students

    are way too much into gossip. They will spread this like wildfire."

    "I don''t care.

    I want to understand what you are aiming for. Because time and again, your stunts are

    pushing the academy realm to the verge of its destruction.

    You increased the pressure too much and this is like a container ready to blow up. I want to know what you want to do, so that I can put a leak and reduce the pressure."

 Chapter 2372: Silence

    Chapter 2372: Silence

    ?

    Sam and the rest of theirpany reached the space gate.

    While the remaining went in, Sam stood there looking at f. At that moment, he didn''t see the majestic dean of an academy. All he saw is a tired man, who is burdened by the responsibilities that he is about to face.

    He knew the easiest route.

    Just kill Sam and be done with it. Everything will be over. But there are restrictions ced on him, not to kill other yers.

    Even if there are no such restrictions, he still felt a bit ashamed thinking about it. Killing a weak Divine ne Initiation cultivator with his own hands...

    All for what? Because he couldn''t handle the trouble created by a cultivator of such weak cultivation? Someone who is centuries younger than him made him feel that way. He felt more than ashamed.

    He felt so small and tiny, almost unworthy of the position he held.

    But that one kid is creating so much trouble for him. He knew that the whole Norse region will be on fire because of this incident.

    The worst part is, every part that is involved in this is aware that they are being manipted.

    Every party involved now also believed that Sam is more connected to the Hub and their suspicions are being proven right.

    However, the matters that he revealed are so much more sensitive, they are rted to something much more valuable than the growth and riches the Hub can provide them. It is their ego.

    A Dean of the academy respected by thousands of realms is now a cuckold.

    A grand elder who can destroy a hundred realms with just hismand was scammed by someone.

    Many more incidents like this. This hurt ego... that is not easy to swallow. They can even put their benefits on the backseat for this.

    If not for the messenger council''s rules and f''s stringent actions, the Thor academy would have been dyed in red.

    Sam could see all these thoughts creating a chaotic minefield in f''s head. He could see all that chaos just from the gaze.

    "I almost feel bad for you. Almost.

    You are so frustrated about the consequences of your god putting me here and tying up your hands, not letting you protect your home from the chaos I am causing. However, you never everined about all the chaos that you raised and covered up for the same God.

    I am a hypocrite myself, don''t get me wrong. But I am very well in touch with my own hypocrisy.

    You are asking me, why I am doing this and want to put a leak in the pressure that I am creating. But have you ever stopped ask the same question to your god?

    Ask him to deal with me. Ask him to make me get out of this ce. Since he put this burden on you, tell him to remove it.

    Even for that leak, ask him for the advice there.

    I am just as frustrated as you are if not more.

    I am not this academy realm because of my own free will. I am here because I am forced to be here. And all the chaos that I am creating is just the consequences of me being forced. It is my retaliation.

    If you are so frustrated by me, it is because you are being forced by the god that you love so much.

    Now, start retaliating against his force and maybe you can find a way out."

    With those words, Sam left the Norse region. He went back to the Gambler academy.

    The moment he did, Dove was waiting for him there.

    "There was supposed to be an Olympian region ceremony like it happened with the freshman tournament. But because of the tensions, they were cancelled.

    Just wanted to inform you."

    "Thank you."

    "Anyway, I wanted to ask you something."

    "What is it?"

    "That cube. Those shes. Did you make it?"

    "Yes."

    "How?"

    "How stupid do you think I am?"

    "No, I don''t want to the process of making it. But I do believe it helps a lot. What I want to know is how the technology that was in hands of Ling Tian just a while back, appear in your hands.

    And the information that could have only been at the hub...

    Are you really rted to the Hub? Are all the suspicions on yourpletely true?"

    Sam just shrugged and left. He couldn''t keep on answering these questions. He has way too many things to do.

    He stepped way.

    He has lost a lot of time in the inter-academy tournament. His work with Zeus academy has been mostly done.

    Most of the fourth graders are dead, the elders that are rted to Icarus'' case are destroyed and lost their jobs as well.

    A lot of elders and instructors of the Olympian academies are dead because of the misunderstandings Sam caused. It is a pretty clean cut and they are bleeding really good. Sooner orter they will copse with the debt they owe to the Hub.

    They are put on the back seat for now.

    He needs to focus on other academies now. The managers had enough of the break for now. He is also causing a lot of disturbance in other academies. He is just considering if he should go with the Thor academy that is alreadypletely warmed up or some other academy that The made some foundation with.

    Before he does that, he needs to do some meetings.

    The next morning, he finished the little ceremony that gave him the rewards. These rewards are from the Olympian region, for getting the good results in thepetition.

    After that.... nothing happened.

    Sam expected some kind of massive response from all the academies that he pissed off.

    With the killings he made in the teambat, he killed the prospects of many academies. Almost sixty to seventy academies across all the academy regions.

    And he took a shit ton of resources by strong arming the prospects across various regions. The worst part about all of this to the other academies is that, even the people that he killed owe him a bunch of money.

    He put that wicked use in the contract, about how most of their property that was in their name while alive, will be his after their death in the pocket dimension.

    He expected the people of these families toe at him and to the gambler academy. Even though the outsiders are still not allowed into the academy realm, he expected the academies affiliated toe forward for this.

    But none of this happened.

    He was left alone. He even thought that he will go ahead of the schedule and demand the debts be paid ording to the contract to poke the bear a bit.

    He held that urge in.

    So, he did something else. He arranged a meeting with his friends in the secret room of the

    hub.

    "So, what have you guys been doing while I was gone? How is your cultivation going?" Sam

    asked with a wide smile.

    "Okay, I guess." Philip just shrugged.

    The rest also gave casual answers.

    "Sam, I always wanted to tell you this. You are never good at small talk."

    Jack said when it was his turn. Sam nodded and said.

    "Alright then. I called you guys here to ask you of something."

    "What is it?"

    "I need you all to breakthrough and enter the second grade as soon as possible."

    They all nodded. Because this is what they have been thinking and doing quite for a while. Ever since Sam broke through. Sam also knew about this and continued.

    "As you know, I got the mission from the gods when I broke through to the second grade. The

    other yers will also get it and only when they all do, can I move past this mission and get

    more missions.

    I am keen on pushing them to breakthrough early.

    I want you guys to be on par with them.

    There is also another thing. The mess that I caused in the pocket dimension and this

    tournament will blow up.

    As we speak, I am sure that there are a bunch of people trying to push to the messenger council about lifting the ban on violence.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Once that happens, everyone will try to make a move on me. With thest stunt, I made them

    believe that I am the way to the hub.

    There is no way they are not going to gun for it.

    After such long suppression, everyone will be in itching tond a punch or two. We are going

    to strike at that moment.

    I want you guys to be prepared at that moment with second grade strength so that I can have

    you deal with the second graders."

    Sam gave a few more instructions and just let them be.

    He went back to the academy, where an invitation from Dean was waiting for him.

 Chapter 2373: Prince of Darkness

    Chapter 2373: Prince of Darkness

    ?

    Sam went to Wharton''s office, where apart from the Dean, two other people are waiting for him.

    Dove and Ling Tian had serious expressions on their faces as they awaited his visit.

    "Where did you go? I told you to stay put in your room for now." Dove started giving it to him immediately. Sam just shrugged and took a seatfortably.

    Wharton gestured Ling Tian to speak. It seemed like he is way too bored to speak out loud.

    "With all the shit that you stirred, it is safe to say that you are on top of everyone''s kill list. I am sure you understand that part."

    "Of course."

    "I am also sure that you are wondering why there are no attacks at all. You might have anticipated that someone will break the cease on violence."

    "A man can hope."

    "That will not happen. Everyone suffered too many losses. So, even the egos are on the back burners for now.

    However, it is not to say that they are not pushing for the end of the cease. In fact, the Deans of almost all academies are pushing to end the cease.

    Most of them, so that they can deal with you, some to take advantage of the situation. Many academies have been weakened and they want to take them out. The change in rankings also ys a significant role here of course.

    Some academies have changed their locations because of this.

    Anyway, whatever the reasons are, the majority is pushing to open the cease. You are the person that is at most risk here. It is not that the academy will not protect you. But I don''t know how well we can fare with all the strength focused on us from all the directions.

    At least, the shy stunt you pulled reduces some pressure.

    That''s why I think you might have some ideas to reduce the pressure on yourself. I want to discuss the measures with you so that we can minimize the losses after the cease opens."

    Sam nodded and said.

    "I do have some measures.

    I will try to minimize the damage to your academy. Don''t worry about it."

    Sam was about to continue but he stopped. Ling Tian noticed this and said.

    "It will definitely be advantage to reduce the academy''s damage, but I want to make sure that you are safe as well.

    I also wish that you stop making so many enemies so that you can live a bit longer."

    "As I said, don''t worry too much. I would just like to know how much time do I have before the cease ends.

    From what we knew before, we should have gotten a decision on this after the tournament is over."

    "Well, what you did created a massive effect. The people behind the decision makers are overwhelmed with the current scenario and are in the middle of a discussion.

    I will make sure to let you know once the decision is made. However, you can be assured that it will take at least a couple of weeks before a decision could be made that keeps all parties satisfied."

    "Thanks. That would be helpful.

    Anyway, as I said before I will try to take as many measures as possible to keep the pressure off the academy.

    I am going to start working on it right away."

    Sam left them and went back to his dorm. He went into a deep thought. There are too many things to do, a limited time. The whole academy realm is currently in a state of calm before storm. It is going to explode soon and he needs to cover all of his bases.

    After some time, he came to a decision and went back to Hub secretly.

    He connected with the Hub constructed in the Duat region. A bird puppet discreetly flew over the Duat region''s hub and went to the Set''s academy. It flew over through the gaps in their surveince andnded in front of a residence deep inside the academy.

    The moment itnded, Elder Trike walked out and looked at the bird puppet with a smirk on his face.

    He thought for a moment and took out the wrist band from his storage. Unlike most people he didn''t destroy the wrist band. Because like most people, he didn''t have any secrets that the Hub to could leverage on.

    The only reason he removed it is to keep up the appearances.

    The moment he strapped the wrist band on, the bird puppet flew forward. It activated with the new glow.

    The elder caught it and brought it inside.

    The moment they are in, the puppet''s eyes projected an image of Sam.

    "Hello, I have been waiting for you to contact me." Trike said with a smile.

    "Same. I was also waiting for you. But I have way too many things to do. I couldn''t dy this anymore."

    "I was not sure when would be the right time. I figured, my presence in the Olympian region will stir unnecessary circumstances."

    "Its fine.

    Now that we are here, let''s discuss the terms of the deal. But before we do that, I have some information that you might want to see."

    "I am interested."

    "First of all, I kind of know what the purpose of that ck fog is. And the guy that you picked, the guy that I stole this ck fog from, is not the one that serves your purpose."

    Trike was stunned for a moment and the smile returned.

    "What do you even know about the purpose of the fog?"

    "More than you expect me to know. I don''t want to get too deep into it. I am sure, the academy realm''s formation wouldn''t be the greatest of audience for that type of discussion.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    However, I do have some information that might convince you of my knowledge."

    Sam paused and the image changed. A new projection appeared showing the video of an old man, a middle-aged man along with a young man.

    The young man is lying on an inscription table. He is buck naked.

    The old man, with hunched back and extreme greyplexion moved in a very slow pace as he made some surgical changes to the young man. He even reced the young man''s heart with a purple colored heart that was inscribed by thousands of inscription patterns. Trike''s eyes widened and his grip over the arm rest has tightened. He broke the chair and stood up in rage. His aura is almost out of control and it took a lot out of him before he managed to control himself.

    The conversation of the video after the surgical process has beenpleted, only confirmed

    Sam''s story.

    "The heart is now capable to withholding the ck fog. This worthless son of yours can now be the vessel to be the prince of darkness."

    "Grandfather. Do you think this will cause us any trouble? Are you sure that we can slip this

    past the Set academy? Trike is very perceptive."

    "Trike? That bastard is still sucking his mother''s breasts when I started working on my

    experiments on enhanced organs.

    He can never get past my deception.

    And anyway, who is to know that my creation is not worthy of being the child of darkness? You know the requirements given by Set. There is no way a human being can have those qualities. Even with all the research information that we gathered across myriad realms on the constitutions and physical nature of the bodies, we only came to one conclusion. It is not

    possible.

    The artificial heart that I imnted in your son make him closest to the conditions mentioned by Set. So, from now on he is the vessel for the prince of darkness. Heck, he is the prince of darkness from now on and I dere it so."

    The video ended there and Sam''s face came back on.

    "That old goat. I should have skinned him when I got the chance." Trike said through gritted

    teeth. He paused for a moment and calmed himself down before saying.

    "You are not just rted to the Hub. You are deeply linked with it aren''t you? You are affiliated with its makers. You are part of their deep inner circle, aren''t you?"

    Sam didn''t confirm or deny it.

    "I won''t ask how you got this information. But this changes a lot. Now, tell me what your

    proposition is."

    "Okay, what I want is aplete and absolute protection from any forces that are in the Duat region or anyway rted to the Duat region along with the resources of my choice in the

    quantity that we can agree onter.

    In exchange, I will give you two things.

    I will reveal you the information on every mole that is in the Set academy and every person

    that is working with someone outside to bring down the Set academy.

    This information also who in the Duat region has any kind of leverage on you guys and any

    plots that are going on against you academy.

    The second thing is that I will give you the prince of darkness.

    A true prince of darkness that satisfies your requirements."

 Chapter 2374: Deal

    Chapter 2374: Deal

    ?

    "The real prince of darkness? Can''t say I am not tempted." Trike kept his calm.

    There is no sign of surprise or delight on his face. Nor was an expression of doubt. But his heart is in extreme turmoil.

    "I am sure you would be. Because I know how important the prince is for you and the rest of the Set academy.

    That is the mission given to you guys by Set after decades of silence from him. I am sure the price to pay is worth it."

    "Then enlighten me on one thing. How are you nning to get me that prince of darkness? Trust me, there are not a lot of ces left. We searched high and low for a person that satisfies the requirements to be a vessel."

    "Well, there is one part of that video that Ipletely agree with. Whatever that old man said about creating a person artificially, it is actually true.

    However, the approach he took ispletely wrong.

    He changed the heart. He reced the perfectly good heart with an artificial heart that is made out of tissues of some undead creatures. It runs solely on the inscriptions and consumes a lot of energy, hindering the vessel''s cultivation.

    To increase that cultivation, you have to use other artificial methods again.

    However, there are some long term issues thate with this approach.

    The heart is contaminating the blood and mutating it. This mutation is spreading across the vessel''s body and is changing the tissues on a cellr level. Sooner orter, the whole body will dpose and he will be more or less a creature that is half undead and half alive.

    Both of the parts contradicting each other and in process, killing the potential as a whole. That is going to be the final result of it all.

    However, I have a great way of recreating the body that won''t have any of these affects. All you need to do is find a Astral ne cultivator who has physical constitution, closest to the requirements. I will take it from there."

    Trike stayed silent for a moment to process everything.

    "You can recreate a body? You can artificially create a constitution that I need?"

    "I can neither confirm or deny it.

    All I can say is that you will have the final result that you desire."

    "Why are you being so cooperative all of a sudden? As far as my knowledge goes, the moment you stepped foot in this academy realm, you have been hostile to the very essence of it.

    You created trouble, made enemies out of everyone that you came across.

    Now, you are suddenly a good Samaritan?"

    "Who said I am?

    I realized that I got too greedy in the teambat and bit off more than I could chew. But I still don''t want to void the contract and let all the riches that came to my doorsteps slip away like that.

    So, I am just trying to cover my bases and reduce some danger.

    I am sure, the Duat region also has some of my newly made enemies, trying to break a piece of me."

    "You would be right to assume that."

    "That is why I am approaching you.

    I don''t really have any personal grudge against your academy or the Duat region for that matter. I have what you want and I am sure you can create the circumstances as per my requirement.

    But who are we kidding, you would still get the better end of the deal, even if you pay me twice of what I am asking you for."

    "Alright, I will take the bait.

    But I need to see some proof. I cannot just take your word about making a new prince of darkness out of nowhere. I need to see a detailed n of your approach and convince me."

    "You want me to reveal all my ns and procedures before we sign a deal?"

    "Not really. We will sign an airtight soul contract before we finalize the deal or even before we discuss the details of your approach. I am nothing if not fair."

    "Alright. Just await for another bird puppet thates with my soul contract. And you can keep that bird puppet as a gift. That is thetest version in the series. A special edition I would like to call it. I am sure you will appreciate how purposeful it could be."

    "I am waiting."

    The bird puppet left, but not before dropping spatial ring and a final statement in Sam''s voice.

    "A parting gift and a friendly gesture."

    The spatial ring is full of documents and recording crystals. A sample of the information that Sam said he will give.

    Trike went through it the whole night and was both surprised and terrified at the same time. The information is too sensitive and he knew some of it. But there are parts that he is nowhere near knowing. He is surprised Sam even managed to catch a hold of it.

    The terrifying part... he understood that this is just the sample. He couldn''t even fathom what the full extent of the information he has on him.

    He is suddenly looking forward to this cooperation way more than he did before.

    Sam stayed in the Hub as he concocted the n.

    He started arranging the information that he nned to give Trike. He is not stupid, he is not going to give everything he had on the Set academy to Trike. That would be him losing a lot of cards. Getting on the good side of the Set academy is well and good, but it is not worth the

    price.

    Hepiled and organized the information that he wanted to set and also drafted the n to convince the Elder.

    After that is done, he ced the signed soul contract in the space gate formation, sending it to the hub on the Duat region''s side.

    The next morning, one of Sam''s special bird puppets flew out of the Duat region''s hub and entered Elder Trike''s residence once again.

    Unlike the ones before, this bird puppet is a lot more different. It is a bit smaller, but much moreplex and life like in its structure. The signs of vitality emitting from it, gave an illusion like that.

    It connected with Trike''s wrist band and all the information regarding that was made

    avable to him.

    Along with that, the storagepartment of the bird puppet was also released, revealing the documents of the soul contract and the recording crystals with Sam''s n all revealed to

    Trike.

    Trike first opened the soul contract. After reading all the uses and seeing Sam''s signature,

    he signed it.

    It ensures that whether the deal goes through or not, neither Sam nor Trike will reveal each other''s secrets that they are exposing to each other.

    Sam will not speak of the dark prince, the ck fog and anything else rted to the matter,

    while Trike will not speak of Sam''s ns and his capabilities.

    Once it is signed, the recording crystals were truly made avable to him.

    In the recording crystals, what Trike saw made him look at Sam in a whole new light.

    He is an experienced elder and he prided himself on seeing all sorts of people with all sorts of abilities. Still, he assumed when Sam said he can create the prince of darkness, that Sam is just

    bullshitting.

    But what Sam showed made him think otherwise.

    And for a good reason. Because what Sam revealed is before and after analysis of Stone. He

    didn''t go too deep into the surgery or the procedure that Sam conduced, nor did he mention

    the fact that he changed it.

    However, he showed what changes urred in Stone''s body.

    A clear analysis of Stone before the surgery and a clear analysis after the surgery.

    Theplete change in his body, strength and constitution. If this doesn''t convince Trike,

    nothing will.

    That is a solid proof indicating that he might be the closest thing that can deliver what Trike

    needed.

    That is enough to convince him.

    Just like that Trike sent back a message stating that he is agreeing to the deal. Of course, Sam needs some time to figure out the details and there are too many eyes on him. He needs to findn/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    the suitable time to go to Duat region.

    But before that, he has some other things to take care of.

    One of which is sending message to the remaining six yers across the realms. It wasn''t also

    that much difficult.

    Because apart from Dayus, the rest of the people already have an inkling about the Hub. Sam even collected the names of the yers''ckeys to not get them stuck in the crossfire.

    The message clearly detailed what Sam''s first mission is, how it was triggered and how far he hase in aplishing the mission conditions.

    He didn''t reveal any other information, nor did he prompt them to get their missions. All he did was reveal the information about his current mission status.

    That was enough to light a fire under their bottoms.

 Chapter 2375: To Duat

    Chapter 2375: To Duat

    ?

    Sam''s message had a magical effect.

    All the yers who were already on fast track for a breakthrough, increased their speed of actions even more. Meanwhile, Sam made some more arrangements before he found a way to slip to the Duat region.

    Trike helped with that actually.

    The elder somehow managed to convince all of the Duat region in just a couple to days and made it so that Sam will not be targeted there. He even arranged long winding appointments with the people of Duat region whose descendants or affiliated people have signed the agreements with Sam.

    So, he is basically going there to inherit the properties and riches that he strongarmed them into signing off to him.

    Everyone just assumed that various powers will look for a way to break that agreement with Sam. In fact, most people are doing that. They even estimated much more pushback from rtively neutral territories like Duat and Xia will be a lot more resistant to this.

    After all, at least Olympus, Norse and Sanatan realms have some grudges with Hub and Sam and their amplified a bit.

    The same couldn''t be said about the other realms. So, Sam''s imposing and unreasonable penalty on them ispletely uncalled for.

    At least that was what''s in everyone''s mind, before Duat region''s open invitation for Sam.

    Of course, this raised a million rm bells in Ling Tian''s and Dove''s hearts. The moment the invitation was announced, he was called to the Dean''s office.

    "What the hell is happening? Is Set academy trying to lure you and kill you? Did you piss off Trike while we were not watching?"

    The moment Sam stepped his foot in the office, the barrage of words from Ling Tian''s mouth hit him.

    Dove didn''t say anything, but the way she is biting her lower lip trying to stay put, clearly showed how much she wanted to yell out loud.

    Wharton looked bored as usual.

    "Why the heck are you even using my office for meeting without my permission? Even if you use it, why do you need to force me to stay here?"

    Wharton muttered even before Sam could answer.

    Ling Tian gave him a re and turned back to Sam.

    Sam sighed and said.

    "Can you stop nagging me every time you hear something about me? If it is really needed, and if there is really a sign of threat, I would have contacted you myself. This one ispletely safe."

    "Safe? How will you know that?"

    Sam looked at Dove and Wharton before sighing again.

    "I signed a soul contract. Trike himself vouched for my safety.

    Don''t worry about it."

    Ling Tian looked at him intently before he also sighed in exhaustion.

    "I would rather be in the frontlines that dealing with you. This is getting ridiculous."

    "I should be the one saying this. I understand you are paranoid about another disaster, but can you stop summoning me here every time you hear something?"

    Sam turned around and left. He didn''t want to give anymore exnations. These old men are all full of questions.

    He just made some arrangements before leaving. He didn''t go through the space gate. He went out on harbinger. Duat region is one of the farthest in terms of distance. So, it took some time for Sam to arrive there.

    The moment he arrived, Trike came out to greet him outside the Duat city.

    Sam has seen this city before. He came here when the hub was being built. At that time, he moved secretly. Later he has seen all the secrets of the city through the Hub.

    Apart from that, his interaction with this ce has been minimal. Of course, there is some business for him or rather one of his managers here.

    In the eight people that he recruited, just like how Icarus has beef with the Zeus academy and Ivar has beef with Thor academy, Khufu has a beef with the Set academy. However, Sam ising to Duat region to make a deal with the same Set academy.

    Of course, not without a n.

    A promise is a promise and Sam promised all the managers that he will help them get their revenge and copse the academy realm.

    And in process if he has to get chummy with some of them, then so be it.

    Trike escorted Sam to a special residence arranged for him in the city. It is close to the Set academy.

    "I ensured that all the appointments are scheduled with a decent gap in between. You will stay here for at least a month.

    I hope that this time is enough for you to at least get started.

    There is only one or two appointments a day and they are all in the first half of the morning. Before noon, you should be done. From noon to the next day, you can focus on the work at hand."

    Sam nodded and said.

    "So, have you found the guy with the criteria I mentioned?"

    "There are a few picks. You can meet them tonight and make a decision.

    Anyway, I am sure I don''t have to tell you this, but keep it aplete secret. I am ensuring that none of this leaks from my side. So, if there is a leak, you will be my first suspect."

    Sam nodded and said.

    "You arranged for the people that I should be working with?"

    "Yes, they are ready. Apart from me, they will be the only ones that will be in touch with you regarding the work.

    No one else knows about this. Not even the people who are privy to the information regarding the prince of darkness."

    "Alright, I want to know. Aren''t there any people in your academy that are against this prince of darkness thing? I am sure they are also aware of the prince that you used a ce holder

    until now."

    "Of course there are. That is one of the reasons I am asking you to keep itpletely under the wraps. They cannot know what is happening. As I said, if they do, you will be my first

    suspect."

    Sam just shrugged and didn''t bother refuting it.

    Everything that he wants to say, will be said in all due time.

    That night, Sam went to meet with the others that will be involved in the project. There are four elders in total. Two of them seniors from Trike''s generation and the other two aren/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    rtively younger. They became the elders a few years ago.

    Along with them, he also saw a lineup of the candidates.

    Sam recognized most of their faces.

    Their information is part of the database he made of the astral region students. They are from

    the lesser academies in the astral region. All from the academies that are affiliated to Set

    academy.

    Sam checked their constitutions once again and was impressed by Trike''s ability to gather them all here. They indeed meet most of the requirements Sam mentioned.

    Among them, he picked three.

    "These three will suffice. They have the highest affinity to the dark element and death energy. Their constitutions are also not rigid, which allows us to be a lot more flexible with our

    approach."

    Trike was surprised by Sam''s selection, but he didn''t show any objections. The same didn''t go with the other four elders though. Once Sam left to back to his residence, the gathered and

    started bitching about it.

    "Elder Trike, are you sure this is the right guy for this? The three people he selected are the ones with the least potential. They would barely be able to breakthrough to the Divine ne

    and that will take their life time.

    How can we create a vessel for the prince of darkness from any of the three?

    The previous vessel is a dozen times talented than any of them. But even he wasn''t able to

    hold the ck fog without any consequences."

    "I also have some doubts about him. Recreating something, recreating a body with a constitution... that is the job of gods. How can a normal cultivator, that too a human do it?

    This could very well be the impossible."

    Trike stayed silent for a while.

    These questions bombarded his mind as well. He also thought the same thing.

    But Stone''s results.

    The change in Stone''s body is not small. He even investigated about Stone and his involvement with Jade and Theron. Stone''s past is not that hard to find.

    Stone''s connection to ming skulls and that ming skulls'' alleged connection with Sam, he

    can fill in the rest of the nks.

    And Sam himself admitted that he can do it.

    On top of all that, his instinct told him that Sam is the man for the job. So, he convinced

    himself and convinced the elders.

    "Are you doubting my judgment?" That is all he said.

    The other four immediately went mute. They didn''t dare raise their voice.

    Anyway, Sam managed to changed their mindter and they realized these doubts were just

    them being ignorant.

 Chapter 2376: Getting started

    Chapter 2376: Getting started

    ?

    Sam dove into work immediately.

    The next morning, he had the first meeting with one of the elders of the Amun academy. He is the father of one of the students that Sam killed.

    Sam and elder sat in silence facing each other. The elder looked like he wanted to kill Sam with just his gaze.

    "I know it is not too sensible of me to rush you, but I have a big day ahead. I even made ns for my lunch. So, if we can finish this meeting and sign the contract, then we can go on our merry ways."

    The elder gritted his teeth and ced the documents on the table.

    "These are the properties that were under my son''s name. As per the contract, you will get one-third of them."

    He then ced another pile on the table.

    "These are the ones that my son was supposed to inherit. You will get your share in this as per the contract.

    As you can guess, we are notfortable giving it all to you directly. So, I would like to negotiate to see if you are willing to ept different property or other resources."

    "Okay, let''s start with the negotiations."

    Just like that a heated discussion was triggered. Sam now understood why Trike made appointments with suchrge intervals in between.

    He just assumed it is to keep Sam in the Duat region longer. But from the looks of it, he might have anticipated this response.

    The elder tried to get away with handing over some trashy property and litigated property to Sam. But Sam who knew most of the information slipped past and finally negotiated to get whatever he wanted.

    He became richer in just a few hours.

    After that, Sam went to lunch at one of the restaurants of the Duat region which is still operating. Since the ban has not been lifted, not a lot of businesses are operating. This one is run by one of the fourth graders, so it is still open.

    After finishing the mean, Sam went back to his residence.

    He set up a concealment formation and disappeared from there, leaving behind a decoy energy signature in case someone is spying on him, which he assumed is happening real time.

    He reappeared in the secret room of the hub. He opened the special passage to ess the energy reservoirs underneath the hub.

    He manually activated one of the reservoirs so that the artificial cores will be generated. Of course, he need to make a converter mechanism before doing it.

    The neutral energy cores are good enough for Stone''s purpose, since Sam was making a pure warrior at that time. Stone''s main focus is on physical strength and energy control. But the prince of darkness needs a lot more and those requirements are way damn specific.

    The converter mechanism helps him get what he wants.

    It took a decent time for him toplete all the preparations.

    After that is done, he went to the first official meeting with the other four elders and Trike. The rest of the kids were sent away and only the three Sam picked were left. All three of them were put in separate rooms with heavily constructed formations.

    They are istedpletely and were kept in optimum environment.

    Sam drafted up some ns and gave them to the three elders.

    "First day of work, I am sure all of you have way too many questions.

    To be honest, I am way too tired answer any questions at the moment. I just hope that your questions will be answered while you are working.

    If you can''t even understand then, we can discuss further."

    "Discuss the questions then?"

    One of the elders asked.

    "No, discuss whether you should be on the team." Sam said nonchntly. Despite the angry looks, he continued.

    "Let''s talk about the first candidate. Open the n of action written for him."

    They did as he told.

    The document is long and is almost like a book.

    "Memorize everything and destroy it in front of my eyes, before you leave the room. None of it should be revealed to anyone else outside. This stays in between the six of us.

    The first candidate is a mage. A necromancer to be precise with a dark elemental core.

    No constitution, no specialty in his spiritual core. Average talent, average potential. The only reason he even made to the Astral ne at his age is because of his overwork and the fortuitous encounters he identally gained.

    His potential is low..."

    "Way too low. Too low to even amount to anything in the academy realm, much less be suitable to be a prince of darkness." One of the elders interrupted Sam.

    Sam paused for a moment and looked at him calmly and spoke.

    "Average means, more room to improve.

    His spiritual core aside, being a mage, his body is weak.

    ording to the n, we first need to strengthen it. I prepared the physical training n. One of you will oversee it. It should be done in a controlled environment. He should meet all the required targets within the pre-determined deadline.

    I am going to hold the person in charge ountable if he doesn''t.

    While his physical training is going through, he will be going through a series of treatments for his physical body as well.

    The medicine has been prescribed. I heard one of you is skilled in potion making and pill making. You should take charge of that and administer the treatment as prescribed.

    Whether making the medicine or executing the treatment, any error and you are ountable. If you are notprehending any of it, you can ask me, but do no make a mistake.

    Who is the necromancer here?"N?v(el)B\\jnn

    One of the elders raised his hand.

    "You are in charge of creating specters. That is for the phase two of the n. Still, you should get started on it, if you don''t want to waste any time.

    One thing about these specters though, the people you extract the souls from should satisfy

    specific requirements.

    They should all be from the creatures that have dark element and dark element only.

    The souls should all belong to the Divine ne initiation initial stage. Nothing more nothing

    less.

    The creatures should not specialize is any form of soul arts or soul type constitutions.

    No creature should have a necromancy skill.

    They should not belong to any undead creature.

    Ensure these requirements are met. And the soul energy of any specter should not exceed the

    limit of Divine ne initiation.

    As usual, if they miss the mark, you are ountable. The specters should also be made within the specified time limit.

    Now that makes you three elders. The fourth elder, I need you to be in charge of the resource gathering. All the resources are listed down in the order of their importance as well as their

    requirement in each phase.

    The timeline in which they will be required is also mentioned. Apart from that, the requirements for processing these are also mentioned.

    I can''t be bothered to do most of those menial tasks. You are in charge of them.

    You do them yourself or get them done by someone, I don''t give a crap. But I need you to

    bring them to me on time with no dy. Or..."

    "I will be ountable."

    "Thank you. Now, on to the second candidate.

    The first phase of this guy is a bit differentpared to the first one. This guy doesn''t have a constitution either, however his soul is a bit different..."

    Sam kept on going about the requirements for the three candidates and assigned a mountain

    of tasks to the elder.

    The night was deep before they managed to grasp every detail of what they are supposed to

    do.

    After that, they immediately slipped into their tasks as they read the ns in detail.

    Sam and Trike are left alone in the room.

    "That is quite a n. I never thought that I would hear the words, change the physical muscle

    density, change the bone marrow so casually. Any time I heard those words, I am sure I ended upughing out loud. No doubt about it.

    The way you put those tasks as well... they would have been brushed away if they were even uttered anywhere else."

    "I don''t know what kind of people you are hanging out with, but you need to change your

    social circle. If you are surrounded by people who can onlyugh and brush off your insane ideas, then your imagination will never reach a point where you would dare try them.

    You would be limited by the thoughts and ideas projected by the idiots around you."

    "Is that your philosophy for growth?"

    "No, that is philosophy I offer up as unsolicited advice. That doesn''t apply to me."

    "Why?"

    "Because no matter how brilliant the people around me are, I already consider them all as idiots. Brilliant ones, but idiots still. So, this won''t apply to me."

 Chapter 2377: Checking the black smoke

    Chapter 2377: Checking the ck smoke

    ?

    Once Sam delegated the tasks, he took more of a supervising role in the initial phases.

    There would be time for surgeries for all three of them and until then the elders can handle the things. All he needs to do is offer them enough guidance and ensure that they are following everything to thest instruction.

    Meanwhile, the days went by as they busied themselves with these tasks.

    Sam attended his meetings and always had heated discussions with the people. Negotiations were always on the verge of breaking down until he managed to get whatever he wanted. Of course, he wondered if the negotiations are increasing the hatred more than before.

    He is certain that they are not decreasing the hatred.

    Anyway, he already has enough bad blood with so many people. He is sure that a little more scorn wouldn''t hurt him more.

    While things are going on like this on the surface, he has been doing something else in his own time.

    Before the meetings started in the morning and after the work in their newb is done, Sam is free to do whatever he wanted. Trike and the elders attributed to his rest time, since even being the supervisor is hard enough with all the daily calctions and measurements.

    However, contrary to their thoughts, Sam is spending that time in one of the secret rooms of the Hub.

    In that secret room with a myriad of inscriptions funneling the death energy to the central part of the room, was a cylinder made of a transparent crystal material.

    The crystal cylinder is ingrained with runes in its structure. In that cylinder is a thick ck fog that Sam collected from the fake prince of darkness in the academy tournament.

    Sam didn''t hand it over to Trike and thetter didn''t ask him.

    Because ording to the deal, Trike is sure that Sam couldn''t hold on to the ck fog if he were to satisfy the conditions. Because the creation of prince of darkness involves the ck fog in its final step.

    He just let it stay with Sam for two reasons.

    First one is, he respected Sam''s possible curiosity as a researcher towards the ck fog. It is a novel substance that shouldn''t even exist in the world of mortals and divine. It belongs to the world of celestial and beyond.

    So, he is sure that Sam would want to take a deeper look at it.

    The second reason is that no one else other than Sam can hold it for long.

    One of the key properties of this ck fog is that it can only stay where it is supposed to stay and that is within the body and soul of the prince of darkness.

    If it stays anywhere else is corrodes and consumes them. Leaving nothing but empty husks and debris in its wake.

    It might take some time depending on the power and resistance of the entity it is attached to. However, in time it willpletely devour it.

    Sam created modified this chamber to keep this smoke here. It will also be devoured in time if he left it alone. However, to ensure that it doesn''t happen, he is channeling the death energy into the chamber.

    The smoke is very fond of the death energy and is now ignoring the other entities in process of consuming the excess energy.

    Sam ced his hand on the crystal cylinder and injected some soul energy into it.

    The moment he did...

    *SCREEECH*

    Screams of rage and spite erupted from within the chamber. The ck smoke revealed several faces. Faces of various creatures and the face that are expressing nothing but scorn and hatred towards everything.

    Sam observed these faces keenly, he counted them and did some calctions in his head. After that, he took out reaper sword and the shadow sword from his storage and projected their spirits out.

    *ROAR*

    The blood ghost spirit of the reaper sword with his monstrous humanoid spirit is gazing at the faces within the crystal cylinder. The shadow spirit is nothing but a ck mass. There is no face or eyes that Sam could make up.

    But the faces inside the cylinder became restless.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    *THUD* *THUD**THUD* *THUD* *THUD* *THUD*

    They crashed against the cylinder as if they are trying to break out of it. But the inscriptions on the cylinder lit up restraining them. The faces kept on making noise and tried to get out. They are alternately looking at the reaper spirit and the shadow sword spirit as if they are possessed by incontroble hunger.

    The shadow sword spiritmunicated with Sam.

    [The aura of these spirits is filled with evil. What is this abomination? This feels like it is

    something that shouldn''t exist among the world of living.]

    "Your feeling is right. I need you to do something for me."

    [What?]

    "Interact with it. I will restrain the spirits from acting out. I just want to understand the urge. Just interact with it and see how it behaves."

    [Alright]

    Sam closed his eyes and tried to connect with the cylinder. While he was making preparations for the experiment, the faces inside the cylinder grew more and more restless. They transformed into various shapes, like the spikes trying to pierce through the cylinder, they exploded a bit, they even tried to corrode the cylinder.

    But no matter what they did, the cylinder didn''t budge.

    Soon, Sam is done with the preparation and he made the Blood Ghost spirit and the shadow sword spirit connect with the smoke through the cylinder.

    Just when the faces were about to hurriedly devour them, Sam forced a restraint. Golden runes flew over from the bottom of the cylinder and manifested into chains tying that ck mass up into a small ball.

    The sword spirits probed these faces for over half an hour.

    Sam kept his eyes closed and connected with the emotions of those faces or rather the spirits. He could feel their urges as they tried to get close to the sword spirits.

    For a moment he felt like he could understand theirnguage. And when he finally understood it, he couldn''t help but smirk a little to himself.

 Chapter 2378: Weapon spirit in the making

    Chapter 2378: Weapon spirit in the making

    ?

    Sam disconnected himself as well as the weapon spirits.

    He sent the weapons back into the storage and took out some specters. He fed one of the specters into the cylinder. The faces didn''t show the same excited reaction as they did with the weapon spirit. However, they did show some reaction.

    Sam connected himself once again and observed as the specter being forcefully devoured by the faces. All these faces are representatives of the spirits within and these spirits are now devouring the specter as if it is nothing more than a snack.

    However, the urges and the actions of these spirits ispletely differentpared to how they acted when he made the weapon spirits go into contact with them.

    He went into a deep thought and decided to go with another experiment. He took out a weapon and another specter. Then with his spell made enchanted the weapon with the specter and made that specter a spirit.

    Then he connected himself with the spirit and embedded some sword arts. Of course, this is not enough. He needs some the spirit properly attached itself to the weapon and developed as the true weapon spirit.

    For that to happen, he needs to use the weapon properly in battle.

    The next morning, when he arrived at the meeting and started negotiating, he led the whole conversation to the deadlock.

    "Alright, let''s make a wager." Sam proposed.

    "Okay, what is it?"

    "A battle. Let''s participate in a swordsmanship battle. You can bring ten swordsman. They can even be of third grade, but they need to suppress their cultivation tote stage of Divine ne initiation. Which means, they should suppress their cultivation to the second grade.

    It would be a battle of swordsmanship and no other tricks or elements can be used.

    If I can win seven of the ten fights, then I will get what I want, if not, I will take what you give me. You okay with that?"

    The elder''s eyes beamed with a glint. He immediately agreed.

    "I agree, but you know that swords don''t have eyes and things can get out of hand. What if you died in the battle?"

    "I am fine with that. I will ept the consequences. However, the same can be applied to your candidates. So, if they died I wouldn''t be held ountable for their deaths."

    "Don''t worry, with their superior cultivation they won''t die and of course, if they break their suppression they will lose automatically."

    "I understand that. But if they break their suppression and attack me, what do you propose we do about it?"

    "You tell me."

    "I will increase the properties that I take from you. You can getpensated from the candidate directly if you want. But you will be the onepensating me."

    The elder thought for a moment and said.

    "Alright, Deal.

    When do we schedule the fight?"

    "In one hour. We will meet in the Set academy. I am sure elder Trike will be more than happy to give me the arena."

    "Alright. I will meet you there." The elder has left immediately.

    Ten minutester.

    "No. Are you out of your mind?" Trike is fuming as he looked at Sam. He didn''t even know what to say apart from this straight rejection.

    "Don''t worry about it elder Trike. I know what I am doing and this is important for me. I cannot stay inactive for such a long time and who knows how long the project will take? I cannot just stay dormant in this region.

    Or I will raise a million suspicions. I am sure you noticed that there is some change in the movements within the city. Several dormant spies are now active and are very busy trying to get info from me.

    Even though the meetings are there, it is still out of my character for me to not create an ruckus in this ce. It is not my style to just negotiate some deals and go back without an incident. This will serve my purpose greatly and keep the cover intact."

    Trike gritted his teeth, but he didn''t have a proper rebuttal for that. What Sam said stands correct.

    It is indeed out of Sam''s character to not cause an incident. After some thought he came to apromise.

    "Alright, I agree. But on the condition that I will be present during the fights. I am in charge of your safety. If things go south, I will directly involve myself. I don''t give a shit about the deals you made with them.

    You being alive is way too important for me right now.

    And if you are so eager to court death, I can kill you myself after the project is over."

    "As you wish.

    And please don''t take thatst line so seriously. I will never try to kill myself. I might look like I might take my life lightly, but I have way too many things to do, before I go."

    Within an hour, the elder has brough the ten swordsmen, while Sam arrived along with Trike. Surprisingly not a single swordsman is of second grade. Well, Sam couldn''t even say that it is that surprising. He kind of expected it.

    All of them are third grade students. Trike himself oversaw that they suppressed their cultivation properly and made them wear the suppression bracelets. It is much harder to break the suppression with that bracelet on.

    Then started the fights.

    The first one is a woman.

    "I have seen you in the tournament. I haven''t seen you use a sword that much though. You got balls proposing this challenge."

    Sam took out a sword without answering. It looked quite normal. There is no fancy design. No signature make or specialty to it. It is just a regr double edged, straight sword.

    "Alright. Let''s go. I want to see how much of a swordsman you are."

    The woman lunged forward and started with a stab. Sam blocked the sword smoothly and the exchange went on. He didn''t move much. His aura is changing with every movement as he used that sword though.

    His feet are stationary while his upper body is moving at an incredible pace. His breath became sharper and his sword aura is raging. The sword in his hand soon started resonating

    with his aura.

    At the same time, when his sword met with the sword of the opponent, the opponent''s sword aura is also responding in kind. The woman felt like she is in a new territory which she is also oddly familiar with.

    She herself felt like a sword and the more she shed with Sam, the more she felt closer to her sword. As if she and her sword are bing one.

    She knew this state. This is what she wanted to achieve always in her sword training sessions. She often reached it, but it was always hard to hold this state for long.

    Now, however this battle turned out to be the training session she needed. But the only problem is she felt like a student in front of Sam''s swordsmanship.

    The more she observed the more she realized that she fell short. Sam''s swordsmanship is very close to the basics. There are no fancy moves, no over the top swings. He stuck with the basics, but every move was made with so muchpleteness.

    And each move is connected with the next one, creating a clean and clear flow.

    This feeling made her feel inferior and to cover up that inferiority she started channeling

    more and more strength. She stopped with the probing moves and went with full fledged

    sword attacks.

    Sam also responded in kind. However, it felt more like disy of a sword style rather than pre-configured sword attacks.

    He is still making the same stabs and shes, but they are just amplified in scale. His swordsmanship is like a gentle stream. It is so refined and elegant, but when amplified, it was like a huge current of river. Still refined, still precise, still flowing, but a lot more lethal and

    powerful.

    And just like that she lost in his hands.

    Her sword didn''t budge anymore to make a move against him in that state. Sam closed his

    eyes after the first battle and kept his state intact.

    The second opponent stepped up and the same type of battle continued. Trike''s expectations were crashed. He expected some kind of ass-whopping for Sam, but instead it became a disy of swordsmanship. It almost felt like Sam is showing off. Even the opponents that lost in his hands didn''t show much hostility towards him.

    Because in that brief exchange, they felt like their sword sense has benefited. So, even thatn/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    defeat didn''t feel so humiliating. Each battle took a good enough time, but not too long. Sam spent a few hours there on the stage and won all ten battles.

    He finally came out of that state and had a huge grin on his face. His sword and its spirit is

    ready.

 Chapter 2379: Surgery

    Chapter 2379: Surgery

    ?

    Sam went to work in theb after that.

    He just focused on that day''s tasks regarding the three. After that, he went back to the Hub''s secret room where the ck smoke is captured. He channeled his energy into the sword. The spirit has been strengthened a lot.

    It is of course nowhere near the strength of the spirit of shadow sword and the reaper. But it is still strong enough. The weapon with a spirit like that would be extremely attractive to an Astral ne cultivator.

    Of course, this method is not exactly ideal in creating spirits. The forceful enchantment aside, the artificial growth that Sam createdpletely defeats the purpose have a spirit weapon. The preferrable method is like how Sam developed the spirit of the reaper sword over time.

    The spirit generated with the numerous battles Sam experienced with that sword. So, whatever the growth, strength and changes the spirit experienced, theypliment Sam''s style a lot.

    The sword spirit that he created in this new sword, it will be beneficial in terms of strength. It adds an extra edge when fighting people of same strength, however this heavily limits the growth of the cultivator who practices this sword.

    The spirit of the sword influences the growth and in turn cuts the flexibility in the sword path the cultivator could explore.

    This reduces his potential by a huge margin.

    Having a wrong spirit sword in the hands of a swordsman in his learning stages can be turned into a huge disadvantage.

    Anyway, that is apletely different matter. The spirit albeit being weak, served Sam''s purpose.

    He threw the sword into the cylinder along with the ck fog.

    The fog immediately disyed its faces and all of them are pointed at the sword. The sword vibrated heavily before it disyed its spirit. Since it is made from the specter, it retained its humanoid form. The humanoid form wrestled with these dozens of faces as if it is resisting their invasion.

    However, it failed really badly.

    The faces pulled the humanoid form into the ck fog and in process the sword turned into shambles.

    In front of Sam, the ck fog went through a massive change in its nature. It went dormant for a moment and turned into a sphere of ck smoke, before it revealed the faces again. This time, a new face appeared in it.

    The same face as the spirit that that was just devoured.

    Sam then connected with the ck smoke once again. He made it attack. This time, the smoke threw out sword rays, all the consistent with the sword style Sam used.

    The experiment worked. From that day onwards, apart from attending the meetings and negotiating, he always proposed a battle. With various weapons each time and some challenges are a bit hybrid. He used ming sword styles with the challenge being about fire and sword users.

    Simrly lightning and spear users, dagger and shadow element users, he applied all kinds of logics to nurture various spirits and experimented with the ck smoke.

    Of course, his focus hasn''t lessened on the three test subjects either. The prince of darkness project is going smoothly. The only problems came with the specter creation and it is within Sam''s calctions.

    Of course, the created specters are not exactly wasted either.

    From the repeated experimenting with the ck smoke, Sam understood something else. The specters are a great feed for the ck smoke. While the spirits made qualitative changes, the specters increased their energy level and strength.

    They are making it powerful. It is like cultivation for it. So, whenever an elder made a mistake in the energy level of the specter or if he added some soul in the mix that shouldn''t be added, he directly threw that specter in the cylinder feeding the ck smoke.

    Within twenty days, the first candidate finished the physical training and achieved the desired results. His skin, muscles and bones all reached the desired level of strength that Sam wanted. Now it is time for the first physical surgery. When Sam exined this part of the n, the elders and Trike got so curious that they have been anticipating it for a long time.

    It is abination of two surgeries. One is the marrow surgery, simr to the one he performed on Stone. A surgery in which he changed the marrow with a dragon type beast''s marrow.

    Now he is changing the marrow with a different type of beast''s marrow. A very special beast in fact. Marrow of the devil Wyvern. It is a very close rtive to the devil dragon that Kai has with him. A bit less in the bloodline hierarchy.

    It has high enough bloodline potential.

    The second part of the surgery is embedding the transformation gene into the young man''s organs. For that, apart from the transformation gene, he also needs clear gic and organ tissue samples of some other creatures with dark element.

    They are also of high bloodline ranking.

    That day, Sam cancelled all the meetings and pushed them back. The surgery started at dawn and by noon, he only managed to finish the marrow surgery. After the marrow surgery is done, he elerated the healing process of the body and enabling the new blood to be transformed.

    The new blood cells imbued with the new qualities of this updated marrow. The organs are also slowly being injected with this blood rich and dark element.

    This immediately showed adverse changes. The organs slowly started deteriorating, bit by bit.

    That guy might have some affinity with dark element, but the changes that are happening are too drastic and powerful for him to bear.

    That is the reason why he needed that transformative gene surgery.

    For that, he created a special took. He started with the heart first. That is the organ that experienced the most deteriorating in the smallest time. He punctured the heart and removed a small piece of tissue with the device. In that void, he injected the new tissue along with the transformative gene.

    He alsoid down a very minute inscription formation around the gene. The dark energy that is flowing through the surgery table is directed towards that tissue. At a visible pace, the transformation started.

    While it is going on, Sam moved to the lungs, then the liver, pancreas, kidneys, even the intestines were not left.

    The rest of the day went away with changing all those organs one by one.

    By midnight, the surgery is finally done and Sam was left exhausted. He copsed on the floor leaning against the wall. He observed the healing process while chugging his wine along with

    some liquid energy capsules.

    He tried to recover as soon as possible.

    At that moment, Trike and the other elders took the chance to observe the changes in the body. They were dumbfounded.

    They are all aware of the physical strength of that young man. He was a mage and he would nowhere near be a match of a warrior in terms of physical strength, even if they are on the same level. Even a warrior one stage below might have better physique than a mage.

    The four elderspletely lost words. Trike was the only one who managed toe out of the shock. Maybe it is because he doesn''t have the full understanding on what it takes to

    change a person like this.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "How did you do this? Did you invent this method?" Trike asked Sam.

    "You have witnessed the whole surgery directly. I am sure I don''t need to answer your first

    question.

    As for the second one. I did. But I got a lot of inspiration for the organ surgery from the plight of one of my friends. It took a long time to develop this method though. But I am really satisfied with the result.

    Tell the elders to not mess with that guy for the next few days. He would be inatose state, while his body undergoes the full changes."

    "These are not theplete changes?"

    "No way. He would be apletely different being. You can thenpare him with the ideal requirements given by Set. You will see how much progress we have made."

    Trike paused for a moment and asked.

    "You said something about the Soul surgery, what is it about?"

    "You are curious about it now?"

    "Well, I never really thought what it meant. But now I saw your marrow surgery, I am just way

    too curious about this."

 Chapter 2380: Soul Surgery

    Chapter 2380: Soul Surgery

    ?

    Trike didn''t have to wait too long to satiate his curiosity.

    With everything going on at predetermined timeline, the surgeries for the three candidates were going perfectly.

    Just like Sam suggested, Trike kept on testing the three candidates against the criteria given by Set. And to his surprise, these kids are meeting those criteria more and more. Of course, there are still some requirements for their mental state, energy capacity, energy affinity and efficiency in energy usage.

    However, with the way things are going he is a lot more optimistic about these three

    candidates meeting the requirements.

    Even though Sam is performing everything in front of their eyes, Trike and the elders barely understood anything. They at least understood some principles behind the methods Sam is using, but that only increased their confusion.

    They couldn''t understand how Sam managed to bring that principle and theory to life. Much less make it so efficient that he can use it in such a fluid and controlled way.

    This shock only intensified when Sam performed the soul surgery. After the elder in charge of the specter creation finally reached the specter count needed for the first candidate''s soul surgery, Sam scheduled it immediately.

    And when Sam exined the procedure, the four elders and Trike felt like they are seeing a brand new world.

    "Are you sure this is the right way? You are not kidding me, are you?" Trike asked in bewilderment.

    "Of course, I am sure. Or do you think I am an idiot who likes to kid around by staking his life on the line?

    That is my soul we are talking about. I won''t joke around with it."

    "That is exactly why I am asking, if you are kidding. You are going to use your own soul, let all the specters enter it, fuse with it and then you will tear your soul apart and enter the consciousness of the candidate, before fusing it again and finally destroying your own soul fragment?

    Just saying it out loud feels so ridiculous and you are saying that you will do it? Are you nuts?"

    Trike couldn''t control his shock. He usually talked with a refined and dignified tone. But now he is like a shill in a market.

    Sam just stared at him calmly. He didn''t know how to respond. The only possible answer is for him to do it and show it to them. But for that, he needs Trike to shut up. Ironically, Trike seemed to be not so willing to shut up without knowing the details.

    "How are you even going to do that? How is that even possible? What if your soul is injured? You will go into aatose state and god knows what you will need to recover. It will create a whole lot ofplications with the procedure."

    "First of all, the soul will be injured.

    And that doesn''t mean I will go intoatose state. As I said, I am not idiot. I won''t mess around with my soul that easily.

    Finally, It is not the first time I have done this."

    "Stone?"

    "Yes. Do you really think that guy has the mental capacity to bear all that energy and the consequences of the new bloodline and constitution he was given without the mental capacity? I forcefully increased his mental capacity by myself.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    It is just a repeat procedure to me.

    So, just stop with the questions and let me get on with it. It will be a lot easier for you to witness it to understand it."

    At this moment, the elder in charge of the specter creation, pulled over Trike and talked to him secretly. Only after that, did Trike calm down and agree to the procedure. But he had a condition.

    "Let the elder attach a minute fragment to the candidate''s soul. Just in case. He will be able to monitor the process and ensure that there are noplications."

    Sam smirked and asked.

    "Are you sure that is all? If I didn''t know any better, I would have thought that you are actually concerned about me. However, I do know better and that guy just wants to witness the fusion process and ensure that my fragment is really dead.

    To ensure that I won''t steal the precious body of your candidate and make it my own with my soul fragment."

    The elder and Trike didn''t disagree. They just stayed silent.

    Sam just shrugged and said.

    "Make sure that your elder doesn''t do anything out of line. As I said, I don''t y around when

    ites to my soul. There could be adverse consequences if he does something that he

    shouldn''t."

    Sam went into the specially crafted formation. His soul was projected outside and the specters were let into the formation. Sam''s soul captured the specters and all of them lumped together were focused one specific area on Sam''s soul.

    At that moment, Sam created a clone of his soul by tearing off a fragment. It is a smaller part with much smaller energy level.

    The fragment was immediately attacked by the specters. The struggle didn''tst long as Sam''s soul absorbed all the specters and it increased in strength immediately. It is very close to the natural energy level of a Divine ne initiation initial stage cultivator''s soul.

    The fragment immediately entered the consciousness of the young man.

    There Sam can see two consciouses already present. One is aplete consciousness. The candidate''s.

    The second one is also a fragment, much smaller than his own. The fragment of the elder.

    Sam''s fragment with all its power merged into the soul of the candidate. He ensured that the fusion process is seamless. He also made sure that his soul is on the dormant side of the fusion process, allowing the soul of the candidate to take upper hand.

    This ensured that there are noplications on the fusion process.

    However, while this process is happening, when Sam''s own consciousness is ready to disappearpletely and be destroyed, he sensed a faint disturbance.

    The consciousness of the elder seemed to be causing a faint disturbance.

    Sammunicated with it, sending a message to the elder to withdraw immediately. However, not only did he not get the desired response, the other party even seemed to act oblivious to his demand.

    Sam spread is consciousness a bit and connected with the elder''s fragment to send a direct

    message.

    He even forcefully removed that fragment from the candidate''s soul. Hoping that it would send a much stronger message.

    However, at that moment, Sam felt something, almost like an all-seeing eye invade his fragment of consciousness. He knew what was happening immediately. He got angry and forcefully detonated his soul fragment.

    "FUCK*

    The elder who sat in meditation opened his eyes. Some blood came out of his nose as he

    red angrily at Sam.

    Sam on the other hand didn''t open his eyes immediately. He is also feeling the pain, however, he anticipated it and is ensuring that he didn''t suffer severe damage.

    It took a while for him to open his eyes.

    He is panting while blood slightly dripped down from his nose. He felt light headed and dizzy.

    He is in much better shape than when he conducted the soul surgery on Stone.

    The live and direct experience indeed helped him a lot.

    However, that is not his concern. He looked at the Elder who is also ring at him.

    Sam turned to Trike and said.

    "I already told you that there would be consequences. Did he really think that I have such crappy control over my fragment and wouldn''t know that he is invading it?

    I thought your people would be smart enough to not underestimate after all that they have

    witnessed."

    Trike gritted his teeth and red at the elder.

    The elder was about to speak, but Trike extended his palm forcefully. An invisible force, pped the elder to the wall, applying mountains of pressure making him unable to speak.

    "What''s the point of disying that force now? None of your elders can spy on anything. Their privilege to be a witness of the procedure has been revoked immediately."

    Sam didn''t even wait for Trike to speak up. He just walked away. Right before he was about to walk through the door, he spoke.

    "I am not working tomorrow. Ensure that they are meeting their targets. I need to take some

    rest. My soul is hurting."

    Trike looked at the elder and is very tempted to break his neck. But he needed him for the dark prince project and cannot let him go now.

    "I will deal with you after the prince of darkness finallyes down. Until then, you better be

    especially silent unless you are asked to speak up."

    Trike also left.

    Meanwhile, Sam''s frown slowly turned to a smirk. He wanted to thank the elder for doing

    something so stupid. But he knew it wouldn''t be appropriate. That guy just gave him a new avenue to execute his n.

 Chapter 2381 Contracts again

    2381 Contracts again

    After the first soul surgery, Sam''s life became a lot more easier.

    The questions from Trike and his team lessened. They didn''t dare doubt him and if they did, they didn''t dare to voice them out. One elder''s momentarypse of judgment cost them a lot of learning experience.

    The other three elders isted that guy.

    Just like how high school students do to the nerd or the teacher''s pet. The work went on and their thoughts of stuck because of this.

    Sam on the other hand moved at a clean pace. He fought and won all his battles. Gained the weapon spirits, fed them to the ck smoke. After some time, the ck smoke increased in quantity because of the vast amounts of death energy fed to it.

    Sam erged the container to double its original size to amodate all this smoke.

    While things are like that, he performed the soul surgeries for the remaining two candidates as well. This time, as expected there is no monitoring or intervention from others. Once the soul surgeries are done and the candidates reached the desired physical and mental requirements, there is one final thing that he needs to do.

    The final phase for all three candidates. Thest part of their transformations.

    "I am going to do a special surgery and I need some special contract with you and your elders to move forward with it." Sam proposed to Trike and his team.

    "What do you mean?"

    "What I mean is that I don''t trust you guys enough to not to reveal what you are about to see. This is the final surgery to all three candidates and it would happen simultaneously.

    It also involves the key element to turning their constitutions from good to great. I won''t give that up away that easily."

    Trike sighed and said.

    "Sam, it happened one time. And even you know that it was a momentary thing."

    "I don''t give a crap. I don''t trust him and in conjunction I don''t trust your judgment that much."

    Trike frowned at this. It is hard not to take offense from those words. But Sam didn''t back down. He doubled down.

    "This might be the most important project in your life. The stakes are way too high and you can only select four people that you can trust. And with the importance I expect you to select the people that you can trust the most.

    In those four people one of them turned out to be dud.

    Are you still surprised that I think your judgment is shit?"

    Trike''s sigh turned to a ck jaw. He turned to the elder who caused all this and almost wanted to st the head off. But he controlled himself.

    He looked at the reports of the three candidates. Their current statuses¡­ they could already be considered gifted. They could easily get ced in any academy in the academy realm with the current levels they have.

    In fact, he believed their condition is already better than the fake prince of darkness they had a few days ago.

    He can estimate how well these three, any of these three could hold up with the ck smoke. But aftering this far, he wanted to see what the actual final result will be. How will the prince of darkness that Sam envisioned wille to be.

    How will the prince of darkness that the god specified wille to be.

    He wanted to know that and he cannot back down now. And for that to happen, he needs Sam. No one else can do it.

    "What kind of assurances do you need?"

    "There are a few conditions.

    I need you to ensure that neither you, nor yourckeys here will ever under any circumstances reveal this information to anyone. Not even when you are under coercion.

    I can at least take your soul contract for this. But those four elders, I want you to put triggers in the minds. If they ever even try to reveal a whisper of this procedure the will die on the spot.

    The second condition is that neither your Set academy nor any other academy in the Duat region shalle after me or any of my associates. That includes the academy staff, students, affiliated families and organizations.

    I will not ask you to be my guards, but it is your responsibility that I will not die in the hands of anyone associated with the Duat region. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    If that condition is broken, I will take a lot more than just one third of properties.

    And this should apply whether they try to attack me, or plot against me under any circumstances.

    Finally, I shall not be hindered when I desire to leave this ce. I shall not be captured and I repeating again, that any of the abilities that I revealed to you until now, whether it is my techniques, theories or affiliations, you are not allowed to reveal that they came from me.

    And you should assure me that I will not be restrained in any manner for your benefit. But your benefit I mean the benefit of anyone rted to Duat region."

    Trike sighed and said.

    "We already signed a contract for these conditions."

    "But not covering every loophole. Don''t tell me that you didn''t think about restraining me here somehow and make me churn out talented people for you."

    Trike shut up. He did think about it.

    He looked at Sam and by decisive expression, he knew he meant it. He then turned to the elders and said.

    "We are giving him what he wants. Because he is the only one that can give us what we need. So get ready with the contracts."

    Sam made even more air-tight contracts. He signed them along with them. And finally he went to prepare for the surgery.

    Thisst surgery is implementing the artificial cores in the bodies of the three candidates. That is why he made some extra precautions.

 Chapter 2382 Core surgery

    2382 Core surgery

    After the contracts are signed, Sam went back to the hub. He entered the secret reservoir room, to the one that he modified before.

    When he modified and opened it, there are a total of nine glowing objects floating within the reservoir chamber. With his interaction, they floated out. The three sets are simr. All of them are glowing with ck smoke surrounding them. They are ck in color. cker than anything Sam has ever seen.

    They are made of pure dark elemental energy.

    Each set has three cores. One bigger than the other two. Sam carefully stored the cores in the cylindrical containers made specially for them and then stored them in his divine dimension.

    He then went back to theb where all three candidates wereid on the table unconscious. Samid down a formation carefully. Even was very meticulous with the process. He tried to ensure that there are no discrepancies or any possibility for error in the formation.

    Once the formation isid, he sat in the middle of it.

    It is an energy gathering formation. The moment it was activated, even the elders were stunned. The suction power of the formation is unprecedented. At least for the size of the formation and the time it took to create the formation.

    Sam sat in the middle of the formation. His body turned pitch ck with the dark elemental energy fusion activated. At the same time, the containers he ced in the storage have been moved out.

    The containers opened up automatically with nothing but his will, the cores flew out of the containers.

    Each set moved towards one candidate. First, the bigger cores moved towards the hearts of the candidates. One of the smaller cores moved to the head and finally the second smaller core moved towards the location of their original and natural spiritual core.

    The presence of the artificial cores itself made the spectating elders including Trike freeze stiff.

    Everything Sam did since he came to the Duat region subverted their understanding. They couldnt wrap their heads around anything thing that he did.

    But this one is above the rest.

    It made them question the whole existence for a moment. They even had faint doubts, wondering if they are worshipping the wrong gods.

    Even though they have never seen an artificial core or even a natural spiritual core for that matter as a separate entity that could exist outside of the body, they can understand what they are from the way the energy behaved around them.

    Without a doubt they knew and believed that these are spiritual cores of pure dark elemental energy. Purest they have ever felt.

    And they are in the hands of a Divine ne initiation student that they could squash like a bug if they just decided to ignore the nasty consequences that will haunt them for a long time.

    Of course, that is when they did not consider the consequences of the contracts they signed.

    Even with all those restrictions for a moment, they are tempted.

    They are tempted to interrupt the process, grab those cores, capture Sam, pry open his soul and devour all of his memories, including the knowledge.

    And that thought just intensified in their minds, constantly echoed in a twisted voice that is simted by their greed and desire.

    However, they came out of that state because of the sheer shock of Sam''s actions.

    The moment he moved the spiritual cores to the three most sensitive parts of the cultivators, they came out of the reverie. One of the elders immediately stood up, instinctively thinking that he should intervene.

    Maybe only now did his greed filled mind halted to think about the purpose of the cores.

    When they are taken out, they are unable to think past their desires to obtain the cores. Now a huge question hung in their minds.

    ''What the hell is he going to do with those cores?''

    Everyone knows, irrespective of cultivation level, that messing with spiritual cores is a taboo. The most one can do is heal it when it is cracked or stressed.

    That is all.

    They should never ever mess with it, tweak it or experiment with it.

    But what Sam is doing, imnting them¡­ they barely heard of the legends of the past, a very distant one of course, that some crazy bastards that dared to go against the will of gods experimented with it.

    They tried to steal the spiritual cores of the people born better than most.

    However, there were no concrete records of such event''s sess. Even the legends that say that someone seeded, never mentioned anything about the procedure.

    Sam didn''t care for any of their expressions and reactions. There is only the surgery in his mind. This one is a lot more unstablepared to the one he performed before on Stone.

    In that surgery, he has many cores embedded into different parts of his body, they all created worked with the major core he installed and kept each other in bnce.

    However, right now, there are only three cores that are being imnted and one of them is being imnted in the same spot as the spiritual core.

    At the same time, the artificial cores slowly prated the skin. They moved through the flesh and bone as they reached their pre-destined positions.

    The bigger core went to the heart. It even prated through the heart and reached its centre. At the same time, the second core that is positioned at the spiritual core of the candidates, prated forcefully into the spiritual core.

    The same happened to the third core. It prated and imnted itself into the brain.

    Sam''s frown deepened and at the same time, the candidates all started shaking. From far away, the elders kept a check on their life signs and vitality. They could sense the severe fluctuations.

    "Sir Trike, they won''t be able to hold on. Those cores¡­ they have too much energy, direct introduction of that level of energy is not something any organ no matter how enhanced it is can endure.

    The spiritual core will also copse at any moment.

    We will lose the three candidates."

    Trike clenched his fists as he contemted what to do. It is not like he didn''t understand what the elder is saying, but he is hesitant to act. He had a feeling that he shouldn''t.

    At that moment, they noticed a huge increase in the energy intake by Sam. The surrounding energy is all moving to him. Even Trike had to focus more to just absorb a small amount of energy.

    Sam''s fusion form seemed to have changed. The surrounding energy that was alling into the formation, hovered over him. A huge amount, like a massive sphere. It felt so ominous and superior in nature.

    With a mere thought, Sam opened his eyes while all this energy injected itself into his body. It went through him toward the three candidates. It split into nine streams in total. Each stream attaching itself into the artificial core ced in their bodies.

    He started injecting the energy. The amount is huge, but it is not really more than the energy inside the cores. However, he is using this energy as a control mechanism. This went on for three more hours.

    The three cores merged into their respective positions as if they are an inherent part from the beginning.

    The moment they are merged, there seemed to be a quantitative change in their bodies. All three candidates experienced a physical change. Their hair turnedpletely ck. cker than the darkest of the nights.

    Their skin tone changed.

    All three of them had different skin tones by the virtue of their genes, however now all of them changed to a shade of ck.

    Their bodies looked like they are carved out of the dark clouds in the sky.

    Every pore of their bodies opened up. Their bodies as if they are breathing through their pores. Instead of air, they are just breathing the dark elemental energy. The purest of it.

    Finally, their eyes changed. Irrespective of their original color, all their eyes turned ck. And with contrast to their white eyeballs, these ck eyes stood out even more. They appeared crystalline. As if it is the purest of the ck obsidian.

    The elders could see it all as the three candidates opened their eyes.

    Sam''s fusion form is cancelled. He disconnected himself with the candidates and the formation is also deactivated.

    Sam copsed on the spot. The elders along with Trike ran over hurriedly. They checked the condition of the three candidates, while Trike came to check on Sam.

    Sam''s vitals are stable, his energy is exhausted. Both physical and mental.

    Meanwhile, the elders are eximing in shock and awe as they noticed the changes in the three candidates. n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    Trike took a deep breath as he carried Sam over to the nearest bed. He let him rest there while he looked a the three candidates.

 Chapter 2383: The Next day

    Chapter 2383: The Next day

    ?

    The next day.

    Sam woke up from his deep rest. The first thing he did was to check everything that he had on him.

    As much as he trusted the soul contract, ever since he found out about the faith of agmon and their method to move past the soul contract, he became a bit more vignt about it as well. Luckily, his fears werepletely unfounded.

    Not only was not robbed of anything, he was even left alone. To rest in privacy.

    Not even the three candidates were left there. He woke up and looked around. Everything from the day before was left as it was. Only the three candidates were removed.

    A few minutes after he left, Trike and the elders came into the room. They didn''t speak. They didn''t even know what to say. The Elders had their doubts of course, so they too shook to speak their thoughts.

    But it is a different matter for Trike.

    He had a feeling that he could trust Sam, but he wasn''t able to wrap his head towards that sessful result, because he couldn''t even imagine the process and possibility of the process to seed.

    Now that he saw it, he is at a loss of words. He cannot even find the proper words of appreciation to shower Sam with.

    "I am guessing those three candidates are fine? I am sure they might have woken up and felt normal by now. Their process to adapt will be very quick." Sam asked as he stretched his body. Even though he went into a sleep due to physical and mental exhaustion, the feeling of rest is very satisfactory.

    There are few pleasures that could beat a night''s peaceful sleep.

    "That''s what I wanted to talk to you about. Do you want to see how they are doing?"

    "Sure."

    Sam and the elders went to the arena next door. This is also a secret residence and there are a bunch of soldiers wearing the same uniform. All of them at the initial stage of Divine ne initiation. All of them in the first grade level standing there in a queue.

    There are three five rings in the room, and out of five, three are upied. Each ring upied by one candidate.

    The candidates are emanating a ck glow, the result of their constant cirction of dark elemental energy with the atmosphere.

    The soldiers in these uniforms went up one after another into the arena and the three candidates are fighting with them.

    There are already a bunch bodies, limbs and blood decorating the arena. A lot of soldiers are already dead, but it seemed like the remaining soldiers are not really fazed by this. They are walking straight into the arena, without thinking about the life or death.

    They are fighting with stern expression even as their throats are being ripped apart, like robots.

    The ones with maximum emotion there are the three candidates. They are still shock over their new found strengths.

    Their spiritual energy is off the charts, their physical strength is not something they could have ever imagined. They didn''t even know that a person can be this strong, they never ever imagined it.

    And right now, they are just using this physical strength to fight the soldiers that areing at them.

    "Who are these soldiers?" Sam asked. He is really curious about them. The hub ensured that there are not many things in this academy realm that he is not aware of. But these soldiers he has never seen them.

    "These are my personal soldiers. A separate program that I am working on. It is funny though. I thought you would have seen through them already."

    Sam is surprised and frowned. He activated energy vision immediately and the moment he did he was shocked.

    The energy interaction between these soldiers and the surrounding atmosphere ispletely unnatural. It is not simr to how it is with normal cultivators. No matter what kind of cultivation technique a person uses, their interaction with the spiritual energy will have at least onemon point with the rest.

    However, these people didn''t have it. It is almost like... they are machines or something that is not alive.

    But Sam can clearly see it. The blood and flesh all over the ce. Then he thought of something and his bloodline surged. The Raiju bloodline increased his sense of smell to the maximum and he suddenly felt a huge pungent smell of dead flesh invade his mouth.

    "They are undead?"

    Sam is dumbfounded.

    He crouched down and observed the blood. Then only he realized that is not truly blood. It is simr to blood and is definitely made out of blood, but it is not pure and warm blood that circtes through a living creature.

    Trike nodded and said.

    "Yes, they are undead creatures. The undead creatures of the highest level that you can imagine. They are one of the greatest creations my underlings created. A project that I almost spent a century on before it yielded any decent results."

    Sam is surprised, but he didn''t attempt to move further and check it. Because just within his heightened senses, he could guess a lot of things based on the smell. And now that he found the anomaly he started the see more things that he previously ignored.

    He also understood one of the reasons why these creatures are unable to do much damage to the candidates.

    "That is why these undead are extremely weak. The three candidates are designed to feed on the death energy. Anything that has death energy will be nothing more than feed to them. Of course, the quality is not too strong at their current level, but when fighting with same level, the death energy is basically nullified.

    And these undead creatures... from the looks of it, their death energy is circted through that blood. They don''t have freedom on how their energy will be transferred. So, when the quality of the candidates is effecting the death energy, they are unable to correct it.

    Making them the easiest target of them all."n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Sam exined out loud without evening thinking. Trike nodded with a subtle smirk. He knew

    Sam would figure this out.

    "I am sure, you can figure out why I am showing this to you."

    "A show of good faith."

    "Right. I can understand why you have the desperate need to make us sign those contracts and if I were in your position, I would have done the same and much more.

    That is why, I am showing you this. You have done me a great favor. A favor that I can hardly even think of ways to repaying you. I am sure I will not be able to repay you in this life time. So, I at least want you to trust me enough to be at ease around me.

    And this is my show of good faith. After all, I cannot ask you to trust me without me trusting you. So, I am trusting you with one of my most hidden secrets.

    In fact, even the four elders don''t know much about this and barely know the basics. Out of which most are their spections."

    Sam stayed silent. He suddenly felt a bit bad about all the schemes. Maybe he has be way too good at hoodwinking people after doing it for so long. Trike is really trusting him.

    This made him have some second thoughts about his original n. Of course, before he could do that, he needs to consult the Khufu. One of the managers, and the person who was from the

    Set''s academy.

    Sam did agree to help him solve the grudge and he cannot back down now just because he had

    a good impression on one of them.

    "Alright. So, how are they doing?"

    "They have been fighting for over three hours now. Only physical attacks. Their affinity

    against death energy is working well. Their physical strength is beyond the limits of someone at the same level. They are very sensitive to dark elemental energy.

    Their senses improved to be the best that I have seen. Their souls are stable and will power

    has improved." Trike gave Sam an update.

    Sam nodded and said.

    "There is one problem and I already mentioned it to you before. You should find a way to actually increase their will. You need to harden them. I might have increased their soul energy, but the size of the soul wouldn''t matter if they can believe that they can hold up to

    that.

    They can easily turn to madness if they are not ready.

    To avoid the risk, always keep on testing them. Put them through challenges with gradually increasing difficulty. Anyway, since the prince of darkness will take over, there wouldn''t be a problem for short term. Otherwise, in long term, no amount of measures will be enough to

    save them.

    They will soon copse under the weight of the new found talent because their minds are not

    strong enough."

    Trike nodded and said.

    "I will keep that in mind.

    Now, it is time to put the vessels to use. I guess you have to part with the ck smoke."

 Chapter 2384 Preparing to leave

    2384 Preparing to leave

    Sam didn''t resist.

    He just gave up the ck smoke. Hepressed it all into a small container and gave it to Trike that evening. Trike looked at the small transparent and crystalline container and chuckled.

    "You have a solution for everything, don''t you?"

    Sam just shrugged. The container is attached with an energy resource that constantly provides death energy to it. It is a bit crudepared to Sam''s other inventions, because he just filled up a space jade with the liquefied death energy and attached it to a mechanism that extracts the liquid and covert it into absorbable energy.

    The only thing that Trike would get to see is that the energy is in liquid form.

    He wouldn''t know how to achieve it and certainly wouldn''t be able to reverse engineer it. Sam''s secrets are safe. He even felt a bit embarrassed getting praised for this. It is that crude in his opinion.

    "Tomorrow is myst negotiation and I will be leaving."

    "I really wish I could restrain you here. The Olympians really don''t know what they are missing out."

    "Really? Don''t you think with all the hatred that I created and festered, their response is pretty justified?"

    "Their anger might be, but response is certainly not. As the elders and instructors their job is the improvement of their academy and in turn the lives of the followers of the gods they worship. That responsibilityes first and foremostpared to any other personal grudge they have.

    Even if that grudge is life and death and they couldn''t find any reconciliation, they still have to put it aside if the benefits are worthy enough. And the only way they can dismiss the benefits as unworthy is by proving that they can bring the same benefits.

    Those are the core principles upon which the academies are founded.

    There was a time we operated that way. It changed when most of the academies used that rule as a loophole and pursued their personal benefits in the guise of academy''s welfare.

    They pushed too hard with no individual moral boundaries and crossed any line they could think of. This in turn created the field for the first academy war."

    Sam is a bit surprised, but not too much.

    He has been in several wars. Heck, he created a bunch. He knows how wars start and how they will intensify. But he never expected that the academy realm was founded on such ideals.

    "So, the Olympians still haven''t woken up and took the ideals back."

    "True. Why do you think I simply negated the threat from the Duat region for you? Because you proved to be valuable. In front of the benefit that you provided, the chaos that you caused is not that much. In fact, we owe you too much still."

    Sam pursed his lips for a second and asked.

    "Elder Trike, why are you not the Dean of the Set academy?"

    Trike''s smile froze and he shook his head.

    "I have my own moral and ethical guidelines. They restricted my hand in ying the political game to reach the Dean''s position."

    "So, it wasn''t your strength that is the problem. Only your ideals?"

    Trike smirked once again and said.

    "I singlehandedly stopped the Duat region from going after you can even made them pay up the debts as per the unreasonable contracts. I am sure, you are smart enough to estimate my strength based on that."

    Sam just smiled and asked another question.

    "So, what would you do, if you find out that the Set academy''s representatives have crossed the moral lines that you believe in? The lines that an academic elder and instructor should not cross. What would your response be?"

    "Do you really think I am not aware of the atrocities some of my people aremitting? But as I said, I need to take some measures that would make me break some of my own rules."

    "That means, you have a decision to make. If such a situation arises, what takes precedence? The welfare of the academy and its purity or the sanctity of your personal rules?"

    Trike was stumped, but he didn''t show it on his face. He looked at Sam''s eyes. It seemed like there ishidden agenda behind Sam''s question. To bepletely frank, it is a question that he didn''t have an answer to.

    He thought about it before. It would be a life if he said he didn''t. To what extent can he let these halfwits tarnish the sanctity of the academy before he bends his own beliefs a bit and take care of them?

    Sam didn''t push him for an answer and said.

    "I will be leaving tomorrow. From then on, we will never speak of the project we worked on. And this will be my final advice regarding it.

    Don''t be shy in choosing more than one. I am sure a kingdom can amodate multiple princes."

    Sam left after leaving those words. Trike clearly understood what Sam meant. It couldn''t be more obvious. But he didn''t know how he can divide the ck smoke. He just went back into theb to prepare for the next steps.

    While he was busying himself, and Sam is preparing to go back to the Olympian region, something else is happening deep inside the Set academy.

    An old man, that almost looked like a corpse looked is confronting the Dean and a Grand elder of the Set academy with a fierce gaze.

    "What the fuck are you guys doing? Do you really think I can''t do anything to you, just because I retired to do my research?

    How dare you guys let Trike mingle with the guy who put my grandson in such a state?

    I demand that you immediately bring Sam to me and extract that ck smoke from him."

    The old man is the same guy that was in the video Sam showed to Trike. The old man who reced the heart of his grandson to make him a fake prince of darkness.

    "We cannot." The Dean replied firmly.

    "Why is that?"

    "Trike made an agreement on behalf of the Duat region that Sam shall remain unharmed by anyone rted to Duat region in exchange for the ck smoke."

    The old man is stunned before he spoke in excitement.

    "That means, the ck smoke is with us again?"

    The Dean''s expression became awkward.

    "Well¡­"

    "Well what? What happened to the ck smoke? My grandson is dying every second. One second we wait is one second toote. We need to bring the ck smoke to him immediately."

    "That¡­"

    The Dean still kept on chewing on his words.

    "Just say it."

    "Trike has taken over the Prince of darkness project. And he clearly stated that your grandson is no longer a suitable candidate to be the prince of darkness."

    "What the fuck did you just say?"

    The old man yelled out loud.

    The Dean didn''t repeat himself. He sure as hell the question was rhetorical. The old man copsed to the ground and despaired.

    "My grandson¡­ he will die?"

    The grand elder sighed in sadness.

    "No, that cannot happen. You told me that the prince of darkness has been finalized. You gave me your word that my grandson will remain the prince of darkness. How can you change your words so easily? That cannot happen."

    "But Trike insisted on it. He said that your grandson who lost the ck smoke to an outsider out of a petty grudge doesn''t have what it takes to be a vessel for the prince of darkness."

    "Doesn''t have what it takes?" n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    The old man didn''t even know what to say other that repeat those words. However, the old man''s son, and elder and also the father of the fake prince spoke from the side.

    "Then, who is going to be the prince of darkness?"

    "The decision is taken over by Trike. He will decide and we will merely be informed. However, recently he has been making some moves, looking into different students and candidates of Duat affiliation. He even went out of Set''s faction to look for candidates." The Dean exined.

    The old man had a bad feeling.

    "Did he tell you any other reason? Apart from the loss of the ck smoke."

    "Not much. All he said is that only a fake would lose the smoke like your grandson did. But I feel like he said it out of spite."

    The Dean said once again.

    The old man''s face despaired and paled. The same thing happened to his son.

    Both of them exchanged a nce and walked out silently before the old man spoke.

    "So, Trike knows."

    "Are you sure, father? Maybe, he was really speaking out of spite?"

    "Trike? Spite? I would kill someone to see if he can really feel that emotion. That bastard never acts out of spite. He must know, that means our days are numbered. We need to find a way out."

    "Way out where? The academy realm is blocked. We cannot get out."

 Chapter 2385 Ban lifted

    2385 Ban lifted

    Neither Sam nor Trike are actually in mood to deal with that old man.

    It is not really in Sam''s interest to deal with this old man. He might be a good enough to trigger to cause a mess if yed well. However, he is nowhere nearbig enough to keep Sam''s consistent interest. As for Trike, he knew that this man couldn''t get out of the Duat region.

    Not without Trike''s explicit instructions. So, he will let the rat worry about its life for a while before dealing with it.

    The next day, Sam just finished thest negotiation. This time, he didn''t want to fight. After all, there is no purpose to it. But he has to fight to keep up the appearances. He finish the fight quickly and finished the contract.

    He didn''t even wait for long. He just left the Duat region as soon as the contract is signed.

    When he came back to the Olympian region, that first thing he did is to go and meet Ling Tian to confirm when the ban would be lifted.

    "I was about to contact you. We are not aware of the exact date, but there is a good chance it will be lifted soon." Ling Tian replied with a sigh.

    "Why are you so distressed?"

    "The information on the ban is being restricted to me. The other gods are making a fuss. Because of your over handed methods, too many external gods are involved in the game. They are keeping a close eye and most of them are hostile to you.

    They are slightly aiding the gods in the game that are against you and the current result of that situation is that my information is being restricted. Because the know that I am helping you."

    Sam just shrugged.

    "Will you even know about it the day before?" n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "I hope I will. But from the looks of it, I might not.

    Why are you asking? Are you finally nervous?"

    "A little bit." Sam just replied casually. Looking at hisx behavior, Ling Tian had a bad feeling.

    "You are nning something, aren''t you?"

    "Can''t say it now, can I?" Sam left after that.

    He just kept working on his future ns, when he received some news that he was waiting on. The news of one of the yers breaking through to the second grade. Surprisingly, it was Kumar who reached it first.

    Sam guessed it would be Dayus.

    After a couple of days, he got the message that Arkiv has broken through. Then Noah and then Dayus. Donner and Akhil are actuallyst, on the same day.

    Just like that, within a week they all broke through. This also attracted a bit of attention in the respective regions. Even though these candidates didn''t do much in the first grade, and stayed silent mostly for the freshmanpetition, they did stir some chaos in their own ways.

    They didn''t participate in official challenges, but they did beat the crap out of the other first graders in their respective academies in the duels and became the unofficial overloads of the first graders.

    Of course, the only reason they are not publicized is because the Deans of the academies are not willing. They don''t want to attract too much attention to the yers in the first grade, because they guessed there would be too many questions about them.

    Another reason is that the shit that Sam stirred in Olympian region and with hub, is lot louder than anything they could have aplished.

    But still, some keen eyes were on them and they quickly caught the secondmon denominator in all the yers.

    They all broke through at simr times. The first one is of course they are all special admissions.

    Anyway, even if they did have doubts, no one went after them. Because the academies are all guarding these people with their lives and all the academies have only onemon enemy.

    Sam.

    He killed so many people in tournament. Even though it is a golden rule that no one should seek vengeance for the things that happened in the tournament, they are all holding a grudge.

    While they are all thinking of killing him, Sam''s friends are also slowly getting closer to breakthrough. The first one to reach is Night Ghost and from their status, Sam believed Saber monarch will be next.

    At that moment, the academy realm went into a sudden chaos. Because the academies all passed down an announcement.

    The Gambler academy as the representative of the Olympian region release that announcement to reach everyone''s ears in the region.

    "Because of the escting conflicts that almost triggered an academy war, we have implemented a strict ban on the travel and violence.

    Even though we said we will lift the ban after the inter academy tournament, the circumstances still didn''t cool down and that made us feel concerned about lifting the ban.

    However, we understood that we cannot limit the growth of the students and have to make the academies run properly and for that, the ban should be lifted.

    From now on the travel ban of the academy realm has been lifted.

    The ban on violence has also been lifted.

    And the gods have also shown some grace because of the current strain on the economic situation of the academy realm. Thus they announced the Conquest of restricted worlds.

    Exactly in one month''s time, the Conquest of restricted worlds will begin and you will get the details of the worlds in fifteen days."

    That was the gist of the announcement.

    Sam who was walking in the streets calmly, felt the presence of several people around him.

    *SWOOSH* *BOOM*

    They didn''t bother to wait. They attacked. However, Sam was just a tad bit faster. There was a special ring that he wore and the moment the announcement started he already tapped it three times.

    The formation on it was activated and he was taken away.

    He reappeared in the secret room of the hub. There are several students, and even some low level instructors all of them swarmed the streets. They even blocked the paths to the Gambler academy.

    Several people that were put on tail of Sam for the past few days all felt a bit lost.

    They did consider the possibility of transference token and they even made arrangements for that.

    They are all using a special artefact to identify the possible destination of the transference. However, their device acted like a dud. They couldn''t find a way.

    "Fucking amateurs"

    Sam muttered as he started checking the limited surveince he had. The bird puppets are truly goners. There is no way to use them anymore. But he did set up some secret surveince spots and he definitely has everything around the hub covered.

    19:56

    Sam muttered as he started checking the limited surveince he had. The bird puppets are truly goners. There is no way to use them anymore. But he did set up some secret surveince spots and he definitely has everything around the hub covered.

    He also started checking up on the hubs in the other regions. No one had made an immediate move. They are not trying to destroy it. At least not yet.

    Even there, only students moved. None of the elders and senior instructors came out. Sam didn''t expect this.

    He thought the elders would be swarming out. It is one thing that the elders of the Olympian academy didn''te out. After all, Ling Tian is still here. All Olympian academy people always shiver in front of Theron, and Ling Tian rag-dolled that guy.

    There is no way, they would dare to make a move. They might have called for allies and must be waiting for them toe and make a move.

    He even prepared some fire works for the grand asion. But no one made a move. All the elders are holed up.

    He took out hismunication device and contacted Ling Tian. But it didn''t go through. That guy turned off themunication device.

    Sam waited and waited. The students from other areas starteding over.

    People rted to the people Sam killed in the tournament all areing, but no one at the elder level came.

    This made him feel frustrated.

    The only relieving situation is that the Gambler academy''s students didn''t leave these guys alone. Fights started everywhere. The fourth graders in particr, Dove led them and beat the other fourth graders ck and blue.

    Rashma as well, just randomly walked around and picked a fight with any second grader that she couldy her hands on.

    Just from the looks, Sam clearly understood what is happening.

    It is a disy of solidarity. The Gambler academy is tell him that they are standing with him. It is not that they are not hostile anymore. Its just that they managed to find some reconciliation.

    After feeling a bit exhausted, Sam decided that since they are noting, he will wee them himself.

    He tapped a few buttons here and there and changed the formations of the hub a bit.

    All the hubs across the realms also started changing. Light beams shot into the sky, attracting everyone''s attention. Even the fights in the Olympian region stopped.

    The light beams changed and conjured together into a humanoid figure almost everyone is familiar with.

 Chapter 2386 Flip the Table

    2386 Flip the Table

    Joker''s form towered on top of the already huge Hub.

    No matter where they stood, as long as someone is within a couple of dozen mile radius of the city, they can clearly see Joker''s figure. However, instead of the usual faint but confident smile, there is a crooked grin on the mask.

    "Hello, my dear residents of the academy realm.

    I missed you all a lot and I hope you did the same. I noticed that almost all the payments areing in a timely manner. For those who haven''t been doing the payments, soon I will be sending someone on my behalf to collect the debt that you owe me as per the contract, so please await my next message. N?v(el)B\\jnn

    Right now, I am here to deliver something else."

    The voice paused a bit. By now, the reaction Sam originally wanted happened.

    The elders that were inside the academies finally came out and they all surrounded the hub. They didn''t attack it, because the Bloody chariot hase with a grudging expression.

    He is still bound by the contract and he has to defend the hub no matter what.

    Also, Ling Tian is standing nearby as well. Even though there is not direct and hard evidence, all signs of hub are pointing to Sam. And they still don''t know if Ling Tian who came out to defend Sam will deal with them if they try to make a move.

    Two deterrents. They don''t have two lives to test them out.

    "I heard that the ban has been lifted. So, everyone must have already drawn their weapons. Who are you going after though? Are you going after the hubs, themselves?

    Last time someone did, It didn''t end well. Sanatan region is still tense because of the information leak.

    Are you going after the managers? I don''t think they are in the academy realm at all. And even if they are, you need to catch them first. Despite your overwhelming and almost godly advantage you have on them, they still managed to leave this realm unscathed. That too after taking the heads of several fourth graders of Olympian region.

    I doubt you would be able to identify them that easily.

    Then what''s left?

    I did hear that you are going after Sam for the dealings we had. Not a bad idea. Maybe I can test out how soft my heart is and see if it would melt away upon seeing Sam''s plight.

    It is a hard thing to imagine that guy to be suffering in the hands of the likes of you.

    Anyway, do what you want to him.

    However, I came back bearing gifts and I wonder if your priority will still be to go after him.

    I realized that the reason for the high tension state of the Academy realm is because everyone knows that there is some information that could incriminate themselves out there. They don''t know who has control over it and what it takes to get rid of that information.

    So, you are going after Sam. The one straw that connects your academy realm to the hub.

    Of course, there is also the question of benefits.

    You would be fools not to salivate over the technology that hub has.

    So, you might be trying to go after him for that as well.

    It is so boring and predictable. Very clich¨¦. In the time I was gone from this realm, I thought about what I could do destroy this clich¨¦. I brainstormed the ideas that would break your fa?ade and give you a real push, so that you will think past these petty tricks and self-righteous mask for your revenge.

    Then I want to see how you will actually react.

    So, this is what I am going to do.

    I will be sending you all a new bird puppet. One for each of you. And that bird puppet will once againe with a wrist band. However, this time the bird puppet will not have all the previous restrictions that you saw.

    You can directly view the design and inner mechanism of it, so that you can be assured that I am not spying on you.

    In fact, the recording feature ispletely deleted from the bird puppet and I only provided some empty space. If you want, you can install the necessary equipment yourself.

    This new bird puppet will have all the features that the previous one has. However, thises with a three extra gifts

    First one is information. You will have all thepiled information of a random person. The bird puppet will carry it and if you want to take a peek, you can do so. The information that has already been sent will be permanently removed from the Hub.

    So that means, whatever information you got will be the only copy of the information about that particr person.

    Second one is also information. Assuming that all of you have somemon sense, I am sure you would have guessed by now. Based on the first gift, it would be safe to say that someone out there in the academy realm will possess your information.

    The second piece of information that I mentioned will be the details of the person who has the bird puppet that has your information.

    The third and final gift is¡­ also information.

    But this information is rted to the technology of the hub.

    Every piece of technology used in the hub that you have seen, I am releasing it all. Each bird puppet will have information on one piece of technology. No two puppets will have the same technology. And I promise you, if one of you manages to gather all the information to one ce and has enough brains to fill in the gaps and figure it out, you have at least fifty percent chance ofpletely replicating the hub.

    Everyone of you, I mean, every single one of you is eligible for getting this bird puppet.

    Once the puppets are released, all the technology rted to everything you have seen in the hub will be out in the open.

    So, if you want to go after anyone in the name of hub, please don''t. Just go after them for your personal grudges. Like men with actual balls do."

    Joker stopped speaking and the next moment, massive swarm of bird puppets starteding out of the hub. They didn''t fly away, they just hovered over the hub''s building. Inplete contrast to the previous situation where no one showed up.

    Everyone, not a single elder was left in the academy grounds. All of the swarmed towards the hub.

    However, no one made a move.

    The Deans and grand elders are all staying silent, so of course the elders couldn''t speak up.

    They are calcting. The Joker''s appearance and the announcement, put them in such a difficult position. While they are all afraid of their information being revealed, they are extremely tempted about the technology thates out along with this.

    The Olympians in particr are the most nervous among them all. Because they have already seen what will happen with Sam''s previous trick. The trick of information mule.

    He already made them all go against each other. He lit the whole region on the fire. The whole Olympian region had to be blocked and curfewed for them to minimize the damage.

    They didn''t even have the chance to recover from it and now Sam is bringing another wave of chaos to them. And this time, it is much more powerful.

    Sam, who is witnessing all their dilemma is amused. He expected hesitance but not this much. He believed there should be at least one idiot who should have already jumped in and bbed something stupid.

    But there is no sign of such idiot.

    Sam wondered what is happening, when hismunication device gave an alert. He picked it up and said.

    "Hello, Ling Tian. Mr. Busy man."

    "What the fuck did you do?"

    "Well¡­ I am sure you are watching what I am doing. Why are you asking the obvious?"

    "I need to speak to you, right now."

    "Sorry, I am kind of in the middle of something."

    "You¡­ don''t send the puppets out. If it is all about you being targeted, I am telling you, you don''t have to worry. You already got the perfect way to save your ass."

    "I don''t know what way it is, but I am sure, my way will be a lot more fun."

    As Sam said that, he pressed a button.

    *SWOOSH*

    With a huge sh, all the bird puppets flew in different directions. They flew towards all the students, instructors and teachers.

    The Deans and elders still didn''t speak. Grudgingly they left their spots and went back to their respective academies. They are so fast that their bird puppets didn''t even reach them, despite them being the closest of all.

    Sam smiled at them being scattered.

    "COME TO THE ACADEMY. NOW!!!"

    Ling Tian yelled at Sam.

    For the first time Sam felt a little nervous facing him.

 Chapter 2387 Conquest of Restricted worlds

    2387 Conquest of Restricted worlds

    Sam went back to the academy.

    Ling Tian is waiting for him in his room.

    "So, why are you yelling at me?"

    "Do you even understand what you are doing? Do you understand the extent of damage you have done? I..f¡­You¡­" Ling Tian is so angry. He spoke through gritted teeth and before long hepletely lost control of what he was saying.

    "Alright, calm down for a moment. Just chill and exin what got you riled up like this."

    Ling Tian took a deep breath and said. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "That stunt you pulled. Do you know how much chaos you are going to create?"

    "I don''t know. I hope it at least creates half of what I want to create."

    Ling Tian sighed in exasperation.

    "You just have to do this right now. Why, damn it?"

    "Well¡­"

    "That was rhetorical Sam. Don''t answer it."

    "Alright, you still didn''t exin what riled you up like this."

    "Haven''t you heard the announcement?"

    "Yeah, I did. The ban is gone and there is something about Conquest of restricted worlds."

    "Yes, thetter part. Do you know what the conquest of restricted worlds is?"

    "I don''t know. But from what I could guess, it could just be the gods using the academy realm''s people to send people to various realms on conquest. They will do the dirty jobs for the gods and spread the faith. In return the gods will allow these people to take the resources and also give out some gifts."

    "You are close.

    But you missed one thing. The keyword in that thing is not conquest, but the restricted worlds. That means, there is a restriction put on that world. A restriction that does not allow people more than certain cultivation strength to get into that world.

    A restricted world has a ceiling to the highest cultivation one can reach.

    Another feature is that these restricted worlds are not connected with the rest of the worlds. They are isted and exist in their own ecosystem ofs. There is no external influence on them including that of the Gods.

    Their faith is free for picking. And in to those worlds based on the energy level, we the academies will be sending down people. These people are responsible for conquering that world. They need to increase the academy influence and start recruiting people for various things. Of course, all those various things being different services of the gods.

    The conquest period goes on for five years. In those five years, every three months an analysis will be done by the Messenger council.

    Based on that analysis they will estimate how much the influence of the different academy teams is in those worlds. And the academy with the leading influence will get rewards that you can never even imagine.

    All things are open. New pocket dimensions, cultivation techniques, blue prints, special weapons, blessings.

    You can get it. This conquest hasn''t happened in hundreds of years and this time it did."

    "So, that is what you meant when you said that I have another way to be safe? I just need to get into the world with only second grade level threshold and the stronger cultivators wouldn''te?"

    "Yes. That is exactly what I meant."

    "Still, my way is more fun."

    "You don''t understand. The whole point of this Conquest of restricted world is to ensure that this level of bloodshed doesn''t happen. The gods thought that everyone would be more interested in this bloodshed, than going after you and creating another academy war in process.

    But with what you did, you just incentivized killing each other. More so than ever."

    "That, I did and I don''t regret it."

    "You¡­"

    "Come on, you know that things will end up like this sooner orter."

    "I know but¡­"

    "You should have given me a headsup, if you want something from me. Anyway, if you have nothing else, I will just go and enjoy the chaos that I created. I want to say, who will make the first move."

    "Wait. I need something."

    "What?"

    "The information that you sent tothe Gambler academy students. I want to know who is going toe after them."

    "Sure."

    "I also want to know who will go after White."

    Sam paused and looked at Ling Tian.

    "You know, I am the yer that is fighting on behalf of Gambler, right?"

    "Yes, of course. I know of it."

    "You didn''t even take care of me, this much. You put way too much effort into coddling that guy."

    "Why? Are you jealous now?"

    "Trust me, it has been years since I became jealous of someone. I am curious. More so than ever. This is the second time you are asking a favor from me. And for both times it is because of that guy.

    Is he really not your illegitimate child? Some old me? Got tipsy over some wine? Sharing the passion?"

    Ling Tian rolled his eyes and said.

    "Is it possible or not?"

    "It is. But you owe me one."

    "What do I owe you?"

    "I will tell youter."

    "No, say it now. I don''t want to owe you a favor."

    "Come on, you already owe me one. You think we are even for the previous help I did for you? It is because of me that silly little white costumed bitch is still alive."

    "Don''t call him that."

    "Why? You are going to beat me up for him?"

    "No, if he hears it, he will get all riled up and then get beat up by you."

    "At least you are clear about that. Anyway, you will have your info sent to your bird puppet. And¡­ it''s sent. You owe me."

    Sam left.

    Ling Tian sighed and said.

    "This guy¡­ all he had to do is snap his fingers and he now owns a favor from me. I wonder what will happen in the celestial realms if someone hears that he got a favor from me this easily. Fucking asshole."

    Sam went back into his room and just rested.

    The news of the conquest didn''t reach anyone.

    The conquest is not exactly announced. There was just some curfew implemented. The academies strictly prohibited anyone from attacking anyone else. Sam is just waiting for the conflict to erupt to enjoy it.

 Chapter 2388: Information

    Chapter 2388: Information

    ?

    Days passed.

    However the restrictions on violence and strict curfew persisted. The Deans ced a very tight leash on everyone, including the elders.

    Of course, it is not like there are no incidents at all. Sam diversified and spread out the information as much as possible. He sent most of the information from the Olympian region to different regions. Some went to Duat, some went to Xia.

    He found the pairs that could create most damage upon shing.

    But there are some great cases, where the information of some people falls in the same region and some times there are even rarer cases when the information just fell in the same

    academy. He created these cases for two reasons.

    First one is the existence of the factions within the academy. Even though they are single entity, the thirst for power and greed for authority divided them into so many factions, some times the arch-enemies of some people happened to be in their immediate vicinity.

    Another one is that they are dumb people and will be desperate enough to flip the table and just start the fire.

    He hoped that in case the academies reacted like they did now, these idiots will start the conflicts.

    However, Sam clearly underestimated the current situation. The Deans and elders suppressed these incidents so hard that not even the students of the same academy are not aware when an incident happened next to them.

    They didn''t leave past the academy doors and they are far cry from reaching Sam.

    Sam didn''t understand why these people became so docile all of a sudden. He knew for a fact that they are grinding their weapons waiting to cut his head off. But now, he gave them a thousand times more incentive, a lot more definite than whatever they could have gotten from trying to kill him, but they just shut themselves off.

    He tried to fish some information from here and there, but there is no use.

    Not many people are willing to talk to him. There are some that do, but...

    "I can understand why are you curious. But I am toozy to exin." That''s what Chorus said.

    "Can we count it as us getting even? As you usually say, information is the most valuable thing." That is what Ling Tian said.

    Sam decisively left. He is not going to let Ling Tian off the hook that easily.

    Finally, he went to someone who he thought would be a long shot.

    "Oh? I know about it. What do you want to know?" Dove said with a wide and bright smile that made Sam feel like he is in a children''s fairy tale.

    The way she ced her hand on his shoulder with puffed chest. She seemed way too delighted to just have the chance to teach him.

    Sam sighed and said.

    "Alright, first things first. Why the hell the academy realm is so calm? I thought people would have been at each other''s throats. Is the conquest of restricted realms that important?" "Important? That word doesn''t even cut it.

    I understand why the students are ignorant of it, but the Conquest of restricted worlds is one thing thatpletely destroys the current ranking system. From what I read in some archaic records, there are some academies that directly climbed dozens of ranks in just a year after the conquest started."

    "It has an impact on rankings?"

    "Of course, not just rankings. Basically, every quarter there would be an evaluation. There would be a conquest ranking based on that. The better your academy''s ranking in that system, the better their ranking will be in the academy ranking system.

    You might not see an immediately jump of twenty thirty ranks, but the longer you hold a high position in a world, the better your rewards will be. For both the academy and the students.

    Let''s assume that you have the lead in one of the worlds. You will receive the reward for the first quarter. And the reward will be worth 90 points multiplied by the percentage of area that you conquered. So, let''s say that you have thirty percent area under your control. That would 2700 points.

    You and your academy will both get a reward worth that many points.

    Nextes the good part. If you continue to hold the lead for the next quarter, and even increased your area. Then the point system will change a bit. For the first thirty percent, your rewards will be multiplied by 180 points. That would be 5400 points. And let''s say you conquered 10 percent more in that time. That will be multiplied by 10 multiplied by 90. 900 more points. Just like that, you now have 6300 points by second quarter.

    There are also special bonuses.

    Of course, the point system and reward system are divided by the grade levels. From what I know, the first graders are not allowed to participate. The second graders to fourth graders can participate. There are special worlds for Instructor level, elder level and even some Dean level ces.

    They also have a separate point system and reward system."

    "So, how can these points be converted to rewards?"

    "It is very easy. The exchange center is used for the rewards exchange. You can even exchange the points for coins there if you need. But for the actual rewards, there is a list of sorts. A

    catalog.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    If you obtained a thousand points in one world. A thousand will be credited to the academy ount and another thousand will be credited to the students. It will be divided based on the contribution in the conquest.

    With your personal points, you can check the list and obtain whatever you want.

    The academies of course, can also use the list.

    Even if an academy uses all of its points, they are still counted when the ranking is adjusted.

    It is like a vast game. You go, you fight, you conquer, you loot, you exchange and repeat. Your glory will be added to the affiliated organization that you represent and in turn their glory

    will raise.

    Usually, in regrpetitions the academies focus on individuals. Because numbers don''t mean much in terms of strength. There quality takes over quantity. But the same cannot be

    said about this conquest.

    Because there is a system of affiliation in ce. Every person can mobilize their own forces as long as they are within the eptable threshold of the world.

    So, I am sure you know what that means."

    "That means, no matter, how stupid or useless a guy usually is, now he is useful because of his background. He can mobilize forces that can help manage, stabilize and explore these vast new worlds. For all three tasks, where the numbers are actually important."

    "Yes.

    If they are dead now because of the conflicts hub created, their backgrounds will not be mobilized. The academies will lose out." Sam finished her thoughts.

    He sighed and copsed into his chair.

    "Cough, Cough" Dove suddenly fake coughed attracting his attention, as he seemed to have

    lost himself.

    "What?"

    "Well, since I did you a favor, I ..."

    "What do you want?"

    "Wine."

    Sam rolled his eyes and threw her a bottle before he left. He didn''t expect the conquest of restricted words has this much at stake. No wonder the academies didn''t move. This is way too big of a deal. And he realized that Ling Tian is right.

    He didn''t have to worry about being safe at all.

    He could have easily slipped through the restricted world and stayed therefortably for a long time. Five years is a shit ton of time to do a lot of stuff.

    And he also realized that he could have had a bigger chance to incite chaos. Once the rewards and points are pouring in...

    The academies will be tense. Strategies, ns, traps, people. All the minds out in the open for him to manipte. It is a golden opportunity. He can leave every academy out there, licking their wounds, terrified out of everything. And that would be the time to leave the information

    out.

    When everyone is weak, a lot of people want to raise up above the rest. That would be the time when the actual scumes afloat and take advantages of the weaknesses that Sam so

    graciously provided them.

    That would be the time. Ah... that would be the time.

    He indeed let this out a bit prematurely. Sam felt a very slight tinge of regret.

    However, various other thoughts ran through his mind. He immediately took out hismunication device to call Arkiv.

    "What''s up, Sam? You got another tip about the missions?"

    "Nope. Not really. I have something else in mind. I wonder if you will be up for it."

    "Whatever you need, man. You don''t need to ask. Just tell me and its done."

    Sam smiled and said.

    "How would like sticking it up to Hou Yi?"

 Chapter 2389: Request

    Chapter 2389: Request

    ?

    "What do you have in mind?" Arkiv''s voice became a lot more exciting than it was before. "Heard of the new announcement?"

    "The one you made with that Hub thing? I forgot to thank you by the way. All my boys didn''t get anyone''s info attached to them."

    "I did give my word. Even though I am interesting in seeing how you would have handled the heat."

    "Don''t. Not everyone has a interest in dancing with these overpowered assholes like you do."

    "Alright, anyway, can''t get sidetracked now. That is not the announcement I am talking about. It is about the Conquest of restricted worlds."

    "Oh, yeah. Is it important?"

    "That''s the reason why people are not killing each other even after being tempted by the technology. So, you tell me. Is it important?"

    "Damn, really? Then why the hell the elders didn''t give out any information?"

    "They will in all due time. I got it from a senior who is way too enthusiastic about everything. So, I got a n."

    "What would that be?"

    "As I said, something that will stick it right to Hou Yi''s face. But of course, it focuses on the Hou Yi''s academy."

    "Alright..."

    They kept on discussing the n for a while.

    "Don''t you think this will be a bit risky? This coboration might bring out our old friendship." Arkiv asked curiosly.

    "Why? You are afraid of being associated with me?"

    "Come on, man. You know that I don''t mean it. Go on and announce it if you want. I don''t care. But You have to a lot of lose here. The Dusk is at stake here. I am already surprised that they haven''t already found you, with the massive footprint he left behind.

    But I guess you covered a lot of your tracks, but the same cannot be said about me.

    I might not have had a foolproof past like yours. That is all I am worried about."

    "Don''t bother about it. If they want to investigate, they can. I am sure Christos already found a lot about it. But they cannot move as freely as they want. I have measures in ce. I also know it cannot be hidden for the rest of my life. A bit sooner orter wouldn''t matter much.

    Anyway, they will only suspect if the cover is blown. And you know. Do you really think it will be that easy to break my n?"

    "Well, its your decision. I will get myself a team and keep you updated."

    "Got it. See youter."

    Sam cut themunication andid down on the ground looking at the ceiling. He realized, he kept all the yers a bit too inactive. Under the shadows of all the chaos he is creating, they are getting by.

    He didn''t like.

    And this is a great opportunity to put some of them to work and he also decided on the next target for the manager revenge.

    It is not hard to guess who it would be.

    Time passed. Sam didn''t know how to prepare for the conquest. Even though Dove gave him enough information about the results and point system, she still doesn''t know the minor constraints and other possible rules.

    There are no records left that she could ess to know those.

    So, he just made some preparations that would apply for any general and ruthless conquest. Finally, five days before the determined announcement time, Sam heard some news. He was called to Dean''s office once again. And Dove was the one who took him.

    Wharton looked as bored as ever. Ling Tian as anxious as ever.

    "What did I do this time?" Sam asked directly.

    Ling Tian wanted to p him on the head.

    "We called you here about the Conquest of the restricted worlds. You might have guessed, you are a very favorite candidate for this kind of thing. Even if the other elders don''t know, I know what you can do in these kinds ofpetitions."

    "And? Are you asking me for something here?"

    "I am sure, you have your own ns. But are you nning to take any teammates with you?"

    "Why are you asking?"

    "We are hoping that you could lead the second graders for this. Of course, the Gambler academy never ces restrictions on the students. So, any students who want to go in with their own ns can go. But we want to run an academy representative team.

    All the academies do it.

    This team is consisted of the special candidates that the academy selects with a specific goal."

    "Let me guess, the goal is most likely to aim for a high value world and persist in its conquest. Most likely an initial hundred percent conquest to ensure thepounded results to the highest."

    "Yes, that is their go to strategy."

    "I never thought the Gambler academy will be in the game of imitation. You want to make a representative team just like them? And you want to make me part of it?" Sam asked as if he was genuinely disappointed.

    His tone is dripping with disdain as he leaned back into the chair.

    *PAK*

    Dove pped him on the head and made him sit straight. He looked at her more shock than

    anger.

    "What the fuck did you just do?" Sam almost yelled out loud.

    "Oy, you are in the presence of Dean and Elder. Mind yournguage. Or you will get more where that came from."

    She red at him and for some reason Sam felt a bit scared.

    "This woman..."

    "Stop it both of you." Ling Tian stopped them and continued.

    "You don''t have to be so disappointed. This time, instead of asking you to be something that you cannot be, I am thinking of ying more into your strengths this time."

    "Really?"

    "You are so set on creating chaos. So set on raising havoc. So, choose a team and do it. Do it as

    a representative of the academy. Just tell me what kind of people you need and I will help you

    form that team."

    Sam almost wanted tough out loud.

    "Elder Ling Tian. Are you sure, you are in your right mind? You do know what you are asking me to do right? You know what I can do with those words, don''t you?"

    "I am counting on it."

    "Why the sudden change, though?"

    "Just for the sake of it. Think of it as me taking some revenge on behalf of someone."

    Sam raised an eyebrow not understanding what it is. Wharton and Dove are also surprised. Revenge. That is way out of character for Ling Tian.

    "Alright, I will let you guys know. But there is no hurry in recruiting people. I need to know

    more details before I do that."

    "What details?" Ling Tian asked.

    "Oh, now you are ready to give up the info?"

    "Just say it and stop being a pain in the ass."

    "What kind of restrictions can I expect for each world? How many worlds could there possibly

    be there? And are there worlds that are for higher grades but still I can enter as second grade?

    How will my points be calcted based on that?..."

    Sam went on and on with his questions.

    Ling Tian found a gap in the middle and slowly exined him everything.

    Sam digested the info and thought of some ns.

    "Alright, I do have a n, but to make it perfect, I want to know your end result."

    "You know my end result. I am sure you are not dumb enough to not understand what I said."

    "Alright, you asked for it.

    I will tell you all the detailster on. But just know that the team and the requirements won''t

    be small.

    I might not need them to do anything out of the world, but they do have to work a lot."

    "Got it."

    Sam left the room. Even though Ling Tian''s requirement is way too vague, Sam clearly understood what he wanted.

    They have beenmunicating for such a long time. There is no way for him to not get it.

    Sam went knee deep into the preparations. Soon, he also sent the list of requirements to Ling Tian who said he will arrange everything ordingly. Sam is surprised that he didn''t receive any pushback. Because the list that he sent is not just some list of chosen candidates. It is way more than that and can be considered nothing short of an imposition.

    But since Ling Tian agreed so readily, Sam can only guess that he is really looking for some blood with this revenge pursuit.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    Anyway, soon it is time for the final announcement regarding the Conquest.

    On that day, every academy waited in anticipation to get the message from the Messenger council. This conquest can wash whatever happened in the past few months to nothing and

    give them a fresh start.

    They are all excited.

    And the excitement doubled when they finally saw what the gods offered to them.

 Chapter 2390: Prep

    Chapter 2390: Prep

    ?

    The announcement is made.

    Every academy called for immediate meetings. They all started strategizing. Sam was also called for a meeting. Unlike the other academies, there are not many people in the Gambler academy''s meetings. In fact, there are only five people.

    Wharton, Ling Tian, Dove, Sam and a third-grade student called York. He is supposedly the current representative of the third grade team.

    "We only called you three because, we are not going to micromanage the activity of all our students for this conquest, which seemed to be what the other academies are doing. Most of our students can go.

    The people that joined the representative teams are selected from a bunch of volunteers. The rest of them had their own goals.

    Of course, we did request these independent students that they shouldn''t disrupt the activities of the representative teams and give them some help or updates if needed. That is also a two way street. If the students felt like they need some desperate help or need some guidance in solving a pinch, they wille to you for help and you would do it.

    We have separately discussed what all the things you need and the arrangements have been made.

    Now, this meeting is just for you, the student representatives to get a better idea on how this conquest is going to work.

    As you have heard, there are hundred worlds for each grade. So, three hundred worlds in total for the students. That covers until the Divine ne transcendence. Going further, there are a hundred more worlds. Twenty five for each sub-cultivation stage in the Divine ne consummation. Lastly, there are ten special worlds. To have a smooth run in this world, one has to be on the highest ends of the Demi-god state, which means the highest level of the Divine ne consummation one can be.

    So, this one is mostly made for the Deans and Grand elders and even they will have a lot of trouble.

    The list of all these worlds are disyed at the exchange center. For this purpose, that long closed exchange center has been expanded and there is a separate counter now. You can check out the brief description of the worlds before you choose to enter.

    Of course, there are some special conditions for some of the worlds.

    For example, one of the worlds specifically mentioned that a special reward will be given if the conquest is done through sword.

    In that case, the contribution their sword brought in that conquest will receive extra merit. There is one fiery world that stated that conquering this and establishing themselves as ice monarch will gain more points.

    Take note of these special conditions when you choose a world.

    Another important thing is the point calction system. You already know how it will be evaluated if you are conquering a world at your level.

    But there is also another condition here. If you as an individual go to a world of a higher level than you, you will get higher rewards. However, this factor of multiplication is not fixed. The rewards like this are variable for each world and they will be revealed only when you attempt to enter them.

    I hope you are clear up to this point."

    All of them nodded.

    "Now, about how these things y.

    The portals for all these worlds will be opened in all the academy regions. There is nomon entry and exit point for all the students. If you enter the portal here, you will fall in a random ce within the world that you entered.

    You can use a special token given to you to escape.

    However, if you use the token to escape while you are in the fight or when your life is at stake, then you can not longer enter that particr world.

    You can enter others, but you won''t be able to enter that particr world. So, keep in mind when you use it.

    Of course, that doesn''t mean you can use it limitlessly just because you used it in a harmless time. Even in those situations, you have only three uses. After the three are up and you are using it for the fourth time, you are restricted from that world.

    You might want to be smart and your own spatial tools to get out, but you cannot do that. even if you use your own means to get out of the confines of that world, your token will be triggered and will be counted.

    You can use the spatial methods to only move around within the confines of that world.

    The only way for you to move back and forth from the world as you please, is to find special portals ced all over the. These portals are also of two kinds. One is the green portal. These are for the participants. They can cross over through those portals. When they use it, they will appear at the entrance of the portal in our realm.

    When you go back taking the same portal, you will reappear out at another random location.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    The second type of portal is the blue portal. This can only be essed either after the conquest is over. This blue portal will then turn into a worm hole that connects that world to another one, chosen by the winner of that world.

    You can keep any resources you get from that world and you can take almost anything to that world. Of course, as long as it doesn''t trigger the restrictions ced on that world, you can use it there for trade, fights, whatever you can.

    More often than not, the trigger will happen if that thing is impossible to produce with the level of materials and resources present in that world.

    So, keep in mind when you bring something over there..."

    Ling Tian went on and on about this. Of course, the other students are also being informed about the rules, but not by these big wigs. After exining all the rules, Ling Tian finally said. "I talked to you all individually and gave different missions to you. I want you to stick with the mission. I know that you are capable of bringing the results that I desire. So, please do not

    let me down."

    After some more yapping, everyone left.

    Sam went to check the list of the worlds just like everyone else. He created a simr list in the

    hub and stayed there most of the time, nning some moves.

    Then he contacted Arkiv.

    "You got into the representative team?"

    "Yes."

    "That''s good. Let me know what your primary picks are. I will handle the rest." "Alright, I will call you as soon as the list of our target worlds is finalized."

    "Good."

    He cut the call. After a couple of hours, Arkiv called with a list of names. There are ten worlds. The primary targets of the representative team of Hou Yi academy. It is also mentioned that they made an alliance with another academy in Xia region to have smaller share in some of these worlds.

    Sam made a not of the list. Then he hesitated a bit to call Kumar and Noah. He is still a bit salty over Kumar because of that encounter. However, he gritted his teeth and called Noah. "Hello?" Noah sounded so surprised and stunned. There was no usual re in her voice.

    "Can we talk?"

    "Sure. What''s up?"

    "I am assuming you made the representative team?"

    "Of course I did. Thanks to certain someone who yed all the elites in the second grade. The

    spots are wide open for me to take."

    Sam just brushed it off and asked.

    "I want to know what worlds you guys are getting into?"

    "Why is that?"

    "I got some ns. Don''t want you and Kumar to get swept in it."

    "How considerate of you. Someone mistake us for being friends."

    "Noah, I am indeed being considerate because we knew each other for too long. And you know that I don''t take these quips lightly. I am doing you a favor here. So, if you cannot resist, take

    it up with your husband."

    "Alright, alright. I was just being funny."

    "I am sending you a list. Tell Kumar as well. I don''t want your teams to be in those words. And

    tell me the list of your primary targets. At least, I won''ty my hands on them without a

    headsup."

    "Alright, thanks. Seems like you are brewing some another storm."

    "Just another day in my life." Sam cut the call and sighed.

    Soon, he got two more lists from Noah and Kumar.

    Of course, Sam is not counting on them being the final lists. But they are most likely. After marking all these lists, he finally starting sending out some messages to some of the other

    students in the gambler academy.

    He spent most of the day like that.

    Meanwhile, the academy realm is once again bustling with external people. More so than

    ever.

 Chapter 2391: Conquest begins

    Chapter 2391: Conquest begins

    ?

    Time passed quickly and it is time for the worlds to open.

    Sam waited at the area where the portals are supposed toe. He came early at dawn, but the ce is already bustling with people of all strengths and expertise.

    The outers are also there. He also observed several groups of people wearing simr uniforms and such. The forces of the students'' families, they are also here. Another thing he noticed is that a lot of people, who are supposed to be in first grade are now in second grade.

    It seemed like they made haste to meet the criteria to join the conquest.

    While Sam is observing everyone, he also felt several observant gazesnd on him. He didn''t feel surprised though. He knew why they are looking at him. He is still a target. He might not be target for being connected to the Hub anymore, although there is a good majority of people that still suspect him, they are not acting on the suspicion yet.

    He is still the one who caused the death of so many second graders.

    He basically crippled an entire generation of cultivators for these academies. Anyone who is worth their salt has died in the groupbat of the tournament. As if that is not enough, the gods released the conquest now of all times. Their resent grew only deeper.

    If given a chance they will definitely kill him.

    He is sure that there are some special teams that will only focus on him and his activities.

    While Sam is thinking, the portals soon appeared.

    The elders made sure that everyone lined up properly without any trouble. One student after another was allowed to enter their desired portal.

    The external people had to wait until all the students are gone. After much contemtion, Sam decided to pick a world with special conditions. Sam has checked the information provided on all the worlds and this one intrigued him a lot.

    It is a world with only one. The specialty of this world is that it is in its dystopian phase. It is a cultivation world full of humans. There are no other cultivation species apart from the beasts.

    But the is vast and most of it was originally upied and controlled by the human beings. However, a bunch of humans of this ce have reached the highest level they can reach in that.

    And some dozens of old fellows who have been stuck at that top cultivation level which is the peak of divine ne initiation, formed a secret group and tried to find a way out. To break the ceiling they have been given.

    In process, they did all kinds of stupid stuff and thus created the current dystopian age.

    Since they neither have the knowledge nor the nature''s cooperation to reach the next cultivation stage, they started experimenting with one resource that they abundantly had. The beasts.

    Even though the humans upied mostnd, they didn''t upy all thend. The some parts that are not conquered were under the control of the beasts and these few beasts who are at the same highest level as these humans are more powerful than their human counterparts.

    This made humans go crazy and they started experimenting with the bloods, genes and bodies of the beasts.

    They did all kinds of vile things and a few experiments flipped on them.

    There are not many details on how they flipped and what has changed, but the end result is that most of the is now upied by the beasts. There are only a handful of settlements in which humans reside an they are just focused on getting by.

    It sounded like a fantasy story to Sam. On top of the interesting situation there, there is something else Sam is extremely interested in.

    The special condition.

    If the root of the problem is solved and the territory upied by the humans is increased by at least fifty percent, and if someone conquers at least seventy-five percent of the before the first quarter evaluation, then that person will be awarded with a bloodline and constitution reward. The actual reward is depends on how good their conquest is. This special condition attracted Sam because of how specific and particr it is.

    To gain this special reward, Sam needs to finish the conquest in the first three months. He has to upy more than seventy five percent of thend in the. That means, all these ces should be dominated by the forces that are controlled by him.

    And he also have to push back these beasts and let humans establish themselves in morend. That fifty percent increase is vague. If humans only had an influence over a couple of square miles, he just needs to conquer some area and let them settle there. But if they upy one fourth of, then Sam needs to conquer newnds worth one-eighth of the and help humans settle down there.

    It is vague and hard.

    There are no other special conditions. This ce is not interesting to anyone else. The world is small. The people are few, so not much faith will be gained for their gods. Resources will be limited and it would take a lot of time to make this habitable with all the beasts.

    Too much effort and too little rewards.

    But Sam wanted to test this out and he is going in alone. Without any teammates. Seeing Sam''s choice many of the students from other academies cursed out loud. Because these are some middle ranked students in academies and are tasked to follow around in the worlds Sam will be in.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    They didn''t expect him to choose this. But they had to follow him reluctantly.

    Sam disappeared into the portal and reappeared, feeling a cold and swift breeze to his face.

    He fell on the peak of a mountain. He could literally feel the clouds passing over him. Although it is cold, there is snow and such. This also happened to be a lone mountain in what looked like a vast expanse of a forest.

    As soon as Sam appeared, he felt something closing in on him.

    *SWOOSH*

    A ck colored hawk charged at him fearlessly. Sam smiled and his aura raged.

    *CAWW*

    The ck hawk immediately stopped and hovered in the spot. His eyes that looked fierce and fearless suddenly looked distressed and despaired.

    In this world the strongest cultivators are at the peak of Divine ne initiation. They are extremely rare and will be less than twenty. Even less considering how small the human poption here is. Even if he counted beasts, there could triple that number.

    That means, the Late stage of divine ne will be dozens, middle stage will be in hundreds, initial stage could be less than a thousand. The vast majority of the creatures here will be in

    Astral ne.

    The hawk is also one such creature.

    The only reason it charged at Sam is because he didn''t let his aura out. He restrained it, just in case he appeared in a human settlement. But he is in the middle of nowhere, clearly a habitat for the beasts. He doesn''t have to restrain himself at all.

    Sam kicked on the ground and shot himself in the air, before the Hawk could react, he is

    already hold its throat in his palm.

    "So, now. How about you tell me all I want to know?"

    Sam said with a smirk. The Hawk nodded hurriedly.

    This is another reason Sam is sure about his progress in this world. In a world of beasts, particrly one in which majority of beasts are weaker than him... he can do whatever he wants and know whatever he wants.

    It is his yground and no one can stop him.

    Sam got a clear situation about the location around him. Unfortunately, there is no human

    settlement or any traces of humans around here. The whole forest as far as he could see is the ce full of all kinds of beasts. He also learned that this is an ind. A vast one, but an ind

    nheless.

    Judging by how ignorant the hawk is about the other questions he asked, it is separated from

    the rest of the world.

    "Well, let''s start our conquest here then."

    Sam said as he waved his hand.

    *CAAWWW*

    Sky came out and crowed at the sky with all its might. A sharp glint shed past its eyes as it

    crowed at they ofnd around him.

    "I will leave this ce to you.

    If you find an opponent you cannot deal with, call for me. We will take care of it together.

    From now on, you shall be the king of this ind. Find a worthy sessor and let''s groom him

    so that he can take over this ce when we leave."

    [Consider it done]

    Sky replied and rose higher. Its aura spreading throughout the forest. Laying im to this

    forest and announcing the beginning of the conquest. The first surrender is from the weak

    ckhawk.

 Chapter 2392: Weird creatures

    Chapter 2392: Weird creatures

    ?

    Sam didn''t worry about Sky.

    He just took off on Harbinger at his fastest speed and within a few seconds he is already off the ind. He just moved in a random direction not caring much about the destination. As long as he reaches a ce that has people are beasts, then it is a prospective ce for him to act.

    Only as he travelled over the ocean did he realize just how big the is.

    That is part of the information that was left on this''s description. Nowhere was it mentioned that this ce is so huge.

    Even after he travelled for over an hour at full speed, he didn''t see any sign of thend. At his current level and using harbinger''s speed... that is way too fast and he covered a lot of distance.

    He also kept his divine sense spread to its full range as he moved, he is covering a lot of territory at the same time. Sam travelled for another fifteen minutes, before he thought if he should take a different approach, when he finally sensed something.

    At the farthest end of his spiritual sense, to his right, he sensed and mass. He turned and moved in that direction. Within two minutes he could clearly see thendmass and from what he saw, it looked like there are some signs of human settlement. He could see a towering structure resembling a light house on the shore.

    After he reached a certain distance, he even felt a ping to his spiritual sense from that tower.

    At that exact moment, on the shore that Sam is heading towards, within the tower, an inscription circle that has been dormant for a while started glowing. The glow is so bright that Sam could sense it through the spiritual sense.

    However, to his surprise he couldn''t see it with in eyes. He was intrigued by it. As he was thinking what it could possibly be, and kept on interacting with it through his spiritual sense almost as if he is probing it, the deepest part of his spiritual sense that is spread into the water also picked up on something.

    *SWOOSH*

    He slipped to the side along with Harbinger. A huge shark covered in blue and ck scales came out of the water. On the head of the shark, a humanoid figure stood with a spear in his hands.

    *SWOOSH*

    That humanoid figure, threw the spear at Sam. As if on cue, the water in the surroundings reacted to the spear''s movements and surrounded it, forming a giant spiraling water spear, aimed at Sam.

    Sam frowned.

    An energy barrier formed around his palm as he waved it. With a ssh the giant spear burst into water and dropped back into the sea.

    The actual spear flew far away.

    The humanoid and the shark already went into the water. Sam could sense them. They once again came above from right underneath him. This time, Sam didn''t dodge. Instead, he sent an energy explosion attack.

    The condensed wind energy from within the thrusters of the harbinger was shot down and it exploded.

    The opponent hurriedly controlled the water and covered his and the shark''s bodies. *BOOM*

    The fatal damage was avoided, but the strength of the explosion blew the fish and the humanoid back into the water. It was so forceful, that they went hundreds of meters deep. Sam focused his senses on the other party.

    Both the creatures that he saw... he has never seen them before. Even with the heaps of knowledge that Gambler gave him initiallybined with even more knowledge he gained by the virtue of the hub, failed at the moment.

    He can faintly see the resemnce of some ck headed shark in the shark type beast, but the scales are a bit too different. Those scales almost look reptilian.

    And even more of a shocker is the humanoid figure that rode the shark. As per the information revealed about this ce, this is supposed to only have the humans and the beasts.

    But he can clearly is a humanoid creature. One that has opposing thumbs and uses a spear. And the way it is reacting beneath the surface, it is clearly a lot more intelligentpared to an average beast.

    As if that is not enough confirmation, Sam saw several other humanoid creatures,ing from the deeper parts of the seas, all of them riding on those weird scaly sharks.

    Sam frowned and focused on them.

    ''Come here''

    At that moment a faint whisper echoed in his eyes. He looked around cautiously.

    ''Come in this direction. You can''t take them on.''

    The same voice, but this time a lot clearer and he could see which direction it ising from. The shore. From that tower.

    Sam turned to look at that spot. Even with his enhanced vision, he cannot see that light, but can only sense it. The voice could be heard, but he couldn''t sense any living being from there.

    *SWOOSH* *SPLASH*

    While he is focused on them, the creatures came out, all of them attacking Sam at the same time.

    *SWOOSH*

    Harbinger made a quick circle in the air, sending out a wind de, covering three hundred and sixty degrees around him.

    *SLASH*

    The fish were cut and so were the people that are riding them. Blood squirted out of their wounds. Sam covered his nose in disgust. The blood is not usual red color or any normal color Sam has seen. It is a weird shade of blue and it has much thicker consistency than normal

    blood.

    It stunk.

    Of course, not all the creatures are dead. But most of them are all. The rest are injured. Sam caught a hold of one of those humanoid figures. That creature struggled like crazy, but Sam knocked it out and tied it up.

    These creatures are all at Initial stage of divine ne initiation. And for some reason, they appeared a bit stronger than the usual cultivators of that level. It didn''t make much difference to Sam, but judging by the injuries on them... none of these creatures were fully cut all the way

    through.

    His wind de, cut deeply, but none of them were cut in into two parts. Which should have been the expected result.

    Sam turned towards the shore and moved at top speed while holding the creature.

    A few hundred meters away from the shore, he suddenly sensed some other movement. Turtle type beasts of various kinds shot out of the water and attacked him.

    Spheres of water and poison came at him from multiple directions. Sam dodged through the attacks and closed in. At that moment, the water raised and formed a huge wall in front of

    him.

    It surrounded him from all the directions. Even the slight ssh of that water, gave his skin a

    burning feeling.

    "Poison"

    He muttered to himself.

    ''Leave it.'' The voice once again came. Sam instantly understood what it meant. It is telling

    him to leave the creature behind. But Sam is not willing.

    The beasts kept on attacking him.N?v(el)B\\jnn

    "Alright. Let''s do this then..."

    Sam was about to take out his reaper sword, when he heard something.

    "STOP"

    A human voice. He looked ahead and someone came running on the shore. They are yelling and the beasts attacking him stopped.

    Sam hovered in the air and looked at the people on the beach. There are two of them. A man

    and a woman and they wore some regr shabby clothing. Both of them had long ck hair. They had simr facial features as well. They looked a bit depraved. Thin, pale and exhausted. Those are the words that came to his mind.

    Both of them looked at Sam sizing him up and then looked at the restrained creature he held

    in his hands.

    "Who are you?" The young man asked.

    Sam is also sizing them both up. Both of them are at Divine ne initiation. Initial stage.

    "I am a visitor. Is there a city or any form of human settlement nearby?" "Visitor? Where are youing from? As far as I know, there are no inds nearby and even if

    there are, no man can cross this sea ande here. Tell me, who are you? Or don''t even think about stepping foot on the shore."

    At that moment, all those sea beasts that were previous attacking with ranged attacks, put

    their heads out of the water. Ready to aim.

    "This is getting annoying.

    It is already out of character for me to not kill these beasts since they attacked me first... so

    just call your leader, I want to talk to him."

    As Sam replied, his aura raged. His killing intent is raging. More than that, his Hydra bloodline is active. The beasts that were so fiercely attacking him a couple of seconds ago, suddenly started shivering in their spots.

    Even the two humans didn''t know what was happening for a moment and froze. Sam leaped off the harbinger andnded in front of them. He still held the creature and said.

    "I will give you an hour. Go back to your settlement and bring your leader. I won''te to your ce or attack you guys. At least, not yet. I give you my word. After an hour, I will make my way there. And at that time, it won''t be a pleasant conversation that we would be having."

 Chapter 2393: Test

    Chapter 2393: Test

    ?

    The two humans didn''t know what to do.

    They are overwhelmed by Sam''s killing intent and aura. However, their instinct screamed something in their heads.

    ''Just do it''

    It is telling them to obey his words. They only loosened up when Sam finally eased his aura over him. They exchanged a nce. The man took out a dagger and got into a fighting stance while the woman left.

    Sam didn''t attack, neither did the young man.

    "She will bring our leader." The young man said through his low tone. He felt exhausted just for talking out loud in Sam''s presence.

    Sam didn''t respond and turned to the waters.

    The Hydra bloodline in him raged out and the beasts inside the Seas kept their heads out as if they are answering amand.

    "I have some questions for you. I need you to answer them honestly."

    Sam said while he ced his hand on the knocked out weird humanoid creature. He is only getting a good look of it now. The creature has a scaly skin. He looked very much like a reptile. If someone is presented his skin and only a patch of his skin, they will definitely mistake it for some snake''s skin.

    He channeled his spiritual energy into its body and used observation.

    Meanwhile, the sea creatures nervously awaited his questions.

    Sam opened his eyes after getting a good look inside the creature and frowned.

    All the organs inside seemed a bit different. Which is to be expected, but the bone structure

    and muscle structure of this creature is awfully simr to a human. No, simr is not even the right word. They are exactly the same.

    Sam stopped and looked at the sea creatures.

    "I am talking to you guys. I need an answer."

    *ROAR*

    The sea beasts started making noises in acquiescence. But there is a faint hint of confusion and doubt as if they are doubting if Sam could even understand them.

    Sam nodded and said.

    "Good, now exin. What are those sea creatures? The humanoid ones. What exactly are..." Sam kept on barraging them with questions and these beasts answered to the best of their abilities. Sam got the gist of the situation and it seemed like even the beasts don''t know the full extent of the story.

    From what they knew, a few years back, the seas are invaded by these weird humanoid creatures and once they did, they started polluting the water somehow. They mutated some other sea beasts and they reproduced quickly.

    They don''t know where they came from, but they can increase their numbers by capturing the humans and turning them.

    They also amassed a lot of forces by forcing some of the other sea beasts to mutate. The sharks that Sam are also part of those creatures.

    The water that Sam came past just now is also infested by those creatures and these sea beasts that previously used to stay were driven closer to the shores. However, they realized that the only creatures that had a fighting chance against these are the ones with poison and venomous affinities.

    The poison secreted by them, polluted the surrounding water and those sea creatures are awfully sensitive about these poisons.

    Then, through the help of a tamer, the sea beasts made a contract with the humans here after finding out that these weird sea creatures are themon enemy to these beasts and humans alike. They are defending the shore.

    That is all Sam got from them.

    He turned to looked at the young man who is still staring at Sam vigntly, and also as if Sam is crazy.

    Before Sam could direct some questions to him, he noticed the movements not too far away. "That''s a big party."

    Sam said with a smile.

    Within no time, he is surrounded. His back is to the sea, while the Sea shore is covered with cultivators of various levels.

    Two bird type beasts are covering the sky, upon which four people are standing with spears and bows. The young man who was tense until now, finally rxed a bit.

    The crowd is dense with all kinds ofbatants. They all stood in a formation with close range surrounding Sam, followed by some mages who already conjured some attacks and are ready tounch.

    Then the long range attackers aiming their spears and bows. There are at least a fifty people or so surrounding him.

    Among them, there is one woman who seemed to be middle-aged stood in the middle. Her hair has some greys here and there and she had crow''s feet wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. There are also dark circles decorating those eyes.

    She appeared exhausted and drained.

    "Who are you? Why are you here?"

    She asked Sam. A tired but authoritative tone. She is ate-stage cultivator of Divine ne initiation. The strongest among them all.

    Sam sighed slightly and said.

    "Can I assume that you are the leader?"

    She nodded slightly.

    "Alright, as I said before. I am a visitor. Where I came from is not from this world and how I came is through the means beyond your reach. All I can tell you is that I came here to help the humans of this to recover some of their lostnds back.

    That is my goal and I would like it if you guys cooperate with me."

    Thedy frowned but before she could speak, the youngdy who just returned alo with the

    group asked.

    "How do you think we can trust you? For all we know, you are just another one of those fish creatures that came to kill us, in disguise."

    Sam smirked at those words.

    "Trust me, to kill the people here, which is actually an easiest way to achieve my final goal by the way, I do not under no circumstances need to disguise myself. If I wanted that, I could have stormed your settlement like I am visiting my backyard and you wouldn''t have been able

    to do anything to stop me.

    As for proof...

    From what limited knowledge I gained while waiting for you guys is that you are being attacked by those fish type creatures. The sea beasts and you are in the same boat now. The poison excreted by the sea beasts and the tower that you built on the sea shore are the only means that you have to identify and resist any attacks thate from these creatures.

    The tower is enchanted with a spirit or rather a very strong soul that has very high affinity with soul energy to the point it can sense the human souls nearby.

    The voice I heard before, toe to this ind and leave that fish creature behind must have been from that as well."

    Everyone looked at the young man who kept an eye on Sam since the start. They suspected

    that he told them.

    "I learned that from the sea beasts."

    Sam rified. One of the members of the group stepped forward andmunicated with the

    sea beasts. Most likely the tamer.

    "He is telling the truth about learning it from the beasts. And they also think he has no reaction against their poison. So, he must be a human."

    Another tamer who is standing behind also sent a message forward saying that his beast is sensing that Sam''s scent is clearly human.

    "I don''t want to waste too much time. If you want, I will just stay here and you can just tell me the way to prove myself. Then we can talk. I don''t want to count your own contemtion to figure out if you can trust me or not. I don''t have that much time."

    The group got rowdy.

    "We cannot trust him. Not in our current situation. I suggest we just kill him." The first girl

    passionately said.

    "I agree. We can''t afford this."

    "But don''t you think this is too weird. If someone really wants to infiltrate in disguise, would

    theye in such an aboveboard way?"

    There are basically three sides. One to kill him, the other to talk to him, the third to just let

    him go and leave the way he came from.

    The leader rarely spoke and it seemed like she just took her decision without having to exin

    it to them.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om

    "The tower and the sea beasts have both witnessed him fighting those creatures. Even the first responders have seen him knock down and bring one of them back forcefully. We all know, the creatures cannot use regr attacks and they cannot use artifacts. Our responders

    once again vouch that he did.

    It is very unlikely that he is one of the creatures, but of course it is indeed hard to trust him.

    So, let''s give him a test."

    She spoke as if Sam is not even there. Then she turned to him and said.

    "If you really want to help us, it wouldn''t be enough for you to just enough capable of killing

    us all. I can do that too, but even I cannot go against those creatures on arge scale.

    So, prove yourself. Go into the sea and kill fifty of those ordinary ones and find one of their group leaders. Bring their heads to me as proof and I will listen to you."

    Sam didn''t even say anything and just turned towards the sea.

    Everyone stood there in silence. For most people in the group, it felt like their leader actually

    took the decision to kill him. After all, in their minds, it is impossible to achieve what was

    asked.

    Sam stood there in silence.

    "If you cannot do it, then leave the way you came. Even if you are not part of those creatures,

    if you are not capable of that, we cannot use you. Your presence won''t make any difference."

    Sam kicked the ground and flew into the air. He leaped over the area covered by the sea beasts

    and was about to dive into the water.

    At that moment, with a sh, Mia came out of the divine dimension.

    *ROAR*

    All her nine heads roared at the same time, making even the seas shiver.

    *SPLASH*

    Sam and Mia went into the water creating a huge ssh. A huge wave rose over and came

    towards the shore. The sea beasts had to create an opposite wave to block it.

    Everyone looked at the scene in utter shock.

    The Novel will be updated first on this website. Come back and

    continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

 Chapter 2394: Passed

    Chapter 2394: Passed

    ?

    The leader of the settlement and the rest of the cultivators are all looking at the Sea with bewildered gazes.

    They have never seen something like this. The way Sam just dove into the water was one

    thing, but the giant beast that has an appearance that they have never ever heard or seen before, scared them shitless.

    That shock led to the confusion.

    A million questions rose in their hearts and one of them is about what to do now. Sam didn''t even answer their request. He just jumped into the sea and left. Even the leader was left confused. After around half an hour, she came made a decision.

    "I will stay here. The rest of you, go back to the city and tighten the defenses. Activate all the defensive mechanisms and formations.

    If he is truly part of the enemies. Then we need to be prepared to fight him."

    "But that guy is just one person and he only appears to be at Second Star level (A/N: This is what the people of this call the Divine ne initiation middle stage) Even with his beast, I am sure we can take care of him."

    One of the assistants suggested the leader.

    But she didn''tment on it and just told them to do as they were told.

    Soon, apart from the leader only the two first responders that came to see Sam are left. They all gazed at the sea.

    "Leader, what do you think about him? Do you really think that he is telling the truth?" The young man asked.

    The young woman immediately refuted.

    "Deke, what kind of nonsense is that? He is definitely not telling the truth. He said he is a visitor, but where could he be visiting from? We already know all the remaining human settlements. We already contacted them and they said, they haven''t sent anyone here.

    He is definitely part of those three abominations'' n."

    The youngdy is adamant and even looked at the leader to back her up. But the leader had aplicated gaze.

    After some silence, he said out loud.

    "Do you remember the story of how our turned out this way?"

    Both of them stayed silent. They obviously remember it and they didn''t have to acknowledge that.

    "More than the three abominations, more than the greed of the humans, there was one thing that drove all these things to happen. Do you know what it is?"

    The two youngsters appeared confused. All they knew is that one day the three abominations appeared and they appeared because of some human greed. Apart from that, they don''t know anything.

    The leader continued.

    "The human greed that our predecessors talked about is caused when one of the human leaders of that time, had a vision.

    A vision of the world beyond the stars. He got that vision in one of the rare moments of enlightenment and he believed it was the source of nature that gave him those visions.

    And from then on, as time passed human leaders craved to see that world and that can only happen if they reach past the limits they are born with.

    That pursuit is what caused all this mess.

    I sometimes wonder if there really is a world like that, don''t you think just like our people, their people might have also received a vision? Maybe their people might also want toe and visit this ce?"

    "Do you really think this guy is a visitor from out of this world? That is impossible?"

    "Maybe or maybe not. I was just rambling. Let''s just wait and see if hees back. Then we will know."

    While they are conversing and wondering who Sam might be...

    Deep in the Sea.

    The depths of water has turned purple in color, with patches of blue colored sludge here and there. And apanying that sludge are the headless humanoid bodies of the weird creatures that Sam spotted.

    In the middle of that patch, Sam and Mia are hovering as he counted the number of creatures he just killed.

    "We are still short of ten. But the progress is way too fast. Who would have thought that there would so many in such a short distance from the shore.

    They all came at him with such gusto too. But too bad, we couldn''t find that leader of whatever that guy is."

    Sammunicated with Mia through their mental connection.

    [I think we can finish the remaining ten. I can sense the movement to your right side.]

    "What are we waiting for? Let''s go then."

    Both of them swam through the water at an impable speed and covered thousands of meters in seconds.

    At that spot, there are a dozen creatures riding the sharks moving towards Sam''s direction.

    *BOOM*

    One of the creatures was hit and with a huge explosion, its body disappeared. Leaving only the head.

    The aftershock of the explosion sent the remaining creatures far away. Except for one.

    Sam looked at this one creature and was surprised.

    "I guess this is my lucky day."

    The creature in the center looked a bit different from the rest. Instead of the blue reptilian

    skin, this one had golden scales at the chest and on the back.

    His power level is also higher. The energy wavesing out of him are equivalent to a middle stage of Divine ne initiation.

    The creature locked in on Sam and made a weird gesture with its hand. However, nothing happened. It repeated the gesture and Sam saw a sense of panic in its face.

    It turned around to take a look. There he saw it, the remaining creatures that apanied him are now nothing but headless corpses with arge amount of blue sludge seeping out of

    them.

    The creature turned to Sam, took its spear and was about to attack him.

    *CRUNCH*

    Sam clearly heard it even in the deep waters. Mia''s head chomping down on the shoulder of

    that creature.

    The creature didn''t even have time to react.n/?/vel/b//jn dot c//om

    *CRUNCH* *CRUNCH* *CRUNCH*

    Three more heads of Mia appeared and bit the body at various parts. While the creature''s face

    is covered in horror, she tore the body of the creature into five parts exactly.

    The head separate and the remaining body into four based on its limbs.

    The blue sludge came out of it as well. But it has a faint golden hue to it.

    ...

    Back at the shore, the leader is sitting on the beach looking at the creature left behind by Sam.

    It was the one he captured when he came to the shore and met with the leader. It gained consciousness and has been struggling to get back into the water.

    The sun light and the hot sand are not agreeing with it.

    The two youngsters are also looking at the creature up close. While the leader had experience dealing with these creatures before, the two youngsters are actually seeing them this close for the first time. The woman in particr got curious and was about to poke it with her spear.

    *SPLASH*

    With a loud ssh, the sea split open from within Mia came in her full form. Sam stood on her

    central head.

    The water sshed on the beach like rain and along with that came the heads of the creatures

    that he just severed.

    He stood there calmly as Mia took him slowly to the shore.

    "FUCKING HELL"

    The youngsters screamed as they defended themselves from theing heads. The leader on the other hand was stunned and looked at Sam with her eyes wide open.

    Mia carefully came to the shore as the Sea beasts gave her the way. She declined her head to let

    Sam walk off.

    He turned around and tapped her with a smile.

    "These seas are now yours. Go crazy and do whatever you want."

    *ROAR*

    Mia roared through her nine heads and went back into the Sea.

    Sam looked at the leader and said.

    "A hundred creatures. Including one special one with golden scales. I don''t know if he is the

    leader you mentioned though."

    He said as he extended his hand and the special creature''s head appeared.

    The leader stepped forward slowly and took that head in her hands. She copsed to her knees

    and tears streamed down her face.

    "How? How did you do this?"

    She spoke in a soft tone. "The information you had was useful. These creatures are indeed very weak against poison.

    And I happen to have the ability to create the most potent poison there is."

    They didn''t even present a challenge.

    Now, can we talk about liberation of humans? I have way too many questions and way less

    time to waste."

    Sam''s tone, voice and face appeared unfeeling. As if he is oblivious to the emotions that the

    woman was feeling.

    He just rushed to ask the questions.

    "I will tell you, whatever you want. Whatever you need. Just ask me."

    The Novel will be updated first on this website. Come back and

    continue reading tomorrow, everyone!